Warhammer - Curse of the Necrarch

by Steven Savile

  The Autumn of the Living Dead, 2532

  The dead came down to Grimminhagen looking for more than souls to steal.

  They crept and slithered and shuffled and stumbled and swayed, bones creaking arthritically as they went. The living met them head-on with steel, rank after rank of breastplates and brandished swords in the moonlight. The dark of the battle was eerie in its quiet. The living did not scream or cheer. They fought grimly and died frightened. All around them, the dead clambered over the walls, bringing a reign of torture and cruelty the like of which the living could not hope to withstand. The moon reflected off the bone transforming the field into a corpse riddled with rot, the bone the pus within the wounds. There could be no blissful ignorance. Even as the living swarmed towards the tide of slaughter, their lines holding formation as ten by ten they threw themselves into the fray, still more of the skeletons tore at the dirt of the old temple, eager to unearth its foundations, but they could not get far with their excavations. The fighting held little interest for the necrarch. After all, any creature could fight and he cared little if they lined up in neat formations or scattered wildly in a frantic melee. The dead would triumph, that was all that concerned him. The treasure would be his.

  Radu walked towards the wound in the earth.

  He was thrown from his feet to the crack of magical energy. It was sharp and brutal, charged with elemental power. The air around them reeked with the aftertaste of lightning. Radu levered himself to his feet and dusted his brown suit off. All around him the skeletons moved to the machinations of the acolytes and his thralls, matching the swords and knives of the defenders with bone that shattered and not once did they scream or cry out because it didn’t matter. Every broken bone was ignored or turned into a weapon to hurt the living.

  Radu looked down at his suit. More of the material had singed through to the bare bone. He studied the exposed stone with distaste, angry with himself for being taken so easily off-guard. The faintest traces of a rune were etched into the rock. It had worn away to almost nothing, yet the power within it was undeniable. He reached out again tentatively, only to trigger a second shock that hurled him off his feet no less vehemently than the first had.

  “Bring me innocent blood,” he rasped, reasoning that he needed someone pure, and how he detested that word, to cross the threshold. “I will not be denied by petty hedge magic.”

  “Master,” the damned thrall said, scraping his heel in the dirt.

  “Go, now.”

  He watched Amsel limp off through the fighting in the direction of the nearest house and then turned his scrutiny to the black marks in the earth. How many more runes were there? One? ten? Were they all wards or worse? He did not need to ask who had placed them. Korbhen had led him here and no doubt thought him slow enough of wit to be undone by a few scratches in the dirt. How wrong his arrogant sire was. He crouched, studying the marking, and recognising within it the one flaw he had already suspected would be present. It was poised to be triggered by the taint of unlife and any living breathing thing could wander happily across its barrier.

  “How simple a trap,” he said to the acolyte, Volk, who stood at his shoulder. “There is no artifice to it at all.”

  “Did I not see you sprawling in the dirt a moment ago?”

  Radu wheeled on him, raising a long finger threateningly. “Do not overstep your mark lest you want your tongue turned to rot and your flesh to dissolve from within. I am in no mood to be mocked by anyone.”

  “I was wrong,” Volk said artfully. “It must have been your thrall making a fool of himself. One rotten face looks much like another in the half-light. My apologies.”

  Great horns blared a fanfare, sending a warning out to the barracks, the manor house and the keep itself. The fighting turned savage.

  Radu did not care. He would have the treasure delivered into his hands by some witless child and would delight in outwitting his sire with such a simple ploy. That was all that mattered.

  His minions orchestrated another wave of violence. Watching the attack was tantamount to spying on an elaborate ballet of death. The bones jerked and twisted mimicking the savage movements of Amsel and Volk and the other acolytes, anticipating the cut and thrust of the mortal’s weapons. The flames of brands slashed at the air, snapping and sizzling as they charred rot-riddled flesh. Volk, he saw, revelled in the slaughter. That was his madness and that was how the pair differed. Killing was not true strength. Any fool could kill. It was the mastery over death that brought power with it, the banishment of time and its treacherous tinkering. In that way Radu was different.

  Radu placed a gnarled hand over his unbeating heart. Life in the silence where the frailest organ of mortality had once drummed out its rhythm of existence, that was strength, power, might and all of the other synonyms for potency he could conjure.

  It was a strange sort of homecoming, not that Grimminhagen had ever seen Radu’s home, not this Grimminhagen, at least. He had lived ten lifetimes since he had last set foot on this defiled dirt. There had been a temple then, and houses of adobe and wattle and wood, and cattle grazing in the field. The memory came back to him with the vivid clarity of grief, of fields of fire. He turned in a circle, and around again, the sounds of fighting and fire bringing to life the recollection. They had brought his woman, Esther, out and pinned her down with iron nails, driving them into the earth and even as her lifeblood leaked out into the black dirt, they had lit the grain crop effectively murdering every last man, woman and child of the township. He remembered Korbhen’s gaunt face, his leer as he licked his damned lips and laved his tongue across Esther’s throat and the grin he shared with the man he had yet to break.

  Had he planted this “treasure” back then, even as his parasites had burned his home?

  Was his sire capable of such premeditation?

  Listening to the screams of his ghosts he knew that the answer to both questions was yes.

  The regret Radu felt was fleeting. Indeed it could barely be called regret. It was a half-remembered spectre, nothing more. His link to the man he had been had withered away to naught centuries before. Even now, turning back to face the tear in the earth where his minions had cut into the heart of the old temple, he saw it all in a curiously detached manner. It was as though he remembered the thoughts of a stranger, those thoughts a translucent veil draped over the here and now. It was this place, he knew. Once it had been the world now it was nothing more than its elements: wood, stone, and dirt. It meant nothing.

  With that realisation the screams of the ghosts melted away leaving him with the screams of the living.

  The peasants could not hope to stand against the naked ferocity of the dead. Their neat lines were ragged, their metal frail protection from his minions. Radu watched for a moment, enjoying the desperation of the enemy. It was only a matter of time before the hopelessness of the fight sank in and the sensible broke rank and fled while some few valiantly stood their ground. The dead drove them back, turning their homes into traps, pressing them up against the walls so that they could not fight back. Crushed up against their homes, they died like the cattle they were, slaughtered, gutted and heartbroken. Some few found it in themselves to fight back. Their heroics could only delay the inevitable. Even as the horns of the rallied militia and the destriers of the roused knights joined the fray it was never going to be enough for them.

  He saw an old man in the centre of the violence, anger driving his blade as he cut and parried, his face bathed in sweat and grim determination. For all his age he was more than a simple old man. He radiated strength and power, his skill with the blade unmatched by any that faced him. The living flocked around him, answering his cries as he dictated the defence, ordering the militia to flank around on the right, and the knights to close the pincer on the left. For all that strength Radu could smell the old man’s lifeblood straining through his veins, forcing his heart close to rupturing. Yet there was an awesome vitality to the town’s defender that belied his years. So mu
ch purity sang in his blood it was sickening.

  “You will die, old man,” Radu whispered.

  In the thick of the fighting the grizzled warrior looked up, as though hearing the vampire’s promise. Their eyes met and for a moment the world was reduced to the two of them and then the fighting closed around the old man, the sheer weight of the dead bearing him down. The knights came to the old man’s aid, hacking a path through the bone-puppets to get to his side. There was an air of inevitability to the scene.

  Radu turned his back on the slaughter, taking no great pleasure in the killings. He wanted one thing out of this night and one thing only: the treasure his sire had hidden, be it a gift or a curse. Amsel had been right in one thing, it was his birthright and he knew instinctively where they would find it buried. There was only one place it could be: the same patch of graveyard dirt where Korbhen had taken Esther. There was a poetic symmetry to it that his sire would not have been able to ignore. The prize was personal. It always had been.

  He turned his head, seeing Amsel drag a young girl out of the fighting by the hair. She wept hysterically and struggled against the thrall’s grip, but Amsel was merciless. Her knees buckled as he dragged her over the churned dirt and broken stones. Blood dripped down her scalp where her struggles tore her hair free. Amsel slapped her and hauled her back to her feet.

  “She retains her innocence,” the thrall declared, as he pushed the child at Radu.

  “Good.” Korbhen’s treasure would soon be his.

  The girl’s face was streaked with tears. Sobs hitched in her throat.

  “I do not intend to kill you, child,” the necrarch said, his mellifluous voice anything but reassuring. He knelt, ignoring the slaughter, and grasped the girl by the shoulders, his long fingers hooking into her flesh. She cried out as his withered nails drew yet more blood from her but did not dare struggle against his hold. “You are going to do me a service, and then I shall send you back to your mother,” he lied smoothly. He had no intention of passing up her innocence. He would take the treasure from her hands and then he would draw out the second more intimate treasure from her meat. There was nothing like the taste and texture of innocent blood. She stared back at him blankly, uncomprehending.

  “Go down into the dirt. There is a casket hidden within that is mine by right. Bring it back to me and you shall live a while longer. You want to live, don’t you?” He lost himself in a ghost, remembering a time when he had stood on the same dead earth. “There was not always a temple here,” he said more to himself than the girl. He pointed towards a patch of grass much like any other patch of grass. “You will find it there. No doubt there will be markings in the stone around it, much like the one you will see as you cross the threshold to begin your descent. Let the markings guide you to the box. Bring it back to me and you will be rewarded with your life. Do you understand?”

  The girl nodded, tears and spittle staining her otherwise pretty face.

  She understood more than just the words. She understood the subtle knife beneath them, the glorious reward he promised.

  She knew she was dead even before she took her first step into the belly of the earth.

  What she didn’t know, what none of them could know, was that her first step was the culmination of hundreds of years of cunning that would ultimately bring about more than just her downfall.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Phantoms

  Grimminhagen, in the shadow of the Drakwald Forest, Middenland

  The Autumn of the Living Dead, 2532

  Bonifaz, Cort, and Bohme fought like daemons possessed to reach his side.

  Reinhardt Metzger felt his heart breaking. It was not some metaphorical agony. It was a very real, very physical pain that lanced through his left arm and into his chest. Metzger winced, forcing his shield arm out to take a hammer-blow from a rotten corpse. The impact resonated through his blood and bone, fresh agony firing his heart. He turned on his heel, delivering a crushing blow that cut through the lower jaw of his enemy, sheering the bone in two and leaving his mouth flapping open stupidly. Spots of fire blazed across his eyes as the horizon swam. Metzger felt the fist clench around his heart, crushing it in its merciless grip. He took another hammer blow on his shield, from what looked like a razor-toothed bone blade.

  The impact cleaved into his shield, opening a deep tear in it. The sounds of death and dying took on a surreal distant quality in his ears. He twisted, thrusting the point of his blade deep into the rotten corpse of the creature that had risen up before him. The sudden and shocking flare of pain rippled out across every inch of his skin like sunburn. His knees buckled.

  The sounds of battle muted down to the drum of blood in his ears and he knew he had failed everyone. It was that, more than the understanding that his courage was bigger than his old heart could hold, that undid him.

  He let out a roar of anguish and swung the sword in a vicious low sweep, but he didn’t finish the move. The blade slipped through his fingers and fell to the dirt by his side.

  Through the pain of his heart’s betrayal he saw the hideous face of the vampire mocking his failure. Metzger held the beast’s gaze until a second savage twist of pain attacked his heart and the world went black. He pitched forward onto his face and the dead fell upon him.

  Cort reached his side first, the Silberklinge’s twin short blades cutting a swathe of destruction through the ranks of the dead. He moved with the grace of a natural born killer, his swords weaving a pattern of murder between them that was almost beautiful to behold. He turned the blades into a reaping hook, disembowelling and beheading all that fell across his path. Bonifaz and Bohme came in his wake, adding their steel to the danse macabre. It did not matter that the fight was impossible, that Reinhardt Metzger’s heart was one foe they could not vanquish with skill, steel or sheer bloody will. Neither one of them was about to abandon their friend to the teeth and claws of the vampiric horde, even if it meant laying down their lives to save the dying man for a few minutes longer.

  There was an eerie silence to their foes who surged forward in wave after endless wave without a single groan or sigh even as they were cut down. The only sounds of battle were the clash of steel and the cries of Grimminhagen’s fallen. It sent a cold shiver deep into the core of each of them, but it was the very unnaturalness of the battle that spurred them on to reach their fallen comrade. They did not care about winning the fight or saving the town, that was beyond them. They had a single purpose, to protect Metzger.

  He was unconscious when they reached him, but alive, barely.

  The three swordsmen formed a circle around their leader, talking incessantly as they blocked, parried and thrust desperately. It took every ounce of their skill and more still of their indomitable will to drive back the silent ranks of the dead.

  The fog of battle broke, leaving him with room for respite. Through the blood and spittle, Bohme saw the miller’s girl emerge from the ground clutching a wooden casket to her breast. He began to run towards her, seeing the creatures all around her. A withered vampire took the box from her with grasping hands, and then laid it aside and caught her by the shoulders. In the space between footsteps the creature sank its feral teeth into her skin. She offered no resistance, simply going limp in those vile arms. Before Bohme could get close, he saw the boy, Fehr, fighting to reach her with a stubborn determination that outmatched his little skill, but it was that fierce will that would see him live even though there was no hope for the girl.

  A corpse lurched for Bohme’s face. He cleaved it open, taking its jaw from its ruined face and leaving its rot-addled tongue hanging. He finished the wretched creature, dragging his sword out of its bowels. As the corpse fell Bohme saw Fehr run, screaming, at a man with no face. Bohme knew him: the vampiric acolyte that had summoned the bones from the earth to fight him. Hatred boiled up within the warrior. He pushed aside another shambling corpse and ran flat out to reach Fehr’s side. Before he could reach him Fehr thundered his blade clean through the gash wh
ere the acolyte’s nose ought to have been. Again and again Wolfgang Fehr drove his blade into the ragged wound, until the body ceased its twitching.

  As he died, all across the field hundreds of bone creatures fell, the will binding them together undone.

  Bohme cracked his fist into the face of a blood-smeared woman, blood exploding from her nose. He cast her aside, thrusting the long blade in his right hand into the gut of the man at her side. These two, he realised, bled, and worse, screamed.

  Bohme dispatched another stricken foe, buying himself a yard of breathing space. He brandished his blade, keeping the deformed at bay. At his side Bonifaz was bleeding badly from several cuts; most were superficial but the worst ensured that he would never be thought of as handsome again.

  He saw Metzger fall, and reversed the direction of his charge.

  A dozen yards away Fehr looked around stupidly, realising that he had abandoned the safety of the line. He cut down three rag-clothed creatures. A fourth threw itself at the young man only to pull up short, Fehr’s blade emerging bloody silver from its back. As the damned creature fell from his sword Fehr saw the three Silberklinge and ran towards them.

  “Make me a path. I’m going to get him away from here,” Bohme barked. Bonifaz moved with renewed ferocity, his blades tearing a hole through the press of the dead. There was an economy to his swordplay, his blades never cutting an inch more than necessary to deliver the hurt. The man was a daemon possessed.

  Without a word, Kaspar Bohme knelt to cradle his friend’s body and lifted him.

  With Fehr and Cort protecting him on either side, and Bonifaz cutting a path back to the safety of the buildings, Bohme carried Metzger out of the worst of the fighting.

  “Don’t die on me, old man,” he whispered like a prayer.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Hour of the Man

  Grimminhagen, in the shadow of the Drakwald Forest, Middenland