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spending
another night in the town unsettled him deeply.
     
    Erich Karlsen had also heard the rumours about the Corpse
Taker. He, however, was less taken in by the idea that the phantom bodysnatcher
was a practitioner of the black arts.
    “There are all manner of physicians and surgeons working
within a town this size,” he said one evening as Dieter found himself treating
Erich to another flagon at the Cutpurse’s Hands. “And they’re not all licensed
by the guild, mark my words. Progressive thinkers or dangerous madmen, they all
need to get the bodies they use in their studies from somewhere. And there are
plenty desperate and immoral enough to do their dirty work for them, exhuming
corpses from their graves for a small fee.”
    Erich took another swig from his tankard and fixed Dieter
with a knowing look. “Not everything untoward that happens in this world is down
to dark magic. There is evil enough in the hearts of men without the need for
necromancers and daemons as well.”
    As the days of their mutual confinement in the garret
quarters had passed, Dieter found himself warming towards the slovenly,
rebellious Erich. There was something secretly charismatic about the unruly
apprentice physician. And for his part, Erich seemed to enjoy having someone as
young and naive, and as easily impressed or shocked, as Dieter. New to the
uncaring life of a busy market town and still for the most part innocent to the
ways of the world, Erich could regale Dieter with his stories of an exuberantly
youthful excess in a town that had almost anything a rebellious young man could
want on offer. Erich also had a captive audience when he wanted to espouse on
what he thought was wrong with the world or rather, the physicians’ guild, or
the guild of fossils as he preferred to call it. It soon became apparent to
Dieter that the reason why Erich could not afford to live anywhere better was
because he had found other things to spend his allowance on. He had frittered it
away on the good life, wild carousing rather than comfortable accommodation.
    Their lodgings were in a street off the Eisen Bahn, in one of
the poorer parts of the city, but it was the only place Dieter, or Erich, could
afford to live. There were three other people sharing the crumbling tenement
with them. Frau Keeler, their harridan of a landlady, lived on the ground floor
of the building. She had told Dieter that the rooms on the first floor were let
to a noted playwright and actor, one Franz Liebervitz. In truth Liebervitz was a
weirdroot user with a fondness for seducing the latest young starlet to try to
find fame in the theatre. The second floor apartments were used on an occasional
basis by one of the town’s most highly regarded merchants, who Frau Keeler
assured Dieter she was too discreet to name, for his cousin to stay during her
frequent visits to Bögenhafen from the Imperial Court in Nuln. That left only
the rooms on the third floor, really nothing more than the spartanly decorated
attic of the crumbling lodging house, where Dieter and Erich resided in their
thinly partitioned rooms. All of the apartments could be accessed from a rickety
wooden staircase that ran up the entire height of the building, from a front
door that opened directly onto the stinking refuse channel street of Dunst
Strasse.
     
    So this was what life in Bögenhafen was like, Dieter
considered as he tried to get to sleep that night, in an uncomfortable bed in
draughty lodgings, in a town full of people who seemed either not to like him
without even having to meet him—apart from Leopold and Erich—and with a body
snatcher, or possibly worse, on the loose. Dieter could not help feeling a
little disappointment. His dream was not quite all he hoped it would be in
reality.
    But at least he was finding his feet at the physicians’ guild
now. Nothing could truly quash his enthusiasm for the path he had set himself
upon, and that was all that truly