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justice is to put the accused through one of
their barbaric ordeals. They extract confessions, false or otherwise, by
torture, many of those they abuse in this way succumbing before ever facing the
ultimate punishment the witch hunters have proscribed for them—much to the
villains’ disappointment and chagrin.
    There are few who escape the prying suspicious intentions of
witch hunters, not even others of their accursed kind. They are dangerous
individuals whose merest word can stir up mass hysteria among a town’s populace
and encourage a mob mentality that results in rioting and causing an otherwise
peaceful crowd to bay for blood. Anyone who is slightly different can end up
dead—strung up from the gallows or burnt at the stake—killed by people’s
fear of what they don’t understand.
    I hate them all with a burning black passion—this I do not
seek forgiveness for—and none more so than that daemon Ernst Krieger.
     
    The rest of the month of Nachexen passed in a whirl of
excitement for the newly inducted apprentice of Bögenhafen’s physicians’ guild.
Despite the promising signs that had appeared earlier in the month that spring
was coming, now it seemed that winter showed no sign of releasing the town from
its icy grip. In fact the weather seemed to worsen and the temperature dropped
again as the days and weeks passed, to the point where on the twenty-first day
it seemed that the relentless River Bögen itself might freeze and bring the
barge traffic on the river to a standstill. Despite this fact, there still
seemed to be a fair number of barges passing through the town bearing cargoes
from as far away as Talabheim and the port of Marienburg.
    But the cold weather did nothing to deter the increasingly
enthusiastic Dieter Heydrich from his studies. As each day passed, he began to
feel that he had truly found his calling in life, his vocation. Indeed his
passion for his subject blazed so strongly within him that he barely noticed the
cold of the attic room he shared with fellow student Erich Karlsen, a damp cold
that seeped through his robes and even the blankets on his bed, as if his
enthusiasm warmed him and kept the cold at bay at this dead time of the year.
    For Dieter, Nachexen passed with daily attendances at the
physicians’ guild listening to lectures given by the Guild Master Professor
Theodrus and other senior members. Much time was also spent preparing the
ointments, solutions, syrups, unguents and powdered remedies used by the
physicians when practising medicine.
    To begin with, Dieter was put to work preparing those
medicines required by the respected sage Doktor Hirsch, who counted members of
the noble merchant families of the town amongst his patients.
    But then on the morning of Backertag the following week,
after only five days’ service to Doktor Hirsch, Dieter received a summons to the
chambers of Professor Theodrus himself.
    “You show promise, Heydrich. You appear to have an almost
intuitive understanding of the human body and its humours,” the professor told
him at their meeting.
    And that was that. Dieter was now apprentice to the head of
the guild himself.
    When he wasn’t attending to those duties he now fulfilled for
Professor Theodrus, Dieter spent as much time in the library as he could. The
keeper of the books, one Kubas Praza, quietly boasted that the Bögenhafen
physicians’ guild’s library rivalled that of the guild house in Altdorf and
contained some rare texts that could not even be found in the Shallyan temple in
the city of Couronne over the Grey Mountains in the land of Bretonnia, the
centre of the Cult of Mercy.
    Erich continued to attend to his duties at the guild
haphazardly and once it became common knowledge that Dieter was his roommate,
the errant apprentice’s mentor—or rather overseer—Doktor Panceus stopped
Dieter in the corridors of the guild house on more than one occasion to berate
Erich and put the onus on Dieter to