The Witch Hunter Chronicles 3 Read online

  About the Book

  Fire and brimstone. Hell on earth. Flames will not stop the Hexenjäger.

  It is said that the Codex Gigas contains a spell for summoning the Prince of Darkness. So when the medieval bible is stolen by demonic soldiers known as the Sons of Cain, Jakob and his companions form an alliance with an order of English witch hunters and race to London to prevent a horrific prophecy from being fulfilled. Whether battling his way into the gaols of Rotterdam or crossing blades with the Sons of Cain during the Great Fire of London, this will be Jakob’s most perilous mission yet.

  A nightmarish prison, a charismatic prince, a graveyard of unspeakable horrors, a race to the death . . . Strap on your swords for one hell of a ride.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title

  Dedication

  Maps

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Historical Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Book One – The Scourge of Jericho

  Book Two – The Army of the Undead

  Copyright Notice

  More at Random House Australia

  To Belinda, for everything

  Standing knee-deep in water in the flooded medieval dungeon, I raise my pistol to my lips, kiss its polished barrel and pray hastily that our ambush works. I lean out of the cell, take aim down the tunnel and fire at the closest of the unsuspecting Dutch soldiers. He staggers back, holding his blasted chest.

  My signal given, six English soldiers spring out of the adjacent cells that line the tunnel, level their muskets and pistols at the Dutchmen and blast away. Before the powdered flashes from our firearms have cleared, my fellow Hexenjäger Armand races out from one of the cells and tears into the startled Dutch soldiers, his mortuary blade and sabre moving with blinding speed. Three of the Dutchmen drop dead, clutching at wounds they never saw delivered.

  Deftly dodging a swipe at his head with the butt of a musket, Armand weaves past two other soldiers before finding himself in front of a brutish Dutchman. This soldier’s face is a butchered mess of scars – souvenirs collected from a life of fighting. Whipping up his pistol, the Dutchman takes aim at Armand’s chest. But Armand is faster. The French duellist grabs hold of a nearby soldier who is fumbling with his musket and uses him as a human shield against the Dutchman’s shot. Armand tosses the now-dead soldier towards the hulking figure standing before him, forcing the Dutchman to lose his balance in the water. Armand seizes the advantage and lunges forward, his sabre snaking out and punching through the side of his adversary. Collapsing to his knees, the brutish soldier lashes out desperately with the butt of his pistol, but Armand parries the attack aside and finishes him off with a savage slash across the throat.

  Armand leaps to his left, shouldering into the nearest soldier, and sends him careening head-first into the tunnel wall, knocking him senseless. His eyes then lock on an advancing Dutchman, whose sword-arm is outstretched and held high. The point of the soldier’s rapier is aimed at the Frenchman’s face.

  Facing an adversary trained in the Spanish school of swordplay, Armand adjusts his fighting technique accordingly and assumes a traversing stance, raising his sabre to counter the Dutchman’s blade. Having parried aside the first three thrusts and assessed the quality of the soldier’s fencing, Armand turns his fourth parry into a lightning-fast riposte, his sabre transformed into a hiss of death. The Dutchman is caught off-guard – and left with three hand-spans of steel protruding through his back.

  Armand kicks the body free from his blade and twists to his left, narrowly avoiding a pistol shot from one of the two remaining soldiers. The duellist then streaks across the tunnel, crossing the distance to the remaining Dutchmen in less than a heartbeat. Feigning to his right, he lures one of them into a lunge that forces him to over-extend his attack. Armand springs forward and hammers the pommel of his mortuary blade into the man’s temple with a sickening crack. Even before the soldier slumps unconscious into the waters of the flooded corridor, Armand spins on his heel and flicks out his sabre, its point stopping a hair’s-breadth from the throat of the remaining Dutchman, pinning him against the dungeon wall.

  Sheathing his mortuary blade, Armand unhooks the lantern hanging from the soldier’s belt and attaches it to his own. ‘Tell your comrades not to come down,’ he snarls, forcing the terrified soldier back down the tunnel. ‘All that awaits them here is death. Now go, before my blades decide to taste your blood!’

  One of the English soldiers assigned to help us defend this section of the dungeon runs over to join Armand and shakes his head in awe. ‘My God! Well done,’ he says in stilted German, watching the Dutchman flee. ‘Never before have I seen such skill with a sword!’

  ‘Don’t commend me for butchery,’ Armand says disdainfully, his features looking twisted and demonic in the lantern-light. He bends down to wipe the blood from his sabre on the cloak of one of the fallen Dutchmen. ‘Taking the lives of innocent soldiers gives me no pleasure. I am a Hexenjäger – a witch hunter. I wage war at a higher level, with the Devil’s legions. Now let’s move back before reinforcements arrive and I’m forced to spill more Dutch blood.’

  No sooner has he said this than a dozen or so Dutch soldiers appear at the end of the tunnel, their muskets and pistols raised in preparation to fire. Calling for our English allies to take shelter in the cells, Armand races frantically towards me through the water, his head held low, a hand keeping his wide-brimmed hat in place. The BLAM! of firearms reverberates from the darkn
ess at the far end of the passage, and musket balls zip past the French duellist. As he races into the cell where I am hiding, I lean out and discharge my remaining pistol at the Dutch soldiers, knocking one of them off his feet with a direct shot to the forehead. The rest respond with hasty shots as they retreat down the tunnel.

  Armand sheathes his sabre and draws the long-barrelled flintlock pistols from his belt. ‘Where are Christian and Francesca?’ he roars over the report of gunfire.

  ‘Somewhere up ahead with Captain Lightfoot,’ I yell back. ‘They have moved deeper into the dungeon. The Captain wants us to join Lieutenant Wolf. We’re to hold the Dutch at bay, granting the Captain the time he needs to blast through to the gaol.’

  Armand’s eyes flash with alarm. ‘What? I thought we’d agreed against that. Didn’t we say that it would make too much noise and alert the prison guards?’

  ‘I know,’ I say as I start to reload my pistols. ‘But the Captain has changed his mind, and I can see his point. We no longer have time to carry through with our initial idea of chiselling through to the prison. We’ve lost the element of surprise – these dungeon tunnels are alive with Dutch city watch. We just have to hope that we can still break into the prison before the guards are alerted. The last thing we want is to get trapped down here, with the Dutch coming at us from both sides.’

  Armand shakes his head. ‘This has gone from bad to worse. But what can we do? We’re stuck in this mess now. If Lightfoot wants to blast his way through, then so be it. I just hope to God he does it quickly, because I don’t know how long we’re going to be able to hold the Dutch off; I think the entire city watch has come down after us.’

  My companions – Armand, Christian von Frankenthal and Francesca – had accompanied me to Rotterdam in the hope that my father, long thought dead, may have been captured by the Dutch some ten years ago and imprisoned within the Devil’s Bowels: the notorious gaol lying in the very heart of the Dutch city-port. Having entered a war zone – with the Anglo–Dutch War in its second year – we had kept our numbers to a bare minimum, believing that stealth and secrecy would be best suited to this mission.

  Armand had only recently been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant. Before setting off on this adventure, he had assured me that my resourcefulness, Francesca’s skill with traps and locks, von Frankenthal’s brute strength, as well as Armand’s own skill with swords – not to mention his dashing good looks and charm, Armand had modestly added – would be more than adequate to deal with a handful of decrepit prison guards. If all went to plan, he bragged, we wouldn’t even have to draw our blades.

  Famous last words if you ask me. For here we are now, having formed an alliance with a much larger English force and engaged in a vicious skirmish with a Dutch patrol, deep in an abandoned dungeon.

  We arrived in Rotterdam yesterday morning and took residence in a coaching inn on the outskirts of the city. Not long after our arrival, Armand – having stepped outside to observe which parts of the city were monitored by the city guards, and to make a mental note of the location of Dutch garrisons throughout the area – had a fortuitous encounter with a disgruntled former prison guard. Armand convinced the man that he was part of a French contingent sent to assist the Dutch in their war against the English, and managed to bring the former guard back to our inn to toast a speedy Dutch victory. Several flagons of claret later, the guard was well and truly inebriated, and he revealed a secret that gave hope to our cause of freeing my father.

  Rotterdam’s prison had been built earlier this century to replace an older medieval dungeon. This twisting labyrinth of tunnels, stairwells and cells was located beside the Meuse, the central river that flows through the city, and had been abandoned sometime last century due to constant flooding. Although built further back from the Meuse, the prison was connected to the old dungeon via a doorway. This had been bricked over in the past decade, but the guard believed that it would be possible for two or three men, equipped with mallets and crowbars, to sneak into the dungeon and break through to the prison. He had also revealed the location of a secret entrance to the medieval dungeon: a metal grate, hidden beneath a pier along the northern embankment of the Meuse.

  If the guard’s information was correct, the prison comprised of two levels: an upper level, which was reserved for prisoners of state; and a lower level, which was full to bursting with English soldiers and sailors, most of whom had been captured during recent naval engagements. But there were a few cells in the southern wing – the dampest, rat-infested, most Godforsaken section of the entire prison – which housed Spanish and German prisoners, some of whom had been shackled within their solitary cells for over a decade.

  Several hours before the break of dawn this morning, Armand, von Frankenthal, Francesca and I decided to investigate the dungeon. We had no intention of staging our gaolbreak just yet, for we first needed to test the validity of the guard’s information. Indeed, this morning’s expedition was intended as nothing more than a reconnaissance mission.

  Wrapped in the folds of our cloaks, we scurried through the deserted streets. Coming to the aforementioned pier, we climbed down the brick embankment – only to find a force of twenty or so soldiers concealed in the darkness near the entrance to the dungeon, treading water in the river, their firearms and gunpowder flasks held above their heads so as to keep them dry. Some were hanging onto the sides of a small rowboat, its contents hidden under an oilcloth cover, and atop which sat a man. His features were obscured beneath a wide-brimmed hat, and he was wrapped in a cloak. I detected the outline of a rapier and a brace of pistols strapped across his chest.

  Believing that the former prison guard had betrayed us to the city watch and led us into a trap, our hands flew to our blades, and the stillness of the night was disturbed by the hiss of drawn steel. It quickly became apparent, however, that we had encountered a group of English soldiers; this observation being based on the curses they hurled at us in their native tongue.

  For several anxious moments we tried to convince the startled soldiers that we were not working for the Dutch, but were members of the Hexenjäger, on a personal mission to rescue my father from the prison. Although Armand was fluent in English, his French accent alarmed the soldiers, who were suspicious that he may have been a French soldier allied to the Dutch. Fortunately, the man sitting atop the boat, who later introduced himself as Captain Lightfoot, believed our protestations, particularly after we revealed the crimson tabards concealed beneath our cloaks, proving that we were indeed members of the Hexenjäger.

  Fluent in German and with a roguish twist to his lips, the Captain had reasoned that if we were allied with the Dutch then surely we would have made a greater effort to alert the enemy of their presence. Nonetheless, he had insisted that we would have to join his men until he had achieved his objective in Rotterdam: namely, to break into the Devil’s Bowels to free over fifty recently captured English prisoners of war. He could not risk us being detected and captured by the Dutch, only to reveal his plan under the threat of torture.

  He then explained that English spies in the Dutch Republic had learned that the enemy were planning to place all captured English soldiers and seamen in the holds of Dutch merchant vessels. This barbaric act was going to be committed as an attempt to dissuade the English from attacking Dutch ships, for fear of killing their own men. It was a response to the recent English raid on Terschelling, an island off the coast of the Dutch Republic, where over a hundred Dutch merchant vessels had been caught by surprise and destroyed. The English fleet had then sacked and plundered the town of West-Terschelling. It was a brutal, savage attack, word of which had even reached us in Saxony.

  The English spy-network had also revealed that Rotterdam’s gaol was to be emptied and the prisoners transported onto the vessels before the end of the week. Hence the English needed to strike whilst they still had the chance. As a large fleet of English men-of-war and frigates lay read
y for action in the Channel, trying to draw out the Dutch fleet, a small, hand-picked team of twenty-six soldiers was to infiltrate the gaol, free the prisoners and make their escape back down the Meuse, where they would rendezvous with an English warship and be transported back home.

  Seeing that we had similar goals, Armand declared that we would become allies of convenience, and that we would join our four blades with the twenty-five under Captain Lightfoot’s command.

  ‘It’s time we moved,’ Armand announces, noting that the Dutch soldiers have withdrawn, but alerted by the sound of splashing feet that carries from beyond the turn in the tunnel. ‘It sounds as if there’s a much larger force approaching, and we need to pull back. If they catch us here it will only be a matter of time before they overwhelm us.’ He turns around and looks up the opposite end of the passage. ‘But if we withdraw to the next bend in the tunnel, we can use that to our advantage, picking the Dutch off with our firearms and then pulling back to reload.’

  He orders the six English soldiers hiding in the cells along the tunnel wall opposite us to cover our retreat with their pistols and muskets, and then we are off. Hoisting our legs through the water, we race back twenty yards before reaching the next turn in the dungeon, where we join a further six of our English allies. This team is led by Captain Lightfoot’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Richard Wolf: a lean and wiry career soldier with eyes as black as olives, and wearing a scarred leather buff coat.

  ‘We are to hold them off for as long as possible,’ Wolf says in stilted German, his musket trained on the far end of the tunnel, to where the Dutch patrol will shortly appear. ‘We’re to buy the Captain the time he needs to blast through to the prison.’

  ‘So I’ve heard,’ Armand says, stepping aside to allow the six Englishmen who had covered our retreat to join us. ‘I just hope we don’t have to buy him too much time. There’s a second patrol approaching, and it sounds much larger than the first. The longer we are stalled down here, more and more Dutch soldiers are going to rush into these tunnels like flood waters.’

  An inner fire flashes in Lieutenant Wolf’s eyes and he smiles ruefully. ‘Then I hope you can swim, Frenchman?’