62: Body Snatching

So we were all in the shed overlooking Johnny Tombstone’s warehouse wondering how to find out which of his minions was responsible for the body snatching. I say all of us, but Kurtis was not there. He had been feeling ill after the previous evening and may have caught something from his indiscretion. He wanted me to take a look at it, and although I am medically trained, and his life-long friend, that was asking too much. So he went home, and I think Aunt Clara said she had a ‘cure’ for it. I’m not sure what it was, but it involved a long tube and a big bucket of warm water.

Konrad and I would be on the late shift so we went home to get some rest, leaving Erhardt, Ursula, and Otto to watch over the warehouse. I was a little apprehensive about leaving Otto alone with those two, but what was the worst that could happen?

Anyway, not much was happening at the warehouse, and there probably wouldn’t be any body snatching before night fall. Erhardt asked Otto why he didn’t kill the rat man when he had the chance. Otto said he did kill it, he had hit it with the rock, as everyone had seen. But Erhardt said it hadn’t died and Otto knew that. Otto said that he’d done his best but it wasn’t his fault he didn’t hit it hard enough. Then Ursula started questioning him about the jar of contaminated rats he’d been carrying around.

Erhardt told Ursula that he thought they were on the same page about the best way to deal with Otto. I’m not sure what page Erhardt was on, but Ursula was on the page where she shot him with a crossbow. Ursula told Erhardt to bolt him with his magic, but he declined, although I think he’s still a bit upset about what Otto did to him at the opera. The crossbow bolt missed, and Otto legged it out of the shed and straight to the temple of Shallya.

Erhardt and Ursula did see two men moving a body in a sack into the warehouse, but it was clearly still alive and so they decided it was not the sort of body we were looking for. They followed a couple of the gangsters around for a bit but nothing particularly interesting was happening.

Otto found me at the temple and told me about Ursula and Erhardt trying to kill him. Obviously, I couldn’t really believe they would do anything like that, and so I told Otto it was probably a misunderstanding and that it could all be explained if we went to talk to them. He got quite upset that I wouldn’t believe him and insisted on staying at the temple.

I went back to the shed (it was nearly time for my shift, anyway), to talk to Erhardt and Ursula. I explained that I realised it was all a misunderstanding, but I wanted to know what happened. They told me that they had just been chatting, and Otto had started behaving strangely and then just ran off. And they asked me where he was now. That made me a bit suspicious, and they had been acting a bit shiftily, so I started to think that maybe Otto had been correct. So I told them Otto was at Kurtis’ and they should go and see him there.

After Konrad had arrived for our shift, we spotted two people leaving the warehouse acting suspiciously, carrying a large sack, and so Konrad followed them. After a suspiciously circuitous route they ended up at a Garden of Morr in the north of the city and when they got their spades out of the sack, Konrad sent us a note by urchin post.

The urchin arrived, a rather self-assured young lad who was keen to big up his part in life, and I think one day he will make something of himself. But meanwhile he was just rude to us and managed to get a couple more pennies out of us. I sent him on to the temple to fetch Otto, as well, and Erhardt overheard this, and realised I had been lying about him being at Kurtis’.

Meanwhile Konrad was listening to the two body snatchers as they dug up the grave. One of them said something about the last time he was doing this, in another graveyard, one of the bodies had come to life and tried to grab him. And Konrad heard that one of their names was Gottschalk. They also said they needed to be careful because they thought that Johnny was onto them.

The urchin arrived at the temple and found Otto and told him where we were heading. The Urchin didn’t charge him the delivery fee if Otto, who he thought was a priest, would do a prayer for his cousin who had just joined the cult. Otto didn’t really know whether to join us or not, but he found a priest and blurted out the whole story, and gave her the penny, and she was none the wiser but did tell him the parable of the candlewick, which is a good one, but like most parables, tended to confuse Otto. In any case, I think Otto decided he needed to burn more brightly, even if it meant him burning for a shorter time.

We all got to the graveyard and spread out, surrounding the body snatchers, undetected, except Otto arrived late and started calling for me. Luckily it didn’t put the body snatchers off and they reached the casket and began prising it open.

Erhardt made a magical flame, surprising them, and ordered them to drop their spades, which they did. Then Otto, anxious to prove himself after the earlier disagreements and burn a bit brighter, charged in, whacked one of the body snatchers on the head, mistimed it somehow, went flying into the newly dug grave, and dislocated his shoulder.

Despite Otto’s efforts, the two gangsters surrendered. They were Gottschalk Wiedermann and Bodobert Karchel, so we had their names for Johnny Tombstone. Konrad told them that they were in deep trouble, but we would be able to cut a deal with them. He said we were only interested in the names of the people who were buying the bodies, and if they told us then we would let them go. They told us they were selling them to medical students and seemed to think they were doing their duty to the furthering of scientific knowledge. And they gave us the names of a group of five students they had dealt with. Konrad said they could go but told them their big error was to dig up the grave of a noble.

And when they had gone, I managed to pull Otto out of the hole and pop his shoulder back into the socket. I told Ursula and Erhardt to apologise to him for any misunderstandings that had happened earlier, and they did, but insisted Otto had the wrong end of the stick. He was still upset about it all, but I explained that there was always two points of view for any story, and they should agree to compromise, but I’m not sure that helped.

We were interrupted by the gardener who wanted to know what all the racket was. I think I managed to smooth it over with him and told him I would write to his cult to explain everything, but I assured him we were important and on the trail of body snatchers.

It was too late to go to the university that night, so we planned to go there the next day. Otto went back to stay the night at Kurtis’. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but he’d seemed to make up with Ursula and Erhardt and he thought Kurtis would be able to protect him, even if he was lying down having his treatment. Otto did have a half decent night but kept getting woken up by Kurtis ringing his bell for Aunt Clara to fetch him stuff.

In the morning we approached one of the professors, Witold Blumfield, at the medical school of the university and told him about their students. He had an extremely opulent and extravagant office with lots of expensive things in it. I wondered whether that was suspicious or professors just get paid a lot. Blumfield was clearly upset and told us that the students would be immediately dismissed. That was not really what we wanted, we wanted to have the chance to confront them at the university, and realised we would have to contact them before they found out they had been thrown out of the college, and planned to go to the Travellers’ Rest where Blumfield told us they hung out. Konrad told Blumfield that he didn’t need the matter to go any further and he would be happy to work for him if he needed anything done in the future and gave him his card.

After all the anti-Wizard feeling we had discovered at the Travellers earlier, Erhardt thought it best to avoid the place and took Otto to see Johnny Tombstone. They told the bouncer that ‘Johnny is the best’ and were allowed in. Johnny and Leonhard were torturing some poor soul stuck in a barrel having his fingers cut off for being late paying his debt. They gave Johnny the names of the body snatchers and Johnny said he would sort them out. I think we had just got them killed. Then Johnny offered Erhardt and Otto jobs with his organisation, but they both politely declined, having important vocations themselves, but Erhardt did give Johnny Konrad’s card.

At the Travellers’ Rest we spotted what looked like the students and Konrad went to talk to them. He spoke to one, Hildemar, and managed to make her give herself away. He told her that he didn’t want any fuss, and that if she could deliver the one body we needed, then he would not mention them to anyone at the university, going forward. Of course, he neglected to mention they were already due to be expelled.

I’m not sure about Konrad. I’ve noticed now in the space of a couple of days while he largely tells the truth, or at least doesn’t openly lie, he has managed to play, if not double cross, practically everyone we have met. I suspect he will be doing that going forward, and so I made a note to treat what he said very carefully and be careful myself in what I say to him, and any agreement I might make with him. I think he is a lot more ruthless than he lets on.

The students went on to deny everything, but Konrad knew they were lying and explained we could do this the easy way or the hard way. In the end they told us that they knew the body we were after, and they had recognised Markward Dehnert, and their friend Lothar had it. They said he was becoming withdrawn and taking his work too seriously, and so they didn’t really hang out with him anymore. They told us where we could find him, in his workshop in the cellars below the university. And we left the students arguing among themselves about whose fault everything was.

After all meeting up again, we made our way into the cellars below the university. I get the impression a lot of buildings in Altdorf have many subterranean levels that hardly anyone knows about, and the university is no exception. We found Lothar’s workshop and Erhardt let himself in. He found the student working in the light of a candle, writing in a notebook, and reading a large, old, mouldy, tome.

I’m not sure whether Erhardt needs to concentrate on his strange second sight if he is to detect the magical winds, or it comes naturally without him needing to direct his senses, but he did detect the dark wind of Dhar and the death wind of Shyish emanating from the book.

Erhardt put out the candle with his mind and then while Lothar was trying to relight it, he lit his own magical flame, and told him that he needed Markward Dehnert’s body back. The student was so stunned that he led Erhardt straight to the cadaver. It had a lot of cuts on it, and lots of bits missing, but the face was mostly intact.

We all went in to sort out the body and inspected the magical book. Lothar said he had just found it in the forest, and it was about saving life and that he could help people with it. He was trying to translate it for the good of mankind. He got frustrated that we didn’t understand, and he thrust the book at me.

When I touched it, I had a sudden vision. I sensed I was out of my body, and I flew up from the university, over Altdorf and away from the city. My mind sailed over the forest and across some sodden moors, and it came to a tall tower in the moors. It went through a window in the top of the tower where I sensed I was being throttled by a dark hand. I was trying to insist I didn’t lose it, but a hooded figure hissed about my incompetence. I could see a pale face behind the hooded figure, and then I felt my throat being ripped out and the pale face smirking at me. Then it all went dark, and I found myself back in the university of Altdorf, and I fell to the floor in shock.

Erhardt made a larger flame and began to burn the book. Lothar cried out in anguish and tried to stop him, and Otto grabbed him to keep him away. Despite his sore shoulder Otto just managed to restrain the student, and we all watched the book burn. Ursula told Lothar that he would be taken to the witch hunters, and he would be burned too, but it was for his own good.

Ursula asked me if I had been overcome by the dark powers, but I explained that I’d just slipped. I didn’t want to go to the witch hunters with Lothar. I noticed that Otto was looking a bit disturbed by the whole thing. I think the book had some power that we couldn’t understand. So we said some prayers together and he looked a bit better after that.