by Rob Sanders
‘What?’
‘If we couldn’t find him,’ Diederick clarified, ‘you said not to worry about you. Where would you go?’
Nils looked uncomfortable.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ the squire said. Diederick nodded. Silence dominated the stone circle. It was eerie. Sounds reached out for them from the Drakwald beyond. Every scurry, every snapped twig and flutter through the foliage drew their eye-flitting gaze. ‘All right,’ Nils said suddenly.
‘It’s fine…’
‘I’ve waited long enough,’ Nils said. ‘I’m going to Altdorf. To the cathedral. To the chapterhouse. I’m going to apply to be a knight. If the Knights of the Twin-Tailed Orb will have me. If Sigmar will have me.’
Diederick mulled over what the squire had said. ‘I’m sure Sigmar will accept you into the ranks as he has accepted you into his heart. That’s not the problem. Squire or not – only sons of noble birth can apply to the chapterhouse.’
‘It’s only a matter of time,’ Nils said, his thoughts wandering. ‘Even if we find him – sooner or later Kastner will end up with a sword in his gullet in one of his drunken duels or a pitchfork through his heart from some farmer, whose wife or daughter he wronged. That beastman in the Schadensumpf last month almost got the better of him. Or more likely, he will just fall to a tavern floor one night and not get back up.’
‘All true,’ Diederick admitted. ‘But that doesn’t help you.’
Nils leant in conspiratorially.
‘For years, Sieur Kastner has been a menace to maidens all over the province. It was going on long before I joined him. It is said that his issue routinely arrive at his estates in the Gruber Marches – sent by their commoner mothers to find their father and seek their fortune.’
‘I have heard such things,’ Diederick agreed.
‘Have you ever met Lady Kastner?’ Nils asked.
‘No.’
‘Neither have I,’ Nils said, ‘which isn’t surprising considering how often Kastner returns to his estates. She keeps a townhouse in the city also. It is well known that Lady Kastner is of good heart: a giver of alms to the poor, a good mistress of the Marches and unlike her husband – a true Sigmarite.’
‘Good to hear but so what?’
‘What is less known,’ Nils told him, ‘is that partly out of good heart and partly out of resentment for her husband’s disgraceful antics, Lady Kastner sponsors his baseborn’s beginnings with wealth from the estate and allows them to carry his name.’
‘You would present yourself as Sieur Kastner’s issue?’ Diederick asked.
Nils nodded slowly, looking down at his reflection in the short sword’s oiled blade. There was a self-satisfied grin on his face. ‘Would you tell her of his death?’
‘I would take some small proof,’ Nils said, thinking on it. ‘Dead or alive, Lady Kastner is mistress of the Gruber Marches. Does she not deserve to re-marry? Does she not deserve some small happiness of her own?’
Diederick never got opportunity to answer the squire’s question. ‘Did you hear that?’ Nils said, getting to his feet. Diederick had and even if he hadn’t, Oberon’s ears had pricked up. Through the curtain of dripping and nocturnal movements the forest had to offer, it sounded like a distant and angry wail: some agonising roar of fear and frustration. The two boys looked at each other, their faces pale in the moonlight. Nils took several steps towards the sound with sword in hand. Snatching up the lantern and Oberon’s reins, Diederick followed.
‘Come on,’ Nils said grimly, cutting his way back into the blackness of the tangled forest.
As they moved through the maze of midnight trunks and snarled foliage, they heard the dreadful call again. It was Sieur Kastner. They would know it anywhere. He sounded weak. Desperate. In pain. Nils went to call out to him but Diederick’s hand grabbed his shoulder. The pair stopped. Oberon snorted its anxiety. There were whisperings about them. Voices harsh and hushed, hidden in the forest night. The boys stared about in neck-craning disconcertion. Sieur Kastner called out again. This time it was more of a miserable howl of agony. Much closer. Almost an echo.
Nils pushed on through the Drakwald but once again Diederick’s hand shot out for his shoulder. Nils hacked through the rampant shrubbery of the ancient forest, his blade slicing its way back through to the moon’s ailing glow. His boot found nothing before it and the squire slid down a collapsed bank of shredded roots and saturated earth. Diederick’s hand slipped down his shoulder and arm, the two squires grabbing for one another as they ran out of limb. Snapping his hand closed about Nils’s own, Diederick was almost pulled after the squire, as the pair of them hung off the edge of a forest sinkhole. With his other hand, Diederick held onto Oberon’s reins, the weight of the horse the only thing preventing the pair from plunging into the gaping hollow.
The steed, also not wishing to fall, reared – which fortunately was what the squires needed it to do. With Nils back on solid ground and Diederick regaining the use of his arm, the pair clung to the trunks of rain-drenched trees and peered into the large sinkhole. It was lined with ancient trees and foliage fortunate enough not to have fallen in. Its walls were threaded with rotten roots and jagged with stones but everything was greasy with moss and mud, as rainwater from the surrounding woodland dribbled down into the depression. Diederick went to grab the staff-lantern but discovered that he didn’t need it. Mannslieb gleamed down on the Drakwald, dusting the canopy with a sickly, silver light that penetrated and illuminated the sinkhole’s depths. The hollow reached into the forest’s black bowels. Its bottom was uneven. A landscape of root-strangled earth, mouldering logs and depressions, deep with collected rainwater. Then they saw him.
‘Heldenhammer’s sweet blood,’ Nils said.
It was Sieur Kastner. He was lying broken and delirious at the bottom of the sinkhole, where he had fallen the night before. The sight of people peering into the hollow drew urgent groans from the knight, who was beyond words.
‘We’ve got to get him out,’ Diederick said. Nils said nothing. He just looked down on the fallen templar. ‘We’ve got to get him out,’ Diederick repeated.
‘I’m thinking,’ Nils said.
‘I’ll climb down,’ Diederick suggested.
‘And how are we supposed to get the sack of wine back up here?’ the squire put to him.
‘The man is suffering,’ Diederick told Nils.
‘Perhaps he deserves to,’ Nils said, looking down on his master.
‘He’s a servant of Sigmar.’
‘Have you ever known him serve anyone but himself and his appetites?’ Nils put to the squire.
‘One of us could go back to Suderberg for help,’ Diederick suggested, looking back into the whisper-haunted darkness of the forest.
‘Alone? Through the Drakwald? In the middle of the night?’ Nils said. ‘You think that a good idea? Look what happened to him.’
‘Exactly,’ Diederick pressed. ‘Look what happened to him. You can’t seriously be contemplating leaving him down there.’
‘What can we do?’
‘Like I said,’ Diederick repeated, ‘I’ll climb down. You drop a rope to me. I’ll tie it around him and we’ll use Oberon to pull him out.’
Nils seemed to consider the plan.
‘The rope is back at the stable,’ he said dourly.
Diederick fixed the squire in a stony stare that gleamed in the moonlight.
‘Nils,’ he said, ‘I know what you’re thinking but we’re not doing this. I’m going down into that hole. You are going to rig something up here with Oberon – take apart the harness – vines, roots, anything.’ Diederick handed Nils the reins. ‘Yes?’
‘Yes,’ the squire said finally.
With that, Diederick ventured into the sinkhole. Descent wasn’t a problem. Climbing down the wall of the hollow,
the squire found that the earth came away in his hand in squelchy sods but that the root systems of surrounding trees gave him all the handholds he could wish for. As he climbed down, he could hear the templar’s ragged breathing and his agonised moans echo about the depths. Mannslieb looked down on them from above, like a great coin in the night sky, reflecting light from its blotched, silvery surface down into the sinkhole. Nearer the bottom of the hollow, where even the roots of the ancients above failed to reach, Diederick would be forced to drop the remainder of the distance. This would make climbing out all but impossible if Nils failed to rig something for their extraction.
‘How’s it coming?’ Diederick called up. His voice assumed an empty desperation, as though the depth of the hollow sapped all of the strength and determination from his words. There was no reply from above but Diederick could see roots twitching at the hollow edge suggesting that the squire was hacking up material for an improvised rope of some kind. Clutching the hammer about his neck and offering a small prayer to his God-King, Diederick dropped.
It felt further than it looked. Something leapt in the pit of his stomach. His boots hit the sodden ground and he slipped, falling to one side into a sunken depression of collected rainwater. Pulling his face from the water, Diederick found the stinking pool to be choked with bones. Extricating his hand from a ribcage, while staring at a skull – jawless and cracked – Diederick found himself swarmed by a plague of frogs that had made their home in the dank underpool. The disturbed colony hopped about in filthy panic, croaking their disconcertion.
Scrabbling to his feet, Diederick made his way across the pit with difficulty. The bottom was a boot-clamping mire that threatened to drag the boy down further into its foetid depths. Clambering across a log that disintegrated in his hands, liberating infestations of lice and the segmented lengths of venomous centipedes, Diederick reached the templar. Sieur Kastner looked up at his squire with unseeing eyes. The knight was feverish and out of his mind with pain. His plate was bent and buckled, while beneath there were almost certainly bones broken. He clutched the length of the greatsword Terminus to him like a child he feared to let go of – a lethal, mud-splattered child, whose cleaving blade and inset jewellery glinted in Mannslieb’s pallid blaze.
‘We’re going to get you out of here,’ Diederick assured his master bleakly. ‘Can you move?’
When the templar didn’t reply, Diederick went to inspect his legs for injury. With heart-sinking realisation, Diederick saw that Sieur Kastner’s legs were no longer there. The knight moaned miserably to himself. Diederick looked about the bottom of the pit. There were wretched holes – openings – in both sides of the hollow wall. The sinkhole had collapsed into a network of excavated misery running beneath the ancient forest. Something living both beneath the Drakwald and the ruined barrows of the Empire’s long-dead tribes had been liberated. Diederick stared into the darkness of the nearest opening. He strained to see what was within and was greeted by the suggestion of beady, blood-hungry eyes staring back. Diederick stumbled back through a water-logged crater, only to turn and find the tunnel entrance behind him similarly haunted. Needle-toothed monstrosities were swarming the dribbling crawlspace of the passage, eager to catch a glimpse of their next meal.
‘God’s wounds,’ Diederick cursed. He looked back down at Sieur Kastner. Whatever infested the tunnels seemed to fear the light. Where the knight’s armoured body had fallen, in both presence of daylight filtering down through the Drakwald, or the fearful gleam of the moons during the horror of night, Sieur Kastner had remained untouched. Where his legs had lain in shadow, near the hollow’s edge, things had ventured from the tight, muddy openings to feast on the knight’s flesh. Opening his plate up, the monsters had begun to eat Sieur Kastner alive. Only the reach of Terminus, wildly swung, and the light of the sun and moons had kept the creatures at bay.
Diederick retched into the frog-writhing pool. Wiping his mouth, the squire suddenly felt something slither across his shoulder. Spinning around, the squire found a root-twined rope had fallen across him.
‘Thank Sigmar,’ Diederick murmured, grabbing at the improvised rope. The squire looked down at Sieur Kastner. There would be no saving him now. As his squire and a servant of the God-King, it was still Diederick’s responsibility to see his master’s body to a funeral pyre. He had to try. Father Dagobert would never have forgiven him otherwise.
Diederick pulled the length of entwined root. Something was wrong. Its length ran and it ran until finally the coils of its hasty construction fell down into the pit.
‘Nils…’ Diederick growled, his eyes drawn back up towards the forest above.
Something was happening. The squire could hear the sound of Oberon crashing about the trees. He listened to the fearful whinnying of the stallion and the thud of panicked hooves into the woodland earth.
‘Nils!’ Diederick called. There was something up there with them. The squire could make out the break of branch and the snapping of foliage as Oberon turned, bucked and kicked out at creatures of darkness emerging to claim him. Of Nils he heard nothing. No friendly face appeared at the sinkhole edge and no further root-twined rope dropped down to extricate him. All he could hear was the crunching of bones, the scissor-slice of needle teeth and the horrible passing of flesh down goblinoid gullets. Diederick felt a dank dread creep through him. Nils could not save him; Oberon would follow; the squire would be left in the pit with his dying master, to face a slow death by starvation or be flesh-stripped by swarms of subterranean fiends, the instant clouds covered the guardian moon.
The boy’s lips tightened to a dogged snarl. He would not die here, in some arsehole of the Drakwald, as a full belly for an underclan of shadow-suckling goblinoids. This was not the death the God-King had planned for him.
Diederick turned back to Sieur Kastner. The knight still clung to Terminus with an almost religious fervour. Diederick looked about the grim pit for an exit. He made a decision. He needed that sword.
‘My lord,’ Diederick said, kneeling down in the mire beside the fallen templar. Kastner’s eyes writhed about their sockets in delirium. ‘Master, trust that I will see Terminus back to your family’s lands.’ The squire took hold of the great blade but Kastner would not let it go. ‘Your great grandfather, your grandfather and your father saw its honoured blade – a blade that shed blood at the side of Magnus the Pious – back to the Gruber Marches. There, Sigmar-willing, it will one day find service with one of your issue. A warrior, like yourself, pledged to the God-King’s cause. Let me do this last service for you, master. Allow its example to live on. Let me see Terminus home.’
Diederick couldn’t tell if the knight had heard him but the metal-cased digits of his gauntlets suddenly released the blade. Diederick nodded but the templar’s eyes trembled shut. He fell to moaning away the last of his life – a life long with sin and regret. Despite the knight’s failings, Diederick hoped he could find his way to peace.
Drawing the greatsword to him, Diederick gauged the weight. It was far too heavy for him to hurl from the pit like an anchor or grapnel. Above, a sliver of cloud was drifting before Mannslieb’s full form. Diederick didn’t have much time. Grabbing the rope Nils had thrown down to him, he climbed through the loop intended to haul Sieur Kastner back up the side of the hollow. The end Nils had failed to secure Diederick triple-knotted about the hilt and guard of the greatsword. Attached to Terminus by a line of entwined roots, Diederick held the heavy sword over his shoulder in the fashion of a pikeman or halberdier. Splashing through the bone-littered shallows, the squire launched the tip of the weapon at the sinkhole wall like a javelin. The broad blade passed into the damp earth, its weight and the keenness of its edge taking it with ease into the side of the pit.
Backing along the wall, with the horrid whispers of tunnel crawlers in his ears, Diederick prepared to save himself. He breathed in. He breathed out. With water erupting about his footfalls, the
boy launched himself at the protruding hilt of the two-handed sword. Swinging about it like a tumbler or acrobat, the squire’s legs came about and his boot tips reached the flat of the blade. Without waiting to lose his balance, Diederick bent his knees and pushed off from the embedded blade, leaping desperately for the wall-snaking roots of the trees. Like grapnels, his hands clawed through the strata of black soil, grasping for anything that might provide purchase. And there the squire hung, by the tips of the index and middle finger of his left hand, ensnared in a willowy root.
As the mire-smeared squire made his ascent through the under-tangle of the ancient forest, he could hear Oberon stamp and snort, whinny and haw. The steed was being attacked by the dark denizens of the below and beyond.
‘I’m coming!’ Diederick hollered up the sinkhole wall. He was terrified that the horse would bolt and abandon him. ‘Nearly there, boy…’ Diederick was exhausted, but managed to haul his mud-sleek form over the edge of the pit. There was no time to catch his breath. He could hear the steed stomping and skidding to a halt, hemmed in by the dense forest. The Drakwald darkness was sibilant with the hissing of shadow-hidden forms. Things that crawled from the earth to feast.
Diederick skidded about the edge of the pit, bathed in the silver safety of the dying moonlight. He slipped out of the roots looped about him like a harness. Upon reaching the far side of the hollow, he began to gather the rope in his arms. With the slack taken up, he hauled at the hairy roughness of the root line. His palms burned and his heels sank as he fought the sinkhole wall for possession of the embedded greatsword. Inch by inch it slipped out, until finally Terminus slurped free of its earthen prison, sending Diederick tumbling back into the blackness of the forest.
On his back, and with the weald about him alive with the sounds of famished evil, Diederick gathered the rope hand over hand like a sailor. Finally hauling the greatsword through the forest tangle and to him, the squire scrambled back to his feet. Terminus was far too heavy for the boy to wield. Grunting, Diederick laid its length across his shoulders. As he felt something come at him in the murk he used his body to lunge the blade tip at the threat, sometimes spinning on his heel to cut at his tormenters with the cleaving edge of the weapon.
