The End Times | The Fall of Altdorf

by Chris Wraight

  Von Kleistervoll looked at him doubtfully. He did not know to whom Helborg was referring. There was no surprise in that – so many horrors had assailed them over the past few months that it had become hard to choose between them.

  ‘Von Carstein,’ explained Helborg, spitting the words out. ‘The eldest of the line. It was he that broke us.’

  ‘They say the dead fought the northmen,’ replied von Kleistervoll, carefully.

  Helborg laughed harshly. ‘Do they? Who are they? Who still live who witnessed this thing?’

  The preceptor had no reply. The bitter wind moaned across the land, cutting through the scant protection of their cloaks. The whole world seemed drained of life and colour, sunk into a rotting mass of corpse-earth.

  ‘He came to feast on the remains,’ Helborg said. ‘I felt his fell magicks even at the heart of the fighting. These are our darkest enemies, preceptor – the corrupted and the undead. The day has come when they march in tandem.’

  Von Kleistervoll looked unconvinced, but said nothing. Helborg’s voice was becoming firmer. The pain in his wounds still flared, but he would recover. He would grip the Klingerach again. Karl Franz had gone, but there were other powers in the Empire, and there had been other Emperors. A successor would be chosen, and new armies raised. The war was not over.

  ‘My order remains,’ Helborg told him. ‘We gather what we can, and we march on Altdorf. The other electors will gather now. In the face of this, they will put their rivalries aside. They will have to.’

  As he spoke, a banner-bearer walked across the land before them, dragging a limp trailing leg through the mud. His face was a mask of effort – every last scrap of energy was devoted to keeping his rain-heavy standard aloft. The banner itself hung solidly, blackened from mould-spores but still bearing the griffon icon of the Empire on the fabric.

  Helborg watched him go. Other marching men looked up at the rumpled griffon, and their glassy eyes fixed on it in recognition.

  ‘We must get that standard cleaned up,’ Helborg said. ‘Find other regimental flags, and find men to bear them. We will march with the sacred images held before us. We will not enter Reikland like thieves, but rightful owners.’ For the first time since awaking, he felt the urge to smile – to let slip with that wolfish grin he wore in combat. ‘We do not matter, Heinrich. That matters. When we are long gone in our graves, men will still carry those signs, and they will still fight beneath them. We are but their custodians. There are no End Times, there are only our times.’

  The pain in his wounds was like a goad, giving him energy again. The road would be long, but the prize at its end was worth fighting for.

  ‘To Altdorf, then,’ he ordered, turning on his heel and walking towards the wagon where his armour had been stowed. ‘The eternal throne of Sigmar. If there is to be an end to us, we will meet it there.’

  Only the living dreamed, he had discovered.

  Death was a kind of dream all of itself, so there was no escape there. In truth, he remembered very little about being dead – just vague and horrifying impressions of an absolute, eternal nothingness that extended beyond imagination.

  He had once heard it said, a long time ago, that the only thought a mortal was truly unable to entertain was that of his own oblivion. Now he was able to reflect on the deep truth of that. Perhaps it was still true even of him, even after all he had experienced beyond the gates of the living.

  There were many levels of oblivion, after all. As far as the faithful of the Empire were concerned, he himself had been dead for a very long time indeed, but that supposition was based on a fearful level of ignorance. There was all the difference in the world between the cold, hard existence of the Curse and the utter, profound oblivion of bodily annihilation.

  He was free to dream again, now. His mind had knitted together, and with it had come all the old images, all the old desires and lusts and fears.

  Preeminent among them was, of course, her. She had come to him in his dreams, dressed in bridal white, her smooth neck exposed, her dark eyes glinting wetly in the light of candles. She still moved in just the way she had done in life. Isabella had never been capable of a clumsy gesture. The sight of her again, after so long, was just as intoxicating as it had ever been. He found himself extending a withered hand into the depths of his own visions, trying to pull her towards him.

  Perhaps that was the only preferable aspect to oblivion – the torment of seeing her had been spared him.

  Vlad rolled a near-empty goblet in his palm idly, watching the dregs pool in its base. The fingers that cradled the silver bowl were pearl-grey and as dry as dust. Since being restored to existence by Nagash, his body had not entwined together in quite the way he might have wished. Some aspects of his earlier presence had not carried over, others had changed in subtle ways.

  He felt... scoured. Learning to use muscles again had taken a long time. First, there had been the numbness, which brought on its shameful concomitant clumsiness. Then the pain had come, the raw, burning pain of reincorporation. That had been welcome – it had proved his body was his own again. He had drawn breath, and felt the damp air of the Old World sink into his lungs, and known that it was no illusion, and that he was back again, alive, and with unfinished tasks in the world of the senses.

  For a long time, he had wondered whether his heart might beat. He had lain awake during the long nights, expecting to feel the hot rush of blood around his veins, pulsing with the old immutable rhythm he could barely remember.

  It never came. He had been restored to the state of semi-life, just as he had been in the last days with Isabella. He still felt the Thirst, and still commanded the same strain of dark magic, and still felt at home in the shadows and the dank hearts of decay. The souls of the living were still translucent to him, burning like torches in the dark, and he still salivated at the sight of a bared vein.

  I am an instrument, he ruminated sourly, pondering the time that had passed since his restoration.

  In his earlier incarnation, Vlad had been master of his own destiny. Armies had risen and marched at his command. Sylvania, the Empire itself, had trembled before his name.

  Much of that old power still remained. The unquiet dead still rose at his bidding, but he knew, in his silent heart, that his will was now a mere proxy for a greater intelligence.

  There was no resisting the Master. There never had been. Some souls were so great, so bloated with power, that they transcended the standard order of things, and even a pride-driven aristocrat like Vlad felt little shame in bending the knee to that.

  Still, it rankled. Deep in his stomach, where the last vestiges of human pride lingered, it rankled.

  He lifted his goblet to his grey lips and drained the last of the wine. It was foul. In his former incarnation, even Sylvania had produced better vintages. Truly, the Empire was a shadow even of its earlier, rotten, decadent and miserly self.

  Around him, candles burned low, their thick stumps heavy with molten tallow. The stone chamber was dark, and the ever-present north wind moaned through the cracks.

  Before him, set on a bronze table, was a severed head. Walach Harkon’s eyes had rolled up into his skull. His once elegant features had been defiled by tattoos and scarification, something that made Vlad’s lip curl in disgust. Only the fangs gave away his proud bloodline; everything else had changed.

  When Vlad had spied Harkon bringing his Blood Dragons into combat during the climax of the battle at Heffengen, he had assumed that the task was near completion – the Chaos forces would be broken between his own and those of the Empire, crushing them utterly. It should have been a great victory, the first step in the long road of bringing the living and the dead together to fight the damned. He had already rehearsed his speech before the mortal Emperor, demonstrating how only an alliance of former enemies could hope to staunch the tide of corruption spilling through the Auric Bastion.

  No one, least of all him, could have guessed that Harkon had turned. Somehow, during the Blood
Dragon’s enforced exile north of the Bastion, his battle-hungry mind had been twisted to the service of the Blood God.

  It was shameful. Embarrassing. Mortal cattle could have their heads turned by every petty shaman raving under a standing stone, but a lord of undeath, one of those capable of delivering the Kiss, one of the mightiest servants of Death in the entire world...

  The thought made him furious. Harkon had driven a wedge between that which should by now be in unity. Far from gaining the trust of the mortal Emperor, he had slain him. Such rebellion, propelled by weakness, had earned him the torment of a thousand years. It had given Vlad some little pleasure to crush him, taking control of his draconian mount and using the tortured beast to end its own rider.

  By then, though, the damage had been done. The Empire army had been routed, handing the servants of the Ruinous Powers an unbreakable momentum. Vlad himself had been forced to withdraw, an ignominy he had suffered too many times over his many lives.

  He placed the goblet on the table next to Harkon’s shrivelled head and glowered at the blank-eyed face. ‘Glory-hunting fool,’ he hissed.

  The setback was a grave one. Every day saw more corrupted souls flock to the hosts of the North. The Empire was in no condition to offer more than a token resistance – for all Gelt’s boasts, the Bastion was entirely breached now, and the hordes would soon pour through it like blood through a sieve. The scattered cities of the northern Empire, over which he had once cast covetous eyes himself, were as good as lost. No doubt the remnants of Karl Franz’s army would attempt to make some kind of stand at Talabheim and Middenheim, but if there was to be genuine resistance, a chance to recover something before all was lost, it would have to be mounted further south.

  ‘Altdorf,’ he murmured, remembering his last sight of those white towers. He had got close enough to smell the fish being landed on the quays. For a glorious moment, many lifetimes ago, he had stood on the battlements and seen the entire city spread out before him, supine as a lover, tense for the ushering in of a new age of living death.

  He did not know how he would feel when he saw it again. Perhaps the old passions would stir, or perhaps that was all behind him now. That was the strange thing about being reborn – he had to learn about himself again.

  He sighed, and shoved Harkon’s head from the table. It hit the stone floor with a wet thud and rolled away.

  There could be no postponing the matter now. He had tarried long enough, uncertain how to break the news. There were few souls in the world that could make Vlad von Carstein hesitate, but the Master was one of them.

  He sighed once more, pushed himself from his chair and arranged his cloak about him. The fine ermine settled on the polished crimson war-plate. He ran his fingers through his snow-white locks, ensuring not a strand of hair was misplaced.

  From the chambers below, he heard the screams of living sacrifices as the last of the rites was completed. It was a waste to end mortal souls in such a way, and he took no great pleasure in it, but establishing a link with the Master over such distances could not be done without some trivial hardship.

  Vlad made his way from the chamber and towards the lower levels of the tower. The disaster at Heffengen had to be recounted, and Nagash was not one to be kept waiting.

  It was well, then, that he had something else to tell him – a new path to tread, and an old one to revisit. The future was just another aspect of the past, after all, which was yet another lesson his slumber in the halls of eternity had taught him.

  The dead did not dream. Neither, it so happened, did their dreams ever die.

  SIX

  Gregor Martak, Supreme Patriarch of the Colleges of Magic, awoke from a fevered dream of ruin and terror.

  He had done likewise for the past three weeks, and it made him exhausted and irascible. Previously, he had slept phenomenally well. Wizards of the Amber Order were accustomed to deep slumber – they had little to trouble their unwaking minds, and so they slept like the beasts they emulated: in brief, deep snatches, as dreamless as the empty vistas of the underworld.

  Martak yawned and scratched his unruly beard. Then he lifted his coarse robe and scratched the rest of himself. Tufts of hay stuck out from every crevice of his makeshift nightshirt, a result of taking his bed in the Imperial Stables. As one of the three most powerful men in the Empire, he could have occupied the most opulent chambers of the Palace. He could have had a staff of hundreds, a whole series of willing and creative companions, and barrel-loads of fine victuals carted into his personal kitchens every morning.

  His predecessor, the avaricious and brilliant Balthasar Gelt, had taken full advantage of such opportunities. Martak had always had a sneaking admiration for Gelt, in the way only a man of such completely antipathetic character could. The two of them had never been rivals, for Martak had spent most of his life in the wilds of Taal’s boundless forests, far from the labyrinthine conspiracies of the capital city. Where Gelt had been an accomplished puller of Imperial levers, Martak had been content to remain an uncultured savage, scavenging around the margins while his powers over beast and bower grew steadily stronger.

  When news had come in concerning Gelt’s fall from grace, Martak had not been one of the many who had secretly rejoiced. Subsequently being named as Supreme Patriarch had come as a complete surprise. He had been stalking through the wildwoods of the northern Reikland when the summons had come. Six messengers had been dispatched to find him; only one made it, and he had been white from primal fear when he had turned up. The deep forest was no place for ordinary men.

  Martak was under no illusions why he had been chosen: he was the least offensive candidate to the largest number of people. The Amber College was a filth-ridden backwater compared to the lofty Gold, Light and Bright Colleges, from whose precincts the Supreme Patriarchs were normally drawn, and that made him a non-contentious choice, particularly as the Emperor was not around to oversee a protracted dispute.

  The Amber reputation did not worry him. If his colleagues were too preoccupied by their incessant feuding to see just how powerful the Lore of Beasts could be, and just how completely he had mastered it, then that was their fault to remedy. So he had taken the honour when it had been offered, even putting on a largely fresh robe to receive his staff of office. Then he had left the Palace for the stables, bedding down in the straw and breathing in the thick aroma of horseflesh.

  For a while, surrounded by thoroughbreds, he had slept well. Then the dreams had come.

  Martak ran his calloused hands through his long greasy hair, and belched. Moving stiffly after his troubled night, he staggered over to a water trough and splashed his face. He walked out of the stable doors, yawning again widely. It was the hour just before the dawn. The eastern sky was a deep blue, casting a weak light across the entire cityscape. Mist rose up from the ground, as white as cream and nigh as thick.

  The stables were situated on the southern edge of the vast Imperial Palace complex, not far from the upper curtain walls. Martak strolled through courtyard after courtyard, loosening his limbs and rolling his shoulders as he went. By the time he reached the outer parapet, the first rays of the sun were slipping over the distant eastern hills.

  He leaned on the stone balustrade, and took in the view.

  Below him, a tangle of roofs tumbled away down the steep slope towards the river. Thin columns of dirty smoke spiralled up from the streets, bearing the wet, dirty aroma of Altdorfers’ hearths. Ahead of him, a quarter of a mile eastwards, the huge dome of the Temple of Sigmar thrust up from the clutter of houses, its copper skin relatively unscathed by the grime that affected every other building in the city.

  Beyond the temple lay the wide curve of the river. The rising sun cast rippling lines of silver across its turgid surface. Barges were already plying the trade-ways, sliding like whales through the muck. Martak could hear the calls of merchants as they unloaded their cargo onto the wharfs.

  Altdorf had a kind of rough, unregarded beauty to it. Perhaps Mart
ak was one of the few to appreciate that, for he liked rough, unregarded things. The poet Heine Heinrich had once described Altdorf as having the looks of a toad-dragon combined with the charm of a threepenny harlot. Being strictly chaste, Martak could not attest to the latter, but as for the former, toad-dragons had their own kind of magnificence. They had certainly been around a long time, something that could also be said of the City of Sigmar.

  He drew in a long, deep breath. The nightmares were fading. Soon the Palace would begin to stir in earnest. Night-watch soldiers would slope back to their barracks, hoping none had witnessed their snoozing in the shadow of the battlements, to be replaced by bleary-eyed, unshaven day-watch regulars. The great fires would be lit in the hearths, banishing the worst of the night chill, and pigs would be rammed on spits for the evening banquets. The refuse-strewn streets would fill with the harsh, jostling press of unwashed bodies, replacing the cutpurses and petty cultists who had stalked the night shadows.

  Until then, Martak’s view would be largely untroubled by interruption. The city lay before him peacefully, barely touched by the burnishing rays of the world’s sun, as dank and sullen as fungus.

  In his dreams, he had seen the city burning. He had seen the cobbled streets erupt in foul growths, and the walls collapse under the weight of rampant vegetation. He had seen monsters stalking through the ruins, their eyes bright green in the flame-lit dark. He had seen the river clogged with strangle-weed and the proud towers of the Imperial Palace cast down in flaming destruction.

  He had seen the Emperor, alone, wandering across the lands of the dead, surrounded on all sides by the hosts of the damned. His armies were gone, and the sky had been alive with light of all shades, some hues having no name in the languages of mortal men.