by David Guymer
Like her maker, Adolphus Krieger, Ulrika was master of only the bare rudiments of sorcery. Her new master however had encouraged the development of those talents and through the eyes of her aethyric self she saw the magic drawn from the henge like water from a well. The power of the Light brought it from the earth. The alchemy of the Gold transformed it, melded it with the incantations of the clergy to turn it into something holy, and sent the product flooding north.
To the Auric Bastion.
Less a wall than a mountain dragged out of the very earth, it was invincible. Even the winds of magic themselves were blocked. The ground before it was bare of snow and the banners of the Ostermarkers flaccid for want of a breeze from the north. It could not be breached, could not be overflown, and such was its scale that it would have taken a spell of truly apocalyptic proportions to make so much as a crack. It exuded a very real, visceral kind of holiness and, in spite of the enchantments woven around her coach, Ulrika felt as if she were in the presence of Ghal Maraz itself. Ever since Nagash’s defeat to Sigmar, and the curse that the Great Necromancer then laid upon all vampire-kind for refusing to aid him, the Heldenhammer’s power over the Arisen had been strong. The repulsion from that barrier of force blocked even her master’s attempts at scrying.
And yet Ulrika knew that Max was alive.
They had a connection that she could trace all the way back to Praag when his magic had purged her then mortal body of plague. A part of him had remained with her ever since. It had outlived death, endured even as her perception of colour, her internal organs, and all other affections had withered. Perhaps it was the nature of the magic for the Light was, of course, always anathema to the dark.
She thought she loved him.
Her master might have had only a passing interest in Max’s welfare, but to Ulrika the wizard was almost as important as their other goals. Nothing less than saving the world. Or at least preserving it.
The rising trail turned in towards the Worlds Edge Mountains, robbing Ulrika of her view and pushing her into her seat as the ascent steepened.
Ahead rose Rackspire. It was a black talon of volcanic rock that jutted from the Worlds Edge Mountains like a vestigial claw. Its battlements studded the flanks of the mountains themselves. From casemates of hewn stone stub-nosed cannon were angled onto the trail and scarlet banners fluttered from the turrets, but there were no guards that Ulrika could perceive. At least none with a beating heart.
The trail terminated at a stark, granite gatehouse. The gates were open and the portcullis raised, but the edifice was far from welcoming. The iron spikes at the base of the portcullis resembled a vampire’s fangs. The horses responded to Damir’s goading to draw the coach into the barbican’s cold throat. Ulrika felt the nocturnal flutter of nervous butterflies. An acceptance of one’s power came with the acute realisation of one’s place in the scale of such powers.
And Ulrika was but an infant compared to the dark majesty that now masqueraded as the late Commandant Roch.
‘My doom is at hand,’ whispered Durin Drakkvarr, eyes closed as if in prayer. His face had taken a second layering of muck from the maltreated portion of the Underway they now travelled. He ran his fingers over his face to re-expose the ligament-like lines of his daemon tattoos. ‘By the face of the Destroyer, by the coming End Times, grant this dwarf a swift and bloody doom.’
‘Not so keen at the front there,’ Krakki grumbled from the rear of the column. The way his torchlight deepened the shadows of Durin’s face made the Daemonslayer look like a dwarf buried within another dwarf. Krakki cleared his throat, suddenly nervous. ‘You’ll make the rest of us look bad.’
Durin returned the laughter with a hollow stare. He flexed his fingers and stared at his hands as though marvelling at them. ‘Can you not feel it? The end is nigh.’
‘Beastmen,’ said Skalf with a short nod, then pointed forward. ‘Ahead.’
‘Snorri thinks we should all stop talking about it then,’ Snorri snapped, trying and failing to forget about the beer strapped to Krakki’s back.
‘Heedless or measured, Snorri, these are the End Times,’ said Skalf. ‘A doom will find us all however we seek it.’
‘Aye,’ Krakki murmured without confidence before taking a deep breath and turning to Durin. ‘So chuff off about yours.’
Drawing his axe, Durin smiled coldly, then said nothing and walked away.
‘I don’t like him,’ said Krakki, pulling a face
‘That’s Snorri’s rememberer you’re talking about,’ said Snorri.
‘I do not like anyone,’ said Skalf. ‘And they, in their wisdom, do not like me. You are Slayers and all that matters is your oaths to Grimnir, to me, and to Gorlin.’ He nodded at the young runesmith as he passed, burdened by his heavy pack and walking with the aid of his staff. The thin old Slayer, Drogun, and a posse of shortbeards stuck to him like rust. Big Brock Baldursson marched with a graven scowl, axe berthed against his shoulder and eyes fixed forward as though determined to ignore the dripping walls that evidenced dwarfish decline in their own former domain. ‘Guard the runesmith with your lives and the rest will follow as dirt follows digging.’
Krakki drew a noisy breath and pulled on a fistspike. A mail sheaf fell down his forearm to his bicep. After jigging it until the mail was free of kinks and comfortable, he adjusted his shoulders into his beer harness. Snorri smacked his lips. He had to force himself to swallow and work some saliva onto his tongue before he could speak.
‘That looks heavy.’
A sorry grin parted Krakki’s beard. ‘I should’ve known you weren’t sticking around at the back for my company.’
‘Just a little. Snorri only wants one mouthful, he promises.’
Krakki sighed, shoulders slumping under their load. ‘I think Skalf pulled a cruel one on you, Snorri, I do, but an oath is an oath.’ The dwarf looked hurt, despite his grin, and suddenly Snorri didn’t feel so thirsty any more.
He had hurt enough friends. He remembered that much.
‘I suggest you stand by Durin rather than me,’ Krakki went on. ‘He seems intent on a fast doom for you both.’
The black coach clattered through the long grey tunnel of the barbican and out onto a cobbled bailey. Ahead, encircled by a natural chasm, was the rugged keep of Rackspire itself. It was built high onto a knuckle of rock, towering high enough over its mountainous fortifications to grant a view over the Auric Bastion itself and into the heartlands of home. On a clear day, her master could see all the way to Kislev City. Ulrika looked inside of herself, expecting to be moved by the thought of home, but there was nothing, just a vague emptiness that she felt that she should fill.
The coach continued over the uneven cobbles towards the chasm-spanning drawbridge that led on to the keep.
Ulrika sensed the granite integrity of the outer walls enclose her. They were massive, almost dwarfish in the ruggedness of their construction, and struck from mountainside to mountainside in a rough diamond around the keep.
The bright colours of Ostermark fluttered through the sleeting rain, interspersed with banners bearing a heraldry that a man of this province would have to study far indeed to recognise. The motif was unusual and chilling: a snarling, inhuman skull, winged like a bat and displayed upon a field of blood-red cloth. Beneath their banners, shadowed figures were slumped on the parapet. Ulrika’s dark-piercing vision picked out halberds and crossbows, but not a breath of movement, not a glimmer of warmth. They were meat wrapped in Ostermark livery.
Besides Damir and his horses, not a single heart beat.
The prevailing sense of emptiness only served to emphasise a sense of what she could only describe as omniscience as it closed around the coach. Ulrika felt her hairs rise.
‘Welcome back, Ulrika.’
The urbane voice spoke directly into her thoughts, words rushing through the blood vessels of her brain. It was cultured to
the point of antiquity, the ancient roots of an accent discernible only to a fellow child of the steppe who knew where to look. The casual display of power was astonishing. Ulrika had last imbibed her master’s blood before she had left for Altdorf, and it remained strong.
The recollection made her mouth ache. This was how Damir felt when she went too long without bleeding him. The monster within her bared its fangs and announced its hunger. This was what Krieger had felt when he had been trapped in Praag the last time Chaos waxed.
‘The lifebringer marches on the Auric Bastion as we speak. Everything is prepared for him. For us.’
Ulrika peered through the window of her coach, studying Rackspire’s distant pinnacle. One thing Felix had thus far failed to realise was that to get into Kislev, the Auric Bastion would first have to come down. She considered the countless thousands of currently living Ostermarkers in the path of the Chaos horde on the veldt below.
And still she felt nothing.
Kislev was alive, and it had become a land of surpassing beauty. Gone were the fields of grain and barley, their monotony of colour and form. Gone too were the men that had grown them, the livestock they had fed, the vermin they had harboured.
In their place had come life.
Mile upon infinitely diverse mile of beastmen, marauders and Chaos warriors clamoured under the falling snow. Armour of every type. Flesh of every hue. Horns. Hooves. Tentacles. Claws. Every twisted possibility of creation was here and here for battle. The roar from so many divergent varieties of throat was all consumptive, a thunderous outpouring of adulation to their champions and their gods. The sound of one name rose above all others. He was the conqueror of Kislev.
‘Helbrass!’
Where the bare opal-coloured flesh of his feet fell, the snow melted and birthed flowers. The very air around him crackled with an aurora of changeling energy. It fizzed and popped, spontaneous generation summoning iridescent dragonflies that hummed ahead of his path like evangelists to a new order. His plate armour met the colour-shift of the Auric Bastion with a rainbow iridescence of possibilities. Through the eye slits of his helm he studied the edifice’s artificial wrongness. It was a barrier, and life suffered no barrier. Life would dig, it would bore, it would learn how to fly. And however distant its bars, Aekold Helbrass would not exist within a cage.
He had broken free of the Troll King. He would break this.
Watching the legions crushed against the Bastion’s base was like watching ants at work. From the mutated giants battering it with massive uprooted trees, through the sorcerers beseeching the aid of the infernal, to the harpies that screeched their frustrations from the clouds it was individually chaotic, but collectively driven. A staccato string of concussive screams resounded over the plain as the daemon-possessed hellcannon of a Chaos Dwarf contingent blasted the barrier. From the forest to the west, beastmen locked horns and fought for the right to enter the ancient dwarf tunnelway they had uncovered there. Perhaps the tunnels even led somewhere? Helbrass was not omniscient. There was no purpose beyond the effort alone.
One amongst the legion sorcerers paused in her incantations as Helbrass approached. Beneath a long, decorative silk robe she wore plate mail the colour of roses with mouldings edged in gold, each piece stylised into the form of androgynous figures that seemed to writhe in orgiastic embrace. She was flanked by an honour guard of fleshy pink trolls accoutred in stylised Chaos armour and with fixed expressions of existential wonder.
The colours of Helbrass’s armour blurred into red as he ground his bare hands into fists.
He hated trolls with a passion.
‘Helbrass,’ moaned the sorceress as if pleasured by the mere sound of her voice. ‘I have claimed this part of the wall for my own. When it falls it shall be the name of Porphyry the Unchaste that they sing: conqueror of the Palace of Flesh, survivor of the Trial of Twelve Pleasures, defiler of the flower of Kislev.’ Extending a hand, she planted it flat against the sheer stone of the Auric Bastion and produced a smile that could have corrupted a dead man.
‘I stand corrected,’ Helbrass bowed. ‘It is yours.’
Porphyry laughed, then suddenly cried out as a spasmodic wave wracked her body. The life-giving power of Change crackled through her. Her thighs bulged and pushed her feet into the earth. Knots formed in her perfect flesh as it hardened, cracked, and birthed new life in the form of buds and flowers. Her mouth opened to scream, but rather than a human voice there emerged a green shoot that, as if drawn by some sustenance other than sunlight, whipped into the Auric Bastion with a great splintering of stone. Porphyry the Unchaste gave one last moan as the last plates of Chaos armour were pushed aside and more questing shoots forced their way through.
Life was emergent. The humblest fungus would tunnel through the mightiest wall. For food, for shelter, and often for the simple imperative of expansion.
It was better to blossom as the flower of Chaos than to toil in the cages of Praag. He could not defeat the Troll King, but he had escaped him, smashed the Ice Queen, torn down her Ogham stones, and gifted every magician that his former captor craved an invigorative new form.
The Unchaste gave a zoetic pulse, a push of labour that thrust squirming hyphae into the wall. Rock groaned, and then the Auric Bastion began to split.
Helbrass drew his weapon, the two-handed broadsword named Windblade. The cracks rose higher and so did the pitch of his laughter.
‘Let there be life.’
Seven
The Battle of Trzy Siostry
‘Heldenhammer help us now,’ breathed Gustav Jaeger, his wiry mare spraying to a halt on the black slush road north of the Talabec Bridge crossing.
Everyone knew that Sigmar would return for the final battle. The ‘now’ was to beseech his aid early and, on current evidence, appeared to Felix completely superfluous.
Across the low, battlement-crusted hills of the Empire’s northern front, men climbed from their tents, lowered their weapons, and stared upwards in disbelief. The Auric Bastion was a mountain. It had stood inviolate for a year. And it was coming down.
The creak of wild roots and splitting stone resounded over the plain. It was louder than thunder, as though the earth had been turned downside up and then wrenched asunder. A clutch of gargantuan vines ripped through the surface of the stone. Thorns like dragons’ teeth bit into the wall as the Chaos vines strove higher, throwing out waxy leaves with the span of galleons’ sails to bat boulder-sized debris out over the dumbstruck Imperial lines.
Horns began to sound off as boulders hammered down on the forward positions like meteors. Men were crushed and wagons smashed to smithereens, stretches of drystone wall as old as the borders of the Empire were reduced to flying rubble under the sheer tonnage of rock. Into the screams of confusion and pain came the harpies.
Like a cloud of bees released from the nether reaches of hell, they swarmed through the Auric Bastion’s breach, cackling and gambolling between the pulsing vines towards the artillery batteries on the surrounding hills. At once feminine and monstrous, they swept down on those men forced from cover by the preceding barrage to hoist them screaming into the air. A sputter of handgun fire peppered the cloud, a futile gesture of defiance compared to the shrieking of the harpies and the continual gut-rumble of fissuring rock, but the wall of musket-shot was enough to drive the flock from the batteries. Shrieking into the blackpowder thunder, the swarm spiralled into dozens of splinter flocks that tore across the Imperial lines. Men cried out, ducked, those that didn’t snatched up by clawed hands and dropped from a great height. Matchlocks crackled, the spark of ignitions rippling back across the battle lines.
And then came the rest.
Felix had seen and done too much to fully share in his nephew’s horror, but even he found himself shaping the hammer across his chest and mouthing a prayer for Morr to welcome his soul to the garden of the dead. As he watched, a giant so muscular and
oiled that he gleamed kicked his way through the vine-choked rubble of the Auric Bastion like a living battering ram. Horsemen in thick furs waved stub spears above their heads and yapped like wild dogs, pushing their mounts past the striding giant until they foamed at the mouth. Beautiful daemon-women with pincer claws kept pace on loping, two-legged steeds while strange stingray-like creatures soared overhead, wings rippling on the invisible currents of magic through which they swam.
Like a man coming around to find the reality of waking infinitely worse than his nightmares, the first cannon roared, then another, the artillery crump shouting down the rattle of halberds, spears, a hundred banners, and the cries of forty thousand Ostermark soldiers. Felix’s heart lifted to see men of his Empire respond to the hell of the End Times with such stubbornness and courage. He wished Gotrek was here to see the mettle of men.
The Slayer would have loved this.
‘Gustav. Ride back to Badenhof, and quickly.’
‘You’ll get no argument from me,’ Gustav returned. He had one of a brace of pistols drawn and tracked the swooping of the nearest harpies anxiously. ‘But what are you going to do?’
Felix smiled wryly as he drew Karaghul. Sigmar, but that felt good. Even the knot of pre-battle jitters in his belly felt as familiar as an old pair of shoes or a poem that he had written as a child and thought forgotten. Bretonnia burned, Kislev was gone, the End Times were here and damn it if it was prideful but Felix Jaeger had played some part or other in every major conflict of the last twenty years and he wasn’t about to start sitting out now. ‘What I came to.’
‘You realise how ridiculous you sound. This is what comes of reading von Diehl.’
