‘Absolution,’ replied the woman nearest to him, and slammed a two-handed warhammer into his face.
Frederick’s head snapped backwards with a click, and he dropped heavily to the ground.
Otto stood, frozen with shook, then howled with pain as a steel whip licked across his face. His eyes ran down his cheeks like tears and an agonising blackness engulfed him.
‘I’ll pray for you,’ said a soft voice in his ear, as a quick blade at his throat finally released him from the City of the Damned.
‘Gutless worms,’ said novice sister Wolff, spitting on one of the dead mercenaries. ‘I won’t pray for them.’
Von Stahl looked over at the young girl. Beneath her hood, her pale aristocratic features could just be seen, and as she rifled through the corpse’s pockets her face was twisted in a sneer of disdain.
‘They barely seem worth the effort,’ - Wolff gave up her search with a sigh - ‘and they don’t have so much as a speck of weirdstone on them.’
‘You didn’t seem to think them so gutless a minute ago,’ said von Stahl quietly.
‘What do you mean by that?’ replied Wolff.
The third woman - novice sister Elsbeth Faust - stifled a laugh.
‘Well, you seemed happy for me and Elsbeth to waste our energies on them, but I couldn’t seem to spot you when the fighting started.’
‘Fight? I’d hardly call that a fight.’ Wolff’s eyes were wide with emotion as she stepped towards von Stahl. ‘If you want to waste yourself on such worthless prey as this’ - she spat on the corpses again - ‘then go ahead, but I haven’t forgotten why we’re here. There is the small matter of a trial to be considered.’ Her face was now almost purple. ‘Anyway, how dare you accuse me of cowardice? Remember your place, wastrel.’
Von Stahl winced at the nickname. Few dared to use it since she’d reached adulthood, but it still had the power to hurt. ‘I’m not accusing you,’ she snapped, wiping the mercenary’s teeth from her warhammer, ‘and I haven’t forgotten the trial. Didn’t you listen to their conversation? They’ve found something’ - she gestured over towards the ruined grandeur of the theatre - ‘over in the Magdeburg Playhouse.’
Stepping into the theatre was like stepping into a fractured mirror of the past. Broken marionettes lay scattered across the stage and faded, peeling faces smiled sadly down from the shattered balconies.
‘I came here as a child,’ said Elsbeth as they picked their way through the wreckage, ‘to hear Giotto Vasari. It was beautiful. I remember-‘
Von Stahl silenced her with a wave of the hand. They carried no torches and the darkness was almost complete, but she thought she could see movement on the stage. As they crept silently through the shadows, each taking a different path through the stalls, von Stahl noticed Wolff nervously lagging behind again and frowned. Is she ready for this, she wondered?
The dusty boards creaked loudly as they stepped out onto the stage, and von Stahl winced at the noise. Then she stooped to examine something. Sprawled before the broken footlights lay the corpse of a man. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘he seems to have been crushed somehow.’ Wolff and Faust crouched next to her. ‘It’s as though a great weight has fallen on him.’ She prodded his chest with a grimace. ‘His bones have been completely destroyed.’
‘It’s another Marienburger,’ whispered Wolff, noting the man’s flamboyant outfit. ‘More gold than sense, the lot of ‘em.’
Von Stahl raised her eyebrows.
‘What?’ replied Wolff, raising her voice a little and blushing again, ‘a blood-tie to Lady Magritte doesn’t lower me to the level of these dandies.’
Von Stahl ignored the petulant tone in her voice, and simply put a finger to her mouth. ‘Look,’ she whispered and gestured to the area of stage next to the body. ‘Something was there. The dust has been disturbed. And all that blood didn’t come from our friend here.’
With a growing sense of unease they rose to their feet - as they all saw a trail of blood that led towards the back of the stage. Wolff tightened her gromril armour and stepped closer to Elsbeth.
‘What did the dandies find, I wonder?’ said von Stahl, throwing back her hood and straining to see through the dark.
Wolff’s voice sounded uneven as she pointed towards the curtains. ‘Is that… what is that?’ In front of the tattered velvet, there was an area of darkness even more intense than the surrounding gloom - a tower of shadow that seemed too solid to be a mere play of the light. For a few seconds no one spoke, as they tried to discern the outline of the large shape.
Slowly, as her eyes grew accustomed to the pitch dark, von Stahl made out a monstrous face, glowering down at them. ‘Sigmar preserve us, it’s-‘
Before she could finish, the stage exploded as a huge beast stepped forward and ripped the floorboards from beneath their feet - hurling the three novices in different directions and sending von Stahl’s hammer flying from her fingers.
Von Stahl landed heavily in the pit, momentarily winded and powerless as the creature lunged towards her. It was fifteen feet tall, covered with matted greasy fur and bore a look of such malevolence that she found it impossible to meet its blazing red eyes.
‘Wolff,’ she gasped, ‘wait,’ but the terrified girl didn’t even look back as she fled from the building. Von Stahl’s heart sank as she realised that she and Elsbeth would have to face the creature alone. She rolled to one side as a hoof the size of a small cart crashed down beside her.
Still incapable of breathing, she staggered away through the tiered stalls, trying to gain herself a few seconds to catch her breath.
To her surprise, the beast didn’t follow, but instead gave out a deafening roar of frustration and grasped desperately at its throat. Elsbeth had climbed up the shreds of curtain and leapt down onto its back, from where she was now proceeding to throttle it with her steel whip.
As the monster careered back and forth, howling with rage at its inability to free itself from Elsbeth’s grip, von Stahl searched desperately amongst the seats for her hammer. It was nowhere to be found and as Elsbeth’s cries for assistance grew more desperate, she realised she would have to find another weapon. She grabbed an ornamental sword from the wall and tested its blade. She cursed - it was nothing but a rusty prop.
‘Blessed Sigmar, help,’ cried Elsbeth as the maddened beast span around the theatre, smashing furiously against the already unstable walls.
Von Stahl had no choice. She could hear the frame of the building groaning each time the beast slammed against it - the whole structure sounded like it was about to come down. Clutching the blunt weapon she rushed to help.
By the time she reached it, the creature was in such a frenzy of rage and asphyxiation that she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to get its attention. Its bestial face had taken on a deep purple hue as Elsbeth’s whip bit deeply into its thick neck. A mixture of spittle and blood ran freely from its gaping jaws. After being repeatedly slammed against the walls of the theatre, Elsbeth looked like a broken doll hanging from beneath the beast’s filthy mane.
Von Stahl cried out to the monster from across the stage, waving her pitiful weapon defiantly at it. It whirled around and rooted her to the spot with a withering stare. With a bellow of rage, it threw its massive frame towards her and von Stahl screamed back in defiance and terror.
As she had hoped, it never reached her. In its anger, it overlooked the hole it had torn through the floorboards and crashed through the stage - skewering itself on the jagged planks with a thunderous howl.
An even greater fury now consumed it. It had sunk waist-deep into the floor and one of the planks was deeply embedded beneath its ribs, pinning it to the spot. However much it howled and thrashed about it couldn’t free itself, and every twist increased the flow of blood from its torso.
Von Stahl dropped weakly to her knees and watched the monster’s fury as it gradually ripped itself to pieces on the jagged planks. Soon, the whole stage was slick with blood and with each lunge its struggles grew weak
er. Finally, with a gurgled bark of rage, it fell forward onto its chin and lay still.
Silence descended on the theatre, and for a few moments von Stahl lay motionless on the stage, her eyes closed. Then she sat bolt upright. ‘Elsbeth,’ she said in a hoarse voice. ‘Are you there?’
‘I think so,’ came a weak reply from out of the darkness, ‘although maybe not for much longer.’
Von Stahl climbed to her feet, and trod carefully up to the dead creature. Its chest was still, but just to be sure she took her blunt blade, and with all her strength, thrust it deep into the thing’s throat. ‘Nothing,’ she whispered. ‘Dead.’ Only then, as she was about to walk away, did she notice the stone around its neck. ‘Oh, Sigmar. Weirdstone… and the size of my fist.’
A weak cough reminded her of Elsbeth.
‘We’ve done it,’ she cried, rushing to her fellow novice. ‘We’ve got a piece of the stone. One of us at least has passed the trial.’
‘Not me,’ said Elsbeth, grinning through bloody teeth. ‘I think this is my last performance.’
Von Stahl saw with a jolt that the girl was dying. Her face was almost white from blood-loss, and her body was as twisted and broken as the marionettes that lay around her.
‘Elsbeth,’ said von Stahl, taking her hand. She tried to think of something to say but the words caught in her throat, and she simply hung her head.
‘You have a piece of the stone,’ said Elsbeth, after a few moments, trying to smile through the pain. ‘You’ve passed the test - they’ll let you back into the abbey, and you’ll be ordained as a fully-fledged sister. This is a good day, Virtue. You’ll be a novice no more.’
For a few moments von Stahl was unable to speak. Her fellow sisters were her only family and to watch Elsbeth slipping away before her eyes was almost more than she could bear. ‘I can’t return without Wolff,’ she said eventually, hardly aware of what she was saying but desperate to break the awful silence. ‘I must try and find her. Maybe together we can find a second shard and both pass the trial.’
Elsbeth grabbed von Stahl firmly by the arms and pulled her close. ‘Leave her,’ she hissed. ‘She’s no good! Take the stone and return without her.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You must!’ Elsbeth groaned and dropped back to the floor. ‘She should never have been inducted into the order. Matriarch Ebner was just too scared to offend Lady Magritte, otherwise Wolff wouldn’t even be a novice.’
‘But I can’t just desert her. I can’t just leave her out here - alone in the city.’
‘Take the stone back to the abbey and leave her to her fate. It’s all she deserves. Don’t die a novice like me just to save her worthless hide.’
‘But what of my vows - how can I just desert a fellow sister? I know what she is, but she’s still a member of our order. I can’t just-‘
‘She betrayed us! If she had stayed to fight-‘ Elsbeth’s voice caught with emotion. ‘Well… who knows, but she’s not worth a single drop of your blood.’ She dug her fingers deep into von Stahl’s arm. ‘Promise me you won’t go after her.’
Von Stahl shook her head sadly, but could think of nothing else to say and a short while later, Elsbeth passed away. She prepared the body according to the rituals of her order and laid it out on a makeshift pyre of scenery and curtains. As flames lit up the stage of the Magdeburg Playhouse for the last time, she snapped the stone from around the creature’s neck and dropped it carefully into a small pouch around her own neck. Then, with a final bow to the blazing pyre, she took Elsbeth’s whip and slipped out into the darkness.
Novice sister Wolff grimaced as she crept along the crumbling rooftops. However much she tried, it was impossible to ignore the thick, slightly sweet smell of death. She pulled her hood tighter around her face in an attempt to block out the stench, but Mordheim’s acrid stink had a way of seeping into your skin. She paused, sensing movement in the streets below, and crouched low on the shattered lintel of a long gone window to listen. She picked out a sound, so faint that she thought she had imagined it, but gradually growing louder. It was a kind of undulating wail, drifting up towards her. Music maybe, she thought, or was it screaming? As the minutes passed, she realised that it wasn’t one sound but many, emanating from several different directions. With growing horror, she realised that a symphony of howls and moans was floating towards her out of the dark. She shifted her position slightly and, using her steel whip as leverage, she leant out from the ruined window frame to peer down into the streets below.
The sight that greeted her turned her stomach. As a novice she had ventured into the city before, but only in the company of a matriarch, and never far from the safety of the sisters’ fortress abbey. Until now, she had largely been spared the full horror of Mordheim’s inhabitants, but here they were in all their awful glory. A tightly-packed crowd was shuffling towards her and to Wolff’s amazement it seemed to be some kind of grotesque carnival. The light of hundreds of torches punctuated the narrow, winding streets, and a cacophony of drums, bells and whistles echoed discordantly across the plazas and gardens. ‘What are they?’ she whispered as her pulse quickened with fear. The figures marching towards her were torn from a lunatic’s worst nightmare: she saw men whose faces were in their bellies; men with the bodies of animals; women with serpents for limbs; people whose pulsating viscera lay outside their skins; every possible perversion and permutation of human flesh was crawling and sliding slowly towards her. ‘Blessed Sigmar, save me,’ she said, feeling hot tears forming in her eyes. ‘Save me from the damned.’
She climbed back through the broken window into the remains of a small chapel. ‘What am I to do?’ she said, collapsing to the floor and curling into a foetal position. ‘How can I pass the trial now? Without a piece of weirdstone I can never become a sister,’ - a sickening thrill of adrenaline rushed through her - ‘and I can never return to the abbey.’ Great sobs began to shake her body. ‘Oh, why did von Stahl have to take us into that cursed theatre? She has killed me. She has killed us all.’
She might have lain there, weeping quietly, until the horde of lost souls finally discovered her, but to her dismay she realised that the approaching crowd was not her only problem. Sounds were coming from just below her, within the chapel.
She pressed her ear to the floor to listen. A pompous heavily-accented voice was talking: ‘-to the west?’ it said. ‘What do you expect to find that way? The rat-things came from the quayside, you oaf. Are you really so keen to be more intimately acquainted with them?’
‘We need to go somewhere,’ replied another voice. ‘If we reach the river we might find a merchant’s barge and head south - past the sisters’ rock and out through the South Gate.’
‘Ah, that delightful waterway, the Stir. What a haven of peace and tranquillity that will be. Maybe we could stop for lunch somewhere - perhaps with that wonderfully fragrant family we met in the cemetery, or those quaint creatures we discovered in the Executioner’s Square. Remember, the ones who seemed so interested in our stone?’
At the word ‘stone’, Wolff’s eyes widened.
‘Listen,’ cried the increasingly desperate voice. ‘That mob will be here any minute.’ Wollf realised that he was right, the hideous chorus was growing louder. It could only be a few streets away. ‘If we don’t move now, we’re dead anyway. What choice do we have?’
A note of resignation now filled the first voice. ‘What possessed me to follow you into this festering pit of a city?’
‘But it was your idea, sire. I was just-‘
There was a loud crack, followed by a whimper of pain. ‘Now,’ said the pompous voice, ‘take me to this blessed river, and kindly refrain from speaking. If I could have even a few moments’ respite from your whinging, I might even survive this absurd expedition.’
Wolff heard the sound of equipment being hastily packed and felt a sudden panic. Using all the skills she had developed during her training, she crawled silently across the chapel’s dusty attic and peered carefu
lly down through a hole in the floorboards.
Fortunately, the men had their backs to her. In fact, they were already climbing out through a crumbling window and down onto the street. As she watched them, Wolff could easily identify which figure belonged to which voice. One was a tall, distinguished-looking foreigner, wearing a suit of polished plate armour, a brightly-plumed helmet and a shield bearing a colourful chalice motif. How has he survived more than a day, she thought incredulously, in such a gaudy and noisy outfit?
The other figure seemed little more than a human carthorse. He was squat, ugly, dressed in filthy rags, and laden with dozens of bags and weapons - including, she noted with bemusement, a jousting lance.
As the men dropped from sight, Wolff lowered herself cautiously down into the room they had just vacated. She rushed to the broken window just in time to see the gaily-plumed knight and his servant disappear up an alleyway. She hopped out onto the street, and sped after them. That feathered ponce can’t survive much longer dressed like that, she thought, and the fat one wouldn’t put up much of a fight. If there was some way of separating the two, it would be a simple task to get the stone from the servant.
Images of a triumphant return to the abbey suddenly filled Wolff’s thoughts. Then the sound of the approaching mob interrupted her thoughts and, with a nervous glance over her shoulder, she picked up her pace.
Virtue sped through the dark narrow streets, all sense of caution abandoned as she raced across the gloomy squares and scrambled noisily over the crumbling ruins. The novice did not go unnoticed. As she passed beneath the crooked townhouses, indistinct figures peered down at her through filthy windows, while others shuffled awkwardly from doorways in slow pursuit.
‘Where are you, girl?’ she gasped, finally coming to a stop outside a large fenced garden. Her training had led her this far - a footprint here and a piece of robe there had been enough to signpost Wolff’s route, but now she was at a loss. ‘Where are you heading?’ Shaking her head in frustration she began to clamber up the warped, rusted iron of the garden fence, in the hope a better vantage point might give her some clues.
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