by Nathan Long
She smiled, her eyes focusing behind him. ‘That won’t be long.’
Reiner glanced back. The stable doors were swinging out, pushed open by a mass of nurglings spilling into the yard like a river breaking through a dam.
‘Your doom is upon you,’ laughed Anyaka.
Reiner cursed and scrambled painfully to his feet. ‘At least you won’t live to rejoice in it.’ He lunged at her and cut her shoulder.
She yelped and ran, trying to angle toward to the street, but Reiner blocked her way, slashing again. The nurglings swarmed toward them, their little eyes glinting in the lamp light like jewels.
Anyaka wheeled for the brothel’s back door and disappeared into the kitchen. Reiner was behind her, limping madly.
The nurglings were right behind him.
ANYAKA AND REINER crashed through the narrow kitchen, frightening the Kislevite cook and the half-naked serving maids, and burst into the brothel’s front room, a candle-lit salon crowded with rowdy, red-faced knights and laughing, languorous harlots.
‘Save me!’ cried Anyaka. ‘Save me, gentles! He means to slay me!’
‘Stop her!’ bellowed Reiner. ‘She’s a sorceress! She’s loosed a plague upon us!’
But both appeals were lost in a rising chorus of shrieks and curses as the nurglings erupted from the kitchen and fell upon the revellers. Harlots screamed and climbed the furniture, drunken knights roared and bashed at the nurglings with daggers, bottles and candlesticks, shouting for their swords. In their inebriated state, the men did as much damage to each other as to the nurglings: wild swings cut fingers, mashed toes and bloodied noses. Fights broke out among friends.
In this carnage the nurglings flourished; raking eyes, biting hands and feet, opening veins in leg, neck and arm. All over the room harlots and soldiers alike shrieked as blood pumped from shredded arteries. Others fell to the floor with severed tendons to drown in a chittering swell of teeth and claws.
Caught in this mad whirlpool, Reiner and Anyaka continued their chase. Reiner felt like he was in a dream, where no matter how swiftly he ran, he moved only inches, but at last he cornered the sorceress in a romantic nook, complete with a love seat and plaster cherubs.
‘Spare me!’ cried Anyaka, piteously.
‘As you spared Hennig?’ Reiner pulled back for the killing thrust, but strong hands pinned his arms.
‘How now, sir?’ said a black-bearded knight. ‘Do you violence to the good lady?’
‘For shame,’ said another, a blond giant with cavalry braids.
‘She’s not a good lady,’ panted Reiner. ‘She’s a priestess of Nurgle!’
‘Protect me, noble knights!’ Anyaka begged. ‘It is he who is a servant of Nurgle. It is he who has summoned these foul vermin.’
‘A sorcerer, hey?’ said the first knight. ‘He has the look.’
‘Don’t believe her!’ said Reiner desperately. ‘She wears marks of Chaos carved into her very flesh. Open her robe and look for yourself.’
The blond knight punched him in the face. ‘Swine! Dare you ask us to abuse a Sister of Shallya thus?’
Reiner spat blood. ‘But she’s—’
He was interrupted as a pack of nurglings discovered the party and attacked. Anyaka bolted from the alcove. Roaring in pain, the knights dropped Reiner and slashed at the nurglings with wild abandon.
Reiner wormed between the two giants, chopping at clinging nurglings as he went, and ran back into the salon. He spied Anyaka through the surging crowd, making for the kitchen. He ploughed after her, and after a frantic push reached the kitchen and rushed through it. A serving maid sobbed, eyeless, in a corner. The cook lay sizzling in his cooking fire, dead from a thousand bites.
Reiner ran into the yard. Anyaka wasn’t there. He limped quickly to the stable and listened. A murmur of chanting reached him.
Picking up a wooden bucket, he crept down the aisle past poor Hennig’s bones to the tack room door, and listened again. The chanting continued unabated. He looked in. Anyaka had righted the frying pan and was once again filling it with poisonous ingredients, muttering over it all the while.
Reiner drew back. He hefted the bucket, took a deep breath, then spun into the door and hurled it. The bucket crashed into the brazier, overturning it, scattering hot coals and sending the frying pan flying.
Anyaka shrieked and fell back as boiling liquid splashed her. Reiner limped forward, sabre high, but the sorceress rolled away from him, around the fire. Reiner attempted to turn, but had to leap awkwardly over the spreading pool of poison and jarred his bad leg. Anyaka scrambled out of the door.
Reiner staggered after her, kicking through the fire that was spreading across the straw-covered floor. The stable aisle was empty, but he could hear the sorceress moaning from one of the stalls. He approached it cautiously. Anyaka was crooning as if enjoying the most sensuous pleasures imaginable. ‘Lord Nurgle, I thank you for this glorious pain, for the poison that wracks my body so deliciously, for the gift of plague that I shall spread to all who feel my touch.’
Reiner looked into the stall. Anyaka huddled beside an exploded corpse, but as Reiner’s flame-cast shadow crossed her, she looked up. He stepped back, aghast. The boiling poison had splashed her face, raising flame-red blisters from her left temple to her chin. Her lips on that side had shrivelled away from her teeth, and her left eye was a bulging white orb with no pupil, too big for its socket.
With an animal snarl the sorceress leapt at him, the corpse’s curved Kislevite sword in her hand. Reiner parried, but her blow was so powerful it knocked his blade against his brow, stunning him. He fell back, Anyaka raining blows on him like twenty women. She was frighteningly strong, striking sparks with every slash. His sabre was soon so pitted it looked like a saw blade.
At last he bound her high, but she kicked him in the chest and he flew back, crashing against a stall. She advanced slowly, smiling, the fire from the tack room billowing into the aisle behind her.
‘I congratulate you, my lord,’ she said. ‘You have stopped my plans from reaching fruition.’ She raised her sword to her face and drew the honed edge down her scalded flesh, slicing open angry blisters. Thick yellow pus oozed out, coating the blade and eating into its steel. ‘But there will be other camps, and other greedy fools ready to help a poor Sister of Shallya in need.’
‘You won’t win many hearts with that face, lass,’ said Reiner, struggling to get up.
‘Grandfather will heal me, as he has before. He will hide my wounds and corruption within, so that I may walk among the populace undetected and spread his blessings to all.’
Reiner grimaced. ‘I begin to be glad we didn’t kiss.’
She lunged with the poison blade. Reiner blocked it an inch from his face. Its foul ichor choked him. He staggered back, and she pressed her attack, forcing him toward a mound of burning hay. The fire was spreading quickly. The posts that held the hayloft were trees of flame. Hot smoke burned Reiner’s eyes, but he couldn’t blink, couldn’t let Anyaka past his guard, for the merest scratch from her blade would mean death. His lungs ached. His strength was waning, while hers seemed only to increase. He dodged a slash and fell backward over Hennig’s bones. She knocked his sabre away into a flaming stall, then stepped over him, triumphant, raising her sword for the killing blow.
Reiner scrabbled for something, anything, to throw, and grabbed Hennig’s skull. He hurled it. It caught her on her blistered face. She barked in pain and stumbled back.
Reiner rolled to his feet and kicked her before she could recover. He looked frantically for a weapon. His sword was behind a wall of flame. A length of rope hung coiled on a peg. He grabbed it.
Anyaka lunged again. Reiner dodged and stepped behind her, looping the rope around her neck like a garrotte. She flailed wildly. Her sword bit into his boot. Had she cut him? He couldn’t tell.
He kicked her legs out from under her. She choked and thrashed again with her sword. He needed to get away from that poisoned steel. He threw two m
ore loops of rope around her neck and knotted it, then jumped back.
Hissing like a cat, Anyaka scrabbled at the rope, but before she could free herself, Reiner tossed the coil over a beam and hauled on it. Anyaka jerked into the air, kicking and retching. Reiner heaved again until she swung a yard off the ground. She dropped her sword and clawed at the makeshift noose.
Reiner laughed. ‘Where’s your grandfather now, witch?’
Anyaka turned flame-reflecting eyes on him, so filled with hate that, impossible as it was for her to reach him, Reiner still stepped back. She ceased struggling and began instead to spit out a rasping incantation while calmly moving her hands in sinuous patterns. A green glow began trailing from them. Fear gripped Reiner’s heart as he felt invisible forces squeezing his windpipe, shutting off his breath like the rope shut off Anyaka’s. He’d hung her, and she was still killing him.
Choking, eyes streaming from pain and smoke, Reiner darted forward and snatched Anyaka’s poisoned blade from below her feet. She kicked feebly at him, still chanting.
Reiner’s throat closed entirely. The world turned black and red and spun past his eyes. He swung the blade blindly and was rewarded with the satisfying bite of steel into flesh. Anyaka cried out. Her incantation stopped, and the pressure in Reiner’s neck eased. He swung again and again, until the sorceress’s screams stopped at last.
Reiner collapsed to the ground, sucking air as his throat opening fully. Hennig’s skull looked at him, tilted at a jaunty angle. Reiner nodded to it. ‘Thank you, lad. Well struck.’
The flames encroached from all sides. Reiner was just heaving himself up and make for the door when a group of men hurried through it.
‘What’s all this?’ asked a familiar voice.
Reiner squinted through the smoke. It was Captain Deiter Ulstaadt and the watch.
‘Hetzau,’ cried Deiter. ‘I might have known. What in Sigmar’s name have you done?’
‘Saved the Empire,’ coughed Reiner, staggering up. ‘Or at least this little bit of it.’
‘You call murdering a Sister of Shallya saving the Empire?’
‘But she wasn’t. She was a priestess of Nurgle. She meant to spread disease and confusion through the camp.’
Deiter scowled sceptically. ‘This little thing? I don’t believe it.’
Reiner waved behind him. ‘Look in the tack room. She covered it with unholy symbols. She was brewing…’
The tack room collapsed in an explosion of falling beams and roaring flames. Reiner and Deiter and his men jumped back.
‘Most convenient,’ drawled Deiter.
‘But, but… look at her. Look under her robes. She’s carved marks of Chaos in her flesh!’
Deiter wrinkled his nose. ‘You ask a Knight of the Banner to look upon a woman’s nakedness?’
‘No, you pompous ass!’ cried Reiner, losing patience, ‘I ask you to use your head for once in your miserable life!’
Deiter sniffed. ‘I think we have had more than enough of that.’ He motioned to his men. ‘Bring him.’
The guardsmen marched Reiner out, still protesting, just seconds before the roof beam cracked and the stable collapsed.
In the yard, soldiers, knights and harlots had formed a bucket brigade to try and quench the fire, while the brothel’s neighbours were draping their roofs and walls with wet blankets. Others were tending to those who had been maimed and killed by the nurgling invasion.
‘He’s the one!’ shouted a pikeman, pointing at Reiner. ‘He’s the villain who lead those little horrors into the brothel.’
‘And he the one who talk me into putting up sick people in first place,’ said Madam Tolshnaya, bustling up importantly.
Deiter glared at Reiner. ‘After I turned them away?’
‘And I saw him earlier today,’ said a handgunner. ‘He kicked a body off a cart and it exploded with nurglings.’
‘Actually, it exploded, then I kicked it off,’ said Reiner weakly, but nobody was listening.
The burly acolyte of Morr pushed through the crowd. ‘And he left a corpse at the mortuary that birthed a swarm of monsters!’
Deiter looked at Reiner in disgust. ‘It becomes clear that it was you, not the sister, who meant to spread disease and confusion, that it is you who is the servant of Chaos.’ He raised his voice. ‘Reiner Hetzau, in the name of our benevolent Emperor, Karl-Franz, I arrest you for the crimes of murder, treason, sorcery, and consorting with the enemy.’ He turned to his men. ‘Gentlemen, take him away.’
Reiner sighed as the guardsmen marched him to the street. It was just as Ranald taught. No good deed goes unpunished.
THE HANGMAN CHECKED the lever again. The trap dropped and the sack of earth twitched at the end of the noose. It was late afternoon. The long shadow of the gallows touched Reiner’s face. He turned away from the brig window. There was no laughter in him now. The sunset behind the gallows would be his last. No more dice. No more cards. No more women. No more fine food and drink. He hung his head. It wasn’t fair. His life couldn’t end like this. He had to escape. There must be a way!
If he could get out of the camp—out of the cell—he could make his way to the Sea of Claws. Then he might sail south to… anywhere really anywhere the Empire’s shadow didn’t fall: Tilea, Estalia, the Border Princes. There were always opportunities for men of adventurous nature to be had there. All he had to do was get out of here.
He looked around with eyes refreshed by desperation: thick walls, iron bars, narrow windows. He couldn’t break through all that, not by tomorrow morning, certainly. He stepped to the cell’s heavy oak door. The lock looked simple enough, but picking locks was not a skill he’d learned, and smashing the door down was a foolish fantasy. It was as thick as the walls.
He looked through the door’s tiny barred window. The turnkey sat on a stool just outside, picking his nose. Reiner brightened. He knew the man: a dull, stolid trooper he had diced with on many occasions—and taken many a reikmark from. It had been like stealing alms from a blind man. There was hope after all.
‘Vassendorf, my lad,’ he whispered through the bars. ‘A word in your ear.’
Valinr’s Bane
ONE
Victims Of Circumstance
REINER HETZAU HAD not had a good war. When he had ridden north with von Stolmen’s Pistoliers to join in the last push to drive the heathen horde back north of Kislev where they belonged, he’d hoped to return home to Altdorf with a few battle-scars to impress his various sweethearts and bedmates, a few trunks full of plunder and battlefield souvenirs to sell on the black market, and a few saddlebags full of gold crowns, won from his fellow soldiers in games of chance played behind the cavalry stables. Instead, what had happened? He had been wounded in his first battle and forced to sit out the rest of the offensive in Vulsk, a Kislev border town that fell further and further behind the front as the Grand Alliance forced the raiders deeper into the Chaos Wastes.
Then, while recuperating, he had single-handedly flushed out an evil sorceress disguised as a sister of Shallya and had slain her before she had succeeded in spreading disease and confusion throughout the army. But had they heaped praise and promotions upon him for this heroic act? No. Through the blind stupidity of his superiors, he was charged with murdering a clergywoman and perpetrating the very crimes he had stopped the false sister from committing.
Fortunately—or unfortunately—depending on how one looked at it, his arrest had coincided with the final offensive of the war, and the outcome had been so uncertain that little things like court martials and executions had been postponed while the conflict came to its blood-soaked climax. Reiner had cooled his heels in various cells for months, being moved from brig to brig as the vagaries of war demanded. At last, with the war half a year over, he sat in the garrison brig at Smallhof Castle, an Empire outpost just west of the Kislev border, awaiting execution by hanging at dawn in a cell full of the lowest sort of gallows trash.
No, it had not been a good war. Not a good war at
all.
Reiner, however, was not the sort of fellow to give up hope. He was a gambler, a follower of Ranald. He knew that luck could be twisted in one’s favour by an astute player with an eye for the main chance. Already he had succeeded in bribing the thick-witted turnkey with tales of treasure he had hidden before his arrest. The man was going to sneak him out of the brig at midnight in return for a cut of that fictitious cache. Now all he needed was one further accomplice. It would be a long, dangerous road to freedom: out of the camp, out of the Empire, into the unknown, and he would need someone to keep watch while he slept, to boost him over walls, to stand lookout while he liberated horses, food or clothes from their rightful owners. Particularly, he needed someone to push in the way of the authorities so that he could make his escape if they were trapped.
As the sun set outside the barred brig window, Reiner turned and surveyed his fellow prisoners, trying to determine which of them might be the most desirable travelling companion. He was looking for the right combination of competence, steadiness and gullibility—not qualities to be found in great abundance inside a prison. The others were all trading stories of how they came to be imprisoned. Reiner curled a lip as he listened. Every one of them proclaimed his innocence. The fools. In their eyes, not one of them deserved to be there.
The engineer in the corner, a brooding, black-browed giant with hands the size of Wissenberg cheeses, was shaking his head like a baffled bull. ‘I didn’t mean to kill anyone. But they wouldn’t stop. They just kept pushing and pushing.
Jokes and names and…’ His hands flexed. ‘I didn’t swing to kill. But we were framing a siege tower and I held a maul and…’
‘And yer a bloody great orc what don’t know his own strength, that’s what,’ said a burly pikeman with a bald head and a jutting chin beard.
The engineer’s head jerked up. ‘I am not an orc!’
‘Easy now, man,’ said a second pikeman, as thin and wiry as his companion was sturdy. ‘We none of us need another helping of trouble. Hals meant no harm. He just lets his mouth run away with him now and again.’
