by C. L. Werner
Mandred thought of his strange meeting with the witch in the woods. He pondered the doom Hulda said the gods had proclaimed for him. He remembered her words, that a man who fled from power was the only man fit to wield it.
When the Graf of Middenheim voiced his decision, it wasn’t the mere echo of the priests seated to either side of him, it wasn’t the ambition of his nobles or the caution of his vassals. His choice was his. It belonged to him alone.
‘I must reject the fealty of Westerland and of Nordland,’ Mandred decided. He fixed his gaze upon the representatives of those realms. ‘To accept your fealty would be to assume dominance over your people and your lands. That is something which I must reject.’ He gestured to Hartwich seated beside him. ‘There are some who would see me as Emperor, but I own no such ambition. The dream of Empire is not my own.’
With each word, Count van der Duijn sank a little lower in his chair, his face became a little more drawn and filled with despair. He had placed all his hopes in the army Mandred had raised, an army he had prayed he could turn towards the west, to use to drive the Norscans from his city as they had driven the skaven from Carroburg. Dejected, it took all of his dignity to keep from weeping before the nobles of Middenheim.
Baroness Carin was more composed, finding anger rather than despair in Mandred’s denial of her offer. ‘What then are your dreams, Wolf of Sigmar?’ she demanded, challenge in her voice.
Mandred stood away from the table. Slowly he drew Legbiter from its sheath, displaying the runefang to the Electress of Nordland. ‘Middenheim is realm enough to rule,’ he said. Chastened, the baroness tried to look away from his fierce gaze, but found herself caught by the fire of his eyes.
‘My dream,’ Mandred said, slowly marching around the table, his footfalls like his words echoing through the wrecked temple, ‘is a bold one. It is a vision that speaks for all men. It is a vision of lands fractured by divisions of greed and heritage brought together by shared hope and shared dignity. It is a vision built not upon the thrill of conquest and the desires of dominance, but one founded upon the pride that burns inside all men, be they noble or base.’ His march brought him around to where the representatives were sitting. Mandred stared down at Count van der Duijn.
‘I reject the fealty of Westerland,’ Mandred repeated, then extended his hand to the distraught count. ‘Instead, I beg the friendship of my brotherland. I ask that they accept the fellowship of Middenheim.’
Stunned silence held the room. Tears were in Count van der Duijn’s eyes as he rose and seized Mandred’s hand in his own.
‘This is my vision,’ Mandred declared. ‘Not an Empire reforged in the flames of conquest, but of neighbours united in a coalition of mutual protection and respect. Look about you and see the destruction that is harvested by a people who stand alone. The same vile pestilence afflicts other lands, enslaves other peoples! Can we ignore their cries? Can we abandon them to the same vermin that sought to despoil our own homes? I say to you that the man who would contemplate such craven cowardice is a disgrace to his father and his grandfather and all the ancestors before him that ever walked proud beneath the sun.’
Mandred brandished Legbiter, letting its edge gleam in the sunlight filtering down through the temple’s broken roof. ‘Need we an Emperor?’ he asked. ‘That is a question for all men, all lands to decide. And it is a question that shall wait until the last skaven has been scoured from those lands!’ Savagely, he thrust downward with the runefang, driving the blade into the charred surface of the table.
Their sovereign’s passion brought the nobles from their chairs. They thrust their fists in the air, cheering this man who had walked through the Sacred Flame, this hero who had saved their city, this champion who had led them in the liberation of Drakwald. Perhaps they were too selfish, too small to share the vision that guided him, but it was enough that Mandred could see the path ahead. Where the Wolf of Sigmar led, they would follow.
Baroness Carin sat in silence as the nobles of Middenheim praised their graf. She too had been moved by Mandred’s words and, as she gazed up at him, the flames of ambition were kindled in her eyes.
Lady Mirella was waiting for him beside the shattered image of Verena. There was a warmth in her smile that Mandred could feel in his very bones.
‘When they built this place, the architect must have been well versed in the arcane secrets of acoustics,’ Mirella stated. ‘Even in here, I was able to hear you.’
Mandred shook his head. ‘We’ll have to find a different place to hold council,’ he mused. ‘Somewhere better able to keep its secrets from stray ears. I can’t have the whole camp learning what kind of simple-minded asses some of their noble lords are.’
Mirella closed her arms around him in a tight embrace. ‘Then they couldn’t take pride in the greatness of some of their noble lords,’ she said, pressing her lips against his ear. He started to pull away as her kisses became more passionate.
‘There is much still to do,’ Mandred said. ‘I must meet with Baroness Carin and Count van der Duijn to discuss plans for the campaign to relieve their peoples. I have to discuss the logistics of moving the army, of organising the Drakwalders who are able to fight and providing for those unable to march with us…’
His words were silenced by the soft fingers Mirella pressed against his mouth. ‘Later,’ she told him. ‘It will all be waiting for you later. For now, there is this moment, this peace within the storm. Don’t let it slip away. Let me share it with you.’ She shook her head, apology in her voice. ‘I’m not a powerful ruler or wealthy potentate. I don’t have the wisdom of sages or the philosophy of priests. I’ve never worn armour or carried a sword. I am just a landless refugee, like so many others.’ She set her head against his chest. ‘There is so little I can offer you.’
Mandred’s hand closed about her chin, tilted her face upwards so that he could gaze down into her eyes. ‘More than gold and swords and philosophy,’ he told Mirella. ‘What can anyone offer another that is more precious than the love within their heart?’
The woman in his arms tightened her embrace, clinging to him with the desperate fear only love can know. Soon, she knew, he would again ride to war. Again he would be in the thick of battle, waging his crusade against the obscene enemies of mankind. Perhaps the gods would again bring him back to her unscathed, but after experiencing the tyrannies of Emperor Boris, she knew how fickle the beneficence of the gods could be.
No, she couldn’t think of tomorrow. There was only now. This moment. This fragment of time they could share. This small sliver of life that belonged not to gods or nations, but to them and them alone.
Sylvania, 1121
Over the barren desolation of a haunted land, the silent height of Vanhaldenschlosse lorded over the terrain. A mad spiral of ancient stone steeped in the corruption of Morrslieb and the foulness of darkest sorcery, the tower emanated its own atmosphere of horror, the rank miasma of the eldritch and the profane. For all its aura of hoary age and primordial evil, the fortress was a recent construction, raised less than a decade earlier. Black magic and legions of supernatural labourers had erected the great tower in only a few months.
Those legions now lay strewn about the walls of Vanhaldenschlosse, exposed bones bleaching in the sun, rotten flesh drying and hardening into leather, acres of bonefields, thousands upon thousands of the unburied dead. The slaughtered husks of armoured Nachtsheer lay strewn beside the mangled shapes of Sylvanian peasants and the desiccated shells of prehistoric bog-men. Among the corpses were the inhuman carcasses of skaven by their thousands, elongated skulls rife with sharp fangs. Hulking among the legions of dead, rising from the bonefields like morbid hills, were the saurian vastness of vanquished dragons, strips of scale and flesh still clinging to their reptilian frames.
High overhead, carrion crows cawed and vultures wheeled. The scavengers were drawn to the stench of death and the sight of such a necrotic fe
ast. Yet a force more primal even than their hunger kept them from descending, kept the wolves and jackals from stealing out from the woods. The beasts of field and sky could sense the arcane ember that lingered within each carcass. They could recognise the loathsome taint of sorcery that had once endowed these dead things with an abominable simulacrum of life. Their instincts warned them away, lest the natural life within their own flesh should stir those lingering embers. For what had once risen to the necromancer’s call would never rest easy and might at any moment hearken to some sinister summons.
Birds and beasts shunned the wastes around Vanhaldenschlosse, but other things were more daring. Flitting across the bonefield, slinking from shadow to shadow, was a clutch of wiry figures draped in black. The shapes sometimes paused in their stealthy advance, sometimes made gestures to one another with hand-like paws before resuming their cautious journey. Like ghosts, the figures flitted through the desolation, converging upon the ominous majesty of the tower itself. Yet these were no ghosts, but creatures alive and driven by grim purpose.
Despite appearances, there was life within the black vastness of Vanhaldenschlosse. Life these black-draped killers had travelled far to extinguish.
Behind the sombre walls of Vanhaldenschlosse there existed a great hall, a mammoth vault with soaring ceiling perched upon the tips of pre-human dolmens. The eldritch vibrations of the standing stones sent a wailing crackle of aethyric energy swirling about the room. Like the pulsations of an unseen heart, the vibrations throbbed and ebbed. Each pulsation flickered as it was drawn out from the ancient dolmens, pulled to the centre of the hall where a crystal dais stood. Atop the dais stood a great seat, a throne built on a titanic scale. Skulls were the fabric of that throne, fused together with blackest magic, each brow stamped with arcane sigils and obscene hieroglyphs. In each eye socket, the dark flicker of a warpstone nugget lent its corrupt radiance to the profane power saturating the throne.
Nestled upon the throne like a black spider at the centre of its web was the master of the tower. No giant or titan, yet there was about the dark-robed figure such an aura of power that he was not diminished by his gigantic setting. The robes were those of a Morrite priest saturated in the vapours of betrayal and heresy. About his face was a mask of bone steeped in the horror of vengeance. And within the eyes, within the terrible eyes that stared from the sockets of the mask, there shone the glimmer of abominable purpose.
Am I the dream or the dreamer? The question had vexed the man who had once been Frederick van Hal the priest these past months. Van Hal, the man who from misery had turned his heart from Morr, god of death, and set his foot upon the black path of the necromancer, remaking himself as Vanhal, Scourge of Sylvania.
Long years had Vanhal rested upon his throne, allowing the vibrations of the dolmens, the vapours of warpstone, to seep into his spirit. By his sorcery he had harnessed the might of the magical fulcrum upon which Vanhaldenschlosse had been raised. His power had been such that he had turned forward time itself, hurling the fortress ahead many months to that moment when stars and moons were in their most propitious alignment. The resultant energies had been the fuel for spells not dared by mortal flesh in a thousand years. He had called the great wyrms from their graves, enslaved their decaying husks to his will, and unleashed them against the verminous foe that thought to destroy him.
The Battle of the Plague Dragons had annihilated the skaven host, but it had also drained Vanhal’s powers, taxed his vitality. It had brought him to the borderland between life and death, the shadow world between the spheres. As he stood upon the edge of mortality, he could feel his passions crying out to him, striving to draw him back to the world of the living. Across the threshold he could see the shades of loved ones beckoning to him. Almost he could put names to once familiar faces, almost he could recall the emotions that had set him upon a path of horror and atrocity. Almost he could remember those who had been his family.
Between himself and the gardens of the dead, he imagined two mammoth pillars. One barred his way, stern and implacable. The other beckoned to him, drawing him to it like a moth to flame. As he approached, he found himself in a vast desert, a waste of sand dunes stretching to the far horizon. The pillars had dwindled to a pair of colossal stone feet, the statue they had once supported toppled and buried beneath the shifting sands. Between the feet was an inscription in the hieroglyphs of lost Khemri: a name so steeped in evil and horror that it was spoken only in whispers even a thousand years after the thing that had worn it was destroyed.
Vanhal felt an obscene affinity for that name, a ghastly kinship that leeched the warmth from his flesh. It was a name he had worn or would wear. The name of the black dreamer upon its black throne.
‘No,’ the necromancer hissed, raising himself from the seat of skulls. He was neither dream nor puppet. His will was his own; his mind was his own! He had chosen this path, it had not been chosen for him.
Vanhal looked about him, staring in wonder at the vast hall around him. He could see the aethyric vibrations dancing from the standing stones, could watch the skein of their energies swirling and dancing about him. He could see them twisting and writhing, fashioning themselves into hieroglyphs as they flittered through the chilly air. There were secrets wrapped in those symbols, obscenities too vile to be consigned to even the most degenerate tome. There were past and present, the dim shades of the future and the grotesque oblivion of eternity.
As the profane knowledge crawled into his brain, Vanhal could feel the embers of his humanity dying inside him. The last vestiges of kinship to man were being smothered, crushed with the bony talon of a monster that had made itself a god.
Only the dimmest, most primal part of Vanhal’s brain was still conscious of the purely mundane nature of the hall around him. It was through veils of sorcerous distractions and esoteric thought that he saw the cloaked shapes creeping along the walls. Masked by a mental fog, the assassins pounced upon their prey.
The foremost of the killers leapt into the air, throwing its body into a tumbling roll. As it did so it threw forth its hand-like paws, flinging a menagerie of angular throwing stars at the necromancer. Iron saturated with warpstone powder, the missiles dripped corrosive poison, pitting the floor with their noxious venom as they hurtled towards their target.
Detached from the purely temporal, for Vanhal, the assassin’s shuriken flew absurdly slowly. Even in his distracted state, it was a small thing to conjure a corpse wind to buffet the little slivers of murder, to cast them back into the face of his would-be killer. The skaven assassin shrieked as it saw the throwing stars reverse direction. Its amazing reflexes allowed it to throw itself flat, but even its speed was unequal to the capricious magic of Vanhal. With but a thought, he shifted the angle of the necrotic wind and sent the shuriken slicing downwards into the prone assassin.
While he was disposing of the first killer, a second monster dropped at Vanhal from the ceiling, crooked blades clenched in both fists, a third knife wrapped in the coils of its naked tail. The assassin didn’t cry out, didn’t make any sound to betray its intention. Just the same, its advent didn’t go unnoticed. Midway in its descent, the skaven was caught in the air, held in place as though an unseen hand gripped it. The ratman writhed and struggled as the restriction closed tighter about it. Soon squeals of agony and flecks of blood flew from its mouth. The sickening crunch of grinding bones shuddered through the hall, yet still the pressure didn’t abate. The coils of spectral force were without mercy, clenching tighter and tighter until the pulverised assassin dripped to the floor in lumpy puddles of gore.
A third killer sprang out from the darkness. In its paws it clutched a great brass globe. Vanhal could perceive the sorcerous weapon as a baleful glamour, a hellish bonfire of malignant enchantments. The weapon never left the ratman’s paws. Before it could hurl the sphere at the necromancer, his spells were already at work, crawling through the assassin’s brain like so many maggots. Me
smeric paralysis held the skaven for a moment, then, with shuddering resistance, it lifted its paws on high and dashed the brass sphere at its very feet.
The assassin vanished in a coruscating ball of destruction, wrenched from reality and hurled bodily into the void between worlds, even its screams unable to escape the vacuum.
More assassins came leaping, crawling, slinking and stalking from the darkness. Singly and en masse, they strove to slaughter their terrifying foe. Singly and en masse, they were slaughtered.
When it was over, when his spells told him the tower was once more stripped of life, Vanhal muttered a lesser conjuration, endowing the least mutilated of his adversaries with a mockery of animation. The zombie skaven shuffled and staggered, stumblingly obeying their killer’s commands. The undead began gathering up the remains of their less complete comrades, to cleanse the hall of the detritus of battle.
Vanhal leaned back in his throne, the fight already forgotten as he studied once more the profane hieroglyphs only the eyes of a master necromancer could see.
Deathmaster Nartik didn’t stop until he was well beyond sight and smell of Vanhaldenschlosse. Sole survivor of the dozen master-killers Clan Eshin had dispatched to murder the necromancer, Nartik knew it was only the cape of elf-hair that had protected him, hiding him from Vanhal’s magic. His faith in the cape’s protection, however, only went so far. The vision of his death squad’s massacre, of his own apprentices being butchered like mice, was enough to shake even the Deathmaster’s confidence.
The contract Eshin had made with Bonelord Nekrot would have to be nullified. That would displease Grey Lord Kreep, but what else was there to do? Vanhal’s magic was too much for the assassins to overcome. The lone killers Nartik had sent into the tower had all disappeared and now this mass attack had met with disaster. The necromancer was simply too terrible to die. Nartik didn’t like to think about Nekrot’s claims that this was a weakened Vanhal they had been trying to kill. The very idea that the man-thing could be even more powerful was enough to make him forget the strict bodily control of an Eshin assassin and spurt the musk of fear.