by Warhammer
Pistol shots rang out across the square. Blades clashed, and voices rose in cries of hate or screams of pain. Captain Morthan hacked her sword through a grot’s neck as its steed landed nearby, and the squig bounded on again with the headless corpse still clinging to its stubby horns. A squig landed on Borik from behind and Aelyn felt a surge of alarm, but the thing’s fangs struck sparks from the Kharadron armour before Borik managed to squirm around, ram his pistol into the monster’s mouth and fire. The back of its spheroid body erupted in a flash of fire and gore, and its rider was blown through the air to land twitching on the cobbles.
Suddenly, there were no more squig riders, just a smouldering pit surrounded by bleeding, dying bodies. Aelyn dragged her blades from the body of a fallen squig and took stock. Thirteen left standing, she saw: Captain Morthan and five of her watchmen, the three Swords, three militiamen and a single, bloodied palace guard. Most of them were wounded in some way or other, and all were breathing hard. Aelyn realised with alarm that they were all sucking down the spore-thick fumes with every breath, heard suddenly the wet congestion in her lungs.
‘Let us get away from this pit,’ she said, feeling nausea stirring in her gut.
Morthan coughed wetly, took her meaning and nodded. ‘You soldiers, you’re with us,’ she said. ‘We push along the Fieldway and join the muster at Fountains Square. No damned greenskin invasion is going to take Draconium from us, you hear me? This is Sigmar’s own city, and we–’
She broke off, her inspiring words interrupted by a bout of phlegmy coughing. Morthan spat and scowled angrily.
‘Just follow me,’ she snarled, and was off again, leaving the square by its eastern edge. Aelyn and her companions followed.
The Fieldway turned out to be a wide arterial street that connected Marketsway to High Drake near the city’s centre, and to Pole Hill in the east. Aelyn saw it had been built broad enough for ranked formations of soldiery to move along as easily as foot-and-trade traffic, and understood why Morthan had chosen this route to reach Fountains Square quickly. Yet it was clear that many others had had the same idea, friend and foe alike.
Grots roved in packs between panicked masses of city folk, who fought back against their leering attackers with whatever implements came to hand. Many fled screaming, only to be dragged down and knifed cruelly. Aelyn saw greenskins maliciously hacking off fingers and toes and stuffing them into dirty cloth bags tied to their belts.
She saw a spider-legged grot picking his way through the carnage, a gnarled staff in one hand with what looked like a beast’s stinger jutting from its end. The awful creature had a cluster of red eyes scattered across its face, and a bulging wicker basket lashed to its back that clinked with bottles and vials. A militiaman charged the arachnid greenskin with a yell, spear levelled. The grot hissed and spun its staff, weaving aside from the man’s blow and driving the stinger into his throat. The soldier staggered back, clawing at his neck as his flesh swelled and turned black around the wound. The corruption ran through his flesh like wildfire, bloating and distending his skin even as it turned it bruise-black and splitting it in splatters of fluids. He crashed to the floor, choking on his own swollen flesh, then lay still, a blackened and bloated ruin.
The grot peered at its handiwork with amused fascination, before fishing a vial from its basket and emptying the contents over its stinger-staff. Aelyn itched to slay the monstrous poisoner, but Morthan wasn’t stopping for anything and the crowd swept the grot away.
Aelyn’s shoulder hurt, her injured arm ached, and her mind churned with the constant terror of the Bad Moon leering down. She felt as though, if she could not escape its monstrous gaze soon, she might go mad. Instead, she kept moving. She wove around the fiercest knots of fighting and drove her knives into anything greenskinned that came too close. An arrow whipped over her shoulder – friend’s or foe’s, she didn’t see – and Aelyn felt keenly the lack of her longbow. Her comrades were retrieving her backup weapon, she reminded herself. She would have a bow in hand soon.
‘Providing any of us survives this long enough,’ she muttered, grimacing as a troggoth smashed out through a shopfront in a shower of stone and broken glass to swing its club through a knot of watchmen. Broken bodies flew through the air, the one survivor screaming in terror as a spore-sickened nobleman pounced on him and vomited across his face.
‘The sickness is still spreading!’ shouted Aelyn, spotting several more gibbering infected tearing their way through the crowd.
‘I know,’ replied Morthan. ‘We’ll regroup with the muster then put them all down.’
Another earth tremor rocked the ground. Something huge and shadowy ploughed along a neighbouring street amidst a chorus of screams. Aelyn privately wondered whether matters were already too far gone, but she kept moving. At this point, a determined fight back from a secure position seemed the city’s best bet. She tried not to wonder how they might even begin to banish the lunar monstrosity that filled the skies above them.
One problem at a time, she thought.
‘Where the hells are the Heav’ner Stormcasts I heard so much about?’ shouted Olt as they pushed through a mass of panicking city folk. ‘Seems like the sort of thing they might take an interest in?’
‘All off fighting their damned wars of conquest, just like most of our city militia!’ replied Morthan angrily. ‘I told Selvador he’d left us too weak. I damned well warned that old fool.’
They reached the end of the street, and at last Fountains Square opened out before them. Aelyn felt a sudden surge of hope. Around the square’s edge, greenskins and soldiery were locked in violent conflict. Further back, arranging themselves with swift and professional determination around the fountain itself, she saw hundreds of militia. Watchmen were gathering there too, and mobs of what looked like citizens clutching makeshift weapons, old blades, broken bottles; anything they could find. Aelyn saw priests, too, clad in similar garb to that worn by Romilla, their flesh scarified and tattooed, their expressions fierce. The Etched, she assumed. Cannons were wheeled into place by sweating crewmen. The banners of Draconium hung lank and fungus-spotted beneath the Bad Moon’s light, but they were raised nonetheless, and a substantial army was gathering beneath them.
Aelyn saw a figure she assumed must be Arch-Lector Kayl, astride a snorting demi-drake that wore hammer-inscribed barding of rich gold. The man was straight-backed and imposing. His beard was neatly forked and a halo of saintly power played about his head. A cloak of spun gold flowed behind him as he stood in his stirrups and bellowed commands at his swiftly mustering soldiers.
‘Quickly now, we must join them,’ said Morthan, and set off across the square at a run. The ragtag group followed, weaving around a mob of greenskins and discharging pistols into them, dodging their return spear-thrusts. Aelyn spun around an assailant and rammed a blade into the grot’s eye, ripping it away bloody before running on. The ranks of soldiery were less than a hundred yards away now, closer by the footfall. Here was a chance to fight back. Here was a chance to survive, to take revenge for Hendrick’s death.
The pressure wave hit like an avalanche.
Aelyn felt herself leave the ground, felt everything tumble madly around her. The floor hit her cheek like a punch. She blinked stars from her eyes, tasted blood and felt the tug of a loose tooth. Aelyn scrambled to her feet and saw the proud muster in disarray. Men and women were picking themselves up, dazed and bleeding. Cannons had been hurled onto their sides and one crewman was screaming shrilly where his legs had been pinned beneath a fallen field-gun. Around the square, several buildings had collapsed in avalanches of rubble, burying city folk and greenskins alike, and the square’s ornamental trees now leaned at crazed angles, their roots jutting up from the ruptured soil of their beds.
‘Are those stars?’ asked a watchman as she staggered upright beside Aelyn.
‘Stormcasts! It’s the Stormcasts!’ cried another, pointing up at
the glowing points of light that stood out stark against the Bad Moon’s visage. They were bright, glimmering sparks that grew larger by the second. Drawing closer, Aelyn thought. Could they be Stormcasts, riding the God-King’s lightning down into Draconium to deliver vengeance and retribution?
Then she took in the subtle shift in the Bad Moon’s ghastly visage and her blood froze in her veins. Its crater-eyes had constricted impossibly into narrow chasms. Its mountainous maw was twisted as though coughing, or retching.
‘Sigmar, no…’ she breathed, as the glittering lights swelled into roiling fireballs plummeting closer and closer. Her sharp aelven eyes picked out the shapes of jagged meteorites, mercilessly showing her the vast weight of loonstone hurtling down upon Draconium.
‘Fangs of the Bad Moon,’ croaked Borik. Across the square, fresh screams rose as soldiers pointed skywards and fleeting hopes of deliverance turned to panic.
The first rock struck far away across the city, ploughing through the distant towers of Rookswatch amidst eruptions of fire and shattered mortar. The structures had no time to topple, as the meteorite hammered into the ground and raised a roaring blast wave that snatched the towertops and blew them apart. Blazing lumps of stone and blackened bodies rained down for miles around.
Another rock struck closer, slamming into the slopes of Gallowhill and flattening a quarter-mile zone of buildings, streets and people in a heartbeat. Captain Morthan cried out as the proud silhouette of the distant watch blockhouse came apart amidst the devastation.
Another burning light consumed Aelyn’s focus, a blazing projectile that grew and grew above the square until the entire area was lit by an apocalyptic false dawn.
‘Get to cover!’ she yelled. She turned, grabbing Olt and Borik by their shoulders and urging them towards the sagging shopfront of a milliner’s on the edge of the square.
Fire blazed above them.
Their footsteps pounded the cobbles.
The cries of terrified city folk were drowned by the roar of the falling rock.
Then the impact. A blinding flash. A furious convulsion of air and ground, and Aelyn knew no more.
Across the city, near the southern edge of Docksflow, desperate eyes watched fires consume the skyline. Orlen Drell had scrambled from his barge before it was dragged below the waters and somehow, by the grace of Sigmar, he had made it through the bars of the river gate. He hadn’t wanted to attract the attention of the city watch, and so he had slunk from one shadowed doorway and draughty corner to the next, a half-drowned shadow indistinguishable from the other homeless vagrants who haunted the city’s poorest districts. His mind broken by the sights he had seen, Drell’s only thought had been to hide amidst his fellow humans, to seek what comfort he could beneath the city’s flickering lights. He had scavenged and stolen to survive, and for a few precious days he had believed he might be safe.
Now he crouched in a broken crate beside the Wayward King and knew he had been a fool. The ground shook. Orlen cried out weakly, a pitiful sound that might have brought folk searching for the source of the sound. They were all gone, though – fled to Orlen knew not where, or lying butchered and strewn across the street.
Another shudder ran through the cobbles, and the centremost point of the alleyway rose briefly, before falling away into a deep pit. Cracks shot up the wall of the inn with a sound like cannonfire. The structure sagged alarmingly.
Orlen sunk lower in his packing crate, heart hammering. He would have fled, but the terrible face that hung above the city left him too frightened to move. Instead, he watched as black-clad figures with green skin and gleaming red eyes scrambled up from the pit. A sharp stink reached Orlen’s nostrils. The creatures advanced down the alley and Orlen cringed into the deepest, darkest corner of the crate. He was desperate to escape their notice. These things stank of cruelty and malice. The black-robes scurried past Orlen’s hiding place, oblivious to the rag-clad wretch praying silently to Sigmar. They spilled out into the street, some of them clanging away at crude copper gongs, others brandishing ragged black banners with stylised leering moon devices emblazoned upon them.
A third shudder ran through the alleyway, so violent as to shake Orlen to his bones. The man dug his nails into the splintered wood and stayed low, breathing in short, shallow pants. A moan of alarm escaped him as stone splintered and beams groaned, and the alleyway floor heaved. The edge of the pit widened rapidly, falling away in great chunks, and the Wayward King reeled like the drunks who had so often frequented it. Something massive moved in the pit and a huge hand emerged, a gnarled mass of flesh nearly as large as a wagon. Fungi and weird mineral deposits clung to the leathery flesh of that hand, and its talons sank into the stonework of the sagging pub with ease. A mighty heave, and something terrifying dragged itself out of the pit, even as it pulled a great chunk of the Wayward King down into it. Orlen Drell had an impression of a massive humanoid shape, hunching shoulders thick with stony growths, and beady eyes glinting from within the eyepieces of a crude helm. The thing stomped its way down the alley, smashing chunks from the stonework on either side and barely avoiding treading on Orlen where he hid, paralysed by terror.
Another of the massive things clambered up from the darkness, then yet another, each clad in segments of lumpen metal, each gripping massive clubs in their boulder-like fists. Their heads swung ponderously back and forth as though searching for threats, or perhaps for victims.
For all that the monsters were terrifying, it was only when the last figure emerged from the pit that Orlen’s fractured mind finally snapped with terror. It wasn’t large, this last being, barely bigger than the black-robes that had preceded it, but a bow wave of malice swelled before it and filled the alley until it felt as though the crumbling buildings to either side must surely collapse. The creature rose regally from the pit, its green-skinned scalp topped with a pale crown of glowing fungal growths whose mycelium dug deep into the creature’s skull. Its red eyes crackled with power, lurid green sparks that danced in the air one moment and dripped like slime the next. One taloned hand clutched a short rod topped with a human skull, whose jaw-bone twitched and whose worn teeth chattered together. In the other, the creature gripped a long staff of gnarled wood from the top of which grew a pallid fungal moon as large as his head.
It was from this awful fetish that the wave of oppressive menace spilled, and as the figure raised its face and arms towards the leering moon in the skies above and screamed out in triumph, Orlen’s basest instincts drove him from his hiding place in a scuffle of rags and splintered wood.
He ran as fast as he could along the alley, weaving frantically through the mass of surprised creatures, darting madly past the few jagged blades that flashed out to slice his skin and tear his ragged clothing. A stomping foot almost mashed Orlen into paste and then he was free, pelting down the street to he knew not where, eyes bulging out of his skull and heart hammering madly. Gales of malicious merriment and jeering shouts followed him into the night.
He knew only one thing. He had to get away from the creature with the moon-topped staff, the being that almost seemed the embodiment of the evil moon above, crammed into a living form and walking the city streets. He had to get away from its malevolent gaze, and its chilling peals of insane laughter.
Chapter Eleven
SHOCKWAVES
Romilla straightened up, Aelyn’s quiver of arrows, third knife-belt, backup aelven longbow and a satchel of wickedly crafted snares clutched in her arms.
‘Do you have everything yet?’ she asked Eleanora, who had hurriedly but precisely laid out her stash of munitions on top of her bed and had been counting them methodically into a large backpack. As the engineer turned to reply, she let out a hiss of pain and stumbled against the bed. She took a limping step and sat down hard amidst the last few scattered devices, her face drawn.
‘Sigmar’s grace, what is the matter?’ asked Romilla. ‘Eleanora, is it your
foot again? Will you let me look at it, please?’
‘It’s just a bite, it just hurts sometimes,’ said Eleanora, looking uncomfortable. Romilla had tried to get a proper look at her friend’s bitten foot for the best part of a week, but Eleanora had been remarkably cagey about it. She did this, sometimes, if something she mentioned was not immediately paid attention to; Eleanora had an odd habit of assuming if something wasn’t addressed instantly then it must be unimportant and should be stringently ignored. If Romilla was honest, Eleanora had many strange habits that they had all simply adjusted to. They were just part of her genius, a side effect of the gifts that Sigmar had given her. But this one had caused her to hide injury and illness before, and if Romilla hadn’t been so distracted by darker matters, she would have insisted she be allowed to treat Eleanora’s foot before now.
As she knelt and stripped off the engineer’s footwear, she cursed herself for not checking sooner. Eleanora’s foot and ankle were both badly swollen, the flesh mottled red and blue and warm to the touch. Gently holding the foot still despite Eleanora’s uncomfortable squirming, she found a green-black lump near the arch of the foot, presumably the original bite. Tendrils of the same unclean hue had spread out from the bite mark and begun to make inroads on Eleanora’s calf.