by David Guymer
‘Death for the Dark Master,’ Golkhan roared. His daemon-steed snorted in fury, bearing the Chaos champion into a charge as his voice boomed over the destruction like thunder. ‘Bring me the bones of the Gloried. The first to find them will live to see his rise. Every other one of you will die by my sword!’
Howling like dogs, Golkhan’s warriors scrambled over the heaped rubble of the wall. From some ingrained reserve, shell-shocked defenders found wit to raise shields, form a line, and see battle joined. The two hosts came together with a staccato thump of brazen flesh upon bronze, discipline and desperation pitched against rabid ferocity. Men yelled and monsters roared, blood of every colour and thickness spraying across the rictus snarls of all.
A pistol cracked, flooding the gritty air with ash and thunder. A defender fell with a steaming crater in his cuirass. A warrior with flesh like coal and knives for hands threw himself into the gap, tearing two defenders apart before the line could be closed. A tramp of feet sounded above the din, a regiment of mailed billmen marching in ordered file through the smoke. The line faltered. Another pistol round took out a spearman.
At the heart of the line, Ologul thrust his claw into the air like a standard and bellowed for order. For a moment he got it. The defenders roared defiance. The invader’s shock troops bellowed bloodlust and charged.
As if it had never departed, the clash of steel was rejoined with a vengeance.
Then came something far worse.
Felix’s chest tightened, glimpsing the armoured knight through the clashing billhooks like a wolf spied through swaying grass. Its mount was a creature straight from the realm of nightmare, equine only in the most disturbed way. A horse would have broken a leg on the loose ground, but the six limbs of the daemonic steed took it with ease, driving its master onto the defenders’ shields and smashing them down like a battering ram.
Felix squeezed his fingers around the reassurance of his sword, but found it had little to offer. This was not the way he had thought to die although, thinking on it, hearing the screams of the mutants as blood and broken bones turned defiance into rout, one way was surely no worse than another.
The thought was darkly reassuring. For die he was about to.
He faced a Chaos warrior.
Ologul screamed a command, the wavering defenders hastily falling back from their defensive line. With a feral scream, the host of Chaos harried their retreat, snatching shields from unsteady grips and tearing men apart. Ologul issued another bellow. There was a weary clatter as the men reformed into a schiltrom, spears threatening every angle.
The Chaos warrior laughed at the projecting blades, seeing how they shivered, and turned in his saddle to wave his reserves into the township. Ologul slurped defiance in the face of the charging hordes. He dragged his mutated body into the knight’s path, lifted his buckler, and snapped his monstrous claw in challenge.
Wailing like a flock of daemons, the invaders swept past the Chaos warrior and the defenders’ embattled formation, sprinting well clear of the fallen wall. Black-cloaked vermin took advantage of the chaos, sweeping over undefended walls and onto the highest rooftops. Slingshots whirred and cracked, punching bloody holes through fleeing fighters. Those the ratmen missed were swiftly overtaken by the pursuing host, bringing isolated pockets of mayhem to the streets of Die Körnung.
Felix struggled to tell friend from foe as one muscular abomination struggled to rip the throat from another. Then a pack of bloodstained monsters screamed his way and the distinction became moot.
Felix met their charge with one of his own, his blade impaling a crazed fiend through the chest. His charge bore him into the skewered monster shoulder first, throwing it to the ground as he wrenched his weapon free in a spray of fragmented ribs. From his left, a scaly-faced creature swung at him with a club. Blood rained from Felix’s blade as it swept upward, the mutant’s belly spitting scales from the touch of steel. The mutant’s guts hung open but it came on. Felix spun around its clumsy swing, deftly severing its spine with a backhanded swipe. The creature jerked and fell and he kicked the paralysed mutant onto its face and leapt over it, eyes on the melee at the wall.
Ologul was taking a hammering from the Chaos warrior. His shield was in pieces, his arm bleeding, his warriors buckling before those of the champion. And the knight’s black, weirdly grooved armour looked unmarked.
Felix ran forwards, Karaghul flashing across the hand of a swordsman that came too close, sending the blade and a clutch of fingers to the ground. The warrior screamed from its two mouths until Felix punched it in the face and ran on. The ground beneath his feet became rubble and the scale of the tear in the earth that had toppled the wall became clear. The rising scent of sulphur almost made him gag.
Attackers came at him from every side. He no longer held to the hope of survival. His runesword split a billman’s mail, sending him shrieking into the abyss. To his surprise he was not much troubled by that. He parried a sword thrust meant for his belly, turned the blade, tripped the wielder, then stabbed down through his armpit. All he felt was determination, a resolve to hold the breach for as long as he could. To grant Mori another few minutes to flee.
To earn a mighty doom on Gotrek’s behalf.
Through the never-ending tide of foes, he saw Ologul’s claw scissor uselessly across the black hell-steel of the daemon-steed’s barding. The Chaos warrior hacked through the arm at the elbow, laughing as the daemon then butted the mutant champion to the ground and stamped his bones into rubble. With his fall, the defenders’ resolve crumbled. They broke and ran; the hosts of Chaos at their heels.
The Chaos warrior did not pursue. Some instinct made him hold, turn, and meet Felix’s eye across the field of battle. Felix could not see the warrior’s eyes through his closed helm, but the look was one Felix had learned to feel through the back of his skull. It was the look of a noble spying a merchant’s son.
And sensing sport.
Felix growled, angling his sword into an inch perfect schrankhut guard.
The knight chuckled and swung from his mount. Rubble crunched beneath heavy black sabatons. Feral mutants gibbered and fell back as he strode through them. His claymore looked twice the weight of Karaghul and was half as long again. Felix backed off, settling into a ready stance, pebbles scuttling into the creaking abyss as he circled. He tried to position the Chaos warrior between him and it.
It was a slender advantage but he would take what he could find.
‘I tire of bleeding beasts and spawn,’ said the warrior, in his element amidst the shrieking packs that charged past them, screams and clashing steel sounding continuing defiance from the township. ‘But you are wearied. Perhaps I should be chivalrous and fight you with my hand behind my back.’
Felix felt surprisingly calm for a man squaring off with a champion of the Ruinous Powers. His guard was true enough to spear a hangman’s noose. ‘I assure you, I know how to handle a sword.’
‘Before I was anointed with the destiny of Be’lakor…’ the warrior returned, stowing one murderously spiked gauntlet behind his gorget. He mirrored Felix’s circling steps, onyx claymore in his left hand.
‘…men would say similar things about me.’
The straits between the riverbank and the sandbar were littered with corpses and debris. In amongst the floating carnage, swimming creatures drove up from beneath to stuff still-moving bodies with knifes. Nikolaus ploughed into the river belly-first, swallowed a mouthful and swam upright, gagging on blood and slime. He felt feverish, confused, and the water had a sickly warmth, as though he floundered in another man’s guts.
Sigmar’s judgement had fallen again upon the City of the Damned.
Shaking gore from his body, he waded deeper and grabbed the boat that was still moored to the stricken jetty. There was a corpse in it, a foul thing with no eyes and a nose too large. It was a woman, and disconcertingly appealing in death.
Even here. Even now.
He shuddered, wishing for a punishing pain,
and tipped the body into the water. Unhooking the mooring line, he dragged the boat to the bank. His actions were automatic, but they nudged aside a portion of the shadow that veiled his mind.
He had been a seaman once.
The white lady waited on the gravel. She clutched a black sack. She was frightened, but Nikolaus could help. For some reason, that filled him with warmth.
‘Get in, my lady.’
The girl glanced back to her home, then took Nikolaus’s hand and clambered up onto his shoulders. He took the sack from her and stowed it beneath the aft rowing bench. The girl jumped in and then turned to him, slender hand outstretched.
It was then that Nikolaus noticed he had only one arm. The realisation stunned him.
When? How?
‘Quick!’ the girl screamed.
She was looking over Nikolaus’s shoulder. A pair of cloaked shadows were sprinting down the shingle, a third already slipping through the water like a poisonous eel. Voicing a prayer, Nikolaus rammed his shoulder into the skiff’s hull and shoved it off. The girl wailed, but he ignored her.
‘Be stout-hearted, you sinner. Step through the fire of battle, and let sins be cleansed.’
He found a leathern thong tied at his kilt and unhitched it.
It felt good.
Felix’s sword moved swifter than his hands could command. Steel blurred before sweat-blinded eyes as survival instinct somehow forced his blade to counter the Chaos warrior’s every stroke.
A pity the fiend was barely trying.
The warriors of Chaos were peerless, those select men and women for whom a lifetime was insufficient for the slaughter they craved. They had been the best and the most brutal, even before their Dark Gods elevated them above their mortal foes, gifting them power and strength for the havoc wrought in their names.
An impact rang down Felix’s blade. He grimaced, but his arms had numbed long ago. It was a miracle he still held his sword at all. Felix backed off, searching for an opening in the warrior’s guard.
There was none.
The knight stabbed for Felix’s left side. Had Felix’s head been able to keep up, he would have recognised the feint. Instead, instinct parried the blow, inviting the head butt that crashed the bridge of his nose in a burst of hell-steel and gibbering daemon-lights. Felix screamed and fell back, too beaten to do anything more than twist his neck as the blade skewered the rubble by his ear. An armoured boot stamped into his belly. Felix yearned to scream, but had breath enough only for a sharp gasp of pain.
The warrior leaned forward, laying his vambrace across the banded steel of his thigh like a huntsman posing with his kill.
‘I am Golkhan the Anointed, destined Everchosen of Chaos, and you were no sport at all.’
‘Sorry to disappoint,’ Felix managed, blood dribbling from his nose and into his mouth.
‘You are tenacious for one so insignificant. What brings a civilised man to the City of the Damned?’
‘For the baron.’
The warrior chuckled hollowly. ‘A thousand millennia without form has taught Be’lakor to sculpt the fates of men. He wished to bring outsiders to his city and he has.’
Felix pulled at the spiked sabaton that was driving through his mail and into his gut, but the foot within may as well have been cast of lead.
‘You’re from outside?’ Felix wheezed. ‘You know when we are?’
‘I see all Be’lakor promised me coming to pass. And your von Kuber will be the key to it all!’
Golkhan upended his blade to Felix’s heart, lifting it so the comet motif that crossed the hilt drew level with his eye slit.
‘I have enjoyed this distraction. But all good things must come to an end.’
‘Why?’
‘Because otherwise they go on forever.’
Felix swallowed, pain spearing from his gut, crying eyes fixed upon the hanging blade.
He tightened his grip around his own sword and prepared.
Chapter 16
A Hero’s Return
Bloody water splattered Nikolaus’s face as he lashed his scourge across the face of the first of the two cloaked creatures. Its scream became a torrent of bubbles as it went under. The second splashed around its kin. It feinted and jerked back, seeking to circle into deeper water towards the boat, but Nikolaus blocked it. It stabbed again, earning a lash across the knuckles that made it hiss with pain. It was swift, but the water robbed it of that advantage.
There was a scream from the boat. Nikolaus thumped his scourge into his opponent’s snout and turned.
The swimmer had pulled itself up onto the prow, causing the skiff to rock. It stood, dripping, rolling with the waves. The white lady stumbled over the black sack as she backed into the stern. The creature snickered and advanced.
The first whose face Nikolaus had bloodied was now swimming in an arc for its stern. Already waist deep in water, Nikolaus waded after it, helpless to do anything but watch as the child raised one hand.
The shadows around the girl condensed, as though a cloak had suddenly been drawn in, and there was a blinding flash. A spear of lightning leapt from her arm, a black nimbus washing out to envelope the entire boat. There was an implosion of sound. Nikolaus’s ears popped. And then a scorched ratman shot across the prow and plunged into the river with a spume that was already turning to steam. The girl was flung back the opposite way, screaming as she splashed into deeper water.
Ignoring her, the swimmer pulled itself into the boat and made a grab for the abandoned sack. It did not look back as it tightened the cord, hefted the thing to its shoulders and dived headfirst into the water.
Nikolaus watched it go.
Protect the bones, he had been told.
A plea for help pulled his attention back.
Protect Mori. The girl floundered. Don’t take her across the water.
Ploughing into the river with a clumsy, one-armed stroke, he let the vermin keep its prize.
Flicking horsemeat from her claws, Morzanna watched without a flicker of emotion as savages plunged through the breach her power had torn from the earth. Men with faces she dimly recalled were cut down and trampled. There could be no mercy for those that crossed the Dark Master.
She was empty inside, but such was the price of dark magic. It was a fair exchange, considering her soul was already the jewel in the crown of Be’lakor, the Dark Master, first of the daemon princes.
Claws to her cold, dark breast, she tracked the ruined wall to the tower she had failed to destroy. She sought within herself for a glimmer of anger, of gratitude. But there was nothing.
No, that was wrong. Not nothing.
She ran her fingers through her hair, claws tapping the vestigial horns. It was danger she felt. And one she recognised. She had felt it once before.
She glanced across the killing field to the breach where Golkhan prepared to break his mortal toy. A vicious smile played with the corners of her lips.
For this was a bout she would gladly watch.
A sloping bed of rock dug into Felix’s back, stiffening the back of his throat with the scent of powdered granite. Screams carried over the shift of rubble, sounding from all around, making his own feeble cries all the more piteous. Through his tunnelling vision, he saw Golkhan the Anointed. The Chaos warrior laughed as he forced his boot into Felix’s belly. Blood drained down the slope of his body and into his head. It felt heavy, a thumping presence to contrast the hollow agony in his gut. Fighting against the crushing weight with a howl of defiance, Felix lashed his sword from the ground and up, aiming for the join between plates around the warrior’s groin, but his arm was ponderous, his aim wide, and Golkhan merely twisted to deflect the flat blow harmlessly off the steel faulds that skirted his hips.
Golkhan greeted his effort with a hollow chuckle and smashed Felix’s sword from his grip. It rattled to the rubble and slid several feet downhill towards the abyss and out of reach. It shimmered pink where dust did not cloak it. Felix grasped for it and the warrior pressed d
own a fraction harder. Felix whimpered, reduced to pawing at the champion’s grieves.
Upside down, through fog and rock dust, with one beaten eye and another that swam with pain, Felix saw mutants run, fight, scream, and die. A piercing shriek rose above the lesser wails and rang through the beclouded ruins. It was familiar. A shadow struck from the township. In its paws it clutched a sodden black sack.
Felix felt the pit in his belly open out to consume him.
Nikolaus and Mori were dead.
The ratman swerved past the pockets of combat, its light step skipping over the stinking morass into which those few armoured men that might have given chase sank. Felix watched a bronze-armoured defender down his foe and heft his short spear like a javelin. His cuirass was struck red with blood, his wide face frantic. A shot rang out, close enough to make Felix’s eardrums shiver. Splinters of bloodied bronze erupted from the mutant’s chest. The spear dropped from its hand and it fell. The ratman chittered anxiously, speeding towards Felix and the Chaos warrior. Felix felt the pressure on his stomach ease and then release.
Golkhan turned, finding a grey-cloaked soldier stood upon the rubble behind him. Black smoke leached from the muzzle of his pistol. The man offered a crisp salute.
The Chaos warrior returned it. ‘Matthaus! See this rat to the temple. And sound the retreat, we have what we came for.’
Felix felt the pressure return, his vision blacking out as Golkhan rolled him onto his front.
He lay on his face, too broken to stand and stared into the fog, distracted from the crunch of hell-steel boots by the distant peel of a bell. The black hull of the Hand slipped through the distant murk. It was heading upriver. To the bridge. Fate could not be averted. Nikolaus had been right all along.
The End Times were coming.
The grey cloaks of the Chaos host parted to admit the fleeing ratman and his escort, then smoothed into file, all while beating an ordered march back over the sundered wall, billhooks presented like the gift of an early death. Islands of frenzied bloodlust were left in their wake, howling defiance of the call to retreat before suffering wounds enough to staunch their craving for pain.
