‘We will draw them to us,’ Arnhault declared. ‘If we can keep them fixated on us, then our brothers may yet surprise this fiend.’
Orthan’s hands tightened around the haft of his stormsmite greatmace. ‘Sigmar smiles upon the bold,’ he said. He put action to words, swinging the weapon and obliterating the wooden wall. A hulking figure in golden armour, he pushed through the breached pagoda and strode out onto the open ground. ‘Night-haunting wretches!’ his bellow rang out. ‘Here stands Orthan of the Hammers of Sigmar! Here stands he who will send you back to your empty tombs!’
Arnhault followed Orthan out onto the blighted ground. The undead had displayed no especial attention to the Sequitor’s challenge, but the moment the Knight-Incantor appeared in the open, there was a pronounced change. The air itself seemed to crackle with hate. The ghoulish glow in the Shrouded King’s skull took on a livid hue. The intensity of the creature’s focus felt like a blade piercing Arnhault’s breast.
‘Volkhard,’ the Shrouded King’s snarl echoed above the silent tide of wraiths. The name, as it rang out, was filled with venom, spat into the air as though it were poison.
To Arnhault, the effect was poisonous. He felt a searing shock burn through his veins. He would have sworn he had never encountered the name ‘Volkhard’ before, yet when he heard it uttered by the Shrouded King it felt… familiar. More than familiar – at some deep level, some depth of being beyond conscious awareness, he recognised it. Recognised it as belonging to him. As a part of him.
Orthan cried out in alarm when he saw Arnhault stagger. He shifted his hold upon the greatmace and reached out to steady the aether-mage. Even as he did, the enemy came rushing towards them. No longer a silent wave of shadows but a howling gale of undead fury, impelled by the rage that swirled within the spirit of their master.
‘Loose!’ Nerio shouted down from the roof of the pagoda. The Castigator-Prime and two of his brothers stood up, their greatbows trained upon the wave of wraiths. Crystal-tipped maces shot down into the ghostly throng. Attuned to the necromantic forces that gave the nighthaunts shape, the flasks fitted to the maces exploded as soon as they connected with the ghostly creatures. The draconic breath trapped within burst forth in blazing balls of blinding light. The dark forms of the wraiths were seared by the holy energy, torn into wispy tatters that dissipated in the mist, their tortured souls banished from the realm of Ghur.
A dozen of the wraiths were vanquished by Nerio’s volley, yet the destruction of their companions did nothing to slacken the charge of those that remained. The shadowy host spilled across the barren ground, rushing towards Arnhault and Orthan. Castigators in the surrounding buildings now sent their own shots into the undead legion, obliterating dozens more of the spectral creatures. Penthius and his Sequitors emerged from concealment and ambushed the flanks of the spirit army, their mauls shattering the ghosts in brilliant flashes of Azyrian light.
Still the horde continued to pour towards one fixed point, converging upon the pagoda and Arnhault. The Knight-Incantor had prayed he could focus the attention of the nighthaunts, but now that prayer was being answered with a vengeance. Desperately he tried to rouse himself from the shock that had stunned him, but it was like trying to swim against a raging river. His innermost being rebelled against the effort and refused to obey.
Orthan turned and raised his greatmace, ready to defend Arnhault to the last. But there was another who moved to defy the oncoming horde. Blind though he was, Friar Mueller could sense the malign evil of the wraiths. He turned towards Orthan and gestured at Arnhault. ‘Take his lordship somewhere safe until his affliction passes! I will delay these fiends for you.’
Before Orthan could react, Mueller was moving towards the undead. As he stepped into their path, a nimbus of divine light surrounded the friar. He raised his arms and cried out. ‘Sigmar’s will be done!’
The spectral horde faltered for an instant, repelled by the holy aura in its midst. But then an inarticulate shriek of rage rose from the Shrouded King, a command that would brook no denial. The army charged onwards and rolled across the friar in a black wave of death. The priest and the divine light around him were crushed under the phantoms, smothered in the cloying swirl of undead.
The sight of Mueller’s self-sacrifice snapped Arnhault from the paralysis that held him. Orthan was already swinging his greatmace to meet the foremost of the shadowy wraiths when Arnhault raised his staff and drew upon the magic of Sigmar’s storm.
A gale of aetheric force roared through the undead, crackling with arcane energies. The least of the wraiths were blasted apart by Arnhault’s spell; others were hurled back and forced to draw their scattered essence back into a concentrated shape. The cohesion of the horde was shattered. From a single unstoppable tide, the nighthaunts broke into a litter of disparate bands. Into this bedlam of disorder, Penthius and his Sequitors surged forwards. Arnhault could see them, employing their soulshields to further divide the wraiths and push them into pockets where their stormstrike mauls would complete their dissolution.
Orthan’s greatmace struck down the leering, chain-wrapped spectres that came shrieking towards Arnhault. With every blow of the huge weapon, a wraith was obliterated, the cohesion of its shadowy form shattered in a spray of spectral ribbons. Continued shots from Nerio and his warriors kept the wraiths from bringing any great numbers to bear upon the Sequitor.
Arnhault employed his staff to aid Orthan in the defence. Crackling with magic, the sigmarite weapon ravaged the undead horrors. A fiend with the fanged skull of a beast, brandishing a glaive, charged at the aether-mage, only to be struck by the electrified staff and boil away in a cloud of smoke. A dark ghost draped in chains was immolated by the arcane force Arnhault sent into it, a brief flash of spirit fire that quickly vanished.
‘Volkhard!’ The Shrouded King’s cry pierced the night, ringing out over the sounds of battle.
Again the name struck Arnhault. His awareness seemed to expand, a cascade of images racing through his brain – confusing flashes of places and things, events he could see but not remember. When he looked at the charging wraiths, faces began to appear, filling out the fleshless skulls. Familiar faces, though distorted by the necrotic powers that had resurrected them as grave-cheating ghosts. He could almost put names to some of those faces. If he concentrated, Arnhault thought he might…
The Knight-Incantor strove to retain his focus. The song of a spell quivered upon his lips and unleashed a bolt of lightning through the oncoming wraiths. Seven of the fiends were banished in an instant while many others were thrown back in tatters, their dark essence only gradually seeping back to reform into grisly apparitions.
If there were names that belonged to the faces Arnhault saw, then they had little connection to the phantoms. These were but the distorted, twisted echoes of the people they had been in life. Whoever they had been, it had no bearing upon what they were now.
This conviction made it easier for Arnhault to vanquish the wraiths that surged around him, but when a gap in their shadowy ranks afforded him a view of the Shrouded King he found cause for doubt. The master of the undead army had kept clear of the battle, marshalling his spectral forces from the streets beyond the Shrine of Nagash. Now when Arnhault looked at the monster, he saw a pale face clothing the leering skull, an almost transparent skein of skin about the bones. As with the others, it was a face that was familiar to him.
Only this face had a name. For the third time, turmoil seared through Arnhault’s mind and shock sizzled through his veins. He knew the Shrouded King, or at least the man he had been in life…
‘Sabrodt,’ Arnhault hissed. Then he added a sobriquet to that name. A title that the villain might not have carried in life but which he had certainly earned in death. ‘Sabrodt the Usurper.’
Across the distance, the rider appeared to hear Arnhault. The wraith responded with a bitter peal of laughter, an audible sneer of withering mocke
ry. The Shrouded King fixed his malignant gaze on Arnhault.
‘Sabrodt!’ Arnhault raged. He could see the nighthaunts surging towards him again, refocused by their master to destroy the aether-mage. Orthan stumbled back as the tide of chainrasps and glaivewraiths threatened to overwhelm him.
A sense of righteous fury blazed through Arnhault’s mind. He drew upon that emotion, feeding it into the arcane song that fell from his lips. A tempest of magic swirled through the geyser-born clouds above Wyrmditt. At his direction, that energy came pelting down in a cascade of burning rain. Against the sigmarite armour of the Stormcasts, the searing deluge was harmless. The undead, however, were not invulnerable. Like wax candles melting beneath a flame, the creatures wilted in the rain, clumps of their essence dripping away. Where a seething mass of shadows had filled the cursed ground around the pagoda, soon there was only a stagnant slime of smouldering ectoplasm.
One wraith alone had the force of will to defy the storm Arnhault had summoned. Away in the streets, the Shrouded King glared at the aether-mage. The semblance of a face vanished, leaving the creature’s leering skull.
‘Sabrodt!’ Arnhault cried out again. Before he could muster the energy for another spell, the Shrouded King whipped his steed around and galloped off into the deserted town. ‘Sabrodt!’ he shouted and started to run towards the streets. As he charged after the retreating rider, Arnhault found he was not alone. First Orthan, then other Stormcasts joined him in pursuing the wraith.
When he reached the spot from where Sabrodt had watched the battle and directed his forces, Arnhault paused. There was a scum of darkness spattered across the cobblestones, residue from the wraith that had melted off in the deluge. A little further on, he could see more drops of ectoplasm.
‘We must hasten, my lord,’ Nerio advised. The Castigator-Prime gestured with his greatbow towards the hill above the town. Just visible from where they stood was the dark shape of the undead rider. ‘He has been hurt by your magic. We can still catch him if we hurry.’
Penthius nodded, taking up his brother’s call to action. ‘Wyrmditt will not be safe and our mission not fulfilled until we have destroyed the Shrouded King.’
Arnhault gazed up at the fleeing wraith as its aethereal steed carried it over the top of the hill. He looked back at the spatters of ectoplasm. But more than that, he reflected upon the things he had experienced during the battle.
There were questions here. Questions that might prove even more important than pushing back the grasping hand of Nagash and his undead slaves.
‘No,’ Arnhault commanded. ‘Let him go.’ He could see the confusion in their eyes. They did not doubt his abilities but that did not mean they understood his intentions.
Arnhault wanted to keep it that way. At least for now. Instead he placated his brothers with a half-truth. ‘It is vital we end this scourge not simply for today, but for good. To do so, we need to do more than just destroy the Shrouded King. We must track him back to his lair and purge it of whatever infernal power has concentrated there. We must find the source of this undead plague and ensure it has been disposed of.
‘Only then can we say we have honoured our obligations to Sigmar and our Stormhost,’ Arnhault told them. ‘Only then can we go home,’ he added, but there was a strange light in his eyes when he said it. Because somewhere deep inside him, he could not shake the uncanny sensation that he already was home.
Chapter four
Cold pain crawled through the spectral essence of Sabrodt as his steed galloped away from Wyrmditt. The searing deluge that had been conjured from the misty sky had inflicted a measure of harm upon the wraith. But it was an injury from which the Shrouded King was already recovered, his black powers drawing from the deathly vibrations left by the necroquake Nagash had unleashed upon the realms to replenish his phantasmal shape.
No, it was the other wound he had taken that wracked Sabrodt’s being with a numb, gnawing agony. An old wound, festered and rotten, so long a part of him he had deluded himself that it was gone. Sight of the aether-mage who led the warriors of Sigmar ripped open the scab and let the poison of hate swell through his soul.
He knew that one. There was no mistaking the flavour of that spirit, the presence that motivated the reforged body. Through a thousand generations and all the manifold realities of the Underworlds, Sabrodt would have recognised the being of King Volkhard.
The fires in the pits of the wraith’s skull flared into a ghastly crimson incandescence. Sabrodt no longer saw the mist-veiled hills above Wyrmditt or the plumes of steam streaking up from the fields of geysers. It was a different kind of land through which he now rode, a land richer and more vibrant than that he had claimed as part of his domain. He could see great fields of wheat and corn, vast orchards of peach and almond, hills green with grapevines. There were tall manors with ivy-covered walls and roofs tiled in white slate. The villages of tenant farmers with their huts of wattle and daub, each with its little garden and chicken coop.
A bitter hiss rasped across the wraith’s teeth. This was the land he’d coveted, the land he’d fought so hard to possess. The memory of it was etched onto his spirit, branded there by the fire of his passion. It was his by right! Kharza and the Dragonseat and all that fell within its dominion.
Even as he stretched forth his fleshless claw, Sabrodt saw the landscape fade and change, shifting back into mist and wilderness. A mirage of the past. All that remained of the kingdom that should have belonged to him.
The Shrouded King looked back over his shoulder, towards Wyrmditt. He would return. He would bring forth all the ghostly legions at his command and he would raze the place. Not one brick would be left standing, no two beams of wood left nailed together. Every soul in the place would be wrested from its mortal flesh and drawn into Sabrodt’s undead army. The Stormcasts…
A cruel laugh rose from Sabrodt as he considered the sigmarite-clad knights. He had made a mistake before, allowed his kingly outrage to cloud his judgement. Revenge upon Volkhard made him oblivious to the might of his foes. The retinue he brought with him from his graveyard court was unequal to the feat of destroying the Stormcasts. More, much more, was needed to overwhelm them. And he knew just where he would bring such a horde to bear upon Sigmar’s knights.
Volkhard would not be content to remain in Wyrmditt. Sabrodt had seen him, so too had he seen Sabrodt. Volkhard would pursue the wraith now, hunt for the Shrouded King across the entire realm if need be. Were their positions reversed, had Volkhard done to Sabrodt what Sabrodt had done to him, there would be nowhere the wraith would not follow. The aether-mage would lead the rest of the Stormcasts after the Shrouded King.
Sabrodt raked his talons through his spectral essence, willing his recent wounds to reopen. He watched with abominable satisfaction as splashes of black ectoplasm dribbled onto the ground. A trail for his foes to follow. He would make it easy on Volkhard.
It would be unbrotherly to let him be late for his own funeral.
‘There is more of the wraith’s ichor up here, my lord!’ Nerio called down to Arnhault. The Castigator-Prime gestured with his greatbow at the spectral splotches that marred the ground beside him.
Arnhault felt a sense of relief that Nerio had recovered the trail. Twice since leaving Wyrmditt, the Stormcasts had lost the Shrouded King’s track. The spectral steed he rode left only infrequent marks behind – a wilted stem where its flanks had brushed across a bush or a patch of yellowed grass where a hoof had touched the ground. The stains left by the wraith himself were far easier to find, ugly black blemishes that looked like painted shadows and carried with them the rank stench of the grave. Keeping them in sight, the Hammers of Sigmar could be certain of following their quarry back to his lair.
‘I do not like this,’ Penthius confessed, drawing close to Arnhault so that the other Stormcasts would not hear. They were marching through a system of narrow valleys that wended their way between
the hills beyond Wyrmditt. It was terrain to make any soldier uneasy. If an enemy should appear on the hills and spring an ambush, the Hammers of Sigmar would be trapped.
‘You have dispatched scouts to warn us of any lurking foe,’ Arnhault reminded Penthius. He gestured with his staff at the hills around them. Carefully making their way along each flank were a pair of Castigators with a Sequitor to support them. ‘In perfect keeping with the doctrines of Lycaeon. We use the valley to hide our presence, we keep scouts on our flanks to ensure we have remained hidden.’
Penthius shook his head. ‘It is not a question of procedure,’ he said. He tapped his hand against his chest-plate. ‘This feels wrong. I feel it down inside.’ He pointed at the black stains left by the Shrouded King. ‘This trail strikes me as too deliberate, too easy to follow. I think Nerio would agree with me. Even when he loses it for a moment, it is never too hard for him to find again.’
‘The Shrouded King was wounded when I summoned the storm’s power,’ Arnhault declared. ‘Only the most powerful among the undead could recover from that magnitude of divine magic.’
‘Then this one should have already faded away,’ Penthius said. ‘We have followed this trail for several miles now and the wraith still leaves its essence behind like a slug’s slime. Surely it has lost enough to lose its ability to manifest and been compelled to fade back into its grave?’
‘Perhaps he can draw upon the energies of the necroquake,’ Arnhault suggested. ‘I am more attuned to the aetheric vibrations than you, brother, and I can sense the fell energies left by Nagash’s ritual. How much more connected to those vibrations would a creature formed from the same energies be? We have already seen that the Shrouded King can call upon the black art of necromancy. Perhaps he can also draw on the necroquake’s vibrations to replenish the ectoplasm he is losing.’
‘Or perhaps the wraith is baiting us,’ Penthius warned, his tone severe.
Sacrosanct & Other Stories Page 6