by Nathan Long
She touched a hand to her chest. ‘You see, our mission was just outside of Praag. We took in many of the dying during the battle, and many, being devout men, bequeathed to us their possessions as thanks for the comfort we gave them in their final hours. When…’ She paused, and a shiver passed though her. ‘When the raiders overran the convent, I brought the treasury and those I could save south to continue Shallya’s work here.’ She looked up at him again, eyes moist. ‘Have I explained things to your satisfaction, my lord?’
‘Oh, yes. Absolutely,’ said Reiner, blushing. He felt horrible, having asked such a question of so virtuous a woman. ‘I crave your forgiveness.’
‘You require none.’ She put her hand on his. A warm thrill shot through him. ‘Anyone might have thought the same.’
‘Nonetheless…’
‘And I wish,’ she said, leaning forward so that the fabric of her habit tightened against the swell of her breasts, ‘that since you are obviously a man who cares little for gold, there were some other way I might repay you for your trouble.’
Reiner’s heart thudded audibly in his chest and perspiration sprung out on his brow. The priestess traced the veins of his hand with a delicate finger. ‘The sisterhood of Shallya is dedicated to relieving suffering in all its forms,’ she said softly. ‘And I sense, Master Hetzau, that you are suffering from loneliness, that you are ill from want.’
‘Sister,’ said Reiner hoarsely, and took her by the shoulders. She stopped him with a hand on his chest.
‘Forgive me, my lord. It would be an honour—nay a pleasure—to tend to your needs, but the needs of my patients are greater, and there are things I must do before I can give you the attention you deserve.’
‘How soon will you be done?’ asked Reiner curtly. He couldn’t remember when he had been so filled with desire.
The priestess smiled. ‘Well, I’ll be done the sooner, if you will once again assist me.’
‘Anything,’ said Reiner, licking his lips. ‘Anything.’
‘THE LENGTHS YOU will go to get your wick waxed will be the death of me,’ growled Hennig as they again manoeuvred the cart through the teaming town. ‘Sigmar’s oxter, what a stench.’
‘Don’t blaspheme, Hennig,’ said Reiner. ‘We do holy work.’
‘But you’re the only one who’ll be getting a reward.’
‘Now, lad. It isn’t as if you’ve lost on the deal. I convinced the sister to give us more gold, as well as, er, intangibles.’
‘I’m not sure if it’s worth it.’
This time the cart’s cargo was two corpses, reeking of death and disease, and covered in lesions and festering boils. Anyaka had tried her best, she said, but the two men—a handgunner from Nuln and a Kislevite lancer—had slipped through her fingers. She had asked Reiner to dispose of the corpses: the handgunner to the army’s priest of Morr, who operated the camp mortuary on the west side of town, and the Kislevite to the village’s cemetery on the east, where the priests incorporated local customs into the ceremonies.
It was not a pleasant task. Even in the cold, the smell was overwhelming, and Hennig, stomach still delicate after the previous night’s revels, had had to jump off the cart and vomit before they’d travelled half a league. But eventually they reached their first stop, the camp mortuary. Erected a discreet distance from the camp itself, it consisted of a few low black tents, one of which was a consecrated temple of Morr. A small, wood-framed shack sat behind it, which housed the furnace that cremated the dead. Tall stacks of firewood were piled next to this, and stacks of bodies, almost as high, were piled in front of the temple. The smell that drifted from them was the first thing to drown out the stench of the bodies Reiner and Hennig carried. Black-robed acolytes of Morr crawled over the mounds like flies over carrion, preparing the corpses and taking them into the black canvas temple.
A burly acolyte with his sleeves folded back approached them as they trundled up.
‘What have you there, my lords?’ he asked.
‘A citizen of Nuln,’ said Reiner. ‘Name unknown. And a Kislevite who we take to the local temple.’
‘Very good, my lord,’ said the man, turning to whistle at two acolytes who wore heavy gloves and kerchiefs over their faces. ‘Though there’ll be a wait until we can see to him properly.’
Reiner surveyed the mounds as the masked acolytes lifted the body off the cart, ‘Does the war truly go so poorly?’
‘Taint the war, my lord. It’s sickness. Last day or so they been dropping like flies. Don’t know why.’
‘Most disturbing.’
‘Yes, sir.’
IT WAS DUSK. Shopkeeps were boarding up their storefronts and taverns were hanging out lanterns. As they rode through town to drop off the second body Reiner and Hennig noticed a commotion in the town square. Villagers were using ropes to haul something out of the well, and just as Reiner pulled abreast, the men succeeded in getting it over the lip. It flopped to the street with a wet smack. It was a body, so bloated as to be unrecognizable. What was readily apparent however, was that the fellow had been terribly sick before he fell in. Though his waterlogged skin was the colour and consistency of gruel, Reiner could see black gangrenous wounds all over it.
‘That accounts for the wave of illness,’ he said.
‘Good thing we only drink samogon,’ said Hennig.
Reiner was urging the carthorse forward again when a villager fished something else out of the well. At first Reiner thought it was a drowned cat, but then he saw it was a large Kislevite hat of snow leopard fur, pinned with a red and gold cockade.
‘Damn and blast!’
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Hennig.
Reiner geed the cart horse into a trot. ‘That hat! Getting some air, was he? Ranald curse the woman!’ he cried.
‘Who?’ asked Hennig. ‘The sister? Why are you angry at her?’
‘Because if she’s up to what I think she’s up to, I won’t be getting my “heavenly reward” this evening.’
Reiner drove the cart as fast as he could, which wasn’t very fast. The streets were as crowded as ever with refugees, and Reiner spent as much time bawling at lollygaggers to get out of his way as he did moving forward. They were just three blocks from Madam Tolshnaya’s and moving well at last when Reiner heard Hennig gasp.
‘Reiner!’ he said. ‘Reiner, look! The corpse!’
Reiner glanced behind him and froze at the sight that met his eyes.
The Kislevite had been a trim, well muscled warrior in life. Now his abdomen was more bloated than that of the fellow who had drowned in the well. He looked like he’d swallowed a hogshead of Marienburg Ale whole. His belly was taut as a drum head; so tight that the skin was splitting. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The balloon of flesh bulged and squirmed like a sack full of rats.
Reiner pulled on the reins and brought the cart to a juddering stop, then turned, staring.
‘What is it?’ asked Hennig. ‘I’ve heard corpses fill with gas when they—’
His sentence went unfinished, for with a horrible wet pop, the body’s stomach erupted in a shower of rotting flesh and putrid viscera. Reiner and Hennig recoiled, instinctively covering their faces as they were spattered with clots of stinking flesh. Choking and blinded, they didn’t at first notice that, mixed in with the reeking ejecta, were small snot-coloured creatures that skittered over the cart on tiny, malformed legs.
The first Reiner knew of them was when one sank needle-like teeth through his boot into the flesh of his calf. He yelped and knocked it to the ground. His hand came away smeared with slime. Another bit his left toe. More climbed Hennig’s legs. He plucked them off, gagging.
The street, a narrow way lined with tanneries and low taverns, was crowded with idle soldiers, street-hawkers and sisters of joy. The slimy vermin leapt off the cart into that river of humanity like fleas, biting and clawing, and the normal street chatter was replaced by bellows of pain and surprise. A roiling knot of victims twisted and swatted at the miniature horrors, looking
for all the world as if they performed some strenuous dance. It would have been ludicrous were it not for the unfortunate soul, who fell, screaming, with eyes plucked out and veins chewed open to the muddy ground.
‘What are they?’ wailed Hennig, trying to knock one loose with his sabre.
‘Nurglings!’ said Reiner, snatching one off his shoulder and hurling it away. ‘Revolting little beasts, aren’t they? Ow!’ He stomped on one that was biting his ankle.
Recovering from their initial shock, soldiers lounging outside nearby taverns rushed forward, swinging swords and stabbing with daggers. Reiner and Hennig jumped down and joined them.
‘Second time today,’ said a crossbowman. ‘Things just like this attacked the camp hospital not two hours ago. Killed a score of wounded before we put ‘em down.’
Reiner frowned at this news, but a nurgling jumped on his leg and he had to attend to it.
The tide was turning when a young guardsman, riding past at a gallop, reined up sharply. ‘What happens here?’ he demanded, breathless.
‘Nurglings,’ said Hennig, still swatting. ‘Corpse was full of them.’
‘Sigmar preserve us,’ said the guard, making the sign of the Hammer. ‘It’s an infestation. The same thing happened at the mortuary. I ride to inform Captain Ulstaadt. Now I shall have two tales to tell.’
‘The mortuary?’ said Reiner, but the boy had already spurred away. Reiner’s stomach sank like he had swallowed lead shot. ‘Hennig!’ he called, climbing onto the cart. ‘Mount up.’ He pushed the exploded corpse off the cart with his boot, then grabbed the reins as Hennig swung up to the buck board beside him. Reiner slapped the reins across the horse’s rump and they were off at a trot.
IT WAS FULL dark when they reached Madam Tolshnaya’s, and the evening’s festivities were already in full swing. Drunk troopers staggering in and out, arm in arm, singing bawdy songs. Knights intent on breaking their knightly vows ducked in discreetly, the badges of their orders hidden under plain cloaks. Fiddles and flutes mixed with feminine laughter behind the glowing mullioned windows. But though those sights and sounds would normally have made Reiner green with envy, tonight he was too angry to pay them any mind. He disliked being beaten at his own game. He was nobody’s dupe. Nobody’s.
He slewed the cart into the yard behind the brothel, scattering protesting soldiers as he went, and reined up with a skidding of hooves and a skittering of wheels. Drawing their sabres, he and Hennig leapt off the cart before it had come to a full stop and kicked in the stable door.
The long room was dark and silent, but smelled like a charnel house. Reiner and Hennig clapped hands over their faces, retching. At first they could see nothing, but soon their eyes adjusted. Anyaka’s patients lay in their stalls as before, but seemed now very still—too still. Reiner and Hennig could hear no breathing or movement. All sound was lost in a constant low buzzing.
‘What’s that?’ whispered Hennig through his fingers.
Reiner swallowed thickly. ‘Flies, lad.’
The patients were dead, all of them. Reiner wondered with a prickle of dread if he had ever seen them alive, if they had all along been corpses, animated by some foul magic.
A faint orange glow emanated from the tack room. He put a finger to his lips and they tiptoed down the aisle, trying unsuccessfully to breathe without smelling. As they reached the tack room door the death stench mixed with another scent: a sweet, cloying mildew odour over a thick fecal reek that burned the eyes. They looked in the door.
Kneeling with her eyes closed behind a brazier of coals was Anyaka, but not the sweet Anyaka Reiner and Hennig knew. She had thrown open her priestess’s habit, revealing her small but sinewy body, which glistened in the heat of the coals. At first Reiner thought that the swirling designs and eldritch symbols that covered her body—and which were echoed by others painted upon the tack room’s wooden walls—were tattoos, but looking again, he realised, with a heaving of nausea, that they were deep cuts sliced into her skin, black with necrosis.
Over the brazier’s coals sat a frying pan in which bubbled a viscous green stew. Prehensile tendrils of steam rose from it to caress Anyaka’s nakedness obscenely.
As Reiner and Hennig watched, the priestess added to the stew from the packets Reiner had purchased for her, then ran her finger inside the cuts in her breast and abdomen and flicked into the pan the pus she gathered there. Fetid steam billowed up from the soup.
Hennig choked as the noxious cloud overwhelmed them. Anyaka’s eyes flashed open. ‘Defilers!’ she cried. ‘The ritual must not be interrupted!’
‘Oh, but it must, lass,’ said Reiner, advancing. ‘Now back away from that fire.’
Anyaka did just that, but rather quicker than Reiner expected. She leapt up, snatched a dagger from her robe, and pulled a whip from a peg on the wall.
‘Charge her!’ cried Reiner. He and Hennig ran around the brazier. But as they did, Anyaka leapt over it and dashed out of the door. Reiner turned and ran after her, but Hennig paused.
‘Wait, Hetz.’ He kicked the frying pan. It slid off the brazier and splashed to the ground. Hennig jumped to avoid the spray and joined Reiner at the door.
‘Good thinking, boyo,’ said Reiner. ‘Now quick, before she gets too far.’
But as they ran into the stables they saw Anyaka was standing near the door, hands raised. ‘Servants of Nurgle, come forth and slay these unbelievers!’ she called.
Reiner and Hennig slowed, looking around uneasily, half expecting daemons to materialise out of thin air. Reiner smirked when nothing happened. ‘You seem to have an exaggerated opinion of your powers, lass.’
He and Hennig advanced on her again, but faint sounds to their left and right made them pause. It was a creaking, stretching noise, like leather being pulled taut. Their eyes settled on the body in the stall nearest them. Its stomach was swelling like a bladder filling with air. Reiner glanced at the stall opposite. That body too was swelling.
‘Oh gods,’ he groaned.
A wet pop sounded from the darkness, and another, followed by a horrible chittering and rustling. The body on their left exploded, showering them with rotten flesh as mucus-covered nurglings spewed from its stomach. The body on the right followed like an echo.
‘Sigmar save us,’ quavered Hennig. ‘So many.’
‘Forget ‘em, lad,’ said Reiner, starting forward. ‘Get their mistress.’
He and Hennig ran at the sorceress, while corpses exploded left and right. But before they’d closed half the distance, Hennig cried out and fell.
Reiner stopped. Hennig was clutching his boot and screaming. Reiner looked down. Hennig’s boot was falling apart. Where splashings of Anyaka’s brew had touched it, the leather was eaten away, and the flesh beneath it boiled with blisters that split and popped as if Hennig’s foot was on fire.
Hennig’s shrieks grew louder. His hands, having touched his boots, were blistering as well. ‘Stop it, Reiner! Make it stop!’
‘Lad, I…’
Anyaka laughed. Reiner looked up. The sorceress was stepping into the yard and closing the door behind her.
‘Foul witch!’ he cried, but there was no time for curses. Out of the darkness a seething carpet of nurglings was converging on them.
‘Hang on, lad.’ Reiner grabbed Hennig under the arms and dragged him as fast as he could toward the closed door. It wasn’t fast enough. A nurgling leapt on Reiner’s back. Three climbed up his legs. Another bit into his arm. They were crawling over Hennig like roaches. The boy swatted at them weakly, but they only bit his hands.
A nurgling clawed Reiner’s neck. He dropped Hennig involuntarily and flung the little beast away. Hennig instantly disappeared under the wave of vermin. Reiner tried to pull him out, but nurglings swarmed around him, biting and scratching him to the bone. He roared with rage and pain and was forced to leap onto a parked draycart, stamping his feet and scraping with dagger and sabre to dislodge the beasts that clung to him. He was bleeding all over.
&nb
sp; ‘Reiner!’ shrieked Hennig, his voice unrecognizable in his terror. ‘Reiner, save me!’
Hennig was but a thrashing mound under the madly squirming forms. An arm shot up out of the mass, clawing the air. It was stripped, only a few pink scraps hanging from wet bones. Then the arm sank again, falling apart as it dropped. The little daemons had even eaten the cartilage.
Reiner’s throat constricted. His friend was gone, who had moments before been a laughing, skirt-chasing lad with a contagious smile. ‘Hennig… Karl. I… Gods, what am I to tell your mother?’
A nurgling bit his foot. Reiner yelped and danced back. No time for grief. The little daemons were swarming up the cart’s wheels. Reiner looked around desperately. He was too far from the door to run for it. The nurglings would bring him down before he got halfway there. He couldn’t kill them all. He was no Sigmar, and nurglings were much smaller targets than orcs. If only he had wings.
The thought made him glance up, and his heart flooded with new hope. The hayloft had a small door, directly over the main door. Reiner leapt up, caught a crossbeam, and clambered up to the loft. A few nurglings came with him, clinging to his boots, and he rolled and kicked, twitching and biting back screams, until he had crushed the tenacious vermin into red paste.
The others didn’t give up. Hearing a scrabbling, he looked down. The nurglings were climbing the posts, digging their needle-sharp claws into the wood. Reiner hurried to the loft door and pushed it open. In the yard below, Anyaka listened at the stable door, belting her robe. Reiner smiled. Here was an opportunity not to be missed.
He leapt down, slashing with his sabre.
It was not quite the devastating attack he envisaged. First, he misjudged his leap, and jarred his sword arm against the wall as he dropped, so that while he knocked Anyaka flat, he missed her utterly with his sword. Second, he had forgotten his wounded leg. He grunted in pain as he landed on it and fell flat on his back.
Anyaka was up instantly, advancing with dagger and whip.
Reiner raised his sabre. ‘Sorry, lass. Your ceremony will remain unfinished while I live.’