Warhammer - Curse of the Necrarch

by Steven Savile

  As the drowned men fell, a fork of lightning rent the black sky, spearing down into the heart of the earth.

  With a pitiful shriek, the ground was torn asunder.

  The gravestones fell away into the huge cavity that opened up beneath them, the bones of the long-dead sliding down to back-fill the wounded earth. For a moment the cacophony of falling soil and stone and corpses buried the sounds of the battlefield.

  Then a swarm of bats erupted out of the belly of the earth.

  “Arise!” Radu roared, throwing his hands wide.

  Thousands and thousands of bats wheeled in the air, banking, rising and falling erratically Their screeching had the men on the ground dropping their swords and covering their ears as the madness of sound clawed into their skulls.

  “Drums?” Bonifaz said, staring down at the fight below. He breathed in deeply. “No, hearts,” he corrected himself, the wild hammering growing louder and louder in his ears. “Hearts and fear.”

  Beneath it came a deeper sound, a rumbling far down in the heart of the labyrinthine tunnels beneath the castle, down where the bones of the dragon stirred.

  “Arise!” Radu bellowed. A flesh-eating worm burrowed its way out of his death-mask of a face, exposing the bone beneath the rotten pulp of flesh. “Arise!”

  Lightning pierced the sky once more. The wind whipped up into a savage bluster that bullied the bats across the lightning-bright sky.

  Beside him the scar-faced death-bringer fingered the hilts of his twin swords as he watched the old man and his blades struggling against the tide of the dead rising up from the lake bed. Each scream sent a thrill through the cavity where his heart had been. Quietly, he whispered, “Suffering,” and Radu had no way of knowing if it was a promise to him, or to the men down there.

  Amsel felt the earth fall away beneath his feet, and even as he stumbled and fell, he saw the dirt of the roof come crumbling down like filthy rain.

  He forced himself back onto his feet and pushed on, deeper into the warren of tunnels.

  He knew the dark ways intimately, having spent so much of his unlife exiled in them. There was a comfort to the dark, and with it a sense of self that the vampire did not feel when he was up above with the moon on his face, and yet he must rise, he knew that. He could not hide out here forever hoping that the end of all things would pass him by. It had begun.

  The ground shifted beneath him again, like some volcanic shiver tearing through the crust of the earth. Amsel pressed up against the beams that supported the excavated wall. The wood had buckled and splintered beneath the enormous weight of the collapse. It was only a matter of time before the stresses being brought to bear on the beam’s wooden core found the weaknesses within the grain and the supporting strut tore apart. One of the alchemical globes along the tunnel fell, shattering on the floor, its eternal flame extinguished as crudely as that. Amsel shuffled towards the dark spot. His footsteps dragged loudly in the echo-trap of the subterranean walkway. He clutched the sword to his chest.

  He heard other noises down in the deep: a susurrant rush of dirt and rock out of the cracks in the wall, the grating of bone on stone as the graves from up above poured down to fill in the cavities beneath them, the groans of the straining support beams buckling grain by grain, and so much more that could not be explained: sounds of the earth.

  The air around him grew hotter the deeper he went, uncomfortably so.

  A sharp crack behind him preceded the collapse by a moment.

  Amsel started to run, his robes tangling around his legs and the fetishes that hung from his rope belt getting in the way of his long strides. He ran hard, gripped by panic. He had died once before. Death held no fear. Living did. His mind filled with frightened thoughts of being buried deeper than the bones of the castle, trapped in the torment of the unlife for an eternity. He could imagine no worse torture than the dirt and the broken stones pressing into his face and down his throat, pinning his arms by his side, the claustrophobic weight on his chest pressing down mercilessly. He could imagine nothing worse than being unable to move, unable to feed, but equally unable to let go of consciousness and thought, unable to let go, and so driven mad by an eternity of nothing.

  He ran, if not for his life, then for his death.

  Before, there had always been a loneliness to the dark places, but the chorus of collapse stripped them of that. Now there was only noise and fear.

  The ground cracked again. He clutched the sword’s blade so tightly that its flame-scalloped edge bit into his hands. He barely registered the pain. The grating of the rock above his head swelled to fill his mind, and he understood. The world was not collapsing, but that did not help him. The tunnels were still caving in beneath their added burden. The ceiling of the subterranean laboratories had been opened up, causing the seismic shifts as the world contracted to fill the empty spaces beneath it.

  “Time, time, time,” Amsel said, the words like ghosts taunting him. He looked up at the stones above, willing them to hold until he had found his way back to the world above.

  But if Radu had released the dragon he had no hope.

  A single imperative galvanised him: I will not fail the master.

  Amsel stumbled on towards the wooden staircase and the hidden trap that opened up within one of the false graves of the bone garden.

  Casimir grabbed the woman by the throat, his dirty nails digging deep into the vein that pulsed at her throat. She was one of the coterie, a faceless piece of flesh that he had never given a second thought to. Now she was imperative to his plan’s fruition. The wind and the shrieks of the enemy howled all around the courtyard, bringing it close, making it all so real.

  “Listen, woman, and listen well,” he rasped, pushing his face up to hers, so close that they might have shared the most tender of kisses. “The message is simple: he has been betrayed. Tell him that. Tell him that Amsel has betrayed him. Tell him the wretch has made a pact with the living and led them to our door. Do you understand me, woman?”

  She nodded.

  “Then tell me what you are to tell the master?”

  She licked her dry lips. “We know of the betrayal because we are supposed to be his secret army, to rise up and help the living when they enter the keep. There are men within our number who will turn on the necrarch at the last, delivering him to the old man with the white hair. I know this because it is the vampire Amsel’s doing. He is loyal still to the one they call Korbhen. I do not know who, so none are to be trusted.”

  “Yes, yes. It is important you name the threat. Feed his paranoia. Good. Now go.”

  He pushed the woman away. She stumbled, catching her filthy skirts, and fled towards the stairs that would take her up to the battlements and the great necrarch himself.

  Content that the seeds would be sown, Casimir moved through the duster of tents and wooden crates and all the filth of humanity that festered within them, towards the gate.

  No one moved to stop him, but why would they? He was untouchable, the master’s most loyal servant. He was Radu’s left hand, full of sinister purpose. Who would dare suspect him of treachery? Who apart from that wretch, Amsel?

  A self-satisfied grin touched his lips at the thought of that lickspittle being undone by a few words.

  “Arm yourselves!” he demanded. “The wolf is at the door, and the beast won’t be content until we are all purged from this place by fire and sword. Let us give them the fight of their lives!”

  There were no cheers to greet his rousing words. Some of the men moved away, grabbing makeshift weapons, spears and staves and whatever else lay to hand, while others rooted around in the rags of their lives and pulled out rusted old blades that had seen better days.

  He left them to get on with it, turning once, halfway to the gatehouse. “Protect the master at all costs,” he called back. “It is imperative!” The lie was an easy one but then they all were. With one well-placed lie Radu would believe some within the coterie meant him harm, with another the damned and defo
rmed would do all they could to remain at the necrarch’s side believing it their duty to protect him. It was delicious the way they all tangled up within themselves but he could not allow himself the luxury of enjoying it, not yet.

  It was never about the might of swords or the mastery of magic. Fools believed in those tools of power. Men of power understood its nature better. It was about greed and lust, those base instincts had primacy. The weak craved more, the strong craved more. There was no difference between them outside their ability to take it. That understanding made all the difference in the world. A simple word in the right ear at the right time could undo the strength of any sword arm. It was the nature of magic to gnaw away at the practitioner. When the world became a mutable thing it became much more difficult to believe in the truth of the eye. A word at the right time, whispered to feed the right doubts, could undo every strut and support that held together the paranoid’s world. Those were the powers that ruled the world, whispered words, not the thud and blunder of swords or the flash and bang of mages. Casimir understood this. He always had.

  He barely noticed the rain as it came down, bustling up to the abandoned gatehouse.

  As the air filled with the shrieking of bats, Casimir lifted the wooden brace that held the huge door closed, and grasped the great mechanism beside it, turning the spigots that in turn dragged on the ropes that pulled the hidden cogs. Slowly the gate began to drag open.

  It amused him to think that it could all be undone by such a simple thing.

  Amsel found the staircase and climbed up out of the grave.

  He had never thought to enjoy the feel of the air on his face again, but as he emerged into the night a sigh of contentment slipped out of his lips. He had come up behind the line of fighting, between the lake and the old graveyard, though there were no gravestones now, only a vast pit from which thousands upon thousands of bats streamed up into the night, the press of their hides so thick that they blocked out the moon.

  Amsel moved fast, keeping low as he ran. The bone and feather fetishes on his belt bounced against the atrophied muscle of his thigh. He twisted left and right, constantly looking up towards the walls, sure that the new master could see him from his perch.

  The killing had shifted its emphasis away from the lake, the living clinging to the narrow trail that led around it, skirting the line of trees, to the castle gates. He could not tell if it were a trick of the dark, or if the huge black iron-bound doors truly were grinding open on themselves.

  He ran towards the fighting, thinking only to reach the white-haired warrior that led the line. He had seen him at Grimminhagen, and now here, fighting with controlled fury. That the living flocked to his side to fight with him told the vampire all he needed to know. He had to get the blade to the old man.

  Before he could take another step a soldier loomed up out of the darkness, full of righteous fury at the sight of the vampire’s rotten features, and rammed his sword hilt deep through Amsel’s chest. The shock of it was like fire lancing through his corpse. The blade tore from his chest, its teeth tearing so much of his insides out that Amsel felt his body coming undone. His hands refused to obey him. He tried to offer the sword up, to speak to the warrior, but the man’s blade drove in again, opening his throat as fully as it had opened his gut. Gagging on the sudden swell of rank black blood in his throat, Amsel dropped the sword and fell to his knees. He reached up weakly towards the steel still embedded in his throat, thinking only to wrench the wretched metal free.

  The sword, he tried to say, but the words would not come out.

  He looked down at the blade lying in the mud, pleading silently with his killer to understand.

  But there was no understanding for the vampire in the man’s eyes, only the cold hatred of the living for the dead.

  The man wrenched his sword clear of the vampire’s throat, tearing out the tubes of speech and sawing deep into the vertebrae.

  Amsel lowered his head, reaching out, groping blindly in the mud for the flame-scalloped blade. As his hands found its hilt, a surge of triumph flared through his veins, and for a moment, for a mote in the eye of time, it felt right. He surrendered to the rage and allowed his bestial aspect to rise from deep within his skin. His lips shrank away as his jaw distended and his teeth sharpened to venomous fangs. He looked up, meeting the warrior’s frightened gaze, and roared. The animalistic venting sprayed blood and spittle as he drove the sword upwards, but Amsel was no swordsman.

  The warrior moved at the last moment, bringing his sword round to deflect what should have been a killing thrust. Instead of driving deep into his gut the blade glanced off the curve of his breastplate, slipping between the crack and sliced viciously into his side. It bit deep enough to hurt, but not enough to kill. It wasn’t a clean blow, the serrated edge opening more of the man than a normal weapon would as Amsel dragged it clear.

  Then, in the silence between life and death the nameless warrior gripped the hilt of his sword resolutely, and with every last ounce of strength left to him, he scythed through the vampire’s neck, severing meat and bone.

  The sword broke, but it did all that was required of it.

  The steel took the vampire’s head before its weakness snapped it clean in two.

  At the gates, Casimir’s skull pounded with the drumming of countless heartbeats beating wildly and erratically. The reek of blood in the air turned his mind feral. It had been so long since he had tasted fresh blood.

  He clutched at his temples, digging his fingernails into his scalp. The pain served to drive the thoughts of blood way. It was an intoxicant, not a need. He did not need blood, not now. He willed himself to hold to the task as he cranked the spigot around again and again until the great gates stood open, the way into the belly of the castle wide open.

  The rain came down so hard that it drummed six inches back off the dirt. He looked up at the sky filled with bats. The reek of blood was overpowering. He felt the beast slipping out from beneath his skin, drawn by the vital fluid. He knew he could not stay out there for long. With each passing minute the stench of blood rose, thicker and more viscous, and with it rose the beast within him, that primal aspect of the vampire. He could barely keep it in.

  Behind him the coterie of the damned and deformed formed up, their makeshift weapons clutched tightly in trembling hands. They cut pitiful figures in the downpour, utterly tragic with their rags soaked through and the filth streaked across their faces. They stood in a dozen lines that stretched the width of the courtyard, those with real weapons at the front. They were ready to die for him. He savoured the thought, backing away from the gate.

  “They come!” he said, throwing back his head. He tasted the rain in his throat and it tasted of blood.

  The damned raised their weapons and stamped their feet ever faster in some mad tribal dance, whooping and hollering as they slammed their clenched fists off their chests. Behind each one lurked a ghost that would be released before the night was over. They were truly damned.

  “Do not go gently. Fight. Make them hurt for every hurt you have ever suffered at their hands. They are the parents that rejected you, the villagers that shunned you. They are the bastards that tried to drown you in their sacks or dragged you out into the forest and left you to die. They are all of these people. Dig deep. Find the taint within your blood, savour it, draw it to the surface, let it consume you, and then, when it has and they are so close you can smell their rancid breath, use it to take from them everything they took from you!”

  They cheered him, even as the doors behind him were torn asunder and the living poured in, led by the white-haired warrior.

  Casimir stepped forward, the rain blurring around him as it appeared to hiss and sizzle off his body, forming a thick white mist that hung between them. When the rain finally tore through it, the vampire was gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The Knight of the Last Hour

  Kastell Metz, Deep in the Heart of the Howling Hills, Middenland

&nbs
p; The Final Spring Night of an Old Man’s War, 2533

  The youngster, Kane, looked down at what remained of his sword: the leather-wrapped hilt in his hand and a broken stub of steel. His knuckles blanched white where he gripped the hilt. A weakness in the blade had seen it sheer in two as it cleaved into the vile creature’s neck.

  He stood over the dead vampire, breathing hard, hurting from the deep cut in his side. Of all things it was the broken sword that betrayed him, accentuating his trembling. It wasn’t that he was afraid; it had gone well beyond that. In the last few hours he had seen his brother, Blaine, drown and had barely had time to grieve for him before his corpse came shambling back out of the lake that had claimed his life. He had killed him again, but in the process something inside Kane had broken. Like the sword, he thought.

  He had tried. He had stood next to Bohme ready to follow the man into hell, but when the gates had groaned slowly open to give them a glimpse of the freaks lined up behind them, he hadn’t been able to do it. He had no thoughts of revenge or retribution. Instead he imagined his mother and his father in their shared grief and wondered how he could possibly tell them it was his sword that had finally put his brother in the dirt when he had promised them that he would protect Blaine? And he fled.

  Kane lifted the broken blade, seeing his grief-torn reflection in the steel. He could not bear to look at himself, and though it hurt to discard the blade, that one swing had rendered it useless. He tossed it aside. The sword had been a coming-of-age gift from Blaine. That it had broken in his hands, just one swing after delivering the blow that turned him into a kinslayer seemed so fitting.

  It was a sign.

  He had tried to flee and the battle had come to him. His blade had possessed one last blow before its weakened core had splintered, but that one blow had been enough to save his life. Did he run again, leaving the others to die? Or did he turn around and go back to the dying? He harboured no illusions: that was precisely what they were doing here, dying. The choice was simple, run now to die another day, or return to fall beside the men who had over the last few months become his surrogate family. It was no choice at all. He knew what Blaine would have done in his place, so how could he do anything other?