And there was something else. To Gerhart’s mage-sight it seemed that the Chaos sorcerer was draining the magical essences of the winds of magic.
Gerhart was convinced that it was this sorcerer who was responsible for the Chaotic storm. Ribbons of swirling magical energy linked the man to the turmoil above, and the enchanted skull was the key to the spell.
Gerhart knew what had to be done.
In his mind’s eye, and in the presence of the hungry flames and the growing power of Aqshy that was drawn to the burning city, the candle-flame was no more. Instead it was a fiercely blazing brand. Gerhart could feel warmth being transmitted through his body as well as the heat of the fires all around him, suffusing him with their power, their majesty and their might.
Seeing what had become of the ancient sentinel city, frustrated that the council of war had not followed his advice, and angered that he had been sent away from Wolfenburg when the city needed him most, Gerhart had fuelled the fire of his fury and hatred. This in turn fed the fires burning within him, and the flame of Aqshy.
The fury the pyromancer would unleash upon the Chaos sorcerer would be like nothing the self-satisfied villain had ever known, nor would ever know again.
Meanwhile, the fell sorcerer held the glimmering skull above his head and began to utter some vile incantation in the cursed language of those blasphemous entities that existed beyond the boundaries of the mortal realm.
The two spell-casters faced one another across the square. The Chaos sorcerer seemed unconcerned by the ten halberdiers. He was wholly focused on the bright wizard who stood braced, staff outstretched, sword in hand, ready to duel.
But then Reimann’s men had their own battles to fight. As if drawn to the heart of Chaos, warp-changed Chaos spawn crawled and slithered through the corridors of flame that were the burning streets of Wolfenburg.
The Chaos sorcerer laughed mirthlessly as he witnessed their predicament.
Hearing a scraping behind him, like plate mail dragged over cobbles, Karl turned. Dragging itself towards him across the square was something that had obviously once been a man. From the chest up it was still human, whimpering and moaning in agony and horror. From the waist down, the poor wretch had been changed utterly. His lower body had developed a hardened carapace that looked like armoured plates. His legs had become swollen, veiny-fleshed arms, his feet now clawed, three-fingered hands. No matter what his broken mind might will, the lower half of his body was reacting to some other sentience as it heaved its bulk forwards.
And there were other things too creeping, scuttling and sliding towards them. Things with feathers, claws and fungoid bodies. Things with too many bony limbs and too many gaping mouths. There was something that looked like two people merged, but they were joined in such a way that it was no longer possible to tell which limbs had belonged to which half. The skin covering the Chaos twins looked like melted wax and was striped with great red weals as if it had been under the lash.
The Reiklanders moved away from the wizard’s side to more defensible positions. The fire mage was on his own now and Karl prayed that the wizard was a match for the corrupted sorcerer.
An arachnoid abomination, bloated and covered in matted fur, but displaying a fanged human face with ophidian eyes in the centre of its body, skittered down the side of an untouched building. It leapt several yards in one bound to get close to the infantrymen.
Karl realised that this might very well be the last battle he ever fought. He was determined to make it count and sell his life dear, as would all of his men. This was what they had been born to, the life of a soldier was the only life any of them had ever known. Karl couldn’t imagine meeting his end any other way.
“Come on, boys!” the old Reiklander captain shouted grimly over the tumult of the warp storm. “This is it. This could be our last stand. Make it count!”
Shouting the war cry of the armies of the Reik, the halberdiers prepared to sell their souls at a very high price indeed.
Spells roared from the hands and staffs of the two wizards like screaming skull-face comets. They streaked through the tortured air as the Chaos sorcerer and the Imperial wizard each tried to bring ruin upon each other. Arcane gestures and sweeps of their magical totems lessened their impact.
A raging inferno swirled around them, sparking eddies of power bursting from the mage-storm and exploding like firecrackers in the air. The flames leapt higher, as if in response to the fury of the magical duel being waged in the square. Every building around them was burning now, like a fiery barricade that kept other players in the battle at bay.
As they battled in their unreal otherworld of sorcery, the unnatural light of the spectral storm overhead combined with the blasts of their spells to illuminate the two combatants.
The Chaos sorcerer was so suffused with magical power that nothing Gerhart did seemed to touch him. They would fight on until exhaustion eventually claimed one of them. Gerhart feared he would be the first to tire. For while the sorcerer had the fearsome skull in his possession the winds of magic were drawn straight to him, to fuel his spells as well as his magical defences. Thanks to the barrage of sorcery directed at him by the warp-enchanter, Gerhart could not get near enough to his opponent to disrupt his spell-casting.
Gerhart was on the verge of losing his temper but he somehow managed to focus his mind and keep a tight rein on his powers. He feared—he knew—that if he lost control now, with the Chaos storm raging above him, he too could go too far into his own magic and never be able to return. He would become a feral thing like the creature he had encountered in the hills above Keulerdorf. And if that happened Chaos would have his soul and what semblance remained of his humanity. His individuality and personality would be swallowed up in a haze of soul-destroying madness. Gerhart Brennend would not allow that to become his fate.
The heroic effort he was making to remain in control was costing him dear. In spite of the wind of Aqshy surging through him, he still felt himself weakening with every spell he cast. Gerhart did not know how much longer he could keep his efforts up for.
He was only vaguely aware of the Reiklanders battling the Chaos spawn around them. He was becoming more and more aware of the bone-aching weariness that threatened to overwhelm him. Then, weakened, with his guard down, the Chaos sorcerer would step in for the kill, no doubt savouring the moment of victory.
The burning brand inside his mind began to sputter and spark fitfully. Gerhart sensed that he could only really channel one more spell before he was spent.
Then it came to him, as lucidity comes to an old man on his deathbed, when there is nothing more that can be said or done.
Gerhart staggered backwards, leaning on his staff for support. The flame trailing from the end of the oaken bough coughed and went out. Perverse satisfaction flashed in the Chaos sorcerer’s unblinking, coal-eyed stare. The bright wizard sagged to his knees on the hot cobbles of the square. His nemesis took a step towards him.
“Before I kill you it is only right that you should know the name of the one who has robbed you of your strength, your art and your life, so that when your soul has become the plaything of daemons you will be tormented for all eternity by the knowledge,” the Chaos sorcerer declared cruelly. “I am Vendhal Skullwarper and the warping storms of Chaos are mine to command!” the sorcerer pronounced, his voice rising above the howling of the storm and its Chaos-spawned offspring.
“And I,” growled a sweat-streaming Gerhart, “am Gerhart Brennend, pyromancer of the Bright order and keeper of the keys of Azimuth. Now burn in hell, you bastard!” and with that the fire mage released the spell he had been holding back—one last magical missile that burned with the intense heat of a volcano.
The monstrous fireball, a flame-wreathed screaming skull of a comet, blasted at the sorcerer, hitting him with all the force of a meteorite crashing to earth. Possessed of a supreme arrogance in his own abilities, the gloating sorcerer had fallen for Gerhart’s piece of ham acting, and had left himself ope
n to a close range attack.
Vendhal Skullwarper was sent flying through the whirling air by the impact of the fireball and smashed through the burning bricks and mortar of a building. With a ravenous roar, the blazing timbers of the structure’s roof gave way, crashing down on the sorcerer in a great cloud of blossoming sparks.
For a moment Gerhart believed he had stopped the master of the Chaos storm, but the wreckage of the burning building was thrown clear and the Chaos sorcerer strode out of the ruins, his body seemingly unharmed. He was surrounded by an aura of writhing multi-coloured energy, the ever-changing colours looking like the swirling spectrum of oil on water.
So charged with magic was Vendhal Skullwarper that Gerhart’s final, most powerful spell had not caused him any damage at all.
But it had made him drop the glittering skull.
Karl witnessed the blow the Imperial wizard dealt the sorcerer, and saw the servant of Chaos hurtle through the wall of the burning building, the malignant skull flying from his grasp. Then, in horror, he watched the sorcerer rise from the ashes, apparently unharmed.
The gleaming skull landed with a clatter amongst the scalding cobbles and scattered pieces of burning material. He did not fully understand why, but Karl knew that he had to get hold of the skull before the Chaos sorcerer did.
With a sharp thrust of his gore-encrusted halberd, the veteran soldier dispatched the half-fish thing that was hopping towards him, hissing like a serpent, opening its belly with a deft twist of his weapon. Something akin to stinking broth gushed from the wound. There did not appear to be any solid organs amongst the mess. Karl forced his tired leg muscles into a sprint, desperation and adrenaline lending him strength.
Karl reached the spot where the skull lay just in time to kick it from the grasp of a slime-exuding, tentacled thing. With a sharp thrust he brought the heavy haft of his weapon down on top of the shimmering-hued bony object.
There was a crack like a thunderclap as the skull exploded and Karl was lifted off his feet to crash to the ground again several yards away as the warp storm went berserk.
With the destruction of the Chaos sorcerer’s potent talisman, it was not only the warping storm that changed as the link holding it all together was broken.
The sorcerer was screaming, his shrill, high-pitched shrieks cutting through the voice of the storm like a bell. His cloak streamed out behind him, and he became the focus of the storm’s rage.
Something else was happening to the sorcerer as well.
Gerhart saw it most clearly in the man’s puffy grey features. The flesh there rippled like the wind-blown surface of a lake. The fire faded from the sorcerer’s eyes, which now bulged and retracted as the warping power flooded through every part of his body searching for a means of escape.
Unable to contain the raw warping energy surging through it, Vendhal Skullwarper’s body reached breaking point and warped out. Arms and legs twisted at unnatural angles. Other bones and joints bent out of shape, thrusting at the man’s deforming flesh from inside. His staff was torn from his grasp and spun away.
Still screaming, the mutating Chaos sorcerer was carried up into the spiralling vortex by hurricane force winds. He was sucked up into the heart of the storm, his body twisting horribly out of shape in excruciating throes, until he was no more than a dark speck against the flickering, roiling, unnatural clouds.
Gerhart gradually became conscious of a shout coming from the soldiers still battling around them. It was the Reikland captain. “We have to get out of here, now!” the veteran soldier was screaming.
The bright wizard glanced up at the boiling clouds above him. The thunderheads had darkened to purple like a spreading bruise, and the clouds roiled like milk poured into water. The Chaos sorcerer was gone, Wolfenburg had been razed and there was nothing more that they could do now.
With the command, the survivors of the halberdier regiment, several sporting gaping wounds delivered by scything claws, brutal fangs and contusions caused by constricting tentacles or pseudopods, rallied. Reimann prepared to lead his men out of the city again. The howling hurricane had blown out many of the flames so that now a way could be navigated between the burning buildings. Gerhart, exhaustion threatening to overwhelm him, leaning heavily on his staff for support, turned to follow.
A new sound came to his ears over the whining of the wind and the crackling of the flames. Hearing an insane giggling, the wizard turned. Behind him, on the other side of the square, standing between two burning buildings, was a figure wearing an all-enveloping cloak.
“Gerhart Brennend!” the stranger called. There was something familiar about the voice. “We meet again.”
An arm emerged from the folds of the heavy cloak and the figure aimed the flintlock pistol at the fire wizard. With a ratcheting click the firearm was primed. The pyromancer had seen that weapon before. He had been in a similar position once before.
The cloaked stranger threw back the hood of his cloak to reveal the horribly disfigured, burn-scarred face beneath. Regardless of the terrible changes that had been wrought upon the man’s body, there was enough about him for Gerhart to recognise the man as being his one-time judge, jury and would-be executioner, the witch hunter Gottfried Verdammen.
Verdammen’s manner retained nothing of its previous composure. It was apparent to Gerhart that the terrible burns the witch hunter had suffered at the fire wizard’s hands, and all that he had witnessed since from within Wolfenburg had driven him insane. How had he even survived his fireball spell, Gerhart found himself wondering?
Verdammen giggled again, a disconcerting, childish sound. “I won’t miss this time,” he said, and fired the pistol.
There was no way of avoiding the shot and the bullet found its mark. Gerhart was spun round by the force of the impact and went down, falling into the ruins of a burning house.
The witch hunter’s hysterical laughter ceased abruptly as the fire mage rose from the flames like the legendary phoenix of Arabian myth, born again from the fires of its own destruction.
Gerhart’s robes had caught fire. His eyes blazed and balls of scintillating flame surrounded his bunched fists. The flames of the burning building flickered and writhed, forming a roaring vortex of fire with the pyromancer at its heart. Dark blood dribbled from the bullet-hole in the wizard’s shoulder.
At first the terribly scarred witch hunter’s face fell, then the hysterical laughter returned. Verdammen was still cackling like an inmate of an asylum when the smouldering fire mage cast his spell.
Racing, writhing flames burst from the wizard’s stabbing fingertips, eating up the space between the mage and the witch hunter. By the time the conjuration reached Verdammen it had become a roiling ball of fire that burst around him in a molten flood. Clothes, hair and skin charred, sizzled and blistered as Gerhart obliterated his nemesis in a fiery, bone-burning conflagration.
Within seconds the searing blast turned the witch hunter into a blackened skeleton and a cloud of whirling ash that was carried up to the heavens by the ascending thermals. As the furious blast furnace roar of the flames died so at last it seemed did the madman’s hysterical laughter.
And with that, the temper that Gerhart had struggled so hard to control burst like a ruptured dam. The searing pain of the bullet wound he had sustained had been the final straw. The one thing that he had tried so hard to prevent had come to pass. He lost control of the raging magic coursing through his veins like molten magma.
Fires raged.
Wolfenburg burned.
And all hell was let loose once again as the pain-maddened pyromancer went on the rampage like a man possessed.
TWELVE
Winds of Change
I felt I was racing over the world, following the writhing tendril, but now it seemed to my mind’s eye more like a wind, only a wind made of impossible colours, that chose their own course as they blew over ice-capped mountains, stormy seas and brooding forests. And at last I found myself descending with the magical winds t
o those places where the dead lie, and my heart was heavy for then I understood the truth of the fate that awaits all those who would practise the art of magic.”
—From the Liber Hereticus,
Chapter LVIII, “Galdrath’s Vision”
Autumn had come at last and the prevailing wind stopped blowing from the north and began to blow the last warmth of summer from the south. The leaves on the trees curled from emerald to gold.
Several days had passed since the sacking of Wolfenburg by Surtha Lenk’s Chaos horde. The Northmen had run through the city streets putting everyone they found to the sword to the glory of their dark masters and setting all the buildings to the torch in their wake. Much of the ancient, sentinel city had been razed to the ground thanks to the machinations of the marauders, the intervention of terrifyingly powerful sinister entities, and the subsequent fire that had spread rapidly through the close-packed streets and half-timbered buildings.
The morning after, the warbands had raised their hateful skull-stacks outside the broken curtain wall on the mud-churned meadow at the bend in the river. They baptised them with the blood of further human sacrifices, souls slaughtered in a second massacre, almost as horrendous as that which had occurred the night before. They spent the rest of the day celebrating the downfall of their landmark conquest, singing blasphemous hymns of praise to their vile patron gods, and lauding the fell powers.
Those who had survived the breaking of the city had fled north-west away from the rampaging Chaos horde. These same refugees—soldiers mainly, their units broken and routed—knew there was nothing they could do now to drive back the invaders other than regroup and plan their next course of action. Some townsfolk joined them in their flight, only stopping when the city and the shouts and screams of the Kurgan war company were a memory, echoing in their ears. Once they reached the foothills of the great mist-shrouded foothills of the Middle Mountains and they made camp there.
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