Now they knew the fate of the cannon-team, the only thing Gerhart’s party could do was return to Wolfenburg, with all due haste, and report what they had discovered. Disturbingly, however, they still were none the wiser as to what had become of the knights.
Even with the Chaos sorcerer dead and the daemon engine destroyed, the wizard could still sense the power of Chaos pulsing beneath the surface of reality. The coming storm of Chaos would almost be at the gates of ancient Wolfenburg and the fire mage could do nothing to thwart it here.
First, the survivors of the daemon-loving warband had to be made to atone for their hellish sins. Staff back in hand, its tip aflame once more, Gerhart charged into the fray, cursing the Chaos warriors with every oath he knew. And the wrath of a wizard of the Bright order was terrible indeed.
TEN
The Whim of the Dark Gods
“Our pitiful lives are governed by nothing more than the uncaring seasons and the whim of the Dark Gods.”
—From the writings of
Mandrus the Heretic
“So here we are again, Vendhal Skullwarper,” the high zar said, his voice imbued with a tone of annoyance.
“Yes, lord seh,” the Chaos sorcerer said, casting his eyes away from the hideous visage of the lord of the Kurgan horde.
Surtha Lenk had summoned Vendhal to his appalling pavilion at dawn. He knew why. There was dissent among the ranks. The zars and their warbands were hungry for blood and victory and after the ease with which they had taken Aachden they were becoming frustrated. They were looking for someone to blame for the stalemate, and many accused Surtha Lenk for bringing them to this impasse.
The sorcerer had approached the tent, pitched behind the ranked mass of the Kurgan, with trepidation. It was as blasphemous and corrupted a creation as the warlord of the Northmen host himself. The fabric of the pavilion was composed of tanned human skin, the guy ropes were of plaited sinew, its support poles made from calcified spines. As Vendhal had passed through the breeze-batted flaps of the entrance, the familiar stench of decay and cloying perfume washed over him.
It was dark inside the battle tent. An acrid fog of incense palled from hanging brass lamps so that the sorcerer could not see the floor. He was aware of a dull susurrating sound, however, like dry, serpentine coils twisting and writhing over the floor of the tent.
“Here we are again, and still Wolfenburg remains to be broken. I am… displeased, Vendhal Skullwarper,” the high zar burbled.
The sorcerer said nothing. Things brushed against his cloak in the dark, their touch like feathers, their voices an inhuman chittering.
“Why have you not yet used your prestigious sorcerous powers to break the siege?”
Surtha Lenk was looking for someone to blame too and he had singled out the sorcerer chief.
“As I have told you, lord seh, we are far from the Shadow of the north and its influence.”
“You would lecture me?” the high zar snarled. “Is it not true that where we march under the banners of Lord Tzeen, the influence of the Shadow also grows? The world changes as we pass.”
“That is true, lord seh,” the sorcerer conceded. “But with the sun high in the sky for so much of the day, the Eye of Tzeen cannot suffer its glare. So it remains closed for most of the time.”
“Then the sun must not be permitted to blind Lord Tzeen any longer. See to it, Vendhal Skullwarper, or your soul will be given up in sacrifice to the greatest of sorcerers.”
The Chaos sorcerer took a deep breath. He still could not look directly at the crimson armoured giant and the grotesque swaddling babe harnessed to its front.
“My powers have been weakened by this environment,” the sorcerer explained angrily, admitting to the truth of the situation. “If I am to gather the power needed, lord seh, an atrocity on a grand scale will be needed…”
“If that is what it will take,” Surtha Lenk said, his voice giggling once again at the prospect of greater slaughter in the name of Chaos, “then that is what must happen.”
“Yes, lord seh,” Vendhal said, bowing. He had not once cast his eyes on the warlord. He retreated from Surtha Lenk’s presence, and backed out of the tent.
“Oh, one other thing, sorcerer,” Lenk said in his squeaking, high-pitched voice, just as Vendhal reached the entrance of the tent. “If you continue to… displease me, I shall gut you myself and tear your soul from your dying body.”
The big push came the following day, as dusk was spreading its twilight veil over Ostland. That night warriors from every warband under Surtha Lenk’s banner assaulted the walls of Wolfenburg, and the Northmen’s war machines renewed their meteoric missile attacks on the sentinel city, hurling death at its ancient walls.
At first, the city’s siege defences and garrison held off the attacks, but as the night wore on past the second watch, the size of the attack increased. So great were the numbers of barbarians assaulting the walls, that the bodies of the Northmen lay ten deep at its foot. These mounds of the dead provided other battle-maddened marauders means to clamber further up the ramparts and attack the city’s defenders.
There was nothing the Imperial defenders could do but ride out and meet the Northmen’s attack. Fully half the standing army of Wolfenburg, the knights of the Order of the Silver Mountain and a hastily conscripted town militia charged out of the gates of the city as the great doors opened.
There was worse to come for the noble champions of the city.
As soon as the brave defenders left the relative security of their bastion, the Chaos horde turned from the walls, leaving their dead behind them without a second thought, to face Wolfenburg’s guardians. Those left inside the city had no choice but to close and bar the gates behind the overwhelmed soldiers: they could not risk losing all and allowing the Northmen into Wolfenburg. But, to their credit, not one of the brave Imperial defenders, even those drawn from the city militia, ever attempted to re-enter the city. Against such overwhelming odds, however, there was nothing the Imperial troops could do.
That night, Surtha Lenk’s horde captured more living prisoners than they had done so far. The defenders of Wolfenburg watched from the walls as their fellow men were dragged to the Kurgan encampments. What troubled them was that the Northmen had taken virtually no prisoners until this point. What could they possibly have in mind for the poor wretches they now took? Why did they need so many living souls?
The wall guards and their commanders crossed themselves with the sign of the holy hammer but dared think no more upon their damned brethren. There was no helping them now. They were already as good as dead—or worse.
Amongst the Kurgan there was a great deal of celebration and carousing. Many of the marauders, frustrated by weeks of inaction, felt that at last something was being done to break the city. Hope filled their hearts once more. They were elated to have taken so many prisoners.
Hope also came with the rumour that a lone warrior among the warbands of the high zar’s army had been singled out by the power known to those wild men as Tchar or Tzeen. He had brought the luck of that unholy deity to Surtha Lenk’s enterprise.
A time of great change was coming, all could feel it—loyal servants of the Empire and sons of the north alike.
Bruised and battered, Lector Wilhelm Faustus was dumped unceremoniously on the leaf-littered floor of the clearing between the gnarled and twisted oak trees. Groans came from around him as survivors of his party who had also pursued the fleeing war herd into the Forest of Shadows were dropped next to him.
The beastmen had taken them all by surprise from the cover of the trees. It was easy once they strayed too far into the green-shot twilight of the forest—and so the men when they became separated from one another. Wilhelm had come round to find himself tied to a broken tree branch slung between two of the beastmen. Another of the creatures carried his heavy warhammer over its shoulder.
The group made fast progress through the forest. The pack that had captured the priest had soon joined up with others
who had captured more of Wilhelm’s entourage. He didn’t know what had become of his loyal steed Kreuz.
They had been carried through the Forest of Shadows, strung from denuded branches, with the hot stink of the beastmen reeking in their nostrils, and the sounds of grunts and guttural barks ringing in their ears. The tongue of the beastmen was as unintelligible as the lowing of cattle or the bleating of sheep.
They had been travelling for a day, the priest judged, deeper and deeper into the dark and untamed woodland. The trees grew closely here, but they were dark and twisted parodies of natural life. The beastmen waded through briar thickets, brambles and nettle beds without a second thought: their tough animal hides protected them. The Sigmarites were not so fortunate, however. By comparison their skin was as soft as a Bretonnian damsel’s. Wilhelm felt every scratch and sting as thorns dug into his flesh and prickly nettles brushed his face and the exposed skin of his arms.
The beastmen had not done anything to remove his armour, even though they had taken his holy weapon. The additional weight didn’t trouble them at all. They were lean, hard-muscled creatures, thanks to their tribal existence.
And so, after an unpleasantly uncomfortable journey, the lector and his followers now found themselves at the very heart of the beastmen’s territory, inside the creatures’ camp.
The beasts’ prisoners were released from the poles, either by cutting the twine that bound them or by simply biting through the knots with their sharp teeth. The ungors, directed by their larger, whip-wielding cousins, poked and prodded at the humans with rough spears until they had goaded them into a crude cage in the clearing. It was constructed from tree branches, tied together with more twine and dried animal gut, in a haphazard fashion. But the cage served its purpose. Once all of the men had been hustled inside a heavy log was pushed through two loops of rope to keep the door shut. It wasn’t the most complicated of locks but it too served its purpose. With a whole herd of beastmen squatting only a few feet away, escape was improbable, in fact impossible.
But for Wilhelm Faustus, a faithful servant of Sigmar, there was no such thing as impossible as long as he maintained his faith in the Heldenhammer. And never was the light of Sigmar needed more than in this forsaken forest, dedicated to darker, fell powers.
Everything about the beastman camp stank like a midden. The cage reeked of filth and rotting meat, the lingering odour of its last unfortunate occupants no doubt. The priest could smell a dung heap nearby, and everywhere was the all-pervasive musky smell of the herd.
Wilhelm noticed that the hugely muscled red-furred beastman, which had led the whole expedition, was now exerting its authority over the others. Its red hide set it apart from the rest, and no doubt meant that it had been singled out for greatness by the Dark Gods they worshipped. Amongst the beastmen might was most definitely right, the strong dominating the weak. Life amongst the herd was a case of the survival of the fittest.
There were other beastmen here too. They seemed, to the ever-observant priest, to be arranged into small warbands, as if they formed the units of the larger, combined war herd.
Trapped inside the stinking cage, Wilhelm took a moment to study the layout of the camp. The clearing was roughly half a mile long and a quarter of a mile across, surrounded on all sides by dense forest. Wilhelm had been aware that the ground had been rising steadily since that morning, but now that he was in the clearing it was more obvious that they were on higher ground. Craggy granite teeth broke from the turf and dirt of the clearing and Wilhelm could see no higher outcrops of land beyond the tops of the trees.
The beastmen had made their camp next to a crude stone circle that stood within the clearing, close to its northern edge. At the centre of the circle of weatherworn monoliths was a single stone, twice as tall as the others, that looked like it had dropped from the heavens and had landed upright. Wilhelm could only guess at who, or even what, had raised these granite menhirs. He could feel that their purpose was not worthy The psychically sensitive holy man could sense a great evil hanging over the camp, like some malign entity hungry for the souls of mortal men. The towering stone, in whose shadow they lay, seemed to pulse with its own malign power.
Adorning the stone were the corpses of several armoured knights, They were hanging from gore-encrusted chains and great butcher’s hooks, and they had been horribly disfigured by the injuries they had suffered. Several were missing limbs, others looked like they had been partially devoured and one had been disembowelled: the warrior’s viscera were strung out over the rock along with the chains. All of the dismembered cadavers were caked in dried blood, obscuring their features. It looked as if the knights’ tabards might once have been white. Various scratchlike runes and sigils had been daubed on the surface of the monolith in blood, but Wilhelm could not look at them for long because they made his eyes water and he could feel a headache forming behind his eyes.
Dumped at the base of the huge standing stone were the herd’s many trophies taken in battle and raids on the peoples whose dwellings bordered the Forest of Shadows. There was everything from weapons and armour of the herd’s bested foes to skulls, human and otherwise, and battle banners. Some of them looked very old and were almost nothing more than torn, mildewed rags.
One of the banners, although its design was antique, looked like it had been in a fairly good state of repair before the beastmen had got their filthy paws on it. It was bloodstained and soiled with mud and faeces like the rest of the captured standards. Wilhelm couldn’t help thinking that there was something familiar about the crest the banner bore.
As Wilhelm watched, a gor wrested his holy warhammer from the ungor that had been carrying it and tossed it onto the mound of prizes. The weapons that had been taken from the other members of Wilhelm’s captured party were also added to the collection to gather rust.
“I know that standard,” a voice whispered hotly in Wilhelm’s ear.
He looked round. A balding, grey-haired swordsman who had joined his following at Haracre was standing there looking towards the tribe’s herdstone with a mixture of appalled horror and nervous excitement. The warrior priest knew which standard he meant.
“How come?” Wilhelm asked.
“I once fought under that very banner,” the man said. He was one of the few amongst Wilhelm’s zealous Sigmarite band who had ever been a professional soldier. “In my youth. When I stood with the standing army of the Elector Count of Ostland to purge the farmlands south of Kosterun of a greenskin incursion. It is the battle banner of the ancient sentinel city of the north. It is the Wolfenburg standard!”
“The Wolfenburg standard you say?” Wilhelm repeated, half to himself.
“Yes, your holiness.”
“Then that ancient city is, as we suspected, in the direst danger.” Wilhelm knew the legends: that should the city be assaulted whilst lacking the presence of the ancient war banner, then it would surely fall. “We must recover that standard and return it to its rightful home,” he said, his purpose clear.
“What will become of us?” a cowering forester asked, his right eye swollen and bruised from the treatment he had suffered at the hands of the beastly ambushers.
“Is it not as plain as the nose on your face?” a rag-robed flagellant snapped. “We are to be sacrificed to the beast-things’ foul gods! Why else have they kept us alive and brought us all the way here? Is that not right?” the flagellant asked, turning to Wilhelm.
“When the time is right,” the warrior priest rumbled.
“Perhaps when the correct constellations are visible in the sky overhead,” another, much older priest suggested.
“And what do we do until then?” the forester persisted, gloomily.
“We keep our faith in Sigmar, and wait,” the warrior priest said.
This was not the death—the martyrdom—he sought. Lector Wilhelm Faustus still had much work to do. He would not wait to be made a sacrifice to the foul gods that lived beyond the veil of reality. Now he had a new purpose. He n
ot only had to escape from the clutches of these children of Chaos but he and his men had an obligation to recover the Wolfenburg standard and return it to the ancient city.
Wilhelm returned to watching the beastmen, on the lookout for an opportunity when he and his men could act against their captors and exact their revenge at last.
It was several days later that Wilhelm was presented with the opportunity he had been patiently waiting for. He had been watching the beastmen constantly, and studying the arrangement of the herd and its hierarchical pecking order.
Unsurprisingly, the conditions inside the cramped cage were rapidly worsening. Now the imprisoned entourage smelt as strongly of their own waste as they did of the permeating reek of the beastmen. Their captors had fed them scraps of raw meat. The captives couldn’t be allowed to die before they were to be sacrificed, after all. The priest had readily wolfed down whatever had been thrown his way. He needed to keep his strength up.
Dawn broke cold and damp even though it was a summer’s day. As the warrior priest woke amidst the filth and detritus littering the cage floor, he felt his body aching as it did every morning thanks to the rough, uneven surface. A hubbub of noise permeated the camp and it soon became clear why.
A troupe that Wilhelm had not seen before had entered the clearing. At first the priest wondered if they were members of a rival warband, come to claim the campsite as their own, but it soon became apparent that they were an accepted part of the tribe. The small force of beastmen was led by a monstrous creature, unlike the others in shape or form. It, and the three warped creatures of its retinue, were bull-headed monstrosities, nearly twice the height of a man and far greater in bulk, but the leader was by far the largest.
The minotaur, obviously a champion among its kind, was a huge, pot-bellied creature, with arms of bulging corded muscle. Its ugly, broad, snouted head was surrounded by a dark, shaggy mane. The distance from one sharpened horn tip to the other was somewhere around two spans Wilhelm supposed. Around its neck, the minotaur wore a spiked collar. It had little else in the way of armour, but spiked, curved steel plates protected its shoulders. A studded harness crossed its chest and at the centre of this was a bronze disc inscribed with the eight-pointed star of Chaos. The jutting-jawed head of an orc hung from the belt of its loincloth and it carried two heavy axes—one in each of its massive man-like hands. One of the weapons looked like it might have been dwarfish, before the intricate etchings on its blade had been defaced and inscribed by altogether more malignant markings.
[Warhammer] - Magestorm Page 15
