Warhammer - Curse of the Necrarch

by Steven Savile

  They were building a small army one soldier at a time.

  It wasn’t enough, the old knight knew. He had seen the things the enemy could do, raising swords from the grave and turning the casualties back on their friends before their blood had stopped gouting from their wounds. It was a perversion but it was only one of many that the enemy was capable of. Bohme was right: the enemy could not hide. The earth revolted at their vile presence, all of its vitality touched by the blight of unlife as the dead walked. In their wake they left a path of disease and decay.

  More than anything, he felt helpless. It galled him to have to beg for aid, his own sword arm not strong enough to do what was necessary. He missed watching the goshawk fly. He missed the sweat of honest toil training side by side with his men. He missed being able to trust his own flesh.

  “Enough with the self pity, old man,” Metzger berated himself. He knew he had reached a fork in the road. Stay in the chair and slip into dotage as a feeble old man, or push himself to his feet, get dressed and get back to whatever little life his heart permitted. Better to die defending what he loved than live like a dotard swaddled in blankets and drinking pulped vegetables with a wooden spoon listening to some well-meaning Shallyan nursemaid cluck and croon about what a good boy he was. That wasn’t the death he had imagined for himself, certainly not the one he had fought for time and again. He had earned the right to something better.

  With that fixed firmly in his mind, Metzger pushed himself out of the chair.

  “There is only so much coddling a grown man can take,” he told Sara as he saw her on the stairs. The woman smiled and hugged him. The warmth in her eyes shamed him. He had done nothing to deserve it. He almost told her as much but stopped himself, realising it was self-pity and anger that fuelled the thought, not the truth. He walked slowly, favouring his left side still, out onto the parade ground. For a minute or more the drill continued, the men forcing themselves through the motions. Again he was struck by the notion that watching them was like watching an elaborate dance. There was most certainly grace to the movements and rhythm to the footwork. He smiled as Cort rapped one of the young men on the knuckles with the flat of his blade; it stung his fingers open and sent the sword tumbling. Cort shook his head as though despairing. It was all an act, Metzger knew. The man was incredibly proud of the leaps and bounds his recruits had made. In a few months they had gone from farm boys and stable hands to soldiers, and watching them now, Metzger knew that was exactly what they were.

  They have just enough skill to get themselves killed following an old man to his doom, he thought bitterly.

  Then they saw him and one by one the swords ceased swinging. Fehr started it, sheathing his blade and clapping slowly, and it was taken up by the others until every man on the field was applauding him. Someone else cheered, and suddenly more cheering rang out.

  “Come to join us?” Bonifaz said.

  “Not today, my friend. I’m just stretching my legs,” he said. Then with a wink he added, “We’ve got a long ride ahead of us if we are going to hunt down the whoresons responsible for all this senseless death.” He swept his arm out around him, encompassing the silence that had until recently been a bustling town. That was in its own way the worst of it, the lingering emptiness where a town once stood. There was no laughter or cheering now, as the reminder sank in.

  “We’re ready,” one of the men, Sirus, pledged. Until two months ago he had been apprenticed to the tallow maker, now he was ready to die with a sword in his hand to fulfil the demands of honour.

  Metzger nodded. “I know you are lad, I have been watching you from my window. You do not think I would leave the comfort of that damned chair if I didn’t know that all of you were ready? Of course I know lad, that’s why I came down, to show you that I was ready to join you. There will be blood, my friends, and there will be a reckoning.”

  “Aye,” Sirus said, nodding thoughtfully. “I count on sending ten to the flaming pit for each one they robbed me of.”

  “They robbed me of an entire town,” Metzger said, meaning it. “I’ll match you on that ten, lad, and throw in a few more for the hell of it.”

  As the night wore on the conversation turned to the practicalities of what amounted to a crusade. Metzger summoned Bettan Moyle, wanting his wisdom. He joined them in Metzger’s ill-lit study. While Cort and Bonifaz and to an extent Bohme were all veterans there were aspects of fighting that remained almost magical to them. Not so for Moyle. The man had served as Metzger’s quartermaster for the best part of a decade and knew the logistics of combat inside out.

  “It is more than merely an understanding of maps,” Moyle said, marking out an area of ground with the sweep of his finger. “On any given day this area here could be relied upon for foraging, but given what we know of our enemy we cannot rely on the land to support us. Instead we need to look after our own.”

  There was a frightening truth to that simple statement. Metzger recalled the blackened soil and withered grasses. With the enemy’s passage blighting the land the ramifications would bleed over into so many other areas they took for granted. There would be no feed for the mountain goats or sheep and no grain crop. They could not simply forage for survival as they moved deeper and deeper into enemy territory. They needed to read the world and make appropriate countermeasures to ensure survival, otherwise they were as good as beaten before they even saddled up.

  Moyle had a way of looking at lines on paper and reading into them things that no one else seemed able to see. They had several maps laid out between them, and Bonifaz had marked off the routes between the watchtowers that had failed to report, plotting in reverse the advance of the dead. It was nothing more than supposition, Metzger knew, but they had to come from somewhere. They did not simply crawl out of the ground in the middle of nowhere; there had to be a zero point, an origin. He feared he knew all to well where that point was.

  “It’s folly,” Moyle said, not for the first time that night. “Is this what you intend for your legacy, Reinhardt? You want people to remember your army that starved to death?”

  “I made a promise to them,” Metzger said, his voice barely carrying across the maps. “I intend to keep it or die trying.”

  What was he supposed to say? That it was a campaign of punishment? Revenge against the vampire for destroying the lives of the people under his protection? That he felt the unbearable weight of failure on his shoulders and needed to make amends? Or should he say that he feared the beast would return? They would believe the second, but there was no truth in it. He wanted to make the beast pay. He wanted to recover his faith in his own body. He wanted to drive the beast back to its lair, and something more, something he dreaded giving substance to by forming it as a thought: an ancient shame carried close to his heart.

  Moyle shook his head. “Be reasonable, man. The numbers don’t add up. An army marches three leagues a day at best. It isn’t like you or me going for a stroll. An army is only as fast as its slowest wagon unless you want to break the supply lines. You’ve marshalled almost seven hundred fresh fighters, knights, halberdiers, infantry spearmen, and rank and file militia, but you know what? It doesn’t matter how skilled they are, they all eat the same amount of bread and meat at the end of the day. So that’s more than a thousand hungry men, three hundred of them on horseback. Forgetting the animals, that’s a thousand mouths to feed, every day for as long as it takes to march to their doom and back. You know, if you are intending to come back?”

  “Don’t be facetious, Bettan, it doesn’t suit you.”

  “Fine,” the quartermaster said, “even marching for a week means providing forty-two thousand meals: three meals a day out, the same back. You can discount probably sixty per cent of the victuals needed for the return journey, putting them down to casualties. Like it or not, people die in war. So even if we are only looking at thirty thousand individual meals we are talking enough coin to drain your treasury dry, never mind the logistics of trying to transport that much food
.”

  “You paint a grim picture, my friend.”

  “That’s because it will be bloody grim, and make no mistake about it. We aren’t talking sweet meats and delicacies either, we are just talking the staples, grain for bread and the like. If you don’t keep their bellies full come the time to fight you’ll have ranks of hungry, dizzy, tired men barely able to swing their swords.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Stay at home,” the quartermaster said earnestly. “You don’t have the resources for this war, not if you expect to provision an army.”

  “Yet without an army we cannot hope to prevail,” Metzger said. “You saw them, Bettan.”

  The quartermaster nodded. “I’m not denying it, but is vengeance worth a winter of privation for those left behind? If we emptied the grain silos and culled the cattle to dry the meat we’d barely have enough to see the town through to the turn of the season. Forget the fact that we would be without milk and eggs and other stuff. Take that to mount your crusade and you are killing those left behind as mercilessly as the bastards who set this whole sorry mess in motion.”

  “But if it could be done?” Metzger pressed, “How would you do it?”

  “There are so many practicalities to think about. Food aside for a moment, think about the horses: three hundred mounts. It’s a safe assumption that each one will throw at least one shoe before journey’s end, and a lame horse is no good to anyone, so you need three hundred shoes hammered out for starters. Then there is cooking pots and pans. Seven hundred mouths take a lot of feeding. How many blacksmith’s are there in town?”

  “You know very well there is only one forge, my friend.”

  “And you know how long it takes Mac to hammer out a single shoe. Even with the fires burning day and night it will be a week before he has made even half the shoes, and that is not allowing him to sleep. With the cook pots it will be a month before he’s done, and then you need someone to fit the horse shoes and patch the pots, sharpen the swords and hammer out the shields, so you have to find a way to take him and his fires with you. You know all of this, Metzger. It isn’t as if you’ve never been to war. You know that even the best laid plans will go awry because of boggy ground or some other unforeseen nonsense.”

  “Yet still I need to find a way to make this happen. There will be a reckoning for the dead of Grimminhagen, mark my words.”

  With the quartermaster gone, Kaspar Bohme took his friend aside.

  He had watched Metzger for weeks. At first he had thought the old man was coming to terms with what had happened, but now he was not so sure. A different thought had wormed its way into the back of his mind and refused to be shifted.

  “Look me in the eye and tell me you intend coming back,” he said, grabbing Metzger by the shoulders and forcing him to meet his gaze.

  Without pausing, the old fighter said, “I have every intention of coming home.”

  “Now I know you are lying,” Bohme said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Swords Against the Damned

  On the March, Deep in the Heart of the Howling Hills, Middenland

  The Winter of the Faithless, 2532

  They marched into the teeth of the storm.

  Aside from his loyal Silberklinge Metzger had recruited thirty knights from the Order of the Twin-Tailed Comet, who rode at the rear of his force while Metzger and his Silberklinge rode alongside the foot soldiers who marched eight and ten abreast where the road allowed.

  The winds howled through the hills, their mournful cries making it painfully obvious to every one of the men how the rocky peaks had got their name. It was a harsh landscape made harsher by the brutality of the weather. Storm clouds gathered overhead. The infantry carried the banner of the Sternhauer family, the pennon matted with the dirt of the road. It had been a long time since they had sampled the creature comforts of home. These simple men were not fighting for money or honour, but were miles from home for the most basic of reasons: love. They were not knights who had sworn oaths to protect the weak, they were men who had lost something more precious than honour. They had lost one of the most basic human rights, that of the sanctity of hearth and home, the safety of their loved ones. So they had given a vow to Metzger; they would follow him to the end of this road he was on and they would fight, and they would slay the vampire and its horde and restore the illusion that all was well with the world and that their four walls were protection enough.

  Metzger had not made it easy for them to make their pledge. He had assembled them on the parade grounds and spelled out the hardships they were volunteering for, making a point of facing each man eye to eye and holding them to the same need for reckoning that drove him. Months on, hungry, cold and with the threat of snow heavy in the sky not one of the men doubted their promise. They remembered the parade grounds and Reinhardt Metzger’s words. It wasn’t that he had inspired them, or even roused them to a righteous fury. He had simply reminded them. It had been enough then and it was enough now.

  The difference between Metzger and Ableron, the Preceptor of the Twin-Tailed Comet, could not have been starker. Ableron was cold and disdainful of the infantry, preferring the company of his own men. He rode his charger, his armour immaculate, even his hair groomed and chin shaven while Metzger let his beard grow out and did not care that mud stained his cloak. Metzger understood the more basic needs of the raw untested troops under his command. They might have been fighting for a cause, they might have believed that Sigmar walked with them towards righteousness, but that didn’t mean they did not need a connection with their leader, that they needed to know he was one of them, willing to get mud as well as blood on his hands, and that they were more than merely cannon-fodder in the game of knights.

  They had ridden the paths of the dead, following them back through the ruins of ghost towns and the broken stones of homesteads and farms, every day encountering another reminder of the human cost of this war. Their path was laid out plainly for them: the dead had left their blight all across the land, withering crops down to rotten kernels of corn and husks of wheat, brown grasses and withered trees.

  There could be no mistaking the sickness they wrought upon the land, nor the cost of their passage. The rolling hills transformed into wind-blasted places bereft of shelter, the valleys clogged with fog and the echoes of lost souls. Riding down into the fog was never less than chilling, the trailing wisps conjuring spectres, each one wearing the face of one of the fallen. There was not a man among them who did not shed a tear for the lost somewhere along the road, reminded by the world of what they had once had. The ruined towns were worse than the ancient burial mounds because their ghosts were newer and more intimately connected to the soldiers’ crusade. Each abandoned house served as a reminder of Grimminhagen.

  It wasn’t just that they found empty buildings, for they found so much more in the way of cruelty, but not once did they find a corpse.

  The dead took the dead with them.

  Metzger was stronger, his recovery plain in his face. He had taken to flexing his left hand, clenching his fist again and again, and curling the arm to build up the muscle through sheer repetition. He did not talk to the other men much, leaving the bonhomie to Bohme. The irony of that turnabout amused Kaspar. He had never considered himself a man that others would die for, that had always been Metzger’s department. It was Metzger who commanded the loyalties and admiration of the men and it was Metzger who inspired them and made them — want to die for him. They did not like Bohme, no matter how much he might have wanted it to be otherwise. They respected him for his skills and they admired him for the honesty of his tongue and for the truth that he would lay his life down for any one of them unquestioningly, but there was not a man among them who actually liked Bohme.

  He did not need them to like him. He only needed them to listen and act on his command.

  So this was new to him, riding side by side with knights and infantry, getting to know their names, drilling with them on the long road. He
walked amid the rank and file, and though he could not know them all, he took the time to let those he recognised know that he did so, and that they were every bit as important to the animal that was their army as any knight. It happened slowly, without him realising, but it happened, nonetheless. The men began to look to him, to seek out his experience, and perhaps even to like him a little.

  The thought of it frightened Bohme. He had never needed friends, nor sought them, especially not from among the ranks of the doomed.

  “How do you do it?” he asked Metzger. The pair rode at the front, between the outriders who scouted a mile further down the road and the main body of their tired army that lagged a mile behind. They needed this alone time.

  The old man looked at him slyly. “What?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, you old fox. How do you do it? How do you cope with knowing that they all think of you as a friend?”

  “I am their friend, Kaspar. They need to believe that if I am going to ask them to die for me, don’t you think?”

  “Bollocks to that. You’re twisting my words around. You know very well what I mean.”

  “Probably,” Metzger said. Kaspar noticed that he still favoured his left side slightly. He had seen men before who had lost all movement and mobility down one side of their body after some particularly vile humour attacked their brain. His friend clenched his fist around the reins. That simple gesture was in itself an ever-present reminder of their mortality.

  “So how do you do it? How do you cope with knowing that you are leading half of these men who think of you as their friend to their deaths?”