Warhammer - Curse of the Necrarch

by Steven Savile

  The great door slammed behind him, the sound resonating through the stones of the floor and walls. The unexpected noise disturbed Casimir’s concentration, causing the memory of the bones to unravel as quickly as it had come together. The thrall shrieked his pain as the flame vanished from around his fingers, leaving the flesh untouched. The breaking of the spell brought Casimir to his knees, hands pressed against his temples as the backlash of magic tore into him. Radu had no pity for the thrall’s failure. He turned to see Amsel shuffling into the room, the crook-backed thrall dragging his lame foot. He clutched a large sack of bones.

  His eyes glimmered with the last moment of the memory’s reflection. He dumped the bones into the nearest pit. “The master is strong in death magic.”

  Radu looked from Amsel to Casimir; he was right, he was strong in the ways of the death wind, but Casimir had just done something that he had never even imagined.

  He recalled the sly tone that Casimir had used before raising the memory of the bones. Hearing it again in his mind it sent an icy shiver down the length of Radu’s spine.

  He watched his thrall with distrust as he gathered the remains of the alembic from within the pile of bones.

  “The distillate, of course. Yes, I had ventured such an invocation months ago, but judged it little more than pretty lights. You disappoint me, Casimir, I had hoped you had something of interest to show me.”

  “Sorry, master,” the thrall said, but this time Casimir defiantly met his eye.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Deeper than Bones

  Kastell Metz, Deep in the Heart of the Howling Hills, Middenland

  The Autumn of All Our Fears, 2532

  Amsel sought refuge in the darkness.

  He moved slowly, dragging his ruined fingers across the stones.

  “Casimir, Casimir, Casimir, always Casimir: master’s favourite, master’s lickspittle, master’s chosen. Casimir the ugly, Casimir the liar, dirty stinking Casimir with treachery in his heart. Why can’t the master see like we can? How does the traitor blind the master to his ambitions? How can the master not see?” And at the root of his grief, “Why does the master ignore us? Why? How have we wronged the master? How have we disappointed him that he chooses to ignore us in favour of that damned Casimir? What of us? What of Amsel, oldest, most loyal, what of me?”

  The dark was his friend. It did not judge. It did not mock. It did not flaunt its superiority.

  There was so much secret darkness hidden within the castle: chambers long sealed away, lost to cobwebs, spiders and ghosts; passageways that reached out like wizened fingers beneath the lake into the belly of the hills; the warren of cells that had housed the screams of countless fallen foes banished into that same darkness that Amsel craved; the crypts with their sarcophagi and effigies, stacked with rotten grave goods; and then there were the true secrets, the places only he had found, deep in the foundations of the castle where the stones rooted into the hills; the walls that were not walls, that slid and moved beneath his touch, their mechanisms rusty but still serviceable. These were the dark places he returned to again and again. Some were shown to him, others found. He had not yielded up all the secrets of the castle to Radu, some he kept for himself.

  He dragged his lame foot behind him, his gait a lopsided shuffle-drag, shuffle-drag. As he moved down the claustrophobic passageways he breathed a single word again and again, snuffing out the alchemical globes that stubbornly held some trace of light in their glass hearts. The globes were Radu’s creation, meant to be used up above, to light the hovels of the coterie of the damned that they had gathered to them. He had stolen a few, using their long light to help root out more nooks and crannies where he could be alone to think and scheme.

  His footsteps echoed their peculiar echo. He heard the mockery of eternity in them, the deformities of his flesh that would stay with him forever and beyond. His flesh was a cloak that even in death he could not cast off, a weakness he could never be free of. He loathed it, just as he loathed all flesh.

  In the darkest places of his mind he imagined stripping the world of its flesh, turning the perfect footsteps of the living into a haunting reminder of their mortality, and draining out the sustenance that was blood from their veins and scorching the meat with hideous fire until nothing of the flesh remained. He kept those thoughts behind his wretched face, secret, hidden for now.

  The master would not overlook him for long. Oh no, Radu the Forsaken would see him as he finally shed the shadows. Until then he would find peace down below, deeper than bones, where the others never came. Radu had made the vault beneath the cemetery his haven, and rarely left, living in the filth of his experiments. Casimir clung to the high places, tending the ravens and laying his plans to oust them all. Only Amsel truly understood the nature of the castle, but then he had lived there longest.

  The passage ended in a stone wall that was not there. Amsel closed his eyes as he stepped into and then through the false wall. Beyond it lay a thick door that still bore the vestiges of the familial crest of the first inhabitants of Kastell Metz all those centuries before.

  It was a sigil he associated with the first master of the castle, Korbhen, though it was not the great necrarch lord’s mark but one he had stolen from the castle’s inhabitants.

  The mysteries of Korbhen’s horde had lain hidden behind that door for so long: pages written in the blood of his sire, on pages cured from his flesh and bound in his skin as he moved towards ascension, unburdened by the bonds of flesh. Those pages contained all the wisdom of the creature that was Korbhen’s father in death, and such secrets they were. Precious few remained.

  He would make the new master value him. He would bring him a treasure such as his greed could only imagine. The thought thrilled him. The master was wise. He had foreseen all eventualities, even this, the arrival of a rival. His fingers went to his throat, feeling out the vein where once his pulse had been so strong. He wore the wound still that had welcomed him into this second world of ghosts and shades where blood meant so little.

  Unlike so much of his life before, he remembered still the heady tang of the blood kiss as if their lips had just parted. His entry into a second life had been so much sweeter than his entry into the first, his mother squatting in an alley, amid a mulch of rotting cabbages, cauliflowers and seed potatoes that had been thrown out from the market the night before. She told him later that she had almost abandoned him to the animals and let them eat their fill, but something had stayed her hand.

  It was not love, for she had never loved a thing in her life, not even the men she rutted with; not compassion, for the life she cursed him too was worse than death at the jaws of the dogs. Perhaps it was hate, because she surely hated him every day of his stinking life. In comparison his second birth, into death, had been tender despite the pain. He would do anything for the master who shared his blood, and to think that he had first turned up at the gates of Kastell Metz looking to kill him. Amsel opened the door.

  The familiar smell greeted him before he set foot inside. The pages retained the perfume of their maker even after all this time. He stood in the doorway, breathing it in. There were two low shelves in the centre of the room, and glass cabinets against one wall. Where there had been so many treasures now there was only broken glass and empty shelves. The wonders were gone, save for the single sheet that lay beneath the glass of the last one. Korbhen had pillaged most of the arcane treasures before abandoning the castle in search of von Carstein’s book, lost all these years since the fall of Drakenhof at the end of the Winter War.

  He looked down at the single sheet of sun-cured skin in the last cabinet. The bloody ink had paled to the point of illegibility.

  Amsel cleared the splinters of broken glass away with great care and lifted the skin of the great vampire out. He handled it reverently, but still it was brittle beneath his clumsy fingers. A fragment from the edge crumbled away, taking half a word with it. Amsel could not read the text; it had taken him three centuries to lea
rn his letters and how to inscribe his own name. These words were older than any language he had mastered in the years since. All he knew was that this one page contained secrets so great that they would damage Casimir in the new master’s eyes, restoring his reliance upon Amsel. The master had promised him.

  “The master is wise,” Amsel crooned, cradling the page to his chest as he left the hidden chamber. He walked slowly. He did not breathe light back into the alchemical globes. There was no need; he knew every twist and turn intimately and he preferred the darkness.

  “What is this, fool?”

  “I found it, master,” Amsel said, still not showing the blood-inked side of the cured page to Radu.

  “You disturb my studies to show me something you found? What are you, some kind of child needing my approval? A kitten bringing me a gift? You should be more like Casimir. He applies his intellect to the problems we face, he does not squirrel himself away in the dark, making his home down with the rats. Show me this treasure, then and let me judge its worth,” Radu said with disgust. Radu had been in a vile temper for days. The beast refused to rise; no matter what invocation he applied, the bones remained bones.

  The threshold of death was not so great or daunting that it could not be crossed. Something stymied the necrarch’s work, some piece of wisdom he lacked. Ignorance made a monster of him. He paced the perimeter of the workshop, scratching out formulae and pictograms as his anger and frustration rose. An entire stretch of wall was now solid black, whatever had been beneath it lost forever, and as he scrubbed out the writing he raged. Amsel moved quietly, creeping through the detritus strewn across the workshop floor soundlessly; soundlessly because he heard the vile name Casimir trip off the new master’s tongue.

  The way Radu said it, the syllables dripping with acid as they left his mouth, brought pleasure to Amsel’s withered heart. He lurked, hoping for more, a hint as to the reason behind the loathing, but Radu fell silent, scrubbing and scrubbing at the charcoal erasing all traces of the words beneath. When he hadn’t uttered a sound for the longest time, Amsel dared approach with his prize.

  Still the master vented his scorn upon him.

  “Paper? You bring me paper? Does it have words on it, this miraculous paper, or is it blank?”

  “It is not paper, master,” he said, holding it up before his face and inhaling to emphasise his point. “You can still smell the fragrance of the man beneath the skin.”

  “Cured flesh? Well it isn’t the best writing material, the ink fails to take to it, over time it fades. I suppose that is why it is blank, anything interesting must have soaked into the flesh. Here, let me have it.”

  Amsel lowered the page from his face and gave it to Radu. The necrarch turned the page over in his hands. His eyes betrayed nothing as he saw the faint scratchings of the dead language that remained. He mirrored Amsel, lifting it to his nose to inhale the essence of the man who had sacrificed his flesh for the word. Still his dead eyes showed no hint of pleasure as he breathed deeply of the brittle skin.

  “There is nothing remotely interesting about this find of yours. You bother me with trifles. The markings are gibberish, the man himself of no consequence. I am disappointed, Amsel. I thought more of you than this. Go, and do not bother me again unless you have something of worth to say.”

  Amsel held out his hand to take the page back.

  “Oh no, I shall keep this, I think,” Radu said. “I am sure I can get some use out of it. I can bleach the remnants of ink from it and use it again to record one of my own formulae, perhaps.”

  “The master is wise,” Amsel said, leaving Radu alone with the page and its hidden secrets, satisfied that he had planted the seed of curiosity no matter how vehement the necrarch’s denials.

  Alone, Radu examined the page.

  He did not recognise the script, which in itself piqued his curiosity. He had mastery of thirty-seven tongues, more than even his own sire. He had dedicated decades of his existence to the accumulation of languages, of graphology and syntax, the similarities so many tongues had at their roots, showing a common heritage, and so much more. Yet here was a page unearthed in his own home in a script he had never seen, bearing no similarity to any of the tongues he was familiar with.

  Which, he surmised, meant it was no script at all, but if not a script, then what?

  The blood used to ink it had faded to the point that some symbols were obscured, and around the edges of the page decay had claimed more than a few others.

  There were several repetitions within the markings, the same brush strokes rendered again and again, where other symbols appeared but once. Curiously, a few of the symbols were misplaced on the page, slightly above the line of the rest, or slightly below.

  The penmanship was so intricate that it was difficult to imagine that the displacement was due to carelessness, which meant it was almost certainly deliberate.

  “A cipher,” Radu mused, guessing the nature of the page, but what secrets did it unlock? And more pertinently, how could he ever hope to possess those secrets even after deciphering the page?

  Secrets within secrets? His mind raced with the possibilities.

  Some of the symbols were relatively simple, intersecting lines, spheres and hemispheres, others were more intricate. The repetitions would be the key. In any language certain double letters revealed the intent of the cipher’s creator, but without somewhere to begin it would prove if not impossible, then incredibly difficult to work any meaning out of the greater text.

  His fingers lingered on the cured skin, recognising the stench of death upon it. Though it possessed no magic of its own, this was no mere page that Amsel had rendered unto him. He needed to know more about the page, and where the thrall had found it. Had Amsel recognised the taint of the blood kiss that still clung to the skin? Radu crouched over the page, inhaling its intoxicating perfume once more. He imagined the layers of fragrance hidden just below the most pungent: the streets the vampire walked, the flesh he tasted, his desires and discoveries all seeped into that single page so long ago. He would have done almost anything for the chance to inhale them, drawing the essences of all those forgotten memories into him that he might learn from them.

  Laying the page aside, he went in search of Amsel.

  Considering the underground labyrinth and the above ground sprawl, the castle was huge, with countless hiding places for the lame thrall. That Amsel knew it far better than anyone else, having lived all of his life within the walls, exploring its dark and deep places, made him almost impossible to find if he did not want to be found.

  Though they all had chambers within the towers, Amsel was a nester by nature and had several nooks and crannies that he had feathered for comfort out of the life of the castle, all below ground. It would take him the best part of the night to track down the errant thrall if he had to traipse to even half of them. The alternative was to have the others look for him.

  Loath to leave his workshop with so much undone, Radu chose the lesser of two evils. He pushed open the great double doors of the workshop, for a moment wearing their shadows like ethereal wings, and stalked out. He would have Amsel brought to him in the high tower, close to the soothing radiance of Morrslieb and Mannslieb, and as far away as possible from the places where Amsel felt so comfortable.

  The workshop was annexed to the old cells, hollowed out from the rock beneath the graveyard, and linked to the main keep by a narrow twisting passageway. Damp seeped through the smooth stones, lending them a gloss that caught the glow of the alchemical globes. The ceiling was low, barely clearing the height of Radu’s bald head, and the floor sloped upwards as it neared the cells, causing him to hunch slightly as he walked. The texture of the stones changed, as well, from natural stone cut away to inlaid blocks used to hold back the weight of the dirt. The new material brought with it new odours, most redolent the musk of the grave dirt it held back and the brackish water that stagnated in it.

  He found two lost souls in the cells, Rakeh and Rane. T
he twins looked at him with the disturbing cataract-filled white stare they shared. It was the only thing they did share: Rakeh was thin to the point of emaciation, hollow eyes and sallow skin, his long greasy hair pure white, while Rane was rotund and ruddy, with spikes of ebon-black hair greased into points.

  “Find Amsel, and when you do, bring him to the Galas Tower. I shall be with the ravens, enjoying the moons.”

  “As you wish…” Rane said, dusting off his meaty hands on his coarse apron, “…master,” Rakeh finished.

  The wind carried the dreams of mortals, spilled by twitching sleep-fevered lips and whipped away.

  Radu braced himself against one of the machicolations, the twin moons casting his twisted shadow down to the abutments below. A few of Casimir’s ravens slept with their heads beneath their oily black wings, creating the illusion of a row of headless guardians ringing the tower. They were not his chosen watchers; the carrion eaters lacked the finer qualities of his beloved bats who could find their way unerringly without sight, using echolocation to sound out the landscape they needed to navigate. Yet many of his kind craved the company of the death eaters, seeing them as some sort of kindred creature. They did make a better meal, he thought, looking at one of the fat-bellied birds.

  The hills were laid out before him like waves crashing up against the shore of his home. The lake, alive with small ripples agitated by the breeze, had taken on a sickly green pallor from the moon’s glow.

  The waters had risen, effectively isolating the castle. A peculiarity of the mechanisms he had devised caused the tidal ebb and flow of this land-locked lake high in the Howling Hills. It had been no huge feat of engineering but rather a subtle enchantment of the subterranean waters, causing them to swell with the rising of the moon, and the water level of the lake to rise just as a real tide would.