Warhammer - Curse of the Necrarch

by Steven Savile

  Metzger stepped forward, licking his lips uncertainly. This was Korbhen? This decrepit thing? The swords of his men still rang out, matching the pounding of his heart. He stared at the beast he had hunted for so long, at a loss to explain its frailty. “Evil wears countless faces,” he told himself, peering snow-blind into the darkness beyond Korbhen’s cadaverous figure. He was looking for the trick. This wretched thing could not be the vampire that had plagued his protectorate. It could not possibly have the blood of so many staining its ruined hands. There had to be another, some monster with the strength to tear asunder the rules that bound his world together, capable of reaving the veil between life and death, capable of all the evil he had been forced to live through.

  The vampire moved slowly, as though age had calcified its brittle bones and even this little movement was tortuous. Metzger stepped forward to meet it, feeling faintly ludicrous brandishing his great sword at such a pitiful creature.

  “Death would be a mercy,” Felix Metzger said.

  “What would you know of death? Have you lived in its shadow for so long that you claim to know it?” Korbhen reached out a filthy fingernail and tapped it against the burnished bronze breastplate, matching the rhythm of the swords hammering shields behind Metzger. Each light touch placed a deeper and deeper chill in his heart. The vampire leaned in close, its bloodless lips grazing Metzger’s ear as it whispered, “You think you can stop me with your big sword?” The vampire’s malevolence saturated its voice. Metzger felt the chill thrill of the beast’s sharpened teeth graze the skin beneath his ear. He lurched back to the sound of the creature’s mocking laughter. The sudden shocking intimacy of the gesture chilled his blood more thoroughly than the snow or the wind ever could. Sickness clawed at his craw. He had thought he was prepared. He had been a fool.

  The sound of drums intensified, taken up within the anonymity of the snow out over the lake and back towards the ruined town. They grew louder and louder in his ears with every heartbeat as the creatures sheltering within the snow hammered on the ice with fist and claw, drowning out the efforts of Metzger’s men.

  “You think a little fire and noise frightens me, Metzger? Yes, I know your name. I know all about you, Felix Metzger. The dead whisper to me, telling their tales, but then they fear me. The dead fear me. Can you comprehend the power instilled in these old bones?”

  He saw them, indistinct shadow-shapes, leering faces, hungry eyes glittering in the swirling snowflakes, twisted and deformed. Not one or two, but hundreds of them writhing in the shadows out on the ice. Some of their faces bore the marks of their deformity, the skin slipped, eyeless sockets hollow, the cartilage of noses rotten away. With others it was less obvious, limbs shrunken, claws instead of hands, spines twisted, feet clubbed. The creatures lurking in the ward were truly monstrous.

  “What are these monsters?” he breathed, his question barely a whisper.

  “You have your soldiers, I have mine,” Korbhen said, licking his pale lips.

  The creatures came out of the snow, moving with shocking speed, their vile visages twisted and brutal as they hurled themselves at the line of knights. The Twisted Thorns surged out onto the ice to meet them.

  The vampire’s gaze held Metzger apparently incapable of movement as some wretched mesmerism gripped his muscles. By sheer force of will the old knight broke free, bringing his flame-scalloped blade up. He lunged at the vampire’s heart.

  The creature moved with a speed and force that belied its apparent frailty. The bones of its face contorted, the line of its jaw distending as the beast’s thin, bloodless lips curled back. Even as Metzger buried his blade deep in the vampire’s gut, thrusting up beneath the ribs spittle frothed from its mouth, silvered by the moon, as the vampire bared its fangs. In that moment, the hollow nothing between heartbeats, Felix Metzger saw the beast for what it was, but by then it was too late. The vampire threw itself further onto the knight’s sword, teeth tearing out Metzger’s throat with shocking savagery even as the warrior’s blade missed its heart by the merest fraction.

  Metzger lost his grip on the blade. It did not fall to the ice.

  The sound of drumming on the ice drowned out the bronze knight’s screams while the necrarch fed with barely controlled frenzy.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Beneath the Bone Garden

  Kastell Metz, Deep in the Heart of the Howling Hills, Middenland

  The Autumn of All Our Fears, 2532

  “Peace! I want peace! Is that so much to ask?” Radu raged against the dying night. He clawed at his skull, raking the mottled flesh of his scalp with thick crusts of nail and then turned and slammed his clenched fists against the wall. Had there been blood in his veins it would have run from the deep graze he tore into his skin.

  Radu’s footsteps haunted the vast subterranean chamber as he paced back and forth, back and forth, beneath the spectre of failure.

  He wore a tattered black cloak over a close-fitting, brown, tailored topcoat and a blood-red cravat that covered his throat. The cravat was held in place by a five-pointed black iron pin, its head worn down by years of thoughtless caressing while the vampire worried through a conundrum. The cloak was spattered with smears of blood and alchemical treatments that had seared holes in the coarse fabric. The topcoat was of a cut that had ceased to be common centuries before, worn ragged at the cuffs to expose flesh that had rotted through to the bone.

  A pustulent reek pervaded the creature’s lair with no breeze from the world above to stir it. Thin ribbons of turgid water dripped through the grave dirt and fell fifty feet to the floor, drip, drip, drip, leaving stagnant puddles to gather across the hard stone.

  As Radu walked behind the single source of light, an oil burner, he cast an emaciated silhouette against the distant wall. As he stalked around the rim of the two great pits in the centre of the chamber his shadow stretched out, thin fingers growing impossibly long, ears taking on a bat-like sharpness to their shape even as all the strength seemed to be hollowed out of his form.

  Every inch of the walls was covered in mad intricate scrawls in countless languages, pictograms, and numerals. There were drawings, far more complex than any cave drawing, rendering concepts as art in a struggle to capture the essence of their meaning. Snatches of enchantment and incantation were inked in beside precisely rendered alchemical formulae. It was all packed so closely together that the walls had ceased to make any sense to anyone but their creator. So many secrets, so many discoveries, had been blotted out by Radu’s hand as more ideas began to take root in his diseased mind.

  “Why do you vex me so? What is so difficult to understand? This noise! This noise! How am I supposed to concentrate with this infernal racket? There is always so much noise.”

  The chamber was shrouded in complete and utter silence.

  The ceiling, fifty feet above his head was a vast writhing mass of leathery bodies, bats nesting in the chill confines of the cavernous enclosure. Moonlight leaked in through the vents the bats used for their passage to the world above.

  “Go! Now!”

  His two thralls, Casimir and Amsel, ever faithful, shared a look and emptied the bones they carried into the great pits. Then they shuffled out, leaving him alone with his despair. Radu was not to be reasoned with.

  More bones were gathered in piles spread out across the granite floor, hundreds of thousands of them of all shapes and sizes. Decay had set in, leeching the marrow from the largest. Porous craters speckled the balls of the joints where calcification had already begun to occur. They had been in the dirt too long with nothing to preserve them from the ravages of the elements. Radu picked up one the size of his forearm and hurled it at the mocking shadows. It shattered on the painted wall.

  “Must you always weep, woman? Day and night, so much wretched sobbing. You wear my patience thin. Were you not already dead I would give you a reason to sob your heart out.” He turned away from the wall to face the spectre of a girl, a maid, standing in the centre of the largest pile of bone
s. She was naked and clutched at her chest, which still bore the savage wound that had killed her. The place where her heart should have been lay empty, her ethereal torso stripped back to bear the empty cavity. Tears streaked her cheeks, and her blue eyes were haunted by a melancholy so deep and profound that even without the wound to bear witness he knew she belonged to the dead of this place, bound still by grief or hate. She crossed her arms over her breasts when she saw him leering.

  Hopping from foot to foot in a mad caper, Radu snatched up another bone and hurled it through her shade, cackling madly as he did so. She threw up her arms amid his rising laughter, losing substance and solidity before his eyes. He hurled a third bone, through her tears. “Now, go woman, lest you would have me reeve your soul, shred it and banish it to that darkness from which there is no haunting? Go, you are disturbing my work!”

  She was already gone and only the ragged whisper of her weeping remained.

  Grinning fiercely, Radu scattered the bones at his feet, dropped to his knees and began to paw through them, discarding some and stacking others reverently. He scrambled forward, pulling a piece of charcoal from his pocket and began scraping it across the hard stone, trying to record an idea that flowered fully formed in his mind. The charcoal stick snapped under the insistent pressure of his urgent writing. Cursing, Radu hurled a piece of the broken stick away in disgust and bent down again to continue, only to have lost the thought. He stood and scuffed his feet over the half-finished drawing, knowing that whatever it had been, the notion was lost to him now. It would return, in time, or it wouldn’t. So many ideas didn’t.

  He sat amid the bones. The stench of the swamp still clung to them. The creature had been dead for so, so long, but the bones remembered. He let his crooked fingers linger, stroking the length of a single vertebrae almost half his size. “My beautiful one… you will rise again in majesty. You will soar.” As his fingers touched the bone an image of the creature swelled in his mind, the mighty beast owning both land and sky. “Soon, my beauty, soon.”

  The greatest of all the bones, the skull of some enormous beast with its massive ridged brows and over-sized canine jaw, stood like an altar at the far side of the chamber. Even stripped of scale and flesh it had a daunting presence. Beside the skull row upon row of dusty tomes were stacked haphazardly, some open on cracked spines, others bound in human skin so brittle that he dared never open them lest their secrets be lost for eternity. Such knowledge had been amassed beneath the graveyard: words unspoken since antiquity, ancient wisdom, glimpses into the darkest arts, thoughts and philosophies from races long since lost to the world. Radu whispered the words of a simple incantation, causing one of the countless bones to rise up, separated from the rest, only to fall as his concentration slipped.

  Screams filled the room, echoing off the walls as a coterie of spectres shambled through his workshop, none of them whole. Each bore the deformities of life, though in the shadows the illusion of wholeness survived. As they passed through the light the glamour-flesh failed and the wounds that undid them, noose burns, knife-wounds, gaping holes, hideous burns and the bloated rot of decay was exposed. They dragged ruined limbs, remembering the agonies of life.

  “Begone!” Radu screeched, cursing the damned even as they fled his wrath. The shades disappeared into the charcoal-smeared walls.

  Someone coughed behind him; an absurdly polite gesture. Radu wheeled around to see that Casimir had crept back into the subterranean chamber. His face bore none of the ruin that marred Amsel’s, but death was new to Casimir. His long white hair, cinched in a ragged knot of string at the nape of the neck, had lost the lustre of life but had yet to flake away with the desiccated skin of his scalp. Like Radu, he wore an immaculately tailored suit that had seen better days. Moths and maggots had eaten clean through the wool weave in several places. The leather of his left shoe had rotted through, baring pallid white flesh and thick ridges of bone.

  “What?” Casimir shuffled uncomfortably. Radu enjoyed his uncertainty. “Speak up, man. What do you want?”

  “I had a thought about the work, master,” Casimir said not meeting his eye.

  “You had a thought about the work? How splendid. A thought. Did you catch it and write it down or did it flit like a bat out of your little brain?”

  “It is about the bones, master,” the thrall said, and there was something almost sly about the way he said it that rankled with Radu.

  The necrarch sneered, “The bones?”

  “Yes, master.”

  “Well are you going to share this thought of yours or am I going to have to pry your tongue out and have it whisper in my ear all by itself?”

  Casimir tugged self-consciously at his ear and shuffled from foot to foot. Radu smiled, appreciating the deference. With his rotten cheeks the expression was far from friendly. Casimir craned his head towards the skull, speaking sotto voce, “If bones are like stone, is it possible they absorb the memories of things that happen around them?”

  “Possible,” Radu mused, intrigued by the notion that a skull might retain the memories of the departed.

  “If we can cause those memories to stir, perhaps the beast can remember itself.”

  Radu’s smile turned cruel. “You think it falls apart because the beast cannot remember what it was? Preposterous.”

  “No, master,” Casimir said his tone shifting again, wheedling, “not precisely. May I demonstrate? It is far more effective to see than to hear.”

  Amused, Radu gestured towards the pile of bones. “Go ahead.”

  Casimir drew back the ragged sleeves of his topcoat, like a prestidigitator undertaking the simplest legerdemain. He took a small alembic from the depths of his pocket. It contained some sort of cloudy white distillate. Casimir uncorked the tube and began to chant slowly, the rhythm of his words building momentum as he agitated the liquid. He crumbled something in his fingers and added it to the alembic, causing the liquid to shift from white to chartreuse. Next, as his incantation intensified, he withdrew a fragment of glass, which he crushed and flaked into the mixture. The chant took on speed. His words were precise, each syllable clipped so that they did not run into one another. He knelt, still gently agitating the alembic, and drew a small bone-handled knife from the same pocket he had taken the glass tube from. His eyes had rolled into his skull, the pupils disappearing. Still his hands moved with uncommon surety, as he deftly peeled away slithers of bone from one of the larger vertebrae. The bone went into the alembic, the final ingredient.

  Radu watched with barely masked fascination, quite perplexed by Casimir’s trance. The distillate had turned perfectly clear before Casimir ceased shaking it. Then, with surprising aggression, the thrall shattered the alembic in the centre of the bones and raised his face to the distant ceiling. The bats above mirrored the agitation below, their leathery wings astir as one by one they woke from their graveyard sleep.

  “Rise!” Casimir shouted, all meekness vanishing from his voice. At the sound of his cry hundreds of bats burst into shrieking flight, their shrill screeches deafening in the confines of the subterranean chamber. Curious acoustics made the noise move around them in the same tight spiral as their wild flight. “Rise!” Casimir commanded again, driving the bats towards the vents and out into the first shadows of twilight.

  Radu was not watching the bats. He stared, rapt by his thrall’s theatrics as Casimir beseeched the bones to miraculously come to life. He wanted to laugh, but he felt a frisson in the stale air that had not been there a moment before. Something was happening. Casimir punctuated each new word with a sharp flick of the wrist, urging the bones to rise. No, not the bones, Radu realised, captivated by the genius of his underling. It was no mere reanimation. It truly did appear as though Casimir’s invocation conjured the memories out of the bones, his exhortations willing a vaporous ghost of what once had been into the air so that, for a moment at least, the great beast’s skeleton dominated the huge chamber.

  Radu gazed upon it with nothing short of aw
e, though he masked it well. It disturbed him that his thrall had rendered the physiognomy of the wyrm so beautifully. He moved forward, reaching out to touch the ghost-light as the memory of each bone came together to complete the whole. Just as it was no mere reanimation, it was no mere illusion either. Radu’s calloused fingers thrilled to the touch, the energy flowing from the ghost-light through him as blood once had. “She is beautiful,” he breathed, captivated by the thickening of the memory. The longer Casimir maintained the invocation the stronger the memory of the bones became. The first red muscles coagulated around the sheen of bone and then the fatty white of sinew and more, huge pulsing sacs of lung and pounding heart within the cage of bone, and still more as Casimir’s words gave it body.

  The more the great wyrm remembered itself, the more Radu forgot himself.

  The ghost of fire roiled in the guts of the beast.

  Sinew and tendon slowly plated over with ethereal scales.

  The ghost-memory was so real that Radu turned to look back over his shoulder at the huge skull still on the stone floor at the other side of the room. The wyrm dwarfed him, standing almost ten times his height, barely caged within the huge chamber, the remembered wings spanned tip to tip two hundred feet, and were furled up at the beast’s sides as it lowered its massive head to stare at the jumble of broken bones before it.

  “Beautiful,” Radu said again, and the ghost opened its jaws to breathe fire. He stood unmoving in the heart of it as twin gouts of flame seared the air around him, but there was no heat. The flames roared, turning everything to blood. Radu stared as the unforgettable fire coiled around him, cradling his corrupt flesh in what should have been a cleansing flame that stripped him down layer by layer, from flesh to bone to soul. Then the fire in the beast’s heart burned out, as though it understood that its shade was no match for its true form, that death denied it might and majesty, and the last lingering lick of flame played with his outstretched hands.