Mortarch of Night

by Various

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Your reaction when Vandalus mentioned it. I have fought alongside you for some time now, Lord-Relictor.’

  Ramus nodded. He was Lord-Relictor, of the fourth Stormhost to be forged. Of the twelve rituals he had endured, the first had been of Recitation – to weed out the unworthy early, he supposed, for the histories of the realms were neither pleasant nor short.

  He carried those stories proudly, like scars. History was a passion, and he had few enough of those. His knowledge of it went deeper and further than most men would dare.

  ‘Long ago, early in the Age of Myth, there was a tribe of orruks known as the Junkar that lived in these mountains. Favoured by both halves of their unruly god, revelling equally in trickery and in war, they were unbeatable in any arena. Men fled the cities in their millions, sealing the realmgates behind them as they went, and the Junkar rampaged up and down the realm for generations.’

  Like almost every such tale Ramus had committed to memory, it was one of unparalleled might leading to an even mightier fall.

  ‘So glutted on battle had the leaders of the Junkar become, so massive had they grown that, unassailably mighty though they were, every battle left them wearier than the last, and every march to new fields became more arduous. In the end, they no longer moved at all, settling in the mountains that they had once called home.’

  Sagittus pivoted his boltstorm crossbow almost imperceptibly towards the brooding line of unpleasant peaks.

  ‘The Junkar Mountains...’

  ‘A name not lightly bestowed, not here.’

  ‘I assume they must have perished long ago.’

  ‘An orruk’s need for conflict knows no bounds and over the centuries, the Junkar abandoned their god and turned their war upon each other. Some treatises claim it to be the longest unbroken war in the history of the realms or the world-that-was. They say it continues to this day. Only a narrow strip of neutral ground holds the two sides apart: those pledged to Mork – he who was cunning but brutal – and those pledged to Gork – he who was brutal but cunning. It was called the Heldenline.’

  He rapped his staff on the stony ground.

  ‘For Sigmar Heldenhammer. It was he, in the closing days of the age, who had personally bested both sides’ champions and wrought this thin margin of peace, hoping one day to reunite them again and turn them against the Dark Powers.’

  He snorted, unsure whether to continue.

  ‘In some of those accounts, it was said that the God-King was so badly beaten that his men did not initially believe it was truly him when he returned to Sigmaron.’

  Ramus plunged his staff into the rocky scree, rubble sliding around his boots, and looked darkly over the misshapen piles of rock that loomed high on either side.

  The largest was little over half a mile high, but they were rugged, intimidating, bunched up against one another like a wall of barbarian hillsmen about to pour into the pass. Coarse black vegetation coated their upper reaches, the occasional spindly tree hanging from a crag and nodding in the wind.

  That wind was strangely humid and sulphurous. Furrows blew through the short grasses, flattening and stiffening them, reminding Ramus horribly of human hair.

  An odd grunting sound echoed amongst the flat-topped peaks. An animal, perhaps, or a pack of them, but Ramus could see nothing move and the sounds seemed to come from nowhere in particular before the echoes took them on and carried them.

  Iunias and the Retributors were several hundred yards deeper into the pass, walking slowly, arranged in a lopsided chevron with the Prime at its head. From right to left the pass was steeply sloped, the ground loose so the warrior on the far left wing was struggling to push his feet through the stones.

  Following a few hundred paces behind, spread out in no particular formation, the Judicators covered their brothers’ advance. They were wary, very wary, strain showing in every stop, start and shift of their crossbows.

  Ramus tried, and failed, to shake off the sense that the mountains themselves were watching him, growing taller, inch by inch.

  Or moving closer. Inch by inch.

  ‘Easy. Have faith, brothers.’

  He shook his head firmly, resting a hand on Skraggtuff’s large skull, which now hung from his hip – Brakka had shown an uncommon artistry with a knife. The skull’s jaw opened and closed silently, wordlessly, still animated by whatever dark magic clutched at the ogor’s soul. It and the shield on Ramus’ back clanked against his armour as he walked. The echoes were aggressive and over-loud.

  Half an eye on the peaks, he tried to walk more evenly, but the moving ground made even that impossible, and two-score armoured Stormcasts simply could not move silently.

  The Astral Templars took the rear, quiet for perhaps the first time in their lives, carefully watching the mountains.

  ‘Our destination is in sight!’

  Vandalus’ cry called Ramus’ attention upwards. Prosecutors in maroon and gold banked and soared on wings of light. They looked tiny, specks of gold with their own glowing haloes. They were spread out in a long line, the most distant far out of sight, and likely already overflying the Sea of Bones. He tried to draw reassurance from that, but for some reason could not.

  He watched Vandalus swoop towards the right hand of the range. He felt his heart jump into his mouth, struck by a sudden fear of those mountains that was all the more crippling for being an emotion he had never thought he would experience again. He stumbled, wargear clanking, let go of Skraggtuff and tightened his grip on his reliquary as though the safeguarding of Sigmar’s realm depended on it.

  ‘Do not venture from the Heldenline!’

  The pass pulled his voice apart and scattered it.

  The Heldenline... The Heldenline... The Heldenline...

  Rather than simply diminishing, the echoes became successively more brutish, grunts and growls in place of syllables, and what came back was a horrific distortion of his words.

  HELDENLINE.

  Wincing, Ramus waved his arm in from the right.

  ‘Keep back...’

  Back... Back... Back...

  Signalling that he understood, the Knight-Azyros veered off, but Iunias raised his hand sharply and the Retributors ground to a halt.

  BACK.

  There was something there in the pass ahead of them, a hump, like a sand dune made of stones or some kind of cairn. Its presence alone could not explain the odd prickling that the sight of it gave Ramus inside his skull. People died and were buried under piles of stones in mountains across the Mortal Realms, but no one had passed this way in centuries.

  Except for Mannfred, of course. Except for Mannfred.

  ‘Weapons!’ he roared – to hell with his guttural echo! – tearing free his hammer just as the first skeletal arm burst through the stone pile and seized Iunias’ leg. The Retributor swept up his mace, but was pulled to the ground, fleshless limbs sprouting from it to claw at his breastplate.

  More were rising. Dozens. Hundreds. The split-crack report of the Retributors’ lightning hammers already echoed around. Sagittus gave the order and the Judicators poured a salvo of bolts into the half-buried horde.

  A rattle from further up the pass spun Ramus around. Another legion of skeleton warriors was digging itself up out of the ground.

  ‘It’s an ambush!’

  Brakka thrust his warhammer and gladius to the heavens, gave a bloodcurdling howl, and charged alone towards the second force. As though granted permission, the other Astral Templars erupted with cries, each one their own, and tore off in ragged pursuit.

  The Astral Templars could fight – by the Celestial Dragon, could they fight! – but Ramus wasn’t about to rely on them to be as diligent in defence of their brothers as they were in the persecution of their foes. And forward lay the path to the Betrayer.

  ‘Who shepher
ds the souls of the lost to Sigmaron?’

  ‘Only the faithful!’

  No one was bothering to be quiet now and to Ramus’ surprise it felt good. He almost smiled. That was how good it felt.

  Bellowing a prayer to Sigmar that was as loud as any he had ever made, he sent a bolt of lightning splintering through the ranks of undead.

  ‘Who confronts the blasphemous and the unclean?’

  ‘Only the faithful!’

  Lightning whipped and arced from his reliquary, his ghoulish helm strobing blue-white and black. Skeletons exploded, bone chips scything through the horde and littering Ramus’ path with blackened shrapnel that popped under his boots.

  A bony legionnaire in a tarnished breastplate and helm, missing one arm and half its ribcage, tottered towards him. With a growl, Ramus hefted his reliquary staff, staving in the undead warrior’s skull and sending what was left of it sailing into the melee.

  ‘Who will be victorious?’

  ‘Only the faithful!’

  A beam of light lensed down from the sky, strafing through Ramus, Iunias, Sagittus, and back up the pass. For the moment that it illuminated him, Ramus felt uplifted, as though faith in Sigmar’s will alone was enough to carry the day. Vandalus arrowed overhead, low, fast, the golden light of Azyrheim shining from his lantern and burning a trench through the undead.

  ‘Back to your graves, damn you!’

  The light was Sigmar’s gaze, and where it fell on them the spirit that animated the undead warriors simply evaporated into the air, leaving lifeless bones that collapsed like dominoes in the Azyros’ wake.

  He banked hard and pulled up, beating his wings to go chasing some screeching ethereal thing that rippled over his head.

  Iunias delivered swift and crushing blows with his star-soul mace, blasting skeleton warriors apart.

  ‘Praise be to Sigmar, Lord-Relictor!’

  Ramus grinned.

  ‘Praise be to Sigmar indeed. Shoulder to shoulder! Form a wedge and drive through – let us show these Astral-savages how the Hallowed Knights wage war!’

  His warriors cheered with one voice, the clashing of plate making them a single armoured body. Theirs was not the war of hotheads or angry hearts. That was the purview of the Astral Templars and the orruks, and they were welcome to it. The Hallowed Knights’ strength was in discipline, conviction, faith in each other. It was worship in silver and blue, and it led Ramus’ heart in song.

  ‘Forward!’

  The phalanx advanced. Skeleton warriors, still spread out and facing the wrong way to confront the change in formation, broke against a rolling wall of sigmarite. Lightning hammers spoke with ear-splitting booms.

  The last two Decimators took the edges, handling their long-hafted thunderaxes with consummate skill and no little grace, armoured Paladins weaving about themselves ribbons of bone fragments and seething energies. As one they ground forward.

  A notched blade slid under a Retributor’s armpit. He screamed and then dissolved into a rising bolt of lightning, back to Sigmar.

  The Judicator at his back smashed open the skeleton’s skull with a torrent of bolts. The warrior to his left stepped in to fill his place, crushing the skeleton underfoot. The formation narrowed. Ramus yelled over the din of battle.

  ‘On! On! I can see the end!’

  Or, at least, he believed he could, and belief had always been enough.

  The echoes of battle creaked through the sullen range, changing as Ramus’ voice had been changed. The crack of rock, the tearing of roots, the split of stone.

  But not of stone.

  The ground shuddered and groaned, a reverberating string of snaps of knotted old muscle and cable-tight sinew. Ramus swayed with the tremors. From where he was standing, at the far left edge of the Heldenline, the mountain that Vandalus was flying over seemed to uncurl. He stopped fighting for a moment to stare upwards.

  ‘Sigmar give me courage. Sigmar give me strength.’

  That explained the disappearance of the Junkar. The legend had said they had grown massive...

  Ramus could only watch as an arm to rival the great spires of Sigmaron rose slowly up into the sky, blocking out the sun and plunging the pass into shadow.

  ‘I told you, Knight-Azyros – do not cross the line!’

  Watching that mountainous limb come down was like watching a glacier wall falling away – apparently slow, but only because it was so very, very large. Vandalus was already moving out of its path, wings folded and dropping like a stone.

  The arm missed him by at least a hundred feet but it was so impossibly big that it dragged a void behind it that the surrounding air rushed in to fill. Ramus saw the Knight-Azyros snatched up, wings rifling, rushing back up over the Junkar’s swing, and then sent spinning out of control.

  A great wrenching from the opposite side of the pass turned Ramus around. Immense pillars of legs were unfolding, light coming through newly opened gaps, drawing away from the soil they had become rooted in over thousands of years.

  His head tilted as far back as the join between helm and gorget would allow, he backed away. As if he could escape that.

  A monster that defied his ability to describe stood tall. The crack of a neck thicker than the Hallowed Knights’ formation sent trees and rubble cascading down its chest.

  ‘Beware!’

  Sagittus dropped to his knees and raised his arms over his head as boulders fell amongst them. Cassos fell, but his blessed sigmarite armour held firm.

  Ramus looked back to the mountains. The pass was suddenly about a hundred yards narrower. Half of the fragile skeletons still in front of them were gone, obliterated utterly.

  More Junkar were stirring on both sides of the line. A question, wildly, inappropriately urgent, arose in Ramus’ mind.

  Which side is for Gork, and which for Mork?

  The answer was irrelevant, but for a paralysing moment his mind refused to consider anything else. He thumped the side of his helmet, stabbed his staff into the ground to push himself back up, and then raised it high.

  ‘Sigmar, be my hammer!’

  Lightning lanced from his reliquary and blackened a portion of the mountain. It was like trying to burn down a cliff face.

  Vandalus was having similar luck. The Knight-Azyros had stabilised himself now and was sending tight beams of light into the mossy eyes of the Junkar on the other side of the pass. They simply rumbled in annoyance and shut their eyes, their eyelids thick like curtain walls. It slowed them if nothing else, but the Heldenline was continuing to close.

  Those enormous eyes ground open again and, for a moment, Ramus thought he saw a glimmer of recognition, as though the Junkar felt the touch of something to be feared in his power.

  It was not just his imagination that made the word Sigmar from those echoing, brutish grumbles.

  Ramus spread his arms wide, to both sides, as though when the moment came he would hold the truce that the God-King had won in battle with his bare hands, and dug deep of the divine storm.

  ‘Lords of the Junkar. In the names of Mork and of Gork and of Sigmar before whom you swore peace, I command you back.’

  Nothing but the tearing of rock and the calamitous pounding of the earth. Vandalus circled overhead, coming heavily in to land alongside Ramus.

  ‘We are warriors of Sigmar!’

  He held his lantern aloft and let it bathe them both in light. Ramus’ reliquary blazed.

  ‘No one relishes a fight more than us, but when there are greater foes to be found, you orruks and we men of Sigmar have always fought side by side. Fight with us now!’

  The nearest of the Junkar lowered its immense fist. It blinked glacially. A confused grumble trembled out into the deepest reaches of the range.

  Ramus gave a snort of disbelief. They were heeding Vandalus and not the power that imbued him? But no. He re
alised. They were heeding the both of them, together. One Mork, the other Gork, Sigmar the divine and Sigmar the barbarian king.

  A skeleton rattled towards him, the Stormcasts’ tight formation well and truly broken open. His hammer’s sideswipe knocked its teeth through the side of its skull. Vandalus stamped through the ribs of another that was crawling towards him.

  The Junkar gave an ominous rumble.

  Ramus cursed them, inwardly. He was not Sigmar. If asked, he would fight the Junkar and give praise for it, but theirs was not his war. It was time to get out.

  ‘Ruuuuuuuuuun!’

  It was an unfamiliar order, but came surprisingly naturally in that moment.

  Iunias smashed a skeleton apart, shoulder-barged another as it blundered into Ramus’ path and roared as two more grabbed him from behind and threatened to wrestle him to the ground. Ramus stopped to help him up.

  ‘Leave me!’

  Iunias dropped his mace to reach back and haul the skeleton over his shoulder. The Retributor wrung its spine between his massive hands. Another charged into his back, almost knocking him flat.

  ‘I will hold them here. Go.’

  Ramus grimaced, but nodded, already backing off.

  ‘Tell Sigmar when you see him, he will soon have his vengeance.’

  Iunias was chanting the canticles, joy in his voice, as he went under. Ramus turned and almost ran straight into Vandalus.

  ‘My men, brother. They’re trapped further back in the pass. I’ll not abandon them!’

  ‘You will see them again! You cannot fight an army and I cannot hold back a mountain! We have to leave!’

  With a howl of anguish, Vandalus spun around and took to the air, leaving the Lord-Relictor alone. Ramus turned to watch the Astral Templars fight. They died for Sigmar and the least he could do was remember their story to tell of it.

  And, by the Celestial Dragon, could they fight.

  The last thing he saw was Brakka, the last man standing, hammer in one hand and gladius in the other, bellowing for all he was worth atop a pile of bones. No one had been despatched to the soul-forges more times and been remade.