by David Guymer
Snorri tried to hang the severed strap over his shoulder. It dropped twice more before he showed it to Durin. ‘You’ll have to tie it. Snorri… Snorri’s not very good at knots.’
Durin did so without fuss. ‘Let us race to Praag, Snorri, and the first one to the Ancestors’ Hall will have the beers ready.’
With a grin, Snorri picked up his hammer and threw himself back into the fight. He felt good, better than he had in days. This was surely the mighty doom he had been promised.
You will have the mightiest doom.
Blown apart and entombed with a horde of beastmen seemed mighty enough to Snorri and the likes of Durin and Krakki and Drogun were good dwarfs with whom to share it. He didn’t even mind overly when Durin tackled the beastman that had been about to bury its axe in his skull, and then screamed something in Snorri’s ear as he pushed him ahead into the press.
There was a moment’s pause, as if Snorri’s crossed stars held their breath.
And then the bombs went off.
The explosion rippled through the reinforced stone walls of the manor like a wave. Felix threw himself on top of Ulrika as Helbrass caught a glimpse of his own future and bellowed. A shock wave from somewhere deep within the structure pummelled his armour and shredded his bare hands with shrapnel. The champion’s hand snapped through a new incantation, summoning back his grey fire, but too late. Always too late.
The cracked lintel above his head finally split and the champion looked up, witnessing just one of manifold possibilities realised as the supporting structure gave and three storeys’ worth of masonry piled onto his shoulders.
There was a subterranean crump as one of the munitions stores in the manor’s cellars went off. The walls shook, but that one hadn’t been nearly as fierce. Mingled cries of triumph and dismay drifted down from the shell-shocked men on the ramparts.
Dizzied and slightly deaf, Felix picked himself up off of Ulrika. Rubble drizzled from his hair. He winced as his numerous aches and pains let him know where they were. The air tasted burned, and it tingled as if it had felt too much violence on its way to his throat. The sky rumbled with the roar of cannon.
Helbrass’s own fires must have ignited one of the blackpowder rooms. That was the only explanation.
Ulrika groaned beneath him and shifted. Felix felt an inappropriately timed pang of desire at the sight of her; tousled, spent, a little groggy from too much drink. He pushed the thought aside. There would be time enough to explore it later if they could just get out of here alive.
‘What happened?’ Ulrika murmured. ‘Did you kill him?’
‘After a fashion, I think.’
‘How? He was the conqueror of Kislev. And you are–’
‘A has-been former henchman?’
‘Something like that.’ Ulrika smiled and held up a hand for Felix to pull her up. He did and she fell into his arms before she could steady herself. Her body was oddly warm after having drunk. Her white hair was clotted with blood and smelled of smoke. She looked at Helbrass’s buried remains, and then at Felix, lips parted in an expression of awe as if he had just done something astounding.
‘It’s not quite what you think.’
A low growl disturbed the sprinkling rock dust. Ulrika looked up and Felix turned to see the big bull minotaur that had first broken through the manor’s doors return to look for its raiding party. Its horned head drew level with the eaves of the row of houses behind it, even hunched under the weight of its armour and the massive warhammer in its hands. It surveyed the wreckage and snorted a great plume of hot air. Felix drew up his sword wearily.
What god did I offend today, he thought?
‘Starovye!’
Felix had heard that word before, had in context assumed it meant ‘drink’, but as he twisted around he saw Damir and his stubborn little Ungol pony bolt through the breach in the village’s northern wall with his bow nocked and two-score stridently garbed horsemen thundering in his train. With a shiver of forty-plus recurve bows, the minotaur sprouted arrows.
Hollering fury, the monster swung its warhammer across a high, sweeping arc. Damir pressed himself down against his pony’s neck as the hammer whistled overhead, then smoothly nocked another arrow, shot it point blank into the bull’s neck, and kicked his pony out of reach. The Ungol rode to Ulrika and offered his hand. Ulrika took it, planted her boot into the pony’s flank and swung herself up behind Damir into the saddle.
The minotaur bellowed, goring a pony through the shoulder and flipping it and its rider through the air. Ulrika flourished her sabre.
‘Let us finish this and be away.’
‘Nyeh,’ said the Ungol, sucking in his teeth and nodding back the way he had just ridden.
More horsemen were following in through the breach, riding hard as if pursued not just by the forces of hell but by hell itself. Felix caught glimpses of Imperial colours within the coloured wools and hemp coats of the Ungol horse-archers. A smattering of pistol shots peppered the minotaur’s armour before one, fired from close range, blew out the back of its pot-helm. The beast crashed forwards and riders yipped or else just continued to gallop past.
Felix saw the pistolier cough and wave a hand through the pistol discharge. He was a shade too tall to sit comfortably on a horse the size of the wiry mare he rode. Long blond hair lay over blood-spattered mail. A blue cloak hung over one shoulder. With shaking fingers, he inexpertly refilled the chamber of his pistol from the horn tied to his saddle. His efforts seemed to spill more powder over his fingers than into his weapon. He noticed Felix and gave a fraught half-smile.
‘If ever I see a Detlef Sierck or a von Diehl or any of those “just war” poets, then I’m going to kill them.’
‘Gustav?’ said Felix in disbelief. ‘What are you doing here?’
The young man scowled, closing the powder chamber and shaking spilt powder from the gun barrel. Then he holstered it. ‘My men are club-footed sots and the guards von Karlsdorf placed on the Bechafen road have patriotism to fill their pockets.’
More horsemen were piling through the breach, firing over their shoulders as they came.
‘You can talk later,’ said Ulrika. ‘We have to ride east. My master’s soldiers wait for us there to escort us across the Auric Bastion.’
Felix gestured to the men still clinging on to the battlements of the subsiding manor-fort. ‘These men–’
‘Will serve Roch and the Emperor long after this, I assure you.’
‘At least let me see Gustav to Badenhof. I owe my brother that much.’
‘No time!’ Ulrika snarled, angered by something Felix had said. The crack of pistol shots was growing sharper and more frequent. ‘He can risk the ride back to the Empire or he can come with us.’
Felix turned to his nephew; nervous, scared, slightly exalted, face painted by the back-splatter of a monster few would ever see and that he had still to realise that he had just slain. He was family. And Ulrika was essentially asking him to choose the time and manner of his death.
Life or death? Here in Kurzycko or sometime later in Kislev?
He ground his teeth and relented. It wasn’t really much of a choice, and at least this way Felix could keep an eye on him.
‘Stick by me, Gustav. I’ll see you through this.’
Felix was reminded of another promise he had made back in the Shallyan temple in Altdorf, another promise he’d known he wouldn’t be able to keep.
‘You’ve got to be joking. I am not going to Kislev with you.’
Felix waved his protests down. His nephew’s opinion was moot now anyway. He looked around for a horse of his own to ride as a wedge of heavily armoured knights in moulded black plate and riding muscularly caparisoned destriers came through the north breach at a hard canter. A rearguard of pistoliers followed in a skirmish line, loosing a fusillade of solid shot into the pursuing northmen.
The knights reined in by Felix and Ulrika while the pistoliers and the Ungols rallied into a formation to hold the northmen at bay. A standard bearer bore a swallowtailed red banner that fluttered loosely in the heat eddies from the village’s burning. Their black plate was shaped into effigies of snarling faces, decorated with unusual variants of holy iconography and strung with tattered scraps of scripture. The wargear was stained and dented, but the marble-hard men within were pristine exemplars of beauty and strength.
To Felix’s mind, they could have equally just had ‘vampire’ emblazoned on the banderoles fluting from their lanceheads.
He could almost picture the recruitment poster right then: a phalanx of rotting zombies marching on the Auric Bastion under the heraldic bat of the vampire counts of Sylvania. Somehow, he couldn’t see it passing the Reiksmarshal’s approval. He gave a world-weary sigh. Why should the dead not bear their own weight?
‘I presume one of you lords has a horse for me?’
‘You may ride with me, Herr Jaeger.’
The knights’ commander drew in the reins of his chilling, ghost-white charger. His eyes were pupil-less, as clear and compelling as pearls, and just standing under their gaze without bending the knee felt like an act of treason against the natural order. His high cheekbones reminded him a little of Ulrika, telling perhaps of a shared Gospodar heritage. He wore the same black full plate as his command, only much more elaborate and with a faint magical aura perceptible even to Felix.
It was clearly none other than Commandant Roch himself.
‘I saw you die,’ Felix murmured.
‘Life and death are seldom such straightforward affairs.’ The vampire lord produced a smile more predatory than anything ever worn by a dire wolf or a Southlands alligator and extended a hand. Felix noted the ring that glittered from his translucent finger. He was reminded of his own. ‘If you knew me, then you would know I have returned from worse.’
‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’ screamed General von Karlsdorf until spittle was flying from his mouth.
The Chaos hordes were streaming out from the chokepoint at Kurzycko. Everywhere he looked now, provincial banners were being tramped under the iron heel of the advancing legions as men were cut down or broke. The stamp of so many feet was loud enough to sound even over the burst and whine of mortar fire from Wilhelmshügel.
Roch had abandoned them. It was over.
Matthias Wilhelm dropped his eyeglass and stared numbly over the coming wave.
‘Fire,’ he murmured. ‘Somebody?’
The words dried up as the corner of his eye caught a flash of red and he turned to see the wizards of the Three Sisters immolated in dragonfire. Harpies and daemons shot through the flames, followed by the imperious glide of the Chaos dragon.
All around, men abandoned their guns in terror, but Matthias Wilhelm stood frozen. He whimpered as the cloud of harpies poured down, claws outstretched for the kill.
Ulrika hardened her heart to the screams as she gave her white stallion its head to run. It was unsurprisingly easy. Men were dying, but it was not as if they were going anywhere. Her master would still need an army to reclaim Trzy Siostry and push the Chaos host back through the Auric Bastion.
She closed her eyes and let her mount gallop, allowing the rhythm of its stride to perfuse the muscles of her thighs. The horse had found its way back to its stablemates after the fight in Kurzycko and she had been pleased, in a detached sort of way, to be reunited for this final leg of their journey. The infamous cold of the oblast wind ran though her hair, but of course, she did not feel it. She did not know what she had been expecting to feel on her return home.
But not nothing.
In Praag perhaps, it would be different. Yes, the true Ungol steppe. That was her home, not this rolling southern country that in all but language and the names of its villages was not dissimilar from the Empire across the river. Burned-out farmsteads dotted the snowscape. The snow-coated firs of the Shirokij Forest prickled the hills to her left while mountains climbed through the clouds to her right. This was not home.
At the approach of familiar heartbeats, she turned in the saddle to watch Felix, Gustav and Damir leading a sizeable force of horse-archers, free company pistoliers, and demilancers out from the Auric Bastion.
Damir of course could ride all day and sleep in the saddle by night. He had done so before and would doubtless be called on to do so again. He was loyal beyond mortal scope and a fierce warrior. She had no concerns about him or the men he led.
For all his griping about aches and pains, Felix compared favourably with his younger counterpart. His greying hair and battle scars lent him an air of experience that men he had never even met seemed to want to follow. Ulrika suspected that there was some block in Felix’s head that did not permit him to see – and he would doubtless resent it if he did – that he was a twenty-year veteran and looked it. Men respected that, particularly on the oblast where a man without children at twenty risked both his life and his line.
On turning to Gustav she sighed. The young man was such a mirror to a younger Felix that it almost hurt. Almost.
She had long ago forgotten how it felt to bathe in running water, to feel the breath of the sun upon her skin. Had she finally also forgotten how to feel?
‘You are troubled, Ulrika.’
‘Not by anything that matters,’ she replied, turning to the proud prince of the undead who rode alongside her. Despite her master’s ornate wargear and the horse’s heavy black barding, his spectral charger kept pace without even appearing to breathe.
‘There is a blood bond between us, and I know when you lie. The wizard, Schreiber, is as important to me as he is to you. Balthasar Gelt speaks most highly of him, both as a scholar of Chaos and a man of sound reason. I will need such allies.’
‘Yes, lord.’
‘But do not forget your true purpose. Even we cannot wage this war alone. Serve me as well as Adolphus Krieger once served my own wayward child and I will see you rewarded in kind. There are nine seats in Nagash’s court, Ulrika, and the fate of Walach Harkon at Alderfen leaves at least one open for you.’ There was a snarl, a slip of the mask. He stared dead ahead, as though he too yearned for the oblast to give him something to feel. ‘Others will fall before this war is decided, and when we prevail then you will rule Kislev for eternity.’
Ulrika grit her teeth and said nothing. Talk about a poisoned chalice. It was easy to speak of the lesser of two evils. Too easy. Especially when the evils in play were both so great.
Stasis or Chaos?
She was a Kislevite. Her instinct was to rebel, to bend the knee to no lord, and particularly not one from a millennia-dead desert kingdom so far removed from the frozen oblast that there were plenty of men even in the mercantile quarters of Erengrad and Volksgrad that had never heard of it. But the middle ground had crumbled into the abyss the day that Archaon claimed the crown of the Everchosen and Nagash arose to oppose him. Now was the time to make a choice, pick a side, and accept that the world was beyond the power of her own stubbornness to mould. She wished that she could explain this to Felix but, as he and Katerina had both proven in refusing Ulrika’s gift, the mortals were not yet ready for that choice.
The Great Necromancer or the Great Powers?
‘We will be the good shepherds, Ulrika. It is the only way.’
‘Yes, lord,’ Ulrika whispered. ‘It will be done.’
‘There is no need for subterfuge here, Ulrika. You are home. You may call me by my name.’
Ulrika turned to regard him properly. He looked back, long white hair thrashing in the wind, white wolf smile gleaming. The compulsion in his gaze was powerful, even to another of the Arisen. How different history might have been had the Vampire Wars ended with the Emperor’s crown on the head of this immortal potentate. Would the world be in the crisis it now was with Vlad von Carstein on the throne of its most
powerful nation?
‘Yes, Lord von Carstein.’
Vlad nodded. His expression was still as the surface of the moon, but a deep hurt glittered in his milk-white eyes. ‘I would have made this journey myself. Beloved Isabella once spent the season in Praag, and would you believe that I have never even seen the opera house, the Grande Parade, the Square of Kisses, those sights that delighted her mortal life?’ He shook his head. ‘It is too late for me. My ties to humanity were broken long ago.’ He blinked, an oddly manual gesture that had nothing to do with moistening eyes harder than most men’s blades. He turned to regard Felix and the other mortals. ‘For almost as long as my own unlife, Praag has been a tainted city. Now it is firmly in Chaos hands. Recall how its influence almost maddened Krieger and think what its power will do to you now.’
‘I do, lord. I understand that all too well.’
With a grimace which might have concealed a droplet of affection, Vlad turned his steed about and summoned the Drakenhof Templars to escort him back to Rackspire. He nodded towards Felix.
‘Then cherish him, Ulrika, because you will need him before the end.’
Kolya knelt into the snow to wrench his arrow from the beastman’s back. The shaft came loose in a tearing of muscle and a small spurt of blood. He did not have the spares to throw away and, as the wise woman had used to say, what falls from the horse on the oblast is as good as gone. He wiped it clean on the back of his mitts and slid it into the quiver he had fashioned from a gor chieftain’s drinking horn that hung from his waist.
Looping his bow over his shoulder, he looked across the field of mangled, snow-furred corpses to where the dwarf, Gurnisson, stomped away. The witchlights of the corrupted northern sky paraded purple and green above their destination.
Praag.
Kolya looked down at the crystal beauty of the troll that lay dismembered upon the ground where the dwarf had slain it. It was an ice troll of the Goromadny, that Kolya had thought existed only in old dwarf sagas and the boasts of mountain rangers. A red gleam of alien intelligence had lit its eyes before it had died. It was nothing Kolya had ever witnessed in the eyes of a troll before now.
