“I cannot bear this!” exclaimed the count, striding across the room and snatching the papers from Gormont. “We’ll all be in our grave by the time you start the first paragraph! Let me read the thing myself!”
Gormont seemed too shocked—or too inebriated—to resist, and Rothenburg marched back to his seat with the journal. He turned the papers over in his hands a few times, and then began to read: “It is only as a warning to others that I tell this morbid tale…”
It is only as a warning to others that I tell this morbid tale. For myself, I would wish nothing more than to wipe the whole tragic affair from my memory. However, my duty is clear, and I could not, in all conscience, allow these terrible facts to go unrecorded. Even now, only months after my return to the south, those events which have so haunted my every waking moment are already becoming indistinct and hazy. It is almost as though such terrible visions are too much for a mortal mind to comprehend; like worms they writhe and twist in my thoughts—elusive and serpentine, eager to avoid a closer inspection. But I will pin them to these pages with my quill. My tale must be told.
We set sail from Erengrad on the good ship Heldenhammer in the year 2325. As ship’s surgeon, and close friend of our intrepid employer, Baron Fallon von Kelspar, I was blessed with a cabin that was merely unpleasant rather than uninhabitable. The damp seeped through the bed linen and the rats nested in my clothes, but to have a bed of any sort was enough to earn the enmity of our swarthy Kislevite crew. They eyed me resentfully from within their fur-lined hoods.
Still, if it is possible for me to remember any stage of that doomed expedition with fondness, it would be those first few days. The baron wore the air of a man possessed, and his enthusiasm was infectious. Even the Kislevites seemed affected by it. The whole ship’s company was charged with his fervour.
There were, however, rumours of a scandal following closely on his heels, and I heard it said that his journey to the north was one of convenience as much as discovery. Certainly it was true that he seemed to show scant regard for the family estates he had abandoned so suddenly, and he politely evaded any enquiries about the baroness; but nevertheless, I could not doubt him. Seeing him stood at the prow of the ship, leaning forward impatiently into the bitterly cold wind, I found it impossible to harbour any suspicions as to his character. In fact, with the ice freezing in his beard and the snow settling on his broad shoulders, he looked more worthy of trust than any man I have ever served. My faith in him was absolute.
We had made good headway around the coast of Norsca, but were in the midst of a five-day gale when the first of many disasters struck. I was up in the slings of the foreyard, struggling to hang on as the ship rolled and lurched, when out across the churning black sea I spied a jagged shape rearing up from the horizon.
“Land,” I called down to the deck where our captain, Hausenblas, was busily bailing water with the rest of the crew, “to starboard!”
He rushed to the prow of the ship, and shielded his eyes from the snow. Even from my perch up in the swaying spars, I saw the colour drain from his face and, as he hurried back to his cabin, I clambered down the rigging with fear already tightening in my stomach.
Moments later, the baron and I watched helplessly as he pored over his maps and charts with increasing desperation. “Clar Karond?” he muttered.
“Can we be that far west? It cannot be!” Although the name meant nothing to me, my fear continued to grow, and as I watched him wading through map after map, filling the cabin with a storm of papers, I wondered what it was that I had seen out there across the waves. What could have driven Hausenblas into such a frenzy?
Finally, as his muttered curses seemed on the verge of hysteria, Kelspar stepped forward and calmly placed a hand on his shoulder. “Captain,” he said, “is there something you would like to share with us?”
Hausenblas whirled around to face the baron. Kelspar’s composed tone seemed to calm him a little, but there was a wild look in his eyes and, as he replied, he could not disguise the tremor in his voice. “North of the Empire all is damnation and rain, baron, but a sailor of my years can—with the good will of Manann—avoid the worst of the dangers…” His voice trailed off into silence, and he looked distractedly out of the porthole.
“Yes?” prompted Kelspar after a few moments.
Hausenblas grabbed a crumpled piece of parchment and thrust it at the baron. “It’s the Clar Karond peninsular!” he barked. “The storm has taken us too far west! We’ve entered the Land of Chill, where the foul corrupted elves dwell!”
I gasped involuntarily. The ship’s carpenter had told me many tales and legends concerning that cruel, mysterious race, and the look of fear in the captain’s eyes banished any doubt I may have held about their existence.
“They’ll be on us like dogs within hours,” wailed Hausenblas, dropping heavily into a chair. “We don’t stand a chance.”
Kelspar stood in silence for a few moments, seemingly lost in thought, then he nodded and strode out into the raging storm.
With every ounce of his skill and experience, our captain tried to steer the Heldenhammer away from the coast I had spied, but Manann’s thoughts must have been elsewhere that day and within hours, sinister silhouettes began looming out of the tempest like ghosts. At first, as I peered out through the falling snow, I thought we were being surrounded by great living creatures—terrible leviathans of the deep, with brutal slender claws and arched ragged wings; but as they grew nearer, I realised to my amazement that they were ships.
They were like no ships I had ever seen before.
Their design seemed the work of some strange, incomprehensible mind; but despite their hideousness, I could not deny that was also a perverse beauty to them. The twisted curves and cruel lines were strangely sensuous, and graceful.
The charismatic baron had a way of making the impossible seem achievable, and whatever the scheme, his men would leap to realise his every whim and fancy. They were not fools, however. An expedition into the unforgiving north, from whence few men had returned was something that required the necessary tools, and from the bowels of the ship emerged an armoury fit to defend a small city: swords, slings, muskets and the like were soon arrayed along the taffrail in their dozens as the men prepared to engage the enemy. Beside them stood all of the crew that could be spared—these were men used to hardship and war, living so far north, and they would not give up their livelihood, or their lives, easily.
The Heldenhammer was no warship, however, and there was little that could be done to prevent the dark elves boarding us. After a brief game of cat and mouse, their grappling hooks and ropes began sailing over the deck, and I finally saw with my own eyes the terrifying nature of our foe. In terms of physical proportions they were not so different from men; but there the similarity ended. Their screaming elongated faces froze my blood in a way that the even the icy temperatures had failed to do, and the twisted, ornate curves of their armour left me gasping with fear—what possible hope could we have against such a foul corruption of nature? I saw in an instant that there was no hope for us against such inhuman opponents.
From out of the dazzling whirling snow they came, falling on us like daemons. Cruel blades glinted in the cold light as the elves hacked and lunged. Frozen fingers fought to grip the hafts of weapons, and warm blood washed over the icy deck. I fought blind, with the snow in my eyes, and in my fear I struck wildly at every shape that came near me. Sigmar preserve me, but in those moments of panic I knew not what, nor whom I struck with my clumsy blows. The battle was not the epic struggle for glory I had so often read about; but rather it was a brutal, ignoble farce with men slipping about on the ice and blood, while others fell clumsily on their own blades.
It was with something akin to relief that I felt a blow against the back of my head; and as I collapsed into the welcoming oblivion of death, I felt as though I had cheated fate in escaping the fight so early on.
In the frozen wastelands of the north, strange sinews of lig
ht flicker in the heavens, fitfully illuminating the blasted landscape; but all else, as far as the eye can see, is darkness.
I did not perish on the rolling deck of the Heldenhammer, but as I stumbled on through the endless night of Har Ganeth—the bleak, frozen tundra that lies far to the north of our glorious Empire—I wondered if that was such a blessing. Certainly with the benefit of hindsight, knowing all that I now know, it would have been a kindness to have died then, innocent of the horrors that were to follow.
It had been the baron himself who plucked me from beneath the mound of corpses, and as I watched him striding through the knee-deep snow, just a few yards ahead of me, I wondered at his fortitude. The battle against the elves had been a grim, brutal affair, and whilst the victory had been ours, it had been hard won. Few of the baron’s men had made it off the Heldenhammer alive—it was a pitiful group who remained to set foot on the packed ice of that forbidding wasteland—yet Kelspar seemed utterly undaunted.
As for the rest of us, it was the white heat of our own avarice that drove us onwards through the plummeting temperatures. I remembered all too well the cheery warmth of the baron’s drawing room, and the passion with which he had told me his story. It was a tale of the Hung: fierce, nomadic wild-men who roamed the barren north, worshipping foul ancient gods, and feasting on the flesh of their own fallen. It was a tale of frozen lands and unexplored realms; but most of all, it was a tale of gold.
I had seen with my own eyes some of the strange guests entertained by Kelspar over the years: many of them travellers from the east, with gifts of exotic spices and lurid poetry, who regaled the wide-eyed baron with tales of uncountable wealth in the vast steppes of the north. I had heard one man in particular—a small, twitching seer named Mansoul—tell the baron in hushed tones of a great city called Yin-Chi, deep in the realms of the Hung. He whispered of great towers of ivory and gold rising out of the ice-capped mountains, and streets littered with the accumulated wealth of generations of the barbarians. As I turned away to pour the baron and his guest another glass of Carcassonne brandy, I had seen in the cut crystal a sinister fractured image of the room behind me, in which Mansoul discretely leant towards the baron and slipped him a crumpled map. From that moment, my interest was piqued—and my fate sealed.
All the remaining members of our party now shared this vision of riches, and to a man we were consumed with greed.
There were seven of us in all, plus dogs, a sledge, food supplies and other items, including a mysterious chest the baron claimed would guarantee our entry into the fabled city. From his hints I deduced it contained gunpowder, or mage-fire of some sort, with which he presumably intended to create a distraction. In truth, I had not pressed him too hard as to the details of his plan—I knew he had one and, in my fevered lust for wealth, that was enough.
I thought I had known the meaning of cold before we set foot in that cursed realm… but I was wrong.
It is the nights that I remember the most. As the wind howled outside the tents, we cowered inside, sleepless on bedding too frozen to crawl into, and with terrible cramps in our stomachs from the fat-laden food we were forced to eat.
Then, with no dawn to guide us, we would rise at some arbitrary hour and attempt to don our packs; but by this time our robes were like plate-armour, and our hoods had become soldered to our faces. We would lumber off like a group of bloated revenants, limping and stumbling through the powdery whiteness. Our breath froze and cracked painfully in our beards, and beneath all the layers of coats and tunics, our own sweat became ice. Without the kernel of avarice glowing deep in my thoughts, I think I would have simply lay down in the soft embrace of the snow, and lost myself in the peaceful sleep of the dead.
But, even then I had not experienced a fraction of the horror that was in store for me.
Despite the horrors we had already endured, it was not until the twenty-first day of our slow, tortuous trek that we discovered the true face of terror. It was the dogs that first alerted us to the fact that we were no longer alone in the snow. At first they seemed merely nervous, barking more than usual and hesitating where they had previously been sure-footed. In the pale light of the moon, the all-encompassing whiteness felt smothering and claustrophobic, and the agitation of the animals quickly filled us all with a nameless dread. The younger members of the party began flinching at imagined shapes in the drifting banks of snow, and even the baron seemed to quicken his pace a little.
Soon the dogs became utterly impossible to control. They howled and yelped, seemingly in mortal terror for their lives, and however much the baron cursed and kicked them, they would go no further. The barking sounded alien and muffled in the blizzard, and my mouth grew dry with fear.
Then, suddenly, the noise dropped. The dogs crouched low to the ground with their hackles raised and began emitting a low, pitiful whining sound that seemed horribly ominous.
We all waited.
The sound of my heart thudded so loudly in my ears that I felt certain the others must surely hear it.
I looked over at Kelspar, and saw that his hands were resting nervously on his two long sabres. Something glittered in his eyes. Was it fear or merely impatience? I could discern nothing clearly through my ice-encrusted hood.
Silence reigned, and I sensed the muscles of every man near me tensing with expectation. I felt I might scream just to break the awful quiet.
Then, out of the snow, came the creature from my darkest childhood dreams. My mind split like a shattered glass as I beheld a sight that in one cruel stroke tore apart my every conception of all that was logical and natural in the world. It loomed out of the whiteness like a mighty tree crashing down on us. Its size was immense—ten feet tall at least; but it was not the scale of the thing that tore screams of abject horror from me, it was its form: a shifting writhing mass of muscle and teeth that had no right to exist in an ordered world. Bestial faces howled and moaned in its blood-red flesh, before twisting into other indescribably awful shapes, and cruel weapons appeared from nowhere in claws that had previously not existed.
I’m afraid any greater detail is impossible for me to relate; my mind seemed as incapable of grasping the being’s true nature as my hands would be to grasp falling snow. To my shame, my legs gave way completely in the face of such a monstrous assault on my senses and I fell to the floor.
Fortunately, the others somehow retained the strength of their limbs and drew weapons to strike. A burly Middenheimer near to me swung an ice pick at the heaving, thrashing creature, but its muscles seemed to slip effortlessly out of the way of his weapon. As we all looked on in horror the man was lifted up into the air by several pairs of arms, and, with a sound like the ripping of wet cloth, torn clean in half. Another man leapt at the beast with a terrified howl, swinging his hammer at what seemed to be a face, but the creature tore him open like ripe fruit and his remains fell steaming onto the snow.
I saw then that our expedition was over, and that our end had come. I prepared myself for the pain.
The baron had other ideas, however. With a look of determination that seemed absurd in the face of such an unholy apparition, he strode purposefully towards the creature with his musket drawn, and before the lumbering, howling brute had registered his presence, he unloaded his buckshot straight into what currently appeared to be its face.
The pitch of the thing’s voice suddenly rose to a high-pitched keening, and for a split second, as a torrent of gore rushed from its head, the beast’s form became fixed and solid. The baron seized his chance and, as we all looked on, paralysed with fear, he drew both his sabres, stepped calmly forward, and thrust them straight through the creature’s gelatinous eyes.
There was an explosion of noise and blood as the thing reared up in pain, and at that moment, spurred on by their leader’s fearlessness, the other men rushed forward and plunged their weapons into its still unchanging form.
This seemed more than it could bear, and with a deafening roar of impotent rage and a spray of blood a
nd viscera, it lurched back into the shadows from whence it came.
“Bloodbeast,” said the baron calmly, wiping the gore from his swords and face.
From that time on, I fear I became something of a burden to the others. My mind seemed irreparably torn and I found even the smallest tasks arduous. The best I could do was to shuffle along behind the others like a simpleton, muttering to myself and flinching constantly at imagined apparitions.
Strangely, little was said of the attack over the following days. The bodies of the dead men were placed in rudimentary graves, and we marched on in silence. It seemed too awful a subject to broach; and what good could come of raising it? We were alone in the wilderness. What could we do? Other than his enigmatic statement after the beast had fled, the baron had said nought else on the subject.
Bloodbeast. What could such a word mean? It festered in my fractured thoughts like a canker. How was it that the baron could put a name to such a monstrosity? What foul tomes had he pored over to discover such a phrase? I itched to interrogate him on the matter; but I feared that what would start as rational speech would descend into the wailing gibberish of a madman. So I simply acted out the mechanics of life and waited for the violent death that I felt was waiting for me out there in the snow.
In the fourth week of our journey we perceived a change in the landscape. We appeared to be crossing a great plateau and occasionally, through gaps in the constant downpour, we spied what might be the distant crowns of a mountain range. The Baron’s determination seemed not to have waned one jot and, if anything, at the sight of those peaks, I noticed a quickening of his pace. He began checking Mansoul’s map more frequently, and I detected a new urgency in his voice when he spurred us on. Could we be getting near, I wondered, and, like a long forgotten tune my greed returned to me. I felt a new resolve harden in me and I put aside my idle thoughts of lying down to sleep on the crisp white bed of snow.
Tales of the Old World Page 40
