[Warhammer] - Zavant

by Gordon Rennie - (ebook by Undead)

  The Templar slowed the pace of his advance, nervously testing the familiar weight of his blade as he sensed danger close by. “Stand to,” he called. “Step out where I can see you, or, Sigmar help me, I’ll run you through where you stand!”

  The only response from the darkness ahead was silence.

  Cautiously, the Templar man-at-arms continued advancing, all too aware of the sudden, dry, bitter taste of apprehension in his mouth. There was a subtle, hot draught of air blowing along the passage towards him now, a shocking contrast to the normal cold chill of the place, carrying with it the faint but discernable reek of something foul and rotting.

  He saw stairs directly ahead of him: worn, stone steps leading down into blackness. At their top, a thick, metal-bound wooden door had been drawn open. The scattering of dust from the corroded bolts and locks painting the surface of the flagstones at the top of the stairs suggested that it had been many years since the door had last been opened.

  The smell was stronger here, a hot, feral stink wafting up from out of the darkness below. The Templar stood at the top of the stairs, fearful to descend into this new and unknown place. Surely his quarry could not have gone down into those unlit depths? Surely he would have heard the phantom’s strange shuffling footsteps if he had descended down into—

  The movement came suddenly from behind him. The Templar felt a strong pair of hands thrust themselves against his back and push hard, propelling him with sickening surprise off the top of the stairs down into the darkness below.

  The man tumbled headlong downwards into the blackness, stupidly wondering in what hidden alcove or recess his assailant had been hiding as he felt the bones of his body smash and break against the edges of the stone steps. He landed at the bottom, fracturing his skull in one final, cruel impact on the rough, unworked surface of the stone floor. Fighting off the pain and the sweet, deadly promise of pain-free unconsciousness, he looked up, his vision swimming as he saw the blurred figure at the top of the stairs above—shockingly closer than he thought, even if it seemed that his fall had taken an eternity—start to haul shut the loudly-protesting door.

  The Templar felt a searing pain in his head from his broken skull. He felt the blood flowing freely down his face. He felt the stabbing pains in his side and innards where broken ribs pressed into punctured organs, and, terrifyingly, he felt nothing at all from his shattered and useless legs. Grimly, methodically, he began to search around in the darkness for his sword, using what little dim light still emanated from the open doorway above.

  His hand closed on the pommel of the weapon, just as the door slammed shut, and darkness, shocking and complete, swallowed him up. For a moment, the only sound that existed in the world was the shallow, laboured breathing from rib-punctured lungs. And then, from out of the darkness around him came the other sounds.

  Hungry bestial growls; an eager, monstrous shuffling. The sounds of inhuman monstrosity. Abominations, closing in on him from all sides.

  The Templar prepared to meet them, managing to agonisingly haul himself up, determined to die with his sword in his hand and a prayer to Sigmar on his lips.

  Safely back in his room, the servant of the Ruinous Powers wept with pain, rivulets of blood running down his sides from the scourge marks on his back. The gibbering, insane thing behind him—that hateful monstrous twin-thing—kept giggling to itself. The harder the monk chastised them both with the leather-bound bundle of nettles and thorn branches, the more it giggled and snickered to itself.

  He knew that the master was displeased with them, and he knew that it was his monstrous companion, not he, who had made the mistake. It was he who had prepared the secret plague-gift without the master’s knowledge or permission, and so it was he who had brought this strange investigator from Altdorf to the remote monastery, together with his escort of holy warriors.

  The thing behind him giggled even more at the mention of the Templars, and what the two of them had already done to one tonight. The deed had done much to placate the master’s anger, and, just as importantly, it had given the hungry ones below their first taste of human flesh. Judging by the enthusiastic feeding sounds the monk and his grotesque other could hear coming from the other side of the safely locked door, they had greatly enjoyed the unexpected treat.

  If the master’s designs went according to plan, they would soon have the opportunity to taste a great deal more.

  Yes. Soon, the monk promised himself, flaying away the skin of his back, drawing another vile bout of giggling from the thing there with him.

  Soon his torment would be at an end. Just a few more tasks to accomplish, and finally he would be released from his service to find the promised oblivion that was all his damned soul now craved.

  Five

  Vido shivered, and wrapped his cloak tighter around him. The morning sun was a faint smear in the sky, obscured by the low, vaguely ominous ceiling of dark cloud that seemed to hang perpetually over the monastery.

  It was also raining, of course.

  Vido shivered again, and thought idly of his homeland, which he had departed long ago and vowed never to return to again. Dull the Moot might be, but at least it was generally warm and sunny, its fertile meadows and rolling, low hills so unlike the rest of the damp, misty and dark, forest-shrouded landscape of these northern environs of the Empire. Nor, he reminded himself with an inward grimace, were marauding packs of foul Chaos beast-creatures or strange, sinister goings-on in ancient, crumbling-stoned monasteries much of a feature of daily life in the Moot.

  They were standing in a gulley at the foot of the monastery rock, in an area which Vido had originally taken to be an overgrown and neglected herb or kitchen garden, abandoned, like so much else at Alt Krantzstein, to the vagaries of wild nature. On closer inspection, the curious stones planted sporadically across the ground turned out not to be rocks or pieces of fallen masonry from the walls above, but were in fact ancient and vegetation-covered grave markers. With a shock, Vido had realised that he and his master were standing in the midst of the monastery’s graveyard.

  Konniger was down on his hands and knees, scrambling about amongst the gravestones, uncovering and reading names and dates from the time-worn inscriptions. “Pontranius Glantz, librarian of this blessed place, taken by the Black Plague in the Year of the Lord Sigmar 1966. No, that won’t do at all… wait, what’s this? Wilhelm Keitel, holy brother, died of sickness 2478. Much more promising, don’t you think, Vido?”

  Vido was barely listening. Idly, he wondered if he was supposed to be writing any of this down. Konniger had a truly prodigious memory, but occasionally he required Vido to make notes of his observations while he went about his inscrutable business. Tense and irritable after a generally sleepless night—halflings seemed to require more sleep than their larger human cousins—Vido’s surly mood was little improved by their present surroundings. He had a traditional Old Worlder’s dread of cemeteries and graveyards, and it was a matter of considerable and troubling frustration to him that so many of Konniger’s adventures and investigations seemed to lead, at some point or another, to such places.

  And now here they were again, grubbing about in some ancient, rain-soaked boneyard where Konniger was bound to uncover something which would lead to more gruesome and grisly events. Vido shivered again, although this time it was not the cold which troubled him.

  “Brother Robel, called to Sigmar’s side 2482. Ah, now we’re getting somewhere, Vido,” continued Konniger, clearly on the track of something that only he was yet able to discern. He redoubled his efforts, checking gravestone after gravestone, using a metal spatula to clear away dirt, grime and moss to reveal the inscriptions hidden underneath. Vido watched, confused, as he was bombarded with a bewildering array of names, dates, and occasional causes of death.

  “Waluth Haller, taken by the pestilence 2483… Brother Kagenack, abbot of this place, died of sickness 2491. We are getting closer, are we not, Vido? Brother Goellecke, resting in blessed repose 2495… Brother
Boddenberg, 2488… Brother Weinert, 2500… Brother-Codicier Riedesser, 2495… Brother Sommerfeldt 2495… Novice-Brother Stahlberg, 2497. Striking, is it not, Vido? What then are we to make of all this?”

  “That many of them have died of some kind of plague or sickness?” ventured Vido, joining his master at last in his study of the inscriptions.

  “That much is obvious,” responded Konniger. “As I have already explained, Alt Krantzstein and the area around it has a long and infamous history of plague and pestilence, and the monastery was founded here to re-sanctify this remote, if blighted, corner of the Empire. No, Vido, look again at the inscriptions, and pay particular attention to the dates upon them.”

  Vido was about to bend down and look more closely, but before he could do so he caught sight of the dark-cloaked figure of a monk limping hurriedly down the slippery gulley path towards where he and Konniger stood. At first, Vido presumed that the man was limping as a result of some self-inflicted flagellant injury, but, as he drew closer, he saw that the man was apparently club-footed. His right leg was hidden inside his long cassock but it was clearly twisted in some way and dragged heavily on the ground as the man moved.

  The monk stopped before them, and bowed nervously. “Herr Konniger,” he said, breathing heavily after an apparently laboured journey. “Brother Himerius awaits you in the vestry of the library. He is most anxious to discuss the reasons for your mission here, and to offer any assistance that may be in his power to grant.”

  Konniger bowed in acknowledgement. “Tell the honourable brother that we are on our way, and that I look forward to enlightening him further.”

  The man bowed again and hurried off with the message. Konniger and Vido followed him at a more stately pace. Vido looked questioningly up at Konniger.

  “Master? The dates on the gravestones?”

  “Indeed,” nodded Konniger. “It is now the year of our Lord Sigmar 2517, and yet the most recent date to be found on any of those stones is 2500, an observation further borne out by the neglected state of the burial area, and the fact that the ground is undisturbed. No fresh graves have evidently been dug there for some number of years.”

  Konniger looked at Vido, seeing the look of confusion on his manservant’s face. “I look forward even more to our meeting with the honourable Brother Himerius, Vido. Perhaps he will be able to tell us when and how the Order of the Holy Three came upon the secret of eternal life, since, according to the evidence in this graveyard, not one monk has died here in the last seventeen years. A most remarkable feat,” added Konniger archly, “considering the troublingly high mortality rate amongst the brethren here in the years preceding the turn of the century.”

  “These are serious matters, Herr Konniger. You have proof of what you seem to be accusing us of here?”

  They were in a small, private scriptorium chamber within the library. Brother Himerius sat facing them at the scribe’s desk. Himerius had a touch of the palsy—Vido had noticed a hint of it the previous night, when the monk had so singularly welcomed them to the monastery—but now the symptoms were quite apparent. Himerius’ hands shook volubly while he talked.

  It wasn’t just the effects of palsy, Vido supposed. He had always thought himself a fairly shrewd judge of character, and his time with Konniger had only heightened those skills. There was an extra tremor in the movement of Himerius’ hand, Vido fancied, and a tremor in his voice. It was fear, he thought. Himerius was nervous, and trying to conceal something from them.

  With Himerius were two other monks, both of them standing behind him and staring sternly across at Konniger. One was Brother-Codicier Kree, the monastery’s chief librarian. He was a small, withered-looking man, surprisingly young to have risen to such an important position within the Church, but already showing the early signs of advanced age. His head was entirely hairless, and his skin had a curious and unpleasant shrunken and prematurely wrinkled look to it.

  Vido had seen this strange patina effect once or twice before, on the skin of fierce Kislev and Norscan mercenaries, whose faces had felt the chill, flesh-shrivelling kiss of frostbite or exposure to the deathly and unforgiving cold of the Old World’s most inhospitable northern latitudes.

  Why it should also appear here on the face of a man who had presumably spent most of his life within the cloistered confines of a monastery of the Church of Sigmar was a question which Vido was unable to immediately answer.

  The other monk had been introduced to them as Brother Rynok, the monastery’s chief cellarer, responsible for the organisation and supply of the monastery’s kitchen and stores.

  Many monasteries had extensive agricultural holdings where they grew their own crops and raised their own cattle in quantities to virtually make them self-sufficient, any excess surplus being sold off and the profit added to the monastery’s own coffers. In this way, many monasteries had amassed considerable wealth, Vido knew, and in such places the brother cellarer was an important and influential figure, controlling the monastery’s finances and much of its daily secular business. It was not unknown for wayward cellarers to be partial to a little light-fingered pilfering or extra-mural use of the monastery’s often considerable surplus assets.

  This, however, was evidently not the case at Alt Krantzstein. Rynok was tall and gaunt, his morose expression and sickly pallor doing little to suggest that he enjoyed living off the fat of the land of the monastery’s neglected agricultural holdings. Indeed, many of the monks had a pinched, starved look to them, probably due as much to flagellant-inspired self-starvation as to a shortage of food supplies in the monastery. Vido suspected that, unlike some Sigmarite holy orders, the pious brethren of the Order of the Holy Three were not unduly troubled by the temptations of the sin of gluttony.

  Alt Krantzstein. “Old Sickstone,” thought Vido, looking across at the three monks and thinking how much the truth of that strange name seemed to be written across the face and bodies of the inhabitants of this remote and blighted place.

  Both Kree and Rynok stared across at Konniger from behind the abbot; Kree with quite blatant hostility, Rynok with morose indifference. Together, the two of them were, Vido decided, a perfect précis of the welcome that he and his master had so far received here at the monastery.

  “There was an outbreak of contagion of the Unholy Powers within the very walls of the great cathedral fortress in Altdorf.” said Konniger, looking calmly across the desk at Himerius. “At the command of the Office of the Grand Theogonist, I have been conducting an investigation into the source of the contagion. I am satisfied that I have traced the source back to here, to Alt Krantzstein.”

  “And, as I said, these are serious matters you speak of. You have proof of these allegations?” replied Himerius, the tremors in his palsy-shaking hand increasing.

  “Of course,” said Konniger, gesturing to Vido. The halfling nervously stepped forward, holding up the sealed casket he was carrying. Konniger took the box from him, and Vido stepped back smartly, glad to be rid of the box and the vile thing it contained.

  “The contagion was carried within the body of one Brother Vallus, whom the good Brother Kree here may remember.” Kree scowled in unwelcome surprise at the mention of his name, his frosty and hostile stare intensifying as the sage-detective continued talking. “Vallus was a master scribe at the cathedral, and ventured rarely, if ever, outside its environs. If he did not come into contact with a contagion outside the cathedral, then it seems most likely that the contagion was instead transmitted to him. A likely hypothesis, yes? But the question then is, of course, how was this accomplished?”

  Konniger laid the box down on the desk before the abbot and reached into his robes, drawing out a pair of fine calfskin leather gloves, which he then carefully donned.

  His audience watched his every move with morbid interest, listening as he talked throughout the whole intricate procedure:

  “Checking the scriptorium inventory, I saw that the unfortunate Brother Vallus had been working on a compendium of herbal l
ore, and had recently been in receipt of a number of books on that subject which were sent to him from this monastery.”

  “Brother Kree, is this true?” asked Himerius.

  “I seem to remember receiving a request from the cathedral scriptorium,” admitted Kree, glaring icily at Konniger. “It is the policy of the cathedral scribes to make copies of works in their own style rather than accept the copied work of our own scribes, so the required volumes were duly collected and sent to Altdorf via the regular monthly messenger.”

  “Quite so,” agreed Konniger, amicably. “The contents of Brother Vallus’ chamber were destroyed as is right in all cases of Chaos contamination, but, through entreaties to the Office of the Grand Theogonist, I was able to briefly search amongst its contents as they were put to the torch. And what I found was this…”

  He flipped open the lid of the casket, reached in, and, with his gloved fingers, carefully lifted out a torn page of parchment. The three brethren leaned forward to inspect it. It was illuminated with carefully hand-drawn letters and illustrations of herbs and plant leaves, clearly the work of a patient and talented monkish scribe. One whole edge of the parchment was smeared with a strange residue, dirt perhaps, or something else…

  “You recognise it?” he asked Brother Kree. No answer was forthcoming. “No? It’s a page from your monastery’s copy of Root and Herbal Remedies and Toxins of the Ostland and Ostermark Provinces. I have a lesser copy myself, although regretfully not as complete or as finely rendered as this version. From what I have ascertained, this was the text Vallus was working on when he succumbed to the contaminating touch of Chaos.”

  Konniger ran a gloved finger down the discoloured margin of the page. “Look at this strange mark on the page. What do you suppose it to be?”

  “Dirt, water damage or some kind of ash? You yourself said that you rescued the page from the fire,” ventured Himerius.