Warhammer - Curse of the Necrarch

by Steven Savile

  He scurried down the narrow hall towards the stairs that led down towards the underground laboratories.

  “Casimir!” he called again at the foot of the stairs.

  There was no sign of the thrall.

  He was more at home in these dank tunnels than anywhere else in the world. He was a nesting creature, a hermit crab squatting in the shell of Korbhen’s great triumph. He knew all that but it did not matter one whit. These tunnels were his just as much as if he had carved them out with his two bare hands.

  It was impossible to tell if it was the casket or his hands, so violent was the trembling as he pushed open the door to the arcanum. “Casimir?” he called out again, but his shouts fell upon deaf ears. It did not matter.

  It felt good to be back in the familiar room, surrounded by the scrawled sigils of his formulae, and the objects of his craft: the pipets and tubes, the ampules and clay tablets cultivating festering moulds and growths that defied naming as well as more arcane paraphernalia that cluttered the acid-burned benches.

  He closed the door behind him, and then set the box down reverently on a marble slab, marvelling again at the lurid simplicity of the faces for a moment before depressing them to trigger the mechanism. Each pressure point was met by a soft snick and increasingly frenetic vibrations. As the third lock was released the wood grain of the lid shifted rather like the opening of a puzzle box, the metal plates falling into place. Radu closed his eyes, savouring the moment.

  “Patience, patience,” the necrarch crooned, his hands lingering over the unfastened mechanisms. It was easy to preach calm but inside his thoughts were a tempest, seething with anger that seemed to emanate from the box and plant itself within his mind, such was the wrath contained within the casket. He felt out each and every grain of wood in the surface. There was so much hatred carved into the simple lines of the wood, so much that he could feel it, like fire burning the tips of his fingers, like ice biting into the turgid blood in his veins. The anger called to Radu, its insidious voice whispering talk of destiny. Right then, right there, the necrarch knew that the casket had been waiting for his hand to break the seals and return the relic to the world of the flesh.

  Breathing deeply of the dead air, Radu opened the box for the second time. Even though he knew its contents, he gasped slightly at the sight of the grey mottled hand that lay on plush red velvet just the same. The fingers were withered and hooked around on themselves like a raven’s claws. There looked to be no physical decay; there were no obvious signs of mould festering or other such malignant contagion eating away at the hard crust of leathery skin. It was in a remarkably well preserved condition given the propensity of flesh to rot. Buried away for centuries it almost certainly should have been grave dust. Instead the ragged wounds in the flesh were still readily apparent from where it had been hacked off at the wrist. The flesh beneath was clearly dessicated, all the juices of humanity that kept the hand ripe, soft and supple, leeched away by time, but it could be restored. He had that skill.

  Radu held the hand in his, and felt the overwhelming rush of anger and hate wash over him as the fingers of the severed limb clenched into a fist beneath his grip. Images of places he had never visited, deaths he had never wrought, pleading, begging and pitiful screams filled his mind, and with them came the fierce joy of power. It flooded his system, energising his coagulated blood. The final image, of a man on his knees, pleading as a bone knife severed his hand at the wrist left him in no doubt, from the strength of the flesh’s memory that this was the same hand he saw in his vision. It did not matter that it was not the Great Necromancer’s own flesh. That he had possessed it, perhaps even crafted it, was enough. The hand was imbued with such lingering magic that even now it was as strong as any relic he had ever touched. The necrarch’s hands trembled as he lifted the hand out of the casket.

  Behind him, someone coughed.

  He had not heard the door open.

  Radu wheeled around to see Amsel standing in the doorway, contrite, head bowed. When he looked up from his shuffling feet an unholy hunger filled his eyes and he asked, “Is it all you dreamed, master?”

  “Everything and more,” Radu admitted. The power seethed within him, barely constrained by the bounds of his flesh.

  “What is it?”

  “My birthright,” Radu said.

  “A fetish? A totem? Some kind of arcane component? An incantation?”

  “Far more than any of those, I think,” Radu said, wallowing in the memories of agony that filled his mind’s eye. He had connected with the force that lingered within the hand, but not with the man. Despite the snatches of memory that tormented him, he had no clue whose the hand might be. “There is much I have yet to learn of this treasure and much study to be done. Watch,” he said, holding out his hands. Within them the severed fist unclenched reflexively.

  “It’s alive?”

  “I do not think so, no more than you or I are,” he said, the irony causing Radu to smile.

  “Do you control it?”

  “Yes,” the necrarch lied smoothly. With the lie came an overpowering vision, so real that it pulled him out of the subterranean chamber. In it he learned the secret of the hand and how it might be used.

  He saw a thick muscled man bound to a sacrificial stone, vents and raging tongues of flame hissing and steaming. He was part of the vision, living in its centre. He stood over the frightened man, looking down at the elaborate pattern of blue woad tattoos inked across the well defined musculature. In the patterns he saw the ghosts of gods long forgotten by man and the faces of devils and daemons lost even to the most superstitious of fools. They were in some infernal pit, the twin midnight moons casting their silver and green across the landscape although the venting flame gouts turned the centre of the pit day bright. The clash of steel rang out and the necrarch reached down with his withered hand, forcing the hero’s muscle and bone apart to expose the great weakness of the living: the heart. Slowly, with tenderness, the necrarch’s vision-self closed his fingers around the still-beating organ and wrenched it out of the man’s chest. Despite the primal screams of pain the man did not die for a full agonising minute in which his blood-starved brain refused to look away from the horror of the vampire clutching his heart.

  The vision swirled around within him vertiginously, the necrarch losing the fixed point of reference within the scene as though coming unanchored from himself, his sight spinning furiously. He tried to take in the hellish magnificence of the pit, catching flashes of metal and bone constructions lining the walls, and the grim-faced dead who manned them working with laborious precision. Each movement possessed a weirdly choreographed fluidity. There were hundreds of them toiling in the heat of the fires, bathed in the grime of the pit. In the centre he fastened the heart of a nameless hero within the grasp of a severed hand and laid it within its velvet-lined box.

  With words writ in blood across his ruined body the warrior rose to stand beside him, born again.

  Then the vision crumbled, slipping away like grains of sand through his clutching fingers. Amsel looked at him with a mixture of concern and confusion on his ugly face. He had not been ready for the vision to fail. There had been so much hidden within the layers and textures of it for him to learn, savour and understand, but as suddenly as it had come, it was gone. It did not matter; he knew what he must do.

  “Bring me a man.”

  Amsel looked perplexed by the command.

  “I said bring me a man,” Radu rasped. “Do I need to beat the order into your head.”

  “A man?” the thrall repeated stupidly.

  “A warrior. Bring me a warrior of great strength and heart. Bring someone to inspire terror and awe with his martial skill. Bring me the corpse of a hero, I would raise a champion!”

  “I do not understand, sire.”

  “I will take the greatest they have and remake in him my image, Amsel.”

  “You wish to sire another?”

  “Hardly, I have no need for a third l
ickspittle. No, I will raise a warrior whose might will make the ground beneath his feet tremble with fear, a killer immortal. I will raise a legend! I will raise a bringer of death like no other and the world will understand what it means to live in fear! Now go! Bring me my hero!”

  “So it shall be, master,” Amsel said, bowing and scraping as he turned to leave. Then, almost as though an afterthought, he turned and asked, “Should this hero be alive or dead, master?”

  Radu’s smile was imperious. “It does not matter, such is my command over the veil. Bring me the corpse of the greatest warrior who ever lived and I shall make him rise as my butcher, or bring me the living breathing embodiment of mankind’s obsession with heroes, and I shall break him into my bringer of death.”

  “Very good, yes, yes,” the thrall muttered, turning and fleeing the great laboratory in search of a hero of the human cause to appease Radu.

  Not one of the mortals within the castle was fit for the new master’s scheme. With the winds howling around him, Amsel scoured the gravestones of the castle cemetery, reading the names. It was impossible to judge the heroism of the dead, and though he was tempted by the largest of the mausoleums, assuming it marked the greatest of the warriors, that could not be taken for granted. The storm broke. Fat heavy rain began to fall. In a matter of minutes it was pouring from the heavens. The ground quickly turned to a sucking mire of mud.

  He had to find a suitable corpse, a fallen hero: a colossus.

  He thought of the black knight with the ruined face. The man had been a brute in life, and had died like a coward pleading for his worthless hide, but in death he had been a giant. He had died truly, cut down by a better warrior, a true bringer of death.

  Amsel knew what he needed to do, and precisely where he would find his heroic corpse.

  He ducked his head and shuffled through the sludge towards the heavy ironwood door that led out through the wall. The rain lashed down as he skirted the lake, transforming the skin of the water into a drum. The fog was thick now, thick enough so that he could barely see beyond his outstretched hand. He pressed close to the fortified walls, using them to guide him around the hidden waters of the lake. The footing was treacherous but he moved slowly, placing each foot with great care. Still he lost his footing on the narrow path more than once, barely avoiding falling in.

  The deadfall of leaves and branches provided the timpani to offset the rising water. He drew his ragged travelling cloak tightly around his shoulders, only his bald pate and grey knuckles exposed to the downpour. He walked with purpose, keeping to the dark places along the fringe of the trees and the treacherous slopes, through the broken peak, and then across the marshland working his way back towards the battlefield he had barely escaped with his death.

  The memory was still fresh in his mind: the old man cleaving through the ranks of the dead towards him. Amsel recognised him then, and now, for what he was: a hero, the kind of man that stood as a fulcrum around which the events of history pivoted.

  He would bring the old man to the castle.

  Amsel drew the image of the bat into his mind, giving his form over to it so that he might catch the wind and rise with it. He felt the aches of the flesh subside and the freedom of the air covet him, and then he was flying, flitting across the night landscape in search of the battlefield. He flew along the tree line, weaving in and out of the branches, and then across the long open expanse of marsh, skimming low across the rank bog, the stench strong. He no longer saw the world, he heard it, rebuilding it in his mind through the sounds it fed to him. Amsel flew, drawn by the stench of death that still clung stubbornly to the land, for the land was not unlike the mind, it cradled memories of pain and locked them in stone. It did not forget.

  Dead or alive, the new master had said, and there were heroes galore freshly buried down in the valley where the living and dead had clashed.

  It was deep in the night that he found the familiar landmarks of the narrow passes. He settled into the form of a man and crouched, pressed up against the rock behind a thin line of scrub bushes. The rain brought out the scent of the bushes: lavender. He scanned the fields below, reconstructing the fight in his head. Had the old white-haired warrior fallen after Amsel had fled the field? Or was he alive still? Amsel sniffed the air but he could not tell one reek from another, so powerful still was the taint of blood on it.

  The living had abandoned the field, though he doubted very much that they would ever find the castle they sought. A number of simple obfuscation charms combined with the natural protection of the geography made the place almost impossible to stumble upon if you did not know precisely where it was. The master took few chances with their privacy. An army could march for months within a few square miles and never realise they had passed the ruin a dozen times, the great gate close enough to breath upon.

  Expedience would have them burn rather than bury the dead, but they would not burn a hero. That was a peculiarity of mortals, somehow they viewed the flames as less than a corpse left to rot and feed the worms in the Garden of Morr. It was folly, as was much of their thinking, based on a falsehood of logic. There was beauty and glory in the flames of a funeral pyre. Any truly worthy corpse would not have been burned.

  Scorched earth marked the remains of the ruined supply wagons. Along with the deep scores in the dirt that marked the graves it was the only remnant of the battle with the Imperial force. The few actual graves were honoured with marker stones, though one was honoured with a sword thrust into the earth.

  The storm had turned the ground treacherous. Amsel prowled the graves. It was obvious which belonged to the mightiest warrior. He grasped the hilt of a mighty blade driven deep and drew it out of the soft earth.

  The sky was framed a soft silver by the distant stars. It ought to have been an image of beauty but there was no place for beauty in such a harsh landscape. Only a hero would wield a blade of its like, Amsel reasoned. Only a hero would have been spared the burning. This was his white-haired warrior. This, buried here beneath the blood-soaked dirt of the field, was the master’s heroic corpse. Amsel stabbed the sword back into the dirt and began to dig. It was a shallow grave. After a few minutes he tossed the weapon aside and finished the job with his hands, pulling handfuls of soil out of the hole until he saw the twin scars on either side of the dead swordsman’s face and his hands clasped across the hilt of a second blade that matched the grave marker. Rust had eaten into the second blade. Amsel cast it aside as useless and dragged the corpse from the grave. It was not the white-haired hero but another. Rot had ruined his skin, decay and worms eating into the muscle.

  He gathered the corpse into his arms. He could not carry the blade, but there were other swords. The master needed bones not steel. Amsel carried the dead man the many leagues back to the subterranean warren and his expectant master.

  All the way, the storm raged, all the forces of nature unleashed in mourning for the loss of the hero given over to the earth’s protection.

  “You have brought me a worthy corpse?”

  They were in the necrarch’s subterranean arcanum, the workshop where he quested for knowledge.

  “I have, master, yes, yes, most worthy, a true hero of the living.”

  “Let me see,” he said, rubbing his hands together expectantly as he bustled through the tools that he had prepared for the ritual of resurrection. The visions had intensified, the consciousness contained within the hand sharing more and more of its secrets, and with them, its power. Radu hungered to feel, touch, taste, experience all of it.

  The necrarch studied the corpse. There was no obvious cause of death until he drew back the hair and saw the exit wound punched out through the back of the dead man’s neck. The arrow had entered his mouth, tearing out the back of his throat, breaking the bones in the process. He could repair it. He had mastery over blood and bone. Otherwise the corpse was only now beginning to be consumed by the lividity of death. The dead man’s back was deep purple where the blood had settled post mortem.
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  “Lay him on the slab, and then leave me,” Radu said, fetching the necromancer’s hand from the casket. He would not allow unwanted eyes. None would share his secret. This magic was his and his alone. He cradled it close to his chest, stroking it lovingly as he shuffled back towards the slab and the exquisite corpse.

  He heard the door close quietly behind him as his thrall left.

  Radu had marked out the same arcane sigils that he remembered from his vision, as well as emulating the great flame gouts with strategic alchemical globes and candles of black wax. Lighting each in turn he intoned a single ritualistic line of offering in a long dead tongue, and with each new illumination the ambient temperature of the room dropped another degree until the air was like ice.

  Still, the corpse did not rise the first time he intoned the invocation. The flesh twitched and trembled but in the end lay lifeless. Radu cursed. He charged around the room grabbing things and hurling them to the floor in his frustration. Then he turned to beating his fists down to pulp and bone against the walls while he struggled to find his focus.

  He returned to the slab and demanded the dead man rise.

  For a moment it looked as though he might; the corpse’s head came up, as did its shoulders.

  “Yes, yes!” he hissed, only for the dead man to collapse again, inert.

  Then he placed the withered hand in contact with the dead flesh. With the contact the invocation came naturally to mind, but only while both he and the corpse were in direct contact with the dismembered limb.

  “As death demands the heart of a noble warrior to give heart to the fiercest fighter, so we take heart,” Radu whispered reverently, caressing the mottled skin with a crooked finger. His blackened nail raked across the pale nipple, digging into the thick muscle protecting the silenced heart. He looked at the warrior’s beatific face. “Come to me, my champion,” Radu commanded, forcing his hand into the dead man’s chest, hooked nails puncturing the skin and tearing through the layers of muscle until they reached the bone cage over the heart. Grunting, he forced his hand deeper, cracking the bones until his hand closed over the lifeless organ. He dragged his hand clear, turgid black blood clinging to his wrist where the jags of bone had torn into his flesh, such was the force of the violation.