Warhammer - Curse of the Necrarch

by Steven Savile

  “You do not look distressed at the notion,” Gehan Volk observed.

  “They will extinguish us, or we them, it matters little which. Today we are victorious. To think that it will be the same tomorrow is nothing more than hubris.”

  “Then plan for tomorrow, to ensure the day is won again.”

  “You speak as though the whims of my kind are shallow and fleeting. We are here,” Amsel said, stooping to pick up a fragment of temple wall, “to carry out the plans of a long forgotten tomorrow laid down by my sire. We stand in a ruined temple just as he envisioned it more than two centuries ago. It just happens to be our today.”

  “That is… convenient,” the acolyte said, a sneer twisting the last word to escape his lips.

  On their hands and knees, the dead tore what remained of the temple apart stone by stone, deep into the night. Amsel watched the perilous passage of the moon, knowing that the herald of dawn could not be far away. “The first cock that crows,” he muttered more to himself than the man beside him, “I eat.”

  “There is nothing here,” Sebastian said, stumbling on his club foot as he struggled through the rubble to reach them. Dugar came beside him, swinging his huge arm like a club. The hour was late and they had been at it for the best part of the night.

  “It has to be here,” Amsel said, no room for doubt in his mind. “Casimir is right; I have gone over his interpretations again and again. The master intended us to come to this place, to find the revelation.”

  “Then someone has taken it. There is nothing here.”

  “It cannot be. Look again.”

  “But it is.”

  “No!” Amsel snarled, “You are wrong! Look again!”

  “You can say that all you like, but it doesn’t change things. The prophet’s testimony isn’t here.”

  “It is here. There is nowhere else it could be. How many Sigmarite temples do you think there are in this gods forsaken hole?”

  “Perhaps there was another Sigmarite temple. It was common for the people to build a wooden temple first, before they constructed the final stone building.”

  “No, it is here, hidden.”

  “We have torn the place down to its foundations, master. There is nothing here.”

  “Then you are looking in the wrong place.”

  “That’s what we said. It isn’t here.”

  “But that is not what I said,” Amsel rasped, turning on his servant with fangs bared. Dugar recoiled, his heel catching on the edge of a piece of rubble, and went sprawling. Sebastian couldn’t help but laugh, the sound choking in his throat as Amsel’s venomous gaze turned on him. “The words are hidden, not in some book, turned to the right page on the altar.”

  “We have looked everywhere,” Dugar objected, but Amsel was having none of it. He scrambled across the debris and started clawing at it with his bare hands, desperate to prove them wrong.

  “You have merely scratched the surface,” he shouted over his shoulder, hurling aside a huge chunk of masonry. The stone hit a slew of smaller stones as it fell, causing a small landslide of rubble and dust. He pushed aside bigger and bigger sections of the wall, digging down to where he knew the altar had to be. It took Amsel more than an hour to dig his way through to the white marble of the prayer block. It was not in any way what he expected to find in the heart of a Sigmarite temple. Indeed, like the heresies of the lost prophet it was completely and utterly wrong. He laid a hand flat on the stone, feeling a curious warmth within it. The sensation brought the smile back to his lips. It was a curious piece of craftsmanship, almost pagan in its design. The carvings, in bas-relief, were all wrong for a place of worship. These were not recreations of the trails of the Man-God; far from it in fact. As he brushed aside the dust Amsel uncovered depictions of life frozen within the marble that were almost bestial in nature. He traced the lupine features of a wolf walking on two legs like a man and some kind of fertility spirit. There were so many more, each image exquisitely rendered with a skill far beyond the worth of a small backwater temple with only a handful of faithful in its flock. Amsel’s smile grew cunning as he uncovered yet more of the altar’s vile curiosities.

  “It is here,” he said with certainty, his palm flat against the grizzled face of a man and bear either conjoined or consumed, it was impossible to differentiate.

  Standing again, he cast about for a stone hefty enough to wield against the main altar block. “Help me,” he demanded of Dugar and Sebastian, and between them they raised a section of the wall above their heads and jumped away as they brought it crashing down on the altar. Stone hit stone in a cacophony of shingle and shale as the sheer mass of collision cleaved the altar block, a deep cleft opening up. Grinning fiercely Amsel leapt upon the altar and wrenched the two sides of the gash apart. “It’s hollow!” he cried, bringing down a smaller piece of rubble violently again and again to work the crack wider.

  He reached into the cavity, feeling around with his fingers until one of his nails snagged on something that moved. He felt a thrill of trepidation at the fleeting contact, and knew what he had found. He reached deeper, his fingers finding the cylinder and closing around it. Amsel withdrew his arm slowly, bringing the bone scroll case into the light for the first time in centuries. Like the altar it was decorated with intricate carvings, and again like the altar none were even remotely Sigmarite in nature.

  It amused him that his master had hidden this treasure within the sacred heart of their enemy’s faith. Such was his cunning that the haunters of the dead never thought to tear apart their own house to find it. Like the hidden door within Kastell Metz, the scroll-case bore the familial sigil that had belonged to the first inhabitants of his home. He felt the thrill of excitement as he cracked the seal on the tube and eased the curl of vellum sheets out. The pages were brittle to the touch, forcing him to handle them with the utmost care. Reverently, Amsel laid them out on the broken altar, scanning the faded ink.

  “How can it be so?” he said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “What is it, master?” Sebastian asked, moving up close enough to see the pages over his shoulder.

  “It is incomplete.”

  “That is impossible.”

  “You are wonderfully simple, Sebastian. There are days when I like that quality in you, and then there are days like today when it makes me want to tear out that pulsing vein in your throat with my teeth and feed. It has to be possible because it is precisely so.”

  Sebastian picked up the bone scroll-case and held it for a moment, raised like a weapon, before Dugar snatched it from him with a big fist. The misfit grunted, turning the scroll case in a complete twist of the wrist.

  Volk stood by silently, his face impassive.

  “What is it?” Amsel asked without looking up from the vellums. The ink had faded so badly that it was barely legible in places. It would take all of his skill and a good deal more patience to restore whatever wisdom the sheets contained, but that was the task his master had allotted to him and he vowed to be equal to it.

  “The answer,” Dugar said, looking down at his feet. The big man had worked up a feverish sweat from the exertion. His black hair was plastered flat against his scalp. He wiped his massive ham-hock of a hand across his brow, mopping up the sweat.

  Amsel looked back over his shoulder, his lips already curled in a sneer prepared to scoff at the freak’s stupidity, when he saw the carving properly for the first time. He saw the details and read beyond the symbolism and the heresy its maker had etched into the bone, but even seeing them was only a part of the whole. Before his temper could flare Dugar looked down pointedly at his feet. Amsel followed the direction of his gaze and saw the patterns mirrored in the stone column the big man was standing on. It was not a perfect replica, though the differences were both minor and surprisingly subtle, but there could be no doubt that it was a part of the same overall design.

  “Shall I crack it open?” Dugar asked, reaching down for a boulder.

  “Let us not be hasty,
” Amsel cautioned. Something about the similarities in the two sets of iconography stayed his hand, or rather the subtle differences. “He who acts in haste repents at leisure.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Good, now, hand me that scroll-case.” He took it, and turned it over and over in his hands, marvelling once more at the skill of the craftsman in rendering so many intricate images so immaculately. It struck him as peculiar that, with such obvious skill, the man had made a single glaring mistake, but of course, despite his misgivings, it wasn’t a mistake at all, but simply another layer to Korbhen’s puzzle. The carving was the key. He ran his fingers lovingly over the lines scored into the bone, but where on the column there was the image of a robed man in supplication, there was an open book on the scroll-case. He tapped the bone against the stone.

  “There,” he said, indicating the kneeling man. “Open it up.”

  Dugar nodded and brought the huge chunk of masonry down in a savage blow squarely over the kneeling man’s bowed head. The layer of stone in that single spot was paper thin. It crumpled inwards leaving a fine coating of powder over the contents hidden inside. Dugar reached inside with his smaller hand and pulled out a second bone scroll-case, identical in every way to the first.

  Amsel took the tube, which again bore the seal of his master’s forebears, and cracked it open. The seal gave a soft pop as it broke, air leaking back into the canister for the first time in who knew how long. He hooked a finger into the crisp vellums and fished them out. Amsel lay the second set of pages down beside the first, knowing even as he turned the final sheet that it was not the last, ending, as it did, in the first part of an elaborate alchemical formula. Again the ink was faded to a thin flake of rust. The scribe had used blood of some description, which while potent offered little in terms of longevity for the message it inked out. The quality of these sheets was different from the first few pages. It was thicker, the edges yellowed where the air had bleached them and turned them brittle as marrowless bones. He turned the page over to look at the back, but it was unblemished.

  “There is another,” he said, laying the page down again.

  “Is this some kind of game?” Sebastian grumbled, looking around the rubble for some sort of clue to the whereabouts of the final pages.

  “The master does not play games,” Amsel said, seriously.

  “No, no, of course not,” Sebastian said, turning away so that the vampire could no longer see his face.

  Amsel studied the scroll-case again, looking for the one thing that would set it apart and lead them on to the next stage of their hunt, but it was identical in every way to the other scroll-case. He drummed his gnarled fingernails on the stone, willing the answer to somehow materialise inside his skull. There were no such miracles. He hurled the bone scroll-case away in a fit of temper, kicking out at the damaged column.

  Sebastian turned his back and scrambled away across the treacherous rubble towards the rest of his kind. Amsel let him go. He turned his attention back to the damaged pillar, sensing that the final solution lay not in the bone case but in the case that had sheathed it, a layer within a layer, just like the initial puzzle. It made a poetic kind of sense, and very much matched his master’s playful mind, but as he stood there, trying to find whatever final clue Korbhen had left him, all he could see was the wound left by that first inconsistency of the kneeling priest.

  With the sun rising and the mournful cries of the dead growing more urgent, Amsel crouched, digging through the rubble to bare the entire column. The frieze was an otherwise perfect copy of the two bone cases.

  “The priest in prayer is surely a sign of the first resting place, not the last,” he mused. Then he scrambled to his feet, suddenly sure what he would find if he reexamined the bas-relief images on the side of the altar.

  It was there amid all of the fanciful fusions of man and beast: a funeral bier.

  Amsel recognised the religious significance of the carvings on the bier. It was a priest’s tomb.

  “Where would you find a priest’s tomb in a temple?” he wondered.

  “In the crypt,” Gehan Volk said.

  Amsel pointed down at the stone around his feet. “Clear this mess.”

  Volk smiled, and took a gewgaw from the depths of his robes. “If I may?” he said, and without waiting for permission from the vampire, the acolyte touched the fetish to his lips and whispered a word. He set it down on the broken stones. It was a thing of bone and feather, delicate as it perched over the cracks between two stones. With a second word it sank into the shadows of the small crevice and disappeared. A moment later the stones in front of them appeared to shimmer, like a snake slithering over a hard-baked desert. It was as though a molten thread ran through the hard core of the stones.

  “Bring me to the older dead, my charmed one,” Volk whispered, looking back over his shoulder at the pile of broken bodies. “Not this new meat. Old bones. I want old bones.” Amsel watched as the shimmer coiled, the rock around Volk’s feet puddling like mud before it snaked away from him, rippling through the heart of the shattered temple stone for a full twenty paces before disappearing again. “Over there,” Volk said, directing his dead to begin their digging. Within minutes they had uncovered the trap door down to the crypts.

  Amsel stood over the wooden door set in the huge granite slabs of the floor and then threw open the trap. The dead crowded around him, as though drawn by mawkish curiosity.

  He descended into darkness.

  As a creature of the night his eyes were sensitive to all of the shades of darkness. He had no need of light beyond the sliver of early dawn that followed him down. He stood stock still, allowing his vision to clear. Slowly the details of the chamber began to solidify for him. It was a small room with three cornices, and in each cornice were set three stone sarcophagi.

  The air down below was old air, robbed of its vitality by years of entombment.

  There were bones not in any coffin, incomplete skeletal remains scattered across the hard-packed dirt of the crypt floor. He kicked aside a desiccated tibia. The bone powdered beneath his foot. Crude markings had been scratched into the ground below the bone. He crouched to examine the three deep scores, like the points of a cloven hoof scuffing up the dirt before a charge. He raised his fingers to his nose, inhaling the redolent earth. He was about to push himself back to his feet when he saw the misshapen skull. Where the other bones had been distinctly human in nature this was without doubt animal in form. He turned it in his hands, studying the powerful jaw-line and the atavistic brow. The skull almost certainly belonged to a bear or some such forest dweller. It made no sense. If the animal had crawled in here to die surely they would have found more of its bones? Perhaps the priest had taken the head as a trophy or an ornament in return for a favour?

  He set the bear’s skull down at the foot of the first stone sarcophagus.

  Again the tomb was decorated with depictions of bestial men cavorting in some vile ritual. It was not the holy tomb of a true Sigmarite, no matter what the temple might have become today, it had once been something far removed from all that this new faith called holy.

  “What was this place?” Amsel muttered, his voice echoing in the dank confines of the crypt. He shook his head; it did not matter. All that mattered was finding the final pages of the testament. There was no kneeling priest for him to pry the vellums out of cold dead hands though. He cast about the crypt, nine tombs, three by three by three. He was going to have to disinter all of them, since there was no way of knowing which contained the right priest.

  The sun was brighter through the hatch of the trap doorway. It would be full dawn soon, his army would weaken, and he would be forced to take shelter down here. He could not allow that to happen. The ransacking of Ashenford would not be without consequence. To stay here even an hour longer than necessary was a mistake he could not afford. One hundred swords offered little defiance, but in days a thousand or more might be mustered. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory was
a fool’s folly, and he was not a fool.

  Moving with urgency, Amsel toppled the lid of the first sarcophagus. It hit the ground and cracked into three pieces upon impact. The corpse inside was wrapped in yellowed bandages that had rotted through in several places to expose mildewed bone. He grasped the corpse and heaved it aside. The bottom of the tomb was empty. He toppled the second lid and the third and the fourth, grunting with frustrated anger as the fifth broke at his feet.

  The dead man, still recognisably a man with leathery skin stretched tight across his shrunken face lay in peace, as though he had died but yesterday, simply falling asleep never to wake again. His arms were crossed over his chest, his priestly raiment riddled with holes. The priest clutched the final pages of vellum in the calcified bones of his fingers. Amsel pried the fingers back one at a time, the phalanges coming away in his hands as he claimed the pages.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Walking the Line

  Grimminhagen, in the Shadow of the Drakwald Forest, Middenland

  The Autumn of Lost Souls, 2532

  Reinhardt Metzger watched his men drill from his vantage point in the study of the manse. So few would make it. He was an old man. He had been listening to lies all of his life. He recognised the sound of a lie even before the words had finished forming in the liar’s throat. It was his gift. It had helped make him who he was, and before today it had saved many lives. Before today.

  “A general offering peace while continuing to raise armies is lying through his teeth. Have you ever heard that saying, Sara?”