The Witch Hunters, Book 1: The Prophet of Ash

Panicked cries echoed from above, growing ever closer, and drew their attention to the dark hallway. A panting messenger staggered towards Volkard, and made a breathless report. They’d found a spy in the old stable. One of their number had been wounded. Master Rahm was in pursuit.

“They’re coming for you,” Martin said, forcing a smile at the large black beast.

“We shall see,” Volkard replied coldly. He bid the messenger guide him upstairs to the surface. No one objected when Martin followed in his wake. The black bull ordered his bodyguard to watch the boy, though Martin had no intention of running just yet. Life was cheap to the black bastard, and Martin doubted the minotaur’s threat was a bluff.

They passed through badly lit and reeking corridors as they ascended. The sudden drop in temperature when they emerged into the night air caught the young Bauer off guard. He wrapped his arms about himself and shivered. The Ashen were all standing, having pulled themselves to their feet at the news of their prophet’s imminent arrival. No one spoke. No one dared look at the beast. Martin surveyed them, took in their naked bodies clustering near the fires. The flickering light showed what the filth could not cover: most of them appeared scrawny and badly fed. The only ones with meat on their bones were the new converts. These people were no army, but then he doubted that was what Volkard intended to use them as.

Commotion drew the attention of all to the edge of the camp. A man was being laid down near a fire to be examined by whatever passed for a barber or apothecary with this rabble. Volkard stalked towards him. Martin followed.

The man was fat and soft, clearly a successful merchant or artisan that had been taken by surprise in the revolt of the Ashen. The feathered tail of an arrow just protruded from his big, shaking belly. He was coughing up blood and making weak, terrified pleas for help that even Volkard’s brooding presence could not still. Martin stared down at the man, and did his best not to see him. He watched Volkard instead, as the bull watched the man, and then looked out into the darkness.

A bellowing shriek rang out from the stones of the dead city, far beyond the reach of the firelight. It turned into a sickening wail of anguish and then into a crescendo of rage. The voice was deep, the lungs behind it powerful. Martin knew who’d made that noise.

“That’s Rahm dead,” the boy said, loudly enough for Volkard and all the nearby Ashen to hear.

“If we’re to reach the Dead Lands, then I only need your legs to work, boy,” Volkard replied without looking at him. “I can still break your arms.”

Martin glared at Volkard’s back in hateful silence.

Volkard picked a few of the scattered crowd about him and sent them in the direction of the stable to find Rahm. Sadly, that proved unnecessary. The archer appeared on his own in short order. He was unsteady on his feet, panting, and clutching at a bloody wound on his face.

Many of the crowd gasped and pulled back as he approached, covering their mouths or looking away. Martin found it hard to keep his gaze fixed on Rahm too, when he realised the bloody mess that had been made of the archer’s right eye.

Volkard pushed people aside, sending them sprawling across the rubble as he hurried to meet his comrade. He grabbed the other bull’s arm and shoulder with a degree of concern Martin had never seen before in the beast. He led his lieutenant into the circle of firelight and made him sit by the fire where the dying man still lay.

“What happened?” the black bull asked. “Are they coming for us?”

“No,” the archer hissed. “It was only a scout. A runner. He got lucky.”

Volkard snarled and his unnatural eyes roved over the mob of Ashen surrounding them.

“Half of you are to spread out across the ruins and find that little shit! Bring him to me alive! Kill anyone else you find! Go! NOW!”

As the terrified crowd hastened to obey, the black bull gestured to one of his bodyguard from where he knelt by Rahm. When the man was close enough, Volkard gave him an order that Martin was just able to hear over the crackling flames.

“Bring me ten of our people. The weakest. Those who will be of no use in a fight tomorrow.”

“Our sick, sire?”

“Or the old,” Volkard said with a shrug. He gently pulled Rahm’s hand away from his bleeding, ruined eye. The archer looked up at him in silence, a stony expression on his muzzle. Martin felt a chill trickle down his spine. “Or the children. I don’t care.”

The man hesitated. Volkard rose and tore the star stone from around the man’s neck. The man gasped and tried to back away, but the black bull’s booted foot lashed out and destroyed his ankle. As he toppled to the ground, clutching his leg and shrieking, Volkard barked gave the same orders to the nearest remaining member of his guard. There was no hesitation this time.

“We’ll only need nine now,” Volkard called after, glancing down at the man he had just crippled. His gaze swept over Martin then, and though it did not linger, it left the boy trembling, rooted in place. The monster’s eyes found the man with the arrow in his belly next. His pleas for help had ceased, though he still moaned, lingering in awful agony as his lifespan shrank to minutes.

“Make that eight.”

*

A trio of naked men reached the doorway. The boldest of their number thrust a burning torch into the gap, the firelight playing off the surface of the rubble within and the weapons in their hands. They were nervous and inexperienced. None of them went in, but called out to someone they might have thought was there, some lost comrade or friend. They waited. They did not enter.

A voice could be heard from further down the street, urgent and afraid. The light vanished at the doorway. Bare feet patted against the stone outside, growing distant.

Gerda slipped out of her hiding place, one of her blades in hand, her crossbow slung over her back. The sounds and flashes of torches had warned her well enough before getting close to the streets occupied by the Ashen. Something had gone wrong. She could guess the name of the culprit who had apparently killed someone after being spotted and fleeing into the night. The only question was could she find Janus before these people did? The area to search was vast, and tracking in these darkened, ruined streets was a lot harder than in the wilderness. The pup had made a mess of this, but at least he had decent odds of escaping so long as he did not do anything else stupid.

Gerda moved quietly, sticking to the shadows and the larger remnants of the dead city’s buildings that provided her with many possible hiding places. Occasionally another party of searchers would fill the street whose ruined buildings she crept through, and some might even venture briefly into a rotten skeleton of a home or two, but for the most part Gerda’s progress was unhindered. Her search inevitably brought her closer to the ruined temple at the centre of the city. Searching for Janus in the dark without the slightest hint of a clue was pointless on these mostly cobbled streets, and the Ashen travelled in groups of three or more, which would make grabbing one of them for information too difficult and dangerous to try. No, Janus might not be good at covering his tracks, but there was nothing to go on here. Far better, and more useful to her comrades if she approached the temple ruins and scouted out the situation for the morning. This would take her close to Volkard and, perhaps if God was good to her, the black bull could be standing out in the open somewhere. The orange glow in the sky told her all she needed to know about visibility close to the temple. The night air was mostly still, the breeze intermittent but weak. If Volkard was outside, she might have a shot at ending this tragedy before it had truly begun. Gerda did not personally hold much faith in the helpfulness of God. Experience had taught her otherwise. The stone of Saint Heinrich was draped around her neck, but her faith and loyalty belonged to simpler ideas and their ancient proponents.

The Knife reached the edge of the square where the old temple of the Elves once stood. She had heard that it was nothing more than rubble and wreckage at this point, and yet there was still a profound feeling of anti-climax as now dark silhouettes rose up before her. The many fires blazing out here only reinforced the disappointment, displaying mounds of rubble. Gerda had little time for the studious pursuits of some of her comrades, but she had held a private fascination for the Elves and their ways that went back even before the day she had found Eisengrim.

Memories of the days before the bull came into her life were few, but vivid. To the child she had been then, life had been exciting with her kin on the river boats. Their work had taken her to many interesting places within the borders of Sturmwatch. They’d even gone beyond its bounds, to places unknown to even ageing greybeards, or the tribes of runners that filled many of the world’s forests. People were forgetting the Elves, and the memory of people that they were was fading, and yet they were not as gone as the Order and the people they protected might think. The hands that fixed the stone or hewed the timber were long dead, but much of what they left remained, hidden in valleys and woods rarely visited by even the most intrepid and curious explorer. But they were not unknown to the river dwarves.

The others had been aghast at the presence of an Elven house that was still standing so close to the Capital, but Gerda had not been surprised. She had seen buildings such as that and greater, concealed behind river bends, or half hidden among the trees on a foggy lakeside. She had never read much about the Elves. Little had survived the Order’s purges through the centuries. Even so, she had not needed it. She still dreamt of, and had even visited, those beautiful, furtive places. Little surprised her when it came to the Elves any more. She had seen too much of their forgotten world for it to be otherwise.

A structure beyond the edge of the rubble perimeter offered her a better view, but Gerda remained where she could hide and vanish with ease. That was the stable Siegfried had told of her of. Janus must have been in a hurry to risk slipping into a building so obvious and within the lights of this camp. The silly fool was probably reliant on his eyes to count the numbers of their enemy, but Gerda had been doing this for nearly as long as the pup had been alive. She found a taller structure with no floorboards remaining, but enough footholds left in the walls for her to ascend what must have been a bell tower once. The darkness made the ascent far more dangerous than it needed to be, but the dwarf dared not light a candle. She had done this before, and had the patience to do this efficiently.

The crown of the tower was ragged, decaying with age, and full of abandoned birds’ nests. A couple of heavy beams that had once formed the supports for the floor on this level remained, apparently too difficult for looters to make off with. Gerda, her limbs aching from the climb, hauled herself up onto them, sweeping away dust and detritus. Her first order of business was a tentative test of the beams to ensure they could, in fact, still support her despite their age. Satisfied they weren’t likely to give out, Gerda withdrew some sturdy rope from her rucksack and tied it around the beams. Satisfied that her escape route was ready, she set the coil of rope down on the ancient wood. It would be a trivial matter to kick it off and into the darkness below once she was done up here. The ascent had taken her quite some time and effort. The descent at least would be quick and easy.

Despite the advantage of height the tower provided, the distance from the camp and the darkness would have made this useless as an observation post to even a runner’s naturally sharp eyes. Luckily, Gerda had long ago accepted her natural limitations. Taking a reinforced case from her bag next, she unpacked a small brass telescope. The dwarf had seen it in the Great Market during her days under the old bull’s tutelage. Eisengrim had procured it and a sextant for her, joking that she could be the first witch hunter of the seas. He had only been half teasing, for Gerda had told him of her old life, and the great uses one could make of these devices if properly trained. She had lost count of the times these things had saved her life. If only such things could have been of use to her parents and the rest of the crew.

That was the risk one took being a slaver, and a careless one at that. If you kept going back to the same settlements to steal people away, then eventually they will get wise, and be waiting for you. Gerda had little time for the careless, and as her telescope swept over the camp of her enemy, she reckoned that it was Janus’ carelessness that she disliked the most about him. Intentions meant nothing to Gerda. Her parents had only wanted the best for her, but their way of doing so was stealing people her age and even younger, and taking them to places like this decrepit town and selling them to the fleshpots where wrinkled fiends would do things the dwarf would later kill many for. Intent meant nothing. Consequence was all, and before Gerda stretched the consequences of their failure to end this in the woods far away. She counted the bodies left to rot, either in piles or hanging from lampposts. She made rough estimates of the people she saw, huddled around blazing fires, all naked save for the dirt smeared over their bodies. A rough count brought their number to ninety, with perhaps just as many roaming the streets searching for Janus. This should not have been a problem, even for just half of the number the Duke brought from Gozer, but Volkard’s presence changed everything.

“Fuck,” Gerda muttered to herself, the first noise she had made in at least an hour. Volkard was not here, at least not above ground. She could not see Martin Bauer anywhere either, but that made sense. How many more Ashen were attending them underground? Gerda swore again. She hated the idea of not knowing, but there was no way even she could sneak through all these people to make a count of those below ground. Especially not with that monster standing at the entrance to the lower levels, his massive bow in hand. Gerda watched Rahm through her telescope, and lingered. At first she could not guess why, but something bid her keep her eyes on him. At this distance, even with her telescope’s aid, the finer details of Rahm’s figure were difficult to make out, but there was something about that brooding figure which drew her attention back. She tried to resist the urge—she had to double check her estimates of the Ashen in the old temple courtyard—but it was impossible. Nagging curiosity got the better of her. What could it be, though? All seemed normal, and yet…

Time crawled. Gerda did not move, silently fixated on the bull and not fully understanding why. An hour might have crept by before Rahm finally aided her. He walked out amid the flames again, going to the edge of the fires to carry out a brief patrol and eventually he drew close enough to allow Gerda to get a better look at him, the details of his tall frame outlined by a blazing fire he paused at briefly at the edge of the camp that was closest to her position. Thick, muscular limbs and a mighty scarred torso. A thick snout, and...

Gerda nearly dropped her telescope when she got a better look at the whole of the beast’s face. Her hands shook and she willed them to stop, fighting to keep her breath steady. She needed to keep herself together, if she was to climb back down safely to the ground from this precarious perch. She needed to go back now. She needed at least a few hours of safety before Hell came to visit in the morning. She did not dare look back out at Volkard’s camp.

Gerda packed her things back away, and quickly slid down the rope. She did not want to think about what she had just seen, but the sight itself was not interested in her desires. It stayed at the edge of her vision, followed after her like a shadow. Eisengrim had told her of what he had seen when he had faced down Volkard personally in the woods. She had not really believed him when he had told her of the black bull’s eyes. How they were wrong in ways that could not be spoken of but understood if seen.

Gerda had not understood, but she did now. Rahm the archer was not the same any more. His right eye was like those of his master now. Burning. Bleeding.

Black.