Necromancer Read Free

had done business
with on the three-day journey—as his nephew.
    Dieter judged the young man to be of a similar age to
himself, but that was where their similarity ended. The youth was a fop, dolled
up like a mummer, in Dieter’s opinion, in silks and other expensive fripperies.
Strategically placed beauty spots might be all the rage amongst the members of
the ostentatious Imperial court, but to Dieter’s mind they looked out of place
in the outlying market towns and country provinces of the Empire.
    His appearance was certainly a stark contrast to Dieter’s
plain cloak and well-worn and practical, rather than fashionable, jerkin,
breeches and money belt. The merchant’s snooty companion was fair where Dieter
was dark, his build cadaverously thin where Dieter, although slight, was toned.
Jewellery adorned his fingers, wrists and ears, whilst Dieter wore none. The
fop’s gaze was condescending and sarcastic where Dieter’s was brooding, guarded
and tight-lipped. And he had nothing in common with the effete merchant or
wittering dowager either.
    As they had drowsily boarded the carriage again at Vagenholt,
as the village bell was ringing four of the clock that morning, none of the four
temporary travelling companions had been particularly ebullient, not even the
dowager. The fop had picked at his nails in silence whilst the merchant had been
the first to doze off to sleep again.
    Even though he was excited to finally arrive at the town
where he would make his name, on being roused by a grubby-faced urchin—the
keeper’s son—Dieter had sleepily struggled into his clothes, musty from days
of travel, feeling the first biting chill of morning in the fire-bereft spartan
room. He then gathered up his scrip and dragged himself downstairs and onto the
coach.
    The single trunk that comprised the rest of his luggage was
still strapped to the top of the carriage, along with the possessions of his
fellow travelling companions. In fact it barely seemed that there was any room
for his one piece of luggage when he saw how much the dowager was transporting
with her and the skeins of cloth the merchant had insisted on bringing with him,
along with the strongbox, replete with three heavy locks that he kept with him,
beneath his seat, at all times.
    All the luggage certainly didn’t seem to leave much room for
the driver, the Four Seasons’ pistolier watchman and the merchant’s personally
hired bodyguard—a brawny man with a polished dome of a head, sporting a brutal
scar that bisected his right cheek and continued on, down the line of his neck,
beneath the collar of his battered hauberk. The strong-arm’s broken-toothed
grimace and ugly broken nose was enough to deter most opportunist robbers,
Dieter thought, but just in case they didn’t persuade everybody, his
brutal-looking battleaxe and shoulder-slung crossbow probably would. If any
thieves persisted in the face of all of those warning signs, then they deserved
whatever they got for their pains.
    Dieter had thought that the two employees of the Four Seasons
Company looked by far the worse for wear, but the merchant’s incentive was more
than enough to shake their hangovers from them long enough for them to get the
coach back on the road.
    As the carriage jolted on its way, Dieter’s thoughts were
drawn back to the home, the village and the people he had left behind. His
sister, his father.
    The last thing his father had done for him, before he had
left Hangenholz, was to open his personal coffer and give Dieter the money for
the coach fare to Bögenhafen.
    There had been no words of well-wishing or any suggestion
that Dieter might be missed. It was as if he was glad to be rid of his son. Now
eighteen, and a man, it was time he made a name for himself in the world beyond
Hangenholz, if that was what he was determined to do. It was as if Albrecht
Heydrich did not understand what Dieter was trying to do with his life, that he
wanted to make a