by C. L. Werner
Three years for the army to sit idle, bivouacked in Nordland while they waited for the ships to be built. Three years to allow the enemy to recover from their defeat, to marshal their forces and strengthen their defences. Three years for still more men to be slaughtered by their bestial overlords.
It was a situation that Mandred wouldn’t allow. Brooking no dissension, he’d made his position clear. The army would secure Dietershafen and recuperate through the winter from the long march and the fierce battle. During that time, detachments would range across Nordland to clear out such pockets of skaven as might yet be lurking in the towns and villages.
Once the spring thaw came, they would move eastwards. While the great city of Mordheim, crown jewel of the Ostermark was yet in human hands, defended by a vast army of Ungol mercenaries, Roppsman horse archers and Dienstleute from across the Empire, much of Ostland and Hochland were in the possession of the foul ratkin. The mountain city of Wolfenburg had been under siege by the skaven for two long years. Breaking the siege, liberating the capital of Ostland, would be the next objective of Mandred’s army.
It was his decision, one that he shared with no one else. The enormity of that choice rested heavily on Mandred’s shoulders. He had listened to the arguments against such action even if he hadn’t allowed his convictions to be swayed by them. Count van der Duijn’s position was clear, but there were other voices who raised more reasonable objections. Some felt that they should consolidate what had already been won, warning Mandred against over-extending his advance. Others cautioned that to bring sufficient forces to bear on Wolfenburg would mean a perilous reduction in the troops left behind to garrison Nordland. If the skaven did return, they might win Wolfenburg only to lose Dietershafen.
Surprisingly, it had been Baroness Carin’s voice that spoke loudest against such reserve. With the evidence of what skaven dominance meant, she felt any hesitation was unconscionable. Wolfenburg would be rescued; Ostland would be freed. If it meant the loss of Nordland, then her people would die fighting rather than submit to the ratmen again.
Arch-Lector Hartwich had enjoined the council to have faith in Sigmar and the other gods, to remain true to the nobility within the blood of man. Ar-Ulric had echoed Hartwich’s sentiments, though the old priest lacked his usual fire and verve, seeming unsettled in mind and spirit. It had been the Sigmarite’s rather than the Ulrican’s appeal to religious sensibilities that finally impressed Mandred’s council. He watched as the gaze of each noble strayed from Hartwich to their graf. It was easy to see the thought burning behind each man’s eyes, the memory of that instant of miraculous intervention. Those who had been there, who had watched Mandred step from the Sacred Flame unharmed while the skaven assassin was utterly consumed, had no doubt in the power of the gods. They had seen it.
It was somewhat ironic then that the man who had been the direct focus of that miracle should be so plagued with doubt and fear. The esteem of his fellow man, their willingness to accept his commands, to stake their lives on his words, these were like millstones chained about him. Mandred could feel their weight dragging at his every step, stifling his breath, smothering his brain. What was it Hulda had said? A tyrant glories in power, a leader is humbled by it?
As though thinking of the wolf-witch had conjured her from the darkness, Hulda emerged from behind the hanging tapestry that partitioned Mandred’s tent. The graf shook his head, throwing up his hands in frustration.
‘Beck must fear for the perpetuation of my line,’ Mandred declared. ‘Every time I turn around he’s letting a beautiful woman sneak into my tent.’
Hulda paused, tilted her head back and sniffed at the air. There was an amused sparkle in her eye when she returned her gaze to Mandred. ‘Was it he who invited the Lady Mirella?’ the witch wondered.
Colour rushed to Mandred’s face and there was more than a touch of embarrassment in his laugh. ‘No,’ he admitted, ‘her ladyship was here by my invitation. I rather think Beck disapproves.’
‘No doubt he believes Baroness Carin to be a companion more befitting your station,’ Hulda said. ‘Even the Graf of Middenheim must observe certain proprieties,’ she cautioned.
Mandred shifted uncomfortably. He was willing to give of himself for his people and he had accepted that there were sacrifices he would be called upon to make. Even so, he didn’t like being reminded about those obligations. Determinedly, he changed the subject.
‘You have scouted Salzenmund?’ he asked. When Mandred had determined to bring Baroness Carin’s supplies to Dietershafen, a chief concern had been the disposition of the skaven hidden there. He didn’t pretend to understand what sort of magic the witch possessed or how she had discovered the skaven ambush to begin with, but he hoped she could use those same powers to discover if the monsters were still there.
‘The ratkin are gone,’ Hulda reported. She smiled, displaying her strong white teeth. ‘They learned what happened here. They didn’t want to share the same fate, so they retreated back into their tunnels. You may have the caravan sent whenever you like.’
Mandred started pacing again, his mind working out the details of how best to handle moving so much food through a starving land.
‘Let tomorrow’s daemons fight among themselves,’ Hulda suggested to the troubled graf. ‘The evils of the future will wait for you to find them.’ The sparkle came back into her gaze. ‘You might ask Lady Mirella’s counsel. Her smell is strong. She can’t have been gone long. Certainly not long enough to be already abed. She wouldn’t be disturbed if you sent for her.’
Perhaps because the suggestion was so appealing to him Mandred took umbrage at Hulda’s words. Directing a stern gaze on the witch, he spoke his mind. ‘What is it between you and Ar-Ulric? You seem to have a terrible fascination for him. I’ve known the priest since I was a boy and I’ve never seen him so… uncertain. There are some in the camp who say you have bewitched him. Is that true?’
Hulda’s gaze matched the harshness of Mandred’s accusation. ‘Idle tongues work more mischief than idle hands. The discord between myself and Ar-Ulric is a matter of doctrinal differences. We each honour Ulric in our own way. I know his way. He believes he knows mine.’
‘And what does he believe?’ Mandred asked.
‘Ask him,’ Hulda said as she stepped towards the doorway. ‘I would be very interested to hear how much he dares tell someone else.
‘I’ve already heard how much he dares to tell himself.’
Skavenblight, 1122
Locked within the dank burrows beneath Skavenblight, the only illumination coming from worm-oil lamps and candles rendered from rat-fat, Wolfius Moschner had degenerated into a living scarecrow. In those rare moments when he saw his image reflected in a bucket of water or mirrored in the glazed eyes of a dead skaven, the physician found it hard to accept that the person he gazed upon was indeed himself. His arms had shrivelled into bony sticks, ribs pressed against his pallid skin; his face was a wrinkly mess of loose skin and blotchy sores.
‘The gods pay me back for my hedonism,’ Moschner said, his voice a scratchy whisper. He ran a skeletal hand along one cheek, watching the process in the reflection of a blood-filled bowl. The sanguine fluid made the image both horrible and fascinating. Like the fabled stare of the gorgon or the compelling gaze of a serpent.
‘Oh how proud I was of my fine things!’ Moschner declared, shifting around on his wooden stool to speak directly with Schroeder. ‘The Emperor provided me with everything. The best clothes, the most delicate sweetmeats! I was attended by the Barber Imperial and my tresses were shorn with golden shears. I wanted for nothing… save perhaps my dignity.’
Schroeder reached into the wickerwork cage, employing a barbed hook to drag out the corpse lying inside. He shook his head at the despair in the doktor’s voice. These morose fits had become more frequent of late. It wasn’t hard to guess the cause. The reason was impaled on the end of the knight�
�s hook. Dissatisfied with the progress Moschner had been making, Queekual had expanded the doktor’s field of study. The inhuman fiend had provided Moschner with a new kind of specimen for his studies – human slaves. Something to compare the progress of the plague on Moschner’s skaven test subjects.
The hideous results of that strategy languished in cages all around them. When the captives had first been brought to Moschner, their screams and cries had pressed him to the edge of madness. Queekual had solved that distraction, however, in typically fiendish fashion. The mouth of each captive had been sewn shut with cords of rat-gut, leaving just enough space between the lips that the sludge-like swill the skaven gave them to eat might be forced down their throats. Utterly without empathy for their own kind, the skaven could not understand the pity the lot of these wretches evoked in other men. It was, Schroeder felt, the most chilling aspect of the underfolk.
‘Now I have nothing,’ Moschner declared. ‘When I watched Emperor Boris die, when I defied him and cast aside the honours he had bestowed on me, I thought at least I might regain my dignity. I thought I might be able to walk the streets of Altdorf with my head held high. But the skaven leave nothing, dignity least of all.’ He stared down into the bowl of blood, not the black filth of skaven veins but the humour found within human ones. He tried not to think of the man the blood had been drawn from, to forget the weakness that would afflict him as his body withered under the caprices of maladjusted humours. He tried to focus as Schroeder told him to. He tried to think only of the work, only of the end result his labours must yield.
‘Is… is the herdsman well?’ Moschner asked, setting down the magnifying crystal and covering the blood bowl with the clay tablet on which he had been scratching his notes.
Schroeder pretended not to hear the question, concentrating instead on removing the dead captive. If he dragged the body to the cave entrance, the guard-rats would remove it. He didn’t like to think what they did with the corpse when it was gone.
‘I asked if the herdsman is recovering,’ Moschner repeated, anger creeping into his tone. ‘Check on him!’ he added, slapping his withered hand against the table.
The knight released the hook and let the corpse flop to the floor. Grimly, he stalked towards the cage where the man in question was kept. ‘You need to forget about these people,’ Schroeder scolded him. ‘None of us matters. We are already dead. Have been since we were brought into Skavenblight. All that matters is your work and what you can do here.’
‘Look in on him,’ Moschner shouted, the effort wracking his body in a fit of coughing. He could hear agitated squeaks in the tunnel outside, but he didn’t care if he upset Queekual’s guards. All that mattered now was assuaging his own sense of guilt.
A sour look on his face, Schroeder navigated the tangle of cages, recoiling when an especially lively skaven slave tried to nip at him from behind the bars of its prison. When he reached the herdsman’s cage the knight threw back the bolt and opened the tiny door. A moment only he lingered there, before turning back to Moschner. ‘He’s dead,’ Schroeder reported, his voice conveying all the emotion of solid stone.
Moschner reeled, almost falling from the stool. Dead? Another victim! Another black mark upon his soul! Drawing the man’s blood had been too much, one abuse too many for him to endure. Moschner thought back to when the herdsman had been brought to him. Rendered mute by the skaven, rendered illiterate by the indifference of his noble liege lords, the prisoner had been clever enough to draw in the dirt beneath his cage to convey his story. Such cleverness in the face of brutality that had broken knights and nobles had impressed the doktor. It had spoken to him of some indomitable endurance deep within the human form, a quality he prayed he might find hidden somewhere inside himself.
Now the man was dead, killed by Moschner’s own cruelty, by the abominable demands of his studies. For what had he died? To placate the insane ego of Queekual? To further research that profaned every oath sworn by every doktor who ever lived?
‘No more,’ Moschner whispered. He stared at the bowl of blood he had been studying. ‘No more,’ he cursed in a louder voice. With a sweep of his arm he sent the vessel flying from the table, spattering the floor with gore. ‘No more!’ he raged, flinging himself to his feet. Dimly he heard Schroeder shout at him, could hear the big knight crashing against the cages as he rushed for the doktor.
How many times had they helped one another so? The knight and the physician, pulling one another back from the brink of madness, reminding each other of the purpose that drove them on. Not this time. Moschner wouldn’t let Schroeder’s words pull him back. He could endure no more. Better a gruesome death than an obscene life.
Moschner rushed to the mouth of the cave, screaming his defiance. The guard-rats scurried into his path. Not daring to enter the cave itself, they pointed their spears at him from the edge of the tunnel, hissing and squeaking in their loathsome parody of speech.
The doktor did not relent. A red fury propelled him into the waiting guards, a crazed recklessness that would have impressed a Norscan berserk. The ratmen recoiled before the deranged human. Moschner had always suspected they’d been given orders not to harm him, just to keep him in his prison. Now he exploited their reluctance. When one of the skaven lowered its spear, he lunged at the vermin. Wasted as he was, he was still able to wrap his arms about the beast’s neck, to squeeze and strangle. Positioned as he was, the ratman could bring neither fangs nor spear against him. The agony of verminous claws raking his back only sent him into a greater fury.
‘Look out!’ The warning came from Schroeder. Before Moschner could react to the warning, he felt a terrific impact against his skull. The other guard had slammed the butt of its spear against his head. His grip on the choking skaven slipped away as he wilted to the floor. The next instant he felt a clawed foot kick against his ribs.
Before he could be abused further, a shrill bestial scream rang through the tunnel. Through his bleary gaze, Moschner could see Schroeder standing over the sprawled body of one guard-rat, a bloodied pestle clenched in his fist. The other guard-rat, the one the crazed doktor had half-strangled, was coughing and sputtering on the ground. Before it could recover, Schroeder caught up one of the spears and ran the creature through.
The knight turned away from the dead skaven and pulled Moschner to his feet. The doktor tried to turn around, to flee into the tunnel, but Schroeder’s grip was too tight. ‘It’s no good!’ he yelled at the physician. ‘There’s no escape! There are leagues of tunnels, thousands upon thousands of underfolk! The only chance, the only hope is to complete your work. That’s the only thing you can do to make restitution to all the victims of these fiends.’
Moschner glared at Schroeder and tried again to pull away.
‘Please, doktor, you must do this for me,’ Schroeder said. ‘Make my death worth something. Kill as many of these bastards as you can.’ The next instant, the knight buried his fist in Moschner’s gut. He carried the stunned doktor back into the cave, laying him down beside the table.
The doktor had an impression of Schroeder staring down at him, then the image faded into the blackness of unconsciousness.
When Moschner awoke, it was the terrifying figure of Seerlord Queekual standing over him. In the sorcerer’s paws was Schroeder’s severed head. Queekual said the knight had killed the guards and tried to escape while Moschner was asleep. He hadn’t got very far before skaven trackers sniffed him out and brought him down.
Queekual left the head with Moschner as a reminder of what would happen should he try to follow the dead man’s example.
It was a needless lesson. With Schroeder’s last words still ringing in his ears, the last thing Moschner wanted to do now was escape.
Chapter XII
Averland, 1123
The mood within the hunting lodge Mandred and his commanders had taken over for their headquarters was tense. After the long campaign through Os
tland, the liberation of Wolfenburg, the fighting against both skaven and Vanhal’s undead in Stirland, many of his nobles had grown weary of the war. They urged Mandred to secure what had been gained, to disperse the army and send the men back to their homes.
It was an argument Mandred had heard many times, and it was an argument that never failed to fill him with contempt for those who made it. Only a week before, these same men had walked the streets of Woerden, seen with their own eyes the misery the town had been reduced to by their skaven conquerors. The ratmen weren’t simply a rival baron, a mortal human enemy to be fought between spring and the harvest. They were an insidious pestilence, a plague every bit as heinous as the Black Plague itself. Where they conquered, they despoiled, stripped the land bare, enslaving the populace and taking many of them down into their burrows – never to be seen again. There was no question of coexistence with this vermin, no possibility of simply conceding territory to them and hoping they would be content. No, the skaven had to be hounded out, pressed relentlessly, exterminated until not a single one remained. Nothing less could ensure the security of the Empire or even just a small corner of the Empire. It had to be all or nothing, because this inhuman foe would never relent. Given the chance to recover, allowed any respite at all, they would be back. Kurgaz said the dwarf Book of Grudges was riddled with wars against these monsters, wars that stretched back thousands of years.