[Warhammer] - The Laughter of Dark Gods

by David Pringle (ed) - (ebook by Undead)

  Once there had been terror and evil in this crypt, but now there was only the oppressive weight of time, the press of centuries. Helmut knew about the liche. Long ago, decades before some mendicant priest had consecrated this altar to Morr, it had seen sacrifice to another, darker deity. Perhaps time had withered the liche away to dry bones and whispering dust, but in those long-gone days it had struck terror into the hearts of all who passed this isolated headland.

  Strange fruit rotted among the branches of the oak trees, and when the flesh of living things had perished the naked bones walked the moonlit earth once more. The sacrifices were not of blood, but of something altogether less innocent. And this was the burial crypt of that source of ancient evil.

  Impelled by some sense of urgency he only half comprehended, Helmut headed for the nether reaches of the dark tunnel. It led downwards, dropping a step every yard or so; narrow enough that men might walk in single file only, low enough that their heads must be bowed. Ten yards inside the musty entrance, Helmut passed a pair of niches in either wall. Within them, pathetic and crumbled by time, lay two skeletons wrapped in cerements that had long ago assumed the texture of mummified skin.

  The tunnel was now far from the graveyard. Passing the guardian niches, he held the candle before him. The stones had resisted the grinding of roots and the infiltration of damp; the air was dry and musty, the floor thick with dust. As if in a trance he paced out the steps of the mausoleum, descending towards a doorway which suddenly loomed in front of him, oppressive and dark. Pillars to either side were carved into the semblance of twisted mummies, their mouths open in an eternal shriek. With a strange thrill Helmut realized that they might well be real, petrified in their dying terror by the ancient monster within.

  This is it, he thought. He’d been here once before, but no further. The closed door with the human jawbone, yellowing with age, that served as a handle. Inviting him in. Is it worth it? He felt a hot flush. Yes! He reached out and grasped the bone, seeing in his mind’s eye the battle that rolled chaotically up the beach, already shedding limbs and lives like the skin of some strange and bloody serpent. It was not for him; nothing of the kind. He had a destiny, and it was greater by far than that.

  The oak door opened with a screech of dry hinges, and Helmut pushed through. The sight that greeted him held him paralyzed like a rat before a snake, or a priest facing a god. The liche held his eyes with a burning vision, grinning from empty eye sockets above a throne as shapeless as black fire. Welcome, it seemed to say in his head; I’ve been waiting a long time for you. Helplessly, he felt himself drawn forward by the deathless bony gaze. And the door closed behind him.

  Klaus Kerzer’s first reaction was to protect hearth and home. As Maria stood immobile, hearing the brassy clangour of the bell, he was already reaching for the heirloom which hung in oilcloth above the lintel. He swept it down from its pegs, swiftly unrolling the swaddling of greasy rags that protected the blade from damp. He looked at his wife grimly.

  “Smoke you smelt,” he said; “at high tide, and the bell tolling.” He breathed deeply and pulled the door open. “Quick woman, rouse out your neighbours! Goodwife Schlagen, the Bissels. Everyone. Get them to the temple and take sanctuary there, or else wherever the rest go. But hide—I fear the reavers are coming.”

  Her freeze broke. She embraced him swiftly, tears forming in her eyes. “Come back to me,” she whispered.

  “Go,” he grunted, turning his head away. The sword lay naked on the rough table, edge gleaming and sharp. His throat was dry. Despite his bulk and his brooding temper, Klaus Kerzer was no warrior. The sword merely emphasized how his family’s fortunes had sunk over the years. He grunted again, in the back of his throat, then inexpertly took the weapon in both hands. It was long and heavy, and he hoped that he remembered what his father had taught him of its use. Behind him, Maria slipped into the darkness of the night. The bell still clanged mournfully, but now there was no mistaking the noises that carried from the beach on the chill night breeze.

  He stepped outside just as the first of Ragnar One-Eye’s soldiers reached the village.

  Oblivion’s sweet and sickly sea floated Helmut away. It was dark in the crypt, and he knew he slept—no one could, waking, face the liche and not flee screaming—for he sat on a stool that crackled beneath his weight and paid attention to the ancient monster.

  Long ago, it seemed to say, things were not as they are now. The people of this land were not poor fisherfolk and peasants, oppressed by the Imperial nobility and the ravages of war and piracy. Things were better—far better. They had me. Whether it was truly dead or only half so remained a mystery. But there was no sign of malevolence, nor arrogant disdain; it talked to him quietly, like a friendly uncle or a visiting scholar. As if it sensed an affinity in him, and wished to enlarge upon it.

  As he gazed upon the candle-lit skull of the robed and bejewelled corpse that sat, enthroned, against the wall opposite him, Helmut seemed to see visions of that far-gone time. It had been a bright age, golden in colour. The Nameless One had ruled mercifully for centuries from his fastness on the headland, exacting a tax of corpses and little else from his domain. Those who lived there closed their minds and their souls, leaving their mortal remnants to the high one; only foreigners chose to dispute his supremacy.

  There had been endless days and endless nights of splendour in his fastness. The elixir of life, served from a golden bowl beneath a chandelier of fingerbones; the butler a black-robed skeleton. The dark studies of the eternal overlord who sought to extend his knowledge into every niche, temporal and spiritual, from pole to pole. The searing light of dawn, seen by eyes grown too sensitive for daylight but which yet anticipated a billion tomorrows. His Nameless splendour had ruled for five hundred years while all around him were little more than barbarians.

  There came a time, the undead thing seemed to say, when the burden became tiresome. When night alone was sufficient for me, and I chose to sleep, and meditate, for I had much to think upon. I had lived a hundred lifespans, and it happened so that I barely noticed the decline of my powers. It grinned at him from the shadows. Helmut grinned back, lips curled in a rictus of fear and longing. Shapes speared out of the darkness to either side of the liche’s throne; edges of boxes, a lectern, great leather-bound books clasped shut with bony locks. I have been waiting a long time for my heir, the skeleton stated in a silent voice which seemed as dry as the desert sands of Araby.

  “Yes.” Helmut was surprised to hear his own voice, itself as dull as the rocks around him. “Yes,” he repeated. How did you know? he asked. How did you know what I wanted? What I was afraid of? It seemed so right, to him, that he should be chosen. Heir to, to…?

  The dominion. The dominion of Helmut Kerzer, necromancer. Yes, that was it.

  “I accept,” he said, and although the corpse stayed seated in frozen splendour, a wind seemed to blow through the chamber. His candle guttered and died, but he didn’t need it anymore; Helmut saw with a clarity he had never known before. Behind the throne lay a flight of steps leading down, down to the rooms and abode and workshops of the Nameless One. Down to his new home. It had been waiting patiently for him, or for someone like him, for many centuries.

  A feverish exaltation coursed through Helmut’s blood; there was much for him to do, much that would need preparing afresh. Knowledge to be gained, books to be read, unspecified tasks to be carried out. As he pushed eagerly past the throne, its skeletal ruler slumped with a brittle crackle of time: dust rose in final release. It would be years before Helmut came to understand the nature of the spell he had succumbed to, and by then it would be far too late to escape. For now he was blinded by the promise of dark things.

  First they came ashore; then they burned the fisherfolk’s boats as they found them. Horst the Hairless was still there, bundling his nets for the morrow, and he remained there afterwards, albeit with half his brains in his lap and the flies buzzing huge and hungry around him. Ragnar One-Eye voiced a wordless,
ululating battle-ay; hefting his axe, he led a stream of soldiers up the trail towards the village.

  “Forward and kill them!” he roared. “Take what you want and torch the rest. Leave none behind!” Succinct; and, more to the point, exactly what the men wanted to hear. The fury of the battle brew was upon them, and they were in no mood for restraint. They charged towards the village in a stream of iron.

  Ahead of them, Klaus Kerzer heard Horst’s death-cry and Ragnar’s deep voice. Shocked into a slow run, he made for the village hall. “Foe! Fire! Murder!” he shouted raucously at the top of his lungs.

  As Klaus staggered up the track, one of the foemen hit him with a thrown dagger. Shock and pain seared through him, and he fell heavily. As he lay groaning in the dirt, the raider paused to finish him off; but, unexpectedly, Klaus caught the reaver in the hamstrings with a desperate sweep of the heirloom sword, and the man fell cursing to the ground. With a gasp, Klaus raised the aged sword again, but this time the younger and more experienced fighter was far too quick for him: the reaver stabbed the older man in the throat, and Klaus’ life began to bubble away. The sword fell at his side.

  Klaus’ yells, added to the mournful tolling of the bell, had brought the angry, frightened fisherfolk swarming out of their hovels. Some of them bore scythes and other farm implements of dubious vintage; one or two of the richer ones possessed genuine weapons, but none were armoured or trained, and collectively they were a pathetic match for the raiders.

  The villagers milled around in front of the hall, incapable of forming any sort of battle order. The local priest had turned out, but there was no sign of real authority; no lord or knight to muster a defence around himself. The berserkers laid in with a will, hacking negligently at the terrified peasants. Ragnar snarled wordlessly, his axe-blade dripping; he was truly in his element. The ruddy glare of fire added a surreal element to the scene as one of the thatch-roofed cottages caught alight. Whether the blaze had been started deliberately or by accident was irrelevant—it spread rapidly, leaping from roof to roof like a ravenous beast on the prowl. The crackling roar thrummed through Ragnar’s blood, heating his battle-fury to the boil.

  Fleeing women and children fell victim to the raiders. A party led by one Snorri Red-Hair came upon a group of them from behind. Blood flew and screaming rent the air, as terrible as in any slaughterhouse.

  Klaus Kerzer had been one of the first villagers to go down, his precious old sword in his hand. Thanks to that weapon, one at least of the berserkers limped whey-faced from the fray, blood pumping from severed veins. But Klaus never heard the screams of his wife, never saw the swinging axe-stroke that half-beheaded her. He died where he had fallen, wondering at the last why this had happened to him now—and where young Helmut had been when he should have been mending the nets.

  Presently the fighting ceased for want of a living target for the berserkers’ frenzied blows. Ragnar One-Eye looked down on the field of battle from a giant’s perspective, his soul floating huge above his body. Corpses lay scattered like trees after a storm, and the steady crackle and snap of burning homesteads was the only constant sound. That and the quiet moaning of the few of his soldiers who had been lax enough to fall victim to fishermen and peasants.

  At his feet, a body twitched and opened its eyes. Ragnar looked down incuriously, and saw that it was a priest. In the darkness his cassock was blacker than night, sticky with blood oozing from a deep gash in his belly. The putrid smell told him that the sacerdote would not live long.

  The man was trying to speak. Ragnar paid little attention. He was trying to warn him…

  “The curse…” Father Wolfgang gasped. His guts were cold now, and he knew what that meant. “The evil of the headland. You’ll release it, you fools!” The hulking barbarian showed no sign of interest, no indication that he understood. Wolfgang stopped trying. It was very cold, and in any case he wasn’t sure that he should warn the raiders. A fate worse than death, perhaps, befitted them. Meanwhile, he could just relax a little. Shut his eyes. It would be all right; everything would…

  Ragnar looked down. The priest was undoubtedly dying, if not dead already. A frown furrowed the Norseman’s brows slightly. Had he tried to lay a curse on him with his dying breath?

  Angered by the thought, he stomped away towards the blazing village hall. Heretics! Spawn of daemons! Worshippers of evil! These weak men of the Empire. Clean them out!

  It was necessary of course. Since the winter when the fish had been pulled rotting from the sea, netloads of grisly putrescence blighted by dark magic. The divinations of the shaman, oneiromancy and cheiromancy, had shown the source of the pollution to be this coastline. His town had starved out the winter, eating rats and drinking the blood of their horses to survive. Practitioners of evil lived hereabouts and must be wiped out. It was as simple as that.

  Ragnar vacantly relieved himself against the charred remnants of what had once been the house of the Bissels, as inoffensive a family as could be conceived of. Then, feeling more himself, he looked round. Yes, it would do. Back at the beach they could camp for the night, bind such wounds as they had and prepare for the voyage home. He nodded gloomily.

  Home…

  Home. Helmut Kerzer in his new home. A study and a laboratory, and the library of a necromancer who had been vast in his power and great in his terrible majesty. A bedchamber—or a crypt—fit for a dead prince. A robing room where the heavy robes of the mage hung in dusty rows. A dark exultation took hold of Helmut. It was as if he was returning to himself, after a childhood of darkness and ignorance. Somehow he knew where everything was, knew what the rooms were, as if he had lived here before in some past incarnation.

  Nobody had ever told him of the dread life-in-death of the great necromantic wizards, much less of the whispered, rumoured ability some had to take possession from beyond the grave. In accepting the domain of a liche, Helmut had accepted far more than the old monster’s possessions. Already he felt a power in himself that was new: a confidence and a knowledge dark in its intensity and external in its origins.

  First Helmut lit the lanterns that, scattered through the mausoleum, shed a gloomy light upon the ancient dwelling-place. In the robing-room he paused for thought. Surely…? He shook his head. He had never possessed a garment that was not much-patched, handed down from some previous owner. Rags!

  A black robe hung waiting. It crackled with age as he pulled it over his head, but it fitted well. The hood came over his head and he laughed grimly, satisfied. The very image of a wizard.

  Next he proceeded to the library. Shelves that bowed under the weight of mighty codices stretched to the ceiling on two sides. There was no reading desk, but there was a lectern in the shape of a hunchbacked, screaming skeleton. A tome was already positioned on it, open to one leathery page. Helmut walked round it, admiring the binding which was of a curiously light, fine leather that could only have come from one source. Then he looked at the first page.

  It was in a script and a language with neither of which he was familiar. But he could read it, or something in him could; it made perfect sense. He laughed again. Voles and mice and dead squeaky bone-things in the forest! Such toys seemed ludicrous now. Then he frowned, remembering the reaver ship. It had been heading for the beach, a landing at high-tide twilight, full of warriors dreaming of the mystery of the axe. Impersonally he realized that there would be plenty of material on hand for his new-found-trade; plenty of familiar faces in strange, twisted contexts…

  He turned the page and heard the electrifying crackle of trapped power. Runes glowed on the parchment, gold-encrusted shapes that sizzled with potential. Illustrations of death and the unstill life beyond it, hermetic monsters and people of the twilight. On the raising of corpses and the ghastly perfection of skeletons. On the touch that brings pain and death, and the touch that restores a semblance of life. On the nature and treatment of vampires, ghouls and the like. The elixir of life, and of death-in-life. His fingertips glided from page to page, subtly
memorizing the more useful items.

  Then a thought struck him. A thought or a vision. His spine chilled as sweat stood forth on his brow—cold sweat. In his mind’s eye he saw a picture of burning houses and villagers butchered, the priest’s body gibbeted by the wayside. Barbarous raiders retreating to the beach to feast and celebrate their victory. His parents lying unnoticed among the dead, until the worms and beetles and small furry things came out to feed on human flesh.

  The book shut with a crack, dust flying from the spine at either end. Helmut stood with head bowed, a terrible tension in his shoulders. They would test me, would they, he thought with massive, terrible indignation? I, the heir! He still lacked the actuality of power, but nightmarish vistas were opening up to his dark imagination. With what he had here he could rule the headland for miles around. Poison the fish in swarms so that those who failed to fear him would starve, learning their lesson as their bellies bloated and ate the flesh from their bones. Did you do this, master? he asked silently. Did you prepare them for my arrival? Did you?

  There was no reply, but somehow he was sure he heard a chuckle from beyond the grave.

  Shaking his head, Helmut took the tome and placed it on one of the shelves; by instinct slotting them into the correct location. Pausing to consider, he selected another. The lectern creaked with a noise like a man racked by torture, as the codex settled onto it. The candles that lit this room smoked eerily with a smell like bacon; the fat of which they were made was wholly appropriate and readily available to any necromancer. He barely noticed the passage of rime as he studied, feverishly trying to cram comprehension into his inexperienced skull. Spells and incantations normally beyond one of his experience seemed to be just barely accessible, falling into place with a curious, demented logic of their own. As if he already knew them, as if he had used them before.