Their lodgings were in a street off the Eisen Bahn, in one of
the poorer parts of the city, but it was the only place Dieter, or Erich, could
afford to live. There were three other people sharing the crumbling tenement
with them. Frau Keeler, their harridan of a landlady, lived on the ground floor
of the building. She had told Dieter that the rooms on the first floor were let
to a noted playwright and actor, one Franz Liebervitz. In truth Liebervitz was a
weirdroot user with a fondness for seducing the latest young starlet to try to
find fame in the theatre. The second floor apartments were used on an occasional
basis by one of the town’s most highly regarded merchants, who Frau Keeler
assured Dieter she was too discreet to name, for his cousin to stay during her
frequent visits to Bögenhafen from the Imperial Court in Nuln. That left only
the rooms on the third floor, really nothing more than the spartanly decorated
attic of the crumbling lodging house, where Dieter and Erich resided in their
thinly partitioned rooms. All of the apartments could be accessed from a rickety
wooden staircase that ran up the entire height of the building, from a front
door that opened directly onto the stinking refuse channel street of Dunst
Strasse.
So this was what life in Bögenhafen was like, Dieter
considered as he tried to get to sleep that night, in an uncomfortable bed in
draughty lodgings, in a town full of people who seemed either not to like him
without even having to meet him—apart from Leopold and Erich—and with a body
snatcher, or possibly worse, on the loose. Dieter could not help feeling a
little disappointment. His dream was not quite all he hoped it would be in
reality.
But at least he was finding his feet at the physicians’ guild
now. Nothing could truly quash his enthusiasm for the path he had set himself
upon, and that was all that truly mattered. After only two or three years his
training would be complete and he could return to Hangenholz and his beloved
sister Katarina.
He saw her face now as his eyelids closed, her swan neck and
almond eyes so like their mother’s, her shining hair, the sheen of her dark
tresses like moonlight on a lake at midnight, framing her delicate, pale
features. So like their mother. So unlike their father. And then, unbidden, the
crow-black figure of his love-lacking father came into sharp focus in his mind’s
eye.
No longer would he just be the loner son of Albrecht
Heydrich, priest of Morr, Dieter determined. He would be Dieter Heydrich, doktor
of physick, Healer of Hangenholz. Yes, he liked the sound of that. Hunched under
his rough-haired blanket on the thin straw mattress of his bed he tried the
title out in his mind, as weary sleep pulled at him.
Yes. Dieter Heydrich—Doktor Heydrich—the doktor of
Hangenholz.
And then as sleep took him at last, one last, haunting image
swam into his mind and his dreams. It was a face he had never seen before, one
he could never have seen before. A horrific bandaged face with one baleful
yellow eye peering through the bloodstained rags, its mouth a mess of drawn back
gums and rotting elongated teeth. But he knew who it was nonetheless, although
he knew not its import at that time.
It was the face of the Corpse Taker.
Looking back now, it’s hard to believe that I was ever
actually impressed by that blinkered old bigot, Theodrus. His mind was as closed
to new thinking as a cast-iron strongbox. He could not bring himself to believe
that there might be another way, another avenue of knowledge more far-reaching
and powerful than his own. For he was a coward at heart, afraid of those who
dared to question the primitive, out-dated understanding of the world that he
held to be irrefutable truth, a way of thought that he would not let go of, like
a mongrel with a scavenged leg of mutton. The guild master was a craven,
opinionated sop whose position of power and influence was built on a
feeble-minded adherence to the received knowledge and practices of others.
But looking back, however much I might despise the memory of
Theodrus, it is nothing compared to the hatred and contempt I hold even now for
that whoreson witch hunter, Ernst Krieger, Barakos take him.
Witch hunters! A pox on them! May they rot in the
festering hells of their own creation, burning perpetually at the stake,
throttled by their own intestines, as they have sent so many untold thousands to
their deaths, innocent and guilty alike.
They dare to call themselves templars, divinely inspired holy
warriors, knights of Sigmar. In truth they pursue their own obsessive hunts and
exorcise their own daemons on the frail flesh of others.
They are a plague upon mankind, worse than anything the
servants of the Ruinous Powers could ever conjure up. They claim piety and to be
the true servants of Sigmar, yet they spread suspicion like a sickness. Their
unbridled paranoia and pathological mistrust of others unnerves, terrifies and
ultimately alienates the Heldenhammer’s otherwise faithful flock.
None can match their impossible, exacting ideals and
expectations, so all—save Sigmar himself—are found wanting. And since they
are the representatives, and instruments, of Sigmar’s divine retribution on the
earthly plane, anyone they suspect of heresy is immediately considered to be
guilty. And of course anyone who dares to disagree with them is a heretic.
They are mentally unbalanced, obsessive, irrationally
paranoid individuals. They will burn, drown or put to the sword anyone—regardless of age or gender—without clemency. They are utterly without mercy
and most of them are without reason of any sort. They encourage fanaticism and
the mortification of the flesh, knowing little of its power. They breed
discontent and spread antagonism in their wake.
Their idea of justice is to put the accused through one of
their barbaric ordeals. They extract confessions, false or otherwise, by
torture, many of those they abuse in this way succumbing before ever facing the
ultimate punishment the witch hunters have proscribed for them—much to the
villains’ disappointment and chagrin.
There are few who escape the prying suspicious intentions of
witch hunters, not even others of their accursed kind. They are dangerous
individuals whose merest word can stir up mass hysteria among a town’s populace
and encourage a mob mentality that results in rioting and causing an otherwise
peaceful crowd to bay for blood. Anyone who is slightly different can end up
dead—strung up from the gallows or burnt at the stake—killed by people’s
fear of what they don’t understand.
I hate them all with a burning black passion—this I do not
seek forgiveness for—and none more so than that daemon Ernst Krieger.
The rest of the month of Nachexen passed in a whirl of
excitement for the newly inducted apprentice of Bögenhafen’s physicians’ guild.
Despite the promising signs that had appeared earlier in the month that spring
was coming, now it seemed that winter showed no sign of releasing the town from
its icy grip. In fact the weather seemed to worsen and the temperature dropped
again as the days and weeks passed, to the point where on the twenty-first day
it seemed that the relentless River Bögen itself might freeze and bring the
barge traffic on the river to a standstill. Despite this fact, there still
seemed to be a fair number of barges passing through the town bearing cargoes
from as far away as Talabheim and the port of Marienburg.
But the cold weather did nothing to deter the increasingly
enthusiastic Dieter Heydrich from his studies. As each day passed, he began to
feel that he had truly found his calling in life, his vocation. Indeed his
passion for his subject blazed so strongly within him that he barely noticed the
cold of the attic room he shared with fellow student Erich Karlsen, a damp cold
that seeped through his robes and even the blankets on his bed, as if his
enthusiasm warmed him and kept the cold at bay at this dead time of the year.
For Dieter, Nachexen passed with daily attendances at the
physicians’ guild listening to lectures given by the Guild Master Professor
Theodrus and other senior members. Much time was also spent preparing the
ointments, solutions, syrups, unguents and powdered remedies used by the
physicians when practising medicine.
To begin with, Dieter was put to work preparing those
medicines required by the respected sage Doktor Hirsch, who counted members of
the noble merchant families of the town amongst his patients.
But then on the morning of Backertag the following week,
after only five days’ service to Doktor Hirsch, Dieter received a summons to the
chambers of Professor Theodrus himself.
“You show promise, Heydrich. You appear to have an almost
intuitive understanding of the human body and its humours,” the professor told
him at their meeting.
And that was that. Dieter was now apprentice to the head of
the guild himself.
When he wasn’t attending to those duties he now fulfilled for
Professor Theodrus, Dieter spent as much time in the library as he could. The
keeper of the books, one Kubas Praza, quietly boasted that the Bögenhafen
physicians’ guild’s library rivalled that of the guild house in Altdorf and
contained some rare texts that could not even be found in the Shallyan temple in
the city of Couronne over the Grey Mountains in the land of Bretonnia, the
centre of the Cult of Mercy.
Erich continued to attend to his duties at the guild
haphazardly and once it became common knowledge that Dieter was his roommate,
the errant apprentice’s mentor—or rather overseer—Doktor Panceus stopped
Dieter in the corridors of the guild house on more than one occasion to berate
Erich and put the onus on Dieter to cajole his slovenly, defiant fellow lodger
to attend.
One such incident occurred when Dieter and Leopold were
making their way to a lecture on the last Konigstag of Nachexen. Leopold was
updating Dieter with regard to the latest outrageous rumours about the phantom
Corpse Taker when a wild white-haired man, as bony as a skeleton and as drawn as
a plague victim, burst out of a door only a matter of feet in front of the two.
He looked up and down the corridor, his soot-smeared face a portrait of fury.
Dieter recognised the aging physician at once.
“Shallya damn him!” the old man exclaimed, his outburst
making him cough phlegmily. “Where is that insolent whoreson wretch?”
Then his wild, bradawl eyes fixed on Dieter. “Heydrich! Where
is Herr Karlsen, eh? Where is he, the blackguard?”
Dieter and Leopold were pulled up abruptly. Everyone knew
Doktor Panceus. Panceus was Erich’s long-suffering master at the guild. He was
renowned as an expert in the field of alchemical chemistry and was also slightly
feared as being an irascible, unpredictable character.
“Um. I don’t know, Doktor Panceus,” Dieter said nervously,
hoping that he didn’t sound as uncertain and as wavering as he felt.
“You don’t know? You don’t know? You lodge with him don’t
you? Isn’t that what I heard? Eh?”
“I haven’t seen him today, doktor,” Dieter added, feeling
that he was being blamed for Erich’s absence from the guild.
Leopold looked from Dieter to the wild-eyed doktor and back
again, but said nothing.
“Probably drinking his poor father’s fortune away, I expect,
down in one of those seedy dockside bars. Or still under the covers with some
schilling and farthing whore!”
Panceus suddenly grabbed Dieter roughly by the front of his
robe and pulled his face close to his own hooked beak of a nose. The doktor’s
visage was pockmarked and wild white hair seemed to burrow up out of every part
that wasn’t smeared with soot and the residue of Shallya knew what bizarre,
unstable experiments. His breath stank of sulphur for some reason.
Indeed, Doktor Panceus had a reputation for being one of the
only guild members who still actively experimented and tried to advance the
boundaries of his science, rather than merely passing down previously received
knowledge and honing delicate handiwork skills such as suturing, cauterising and
amputation.
Dieter found himself staring into the bulging pinprick pupil
eyes of the crazed master apothecary.
“Is it any wonder I give him the midden jobs if he never
bothers to turn up? That boy has to learn respect. How can he hope to practise
medicine if he has no respect? Damn his eyes! I’ll have to get Georg to do it.”
Dieter glanced over Panceus’ shoulder, unable to bear the
doktor’s needling gaze any longer. The room beyond the Panceus’ open door was a
smoke-darkened chamber, the brickwork of a huge fireplace dominating the room
blackened with soot. Dieter could feel the heat radiating from the brickwork
inside the laboratory. Cowering beside the chimney breast was an even more
soot-stained urchin whose job it was, for a measly three farthings a week, to
keep the fire hot and keep a watch on the cauldrons hanging over the flames. The
birch Panceus used to beat the boy, if he ever failed in his duties, hung on the
wall next to him. The rest of the room was cluttered with wooden work benches
littered with alembics and various pestles and mortars full of brightly coloured
compounds.
“Well when you next happen to bump into Herr Karlsen, tell
him that if he lets me down again I shall have to have words with the professor
about his position within the guild,” Panceus spat.
From what Dieter had gleaned from his occasional
conversations with Erich in the Cutpurse’s Hands, the heir to the Karlsen
estates was in truth assured as long as his father kept paying the guild fees.
And his father would, as long as it kept Erich away from his family estates.
In terms of his practical ability, as well as his mental
acumen, it soon became apparent that Dieter was a fast learner and a skilled
practitioner. By the time the lightening skies and thawing frosts of Jahrdrung
had supplanted the bitter chill of Nachexen, it seemed that Dieter had learnt as
much in the past month as his roommate Erich had learnt in the past two years,
if not more.