'Waasen!' Gustav screamed in anguish, limping forward to the aid of his second-in-command. His sorcery-withered arm hung uselessly at his side, and the pain from it was beyond any natural measure, but the Templar captain closed his mind to the agony and kept on running. A beastman reared up before him. Gustav cut it down with one swing of his sword, as he did the one that came after it.
Cruel eyes tracked his progress across the batde-filled courtyard. Arek had done his share of killing, but quickly became bored and now hung back, watching his warband in savage action. He recognised the Templar's rank markings - he had killed enough of Sigmar's holy warriors in his time to realise the meaning of the silver trimming on the man's scarlet cloak - and wondered if this one was worth killing. He glanced across the courtyard, seeing the Templar's obvious target. If the man managed to kill Vorr, Arek decided, then perhaps he would be a worthy next victim for Arek's own blade.
Screaming in rage, Gustav threw himself at Waasen's killer, raining a hail of blows at its shield and parrying blade. Wielded two-handed, his sword could easily have cleaved through whatever defence the creature tried to throw up before it. Forced to fight one-handed and without the protection of a shield, it took Gustav several seconds longer than he would have expected to kill the beast-thing.
Stepping past its guard, he severed its spine with one clean stroke. The beastman fell to the ground, dying with a quizzical grunt as Gustav put the point of his blade through its heart.
Gustav leaned forward, resting on the blade, pushing it deeper into the twitching corpse. The pain from his dead arm drained away his strength, but he mustered enough of it to stand back up and pull away his blade in readiness at the sound of the voice addressing him.
'Templar.'
It was the Chaos warrior, the one who Gustav had previously only glimpsed from afar at the onset of tonight's battle. Now he was almost upon him, drawing his own blade as he strode confidently towards Gustav.
'Are you strong enough, Templar? Are you worth the effort of killing, or shall I summon one of my lesser bray beasts to do the task for me?'
Gustav answered the warrior's sneer with a defiant roar, bringing his own sword up in challenge. The blades of the two warriors clashed in a blurring series of blows and parries. Both of them seemed perfectly matched in skill, but, as one of them was soon to discover, it was all a cruel feint.
Arek broke first, apparently stumbling back and encouraging Gustav to press forward with his attack. The Chaos warrior attempted a desperate counter-attack, bringing his sword up for a downward blow at Gustav's head. It was a clumsily-telegraphed move, and one which the Templar was well prepared to counter.
Then, suddenly, impossibly, the Chaos warrior spun the blade from one hand to the other, reversing its sweep in the progress; what had been a downwards slashing motion now became an upwards thrust. The thrust cruelly gutted Gustav, and he stared in wide-eyed horror and disbelief at the sneering features of his enemy, now only inches away from his own face.
'Weakling gods deserve only weakling followers, Templar. Go tell that to your precious Lord Sigmar.'
Arek pulled the blade upwards in one brutal ripping motion. Gustav fell dead to the ground, laid open from abdomen to sternum. The Chaos warrior stepped casually over him and mounted the steps of the entrance to the
monastery. Let his followers continue the slaughter out here, he thought. He had more important business within.
'Master!' Vido called in relief.
He would have rushed forward, but was stopped short by the strange sight of Konniger on his hands and knees, bending down before the stonework of the bricked-up entranceway to the forbidden west tower, muttering to himself over the intricacies of the mysterious task he was busying himself with. A warhammer, brutal and incongruous looking, lay on the ground beside him.
If Vido was surprised at the sight of Konniger engaged in whatever he was doing, armed with something as uncharacteristic as a warhammer, he was taken even more by surprise by the appearance of the figure that stepped from out of the shadows beside him. A figure wearing grimy, dirt-smeared black leather breeches and jerkin. A figure holding a sword in one hand and casually aiming a loaded crossbow at him with the other as it regarded Vido with its grey, cold eyes.
Vaul Steiner, the Emperor's personal bodyguard and assassin.
Vido,' noted Konniger, not troubling to look up from his mysterious task. 'Good to see you still amongst the land of the living. I trust you remember our friend Herr Steiner?'
Steiner lowered the crossbow, satisfied that Vido represented no threat to him or the sage-detective. He continued to stare at the halfling for a second or two more, and Vido returned his stare for a moment before looking away, seeing only the promise of clinical, cold-blooded death in that terrible, otherwise empty gaze the assassin presented to the world.
Vido looked questioningly at his master, glancing significantly towards the silent shadow-figure of the Imperial assassin.
"When we were sent here, it seems that someone who had our best interests at heart decided that a company of Templars may not have been enough to adequately protect us, so they wisely and kindly decided to despatch the good Herr Steiner here to secretly guard over us. And happily so, perhaps, since we may not even have reached our journey's end without his hidden aid.'
'That last ambush on the road here... that sound which caused those things to retreat, even when it looked as if they were just about to overwhelm us,' noted Vido, in wonder.
'Quite so,' nodded Konniger. "We owe Herr Steiner our lives, Vido, and not merely on that occasion, but also on several others of which we knew nothing about at the time, so circumspect was he in scouting out the road ahead of us during our journey here. As I told another brave man not so long ago, I feel Sigmar is watching in this endeavour, but it seems we must also give some thanks too to Herr Steiner and the Graf von Bitternach.'
The last comment was spoken with a wry smile before Konniger turned his attention back to the task at hand. 'Now tell me, Vido, where have you been all this time, and what have you learned?'
In a garbled rush, Vido told Konniger everything that had happened in the crypts - the existence of the mutated former brethren, the treachery of Brother Rynok. As Konniger listened carefully while he worked. Standing beside him, Vido could see that he had mapped out a chalk-drawn grid over the face of the stonework, with a scattering of strange, indecipherable markings and sigils scrawled across it. Some of them looked distinctly dwarfish to Vido's untrained eye, but that was as much as he could discern. Konniger grunted and muttered to himself as he listened to what Vido had to say. The revelations about the things kept locked in the crypts - 'the afflicted ones', as Kree had called them, drew a hiss of concern from the sage.
Those Sigmar-damned fools. It would have been wiser and kinder by far to have put those things out of their misery than to allow them to have lived on like that. If the mutations were as severe and far gone as you say, could they really have believed that there was any shred of humanity, any trace of what was once their former brethren, left in those monstrous bodies? Chaos consumes everything, Vido, the mind and soul most of all. And now you say these things are most likely escaped and are at large somewhere within this place?'
The sage-detective shook his head in angry sorrow as he ran his hands one final time over the surface of the stonework, completing the last rune-mark with a last slash
of the chalk nub. Vido watched as his master took up the warhammer.
'Hadn't you better let our good friend Herr Steiner handle that?' Vido meekly suggested. That wall looks to be a fair old thickness, and I doubt that even Captain Gustav and a half dozen of his men could make an easy task of breaking through it.'
Konniger smiled as he brought the warhammer up to strike. 'Stone speaks to you, if you have the ears to listen to it. Any dwarf engineer could tell you that, even though that is one of the secrets their kind always persevere to keep to themselves. Still
, ask the stone the correct questions, and it will tell you the correct answers. Such as where its hidden weaknesses lie, and where best to strike in order to break it.'
The hammer smashed into the stonework with a sound like a thunderclap, made all the more deafening and shocking as the noise rebounded off the stone walls of the passageway, sending loud echoes reverberating through the interior of the monastery. The stone barrier blocking the sealed doorway fell apart with a shattering roar, stone blocks fully a foot or more thick crashing down on each other and sending up a choking cloud of dust and destroyed, crumbling mortar.
When the dust cleared, the barrier was gone, revealing a flight of shadow-shrouded stone steps heading up into the unknown interior of the sealed-off tower.
Speaking stone, my Moot-born backside, thought Vido as he surveyed the broken wreckage of the stone wall. Unless he was very much mistaken, there was more than a touch of dwarf runesmith magic to what he had just witnessed. He looked at Konniger speculatively, wondering just how his master might have come upon such knowledge, and just what the notoriously secretive dwarfs would do if they knew that a mere human possessed even a fraction of their most precious and mysterious rune-lore.
The echoes of the wall's destruction faded away, and it was only then that another sound became apparent. Rapid, confident footsteps, echoing along the passageway towards them. Steiner spun round, alert and lethal, ready to meet the threat of whoever or whatever was now approaching. They saw a figure striding towards them down the corridor, its
black beastman-hide fur cloak swept over one shoulder, revealing the burnished highlights of its dark platemail armour. There may once have been heraldic emblems or even the holy cross of the Hammer of Sigmar on the chest- plate of the armour, but all that remained now was the forbidden and unholy eight-arrowed circle emblem of the Ruinous Powers of Chaos. The figure had a sword in its hand, the blade bright with blood, and the visor of its crowned helm was up. A face, cruel and arrogant, handsome and merciless, stared out at them, its lips creasing in a smile of mocking amusement.
"What have we here?' asked Arek, with a sneering laugh. 'Three more weaklings, perhaps? A bookworm, a halfling runt and some idiot peasant of a woodsman. Come, weaklings, don't be shy. Who shall be next to have the honour of bearing my respects to your pitiful god?'
Steiner stepped forward, dropping the crossbow and drawing a long-bladed dagger to match the sword in his other hand. He stood solidly in the middle of the passage, shielding Konniger and Vido from the Chaos warrior.
'Go,' he said simply. 'Do what you must do, Herr Konniger, and let us be done with our business here.'
Konniger, still carrying the warhammer, pushed Vido forward through the gap in the shattered stonework, pressing a lit firebrand into his servant's hand. Vido simply did as he was guided, too afraid and nervous - of the enemy right behind them, of the enemies that might be ahead of them - to complain or resist.
He and Konniger hurried up the darkened stairway towards the upper reaches of the tower, and whatever awaited them up there. Behind them, they heard the clash of sword blades as the assassin and the Chaos champion began their duel.
Ten
The daemon-thing waited in the darkness, hearing the footsteps of its would-be destroyers on the stairs. The crucial moment was almost upon it. Glorious rebirth or defeat and death? Both possibilities hovered tantalisingly close there in the surrounding darkness, awaiting the moment of decision. The future was still a shifting, shadowy blur to the creature's daemon-sight, but the past and the present were unravelled before it and, as it waited and listened to those fatal footsteps approaching, it looked out with its mystic gaze and beheld all.
A footstep.
The past. Millennia ago. The dread shape of the dark Morrslieb moon hangs above the blue and verdant planet. Its eccentric, unpredictable orbit brings it within the invisible, mystic reach of both its parent world and its brighter twin Mannslieb. It rides out the powerful, unseen forces that are exerted upon it, but the strain of the battle causes eruptions and fractures amongst the unstable, unnatural material
which the Chaos Moon was composed of. Morrslieb pulls itself free of its spiteful parents' and sibling's grasp and continues on its path, leaving a trail of broken, discarded fragments of itself in its wake. They drift in the void, but are soon captured by the irresistible pull of the larger parent planet below.
As meteors, they fall spluttering to earth, cutting fiery trails through the blue sky as they rain down on the world of man.
The world of the daemon-thing's time is a far different place from what it is now. Here, the face of the Old World is still unscarred by the marks of human civilisation. There are no cities and no roads, only endless green forest covering the face of the lands which will one day come to be known as the Empire. One of the burning fragments falls towards these lands, ploughing into it and gouging a wide, fiery wound into the face of the forest. The land convulses at the violence of the impact, the earth splitting and heaving in reaction to the violating intrusion of the unnatural shard of Chaos Moon material now lodged within it. A rocky peak is thrown up by these convulsions, breaking through the floor of the forest landscape. Buried deep beneath it is the moon-shard, leaking its unnatural, corrupting radiance out into the surrounding earth.
Another footstep.
The present. This night. Out in the courtyard below, the battle is almost over. Beastmen mercilessly surround and tear apart the last few still-fighting Templars, while others fall, blood-maddened, upon the human dying and injured. Come dawn, no defenders will remain alive within the monastery, but then few beastmen will either.
Battle-crazed, and without any human leadership, these simple, savage creatures will turn on each other. Tribal animosities between different warbands, inflamed by the worship of different, rival Chaos gods will soon manifest themselves. Left unchecked, with their Chaos warrior master absent and his sorcerer and beastman hetman lieutenants dead, the beast-things will turn their appetite for slaughter on each other. The survivors of the resultant carnage will flee into the woods, some of them eventually making their way back to the sheltering thickets of the Forest of Shadows
where they will join the ranks of the warband of yet another aspiring champion of Chaos.
None of this mattered, the daemon-thing knew. The beastmen had already achieved the one task it had required of them.
Another footstep.
The past. Millennia roll forward. The land around the rock recovers from the cataclysm and the forest grows again to cover over the wounds inflicted upon it. But still, deep beneath the earth, the lurking, all-tainting shard of Chaos- stuff remains. Humans come to the land and settle there, building their first wooden stockade settlements upon the rock. They are happy with their new home, for the soil here is rich and fertile, and the rock is a perfect natural bastion where they can be safe from their enemies.
Their happiness does not last.
Their crops wither in the fields. Their cattle sicken and die. Their children are born weak and deformed, and many, many of them die in infancy. There is a secret sickness in the soil, they come to realise, a hidden blight which taints everything around it. Many of them move away and prosper elsewhere. Others remain, the hidden taint already planted within them, and so become even further corrupted.
Centuries roll past. The rock and the land around it become a haven for unnatural and Chaos-tainted things of all kinds. They sense the power in the earth beneath the rock, and gather to venerate it, defiling the stone of the rock with sacrifices to their unholy gods. In time, others come to cleanse the land of their presence. These newcomers wear the hammer-cross of their warrior god upon their shields and armour, and they build a holy fortress upon the rock, consecrating it to the glory of their god.
They give the holy fortress a name, calling it after the ancient name of the rock it stood upon. Alt Krantzstein. 'Old Sickstone'.
They believe the re-consecration of the rock
will wipe away the blight that had long plagued the land around it. Future events were to prove them wrong.
Another footstep.
The present. The monastery refectory. The monks there listen to the sounds of slaughter from the courtyard outside and wait for the beastmen to come claim them too. They needn't worry, the daemon-thing knows. After they have finished with the Templars, the beastmen will be too busy killing each other to feel the need to search out further human victims.
No, the daemon-thing thinks, the monks' deaths will be at the hands of its other remaining servants still inside the monastery.
They come creeping and slouching towards the place where their former brethren are gathered, scrabbling and sniffing their way through chambers and passageways which a few of them still dimly remember from their previous human existence. There is one thing they all remember, however: their terrible years of captivity in the crypts. The terror and fear of being abandoned in the subterranean darkness as they slowly completed their transformation from the human into the monstrous.
And the terrible hunger that consumed them. Hunger that would not be satisfied by the rotting scraps their former brethren fed to them. A hunger that they had only now found a name for, a hunger for the warm, screaming flesh of the ones who had been delivered into the darkness for them to consume. One of those had escaped - indeed, had hurt and killed several of them - but it did not matter. They had escaped the confines of their prison, and now they had found a plentiful source of this new nourishment to feed their hunger.
The doors of the refectory creak open, and the first hunched, twisted shapes push forward into the room, eager to be reunited with their former brethren. They discover that their brethren have been waiting for them.
The monks have found vats of lamp oil in the cellars beneath the refectory. They have broken them open, smearing themselves with the oil inside. Their robes hang heavy with the liquid. Its smell fills the refectory, where the vats have been dragged up and their remaining contents poured out onto the floor and furnishings of the place. The monks know the moment of their death is upon them. They have
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