Lord of Undeath

by C. L. Werner

  ‘Break upon the Anvil!’ Vogun shouted, holding his lantern high in one hand as he brought his halberd smashing down into the bearded face of a marauder with his other. The barbarian staggered back, clutching at his bloodied visage with something that more resembled a tentacle than a hand. Before he could recover his thoughts enough to resume his attack, the marauder was borne down by the raking claws and slashing beak of Torn. The gryph-hound made short work of his adversary and hastened back to Vogun’s side, ready to kill all who threatened his master.

  By degrees, the Stormcasts were gaining ground, forcing the Chaos warriors back onto the rusted spears and primitive swords of the undead. Pressed between two foes, the marauders and beastmen broke ranks, descending into utter disorder. In their panic to escape destruction, they stampeded over their own comrades, turning their axes and clubs upon the daemons and chieftains who tried to force them back into the fight. The routed barbarians and gors were ripe for the slaughter. Makvar felt no compunction ordering his knights to obliterate their reeling enemy. The Stormcasts had seen for themselves the mercy Chaos extended to those who felt helpless before them.

  The dark shapes of Huld and the Prosecutors soared close to the Anvils before climbing once more and speeding away to the right. Makvar responded to the arranged signal and urged his knights to leave their broken enemies to the pitiless attentions of the undead. Their own objective was elsewhere. Smashing through the few packs of beastmen and warbands of marauders who stood in their way, Makvar led the Anvils in pursuit of the armoured Chaos warriors trying to converge upon the summit of Mount Khaerops.

  The Prosecutors cast their javelins down into the charging Chaos warriors as they flew past them. The missiles cracked against the spectral sludge with elemental fury. Great craters opened up in the ectoplasm, gouged from the ghostly material by the explosive bursts of electricity. The scorched bodies of mangled warriors were sent spinning through the air. Others fell into the ghoulish pits, screaming with the horrors of the damned as the translucent muck came flooding back in to fill the depression. Trapped within the spectral mud, they struggled to claw their way back to the surface before the ectoplasm smothered them. Few proved equal to the effort.

  Huld landed on the bone-littered slopes of the mountain, wings unfurled, the light of his celestial beacon blazing around him. The Knight-Azyros put himself between Arkhan and the Chaos warriors who still sought to overcome the Mortarch. The first armoured brute who rushed towards him was sent flopping down the slope, cut in two by a sweep of Huld’s sword. A second warrior crashed to his knees and pitched forward among the bones after the winged knight sent his horned head bouncing from his shoulders.

  The Prosecutors made a second pass over the Chaos warriors, scattering their enemy and breaking the momentum of their charge. A stream of sizzling foulness shot up from the mouth of a diseased warlock, the boiling spew engulfing one of the flying Anvils and knocking him from the sky. As the stricken Prosecutor slammed into the ectoplasm, a blue flare streaked skyward. Before the sorcerer could try to repeat his murderous feat, Kreimnar brought a cascade of retribution roaring down from the sky, engulfing the enemy warlock in a shower of thunderbolts.

  Then, Makvar was leading the vanguard of his force into the scattered Chaos warriors. Steel plate pitted with corrosion and rust flattened beneath his dracoth’s claws, pox-ridden flesh branded with the viral sigils of Nurgle split before the cleaving edge of his sword. A bolt of lightning from Gojin’s jaws reduced a charging foeman into a steaming husk, the spiked mace in his hands splashing across the ground in a molten puddle.

  Liberators rushed to support the Lord-Celestant, forming up to either side of Gojin to guard the dracoth’s flanks and keep Makvar from being surrounded by the enemies who remained. Though they had the numbers, Makvar doubted the Chaos warriors still had enough unity of purpose to coordinate such an attack. Those who came rushing at the Stormcasts did so as individuals, sparing no thought for any strategy greater than coming to grips with the ebon knights. The Anvils, by contrast, fought as though they were bound into a single sigmarite body. The Liberator who struck down a flail-wielding invader was guarded by the broad shield of the knight beside him when a slobbering axeman sprang at him. The Decimator who failed to finish a fly-headed Chaos champion with a blow of his thunderaxe was spared the bite of his enemy’s rusty claymore when a Judicator sent several bolts from his crossbow punching through the warrior’s chest.

  Some few of the Chaos warriors still tried to climb the slopes of Mount Khaerops. Thinking to overwhelm Huld with ferocity and numbers, they failed to account for the speed and finesse of the Stormcast. Weaving between a half-dozen foes, Huld visited upon them a flurry of glancing cuts and shallow slashes. Death wasn’t the dominating concern of his swift blows, but simply a measure to dull the haste of the rancid invaders. Diseased blood spilled from each of the Chaos warriors as they tried to recover their momentum and make another rush up the slope.

  Flapping his great wings, Huld hopped higher up the bone-strewn rise, keeping himself between the enemy and Arkhan. He risked a look back at the kneeling liche. He could make no sense of the incantation that tumbled from the Mortarch’s bony jaws or the symbols he scratched into the earth with his skeletal claws. But he could feel the power Arkhan was evoking, the magical chill that crept into the air and turned his sweat into beads of frost.

  The enemy could sense it too. Huld could see the lethal resolve that wriggled in their eyes. Whatever spell Arkhan was working, these minions of Chaos were determined to disrupt his conjurations.

  Huld pointed his sword at the biggest of the brutes, a barbarian with such a swollen gut that his iron armour had split open to expose the bulge of his belly. The Stormcast could see the blistering fury in the diseased man’s eyes. ‘You’ll have to get past me if you want him,’ he warned the invader. The bloated warrior scowled at him with what little of his face wasn’t hidden behind the rusted mesh of his helm. His pudgy fingers clenched tighter about the haft of the twisted axe he bore. Huld nodded as he prepared to receive the Chaos warrior’s attack.

  Then the Knight-Azyros found himself thrown into the air. Before he could catch himself, he slammed into the litter of bones and started rolling down the slope. As his vision swirled, shifting between the slope and the sky, he had the impression of something rising up above him.

  Something unbelievably gargantuan.

  Something unspeakably monstrous.

  Makvar gazed in disbelief as the entire top of Mount Khaerops reared up. An avalanche of bone was sent crashing down the slopes, spilling across the clearing in a clattering cascade of grinning skulls and broken skeletons. Up from beneath the mound of bones, an enormous talon erupted into the air, slamming down with pulverising force against the exposed rock of the mountain. Two smaller claws flanked the huge talon, all of them attached to a great skeletal framework that somehow recalled to Makvar the outline of a colossal hand.

  The immense fingers stretched, revealing a skein of tattered flesh between them. Leathery, hideous, the decayed skin gave off a charnel reek. A dozen yards from where the first talon gripped the rock, a second enormous set of claws burst from beneath the mound of bones. These talons smashed through the layers of bleached bone to seize the rock buried beneath. Again there was the vast finger-like framework with its canvas of rotten skin stretched between each digit.

  With both talons anchored in the rock of the mountain, a fresh avalanche of bones came crashing down the slopes. Rearing up from beneath the skeletal heap was a titanic shape. As big as a dragon, more hideous than anything that had haunted the cursed streets of Nulahmia, the beast lurched up from its hidden tomb.

  Makvar saw now that the limbs it had first thrust forth were the behemoth’s forelegs, attached to its shoulders by thick knots of wiry sinew and exposed muscle. Its body, broad at the chest, tapered off to a long tail of naked bone. Masses of mouldy grey fur clung to the beast’s torso,
rents in its skin displaying the raw meat and organs within. A great gash along its left side exposed the skeletal frame of its spine and ribs, and the withered husk that should have been its heart.

  The colossal beast’s head jutted forwards on the merest stump of a neck. It was a hideous countenance, at once possessed of a long jaw and a squashed forehead. Grisly eyes gleamed from the pits that opened to either side of the yawning nasal cavity. Long fangs jutted from the bone stretch of its jaws, curving downward like scimitars, stabbing upward like a phalanx of pikes. The tatters of leathery ears dangled from the sides of the monster’s bestial skull, strips of skin and fur dripping from their rotted lobes.

  The terrorgheist will destroy us all. The words echoed through Makvar’s brain, stabbing into his awareness like a knife. His gaze turned from the gigantic creature, drawn to the one who called out to him. He saw a skeletal figure retreating from Mount Khaerops on the back of an abyssal steed. Whatever relief he felt at seeing Arkhan intact was quashed by the realisation that the thing looming above the mountain was mighty enough to make even the Mortarch withdraw from it.

  My magic has roused it, but I underestimated its strength. I can exert no control over it. Each thought Arkhan thrust upon Makvar carried an icy lack of emotion. There was no apology or shame that the creature his necromancy had conjured wouldn’t obey him. It was a statement of fact, nothing more. Arkhan had certainly adopted his master’s air of passionless detachment.

  Makvar swung around in Gojin’s saddle, looking across the battlefield. The Chaos warriors who had been engaged with the Anvils were all but exterminated, and he could see that the remnants of Arkhan’s army had fared much the same. It was the army of Neferata that now bore the brunt of the enemy’s effort. He could see the grotesque Great Unclean One waddling about, snatching vampire knights from their saddles with his flabby claws or incinerating grave guard with bile from his gaping maw. Though he could feel the sinister presence of Nagash, he saw no trace of the Lord of Death within the raging melee.

  The Lord-Celestant looked back to Mount Khaerops and the gigantic terrorgheist that now squatted upon its slopes. Gazing upon it, experiencing the air of hostility and evil that rolled off it, he didn’t doubt for a moment that the behemoth had the potential to turn the tide of battle all on its own. Under Arkhan’s control it would have ensured the annihilation of the Chaos horde. Free to vent its malignance at liberty, it represented a threat that couldn’t be ignored.

  ‘Makvar!’ Vogun cried out, gesturing with his halberd. ‘The beast has spotted Huld!’

  It was true, the terrorgheist’s head had turned downward, contemplating the cadaverous mound beneath it. Among the litter of bones, the dark armour of Huld fairly shouted his presence to the gigantic undead bat. The Knight-Azyros was keeping still, refraining from any sudden motion that might provoke the beast.

  ‘The terrorgheist has slipped free of the Mortarch’s control,’ Makvar declared, his voice loud enough to reach every Stormcast gathered near to him. ‘How is a question for later. What concerns us now is what to do about it.’ He looked at Vogun’s lantern, thinking about the adverse way the undead reacted to the light of Azyr. Leave this task to us, he thought, hoping his intentions would reach Arkhan’s mind as the Mortarch’s had his own.

  ‘The undead are leaving us!’ Brannok called out. The Knight-Heraldor indicated the battered legions of Arkhan. The bone warriors were leaving the positions they had held, advancing across the clearing to support Neferata’s embattled forces.

  ‘Leave them,’ Makvar declared. ‘Against this enemy, the Anvils of the Heldenhammer will fight the better for being alone.’ He turned towards Kreimnar. ‘Call down Sigmar’s wrath against the beast.’

  The Lord-Relictor nodded his skull-like helm. ‘One strike may not be enough to consume that monster,’ he warned.

  ‘So long as it gives Huld a chance to slip away, and the rest of us a chance to draw near,’ Makvar said.

  Kreimnar raised his relic-weapon. On the mountain, the terrorgheist was slowly moving one of its clawed hands, gradually shifting the talons closer to Huld. Perhaps the undead beast thought if it moved slow then its prey would be oblivious to the peril. Perhaps it simply thought the Knight-Azyros was paralysed with fear. Whatever its motivation, the gigantic brute was unprepared when a crackling deluge of lightning seared down upon it from the dark skies above. As it reared back in shock, strips of fur and flesh burning in the fury of Kreimnar’s magic, Huld sprang to his feet and stretched his wings. The Stormcast became a dark blur as he threw himself from the slopes of Mount Khaerops and soared away from the bat-like behemoth that had been ready to devour him.

  Enraged both by the blast of lightning that had scorched its bones and by the escape of its prey, the terrorgheist threw back its head and uttered a deafening shriek. Spreading its tattered wings, the beast rose into the air, diving down from the summit straight towards the Anvils’ black ranks.

  The beast’s flight was too swift for Kreimnar to draw down another thunderbolt to intercept it. Instead, Makvar called upon the Judicators to loose against the oncoming behemoth. At the Lord-Celestant’s signal, the massed archers sent a volley of crackling energy searing up into the terrorgheist. Most of the lightning simply steamed against the beast’s hardened bones or tore ribbons of decayed flesh from its desiccated body, but a few provoked angry snarls and flicks of its bony tail.

  Diving down upon the behemoth from above, the Prosecutors were the next to assault the flying horror. Throwing their stormcall javelins into the gigantic brute, the explosive spears detonated in the beast’s decaying bulk. Shreds of meat and bone were ripped from the behemoth, and its tattered wings were further mangled as skeletal shrapnel tore through them. A living beast, even one of the mighty dragons, would have been felled by such havoc, but if any spark of true life had ever burned within the terrorgheist, it had long ago been extinguished by the fell magics of Shyish. Abruptly turning its dive into a vicious climb, the gargantuan horror snapped at the Prosecutors flying above it, catching one of its tormentors in its enormous jaws. The sound of splintering mail echoed down to Makvar and his knights as their winged comrade perished under the bat’s piercing fangs.

  Once more, Makvar called for the Judicators to loose against the titanic beast. This time, Gojin’s electric breath was added to the barrage that rose up to strike the terrorgheist. Again, the havoc visited upon the beast was hideous, but largely cosmetic to a creature that could endure with a shrivelled heart and bloodless veins. The gigantic bat wheeled about in the sky, chasing after the Prosecutors as though they were mosquitoes flying above the stagnant waters of Wolfhof’s tarn. A flash of celestial light marked the end of another Anvil in the monster’s jaws.

  ‘Keep after it!’ Makvar commanded. The Stormcasts spread out along the drowned plaza, trying to keep the terrorgheist overhead. Retinues of Judicators kept their skybows trained upon the beast, loosing whenever it drew within range. Among the Paladins, those armed with the brutal starmaces gripped their weapons with frustrated anticipation. Let the monster descend for but a moment, and they would let it taste the might of the Anvils.

  The terrorgheist swung around once more, hurtling after a Prosecutor it had missed in its previous rush. Now the bat intended to finish its foe, its jaws stretched wide as it flew towards him. Before it could close with its prey, another winged Stormcast dived towards it. Makvar thought he caught the gleam of the golden halo fastened to Huld’s helm. An instant later, he knew for certain the interceptor was the Knight-Azyros. Interposing himself between the terrorgheist and the Prosecutor, Huld held his celestial beacon before the undead monster, letting the purifying rays sear into its grisly essence.

  Stunned, shrieking, the huge monster plummeted earthward, slamming into the translucent syrup that covered the plaza with the force of an earthquake. Monoliths and statues that had stood so long above the spectral sludge now toppled under the force of the b
east’s impact, sinking with eerie lethargy into the mire. The terrorgheist itself floundered in the ghostly slime, the crater inflicted by its impact swiftly filling again and threatening to suck the beast into the depths.

  ‘Before it can free itself!’ Makvar called out to his knights. Dozens of Stormcasts charged toward the trapped terrorgheist, striking it with swords and hammers. Makvar noted the blazing discharge of a starmace and watched as several feet of the monster’s thrashing tail went sailing through the air.

  The beast’s claws lashed out at its attackers, crushing one Liberator and ripping a Retributor open from collar to groin. Then the terrorgheist drew back, seeming to fold in upon itself like a coiling serpent. For a moment, it held itself still, then it lurched forwards, its jaws stretching wide to let loose a murderous shriek. The terrorgheist’s cry proved as deadly as the blast from any dragon’s maw. Blue light erupted from several Stormcasts unfortunate enough to be too near the bat’s head when it gave voice to its rattling scream. The howl had extinguished their vitality in less than a heartbeat, hurling their spirits back to the Realm Celestial and the armouries of the God-King.

  Makvar urged Gojin towards the hulking beast, hoping to save more of his knights from the terrorgheist’s malevolence. The brute turned its head towards him, coiling back to unleash another deadly shriek. Two things happened before the gigantic bat could sound its cry. The first was the bolt of crackling lightning that flew from Gojin’s jaws to blast one of its ears to ruin. The second was the blinding blaze of Vogun’s warding lantern as the Lord-Castellant shone it into the terrorgheist’s eyes. The beast’s agony was such that it forgot about Makvar and his dracoth, instead snapping its huge jaws at Vogun.