Chapter 12
Otto
Otto’s strategies to stop himself from thinking don’t always work.
Take, for instance, what happened when the necromancer brought that peasant they found in the woods back to life.
For all that Otto has done his best to banish the memory of that wretch telling them about the two women whom he gave the skull to, he fears that it will haunt him for as long as the necromancer sees it fit for him to walk this earth.
Yet sometimes, in moments that must be blessed by the Almighty, proving that Otto is not forsaken entirely, his mind will simply stop working of its own accord. Afterward, he will remember only snippets. Their time in a deserted little town the necromancer’s bones have led them to is such a moment.
The snippets Otto remembers are thus:
Standing in the graveyard littered with the dead, going from body to body to find a fresh one to resurrect so they can ask whether the women with the skull came through.
Settling on a dead child ripe with rot, though luckily not so rotted that he must pull body parts from other corpses and sew them together to create something capable of speech.
Her screams, not high-pitched as you’d expect from a child, but low and guttural, and the necromancer frowning and saying, “I hate it when they do that.”
A walking corpse interrupting them, babbling things that almost make sense but never quite, though perhaps they might, if only Otto can keep listening for a little while longer…
When it unhooks its lower jaw and Otto sees inside its gray mouth full of teeth, he is shocked into alertness.
“A Nachzehrer!” the necromancer says and claps his long pale hands together in delight. “Oh, but it’s been a while since I have seen one of those. No wonder our skull thieves have fled from here. Go and kill it, Otto; there’s a dear. You remember how to do that, don’t you? From the farmhand?”
Otto does. He draws his Katzbalger and circles the revenant, whose milky eyes follow his every move.
“In the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, I beg of you: Please stop whatever you are doing and let me go,” it babbles, the words all slurred because its lower jaw is dangling like a piece of meat from a butcher’s hook, but Otto has never shown mercy before, and even if he was inclined to do so now, the necromancer’s command forbids it.
The Nachzehrer lunges, its rotting tongue lolling. Otto easily sidesteps, then cuts off one of the monster’s hands. It flops to the ground. Black blood oozes from the stump.
Again, the Nachzehrer tries to grab Otto; again, he lops off a hand.
“I am growing bored,” the necromancer says, his spidery fingers toying with the little bones he uses for tracking. “Finish this, please.”
The next time the Nachzehrer charges, Otto shears through its neck with his sword. The head lands with a thud, the lower jaw still unjointed, the flesh around it folded and draped. The Nachzehrer stumbles around for a few more heartbeats before it collapses and falls still.
Next, the necromancer makes Otto gather all the bodies on a great heap to burn them.
He drenches them with lamp oil, then tucks bits of paper and wood chips into their mouths and pockets, anything that will burn, really, though once a body has caught fire, the fat will make it burn well and long.
In that way, human bodies are like candles.
The smell when Otto sets them on fire is familiar to him: half rot, half sweet meat cooking. There is no comfort in this familiarity.
The necromancer’s yellow goat eyes glow as bright as the flames in the dark.
They are such a horror to look at. Otto thought he might get used to them as time wore on, but they still sicken and frighten him just as much as when he saw them for the first time.
How wonderful it would be to work his thumbs into the necromancer’s sockets and pop out those unnatural eyes like grapes!
Or he could puncture them with a needle, the same he was forced to use to sew that dead peasant back together, and watch in grim satisfaction as yellowish fluid drips down the necromancer’s cheek like yolk.
Alternatively, he could burn out the necromancer’s eyes, leaving nothing but shriveled tissue behind.
Tearing, stabbing, burning; there are many ways to blind a man.
Only Otto can’t carry out any of them, of course, because he cannot hurt this witch, and even if he could, it would be unwise; the necromancer may have killed him, but he is now also Otto’s only hope of getting his life back. He’ll never find the saint’s skull on his own.
Still, he can’t help but think that, if only it wasn’t for the necromancer, he could have spent this night making love to his sweet Frieda, and afterward eat the bread she bakes for him and admire the look of the golden necklace he stole for her around her throat instead of torching a pile of corpses.
Though if that’s what it takes for him to be able to go back to her, he’ll do it, just as he spent the past years marching for days in the pissing rain, cleaning muskets, digging trenches, and suffering all the other drudgery of life as a lowly soldier in order to pay for her upkeep.
Otto stares at his gore-smeared hands. His skin has torn along the folds of his palms, and the seven nails that remain have turned this disgusting brown color.
These hands are fit for nothing but killing, and soon not even that.
It’s as if all the murdering and maiming he has done no longer merely stain his soul but can now be read on his skin, too. It makes him feel used and unclean.
“That’s how that farmer’s daughter felt, you know. Sore and soiled, used and abused,” the necromancer says without looking away from the heap of burning corpses.
If that’s true, it’s not to be wondered at that she cried so. But instead of drying her tears and telling her that all things, both good and bad, will pass, Otto had no compassion for her, no kindness, only annoyance and anger.
Violence upon violence upon violence.
And for the first time in twenty years, Otto is fiercely tired of it. Softly, he begins to weep, yet all that drips from his eyes is a single tear, dark and foul.