Necromancer (28 page)

It had not been Dieter who had driven Erich mad at all. It
had been the older youth’s bond with the Corpse Taker that had caused him to
steadily lose his grasp on reality. This bitter insight brought Dieter back to
the present with a jolting shock.

He knew that he was going to die. For the briefest of moments
he wondered whether he should let Drakus finish him, rather than let the black
sorcery he had turned his back on use him again for its own foul purpose. It was
nothing less than he deserved.

But then the tiny part of Dieter’s mind that was still his,
and that was still rational, realised the awful consequence of such an action.
If Drakus succeeded in what he was trying to do—if Dieter simply gave into him—the Corpse Taker would live on in a renewed body and with renewed vigour, able
to see the fulfilment of his evil schemes, whatever they might be.

The necromancer had to be confident that his plans would come
to fruition on this night, for having been so careful to keep himself hidden for
so long, Drakus had taken a great risk by killing the town’s sextons and Father
Hulbert. He was obviously not intending to remain in Bögenhafen much longer, not
unless he had something even more shockingly atrocious in mind. After all, in
the wake of the plague there had been a huge increase in the number of fresh
corpses buried within the environs of Bögenhafen: a veritable army. The army
Dieter had seen in his dreams, in his nightmares. Dieter had no choice
but
to fight the necromancer. And besides, he wasn’t ready to let death take him
just yet, as it had taken every last member of his family.

Fighting back the pain, Dieter inhaled deeply, feeling talons
pressing against his skull, feeling the necromancer’s dark intelligence crushing
his psyche, as if Drakus was squeezing his very soul from him. As the mildewed
air of the mausoleum filled his lungs, Dieter focused on the horrific unreal
sensations overwhelming his senses.

His mother lying cold in her grave. Rats burrowing whiskered
noses into the soft parts of his body, elongated incisors biting and tearing.
The ring of a whetstone on an executioner’s axe. Blighted crops. The
abattoir-stink of the slaughterhouse. The highwaymen butchering the coach driver
and his passengers. A platter of furred rotten fruit, turning to black sludge in
the fusty heat of summer, thick with flies. The acrid taste of soured milk.
Hordes of zombies bearing the marks of the plague, and the faces of the people
of Bögenhafen, marching to make war against the living; their leprous bodies
blotched with rot and riven with maggots.

With the last shreds of his conscious mind, Dieter distilled
the sights, smells and sounds back into the eldritch, ethereal matter out of
which they had originally grown, watching them melt and dissolve into an inky
morass as he drew the dark power from the essence of death itself congealing
within the crypt, focusing them into a single point, into one thought: that he
wanted to live.

And that one simple desire took form.

A bolt of dark energy blasted out of Dieter, exploding from
him in a catastrophic shockwave of lethal power. It slammed into Drakus and his
moribund manservant, hurling them backwards. Erich stumbled and fell to the
floor of the crypt, as the chamber shook. There was a sharp
crack
as he
hit his head on the flagstones and was knocked senseless. The echoes of the
chanted mantra died, swallowed up by the cloying air.

The unnatural mental connection was broken. Dieter felt numb
with cold and yet at the same time every nerve ending in his body was on fire.

The eldritch wind rose to become a screaming gale that tore
through the crypt, tugging at the grave-clothes of the skeletons in their niches
and swirling the sorcerer’s robes around him as the necromancer got to his feet.

“Such power!” Drakus gasped, tasting Dieter’s aura. “I can see it blazing
like black fire in the orbs of your eyes. But it is not enough to stop me!” he
roared with malice burning in his own cataract-clouded eyes.

Dieter strained against the ropes holding him. He focused his
mind on the bindings, seeing the hemp rotting away over time. The rope dissolved
and Dieter rolled off the sarcophagus, landing on his hands and knees on the
flagstoned floor. His kneecaps and wrists jarred painfully but it was nothing
compared to the agony flaring along every nerve in his body as the dark energy
surged through him in an uncontrollable torrent, like a howling gale.

He struggled to his feet, using the sarcophagus for support.
He breathed in deeply, gulping in stale air as he felt a twinge in his chest.
Had he cracked a rib? Or was it another side-effect of drawing on the esoteric
energies of the dead?

Dieter heard a shout, a barked command. Drakus was holding
his hands to his shrivelled skull.

Figures that had been standing propped against the walls of
the crypt, as motionless as marionettes waiting for the puppet master’s will to
give them life, lurched towards Dieter as Drakus’ flesh-puppets jerked into
stilted life.

Father Hulbert’s corpse thrashed against the wall where it
hung, twisting spastically from the iron manacles, the rope of its intestines
slapping wetly against the floor as it spasmed.

The zombies advanced on Dieter with slow yet relentless
steps. The two body snatchers, their septic faces spoiled by rot, were closing
on him from behind. Their hulking forms blocked his escape route up the steps
out of the crypt. And the charred-flesh form of Leopold Hanser was bearing down
on him from the other side. The smell of overcooked meat hung heavy about
Leopold’s carcass.

Dieter recoiled again before the mindless monster he had created. Looking
into that slack-jawed, fire-blistered face was like staring into the face of his
own mortality.

To his right were the obstructions of the sarcophagi, to his
left the burial alcoves of the ancient dead. He was trapped, and he was going to
die. There would be no salvation for him now.

Dieter gazed in horror into the dead eyes of the zombies. It
was said that the eyes were the windows to the soul. The zombies’ glassy stares
told him that there were no souls left inside the macabre shells of their
reanimated bodies.

Oppressive shadows closed in on Dieter once more.

He inhaled again, ignoring the pain in his chest this time,
welcoming the approaching dark. And now it seemed to Dieter’s mage-altered sight
that rivulets of glistening darkness were running like fluid obsidian across the
floor of the crypt to pool at his feet, before being absorbed into his body as
he began to shape his own spell.

Drakus’ ritual of awakening, all those months ago, had
roused a monster lurking inside him, a sinister latent force that had lain
dormant throughout his life until he had reached adulthood and fate had brought
him to Bögenhafen. But where had that power come from? Had it been because of
his upbringing? Had it been due to veneration of Morr and all things funereal?

From an early age Dieter had been exposed to death in its
various forms, archaic funeral rites, and the dwelling places of the dead. He
had been left traumatised as a child by his mother’s death. As he entered
adulthood he had been drawn to death. He had sought a profession that dealt with
death, or at least supposedly its prevention, on a daily basis.

He had tried to deny his heritage; he had tried to become a
physician, a healer of the sick, but fate, or nature, had determined that he
should become a killer, a dealer in death. From the very beginning, his
upbringing and life experiences had prepared him for this moment, had prepared
him to take on the mantle of the necromancer. He had fought his inherent dark
nature and had lost.

Dieter did not know where the enchantment came from, but it
came nonetheless. He could hear the drumming of rib bones on stretched skin. The
drumming grew louder until his head throbbed as though the bone-beaters were
hammering on his eardrums. He felt the cold wind of Shyish, blowing right
through him as if he were no more corporeal than a ghost, drawn to this place of
necromancy and death.

And Dieter understood why it was so easy to raise the dead in
this place. The power had always been here, residing within the mortuary crypt,
a source of great and terrible power waiting be tapped. That was why he had been
able to resurrect Leopold in the warehouse. By killing his friend there Dieter
had consecrated the place by the act to the forces of death, and encouraged the
darkest winds of sorcery to blow there more readily.

Dieter didn’t need his notebooks or hours of preparation, to
work his spells in the mausoleum either. Drakus was drawing the power of death
from this place and Dieter was able to use it just as well. But there was no
doubt as to which was the more powerful will at work here. Dieter could still
feel the Corpse Taker’s malignant presence lingering at the edge of his
conscious self. There was no time to waste. Dieter had to act fast whilst Drakus
was still reeling from the shock of his initial assault.

The dark apprentice cast his spell.

Blood, hot and sticky, gushed from Dieter’s nose as the dark
power gathering behind his eyes was released in a second conjuration. The bitter
black bile taste filled his mouth and he doubled up, beset by agonising,
stabbing gastric pains. But his suffering mattered not: the spell had worked.

Coils of palpable darkness extruded from Dieter’s fingertips—drawn from the hurricane of eldritch power raging within the mausoleum—and
wound through the shimmering air into the wall alcoves. The black mist wrapped
itself around the bones lying there, shrouding them in a cloak of writhing
shadows that pulled the bones together, creating bonds of darkness where in life
there had been knotty strings of sinew and ligaments. In a hollow clatter of
rattling bones, three skeletons pulled themselves free of their stone shelves,
dragging threads of cobwebs with them.

Amidst the pain, Dieter felt a certain grim satisfaction that
he had accomplished what he had set out to do. He had raised the dead.

The skeletons moved with jerking insect-like movements
towards Drakus’ shambling undead. The zombies, in response, turned on the bone
mannequins, groaning hungrily. A fist like a lump hammer smashed into the
ribcage of a skeleton, shattering its sternum, as chattering teeth sank into the
meat of the sexton’s arm. A hand that was made of nothing but bare bone clawed
the face of the other dead gravedigger, tearing open a cheek, so that the
zombie’s own champing teeth could be seen. The last of the skeletons leapt on
Leopold’s corpse, tearing at the crackling of its blackened hide, its jaws
closing around the flesh-puppet’s head.

Dieter’s vision was beginning to grey at its periphery. He
felt utterly exhausted. Maintaining the sheer physicality of the skeletons was
taking an extreme toll on his body. He could feel the strain in every muscle,
every sinew, every nerve flaring with pain. He had nothing more to give.

A spear of dark energy slammed into a skeleton, sending it
hurtling across the chamber to shatter against the far wall. The same fate
befell a second and then the third was obliterated in an explosion of bone.

Doktor Drakus had recovered and his wrath was terrible
indeed. But he wasn’t going to rush his revenge. He was going to savour every
moment he spent punishing Dieter for his audacity.

Through a combination of luck, will power and sheer terror
Dieter had managed to raise the dead in order to defend himself. Yet he lacked
the power, and more importantly the control, that one so well practiced in the
Black Arts as Drakus possessed. And the Corpse Taker was showing him who was
still the true master here. Now it was time for Dieter to die.

The apprentice was aware of the insistent buzzing again, a
sound like rusted metal teeth sawing bone.

The bolt of pure, concentrated malevolence hit him squarely
between the eyes and sent him sliding across the floor. Dieter was gripped by a
violent seizure, which crippled him as a series of thrashing paroxysms convulsed
his body. Foamy saliva spurted from between clenched teeth.

It was as if the veil of mortality had been torn down from
before his eyes.

Dieter Heydrich stared in heart-stopping horror into the
oblivion of the void. And it recognised him as its own.

He was only dimly aware of the clatter of horses’ hooves
somewhere outside, the shouts of men and then the sound of booted feet running
down the stone steps into the tomb. The shouts grew louder. Drakus spat
something in the unholy tongue of the lords of undeath. There was the clash of
steel upon stone, the wet
thunk
of blades meeting flesh and a god-fearing
oath.

Dieter opened tear-blurred eyes and looked upon the mortal
world of shadows again in time to see Brother-Captain Ernst Krieger confront the
Corpse Taker’s undead.

The bastard received my letter then, he thought.

Sigmar alone knew how the templars had tracked Drakus to this
place and at this time. Then again, a garden of Morr would be the first place a
witch hunter would look for a necromancer.

“In the name of Sigmar, I renounce you!” Krieger bellowed,
laying a blow against a re-formed skeleton that was now fighting for the
black-hearted necromancer. “I smite your evil in the name of the holy
Heldenhammer!”

The skeleton fell, its backbone severed. Krieger’s two
lieutenants were grappling with the hulking gravedigger’s zombie and that of
Leopold Hanser.

Dieter rolled over onto his side and tried to stand. He was
suddenly horribly aware that he had soiled himself.

Shrieking, the necromancer’s manservant ran at the witch
hunter captain, hands become talons raised before him. Dieter saw Krieger’s
blade, blazing with the holy golden light of Sigmar himself, open the retainer’s
body across the middle. A torrent of maggots, grubs and many-legged crawling
things cascaded out of the dry husk of a man. The withered leathery remains of
the manservant shrank to the ground like a deflating pig’s bladder as beetles,
centipedes and mealworms wriggled free of it, escaping into the cracks between
the flagstones.