The End Times | The Return of Nagash

by Josh Reynolds

  The smoke swirled clear for a moment, and he saw that he stood on a carpet of bones, picked clean by the ages. Old bones and new bones, brown and white and yellow, clad in the shapeless remnants of clothing and armour from a span of centuries that boggled Volkmar’s already addled mind. He saw weapons and tools the likes of which he had only seen in the most ancient of barrows, and those that seemed far more advanced than the ones he was familiar with. It was as if someone had emptied out all of the graveyards of history.

  Volkmar did not know where he was, or how he had come there. He only knew that he was frightened, and tired, but not yet ready. Ready for what, he did not know, but the thought of it caused him to shudder in horror. He raised his hammer wearily, preparing himself for what he somehow knew came next.

  All about him, the plain of bones began to tremble and clatter. Sparks of weird light grew in the empty sockets of every skull and a eye-searing green fire crackled along the length of every bone. The bones surged up with a cacophonous rattle, and something began to take shape – something immense and powerful, Volkmar knew, though he had never seen it before. A single voice suddenly drowned out all others, silencing them. It spoke in a language that Volkmar had only ever seen written down, and the words were carved into the chill air like sword strokes.

  As the thing – the daemon, his mind screamed – grew and formed and spoke, the smoke above him cleared. He looked up at the cold, black stars that pulsed in the dead void above. A thought quavered in his head, like the tinny tone of a child’s bell. Everything was dead, here. Nothing lived, save him. Nothing moved, or breathed, or laughed or loved, without the whim of the monstrous intelligence that guided the climbing, shifting pillar of bones rising up before him. It had conquered and covered and was the world about him. His world, for he could see the ruin of the great temple of Sigmar, there, rising from the sea of death, and the Imperial palace and a hundred other landmarks, barely visible through the smoke.

  His heart sank. He saw the blackened skeletons of the Vagr Breughel Memorial Playhouse and the Geheimnihsstrasse Theatre, the broken ruin of Temple Street, and shattered remnant of the Konigsplatz. Altdorf, he was in Altdorf, and it, like everything else in this world, was dead and buried. The gods were gone, and only this cold, malignity remained.

  The thought incited him, freeing him from his terrified paralysis. A hoarse roar slipped from his blistered lips, and he swung the hammer up, catching it in both hands as he forced himself forwards through the clawing tide of dead matter that swirled about him. A light, weak at first, and then growing stronger, suffused him. A corona of heat swirled into being about the shattered head of the hammer as he swung it.

  The hammer smacked into a giant’s palm. The sliding, slithering bones that made up the titan’s claw gave slightly at the force of the blow. Then the massive claws curled down, enclosing the hammer completely, and, like a parent taking a toy from a child, snatched the weapon from Volkmar’s grip. The arm was impossibly long, and attached to an equally out-of-proportion shoulder. The constant motion of the bones made it hard to discern the truth of the shape before him, but he saw enough to want to look away – to run, a voice screamed.

  Volkmar turned and ran. It was not the first time he had done so, and he knew that it wasn’t the first time he had faced this enemy either. He had fled from it before, and fought ineffectually against it and been buried by it again and again. He ran, and his hammer was somehow in his hand again, still broken, its weight slowing him down. The thing followed him, ploughing through the smoke and charnel leavings like a shark through shallow waters, absorbing and expelling the bones it rolled over. Sometimes it was beside him, and other times it loomed over him, its shadow enveloping him in a cloak of numbing cold. It outpaced him at times or fell far behind. He had the sense that it was in no hurry. That it was enjoying itself. But he did not stop, he could not stop. To face it, he knew, was to fall. Only in flight was there life, and Volkmar dearly wanted to live.

  The courage that had sustained him throughout his long life, that had kept him on his feet through fire and ruin, that had seen him match his hammer against all manner of foes, had failed him. All of his training, all of his rhetoric, all of his faith, had fled him, leaving only the raw atavistic impulse to survive at all costs. So he ran.

  He ran in pursuit of the wind. He heard a woman’s voice, in the hissing sibilance of the breeze that stirred the smoke. He always heard it, as he ran. Sometimes he thought it was his mother, or an old lover, or the daughter he’d never had, but other times, he knew it was none of those. It was not a human voice. It was a voice that spoke to the wind, and to eagles, and it lent him strength, and propelled him on, easing the weight of his hurts and sweeping aside the dead shapes that lunged for him out of the smoke.

  Run, she murmured.

  Run, she whispered.

  Run, she screamed.

  Volkmar ran, and the dead world pursued him. And as his limbs failed, and his blood pounded in his ears, and the rattle of bones grew thunderous in his ears, he grasped at her words, her voice, grabbing for any shred of salvation, of hope, and, as all of the dead of Altdorf heaved beneath him, the Grand Theogonist woke up.

  Volkmar’s eyes sprang open, and he sucked in a lungful of stale, damp air. He shuddered and twitched, unable to control his limbs. His heels drummed on the stone floor, and his palms flapped uselessly against his battered cuirass. He moaned and tried to roll over, but the manacles about his wrists prevented it. He was forced to squirm about and haul himself up into a sitting position. His body ached, much as it had in his dream. He coughed, trying to clear his throat, and looked around blearily.

  ‘Still alive, my friend?’ someone asked. Volkmar peered through the gloom, and caught sight of golden armour gleaming still beneath a layer of filth. He struggled to recall the Tilean’s name, through the mugginess of his aborted sleep.

  ‘If you can call it living,’ Volkmar coughed. His throat was parched and drier than the deserts of Araby. He squinted at the knight. ‘You’ve looked better, Blaze.’

  Lupio Blaze, Templar of the Order of the Blazing Sun, laughed shallowly. ‘As have we all,’ he said, rattling his chains. His once-handsome features had been bludgeoned into a shapeless mass of dried blood and bruises, but his eyes were still bright, and his torn lips still quirked in a smile. ‘Still, it could be worse. It could be raining.’

  Overhead, thunder rumbled. The soft plop of water was replaced by the steady downbeat of falling rain. Blaze laughed again, and craned himself backwards, so that his head and torso was caught in the downpour. ‘You see, Olf? I say that the gods still watch over us, eh?’ Blaze called out, gulping at the rainwater. He made a cup of his hands, and caught a handful of the rain. Then he kicked the legs of the figure chained next to him. ‘Up, Olf, have a drink, on me,’ he said, pouring the handful of water into the cupped hands of the burly Ulrican priest who was chained to the lectern next to his.

  Olf Doggert eagerly slurped the water, and then grudgingly passed the next handful of water to the next prisoner in line, the pinch-faced young priest of Morr, Mordecaul Cadavion. Cadavion drank his share and passed along the next handful, emptying his cupped hands into those of the wan-faced matron named Elspeth Farrier, a priestess of Shallya. Volkmar turned his attention to the figure of the man chained beside her. Wild haired and raggedly dressed even before their captivity, Russett, blessed of Taal looked like a living corpse now. He hadn’t eaten in days, and he’d barely drunk anything. His flesh was mottled with bruises where he’d thrown himself at the walls, and bloody marks chafed his wrists where he continually yanked on his chains. One of his ankles had been gnawed to the bone, not by any of Mannfred’s beasts, but by the man himself in an attempt to get free of an earlier set of chains.

  The nature priest had suffered more physically in captivity than any of them, save Volkmar and Sindst, the sour-faced priest of Ranald, who’d lost a hand and several chunks of his flesh on their journey across Vargravia in Mannfred’s bone cag
e. Russett crouched, wrapped in chains and silently rocking back and forth. Like an animal that had been caged too long, he had gone quietly mad. Now he stared at the cockroaches and rats that shared their prison, as if trying to communicate with them. But whatever esoteric abilities Taal had granted him were not in evidence, not in Sylvania. The voices of the gods, ever faint, might as well have been the only fevered imaginings of a flagellant, for all that they reached their servants here, Volkmar reflected.

  He watched Elspeth help Sindst drink. He slurped greedily at the water in her hands, and nodded weary thanks when he’d finished. Volkmar looked around. After Mannfred’s last visit, they had been moved from the walls to the lecterns, and had their chains shortened. The reason hadn’t been shared, but Volkmar suspected that it was another of Mannfred’s demented games. He knew that the vampire enjoyed their futile escape attempts, just as he knew that they couldn’t stop trying. Wounded, exhausted and filthy as they were, none of them were yet ready to give up, save perhaps for poor Russett and the Bretonnian, Morgiana, whose mind and soul had been taken by Mannfred long before they had met her. She belonged to von Carstein now. She murmured to herself in the far corner of the room, unchained, but unmoving. She lay on her side on the cold stone, and stroked the floor as if it were a beloved pet, whispering constantly to it. He caught a flash of a delicate fang as she muttered, and looked away, sickened by what she had become.

  Volkmar caught Elspeth’s eye, and the Shallyan priestess shook her head slightly. Volkmar sighed and winced, as the wound on his head split and began to leak blood and pus. He reached for it, but Elspeth hissed, ‘Don’t touch it. It’s having enough trouble healing without you picking at it.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s ever going to heal, sister,’ Volkmar said. ‘Mannfred won’t give us that time.’ He looked around. ‘You can all feel it, can’t you? That heaviness in the air? We’re in the eye of a storm, and one that Mannfred wants to unleash on the rest of the world. He needs us for that.’

  ‘Otherwise why keep us alive, right?’ Sindst muttered, hugging his wrist-stump to his chest. ‘We know all of this, old man. That’s why we keep trying to escape. Badly, I might add,’ he spat, glaring at Blaze and Olf.

  ‘Keep talking, sneak-thief,’ Olf growled. ‘Seems to me, if Mannfred needs you alive, I’d be doing us all a favour by wringing your scrawny neck.’

  ‘Do as you will, brute,’ Sindst said, tonelessly. ‘We’re not getting out of here upright, none of us. We’re all dead, even the pointy-eared witch over there.’ He motioned with his stump to the elf maiden.

  Volkmar looked at the elf. He pushed himself to his feet and moved as close as he could to the lectern where she was chained. Her eyes were closed, as they had been for the entirety of their brief, inhospitable association. Volkmar gathered water from Elspeth, and got as close to the elf woman as he could. ‘Drink, my lady,’ he croaked. ‘You must drink.’

  Her eyes flickered open. Volkmar realised that she was blind, and felt his heart twist in his chest. ‘Aliathra,’ she murmured. Volkmar blinked. He recognised her voice instantly as the same one he’d heard in his dream, urging him to run. A weak smile flickered across her face and was gone. She leaned forward, and he held his hands out. She reached up and took his hands in hers and bent her face. She drank deeply, and sat back, frowning. ‘Tainted water from tainted skies,’ she said. ‘It tastes of his sorcery.’

  ‘Funny, I thought it tasted of smoke, maybe with a hint of a Sartosan red?’ Sindst said.

  ‘Quiet,’ Elspeth said sharply. ‘That’s quite enough out of you, servant of Ranald. If you can’t be of use–’

  Sindst’s manacle clattered to the floor. He stretched his good arm and Volkmar saw a twist of metal sticking from the raw stump of his other wrist, poking through the filthy bandages. He grinned in a sickly fashion and said, ‘It took a while. I had to hide it where the flesh-eaters wouldn’t sniff it out. And wait for the flying fang-brothers to go wherever such creatures go when they’re not watching us,’ he added, referring to the two vargheists that Mannfred had left to guard them.

  He heaved himself up and began to free the others. ‘This is useless, you know,’ he said, as he worked on Volkmar’s manacles. ‘We’re all dying by inches – no food, no water, no weapons, sick, hurt and bled dry thanks to Mannfred and his cursed spell. We won’t get far.’

  ‘Then why bother?’ Volkmar asked, looking up at him.

  Sindst chuckled. ‘Ranald is the god of luck, among other things. And you don’t get lucky if you don’t roll the knucklebones, Sigmarite.’

  ‘I hope we have a better plan than last time,’ Mordecaul said, as he was freed.

  ‘Run faster,’ Elspeth said.

  ‘That’s not a plan,’ Mordecaul said.

  ‘Die well,’ Olf said, heaving himself to his feet.

  ‘What part of the word “plan” don’t you understand?’ Mordecaul demanded.

  Sindst chuckled. ‘For the servant of the god of death, you’re not very eager to make his acquaintance, are you, boy?’

  Mordecaul hugged himself. ‘I wouldn’t be in his bower for very long, would I? Death is not the end here.’ He looked up, his pale face pinched with grief. ‘I can’t feel him. Morr, I mean. I can’t feel him here.’

  ‘None of us can feel our gods,’ Blaze said, kicking aside his chains as Sindst freed him. ‘That does not mean they are not there, hey?’ He went to the younger man and clapped him on the shoulders. ‘I knew a man, he was from Talabheim. His name was Goetz, and he was a brother-knight to me. He grew deaf to the words of Myrmidia, but he fought on, deaf and blind to her light. He still served. And when the time came, when he was at the end, suddenly – there she was!’ Blaze made a flamboyant gesture. ‘She had been there all the time, and he had been like a blind man standing in the sun, hey? That is what we are, newly blind. We must find the sun.’ Blaze patted Mordecaul on the cheek. ‘Find the sun,’ he said again.

  Volkmar watched the exchange silently. Blaze’s overt display of faith made him feel ashamed, in some small way. His own faith had not so much been shaken as it had been uprooted. One did not become the Grand Theogonist on the strength of faith alone. Such a position was built on a bedrock of compromise. He had felt the power of Sigmar in his veins, but he had never spoken with his god, or gazed upon his face. He had never felt the need to do so. Sigmar provided him with purpose and the strength to carry out that purpose, and that was enough.

  Or it had been. Now he wasn’t so sure. He felt eyes on him, and looked around to see Aliathra gazing at him, her face like something carved from marble. In her eyes was something he could not define – sadness, perhaps. Or pity. Volkmar felt a flush of anger and shook off the cloud of doubt that had settled on him. Mannfred had called him ‘Sigmar’s blood’. Well, he’d show the vampire the truth of those words, when he pulled out the leech’s unbeating heart and crushed it before his eyes.

  Sindst had gone to the chamber door. ‘I can’t get it open,’ he said.

  ‘Then step back,’ Olf growled. He flexed his long arms. ‘Still a bit of strength left in this old wolf, I think. What about you, Blaze? What’s that you Myrmidians always say?’

  ‘We go where we are needed,’ Blaze intoned. ‘We do what must be done.’ He grinned. ‘See, I teach you something yet, yes?’

  ‘Shut up and put your shoulder into it, you poncy pasta-eater,’ Olf growled. Blaze chuckled and both men struck the door with their shoulders. Volkmar longed to help them, or to see to Morgiana with a sharp length of wood, but it was all he could do to stand. Instead, he kept an eye on the corner where Morgiana still lay, unheeding of their actions, as well as on the open roof above, just in case the vargheists decided to return. There was no way they could fight the creatures in their current state. It would be a miracle if they made the castle gates. But better a quick death in battle than whatever Mannfred had planned. He rubbed his blistered wrists and glanced down at the blood that flowed through the runnels that cut across the floor.
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  Then, his eyes were drawn to the gleaming iron crown, where it sat on its cushion of human skin. It seemed to glitter with a strange internal light, at once ugly and beauteous, attractive and repulsive in the same instant. He thought he could hear a soft voice calling to him, pleading with him, and he longed to pick it up.

  I should, he thought. It was his duty, was it not? The Crown of Sorcery belonged in the vaults of the temple of Sigmar, in the Cache Malefact with the other dangerous objects. It should never have been brought into the light. How Mannfred had breached the vaults was still a mystery, but Volkmar’s fingers itched to snatch up the crown and – place it on my head – carry it away from this fell place.

  He froze, startled at the thought that had intruded on his own. It had not been his, and he knew it. His eyes narrowed and he mustered the moisture to spit on the crown, which seemed to flicker angrily in response.

  ‘You can hear it, can’t you?’ the elf maiden murmured, from behind him.

  Volkmar licked his lips. ‘I can,’ he hissed hoarsely. He looked away. ‘But it says nothing worth listening to. It is nothing more than a trap for the unwary.’

  ‘I saw Mannfred wearing it,’ Mordecaul said. He looked at the crown and shuddered. ‘It fit him perfectly.’

  ‘It fits any head that dares wear it,’ Volkmar grated. ‘And it hollows out the soul and strips the spirit to make room for that which inhabits it.’ He grinned mirthlessly. ‘Let the von Carstein wear it, and bad cess to him. Let it drain him dry, one parasite on another. A better fate for him, I cannot imagine.’