“Cort! Cort! Get them back from the causeway! Look at the water!”
He started to ran down the scree covered slope, skidding and sliding as his arms pin-wheeled desperately. He did not fall. Bohme yelled at the top of his voice but with the discordant symphony of the melee, his voice couldn’t carry to those out in the middle of the no-man’s land that until recently had been submerged beneath the water. He yelled again, crying himself hoarse, and still his warnings couldn’t rise above the din.
It was subtle at first, the lake water lapping against the edge of the causeway’s cobbles as whatever force had driven a tidal line down the centre of it ceded its hold over the water. Then the water was up around their ankles, and deeper, around their knees in a matter of moments. The men out there realised then, turning to flee the trap before its watery jaws could snap shut and drown them.
It was too late.
The water banked up into steep waves that came crashing down, the sheer elemental force of nature surging around the living, driving them off their feet and under the frothing white-caps. It carried them off the relative safety of the causeway and out into the deeps of the lake where more submerged dead swam, grasping and clutching and keeping the desperate soldiers from getting their heads above the waterline.
Then they were down and they were drowning, their forgotten blades dragged away from limp fingers to the bottom of the lake.
He stood watching in horror as one by one the corpses of his friends bobbed back to the surface of the suddenly placid lake, only for the weight of their armour to drag them back down as the air leaked out of their dead lungs.
Within minutes they were gone, and it was as if they had never been.
Bohme stood on the edge of the lake, balanced as though hovering over the edge of forever beyond which the endless night waited, staring at the still waters, and then at the cackling figure on the wall walk.
The emaciated hunchback threw up his arms as though trying to pull down the sky and the storm broke. A single jag of lightning and a deep ramble of thunder heralded the downpour. He saw a ghost within the white light: Bonifaz. There was a cruelty to his face in death that had never been there in life, marking him more indelibly than his twin scars ever had.
There were no more screams.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Blood Crazy
Outside the Walls of Kastell Metz, Deep in the Heart of the Howling Hills, Middenland
The Winter of Scars and Grief 2533
“It burns, it burns in my veins,” Wolfgang Fehr whimpered, scratching at the wooden walls of his prison. “Help me.” But no one heard him.
The darkness within the box ate him, gnawing into his mind. His hands were warm and sticky where his nails had been pulled back and broken off with his desperate clawing. It was only when he reached down for the tiny hole that he saw the blood and the damage his claustrophobic fear had wrought.
The sounds of fighting had been dampened by the wood, the anguished screams of the dying muted. Now there was only darkness and silence. Even the motion of the box had ceased leaving him lacking any sensory perception beyond the pain of his rained fingers and the fire in his blood.
It was worsening by the hour.
At first he had believed it to be a sickness, swamp fever or even the blood plague ravaging his veins, but as it progressed he knew it wasn’t. Primal images filled his mind, visions driven by the most basic, animalistic urges. The hallucinations took on integrity and shape and soon became more real to him than the walls of the box and the darkness.
Inhaling the musty air of the wooden prison he breathed in the cadaverous reek of the slaughter. Closing his eyes he found he could differentiate the disparate tangs and textures of the blood, old dead blood against the fresh vital blood spilled by the living. That chilled him.
“What is happening to me?” he begged the darkness.
It harboured no answers, only more secrets.
There was another sort of blood, too, neither living nor dead, but tainted like his. He felt its pull in his blood, not in his nose. It was thicker, bonded to the world in a way the spilled blood wasn’t.
Fehr clawed at the wood, needing to be out of the choking confines of the box. He pressed his face up against the tiny hole, sucking desperately at the air.
Time did not merely lose its meaning it ceased to be.
The world was reduced to fragments: one when the box shook as someone kicked it; another as someone left a canteen of water within scrabbling distance of his fingertips, though he could not drink it because the hole was too small; and another as the voices came, whispering up against the hole, goading him to die. Finally he lost control of his bodily functions, the pain in his gut and bowels so intense that he could do nothing to prevent them from emptying. The stench of faeces and the acrid tang of urine transformed his prison into a new kind of hell.
As the hallucinations worsened he imagined he was a wolf, and saw his own yellow eyes burning back at him. He prowled, hunting, stalking the beasts whose rank blood seared his nostrils. He saw himself rending flesh with tooth and claw, lapping greedily at open wounds and somewhere within those dreams his mind broke.
The images shifted in intensity and focus as the beast rose from within. His body responded in kind, the arc of his spine lengthening, the grasp of his hands becoming claw-like.
The darkness existed for a single reason: to taunt him with the smell of blood.
Desperately, he pushed at the walls of his prison.
“Let me out! Help me! Please! Please! Let me out!” He roared and raged, hammering against the walls of his stinking prison, his mind conflicted as the human struggled to stave off the all-consuming rage of the beast. It was a fight against nature that he could not hope to win. Somewhere in that timelessness the man that had been Wolfgang Fehr ceased to be. All that remained was the mind of the wolf.
Then the walls of his prison came tumbling down.
Rest was impossible, but without it they were doomed.
In the grim shadow of the beast’s castle, Metzger ordered the men to strike camp. After the initial ambush the dead had not sallied forth, content to barricade themselves up behind the high walls where they could not be reached. With the sun fully risen they would not strike out. The men needed to rest whenever they could. With the lake between them Metzger wrestled with guilt. His men were down beneath the water somewhere. They deserved a Sigmarite burial, or at least they deserved not to bloat and rot and float to the surface in a month’s time, ruined husks with no trace of their humanity left to them.
But what could he do? Dive after them and drag them back? Hardly. Let them rot?
He could see little alternative, and it sickened him.
This was his death, not theirs, his last hurrah. A silent tear rolled down his cheek, over the bone. “How did it come to this?” he asked the man beside him.
Kaspar Bohme shook his head and said, “The same way it always does, my friend. The same way it always does.”
Four hundred and fifty of the seven hundred men who had left Grimminhagen still looked to him for leadership. None of the Twin-Tailed Comet had survived the lake. He felt the sharp twinge of pain in his left side but refused to acknowledge it.
“We can’t very well go under the walls,” he said, looking at the lake. Using sappers was out of the question; the water from the lake would have seeped down to permeate deep into the rock undermining any chance they had of digging tunnels beneath the walls. The weight of the earth pressing down on them would cave in any excavation they tried and almost certainly result in dozens of men being buried alive. He could not imagine a worse fate. “And a protracted siege is out of the question. We don’t have the supplies or the men to starve them out or batter down the gates.”
“Not to mention how you starve the dead out of anywhere,” Bohme said. It was a poor joke.
Reinhardt Metzger ignored him.
He only had eyes for the man standing on the battlements who was in turn watch
ing them.
“Is that…?” He didn’t have the stomach to name the dead man looking down at them. His stomach twisted, dread taking root. He couldn’t be sure who he was seeing. He didn’t want to be sure. It was impossible. It was horrible. He stared up at the man on the wall.
Bohme nodded. “Bonifaz.”
“He looks different.”
“He’s dead,” Bohme said, “of course he looks different.”
“No, it’s more than that. He looks… inhuman.”
“He is waiting for us,” Bohme said. The notion, now voiced, sent a cold shiver down the ridges of Metzger’s spine. “He always believed he was the best of us.”
“His chance to test that belief will come,” Metzger said bleakly. No threat, no bluster.
“Do you think they will come at us tonight?”
“Why would they? We’re like flies buzzing around their stinking carcass. Soon enough they’ll reach out to swat us away, but right now we are barely even a nuisance.”
“So what say we make a nuisance of ourselves?” Bohme said, with a fierce grin.
“What do you have in mind?”
Before he could answer, the sound of wood rending tore through the thick silence. It took Metzger a moment to place the sound, so out of place was it in this blighted place. He turned as the side of the brig-box splintered and Fehr’s hand came reaching out through the tear. Only it couldn’t have been the lad’s hand, Metzger thought, seeing the thick clumps of reddish hair that clung to the back of it. The fingers were inhumanly long, the joints twisted and spindly, hooking the misshapen hand into a vicious claw. The wood frame buckled against the pressure from within, the metal nails tearing free. The rest of the arm, as weirdly malformed as the hand emerged, the musculature distorted and overly thick around the joints. Then the box shattered completely and the wild-eyed Fehr lunged out of the debris, his face bestial with rage as he ripped away at the wood with his bare hands.
The manacles shackling the deserter stretched tight as he threw his arms up above his head, forcing them apart beyond the limits of the metal’s tensile strength. The chain snapped with a shocking finality. Fehr launched himself at the nearest man, lashing out with the dangling chains transforming his imprisonment into a weapon. He slashed the man across the face again and again, moving with dizzying speed. The chains bit deep, cutting mercilessly through the soft flesh of the soldier’s cheek and eyes. Again and again Fehr lashed out, driving the man to his knees and then onto his back, screaming as the chains cut him up.
Fehr crouched, chains dangling, and looked left and right, his face contorted with animalistic rage.
Moving with unerring agility he threw himself forward, rolling away from a wild sword slash, and came up on his bare feet, kicking up dirt and dust from the lake shore as he scrabbled backwards. He threw back his head and barked at the rising moon.
Two of Metzger’s militia moved to intercept the prisoner before he could flee, only Fehr never intended to flee, that much was obvious by the way he rounded on his would-be captors and snapped them like brittle twigs. His hands reached out, grabbing the closest of the men by the wrist and forcing it back to the point beyond which it could bend, until it snapped. Then he jumped to his feet, wrenched the soldier’s arm out of its socket and dragged him in close. Fehr’s mouth opened in a feral snarl, and then with shocking swiftness, Fehr ducked his head and tore his teeth into the screaming man’s throat, ripping the flesh out in one bloody mouthful.
Metzger ran towards Fehr as the deserter spat a clotted lump of flesh out onto the dirt at his feet.
The second man died through carelessness. He came too close to the bloodstained chains. Fehr lashed out, but not to hit or hurt. The metal links wrapped around the man’s legs and with one quick tug Fehr pulled his feet out from under him. He fell upon the man, biting through the cartilage of his nose and tearing it off in a fountain of blood. The man’s screams were as sickening as they were short-lived. Swallowing down the meat and gristle, Fehr sank his claws into the soft stuff of his eyes, hooking deep into his skull as he jerked his head back and bit deep into the pulsing vein at his throat, driven crazy by the siren song of the rich blood.
He pushed himself forward, into a crouch, ready to spring at anyone who came too close.
Fehr looked at the old warrior; and such pain and grief there was in the jaundiced eyes that looked back at him. In that moment, gazes locked, the beast that Fehr had become was painfully obvious to Metzger. Stripped of his humanity, abused by his captors, caged and bound, beaten and humiliated, he had lost whatever held his mind together only to find some deep buried primal instinct: the animal within. He howled again, all traces of humanity shorn from his ragged cry.
Metzger moved in cautiously. Fehr lowered his head, a low growl purring deep in his throat.
Then he spoke, only two words, “Help me.” Metzger nodded, reaching around to draw his sword.
“In death there is mercy,” Metzger said, and he almost believed it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Wolf’s Hour
Outside the Walls of Kastell Metz, Deep in the Heart of the Howling Hills, Middenland
The Winter of Scars and Grief, 2533
Behind the old man and the beast, their dead friends rose up out of their watery grave.
Skulls broke the placid skin of the lake, followed by lank hair tangled with strands of water-weed and scum, and worm-eaten eyes and mottled skin. One by one the drowned resurfaced. Many of them bore no weapons but then they needed none. They came out of the water, moving slowly with the sickening grace of swans gliding over the smooth surface of black water.
The filth of the lake clung to their armour and flesh.
The shell of the warrior, Cort Angiers, opened its mouth to scream. Lake water bubbled and frothed out of it, followed by a low keening moan that slowly shaped itself into a word, a challenge: “Metzzzzgeeeerrrr!”
* * *
Reinhardt Metzger heard his name but did not turn to face his challenger. His knuckles whitened as his fingers closed around the leather wrap of his sword’s hilt and slid the blade out of its sheath. The blade sang as he dragged it free.
It felt utterly natural in his hand, like an old friend.
He felt a stab of pain, sharp like needles piercing his chest, and numbness flow down his left arm. It was as though the blood were somehow leaving that side of him empty. He clenched his fist and hammered it off his breastplate in defiance of the pain and in challenge to the beast that he faced.
Fehr sprang.
At the sound of Metzger’s name, coming out of the water like the voice of Manann himself, Kaspar Bohme turned. His hand went instinctively for his blade, but he fumbled it. The cold steel fell through his fingers as the sight of his fallen comrades emerging from the lake ripped into that part of his mind where fear lay nascent.
“Look to the water!” He yelled, bending to retrieve his blade.
The men were ill-prepared, stripped out of their armour, swords laid aside as they readied themselves for the respite of night before the dawn of war. There would be no sleep this night. Beyond the dead, Bohme saw the hunchbacked figure up on the high tower, a madness of ravens circling around him like a feathered cyclone, and beside him the unmistakable bulk of the dead Bonifaz. The hunchback cavorted like some demented dancer, throwing himself around like some dervish. With the moon at their back the pair looked like a faceless manifestation of death.
Bohme straightened. His sword hand itched.
“To me!” he shouted, and ran headlong at the line of corpses shuffling up the lake’s shore.
The men reacted, grabbing shields and swords. Some ran bare foot, others with breastplates partially strapped in place, buckles hanging loose. They charged down to join Bohme as he ducked beneath gasping hands and drove his blade hilt deep into a familiar face. Dragging it clear, he spun to block a blow raking in from the left, taking it on his arm. The pain shivered through him, almost wrenching the blade from his hand. He
hacked into a third drowned knight, his blade clattering off the dead man’s rusted breastplate and sliding up into the bloated white flesh of his neck. The blow barely slowed the drowned man. Bohme stepped in and drove his fist into the dead man’s face, snapping his head back, and then brought his sword arm up savagely, the blade sliding up through the gap between the plate and skin, disembowelling the corpse. His insides spilled down over the blade, soaking Bohme’s hand with blood and gore. Bohme slid the sword clear.
Then he was no longer alone in the shallow water, cutting and splashing and struggling desperately to stay on his feet as the lake-bed shifted treacherously beneath them.
The world around him was reduced to sword and bone.
Bohme broke away from a clinch, forced to draw a short stabbing dagger from his opponent’s sodden belt and ram it into the dead man’s gut to buy himself a few feet of calm. He found himself once again side by side with the young warrior, Kane. There were no grins between them this time. Tears stained the youngster’s cheeks as he fought, all discipline gone from his movement. Seeing the facial similarities between Kane and the vile corpse he hacked away wildly at, Bohme knew all too well why.
He stepped in close enough to reach around and drive the point of the dagger deep into the eye of the warrior’s brother. He dragged it clear and stepped away from the corpse as it fell, the motors of its brain ruined.
Still Kane slashed wildly at the air where his brother had stood, his face torn with grief as his blade slashed again and again at nothing. He fell to his knees in the shallow water and threw his head back in a pitiful scream as his brother’s corpse brushed up against his side. He reached down, sobbing, to cradle the dead man in his arms, oblivious to the battle raging around him. He was locked in his own personal hell.
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