An early spring brought snowdrops and orange caterlilies, cascades of pink madelia and a sea of bright blue sylphettes that whipped like roiling waves when the wind swept through them. Vittenberg was famously lush, but even so, a vulgar fertility beyond the norm permeated everything. A slow patter of rain scored each night, punctuated by the sharp cries of men and women rutting in the city’s alleys.
Manfred Eisenfaust detested every bit of it.
The hook-nosed captain sat brooding in his study with a cigarillo when a runner arrived with a note bearing the seal of Vittenberg’s city watch. Each letter stumbled over the next, until it devolved into a maddened scribble Eisenfaust could barely make sense of.
It read:
Something ate the Wessels.
Graffiti everywhere.
Please come at once.
-Bernhardt
Graffiti. Eisenfaust’s thin lips turned to a frown.
In recent weeks there’d been an uptick of religious unrest in Vittenberg, accompanied by vandalism and violence of the worst sort. Worship of the old gods was forbidden in the free cities, but Vittenberg was full of proud families whose origins were tangled up in ancient loyalties. Many kept to the old faith in defiance of the restrictions.
Manfred gathered up his coat and dropped a kiss on his wife Johanna’s cheek as he left. “I have to work.”
“Will you be home for dinner?” she asked.
“Not likely. What are you making?”
“Stew.”
“Rabbit?” he asked, a note of hope in his voice.
“No,” she said. “Onions and sweet carrots.”
“Save a bowl for me. I may be hungry.”
“Be safe.”
It took an hour on horseback to reach the Wessel estate. Manfred did not enjoy the countryside the way some people pretended to. He did not like the bright spring colors, which struck him as gaudy, or the noise Stummesferd’s hooves made squelching in the soggy creeper moss of Vittenberg’s west road. If there were any silver lining to being called to work, it was that he did not have to endure the ear piercing shrieks of his children playing in the yard.
Franz and Gertrude Wessel lived in a large manor house at the edge of the Eichenvauld forest with their five children: Franz Jr, Ingrid, Mary, Dieter, and baby Helmüt. Ivy crawled up the walls from the base of the house, invading through windows and cracks in its mortar. A tangle of vines stretched from the roof to the branches of nearby willow trees, suspended above the manor’s grounds.
A spider’s web, Eisenfaust thought, looking at the vines. He wondered what that made him.
Private Bernhardt greeted the captain by the front porch. The sight of him irritated Eisenfaust. He was an odd looking young man with a weasel face and wisps of hair about his chin and mouth that would never make for a proper beard. Eisenfaust prized neatness and order above all else, and Bernhardt’s head possessed some irregularity in shape that annoyed the captain to his very core.
“Glad you’re here, Captain,” the young man said. “I wasn’t sure what to do.”
Eisenfaust scoffed at the sentiment. It was a lie. Not that Bernhardt was unsure what to do—of that, there was no doubt—but the captain knew no one was ever glad to see him. Not even his wife. It was the way he liked it.
“You are paid to know what to do, Private Bernhardt.”
“Yes sir, it’s just…” he struggled for the words, “…this is different, that’s all. It’s a mess, sir.”
“It better be, Private. It is the weekend. I am a family man.”
Eisenfaust dismounted and tied Stummesferd’s reins to a gas lamp at the foot of the porch, then discarded the cigarillo he’d been smoking and stamped it into the loamy soil. “Show me the bodies.”
Private Bernhardt led the captain up the front steps of the house, onto the porch and toward a set of double doors that opened to a grand foyer. A thick mess of flowering vines covered the entry, hanging loose.
“What is this?” Eisenfaust asked the private, lifting one of the vines.
“We were forced to cut our way in. The doors were sealed shut. Overgrown.”
“We?”
“Mr. Brandt, the neighbor. He’s the one who sent for us.”
“You let him into the scene?”
“I’m sorry, Sir. I wasn’t thinking.”
“A habit of yours.”
A gnawing sense of discomfort grew in Eisenfaust’s gut as he examined the vine. The thing was as thick around as his wrist. Much thicker than it ought to have been.
“Summer growth,” he noted, casting a glance at Private Bernhardt. “Unnatural.”
“Yes,” Bernhardt concurred. “I thought so as well. Neither myself nor Mr. Brandt knew what to make of it. His cottage is a few miles up the road. Nothing like these vines there.”
The dining room table was still set, a roast pork at the center, sliced neat. A crystal bowl sat to the right of what Eisenfaust assumed was Gertrude Wessel’s seat. The baby’s dinner, only partly eaten. It looked for all the world as if they’d gotten up and left in the middle of their meal.
“Where are they?”
“The cellar.”
“And the graffiti?”
“It’s all in the cellar.”
Captain Eisenfaust followed Bernhardt to the root cellar door. Here, he saw the first signs of struggle, and paused to examine the door’s frame. Fresh scratches in the wood. A woman’s fingernail on the floor, torn loose.
“You saw this?” Eisenfaust asked, tapping the frame.
“I wasn’t sure what to make of it.”
“You found the children in the basement?”
“All five and the father. No sign of the mother. Mr. Brandt helped me confirm.”
“The children must have been killed first. The scratches start on the inside of the door frame, here—” he indicated the spot to Bernhardt. “Gertrude Wessel, I think, based on their height. She was trying to claw her way down. Someone held her back. Perhaps she was taken, or killed elsewhere.”
Eisenfaust took a lamp from a hook, lit it, and made his way down the stairs. The cellar was a large, open room with a few stone foundation pillars around its center. Moss carpeted the cellar’s earthen floor, garnished with alien fungus of a type Eisenfaust did not recognize; pale mushrooms dappled with bright white blisters, and a fluorescent ascomycota that bathed the room in unearthly greens.
“Nothing has been touched?” Eisenfaust asked, pausing at the bottom of the stairs, lamp held high.
“No,” the Private said. “I could not bear to stay.”
“You must be strong, Private. It will do you no good to look away now. You must numb yourself to it, or you will see it for the rest of your life. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Captain.”
On the far wall of the cellar was a shrine for offerings, and a statue of the river goddess, Ambergresse. She beckoned with spread legs and dull, bovine eyes, her supple curves adorned by a strange, flowering vine. Blood everywhere—on her breasts and at her feet, and all across the wall. Even the moss at the foot of the statue was stained red, as if it’d gorged itself on the Wessels.
“You were right to call me.”
“Asterites,” said Bernhardt, spitting near the base of the statue.
“Indeed. They kept to the old ways.”
“Paid for it, by the looks of it.”
Eisenfaust conducted a silent inventory of the scene. Each member of the family was scattered across the floor of the basement, as if they’d been torn apart and discarded. Vines wound their way around the dismembered limbs, penetrating them. The body parts were shriveled and desiccated, as if they’d been dried out. He found the remnants of Franz Wessel, barely forty, laid out together like a mosaic with little Helmüt cradled near him. Marks covered what was left of Franz Wessel’s wrists, which were bound by a length of rope.
“A ritual.”
“What god would demand a sacrifice like this?” Bernhardt muttered.
“What is blamed on the gods is rarely their fault, Bernhardt. Men did this. We must find them and bring them to justice.”
Eisenfaust knelt in the dirt to examine the scene, and as he did one of the vine’s creeping tendrils seemed to reach for him. Its exterior was coated in a thin layer of mucus, and the vine itself the color of raw, bloody flesh. It looked for all the world like a length of intestine, sprouting yellow and brown leaves and fruited with thin, rubbery red sacs.
“What is it, captain?” asked Bernhardt.
“I do not know.”
“We should burn it.”
Eisenfaust stood and turned his attention to the graffiti Bernhardt mentioned in the runner’s note. All across the cellar’s outer walls were queer signs and sigils, scratched in stone or drawn in blood, letters whose shape changed from one moment to the next, struggling against observation. He recognized it at once as the divine language of the old gods, though he could not read it. The throbbing spirals and unnatural geometry of the script were the worst sort of magic.
Eisenfaust lifted his lamp and drew closer.
“How can you bear to look at it?” Bernhardt asked, “Doesn’t it hurt your eyes?”
“No,” the captain answered, lying flatly. Certainly it hurt its eyes to examine the scrawl, but not to any great extent. Some were more susceptible to the effects of the divine language than others. Through his forty years, the captain witnessed men bleed from their eyes or their nose when they looked too long. He’d heard rumors of people changed by the words. Transformed. Vittenberg’s asylums were full of its victims. “We’ll need help with this.”
“The Council of Lords?”
“Vittenberg is an ancient city, Bernhardt. Many of her families still worship the old gods in secret. Any of the lords could be involved. We need someone else. An outsider.”
“The witch?”
By witch, of course, Eisenfaust knew Bernhardt meant Lady Grimsby of Volgstadt. That the woman was not a witch did not matter. She knew things others did not, like the proper balance of chemicals to make explosives, and how to harvest widow’s wail for use as a poison. As a young man, Eisenfaust worked with her on the investigation into the Rothmorrow murders. He did not particularly like the woman—he did not particularly like anyone—but he respected her efficacy. She possessed a rare intellect and a peerless knowledge of the old gods and their language.
“Yes,” Eisenfaust said, brow furrowing as he scowled at the undulating graffiti, eyes drawn to one word in particular, repeated throughout the room. “If there is anyone who can translate this scrawl and shed light on the purpose of this ritual, it is her. I’ll write to her and ask her to make the trip at once.”
“Are you sure that’s wise, captain?”
“You have a concern?”
“I’ve heard stories, sir, that’s all. Things have a way of going from bad to worse when she’s involved.”
“Look around, Bernhardt. How could it get worse?”
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