[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion

by Steve Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  A WARHAMMER NOVEL

  DOMINION

  Von Carstein - 02

  Steven Savile

  This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons

  and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the

  world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury

  it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds

  and great courage.

  At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the

  largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for

  its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it is

  a land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests

  and vast cities. It is a land riven by uncertainty, as three

  pretenders all vie for control of the Imperial throne.

  But these are far from civilised times. Across the length

  and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces

  of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come

  rumblings of war. In the towering World’s Edge Mountains,

  the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and

  renegades harry the wild southern lands of

  the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the

  skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the

  land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the

  ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen

  corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods.

  As the time of battle draws ever near.

  the Empire needs heroes

  like never before.

  PROLOGUE

  The Eye of the Hurricane

  GRUNBERG

  Late winter, 2052

  It was desperate.

  Kallad Stormwarden knew the tide of the battle had turned. Still, the young dwarf prince stood side by side with his father, matching the gruff dwarf blow for blow as Kellus’ axe hewed through the swarm of dead storming the walls of Grunberg Keep. The dwarfs of Karak Sadra had chosen to make their last stand against the Vampire Count together with the manlings.

  The walkway was slick with rain.

  Kallad slammed the edge of his great axe, Ruin thorn, into the grinning face of a woman with worms where her eyes ought to have been. The blade split her skull cleanly in two. Still the woman came on, clawing desperately at his face. He staggered back a step beneath the ferocity of her attack, wrenching the axe head free. Grunting, he delivered a second, killer blow. The dead woman staggered and fell lifelessly from the wall.

  He knuckled the rain from his eyes.

  There was no blood and the dead didn’t scream. Their silence was more frightening than any of the many horrors on the field of combat. They surged forwards mercilessly as axes crunched into brittle bones, splintering shoulders and cracking skulls. They lurched and lumbered on as arrows thudded into chest cavities, piercing taut skin and powdering it like vellum, and still they came on relentlessly as heads rolled and limbs were severed.

  “Grimna!” Kallad bellowed, kicking the woman’s head from the wall. His rallying cry echoed down the line as the dead shuffled forwards. Grimna. Courage. It was all they had in the face of death. It was all they needed. Grimna gave them strength while the stubbornness of the mountain gave them courage. With strength and courage, and their white-haired king beside them, they could withstand anything.

  There was an air of greatness about Kellus Ironhand. More than merely prowess or skill, the dwarf embodied the sheer iron will of his people. He was the mountain, indefatigable, unconquerable, and giant.

  And yet there was a chill worming its way deeper into Kallad Stormwarden’s heart.

  Only in death did moans escape their broken teeth, but these weren’t real sounds. They weren’t battlefield sounds. They were sussurant whispers. They weren’t human. They weren’t alive. They belonged to the gathering storm and they were terrifying in their wrongness.

  It didn’t matter how hard the defenders fought, how many they killed, they were trapped in a losing battle. The ranks of the undead army were endless, their bloodlust unquenchable.

  Bodies surfaced in the moat, rising slowly to the surface, their flesh bloated and their faces stripped away by the leeches that fed on them.

  Kallad stared at the tide of corpses as one by one they began to twitch and jerk like loose-limbed puppets, brought violently to life. The first few clawed their way up the side of the dirt embankment. More followed behind them: a seemingly endless swell of death surfacing from beneath the black water.

  The futility of fighting hit him hard. It was pointless. Death only swelled the ranks of the enemy. The sons of Karak Sadra would be dining in the Hall of the Ancestors by sunrise.

  Kallad slapped the blade of Ruinthorn against his boot and brought it to bear on a one-armed corpse as it lumbered into range. The bottom half of its jaw hung slackly where the skin and muscle had rotted away. Kallad took the miserable wretch’s head clean off with a single vicious swing. The fighting was harsh. Despite their greater prowess, the dwarfs were tiring. Defeat was inevitable.

  Behind Kallad, someone yelled a warning, and a cauldron of blazing naphtha arced high over the wall, crashing into the ranks of the dead. The fire bit and burned bright as dead flesh seared, tufts of hair shrivelled and bones charred. The pouring rain only intensified the burning, the naphtha reacting violently to the water.

  The stench was sickening as the corpses burned.

  Kellus brought his axe round in a vicious arc, the rune of Grimna slicing into a dead man’s gut. The blow cracked the man’s ribcage open. His entrails spilled out like slick loops of grey rope, unravelling in his hands even as he struggled to hold them in. The dead man didn’t bleed. His head came up, a look of bewilderment frozen on his features as Kellus put the thing out of its misery.

  Kallad moved to stand beside his father.

  “There’s no better place to die,” he said in all seriousness.

  “Aye there is lad, in a bed with a score of grand bairns running around and yapping, and your woman looking down at you lovingly. This here’s second best. Not that I’m complaining, mind.”

  Three shambling corpses came at them at once, almost dragging Kellus down in their hunger to feast on his brains. Kallad barged one off the walkway and split another stem to sternum with a savage blow from Ruinthorn. He grinned as his father dispatched the third creature. The grin died on his face as down below one of his kin fell to the reaching hands of the dead and was dragged down into the mud of the field where they set about stripping flesh from bone with savage hunger. The dwarfs screams died a moment before he did.

  His death spurred the defenders on, firing their blood with a surge of stubborn strength, until the desperation itself became suffocating and closed around their hearts like some black iron fist, squeezing the hope out of them. On the field below, another dwarf fell to the dead. Kallad watched, frozen, as the creatures ripped and tore at his comrade’s throat, the fiends choking on his blood in their urgency to slake their vile thirst.

  Kallad hawked and spat, wrapping his hands around the thick shaft of Ruinthorn and planting the axe-head between his feet. The last prince of Karak Sadra felt fear then, with the understanding that his wouldn’t be a clean death. Whatever honour he won on the walls of Grunberg Keep would be stripped from his bones by von Carstein’s vermin. There would be no glory in it.

  The rain intensified, matting Kallad’s hair flat to his scalp and running between the chinks in his armour and down his back. No one said it was going to be like this. None of the storytellers talked about the reality of dying in combat. They spu
n tales of honour and heroism, not mud and rain, and the sheer bloody fear of it.

  He turned to his father, looking to draw courage from the old king, but Kellus was shivering against the rain and had the deadened look of defeat in his old eyes. There was no comfort to be drawn from him. The mountain was crumbling. It was a humbling experience, to stand at the foot of the mountain and witness the rock crack and fall, nothing more than scree where once the mountain had stood tall and proud. In that one look Kallad saw the death of a legend at its most mundane.

  Kallad looked out across the fields where countless hundreds of the dead shuffled and milled aimlessly among the piles of bones, waiting to be manipulated into the fray, and beyond them the black tents of Vlad von Carstein and his pet necromancers. They were the true power behind the dead, the puppet masters. The corpses were nothing more than dead meat. The necromancers were the monsters in every sense of the word. They had abandoned every last trace of humanity and given themselves to the dark magic willingly.

  Kallad watched as five more fiends clawed their way up the wall of the keep to the walkway. Would these be the ones who sent him to the Hall of Ancestors?

  “They need you down there,” Kellus said, breaking the spell of the creeping dead. “Get the women and children out of this place. The keep’s fallen and with it the city. I’ll have no one dying who can be saved. No arguments, lad. Take them through the mountain into the deep mines. I’m counting on you.”

  Kallad didn’t move. He couldn’t abandon his father on the wall; it was as good as murdering him.

  “Go!” King Kellus commanded, bringing his own axe around in a savage arc and backhanding its head into the face of the first zombie. The blow brought the creature to its knees. Kellus planted a boot on its chest and wrenched the axe free. The creature slumped sideways and fell from the walkway.

  Still Kallad didn’t move, even as Kellus risked his balance to slam a fist into his breastplate, staggering him back two steps.

  “I am still your king, boy, not just your father. They need you more than I do. I’ll not have their deaths on my honour!”

  “You can’t win… not on your own.”

  “And I’ve got no intention of doing so, lad. I’ll be supping ale with your grandfather come sunrise, trading stories of valour with your grandfather’s father and boasting about my boy saving hundreds of lives even though he knew to do so would be damning this old dwarf. Now go lad, get the man-lings out of here. There’s more than one kind of sacrifice. Make me proud, lad, and remember there’s honour in death. I’ll see you on the other side.” With that, the old dwarf turned his back on Kallad and hurled himself into the thick of the fight with vengeful fury, his first blow splitting a leering skull, the second severing a gangrenous arm as King Kellus, King of Karak Sadra, made his last glorious stand on the walls of Grunberg Keep.

  More dead emerged from the moat. It was a nightmarish scene: the creatures moving remorselessly up the embankment, brackish water clinging to their skin. Cauldrons of naphtha ignited on the dark water, blue tinged flames racing across the surface and wreathing the corpses. And still they were silent, even as they charred to ash and bone.

  The slick black bodies of hundreds of rats eddied across the blazing water, the rodents racing the bite of flame to dry land.

  Kallad turned reluctantly and stomped along the stone walkway. He barrelled down the ramp, slick with rain, and skidded to a halt as the screams of women and children tore the night.

  Heart racing, Kallad looked around frantically for the source of the screams. It took him a moment to see past the fighting, but when he did, he found what he was looking for: a petrified woman staggering out of the temple of Sigmar. She clutched a young baby in her arms and cast panicked glances back over her shoulder.

  A moment later, the bones of one of Grunberg’s long dead emerged from the temple. Dust and cobwebs clung to the bones. It took Kallad a moment to grasp the truth of the situation: their own dead were coming up from the dirt and the cold crypts, and were turning on them. Across the city, the dead were stirring. In cemeteries and tombs loved ones were returning from beyond the veil of death. The effect on those left behind would be devastating. To lose their loved ones once was hard enough, but to be forced to burn or behead them to save your own life… few could live through that kind of horror untouched.

  It made sense, now that he could see the pattern of the enemy’s logic. The necromancers were content to waste their peons in a useless assault on the walls. It didn’t matter. They had all the dead they needed inside the city already.

  The impossibility of the situation sank in, but instead of giving in to it, Kallad cried, “To me!” and brandished Ruinthorn above his head.

  He would make his father’s sacrifice worthwhile, and then, when the women and children of Grunberg were safe, he would avenge the King of Karak Sadra.

  The terrified woman saw Kallad and ran towards him, her skirts dragging as she struggled through the mud. The baby’s shrieks were muffled as she pressed the poor child’s face into her breasts. Kallad stepped between the woman and the skeleton hunter, and slammed a fist into the skull. The sounds of metal on bone and the subsequent crunch of bones breaking were sickening. The blow shattered the hinge on the right side of the fiend’s head, making its jaw hang slackly, broken teeth like tombstones. Kallad thundered a second punch into the skeleton’s head, his gauntlet caving in the entire left side of the monstrosity’s skull. It didn’t slow the skeleton so much as a step.

  The twin moons, Mannslieb and Morrslieb, hung low in the sky and the combatants were gripped in a curious time between times, neither the true darkness of night nor the first blush of daylight owning the sky. The fusion of the moons’ anaemic light cast fitful shadows across the nightmarish scene.

  “Are there more in there?” Kallad demanded.

  The woman nodded, eyes wide with terror.

  Kallad stepped into the temple of Sigmar expecting to find more refugees from the fighting. Instead, he was greeted by the sight of shuffling skeletons in various states of decay and decomposition trying to negotiate the rows of pews between the door down to the crypt and the battle raging outside. He backed up quickly and slammed the door. There was no means of securing it. Why would there be? Kallad thought bitterly. It was never meant to be a prison.

  “More manlings, woman, not monsters!” he said, bracing himself against the door.

  “In the great hall,” she said. The overwhelming relief of her rescue had already begun to mutate into violent tremors as the reality of her situation sank in. There was no salvation.

  Kallad grunted.

  “Good. What’s your name, lass?”

  “Gretchen.”

  “All right, Gretchen. Fetch one of the naphtha burners and a torch.”

  “But… but…” she stammered, understanding exactly what he intended. Her wild-eyed stare betrayed the truth: the thought of razing Sigmar’s house to the ground was more horrifying than any of the creatures trapped inside.

  “Go!”

  A moment later, the dead threw themselves at the door, fists of bone splintering and shattering beneath the sheer ferocity of the assault. The huge doors buckled and bowed. It took every ounce of Kallad’s strength to hold the dead back.

  “Go!” he rasped, slamming his shoulder up against the wood as fingers crept through the crack in the door that the dead had managed to force open. The door slammed closed on the fingers, crushing the bone to a coarse powder.

  Without another word, the woman fled in the direction of the naphtha burners.

  Kallad manoeuvred himself around until he braced the huge door with his back, and dug his heels in stubbornly. He could see his father on the wall. The white-haired king matched the enemy blow for savage blow. With his axe shining silver in the moonlight, Kellus might have been immortal, an incarnation of Grimna himself. He fought with an economy of movement, his axe hewing through the corpses with lethal precision. Kellus’ sacrifice was buying Kallad precio
us minutes to lead the women and children of Grunberg to safety. He would not fail. He owed the old dwarf that much.

  The dead hammered on the temple door, demanding to be set free.

  Gretchen returned with three men, dragging between them a huge black iron cauldron of naphtha. There was a grim stoicism to their actions as the four of them set about dousing the timber frame of the temple in the flammable liquid while Kallad held back the dead. A fourth man set a blazing torch to the temple wall and stepped back as the naphtha ignited in a cold blue flame.

  The fires tore around the temple’s facade, searing into the timber frame. Amid the screams and the clash of steel on bone, the conflagration caught and the holy temple went up in smoke and flames. It took less than a minute for the building to be consumed by fire. The heat from the blaze drove Kallad back from the door, allowing the dead to spill out of the temple.

  The abominations were met with hatchet, axe and spear as the handful of defenders drove them back mercilessly into the flames. It was nothing short of slaughter. Kallad couldn’t allow himself the luxury of even a moment’s relief—the battle was far from won. His brow was smeared with soot, and his breathing came in ragged gasps, as the heat of the blaze seared into his lungs. Yet, in his heart, he understood that the worst of it was only just beginning.

  Kallad grabbed the woman. He yelled over the crackle and hiss of the flames, “We have to get everyone out of here! The city is falling!”

  Gretchen nodded dumbly and stumbled away towards the great hall. The flames spread from the temple, licking up the length of the keep’s stone walls, and arcing across the rooftops to ignite the barracks and beyond that the stables. The rain was nowhere near heavy enough to douse the flames. In moments, the straw roof of the stables was ablaze and the timber walls were caving in beneath the blistering heat. The panicked horses bolted, kicking down the stable doors and charging recklessly into the muddy street. The stench of blood coupled with the burning flesh of the dead terrified the animals. Even the quietest of them shied and kicked out at those seeking to calm them.