It wasn’t merely pragmatism. He had to survive this final ordeal. He had no choice in the matter. He had to deliver his warning to everyone capable of standing against the vampires, and convince them that their only hope of survival lay in putting aside their arguments and joining together. By dying here, he would damn them all.
The dwarfs were a short range scouting party from a nearby stronghold, Karak Raziac, although it still served under the aegis of Karak Kadrin far to the north.
The cave was stocked with game that had been skinned and dried, and it was obviously something of a permanent base for the dwarf scouts.
“Hunting greenskins,” Grufbad Steelfist explained. “The beasts have been causing hell over the last few months. Getting braver and braver with their raids. Stealing cattle, burning down homesteads. Razzak wants them stamped out good and proper, so we’re out looking for the rat hole they crawled outta.”
Steelfist was the leader of the small troop, an unflinching soul hewed out of the very stuff of the mountain he ranged.
Kallad knew the story well enough. He could have been listening to his father, Kellus, declaring that the greenskins had gotten out of hand and needed to be put in their place. He nodded.
“What about yerself? By the sounds of it you’re a long way from home, Kallad son of Kellus.”
“Aye, long way for sure, Steelfist, and I’m just talking about distance,” Kallad said sourly. “We got thirty refugees from the dungeons of the Vampire Count here, and barely a lick of grub between us. The man-lings have been through hell and back, and instead of being safe, now they’re up against the elements. I doubt even half of them will make it back to their families.”
“That’s them, I asked about you.”
Kallad looked at the hard-faced dwarf. Twin scars ran down Steelfist’s cheeks where he had been in an argument with a wicked blade and lost, badly. He was perhaps twice Kallad’s age, if not more, but then, in eyes of his people, Kallad was little more than a child, for all that he had lived more than sixty years.
“There are things I have to do,” Kallad conceded. “For my people, and for others’
Steelfist nodded, “You have the mark of a grudge bearer.”
“Aye, but I’m coming to understand that the grudge isn’t all, that there’s more I have to do to earn my rest.”
“It never ends,” Grufbad Steelfist agreed. “So, for now, share the burden a while. Tell me your story, Kallad Stormwarden.”
And so he did.
Kallad talked of abandoning his home, the march to Grunberg, the fall of Kellus and the suckling baby dead in its mother’s arms, feeding off her like some ungodly parasite until he killed it a second time. He couldn’t remember her name, and it hurt him that she had slipped from his memory so easily. He talked of the slaughter of the Sigmarites in Altdorf, hunting Skellan and his unnamed master, the death of his companions at the hands of the beast, and his own bitter wounds. He told Steelfist of the villages with their barred windows where fathers locked out their own sons because the plague of unlife had claimed them, the traitorous vampire who had freed them in return for the promise that they would raise a force to stand against the Blood Count, and he painted a bleak picture of the days to come.
“We must get word to Razzak,” Steelfist said, “convince him to dispatch emissaries to Karak Kadrin, Zufbar, Karak Varn and every stronghold the length of the Worlds Edge Mountains. It won’t be easy, he’s dour at the best of times, but he’s not stupid. This threat goes beyond the manlings. The undead curse is one that even a thickhead like him cannae ignore for long.”
“You think he’ll march?”
“Aye, if you plead your case like you just did, youngling. I think he’ll answer the call, and the dwarfs of the deep will march to war at the side of the humans once again.” There was an edge of pride in Steelfist’s voice as he wrapped a fatherly arm around Kallad’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s round your boys up for a feed, and then get on our way. Time’s running out. It’ll be day after the morrow before we’re in sight of Karak Raziac. “Nother day after that before you can talk to Razzak.”
Kallad felt the uncomfortable sensation of eyes watching him. He twisted. There was no one there. Then he saw a black raven, perched on an overburdened bough less than ten feet beyond the mouth of the cave, studying them intently. He trusted his instincts. The bird was unnaturally curious. Kallad knelt and picked up a rock, throwing it at the carrion bird. The stone whistled past the raven, cannoning off the tree trunk and causing a flurry of snow to spill. The raven cawed once, a deep guttural sound, and took flight.
Something about the bird disturbed Kallad Stormwarden profoundly. He sensed, in fact, that he was witnessing the first rumblings of the storm of the century.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Torn
THE RAVEN TOWER, DRAKENHOF CASTLE,
SYLVANIA
The Winter of Discontent
Jon Skellan juggled the knife easily, tossing it from hand to hand, the silver blade turning end over end lazily as it passed through the air.
Konrad was raving.
He wasn’t listening. He didn’t actually need to, he had heard it all before: the paranoia, the deep-seated insecurity, and, surprisingly the suspicion of all animals around the castle. He had ordered all of the dogs butchered, cats gutted and nailed up around the city, drove the ravens from the tower and had poisons laid down to kill any foolish enough to return. He did the same with people he grew suspicious of, gutted them, poisoned them or drove them off.
The Blood Count went off on these random rants regularly, losing all sense of self in his tirade, and one was very much like another.
“Konrad doesn’t like it! Oh, no he doesn’t. Not at all. No, can’t trust them. No. They would destroy Konrad if they could, but they can’t. No, they can’t.”
“No,” Skellan agreed, “they can’t.” Whoever they were, Konrad had developed a wonderful habit of railing against imaginary foes recently, seeing conspiracies where there weren’t even people to conspire. He liked to take credit for the mild erosion of von Carstein’s sense of self. He had wormed his way into the Blood Count’s confidence, dislodging the others he trusted, those who supported his reign.
The prize was the necromancer, Nevin Kantor. The magician had been a thorn in Skellan’s side ever since his arrival at the black castle. He had worked his way close to the Count, ingratiating himself into Konrad’s favour by reinventing himself as the Blood Count’s pet.
For a while it had worked. Kantor offered Konrad the gift of magic.
It was something Skellan couldn’t hope to compete with. The hunger for magic had, for years, been the Blood Count’s obsession. The secret was to turn the magic itself into something sinister and untrustworthy, like the Hamaya who had betrayed their master, like his treacherous kin, like all who had a reason to covet Konrad’s power. It was as ingenious as it was simple. He had to play on Konrad’s ignorance and turn the magic into something to be feared instead of adored.
The whispers were simple enough at first, snatches of gossip overhead below ground, in the subterranean necromancer’s library, from the soul cages and the fighting pits. Magic had been used in the dwarfs escape. Skellan hinted that he believed the necromancers had engineered the whole thing, after all, the dwarf had been Kantor’s travelling companion. They had a shared loyalty, a bond older than Kantor and Konrad’s. The web of lies he spun was almost believable, and the beauty of it was that with Konrad’s mind so torn, there was far more material than necessary.
He told Konrad that his precious necromancers were looting his gold, using his own coin to raise armies of their own, loyal to the black magicians, merging their skeletal horde with ghoulish humans.
In the end, Skellan had broken Kantor’s hold over von Carstein with the simplest of arguments: the magician could not be trusted. It was in his nature to manipulate the truth of the universe and reshape it in the guise of one of his lies. It wasn’t that Nevin Kantor manipulated
the winds, it was the nature of magic itself to corrupt the practitioner. If it were natural, honest, then Konrad would have been able to do it, but he couldn’t. So it wasn’t Konrad’s failing. On the contrary, it was Konrad’s strength. The winds could not twist him.
Skellan also promised him protection, of course.
He looked around the room, at the gibberish that he had forced a peasant to scrawl in a tight spidery hand across the walls. He lied to Konrad and told him that they were wards against incantations, shields against the evil thoughts of those who would do him harm, and that the peasant was actually a hedge mage. He cemented the lie with another, promising Konrad that if he fed on the blood of the mage he would make the gibberish unbreachable. Konrad drank greedily and fed the corpse to his dogs, the same dogs that he butchered a week later.
The delicious irony was that the protection itself terrified the Blood Count. He paced the room, never at rest, never able to relax for fear that there was more to the scrawls than the dead hedge mage had admitted—that perhaps the peasant had actually been in the employ of the necromancers, and that it was no protection at all, rather a form of entrapment.
The Blood Count turned to Skellan, his anchor in a sea of chaos.
“But you love Konrad, don’t you Skellan? You are loyal to him. You understand that Konrad is great.”
“I worship him,” Skellan said, knowing that the wry humour was lost on Konrad, “for Konrad is the most monstrous and powerful of all the children of the night. Konrad is Vashanesh reborn.”
Konrad is also stark raving mad, he added silently.
“Yes,” Konrad said. Yes, yes, yes. You understand Konrad. You are loyal. You are the only one, Skellan, the only one that Konrad can trust.”
“I am the Golden One,” Skellan said.
The secret was in the way the web supported itself with its own fabrications. Enough lies had been proven true in the Blood Count’s eyes to make even the most outrageous new ones seem plausible.
The Hamaya were his now, freely given by Konrad. With Onursal implicated in the escape from the slave pens—he had, according to Skellan, turned on his fellow vampires. It was only good fortune for Skellan that the dwarfs axe had brought the dark-skinned Hamaya down before he could turn on him. Konrad, at Skellan’s insistence, demanded the Hamaya purged. Then, summoning the remainder of the vampiric aristocracy to the subterranean cathedral, he urged Skellan to fulfil the role of father to the Hamaya, as the wolf, Jerek once had, and choose only those that could be implicitly trusted, so that once more the Hamaya were proud to serve Konrad, the Blood Count.
This winnowing gave Skellan the perfect opportunity to cull the few lynchpins of Konrad’s precarious Empire, isolating Konrad in his own court.
It was all so subtly perfect. There was a synergy to the lies. They fed off one another.
Where others trod on eggshells around the madman, Skellan masked his own role in the dwarfs escape with the confession of failure. He begged Konrad’s forgiveness for his own shortcomings. He hadn’t seen the traitors in their midst. He had allowed himself to be gulled by them and as such it was his fault as much as it was Onursal’s and Kantor’s.
It was a stroke of genius. His own cowardice had allowed the dwarf to escape. Indeed, he was only alive because the dwarf chose to allow it. In confessing his own failings, Skellan showed himself to be the true inheritor of the wolfs place at Konrad’s side. With one beautiful lie, he became Konrad’s new truth speaker. In a court of lies and paranoia few would own up to failure for fear of bringing von Carstein’s wrath down upon their own heads. It was a self-preservation instinct. Skellan set himself apart by owning his failure.
He had knelt before the Blood Count, asked forgiveness, and awaited judgement. It had been a risk, but he had played it right. By offering up his own head, Skellan had proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt in the madman’s torn mind, that he was the only one that Konrad could truly trust.
The improbability of the dwarf sparing the vampire never occurred to him.
“Konrad will see them now,” Konrad said, suddenly.
Finally.
“You understand what you must do?”
“Konrad is not a fool. Oh, no, no, no. Konrad is not a fool. He will not allow them to treat him like one. They will learn their lesson well today. Konrad will teach them with steel.”
“Well said, my lord.”
Skellan sheathed the knife.
It had taken little prodding to convince Konrad that the time had come to go to war, it was all part of the web of deceit that he had spun. The beauty of it was how it all came together so flawlessly to support itself. The dwarf, freed by the faithless necromancers, was out there, warning the humans, galvanising them into resistance. Because of the necromancers, the Empire’s defences would be strong, stronger perhaps than anything his sire had ever faced. It was fitting that the traitors should lead the line. The necromancers should be made to fight, not merely raise zombies to hide behind. They must fight, and die.
Skellan opened the door to the necromancers, Fey, Leverkuhn and Kantor.
He was looking forward to seeing their faces as he delivered their death sentences.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ruinthorn and Runefang
THE BATTLE OF THE FOUR ARMIES
The Season of Rot
The relentless stamp of ten thousand feet reverberated around the hills. The sound folded in on itself, becoming an endless rolling thunder that washed across the Empire. Hammers and axes banged on shield bosses, and gruff song drove the dwarfs on. They were a tidal wave of righteous fury to come crashing down mercilessly on the heads of the dead.
They bore the weight of vengeance on their shoulders.
The world had suffered enough.
It ended here, with the coalition of the living, ready to purge the land of the unnatural plague of von Carstein’s kith and kin.
“We’ll not fail you, Kellus,” Kallad Stormwarden swore, hoisting the banner of Karak Sadra. He bore the burden of the banner himself, proud to bear it into battle one final time. He fully intended to plant it in the Blood Count’s skull and make his final stand beneath the pennon as it tore in the wind. “Not while there’s breath in our lungs and iron in our arms.”
The dwarfs marched to war united under the banners of the great strongholds. They had mustered six moons ago, in the shadow of the blighted towers where the Stir crossed the Silver Road. Five thousand was less than Kallad had hoped for, but more than he had dared expect. He prayed it would be enough.
At the muster, King Razzak and his counterparts from Karak Norn and Karak Hirn had urged Kallad to claim his birthright and allow them to name him king before the great battle so that he might march towards whatever fate Grimna held in store for him as the last ruler of the fallen karak.
“Nay, your kingship, it isn’t right,” said Kallad. “Kellus was the last king of the stronghold. There is no Karak Sadra now. I’ll not be proclaimed king over a pile of rubble and ghosts. It’s not right.”
That had ended the discussion, and the royal line of Karak Sadra would end with Kellus, last true King of the Karak, slain by the very monster that they were marching to fight. It was a fitting tribute that his son should carry the banner of Karak Sadra alongside the banners of Karak Raziac, Karak Kadrin, Karak Hirn and Karak Norn.
The vampire’s evil had spread deep into the Empire. Instead of uniting, the forces of the Empire were in complete disarray. Runners had returned at dusk with stories of bitter conflicts amid the forces of the living, with both Lutwig and the Otillia claiming the right to lead the army. Helmut of Marienburg, on the other hand, strove to council patience and cooperation, arguing that in fact each of the three of them should be figureheads for their own forces, as Razzak should be for the dwarfs, in a grand army of equals.
They shouted him down as an idealistic fool.
So, all three declared themselves master and commander of the four armies, and retreated to discuss tactics with their ow
n men, ignoring emissaries from the other camps. Instead of cooperating, they were tearing their armies apart, issuing conflicting orders, preparing conflicting contingencies, and expecting non-existent support.
It would be a massacre.
“Fools!” the dwarf king spat. “The Blood Count won’t need to defeat them, they’ll do it for him.”
The stars hung radiant silver in the darkening sky, casting their pure light down onto the cracked and broken path that led to the battlefield. Most of the bloodsucking flies of the mountain’s moss had retreated into the night, but Kallad felt the sting of the occasional stubborn insect feeding on his flesh. He slapped his neck, bursting the bloodily between his fingers.
The winds blew incessantly down the Silver Road, funnelling down between the mountains and along the path of the river.
“The curse of power, Razzak. Much wants more,” Kallad said, shaking his head sadly.
“It was ever the way,” the king agreed. “Your few years have brought you wisdom, Kallad son of Kellus. That’s a rare thing.”
“In worse things, aye,” Kallad agreed, accepting the compliment. He scuffed his feet. The brittle grass had been worn away by trampling boots. “But in other things, in better things, I’m woefully ignorant, your kingship. It is my curse. I know peace only with my axe in me hand.”
“Such are the times,” Razzak agreed.
Far to the south, the camp of the pretenders’ three armies was a wall of glowing light against the backdrop of night. It was impossible to judge how many souls camped out under the stars, making their peace with Morr before the dawn’s early light banished the little respite they knew.
Kallad had faced enough battles to know what was going through the mind of each and every manling down there: thoughts of home, faces and smells, making connections inside their heads, bringing back memories of childhood and first love, of intimacy, and beneath them all, a black undermining undercurrent: fear.
[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion Page 27