HATRED
By Ben Chessell


I am hatred. I am revulsion. If you know me and do not hate me, you are evil. I have enough hate for myself.

THE GIBBET IN Kurtbad was unoccupied. Swinging in the gentle breeze, the empty loop of rope regarded the village like a macabre eye. The people of Kurtbad slept, though they had gone to bed afraid. The two guards posted outside the barn which served as meeting hall slumped against the wooden door, blankets wrapped around them like shrouds. Their pitchforks lay discarded on the black Averland soil. If the humble wind which shook the noose had been so bold as to sniff the breath of these men, it would have smelt wine, much wine.
The midnight watch in the midst of an Averland witch hunt was not a duty to face unfortified. The small stocks of wine, kept in Kurtbad for Taal's Day of Spring-return, had been cracked open and distributed to all the villagers. When that day came, and it would be soon, everyone but the children would understand.
Now all that mattered was that a man had been killed.

GUNTER PULLED HIS woollen cloak tighter about his shoulders and made enough noise to wake the form in the bed he had recently left - but got no response. The thin moonlight didn't help Gunter see whether she really was asleep. He buckled on his sword, his since his father had died on a frosty night early in the winter, and drew back the bolt on the door of the house which had come to him the same way. Ice on the stone step cracked under his militiaman's boots and the breeze blew away the last cobwebs of sleep. Gunter found much solace in his duty, the sole permanent militiaman in the village of Kurtbad, responsible for more than a hundred men, women and children. He straightened his back and headed for the barn to see how his new recruits were doing.
Anja waited for the door to close behind him before sitting up and lighting the candle from the last coals which winked like dying stars in the ashen sky of the hearth. She returned to bed via the door, where she drew the bolt again. Gunter's side of the bed was warm but cooling quickly. She crawled back to the corner where she had curled like a cat on the night when Gunter fetched her from her family, telling her mother that she would be safer with him. It was probably even true. How could her mother, older now than most women in the village, tell the militiaman, tall as a bear, he could not take her only daughter. It was for Anja's protection, after all.
Anja and Gunter were not married, and had he not been arguably the most important man in Kurtbad, action would have been taken. As it was, many people in the village muttered after she passed by and looked at her as if to see some sign of her sin worn openly on her garments.
Anja curled up and thought about these things, looking at the candle flame and how the beeswax melted and ran down the stem like tears. The candle cried itself to death.

OUTSIDE THE VILLAGE, on the road to Nuln, the night was shredded by a startled cry and a flash of blades. A man leapt from the back of a horse and stumbled in the mud at the side of the road. Another man rolled on the ground, the winter leaves sticking to his face, his wrist in his mouth. The struggle was as bloody and quick as a dogfight. When it was over, the inadequate moon lit only naked skin and cooling blood.
The victor of the battle rode through the forest toward Kurtbad, searching for something.

OTTO THE BUTCHER slept well that night, despite a nagging feeling of guilt. He was used to that.

KURTBAD NESTLED ON the edge of the Reiksbanks Forest in central Averland, four days' ride from Nuln. It sat beside an old trading route which led from that great city of commerce and industry to a dwarf outpost at Hammergrim Pass in the Black Mountains. There, for centuries, the dwarfs had sucked lead and iron from the guts of the fat mountains. The orc was loaded onto oxen carts and passed through Kurtbad on its way to the markets at Nuln, and thence by river to whatever Empire foundry was prepared to pay the best price: gold for steel. Kurtbad had seen some business in those days.
The greed of the dwarfs eventually exceeded their skill and the bounty of the Black Mountains and the orc dried up like a staunched wound. Hammergrim Pass was abandoned and the dwarfs returned to fight the Goblin Wars or whatever dwarfs do. Kurtbad became a ghost town overnight. The inn was closed and its keeper, who was a businessman, left for Nuln with a girl from Kurtbad he had married. She later returned to the village with a young child, no money and a brand on her arm. The inn was knocked down. Perhaps it was anger or perhaps the people of Kurtbad needed the wood for their sheep pens, living in wolf country as they did.
Nevertheless, in the space of a generation, the village had purged itself of the influence of the dwarfs and merchants, and grass had grown on the road to Hammergrim Pass.
Into this small village, a single black stitch on the great embroidered map which hangs in the commerce hall of the Merchant's Guild in the city of Nuln, came a black horse with hooves of silver. On its back was a tall man clad in dark cloth. He wore a hat the colour of coal, with a plume which must have been dyed because no one knew of any bird with feathers like that. He wore a sword and a knife, in the manner of a gentleman, and his boots were of soft leather, also stained the colour of moonless night. His arms were scarred and scratched, from old battles and new, and he grasped the reins with his left hand as if the right was unequal to the task.
He sat on his horse for some time, surveying the village and its people as they stirred in the dawn grey. He sat there long enough for Wilhelm, chastened for being asleep on duty at the barn, to ring the huge bronze bell. This bell was the last remnant of the dwarf mining days, except for the occasional brightly painted rail which kept the sheep in. It had originally been used to warn the wagons as they left the mountain trail that the road was too muddy for reliable passage and they should wait for a drier day. Now the bell, which bore the crossed hammer and axe stamp of the miners, was struck with a mallet to summon the villagers to the common, the steam mechanism long since decayed.

I am a snake. I am a worm. There is poison in my blood. I can never die a peaceful death. I am burning now as I will burn then.

GUNTER HEARD THE bell as he stared for the fifth time at the place where Gregor's body had been found. There were signs to read here, he knew that, answers written in the ground as clear as any illuminated manuscript.
Just as he couldn't read the scratchings in ink which adorned the pages of his father's books, so he couldn't comprehend the signs in the mud which had hardened and cracked since Gregor's violent death two days ago. He had found the pieces of clay from the shattered bottle, but they only served to confuse things further. The only marks he could read reliably were his own deep boot prints, four sets.
He turned away and straightened himself as he made his way to face whatever disaster had befallen Kurtbad now.

ANJA LOOKED OUT between the curtains of Gunter's cottage. The man sat silently on his horse like a sculpture cast in black leather. She thought he didn't look well. He had the balance of a drunkard, and as she watched he shut his eyes and swayed like a young tree in a breeze. Anja pulled on the shoes which Gunter had bought for her on one of his trips to Nuln and unbolted the door.
She was the first of the villagers to approach the man and she straightened her hair as she walked carefully towards him. He made no sign of having seen her, so she moved around to the front of his horse. The big brown eyes of the stallion regarded her critically but the man's head remained slumped. There was a stain of dried blood, Anja knew it by its colour, on the man's right wrist, above his black leather glove. Anja could see he was alive; his chest rose and fell slowly.
She summoned up the courage to address him without considering that she didn't know how one should properly address a witch hunter.

GUNTER DREW BREATH and held the air in until all the goodness had been taken from it. A witch hunter. Just what we don't need.
He sized the man up. Anja had helped the man from his horse, which was now grazing contentedly on the lush grass of the Kurtbad common, before Gunter had banished her inside. Foolish girl. These witch hunters had no purpose but the discovery and destruction of Chaos, he knew that, and although there was a dangerous killer on the loose, perhaps even a monster of some kind, the man in black might be just as dangerous. Didn't she know that? Of course she did.
Even now she watched proceedings from the window and heated water on the stove for the man. Anything to make contact with the world outside Kurtbad, that was what Anja wanted. Why can she not be content with me? Gunter knew that it was likely only his training and foreign postings with the Empire army had brought Anja to his home in the first place, and that was a fragile bargain he was determined to protect.
He turned his attention to the witch hunter. The man sat slumped against the wall of his house like a wilted flower, except that he knew no blooms that were the colour of Death. Gunter addressed him formally, welcoming him to Kurtbad and asking his business.
When the man spoke it was in a voice which sounded like it was squeezed through a throat too small to let the words pass, and he shut his eyes in pain. His name was Dagmar, he was indeed a witch hunter, and he knew about the troubles in Kurtbad. Gunter had no choice but to offer him the hospitality of his cottage.

DAGMAR LAY IN the strange bed and contemplated the rafters. They were oaken and old. Like strong ribs which held the thatched skin of the roof from collapsing, they met at a huge beam, a great rounded trunk which still bore bark in some places. A crossbow hung from one end of it, he noticed, well oiled and maintained. The other held cooking pots and bundles of roots and spices.
Dagmar shifted in the bed and turned his head to watch the girl who stirred the pot. A whip-crack of pain shot through his ribs when he turned his body to the side, so he contented himself with the briefest of glances and returned to looking at the thatching. Grey sunlight filtered between the straw; it lay across him like gashes.
He had allowed the girl to remove his boots but otherwise he was clad as he had been when he arrived, in ill-fitting witch hunter's clothes. The fight in the forest last night had almost been his last and only the overconfidence of his opponent had saved him. Dagmar waited patiently for the girl to return with the stew she was making and wondered if his luck might be changing.
Anja had to feed the man as he couldn't easily sit up. Gunter had not told her his name, saying that he thought it was better if she didn't know such things. He had gone now, to attend to the horse or get wood or something.
She fed the man patiently, noting that he was most polite. He told her his name in an attempt to learn hers. She learnt that he was called Dagmar and freely named herself. What was the danger in that? From what she knew of witch hunters, they were good folk who hunted monsters throughout the Empire. She had never seen one but Gunter had occasionally mentioned them in one of his many travel stories. If he had come here to catch Gregor's murderer then wasn't that a good thing?
She looked at the man's mud-spattered and blood-stained clothes. Normally she would have undressed him and washed his clothes for him. He was clearly wounded beneath the expensive garb. Gunter had not protested when the man had climbed into his bed fully clothed but Anja had seen his face. She did not want to anger him further. Not now.

I am evil and it is consuming me. There is no place in me but hate. There is no place in me but disease. Do not touch me.

GUNTER CUT WOOD as if each log was the head of an enemy. He saw many faces beneath the wedge as he drove it deeply into the chopping block - goblins, Bretonnians, men who he had slain or almost slain. Most of all, he saw what he imagined was the face of the monster who must have killed Gregor: scaled, with tusks and fangs. The creature's head split with a satisfying snap but there was nothing inside. He lifted his axe for the coup de grace but the face he saw became that of his guest and he held the stroke.
Angry with himself for unworthy and inhospitable thoughts, Gunter reasoned, as he gathered the wood, that the witch hunter had done nothing to earn his enmity. Perhaps he could bring resources to bear on the problem that would enable them to catch the killer. He determined to consult with this Dagmar, after they had all eaten, and returned to the house in a better mood.
What he saw as he came through the low door destroyed his good nature as surely as if a daemon-wizard had banished it to another realm.

ANJA MOPPED DAGMAR'S brow with one of Gunter's kerchiefs and sat by him as he dozed. When Gunter returned with the wood she was cleaning the cut on the man's right arm. The wound was not very deep but had bled a great deal and had ragged edges like a newly ploughed track. She tried to take off his leather glove but he clenched his fist; the pain was obviously too great.
She bathed his arm and wrist but did not ask to take off the glove again. There was clearly something wrong with the arm, which had a bulge in it where hers did not. He had talked of a fight in the forest. Perhaps he had broken a bone then. When Gunter suggested she should return to her mother while the stranger stayed in his house, she shrugged him off. Gunter might be a great soldier but he had no idea how to look after a sick man. When he tried to order her, she responded by reminding him that they had taken no vows and that she only need take orders from her mother until such a time as they did.
Things became more heated and Anja was forced to stop stitching her sling and stand up to face him.
Dagmar got out of bed at this point and made excuses about needing to perform his ablutions.
Anja's pointed comment about the stranger's good manners did nothing to pacify Gunter.

WHEN HE RETURNED, she had gone and Gunter sat by the soup pot. Dagmar could not be sure whether the man or the fire glowed more hotly.
The two men found they could talk easily enough and Dagmar imagined that he might have more in common with this lonely man than he thought.
For his own part, Gunter was surprised to find himself trusting the engaging witch hunter, and rethinking what he knew about their kind. This man, Dagmar, although very knowledgeable about mutant creatures of Chaos, was unlike any witch hunter he had ever heard of.
Dagmar talked with Gunter for several hours, making various suggestions for the defence of the village. He suggested, and this is just one example of his useful ideas, that some mutants have thick, strong necks, and might survive a hanging. Dagmar proposed the building of a pyre, with a stake set into it, so that the criminal, when captured, could be burned.
He also said that the mutant was quite possibly living in the village and promised to hunt the man down. Dagmar asked many keen questions about the habits of the villagers of Kurtbad, and Gunter told him who was reliable and who perhaps was not. Then Gunter took a deep breath and told Dagmar his suspicions.

I am unclean. How can you not smell it on my breath? The rot of my body, the decay of my heart. We are so much the same, and so different.

OTTO FLEISCHER WAS a very fat man. He was not a nice man. If the villagers knew everything there was to know about Otto, instead of just suspecting it, they would never have let him be their butcher, let alone their undertaker. When Otto had buried Gregor he had made no secret that he would not grieve for the man.

ANJA THOUGHT THAT the cottage looked like Gunter had been carousing all night with one of his mercenary friends who occasionally came to Kurtbad, most likely to hide from the law, and not like the place where a sick man had been quartered. There were two empty clay bottles next to the fire and Gunter was snoring loudly. He had obviously slept on the hearthstone and his face was covered with a thin layer of ash which lifted in tiny clouds with each snore. The veins on his cheeks were red like a fox and his moustache curled upward on one side.
Anja looked at this man, her lover, as a farmer might appraise a new-born lamb, and turned as if to compare his visage with Dagmar's. The bed was empty.
Anja put the steaming breakfast she had brought onto the scarred table and walked outside.

DAGMAR EASED THE glove off his right hand and washed both in the stream. The small stream ran down from the Black Mountains beside the road from Hammergrim Pass and beneath the stone bridge at the north of the village. The small graveyard for the people of Kurtbad lay on the top of the opposite bank. The water was like knives of ice but the hand was mostly numb anyway. He stared at it in disgust.
He unbuckled his belt and took off his boots. The touch of the water on his feet was agony but he forced himself to stand, unsteady on the slippery rocks beneath the shallow flow. He watched the dirt and blood billow and mingle with the water, quickly lost in the enthusiastic stream. He imagined a purifying experience.
He heard the girl approaching just in time to get the glove back onto his hand.

OTTO SCUTTLED FROM behind Gregor's gravestone and picked up his sack. He knew what he had seen. He took the long way back to the village.

GUNTER PINCHED THE skin above his eyes, his hand clasping together at the bridge of his sharp nose. He shook the ash from his clothes and, wiping his eyes again, looked around the cottage. Breakfast. No Anja. No Dagmar. He took a knife from the roof beam and began to eat the spiced tomatoes. He tried to remember the conversation of the previous evening. Had he gone so far as to mention Otto's name? That was unworthy.
Gunter had long disliked the butcher and declined to eat his meat, preferring to kill and smoke his own, but he had no evidence that the man was a murderer. What had possessed him to tell a witch hunter? Dagmar had been talking about mutations caused by exposure to Chaos he had had experience with and had mentioned that such a man might become extremely fat but otherwise remain normal. That did fit Otto's description.
Gunter had to admit that the Tilean wine was mostly to blame for the liberties he had taken. It was not fair to his guest, who seemed to be a decent man, to burden him with wild suspicions.
Gunter lurched to his feet like a becalmed ship which suddenly finds the wind, and went off in search of Dagmar.

* * *

ANJA SAT ON a dry rock in the stream and listened intently to Dagmar's story. The man was charming, there was no doubt of that, and appeared to be well recovered, almost impossibly so, from his illness of the previous day. There was colour in his cheeks and his beard seemed to have grown overnight.
Dagmar was standing solemnly on the bank of the stream in mock concentration as he related an apocryphal tale about an acolyte of the Temple of Verena in Nuln. The story was convoluted but Dagmar told it faithfully and well, keeping his face serious until the punch-line, which made them both laugh.
Dagmar bent double, exaggerating his laughter and slipped on the muddy bank. He fell heavily on his right arm and his face screwed up in pain. Anja pounced across onto the bank and helped him to sit. Her face was a flag of concern. A great deal of blood stained the sling she had made and she could see bone sticking through the skin below the elbow. He held her away with his good arm, which was surprisingly strong, like a man shielding himself from the sun.
Eventually she calmed him down and they both sat together on the bank. When she went to put her head on his good shoulder, he let her.

GUNTER STOOD ON the bridge and gouged the moss of the low stone rail with his knuckles. He felt the water flow beneath his feet and felt the blood flow through his body. He made himself breathe the air as he watched them. Gunter remembered how he felt when he saw Anja dance with other men on Taal's Day. He stood there for some time.
When he finally managed to uproot himself from the bridge and make his way down through the trees to the stream he walked noisily, so they might hear him and untwine by the time he reached them. Gunter completely forgot his purpose in seeking Dagmar.
Anja met him as he emerged from the trees, smoothing her dress and pulling leaves from her hair. She matched his gaze and her eyes danced.
Dagmar stared into the stream and cradled his right arm like a babe. Gunter could have sworn he was talking to it.
When Anja had gone, the two men looked at each other for a moment, the kind of moment which might be the prelude to anything. As it was, Gunter suggested that they go together to examine the tracks at the place where Gregor was killed.

OTTO KNOCKED ON the door again. He was sure someone was in there. This was the one time he had ever been desperate enough to call on the help of the militiaman. He was dismayed when the door was opened not by Gunter, but by his harlot.

* * *

DAGMAR STOOD BEHIND Gunter as he crouched over the tracks, pointing at various features which he had indicated with muddy sticks in the turf. They stood like a blighted forest, marking the last steps taken by the man called Gregor.
Gunter was trying to understand how Gregor could have been ambushed by the mutant in such an open area as, apparently, he was always a careful man.
Gunter did not suggest that Gregor might have been very drunk on that night. Perhaps the bottle he had found did not fit the fiction of the man's death which Gunter was trying to write in muddy characters on the killing ground.
Dagmar suggested that perhaps Gregor had been the attacker and the mutant had merely tried to defend himself. Gunter was vehemently opposed to the suggestion.
Dagmar explained to Gunter his own version of the tracks. He moved some of Gunter's markers with his good arm, showing exactly where the mutant had been surprised, where Gregor had picked up a stick, and where the broken halves of the stick now lay, stained with the mutant's blood. He finished by showing where the mutant had finally fought back and where the body had fallen.
Gunter concluded that Gregor must have been drunk to be so foolhardy.

I am trying to tell you. I am amongst you. I am Chaos. Destroy me.

ANJA SAT ON Gunter's bed and stared into the fire. She had heard what the butcher had had to say, heard his testimony about the scaled hand of the witch hunter. She had asked him what business he had had in the graveyard but Otto had pressed his case. The man, apparently, had red-green scales on his right hand below the wrist - a sure mark of Chaos. The fat butcher had pointed out how badly the man's clothes fitted him, how he was clearly not a natural rider of that perfect stallion.
Anja had listened to all of this and she saw that it might be true. She promised Otto she would fetch Gunter, and told him to retire to his cottage and wait for them. Then she sat in the dark and tried to recall the taste of the man's breath, as it had been on the bank of the stream.
She tried to remember the taste of decay, of corruption, but she could remember nothing but the sound of the stream and the look in his eyes.

GUNTER CAME SLOWLY back to the house as the burning galleon of the sun sank behind the Grey Mountains. He thought about what Dagmar had said, how he had shown him a different way of looking at the signs in the mud. How he had forced him to see the truth which had all the time been set before his eyes.
More than ever, Gunter felt he was in a great library, like the one he had seen in Middenheim, where all the knowledge of the world was kept and yet he could not read a word of it. He walked past the waiting pyre and smelt the oil. A small group of Kurtbad residents stood about it, like birds of prey who anticipate a kill. Gunter felt it too and began to trot back to his cottage.
Anja was waiting at the open door for him, a sight which grasped his heart. She brought him inside and after looking to see that he was alone, she closed the door. She told him: I have found the killer.

DAGMAR STOOD ON the slope above the village in the struggling light. He looked at the cottages and their hearth-fires which sent up vines of smoke from holes in the thatch. He imagined the meals being prepared. There would perhaps be children, certainly animals, underfoot. There would be both happiness and unhappiness in those cottages. He hated them, every one. I am hatred.
Except her. He thought of her by the stream. Reflected sunlight splashing her face, cooling her eyes. He thought of the way their faces had touched.
How can you not smell it on my breath?
He shattered the picture with the mallet of his hatred.
How dare she?
Do not touch me.
Doesn't she know what she's done to me?
He pulled off his right glove and shook his arm free of the sling. As he flexed it he felt blood course through it and the cuts at his wrist opened again and bled freely.
There is poison in my blood.
How dare she?
I am a killer.
I am Chaos.
I will show her.
He drew the witch hunter's sword from the witch hunter's belt and strode down the hill, I have changed my mind. I will not die. I will live as I am and I am as I will.

GUNTER SURVEYED THE assembled crowd. Fifteen or so men and boys had gathered in the gloom. Each carried a weapon of some kind, many carried torches which they lit from the coals of Gunter's fire. Anja sat on the bed and said nothing.
Gunter gave his last instructions and the group moved out. Gunter led them. He was the only man with military training and although they felt they knew their quarry, who could tell what strength the curse of Chaos could lend to a man? They were not scared - there were too many of them for that - but there was a thrill which ran through them as they moved closer. They spoke of revenge and justice, though not one was thinking of Gregor.
Gunter gripped his sword and strained his eyes in the dark. He thanked Sigmar that Anja was safe, having come so close to danger. Images of the library returned to him but Gunter no longer needed to read.

ANJA HEARD HIM coming. He was walking loudly and didn't seem to know anything about the mob. She stood behind the door and cancelled her breath while he tried the handle.
Dagmar staggered into the room and she saw that his left hand held a sword. His right hand hung at his side, the fingers moving, almost as if he was not aware of it. It looked as if the first two and second two fingers were in the process of fusing and they did not move independently. Perhaps that was why he no longer wore the glove.
'Dagmar?'
He turned on her like a cornered boar and she saw his face contorted by pain and rage. She brought the iron firestick down on his left hand and the sword bounced off the flagstones.
He moaned, No, growled in pain and sank to the floor. He looked at her. Tears of black blood streamed from his eyes.

GUNTER GAVE THE signal and the mob moved forward. They had trapped the murderer in the house and all that remained was to apprehend him. As far as they knew, he was alone. Hardly surprising. By all accounts, Chaos carried a stench that was enough to make a soldier cry.
Gunter steadied himself and kicked the door with his mercenary's boot. It gave way easily and he almost fell into the room. The sole inhabitant of the cottage leapt up in shock, banging his head on one of the butcher's tools which hung from the central beam. The mob piled in behind Gunter, pressing him forward.
Otto cowered away from them, but some spark of unworthy courage flared and he grabbed a cleaver. He wore no shirt and Gunter stared in disgust at the rolls of fat which hung over his linen breeches. The skin was pasty and white and the whole cottage smelt of dead flesh. Gunter disarmed the man with a chopping stroke to his right wrist. The mob grabbed him and silenced his protests.

ANJA MET THEM at the pyre. She held fresh torches in her hands. She watched without flinching as the unconscious Otto was lashed to the stake. It had been easy enough to convince Gunter. He had seen Otto many times with the blood of pigs on his hands. Such a man could kill. There was little distance between the butcher of Kurtbad and the Butcher of Kurtbad.
Otto was a hateful man and Anja told herself that the village would be better off without him.
Gunter was calling for the matter to be settled and judgement to be passed. The eyes of the crowd, hungry and violent, turned to where she stood, supporting Dagmar with her shoulder. His right arm was back in its sling and the hand was tightly bound with linen bandage.
She nudged him forward. Dagmar stepped into the torchlight. He smelled the oil. He looked at the circle of people, death in their faces. He turned to look at the fat butcher tied to the stake like a grub about to be roasted. He thought of the dead, drunk man, buried by the butcher in the graveyard. He thought of the witch hunter, stiffening beneath a pile of forest leaves. He thought of the militiaman, who surely knew and wondered why he stood there amongst the ignorant, blood-driven rabble.
He thought mostly of Anja, of what she had said to him, of how she had looked at him, of what she must have seen when she did, and of how she had again brought him back to himself. He tried to imagine what might happen after this night was over. Someone was forcing a torch into his left hand.
He spread his damaged fingers apart and held the wood as if in a claw, between thumb and forefinger. He hesitated. He asked the crowd: Why should this man die?
The crowd told him: He is Chaos. Destroy him.
Dagmar's right arm twitched and stretched against the fabric of the sling. Anja touched him gently with her fingers, a reassuring squeeze. The sling tore and scales backhanded her away.
Dagmar leapt onto the pile of oil-slicked logs. He looked at the men and women with their torches and their murderous fear.
We are so much the same, and so different.
The butcher tried to lift his head. Dagmar thrust the torch into the logs and a forest of flames sprang up. Otto screamed and Dagmar howled. He embraced the fat man and locked his claw hands around the back of the stake.
The people of Kurtbad drew back from the thick, fetid smoke and the stench of decay. All except Anja, who stood in the glow of the flames and wept gently, her tears mingling with blood from a cut on her cheek.
Gunter dragged her away, put himself between her and the flames.
Dagmar's body melted like a candle as if the blaze inside him was hotter than the fire of oil and sticks. It took longer for the butcher to die.

I am burning now as I will burn then.

* * *

THOUGH KURTBAD REMAINED a single stitch on the merchant's map it was never the same town. Some believed that they could always smell the stench of the mutant on the common. Chaos had touched them, they said, and that was the reason the crops were poor. The lonely gibbet was demolished and the wood used to make a new sheep pen.
Gunter tried to resign his post but he was forced to stay by the people who said that now they truly understood the gravity of the threat. He tried to learn to read. Anja left the town on the black stallion with the silver hooves, which she was said to have sold for a fair price in the market at Nuln. She never returned to Kurtbad, either with a child or a brand on her arm.