by Rob Sanders
Like two farmer’s sons fighting for the reins of a cart on its way to market, Kastner felt a fight within him for the murderous path and the plunge of the crusader blade. At moments, the vengeful thrust of the weapon’s broad tip into a crunching helm or the unyielding, stone cold parry of a halberd blade that should have hewn him apart were his own. He was a knight. A templar. A battle-tempered warrior at the peak of his training and physical fitness. He still was, of a different following. At other moments, lives were taken before he had conceived of their ending. Feats of incredible strength or unknowable skill were performed by his hand. His body raged in fires of exhaustion and the weight of the greatsword was an agony in his arms but this didn’t stop Kastner smashing knight after Sigmarite knight into the sanctuary floor, punching visors and jaws from his mailed fist and cutting clean through Gotz Schroeder – the Master of his own Order – Terminus finding a path through every chink, hinge and weakness in the knight’s finely crafted plate.
As the horror followed the blade everywhere it went and the torso and legs of Grand Master Schroeder fell to one side, Kastner suddenly realised that his eye was firmly shut. He was a raging bonfire, blinding in the darkness he threw across the stinging purity of the temple sanctuary. Blotted out by the brightness of the cathedral walls and the holy ground upon which they charged, the knights of Sigmar caught the full glare of Kastner’s burgeoning malevolence and cast shadows of light – some blazing with the pious nobility of their hearts, some long and sallow with the doubt and dark secrets they hid deep within themselves. Kastner saw through their plate and the armour of their souls. He read them like heretical texts: their hopes, their needs, their flaws and their fears. He knew what they were going to do to him before they did and he killed them for it.
Kastner’s darkness was only eclipsed by the deep inscrutability falling from the great, round stained-glass window in the cathedral wall. A great black sun, it looked down on him like a lens and Kastner felt the dread ancients of existence take turns to peer down on his miserable mortality in simultaneous celebration and judgement. As he hacked and skewered the God-King’s warriors on Terminus’s blazing length, Kastner both grew and withered under their infernal gaze. Stronger. Faster. More adamant and savage in mind and form. Hope shrivelled and crumbled within him like leaves during the Great Fall. His love of life, the architecture of his beliefs and the nobility of a man never to be, all turned to dust within him. It rained like loss through his soul, leaving a terrible emptiness for the darkness to fill. Perhaps it was this last moment of doubt – this scintilla of shattered honour – that allowed Etzel Boschkowitz through.
Kastner felt the Grand Master’s warhammer smash into his back, pulverising his shield and the pauldron beneath it. Kastner was spun off balance by the weapon’s brute force and was tossed off his mound of bodies and into a forest of halberd spikes and blades. Caught offguard, the weapons clattered against the templar’s armour rather than through it, but as Kastner became swamped by knights eager for the kill, he rediscovered the hot sensation of steel passing through his plate and flesh. Pushing himself back and forth in the metallic throng, with knights finding it difficult to bring their weapons to bear on an enemy so close, Kastner gave back to his brothers. Messily grabbing knights from behind their helms, Kastner plunged the searing blade of Terminus blindly at guts, groins and thighs, feeling his enemies go down before him.
Suddenly the sound of clashing metal subsided and the knights pulled back. Kastner attempted a tight turn in his armour. It was difficult. Terminus was employed in swiping away the thrustings of spear-points and angled blades and the templar was off balance. He turned to see Boschkowitz before him, his beard shaking with righteous rage. He felt a mind-splitting smash as the Grand Master battered his helm aside with a swing of his hammer. The world suddenly spun. It felt as though the Grand Master had taken his head clean off. He hadn’t. He had just sent the templar tumbling back into the wall of knights and blades. Steel squealed once again through his armour. Pain lanced through his back and thigh.
Shaking sense back into his concussed skull, Kastner turned Terminus about and thrust the anguished blade straight back into the knight behind. He pulled it out and thrust it straight back into the armoured warrior unfortunate enough to take his place. Once again, the disorderly throng withdrew. Like Sigmar’s fist, Boschkowitz’s warhammer came down on the templar. Kastner went down on one knee to receive the God-King’s blessing before bringing the flaming Terminus up, his gauntlet on both the hilt and blade like a staff to intercept the incredible force of the weapon. The warhammer’s haft hit the blade, Kastner holding his sword above his head and keeping the weapon from smashing him into the flagstones of the sanctuary. A combination of the Grand Master’s own strength and the cleaving edge of Kastner’s crusader blade took the head of the hammer from it haft. Kastner stood to press his advantage but Boschkowitz kicked him straight in the breastplate, knocking him back into his knights.
‘Hold him,’ the Grand Master roared like a lion through his beard. ‘Hold the Ruinous slave.’
A Knight Griffon took Kastner about the throat with his arm, while a gauntlet grabbed out for his plate, holding him fast. He felt his helmet crumple as Boschkowitz slammed into his helm with his great mail fists. One-two. One-two.
‘Kill him!’ Kastner heard the Grand Theogonist screech. ‘Kill him now, Boschkowitz!’
Grand Master Boschkowitz held his mighty fists out to receive a pair of warhammers, tossed to him by Knights of the Fiery Heart on either side of the parting. He clenched his teeth and smashed the pair of hammers at each other, causing them to spark.
‘Now you die,’ Boschkowitz spat, bringing one of the warhammers up to strike the templar’s battered helm from his armoured shoulders. Kastner had no doubt that this time the Grand Master would send his head flying across the Great Sanctuary. Pulling on every ounce of strength he had left, Kastner dived. Lowering his head like a bull, he lurched forward, dragging the knights holding him from behind with him. As Grand Master Boschkowitz’s warhammer pulverised its way through skull after knightly skull – several belonging to knights of his own Order – the gauntlets released their grip on Kastner. The templar surged on, his battered helm lowered and its head-spike aimed at the exposed chest of the Grand Master. As his helm hammered into Boschkowitz’s chestplate, the knight gave a grunt. The spike had slammed straight into his heart. Drawing on the strength of the God-King himself, still the knight fought on, holding Kastner to him and smashing down on the templar’s back with his other hammer.
Kastner pulled his head from his helm, leaving the head-spike buried in the Grand Master’s chest, and stumbled into a fighting stance. Boschkowitz stared down at the spike and then back at Kastner, bringing both warhammers at him with as much force as the knight could muster. This time Kastner was ready for him, turning aside one warhammer, then the other, before sweeping Terminus back across the Grand Master’s throat. All fell silent for a moment in the Great Sanctuary. Boschkowitz started to say something, but his final words were lost in the awful sound his neck made as his head lolled backwards to hang down between his shoulders. The chamber echoed with the clatter of his knees on the flagstones and the crash of his armoured body to the ground.
Silence reigned for a few moments more as the ring of the Grand Master’s metal plate endured. It was broken by the imperious shrieks of Grand Theogonist Lutzenschlager as he was removed to safety from the chamber, throne and all.
‘The cannon,’ he called in a panic driven by the fact that only he of all Sigmar’s servants in the sanctuary knew the extreme importance of Kastner’s death. ‘Fire the cannon. Destroy the interloper. Somebody end this now!’
As Lutzenschlager was removed through the brick-ragged hole in the cathedral wall, Kastner saw the monstrous muzzle of Big Bathilda wheeled awkwardly up to the opening. It didn’t matter, the response from the knights was instantaneous. At the Grand Theogonis
t’s order, they fell on Kastner like an unstoppable silver wave. Terminus smacked away the first hammers and halberds, but Kastner was soon clamped between the armoured bodies of knights. Some were driven by simple glory. Others by the grief of fallen brothers. Others still by the blessings of their God-King. Within seconds it became a plate-pulverising crush, with those most ardent in their attempts to end Kastner pushed against the templar by knights further away, eager to play their part in the downfall of a dangerous foe.
Kastner tore his body this way and that, attempting to create some room about him – at least enough to bring Terminus up from where it was trapped between the vice-like bodies of two Sigmarite knights. It was no use. There were too many knights, with a never-ending stream of armoured warriors filing into the Great Sanctuary from the blasted opening and the main doors. Beyond that, Big Bathilda was being loaded and primed. Kastner had no doubt that the Grand Theogonist would order the great cannon fired as soon as possible and wouldn’t let a consideration like the lives of his knights get in the way of such a decision. Not to kill a man who would become the Everchosen of Chaos and the Lord of the End Times.
Kastner felt the axe blade of a halberd bite into him. The wicked point of a spear slid into his shoulder, cutting its hot way through meat and bone. Sword tips waggled their way between joints and split chainmail rings to knife at his flesh. These hot agonies and more, Kastner felt through his trapped form. He heaved. He pushed. He tried to extract the broad blade of Terminus where it sat extinguished between the backs of two equally immobile knights, but the greatsword would not budge. The tip of a crusader sword stabbed wildly at his face, opening up gashes across Kastner’s forehead and cheek, but the templar couldn’t even crane his neck out of the way. It suddenly became difficult to breathe as the spear-tip of a halberd that had been burrowing into his torso breached his plate and sank into his side.
Kastner reached up at the multi-coloured light coming in through the stained glass. His fingertips scraped at dust-defined beams. In his last moments, even a monster like Kastner could appreciate its beauty. He watched as he waited. Waited for the killing strike through the clash of bodies. Waited for the thunder of the great cannon turned on the mad throng of knights. Waited for a death well-earned.
It was raining. Inside the temple. Glass fell across the bloody scene, glinting as it caught sunlight that had blasted its way into the cathedral. The stained-glass window was no more. Dark shapes, like fallen angels, rocketed down towards the mob of Sigmarites. They landed in a circle about Kastner, crushing surrounding knights into the floor of the Great Sanctuary beneath their boots, producing fountains of gore that rained about them. The figures rose. Their dark armour was unmistakable. Their skull-helms of bronzed bone. Their armoured wings, now extended about them like the lengths of shields. They drew their bone swords from the finger-sheathes of the wings – one in each hand. The marauders. The Ruinous Warriors. The Swords of Chaos that Kastner had left behind at Fort Denkh to finish Riesenweiler’s knights. It seemed that they had not left him.
The slaughter began almost immediately. The razored rachidian edge of the warriors’ bone swords cut a bloody swathe through the confusion of plate. They stabbed. They sliced. They cleaved. The air was thick with a bloody haze and the death that accompanied it. Like a closing star, the Swords of Chaos moved in on Kastner. The throng loosened in the knights’ panicked attempt to turn their weapons outward to defend against the new threat. The winged marauders were like an elemental force. Overwhelming. Unstoppable.
As the bodies parted, Kastner fell to his knees. His armour was slick with gore and he was knelt in a pool of blood – much of it his own. He swung Terminus wildly at passing knights, hamstringing several with the remaining strength he had left. Mostly he just drove knights into the armour-opening slashes of bone swords as the Chaos warriors closed in. They were suddenly about him. One winged marauder either side of Kastner. They were cold and deathly to the touch and promptly re-sheathed their weapons in their leathery wings. The other marauders had turned, forming a ring of bone swords about Kastner as the dark warriors supported him. Knights of the Fiery Heart stared in disbelief at the slaughter of fellow Sigmarites. Butchery in the temple of the God-King. There would be bellows of righteous revenge and a renewed call to charge the hated foe, but the knights were weary and their numbers decimated. Even knights and men-at-arms fresh to the death and destruction were given cause to pause.
The knights of Sigmar stared at their enemy, swaying in their armour and exhaustion. The winged marauders stared back before sheathing their bone swords, bending their knees and surging for the domed ceiling of the Great Sanctuary. Still clutching Terminus loosely in one hand, Kastner was held between two of them, who dragged him up horribly up into the heavens. With powerful beats of their wings the warriors were soon high off the holy ground. There was a colossal crash. Big Bathilda had once again visited her fury on the scene of slaughter, the fat cannonball blasting through the bodies – both dead and dying – and out through the other wall. Knights still on their feet were knocked to the ground and slid through the gore of their brothers while a cloud of brick-dust erupted from the far wall, obscuring the horror below.
Kastner fell in and out of consciousness. The blood loss had made him faint. He felt pity for the birds and the bats. Flight was not a pleasant sensation.
He was high above the Cathedral of Sigmar. It was a sight not even the dwarf engineers had enjoyed during its construction. The wretched city of Altdorf fell away, its reek and rooftops melting into the tangled woodland of the Reikwald and the Great Forest. Roads cut sharply through the canopy while rivers snaked their lazy meandering way into the distance. His tense limbs slackened and his head slumped. As consciousness left him and obscurity crept in from the edges of his sight like the ash of a ravaged wasteland claiming everything he could see, Kastner saw his homeland and Sigmar’s Empire darken.
It was a vision he promised himself he would realise… upon his doomed return.
‘Doom hath drowned more men than the sea.’
– Ignatz van Offen, Offered Truths
‘So the doom of man travelled north –
north through forests and shadows cold,
Through lands of iron, spice and ice –
through man-eating ogres and trolls.
‘Bitter like winter’s bite he was,
with the God-King’s lands at his back.
His darkened heart beat to vengeance,
echoing with questions unasked.
‘A new path lay before the knight,
a way of blood and butchery:
On which no sacred life was spared
and his dark patrons were appeased.
‘Northern Wastes and warrior met,
where men’s forlorn hopes go to die.
Accepting he was damned and lost,
to his gods he made sacrifice.
‘Warrior of the Empire dead,
subject of the God-King deceived.
Great warlord of the Shadowlands,
of Ruinous treasures received.’
– Necrodomo the Insane, The Liber Caelestior
(The Celestine Book of Divination)
CHAPTER X
‘There are many ways north, for the path is well-trodden,
There are none from the south, for the route is forgotten.’
– Ungol proverb
The Worlds Edge Mountains
The Northlands
Poslekogot/Month of the After-Claw (Gospodarin Calendar)
Hieronymous Dagobert had found the bloodied and broken knight in the stable, saddling Oberon. He looked like suffering itself. The priest had tensed as he discovered that they were not alone. The armoured marauders, the winged knights that had slaughtered the soldiers and templars at Fort Denkh, were leading some of Lady Kastner’s finest horses from stalls deeper within. Dagober
t looked to the templar, to the Ruinous knights and then back to his friend.
‘So it has come to pass,’ Dagobert said gravely.
The templar grunted. He sounded different, Dagobert decided.
‘I’m in no mood for riddles, old man.’
It was still his voice, but there was something… more. Potent. Powerful. A slight echo – like that created when speaking in some great hall or chamber. A dark authority – even at a grunt or a whisper.
‘You are Archaon.’
‘I am… Archaon.’
‘To be the Everchosen of the Dark Gods and Herald of the End Times.’
‘In the flesh.’
The Chaos knights, deathly things with their dark armour, skull-helms and wings, led their steeds outside leaving the two men alone.
‘Well, you will always be Diederick Kastner to me,’ Dagobert said.
The knight tightened Oberon’s harness and took Terminus from where it hung off the stalls on its cross-guard. The blade sizzled to afflicted flame at the templar’s touch; a ghostly torment seething about the weapon’s honourable history and service to the God-King. The knight slammed the greatsword down in the scabbard attached to Oberon’s saddle.
‘One of those names I stole,’ the templar said. ‘The other was given to me as an act of pitiable charity. You’ll forgive me if I choose not to hear either of them ever again.’
‘You expect me to call you… by that name?’
‘It is the only one that is truly mine,’ Archaon told him. ‘Where’s Gorst?’
‘I think you frightened him off.’
‘And the girl?’
‘In the hall, with the crossbow,’ Dagobert said.
‘Whereas you opted for one of Sieur Kastner’s duelling pistols from the mounting on the hall wall,’ Archaon said. He could hear the weapon rattling in the priest’s nervous grip. The warrior turned. ‘Have you ever fired one of those things before?’