by Warhammer
Fresh alarm filled Orlen as stinking fumes built up in the air. Instinct drove him in a scramble along the drain, through sticky patches of rotting fungi that slicked his palms, and out into the open.
Just in time.
Orlen hissed at the sight of a rippling black carpet flowing across the cobbles towards him. Insects of every sort scuttled and squirmed frantically towards the shadows of the drain, thousands upon thousands of them. Panic lending his weakened frame strength, Orlen scrambled like an animal up a nearby heap of rubble and then into the branches of a withered and listing tree. For a moment he felt his grip fail him as exhaustion and malnutrition sought to pull him down into the seething tide of insects below.
Somehow, Orlen hung on. Below him, insects were pouring into the drain he had vacated. So many pressed in at once that they piled in a drift about the drain’s entrance, scrabbling over one another in a clicking mass of waving antennae and flailing legs. Many didn’t make it, shrivelling and squealing as the last rays of daylight found them and pinned them in place. Soon, a desiccated carpet of lifeless husks covered the ground. Then came bigger creatures, greenskins in black robes and pointed hoods. They ran, faces grim as they cast hateful glances up at the open sky. Orlen sensed the panic that came off them in waves. They had taken his place, he realised. Now it was these sharp-fanged monsters that fled into the shadows for fear of what might hunt them. The greenskins snarled, jabbering in fear at the sight of the drain clogged with insect corpses. They dropped to their hands and knees and dug madly, scooping fistfuls of crunching matter out of the way. They fought and pushed and clawed at one another to go first, one of them driving a blade into another’s throat and leaving him to thrash and bleed into stillness amidst the dead insects. Like maggots vanishing into an open wound, the creatures squirmed into the storm drain and were gone. Orlen felt the rays of evening light bathe his skin, and the feeling brought forth a vague recollection of a time before madness, and terror, and pain. He remembered a family, waiting for him in Hammerhal Aqsha, and tears spilled from his deep-shadowed eyes at the thought that perhaps, against all the odds, he might live to see them again. He looked up and saw clouds streaked salmon pink and pale grey. He saw the flanks of the volcanoes limned with the golden light of Hysh as the stately dance of the heavens swept it from view and the first stars of night flickered into being.
True night, natural night, with no sign of the monstrous moon that had hung above the city for so long.
Orlen looked down from his vantage point for a long time, until he was absolutely sure that nothing was moving. Then, at last, as the night wind rose and began gently to sweep the insect corpses across the cobbles with a susurrus whisper, Orlen scrambled down from his perch.
He was hungry, and exhausted, and every part of him hurt. But he had a family to return to. A life.
Stepping gingerly, jumping at every sound of movement from the dead city around him, Orlen began the long trudge homewards.
When Romilla opened her eyes and found herself still alive, she wept with gratitude. Her silent tears became a flood when she found Eleanora lived too. Both of them were a mess, certainly, covered with cuts and bruises. Her robes were torn and fire-blackened, and her back was a raw mass of pain that she knew must be burns. Her ears rang, and she felt as though her wits had been blasted from her skull.
It didn’t matter. They lived.
A sudden shock of realisation caused Romilla to grab for the ragged hem of her cloak and try to throw it over Eleanora’s prone form: they were lying out in the open, patches of their skin exposed to the skies above! Yet as Romilla looked upwards and her eyes at last managed to focus, a sense of wonderment stole over her.
It was gone. The Bad Moon was gone, replaced by straggling clouds and the last amber glow of evening.
They lay upon a spongy and disgusting mass of fungus, tangled amidst a heap of wreckage, of twisted metal and shattered stones and a forest of sundered pipes, ruptured machinery and the black-burned husks of giant spiders. The ruins of the pipehouse loomed over them, thick smoke rising in a billowing plume from its shattered glass roof.
‘We’re… alive?’ asked Eleanora in a faltering voice, wide-eyed with bewilderment.
‘The grace of Sigmar, my girl! Oh, thank the God-King, we’re saved by the grace of Sigmar,’ Romilla replied.
‘We must have been ejected through the rent by the blast wave,’ said Eleanora, staggering to her feet and looking around at the wreckage surrounding them. ‘We were near the end of the stanchion… Yes, look at the damage to the building’s flank, we were caught in the blast cone and blown clear amidst a bow-wave of detritus. Romilla, the chances of our escape… if we had been a mere foot to either side, or a little further from the hole…We would have burned…’
‘You got it just right, as I knew you would,’ said Romilla with a weary smile.
Eleanora was still frowning furiously, counting on her fingers and looking from the building’s wall to the fungal pulp in which she stood. She shook her head, and Romilla knew that the engineer was reasoning out their fortunate escape, calculating every angle, trajectory and whatever other technical details helped her to rationalise what had occurred.
‘We must have landed atop one of the greenskins’ fungal outcroppings. That at least does not seem so unreasonable. I mean, they sprout everywhere the light of–’
Eleanora stopped. She looked up. She made a choking sound and put one hand to her mouth.
Romilla nodded. ‘It’s gone,’ she said simply.
‘We did it,’ said Eleanora.
Romilla shook her head, and wrapped her arms around Eleanora in a tight hug. They held each other and sobbed, all the terror and horror and pain flooding out of them in a tide.
At last, feeling exhausted but somehow cleansed, Romilla leaned back and looked at Eleanora. The engineer’s hair was still plastered to her face with old sweat, but her fever had broken, and the black lines had vanished from beneath her skin.
‘Let me see your leg,’ said Romilla, then winced at the sight. Fire had burned Eleanora’s flesh, but it looked to have done so many weeks ago, not mere minutes. On closer inspection Romilla realised that she could find no sign beneath the gnarled and silvered scar tissue of the corruption that had been spreading there before. Instead, she realised with growing wonderment, the burns on Eleanora’s leg described a jagged, scything pattern that wound around her injured limb from foot to thigh.
‘Lightning,’ breathed Romilla.
‘It aches, but not like before,’ said Eleanora in bewilderment.
‘And your fever is gone.’
‘How can that possibly be?’ asked Eleanora.
Romilla held up her hammer amulet for Eleanora to see. It was cracked right down the middle, and its blue glow was gone. They stared at one another in mute astonishment, and even Eleanora, for once, could offer no rationalisation for what had happened. Romilla looked up at the crumbling ruin of the pipehouse, at the place where, by rights, she and Eleanora should have died.
‘Let us get out of this awful place,’ she said to Eleanora. ‘Can you walk on that leg?’ The engineer took a few tentative steps, wincing with pain, then nodded and picked up another twisted spar of metal to serve as a makeshift shiv.
‘We need to find our friends,’ she replied.
Walking the streets of Draconium in the light of that blessed evening was the most surreal experience of Romilla’s life. All around her was the evidence of slaughter, destruction and butchery. Bodies lay in chewed heaps. Buildings lay in ruin, or slumped crumbling and broken across the streets. Yet the Bad Moon was gone, banished, Romilla assumed, by Sigmar’s divine might. Or perhaps it had simply turned its gaze elsewhere when its worshippers’ plans were undone, she thought; if the gods of Chaos could be so fickle, could discard their followers’ lives so lightly when they were not appeased, then why not the gods of the greenskins? For s
urely the Bad Moon must be a foul god. What other being could have wreaked so much unnatural misery and ruin?
‘The fungi are entering an accelerated state of decomposition,’ Eleanora said as they limped down a cobbled street between shattered shop-fronts. Romilla saw she was right; everywhere she looked, foul toadstools were bubbling with rot and collapsing into blackened slurry.
‘Perhaps they cannot live without the light of the Bad Moon,’ she suggested.
‘Good, I hope they all rot,’ said Eleanora with more venom than Romilla had ever heard in her voice. ‘The fungi, the insects, the greenskins, all of it. And I hope the Bad Moon suffers worst of all.’
Romilla thought that last was unlikely, but as they staggered in a bewildered daze through the empty streets, she saw that much of Eleanora’s wish seemed to be coming true. Fungal slurry slicked the cobbles and the stink of rot filled the air. Corpses of greenskins and squigs lay everywhere, mingled in amongst the bodies of the Draconium dead. In places, they waded through the dried out husks of foul insects, heaped now like mountainous drifts of fallen leaves. What had killed them, Romilla could not say for sure, but she presumed that without the light of the Bad Moon these vile things, too, had withered and died. The only other suggestion of the greenskins or their foul creatures that she saw was hints of movement in the deepest shadows, red eyes glinting and wicked fangs bared in snarls of fear as the grots fled back underground.
They rounded a corner into a wide thoroughfare and Romilla tensed as she saw two of the spore-sickened lurching towards them. Yet she realised that the cursed creatures were stumbling and gasping, their flesh bubbling like the toadstools at their feet. As she watched, skin and muscle sloughed from their bones and noxious froth spilled from their mouths, noses and eye sockets. One of the infected reached a withering hand towards her as it fell to its knees, and for a horrible moment Romilla thought she saw a glint of terror in its eyes. Then it collapsed into a mouldering heap and she put the thought from her mind as best she could. Just one more nightmare to add to the pile.
Still, Romilla thought as they limped on towards Fountains Square, she was more glad than ever that she had given Hendrick Sigmar’s mercy when she could. The thought of her old comrade brought sorrow, and she quickened her step, praying fervently that they might find their remaining friends still alive somewhere ahead.
The square was a blackened pit. Every building around its edge was blasted flat, and scorched corpses lay strewn about like fallen leaves. The devastation caused by the explosion was so absolute, so shocking, that it took Romilla and Eleanora long minutes to grasp the scale of what they had wrought.
Silent and full of dread, they searched for their friends all the same. Minutes became hours and the stars wheeled above them as, eyes grainy with exhaustion and hearts leaden with dismay, they sifted through the charnel horror of the square. Eleanora’s limp became more pronounced and she stumbled more than once, but she did not complain.
At last, they found Bartiman Kotrin lying amidst a tangle of corpses near the edge of the ragged pit that had devoured much of the square. His tattered cloak had caught upon a jutting spar of wood and had saved him from a plunge into the yawning gulf below. Carefully, gradually, Romilla and Eleanora reeled their comrade’s body in and pulled him up from the brink, trying all the time not to dislodge the tangle of limbs and wreckage that had arrested his plunge.
All the while, Romilla’s heart was in her throat. Bartiman looked so frail, so battered and limp. There was no sign of life in him at all. She prayed with all her might that some spark of life still clung on within the old wizard’s body, but she didn’t believe it was so.
At last they had him, and as they pulled Bartiman back from the edge the corpse-mound gave way. Bodies slid and tangled, slipping one by one over the edge and into the dark depths below.
Romilla rolled Bartiman onto his back and slid the balled up remains of her cloak beneath his frail old head. He was so pale, she thought, looked so wizened. Praying fervently, desperately, she lowered her head and listened. Faint, so faint, she heard the rattling wheeze of Bartiman’s breath rasping in and out. Relief blossomed inside her, but also urgency.
‘El, he’s close to the brink,’ she said. ‘We need to get him out of here, to somewhere with clean water and a fire’s warmth. Help me make a litter.’
‘What about Aelyn? We have to find her too,’ said Eleanora as the two of them cast about for the right bits of wreckage to fashion a makeshift stretcher for their friend. Romilla stopped for a moment and looked around sorrowfully.
‘We have searched all night, El,’ she said. ‘We’ve covered every yard of this square. It is near dawn, and we have seen no sign of her. Bartiman is here, now, but he won’t be for long if we do not get him somewhere that I can care for him properly. Do you understand me?’
Eleanora looked at Romilla without expression for several heartbeats, then blinked and counted her fingers. Right hand. Left.
‘Perhaps she escaped,’ she said as she dragged a blackened branch out from beneath a scattering of rubble.
‘Perhaps she did, and we will see her again,’ said Romilla, yet as they lashed their makeshift litter together she felt a bone-deep sorrow at another lost friend. Sigmar had lent them his grace, she thought, but they had suffered terribly for it. She had not buried this many friends at once in a very long while. She had hoped never to do so again.
They lashed Bartiman in place and bundled him in what remained of their watch cloaks. Romilla applied what scant herbs and tinctures she had left, hoping at least to ease the pain of the old wizard’s wounds. Then they hefted their burden and set off, moving slowly towards the south gatehouse, barely managing more than a shamble. They would not stay in Draconium another hour, thought Romilla, not another minute longer than they had to. The greenskins’ plans had been stopped. Countless thousands of lives had been saved from a blight few would ever know had threatened them. Sigmar’s work was done.
Yet the city was a corpse, gutted and dead, and it had claimed too many good friends.
It was time to leave.
Romilla and Eleanora carried Bartiman out through the half-collapsed ruin of the gate through which they had entered Draconium so many days before. They walked out into the first light of a new dawn, through drifting ground mist and faint golden light.
Romilla had hoped perhaps to see the refugees of Draconium waiting upon the road. She had prayed that perhaps their efforts would indeed have given the surviving city folk a chance to escape, that they could have saved a few hundred lives from all those who had dwelt in this cursed city. It would have been some small compensation to her, that they could have done something for the people of the city they had failed to save. Perhaps there would also have been someone to help them save Bartiman’s life.
Instead she saw an empty road, dotted only with the corpses of those who had tried to flee. The marshes stretched beyond, the dew glinting gold upon long stems of grass in the dawn’s light. The waters of the canal lapped and splashed quietly, the half-submerged hull of a single barge jutting up from their dirty depths.
‘We have no food, and no medicine,’ said Eleanora. ‘It’s a long way to anywhere, Romilla. How are we–’
‘Sigmar will provide,’ said Romilla quickly, cutting the question off before Eleanora could ask it. She thought that if the question was voiced, the unfairness of it all might finally undo her. Romilla would drop to her knees in the roadway amongst the dead and scream until her sanity snapped.
Instead, she hefted Bartiman’s stretcher and pushed aside the bone-deep weariness that threatened to pull her down.
‘We go south,’ she said. ‘And Sigmar will provide.’
They were an hour’s walk south into the forest, travelling slowly along the trade road that ran beside the canal, when Romilla halted suddenly. Even through a haze of exhaustion, she had heard the crack of branches breaking und
erfoot amidst the ashenpines off to their right.
She set down her end of the litter and turned, raising her makeshift metal shiv. She motioned for Eleanora to do the same. The cracking came again, echoing between the tightly packed trees. She and Eleanora exchanged a look. The forest canopy was dense here, and little enough daylight got through. If something foul had fled the city into the forest… They shuffled closer together, between Bartiman and the trees, and waited.
The branches stirred, then parted.
Romilla brandished her blade.
Then she sagged with relief as Watchman First Class Marika emerged from between the ashenpines. The watchman stared at them in frank disbelief. She lowered her pistol, then put her fingers into the corners of her mouth and whistled short and sharp.
Two more figures emerged behind her, a watchman and a militiaman. They gaped at Romilla and Eleanora, who stared back in equal shock.
‘You’re alive,’ said Marika finally. ‘Sigmar’s throne, you survived!’
‘Barely, and not all of us,’ replied Romilla. ‘And Bartiman still may not live. Please, tell me you have a camp near here. He needs a fire, broth, bandages and herbs if you have them. I–’
Marika held up a hand and smiled, the first honest smile that Romilla had seen in a long while.
‘Follow me,’ she said. ‘You helped us beat them. You banished the moon. What we have is yours.’
Marika’s companions moved to take up the litter but Romilla waved them away, and she and Eleanora hoisted their frail companion between them. They followed Marika into the underbrush, taking care not to let stray branches or thorns scratch at Bartiman’s unconscious form. The watchman and the militiaman fell in behind them, betraying themselves as city-dwellers with every crack of a broken twig that snapped beneath their feet.
