The Autumn of the Living Dead, 2532
Radu the Forsaken’s long fingers trembled as they caressed the wooden case.
He crouched beside the wound in the earth that led down to the hidden temple, the dead girl cast off to the side. Amsel lurked at his shoulder. The pair were removed from the slaughter, but not by much.
The box was a simple thing, devoid of ostentatious decoration. Bronze hinges clasped the casket and where the keyhole ought to have been a small face had been rendered in the wood. He let his fingers linger over the elaborately carved features, feeling out the hatred in its expression. The craftsman’s mastery was evident in every embellishment. He felt the coils of gorgonian locks that cascaded from the face, probing for the trigger that would release the mechanism and spring open the lock.
“We must away from this place,” Amsel said, staring down covetously at the wooden casket.
“Yes, yes, yes,” the necrarch agreed without looking away from the engraved face.
“We have what we came for,” Amsel pressed.
“Yes,” Radu crooned, though not in answer to his thrall’s urging. The thrill of sheer raw power was palpable. Whatever the casket contained hungered to be free. He felt its siren call sing through the tainted blood in his veins.
He traced the line of the nose, and then, understanding, placed his thumbs on either side and put out the carving’s eyes.
The spring-loaded mechanism responded with a soft click as the clasp released and the lid opened.
Radu opened the box.
“Oh, yes, yes, yes.”
Within, set in a bed of red velvet, sat the withered stump of a hand. The flesh had shrivelled tightly around the bone but rot had not touched the hand. He reached into the casket to hold it and felt its coolness. The fingers twitched in response to his touch. The hand was still alive. All thoughts of treachery slipped from his mind as he clasped the hand, hungry for all that the relic might give him.
The necrarch whispered reverently, daring to speak the name of the dread lord. Could it truly be a treasure of the Great Necromancer? He laughed maniacally as he thrilled to the desiccated touch of the hand. Such a treasure could not literally be the flesh of the necromancer, but it was almost certainly an artefact imbued with his might.
“We must go,” the voice said, like a bee buzzing irritably around within his head, refusing to leave him alone.
The dead fled the field, leaving the living to cope with their losses.
Of the three hundred and sixty butchers, bakers and farmhands over three hundred had fallen. Beside them lay more than half of the militia, another three score nursing life-threatening wounds, fifty more carrying light wounds. Metzger had lost twenty of the Silberklinge and another thirty were sorely wounded. The town had faired little better. All the streets around the outskirts, from Metzger’s fortified manse in to the well at Grimminhagen’s centre, resembled rock dust and rubble. The bracing walls had come down spilling terracotta roofing slates all over the ground like the blood of the buildings.
Bonifaz and Cort joined the militia men in gathering corpses while Wolfgang Fehr joined the rest scavenging for the huge funeral pyre. The necessity sickened Bohme; the dead deserved the rest of the funeral gardens or Morr but given the nature of their enemy burning was the only sure way to prevent the fallen villagers from rising. Fehr had fought well. Indeed, of all of them he had without doubt claimed the prize kill. It had not gone unnoticed among the men that the corpses fell as the link between them and their vile master was severed, nor that it was Fehr’s blade that severed that link. That they rose again as some fresh master claimed their servitude did not matter; it demonstrated that the links between the creatures and their puppets could be broken. That was enough.
Every able-bodied man moved with purpose, aiding in the disposal of the dead, dragging corpses to the huge flames and casting them into the fire. There was no time for grief. The aged priest of Morr stood beside the pyre offering nameless blessings as the dead flesh spat and hissed in the flames.
The eight sisters from the Shallyan temple moved with purpose, summoned by the men as they found more and more terribly wounded survivors out on the killing grounds. There was a reassuring grace about the women as they tended the wounded and the dying. How many lives they saved in that first hour it was impossible to say, but their presence was enough to cast a calm across the field, their touch taking away more pains than any small town ought to bear.
Removed slightly from the suffering, in what had until hours before been the town square, Bohme sat with Metzger. Now the tavern and the smithy were reduced to smouldering timbers and gutted wattle. He sat with his back against the well, and did not leave the old knight’s side. On the surface Metzger’s wounds looked fearsome, but none were more than superficial. There was plenty of blood, but when it was washed away the cuts did not go deep. Metzger had suffered much worse in his day without so much as a complaint. On another day he would have sat against a tree and stitched the worst of the cuts himself.
He looked grey, his skin waxen.
Bohme touched his fingers to the thick vein in his friend’s neck, feeling out the weak, erratic pulse.
“Your heart always was too big, old man,” he muttered, shaking his head. Seeing the truth like this frightened Kaspar Bohme more than all of the assembled dead had. Age was the one foe that neither skill nor stubbornness could match, and whether they admitted it or not, they were all succumbing to its silent assault.
He did what he could to make Metzger comfortable.
He sat beside his friend deep into the night. The funeral fire blazed high, the huge light marking the human cost of the raid. The survivors were subdued, dealing with their losses alone. No one was left untouched. The worst of it was that most of the corpses on the pyres belonged to the very young, the women, or the elderly: people who on any other day would never have been called upon to fight. They had died protecting their homes. Their sacrifice would not be forgotten, not by those left behind. In time the tragedy would serve to unite them, but this close to it they had no wish to share their grief while it was still so personal.
None of them wanted to hunt down the enemy.
The fight had passed beyond their walls. It was someone else’s now. The selfishness of it counted for nothing.
The woman, Sara, walked amid the survivors, moving in the light of the pyre. She held the babe Lammert close to her chest as she sang an elegiac farewell to the fallen. Her voice was beautiful and heartbreaking. Her lament touched the souls of those left behind, lifting them up. Tears streaked her cheeks, reflecting silver in the firelight. Though she hardly knew these people, her grief was pure. It was the grief for her own, the friends and lovers that had joined Morr today and on every other day that the dead had marched across the land.
Bohme closed his eyes, losing himself to her voice.
When he opened them again he saw another woman he knew well, Rosamund, Metzger’s housekeeper. Like Sara her face was streaked with tears, though they were of a more intimate grief than the girl’s. She knelt close to the huge pyre, Fitch’s unmoving body in her arms. Her man had been one of the first to fall, running recklessly in to the thick of it with a rusted sword that had never been swung in all its years of corrosion. It broke his heart to see a good woman like Rosamund suffering so, but they were all suffering. To highlight the grief of one was to diminish the grief of many.
Beside him, Metzger groaned. He was awake but weak as a lamb as he struggled stubbornly to sit. His face twisted in pain and Bohme had to catch him before he fell once more. Metzger tried weakly to shrug off his helping hand. “Rest a while longer, Reinhardt. There is nothing to be gained by killing yourself now.”
“No,” Metzger said, his voice was weaker than he had ever heard it. “I need to know. I need… to see.”
“You can see later, my friend, and what is to know? We are alive, that has to be enough,” Bohme said, not unkindly.
“Just help me up, Kaspar. I nee
d to be seen.” His words broke away as another jag of pain speared into his chest.
“You always were a stubborn old fool,” Bohme muttered, shaking his head.
“These are my people. They look to me.”
“And what good will it do them to see you like this? By rights you ought to be dead. You need your bed.”
“Then I still need to rise,” Metzger grunted, levering himself up onto his elbow in the dirt. “So you might as well help me up now rather than later.”
Together they walked slowly through the ruin of their town, Metzger leaning on Bohme for support. It was a difficult journey, and not merely because of the physical pain. The enormous pyre burned against the bruise-purple sky. Loved ones knelt before the fire, heads bowed in farewell as the sweet stench of burning flesh filled the air. He imagined he could see their ghosts in the flame, watching over those left behind and sharing their grief at the sudden parting.
Metzger made a point of standing beside each mourner, sharing a prayer and sad words with each and every one of the surviving townsfolk. Bohme could see the grief reflected in their eyes but knew in the days to come that they would draw some small comfort from the fact that he had come to them. He laid a reassuring hand on the cooper Dierdrich’s shoulder, making a whispered promise to the old man to avenge his three fallen sons, and hugged the woman he recognised as the tanner’s wife, promising that he would not rest until her husband’s and daughter’s killer gave restitution. It was the same with others whose names he did not know but whose faces he recognised: the same moment of intimacy accompanied by the same solemn pledge. They loved him for it. They always had. He was not some distant fighter or stoic protector. He was a man, like them, not some colossus, not some mythic hero. He was one of them, he lived among them, he called them friends and never hid from the demands of their lives. That was the kind of man he was, a man who grieved alongside them for all that the town had lost.
But Bohme knew he was in no state to make good on those promises.
Worse, he would probably kill himself trying.
The woman, Sara, saw them standing beside the fire as Fitch’s corpse was fed to the flames, and came to join them. She was no longer singing. Her shawl wrapped tight around her throat she looked as though she had lived a thousand lives in one night. She laid a hand on Rosamund’s shoulder. The older woman looked up, red-eyed. She had no smile of greeting. There was no need for words between any of them. The women stood awhile in silence, sharing the company of grief. Reluctant to intrude, Bohme lost himself in the dance of the flames. The orange tongues of fire took on an almost hypnotic quality as they cavorted to the chill wind. In the hush that accompanied the aftermath of battle, voices carried; they said the same things with different words. That, too, was the nature of grief, it owned a vocabulary of its own. The wind was a welcome reminder of mortality. It cut through the steel rings of his armour more effectively than any sword, driving its ice into his aching muscles even as the death fires warmed his face. That duality of fire and ice was in itself the paradox of survival, that the body was capable of both, simultaneously, and both to the point of extremis.
There was something else that kept the distance around Kaspar Bohme: the difference between him and Reinhardt Metzger. Where Metzger was adored by his people Bohme and the other Silberklinge were respected. There was no intimacy in respect. They did not share his grief, or more accurately he did not share theirs. He was in the town but he had never been of it. In that he was alone.
“What did they want here?” Rosamund finally asked the question that Bohme had asked himself a hundred times in the last hour, and even though he had seen the miller’s girl delivering the wooden box from the bowels of the earth, he had no understanding of the answer.
Metzger shook his head. “Truthfully, I do not know.”
“I do,” the boy, Fehr, said. Bohme had not heard him approach. He looked at Fehr, seeing the man he could become if this war did not kill him first. There was a strength to the boy that would serve him well in the days to come. He showed no outward signs of grief despite the fact that the pyres burned every last member of his family. Of all the survivors he had almost certainly suffered most.
“Tell us, lad,” Metzger said.
“The box,” Wolfgang Fehr said, as though it made all the sense in the world.
“And what box might that be?”
“Jessika brought it up out of the ground. The creature killed her for it.”
The lad was right; it had all been about the contents of that box. The realisation set a chill in Bohme’s heart. “Name it for what it was, Fehr. There is power in a name, but there is also power in knowing it. Name the creature. Calling it anything else gives it a hold over you,” Kaspar Bohme said. “Claim the creature.”
Fehr looked at him, stared. The young man’s dark eyes seemed to shift from hues of brown to silver-grey and back under the Silberklinge’s scrutiny. It was a subtle shift, a trick of the firelight.
“The vampire killed her for it,” Fehr said, naming the necrarch for the bloodsucking daemon it was. Bohme nodded. “I couldn’t reach her in time,” the young man said, his voice breaking as he relived the memory of it. Bohme had seen it all, but hadn’t seen it true. Sometimes his misunderstanding of human nature frightened him. She might have been the miller’s girl but she was also Fehr’s sweetheart, that much was obvious now.
“If it wasn’t for you, lad, none of us would be here now,” Bohme said, knowing that the truth was no consolation.
“Show me where it happened,” Metzger said, holding out a hand for Wolfgang Fehr to lead the way to the tear in the belly of the earth.
They walked through the rutted ground, picking a path through discarded swords and fallen shields, kicking aside rotted bones as they splashed unseeing through puddles of blood. They crossed the killing ground in silence, humbled by the proximity of the fallen, towards the blacker rent in the earth.
The dead had left the ground blackened, the grasses withered beneath their feet. Bohme knew the place for what it must once have been. The scorched outline of the ancient temple’s foundations stood out starkly against the ruined grass. The blight affected stalk and stem of grass right up to the ruin’s perimeter and beyond that mark the protection of the hallowed ground could not have been more obvious: the grass remained lush, green and unsullied by the dead. It was as though nature had rebuilt the ancient foundation. None of them doubted for a moment the miracle of what they saw.
Fehr crouched down a little way to the side of the hole, resting his palm flat to the ground. Bohme recognised the spot as where the girl had fallen. The young man lifted his fingers to his nose and sniffed them as though trying to breathe her last moments of life into him. When he looked up, tears streaked his dirt and bloodstained cheeks. He did not need to say what had happened. They understood.
“No!” Bohme argued vehemently. “Enough of this foolishness, old man. You are not well enough.”
“You expect me to lie abed like some cripple?” Reinhardt Metzger roared back, anger giving him strength, but even as it fired his blood it betrayed him, sending a sunburst of pain across the back of his eyes. He winced, knowing his temper had proved his friend’s point. He was far from fit enough to lead a crusade against the monsters that had ravaged his home, despite all of the midnight promises he had made to the bereaved.
The po-faced Sister of Shallya left the room. The men had been arguing as though the healer were not even there. She had tended Metzger in his private chamber for three days, feeding him with tisanes and changing the poultices on his wounds.
The curtains stirred as the draught found its way through the cracks in the window frame.
“That is exactly what I expect you to do. Use your head. We cannot do this alone. We are not invincible anymore, my friend. Age has slowed our blades and weakened our hearts.”
“Then what do you suggest?” Metzger asked reaching across his chest to massage his side with his right hand. It was an unconsc
ious tell that betrayed the continued pain his heart gave him.
“We send out runners and call in every favour we believe we are owed and beg more from those we call friends and neighbours. We petition for the state troops to join us, we continue to train the lads we have hear, bolster the militia, hell, we finance the recruitment of knights and mercenary soldiers from our own pockets where necessary, but we gather ourselves an army. Talk to Sternhauer, have the Graf dip into his bottomless well of gold and bring us the money we need if we are to protect his people. This is a fight for younger blood, my friend, and older heads. It is time we admitted too that neither one of us is the hot-headed youth we once were.”
“I hear you,” Metzger said, the fight leaving him. Bohme was right, just as he always was.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Last of the Great Liars
Grimminhagen, in the shadow of the Drakwald Forest, Middenland
The Autumn of the Living Dead, 2532
Days abed turned into weeks, as Metzger gathered his strength.
The po-faced sister returned with her vile tasting tisanes and took away the soured poultices. There was nothing sweet in her demeanour but she most certainly had a healing touch.
There were mornings when Metzger awoke sure that he had died in the night and woken in the underworld, a prisoner of Morr, but then the pain bit and he knew that he was still alive. It was funny how the same thing that threatened to kill him became the thing that told him he was alive. It was an exquisite irony.
The men mustered. He sat in a wicker chair, watching from the window as Bonifaz and Cort put them through their drills, driving them hard. No one complained, the deaths of their friends and neighbours still fresh in their minds. The sound of swords rang out from dusk till dawn for a month and the rhythm of the drills changed, hinting at the growing proficiency of the men down on the parade grounds. Bonifaz visited night after night, the sweat still clinging to him as he sank into the chair opposite to report the day’s news. “We’ll make fighters of them yet,” was the most common conversation starter between them, followed almost always by, “Six men arrived from Merz,” or “Five more came in from Genz,” or some such.
Warhammer - Curse of the Necrarch Page 15