[Von Carstein 03] - Retribution

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  “These humans are brave,” Rinanlir, the last of the three moved out of the shadow of his brothers, “but they are not endless in number.”

  Finreir turned his back to his kin and stepped to one of the arrow slits, contemplating what awaited them over the horizon. He had touched Mannfred’s evil and recognised the steering hand of Nagash. He realised that he would not be able to discern the slumbering evil’s scheme unless he removed his proxy. It was time to remove Mannfred von Carstein from the game.

  “Prepare your horses,” he said, simply because there was hope.

  At dawn he had reached out across the winds, scrying the lie of the land. Events unfolding across the generations of the Old World were greater than he had anticipated. The humans had already fought this battle and won countless times, but they had made catastrophic mistakes, mistakes that could not bear repetition. The forces of Stirland under the banner of Martin von Kristallbach combined with the might of Altdorf and regiments from Talabecland were marshalling. They did not know, Finreir. How could they? But through the eight winds the mage knew them. The minds of the humans were akin to open books hungry to be read.

  Beyond the trees he saw roiling dark clouds rolling in and felt the touch of darkness. This was no natural night rolling towards them. Dusk was not for another three hours. Mannfred was growing in confidence. Already he was arrogant enough to turn day into night in his hunger to bring the battle forward.

  With Martin’s forces gathering behind the dead it fell to Marienburg to be the rock against which Mannfred and his damned legions could be smashed. The strategy was clear: to hold out for as long as was humanly possible.

  Finreir turned back to face Aelélasrion. The elf’s words made what he was about to do all the easier. “The humans are coming. Ride for Martin von Kristallbach, tell him that his hour has come. We will hold Mannfred at Marienburg. We invite the leader of men to come, to smash the Vampire Count upon our rock.”

  “How dare you banish me on some menial errand? I am not your lackey! I am here to fight!”

  “Then if you want something to fight you had best hurry, Aelélasrion.”

  Finreir knew Aelélasrion’s anger would only serve to quicken his passage to Martin. The warrior would be hungry to return in time for the meat of the battle. “Remember, they have never met our kind before. Try not to frighten him. He is rather useful.”

  “I am a swordmaster. I am no messenger boy, Finreir. Get someone else to run your errands.”

  “I was not opening the matter up for debate, Aelélasrion. You have your orders. I suggest you ride, now.”

  Aelélasrion stiffened as though to voice more complaint. Instead a moment later he said, “He doesn’t know us. What if he doesn’t believe me?”

  “We can only trust that he will; our lives depend upon it.”

  Aelélasrion bowed deeply and swept out of the room.

  A deep basso-profundo horn rumbled, shaking the very foundation of the armoury tower.

  The enemy had been sighted.

  The massive teeth of the portcullis hung over the maw of the city wall, hungry to bite down as the defenders marched out to face their foe.

  Archers lined the battlements, their barbuts gleaming in the last glimmers of daylight. A single archer, crouched, nocking an arrow as he aimed his recurve bow high. The man had been chosen from the ranks of the city a champion archer from the last tourney. Breathing shallowly, he drew back his arm until the catgut had dug so deep into his fingers that he had lost all feeling. The arrow felt unwieldy. He had never fired its like before. Its balance was unnatural, but he followed Finreir’s instructions to the letter. He made a silent count of ten before he loosed the sorcerer’s arrow high into the black sky.

  As the arrow left the bow, the archer recoiled as it unexpectedly burst into flame. Its red glare streaked over the heads of the dead before exploding in a shower of shimming fireballs that hung in the air, revealing the extent of the enemy they faced.

  The front line swelled with the slack-skinned putrescent flesh eaters scuttling forward. Behind them came the Black Hand, skeletal knights in rusted armour, under the command of Adolphus Krieger. Unmatched terror emanated from their corpses, fear rolling across the battlefield. Mannfred’s own grave guard, wights wielding deadly wight blades and clad in gleaming black plate, brought up the rear.

  On either flank were the Black Knights, the right led by Gothard, the Undying Wight Lord, and the left by a faceless vampire, a white rose emblazoned on his chest. The knights reined in their skeletal steeds, chomping at the bit, hungry to taste man flesh.

  Finreir and the two elf warriors, Rinanlir and Málalanyn, emerged from the great mouth of the city, the rank and file of humanity swelling out behind them to face the undead.

  The human forces, led by the army general and an experienced and battle-scarred veteran, Syrus Grymm, flanked Finreir to the left and to the right in ranks ten deep and one hundred wide, spreading out across the killing ground of the battlefield. Down the entire length of the city walls before them a harsh snow-filled landscape rolled out for yard after yard, until the first line of undead foot soldiers stood mockingly just out of arrow range.

  The undead army roared as one at the living, their mere existence taunting them, beckoning them closer, but the humans would not move.

  Mannfred gave the signal to the left flank.

  Gothard responded by spurring his nightmare steed into a charge, leading a single probing wave of Black Knights down the length of the men’s front line. They immediately drew fire from the frightened archers up on the battlements, but curiously the infantry did not flinch or recoil. Instead as the riders of the dead raced back and forth, their presence goading the living, the entire rear line of Marienburg’s innocuous looking foot soldiers sprang into action. Grabbing up sharpened pikes that had been concealed in the snow, they raced to the front line and ten deep thrust their pikes into the ground, erecting a barrier that no riders, undead or otherwise, could ever hope to penetrate.

  It was little more than a trace memory, a ghost of who he had been, but he felt it: satisfaction. He had forced the living into showing their hand. Gothard led his riders back to their place on the left flank to await further orders.

  Mannfred saw instantly that he must send in his foot soldiers.

  He ordered the flesh eaters—and only the flesh eaters—to advance.

  The cadaverous ghouls salivated and slavered, shrieking with delight as they surged across the no man’s land between the forces, banging gnawed bones and clubs to raise a cacophony of sound. They broke into a run, brandishing their chipped and rusty swords above their heads.

  Finreir nodded once to Grymm and once to the sergeant of the archers on the battlements who raised his arm in acknowledgement. The man’s arm came down with a cry of, “Loose!” A rain of steel poured from the heavens.

  Arrow upon arrow thudded into putrid chests and pus-filled arms, cutting down wave after wave of the damned flesh eaters.

  A cold smile spread across the Vampire Count’s grim face. The living had taken the bait. He called forth his necromancers, bidding them have the newly dead rise. The fear in the faces of the living was a wondrous sight to behold.

  The dead flesh eaters rose from the dirt right on top of the terrified pikemen.

  Finreir had anticipated this manoeuvre too.

  A second row of archers sprang up from behind the first along the high walls of the battlements, crossbowmen bearing flaming bolts soaked in naphtha. They took aim and fired upon the undead.

  Adolphus Krieger chuckled bleakly at the obvious mistake. “The living were commanded by idiots. They fire on us, they fire on their own pike-men,” he said, pointing out the irony that already the pikes were burning as the flesh eaters surged relentlessly forwards, throwing themselves onto the defences. Soon they would be reduced to ash and that would allow the riders back through. We must press the advantage!”

  Mannfred gave the order for Krieger to advance with the Bla
ck Hand, marching on the centre. At the same time, he released the dire wolves to undertake continuous hit-and-fade assaults on the flanks of the living forces, augmenting the knights’ more powerful cavalry charges with constant harassment attacks and drawing the archers’ fire away from Krieger’s foot soldiers.

  Across the battlefield Finreir felt deep satisfaction that the arrogant dead had fallen for his double bluff. His only remaining fear was that Grymm and the living could not hold their line or their nerve long enough for the reinforcements led by Martin of Stirland to arrive and smash through the exposed ranks of the damned.

  Mannfred threw up his hands, the lethal incantation screaming off his tongue. Ribbons of dark energy coursed from his cruel fingers, rippling out across the battlefield and ensnaring his front line. The flesh of the risen zombies became thin and desiccated as Mannfred’s magic took hold. Compelled to thrust out their arms, they grasped for the nearest living being. Flesh decayed beneath the zombies’ touch, fell conduits for the vampire lord’s power. Their victims didn’t even have time to scream.

  Finreir reacted swiftly, raising his ivory staff and planting it firmly in the ground between his feet, but it was too late for many. The ground shook so violently that forces on both sides lost their footing and fell. In response, the snow and dust raised up from the ground beneath the living hung in the air for a moment, before blasting across the battlefield into the faces of the flesh eaters, like a maelstrom. The ice and the snow scoured the ranks of the dead, ripping the very flesh from their bones, pitting their bodies and obliterating them before the eyes of the humans.

  There was nothing left for the necromancers to raise.

  Mannfred raged in the cold heart of the undead army’s ranks, his eyes blazing.

  Finreir turned to his kin. “Remove the necromancers from the field, brothers’

  Rinanlir and Málalanyn set off at a mad dash, using the chaos of battle as cover. None could touch them. Their swords whickered out occasionally, cleaving a path out of the flank, seeking the opportunity to cut back inside and catch Mannfred’s sorcerers unawares. It was a simple but effective manoeuvre, surgical in its precision, elegant in its execution. The two elf swordmasters made light work of all in their path, but they did not underestimate the long-reaching powers of the magicians. Speed was of the essence. Within feet of the necromancers they felt their blood beginning to boil and their energy draining as the flesh began to melt around their bones.

  Málalanyn brought one of Mannfred’s grave guards to his knees and, leaping from the undead warrior’s back, launched into the air, scything around in a deadly arc. His sword cleaved through the skulls of a surprised coven of necromancers. He landed in the midst of the dead, sword planted in the ground. He looked back at Rinanlir and said, “Your turn.”

  But there was no one left to kill.

  “You take all the life out of fun, my friend,” said Rinanlir shaking his head. “Perhaps we should take the initiative to kill a few more of these… things.”

  Mannfred’s elite grave guard, seven feet tall, were already closing in on the company of two elves.

  “This could be interesting,” Rinanlir said, raising his sword in readiness.

  Before a single blow could be landed, Finreir’s presence touched their minds, ordering them back to the line.

  As they turned to withdraw, they saw that Mannfred was already unleashing his next gambit, the bones of the long-dead clawing up from the earth in a vile parody of birth. But Mannfred’s rage was not sated. Out at the extreme flanks of the living’s lines, a foul stench began to form, filling the senses. The noxious fumes came not from without, but from within the very flesh of the soldiers, the rank corruption causing their flesh to rot and fall from their bones. The soldiers screamed in absolute terror and utter agony.

  Gothard seized his chance, and the once proud warrior of the Knights of the Divine Sword led his riders in a wild charge at the human’s flanks, racing them down the rear of the human forces. His damnation tore through him, flickering half-memories of a time before Mannfred had raised him from the dead, a conscript to his damned army. Emotions were alien now. There was no sense of self, no recognition of the banner of the Divine Sword, no stirring within him. He hungered for nothing more than the death of self. He lived on merely to fight, to serve, to destroy all that he had once held dear. He was destruction, wrath personified.

  Finreir closed the noose on the perfect play, signalling Syrus Grymm to lead the remaining forces out, holding the flanks to face inwards and slam shut the steel trap, cutting off Mannfred’s riders from the rest of his hellish legions. Held as they were at the foot of the city walls, the ranks of crossbow men and archers above loosed everything they had.

  A swarming sound filled the air, a swirling black vortex of flesh eating insects streamed across the killing ground from Mannfred’s fingertips, chewing a path through the living. The insects swarmed into mouths and eyes, and up the noses to clog the throats and choke the life out of the soldiers in their pestilential path.

  Finreir cried, “Stay out of the light!” as static blue charges lanced from him into the soldiers next to him and on from them, cascading into the next and the next, and the next until every living soul was alive with raw power. The static light drove back the unnatural darkness, cracking open the sky. The light was so bright that the flesh eating insects combusted, flaming like a shower of hot coals falling into the snow with a hiss.

  In the distance, the sound Finreir and the living had been longing for, Martin’s horn, heralded the arrival of reinforcements. Banners flapped in the wind, regiments of Stirlanders marching side by side with an army carrying the banner of Altdorf. Thousands of soldiers were moving with rhythmic precision across the fields. They banged swords on shields, hammering out their defiance as they advanced. The clamour had little effect on the dead, immune as they were to such primal instincts as fear, but it served to rouse the living, renewing strength in exhausted limbs, giving them fresh hope that they might yet live despite the uncompromising evil they battled.

  Finreir smiled. Such was the power of hope. A single spark could banish an all-engulfing darkness.

  Mannfred cocked his ear. How had he not seen this? His blindness incensed him. Finreir had drawn his Black Knights, and his rear was completely unprotected. Mannfred had expected to make an assault upon a city. He had not expected that the assault would be upon him. Finreir had played him masterfully, but the game was not over yet.

  Krieger, almost at the front line of the living, came to the same realisation. He unleashed his will, invigorating the Black Hand with the sheer malevolent force of his presence, spurring them into a wild frenzy. They charged, concentrating his forces on a single point. The only task was to punch a hole through the living to rescue what was left of the Black Knights.

  Mannfred did not wait to see if Krieger’s Black Hand were successful. He wailed at the night, calling forth the banshees of nightfall. The wailing spectres would hold back the living long enough for them to flee.

  This battle was over, but the Winter War was not.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Carpe Noctem

  Hel Fenn, The Blighted Forests of Sylvania

  And so the living drove the dead relentlessly out of the Empire and back into the foul forests of Sylvania.

  It was not one battle, not one decisive victory that did it. Scores of skirmishes and confrontations with a spiralling death toll matched the determination of the living not to fail. Swords clashed across hundreds of miles, the dead of countless provinces, hamlets, towns and villages gathering to rot in ditches so very far from home. The living swelled the ranks of the dead. Faith was stretched thin and hope was all but crushed, but that last stubborn flicker refused to die and from it blossomed an unflinching optimism. The living fought for their friends, their families and their land, the dead fought only for their master. It wasn’t fear or hunger that drove them on, they were far removed from such base emotion, it was a weakness that dea
th had cured them of.

  Carrion crows hovered over the battlefields, picking at the remains of two hundred thousand souls. It was death on an unprecedented scale. That was the cost of the endless Winter War. For the living it seemed as though spring would never come, indeed, for more than a year it didn’t. Though the snows came and went with the melt, death held the landscape in its icy grip. Morr’s appetite for souls was so fierce that it could never be slaked.

  There were too many skirmishes to remember, too many bodies to count, too much grieving to be done. It was an endless stalemate, no one’s objectives truly met.

  Battlefields were scoured and the fallen gathered into huge pyres. The cremation fires robbed von Carstein of more foot sloggers.

  Even so, too many were born again into the ranks of the undead.

  The clash of steel and the rasp of whetstones became the anthems of humanity.

  The balance was precarious. The ebb and flow of slaughter never ceased. Martin, Count of Stirland and Kurt III, Grand Theogonist of Sigmar, marshalled the combined forces of humanity. Despite huge losses, they decimated the ranks of the undead more than once.

  The strength of steel and the unbending determination of faith combined to forge two beacons of courage. They led by example. Martin von Kristallbach’s horn rang out over the battlefields. He was not some fair-weather leader who sought the protection of the command pavilion. He fought with the rank and file, inspiring those around him with his bravery. Though others damned him for his reckless stupidity, none were prepared to carry the fight to the undead. Martin von Kristallbach was the unwavering beacon of humanity that inspired the living and drew the undead like flies.

  Martin’s grasp of strategy was instinctive and often daring.

  Kurt witnessed a greater evil playing out on the battlefield and prayed to Sigmar for guidance. The Man-God granted him strength of purpose to do what must be done, the answer revealed when what appeared to be a ghoulish foe that had fallen at his feet begged him for release. The ghoul turned out to be no ghoul at all, but a revivified cadaver whose original spirit, imprisoned in its vile flesh, had been unable to cross over into the afterlife. Kurt recognised him. He had been cut down on the battlefield only hours before and somehow, through sheer force of character, had managed to regain a shred of control over his lips so that he could beg to be released from his own personal hell. If this had happened to just one man, how many thousands of others were, like him, denied salvation?