‘Suit yourself,’ said Wolfgart, riding onwards in silence.
The streets were quiet, the unnatural greyness of the world keeping people indoors, as though to see so grim a day would remind them of the gathering threat. Word of what was facing them had spread throughout the city, and though the temples were busy, little else had the power to tempt people from their homes. Every doorway was hung with talismans of Morr and every keyhole was plugged with dried fennel. Those men and women on the streets avoided eye contact and hurried into side streets and doorways as the armoured horsemen passed.
‘Some welcome home, eh?’ said Wenyld. ‘Don’t they know we’re out there risking our lives to keep them safe?’
‘They know,’ said Wolfgart, ‘but no one likes to be reminded of what we’re fighting. It’s bad luck to dwell on the dead, and only a fool wishes for more ill-fortune at times like this.’
‘I suppose,’ replied Wenyld.
Wolfgart turned his horse into the square of the Oathstone, the hard-packed earth almost as solid as stone. There had been talk of paving the square, but Sigmar had refused to allow this ground to be covered.
‘If we sever our links to the earth beneath us completely, then we are doomed. The Oathstone shares its bed with no other slab,’ the Emperor had said, and the matter was closed.
The square was empty save for a few wild dogs fighting over scraps stolen from a nearby butcher’s slops, and the sound of hoarse bellows roared from within Beorthyn’s forge. Wolfgart smiled. The old smith had been dead for twenty years or more, yet still the name stuck. It belonged now to his apprentice, Master Govannon, a worker of metal considered by many to be a greater craftsman than Beorthyn had ever been.
‘What do you suppose they’re doing in there?’ asked Wenyld, as a sooty black cloud billowed from the iron chimney stack and a thunderous bang echoed from the walls of nearby buildings. Even over that noise, Wolfgart could hear Govannon cursing.
‘Who knows? Something with that giant thunder bow Alfgeir and Cuthwin brought in I expect.’
‘Is Cuthwin still in the city?’
‘I don’t know, maybe,’ said Wolfgart. ‘Why?’
‘We were friends as youngsters,’ answered Wenyld. ‘The years have taken us down different paths, but it would be pleasant to see him again.’
‘I vaguely remember the pair of you trying to get a look at my Blood Night, the evening before Sigmar rode to Astofen for the first time.’
‘You remember that night? I thought you were too drunk.’
‘Not so drunk I don’t remember you falling on your arse and running like the Ölfhednar themselves were after your manhood.’
‘Aye, well it’s not every day you’re caught by the king’s son on his Blood Night.’
‘Sigmar and I tried it once, and we got the thrashing of our lives.’
‘Maybe you should have run as fast as I did.’
Wolfgart smiled. ‘Maybe, lad, maybe.’
He reined in his horse and dismounted before the Oathstone, the earth around it trod by a thousand people every day. He knelt beside the red stone, its rough surface warm and threaded with golden veins. Those veins were thinner than they had been when Sigmar had made them swear their oath to help him build the Empire, and he hoped that wasn’t an omen.
‘I miss you,’ he whispered, thinking of Maedbh and Ulrike.
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he felt the Oathstone grow hot to the touch. He tried to pull his hand back, but it was stuck fast to the stone. Wolfgart gasped as he felt the heat travel up the length of his arm, his vision swimming as unknown power held him in its grasp.
‘What…?’ he managed as his vision greyed and he saw a host of chariots riding through hills of rolling greensward in his mind’s eye. Armoured in black and gold, they were escorted by hundreds of horsemen and painted warriors in mail shirts who marched beneath banners of gold and red.
He recognised the landscape around Three Hills, and the chariot at the front of the army as that of Queen Freya. The woman at the reins was not Maedbh, and a gathering evil loomed over the Asoborns, a doom that none could see, but which was slowly enveloping them in its encroaching shadow.
The vision of Freya’s army was overlaid with the sight of Maedbh and Ulrike standing side by side on a wooded hillside. Both loosed arrows into an oncoming horde of the dead, but he could tell from their expressions that it wouldn’t be nearly enough to stop them. His heart broke to see the fear on their faces.
Death stalked these lands, and he wanted to scream, but he had no voice, no way to warn the Asoborns that their enemies were almost upon them or that he was aware of their plight. He heard wolves, noble, white-furred heralds of Ulric, and knew they were calling to him, demanding he take action.
A sudden, twisting sense of vertigo seized him, and he felt himself falling, his arms windmilling for balance. The visions faded from sight, and the harsh angles and stone walls of Reikdorf snapped back into focus. Wolfgart’s stomach lurched and he put a hand out to steady himself, his gut churning in fear.
‘What in Ulric’s name just happened there?’ demanded Wenyld, and Wolfgart looked up to see the warrior holding onto his shoulders. The golden lines on the Oathstone pulsed with life, now even thinner, as though the stone had all but exhausted its power to grant him this vision.
‘I have to go,’ said Wolfgart, pushing himself unsteadily to his feet. He ran to his horse and vaulted into the saddle.
‘What are you talking about?’ demanded Wenyld. ‘We’ve only just got back.’
‘My family is in danger,’ said Wolfgart. ‘And I have to go to them.’
Twelve
Three Thrusts to the Heart
Freya’s army left Three Hills in triumph, cheered by those whose age or wounds prevented them from joining their queen. Three thousand warriors marched or rode south-east through the rolling landscape, moving quickly towards the River Aver, the watercourse that effectively divided Asoborn lands from those of the Brigundians.
Within three days, the army came within sight of the mighty river that ran from the Worlds Edge Mountains through the Empire before emptying into the sea at Marburg.
Here, the coming winter had made the landscape flat and hard, ideal for chariots and cavalry, and the army moved into marching column as it followed the river east towards the river crossing at Averstrun.
Despite the grim skies that wreathed the world in bleak twilight, the army’s spirits were high. Freya was an inspirational presence, taking many lovers en route and ensuring that overblown erotic tales spread through the camp quicker than a dose of the pox. As always, Freya led from the front, her black and gold chariot unmistakable among the less ornate chariots of the Asoborn warriors.
With the river on the army’s right flank, Asoborn horse archers galloped wide, while the heavier lancers rode closer to the main body of the infantry and chariots. By noon of the fourth day of march, Freya sent word back down the line that she had spied the river crossing and their enemy.
Blocking the crossing were a thousand dead warriors in ancient armour, arranged like a row of obsidian statues in a mausoleum. All were clad in rusted bronze, the weak light glinting from the corrosion on the rings of their mail. An eldritch green light glimmered in the empty eye sockets of each warrior and a hundred knights sat on skeletal horses on either flank. Flocks of carrion birds gathered for the feast and the few trees in the scattered patches of woodland were thick with screeching bats.
A warrior in gleaming silver armour sat upon a hellish steed at the centre of the host, black wings like smoke billowing from its flanks. Khaled al-Muntasir was an incongruous sight amid this army of darkness, and his wondrous form drew all the light to him, such that he shone like a legendary hero of old.
Freya wasted no time in arraying her army for battle, issuing orders with customary fire and fury. The Asoborn infantry moved into four blocks of five hundred, spears and swords held in fists that demanded vengeance for the loss of the Brigun
dians and Menogoths. With the chariots thrown out before her main battle line, the heavy horse rode out to the flanks, ready to roll up the line of the dead warriors.
Bare chested horse archers whooped and yelled as they rode around the army of the dead, loosing flurries of arrows into the massed ranks of skeletal warriors. Though the dead had no flesh to damage or organs to pierce, the barbed shafts felled them just as surely as they would a mortal man. Intended to provoke a reckless charge rather than inflict mass casualties, the arrows of the horse archers did little but fell a few score of the dead warriors.
Ululating Asoborn war horns signalled the advance, and the infantry moved forward, moving at a brisk trot to cover the ground between the two armies. Freya led the advance, her chariot thundering towards the serried ranks of the dead with hundreds more behind her. The hard ground threw up no dust with their passage, and the entire army witnessed the horror of what happened next.
Before Freya’s horn blew to signal the turn, Khaled al-Muntasir aimed his sword at the earth before the charging chariots. The hard ground cracked and split as hundreds upon hundreds of dry, fleshless corpses clawed their way to the world above, dust and earth spilling from their empty skulls and opened jaws. Unable to stop or turn, the chariots slammed into them with a tremendous crash of dried bone and wood.
Asoborn chariots were never meant to be run straight into the enemy, but raced along the front of a foe’s formation. Archers would loose arrows into the faces of the enemy at point-blank range, and spear bearers would hurl heavy, iron-tipped shafts into the warriors pressing in from behind. To run a chariot straight into the foe would certainly kill a great many of the enemy, but would, more often than not, destroy the chariot and kill the riders and horses.
The chariots came apart in a screaming bray of pain, both animal and human. Most simply shattered in the impact, but some overturned, crushing their crews and breaking the horses’ legs. The queen’s chariot vanished in a crash of shattered timber, broken apart by the violence of the impact. Hundreds more were destroyed in explosions of splintering timber, hurling their crews to the ground or breaking them beneath the wheels of those behind them. Only the quickest crews were able to avoid the catastrophic collision of dead bodies and screaming horses, but in doing so they bled off the speed that kept them safe.
Grasping skeletons clawed their way onto the chariots, attacking with broken swords or cudgels salvaged from the vast swathe of wreckage left by the destruction of the chariots. Khaled al-Muntasir swept his sword up and hundreds of rotten-fleshed wolves burst from the ranks of the dead warriors at the river. They fell upon the struggling Asoborns with dreadful hunger, jaws tearing open throats and claws raking warm flesh from the bone.
The warriors blocking the river crossing marched forward in dreadful unison, each bony footfall crashing down at the same time as they fell upon those the wolves hadn’t yet killed. Swords and spears stabbed and slashed with mechanical precision, and the entangled Asoborns were cut down without mercy.
Freya’s shield maidens dragged her bloodied body from the wreckage, fighting with all the fury of berserkers as the rest of the army raced forward to rescue their fallen queen. The black skeletons chopped through the ruin of the chariots, killing anything living they could find.
Asoborn cavalry charged towards the flanks of the dead army, but the corpse knights wheeled their skeletal mounts and raced towards them as hundreds of leathery-winged bats launched themselves from the trees. Green fire flickered around the undead knights, their blades shimmering with ghostly light, and the two forces met in a thunderous clash of iron. Asoborn lances smashed through ancient armour, splintering as the weight of the dead broke them apart. Screeching bats tore at the Asoborn riders, clawing their faces and entangling their blades with their wings and stinking bodies. Both forces of horsemen swirled together, hacking at one another with swords and axes, but within seconds it was clear the Asoborn charge was doomed.
In the centre of the battle, Khaled al-Muntasir danced through the fighting, his gleaming sword slaying all it cut. No weapon could touch him, no warrior lay him low, and he slid through the scattered Asoborns like a ghost, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. Tattooed warrior women of the Myrmidian sects formed a ring of screaming fury around him, but within moments, all were dead, gutted, beheaded or fatally pierced by his quicksilver blade. Malign clouds of sable light billowed around the blood drinker, a miasma of dark sorcery that drained the life from any who came near him and animated the corpses of those he had killed.
The ranks of the dead swelled with every passing moment, for the newly slain rose up to attack their former comrades, bloodied and mangled charioteers clawing at men and women they had broken bread with only that same morning. The encircling horns of the dead army began to envelop the Asoborns, but even at this desperate moment, the battle could have been saved.
At that critical moment, when one spark of heroism or fear could have turned the tide of the fighting, a warrior named Daegal, a lad no older than twelve summers who had trained and fought with Maedbh, turned and fled from the horror of the bloodletting. His sword and shield forgotten, Daegal ran in blind terror, and his panic spread to those around him.
Within moments, hundreds of Asoborns were fleeing the battle, desperate to escape the slaughter and frantic to live. The battle line collapsed as the fragile courage of the mortal army broke in the face of this nightmare horde.
But there was to be no such easy escape.
The dread knights rode down the fleeing Asoborns, trampling them beneath the pellucid fire of their mounts’ hooves or chopping them down with pounding blows of their swords. The encircling army of the dead surrounded the dying Asoborn host, drawing it into a black embrace of massacre.
Only a handful of mortals escaped the slaughter, the queen’s shield maidens and a hundred or so warriors who had been first to flee. Their shame burned almost as hot as the relief that they still lived, and as darkness fell, barely a tenth of the queen’s army escaped into the hills.
Khaled al-Muntasir stood triumphant, his army arranged across the battlefield in silence as the crows and ravens pecked the choicest morsels from the defeated army. The blood drinker let them have their feast, for what could be more terrifying to a mortal warrior than to later face one of his own kind with eyes pecked out, flesh partially eaten and tongue hanging loose on rotten sinews?
As Morrslieb slipped from behind the clouds to bathe the blood-soaked field in its rich, emerald moonlight, he uttered the words given to him by Nagash and laughed long into the night as the vanquished Asoborns rose to their feet once more.
Without any orders needing to be issued, the army of the dead arrayed itself for march, moving in deathly silence and utter precision as they followed the route Queen Freya’s doomed army had taken.
Back towards Three Hills.
Volleys of arrows flew overhead, slashing down the causeway and slicing into grey, lifeless flesh. Bordan’s foresters loosed more arrows, and another clutch of the dead were felled. The viaduct from the ground was thick with dead warriors, partially decayed men and women lurching and swaying towards Middenheim with horrid purpose and grotesque hunger moaning from their slack jaws.
‘Got to hand it to Bordan’s men,’ said Holstef, the beast-horn clarion clutched tightly in his gauntleted fist. ‘They’re killing everything they hit.’
Ustern grunted. ‘They can’t miss. Even I could loose an arrow that would slay something.’
‘Probably one of us,’ added Leovulf, undoing the leather thong that held his black hair.
‘You cut me deep,’ said Ustern, tapping smouldering ash from the end of his pipe.
Redwane let them talk, it was their way of easing the tension before a charge. Though the White Wolves feared no living foe, the horde arrayed before them today was something much worse. Redwane had fought the living dead before, but the same fear was still there, still poisoning his gut with a sour-bile taste. The thoughts that had haunted him on the
march towards Brass Keep returned to him anew; the dread of dying alone, the fear that his best years were already behind him and that he was on a grim descent into dotage and infirmity.
Redwane took a deep breath, looking to the sky in a bid to cast off such gloomy thoughts, but he found no refuge there. The sky above the Fauschlag Rock was as black as his mood.
It had been that way ever since the dead had isolated Middenheim from the Empire.
The noose had closed slowly, with villages blotted out one by one and the steady stream of traders, mercenary companies and pilgrims diminishing until it was impossible not to see that something terrible was developing in the haunted forests surrounding the city.
Despite his dislike of the man, Bordan’s foresters had quickly discovered the roads cut by lurking bands of the dead and packs of fiery-eyed wolves. The villages and camps around the city were hastily evacuated, their people brought within Middenheim’s walls. Even Torbrecan’s band of lunatics had come into the city, which had surprised Redwane until he remembered that they had foreseen their deaths before the walls of Reikdorf. Despite his insistence that no one be left beyond the city, Redwane suspected that Myrsa was already regretting his decision to allow the self-mutilating madmen into Middenheim. They marched through the streets, preaching their prophecies of destruction and pain, while whipping themselves into maniacal frenzies. No warriors could be spared from the fighting to stop them, and the mood in the city soured as more and more of Middenheim’s citizens joined in their cavalcade of blood.
‘If they’re so eager for death, I say we help them on their way. Give them a sword and stick them on the walls,’ Redwane had muttered at one of Myrsa’s war councils, and few disagreed with him. Yet for all their apparent lust to die, the madmen refused to take arms to defend Middenheim. Clearly they weren’t insane enough to want to die just yet.
Within a day of the gates closing, the living dead host swallowed the lands around Middenheim, throwing themselves at the fortresses clustered around the city and the chain lifts. Those bastions still held, but the horde had soon discovered another way up. Led by shadowy, dark-cloaked figures on black steeds, skeletal warriors armed with spears, axes and swords climbed the great viaduct towards the city. Frothing, blood-hungry corpses scrambled up the rocky sides of the Fauschlag Rock, and Orsa’s city defenders had their hands full hacking them down as they reached the summit.
The Legend of Sigmar Page 91