Blighted Empire

by C. L. Werner

  Beck snarled at the dwarf. ‘I know how to use a sword,’ he snapped, tearing the blade free just as a ratman leaped for his throat. The brute knocked Beck onto his back, its claws raking his cheek. Before the thing could do any worse damage, Kurgaz’s hammer came crashing down.

  Beck blinked up at his saviour from a mess of vermin blood and rodent brains. Kurgaz shook his head at the knight. ‘If you fight like one of them, you may as well smell like one of them.’

  Mandred chopped the paw from his own adversary, the creatures behind it losing their appetite for battle when they heard the squeals of their maimed comrade. The prince struck the injured ratman across the neck as it tried to flee, dropping it in a quivering heap. The other skaven fled, struggling to wriggle past the press of warriors behind them.

  ‘Beck! Kurgaz!’ the prince shouted as he saw the nature of those warriors. They were tall, black-furred skaven clad in imposing armour of plate and chain. Rending axes and murderous halberds were clenched in their paws.

  Mandred’s comrades rallied to his side, guarding his flanks as the Verminguard charged at them. Slippery, treacherous foes, the huge skaven married their bestial strength to the depraved tactics of the lowest street fighter. Mandred thought of his many mock-battles with his instructor, van Cleeve. The swordmaster would have been appalled at the feckless, vile methods employed by these monsters.

  Kurgaz was nearly beheaded after a Verminguard smashed the butt of its halberd into the dwarf’s groin, eliciting a shrill gasp Mandred would never have believed him capable of. Beck’s left eye was an oozing mess of blood and jelly after a skaven jabbed one of its claws into his face.

  His own turn came when a Verminguard was practically thrown onto his sword by one of the skaven’s treacherous kin. Mandred’s sword was wrenched from his grasp by the shuddering body impaled upon it. As the armoured ratman crashed to the ground, its betrayer moved in for the kill.

  Its fur was even blacker than that of the Verminguard, its armour cast from some strange alloy and adorned with a riot of spikes. There was a stamp of such unreserved evil in the thing’s aspect that Mandred reflexively recoiled from the ratman’s approach. The monster’s eyes glowed with an eerie luminance as it bared its fangs.

  ‘Prince-meat,’ the skaven hissed in debased Reikspiel. ‘Die-die for Vecteek!’

  The Grey Lord jumped at Mandred, bringing a huge spiked mace smashing towards the prince’s skull. Mandred managed to throw himself to one side. Instead of having his brains dashed in, his shoulder was merely clipped by one of the spikes. Even that slight cut sent burning agony roaring through his veins. As Mandred reeled away, trying to fend off the skaven with nothing but a dagger, he realised the monster’s weapon was coated in some loathsome poison. Vecteek didn’t need to land a telling blow; even a glancing hit might deliver enough poison into his system to drop him!

  Vecteek raised his muzzle, snuffling as he inhaled the smell of fear wafting from Mandred. The Verminguard had distanced themselves from the fight, concentrating on Beck and Kurgaz and the others trying to aid the prince. The ratmen seemed confident their overlord could settle Mandred on his own.

  That display of contempt, executed by such lowly creatures, was a slight that made Mandred forget his weariness, forget the burning pain of skaven poison throbbing along his shoulder. Even the fate of his city, the rescue of his father were forgotten. All that was left was outrage.

  Snarling like one of Ulric’s wolves, Mandred dived at the gloating Vecteek. His drive brought him upon the monster almost before the fiend could react. He felt the mace slam against his back, felt the sting as some of its spikes pierced his mail. But he also felt his dagger slice against furry flesh, felt hot blood ooze down the blade.

  Vecteek leaped away from the prince, snarling in pain. The skaven pawed at the cut across his forearm, hissing as black blood bubbled up between his claws. There was an almost human expression of disbelief on the monster’s face, as though he refused to accept that anyone could be so bold as to strike him.

  Mandred exploited Vecteek’s distraction. Fighting against the pain that coursed through his body, he threw himself to the ground in a sprawling dive. Vecteek reacted swiftly to the prince, bringing the spiked mace crashing down. The blow narrowly missed Mandred, slamming into the paving stones and pelting him with chips that cut his face.

  The ratman reared back to strike again, but his opportunity was lost. Mandred’s dive had brought him to where a skaven carcass lay. Snatching the rusty sword from the dead paw, the prince rolled onto his back and thrust the point of the blade upwards at the same instant that Vecteek dived down upon him.

  The point of the sword caught the monster in the belly, Vecteek’s own impetus driving the sword through the spiked mail he wore. The skaven’s fierce howl of bloodlust disintegrated into a pained yowl of agony.

  Vecteek’s foot raked across Mandred’s face when he tried to drive the blade deeper. Instinctively, the prince flung his arms across his face to protect his eyes from the vermin’s claws. The instant the grip on the sword was gone, the skaven staggered back, his own mace falling to the ground as he clawed at the impaling blade.

  Squeaking in agony, Vecteek wrenched the sword free, his glowing eyes glaring vindictively at Mandred. For an instant, the wounded monster seemed determined to rejoin the battle. Then the hate-filled eyes widened, the bestial head whipped from side to side in frantic, erratic motions.

  A keening wail of sheer terror rolled across the plaza, erupting from a thousand skaven. The scent of Vecteek’s fear, the sound of their invulnerable tyrant squealing in pain, these had resonated through the senses of every ratman, driving black terror into their craven hearts. Moaning, bewailing their own imminent doom now that the despot was defeated, a wretched rout began. Wherever Vecteek turned his head, he saw the same thing. Hundreds of warriors throwing down their weapons, clawing and trampling each other in their desperate efforts to escape back into the streets. Men and dwarfs pursued the creatures, butchering them as they tried to flee.

  The terror of his minions infected Grey Lord Vecteek. His eyes widened with fear. Whipping his tail at Mandred, forcing the prince to again shield his face, the Warmonger turned and fled, dashing towards the burned shell of the theatre.

  Vecteek the Tyrant never reached the safety of the ruin. As he fled, a lone figure stood in his path, a blazing sword clenched in his mailed fist. Much of his speed and agility had bled out of the wounded skaven. When Legbiter came slashing at his head, Vecteek wasn’t quick enough to escape the runefang’s bite.

  Bloodied, his finery reduced to rags in the long fighting, his wolfskin cloak dragging behind him, Graf Gunthar spat on the twitching corpse of Grey Lord Vecteek. A kick of his iron boot sent the vermin’s head bouncing across the plaza.

  The graf cast his eyes across the battlefield, nodding to himself as he watched the defenders of Middenheim pursue the fleeing skaven back into the streets. The battle was over, now the cleansing would begin.

  From the corner of his eye, Graf Gunthar noticed movement. He watched as a man rose painfully from the ground. Until that moment, he hadn’t realised that Vecteek’s foe had been his own son.

  Across the bloodied battlefield, father and son looked to one another. The eyes of the son were filled with love and adoration, exhilarated to find the father alive. The eyes of the father beamed with pride, exalted to know that his son had become the man he had always prayed he would become.

  For a moment, the lords of Middenheim stood, not speaking, words too clumsy to convey what they would say to each other.

  The moment ended as a sharp crack boomed from one of the rooftops. A puff of smoke, a flash of flame and a slinking shape retreated into the darkness.

  The graf cried out, threw up his arms as the warpstone bullet slammed into him, chewing through armour and flesh like a hot knife. The agony of his wound sent him crashing to his knees. From his knees
, he pitched forwards onto the ground.

  Mandred rushed forwards, cursing the pain that slowed his steps, that tried to drag him down before he could reach the body lying sprawled face-down on the cold stones. A tangle of soldiers and noblemen had already gathered around the graf, but the solemn circle parted at the prince’s approach.

  Sickness bubbled in Mandred’s stomach as he stared down at the horrible hole in his father’s back. He recognised the evil black bullet sizzling at the centre of the wound. It was such a bullet that had almost killed Kurgaz Smallhammer – the poisonous bullet from a skaven jezzail.

  His hand trembling, the prince reached down and gently rolled his father onto his back. A gasp of pain shuddered its way from the graf’s lips. Mandred’s heart raced. The graf yet lived!

  ‘Quickly!’ Mandred shouted at those around him. ‘Lift up the graf!’ He hesitated for a second, wondering where they could take him. The Sisters of Shallya were below in Warrenburg. The alchemist Neist was dead. It might take days to stir any of the physicians of Eastgate from their hiding places, assuming any of them had survived.

  The life of his father hung by a thread. There was only one power to which Mandred could appeal for mercy, the same power that he felt had delivered Middenheim from the skaven.

  ‘Take him to the temple of Ulric!’ Mandred ordered, praying that the Lord of Wolves would again lend his aid.

  Carroburg

  Sigmarzeit, 1115

  The green fume crept up the walls of the Schloss Hohenbach, rising like some fog spewed from Khaine’s black hell. The nobles, only moments before mocking death and plague, now trembled in terror, rooted to the spot in fascinated horror as the noxious cloud came for them.

  Archers loosed volleys of arrows down into the fume, hoping to strike down the inhuman monks that menaced the castle. Blinded by the green smoke, the bowmen had to trust to luck rather than skill. Only a few pained squeaks rewarded their frantic efforts.

  Emperor Boris recoiled from the battlements, retreating as the odious fog rolled up between the crenellations. Baron Pieter von Kirchof – the Emperor’s Champion, the most famed swordsman in the Empire, the man who had offered his own niece to stave off the plague – was the first to be touched by the foul fog. Slow in withdrawing from the battlements, he suffered the caress of one of those ghastly wisps. The effect was both immediate and ghastly.

  Von Kirchof’s skin blackened, his face vanishing beneath a confusion of hideous boils. He took a few staggering steps, then collapsed, a wheezing, coughing wreck. Blood bubbled from his lips, gore dripped from his nose. In a matter of heartbeats, the man grew still, his body heaving in a final agonised gasp.

  The Emperor’s guests degenerated into a panicked riot, converging upon the door leading back into the castle as the fog swept up over the parapet. They stampeded the archers who stood in their way, trampled the bodies of peasant servants unfortunate enough to impede their escape. In their hour of death, the great and good of the Empire, the scions of culture and society, the paragons of government, showed their quality.

  Boris, first and greatest of them all, anticipated the rout. First through the door, first to abandon the walls for the security of the castle, he slammed the portal closed even as Count Artur of Nuln came racing towards him. The Emperor could feel the count’s fists beating on the heavy oak frame, could hear the muffled pleas spilling from his lips. He could hear Count Artur’s entreaties become screams as the maddened rush of nobility crushed him against the unyielding door.

  The Emperor shivered as the cries of the doomed hammered against the door. The green fog was boiling across the wall now, bringing its loathsome death with it. The vapour wasn’t simply smoke and mist, but a concentration of the plague itself, a concentration so vicious that it did its deadly work not in days or hours but in minutes. The green monks had brought it to the castle, had brought it to smite the Emperor and his minions.

  Boris retreated from the door. The impact of fists against the heavy oak had become weaker as more and more of those on the wall fell victim to the fume. It was a stout door, designed to repulse invaders in a siege. Even the strongest man would need something better than his fists to bring such a door down. But what good was a door against something without substance or shape?

  Seeping under the door, glowing in the gloom of the corridor, the ghastly fog crept into Boris’s refuge, almost as though in pursuit of the man who had escaped it.

  Moaning in terror, the Emperor turned and fled. It was impossible! All of it impossible! Fleischauer’s spell, the warlock’s magic! He had been assured it would work, that he would be defended against the Black Plague!

  The warlock had deceived him. It was a realisation that made the Emperor’s stomach turn sour. As he fled through the empty passages of the castle, Boris screamed for Fleischauer. If he were to die, then he would demand an accounting from the feckless conjurer!

  Boris found Fleischauer in the great hall. The warlock was lying on his side, prostrate before the pedestal. One of the enchanted leeches was clenched in his hand, but he would never draw its magic into his body. The man was dead, a look of such abject horror frozen on his face as to make even von Kirchof’s agonies seem timid.

  Lying atop the sprawled warlock, its toothless mouth slobbering impotently at his neck, was the tattooed thing, the violated husk of Sasha. It hadn’t been left to the thing to visit any real harm upon its tormentors, but in some caprice of fate Fleischauer’s mind had collapsed when Sasha fell upon him from the pedestal. The warlock’s heart had burst from sheer fright.

  Gazing in horror at the obscene vista, the Emperor fled once more. There was no pattern or motive to his retreat now, simply the blind panic of a man who feels the cold claws of death reaching out to claim him.

  Through chamber and corridor, down stairs and steps, the most powerful man in the Empire raced to preserve even a few scant moments of his corrupt life. He passed the collapsed forms of servants and soldiers, their bodies disfigured by the attentions of the Black Plague. Within the whole of the castle, he alone yet drew breath. All around him were the marks of death.

  Approaching the dungeons in his desperate flight, Boris at last encountered something alive. It was a creature that carried itself in crude mockery of human shape, a verminous abomination cloaked in the habit of a monk, the cloth unspeakably foul and tattered. From beneath the hood, the fanged muzzle of an enormous rat projected. Its whiskers twitched as it drank in the Emperor’s scent, and its beady eyes glittered with obscene delight. Waving a disfigured paw that was bloated with pustules and lesions, the ratman summoned others of its breed from the stygian darkness.

  Boris shrieked. His retreat before had been frightened. Now it was the product of madness. In his derangement, the Emperor fled back the way he had come, matching step for step as he tried to elude the ghastly ratkin.

  Chance brought the Emperor into the little forsaken chapel of Sigmar. Rushing into the sanctuary, he slammed the stout door shut behind him. Sweating, the seams of his finery splitting as he dragged the crumbling remains of a pew against the portal, Boris did his utmost to block the entrance. The first pew was followed by a second, and then by a dusty tapestry he tore down from the stone wall and stuffed beneath the edge of the panel.

  Panting, huffing from his exertions, the Emperor turned away from the blockaded door. It was only then that his panicked mind appreciated that he wasn’t alone in the chapel. Two other survivors had found their way here: a noble and a peasant knelt before the altar.

  ‘There are… things out there,’ the Emperor stammered. He rushed to the noblewoman, turning Princess Erna around to face him. ‘Vermin… Underfolk!’ he wailed, imploring her to believe him. He wilted under the accusation in her eyes. She’d begged him not to bombard Carroburg and he’d been deaf to her pleas.

  Unable to maintain her gaze, Boris turned to the peasant, gripping Doktor Moschner’s arm in a desperate c
lutch. ‘They’re all dead!’ he wailed. ‘The Black Plague. The ratmen brought it. They mean to kill us all. We’re next!’

  Doktor Moschner shrugged free of the Emperor’s hold. ‘If we are meant to die, then we will die, Your Imperial Majesty,’ he told Boris. He turned back towards the altar, raised his eyes to the hammer on the wall. ‘Only a power higher than even an emperor can help us now.’

  The Emperor cringed away from the altar, horrified by the fatalistic acceptance adopted by his companions and their retreat into the facile comfort of faith. All his life he had doubted and mocked the gods. To think they had real power, to believe that they truly governed the world around men – it was a concept as abhorrent to him as his own mortality. Yet, in this hour, was it not his own mortality that confronted him? Where would all his power, all his authority go if he were to die? What would be the legacy he would leave behind?

  In his despair, Emperor Boris knelt down beside Princess Erna and Doktor Moschner. All through the night he added his prayers to theirs, when he wasn’t confessing his many sins to the gods he had reviled all his life. Many were the vows he made, the oaths he swore as he beseeched Sigmar to spare him his life.

  Every moment, the Emperor expected to hear his companions admonish him for his many crimes, waited to hear the ratmen scrabbling at the chapel door. Neither voice nor sound disturbed him through the long hours of darkness.

  The vermin had too many victims readily available to bother about sniffing out the Emperor’s refuge.

  The survivors were too shocked by Boris’s confessions to offer either comment or accusation.