Tales of the Old World (102 page)

A plume of grey smoke rose from the barrel of the pistol Mathias Thulmann
held in his right hand. The other pistol, its butt bloody from its impact
against the mercenary’s skull, was cocked and pointed at Reinhardt von
Lichtberg’s own head.

“It seems the last of these yapping curs has not seen fit to remain with us,”
Thulmann said. Although he now held the upper hand, the witch hunter still
possessed the same air of cold indifference.

“Go ahead and kill me, butcher,” Reinhardt swore, his heart afire with the
injustice of it all. To come so close… “You will be doing me a service,” he
added.

“There are some things you should know before I decide if you should live or
die,” the witch hunter sat down on the bed, motioning Reinhardt to a position
from which the pistol could cover him more easily.

“Have you not wondered what brought me to your father’s estate?” Mathias
asked. He saw the slight look of interest surface amidst Reinhardt’s mask of
hate. “I was summoned by Father Haeften.” Reinhardt started at the mention of
the wizened old priest of Sigmar who led his father’s household in their
devotions. It was impossible for him to believe that the kindly soft-spoken old
man could have been responsible for bringing about Mina’s death. The witch
hunter continued to speak.

“The father reported that one of his parish was touched by Chaos,” Thulmann
paused, letting the distasteful word linger in the air. “A young woman who was
with child, whose own mother bespoke the irregularities that were manifesting
beneath her skin.”

Stunned shock claimed Reinhardt. With child. His child.

“Upon my arrival, I examined the woman and discovered that her mother’s fears
had proven themselves,” Thulmann shook his head sadly. “Her background was not
of a suspicious nature, but the Darkness infects even the most virtuous. It was
necessary to question her, to learn the source of her affliction. After several
hours, she said your name.”

“Hours of torture!” Reinhardt spat, face twisted into an animal snarl. “And
then you took me so that your creature might ‘question’ me!”

“Yes!” affirmed Thulmann, fire in his voice. “As the father, the source of
her corruption might lie within you, yourself! It was necessary to discover if
there were others! Chaos is a contagion, where one is infected others soon fall
ill!”

“Yet you released me,” challenged Reinhardt, the shame he felt at his own
survival further fuelling the impotent rage roaring through his veins.

“There was no corruption in you,” the witch hunter said, almost softly. “Nor
in the girl, not in her soul at least. It was days later that she confessed the
crime that had been the cause of her corruption.” The witch hunter stared into
Reinhardt’s blazing eyes.

“Do you know a Doktor Weichs?” he asked.

“Freiherr Weichs?” Reinhardt answered. “My father’s physician?”

“Also physician to his household. Your Mina confided a most private problem
with Weichs. She was worried that her condition would prevent you from leaving
the von Lichtberg estate, from joining the Reiksguard and seeking the honour and
glory that were your due. Weichs gave her a potion of his own creation which he
assured her would dissolve the life within her womb as harmlessly as it had
formed.”

Mathias Thulmann shook his head again. “That devil’s brew Weichs created was
what destroyed your Mina, for it contained warpstone.” The witch hunter paused
again, studying Reinhardt. “I see that you are unfamiliar with the substance. It
is the pure essence of Chaos, the black effluent of all the world’s evil. In the
days before Magnus the Pious, it was thought to possess healing properties, but
only a fool or a madman would have anything to do with the stuff in this more
enlightened age. Instead of destroying the life in the girl’s belly, the
warpstone changed it, corrupted woman and child. When I discovered this, I knew
you were innocent and had you released.”

“And burned her!” Reinhardt swore.

The witch hunter did not answer the youth but instead kicked the figure lying
at his feet.

“There is life in you yet,” Thulmann snarled, looking back at Reinhardt to
remind his prisoner that his pistol was yet trained on him. “Account for
yourself, pig! Who sends you to harm a dully-ordained servant of Sigmar?”

Mueller groaned as he rolled onto his side, staring at the witch hunter
through a swollen eye. Carefully he put a hand to his split lip and wiped the
trickle of blood from his mouth.

“Gerhardt… Knauf,” Mueller said between groans. “It was Gerhardt Knauf, the
merchant. He was afraid you had come to Kleinsdorf seeking him.”

Mathias Thulmann let a grim smile part his lips. “I am looking for him now,”
he stated. The witch hunter smashed the heel of his boot into the grovelling
mercenary’s neck, crushing the man’s windpipe. Mueller uttered a half-gargle,
half-gasp and writhed on the floor as he desperately tried to breathe. Thulmann
turned away from the dying wretch.

“This Knauf has reasons to see me dead,” Thulmann told Reinhardt, as though
the noble had not heard the exchange between witch hunter and mercenary.
“Reasons which lie in the corruption of his mind and soul. If you would avenge
your beloved, do so upon one deserving of your wrath, the same sort of filth
that destroyed the girl long before I set foot in your father’s house.”

Reinhardt glared at the witch hunter. “I will kill you,” he said in a voice
as cold as the grave. Mathias Thulmann sighed and removed a set of manacles from
the belt lying on the bed.

“I cannot let you interfere with my holy duty,” the witch hunter said,
pressing the barrel of the pistol against Reinhardt’s temple. Thulmann closed
one of the steel bracelets around the youth’s wrist, locking it shut with a deft
twist of an iron key. The other half of the manacles he closed around one of the
bed posts, trapping the bracelet between the mattress and the wooden globe that
topped the post.

“This should ensure that you do not interfere,” Mathias explained as he
retrieved the rest of his weapons and stepped over the writhing Mueller.

“I will kill you, Mathias Thulmann,” Reinhardt repeated as the witch hunter
left the room. As soon as the cloaked shape was gone, Reinhardt dropped to his
knees and stretched his hand toward the ruined body of the mercenary who had
almost killed him—and the small hatchet attached to the man’s belt.

Gerhardt Knauf paced nervously across his bedchamber. It had been nearly an
hour and still he had had no word from Mueller.

Not for the first time, the merchant cast his eyes toward the small door at
the top of the stairs. The tiny room within was the domain of Knauf’s secret
vice, the storehouse of all the forbidden and arcane knowledge Knauf had
obtained over the years: the grimoire of a centuries-dead Bretonnian witch; the
abhorred
Ninth Canticle of Tzeentch,
its mad author’s name lost to the
ages; a book of incantations designed to bring prosperity, or alternately ruin,
by the infamous sorcerer Verlag Duhring. All the black secrets that had given
Knauf his power made him better than the ignorant masses that surrounded him,
who sneered at his eccentric ways. Before the black arts at his command, brutish
men like Mueller were nothing; witch hunters were nothing.

Knauf took another drink from the bottle of wine he had removed from his
cellar. The sound of someone pounding on the door of his villa caused the
merchant to set his drink down. “Finally,” he thought.

But the figure that greeted Knauf when he gazed down from his window was not
that of Mueller. Instead he saw the scarlet and black garbed form of the
mercenary’s victim. With a horrified gasp, Knauf withdrew from the window.

“He has come for me,” the merchant shuddered. Mueller and his men had failed
and now there was no one to stand between Knauf and the determined witch hunter.
Knauf shrieked as he heard a loud explosion from below and the splintering of
wood as the door was kicked open. He had only moments in which to save himself
from the witch hunter’s justice, to avoid the flames that were the price of the
knowledge he had sought.

A smile appeared on Knauf’s face. The merchant raced for the garret room. If
there was no one who would save him from the witch hunter, there was
something
that might.

Mathias Thulmann paused on the threshold of the merchant’s villa and
holstered the smoking pistol in his hand. One shot from the flintlock weapon had
been enough to smash the lock on the door, one kick enough to force open the
heavy oak portal. The witch hunter drew his second pistol, the one he had
reloaded after the melee at the inn and scanned the darkened foyer. No sign of
life greeted Thulmann’s gaze and he stepped cautiously into the room, watching
for the slightest movement in the darkness.

Suddenly the witch hunter’s head snapped around, his eyes fixating upon the
stairway leading from the foyer to the chambers above. He could sense the dark
energies that were gathering somewhere in the rooms above him. Somewhere in this
house, someone was calling upon the Ruinous Powers. Thulmann shifted the pistol
to his other hand and drew the silvered blade of his sword, blessed by the Grand
Theogonist himself and grimly ascended the stairs.

Gerhardt Knauf could feel the eldritch energies gathering in the air around
him as he read from the
Ninth Canticle of Tzeentch.
The power was almost
a tangible quantity as it surged from the warlock and gathered at the centre of
a ring of lighted candles. A nervous laugh interrupted the arcane litany
streaming from Knauf’s lips as he saw the first faint glimmer of light appear.
Swiftly, the glow grew in size, keeping pace with the increasing speed of the
words flying from Knauf’s tongue. The crackling nimbus took on a pinkish hue and
the first faint suggestion of a shape within the light was visible to him.

No, the warlock realised, there was not a shape within the light; rather, the
light was assuming a shape. As the blasphemous litany continued, a broad torso
coalesced from which two long, simian arms dangled, each ending in an enormous
clawed hand. Two short, thick legs slowly grew away from the torso until they
touched the wooden floor. Finally, a head sprouted from between the two arms,
growing away from the body so that the head was between its shoulders rather
than above them. A gargoyle face appeared, its fanged mouth stretching across
the head in a hideous grin. Two swirling pools of orange light stared at the
warlock.

The daemon uttered a loathsome sound like the wailing of an infant, a sound
hideous in its suggestion of malevolent mirth. Knauf shuddered and turned his
eyes from the frightful thing he had summoned. In so doing, his gaze fell upon
his feet and the colour drained away from his face as the horror of what he had
done became known to him.

The first thing Knauf had learned, the most important rule he had found
repeated again and again in the arcane books he had so long hoarded, was that a
sorcerer must always protect himself from that which he would have do his
bidding. In his haste to save himself from the witch hunter, to summon this
creature of Tzeentch, Knauf had forgotten to draw about himself a protective
circle, a barrier that no daemon may cross.

Knauf’s mind desperately groped amongst its store of arcane knowledge seeking
some enchantment, some spell that would save the warlock from his hideous
mistake. Before him, the daemon uttered its loathsome laugh again. Knauf
screamed as the pink abomination moved towards him with a curious scuttling
motion.

Thoughts of sorcery forgotten, Knauf clenched his eyes and stretched his arm
in front of his body, as though to ward away the monstrous horror even as the
fiend advanced upon him. The daemon’s grotesque hands closed about the warlock’s
extended arm, bringing new screams from Knauf as the icy touch seared through
his veins. Slowly, the daemon raked a single claw down the length of the
would-be wizard’s arm, a deep wound that sank down to the very bone. Knauf’s
cries of agony rose still higher as the daemon’s fingers probed the wound. Like
a child with a piece of fruit, the horror began to peel the flesh from Knauf’s
arm, the warlock’s howl of torment drowned out by the monster’s increasing
glee.

Mathias Thulmann reached the garret in time to witness the warlock’s demise.
No longer amused by the high-pitched wails escaping from Knauf’s throat, the
pink hands released the skeletal limb they clutched and seized the warlock’s
shoulders, pulling Knauf’s body to the daemon’s own. The daemon’s giant maw
gaped wide and with a formless undulating motion surged up and over Knauf’s head
and shoulders. The pseudo-corporeal substance of the daemon allowed a horrified
Thulmann to see the warlock’s features behind the ichorous pink jaws that
engulfed it. He could see those still-screaming features twist and mutate as the
flesh was quickly dissolved, patches of muscle appearing beneath skin before
being stripped away to reveal the bone itself. The hardened witch hunter turned
away from the appalling sight.

The daemon’s insane gibbering brought Thulmann back to his senses. The witch
hunter returned his gaze to the loathsome creature and the fool who had called
it from the Realm of Chaos. Atop Gerhardt Knauf’s body, a skull dripped the last
of the warlock’s blood and rivulets of meaty grease; the body beneath had been
stripped to the breastbone. The whisper of a scream seemed to echo through the
garret as the last shards of the warlock’s soul fled into the night. The pink
daemon rose from its gory repast and turned its fiery eyes upon the witch
hunter.

Thulmann found himself powerless to act as the daemon slowly made its way
across the garret room. The preternatural fiend moved in a capering, dance-like
manner, its glowing body brilliant in the darkness, sounds of lunatic amusement
emanating from its clenched, grinning jaws. The daemon stopped just out of reach
of the witch hunter’s sword, settling down on its haunches. It trained its fiery
eyes on the scarlet-clad Templar, regarding him with an unholy mixture of
hatred, humour, and hunger.