by Rob Sanders
CHAPTER VI
‘Methinks the road to damnation cuts
unfairly through lands of fair intention.’
– Frederik III (ascribed – the Great Crusade against Araby)
The Drakwasser Road
Middenland
Klein Frederikstag, IC 2420
Day and night. Day and night. Kastner’s eyes were dry, for he could not close them. In the hours of day he endured the tedium of the world, viewed through the narrow opening between the curtains of the hospice wagon. At night he dreamt dark visions projected on the darkness beyond. He felt a living death. Every moment was so acutely experienced that it hurt to think and feel. He sensed his body healing. It was becoming stronger. More powerful. Assuming a formidability that even he, as a knight trained in the arts of death, had never enjoyed. He was becoming… something else. Something more. The flesh of his side and his leg itched as it knit itself back together. Breaks and fractures were now but dull aches and the dread fever a distant memory.
Only his eye still burned. The storm was still there, raging in the darkness of his mind. A constant torment, shredding at his nerves and his sanity. He could feel the shard of stone in his head. It was heavy and aching with wretched purpose. It was part of him now and wanted him to be part of it. The realisation of his desires and impulses might have distracted the templar from the ever-present agony that shot through his skull. A goal upon which to focus and channel the raw anguish that proceeded from the mind-splitting torture. Instead he was forced to simply lie and endure every single second of a torment without end. If a man knows his labours end as the sun goes down, then he can push on through to dusk. If a man knows his journey’s destination, even though that destination might be far away, he can walk on – putting one boot ahead of the other, until finally he reaches journey’s end. The agony ripping through one side of his face, his head, his mind, was a journey without destination and a day without end. At first Kastner didn’t know if he could take it. Then he discovered that he didn’t have a choice. He finally found that he could, but that it might have cost him his sanity.
He had awoken to horror. When he was but a small boy he would wake in the middle of the night. The temple dormitory was without windows and black with darkness. Down the corridor he could hear Dagobert snoring. It had been a reassuring noise to a boy all alone in the world. Some nights he would wake to silence, however. No sound. No light. Most dreadful of all was the feeling that there was something there in the darkness with him. Something stalking him. Watching him. He knew that to set eyes on it would be the end of him – but he had no choice because he could not move. The horror of vulnerability. It didn’t matter how strong, how fast or lethal you were, if you couldn’t move a muscle to defend yourself. Bumping about the cot in the back of the hospice wagon, that was what Kastner had woken to. Paralysis. Immobility. The insensitivity of the flesh.
He could not lift an arm, kick out with a leg, blink his eye or lick his lips. A fly crawling in between them could choke him. An insect could end him. It was the most dreadful feeling he had ever experienced. No bed wetting nightmare or courage-leeching doubt before combat could compare. He would rather feel the steel of his enemy’s skewer through him than live the soullessness of utter vulnerability. As he was wont to do – as it was the only thing to do – Kastner tried to reach out. He tried to sit up. He tried to move just one toe. But there was nothing. In his mind his body responded with force and enthusiasm for the task. He throbbed with possibility. The power of the things he wanted to do. The magnitude of coming accomplishment intoxicated him. His body was just waiting to catch up with such grand achievements. It was a useless study in flesh. A forgotten vessel housing a furious force. A living trap within which was buried a monster… a giant… a god.
Perhaps, when he had been able to walk, his every step had driven the shard of wyrdstone deeper into his brain. He could even have fallen and driven the sliver further into his skull. He thought on his surroundings. Perhaps some attempt to remove the object had done him more ill than good. Conversely, the thing might just have petrified its way into him and claimed him for its own. It didn’t matter. What danger was he to the Empire, to others or himself laying in a cot like a cadaver? Whatever had happened, the shard had pierced into or pressed against something that had crippled him. His life as he knew it was over.
Kastner heard a moan. There was someone in the cot lining the other wall of the hospice wagon. The templar had never been able to turn his head to see who he shared the wagon with. He assumed it was Emil, his squire – although it didn’t sound very much like him. Like Kastner, his injuries had warranted the long, uncomfortable journey to Altdorf, in search of healing hands at the Temple of Shallya. The boy groaned beneath his bandages and blankets – something between agony and ecstasy. Kastner hoped he was having a nice dream. The wretch would have little to look forward to upon waking.
The knight peered hard at the darkness between the doorway curtains. There used to be just darkness and light. The longer he stared at the only view he was allowed, the one constantly visited upon him, the more he came to appreciate the degrees of difference. With the rising of the sun, day was just the absence of darkness. With the setting of the sun, both the night and the knight were a canvas upon which darkness daubed its dread. Like a painter working colours on his palette, Kastner had observed darkness mixed in many shades – and found himself lost to them. They were to be his masterpiece. And he theirs.
For what seemed like forever, Kastner had watched their journey drop behind the wagon. That was how he knew for sure that they were heading for the Reikland. He had felt the winding path of the Sudenpass, the bump and crunch back up the Flaschgang Road and the rattle as they crossed the well-travelled crossways of the Old Forest. He had watched the trees change and even disappear for a spell as they trundled past the brigand-haunted Weiss Hills. Occasionally, he would spy one of the many individual homesteads and hamlets on the route. In some, peasants peered in with ghoulish curiosity. Not too close – in case the hospice wagon was carrying somebody infectious – but close enough to see the freakishness of the horrifically injured, the almost dead and the dying. Kastner watched the same disappointment cross their faces. He was the kind of freak they could not see. The kind of abomination that hid its true form and denied the morbidly inquisitive a sickening thrill.
It was with ghoulish curiosity, however, that Kastner found himself staring through the curtains as the wagon passed through the larger villages. He knew three through which they passed well: Bergendorf, Heedenhof and Gerzen-by-the-River. He knew the sounds of village life, the sing-song Hochlanden lilt and the bustle of passage on the crossroads – heavy goods moving north and south, regiments marching east-west along the Old Forest Road, both to and from Fort Schippel. The knight would not have recognised the villages through which the wagon had passed on its way south. The thoroughfares were dead but for the congress of ravens. Woodsmoke stung his nostrils and on his dry tongue he tasted the copper-tang of fresh death. He knew destruction without seeing it. Not the terror of beastmen or greenskins from the woods. Their needs were their own. Kastner sensed carnage absolute. A message in the massacre. Buildings had burned. The earth had drunk deep of innocent blood. Mutilated bodies were spread and hung as totems of annihilation. Advertisements to all who would now fear to tread where the archenemy had left its unholy works. Only the slaves to darkness worked in such ways. Ruinous doom from the north. The warriors of Chaos.
Night intruded on the hospice wagon. A kind of a moonless darkness reigned. He could hear the trees beyond, hissing in gentle movement, but he could not see them because the rear of the wagon was facing the other way. The Drakwasser sloshed and slurped not far in the distance. Kastner could hear its broadening banks and the unimpeded breeze coming off the lonely hills that the sunset positioned to the west. All of this and the smoothness of the wagon’s passage through the well-worn ruts in the roa
d told the templar that they were somewhere between Flaschfurt and Fort Denkh where the track broadened to allow camp to be made off the tree line. The knight’s hearing – growing with his other senses – drew the world beyond to him. He could hear a fire – which the low-tinged blackness outside seemed to confirm. He could hear the sizzle of a spit, and the smell of scorched meat pulled at a powerful hunger in his belly like the strings of an instrument. He was ravenous as little had passed his lips in the preceding days but liquids – water and a little broth – for fear of choking. Horses loitered somewhere nearby. Kastner could hear the soft rumble of their hearts and the gush of hot blood through their veins. They snorted and kicked gently at the earth, their tails swishing about them in agitation. Something was bothering them.
It was probably Emil. The squire’s withered moans had become more insistent. Despite being unconscious, the poor boy had become increasingly aware of his agonies and the little anyone could do to alleviate them. Kastner had seen the wreckage the pack of dogs had left behind. The wagon was thick with the squire’s sickly stench – which with the constant groans and lack of conversation had made Emil a poor travelling companion. At least he could move – if the rippling covers, the periods of violent shuddering and the occasional thrash of a bandage-trailing limb were anything to go by. Kastner felt for the boy and felt responsibility for him. He might have felt more if it weren’t for his own dismal prospects. The warherd and whatever Ruinous abominations to which they were making sacrifices had all but finished them both. Kastner was fairly certain that they were spending their last hours together in the back of the hospice wagon.
Sounds, both within and about the wagon fell away. The knight’s concentration intensified. It hurt – as if his ears were bleeding – but the tiny details beyond became his. The nibbling of mice in the grass. Grubs boring through the wood of nearby trees. The imperceptible creak of stones expanding about the fire. Like the forest-shattering felling of a mighty larch or elm, Kastner could hear the turning of the pages of a book. The desiccated leather of the tome’s covers soaked up the clamminess of the hands holding them. The pages – crisp with age and rough like southern parchments – rubbed against one another with an ancient sibilance. The knight could hear the ink – hundreds of years old – still drying in the dread formations of letters on the page.
There were voices. Mind-cleaving in the volume and clarity with which they came to Kastner. Gorst mumbled booming insanities some way off – enjoying the campfire from a distance. As his face-cage and chains rattled and the flagellations quietly bled and soaked into the filthy rags at his back, the fanatic spoke of one Kastner had thought lost to him. The man who became a king. The king who became a god. Sigmar… Kastner’s mind burned to hear the Heldenhammer’s name but it was an old pain – remembered and welcome.
‘I don’t understand any of this…’
‘…any of this…’
‘…any of this…’
New words intruded on the scene and echoed through the cavernous emptiness of Kastner’s thoughts. A girl’s voice: sing-song, coarse of cant, tender with teenage years. Unbroken. Unseasoned. Untouched. The grating insolence of youth to be tamed. The knight remembered. The prisoner. The novice-sister. Giselle – the Sister of the Imperial Cross. The girl from the Hammerfall. Kastner drank in the fear and uncertainty of her words.
‘I’m not so sure anyone was ever meant to…’
Kastner detected a voice from his childhood. The warm rumble of Father Dagobert. He heard the gravelly rasp of the priest’s chins and the weight he carried about his belly – in turn carrying the weight of his words with authority. Despite this, the knight sensed a sweet edge of doubt to the priest’s declaration. It was like the stain of harvested fruit on a knife. It was meant to be an answer. A comfort – but it was anything but.
Kastner heard the priest select another tome from a stack warming near the fire. The creak of an opening spine. The whisper of pages. The priest was consulting. Comparing. Cross-referencing. The world died away. Only the conversation mattered. The frank exchange of hushed words across the crackle of the food and fire, heard by Kastner as though he were sitting there also.
‘Well I don’t,’ the girl said honestly. ‘All this brainworking – it’s not for someone like me. I work in the scullery. I’m not even a sister.’
‘Tell me again,’ Dagobert said. ‘It’s important.’
‘The Reverend Mother summoned us to the Repository,’ Giselle said. ‘Below even the undercloisters. Deep in the mountain. My mistress told us that it was where the most dangerous tomes, papers and artefacts collected by the Sisters of the Imperial Cross were stored. Things a novice was never meant to see, I can tell you that.’
‘I know of it, child,’ Dagobert informed her. ‘Though I have never been honoured with an invitation.’
‘Well I didn’t know of it,’ Giselle said. ‘Sister Elissa told me she thought it was a myth. I was terrified.’
‘As you should be, my child,’ Dagobert said. ‘For the Hammerfall’s vault holds centuries of recovered deviancy, the life’s work of madmen and knowledge of the damned once employed – or intended as such – against the God-King’s subjects. Even the Arch Lectors require the Grand Theogonist’s own permission to conduct their studies there – so secure a repository for darkness it is. Only Sigmar’s own cathedral in Altdorf could boast better protection for such damned things than that mountain. Pray continue.’
‘My mistress was acting oddly.’
‘How so?’
‘Out of sorts. Like she was afeared. I’d never seen her that way,’ Giselle told him. ‘There was this time, Sister Elissa and I–’
‘Please, my child. To the bones of the matter.’
The girl paused. A demonstration of her childish hurt.
‘The Reverend Mother’s patience was thin and her instruction urgent,’ Giselle said. ‘That’s all I meant to say. She set her sisters to work destroying the artefacts and burning the tomes of the Repository. Elissa, me and the other girls from the scullery, we were scared. It felt wrong, to destroy all that the sisterhood had worked hard to protect.’
‘Then?’
‘She had selected a number of items that she claimed were – well, as she put it, too dark, too rich in potential or too essential to the Empire’s continued existence to be put to the hammer or flame. Grand boasts, from my Reverend Mother’s lips, I can tell you.’
‘This scared you even more, I suspect.’
‘Yes, Father,’ Giselle acknowledged. ‘It terrifies me to know that such dark treasures exist in the world.’
‘They do,’ the priest assured her. ‘Such tomes – studied with care and precaution – are a great boon to our crusade against the Ruinous Powers. If they were to fall into the wrong hands, however, they could spell the end of the world. I exaggerate not, child. You carried such tomes to me from the indomitable Hammerfall.’
The pair were quiet for a moment.
‘“Giselle Dantziger”, my Reverend Mother said, “you came into the world a rude and inconstant thing, with a mouth more at home in the gutter than the cloister”,’ the novice told Dagobert. ‘“You may have lacked the study and serenity required to achieve the rank of Sister so far but the one thing you do not lack is courage, girl.”’
‘You were not originally intended for the sisterhood?’ Dagobert said. It was not really a question.
‘I call the City of the White Wolf home, sir. My father thought some time at the isolated Hammerfall would tame my wilfulness and wild ways,’ Giselle said.
‘Not Ulric’s own wolf priests?’
‘The Al-Ulric and his holy men would not have me,’ Giselle said. ‘The God-King took me to him and for that I am thankful.’
‘You have served him well, child.’
‘She gave me the collection of tomes, grimoires and papers I presented
to you,’ Giselle continued, ‘and sent me down the mountainside with orders to deliver them to a priest – a learned man – a true servant of Sigmar. She sent some of the other novice-sisters down the mountain in other directions. All ways were treacherous. I cannot tell you the number of times I nearly lost my life on those frozen heights.’
‘She sent the novices? What of the older sisters?’
‘The Reverend Mother said that since they were closer in age to meeting the God-King, they deserved to face him at the Hammerfall. I still don’t understand what she meant. Myself. Amalie. Karletta. Marlene. Several more of the scullery girls. Each with a bundle of books or sack of artefacts. Karletta was but four and ten. I don’t know how many of them made it off the Hammerfall alive. I heard screams across the valleys, but they could have been anyone’s.’
‘You were brave,’ Dagobert commended. ‘To climb down out of the Middle Mountains would have tested the most fearless of the God-King’s subjects. Your Reverend Mother sent you south?’
‘South-west, sir, yes. “Don’t you stop girl”, she said. “Not for man nor beast, until you pass your burden on to another.” Well, I would’nt’ve – but for the beasts that walk like men. They didn’t seem interested in the tomes in my care but it was good fortune that your man came by when he did.’
‘Fortune of a sort,’ Dagobert conceded darkly.
‘You think it was the God-King’s doing?’
‘Perhaps,’ Dagobert said. ‘My child, the letter sent with the bundle of books. Did you not read it?’
‘I did not, Father,’ Giselle said. ‘I cannot. I cannot read.’
Dagobert gave a grave chuckle. ‘I think it not amusing, sir. The Reverend Mother was teaching me, but I fought her in my studies.’
