A Choice of Hatreds by C. L. Werner

A Choice of Hatreds by C. L. Werner

Author:C. L. Werner [Werner, C. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-16T00:29:08+00:00


Gerhardt Knauf paced nervously across his bedchamber. It had been nearly an hour and still he had had no word from Mueller.

Not for the first time, the merchant cast his eyes toward the small door at the top of the stairs. The tiny room within was the domain of Knauf’s secret vice, the storehouse of all the forbidden and arcane knowledge Knauf had obtained over the years: the grimoire of a centuries-dead Bretonnian witch; the abhorred Ninth Canticle of Tzeentch, its mad author’s name lost to the ages; a book of incantations designed to bring prosperity, or alternately ruin, by the infamous sorcerer Verlag Duhring. All the black secrets that had given Knauf his power made him better than the ignorant masses that surrounded him, who sneered at his eccentric ways. Before the black arts at his command, brutish men like Mueller were nothing; witch hunters were nothing.

Knauf took another drink from the bottle of wine he had removed from his cellar. The sound of someone pounding on the door of his villa caused the merchant to set his drink down. “Finally,” he thought.

But the figure that greeted Knauf when he gazed down from his window was not that of Mueller. Instead he saw the scarlet and black garbed form of the mercenary’s victim. With a horrified gasp, Knauf withdrew from the window.

“He has come for me,” the merchant shuddered. Mueller and his men had failed and now there was no one to stand between Knauf and the determined witch hunter. Knauf shrieked as he heard a loud explosion from below and the splintering of wood as the door was kicked open. He had only moments in which to save himself from the witch hunter’s justice, to avoid the flames that were the price of the knowledge he had sought.

A smile appeared on Knauf’s face. The merchant raced for the garret room. If there was no one who would save him from the witch hunter, there was something that might:



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