by David Guymer
‘Golkhan the Anointed,’ Nosta hissed. ‘I hope the next one eats him alive.’
The other sorcerers silently joined her in wishing ill to the Dark Master’s chosen. The so-called Anointed had risen through their tangled knot of schemes and into the Master’s favour with all the indifferent prowess with which he handled a blade. Morzanna would have offered her soul to know who it was beneath that daemon mask.
Had it still been hers to give.
Ubek swallowed heavily, neck quivering with focus. ‘After the ritual. What then? When the Master is… risen, and his champion… gloried, what then? Gods are fickle, as you… well know.’
Unconsciously, Morzanna’s hand moved to the vestigial horns that erupted from beneath her platinum hair. She could barely now recall the slender mortal she had once been. Her skin was darkening, her hair adopting a lustrous shine. She revelled in the frenetic pace of change.
‘We have all made our choices. We knew the enemies we made when we pledged ourselves to the Dark Master.’
The cabal fell into thoughtful silence as they considered that. Their souls were forfeit and, like Morzanna, they had no further to fall.
‘What then of the Sigmarites?’ said Nosta, tone thick and sulky. ‘It is only a matter of time before they brave the mists themselves.’
‘Time, indeed,’ Morzanna smiled. ‘All have their role to serve in the Master’s rise. Already, they are caught in the rutted tracks of fate. Their destiny belongs to the Master now.’
It appeared as though Nosta would press for more when a mighty roar boomed from the hollow ring of the amphitheatre. A fat, slug-like beast snapped at its handlers, showering the arena with glowing drool as it was goaded towards Golkhan’s restive blade.
Morzanna surprised herself with a laugh. It was a quite forgotten sensation, as alien as fear, lilting from her pale throat with a songbird sweetness. Nosta and the others looked to her in shock. She ignored them, the vision of the Anointed running afoul of the flame-crested dwarf and his axe staying with her like a guilty conscience.
Now there was a bout that she would gladly watch.
With a sigh, she steepled her fingers before her lips and consigned herself to watch. Golkhan’s blade hummed, an overture to the coming bloodletting.
‘Go, all of you. Prepare yourselves for the ritual. It is me that Golkhan seeks to impress.’
A titter of laughter dappled the shadows. ‘Impress is not the word I would choose.’
Fingers dropping, Morzanna turned, her altered mouth a smile of devil teeth.
Nosta fell silent, the cabal peeling slowly away toward the scorched marble stair that lead down from the acropolis. Ubek was the last to leave. He stood panting on the top step, hunchbacked by the weight of his massive paws.
‘Some things never… change, Morzanna. Some people…’
With that he left, tramping heavily around the curve of the causeway to leave Morzanna alone. Dagger teeth sparkled with amusement. Not quite alone.
And they called themselves sorcerers. Perhaps she had overestimated even Ubek.
A shadow settled over her shoulder. There was a bass growl, a heavy tread on the old temple’s marble forecourt. The creature had not come up by the steps, nor had it been lurking behind the engraved colonnades when Morzanna had arrived. She considered the rugged scarp of the acropolis, its treacherous stratum of ash.
The brute’s agility never ceased to amaze.
He came no closer, repelled as much by the roar of the stadium, as Golkhan meticulously vitiated another unfeeling horror, as he was by the torches. They blazed with a light outside of colour, burning with the intensity of a hundred pliant souls. The creature’s scopophobia was strangely amusing. Any one of the aspiring champions just departed would have bled the souls of thousands for a half of the mutations that corrupted its monstrous body and once brilliant mind. It would have been construed as a sign of the Dark Master’s favour.
But then, as she was well reminded, Hurrlk was not truly one of them.
‘You remembered? I am glad.’
It was impossible to be certain from day to day. Dealing with a creature too far gone in mind to even recognise cause and effect presented, to place it mildly, unique challenges. She turned, only for Hurrlk to recoil with a snarl, torn between the compulsion to retreat under the temple’s shadows and to rip open the slight, platinum-haired woman that looked upon him.
For a brief moment, Morzanna feared the two were not exclusive.
Hurrlk flexed his claws and slid back, head lowered, arms spread. There was no threat that she could impose on a creature that did not fear to die, no bribe high enough for one already indentured to the Dark Master.
Ubek had been right: the gods were fickle.
Her own most of all.
‘We are kindred spirits, you and I,’ said Morzanna, eyeing the bulging sack slung over Hurrlk’s shoulder. ‘Ubek, Nosta…’ She laughed again, as if their names alone were a black joke, caught in a convenient smile as, below, Golkhan turned her way with a bleeding flourish of his dark blade. ‘They’ve not seen the world outside. Not as it truly is, as we have. Would it shock them, do you think? Would it drive them mad?’
Hurrlk shrugged, bone-plated shoulders yielding a rich lode of confusion, of madness.
Abandoning the conversation as pointless, Morzanna gently stretched a hand toward the sack over the monster’s shoulder. Hurrlk flinched, then growled. Morzanna smiled sweetly. Despite their timeless association, she did not know whether Hurrlk was unable to speak, or simply opted not to after so many unchanging years of this purgatory. But there was an amusement that rumbled from its hooded throat that belittled in a way that mere words could never muster. To him, Morzanna was nothing. Golkhan was nothing. In his solipsistic view, there was nothing. Still growling, Hurrlk unslung the sack and let it fall, spilling its trove of disinterred treasures at Morzanna’s feet.
‘The Master thanks you.’
Still Hurrlk came no closer. He agitated, shuffling back and forth as though in the grip of some terrible indecision. With a partial shake of the head, Morzanna extended an open palm. The winds of magic blew fast and hard here, the sky perverted into a cracked reflection of a smothered rainbow by the strength of the dark wind, nobler colours blackened to shaded likeness of itself, focused by the prism of the occult that was the City of the Damned.
That was this temple.
That was under this temple.
Hurrlk lowered his head and shuffled back, sniffing the air that began to crackle and spark between the sorceress’s fingers. Deep within his hood, a scabrous tongue licked hungrily at cracked lips. The motes of green that glittered on eddies of madness began to accrete into a crystalline shard, glowing with an unnatural, internal, evil an inch above her palm. Judging the nugget’s weight, Morzanna let the dark magic fold back into the aethyr. The egg-sized lump of warpstone dropped into her hand as, smiling, her fingers closed around it. Fell light seeped through her grip, like a jellyfish through a net.
She held it out, inviting Hurrlk to take it, which he eventually did, snuffling at the dark rock and issuing a low growl of pleasure. Watching him, Morzanna felt the spread of an almost affectionate glow. It was almost enough to suppress the sigh as she turned back to the open sack of soiled bones. There was a power there, a terrible latency lurking amongst unworthy kin. That the Dark Master desired the reassembly of someone, some mighty champion, seemed a reasonable deduction.
But who, and to what ultimate end, remained mysteries too deep.
‘Can you feel it?’ she breathed. ‘Do you remember this feeling, of standing beneath the flowing sand, time moving again at last? Possibilities change even as we watch.’ She returned to Hurrlk. The giant beast looked down his snout, as a rabid wolf might observe the impassioned rhetoric of a sophist. ‘There comes one who will try and stop you.’
The beast shook, deep cowl echoing to the huffing sound that Morzanna had come to associate with laughter. Morzanna looked to the bridge and th
e fog into which it vanished. This day had been one of many pleasant surprises.
‘I said he would try.’
Gotrek’s axe flared a grubby red in the dark, the starmetal blade carving tormented shades from the windblown mists that harried the three over the ash-white no-man’s-land. Felix followed in the runes’ red afterglow. The fog was so thick, the sky so dark and void of stars, that the ruddy glow, and the bloody mien it cast onto the Slayer’s torso, was Felix’s only point of reference other than up or down. And even that was not nearly as certain as he would have expected. Trying to ignore the cold, the discorporate screams, Felix focused on the axe. Its light was inconstant. When the wind gentled it would dim, roaring back to a furnace brightness with its return. Other times, the fog circling like feral beasts, the axe spat, fading and flaring like a fire dying beneath a downpour.
And all the while, the dark still circled, just beyond the reach of the light.
With numb fingers, Felix crushed ice from the brow of his black eye. He twisted his neck, the crippling stiffness a punishment for walking so long with shoulders tensed against the otherworldly chill. The dead wastes of Sigmarshafen were the province of some other world, as though he walked on the silvered face of Mannslieb itself. The argent light from the greater moon shimmered across the plain of dried out pine stumps and ashen soil, alighting without touching. The emptiness was oppressive, the stillness total. Dead, brittle ground crunched underfoot. It could rain for a month and a day and not begin to quench its thirst. It was a land that had turned its back on life as Felix understood it. And this was only a taste of what was to come.
He tried not to think too much about where they were going. He cursed himself, but it was too late. No other thought dared share his mind.
They were headed to the City of the Damned.
The signing post that they had ridden by earlier that day corporealised from the clouded shadows. The city walls had been visible from here. He strained his eyes on the dark, but could not see it. It was out there somewhere. Hidden. With a tingle of dread, he convinced himself that the walls would have shifted in the night. In this fog they could be fifty paces away, lurking, waiting, hidden out there in the dark. Taking charge of his breathing, he forced himself to calm down. His lungs ached. They felt stiff, as though caked in ice. The signing post had not moved. Its solidity in the changing sweep of fog and shadow was somehow unsettling. Looking at it left him with an uneasy feeling, the curling ‘M’ partly overwritten with hammer carvings and sodden with condensed mist. Like there was something obvious that he was not seeing, the hidden script endeavouring to crawl into his eyes and be read.
With a shiver, he glanced back to where Rudi took up the rear, wrapped in the red cloak of Sudenland wool that Felix dearly wished he could retake for himself. The two men shared a look, teeth chattering too hard to share any more. A few paces ahead of the two men, Gotrek strode ahead. Despite his bare body, his silence was not due to the cold. The dwarf had always delighted in physical adversity, the elements a challenge no less worthy than a ghoul lord or a dragon. His aspect was one of excitement, his one eye fixed to the road ahead. It did not seem to concern Gotrek in the slightest that they walked towards a cursed ruin straight from the legends of Old Night, the lair of a monster about which they knew nothing.
Felix had faced more than his due portion of horrors. At Gotrek’s side he had journeyed to the Chaos Wastes, fought a dragon, scaled the clouds aboard an iron ship and overwintered in haunted Sylvania. But there had always been a reason. Felix had never, nor would he ever, consider himself a hero, but nor had he ever shirked the call of what was right or forsaken his oath to Gotrek. Even when it seemed his life depended on it. Even when Gotrek had hinted in his stubborn dwarfish way that he could.
But this was different.
As far as Felix was aware, the Empire would not fall if they failed to track down the Beast of the Ostermark Moors. Indeed, it seemed that Konrad Seitz and the rest of the baron’s fanatics were frothing at the mouth to be after it themselves. Come the first day of Kaldezeit there would probably no longer be a City of the Damned. But Gotrek was not to be denied a doom and, much as it pained him, Felix would follow.
Felix just wished he could be more optimistic about it. The fog leeched the spirit from his bones as, perhaps, it had from the very ground beneath his feet. An image of the mindless mutants locked in their cages back in Sigmarshafen ebbed into his mind on a cold tide. The thought of ending up that way terrified him more than anything he had faced before. More than death. Not for the first time, he wondered what madness it was that drove Gotrek after such dangers.
And did he honestly expect Felix to survive whatever it was that he found there?
Every step bringing him nearer to finding out, muscles frozen both inside and out, Felix almost surrendered to the whispers of the wind.
The City of the Damned would be Gotrek’s grave.
Even if that were so, and by some miracle Felix made it back alive, how was a poet voided of mind or soul to immortalise a single line of it in verse? With a shudder of frozen shoulders, he shook off the macabre musings. It was something in the air. It had to be.
Where was this place, this long-forgotten ‘M’? What had it been like? What smells had drifted from the chimneys on an autumn night such as this? What manner of people had called it home? He wondered how the City of the Damned had come to its parlous state. Was it possible that something similar could happen again? Could this one day be the fate of Altdorf, or of Middenheim or Nuln? The questions refused to stop there. He wondered if they were even still in Ostermark, or whether they had finally crossed into haunted Sylvania?
From the distance, a haze of black began slowly to condense around a jagged length of shadow. Its claws sunk into Felix’s soul, a carrion crow perched over the rim of the next world. From his back came Rudi’s murmured prayer and he repeated it. It was the city wall. A chill whispered down his spine.
They had arrived.
Shapes walked the sepulchral ramparts. They were merely spirits, he told himself, like those he had seen in Sigmarshafen. Theirs was the power to terrify, but not to harm. He repeated the insistence as the shades converged over the gate towers that loomed from the clutching darkness like a titan. A thin sound, like tide bells on a foggy night drifted through the swirling white. Someone, somewhere, was singing a hymn to Sigmar. Felix shuddered.
‘Keep close, manling. At least until we know whether that sword of yours can hurt them.’
Felix nodded, watching through several separations of dread as a hand that appeared his own drew his sword. A sensation of warmth spread across his back as Rudi, unarmed, pressed close and shielded him from the wind.
Caught in a glacial collapse, the gate towers sank into the dead earth. Holes riddled their black walls, plain grey banners devoid of heraldic symbols fluttering silently against the fog from their turrets. Felix wondered whose lordship they declared. They seemed incongruous as an icon of the dead. The gates themselves hung open, like the dark mouth of death, as though granting admittance to the kingdom of Morr itself.
A crushing chill pressed down on his shoulders as he passed through the barbican. The ancient wood was black as though burned. One gate hung off its hinges and was buried deep into the road. The other groaned softly as it backed and forthed in the grip of the wind. Fog sighed through murder holes in the walls and ceiling. Expecting at any moment some ethereal arrow between the shoulders, Felix hugged his sword and pressed on. The oppressive dread lifted slightly as the barbican opened out into a courtyard.
But only slightly.
He felt rounded cobbles beneath his boots, but, of the courtyard, he could see only ash. The city was not black at all. It had been entombed in ash. Felix shivered, trying to pierce the fog to the buildings that wavered on all sides. There were hints of rooftops, of a road, but all he could see for certain was ash. In places it was mounded like barrows, but it was still just ash.
Gotrek’s tattoos smeared p
urple in the glow of his rune-axe, the dwarf edging forwards as he stared into the fog.
‘Hear that?’ he growled.
Felix slid forward, angling his own gently luminous blade to guard Gotrek’s left side.
Rudi pressed in between them. ‘It’s a hymn,’ he whispered with a shiver, arms wrapped beneath his cloak as he eyed the surrounding shadow. ‘We sing it on Sigmar’s Day.’
Felix’s breath hissed as a human silhouette emerged from the fog. There was something not wholly natural in the way that it walked. It shambled over the broken ground, arms loose, head slack. The appearance of another caught the corner of his eye, then another, approaching from a second alley. The same dirge rose disjointed from three throats and more, soulless voices collected in praise. Or in lament.
Red rune-light gleamed from Gotrek’s grin as more of the figures came into view.
‘I told you that you would come seeking me when you changed your mind.’
Felix swallowed, tearing his gaze from the shambolic march as the cold voice echoed through the courtyard.
He knew that voice.
Chapter 8
They are the Damned
‘Schlanger,’ Felix hissed, raising his sword to guard Gotrek’s left side as the faltering shapes stepped fully into the radiance of Gotrek’s axe. They were human, more or less. They were dressed in sackcloth robes cinched about the waist with rope. Amulets and talismans of hollowed wood and painted stones rattled like dusty pfennigs in a beggar’s bowl. They bore scars beyond counting, the marks of claws and knives as well as bruises, rashes and burns. Their throats were swollen with dark buboes, some so large as to pitch their heads to disturbing angles. All lacked one appendage or other, whether it was an eye, an ear, a clutch of fingers or, in the case of one poor woman, an entire leg. Blood welled around fresh scabs at the stump as she dragged herself behind the others on a tall staff, her eyes bloodshot and utterly mad.
Felix’s first thought ran to leprosy. There were widely believed rumours of a leper colony in the ruins of Vanhaldenschloss, which could not be far from this place but closer inspection revealed a truth that was, as was so often the case in Felix’s experience, even more terrible.