Roald hurried through the dark halls of Mhurghast, his pounding feet sending ghostly echoes through the castle. Each turn was met with a feeling of utter dread. He expected to see the thing that had been his daughter waiting for him, its eyes spilling blood down her cheeks, its claws stretched out to rend the flesh from his bones.
‘Faster, damn you!’ Roald snarled at Hartmann. If Liebgarde was waiting for him, keeping the merchant in front would at least provide some kind of warning.
Hartmann’s steps sounded like the thunderous drive of a charging troggoth in the empty corridor. The merchant’s back was drenched in sweat, his breath a ragged wheeze. Terror kept him going, forced him beyond the limits of his stamina. Roald was thankful for the man’s blind panic. If he took only a moment to think things through, he’d know Liebgarde wasn’t after him. Roald was the only prey she was hunting.
How long would Liebgarde linger over Hiltrude? How soon before she wearied of mutilating the dying baroness? However long, it couldn’t be time enough for Roald. Liebgarde might even make Hiltrude’s death quick so that she could pursue her other prey.
‘The trophy room!’ Roald cried out when he saw the doorway ahead. Hartmann turned and ran for the room. The baron let him get a few steps ahead. He watched when Hartmann ducked into the chamber and waited to hear the merchant cry out. When no scream carried back to him, Roald decided it was safe.
Thick shadows hung about the chamber, throwing the suits of armour and display stands into darkness. A few candles had been left burning to either side of the hidden door and the route down to the dungeon. Hartmann stood in the little circle of light, doubled over with his hands on his knees. Roald could hear him gasping for breath, his panic no longer allowing him to ignore the limits of his flabby stamina.
It was actually a good thing, Roald thought. While haste was certainly to be desired, for what lay ahead caution would be even more vital. The less risk there was of Hartmann plunging onwards in unreasoning fright, the better it would be for the baron.
Roald gave a last look back into the hallway. He strained his ears. A faint sound reached him. Was it the patter of rats, or was it something else? Skeletal feet creeping through the castle. A daemon seeking the prey promised to it by a madman.
The baron strode quickly through the trophy room to join Hartmann. He paused only once, stopping before a rack of old spears. He removed two of them and held them under his arm as he continued towards the secret door.
‘We need to be going,’ he said.
His face flushed with his recent exertions, the merchant shook his head. ‘I am all done in. I have to rest.’
Roald glared at Hartmann. ‘You’ll rest forever if you don’t get moving! That monster must already be on my trail. We have to get out of the castle if we’re to have any chance at all.’ He laid his hand on the merchant’s shoulder and urged him towards the tunnel. Hartmann nodded and started down the little passageway.
Light flickered in the cellar below. The room looked just as it had when Roald last gazed upon it. His eyes strayed to the first room of the dungeons. The grisly image of Bruno impaled upon the spiked ceiling rose unbidden to his mind.
The same image must have occurred to Hartmann. He turned back towards Roald. The fat man was shaking, a sick look on his face. ‘I can’t. I can’t go in there.’
‘It’s the only way out,’ Roald said. He took one of the spears and cracked it against the wall. After two tries, he splintered the heft. A third blow expanded the damage enough that he was able to snap off the spearhead by jabbing it against the floor. ‘Here,’ he said, and handed Hartmann what remained of the pole. ‘You can use this to probe your way forwards.’
Hartmann clutched the pole in a desperate grip, but from the way he looked at it the thing might have been a deadly viper. He took a step back. ‘You… you want me to… go first.’
‘If you get in trouble, I can help you that way,’ Roald said.
A light of awareness flashed in Hartmann’s eyes. His face contorted into a suspicious leer. Roald appreciated that he’d overplayed his hand. The merchant was only half credulous fool. ‘You’d leave me. If there’s trouble you won’t risk your neck for mine.’ The suspicion gave way to realisation. ‘You said “the daemon is on my trail”, not our trail! It isn’t after me! It’s only after you! You killed Herlinde and Heimo. There’s no link from me back to the daemon now!’
Cold fury roared through every corner of Roald’s being. He pointed the remaining spear at Hartmann, its sharp tip prodding his belly. ‘If you’d held to your part of the bargain, there’d be no link between myself and the daemon either. But you didn’t, Herr Senf. And now you’re going to make amends. You’re going to help me get through the dungeon. I know I can trust you to do your best, because both our lives will be at stake.’
Sweat poured down Hartmann’s brow. ‘I won’t,’ he insisted. He threw down the pole. ‘You can’t force me to do it.’
‘Can’t I?’ Roald drove the tip of the spear so that it cut into Hartmann’s skin and drew blood. ‘You’ll do everything I tell you to do or I’ll skewer you like a pig. Pick up that pole.’
Roald stepped back while Hartmann leaned over to retrieve the pole. He found himself near the tunnel to the trophy room. Again there came that slow, furtive sound of footsteps. Was it his imagination? He couldn’t take that chance.
‘Get going,’ Roald snapped. He prodded the merchant forwards. Hartmann stopped moving when he saw the bloodstains on the floor in the first room, fed by the drops falling from the ceiling. The baron poked him in the back with the spear. ‘Mind your step and don’t even think of using that pole. You might need it later, but if I see it so much as dip towards those tiles it’ll be the last thing you do.’
Hartmann kept the pole level as he walked across the room. He kept his head down, eyes fixed on the tiles. Such was his wariness of a wrong step that he paused each time he set his foot down, as though waiting for the spikes to come slamming down on their heads. Roald bristled at the exaggerated care and the delay it caused. He kept looking back and wondering if he really could hear something in the secret passage. Either way, he wished Hartmann would move faster.
After what felt like an eternity, Hartmann was across the first room. Roald was quick to join him on the causeway between the count’s deathtraps. ‘Remember what Bernger said about the next room,’ Roald said. ‘Keep to the centre, where your weight can be supported. If you try to walk across, you’ll just be knocked into the walls and cooked.’
There was no need to remind Hartmann of what they faced. He crawled across the centre of the copper floor, where the hidden beam provided support. If anything, his progress was more agonising than it had been in the first room, but Roald knew he couldn’t hurry the merchant. He still needed Hartmann to clear the way. They both knew how the first four rooms functioned. Anything after that would be a mystery, but with Hartmann going ahead of him, Roald would have a chance to see at least a fifth room in operation before having to make his way through it.
The two men had their boots off when they reached the room with the pendulum. Roald had to remind Hartmann to keep his mouth shut when the merchant saw the bisected corpses of Alrik and Goswin. What had been Brond was only a shapeless heap of meat and bone now, corrupted even in death by the infernal touch of the Mardagg.
Warily the two men slid their feet across the floor. Roald kept looking towards the roof, expecting at any moment that some stray sound would provoke the pendulum into action. He listened for the noise of its mechanism grinding into murderous life. It was a different sound that reached him, however. Faint and still distant, it was that of someone stepping out onto the copper floor in the chamber the men had just left. Roald could not hide from the ghastly truth. Liebgarde was pursuing him, and she was now close on his heels.
The fourth room, the last of which Roald knew the secret. Hartmann stuffed his feet into his boots and set off across the acidic floor. Smoke boiled off the soles, but the merchant didn’t delay. Any doubt that the sounds he heard were real left Roald. Hartmann’s haste could only mean that he also heard them and knew Liebgarde was close behind them.
‘Slow down!’ Roald barked. He pulled on his own boots and started out into the chamber. The merchant was a third of the way across and rapidly putting distance between them.
‘The daemon’s after you, not me!’ Hartmann shrieked back. ‘When it catches you, it’ll leave me alone. I can go back! I won’t have to risk these traps!’
The mocking words had Roald seeing red. Before he fully appreciated what he was doing, he lifted the spear and cast it at Hartmann. It was a sloppy throw, just enough to graze the fat merchant’s side. But even that slight contact caused the graceless man to lose his balance. A scream of horror was ripped from Hartmann as he slammed down onto the floor.
Smoke erupted from the merchant’s entire left side. He jerked back to his feet, but it was too late. Some of the floor’s oily sheen clung to his skin, burning into his flesh. There was no blood, only a greasy vapour that bubbled off Hartmann as the acid ravenously bit into him. He lost all reason, all sense of direction. In his agonies he staggered around, no longer striking for the landing at the other end of the chamber.
The foul, charnel reek that hit the baron’s nose caused him to turn. He couldn’t hear the sound of a footfall over Hartmann’s agonised screams, but he knew what he would see. When he spun around, the baron’s heart felt like a lump of ice in his chest. Standing on the landing that connected the third and fourth rooms was the thing that had consumed his daughter. A few scraps of clothing and wisps of hair were all that were recognisable now as belonging to Liebgarde. Her body had elongated into a giant skeletal figure, blood dripping from the split and shredded flesh. The daemon’s grinning skull stared at Roald, its teeth stretched into wolfish fangs. The pools of gore that bubbled in its eye sockets blazed with murderous intensity. The daemon would relish destroying him and sending his soul to the hellish kingdom of Khorne.
The baron raced for the far side of the chamber. He dodged Hartmann as the pain-crazed man lunged for him. Each step sent a shudder through Roald’s body, terror making his veins feel as though they were chilled to freezing. His breath came in desperate gasps that never seemed to fill his lungs. His vision blurred, causing him to sway as he hurried for the landing.
Roald threw himself onto the safe causeway. He couldn’t believe he’d escaped. It seemed utterly impossible. He’d survived.
Then Roald turned his head. He looked back into the trapped room with its acid-glazed floor. The daemon was moving across it with long, steady strides. It paid no notice to the smoke that boiled off its feet or the way the acid devoured its toes. The fiend kept its hideous gaze upon the baron, indifferent to all else that occurred around it.
Hartmann, insane with pain, actually turned towards the Mardagg and reached out to the daemon. There was no succour to be had. A long, bony hand closed around the merchant’s head. A twist of the daemon’s wrist and Hartmann’s screams were silenced. His head went rolling across the floor, the acid eating away his face and scalp. The decapitated body simply slumped down onto its knees like some warrior priest at his prayers.
Roald turned to flee again, but his eyes caught an object lying just a little distance from the ledge. It was the pole Hartmann had been carrying. When the spear struck him, the merchant had flung the pole across the chamber. Now it lay within easy reach of the baron. Roald took two steps out onto the glazed floor and snatched up the pole. He used his glove to wipe away the glaze, then threw the smoking garment at the approaching daemon. It struck the monster high in the chest and remained there, sizzling against its tautened flesh.
Roald knew the daemon wouldn’t be stopped. His only chance was to plunge ahead. He’d use the pole just as he would have had Hartmann do. Probing ahead. Trying to trigger whatever fiendish mechanism Alrik had built.
It was too much to hope that when he turned the corner on the landing he’d see the door leading out of Mhurghast’s dungeons. Instead he found a wide corridor with another landing at its far end. Another of the cogsmith’s traps. Roald stopped and studied the room. The walls, ceiling and floor were all made of iron, apparently as solid as the battlements of Mhurghast itself.
He tightened his grip on the pole and held it out. Roald remained on the landing as he probed the walls of the room ahead. They felt firm under his examination, with no suggestion of heat or acid or any other deadly instrument. He quickly jabbed at the floor and found it likewise solid. He turned his attention to the ceiling and wondered if the menace lay there. As he lifted the pole to check, the walls suddenly crashed inwards. The pole shattered under the crushing impact. Roald jumped back with the wooden stump clenched in his hands. His eyes were wide with horror. Mashed into paste between moving walls! Such was the fiendish trap Alrik had prepared here.
Knowing the nature of the trap wasn’t enough. Roald had to discover the method that activated it if he was to pass through. He watched as the walls slid back into their former positions, but he could see no hint of what had triggered them. Before he ventured onwards, he had to learn. Before his time ran out.
Roald turned around as he heard a scraping sound behind him. He stared in mute horror as the Mardagg hefted itself around the corner. The daemon’s feet had been utterly dissolved by the acid glaze, leaving only the leg bones. It supported itself by using its clawed hands to push itself along the walls. The fiend’s bloody eyes bore down upon the baron.
Time had already run out.
Roald started to rush into the trapped room, but the memory of those crushing walls made him hesitate. In that instant, the daemon threw itself upon him, its skeletal mass crushing him to the floor. He saw the fanged skull leering down at him. Then the Mardagg opened its hideous jaws and sank its teeth into Roald’s chest.
The baron screamed, but his cries did nothing to interrupt the daemon’s feast.
Klueger carefully laid Inge’s body down on the floor and glanced up at the ceiling. The spikes behind the panel would hide the body for him. Even if it were to be discovered, everyone would believe she’d died trying to escape through the dungeons. That, certainly, was what he needed Magda to believe.
The witch hunter stood on the landing between the first and second rooms. He used a candelabra to activate one of the tiles, tossing the heavy iron implement so it struck one of the triggers. The phoney panel whipped back and the spiked roof slammed down. The points stabbed into Inge’s dead flesh, impaling the corpse. Klueger could see the bodies of Bruno and several servants already stuck on the spikes, their faces contorted in the grisly agonies of their deaths.
As he looked upon the bodies, a weird impression came to Klueger. It seemed to him that he could actually hear those tortured cries. When the roof withdrew and carried Inge with it behind the fake ceiling, the sound persisted. Klueger strained his ears and tried to figure out the source of the strange phenomenon. It was then that his gaze chanced upon the floor.
There was so much blood in the first room that Klueger had failed to notice them, but here there was no distraction from the over-sized, bloody footprints. The daemon had been here! Not in the still recognisable shape of Brond, but in its full and monstrous aspect.
Klueger attended the faint sounds more keenly now. Anguished howls, faint to his ears, but with the way the trapped halls baffled noise, they must be strident enough to carry any distance. Someone was being killed. Perhaps it was the daemon’s work.
The pistols Klueger carried were blessed by Grand Lector Sieghard. They had served him well throughout the years. The shot they were loaded with was forged from sigmarite, the holy metal from Azyr with which the arms and armour of the mighty Stormcasts themselves were forged. Each pellet was etched with a prayer on its tiny surface, an appeal to draw the God-King’s judgement upon all the foul minions of darkness. The silvered sword he bore was likewise branded with sacred maledictions, orisons of wrath against the creatures of Chaos. Weapons designed to give a mere mortal the ability to fight back against eternal evil.
If his heart were pure and his faith were true. Klueger thought about the woman he’d murdered and his motive for doing so. How pure was his heart? How true was his faith?
Questions that would be answered soon enough. If the daemon was here, Klueger would try to stop it. Vanquishing the fiend was the only way to be certain of saving Magda.
The witch hunter kept a pistol in each hand as he crossed the second room. He moved in perfect silence through the third, braced for the cleaving sweep of the pendulum. Klueger looked over the residue of what had once been Brond and considered the ghastly essence of the daemon. The Mardagg utterly consumed its hosts. He could not let such a fate befall Magda.
The third room, and now the screams were louder than before. He could see a body smoking on the acid-glazed floor. From its bulk Klueger knew the corpse was that of Hartmann. He could guess then whose screams he was listening to from up ahead. Baron von Woernhoer had tried to escape the daemon by finding the dungeon exit. Instead the daemon found him.
Klueger sprinted across the acidic floor, disdainful of the threat to himself. He was intent only upon confronting the daemon before it accomplished its murderous task and its spirit withdrew to another host. When he smelled the obscene, charnel reek, he knew the fiend was near. Such a stench could only come from one of Khorne’s daemons.
Upon the landing at the other side of the fourth room, Klueger found the ghastly scene. The Mardagg, its shape now that of a monstrous skeleton, was sprawled across Roald’s screaming, blood-soaked body. The fiend’s fangs chewed into the baron’s chest, stripping gory ribbons from the man. Klueger could see the white of bone showing through the dripping meat.
‘Sigmar guide my hand,’ he prayed as he aimed his pistols at the daemon. The weapons barked almost simultaneously. The first shot hit the monster’s shoulder and exploded it into bony fragments. The second smashed into the fanged skull, punching through the cranium and blasting a hole that removed its nasal cavity and the centre of its upper jaw.
The Mardagg turned and stared at Klueger with its horrible, bloody eyes. Never had the witch hunter felt such malignance before. Not from man or undead, not even from those daemons he had battled in the past. There was an eternity of hate in the creature’s gaze, an infinite sea of carnage. The Mardagg was the embodiment of death. Not the inevitable, regimented demise that must come to all things, rather the sudden slaughter and the bloodthirsty havoc of primal savagery. The oldest of all emotions, the sin that smouldered in the lowest reptile. The urge to destroy.
Klueger dropped one pistol and drew his silvered sword. The Mardagg swung at him with its clawed hand, the talons raking through the air only inches from his face. He retaliated, his blade licking across the fiend’s fingers. Three of the talons were severed by the blow, a greasy red steam spraying from the wound.
The daemon glared at Klueger. Then it brought its other hand stabbing down into the screaming ruin on which it sprawled. The screams stopped as it crushed Roald’s heart.
Klueger didn’t bother to attack as the skeletal daemon began to disintegrate and collapse into the sort of grisly mash he’d passed in the pendulum room. The Mardagg’s essence was already in transition, leaping from this body into that of its next host. He could accomplish nothing here now.
Klueger recovered his pistol and picked his way back through the dungeon. He was still shaken by the enormity of the power he’d sensed in the daemon. Had he truly harmed it in any way, or had it simply been testing him to see if there was any hurt he could do it?
There was one point in the witch hunter’s favour. He was convinced now that the Mardagg was drawn to those who had a link between host and victim. He’d recognised the tattered clothes hanging from the daemon as those worn by Liebgarde, and the victim had certainly been Roald. With Hartmann dead, that meant there was no victim to connect Magda, Bernger, Abarahm and the Senfs. That meant its next host could only be Thilo Krebs.
It would not be murder, Klueger told himself as he ran through the trophy room and back into the castle’s gloomy halls. It would be an execution. Thilo’s life against those of his parents. Two for one, and perhaps more. He’d be able to put to the test whether breaking the chain would also sever the arcane connection that allowed the Mardagg entry into Chamon. It was something that had to be proven.
Klueger dashed up the stairs towards the bed chambers. He could hear Magda banging her fists against the door to her room. She was in a panic, but the thick door muffled her voice so he couldn’t make out the words. He could hear Bernger also pounding against his door. Thilo’s and the aelf’s rooms were quiet. So too were those of the Senfs and von Woernhoers. He could see that the door to each was open. A hideously mauled body lay in the hall just outside the von Woernhoer room. That, he judged, would be the baroness.
He was more surprised when he looked into the other room and found Herlinde and Heimo dead. A sickening scheme suggested itself now. Klueger understood why Roald and Hartmann had been in the dungeon. They’d conspired to perpetrate the reverse of the plan Klueger had adopted. They would save themselves by killing their children. Only the plot had been too late. The daemon had already possessed Liebgarde.
Klueger turned from the scene of filicide. He checked the charge in his pistol and moved towards the door to Thilo’s room. His gaze strayed down the hall to Magda’s. Any hesitance left him. He’d already come too far to stop now. He turned the key in the lock and threw open the door. His pistol swept across the room as he looked around for the man he’d come to kill. At least,help me
if Thilo was still human enough to kill.
There was only silence. No cry of surprise from Thilo, no yell for help. The reason was simple. Thilo wasn’t in his room. Klueger made a quick search, but there was no sign of him. Somebody had released the alchemist’s son. Or else the daemon had found some way of releasing its new host.
Klueger hurried back into the hall. He dashed across to Bernger’s room and unlocked the door. The thief backed away when he saw the drawn pistol, alarm in his eyes.
‘Come along,’ Klueger said.
‘What’s happening out there?’ Bernger demanded. ‘I heard screams. The most awful screams.’
The witch hunter scrutinised Bernger’s expression. ‘Did you hear anything after the screams?’
‘Later,’ Bernger said. ‘After they stopped I heard doors opening. Somebody was talking, but speaking too low for me to hear what they said. I pounded on the door but they ignored me.’ He gave Klueger a sharp look. ‘I thought it must be you.’
‘It wasn’t,’ Klueger said. He motioned Bernger into the hall. When he joined him, he gestured with the pistol towards Hiltrude’s body. ‘The baroness is dead. So are Herlinde and Heimo. I think Hartmann and the baron killed them. They tried to keep the daemon from possessing their children so they’d save their own skins. They were too late. I found both of them dead down in the dungeons. They tried to escape, but the daemon was already inside Liebgarde and chased them down.’
Bernger’s face turned pale. He shook his head, staggered by the horror of what he was being told. ‘We’re dying like flies,’ he muttered. ‘None of us will make it out of here alive.’
‘You’ll escape,’ Klueger snarled. He pulled Bernger with him towards Magda’s room.
When he opened the door, Magda leapt forwards rather than back. She held a candlestick. Only Klueger’s quick action kept her from braining him with the improvised weapon, darting aside as she brought it whipping down. Magda dropped the bludgeon in horror at what she’d almost done.
‘I didn’t know,’ she cried. ‘I didn’t know who was out here. The screams…’
Klueger nodded and took her into his arms. ‘It’ll be all right,’ he assured her. He found the words hard to say. So much had already gone wrong. Life would never be the same again. All that remained was to try and save what was left.
‘The screams, what were they?’
Klueger quickly told Magda what had happened, though he left out the real reason he’d been in the dungeons. When he finished he explained what he needed her to do. ‘You have to get out of the castle. The daemon has taken Thilo as its next host. I’m certain of that. I don’t think it’ll be content to simply claim the victims Count Wulfsige designated for it. It knows I can fight it, that Thilo will be its final host. It’ll not abandon his body as readily as it did the others. It’ll try to use him to slaughter anyone it can reach, because it knows it’ll be its last chance to kill.’
‘How can we get out?’ Magda asked.
‘You’ll go with Bernger,’ Klueger said. ‘He has seen for himself how the first four rooms in the dungeon work. I followed his instructions and was able to reach the landing where the daemon killed the baron. Follow him, do what he says, and you’ll make it through.’ He turned and faced Bernger. ‘There is a fifth room, at least. I saw it when I found Roald. There must be some mechanism there, something he had some warning of but wasn’t able to get past. If the way had been clear, I don’t think the daemon would have caught him.’
Bernger nodded, a grave look on his face. ‘At least one more,’ he mused. ‘It would be an interesting puzzle if our lives weren’t being wagered on the solution.’
‘If we stay here we’re just as dead,’ Magda said. Alarm suddenly filled her eyes. She grabbed Klueger’s hand. ‘My mother! We can’t leave without her!’
Klueger’s expression was sombre. ‘I’ve already looked for her. Before I came here to release you both. I couldn’t find her.’
Magda frowned. ‘Then I can’t go. I won’t leave her behind. Please, I’ve already lost my father.’
The worry and agony in Magda’s face stabbed at Klueger like a knife. He almost choked on the words that came off his tongue. ‘I’ll look for her, but I need you to go with Bernger. I need to know that you’re safe.’ He took her by the shoulders and drew her close. His lips pressed against her mouth. ‘There is nothing I wouldn’t do to protect you. Believe that. I’ll stay and look for her. I’ll fight the daemon and keep you safe from it.’
Magda’s body was shaking. Klueger could feel her tears against his neck. He looked away and caught Bernger’s gaze. He motioned with his head for him to lead Magda away. ‘Go with Bernger,’ he ordered her as he pushed her from his embrace.
‘You’ll follow?’ Magda asked. There was a severity in her voice that would not be ignored.
‘When I have your mother,’ Klueger lied. ‘I already know the way to get past the first four rooms.’ He turned to Bernger. ‘When you discover how to get past the fifth room, you can leave instructions for me on the landing.’ He reached into his tunic and brought out a short stub of pencil and a small leather-bound book. ‘Write down what you learn. I’ll follow.’ He squeezed Magda’s hand. ‘I promise I’ll follow.’
‘Find my mother, Klueger,’ Magda begged. ‘Save her. Promise me you’ll save her.’
‘I’ll do everything I can,’ Klueger vowed. A sudden thought occurred to him, and he glanced at the door to Abarahm’s room. ‘I’ll get the aelf to help me find her. There’s no better tracker in all the Mortal Realms than an aelf. But you must hurry now. If Abarahm knows you’re trying to get through the dungeon, he may decide to go with you instead of helping me look for Inge.’
The lie was bitter in Klueger’s mouth, but it had the desired effect. Magda didn’t resist Bernger’s efforts to start her down the stairs and lead her off towards the trophy room. He hoped the thief was as smart as he seemed. Certainly of all of them he was their best chance to get around the traps.
Once he was certain Magda and Bernger were gone, Klueger turned towards Abarahm’s room. He did intend to fight the daemon, just in case it still had any claim upon Magda. The aelf would make a useful ally in such a fight, if he could be convinced of his own peril.
Klueger knocked at the door, but there was no answer from within. A sense of danger nagged at him, and he had his pistol back in his hand when he turned the key. He stepped into the room. Candles burned on the table near the window, but just as he’d found with Thilo’s room, the occupant was nowhere to be found.
Perplexed, Klueger walked back into the hall. As he stepped out from the doorway, he was struck from behind. A cloth was crushed against his face while a steely grip clamped down on his wrist and kept him from using the pistol. He fumbled with his other hand to draw another weapon, but the pungent smell of the cloth was already numbing his senses and draining the strength from his limbs. He thought of Alrik and the way Lothar had subdued the duardin.
The witch hunter’s legs buckled beneath him and he wilted to the floor. His attacker flowed downwards with him and kept the drugged cloth against his nose and mouth. As his mind started to fade into darkness, Klueger was surprised by the identity of his foe. It wasn’t Lothar. It was Abarahm.
From the intensity of the aelf’s gaze, Klueger had the impression Abarahm would have been happier using a knife than Lothar’s stupefying vapours.