by Warhammer
The guardsmen obviously knew who he was, for they gave him a wide berth. As he walked past Felix heard the soldiers whispering about the day’s battle. It seemed their exploits on the walls were well known.
Fine, thought Felix. It might not do them much good to be the heroes of the hour, but every little helped. While they were useful fighters in the defence of the city, he doubted anyone would look too closely at their other activities.
He entered the tavern and immediately headed upstairs, leaving Gotrek to his solitary drinking in the bar.
‘How is she?’ Felix asked nervously. Max sat in the chair next to the bed. Felix was not sure how he felt about the wizard being here. He was at once jealous and grateful.
‘She will be fine,’ Max said softly. ‘She just needs rest and time to recover.’
‘How are you? Feeling any better?’
‘I’ve been less tired, but I’ll live. Find out anything interesting?’
Felix risked a look at Ulrika to make sure she was asleep and then explained where he had been and what he had learned.
‘It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing,’ Max said. ‘Did you really expect to uncover the name of the assassin’s master?’
‘No, but sometimes you get lucky. If you don’t try, you never get anywhere, and then we might as well all go back to waiting for a poisoned knife in the back some dark night. Can you think of anything?’
‘No. I am worried though. It’s not a reassuring thought that there may be traitors in the palace. I can’t say I am surprised though.’
‘Nor can I.’
‘Really? You say that with some authority, Felix.’
‘It won’t be the first time I have encountered traitors in high places.’ Max just looked at him. Without knowing why, Felix found himself telling the tale of his encounter with Fritz von Halstadt, chief of the Elector Countess Emmanuelle’s secret police, and an agent of the skaven. Max was a good listener, nodding and smiling and asking intelligent questions when he needed a point clarified.
‘You think the traitor might be just as highly placed?’ Max asked eventually.
‘No reason why he might not be even more highly placed. High birth is no guarantee that a man is not corrupt.’
‘I am sure many of our ruling class might violently disagree with that,’ said Max. ‘But I won’t. Even in Middenheim I saw evidence of that. I can remember…’
As Max spoke a look of pure fear passed across his face. His features went pale. His hands shook. He looked like he had just been struck by a thunderbolt.
‘What is it?’ asked Felix.
‘We must go to the wall! Now! Get the Slayer!’
EIGHT
The man called Halek stood on the topmost tower of the citadel and gazed off into the night. Below him he could see the snow-covered roofs of the inner town, the towering temple tops, the maze-like pattern of streets, and the enormous inner wall. The houses and tenements beyond that looked tiny in the distance. Only the massive outer wall appeared to have any substance. In the far distance, he could see out into the vast sea of campfires that surrounded the city, the silhouettes of the monstrous daemonic war-engines, dark metal leering out through their covering of snow. He could see other things now too.
His master had granted him a gift recently. He had been changed. His eyes could see more than mortal eyes now, could see the powers of his master, Tzeentch, Lord of Magic, as it ebbed and flowed around him. He knew that soon his eyes would start to change, and would show the stigmata of mutation, but it did not matter now. By the time any of the people around him realised he was one of the Gifted, it would be far too late to do anything about it. They, and their whole city, would be crushed beneath the iron heel of Chaos.
Halek knew he had to stop thinking like this. He knew that with the change he was becoming unduly sensitive to the currents of magic being summoned by the master magicians out there among the Chaos horde. He knew that it was starting to affect his mind. Soon it would not matter. Soon he would be free to revel in unfettered worship of his master, the Changer of Ways, but now things were at a delicate juncture, and might still go wrong. As he had so often reminded himself, there was no point in Chaos triumphing if he himself was not there to witness it. He did not want to risk exposure so soon before the glorious day when the Time of Changes arrived.
Part of him was still unsure whether he wished to see the triumph of Chaos at all. Part of him was still loyal to the city and the people and the duke. Part of him wished he had never attended that first meeting, never allowed himself to be seduced into the quest for forbidden knowledge. Too late now, he told himself, trying to submerge the side of himself that felt guilt and weariness and pain. Too late for anything except to play his planned part.
He tried to tell himself that the changes were for the better. He could feel his master’s gifts wakening within him, as they would soon be doing among all the chosen of the Old World. With his new sensitivity to the winds of magic had come the first hints of the ability to wield it. He could with an effort of will now shape the raw stuff of magic itself. To prove it to himself, he concentrated on making light appear around his hand. By dint of prodigious effort he made a faint nebulous glow appear about him. Astonishing, what it took most magicians years of study and intensive training to master was coming to him through nothing more than the force of his own will. If he could do this now, after only a few days, what else might be possible in a few years?
He glanced out into the distance, his attention suddenly caught by the vast skein of magic woven around the city. Tonight it blazed with astonishing brightness. Tonight as Morrslieb blazed down in all its glory, the final rituals were taking place to seal the circle around the city, and move the Great Scheme forward. He could see the webs of force shimmering through the lines of the Chaos army, running from sacred obelisk to sacred obelisk, as the sorcerers in the service of Tzeentch summoned the winds of magic and channelled them to their own purposes. Each of those great, carved standing stones had been brought down from the Chaos Wastes borne by hundreds of sanctified slaves. He could not yet guess what the purpose of them was, but he knew it must be mighty. When the time was right, he would know.
He forced his enraptured mind away from the contemplation of the infinite beauty of the magical weaving, and back to matters at hand. It was a pity Olaf and Sergei had failed in their assigned task. They had been good servants in their way, and he was sorry they would not be around to claim their rewards on the great day. Felix Jaeger must have been very lucky or very tough to survive that encounter, for the pair had been formidable killers. It was not a reassuring thought, for he had counted Jaeger as the less formidable of the pair it was his assigned task to see killed.
If it took this much effort to kill the man, it was going to take much more to get rid of the Slayer. Still, he knew with patience, persistence and a painstaking determination to learn from one’s mistakes, all setbacks could be overcome. He would just have to find another way forward, that was all. He felt sure that he would fulfil his part in the Great Scheme before too long. He always had before.
Right now there were other things to concern him. His agents must have poisoned the Watergate granary by now. It would be the first of many if all went well. He shuddered. He did not like doing these things. It went against all he had been brought up to believe. He did not like thinking of himself as a traitor. Even as this thought crossed his mind, he was granted a flash of insight. Part of him did feel guilty, it was true, but another part of him revelled in the wickedness of it all. He was taking his revenge for a lifetime of being in second place, for all those little slights that had been heaped on him. He was breaking free from the straightjacket of honour and responsibility. In a way it was a good thing. Then why do I feel like I stand on the brink of an abyss, he thought.
Even as he watched he sensed a change coming over the city in response to the flow of power in the distance. It sounded like a high-pitched keening wail. The sort of sound a so
ul in torment might make when plunged into Tzeentch’s deepest hells. What was going on, Halek wondered? Was this some part of the Great Scheme of which he had not been warned?
As they raced through the snow, shapes emerged from the gloom. At first, Felix could not believe his eyes. He thought he was just seeing gusts of snow, being driven into odd forms, but as he watched it became obvious that it was not so.
The outlines took on a misty nebulous substance that looked like the silhouettes of men but had the faces of souls in torment. They howled and wailed thinly, their spectral voices rising above the wind in a terrifying shriek. One of them came straight at Gotrek, gibbering insanely, long trails of faintly glowing ectoplasm swirling out behind it as it flowed through the air. The Slayer raised his axe, and his blow passed through the ghastly creature as if it were made of mist. As it did so, the creature lost coherence and dissolved into invisibility. All around them the wailing intensified, and a sense of terrible presence thickened.
Looking around him, Felix could see that thousands of the creatures swam through the air of the city, shrieking and howling and gibbering. One of them flashed directly at him. He raised his sword to block it, the way Gotrek had blocked his. As the creature came closer, he could see that it was almost transparent. It glowed green in the light of Morrslieb. Snowflakes passed through it, as if it were not really there. It did not seem quite real. As he watched he saw more and more of the things were emerging from the very stones of the city. What new Chaos-spawned evil was this, he wondered? What had the forces of Darkness unleashed this night?
With appalling speed the creature swerved around his blade. It reached out and clasped his face with its eldritchly glowing fingers. At the instant of contact a shock passed through Felix, potent as if he had been struck by lightning. The shock was not physical but emotional. It was a jolt of pure undiluted terror. Felix felt his blood run cold as fear entered his mind, and threatened to bury his mind under an avalanche of pure dread.
A flood of images flickered through his mind, threatening to drown his brain. He saw the city of Praag, oddly changed. He saw a vast Chaos army outside the gates, and a leering hungry face glowing in the moon. He saw a pitiful army of human defenders cut down by the warriors of evil. He saw the city razed and the army of Darkness move off leaving only the spirits of the restless dead. Later he saw the city rebuilt, and the eerie consciences of the slain seeping into its very stones, to be poisoned and corrupted by the warping energies that surrounded them.
Instantly he realised what the thing was. It was a ghost of one of those warriors who had fallen two centuries ago, in the Great War against Chaos. Once it had been a man like him, now it had been reduced to a near mindless hungry echo of what it once was. The fear it projected into him was its own fear, a thing that had consumed its consciousness over the long decades of imprisonment in the stones. It was an all-consuming horror that threatened to kill him with its sheer power. His heart raced until he felt it would burst. His nerve endings screamed. Something deep within his brain shrieked and gibbered in primal terror. He felt as if his mind would crumble under the sheer intensity of the feeling, and as sanity receded he felt tendrils of alien thought begin to invade his brain. He had a sense of a bottomless hunger, and a mindless lust to take on flesh once more, and slake desires that had not been gratified in centuries.
He knew something was trying to displace him from his own body, to force his spirit out so that it could possess his body and work evil. He knew that if it succeeded, he would become like it, a disembodied spirit slowly degenerating into a creature like this lost, mindless thing. Desperately, without knowing quite how, he fought back, seeking to push the thing out of him.
As he did so, he felt the fear begin to recede. His heartbeat slowed once more. His vision cleared. He saw the ghostly thing’s horrifically distorted face before him. It was a ghastly parody of a man’s, twisted with rage and a sickening desire for mortal flesh. Its mouth opened, distending far further than any human mouth, becoming so large it looked like it could swallow Felix’s head in a bite. He snarled back at it, and swung his blade. It passed through the creature. The runes on its blade glowed and the hideous thing fell apart into dozens of smaller component clouds that slowly dissipated. As they did so the near overwhelming terror vanished as if it had never been.
He glanced around and saw that Gotrek stood in the middle of a cloud of shrieking spectres, his axe destroying them before they could get close to him. Max was nearby, encased in a shield of golden light that prevented the creatures from getting close to him. As Felix watched, Max gestured and incanted and the sphere surrounding him expanded, racing outwards into the night. Where it touched a ghost the thing disintegrated, unable to resist whatever magic the wizard had unleashed. Felix envied Max his powers. In a moment, the street around them was clear of the monsters, as was the sky above. From houses around them, Felix could hear shrieks and insane gibbering. He guessed that not all of the inhabitants of the houses has been as successful as he had at resisting possession by the ghosts. At that moment, another fear almost as overwhelming as the one the spectre had inflicted on him filled his mind. He glared over at Max: ‘Ulrika – is she safe?’
Max’s face went pale then he closed his eyes and made a complex series of hand-gestures. Behind his eyelids, Felix could see a molten golden glow. It was not a reassuring sight. The fire within had only just started to die away as Max opened his eyes once more. ‘Do not worry. She is safe. The wards I left in place were more than enough to keep those creatures at bay.’
‘What in hell were those things?’ Felix asked, although he already knew the answer. He needed to hear his own voice just to prove to himself he was still human.
‘Ectoplasmic creatures, a psychic residue of the evil that once flowed over this city.’
‘Once more Max, in language I might understand.’
‘Ghosts, Felix. Spirits bound to the place of their death by the power of dark magic, and their own fears and hatreds. Praag is a haunted city.’
‘How did the Chaos warriors free them? I thought you said their magic could not penetrate the warding spells in the city walls.’
Max shook his head, and all the light died from his eyes. He looked over at Gotrek and Felix. Heavy footsteps came closer in the night. Felix held his sword at the ready. Gotrek shook his head, telling him the weapon would not be needed. Max seemed oblivious to the potential threat. He kept speaking in a loud slightly theatrical voice, reminding Felix for all the world of his former professors at the University of Altdorf.
‘Perhaps their magic has grown strong enough to pass through those spells. It is possible, but not likely. I do not think they are strong enough yet to manage that.’
‘Then what did this?’ As Felix watched glowing spheres of light began to expand outwards over other parts of the city. Felix did not need Max to tell him that other wizards were at work, doing exactly what Max had done.
‘I don’t think the Chaos horde freed these things exactly,’ said Max. ‘I think they were always here, always within the walls. I think that something the Chaos magicians have done woke them.’
‘And what might that have been?’
‘I don’t know, but I sensed a mighty movement of the winds of magic not a watch ago. The Chaos moon waxes. The powers of evil magic grow strong. Let us go to the walls and see for ourselves.’
Even as Max finished speaking, Snorri Nosebiter emerged from the gloom and the snow. ‘Funny ghostie things attacked Snorri. Stupid things kept hitting him. Nothing happened.’
‘You didn’t feel anything – fear, terror, pain?’ Felix asked.
‘No. Snorri didn’t feel any such things.’ Snorri sounded insulted by the very suggestion.
‘That’s because you need a brain to feel fear, manling,’ said Gotrek. ‘Snorri doesn’t have one.’
Snorri beamed proudly at Gotrek’s words. He looked pleased as punch as they rushed on towards the walls.
A man emerged from the sn
ow. His features were pale, corpse-like. His eyes glowed with the same spectral luminescence that had surrounded the ghosts. Max knew instantly that here was one of those foul beings taken flesh. Embedded as it was on tissue and sinew, it could not now be disintegrated by the magical energies that Max had used to dispel its brethren. He summoned his energies, but it was becoming more difficult. He was numbed by the cold, and drained by the magic he had already wrought. The thing chuckled evilly and reached for him with long, cold white fingers.
Before it could reach him, Felix leapt past Max and slammed his sword through the creature’s body. Blood seeped forth slowly, staining the snow. It was an unnatural response to so deep a wound, but the evil thing that had possessed the man was not giving up its life easily. The runes along Felix’s blade glowed dully. Max did not sense any of the ancient sentience that had emerged when they had confronted the dragon Skjalandir. If it was still within the blade, it remained dormant.
As the creature fell, a long wailing shriek emerged from its mouth, and white mist bubbled out. At first Max feared that the ghost was going to attempt to possess either Felix or himself, but it did not. Instead, it began to disintegrate and blow away in the wind.
‘Thank you,’ said Max, and meant it. He was suddenly grateful that Felix, Gotrek and Snorri were there. They might not have been people who he would have wanted to spend time with under normal circumstances, but when you were trapped in a snowbound haunted city under siege by the powers of Chaos, they were exactly the sort you wanted by your side.
They continued to move on towards the walls. Max feared what they would find there. Overhead Morrslieb glowed fearfully. Its light was brighter than that of its larger brother, Mannslieb. He was not sure why this was happening but he knew from his reading of history that it was always a portent of dreadful things. In truth, he did not need the alteration to the moon to let him know this. His mage senses told him the same thing. The currents of dark magic swirled visibly beyond the city walls, a mighty tide of evil energy being drawn there for a reason. And he was sure that the reason was not a good one.