by Ben Counter
More than a hundred knights rode with him. Along with them were double that number of mounted militia, armed with whatever armour their fathers had handed down to them and riding horses trained for hunting. Many horses shied or bolted in the wrong direction, others threw their riders or fell. But the charge did not wait for them, and the Emperor was the first man to hit the host of ratmen in the skaven army’s centre.
Thousands of beastmen had advanced in a great mob. Those leading them had probably expected to fight in the towns, storming the Imperial defences. Instead they were not ready for the Imperial counter-attack that slammed into them. Eckhardt vanished in a mass of squirming, panicking bodies and shattered spears as the Reiksguard hammered home beside him. It looked like nothing so much as a meteor hitting the enemy army or a volcanic eruption beneath it. Bodies were thrown into the air by the impact. Beastmen turned to run and were trampled by those around them. Hundreds fled at the first impact, the enemy rear lines emptying in seconds, their leaders shrieking in disgust as their clanmates dropped their spears and scampered away on all fours.
Those knights must have seen the ratmen’s faces and their squirming tails. They must have realised they were facing the shadowy antagonists of those childhood tales, the ones their parents forbade them to tell, of rats that walked like men and wanted to rule the world. But they were not children any more. They were men, who had sworn to defend the Empire and their Emperor, and they showed no sign of that realisation as they fought on and ground the enemy beneath the hooves of their warhorses.
And suddenly, everywhere was death. Militia marauded forwards into the fire of enemy war machines, chunks of evilly glowing rock falling among them and the bullets from crude iron rifles sniping them down. A horrifying creation, like a great rolling wheel that fired bolts of green-blue lightning in every direction, was loosed from the beastmen lines and carved a bloody, charred path through several scores of men from a state regiment from Averland.
The Celestial wizard Scarfinkrae flew over the battlefield and rained down bolts of orange flame. He cast runes into the sky which shattered and sent shards of starfire down among the clanrats. As the Empire infantry and the enemy hordes met, the front line disappeared in a mass of bodies. There Rootwarder Wseric stood, waves of deep-green Jade magic pulsing off him, the grass growing thick and deep as he knitted the wounds of fallen soldiers together. Magister Kardiggian of the Light Order was there too, and around him blazed circles of protection that beastman spears and war machines could not penetrate.
Somewhere in the bedlam, the Amber wizard Grunhelder died. He had shifted into his bestial form and charged at a towering horror of flesh, like a hundred giant rats melded into one foul monster, and when he lost his battle against the thing his death-scream sent waves of raw magic surging across the battlefield.
Bursts of white flame flashed as the Imperial infantry charge arrowed deep into the hordes of slave-warriors the enemy sent forwards. The slaves were wretched and frenzied creatures, frothing at their boil-encrusted lips, dressed in rags and armed with nothing more than sticks. claws and teeth. But there were thousands of them and with every step the Imperial advance slowed, bogged down by the enemy, whose commanders were content to weigh the human attackers down with a sheer mass of bodies.
The white fire was coming from the hands of a Light magister who strode forwards blasting bodies apart. He left the soldiers around him behind as he pushed on, even as he stumbled with fatigue from the excess of magic coursing through him.
They had wizards, these ratmen.
The ratman that van Horstmann had spotted in the flashing of its lightning was one of the skaven wizards. He had read a treatise on the skaven from a period of Imperial history in which it had been acceptable to believe in them, and it speculated that the role of wizard, priest, and king might be contained within one such skaven, born albino and horned, the marks of whatever thing the ratmen worshipped. This was what van Horstmann had seen. This was what he fought his way towards, throwing skaven out of his path with blasts of purifying flame that seared his muscles and veins to force out into reality.
On its bone platform, held aloft by a gaggle of scarred and tail-docked slaves, the grey skaven wizard screeched. Its incisors were long and yellow, drooling with pallid slime, and the stone in its eye socket flared bright green as if with anger. It pointed its staff right at van Horstmann. It recognised in the Light wizard an enemy, an adversary beyond a normal man, no doubt because van Horstmann had carved a smouldering path already through dozens of lesser skaven.
The slaves chittered and fled, sensing that their master would think nothing of immolating them with a spell aimed at van Horstmann. The platform sank to the ground and the grey skaven did not even bother to admonish the slaves who abandoned him. Perhaps when the battle was done and van Horstmann was dead it would string them up, or quarter them, or sacrifice them on an altar, or whatever these creatures did to sate their anger.
It spat a string of high-pitched noises at van Horstmann. Though van Horstmann did not understand the skaven tongue – no man ever had as far as he knew – the challenge was clear.
‘Men see you in their nightmares,’ replied van Horstmann, knowing the skaven would know the sense behind his words, too. ‘But your kind have nightmares too, and when I am done with you, skaven nightmares will be about me.’
The skaven laughed to see this hairless, tailless creature who wanted to match magic with a grey seer. Black lightning flickered around its staff and it drew a chunk of stone from a pouch on the belt of its filthy once-purple robes – the same stone with which it had replaced one of its eyes. It crumbled the stone and inhaled the dust, its eye growing wide.
The lightning flared black and red. With a gesture of its whole body the skaven hurled the black lightning bolt at van Horstmann.
The aethyr was not the real world. Lightning did not travel in an instant if it was aimed at one who could manipulate the energies of the aethyr like the caster could. The lightning slowed and coiled like a snake as the skaven tried to force it through van Horstmann’s magical defences. He had meditated for days at a time on the rituals that cast permanent enchantments of counter-spelling and mystical defences around him. It bought him the time to cast a circle in the air in front of him against which the lightning crashed.
It kept hammering against the magical shield. Van Horstmann felt himself pushed back, his own efforts matched by the skaven.
The albino ratman was strong. This was Dark magic, dredged up from a place in the aethyr that a preacher or a poet might equate to one of the hells of the Empire’s faith. The skaven’s mastery of it had been enough to win him lordship over a mighty army, and to make it follow him to win conquests among the lands of men.
Van Horstmann responded with a torrent of white flame that fell down from above, bathing him in it and shattering the magical link along which the lightning was flying. The grey skaven stumbled back, dazed for a moment by the force of van Horstmann’s mastery of Light magic.
The two were separated again. They circled for a couple of seconds, having tested each other out and not found one another wanting.
The grey skaven made the next move, but van Horstmann did not know it right away. He felt pain in his joints first, the wrenching in his belly. It was indistinguishable from the fatigue of battle magic until it grew, flaring up and down his limbs.
His hands were crusted suddenly with boils that welled up from beneath his skin. He could feel them on his torso too, and his throat. His mouth was suddenly dry, his tongue feeling like it was big enough to fill his whole mouth and his fingers now bent into claws.
The staff dropped from his hand. Van Horstmann coughed and black phlegm spattered his sleeve.
Dark magic. Plague magic, the lores of death and decay. Such things were written of only by madmen, and a Light wizard would not know anything more than that they existed and that to know them would be to invite corruption and death. A Light wizard would have no defence at all.
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Van Horstmann was not just a Light wizard. By day he was, and he had absorbed as much knowledge from the order’s library as anyone ever had in its history, But by night, he studied what Tzeentch had willed him to know – the ways of Dark magic and the daemon, of things forbidden, and he was all the more powerful for it.
Van Horstmann caught the strand of magic that the grey skaven was working. He reeled it up with his mind like a fisherman drawing in a net. He could grasp the slippery, deceitful weavings of Dark magic because he knew them too. Perhaps he knew them, in an academic sense at least, as well as the grey skaven. Certainly the ratman did not expect van Horstmann to grasp that working of magic, turn it around and cast that net back at the skaven.
It did not take to the grey skaven’s body as it had to van Horstmann’s. He had not expected it to. Probably the thing was host to enough diseases to wipe out an Imperial town anyway, and the skaven repelled the plague before it could erode its joints or blister its flesh. It did not matter for the time being.
Light magic was the magic of, among other things, purity. Van Horstmann opened his mind to the aethyr and let the magic flow through him unfocused and unworked. It flushed out his veins of the plague and the boils vanished. Light bled from his mouth and eyes, and all his senses were filled for the moment by the force of it. It was a risk – he was blind and deaf, and the skaven could have just scampered up to him and stabbed him if it had been quick enough. But the plague could not survive the force of such purity, and in another few seconds it would have killed him. He imagined it as black smoke blowing away on a white gale, dispersed and destroyed.
The next thing he saw was the grey skaven’s horned form silhouetted against a purple fire. It had rammed its staff into the ground and was clutching onto it as if to keep itself from being blown away. The fire raged up higher, tinting the whole battlefield with its darkness. The eyes of cowering skavenslaves glinted purple in it and they shivered with dread, mesmerised. They had seen it before. They feared it.
Bolts of purple flame shot into the sky and arced back down at van Horstmann, a shower of black comets aimed down at him. He thrust his hands into the air and felt the Light magic still burning through him spray out, describing a dome above his head. The purple-black fire slammed into the impromptu magical shield and battered him down to his knees, but it held, just.
A swarm of rats composed of chittering shadow flooded across the torn earth towards van Horstmann’s feet. He dropped the shield and let it erupt outwards, bursting the rat-shapes as the swarmed forwards.
The grey skaven was shrieking now and van Horstmann thought it was at itself, admonishing itself for not finishing off this creature, for being matched in magical strength in front of the slaves in whose eyes it should have been invincible.
Van Horstmann trawled through the sump of his mind where all the dark things were, all the sour memories and foetid emotions he had banished there for just such a time as this.
This part of his mind was infested with snakes.
Snakes of Light magic sprayed from his fingertips. They wound across the soil and snared around the ratman’s ankles, lashing up at its hands and throat. They tore the staff from its hands and one got a purchase around its neck. The skaven tore one hand free to grab the snake around its throat but it could not dislodge it.
The skaven was burning. The opposing forces of magic, the Light of van Horstmann’s spell and the Dark within the skaven, could not exist together and their instability ruptured everything around them.
Van Horstmann took his staff in both hands. A glowing point emerged from the end of the staff, a shard of Light magic concentrated and honed by a force of concentration that whitened van Horstmann’s knuckles. Ripples of power rolled up and down the staff as van Horstmann took deliberate steps towards the struggling skaven.
Its one natural eye rolled up at van Horstmann. Flecks of blood were in the foam around its limps. Its robes and fur were scorched away in patches showing red, burned skin beneath. Its tail was coiling and uncoiling in spasm. The magical snakes were dissipating, but the skaven only had to stay stricken for a few seconds more.
Van Horstmann was in striking distance. A wizard was not a fighting man. Not even the battle magisters could say that. It was magic they killed with, not blades or bows. But van Horstmann was not yet old, or obese, or crippled, as many magisters were. He could fight, if he had to.
He raised the staff, like a spear, with the point aiming down at the grey skaven. He drove it down, impaling the creature through the gut. He leaned on the staff, forcing the point deeper through its innards.
It screamed and squirmed, limbs thrashing. It looked nothing like a lord of its species any more, but like an animal killed by an incompetent slaughterman who had missed the killing blow. It was messy and loud. Blackish blood sprayed and the skaven convulsed now, eye rolled back, as van Horstmann twisted the staff and felt the point pass through the creature’s back and into the bloodsoaked earth.
Van Horstmann put a foot on the skaven’s throat and pinned it down. It was still drawing ragged, bloody breaths, but it could not move. Perhaps he had severed its spine, or perhaps the pain and shock had paralysed it.
The blade that van Horstmann drew from his robes had been cleaned dozens of time since he had used it last, but somehow it still kept the sheen of Magister Vek’s blood on its wavy sacrificial blade.
‘Your nightmares,’ said van Horstmann.
The point of the blade reached the place where the skaven’s one eye met the socket.
Again, van Horstmann went to work.
By dawn, the battle was already being called the Battle of Drufenhaag, and the Imperial scribes had begun writing down the story of the battle and the rolls of its notable dead. Van Horstmann had seen the aftermath of battle before at Kriegsmutter Field and had no wish to watch it unfold again, especially when the too-familiar smell began to waft down from the corpse-strewn hillside.
The beastmen – that was what they were to be called, by an unspoken agreement by everyone who had fought there – had fled as the Reiksguard shattered the heart of their line, the Imperial lines held fast and their leader had died somewhere in the heart of the slaughter. The battle had been won. Thousands of Imperial souls lay dead though, and so the celebration of victory would have to wait until the human bodies were safely out of sight in their mass graves.
Such was the scale of the ruination, the shock of the battle that still rang around the Imperial army after the break of dawn, that no one noticed the lone Light wizard making his way back towards the walls of Altdorf.
CHAPTER TEN
PESTILENTIUS
The Emperor Eckhardt III, being a Stirlander, was as common and coarse a man as might ever be found among the Imperial nobility. He wore the garb of an Emperor and carried, in a scabbard embroidered in red and gold, the runefang which was his badge of rank as the Elector Count of Stirland. His robe was lined with purple and trimmed with ermine and his armour was lacquered black and gold, custom-made for his frame in the armouries of Nuln. But he seemed to want to shrug it all off at the first opportunity, as if it were a skin for him to shed and reveal the rough, windburned Stirland son he had been born.
‘So,’ he said in the provincial accent that Altdorfers mocked behind his back, ‘there is no one in charge?’
‘That is true, your majesty,’ said Master Chanter Alric. He and the Emperor were walking up the main staircase that led from the Chanter’s Hall to the level of the pyramid on which the library was found. ‘In a sense.’
‘What sense is that?’ asked the Emperor. He was shorter than Alric, with a square jowly face that made him look like a much taller man who had been compressed. ‘The sense where there is a Grand Magister’s position but no one in it, or some other sense? Tell me, Master Chanter. You’re a man of learning.’
The palace staff who accompanied the Emperor had got used to him by now. One of them was Huygens, the minister who had met Alric and the late Grand Magister dur
ing the unfortunate incident with the previous Emperor’s daughter. Alric, however, had not acknowledged any recognition of the man. Another was a scribe whose task was to note down anything noteworthy to be discussed later – he was a young man, thin and grey of skin and eyes, in a simple brown robe. The last was a knight of the Reiksguard, the knightly brotherhood native to Reikland and traditional household troops of the Emperor. His armour was brightly polished and his visor was down, as if he anticipated some assassin to leap from the nonexistent shadows of the pyramid at any second.
‘The Light Order is not an army,’ said Alric. ‘It does not need a general to function.’
‘I care nothing about a general,’ said the Emperor grumpily, as if Alric was a functionary who had failed to lay out the appropriate garments of state in the morning. ‘I care about who I will call to account if there is another Great Fire, or some other catastrophe you bloody wizards call down. What if one of you burns down the whole Buchbinder District? What then? Am I supposed to haul the whole lot of you before my ministers at the palace? No, it must be one man to take responsibility. You’re not politicians. You don’t understand.’
The party reached the doorway to the Diviner’s Hall. There the senior magisters of the Light Order had gathered to receive the guest. The Diviner’s Hall was one of the most magnificent in a wholly magnificent building. When it was built the students of Teclis had sought out the finest fresco artists in the Old World to decorate it, and the walls and ceiling glowed blue with a sky filled with clouds on which sat sacred figures of Imperial history. Sigmar himself was one of them though only those who understood the symbolism would recognise the shirtless, wild-haired man with the scar in the shape of the double comet on his chest.