by David Guymer
Felix leaned out, looking back down the street to ensure they had not managed to misplace any stragglers. There was just one flagellant left behind. The man muttered under his breath, words lost to the shrill wind. Every few paces, he pushed his hand into a pouch that hung from the belt above his groin, pulling out a handful of salt which he then tossed over his head and onto the road.
‘Alms for the damned.’
Felix jumped from the unexpected voice beside him, but it was just Caul, as unwelcome as any restless spirit. Heart beating almost loud enough for the other man to hear, Felix shuffled along the wall away from him. ‘This place is lost. He’s mad even to try.’
‘A shining faith might, to some, seem madness. Götz used to say that Brüder Nikolaus was an example to us all; braving the worst depravations of Chaos, all within sight of Sigmarshafen’s walls.’
‘And those who follow him?’
‘Men will always follow one who is stronger, wiser, more holy.’
Felix regarded the flagellants, struggling through the rubble-strewn lane in defiance of cuts, burns, sores, and missing limbs. ‘Human nature is not always a good thing.’
Caul uttered a soft grunt of agreement. ‘I warned Götz that too many were coming to Sigmarshafen. The City of the Damned was always meant to be forgotten. Instead, thanks to the Beast and the likes of Brüder Nikolaus, its infamy spreads further each day. The baron welcomed newcomers with open arms and promises of holy war. His grandfather would have ridden them down before they were a day out of Osterwald.’ The look on Caul’s face left Felix in no doubt as to whose methods he preferred. ‘This is the result.’
‘What happened to these men?’
‘No one believes that Chaos will afflict them. How could it? Are they not strong of will and of heart? Does Sigmar not love them?’ He pointed out the man who shuffled behind the others with his bag of salt. He had no ears, the stumps bound with bloodied sackcloth. ‘Friedrich was a pious man, a sergeant of the moralpolizei and one of Konrad’s lieutenants. Until one recent morning when he found that his ears had grown spines. He gave himself to Nikolaus’s ministry and now he is here. As are they all. They will die for Sigmar long before they can fail Him again.’
Felix watched the broken man trudge past, a fistful of glittering crystals periodically cast to the roadside in his wake. Fingers doused with cold sweat drummed around the grip of his sword.
‘Perhaps you should have let Konrad destroy this place after all. Gotrek may have complained, but I’d surely not.’
‘Götz wanted nothing more than to destroy this city but he would not. He had a name, a family, and knew what acting against the judgement of the temple could mean. Konrad has none of those things. He will burn this place to the ground and do it with a song. But he must not. An army must never enter the City of the Damned. This much we have always known.’
‘But why? What will happen if Konrad were to come searching for von Kuber?’
Caul’s expression was as static as a serpent. He had not so much as twitched a hair in the devilled wind, but there was something forced in his dispassion. ‘There are no legends of the City of the Damned, Herr Jaeger. You fancy yourself a poet; in Ostermark, every hill hides a barrow, every ford was the site of a tragedy immortalised in song. Yet this place was forgotten.’ He spat on the ground and, off his elbows, pushed himself from the wall. ‘And good riddance to it.’
‘Damn it,’ Felix hissed, grabbing the man by the shoulder and pulling him back around to face him. Caul glowered dangerously, but Felix did not back down. ‘Somehow you know Gotrek and me, and that’s fine. But I don’t like people keeping secrets where my life is concerned.’
‘Not just your life, Jaeger, but your soul. All our souls.’ As Felix absorbed that, Caul shrugged his shoulder from his grip, then slammed Felix back against the wall. Ash rained from the eaves over both their heads. For a moment, Caul pinned him, hands around his biceps like steel bands. Then he let go, glaring balefully as he stepped back and snarled, ‘Don’t touch me again.’
Felix drew up against the wall, rubbing the back of his head as he watched Caul turn and walk away. The fog swallowed him, and poor Brüder Friedrich shortly thereafter. He would have despised the man even had he not been keeping his precious secrets. What had befallen this city that had to remain so well hidden that, even now he was within its walls, Felix could not be trusted with it?
The dead, the burning, the desiccated wastes that surrounded the walls for leagues. This had not been the doing of the Ruinous Powers. Men had done this. If not Magnus the Pious himself, then men like von Kuber’s ancestor who had followed him. They had burned it down, poisoned the earth upon which the ashes rested and then, almost as inconceivable in its own way, consigned their descendants to watch, generation after generation, to ensure that what they left stayed dead. What terror could still dwell within these ruins to justify such a commitment?
He recalled Arch-Lector Gramm and his talk of an evil that even the fire could not destroy. The Beast was fearsome, but Felix had seen it close at hand and reckoned it a creature that would bleed readily enough. If not for him, then certainly for Gotrek. There was something more at work here, something dark in the earth and in the shadows. Felix could feel it, this ‘Master’ that was spoken of by the mindless and in his own dreams. He dreaded the thought of a confrontation with whatever manner of being could hold an entire city under such thrall.
As he was thinking that, a dull moan passed overhead. Felix ducked, looking up. A drift of instinctual dread streamed from rooftop to rooftop between the clouds of fog, fading but never quite dispersing. Like everything else in this city. With an effort of will, he turned his back on the anguished shade and hurried after the departed men. He pressed a hand to his chest. If only his heart was so easily commanded.
There was nothing to be found here.
Wherever he was, he hoped Gotrek was having better luck.
The young man flailed and splashed through the shallow water. He did not cry out; not a scream, not a challenge, not a plea for mercy. It was as if he were nothing but an exhalation of the mist. A low moan escaped his throat as he flopped under. An iron bolt jutted from his shattered collarbone. The dark water ran ruddy as it flowed over him.
‘Hit it again, manling. They’re a stubborn lot.’
Lying flat, crossbow rested on the grey stone of the river wall, the mercenary so addressed bit down on the warm mulch between his teeth and sighted down his stock. The wounded man lurched out of the water and stumbled forward. Water streamed from his corrupted body, making the wound in his neck run from pink to clear. The wound had barely given the mutant pause. The mindless could almost be mistaken for the reanimated dead, if not for the ease with which they bled and died.
Taking his time, Bernhardt Armbruster allowed the mutant to splash closer. Ten feet away. Up to his belly in dark water. Just near enough to distinguish its features from the wisps of fog and shadow. The man’s head was just slightly too large for its body and its arms obscenely mismatched, one no more than a hideous polyp of grasping fingers while the other dragged through the water in a crooked trail of wrists and elbows.
Joints stiff and muscles sore, he took aim, drawing measured breaths through the red linen scarf that was wrapped tightly around nose and mouth. His lavender-scented breath made the coloured fabric clammy against his face. But there had been too many wasting illnesses, too many seeping rashes and crippling pains amongst those who sought their fortune in the City of the Damned. And Captain Bernhardt Armbruster was taking no chances.
Clearly at least half aware of its surroundings, the mutant reached its lengthily articulated limb for the rungs of a mooring ladder. Rusted and covered in a rough brown mould, its half a dozen rungs counted down to the water from where Bernhardt lay. The mutant looked up at him and moaned. Bernhardt fired.
The crossbow’s recoil thumped into the specially thickened wool mesh padding of his right shoulder and flung an iron bolt in the opposite direction
. The bolt struck through the roof of the mutant’s skull, piercing its foul brain and crushing its vertebrae as its tip lodged halfway down its throat. Without a sound, the mutant slapped back into the water. The outrush from one of the many outlets for the city’s sewers forced the body back out into the current, bearing it and its dirty blood cloud downriver.
Bernhardt set down his crossbow, turning his head to offer a scant nod of congratulation to his second, Nils, who lay beside him. The man grinned back, had not even bothered to crank back his whipcord and reload after that initial shot.
‘Easier than shooting at targets,’ said Nils, his smile almost bright enough to compensate for the clouded moon. Like Bernhardt, he wore a face-scarf of scarlet linen, but the younger man had allowed it to slip beneath his jaw like a neckerchief. ‘Targets don’t come closer to give you another shot.’
‘As you say,’ said Bernhardt. He coughed hard, then pulled his knees under his body so that he was kneeling. Calmly slinging his crossbow over his shoulder, he rubbed gum from his bloodshot eyes. The City of the Damned changed a man. He could feel it in his water, in his belly, whispering cold nothings in his ears. He coughed again, clearing the crackling from his lungs.
As empathetic as a plague cart, the dwarf trundled between the two men, stamping his axe loudly down onto the river wall. He tilted up onto tiptoes to peer down. ‘Dwarf sewer?’
‘Yeah, probably.’ Bernhardt thumped his chest until his lungs felt clearer. ‘Never been down there. I hear they’re haunted. Even worse than up here.’
Sweeping his fiercely crested head back and forth along the wall, the dwarf at last gave a grunt and scraped his axe back across the stone. ‘Zombies and ghosts; is this all the damned city has for me?’
‘That was no zombie,’ said Bernhardt, masked face nodding toward the far shore. A cutting wind struck across the water, carving temporary, uncertain shapes into its black surface. Moonlight and a fraught imagination imbued the water’s whisperings with a conscious menace. The mist that occluded that far bank however, remained eerily unmoved, as if it were the emanation of some other plane, a body upon which even the wind dare not impose. ‘They come from the other side.’
‘What’s over there then?’
‘Praise Ulric that I never find out. And if that’s where the baron is, then I say good luck to him.’
The dwarf grunted something stonily monosyllabic and turned away. ‘Things are bloody useless anyway…’
Watching the dwarf stomp back across the derelict wharf, Bernhardt pressed the flaps of his face-scarf to his cheeks, drawing deep on the trapped aroma of lavender wort and Arianka root. The quayside tenements groaned as if the sky itself pressed the fog down upon it. A cold sweat shone from his brow as he unslung his crossbow and, sighting down it, swept the row of crumbling roofs. It was unloaded, but that hardly mattered.
There was nothing there.
‘Caul should have made the Retterplatz crossroads by now.’ He slung his crossbow, casting a last look to the still empty rooftop, chewing harder on his herbs as he suppressed a shudder. He cursed the day he had ever brought his men here.
‘Let’s go.’
Troubled by a growing sense of disquiet, Felix followed the last of the flagellants from the road and onto a large, open square. The flagellants had already disappeared to search the ruins for signs of the Beast. Too impatient, or more likely too terrified, to remain behind, Rudi had gone with them. Felix tried to pick the men out but they were gone. The fog was thick here, enough to consume men whole. The buildings on the sides of the square were naught but shades. Of the far side, he could see nothing, as if it barely belonged to this world at all. The way the fog leapt between the ruins cast a distracting resemblance to dancing flames. Felix could almost hear the crackle of wood.
Retterplatz, Caul had called it. The Place of the Saviour, and a more unlikely name Felix could not conceive. A statue marked the centre of the square, banked within a ring of burned stones. At least it had once been a statue. Now it resembled nothing much more than a stalagmite. The once white rock was pitted and scorched and it was without arms, face, indeed without any human feature at all. Yet it drew his attention.
‘Is that…?’
‘Sigmar?’ Caul finished, the man never far away.
‘Yes,’ Felix breathed. Something in the aspect of formless rock made his hairs prickle.
‘What makes you ask?’
‘I don’t know. I… I feel it.’
‘Then why do you doubt?’
The fog seemed to draw in, the statue growing larger and ever more wreathed in darkness. ‘I haven’t seen a statue of him like this one before.’
‘Sigmar did not forbid the creation of his likeness.’
‘I know…’
Sigmar was a warrior; a leader not a saviour. He encouraged men to stand up for themselves; with faith, courage and steel to oppose the enemies of man. As he watched the statue began to blur and he blinked, rubbing carefully under his eyes. His fingers came away sticky. Curious, he opened his eyes and studied them. His vision was still blurred and a little red. It took a moment for the realisation to hit him. His fingers were covered in blood. His eyes were bleeding!
Clenching a fistful of his breaches in his bloodied hand, he looked to see the statue similarly drenched in blood. Red fluid pumped thickly from the pits in its shapeless body. Stifling a scream of horror, Felix spun around. Caul smiled coldly, still as a statue himself. Blood streamed from the corners of his mouth as well as from his nose, his ears, his eyes. Fingers across his mouth, Felix stumbled back, this time giving in to the scream when it came.
The cry echoed, shared and shared again. The wind laughed darkly through his hair, tangling it before his bleeding eyes as he spun a full circle, sweeping the unruly strands from his brow, unwilling to believe his eyes.
Caul was gone. Nothing where he had been but mist. The road behind him was empty.
He was alone.
The wind picked up. It whispered something, something Felix was too slow to comprehend and, for a moment, the fog cleared. In its place, a darkness bled from the starless sky. As it struck upon the ashes of the city it hissed; spreading outwards, solidifying, redrawing crumbled walls with diaphanous black lines. Felix gaped. The city shimmered, whole but at the same time not, like a picture that showed a different image depending upon how it was viewed.
A prickling sixth sense told Felix that he was being watched.
Spectral outlines, human in suggestion, stood at windows, crowded onto flickering balconies. Everywhere there was space, shimmering bodies were coming into being, boulevards and balconies filled by such an overlay of wavering figures that Felix abandoned the hope of distinguishing one from another. And they kept on coming. He saw them in the street behind him, and across the square. His heart screamed. They stood faceless, their bodies lit by the silver glow of the grave.
And they were not looking at Felix at all.
Unable to control his actions, as if this were nothing but a terrible dream, Felix turned to face Sigmar, the supposed saviour of these tormented souls.
The statue was whole again, but it was no longer Sigmar. Recast in shadow, white had become black. From its fingers there now sprang talons. Beating monstrous wings of inky black, it reached for him. A likeness shivered across its form, recognisably human yet hideously vague. There were horns, a crown.
The Master will rise.
Felix twisted away with a scream, screwed his eyes shut and thrashed his hand through the apparition’s claws. He felt nothing. He had expected an icy chill, a spasm of dark energy, a prickling of pins and needles at the least. He tensed and, when still nothing happened, he unpeeled one eyelid. His vision was clear. He dabbed at his face, winced, his black eye still throbbing bitterly.
‘I’ve said it before manling and I’ll say it again. Yours are an odd lot.’
Gotrek stood over him, both ham-like fists bunched about the haft of his axe.
Heart slowing by painful
degree, Felix swayed upright. A black whirl of dizziness reminded him of the need to breathe. He gave the Slayer an experimental poke and was rewarded with a scowl.
‘Praise Sigmar,’ he breathed.
‘We were already on our way here when we heard yelling,’ said Gotrek, jerking a thumb back to the two mercenaries that stood with loaded crossbows and tense expressions at his back. ‘Just found you two rolling about like pigs in muck.’
‘It was… it was…’ Felix found Caul, just where the man had been.
Shaken, and clearly irritated that it showed, Caul dusted down his cloak. ‘The Damned,’ he finished, breathlessly. ‘Every man, every woman, every child.’ With a snarl that was borne as much in anger as it was in fear, Caul pointed back the way they had come. ‘Forget everything that the priests of Morr or Sigmar have said to you out there. Within these walls, there is no salvation. This is what it means to be truly damned.’
As fiercely as he endeavoured not too, Felix recalled the rank upon rank of faceless shades that he had seen, so numerous that their outlines intermingled with others, and with others, and with others. Like trying to squeeze too many letters onto a page until what was left was illegible and could hardly any longer be called words. Was that why they had no faces, he wondered? Were they simply too numerous, too forsaken, to be remembered? The world may have forgotten them, but they remembered the world. They remembered how to hate. Felix could still feel the heat of it in his chest. And the statue.
He felt the need to check again. It was as it had been.
Pitted.
Scorched.
But there was something else beneath that broken facade. Like a caged beast, something tense and full of rage snarled beneath the surface. It calmed as Felix’s heart slowed. But it was still there. Still angry.