“And you are?”
The cat gave Dieter a wild-eyed look, as it might regard a
scampering mouse.
“Heydrich. Dieter Heydrich.”
“So old Frau Keeler’s found someone fool enough to share this
draughty garret, has she? I suppose you’d better come in then.”
The gaunt young man moved back into the room, allowing Dieter
to haul his trunk over the threshold but not offering to help in any way.
“Sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” Dieter said, hesitantly
polite.
“That’s because I didn’t tell you,” the youth replied. “The
name’s Karlsen. Erich Karlsen.”
The mop-haired youth closed the door behind Dieter and then
looked the hopeful physician’s apprentice up and down.
“So, what brings you to Bögenhafen? You’re not native, that’s
for sure. That Reikland country burr is a dead giveaway.”
“I-I have come to train at the physicians’ guild,” Dieter
said nervously but with an element of pride. “Frau Keeler mentioned that you
were a. student of medicine yourself.”
“For my sins,” Erich replied, fixing Dieter with an almost
suspicious look as he stroked the cat in his arms.
Dieter couldn’t help feeling slightly despondent, as his
idealised image of what it would be like to train as a healer at Bögenhafen’s
renowned physicians’ guild took another knock. It obviously showed in his face.
“Look, there’s no need to look like that, it’s not terminal,
you know,” Erich said, casting his expressive eyes at the ceiling. “My advice is
get back onboard the coach that brought you here and go back to wherever you
came from. You’ll have a much more rewarding life that way I can assure you.”
“What’s the guild like then?” Dieter couldn’t help asking.
“An institution of old men whose minds are stagnating in
their own preposterous arrogance.”
Dieter looked at Erich, appalled. Erich could hardly miss the
look of innocent horror.
“It’s all right if you don’t mind being given all the cesspit
jobs to do.”
“You are not enjoying your apprenticeship at the guild?”
“I have decided that it is a tedious and tiresome profession.
Your time is spent studying dry, over-written, out-dated texts recommended by
unimaginative, tiresome, out-dated, age-addled lecturers and you’ll be lucky if
you even get to look at a living flesh and blood patient in your first year. But
even that is more interesting than cleaning up after the senior guild members,
rather than actually practising medicine for yourself.”
Erich was pacing across the garret now, like an actor
speaking his soliloquy on the stage. He was stroking the cat behind its ears as
he did so.
“Some get to try out their skills on the poor unfortunates
imprisoned within the infirmary at the Temple of Shallya, of course, wretched
souls who no longer have any family left to care for them—or at least none
that actually care what happens to them. But even then as an apprentice you’re
only working under direction from the guild masters. No, they’re all a waste of
space if you ask me.”
“What of the master of the guild, Professor Theodrus?”
“He’s the worst of the lot. Anything he has to say is a
criminal waste of the air we breathe, if you ask me, which, I would hasten to
add before you look at me like that again, you did.”
For a moment neither of them said anything.
“So what’s Bögenhafen like?” Dieter asked at last to break
the conversational impasse the two new roommates had seemed to reach.
“All right if you don’t mind the smell. In the summer the
river, not to mention the open sewers that run down half the streets, stinks to
high heaven and in the winter the mists coming off the Bögen get so thick you
can’t even see the hand in front of your face. And the chill wind will freeze
your bones to the marrow—especially in this place,” he concluded, indicating
the attic space with a roll of his eyes.
Dieter’s disappointment grew, but he had to admit that he
felt colder here than he had waking up as the draughty carriage approached
Bögenhafen that morning.
He paced sullenly across the attic, leaving his trunk where
it was, and looked out of the grimy pane of the nearest of a pair of dormer
windows. He found himself looking east across the rooftops of the town towards
the looming shadow of the town wall. This part of Bögenhafen was an overcrowded
region of crumbling towers and tenements that had been allowed to fall into a
state of disrepair over the last few hundred years, away, as they were, from the
commercial and administrative centres of the town, and riddled with a maze of
hidden, half-forgotten alleyways and rat-runs, some of the buildings connected
by apparently inaccessible buttressed footbridges and wooden staircases clinging
to the mouldering brickwork.
Beyond the black line of the wall battlements, the watery
yellow-ochre disc of the sun had become a line of wan colour outlining the
parapet of the wall. Dieter realised he had lost all track of time during the
course of his eventful day, first having to wait at the guild for what seemed
like an eternity whilst his application was processed—the porter having
determined that Dieter was not an envoy from one of the more politically
important noble houses requesting a doktor’s aid for his lord and master—and
then having to search out lodgings in the town.
“Look, enough of this. I’m even starting to depress myself.
Let’s go for a drink.”
Erich dropped the cat, which gave a yowl as it landed on the
floor, hissed at its fickle master and then stalked off beyond a partition to
where Dieter could see the foot of an unmade bed.
“Oh… um… all right,” Dieter hazarded. He wasn’t used to
that sort of thing. To tell the truth he wasn’t used to socializing at all, nor
was he at ease with it.
There had only been one drinking house in Hangenholz and
Dieter had not been comfortable going there. Everyone had known who he was and
his father would inevitably find out about it. A village tavern was not the kind
of establishment a priest of Morr would choose to spend time in—at least not
Albrecht Heydrich—so neither should his son. But Dieter was his own man now,
and although it still might not be the kind of thing he was used to doing, he
did not want to alienate his new roommate, who he would have to spend so much
time with and the one person he even remotely knew in a strange and overwhelming
city.
“Where should we go?” he asked.
“Don’t worry, country boy,” Erich said, smiling for the first
time since he and Dieter had met, although it was an expression that spoke to
Dieter of even more uncomfortable situations to come. “I know a place.”
“What did you think of the lecture?” Dieter heard a voice ask
breathlessly at his shoulder. The accent was native to the town Bögenhafen
itself.
Dieter looked round to see another student trotting to catch
up with him as they left the lecture chamber. He looked to be the same age as
Dieter, with a tidy head of blond hair and fuzz of a beard on his chin, cut in
the way that Dieter believed was the fashion in the Imperial capital of Nuln. He
was obviously also a stone or two heavier than the more wiry young man from
Hangenholz. The student was clutching a half-open scrip to his chest, parchment
and quill pen spilling out of it.
“Fascinating. Better than I had expected.”
“Better than you had expected? What do you mean by that?”
“Oh… It doesn’t matter. In truth it was everything I had
hoped it would be.”
“Professor Theodrus is certainly an excellent speaker, isn’t
he?”
“He is obviously a highly intelligent man and extremely
knowledgeable.”
“Extremely,” the other young man agreed enthusiastically.
“Was this your first lecture here?”
“Yes. Yours too?”
“Oh yes, absolutely.”
The two men came to a halt in the passageway outside the
operating theatre-cum-lecture room, as the bustle of the other students
continued to wash past them.
“Sorry, I forgot to introduce myself,” Dieter’s conversation
companion said, proffering him an outstretched palm, at the same time almost
dropping his bulging scrip as he let go with one hand. “Leopold Hanser.”
“Dieter Heydrich.” Dieter uncertainly offered the other his
own hand in return and the two of them shook. This was a very different greeting
to the one he had received from his fellow lodger, Erich Karlsen.
“Where are you from?” Leopold asked in a friendly manner.
“Hangenholz. It’s a small place. You won’t have heard of it.
It’s about six leagues from Bögenhafen.”
“Have you been in Bögenhafen long?”
“Three days.”
“So what do you think of the guild?”
“It’s incredible, truth be told.”
“Yes, I would have to agree with that diagnosis, as Professor
Theodrus would say,” Leopold chuckled.
“I take it you’re from Bögenhafen yourself?”
“That’s correct. I live with my mother, a widow. I’m the man
of the house now; have been since the age of thirteen. But my father’s
inheritance won’t last forever. So I’m putting myself through the guild,
following in my father’s footsteps, as it were. He was a respected doktor. And
now I’m making a career for myself.”
“I suppose this—the guild, Bögenhafen—is nothing new to
someone like yourself,” Dieter said, almost admiringly.
“Oh I don’t know about that. This town has its fair share of
excitements for citizen and visitor alike. I expect you have already heard tell
of the Corpse Taker.”
“The Corpse Taker?” Dieter repeated, anxiety etching itself
across his pale expression of uncertainty. “N-No. I haven’t.”
“Well I’m surprised by that revelation, friend Dieter,”
Leopold said and then took him to one side of the passageway, conspiratorially.
“It’s all the talk amongst the guild students at the moment, since the second
body disappeared from Morr’s mortuary in the cemetery since Hexensnacht.”
Dieter felt a shiver pass involuntarily down his spine like a
drop of ice water. Hexensnacht was as reviled as the New Year’s Day of Hexenstag
was celebrated. It was a night when both the moons of Mannslieb and Morrslieb
were full in the sky. It was a night when even the most hardened cynics stayed
out of the eerie moonlight cast by the twin satellites, for it was during the
hours of darkness that all manner of evil made its way through the world of men,
a night when spirits walked and daemons held sway. It was the Witching Night.
“They say Father Hulbert was up in arms about it. He’s
petitioned the town council to post men-at-arms at the entrance to Morr’s field
to stop it happening again.”
“Father Hulbert?”
“The attendant priest of Morr.”
“So who is this Corpse Taker?” Dieter asked, unnerved.
“The name originates from a folktale told to children by
their parents to scare them and keep them in line. But now it seems that the
Corpse Taker is no nursery bogeyman after all. The first bodies began to go
missing as the old year died. Three in the space of as many months. The first
was hardly missed. The body belonged to that of a hanged criminal. The second
was apparently a beggar who had died of exposure, outside the Temple of Shallya
of all places. The third was that of a man pulled out of the Bögen. But now
there have been two more disappearances in the space of a week, both from the
mortuary chapel of the cemetery itself.”
“But who would do such a thing?” Dieter asked, appalled. “And
why?”
“Botolphus, apprentice to Doktor Fitzgarten, overheard some
of the senior members talking in Fitzgarten’s office. They fear it is the work
of necromancers.”
Dieter felt the blood drain from his cheeks.
Necromancers, he thought. The very bane of all life and of
his father’s life in particular. He had heard his father say as much on several
occasions. They were the blight of Morr and the mortal enemies of his guardian
priesthood.
Dieter even loathed the idea of them. That anyone should wish
to tamper with Morr’s plan and desecrate the final resting places of the dead,
and then on top of that to bring the dead back to unholy, inhuman life for their
own gain, to further their own insidious plans, was unthinkable to him.
He had come to a town where a madman, murderer or even a
summoner of the dead terrorised the watches of the night. And three days ago
Bögenhafen had seemed to offer him so much promise. Now the thought of spending
another night in the town unsettled him deeply.
Erich Karlsen had also heard the rumours about the Corpse
Taker. He, however, was less taken in by the idea that the phantom bodysnatcher
was a practitioner of the black arts.
“There are all manner of physicians and surgeons working
within a town this size,” he said one evening as Dieter found himself treating
Erich to another flagon at the Cutpurse’s Hands. “And they’re not all licensed
by the guild, mark my words. Progressive thinkers or dangerous madmen, they all
need to get the bodies they use in their studies from somewhere. And there are
plenty desperate and immoral enough to do their dirty work for them, exhuming
corpses from their graves for a small fee.”
Erich took another swig from his tankard and fixed Dieter
with a knowing look. “Not everything untoward that happens in this world is down
to dark magic. There is evil enough in the hearts of men without the need for
necromancers and daemons as well.”
As the days of their mutual confinement in the garret
quarters had passed, Dieter found himself warming towards the slovenly,
rebellious Erich. There was something secretly charismatic about the unruly
apprentice physician. And for his part, Erich seemed to enjoy having someone as
young and naive, and as easily impressed or shocked, as Dieter. New to the
uncaring life of a busy market town and still for the most part innocent to the
ways of the world, Erich could regale Dieter with his stories of an exuberantly
youthful excess in a town that had almost anything a rebellious young man could
want on offer. Erich also had a captive audience when he wanted to espouse on
what he thought was wrong with the world or rather, the physicians’ guild, or
the guild of fossils as he preferred to call it. It soon became apparent to
Dieter that the reason why Erich could not afford to live anywhere better was
because he had found other things to spend his allowance on. He had frittered it
away on the good life, wild carousing rather than comfortable accommodation.