Necromancer Read Free Page A

difference.
    It was only Katarina who had shown any emotion at her
brother’s departure, the tears falling freely from the limpid deep brown pools
of her eyes. The memory of the sadness he had seen in those eyes Dieter knew
would haunt him for a long time to come, particularly in the dark watches of the
night and the lonely times that undoubtedly awaited him in the days, weeks and
months of study ahead.
    Then she had pulled herself together again and wished him
every blessing and told him how proud she was at what he was doing. And then the
sadness in her eyes had been tempered by the familial love he felt for her, and
from her, and an ember of pride flared into glowing life.
    The memory of her warm words expressing pride and love would
temper those dark times and bring some warmth into his heart, no matter what the
trials and tribulations of the forthcoming years of study would put in his way.
    The persistent snores of the merchant, the irritated sighs of
his younger travelling companion and the dowager’s heavy breathing whistling
through her yellow-stained teeth, Dieter watched the world go by, feeling the
anticipation and excitement rising within him with every bump of the carriage,
his breathing frosting on the cold glass of the window.
    He was almost there, at Bögenhafen, at last. He was on the
verge of beginning to fulfil a life-long dream, a desire he had harboured for
the last ten years, when, at the age of eight, three years after his mother’s
death, he was at last able to express what he had wanted to do since the day he
was told that the brain-fever had taken his mother from him, and the life and
love he had known, were taken with her.
    Within a matter of hours now—if that—Dieter Heydrich
would be admitted to the grand guild of physicians of Bögenhafen.
    The old year had been and gone and now, with the buoyant new
year celebrations of Hexenstag, and the eerie witching night of Hexensnacht
eight days past, the first signs that spring was on its way were already upon
the land, showing themselves on the trees, in the undergrowth, even in the scent
of the air. New life would soon come to the Empire, following the dead months of
winter, just as new life had come to the Empire twenty-two years before, when
Magnus the Pious and the armies of the Empire had met and defeated the Great
Enemy at the gates of Kislev and the Great Incursion by the North had been
halted.
    A subtle mist was rising from the swathes of meadow beyond
the trees lining the road, the warming golden rays of the sun’s first light
lifting the night’s dew from the ground. The first fresh green growth of spring
almost seemed visible on the elms and alder, the still-lifeless fingers of the
trees’ branches clawing at the grey sky and forming a canopy over the road.
    In only a matter of days Dieter would begin training that
would set him on the path to become one of the greatest healers the Empire had
ever known.
    And then, there between the trees, on the other side of the
mist-shrouded meadows, he saw it, the grandeur that was Bögenhafen.
    Dieter gave an audible gasp and felt his scalp tighten, his
skin turning to gooseflesh. He had never seen anything like it. Dark stone walls
rose up to crenellated battlements thirty feet high, containing the riot of even
taller, steeply sloping-roofed town houses, tenements, mysterious towers and
temple spires. The town had stood for hundreds of years and from first
impressions Dieter thought it looked like it would stand for centuries more.
    Port, market town or seat of learning; it was all these
things and more to the overwrought Dieter. To him Bögenhafen embodied hope,
deliverance from the peculiarities of his childhood, a future. It offered a life
away from Hangenholz and the spectre of his father’s disappointment,
dispassionate disinterest and deathly influence.
    Dieter was fully awake now, exhilarated at the prospect of
reaching Bögenhafen and commencing a