Swords of the Emperor

by Chris Wraight

  “I truly believed that I loved her,” he croaked. His face went from grey to white, and a slick of sweat broke out over his forehead. “Can you believe that?”

  Helborg and Volkmar said nothing. The sound of stone and iron grinding against each other grew from below. More debris showered down from the shaft and the roar of the bloodfire became intermittent. The Tower, bereft of its guiding will, was cracking.

  “I thought she would deliver more than Averland to me,” said Leitdorf, his breath ragged, still gazing at Natassja. “I thought she would give me what I wanted. A son, Lord Helborg. Blame that desire, if you still need blame. My line dies with me here. I am the last.”

  Helborg grasped the dying man’s hand.

  “You have saved the city,” he said. “Your deeds will be remembered.”

  “No,” Leitdorf replied, and blood ran from his cracked lips. His voice shrank to barely a whisper. “Tell them what my father did. He discovered her name. Tell them—”

  Leitdorf broke into coughing again, and black fluid bubbled up his throat. His hand clenched Helborg’s tightly as he recovered himself. In his last moments alive, his face was a mask of pure determination.

  “Tell them he wasn’t mad,” he said.

  Then Leitdorf’s eyes went blank. He stiffened, and the fingers of his free hand clutched at the air wildly. He took one last shuddering breath, and then fell still. His pudgy face, speckled with blood and ash, relaxed. In the shifting firelight, the resemblance to Marius was striking.

  More debris began to fall from above. A great iron spar tumbled down the shaft, clanging from the walls as it spiralled before crashing to the earth on the far side of the chamber. Flames, real flames, began to lick up from the cracks in the floor.

  “We need to go,” said Volkmar.

  “I will take the body,” said Helborg, reaching for Leitdorf’s prone corpse.

  “Leave it.” Volkmar stood up. “It will slow you. This is his victory, and his realm. No tomb in Altdorf would be finer.”

  Helborg hesitated, then ran a hand up to his bleeding shoulder. More cracks ran up the walls, lifting the plates of iron and exposing raw, pulsing aethyric matter beneath. The Tower was suffused with it, a conduit of baleful energies.

  He rose, stooping only to retrieve Leitdorf’s sword from where it had fallen.

  “A pup no longer,” he said, looking bitterly at Leitdorf’s body. “You should have lived to wield this.”

  Then Helborg and Volkmar left the chamber, hurrying under the doorway as the Tower began to fall apart. Behind them, the room was marked only by the corpses on the floor and the sinister presence of the Stone in their midst. It glowed in the darkness for a while, as if revelling in one last lingering expression of power.

  Then it died, failing back to dull grey. The bloodfire flared around it, swirling in one last angry eddy, and went out.

  The bodies were slumped on the earth as if sleep had stolen upon them all. Bloch was dead, and his muscles had grown cold. Verstohlen still lived, but his pulse was shallow and his flesh pale. He lay next to his comrade, insensible to the thunder of battle around him, lost in a private struggle against the poison within.

  Standing over them, holding the line against the ravening horde beyond, Schwarzhelm heaved his sword back, dismembering a dog-soldier with the trailing edge of the Rechtstahl. All around him, his men fought on. The line was intact but thinning. Any pretence at an advance had long been given up. The Imperial forces were exhausted, driven to the utter reaches of fatigue by the unending masses of enemy troops before them. The walls of the city were no closer than they had been hours earlier, and the plain still swarmed with lilac-eyed soldiers. Averheim would not be taken by force. The best they could hope for was to hold for the dawn and organise some kind of withdrawal. In the face of the surviving war engines, the retreat would be ruinously blood-soaked.

  “We’re losing this fight!” came a familiar voice.

  Kraus fought his way to Schwarzhelm’s side. He’d lost his helmet in the melee and his forehead was shiny with blood. A hasty battlefield tourniquet had been wrapped around it, but it didn’t do much to staunch the bleeding.

  “You forget Helborg.”

  Kraus snorted, and launched into the enemy troops before him. The wound didn’t seem to have slowed him down much.

  “He’s one more sword,” he spat, his arms working hard. “Just one more sword.”

  Even as he finished speaking, though, something changed. A vast, rumbling boom resounded from the city, still half a mile distant and shrouded in smoke.

  All felt it. Some stumbled as the earth reeled, their tired limbs no longer able to absorb the shock. The dog-soldiers halted in their tracks. The cultists around them went limp. Weapons fell from their slack hands.

  Another boom. The bloodfire, that vast column of thundering, writhing flame, shuddered. The massive pillar of aethyric matter wavered like a waterfall cut off at its source. More crashes resounded out from the city walls. Above them all, the Tower loomed darkly, still wreathed in its corona of fire.

  “Stand fast, men of the Empire!” roared Schwarzhelm, raising both swords above his head.

  All down the exhausted lines, halberdiers and swordsmen looked up in sudden amazement. The enemy had stopped attacking. Grosslich’s mortal troops stood immobile and listless. In the heavens, the circles of cloud broke open, exposing the dark blue of the sky beyond.

  There were more distant rumbles, and a cloud of ash and dust rose up from beyond the city walls. The lesser towers crumbled, one by one, falling back in on themselves with stately majesty.

  “What is this?” asked Kraus. His face betrayed his hope. Before them, the dog-soldiers fell to their knees and began to claw at their faces. The dread power that had animated them had been withdrawn, and the agony of their twisted bodies now flooded into them. All across the plain, the Army of the Stone descended into a frenzy of pain and self-destruction.

  Schwarzhelm didn’t smile. He spun round, looking east. The night sky was stained with a faint blush of grey.

  “This is the dawn,” he said. His raised blades caught the first glimmers of light.

  The Iron Tower, huge and dominating, began to shed its high spars. Cracks ran up its massive flanks, stained red like the wounds of a living thing. Plumes of black soot rolled up from its foundations, effluent from the mighty machines still turning in the deep catacombs. As vast as it was, the withdrawal of the malign intelligence that had built it was too great a strain to bear. It was falling apart.

  Men, freed from the incessant fight for survival, gaped up at the sight, their jaws hanging open. Some wept with relief, falling to their knees and crying praises to Sigmar and Ulric. Others vented their pent-up rage, wading into the supine rows of the enemy, laying waste to the defenceless thousands who still stood on the plain.

  Kraus sheathed his sword, watching with dismay as the dog-soldiers in front of him clutched at their ruined bodies. Some ripped off their iron masks, revealing their horribly stretched faces. The Empire soldiers around him looked up at him uncertainly, caught between their hatred and confusion.

  “What are your orders, my lord?” asked Kraus, looking as torn between instincts as they were.

  Schwarzhelm sheathed the Averland runefang, keeping the Rechtstahl naked in his right hand.

  “Keep the men together,” he said. “The bodies of Verstohlen and Bloch are to be taken from here and preserved. If any apothecaries still live, tell them to minister to the counsellor. I would not see him die. Not now, not after all has been accomplished.”

  “And what of you?”

  Schwarzhelm began to stride through the writhing mass of dog-soldiers towards the city. None hindered his passage.

  “The field is yours, captain,” he said, and his voice was free of the anguish that had marked it since the Vormeisterplatz. “My brother-in-arms has been victorious, and homage is due.”

  Ahead of him, the titanic pillar of flame faded and flickered out. The
thrum of its burning died away, exposing the charred and crumbling spires of Averheim beneath. Free of the crushing, oppressive weight in the air, a cleansing wind tore across the battlefield. Tattered standards rippled back into life. Shattered detachments of soldiers regained their feet.

  With an ominous creak, the Tower listed to one side. More spars fell from it, raining down on the shattered cityscape below. More cracks raced up its sides, breaking open the sigils of Chaos and cracking their symmetry. Real fire flared up from the dungeons beneath the base of the mighty columns, licking at the buckling iron, replacing the sorcerous flames that had wreathed the metal for so long.

  There was a final rolling clap of thunder, born deep in the heart of ravaged Averheim and sweeping up into the soot-clogged air. The Tower reeled, shedding spiked buttresses and crossbeams. Its jagged crown tumbled, disintegrating as it spun from the pinnacle, and crashed to earth in a surging cloud of ash and fire.

  With terrible slowness, the gigantic framework of Natassja’s citadel crumbled in on itself. Iron ground against iron, throwing sparks high into the air. Like a landslip of the high peaks, the abomination slid gracefully into ruin.

  A vast cloud of smoke and smog rose up in its wake, huge and threatening. Then it too was borne away by the wind from the east, ripped into nothingness and dispersed as the dreams of those that had made it had been dispersed.

  The Tower was gone. The battle for Averheim was over.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  In the annals of Imperial history, the victory at Averheim would be recorded as a triumph for the Grand Theogonist Volkmar. Honourable mentions would be given to the Lords Helborg and Schwarzhelm, as well as glowing tributes to the heroism of the martyred Rufus Leitdorf. The loremasters would record in exhaustive detail the tactical genius of the Empire commanders and the craven collapse of the forces of the great enemy. As ever, they would use the example of Grosslich’s defeat as evidence of the futility of opposing the all-conquering Empire of mankind.

  The archivists would not mention the destruction of the city. They would remain silent on the deaths of Averheim’s entire population, either killed in battle or during the construction of the Tower. None of them would mention that, out of Volkmar’s army of forty thousand, less than a quarter survived to return to Altdorf. Nor would they see fit to record the litany of mistakes and treachery that had led Grosslich to be crowned elector instead of Leitdorf. Confident in the faulty memories of those they wrote for, they knew the passing of time would erase such inconveniences. The important thing was that the enemy had been defeated and the rule of Karl Franz reimposed.

  The physical devastation, however, could not be hidden. Averheim was in ruins, scorched by fire and reeking with the residue of corrosion. The river was clogged with ash and the streets wine-red with bloodstains. Though the daemons had disappeared with the passing of the bloodfire, their spoor of madness still hung in the shadows.

  It took months to cleanse the place. Hundreds of witch hunters were summoned from surrounding cities. Volkmar himself presided over the ritual exorcism and stayed in the heart of the shattered city for several weeks. His army remained too, though their swords were swiftly replaced with picks and shovels. The task of demolishing the remains of the Tower and restoring what was left of old Averheim was long and arduous.

  In the days after the battle ended, there were many, Helborg among them, who counselled that Averheim should be abandoned. The stain of Chaos ran too deep, and the losses had been too grievous. It was Volkmar who overruled them. The greater war still ground on in the north, soaking up resources and manpower, sapping the will of the Empire. The populace needed a sign of victory. They needed to be shown that the lost ground could be recovered.

  So he ordered the city to be reclaimed. Broken houses and streets were repaired with the labour of his men. Merchants, soldiers and families were enticed from the nearby towns with the promise of property and wealth. Grosslich’s treasuries were discovered and the gold used for the work of reconstruction. Only the iron of the Tower was not reused. The ruins were cordoned off for weeks as a phalanx of priests ritually destroyed the foundations. The reek of molten metal hung over the city in a pall of bitterness long after the last of the iron had been turned into ingots and shipped away.

  Beneath it all was the Stone. Only Volkmar descended back down to the hidden chamber during the long months of recovery, and he never said what work was done there. As the autumn faded into winter, the wide courtyard of the Tower was finally paved over again, and the last of Grosslich’s gold used to sponsor the construction of a cathedral on the site. In later years, the Church of Sigmar the Destroyer of Heresy rose up in place of the Tower, vast and opulent, a counterpart to the restored Averburg across the river. It would become a centre of pilgrimage as the years wore on, drawing supplicants from across the southern provinces of the Empire. Few priests wished to serve in its incense-soaked naves, however. It swiftly developed an evil reputation for ill-luck, and the clerics were prone to bad dreams.

  Though it took many more years, Averland recovered much of its prosperity. The people of the province were fertile, the land was still good, and memories were quick to dim. The destruction of Averheim was the making of some families, just as it was the doom of others. Trade resumed along the Aver, and the last of Grosslich’s edicts were repealed.

  A new Steward was appointed. Klaus Meuningen was a surprise choice, taken from provincial obscurity in Grenzstadt and given command of the capital. He proved capable enough, however, and loyal to the Emperor in most things. Under his rule, the clamour for a new elector faded again. Whenever the issue was raised, some excuse was found to shelve it. All knew that the matter would have to be returned to at some point in the future, but all also knew that it would be long before Averland was ready again.

  In the immediate aftermath of the great battle, none of these things were obvious. Volkmar’s troops were mostly just glad to be alive. Under Kraus’ leadership, they gradually went about the grim business of finishing off Grosslich’s will-bereft forces. When Volkmar returned from the city to resume command, huge pyres were constructed for the dead. As at Turgitz, one was raised for the corrupted, another for the uncorrupted. The latter burned with a pure, angry flame. The former would smoulder for weeks, tinged with lilac.

  All knew that the vista would never be the same again. The old fertile soil had been ruined by Natassja’s poisons, and the Averpeak now slumped into ruin where the war engines had demolished it.

  Even there, though, the grass would grow again. It just took time, the great healer of all wounds.

  Verstohlen lay on a pallet and gazed at the roof of his tent. Despite the blankets and cloak that covered him, he shivered. The wind from the east was bitter, and the last shreds of summer had been driven away. Four days since the battle, and he had barely slept. Worse than that, the poisons still worked within him. Thanks to the expert attentions of one of Volkmar’s apothecaries, he had survived the worst of it. He was enough of an alchemist to know that the damage done to him was severe, though. He still couldn’t walk, and his vision was cloudy. Perhaps that would improve in time. Perhaps it wouldn’t.

  The flaps of the tent entrance opened, and Schwarzhelm ducked down through the gap. He was ludicrously outsized for the cramped space, and stooped within like a giant trying to squeeze into the hovel of a peasant.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “Better,” he lied.

  “There are rooms being made ready in the city. You should move to them.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Verstohlen, shuddering under his blankets. “Here is fine. I never want to see Averheim again.”

  Schwarzhelm shrugged.

  “So be it, but I’ll be gone soon. The Emperor has demanded my presence.”

  “I’m glad of it. He’s forgiven you?”

  “I doubt it. There’ll be penance for this. The north.”

  “More fighting? How dreadful for you.”

  Sch
warzhelm didn’t smile, but nor did he scowl. A cloud of bitterness seemed to have lifted from him.

  “I could use a spy up there,” he said.

  Verstohlen shook his head.

  “I think my prowess on a battlefield has been demonstrated,” he said. “In any case, the days of the family are over.”

  He looked up at Schwarzhelm.

  “I’m sorry, my lord,” he said. “There’ll be no more of this for me.”

  Schwarzhelm raised an eyebrow.

  “You’re ill, Pieter. Make no hasty choices.”

  Verstohlen smiled sadly.

  “When Leonora died, all I wanted was a way to fight the enemy. You gave me that. We’ve done much good together, and I’m proud of it.”

  He shook his head, thinking back over the past months.

  “Not now. My usefulness is over. Perhaps there’ll be some other way to continue in service. Or maybe my time has ended.”

  Schwarzhelm pursed his lips thoughtfully. He gave Verstohlen a long, searching look.

  “We’ll speak on this again,” he said at last. “There are many ways a man can serve the Emperor, and your gifts are unique. Think on it anew when your wounds are recovered.”

  Verstohlen winced at the mention of his wounds. He knew that some of them would never be made whole.

  “As you wish,” he said, suddenly wanting to change the subject. “And what of you, my lord? This has been a trial for all of us.”

  “So it has,” said the Emperor’s Champion. “And there will be more trials to come. But we have prevailed here, and that is all that matters.”

  He rose awkwardly, hampered by the canvas above him.

  “I’m glad to see you recovering,” he said gruffly. “Remember what I said—make no hasty choices. Inform me of your progress when you can. I’ve lost many friends here, Pieter. I do not wish to lose another.”

  Friends. That was not a word he’d heard Schwarzhelm use before.