Mortarch of Night

by Various

  Several beast-born threw themselves from the walls in grasping pursuit. Some caught trailing legs and dragged the winged warriors down. Others flailed, impacting in disjointed heaps on the berm. A handful staggered up on broken limbs and, whimpering in pain and hunger, dragged themselves towards Ramus.

  From the other direction, the ogors once again lifted up their wall-shields and advanced. The bridge trembled with their tread, Mannfred’s mocking laughter a counterpoint in gusts and whispers.

  Hamilcar backed up from the rampart, staring at the blood daubed over his gauntlets. ‘I did this...’

  ‘Back from the wall, to the city! We will hold the second bridge and make a stand there,’ cried Ramus.

  Ramus spat, turning and blasting a ghoul from the wooden berm with a bolt from his reliquary. The burning creature plunged, shrieking, through snapping leaves and on into the dark. Ramus came about, mouthing a prayer, and sent lightning to scorch the front rank of ogor shields.

  Hamilcar bellowed again, swinging his halberd overhead and cleaving the pair of man-beasts that came gnashing for his throat. ‘I did this! With Sigmar as my witness, Lord-Relictor, I will undo it!’

  Blasting and bludgeoning a path, Ramus retreated from the ogors’ advance, through the splintered outer gate and into the barbican. Where, a few minutes prior, bowmen had stood and loosed, they now hurled themselves into the tunnel. Ramus’ reliquary drove forked lightning through those that blocked his way.

  Taking the glowing staff in both hands, he looked back over his shoulder as an ogor in a studded helm crashed through the open gate, deep-set eyes peering over the top of its shield. It saw him and opened up to charge.

  ‘Down, Lord-Relictor!’

  Ramus ducked as a rank of Judicators in Azyr-blue and silver levelled crossbows as one and unleashed a storm of bolts into the tunnel. The ogor fell, bolts bristling from shield and helm and jowly face. Retributors and Decimators moved in to shore up the inner gate with crates dragged over from the drill yard, and with the bodies of the dead.

  The yard had slipped into a demented nightmare. Tortured screams abounded. Shadows darted, men and women gouging each other’s eyes out amidst tumbling leaves. Half of the Stormcasts pivoted to face them, but the ghouls seemed more interested in each other.

  With a sudden inhalation, one of the corpses being piled into the barricade made a grab for the Retributor carrying it. Surprised, the Stormcast struggled with it for a moment, its arms squirming around his neck, then tore it off him and hurled it against the wall where it broke and did not rise again. The Protectors formed a cage around Ramus, stormstrike glaives striking up a static hum that almost drowned out the moans of the reawakening dead.

  The barricade began to pull itself apart. Ramus noted Hamilcar’s absence and the incoherent cries coming from the Lord-Castellant’s last position, and broke into a run.

  ‘Back to the bridge!’ he ordered.

  A small band of Astral Templars held the rope bridge. Subhuman beasts battered themselves against the Liberators’ shields and fell to their hammers by the score. Against such guileless opposition, the warriors might have held their position for hours, if not indefinitely, but they were beset from both sides.

  Ramus felt cold spear his chest. Mannfred had not restricted his call to those on the walls. It had turned everyone. Everyone who had drunk, even once removed, the blood of Cartha.

  With a doleful prayer, Ramus raised his reliquary again. After so much use it felt like lifting a stone block but he thrust it high, as if to rip open the sky in person, and dropped a thunderous barrage of lightning strikes onto the flimsy bridge. Obliterated, bits of wood and wailing beast-touched people plummeted into the forest’s depths.

  The Judicator-Prime looked on. ‘It falls on me to point out that there is no other way out.’

  ‘Sigmar is our way out. And I will face the pain of that re­union gladly if I can push Mannfred von Carstein through the door ahead of me,’ snarled Ramus. ‘Astral Templars, to me!’

  Cartha was gone. They had no cause to fight for now but his. He turned, scanning the chaos behind him.

  ‘The Lord-Castellant hunts for the Betrayer. Good. His is the only life of consequence in Cartha now.’

  The Stormcasts formed up into a block around him, shields, blades and crackling hammerheads held outwards, the three corners facing away from the ruined bridge anchored by bulky Protectors. The savage-looking Astral Templars slotted in at the rear. The join between the two cohorts was seamless.

  At Ramus’ gesture, the Decimators each doubled up with a Judicator and ranged ahead. The rest of the Stormcasts snapped to a forward facing, brought weapons to marching order and, as one perfect unit, broke into a run back towards the gate.

  Their bodies were sacrosanct and of no value either to the ogors’ bellies or to the vampire’s ravenous new minions.

  And so they had turned on each other.

  An ogor encased from the waist down in heavy plate came blundering through the thin wooden partition of a barracks hall with a beast-touched man struggling in a lock under one arm and a shank of flesh dribbling from its mouth. Several more loped after it, evading the long swings of its fist and chasing it through the splintering wall of another structure on the opposite side of the yard.

  Elsewhere, another lay dead on the ground, the leaf bed around it whisked up by the frenzied attacks of the beast pack that mobbed it. Somewhere in the bedlam, an animal like a wolf, yet not quite, howled. Several scattered beast packs lifted bloodied mouths from the glut and loped off towards the sound.

  There, higher up in the canopy, a light pulsed in the gloom. Vandalus’ lantern. Even through the crowding foliage Ramus could feel the golden warmth of its summons.

  Sigmar did not bestow the Knights-Azyros with wings simply to serve as messengers and heralds. They were the sigmarite-tipped blade of the God-King’s spear. It was in their nature to be at the sharp end of any engagement, and the pride they took in that fact was legendary. Ramus knew little of the Astral Templars, and did not care to learn what the Reforging might one day take away, but he understood the temperament of the Knight-Azyros well.

  Wherever Vandalus fought, Mannfred could not be far.

  He lowered his reliquary to point out the pulsing lantern to his retinue, just as the breathless pant and claw-on-wood scrabble marked the approach of something four-legged and frantic. Ramus took a firm breath, ready to again loose lightning, as a gryph-hound burst through the leaves and skidded to a halt in front of him.

  It was limping, carrying one paw, its beak frothed and its fur matted with blood. Its sapphire-blue eyes were piercingly intelligent, but dancing with an animal fright almost painful to behold.

  The air grew chill, a sense of spiritual pressure building. The hound sniffed the air in alarm, then looked up and shrank to the ground with a whine.

  Ashigaroth dropped from the sky, slamming the gryph-hound down and ripping into its throat in a single, crushing instant. Tearing out muscle and tendons and spraying the ground with blood, the dread abyssal swallowed a chunk of flesh, and then shrieked its challenge as a wave of beast-born loped in from the shadows.

  ‘Judicators!’ Ramus called. ‘To your duty.’

  Swaying in the saddle of his unholy beast, Mannfred observed the rank of boltstorm crossbows with indulgent good humour. ‘Why is it, I wonder, that Sigmar felt compelled to burden you with such poor imaginations? Very well. “Judicate” me, if you can.’

  A volley of fire ripped through empty space as the dread abyssal leapt skywards. With a war cry from their retinue, the Retributors stepped forward to meet the charge of Mannfred’s beasts. Ramus turned from the slap of meat on metal and the ripping of joints from bone to follow Ashigaroth’s flight.

  ‘Spread out, Judicators! Follow his...’

  The order died on his lips as the monster reached the apogee of its arc and beg
an to descend. Strong hands on Ramus’ back pushed him clear. He hit the ground and immediately rolled over, just as Ashigaroth landed on top of the Protector that had saved him.

  The Stormcast went under in a shriek of metal. The dread abyssal’s knife-like mouthparts went straight for the warrior’s chest, splitting his breastplate in two and digging in. With a toss of the head, it pulled something wispy and golden from the warrior’s ruptured chest cavity and swallowed.

  The bolus glowed brightly through Ashigaroth’s skeletal neck as the monster struggled to get it down. It opened its jaws as though to gag, and vomited a bolt of lightning that struck towards the sky. The undead monster slumped forward, eyes quivering, and gave a rattling heave.

  Ramus thrust his reliquary up towards the sheets of lightning flashing across the crowded sky. ‘His soul belongs to Sigmar. As does mine. As does yours.’

  Ashigaroth heaved forwards and knocked his staff from his hands with a swipe of its claws, then struck him in the chest with the bony bridge of its skull and sent him stumbling. Mannfred stood up in the stirrups, a soft golden light nicking the edges of his armour, and pointed with his sword. ‘Outclassed and ready to die – now I remember you–’

  ‘Hold, blood-drinker!’

  Lord-Castellant Hamilcar strode in from Ramus’ right with his lantern held high, halberd scraping across the wooden ground. Two snarling gryph-hounds came at his side, bursting forwards with a snap of their vicious beaks.

  At his back marched a phalanx of Astral Templars, armour scraped and bloodied, adorned with savage icons, but Ramus could not recall any sunrise over Azyrheim so magnificent.

  Hamilcar broke into a run. Then his hounds. Then his Liberators. Sigmarite pounded excitedly on thick wood.

  ‘Cartha is my city, vampire. I am the Bear-Eater, and today you are my prey.’

  The Liberators crashed through the beast-born with the pleasure and ease of men kicking in empty packing crates, crushing open a path long enough for Hamilcar and his whirling halberd to charge through.

  Ashigaroth twisted to get out of the way. Hamilcar’s blade cracked its shoulder and shards of blackened metal flew loose. The monster bellowed, throat still shivering, and fought to be airborne. Mannfred reined it in with a harsh tug, urging it forward instead to trample the Lord-Castellant under its hell-metal bulk.

  Hamilcar raised his halberd across the abyssal’s throat like a barrier. Ashigaroth chomped furiously over the top of the haft for his armoured face, driving the mighty Lord-Castellant a dozen strides back for every snap of its jaws.

  With a snarl, Mannfred stabbed for Hamilcar’s neck. The Lord-Castellant ducked the shoulder, bent his neck to the other side, and the blow pierced his cloak to glance off his armour. The abyssal twisted out from Hamilcar’s halberd with a furious shake of the neck and snatched a gryph-hound mid-leap from the air. It shook it hard, and tossed the brutalised animal clear. The second circled in low, clamped its beak on the abyssal’s hind leg, and brought those infamously powerful jaw muscles to bear.

  Did unnatural beasts such as this feel pain? Ramus did not know. But he certainly felt the crack of fell metal as the gryph-hound bit down.

  The dread abyssal retaliated with a head swipe that sent the Lord-Castellant reeling. Swift as a turning wind, Mannfred twisted in the saddle and plunged his sword through the gryph-hound’s spine.

  Ramus snarled. ‘Bring him down! Forget everything that I said. The warrior who slays the vampire will be exalted by Sigmar forevermore.’

  Mannfred brought his sword up. ‘Don’t think to forever just yet, Stormcast... You wish to return me to Nagash, but that is a journey I fully intend to make on my own terms.’

  Ramus risked a quick backwards look.

  His Paladins staggered under bodily blows as beast-born beyond counting ran into them headlong. There was barely room to deploy a shield, much less a thunderaxe, and even the Decimators who would ordinarily relish such a numerical mismatch were dragged into a melee that was literally hand-to-hand. Arriving piecemeal through the scrape of leaves and the snap of reluctant joints, dead things shambled into the stragglers’ backs, driving the ghouls’ unnatural frenzy into the surrounded Stormcasts.

  Ramus glanced across to where his reliquary had been tossed. Mannfred was far too fast to let him reach it, far too strong to let the attempt go unpunished.

  Hamilcar’s halberd beat a long dent into Ashigaroth’s shoulder blade, shoved it sideways with a shriek, and gave Ramus the time to unsling his silver shield. The Lord-Relictor fed his arm through the straps, and swung in behind the monster.

  Sigmar’s Gift was heavy and polished, and carried an unusually wicked edge for a shield. It loosened an old memory, something he had once said to the warriors of his mortal nation as they had marched to war – a command to return with their shields, or on them.

  That was how Sigmar wanted the Betrayer, and that was how he would get him.

  Ramus struck for the slowly reknitting gash that the gryph-hound had put into Ashigaroth’s hind leg, but rather than putting the dread abyssal onto its belly, his hammer somehow crashed into Mannfred’s steel.

  It was like punching a wall. Impact spasms jerked up his neck. He swung his shield across the vampire’s counter, turned the blow over his shoulder and stumbled back from the force. He got his feet into place under him, caught a glimpse of Hamilcar and Ashigaroth trading hits a few feet away, then Mannfred’s meteoric downstroke forced him under his shield again.

  ‘This realm will be mine, Stormcast. You cannot stop me. If Nagash will not welcome me then I will make him fear me.’

  Ramus brought up his hammer as an arcane bolt leapt from Mannfred’s fingertips and scorched his breastplate. In that same moment he saw Hamilcar finally falling under Ashigaroth’s claws. The determined thumps of his halberd against the abyssal’s lower ribs continued, even after the ripping open of his faulds turned curses into screams.

  Unable to reach Ramus while his beast finished with the Lord-Castellant, Mannfred let go of the reins and pounced from the saddle, launching himself into a spin of such power that he became a blur. He cannoned into Ramus, smashing him through the struggling cordon of Stormcasts and into a pack of feral beasts. Hands smothered him, scratched and bloody, individually weak but irresistible in such volume. Fingernails dug in between helm and gorget. They pulled at his arms and legs, pounded on his bruised chest. He felt the join between boot and greave creak and fought in vain to draw in his leg. Something bit down on the narrowly opened gap but, to his astonishment, the pain faded almost as quickly as it had flared.

  He saw light, golden light, and he was the only one not screaming.

  Vandalus.

  Finished with the crypt flayers, the Knight-Azyros and his Prosecutors had returned. Beast-born reeled, screams bubbling from their throats as their corrupted flesh steamed, and Ramus immediately shook them off to sit upright. The light eased away his hurt and replenished his heart with faith. He saw Mannfred back warily from the aura, winding his wrist again through Ashigaroth’s hanging reins.

  Ramus picked up his shield from where it had fallen on the ground. In that flash of the divine he knew what it was for, as though he had been gifted with it and despatched to the light of Sigmar’s herald for no greater purpose than this.

  ‘Betrayer,’ he called to Mannfred. ‘I told you that Sigmar knows you.’

  He tilted his shield forward, its mirrored face cutting the light stream and turning its full force onto the vampire. Mannfred screamed as though he had been set ablaze, and a moment later the dead thing did indeed burst into purifying flame. Ashigaroth pulled on its wailing master, dragging him off the ground by the reins wrapped around his wrist in its own panic to escape.

  ‘No!’ Ramus gave a howl of frustration and looked upward. He could not see the Prosecutors directly, but he could tell from the faint shimmer of their wings they were up there. ‘Fo
llow him! Do not allow him to escape again!’

  In a sparkling impact of steel and thunder, Vandalus made landfall. The Astral Templar folded back his wings. The glow of burning buildings reflected in his armour made the animal iconography appear to dance.

  ‘I swore an oath of my own to hold this realm for Sigmar. I cannot fulfil yours for you as well.’

  Ramus bustled to his feet in a fury, pushed immediately to the ground again as an ogor came barging through the heaving mass of beast-born, so desperate to pull away from something behind it that even the Hallowed Knights Paladins broke before it. The fat brute stubbed its toe into the ground and tripped. Its face slammed down, blood and spit leaking into the grain. A huge-bladed and oddly shaped axe was stuck in its back.

  Ramus turned to look over the crushed bodies it had left in its wake.

  Standing there was a dark-skinned orruk in thick armour, painted red and black and marked with a pair of crude glyphs, carrying a heavy, well-made shield. Its face was covered by an up-cutting iron jaw. As difficult as it was to judge an orruk’s mood through a layer of steel, it looked as surprised to see Ramus as Ramus was to see it. Is that what Mannfred had been afraid of? Orruks? Hardly a peril worthy of notice to someone with two gods after his blood. Before he could finish the thought, the orruk was gone.

  Vandalus dropped to one knee beside Ramus and hauled him up. ‘Did you see the markings on its armour?’

  ‘What of them?’

  ‘They said “Great Red”.’

  ‘What of it?’

  Vandalus clasped his forearm in one hand, his shoulder in the other, and ignited his wings. ‘Come, brother.’

  From within the squall of animal cries and shrieking beasts, deep-voiced drums sounded out an urgent rhythm. Faster than a human beat, the tempo of something for whom the killing could not come quickly enough. The occasional, muffled cry of ‘Waaaaaggh!’ rose over the din.