03 - God King

by Graham McNeill - (ebook by Undead)

  In that instant of connection, Khaled al-Muntasir knew that if he took another step his undying existence would be ended. For the first time since he had awoken as an immortal blood drinker, Khaled al-Muntasir knew the meaning of fear. His limbs trembled. The thought of oblivion and the bleak emptiness that awaited him robbed him of all his courage.

  Siggurd pawed at the ground, desperate for blood and unable to comprehend why his master hesitated to end this upstart mortal. His senses dulled and broken by his pain, Siggurd could not feel the terrible danger Sigmar represented to him and all his kind. The Emperor’s hate of the blood drinkers was a force all of its own, a force that transcended time and all notions of mortality.

  Khaled al-Muntasir backed away from Sigmar, dragging the wretched vampire count he had sired back down the hillside. Terror of Sigmar’s inner power burned into their damned souls with unending torment as his voice chased them from the battlefield.

  “Hear now the word of Sigmar Heldenhammer,” shouted the Emperor. “I curse you and all your kind to be my enemies for all time!”

  The vampires fled into the shadows.

  Sigmar watched the vampires run, thankful that his killing boast had not been put to the test. His body was a mass of pain, his heart heavy with the mourning yet to come, and his soul was sickened to see what might yet become of his beloved Empire. The air around him was thick with foetid vapours, unclean fumes that lingered in the wake of the necromancer’s destruction. Yet even as he waited, a fresh wind was building, blowing from the west with clean air and the promise of new beginnings.

  He took a deep breath, savouring the sweetness of that air. It had been so long since he had tasted air untainted with the ashen reek of grave dust and death that he had almost forgotten what it was like. Freed from the necromancer’s magic, the land was already beginning to heal, purging the foulness of dark magic from its soil and wind.

  Soon the desolation of Nagash would be little more than a memory, for the world was more resilient than people knew. It would outlast mankind, and its mountains, forests and rivers would see them dead and buried before it would even blink. Mortals were a flicker in the life of this world, yet even that was worth holding onto.

  Sigmar opened his eyes as he saw a host of men and women gathering around the desolate hillside, warriors from his army, people from his city and allies from across the land. They were weeping tears of hope and mourning, loss and relief.

  The battle was over and they were alive.

  Sigmar dropped to one knee before his people, giving homage to them as they had given homage to him. The sky above the battlefield began to lighten as the perpetual twilight of Nagash was banished. Its sullen gloom had gripped the Empire for so long that its people had forgotten the feel of sunlight on their skin. Its radiance spread across the land, a bounteous illumination that banished evil to the shadows and chased away the darkness.

  Sigmar smiled and turned his face to the sun.

  “People of the Empire,” he said. “A new day is upon us.”

  ——

  In the aftermath of the battle, the bodies of the dead were gathered and taken to the blasted hilltop where Sigmar had defeated Nagash. Nothing would ever grow there again, and the priests of Morr declared it a fitting place for the dead to be given their final rest. Night after night, the priests of all the gods spoke prayers for the dead, and scattered the ashes into the river Reik, where they were carried downstream to Marburg and the open ocean.

  Count Marius and Princess Marika were married a month after Nagash’s defeat, the ceremony attended by Sigmar, Krugar, Aloysis, Otwin, and Myrsa. Claiming the injuries she had suffered at Siggurd’s hands still pained her, Freya and her wounded sons returned to Three Hills to rebuild what the dead had destroyed. Though many people muttered darkly as to what the union of Jutones and Endals might mean for the Empire, Sigmar had blessed the marriage and gifted the couple with a pair of golden sceptres from his treasure vaults.

  Wolfgart and Maedbh remained in Reikdorf with Ulrike, though they decided that they would split their time between Sigmar’s city and Three Hills. Never again would they allow anger to get the better of them, and never again would they allow themselves to be parted with bitter words between them. Within days of the wedding at Marburg, Maedbh announced to Wolfgart and Ulrike that she was with child, and the celebration that accompanied the news was more raucous than the wedding feast of Marius and Marika.

  Redwane left Reikdorf within a day of the victory, leading his ravaged, self-mortifying band of madmen into the forests of the Empire. Less than a thousand of them remained, their headlong charge into the undead costing the majority of them their lives. Sigmar had caught Redwane as he prepared to lead his march of doom, but no words could reach the younger man; his hope had been crushed and life now held no meaning for him. Otwin told Sigmar how the crazed Redwane and Torbrecan had broken the siege of his castle and whipped the people of the Empire along the route of his march south into a morbid frenzy. Taking up a hook-knotted rope, Redwane wished the Emperor well and set off into the shadowed forest with Torbrecan, leaving his heartbroken White Wolves behind.

  Master Alaric and his dwarf warriors had sought to destroy Krell after the fire of the repaired Thunder Bringer had brought him low, but Nagash’s will was not the only force empowering the dread champion’s unlife. The monstrous warrior had fought his way clear of the dwarfs’ vengeance, and fled into the north. Too blooded to pursue, the dwarfs had watched in bitter impotence as Krell escaped the clutches of their blades. Yet more entries were noted for the Dammaz Kron, the names of all the dwarfs Krell had slain.

  Govannon and Bysen both survived the Battle of the River Reik, as it was becoming known, and returned to their forge. The Thunder Bringer had been crushed in the fighting raging around Krell, but its remains had been salvaged and brought back within the city walls while the dwarfs grieved their fallen brothers. Though it was smashed beyond all hope of repair, Govannon immediately set about working out how to make newer and bigger machines. A scrap of fire powder from the misfiring barrel had been recovered from the wreckage, and the near-blind smith was optimistic he would be able to replicate it.

  If Master Alaric knew of this, he gave no sign, and after meeting privately with Sigmar in his longhouse, led his warriors in solemn procession to the east. The loss of his hand affected him deeply, and as Sigmar watched the mountain folk return to their homeland, he sensed a great melancholy within Alaric.

  Sigmar returned Nagash’s crown to High Priestess Alessa, and bade her take it far from the Empire, somewhere its evil power would be unable to corrupt men’s souls. With a group of iron-willed warriors, Alessa left Reikdorf and rode into the east, never to return.

  Of all the warriors who had fought for Sigmar, Alfgeir carried the burden of victory more than most. Though many men and women had been dreadfully wounded in the fighting, the loss of his arm cut the Marshal of the Reik far deeper than the flesh. His eyes never regained their normal colour and no fire could warm his skin. Six months to the day after the battle’s end, Alfgeir rode a white horse into the north toward a frozen lake, where he met a fur-cloaked warrior with two wolves at his side.

  Wenyld and Sigmar watched him go, and the Emperor knew that a stronger compulsion than duty to Reikdorf called to his old friend. As Alfgeir vanished over the hillside, Sigmar bade Wenyld farewell and made his way into the depths of the frozen forest to the west of Reikdorf.

  The cathedral of evergreen trees was a shimmering winter garden of glistening icicles and stillness. Walking paths he had not taken in years, he made his way to a peaceful hollow where weeping willows drooped with the weight of snow and ice on their branches. A gurgling waterfall spilled into a wide pool, and a simple headstone was set at its edge.

  He touched the headstone and looked to the east.

  “Soon, my love,” said Sigmar. “Soon.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Hailing from Scotland, Graham McNeill worked for over s
ix years as a Games Developer in Games Workshop’s Design Studio before taking the plunge to become a full-time writer. In addition to twenty novels for the Black Library, Graham’s written a host of SF and Fantasy stories and comics, as well as a number of side projects that keep him busy and (mostly) out of trouble. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller and his Time of Legends novel, Empire, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award. Graham lives and works in Nottingham and you can keep up to date with where he’ll be and what he’s working on by visiting his website.

  Join the ranks of the 4th Company at www.graham-mcneill.com

  An Exclusive Interview

  with Graham McNeill

  BL: What attracted you to writing for the Time of Legends series, and the Sigmar character in particular?

  GM: If you’re going to write about anybody historical in the Old World, as far as human characters go, it’s got to be Sigmar. He’s the character who casts his shadow the longest over the Empire. Everything he’s done is legendary, so it fits the Time of Legends series perfectly. Telling his deeds and humanising them without reducing them was a real challenge. Sigmar’s story had to be epic, but he had to be a real character that wasn’t just going to steam through everything in the way that a Space Marine would. He was human, he was fallible, he didn’t win all the time, he was wounded and bled, but his story still had to be suitably grand-scale.

  BL: This trilogy is your first Warhammer Fantasy fiction for some time—how did it feel returning to that setting?

  GM: I was really looking forward to it—I love writing fantasy. I don’t get to do as much of it as I would like. I was really excited about it, even though this series is very different to writing Warhammer, because the Warhammer World as we know it from contemporary books just doesn’t exist yet. This is very much a proto-Empire; we’re seeing a land of barbarians and tribesmen change from one state of affairs to another, albeit slowly, taking their first steps towards the Empire as we know it.

  I’ve always loved writing fantasy books—axes swinging, cavalry charges, that’s the kind of stuff I enjoy the most. I write it a lot quicker than I write 40k and Horus Heresy—I find those require a much more meticulous approach, and they need more reworkings along the way before I am happy to hand the manuscript in. Fantasy novels tend to flow a lot quicker and I am much more pleased with the initial output. It feels more natural because you can relate to the characters much more easily than in 40k. They still want much the same things that we do—a roof over your head, companionship, family. In 40k characters are more worried about not being crushed by daemons or orks invading your home world. In Warhammer you still have concerns of beastmen and ogres and orcs, of course, but the characters’ immediate homely concerns are much more familiar to us. That’s probably why it’s easier to write, but that also presents its own challenges, because you still want to make it feel like a different world, not just a historical setting.

  BL: As you say, Sigmar casts a long shadow in the history of the Empire. How do you approach writing about a character that is so well-known within the Games Workshop background?

  GM: You need to make sure he gets plenty of “wow” moments in the books—flying through the air to smash a dragon ogre in the face with Ghal-Maraz, fighting Nagash, any number of big moments. You also give him enough humanity to make sure he has the strength, the understanding and the wisdom to be better than everyone else. There’s no getting away from it—Sigmar is the greatest of the Empire, the one who has the vision to see beyond the petty in-fighting and tribal wars. He can see that the race will either live together or die alone. Therefore he needs to come across as the kind of person people would follow into battle, or listen to when he speaks and change their lives based on his words. That comes with his charisma, but all sorts of things go into making a character charismatic. You’re trying to capture a somewhat indefinable characteristic there.

  Essentially I tried to cherry-pick the personality traits I wanted to give him that were interesting and fun and heroic but also making sure he wasn’t all that—he wasn’t all square-jawed, Sgt. Rock, leading from the front. He did suffer loss, he wasn’t infallible, he did go off at the deep end—he is an Unberogen tribesman barbarian warrior at the end of the day, not a gentleman soldier! The key to making him work was to give him a rounded personality.

  BL: How about approaching those events that are detailed in the background? How do you go about making those tense and dramatic, even though the outcome is already known?

  GM: Taking events people know and put a surprising twist on them has always been the writer’s challenge with this series and the Horus Heresy. We know Sigmar wins at Black Fire Pass, that’s a given, and I’m not going to try and subvert Warhammer history by saying he didn’t! But still, making it tough for the hero is important. I often use the Bruce Willis/Steven Seagal dichotomy—in Die Hard John McClane was always beaten up by the end; he was bloodied, his feet were in tatters, his vest was covered in dirt—you could tell he’d been through the wars. You watch something like Under Siege and at the end Steven Seagal has hardly broken sweat. You never really felt he was in danger, whereas with John McClane, while you always knew he was going to win, you didn’t know what kind of state he was going to be in.

  And that’s exactly it for these books. Even though you know someone will make it, you can beat the hell out of them along the way, both mentally and physically. Also, if you build up the characters that surround your hero, they can serve as a means of hurting the main character through their loss. That way your readers feel that, though a victory has been won, a terrible price has been paid to get it. If you create good enough characters, you become attached to them along the way. If some people are lost, you feel there has been tension and things for you to worry about, and you still wonder who is going to live and who is going to die.

  BL: There are some epic battles throughout this trilogy, and none more so than in God King. How do you go about capturing the full glory—and horror—of warfare?

  GM. I often draw sketches of the battle and scenes that are going to happen, picking out the key moments pivotal to the flow. Keeping things coherent, so that the reader can follow what’s going in, is important. But it also needs to be ragged enough that you feel the confusion that people in the battle suffer—they can only see what’s happening for a few yards around them, their immediate vicinity. They can be fighting and think they are kicking ass, not knowing that the rest of the army has collapsed and is running back to the wall! Or they can be winning, but see a few folk running and think the battle’s lost.

  It’s essentially a mix of camera distances—sometimes you pull out and show the shape of the battle, the flanking and the manoeuvres, the strategic elements; sometimes you’re right in the thick of it, and sometimes you’re with a couple of units charging through… varying that allows you to show the progress of the battle as well as the nitty-gritty of it. As much as any student of historical warfare or writer of battles might say “I’d love to see a battle”, you really wouldn’t! It would just be the most horrifying slaughter you can ever imagine, and trying to remember that is important. You want those moments of glory; you want the cavalrymen breaking the enemy line and surging through and the feeling of exultation that comes with it. But you also have to remind people that we’re not glorifying in this—the fact remains that thousands of people are going to die and be maimed for life. It’s bloody and it’s real and it can be glorious, but it’s also horrible.

  BL: The second book of the Sigmar trilogy, Empire, claimed an unprecedented success when it won the David Gemmell Legend Award recently. How did it feel to win, and what has it done for your career?

  GM: It was an awesome moment. Being a huge fan of David Gemmell, to win an award bearing his name was a real affirmation, and proved to me that tie-in fiction is just as legitimate a form of writing as any other. People were voting for the book that they liked, and, although I didn’t know David Gemmell, I suspect that
’s the sort of thing he might have approved of. It was very unexpected given the competition that was there that night—I never thought we would win it. I’m still pretty “wow” about it, because we did that—my website, the BL website, readers and friends and fans around the world really joined forces to make it happen. I’ve no idea what margin we won by—and I don’t want to know if it was by one vote or a million votes—but either way it was an amazing effort from everyone who banded together.

  As far as changes to my career, it’s a bit soon to tell, but I’ve got an axe above my computer now, so that’s certainly good!

  BL: And what can we expect from Sigmar next?

  GM: Well, the biggest challenges (that we know of…) have been met and overcome in these three books, so I’m pretty much free to take the story wherever I want now. I’ve sown some seeds in the trilogy—particularly the last one—for future stories, ones that will allow me to explore the time of Sigmar in new ways, and tell quite different stories, not just Big Bad arises and We Must Defeat It stories. There’s moments of awesome still to come, just not how you might expect them…

  Scanning and basic

  proofing by Red Dwarf,

  formatting and additional

  proofing by Undead.