by Phil Kelly
‘Gerhardt the Worm’s underclothes,’ explained Gerhardt the Worm, grinning wildly.
‘Charming,’ said Volkmar. ‘Right. Von Korden, you like this sort of thing. Get some answers out of our guest here – who he works for, where his master is. Kaslain, keep your eyes open. I’m going to get the crusade up and ready to move as soon as you’ve procured the answers we need.’
‘Of course, my lord,’ said Kaslain, bowing his head as Volkmar departed.
Von Korden squatted down in the muck, pulling the Strigany up by the throat and pushing him against the wheel of the war wagon. Kaslain stood next to them as still as a statue, his face impassive. The witch hunter grinned with all the mirth of a corpse, ripping out the dirty cloth between his captive’s teeth and squishing his bloodied cheeks together with a pinch of his gauntleted hand.
‘We both know you’re going to talk, so I’ll let you keep your lips,’ he said. ‘For now.’
The Strigany let fly a complex curse, his bloody spittle pattering into von Korden’s face. Without taking his gaze from the nomad’s, the witch hunter grabbed hold of the bone sticking out of his captive’s leg and twisted it, eliciting a howl of pain.
‘I’m going to gouge your eye out with your own shinbone,’ hissed von Korden over the nomad’s screams. ‘What do you think of that?’
‘No!’ shouted the Strigany. He looked up at Kaslain, eyes wide. ‘Get maniac away! I talk!’
‘Back off, von Korden,’ said the Arch Lector, solemnly.
The witch hunter moved away, his face as dark as sin.
‘Right,’ said Kaslain, arms folded. ‘Where is he?’
‘Who?’
‘You know who.’
‘Pale count? He… He in Konigstein…’
‘Von Korden, the knives this time, please,’ said Kaslain, turning away. Von Korden stepped forward, sharpening his filleting knives against each other with a metallic chime.
‘No! No, the count… He is with wing-devils.’
‘Wing-devils?’ repeated von Korden, sharply. ‘The Devils of Swartzhafen?’
‘No, Empire man,’ croaked the Strigany, teeth bared in a bloody smile. ‘Konigstein.’
‘Swartzhafen. His eyes tell it,’ said the witch hunter, drawing a pistol from his surcoat and shooting the Strigany in the forehead in one smooth motion. Getting to his feet, he broke into a loping run down the ridge towards his Talabheimer escort.
‘Up! We march to Swartzhafen, right now!’
Kaslain shook his head in sadness. Touching his chest with the Reikhammer’s head, he knelt down in the mud, intoning a prayer to Sigmar as he closed what was left of the nomad’s eyes.
THE HIDDEN NECROPOLIS
Vargravia, 2522
A strangled cry came from behind, startling Bernhardt from his daze. One of them young wizard idiots, he thought. Probably worth a look.
The big man blinked away the clouds in his mind, and turned his head in the direction of the lens wagon. A white giant was looming out of the mist, ragged and corpse-like. It was so large the weird machine barely came up to its waist. It swung a fist the size of a barrel at the slumped-over wizard on the back plate. That will kill the old buzzard right enough, Bernhardt thought idly.
There was a sudden blaze of light, and something blurred around the bald wizard’s neck. Bernhardt watched as a glowing yellow shape floated out and caught the giant’s fist. The old man’s ghost, he thought, or something like it. Fighting with that giant.
‘Looks like it’s winning, an’ all,’ he murmured to himself.
‘Huh?’ said Cobb, sitting up next to him and picking gravel out of his cheek.
‘That glowy thing. Is’ tearin’ bits off that giant. Look.’
Sure enough, the golden figure that had emerged from Sunscryer’s robes was ripping great chunks of dead flesh and rotten bone from the giant’s frame. A second later the white monstrosity just fell apart, and the golden figure had vanished. The old man Sunscryer was up, now, pointing past Bernhardt and shouting some of his complicated wizard words.
There was a sudden flash of light, and as one, the militiamen spasmed from their trance. Bernhardt jumped up with a roar, shaking off the bony arms that had reached through the cold earth below him to grasp at his shoulders. He ran over to his men and yanked them to their feet, Cobb at his side. Together they kicked away the skeletal limbs and leering skulls that had been grasping and gnawing at their fallen comrades. One by one, the men regained their feet, stamping the bones back into the dust.
‘What the bloody hell just happened?’ said Delf, his jowls shivering.
‘S-s-site spell,’ said Khalep.
‘Indeed,’ added Sunscryer, straightening his robes. ‘Somewhat embarrassing, really. If it weren’t for my little helper I think we might all be dead as hobnails.’
‘What helper?’ asked Bernhardt, struggling to comprehend what had just happened. ‘That glowing thing? I thought that was your soul or something.’
‘Dear me, no! What you saw was a light-djinn, a kind of elemental.’
‘You’re a kind of mental,’ grumbled Cobb, brushing grave dirt from his jerkin. Bernhardt shot him a look as Jovi continued on. ‘It was bequeathed to me by a gifted but impractically rotund magus I befriended during my studies in El Khabbath,’ said the wizard. ‘We have mutual enemies in the von Carstein dynasty. But never mind all that. Shall we press on?’
‘Let’s,’ said Bernhardt sourly.
The Templehof expedition wound through the hidden necropolis of Vargravia. Still the hoofprints and cart ruts guided them, though the darkness was thickening. Bernhardt turned to face the rest of the Goat’s finest, trudging through the scree like condemned men heading towards a gallows. The taint of something foul hung in the air, a vile aftertaste on the back of each breath that promised evils yet to come.
Something writhed beneath Bernhardt’s boot. It was a thick, serpentine mass buried in the meaty earth, like a root, or a vein. Numbness spread up his leg, making his hands shake. Behind him, Derrick Vance went down with a cry, his habitually bare feet turned shocking crimson by a writhing mass of root-veins. Vance’s comrades rushed to help him, attempting to pull him free, but it was too late. Blood pooled in the hollow where his feet had been burrowed into by the vampiric roots. The rest of his lifeless body was white and pale.
‘To hell with this. We should go,’ said Bernhardt. ‘Get out of here fast, before any more of us get killed.’
‘I think you might be right, at that,’ said Sunscryer, biting his thumbnail and looking back the way they had come.
‘M-m-master!’ gummed Khalep, pointing at a break in the mist. ‘Isn’t that the m-m-manse?’
Sure enough, the domed top of a ruined manse was silhouetted against the rough glow of Morrslieb. It poked through the mist, its scrying scope glinting like a cyclopean eye. Its rough bricks were limned with a greenish tinge that emanated from behind the ramshackle building.
The expedition had reached the heart of Vargravia.
Gritting his teeth, Bernhardt boosted himself up onto the plinth of a nearby monument and peered into the mists. The manse was less than thirty yards away from him. Behind it he could just about make out something glowing a sickly green in the fog.
As he squinted, the thing seemed to resolve itself in greater detail. It looked like an ornate construction of black ironwork gates welded closely together, or perhaps a set of fused bones melded to look like a cage. It was glowing from within. Mounted on a series of carved stone slabs, the dark cage contained a shackled casket that positively thrummed with power. It hurt Bernhardt’s mind even to look at it.
The militiaman closed his eyes tight, but the after-image was still there, dancing behind his eyelids – the negative image of casket, its purplish glow encasing a hand of purest black.
At the fore of the strange construction was a lectern made from a human corpse that held a giant grimoire upon its back. The tome’s pages crackled with tendrils of purest darkness as they flappe
d back and forth. As Bernhardt watched, a gaunt figure rose up from the stonework and loomed over the book, his hissing syllables cutting through the mist. Low moans came from all around the expedition. The Stirlanders formed up tight, blades held ready.
‘That’s… no, it can’t be…’ said Sunscryer softly, peering into the mist. ‘That’s an unholy reliquary, it has to be!’
‘Whatever it is, there’s a black hand inside the middle of it,’ said Bernhardt, grinding his fists into his eyes. ‘I can’t stop seeing it.’
‘There is!’ Jovi hissed in triumph. ‘The book, the hand… I was right, Neftep! That cage holds the reliquary of the Great Necromancer himself!’
‘Surely that disappeared centuries ago, master?’ whispered Neftep.
‘Yet clearly Mannfred has found it! That tome on the front – it’s one of the Nine Books of Nagash, my boy. It’s where the darkness is coming from!’ he crowed. ‘It’s all powered by the thing inside that reliquary, a casket containing the disembodied claw of Nagash, cut from his wrist at the fall of Nagashizzar! That’s what’s behind all of this!’
As their necromantic master’s name was spoken out loud, the grave-things around the manse rose up as one. A milling swarm bore the reliquary aloft, shrieking loud enough to wake the dead.
‘Oh dear,’ said Jovi Sunscryer, his hand flying up to his mouth.
Khalep cracked the reins and sent the warhorses surging forward, the war machine juddering in their wake. Something white flashed on the other side of the machine, a brief flurry of lace and long hair that flitted from one grave to the next.
‘Delf Cook,’ came a ragged female voice. ‘Lie with me forever.’
By Bernhardt’s side, the fat militiaman clutched at his throat, gasping for air. Something vaporous slid out of his mouth into the mist, and he toppled over, stone dead.
‘Johan Breckner,’ it said. ‘Ferdinand Lessner. I claim your souls.’
Two of the Goat’s finest fell to their knees amidst the ranks of their fellows and slumped over, disappearing into holes in the ground that closed over the top of them like mouths.
Barely a few feet away a worm-eaten visage surrounded by a mass of floating black locks pushed out from the side of a slab of stone. The apparition stared straight at the knot of militiamen, cold malice bleeding from its empty sockets. The nearest Stirlanders cried out and lurched backwards, features twisted in shock.
‘Jonas Cobb. Rest with me in eternity.’
The tall halberdier’s eyes rolled up into his head before he fell over in a heap, his polearm clattering to the ground.
‘Bloody well do something!’ shouted Bernhardt up to the wizards. ‘That’s Nell! She’s killing us!’
He fired a crossbow bolt straight at the ghastly spectre’s head. It pinged off the rock behind, spinning off into the mist.
‘What, sorry?’ shouted the figure on the lens deck of the receding Luminark, cupping his ear.
At the sound of his voice, the ghost of Emmanuelle von Templehof turned to face the old wizard, arms outstretched.
‘Jovi Sunscryer,’ it said, tendrils of darkness pouring out from its mouth. ‘Die.’
ARFEIT/SWARTZHAFEN BORDER
Vale of Vain Hope, 2522
The crusade had made good time across the fordable point of Unterwald River and pressed on with its forced march, von Korden striding determinedly at their head. The witch hunter had not spoken a word nor slowed in the slightest since the battle against the Strigany at Deihstein Ridge. Every iota of his deadly conviction was focused on finding his quarry, and anyone who hailed him was met only with stony silence.
Volkmar, by contrast, was blinking away exhaustion. Flashes of memory from Fort Oberstyre assailed him whenever he closed his eyes, and the war altar was juddering along at such a pace it was impossible to get any kind of rest. The Tattersouls, having picked up on the urgency in the air, were chanting and lashing themselves with even more zeal than usual, some of them even breaking into short runs when their fervour overflowed.
The Grand Theogonist looked back through the thinning light at his unsteady flock. He did not know whether to be reassured or disturbed by their manic energy. He was sure they had grown in number since the crusaders had passed the refugee train. For a second, he thought he could make out the peasant with the cleft lip they had talked to, trailing at the back with his wife. They gabbled strange syllables and tore at their hair, eyes rolling.
‘Sigmar! Sigmar through the Great Fires!’ shouted Gerhardt the Worm, grinning up at Volkmar. ‘Plunge through the Great Fires and transcend to the world of glory!’
The Grand Theogonist muttered a prayer to the Heldenhammer and turned back to the road. Keeping this pace was madness. He wanted to sleep for a week, a year, maybe even to just lie down forever. But the trail was still warm, and Sylvania needed him still.
An hour of hard slog later, the steepled roofs of Arfeit hove into view. There were still a few windows with light in them, and the promise of decent beds. The town’s protective border of stakes bore many a corpse, each in a different stage of decomposition. Ravens picking at strings of decaying flesh stopped their feast to look up at the vanguard’s approach, cawing in disapproval. Arfeit was a defensible position without a doubt, and potentially a vital night’s sleep for the soldiery.
‘No time!’ shouted von Korden from the front of the marching column.
Volkmar’s shoulders sank down. ‘He’s right,’ he said in answer to Kaslain’s questioning stare. ‘We press on.’
Dawn should have arrived by now, even by the shallow standards of the last few days. Volkmar could taste the morning dew in the air, mouldy and chill. Yet the skyline remained as grey as a month-old corpse.
Up ahead the vanguard had spotted the von Swartzhafen mansion, its ruined and slouching walls a patch of pitch black on the horizon. Already the war altar had passed statuary and shattered stonework, and the decaying vegetation that had been lining the road had thinned out to sparse brown twigs. As the ground opened out Volkmar could see something else up ahead, barring their path. At this distance it appeared no more than a thin white line in the mist.
Volkmar looked up, his eye caught by motion from the mansion’s tower. Morrslieb’s wan glow broke through the clouds for a moment, and bat-winged things were illuminated in silhouette.
‘Fan out and form up,’ called Volkmar, his voice strained. Several of the Talabheimer men turned questioning looks in his direction. ‘Just do it!’ he shouted. ‘Now!’
The ragged crusade spread out, taking advantage of the open ground in front of Swartzhafen’s gates. A low cry cut through the air, a sound that a living man could not have made. Blades were drawn, but kept low.
In the distance, a bell tolled.
Von Korden span around to look straight at Volkmar, an expression of wild bloodlust in his eyes. Turning back, he signalled his Talabheimer escort to move forward, waving Bennec Sootson’s cannon crew up the field on the right. The state troops obeyed with surprising speed, hustling forwards towards the distant gates.
‘You faithful,’ said Volkmar, motioning to the Tattersouls below. ‘Forward, and fast.’
THE HIDDEN NECROPOLIS
Vargravia, 2522
‘I can’t hear you, I’m afraid, lads!’ bellowed Sunscryer as he trundled away from the shouting Stirlanders. ‘Candle wax in the ears! Just in case Whispering Nell makes an appearance!’
Dropping his swords and roaring in desperation, Bernhardt snatched something from his coat pocket and flung himself straight at the female gheist that was drifting around them. A small knot of his men charged after him. Militiamen thrust their spears and blades into the midsection of the gaunt horror, but they passed straight through. Bernhardt’s brawler instincts took over, his left jab passing straight through the gheist’s maggot-chewed face. Quick as a daemon his right hook came around in a haymaker punch that connected hard, tearing the hideous thing’s skull into a scrap of diffusing ectoplasm. There was a dwindling screech as the
apparition sunk into the ground, mist roiling in her wake.
‘How in Sigmar’s name?’ said Janosch Velman, coming up to Bernhardt’s side.
‘Not Sigmar,’ said Bernhardt, unfurling his fist to expose a pair of smoking pfennigs. ‘Morr.’
Up ahead, the horses pulling the wizards’ contraption into the lee of the tumbledown manse struggled to make it the last few yards to the highest point of the peak. Bernhardt led his men in a loose run towards it, heedless of the ghastly faces roiling in the mist. High up at the manse’s dome, a glowing figure was wrestling free the scrying lens at the end of the astromancer’s telescope, bearing it down and angling it above the Luminark so that it glowed in sympathy with the glass discs ranged along the machine’s length. As Sunscryer shouted an arcane phrase of staccato syllables, a stuttering light shone out across the peaks – weak at first, then with increasing stridency – until the necropolis was lit with the strobing of the Luminark’s distress call.
The Stirlanders had reached spitting distance of the glowing Luminark when the air was split by a hideous screech. A group of hooded, flaming wraiths rode out from the wall of the ancient manse, their skeletal steeds passing straight through the rear carriage of the arcane war machine and heading down the scree towards the militiamen. The wraiths held their burning scythes high as they drove through the Stirlanders’ ranks, sweeping their blades low to cut into the men that flailed ineffectually at the flanks of the undead horses. The strange hooked scythes of the apparitions did not cut the flesh of their targets, instead passing straight through them. The wraiths galloped on, and five militiamen fell lifeless to the ground as if every tendon in their bodies had been severed at once. The rider-gheists wheeled around for another pass, screeching wildly as the unnatural green flames around them burned bright with stolen energy.
‘The Wind of Hysh repels you!’ shouted Jovi Sunscryer, standing on the riding plate of the Luminark and gesturing fiercely at the strange apparitions. The skies flashed white, and two of the wraiths were obliterated by lances of energy that darted from the gloom.
