Warhammer - Curse of the Necrarch

by Steven Savile

  He placed the dead heart into the clawed grasp of the necromancer’s withered hand and set it back into the casket. As he closed the lid he saw the heart beat, once, the blood within it pumping out of the torn veins with the convulsion. Radu closed the lid and returned to the body on the slab.

  An hour later the necrarch’s hand ceased trembling as he sewed the last suture, closing the dead man’s ruined chest. He wiped the blood off his hands and whispered the final word of power to complete the resurrection.

  A gust of wind rose up from nowhere. The candles guttered and blew out. In the soft alchemical light, the necrarch saw his scar-faced warrior reborn.

  The corpse that had been Bonifaz the Silberklinge opened its eyes.

  The risen knight was unlike the zombies he had caused to return. That much was apparent immediately. The scar-faced warrior was not some mindless automaton to do the bidding of its master like a marionette. Far from it. In the silence after the corpse of Bonifaz opened its eyes, the necrarch could see the Silberklinge’s final, and greatest fight being played out behind his dilated pupils. The dead man’s glazed eyes roved wildly back and forth, widening with sudden clarity as the essence of the necromantic displaced the consciousness of the hero.

  In that instant, as the last remnants of Bonifaz died, a scream was ripped from the dead man’s lips.

  It was a primal sound, rooted deep in the soul of the human. As it died on the dead man’s lips, so too did the last fragment of his humanity. The creature that stared back at the necrarch was utterly alien.

  The warrior rose from the slab to stand at Radu’s side.

  From its ruined mouth came the simple truth, barely intelligible as words, “I am reborn.”

  “You are my death-bringer, warrior.”

  “Deathbringer,” the dead man said, the word hanging like a promise in the stale air. There was a hollow echo to his voice filled only by the sucking rasp of air. Its eyes blazed with cruel intelligence. Almost hesitantly, the scar-faced warrior touched the rough stitches that drew the mottled skin tight across its chest, and then moved down to the empty sword belt still on his hip. “Sword?”

  Amsel scurried forward carrying two exquisitely-wrought blades like an offering, resting on his palms.

  The dead warrior took them, cutting the air again and again and again, slowly and awkwardly at first, but with gradually more precision before sheathing them. It was a slow, macabre, dance, the steel describing arcs in the air, cutting high towards his throat and low, snaking out to emasculate the necrarch.

  Radu did not flinch.

  “Incredible,” he breathed.

  It was no mere zombie. It was learning how to move again, clumsy and awkward like any shuffling dead at first, but, as though rediscovering its own corpse, the death-bringer was beginning to fill the skin and bones. Risen corpses were puppets to the will of the summoner. They did not practise weapon katas or demand their blades. This death-bringer was more, a zombie yes, but one capable of improvement. Could it eventually become a true warrior of the dead? The thought excited the necrarch.

  “Come,” Radu said to the scar-faced warrior, “I have such delights to show you.”

  The dead knight inclined his head and followed as the vampire scuttled out of the laboratory and deeper down the labyrinthine twists and turns of the tunnels hollowed out beneath Kastell Metz towards the vast chamber of bones beneath the graveyard where Casimir was toiling over the bones of the dragon.

  The thrall looked up guiltily, his hands black with oily residue. He wrung them out like some miser over a pile of coins and shuffled towards Radu.

  “Progress?” The necrarch demanded.

  The thrall shook his head. He was lying; Radu could always tell when his underlings were trying to keep things from him. They thought themselves so clever with their schemes but he knew better than to trust either of them. No, Casimir was hiding something. There had been progress.

  Radu looked over the clutter of the laboratory but could see nothing out of place. In fact everything was exactly as he had left it, weeks ago, meaning that Casimir had been toiling over his own experiments while he was alone, not proceeding with the task Radu had charged him with. It was a petty betrayal but indicative of the thrall’s burning ambition. He thought himself above menial labour. How long before he turned on his master? It was all dependent upon how hungry Casimir was for his freedom. Radu knew the burning need well enough; he had felt it for centuries, chafing beneath the constant battering of Korbhen’s iron fist. He saw it now, smouldering in the thrall’s dead eyes when he looked at him. The question was when, not if.

  “The dragon will be reborn today. I feel it in my blood.”

  “Master?”

  “The song of the dragon, can you not feel it, Casimir? The ancient spirit of the beast is with us today. It is time. The beast will rise.”

  He could see that the thrall had no idea what he meant when he talked about spirits and songs of the blood. Good, let the arrogant fool think there is some secret he has not yet learned. It will serve him well to be humbled a while, Radu thought.

  “What is this?” Casimir asked, looking beyond the necrarch. The scar-faced warrior met the question with a curious tilt of the head, as though it had not yet considered who it had been, or who it had become.

  “I am two. Bonifaz… called bringer of death,” the dead rasped. It was, Radu thought, almost as though the dead warrior had reasoned it out, not merely repeated the words he had heard.

  “Another misfit for your menagerie, master?” the thrall said, though rather than looking at the scar-faced Bonifaz he stared squarely at Amsel beside him.

  “Quite,” Radu said, twisting the implication subtly. “Now, we must apply intellect to our quandary, not brute force. We are not thugs of magic; we are engineers of the arcane. There is dignity to what we do, majesty in what we fashion. So, my greedy brethren, let us bring this damned beast back, shall we?”

  Radu walked across to the wall with its maddening scrawl of arcana and reached out, touching the scratches of a dozen aspects of the formulae. “Yes, yes, yes,” he muttered fiercely, familiarising himself with the challenges of the chant he had begun to unravel so long ago. There was genius in the workings, the daemons buried deep in the details. Quickly he bustled across to the far side of the chamber, pulling open a draw and rooting through the collected miscellany until he found what he was looking for. The necrarch pulled out a candle quite unlike the others already laid out around the room. The black wax was merely a stub compared to the rest but that did not matter. He lit it quickly from one of the others and then moved into the centre of the room, shielding the flame so that it did not blow out. He planted the candle within the jaws of the great skull, allowing the molten wax to dribble on to the bone. Even as the candle burned down it did not burn out. Radu stepped out of the summoning circle, clapping his hands thrice, sharply. On the first clap the candles around the room guttered. On the second they failed, leaving only the soft glow of the alchemical lights. On the third the room was plunged into darkness.

  For a moment there was only the sound of that tiny flickering flame of the black candle stub that he had placed within the dragon’s skull, and then Radu spoke, framing the words of the invocation. Behind him both Amsel and Casimir took up the intonations of the chant. Slowly, inch by inch, the skull rose, the shadow beneath it receding as the lone candle burned on. The pitch of Radu’s voice rose, the intensity of his words heightening as the invocation tripped off his tongue. The sound of bones gnashing against one another filled the darkness, as all across the floor, the skeletal remains of the dragon rose.

  This time the fell beast’s remains did not crumble and collapse. The words of binding held it.

  Radu clapped his hands together thrice more, bringing back the light. As it rushed to swell back into the vast chamber, the light brought with it a sight of unbridled horror: before them, rearing up on the thick bones of its huge hind legs, the skeletal frame of its wings unfurled l
ike some daemonic behemoth, the serpentine zombie rose, stamping and snarling. The creature was giant, the span of its wings bone-tip to bone-tip more than one hundred feet.

  The necrarch did not cease his chant, his reedy voice spiralling until he had enunciated the final syllable of the resurrection ritual, bringing the beast back and binding it to their plane. The bones reacted like rats to some pied piper’s flute, jerking and rising up to fuse with the malignant monstrosity that was the dragon until finally it stood before them in all its vile magnificence.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A Mad Man’s Dreams

  In the Shadow of the Howling Hills, Middenland

  The Spring of Bloated Parasites, 2533

  Wolfgang Fehr ran for days that bled into weeks. He had been travelling in circles, it seemed. Landmarks that he thought were familiar kept being rediscovered as he crested new hills. Lakes and trees all looked the same to him, but could they have actually been the same? He scavenged the barren landscape for berries and roots. They left an ache in his belly that went beyond hunger. He stumbled and staggered, ran on and collapsed, into the marshy ground, on the rocky abutments to the hills, in the shadow of the grim… It all blurred into one single hellish geography of torment.

  He lay on his back looking up at the sun or the stars. They were as unreachable as any other form of freedom.

  He was a fugitive, a deserter, a traitor.

  His life was forfeit.

  He had thought about hunting Metzger’s men. He harboured some vague notion of returning to the ranks of the army he had fled, a hero, buying back his life with the secrets he had learned from Casimir, and delivering the beast and his vile kin up to the swords of the Silberklinge.

  Those thoughts were naive. He was not a child. He knew that it didn’t matter what secrets he brought back to Metzger, there could be no forgiveness for his crime. That was the hopeless truth of war: cowardice was a pandemic. If one ran, others would. He had undermined the cohesion of the crusade, worse he had betrayed his friends.

  Only one fate awaited him if he ever returned.

  So he banished all thoughts of going home.

  His flesh was rank. It had not rained in weeks and the foetid swamp water had bled itself into the weave of his clothes. With the sun up he stank like one of the dead. He found a shallow stream, stripped and jumped in. The shock of icy water was like a fist buried deep in his gut; it doubled him over as he sought to minimise the cold. Even so, he submerged his head beneath the brackish water and came up spluttering for air. He swam for the bank, and then pushed off and swam for the opposite side, forcing his arms and legs to pump hard to get the blood circulating. Then he crawled up to get his clothes and soaked them. With no lye or soap he wasn’t really cleaning them, but anything was better than the rancid reminders of the swamp wafting up from his breeches.

  He crossed the river, and laid his sodden clothes out on the grass. Fehr lay on his back on the riverbank, utter exhaustion bullying him into sleep while the sun dried his skin and his clothes beside him.

  His skin crawled as it contracted beneath the sun’s warmth. His dreams were haunted by faceless creatures stalking him. He awoke sweating, the remnants of the nightmare lingering. He struggled to unravel them before they whispered away to nothing and were forgotten like all the other dreams that had filled his flight from Kastell Metz. There was nothing substantive to hold onto, only subconscious symbolism. It wasn’t difficult to work out what it all meant. He was a lamb in a world of wolves.

  He rolled over onto his stomach and forced himself up. The clothes were still damp, but it didn’t matter. He dressed quickly and set off again, moving towards the lowering sun. He saw curls of smoke in the distance, from a hearth fire. Without thinking about it, his path had carried him back towards people. He berated himself for his carelessness, but the gnawing in his belly kept him walking towards the distant farmhouse.

  He started to run, in his head making up lies to tell the farmers in return for a hot meal and a bed for the night before he moved on. The first thing he noticed as he neared was the disrepair of the fences around the higher fields. The corn husks had been left to rot, unharvested from the year before. In the lower fields emaciated cattle had butted into the planks again and again, splintering them. Nails had torn loose leaving timbers dragging in the dirt. Despite the smoke coming from the chimney breast this was not a working farm. It had been once, but not for the best part of a season, which meant one thing: the farmer had died leaving his widow alone and unable to cope. All the lies he had been brewing fell apart as his mind raced. A widow alone?

  His first thought, and he hated himself for it, was that he could simply take the farmstead. How could a woman hope to stop him? He could snap her with his bare hands and bury her in the dirt of the yard and no one would be any the wiser. The thought was not his own, or at least he needed to believe that it wasn’t. Growing up, Fehr had always believed he would be the hero of his own life. When the time came he would fight and do right by those he loved and who relied upon him. When Jessika had fallen he had fought. He had run in without thinking and buried his sword in the necromancer’s bloated belly, but there had been no heroism in the charge, only grief. Now, instead of doing the right thing he entertained thoughts of butchering a helpless old woman and digging a hole in the yard to hide her remains from the wolves. Those were not the thoughts of a hero.

  “What has happened to me?” he asked aloud. The wind had no answer for him. The sky above still clung to the last shreds of blue before fading into black, the clouds full and soft and white. It was an ordinary sky, unremarkable in any way, just as it was an ordinary wind. Yet it was not an unremarkable day. Far from it, it was the day when that naive dream of heroism died once and for all.

  He walked on through the fields of rotten corn husks and the chewed-out meadow of grazing cows, along the side of a narrow brook, all the while heading towards the curls of smoke.

  The house was small, the white-wash daub of the walls cracked and broken to expose the wattle beneath. A rat scurried across his path, disappearing into the cattle shed. The old shed itself was dilapidated, the doors hanging drunkenly on their hinges. The stench of mulch and rotten hay filled his nostrils. The farmhouse was little better; the windows were covered with grime making it impossible to see in or out, and the timbers around them were riddled with woodworm. He walked around the outside of the house. There were no neighbours within sight or sound of the place, no dogs yapping. The tools he saw lying out had been abandoned for so long that they had begun to rust; the blade of the hand plough was red with the stuff.

  Fehr knocked on the door and waited.

  He heard the woman bustling about behind the door before she opened it. She peered out through the crack as though with myopic eyes, straining to see him in the failing light of the day. Fehr stepped back, making sure that she could see him properly, and smiled what he hoped was a warm, reassuring smile.

  “What do you want? I ain’t got no money, ain’t got no work, neither, so if it’s either of them two, you’d best be on your way,” the woman said. Fehr saw more of her as she opened the door wider. She was not the doddering old maid he had expected, far from it. She was no more than a handful of years older than him, plain but handsome, good breeding stock as his old man would have said.

  He found his voice and said, “I’ll work for food and a bed for the night, nothing more. Put me to use around the farm, mending the fences, tending to the tools. I’ll feed and water the livestock, clean out the cattle shed, whatever you need in return for a meal and a place to lie down out of the elements.”

  “Ain’t got nothin’ that needs doing,” the woman said, crossing her arms defensively over her ample breasts as though that small gesture made her argument irrefutable.

  He stepped forward, and she bristled. He knew then exactly how it must seem to a woman alone, a stranger who despite his recent dip in the river, looked like he had been dragged through a hedge backwards kicking and screa
ming, and was still pungent. He looked like what he was: trouble. He held up his hands. “I’m not looking for trouble, honestly. I don’t even need to set foot in the house. Let me sleep in the barn. I’ll work my hands bloody for a decent bite, and then I’ll move on. Please.”

  “It ain’t fittin’ for a man to beg none,” she said, shaking her head.

  “I am just so tired. Give me a blanket and I’ll sleep in the straw. You won’t be bothered by sight nor sound of me, I promise. I just need a place to sleep.”

  “You’ll work the fields?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Straighten up Klaus’ tools?”

  He nodded, assuming Klaus was her dead husband.

  “For a meal and a blanket?” He nodded again.

  “Yer bad news, ain’t you, boy? You gonna break in here in the middle of the night and cut my throat? That yer plan?”

  Fehr shook his head. “Just a bed,” he said again, but he couldn’t shake the image of a hole dug right beneath his feet.

  “I oughta drive you off my land, you know that, don’t you?”

  “But you won’t,” he said, and it was not a question.

  Fehr slept in the barn that first night, deeply and well for the first few hours, his dreams untroubled. He woke deep in the heart of it, sensing the woman’s presence even though he could see nothing in the darkness but shadows and shapes.

  He lay there silently, his face pressed into the mulch of the rotten straw, breathing deeply and listening to the sound of it swelling to fill his mind.