Warhammer - Curse of the Necrarch

by Steven Savile

  He did not move, but then, neither did she.

  The woman stood framed in the doorway, content, it seemed, to watch him sleep.

  He watched the deeper shadow where she stood with one eye open while he concentrated on keeping his breathing shallow and even, feigning restless sleep. Fehr shifted slightly. Instinctively, she matched his movement. The more intently he stared, the greater definition she took on as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light until he could see her clearly. A glint of silver in the moonlight caught his eye as she turned a meat carver over in her hand. After a dozen minutes of silent watching, she left him and returned to the farmhouse. He did not close his eyes until he heard the soft snick of the door closing. He did not sleep for the rest of the night.

  After a breakfast of hard bread and mouldy cheese, the woman worked him like a dog. He began by clearing out the barn and burning the rotten straw, scrubbing down the surfaces with water and lye, and patching the broken slate that let the rain leak through. He spent the afternoon with the whetstone grinding off the rust from the blade of the plough and the other hand tools, and oiling them once he had honed an edge. The widow came out to watch him work three times, standing a little way off with her arms folded across her chest, without saying anything. He did not even know her name. He supposed it was unimportant; after his meal he would be moving on. There was no need for them to be best friends forever. Come sundown she fed him a bowl of stew with chunks of meat in it. It was the best thing he’d eaten in months. They talked a little.

  “My name is Wolfgang,” he said, between spooning mouthfuls of the steaming soup down his gullet. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

  “Irena,” she said.

  “I will be moving on tonight, as I promised.”

  She nodded. “There is still a lot to be done,” she said after a moment.

  Fehr spooned a chunk of stringy meat into his mouth. “Another day would not hurt. After all, it is getting late for being out on the road.

  “Stay the night if the barn suits your needs. I will not chase you out.”

  “My thanks,” Fehr said.

  So it went for several days.

  Fehr worked his fingers bloody, dead-heading the husks and burning the chafe, and then turning the soil and replanting, and night after night they shared a quiet meal. For a while it was as though he had stumbled into a normal life. He slept out in the barn, his muscles burning with the ache of honest toil, and it felt good. He didn’t sleep deeply, and his dreams were often troubled.

  For the first two nights Irena came out to watch him. She stood quietly in the doorway, the steel carver in her hand. She did not enter the barn, but simply stood in the doorway, watching.

  At the start of his third day working the farm she invited him into the house. He came willingly. Irena talked more openly about her life and her man and how he had died a year before, and about the loneliness he had left her with. In turn, Fehr told her about Grimminhagen and Jessika and, in the darkest part of the night, about the dead.

  “I see him each time I look in your eyes,” she said.

  He rolled over onto his elbow and looked at her. She was not pretty, not in the girlish way of girls he had known, but nor was she ugly. She had a strength about her that lent its attraction. “I am not going anywhere,” he promised, but even as he said it he knew it was one of those lover’s promises, rash and unkeepable, like, “I will always love you”.

  “Your eyes!”

  He reached up and touched his face. He could feel nothing wrong.

  Then she started laughing at herself. “I could have sworn they were yellow,” she said shaking her head, trying to dislodge the tricks of the candlelight.

  “Are they yellow now?” Fehr asked.

  She shook her head.

  Fehr found himself in those long nights. It was during the day that he lost himself. He threw himself into the chores of the farm, seeding and furrowing, herding the cattle, milking the cows, clearing away the burned chaff and so much more. He relished the burning in his blood and for a while he forgot about Metzger and Bohme and the armies of the damned.

  At night he dreamed, and in those dreams he was not hunted. In those dreams he was a father.

  Like every lie he had ever told, it could not last.

  It was not a normal life. In the daylight she could not bear his touch and would not look into his eyes, no matter what colour she thought them.

  Fehr was on his knees in the top field when he saw the outriders coming down the hill. He hid, curled up beside the brambles, and watched them. He recognised one of the two men as Cort, the Silberklinge who had worked them so rigorously on the drill fields with Bonifaz and Bohme. His heart hammered against his breastbone. His hands sank into the rich black loam. He kept his head down. He did not dare move as the pair rode passed. He watched them all the way down to the farmhouse, praying fervently to whichever god or daemon watched over deserters that they would ride on by. They did not.

  The two warriors dismounted and approached the farmhouse.

  Fehr was torn. He did not know whether to run towards them or as far away from them as he could. In the end he stood rooted to the spot, watching as Irene opened the door to them. After a moment both men turned to look up towards him. They were like ants down there but he fancied he could see the most minute of details: Cort raising a hand to shield his eyes from the morning sun, his companion licking his lips. He could smell them on the wind. They had ridden hard, their sweat dried into the wool of their under-tunics. He breathed it in. They were weary, tired of being afraid in this hostile hell of a place, so far from home with no means of return. Fehr licked his lips, not sure how he could know any of this. His blood pumped through his veins, his heart racing. He strained to hear, despite the mile or more distance between them. Cort and his companion saddled up and kicked their mounts into a gallop, riding straight for his hiding place.

  She had turned him in. For a moment he could not believe it. He had thought… what? That she loved him? That they would be a normal happy family? He laughed bitterly at the ridiculousness of the notion. She could not even bear to look at him when the darkness did not hide his face.

  Fehr ran.

  They came fast, spurring there mounts on. The horses were grateful to be given their head. Like the men, they were frightened in this place, though their fears were more primal. They smelled death on the wind, death and predators. Fehr stumbled, grasped a wooden style and threw himself over it. The mud of his freshly furrowed field sucked at his feet slowing him down. The horses’ hooves drummed loudly in his ears. He looked about frantically for a place to hide, but the landscape offered little shelter: a line of trees up ahead, the bank of the shallow stream off to the left, or wide open fields of burned chafe to the right. He ran for the water.

  He did not reach it.

  They rode him down long before he made it to the riverbank, driving him down onto his knees with blow after blow from the flats of their blades. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he collapsed, but he did not beg.

  Cort dismounted and came up to stand on his shoulder. He grabbed a fistful of Fehr’s hair and yanked his head back.

  “I know their secrets,” he pleaded, clawing at the fist that held him.

  “What rubbish is this?” the warrior’s companion said contemptuously. He drove a booted foot into Fehr’s gut. Cort’s grip on his hair prevented him from doubling up in pain as a second savage kick hammered home.

  “Hear me out,” Fehr gasped, refusing to plead even as he felt something inside him break as a third kick crunched into his ribs.

  “Speak plain, and speak fast, boy,” Cort said. “No lies.”

  “I have seen inside the vampire’s lair. I have lived among his wretched kin. I know where they hide away. I can take you there.”

  “Impossible!” Cort’s companion rasped, driving in another brutal body blow. “There is no lair! We have walked these hills for almost a month, being turned there and there about by the
mists and the crooked paths. There is no castle here. There is only death. Kill the traitor!”

  “No. That is not for us to decide,” the Silberklinge said, and then he brought the hilt of his sword down hard against Fehr’s temple. The last thing he heard as he blacked out was the warrior saying, “Bind him.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Hollow Man

  In the Shadow of the Howling Hills, Middenland

  The Spring of the Beast, 2533

  Kaspar Bohme sat with his head in his hands. He felt hollow.

  They had walked and walked, hunting high and low, but there was no sign of the enemy nor its lair. Before it had been easy, tracking the damned; their passage was burned into the earth, but after the confrontation at the pass the blight had faded. They followed signs that led them in circles. The mists that clung to the lower land hid the truth of the landscape, but even that couldn’t explain the fact that they could walk towards mountain peaks for a week without appearing to get any closer, and then turn around and see the same peaks behind them, their path all turned around. It sapped the will and left the men thinking that they would never get the justice they craved, which in turn left the craving weakened, their resolve undone.

  The crusade had taken its toll on all of them. That was the truth.

  They sat in the valley basin, either one hundred leagues from where they had battled with the dead, or just over the next line of hills. They were lost in more ways than one.

  There was something inherently sickening about bringing judgement on one of his own men. He felt as though he had failed young Fehr, rather than the other way around. He was the experienced warrior. He was the one who had walked into hell and back time and again. He was the one who had watched his family and friends lowered into the ground. He was the one who had lived and died a thousand times. How could a mere boy be expected to pay such a huge price for a moment’s panic? He wanted to tell the boy he was forgiven, that there was still a place for him among the men. Then he remembered the look of shock on Bonifaz’s face as the arrow took him and he knew he could not. The men needed to see strength from him, not compassion. There was nothing to say that had Fehr held his nerve Bonifaz or any of the others would still be alive, but that was irrelevant. Fehr had run, as had others, and their sword-brothers had paid the price. Now it was up to the youngster to count the cost of that decision.

  “I am sorry,” he said, and he was.

  “I don’t want to die,” the prisoner said without looking at him.

  “That’s the one truth of life, lad. We all do it.”

  “There’s no one left to mourn me,” Wolfgang Fehr told him. There was something terribly sad about a young man being so alone in the world, but that was the way of life. There were fathers who outlived their sons, no matter if they fathered one or one dozen. Life was not a list of checks and balances, it was cruel and capricious and ultimately unpredictable.

  “There’s no one left to shed a tear for me, either,” Bohme confided. “That’s a soldier’s life. Why’d you do it? I saw you at Grimminhagen. You are no coward, lad. You saved us all that day, and don’t think we’ve forgotten it. Soldiers have got long memories. We might not say much, but we don’t forget. Had you been anyone else Cort would have brought your head back. You know that, right? That’s all an officer needs to instil discipline, the head of a traitor. He brought you back because of the blood debt he felt he owed you, and now you’re my problem.”

  “I’m sorry,” Fehr said. It was too little, too late, of course, but it was the truth.

  “I don’t doubt it for a minute, lad. I just wish you had come back rather than kept on running. That’s the part of this whole sorry mess that’s going to cost you your life.”

  There were only five hundred of the men left. The crusade had seen two hundred fall, and a hundred horses besides. The atmosphere in the camp was subdued. The realisation had settled in long since that they were not going home. This was Reinhardt Metzger’s last crusade. It wasn’t some noble adventure. The old man had come to this place to die, and he had brought them with them. Each and every one of the men was content with his fate. They were soldiers. This was what soldiers did: soldiers died.

  The initial anger over the slaughter at Grimminhagen had faded, dulled into an ache and then more until all that remained was a deep festering need for justice. “Every one of the men lost someone that day,” Bohme said, “not just you lad. I know you feel like your life was ripped apart. I’m not going to waste platitudes on you, but tell me, why all the lies about being a prisoner in the vampire’s lair when you were happily rutting away with the merry widow?”

  “They aren’t lies,” Fehr said, stubbornly.

  “Really? You expect me to believe that you lived in a shanty town with the freaks and they didn’t gut you like a fish? Why would they spare you, Wolfgang? That’s what I don’t understand. Why would they welcome you as one of your own? Your story doesn’t ring true. In fact, it sounds to me like a story you’ve concocted in the hope of buying your life back. That’s what I think.”

  “I can show you,” Fehr said. This time there was an edge of desperation in his voice.

  “Lead us into a trap, you mean?”

  “No, you have to believe me. They want the vampire dead as much as we do.”

  “My enemy’s enemy is my friend,” Kaspar Bohme said.

  “Yes! Exactly!”

  “Do you take me for a fool, Wolfgang? Is that it? Do you look at me and see an idiot?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do you expect me to believe that they would send you back to us with a promise to betray their evil master? That all we have to do is follow you to the door of their hidden lair and they will throw the doors open in welcome? Can’t you hear how preposterous it all sounds?”

  “But it is true, I swear on my mother’s—” he had been about to say ‘life’, “grave.”

  “Then Metzger will want to hear your story,” Bohme said, not unkindly. “So you will die another day.”

  “Two old men waging a war against the beast and his dead army,” Metzger said. The old man paced back and forth. They had struck camp three days before and it had begun to take on an air of permanence. The landscape was familiar in that he was sure he had seen the same line of trees and the same deft of rocks three times since they had entered the hills. The castle was here. It had to be. The location fit everything he had ever heard about his original ancestral home. It had to be magic masking the landscape, turning them around and hiding the place in plain sight. There would be a way to break the charm and he would find it. He couldn’t ignore the possibility that maybe the lad, Fehr, was the key. “How pitiful does that sound in your ears, my friend? I have to admit that in mine it sounds like the grandest folly.”

  “No more foolish than two young men going into battle alone against arrayed mercenaries of a petty baron because the bastard raped the daughter of a friend,” he said, chuckling bleakly at the memory.

  “Ah, but those lads were fired up with the passion of youth and driven to see justice done. The world had yet to beat the idealism out of them.”

  “Whereas the old men have seen all the shit the world has to throw in their faces and still want to see justice done. I don’t know who I would be more afraid of,” Bohme said, wryly.

  “Do you think he’s telling the truth?”

  “He is too frightened to spin such a compelling lie.”

  “Perhaps not, perhaps he is just frightened enough.”

  Bohme shook his head. “You don’t believe that.”

  “You’re right. I don’t, but there’s something ugly about his confession.”

  “I know what you mean. Why would the damned simply let him walk away? It makes no sense unless it is a trap.”

  Metzger shook his head and said, “No, not that, though what you say is a reasonable assumption. No, why would they welcome him in the first place? That’s the bigger question, I think.”

  The old man rubbed a
t his thick growth of salt-and-pepper beard. His eyes were still as sharp as ever. The wind had its dander up and was blowing in fiercely from the west. The ground was still moist with rain from the morning. Looking at the sky another shower was moving in. That was spring in the lee of the hills: fierce winds, intermittent showers and glorious sunshine as the meadows bloomed all at once, life returning to the world.

  “But not one we need to worry about,” Kaspar Bohme said as a tree frog crossed his path. “Either we walk knowingly into the trap they’ve laid, or we don’t. Strip away the bullshit and it is as simple as that.”

  “Hardly simple, then, is it?” Metzger said.

  Bohme grunted out a miserable laugh. “I think I know you well enough to know just how simple it really is.”

  “The lad’ll lead us to their door. They’ll be expecting us but this time we’ll be expecting them as well. That makes all the difference in the world. We won’t be walking blind into some ambush on the hill. There’re five hundred of us and a whole hell of a lot of them, so we’ll end up fighting like bastards when they come at us. If there’re ten more of them to every one of us we’ll have to kill ten of them each. It’ll be bloody but we’ll kill every last one of the bastards or die trying.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Bohme said. “One last grand huzzah!”

  “One last grand huzzah,” Metzger agreed.

  “Are we going to die?”

  “Eventually, but not today. I don’t know about you, but today I intend to live,” Kaspar Bohme told the young man at his side. It was true. They would not die today, but that did not mean they wouldn’t die tomorrow.

  They had struck camp and started marching that morning, and had walked deep into the day, following Fehr’s directions. He did not trust the lad.

  “Then why have we left the wagons?”

  It was a question that only had one answer: because the wagons would slow them down, and because after tomorrow it was unlikely that any of them would need to feed again. They would meet the enemy on the field of battle and they would do what soldiers did best. They would die. It wasn’t the kind of answer that needed to be said aloud, but they had been through enough together to be spared lies, “Because tomorrow is another day.”