Sigmar's Blood (9 page)

ARFEIT/SWARTZHAFEN BORDER

Vale of Vain Hope, 2522

The crusade had made good time across the fordable point of Unterwald River and pressed on with its forced march, von Korden striding determinedly at their head. The witch hunter had not spoken a word nor slowed in the slightest since the battle against the Strigany at Deihstein Ridge. Every iota of his deadly conviction was focused on finding his quarry, and anyone who hailed him was met only with stony silence.

Volkmar, by contrast, was blinking away exhaustion. Flashes of memory from Fort Oberstyre assailed him whenever he closed his eyes, and the war altar was juddering along at such a pace it was impossible to get any kind of rest. The Tattersouls, having picked up on the urgency in the air, were chanting and lashing themselves with even more zeal than usual, some of them even breaking into short runs when their fervour overflowed.

The Grand Theogonist looked back through the thinning light at his unsteady flock. He did not know whether to be reassured or disturbed by their manic energy. He was sure they had grown in number since the crusaders had passed the refugee train. For a second, he thought he could make out the peasant with the cleft lip they had talked to, trailing at the back with his wife. They gabbled strange syllables and tore at their hair, eyes rolling.

‘Sigmar! Sigmar through the Great Fires!’ shouted Gerhardt the Worm, grinning up at Volkmar. ‘Plunge through the Great Fires and transcend to the world of glory!’

The Grand Theogonist muttered a prayer to the Heldenhammer and turned back to the road. Keeping this pace was madness. He wanted to sleep for a week, a year, maybe even to just lie down forever. But the trail was still warm, and Sylvania needed him still.

An hour of hard slog later, the steepled roofs of Arfeit hove into view. There were still a few windows with light in them, and the promise of decent beds. The town’s protective border of stakes bore many a corpse, each in a different stage of decomposition. Ravens picking at strings of decaying flesh stopped their feast to look up at the vanguard’s approach, cawing in disapproval. Arfeit was a defensible position without a doubt, and potentially a vital night’s sleep for the soldiery.

‘No time!’ shouted von Korden from the front of the marching column.

Volkmar’s shoulders sank down. ‘He’s right,’ he said in answer to Kaslain’s questioning stare. ‘We press on.’

Dawn should have arrived by now, even by the shallow standards of the last few days. Volkmar could taste the morning dew in the air, mouldy and chill. Yet the skyline remained as grey as a month-old corpse.

Up ahead the vanguard had spotted the von Swartzhafen mansion, its ruined and slouching walls a patch of pitch black on the horizon. Already the war altar had passed statuary and shattered stonework, and the decaying vegetation that had been lining the road had thinned out to sparse brown twigs. As the ground opened out Volkmar could see something else up ahead, barring their path. At this distance it appeared no more than a thin white line in the mist.

Volkmar looked up, his eye caught by motion from the mansion’s tower. Morrslieb’s wan glow broke through the clouds for a moment, and bat-winged things were illuminated in silhouette.

‘Fan out and form up,’ called Volkmar, his voice strained. Several of the Talabheimer men turned questioning looks in his direction. ‘Just do it!’ he shouted. ‘Now!’

The ragged crusade spread out, taking advantage of the open ground in front of Swartzhafen’s gates. A low cry cut through the air, a sound that a living man could not have made. Blades were drawn, but kept low.

In the distance, a bell tolled.

Von Korden span around to look straight at Volkmar, an expression of wild bloodlust in his eyes. Turning back, he signalled his Talabheimer escort to move forward, waving Bennec Sootson’s cannon crew up the field on the right. The state troops obeyed with surprising speed, hustling forwards towards the distant gates.

‘You faithful,’ said Volkmar, motioning to the Tattersouls below. ‘Forward, and fast.’

THE HIDDEN NECROPOLIS

Vargravia, 2522

‘I can’t hear you, I’m afraid, lads!’ bellowed Sunscryer as he trundled away from the shouting Stirlanders. ‘Candle wax in the ears! Just in case Whispering Nell makes an appearance!’

Dropping his swords and roaring in desperation, Bernhardt snatched something from his coat pocket and flung himself straight at the female gheist that was drifting around them. A small knot of his men charged after him. Militiamen thrust their spears and blades into the midsection of the gaunt horror, but they passed straight through. Bernhardt’s brawler instincts took over, his left jab passing straight through the gheist’s maggot-chewed face. Quick as a daemon his right hook came around in a haymaker punch that connected hard, tearing the hideous thing’s skull into a scrap of diffusing ectoplasm. There was a dwindling screech as the apparition sunk into the ground, mist roiling in her wake.

‘How in Sigmar’s name?’ said Janosch Velman, coming up to Bernhardt’s side.

‘Not Sigmar,’ said Bernhardt, unfurling his fist to expose a pair of smoking pfennigs. ‘Morr.’

Up ahead, the horses pulling the wizards’ contraption into the lee of the tumbledown manse struggled to make it the last few yards to the highest point of the peak. Bernhardt led his men in a loose run towards it, heedless of the ghastly faces roiling in the mist. High up at the manse’s dome, a glowing figure was wrestling free the scrying lens at the end of the astromancer’s telescope, bearing it down and angling it above the Luminark so that it glowed in sympathy with the glass discs ranged along the machine’s length. As Sunscryer shouted an arcane phrase of staccato syllables, a stuttering light shone out across the peaks – weak at first, then with increasing stridency – until the necropolis was lit with the strobing of the Luminark’s distress call.

The Stirlanders had reached spitting distance of the glowing Luminark when the air was split by a hideous screech. A group of hooded, flaming wraiths rode out from the wall of the ancient manse, their skeletal steeds passing straight through the rear carriage of the arcane war machine and heading down the scree towards the militiamen. The wraiths held their burning scythes high as they drove through the Stirlanders’ ranks, sweeping their blades low to cut into the men that flailed ineffectually at the flanks of the undead horses. The strange hooked scythes of the apparitions did not cut the flesh of their targets, instead passing straight through them. The wraiths galloped on, and five militiamen fell lifeless to the ground as if every tendon in their bodies had been severed at once. The rider-gheists wheeled around for another pass, screeching wildly as the unnatural green flames around them burned bright with stolen energy.

‘The Wind of Hysh repels you!’ shouted Jovi Sunscryer, standing on the riding plate of the Luminark and gesturing fiercely at the strange apparitions. The skies flashed white, and two of the wraiths were obliterated by lances of energy that darted from the gloom.

A second later a latticed net of light flickered into existence in front of the remaining wraiths. They galloped right into it and were held fast in the air, the strange magical trap curling around them as it threw dancing shadows everywhere. The fell creatures screamed curses in a language that Bernhardt did not understand, though the wizards were shouting louder and louder in a repetitive chant that sounded suspiciously similar.

There was a chime of glass as Khalep swung the apparatus around, releasing a searing blast that burned straight into the trapped wraiths. When Bernhardt blinked away his shock, the figures were no longer there, and the echoes of their dismayed shrieks were fading away to nothing.

Bernhardt breathed a shallow sigh of relief until he realised that the men guarding the far side of the Luminark were crying out in pain. Two of them staggered back in horror as a robed grave-gheist rose out of a nearby tomb and cut them open to the spine with its long, hooked scythe. The big man darted through the gravestones towards them, only to see a contorted knot of militiamen sinking in on themselves, their flesh darkening like fruit succumbing to a season’s rot in the space of a few heartbeats.

Drifting towards the dying men was the ironbone reliquary that Bernhardt had seen rise into the air upon their arrival. Ghostly forms whipped around it, bearing it forward at a slow but inevitable pace. The ropes of black energy that crackled around the casket at its heart reached out, extending like the tentacles of some undersea nightmare. At their caress, Stirlanders blackened to skeletal ash and blew away, scattered by ethereal winds that caressed Bernhardt’s sweating forehead with the chill of the grave.

‘Run! Get out of here!’ he shouted. ‘It’s hopeless! We’re all dead! We’re all dead!’

He sank to his knees, gibbering in misery and gouging at his eyes in an effort to remove the stain that the black claw inside the casket had seared into his sight. It was no use. It was still there, and getting bigger and more oppressive by the moment.

‘Run…’ he said, weakly, but everyone else had already fled.

The howling of gheists grew louder and louder as the cadaverous guardians of the claw rode slowly towards Bernhardt, their glowing blades raised for the kill. The militiaman’s head was torn upwards by an invisible grip, and was slowly turned around so he could fully appreciate the majesty of his oncoming doom.

Just as the reliquary filled his whole world, a blinding bolt of energy speared out from the lee of the manse, blasting into the stone carriage of the palanquin. A deafening, mind-numbing shriek of anguish rose up into the night as the magic binding the reliquary was shredded. The sound was like a thousand tortured souls all screaming themselves hoarse at once. It looked to Bernhardt’s addled perception as if the hellish thing was dissolving, shimmering into a river of greenish mist that wound away into the darkness like a serpent’s ghost.

The last thing he saw before he fell unconscious was the Luminark shuddering after it in pursuit, a trio of haggard wizards hanging grimly onto its wrought-iron chassis.

SWARTZHAFEN

Foothills of the Broken Spine Mountains, 2522

The crusade’s men, gathered into as tight a battle line as the outskirts of Swartzhafen would allow, padded through the darkness towards the settlement’s wrought-iron gates. Once a rich town jealously guarded by the reclusive nobleman that lived in its mansion, Swartzhafen had fallen into decay. Much of its defensive perimeter had been torn down by nameless assailants. As the mist thinned, Volkmar saw that another line of defence had been raised up, one far more dangerous than a mere gate.

Dozens of dead peasant bodies were packed tight in each of the gaps in Swartzhafen’s walls, some still clothed in flesh and rags, some no more than mouldering bone. They were caught in mid-stumble as if they had been abandoned by time itself. Dead wolves dotted the fore of the corpse army, frozen still as they prowled. Stretching into the mist by their side was a pack of ghouls, held fast in mid-lope as they had attempted to flank the approaching forces. Behind the gates leered the necromancer, Ghorst, atop his macabre cart. Even he was immobile. The entire tableau was disturbingly still.

With one exception.

At the head of the wall of undeath was a heavily built figure, mounted on the back of a giant stallion-corpse. It was clad in ornate armour, its plates fashioned as an overlapping series of bat wings, and in its gauntleted hands were long, bladed weapons that glowed dully in the gloom. A cloak of blurring shadow-spirits billowed around the figure’s shoulders, their tiny skeletal mouths open in silent screams.

The figure’s face was hideous, a mask of cruelty rendered in dead, dew-slicked flesh. Its hairless grey head tipped backwards as it bared its fangs slowly, cocking a hooked claw and motioning Volkmar to come close.

‘He looks like a von Carstein all right, in all that armoured finery,’ said Kaslain. ‘Wants to parley, by the look of things.’

‘Oh, there will be a parley, all right,’ spat the Grand Theogonist. ‘A parley of blades, and of fire.’

‘Old man!’ called an ancient, cultured voice through the mist. ‘Volkmar of the Hammer, who is called The Grim! Thou hast come to mine gate at last!’

Volkmar ground his teeth. ‘That’s him. Mannfred,’ he growled, the name a bitter curse.

‘I wish to discuss matters that thy… common folk need not hear,’ said the vampire, motioning dismissively at the state troops taking position opposite him. ‘Fools, kindly leave thy master and I to our grandsire’s talk.’

Several of the Talabheimers jerked as if they had been burned and made to flee, but their comrades held them fast, slapping them back to their senses and pushing them into the ranks once more.

‘Ha! So many true believers,’ said Mannfred, his tones appreciative. ‘So many thoughtful gifts thou hast brought me, my tired friend. Myrmidians, Sigmarites I see, even Morr’s playthings… and a new golden ornament for my halls.’ The vampire motioned towards the war altar as if it were no more than a trinket to be easily dismissed. ‘I cannot wait to gorge on the blood of the faithful – it has such a distinctive tang. Thine most of all, I am wagering, old man.’

‘We come to burn you in the name of Sigmar, fiend, and nothing more,’ said Volkmar. ‘Your sorcery has no hold over us.’

The von Carstein laughed incredulously, the sound surprisingly human from one so monstrous. ‘Thine years have been far from pleasant, old man,’ he said, wiping away a tear of blood as his smile faded into a mask of derision. ‘Thou art spent. As is thy rabble. The smell of defeat is upon thee. Let me release the strength that flows in thine veins. It is a rare vintage indeed, and I alone know the power it can bring.’

‘Fire!’ shouted von Korden from the Talabheimer flank.

The vampire snarled a strange syllable in response. A split second later the Hammer of the Witches boomed and a black cannonball streaked straight towards the von Carstein. The vampire exploded in black shadow, coalescing in the cannonball’s wake before flying towards the war altar at terrible speed.

‘Charge!’ shouted Volkmar as the motionless wall of undead suddenly unfroze and poured towards them. ‘In the name of all that’s holy, charge!

The Silver Bullets opened fire, and a heartbeat later a clutch of frozen ghouls were bowled backwards into the mist. Bounding through the remainder of the troglodytes came eyeless wolves with skin flapping from their jaws. Von Korden could see Ghorst on the far side, his cart’s cursed bell tolling loud. The witch hunter growled in disgust as the necromancer chanted his thrice-damned resurrection rite, summoning the dead ghouls back to their feet.

Well, if gunpowder was not enough to keep the undead scum down, he had other ways of dealing with them. The witch hunter peeled back his glove and placed the ivory ring that the wizards had given him against his bare palm. ‘Be banished!’ he shouted. A triple-headed serpent of light streaked out towards Ghorst’s cart like a sinuous thunderbolt.

The necromancer ducked down into his morass of corpses as the spell struck home, blasting apart the infernal bell and setting fire to the carriage’s rear. Von Korden gave a short cry of triumph, gesturing for the swordsmen behind to move forward as his attack drew the undead canines in close. When they were only a few feet away, the witch hunter calmly stepped back into the ranks of Sigmar’s Sons, their sharpened swords coming together in his wake.

The ghastly wolves leapt forwards just as von Korden had planned, skewering themselves on the Sons’ blades in their haste to snap and bite. Two sets of slavering jaws closed down hard, tearing Sigmarite heads from necks as they bore the front rankers down with their rotten weight. One was hacked into pieces as it sprawled amongst them, whilst the other was blasted free by one of von Korden’s pistols. The decapitated remains of the wolves’ prey fell slowly backwards, spurting blood over the red and white cloth of their comrades’ uniforms.

At the insistent tattoo of Redd Jaeger’s drum, Sigmar’s Sons shouted in unison and stepped forwards, pushing back with shields and stabbing through the gaps into the dead flesh of their assailants. Their frenzy spent, the undead beasts fell apart in a sloughing mass of worm-eaten meat. The Sons stumbled forward, leather shoes and bare feet alike squishing on the remains of their foes.

Cantering out of the darkness of the wooded right flank, the Knights of the Blazing Sun accelerated into a gallop, ploughing straight into the mass of pallid ghoul-flesh that was bearing down on the Silver Bullets. Lances speared sunken chests, and several of the ghouls were pinioned to the peaty earth, never to rise again. Frog-like, several of the hunchbacked things leapt up at the cavalrymen as they rode past. Their filthy claws and needle teeth scratched ineffectually at lacquered black steel before they were shoved roughly away with lance shafts or, in Lupio Blaze’s case, dislodged by a visored head-butt.

Von Korden called out a warning as three massive, winged figures fell out of the misted skies and screeched towards the Myrmidian riders. The fiends were huge, their leathery pinions expansive enough to cover a horse nomad’s wagon. Vargheists, the Sylvanians called them – lesser von Carsteins who had been altered to a form more pleasing to their elders’ desires.

The monsters threw their clawed legs forward as they landed, grabbing at the knights like swooping raptors seizing up vermin. Two of the armoured warriors were plucked from their saddles and borne screaming up into the air. The witch hunter fired a long-range pistol shot, blasting a chunk of hip from the largest of the beasts. The Silver Bullets followed suit, their volley of shot tearing the wing of one of the vargheists and slamming into the torso of another. The wheeling creatures screamed and released their prey, letting their captives drop into the battle below.

One of the falling knights ploughed into the ranks of the Tattersouls, bowling several of them over just as they charged into the corpses shuffling out of the town’s broken gates. The momentum of the charging zealots faltered as confusion broke out in their ranks. Some looked in rapturous awe at freshly broken bones, others looked skywards to see if Sigmar himself was throwing down reinforcements.

Scant yards away the corpse-horde lunged from the gates as if propelled by some unseen force, lopsided jaws gnashing and broken hands outstretched. The Tattersouls roared in delight, crying out about the mortification of flesh and the end of days. A handful of their number threw themselves bodily into the mass of corpses with a shout, bearing several of the cadavers to the floor. Their bellies and backs were pulled open by the claws of those undead milling behind, the martyrs dying in bloody agony. Taking advantage of the distraction, the front rank of the Tattersouls whirled their flails skyward and brought them down with crushing force, splitting open heads and tearing arms from bodies.

Still the dead things came on, crowding in. Yellowed teeth sank into tattooed flesh, farm implements jabbed spasmodically, and faithful blood spurted.

‘I am Sigmar’s Holy Worm!’ shouted Gerhardt, his eyes alight with madness. ‘Burrow into the grave and out the other side!’ He lashed out with his elbows and knees as he looped his bare foot around a fallen flail and flicked it up into a corpse’s face. ‘Burrow, damn you!’ he shouted, pushing his thumbs through the milky white eyes of another gnashing corpse and pulling its head free in a curving spray of grave-fluids. He used the disembodied head to smash another corpse-puppet’s head clean from its neck. ‘Burrow like a worm!’

Calmly reloading his pistols on the right flank, von Korden took stock of the mayhem unfolding around him. To the left he could see a mass of stalking bone emerging from the mists and charging into the Hammer of the Witches, rusted blades raised. The war machine’s crew valiantly defended their cannon for a moment before stumbling back into the woods, unintentionally exposing the flank of the Sons. The swordsmen he had left in order to close with Ghorst were too preoccupied to notice, fighting hard against the mismatched wolves that had somehow pieced themselves back together and attacked with renewed vigour.

Up above, the vargheist servants of the vampire were falling once more upon the sun-worshipping Myrmidians in a strange vertical battle that the knights were ill suited to fight. Through the tumbled gates of the town’s border, yet more corpses were staggering towards them through the mist. All around the battle hung in the balance, but it was the scene at the war altar that made bile lurch up into von Korden’s throat.

The Sigmarite war machine had ploughed forward so far into the ranks of the corpse-horde that it had become swamped, its wheels jammed with tangled limbs and dead flesh. Worse still, the vampire von Carstein had left his incorporeal steed and had leapt onto the pulpit of the great chariot. He was hunched over in a duellist’s crouch less than a few feet away from Volkmar. Von Korden watched in incredulity as the fiend become a blur of motion, his glowing sword looping in a figure of eight to send the old man’s sacred warhammer sailing from his grip. The vampire stood up tall, seeming to swell with dark power as wings of shadow blossomed behind him. Von Korden touched his pistols to the Sigmarite symbol hanging around his neck and took careful aim.

Volkmar’s fists flared white as he roared forward, staggering the beast with a blast of pure faith as he roared the First Catechism of Banishment. Mannfred fell back, weapons tumbling from his twitching hands. The count’s cloak of screaming souls whipped out at the Grand Theogonist’s face, driving him back in turn. Von Korden took his chance, hot silver flashing out as he fired with both pistols at once. Blurring downward, the vampire dodged behind the war altar’s lectern, claws clacking onto its topmost ledge. Yet the shot had bought Volkmar time. As the undead count hoisted himself upward to attack once more, Volkmar grabbed a solid-gold skull from the pulpit’s lectern shelf and brought it crashing down onto Mannfred’s bald pate.

Screeching, the vampire fell backwards from the war altar only to catch the balustrade and channel his momentum into a swinging leap. He vaulted over the pulpit and kneed Volkmar back against the war altar’s Golden Gryphon in one lightning-fast lunge. Weaponless, the von Carstein wrenched a length of ironwork frame from the timber of the war altar’s pulpit with a single claw, lifting it high to strike the Grand Theogonist down.

Suddenly a hundred screams filtered through the air from the east of the vale, chilling in their intensity despite being on the very cusp of hearing. Mannfred looked at the Vargavian Mountains on the horizon with an expression of utter shock before launching backwards off the pulpit. He landed with impossible grace, crouched like a Strigany horseman upon the saddle of his deathless mount.

The undead beast reared, hooves flailing, before thundering off eastwards at a pace no mortal steed could hope to match. In the murky mists above the battlefield, the vargheists abandoned their bloody persecution of Blaze’s knights and winged off into the night after their master.

‘Forge onwards!’ coughed Volkmar desperately, regaining his feet. ‘Don’t let them escape!’

His men gave a great roar and plunged into battle with renewed vigour, cutting down the slumping bodies of their suddenly listless foes. Within less than a minute, there was nothing left of the undead army that was not covered by ankle-deep mist.