The minotaur was a creature to inspire awe and dread in both its allies and enemies alike. It was a doombull, as the champions of bull-men were known.
The minotaur’s warband was dragging a roughly-constructed sled weighed down with yet more battle trophies, but they did not appear to be human in origin. The party had obviously returned from its own raiding expedition and, as far as Wilhelm could tell from the brutal looking artefacts, it had been against the greenskins.
Up until that moment, Wilhelm had considered that they had seen all of the beast-tribe. But now it was clear that the force his entourage had faced at Walderand was only part of the war herd.
The lector observed the reactions of the rest of the warherd to the doombull’s arrival. Beastmen scurried out of the minotaur’s way, gors lowered their heads an inch and some of the ungors even urinated or defecated, in deference to their leader.
But not all of the herd behaved in this way. As the doombull approached the stone circle, Wilhelm could see the red-skinned bestigor and his followers were making no reverences before the bull-headed monster.
To begin with it seemed that the minotaur was totally unaware of this or that it ignored it in its feral arrogance. The rest of the doombull’s party added the arms and armour they had taken from the greenskins to the rusting and foetid pile at the foot of the great standing stone. It was only when this was done that the monstrous minotaur turned its attention towards the unabashed wargor.
Raising both axes in the air the minotaur snorted and bellowed at the bestigor, its bull eyes blazing. In response, the red-skinned wargor raised its own cleaver-like falchion in both clawed hands and, throwing back its head, with an ululating cry, howled its challenge to the sky.
The scene unfolding before them transfixed all in the camp—men and beastmen. Wilhelm doubted that any of his fellow prisoners fully understood what was going on. The warrior priest, however, had studied various permitted texts concerning the enemies of Sigmar’s light, and their practices. He could guess what was going on. The rebellious wargor was making its challenge for the position of sire of the tribe. The wargor had captured a great prize: souls to be sacrificed to the herd’s animalistic gods. It believed itself worthy of the tide of Banebeast.
Then there was nothing more to be said.
The minotaur and the wargor, traded blow after blow against each other. They fought with the ferocity of rabid dogs, grunting, snarling and bellowing at one another as they did so. At first they seemed evenly matched, in terms of size, strength and animal cunning. As the doombull’s dwarf axe cut down towards the wargor’s neck, the bestigor parried with a strike of its falchion. As the red-skinned challenger thrust with its own blade, the minotaur caught the knocked edge with the hook of its Chaos-forged war-axe. The two beasts also tried to kick and bite and gore one another. Nothing was too base for these degenerate creatures.
Then suddenly, twisting its great bulk out of the way of the wargor’s descending falchion-blade, the minotaur skewered its challenger’s shoulder with one of its sharpened horn tips. The doombull had demonstrated why it was the leader of the tribe. With great muscles in its bull neck bulging, the minotaur lifted the other beastman off the ground, impaled on the end of its horn.
As the wargor kicked out at the minotaur’s loins with its sharp-hoofed feet, the herd-leader brought both of its axes around in front of its body, delivering two savage cuts that sliced open the gor’s stomach. The red-skinned beastman gave a shrieking cry as its entrails burst from the ruptured flesh in a torrent of black blood and offal. The doombull shook the beastman free of its horn and the challenger fell to the ground, wailing like a newborn calf.
But the doombull did not stop. The frenzy of blood-greed was on it now. The leader threw itself on the dying, gutted challenger and took a great bite out of its labouredly heaving chest. The doombull threw back its head, blood dripping from its chin, and gulped down the bloody lump of gouged meat.
Having witnessed such savage brutality, bloodlust had taken hold of the tribe. The scent of blood was in their nostrils, and blood was pumping in their veins. Blood was the only thing that would satisfy them now!
The beastmen were not quelled by the death of the wargor; they were giddy with the scent of carnage and wanted nothing more than to have their bestial cravings sated in battle. They divided into two camps—those who wished to avenge the upstart that slayed their wargor, and the others loyal to the doombull.
The two sides immediately clashed in the middle of the clearing. With the prisoners forgotten, beastman fought beastman in an orgy of bloodletting. As some of Wilhelm’s followers watched the confusion of the battle, wary of any stray axes or battling combatants coming their way, the warrior priest and the stronger soldiers began to wrestle the heavy log-bolt that held the cage shut. They struggled to free the securing ropes, all the while straining to reach it through the haphazard bars.
One of the men gave a cry as he saw something hurtling towards the prisoners. With a crash, a hulking gor smashed into the side of the cage and through the splintered bars. As the injured beastman struggled to rise, Wilhelm grabbed a splintered stake and plunged it through the soft flesh of the creature’s neck. The gor died choking on its own foul blood.
Chaos reigned in the clearing. The cries of the battling beastmen echoed around the stone pillars of the lithic circle. Metal rang on metal and stone. But Wilhelm Faustus and his Sigmarite crusaders were free.
“We have no time to lose,” the priest told his men. “We must recover our weapons and leave this place.”
None of the priest’s followers disputed this decision. They were weak after days of imprisonment and knew that they were hopelessly outnumbered by the beastmen. Luckily the herd was doing more harm to itself than Wilhelm’s holy entourage could ever hope to.
For that was Chaos’ greatest weakness, the lector knew. It would always turn on itself and destroy itself, in the end.
It must have taken a terrifyingly powerful individual to unite the northern hordes to attack the Empire with a common purpose. And they were backed by all four of the fell Chaos powers.
Wilhelm ducked and weaved through the melee, avoiding sweeping war-axes, crushing hooves and goring horns as he made for the great, central standing stone. The most confident of his followers followed him. Angry battling beastmen hurtled past them, grappling with one another. To some, such action might seem like madness. But as a warrior priest of Sigmar there was no other option, how could he abandon his consecrated weapon? A lector of Sigmar was nothing without his holy warhammer, the tool with which he delivered the God-Emperor’s justice.
A beastman with its flesh bearing tattooed whorls and spirals suddenly turned towards Wilhelm and snarled. It was bowled over as another gor, its hide the same colour as the minotaur’s challenger, slammed into it, curved ram’s horns butting it in the stomach. Wilhelm darted past the outer edge of the stone circle and in three long strides reached the treasure pile. A moment later his warhammer was in his hands. Gripping its haft tightly between his gauntleted hands, he felt the righteous power of Sigmar surge through his body.
There was a crash and bellowing close behind him. He turned, warhammer ready. The almost-deposed doombull was suddenly on top of Wilhelm, its animal breath gusting in his face. He became wet with saliva and mucus. An ungor was hanging from one of the minotaur’s great, outstretched arms by its teeth. The minotaur tried to shake it free, at the same time trying to extricate a dwarf axe from the carcass of a boar-headed beastman in his other hand. Despite such encumbrances, the minotaur still tried to snap at the priest with blunt teeth, darkly malevolent fire burning in its eyes.
In the presence of the cruel beast, the head of Wilhelm’s recovered warhammer burst into golden flame. Reacting instinctively, heart pounding, Wilhelm brought the weapon round in a great arc, slamming the blunt head of the hammer down on top of the minotaur’s unprotected skull.
There was a crack like a thunderclap and the great, tough cranium fra
ctured. The doombull bellowed in surprise and pain and reeled, throwing the ungor from its arm and tugging the dwarf axe free in the same lunging spasm. Before it could focus through the fog of concussion Wilhelm had struck again, this time landing the head of the hammer squarely against the side of the monster’s head. The doombull’s face collapsed, splintering inwards. Shards of thickened bone carved through the pulped grey matter beneath, which in turn spurted from other cracks in the minotaur’s shattered skull.
Toppling like a great, lightning-struck oak, the minotaur crashed to the ground. Its tongue flopped from its slack mouth and slapped against the warrior priest’s booted feet. The doombull, once so favoured by its Dark Gods, had clearly lost that favour now, and with it its ill-begotten life.
With the monstrous minotaur defeated, the rest of Wilhelm’s party rushed to collect their weapons from the pile at the bottom of the defaced herdstone. Wilhelm took hold of the ancient Wolfenburg banner and led the escape from the odious camp.
Armed once again, and with the beastmen preoccupied with the battle raging in the clearing, it did not take the Sigmarites long to fight their way clear of the tumult, running for the fringes of the forest and the cover the trees provided. The forest closed around them again and the bellows, hoots and braying cries of the beastmen dwindled into the distance.
Wilhelm and his band had regained their freedom. Whether it was thanks to the benediction of Sigmar, as the priest liked to believe, or simply the vagaries of fate, or even the whim of Dark Gods, Lector Wilhelm Faustus and his band had escaped the fate the beastmen had intended for them.
It had been Sigmar’s will all along, the warrior priest believed, that he and his men be taken to the beastmen’s camp and recover the Wolfenburg Standard. For the return of the ancient battle banner might very well be the only thing that could turn the tide of the siege in the sentinel city’s favour—as long as Wilhelm’s party could reach it in time.
ELEVEN
The Eye of the Storm
“The powers of the pyromancer are truly formidable, and where they bend their powers ruin and destruction is sure to follow, no matter what is intended.”
—From A Treatise of
the Lores of Magic by
Theodoric Wurstein
Wolfenburg.
It stood before the gathered Chaos horde as a symbol of Imperial might they had to overcome. If it could be conquered, then the whole of Ostland would be Surtha Lenk’s for the taking and the Empire would be Archaon’s.
As summer began to wane, so the shadow cast by the fluctuating Realm of Chaos broadened, engulfing more of the lands of men. The Chaos host felt its power surging through their bodies, pulsing in their veins with every beat of their hearts. Now in the fourth month of the siege, a host as large as the one that had attacked on the night when the prisoners had been taken was readying itself for the final assault on Wolfenburg.
Drums beat a tattoo of death that was interrupted by the unearthly blaring of carynx horns and the clashing of weapons against armour and shields. In front of the Northmen stood the prisoners they had taken from amongst the valiant defenders of the resilient city. They had been lashed to barbaric symbols constructed from an amalgam of rotten wood, huge bones and rusted metal. They were in the shadow of the horde’s leviathan siege engines.
Some of the Northmen’s prisoners remained proud and resolute, showing no fear, despite the despicable treatment they had suffered at the hands of the barbarians. Others, however, were whimpering shells of the men they had once been, who screamed their pleas for mercy to the uncaring heavens; they were broken by the atrocities they had suffered and been forced to witness in the daemon-worshippers’ camp. Some were no longer aware of what was happening to them; they were either unconscious or their wits had left them, so terrible had been the experience.
The Northmen knew that those watching from the walls of Wolfenburg would be able to see the prisoners and would understand what fate was about to deal them.
Dark clouds were building on the horizon over the Middle Mountains, rolling down from the north to smother the marches of Ostland as they had done during the spring of that year. The wind was picking up too.
Behind the lines formed by the Chaos warbands, Vendhal Skullwarper sat cross-legged within the outline of another blasphemous symbol that had been burnt into the turf of the ground. To any that could bear to look at it, they would see the sigil was that of an eight-pointed star, four spans across which merged with a curving, fish-like form set within a corrupted circle. Where the sigil had been formed, the grass hissed and smouldered, and an acrid smoke rose from the ground where the corrupting influence of Chaos had taken hold.
Other esoteric markings had been made at the various points of these images as well. Around the outside of the ring nine stakes had been thrust into the ground at regular intervals, each topped with a skull, which had been doused in tar and set alight. Despite the wind, these death’s-head torches burned brightly.
Vendhal Skullwarper studied the roiling currents of flickering colour that wound and bucked around, above and within his circle of power. He breathed in deeply. The wind brought the smell of death and decay to him as well as the scent of future possibilities. The time was almost ripe. He could feel the strength of the Shadow in his bones; he could see it creeping over the Northlands towards this place, towards the moment when all future possibilities would end. It would grow like a malignant cancer that would ultimately envelop the whole world.
“It is time,” the sorcerer said, his voice heavy with the doom of what was coming to Wolfenburg.
At his word one of the high zar’s battle-shamans, wearing nothing but the skin and horns of a stag and wildly applied body paint, capered from where he waited into the ranks of the amassed warbands. He fidgeted nervously.
“It is time.”
“It’s time.”
“The time has come.”
“It is time.”
The sorcerer’s decree spread through the ranks of the Northmen like wildfire. Then, unnervingly, all the noises ceased. For several seconds, the only sounds were from the mewling and groaning prisoners. Prayers could be heard alongside babbled nonsense, as men commended their souls to Sigmar and others whimpered their agonies to the unheeding air.
Warriors stepped forward from each of the gathered warbands, blades drawn. The marauders held their swords ready. A large, hunchbacked creature raised a brass horn, its trumpet mouth a boar’s head, and blew one sonorous note that echoed mournfully over the ground between the two opposing forces. Almost as one man, the chosen warriors raised their swords and axes and executed the prisoners. So much blood washed over the hateful symbols to which the men had been tied that the tinny stink of the life-giving fluid was carried on the breeze to the city itself.
The blood-letting drove the impatient horde into a frenzy. Only the total destruction of their enemy would satisfy them now.
The ritual slaughter of the captured knights and men-at-arms would have as much of an effect on the morale of the city’s appalled defenders as it would against Wolfenburg’s defences. Now that ritual could begin in earnest.
The sorcerer could feel the forces he needed gathering in the ether around him, drawn by the spilling of blood and the markings of power. He was bound by ancient covenants and summoned by primal emotions. It felt as if he was at the very centre of the roiling storm of magical energy.
The sorcerer could feel the insidious creep of Chaos in every part of his body until it was the realm that existed beyond reality that seemed most real to him. Reality became nothing but a ghostly echo.
The pounding of hooves, the jangle of harnesses and the snorting of horses brought him back to the real world briefly. Twenty riders stood beyond the limit of the magical sigils. Their intrusion irritated the sorcerer but their arrival was necessary for the completion of the ritual Vendhal had begun. They needed to bring the wrath of the Dark Gods down upon the bricks and mortar of Wolfenburg.
The riders w
ere all from the high zar’s personal bodyguard. A giant of a man led them who had bullhorns sprouting obscenely from his malformed skull. The big man dismounted and stopped at the edge of the circle.
“You have it?” Vendhal asked.
“I have it,” the bodyguard replied.
“And it has been blessed by the chosen one from amongst Zar Uldin’s band?”
“It has.”
“Then give it to me,” the sorcerer commanded.
The horned giant tossed something cold, hard and round into the circle. Vendhal caught it deftly and looked at it. It was a human skull that had been polished to a pearlescent finish. The sorcerer caught the shimmer of rainbow colours skitter over the shiny smooth bone as he turned it in his hand. It had indeed been blessed by the touch of Tchar. Tzeen was looking down upon their enterprise with favour.
Vendhal now had the last piece of the puzzle in his hands. It might only be a human skull, but to one who knew the origin of that skull and the power that it had been imbued with, one also understood that there was no greater instrument of war.
And so Vendhal Skullwarper commenced his dark ritual. The Chaos sigil began to glow and the grass burned black.
The city would fall to the barbarian legions of the high zar and it would fall tonight.
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