The corpse of Helmut of Marienburg shuddered as unlife touched it.
The dread Kallad felt was all too real. Around him, he saw dark shadows moving on the battlefield and heard the low, keening moan, of the dead shuffling forward, effectively isolating them from the rest of the armies of the living.
“Rise!” Konrad screamed. “Rise my new king of all the dead, rise!”
The corpse rose, gracelessly. Its legs betrayed it, collapsing where there was no muscle to support the bone.
Immoliah Fey reached out a hand to steady the newly risen corpse, bleeding the black wind into its bones to give it the strength to stand.
Neither Immoliah Fey nor Konrad saw Helmar of Marienburg gather up his father’s Runefang, and lurch forwards, sobbing. The first they saw was the wicked teeth of the sword cutting into his father’s neck. It took Helmar three swings to decapitate his father’s corpse.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Sometimes They Come Back
THE BATTLE OF THE FOUR ARMIES
The Season of Rot
Skellan faced the dwarf, Kallad Stormwarden, across the mutilated corpse of the third pretender, Marienburg.
This is better than I could have dared hope, dwarf. You have excelled yourself Skellan kicked the corpse at his feet, “So much death, so meaningless in its brutality. The Blood Count could never have wrought so much destruction alone, but you know that, don’t you, dwarf? You understand the sickness of the living, don’t you, dwarf? But, as with all good things, it must come to an end. All those cravings, all those personal weaknesses, greed, ambition, lust and other base hungers. Humans are the worst sort of monster, so dwarf, my thanks. You have served your purpose admirably, but now that you’ve served, I regret to say that you’re nothing more exciting than a loose end. It’s time to tie you off.”
“You talk too much, vampire. Shut your yapping and fight. I’ll kill you first, and then I’ll take your damned master into the dirt if that’s the way its gotta be.”
Beside the dwarf, Marienburg’s son turned on Konrad, brandishing the bloody sword, Runefang.
“I’ll have your head, murderer!”
“Oh, Konrad likes this. It’s grand. Lots of blood to be spilled, lots indeed, starting with the little man’s.” The vampire’s smile was quite mad.
Helmar lunged forwards, but again the dwarf restrained him.
“This is not the place. Go, your people need your leadership. A lot depends on you. More than just your anger is at stake here, manling. You have your people to think about. You’re theirs now, not your own. Be the man you have to be.” The dwarf levelled a finger at Skellan, singling him out. This here is my fight. Me and the vampires. This is what it comes down to: payment of old debts. It was you on the wall at Grunberg, beside your sire. You killed my father that day, you butchered my people, those’re debts that need accounting for, Konrad von Carstein. It’s time for the reckoning, a life for a life.” Kallad stepped forwards, axe in hand.
“Konrad killed your father as well?” the Blood Count asked, relishing the thought. “How delicious. Well Konrad has killed a lot of enemies in his life, so why not two fathers? You have a bond now, you two. Thank Konrad, yes, thank Konrad for making you brothers through grief. Konrad is irresistible. Konrad is Vashanesh reborn. All should tremble before his might. Fall at his feet and beg for Konrad’s mercy. Yes, beg!”
“Oh, shut your yapping, your madness,” Skellan growled, mimicking the dwarfs colourful dialect and economy of words. His patience for the mad Count’s ravings had long since worn thin.
“You serve a fool, Skellan. In my books that makes you the bigger fool,” Kallad said. The dwarf pumped himself up and swung his huge axe in an explosive arc aimed squarely at lopping Skellan’s grinning head from his shoulders. The axe screamed through the air. Skellan didn’t move until the wicked silver edge was less than a foot from his throat, and even then he barely moved. Rocking back on his heels, he watched the axe slice through the air a fingertip’s width from this nose. His grin didn’t falter for a moment.
“Predictable, dwarf,” he said, stepping in close and thundering a clap off the side of Kallad’s helm that would ring in his ears for hours to come.
The dwarf launched three successive scything attacks, the third of which stung Skellan across the left arm as he turned his ankle on a jag of stone, causing him to miss-step and almost not make the dodge.
The wound smarted. He backed up a step further, feeling out the gash.
“You’ll pay for that, little man,” Skellan promised, and the world exploded with violence.
Skellan hurled himself forwards, unleashing the beast within, his face contorting with rage as he roared at the dwarf, hammering him back step after brutal step. The dwarf had no defence for it. His axe flashed and cut, wide of the mark. Skellan drove him back, slamming a fist into the dwarfs nose and shattering the gristle, and again above the eye, spilling blood.
Around them, the battlefield came alive with the sounds of war. The living had seen von Carstein’s treachery, seen their last liege lord fall, and had united, turning their combined fury on the dead. The Blood Count’s necromancers matched their might with black magic. The clouds parted, but instead of a brilliant beam of light shining down from the heavens, they unleashed the might of Shyish, the black wind leaching all light and colour out of the world. Thunder cracked and the rain came down. There was no first drop, it was a deluge, turning the field into mud, and drawing sheets of steam from the scorched earth.
Next came the flies.
Thick clouds of bloodflies swarmed over the living, getting into their noses and eyes, into their mouths and down their throats, choking them and making it impossible to see, as the dead descended. The armies of the living stumbled on blindly into the shambling dead, rotten claws tearing at their armour, dragging them down as they slipped and slithered in the oozing mud.
Konrad was swept up in the fighting and carried away on a rising tide of death as his wyrm-hilted blade hacked a path of blood and steaming entrails through the living. Immoliah Fey was at his back, her whispered incantations bringing them back in time to see their own guts unravel in their hands painlessly.
Bubbles of mud burst as the ground roiled, coalescing into straining arms and the curves of skulls as the long dead crawled back up from far below the battlefield, the bones of animals and men answering the necromancers’ call. Broken antlers breached the surface, followed by the black sockets of a wolfs elongated snout and eyes, and the skeletal remains of a horse’s fetlocks. More beasts rose with the remains of the men, most rotten and incomplete, but that did not stop the dead animals from trying to answer the call back to unlife.
Skellan’s world narrowed to just the two of them, the dwarf and him. The rest could go to hell, blazing every inch of the way with brimstone and the very stuff of the earth, the rocks, the dirt and the grasses melting beneath the intensity of the unholy fire as they went.
He threw himself at Kallad, driving the dwarf to his knees with the fury of his blows, jumping and seeming to hang suspended in the air for half a second before arcing his spine and delivering a massive kick to the side of Kallad’s head. He felt the bone give beneath his foot. The dwarf slumped in the mud, axe spilling from his hands. The fight left his eyes as he looked up, dazed and beaten.
Steel sang as Skellan drew his sword and stood over the dwarf, poised to deliver the killing blow.
He drew back his arm and swung, but the blow never landed.
A crippling blow slammed into the base of Skellan’s spine, and a second one into the nape of his neck. The sword tumbled out of his hand as his fingers sprang open. Before he could turn, a fourth and fifth blow had crunched into his spine and ear with crippling force. Pain exploded behind his eyes.
He staggered away and fell, his legs buckling. He sprawled in the mud beside the dwarf and slithered around onto his back so that he could see the face of his attacker.
He saw a ghost looking down at him.
&n
bsp; Although the ghost’s face was ruined, it was still hauntingly familiar. For a moment, the only thing Skellan could think was that the dead had truly answered the necromancer’s call. A rush of doubt filled him. It was an emotion that he had almost forgotten the taste of, and he didn’t appreciate being reminded of its bitter tang.
He tried to rise, but the ghost pressed him back down into the mud with an all too substantial foot.
“I should have known your being dead was too good to be true, wolf.”
“Go,” Jerek urged the dwarf.
He didn’t allow himself the luxury of seeing if the dwarf heeded his advice. He kicked Skellan hard, hammering a blow into his side that almost lifted him out of the sucking mud.
In the long months of his exile, Skellan’s had become the one face that haunted the wolf, not Konrad’s, not Vlad’s: Skellan’s. His evil was subtle and far-reaching.
He kicked Skellan again, in the face this time, below the right eye. A brutal blow that split the skin and cracked the bone, sending a sliver into the milky orb. Skellan pitched sideways and fell back. Jerek lifted him bodily and slammed him down again in a backbreaking crunch.
“Nice to see you too,” Skellan coughed between gasps, his hand pressed up against his ruined eye.
“Give me a reason, Skellan, just one, to finish you and it is done.”
“You’re going to keep an eye on me, are you?”
The unnatural darkness hanging over the battlefield slowly dissipated as the living drove back the dead.
“You mock me at your peril, Skellan,” Jerek said coldly.
“I know, but what can I do? It is in my nature. Why have you come back, wolf?”
Skellan started to rise, only to have Jerek’s heel crunch into the bridge of his nose. He sprawled backwards in the mud, head cracking off a jagged edge of rock. “I’ve killed men for less, wolf, remember that.” His face was a mess, his nose smeared halfway across his cheek, and the twin white bones of his brow exposed where the flesh had curled away from it. The splinter lodged deep in his blind eye completed the ruin.
“Him,” the wolf said, inclining his head to indicate the manically laughing Blood Count cutting a red swathe through the scattering humans. “He must be stopped.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” Skellan said. He picked at the bone in his blind eye, “but time and again that isn’t enough, is it? We cling to our foolish ideas that simple solutions exist. You want him gone, I want him gone, and yet here we are, enemies once more.” Skellan drew the sliver of bone out of his right eye, the jelly of its vitreous humour spilling down his cheek. “So while I work quietly to destroy everything that he is, you disappear only to return claiming that our mad Count is your sworn enemy? It’s all very… melodramatic, isn’t it, wolf?” He held the jagged splinter of bone between thumb and forefinger, examining it with his good eye. “Have you learned nothing from the von Carsteins? There is beauty in all things, even betrayal. A little more forcefully and you could have really hurt me, you know. As it is, I think it will leave a nasty little scar.”
Skellan tossed the bone away.
Jerek looked at the man he had come to hate. Until that moment, he truly believed that he had gone as far into the vampiric aspect of his nature as it was humanly possible to do.
He was wrong.
“Show me your hands.”
“What?”
“Just do it. Show me your hands.”
Skellan held out his hands.
There were no rings.
Frustration consumed Jerek. He surrendered totally and completely to the black surge of anger, channelling it through his fists as he pummelled them into Skellan’s face, wiping the grin off it by destroying the vampire’s mouth. Over and over, he pounded his fist into the smug grin, ruining Skellan’s mouth by shredding his lips against his teeth.
He didn’t stop until Skellan was incapable of fighting back. He kicked and beat Skellan into the ground and then stood over him. It would be so easy to finish it, to slay Skellan and rid the world of his taint, but he couldn’t do it. He wanted to, there was no doubt about that in his mind, but he couldn’t physically do it. Skellan’s words stayed his hand. What if it was true? What if Skellan truly wanted Konrad dead, and not merely to usurp his throne?
What if for all the crimes the man had committed, for all the atrocities carried out by his hand, he had come to realise the unnatural threat the dead posed to the very fabric of the world itself? What if? What if? What if? He couldn’t answer any of the questions flying round like blind ravens inside his head, colliding, crashing, falling into and over each other, wings flapping desperately, the cacophony of caws drowning out all hope of rational thought. What if Skellan offered the most unlikely alliance?
He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t deliver the killing blow, even though he knew that if the roles were reversed, Skellan would have suffered no compunction in his place.
Jerek left Skellan in the dirt.
The battle raged on.
He didn’t know where to turn. So much of his life had been given over to the hunt for von Carstein’s signet ring. After the fight with Konrad, it had been easier to disappear than to go home.
Home? That was a joke. He had no home.
He was trapped between two worlds, human and undead, and not welcome in either.
Jerek was a ghost, cursed to haunt the Old World until he found the damned ring and could finally rest. Until then, he could only torment himself by haunting the living and the dead, lurking on the outside of their realms, looking in.
He saw the dwarf staggering back towards the safety of the pavilions and felt the pull of the necromancers’ magic. He didn’t know which way to turn. Neither camp would welcome him. He cursed himself for a fool for being drawn to this foreign field, but he had always known that he had no choice but to be here. He had to walk amongst the dead. He had to find the ring. It had to be destroyed. He couldn’t allow it to fall into a madman like Konrad’s hands, or worse, an amoral killer like Skellan’s.
Jerek walked away from the killing.
He followed the dwarf towards the chirurgeons’ tents. War was not one battle: it was continuous attrition, grinding down the enemy over and over again. Von Carstein would surrender the field. The signs were there to be read. A sunburst of light threw its yellow glow across the fighting, scattering the shadows. They returned a moment later to smother the light, but it didn’t matter, the darkness had shown weakness, vulnerability. That in turn gave the light hope. The living rallied, throwing themselves at the dead.
Then, from between the cracks in the hillside, came salvation: a long rippling snake of movement coming out of the valley of darkness and spilling out onto the plain, dwarfs bearing the banner of Zufbar, another thousand at least.
Whooping around them, human riders bore the banner of Marienburg, their burnished armour catching that fleeting burst of light and magnifying it. They swarmed onto the field, lances levelled, skewering the mindless dead who were too slow or too clumsy to get out of their way. Their chargers’ hooves crushed skulls beneath the stampede, and the dwarfs cleaned up after them.
The dead were routed.
This day, at least, was won.
Drive a foe from the field one day and he returns the next, renewed, more desperate to be your doom.
As much as he was loath to involve himself, to expose himself, Jerek knew that his only hope lay with the dwarf and his people. They were committed to exterminating his kind, in that common cause they were united. They were his best chance of destroying Konrad, even if it meant sacrificing himself.
Cheers went up from the living, but they were not the exuberant cheers of victory, they were the desperate cries of relief. They had been saved; they hadn’t won. There was a difference, and they knew it.
Jerek watched the dwarf. He haunted the camp. It was surprisingly easy, considering his nature, to move unnoticed.
He wasn’t sure exactly how he was going to befriend the dwarf. He had thought ab
out claiming that he was owed a life debt for saving the dwarf from Skellan, and while it might be enough to keep him alive, it wasn’t exactly something that he wanted to do.
Would the dwarf throw his lot in with the dead, trading one evil for another? Moreover, when the deed was done, would the dwarf turn on him?
The surprising truth of it was that after living through the torments of this unlife, Jerek welcomed the prospect of that final rest. It held no fear for him, even if dying again did mean the destruction of all that he was. Here, now, he would have welcomed a complete cessation of existence with arms wide open. If the ring was destroyed, then it was a price worth paying.
Years of fighting against his nature could finally end here, on this field.
That was why he had returned, that was the truth he was hiding from himself.
He knew this was the first move in the endgame.
He knew that by saving the dwarf and making his presence known to Skellan, he had accelerated everything. He could have lurked in the shadows, hunting for clues, following the path of the ring, but by coming forward, he had chosen to become a catalyst. Things would happen around him. Mistakes would be made, hands played too early, secrets betrayed. One of them would lead to the ring, he felt sure. One of them had to.
As the dwarf passed, Jerek stepped out of the shadows and grabbed him from behind, pressing his hand over the dwarfs mouth and hissing, “Shhhhhh,” before the dwarf could fight back. “I am a friend.” He removed his hand.
“You’re no friend of mine, freak.”
“Then let’s hope that by the end of the night I am,” Jerek said.
The dwarf heard him out.
“Why in hell should I trust you?”
Jerek had wondered that himself and the truth of it was far from convincing. “Because of who I was, not who I am,” he said, hoping it was enough. “Because, as the White Wolf of Middenheim, I gave my life trying to protect the same thing that you are trying to protect, and because, for some reason, a spark of whatever it was that made me me still burns inside me. How long it will last, I don’t know, but while it does I am a ghost, trapped between the land of the living and the nations of rot and decay. I am nothing in either world, and because of that, I can pass unnoticed in both. I can get where you can’t, close enough to Konrad to kill him if that is how it must end. I do not want to end up like them.”
[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion Page 29