Runefang

by C. L. Werner - (ebook by Undead)

  Kessler hacked at Uhrghul with his zweihander, severing the brute’s already mangled arm. The orc, lost to his bloodlust, didn’t pay the injury any notice. Towering above the screaming wreck of Raban, he brought his axe chopping down in a crimson arc, cleaving skull and breastbone, leaving the blade buried in the man’s gut.

  Kessler chopped at the monster again, scraping his sword across the orc’s ribs. Dark blood spurted from the fresh wound. Uhrghul abandoned his axe, rounding on Kessler with a clenched fist. The mallet-like fist cracked against the man’s chest, kicking him back. The zweihander clattered across the plateau as Kessler crashed to earth. The swordsman forced himself to his feet, taking a perverse strength from the flash of fresh agony that spoke of broken ribs.

  Uhrghul dipped fingers into the fresh wound in his side, sniffing the dark blood that stained them. The orc knew he was dying, that fight as much as he would, there was nothing he could do to stave off the icy hand of death. The understanding simply made him more ferocious, more determined to glut the murderous malice that burned in his heart. Kessler tasted blood in his mouth, and felt the damaged ribs grinding together as he moved. He saw Valdner, unable to stand, and Skanir reduced to a twitching pile of debris. Even dying, the orc would outlast them all.

  For the second time, a shadow loomed large at the mouth of the crypt. This time, the apparition held no terror for Kessler. It was his turn to sneer at the orc. Uhrghul’s beady eye narrowed with suspicion as some of the warlord’s old cunning fought through the red haze of slaughter. He turned in time to see Ghrum’s immense arm come crashing down, slamming into the orc with the awesome power of a battering ram. If a single bone was left unbroken by that impact, Kessler would have been amazed. Uhrghul seemed to fold around the ogre’s fist, collapsing like a punctured bladder. The orc’s body flew through the air as though shot from one of Skanir’s cannons. It crashed among the dead, bounced high, and then plummeted off the edge of the plateau. Kessler could faintly hear the clatter of its descent to the canyon below.

  Ghrum’s face was contorted with pain and fatigue, yet there was a suggestion of guilt in the ogre’s eyes as he looked at Kessler.

  “Sorry,” Ghrum apologised in his slow, gruff tones. “One got out.”

  “You have to get the Sun-Tooth back to your people. We must finish the job we set out to do and send Zahaak back to his grave.” The words came in a frail whisper from Skanir’s bloodied lips. The blow he had suffered from the orc had been worse than Kessler had dared imagine. One leg had been almost ripped clean from its socket. The blood bubbling up from the dwarf’s mouth spoke of other, perhaps no less horrendous, internal injuries. He was dying, but like the orc, he was too stubborn to easily accept the fact. Kneeling beside him, Kessler could not fail to be impressed by the tragic dignity with which the dwarf struggled to keep his grip on life.

  “Tell my people how I died,” Skanir persisted. “Warn them where Ironclaw’s sword was found. Let them put my name in the clan’s book of grudges, that all the Durgrunds, all the generations that bear the name of Stonehammer, will know how Skanir Stonehammer found his doom.”

  Kessler nodded solemnly to the dying dwarf. He felt the once-powerful grip around his fingers grow slack. When he looked again, the light had passed from Skanir’s eyes.

  “You’re going to do what he told you.”

  Kessler rose and faced Valdner. The mercenary was still leaning against the stone that Raban had set him against. The dark pool that surrounded him hadn’t been there before they’d emerged from the crypt. Valdner didn’t make a question of it, not even a statement. Despite the weakness in his voice, Kessler knew that it was a command.

  The swordsman made no move, studying Valdner with an inscrutable gaze. Something inside him was repulsed by the suggestion. He’d killed many men, and seen many others die. He thought he was too old a comrade of death to ever rail against its approach. Now, however, the old acceptance felt hollow, indecent even.

  “Ever think maybe we don’t want you gawking at us while we’re busy dying?” Kessler turned his head, looking down at Theodo’s battered, bloodied body. When Ghrum had emerged from the war-crypt, it had taken Kessler several minutes to realise that the gore-soaked rag he was carrying was the halfling. That there was still any life in the rogue was even harder to believe.

  Kessler stared, his face mask-like. There was something obscene about leaving the men here, abandoning them to the doubtful mercy of the mountain.

  Valdner shifted uneasily, wincing with the effort. “Staying here won’t accomplish a thing, Max, but if you leave now, you might be able to get that dwarf gewgaw to Count Eberfeld while it can still do some good.” He smiled and closed his eyes. “Get back to Wissenland while there’s something to save.”

  Kessler stood silent, hating the sense Valdner’s words made. “I’ll come back,” he promised, loathing how empty the words sounded, even to him.

  “Bring some decent brandy if you do,” quipped Theodo. Ghrum’s belly growled in sympathy to what he thought was a request for food.

  “A few courtesans with low standards and loose morals wouldn’t be turned away either,” Valdner added. The effort of laughing caused the pool around him to widen.

  Kessler nodded respectfully to the fading captain. Slinging his zweihander over his shoulder, the swordsman turned away, marching stoically down the twisting slope to the canyon below.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  From a hilltop overlooking Wissenberg, Count Eberfeld watched as his city was slowly surrounded. The unearthly shroud of fog that surrounded the legion gleamed weirdly in the moonlit night, like a great cloud crushed to the ground and bound to the earth. The fog bank was larger than the count remembered it from Neuwald. He did not like to think why it had to be so, did not like to ponder the hideous fact that it had to expand, because there was more for it to hide from the sun.

  The sacrifice made by General Hock and the people of Dortrecht had given Count Eberfeld desperately needed time. Wissenberg was already a ghost town, its people evacuated to other settlements along the river, towns too recently built to figure in Zahaak’s ancient battle plan. The only men still within the city were soldiers, fighting men drawn from the length and breadth of Wissenland, tasked with holding the walls of the city at all cost. Count Eberfeld’s strategy depended on those walls holding, and remaining in friendly hands.

  Earlier battles against Zahaak had failed, because they had been fought against the skeletal horrors that made up his legion. Hard-earned experience had shown that such efforts were futile, like draining the sea with a thimble. Only the most grievously mutilated bodies were not raised again to unholy life by Zahaak’s necromancy, and they were easily replaced by the mounds of Wissenlanders killed fighting against the wight lord.

  Now Count Eberfeld intended to strike at the heart of the undead legion, the one element of that ghastly host that could not be resurrected by Zahaak’s fell magic: the wight himself. The count let his hand fall to Blood Bringer, the sword that was the companion of the blade that prophecy said could kill Zahaak, and which Baron von Rabwald had left to recover so long ago. The council of his advisors and nobles had prevailed against him throughout the campaign not to risk him or his runefang in battle, warning of the dire ruin that could result from such a loss. So, Count Eberfeld had sat back, sat and planned, sat and let others fight his battles.

  He had sat while his realm died around him.

  Count Eberfeld glared at the glowing fog, at the shadowy wraiths that marched inexorably towards the walls of his city. No more. He had reached that decision when Dortrecht had fallen. He would not let his advisors hold him back any longer. If he did nothing, Wissenland was lost anyway. His ownership of Blood Bringer would mean nothing if the land it was sworn to protect became a graveyard. Wissenberg might be the last objective of Zahaak’s old battle plan to destroy the Merogens, but who could say that the wight would not devise a new campaign once that task had been accomplished. The wight might just as
easily turn his legion against all that had been built since the time of Sigmar as be content with the destruction he had already wrought.

  A small cluster of officers stood with their count, beneath the shade of his pavilion, watching the play of emotion cross their sovereign’s face. At length, through the morass of anger, guilt and shame emerged the emotion that the officers had waited for. An icy mask of grim determination overcame Count Eberfeld’s face. He looked away from the walls of Wissenberg and the doom that marched steadily upon them. Zahaak would never breach those walls, instead the wight’s legion would be broken upon them.

  The count stood next to an oak table, its surface covered by a sprawling map of Wissenberg and its immediate environs. He could see every detail recorded in painstaking care; even the position of his encampment, his soldiers’ tents, and his knights’ stables had been marked. It had taken excruciating patience to watch and wait for the entire legion to close upon Wissenberg, for every last wisp of its spectral fog to fall within the landscape recorded on the map. Perhaps the hardest thing he had been forced to do in the course of the entire campaign was to let the spectre of destruction march right up to the walls of his city while he sat by and did nothing. This time, however, his restraint promised rewards.

  Count Eberfeld nodded to the dark, soberly clad figure that stood beyond the table. Father Vadian of the Cult of Morr bowed in return. The old priest produced a strange silver pendant from within his robes. A small arrowhead was fitted to one end of the chain, the other end attached to a silver ring, which the priest slipped around his finger. He stretched his hand carefully over the map, so that the arrowhead swung idly above it. Closing his eyes, Father Vadian began to chant, the tones low and whisper-thin, like the rustle of leaves across a grave. Again, Count Eberfeld experienced the clammy, unearthly cold that heralded the power of Morr.

  The pendulum hanging from Father Vadian’s hand began to swing, slowly at first, and then with rapidly increasing revolutions. Wider and wider the circling arrowhead spun, dancing above the map with a frantic energy of its own. The priest’s ritual increased in tempo and speed in time to the spinning pendulum. It moved faster and faster, becoming a silver blur to the men watching its revolutions with anxious eyes. Mouthing the words quicker and quicker, the priest’s voice threatened to crack from the strain of forcing the prayers from his lips.

  At last, the pendulum froze, the chain standing rigid above the map, thrust at a gravity defying angle as the arrowhead stabbed downward. Count Eberfeld and his officers rushed forward as Father Vadian’s voice faded away. Their awed faces stared down at the spot the pendulum had chosen, almost unwilling to believe what they saw. Count Eberfeld decided them, tapping the spot with his finger.

  “This is where he is,” the count stated. “This is where we must strike. Mark the position well, men. We must throw everything we have into the effort. I don’t care how many ranks of rotting nightmares that fiend puts against us, we must break through! If it costs every man in this camp, Zahaak must be destroyed!”

  The count’s words brooked no question, no challenge. His officers knew what was at stake. They knew that they would probably die in the attempt to save their land, but they also knew that their sovereign was not sparing himself from the same danger, not trying to escape from the same fate. That knowledge, more than anything else, steeled their hearts to the desperate gambit. If every man in their army had to die, their lives would be well spent wiping Zahaak’s evil from the land.

  The officers saluted and hurried to ready their regiments. Count Eberfeld stared hard at the map, imagining what carnage lay between him and the hideous wight lord. He wondered if this was how Count Eldred, last lord of Solland, had felt as he waited for the gates of Pfeildorf to break and for Gorbad Ironclaw to sweep his city into the dust. No, Eldred’s stand had been one of defiance, a hopeless fight that was lost before it had begun. Here, at least, the illusion of victory, the ghost of a desperate hope, reached out to Eberfeld. Only if he dared to grab that intangible hand would he know if it was a thing of substance or simply a phantom of his own despair.

  Count Eberfeld turned from the table. He would be leading the Sablebacks in the coming charge, and there was much to make ready before the attack could begin.

  “Wait, your excellency,” Father Vadian said, his raspy voice arresting the count as he began to leave. Count Eberfeld gave the old priest a questioning, impatient stare. Vadian held up a pallid finger. “You cannot ride yet against Zahaak the Worm,” Vadian warned. He saw the count direct a horrified look at the map stretched across the table. “He is where the pendulum said he would be,” Vadian assured him, “but you must wait. Ride against him now, and you throw away not only your own life, but those of all Wissenlanders.”

  The count scowled at the priest’s words. He had heard too many similar arguments in the past weeks. He had no mind to listen to another one. If Zahaak was not destroyed, there was no Wissenland to throw away. He turned to leave, not even deigning to argue with Vadian.

  “No, your excellency!” Vadian shouted. “You must wait!”

  Eberfeld rounded on the pleading priest, his scowl turning into a snarl. “Wait for what, bone-keeper?” he demanded.

  Before Vadian could reply, a soldier in the livery of the count’s household appeared at the door of the tent. Both men turned and faced the trooper. Long in the count’s service, the man did not question the angry tone in his master’s voice, nor the livid flush to his face. He merely bowed, doing his best to avert his eyes, fearing that some of the count’s displeasure might be redirected towards him if he did not show proper deference.

  “Excellency,” the soldier said, “a messenger has ridden into camp, begging to speak to you. He says he is from Baron von Rabwald.”

  The anger in Count Eberfeld’s face was instantly replaced by shock. He turned to look at Father Vadian. The priest simply nodded his head.

  “Speak with your guest,” Vadian told him. “Then muster your courage. You will need it if you would send Zahaak’s black spirit back to hell.”

  By column and rank, the grey and white uniforms of the Wissenland army surged from their encampment, closing upon the sinister mist billowing outside the walls of Wissenberg. Sergeants barked orders while priests raised their voices in prayers of protection, drawing upon the faith of the soldiers to steel their hearts against the supernatural horror that they were soon to confront. Halberds gleamed in the starlight, and spears rose above the massed ranks like a forest of steel. Swordsmen smacked the hilts of their blades against the bosses of their shields, producing a cadence of shuddering metal. Any mortal foe would find the sound terrifying. Against lifeless fiends it was made to reassure the soldiers and to fire them with the reminder of their numbers and strength.

  The grim fog continued to drift towards Wissenberg, oblivious to the men marching towards it, like a raging lion ignoring the approach of an ant. Now the soldiers could see the shadowy figures beyond the veil, and could smell the corpse-reek of decaying flesh. Officers shouted commands, in their hundreds, calling upon discipline to keep their men going. The line faltered, and then surged forwards once more. Cries rang out from the foremost ranks as things emerged from the fog to confront them, festering husks of humanity with empty eyes and peeling faces. The crash of steel against bone echoed through the ranks. Battle had been joined.

  Wissenland’s captains shouted new orders, forcing their troops forward, driving them past the zombie scum and into the fog, into the lines of the legion proper. Flesh struggled against undead bone, and steel cracked against iron and bronze. Foot by bloody foot, the soldiers of Wissenland stabbed deeper and deeper into the fog, their thousands pitted against the legion’s tens of thousands. The men fought with the ferocity of despair, cutting their way into the undead host.

  Count Eberfeld watched from a hill as his infantry crashed into Zahaak’s legion. The sounds and screams of battle drifted up to him, sending icy fingers of guilt burrowing through his heart. Every man
who fell was a sacrifice, a sacrifice to buy him the chance that was their only hope. Killing a thousand, even ten thousand of the undead would not save Wissenberg. Force of arms could not win the day for them. Only the destruction of Zahaak would bring them victory.

  The count tore his eyes away from the battle, watching instead the ghoulish mass of the fog. Slowly at first, and then with ever-increasing speed, it began to shift, sweeping outwards. Zahaak was addressing the attack on the legion’s flank, moving to engulf the Wissenlanders. In doing so, the wight had thinned its lines, exposing the legion to an attack upon the opposite flank. Born in an age without cavalry, the wight consistently displayed an inability to appreciate the tactics of mounted warfare. Perhaps it could have reformed the ranks of its legion in time to thwart an infantry assault against the exposed flank, perhaps it had appreciated that the ground was too uneven for chariots. Whatever thoughts had whispered through its ghastly skull, Eberfeld was thankful that they had not moved Zahaak to defend against a cavalry charge.

  Eberfeld looked at the riders gathered around him, almost a thousand strong: templars and knights, outriders and lancers, noblemen and warrior priests. Every man in the camp who had the skill and fire to fight from the back of a horse had been mustered into the count’s command. The count prayed to any of the gods who cared to listen that he was not throwing away their lives. If they did not carry the day, if they did not strike Zahaak down, none of them would live to see another dawn.

  The count looked again at the man who stood beside his horse. Father Vadian bowed his head in deference to Eberfeld’s position and courage. The count paid the priest small notice, looking instead at the map he held and the silver pendulum poised above it. He fixed in his mind the spot that the pendulum had pointed to, the place where he would find Zahaak the Usurper. Then he turned in the saddle and faced his men. Blood Bringer rasped free from its scabbard and the count held it high above his head, letting all his fighting men see the runefang in his hand.