The Last Man, page 1
The Last Man
C L Werner
The streets of Wartenhof were a foul mire of mud and icy slush, desolate and deserted. Shuttered windows faced the troop marching through the town, the door of each hovel locked and barred. The soldiers of the Nachtsheer, calloused veterans long in the employ of the tyrannical Voivode Malbork von Drak, took a sardonic pleasure in the fright they evoked in the peasants. To them these people were little more than dumb animals, creatures to be subjugated. Mercenaries from realms as distant as Nordland and Solland, they felt neither kinship nor pity for the people of Sylvania. It was why Count von Drak employed them. Foreign troops wouldn’t balk at any atrocity that was asked of them.
The lean, russet-cloaked man who accompanied the black-garbed Nachtsheer almost wished he could share the mercenaries’ callous disregard for the denizens of Wartenhof. It was well enough for the soldiers to sneer at the fears of peasants, at the impotent hostility that shone in people’s eyes when they saw them approach. For them, the town was simply another posting, a place that would be left behind and forgotten when the crisis was over and new orders were issued to them. They didn’t call this place home.
For Vincent Rabe, it was different. He’d spent all his life around Wartenhof. As far back as could be remembered, his family had lived in the town. His father had been a forester in the service of the ruling cneaz and his father before him. Vincent was the fifth Rabe to hold the posting, acting as steward of Cneaz Vaclav Rezachevici’s extensive holdings. It was a position of honour and respect, even if it made him the sworn adversary of every poacher in the district. The resentment of poachers, however, was something he could accept. The scorn of his neighbours was something different.
A bitter smile crept onto Vincent’s lean features as his gaze strayed to the cross chalked across the door of a nearby hut. Every day there were fewer neighbours to despise him for colluding with the Nachtsheer, and fewer ears to listen to his protests that he’d been seconded to the brutal mercenaries by order of Cneaz Vaclav.
‘Quiet as a tomb,’ one of the Nachtsheer cursed, spitting into the slush of ice beneath his feet.
‘Keep it that way,’ snarled the commander of the squad, a burly Ostlander named Andreas. The soldier’s hair was parted by a livid white scar, the legacy of a boyhood encounter with a goblin’s knife. A collection of leathery green ears hung from his belt, a silent testament that he’d revenged the injury many times.
Vincent could tell from Andreas’s voice that the soldier was uneasy. It didn’t take any great stretch of imagination to understand why. Plague was abroad in Wartenhof. Normally, the Nachtsheer would simply cordon off an infected community and let it starve. Here, however, because of the strategic location of the town and the influence of Cneaz Vaclav in Drakenhof, the mercenaries had been compelled to take a more intimate interest in the town’s fate. A renegade priest, a madman calling himself Vanhal, was inciting rebellion in the west. The von Draks intended to use Wartenhof as a staging area for their campaign against the rebels once the spring thaw came. For that they needed a living town, not a dead one.
Andreas scowled at the buildings lining the street. His hand brushed against the tangle of dried goblin ears as he removed a strip of leather from beneath his belt. He glimpsed at the crude map of the town inked into it. Looking back at his troops, he jabbed a finger at one of the huts. The mercenaries shied when they saw the cross marked on the door – the warning that plague had visited the household. The Ostlander repeated his gesture, this time with a surly growl.
Accustomed to serving as gaolers for doomed villages, the Nachtsheer were having a difficult time accepting their new role as corpse-collectors. It took armed warriors to enforce the voivode’s edict demanding that the dead be burned as soon as they were discovered. The serfs of Sylvania were prepared to endure much from their noble lords, but denying their dead the dignity of resting in the gardens of Morr was going too far. Several soldiers had been wounded trying to take corpses away to be burned in the plague pit outside the town. In their sorrow, even the most docile serf might become a raging lion.
‘You’re sure?’ Andreas’s question was directed at Vincent. His men were still reluctant to approach the door, each soldier’s face turned to the forester with an expression of anxious hope.
Vincent sighed. Even among his new comrades, he had no friends. With a nod, he crushed their hope. ‘It has been three days since Mircea and his wife were last seen by anyone. When I knocked on their door this morning, there was no answer.’
‘Break it in,’ Andreas ordered his men. The mercenaries glared sullenly at Vincent, but carried out the command. It took only a single kick to smash in the wooden door. Hands closed about the grips of their swords, the soldiers swarmed into the little hut.
What they found sent gasps of alarm and horror ringing out in the street. Vincent hurried into the building with Andreas to see what had provoked such shock, and sickened at the grisly sight. Once again, the Nachtsheer had the advantage over the forester. They didn’t know the actors in the ghastly tableau set before them. They couldn’t put names to the gore-spattered faces that were turned towards them. Neither did they recognise the chewed wreckage strewn across the floor as belonging to a friend and neighbour.
Plague had decimated Wartenhof, but to this had been added an even worse calamity: hunger. The sinister starfall that had rained foul rocks down upon the Sylvanian countryside was an even greater bane to the town. Fields had been flattened by the noxious star-stones, the soil poisoned by their foul vapours. Crops had withered and livestock sickened. An already poor harvest had been ravaged by this ill sending, reducing the ability to sustain the town much less the regiment of Nachtsheer.
It was small surprise, then, that such food as the town was able to gather went to Cneaz Vaclav and the Nachtsheer. The people were left to fend for themselves, reduced to subsisting on tree bark and cooking the filthy black rats that infested the town. Count von Drak no longer ruled Wartenhof alone. He was forced to share his reign with an even greater tyrant: King Hunger.
The obscene result of perpetual starvation stared at the soldiers from the gloom of the hut. Discovered in the midst of their loathsome repast, the disturbed peasants sprang at the Nachtsheer, brandishing dripping bones and bloodied knives in their gore-streaked hands. Viciously, the mercenaries struck out against the corpse-eaters, cutting them down with their slashing swords.
Vincent watched the scene unfold, unable to reconcile his memories of the people he had known all his life with the degenerate cannibals being killed before his eyes. As though he were moving through some awful dream, he drew the heavy axe from his belt and defended himself as a blood-spattered thing that had once been a swine-herd named Dumitru came leaping at him with a cleaver. His axe caught the cannibal in the midsection, opening his belly and knocking the howling wretch to the floor.
Andreas stabbed the point of his sword into Dumitru’s throat, silencing the dying man’s howls. Grimly, the Ostlander wiped his blade clean on the dead man’s goatskin boots. There was a look of disgust on his face as he gazed over the carnage his men had witnessed. ‘Take them all to the pit,’ he ordered and started to turn away.
The motion was arrested in mid-step. Andreas’s face paled until it was the same lifeless shade as the scar running through his scalp. The other Nachtsheer followed the direction of their commander’s gaze. Vincent’s stomach sickened when he saw the thing that had so horrified these hardened warriors.
Mircea’s gnawed remains were strewn across the floor. The cannibals must have been feeding on the corpse for at least an hour. It was impossible there could be any trace of life in what was left. Yet, before the incredulous eyes of soldier and forester alike, that human detritus was moving! With abnormal, abominable vitality, it was struggling to lift itself from the floor with the stump of arm still clinging to its shoulder. Its mouth flopped open and closed like a gasping fish. Its eyes rolled about in the pits of its face, staring balefully at the men gawking at it.
It didn’t take an order from Andreas to send the soldiers scurrying out into the street. Soon the structure was in flames, put to the torch by one of his men.
As they watched flames engulf the hut and the horror inside, the Nachtsheer felt relief. Vincent wished he could take comfort in the destruction, but it was impossible. The soldiers didn’t have to live here. They didn’t have to wonder about what they had seen. It was enough for them to simply destroy it.
Vincent Rabe didn’t have that luxury.
‘It is better not to ask why.’
Those words of wisdom came to Vincent from one of the few men in Wartenhof he could still count as a friend. Though by rights there should have been nothing but bitter enmity between Cneaz Vaclav’s forester and Wartenhof’s most capable poacher. Vincent’s father had never been able to catch Szalardy Dozsa and the son had fared as poorly as his predecessor. Out of their antagonistic relationship a strange kind of mutual respect had grown. It was still Vincent’s duty to catch Szalardy and of course it was the poacher’s job to avoid getting caught, but that didn’t mean the two men couldn’t feel a professional admiration for each other.
Vincent shook his head and sipped at the cup of watery beer his host had provided him when he’d come to Szalardy’s hut and started to relate the harrowing experience of that afternoon. ‘I can’t let it go,’ he said. ‘I have to wonder why the gods could allow such… such horror.’
Szalardy paced about the simply furnished room, the nimble fingers of his hands folded across his emaciated belly. ‘Hungry men don’t ask. They take,’ the poacher replied philosophically.
‘That isn’t what… It’s the other… That thing, that dead thing trying to move, trying to live again.’
‘Even the priests don’t know the ways of the gods,’ Szalardy stated. He forced a laugh to his lips. ‘I’ve spent most of my life amusing Ranald and I’m still never sure if the Trickster God is going to steer me away from one of your traps!’
Szalardy saw that his attempt at levity had no effect. It was a decidedly more dour man who seated himself on the stool facing Vincent. ‘You’ve heard what they are saying? The stories about Vanhal? That he is a necromancer, and wherever he goes he calls the dead from their graves?’ The laugh that he now uttered was thin and bitter. ‘Would a mere man dare defy the Von Draks?’
Vincent stared at his friend. ‘But why? Why would anyone evoke such terrible forces?’
The poacher shrugged. ‘He’s evil,’ he answered simply. ‘Or he’s mad. Maybe both.’ His expression became grave and he glanced across the hut, looking at a section of the floor. ‘Maybe he lost someone, someone he would do anything to get back.’
The forester repressed a shudder as he heard the mournful pain in his friend’s voice. Szalardy had lost both his sons and his wife when the plague struck Wartenhof. Except for his aged mother, the poacher had no family left to him.
‘One more hour,’ Szalardy said. ‘One more day. Wouldn’t that be worth anything?’
Vincent rose from his stool, every muscle in his body tense. Few men would have heard that slight scratching sound, but Vincent’s hearing had been sharpened by a life spent in the wilderness. His ears were acute enough to pick up that furtive scratching – a scratching he knew wasn’t the work of rat claws.
Szalardy grabbed his friend’s arm as he started to move towards the sound. ‘Please,’ he asked. ‘Leave her for me. She’s all I have.’
Horror pounded in Vincent’s heart as he pulled away and rushed across the room. For a moment he hesitated, staring at the floor. How often had he searched for Szalardy’s hiding place, that secret spot where he cached the furs from his traps? Now he knew he had found it.
He wished he hadn’t.
Szalardy didn’t move to stop him as Vincent’s fingers closed about the edge of the concealed door sunk into the floor. The poacher watched in silence as the forester exposed his hiding place and the thing which was its only occupant.
Scrawny, pallid arms reached up at Vincent as he threw open the door. He could see the blotchy marks of the plague that discoloured the decayed flesh and smelled the stink of the disease even over the funk of rot. There was no question of how Szalardy’s mother had died.
‘The one you saw wasn’t the first,’ Szalardy said, his voice soft and resigned. ‘There have been others. Some think it is Morr’s punishment because of the cannibals, others say it is Vanhal’s sorcery reaching out to claim Wartenhof. A few think it is the poison from the starfall.’ The poacher rose to his feet and faced his friend. ‘I don’t care what it is. It’s given me back my mother.’
There was a dagger in Szalardy’s hand as he approached Vincent. Cautiously, the forester backed away from his friend and the hole where the corpse of his dead mother scratched and clawed.
‘Szalardy…’ Vincent called to the poacher in a soft, placating tone. He continued to back away, careful to avoid the gaping hole. ‘This… It… Can’t you see the horror of it?’
The poacher paused, his eyes misty as he considered his friend’s question. ‘Yes. Oh, yes. I know the horror. Haven’t I lived with it these many weeks?’ He looked down at the dagger in his hand, the blade he had used so often to flense the hide from a trapped rabbit. He glanced back at Vincent. ‘Horror is all that is left now.’
‘Please, Szalardy, try to be sane,’ Vincent pleaded.
A sad smile formed on the poacher’s face. ‘We were friends, weren’t we?’ He raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘All these years and you never caught me. Now you have something Cneaz Vaclav will be happy to hear.’
‘He doesn’t need to know anything,’ Vincent said. ‘No one need know of this, but we cannot… That thing down there isn’t your mother any more.’
Szalardy shook his head. ‘I think you would lie for me,’ he told Vincent. ‘Do they hang men who harbour monsters, or do you burn for such a crime? I wouldn’t let you take such a risk.’ The dagger fell to the floor as he strode towards the hole.
‘Besides, it still looks like mother.’
Vincent moved to stop Szalardy, but he was too late. Like a plummet, the unarmed poacher dropped down into the cellar and the waiting talons of the undead thing below. As he fled the hut, Vincent thought his friend’s screams would never stop ringing in his ears.
Before the next bell tolled, he returned with Andreas and a Nachtsheer patrol. Szalardy’s hut and the decayed monster beneath it were put to the torch. A macabre pyre for the man who’d refused to accept the cruelty of King Death.
The scene at Szalardy’s was repeated many times in the days that followed. The plague wasn’t through with Wartenhof and as quickly as the Nachtsheer quarantined one hovel the disease would pop up somewhere else. Even burning the structures did nothing to halt the corruption. Corpse carts trawled the streets twice a day, the dead heaped like cordwood as they bore their diseased cargo to the flames of the plague pit. Still, there were many bodies that went unburied: those with none to care if they went undiscovered and those with relations who cared only too much. Several times the Nachtsheer had uncovered some hidden attic or sealed room where families had concealed their dead, too horrified by the ghastliness of the plague pit to give up their beloved.
Such scenes were made still more horrible when the corpses shambled from their concealment, animated by some obscene semblance of vitality. With rotten fingers and clawed hands, the undead struck out at the living, even those who had loved them so dearly in life. Vincent had been there when a woman had been clawed apart by the rotten husks of her own children, and had watched as the shrivelled shell of an old man bit through the throat of his own son.
Day in, day out, there was no refuge from the horror that had descended upon Wartenhof. One by one, the men of the Nachtsheer began to drop away. Some deserted, deciding that even gold wasn’t adequate compensation for what was asked of them. Some were killed by the crazy and the desperate, mobbed by gangs of cannibals or knifed by looters. Many, however, were taken by the plague itself.
Sense of duty bound Vincent to the survivors, at least until providence deserted him. He’d been fortunate to escape the fate that had claimed so many of his comrades. His household wasn’t so fortunate. One morning, his wife Mircalla awoke to discover the stinking black boils of the plague at her throat and on her armpits. The plague had come for her.
Vincent had seen the plague take victims in only a few hours, while with others the flicker of life might linger for days. He knew there was no hope, that those visited by the plague were doomed to die. His obligation to the community was to announce Mircalla’s affliction, to alert the Nachtsheer, to have the white cross chalked upon his door to warn his neighbours away from his hovel.
It was no easy thing, refusing that obligation. It was an onerous weight that pressed down upon Vincent’s body, compelling him to obey the edicts of the voivode and cneaz. Defiance was a thing that had been periodically starved and beaten out of the minds of Sylvania’s peasants. Obedience was something that had become almost instinctive to men of Vincent Rabe’s station.
Yet, as he looked down into his wife’s eyes, he saw the last embers of her love for him shining out from behind the pain that blighted her flesh, and Vincent knew he could never consign her to the horror of the plague pit and its infernal fire. To tell anyone of Mircalla’s sickness would be to condemn her to such a fate. Mustering his courage, denying his duty to Cneaz Vaclav, he determined that his obligation to the woman he loved was greater than anything his noble lord and his peasant neighbours could expect of him.
The forester stayed at his wife’s side throughout the illness, shirking his work with the Nachtsheer. There was no sense to those hideous excursions through the town. Nothing they did, no matter how ruthless, had any effect on the spread of the plague. It was useless, an empty and fruitless labour. At least by staying with Mircalla, Vincent might ease her suffering, ensuring that she didn’t slip away into Morr’s keeping alone and unlamented.
