Warhammer - Curse of the Necrarch

by Steven Savile

  “I can’t say I have,” the woman beside him said. She looked at Metzger with a mixture of admiration and pity, and perhaps something more. It was not uncommon for affections to be transferred during excessively stressful circumstances, and there could be no denying the excessively stressful nature of the events that had thrown them together. Was it love? Misplaced? One-sided? Did it even matter?

  “Commit it to memory. A man offering peace should not be preparing for war. It is a contradiction.”

  “I will remember,” she promised.

  “It isn’t all about generals and war, Sara. It is about people. A man promising one thing should never be preparing for another. A man promising to love and cherish you should not be bedding your sister. It is the same.” She nodded. “Tell me something, do you believe in me, Sara?”

  “Believe in what?”

  “The stories. I hear the men talk. I am a man alone. I have never taken a wife, never raised children. I gave myself to the service of others. They talk of me as though I am some kind of legendary figure, a hero of old, but you have lived with me now. You know I break wind just like every other man. So, tell me, knowing the real man, do you still believe the stories?”

  “Do you want the honest answer?”

  “Is any other worth hearing?”

  “Then, to be brutally honest with you, sir, no,” she said, a wry smile playing across her lips. “No man could do what they say you have done. Not all of it.”

  “Ah, you are a rationalist. Good, my dear. Very good. You are quite right. I haven’t done even a quarter of what the men claim, but I have done many, many things they never speak of. So, tell me, why do I let the stories persist? Why not quash them? They are obviously lies, after all.”

  “Because the men need to believe them.”

  “Explain.”

  “They need to believe you are a giant. To follow you into death they need to believe that you are immortal. Your immortality rubs off on them. By serving you they in turn inherit your immortality.”

  “Good, Sara. Very good, indeed. Psychology is a rare trait in a maid. Being able to read a man is a gift. Now answer me this, how many men do you see outside?”

  “Eighty, perhaps a few more.”

  “And the others?” Metzger persisted.

  “Boys.”

  “So, tell me, when you look at them, are they immortal?”

  “No one is, not truly.”

  “Wrong. I am, Sara, and as far as those boys out there are concerned the rest of the Silberklinge are. Do you understand?”

  The young woman wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She stared at Metzger’s knights as they drilled the youths, saw wooden swords clashing, the men ducking and weaving, duking it out like pugilists. They were just men, no matter how much she wanted to see them as more. Immortal? Hardly. Even from here she could see the difference between the knights and the others, the butchers and bakers and tallow makers and stable hands. They were less than the scraps of an army. They were not conquering heroes. She saw the ghosts of men soon to be conquered out there on the parade ground, still living, still breathing but ghosts just the same. “No, sir, I don’t.”

  Metzger wasn’t surprised by the answer. It was hard to look beyond the literal surface and into the figurative implications of those few men striding out to join the boys.

  “They made it, Sara. Despite everything, they made it. They offer hope. A slim hope, but hope nonetheless. To the younger men, the ones yet to face another man sword to sword on the field, they represent survival. They faced death and came home.”

  “But at what cost?”

  “That’s not important, Sara. This isn’t a game of costs. The fact that they came home is everything. It means hope. Even against the tide of death sweeping our way, their return again and again means hope, and hope, sweet Sara, is the last thing we want to die. Just imagine if these men rode out tomorrow and did not come home. How would those boys feel knowing that better men had failed before them? How would you feel?”

  “Hopeless.”

  “Exactly. And Sara?”

  “Yes?”

  “It is all right to be frightened. Remember that. Fear is healthy. In the days to come it might well be all that keeps you alive.”

  “Not all,” the young woman said, resting her hand on his broad shoulder.

  “Quite right,” Reinhardt Metzger agreed. “You’ll need a slice of luck or two as well.”

  Alone, looking at the pitiful sight of his makeshift army being put through its paces it was difficult to heed his own words. Other than his men, hand-trained and loyal, he didn’t see heroes down there. He saw children pretending to be men, out of their depth but willing to give everything to protect their home. He couldn’t ask more of them even if the darkness gathering on the horizon gave lie to their hopes. There was no safe place.

  “I can’t save everyone,” he said, more to himself than to the woman at his side. It was the bitter truth, no matter how distasteful it was to swallow. It was impossible to save everyone who looked to him for protection. His protective reach extended far beyond the city skirts, out into the farms and homesteads a fortnight’s ride away from Grimminhagen. The riders had gone out to warn the major townships and word would inevitably filter out to the smaller farmsteads. He had to pray that it was enough. He did not have the men to spare to warn all of the people who looked to him for protection, not if he was going to try and see to that protection. He knew that abandoning them to their fate was tacitly signing their death warrants, and that did not sit comfortably with the old soldier but there was nothing he could do. He could not save everyone.

  He needed to talk to Kaspar. There were things that needed to be done. He couldn’t sit by idly and watch these people, his people, die when it was his job to protect them.

  “You can go now.”

  “Sir.”

  They had no time.

  The cart had bought them perhaps two days’ lead on the dead, but they had lost the best part of it collecting strays. The thought of it burned Kaspar Bohme. He was a warrior, supposed to train farmers’ and bakers’ boys to defend themselves against the oncoming storm. If he had not witnessed the river of death shuffling through the heart of the land with his own two eyes he might have been able to lie to them and promise hope. But he had seen it, and he could not lie. It wasn’t in his nature. No matter that the truth was a demoralising force, it was better for these young men to know that hell was walking towards them and pig-stickers and pitch forks were all they had to fend it off.

  No time was nowhere near long enough, but ironically it was perfect. With too much time on their hands to dwell upon their mortality discipline would have broken. As it was, they had hours not days to drill these boys, so naturally they struggled to cope with the drills and the demands he put on their bodies, but it had to be done. It was a fine balance of need and fear, but he would have killed for another month to work with these boys. They were good boys. They deserved the chance to become good men.

  Birds circled overhead all the long edgy hours of the day. Their presence promised one thing: that the dead could arrive at any time. Their ceaseless caws cut to the soul of the inhabitants of Grimminhagen. The ghastly sound penetrated the walls of Metzger’s fortified manse, from the highest heights of the temple’s bell tower to the lowest depths of the cellars hidden beneath. They cut across the houses crowded nearby and Sternhauer’s keep off across the rooftops to the east. The black birds circled and watched until Reinhardt Metzger’s patience crumbled and he sent Morgenrot up to reclaim the sky. The goshawk killed with ruthless efficiency, plucking the ravens from the sky one by one, chasing them down until every last bird lay dead in the dirt.

  He sent the dogs out to finish the task.

  Metzger did what he could to establish the passage of the damned, sending out scouts into the surrounding countryside to give advance warning of their arrival. Even an hour was a luxury worth deploying every trick in his arsenal to secure.


  The black miasmic cloud still clung to the sky, thicker now than when they had first spotted it, so thick that it already smothered most of the surrounding land in its choking fug. It could not be used to predict the arrival of the dead, only to demoralise the men further with the promise that they were close.

  Bohme had gathered every able-bodied man between the ages of twelve and fifty onto the parade ground and was vainly trying to turn them into soldiers in less than a day. It was an impossible task and everyone concerned knew it, yet it needed to be done. Simple drills gave the defenders a sense of worth, and sold them the lie that their lives would not be given cheaply. By the end of the morning Bohme had them believing that each one of them was worth five of the undead horde. By the mid-afternoon word had begun to spread that the dead numbered thousands. The three hundred and sixty men Bohme had plucked from the tanneries, bakeries, market stalls and farms to swell the ranks of the militia knew fear then, in ways that they had never previously comprehended.

  Throughout the afternoon, Briony, Rosamund and the women of Metzger’s household brought food and drink out to the men and lingered to watch.

  The confidence of the first few hours, the easy camaraderie of sword brothers their shared plight had formed, had died by dusk. The truth spread like a canker in the ranks, its darkness consuming what little hope Kaspar Bohme had begun to instil in them.

  “It’s hopeless!” Bohme yelled, hurling his spear like a javelin. Frustration ate away at him. Despite everything, all the lies he offered in praise to boost their morale, his rag-tag troop of defenders were, to a man, incapable of mastering even the most rudimentary weapon skills. They waved their wooden swords around like fly swatters. Sigmar help them when they donned armour and tried to fight with real swords. He shuddered at the thought.

  There were other thoughts, too, that he wilfully avoided thinking, but one kept returning, every bit as stubborn as his refusal to think it: there were nowhere near enough weapons to equip even these few. Those too old to man a genuine defence slaved all day long and into the night in the forges trying to make up the shortfall of spears, swords, arrowheads and armour, but their skills were laughable. They drilled with wooden staves instead of proper balanced blades, the clash of wood on wood ringing out from first light deep into the dusk, but for all the sweat and effort, toy swords were not the real thing and Bohme knew that come first blood everything they had learned would flee and the boys would be left dying and wondering why the swords in their hands didn’t feel like the wooden sticks they had practised with.

  He felt like he was banging his head against a stone wall.

  The weight of real weapons was so different that even the most basic of moves he struggled to drill into the men was worthless.

  It pained Bohme to admit the fact that he wasn’t helping these lads but he had promised Metzger that he would do all he could to give them a fighting chance of survival. That fighting chance would almost certainly be what got them killed. He was giving them a false belief in their skills that would see them as dead as if he left them to it. It was a hopeless cause.

  He let them believe what they wanted to believe.

  What was interesting though was the effect the drills on the makeshift parade grounds had on the wives and would-be lovers. The women came out to watch their men sweat and cheered them on even as they dropped their pretend swords and nearly brained the men beside them with mistimed swings. Their presence gave the men a chance to show off. It was as though the drills had become an extended part of some sort of weird mating ritual.

  Undoubtedly, if they survived, nine months down the line there would be a spate of births and a surge of new life within the township. He wasn’t about to deny them this last flirtation with happiness. Hell, in their place, he would have wanted to work out some of that nervous tension in as physical a way as possible. As it was he put himself through a series of punishing routines, driving his body as hard as he could despite the hammering it had taken from the sorcerer’s construct. He knew he was not even close to half-way fit and that only served to make Bohme push himself all the harder. Most of the boys could out run him and would outlast him in a serious duel, if they had the wherewithal to avoid his cuts and wear him down. So while they were doomed through lack of skill he was damned by a body that would turn traitor at the first opportunity.

  Metzger moved up beside him. He had been so wrapped up in his thoughts that he hadn’t heard the old man approach. “Nothing is truly hopeless, my friend,” Metzger said, laving a firm hand on his shoulder. “Don’t make the mistake of underestimating these farmers. They may not be soldiers but they are fighting for their homes, their wives and their children. Today that makes them fighting men because they know if they fail it all ends here. When the time comes they will fight like cornered beasts, and who knows, they might even surprise an old cynic like you.”

  “You are talking about desperation, Reinhardt. We both know that won’t last. It never does. It might hold off the initial assault but what good is that if they just keep coming? And that’s what they do, isn’t it? In the face of the dead it won’t be enough.”

  “One day at a time. That’s all we can ask for. Remember the darkness will always be turned back by a single light.”

  “You are a hopeless optimist, and I love you for it, but, friend to friend, you sound like a fool,” Bohme said, honestly.

  “Perhaps,” Metzger conceded with a smile, “but ask yourself this: which is more inspiring, the optimistic fool or the weary pessimist telling the world it is doomed?”

  Kaspar Bohme looked at the old man as though seeing him properly for the first time. He wasn’t just a grizzled old warrior facing one last hurrah; he understood his people. “Perhaps you aren’t a fool after all,” he said with a grin. “And they do say the gods favour a fool so maybe your longevity is down to the whims of some fickle immortal you have yet to piss off.”

  “Go get your spear, we have work to do. The first scout’s just reported back. If the dead march relentlessly they will hit us in the dark heart of the night. If they rest they will arrive come first light.”

  “When did the dead ever rest?”

  “Exactly. I want to divide the men into squads and I want them to get to know each other. They aren’t going to learn much fighting in an hour, so now it is down to trust. Their lives depend on it. They have to know that a friend has their back. There is only so much drilling a man can do with wooden swords. And while we are about it, I think we should divide the Silberklinge between the squads, for organisation and because their presence will be good for morale. For each knight we have fifteen trained soldiers. It theoretically weakens our fighting unit, but individually their presence will give each new troop an element of experience that could be vital when it comes to the crunch. We’re all lost if these boys lose their heads, remember. This isn’t about theoretically turning artisans and farmers into swordsmen, it is about giving ordinary men the tools to survive.”

  “Everything you say makes perfect sense, but—”

  “You can’t get past the reality that it isn’t enough?” Metzger said for him, voicing what they both knew to be true.

  “Big hearts won’t save us.” Bohme agreed.

  “Don’t you think I know that, my friend? I do, of course I do, but this is my home and these people are my friends. I grew up with them, fell in love with them and will give my life to try and protect them. That is what it means to be Knight Protector.”

  “You are a better man than I am, Reinhardt Metzger.”

  “I don’t believe that for a minute. You’re here aren’t you? Even when you know it is hopeless.”

  “When you put it like that you make me think I must be the fool,” Bohme said bitterly. “Come on, let’s go and talk to our army. One last chance to practise your foolishly optimistic rallying cries.”

  There were no drills left, and despite the thumping rain and the boggy soil, the wolf-whistles of the women and the lies of the soul that he had
propagated, he found himself liking some of the boys.

  Bonifaz, the youngest of the Silberklinge, came to find him three hours before dawn. The men and boys sat around nervously in their armour, some of them grasping a sword for the first time. He was a serious young man, bearing twin scars on his cheeks when a tavern brawl had turned ugly. Without them he might have been considered handsome. With them, when his face creased into a smile, he looked almost manic. There was no more ferocious or skilled warrior in the ranks of the Silberklinge, and none more loyal to the old man.

  “Fehr continues to show promise,” Bonifaz said, unbuckling his bracer.

  “One man from three hundred and sixty,” Bohme said, trying to keep the bitterness from his voice.

  “It is better than no men from the same number,” the young warrior said. He scratched at the nape of his neck and then finished unbuckling the leather strap.

  “How many others are there?”

  “In my unit? None. Cort reckons he has two or three in his group, the butcher’s boy, Eugen, and Eva’s eldest, Fabian. Fester is less hopeful. He counts for none who might not break ranks and flee at the first sight of the dead coming round the mountain. He urges we cut the farmers free and leave the fighting to the real soldiers. We might be fewer in number but fear is like a plague. If one farmer loses his bowels good soldiers are going to be unnerved, not just the bread-maker and the butcher. Jakob and Ingo are no more impressed, either. I haven’t talked to the others, but I reckon it is safe to assume we have maybe twenty boys from the three hundred and sixty that we could, given time, make men out of.”

  “Twenty,” Bohme repeated, the significance of the word “time” not lost on him. Of those twenty, how many would buckle at the first sight of death? It was one thing to swing that wooden sword and look the part, it was quite another to do it in the piss and shit and blood of battle with friends dying all around.

  Of those twenty maybe one…