by Warhammer
Selvador set down his cup upon the edge of his pulpit and smiled around the room.
‘And now, my friends, to make…’
He stopped with a slight frown, and Hendrick found himself tensing.
‘And now…’ the regent militant tried again, stopping and swallowing hard. His mouth turned down in consternation. A murmur rippled around the hall. Hendrick felt the dread that had been gnawing at his guts surge up like bile into his throat as Selvador leaned heavily on the edge of his pulpit and thumped himself in the chest.
Poison? thought Hendrick. Or was it something in the food, or in the wine? He was half way to his feet, ready to rush to the regent militant’s aid when the old man gave a convulsive cough, and his eyes widened as a great cloud of glowing purple motes billowed from his mouth and drifted down upon the feasters below.
Then, bedlam.
Chapter Eight
MOONRISE
Hendrick felt a surreal sense of horrified fascination as the glimmering purple cloud hung in the air. It coiled languidly, then began to drift downwards. By the time those feastgoers nearest the pulpit broke their paralysis, the motes were settling on them like snow.
Selvador shuddered and gave another convulsive cough. Another cloud billowed from his lips, and this time Hendrick saw the glisten of blood mixed in with what he realised with a lurch must be spores.
‘Someone fetch a healer! Attend the regent militant, damn it!’ shouted Hendrick, his sergeant’s bark shattering the silence like a hammer-blow. Selvador Mathenio Aranesis clutched his throat, staggered forwards and pitched over the low railing of his pulpit. His body fell with a crash onto a banqueting table ten feet below, splattering feastgoers with mashed vegetable and splatters of cooling sauce. Madness erupted as guests across the hall pushed themselves to their feet, some trying to make for the regent militant to offer aid, others turning for the exits, many of them drunk and all of them quickly entangling one another in a heaving mass of panicked bodies, toppled chairs and spilled wine.
Hendrick’s eyes widened as those who had had the spores fall upon them pushed themselves to their feet and began to convulse. Bloody foam squeezed between their teeth and trailed down their chins, and their veins stood out dark and purple against their skin. A man who had not been touched rose to help the woman next to him, who had. Confusion and concern were plastered across his features, but they gave way to shock as she spun with a feral snarl and lashed out. Her nails dragged red lines across the man’s cheek and he reeled back.
The woman wasn’t done. She pounced on her would-be helper, her furs and finery whipping incongruously about her. Her face was contorted in a look of absolute fury and her eyeballs had turned a reddish-purple, as though the blood inside them had burst its channels. The table was only a dozen or so feet from where the Swords had sat themselves, and so Hendrick had a perfect view as the woman pinned the man to the table by his shoulder. Her chest hitched, her jaws yawned wide, and Hendrick’s gorge rose as she vomited a torrent of purple, porridgey slime across her victim’s face. Frantic with disgust, the pinned man managed to get an arm free and land a punch on his assailant’s jaw, knocking her back.
Even as he staggered, dripping, to his feet, the male feastgoer started to shudder and whine, spitting up clots of bruised foam. Unperturbed by a blow that should have stunned her at the very least, his attacker darted past him with a shriek and launched herself at a merchant’s wife who was trying to extricate herself from her bench-seat. The two went over in a mass of flailing limbs, screaming and vomit-spatters.
‘What in the Eight Realms is going on?’ exclaimed Bartiman, hauling himself to his feet and leaning on his staff.
‘It’s begun!’ said Hendrick, before adding, ‘Whatever in Sigmar’s name it is.’
‘Where are the guards?’ asked Romilla.
‘Trapped back in the shadows in those stupid alcoves,’ answered Olt. ‘They’ll be lucky if they don’t get crushed in the panic.’
‘Hrukni, up to us then,’ said Borik.
‘That’s if you’ve not been poisoned like the regent,’ snapped Hendrick. ‘I damned well told you not to drink.’
Borik tossed his goblet aside and spat. ‘Duardin constitution lad,’ he growled, but Hendrick thought he detected a note of concern there all the same.
‘Hendrick, orders?’ asked Aelyn. For an instant, he froze as the realisation struck him that it was he, not his brother, who would have to set their course. He, not Varlen, whose job it was to keep them alive and get the job done. Whatever the job even was, now, with the regent militant possibly dead and some form of spore-madness sweeping through the hall.
He saw Varlen again, as he had been at the end, with his flesh running like tallow and one eye bulging forth on a distended stalk, with his tongue split in two and a nest of three-foot, lashing worms where one arm should have been. Varlen, covered in the blood of the villagers, with that damned crown still embedded in the flesh of his forehead, the stone in its centre still blazing blue. Varlen, who he’d failed.
‘Hendrick!’ snapped Romilla.
‘The regent militant,’ barked Hendrick in reply. ‘Captain Morthan ordered us to keep him safe, and if there’s a chance we can still save him then we’ve got to take it. We can’t let her down.’
Bestial howls rose from the feastgoers who had already contracted the spore sickness. The crowd surged and heaved around the Swords of Sigmar, threatening to sweep them away from one another. Glass shattered, metal rang against marble as plates scattered to the floor, people wailed and shrieked and sobbed. Some, who had made the theoretical connection between the regent militant’s last drink and his horrible fate, rammed fingers down their throats to make themselves vomit. By the stench, others had soiled themselves in terror amidst the crowd. For an instant, Hendrick was struck by how swiftly the veneer of genteel civilisation was stripped away to reveal little more than frightened animals fighting for their lives.
‘We need our real weapons!’ said Borik. ‘I don’t fancy our chances fighting those things off with shivs and side-blades. I want my damned cannon.’
‘They put them in the guard-post just inside the main entrance on the left as you come in,’ Eleanora said rapidly, a look of barely contained fear on her features. She was sweating, Hendrick saw, and looked almost feverish.
‘All right, whatever this is we can’t fight it here, like this. Not with side-blades. Aelyn, take Eleanora and secure the rest of our weapons. Don’t try to get them all back to us, you’ll never fight your way back here against the human tide carrying all that. Get them ready and we’ll come to you.’
Aelyn shrugged off her sling bandage and winced as the crowd surged against her. She grabbed hold of Eleanora’s arm and set off, all but towing the young engineer behind her.
‘Borik, Bartiman, Olt, get as many people out of here as you can,’ Hendrick continued.
‘Why waste time on these fops?’ snarled Olt, shoving a portly, panicked man in a skewed hat away from himself.
‘Whatever this thing is, it’s spreading from one person to the next,’ said Bartiman, nodding understanding as he clung on to Hendrick’s arm to steady himself against the crowd. ‘They might deserve saving, they might not, but it’s a question of limiting the exponential explosion of enemy numbers.’
‘What he said,’ said Hendrick. ‘Just do it!’
‘And what are we doing, Hendrick?’ asked Romilla as the others began to shove their way towards the exits, bellowing at those around them to do the same.
‘You know,’ he said, reaching down and wrapping both hands around the leg of a fallen bench. Hendrick’s muscles bulged like rocks under his dress shirt as he heaved at the leg, snapping it off with a loud crack of splintering wood. Hendrick hefted the three-foot club, testing its weight. It was no hammer, but it would do.
‘The regent militant,’ said Romilla, hoisting herself up
onto the table and sliding off again to land next to Hendrick. The guards had let her keep the smaller warhammer she carried at her belt, on the understanding that it was purely ceremonial.
It was not.
Romilla unhooked the weapon now and brandished it, her other hand going to her hammer pendant.
‘Sigmar, lend us your strength and your protection,’ she intoned, glancing at Hendrick with serious eyes. ‘Realms know, we’re going to need it.’
The two of them made for the banqueting table beneath the pulpit where Selvador had fallen. The human herd had thinned slightly, allowing them easier passage, but that only meant that the spore-sickened could come at them all the quicker.
Hendrick saw the first one coming, scrambling along a tabletop on all fours and scattering food and cutlery in all directions as he came. The man wore a priest’s robes, but nothing holy remained in him, nor anything remotely human. His face was contorted in a rictus of hate and Hendrick realised with revulsion that the man’s flesh was covered in bulging white lumps. His teeth seemed to have elongated, also, until they resembled yellowed tusks, and his nails had twisted into jagged talons.
‘What is this?’ shouted Hendrick as the spore-sickened priest sprang at him. Hendrick swung his improvised club double-handed, throwing all his strength behind the blow. It caught the leaping man in the face with an appalling crunch of bone and a spray of blood. His momentum through the air violently arrested, the priest crashed to the floor and thrashed like a dying insect before lying still.
‘Something dreadful,’ replied Romilla, swinging her hammer in time to catch a charging nobleman in the face. Yellow teeth sprayed through the air and the nobleman crashed backwards onto a table with a tinkle of shattering glass. ‘Something unclean and corrupt. Surely something sent by the Plaguefather.’
‘Are you all right?’ Hendrick asked, sidestepping the next shrieking attacker and ramming the splintered end of his club into her gut to double her over. A brutal upward swing caught her under the jaw and flipped her onto her back, heels drumming the marble.
‘You mean can I remain stalwart in the face of Nurgle’s foul works?’ asked Romilla. She spared him a momentary glance, a pallid smile. ‘I must, for that is the task Sigmar sets before me.’
‘Oh, Sigmar save us,’ exclaimed Hendrick as they rounded the end of a table and came into sight of the regent militant through the scattered crowd. Here, those first infected seemed to have completed whatever horrifying transformation was overtaking them. Their jaws had stretched and cracked, yellow tusks forcing their mouths open and allowing froth to pour constantly over their blackened gums. Purple veins stood out all over skin gone waxy pale and somehow spongy, like the flesh of a mushroom. A pack of five were hunched over several more feastgoers and one of the regent militant’s aelven guards; by the busy way their jaws were working and the wet crunching sounds they were making, they were enjoying an entirely different feast of their own.
Beyond them, Hendrick got a fleeting glimpse of Selvador lying spreadeagled on his back, chest bulging as though he had breathed in as far as he could, eyes rolling and more glowing motes billowing up from his mouth.
Then the spore-sickened realised that he and Romilla were there, and spun with vicious howls. They charged as one, scrambling and leaping like simian monsters. The first fell to a thunderous blow from Hendrick’s club, the second to a meteoric impact from Romilla’s hammer. The priest reversed her momentum and brought the weapon back down to crack the skull of another luckless feastgoer, while Hendrick grabbed the fourth by the throat before it could leap and stove the side of its head in with his club.
He hurled the body aside and looked for the last one. He got a fleeting impression of a crouching figure atop the table to his left and spun in that direction, raising his guard. It was pure instinct, and Hendrick’s eyes widened as he realised his mistake a moment too late. Warm, putrid slime hit him in a gushing torrent. It spewed into his eyes. It squirted up his nostrils. It spattered into his mouth as he cried out in horror.
Instantly, Hendrick’s body prickled with fever-sweat. He felt something wrench inside him, something bilious and squirming that began in his guts and spread through every fibre of his body like poison. Hendrick spat a lukewarm mouthful of someone else’s vomit, feeling his own gorge rise at the sensation.
‘Hendrick!’ he heard Romilla’s yell of shocked horror, but it was as though it echoed to him from the other end of a tunnel that was growing longer and darker by the second.
‘Romilla… get… away from…’
His mind wasn’t with her anymore, wasn’t in the receding chamber with its echoing screams and dim shadows of pandemonium. Hendrick was in the darkness, searching, staring, feeling something rushing up towards him along the tunnel like a warm wind or a tide rising. He thought he could see something down there, something that glowed with pallid light, something with staring eyes of jaundiced yellow and a leering maw full of fangs.
‘Varlen… I… sorry…’ he heard himself gasp wetly, then rational thought fled.
Olt had shed his cloak the moment the panic started. These city-cattle had worse things to fear than a barbarian in their midst, he reasoned, and if the sight of him scared them, then good – maybe they’d stay out of his way.
Now he pushed his way through the shoving, yelling masses brandishing a dagger in each hand. Olt preferred to fight with paired weapons. With the unintentional arrogance of the naturally talented, he had never understood why many fighters restricted themselves to a single blade when they had two perfectly good hands to fight with.
‘Get out of here!’ he bellowed, doing his best to herd the terrified feastgoers towards an arch on the western edge of the hall. ‘Move your pampered arses!’ A bespectacled man jostled past him, his arm thrown protectively around a woman in a fine gown, who had blood pouring from a wound to her scalp. Ahead, a gaggle of merchants fought tooth and nail to push their way through the crowded archway. Olt almost stumbled over the prone body of a trampled guard, the man’s face a bloody mess and his fine attire soiled and torn.
‘Stop fighting each other and get moving!’ Olt roared, and as he did so he felt the wyrd come upon him, as it always did when the gods lent him their power. Olt’s skin tingled, and a crimson glow filled the air around him as his tattoos lit with inner fire. The merchants looked back, reacting with precisely the alarm he’d expected and squirming through the doorway in a sweating, finely garbed mass.
A palace guard came at him, hammer in hand. Olt caught the man’s frantic swing upon his crossed blades, and his tattoos glowed brighter as he drew on their strength to push the guard stumbling backwards.
‘I’m on your side, you fool,’ yelled Olt. ‘Stop fighting me and get these people outside!’ The guard blinked, then seemed to grasp who Olt was, what he was saying. Still the man hesitated, and it was that indecision that saved Olt’s life. The guard’s eyes widened in sudden panic at something over Olt’s shoulder, and the tribesman reacted. Instincts enhanced by the gods’ blessings, he spun and ducked, thrusting out with both blades. He caught the charging spore-sickened in the chest and the gut and rolled, hurling the snarling monster clean over himself to crunch headfirst into the wall by the archway. There was a dry snap as his attacker’s neck broke, and they lay still in a spreading pool of blood and purple foam.
Olt turned to find the guard still staring at him.
‘MOVE!’ Olt roared, the crackle of fire playing behind his voice, and at last the guard woke up, turned and fled. Olt shook his head in amazement and pressed on, herding the panicked city folk before him. He hoped the others were having an easier time.
‘This is simply unacceptable!’ snapped Bartiman as another fleeing noble barrelled into him, almost spilling him from his feet. The old wizard clung to Borik’s armoured form, the stolid duardin like a boulder amid rough seas.
‘I could just shoot us a way out,’ came B
orik’s baritone voice from within his helm. He brandished a short cutlass in one hand, and what he had proudly announced to be a Grundstock Aethermatic Repeating Handgun in the other.
‘No, let me deal with it,’ shouted Bartiman over the cacophony of screams and cries. ‘One should always practise one’s art lest one becomes–’
‘If you have to do something unnatural, just get on with it,’ interrupted Borik. He levelled his pistol and fired it with a loud bang, the shot snatching a charging spore-victim off their feet. Gears clicked and spun as the gun reloaded itself.
‘Very well, very well, bones of Shyish, rushing an old man,’ grumbled Bartiman. He cleared his throat and raised his arms, allowing his capacious sleeves and jangling bangles to slide down and leave his forearms bare. He reached out with his senses and found the magics he had spent his long life learning to channel. By now, they were old friends.
‘Ek’suneteh, melloch mel anar!’ Bartiman intoned, his voice growing deep and echoing as he chanted the incantation. ‘Asmosai, asmosai, ghastirith morbidaris Shyishia!’
Black energies leapt along his bone staff and coiled into the air. A howling gale blew up from nowhere and swept into the panicked crowd. It was an icy blast, carrying the howls and cackles of malevolent things as it battered the feastgoers and drove them bodily towards the nearest exits. Bartiman felt the exhilaration of unleashing his powers, caring not one jot that many of those closest to him stumbled away with their hair prematurely greying, or their skin beginning to wrinkle with sudden age. If it got them clear of the hall and away from those monstrous things then he didn’t care what effect it had on them in the long run.
‘There, we–’
He was interrupted as a heavy figure sailed through the air and slammed into him. Bartiman felt something snap in his chest as a great weight landed atop him, then cold fire blazed in his collar bone as fangs dug deep.
Panicking, wheezing, Bartiman struggled against the great weight pinning him. His vision greyed at the edges with shock and pain, and his old fingers fumbled hopelessly for the dagger at his belt. There came another deafening bang, a hot wet spray, and then the twitching corpse rolled off him as Borik shoved one booted foot into its ribs.
