Swords of the Emperor

by Chris Wraight

  “Ah…” Natassja breathed, feeling the tainted essence of the moon sink over her. The tattoos on her flesh whirled into new shapes, spinning and extending like a nest of snakes.

  Below, in the fevered city, the chanting broke out with fresh ardour. The fires on the towers sent plumes high into the sky, tearing up towards the glowing disc, wreathing it in fingers of outstretched witch-lightning.

  “Will you say the word?” asked Grosslich, fingering the wand. He looked half-enraptured, half-terrified.

  Natassja hardly heard him. She was lost on a higher plane of sensation. Below her, the Stone sang. Above her, the vast ball of warpstone sailed through the heavens. Between them was the Tower, the fulcrum on which everything rested. She could feel massive waves of power run up the spell-infused iron, resonating like the peals of great bronze bells. The earth cried out, though only she could hear its tortured wails. The barriers separating her from the raw essence of Chaos were finger-thin.

  Then the moment came, the conjunction of all she’d worked for. After so much suffering, so many years of toil, her vision was realised. The failure with Marius now meant nothing. Lassus’ failure meant nothing. She had the tools she needed to complete the great work. The servants now answering her call would be of a different order to any who had come before.

  She raised her arms high, and coruscating energy blazed from her palms. The Tower beneath her shuddered, trembling as a vast, uncontainable force suddenly surged along its frame.

  “Now,” she hissed.

  And Averheim exploded.

  Verstohlen awoke, covered in sweat. It was still the deep of the night. He rolled over, tangled in his cloak. The wind was rippling across the moors, racing through the tussocks of grass. A storm was brewing.

  That wasn’t what had woken him.

  Schwarzhelm was already standing, arms folded, gazing into the north-west. Overhead, the clouds were racing. Morrslieb had risen, just as it had over the Vormeisterplatz. The heavens were in motion.

  “I dreamt of…” Verstohlen started, but his words trailed away. The nightmares had come back. Visions of daemons leaping from roof to roof. An endless cycle of screams, flesh pulled from the bones of living men, soldiers with the faces of dogs. Above it all, a tall, slender tower of dark metal, looming across the carnage, covering the world in a shadow of insanity.

  “You weren’t dreaming.”

  Verstohlen clambered to his feet, shivering against the cold. Far in the west, a tongue of flame burned bright on the horizon. It was like a column of blood, impossibly distant, impossibly tall. It stood sentinel over the land, neither flickering nor weakening, a pillar of fire.

  “Holy Verena,” Verstohlen breathed, making the sign of the scales on his chest. “What is that?”

  “It is Averheim, Pieter,” said Schwarzhelm, voice grim. “It is what we’ve done.”

  “That’s impossible. Averheim must be over a hundred…”

  Verstohlen broke off again. As he watched, he knew the truth of it. The city was burning.

  The two men remained silent, watching, unable to move or look away. The column remained still, staining the boiling clouds above it crimson. If there had been any doubt in his mind, it was banished now.

  The city was damned. With a terrible insight, Verstohlen knew that no force within the province could hope to counter such terrible sorcery. Whether Helborg received the Sword of Vengeance or not made no difference now.

  This was a power no mortal could hope to contest, and it had entered the world of the living.

  The wizard screamed. Drool flew from his lips, splattering against the dirt of the camp floor. His fine sky-blue robes ripped as he rolled across the ground in his agony, eyes staring, nostrils flared. Blood ran down from his ears in thin trails and his fingers clutched at the air impotently.

  “What is this?” roared Volkmar, lurching to his feet. He’d sensed something too, but Magister Alonysius von Hettram, Celestial Wizard and the Master of the Seers, evidently felt it more keenly.

  “She is coming!” he shrieked, scrabbling at his eyes feverishly. “She is coming!”

  Efraim Roll strode forwards, lifting the man from the ground and shaking him like a doll. The other members of Volkmar’s command retinue, clustered in his tent overlooking the encampment, hung back in horror. Hettram was now vomiting, his limbs shaking uncontrollably.

  “She… is… coming!” he blurted between heaves.

  “Enough of this,” snapped Volkmar, moving to the tent entrance. He pushed the canvas to one side and strode out into the night.

  Below him, the lights of the camp glowed in the darkness. Men slept in their rank order, curled in cloaks and watched over by teams of sentries. Far to the south, a storm had been brewing for days. Now it had broken.

  “Sigmar’s blood,” murmured Roll, coming to stand beside him.

  Many miles away, a column of fire, slim as a plumbline, disfigured the southern horizon. The swirling clouds above it were as red and angry as an open wound.

  “How far is—?”

  “Averheim,” said Volkmar. He felt a cold fist clench around his heart. It was the Troll Country all over again. Chaos ascendant.

  “Are you sure?”

  “What else could it be?”

  Above the vision of flame, the malignant orb of Morrslieb peered through the tattered streams of cloud. The line of fire rushed to meet it, streaming into the high airs and tainting the very arch of the sky. The pillar was far away, very far away, but even so the stench of Dark magic clogged his nostrils. Something of awesome magnitude had been discharged, and the natural world recoiled from it in horror.

  Back in the tent, the Celestial wizard was busy raving. All across the camp, men were woken from their slumber, knowing even in their mean, base way that some terrible event had taken place. When they saw the distant column, voices were raised in alarm.

  Volkmar felt his resolve waver. Anything capable of rending the heavens in such a way would be untroubled by blackpowder or halberds. What had Schwarzhelm unleashed here? How deep did the corruption run?

  “Theogonist?” asked Roll, his voice as flat and savage as ever. “What are your orders?”

  Volkmar said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. The commotion across the camp grew. More of his commanders stumbled from the tent, gaping at the distant glow. Maljdir was among them, for once speechless. Gruppen too. They all looked to him.

  He clasped his staff. It gave him no comfort. Placed beside the abomination ahead, all the weapons they had seemed like so many trinkets and charms. He felt despair creep up, just as it had when Archaon had come for him in the north. The great enemy were too strong. They were too strong.

  “Theogonist?” asked Roll again.

  Volkmar looked away from it. That helped. Just gazing on the searing line of flame seemed to bleed the hope from him. He looked down. His palm was raw from clutching the ash shaft of the Staff of Command. He remembered Karl Franz’s final words to him in Altdorf. Can I trust you, Volkmar? Can you succeed where both my generals have failed?

  “Yes, my liege,” he muttered through clenched teeth. “You can.”

  Roll looked confused. “My lord?”

  Volkmar whirled on him.

  “Light fires of our own. Banish the dark, and the men will no longer be plagued by it. Get an apothecary for the wizard, and minister to him yourself too. He cannot be allowed to die—we’ll need him.”

  Then he turned on the rest of his men, his face lit with a dark certainty.

  “What did you expect?” he snarled, feeling both faith and fury return to him. “That they’d welcome us with open arms? Know your danger, but do not fear it. That is our destination. That is the crucible upon which your devotion will be tested.”

  He turned back to the face the pillar of flame. This time his resolve was solid.

  “Search your souls, men. Purge all weakness. The storm is coming. If we fail here, then all the world will know the horror that Averheim knows now
.”

  Balls of blood-red fire soared high into the sky, racing upwards, coiling round the Tower in a vortex of dizzying speed. Screams from below fractured the very air, ripping it open and exposing the shimmering lattice of emotion beneath, the naked stuff of Chaos.

  All along the length of the Tower, iron panels withdrew. The citadel’s innards glowed an angry crimson, like hot coals. From the newly-revealed recesses, things emerged.

  To Natassja, they were objects of transcendent beauty, diaphanous intelligences, winged and noble, possessed of an ineffable wisdom derived from the realm of the infinite. They soared into the fire-flecked air like angels, swimming in the void, drinking in the unleashed power crackling through the air.

  To mortal eyes, they were women, lilac-skinned, claw-handed, clad in scraps of leather and iron, lissom and fleshy, screaming from mouths lined with fangs, trailing cloven hooves as they swooped. They were visions of lust and death, fusions of sudden pain and lingering pleasure, the incarnation of the debauchery of their Dark Prince and the fragments of his divine will.

  They flew down like harpies, crashing into the roofs of the houses and shattering the tiles, drinking in the sheets of flame lurching up around them, growing larger and more substantial as the aethyr bled into the world of matter, sustaining them and firming up insubstantial sinews.

  In Averheim, the sky no longer existed. The air was as red as blood, thundering upwards in a vast column of roaring aethyric essence. In the midst of it all was the Tower, focussing the torrent, keeping it together, directing the inexhaustible will of the Stone.

  Natassja laughed out loud, glorying in the rush of the fire as it surged past her, rippling her skirts and tearing at her hair.

  “Behold the Stone!” she cried, and from hundreds of feet below a rolling boom echoed across the city.

  Grosslich staggered away from her, his face drained. Torrents of aethyr latched on to him, clutching at his armour and then ripping away in shreds. The daemons came soon after, tugging at his hair and laughing.

  “Unhand me!” he commanded, brandishing the wand. They laughed all the harder, but none dared harm him. Instead they limited themselves to lascivious gestures, wheeling around the pinnacle like birds flocking to a storm-tossed ship. As they screeched, their voices echoed across registers, at once as flighty as a girl’s and as deep as the pits of the abyss.

  “What is this, Natassja?” he demanded, turning on her, eyes blazing with fear and anger.

  The queen of Averheim gave him a scornful look.

  “The allies we seek,” she said. “What mortal army would dare to venture here now? The Stone sustains a portal, one which can last for centuries if I will it. This is the stuff of Chaos, Heinz-Mark, the raw material of dreams. Daemons will come. While the column of fire lasts they will endure, terrible and deadly. We have created what we wished for, my love! A foothold of the Infinite Realm in the heart of Sigmar’s kingdom!”

  Grosslich looked as angry as before. His armour made him nearly invulnerable and he’d developed powers of his own—he would be a formidable enemy if she chose to pick a fight with him. Formidable, but not insuperable.

  “This is not what I wanted!” he roared over the torrent. “I wanted dominion over men, not a realm of magic! What good is this to me?”

  Natassja’s eyes narrowed dangerously. She was flush with power, suffused with all the roaring energy of the Stone. Grosslich had served a useful purpose and at one time she’d been fond of him, but he was playing a perilous game.

  “This mortal realm is yours for the taking, my love,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Only the daemons cannot venture from the column of fire. All my other creations will serve you in the realm of the five senses.”

  “But you have destroyed them!”

  “Look around you, fool!” she snapped, tested almost beyond endurance by his stupidity. “Do you see the buildings burning? Do you see your troops withering? This is no earth-bound fire. These flames burn souls, not flesh.”

  Grosslich hesitated, then stalked to the edge of the platform. Bracing against a huge buttress of iron and stone, he leaned far out over the void. Natassja came to his side, fearing nothing of the precipitous drop. She was fast becoming impervious to physical harm.

  “Watch them, my love,” she purred. She couldn’t stay angry for long, not when so much had been accomplished. “See how they relish what we have done for them.”

  Far down on the streets of Averheim, the dog-soldiers still marched, filing from the gates and assuming defensive positions outside the walls. The citizens of the city had been transformed in their turn, moulded by the power of the Stone and warped into something greater. Where their eyes had been there were now smouldering points of light, blazing in the smog of the furnaces like stars. All their previous cares and infirmities had been shaken off, and they stood tall, glorying in the rush of aethyr around them. Grosslich’s army, already huge, had been bolstered by thousands more, their wills bound to the Stone, their bodies hale and ready to bear arms.

  “Don’t you see it?” murmured Natassja, caressing Grosslich’s cheek and speaking softly into his ear. “The daemons are for me, here in the Tower. Your realm will stretch for many leagues to the north, to the south, to wherever you wish it. Only here will the raw essence of the world of nightmares be permitted to endure.”

  Grosslich looked sullen but impressed. Far below, the hordes of Stone-bound slaves had begun to form into crowds and head towards the courtyard below them. Even as they did so, dog-soldiers prepared to hand them weapons. The Everchosen himself could hardly have wished for a more devastating host to command. The joyroot had prepared them, and the Stone had completed the great work.

  “I believed we would rule Averland together, you and I,” he muttered, torn between rival lusts. “I thought that’s what you wanted too.”

  “I do, my love,” said Natassja, pulling his head round from the scenes below. The furnaces, the screams, the capering daemons, the palls of smoke, all of these were forgotten for a moment.

  “This is what we have done, you and I,” she said, pulling him close to her. “Why can’t you be happy with it?”

  “I am, my queen,” Grosslich replied, his anger dissipating as her eyes bored deep into his. Resisting her was never easy, even after he’d been taught so much. “It’s just that… my vision was different.”

  “Then revel in this. See what glories will be achieved here. Our names will pass into the annals of legend, not in this fading world, but in the libraries of the gods, etched on tablets of marble and placed in halls of perpetual wonder. You have taken a step towards a new world, Heinz-Mark. Do not falter now, for there is no way back.”

  He nodded weakly, all resistance crumbling. His will was always so easy to break. Not like Schwarzhelm, and not like Marius—they had been made of more enduring material. As she spoke, she sensed the doubt in his mind. Had it always been there? Perhaps she should have paid more attention.

  “Remember my words,” she warned, making sure he’d taken her meaning. “This is the future for us, the future for mankind. I will say it again, in case you failed to hear me: there is no way back.”

  Kurt Helborg turned uneasily in his sleep. In the past, his slumber had been that of a warrior, complete and unbroken. Ever since the fires of the Vormeisterplatz, though, the pattern had been broken. He saw visions before waking, faces leering at him in the dark. There was Rufus Leitdorf, fat and pallid, gloating over his failure to secure the city. Skarr was there too, mocking him for the loss of the runefang. And there was Schwarzhelm, his face unlocked by madness, brandishing the Sword of Justice and inviting the duel once again. It was all mockery and scorn, the things he’d never encountered in the world of waking.

  At the vision of the Emperor’s Champion, Helborg awoke suddenly. The sheets around him were clammy and blood had leaked from his wound again. The pain was ever-present, a dull ache in his side. He could ignore it in battle, just as he’d ignored a thousand lesser wounds b
efore, but the architect of it would not leave him in peace.

  Helborg lay still, letting his breathing return to normal. The room around him was dark and cold. Dawn was some hours away and the shutters had been bolted closed. At the foot of his massive four-poster bed hung the sword he’d been lent by Leitdorf. It was a good blade, well-balanced and forged by master smiths of Nuln. It was nothing compared to the Klingerach.

  Helborg swung his legs from the bed and walked over to the window. He unlocked the shutters, letting the moonlight flood into his chamber. Mannslieb was low in the eastern sky, almost invisible. It was Morrslieb, the Cursed Moon, that rode high. Helborg made the sign of the comet across his chest, more out of reflex than anything else. He feared the Chaos moon as little as he feared anything else. Far out in the north-west, he noticed a faint smudge of red against the horizon. Perhaps a fire, lost out on the bleak moorland.

  He limped back to the bed and sat heavily on it. Being isolated, cut off from the Imperial chain of command, was an experience he’d not had for over twenty years. Even in the fiercest fighting he’d always had access to some indication of how things stood in Altdorf. Now things were different. For all he knew, Schwarzhelm still hunted him. If so, then the man’s soul was surely damned.

  Leitdorf had told him of the corruption recorded in Marius’ diaries, the sickness at the heart of Averheim. He’d seen it for himself at the Vormeisterplatz. Whatever force had the power to turn Schwarzhelm’s mighty hands to the cause of darkness was potent indeed. The old curmudgeon had always been infuriating, stubborn, grim, taciturn, inflexible, proud and prickly, but he’d never shown the slightest lack of faith in the Empire and its masters. Not until now.

  Prompted by some random inclination, Helborg took up his borrowed sword and withdrew the blade from the scabbard. He turned it slowly, watching the metal reflect the tainted moonlight. A weak instrument, but it would have to do. Nothing about his current situation was ideal. Leitdorf was a simpering, self-pitying fool, the men at his command were half-trained and liable to bolt at the first sign of trouble, and Helborg had almost no idea what Grosslich’s intentions or tactics were.