Wolf's Cross - By S. A. Swann
PART ONE
Anno Domini 1353
I
Brother Josef had thought he had seen Hell itself. He had seen it in the black swellings that plagued his father and mother, sisters and brother. He had seen it in the doctors who fled at the sight of him coming from an infected house. He had seen it in the faces of those who still dared walk the streets of Nürnberg, carrying smoldering bundles of aromatic herbs to chase the infection away, or at least mask the omnipresent smell of death. He had seen it in the piles of bodies left to rot for lack of men to bury them. And he had seen it in the blackened face of a woman he loved, abandoned to die alone in her family’s house.
However, upon joining the Order, he had learned that Hell took many forms.
It was the will of God, and his superiors, that he serve his probation under the command of Komtur Heinrich, who headed a convent of warrior monks within the still barely tamed wilds of Prussia. Komtur Heinrich held a peculiar place in the Order, and his men bore a name within the Order that Josef had not heard before: Wolfjägers.
Even the device they bore had a difference from that of the wider Order: a severed wolf’s head occupied the upper left quadrant of the Teutonic Knights’ black cross.
The weapons borne by the Wolfjägers were different in character, as well. The smaller items, daggers and arrowheads, were cast of pure silver. Swords and axes were of more typical steel, but with edges clad in silver.
It was not his place to question his role, and it was not until he saw the first signs of what the wolf hunters actually hunted that he understood.
He knew that their foe was some sort of demon, but he was worldly enough to expect that the “demons” they sought would resemble men. In the depths of his self-doubt, he feared they might resemble Jews. He knew that Jews were not responsible for the pestilence that had scoured the land. During the worst of it, the synagogue at Nürnberg had stood as empty of life as the cathedrals.
But that hadn’t stopped riots in the countryside, as panicked villagers burned Jews like the city folk burned incense, in a pathetic attempt to keep the death at bay. Even decrees by Pope Clement VI hadn’t been able to halt the slaughter.
Josef didn’t believe that the men of the Order, devoted to Christ and the pope, would be so readily deceived. But when Heinrich talked of demons who walked like men, it so much resembled the rhetoric Josef had heard during the worst of the death that he wondered—and chided himself for the doubts. His faith had led him to this point, and he did not believe his service to God would be so subverted.
Soon enough, God and his Komtur saw fit to give him evidence of the demons the Wolfjägers hunted, and they were not men—Christian or Jew.
He was unprepared when Komtur Heinrich stopped them outside an unnamed village whose fields had gone wild and unharvested. At first, Josef thought they had come across an outbreak of the pestilence finding a northern foothold. But Heinrich announced, “For those of you new to this service, observe well what we find here. We are close on the trail of the demon.”
They rode forward in silence, and unlike the plague villages Josef had seen when he had finally departed his family’s estate at Nürnberg, the first bodies he saw were those of animals. The corpses of sheep and oxen dotted an overgrown field, their bodies black with flies. Despite the decay, Josef could tell that the beasts had died by violence, not from illness. Parts of the corpses were scattered, so that an accurate census of the dead wasn’t possible.
They stopped at a house with a splintered door. Blood splattered the threshold as if in mockery of the angel of death. Inside was chaos—blood, fragments of furniture, and a broken scythe whose blade was spotted with gore and tufts of blond fur.
There were no bodies.
“It has been here,” Komtur Heinrich said, drawing attention to bloody prints in the dirt floor of the cottage, where the weather had not washed the marks away.
Pressed into the gore was the pawprint of a wolf, but a wolf that would have to be the most monstrous animal Josef had ever heard of. The gauntleted hand of a large man could barely spread wide enough to cover it.
“What manner of wolf made these prints?” Josef asked.
“Wolfbreed,” Heinrich answered. “The spawn of Hell itself. The beast has the aspect of a wolf, but stands—and thinks—as a man. It can cloak itself in human skin as it wishes, and it will ignore all wounds but the instantly mortal from all but a silver weapon.” Heinrich lifted the scythe and turned to Josef, and for a moment, in the darkness, he had the aspect of the angel of death himself. “This was a futile weapon, useless unless it took off the head of the beast with the first stroke.”
“But where are the bodies?” Josef asked, afraid of the answer.
He had his unwelcome answer at the village’s church.
At first, as they approached the small building, Josef thought that the window ledges, the roof, and the cross set in front had all been draped black in mourning. It wasn’t until they got closer that he saw that the black moved.
Every horizontal and near-horizontal surface in the area was covered with crows. The evil birds stood so closely packed that Josef’s eyes couldn’t distinguish one from another. They became a single black mass with ten thousand heads and ten thousand beaks. As one, the mass turned its eyes toward the approaching knights.
Then, as if by some demonic signal, they lifted as one, with a deafening screech and a thunderous pounding of wings against the sky. For an instant, the sun went black. Then the hellish cloud dispersed, leaving the men to view the feast that had drawn the birds here.
All the bodies had been thrown into the church, before the altar. Although the carrion birds had left little of the villagers but bone and sinew, the stench in the church was as bad as anything Josef had endured at Nürnberg. Given the state in which nature had left the bodies, the scene could have been the remnants of another plague village—a particularly gruesome one.
If it wasn’t for the drag marks.
The corpses had been killed elsewhere and methodically dumped in front of the altar. Perhaps most disturbing was the small painting of the Madonna and the Christ Child, where the faces had been clawed away.
Josef knew then that they did face a demon.
They followed the demon for three days, through the Prussian wilderness. Josef thanked God that they didn’t run into another spectacular atrocity, but that in itself was troubling. It meant that their foe—this wolfbreed—didn’t act randomly or in haste. It had planned the death of that village, and had methodically carried out that plan.
And, as they followed its trail, Josef was disturbed by the thought that the trail they followed was younger than the scene of carnage at the village, as if what they hunted had waited for them to catch up.
Even so, their tracking wasn’t perfect, and right now they stood in the woods, waiting to decide on the direction of their hunt.
The woods are dark here, Josef thought.
He sat astride a horse with the other probationary brothers of the Order—a line of ten men with incomplete crosses on their tabards. Ahead of them, dismounted, stood three of the knights with Komtur Heinrich, holding a low discussion about their course.
The tracks they followed had led down a path in the woods that was now little more than a game trail. The woods here were not dense, and their horses could navigate through the trees, but it had reached the point where their movement was restricted. Just turning his mount around would be an ordeal, weaving past trunks and over deadfalls, and the whole party had slowed to no faster than a man could walk.
Now they had stopped.
Above them, the sun had nearly left the sky, and the trees had already wrapped them in twilit darkness.
Where are we? Josef thought, unwilling to voice the question in the unnatural silence. Around them, the woods were as quiet as a sepulchre waiting for a corpse. The only sounds were the low voices near Komtur Heinrich and the muffled scrape of horses’ hooves against the dead leaves covering the forest floor. While they waited for word from Heinrich, Josef held a loaded crossbow in front of him. It had been close to half an hour since they had stopped, and his arms were fatigued from the weight in his hands.
After everything, have we actually lost its trail?
Even as a neophyte to the Wolfjägers of the Order, he had seen enough of what they hunted to question that such a trail could be easily lost.
The creature they hunted cared little for stealth or subtlety. Its path was marked with scraps of blood, hair, and bone. Its evil was written in the corpses of man and beast alike. It had not made itself difficult to follow.
We haven’t lost it, he thought.
We aren’t following it.
It’s leading us.
Josef looked back and forth, but the woods around them had become impenetrable with the evening shadows. He called out, “Brother Heinrich!”
His mount pinned its ears back and let out a cry of pure terror. Suddenly all the hoses were spooking, and Josef’s mount reared up. With both hands on his crossbow, Josef couldn’t grab the reins or the saddle to keep himself and the crossbow from tumbling backward. Before he fell, his horse whipped its head to the side, showing a foaming mouth and one huge eye, white with terror.
Josef slammed into the ground, momentarily stunned. He heard a growl that seemed to come from everywhere at once, and he realized, It’s here.
He fumbled for his fallen crossbow as, off to his right, he heard a man scream. Around him, the knights gained control of their horses, doing their best to turn outward in the confined space. Josef’s own horse was lost past Heinrich on the narrow game trail.
On Heinrich’s face was a look of surprise that even his normally stony expression could not hide. He hadn’t expected the thing to attack.
Josef found his crossbow and brought it up to face the greatest sound of chaos, but one of his brothers’ mounts was in the way. He saw the hint of something large moving impossibly fast; then the rider in front of Josef tumbled off his mount to fall at Josef’s feet, a large part of his throat gone.
The horse reared at something, and that something howled—a hellish noise followed by a ripping sound that left the horse collapsing to its knees. Josef backed up, looking for a target as the horse fell dead in a pool of spreading gore.
It had moved behind him. Josef spun around at the sound of growling in time to have the body of another rider slam down on top of him. Josef fell under his groaning comrade and screamed at the heavens, “Where is it? Where is it?”
He rolled out from under his brother and came face-to-face with the answer.
A head taller than any of Heinrich’s men, it bore a head twice the size any wolf’s had a right to be. Its muscles rippled under gore-stained blond fur, and it stood on legs crooked like a wolf’s. But it had hands—demonic clawed hands that flexed and reached for Josef as it leapt at him.
With a brief plea to God, he brought the crossbow to bear on the approaching monster. He exhaled and took the extra second to aim, even though every muscle in his body screamed at him to fire now!
He pulled the trigger after aiming square at one of the creature’s glaring blue eyes, knowing he only had the one chance to save himself and his comrades. A bolt though the brain would finish this thing once and for all.
But nothing happened.
He only had a fraction of a second to realize that the bowstring had snapped in the fall from his horse. The bolt rested against the block, inert and useless.
Then the monster was on him, slamming him to the ground, tearing at his armor. The weight of it slammed into his lower body, pressing down on his legs as it buried its muzzle in his stomach. He screamed as if the beast had already torn into his entrails, even though a part of his brain knew that it was still tearing through his mail and the padding underneath.
That cleared his head of panic for a moment. He had to find a weapon, an attack, anything. He whipped his head around, looking at a world blurred by pain and tears. Praying to God for—
The crossbow bolt.
The dead crossbow had fallen next to him, the unfired silver-tipped bolt still nocked. He reached a gauntleted hand toward it as the monster found his flesh under the mail, and Josef screamed as he felt its teeth sink into skin and muscle. Every fiber of his being tried to pull away, his body ripping itself away from the insult as the creature lifted him, raising him partway off the ground. The beast’s muzzle wrinkled as blood flowed, darkening its fur. Even through the pain, Josef felt the heat of its fetid breath against his skin.
I am dead, Josef thought in a moment of pain-sharpened lucidity. The burst of calm must have been divine in nature—the same grace that allowed the saints to face their own martyrdom.
It was with that sudden clarity that he grabbed the crossbow bolt, brought it up, and jammed the point into the creature’s left eye with all the force he could muster.
The beast howled, letting loose its grip on his stomach. Josef fell back into the mud, feeling his life spilling out of the hole in his belly. Before he lost his grip on the world, he saw the monster retreat, the bolt sticking awkwardly out of its face.
Josef lost consciousness praying he had finished the beast.