by Warhammer
More figures dashed into view, sprinting things with deformed faces and revolting froth spilling from their jaws. A mob of spore-sickened sprung onto the man before he could rise, and his screams echoed along the street. Aelyn made herself watch until it was over, until the infected had risen and stalked away, twitching and gibbering, a new figure in torn pantaloons lurching along in their midst.
She heard movement behind her, turned to see Romilla standing in the doorway.
‘They’re gone,’ she said quietly in answer to the priest’s unasked question.
‘So many we can’t save,’ said Romilla, shaking her head in sorrow.
‘There are those we can,’ said Aelyn. ‘But we need to decide how, and whom, and we need to do it now. I don’t believe that this building will remain inviolate for long.’
‘That’s true enough,’ said Romilla. ‘There are patches of fungi beginning to sprout from the walls on the ground floor, and watchman Shen found insects spilling into the basement armoury through a drain cover. He’s blocked it, but…’ Romilla’s shrug was eloquence enough.
This was a temporary sanctuary at best. At any moment, the horrors that prowled beyond its walls could come spilling in.
The two of them made their way along the house’s landing and down its ironoak stairs to the ground floor. Despite its dilapidated outward appearance, the interior of the building was smartly appointed in the colours of the Draconium Watch. It had the feel of a fortress, its fixtures and fittings austere and functional but for a few portraits of previous watch captains that hung on the walls. Aelyn wondered if such a portrait would be commissioned of Helena Morthan. It was the least she deserved, but it seemed tragically unlikely. Barring a miracle, Aelyn wasn’t sure there would be a city left for that portrait to be painted in soon.
They picked their way over the sleeping forms of exhausted city folk and nodded reassuringly to others who huddled watchfully in corners, their clothes stained with dirt and blood, their possessions or loved ones clutched close.
The largest of the ground floor rooms was what Aelyn took to be the office of whichever watch officer had run this place. It boasted a solidly-built desk and chair, a half-stocked weapons rack and scroll shelving along one wall that overflowed with rolled parchments. A large street map of the Docksflow and Marketsway districts dominated another wall, festooned with brass pins and faded notes; Aelyn assumed each pin related to a recent incident. She noted uncomfortably that, if she tilted her head slightly, they described the rough shape of a crescent moon.
Borik, Bartiman and Eleanora were all sleeping in this room, their bedrolls pushed up against the wall nearest the weapons. A couple of the watchmen had chosen to bed down here too. Watchman First Class Shen stood guard by the window. A pale sliver of moonlight made a sickly stripe across the man’s face. It made him look pale and drawn.
As Aelyn and Romilla entered, he looked around.
‘Who’s in the upper lookout?’ he asked softly.
‘Currently, no one,’ replied Aelyn. ‘We’ve rested long enough. We need to make plans.’
‘Not alone, you won’t,’ said Shen, and Aelyn couldn’t tell whether his firm tone was meant to sound comradely or threatening. ‘I’ll wake a couple of the third class and set them on guard. If you mercenaries are planning your next move, myself, First Class Marika and First Class Thackeray should join you.’
‘As you wish,’ said Aelyn. The watchmen knew that she had been entrusted with Captain Morthan’s brooch of office. No one knew what had become of Lieutenant Grange, and in his absence the watchmen seemed to have assumed that meant Morthan had also entrusted Aelyn with the fight for Draconium. When talking their way into the sanctuary of the safe house, it had seemed prudent not to disabuse them of the notion. She wondered, though, how they would feel by the end of the conversation she knew must be had. Were the Swords of Sigmar Draconium’s saviours, or mercenaries who would cut and run now that the money had dried up?
Honestly, at that moment, even Aelyn herself didn’t know the answer to that question.
While Romilla went in search of breakfast, Aelyn woke each of her comrades in turn. Borik, whose only concession to comfort had been removing his helm before he fell asleep, was surly and quiet. Bartiman was pale and drawn; the deaths of his companions seemed to have aged him, and he required some effort to wake. Eleanora smiled wanly at Aelyn when she woke, but her skin was clammy and warm to the touch.
Romilla returned with a few scant provisions and a warm jug of metha, then proceeded to move Aelyn aside and see to Eleanora’s bitten foot. Aelyn winced at the sight of puffy flesh and blackened veins creeping up to Eleanora’s knee. What could they do, though, except rely upon Romilla’s knowledge as a healer and what meagre supplies she still possessed?
Watchmen First Class Marika and Thackeray arrived just as Eleanora was pulling her boots on, struggling with her swollen ankle. Marika was a short woman with an intense cast to her features and a long scar running down one cheek, while Thackeray looked far too boyish to be a watchman first class. Aelyn could read his calm composure, however; no matter that the world had gone to the hells around him, she sensed that Watchman Thackeray intended to do his duty to the last.
The Swords and the watchmen gathered around the desk. Everyone stared at each other. No one quite seemed to know where to start.
‘We’re leaving,’ said Borik after the pause had become uncomfortable. Aelyn looked sharply around at him, but the duardin’s expression was stubbornly unrepentant.
‘We haven’t decided anything of the sort!’ exclaimed Romilla.
‘Captain Morthan trusted you with a duty!’ said Watchman Shen at the same time.
‘Captain Morthan still owes us a substantial sum of money,’ replied Borik. ‘As it doesn’t look likely that’s going to be paid, our services are no longer available. Are they, Aelyn?’
‘Typical cheffing mercenaries,’ muttered Watchman Marika. ‘No faith, no loyalty, no care for Sigmar’s realm, just in it for yourselves.’
‘We’ve lost three of our own to this nightmare,’ Romilla retorted hotly, turning a furious glare upon Marika. ‘One before we even got here! We didn’t need to come to your damned city, didn’t need to bring you our warning.’
‘Oh, and what good did that warning do anyway?’ asked Marika. ‘The way I heard it, you fools turned up with a few scraps of prophecy and nary a clue how they related to anything. I heard the regent militant threw you out of his palace.’
‘That much is true, and look at how matters have turned out,’ said Bartiman sourly. ‘Perhaps if your precious regent militant had listened to us when we arrived he’d be alive now and so would a lot of other folk.’
‘Listened to what?’ snapped Watchman Shen. ‘A bundle of half-formed guesswork? The words of a tainted freak? Lieutenant Grange told us all about you lot, don’t worry about that. He had no idea why the captain put any faith in you at all.’
‘Maybe the captain recognised a company of proper warriors when she saw one, realised we’d be more help than you glorified night watchmen,’ growled Borik. ‘Doesn’t matter anyway, she’s dead and she’s not paying us any more, so whatever task the captain had for us here, it’s done.’
‘She trusted you with her brooch of office!’ cried Marika. ‘You claim to be good servants of Sigmar! How can you possibly spit upon all of that and turn away when an entire city is at risk?’
‘What damned city?’ Borik shot back. ‘Half of it’s in ruins already, and how long before the rest follows? Open your eyes, human. You lost this fight before it even started. The best thing you can do now is evacuate as many folk as you can and leave the place to the grobs.’
‘You’d like us to run away, wouldn’t you?’ asked Marika, her tone venomous. ‘Make you feel better about your own cowardice, wouldn’t it? I thought duardin were supposed have backbones.’
‘It’s
not a lack of courage I suffer from, just a lack of stupidity!’ yelled Borik furiously. ‘There’s neither profit nor sense in fighting an enemy that’s already beaten you!’
‘No one is running anywhere!’ said Romilla. ‘We haven’t decided anything, Borik. You don’t speak for us, Aelyn does.’
‘Grungni’s divine arse!’ shouted Borik. ‘Am I the only one who remembers who we are? We are mercenaries, Romilla. Mercenaries. We fight for money. Hendrick was the bleeding heart who decided we had to come here and get mixed up in all this madness. Gods give us Varlen back, he’d never have brought us within a hundred miles of such a profitless mess.’
‘Varlen would have wanted to aid these people, just as Hendrick did, and you know it,’ shouted Romilla. ‘Varlen, Hendrick, Olt – the Bad Moon claimed all their lives and yet you just want to turn tail and run? What of vengeance, Borik? Do not our friends deserve to be avenged?’
‘Against all of that out there? Amidst this madness?’ asked Borik. ‘Who’s going to avenge us when we’re all dead, Romilla? Because that’s all anyone who stays here is going to be.’
‘You see, they’re just a bunch of damned cowards!’ exclaimed Watchman Marika to her comrades. ‘I told you we couldn’t rely on them!’
‘All of you, shut up.’ Aelyn didn’t raise her voice, but her words cut through the angry tumult all the same. Everyone turned to stare angrily at her. ‘Keep your voices down, or do you want to bring a horde of greenskins down upon us?’ she asked. There were a few uncomfortable glances towards the boarded window. People strained for any telltale sounds of scrabbling claws or animal snarls.
‘Captain Morthan tasked us with the defence of this city,’ said Watchman Thackeray into the restored quiet. ‘It’s a simple enough question. Do you plan to help us, or don’t you?’
‘It is not so simple as you imagine,’ said Aelyn. ‘I ask you, what do we face here? Why has this curse descended upon Draconium?’
‘The Moonclan grots, we know that much,’ said Bartiman, who was clutching his hot mug of metha to his breast like a talisman.
‘What, Grobi-the-blackcap? The lurkers below?’ asked Shen incredulously.
‘Is anyone even still asking that question?’ replied Romilla. ‘You’ve all seen them out there. You’ve seen the Bad Moon in the skies above. Fairy tales are only fairy tales until they’re sinking their fangs into your neck. They don’t care whether you believe in them or not, they’ll kill you either way.’
Shen looked ready to argue further, but Marika put a hand on his arm and shook her head.
‘You haven’t been out there, Shen,’ she said, her former anger replaced by a haunted tone. ‘Just believe us, it’s all true and much more besides. There’s things from nightmares roaming the streets. I saw a spider big as three coaches weaving its web right around a townhouse, for Sigmar’s sake. The people inside were still screaming…’
‘Strip away the fae-tales and underneath you find greenskins, albeit monstrous ones,’ said Thackeray. ‘They wreak destruction for its own sake, do they not? Surely the answer to your question is that Draconium is beset simply because we were unfortunate enough to stand in their path.’
‘I don’t believe so, and neither does Eleanora,’ said Aelyn. ‘Is that not right?’
The engineer looked stricken as all eyes turned to her. She counted quickly on her fingers then brushed her sweat-lank hair back from her forehead.
‘Too much planning, too many omens,’ she said. ‘Unrest, unnatural phenomena, all chipped away at the city’s capacity to fight back. Draconium was under siege but we didn’t recognise it, because the methods were too strange. Food, morale, defences all eroded over a turning or so, then when the attack came it was coordinated all across the city. Who poisoned the regent militant? That wasn’t random elemental violence, it was part of a deliberate strategy of terror and organisational destabilisation that suggests prodigious forethought.’
‘Are we sure it’s greenskins at all?’ asked Shen. ‘That sounds more like the machinations of some cult to the Dark Gods.’
‘It’s greenskins all right, but they don’t fight like any I’ve ever faced before,’ said Aelyn. ‘Orruks come at you from the front, an avalanche that sweeps away all before it. This is insidious, cunning, a poisoned blade sunk into your back before you even know you are at war. But I ask again, in aid of what?’
‘Conquest, ruin, pure and simple,’ said Borik, in a tone intended to brook no argument. ‘Greenskins can be wily but they don’t plan ahead. It’s as the watchman said, Draconium was just in their way.’
‘I don’t think that we can choose our path until we know for sure whether that is true,’ said Aelyn. ‘Perhaps you are right, Borik. Perhaps this is simply ill fortune, and the best course of action is to clear the path of the avalanche. We could make for the towns and cities to the south, warn them of Draconium’s fate and call down the wrath of the Stormcasts to retake whatever remained of the city.’ She held up a hand to forestall Marika’s angry protests. ‘But what if that is not the right move? What if that ghastly moon hanging above us… what if the greenskins have conjured it somehow? What if they have a wider-reaching plan, and its light ends up spreading to all the corners of this realm?’
‘How do we know that isn’t already the case?’ asked Romilla darkly.
‘You said it yourself, Sigmar made the Stormcast Eternals to deal with matters of such vast import,’ said Borik, taking an angry swig of his metha. ‘If there is truly some dreadful plan afoot here, let them be the ones to deal with it. But I don’t believe it. I’ll butcher greenskins as gladly as the next duardin, but I follow the Kharadron code, and its statutes leave no room for doubt – there’s no profit in a losing battle, and the honourable dead are still dead all the same.’
‘Krysthenna’s cult tried to leave,’ said Eleanora quietly.
‘Rust it all, Krysthenna’s cult were a gang of moon-eyed fools who marched out into the wilds without a blade between them,’ snapped Borik.
‘And how much better do you believe the people of this city would fare, if they tried to flee?’ asked Marika.
‘If they have any sense, they already have fled,’ Borik replied. ‘As we should. As we’re going to.’
‘We are called the Swords of Sigmar, not simply the Swords,’ said Romilla. ‘There’s a reason Varlen and Hendrick chose that name, Borik. No matter how much you try to argue otherwise, you know that they cared more about their duty to the God-King than they did about the money they earned performing it. They became mercenaries because it suited their methods, not because they cared more about coin than they did about the war for the Mortal Realms.’
‘And now they’re dead,’ said Borik. ‘I don’t intend to make the same mistake. You can all do what you like. Varlen hired me and my contract ended with his death. I’ve come this far on faith, but no further. This isn’t our fight, it isn’t worth our deaths, and if I can’t make anyone else see that then I’ll light a mourner’s beacon for you all when I’m next aboard an airship.’
‘The Swords of Sigmar will stay and aid you in your fight,’ said Aelyn, addressing the watchmen as though Borik hadn’t spoken. ‘But we will not fight blindly. I propose a scouting mission to discover our foes’ intentions.’
‘We should also try to link up with other defenders,’ said Thackeray, nodding. ‘We can’t fight back just the few of us, but I don’t believe that we’re the only ones left. There are other safe-houses, other arms caches. Perhaps we may still find Lieutenant Grange as the captain asked.’
‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this foolishness!’ exclaimed Borik. ‘If you–’
Aelyn spun, interrupting Borik with a raised finger. She marched past him to where the Swords’ remaining bags had been piled in a heap. A moment’s rummaging and she returned with a felt pouch, which she thumped down on the table before him with a heavy clink of coin.
&
nbsp; ‘You are leaving. You have made that sufficiently clear. Does anyone else consider their business in Draconium concluded?’
Romilla stared back at Aelyn fiercely, her answer clear. Eleanora looked to Romilla, then looked back and shook her head. Aelyn felt her determination waver as she saw a complex mix of emotions pass across Bartiman’s features. The wizard made her wait long enough that she thought perhaps they had lost him too, but then he sighed.
‘Hendrick… Olt… no, this has gone far enough. It’s personal, and I’ll not leave their shades to roam unavenged.’ He coughed wetly into his handkerchief, which by now was stained a ruddy brown. He huffed ruefully. ‘Besides, I’ve breathed in too much of this city’s muck, I suspect. My soul is long overdue in the Land of Endings. Perhaps it’s time to come to terms with that at last. I’d rather die doing something meaningful than waste away knowing my last true choice was to abandon the few friends I have. Borik, for the gods’ sakes stay, will you?’
The duardin’s face had set into an impassive mask when Aelyn thumped the coins down in front of him. She knew that he was the most truly mercenary amongst their number, that his code compelled him to act in that fashion and that to a duardin such matters were of gravest import. Still, she dared to hope for a moment that Bartiman’s words might have swayed him.
Moving stiffly, Borik took the coin purse and tucked it into a pouch on his belt. He looked around at them, his expression unreadable, then turned without a word and marched over to collect his equipment. No one spoke as the duardin donned his helm, hefted pack and gun, and strode from the room. Borik paused in the doorway for a heartbeat, and then he left. The door swung shut with a click behind him. Aelyn sighed deeply into the deafening quiet that followed.
Another comrade gone. Silently, she wished Borik luck in escaping the city alive. Then she turned back to those who remained.
‘So, a scouting mission,’ she said.
Chapter Thirteen
CURSED