The End Times | The Return of Nagash

by Josh Reynolds

  It was Vlad who had elevated him from the common muck, and made him a Templar of the Drakenhof Order. It was Vlad who had nurtured his natural gifts for sorcery and strategy. It was Vlad who had given him purpose.

  And it was Mannfred who had taken it all away.

  Mannfred the liar. Mannfred the schemer. Mannfred the acolyte. Mannfred, who had come from somewhere else to join Vlad, who was no Sylvanian, who sometimes spoke in an accent that Markos had yet to recognise, despite his travels.

  Vlad should never have trusted him. But that too was part of the ideal. Vlad had worn his honour like armour, and it had dragged him down in the end. Markos had learned from Vlad’s mistakes and when Mannfred had set his feet on the path of empire, Markos had absented himself. Mannfred was not Vlad, and he lacked Vlad’s patience, something that inevitably led to his downfall. His attempt at conquest had ended with him sinking into Hel Fenn, and the shattering of the Drakenhof Order. They had all gone their separate ways, eager to put their defeat behind them.

  Markos had spent years building up his own network of spies and informers. He had schemed and plotted dynastic marriages and political alliances, all to ensure his ultimate success. Elize, he knew, had been doing much the same, as had Tomas and the others. The Game of Night had lasted for centuries, as the remaining von Carsteins wove plot and counter-plot against one another and the Lahmians.

  And then Mannfred had ruined it all by coming back.

  Markos growled and parried a rust-edged cleaver. He thrust down, pinning the skaven to the cavern floor. There were seemingly thousands of the beasts, and they just kept coming in wave after wave of squealing fodder. He jerked his blade up out of the dying skaven and looked around. The cavern resembled the bowels of some vast, nightmarish engine – immense cogs, corroded pistons and acid-pitted flywheels projected from the walls at all angles, and rose from deep grooves in the cavern floor. The mechanisms were still in motion, despite the battle, and as Markos watched, a skaven warrior got too close to one and was whisked into a clanking maw, to be pulverised instantly.

  The cavern was so choked with machinery that it was impossible for the combatants to fight more than five or six abreast, and the skaven suffered for this inability to bring their numbers to bear. Horns wailed and bells clanged somewhere far back in one of the tunnels, and those skaven closest to the exits began to flee the cavern.

  Markos wheeled his horse about and galloped back towards the knot of undead horsemen who surrounded the Drakenhof Templars and Mannfred. As he passed through the ranks of the former, he examined them enviously. The Doom Riders had been legendary even in Vlad’s time. Supposedly, they had first ridden forth from whatever barrow had held them at Nagash’s command, and after his defeat at Sigmar’s hand, they had ridden into the depths of the Drakwald, from whence they had haunted the surrounding lands for centuries until Vlad had sought them out and bent them to his will.

  The undead horsemen wore corroded armour of a bygone age, and carried lances wreathed in cold flame. They watched him as he threaded through them, and his flesh felt as if it were covered in crawling spiders as they tracked his progress with hell-spark eyes. When he reached the others, Mannfred glanced at him. ‘Well?’

  ‘They’re falling back,’ Markos said. He leaned back in his saddle. ‘We’ll have the cavern cleared within the hour, unless they bring up reinforcements. Which they don’t seem inclined to do, if you want my opinion.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Mannfred said, turning away.

  Markos bit down on the reply that sprang unbidden to his lips. He turned away from Mannfred and settled down to wait, one hand resting on the pommel of his blade. His anger simmered, but he wrestled it down.

  Striking now would be disastrous, whether he succeeded or not. They were miles beneath the surface, and dependent on Mannfred for guidance to find their way through the seemingly endless labyrinth of twisted and reeking warrens. He’d considered trying his luck when the skaven had attacked Forzini’s camp, but Elize’s words of caution had restrained him. Mannfred was wary, ready for treachery right now. But, when he’d achieved his goal, Markos would have his chance, or so Elize swore. With the Claw and the Fellblade in his possession, Mannfred would be distracted, drunk on victory and his own power. It was a window of opportunity, albeit a narrow one.

  Strike swiftly, before he has the chance to acclimate himself to the power of the artefact, she’d said, and he had to admit that it wasn’t bad advice. Not that he trusted Elize farther than he could throw her. She was likely hoping that he and Mannfred would kill one another. So be it. He couldn’t find it in his heart to blame her. Elize had her own games, just as he did.

  Mannfred had ruined them all by coming back. Arrogant, assured of his superiority, he had smashed their delicately woven webs to shreds and tangles, and demanded that they kowtow to him, as they once had. As if their ambitions meant nothing compared to his own.

  Well, Markos intended to show him the error of his ways.

  Mannfred was as mad as Konrad had been. Oh his madness took a different form, to be sure, but he was just as much a lunatic. His time in the mire had rotted his brains, and he endangered them all with his current obsession. Markos shivered slightly as he looked at the staff Mannfred clutched, and the withered thing that occupied its head. He could feel the malignancy of the Claw in his bones.

  Markos was not one to lie to himself. He knew what he was, and what he had done in his centuries of bloodletting. But there were things in the world far worse than him, and the Claw was the tool of one of them. Mannfred was caught up in its whispers and promises. They could all hear the voices – the voice – of the artefacts that Mannfred had gathered. A wheedling, demanding susurrus that permeated Castle Sternieste and haunted them. Every vampire felt the call of Nagash in their blood, whether they admitted it or not.

  Most, however, knew better than to give in to it.

  He looked at Mannfred again, and blinked. For a moment, in the flickering of the great globes of warpfire that hung from the roof of the cavern, he thought he’d seen something looming over the other vampire. A dark shape, far darker than any shadow, and colder than the depths of a mountain lake.

  Markos shuddered and looked away.

  La Maisontaal Abbey, Bretonnia

  Heinrich Kemmler didn’t flinch as the knights struck the vast sea of the dead. He felt the reverberations of that impact in his bones, but he ignored it. He had more important matters clamouring for his attention. His magics were growing less precise, and less effective. At first, he’d thought the culprit was Arkhan. He wouldn’t have put it past the liche to strike while he was otherwise occupied, and try to wrest control of the dead from him.

  Arkhan didn’t trust him, Kemmler knew. Nor did he blame the liche. Kemmler had no intention of allowing Nagash to return, whatever Arkhan’s desires. Nagash’s time had passed and good riddance to the creature. Hundreds of arch-necromancers had risen and fallen with the tide of years since the Undying King had been gutted on his own basalt throne, each of them worth more than any old dead thing.

  The very thought of it incensed him. The drumbeat – the heartbeat of the Great Necromancer – in his head threatened to drown out all of his hard-won coherency. It had driven him mad, that sound. He knew that now. It had forged him, and fed his hungers. It had been the rhythm that had guided his steps, and set him on the path he had trod for centuries. It was the voice inside his head, whispering the secrets of power and the wielding of it; and then, when he had needed it most, it had taken all of it away. That was something Kemmler could not forgive.

  Fresh rage flooded him, and he clawed at the barely visible skeins of magic that flowed about him, trying to find the source of the interference. He could feel the heat of Krell’s growing battle-lust, and he focused on it, using it as a touchstone. The wight had been his constant companion for more years than he cared to count, and he had woven innumerable spells with Krell at his side. The creature was at once a sump and a sponge for dark magic. S
ometimes, he even thought that he could hear Krell speak. Or perhaps not Krell, but something that clung to his brutal husk like a shadow.

  When Krell was near, the drumbeat was almost impossible to ignore. But that was not the only sound in his head. There were words as well, whispers and wheedling, plaintive murmurs, which rose and fell with the winds of magic. Kemmler had first heard those voices in the hour of Krell’s resurrection, when they had offered him aid if he would bend the wight to certain tasks. And he had, and the voices too had grown quiescent. But now, as the drumbeat grew louder, so too did they, as if the initiators of each were attempting to drown out the other.

  Strange currents of power flowed through him now, beneath the old familiar shroud of deathly sorcery. Like an adder beneath the water, this new power warmed him to his joints, and buoyed him. It had healed his mind and memory and soul, though it had taken centuries to do so. Centuries to clear out the rot of Nagash, Kemmler knew.

  Nagash had used him. It was Nagash who had used him to build an empire, and Nagash who had guided him to Krell, but not for Kemmler’s sake. That was what the whisperers had told him. And it was Nagash who wanted to use him now. It was Nagash who stalked him in the dark hollows of memory, hunting the tatters of his soul.

  Fear, now, warred with rage. He flailed as a thread of magic slipped between his fingers. A nearby zombie flopped down, inert and inanimate. More followed suit, and Kemmler hissed in mounting frustration. Concentrate, he had to concentrate. Between the hammer of the drum and the mounting agitation of the whispers, he heard the telltale cackle of the skull atop his staff.

  Kemmler turned, and his eyes narrowed. He caught a pale wisp of rising magics – not the ashy smoke of the wind of death, but the gossamer effluvium of the raw stuff of life – and saw a trio of women standing behind the embattled shieldwall of peasantry. His lips writhed back from his teeth in a snarl of disdain.

  The women were marshalling the magics of life to counteract his sorceries of death. Behind them, moss and flowers crawled across the stones of the abbey walls, and thick vines and roots crawled across the battlefield about them. The impertinence of it assaulted his sensibilities, and he slammed the end of his staff down, planting it like a standard.

  ‘This is my ground, witches,’ he hissed. And it was, in every way that mattered. He had bought it in blood and time. Every time he had made war in this place, on the abbey, he had shed his life’s blood and soured the ground with the stuff of death. They could plant all of the trees and flowers they liked, remove all of the bodies, weave every protective enchantment known to elf or man, but the ground was still his and would be forever more.

  As if they had heard his words, three pairs of eyes, violet and alien, met his own dark ones. He felt a jolt as three minds, trained to think inhuman thoughts and bent to inhuman goals, reached out to him. They were powerful, these witches. The cursed elves of Athel Loren had taken their natural gifts and forced them down unnatural paths, moulding them into weapons to be used against their own kind.

  Thoughts like claws tore at his connection to the winds of magic, severing his links with brutal efficiency. He snarled and champed like a beast in a trap, and every vein stood out in his neck and arms as he reached for his staff with his free hand. A wind sprang from nowhere, tearing at him, hot and cold all at once. His bones felt heavy, but hollow, and things that might have been maggots squirmed beneath his flesh and dripped from the unhealed wound that Tancred had dealt him. The soil churned beneath him, as if in pain, and there was moss growing on his staff. He swept it off angrily.

  They had minds like trees with ancient roots: anchored and arrogant. He lashed out at them, attacking them mind to mind, and was rebuffed. Kemmler ground his teeth in growing frustration. His rage turned incandescent and burned away all hesitation.

  The whispers rose, drowning out the drumbeat. Warmth – true warmth – flooded him, filling the cold emptiness that Nagash had left in him all those centuries ago when his voice, his spirit, had abandoned Kemmler on the eve of the Battle of Ten Thousand Skulls. Yes, they whispered. Yes, yes, yes, it is all yours for the taking. You do not serve us, but we will serve you. And he knew that they lied, because they were crafted from the very stuff of falsehood; but he also knew that what they offered was real – and that Arkhan, and his phantom master, offered nothing at all save the very thing that Kemmler had fled from down through the long, winding nightmare road of years.

  No, better damnation than oblivion.

  Better madness than servitude.

  Better to fight and fail than surrender and be nothing.

  ‘Mine – the abbey, the air you breathe, the ground you stand on, all of it mine,’ Kemmler snarled, as the fire surged in him. He dug the end of his staff into the ground the way a torturer might dig a blade into the flesh of his victim. ‘So listen and listen well to the master of La Maisontaal, witches.’ Power flooded through him as he gripped his staff with both hands and channelled the new, destructive magics that hummed through his veins into the earth. Pockets of dark magic and old, sour death awoke at its touch, and the ground lost its colour as he sent the awakened power burrowing through the soil. ‘I am not the intruder here. You are.’

  He felt, rather than saw, the panic begin to creep in and undermine their inhuman calm. They could feel the very earth beneath their feet rejecting their petty magics. Steam escaped from the cracked and dying soil, rising up to mingle with the smoke of the fires. Three pairs of hands began to weave a complicated counter-spell, but it was too late.

  Kemmler smiled as he felt their mystical defences fall away, as if they had built them on sand. Then, the sky spoke harshly, and a bolt of black lightning lanced down through the dark sky to strike the three women and the men who protected them. Kemmler felt their deaths and he threw his head back and expelled a cackle.

  ‘Thus to all who would deny me my proper due,’ he roared. ‘Heinrich Kemmler yet lives!’ He swept out his hands and felt his ebullience fill the dead around him, driving them faster and lending strength to their faltering limbs.

  For a moment, he stood in an eye of calm amidst the chaos of battle. He felt strong – stronger than he had ever felt before. He was cloaked in magic, and his wound was healed. He sucked in a breath.

  The dead hesitated. Empty eyes turned towards him, and lipless mouths flapped as though in warning. His skull staff was silent. The rush of confidence, of self-assurance, faded. Kemmler licked his lips, suddenly nervous. Though many corpses were looking at him, they were all doing so with the same set of eyes. And they were neither as dead nor as empty as he had first thought. They were dark with anger, and with promise.

  Kemmler pushed through their ranks. One or two reached out for him, but he clubbed them aside with his staff and his will. More and more of them turned to follow him, but not in the way they had before. He felt his control slacken, and knew then what he had given up.

  It was time to get what he had come for.

  It was time to put an end to things.

  FIFTEEN

  Mordkin Lair, the Border Princes

  ‘Again! Burninate them again – quick-rapid!’ Snikrat shrieked, beating one of the warpfire gunners about the head with the flat of his blade. ‘Immolate, by which I mean set fire to, the cursed twice-dead, but still somehow moving and, more importantly, biting, things!’

  Things were not going as well as Snikrat had hoped.

  The gunner chattered curses as he aimed the warpfire thrower and unleashed a second belch of crackling green flames into the mouths of the tunnels that opened up onto the cavern. The fire lashed out indiscriminately, spraying the walls and those skaven too slow in retreating as well as the inexorable dead. Skaven flooded out of the tunnel past Snikrat and his warriors, squealing and slapping ineffectually at their fur as they sought to escape the hungry grasp of the flames.

  The undead came on at a remorseless pace, pushing through the flames. Some fell, but these were replaced by more. And those that had fallen continued to c
rawl or slither forward until they were consumed entirely by the snapping flames. They inundated the upper tunnels, marching blindly into the spears and swords of the skaven, dragging down their destroyers as they were hacked apart. No matter how desperately the skaven fought, no matter how ferociously or cunningly, they could not match the dead, nor the unbending will that forced them on, metre by metre, tunnel by tunnel. Little by little, the warriors of Clan Mordkin were being driven back to the very heart of their domain.

  ‘More! More-more-more!’ Snikrat wailed, battering away at the unfortunate gunner with his blade for emphasis. ‘Hotter! Faster! Quicker! Don’t look at me idiot-fool – look at them!’ The warpfire gunner snarled and hunched, trying to avoid the blows. The warpfire throwers burbled and a third roar of green flame spewed out, momentarily obliterating the mouth of the tunnel. ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ Snikrat bounced on his feet, sword waving over his head as the front rank of corpses vanished, utterly consumed. ‘Fall and cease, dead-dead things. Snikrat the Magnificent commands you in his most commanding and authoritative manner to die, by which he means die again, and to thus stop moving!’ Behind him, his Bonehides began to cheer in relieved fashion. The stormvermin hadn’t been looking forward to fighting the undead again, especially in the cramped tunnels.

  The cheers died away abruptly as the first stumbling, staggering torch lurched blindly out of the tunnel mouth. It was followed by another and another and another, until it seemed as if hundreds of burning corpses were squirming towards Snikrat’s ragged battle-line. A snorting undead boar, still girded with the legs of the orc who had ridden it in life, barrelled towards the warpfire throwers.

  Snikrat yelped and, in his haste to scramble out of the way, his sword accidentally chopped through the hose. Green liquid sprayed everywhere as the burning pig lunged at the hapless gunners. The resulting explosion picked Snikrat up by the scruff of his neck and sent him hurtling away from the tunnel mouth, his fur crisping and his flesh burning.