Fassbinder shook his head. Schulmann regarded him carefully. His wounds were serious, and he looked in great pain. And yet he didn’t beg for his life, nor rave with contempt. He remembered the horseman he had seen after the failure at the ambush. Had that been Fassbinder? He had to assume so.
‘Leave your self pity out of this,’ Schulmann said bitterly. ‘We’ve both come too far to regret our actions. There’s no going back.’
Fassbinder sighed, and looked down at the floor.
‘So why don’t you kill me?’ he said quietly. ‘As long as I’m alive, I’m a threat. If our roles were reversed, I’d do it.’
He looked back up, an expectant expression on his face. Despite his wounds, his chin was held high, and his eyes showed no fear. Schulmann reached inside a leather pouch, and withdrew some scrolls. They were stained with mud and blood, but were still legible. He spread them out and held them up in front of the captain.
‘I’ve had these for some time,’ Schulmann said. ‘None of my men can read the code. You can. I want to know what’s written in them. The way we got them makes me think there’s something important in them. You, captain, will tell me their contents. I don’t like torture, but I’m no callow goatherd. I’ll use it if I have to. You’d better start talking.’
Fassbinder smiled coldly.
‘You really think I’d help you?’ the captain asked, bracing himself in his chair in readiness for what might come. ‘Never.’
Schulmann rose, and pushed the scrolls closer to his face.
‘Think carefully, captain,’ he said, an edge of menace in his voice. ‘I’ll be honest, I can’t bring myself to hate you as much as I thought I would. But this cause is everything to me, and I owe it to the men. Read it!’
Fassbinder shook his head sadly, but as he did so his eyes caught something on the pages. His gaze was held, and he scanned quickly across the remainder. His face, already pale, seemed to drain of its residual blood.
‘By Sigmar!’ he breathed.
Fassbinder seemed to diminish in the chair. His frame, held so proudly erect, slumped. An agony of frustration and anguish was etched on his ravaged face.
‘What is it?’ pressed Schulmann urgently. ‘What did you read?’
Fassbinder didn’t reply at once, seemingly caught up in his own internal torment. But then he looked up again, a desperate expression on his face.
‘Though I’ll be damned for this, I’ll tell you,’ he said, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. ‘But you must listen to me. All of this, everything we’ve done, is irrelevant beside what is to come. You’re asking me to betray all I believe in, to help one who has turned against my rightful lord. I’ll do it. But I beg you, listen to what I say. By Sigmar’s grace, you must listen!’
Schulmann frowned in confusion. The captain looked distraught. He nodded slowly. Something in the man’s voice compelled him.
‘Very well,’ he said, pulling his chair close. ‘Tell me.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Morgil stooped close to the ground, his eyes glinting in the dusk. The shadows of the trees lay in bars across the forest floor. The sky was as tormented as it had been since he had arrived in Elthin Arvan. Streaks of flecked cloud were driven fast and high by the unquiet air. The light of the Chaos moon, slick and lurid, lay across the land like a curse.
The White Lion rose soundlessly. His keen ears could hear the slightest movement, but nothing stirred in the dark wood. The place was sick. On his long journey north from Altdorf, he had seen for himself the blight on the land. Empty villages, deserted farms. Even the beasts of the field had suffered. In some abandoned paddocks, grotesque mockeries of cattle and horses had limped and bellowed. The carcasses of their unaffected kin lay rotting in the mud, bite marks glistening on their flesh. All health had been replaced with affliction, all order with perversion. The city had been bad enough, but the trackless depths of the wilderness were far worse.
Picking up a faint trace of noise ahead, he broke into a loping run. His footfalls were impossibly quiet, but he still managed a steady pace. He flitted through the trees like a shade, his pale clothing reflecting the tainted moonlight dully. He had come many leagues since leaving Altdorf. His quarry, the dark elf, had gone amazingly quickly. Even for one of her kind, she was skilled in subterfuge and concealment. She had left no obvious tracks, nor rested for a moment in her desperate flight from vengeance. Morgil did not fool himself that she was running from him. The way she had fought spoke of a dark pride in her abilities. If she didn’t have some other errand, she would have turned by now, cornered him in some dark and forgotten part of the forest and resumed the duel.
No, there was some other purpose to her retreat. She went fast, as fast as anyone Morgil had ever tracked. She never tired, never deviated, never flagged. Despite his skill, he worried that the trail had gone cold. The last sign of her passing had been two days ago. His vengeance would have to wait.
As Morgil ran, the trees slipped past smoothly in the semi-darkness. His senses had been honed to perfection over a lifetime of tracking. The startled bound of a roe deer, many yards away in the deep forest, was as clear to him as a bell chime. Lit with the corrupted sheen of Morrsleib, the foliage around him stood sharply against the shadows. There were still noises ahead, very distant, but clear for all that. Perhaps plague beasts. They infested the forests, even though their numbers seemed to be falling as the worst of the contagion eased. If the dark elf had stumbled into a band of such monsters, Morgil knew he would stand alongside her to slay them all before turning his axe against her. He wanted no other hand to share in her slaying. So it had always been with him. All or nothing. That is what had caused all the trouble in Ulthuan, had prevented his induction into the Phoenix King’s retinue, had seen him nearly banished from Chrace. Artheris had saved him, taken in the young, wayward warrior and schooled him as best she could in restraint. But he could not change. Khera’s death had only heightened his lonely sense of defiance.
The noises were becoming louder. They were plague creatures indeed, crashing through the undergrowth clumsily. Even when human they had no doubt been lumbering imbeciles. Now consumed with the plague-generated mania they were little more than animals. The trees clustered thickly on all sides. They were tall and ancient, their trunks lined with clinging fronds of vine and mould. Sounds of battle echoed amongst them from ahead, booming eerily in the vault-like spaces. He was coming closer.
Morgil smoothly shifted the weight of his axe into his preferred left hand, picked up speed, and uttered a brief prayer to Kurnous under his breath. Not for his own safety – that would be beneath contempt – but for the swift discovery of his quarry and an honourable kill. So all hunters prayed in Ulthuan before entering the domain of their most prized prey, the white lions they both hunted and venerated.
He burst from the shadows. The stink assailed his senses immediately. With a snarling hiss, three plague creatures turned towards him. With just two perfectly aimed thrusts of the axe, they fell to the ground, eviscerated. Morgil leapt over them and collided heavily with a fourth beast. Using his momentum to knock it backwards, he followed up with a savage zig-zag swipe. Its head slid from its crumbing torso, falling to the ground in a cascade of blood. He was coming to the heart of it. There were human voices raised in anger. The sound of a pistol rang out through the trees. A roar of aggression followed. There was a flash of crimson light, and a blast of hot air rushed past him. Checking his direction slightly, Morgil raced towards the new sounds. If there were humans in the forest they were surely doomed.
Smashing his way through a grasping band of plague beasts, he burst from their clutches and into a wide, open area. The Chaos moon poured its baleful light into the clearing, and Morgil could see the dozens of plague creatures basking in its cloying luminescence as they groped their way towards their prey. Dozens more of them lay in the mire, their limbs hacked off or ribcages smashed. Many had horrific burn marks. Whoever they were hunting, they were no mere band of pe
asants or militia.
A cry rang out, and a wall of fire burst into being ahead. The plague creatures ploughed into it regardless. Many of them ignited and crumpled in agony. The flames swept across them. Morgil flung himself to the ground, feeling the intense heat scream over him, inches above his prone body. It was magical fire, and his asur senses detected the Wind of Aqshy swirling within it. No branch kindled, only flesh. But the casting, for all its impressive appearance, was weak. The mage behind it was clearly tired. The rushing fire blew itself out, and Morgil sprang to his feet once more. All around him the plague creatures staggered towards him. One half-dead monstrosity, burned black and writhing in the mud, blindly grabbed his ankle. Another flung itself at him, its stench almost as overpowering as its body weight. Others loomed behind them. The sheer number of mutants was beginning to pose a problem.
Morgil let his body go briefly limp, putting the stinking hulk pushing against him off-balance, before twisting away and bringing the axe-blade heavily down on its back. A second stroke severed the fingers scrabbling at his feet. He savagely punched another plague beast aside, crushed another’s skull with his axe pommel, and then burst from the horde. There were three humans before him. A wizard, his face pale and drawn, trying to summon fresh magic without a staff. A knight, hauling a broadsword with impressive strength, his raw bellows still full of defiance. A witch hunter, coolly using her short sword with great skill, an icy hatred etched on her solid face.
The knight swung his huge sword in Morgil’s direction. The blow was clumsy, perhaps misdirected by fatigue. The White Lion casually ducked beneath the swipe before turning and dispatching the nearest plague mutant with aplomb.
‘Fool!’ he snapped. ‘Save your haymaking for the mutants.’
The knight stared at him for a moment, eyes wide with surprise, before the grasping limbs of another plague beast drew him away. His companions were too busy to react. Giving up for the moment on thoughts of his quest, Morgil let himself relax into a state of pure martial awareness. If his movements had been quick before, they became a blur. The axe ceased to be a separate entity, and became fused with his body. The movements of his enemies became, as they always did, strangely sluggish. He felt the fire of his soul surge, his blood pulse with a savage heat. In such a state, he was death incarnate. Bodies piled up around him. A savage roar burst from his normally silent mouth, and he sliced and danced his way through the crowd of unnatural, twisted bodies with something approaching mania. Blood flew. Bone crunched. Flesh ripped. Awareness of the real world passed into memory, and his consciousness sunk into a focussed point of aggression. The spirit of the lion animated him, and all that remained was the hunt, the fight, the killing.
After what seemed like mere moments, but was in reality much longer, the tide ebbed. Even the plague creatures, their senses dulled to all but horror and blood-lust, were cowed. They began to retreat, limping and skulking back into the shadows. The cadavers of their kin lay in piles around them. Slowly, haltingly, they retreated to the trees. They went slowly, grudgingly. As their numbers thinned, some remembrance of fear stirred in their fevered minds. More fell. The rest broke into a lurching run, merging into the shadows of the forest like wraiths. A howl of frustration rose from the branches, and fell away mournfully. For the moment, they were gone.
Morgil allowed his senses to return to their usual pitch. He looked around him. The humans still lived. The wizard was near the end of his strength, but fire burned fitfully in the palms of his hands. The knight slumped to the ground, his heavy armour dented and scored by hundreds of long scratches. The witch hunter limped over to him, her face lined with fatigue.
She dropped to the ground beside him, looking utterly exhausted. Morgil sat beside her. The intense burning in his eyes had extinguished, and his features had returned to their normal composed arrangement. He waited patiently for her breathing to return to normal. He had no contempt for her, nor for her companions. They had fought well, and might have been doing so for hours before he had arrived.
‘So,’ she said at length. ‘Who in Sigmar’s name are you?’
‘Morgil of Chrace,’ he said in his halting, imperfect Reikspiel. ‘And you?’
Annika introduced herself and the others. The knight and wizard had recovered some of their poise. Dieter looked around him with distaste, and painfully rose to his feet.
‘We cannot stay here,’ the knight said, his voice dry. ‘These plague beasts are lethal, even in death. We should burn them, and move on.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ said Alexander in a surly voice, sounding exhausted.
Morgil looked around the scene of desolation. The knight was right. The place was heavy with contagion and death.
‘The bodies will have to lie here,’ he said flatly. ‘You must find a better place to rest.’
Morgil turned around to see the trio of humans looking at him with undisguised suspicion. For a moment, he was tempted to return their scorn, and disappear back into the trees. But such a move would be foolish. Even for one of his skills, the shadows were perilous. Though he was loathe to admit it to himself, the trail of the dark elf had given out. He had grown weary, and until matters resolved themselves, allies would be welcome.
‘You do not trust me,’ Morgil said to the humans.
Dieter stared at him darkly, looking unwittingly murderous in the dark with his blood-splattered armour. Alexander seemed nearly as reticent, but said nothing. Annika, the witch hunter, seemed to be in charge.
‘It’s not common to find one of your kind in the Reikwald,’ she said. ‘These are strange times.’
Morgil shrugged. The air of either wonder or aggression shown towards him by humans had long since become tiresome.
‘So they are,’ he said. ‘But talking about it will do us no good. The creatures are numerous. We should remain together, at least until the dawn. Then I’ll be on my way. To part now would be unwise, for both of us.’
The witch hunter looked pensive for a moment. Morgil suspected that if they had been less exhausted, the humans would have resisted his offer. But their faces were all heavy with fatigue.
‘Very well,’ Annika said at last. ‘We’ll tell each other our stories as we move. I assume your presence here is not an accident any more than ours is.’
‘Indeed,’ said Morgil darkly.
The White Lion turned and began to scout out a route up to higher ground. The rest of the weary group collected themselves, brushed the worst of the grime and gore from their clothes, and joined him. Painfully, haltingly, the unlikely band walked from the scene of destruction and back into the endless sea of trees.
Dawn was near, but the ever-present cloud cover masked the sun and kept the land shrouded in gloom. On a jagged plateau of iron-dark granite, a vast castle stood against the horizon. A few narrow windows flecked its mighty sides with brief orange light, but otherwise it sat in shadows. Like all Imperial keeps, it was heavily-built, with massive stone buttresses supporting a collection of towers, pinnacles and sheer-roofed halls.
This was no nobleman’s folly or country retreat. It was a keep designed for war and siege. The battlements were cut from stone a yard thick, the dry moat was wide and studded with spikes of twisted metal. The massive gates were barred by a mighty iron-bound drawbridge. Murder holes perforated the stone above it, and arrow slits marked every wall. The land was bleak in every direction, empty and devoid of life. It was a formidable location, and was the home of a formidable man. Castle Grauenburg mimicked the character of its owner. Dour, huge, unshakeable.
As the eastern horizon finally began to show a faint blush of red, a lone horseman made his way along the stone pathway towards the gates. He rode erratically, and the horse stumbled more than once before arriving beneath the soaring walls. Some signal was given, and the drawbridge began to lower. It was huge. As it slowly descended, thick chains the width of a man’s waist became visible. The scrape of metal against metal filled the air, and the noise of intricate machinery clan
ged from the vault beneath.
The wooden drawbridge fell on to its stone heel with a resounding boom. The horseman entered, passing under the shadow of the mighty ramparts and into darkness. Behind him, the portcullis began to creep downwards again. With a shriek of metal, the drawbridge started to rise. The chains, mighty as they were, shuddered and creaked as the vast construction of oak and iron was hauled high. Eventually, the machinery ceased its clashing, and the breach was sealed. The castle sat inviolate once more.
In a chamber high up in the central tower, Lord Grauenburg waited on a throne of burnished bronze. Little natural light struggled through the narrow windows. Great metal bowls filled with a lurid fire lit the cavernous space. Cold, unadorned stone walls rose high, tapering towards the roof thirty feet up. The chamber was furnished sparsely. Aside from the mighty throne, decorated with the emblems of Grauenburg’s long and proud line, there was a simple altar to Sigmar and three tattered standards. The flags had been nearly worn away with age, and hung limply in the chill air. A fireplace of huge dimensions sat in the centre of the wall on the left-hand side, but only embers lay in the grate. Grauenburg sat alone, seemingly lost in thought. An empty flagon and a crystal goblet sat on the stone steps at his feet.
A firm knock came from outside. The lord stirred slightly, and motioned with a finger. Though no servants were visible, the doors opened. A thin figure entered. The horseman. He walked up to the throne, his boots clattering on the stone and breaking the silence. When six feet before Grauenburg, he abased himself fully. The doors closed behind him with a heavy clang of metal.
‘Rachsdorf,’ said Lord Grauenburg. ‘You may rise.’
The sorcerer clambered to his feet stiffly. Rachsdorf seemed wounded, and clutched his midriff anxiously. He was pale and clammy. Grauenburg looked at him with disgust. The man was weak. He had made a misjudgement with this one. Some men controlled the powers of the gods well, others badly. He had thought Rachsdorf capable of dealing with the knowledge he had been given. His judgement had been poor on this occasion. The thought angered him, and he regarded the sorcerer darkly.
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