For a second all was still.
'Ranald's eye! Hurry!' Vido almost screamed at his master, realising the nature of the new horror which was about to assail them.
The mummified, disease-rotted congregation of corpses in the rows of silent, darkened pews began to stir. From inside each of them came the faint, muffled buzzing of insects. The living soul-stuff of the daemon, a small part of it now inhabiting and animating each of the cadavers.
Konniger and Vido hurried towards the mouth of the stairwell ahead of them. Parchment-skin hands reached out at them from the pews at either side of the main aisle. Vido slashed at the closest ones with his dagger, slicing through bony, disease-wasted fingers. There were ominous shuffling steps on the flagstones behind them. Ahead of them, more of the shambling corpse-figures were spilling out into the aisle to block their path.
Vido and Konniger threw themselves forward. Konniger, rallying his returning strength, snatched up the leg of a collapsed pew, wielding it as a weapon, and with a single blow crushed the skull of the first walking corpse in his path.
The zombie-thing stumbled back, flies spilling out of the gaping holes in its age-rotted skull. Others pressed forward, hands clawing and grasping at the sage-detective.
Vido slashed and stabbed in despair at them with his knife, knowing the relative uselessness of the weapon against such creatures. Konniger fared better, bringing his unarmed combat skills to bear, apparently determined to go down fighting.
An undead thing came at him, mouth gaping; a blow from Konniger's fist tore away its lower jaw. A second blow caved in its face. It collapsed away, a dark halo of insects buzzing up from its once again lifeless flesh as that part of the daemon which had inhabited it was forced to flee its damaged new home.
A spinning kick to another's midriff broke the creature in half, sending another billowing cloud of angry, dispossessed flies spilling out of the shattered remains.
More hands pulled and tore at them, and yet still they pressed forward, coming tantalisingly close to the mouth of the stairwell.
Stabbing and hacking apart another of the things, Vido dared to hope for a moment that they might actually escape, estimating that their chances of making it alive to the stairwell might even be as high as one in ten.
Those seemingly generous odds dropped sharply when he saw the figure emerging from the mouth of the stairwell, and recognised the gleaming black metal blade in the figure's hand. It was the Chaos knight.
The figure stepped forward, swinging the blade at Konniger. The blow decapitated two of the creatures with one swing.
Vaul Steiner.
The Imperial assassin wielded the purloined Chaos weapon with consummate skill, severing zombie limbs from bodies, splitting dried-out torsos from shoulder to groin with one blow. Suddenly, there were no more of the creatures around Konniger and Vido, and they hurried forward towards the assassin's protective presence.
More of the creatures tried to pursue them. Steiner cut away the legs of the first of them. With the second, he thrust the tip of the burning torch in his other hand into its caved- in chest, instantly setting the creature ablaze. A good, powerful kick from his boot propelled the flaying, burning thing back into the ranks of the others behind it.
Konniger had once explained the tactics of naval warfare to his servant, and so Vido was dimly aware of the concept of fire ships: vessels deliberately set ablaze and left to adrift amongst the enemy formations. What he saw now was a textbook example of this tactic put into practice, as the burning creature blundered into those around it, setting them alight in turn as the fire quickly took hold of their dry, desiccated bodies.
'Good sirs, our work here is done, I think,' said Steiner without any hint of drama or even grim humour as he took hold of them and herded them down the stairs away from
the fire-filled chamber. 'It is time we were gone from this place.'
Voiceless, formless, the dispossessed spirit of the daemon- thing could only scream silently into the void as it felt the nebulous stuff of its mind - all that was left of its very being - start to dissolve away. So many of the tiny creatures that each harboured a tiny piece of its soul-stuff had been consumed by the growing heat and flames which now filled the chamber. Robbed of a proper corporeal form, it could not maintain its control over the remaining insectoid mass for long.
Piece by piece, second by second, it felt itself ebb away into the void. It had failed, and it felt the Grandfather withdraw his favour.
Not fair, it screamed soundlessly as the void opened before it, and all that was left of it was swept away and torn apart amongst the seething maelstrom of the Realm of Chaos.
Not fair...
They fled through the monastery, as the place died around them.
At the foot of the stairs, they passed the corpse of the Chaos warrior where it lay amongst the rubble of the destroyed stonework barrier. Steiner stepped casually over it, not even sparing it a second glance. Vido looked down at it, seeing the pommel of Steiner's long-bladed dagger jutting out from beneath the Chaos follower's chin, the weapon blade rammed brutally up through the inside of his head. The man stared back at Vido, his gaze still full of unspoken moment-of-death disbelief at the realisation that he had finally met an opponent more deadly than himself.
On they went, the fire in the chamber at the top of the west tower already starting to take hold in earnest. One whole eastern wing of the building was also fully ablaze. The fire there seemed to have started in the area housing the refectory, Vido judged, and the two fires would soon grow to meet each other, destroying the entire monastery in the process. Konniger had to be almost restrained by Steiner from breaking away in an attempt to reach the monastery library to try
and save some of the precious, unique volumes and texts housed there. Steiner would hear nothing of such foolishness, as he saw it, and made it quite clear as he herded them on towards the monastery entrance that he would allow nothing to interfere with the orders given to him by the Iron Graf. He was to watch over the sage-detective, give him what aid he could in the successful completion of his investigations at Alt Krantzstein, and then see to it that Konniger made a full and safe return to Altdorf.
When the Iron Graf spoke, he did so with the full authority of the Emperor, and for a man like Steiner, the word of the Emperor and of his chief spymaster was akin to the word of Lord Sigmar himself.
As they exited the main doors of the monastery and entered the courtyard a group of beastmen blocked their path. The Chaos things were snarling and fighting over the remains of a particularly prized corpse meal from the recent slaughter. The appearance of Steiner, Konniger and Vido called a halt to the noisy dispute.
An ungor-caste beastman raised its bloody snout and snarled in challenge at them. Steiner stepped forward, raised the crossbow he was holding and casually fired it one- handed, shooting the creature between the eyes. It dropped dead to the ground, and he brandished the gleaming black blade in his other hand. The beastmen recognised the weapon and ran off in panic, afraid to face any opponent capable of taking that weapon from its original owner.
Steiner motioned for them to proceed. 'Wait,' said Konniger, stooping down to inspect one of the Templar corpses lying nearby. It was Gustav. Konniger knelt over him, intoning a silent prayer over the dead Templar commander and touching his hand into the man's head, shoulders and chest as he invoked the traditional blessing of the Hammer of Sigmar upon the slain holy warrior. Then he reached down, reverently lifting the sword from the dead man's grip.
'I'll see this is safely returned to your brethren, captain, and I'll see to it that they add the name of another brave hero to the worthy list of those who have wielded it in the holy service of Sigmar,' he murmured to the corpse.
Konniger turned, offering the sword to Steiner. The Imperial assassin shook his head and searched amongst the
other Templar dead, finding another blade more suited to his humbler, simpler tastes. He threw Arek's sword in
to the tainted depths of the courtyard well without a second glance, glad to be rid of the touch of the vile thing.
They found two Templar horses still left alive and relatively unscathed in the stables at the side of the courtyard. Steiner gently stroked their noses and flanks, his peasant woodsman's intuition showing as he soothed away the fear from the terrified animals. A minute later, and they were riding out through the broken, sorcery-blasted remains of the monastery gates, Vido sharing the saddle of Konniger's horse. Behind them, flames were already visible in most of the windows of the burning monastery.
They rode on into the forest, into the first dawn light. Fearful beastman eyes watched them from the lurking darkness of the trees, but none tried to stop them. They kept riding, never once looking round. Not even when, a few minutes later, there came the dull roar from the road behind them as the monastery's west tower, its stones split by the heat of fire raging within it, its wooden support beams burned away, collapsed in upon itself and tumbled down into the graveyard gulley at the base of the rock.
Epilogue
Later, back in Altdorf, letters were written, reports were filed, sacred auguries were performed and certain ancient and prophetic texts were consulted. Some parts of the truth of what had happened over the many years at Alt Krantzstein were discovered. Other parts, darker and more mysterious, were still unknown, while certain things remained suspected but never proven.
A week after Konniger's return to Altdorf, and by joint decrees from both the Imperial palace and the Holy Office of the Grand Theogonist, three companies of Templars, a phalanx of powerful and high-ranking Sigmarite priests, and a unit from the Imperial Engineering School in Nuln were despatched to Alt Krantzstein. The Templars gathered up the remains of their slain brethren and searched the area around the monastery rock, vigorously purging it of any beastmen stragglers still lurking in the woods there.
The engineers set to work amongst the burned-out ruins of the monastery. They planted powerful gunpowder charges and razed what was left of the place to the ground, sending
much of it tumbling down the face of the escarpment to join the heaps of fire-blackened rubble already piled there. Afterwards, when the engineers had finished their work, the priests carried out exorcism rites on the bare and barren rock, trying to drive out the evil that had taken root there. The rock was re-consecrated, but no further attempt would ever be made to build upon it, and when the forces of the Empire gathered up their dead and left the place again, they did so for good this time.
Yet the rock remained, and so did the ancient, unnatural power still buried beneath it.
Dormant.
Lurking.
Waiting for a time, centuries or even millennia from now, when the right set of circumstances might awaken its malignant power once again.
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