Warhammer Anthology 13

by War Unending (Christian Dunn)

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘if you do not like the terms of my offer, you can always say no.’

  HE HAD SAID yes, of course. Granted, he had bargained for better terms, ultimately persuading Samael to extend the period of guaranteed longevity between each boon to twenty-five years. But, beyond that small concession, he had had little choice but to accept the daemon’s terms. In the end, the daemon Samael had every cause to be smug; his was the only bargain on the table.

  Now, as he hurried to complete the preparations for his ritual in the shell of the ruined inn where he had met Samael all those years ago, Gunther found his thoughts turning towards the six boons he had completed on the daemon’s behalf already. Some had been relatively straightforward: arranging the disgrace and murder of a high-ranking nobleman, or the theft of a holy relic - a cup - from the Temple of Sigmar the Merciful in Stirland. Others had been both more complicated and time-consuming. Take the six years he had spent working as a humble lay gardener in the grounds of a temple of Shallya in Ostermark, corrupting the priestesses and their novitiates one-by-one until he had turned them all to the worship of Slaanesh. He could still remember the look of outtage on the mother superior’s face turning to delight when she had finally yielded. And, while Samael’s motives in requesting some of the boons had been obvious at once, others had been more obscure, only becoming clearer with time. Take the sixth boon for example, when he had been called upon to ensure the progression of a young Sigmarite cleric called Johann Esmer. But, no matter how strange or onerous the tasks he had been called upon to perform, he had completed them regardless. And with each completed boon Samael had kept his own side of their bargain: Gunther had not aged a day in one-hundred-and-fifty years. Tonight though, the seventh boon was due.

  Two days earlier, a messenger had arrived bearing Samael’s instructions to meet him here in the Six Crowns at midnight. But, for all the successes of their arrangement thus far, Gunther was not so foolish a man as to trust a daemon to his word. He had always known Samael would try to cheat him. And Gunther had seen the loophole in their bargain a century and a half earlier when Samael told him he would not be protected against disease or violent death. Once the seventh boon was done and his value was at an end, Gunther fully expected the daemon to kill him. Why should Samael be willing to wait another twenty-five years for his soul after all, when it was within his power to kill him and take it at once? There could be no doubt, the daemon was going to try and cheat him.

  Unless, of course, Gunther cheated the daemon first.

  From the very beginning he had been playing his own double game, only agreeing to Samael’s terms to give him the time he needed to find a method by which to cheat the daemon of his due so that he might live forever. And now, after one hundred and fifty years of planning and preparation, the final movements of that game were almost upon him. The pieces were all in place. Soon, Gunther would play his devil’s gambit.

  There was only one last thing.

  Turning towards the corner of the room, Gunther saw the boy lying slumped and asleep on the floor, surrounded by the spilled contents of the bag he had given him earlier. Seeing the sedative he had put in the sweets had done its work, Gunther allowed himself the luxury of another moment of satisfaction.

  He really had thought of everything.

  BY THE TIME the first peals sounded from the harbourmaster’s bell calling midnight, all the preparations were in place. At the five corners of the pentagram the man-tallow candles had been lit, thin plumes of acrid smoke rising to join the sickly-sweet haze of incense hanging above them. At its centre, a section of the counter of the ruined bar had been set out as a makeshift altar with the unconscious boy bound and spread-eagled on top of it. Beside it, Gunther stood stoking a burning brazier, chanting the words of the final ritual.

  Then, as the bell pealed its last, he heard the door to the room open and saw the blond-haired figure of Samael arrive with cloak flowing behind him in a gentlemanly flourish.

  Careful not to allow his eyes to meet the daemon’s gaze, Gunther continued his chant. From the corner of his eye he saw Samael advancing towards him. Coming to the binding circle the daemon stopped, raising his hand to press palm-outwards on the invisible barrier before him, testing its power.

  ‘A binding circle? Impressive, Gunther, if ultimately pointless. After all, you can hardly stay within your circle forever, can you?’ Then, hearing the sound of lapping water, the daemon finally looked behind him.

  The trap had been surprisingly easy to build. Set to be triggered by a tripwire when the door to the room swung shut, a hidden mechanism had caused a gourd to tip, releasing a steady flow of water which, even now, fed a shallow circular channel encompassing the entire outer circumference of the room. Of course, the real power of the trap lay not in channel, but in the nature of the water that flowed through it.

  ‘Holy water?’ the daemon said, eyebrows raised in sardonic amusement. ‘It seems I am caught in the space between two impenetrable circles. Really, Gunther, you are full of surprises tonight. But tell me: now you have me where you want me, what do you intend to do with me next?’

  On top of the counter, close to his right hand, one of Gunther’s pistols lay primed and powdered, needing only a bullet to give it lethal force. And, glowing white-hot within the flames of the brazier, the bullet was almost ready.

  It had taken fifty years spent in the study of forbidden texts to learn how Samael’s bargains worked. Fifty years, in which he had slowly come to understand that when they had entered into their contract, Samael had lent him a tiny fragment of his own daemonic essence. A fragment so small that Samael would never miss it, but still powerful enough to stop Gunther from aging. Hence the time limit built into their bargain - as small as that fragment was, the daemon was not about to give up a part of himself forever. But at the same time, Gunther had learned this essence would not naturally flow back to Samael. It had to be taken.

  And, if Gunther could kill Samael first, he could keep it forever.

  Of course, killing a daemon was no easy thing. But, gifted with great wealth and a century in which to search for the answer, Gunther had finally discovered a method. In the brazier before him was a bullet forged from meteoric iron and covered in sigils which Gunther had paid a down-on-his-luck dwarf craftsman a small fortune to create. One of dozens of savants Gunther had paid to help him over the years without any of them ever knowing the true nature of his project. All of them working unknowingly towards the creation of a bullet ensorcelled to act as a bane to daemon flesh.

  A bullet to kill a daemon.

  Taking a pair of tongs, Gunther retrieved the glowing bullet from the fire and slotted it into the notch set in the side of the trocar. Even now, with his own life in the balance, he could not be sure whether it was possible to kill a creature like Samael forever. At the very least though, killing the daemon here and now would banish him back to the daemon realms for a thousand years - more than long enough for Gunther to find a more permanent solution. But before the bullet could be used, the ritual demanded that it be tempered in the heart’s-blood of a sacrificial victim. As to the nature of this victim, the terms of the ritual were very precise: Only someone possessed of a perfect and utter purity would do.

  Abruptly, eyelids fluttering, the boy on the altar began to stir. But Gunther had come too far and risked too much to give in to squeamishness now. Besides, whether the boy died asleep or awake hardly mattered. Lifting the trocar above his head, Gunther stepped forward to complete the sacrifice. Only to see the boy’s features suddenly seem to shift and blur, growing bigger. In an instant the boy was gone.

  Staring in amazement at the alabaster-skinned female figure that had replaced him, Gunther found himself strangely attracted to the swelling curve of her hips, the sharp-toothed seductiveness of her smile and the jagged perfection of her horns. Then, as the writhing goddess before him lashed out with a scythe-like claw, Gunther found the growing warmth of his desire displaced by a more primal se
nsation.

  Pain.

  AFTERWARDS, WATCHING THE daemonette flaying the flesh from Gunther’s dead bones, Samael found himself wondering briefly if he should punish her for her excesses. He had so wanted to see that last look of despair in the man’s eyes when he realised his long life was finally over and torment awaited him. But, lost in her enjoyment, the daemonette had killed him too quickly. Though, on balance, Samael decided to let the matter pass - it must have been difficult for her, after all, to have had to walk beside the mortal all night without tearing him apart. And, besides, the daemonette’s purpose here was not yet done.

  In her abandon, the daemonette had knocked over one of the pentagram’s candles, breaching the binding circle. Approaching the altar, Samael saw the trocar lying on the floor where Gunther had dropped it and he stooped to pick it up. Inside, the bullet was still hot, the magical energies released by Gunther’s ritual still waiting latent within it.

  Turning towards the daemonette, Samael saw her pause in her mutilations to lick the blood, cat-like, from her talon. Looking into the amber irises of her eyes, Samael saw a perfect and utter purity, untainted by conscience or thoughts of compassion. Then, savouring that thought for a moment, he took the trocar and stabbed her in the chest.

  ‘Why?’ the daemonette asked him in Darktongue, her accent like the mewling of scalded cats.

  ‘Because it would be a shame to let Gunther’s work go to waste,’ he told her, pushing the blade deeper into her heart. ‘Especially when I spent so very long covertly guiding that dull-witted mortal on his quest.’

  Strength fading, her heart’s-blood ichor flowing down the tube of the trocar to temper the bullet inside it, the daemonette looked at him in incomprehension. Then, the memories of thousands of years’ worth of sensations dying with her, her heart grew still.

  Letting her body fall as he pulled the trocar from it, Samael was pleased to feel the stirring of painful energies emanating from within the bullet. In the end, the whole affair had come to a most satisfactory conclusion. After one-hundred-and-fifty years, the ritual - and the seventh boon - had finally been completed. The bullet was ready now. A bullet to kill a daemon.

  One could never know when a thing like that might prove useful.

  BROKEN BLOOD

  Paul Kearney

  They broke cover in the afternoon, just as the snow was starting again. Morgan spat over his horse’s ears as Arundel cantered up to him, as breathless as his mount.

  ‘Out of the trees – maybe eight score of them. They’re heading for the river.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Half a mile. Not more. Briscus has it in hand.’

  ‘Get back to him, Arundel. Hold them there. This is a feint, or I’m a lady’s maid. They’re trying to pull us out. You get back to Briscus and tell him to hold his lines.’

  Arundel, a slim, ruddy-faced youth barely out of his teens, slapped his gauntlet to his chest. ‘They won’t get by us, general.’

  Off he went again, kicking the ribs of his horse. Gabriel Morgan smiled. Was I ever that young, he wondered? Methodically, he opened his saddle-holsters one by one and checked the slim matchlock pistols within. They were dry and loaded, their grips as familiar to him as the hilt of his sword.

  Beside him, Jubal Kane sat impassively. ‘That boy has done some growing up these past five months,’ he said in his bass rumble. The words seemed to emerge from his beard. His eyes narrowed – the closest he came to smiling.

  ‘They’ve aged us all, these last months,’ Morgan retorted. He clapped shut the holster-covers. Time enough yet to light the match.

  ‘You think they’ll make the main move here, at the ford?’ Jubal asked him.

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘We should perhaps call in the other wings, then.’

  ‘Not yet, Jubal. They’re all afoot. We can dress our lines quicker than they can. Briscus and Harpius will hold where they are for now.’

  A grunt in reply. Jubal Kane was not a man to waste words. He stroked the thick neck of his warhorse with one gauntleted fist. He looked old, sitting there in a cloud of his own breath. Frost had whitened his beard, giving him the aspect of an aged man, and his eyes were set in a tired mesh of lines and folds, dramatically so at the corner of the right one, where a livid scar buckled the skin in ridges. But the cold eyes were clear and bright – as hard as the icicles which hung in the lee of every rock, this high up in the Troll Country.

  He and Morgan had ridden at each other’s side these past twelve years, and knew each other better than most brothers.

  Most brothers.

  Morgan twisted in the saddle and looked behind him. The wide white high-country extended to the horizon, a blinding snowscape dotted by black scattered woods. To the east, the Worlds Edge Mountains were a mere glimmer on the edge of sight, and to the south the open country rolled in a white waste of rocky ridges and scattered pinewoods, all the way down to the Urskoy River, perhaps some thirty leagues away. Erengrad, their base of operations, was three days, hard ride from here. If they were bested on this field, there would be no sense in retreating. They had no place to run.

  And these men behind him had followed him here without question, perhaps to their deaths. Morgan turned his mount with a twitch of the reins to look up and down the lines. Perhaps two hundred men on horseback stared back at him, arrayed in two ranks. Their pennons whipped and snapped in the rising breeze, and the snow was already spotting the manes of their horses. Morgan touched the flanks of his own mount with his heels and the big animal limbered forward, kicking up the snow. He clicked his tongue and spoke to the animal softly, sensing its weariness. ‘Ho, now, Arion, my brave. Head up for the lads. Come now, boy.’

  The big warhorse seemed to understand him. It lifted its gaunt head and pranced a little under him. Poor Arion was half-starved, as were they all. Not much for a horse to pick at, up here in the steppes of the Troll Country.

  He rode down the lines, catching the eyes of the men as he passed, nodding, smiling, raising his gauntlet to the officers. They grinned back at him, hollow-cheeked and unshaven, many mounted on scrub mountain ponies for want of better. They wore an eclectic mix of harness: light brigandines of leather reinforced with iron scales, chainmail, and here and there a few pieces of white plate, relics of past glories. Their lances were all pointed skywards, butts in the stirrup-cups, pennons snapping. The lance-shafts were all of pine, here. In past years they had been of ash, down in the forested Empire, and cornel-wood in the foothills of the Grey Mountains.

  At the pommel of every man’s saddle were two leather holsters, and from these protruded the grips of his matchlocks. They had not yet lit their match, but that time was almost upon them. It would be soon, now, very soon.

  The traditional ribaldry, or a skeleton of it, flashed out as Morgan rode down the ranks.

  ‘General, any chance of a drink? I’m pissing hailstones.’

  Morgan smiled. He saw faces which had been riding at his side for a decade – though precious few of them now. And he saw faces which had been part of his command for only a few months, like young Arundel. They all met his eyes – that was good. They would be here with him until the end.

  He reined in his horse, and stood upright in the stirrups. A flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye: Jubal had raised an arm, and the banner bearer, young Kyriel, was slowly waving the battle-flag at the centre of the line.

  ‘Light your match, lads!’ Morgan called out at once. ‘It’s time to melt those icicles!’

  He kicked Arion into a canter, wheeling him around on the spot. The big horse leapt forward off his haunches, like some huge, predatory feline – he had caught the sudden quickening of his master’s mood.

  Morgan galloped back up the line as the men uncovered their firepots and began blowing their match into life. They clicked their lances into their back-straps so as to have both hands free, and soon the evocative reek of gunpowder was eddying down on the breeze. Morgan wiped snow from his fa
ce and reined in Arion. The big destrier was snorting and blowing and prancing now as though he were a colt again; he always loved the moments before battle. He had been bred for this.

  As was I, Morgan thought.

  ‘What do we have?’ he snapped at Jubal.

  The big man tilted his head to one side, looking north-east down the slope to the grey blade of the river. On the far bank the eaves of the forest loomed, dark and ominous.

  ‘I think our friends are making their move, Gabriel,’ he said mildly. Then he donned his helm, a battered, disreputable bowl of iron with a beak-like nose guard.

  Morgan stared at the gloom-wreathed foot of the wood. There was movement there, all along the riverbank. For perhaps four hundred yards the forest was bristling with half-guessed moving shadows.

  ‘Take Garnedd’s squadron forward,’ he said calmly to Jubal. ‘Get them down to the water.’

  ‘Cold day for a bath,’ Jubal said, and his eyes narrowed in cold humour. He raised an arm. ‘First squadron, on me – at the trot – hold your ranks, you lazy bastards!’

  A dry cheer went up, and horses whinnied up and down the line. The long-awaited battle was happening at last.

  Morgan turned to the little knot of aides who had come forward out of the ranks as he waved his fist.

  ‘Krauz, go to Briscus and tell him to break off and get his wing back here at all speed. Tell him they’re going to force passage of the ford. Feldtir, you go to Harpius. He’s to make his way here at a walk. Tell him to keep an eye on his right flank as he advances. They may yet feint out to the east.’

  Both men slapped gauntlets to chest, and galloped off in a cloud of flurried snow.

  Morgan began to hum, an old hymn he had learned as a child. He patted Arion’s neck as the warhorse snorted under him.