Warhammer - Curse of the Necrarch

by Steven Savile

  Fehr stumbled forward, struggling against the ferocity of the storm. The ghosts of the brutal battle burned bright in his mind, resurrected with each fresh lightning strike. The wind and rain battered him, biting at his face, drawing the heat out of his blood and through his stinging skin as it cut him. He shivered, drawing his damaged arm in closer to his stomach protectively.

  The lightning revealed the high towers of the ruin, and it was very much a ruin. Each one crumbled as though the stones were being reclaimed by the island it rested on. It looked like no place he had ever seen outside of nightmare, with leering gargoyles and daemonic faces carved into the broken stones. Withered trees shrived of life bordered one side of the path down to the ruined castle, and before it lay a huge lake in which it seemed to stand. There was no drawbridge or any other means of reaching it that he could see. As he neared the afterglow of the lightning made it appear as though the stone creatures writhed and twisted, the stark shadows adding to the nightmarish quality of the vision. It took Fehr a moment longer to realise that there were subtle movements within the stones, and a moment more to understand that the worms of motion he thought he saw were actually a madness of ravens swarming in and out of the cracks between the stones.

  Fehr felt eyes watching him as he neared and tried to convince himself that the only spies looking down on him were avian. He didn’t believe his own lies for a minute.

  He stood at the water’s edge. The great ruin loomed over him, full of menace in the storm. He could not hope to cross the water with the rain lashing down in torrents. Fehr stared across the churning lake to the castle gates. But for another jag of lightning he would have missed it: a path led back from the gates, running close to the wall and then around the lake. It was well hidden, and almost invisible from this side of the water, making it a deceptive defence. He followed the line of the path with his eyes as it skirted the lake on the furthest edge and then followed the line of trees. Fehr stumbled towards the trees, and halfway there saw that the illusion of the water was even more cunning: the lake was a naturally formed horseshoe of water. Despite how it appeared from the pass, the ruined castle was not actually on an island within the lake but set behind its bowed waters.

  He stumbled on, dragging himself around the lake. Twice he needed to rest, first using the trees and then the curtain wall for support, before he reached the gate.

  The arch of stone over the huge ironwood doors of the castle offered some slight protection from the elements. Another fork of lightning and crescendo of thunder lit the doors in stark relief. They were banded by black iron and deeply pitted with woodworm. Like the rest of the ruin the doors retained little of the integrity they had had when they were new. The iron-wood crumbled like sand against his fingertips. Beneath the corruption a hard wood core remained. He pushed at the door but it did not open. Thinking it was just the resistance of disuse, Fehr put his shoulder to the wood and pushed. Still, it did not open. Grunting, he dug his heels in but the door didn’t budge so much as an inch.

  Above, the ravens mocked him, their caws like laughter as they rolled beneath, behind and between the thunder.

  He looked up, and for a moment fancied he saw an ugly face leering back down at him through one of the murder-holes set into the stone arch.

  Fehr hammered on the heavy wood with the flat of his hand.

  The last thing he expected was for it to open, even if only a crack.

  Through the crack he saw a curious bloodshot eye peering out at him.

  “What do you want?” the mouth beneath the eye rasped, chipped and broken teeth turning the question into a single elongated sibilant hiss: Wathdyouthwanth?

  Fehr lifted his damaged arm, showing the gatekeeper that he was helpless. “I need water and bandages first, though I would not refuse shelter from the storm.”

  “There is no place for you here.”

  “Please,” Fehr said, stepping closer to the door. “One night, then I will move on. If I cannot treat the wound it will fester. I am starving, cold and in agony. Have mercy.”

  “That is not our concern, stranger. There is no mercy in this place. Go.”

  “Please,” Fehr repeated. There was nothing else he could say. He held out his arm as though he hoped it might inspire pity in the man behind the door.

  “Come closer,” the gatekeeper said, pressing his face up into the crack, tongue lolling between his yellow teeth as he sniffed the air like some rabid dog. “Who are you boy? And what brings you to our door?”

  “Fehr,” he said.

  “Fear?” The gatekeeper repeated, missing the inflection. “You are fear or fear brought you to our door?”

  “Both,” he answered, honestly.

  “Wait,” the man said, but instead of pushing the door open he slammed it closed in Fehr’s face. He heard the drag of wood on wood as the beam was dropped in place to lock him out. With little other choice, he did as the peculiar gatekeeper had bid him.

  As the minutes stretched into a full hour Fehr sat slumped against the foot of the curtain wall, staring blindly up at the stars. The rain streamed down his face. He found himself picking at the scabrous crust that had hardened over the damage caused by the wolf’s bite. He broke the crust, causing the wound to bleed again.

  Behind the door, Fehr heard the wooden brace being lifted. He scrambled to his feet in time to see the huge door open wide enough for him to walk through. He didn’t. A young girl of perhaps ten or twelve stood in the doorway, her face wrinkled with concentration. She was a pretty young thing. She smiled at him, the warmth in her eyes causing him to smile in return. She was dressed in a simple white shift, the hem blowing around her legs. The rain matted her long blonde hair, causing it to curl into ringlets. He had no idea who she was, or what she was doing awake at such an ungodly hour, or why the gatekeeper would summon her to greet him. None of it made a lick of sense to him. Her feet, he saw, were bare. The right was small and dainty like the rest of the girl, but the left was withered and twisted with the relics of polio or some other heartless disease.

  “Give me your hands,” she said, holding out her own, palms up.

  She was trembling with the cold.

  Fehr crouched down before the girl and offered up both hands, wincing as the skin beneath the scabs stretched painfully. Her fine-boned fingers closed around his and she drew them up towards her face. She placed them on either side of her face. Her cheeks felt like ice to the touch, the cold going deeper than the bone. She smiled reassuringly at him as, with questing fingers, she picked away at the makeshift bandage covering his wounded arm. Before he could stop her the girl dipped her head and licked at the crust of blood. Her face came away slick with crimson.

  She looked up at him with a misplaced longing in her eyes and nodded as she let go of his hands. “You are welcome here, Fear. Your running can stop now. Let Kastell Metz be your new home.”

  He caught himself about to correct her pronunciation of his name and then he realised what she had called this ruin. Kastell Metz? It couldn’t be. Metz was back in Grimminhagen. He had grown up playing in the fields beneath the fortified manse. This place, this ruined fortress, wasn’t Metzger’s ancestral home.

  She opened the door wide and stepped back so that he might see the place she had bid him call home.

  He did not move.

  Fifty rag-clothed wretches gathered on either side of the door, waiting to welcome him. They wore the shadows as protection against ridicule. He saw one-legged women shuffling uncomfortably, pox-addled pickpockets itching, he saw a twisted hunchbacked dwarf of a man, and a woman whose face seemed to have melted beneath an angry flame. They were the wretched, the sick and the twisted. They were monsters to a man, woman and child.

  They moved back to let him through.

  She looked at him strangely, tilting her head. “Do not be afraid, Fear,” she said, misreading his hesitation. “They are like you, refugees here. We do not judge, we do not condemn. We find a little peace in this isolation, and the maste
r is kind to us. You will not be a pariah here. You are one of us. This is where you belong.”

  Here, he thought, as she beckoned him, here among the freaks and killers that took Jessika and destroyed my home. This is where I belong? He wanted to scream at the stupidity of the thought. He belonged nowhere. The dead and the damned had seen to that when they murdered his friends and tore down the walls of his town. He looked at the little girl, lost, it seemed in this macabre flock. His eyes drifted down to her shrivelled foot. She was one of them. Touched by some cruel deformity she had taken refuge behind the crumbling walls of the castle and made herself a new life amid the damned, and that was truly what they were, each and every one of them. Abandoned by mothers and fathers through fear, left out to drown or bundled in sacks and beaten to within an inch of their lives, these wretched souls were, like him, survivors. The similarity, when he thought of it in those terms, rocked him.

  Fehr reached out his ruined arm and the young girl took his hand, leading him into the wilderness of lost souls.

  There was so much pain all around him, and beneath it, an underlying hatred that was shocking in its intensity.

  “Let Messalina see to your wounds and then we will find you a place to sleep.” He nodded, mutely.

  Messalina, it turned out, was a haggard-faced weather-witch who had taken up residence amid the clutter of rags and barrels and other refuse at the far side of the bailey, making her home out of a garish swathe of tent cloth tied to wooden poles. She shuffled forward on her knees as they neared, her grey hair hanging over her eyes in greasy wet ringlets. Her clothing was every bit as garish as her makeshift home, though thick with mud and grime and soaked through from the downpour. She looked up at Fehr, nostrils flared as she sniffed the air like some mindless mutt. “You bleed,” the woman said. “Agnes, you bring a bleeder into our home? Lucky the master is away, lucky indeed. Such temptation, such foolishness.”

  “Fear needs our help, Messalina.”

  “Does he now? Does he indeed? Can Fear not speak for himself?” She rounded on him, her eyes thick with cataracts that made them as grey as her hair.

  “A wolf bite,” he said, holding out his arm again.

  “I can see what it is, Fear. You are a lucky man. Be grateful the Forsaken one is gone chasing treasures. You would not want to meet him with your life exposed so. He does not feed on our kind often, but the temptation of the blood is too much for his sort. He would wring it out of you greedily, make no mistake. Now, sit, sit, let me put water on the fire and find some rags. We will clean and bind the wound before it draws them out of the tower.”

  He did as he was told. All this talk of blood and the Forsaken one feeding swam around sickly in his head. That they were so obsessed with the ramifications of blood told him all he needed to know about the nature of the Forsaken. There were few such predators that feasted on blood, and only one he could imagine making its home in such a noble ruin. Wolfgang Fehr had unwittingly staggered into the lair of the vampire that had damned Grimminhagen. On all sides he was surrounded by the dead and the damned. He did not belong here.

  * * *

  He scratched at the clean bandages.

  For all the filth they lived in, Messalina and her kind were fastidious when it came to cleaning away blood. He pieced it together in his head: they talked in fearful whispers of one they called the Forsaken, a withered ancient as old as the hills where he made his home, cursed to life eternal even though his flesh passed the way of all things, into rot. The Forsaken made his home in the highest tower of the castle, with those few he trusted, and seldom walked among the brethren gathered below. The rest, those wretched souls marked with deformity and sickness were given shelter but this was not their home. They did not enter the keep unless bidden, living instead beneath canvas and other scavenged shelter. They feared the vampire’s wrath for its capriciousness, just as they feared his thirst; neither were predictable.

  The creature spent day and night closeted away in the darkest places of the castle, slaving over mad experiments. Now and then he would wander out into the courtyard and snatch one of them, dragging them back into the damned castle to feed his lust for power and understanding. That constant fear was a small price though for a place of relative safety away from the judgements of mankind.

  The name Fear stuck to him. The little girl, Agnes, was much loved by the damned of Kastell Metz. She drifted amongst them all, claiming hugs as she passed from wretch to wretch, nuzzling up against the ugliest of them. At night she would seek him out to tell him stories of her day. That night, for the first time since his arrival, she spoke of the creatures from the tower, confirming what he had always known: they only came out at night, beneath the shelter of the moon, and save for Amsel, who in his own way cared for them, they kept themselves to themselves. Amsel had gone months before, taking with him the vile Volk, and Radu, the Forsaken, had not been seen for two cycles of the moon. Casimir, remained behind. The night before he had snatched Elis, Agnes’ brother from his cot and dragged him screaming into the tunnels beneath the castle.

  “He is dead now,” the girl said, as though offering an indisputable matter of fact.

  “You don’t know that,” Fehr reasoned, worming a grubby fingernail beneath the wrap of cloth to stab at the wolf bite. The wound was still sore, but it was healing, the flesh pink and healthy.

  “I do,” Agnes said, resting her small hand over his as though he were the one in need of comfort. “I cannot feel him. When I search inside my head Elis isn’t there. He was always there and now he isn’t.”

  He did not know what to say to that so he merely stoked the fire with a twig, causing sparks to dance.

  “Tell me about him,” he said in the end, not taking his eyes away from the flames.

  And she did, for hours, her voice an enthusiastic babble as she took him through her childhood. Fehr closed his eyes as he listened and found that she painted such a vivid image with her words that he could almost see the stories playing out across his mind. Her tone changed though, as her words brought them back to Kastell Metz, and eventually the beast that had killed her brother. “Casimir is a monster,” she whispered, looking around fearfully as she did so, as though she thought the vampire’s thrall might be there now, wreathed in the shadows, listening and waiting to punish her for her loose tongue.

  It occurred to him then that the little girl might well be the answer to his prayers.

  Perhaps, with her help, there was a way for him to go home.

  Over the next span of nights Casimir proved himself a petty and vindictive beast.

  He came out of his tower with the full moon.

  It was the first time Fehr had seen him. The thrall stalked though the shanty town of rags, kicking through the detritus of their wretched lives, hunting for something, or someone. They recoiled from him, pressing their flesh up against the stone curtain wall as though trying to disappear into it, all except Fehr, who sat before his fire picking at his wounded forearm.

  The vampire came up to stand beside him. The fire’s shadows cavorted eerily across the beast’s gaunt face, conjuring life and movement where there were none. “I do not know you, human,” Casimir said, his voice thick with malice.

  “And I do not know you,” Fehr said, surprising himself as he looked into the eyes of the monster. “They call me Fear.”

  “Because you cower from the shadows, no doubt, like the rest of your wretched brethren.”

  “Because I do not know the meaning of the word.”

  “Then you are a particularly stupid mortal,” Casimir said dismissively.

  “Perhaps,” Fehr agreed, “but then I am not the one who shies away from the yellow sun.”

  “Where is the girl child?” The vampire asked, ignoring his barb.

  “How should I know?”

  “I smell her on you. Do not try my patience. I am in no mood for lies.”

  “What do you want with her?”

  “Her brother hungers for her company,” Casi
mir said, eventually.

  Fehr looked up. “Her brother is dead.”

  “Yet still he misses the girl child. Tell me where she is so I might offer them a tearful reunion.”

  “No,” Fehr said.

  “Do you dare defy me?”

  “I think I do, yes.”

  Out of the darkness, Fehr saw others beginning to stand. At first it was just one or two of the freaks but as he refused to hand over Agnes to the vampire more gathered the courage to rise up until, as he said “yes” fifty or more of the rag-clothed damned closed in around his small fire. There was something about the way they looked at the vampire; it was not only fear that burned in the firelight reflection in their eyes, Fehr realised, there was hunger there as well, and need. They looked at the beast and saw something in its dead flesh that they craved. They might have appeared human as they pressed in around the fire, but mentally and spiritually they were bereft. These wretched souls craved the unlife.

  “You,” Casimir said, grabbing the one-legged whore by the scruff of the throat, “where is the girl child? Tell me and I shall spare you your suffering.”

  The woman shook her head.

  The vampire cast her aside violently, his face splitting in a vicious snarl as he rounded on the witch, Messalina. “Where is she, woman?”

  “Where you cannot harm her, Casimir.”

  “I will feast on your wrinkled carcass, hag. Where is she?”

  Messalina stiffened and straightened her back as his filthy claws hooked into the loose-hanging skin at her throat, digging deep.

  “Where is the girl?”

  “I am old, Casimir. I have lived my life and more beside. You do not frighten me. Take me. Let me taste your blood. Make me your servant. Only then will I surrender the girl to you, master.”

  “You lie,” the vampire rasped as his nails opened her throat. He licked his lips, savouring the tang of her ancient blood in the fusty air.