by Rob Sanders
Picking up his arming doublet from where it lay across a hedge, disturbing Gorst from his quiet mumblings, Kastner slipped into the blood-stained garment and made his way to the manor house. The new sensitivity of his hearing – one of many changes to the way the templar was beginning to experience his doomed world – picked up the sighs of relief that fell out of Dagobert and the girl. At what should have been well out of earshot, he heard them exchange words.
‘The very Cathedral of Sigmar?’ Giselle said.
‘The lion’s den, child.’
‘Will he return?’
‘No,’ Dagobert said. ‘I seriously doubt it.’
‘Then why send your friend to his death?’ Giselle asked.
‘I sent him because he is my friend,’ Dagobert said. ‘I hope for his sake – and our own – that he does not return. That he finds peace in the God-King’s holy temple. Knight of Sigmar or not, Diederick is polluted. Dread forces twist his soul in the same way they twisted the flesh of poor Emil Eckhardt.’ Dagobert’s manner became grim and brooding. ‘If he does indeed return, with dark answers to dark questions… well then – we shall all be doomed.’
Kastner crossed the pitch-black lawn, heading for the untruth of his ancestral home. He nodded slowly to himself, his head burning with unanswerable questions. His past was a lie. He knew that. But would his future be similarly false?
‘Kastner,’ Giselle called.
Her voice echoed about the empty gardens of the manor house. It was morning and even the birds seemed to be paying their respects to the dead. The air smelled of freshly turned earth. ‘Sieur Kastner!’ Giselle hollered across the graves.
‘He’s not in the house?’ Father Dagobert called back. He had just completed his lamentations for the dead. With the number of bodies buried, it had taken some time.
‘No, Father. Last I saw him,’ Giselle said, ‘he was looking over the suits in the hall.’
‘Sieur Kastner’s ancestral suits of armour,’ Dagobert said. Giselle frowned as he approached her. ‘The former Sieur Kastner,’ the priest clarified. ‘His great-great grandfather fought alongside Magnus the Pious, you know, during the Great War against Chaos.’
‘Perhaps he just left for the city early this morning,’ Giselle said.
‘Without talking to me first – I wouldn’t have thought so.’
‘Perhaps he just wanted to be alone.’
‘Understandable, I suppose,’ Dagobert said. ‘It’s not every day you discover you might be the herald of the apocalypse.’
‘He’ll return when he’s ready, yes?’
‘Yes,’ Dagobert considered. If the priest was right about The Celestine Book of Divination, then Kastner’s whole life was in there. He was going to want to come back for it. Dagobert nodded, his chins wobbling. ‘The tome, yes, indeed. If we wish to know where he is, I should get back to my translations.’
‘I’ll make us some breakfast,’ Giselle said.
‘Yes, my child. You do that.’
As Giselle arrived at the well for fresh water, she discovered that the bucket had already been lowered. Heaving on the handle crank, she found that it wouldn’t budge.
‘The bucket is stuck,’ Giselle called. While she tried her best to lever the handle round with her slight form, Dagobert walked back over to assist.
‘It’s probably the windlass,’ the priest told her. As the pair of them heaved, the rope slowly wound its way around the spindle. ‘What by gods?’ Dagobert said. The weight on the rope was incredible.
‘Perhaps it’s caught or something.’ As Giselle leant over to see the bucket rise from the darkness, leaving Dagobert on the crank, the rope almost ran. The commotion drew Gorst, who sniffed at the well like a curious hound.
‘Get back on the handle, child – or all our efforts with be for naught,’ the priest said, thick beads of sweat forming on his brow. ‘It’s caught on a root or something that’s broken through the shaft wall. We’re probably hauling up half a tree here.’
As the bucket rose above the stone rim of the well, Giselle and Father Dagobert could see that they were dragging no tree root. The bucket hung next to a body, the rope of which had been formed into a noose. Diederick Kastner hung from the well crank. His head settled awkwardly in the noose, as though his neck had been snapped by the long drop. His arms and legs dangled uselessly, his boots dripping from where they had dipped into the water. The templar’s face was a livid white – the black tracks of corruption clear to see, radiating through his flesh, away from his injured eye, like a star.
‘Sigmar’s blood…’ Dagobert said. ‘Sigmar’s precious blood.’
‘What does this mean?’ Giselle said, her face still stricken with shock.
‘It means I was wrong,’ Dagobert said. ‘It means that destiny cannot be compressed like a dead flower between the pages of a heavy tome. It lives. It is untamed and ever changing.’ Giselle saw tears roll down the priest’s rounded cheek. It was a tear of grim happiness, rather than grief. ‘It means,’ Dagobert said finally, ‘that fate is what you make of it.’
But fate is not what you make it, shadow-of-mine. Fate is as inescapable as I choose to make it. Your fate is tied to my own and I will not let us fail. You cannot give away what isn’t yours. Your soul may flee this mortal vessel at my command. When I am ready to assume the Everchosen’s anointed flesh. When I am once again ready to rule a world ripe for ruin. No coward’s noose will deny me my eternity.
You think it took an indomitable will to deny me? To flee your mortality and consign your flesh to corruption? No, shadow-of-mine. It takes an indomitable will to bend, nay break, the very laws of existence. It takes an indomitable will to wrestle the reins of runaway fate and yoke destiny – that tramples even gods – like a beast of my burdens. It takes an indomitable will to send you back to redress your failures and begin again. To live in ignorance and do my daemon bidding. My indomitable will.
CHAPTER VIII
‘They called it the ‘Miracle of Altdorf’. For years the River Reik had served as the city’s latrine, with outpourings and effusions dumped straight into broad waters. It is from this time that Emperor Siegfried declared the city “The Great Reek” – the first recorded use of the term – and transferred his court to Nuln. Plagues of the Bloody Flux and Muddied Waters decimated the population. It is a little appreciated fact that the dwarf engineers tasked with constructing the Cathedral of Sigmar also established the beginnings of the first brick sewer system under the Domplatz District, on the river’s southern shore.
With the diffusion of waste spread along the river’s length, both the stench and the plagues abated. The network and culverts would be greatly extended during the princedom of Wilhelm III. At the time, however, the sewer system was hailed the “Miracle of Altdorf” and the dwarf engineers responsible were given freedom of the city. Many decided to stay, establishing the city’s first Dwarf Quarter.’
– Emmerich Siessl, The Great Reek
The Sewers
The City of Altdorf
Tag von den leered Thron, IC 2420
Kastner had stowed away on a riverboat called the Mutter’s Melken at Ahlenhof. Narrow barges were a common sight on the mighty Talabec. The waters were slow but powerful there and heavily laden with the black earth of the mountains upriver. Still, the journey was swifter than that back upstream to Talabheim, where the use of horses and well-worn towpaths were required. From what Kastner could tell from the hold in which he was hiding and overheard conversations from above, the Mutter’s Melken was transporting grain to Marienburg, with little intention of stopping off at Altdorf. The captain was capable and the small crew busy, making it easy for the templar to maintain his concealment amongst the cargo. It also gave him time to think. To feel. To decide.
Diederick Kastner would not be a puppet of fate. He would not be hunted for being what he
was not. The champions of the Dark Gods were mistaken and the God-King’s servants fools. This insanity would end. Diederick Kastner would end it.
For a large part of the journey downriver, Kastner dozed amongst the grain sacks. He had left the Kastner estates before daybreak, enjoying little in the way of sleep, and took back-forest trails through the Marches to Ahlenhof. He hadn’t woken Giselle or Dagobert, leaving them to enjoy the lonely luxuries of the manor house, its many rooms and soft sheets. He imagined that they would be relieved upon finding him gone. They were safer without him. Kastner was confident that the priest would know why he had left them and where he was going. On a table nearby, Kastner had seen The Liber Caelestior and the primer Dagobert was using to translate it. The knight had glowered at the pages with their meaningless words and symbols. The tome had been open at an early section, where – Kastner could see – a page had been torn out. He had studied the tattered edge of the vellum and the pattern of the tear, hoping to recognise it again. As he stood there, he fancied his life laid out in the macabre volume and imagined himself tearing all of the pages from its wicked spine and feeding them to the fire. His hand had hovered over the tome for a moment before he snatched his fist back.
Down in the Great Hall, Diederick had found Sieur Kastner’s collection of suits. Armour belonging to the knight as a younger man. Plate worn by his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfathers. The noble family that Diederick Kastner had never had. With his own plate ruined and lost, the templar had selected a suit belonging to Sieur Kastner’s great-great-grandfather. Sieur Adalbrecht Kastner – of the Gruberswald Kastners – who had fought in the Great War against Chaos beside Magnus the Pious. The irony was not lost on the knight. It wasn’t an attractive suit – having suffered extensive repairs upon its return from service in Kislev. The work was of fine craftsmanship, however. It was a functional piece of mail and plate, lacking in the fashionable flourishes of the others, which were more demonstrations of status and calling. A boxy crusader helm with a protruding head-spike completed the armour, and Kastner had selected a single-handed battlehammer and round shield combination from a display in the hall that seemed to match the suit in style and brute function.
In the stables, Kastner had fed Oberon. Intending to stay off the roads and taking the river downstream, the knight had decided to let Oberon sit the certain slaughter out. Patting the stallion, he had wandered to the gate where the saddle rested and unbelted the saddle-scabbard containing the greatsword Terminus. Belting the scabbard about his plate, Kastner settled the weapon across his back. Terminus had been earned at Magnus the Pious’s side and complemented the style of the armour well. With that, Kastner had walked from the estates, morning breaking over the surrounding treetops.
Kastner smelled Altdorf before the calls on deck told him of the boat’s approach. It was not called the Great Reek for nothing. Sieur Kastner had an untended townhouse in the Oberhausen District and Diederick had visited the capital on numerous occasions as part of his duties, the chapter house of his Order and the Cathedral of Sigmar both residing in the Domplatz, south of the river. Altdorf was an abomination. A cancerous growth on the hide of the Empire. The city reached out with its slums into the Great Forest and the Reikwald, its boundary walls routinely extended and rebuilt about the more permanent developments. Towering above the surrounding tree tops, Altdorf had the power to steal the breath – which given the stench coming off the river and rising from the narrow streets, was a welcome consequence. Its ramshackle buildings appeared like children’s toys, built precariously about and on top of one another. Towers trembled and steeples leaned about constructions of finer worksmanship – the palaces, colleges and temples – with the Cathedral of Sigmar shaming them all.
It was beautiful. The exquisite brickwork. The spired towers. The glorious windows of stained-glass and lead. The colossal temple-dome marking the spot where Sigmar was crowned the first Emperor. Visits to the cathedral – on cult business or private reflection at the side altars – were the only thing about the city that had brought Kastner any pleasure. The templar suspected that his present visit would be less enjoyable. His route to the cathedral would also be very different. No clatter of horseshoes on cobble. No citizens paying subdued respects to a Sigmarite Knight of the Twin-Tailed Orb.
Kastner felt the difference as the Mutter’s Melken crossed the confluence of the Talabec and the River Reik. The narrowboat rocked as it hadn’t done before on the journey, producing angry calls from the captain and liveliness from his small crew. He could hear the bustling business of the docks nearby, with boats offloaded or loaded with cargo bound for Marienburg and the considerably slower treks upriver to Talabheim and Nuln.
Kastner pushed the fore hatch open. The boatmen were all busy with negotiating the meeting of two rivers and the arches of a towering crossing. It was called the Three Tolls Bridge – or as Kastner knew it, the Ostlander Bridge. Dank weed hung from the underside of the arch like the hulls of galleons in drydock. Skeletal smugglers sat in gibbet cages that in turn were set into the stone of the bridge exterior, waiting for their deaths while riverside ravens circled. Along the shoreline Kastner saw a muddy embankment of collapsed stone blocks, where beggars had erected a small colony tents and shanties. He watched. He waited.
‘Oi, you!’ one of the crew called. The templar had been spotted. ‘Stowaway, captain.’
The captain came forward as the narrow boat cut through the current and angled itself for an approach to the bridge archway nearest the southern shore.
‘Bring ’im ’ere,’ the captain bawled above the heavy slop of the river against the flat-bottomed hull. ‘Any man that travels on my boat, has to pay for his passage. You gets to save your legs. What do I gets, ay?’
As several boatmen closed in on Kastner, the templar rose from a crouch and exited the fore hatch. As the boatmen saw he was clad in mail, plate and helmet, they slowed. They knew a warrior when they saw one.
‘For my passage,’ Kastner called at them, ‘you get to keep your lives. It’s a bargain, believe me.’
Kastner saw what he was looking for. He filled his lungs with as much air as his breastplate would allow, took several heavy steps to the side of the boat and dived into the murky waters.
‘Well, would you look at that,’ the captain said, as Kastner’s fully armoured form disappeared below the stinking surface.
The weight of the plate took Kastner down. The pressure inside his lungs built. Water gushed in through his helmet, but Kastner’s eyes were already closed. You couldn’t see through the waters of either the Talabec or the Reik and certainly not where they met in confluence. Using his shield as a crude paddle, Kastner pushed himself through the weight of the water – all the while the bulk of his armour dragging him to a watery grave. Suddenly his boots hit stone: angular and slimy with algae and effluence. It wasn’t the river bottom. The Reik was much deeper near the harbour dock. He had sunk to the collapsed blocks of the embankment. Pushing the weight of his plate forward and clawing at the architecture of the sunken collapse with the mail on his other hand, Kastner made for the shore.
The air in his lungs burned to be free. His underwater exertions had plunged him into dizziness and disorientation. He felt his way with more than his hands now. He was developing senses he had scarcely imagined a man could possess. Despite the fact that one eye was closed and the other gone, the templar felt that he could still see. Despite the darkness of his world and the cold, wet embrace of the river water smothering him, Kastner’s goal drew him like a wolf to a bleating lamb. He could hear it. He could smell it. He could feel its resistance. He could taste its possibility. He could do all of these things and none of them. They were all part of the way he was changing. It repulsed and excited him. He felt the vulnerability of its power. The promise of doom. The objective in the blinding darkness. Or perhaps he was simply addled and drowning.
Kastner’s helmet spike cl
anged against a stone block above his head. He had found it. The overhang he was looking for. With the spent air stabbing its way out of his chest and oblivion beckoning, the templar stomped on through the depths. Beneath the overhang in the ancient collapse, Kastner had found a pocket of foetid air. As the helmet broke the surface, the templar hauled it off his head and breathed deep in the funk beyond. It was disgusting. He almost wretched but there was nothing in his stomach to bring up. All he knew was that he could breathe in the darkness.
He blinked river water and filth from his eye. Kastner stared into the darkness. He had rarely been in a place so absolutely bereft of light. The forest was never this lightless. Whether it was the glint of the stars or the pervasive gloom of the clouds, there was always something to see by. Impossibly, in the blackness of the embankment hollow – where light had not ventured for possibly centuries – Kastner found he could see. Not well. Perhaps only as well as the things that crept, crawled and slithered through the feculence about him, but he could see. He was not even sure that his remaining eye was responsible for the strange sensation. It was as if Kastner himself was giving off some kind of ghostly darkness, imperceptible to others, which cast everything about him in a contrasting and ominous light.
Kastner stared about him. Every crook and irregularity of the collapsed passage that the hollow fed into caught Kastner’s darkness, throwing shadows of light beyond them. It was as if this sunless and forgotten place had been dusted with the feeblest shimmer. It was fainter than faint, but it was there.
Moving his armoured form up the incline of shattered stone and sludge, he came to the thick metal bars of a subterranean entrance. Kastner put his mailed fingers about the bars. Rust came away in his hands. It was in fact an exit. Kastner had been confident in the location of the passage even if the same confidence hadn’t extended to reaching it. Few people knew of its existence, since few had ever taken an interest. As a templar of Sigmar, he knew of the Grand Theogonist’s security arrangements and on occasion had been part of them – even though that wasn’t the primary role of the Knights of the Twin-Tailed Orb. It was more likely that Kastner’s love of the Cathedral of Sigmar as a squire and young templar had brought the existence of the passage to his attention. He adored the architecture of the temple and had familiarised himself with the history of its construction as well as its cult significance. The dwarf engineers responsible for the architectural wonder had built many functional features into the cathedral as well as flourishes of spiritual grandeur. Kastner knew of the secret staircases that wound through the colossal pillars of the Great Sanctuary. He knew of the ossuary below the catacombs that connected the Sun Chapel and the chapter house of the Knights of the Fiery Heart to the cathedral. He knew of the priest passage – a hidden subterranean route constructed by the engineers as a means of escape and for the evacuation of relics, should the cathedral ever be besieged. The priest passage – connecting the cathedral to the river and providing escape by means of the miracle of the city’s first functional sewer system. The sewer system in which Kastner was standing.