She tapped herself on the chest. “Annaliese, Annaliese,” she repeated. Then she pointed at him and raised her eyebrows questioningly. He made no movement, merely continued staring at her with his lavender eyes.
“Annaliese,” she said once again, tapping herself on the chest. She pointed at him again and made a questioning motion. He probably thinks I have lost my mind, she thought. He stared at her for a moment longer, and began to turn away.
He turned back briefly, and tapped himself on the chest, “Eldanair Lathalos ath Laralemenos lo Nagarythe,” he breathed in a carefully enunciated voice, the words clipped and spoken quickly.
Annaliese stared at him. She didn’t catch any of what he had just said, and it was clear on her face.
The elf blinked, then spoke more slowly, tapping his chest.
“Eldanair,” he said, then turned his back on her.
“Eldanair,” said Annaliese quietly to herself, listening to the sound of the name as it rolled off her tongue. The way she said it didn’t sound quite how the elf had spoken it, but at least she now knew his name. It was a start.
CHAPTER FIVE
The darkened cellar was a bloodbath.
Men lay strewn upon the rough cobbled floor, moaning in agony as their lifeblood leaked from fatal wounds. The stench of the dead and dying was overpowering. There were shouts and curses, the ringing of steel upon steel, and the sickening, wet, meaty sound of swords cleaving flesh.
A thunderous voice rose above the din.
“No clemency! Let none leave here alive!”
More soldiers pounded down the stairs, swords drawn. They wore the black, slashed doublets of Nuln, and carried swords and bucklers—their more traditional halberds would have been next to useless in the confined space.
The enemy were not hard to discern amongst the frantic melee, for they wore long silken robes of blues, yellows and purples. They had drawn weapons of their own, and once they realised that there was to be no escape, they fought with a frenzy and lack of self-preservation that was off-putting, even to the battle-hardened of the state soldiers—they fought rabid, cornered animals.
“Grunwald! To me!” came the booming voice.
The burly, unshaven sergeant loosed a shaft from his crossbow. It punched through the forehead of one of the coven members who fell to his back, dead.
“You heard the man,” Udo Grunwald roared, hurling the crossbow to the side and pulling his heavy, flanged mace from his belt. “Push forward! We end this now!”
With a roar, he led a group of black-clad soldiers into the fray. He swatted a blade away from him with his heavy weapon and smashed the mace-head into a cultist’s face with his return blow, shattering his lower jaw in a spray of blood and teeth.
Another fell, a sword piercing his stomach, and Grunwald kicked him savagely in the head as he went down. A blade slashed across his shoulder and he grimaced in pain, and brained his attacker, the ridge edges of his heavy mace shattering the skull.
He heard a string of shouted words; phrases yelled in a language that he didn’t know.
Hissing against the pain in his shoulder, Grunwald, saw the towering, black-cloaked figure of the witch hunter Stoebar battling against a trio of assailants, consummate swordsman, his sabre flashed out, slicing open the throat of the first, and whipped back quickly enough to block a lethal cut from another foe that would have disembowelled him.
“With me!” shouted Grunwald, and pushed his way through the press of bodies towards the witch hunter, his mace crushing shoulders and breaking limbs.
The soldier to his left died as a spear was thrust into his throat, and another to his right was dropped as a knife plunged into his thigh. Still, the weight of the soldiers smashed the snarling cultists aside, clubbing them to the ground and plunging swords into their prone forms.
A wave of revulsion and nausea washed over them, and Grunwald staggered. He heard a voice chanting in an unholy language, and he felt his stomach contract tightly and painfully.
Again the witch hunter’s voice sounded out.
“Sigmar, lend us strength!”
Grunwald felt the pain within him lessen, and he opened his tightly clenched eyes to see a figure standing on a dais, arms raised over its head as its chant reached a crescendo.
The witch hunter Stoebar cut down the last of his opponents and leapt up the stairs towards the figure, and Grunwald staggered after him.
With a shout that hurt the eardrums with its intensity, the figure completed the incantation and dropped his arms to his side. A high collar of iridescent feathers framed the zealot’s lowered head. Naked to the waist, swirling blue patterns had been painstakingly etched onto his skin. Grunwald saw the twisted patterns begin to move, rotating in circular motions, weaving new patterns and symbols upon the zealot’s flesh.
With a roar of pure hatred and loathing, Stoebar raised his long bladed sabre over his shoulder as he drew near the coven leader, and the sword flashed out to open the throat of the motionless figure.
Throughout the basement, the last of the cultists were hacked down, and the state soldiers of Nuln closed in towards the dais, gripping their bloody weapons tightly as they watched the fateful blow fall.
Half a foot before the blade struck flesh the blow was halted. In mid-air the witch hunter’s blade stopped, and he gasped as he strained to complete the killing strike.
The zealot raised its head then, blue fire flickering in its eyes and a smile upon its lips.
The air around the sorcerer seemed to ripple as if with a wave of intense heat, and his flesh bulged unnaturally, as if things within were trying to escape as line of backwards curving barbs pushed through the skin of his forearms, forming a deadly ridge of horns and his hands extended into long, cruel talons, like those of some mutated eagle. Mouths screaming in obscene languages opened up all over the zealot’s body, ripping through muscle and flesh. Some were filled with needle-like teeth and long, sinuous tongue tipped with thorns, while others were little more than bony beaks filled with tiny, barbed teeth.
Stoebar seemed unable to move, and the creature reached forwards, gripping him by the shoulders. Blood welled where the daemon-possessed zealot’s talons bit into his flesh, and it drew him closer to its hideous, maddening form.
Then, merely by willing it so, the Chaos abomination ripped the witch hunter’s chest open. As if unseen knives slashed him, the clothes and armour of the witch hunter were slashed dozens of times, and the flesh was turned to bloody tatters. Ribs were snapped as his rib cage was pulled back by invisible hands, exposing the pulsing organs within. His heart exploded messily, and the dead witch hunter was hurled across the room away from the daemonically possessed zealot, landing in a wet, bloody heap at Grunwald’s feat.
The daemon’s eyes blazed with fire, and it opened its mouth wide, lips pulling back to expose a double set of sharpened teeth. It lifted one pale taloned hand before it and it began to glow with burning light, as if the fires of the sun were building within its flesh.
Grunwald reached down and grabbed the icon of Sigmar wrapped around the dead witch hunter’s hand—a bronze symbol depicting Sigmar’s holy hammer, Ghal Maraz. It was burning hot to the touch. He held it aloft by its chain, and he felt the heat radiated by the holy symbol increase tenfold. Blinding light spilled from the hammer icon as Grunwald cried out to the warrior god for aid.
But this is where his dream took a path divergent to what had occurred that night. Five years earlier, the creature had been driven back by the symbol, buying time for the soldiers to surge forwards and kill the daemon’s earthly body, sending it screaming back to its own plane of existence.
But not tonight.
No, in Grunwald’s dream the daemon merely laughed at him, mocking his pitiful, weak faith. It killed until Grunwald alone was left alive and frozen in place. And then the daemon began to tear at his skin with invisible claws. He felt his ribcage being pulled open, and heard the first cracks as the bones snapped…
He awoke
, gasping, sitting upright in his sweat-soaked bed. The pain in his chest lingered for a foment.
That was when he noticed the smoke. Swearing, he leapt up, throwing off the sheets, crossed to his door quickly, unbolting it and throw it wide. He stepped out onto the internal balcony above the bar. Smoke was thick, and he could see t glow of flames.
“Fire!” he roared. In his past life, before he became witch hunter, he had been a sergeant in the state army of Nuln, and he was well used to shouting loud enough and with enough authority for his orders to be heard and obeyed over the din of battle. “Fire!” he roared again, and people began to stumble from their bedrooms.
He saw Thorrik kick his door open violently. The dwarf was wearing his armour and brandished his axe in one hand, while his shield was on his other arm. Grunwald ran back into his room, and hastily pull on his boots and hitched his belt around his waist, feeling instantly more in control with his weapons at his side. He scooped up his belongings in his arms and quickly left the room. All the rooms were being vacated now, and there were screams and wails from the people trying to flee the rising inferno. The heat and smoke made him light headed. He saw the terrified, pale face of Fiedler as the plump man ran past him, dressed in his nightclothes. Stumbling out of the front door, the occupants spilled out into the cold, Grunwald and Thorrik amongst them. The Hanging Donkey was ablaze, flame leaping high up the old, leaning structure. Several people were making ineffective attempts to stem the blaze-throwing pails of water against the wood, and beating the flames with blankets.
There was a group of men standing in the main street out front, flaming brands held in their hands. The drunkard who Grunwald had stopped from killing the innocent man earlier that night stood in the middle of the group, knife in one hand and a burning torch in the other. It was clear that the men had continued drinking and now they had drunk themselves enough courage to return and finish what they had started, Grunwald surmised.
“What have you done?” wailed Fiedler.
“Shut up, worm,” shouted one of the men. “It’s your damned inn that is bringing people here!”
“Bring him to me!” shouted the instigator of this violence. “I’ve come to finish what I started!”
Grunwald, the braces of his trousers hanging by his sides and his undershirt unbuttoned and exposing his heavily scarred upper body, stalked towards the group, his square jaw jutting forwards.
At ten paces he drew his pistol from the holster on his belt and without a word shot the troublemaker in the head. The sound of the pistol was deafening, and blood, bits of skull and brain splattered over the gathered drunk locals, who stood frozen in shock.
Grunwald holstered the smoking pistol and drew his heavy-headed mace, facing off against the remaining ten men.
“You bastard!” snarled one of them, a young man Udo recognised from earlier in the night. He hurled his flaming brand at the witch hunter, and ran forwards with his knife drawn.
Grunwald swayed out of the brand’s path and stepped in to meet the man. With a deft side step he avoided the man’s drunken, clumsy blow and smashed his mace into his head, dropping him without a sound. The others hefted their own weapons, their faces angry and dark, and Udo realised that he was in some serious trouble. A gruff, rumbling voice halted the men before they could launch their attack.
“It’s a good day to die, manlings,” growled Thorrik, “Step forward and see if your time has come.”
The dwarf stamped forward heavily to stand at Grunwald’s side, and the witch hunter saw that he was fully decked out in his armour as if ready for war. He held his heavy, circular metal shield over his left arm, and his head was completely enclosed in a helmet shaped and worked to represent a stylised dwarf face. His eyes glittered dangerously within, and his heavy, short-handled axe was held over his shoulder ready to hack at the first man that came within range.
He looked absolutely impervious to harm, for there was not a single inch of exposed flesh on him. Udo had to admit he was an intimidating presence, despite his height. The men stood rooted to the spot, indecision cleat on their faces. None of them wanted to die here. He sensed the change in mood coming over them.
“You two,” he barked, pointing sharply at a pair of men, making them jump. “Pick up your friend here and take him home. He is alive, but his skull may be fractured. And you two,” he said, pointing to another pair, “see that your dead friend is buried. The rest of you, go and help fight those fires.”
His voice was commanding, brooking no argument and the men responded instantly, the fight having evaporated from them completely.
“Beardlings,” scoffed Thorrik, his voice muffle behind the thick metal of his full-face helm.
“Indeed,” said Grunwald, judging it was an insult by the tone of the dwarf’s voice. He walked back towards where he had placed his possessions, shortening his strides to allow the dwarf to walk alongside him, clanking in his heavy armour. He buttoned up his undershirt and pulled his braces over his broad shoulders.
The villagers were battling the flames, though it was impossible to tell if they were winning. Udo saw the barkeeper wringing his hands and hopping from foot to foot, doing little to help.
The pair aided the villagers, Grunwald organising them into worker teams to more efficiently tackle the blaze, and as the dawn began to light the sky, the last of the fire was put out. It had gutted the kitchen and a good portion of the common area, and the exterior was blackened, but the structure was more or less intact, though it would doubtless need months of work.
Grunwald’s face was blackened with soot. He approached Thorrik as he sat on the stoop smoking his pipe. “I’m leaving,” he said.
“Aye, sounds like a plan. I’ve had my fill of this stinking place.” He glared up at the fire-blackened inn. “That’s what comes of building with wood,” he remarked. “Only thing wood is good for is burning. Build something out of stone and it will stand for generations.”
“I can see the merit in that,” said Grunwald.
“I don’t understand you humans, you know,” said the dwarf, looking up at the brightening sky.
“Oh?”
“Your Empire is at war, and your people are suffering from starvation and plague. And yet still you fight amongst yourselves. Have you no honour?”
Grunwald thought about this for a moment and shrugged his shoulders. “Precious little these days, seems. Still, don’t judge us all by the actions of the weak and cowardly.”
“I don’t understand you humans,” said Thorrik. “I’m not sure that I ever will—and I will be glad of that.”
He stood up, and ensured that his pack was tightly secured. With dutiful care, he tightened the leather straps that held the long, oilskin wrapped object upon the pack, and tied his shield protectively over it.
“What is that you carry?” asked Udo as the dwarf hefted the heavy looking pack to his broad shoulders.
“Never you mind,” said the dwarf brusquely, shoving his helmet over his head. “Always wanting to know everyone else’s business, you humans,” came his voice, muffled behind the thick metal of his helm. Udo noted that the helmet even had a stylised metal moustache upon it. The helmet alone must have been worth a fortune, with all the intricate, bronze-gilt knotwork around its rim, let alone his entire set of armour.
Udo shrugged again, and Thorrik began to walk away, each heavy footstep leaving a deep impression in the muddy ground. He walked ten paces before he paused and turned back towards the witch hunter.
“Where you headed?” he said gruffly.
“I am returning to my temple, to seek the counsel of my superior. Near Black Fire Pass.”
The dwarf huffed in response.
“Well, come on then,” he said eventually. “I’m heading to Black Fire myself.”
Eldanair knelt in the undergrowth. He placed a hand to the ground, carefully and precisely reading the sign for even a trained woodsman there would be nothing here to see, but to the elf the ground was like an open book
, and he could read its stories effortlessly. Those that had left the tracks were not unskilled—indeed they displayed a skill that he found surprising this far from Ulthuan. No human could move through woodland and leave such a faint trail of its passing, and his unease grew. This was not the mark of one of his party, and he knew of no other Asur moving through this area, but he could not shake the belief that this was the spoor of one of his kin. Unconsciously, he brushed a wisp of long, dark hair behind one of his pointed ears, his eyebrows drawn together in thought upon his ivory forehead.
The human woman, Annaliese, stood behind him, watching him with interest. She showed spirit, this woman, though to his eyes her movements were painfully clumsy, slow and noisy. She had slowed his progress considerably, but he had bound himself to see her safe. And the safest place for her now was with his kin. The seer would know best what to do with her.
He moved on, picking his way silently through the trees. He paused again, touching his fingers to the cold earth. He lifted them to his nose, sniffing delicately. His concern grew.
These were not human tracks, he was sure of that now. Nor were they made by any of the foul creatures that existed within the dark, foreboding forests that engulfed the Empire.
Urging Annaliese to hurry, he began to run lightly trough the trees. Swift and silent, he leapt over fallen logs and ducked beneath low hanging branches, leaving no trace of his passing. Decades earlier he had mastered the art, and he now he did not break even single blade of grass with his soft footfalls. None would be able to track him.
The same could not be said for the human woman however. She crashed along behind him, and he had to pause often so that she was not left behind. He shook his head slightly at the noise she made as twigs and sticks cracked beneath her heavy footfalls. He glanced back sharply, irritation and impatience flashing in his eyes, and she looked up at him apologetically. It was unfair to blame her, he knew, but that didn’t make it easier to accept her inept blundering.
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