Warhammer - Curse of the Necrarch

by Steven Savile

  Behind the curtain wall, the castle’s ward teemed with its own peculiar life. From his vantage they looked like ants marching in chaotic lines, intersecting but somehow never colliding. He spent so much of his life below ground, wrapped up in his experiments that he sometimes forgot about the coterie Amsel had gathered here, offering them refuge in the anonymity of the mountains. They were damned, one and all, deformed children cast out by bitter parents, bagged and thrown in the rivers to drown, culled by shanks and left to die in the dirt, wretched creatures tainted by sickness and deformity to become freaks in their parents’ eyes. The castle was their sanctuary, Amsel the one they followed. Radu suspected it was his thrall’s club foot that made him sympathise with the freaks, styling them as his own coterie of the damned.

  The trapdoor opened behind him.

  Without turning, Radu said, “You found him?”

  “Huddled…” Rakeh answered, his reedy voice betraying his eagerness to please.

  “…in the crypts,” Rane finished.

  “Excellent.” Radu turned to face the three of them as they emerged. “Now leave us.”

  “Yes…”

  “…master.”

  The wooden trap closed behind them, fitting snugly into the chiselled stone. Like so much of the castle the fit was precise, the craftsmanship undeniable. Alone with the birds, he said to Amsel, “These tortured souls you collect, the deformed urchins unwanted by the rest of the world…” and left the sentence hanging.

  “Yes, master?” Amsel said, shuffling towards the stone crenellations.

  “Why do you tend to them? Are you thinking, perhaps, of turning them against me?”

  “No, master.”

  “Are you sure, Amsel? Do you harbour ambitions? Do you look at me and think perhaps you might usurp me?”

  “No, master.”

  “Then, why do you seek out the sick and the lame and bring them to my door?”

  “Not the sick and the lame, master,” Amsel said, staring down at his feet as though the worn-smooth stone beneath them was the most interesting thing in the world.

  “No? When I look at them that is what I see, the freaks of the Empire given refuge. What are they then, if not your private army?”

  “Tainted,” Amsel said, as though that one word explained it all.

  “Tainted?” Radu repeated the word, his inflection more quizzical, as though the word explained nothing.

  “Their deformities mean they are less than human.”

  Radu turned back to the edge of the battlements and peered down at the shuffling legions of wretched souls that had erected hovels within the ward of the castle, at the filthy tarpaulins that covered them, forming a tent-city where the stables and latrines had once been.

  “Good. Never forget, your freaks exist under my sufferance, not yours, Amsel. Like everything in this place, they are mine.” The moon bathed his white face with its deathly pallor as he craned his neck, leaning in threateningly. “Tell me, do you plan on making a study of the degeneration? It could prove interesting… useful even. Study, dissect, find the secret and replicate it. Perhaps you should look into harnessing some of the more interesting taints as they manifest.”

  “Yes, master.”

  “Good, good. Now, this thing you brought me…” Radu said, leaving the rest of the sentence hanging.

  “Yes, master?” Amsel said, shuffling towards the stone crenellations.

  “Although it is quite worthless, it intrigues me. I would know more of its origins. Where did you happen upon it? Somewhere within the castle?”

  “Yes, master.”

  “That was an invitation to tell me more about your discovery, Amsel.”

  “Yes, master.”

  Radu swallowed down his frustration. “I will try again. Where did you find it? Describe everything to me, leave out no details, I would paint as full a picture in my mind as may be painted from words alone.”

  “Yes, master. It was in one of the old places my sire used to haunt, master. There are many such troves, now plundered, within the roots of the main keep.”

  “Indeed,” Radu mused, “and you just stumbled upon it today?”

  “Yes, master, or no, master,” Amsel said, enigmatically. He twitched visibly, casting fretful glances left and right as though distrustful of the open sky. Radu enjoyed his discomfort.

  “Well, which is it? It cannot be both,” Radu said, impatiently.

  “The inference was that I knew it was there all along, master. To that, the answer was no, master. The words themselves suggested I happened to find it by accident, to that the answer was yes, master.”

  “Are you playing games with me?”

  “No master, I am being precise, as you taught me. I sought to please.” There was something about the way the thrall said it that suggested a different truth hidden within his subservient words.

  “So this was the first time you had been in this hidden chamber?”

  “No master, not the first, but the first time I had fallen through the wall.”

  “You are making no sense, Amsel.”

  “I would show you, master. The old walls, many of them are not what they seem.”

  “Show me,” Radu said, his curiosity getting the better of him.

  Gratefully, Amsel opened the trap and led him down into the old tunnels, down and down, deeper than the bone yard, deeper than the crypts, deeper than the very first stones of the keep, and still down.

  He followed the cripple to a dead end, only to see Amsel shuffle through what appeared to be solid stone and disappear behind the illusion.

  “Follow, follow,” Amsel’s urgent voice said, apparently from nowhere.

  “Curious,” Radu muttered, reaching out tentatively. He felt the familiar tingle of magic as his fingers penetrated the wall. It was not strong, but it was effective. Even this close, the stones appeared solid. He brushed the illusion aside like a spider’s web and stepped through to the other side. The passageway continued another dozen feet, ending in an open door. “And you say you simply stumbled through the wall by mistake?”

  “Yes, master,” Amsel said, turning his face away from him. Radu did not believe him for a moment. He approached the door, noting the sigil carved into the heavy wood. It was a crest he was intimately familiar with.

  He pushed the door fully open and walked inside the room. With a single whispered command he brought a faint bluish light to life in his palm. Its radiance, though meagre, was enough to see that there was nothing left but broken glass and empty shelves. He walked through the debris slowly, his long fingers lingering over every inch of bare wood and shattered glass as though his touch could be enough to draw back some of the knowledge the room had once held. The light emphasised every crag and crease of his bald head, ageing him centuries with its callow caress.

  “And there are more such rooms?” he asked.

  “Yes, master, many more, hidden away by the old families of the castle.”

  “And you know them all?”

  “Oh, no, no master, not all. A few, I have found a few.”

  “And they were all pillaged like this one, or did they perhaps have something of value left?”

  “Nothing, master. All looted like this.”

  “Korbhen,” Radu muttered. It was the only logical solution. “Well there is nothing here. It is all a waste of time, like the page itself.”

  “Yes, master.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Shadow Tongues

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

  The Autumn of All Our Fears, 2532

  Radu retreated to his rooms to be alone with the page.

  He pored over the symbols, certain that the clues to cracking the cipher lay in the raised letters and the dropped ones. The flaw in the scribe’s work seemed far too deliberate to have been anything else. Laying a fresh vellum beside the page Radu recorded each of the raised letters first, curious to see if they made any more sense removed from the clutte
r of the text. He repeated the process with the subscript letters, scratching carefully on the blank page, each symbol rendered in smooth script, and utterly meaningless. The second set of symbols, released from the rest, made no more sense.

  A different language perhaps? A substitution code?

  Could it actually be as simple as that? He counted the symbols he had just copied, but there were twenty-nine different ones, too many for the alphabet.

  Just one word, a single one, would give him a place to begin.

  He looked for matching pairs of symbols, reasoning that they must represent double letters, but even with that it was a long stretch to even interpreting a four letter word from the apparently random twists and squiggles of bloody ink.

  Frustrated, he sent the pot of ink sailing across the room to explode in a Rorschach stain all over the soft white stones of the wall. He stared at the stain for a full minute, looking for some kind of fortuitous pattern hidden within it, but there was no such divination waiting to save him from the torments of ignorance.

  He turned back to the page yet again, convinced there had to be something in it he had overlooked, something so painfully obvious that he had dismissed it in search of a deeper meaning.

  There was nothing.

  The symbols were not alchemical. They were no language he had ever encountered. Were they perhaps numerical? No, a base of twenty-nine was a nonsensical counting system, so not that.

  “But what?” Radu railed at the document, his gnarled fingers inches from tearing the page up in frustration. “WHAT?”

  Why go to such extreme lengths unless you are trying to hide something truly valuable?

  Nights of obsessive study did nothing to illuminate the text. Radu cracked his knuckles, drumming his thick dirt-crusted nails on the wooden surface of the writing table. Radu cracked the bones in his neck, rolling his crook-backed shoulders. He dreamt of the page, the symbols blurring and moving, lifting off the page and rearranging themselves to taunt him. He heard the whispered voices of the night gaunts promising the truth if he burned the page, and laced in and out of the hallucinations, a face conjured for the skin and blood to own, a face to demand answers from.

  He awoke on the sixth morning in a tangled mess of sweat, the inside of his coffin lid bearing the frantic scratch marks where during his slumber he had tried to claw his way out of the box.

  It wasn’t until he walked back into the workshop to see Casimir hunched over the scattering of bones that it occurred to him there was more than one way to skin this particular cat.

  “I have a task for you, a test.”

  “Master?” Casimir asked, looking up.

  “I have prepared a challenge, to evaluate your learning, Casimir. You show signs of aptitude, but signs are not always correct, omens turn sour, hope fades. I would see how well you apply process to a conundrum. If you fail me, your time here is done. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, master,” Casimir said, standing and brushing the bone-dust from his hands. “You are wise, master. I shall not fail.”

  “I trust not,” Radu said, smiling callously. “You will accompany me to my tower. I will watch your methods with interest.”

  “Of course, master.”

  * * *

  Radu stood by the empty fireplace, watching as Casimir pored over the sun-cured skin. His cheek ticked every time something struck him as interesting, Radu noted, wondering if perhaps the same tell would give away more truths in different circumstances. He chose, very deliberately, to remember it.

  As he expected, Casimir approached the problem much the same as he had, noticing the irregularity of the script.

  “It is a key of sorts,” Casimir said eventually. “Indeed it is. Good. Is that all you have gleaned from it thus far?”

  Casimir touched the skin for the first time, lifting his index finger to his lips and licking the residue off.

  “No, master. It was not made this day, or any day recently The blood is old.”

  “Very good. Tell me more.”

  “I believe the page is cured skin.”

  “It is.”

  “Old blood and cured skin, testaments and revelations were often made on such, were they not?”

  Radu nodded, the thought had crossed his mind, but surely if the page were part of some religious revelation it would have been at least vaguely intelligible. What was the point of the gods using mortals as conduits if they did not record their wisdom in a way that was readily open to all?

  “The symbols appear to mean nothing, but I suspect they must or you would not have set the challenge.”

  “Indeed,” Radu said.

  Casimir raised his index finger to his nose, inhaling its fragrance as though it held the intoxicating tang of martyrs’ blood still on it. “Could it be that the blood itself is the key?” He looked at Radu for encouragement. With none forthcoming, he touched the script, tracing his fingertip over the curl of symbols. “Yes!” he said, breathing the gift of death in to his lungs. “Most curious. Not a religious revelation then, given the nature of the blood.”

  “Your reasoning?”

  “There are few instances of blood rites recording written words, and bar a few of the darkest practices, none are particularly religious in nature. The presence of blood, a poor substitute for ink at the best of times leads me to believe that there is more here than a few words of worship.”

  “Indeed,” Radu said, his smile genuine this time. “So if not the wisdom of some deity, what?”

  Casimir placed his hand flat on the page. “It will take me a few hours to prepare the alembic, but I believe you seek to test my skills and more than merely reading and reasoning.”

  “Perhaps I do,” Radu said, excited by the possibility that his thrall was indeed fathoming a path through the riddles of the page that had eluded him these long days and nights. “The path to wisdom entails many obstacles that must be negotiated, and not all of them are obvious.”

  “Skin and blood, not so different from bone.”

  “An interesting notion. You intend to replicate your experiment from before?”

  Casimir nodded, “Who better to tell you the secrets of the book than the book itself?”

  “The writer, perhaps?” Radu said, a trace of irony in his gravelly voice.

  “What is to say we can’t learn one from the other?”

  Radu nodded slowly. “We might find a home for you here yet, Casimir. Go, prepare your alembic. I will meditate on your progress. Take caution, the test is not yet passed. In every achievement there is failure, in every failure the seeds of achievement.”

  Casimir returned with the rising moon. He cradled the small glass tube of distillate in his hands. He laid it down on the writing table beside the other gewgaws of his invocation.

  Without waiting for permission he broke away a tiny piece of the page that contained both skin and blood, and crumbled it into the alembic.

  Radu watched, eagerness etched into the deep crags of his vile face as Casimir powdered the root and the glass and began to agitate the tube, taking it through the transitions of colour and clarity until it became pure. The invocation was subtly different this time, the emphasis on the words shifted from syllable to syllable, the tonal quality of his voice more demanding as he called forth the shadow of skin and blood, urging it back to the flesh.

  Radu breathed deeply of the Amethyst wind, Shyish, feeling it surge all around him. Casimir’s mastery of the wind of magic was undeniable. His voice rose and fell, altering fractionally as he threw his arms wide, urging the wind to gather within him, its dark majesty to recall the man from his parts, bringing back the soul that had flown so that it might sing one last song.

  Casimir hurled the tube down between his feet. The distillate splashed across the floor and over the ruined leather of his shoes.

  “Return,” he whispered, and more forcefully, “return!”

  It came first as a single wisp curling up from the shattered remains of the alembic.

&nb
sp; That one strand thickened, coalescing into a ribbon. A second ribbon curled around it, and a third. The window panes, streaked and bubbled, buckled and shattered to let the sighs of mortal anguish in with the gusting wind. Sorrow was its name. Radu leaned heavily on the support of the fireplace as the sharp-edged splinters of glass cut at them both, swirling and slicing. None bit deep, but they stung.

  “Return!” Casimir commanded, bullying the reticent spirit back into shape and form so that it might answer their demands.

  Radu tasted its bitterness on the wind, its loathing. He opened his mind to it, drinking in all the grief it cared to share. The sheer unbridled power of it was intoxicating. He revelled in the death wind, losing all sense of self as the vastness of nothing threatened to overwhelm him.

  Between them the winds merged with the mist, adding substance to it.

  “Return!”

  Casimir’s bellow brought the first faint features of a hook-nosed face out of the swirling mists. A broad, atavistic brow and cruel teeth followed, sheering the veil as the ghost of the dead man tore and snapped at it, desperate to be free. Its eyes blazed madly, the depths of hatred infinite and vile as the memory of life reared. Radu felt the malfeasance blazing blackly from it.

  This was the thing that had given its flesh and tainted blood to create the page; Radu recognised its kind. It was a mortal so degenerate, so far gone that it lived in the filth of the graveyard, so far gone that it fed on the cold blood of the dead, like poison to the children of darkness. The ghoulish entity taking shape before him bared little resemblance to any human that had ever walked the world; it was bestial, a hunched monstrosity driven blood crazy. It was neither the guardian of any great secret nor the creator of the cipher, it was merely a victim. Radu swallowed the bitter bile of disappointment.

  Casimir was not so easily deterred, however. He stepped forward, dangerously close to the rending talons of the beast.

  He asked a single question, “Who slew you?”

  The answer came back, swallowed in the snarls of rage, “Korbhen!”

  The memory of its murderer was enough to drive all sensibility and coherence from the wretched ghost. It surrendered to paroxysms of murderous rage, teeth tearing at the air inches from Casimir’s face. He stepped forward, into it, the ethereal teeth passing straight through his cruel smile. Casimir’s goading of the spectre, showing the hollowness of its physical threat, was unexpected. Like the facial tick, Radu thought that he had perhaps learned something worth remembering about his thrall: he was dangerous.