“I’m sorry to inform you that His Excellency is not able to grant you an audience after all. I regret extremely that you’ve waited so long for no purpose.”
“His Excellency? What in Sigmar’s name is that? And who’re you?”
“I am Holymon Eschenbach,” replied the official, still as smooth and untroubled as cream. “The new under-Steward. And His Excellency has issued a proclamation on the titles and ranks to be observed in the new dispensation. You would do well to note them, counsellor.”
Verstohlen felt his frustration begin to rise. He was being snubbed, and crudely so. Or perhaps this was another message. He rose fluidly, pulling his leather overcoat closed around him.
“Well then, under-Steward,” he said, letting a note of contempt sink into that title. “It seems I have no more business here. Perhaps you would let His Excellency know that I need to see him as soon as is convenient.”
Eschenbach bowed. “I’ll do so.”
Verstohlen made to brush past him when a faint whiff of something familiar caught his attention. He paused.
“I assume you work for Dagobert Tochfel now?” he asked.
Eschenbach couldn’t suppress the ghost of a sneer across his full lips. “Naturally.” In that one, short word, much information was conveyed. Verstohlen caught the meaning perfectly clearly. So this Eschenbach was after the Steward position. Tochfel had better watch his back.
Then he placed it. The aroma wasn’t strong, but Verstohlen had spent enough time trying to trace its origins to recognise its presence. Joyroot. The man was either a user, or he’d worked on the trade in it. Grosslich couldn’t possibly have missed it. So much for all the promises.
“Are you all right, my lord?” asked Eschenbach, his tone profoundly unconcerned.
“I’m fine,” said Verstohlen. His mind was working quickly, teasing out the possibilities. Tochfel had been right. This Eschenbach was a minor player, but his presence here was no accident. Perhaps the joyroot on his collar was a slip. Or perhaps he was being given a warning, a reward for the work he’d done to drive Leitdorf out and deliver the throne to Grosslich. Verstohlen felt the first stirrings of a deep nausea. More than anyone else, more than Schwarzhelm, he’d done this. He’d brought it about, the man who hated Chaos with a fervour unequalled even by the witch hunters. The irony nearly killed him.
“This has been an instructive conversation,” he said, and pushed the door open. Outside, the guards stood to attention. There was fear in their faces. How could he have been so blind? The fear had never gone away, it had just been hidden for a while. Long enough for the damage to have been done.
Verstohlen hurried down the corridor, anxious to get into the fresh air again. He could still smell the joyroot. A dozen thoughts crowded into his mind at once. He had to find Tochfel. He had to find Schwarzhelm. He had to find help.
And then he remembered Natassja, the masks on the walls, the dreams.
With a pang of fear, he knew then what his principal objective was. They weren’t quite ready to kill him in the Averburg, not while his name was so well known and there were loyal personnel still at their stations. They’d come for him at night, when he was alone, when the last of his friends had been despatched. Nowhere was safe now, perhaps not even the forge.
As he passed through the winding passages of the ancient citadel, the message Tochfel had been trying to convey to him became painfully apparent. The corruption had never been defeated, never been banished, never been suppressed.
It had always been there, and now it was coming for him.
CHAPTER FIVE
At last, the rain had stopped falling on Altdorf. The skies remained a low grey, heavy with sodden cloud, but the dull thud of water against stone and tile ceased for a while. That didn’t make much difference to the stench hanging over the old city. Though much of the water drained down into the vast network of catacombs and sink-holes far beneath the foundations of the clustered buildings, plenty of the filth and slurry had nowhere to go but the street, and large pools of foetid water sat stinking across the thoroughfares. Folk trudged through it while going about their business, making the sign of the comet to ward off pox and plague. It didn’t help much. In the aftermath of the deluge, dysentery and cholera spread with the same speed they always did, and the tight-knit terraces of wattle houses were soon racked with coughs, splutters and phlegmy expirations. The gravediggers and the priests of Morr were the only ones who profited, revelling as they always did in misery.
Set some distance from the sprawl and splendour of the Imperial Palace, as streaked with rain as every other building in the city, was the Cathedral of Sigmar Risen and Transformed. It had been purposefully set away from the Imperial Chapel, whose priesthood were part of the Emperor’s retinue and therefore loyal to the master of the throne. The Grand Theogonists, with their long tradition of independent thought, had always seen the danger in letting the Emperor’s pet priests monopolise the worship of the warrior-god in Altdorf, so funds had been set aside to create a rival institution within the city. The first stones had been laid in the year 580, before Altdorf had even been recognised as the pre-eminent settlement in the Empire. Successive masters of the Cult of Sigmar had augmented, rebuilt, extended, demolished and refashioned the structure until it came to dominate nearly half a square mile of prime Altdorf real estate.
In a conurbation already rammed with massive, vulgar piles of stone, the Cathedral of Sigmar Risen and Transformed was a serious contender for the most massive and vulgar of them all. The Church was rich, and no expense had been spared on its decoration. Huge murals had been commissioned, some by de Buenosera himself, which adorned every inch of the plastered ceilings. They mostly depicted Sigmar slaying some beast or other, although the famously dissolute Michaelangelico had managed to insert spurious vignettes of buxom Reikland maidens being carried off in various states of undress to a fate worse than death at the hands of improbably proportioned Norscans.
Every pillar was encrusted with bands of gold, studded with semi-precious stones and ringed with ingots of silver. The floor was made up of a dizzying array of marble flags, each a different colour, some engraved with trader’s marks indicating passage from furthest Cathay. The windows were a riot of brightly-stained glass, most illustrating moral tales of dragon-slaying, mutant-hunting or witch-burning. In the very centre of the colossal building, where four vaulted naves met under a domed roof nearly two hundred feet high, the Altar of the Ascended Warrior stood in gaudy magnificence, crowned by a thirty-foot-high statue of Sigmar wrestling with the dragon Gauthmir cast in ever-polished bronze and ringed with forty-two censers containing the finest spices of Ind and Araby.
Every day, whether the rain was falling or the pox raging, thousands of pilgrims made their way to the holy site. Some fell on their faces before the splendour, mumbling prayers to Sigmar before being dragged away by the small army of impatient priests. Others fell into silent contemplation, marvelling at the labour required to create such a daunting monument to the human spirit. Still others, perhaps over-educated or seduced by the thin-lipped creed of Verena, found the whole thing mildly distasteful and regretted handing over the three-schilling entrance fee to the heavily-armed zealots at the north gate entrance.
For Volkmar, who had nothing but contempt for the pitiable worship of Verena, that was about the only thing he had in common with such borderline heretics. He hated the Cathedral. He hated the gold, he hated the gilt, and he hated the pilgrims. They were simpering fools, the lot of them. None knew how to wield a warhammer, and hardly any would have been able to read the scriptures or the ordinances. They would come to the Cathedral fresh from whatever petty debauchery they’d been engaged in, thinking that a donation of brass and a few genuflections would save their souls from an eternity of damnation.
Volkmar knew different. He knew what kind of god Sigmar was. Sigmar didn’t value excuses, and He certainly didn’t value offerings. He needed spirits forged in white-hot steel, hands willing to
take up swords, feet willing to march into the cold wastes of the north to pin back the hordes of destruction.
Volkmar also knew about damnation. He’d stared into the face of it, seen the fate awaiting mankind should it falter. On the pitiless plains of the far north, he’d been struck low by the Everchosen of Chaos, Archaon the Mighty. He’d felt his life slip away, had cried out as his soul was ripped from his mortal frame. It was Chaos that had brought him back, had pulled his essence back into his ravaged body and tortured it before the gibbering hosts of ruin. The ranks of the corrupted had stretched from horizon to horizon, filling the northlands with a simmering tide of hate.
Volkmar alone of mortal men knew what it was to die and be forcibly reborn. He alone knew of the utter horror of existence on the planes of madness, and he alone had seen, however briefly, the world through the aspect of a daemon’s eyes.
Most would have been driven mad. He sometimes wondered why he hadn’t. No doubt there was a reason he’d endured. There was some pattern, some divine intention behind it. He wasn’t sure what it was yet. In the meantime, taking the war back to the filth that had caused him such pain seemed like a reasonable way of repaying the debt. They said that familiarity bred contempt. Volkmar, uniquely amongst his peers, was familiar with the great enemy, and Volkmar, uniquely amongst his peers, held it in utter, withering, grinding contempt.
And so it was that he despised the Cathedral. It was showy, a front for the futile rivalry between the Cult of Sigmar and the officials of the Imperial Palace. He preferred the Chapel of the Fallen, or the Cathedral of Sigmar the Avenger in Talabheim, or the Abbey of Sigmar the Destroyer of Beasts in Middenheim, hard under the shadow of the imposing Ulrican temple and carved from solid granite.
He strode down the long south transept, snarling at the shiny flummery around him. Every so often, a priest would see him coming and look for an escape. If none was available, the man would bow low, desperate to avoid the wrath of the Theogonist. Even the brute mass of the populace, as ignorant as they were malodorous, knew well enough to keep out of his way. A six-foot mountain of a man, clad in heavy furs and carrying the ancient Staff of Command, was not someone to be crossed lightly.
Eventually, Volkmar reached his destination: a small door in the outer wall of the transept, barely marked and overshadowed by a tasteless frieze depicting Magnus smiting some worm or other. With a final snarl at the milling crowds around him, Volkmar pushed the door open, ducked under the lintel and went inside.
It led into a small, unadorned chamber. Centuries ago this had been a tomb. Now Volkmar had commandeered it for his private meetings. The walls were made of solid stone and had no windows. Though he was in the very heart of Altdorf, nothing of the plague-ridden, gossip-laced town ever penetrated down there.
There were men already waiting for him. They clustered around the old sarcophagus in the centre of the chamber. All around the walls, torches guttered, throwing sooty smoke curling into the vaulted roof. It was dark, cold and austere. Just how a chapel to Sigmar ought to be.
“Greetings, Theogonist,” said one of them.
Volkmar grunted, slammed the door shut behind him and shot the bolts home. Then he rose to his full height and surveyed the scene.
There were three figures waiting for him. All wore armour, notched and scored by recent fighting. They were nearly as massive as Volkmar himself and had the confident stare of men who’d faced death, or worse, in battle. Two of them Volkmar knew almost as well as he knew himself. The third was new.
On his left was his confessor, Efraim Roll. The man looked as old as the tomb he stood behind. His beard was long and matted, and his skin lined with a latticework of wrinkles. His head was bald, and old wounds decorated the bare scalp. His dark eyebrows jutted out, as did his chin, and he bore himself with the demeanour of a man fighting against a constant stream of rage. His armour was as ancient as any in the Empire, having been forged by dwarfs for the first conclave of Sigmar’s personal priesthood. It was hammered from purest gromril and engraved with runes of destruction and damnation. Roll was perfectly suited to it, being Volkmar’s confessor and the only man in the Empire apart from Karl Franz who ever dared to give him an order. In the flickering light of the torches, the innate savagery of his face was amplified.
To his right stood a very different figure. Odain Maljdir was a vast bear of a man, ruddy-cheeked with a blond beard bursting over his enormous breastplate. He wore his hair long, and it streamed in a series of elaborate plaits over his studded pauldrons. His skin was tanned by the ice-glare of the far north and looked as tough as old horsehide. Once the man had been a priest in the service of Ulric and had made his name smiting the Norscans on their endless raids across the Sea of Claws. They said he’d once held back an entire company of them single-handed on the steps of a pagan temple while waiting for an army of State troopers to relieve his position. Soon after that, something had changed. He never said what it was, but he’d ended up travelling south. The first Volkmar had known of it was when the huge man had hammered on his door with his two fists, blurting in heavily accented Reikspiel that he’d come to learn of the ways of Sigmar. Since then he’d been inducted into the secrets of the Cult, and given the warhammer Bloodbringer as his weapon. If he still hankered for the bleak worship of Ulric, he never gave a sign. He’d become as devoted a Sigmarite as Volkmar himself, which was a rare thing in an Empire made up of doubters, heretics and fools.
The final figure stood apart. He looked scarcely less deadly than his counterparts, though he was clearly no Templar of Sigmar. His dark hair was long, and his visage lean. Like the others, his armour was of ancient pedigree, though dented by recent sword blows. He had a haughty, noble look about him, as confident as it was pitiless. This was a man who had been forged in the keenest fires of combat, who had ridden once against the terror-inducing foes of mankind and had the stomach to do it again. He carried a longsword at his belt, sheathed in a scabbard marked with the campaign records of Araby and Tilea. It was the first day he’d been in Altdorf since being ordered to take the fight to the enemy in the wind-scoured wastes of the north. He bore the scars of that assignment in his dour expression. No man fought against the legions of the dark gods and was unchanged by it.
In other ways, though, he was still the man he’d been when standing besides Schwarzhelm at the battle of the Turgitz Cauldron. Preceptor Leonidas Gruppen of the Knights Panther had been summoned home, though at that point he had absolutely no idea why.
“Greetings to you all,” grunted Volkmar. “Now, to business.”
Drassler lay still amongst the boulders, his grey cloak smothering him, barely an inch of room exposed to see out from under. His breathing was shallow and he could feel his heartbeats against the stone. Around him, he knew the rest of the mountain guard, all two hundred of those who remained, were similarly concealed. As the sunlight began to wane, throwing shadows across the broken landscape, their disguise became even more effective. For generations the bergsjaeger had known how to blend into the barren landscape. The skills had originated in the hunting of game but had been perfected over the long years for warfare. Now he waited, face down and sprawled against the ice-hard rock, waiting.
Nearly two hundred yards away, the Keep stood as solid as a peak. The barrage from Bloch’s artillery was being maintained and a steady stream of arrows flew up at the battlements. Drassler and his men had crept round to the east side of the castle. The gates were in view now, and he could see the Averlanders continue to goad the orcs with feigned executions and mutilations.
He didn’t like the tactic. Drassler had seen too many greenskin armies use the same strategy, driving defenders mad by torturing their comrades in sight of the walls. But he knew what Bloch was doing, and saw how it gave them their chance. The commander had deliberately left his force in disarray, making it look like the overconfident approach of a novice general. The orcs would see that. They would see how far back Bloch had deployed, how little he threatened the gateho
use. The sortie beckoned. If Drassler had been in charge of the Keep, he’d have been tempted.
He wouldn’t have taken the bait. Unlike the orcs, Drassler knew of the opportunities for ambush, of the techniques the mountain guard could use for creeping up unawares. All his men were clad in the same stone-grey cloaks, mottled and streaked to mimic the pattern of the terrain beneath them. It had taken hours to work their way around to the east of Bloch’s position and then shuffle forwards over the rock, grazing flesh and tearing the stiff leather of their jerkins.
If a watchful orc on the battlements happened to gaze straight at them, then the game would be up. Even their camouflage, as good as it was, couldn’t foil direct scrutiny. So it was that Bloch kept up the nagging barrage, doing everything he could to keep the eyes of the Keep on him.
It was a dangerous tactic. A sudden rush from the gates in numbers risked overwhelming Bloch’s first lines of defence. The cost of being so ostentatiously out of position was that a determined assault would cause havoc.
It was a risk worth taking. As long as the gates remained closed, the chances of driving the orcs from the Keep were slim. As soon as they opened, those odds shortened.
Drassler moved his head fractionally, looking out at the distant lines of archers. They were being given a hard time by the defending greenskins. Perhaps a third of them had been killed or wounded, and the shield-bearing infantry around them had fared little better. Orcs didn’t like using ranged weapons if there was a choice, but they were more skilled shots than many Imperial generals gave them credit for.
He felt his stomach turn in disgust. The gates remained closed. The ammunition for the guns would begin to run down soon. Bloch would have to pull back. If he did so, then all his plan would have yielded would be four-score men dead and a brace of empty gun barrels.
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