The Legend of Sigmar

by Graham McNeill

  Some carried torches, while others bore tall banners of bone. He could hear the clatter of armour and a scratching, squealing sound like a barnful of chittering mice. The wind changed direction, and a verminous reek of stinking, unwashed flesh was carried uphill. Sigmar gagged at the stench, like an exposed midden on a summer’s day. He fought to keep his food down as he smelled rotten meat, excrement and a hundred other fouler aromas. The noise of the approaching host grew louder, a barrage of squeals, squeaks and guttural barks.

  Though it was too dark for an accurate gauge of numbers, Sigmar reckoned that at least five hundred or more creatures were marching towards their camp. He looked back over his shoulder to his sleeping warriors, knowing they were dead unless he could get them to move.

  But how to rouse men who had been ensorcelled by some nameless enchanter?

  Before Sigmar had a chance to think of a solution, he saw the pathway leading back down the mountain ripple and undulate, as though the rock had become suddenly malleable. In the thin light of the torches, he saw a wriggling carpet of mangy rats running ahead of the host: hundreds of disgusting creatures with patchy fur, branded backs and splintered fangs.

  He stifled a gasp of horror and pushed himself hard against the cliff, stepping up onto a lip of stone as the seething tide of rats surged past like a furry river of diseased flesh and blood-matted fur. Some were brown, some were black, and yet others were white and furless. Pink tails wriggled like worms, and they snapped and bit at each other, as though driven by the whips of cruel masters. A few turned and sniffed the air as they passed him, and several turned their beady pink eyes upon him. They hissed in puzzlement, but passed on without attacking.

  Behind the rats came scuttling beasts that loped and darted in the firelight of the torches. Wretched things in rags and scraps of armour, with their elongated snouts obscured by sackcloth hoods and their eyes made huge by orbs of glass nailed to their skulls. Sigmar held his breath at the sight of these vile monsters, monstrous hybrids of man and rat. They carried rusted swords, crude halberds and heavy cleavers with notched blades and old bloodstains. They hissed and spat with feral glee as they moved past him, but none of them so much as turned a grotesque, rag-swathed head towards him.

  Sigmar took a tight grip of his hammer’s haft, but instead of falling upon his men with their brutal cleavers, the rat-things tramped over the narrow plateau as though it were unoccupied. They marched past with their strange, jerking, hopping gait, but paid no mind to the sleeping men and dwarfs in their midst. Though the sleepers were clearly visible to Sigmar, the stinking horde of ratmen ignored them, as though they had no inkling of their presence whatsoever.

  Sigmar let out his breath, and regretted it immediately as a rat-thing with black armour and a bronze headpiece, segmented like a beetle’s carapace, paused in its march and stepped close to the cliff. Its nose twitched and its blistered tongue flicked out, as though tasting the air. Stubby whiskers bristled, and it cocked its head to one side. Beneath its helm, Sigmar saw eyes that were the red of a low-burning fire, eyes that narrowed with a loathsome, feral intelligence that horrified him.

  The creature stood tall, its furred body twisted in a hideous parody of a man, upright and erect, but still with reverse-jointed legs and a whipping tail that ended in a barbed hook. A wide leather belt at its waist held a collection of skinning knives and a stubby wooden club fitted to an intricate mechanism of bronze and iron with a glowing green light at its heart.

  Sigmar leaned back, letting the cold water streaming down the cliff pour over him as the creature took a stalking step closer. The icy chill of the water was freezing, but he did not dare move. How this thing could not see him, he did not know, but he guessed that if he so much as moved a muscle, whatever enchantment was keeping his men from the sight of these beasts would be undone.

  The beast’s face was less than an inch from him, its breathing wafting the stench of its last meal in his face. The smell of spoiled dairy and rotten meat made Sigmar want to gag, and its hot, rancid breath was animal and reeked of an open sewer. The flesh of its maw pulled back as it hissed in consternation, revealing two enormous, flat-faced fangs like sharpened chisel blades.

  A whip cracked and the dreadful thing flinched, spinning around and rejoining the marching host as it continued its journey into the mountain. Sigmar watched the creature go, as larger beasts and more intricately attired creatures shuffled and scuttled past. Careful to keep his breathing even and his movements to a minimum, Sigmar blinked away the spray of water in his eyes as he tried to make sense of these nightmarish horrors.

  Wolfgart had spoken of fighting squealing creatures with the faces of rats in the tunnels beneath Middenheim, and Sigmar—like everyone else—had assumed them to be no more than bestial forest monsters yoked to the Norsii army as it burned its way south. But to see such a horde, moving with such cohesion and discipline forced him to think of these things as something else entirely.

  At last the end of the vermin horde passed his place of concealment, and when the last of the hissing, chittering beasts had vanished around the bend in the path farther up the mountain, Sigmar dropped to the hard-packed earth of the path. His body was numb with cold, chilled to the bone by the spray of water from the high peaks. His clothes were soaked through and his flesh was like ice as he stumbled back to his camp.

  A fire burned at the centre of the plateau, and he made his way towards it, stripping off his sodden garments and pulling a warm blanket from an open pack. A solitary figure sat cross-legged before the fire, a shaven-headed man whose body was concealed by a voluminous cloak of black feathers. His shorn skull was tattooed with the black, reflective eyes of crows, and his own eyes were no less black.

  Sigmar knew this stranger must be the source of the sorcery that had kept his men from the attention of the rat-things, but was too cold to do more than kneel beside the fire and let the heat from the flames thaw his naked flesh.

  ‘Greetings, son of Björn,’ the man said with a lopsided grin. ‘I am Bransùil the Aeslandeir.’

  ‘I am Sigmar Heldenhammer, but you already know that, don’t you?’

  The man nodded. ‘I know a great many things about you, son of Björn. Much of which you would rather I did not know, but that is not to be the nature of our relationship. I will know all your secrets, and that is why you will trust me.’

  ‘Trust you?’ laughed Sigmar. ‘I don’t know you.’

  ‘You will,’ said the man with a sage nod. ‘Or you did. It is hard to be certain sometimes.’

  Sigmar looked over to where his men still slept, peaceful and blissfully unaware of the terrible danger that had just passed them in the night.

  ‘So how is it my men and I are alive?’ asked Sigmar as the fire began to warm him. He had decided against any violence to this Bransùil, guessing that any man who could hide so large a group from so many monsters was not someone to be taken lightly.

  ‘A simple incantation,’ said the man with a grin that exposed brilliantly white teeth. Sigmar had only ever seen such clean teeth in the mouths of young children, and he was reminded of the leering skull of the dread necromancer. ‘When you spend as long in the far north as I once did, hiding yourself is the first trick you learn from the ravens.’

  ‘But how did you do it?’ pressed Sigmar.

  Bransùil leaned over the fire, and Sigmar saw the darkness of his eyes had receded. In place of the blackness of crows’ eyes, the man’s eyes were now a brilliant, cornflower blue.

  ‘Magic,’ he said.

  When Cuthwin awoke, it was as though he’d spent the night in a warm bed with one of Aelfwin’s Night Maidens. His limbs felt refreshed and his head was as clear as a winter’s morning. He rolled from his blanket and stretched, sitting upright with a bemused grin on his face as he saw the rest of their company felt a similar sense of wellbeing. Teon and Gorseth set off to gather fresh kindling for the fires, but the smile fell from Cuthwin’s face as he saw the churned ground all around them
, hundreds of footsteps in the earth and scraped claw marks on the rock. Cuthwin leapt to his feet and snatched his sword from its scabbard as he saw more and more signs of a sizeable warhost’s passing. Even the men with little in the way of woodsman’s skills could hardly fail to notice the imprint of so many feet, and voices were raised in confusion at the sight of the tracks.

  ‘What happened here?’ asked Wenyld, kneeling beside a clawed footprint.

  ‘We slept through the night,’ said Leodan, scanning the path that led up the mountain.

  ‘What in the name of Ulric’s balls was in that drink?’ demanded Cuthwin. ‘We could have been killed!’

  Leodan shook his head. ‘Nothing that shouldn’t have been. It’s just burned water rakia.’

  ‘Damn it, Leodan, you could have killed us,’ snarled Wenyld. ‘You might have a death wish, but don’t drag us down with you.’

  The Taleuten horseman gripped the hilt of his knife, and for a moment Cuthwin thought he might actually draw it.

  ‘Talk sense, man,’ said Leodan. ‘If I’d put us out with strong drink then we’d all be dead.’

  Despite his anger, Wenyld saw the logic of what Leodan was saying, and nodded curtly, turning to Cuthwin with a mute appeal for an explanation. Cuthwin had none to give him; he couldn’t tell how many had passed in the night, nor, for that matter, could he imagine how they hadn’t all been woken or killed. He tried to move carefully around the tracks, but it was impossible to step on any patch of ground that hadn’t been tramped flat by the passage of uncounted feet.

  ‘This makes no sense,’ he said. ‘Why aren’t we dead?’

  Cuthwin gave up trying to decipher the tracks and looked up as he heard voices raised in anger from farther along the path. He saw Sigmar making calming gestures towards the dwarfs who all looked as though they were ready to start a brawl in a crowded tavern. A hunched figure in a cloak of iridescent feathers stood behind Sigmar, and Cuthwin took an instant dislike to the man, though he could not say why.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Looks like trouble.’

  Wenyld and Leodan followed Cuthwin as he made his way to the ugly scene brewing between Sigmar and the dwarfs. Even before he reached Sigmar’s side, he heard words like necromancer and daemonspawn. It didn’t take any great leap of imagination to know that these words were being directed at the man in the cloak of raven feathers. As Cuthwin approached, the man turned to look at him, and the huntsman felt acutely uncomfortable, as though all his secrets were laid bare. He looked away, standing just behind Sigmar as Master Alaric glowered in fury.

  ‘We will not march with this warlock at our side,’ said the dwarf, his hand of flesh and blood curled tightly around his axe, his bronze one clenched in a fist.

  ‘But for Bransùil we would all be dead,’ said Sigmar.

  ‘Or enslaved in one of the rat things’ hell-pits,’ said the raven-cloaked man, clearly the Bransùil of whom Sigmar spoke. ‘Which, trust me, would be far worse.’

  ‘Shut your mouth, daemonkin!’ roared Alaric, hefting his axe meaningfully.

  Sigmar raised his hands. ‘Alaric, this man saved your life. Now calm down and put up your weapon before you dishonour yourself.’

  Alaric glared at Sigmar, and only the oaths they had sworn kept him from violence. Cuthwin knew how seriously dwarfs took their oaths, and by voicing how close Alaric was to breaking his, Sigmar had shamed him into backing down. But it had cost Sigmar greatly to invoke the power of his oath, and even Cuthwin could see that Alaric was cut deeply.

  Alaric lowered his axe and calmed his raging temper with shuddering breaths.

  ‘Aye, so be it, Sigmar,’ said Alaric with a disappointed sigh. ‘While we march together in these mountains I’ll not harm this one, but if he ever works his sorceries on me or my warriors again, my axe will have his head off his shoulders so fast, he’ll walk ten paces before he knows he’s dead.’

  ‘You have my word he will not,’ said Sigmar, turning to face the cloaked man. ‘Swear it.’

  Bransùil sneered, as though unused to being given such commands, but he nodded and gave an awkward bow to the Emperor. ‘So be it, I shall not work my magics upon the sons of Grungni again. You have my word on it.’

  Alaric did not acknowledge Bransùil’s words, but simply turned and set off towards the path leading farther into the mountains.

  ‘Be ready to march by the time the shadows reach that rock,’ said the dwarf, pointing to a white boulder at the end of the plateau. Looking at the sun’s position, Cuthwin saw that didn’t give them much time. Sigmar saw it too, and let out a deep breath.

  ‘Cuthwin, Wenyld, get everyone ready to move out,’ said Sigmar.

  ‘Sire, what just happened here?’ asked Cuthwin. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘The tracks you see all around us?’ said Sigmar. ‘A host of armoured monsters passed in the night, and this man saved us from them. How, I do not yet know, but that we are alive at all is thanks to him.’

  ‘I am Bransùil the Aeslandeir,’ said the man, and Cuthwin stiffened at the alien sound of the man’s homeland.

  ‘You are Norsii?’

  ‘I was born in the north, yes,’ agreed Bransùil. ‘A student of Kar Odacen, but don’t hold that against me.’

  ‘We can’t trust his kind,’ said Leodan. ‘You drove the Norsii out for a reason. They hold to the old ways of dark gods and blood sacrifice.’

  Wenyld put his hand on the hilt of his knife, and Leodan’s sword slipped an inch from its leather scabbard. Cuthwin saw Bransùil’s eyes glitter with dark amusement, and stepped in front of his bellicose companions.

  ‘Why are you here?’ asked Cuthwin. ‘And how did you come upon us? I saw no tracks that could belong to you.’

  Bransùil smiled. ‘There are paths through this world that not even you can track, Cuthwin, son of Gethwer. Paths that only those with the shealladh can see.’

  A chill travelled the length of Cuthwin’s spine and he backed away from the man, making the sign of the protective horns over his heart.

  ‘He is a warlock!’

  ‘Warlock, wyrd, galder-smith, sorcerer, seider… I have been called all such things and worse,’ said the man, ruffling the feathers of his black cloak. He grinned, and Cuthwin saw his teeth were a perfect white, like the first snow of winter. No man’s teeth should be as white.

  ‘We owe him our lives,’ stated Sigmar. ‘And that is a debt we will honour.’

  ‘He probably saved us for something worse!’ said Wenyld. ‘A sacrifice to his heathen gods!’

  Bransùil laughed—a cawing, echoing sound—and said, ‘Wenyld son of Wythhelm, if I desired you dead, you would already be a feast for the scavengers of these mountains.’

  Wenyld blanched as the man laughed.

  ‘Enough,’ said Sigmar. ‘This man is under our protection and you will fight at his side as you would any of your sword-brothers. You understand? Now put up your blades and get ready to move.’

  Cuthwin nodded. He didn’t like it, but he understood the debt they owed this man. So many tracks had passed in the night that there was no way they could have lived against such numbers. Sigmar walked past him to where Taalhorsa was hobbled by the edge of the cliff. Cuthwin felt the cloaked man’s gaze upon him and reluctantly turned to face him.

  ‘You do not need to fear me, Cuthwin, son of Gethwer,’ said the man. ‘Today the sun is bright, the wind is clear and the champion of Kharneth is many leagues ahead of us. Let us bask in what the gods have given us while it is ours to enjoy, eh? I have no doom for you this day, but who knows what tomorrow may bring?’

  Wenyld took Cuthwin’s arm and led him away from the grinning warlock.

  ‘Pay him no mind,’ said Wenyld. ‘His kind are never to be trusted. Even their truth is cloaked in lies.’

  Cuthwin nodded, but said nothing as he reached his horse. He would keep an eye on this Bransùil. No good could come of association with those who practised the dark arts. Cuthwin possessed a single arrowhead fashioned f
rom a silver icon of Morr that he’d had blessed by the high priestess of Shallya.

  He had been saving the arrow for Krell.

  Now he wondered if he would need it to slay a mortal enemy.

  Another six days’ travel took them higher and higher into the mountains. Alaric spoke little during that time, aside from advising on the best path for the horses, but Sigmar couldn’t blame him. The dwarfs did not approve of men dabbling in the sorcerous arts, though he would not be drawn on why, save a thinly-veiled barb at the easily corrupted hearts of humankind.

  Midmorning on the fourth day of travel saw the hunters pass the snowline, and the weather deteriorated still further. Swirling blizzards halted Sigmar’s warriors on the fifth day, forcing them to find shelter in a winding cave system that had clearly been home to a large beast at some point. The tracks at the cave mouth were a mix of ursine paw and something vaguely birdlike, but paintings on the stone walls spoke of a crude kind of intelligence.

  Piles of gnawed bones, some as long as a man’s leg, lay in a rotting pile of discarded trinkets and skulls, some recognisably greenskin, others of a form and shape that none of the hunters could recognise.

  ‘We shouldn’t stay here,’ said Cuthwin, looking around the stinking interior of the cave. ‘It smells of fresh blood. Whatever lives here brings its kills back to devour. It’s probably out hunting just now, and we don’t want to be here when it comes back.’

  ‘We don’t have a choice,’ said Sigmar. ‘The storm is too severe. We need shelter.’

  ‘If the beast returns to its lair, we’ll be trapped.’

  ‘That’s a chance I’ll take,’ said Leodan, leading his shivering horse into the cave, though it fought him as soon as it caught a whiff of the blood and bones. None of the horses were willing to enter the cave without a struggle, and hauled at their riders as they were dragged inside. Even the prospect of a blizzard seemed preferable to their mounts, and Sigmar wondered if he should take that as a sign.