“I’m glad you two made up,” said Verstohlen flatly. “You don’t want to prolong a feud with Schwarzhelm.”
“Is that all you have to say? Gods, your arrogance knows no bounds. Truly, I don’t know why you came back. You offer us nothing now.”
Verstohlen swept to his feet in a single, fluid movement. He was taller than Leitdorf and considerably more deadly. Leitdorf, startled, held his ground, and the two of them faced off.
“There were errors,” Verstohlen said coolly. “For these, I am sorry. But you lived with her, Leitdorf. If she could deceive you so completely, then perhaps you will understand why we made the decisions we did.”
“You should have contacted me. The war you started was unnecessary.”
“Don’t fool yourself. If it hadn’t been me, she’d have found another way to implicate you.” Verstohlen’s face edged closer to the elector’s, lit with threat. “It might make you feel better to blame me for what took place, but you’d do well to reflect on your own conduct. If you’d not taken Natassja to your bed, there’d be no joyroot, and no corruption. We have erred, my lord, but you set this thing in motion.”
Leitdorf’s hand slipped to his sword-belt.
“Even now, you dare—”
“I dare nothing. I state the facts.” Verstohlen shook his head in disgust. He was too tired for this. “What do you want from me? Guilt? Oh, I’ve got plenty of that. We both have. Every night when I close my eyes I see Tochfel’s face. He tried to warn me. Do you know what they did to him? They cut out his heart and replaced it with a ball of iron. Your wife.”
Verstohlen looked away, filled with revulsion by the memory.
“So don’t try to pretend this is something you don’t share responsibility for,” he muttered. “We’re all guilty, and we all had choices.”
Leitdorf removed his hand from his sword-belt. Verstohlen expected him to fly off into some tirade. To his surprise, the man remained calm.
“And you don’t think much of mine, do you?” he said.
“It hardly matters now.”
“I disagree.” Leitdorf raised his chin defiantly. “Whether you can stomach it or not, Herr Verstohlen, I am the elector now. Kurt Helborg leads my army, and Ludwig Schwarzhelm stands beside him. Soon my claim will be put to the test, and this time there can be no doubt about its legitimacy. Either we will die in battle, or I will rule Averland. Those are the only outcomes possible. Which one would you prefer?”
Verstohlen smiled grimly.
“I have no wish to see you dead, Leitdorf. Nor, for that matter, myself. But unless you’ve grown much wiser in a short space of time, I have no wish to see a dissolute count ruling in Averheim either. I do not say this to wound you, but your reputation does you no credit.”
Leitdorf returned the thin smile. “So others have said.” He looked back over his shoulder. Near the centre of the encampment, Helborg was conversing with Schwarzhelm and the other captains. “I see the warmth between us has not grown. If you’d spoken to me thus in Averheim, I’d have had you driven from the province in disgrace. Even now, a part of me would not regret to see you leave.”
He took a deep breath. As his chest rose and fell, Verstohlen noticed a book, wrapped in fabric and strapped to his belt. An unusual ornament for the battlefield.
“I’ve changed, Verstohlen,” he said, “even if you haven’t. Perhaps, when this is over, you’ll see the proof of it.”
Verstohlen paused before replying. There was something different about the man. Not enough to be sure about, but hardly insignificant either.
“Perhaps I will,” was all he said, and he returned to the fire.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Holyman Eschenbach made his way down the spiral stairway in the central shaft of the Tower. As he limped from one step to the next, the dull rumble from below grew louder. The iron around him reverberated with the drumming sound of machines turning in the depths. The lower he climbed, the hotter it became. In every sense, he was coming to the source of things.
The stairs finally came to an end, and he stood at the base of the Tower. A long gallery led away in front of him, shrouded in shadow. There were doorways along either side, each with a different rune inscribed over the lintel. At the far end was an octagonal chamber containing an obsidian throne. There were no dog-soldiers around. The only noise was the muffled growl of the machines and the endless rush of the fire as it swirled in the air outside.
Eschenbach swallowed painfully, feeling his neck muscles constrict around the pitiful trickle of saliva he was capable of generating. His transformations had built up over the past few days. What he’d initially thought of as improvements had turned out to be serious handicaps. For some reason, the Dark Prince seemed displeased with him. Eschenbach knew of no cause for that—he’d faithfully served the elector since his coronation—but that didn’t make the pain go away.
He knew his death was close. He could feel it stealing up behind him, padding in the dark like a cat. The only question was when, at whose hand, and how painful they’d make it. Some reward for the service he’d rendered.
Eschenbach shuffled forwards awkwardly, feeling his altered bones grind against one another. The rooms on either side of him were deserted. In the earliest days Natassja had conducted her experiments here, creating the first of the Stone-slaves. Now she had whole levels of the under-Tower devoted to her invasive surgeries, and the screams of the tormented and augmented echoed into the vaults like massed choruses in a cathedral. Dog-soldiers had been born in their thousands there, filled with bestial savagery and strength, utterly loyal and without fear.
Other horrors had been made. He’d seen trios of handmaidens, eyes glowing, scuttling through the lower reaches like a gaggle of bronze-tipped spiders. There were men’s heads grafted on to women’s bodies, eyeless and earless horrors stumbling around in the dark, lost beyond hope of rescue. They had no conceivable use in the war, just amusement value for the queen.
The earliest augmentation chambers now lay abandoned, the instruments lying where she’d left them, the tables stained with old blood and the stone walls as cold and silent as ice.
“I see you, Steward,” came her voice.
It was as familiar as a recurrent nightmare. Eschenbach shivered to his core. It came from the chamber at the end of the gallery.
There was no choice but to follow it. He limped forwards, trying to ignore the residue of agony in the open doorways as he passed them by.
Natassja was waiting for him. She sat on the throne, painfully elegant, searingly beautiful, radiating an aura of such terrifying power and malice that he nearly broke down in front of her before managing his first bow. Elector Grosslich had his powers, to be sure, but Natassja was something else.
“Why are you here?” she asked. There was little emotion in her voice. No anger, no spite, just a faint trace of boredom. She looked at him with the same casual disinterest a man might use on a particularly nondescript worm.
Eschenbach did his best to look her in the face.
“I was sent by the Lord Grosslich,” he rasped, feeling his jaw nearly seize up with the effort.
“For what purpose?”
“He wished me to check on the progress of the Stone.”
“He is welcome to come himself.”
“Shall I ask him to, my lady?”
Natassja shook her head. The movement was so slight, so perfectly poised. The queen seemed incapable of making a clumsy or ill-considered gesture. She was flawless, the living embodiment of a dark and perfect symmetry.
“No need. You may see for yourself.”
She raised a slender hand. Behind her throne the stone walls shifted. Soundlessly, gliding on rails of polished bronze, two panels slid backwards and out, revealing a roaring, blood-red space beyond. Something astonishing had been exposed out there—even Eschenbach’s paltry skills could detect the volume of power being directed from below. He held back, reluctant to venture any closer.
“Take a l
ook,” said Natassja. Her voice sang as softly as it ever did, but the tone of command was absolute. If she’d ordered him to pluck his own eyes out, he would have done it then without question. As he shuffled into place, Natassja rose from the throne, her dress falling about her like wine slipping down a grateful throat, and followed him.
The rear walls of the chamber opened out into the side of a massive shaft. The scale of it took Eschenbach’s breath away. Sheer walls were clad in dark iron, moulded into a thousand pillars, arches and buttresses. Sigils of Slaanesh and Chaos had been beaten into the metal and shone an angry crimson. A hundred feet below, the base of the shaft was lost in a ball of slowly rotating fire. Above him, the columns soared into the far distance, lined along their whole length with elaborate sculptures and gothic ornamentation, before being lost in a fog of flame and shadow. Beautiful, terrible figures carved from iron and steel peered out from lofty perches on the high walls, their blank eyes bathed in flames.
Eschenbach knew without having to ask that the shaft went all the way to the summit of the Tower. Whenever he’d had his audiences with Grosslich, he’d been standing on top of it. The elector’s chamber was nothing more than the fragile cap on this mighty well of fire. He wondered if Grosslich knew that.
The air inside was a mass of roaring, rushing and booming energy. Aethyric matter surged up the narrow space, pressing against its iron shackles, throbbing and fighting to be released. Now, at last, Eschenbach knew the purpose of the citadel. The whole thing was a device with a single purpose: to conduct the will of the Stone, to magnify and condense it into a point, far above the level of the city. As he watched the titanic levels of arcane puissance balloon along the spine of the Tower, as he heard the roar from below, he began to gain some appreciation of the scale of what had been achieved here.
“What do you think?” asked Natassja, standing by his side on the edge of the precipice. The rush of flames licked against her ankles, curling around her body like whips. The red light lit up her face, and her dark eyes glowed.
“Magnificent,” murmured Eschenbach, for a moment forgetting the pains in his mortal body. Beside this, nothing else seemed significant. “It’s magnificent.”
Natassja looked like she barely heard him. She was gazing into the shaft herself, eyes lost in rapture.
“This is what the suffering has achieved,” she murmured. “The merest savage can inflict misery. We never act but for a higher purpose. The Stone is roused by agony. It is agony.”
Eschenbach listened, rapt. Natassja ignored him, speaking to herself.
“Every spar of this Tower, every stone of it, is in place for a reason. There lies the true beauty of this place. The necessity of it. Only that which is necessary is beautiful, and the beautiful is all that is necessary. That shall be my creed, when all is done here.”
She smiled, exposing her impossibly delicate incisors, tapered to a vanishing point of sharpness.
“My creed. Ah, the blasphemy of it.”
Natassja turned to Eschenbach.
“Enough of this. Have you seen what you came for?”
“I have, my queen.”
The pain in Eschenbach’s body had lessened. His senses were operating at a heightened pitch of awareness. Visions rushed towards him like waking dreams. He saw the numberless host of Grosslich’s men, legions of darkness, marching in endless ranks, unstoppable and remorseless. He saw the daemons circling the Tower like crows, ancient and malevolent, glorious and perfect. He saw the full extent of the Stone buried in the earth below, as black as the infinite void, a mere fragment of the future.
Some things began to make sense then. He no longer regretted his choices.
“Will you report back to your master?”
Eschenbach shook his head.
“No, my queen.”
“Good. So you know what will please me.”
“I do.”
“Then please me.”
Eschenbach grinned. The movement ripped his mouth at the edges, the muscles having long wasted into nothingness. He didn’t care. Pain was nothing. There would be more pain, but that was nothing too. Only the Stone mattered.
He stepped from the ledge and was swept upwards by the vast power of the shaft. The flames seared him, crackling his flesh and curling it from the bone. He laughed as he was borne aloft, feeling his tortured face fracture. He was rising fast, buoyed up by the column of fire, speeding past the sigils of Slaanesh. They glowed back at him with pleasure. He had finally done well.
His eyes were burned away. He breathed in, and fire tore through his body and into his lungs. At the end, before his charred figure slammed into the roof of the shaft, he felt his soul pulled from his mortal form, immolated by the will of the Stone, sucked into its dark heart and consumed. In a final sliver of awareness, he knew just how much closer his sacrifice had brought forward the great awakening. Before he could be pleased by that, he was gone, the candle-flame of his life extinguished within the inferno of something far, far greater.
On her ledge below, Natassja remained still, watching the flames as they screamed past.
“Now then, Heinz-Mark,” she breathed, stretching out her hand and watching the torrents caress her flesh. “Your servants are all gone. The time has come, I think, for you to face me.”
Helborg’s army had descended from the highlands and made good progress across the rolling fields of Averland. The men had been organised into standard Imperial formations and strode down the wide merchants’ roads in squares of halberdier and spearman companies. Their livery was patchy and irregular, but they were well-armed and highly motivated. Helborg had made sure they were fed and paid, and they rewarded him by maintaining good discipline. With every mile they travelled, more came to join them. All the villagers in the region had seen the column of fire in the west, and even their simple minds had felt the corruption bleeding from it. Carts and supplies were commandeered and added to the straggling baggage caravan. At the end of the first full day of marching into the interior, his forces had swelled to near three thousand. The few remaining Reiksguard were the only truly deadly troops among them, but the rest at least had blades and some idea of how to use them.
At the end of each day, the army established camp in the Imperial manner, raising earthworks around a close-packed formation of tents and ramming stakes into the defences. As the army had grown, this task had become more arduous and time-consuming, but it was necessary work. Grosslich’s forces had yet to engage them, but the closer they came to the capital the more inevitable an attack became. They were now little more than a day’s march away, almost close enough to see the tips of the city’s spires on the northwest horizon.
With the raising of the encampment, the men retired to their positions for the night, sitting around fires and speculating about the booty they’d receive for aiding the Reiksmarshal on campaign. They avoided discussion of the forces ranged against them, or the growing presence of the pillar of fire, or the reports from the forward scouts of a strange dark lower thrusting up from the heart of the city.
In the centre of the camp the command group held council, screened from the rank and file by canvas hoardings and sitting around a huge fire. Helborg stood in the place of honour, his breastplate glowing red from the flames. The Sword of Vengeance hung again from his belt, and it had made him complete. His habitual flamboyance seemed to have been replaced with a kind of grim majesty, and in the firelight he resembled nothing so much as the statue of Magnus the Pious in the Chapel of Fallen.
On his left stood Hausman, in Skarr’s absence the most senior Reiksguard. On his right was Leitdorf, looking uncomfortable in his armour. There were four other captains drawn from the ranks, all veteran soldiers and Leitdorf loyalists wearing the blue and burgundy.
Opposite Helborg, completing the circle, was Schwarzhelm. The Emperor’s Champion looked almost as imposing as Helborg. He was back in armour, and it seemed to have had a restorative effect on his demeanour. Verstohlen stood, as ever, by his s
ide. He remained in the margins, observing the deliberations rather than contributing, just as his long service in the clandestine arts had equipped him to do.
“You have all seen the pillar of fire,” said Helborg. “You know the story of treachery we march to avenge. But there are greater forces at work here. Lord Schwarzhelm has more knowledge of the foe we face than any of us, so I have asked him to speak.”
All turned to the big man. The bad blood between him and Helborg seemed purged after the drama of their first meeting, but the atmosphere remained brittle. None of the captains seemed to know how to act around him. Schwarzhelm, as was his manner, gave away nothing.
“We do not march alone,” he said, and his growling voice seemed to reverberate from his newly-donned battle-plate. “The Emperor has been warned, and we can be sure there will be Imperial forces hastening to counter the threat. How close they are, I do not know. We may encounter them at Averheim, or they may still be weeks away.”
His eyes swept the captains. There was a light kindled in them, one Verstohlen hadn’t seen for many days. Not since Schwarzhelm had ridden east from the succession debate to crush the orcs. He lived for this kind of test.
“In either case, we cannot wait. I have been in Averheim. It has been turned into a den of Chaos, and our duty is to purge it. We must do all in our power to weaken the defences, whether or not other Imperial forces are committed. Our survival is unimportant.”
The Averlander captains looked concerned by that. Helborg had promised them victory, not sacrifice.
“How many men does Grosslich have under command?” asked one of them.
“We don’t know,” said Helborg. “Nor does it matter. Schwarzhelm’s verdict is the only one—as soon as we’re within range, we’ll commit to an assault. I’ve sent messages to my lieutenant to gather all the men he commands. We’ll join forces south of the city and make directly for it. The bulk of the troops will engage the enemy while a strike force composed of myself, the Lord Schwarzhelm and the Reiksguard will penetrate the Tower. Grosslich is the heart of this—if we kill him, the edifice around him will crumble.”
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