Dead Winter Read online

  The frigid air of the dungeon became impossibly colder as the warlock worked his magic. Engel could feel the tears freezing to his eyelids, could hear the blood crystallising against his skin. His ears rang with the sinister sing-song incantation rolling from Fleischauer’s lips.

  Then, before his amazed gaze, Engel saw the buboes marring the pit of his arm growing smaller. The discolouration of his skin faded, his flesh becoming smooth and unmarked, flush with the ruddy glow of health and strength.

  ‘I can take it all away,’ the warlock promised. ‘All you need do is tell Commander Kreyssig what he wants to know. Then I will take away the plague. I will fix all your injuries. You will be free. You will leave this place on your own two feet.’ The warlock’s hand brushed across the burnt, oozing mess where the iron boot had been used on Engel’s right foot.

  Engel’s eyes rolled, a piteous moan of torment rising from his lips. He wouldn’t break. He would stay strong. He owed that much to all the Marchers he’d brought to Altdorf, the men who had died because he had been naïve enough to think the Emperor was a reasonable man. He had to protect Meisel and the others, engaged upon their great work, fighting to depose a tyrant.

  Against his will, he looked at the spot the warlock’s magic had cleansed. Engel’s resolve shattered. Before he was even aware, words were spurting from his tongue. He tried to stop himself, but it was an effort he knew he couldn’t win. That part of him that was willing to die for the cause was too small beside the part of him that wanted to live. He heard his own voice telling the lurking Kaiserjaeger about Lady Mirella and her cellar. He damned himself as a traitor, falling silent before he could reveal any more than he already had.

  Adolf Kreyssig’s evil laugh told Engel that what he had already confessed was enough. The commander stepped out from the shadows, his cruel face lit up by the glow of victory. ‘That is all I require, warlock,’ he said.

  Fleischauer wiped his brow with the sleeve of his robe. ‘That is well,’ he said. ‘The enchantment is a taxing one to sustain.’ As he spoke, the atmosphere in the dungeon became noticeably warmer. Engel could feel the change in the air, a lessening of the nameless dread crawling over his skin.

  In its place came pain and horror. Searing agony coursed outwards from his chest. Craning his neck, Engel could see the buboes popping back into noxious existence as the warlock’s illusion was broken. As he heard Kreyssig growl commands to the Kaiserjaeger, Engel knew he was worse than a traitor.

  He was a fool.

  Erich listened with growing disgust as Baron Thornig discussed the coming marriage of his daughter to Adolf Kreyssig. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t accept the woman’s shameful sacrifice. It was easy to get his head around the hazards of torture and death, even of disgrace. But something as unseemly as to exploit a woman’s virtue simply to learn the enemy’s secrets? It tainted the entire cause, took their noble purpose and dragged it through the mud.

  Lady Mirella noticed the knight’s disquiet. Detaching herself from the conversation, she drifted over to where he stood against the curtained wall of her sitting room. ‘It disturbs you, such talk?’

  The captain nodded, his eyes never leaving the chair where Princess Erna was seated. She was taking no part in the conversation, content to let Baron Thornig explain the arrangements that had been made, the nuptial vows that had been exchanged. No, he corrected himself. Content was too indifferent a word. One look at the princess made it clear she was anything but indifferent to her fate. Resigned was a better word to convey her sentiment. Resigned to her doom, a doom whose horror she fully appreciated.

  ‘How can Prince Sigdan and the others seriously allow this?’ Erich wondered. ‘What will become of her?’

  ‘If everything works out, she’ll be a widow before summer,’ Lady Mirella predicted.

  Erich’s jaw tightened. ‘But everyone will still know. She’ll still have his stink on her.’

  Lady Mirella gave the young captain a curious stare. ‘If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were jealous. Maybe her willingness to go through with this has aroused that knightly passion. Maybe you sense a kindred spirit, someone willing to sacrifice personal honour for the good of people who will never thank her, people she doesn’t even know.’

  The captain turned away, pulling at the heavy curtain, peering through the frosted glass at the street outside. ‘I wonder when Konreid will be back,’ he said, brusquely changing the subject. ‘If we knew where the Reiksmarshal stands, we could make our plans accordingly.’

  ‘And what are your plans?’ Lady Mirella asked, resting her hand on the knight’s arm. ‘I mean beyond the overthrow. After Boris is deposed.’

  Erich scowled as he heard the question. It wasn’t something he’d considered before. ‘Rebuild the Reiksknecht, I suppose. Try to get things back to what they were.’ His body suddenly stiffened, his eyes fixing on a dark figure he’d glimpsed on the street. He had seen the man for only an instant before he ducked back behind a corner, but he was certain he’d been wearing the uniform of the Kaiserjaeger.

  Even as he turned to warn the rest of the conspirators, Lady Mirella’s manservant came rushing down from the garret. ‘Kaiserjaeger!’ Gustav gasped.

  ‘What?’ Prince Sigdan exclaimed. ‘Where? How many?’

  ‘In the street, your grace,’ the servant said. ‘At least a score moving to surround the house!’

  ‘They must know we’re here!’ bellowed Duke Konrad. All the poise drained out of the nobleman, leaving only terror behind. ‘We’ve been betrayed!’ he shrieked, casting an accusing eye over everyone in the room.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ grumbled Baron Thornig. ‘Everyone who knew about this meeting is here!’

  ‘Arch-Lector Hartwich isn’t,’ Mihail Kretzulescu observed.

  ‘Wilhelm Engel knew about this place too,’ Meisel confessed. ‘He was too sick to come, but as leader of the Marchers, I felt he should know.’ The statement brought a flurry of angry recriminations racing through the room.

  ‘It doesn’t matter who told them!’ Erich barked, trying to shout down the others. ‘What matters is that we get out of here before they can close the noose.’ He let the curtain fall closed. A disturbing thought occurred to him.

  ‘You say you saw only twenty Kaiserjaeger?’ he asked Gustav. The peasant nodded. ‘That’s not enough to rush the building. Kreyssig may be a demented madman, but he’s no fool.’

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Prince Sigdan asked.

  Erich was already racing towards the kitchen and the stairs leading down into the cellar. ‘If he found out about the house, he may have found out about the cellar! The men in the street are just there to keep us in! The real attack will come from below!

  ‘They’re going to use our own tunnel to trap us!’

  Nuln

  Ulriczeit, 1111

  Walther paced along the alleyway behind the Black Rose, his hands stuffed deep inside the pockets of his coat in an effort to defend against the cold, a thick scarf wrapped around his face to defend against the omnipresent stench of the streets. The snow falling from the sky was almost white, scarcely smirched by the smoke rising from the city’s chimneys. For the first time he could remember, the city was blanketed in white, not the dirty grey of soot.

  The image was beautiful, but it was a terrible beauty. The reason the snow was white was because there weren’t enough fires left to stain it. There weren’t enough people. Nuln was dying. By day the corpse carts prowled the streets, men already sick collecting those who were dead. Great pyres blazed at the heart of every district. The priests of Morr had been dying by the bushel, leaving no one to bury the dead. The only solution left was to consign the corpses to fire.

  The city was breaking apart into two camps: those who blamed the plague on spiritual corruption and those who believed it was just an ordinary disease, no more selective about who it struck down than Reikflu. The religious-minded either kept to their homes, fasting and praying, or else prowled the streets
in penitent mobs, lashing themselves with whips and preaching that the judgement of the gods was upon mankind. The threat of the world’s ending, however, only made those less spiritually inclined increase the magnitude of their debauchery. ‘Eat, drink and love,’ was their mantra. ‘For tomorrow, we feed the rats!’

  Walther gritted his teeth as he considered the horror of such a toast. As the people of Nuln became fewer, the number of rats had swollen to fantastic proportions. With the cats and dogs culled by superstitious peasants, the vermin roamed the streets with unprecedented boldness. There had been hideous stories of rats creeping into cradles and gnawing the infants inside. Bodies left out in the gutter would be picked down to the bone in a few hours.

  The rat-catcher shook his head. At one time he would have considered the ferocity and fecundity of the vermin as good for his business. He didn’t feel that way any more. He appreciated the suffering of his fellow man better than before the plague had come. To profit from another’s misery would make him nothing better than a parasite. Besides, the Assembly had stopped issuing bounties for rats. The problem was simply too big to solve that way. Like everyone else in the city, the nobles had resigned themselves to sitting back and waiting for events to run their course.

  In the alleyway, a big black rat scurried through the snow, so confident that it didn’t even twitch a whisker as it passed near the Black Rose. Walther watched the repulsive rodent wend its way towards the street, diverting its course only when it drew near a beggar slumped in a doorway. Apparently the wretch was still healthy enough to be a poor prospect for the rat’s appetite.

  ‘Herr Schill?’ a muffled voice called out from the darkness. Walther turned away from the retreating rat and turned around. A gasp of alarm automatically escaped him. As the speaker stepped out from the shadows, Walther found himself confronted by a tall figure enclosed within a black gown of waxed canvas. A wide-brimmed leather hat fitted to a waxed canvas hood covered the man’s head while a grotesque mask with a protruding beak concealed his face.

  ‘You… you are the doktor?’ Walther asked. The ghoulish apparition sketched a slight bow. The rat-catcher felt anger swell up inside him. ‘You were asked to be discreet, not come dressed like a raven of Morr!’

  The plague doktor shrugged. ‘You cannot pay me enough to take any chances,’ he said, his words all but smothered by his mask. ‘The graveyards are filled with imprudent men.’

  ‘Get inside, before someone sees you!’ Walther hissed. He reached for the plague doktor, but the man brushed his hand away with the heavy walking stick he carried.

  ‘I said I do not take chances.’ The doktor pointed with his staff at the tavern. ‘Lead me to the patient, but do it without touching. I try to limit physical contact when I can.’

  Fuming at the plague doktor’s condescending tone, Walther showed him through the tavern’s side entrance. At this late hour even the Black Rose was without a crowd. The cook and his assistants had retired, leaving just Zena to attend the few patrons still abroad. She nodded when she saw Walther appear at the door, motioning that it was safe to come in. The rat-catcher and the plague doktor swept past her. Walther pulled open the trap in the floor and climbed down the ladder into the cellar below. Zena and the plague doktor followed close behind him.

  The cellar was filled with casks of wine and barrels of beer, provisions Bremer was hoarding against the day when quarantine conditions would kill all traffic from the rest of Wissenland and force Nuln to survive on what was already within the city walls. Walther circled through the confusion of boxes, making for a faint glimmer of light at the back of the cellar.

  A section of the room had been partitioned off by a ragged curtain, behind which Hugo lay sprawled on a pallet. In his fever, he had pushed away the mass of furs and blankets Zena had provided to keep him warm. Despite the frosty chill which gripped the cellar, Hugo’s nightshirt was soaked with sweat, fairly plastered against his chest.

  Walther shook his head sadly as he gazed down at his friend, then his lip curled back in anger. Several rats were circling around the pallet, gnawing away at the rushlights they had knocked down. One of the rodents had even started on the stem of the only light still held fast to its fixture. Walther shouted at the loathsome vermin, but the bold rats didn’t so much as glance in his direction. Only when he started forwards and caught one of the rats with a kick did the scavengers retreat, fading into the blackness with instinctive ease. They didn’t retreat far, their beady eyes gleaming from the shadows as they watched the people gather around the sickbed.

  Walther hurriedly righted the remains of the rushlights, pushing them back into their stands with frustrated violence. ‘Why weren’t you watching him!’ he snarled at Zena when he had the tapers lit once more. ‘You should never leave him alone! The rats…’

  Zena stepped to Walther’s side, laying her hand against his chest. She knew he didn’t mean the unjust accusation, that he was simply lashing out because of the helplessness he felt. He was powerless to stop Hugo’s decline and that was something Walther couldn’t accept.

  While Zena consoled Walther, the plague doktor stood over Hugo, the glass eyes of his garish mask reflecting the fires of the rushlights. The invalid recoiled from the dreadful apparition hovering over him, but didn’t have the strength to ward away the doktor’s staff as it jabbed at his nightshirt. The copper talon at the end of the stick hooked the fabric of the nightshirt, peeling the garment back and exposing the sick man’s chest. A smell of vinegar exuded from the bird-like mask as the doktor peered closer at his patient.

  ‘Plague,’ the physician declared, tugging his stick free from Hugo’s clothes and retreating from the man’s bedside. He turned his back to the pallet and concentrated on holding the copper talon at the end of his staff in the fires of the rushlights.

  Walther’s fists clenched at the plague doktor’s callous attitude. ‘Do something for him.’ He pulled away from Zena’s restraining arms. ‘You’re supposed to be a healer! Help him!’

  The bird-like mask turned and the glass eyes fixed upon Walther’s enraged features. ‘I’ve heard too many pleas, too many threats, to feel anything. If you are appealing to the better angels of my nature, I’m afraid you are too late. They flew the coop months ago.’ The plague doktor drew the copper talon away from the flame, inspecting the hot glow of the metal. ‘After a dozen deaths, you learn not to care. After a hundred, you can’t even if you wanted to.’

  ‘You must be able to do something,’ Walther growled.

  The plague doktor looked past the rat-catcher and his woman, staring at Hugo’s wasted frame. The physician’s gloved hands drew a tiny clay bottle from a pouch on his belt. Grimly, he set it down on one of the boxes. ‘You’ve paid me well, so I leave you this. It will make his going swift.’ He tapped the neck of the little bottle. ‘By Verena, if I only had more of it. Enough for everyone.

  ‘I won’t inform the Hundertschaft about this,’ the plague doktor said, his tone becoming harsh. ‘By law, I am required to. By conscience, it is my obligation. But, I suppose it makes no difference. The gods have decided that we’re all going to die. It is only a matter of time.’ He turned away, walking back across the cellar towards the ladder. On his way, he snatched a bottle of wine from a rack against the wall. ‘I’m going home to drink this and in the morning I will have forgotten I was ever here.’

  Walther didn’t move until the plague doktor was gone. His eyes were fixed upon the bottle the physician had left.

  ‘Perhaps it is for the best,’ Zena whispered.

  The rat-catcher stormed across the cellar, his hand closing about the bottle. With an inarticulate howl of rage, he threw it at the wall, shattering it into a hundred pieces.

  ‘There has to be a way!’ Walther shouted. ‘By all the gods, there has to be some hope somewhere!’

  Tears were glistening in Zena’s eyes as she heard the pain in her man’s voice. Walther felt powerless to help Hugo. She felt powerless to help Walther.

&nb
sp; From the shadows, the rats began to scurry back towards the rushlights.

  Middenheim

  Vorhexen, 1111

  Graf Gunthar leaned back in his oaken throne and studied the foreigner his son had brought to the Middenpalaz. He tried to restrain the hostility he felt towards the man. Whatever the Reiklander’s intentions, the knight had inadvertently led his son into danger. Mandred’s excuses that it was he who had deceived the knight into taking such a risk had fallen on deaf ears. Grown men should know better than to bow to the whims of a mere boy, however great his noble station.

  He had been tempted not to grant the audience at all, to have the knight sent into quarantine at once – or executed out of hand as Viscount von Vogelthal had urged. It was still a temptation. The Graf wasn’t so power-mad that he couldn’t forgive a man who defied his decree to further some noble cause. But the fear of the plague being unleashed inside Middenheim was too great to ignore. Even for this audience, he had commanded smouldering braziers placed at either side of where the knight stood in the hope that the pungent smoke would smother any pestilential fumes the Reiklander might have brought with him.

  To his credit, Othmar had uncovered and helped destroy a hideous conspiracy. The plague cult could have brought destruction upon all of Middenheim – indeed, such could only have been their purpose. The Graf owed him a debt of gratitude for putting an end to the cult’s activities. Indeed, that was the only reason he had agreed to meet with the man.

  ‘Speak, while I am still of a mind to listen,’ Graf Gunthar told the Reiklander. His deep voice echoed through the narrow confines of the audience hall. A much smaller chamber than the palace’s council rooms and great hall, the vault-like room was used to receive dignitaries and visiting royalty in a more intimate and less public setting. The rich tapestries and fantastic hunting trophies lining the walls were intended to create a feeling of informality while at the same time reminding a guest of Middenheim’s splendour.