Gerhart Brennend looked across the bend in the river at the hill rising up to the city beyond. A biting wind blew around him, whipping his robes against his lean, wiry form. He stood firm, however, staff in hand. This rising wind, he knew, was not wholly of natural origin. The tormented weather reflected the turmoil that had seized the flow of the winds of magic sweeping from the north in the wake of the Chaos incursion.
Gerhart could see disturbance all around him. Tendrils of translucent colour whipped overhead or soared from the roiling sky to coil around him in knots and spirals of coruscating, multi-hued energy. Shades of sparkling azure, fiery crimson, burnished gold, glittering emerald, dazzling acid-white, deep purple, dusky grey and earthy umber swept and gusted around him. It was as if a tempest had beset the winds of magic and the more disruption there was within the flow of magical energy, the stronger the effect on the surrounding atmosphere growing over Wolfenburg.
As the hurricane whipped the strands of power around him, Gerhart could also see the tendrils being drawn towards the seething black clouds above the sentinel city. Its great, grey walls now seemed almost black as the day darkened to night. It was as if the glowering thunderheads were drawing the magical energies towards themselves for some fell reason.
This was no midsummer thunderstorm, this was an unseasonable gale that was growing to almost cyclonic proportions. It was as if summer itself were dying. So mighty was the Chaos invasion, and so great the destruction it had caused—whole armies massacred and entire towns laid waste—that the natural world itself seemed to have suffered a mortal wound.
Gerhart and Captain Reimann’s regiment stood watching all this from amongst the stand of trees at the top of the hill. Below them was the cave that led to the secret tunnel and the dungeons of Wolfenburg Castle.
They had reached the city in time to see the Kurgan quitting their camps and preparing to bring down Wolfenburg at last. Gerhart knew that they were going to have to get back inside the city. One of Reimann’s men had scouted ahead, crawling through the mud and filth of the tunnel again, only to find it blocked after less than half a mile. Just as Gerhart had predicted, once they had escaped the city, those left behind had brought the roof down—with Auswald Strauch’s blessing, no doubt.
“We are too late, there is no way back into the city and the attack has already begun,” one of the Reiklanders said dejectedly.
“We are not too late,” the captain chided. “We can still make a difference.”
“But there are only ten of us left,” another weary soldier pointed out. The halberdiers had paid highly for the destruction of the daemon engine and the antlered sorcerer’s warband.
“It does not matter!” Gerhart said, unable to believe what he was hearing. “While we still breathe we can fight. And while we can still fight we can exact a high toll from those who would bring doom to our ancient city.”
“We are tired, exhausted!” another complained bitterly.
“Enough!” the veteran captain exclaimed. “Rest while you can, all of you,” he said and many of the halberdiers gratefully sat down on the stones and turf of the hill. “But be ready to move at my command. Wizard, might I have a word?”
Gerhart understood what Reimann wanted. The two of them moved away from the rest of the party but kept the city, and the advancing horde within sight.
When they were out of earshot of the battle-weary soldiers Gerhart said, “What is it?”
“I believe that you have some understanding of the ways of battle,” the captain said, almost begrudgingly.
“Indeed I do,” Gerhart declared. “I thought you would have seen that for yourself by now.”
“Then I would like to hear what you suggest we do now,” Reimann said, running a hand through his close-cropped grey hair. “I know what I would do, but I would like to see if we concur.”
“Is it not obvious? We pursue this to the end,” Gerhart declared boldly. “We take the fight to the enemy, harry them from behind and do all we can to stop them succeeding in their task, or die trying.”
“My men are weary. They have been pushed to the limits of their endurance.”
Gerhart could see that Karl Reimann was a good man and a worthy captain. He had the well-being of his men at heart but never showed any signs of weakness in front of them.
“With but a push in the right direction, even the slowest soldiers can find the way to greatness,” the wizard said gruffly.
“To a soldier, the only thing more treacherous than the battle itself is the expanse of open ground yet to be won,” Reimann countered.
The captain was obviously tired himself after their recent exertions. Gerhart felt it too, and more keenly with the worsening of the weather, but they could not let it beat them. Not now.
The bright wizard looked back to the city. The flickering beams and bars of the Northland lights had intensified, exuding a malign phosphorescence not unlike the light cast by the sickly Chaos moon Morrslieb. The eerie luminescence lit the night for miles around.
A distant rumble rolled across the hills and the blanket of the forest, but it was unlike the growl of thunder. It was as if the storm had a voice, a booming voice that spoke of the coming of the End Times, the doom of nations and annihilation of all mortal races. And it was getting colder, much colder.
The storm of Chaos was upon them.
Vendhal screamed the words of the incantation in dark tongue. They cut through the gale and the roar of the wind with their cruel timbre.
The Chaos sorcerer was only half-aware of his pronouncements. It was as if he was so saturated with power now that he had transcended his mortal body and was looking down on the scene as he neared the climax of the ritual.
The runes on the ground flickered and writhed. He stood at the heart of it all, the glittering skull raised high above his head, the winds of magic swirling around him in a tumbling tumult. He had thrust his staff into the ground next to him. The stones set into the sockets of the iron skull surmounting it were glowing a malevolent red, like his own eyes. The orb-wand tucked into his belt pulsed with a throbbing, cold blue light. Power soared into him.
Overhead the storm clouds sparked with barely-contained lightning. They roiled and writhed like things given unnatural life by the warping magical energies saturating the environment. The very air seemed to thicken around him.
For a moment he felt as if the power of the building storm was more than he could bear, as if he was about to unleash a force upon the world that was so devastating it could not be controlled by a mere mortal.
But Vendhal Skullwarper was no mere Northern shaman. He felt that he was no longer even just a sorcerer of Chaos. He was something much greater. He was the chosen channel of the power of the Dark Gods of Chaos, who dwelt beyond space, time and the comprehension of primitive mortal minds.
Vendhal threw back his head and looked up into the vortex of power surging above him. He luxuriated in the energising essence of the magical forces gathering there.
“The power of Chaos is mine!” the sorcerer screamed to the tortured heavens.
With a howl like a hundred packs of hungry wolves, the winter storm rushed in and the warping power of Chaos tore through the summer night. The wail of the tempest drowned the excited cheers of the Kurgan as the power of the north laid siege to Wolfenburg.
Snow did not so much fall as sweep across the countryside in a whirling wall of white. In no time at all thick frost covered the landscape for a league in every direction and ice, growing upon thrashing branches in minutes, weighed down the trees of the surrounding spurs of woodland.
Then the night exploded.
Forked lightning clawed the sky, striking the city walls like repeated hammer blows rained down by a storm giant. Masonry exploded from the stonework where the lightning lashed at the curtain wall with flashing talons of actinic white energy.
This was the power of the Dark Gods in all its terrifying glory. Nothing could stand before the might and the supremacy of raw Chaos.
With a roar like the crashing scream of a landslide the ancient gatehouse of the city, which had withstood attacks for two thousand years, collapsed in an avalanche of rock and stone. Men fell screaming to their deaths, crushed by the very battlements that they were sworn to defend.
The city had been breached.
Jeering and yelling, the Northmen needed no command to drive them on. Bellowing their battle cries the marauders galloped and ran towards the fractured city walls. In a great black tide, Surtha Lenk’s barbarian horde broke open Wolfenburg and began to put everyone inside to the sword. They exacted their bloodthirsty revenge on those who had denied them their prize and the glory of battle for so long.
With coruscating tendrils of magic whipping about him still, Vendhal Skullwarper stepped from his circle of runes and joined the advance. Wherever he trod, the ground wept tears of blood, in response to the Chaos power that infused every fibre of his being.
Following the rampaging Chaos horde, the sorcerer strode into the blighted city. Icicles hung from the eaves of buildings, their roofs laden with heavy falls of snow. Ice crunched underfoot, melting with a sizzling hiss wherever he walked.
The wintry winds were now beginning to give way to something far more Chaotic altogether. Such was the warping way of the great mutator; nothing remained free from the effects of change for long. Almost as abruptly as it had begun, the blizzard ceased but the storm did not abate. Tendrils of Chaotic power began to snake down from the seething clouds, striking like lightning. Only unlike the caress of lightning, these strange tendrils had an altogether different effect.
Vendhal watched with unalloyed pleasure as a coil of cloud, rippling with all the colours of the visible spectrum, whipped down from the boiling sky. The warping tendril struck the side of a house. Where it hit, the wall was stone no longer. Instead, something more akin to dark purple flesh bubbled and blistered there.
Another tendril struck, earthing itself against the cobbles of the street. As the power discharged, bulbous, glistening eyes blinked in terror from the stones and gaping, leech mouths opened and closed in the road spasmodically.
A woman ran screaming from the crumbling ruins of a lightning blasted house. Vendhal watched as her foot snagged in an opening leech-mouth and she fell onto her hands and knees. Another twisting tendril of energy lashed down from the storm and struck the woman. Her cries became a harsh, braying wail as her whole body underwent a terrifying transformation.
The woman’s legs became boneless, rubbery tentacles. One arm sloughed its skin and became a serpentine protuberance, her hand now a fanged maw. Her other arm sprouted iridescent feathers and became a flapping wing. Great clumps of hair fell from her scalp as her head swelled and contracted again. It was as if something was writhing inside her skull trying to claw its way out.
Vendhal walked past the woman with a sick smile on his lips. He was revelling in the glorious changes wrought by Tzeentch upon Wolfenburg. The thing that was left after this terrible transformation fortunately did not survive much longer.
The sorcerer knew well the stories of what had happened to the city of Praag in Kislev after the attack of Asavar Kul. Once he was finished with Wolfenburg, Praag would seem like a mere experiment. The sentinel city would become the new renowned masterpiece of Chaos.
Across the street, houses burned amidst the last flurries of snow. Vendhal raised his skull-staff and pointed at a man fleeing from the Chaos looters. He still clutched the pearlescent skull in his other hand. Another bolt of warping energy seared down from the fiery clouds, blasting the sorcerer’s victim from his feet. The man tumbled to a halt against the side of a building, from which blinked tearful eyes. The man now resembled something more like a toad, with a forked whip-tongue, cockerel’s wattles and scuttling crab legs.
Truly he, Vendhal Skullwarper, was the chosen of Tzeentch. He was luxuriating in the raw stuff of Chaos that wreathed his body, heightened his senses, and raised his mind to unparalleled levels of consciousness. Surtha Lenk was nothing compared to him. The high zar was not even fit to lick the filth from the soles of his boots.
When the doom of the Dark Gods had been wrought upon the city of Wolfenburg, Vendhal Skullwarper would show the Kurgan horde who commanded the warping storms of Chaos. They would see who the true messiah of the great sorcerer was.
The blizzard had abated as swiftly as it had arisen. In its wake, the rag-tag survivors of Karl’s regiment, along with the glowering wizard, had made it as far as the city and were now following the Chaos horde, trying to find a way into Wolfenburg.
Ahead of Karl’s party, the last of the barbarians were making their way into the city through a shattered gap in the lightning-blasted curtain wall. It was plain to the life-long soldier that these were the runts of the marauder horde; those who had followed the tribes as they moved south in the hope of sharing in the glory of conquest but having little to offer themselves. They were the weakest, feeblest and oldest among the camp followers.
The Northland lights still flickered over the burning rooftops of Wolfenburg, bathing the snow-covered landscape for miles around with their spectral luminescence. It seemed to Karl that the weather itself had been possessed by some Chaos power, as tornado-like spirals of cloud swooped down from the broiling multi-hued mass of the thunderheads.
A sound like thunder rumbled across the city, but to the veteran Reiklander it sounded more like the snarling of some feral beast. Unnerved by what was happening, Karl looked to the ruddy-robed wizard.
There was fire in the mage’s eyes. The bright wizard paused at the fissure in the curtain wall as the acrid stench of burning washed over the party. The mage inhaled deeply, closing his eyes, almost as if in ecstasy. Gerhart held his oak staff tightly in his left hand. In his right he held a sword that one of the Imperial soldiers had given him. It had belonged to one of their fellows who had fallen battling the daemon engine’s protectors. The wizard’s straggly grey-black hair flicked and writhed in the unnatural winds that blew through the gap in the city wall. He looked every part the avenging hero of old. Perhaps there was hope for them all yet.
Then the screaming began.
At first the city’s terrified townsfolk thought that the daemonic howls were an effect of the unnatural storm battering Wolfenburg. But the sinister, unearthly cries continued and panicking eyes were turned towards the heavens.
Lashes of fluctuating indigo, blue and yellow energy were coiling down from the storm clouds, making the tempest look like some sky-borne ancient kraken of legend. Other things were also escaping from the roiling clouds: creatures born of nightmares, all teeth and talons, carried on bat-wings like ragged shrouds.
The creatures descended in a squabbling flock, falling on the fleeing townspeople. These were the furies. Their flickering shadows swept over the snow-covered, burning streets.
The distraught defenders did their best to fend off the furies’ attacks but they were terribly outnumbered. Men were lifted off the ground, yelling, in the taloned grips of the flying beasts. They were carried, struggling, high above the rooftops only to be dropped again.
Before they even hit the ground, many of the poor wretches were caught by other diving furies and torn apart in mid-air by the savage, hellish creatures.
Those who did manage to escape the clutching talons of the leathery-winged daemons found other, equally horrific things emerging from the smoke and fires. Where the warping-lightning struck, great fire-spouting wyrms had grown, their bodies lengthening as they absorbed the magical energies saturating the air of the city. Gangly-limbed things capered and danced in a seething sea of eldritch energy, their pink and blue-skinned forms never constant as mystical energy seethed through them. They were Chaos unbound given physical form.
What many saw within this scion of hell drove them into madness.
A tall figure moved awkwardly through the running rabble. He was swathed in a thick black cloak, his face hidden by the heavy cowl. As he watched the chaos unfurling all aroun
d him he gibbered and giggled to himself, seemingly unconcerned by this vision of hell. Instead, every so often he patted something secured under his tightly drawn cloak.
The stranger had been mad long before the Realm of Chaos descended on Wolfenburg and made the city a domain of daemons.
The halberdiers, their commander and the fire mage, forced their way further into the madness that was Wolfenburg, cutting down blood-crazed marauders and wild-eyed maniacs every step of the way.
The stricken city was like a living, vibrant vision of one of the paintings of the heretical artist Beronymous Hosch. Buildings burned, men and women, old and young, were put to the slaughter, and screams rent the greasy air.
All around them the Northmen put people to the sword, whilst daemonic entities that had no right to exist in the mortal realm feasted on the bodies and souls of innocent and sinner alike. It was all the soldiers could do to keep from losing their minds as well. But their captain was a veteran of countless battles, many against the unnatural thrall-servants of the Chaos powers. As long as he stood firm in the face of the enemy, then so would his men.
The seething crowds of marauding barbarians, embattled defenders and fleeing townspeople parted and Gerhart and the others suddenly found themselves in an area of relative calm. They were in a square. It was as if they had reached the eye of the storm, of this storm of Chaos.
They were not alone. On the other side of the square stood a figure, silhouetted against the backdrop of burning buildings. The figure was draped in a long, hooded cloak, almost the same colour as the robes worn by the fire mage. Gerhart could see at once that this was no pyromancer of the Bright order. The man also wore brass armour adorned with leering, gargoyle faces, and runes that glowed with an eerie inner light. They left no doubt as to where the man’s loyalties lay.
Gerhart could see immediately that the stranger was alive with the raw power of Chaos-magic. It came off him in pulsing waves; enough to make the world around him shimmer in a heat haze. Gerhart could see it in the glowing red gem-eyes of the sorcerer’s iron-skull staff, in the man’s own burning stare, and in the glowing sockets of the polished human skull gripped in his other clawed hand. The closer Gerhart looked, the more it seemed that the eyes of the pearlescent skull flickered in time with the storm writhing in the sky.
Magestorm Page 17
