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away in the dawn light.
    The natives of Blutroch tell another and darker tale of how Ingrid Hauptman and Gunter, the innkeeper's son were slain in some horrible sacrifice to the Dark Powers. The road war dens who found the corpses up by the Darkstone Ring agreed it must have been a terrible rite. The bodies looked as if they had been chopped up with an axe.
     

THE REAVERS AND THE DEAD
     
    by Charles Davidson
     
    Helmut Kerzer realized that he was going to die when he saw the ship. He'd seen the sail long before the ship itself was visible, but somehow it had lacked immediacy; it was an abstract warning, not the reality itself. Here be reavers . But now the ship itself was visible, a dark hull slicing through the waves less t han a mile offshore. The day's catch was still in the nets of the fishing boats, and the village was five scant minutes inland, and Helmut felt his guts turn to water as he saw what was about to happen.
    The worst element of the situation was the most obvious. Helmut couldn't cover the short distance to the village to warn them, couldn't sound the alarm, and buy time to disperse the young and the ancient into the forest. Because - he gritted his teeth - if he did warn them they would only ask what he had been doing up on Wreckers' Point. And when they found out they would kill him.
    Necromancy was almost as unpopular as piracy in these parts.
    Not that Helmut was anything like a full-blown corpse raiser - oh no. He grinned humourlessly at the thought, as he watched the black sail of the pirates draw closer. Dead mice and bats! It was the unhealthy hobby of a youth who would have better spent his time mending nets, not the studied malevolence of a follower of dark knowledge. He looked down and saw, between his feet, the little contraption of skin and ivory that paraded there. The creature had died days ago; it seemed so unfair that it might cost Helmut his home or his life. His cheek twitched in annoyance and the vole fell over, slack and lifeless as any other corpse.
    Death. Here on the edge of the Sea of Claws they knew about death. It stared his father in the face every time he put out to sea to snare a living by the whim of Manann; it had taken his grandfather and uncles in a single gulp, to cough them up again, bloated and putrid on the beach three days later. He'd been a child at the time, too young for the nets and ropes; he'd hidden behind his mother's skirts as she, and his father, stood stony-faced in the graveyard when they laid three-quarters of the family's menfolk in the ground. It had been then that he'd wondered, for the first time: what if death was like sleep? What if it was possible to return from it, as if awakening to another grey, sea-spumed dawn? But he already knew that they had a word for such thoughts, and he stayed silent.
    Wreckers' Point was thickly wooded; shrouded by a dense tangle of trees and dark undergrowth that stretched south towards the great forest. It was a place of ill omen. In times gone by the wreckers had worked here, lighting beacons to guide rich traders onto the rocks of the headland. They were long departed, hounded by the Baron and his men of yesteryear, but the spirit remained; a tight-minded malaise that seemed to turn the day into a washout of greyness, waiting for the night and the lighting of deadly fires. Rumour had it nowadays that the hill was haunted - and the worse for any child who might wander up there.
    Helmut gritted his teeth in frustration as he thought about it. His dilemma. That Father Wolfgang might wonder what he'd be doing, and summon the witchfinder. That some lad might follow him, to see what he did alone and unseen in the undergrowth. That if such a thing happened he might never learn... Fingernails dug into his palms. The anger of denial.
    The ship was plainly visible now, rounding the headland and turning towards the beach where the boats lay. Any advantage had been squandered by the beating of his heart. Suddenly he realized