“These deeds bring dishonour upon us,” said Eoforth, shaking his head as though unable to believe what he was hearing. “To think that Sigmar is responsible for such slaughter.”
“The Roppsmenn brought this on themselves,” snapped Wolfgart. “They attacked the empire and killed Count Wolfila and his family. What else did they expect?”
“Retribution, yes,” said Eoforth. “But such slaughter? No one could have expected this.”
“Word is already spreading,” put in Alfgeir. “I have had letters from Otwin, Aldred and Siggurd all demanding to know what is happening in the north. They are talking of ‘Sigmar’s Justice’ and what it really means.”
“They fear for their lands and people should they ever voice a contrary opinion,” said Eoforth. “They fear they will suffer the same fate.”
“That will not happen,” said Maedbh. “The Roppsmenn suffer because they betrayed Sigmar and killed his friend. They deserve this.”
“You’re a harsh woman, Maedbh,” said Eoforth. “You are right that they deserve to feel Sigmar’s wrath, but this goes too far. Villages burned to the ground, prisoners executed and entire families butchered? It is too much, and it shames me that our Emperor allows this.”
“The question is, what do we do about it?” asked Wolfgart.
“What can we do?” asked Alfgeir. “He is the Emperor.”
“He is our friend,” stated Eoforth, “first and foremost. The loss of Wolfila must have unhinged him, and he vents his anger and grief on the Roppsmenn.”
“Does that excuse such slaughter?” asked Alfgeir.
“Of course not, but knowing why a thing occurs makes it easier to understand,” said Eoforth. “When Sigmar leads his warriors back home, we will speak with him on this matter. Knowing what drove him to such excess will help us to soothe the fears of the other counts.”
“Where was Sigmar when last you heard from Pendrag?” asked Alfgeir.
“Last I heard, what’s left of the Roppsmenn were falling back towards the great dividing river,” said Wolfgart. “It’s the last line on the map before you head into the unknown.”
“Does anyone even know what lies beyond that river?” asked Alfgeir.
“Ulric alone knows what’s on the other side,” said Wolfgart with a weary shrug. “But we know what’s certain on this side.”
“What’s that?”
“Sigmar and death.”
It was dark by the time the old man decided they had come far enough. Though her hands were bound, Gerreon—she could not think of him as Azazel—held her fast the entire way, whispering the terrible things the old man was going to do to her. The Hag Woman had thought that death would hold no fear for her, but that had been foolish on her part.
She did not want to die like this.
The night sky was cloudless, the stars bright pinpricks in the velvet darkness, and she saw that they had travelled almost to the very edge of the marsh. Somehow the old man had known the secret routes through the deadly swamps. The moon’s reflection shimmered on the surface of the water, and its uncaring face bathed the silent landscape in a pale, dead glow.
“How did you find your way through the marshes?” she asked. “The paths are unknown to most men.”
“I am not ‘most men’, Grainne,” said the old man. “Your powers may be gone, but you can still tell that, can’t you?”
“You follow the Dark Gods,” she said.
“I follow the true gods,” he replied, “the gods that rule in the realm beyond this ashen existence and whose breath fills me with life. They are the real power in this world, not the feeble avatars dreamed up by the minds of men. They existed before this world and they will exist long after it is dust in the void.”
“If you are going to kill me, then tell me your name,” she said. “At least tell me that.”
“Very well,” shrugged the old man. “I am Kar Odacen of the Iron Wolves, shaman to Cormac Bloodaxe of the Norsii.”
“You are a long way from home, Kar Odacen of the Iron Wolves. What makes you think you will live long enough to return? You are deep in Unberogen lands and Sigmar’s hunters are very skilled.”
“As am I, woman,” hissed Gerreon. “I knew this land well enough to escape those hunters once before, and I will do it again. No man can match my skills and cunning.”
She laughed and twisted in his grip. She saw the raging desire to kill her in his eyes.
And the chance to escape the fate Kar Odacen had planned for her.
“You think you evaded them?” she asked. “Sigmar sent no one after you. He let you go to honour Ravenna’s memory.”
“You lie,” said Gerreon, and the Hag Woman relished the flinch she saw at the mention of his sister’s name: the sister he had killed. The sister she had sacrificed to temper Sigmar’s ambition with determination.
The Hag Woman sagged in his grip.
“I feel sorry for you, Gerreon,” she said. “You lost Trinovantes and then Ravenna. That must have been hard. You were a pawn in a grander plan, but I did not foresee what those losses would drive you towards. Nor did I see that I would pay for your fall with my death.”
“I do not want your pity, woman,” he hissed, pushing her to her knees. “And call me Gerreon again and I will gut you right now.”
The Hag Woman spat in Gerreon’s face.
“I should have strangled you with your mother’s cord when you were born,” she said. “I told her that one of her sons would grow to know the greatest pleasure and greatest pain. If she had known you would murder her only daughter, she would have begged me to kill you while you slept in her belly.”
Gerreon slammed his fist into her face, and bright lights exploded before her eyes. Her nose and cheekbone broke, and tears streamed down her face. She fell to her side, feeling the dank wetness of the marshy ground on her skin.
She coughed up a wad of blood and marshwater as Gerreon hauled her upright.
“Your sister knew your soul was sick, but she still tried to help you,” the Hag Woman said through the pain. “You repaid her goodness by sticking a sword in her belly and ending her life before its time. She would have borne strong children and been a mother of kindness and strength.”
Gerreon drew his knife, and the blade hovered an inch from her eyeball.
“Do not mention her name again!” he screamed.
“Why? Because you cannot face the horror of what you did?”
“My sister was a slut!” yelled Gerreon, the killing lust of the daemon behind his eyes flaring with rage. “She opened her legs for Sigmar and deserved to die for that. I was the greater man, she should have loved me! I loved her with all my heart and she spurned me.”
“She knew your true face, Gerreon,” said the Hag Woman. “That is why she rejected you.”
“No!” hissed Gerreon, his shoulders shaking with the effort of control. “She loved me, and I know what you are trying to do. It will not work.”
Gerreon looked up, and Kar Odacen dragged her to the edge of the marsh, his strength surprising for so wizened a man.
“There is no escape for you,” said the shaman. “The Dark Prince has claimed the one you knew as Gerreon. I know you see this, and it pleases me for you to know that you gave birth to this. How does it feel to know that every soul Azazel has sent screaming into the next world, and every soul he will kill during his immortal life, is thanks to you? You created Azazel, and for that I thank you.”
The Hag Woman wanted to spit defiance at Kar Odacen, but she knew he was right. Her designs had shaped Gerreon into a vessel, into which the shaman of the Iron Wolves had poured venomous evil and corruption, making him easy prey for a creature from beyond the veil. She had done this, and now she would pay the price for all eternity.
“Do it,” she said.
“No last words for hate’s sake?” smiled Kar Odacen.
“What would be the point?”
“A chance to feed the self-righteousness that moves you to meddle in affairs th
at do not concern you,” suggested Kar Odacen.
“You are no different from me, shaman,” said the Hag Woman. “You meddle with the fate of the world and will come to no better end than I.”
“I already know how I will die,” said Kar Odacen. “It holds no fear for me.”
Defeated, the Hag Woman sagged in Gerreon’s grip.
“I did the best I could to guide mankind,” she said. “I did what I thought best at the time, and I would do the same again.”
“So arrogant,” said Kar Odacen. “So like you to excuse your actions.”
“No,” said the Hag Woman. “I make no excuses.”
“Very well,” said Kar Odacen, bending to pick up a fist-sized rock. “Then let it be done.”
She saw a flash of iron in the moonlight, and her eyes widened as hot blood poured down her front. Gerreon held her upright as her body began to convulse. Even as she felt the pain of the cut, Kar Odacen smashed the rock against her temple. Bone cracked and was driven into her brain. Fresh blood streamed down her face.
Her mouth worked soundlessly as the life drained from her body, but before either of her wounds could send her down into death, Gerreon turned her around and pushed her body down into the Brackenwalsch.
Black water rushed into her mouth even as her lifeblood poured out to mix with the marsh water. The pain in her head was incredible and she bucked and heaved against her killer’s grip. It was dark beneath the water, but she could see the wavering image of stars and the moon through the churning water.
They were laughing as the thrice death claimed her.
—
The Price of Betrayal
Pendrag sat tall in the saddle on a snow-covered crest overlooking the banks of a bloody river. He supposed that it had a local name, but on his map it was simply known as the great dividing river. Behind him were the lands of the empire, but the far bank was undiscovered country, a bleak and inhospitable landscape of windswept tundra and open steppe. Freezing winds swept down from the north, and Pendrag watched as the last remnants of a destroyed people fled across the cracking ice of the river.
Perhaps a thousand people huddled in terror on the muddy banks, a ragged mixture of survivors: warriors, cavalry and ordinary men and women. It seemed absurd and monstrous that this was all that was left of an entire tribal race, yet the advance of Sigmar’s army had been merciless and thorough. No settlement had gone unmolested, and nothing of value had been left intact in its wake. Every day, pyres of the dead sent reeking plumes of black smoke into the sky, and what had once been fertile eastern grassland was now a charred, ashen wasteland.
A hundred Roppsmenn warriors in iron hauberks and bronze helms tried to impose some order on their people’s flight across the river, but it was a hopeless task. The horror of their tribe’s destruction overcame any thought other than escape, and braving the still-forming ice was preferable to annihilation at Sigmar’s hands.
Pendrag heard a dull cracking sound, and a portion of the ice gave way. Dozens of people were plunged into the sluggish black water. Weighed down with all their worldly possessions, they did not return to the surface. Pendrag closed his eyes as shame threatened to overwhelm him.
“Shallya’s tears,” said Redwane as weeping women pulled children away from the hole in the ice, unable to help those who had fallen through. “What are we doing, Pendrag?”
“I don’t know anymore,” he said honestly, rubbing the heel of his palm against his temple, and regarding the White Wolf through eyes that carried a lifetime of sorrow acquired in the passage of a season. Redwane had aged in the six months since he had left Reikdorf, his demeanour sullen and his youthful eyes no longer sparkling with roguish charm.
Pendrag knew that he looked no better. The healing energies that had undone the necromancer’s dark magic had restored the physique of his youth, yet he was bone-tired and wanted nothing more than to fall into a dreamless sleep. The softness of his former life as Count of Middenheim had vanished from his spare frame, but there was little left of the young man who had set out with Sigmar on the grand journey of empire.
Both he and Redwane had seen too much horror on this campaign to ever be young again.
“Surely this will see an end to the slaughter?” asked Redwane, waving a hand at the terrified people below. “The Roppsmenn are destroyed. Surely Sigmar will halt the killing?”
Pendrag did not answer, and watched as Sigmar and Count Adelhard surveyed what was left of the Roppsmenn tribe. Beside them, an Udose clansman held the Dragon Banner, for Pendrag had refused to carry it after the Battle of Roskova. Nearly three thousand Roppsmenn warriors had been killed on that blasted heath, and there had been no quarter for the wounded. Once the Dragon Banner was raised, it could not be lowered until every enemy warrior was dead.
Twice more they had brought the scattered Roppsmenn warrior bands to battle, and each time Sigmar ordered the bloodthirsty banner raised. The slaughter had been terrible, and the screams of the dying and images of burning villages haunted Pendrag’s dreams each night.
“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” said Redwane, numbly picking at the wolfskin cloak he wore. “This isn’t war anymore. It hasn’t been for some time.”
Pendrag nodded as a fresh dusting of snow began to fall from the slate-coloured sky. To either side of him, thousands of fur-cloaked warriors gathered in sword-bands under the colours of their tribes, ready to be unleashed on the fleeing Roppsmenn. Chequered Ostagoth banners of black and white billowed in the winter wind next to the gold and red flags of the Asoborns, but they were far outnumbered by the patchwork banners of the Udose.
The clansmen had taken bloodthirsty relish in the war, killing all before them with hearts hungry to avenge the death of Count Wolfila. The stories of his death had been told and retold so often that the truth was lost and the horror of what the Roppsmenn were said to have done grew to ridiculous levels.
“All the better to justify what we do here,” he had told Redwane one night as they gathered around the campfire and the White Wolf had told him the latest gruesome embellishment.
Sigmar and Adelhard marched up the iron-hard ground towards the army, and Pendrag felt a chill at the sight of the Emperor that had nothing to do with the plummeting temperature. Though snow swirled in the air and his breath misted before him, Sigmar was clad in only a thin tunic of red with a silver wolf stitched upon his chest. The warriors of the army were wrapped in thick furs, but Sigmar appeared not to feel the intense chill that stabbed like knives from the north.
Since leaving the Middle Mountains, Sigmar’s face had hardened, and the death of Wolfila hung like a noose around his neck. His hair was lank and thin, and the flesh seemed somehow tighter on his body, as though his bones were pushing out a little harder than before. His eyes were haunted by the loss of his friend, but glittered with a light that seemed to come from a dark place deep inside him. He still wore the golden crown he had taken from Morath, and instead of Ghal Maraz, the long, basket-hiked claymore that had once belonged to Count Wolfila was scabbarded at the Emperor’s hip.
King Kurgan’s hammer was wrapped in an oiled cloth in Pendrag’s pack, nestled beside the crown crafted by Alaric the Mad for Sigmar’s coronation. It sat ill with Pendrag that he carried such legendary items, but Sigmar had insisted that the Roppsmenn be fought with the blade of the man they had so brutally killed.
Sigmar drew Wolfila’s weapon and held it out before him. The sword was heavy and fashioned from thick, dark iron. It was not the weapon of a swordsman, it was the weapon of a butcher.
“I want those warriors dead,” said Sigmar aiming the sword towards the Roppsmenn by the river. “Redwane, take your White Wolves and ride them down.”
“Very good,” said Adelhard. “I order Ostagoth horse archers to hem them in and you will drive them into the river.”
“My lord?” asked Redwane, looking at Pendrag for support.
“Is something about my order unclear?” asked Si
gmar.
“No, my lord,” said Redwane, “but is it really necessary to attack?”
“Necessary?” hissed Sigmar. “These treacherous curs killed a count of the empire. Of course it is necessary! Now follow my orders.”
Redwane shook his head.
“No, my lord, I won’t,” he said.
Sigmar planted the claymore in the ground before him, his face twisted in fury.
“You dare to defy me, boy?” he asked. “I am your Emperor and you will obey my orders or I will see you dead.”
“I’m sorry, my lord, but I won’t lead the White Wolves to murder those men.”
“You will do as you are ordered!”
“No,” said Redwane, and Pendrag’s heart soared with pride. “I will not.”
Sigmar stepped towards Redwane, and Pendrag dropped from his horse to put himself between the two warriors.
“There is no need for this,” he said. “The Roppsmenn are defeated. They are a broken people, and you have avenged Wolfila’s death.”
Sigmar turned on Pendrag, and the well of hate he saw in the Emperor’s face sent a jolt of fear down his spine. For the briefest moment, it seemed as though someone far older looked out from behind Sigmar’s eyes, but it vanished so quickly, Pendrag wasn’t sure he had really seen it.
“Always the peacemaker, Pendrag,” hissed Sigmar. “It was your counsel that stayed my hand when I could have destroyed the Norsii. Look at what that mercy has brought us. Wolfila dead and fleets of Norse raiders attacking our coast every day. No, I will not make the mistake of leaving any of these vermin alive to return with vengeance in their hearts.”
“You speak of the Norsii,” said Pendrag, fighting to keep his voice even. “Then why are we not readying ourselves to fight them? You must know they will come at us soon. Our people live in terror of their warlords and, with every day that passes, that fear grows more powerful and saps their courage.”
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