Dead Winter Read online

  Erich crouched in the street, looking around to ensure he was unobserved. With the populace in a panic over the quickly spreading plague, there were few people on the streets, but the captain was cautious just the same. Only when he was certain he was alone did he lift up the stone lid and drop down into the murky darkness.

  A simple rushlight lit his way once he was in the dank sewer. Erich crushed a perfumed cloth to his nose as he walked along the ledge bordering the stream of effluent coursing beneath the street. He took some comfort in the very loathsomeness of his surroundings. No one wanted to think about the sewers, dismissing the disgusting channels from their minds. Wilfully forgotten by most of the inhabitants of Altdorf, they made a perfect road for men who couldn’t afford to be seen.

  Bloated rats scampered away from the flicker of the knight’s light, splashes rising from the culvert as the rodents decided to swim away from the intrusive glow. Erich felt his gorge rise in disgust at the skulking vermin. The rats of Altdorf had grown bigger and braver this winter, sneaking into houses stricken by the plague to gnaw at the bodies of the dead. The priests of Morr had gone so far as to hire rat-catchers to guard the mortuaries and ensure the departed were consecrated into the keeping of their god with all of their fingers and toes still attached.

  Erich’s insides squirmed at the thought of those creeping brutes waiting in the darkness, biding their time like vultures before swarming over a man’s body and stripping it to the bone. Well had they earned the epithet of Khaine’s lapdog, for only the god of murder could have affection for such noxious scavengers. In all the world, there was nothing more repulsive than a rat.

  The knight shuddered as he saw dozens of beady little eyes staring at him from the darkness ahead. The broken-down wall had become something of a landmark to him, a signpost letting him know he was near his hideout, but never would he grow accustomed to the horde of rats that nested among the shattered bricks and crumbling masonry.

  As he approached the eyes withdrew, slinking back into their holes and burrows. By the time he was close enough to see the wall, the only trace of the rats was a long scaly tail vanishing into the gap between two stones. Erich shuddered just the same. He didn’t need to see the vermin to know they were there.

  Watching.

  Waiting.

  The knight hurried on. A few hundred yards past the broken wall he stopped, turning to his left and following a narrow brick-lined tunnel. When the dwarfs had first built the sewers for Emperor Sigismund, they had burrowed into many natural cavities and passageways under the city. Rather than go around such fissures, the dwarfs had simply incorporated them into the construction, leaving occasional cross-tunnels opening onto the main culverts. Over time, as the cellars and vaults of the city above became ever more extensive, many of the old tunnels were breached. Often such openings were sealed up again, but sometimes, when it suited the purposes of the builder’s patron, these hidden tunnels were allowed to remain connected.

  The refuge Erich had withdrawn to after the Bread Massacre possessed such a cellar. For several years he had enjoyed the companionship of Lady Mirella von Wittmarr, a ravishing beauty much favoured by Prince Sigdan. The lavish townhouse she inhabited was maintained by the prince’s generosity. Lady Mirella was quite happy to return that generosity, though Prince Sigdan was liberal enough not to mind if she had her own entanglements outside their affair.

  Erich had to suck in his breath to fit through the narrow fissure opening into Lady Mirella’s cellar. It still amazed him that he had been able to squeeze Aldinger’s bulk through such a tight passageway.

  A torch was burning in the stone-walled cellar. Erich saw one of Lady Mirella’s servants, an old retainer named Gustav, sitting beside the pallet where Aldinger lay. The peasant was applying some sort of compress to the knight’s injured hand. His brow rose in surprise at the sight, unaware that Gustav knew anything about medicine and even more surprised that Lady Mirella had failed to mention such an important fact.

  Then a frightful thought occurred to him. Perhaps, moved by pity, Mirella had sent Gustav to a herbalist or a barber-surgeon. If she had, then there might be a platoon of Kaiserjaeger even now surrounding the townhouse.

  ‘Why the long face, captain?’

  Erich’s hand dropped to his sword as he spun around to face the speaker. He hadn’t been aware of the men sitting there in the shadow of a wine rack. He was about to call out a challenge when one of the men leaned forwards into the light. He relaxed his hold on his sword as he recognised a fellow knight – Othmar, the Grand Master’s standard bearer. The man beside him was another knight, a grizzled veteran named Konreid.

  Erich bounded over to the knights, clapping his arms about them in a fierce embrace. ‘How did you blackguards escape the Kaiserjaeger?’

  Othmar grinned at the question. ‘Konreid here jumped the caltrops. I always said his horse was part pegasus.’

  ‘This idiot tried to fight his way out,’ Konreid groaned. ‘He looked like a hedgehog with all those arrows caught in his mail! Eventually even he realised the Kaisers were going to keep shooting him until one of their arrows did for him.’

  ‘So I turned my horse around and charged right through a wall,’ Othmar continued. ‘Smashed right through a kitchen, a sitting room and most of a vestibule before my horse went through the front wall. There was a whole squad of Kaisers waiting on the other side, but they were so shocked when I came busting through, by Ranald’s purse, they’re probably still standing there with their mouths hanging open!’

  Erich laughed at the knight’s daring escape. ‘By Sigmar, it’s amazing to see you two, but how did you ever find us?’

  ‘You can thank your lady for that,’ Konreid said. ‘You know the Kaisers took the Reikschloss?’ Erich nodded, aware that the fortress had been captured by the Emperor’s forces only a few hours after the Bread Massacre. ‘Well, without the castle to fall back on, a few of us decided to try for Prince Sigdan’s manor. The prince was always a keen supporter of the Reiksknecht, but not so vocal about Goldgather’s policies as to be someone Kreyssig would be watching.’

  ‘There are ten of us staying with Prince Sigdan,’ Othmar said. ‘Including Seneschal Boelter. There’s a physician too, a doktor named Grau who got caught up in the Bread Massacre. He’s been tending Ernst Kahlenberg.’

  ‘Ernst was pretty bad,’ Konreid interjected. ‘If not for Grau, he would have died.’

  ‘Grau is who gave us the medicine and herbs for Aldinger,’ Othmar said.

  ‘Then we all owe him a great debt,’ Erich declared.

  Othmar shook his head grimly. ‘The good doktor doesn’t seem too keen on our gratitude. In fact, he’s pretty eager to clear out of Altdorf. Says he will as soon as Ernst is out of danger.’

  Konreid shot the other knight a look of disapproval. ‘I think it is the talk not the company that bothers him.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Erich asked.

  ‘You know the Kaiserjaeger captured the Grand Master,’ Othmar said. His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘The Emperor has ordered his execution. They’re keeping him in the Imperial Courthouse.’

  ‘Tell him the rest,’ Konreid prompted.

  Othmar’s face split in a broad smile. ‘Prince Sigdan has a plan.

  ‘We’re going to rescue the Grand Master!’

  Bylorhof

  Ulriczeit, 1111

  A white shroud was wound about the little body when Frederick van Hal next set foot in his brother’s house. The priest placed a black rose upon Johan’s breast, a ritual intended to protect the young spirit from daemons and witches until the departed soul could be guided into the keeping of Morr. It was an expensive gesture; black roses were always rare and the plague had driven demand for them to unprecedented levels. They could only be used once. The flower would be burned when Frederick conducted Johan’s last rites, the boy’s spirit freed with the smoke, freed to be gathered by the ravens of Morr.

  Frederick looked up from the body of his nephe
w, staring at the parents who survived him. Rutger’s face was a piteous display of anguished guilt, the face of a father who blamed himself for not doing enough. The pain carved upon the man’s features would never be erased, it was a brand he would carry with him always, a token of the black spot in his heart.

  Aysha had an even more tragic appearance. Her pretty features were collected and refined, her lips pursed in a staid expression. She might be patiently listening to the latest of Guildmaster Patrascu’s long-winded speeches, or watching her husband haggle with a shepherd over the quality of his wool. There was no emotion in her face, only a terrible resignation. Frederick shuddered when he looked at her eyes, for the emptiness he saw there was so absolute there wasn’t even a place for sorrow. The eyes of a corpse had more life in them.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Frederick,’ Rutger said, each word quivering as it left him.

  ‘How could I not come?’ the priest said. He placed a hand upon the grieving father’s shoulder. ‘I would not leave him for the corpse collectors, to be dumped into their cart like a slab of meat. While it is in my power, Johan will have all the dignity a van Hal deserves.’

  ‘And when the time comes, will you do the same for us?’ Aysha’s voice was as careful and precise as the rigid poise of her face.

  Frederick bowed his hooded head. He didn’t want to discuss such things. He had just lost one member of his family. He didn’t want to talk about losing the others. Rutger and Aysha were all he had now. He didn’t want to think about them being gone.

  Yet he knew he must. He knew they must. The Black Plague was merciless and rapacious, a prowling wolf that glutted itself not with a single victim but with an entire household. Where the plague struck once, it soon reared its monstrous face again.

  Frederick placed his hand upon Johan’s head, feeling the cold flesh of the boy through the shroud. For all of Dr Havemann’s vaunted knowledge and skill, the plague doktor had failed to save his patient. The barbaric treatments Johan had suffered had been for nothing.

  A hideous suspicion suddenly flashed through the priest’s mind. His hand tightened about the shroud. His intense gaze swept across Rutger and Aysha. In their pain, they would have accepted whatever Havemann told them. Even if they doubted, they wouldn’t know what to look for.

  Before he could question his action, Frederick ripped the shroud from Johan’s body. Aysha shrieked, her composure broken at last. Rutger wailed in disbelief, lunging at his brother. The priest held him back with one hand while pointing at the corpse with the other. ‘Look!’ he snarled.

  Rutger peered past the priest, staring down with uncomprehending eyes at the pale, unmarked skin of his dead son. In his grief, his mind would not make the connection Frederick wanted him to see. He turned an imploring gaze upon the priest, beseeching him without words.

  ‘There are no marks,’ Frederick declared, raising the rigid arm to expose the armpit, rolling the head from side to side to emphasise the smooth, unblemished skin. ‘The stains of the Black Plague are not here. I have seen enough of it to know the traces it leaves behind.’ The priest’s speech faltered, dropping to a sorrowful whisper. ‘Whatever sickness Johan contracted, it wasn’t the plague.’

  Rutger bit his knuckles to silence the moan of horror that rose from his throat. Aysha said nothing. She was again the imperturbable wife, her face like a wooden mask, her eyes empty as a puppet’s. Turning upon her heel, she sedately withdrew from the room. A few moments later, her footsteps could be heard mounting the stairs.

  Rutger waited until the sound of Aysha’s steps faded along the upper hall, then he leaned close to his brother. The merchant’s jaw was set in an expression of grim determination. ‘How did my son die?’

  Frederick shook his head. It could do no good to tell Rutger. There was only pain in that knowledge, and Rutger had been hurt enough. Ignoring the question, he pulled the shroud close over Johan’s body and started to fold the dead hands over the breast once more.

  Rutger clasped Frederick’s hand, crushing it in a maddened grip. ‘How did my son die?’ he repeated.

  ‘Don’t ask me that,’ Frederick told him, trying to pull away.

  ‘How did my son die?’

  Frederick’s heart sickened as he heard the frantic appeal in his brother’s voice. Perhaps not knowing would be a damnation as terrible as the truth. But he doubted it.

  ‘Too much blood was leeched from Johan,’ the priest said. ‘There wasn’t enough left to sustain him.’

  Rutger twisted away, falling to his knees and being noisily sick, every fragment of his being revolted by what he had learned. And what it meant.

  Never in all his life had Frederick felt more ashamed for being right. Even when he’d uncovered the patron’s deceitful bookkeeping back in Marienburg, an incident that had precipitated his exodus from Westerland, being right had never filled him with such regret. He’d said the plague doktor was a charlatan and a scavenger. Now Rutger understood that the priest had been right.

  ‘Havemann killed him,’ Rutger muttered, repeating it over and over, his voice rising from a hollow whisper to a vicious snarl.

  Frederick listened to his brother’s outburst with the deepest concern. He groped through the corridors of his mind for something, anything, to say to him that might ease the pain and guilt he felt. But for all his education, for the thousands of books he had studied, for the dozens of secret rites and esoteric rituals he had learned, there was nothing to be said. Some grief was too well-fed to be appeased. Like a winter storm, it was something that had to be endured, not avoided.

  A crash from upstairs stirred Rutger from his anguish. He lifted his face upwards, staring at the ceiling for a moment, a look of bewilderment on his face. Then what little colour was left in his features drained away and a groan of soul-stricken despair shuddered from the merchant’s lips. ‘She knows,’ he gasped. Rutger turned and glared at the priest. ‘Don’t you understand – she knows!’

  Rutger didn’t wait, but dashed from the room, taking the stairs in a mad scramble as he raced to confront a horror he knew he was already too late to thwart. Frederick lingered behind him for only a moment, puzzling over the import of his brother’s words. Then in a chill of understanding, the priest pulled up his robes and raced after Rutger.

  The plague doktor had killed little Johan through his barbarous fakery – but it wasn’t Rutger who had sent for Bruno Havemann. It had been Aysha!

  Frederick was only a few steps down the hall from the door to what had been Johan’s room when the house was shaken by a piteous wail. The heart-wrenching sound came from just inside the room. It took every speck of courage the priest possessed to cross into that chamber. Like his brother, he knew what he could expect to find. Only now there was no question it was too late to stop the tragedy from unfolding.

  Rutger sat upon the floor in the centre of the room, bawling like a small child, the beautiful figure of his wife clenched in his arms, her golden hair spilling across his shoulders.

  And just a few inches away, lying where it had fallen from Aysha’s lifeless hand, was a fat-bladed knife, its edge coated in blood.

  Skavenblight

  Ulriczeit, 1111

  The burrows of Clan Verms were derisively known to skaven of other clans as the Hive. Few of them understood how fitting the name was. The earthen walls of the warren were obscured behind crawling masses of insects, the muddy floor was a morass of wriggling life, immense cobwebs dripped from the low ceiling. The air was hot and foetid, stinking of unclean life and the foulness that sustained it. Every inch of the stronghold seemed to have been given over to the cultivation of every manner of scuttling vermin.

  Puskab Foulfur shuddered as he prowled the murky tunnels, thankful that the pestilential blessings of the Horned Rat killed most of the insects as soon as the creatures dared take an interest in him. The lower orders of life were always the first to succumb to corruption. Still, there were some things that proved hideously resistant to the plague priest’s
sacred mantle of disease. The most persistent was a strain of transparent gnat with an aggravating high-pitched buzz and a perverse obsession with crawling into noses.

  The gnats had much in common with their creators. The skaven of Clan Verms were all obsessed with their loathsome livelihood. It went far beyond the simple dictates of commerce and megalomania. They didn’t see their insects as a means toward an end, but rather a purpose in themselves. To breed ever stronger, ever hardier varieties of beetles and spiders, to create new colours of flea or bigger kinds of ticks, such matters formed the meat of the mania that gripped Clan Verms.

  The deranged rabble were much too far gone to appreciate the divinity of disease the way Clan Pestilens did. They would never understand the holy truths of corruption. Their kind would never embrace the one true aspect of the Horned Rat.

  But they would make useful instruments of the Horned One just the same. For the moment, it did not matter if Verms believed. It was enough that they obeyed.

  Puskab stepped around a pool of stagnant water, its surface alive with mosquito nymphs, ducking his hooded head as a huge yellow spider swung down from the roof of the tunnel. A word of power, a gesture of the plague priest’s paw and the arachnid shrivelled into a husk.

  Ahead of him, Puskab could smell the comforting reek of pestilence and decay. It was only the most humble echo of the Pestilent Monastery, but it was enough to relax his glands. A few days of effort and he had made the cave Blight had placed at his disposal into a little patch of diseased corruption fit for a plaguelord.

  The cave was aglow with the light of dozens of worm-oil lanterns, but the fug exuded by the oil was masked by the pungent smoke rising from several bronze incense cauldrons. Even the crazed ratkin of Clan Verms understood the wisdom in keeping their lice and beetles away from Puskab’s laboratory.

  Puskab chittered maliciously as he marched past the armoured skaven flanking the entrance to his lair. They were big black-furred bruisers, their bulks stuffed into mail that looked to have been fashioned from the chitinous plates of enormous bugs – perhaps from Blight’s vanquished deathwalker or its spawn. The guards lowered their heads and exposed their throats in a gesture of submission as the plague priest passed. Puskab wondered how much of their servility was genuine and how much was show. There was a delicate line between the roles of bodyguard and jailor.