Swords of the Empire

by Edited by Marc Gascoigne

  “When they come again, we must make our stand,” the witch hunter continued, something of a preacher’s manners slipping into his tones. “Here, in this house of Sigmar, we will show this filth how real men die and make them pay a price in misery these wretches will not soon forget.”

  A soft clapping punctuated Thulmann’s brief speech. Fergrim Ironsharp hopped to his feet. “And you folk call dwarfs dour?” the engineer chuckled. “You will forgive me if I am not terribly excited by the proposition of dying to impress a human god, but I think that if I can get back to the coach, I may be able to fix things so we can get out of this graveyard.”

  “I don’t think the vampire is going to be bribed with your gold,” scoffed Feldherrn from the doorway. “Indeed, it was probably your ‘valuable cargo’ that made those murderers bring us here in the first place.”

  “Gold indeed!” grumbled the dwarf, turning to the gambler. “If I had a hoard of gold I’d have better uses for it than to take it on holiday to Nuln! I speak of explosives! Five hundred pounds of premium Ironsharp blasting powder!”

  The revelation swept about the room like wildfire, exciting each survivor.

  “You have an idea of how to exploit these explosives?” asked Thulmann, trying not to let any degree of unwarranted hope creep into his words.

  “All I need to do is run a fuse to those boxes and the next time our friends come howling at the door, there won’t be enough of them left to feed a crow,” declared Fergrim, puffing himself up proudly. “Just give me somebody to watch my back, and we’ll give that blood-worm a very unpleasant reception!”

  IT WAS QUICKLY decided. Streng would remain on guard at the rear door while Feldherrn kept watch inside with Lydia in the event that the vampire again chose to enter through the window. Thulmann emerged from the doorway, his sharp eyes scanning the shadowy town square. The dwarf would have made a better sentry with his excellent night vision, but he had a very different role to play. Ravna, the ghoul venom pulsing through his body now, insisted on accompanying the dwarf. Thulmann noted with some dismay the slow, ungainly steps of the once powerful man.

  Fergrim knelt beside the overturned coach, rummaging about amongst the luggage still lashed to the roof. He removed a length of black fuse, traces of gunpowder soaked into the thin line of rope, and then began knocking a hole in the uppermost crate.

  Thulmann could hear the sound of many naked feet running in the darkness. He shouted a call of alarm to the dwarf. Fergrim snorted back that he was hurrying. The witch hunter cursed as the sickly grave-stench of the ghouls and their low groans of hunger emerged from the veil of darkness.

  “They’re closing in, Fergrim,” he said.

  The dwarf remained focused upon his task. From the corner of his mouth he swore at the man. “Perhaps you’d prefer if I made a mistake! We have just one chance at this.” Beside him, Ravna thrust the point of his sword into the ground. Fumbling at his belt, he removed a small tinderbox and a wooden taper. The need for haste had not been lost on the former bodyguard.

  The piteous, feral wailing of the ghouls was rising in volume now. Thulmann sighted one of the creatures as it rounded the overturned coach. Aiming quickly, he sent the bullet from his pistol crashing into its skull.

  “Grace of Sigmar, dwarf! Move!”

  Fergrim finished fixing the fuse to the uppermost box, uncoiling the length of black cord. “You can’t rush a decent job!” the dwarf grumbled. Suddenly the coach shook. Fergrim turned his face upward.

  The Strigoi sat perched atop the side of the coach like a crouching panther. The vampire snarled at Thulmann, flexing its claws, promising its enemy a lingering and gruesome death. The witch hunter had emerged from his burrow. Now the advantage was the vampire’s.

  So intent was the monster on its enemy, that it paid no attention to the much closer prey. Fergrim stared at the undead horror right above his head and slashed at the fuse in his hands, cutting the line much shorter than he had been planning. Suddenly, a powerful grip closed about his belt and the dwarf found himself stumbling backwards falling on the bottom most steps. Even as he started to voice a colourful oath of outrage, the dwarf saw who had thrown him away from the coach, and what he was doing now. Fergrim leaped up the steps and dove onto his face amid the remains of the doorway.

  The Strigoi continued to snarl and spit, waiting while more and more of its ghoul minions rounded the overturned coach. Several of the monsters noted the man crouching against the side of the obstacle, just beneath their master and began to close upon him. But even as they did, Ravna stabbed the lit taper into the hole Fergrim had knocked into the uppermost box of powder.

  Mathias Thulmann ducked inside the doorway, letting the heavy stone wall of the temple shield him from the explosion. The sound was deafening, like the angry bellow of a wrathful daemon. The temple shook, tiles falling from its roof. Debris, wooden and organic, rushed through the doorway, propelled by a hot wind. As the boom dissipated the sound of painful screams and moans erupted, the stench of cooked meat permeated the air.

  Thulmann stepped back through the door. Near his feet, a stout, short form wriggled itself free of the debris that had covered him like a shroud. The dwarf rolled onto his back, grumbling and bemoaning the loss of his valuable supply of powder. Thulmann regarded the devastated scene before the temple. The coach was blown apart, reduced to burning fragments scattered across the square. The firelight illuminated surviving ghouls fleeing back into the shadows, maimed and injured ones slowly crawling away. A score or more were thrown all about, burned, torn and quite dead. The witch hunter quietly saluted the sacrifice of Ravna and prayed that Sigmar would conduct the man’s soul to one of the more pleasant gardens within the realm of Morr.

  Motion snapped the witch hunter from his thoughts. He could see a massive shape writhing at the base of the now toppled statue. He firmed his grip upon his sword and carefully made his way down the temple steps. He could hear the others behind him, filling the doorway, marvelling at the destruction the blast had caused, but the witch hunter did not turn his eyes from the wounded beast. Now hunter had become prey.

  The vampire had been thrown backwards at great force by the explosion. Huge splinters of wood from the coach had been driven through its unclean flesh, piercing it through in a dozen places. The violence of the explosion had tossed the creature as though it were a rag doll, causing it to smash into the eroded statue in the centre of the square. The forgotten hero had struck the ground ahead of the vampire, but had rolled backwards, crushing one of the monster’s limbs beneath its weight. The vampire fought to free itself, but the maddening pain of its injuries had reduced its already disordered mind to an animal level. The misshapen fangs worried at the trapped arm, trying to sever it from the Strigoi’s body. Suddenly, a familiar scent caused the vampire to snap its head about, pain and imprisonment forgotten.

  Mathias Thulmann stared down at the hideous monster as it regarded him with rage-filled eyes of blood. “When you want to kill someone, do so. Don’t talk about it next time.” Thulmann laughed softly as the vampire hissed up at him. “I forgot. You don’t get a next time.”

  Thulmann raised his sword above his head in both hands and with a downward thrust, impaled the Strigoi’s heart, pinning the undead creature to the clean earth below. The vampire struggled for a moment, then its final breath oozed through its jaws in a dry gargle. Thulmann turned away from the dead monster. The blessed steel would serve as well as a stake until he could decapitate the corpse and dispose of its remains in purifying fire. But such work would wait for the dawn.

  MATHIAS THULMANN TURNED his horse away from the flickering flames. He patted the steed’s neck with a gloved hand and looked over at Streng. “Well, friend Streng, I do not think we will find our man here. If he did have the misfortune to come this way, he is beyond the reach of the Temple now.” The two men began to walk their animals back toward the gates of Murieste. Behind them, three figures stood beside the pyre, each wearing an angry look. “What
about us?” demanded Feldherrn.

  Thulmann turned about in the saddle. He considered each of the people staring at him. Lydia stared back at him with accusing eyes, Fergrim Ironsharp was grumbling into his beard.

  “Do what people without horses have done since the days of Most Holy Sigmar,” the witch hunter advised as he turned back around and continued on his way.

  “Walk.”

  THE CASE OF THE SCARLET CELL

  by Gordon Rennie

  WHAT THEY NEEDED, Varra decided, was a nice war or plague outbreak to get things moving again.

  Things had been too slow recently. Business was bad all over. There hadn't been a decent war worthy enough of the name in months, and many of the establishments on Altdorf's legendary - or infamous, depending on which way you looked at it - Street of a Thousand Taverns had either had to lower their prices, or, worse still, relax their door policies and start allowing in the likes of halflings, dwarfs, Averlanders and even Bretonnians to tempt in enough customers to make up for the current chronic lack of free-spending, heavy-drinking mercenaries.

  The owners of the Imperial capital's bars and hostelries weren't the only ones to be feeling the pinch, of course. Things were bad down on the Reikerbahn too, Varra had heard. The gambling dens, whorehouses, weirdroot galleries and bawdy parlours there were also suffering from the lack of customers, and many a footpad and cutpurse would be finding the pickings scarce, with so few marks to go round in the ill-lit alleys and back ways of Altdorf's most crime-ridden district. Things were getting so bad in the Reikerbahn, they said, that the rogues would soon have to fall back on robbing each other.

  Not that things were any better for those in the fortune-telling business either, Varra sighed to herself Hers was a trade that did well enough when times were good, but often very well indeed when times were bad. Plague, war, famine, disorder, chaos. These were things that all brought fear and uncertainty into the minds of the inhabitants of the Empire, and, when people were afraid and uncertain, they wanted assurances of what the future was going to offer them.

  Yes, a nice little war or outbreak of plague to get business moving again, that was what the situation was crying out for. Nothing too major, of course. Maybe just another border dispute with the Bretonnians or a greenskin attack through Blackfire Pass. A Chaos incursion from the north would have been ideal, far enough away from Altdorf not to be of any real danger, but troubling enough to get people nervous and help shake some of the silver out of their purses.

  Or maybe she should get herself a gimmick. It certainly worked for that flashy Tilean bitch four doors down, Varra thought bitterly. She put kohl round her eyes, smeared brown unguent on her face, put on a half-veil and a ridiculous Araby accent, called herself Seraphina, Seer of the Desert Sands, and the customers and, more importantly, their gold and silver, just seemed to pour in. In Varra's younger days, before her looks went, her breasts sagged and the crow's feet appeared around her eyes, she had always been willing to oblige those who still believed the old mercenary superstition that it was good luck to bed a fortune teller before setting off to battle, but even that extra money-making opportunity wasn't open to her any longer.

  Soon, she knew, she would probably have to give up her prime spot here on Street of the Fortune Tellers, and accept her eventual fate down in the Reikerbahn, selling fortunes and lucky charms for a few miserable coppers a time to drunken river-barge sailors and the down-on-their luck denizens of the Imperial capital's poorest and most infamous district.

  The rattling of the beaded curtains at the entrance to her premises and the sound of soft footsteps in the corridor outside told her she would be able to put off that fate for at least one more day yet. She had a customer, and now it was time to get down to work. She hurriedly threw another handful of herbs, cut with just a pinch of powdered weirdroot, into the incense burner on the rug in front of her, adding to the thick, smoky, scented ambience in the place that customers always seemed to expect. She pulled the cowl of her cape up and bent her head down, pretending to be deep in mystical contemplation, as the customer entered the room.

  'Take a seat, my friend,' she said, deliberately not looking up, indicating the patched and threadbare silk cushion in front of her. 'Help yourself to a mug of good Reikland wine, if it so pleases you. Three silvers to find out what the fates have in store for you and those dearest to you.'

  A jug of cheap, heavily-watered wine and a dirty clay mug lay on the rug by the silk cushion, a small dish beside them. As everyone knew, it was customary to leave a copper or two in payment for the wine. In the fortune-telling business, especially during lean times like these, every little extra helped.

  The customer remained standing. The sound of their heavy, ragged breathing filled the small room. A chill of genuine premonition dread suddenly flashed through Varra's mind. She looked into the face of her last customer of the night, and opened her mouth to scream.

  Something bright flashed through the air, but it wasn't silver.

  Something red spilled across the rug, but it wasn't wine.

  'THIS WAY, HERR Konniger,' said the sergeant at arms of the Altdorf city watch solicitously, indicating the way through the press of curious onlookers. City watchmen formed dual lines on either side, pushing back the crowd that had gathered outside the fortune teller's premises.

  'Make way!' bellowed the sergeant to the crowd, in a manner considerably less solicitous. 'Make way for Herr Konniger. Make way for the great gentleman sage!'

  Casually swung cudgel blows pushed back those onlookers not initially deterred by the watchman's commands. A few people on the fringes of the crowd broke away, running off to spread the big news that would soon bring even more bloodthirsty vultures flocking to the murder scene. If Zavant Konniger, the famous sage-detective of Altdorf, had been brought in to investigate, then it must be something notably gruesome indeed.

  Konniger glanced at the excited faces of the crowd. 'The good citizens of Altdorf,' he mused aloud, to no one in particular. 'I've been to the tomb-cities of the Land of the Dead and encountered carrion creatures there that were less ghoul-hungry than the inhabitants of our fair city.'

  He pushed through the beaded curtain entrance to the room beyond. Vido, his halfling man servant, trailed along in his wake, scowling at their surroundings. There were streets like this in every city in the Old World, and Vido could never understand why. Humans were always in such an inexplicable hurry to find out what the future held in store for them. In Vido's experience, especially since he entered Konniger's service, the future just contained all sorts of nasty, gruesome unpleasantness, and Vido was in no hurry to find out what any of it might be.

  Live for the moment and only worry about all the bad stuff when it finally turned up on your doorstep, that was the only way to look at things, as far as Vido was concerned.

  They entered the short corridor beyond the curtain. Konniger sniffed the air with his impressive eagle beak of a nose. Vido smelled it too. The smell of stale wine and cheap incense, but with something else underlying it: the heavy tang of blood and raw meat, serving as a warning of what lay in the chamber beyond.

  The warning still wasn't enough to fully prepare Vido for what was waiting there for them.

  The corpse of the fortune teller lay sprawled on the floor, her robes ripped apart, exposing her body and the violations that had been inflicted on it. She had been gutted from groin to throat, her ribcage brutally pulled apart, her vital organs torn out of her. Some of them lay on the ground, trampled either by the feet of the killer or, more probably, by the boots of however many blundering watchmen had been in and out of the place before Konniger's arrival. The remains of other organs were stuck to the walls, smeared there amongst the thick, dried splatters of blood that had resulted from the killer's butcher work on the body of his victim.

  The woman's face was a mask of gore. The mouth was wrenched open in a silent scream. The lower jaw had been almost completely torn away, and a single, shuddering glance told Vid
o the tongue inside was gone. More than that, he didn't care to look at.

  Konniger kneeled down beside the body, gently laying a hand on the woman's face. At first, Vido thought he was inspecting the ravaged ruins of her face for clues, but then he heard Konniger murmuring words under his breath, and realised his master was intoning a well-known prayer of comfort for the souls of the violently-slain. Before he had become Altdorf's renowned sage-detective, Zavant Konniger had a priest in the service of the Church of Sigmar.

  'More light, Vido, if you please.'

  Vido searched in his doublet pockets for a tinderbox, striking a flame from it to light one of the lamps lying on the floor. He held it up, spilling out light to better illuminate the most horrific details of the crime scene. Konniger went to work, poking and prying amongst the wounds on the corpse. The compassion of the one-time priest of Sigmar was gone, replaced by the clinical and keenly analytical mind of the sage-detective.

  'Hmmm. The tongue's gone, of course. That much is obvious. No immediate sign of it amongst the other removed offal and fleshy detritus.'

  More poking. More prodding. 'Ahh… the eyes are gone, too. Be sure to make a note of that, Vido.'

  Vido did as instructed, glad of the distraction. He breathed heavily through his mouth, trying to avoid the abattoir stench that filled the small room. The breakfast of ham, eggs and toasted muffins he'd happily consumed only an hour ago rumbled uneasily in his stomach. On past experience in helping his master in his investigations, Vido knew they might be here for hours yet. He could only hope his restless breakfast would remain in place for the same length of time.

  Then, abruptly, Konniger rose to his feet, making the traditional hammer sign blessing of Sigmar over the corpse, a clear signal that his inspection was now over.

  'Come, Vido. Our work here is finished. Time to report back to our potential new patron.'