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Chapter One

A Fisher of Devils

A SYLVANIAN BORDER TOWN
Early spring, 2009

The land was devoid of life. No insects chirped, no frogs croaked, there was no bird song, not even the whisper of the breeze stirring leaves in the trees. The silence was unnatural. The malignancy, Jon Skellan realised, infected everything. It was ingrained in the very earth of the land itself. Its sickness ate away at everything; decay only an inch beneath the surface. The trees, still bare despite the turning of the season into what ought to have been the first flush of spring, were rotten to the core. Scanning the skeletal branches overhead Skellan saw that the only nest was empty, and judging by the way the twigs had been unravelled by the weather, had been empty for a long time. It was a spiritual canker. The land – this land – was soaked in blood, cruelty and despair.

Skellan shuddered.

Beside him, Stefan Fischer made the sign of Sigmar’s hammer.

The two of them were chasing ghosts but what better place to come looking for them than the barren lands of Sylvania?

‘Verhungern Wood. Starvation Wood, or Hunger Wood. I’m not sure about the precise interpretation of the dialect into Reikspiel. Still, the name seems disturbingly appropriate, doesn’t it?’

‘Aye, it does,’ Fischer agreed, looking at the rows of dead and dying trees. It was difficult to believe that less than two days walk behind them spring in all of her beauty was unfolding in the daffodils and crocuses along the banks of the River Stir. ‘Forests are meant to be living things, full of living things.’ And by saying it out loud, Fischer voiced what had been bothering Skellan for the last hour. There was a total lack of life around them. ‘Not like this blasted, barren place. It’s unnatural.’

Skellan uncorked the flask he carried at his hip and took a deep swig of water. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and sighed. They were a long way from home – and in more ways than simply distance. This place was unlike anywhere he had ever been before. He had heard tales of Sylvania, but like most he assumed they were exaggerated with fishwives’ gossip and the usual tall tales of self-proclaimed adventurers. The reality was harsher than he had imagined. The land had suffered under centuries of abuse and misrule, which of course made their arrival here inevitable. It was their calling; to root out evil, to cleanse the world of the black arts and the villainous scum who dabbled in them.

The pair had been called many things; the simplest, though least accurate, being witch hunters. Jon Skellan found it interesting that the agony of grief could earn a man such an epithet. He hadn’t made a conscious choice to become the man he was today. Life had shaped him, bent him, buckled him, but it had not broken him. Now, seven years to the month, if not the week, since the riders had come burning and looting to his home, here he was, chasing ghosts, or rather looking to finally lay them to rest.

‘All roads lead to hell,’ he said, bitterly.

‘Well, this one brought us to Sylvania,’ Fischer said.

‘Same place, my friend, same godforsaken place.’

The ruining of one lifestyle and the birth of their new one had been shockingly quick. Skellan and Fischer had married sisters and become widowers within a quarter of an hour of each other. The highs and the lows of their lives were bound together. Fate can be cruel like that. Skellan looked at his brother-in-law. No one would ever mistake them for family. At thirty-six, Fischer was nine years older than Skellan, a good six inches taller and a stone heavier where the muscles had started to slide into fat, but the two men shared a single disturbing similarity: their eyes. Their eyes said they had seen a future filled with happiness, and it had been snatched away from them. The loss had aged them far beyond their years. Their souls were old, hardened. They had experienced the worst that life could throw at them, and they had survived. Now it was about vengeance.

A beetle the size of a mouse skittered across the ground less than a foot in front of his feet. It was the first living thing they had encountered in hours and it was hardly encouraging.

‘Have you ever wondered what it might have been like if…’ He didn’t need to clarify the ‘if’. They both knew what he was talking about.

‘Every day,’ Fischer said, not looking at him. ‘It’s like walking out of the storyteller’s circle halfway through his tale… you don’t know how it is supposed to end and you keep obsessing over it. What would life have been like if Leyna and Lizbet hadn’t been murdered? Where would we be now? Not here, that’s for sure.’

‘No… not here.’ Skellan agreed. ‘No use getting maudlin.’ He straightened as he said it, drawing himself upright as though shrugging off the heavy burden of sadness thinking about Lizbet always brought with it. It was, of course, an act. He could no more shrug off his grief than he could forget what caused it in the first place. It was simply a case of managing it. Skellan had long since come to terms with his wife’s death. He accepted it. It had happened. He didn’t forgive it, and he didn’t forget.

There had been seven riders that day. It had taken time, almost seven years to be exact, but six of them were in the ground now, having paid the ultimate price for their sins. Skellan and Fischer had seen to that, and in doing so they showed the men no quarter. Like their victims, like Leyna and Lizbet and the other souls they sent to Morr in their frenzy, they burned. It wasn’t pretty but then death never is. They caught up with the first of the murderers almost three months later, in a tavern drunk to the point where he could barely stand. Skellan had dragged him outside, dunked him in the horse’s watering trough until the murderer came up coughing and spluttering and sober enough to know he was in trouble. The knee is a very delicate hinge protected by a bone cap. Skellan shattered one of the man’s kneecaps with a brutal kick through the joint, and dragged him screaming into the room he lodged in. ‘You’ve got a chance,’ Skellan had said. ‘Not a very good chance, but more of one than you gave my wife.’ It wasn’t true. Unable to stand, let alone walk, the man didn’t have a chance against the flames and the smoke – and even if by some miracle he had dragged himself clear of the fire, Skellan and Fischer were waiting outside to see he joined the ranks of Morr’s dead.

There was no satisfaction in it. No sense of a wrong having been righted or justice having been done.

It was all about vengeance and one by one the murderers burned.

At first it had been like a sickness inside him, and it had only grown worse until it became an all-consuming need to make the murderers pay for what they had done. But even their deaths didn’t take the pain away, so for a while he made them die harder.

By the time they caught up with the fourth murderer, a snivelling wretch of a man, Skellan had devised his torture jacket. The coat had extra long sleeves and buckles so that they could be fastened in such a way that the wearer was trapped, helpless. The coat itself was doused in lamp oil. It was a brutal way to die, but Skellan justified it to himself by saying he was doing it for Lizbet and for all the others the murderer had tortured and burned alive. Lying to himself was a skill he had perfected over the seven-year hunt. He knew full well what he was doing. He was extracting vengeance for the dead.

It was guilt, he knew, that drove him. Guilt for the fact that he had failed them in life. Guilt for the fact that he hadn’t been there to save them from the savagery of their murderers, and his guilt was an ugly thing because once it had wormed its way into his head it refused to give up its hold. It ate away at his mind. It convinced him that there was something he could have done. That it was his fault that Lizbet and Leyna and all of the others were dead.

So he carried with him his own personal daemons and didn’t argue when he heard people cry: ‘The witch hunter is coming!’

They walked on a while in silence, both men locked in thoughts of the past, neither one needing to say a word.

After a while the wind picked up, and carried with it a smell they were painfully familiar with.

Burning flesh.

At first Skellan thought it was his mind playing tricks on him, bringing back old ghosts to torment him, but beside him Fischer stopped and sniffed suspiciously at the air as though trying to locate the source of the smell and he realised the burning wasn’t in his mind, it was here, now. There would be no burning without fire, and no fire without smoke. He scanned the trees looking for any hint of smoke, but it was impossible to see more than a few feet either way. The entire forest could have been on fire and without the press of heat from the conflagration he would never have known. The wind itself offered no clues. They had walked into a slight declivity that cut like a shallow U through the landscape. It meant that the wind was funnelled down through channel before folding back on itself. The tang of smoke and the sickly sweet stench of burned meat could have come from almost any direction. But it couldn’t have come from far away. The smell would have dissipated over any great distance.

Skellan turned in a slow circle.

There was no hint of smoke or fire to the right, or where the valley spread out before them, and the withered line of trees masked any hint of smoke to the left but the fact that there were trees to hide the fire where everywhere else was barren told Skellan all he needed to know.

‘This way,’ he said, and started to run into the trees.

Fischer set off after him but found it difficult to keep up with the younger man.

Branches clawed at his clothes and scratched at his face as he pushed his way through them. Brittle twigs snapped underfoot. The smell of burning grew stronger the deeper into the wood they went.

And still there were no sounds or signs of life apart from Fischer’s laboured breathing and bullish footsteps.

As he pushed on, Skellan realised that the press of the trees began to thin noticeably. He stumbled into the clearing without realising that was what he had found. It was a village, of sorts, in the wood. He pulled up short. There was a scattering of low houses made of wattle and daub, and a fire pit in what would be the small settlement’s meeting place. Early spring mist clung to the air. The fire was ablaze, dead wood banked high. A body had been laid out on top of the wood, wrapped in some kind of cloth that had all but burned away. A handful of mourners gathered around the pyre, their faces limned with soot and tears as they turned to look at the intruders. An old man with close-cropped white hair appeared to be officiating over the ceremony.

Skellan held up his hands in a sign of peace and backed up a step, not wanting to intrude further on their grief.

‘Peculiar ritual,’ Fischer muttered as he finally caught up. ‘Burning the dead instead of burying them.’

‘But not unheard of,’ Skellan agreed. ‘More common during times of strife, certainly. Soldiers will honour their dead on such a funeral pyre. But this, I fear, is done for a very different reason.’

‘Plague?’

‘That would be my guess, though by rights an outbreak in a village this small would wipe the place out virtually overnight and burning the first victims won’t matter a damn. How many live here? One hundred? Less? It isn’t even a village, it’s a handful of houses. If it is the plague, I pity them because they’re doomed. I doubt very much whether this place will be here when we come back through these woods in a few months time. We should leave them in peace, but we’re not going to. Let’s give them some privacy to complete the ritual then I want to talk to some people. The burning of the dead has my curiosity piqued.’

‘Aye, it is an odd thing, but then we are in an odd place. Who knows what these people think is normal?’

They waited just beyond the skirt of the tree line until the fire burned itself out. Despite their retreat out of sight the mourners were uncomfortably aware of their presence and cast occasional glances their way, trying to see them through the shadows. Skellan sat with his back against a tree. He whittled at a small piece of deadfall with his knife, shaping it into the petals of a crude flower. Beside him Fischer closed his eyes and fell into a light sleep. It always amazed the witch hunter how his friend seemed capable of sleeping at any time, in any place imaginable. It was a useful skill. He himself could never empty his mind enough to sleep. He worried about the smallest details. Obsessed about them.

Even this close to the small settlement the woods were disturbingly quiet. It was unnatural. He had no doubt about that. But what had caused the animals to abandon this place? That was the question that nagged away at the back of his mind. He knew full well that animals were sensitive to all kinds of danger; it was that survival instinct that kept them alive. Something had caused them to leave this part of Verhungern Wood.

Jon Skellan looked up at the sound of cautious footsteps approaching. Stefan Fischer’s eyes snapped open and his hand moved reflexively toward the knife on his belt. It was the old man who had been leading the funeral; only up close Skellan saw that it wasn’t a man at all. Her heavily lined features and close-cropped white hair had rendered the woman sexless over distance but close up there was no mistaking her femininity. There was a deep sadness in her eyes. She knew full well the fate awaiting her settlement. Death hung like a sword over her head. A heady mix of perfumes and scents clung to her clothing. She was trying to hold the sickness back with pungent smelling poultices and essences of plant extracts. It was useless of course. The plague would not be fooled or deterred by pretty smells.

‘It isn’t safe for you here,’ she said without preamble. Her voice was thickly accented, as though she were grating stones in her throat while she spoke.

Skellan nodded and pushed himself to his feet. He held out his hand in greeting. The old woman refused to take it. She looked at him as though he were insane to even contemplate touching her. Perhaps he was, but death held no fears for Jon Skellan. It hadn’t for a long time. If plague took him then so be it. He would not hide himself away from it.

‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ he said. ‘Plague?’

The old woman’s eyes narrowed as she looked at him. She transferred her gaze to Fischer, and rather like a mother berating an errant child scolded. ‘And you can forget about your knife, young man. It isn’t that kind of death that haunts these trees.’

‘I guessed as much,’ Skellan said. ‘From the pyre. It brought back memories…’

‘I can’t imagine what kind of memories a funeral pyre would bring back… oh,’ she said. ‘I am sorry.’

Skellan nodded again. ‘Thank you. We are looking for a man. He goes by the name of Aigner. Sebastian Aigner. We know he crossed over the border into Sylvania two moons back, and that he is claiming to be hunting a cult, but the man is not what he seems.’

‘I wish I could help you,’ the old woman said ruefully, ‘but we tend to keep ourselves to ourselves here.’

‘I understand.’ Skellan bowed his head, as though beaten, the weight of the world dragging it down, and then he looked up as though something had just occurred to him. ‘The plague? When did it first show up here? The first death?’

The old woman was surprised by the bluntness of the question.

‘A month back, perhaps a little more.’

‘I see. And yet no strangers passed through?’

She looked him squarely in the eye, knowing full well the implication of what he was suggesting. ‘We keep ourselves to ourselves,’ she repeated.

‘You know, for some strange reason I am not inclined to believe you.’ He looked to Fischer for confirmation.

‘Something doesn’t smell right,’ the older man agreed. ‘I’d be willing to wager our boy is tucked away in there somewhere.’

‘No, he’s moved on,’ Skellan said, watching the old woman’s face for any flicker of betrayal. It was difficult to lie well, and simple folk were more often than not appalling when it came to hiding the truth. It was in the eyes. It was always in the eyes. ‘But he was here.’

She blinked once and licked at her lower lip. It was all he needed to know. She was lying.

‘Did he bring the sickness with him?’

The old woman said nothing.

‘Why would you protect the man who had, by accident or design, condemned your entire village to death? That is what I don’t understand. Is it some sort of misguided loyalty?’

‘Fear,’ Fischer said.

‘Fear,’ Skellan said. ‘That would mean you expect him to return…’

Her eyes darted left and right, as though she expected the man to actually be close enough to overhear them.

‘That’s it, isn’t it? He threatened to come back.’

‘We keep to ourselves,’ the old woman repeated but her eyes said: Yes he threatened to come back. He threatened to come back and kill us all if we told anyone about him. He damned us, either he kills us or the sickness he brought with him does… there is no justice in our world anymore.

‘He has a month on us. The distance is closing. I wonder if he looks over his shoulder nervously, expecting the worst? He can run for his life. It doesn’t matter. It isn’t his life anymore. It is mine. One day he will wake up and I will be standing over him, waiting to collect my due. He knows that. It eats away at him the way it ate away at his friends, only now he is the last. He knows that, too. I can almost smell his fear on the wind. Now, the question is where would he go from here? What are the obvious places?’

‘Do you really think Aigner would be that stupid, Jon?’ Fischer asked. He was talking for the sake of it. He was looking over the old woman’s shoulder. The mourners were clearing away the ashes, gathering them into some kind of clay urn.

‘Absolutely. Remember he is running for his life. That has a way of driving you forward without really thinking clearly. He sees limited choices. Always going forward, looking for shelter in the crush of people that civilisation offers. So,’ he smiled at the old woman. ‘Where can we go from here? Are there any settlements nearby big enough for us to lose ourselves in?’

‘Like I said, we keep to ourselves,’ the old woman sniffed, ‘so we don’t have much call for visiting other towns, but there are places of course, back on the main track. You have Reuth Losa four days’ walk from here. It is a market town. With spring people will be gathering now. Beyond that you’ve got Leicheberg. It is the closest we have to a city.’

‘Thank you,’ Skellan said. He knew the lie of the land. The old woman had given them directions without having to betray her people. Sebastian Aigner had left here a month ago, heading for Leicheberg. It was a city, with all of the inherent distractions of a city: taverns, whores, gambling tables and the simplest things of life itself, food and a warm bed. Even running for his life it would slow him down. The press of people would give the illusion of safety.

Over her shoulder they were digging a small hole in the dirt for the urn.

‘Might I?’ Skellan asked, holding up the wooden flower he had carved while waiting for the funeral to end.

‘It would be better if I did,’ the old woman said.

‘Perhaps, but it would be more personal if I laid it on her grave.’

She nodded.

Skellan took her nod as tacit agreement and walked across the small clearing. A few of the other villagers looked up as he approached. He felt their eyes on him but he didn’t alter his stride. It took him a full minute to approach the freshly dug grave.

‘How old was she?’ he asked, kneeling beside the churned soil. He didn’t look at anyone as he placed the delicate wooden flower on the dark soil.

‘Fourteen,’ someone said.

‘My daughter’s age,’ Skellan said. ‘I am truly sorry for your loss. May your god watch over her.’

He made the sign of the hammer as he rose to leave.

‘I hope you kill the bastards that did this to my little girl.’ The man’s voice was full of bitterness. Skellan knew the emotion only too well. It was all that was left when the world collapsed around you.

He turned to face the speaker. When he spoke his voice was cold and hard. ‘I certainly intend to.’

Without another word he walked back to where Fischer and the old woman waited.

‘That was a kind thing you did, thank you.’

‘The loss of anyone so young is a tragedy we can ill afford to bear. It was only a token, and it cost me nothing.’

‘Truly, but few would have taken the time to pay their respects to a stranger. It is the way of the world, I fear. We forget the suffering of others all too easily, especially those left behind.’

Skellan turned to Fischer. ‘Come, my friend. We should leave these good people to their grieving.’

Fischer nodded, and then cocked his head as though listening to some out of place sound in the silence of the forest. ‘Tell me,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Has it always been this quiet here?’

‘Quiet? Heavens, no,’ the old woman said, shaking her head. ‘And at night it is far from quiet. There’s no denying that a lot of the creatures left with the coming of the wolves. They don’t bother us and we don’t bother them. They hunt at night, during the day they sleep.’ She leaned in close, her voice dropping conspiratorially. ‘Be careful though, when you are walking at night. Keep to the paths. Don’t leave the paths. Never leave the paths. Verhungern isn’t a safe place at night.’

With that final warning she left them on the edge of the trees. They watched her shuffle towards the mourners at the graveside. Fischer turned to Skellan. ‘What on earth was that all about?’

‘I’m not sure, but I am not in a hurry to find out, either.’

They kept well within the cover of the trees as they worked their way around the settlement until they came upon the narrow cotter’s path that led through the trees back towards the main road and would eventually arrive at the market town of Reuth Losa. They had no more than a few hours of walking before nightfall and he had no intention of sleeping in the forest. It was a godforsaken place. The old woman’s warning echoed in his mind. Keep to the paths. Skellan had his suspicions about what she meant. He was well aware of the horrors that walked abroad come nightfall.

They walked on awhile in silence, leaving the trees of Verhungern Wood behind. The road ran parallel to the forest for miles. The oppressive feeling that had been weighing the two men down since they entered the forest lifted almost as soon as they returned to the road. Neither man commented on it. Fischer dismissed it as nothing more than his nerves and imagination combining to play tricks on him. Skellan wasn’t quite so quick to dismiss the feeling.

In the distance a dark smudge of mountains came into view but quickly lost its definition to the falling night.

They made camp by the roadside, not far enough away from the menace of the dark trees for comfort. Normally they would have eaten fresh meat, caught and killed less than an hour before they ate it, but there was no game to be hunted so they had to make do with the dry bread they had carried with them for three days since crossing the River Stir, and a hunk of pungent cheese. It barely touched their hunger.

Sitting at the makeshift fire, Skellan scanned the brooding darkness of the trees. It was disturbing how the shadows seemed to shift as he stared at them, as though something inside them moved.

‘Not the most hospitable place we’ve ever visited, is it?’ Fischer said. He chewed on a mouthful of hard bread and washed it down with a mouthful of water from his hip flask.

‘No. What would make a man run into this blasted land? How could anyone choose to live here?’

‘The key word is live, Jon. Aigner is hoping we’ll lose him in this hellhole. And I can’t say that I blame him. I mean, only a fool would willingly march into the wastes of Sylvania with nothing but mouldy cheese and stale bread to keep him alive.’

In the distance, a wolf howled. It was the first sound of life they had heard in hours. It wasn’t a comforting one. It was answered moments later by another, then a third.

Skellan stared at the blackness beyond the trees, suddenly sure that he could see yellow eyes staring back at him. He shivered.

‘They sound as hungry as I feel,’ Fischer moaned, holding up what remained of his meal.

‘Well, let’s just hope they don’t decide you’re fat enough for the main course.’

‘Hope is the last thing to die, you know that,’ Fischer said, suddenly serious for a moment.

‘Yes, always the innocents go first, like that girl back there.’

‘Do you think he killed her? I mean, it doesn’t seem like his style,’ Fischer said, worrying at a string of cheese that had somehow gotten stuck in his teeth. The older man poked at it with his finger, digging it out.

‘Who knows what depths the man is capable of stooping to. When you consort with the dead who knows what sicknesses you carry inside you? Aigner is the worst kind of monster; he wears a human face and yet he revels in depravity. He is sick to the core, yet he looks just like you or me. See him in a crowd and no one would be able to tell, but that sickness eats away at his humanity. An evil. He courts death. Is it any wonder he is drawn to the blackest arts? No, we will find our man, in Leicheberg or somewhere close, wherever the sickness of mankind is at its worst. That is where he will be. And then he will burn.’

A chorus of wolves howls filled the night, the baying cries echoing all around them.

‘It isn’t going to be easy to sleep tonight,’ Skellan muttered, looking once again at the shadows cloaking the fringe of Verhungern Wood.

‘I’m sure I’ll manage,’ Fischer said with a grin, and he wasn’t lying. Within five minutes of his head hitting the bedroll he was snoring as though he didn’t have a care in the world.

Skellan gave up trying to sleep after an hour, and instead concentrated on listening to the sounds of nocturnal life stirring in the forest. He could hear the wolves, padding back and forth just beyond the tree line. He thought again of the old woman’s warning to stay on the path. He had no intention of moving away from the dubious safety the path offered. It seemed, at least, that the trees acted as some kind of natural barrier that the wolves dared not cross.

It hadn’t been his imagination. Sickly yellow eyes really were watching them from the forest. A wolf, a giant of a wolf, came close enough to be seen through the silver moonlight. The creature was easily twice the size of a big dog with a long snout and jowls that Skellan imagined curled back in a snarl, saliva flecking the animal’s yellowed teeth. The wolf remained there, stock still and staring back directly at him, long enough for Skellan to feel his heartbeat triple as it thudded against his chest and his breathing become shallow with the onset of fear, but it didn’t leave the shelter of the trees. Skellan didn’t move. He didn’t dare to. A single sudden movement could cause the animal to launch an attack and he was in no doubt as to who would come out on top in a fight between man and this particular beast. Beside him Fischer slept like a babe, oblivious to the wolf.

As quickly as it came, the wolf was gone. It ghosted away silently into the darkness. Skellan let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding. The tension drained from his body with surprising speed.

He heard more wolf howls as the night wore into morning but they were always distant and getting further away each time. He ached. His back ached, the base of his spine the focal point for the irregular jabs of pain that helped keep him awake all night. The inside of his arms burned from being always ready to reach quickly for his knife. The bones in his legs transmogrified to lead and weighed down through the tired muscle encasing them. With exhausted sleep there for the taking the sun rose redly on the horizon.

Daybreak.

Fischer stirred.

Skellan kicked him with the flat of his foot. ‘Sleep well?’

The older man sat up. He knuckled the sleep from his eyes. Then, remembering, shuddered. He exhaled, hard. The breath sounded like a hiss of steam. ‘No. No not at all.’

‘Looked like you did all right to me,’ Skellan said, unable to keep the bitterness of exhaustion out of his words.

‘I dreamed… I dreamed that I was one of them, one of the wolves prowling the forest. I dreamed that I found you in the darkness, that all I wanted to do was feed on your flesh… I had to fight every instinct in my body just to stay still, to wait back behind the line of the trees because some part of me, the human part of the wolf, remembered you were my friend. I swear it felt like I stared at you for hours.’ He stretched and cracked the joints in his shoulders, first the right shoulder, then the left. ‘Morr’s teeth, it was so real. I swear I could taste your fear on the air with my tongue… and part of me thought it was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. I was inside the head of the thing but it was inside me too.’

‘If it makes you feel any better you didn’t move so much as a muscle all night, and yes, I was awake all night.’

‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll be happy when we are away from here.’ Fischer said with absolute conviction.

‘I won’t argue with you there.’ Skellan rose stiffly. He hunched over, stretching out the muscles in his back. He grunted. He moved through a series of stretches, using the exercise to focus his mind. Fischer’s dream disturbed him, not because he thought his friend had some latent psychic talent that stirred conveniently for him to enter the beast’s mind, but because, perhaps the wolf, or whatever it really was, had found a way into his friend while he slept. That possibility made putting as much distance between themselves and Verhungern Wood their main priority.

They walked for the best part of the day, the wolves’ howls receding into the distance, before exhaustion overcame them, forcing them to bed down beside a brackish river. Signs of life returned to the countryside. It was a gradual thing, a blackbird watching with beady eyes from a roadside hedge, a squirrel spiralling up a withered tree trunk, black-bodied eels in the river, but mile by mile and creature by creature the world around them was reborn, making the earlier absence of wildlife all the more disturbing.

The following evening the bony hand of Reuth Losa’s infamous tower poked above the horizon. Even from a distance the tower was impressive in its nightmarish construction. Five bone-white fingers accusing the sky, their moonlit shadow reaching far out across the swampland beneath the imposing tower. Skellan hadn’t seen anything like it before and he considered himself a man of the world. It was unique. It could have been a dead man’s hand reaching through the mountainside.

A rancid stench emanated from the swampland. Marsh gas. The land itself bubbled and popped with the earth’s gases. For all that, they ate well that night, in the shadow of Reuth Losa. Fischer trapped a brace of marsh hares, which he expertly skinned and filleted and boiled up in a tasty stew with thick roots and vegetables, and for the first time in two nights Skellan slept dreamlessly.

The market town itself, swallowed in the shadow of the great tower, was not what Skellan had been expecting. When the pair finally arrived at dusk on the fourth day, the streets were deserted. With grim resolve the two men walked down the empty streets. Skellan’s fist clenched and unclenched unconsciously as he moved deeper into the eerie quiet. The houses were single storey wooden dwellings, simple in their construction but sturdy enough to withstand a battering from the elements. Windows were shuttered or boarded up.

‘I don’t like this place one little bit, my friend,’ Fischer said, pulling at one of the nailed-down boards barring a ground floor window. ‘It’s not natural. I mean, where is everyone? What could have happened to them?’

‘Plague,’ Skellan said, looking at the sign painted over one of the doorways across the street. ‘My guess is they ran to the next town, taking the sickness with them. Still, he’s been here,’ Skellan said. ‘We’re getting closer. I can feel it in my gut. We’re close enough to spit on him.’ He walked across the street and pushed open the first door he came to. The mouldering stench of rotten food met him on the threshold. He poked his head inside the small house. Light spilled through cracks in the shutters. The table was still set with an untouched meal of sour pork. Flies crawled across the rotten meat. Piles of white maggots writhed with a sick pulsing life where there should have been potatoes. The place had been abandoned in a hurry, that much was obvious. He backed out of the room.

Fischer faced him from an open doorway across the street.

‘Ghost house!’ he called over. ‘It’s as though they disappeared off the face of the earth.’

‘Same here!’ Skellan called back.

It was the same story in every house they explored.

On the street corner they heard the distant strains of melancholy music: the sound of a violinist’s lament. They followed the elegiac melody, faint though it was, through the winding ribbon of streets and boarded up houses, tracing it to its source, the old Sigmarite temple on the corner of Hoffenstrasse. The façade was charred black from fire and stripped of its finery but it was still an imposing place, even if it was only a shell. The wooden steps groaned under their weight. The door had been broken back on its hinges where it had been battered down.

‘Something happened here,’ Fischer said, giving voice to the obvious truth. Temples didn’t burn down of their own accord, and streets didn’t lie deserted by chance. The Sylvanian motto might well be to leave the questions to the dead but Skellan wasn’t some superstitious bumpkin afraid of the dark and forever jumping at his own shadow. Strange things were afoot and their very peculiarity only served to pique his curiosity. Inevitably the riddles would play out one way or another when they confronted the musician, and in doing so, no doubt, would lead back somehow to Sebastian Aigner.

They moved slowly, carefully, aware that they were walking into the heart of the unknown.

The music swelled, bursting with the musician’s sorrow.

The damage to the outside of the temple was nothing compared to the systematic destruction of the inside. All signs of the religion had been scoured from the building. It had been gutted, pews stripped and broken up for firewood, in turn used to purge the life from the place. The stained glass windows were ruined, shattered into countless shards of coloured glass that lay melted and fused into ingots across the dirt floor. The lead had been stripped from the roof and sunlight dappled through like a scattering of gold coins. The altar had been cracked in two and the life-size statue of Sigmar lay on its side where the Man-God’s legs had been shattered. The effigy’s right hand had been broken off. Gahl-maraz, the Skull Splitter, Sigmar’s great warhammer, lay in the dirt, the Man-God’s cold stone fingers still curled around its shaft.

Sitting at the feet of the fallen idol an old man in a simple muslin robe played the violin. He hadn’t heard them approach, so lost was he in the sadness of his own music.

Skellan’s feet crunched on debris as he picked his way forward to the musician. The music spiralled in intensity then tailed away in a simple farewell. The old man laid the instrument on his lap and closed his eyes. Skellan coughed and the old man nearly jumped out of his skin. He looked terrified by the sudden intrusion into the solitude of his world.

‘Sorry,’ Skellan said. ‘We didn’t mean to startle you. We just arrived in town… we were expecting more… people.’

‘Dead or gone,’ the old man said. His voice was brittle with disuse, his accent thick and difficult to understand. Pure Reikspiel, it seemed, did not survive this far from the capital. The thick dialect would take some getting used to. ‘Those that didn’t succumb to the sickness fled to Leicheberg in hopes of outrunning it.’

Fischer picked up a piece of the fallen statue. ‘What happened here?’

‘They blamed Sigmar for not protecting their daughters from the wasting sickness. At first they came and prayed, but when their children continued to sicken and die, they turned on us. They were out of control. They came in the night with torches and firebrands and battered down the doors. They were chanting “Wiederauferstanden” over and over as they set fire to the temple.’

‘The risen dead…’ Skellan muttered, recognising the word and its cult connotations. ‘Strange things are afoot, my friend. Strange things indeed.’

‘Describe the symptoms of this sickness, brother,’ Fischer prompted, sitting himself beside the old man. He had his suspicions already but he wanted them confirmed.

The old priest sniffed and wiped at his face. He was crying, Fischer realised. It must have been hard for the old man to force himself to remember. He was their shepherd after all, and his flock had scattered because he couldn’t protect them.

‘The Klein girl was the first to fall, a pretty little thing she was. Her father came to the temple to beg us for help because she was getting weaker and weaker, just wasting away. There was nothing we could do. We tried everything but she just continued to sicken. It all happened so shockingly fast. It was all over in a matter of a few nights. And then there was Herr Medick’s eldest daughter, Helga. It was the same, no matter what we tried, night by night she literally faded away before our eyes.’

Fischer thought of the girl whose funeral they had stumbled across. A wasting sickness, the old woman had said. He didn’t believe in coincidences.

‘I’m sorry,’ Skellan said. ‘It must have been difficult. Nothing you did helped?’

‘Nothing,’ the old priest said. ‘The girls died. There was nothing I could do. I prayed to benevolent Sigmar for guidance but at the last he turned his back on me and my children withered away and died.’ There was an understandable bitterness in the old man’s voice. He had given his life to helping others, and when they needed him the most he had proved helpless.

‘How many?’ Fischer asked, knowing that two or three deaths could still fall into the realm of chance.

The old man looked at him, eyes brimming over with guilt and tears. ‘Sixteen,’ he said. ‘Sixteen before they finally fled from the wasting sickness. They were all girls. No more than children. I let them down. Sigmar let them down. The children of Reuth Losa are gone now; there is no hope for my town. I failed it.’

Fischer looked at Skellan.

Sixteen was well outside the realm of chance.

‘You did all you could, there was nothing else you could do, you said so yourself.’

‘It wasn’t enough!’ the old man lamented. He hurled the violin away from him. It hit the head of the Man-God and snapped its neck. Sobbing, the priest crawled across the debris to the ruined instrument.

‘Come on,’ Skellan said.

‘Where are we going?’

‘You heard the man, the survivors fled to Leicheberg. That means the cultists and Aigner. If we find one, no doubt we will find the other.’

They left the old man on his knees, cradling the broken instrument to his chest like a dying child.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2006 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Andrea Uderzo.

Map by Nuala Kinrade.

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