The turn around in my spirits was, however, short lived. On the morning of the thirty-first day of that journey into despair, I awoke to a nightmare. As the baron and I lurched awkwardly from our tent to raise the others, we saw their tent slashed and flapping in the wind, and their equally torn bodies strewn across the bloodstained snow.
All three were dead.
The scene was too much for me and I retched dryly as I beheld it. Their remains were barely recognisable: it was unmistakably the work of the creature Kelspar had named Bloodbeast.
I searched for hours, but could not find their heads.
My descent into lunacy now seemed complete. I was nothing but a gibbering wretch. I lay on the ground and called out for the beast to come and take me. I begged for death.
I was, however, all that the baron had left by way of a companion and, slapping me firmly across the face, he insisted that I take hold of myself and remember that I was not some raving savage, but a gentleman of the Empire. Through fear of his rage, rather than any real self-control, I managed to make a show of calming myself.
Fortunately, the dogs were miraculously unharmed and I begged the baron to consider returning to the coast. We had a rendezvous arranged with Hausenblas and the Heldenhammer, and if we made good speed we might still evade horrors that waited for us in the snow.
“What?” cried Kelspar, his eyes flashing in the dark. “You would return now? When we have come so far?” Suddenly I feared him almost as much as anything else in that frozen netherworld. There was a barely checked hatred in his voice as he grasped my jacket and pulled my face to his. “Are you mad? Only days away from treasures you could not even comprehend and you would turn back?” He hurled me to the ground, and rested a hand on the butt of his pistol. “We go on, Gustav,” he growled. “We go on.”
From then on I became little more than a beast of burden to the baron. His dislike for me was painfully apparent, and it seemed I was there simply to lug around the box of explosives and the other luggage, while the baron plotted our course.
Was it the madness and carnage I had endured, or the lack of food? Or was it—as certainly it seemed—the very air that began to warp my senses? My mind seemed gradually to be growing strange to me. Alien thoughts, of no apparent sense, gripped me as we rushed over the snow on the sledge. Scenes of violence and power only to be replaced just as quickly by a grovelling awe of what lay ahead. Now when I saw those mountains through a gap in the blizzard, they seemed near and strangely ominous. Something in their make-up seemed not the stuff of reality, but rather the ethereal matter of dreams and visions.
The shifting, capricious nature of my mind began to distort even my memory. The details of my life leading up to that point would sometimes slip away and be replaced by darker memories filled with blood, and a lust for war. I fear my reason was truly gone by this time and I can only accept that my description of what followed cannot be considered the product of a completely rational mind.
Desire seemed to grow in the baron as we neared the peaks. He seemed now almost unrecognisable as the cultured, urbane gentleman I had met all those years ago in Nuln. His face was now a frozen mask of greed and lust. I could not meet his eye and, as the days went by, I grew to fear him greatly.
I know not what day nor week it was, but finally the awful contortions of my mind reached a crisis point, whenever I saw the mountains now they seemed of no fixed shape, but instead they had become a shifting mass—much in the manner of the foul creature that had attacked us. The stone seemed in some places to be formed into monstrous screaming skulls, whilst in others it became impossibly tall towers, whose sinister shapes reared up into the darkness like claws. I even fancied that I saw the faces of beings too hideous and incomprehensible for me to describe, looming above the peaks and beckoning us on.
Finally I could take no more. I knew that the baron was leading me not to wealth and glory, but death and madness. Sigmar forgive me, I began plotting his murder.
The state of my ruptured mind, however, meant that while I had intended to contrive some subtle plan with which I would safely kill my erstwhile protector, I instead leapt on him clumsily with my knife at the first sight of him looking distracted. He was in the process of lifting the heavy chest of explosives from the sled when I attacked, and sent him, the box and myself all tumbling down a steep drift of snow.
We spun and tumbled silently in the soft powdery whiteness, and when we came to a stop I noticed two things: firstly, the baron’s leg was lying at a hideously unnatural angle to the rest of his body, obviously broken, and secondly: the baron’s wooden chest had split open during the fall, spreading its contents over the snow.
I froze in shock.
Rather than the gunpowder I had been expecting to see, I saw instead the severed, and by now quite frozen, heads of our three murdered companions.
“It was you?” I gasped through a parched throat. “You killed them?”
“Of course,” snapped the baron impatiently, trying to rise on his one good leg. “How else does one buy entry into the kingdom of the Blood God, but with skulls?”
My mind reeled. In a heartbeat I saw that Kelspar had never intended to simply plunder some mythical city like a common thief, but rather he wished nothing less than to offer his fealty to the Dark Gods themselves. His years of research into the peoples of the north must have corrupted his mind. The man was a heretic!
I lurched towards him through the snow, raising my knife to strike, but he was quicker, and even balanced on one leg he managed to aim his pistol at my head.
“Fool,” he said, with a bitter laugh, “you could have joined me in paradise.” And with that he pulled the trigger. I flinched, but felt no pain.
Looking down I saw no blood, and so I raised my eyes to the baron in confusion.
By the look of rage and frustration on his face, I guessed what had happened—the hammer of his weapon had frozen fast.
I took my chance, kicked away his one good leg, and thrust my blade deep into his chest.
I stepped back in horror as he thrashed furiously around with the weapon still protruding from his coat. His cries and curses were too terrible to bear and I covered my ears as I staggered away.
As I turned the sledge around and headed back south, I could still hear his cries echoing weirdly through the darkness—even after several hours had passed, the hideous noise was still there, shaming me with every cry of rage and pain.
As I sit here now, by the warmth of my fire, I question all that I once felt so sure about. I question even my opinion of the baron. Maybe he had intended to simply find his treasure and return to the south; maybe it was only after we entered that forsaken realm that his thoughts turned to madness and the unspeakable gods of the north. The one thing I am sure of is that it was no city of the Hung he was leading me towards; if I had followed him over those forbidding mountains, I believe I would have entered another realm completely. Sigmar forgive me, but since my desperate flight to the coast, and my rendezvous with the Heldenhammer, I cannot stop my thoughts straying back to those mountains, and wondering what I may have discovered on the other side.
I find myself sleeping more than is natural, and in my dreams the baron still calls to me; but his cries are no longer full of rage and pain, they are the words of a man who has found a great prize and simply wishes to share it. When I awake, my sheets damp with sweat, his voice still echoes through my thoughts: “You could have joined me in paradise,” he calls.
As the days crawl by, all that was once so dear to me seems chaff, and I find it harder and harder to resist his call.
There was a long silence which even Count Rothenburg seemed reluctant to break.
Finally, after several awkward minutes had passed, he spoke, but his voice did not carry the ring of confidence I was used to. “How did you come by this journal?”
Gormont smiled conspiratorially, obviously revelling in the tense atmosphere his tale had engendered. “My father’s study,” he replied smug
ly. “He thinks it secure in his safe, but he has few secrets I am not aware of.”
The count stared at him.
“And where is this ‘Gustav’ now?”
“Well,” said Gormont, rising from his chair, and beginning to stroll cockily around the room, “when he came to us, he was obviously in a very bad way, and so my father took him in out of pity; but he soon regretted it. The man had obviously lost his reason—we would hear him wailing like a lame dog in the middle of the night, and his presence in the house was beginning to play havoc with my poor mother’s nerves. Then, thankfully, two nights ago he disappeared as suddenly as he arrived, leaving behind all his possessions—including the journal.”
I had never seen it before, and I never saw it again, but the count was lost for words. He gaped at Gormont as though the lad were suddenly a stranger to him. There was a terrible ring of truth to the tale that had finally silenced us all, and even the count seemed incapable of making light of his nephew’s story. He began to reread the journal in silence—seeming to forget that he still had company—and as he pored over the words, a frown of deep concentration settled over his face.
Soon, the guests began to depart, pulling on their great coats in an uncomfortable silence, and disappearing one by one into the cold winter’s night.
A little while later, as I stood in the hall buttoning my own coat, I noticed the count leading Gormont away towards his private chambers. As they turned a corner and disappeared from view, I heard a brief snatch of their conversation.
At the time the words seemed of no importance, but since Rothenburg’s mysterious disappearance, they have begun to haunt my thoughts. In fact, they have circled my mind now so many times, that I doubt I will ever forget them.
“Tell me again,” I heard the count say to his nephew, “what you know of the map and the man called Mansoul.”
PATH OF WARRIORS
Neil McIntosh
A chill wind drove in across the sea, churning the water into great crests, steel grey flecked with white. A storm was coming. Change was coming. A finger of cold, plucked from the sea, entered the boy’s heart and pierced it like a dagger. Change was coming, and things would never be the same again.
Stefan looked up towards his father, standing like a statue at his side. His father did not return his glance, but kept his stare fixed beyond the raging waters, out towards the far horizon where the sun was a deep orange globe sinking into the sea. Fedor Kumansky was waiting. Waiting for the change.
Questions formed upon the boy’s lips and faded away, unspoken. A feeling, one that he barely yet knew as fear, was growing inside him. On either side of them, the huge sugar-ice cliffs that marked the shores of Mother Kislev stretched away into the distance. Before them, the boundless ocean besieged the shore.
They were standing on the edge of the world. It was the world Stefan had known all of his life, but this unknowing fear that swelled like the sea in the pit of his stomach was something that he had not felt before in all his eleven years.
He tightened his grip upon his father’s hand, pinching with his fingernails until they bit deep into the tough, leathery skin until, at last, his father looked down at him. Fedor Kumansky smiled for his son, and Stefan saw that the smile was a mask. “What is going to happen, father?”
By way of answer, Fedor Kumansky extended an arm out to sea. There, where moments before there had been only the jagged line separating sky and ocean, tiny black specks now peppered the horizon.
The ships were too far distant for Stefan to make them out, but it was a common enough sight. Here, where the mighty Sea of Claws funnelled down into the estuary that became the River Lynsk, the traffic of ships was ceaseless. Fishermen, traders, merchants ferrying their wares to and from the great city of Erengrad and beyond. Stefan found the sight of the ships almost comforting. Except that the tiny masted vessels gathering on the horizon seemed to be multiplying by the moment. There were too many of them.
“So many ships,” Stefan said, quietly. “Perhaps they have sailed all the way from Marienburg, or even from L’Anguille, to trade with us?”
His father shook his head, slowly, and in that movement Stefan knew that the small branch of comfort he clung to was gone.
“I have waited for sight of these ships,” his father said. “Waited, through waking hours and times of sleep. Waited in the hope that they would never come. But last night the gods spoke to me through my dreams. They told me of the dark clouds about to gather.” He drew his son to him.
“No,” Fedor said at last. “I don’t think they come from Marienburg, nor from L’Anguille or anywhere to the west.” He drew his cloak tighter round him to fend off the biting cold of the wind. “I think they come from the north. And I fear they have no wish to trade with us.”
North. Stefan turned the word over in his mind. North was not a place; he had never seen the north nor met any man or woman from his village who had been there. But he had heard of “north”, and knew it as the thing that had seeded the fear that turned his stomach. North was the savage lands of Norsca, or worse; the savage, nameless lands whose ships set sail upon the seas of his dreams, his nightmares.
The salt air stung Stefan’s face and tears prickled in the corners of his eyes. He looked to his father for some sign of what he was feeling, but Fedor’s face was blank. The time of his waiting was over. The dark shapes were more numerous now, and larger. Stefan could make out the outline of the sails billowing full-blown upon tall masts. Fedor Kumansky laid his arm gently across his son’s shoulders, and turned him away from the sea.
“The time has come,” he told Stefan, softly. “And we have work to do.”
Father and son retraced their steps upon the flint path that led from the cliffs back towards their village, into the heart of Odensk. Their pace was brisk but not hurried; a good sort of pace for a crisp, cold day at the beginning of spring. Stefan sensed no panic in his father’s measured strides across the headland, but at each timbered house along the path into the village Fedor stopped, and rapped hard upon the door with his staff.
Calm, sombre faces appeared in doorways. Strong, upright men with proud, weather-beaten faces much like his father’s. Fedor clasped each one of them by the hand, but this was not a time for greetings. To each of his kinsmen, the same words, clear, spoken almost without emotion: “The time has come.”
Where there had been one man and his son soon there were a hundred, moving through the streets of Odensk, the same message passing from mouth to mouth. Each repetition met with the same response. Knives that had only seen service gutting fish were cleaned ready for a grimmer purpose. Broadswords tarnished with the rust of peaceful years were brought down and polished with oil. Staffs became clubs in the hands of men who had spent their lives at peace. And from out of an underground store, long-disused and fastened with padlocks, two small cannons were removed and wheeled slowly towards the cove where the seas broke hard upon the shore.
The sleepy afternoon quiet of the fishing port had been broken, the people roused to a level and kind of activity that Stefan had never seen before. Half running at his father’s side, he watched as the village transformed itself into something new, something frightening. Tools of life turned to weapons of war; men hardened by work stood ready to become warriors. Homesteads became fortresses.
By the time Stefan and his father reached the low thatched building that was their own home, the sun had gone and a chill twilight was settling over Odensk. Stefan tried to imagine the fleet of ships as they closed upon the coast; tried to imagine the construction of the masts, the shape and position of the sails; tried to picture the faces of the men, on deck or climbing in the rigging, hoping that somehow they looked no different to his father and the men of Odensk. Most of all he tried to imagine the ships turning away before they entered the mouth of the cove, hoping against hope that their intentions were not, after all, warlike.
But in his young heart he knew that there was no hope. His father’s expression,
and the calm, repeated mantra at each door along the way told him that. The time had come, and there would be no returning.
Mikhal was still in the salting sheds, helping the women clean and gut the fish ready for market. He looked up expectantly as he saw his father enter. Stefan ran to his younger brother and embraced him, hugging his body tight against his own.
Their father moved to the centre of the long room and called for quiet.
“The time for work is over now,” he said. “All of you go home. And may the gods watch over us all.” There was a moment of silence, and then the women began to collect together their bundles of food and belongings. A few celebrated the working day ending prematurely, others looked curious or suspicious. The elder women amongst them stayed quiet, but gathered their things together and left as quickly as they could.
Fedor Kumansky led the two boys across the courtyard to the house. He turned down the wick on the single oil lamp until the room was lit only by a faint amber glow. Then he drew the heavy curtain across the narrow window, closing out the last of the fading twilight. The embers of a fire still burned low in the hearth, and the room was suffused with a smoky warmth. For a moment Stefan felt safe again, comforted by this familiar world.
“Listen to me.” Fedor gripped him tightly by the shoulders. “Soon I must leave you. You and Mikhal must stay here, where you will be safe. After I’ve gone you will lock all of the doors and bar the shutters across the windows. Open them to no one, no one, until I get back. And whatever happens, Stefan, you must look after your brother. You understand that?”
Stefan nodded. He understood, and he did not understand. He understood that his childhood was ending, understood that the time of his being a man was beginning. Understood that he was Mikhal’s protector now, no longer his playmate. But he did not understand why. He took his brother’s hand.
Tales of the Old World Page 41
