by Various
‘Sigmar repopulated other cities here,’ Vandalus explained. ‘Cartha is lost but we have others to protect. Come with us, and perhaps there you will find your vampire again.’
Despite the tension cramping his jaw shut, Ramus nodded.
Cartha had fallen. Now was the time of the beast.
Fist of Mork, Fist of Gork
David Guymer
The fire had been banked with earth and soot, and splinters of creamy white bone sat like teeth in the ashes. Embers spat resentfully at the night. It was almost smokeless. Say what one liked about the Astral Templars – and in the sanctity of his own thoughts, Ramus said plenty – they were not careless. Though they neither felt the cold nor feared the dark, the brooding champions in maroon and gold sat close to the fitfully glowing pit.
Vandalus stared right into the heart of the embers. Even sat as he was with his wings unlit, the Knight-Azyros carried a barbaric kind of nobility. His eyes sparkled like sacred pools, his helm shining in his lap and his long golden hair falling free. He kept his voice low, as though speaking to the fire.
‘The ogor was eighteen feet tall...’
He glanced up. Shadows danced across the metal-cast faces around him. A few were survivors of the siege of Cartha. They had been changed by their time in the wildwood – their armour was scratched and marked with feral icons, their cloaks grimy and torn. The others had been called down in the days and weeks since by the light of Vandalus’ beacon. They were keener in every respect: the bright colours of their armour, the edges of their gladiuses, their faith in their purpose. They sat forwards, attentive, rapt.
‘Eighteen feet tall, and heavier than seven men. Hamilcar had already slain a dozen of the ogor’s best warriors, but we were all tired, all hungry, and this was a brute altogether more formidable than any yet to have breached the gates of Cartha.’
‘There is no ogor so large...’
Ramus was only half attentive, half interested. The warmth of the fire was on his back, his eyes on the dark where he preferred them.
Hacked into by axe and by fire, the Carthic Oldwoods’ northern border looked like the site of any of the thousand massacres that Ramus had seen, after the armies had moved on and the crows were done. Jagged bits of tree stuck out of the ground like the unburied dead, gleaming white in the moonlight where animals had stripped them of bark.
The forest clicked and twittered. An odd snuffling moved through the undergrowth not far from the camp. Gorse, tangled and black and crisp, crunched underfoot as a small party of Hallowed Knights ventured warily ahead. Crouched and alert, Ramus watched the night breathe. ‘Moreover, I doubt there ever has been.’
‘Never is a powerful word to throw around so fearlessly,’ said Vandalus.
Ramus scowled. For him it was comfortable, a settling of facial muscles into positions to which they were well accustomed. No one could see what he thought behind his skull helm in any case. ‘The Lord-Castellant’s deeds that day were impressive enough. Why embellish them?’
Vandalus sighed and leaned forwards, goading the embers to sparks with a dead branch. ‘Hamilcar will return, but what will he remember after his Reforging? Who knows?’ He gestured to the Stormcasts sitting around him. ‘So we will remember for him.’
The animal in the woods snuffled nearer. Hunger coiled Ramus’ guts into knots. He did not know how long it took for a Stormcast to die of hunger. He willed it back. He did not want to be the first Lord-Relictor to return to Sigmar with that knowledge.
The creature stopped moving. A grunting, scraping noise followed, accompanied by the swaying of a pale tree about twenty feet into the forest. Ramus picked up his reliquary, black soil crunching under his grip on the morbid icon. The animal sounded big, which was strange.
Stranger, it sounded careless.
‘If it is untrue then what purpose does it serve?’
‘He died for Sigmar,’ said Vandalus. ‘Is that not worth a little glory?’
One of the fresher-looking Astral Templars leaned in towards the firepit. ‘Perhaps you could tell us the tale of Hamilcar’s fall, Lord-Relictor?’
Vandalus’ eyes sparkled. After weeks of pursuit by ogors, ghoul packs, orruks, and things his language had no name for, this lack of respect was still the most disagreeable thing Ramus had seen since his last death. He could speak of how he and his retinue had held the gates of Cartha, of how he had destroyed the bridge to spare the Astral Templars from being overrun by ghouls, or how he and the Lord-Castellant had fought side by side against the great betrayer, von Carstein. He could have said all that.
‘Sigmar demands much of those to whom much is given. He died for Sigmar. If he desires more glory than that, then I pity him.’
‘Careful, Ramus, a poet lurks somewhere under the black.’
Ramus took a deep breath. The tree had stopped swaying and the rustle of leaf litter was coming nearer. Maybe fifteen feet away now. He strained to see through the tangled moonlight. A twig snapped. He turned towards it, raising his reliquary.
Standing half in shade, sheared by a beam of glittering silver light, was Iunias of the Retributors. He silently gestured for Ramus to follow. The Lord-Relictor nodded, equally silent, and glanced to Vandalus as he pushed off on his reliquary and rose to follow the Retributor.
‘Be ready to move again when I return.’
Iunias clasped Ramus’ pauldron in welcome as he approached, and pointed through an ethereal arch of leaning saplings, bent by wind and scratching beasts, to where Sagittus was standing in a puddle of moonlight, crossbow aimed at the shifting wind.
‘Shhh...’
The Judicator held up a gauntleted finger, listening.
Crouched beside a bole that had been so well polished it shone like a slice of the moon, an Astral Templar wreathed in the skin of a wild boar glanced across at his comrades. In spite of his expressionless dark mask he looked somewhat embarrassed by their attention. He said nothing, however, and returned to his work, chipping at the pale trunk with the glinting tip of his gladius.
Behind the sigmarite of his faceplate, Sagittus exhaled slowly. He dropped his hand, lowered his aim only slightly less grudgingly, and turned to Ramus.
‘I heard... I thought I heard...’
He pulled himself together, shook his head, haloed in moving streams of silver.
‘I thought I heard something.’
Ramus lay a gauntlet on his second’s shoulder. Ghosts. Trees that walked. Animals that could speak as men and adopt human form. Ramus did not doubt that most of the myths of this realm had some truth. Chaos had twisted the realms in countless ways, but Chaos was not the half of it.
The world had been well twisted long before the betrayals of Nagash and Gorkamorka brought the golden Age of Myth crashing down on mortal heads. He sighed.
Betrayal. It always came to that, as constant as a turning world...
But he was Lord-Relictor. His first duty was to abjure and forefend, to keep the souls of his charges pure.
‘Faith, Sagittus. If something calls, let it call the night away. If it comes, I expect it to be filled with bolts.’
Ramus saw the Stormcast relax a little. He clasped his pauldron once more and moved on.
The Astral Templar looked up as he approached. Brakka was, according to Vandalus, something of an unlucky legend. No one had been despatched to the soul-forges more times and been remade. So it was said.
The deep maroon of his armour was almost black, haloed with gold. His cloak was unkempt, similarly colourless in the dark but for a smear of old blood. There were days when Brakka recalled little beyond his name, Sigmar’s, and how to use his hammer, but he could tell dirt from dirt like no one else, alive or dead.
Silently, the warrior indicated a streak of black paint that had been scraped across one flank of the tree – from a shield, perhaps, or an armour plate. He showed Ramus his gladius. There was a tin
y sliver of steel there that he had dug out of the wood.
‘They passed this way.’ Ramus did not intend it as a question. He did not need to ask the man whether he was sure.
Brakka nodded.
‘How far ahead?’
The Templar held up a finger and stood, backing off soundlessly, and waved for Ramus to follow. The surrounding trees thinned as he picked his way expertly around them, another flood of moonlight making his armour’s gold edging shine. He pointed through the opening. Ramus turned to look.
The pale tree stubs climbed towards a low rise. Poking out of the summit like snaggled teeth, partially screened off by hanging greenery, the angles of a stone circle gleamed an unquiet white.
A tower made up of bent metal plates, streaked with rust, leaned incongruously into the overgrown henge, like a troggoth spreading out on a sylvaneth’s leafy bed. A dark glyph depicting an iron-fanged jaw with a monstrous underbite caught the moon in its full, faded glory.
Sagittus did not shift his gaze from the forest.
‘A strong vantage point.’
‘Difficult to take by surprise.’
With his eyes, he tracked the most likely path up the slope. He could see where trees had been snapped and brushwood flattened. There were even bits of discarded gear glinting metallically in the undergrowth. Either the ogors had become desperate or the skills of Brakka’s past life were rubbing off on him.
Had the Betrayer got wind of their approach and pushed his warband hard for a last stand on favourable ground? Ramus had wounded the vampire badly in their last encounter. It would be reasonable to conclude that a rematch was low on his list of desires.
‘It is an orruk fort.’
Ramus looked again at the dark stain on Brakka’s cloak. The fight with the black-skinned orruks the first day out from Cartha, or maybe the ambush at the river? The woods were crawling with them, splinter bands of a hundred or so left by the main horde as it pushed forward, through Cartha and on.
Where to, and why? Easier to ask why the tide rises. The going had become easier now the orruks’ front line was behind them, but still...
‘We’ve already lost half an Exemplar Chamber, and I can ill afford to lose more. We should break camp now. We might yet catch them before the dawn.’
‘The vampire will be weaker if we wait for the sunrise, and a little rest will benefit us far more than it will his ogors.’
Iunias’ dry chuckle strained through his mouthpiece.
‘The vampire would move faster without them. He fears this forest’s inhabitants more than he fears us.’
‘And who will teach the Betrayer of his error?’
The dawn would see the return of Mannfred von Carstein to Sigmar, and then the God-King would present the Betrayer to Nagash and the Dark Powers would tremble at what Ramus of the Shadowed Soul had made be. Peace between the two great deities of Order, and Lord-Celestant Tarsus’ soul set free to lead the Hallowed Knights into the great battles that would follow.
Wary despite the excited beating of his heart, he touched his fingertips to the silver rim of his shield, Sigmar’s Gift, and drew his warhammer.
Sagittus and Iunias likewise reached out and brushed the two-tailed comet emblazoned upon it. ‘Only the faithful,’ they intoned in unison.
The summit was empty. More or less.
Birds crowed from the bushes, and from gaps in the odd crushed-together construction of the tower’s rusted outer shell. Ramus could see their beady eyes from within the tangle, hear the impatient shuffle, the rustle of feathers. The birds he could live with. It was the ogors that were causing his senses offence.
There were about three dozen of them lying in wait, hidden from view of the forest by the way the knoll lipped, then dipped, then rose again before reaching the henge. Staked out in neat, slouching files.
Ramus’ nose wrinkled from the stench. He raised his reliquary to indicate a halt, and the Stormcasts’ uphill march clattered to a standstill. Vandalus and the Prosecutors beat hard to hold their positions overhead.
Ramus had been a priest of Sigmar long before he had entered the Temple of Ages and endured the twelve rituals to become Lord-Relictor. The divine storm did not merely imbue him: it was his to channel. He could glimpse into the spirit world and view the soul-eternal.
Something was amiss here. Slimy against his skin, filling his mouth with its taste. Evil had settled into the rugged hilltop’s depressions like stagnant water.
‘Keep your distance.’
He kept an eye on the sagging ranks of ogors as he sidestepped them to a crumble of old wall. Something moved there, slippery, like an eel squirming over his spiritual sense. He brushed aside a creeper.
The ruin was daubed with finger art, just enough paint left to make out the shapes of beasts and monsters. A chill passed through his empty belly, as if he could hear the trumpeting of the herds through his fingertips on the stone.
He shivered. Without them altering in any discernible way, the images seemed to slide across the wall and back into cover. Stick figures carrying spears followed them. They were green-black, faded, thicker drawn around the arms than the legs.
‘Be this the work of men or orruks...?’
He withdrew his hand. The wall was empty.
Chanting a prayer for the rebinding of his soul, he turned away, aware without needing to see it that the images would be spreading back. This had been someone’s holy site once, long before the Age of Sigmar, a place where men had worshipped the turning of the seasons or the migrations of the herds.
‘And Mannfred has taken the time to defile it. Why?’
‘Lord-Relictor.’
Iunias pointed with his star-soul mace.
‘Over there, by the tower.’
Ramus looked. A set of stone steps led up to a bulging metal doorframe, bent outward in the middle as though by generations of too-wide elbows. The door itself had warped almost off its hinges. The lintel stone was festooned with bone fetishes made from small animals and birds, which clinked together like wind chimes.
What Iunias was pointing to, however, was on the steps, or flanking them – two more rows of stakes each topped with a human skull at a jaunty tilt, and articulated to a crudely wired skeleton. Some of the bones were still fleshed, and even had thin bristles of hair, but they had clearly been here a lot longer than Mannfred’s ogor allies.
An outraged murmur passed through the Astral Templars. Azyrheimer or native tribespeople, the people of this land had been sworn to their protection. Loudly muttering oaths of vengeance to his brothers, against ogors and orruks in equal measure, one of the Liberators wandered towards the front rank of stakes.
Ramus received the sudden sense of something buried deep inside the nearest ogor’s dead flesh. Wispy and faint, it glowed torpidly.
A soul. Sigmar, the ogor was not dead.
‘Away from it. Away, now!’
The ogor gave a deep, fleshy moan and made a grab for the Liberator. The stake creaked forward, but had been set deep into the hard ground. The ogor flailed as though it were drowning in mud.
The Astral Templar gave the bloated zombie a moment’s baleful look, then mashed in its head with a side-on crack from his hammer. It caved like an oversized fruit, splattering rotten mush all over the Liberator’s armour.
The undead thing stopped jerking and slumped back. Its neighbour however turned its neck towards the Stormcasts, eyes rolling like dice in a cup, and began to moan. Then its neighbour started to struggle against its stake until the whole hilltop rumbled with grunts and barks.
Ramus backed off, arms spread to dissuade anyone else from getting any closer. The cacophony echoed from the tower, carrion birds billowing through cracks and windows in a panic. It rang from the old stones of the henge, pealing out over the bleak wood like a funerary bell.
With his reliquary a barrie
r in front of the line of Stormcasts, he pressed a finger to his helm’s gumless teeth. The warriors fell silent. After about a minute of unrewarded thrashing and moaning, the ogors too fell still.
‘A curse on this place.’
It dawned on him then that Mannfred’s ogors must have perished weeks ago. That was how they had kept ahead of the Stormcasts without food or rest. In the time he had wasted chasing down a shambling decoy, Mannfred and his abyssal mount could be anywhere. The Betrayer had never even been here at all.
‘Damn it!’
He raised his reliquary and unleashed a bolt of lightning upon one of the standing stones. It blasted apart, rubble clattering against the wall of the derelict tower and tumbling down the opposite slope.
Vandalus descended slowly, dropping the final dozen feet to land beside him.
‘Better?’
‘No.’
With a jab of his reliquary that clinked the dusty relics stored within, Ramus pointed to one of the dully moaning corpses.
‘Let it down.’
The gore-splattered Liberator shrugged, set down his hammer as he moved round behind the corpse, and then raised his boot.
The kick snapped the stake in half. The ogor barked out a moan, raising the dead trunk of an arm at its assailant, but missed by a foot as its face crashed into the dirt. A gut that rigor mortis had made no firmer rippled under it as the ogor dug fingers into the dirt and tried to rise.
It moved as a dead thing moved, uncaring for the fingernail that snapped off against a stone or the awkward bend demanded of its elbows and knees. With a wet groan it fumbled to its feet, tottered for a moment, unbalanced by its own tremendous paunch, and then lunged for Ramus with a snarl.
It came at him so clumsily that even as a mortal man he could probably have got out of the way, the sway of its gut dragging it a foot off to the side for every forward stumble it took.
But Ramus could barely recall what mortality must have felt like, and he had no intention of going anywhere. He ducked under the shambler’s swinging arm, stepped in close to its sloughing chest, and forced fingers around its throat.
