Warhammer - Curse of the Necrarch

by Steven Savile

  The young man nodded and said, “Does it ever frighten you, sir?”

  Kaspar Bohme looked at the young man. In truth he couldn’t have been much more than a boy, but the last few months had taken their toll on his youth. He carried the grief of the world on his young shoulders. “I’ve had a good life, lad. I went to war before you were born, and I’ve yet to go home. When I was twenty my best friends Maren and Nate died as they stood on either side of me. When I was twenty-three it was Horst and Mort. When I was twenty-four it was Lucan. When I was twenty-six it was Felix and Kurt and Darius. I’ve lost more friends than most men have in a life-time. If I die tomorrow they’ll be there waiting to tell me how much better swordsmen they were, or better with the women or funnier, or more attractive, or simply how much more they could drink than me. I’ll be back among the easy camaraderie of friends. That doesn’t seem so bad to me.”

  “Do you really believe that? That the dead will be waiting for us when we fall?”

  “No,” Bohme admitted, “but it makes a pleasant thought, doesn’t it?”

  The young man nodded but there was disappointment in his eyes.

  “What’s your name, soldier?”

  “Kane.”

  “Well, Kane, when the fighting begins, stick by my side, eh? A soldier needs a man he can trust watching his back and I can’t think of anyone else here I’d rather have looking out for me.”

  “Sir,” the young man said, “but what if?”

  “There are no what ifs, soldier. We deal in absolutes, your sword and my sword. That’s what the world comes down to in the end.” He patted the young soldier on the shoulder and rode to the back of the line, where Metzger was riding with Cort.

  “You were right,” he told the old man, without telling him what about.

  They dragged Fehr along in chains like a dog.

  When the others ate, he was given a cup of water. When the others drank he was left to go thirsty. He neither begged for more nor complained.

  They no longer followed any roads, trudging across the country. The remnants of Ableron’s Twin-Tailed Comets struggled with their mounts. None of the horses of the Silberklinge survived. The animals had been put down for their meat when they started to founder in the impossible terrain, tearing fetlocks and splintering hooves, nature humbling the mighty animals. Their deaths brought the men more time in their quest. The ground beneath their feet turned to marsh, bogging them down. Fehr constantly looked around, trying to get his bearings. He knew they were close to the castle of the damned and deformed, that the marsh would eventually cede to the tidal lake, but memory was a tricky thing at the best of times and one strand of trees and outcropping of rock looked much like another with someone whipping your back.

  “Where now?” Cort rasped, kicking him forward.

  Fehr shook his head, trying to clear it. The chain chafed at his neck, burning into his skin where it rubbed. He stumbled forward on his hands and knees. Then he caught the scent of the freaks, so close, over the next rise, and wondered why the others couldn’t smell it. It reeked.

  “This way,” he said, pointing towards the lightning-shattered peak two miles distant across the boggy plain. “Over the ridge there is a body of water, and beyond that, the castle.”

  “So we are close?”

  Fehr nodded. “A league, no more.”

  “So we are close enough for the fighting to begin at any minute?”

  Fehr had no answer for that.

  The warrior drew his sword and took a moment to very deliberately study the blade for nicks. Satisfied, he said, “Then we’re close enough for me not to want a whoreson like you within a mile of me.”

  Cort hammered the pommel of his blade into the back of Fehr’s skull, leaving him sprawling in the boggy ground like a drunkard. “Get this bastard in the brig,” he ordered two younger men, survivors of the Grimminhagen militia. They ran to do his bidding, dragging the groggy Fehr between them to the cramped wooden box that had been cobbled together by two of the men the night before. A deep-throated feral growl rasped between Fehr’s clenched teeth as he lashed out, trying to bite and claw at his captors. A moment later, wild-eyed with terror he was on the floor at their feet whimpering and begging, “Help me… I don’t know what is happening to me. It burns. My blood burns.” They hit him again, savagely this time, knocking him insensate. They kicked him when he was down, and then manacled his wrists and ankles, shackling him before they lifted the lid and forced Fehr inside. Before he could so much as scream, they slammed the lid back down on him, and while one leaned all of his weight on the box, the other nailed him up inside.

  Even in the relative chill of the spring, in an hour the claustrophobic box would be unbearably hot, the air breathed so many times that all of the goodness would have been sucked out of it by fear. In three hours the dead air would be suffocating, and but for the small hand-sized hole cut away from one of the timbers, in five it would be a coffin.

  That small hole was no mercy though, it merely prolonged the inevitable, another layer to the torture of the box.

  The hole was set low enough for the deserter to reach out with his fingers for any small scraps the men he had betrayed might offer. It was a barbaric punishment, but it was not death. Though given a day or two in the box Fehr might wish it was.

  But then in a day or two they would almost certainly all be dead so what did it matter if the traitor died chained in a box or free with a sword in his hand?

  The two men hoisted the box on the carrying poles up onto their shoulders and marched, bringing up the rear of the line. The ground sucked and pulled at their feet, as though trying to drag them down. They marched out without complaint, even as the weight of the carrying poles dug deeper and deeper into their shoulders. It was not pity for the prisoner that stayed their tongues, it was fear of what waited beyond the shattered peak.

  Grey wraiths of mist clung to the field, coiling up towards the steely sky.

  The boggy ground made it difficult to keep rank and file as they marched, the lines losing all order and cohesion the deeper they got into the wet ground. For the first five hundred or so feet the earth retained the semblance of solidity but that quickly gave way to a shifting landscape of tussocks of tall reeds and thick grasses and instead of the brackish water sloshing around their ankles it was up to their waists making any kind of haste impossible.

  “We’re sitting ducks out here,” Bohme commented to Metzger. The old man didn’t disagree. He checked the prevalent wind direction, licking his finger and holding it up to the breeze, and then gestured for the front line to wait for the rear to fall into line. Bohme turned to watch the rabble splashing and stumbling behind them. The sight did little to instil confidence in him. He watched one of the militia boys go over, screaming like a girl as he fell much to the amusement of the men behind him. That amusement died in their mouths, stillborn, as the marsh water around him turned red with his blood. His body buoyed back up to the surface. His throat had been torn out. It was as sudden and shocking as that.

  The closest to the soldier’s corpse splashed back away from it, reaching instinctively for their weapons.

  Two more went down a moment later, kicking and splashing wildly as they went under the black water. They were dead before they were fully submerged.

  “What the hell’s happening?” Cort shouted.

  “Everyone stop! Stand still!” Bohme yelled, eyes frantically scanning the surface of the black marsh water. Discipline was a soldier’s closest friend. The order got through the panic to them. To a man they stopped mid-step. The bog became eerily silent, the only sound the low susurrus of bodies swimming stealthily beneath the dark water.

  Bohme looked down and saw a dead face looking up at him, the reflection of the lowering sun shimmering on the skin of the water. He stabbed down fiercely with the point of his sword, driving it into the corpse’s rotting skull. The blow severed the dead man’s spinal column and left the decapitated head to drift away with the undertow. F
laxen hair fanned out like the fingers of a grasping miser, tangling around his legs.

  “They’re under the water!” one of the men shouted, pointing at the eddies caused by the sinuous corpses as they curled about the men.

  A moment later a fourth soldier cried out, dragged from his feet by mottled hands.

  Metzger boomed out a stream of orders, and the men struggled to respond to them but it was impossible to obey. They stumbled and splashed trying to form up, and fell back as the ground shifted, leaving them wide open again. By stopping them he had turned them into ripe plucking. “Form up! Form up!” he bellowed. “Defensive lines! Protect your right!”

  Another man hacked at the water, seeing one of the dead drift up against his thigh and reach up for him. Then all was pandemonium as the dead rose up out of the water, pallid skin and mottled bone grasping at the armour of the living. A dozen warriors were dragged under, a dozen more thrown off balance and left floundering as the corpses swarmed over them. Swords hit the water and sank beneath the surface. Men screamed, slashing out desperately, not caring what they hit.

  Kaspar Bohme swung his sword at the head of a putrid corpse. The creature threw up an arm in desperate defence, the blade slicing off the bone and burying itself in the dead man’s throat. Bohme wrenched it clear. Another blow scythed in at him from the left. Bohme took it on his shield and reversed a cut, hacking into this new foe’s thigh deeply enough to sever the tendon that kept the corpse standing. All around him the battle was joined. It was a melee. The living fought back to back, driving back the dead only to have more corpses swim up around their legs and drag them down, screaming, into the black water.

  For a moment he was clear of the slaughter. Bohme saw that Metzger had hacked his way into the very thick of the furore, his blade dripping with the gore of the dead. The old man was surrounded on three sides by clutching dead with rusty blades. They swung ponderously, Metzger battering the blows aside as he stepped in close and hammered his shield into the face of the nearest, driving the dead man off his feet.

  Bohme pushed through the deep water to meet him. He caught a surge of movement out of the corner of his eye and barely brought his shield around in time to block the blow from a rotten axe. The wooden shaft shattered in the corpse’s wretched grip, leaving the axe-head buried in Bohme’s shield. Unbalanced, Bohme lost his footing and fell sideways, sending up a spume of stinking swamp water as he slashed out desperately with his sword. The blade lodged in the ribcage of a corpse. Before he could wrench it free another empty-eyed skull lurched up in front of him swinging a huge hand-and-a-half bastard sword.

  Bohme threw himself forward, relinquishing his hold on his sword in a desperate attempt to dodge the corpse’s almighty swing aimed at parting his head from his shoulders. He barely made it beneath the blade, but hit the water hard, and fell to his knees, up to his chest in the turgid water. The corpse thundered another scything blade at Bohme. The sword slashed across his face.

  Then the young militia boy, Kane, hurled himself bodily at the corpse, taking its wild blow on the flat of his blade and even as the impact staggered him, reversing his swing to slash straight up through the dead man’s chest. Kane’s sword opened the corpse from stem to sternum with clinical precision. He deflected a weak blow from his dead foe, and then drove the point of his sword through the reanimated creature’s heart. He wrenched it free and delivered the coup de grace, beheading the corpse and kicking it aside contemptuously.

  Bohme crawled forward on his hands and knees, the water getting in his mouth as he wrested his sword free of the corpse.

  He nodded to the lad and held out his hand to be helped up.

  The two fought side by side as the dead came at them again and again from below the water, rising up, dripping the ichor of the swamp as they lurched forward with decrepit weapons. “Hold the line!” Metzger shouted, crashing his blade into a skull and splitting it. Still the dead came up, snaking up around the legs of the living and dragging them down into the murky depths of the bog even as they cut and thrust and parried, fighting for their lives.

  The sounds of the battle haunted the landscape.

  Metzger’s men were in disarray, his shouts for discipline falling on deaf ears as the invisible threat from the black water dragged more and more of them down.

  The box bearers dropped the prison. The box fell on its side, the air hole in the water. From within Bohme could hear the desperate hammering of Wolfgang Fehr as the black water swelled up around him. For a moment he thought about letting the lad drown. Then he fought his way through to the box and heaved it up so that the hole was out of the water.

  More than one hundred of them drowned in under an hour.

  Wolfgang Fehr did not.

  Bohme could read a battle. He had been in enough of them to sense the moment when the balance shifted. The elements of surprise and horror had faded and the dead were no longer coming at them in relentless waves. Down the line, Cort issued a piercing cry and threw himself forward, hacking into the dead so ferociously that he drove the creatures back and back. The Silberklinge grinned wildly as his blade opened a path through the dead. “Drive them back to the pits of the underworld!” The warrior yelled, to the cheers of the men at arms. The living rushed forward, pushing the dead further into retreat, until Bohme and the others were standing in the V left by the shattered peak, looking down at the dead as they fled towards the lakes.

  Metzger’s face paled as he looked up at the walls of the castle and the towers.

  Dark clouds festered in the sky above it.

  A storm was brewing.

  The castle seemed to stand betwixt and between glittering expanses of water, its crumbling gothic walls and towers filling the glowering sky. It was like a vision taken from his childhood memories and warped through the filter of a nightmare. What should have been familiar and comfortable was utterly alien and wrong, and yet it seemed somehow fitting. Good men died in the rain not in the glorious spring sunshine, fighting before the portals of nightmarish bastions, not family homes, he thought bitterly as he stared at the machicolations. His men, the men he had dragged from their homes and families on his damned crusade, charged down the hill towards the lakes, brandishing their weapons and hammering them against their shields in a cacophony meant to scare their undead enemy. It had little or no effect other than to break the silence. That in itself was a blessing.

  This was his birthright. It seemed impossible looking at it now but he knew it was true. This was the true Kastell Metz. This was the place where Felix Metzger had fallen to the necrarch fighting the hopeless fight for what he believed in. This was the secret shame of his clan, the ancestral home they had lost to the mad dead. He did not know what he had expected to feel, confronted with the past, but it wasn’t this. He stared at the walls, and the huge lakes traversed by a wide causeway and felt nothing, no pull of homecoming, no vengeful return. Instead there was an immense hollowness within him.

  He stood there, aside from his men, alone on the hill. He was the last man to go over the top.

  As he walked down the scree, he was reminded of so many truths about his life. He was a hollow man on a fool’s quest for an unattainable justice. It was little wonder he felt empty as he stared at the home he had never known.

  The living drove the dead down the hill and into the cleft between the lakes where the causeway ran. Roaring defiance, the men of Grimminhagen charged after them. It was chaos, but there was an element of order within it. The living came together in a driving wedge, Cort at the front, his sword slicing again and again at the stumbling dead. It was butchery. Stripped of their hiding places beneath the black water the dead were a slow, lumbering foe. But something niggled at the back of Bohme’s mind. The living ran and screamed anger and hate at the fiends that had snatched away their friends, and the dead were pushed back towards the castle gates.

  He had fought the dead before.

  This was the first time he had seen the enemy routed.

 
“Back!” he yelled, realising it was a trap. “Pull back!”

  No one could hear him above the clamour of combat. The chill ghost of fear gripped the nape of his neck as he stared down at Cort rushing the dead. The Silberklinge’s charge drove the shambling enemy back onto the first slick cobbles of the causeway.

  Slick.

  The failing light clung to the lichen encrusting the stone like oil.

  It took him a moment for it all to fall into place: the dead driven back, slick cobbles.

  It was there, in the front of his mind but he couldn’t grasp it. Something about the landscape was wrong. He stared and stared, frantically trying to see what it was, but he couldn’t see anything that he hadn’t been warned about by young Fehr. It was a blighted place, of that there could be no doubt but it was more than that.

  Dark clouds gathered overhead, a storm front rolling in. There was a palpable shift in the air pressure.

  Cort drove the dead towards the middle of the causeway fifty men with him. Bohme stared at the cobbled causeway and the skeletal limbs of the trees beyond the far shore of the lake. The dead splashed and floundered, stumbling back towards the huge gates of the castle as Cort cleaved into their panicked ranks. Above them ravens circled, cawing hungrily as they rode the winds.

  The box carriers pushed by him, granting and straining under the weight of the mobile prison. He could hear Fehr weeping inside. Fehr. What was it the lad had said when he was sketching out the lie of the land?

  Something about the lake. The castle is bordered by a huge lake. Not: the castle is bordered by two huge lakes. There was no mention of a causeway dividing the lake.

  It hit him as he looked up at the walls of the castle and saw the misshapen silhouette of a man gazing down over the fighting. It all came together inside his head. The dead hadn’t been driven back. They were mindless puppets; they had baited the trap and drawn the living forward onto the causeway and into the middle of the lake.