by Warhammer
(Altdorf Press, 2529)
ONE
Felix Jaeger stared in horror as eerie laughter echoed in unison from the dead throats of the encroaching zombie horde. Dead man and dead beastman alike, they all laughed with the same voice.
‘Hans,’ he said, edging back. ‘Hans the Hermit is behind this.’
Gotrek Gurnisson hefted his rune axe. ‘Should have gutted him the first time I saw him,’ he growled.
Kat wiped her blood-grimed brow with the back of a bruised hand. Her skin, in the sick green light of Morrslieb, looked as dead as that of the walking corpses. ‘We just killed them,’ she groaned. ‘Now we have to do it all over again?’
‘Good,’ said Rodi Balkisson, smoothing his braided Slayer’s crest. ‘Maybe this time we’ll find our doom.’
‘You may, Balkisson,’ said Gotrek. ‘But Snorri Nosebiter will not.’
The Slayer turned and helped Snorri up from the makeshift stretcher he and Rodi had carried him on after Snorri had lost his right leg. He slung Snorri’s arm over his shoulder as Rodi did the same with Snorri’s other arm, and with Felix and Kat following, the three dwarfs stumped towards Baron Emil von Kotzebue’s troops, who were closing ranks and lowering spears against the undead army in the centre of the narrow valley.
‘Snorri wouldn’t mind slaying a few more beastmen, actually,’ said Snorri, looking over his shoulder at the shaggy undead monsters that groped and stumbled after them.
‘Sorry, Father Rustskull,’ said Rodi. ‘No slaying for you until you make your pilgrimage, remember?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Snorri mournfully. ‘Snorri forgot.’
As rally horns blasted bright tantaras and cannons roared from the hills, weary handfuls of spearmen and knights fought through the dead towards the relief column from every corner of the battlefield – cutting down corpses that wore the same uniforms as themselves.
That was the worst of it, thought Felix. Though half the zombies that threatened the living were risen beastmen, the other half were men he and the rest of the Imperial force had been fighting alongside not a quarter of an hour before. All around, valiant soldiers who had ranked up with their brothers in desperate besieged squares against the raging sea of beastmen, now instead lurched along with those same horrors and attacked their old comrades with blank-eyed ferocity – in death becoming traitors to their own kind.
Felix parried a blow from the corpse of Sir Teobalt von Dreschler, who, until he had died in Felix’s arms, had been a noble templar of the Order of the Fiery Heart. Now he was a horrible, animate cadaver, with a dangling jaw and a glistening red wound in the middle of his caved-in chest. Kat hesitated when she could have hamstrung the old knight, and nearly lost a hand when he lashed out at her.
‘How can I strike him?’ she moaned. ‘He was our friend.’
‘Who he was is gone,’ said Gotrek, cutting down a beast-corpse. ‘Kill it.’
With a sob, Kat buried her hatchet in Sir Teobalt’s knee as Felix hacked off his head with Karaghul, a relic of the old templar’s order which Teobalt had bequeathed to Felix only days before.
‘With his own sword,’ said Felix bitterly as the old man fell.
Felix was so battered and tired as they pushed on that he could barely lift the blade against the dead that stumbled towards them. An hour ago, he and Kat and the three Slayers had charged into the circle of standing stones atop the hill known as Tarnhalt’s Crown and attacked Urslak Cripplehorn, a powerful beast-shaman, attempting to stop him from completing a ceremony that would have turned every human within the Drakwald into a beastman. Half an hour ago, with Urslak dead, they had raced down into the valley below the Crown to join the armies of Viscount Oktaf Plaschke-Miesner and Lord Giselbert von Volgen in their ill-advised attack on the shaman’s ten thousand-strong herd. Ten minutes ago, the forces of Baron Emil von Kotzebue had thundered into the valley and slammed into the flanks of the beastmen, and the young lords’ doomed armies had been saved – though it was too late for the young lords themselves. One minute ago, Morrslieb, the Chaos moon, had eclipsed its fairer sibling, Mannslieb, at precisely midnight on Hexensnacht, the last second of the old year and the first second of the new, and all the dead on the battlefield, both man and beastman, had risen together in undeath and turned their dull, staring eyes upon the living. Felix had not stopped fighting in all that time.
The hulking corpse of Gargorath the God-Touched, the war-leader of Urslak’s massive herd, staggered in front of the Slayers, moaning and swinging the cloven-hoofed leg of another beastman as if it were a club. The hole that Gotrek’s rune axe had made in the beastman’s chest when the Slayer had earlier killed it did not appear to be troubling it in the least.
‘You want to die twice?’ rasped Gotrek as he, Snorri and Rodi ducked the meat-club.
The stumbling beast-zombie turned after them, but Gotrek left Snorri to Rodi and swung his rune axe in a high arc behind him. The blade chunked into the side of Gargorath’s black-furred neck and severed its spine.
‘So be it.’
The dead beast toppled forwards as Gotrek wrenched his axe free and stepped back under Snorri’s arm. They hurried on, falling in with other survivors and hacking in every direction. Fortunately, the zombies were still only rising in ones and twos, and it did not seem that Hans the Hermit yet had full control of their limbs. They jerked and twitched, and fell as often as they walked, or wandered off in the wrong direction, but with each passing second, their movements grew more certain and their attention more focussed – all turning towards von Kotzebue’s besieged column like blind mosquitoes attracted by the scent of blood.
The closer Felix, Kat and the Slayers fought to the column, the thicker the mass of zombies became, until it was a solid wall through which Felix could see almost nothing.
‘Dress ranks! Square up! Square up!’ shouted a sergeant from somewhere beyond the corpses.
‘Wounded on the carts! Them as can walk, carry them that can’t! Move!’
‘We will retreat in good order, curse you! If you want to fear something, fear my boot, or you’ll get it up your backside!’
‘Heads, necks or legs, gentlemen! Heads, necks or legs! All other strikes are worthless!’
This last came from a splendid-looking old knight in the colours of Middenland, who Felix saw over the heads of the zombies, lashing about vigorously with a long sword from the back of a heavily barded charger. His close-shaved head was bare, and he shouted his orders through the largest, whitest and most magnificent moustaches Felix had ever seen. This must be von Kotzebue, Felix thought – their saviour. Fighting beside him was a thick-necked, broad-chested nobleman, with a pugnacious bulldog face that Felix almost recognised. He wore a surcoat of mustard and burgundy over his plate, and the crowned eagle of Talabecland on his shield.
‘My son!’ the Talabeclander was shouting. ‘Find my son!’
Hearing that, Felix recognised the face at last. It was a middle-aged mirror to that of Giselbert von Volgen, one of the young lords who had led his tiny army against the overwhelming might of the beastmen. This must be Giselbert’s father, and he was shouting in vain. Giselbert was dead now, alas, killed by Gargorath, and raised again like all the other corpses on the field. He would not hear his father’s cries.
Ten yards from the column, Felix, Kat and the Slayers found their way blocked by a supply cart, stranded amidst the swarming undead. Its driver and cargo men fought for their lives atop its load – the neatly stowed canvas and sticks of a score of officers’ tents – as their horses kicked and screamed.
‘Help us!’ shouted the driver towards the troops.
But with a ragged blast of bugles and a roar of ‘Company, march!’ the knights and foot soldiers began to push their way south, fighting for every step.
Gotrek nodded Rodi towards the cart as the driver wailed with dismay.
‘Here,’ said the Slayer, hooking a zombie aside with his axe and shouldering his way to the tailgate. ‘Up, Nosebiter.’
He and Rodi shoved Snorri up onto the pile of canvas, then fanned back the zombies and climbed up after him. Felix kicked back a corpse that had him by the leg, then pulled himself up as Kat clambered up beside him, panting.
‘Drive!’ Gotrek called to the driver as he and Rodi swiped back at the undead beasts and men that closed in after them. ‘We’ll hold them.’
‘Oh thank you, sir dwarf,’ said the man. ‘Thank you!’
He took up the reins as Gotrek, Rodi, Felix and Kat joined his cargo men along the sides of the wagon and began hacking and kicking at the encroaching horde.
‘Manling, little one,’ barked Gotrek. ‘Keep them off the horses.’
Felix groaned with fatigue, but crawled past the driver with Kat, then hopped awkwardly onto the backs of his carthorses. The terrified animals bucked and shrieked as Felix and Kat clung to their backs and slashed at the clawing zombies, but when a path had been cleared, they took it, and strained slowly towards the retreating column through a fetlock-deep swamp of twice-dead corpses.
Then a voice rose above the din of battle. ‘My son! Stop! We must go back!’
Felix looked up. Lord von Volgen was pointing directly at the wagon, his eyes wide.
‘Von Kotzebue!’ he cried. ‘Stop the column! My son!’
His son? Felix looked back, frowning. A figure in beautifully crafted armour was pulling itself up onto the tailgate of the cart at the head of a throng of undead. It wore the same mustard and burgundy as Lord von Volgen, but its face under its dented helmet was as withered and lifeless as when Felix had last seen it – when it and the corpse of its cousin, Oktaf Plaschke-Miesner, had moments ago shambled towards him in a horrible mockery of life.
Gotrek and Rodi brained and decapitated the young lord’s corpse, then kicked it back into the rest.
A wail of anguish rose from the column. ‘Giselbert! No! My son!’
A claw raked Felix’s arm, and he had to return his attention to the zombies around his horse, slashing and hacking and kicking them away as Kat did the same on the second horse. The strikes of the dead were clumsy and easy to block, but they were so many, and so relentless, that it was all she and Felix could do to keep them at bay and stay on their mounts.
After what seemed an hour, the cart reached the column, and the line of spearmen who were desperately staving off the shambling horde parted and let them through. Once behind their ranks, Felix and Kat flopped across the necks of their horses and just lay there, panting. Felix was as exhausted as he had ever been, and now that his limbs were at rest, the pain began to seep into the dozens of wounds he had taken during that long, long night. He was cut, bruised, scraped and battered from head to foot. There was nowhere on his body that didn’t hurt.
‘Well, that’s that, then,’ said Rodi, behind him. ‘We can go back and find our dooms now.’
‘You can,’ said Gotrek. ‘I stay with Snorri Nosebiter until the column wins clear.’
‘But…’
Felix looked back as Rodi turned from the sea of zombies to glare at Snorri, who lay in the middle of the cart, tightening the tourniquet that was wrapped around his severed leg.
‘All right,’ Rodi grunted at last. ‘I owe him that, but afterwards, no more waiting. There is a great doom here.’
‘Aye,’ said Gotrek. ‘No more waiting.’ He jumped down from the cart and started towards the left flank of the column. ‘Come on, beardling. We’ll warm up with these.’
Rodi hopped down after him, grinning. ‘Good. The sooner these manlings get away, the sooner we have the rest to ourselves.’
The two Slayers shouldered forwards to join the sidestepping line of spearmen who stabbed mechanically into the surging mass of undead as the column marched out of the valley.
‘Heads, necks and legs!’ roared Rodi, bashing around at the zombies with his hammer.
The spearmen cheered and echoed his call. ‘Heads, necks and legs!’
Gotrek didn’t join in. He was too busy slaying.
‘We should help them,’ said Kat, rising wearily from her horse’s neck.
‘Aye,’ said Felix, ‘we should.’
But when he tried to push himself upright, his arms shook so much he knew he would be useless on the front line. He would only add himself to the dead, and he didn’t fancy Gotrek slaying him for becoming a zombie. Still, there was other work that needed to be done.
Felix saw that the surgeons’ assistants were overwhelmed by the number of wounded and dead falling back from the flanks and the rearguard. They were carrying them to the baggage carts as fast as they could, but men were still being left behind for want of bearers to carry them.
He dismounted and beckoned to Kat. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘This we can do.’
A great cheering arose and Felix and Kat looked up from laying another wounded spearman on the cart that had brought them there. It was following von Kotzebue’s ragged column of knights, spearmen and halberdiers up through a low pass between two hills at the southern end of the valley of Tarnhalt’s Crown, and all the men were shaking their weapons and roaring and thrusting up two-finger salutes back towards the battlefield.
Felix blinked. He and Kat had been so focussed on carrying the wounded that they hadn’t noticed the column’s progress. There were no zombies around them. The shambling dead were all further down the slope, funnelled together by the constricting hills and held back by a rearguard of spearmen that blocked the narrow pass – a noble sacrifice that would allow the rest of the army to escape.
‘We – we won free,’ said Kat, staring.
‘And now we’re going back,’ said Gotrek, as he and Rodi joined them at the tailgate.
Felix’s heart thudded in his chest. This meant that he and the Slayer were parting ways at last. He didn’t know what to say.
But as he opened his mouth in the vain hope that something appropriate would fall out, a cold wind, reeking of death and earth, blew up from the valley and made the brave cheering falter and die. Lightning flashed above them, and thunder followed it, a deafening crack that went echoing across the endless Barren Hills.
Felix and the others looked up with the rest of the column. The two moons were now hidden behind a pale scrim of clouds, and had pulled apart from their earlier eclipse. Now they looked like the glowing eyes of a warp-dust addict gleaming through a mask of dirty gauze. And before them, stepping out of a fading cloud of shadow at the crest of the hill above the pass, was the twisted figure of Hans the Hermit, laughing maniacally.
‘Yes,’ he hissed, as the soldiers shivered and stared. ‘Flee to your masters. Tell them I am coming. Tell them that every castle and town between here and Altdorf will fall before me. Tell them their dead will become my army. Tell them I will take Altdorf with a hundred thousand corpses, and that the Empire of Sigmar will become the Empire of the Dead.’
Pistols and long guns cracked at the hermit, and Kat unslung her bow and sent an arrow speeding his way, but he paid them no heed, and none of the missiles seemed to find its mark.
‘You may outrun the tide now,’ the hermit said. ‘But soon the sea of death will overlap your walls and drown you. Then you will rise and walk with us. All will die. All will be one. All will be mine.’
The spearmen and knights roared defiance at this pronouncement, breaking ranks to start up the steep slope of the hill, and Gotrek and Rodi followed, bellowing dwarf curses, but before any of them could take more than three steps, mist and shadows coalesced around the hermit and he was gone as suddenly as he had appeared, and the ridge was empty.
Felix shivered and pulled his red Sudenland wool cloak tighter around his shoulders as the men whispered prayers of warding at this sorcerous disappearance. He hoped Hans’s words were only boasting, but after seeing how the supposed hermit had tricked him and Gotrek and the others into destroying Urslak’s herdstone so that he could work his dark magic, he wasn’t willing to bet on it. Whoever he was, Hans was a powerful and cunning necromancer, and Felix feared they had only seen a fr
action of his power.
‘Come on, Gurnisson,’ said Rodi. ‘The manlings have picked a good place. We’ll be able to hold the corpses there for a good long time.’
Gotrek nodded. ‘Aye.’
‘Snorri could help if he had a crutch,’ said Snorri, sitting up in the cart.
Gotrek turned and scowled at him. ‘You are going to Karak Kadrin, Nosebiter. This is not your doom.’
Snorri hung his head. ‘Snorri forgot again.’
Felix and Kat stepped to the Slayers.
Felix swallowed. ‘So… so it’s goodbye at last,’ he said, inanely.
‘Aye, manling,’ said Gotrek, and though he tried to be solemn, Felix could see he was finding it hard to keep the eagerness from his voice. ‘Remember your pledge. Bring Snorri Nosebiter to the Shrine of Grimnir and you are free.’
‘I’ll get him there,’ said Felix.
‘Goodbye, Gotrek,’ said Kat. ‘Goodbye, Rodi. May Grimnir welcome you to his halls.’
Felix held out his hand, but as Gotrek made to clasp it, a thunder of hooves shook the ground. A score of knights were galloping down the column, Baron von Kotzebue and Lord von Volgen at their head, and pulled up at the back of the wagon, making a ring of horseflesh and pistols and naked swords around Gotrek, Felix, Kat and Rodi.
‘There!’ said von Volgen, pointing at the Slayers with his broadsword. ‘There are the inhuman berserkers that murdered my son!’
TWO
Felix stared at von Volgen as Gotrek and Rodi went on guard. What was the lunatic talking about? Hadn’t he seen his son’s withered face? Hadn’t he seen him attacking the Slayers with the other zombies?
‘You will die here, dwarfs,’ choked von Volgen.
‘Aye, we will,’ said Gotrek, looking past him into the valley, where the zombies were starting to push back the rearguard. ‘If you get out of our way.’
‘You stand between us and our doom,’ growled Rodi.
The two Slayers started straight for the two lords. ‘Kill them!’ shouted von Volgen, waving at his men. ‘Execute them for the murder of my son!’
