by C. L. Werner
‘Would you have your doom revealed to you?’
The voice caused Mandred to drop the gourd, scattering teeth across the animal skins on the floor. He glared at the darkness near the mouth of the cave, sword held at the ready.
The speaker emerged from the shadows, gliding towards him with an almost soundless tread. Mandred stared in astonishment as a beautiful woman stood revealed in the firelight. She was tall, her limbs well-muscled, her long hair endowed with a silvery-blonde hue he’d never seen before. There was a timeless quality about her face, a fusion of strength and softness that set his pulse trembling. Hers was a visage beyond the worldly pretensions of princesses and queens, a defiance of the mortal laws of age and decay. If he were a priest and allowed the distinction of communing with the goddess Rhya, he imagined her face would be akin to the woman he now gazed upon.
‘I see you have cast the bones already,’ the woman stated as she strode towards Mandred. She was near enough that he could smell the musky scent of her hair. She wore a simple garment of deerskin, cinched at the waist with a belt of dried gut, the brief skirt cut well above her knees. The luxuriant folds of a wolfskin cloak hung about her shoulders, tightened about her throat by a moonstone clasp. No shoes fettered her feet, yet Mandred could find neither scratch nor bruise upon her bare toes.
In a movement more graceful than Mandred would have thought possible for a human body, the woman knelt on the floor and quickly examined the teeth he’d upset from the gourd. Her hands passed over the wolf fangs, turning them over with the merest brush of her palm. Her eyes darted across the runes, flickering from one to another with the hungry fascination of a cormorant stalking fish.
‘These tell me much about you, Mandred von Zelt,’ the woman declared. In a single sweep of her hands, she gathered the teeth into her palm.
Hearing her speak his name broke the strange fascination that had gripped him. Mandred shook his head, but made no move to return Legbiter to its scabbard. ‘What are you?’ he demanded. ‘A witch?’
The woman smiled up at him from where she knelt on the floor. ‘Perhaps,’ she purred. ‘Or perhaps the fame of the Wolf of Sigmar is such that he is recognised even in the middle of nowhere.’
Mandred glowered at the woman. ‘I am a follower of Ulric,’ he declared. ‘I have no truck with witches.’
Reaching to her breast, the woman pulled her deerskin vestment down, exposing the swell of her breasts and the symbol tattooed between them. It was the wolf-head emblem of Ulric, the same symbol that was woven into the ceremonial robes of Ar-Ulric himself.
‘There are many ways to follow the White Wolf,’ she said. Her choice of words sent a chill rushing along Mandred’s spine. Was it mere chance that made her refer to Ulric by such title? Did she somehow suspect the strange path that had led him to her lair?
Mandred lowered his eyes, waving his hand at the witch. ‘Cover yourself,’ he commanded. The order brought a laugh bubbling from her lips, but she did as he asked.
‘A man of violence, a dealer of death and slaughter, a warrior steeped in the blood of his enemies, yet you blanch at nakedness,’ she mocked him.
‘There are such things as decency and propriety,’ Mandred stated. It was his turn to mock. ‘They are the things that make men civilised. That set us above beasts… and witches.’
The woman jostled the teeth she held, sending an eerie clicking noise echoing through the cave. ‘You may call me Hulda,’ she declared. ‘I am the Howl of Ulric. In better times, many sought my counsel. Now there are only a few.’
Mandred felt a curious sympathy when he heard the sorrow woven into her words. ‘The plague has taken many,’ he said. As he spoke, for the first time he considered the true extent of what had been lost to the plague. The toll in lives had been abominable, but now he contemplated what else had been lost with those lives: the ancient wisdom and traditions that had been exterminated with the people who kept them. This tradition of a forest oracle, a peculiarity of this part of Drakwald, how many were left who would keep it? How many of them had perished of the disease or fallen to the skaven who followed?
Hulda stopped rattling the fangs in her hand. ‘The plague has taken many,’ she agreed. ‘Some through sickness, some through fear.’ Cocking her head to one side, the seeress studied Mandred for a moment.
‘The fangs have shown me where you have been, Graf of Middenheim,’ she said. ‘I have seen the road you travelled to get here… and why.’ In a motion that was part lunge and part pounce, Hulda sprang across the floor, catching up the gourd in one hand and returning the teeth to it with the other. ‘There is a terrible hunger inside you, Wolf of Sigmar,’ she said. ‘A hatred that burns for blood but which will never be quenched by blood.’
‘How can I lead men?’ Mandred asked, his voice betraying a note of despair. ‘How can I ask them to follow me when all I can offer them is hatred?’
Hulda dipped her finger back into the gourd, removing a single fang. She held it up for Mandred to see the slash-like rune etched into the enamel. ‘This is your sign. I read it when it fell to the floor. It is called Winterfire, the flame that freezes, the cold that burns. Never have I seen this rune matched to a man’s soul. It betokens greatness.’
Mandred shook his head. ‘I don’t want greatness. I am unworthy of it.’
‘Men do not choose the doom the gods have proclaimed,’ Hulda said. ‘Their destiny is written in the stars, in the mountains, in the song of the bird and the howl of the wolf. To deny destiny is the gravest insult to the gods.’ Hulda smiled at him, a surprising tenderness in her manner. ‘A small man seeks greatness, lusts after it, cheats and lies and murders to steal it. A great man shuns it, hides from it, begs it to pass to another. Which of these are you, Mandred?’
‘But I am no leader,’ Mandred said. ‘I want nothing but to kill skaven. There is no hope, no future I can offer my people. Your bones have shown you. All that is in my heart is hatred. Men deserve more than that.’
Hulda set down the gourd. ‘Then give them more. Give yourself more. Be the Winterfire, use the flame of hatred to bring hope, use the chill of rage to build tomorrow. That is the riddle of the rune, to use the power yet deny the essence of that power.’
‘I am only a man,’ Mandred insisted, clinging to that simple truth, trying desperately to deny the miracle of the Sacred Flame.
Hulda sprang to her feet. In a single bound she was beside Mandred, pressing the fang of Winterfire into his hand. ‘Become something more,’ she told him. Her eyes glittered as they stared into his. ‘Destiny is a web that connects us all. If one strand fails, the skein may be undone. The fate of all men may rest upon the choices you make.’
Mandred clenched his fist, feeling the fang dig into his palm. ‘It is a grim burden,’ he shuddered. His body felt as though a great weight were pressing down on him, threatening to smash him flat against the floor of the cave. Somehow, he felt that if he simply let the tooth fall out of his hand, the onerous duty would pass from him and he would be free.
Mandred tightened his hold on the fang. Hulda stepped back, her face aglow with admiration.
‘A leader makes the right decisions,’ she said. ‘Not the easy ones.’
It was early morning when Mandred left the cave. Strangely, it seemed only a matter of minutes before he was back on the old familiar trail, the path he had quit when he’d started his pursuit of the white wolf. Had the beast led him in circles or had he simply imagined the chase to be far longer than the reality? He turned to look back, to find any glimpse of Hulda’s cave, but the trees seemed to have closed in, blotting out even the trace of his own tracks.
‘Your highness!’ an anguished voice cried out from somewhere nearby in the forest. Mandred recognised the cry as belonging to his bodyguard Beck. Taking a last look in the direction where he thought Hulda’s cave must lie, he cupped a hand to his mouth and called out to the knight. Immediately
he heard the crash of armed men rushing through the tangled undergrowth. In only a few moments, the graf was surrounded by a bedraggled yet relieved group of rangers and woodsmen. Beck, it seemed, had appreciated his own limitations after all and gone to recruit those who knew the forest to conduct the search.
The men gathered around him as Mandred described his pursuit of the white wolf. When he came to relate his discovery of the cave, however, he found himself reluctant to mention Hulda, instead leaving it a mystery who might have made the fire or dwelt in the cave.
When he had finished, the men around Mandred celebrated his adventure and its happy outcome. Only Mad Albrecht, the veteran poacher and hunter was uneasy. A native Drakwalder, he professed to know these woods better than any of them. Gravely, he pronounced that Mandred was fortunate to have emerged from the forest alive.
‘In Middenland, perhaps, the white wolf is a good omen,’ Albrecht explained, ‘but in Drakwald it is an ill sending. Long have the people of the forest whispered tales of a bloodthirsty monster that cloaks itself in the pelt of a great white wolf. It is a beast of unnatural cunning and impervious to mortal weapons. Many generations has it haunted these woods, and on nights when the moons are full its terrible howls can be heard even in the streets of Carroburg.’
Beck was quick to laugh at the poacher’s story. ‘A child’s myth,’ he said. ‘A useful fable for keeping folk away from where the game is plentiful, eh?’ The joke brought laughter from the other men.
Mandred didn’t join the merriment. He looked back into the shadowy forest. He thought about what he had experienced. He thought about Albrecht’s story.
And he wondered.
Altdorf, 1121
He never failed to feel the magnitude of his superiority whenever he stood upon the balcony and gazed upon the palaces of the noble and wealthy. They were his. Not just one of them, but all of them. The illusion of possession and ownership was a useful deceit, something to keep the old order pliable and complacent, docile and oblivious while their world was steadily and inexorably collapsing around them.
It was true, the nobles and aristocrats still had much power. Even in the midst of crisis and plague their wealth commanded respect. Too many commoners were accustomed to deferring to their blue-blooded masters. Servitude was all they had ever known, ambition had been as carefully culled from their minds as a mutant steer from a herd of cattle. They were too afraid of change to aspire for anything more. The promise of food and shelter was enough to kill their pride and smother their dreams. Like so many vampires, the nobility battened upon the complacency of their peasants.
But that world was changing. Before the Black Plague struck, the first seeds of change had been sown. In his merciless greed, Emperor Boris Goldgather had planted the crop, the tax upon the peasant soldiery, the Dienstleute. Unwilling to pay, many of the nobles had simply dismissed the peasant soldiers in their service, loosing upon the Empire thousands of embittered men. Commoners who had dutifully served their noble lords had been cast aside with utter disregard the moment their presence became an inconvenience to the treasuries of their masters.
Most of the displaced Dienstleute had descended upon Altdorf, petitioning the Emperor himself for food and work. The result of their protest had led to the Bread March and the massacre that followed. Those who had escaped the slaughter dispersed among the city’s peasantry, each man spreading the word of revolution and a new society: one without aristocrats and nobles; a land where a man would earn his place by deeds, not breeding.
Adolf Kreyssig was the exemplar of such philosophy. Peasant-born, he’d risen to become the commander of the Kaiserjaeger, transforming it into the secret police of Emperor Boris. His position had become so powerful that he’d married into the House Thornig, noble landholders from Middenland. When Emperor Boris fled Altdorf for his Carroburg retreat, it was Kreyssig who’d been appointed Protector of the Empire in his absence.
Kreyssig smiled at the irony of such a title. Now that the reins of power were in his hands, now that Boris had so conveniently expired from the plague, the last thing he intended to do was protect the Empire. By inches and degrees he was going to tear it down and rebuild it in his own image.
He was indebted to Boris for more than just the authority he now wielded. More than any other man, Kreyssig had been privy to the machinations by which Boris had ruled. Assuming the throne while little more than a boy, Boris had been installed by the elector counts because he would be young and weak, the absolute opposite of the elderly and despotic Ludwig II. Boris, however, had a finely honed instinct for survival. If he was weak, he would use the strength of those around him, pitting one against the other, using their own power against themselves. Emperor Boris had built his tyranny simply by making himself indispensable as arbiter between rival princes and potentates. That many of these rivalries had been exacerbated by the Emperor himself never seemed to occur to those he manipulated.
What had worked so well for the Emperor now served the Protector. Kreyssig had commanded the attack that led to the Bread Massacre, earning him the regard of the nobility, or at least such regard as they might confer upon a commoner. But he had also carefully cultivated the unrest being spread by the survivors. At first simply as a way to expand the power of his Kaiserjaeger, presenting an enemy that would reinforce the necessity for the vicious organisation. Later, with Boris gone, Kreyssig had taken a deeper interest in the peasant movement. He’d acquired as much prestige as the nobles would allow him on their own. Indeed, Duke Vidor and other powerful nobles wanted to curtail Kreyssig’s authority as Protector. It was the threat of peasant unrest and uprising that had stifled their efforts.
Then, almost like a gift of Providence, had come the skaven invasion. Kreyssig’s erstwhile allies had proven themselves far more than a mere handful of degenerate mutants and far more duplicitous than he could have imagined. Their assault on the city had very nearly succeeded. But it had been turned back, and in such fashion that Kreyssig became a hero to the commoners, the man who saved them from monsters straight out of legend. The impression that the nobles would have abandoned Altdorf and its people to the skaven was unfair, but it was a sentiment that played into existing resentments. It was a story Kreyssig’s agents spread among the peasants, exacerbating their jealousy and distrust of their lords. More and more, the nobility was recognising the might of the commoners they had looked down upon all their lives, the strength of the peasant mob to tear down even the oldest and greatest of them.
It was Kreyssig, hero of the people and surrogate for the dead Emperor, the man with connections to both the world of the peasant and the realm of the noble, who alone could mediate between the disparate groups. He alone was there to play the part of the arbiter…
A scowl worked itself onto Kreyssig’s face. No, it wasn’t quite true. There was another element at play. The Temple of Sigmar had been an important tool in establishing his support among the peasants. Through his efforts the Sigmarites had become the dominant force among Altdorf’s religions. The bread the Temple distributed to the starving masses had earned them the favour of the peasants, allowing it inroads into every corner of the city. There was also a solid core of zealots, those who had been there to witness the battle against the skaven outside the very walls of Sigmar’s Grand Cathedral. They were the ones who related in awed tones the bold stand of the Grand Theogonist upon the steps of the temple, the mighty hammer Thorgrim blazing with holy light as he brandished it on high. They were the ones who spread the legend of the Lady of Sigmar, calling down divine power to annihilate the skaven and scourge them from the city.
Kreyssig looked down at the grey cat he held in the crook of his arm as he thought about the Lady of Sigmar. She had been instrumental in that victory, without any doubt. Her magic, her arcane knowledge of the ratmen, her ability to play pious priest and arrogant noble like pieces on a game board. The cat Kreyssig held was part of her legacy, a way to warn him i
f skaven spies were around. Yes, Baroness von den Linden had been an important player in the salvation of Altdorf. But she’d been too ambitious. She would have set herself up as Empress, and Kreyssig had no illusions that she would have kept him around once that position was hers. Everything he had built up over the years she would have exploited, twisted to suit her own ends.
It was with the aid of Grand Theogonist Gazulgrund that Kreyssig had been able to escape the witch’s coils. Baroness von den Linden, as the venerated Lady of Sigmar, had become a heroic figure to the people of Altdorf, eclipsing both the Imperial palace and the Temple of Sigmar. Her sorceries were anathema to the Sigmarite priesthood while her ambitions were a threat to the Protector of the Empire. With Gazulgrund’s help, Kreyssig had eliminated the baroness. Using holy orisons to conceal his intentions from the witch, he’d locked her inside Boris’s extravagant indoor apiary, leaving the enraged bees to destroy her.
Baroness von den Linden was gone. That still left Gazulgrund. Kreyssig was wary of the influence the Grand Theogonist had over the peasants. Even as he built up the Temple of Sigmar to suit his own purposes, Kreyssig was aware that he was endowing Gazulgrund with more and more power. It was becoming a bit less clear which of them was dependent upon the other, the Temple or the Palace.
Kreyssig lowered his gaze, staring down from the balcony at the imposing parapets of the Courts of Justice. Buried beneath that imposing fortress were the secret dungeons of the Kaiserjaeger. Locked within one of those cells was his guarantee that Gazulgrund would do as he was told. So long as the Grand Theogonist’s daughter remained a ‘guest’ of the Kaiserjaeger, the priest belonged to Kreyssig.
Through the Grand Theogonist, Kreyssig controlled the Temple. Through the Temple, he controlled the peasants. Through them both, he controlled the nobles.
In time, he would control the entire Empire.
Slowly, Grand Theogonist Gazulgrund walked across the sparsely furnished cell that served as his private study, advancing upon the little wicker cage resting atop a small side table. The animal inside the cage hissed at him as he stretched his hand towards it. The priest frowned at the black-furred brute. There was no love lost between cleric and cat. In the strictures of the Temple, cats were symptomatic of witchcraft and ill omen, described as emissaries of Old Night in the apocalyptic writings of Arch-Templar Dyre. No priest of Sigmar could feel entirely comfortable around cats after reading Dyre. The animal, for its part, had picked up on Gazulgrund’s hostility and returned it in kind, yowling and scratching at him whenever he came close.