03 - God King

by Graham McNeill - (ebook by Undead)

  “What…?” he managed as his vision greyed and he saw a host of chariots riding through hills of rolling greensward in his mind’s eye. Armoured in black and gold, they were escorted by hundreds of horsemen and painted warriors in mail shirts who marched beneath banners of gold and red.

  He recognised the landscape around Three Hills, and the chariot at the front of the army as that of Queen Freya. The woman at the reins was not Maedbh, and a gathering evil loomed over the Asoborns, a doom that none could see, but which was slowly enveloping them in its encroaching shadow.

  The vision of Freya’s army was overlaid with the sight of Maedbh and Ulrike standing side by side on a wooded hillside. Both loosed arrows into an oncoming horde of the dead, but he could tell from their expressions that it wouldn’t be nearly enough to stop them. His heart broke to see the fear on their faces.

  Death stalked these lands, and he wanted to scream, but he had no voice, no way to warn the Asoborns that their enemies were almost upon them or that he was aware of their plight. He heard wolves, noble, white-furred heralds of Ulric, and knew they were calling to him, demanding he take action.

  A sudden, twisting sense of vertigo seized him, and he felt himself falling his arms windmilling for balance. The visions faded from sight, and the harsh angles and stone walls of Reikdorf snapped back into focus. Wolfgart’s stomach lurched and he put a hand out to steady himself, his gut churning in fear.

  “What in Ulric’s name just happened there?” demanded Wenyld, and Wolfgart looked up to see the warrior holding onto his shoulders. The golden lines on the Oathstone pulsed with life, now even thinner, as though the stone had all but exhausted its power to grant him this vision.

  “I have to go,” said Wolfgart, pushing himself unsteadily to his feet. He ran to his horse and vaulted into the saddle.

  “What are you talking about?” demanded Wenyld. “We’ve only just got back.”

  “My family is in danger,” said Wolfgart. “And I have to go to them.”

  ——

  Three Thrusts to the Heart

  Freya’s army left Three Hills in triumph, cheered by those whose age or wounds prevented them from joining their queen. Three thousand warriors marched or rode south-east through the rolling landscape, moving quickly towards the River Aver, the watercourse that effectively divided Asoborn lands from those of the Brigundians.

  Within three days, the army came within sight of the mighty river that ran from the Worlds Edge Mountains through the Empire before emptying into the sea at Marburg.

  Here, the coming winter had made the landscape flat and hard, ideal for chariots and cavalry, and the army moved into marching column as it followed the river east towards the river crossing at Averstrun.

  Despite the grim skies that wreathed the world in bleak twilight, the army’s spirits were high. Freya was an inspirational presence, taking many lovers en route and ensuring that overblown erotic tales spread through the camp quicker than a dose of the pox. As always, Freya led from the front, her black and gold chariot unmistakable among the less ornate chariots of the Asoborn warriors.

  With the river on the army’s right flank, Asoborn horse archers galloped wide, while the heavier lancers rode closer to the main body of the infantry and chariots. By noon of the fourth day of march, Freya sent word back down the line that she had spied the river crossing and their enemy.

  Blocking the crossing were a thousand dead warriors in ancient armour, arranged like a row of obsidian statues in a mausoleum. All were clad in rusted bronze, the weak light glinting from the corrosion on the rings of their mail. An eldritch green light glimmered in the empty eye sockets of each warrior and a hundred knights sat on skeletal horses on either flank. Flocks of carrion birds gathered for the feast and the few trees in the scattered patches of woodland were thick with screeching bats.

  A warrior in gleaming silver armour sat upon a hellish steed at the centre of the host, black wings like smoke billowing from its flanks. Khaled al-Muntasir was an incongruous sight amid this army of darkness, and his wondrous form drew all the light to him, such that he shone like a legendary hero of old.

  Freya wasted no time in arraying her army for battle, issuing orders with customary fire and fury. The Asoborn infantry moved into four blocks of five hundred, spears and swords held in fists that demanded vengeance for the loss of the Brigundians and Menogoths. With the chariots thrown out before her main battle line, the heavy horse rode out to the flanks, ready to roll up the line of the dead warriors.

  Bare chested horse archers whooped and yelled as they rode around the army of the dead, loosing flurries of arrows into the massed ranks of skeletal warriors.

  Though the dead had no flesh to damage or organs to pierce, the barbed shafts felled them just as surely as they would a mortal man. Intended to provoke a reckless charge rather than inflict mass casualties, the arrows of the horse archers did little but fell a few score of the dead warriors.

  Ululating Asoborn war horns signalled the advance, and the infantry moved forward, moving at a brisk trot to cover the ground between the two armies. Freya led the advance, her chariot thundering towards the serried ranks of the dead with hundreds more behind her. The hard ground threw up no dust with their passage, and the entire army witnessed the horror of what happened next.

  Before Freya’s horn blew to signal the turn, Khaled al-Muntasir aimed his sword at the earth before the charging chariots. The hard ground cracked and split as hundreds upon hundreds of dry, fleshless corpses clawed their way to the world above, dust and earth spilling from their empty skulls and opened jaws. Unable to stop or turn, the chariots slammed into them with a tremendous crash of dried bone and wood.

  Asoborn chariots were never meant to be run straight into the enemy, but raced along the front of a foe’s formation. Archers would loose arrows into the faces of the enemy at point-blank range, and spear bearers would hurl heavy, iron-tipped shafts into the warriors pressing in from behind. To run a chariot straight into the foe would certainly kill a great many of the enemy, but would, more often than not, destroy the chariot and kill the riders and horses.

  The chariots came apart in a screaming bray of pain, both animal and human. Most simply shattered in the impact, but some overturned, crushing their crews and breaking the horses’ legs. The queen’s chariot vanished in a crash of shattered timber, broken apart by the violence of the impact. Hundreds more were destroyed in explosions of splintering timber, hurling their crews to the ground or breaking them beneath the wheels of those behind them. Only the quickest crews were able to avoid the catastrophic collision of dead bodies and screaming horses, but in doing so they bled off the speed that kept them safe.

  Grasping skeletons clawed their way onto the chariots, attacking with broken swords or cudgels salvaged from the vast swathe of wreckage left by the destruction of the chariots. Khaled al-Muntasir swept his sword up and hundreds of rotten-fleshed wolves burst from the ranks of the dead warriors at the river. They fell upon the struggling Asoborns with dreadful hunger, jaws tearing open throats and claws raking warm flesh from the bone.

  The warriors blocking the river crossing marched forward in dreadful unison, each bony footfall crashing down at the same time as they fell upon those the wolves hadn’t yet killed. Swords and spears stabbed and slashed with mechanical precision, and the entangled Asoborns were cut down without mercy.

  Freya’s shield maidens dragged her bloodied body from the wreckage, fighting with all the fury of berserkers as the rest of the army raced forward to rescue their fallen queen. The black skeletons chopped through the ruin of the chariots, killing anything living they could find.

  Asoborn cavalry charged towards the flanks of the dead army, but the corpse knights wheeled their skeletal mounts and raced towards them as hundreds of leathery-winged bats launched themselves from the trees. Green fire flickered around the undead knights, their blades shimmering with ghostly light, and the two forces met in a thunderous clash of iron. Asoborn
lances smashed through ancient armour, splintering as the weight of the dead broke them apart. Screeching bats tore at the Asoborn riders, clawing their faces and entangling their blades with their wings and stinking bodies. Both forces of horsemen swirled together, hacking at one another with swords and axes, but within seconds it was clear the Asoborn charge was doomed.

  In the centre of the battle, Khaled al-Muntasir danced through the fighting, his gleaming sword slaying all it cut. No weapon could touch him, no warrior lay him low, and he slid through the scattered Asoborns like a ghost, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. Tattooed warrior women of the Myrmidian sects formed a ring of screaming fury around him, but within moments, all were dead, gutted, beheaded or fatally pierced by his quicksilver blade. Malign clouds of sable light billowed around the blood drinker, a miasma of dark sorcery that drained the life from any who came near him and animated the corpses of those he had killed.

  The ranks of the dead swelled with every passing moment, for the newly slain rose up to attack their former comrades, bloodied and mangled charioteers clawing at men and women they had broken bread with only that same morning. The encircling horns of the dead army began to envelop the Asoborns, but even at this desperate moment, the battle could have been saved.

  At that critical moment, when one spark of heroism or fear could have turned the tide of the fighting, a warrior named Daegal, a lad no older than twelve summers who had trained and fought with Maedbh, turned and fled from the horror of the bloodletting. His sword and shield forgotten, Daegal ran in blind terror, and his panic spread to those around him.

  Within moments, hundreds of Asoborns were fleeing the battle, desperate to escape the slaughter and frantic to live. The battle line collapsed as the fragile courage of the mortal army broke in the face of this nightmare horde.

  But there was to be no such easy escape.

  The dread knights rode down the fleeing Asoborns, trampling them beneath the pellucid fire of their mounts’ hooves or chopping them down with pounding blows of their swords. The encircling army of the dead surrounded the dying Asoborn host, drawing it into a black embrace of massacre.

  Only a handful of mortals escaped the slaughter, the queen’s shield maidens and a hundred or so warriors who had been first to flee. Their shame burned almost as hot as the relief that they still lived, and as darkness fell, barely a tenth of the queen’s army escaped into the hills.

  Khaled al-Muntasir stood triumphant, his army arranged across the battlefield in silence as the crows and ravens pecked the choicest morsels from the defeated army. The blood drinker let them have their feast, for what could be more terrifying to a mortal warrior than to later face one of his own kind with eyes pecked out, flesh partially eaten and tongue hanging loose on rotten sinews?

  As Morrslieb slipped from behind the clouds to bathe the blood-soaked field in its rich, emerald moonlight, he uttered the words given to him by Nagash and laughed long into the night as the vanquished Asoborns rose to their feet once more.

  Without any orders needing to be issued, the army of the dead arrayed itself for march, moving in deathly silence and utter precision as they followed the route Queen Freya’s doomed army had taken.

  Back towards Three Hills.

  Volleys of arrows flew overhead, slashing down the causeway and slicing into grey, lifeless flesh. Bordan’s foresters loosed more arrows, and another clutch of the dead were felled. The viaduct from the ground was thick with dead warriors, partially decayed men and women lurching and swaying towards Middenheim with horrid purpose and grotesque hunger moaning from their slack jaws.

  “Got to hand it to Bordan’s men,” said Holstef, the beast-horn clarion clutched tightly in his gauntleted fist. “They’re killing everything they hit.”

  Ustern grunted. “They can’t miss. Even I could loose an arrow that would slay something.”

  “Probably one of us,” added Leovulf, undoing the leather thong that held his black hair.

  “You cut me deep,” said Ustern, tapping smouldering ash from the end of his pipe.

  Redwane let them talk, it was their way of easing the tension before a charge. Though the White Wolves feared no living foe, the horde arrayed before them today was something much worse. Redwane had fought the living dead before, but the same fear was still there, still poisoning his gut with a sour-bile taste. The thoughts that had haunted him on the march towards Brass Keep returned to him anew; the dread of dying alone, the fear that his best years were already behind him and that he was on a grim descent into dotage and infirmity.

  Redwane took a deep breath, looking to the sky in a bid to cast off such gloomy thoughts, but he found no refuge there. The sky above the Fauschlag Rock was as black as his mood.

  It had been that way ever since the dead had isolated Middenheim from the Empire.

  The noose had closed slowly, with villages blotted out one by one and the steady stream of traders, mercenary companies and pilgrims diminishing until it was impossible not to see that something terrible was developing in the haunted forests surrounding the city.

  Despite his dislike of the man, Bordan’s foresters had quickly discovered the roads cut by lurking bands of the dead and packs of fiery-eyed wolves. The villages and camps around the city were hastily evacuated, their people brought within Middenheim’s walls. Even Torbrecan’s band of lunatics had come into the city, which had surprised Redwane until he remembered that they had foreseen their deaths before the walls of Reikdorf. Despite his insistence that no one be left beyond the city, Redwane suspected that Myrsa was already regretting his decision to allow the self-mutilating madmen into Middenheim. They marched through the streets, preaching their prophecies of destruction and pain, while whipping themselves into maniacal frenzies. No warriors could be spared from the fighting to stop them, and the mood in the city soured as more and more of Middenheim’s citizens joined in their cavalcade of blood.

  “If they’re so eager for death, I say we help them on their way. Give them a sword and stick them on the walls,” Redwane had muttered at one of Myrsa’s war councils, and few disagreed with him. Yet for all their apparent lust to die, the madmen refused to take arms to defend Middenheim. Clearly they weren’t insane enough to want to die just yet.

  Within a day of the gates closing, the living dead host swallowed the lands around Middenheim, throwing themselves at the fortresses clustered around the city and the chain lifts. Those bastions still held, but the horde had soon discovered another way up. Led by shadowy, dark-cloaked figures on black steeds, skeletal warriors armed with spears, axes and swords climbed the great viaduct towards the city. Frothing blood-hungry corpses scrambled up the rocky sides of the Fauschlag Rock, and Orsa’s city defenders had their hands full hacking them down as they reached the summit.

  Trapped beyond the walls, Wulf’s mountain pathfinders had tried to cut through the dead towards the viaduct, but they had been overrun before making it halfway. Redwane had watched as the Mountain Lord was dragged down and eaten by wiry, hairless things with tearing claws and distended jaws. Orsa led a party of axemen to retrieve the bodies of their fallen comrades, but had been beaten back without success.

  Now Wulf marched with the dead, his ravaged flesh hanging from his bones in rotten strips. His warriors fought beside him, as loyal in death as they had been in life. It had been a blow losing Wulf, for he had been well-liked and the tale of his ending had circulated to become a macabre scare story, growing in horror with every retelling.

  “They’ll be calling for us soon,” said Leovulf.

  “Expect you’re right,” said Ustern.

  Redwane looked towards the fighting raging at the head of the viaduct. Since the war against the Norsii, a more permanent defensive barrier had been built across the head of the viaduct, a curved wall flanked by two drum towers and with a heavy gate of Drakwald oak and good northern iron at its centre. Atop the walls, Count Myrsa led the defenders in battle, the runefang cleaving glowing arcs through the ranks of the dea
d. None of them could resist it, the dwarf-forged blade slicing through mouldering bones, rotted armour and decayed flesh with its runic edge. To see so magnificent a weapon borne by such a hero lifted the hearts of all who fought beside him. Myrsa’s banner bearer battled alongside him, the blue and ivory standard soaked and limp. No wind stirred the fabric and instead of lifting the spirits of those who saw its colours, it only served to remind the warriors of Middenheim of how grim their situation truly was.

  The dead swarmed the defensive wall, scaling its rugged surfaces with bony claws digging into the stonework in a way no living warrior could manage. They fought with a speed and ferocity Redwane remembered all too well, dragging men from the battlements and pushing through any gaps in the line.

  Myrsa and Renweard commanded the defenders on the viaduct, while Bordan and his men occupied the high ground behind the walls. Perched on rooftops, clock towers and watch posts, the foresters thinned the dead host as best they could. Orsa’s men patrolled the city, hunting down any dead warriors that found their way through the caves that honeycombed the rock or successfully scaled its sides.

  Redwane had defended this city once before from an attacking army, but this felt very different. Then he had been one of Sigmar’s warrior companions, but now he was part of Middenheim’s defence, a city that was not his by birth. As much as Sigmar might declare that all men of the Empire were as one, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he ought to be in the south, fighting to protect Unberogen lands. This city wasn’t his, no matter what oaths he had sworn to Myrsa and the White Wolves.

  “Redwane,” hissed Leovulf, leaning in close.

  “What?” he muttered absently.

  “You’re our leader, so damn well lead,” said Leovulf.

  Redwane snapped out of his gloomy reverie, and nodded, ashamed he had allowed his mind to wander when he needed to focus now more than ever.