The Witch Hunters, Book 1: The Prophet of Ash

The stables were the closest building, coming in from the road. There were two dead women and one dead man there, along with a great many dead horses. A couple of corpses were outside, a scaled female and a minotaur male. Dead chickens and geese lay scattered in the yard. He passed a dead dog, slumped in the dirt halfway out of its kennel. A dead cat lay further away, in the arms of a small dead girl.

Theo wiped the tears from his eyes, leaned away from the wall, and moved further in. His empty stomach heaved. He wiped the foul tasting bile from his lips. The main house loomed large before him. He circled it slowly. He had no idea what he might encounter but he knew, or had decided that he knew, what had happened already. Eisengrim and Dietrich had told him about their experiences. He had read the tales of past Hunters. He had seen villages burning in the south during his travels. He knew the hand of death at work. He should be ready for this. But he wasn’t. God forgive him, he wasn’t. The fear that held the minotaur kept him silent. He wanted more than anything to forget this place, and his oath. He wanted to run away to the sea and keep on going. He was not ready. How could anyone be ready for this?

A dead man hung limply over a fence. In the dwindling light, Theo spotted several more prone figures out among scattered, empty baskets outside of a wooden shed. Just beyond lay fields of strawberries that stretched beyond the back of the main house and a couple of buildings that looked to be the homes of the workers. The fields would be dead, too, he knew. Whatever Kurt had hoped to harvest from these fields was out there, rotting under the sinking evening sun. He waited for a sound other than the breeze, or his own breathing, but there was nothing. Everything was dead.

The door to the kitchen lay open. When the wind stirred it and made it creak, the minotaur nearly bolted back down the road. He crept along the wall, checking inside the windows, and was glad he had nothing left to throw up. There were clearly children lying dead inside. The door creaked again. Theo paused a second before he entered. There were splinters on the floor. He checked the door. Someone had kicked it in.

“Hello?”

He stopped dead in his tracks as he entered the kitchen. What in the name of all that was holy had possessed him to call out? These bodies looked fresh. What if the thing that had done this was still here? Theo crept further into the kitchen and tried not to think about the two small boys that lay sprawled on the floor. One of them was a human male. He tried not to think about Kurt just then. Aside from the kicked in door, there were no signs of struggle anywhere outside that the Hunter could find. He should not have been surprised by this. It had been part of his training. When these things happened, it always looked like the victims just fell over, or sat down. There would be no marks on the bodies, aside from any caused by when they toppled over. For all intents and purposes, they would look as if their bodies just stopped working. How many people had worked here...had lived here? Theo had no clue, and was grateful just then that it had been a question that had never occurred to him to ask of Kurt. Theo paused for a moment, as he had done outside before when the scale of what had happened finally hit him. He wanted to hear something, needed to have some small sign that there was still life here somewhere. An animal whining, a baby crying, anything at all that might help anchor him here, and not send him running back to Gozer. Good god, was there no one left alive?!

“Hello?!” Theo cried out, stepping out into the hall of the big house. He searched the ground floor, calling out now for anyone to hear him, his voice growing unsteady, stumbling now in his growing horror. He spotted a dead old couple out in the yard from a window in the sitting room. He felt sick as he reeled back into the hall and climbed the stairs. There was an older, greying minotaur in a room upstairs, lying face down amid piles of coins. Nothing appeared touched. Nothing seemed out of place, or obviously missing. What had happened here? Why had this happened? Theo stumbled back into the hallway, leaned against the rail to the stairs, and started screaming. He screamed until he could not breathe, and lost the power of his legs. He screamed even as he sat down on the floor, leaning back against the wall and covering his face with his hands. He screamed over the pounding of his heart, until he became dizzy. This was a nightmare. It had to be. There was no way this hell could be real. He had not believed in it, even as he had been taught it. How could he? This was insanity. He screamed again, hugging his knees to his chest, but there were still dead children in the kitchen, dead bodies around a shed, and a field of dead strawberries beyond them both.

When he couldn’t scream any longer, and the tears stopped coming, Theo found himself sitting quietly in the hallway. Nothing had changed. Help, if it was coming, was hours away. He could not help these people. They were dead. Someone had done this. Someone knew why these people had all been so callously massacred. Theo dragged himself to his feet, eventually. He did not know the who, or the why, but even if it cost him his life, he swore that he would find the answers to these questions, and make those responsible pay.

Theo returned to the room with the dead bull. He closed his eyes, breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, counting to four as Dietrich had taught him between each inhalation and exhalation. He had to keep calm. He was first here, so he had to begin investigating. There was a body here, and it was surrounded by a small fortune, untouched. That ruled out robbery. But why had the kitchen door been kicked in, then? Theo took a pencil from the desk, and some sheets of paper from the room with the body. He needed to make notes. Yes, that was what Dietrich taught him when it came to these things. He would have to make a report about this. He needed to take lots of notes. It would help.

Money left untouched. Theo looked down at the body. He took a separate page, and made a mark on it.

Downstairs now. Two marks to represent the boys.

Kitchen door forced from outside. The table was covered in half eaten cake and empty bottles. Theo made a note of this. He went outside, started marking the bodies, then paused. The ground here was dirt, and it hadn’t rained last night. There were markings everywhere, indicating the tread of dozens of people. He had not the first clue how to read these things, but Gerda would, or possibly Klara’s savage apprentice. Might Eisengrim, or Dietrich? Theo had no idea and cursed aloud. Hopefully someone who knew how to track was on their way to him. Theo moved on. He had a lot to do, and time and the light were against him.

First things first, he needed to count the bodies. This required him to venture into each building, and patrol the area surrounding them. Nothing was locked, fortunately. Aside from the kitchen door in the main house, there were no signs of struggle or disruption anywhere. Theo walked briskly along, quietly disturbed at how calm he had become as he counted off corpses. There were at least eighteen outside of the buildings, including seven around the nearby shed, as well as the three from the main house, and three in the stables. There were the buildings where the fruits were processed to check, as well as the warehouses, and several more wooden structures beyond the farm proper. These, Theo assumed, were the farmhands' homes, and he had yet to explore them.

It only now occurred to Theo just how big a place this was, and the scale of the operation Kurt and his family had run. That thought made the minotaur pause, and wait for a few minutes to recover his composure, as he sat beside a well that had been dug near the stables. He wanted to fill his tobacco pipe and have a smoke to steady his nerves, but somehow the notion seemed disrespectful, so he stopped himself. Beyond the warehouse and a barn there rose a solid looking wooden block house lined with windows, with laundry hanging out of them to dry. That was where the workers stayed, of that the bull had no doubt. There would be mothers in there, and there would be children much younger than the ones he had encountered sprawled in the kitchen, or out in the yard. Theo looked about the dead farm. The lack of any noise other than those made by the wind and himself was beginning to greatly unnerve him. He did not want to go into that building. What would be the point? There would only be more bodies, more death. Theo felt numb now, but he knew that feeling would not last forever. Part of him was aware that everything he saw today would follow him like a shadow for the rest of his life. The sights of this charnel house, and the growing smells too, would haunt his waking thoughts, and his dreams. Why should he subject himself to that, just to look at and count more corpses?

Because there still might yet be someone there I can help.

Theo stood up and forced his shaking hands into fists. This was his case, his responsibility. Reluctantly, he made his way towards the outer buildings of the farm.

It was dusk by the time Theo found himself headed back towards the large, mostly empty house. The minotaur guessed he might have half an hour of useable light left before he'd need to light a torch, or lantern. He didn't know when moonrise would be, or if there would be enough moon out tonight to see by. Janus would probably know. Or Gerda. He could hear his footsteps, but not feel them. The page he had used to make a count of the bodies was folded and in his pocket. At some point, after he had been forced to use the other side of the page, the bull had stopped counting. He had gone from room to room, then from the block to the warehouse, to processing building, closing the eyes of anyone he found. Their staring had begun to grate on his nerves, like so much else here. It was strange, how it was now the little things, and not the fact that he walked amid a dead settlement, which Theo found were getting to him.

He walked past the house, back down the road to collect his horse. There was a paddock where it could rest and eat, since the stable was out of the question for the moment. The beast must have been hungry, or perhaps the evil atmosphere that had scared it earlier had dissipated, for it made no protest when it was untied and brought into the environs of the farm. Did that mean the birds would be coming back? This thought brought another awful reality to the Hunter’s mind. There were many people lying out in the elements. The smell was already starting. Soon it might attract carrion eaters. There were reports of wolves in these woods, and there were always crows. These people did not deserve what might come tonight, if whatever had kept animals away was vanishing. Theo led his horse to the paddock, and then walked towards the darkening silhouettes that made up the farm. The warehouse had a heavy door, and a padlock on a desk inside with a key.

He gathered the dead in around the shed first. He closed the eyes of each of the cold, limp people before scooping them up and carrying them into the warehouse. Theo cleared the yard next. He placed the old couple side by side in the dark space of the warehouse. He cleared the stable of bodies next. He did not like the idea of the bodies being among so much shit, for there would flies aplenty soon enough. Wherever he could, the minotaur lay those whom he thought were family together. He did not return to the other outer buildings. They were secure from scavengers for the night. That just left the house.

The minotaur in the office upstairs was old enough to be his grandfather, with geometric tattoos along his right arm that suggested a clan affiliation the Hunter was too young to recognise. Theo found a sheet from a linen closet to wrap the elder carefully in. It was not easy carrying the old fellow downstairs, or across the yard into the warehouse where his friends were all waiting for him. Theo could not get the thought of his grandparents out of his head. It had been so long since he had seen them, or his mother. He had not written to them in months, embarrassed to tell them of the turn his life had taken. What were they doing now? Were they safe? What would they think of him if they saw him now, among so many dead? Theo set the elder down near the door and returned to the house. He wrapped the scaled boy up next, choosing another sheet from the linen closet. He paused at the human child and thought of Kurt then. Theo knew that others would be coming soon. Eisengrim, or Klara, or maybe even Dietrich would be here soon. If he asked, he knew they would break the news to Kurt for him. It was a thought Theo was not ready to dwell on just then. He wrapped the boy up, took him and his friend to the warehouse, where he shut the doors and locked them.

There was steam in his breath as he walked back to the house. When had it become night? Theo shivered and wondered if it was the cold, or this place that had caused it. He lit his pipe before he went inside the tenebrous, creaking building. The dim light from it allowed him to find some fresh candles. He closed and barricaded the kitchen door as best he could in the weak light, before moving to the sitting room and setting a fire. There was alcohol in the house. Theo made some coffee. He did not dare try eating anything, not yet. The chairs in here were human sized, so he sat down on the floor by the fire. He was tired, but doubted he would sleep tonight, if he ever did again. Others would be coming soon, he was sure of it. Until then, needing something to distract him, Theo took out the notes he made during the evening, and began reading.