Warhammer - Curse of the Necrarch

by Steven Savile

  She took him, holding him close to her chest, her mother’s instinct taking over the moment she laid eyes upon the helpless child. Shushing him gently, Briony laid a gentle finger against his cheek. He reached up with his small hands and grasped it, drawing it down towards his mouth to suckle on it.

  She looked up at Metzger, her mind made up. “How could I say no?”

  “Thank you, Briony. We are a family here, never think otherwise. Your kindness will be returned to you, of that I have no doubt.”

  “Or perhaps I am returning your kindness, Reinhardt?”

  “I have no kindness, Briony. I am a crotchety old man looking for a good night’s sleep,” he said, winking at her, and both women laughed.

  It was good to be surrounded by laughter.

  There would be precious little of it soon enough. “You’re a good man,” Sara said when Briony had left them.

  “I like to think so,” he said, “but sometimes it feels like I don’t have a choice.”

  “You always have a choice, but to a good man those choices are obvious. To take in a child instead of leaving him to die in the woods with no one to know better, to bring home two dozen more mouths to strain your granaries and smoke houses, those are not easy choices but you made them without hesitation. That marks you as a good man, Reinhardt Metzger.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Coterie of the Damned

  On the March through the Howling Hills of Middenland

  The Autumn of Sour Deaths, 2532

  The midnight hour crawled across the land, casting its dark magic over every hill, every valley, every rooftop and every tower.

  The dead walked, like something conjured from the depths of the dreamers’ minds. They were a plague upon the land, bringing sickness beneath their feet to wither the long grasses. It was not only the dead, it was the sick and the twisted, the damned. Their taint went deeper than blood. The soil withered, growing parched as all goodness was leached from it by the unholy crusade. A thick black miasma gathered in the sky above them.

  Amsel rode in a war chariot of bone in their midst, surrounded on all sides by the rotting flesh of the risen dead. His pride at being chosen by the new master over Casimir had not diminished in the slightest.

  He had Radu’s trust. He revelled in the little victory, but he could not enjoy it to the full for while he was gone Casimir had their master’s ear. To return to the castle without the book, to fail, would undo all that he had achieved. He must follow the clues laid out by Korbhen and once and for all see the back of his rival, cementing his place as the Forsaken’s right hand.

  He whipped the dead dragging his chariot onward.

  The blood taint strangled him, driving all thoughts beyond his urge to please his master from his mind. Time lost its meaning, if it had ever had a true meaning. It slipped and slithered away from him, leaving traces of memory, of what it had been like before, when time had seemed so precious, into what it had become, where time grew irrelevant. It blurred memories of one decade into the next, of one war and one fear into another.

  He had had a daughter once, before, when the world had felt so young. The taste of her blood, the final ecstasy of taking her, came back to his tongue. He would never forget that. The rest might go, but the taste of the blood he had given her would remain even as he crumbled away to dust.

  He felt no guilt over it, even as he had torn at her flesh for two whole hours, forcing pains beyond description upon his own flesh and blood. There had been no remorse because he had become a beast of instinct, and his instinct was self-preservation. He obeyed the way of blood when he needed to, but was not reliant upon it. To feast on the living was an indulgence, a whim, not a need. It was a pleasure to sate that whim every once in a while, but every now and again the call of the blood was irresistible.

  He felt the pull of generations in his veins, more potent than mere time. He felt the dizzying addictiveness of his sire’s blood, the blood he had taken with the kiss that ended and began his life. He tasted the potency of his sire’s sire and his sire beyond, like a river of death running back to the well of darkness that birthed them all. They were family, fathers and sons in death, a binding shared between them that was stronger than the coincidence of rutting that joined them to their fathers in life. That was the true power of his curse.

  “I will not fail, master,” he vowed. It was a promise that could easily have been given to either elder vampire lord who had a claim on his rotten existence.

  The stench of corruption was its own macabre perfume, a heady mix of decay, dissolution and infestation that lingered in the air. It was more sweet than rancid to his nose, a honey to the welter of flies that followed them.

  They moved only at night, for they were stronger then, keeping to the dark places, but how could ten thousand corpses hide? They could not, so with every step threatening discovery, Amsel drove them on in search of the disgraced priest’s testimony. As they marched so their ranks swelled. As people saw and people died, they were absorbed into the ranks of the dead until twenty thousand marched where ten had set out. He doubted the ease of their mission. For all that he grudgingly admitted that Casimir was ferociously intelligent, and that his deductive reasoning was second only to the master’s, to believe that this great secret simply lay under the noses of the cattle in one of their houses of worship just seemed naive.

  Layers within layers, that was the way. What was hidden stayed hidden through deception, not ignorance. There would be no treasure at Ashenford, of that he was sure. Ashenford, the ford of ash, ash being burnt wood and pulp, both vital parts of the production of parchment. A coincidence? Or a hint as to what he would find in this place: the remnants of this lost testament?

  They would not give up their treasures easily. It was the nature of the cattle to accumulate, to hoard, so he had come prepared to take it from them. They were not so different that way, though his kind grasped and gathered knowledge and power while the cattle clung to useless trinkets and trappings. The expectancy was for war, terrible and swift, blood and death and the wretched screams of stupid sacrifice. He had been out of their society for an age, but he remembered enough of what it meant to be a man. He expected no less from them than he would have managed himself in another time.

  “Let them die!” he said to himself more than to the twenty faceless dead that shuffled listlessly around him. They were mindless fodder to do but one job: instil fear in the eye of the beholder. Fear would eat into the courage of the cattle, stripping them of the one thing they needed to hold onto: hope. With that gone he would do what he had to do, and in the process swell the ranks of his host, so much so that the hills would tremble and quake at his return. Let Casimir scheme to oust him then! He would be immune to his petty ploys.

  Amsel was no fool; he had brought as many of his loyal coterie with him as he dared. They were scattered throughout the endless entourage of risen dead, unique in their deformities and in the strength their deformities gave them. And what an array of deformities they had. Close to him in the press of bodies he could see Masken, with growths all over his skin; Dugar, with his giant arm, his fist a match in size for his skull; Kofas, who carried her guts outside her body in loops of translucent entrails; Sebastian with hunched back and clubbed foot, and Glick with his distended jaw, split mouth of seventy teeth and his single eye.

  These few were his loyal servants. They were not unthinking zombies fresh from the grave, minds rotten with the sweat meats and soft flesh of their corpses, but neither were they fighters. They were cunning, and more: they were survivors. How could they be anything other in a world that would see mothers stone their babes to death at birth should they show even the smallest sign of being different, of being wrong. They all bore the taint of deformity, carrying the scars of disease, and yet they had made it, against all the odds, into adulthood with their twisted bones, their conjoined aspects, their scaled skin and all of the other betrayers of difference writ plain upon their flesh.

  Like A
msel, they were survivors.

  Beside him, Gehan Volk, the vampiric acolyte, crushed an inquisitive bluebottle that had settled in the cavity where his nose ought to have been. The man bore his mark with arrogant pride. He might have passed among the living with barely a second glance had he chosen to wear sackcloth and play the beggar. It had been common in the years before Amsel had tasted the blood of his sire for adulterers to be thus marked, their beauty shorn from their face. Volk was no adulterer. He had been born with the ragged hole in the centre of his face.

  The soldier’s dagger had done damage to his shoulder. The wound was festering, the reek of pus and soured skin clinging to the acolyte.

  Lights on the hillside caught his eye.

  They had followed the river to the fording point, tracing its meanders as it coiled like the Lahmian serpent across the Old World, and the light brought its own reward. Amsel smiled coldly as he stared up at the sleeping town of Ashenford.

  They would wake, those dreamers, soon enough.

  But by then it would be too late.

  Death would be among them.

  They came down upon the town like a plague of ravenous locusts, denuding the world of even the smallest shoots of life. Amsel orchestrated the onslaught, relying on Volk to deflect the hysteria of the living as they threw themselves into a pitiful defence while he sought out their holy place. Their soldiers came, but one hundred swords were nothing against the dead. The killing was as brutal as it was swift. He walked through the battle, smelling blood and denying the hunger that rose in him. He had no need to feed; he had purpose, and that purpose lay wrapped and protected in the musty confines of the Sigmarite temple. They had wardings against his kind. He felt the repulsive wrench inside his gut, like poison spreading through his blood the closer he drew to the place. It was a poisonous pestilent whore of a place, a brothel of the petty gods, and its nearness stung him like a dose of the pox down below.

  Amsel listened to the cries of a woman being dragged out of her home by his damned, begging for the life of her baby. It was a mistake to plead mercy, it only incited Sebastian and Kofus and the rest of their kind to do more mischief. The woman had no time to learn her lesson. By the time Amsel had reached the threshold of the tumbledown temple his servants had pinned her out in the centre of the town square and tore the flesh from her bones in a frenzy of tooth and nails. Amsel was deaf to the screams. They meant nothing to him, these humans. He did not care what happened to them. After all, they were meat, and one did not ask a joint of roasted pig its feelings before the feast.

  Amsel paused with his hand on the wooden door, and then pushed it open onto a simple unadorned room. The priest was on his knees before the wooden altar, head bowed in prayer. He looked up, face wrought with fear, and made the sign of Sigmar across his chest. The vampire’s lips curled into a smile. He stepped forward and stopped, brought up short by the sudden and brutal stab of revulsion in his gut. His blood burned against the violation. Every fibre of his being refused to cross the threshold and the fear on the priest’s face slipped as he understood. He pushed himself slowly to his feet and walked towards the door, mumbling the words of his prayer. He clutched a hammer in his right hand.

  Amsel threw himself forward, forcing his first foot over the transom. The fire in his heart was more than he could bear and he staggered back out of the holy anguish of the temple.

  “You are not welcome hear, fiend,” the priest said, his voice strained thin. His knuckles where white where they clenched around the shaft of his hammer. Amsel could smell the stench of his fear and the iron tang of his burgeoning resolve. “Go. In the name of Sigmar, go!”

  “I don’t think so,” Amsel said, his voice relishing the sibilants. For a moment the world consisted of a single room and two men, one living, the other dead. The rest of the world had gone to damnation.

  “Then you will feel the wrath of my holy hammer!”

  Amsel laughed at the ludicrousness of the threat. The man was a pompous fool. He would enjoy humbling him. His slow smile turned cunning as he said, “Is that a euphemism, priest?”

  “You do not frighten me, creature.”

  “Then you are a pious fool. Your flock is dying. Can’t you hear their tortured screams? Their blood sings in the night air. They scream and die, scream and die, over and over while you hide in your temple, a coward against the night’s dying.”

  “I am no coward!” the priest bellowed, raising his hammer and running at the creature standing in the temple doorway.

  “Tear the place down!” Amsel cried, his voice rising above the tumult of the killing. The dead responded to his command unquestioningly, rising from the dirt and blood of the town square, pieces of the fallen townsfolk still in their teeth, dribbling lifeblood down their ruined chins and chests. The front zombie lurched and stumbled, tripping over the body of a faceless knight staring blindly at the starless sky. The creature righted itself. Behind it ten, then twenty then fifty and three hundred of the dead responded to Amsel’s call, shambling towards the temple.

  The priest’s hammer struck the vampire full in the face, the silver burning deep.

  Amsel turned the other cheek.

  The wound opened the left side of his face up, tearing through cheek and jowl to bare his teeth in a permanent grin. Where the skin tore away it exposed corruption, bloated white maggots eating through the flesh beneath. There was no blood.

  The priest brought his hammer up for a second shattering blow that never came. The face of corruption mocked him, daring him to cross the threshold and face him without the protection of his damned chapel. The priest took a step forward, out from under the aegis of Sigmar and into the night. One step was all it took. The vampire fell upon him in savage fury, rending flesh from bone in an arterial spray. Amsel tore the robe from the priest’s back, his thick black fingernails slicing through the tendon and muscle above the man’s heart, and reached into his chest, forcing his fist through the broken cage of ribs, to lift the still beating organ out. The man died in agony, forced to watch as Amsel’s gnarled fist closed around his heart and crushed the life out of it.

  The priest’s corpse lay across the transom, half in and half out of the temple. It was no hindrance to the dead as they threw themselves at the walls and clambered over each other to get onto the roof. The temple groaned, the stones buckling beneath the press of death, and still more fought their way onto the roof and hurled themselves at the walls, forcing them inwards until the mortar cracked and split and the weight brought the whole thing crashing down, reduced to rubble in the centre of the town square.

  Amsel stood removed from the destruction, surveying the fallout of his schemes. Driven by wrath and a furious need for vengeance against the perfectly formed men and women, his coterie were wrath incarnate as they ripped the harmony and solidity of the world apart. There was no protection to be found, no refuge or sanctuary. The walls came down. He felt nothing to see the servant of the Man-God humbled. It did not matter. All that mattered was finding the revelation of the lost prophet and continuing upon the quest that his master had laid out for him.

  He would not fail.

  He felt the warmth of fire on his back as they burned the rest of the town. Come dawn it would be as though Ashenford had been scrubbed violently from the world.

  Amsel explored the wound in his face with his fingers. The flaps of skin ached from where the silver had cauterised the wounds, burned even as it tore through his face. It would never heal, the accursed metal would see to that, but it did not matter. He would wear his maiming as a badge of honour: the disfiguration he suffered to secure the great prize. It would be worth it. He would only need to feel the ruination to remember what it had bought. Amsel breathed deeply, savouring the stench of slaughter. Across the transom, somewhere within the rock, dust and rubble, a world of forbidden knowledge awaited him. He closed his eyes, as though he could seek it out with his mind, calling to it, or as though the lost prophet’s words could call to him.


  He took a single step, expecting the ground to burn, but it did not. With the temple torn down the earth returned to what it had always been: dirt. It was neither holy nor unholy, hallowed, consecrated, defiled or desecrated. It was dirt. He savoured the shiver of satisfaction that this small part of Ashenford resembled at least the first part of its name, ash.

  The hand of the Sigmarite statue lay amid the red clay tiles of the roof, fractured from the rest of the toppled statue.

  Amsel stepped over it.

  The dead were like rats picking over the building’s corpse, rotten fingers grasping up rubble and hurling it aside as they dug through the ruin in search of his glittering prize.

  Gehan Volk moved up silently behind Amsel. The vampire did not need to hear him, the acolyte reeked. “We have matching wounds,” Amsel said without taking his eyes off the excavation.

  “The testament is somewhere under the rubble. My children will bring it to me, and I shall in turn deliver it up to you as was our arrangement.”

  Amsel clasped his hands together, battling the impatience he felt inside.

  The men lay in a pile, stacked as though for a bonfire, their lifeless bodies broken and twisted, heads lolling slackly, arms bent impossibly back on their elbows and wrists. One by one the women were forced to watch the pile grow, their husbands, lovers, fathers and brothers, robbed of dignity in death as they defecated and died begging for mercy where there was none. Only when the men were dead did the deformed turn on the women.

  This was death: unforgettable, dirty, endless.

  Amsel revelled in it, inhaling it, holding it inside him for an age before letting it leak out of his lungs.

  Behind them flames gathered, red tongues laving at the sky.

  By the time he turned to face Volk once again a look of utter beatification had settled upon his ruined features. This death is a contagion, all of it, inescapable and glorious. “The day is ours, the cattle crushed. This is the world as it was meant to be, but,” he mused, thoughtfully, “death begets more death. That is the way of it. The living will come, they will hunt us and we will run from sunrise to sunrise with them dogging our every step. The sun will burn us and silver brand us, and though we live an eternity the short-lived ones will hound us and stake us, chop our hearts out and burn us. They will always be there, hunting us, and thus the death we wrought today will return to us twofold as the children of these wretched few seek us out.”