by Jack Yeovil
The baron had many homes, many estates, many castles. One summer, he and his retinue chose to spend time in an isolated stronghold at the edge of the barony. There, in the greenwood, his sons would learn how to hunt game, and win their trophies. This Joachim had done when he was a youth, and this his sons would now do. With pride, the old baron watched from the towers of his castle as Vukotich took his sons off into the woods, accompanied by Corin the Fletcher, his arms master. Whatever Johann and Wolf killed would grace the baron's table that evening.
Wolf was a born huntsman and was blooded his first day in the woods, bringing down a quail with a single quarrel. He soon became proficient with the longbow, the crossbow, the throwing lance, and all manner of traps and snares. Wolf, it was said partly in jest, was well-named, for he could stalk any beast of the forest. From birds, he progressed to boar and elk. He was equal to them all, and it was said that Wolf might be the first von Mecklenberg in generations to bring home a unicorn, a jabberwock or a manticore as trophies of his prowess in the woods. Corin had discovered that Andreas, one of the stable boys, had once been apprenticed to a taxidermist, and soon had the boy assigned to the preparing and mounting of Wolf's trophies. Within a month, there were more than enough to fill his corner of the great hall of the von Mecklenbergs.
But Johann found the chase not to his taste. Early, he had developed an interest in the animals of the wood, but he couldn't see them through a hunter's eyes. Shooting at straw targets, he could best his brother with any weapon; but with a living, breathing creature before him, his hand faltered and his eye was off. He was too moved by the magnificence of a full-grown stag to want to see it dead, beheaded and stuffed, with glass eyes and dusty antlers. Everyone understood, which made it much worse for Johann, who was foolish enough to think compassion a womanish weakness. The old baron, seeing in Wolf his younger self, nevertheless recognised in Johann the makings of a better man than either of the huntsmen could be. To Vukotich, he confided 'Wolf's delight in the hunt will make him a good regent, but Johann's instinctive turning-away from killing will make him a great elector.' But Johann tried to overcome his quirk of the mind. He would not give up eating meat, and he believed he could not honourably eat if he could not hunt in good conscience, so he applied himself.
Still, one day, while out with Wolf, Corin and Vukotich, Johann missed a deer he had a clear shot at, and his arrow slipped through the trees, lodging in his brother's shoulder. It was a clean, shallow wound and Corin dressed it quickly, but Vukotich was sufficiently cautious to send the boy back to the castle. Johann had felt bad enough then, but later this incident would come to haunt his nights. If his life had a turning point, that careless shaft was it. Afterwards, nothing was as it was supposed to be.
There had always been outlaws, of course. Always been evil men, always been the altered ones. Especially in the forests. There had been raids and battles and bloodshed. There were many areas of the Empire where the servants of the Law dared not venture. And there had been many campaigns against the dark. But there had never been a Champion of evil like Cicatrice. So named for the livid red weal scratched across his face by the claw of a daemon in the service of Khorne, Lord of Blood, Cicatrice had come out of the Wastes transformed beyond humanity. With his so-called Chaos Knights, Cicatrice had terrorised the Southlands, unfettered in his bloodlust in victory, eluding capture even in defeat. Emperor Karl-Franz himself had placed 50,000 gold crowns upon his head, but×though many had tried, and failed to survive the attempt×none had claimed the reward. The songs of his crimes were dark and dramatic, full of blood and fire, and just barely tainted with fascination. For the people of the Empire, used now to the comforts and pettiness of civilisation, Cicatrice was an important figure. He was the outcast, a monster to remind them of the things waiting beyond the circle of light.
Cicatrice had seen a weakness in the summer home of the von Mecklenbergs and mounted a raid that had shocked the Empire. An elector murdered, his household put to the sword, his castle razed to the ground, his child×and the children of his retinue×stolen away. Never had there been such an atrocity, and rarely since did the other electors travel anywhere remote without a force of men capable of besting a small army. Hitherto, stealth, poison and treachery had been the favoured weapons of the night. Cicatrice had changed that. Truly, he was a Chaos Champion, and even the warlords of the Empire credited him as a brilliant strategist. If only because he was still alive and at the head of his Knights twenty years after his first raids, Cicatrice was unique among the servants of evil.
In his dreams, Johann kept being pulled back to that burning castle. He saw his father again, hanging in pieces from trees twenty feet apart. He saw poor, fat, silly Schunzel, the fires in his face and belly still alight. He saw Vukotich, in a rage he had never shown before or since, hacking at a wounded beastman, screaming questions for which there would be no answers. Then there were the slaughtered horses, the violated servant girls, the unidentifiable corpses. Absurdly, he remembered the tennis lawns×not a scrap of green among the red×with its pile of eyeless heads. A skaven had been left behind, a rat-faced mutant he found among the carcasses of his tutors, sawing off fingers for rings. For the first time, Johann had killed without effort. He had never since hesitated to kill, higher race or beast. He had learned his last lesson.
There was another elector now, a cousin who called himself baron, and claimed that Johann had given up his rights to the title by deserting the remnants of the House of von Mecklenberg and setting off on his travels. Johann would not have argued with him. The business of Empire had to continue, and he had other business.
Even with his shoulder wounded, Wolf would have fought. But he was not among the dead. He was among the missing. At thirteen years of age, he would have interested Cicatrice.
That had been ten years, and inconceivable miles, ago. They had followed Cicatrice's band in ragged circles around the Empire; up through the Grey Mountains to the borders of Bretonnia, surviving ambushes on the waterfront of Marienburg, then through the Wasteland into the Drak Wald Forest×where Johann and Vukotich had been enslaved for a spell by a mad dwarf with a magic mine×and up through the Middle Mountains×where they had fought off a concerted attack, and lost Corin the Fletcher to a goat-headed monstrosity×into the Forest of Shadows. Then, down into the Great Forest and east through Stirland towards the World's Edge Mountains where the powers of darkness are paramount, and where they struggled against phantoms that were sent against their minds by powerful enchanters.
The seasons came and went, and the slow progress continued. Johann knew they had been close more times than he could count, but always something had intervened. He had forgotten how many ravaged settlements they had passed through, seeing themselves mirrored in the numb rage of the survivors. Cicatrice's band was unstable, and they had met deserters, cast-offs or defeated would-be champions. Vukotich had more scars now, and Johann wasn't the youth he had been.
Back and forth, up and down, the wandering had progressed across the land, constantly at the edges of the Old World, constantly at the extremes of experience. Johann had seen horrors beyond the imagining of his tutors, had learned not to concern himself with the caprices of the gods, and had survived so far. He had given up expecting to see each day's dawn, he had almost given up expecting to see Wolf at the end of it.
But still, even to the top of the world, they kept on Cicatrice's tracks. By day, Johann tried not to think about the past, or the future; by night, he could think of nothing else. He had long since become used to sleeping badly.
The hand on his shoulder shook him awake. He opened his eyes, but didn't say anything.
'They've turned,' said Vukotich, his voice low and urgent, 'their stink is in the air.'
Johann slipped out of his bedding and stood up. The forests were quiet, save for the drip of snow, and the laboured breathing of Vukotich's horse. The fire had burned to ash, but was still casting a glow. The chill had not left his bones. Ice daggers hung like lanterns
from the lower branches of the trees, mysteriously lit from within.
They rolled furs into man-sized humps, covered them with bedding and arranged them near the fire. In the dark, they would pass. Vukotich took his crossbow from his saddle and selected a quarrel. He checked the sleeping horse Johann couldn't help but think of as Would-Have-Been-Tsar. Then, they withdrew into the forest.
The wait wasn't long. Johann's sense of smell wasn't as acute as Vukotich's, but he eventually heard them. His tutor had been right: there were four, and one was limping. The noises stopped. Johann pressed close to a treetrunk, shrouding himself in its shadow.
There was a sound like the tearing of silk, and the bedding rolls shuddered. Each was pierced with a crossbow bolt where the head would be. They glowed green, and emitted little puffs of fire and smoke. Johann held his lungs. He didn't want to breathe even a trace of whatever poison that was.
The flares died and nothing moved in the clearing. Johann gripped the hilt of his sword, while Vukotich brought up his crossbow. He didn't favour poison, but with his eye he didn't need to.
Johann heard his heart beating too loud, and fought against all the imagined sounds in his head. Finally, the real sounds came.
A human shape detached itself from the darkness and ventured into the clearing. It limped badly, and its head was elongated, with shining eyes and sharp little teeth. It was the skaven. Piebald, with tatters of clothing over oddments of armour, the ratman was distorted in the emberlight. It stood over the murdered bedrolls, its back to them. It wore the eye-in-the-point-down-pyramid symbol of the Clan Eshin on its ripped blackhide jacket, and the stylised scar-face worn by all the followers of Cicatrice. Vukotich put his bolt through its eye. The skaven breathed in sharply, and half-turned. Vukotich's arrowhead stuck out bloody a few inches from its chest. The ratman went down.
Johann and Vukotich circled away from their spot, until they faced the direction from which the thing had come. There were eyes in the darkness. Vukotich held up three fingers, then two. Three against two. It had been worse before.
Fire exploded above them, as arrows pinned balls of burning rag to trees. The balls exploded and rained streamers of flame around them. Three figures came into the clearing, tall but shambling. Johann could smell them now. One of them wasn't alive.
Vukotich put a quarrel through the throat of the creature in the centre, but it still kept walking. It walked to the fire, and Johann saw a rotted ruin of a face. It was leaking dust from its split neck. It had been female, once. Now, it wasn't a person, it was a puppet. One of the others must have raised it, or been given the reins by the magician who had. Like many of Cicatrice's Knights, it had a line of red warpaint across its face, echoing its leader's scar. It moved awkwardly because of its mortal wounds, but that wouldn't stop it from being deadly.
'We'd better do something about that,' said Vukotich, 'before it gives us the Tomb Rot.'
Together, Johann and Vukotich ran forward and counted coup on the undead woman, whipping it with their swords, taking care not to touch the diseased thing. Johann felt brittle bones breaking inside it. The thing staggered from side to side as it was struck, and stepped onto the embers of the fire. Its tattered shroud caught light and so did its desiccated shins. When the flame reached its pockets of rancid flesh, they cooked through with a foul hiss. With an awful keening, the creature became a writhing mass of fire. Johann and Vukotich stepped back, prodding it with swordpoints, staying out of its burning reach.
Its companions came forward now, faces flickering in its dying light. Johann parried a blow and felt its force ringing throughout his entire body. His opponent was taller by a head, and heavily armoured, but its reactions were slower, and its helmet was distorted by a head that seemed to have expanded inside it. It was an altered of some sort, a human being under the influence of the warpstone, that unclassifiable substance so many Servants of the Night had about them, turning into the physical image of whatever dark desires or fears it had harboured. The changes were part of the bargain made with whatever forces they owed allegiance, Johann knew. He had seen too many barely human things left in Cicatrice's wake. This thing was plainly in the throes of some fresh alteration. Under its helm, it would be some new monstrosity.
Johann stepped back and slashed across the creature's chest, denting its breastplate, caving in the scarface symbol etched into the metal. Suddenly, he felt arms around him and pain at his back. The burning thing had hugged him. He shook free, smelling his scorched clothing, ignoring the pain, and ducked away from a blow that could have sheared his head from his shoulders. The undead got in the way again, and the Knight reached out with a huge hand. The giant got a grip on its flame-haloed head and with a grunt crushed it to dust. It fell, useless now, and the Knight returned its attentions to Johann.
Vukotich was grappling close with a toad-faced altered with too many limbs and green ichor was sizzling in the snow around them as his knife went in and out of the thing's bloated stomach. It didn't seem slowed by its many wounds. Vukotich had an arm around its neck, pressing down its inflating ruff.
Johann faced the Knight and made a few tentative passes at its legs. It was already slow; a few bone-deep cuts would make it slower. He realised that the thing was roaring. Johann wasn't sure, but it sounded unpleasantly like the laughter of the heroically insane. The altered's dented breastplate sprung outwards, spiked from within by hard eruptions springing from its mutating body. Whoever it had once been, it was under the warpstone now, progressing far beyond humanity. The Knight screamed its poison mirth, and tugged at its armour. The breastplate came free and Johann saw the growing spines and plates on its skin. Cicatrice's face was tattooed on its chest. The helmet stretched outward, cracks appearing in the beaten steel, horns pushing through above the eyeholes like bulbshoots emerging from fertile soil. Johann thrust at the altered's chest, but his sword was turned aside by the creature's armoured hide. The Knight wasn't even bothering to fight back. Johann struck at its neck and his sword lodged deep. It still laughed at him and his sword wouldn't come free. He pulled two knives from his belt and sunk them into the altered's body, aiming for the kidneys. The laughter continued and the Knight began to peel away the ruined sections of his helmet.
Eyes peered at Johann from bone-ridged cavities. There were seven of them, arranged across the Knight's forehead. Two were real, five were polished glass set in living flesh. Johann prayed to the gods he'd ignored for years. The Knight dislodged Johann's sword from its neck and threw it away.
'Hello, Master Johann,' it said, its voice piping and childish, almost charming. 'How you've grown.'
It was×it had been×Andreas, the von Mecklenberg stable boy, the mounter of trophies. He had found other tutors since Johann had seen him last.
The great hands reached for him, and Johann felt weights on his shoulders. The fingers gripped like blacksmith's tongs. There was no longer ground under his feet. Johann smelled Andreas' foul breath, and looked up into his former servant's mask of expanded flesh. He pulled the knives from the altered's sides and sawed away at its stomach and groin with them. He merely cut through altered flesh that grew back as he ravaged it. Andreas pushed him and he flew twenty feet through the air. He hit a tree, for a moment dreading that his back was broken, then fell. The earth was hard and he took the fall badly.
Vukotich's opponent was downed, and the tutor strode towards the Knight, two-handed sword raised. Andreas put out an arm to stop him and brushed aside the swinging blow. He grabbed Vukotich's wrists with one hand and forced the Iron Man to his knees. The altered was still laughing. Daemons screeched in his laughter and murdered children wailed. Andreas pushed Vukotich back, bending him double, shoving his head towards the still-burning remains of the undead, forcing his own sword towards his face. Vukotich struggled back, and Andreas' huge shoulders heaved as he exerted pressure on the dwarfed human. The sword was fixed between their faces, shuddering as they threw their full strength at each other. The Knight shrugged off his back armo
ur, which fell from him, and Johann saw a streak of white down the creature's mottled and encrusted back.
Ignoring the pain, he ran across the clearing, stepping in the mess Vukotich had made of his toadman, and hurled himself onto Andreas' back. There, the alterations were not quite complete. He drove his knives in between the Knight's horny shoulderblades, where a patch of boyish skin remained between the bony plates, and sawed down the line of his spine, going as deep as he could, cutting through ribs. Blood gushed into his face, and at last he felt his thrusts sink into the real, unaltered Andreas, doing some damage.
The laughter stopped and the altered stood up, trying to shake Johann from his back. Johann gripped Andreas' waist with his knees, and continued his sawing. His hands were inside now, and he was hacking at random, hoping to puncture what left of the heart. Something big in Andreas' torso burst and he fell writhing to the ground. Johann kept riding him, his hands free now, stabbing where he could. Andreas rolled over, and Johann disengaged himself from the dying Knight. He stood up and wiped blood out of his eyes.
Andreas lay face-up, red froth on his lips, the light fast going from his face. Johann knelt and took his head in his hands.
'Andreas,' he said, trying to reach through the Knight of Darkness to the stable lad, 'what of Wolf?'
The Knight gathered phlegm in his throat, but let it drip bloodily from his mouth. In the two living eyes, Johann saw something still human. He plucked the glass eyes from the face and threw them away.