They were Blood-kin, followers of the Blood God Khorne, and Arek knew that they would not be as easily cowed into submission as the rest.
The leader - a squat, bull-headed bovigor - sniffed the air suspiciously, snorting in dull disgust as it swung its heavy head round towards Arek. Its red eyes narrowed in hatred, and Arek could see its wet, dripping nostrils flare in anger. A low growl started somewhere deep in its thick, muscle- corded throat. The rest of its warband quickly took up their master's lead in an eerie, mismatched chorus of snarls, yelps and hisses.
Around him, Arek's own beastmen began to stir, several of them prowling forward, heads sunk low, the fur along their spines rising in warning as they hissed and snarled in challenge at these Khornate interlopers. Arek knew he must do something quickly. He was not afraid of confrontation - blood must be spilled here, that much was clear - but he did not want to lose any more of his followers than he had to. Not when there was still so much to do.
He stepped forward towards the bovigor, drawing his sword and planting it blade-first into the damp, leaf-strewn ground. A challenge to a duel, to be conducted in the manner decreed by the Lords of Chaos. The bovigor unslung its double-bladed axe, swinging it round its head. The challenge had been understood, and accepted.
Without any further ado, the two Chaos champions set about the brief, bloody business of killing each other.
The bovigor charged forward, roaring and swinging its axe. Like so many followers of the Blood God, it depended mostly on sheer ferocity and overpowering savagery to defeat its opponents. Arek was a master swordsman - a veteran practitioner in pain and death - and was fully confident that he could end this duel in seconds, artfully slicing this mindless creature into a bloody heap of stinking offal. But what was needed here was not artistry nor even a swift and shocking resolution. Arek required not only the death of this upstart brute, but also the willing servitude of its followers afterwards.
The servants of the Blood God respected only savagery and blood-hunger, and if that was what the bovigor's followers required, then that was what Arek would give them.
He allowed the creature to charge at him, allowed it to take a fast but laughably clumsy swing at him with its axe. Allowed the blow to smash into his shield when he could easily have stepped aside and dodged the blow. Allowed the blow to smash through the material of the shield, ripping it off his arm. Allowed the terrific impact of the blow to knock him off his feet, bowling him backwards across the ground.
The bovigor roared in stupid triumph, and its followers howled victoriously. From behind him, amongst the ranks of his own warband, Arek heard the sorcerer Sorren snicker to himself in quiet glee. Sorren had always desired leadership of the warband for himself - Arek expected this, and, indeed would not have trusted the competence of any second-in-command who would have been satisfied with such a position for long - but the sorcerer was fundamentally a weakling and a coward, too afraid of Arek to ever try and kill him himself. Watching another do it, however, would suit his purposes perfectly.
Arek came out of the roll and was instantly on his feet again, sword swinging perfectly up to meet and deflect the bovigor's fully-anticipated death-blow. They traded blows for a few seconds, the blades of their weapons clashing together in a ringing cacophony of metal upon metal.
At the end of the exchange, both of them were bloodied, Arek from a stunning blow to the side of the head from the
chain-wrapped fist of the bovigor's weaponless hand. Arek allowed one of his opponent's wild swings to knock his sword out of his hand, but it made little difference. The bovigor was already dead, it just didn't know it yet. Arek had taken that blow to the head, but the damage he had inflicted in return had been far more subtle and far more telling. A precise sword thrust had skewered the creature's kidneys, and its massive body would be bled out in a matter of minutes. The bovigor was too rage-maddened to even feel the pain, and there was little outward sign of the fatal injury, since most of the bleeding would be occurring internally.
The fight was already as good as over, Arek knew. Everything that happened now was just a pantomime for the benefit of his keenly attentive beastman audience.
The bovigor charged forward towards its weaponless opponent, but stumbled along the way. Maybe the watching beastmen imagined it had tripped over a stone or tree-root hidden beneath the leaf-covered ground. Only Arek knew the mistake for what it was, evidence that the creature was starting to weaken from massive blood loss. He was on the champion of Khorne in moments, his fists inside their mailed, spike-knuckled gauntlets smashing blow upon blow into the creature's bull face.
The bovigor's followers bayed and howled for blood, blood they would now have.
Arek's fists broke the creature's jaw, smashed its teeth, shattered the cartilage of its snout, and burst one of its eyes. The creature reeled back, slamming into a tree, mewling in pain, its monstrous face reduced to a broken, red ruin. Arek didn't hesitate and scooped up his nearby fallen sword, grabbing it by its bone-carved pommel and hurling it at his opponent. The sword tumbled through the air, spinning end over end until it struck the bovigor, impaling it through one thickly- muscled shoulder and pinning it to a tree behind it.
Even though it was dying - indeed, was already dead, truth be told - the creature roared in defiance and weakly tried to wrench itself free of the blade. Arek walked forward, making a slow bravado show of everything he was doing now. He bent down and picked up the creature's axe, hefted it once as if testing the weight, looked the bovigor in the eye and then swung the weapon down onto its head, striking it at a point
exactly between its twin bull's horns, splitting its skull with one blow.
The bovigor hung limply, heavy head leaning drunkenly forward, its blood and brains dripping down the haft of the weapon buried deep in its skull.
Arek turned, catching a flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye. The rival warband's beastman shaman chanted words of power and gestured spitefully at him with its skull- adorned bone staff. But, before its own incantation was even halfway complete, the shaman was struck down by a greater and more quickly-cast brand of magic than its own. It screamed shrilly as it was enveloped by a flickering nimbus of black fire, its flesh melting off its bones as it fell to the ground. The other Khornate beastmen scattered in panic, several of those standing too close to the shaman also blackening and shrivelling as they too were caught in the fringes of that terrible black fire.
Arek turned to look towards the ranks of his own followers, nodding in sardonic thanks to the figure of his own warband's sorcerer. The hunched, black-cloaked figure of Sorren stared impassively back at him, his face as ever hidden by that impenetrable mask of beads. The sorcerer was leaning forward heavily on his staff, and Arek knew that such a dramatic and ostentatious display of magical power would have drained the sorcerer's strength to the point of exhaustion, but the demonstration had been enough to terrify the leaderless Khornate beastmen into total submission.
In truth, he and Sorren both knew that Arek had been in little danger from the enemy shaman's spell. The mystical protections that Arek had been granted by his corrupt master were more than adequate to deal with the crude magics of a mere beastman shaman. Whether they were also powerful enough to withstand whatever sorceries Sorren could draw upon was a question upon which both men often secretly pondered.
But the final and, no doubt for one of them fatal, resolution of the two Chaos acolytes' rivalry and mutual hatred would have to wait for another day. For now, they were forced to work together in the service of the Dark Gods. Arek retrieved his sword, the impaled corpse of the vanquished bovigor falling forgotten to the ground as the blade came
free of the tree. He turned, brandishing the blood-stained blade at the bovigor's followers. The beastmen cowered in abeyance before him, emitting a low chorus of subservient grunts.
Arek smiled. For mindless Blood God vassals, they learned quickly.
Very good. Now we do thi
ngs my way.'
Crouching in the dense undergrowth some fifty yards away, the hunter checked the range of his shot again, scanning between the two targets on offer. It would be a difficult shot, firing through trees and foliage from this distance, but the hunter was perhaps the finest marksman in the Empire, and had no doubts about his ability to strike and kill either target.
Head and heart shots were always the best, and, as he proved every year at the public games in the Kaiserplatz to celebrate the Emperor's birthday, the hunter could drill a crossbow quarrel through the centre of a silver shilling from a distance of fifty paces away. So, no, the surely of killing what he fired at was not the problem.
The problem was which one of those Dark-damned bastard sons of bitches should he kill first?
He moved the crossbow between the two targets, unable to decide which target most deserved to be skewered by his deadly accurate marksmanship skills. He would, after all, only have one shot. Lethal as it was, the crossbow was slow and awkward to reload, and, even if he did manage to reload the weapon in time, the other target would doubtlessly have taken cover by that point.
And there was also the small matter of the dozens of beast things milling around nearby. The hunter had picked a position carefully upwind of his prey, and had smeared himself with the creatures' blood and musk to disguise his own scent, but as soon as he fired, they would become aware of his presence.
The newly-arrived and dangerous-looking human war- band leader was the most obvious target, and the hunter trained the crossbow sights on the Chaos knight's face, knowing that one shot would be enough to end the man's foul, treacherous existence. Still, the presence of the Chaos
sorcerer greatly troubled the hunter, and the traditional woodsman in him gave him a dread of any kind of sorcery. His veteran assassin's instincts told him to kill the warband leader; strike off the head, and the body will die of its own accord. The superstitious peasant in him told him to kill the sorcerer first, and be done with it.
The hunter sighed, and lowered the crossbow. He would shoot neither. In the end, it was the voice of the dutiful servant of the Emperor that won out. The hunter was no coward, but neither had he survived this long by being stupid and disobedient of his master's orders. His mission was to protect the sage and render to him any secret aid he could in the successful completion of his investigation. He could do neither of these things if he was dead. For the likelihood of the matter was that, Chaos knight or sorcerer, whichever one he killed, he would be hunted down and killed by a large pack of vengeful beastmen, and then he would be unable to carry out his orders.
Slowly, silently, he retraced his steps, careful not to tread on any twigs or branches that might be lying on the ground. The deaths of those two servants of the Dark would surely come - and by his hands, if he had any say in the matter. But, for, now, the pleasure of their deaths would have to wait.
Not that the hunter had been lax during his time hiding in the forest observing the gathering of the beastman war- bands. He had gone hunting in the woods with crossbow, dagger and garrotte, and there were more than a dozen beastman corpses lying carefully buried in the dark woods behind them. They were stragglers from the main warbands, scouts or foragers perhaps, carefully picked off in ones and twos by the hunter's deadly skills.
Satisfying as it was, he realised that this kind of small-scale guerrilla warfare action against the enemy was of little use to the successful completion of his main duty.
It was time to make his presence more obvious to the one he was supposed to be watching over.
Seven
The row of blood-soaked, blanket-covered corpses stretched out below the low shed roof of the monastery's abandoned stables. Monks and Templars knelt over them, praying for the souls of their slain brethren. Vido stood and watched, counting the pairs of feet sticking out from beneath the coverings. Eight pairs of simple, leather-shod sandals. Seven pairs of worn, sturdy boots. Eight dead monks, seven dead Templars. And that wasn't counting the wounded - more than double those figures.
Still, Vido thought, it was far less than the casualties suffered by the defeated beastmen. There were several dozen of the vile things lying around the courtyard and on the battlements, dozens more lying outside, either piled at the foot of the walls and gates or scattered across the open ground in the road up to the monastery gates. The men of the Empire accorded their dead all proper respect, but the only epitaph the beastmen received from those now gathering up the enemy dead was a spitting curse as the Templars threw their corpses over the side of the batdements, sending them
plummeting forgotten and unmourned down the face of the rocky escarpment upon which the monastery stood.
Vido watched as Konniger bent down to inspect the laid- out row of corpses, lifting the covers to check faces and then murmuring a few words of prayer as he made the blessing of the hammer over each in turn. He paused over one of them, and Vido recognised the face of the dead man - more of a boy, really, he ruefully realised - as being the young novice who had come to the graveyard to convey the abbot's message to them just that morning.
There was something about the corpse that seemed to catch Konniger's curiosity and he lingered over it, looking down towards where a blood-stained and heavily-bandaged foot protruded from beneath the hem of his cassock. Vido remembered that the boy had been club-footed, and certainly the foot inside the bandages looked malformed and oddly oversized.
Still, there was something about it that Konniger, and now Vido, found oddly disturbing.
'Vido, one of your knives please,' asked Konniger.
Vido hurried over to hand a blade to his master. Himerius, who had been nearby praying over another of the dead, looked up and immediately understood Konniger's intent.
'No! I forbid it!' he called out, making a move towards the kneeling sage-detective. His way was suddenly blocked by a sword blade, the finely-tempered metal still stained with beastman blood. Waasen stood before him, glaring at the monk in warning. Clearly, with the battle over for now, the truce was over too. The Templars had not forgotten their suspicions about the monks' role in the still unsolved mystery of the disappearance of their comrade.
Swiftly, with Waasen looking on, Konniger split open the bindings on the corpse's leg. It was the smell - foul and rotten - that instantly alerted Vido to the worst possibilities of what they were about to see.
A typical inhabitant of the Old World, Vido was more than familiar with a wide range of horrifying-looking natural deformities and crudely-healed wounds. Sometimes, it seemed to him that the streets of Altdorf were full of little else but crippled, deformed, diseased or battle-wounded limbless beggars.
The deformity revealed beneath the bandage was quite different, however. The flesh of the boy's leg looked as if it had been turned inside out. Curlicued muscle and veins glistened wetly as they crawled snake-like round the clearly visible stem of the corpse's leg bone. The mess tapered down towards the flesh-fused remains of the foot, which was altering and dividing into what was clearly a split-toed animal's hoof.
'Mutation,' breathed Vido. The word ran in a terrified whisper round the ranks of the Templars crowding round the scene.
'There's another one here,' growled Gustav, using his sword to saw open the front of another corpse's cassock. Fanged mouths, wet and vile, gaped from the man's chest, gasping for breath like dying fish.
'One here too,' called another Templar, finding yet another secret obscenity marked into the body of one of the dead monks.
There were shouts of anger now from the Templars, and drawn swords were raised threateningly in the direction of the other, still-living monks. 'Round them up!' bellowed Gustav in enraged disgust. 'Watch them well. We'll strip them and then we'll see which are monsters, and which if any are still human.'
'That may not be enough, captain,' growled another Templar, a scar-faced veteran man-at-arms with an unpleasant gleam in his eye. 'I've helped deal with these kind of altered scum bef
ore, back when I was in the service of Witch Hunter Lord Kamen. They're cunning devils, sir, and not all of them bear the mark of Chaos on the outside. Sometimes Lord Kamen had to open up them that didn't show any mark, just to check what kind of altered devilment there might be inside of them.'
There was an angry chorus of approval from many of the other Templars, and Vido sensed the beginnings of a massacre. He looked in concern towards his master. Konniger stepped forward, placing himself between the Templars' blades and the nearest terrified monk.
'I remember Kamen and his work,' he intoned. 'He was a blood-maddened butcher who built a career and a fortune on torture and the execution of hundreds of innocents. It
was a blessing to the Holy Church and the Empire when he was finally torn apart by the mob in Nuln, when he accused Saint Friga the Blessed of being in league with the Unholy Powers. I condemned Kamen and his slaughter then, and I forbid any slaughter of these men here.'
'What are you? Some kind of altered lover?' sneered Gustav. 'I've heard some of the stories about you, Konniger, about how you were once charged with heresy. I see now that those charges may have had some substance to them.'
Konniger glared back at the Templar commander. "What am I, you ask? I am the chosen emissary of the Office of the Grand Theogonist, sent here on a mission vital to the Church's interests. I am a confidante of the Graf Otto von Bitternach, and I assume that you are familiar with the reputation and power behind that name. I am a former Imperial ambassador to the court of Bretonnia in Gisoreux, and with the Emperor's blessings I still carry the mark of his authority.'
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