by C. L. Werner
The point of the sword caught the monster in the belly, Vecteek’s own impetus driving the sword through the spiked mail he wore. The skaven’s fierce howl of bloodlust disintegrated into a pained yowl of agony.
Vecteek’s foot raked across Mandred’s face when he tried to drive the blade deeper. Instinctively, the prince flung his arms across his face to protect his eyes from the vermin’s claws. The instant the grip on the sword was gone, the skaven staggered back, his own mace falling to the ground as he clawed at the impaling blade.
Squeaking in agony, Vecteek wrenched the sword free, his glowing eyes glaring vindictively at Mandred. For an instant, the wounded monster seemed determined to rejoin the battle. Then the hate-filled eyes widened, the bestial head whipped from side to side in frantic, erratic motions.
A keening wail of sheer terror rolled across the plaza, erupting from a thousand skaven. The scent of Vecteek’s fear, the sound of their invulnerable tyrant squealing in pain, these had resonated through the senses of every ratman, driving black terror into their craven hearts. Moaning, bewailing their own imminent doom now that the despot was defeated, a wretched rout began. Wherever Vecteek turned his head, he saw the same thing. Hundreds of warriors throwing down their weapons, clawing and trampling each other in their desperate efforts to escape back into the streets. Men and dwarfs pursued the creatures, butchering them as they tried to flee.
The terror of his minions infected Grey Lord Vecteek. His eyes widened with fear. Whipping his tail at Mandred, forcing the prince to again shield his face, the Warmonger turned and fled, dashing towards the burned shell of the theatre.
Vecteek the Tyrant never reached the safety of the ruin. As he fled, a lone figure stood in his path, a blazing sword clenched in his mailed fist. Much of his speed and agility had bled out of the wounded skaven. When Legbiter came slashing at his head, Vecteek wasn’t quick enough to escape the runefang’s bite.
Bloodied, his finery reduced to rags in the long fighting, his wolfskin cloak dragging behind him, Graf Gunthar spat on the twitching corpse of Grey Lord Vecteek. A kick of his iron boot sent the vermin’s head bouncing across the plaza.
The graf cast his eyes across the battlefield, nodding to himself as he watched the defenders of Middenheim pursue the fleeing skaven back into the streets. The battle was over, now the cleansing would begin.
From the corner of his eye, Graf Gunthar noticed movement. He watched as a man rose painfully from the ground. Until that moment, he hadn’t realised that Vecteek’s foe had been his own son.
Across the bloodied battlefield, father and son looked to one another. The eyes of the son were filled with love and adoration, exhilarated to find the father alive. The eyes of the father beamed with pride, exalted to know that his son had become the man he had always prayed he would become.
For a moment, the lords of Middenheim stood, not speaking, words too clumsy to convey what they would say to each other.
The moment ended as a sharp crack boomed from one of the rooftops. A puff of smoke, a flash of flame and a slinking shape retreated into the darkness.
The graf cried out, threw up his arms as the warpstone bullet slammed into him, chewing through armour and flesh like a hot knife. The agony of his wound sent him crashing to his knees. From his knees, he pitched forwards onto the ground.
Mandred rushed forwards, cursing the pain that slowed his steps, that tried to drag him down before he could reach the body lying sprawled face-down on the cold stones. A tangle of soldiers and noblemen had already gathered around the graf, but the solemn circle parted at the prince’s approach.
Sickness bubbled in Mandred’s stomach as he stared down at the horrible hole in his father’s back. He recognised the evil black bullet sizzling at the centre of the wound. It was such a bullet that had almost killed Kurgaz Smallhammer — the poisonous bullet from a skaven jezzail.
His hand trembling, the prince reached down and gently rolled his father onto his back. A gasp of pain shuddered its way from the graf’s lips. Mandred’s heart raced. The graf yet lived!
‘Quickly!’ Mandred shouted at those around him. ‘Lift up the graf!’ He hesitated for a second, wondering where they could take him. The Sisters of Shallya were below in Warrenburg. The alchemist Neist was dead. It might take days to stir any of the physicians of Eastgate from their hiding places, assuming any of them had survived.
The life of his father hung by a thread. There was only one power to which Mandred could appeal for mercy, the same power that he felt had delivered Middenheim from the skaven.
‘Take him to the temple of Ulric!’ Mandred ordered, praying that the Lord of Wolves would again lend his aid.
Carroburg
Sigmarzeit, 1115
The green fume crept up the walls of the Schloss Hohenbach, rising like some fog spewed from Khaine’s black hell. The nobles, only moments before mocking death and plague, now trembled in terror, rooted to the spot in fascinated horror as the noxious cloud came for them.
Archers loosed volleys of arrows down into the fume, hoping to strike down the inhuman monks that menaced the castle. Blinded by the green smoke, the bowmen had to trust to luck rather than skill. Only a few pained squeaks rewarded their frantic efforts.
Emperor Boris recoiled from the battlements, retreating as the odious fog rolled up between the crenellations. Baron Pieter von Kirchof — the Emperor’s Champion, the most famed swordsman in the Empire, the man who had offered his own niece to stave off the plague — was the first to be touched by the foul fog. Slow in withdrawing from the battlements, he suffered the caress of one of those ghastly wisps. The effect was both immediate and ghastly.
Von Kirchof’s skin blackened, his face vanishing beneath a confusion of hideous boils. He took a few staggering steps, then collapsed, a wheezing, coughing wreck. Blood bubbled from his lips, gore dripped from his nose. In a matter of heartbeats, the man grew still, his body heaving in a final agonised gasp.
The Emperor’s guests degenerated into a panicked riot, converging upon the door leading back into the castle as the fog swept up over the parapet. They stampeded the archers who stood in their way, trampled the bodies of peasant servants unfortunate enough to impede their escape. In their hour of death, the great and good of the Empire, the scions of culture and society, the paragons of government, showed their quality.
Boris, first and greatest of them all, anticipated the rout. First through the door, first to abandon the walls for the security of the castle, he slammed the portal closed even as Count Artur of Nuln came racing towards him. The Emperor could feel the count’s fists beating on the heavy oak frame, could hear the muffled pleas spilling from his lips. He could hear Count Artur’s entreaties become screams as the maddened rush of nobility crushed him against the unyielding door.
The Emperor shivered as the cries of the doomed hammered against the door. The green fog was boiling across the wall now, bringing its loathsome death with it. The vapour wasn’t simply smoke and mist, but a concentration of the plague itself, a concentration so vicious that it did its deadly work not in days or hours but in minutes. The green monks had brought it to the castle, had brought it to smite the Emperor and his minions.
Boris retreated from the door. The impact of fists against the heavy oak had become weaker as more and more of those on the wall fell victim to the fume. It was a stout door, designed to repulse invaders in a siege. Even the strongest man would need something better than his fists to bring such a door down. But what good was a door against something without substance or shape?
Seeping under the door, glowing in the gloom of the corridor, the ghastly fog crept into Boris’s refuge, almost as though in pursuit of the man who had escaped it.
Moaning in terror, the Emperor turned and fled. It was impossible! All of it impossible! Fleischauer’s spell, the warlock’s magic! He had been assured it would work, that he would be defended against the Black Plague!
The warlock had deceived him. It was a realisation that made the Emperor�
��s stomach turn sour. As he fled through the empty passages of the castle, Boris screamed for Fleischauer. If he were to die, then he would demand an accounting from the feckless conjurer!
Boris found Fleischauer in the great hall. The warlock was lying on his side, prostrate before the pedestal. One of the enchanted leeches was clenched in his hand, but he would never draw its magic into his body. The man was dead, a look of such abject horror frozen on his face as to make even von Kirchof’s agonies seem timid.
Lying atop the sprawled warlock, its toothless mouth slobbering impotently at his neck, was the tattooed thing, the violated husk of Sasha. It hadn’t been left to the thing to visit any real harm upon its tormentors, but in some caprice of fate Fleischauer’s mind had collapsed when Sasha fell upon him from the pedestal. The warlock’s heart had burst from sheer fright.
Gazing in horror at the obscene vista, the Emperor fled once more. There was no pattern or motive to his retreat now, simply the blind panic of a man who feels the cold claws of death reaching out to claim him.
Through chamber and corridor, down stairs and steps, the most powerful man in the Empire raced to preserve even a few scant moments of his corrupt life. He passed the collapsed forms of servants and soldiers, their bodies disfigured by the attentions of the Black Plague. Within the whole of the castle, he alone yet drew breath. All around him were the marks of death.
Approaching the dungeons in his desperate flight, Boris at last encountered something alive. It was a creature that carried itself in crude mockery of human shape, a verminous abomination cloaked in the habit of a monk, the cloth unspeakably foul and tattered. From beneath the hood, the fanged muzzle of an enormous rat projected. Its whiskers twitched as it drank in the Emperor’s scent, and its beady eyes glittered with obscene delight. Waving a disfigured paw that was bloated with pustules and lesions, the ratman summoned others of its breed from the stygian darkness.
Boris shrieked. His retreat before had been frightened. Now it was the product of madness. In his derangement, the Emperor fled back the way he had come, matching step for step as he tried to elude the ghastly ratkin.
Chance brought the Emperor into the little forsaken chapel of Sigmar. Rushing into the sanctuary, he slammed the stout door shut behind him. Sweating, the seams of his finery splitting as he dragged the crumbling remains of a pew against the portal, Boris did his utmost to block the entrance. The first pew was followed by a second, and then by a dusty tapestry he tore down from the stone wall and stuffed beneath the edge of the panel.
Panting, huffing from his exertions, the Emperor turned away from the blockaded door. It was only then that his panicked mind appreciated that he wasn’t alone in the chapel. Two other survivors had found their way here: a noble and a peasant knelt before the altar.
‘There are… things out there,’ the Emperor stammered. He rushed to the noblewoman, turning Princess Erna around to face him. ‘Vermin… Underfolk!’ he wailed, imploring her to believe him. He wilted under the accusation in her eyes. She’d begged him not to bombard Carroburg and he’d been deaf to her pleas.
Unable to maintain her gaze, Boris turned to the peasant, gripping Doktor Moschner’s arm in a desperate clutch. ‘They’re all dead!’ he wailed. ‘The Black Plague. The ratmen brought it. They mean to kill us all. We’re next!’
Doktor Moschner shrugged free of the Emperor’s hold. ‘If we are meant to die, then we will die, Your Imperial Majesty,’ he told Boris. He turned back towards the altar, raised his eyes to the hammer on the wall. ‘Only a power higher than even an emperor can help us now.’
The Emperor cringed away from the altar, horrified by the fatalistic acceptance adopted by his companions and their retreat into the facile comfort of faith. All his life he had doubted and mocked the gods. To think they had real power, to believe that they truly governed the world around men — it was a concept as abhorrent to him as his own mortality. Yet, in this hour, was it not his own mortality that confronted him? Where would all his power, all his authority go if he were to die? What would be the legacy he would leave behind?
In his despair, Emperor Boris knelt down beside Princess Erna and Doktor Moschner. All through the night he added his prayers to theirs, when he wasn’t confessing his many sins to the gods he had reviled all his life. Many were the vows he made, the oaths he swore as he beseeched Sigmar to spare him his life.
Every moment, the Emperor expected to hear his companions admonish him for his many crimes, waited to hear the ratmen scrabbling at the chapel door. Neither voice nor sound disturbed him through the long hours of darkness.
The vermin had too many victims readily available to bother about sniffing out the Emperor’s refuge.
The survivors were too shocked by Boris’s confessions to offer either comment or accusation.
There were some things too despicable even for the gods to hear.
Bright sunlight streamed into the chapel as dawn broke above the ruins of Carroburg. The first rays stabbed down, piercing through the shadows to illuminate the holy hammer mounted behind the altar. Despite the patina of dust covering it, the daylight shone from the bronze icon bolted to the hammer in an almost blinding brilliance. It was an instant only, then the sun shifted position and the blaze of light was gone.
The three survivors who had sat praying through the night rose slowly, their legs weak from cramps and impaired circulation.
‘We’ve survived the night,’ Boris observed, the words spoken in a timid whisper.
Erna shook her head. ‘Is that a blessing or a curse?’ she wondered, staring at the comet and hammer behind the altar.
‘While there is life, there is hope,’ Doktor Moschner offered. He started to move down the connecting passage leading to the great hall. He saw the fright that rushed into Erna’s eyes. They’d heard the Emperor’s description of what they might find waiting for them outside. ‘Someone has to go,’ the physician stated. ‘Besides, I’m only a peasant,’ he added, directing a glare at the Emperor.
Erna watched the doktor withdraw down the passage, creeping up on the barricade as though he were a hunter stalking prey. Timidly, he began shifting the pews Boris had used to blockade the door.
‘We are alive,’ the Emperor said, this time in a louder voice. His expression was no longer meek, but instead uplifted, the cherubic smile once more dominant. ‘Even the gods don’t dare kill Us.’
‘Do not tempt fate,’ Erna warned him. ‘You made many promises, pledged to undo the crimes…’
‘Crimes?’ Boris sneered. ‘An Emperor is the law itself. We can commit no crime!’ He brought his bejewelled hands clapping together. ‘We can use this,’ he mused. ‘If We act quickly, position the right people, We can fill the vacuum left by the ones the plague has taken. We can put Our people there, make the leaderless domains Our own! It might take a show of force to-’
A far different show of force came crashing down upon the Emperor’s skull. Boris collapsed before the altar, blood gushing from his fractured head. Erna stood above the tyrant and brought the stone hammer crashing down a second time.
A third.
A fourth.
‘Sasha and Fleischauer aren’t in the hall. The ratmen must have carried them away…’ Doktor Moschner’s report trailed off as he stared at Erna and at the mangled heap sprawled beneath her. Both were barely recognizable as the people he had left behind. Erna’s hair was bleached white, her face contorted into a fearful rictus. The Emperor had no face that could be recognised as such.
When Erna finally lifted her eyes from the man she’d murdered and saw Moschner, she let the heavy stone hammer fall from her fingers.
Doktor Moschner said nothing, simply advanced and tenderly led Erna away from the dead tyrant.
‘We must leave this place,’ the doktor declared. ‘Go somewhere there are people. People we can tell this to.’
Erna stiffened, tried to pull away from his grip.
Doktor Moschner smiled at her and shook his head. ‘You’ve don
e nothing,’ he told Erna. ‘His Imperial Majesty has expired from the plague. I am his personal physician. I should know such things. That is what I intend to tell people. If an idealistic young princess tells them otherwise, we will both visit the headsman.
‘You’ve done what no one else was brave enough to do,’ he told her. ‘Come, we must hurry from this place. There is an entire Empire waiting to hear that Boris Goldgather is dead.
‘In dark days such as these, the people can use a reason to celebrate.’
Chapter XXI
Altdorf
Kaldezeit, 1114
An avalanche of fur and fangs, swords and spears, the skaven crashed into the Altdorfer battle line. Men died upon the points of rusted spears, were dragged down by verminous claws, or slashed and stabbed with blades of every description. In that frenzied charge, the speed and ferocity of the ratmen, the bestial bloodlust pounding through their brains, took a butcher’s toll of the untrained peasants. The few clusters of seasoned warriors, the templars and the groups of soldiers, were spread too thinly to blunt the murderous impact of that initial charge.
The skaven revelled in the slaughter, trampling dead and wounded beneath their paws. Many of these had been the same fiends who had marauded through the towns and villages of the south, depopulating entire swathes of country in Averland and Solland. They had seen first-hand the breaking point of humans such as these. Any moment, they expected the confused rabble opposing them to break and flee, to turn tail and try to escape. In that moment, there would be a real reckoning. Even the lowest skavenslave looked forward to a full belly after this day’s work.
The ratkin soon found they didn’t know their enemy at all. The humans held their line. Peasant after peasant was dragged down, mutilated by the ferocity of the skaven, yet for each that fell, another grimly stepped forwards to take his place. After that initial frenzied charge, the monsters found themselves locked in close combat with an adversary who refused to falter. Caught between the human battle line and the press of their own reinforcements rushing up from behind, the skaven lost the room to manoeuvre, their advantage of speed and agility negated. The fight became a test of muscle and endurance, qualities where men had the advantage.