by epubBillie
But still, even to the top of the world, they kept on Cicatrice's tracks. By day, Johann tried not to think about the past, or the future; by night, he could think of nothing else. He had long since become used to sleeping badly.
The hand on his shoulder shook him awake. He opened his eyes, but didn't say anything.
"They've turned," said Vukotich, his voice low and urgent, "their stink is in the air."
Johann slipped out of his bedding, and stood up. The forests were quiet, save for the drip of snow, and the laboured breathing of Vukotich's horse. The fire had burned to ash, but was still casting a glow. The chill had not left his bones. Ice daggers hung like lanterns from the lower branches of the trees, mysteriously lit from within.
They rolled furs into man-sized humps, covered them with bedding and arranged them near the fire. In the dark, they would pass. Vukotich took his crossbow from his saddle, and selected a quarrel. He checked the sleeping horse Johann couldn't help but think of as Would-Have-Been-Tsar. Then, they withdrew into the forest.
The wait wasn't long. Johann's sense of smell wasn't as acute as Vukotich's, but he eventually heard them. His tutor had been right; there were four, and one was limping. The noises stopped. Johann pressed close to a tree-trunk, shrouding himself in its shadow.
There was a sound like the tearing of silk, and the bedding rolls shuddered. Each was pierced with a crossbow bolt where the head would be. They glowed green, and emitted little puffs of fire and smoke. Johann held his lungs. He didn't want to breathe even a trace of whatever poison that was.
The flares died, and nothing moved in the clearing. Johann gripped the hilt of his sword, while Vukotich brought up his crossbow. He didn't favour poison, but with his eye he didn't need to.
Johann heard his heart beating too loud, and fought against all the imagined sounds in his head. Finally, the real sounds came.
A human shape detached itself from the darkness and ventured into the clearing. It limped badly, and its head was elongated, with shining eyes and sharp little teeth. It was the skaven. Piebald, with tatters of clothing over oddments of armour, the ratman was distorted in the emberlight. It stood over the murdered bedrolls, its back to them. It wore the eye-in-the-point-down-pyramid symbol of the Clan Eshin on its ripped blackhide jacket, and the stylized scarface worn by all the followers of Cicatrice. Vukotich put his bolt through the eye. The skaven breathed in sharply, and half-turned. Vukotich's arrowhead stuck out bloody a few inches from its chest. The ratman went down.
Johann and Vukotich circled away from their spot, until they faced the direction from which the thing had come. There were eyes in the darkness. Vukotich held up three fingers, then two. Three against two. It had been worse before.
Fire exploded above them, as arrows pinned balls of burning rag to trees. The balls exploded, and rained streamers of flame around them. Three figures came into the clearing, tall but shambling. Johann could smell them now. One of them wasn't alive.
Vukotich put a quarrel through the throat of the creature in the centre, but it still kept walking. It walked to the fire, and Johann saw a rotted ruin of a face. It was leaking dust from its split neck. It had been female, once. Now, it wasn't a person, it was a puppet. One of the others must have raised it, or been given the reins by the magician who had. Like many of Cicatrice's Knights, it had a line of red warpaint across its face, echoing its leader's scar. It moved awkwardly because of its mortal wounds, but that wouldn't stop it from being deadly.
"We'd better do something about that," said Vukotich, "before it gives us the Tomb Rot."
Together, Johann and Vukotich ran forward, and counted coup on the undead woman, whipping it with their swords, taking care not to touch the diseased thing. Johann felt brittle bones breaking inside it. The thing staggered from side to side as it was struck, and stepped onto the embers of the fire. Its tattered shroud caught light, and so did its dessiccated shins. When the flame reached its pockets of rancid flesh, they cooked through with a foul hiss. With an awful keening, the creature became a writhing mass of fire. Johann and Vukotich stepped back, prodding it with swordpoints, staying out of its burning reach.
Its companions came forward now, faces flickering in its dying light. Johann parried a blow, and felt its force ringing throughout his entire body. His opponent was taller by a head, and heavily armoured, but its reactions were slower, and its helmet was distorted by a head that seemed to have expanded inside it. It was an altered of some sort, a human being under the influence of the warpstone, that unclassifiable substance so many Servants of the Night had about them, turning into the physical image of whatever dark desires or fears it had harboured. The changes were part of the bargain made with whatever forces they owed allegiance, Johann knew. He had seen too many barely human things left in Cicatrice's wake. This thing was plainly in the throes of some fresh alteration. Under its helm, it would be some new monstrosity.
Johann stepped back, and slashed across the creature's chest, denting its breastplate, caving in the scarface symbol etched into the metal. Suddenly, he felt arms around him, and pain at his back. The burning thing had hugged him. He shook free, smelling his scorched clothing, ignoring the pain, and ducked away from a blow that could have sheared his head from his shoulders. The undead got in the way again, and the Knight reached out with a huge hand. The giant got a grip on its flame-haloed head, and with a grunt crushed it to dust. It fell, useless now, and the Knight returned its attentions to Johann.
Vukotich was grappling close with a toad-faced altered with too many limbs, and green ichor was sizzling in the snow around them as his knife went in and out of the thing's bloated stomach. It didn't seem slowed by its many wounds. Vukotich had an arm around its neck, pressing down its inflating ruff.
Johann faced the Knight, and made a few tentative passes at its legs. It was already slow, a few bone-deep cuts would make it slower. He realized that the thing was roaring. Johann wasn't sure, but it sounded unpleasantly like the laughter of the heroically insane. The altered's dented breastplate sprung outwards, spiked from within by hard eruptions springing from its mutating body. Whoever it had once been, it was under the warpstone now, progressing far beyond humanity. The Knight screamed its poison mirth, and tugged at its armour. The breastplate came free, and Johann saw the growing spines and plates on its skin. Cicatrice's face was tattooed on its chest. The helmet stretched outward, cracks appearing in the beaten steel, horns pushing through above the eyeholes like bulbshoots emerging from fertile soil. Johann thrust at the altered's chest, but his sword was turned aside by the creature's armoured hide. The Knight wasn't even bothering to fight back. Johann struck at its neck, and his sword lodged deep. It still laughed at him, and his sword wouldn't come free. He pulled two knives from his belt, and sunk them into the altered's body, aiming for the kidneys. The laughter continued, and the Knight began to peel away the ruined sections of his helmet.
Eyes peered at Johann from bone-ridged cavities. There were seven of them, arranged across the Knight's forehead. Two were real, five were polished glass set in living flesh. Johann prayed to the gods he'd ignored for years. The Knight dislodged Johann's sword from its neck, and threw it away.
"Hello, Master Johann," it said, its voice piping and childish, almost charming. "How you've grown."
It was - it had been - Andreas, the von Mecklenberg stable boy, the mounter of trophies. He had found other tutors since Johann had seen him last.
The great hands reached for him, and Johann felt weights on his shoulders. The fingers gripped like blacksmith's tongs. There was no longer ground under his feet. Johann smelled Andreas' foul breath, and looked up into his former servant's mask of expanded flesh. He pulled the knives from the altered's sides, and sawed away at its stomach and groin with them. He merely cut through altered flesh that grew back as he ravaged it. Andreas pushed him, and he flew twenty feet through the air. He hit a tree, for a moment dreading that his back was broken, then fell. The earth was hard, and he took the fa
ll badly.
Vukotich's opponent was downed, and the tutor strode towards the Knight, two-handed sword raised. Andreas put out an arm to stop him, and brushed aside the swinging blow. He grapped Vukotich's wrists with one hand, and forced the Iron Man to his knees. The altered was still laughing. Daemons screeched in his laughter, and murdered children wailed. Andreas pushed Vukotich back, bending him double, shoving his head towards the still-burning remains of the undead, forcing his own sword towards his face. Vukotich struggled back, and Andreas' huge shoulders heaved as he exerted pressure on the dwarfed human. The sword was fixed between their faces, shuddering as they threw their full strength at each other. The knight shrugged off his back armour, which fell from him, and Johann saw a streak of white down the creature's mottled and encrusted back.
Ignoring the pain, he ran across the clearing, stepping in the mess Vukotich had made of his toadman, and hurled himself onto Andreas' back. There, the alterations were not quite complete. He drove his knives in between the Knight's horny shoulderblades, where a patch of boyish skin remained between the bony plates, and sawed down the line of his spine, going as deep as he could, cutting through ribs. Blood gushed into his face, and at last he felt his thrusts sink into the real, unaltered Andreas, doing some damage.
The laughter stopped, and the altered stood up, trying to shake Johann from his back. Johann gripped Andreas' waist with his knees, and continued his sawing. His hands were inside now, and he was hacking at random, hoping to puncture what was left of the heart. Something big in Andreas' torso burst, and he fell writhing to the ground. Johann kept riding him, his hands free now, stabbing where he could. Andreas rolled over, and Johann disengaged himself from the dying Knight. He stood up, and wiped blood out of his eyes.
Andreas lay face-up, red froth on his lips, the light fast going from his face. Johann knelt, and took his head in his hands.
"Andreas," he said, trying to reach through the Knight of Darkness to the stable lad, "what of Wolf?"
The Knight gathered phlegm in his throat, but let it drip bloodily from his mouth. In the two living eyes, Johann saw something still human. He plucked the glass eyes from the face, and threw them away.
"Andreas, we were friends once. This wasn't your fault. Wolf. Where's Wolf? Is he still alive? Where is Cicatrice taking him?"
The dying man smiled crooked. "North," he gasped, broken bones kniving inside his flesh as he spoke, "to the Wastes, to the Battle. Not far now. The Battle."
"What battle? Andreas, it's important. What battle?"
The ghost of the laughter came again. "Baron," Andreas said, "we were never friends."
The stable boy was dead.
Vukotich was hurt. The toadman had lost his dagger early in their struggle, and his barbed hands hadn't proved a threat. But, when cut, he bled poison. The green stuff ate through clothing, discoloured skin, and seeped dangerously into the body. Vukotich had spilled a lot of it on himself. When the morning light penetrated to the clearing, Johann saw the irregular holes in Vukotich's leggings, and realized his tutor was having trouble standing. He tottered, and fell.
"Leave me," Vukotich said through clenched teeth. "I'll slow you down."
That was what Johann had been taught to do, but he had never been a model pupil. With handfuls of snow, he rubbed at Vukotich's wounds, working away until most of the poison was gone. He had no idea how deep the blight had sunk into his flesh, and also didn't know anything about the properties of the toadman's blood. But if it were fatal, Vukotich would have told him so, in an attempt to get Johann to leave him. He tore a spare shirt into rags, and bandaged where he could. Vukotich was quiet, but winced throughout. Johann didn't ask him if he were in pain.
With branches, and strips of leather from their fallen enemies' clothes, Johann made a stretcher which he fixed to Would-Have-Been-Tsar's halter. It was rough, but padded with furs it sufficed. He helped the unprotesting Vukotich onto the stretcher and wrapped him warmly. The old soldier lay still, gripping a sword as a child grips a favoured toy, his face still stained green in patches.
"We're going north," Johann said. "We'll be out of this forest by night. There'll be some settlement before the steppes."
That was true, but didn't necessarily imply a welcome, a healer and a warm bed. There was a saying, "in the forests, there is no Law; on the Steppe, there are no Gods." This was still Kislev, but no Tsar reigned here. Beyond the steppes were the Wastes, where the warpstone was the only rule, changing men's minds and bodies, distorting souls, working its evil on all. It was Cicatrice's spiritual homeland, and the only surprise was that his trail hadn't brought them there earlier.
They travelled slowly, and Johann was proved wrong. By nightfall, they were still in the forest. Vukotich slept fitfully as he was dragged, voicing the pains he would never admit to when awake. Would-Have-Been-Tsar plodded on like a machine, but Johann knew the horse wouldn't outlive the moon. They'd need fresh horses on the steppes if they were to keep up with Cicatrice, and Vukotich would need healing.
The next day, after an undisturbed night's camp, the trees began thinning, and the gloom lifted. There was even a trace of sun in the dead sky. Johann had seen tracks, had found the spot where Cicatrice had camped - the gutted corpse hanging by its feet from a tree was an obvious signpost - and knew they continued on the right trail. Beneath the corpse, someone had scrawled TURN BACK NOW in the snow in fresh blood. Johann spat at the message.
It took a while to realize how strange this country was. There was no birdsong, and he had long since ceased to notice any animals. At first, he was so relieved not to be constantly on guard against wolf and bear - he had three rakemarks on his back to remind him of an old encounter - that it didn't occur to him quite how ominous the lack of life was.
The forest finally died. Johann passed through a thick stretch where tree corpses leaned against each other, or rotted where they lay, and emerged onto the barren steppe. It was like passing from night into day. Looking back, he saw the edge of the forest like a wall extending to the horizon on either side. The trees were packed together like the fortifications of a castle, and didn't seem to fall outward.
If the forest was dead, the steppe was deader. There were scraggy clumps of grass, and areas of naked, frozen earth. The snows had been thin, but still remained here and there. In a hundred years, this would be desert.
In the distance, a trail of grey smoke spiralled up into the empty sky, and something large and ungainly with wings flapped slowly through the air.
"There's a village ahead, Vukotich."
They rested a while, and Johann dripped some water - they had been reduced to melting snow - into his tutor's mouth, then fed the horse. It had been over a month since they'd seen another creature who'd not tried to kill them. Perhaps, by some miracle, there would be some hospitality to be bought at the village. Johann wasn't too hopeful, but hadn't developed Vukotich's automatic distrust. Men still had to earn his enmity.
Vukotich wasn't speaking, conserving his strength, but Johann could tell his tutor was mending. In him, life was like a seed that lives through the arctic winter to sprout when spring brings a trace of warmth. Twice, Johann had thought him dead and been proved wrong. Cicatrice's bandits had given him the name Iron Man.
Johann chewed a long strip of Tsarina as he rode towards the smoke, and tried not to think about Andreas, not to think about Wolf. He remembered the stable lad as a cheerful youth, and could not see in him the beginnings of the Chaos Knight. But they had been there. Perhaps it had always rankled with Andreas that he was born to serve, while Johann and Wolf were born to the Barony. The ways of the warpstone were subtle. They could steal into a man's heart - a child's heart - and find the resentments, the petty injuries, the flaws, then work on them until the heart was rotten as a worm-holed apple. Then, the outer changes began. In Andreas, in the toad-thing, in the many others they had seen over the years. The goat-headed altered that had killed Corin the Fletcher had once been a simple cleric of Verena, God
dess of Learning and Justice, lured into evil by a desire to glance at the Forbidden Books. Cicatrice himself had been a distant relative of the Prince-Elector of Ostland, posted to the Wastes by a jealous rival during a family feud, changed now beyond recognition.
What could warpstone have done to Wolf? Would his brother remember the unlucky arrow in his shoulder, and greet his rescuers with a murderous attack? Would he even recognize Johann? With each year, the likelihood of his putting up any resistance diminished. Now, most probably, he would have to be rescued against his will. And even then, he might prove too far gone in the ways of darkness to help.
Johann and Vukotich had not discussed the end of their search. It had always been assumed between them that Wolf would be rescued. But just lately, Johann had begun to wonder. He knew that he could never bring himself to raise an arm against his brother, but what of Vukotich? Did the Iron Man feel it would be his duty, if Wolf could not be saved, to put an end to him by the sword? Vukotich had mercy-killed before, in his wars, even along their trail. Would it be so different? And would Johann try to stop him? He suspected that, even wounded, Vukotich was the better duellist.
Something crunched under Would-Have-Been-Tsar's hooves, jolting Johann out of his unhappy reverie. He looked down. The animal was standing on a clean skeleton, his right foreleg buried in a ribcage that gripped his ankle like a trap. Johann dismounted, and pulled the old bones away. The skeleton was nearly human, but for the horns on the skull and the extra rows of teeth.
