The vampire crashed into him, carrying him backwards, through the shelves behind. Books and chunks of wood rained down as they rolled through the debris. Balthas shoved his attacker aside and stretched out his hand. His staff shot towards him, but before he could catch it, Mannfred was on him, blade in hand. Balthas’ hastily conjured shield shattered into fragments of energy, and he stumbled back, on the defensive.
‘Stop.’
A flare of amethyst light swelled to searing intensity, momentarily blinding Balthas. When it had cleared, he saw the dead man he had spoken to in the courtyard standing between him and Mannfred. The librarian lowered his hand.
‘There will be peace, here.’ More dead men stood arrayed about them, arms folded, eyes glittering. As before, Balthas felt a power in them, like a flicker of heat from a pile of embers.
Mannfred frowned as he took them in. ‘You dare come between me and my prey?’ Something about the way he said it caught Balthas’ ear. As if the vampire had expected this.
‘If it means the preservation of this place,’ the dead man said. He looked back and forth between them. ‘You have both come seeking the same thing.’ He glanced at Mannfred. ‘Whether you admit it, or not.’
‘And so?’ Balthas demanded.
‘And so we will show it to you, if only to prevent further destruction.’
‘Feed the wolf and he will leave you in peace, eh?’ Mannfred said, with a smirk. He sheathed his blade and looked at Balthas. ‘What say you, Balthas? Truce?’
Balthas studied him for a moment, considering. If the answers he sought were here, then it would be rankest folly to forgo them on account of the vampire. Or so he told himself. Slowly, he nodded.
‘For now.’
The librarian nodded, as if he had expected no less. ‘Come, then. Come and see the heart of this place.’
The librarian gestured, and Balthas bit back a curse as the stone floor flowed like water, revealing a set of spiral steps, curving downwards.
Mannfred raised an eyebrow. ‘So that’s where you hid it,’ he muttered.
The librarian led them down the steps, into the depths of the mountain. The walls of the stairwell were marked with strange, runic sigils that Balthas only vaguely recognised. Even so, he knew their purpose – to mask and diffuse the power he felt emanating from below. It beat on the air like the heat from a forge.
At the bottom of the steps was a crude chamber – or perhaps a cave. It was large, and shadows clung thick to the walls. Concentric rings of kneeling corpses, each clutching a handful of parchment and a quill, surrounded a shallow pool of water. A natural spring, Balthas thought, before his attentions were caught by the shape hanging above the water, caught in a web of rusted chains. It was a great lump of reddish rock, its surface smoking and bubbling, as if it had recently been exposed to great heat.
‘What…?’ Balthas croaked, feeling suddenly weak.
‘A shard of the World-That-Was,’ Mannfred said, in quiet satisfaction, staring at the chunk of molten rock resting in its chains. ‘Can you feel it, Stormcast? The weight of ages undreamt, dragging on whatever passes for your soul…’
Balthas did not reply. Could not. But he could feel… something. The chunk of Mallus steamed in its web, still hot from the world’s destruction untold millennia ago. Splinters sifted from it, to tumble into the waters. Flashes of light and thrums of noise – a steady hum of whispers – accompanied this constant crumbling, and each sudden flare dug painful hooks into his skull. As the light flashed, the kneeling dead hurriedly put quill to parchment. They were writing, Balthas saw, filling each page with unrecognisable words.
Balthas shook his head, trying to clear it. ‘This… this is…’
‘The secret of this place.’ Mannfred turned, studying the ranks of seated scribes. ‘And these are the scribes who wrote the tomes above.’
The librarian nodded. ‘We found this shard, in ages past. When our blood still pumped, and our hearts still beat. We found this mote of antiquity, embedded in the mountain like some precious gem. It spoke to us, and we listened. We built this place to house it.’
‘But… why?’ Balthas said. ‘Why record these – these whispers?’
‘It is our duty to record it, so that what it speaks of will not be lost, and to keep it safe, so that it will not be misused.’
‘I cannot think of a worse misuse than simply leaving such a potent artefact hanging here, forgotten in the dark,’ Mannfred said. He looked at the librarian. ‘Thank you for showing it to me. I will be taking it with me, when I depart.’
The dead man stiffened, but did not otherwise react. Mannfred nodded, pleased. ‘Good. I see you understand. You could not hide it from me forever, you know.’
‘You knew,’ Balthas said. His grip on his staff tightened.
‘Of course,’ Mannfred replied, grinning. ‘I have been here a hundred times, searching for this chamber and what it contained, and never have I found it. But then I spotted you, crossing the Carrion Deltas.’ He looked around. ‘I encouraged the corpse-eaters to attack you, to see if you were what I thought you were. When my suspicions proved correct, I simply waited for you to arrive, as I knew you would.’
‘You could not know I was coming here.’
Mannfred snorted. ‘Where else would you be going, out here?’ He looked at Balthas. ‘You were easy to provoke. Then, Stormcasts always are. As with the master, so too the slave, as they say.’
Balthas bridled at that. ‘I am no slave.’
Mannfred laughed. ‘That is what all slaves say.’ He gestured to the kneeling corpses. ‘Look at them, Stormcast. Drinking in the whispers of a dead world, and scratching them onto paper for any eye to see. They would say that they are scribes – guardians. But they too are slaves. And I have come to free them.’ He looked at Balthas. ‘I thank you for your aid, in that, by the way. Without you, I would not be here.’
‘Why are you here at all?’ Balthas demanded. ‘What use is dead knowledge to you?’
‘It is of no particular use to me. But Nagash is a different story.’ Mannfred glanced at the shard, his smile fading. ‘I can feel it, scraping at the walls of my mind. Trying to make me remember things that never were. Imagine what would happen if its secrets were loosed upon the realms…’ He drew his sword. ‘I would be doing all of us a favour if I simply destroyed it, and its servants.’ He lifted his blade, but before he could strike the closest of the scribes, Balthas interposed himself. He raised his staff.
‘You will destroy nothing. You will take nothing.’
Mannfred backed away warily. ‘Another childish truism. Another sermon. Is that all there is to your sort?’
‘There is more to me than there is to you,’ Balthas said. ‘Are you not but a splinter of Nagash?’ He laughed harshly. ‘A slave. Just like me.’
As he’d hoped, the words provoked a snarl of fury. ‘I am who I am, and nothing less,’ Mannfred growled. ‘Watch how you speak to me.’
Balthas took a step towards him. ‘Or what? You will talk me to death?’
Mannfred stared at him. ‘It does not have to be war between us, Balthas. Let me take this shard, in Nagash’s name. I will leave you the books, to plunder at your leisure. We both get what we want, and make our masters happy.’
‘Hadn’t you heard, vampire?’ Balthas said. ‘We are already at war.’ He gestured sharply, and a bolt of arcane energy coalesced and arrowed towards the vampire. Mannfred brushed it aside with a sneer.
‘So be it.’ Sorcerous flames gathered about his hands as he spat a string of grotesque syllables. The eldritch flames enveloped Balthas with a roar. His robes blackened and burned, and his war-plate had grown painfully hot before he could slam his staff down, dispersing the flames. He was already chanting the words to his next spell as they faded.
Above them, the shard twisted in its chains, shuddering like a thing alive, as
their magics lashed across it and ripsawed across the chamber. The dead did not move, enduring the tempestuous cacophony. They watched attentively as the battle raged.
Balthas began to sacrifice subtlety for raw power, not bothering to even shape the energies that he wielded. He felt lightning thrum in his veins as his will slammed against Mannfred’s again and again. Grudgingly, he realised that the vampire was stronger, steeped in magics that were beyond his comprehension. Inevitably, Balthas would fall. He would fail.
‘No,’ he hissed, through gritted teeth. Failure was inconceivable. It was for lesser mages. For mortals. Desperately, he plumbed the aether, seeking the magics he’d felt here. If his own were not up to the task, then perhaps they might be.
He grasped at the skeins of magic which inundated the chamber, and found them all too responsive. It was as if they had been waiting, for just this moment. It was unlike anything he’d ever felt, and yet, like so many things here, painfully familiar.
‘No,’ Mannfred snarled, eyes widening. He’d realised what Balthas was doing. ‘Don’t!’ He lunged, and Balthas thrust out a hand to stop him. There was a flash – light, without heat. He felt as if he were sinking into rising waters. Mannfred seemed to freeze, mid-lunge. Time slowed to a crawl.
Then, Balthas was somewhere else – a cavern, a deep well of stone, full of noise… the howling of daemons, the shouts of warriors – he staggered, feeling as if something were being drawn out of him, a horrible wrenching sensation. A shadow at the corner of his eye, a voice full of malice – then pain, sharp and searing. A sword, jutting from his chest. He screamed, and heard Mannfred scream with him.
The vampire was clawing at his face, as if to blind himself. It was as if whatever he’d seen had driven him mad. Balthas lunged, staff extended like a spear. Preoccupied as he was, Mannfred couldn’t avoid the blow, and was knocked sprawling. Balthas whirled his staff up and drove the weighted ferrule down. The vampire caught the staff just before it struck home, and Balthas felt a jolt as something passed between them.
The world twisted about him, and images flooded his mind. Memories, perhaps, but not his own. The images were cacophonic. Dreamlike. A phantasmagoria of colour and sound. But little of it made any sense. In its nest of chains, the shard of Mallus seemed to flex, like a man’s heart struggling to beat one last time.
Balthas tasted blood, and cried out as something sprang from a broken sarcophagus to savage at his throat. He felt a flare of hatred as he met the gaze of a haughty nobleman, with hair the colour of ice, and the eyes of a beast. Fear raced through him as a woman – a vampire – clad in ornate armour and unfamiliar finery slashed at him, screaming her rage. He saw a one-eyed duardin, and felt the bite of an axe; heard the thunder of a god’s voice and felt the death-scream of a world. A hundred thousand memories swirled about him.
He tried to catch hold of them, to keep them, but they slipped from his mind like sand spilling through open fingers. Dazed, he staggered back. Mannfred shoved his staff aside and rose, tears of blood rolling down his cheeks.
‘What…?’ he croaked.
‘A past that never was,’ Balthas said, his voice a harsh rasp. ‘Forgotten stories. That’s what you came here for, isn’t it? Well choke on them, leech.’
Mannfred shook his head. ‘No. No.’ He sprang onto Balthas, knocking him backwards into the pool beneath the shard. Balthas’ staff clattered from his hand as the vampire tore at him with bestial fury. They grappled in the steaming waters, fighting not like mages, but like savages. And as before, here too Mannfred had the advantage. Every blow rattled Balthas’ senses and he felt something break in him. Flailing, he found something hard and sharp and snatched it up, unthinking. Dully, he realised that it was a splinter of Mallus itself, even as he rammed it into Mannfred’s side.
A jolt ran through him. The vampire howled in agony and twisted away from him, smoke boiling from the wound. He staggered from the pool and tore the splinter from his flesh, his hands burning at its touch. He screamed in a language Balthas did not understand. Flames of silver and black ran along his arms and crackled across his armour, searing him to the bone.
Balthas rose and splashed towards his staff. He snatched it up with a cry of triumph, and whirled. But Mannfred was gone.
‘Where…’ he said, hoarsely.
‘Gone,’ the librarian said. He leaned down and picked up the splinter of Mallus. Unlike Mannfred, he did not burn at its touch. ‘As we foresaw.’
‘You… foresaw,’ Balthas said, slowly. Then, as realisation dawned, he shook his head in bewilderment. ‘You knew his plan the moment he stepped into this place, didn’t you? And yet you let him in – why?’
‘As he said, feed the wolf, and he will leave you in peace. Especially if he cannot stomach that which he devours.’
Balthas shook his head. ‘And why let me in?’
The librarian held the splinter of Mallus out to Balthas. ‘It told us to do so.’
Balthas stared at the splinter of stone. What secrets might he learn, what sort of power might even a shard of that long-dead world yet hold? Perhaps the power to save his brothers from the slow erosion of their souls, or the secret of the man he had been.
He thought again of the things he’d seen, the memories not his own. Unfamiliar voices and strange images all warred for space in his mind. In the shadows of the chamber, he saw a face of gold, watching him. He heard a voice that he thought might be his own, whispering urgently. But he could not tell what it was saying.
Or perhaps he simply did not wish to know.
‘Well, son of Azyr?’ the librarian said. ‘Is your stomach stronger than his?’
‘I do not know,’ Balthas said. Around him, the dead seemed to sigh, though whether in satisfaction or sadness, he could not say. It did not matter either way.
He smiled. And reached for the splinter.
‘Let us find out.’
GODS’ GIFT
David Guymer
I held out my hand, palm down, fingers spread, hovering over the animal print caked into the dried mud of the mountain side. The heel of my palm was about level with the matching point of the imprint. The tips of my gauntleted fingers came nowhere even close to the clipped indents left by the passing beast’s claws. I frowned.
‘Are you familiar with the monster, Lord-Castellant?’
The old woodcutter, Fage, crouched across from me on the other side of the print, a long, long way away. His eyes possessed the faint shimmer of the Azyr-born, but his insect-bitten skin and sour odour were those of a naturalised Ghurite. He wore a wax coat fastened up tight with wooden toggles and string, and a pair of trousers of similar material but mismatched colour. A hat fashioned from the skin of a furred creature was pulled down over his greying head, flaps covering his ears. White fog curled about his lips, for though we were half a day’s march from the Seven Words and the great peak of the Gorkoman, the air still had teeth.
He looked at me, waiting to be told that ‘By Sigmar, yes, I know well this beast,’ and that it was nothing I had not slain a thousand of before. I had no wish to lie, particularly, but a reputation for semi-divine infallibility was the foundation of all that I had raised here.
‘I cannot be certain,’ I said, after a reasonable pause.
Broudiccan snorted. The hugely armoured Decimator loomed silently amongst the wiry leechwood pines a few dozen paces up-slope.
He knows me too well.
The trees of the High Gorwood were short, ten or eleven feet tall, clad in reddish bark with long, waspish branches swaying only partially in tune with the wind. A little deeper in, the shadows of several similarly outfitted Astral Templars of the Bear-Eaters jigged and wavered in the light of a fire. The clatter of a rough camp being set rang about the carnivorous trees. The warriors were in high spirits. One of the Vanguard-Hunters was already beating a slow rhythm into an improvised drum. Another, the Raptor – I
llyrius, judging by the quality of his singing voice – was opening the Saga of the Barrel Kings. The saga was a favourite of the Bear-Eaters due to their small (though not the way Illyrius sang it) role in the death of the god-beast Mammothas in its final verse.
In the Age of Myth, Sigmar had tasked his brother-god Gorkamorka with the purge of monsters from the Mortal Realms. With the dawning of the Age of Sigmar, that task had been bestowed upon the Astral Templars.
To the Bear-Eaters, a beast-hunt through the Gorwood felt almost like a reward.
‘We will know more when the light returns,’ I told the woodsman, ignoring my lieutenant’s weighted silence.
Fage peered out into the thickening darkness. Dusk fell suddenly over the Gorkoman, and the colour was fast draining from the landscape. The clicks and chirps of creatures were fading in the transition from day to night. The burden of life in the Realm of Beasts was more or less equivalent, regardless of your side of the dawn. The woodsman fiddled anxiously with the hatchet that dangled from his undercoat on a leather thong.
‘There is nothing to fear in the Gorwood,’ I said, baring my teeth. ‘Hamilcar Bear-Eater is with you now.’
The woodcutter pulled himself together and nodded, reassured.
As well he should be.
For I am a savage vision, awe-inspiring if I might say, at least to human eyes. My hair is dark and wild. My skin is marked with etchings of my own application. Others have oft-times questioned why I would deface Sigmar’s great work with my own. I have no answer for them except that I wished to do so and did. My armour is the colour of amethyst, the very spirit and hue of death, strung with dead animals and scrawled with tribal glyphs whose shape I recall but whose meaning I can no longer comprehend.
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