Mortarch of Night

by Various

  A few moments later, a terrible shriek made the unbound souls that filled the sky scatter, and a bone-grey terrorgheist carrying the Abhorrant King climbed into the wind. A pack of wolfish varghulfs chased them hungrily, their snarls and howls snatched by the soul-storm.

  ‘Good hunting, my liege,’ said Mannfred, with a predator’s smile. ‘May my good friend Ramus receive you well.’

  Vandalus was still climbing into the shrieking gale when the portal shattered out of the storm above him. He tried to turn, but he knew it was too late. The portal was on him, a protean disk of Azyrite energy that filled his immediate sky. He didn’t know if the vampire had directed this portal specifically to target him, but it seemed akin to using a fireball to rid a gryph-hound of ticks.

  Bad luck caught up with everyone in the end.

  He struck the gate. The air became light. It was like hitting a mirror, fractures spreading out in slow motion, time dragging almost to the point at which it stopped.

  He fell through. The fragments under him broke into ever-smaller pieces. And again. And again. The physical and the magical became indistinguishable and his mind struggled to translate what it perceived in the best way that it was able. He felt unearthly music on his skin, smelled colours through the tips of his fingers. He saw otherworldly suns rise and explode. Structures of unassailable marble, the white citadels of Sigmaron, soared and crumbled and rose again. Dust. Sand. Weeping spirits. The Sea of Bones caught from a hundred angles, every one of them the same. The ether burned on his skin, despite his armour. The fire became a single note, shrill and whining.

  The barrier shattered, and the noise fell away in pieces.

  Suddenly he was rolling, not through air or astral winds, but along the ground. Light sky. Dark ground. Light. Dark. Bones snapped under his armour as he crashed through. He could hear the rattle of skeletons and see the wink of bronze and the gimlet blue gleam of witchlight.

  His light-wings exploded in a clap of thunder, blew a hole in the block of marching dead, and dragged him sharply out of his roll.

  Straining hard and shivering, he beat into a climb. He was back on the Sea of Bones. Not where he had been, but it was better than some of the alternatives he could describe.

  A ghoul shrieked, flying at him on tatty wings. The ghoul gibbered at the last second before smashing into him. It bounced off, broken, and before Vandalus could adjust he was mobbed by flapping red wings.

  Ghouls hissed in his face and scratched his armour with their claws. Something tried to rake at his wings, received a snapping burn for its troubles, and fell off with a cry. The stink of burnt meat clogged his nose hole. A grey-skinned flesh-eater with high, sunken cheeks dragged its fangs down his thigh plate. Another wrestled itself around his leg and scrabbled. Bit by bit, he felt himself being dragged back to the ground.

  He tried to work the shutter of his lantern, but he was still fuzzy from his journey through the vampire’s portal and his fingers couldn’t seem to recall how to do it. After several increasingly violent attempts to force it, he remembered to twist the catch and then pushed the shutter open.

  For one cosmic moment, he felt himself burn. Hot and pure and loud, even if the void was too black for anyone to know it but him. Then it was gone. He closed the lantern’s shutter with a hiss of gold over gold, and it was raining burning ghouls.

  ‘Where have you sent me, vampire?’

  No sign of Ironjawz. No sign of Stormcasts. He had clearly fallen well over the undead side of the battle. He had to find out where he was, and return to Korruk and Ramus quickly.

  A death-shriek ripped open the soul-winds before Vandalus had a chance to use his beacon. A huge skeletal beast with shredded wings dropped through the tear in the sky, its long neck straddled by a subhuman monstrosity, hunched and slavering and gripping a gnawed bone club with scraps of flesh still attached.

  Then the terrorgheist’s aural bow-wave hit Vandalus. He was rather more substantial than the ghosts of the Sea of Bones, but the monster’s scream still struck like the paralytic stinger of a venomous beast. It froze the strength in his muscles. It petrified the thoughts as they formed in his head. The magic that gave light to his wings held him aloft, but only until the descending monster snatched him from the air and crushed him to the dust beneath its weight.

  Vandalus looked up at death’s ghoulish face through the claws that pinned his body to the ground. It was a ghoul king. He had seen the like skulking in the Carthic Oldwoods. It was as muscular as an orruk, almost as big even without armour. Its skin was a grot’s mealy green. Nasty yellow eyes appraised him as though a plate bearing something unfamiliar but not unappetizing had been pushed in front of it. The abhorrant made a slobbering, gurgling growl that sounded like speech.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  The ghoul king’s eyes widened as though offended and it raised its club.

  A flash of black and red smeared across Vandalus’ eyes. There was a crack of bone and a judder of iron, and the terrorgheist emitted a sepulchral shriek before flapping back like a gate struck open by a battering ram. Vandalus gave an involuntary gasp as the crushing weight was withdrawn from his chest. He dragged himself and his broken armour to his feet and re-established his bearings.

  The thing that had hit the terrorgheist ground ironclad knuckles into the dusty ground and brought up a sullen, rolling growl. A wall of panting, iron-skirted pig flesh crunched and gored through bone, both ‘living’ and ‘dead’, to catch up with their megaboss. The weak sun winked off the polished iron of the gore-grunta Boyz’ spears. Vandalus had made it a point to learn the names of the Great Red’s major warclans. The knucklebone beads that that particular clan braided through the hair of their animals chattered as they rolled nearer. Running alongside them to the drumbeat of Gorkstikks and Morkstikks were the Wurld Masher Brawl with their giant hammers. And on the other flank, struggling to hold the same reckless pace in their ridiculously bulky armour, the Rok Nobz.

  In the path of the advance, Vandalus thought. He’s brought me within reach of his stronghold.

  The terrorgheist emitted a snake-like hiss, lifted its front legs off the ground and hoisted its neck, raising its abhorrant master high above the Ironjaw’s head.

  There were no clever words. No pithy insults. The terrorgheist’s head simply snapped forward on the end of its long neck, jaw wide to snap off Korruk’s head. The maw-krusha hammered the bone-dragon across the snout with a swinging fist. The terror­gheist made a moaning sound. A broken fang whizzed out and spanked off the Great Red’s armour, and its neck sawed across the Ironjaw’s shoulder.

  The two monsters crushed into one another. The terrorgheist’s thick, bony neck wrapped over the maw-krusha’s back end and gnashed at his legs. The belligerent beast clubbed furiously at whatever the undead thing had under its ribs. Scratching, beating, biting, growling, the two monsters abused each other into a brutal stalemate, with the Great Red and the abhorrant hanging on, face-to-face.

  The ghoul king’s vituperative gibber rang through the blizzard of bone chips that Korruk’s axes struck from his club.

  ‘Like speakin’ to a zoggin’ gore-grunta,’ the megaboss grumbled.

  Korruk turned the abhorrant’s club on Black Axe’s curved edge, then thumped his forearm smartly through the flesh-eater’s teeth. The ghoul king blubbered from its bloody mouth. Its clammy hand grabbed Korruk’s wrist. The Ironjaw instinctively recoiled, then bellowed in surprise as the ghoul king sprayed his face with pinkish spit. While Korruk shook his head, the abhorrant smashed his elbow joint with its club. The big orruk didn’t seem to feel it. The broken joint mashed the ghoul king’s nose and, with a slurp of pain, the flesh-eater let go.

  Pink snot dribbling over his eyes, Korruk gave vent to a titanic roar, flexed the muscles of arm and shoulder and pushed the elbow joint squealing back into place.

  The terrorgheist drowned him out with a trium
phant shriek. The monster, benefitting from having neither ligaments nor tendons, had worked its back foot double-jointedly over the maw-krusha’s champing teeth and pushed back its neck. Snapping and spitting for each other’s necks, the two beasts nevertheless managed to shove each other apart.

  ‘Stupid, zoggin’…’

  ‘I have him!’ Vandalus cried.

  He spread his wings to take flight, then closed them immediately over his head as a furry comet punched into the desert between him and the Great Red hard enough to send the first wave of Rok Nobz flying. It was as though the soul-storm had finally judged that enough was enough and decided to settle matters with its own fists. Dust and bone shards exploded in vibrant colours as they struck Vandalus’ wings. The fizzling discharges died away. A hairy, winged, wolf-bat thing – a varghulf – shook out of its crater and threw itself at the shouting Rok Nobz with a howl.

  Vandalus ran to meet it, a bounding leap carrying him over the Ironjawz, and slammed bodily into the rabid beast.

  The impact forced it onto its heels and Vandalus’ starblade slashed a red mark across its chest. He dropped his shoulder and rammed it. It gave a little, but big as he was, it was bigger and wasn’t to be surprised again. An arm as long as two of his and shaggy with hair hit him across his breastplate from shoulder to groin. The air burst out of him and he felt his boots rise off the ground.

  His wings flew out to arrest his fall and the varghulf, expecting him to be at least a foot further back than he was, howled in unexpected pain as his sword pierced pectoral muscle, then lung, then shoulder blade. He beat himself higher and in so doing ripped his blade out.

  The bleeding varghulf lashed for his legs with its claws, missed, tensed to jump after him, then bellowed as a Rok Nobz axe sank into its shoulder meat. Then the swipe of a gore-grunta’s tusk yanked its steaming guts over the cold desert and the only noise it made was the gristly crunch of galloping boars.

  More of the monsters continued to drop out of the sky like a rain of comets and, as Vandalus sought out the Great Red, braying hordes of ghouls loped ravenously towards the embattled Ironjawz. Skeleton horses ran alongside, barely keeping pace, with more howling varghulfs arriving on foot. The ground quivered, and Vandalus watched as the soul-winds appeared to swell and then shred apart before an entire phalanx of bone gargants on the march.

  ‘Is there no end to them...?’ he murmured.

  ‘I want my thunder door back!’ He heard Korruk roar, and turned towards the sound.

  The megaboss’ maw-krusha was mobbed by ghouls and skeletons. A warrior in bronze armour stuck its spear into the beast’s armpit. It didn’t react as the shaft snapped, nor even as the monster dragged its fist through it – unless you counted being smashed to bits as a reaction. The Great Red booted a grinning head off a set of hanging pauldrons and hacked Red Axe through the arm of another as it stabbed for him with a halberd.

  More kept on shambling in, steel blades and bits of bronze sweeping towards him on a tide of bone. Spears, pikes and halberds stabbed at the maw-krusha’s side while bony fingers grasped up for the Ironjaw’s weapons. The monster shattered a dozen in one blow. Billhooks swung up at Korruk from all sides. Red Axe and Black Axe sent them back to the Bone Sea in splinters.

  ‘The Great Red don’t lose!’

  He flung wide his dusted weapons, pushed out his chest, and opened his dripping iron fangs to the choking sky.

  ‘Waaaaa-’ He rammed his heels so hard into the maw-krusha’s belly that the brute actually squawked. It beat its muscular, winged arms as though willing the ground to mock it for trying to fly and, against all odds, lifted off. It didn’t last long, but then it didn’t have to. ‘-aaaaa-’ The maw-krusha arced gracelessly over the broken, squirming skeletons and smashed into the terrorgheist’s side like a sledgehammer. ‘-aaggh!’

  The terrorgheist went down with a rusty snap. Its ribs cracked under the blow. The maw-krusha made doubly, then triply sure with a series of blows to its head. The shovel-slams after that were overkill, but Korruk was too busy to stop him. Assuming he could.

  Vandalus saw the abhorrant where it had rolled clear of its broken beast. The ghoul king came up in a spray of sand and hefted his club, breathing wetly and hard.

  Korruk dismounted, leaving the maw-krusha to its retribution, and clanked towards him. Skeletons ran full into his armour and simply broke as he built up speed. Some notion of what was coming entered the ghoul king’s sickly yellow eyes and he started to back up, too afraid to actually turn his back on the giant Ironjaw and run. Korruk smashed apart a skeleton that got between them and swung Black Axe for the abhorrant’s head. Straight down. Quick and brutal. The flesh-eater snapped out of it just enough to beat the blow aside with his club, and recovered some of his sneer, only to drop it again when Red Axe hacked off the hand at the wrist.

  Blood splurged from the shortened arm. Korruk kicked the flesh-eater in the chest, cracked a rib, and flung him back ten feet. The ghoul king crumpled in a heap under the fizzling portal that had spat out Vandalus.

  Korruk lifted it by the neck as easily as he might a drunken grot and held it to the portal’s flickering light as though for a proper look. The dust and sand that clung to the ghoul king’s bloodied body made it a grainy white, jumping between shades from second to second. White. Blue. White. Blue. Only its chest and face, facing away from the portal, were a fixed, resigned black.

  ‘Tell Man… Man…’ Korruk bared his iron teeth and growled. ‘Tell ’im the Great Red’s comin’.’ With that, the Ironjaw plunged the flesh-eater’s head into the portal up to its lower ribs. The portal flashed like a lightning storm, and a sudden pull dragged on the Ironjaw’s hand. The body thrashed for a moment and then was still.

  With a grunt of effort, as though he were dragging a sand raft out of a dust flow against the current, Korruk pulled the body out. What was left of it. Vandalus shivered at the sight of the flat, glassy tissue that now closed off the section through the abhorrant’s chest the way its head and shoulders had once done.

  ‘Morka...’ Korruk grumbled.

  Orruks were a superstitious race. Even an Ironjaw megaboss wasn’t too tough for a healthy fear of the weird.

  ‘There are too many,’ Vandalus shouted. He smashed apart a skeleton with a blow from his hammer, and turned back to Korruk.

  Vandalus didn’t fear a death in battle. It was one of the first human foibles that immortality took away. Korruk was not human, nor was he immortal, but Vandalus saw the same fearlessness in his one, savage eye. It was strange to stand before the orruk as an equal. It felt right, like the halcyon days long gone.

  ‘You and me then,’ Korruk said, hefting his big axes. ‘Try and keep up.’

  Vandalus grinned. ‘I do have wings.’

  The first of the running varghulfs charged towards them. They were shaggy and slobbering, long teeth sharply white against the pitch dark of their gaping mouths. Vandalus felt a familiar tingle on his skin and tasted tin on his lips. He had his lantern raised, but before he could operate it, two shots of lightning from above incinerated both beasts. Bits of gore with hair stuck to them slapped down, a lot of them over the broad target that was Korruk’s armour. Ramus strode towards them at the forefront of a line of Hallowed Knights Paladins.

  ‘Azyros,’ he said, by way of greeting as the Stormcasts surged past to bolster the Ironjawz and check, for the time being anyway, the vampire’s sally. He acknowledged the towering megaboss with a nod, but no words. The Great Red growled back.

  All friends here, thought Vandalus.

  ‘We must take the realmgate at all costs,’ Ramus intoned. ‘End the Betrayer and all of this is over.’

  ‘I don’t see how,’ Vandalus replied. ‘Whatever we bring, the vampire has more. We are stalled, brother, and I’d guess several miles from his citadel yet.’

  ‘You don’t speak for me, tin man,’ rumbled the Great Red,
and beat down a skeleton that had tottered through the lines, slipping on the glassy lightning scar on the ground. ‘No one steals from the Great Red.’

  ‘Don’t misunderstand me. The Astral Templars will fight to the death. But I would rather look my real enemy in his eyes before I’m returned to the forge.’

  Ramus pointed his reliquary back towards the portal. It pulsed in the swirling dust, white and blue, unaffected by any of it. ‘In his hubris, the Betrayer leaves the path open to us.’

  ‘That’s no better choice,’ Vandalus cried, shaking his head with a sudden, unworthy fear. ‘I’ve passed through that door, brother, and you’ll find nothing on the other side but Chaos.’

  ‘The light of Azyr is incorruptible and indivisible. There are many portals, but one gate only, and it is there.’ Ramus swung his reliquary to where the bone gargants smashed into the thin line of Hallowed Knights, past the squeal of sigmarite and the stabs of lightning and into the soul-storm. ‘I have seen it. I have seen where the Betrayer waits, confident in his power over the storm and contemptuous of mine. Twice now he has bested me, but today his overconfidence will undo him. Have faith in me, brother. There is but one realmgate and I shall guide us there.’

  Vandalus glanced towards Korruk. The Ironjaw looked at the portal and the messily halved abhorrant with a shudder, then towards the soul-shrouded bone gargants. Their massive arms rose and dropped like colossal hammers.

  ‘Nah. My way’s better.’

  ‘With me then, all who are faithful,’ Ramus cried, driving a bolt of lightning skyward from his reliquary and calling the surviving Hallowed Knights to him.

  Vandalus watched the Lord-Relictor walk into the light. White. Blue. White. Blue. Then gone.

  Just the soul-storm and the battle remained, the Ironjawz shouting as they ran in unruly formations to their dooms. Ramus was right. There could be no victory against these odds.