by David Guymer
The first thing that struck him was the stench.
Felix had ventured through ghoul warrens and ogre butchers’ tents and never encountered an odour more repellent. From outside he had received a taste, but it was only from within that he could truly appreciate it. It took a uniquely human kind of monster to inflict such inhumanity on one of his own. Breathing through his mouth and the tattered hem of his cloak, he took another step into the pen. His foot struck a body hidden under a mess of rags. He pulled it back. He could not see a damned thing.
‘Rudi?’ he hissed into the wool of his cloak
Something shifted in the dark. ‘Felix? Felix is that you? Sigmar, I knew you’d come!’
‘Yes,’ Felix whispered, the single word riding a rush of relief. ‘Come on, let’s get you out.’
He prodded the body he had almost trodden on, but got no reaction. It continued to mutter. The word ‘Master’ cropped up once or twice but otherwise it was gibberish. For its part – its gender was impossible to discern – neither Felix nor his boot were of any interest at all.
‘They can’t hear,’ said Rudi, still just a dark shape in the fog as he made a path through his insensate cellmates.
Anxious to be free, Rudi tried to leap the last two bodies that lay between him and the gate. He landed on a leg that turned under his foot and spilled him into Felix’s arms. Felix held him until his wild breathing calmed, then helped him upright. Stripped of his padded armour, Rudi shivered terribly. Felix unclasped his cloak and draped it over the young man’s shoulders. Rudi nodded his thanks, cold fingers fumbling with the clasp.
‘Just until we find you something warmer,’ said Felix, suddenly feeling the chill redoubled himself. ‘That cloak and I have been through an awful lot together.’
Rudi’s hand shook as it explored the stained and oft-darned red wool. ‘H-how much?’
‘More than you’d believe. And most of it really was awful.’
A sense of motion from behind made Felix spin. A shadow resolved from the fog, solidifying into a horribly familiar form.
Gotrek.
His fingers unclawed from his sword. He offered up thanks that he had looked before he had swung.
‘You found him then. Good. Now close the door, manling.’
‘What about these others?’
‘Have you seen them? Up close?’
‘They’re f-from the c-city,’ stammered Rudi. ‘There are m-mutants on the moors, but not like these. It’s like something has s-stolen their minds.’
Felix looked again. The warm-bodied creatures muttered and twitched, carelessly soiling themselves as they wandered unseeing through the whispering murk, or else simply lay where they had been put. It turned Felix’s insides cold. What power could do this to a man? Strip a body of its mind? Without another word, he closed the gate, fixing his mace like a wedge between latch and broken lock to keep the wind from springing it open. Whatever fate awaited them come morning, it could hardly be worse.
Gotrek gave an ugly grin, running his thumb around the blade of his axe. ‘At last! We’ll find the Beast in that ruined city, I can feel it in my bladder.’
‘The city?’ said Rudi, his grip on sanity so loosened already by horror that he almost laughed. Or perhaps it was merely the cold that summoned a burst of fog from his chapped blue lips. ‘Haven’t you seen enough of what the city can do to a man?’
‘Too bad,’ growled Gotrek. ‘You’re about to see it a whole lot more. You can thank us later, although your own vengeance will have to wait its turn until after the monster has killed me.’ Rudi’s mouth dropped open and Gotrek filled the void with a harsh chuckle. ‘If it can.’
Again, the mad laugh threatened. Rudi peeled open his cloak to reveal a hard woollen smock and breeches. ‘My armour, my weapons. What in Sigmar’s name do you expect me to do?’
Gotrek planted his free hand on his hip and rounded on Felix. ‘This is why you never see a human Slayer. It is beyond a man to seek a doom worthy of his dishonour?’
As Gotrek spoke over him, something in Rudi’s character hardened. A little of the mania settled, his dark brown eyes seeming to shade a little blacker. ‘Is that why you fight to d-die, herr dwarf? Did you do s-something t-terrible too?’
Gotrek shot Rudi a poisonous glare, then stomped grumbling into the fog. Felix stared after him, struck by a sudden dread that the dwarf had left him alone.
‘Did I say something wrong?’ said Rudi.
‘Yes,’ Felix mumbled, still watching the shifting dark, not caring to try and explain.
‘I’ll come,’ said Rudi, soft enough that Felix in his distraction did not fully catch it and the man repeated himself. ‘I’ll c-come,’ he said, louder. ‘I’ll go with you to the City of the Damned, f-find my own penance there.’
‘Forget penance, Rudi. Get away the first chance you get. I’ll not stop you.’
‘I don’t see you running away.’
Felix gave a wan smile, feeling very much the tragic hero. ‘I have Gotrek with me. I doubt I’d be nearly so heroic if I had any choice about it.’
Shivering, Rudi offered a blank shrug. ‘Well now n-neither of us has a choice.’
More than a little taken aback by Rudi’s fatalism, Felix simply nodded. There was something in this cursed night, this crying fog that buried them like earth over their own graves. It bred a defeatist streak. He just hoped that it did not afflict him too.
Three such misanthropes would be a crowd.
For once, he found himself solidly in agreement with Gotrek. The sooner they were gone from this benighted township the better.
The gates were barred and he doubted the guards would be kind enough to open them for him. He recalled from their entrance the day before that the mechanism to open them needed to be operated simultaneously from both towers as well as requiring a man on the ground to unfasten the locking bar. He tried to remember how many militiamen he had seen posted up there when he had ridden through, then cursed himself for failing to pick up that detail. He did not doubt that Gotrek could clear one on his own, but tasking himself and an unarmed waif against an indeterminate number of foes was not a proposition that appealed.
A crash of splintered wood trembled through the fog.
For an instant of horror Felix’s heart refused to beat.
Was it possible that the vaporous legions of the Damned had found a way to breach the township gate? The sound of dying wood came again. And then again. Felix drew his sword, steel sweating under the pallid glow of Mannslieb. Alarmed cries filtered from the militiamen above although none looked to forsake their perch to investigate. Not that the blades of the living were prominent among Felix’s concerns just now.
Felix stepped in front of Rudi, angling his sword into a guard.
For all the good that a physical weapon might do.
‘Get a move on, manling.’ Gotrek’s voice ground through the fog. The tension eased somewhat from Felix’s shoulders and he lowered his blade.
‘I’ve found a hole.’
Tormented souls swept the wastelands, their piteous wails making a mockery of the inviolate union by which each was ensnared to countless thousands of others.
Misery shared.
Misery magnified.
Nothing living or dead could be so connected, or feel so alone.
Seen from above, Sigmarshafen was the roiling eye of a storm, a vortex of grey shadow heaving against its flimsy walls. An unseen eye probed deeper into that convulsing cloud, a payload of nightmares birthed in cold screams from the shuttered houses that passed beneath. The fog parted, like recognising like, the township gates emerging from the turbulent white. All was as it had been. So long. So unchanging. And yet…
And yet here was something new.
A fluttering heart, the sensation coming just seconds after a rush of excitement. A strange disconnect between body and spirit. Something powerful was in play, an artefact of ancient might as obvious to eyes born of the dark winds as the full face of Morrslieb in
a clear sky. Visions of towers and palisades fell aside. The focus of the spirit-sight narrowed. There were shallow impressions, hollow outlines of human form. Shadows in darkness. There was a fear, a steal of intent, but they were not the source of that power. Something tremendous walked amongst them. A destiny.
Mind quested out after the seeing eye, spectral fingers outstretched to touch.
There was contact, then a roar of power, an instant of delirium, of flaring ecstasy that swiftly became pain. Red rune-light burned the inner eye to blindness. The pain grew acute. The physical suffered, the soul’s conviction faltering as a wave of repulsion from an artefact of ancient power drove it and its scrying magicks back into the discorporate masses of the Damned. The mists closed. The white blinded. Further back through writhing white until, as though a barrier had been crossed, the fog was gone. The clear air shimmered with magical distortions, a haze of glittering green madness that eddied and flowed on a hot wind.
The spirit-sight rose to its body’s summons.
The wall of fog receded, clinging to the broken black city walls, closing over half of the city as far west as the river that cut it north to south. The water reflected the coloured fires of Chaos like a ribbon of change. Tiny smacks bobbed on the surface. They burned in the fires of damnation. Ruined streets swept beneath, their walls tarred with weird glyphs, swarming with men and things that had once been like them. They fought and toiled and loudly beseeched the blessings of the Dark Master. Torches blazed from every corner. Reddish fire and an aura of brimstone set a garish light, shadows flickered large and uncanny over a honeycomb of sunken rooftops and crumbling towers.
This was the City of the Damned.
Further back and higher still the spirit-sight soared, the maelstrom of change swallowed whole as if by a gaping maw. A giant amphitheatre had spread through the human streets, a bastardised crucible of rubble and bent steel where the exhortations of a thousand underwent its conversion into a cacophonous roar of hellish power.
The strength of devotion lifted the soul, like an updraft beneath a daemon’s wing. Higher, higher, an acropolis rising from the tainted ruin, pure, yet indelibly the begetter of the city’s fall. At its foot, the howls of daemon-engines and mutant beasts vied for dominance over the cries of the arena. Crowning the acropolis itself, partially buried under charred and blackened rock, a temple to Sigmar stood transcendent. Its roof of iridescent blue slate was chequered with soot, marble cornices throwing the ash of its host’s destruction clear of the elaborate entablature and great columnar walls that remained starkly pristine.
A single tooth, perfect white in a rotten mouth.
‘Morzanna!’
She resurfaced with an ecstatic shiver, gasping in enfeebling euphoria as body and soul again enmeshed. Her whole body shook with rediscovered sensation. A fading recollection carved between her shoaling thoughts. An orange-crested destroyer. An axe of iridescent power
‘What is it, Morzanna? What is coming?’
Her eyes snapped open. She was smiling.
‘Change.’
Chapter 7
Into the Mists
Her back to the defiled temple, Morzanna blinked to banish the after-visions that sailed the changing waters of her glassine eyes. A swell of disorientation made her heart flounder, carried away on the ecstatic currents of the new. Let others fret themselves to madness.
Chaos was its own reward.
Colours shifting like oil on stained glass, her eyes flickered over the tumult. The amphitheatre opened before her, gaping jaws like some hellish kraken of black earth and fired stone. Even by the harsh measures of the City of the Damned, it was an abomination of form and scale, every blackened slab and spar pillaged from the burghal graveyard that had given it life. The stands that ringed its vast interior like rowed teeth heaved to the fervour of two thousand screaming bodies. The very air that Morzanna breathed tasted warm in her mouth, heated by the vibration of so many inhuman voices. The warrior that battled halfway down that throat of oblivion was warped by distance and Chaos, tangled within a confusion of tentacled stingers and barbs. The versicoloured spawn to which the majority of those flailing appendages belonged shrieked in insanity and pain, the cries of the worshippers sinking and cresting back in time.
The entire spectacle was a symphony of devotion, conducted at the point of a blade at the behest of the Dark Master.
‘Morzanna!’ hissed a low, sultry voice from behind her. ‘It is one thing for Golkhan to make us stand here and witness his apish prowess. It is another to play your games.’ The speaker languished within an illusory pool of shadow, her voice describing a condescending sneer. A sorceress of little aptitude, the gods had seen fit to favour Nosta with a familiar of rare abilities, its gifts swallowing her in a thicket of darkness. Power unearned bred arrogance and Nosta was a warning from the gods on the perils of hubris.
A further six figures, eight sorcerers all, had gathered before the temple at their champion’s decree. They were cloaked in black or in fabrics so choked with soot as to have had blackness foisted upon them. The shadows the daemon-glare braziers of the amphitheatre threw were long and twisted, astral beasts clawing at a starless sky, the acropolis snarling like a cornered savage before the roar of the stadium. The ashen surfaces gave off periodic flares of black lightning as the knotted weaves of warding magicks from eight untrusting sorcerers earthed into the realm of the material.
In spite of the din and her own gift for obfuscation, Nosta’s impatience was as palpable as the others.
Morzanna closed her eyes, conjured the feeling of power. The sense of danger, of fear even, was as clear as if the dwarf that she had perceived were here beside her. ‘An artefact of ancient power comes. The bane of the Master’s kind. It is unlikely to be mere chance that brings such a weapon here, now. I sense a great destiny at play.’ The tip of her tongue pricked against her barbed teeth, spiking the arresting taste of change with blood. ‘It is impossible to know what it might mean.’
A bestial creature that had once been a man panted with the effort of convoking words into speech. His shovel-like paws were heavy and clodded with grime, a grubby scrap of cloak cinched painfully tight around his bloated neck. Ubek had once been a magister of the Amber College, but power and a hunger for yet more was the fullness of the man that this twisted aspect retained. Partially swamped by lank brown hair, a third eye glinted from his forehead like a rare flower. With the fickleness of Chaos, it was bone-white and blind. Patiently, Morzanna waited for him to remember how to speak. The arrogant could be ignored, trusted to engineer the conditions for their own destruction. It was the quiet that needed to be watched. Those for whom caution was the mask of calculation.
‘What would the… Dark Master have… us do?’
‘This changes nothing.’ It was an effort not to smile, to dance for sheer, unpredictable joy. This changes everything. ‘Preparations for the ritual are under way. The excavation of the temple nears completion. The Dark Master will rise.’
‘He will rise,’ the cabal murmured in unison, Ubek only a second behind.
‘I have unearthed… every last hole… in our dominion,’ said Ubek, flexing his begrimed paws. ‘We have found… every last relic… that there is.’
‘Then it is time to reach out beyond the river, and find what the Sigmarites would hide from us behind the mists.’
Of one mind, the sorcerers looked across the sprawl of devastation toward the chromatic dance of the river. A great stone viaduct, the river’s sole crossing, vanished into dense fog barely halfway across. Spectrally underlit by reflected fires, shadows duelled with crumbling gargoyles, daemons of fantasy and nightmare perched amongst ruined towers. Hiding in its shadow was the last quarter of the city where the lights of Chaos did not touch. To cross the river was to court death, and only those seeking flight from the Dark Master’s growing dominion braved even its banks. Morzanna traced the bank northward from the bridge to a ramshackle redoubt of corrugated rust and slime-crusted d
riftwood. Set against the ever-changing ruination that enclosed it, it was a veritable bastion of solidity. Her gaze lingered. Too long. By some intuitive contempt, she became aware of Ubek’s knowing sneer.
Mortal memories.
Mortal weakness.
‘It is im… possible.’
‘Not impossible,’ Morzanna whispered, consigning the settlement by the river to the past where it belonged.
‘He is mad,’ said Nosta, a dreamlike mockery. ‘Perhaps that is why he is mad.’
‘Nor is he truly… one of us.’
There was a moment’s silence while Ubek recovered, invaded by an eruption of adulation from the amphitheatre. The spawn heaved, all rippling flesh and flailing tentacles, tenebrous ichor gouting from a hundred cuts. The lacerations were shallow, each one cruelly precise. An onyx claymore wielded in two mailed hands deftly severed a clutch of tentacles. They flopped to the blood-soaked ash of the arena, gyrating like headless worms only to be crushed to paste with a callous deliberateness by a black sabaton. The spawn shrieked from a dozen mouths as the champion of Chaos buried his blade into a pulsating eye-sack, spraying his ornate silver and black plate with gore.
The stands erupted.
‘Golkhan!’ they roared, vitreous fluids streaming over their champion’s spiked vambrace. ‘Golkhan!’ they wept, in the throes of devotion as he flung his arms wide and thrust his gore-slickened blade into the air.
The champion turned a circle, pausing to exult before the watching mages. The hollow laughter of the dark knight extracted a grudging ripple of applause.
‘Another!’ The cry came resonant from the daemonic mask of his hell-steel helm. Balefire blazed across the midnight curves of his armour, leaving shadows to linger within the strange, shallow grooves that ran through the plates. They served no purpose that Morzanna could describe. But when had Chaos ever been about purpose?