by Various
‘Blood drinking?’ Ramus hissed, aghast.
Vandalus chuckled. ‘When I was a man I was king of a desert kingdom, and we would often mix the blood and milk of our mounts to sustain us between oases.’ He touched fingers absently to his lips. ‘Funny. I remember the taste of it more than all the fine foods in the world.’
Ramus scowled. He would die again before confessing it, but he envied those who recalled lives as warrior-lords and champions. As well as he could piece his own mind together – and the pieces there left to him were fewer than they had once been – he had always been a priest. A translator of the divine will and a judge. A shadowed soul.
‘You do not remember fully or truly. None of us do.’
‘Indeed we don’t,’ Hamilcar rumbled. ‘But we are Astral Templars, and we are proud of what we do remember.’
‘But you have water,’ said Ramus, pointing his reliquary accusingly back to where the twisted gargoyle dribbled liquid from the cored trunk into a font.
Vandalus and Hamilcar shared a look. The Lord-Castellant sighed.
‘Tainted. Not a long story, but one that never changes. My walls however are another matter. Vandalus may have called for more of our own host, but I’ll not turn away an Exemplar Chamber, whichever colours they wear. Walk with me, Ramus. Help me hold Cartha and then perhaps I’ll be able to help you.’
They walked down steps, up others, over bridges trained from tangled branches, from one war-torn platform township to the next. Hidden things clicked and twittered at their passing, the boards creaked, and for miles in every direction giant leaves rustled and points of light winked, like stars but not. It was like the centre of a strange, living universe.
The path led through the camp to a roped bridge. From the cleanly sawn stumps protruding from the edge of the platform, the original bridge had been recently brought down, presumably to repel an earlier attack. The new structure swept over a moat that might as well have been bottomless, a febrile chasm of animal howls and thrashing leaves that awaited the unwary and the invader.
On the other side, a barracks yard bustled with Liberators. A hundred or more bow- and crossbow-armed Judicators stood on the walls, towering over the human auxiliaries that moved among them.
As with everything else Ramus had seen here, the walls were wood, entire trunks carved with battlements and hollowed out to function as towers. Workmen crawled over a gate made from planks thicker than a man was tall, hanging like spiders from a complex harness of ropes to patch a breached section.
The Lord-Castellant led him through the drizzle of sawdust to a set of steps that had been cut into the defensive wall, where five mortal auxilia in leather jacks and holding spears stood guard.
Four immediately stiffened as the three Stormcasts approached, but the fifth sat and did not seem to notice them at all. He was scratching at his bare forearm and clearly had been for some time. He stared at the blood that speckled the wooden steps as though he could see his future there. Two of the standing spearmen shuffled across to hide him, but only served to draw attention. Hamilcar glowered at them.
‘What’s this?’ the Lord-Castellant demanded.
The eldest and least ragged of the two straightened. ‘Gut fever.’
‘Wheezing sickness,’ offered another, speaking over his fellow.
The Lord-Castellant drilled each man with his gaze until all four had wilted. The seated man panted, scratching.
‘Has he drunk the water?’
The elder spearman shook his gaunt head. ‘He’s not. I swear it by Ghal Maraz.’
‘Then explain this.’
‘Explain it to me,’ said Ramus, stepping forward.
Hamilcar dismissed the two mortals with an angry jerk of the head, and squatted down beside the scratching man.
‘The fountain is the only source of water here and draws directly from the Great Tree’s roots. It has two faces, that of beast and that of man, and it follows a cycle. Now is the time of the beast. The beasts may drink – my hounds, the birds,’ he nodded to Vandalus, ‘and we must take what we can from them, but a man that drinks from the fountain at this time will eventually himself become a beast.’
‘And Stormcasts?’
‘Would you risk it?’
‘Is this fountain not guarded?’
‘Of course!’ Hamilcar snarled. ‘But somehow, this keeps happening.’ He gestured to one of the auxilia. ‘Take him to the tents. See that he’s restrained.’
Shaking his head as the unlucky man pulled his sick comrade up and walked off towards the rope bridge, Ramus took the steps to the parapet and looked out.
The darkness was in constant motion, branches sighing in the wind, leaves fluttering slowly downward. More gargantuan trees, some larger even than Cartha’s, rose through the void, shadowy pillars of grey and brown and mouldy orange, glittering with hundreds of thousands of tiny lights. Each that Ramus could see was connected to others by mile-long wood-turreted suspension bridges.
Cartha was not a city. It was a cluster of island states up here in the trees. With his soul’s eyes Ramus could see the cloud that hung over all. If von Carstein was not behind this place’s ills then the Lord-Relictor was a dracoth.
Vandalus appeared beside him. ‘We retook them once and will again. Once reinforcements arrive from our realmgate on the Sea of Bones–’
A warning blast sounded out from the sentry post on the gatehouse. The raucous calls of the forest itself almost immediately drowned it out, but the mortal sentry had clearly earned his position for the power of his lungs.
‘Flyer!’
Vandalus looked upward and suddenly tensed. ‘Sigmar...’
The Knight-Azyros’ light wings exploded out and lifted him off the ground. The incomer was already over the palisade and descending hard, motes of feathered light fading fast behind him. It was a Prosecutor. His armour was a deep, bruised purple. His wings were almost gone.
Vandalus collided with the injured Stormcast in mid-air. Arms squirmed around crippled war-plate, wings billowing out as the Knight-Azyros fought to halt his comrade’s fall and fell with him.
Ramus jumped aside as the two armoured bodies hit the ground like a comet. Coming in at a steep angle, they crashed onto the rampart walkway, the Knight-Azyros with arms and wings wrapped protectively around the Prosecutor’s body, and bounced on over the inner courtyard. They came to rest under a mound of wooden shields, Stormcasts and auxilia both running in to help. Hamilcar waved them brusquely back.
Shrugging off a shield, Vandalus unfolded his wings from about his chest. The Stormcast in his arms was pale from loss of blood, his wings skeletal. His armour carried a number of severe dents and blood trickled through the small slit over his mouth. His breathing was shallow, furtive, as if edging towards the point where the pain of a broken rib became too much.
It took a lot to kill a Stormcast. To beat one this hard took a lot more.
‘Brother,’ Vandalus spoke quietly, ‘what did this to you? Where is the rest of the scout retinue?’
The Prosecutor’s mouth worked drily before sound came out. ‘I... am... sorry...’
Vandalus shook his head. ‘Do not be. We will tell stories of your epic flight until the end of days.’
‘No... I am sorry... The Sea of Bones is lost. Our cities are gone and... there will be no reinforcements. I feared Cartha would have suffered the same.’ He closed his eyes, tightened his hand around Vandalus’ forearm and clasped it in a warriors’ embrace. ‘But you are here. Praise Sigmar. You will tell our stories... to the reforged.’
‘And they will retell them.’
Hamilcar growled. ‘What happened to the other colonies?’
The Prosecutor made to speak, but the light left his eyes, departed to the same heavenly abode as his wings. Vandalus slid the warrior from his lap and stood, just as the body dissolved into a bolt of
lightning that blasted open the forest canopy on its return to Sigmar. Ramus mouthed a prayer for him. It was a journey he would wish on no one. For a moment those gathered looked to the heavens or at the scorched ground in silence.
Another blast of the horn broke it. Again, the forest sought to clamour it down, but this time the trumpeter refused to be drowned out and held his note. Soon, others took up the call until the full length of the palisade was ringing.
Gripping his reliquary, Ramus turned back around to the great suspension that yawned into the dark. He could feel vibrations underfoot, ripples running through the connected boards from the approach of something massive.
Ramus muttered a different prayer.
One of war.
The ogors were coming, and this time they came with shields. Tramping over the forest bridge three abreast, every first and third bore a shield of metal the size of a man and bossed with a ten-thumbed stab at a gaping maw. Arrows clattered off the iron shell. Even the foot-long sigmarite-tipped bolts of the Judicators could not punch deep enough to trouble the hulking ogors behind.
Hamilcar’s voice boomed from his fearsomely daubed helm, and he waved his arms wildly as though he held the power to bleed the ogors with the knifing motion of his hands. ‘From the side! Aim for their legs. Bring them down!’
The archers shifted their aim to little effect. These ogors were shock troops held in reserve for the final push. Occasionally, one would tip over the edge with a Judicator bolt splitting their knee but the integrity of the formation held, the unshielded ogor in the centre file of each rank having two hands spare to hold his shield-mates in line. The clank of ill-fitting greaves on iron boots rang over the dark-leafed abyss as they pushed through the arrow-storm to the gate.
Ramus was in the barbican, the rough-walled wooden tunnel between the inner and outer gate where the body-odour haze was thickest. He grunted, hammer locked with an ogor’s steel-toothed maul, shoulder to its gut plate and straining. There was a darkness driving it, pushing against his will even as the ogor pushed against his body.
‘Who holds the gates of heaven?’
‘Only the faithful!’
The Protectors and Decimators were far from their element in such cramped confines, so the honour of vanguard fell to the Retributors. The explosive crump of their weapons reverberated through the tunnel. Bow auxilia from the gatehouse garrison leaned over the internal battlements and loosed directly down.
Ramus pushed back against the ogor’s strength until it felt as though the pressure against the inside of his skull would crack his helm.
‘Who is the shield between Sigmar’s foes and the weak?’
‘Only the faithful!’
‘Who fights with the hearts of bulls?’
‘Only the faithful!’
‘Only the faithful!’ Ramus roared, slamming every ounce of reserve behind his shoulder.
The ogor staggered. Ramus drew back, opening a space between them, and then thrust his reliquary aloft. At a muttered prayer, lightning crackled about its pole and spat a bolt at the recovering ogor. The massive brute jabbered, spraying Ramus with spittle, but stumbled for him regardless on bandy legs that spasmed with Azyrite energy.
Hamilcar appeared on the battlements above. ‘A useful prayer! But you are in the Carthic Oldwoods now, and Sigmar cannot hear you unless... you... shout!’
The Lord-Castellant jumped onto the parapet and thrust his warding lantern over the tunnel, drawing back the shutter with his other hand in the same motion. Golden light flooded the tunnel. Ramus’ armour glowed as barriers of arcane protection enshrouded it. He felt himself strengthen, enough to push the ogor back, then mash its head so emphatically into its neck that its ribs exploded in his face.
Ramus found he had space to move. The pressure from the front was easing off. ‘They are retreating.’
‘Of course they are! Hamilcar Bear-Eater is always triumphant!’
Ramus dismissed the bluster with an irritable wave of his hand. Somewhere behind the sweaty scrape of withdrawing ogors, bells were being vigorously rung and drums thumped.
‘This is no act of panic. They are being called back...’ A cold wind washed against his face and he turned from the bridge towards it.
The sepulchral chill whistled through his helm’s eyeholes and pinched his eyes as a bat-like horror the size of a dracoth shrieked past them. Snapshots rattled off its hide – not flesh but some dark, gravestone metal – or simply passed through its ribcage in wisps of corpselight.
The monster turned from the walls, the thrashing torment of a nimbus of spirits somehow keeping it airborne. Then, with a shriek that killed the nerves, it bounded down, thumping into the bridge amidst a buffeting wail of ethereal dead.
Ramus gripped his reliquary so tightly that it creaked.
Hatred should be hot, a storm that struck wild and hard, but what he felt instead was cold, his heart deadened as though encased in a block of ice. The dread abyssal stamped around as though claiming some of the ground’s solidity for its own. Its eerily glowing nimbus moaned as it dimmed to reveal the beast’s master.
Hamilcar called out from the walls in astonishment. ‘Vampire!’
Ramus growled. ‘Mannfred.’
The vampire shortened the reins around his wrist, then leaned forward in the saddle to execute a bow for the watching Stormcasts. ‘In accord with the finest traditions of war, I offer you this one chance of surrender.’
Hamilcar held up his weapon arm so that all could see it. ‘If you want surrender, then come to my wall and beg for it.’
Mannfred offered an indulgent smile. ‘I salute your sense of occasion, Lord-Castellant. Truly. But you have nothing for me and nothing for them.’ He gestured to the ogors behind him who inched forward, salivating, in a rustle of mail. ‘Those you shelter, however... They will be dead in a week whatever we do here. Let us in, give them up to us, and together we might all survive what is coming.’
Ramus did not believe that Hamilcar gave genuine consideration to the vampire’s terms, but something in the warning had given the Lord-Castellant pause. Was it the talk of orruks and ogors on the march that troubled him more than the Betrayer of the Hallowed Knights?
‘Do not heed the poison that spills from this adder’s mouth!’ Ramus hissed. He slammed his staff down onto the bridge, energy arcing off in wild flares. Mannfred regarded him with amusement, but no hint of recognition. That he could enact such treachery and not even recall his victims only made the lightning storm more furious. Ramus turned to the ogors and raised his voice. ‘Whatever deceits this missionary of lies has used to delude you, discard them from your minds.’
‘Our need is mutual,’ Mannfred said, smoothly. ‘You do not know what is behind us.’
‘It can be no worse that what awaits them. Treachery. That is how you reward your allies.’
The vampire sat back in the saddle and looked him up and down. ‘Do I know you, Stormcast?’
‘I am Ramus of the Shadowed Soul, and I fell the day you betrayed Tarsus and the Hallowed Knights to the Great Necromancer. I know you, Betrayer, and for your crimes, Sigmar now knows you also.’
At the God-King’s name, lightning bolted from his reliquary, flaring off against a screaming barrier of tortured souls before Mannfred’s negligently upraised hand. With a predatory grin, Mannfred raised his hand above his head, fingers spread, the residual charge of Ramus’ lightning bolting from finger to finger. He looked past him to where Hamilcar stood with gauntlets clenched over his battlements.
‘Have you noticed your dependents acting most oddly of late, Lord-Castellant? Blood. It changes one, do you not agree?’
The vampire clenched his fist and a wave of power spilled out. It buckled the ogors’ shields, caused the banners above Cartha’s palisade to pull at their poles until they snapped. Stormcasts braced into the wave, buffeted as the dark grey w
all of force hit their armour and passed around them as if they were rocks in a river.
The effect on their auxilia was markedly different. They were not rocks. They were sand, and the wave broke them. Blood vessels burst in their eyes and skin the moment it touched, men screaming or simply gargling on their own lungs’ blood as the wave passed through and splattered out the other side. Convulsions cracked bones, sent men wailing from the parapet, the survivors turning mad, bloodshot eyes onto the corpses and moving on them with an animal hunger.
Ramus spun around as the defensive line disintegrated before his eyes. ‘What bedevilment is this?’
Mannfred spread both arms in a flourish, urging his dread abyssal to rise on a column of weeping souls. A pack of subhuman creatures with torn clothes much like the folk of Azyrheim and tatty bat-like wings flapped over the gulf from the neighbouring tree in answer to their cries. Their wings were the same dull red as von Carstein’s cloak, their flesh fluted and spiked like his armour, their faces painfully drawn with the same patrician lines.
They had been remade in his likeness.
‘Blood does not cheat or lie, Stormcast. It belongs to the beasts, and the beasts want it back.’
A tortured shriek rang out from the palisade, a hunger for human flesh so acute it was no longer even remotely human. An auxilia sprinted along the parapet, weapon gone, mind gone, mouth covered in bloody drool, and hurled himself headlong into an Astral Templar.
The man – if the flailing, blotchy animal could still be called that – rebounded off the armoured giant, but not before another had leapt onto the warrior’s back and started tearing at the gorget spikes with his teeth.
Across the length of the wall, Stormcasts were being overwhelmed, torn from their war-plate like carrion pulled apart by hyenas. Flurries of lightning stole their bodies from around the teeth of the very men they had been despatched to defend, blasting the savages apart like flesh-wrapped fireworks.
Ramus caught sight of Vandalus and his Prosecutors taking to the skies, abandoning the wall entirely in favour of engaging the ghoulish crypt flayers struggling in from the deep forest sea. Behind them flew the Prosecutors of the Hallowed Knights, wheeling after the creatures.