by David Guymer
They had inflicted these wounds upon themselves.
Cruel scars bore the self-inflicted marks of whips, knives and saws, while the messy ridges of white tissue that swept from flat stumps told of amputations crudely sealed with pitch.
These were the self-flagellating fanatics of the cult of Sigmar. Convinced of the coming End Times, they proved their readiness through pointless acts of self-mutilation. What had brought them here, and what they were doing with Caul Schlanger, were other questions entirely.
‘I should have suspected you were in league with the Beast,’ he shouted, with his left arm shoving Rudi behind him, before thrusting his blade warningly towards a flagellant’s chest. The warning went unheeded, the man welcoming the cut of Felix’s steel across his collar as a sinning man would receive his lord’s forgiveness: with a tear in his eye and a prayer on his lips. ‘Schlanger!’ Felix yelled, the mass of men slowly pushing them back to the gate.
Gotrek gritted his teeth in disgust as, still murmuring their direful lament, they reached for him, only to withhold at the last; fear of divine forbearance, rather than of his axe, preventing them from laying a hand upon him. With a growl, Gotrek stayed his axe. But Felix knew he would only remain patient for so long. Felix’s own sword had cut a shallow gash into the lead flagellant’s chest but still the man did nothing but offer him praise. Blood was streaming down the channels of his blade, and he feared that even if he did nothing at all then someone was going to get killed. He drew a breath to call out Caul Schlanger once more when another sombre voice lifted out of the dirge.
‘And Sigmar spoke unto the Unberogen: these are the dwarfs, my brothers. Let no man see them unto harm as would speak himself brother of mine.’
Without a moment’s cessation in their lament, the flagellants parted to admit the passage of a tall, skeletally thin man as underfed and mistreated as any of his brethren.
It was not Caul.
His legs were wrapped with sackcloth in the form of a kilt. Bare from the waist up, deep cuts took the heads from faded green sea dragons and mermaids, dried blood and florid bruises painting his flesh as colourfully as old ink. But despite the every appearance of frailty, everything from the confident stamp of his stride, the swagger that led with his single arm, to the intensity of the stare with which he fixed the Slayer bespoke a warrior. And Felix recognised him. This was the man he had seen preaching of the End Times from a street corner of Sigmarshafen.
Brüder Nikolaus Straum.
Gotrek snorted, grudgingly allowing his axe to drop. ‘I think I’ve heard that line somewhere.’
The man regarded Gotrek with a crazed intensity. His entire body was dimpled with goose bumps and turning a pellucid blue in the cold. Every inch of the man shivered, but his voice was steady. ‘The lessons of Leodan, from the Unfinished Book.’
Gotrek nodded, respectfully. Like any dwarf, he respected a proper appreciation for the written word.
With a dramatic sweep of his one arm, the prophet of doom presented his brethren and the clouded ruin that all the funereal hymns known to man or dwarf could not make rest in peace. ‘My home, hammer-brother,’ the flagellant proclaimed. ‘Our temple, our battleground. The first front of the final war.’
Gotrek regarded the battered assemblage of men. Murmuring softly, they looked back. Those more lucid and with limbs enough for the task, marked the hammer across their chests. ‘Your home has seen better days, and perhaps your warriors should spare a limb or two between them for the enemy.’
‘Gird your hearts, my brethren,’ Nikolaus bellowed without turning away, a momentary flash of mischief alighting on his lips. ‘Sigmar surely tests us cruelly this day, sending such harsh untruths from the mouth of this trusted one.’
Gotrek glared into each of the rapt faces of the flagellants, muttering a coarse oath when not a single one flinched. ‘My patience is being tested, right enough.’
‘Your time will come, Trollslayer, as surely will the time of all. Even the dwarfs will not endure the scourging of the End Times.’
Chuckling grimly, Gotrek lowered his axe completely. ‘Aye. And don’t we know it.’
Felix studied the pair, suffering an unexpected twinge of jealousy at the lunatic’s instant rapport with his last and only friend. Birds of a feather, he supposed, as the old Hochland saying went.
Nikolaus’s expression abruptly turned grim. ‘I do my best Brüder Dwarf, but all is not well in my ministry.’
Gotrek rubbed his still-pounding head and made a show of examining his surroundings. He sucked in his cheeks. ‘You don’t say?’
Nikolaus nodded, faith the shield upon which sarcasm was ever doomed to break. ‘Sigmar delivers us a saviour, a crusader of visionary zeal and we rejoice.’ He paused as a shambolic murmur of exaltation arose from the flagellants. ‘But always has it been his way to present the steepest paths to those he most loves.’ Mutterings of pained celebration. Nikolaus turned his face to the sky, shaking a clenched fist. ‘Ours is not to question. Only to see that Götz von Kuber’s abduction is a certain sign, a herald of the impending End Times, and we will be there.’ His voice had built in pitch and strength, his followers clawing at what remained of their hair as they joined him in a cacophonous outpouring of joyous grief. ‘We will fight beside him in these final days. We offer our worthless lives to Sigmar’s glory!’ The flagellants cried out, stamped their feet, rattled rosary beads, wept, the din almost smothering the stark rejoinder of a single pair of slowly clapping hands.
Caul’s green eyes emerged from the fog behind the flagellants, followed closely by the man himself. ‘Inspiring, is he not?’ With a long-bladed knife plaited between the four fingers of his hand, he rapped the tinted mail above his heart. ‘Makes you feel it right here.’
‘If I thought there was anything warm beneath that metal, I might even believe you,’ Felix snapped back, angling his sword to this new threat. Ordinarily, he would not have considered a flagellant a threat to a dwarf and his allies, but he noted the way that Nikolaus and his brethren deferred to Caul Schlanger. There was no telling what hold a man like that could have over men so far lost to reason.
Shaking his head as he insinuated himself between the penitent’s ranks, Caul made a tutting sound. ‘That silver tongue of yours is a little tarnished, Herr Jaeger. Little wonder that neither merchantry nor poetry truly became you.’
Felix scowled, refusing to lower his sword.
As the man spoke, the shadows behind him deepened, forming into the shapes of men. The darkness rendered their motley garb drab, the cold dampening the coloured scarves tied over their faces with condensed mist. Despite the caution that gripped every footstep and weighted glance, they moved with a muted clatter, each of the six men burdened with nets, steel traps, tools, and weapons for every occasion bar the End Times themselves. The last to appear was cloaked in an ancient-looking white wolf pelt. He cradled a storm lantern, enveloping the entire party in dark streamers of whispering fog. Wary of the shadows that gusted chilly through the derelict street, the mercenaries formed up behind Caul. The man at their lead took one more step to bring him in front of his smirking paymaster. He was desperately pale and gaunt, a northerner worn down by hard years. The red linen scarf covering the mercenary’s face shifted as the man chewed on something pungent like decomposing lavender. Moonlight glinted from the iron tip of the crossbow he held pointed at Gotrek’s chest. The night wind ruffled his long grey ponytail.
‘A schilling per bolt on top, we agreed.’ He nodded towards Gotrek, nothing on his face but grim professionalism. ‘The dwarf looks like he might take more than one.’
‘You think right,’ Gotrek growled, squaring his shoulders as if to invite a shot. ‘How fast do you think you can reload?’
Caul spared the dwarf a sideways glance. ‘You look a little worse for wear, Slayer, Can’t handle Sigmarshafen’s ale?’
‘What do you want, Caul?’ said Felix hurriedly as two more men lifted their crossbows to cover the scowling dwarf.
At a range of barely ten feet, more than enough to send even Gotrek back to Sigmarshafen with a few unwelcome additions between his ribs.
‘Order to my world, Herr Jaeger, what more could any man want? But since your companion is on the wrong end of the finest shot in the Fauschlag, why not answer a question of mine?’
‘Shoot a dwarf?’ said Felix, indicating with his eyes the flagellants who observed the display with a dour passivity. ‘I don’t think they would.’
‘These paid men are Middenlanders, Herr Jaeger, and come late to Sigmar’s truth.’ Caul shook his head sadly, a companionable clap on the mercenary’s shoulder. The man did not move, continuing to chew. ‘They will surely pay for their heathen ways in the next life, but I am nothing if not accommodating of difference.’
‘Did you say you had a question?’
‘The same as I had for you in Sigmarshafen,’ said Caul, features turning ghoulish under the pulsing red glow from Gotrek’s axe as he turned from Felix to the dwarf. ‘But since you had the wrong answer for me then, I felt I should put it to you again some place more… intimate.’
‘Ask away,’ Gotrek growled, running a thumb along the blade of his axe until a bead of blood welled. ‘A quiet street works well enough for me as well.’
Caul smiled without humour, arching a thin brow as he slowly raised his hands and stepped back amidst his men. ‘We are here for the same reasons, Herr Gurnisson. We both want the Beast.’
‘Is that right?’ said Gotrek, angling the shoulder of his axe to indicate the gathered mercenaries. The angry gesture made them jump. Their gear clanked as fingers trembled against triggers. Gotrek seemed unconcerned. ‘Do you plan to eat it?’
‘We mean to track it to its lair,’ said Caul reasonably, as though explaining to a child why the sky was dark at night. ‘Or, failing that,’ he indicated the mercenaries with a nod, ‘to capture it and extract the location of the baron from it. Between myself, Straum, and Captain Armbruster here,’ the crossbowman acknowledged his name with a grimace, ‘no one knows the city better. But the Beast we hunt is dangerous, and some added muscle would be no hindrance.’
‘We’re here to k-kill it,’ Rudi stammered trying to control his chattering teeth as a cold sigh drove through the ruined courtyard. Abruptly, Armbruster swept his crossbow around towards the source of the wind. Darkness pressed in from every side.
‘Did you hear that?’ the mercenary hissed.
‘The Damned cry out,’ said Nikolaus, beating a fist softly against his heart.
‘Quite,’ agreed Caul, watching Rudi with a faint smile, as though he were a hound that had just mastered a scandalous trick. He turned back to Gotrek, angling his body, grey cloak draping from an arm outstretched towards the unquiet city. ‘This city has never been shy about the provision of doom.’
Gotrek glanced up at Felix, who swallowed nervously and then shrugged. With a scowl, he stuck his bloodied thumb between his lips and sucked it dry.
‘Fine then, you can all come. The racket you lot are making, you’ll doubtless bring the Beast on our heads and spare me the boot leather.’
Fog closed over the road ahead, spilling from the burned and broken teeth of the tenements that ranged on either side. They were burned out, left to rot until each looked much like another, sagging under their own forgotten weight and the restless memory of the shades that still lingered. Rudi shivered and tried not to look, tried not to listen, following the row of black that plumbed as deep into the fog as the mercenaries’ lantern could reveal.
The lantern flame had been reduced as low as it could be. By unspoken consent, it was agreed that the dark was a lesser worry than whatever might hide within it and be drawn to the light. Footfalls echoed from the blackened shells. It sounded like too many. Even Gotrek seemed on edge, the flagellants restricting themselves to an occasional prayer muttered under the breath. The ruined streets might have stretched on for an eternity. The world might equally have ended at the limits of the lantern’s feeble glow. Rudi had no way to be sure. With every step, the damned city grew darker, until all that remained to convince oneself that up was up and down, down, was the feel of stone beneath one’s boots.
Without weapons, or much idea of what madness had brought him here in such a state, Rudi followed the others. That was all he was really good for. The contempt of Caul and the others haunted him, returning in faceless whispers from the derelicts they passed. They were burned out, condemned, left to rot; partially buried under their own forgotten weight. He hunched deeper into his borrowed cloak, trying to close his ears to the voices on the wind.
‘…left us to die…’
‘…the impious flee…’
Scrunching his eyes, he followed Felix by ear.
The city was quiet but for those imagined whispers. This deathly murmur, the spectral dark. Had he not been able to recall the walk through the gates he would have thought this the Grey Vaults; the quiet realm between death and life that Sigmar had once escaped to live again. It was not an encouraging thought.
‘You are troubled, Brüder Rudolph,’ said Nikolaus. The prophet appeared from the fog beside him, approaching from behind. The skin between his many tattoos was blue with cold, but if the man suffered there was no evidence of it. His severe expression was anything but calming, but at least he was a flesh and blood man. ‘The flesh fails to leave the soul to stand strong. Gird your heart in the steel of faith, and trust that Sigmar turns only from those who turn first from him.’ He looked away, into the formless dark. ‘Even here, he watches.’
Rudi nodded to show that he understood and signed the hammer; twice, as his shaking hands made a mess of the first. He spoke, his own voice a whisper, unable to tear his eyes from the shadows that stalked through the ruined tenements after the light. ‘How does He see this and do nothing?’
‘Who says He does nothing?’ Nikolaus turned his face from the darkness, answering his own rhetorical question with a nod. ‘We are here, are we not? Sigmar is a leader of men, not our saviour.’
Tucking his hands into his armpits, Rudi stared into the fog, unsure whether he understood the hermit’s meaning. The certainty that had brought him this far felt impossibly distant now. ‘He could have done better than me.’
Nikolaus pursed his lips, as though contemplating a fine piece of rhetoric. ‘Sigmar elects his champions, men like von Kuber, and it is not to us to judge them good or ill. The End Times come, and then we will all be judged.’
Rudi felt his cold heart stir in response to the prophet’s words. No one had ever described him as a champion before, nor suggested that Sigmar Himself had chosen him for anything more than clutching a spear in a crusading lord’s rear ranks. The thaw in his soul exposed old, hidden doubts, a blackness he felt a sudden urge to confess.
‘But–’
‘I know you are a sinning man, Brüder Rudolph.’ A stern look greeted the surprise on Rudi’s face. ‘My eyes have not failed yet, and nor am I old enough to be senile. I do not begrudge the second chance that Sigmar offers you. As he once did me.’
Rudi felt his spirit swell, as if Nikolaus had opened him up and filled his body with something warm.
‘May I now confess something to you?’
Astonished, it took Rudi a moment to find an answer. ‘Even in my village, we’d heard of you, Brüder Nikolaus. What could a man like you have to confess to me?’
‘Sigmar can change a man, but He cannot change his past. I have done terrible things, and I have…’ Nikolaus’s expression turned pained and he grunted as his nails dug into a recent cut across his midriff, ‘terrible thoughts.’ he fell silent a moment. The wind whistled its own voice into the emptiness. ‘I came here when I first heard the rumours of von Kuber, and in this city found the most apt punishment for my sins. Men say I stay here to purge its streets of wickedness but that is not the reason.’
‘Then why?’
‘I have the most terrible dreams within these walls. A woman comes to me each night. She is small, almost lik
e a child. She says nothing to me, perhaps I deserve no words, but I feel her anguish. I have wronged many women in my life, Brüder Rudolph, and it does not surprise me that one should wish me damned for it.’ For a moment, Nikolaus’s face adopted a smile. ‘I suffer my penance gladly, but my reasons are selfish ones. I believe that is why Sigmar continues to send me these dreams.’
Unsure what was expected of him, Rudi said nothing at all. Nikolaus nodded seemingly satisfied and the two men joined the others in silence.
The darkness swept through and, hungrily, the shadows closed.
Felix pressed his back to a blackened brick wall, reassured by the solidity of its touch. Blackened and blasted ruins pressed in from left and right. They drowned in murk, shingles rotting over a ruined street. Some had collapsed entirely, spilling rubble into the street that the grim party was forced to climb around, but most remained, hollow brick shells with their door frames, windows, roofs all burned away. Fog padded down the narrow street, probing at entrances long ago consumed by fire, as if scenting warm blood but not able to determine quite where. Feeling foolish for doing so, Felix held his breath, waiting for the next gust of cold wind to carry the fog past.
It was plain that nothing had lived here for a hundred years, yet there was a sense of occupancy, of presence that set Felix’s teeth on edge.
Across the street, made ethereal by mist and moonlight, a flagellant smeared red paint onto the charred frontage of a blistered old hovel. Colour dribbled down the long-handled brush, speckling the man’s fingers red as he applied rough upward strokes. On the completion of a long vertical line, he applied a cross at its summit and then, to finish, a pair of curt strokes to close the left and right hand openings of the cross. Despite the crudity of the job, Felix could see the hammer sigil that had been the painter’s intent. Mirroring the painted hammer with his brush-hand across his chest, the flagellant stepped back, dropping to his knees before the doorway and mouthing a prayer. His task done, he dunked his brush into the pot on the cobbles beside him and, with a creaking that wracked his entire body, rose to shuffle to another wall and begin the process anew.