by David Guymer
Surrounded by a gaggle of black-garbed supervisors, a squat and grime-cloaked figure turned from a busy section of the rock face. Needle teeth gleamed a sickly yellow as a paw cleared Ubek’s three eyes of hair.
‘We have… found it, Morzanna. It is… here.’ The animalistic sorcerer beat a ponderous paw against the wall and grinned. The ratmen chittered softly. ‘Do you hear… that?’
Morzanna scowled. Steam-drills whistled, bound souls raged, countless mutants beat hammered hands against the wall, and she heard nothing.
‘It is… hollow. The shadow-paths to the Master’s temple are… here.’
One of the ratmen sloped forward. Its eyes were dim, its posture hunched, not out of submission but from sheer apathy. Morzanna sought within its hood for a glimmer of recognition, but there was none.
‘We dig-dig all around, great-many tail-lengths,’ he murmured blankly, then waved a palsied paw bound in rags, barely fingers enough to grasp his doubly-barbed whip. ‘That way, deep-deep.’
‘Why the delay? The ritual is almost prepared. The final pieces are being gathered now.’
Ubek sneered. His head rolled around his bloated neck to the ratman who had landed himself the role of mouthpiece. The skaven was neither honoured nor distressed. It was as if breathing was a torture, and speaking no less.
‘Wall is hard-rock, lots-many metals and layered. Makes dig-dig hard.’
Morzanna touched the surface where the other sorcerer had. She could feel the power that bled through. It warped the surrounding space, making the daemon-engines strain against their soul-cages and the pink horrors gibber. Ubek’s sightless eye shimmered a blinding silver.
‘Has it been so long that you have forgotten the meaning of haste? Tear this wall apart!’
The skaven dropped its snout in habitual obeisance. ‘Yes-yes, most malignant of white mistresses.’
Ubek was wearing the same clumsy smirk as he pawed muck through his lank thicket of hair. ‘This is not… why I… summoned you. Golkhan looks… for you. Your… pet rat was ambushed and… lost his prize.’ He chuckled slowly, as if copying a memory as to how. ‘Would you still have us… hurry, Morzanna?’
Morzanna glared at him, hatred of the man still warring with disbelief when she spun away.
‘You have not asked… who took the bones or… where they were… taken.’
‘Because I am not a fool,’ she snarled back.
Ubek panted, laughter flecking his grimy chin with spittle. ‘You could have destroyed… that place any… time. Do you claim… you can?’
Morzanna rounded on the grimy sorcerer. The ratmen slouched by his side, unmoved by Ubek’s announcement of their kin-rat’s fate. But then they knew better. Damnation was forever.
‘Stay here and dig. That is what you are good for. I will bring the Master his prize.’
Rudi heard footsteps draw closer, padded by the falling ash. With a frightened yell, he spun, bringing up his sword for a downward hack at whatever spectre had trailed him from the mists. It was a cloaked figure, tall and lithe, and with a swift lunge caught his wrist as it was high above his head. Rudi gave a startled yelp, then doubled over with a whimper and a mailed knee in his groin. His sword clattered to the ground, fingers suddenly like grass. He scratched pitifully at darkly tinted mail as his legs caved. Ash billowed out where he fell, making him choke. A knife materialised from the fog at his throat.
Lying supine, unable to feel his legs below the agony that was his groin, Rudi focused on the blade and tried not to swallow, followed the wiry arm that held it all the way to a hard face. Its coarse blond stubble was smeared with blood, its green eyes wild.
‘I’m unhappy, Herr Hartmann,’ hissed Caul Schlanger, forcing the flat of his knife into Rudi’s throat. Blood trickled from the younger man’s jaw where the blade bit. ‘Ask me why.’
Rudi squirmed under the knife. His eyes pleaded.
Caul tutted, leaning down to pin Rudi’s forehead with his free hand. ‘I said, ask me why.’
‘Why?’ Rudi choked. Speaking made the blade cut deeper. Blood trickled down his neck.
‘Why what?’ Caul sneered as he leaned closer.
Rudi could smell the gore on his face. Was this Sigmar’s punishment for him, to come so close to redemption and be butchered like a swine?
‘Why are you unhappy?’
‘You’re a rare animal, Hartmann. You’re a man who does as he is told when he is told to. I like that. It’s orderly.’ Caul’s cruel smile became a snarl. ‘Corner the Beast and trap it, I said. Was that too much even for cowards, poets, and damned fools?’ Blade suckling thirstily at Rudi’s throat, he craned his neck to the strange black snow. ‘Now, thanks to all of you, I find myself in a hell reserved for Sigmar’s special sinners. Little wonder the world goes to Chaos in a coracle, for Herr Schlanger is its last bastion of order.’
‘I can help,’ Rudi moaned, forcing himself to lie still yet desperate to cup his groin and still the pain. ‘My life is Sigmar’s. I never meant to leave this city.’
‘Spoken like a martyr.’ Caul sneered, withdrawing his knife and roughing it clean in Rudi’s fringe before returning it to his baldric and rising. ‘Dear Nikolaus would be so very proud.’
Rudi felt out his bruised groin and groaned, staring dumbly up until Caul kicked him in the side. Rudi snapped alert, blocking the second kick off his elbow and getting stiffly to his feet.
Caul chuckled coldly at the younger man’s vengeful glare. ‘What happened to the others? Gurnisson, Armbruster, they were all gone when I followed the last of the vermin from the sanatorium.’
Rudi rubbed his side, looking to where his sword lay, remembering a madman’s scream as it had pierced his chest.
‘Hartmann!’
‘Gone,’ Rudi managed, ‘though I saw Felix cross the bridge before me. It was a matter of minutes, he can’t have gotten far.’
‘You still have no idea where we are, do you. I thought there was no secret safe from peasant’s gossip. I never thought I’d be glad to be proven wrong.’ He turned, peering into the black surrounds before, seemingly at random, starting off downriver.
Rudi hastened after him, dodging back as he remembered to collect his sword, then hurrying in his silently filling footprints. ‘Aren’t you going to tell me where we are?’
‘Even if it were a question of where we are, then I still would not.’
‘At least tell me where we’re going.’
Caul pointed through the snow to their left. Jagged tusks of shadow loomed in the middle distance, surrounded by an indeterminate haze of formless black.
‘To the first place you look for one as devout as Baron Götz von Kuber – the temple of Sigmar.’
‘And what…’ Rudi shuddered, eyeing the black drifts that descended over the city. ‘What if there are more shades?’
Caul turned back, soulless green eyes like painted lead.
‘This is the City of the Damned, boy, be assured there will be.’
Chapter 14
A Doom Comes
‘Sigmar is with you, through the oceans and the rivers…’
Felix tried to hide his disappointment, felt guilty for it. The other of which Morschurle spoke was not Gotrek.
Nikolaus Straum stumbled through the sand between the marching warriors, occasioning a brusque shove to keep him from wandering into the river. The cuts to his wrists testified to Felix’s earlier, apparently successful, efforts to cut him loose.
‘…and the waters will not overwhelm you, and when you walk through the fire it shall not burn you.’
The flagellant was looking at no one when he spoke, his eyes glazed and wandering. Felix wondered if the man was drugged but it was something more than that. It was tendrils of what looked like smoke that clouded the flagellant’s eyes, and his forehead and tattooed chest were lathered by a fever of the mind.
‘Nikolaus,’ Felix whispered, laying a hand upon the stump of his right shoulder and giving it a shake.
The f
lagellant’s gaze drifted across the water’s fog. ‘Remain faithful, Brüder Grahl. As we purged the north of Chaos, so we shall this accursed city.’
Felix shuddered. The flagellant’s mind was clearly elsewhere, but something in what he said made sense and that was what made Felix’s skin crawl. He followed the flagellant’s gaze across the water, watched it disturb the mist with its passage like a cold wind beneath a lady’s dress. On some level he too felt the presence of Brüder Grahl, shared the dead man’s fears.
‘He will not shpeak shenshe,’ Ologul reminded him. The big warrior marched at the column’s rear, deliberately close to Felix and Nikolaus. Morschurle insisted the two men were guests, but Felix was not so sure.
‘He ish mindlesh.’
Felix ignored him, seeking a spark of self in Nikolaus’s eyes. There was none. But the shadow upon him was different to that which hollowed the mutants. Tendrils leached across eyes, and mouth. As if something was trying to get in.
‘There were others with him,’ he spoke at last.
‘We did shee others, but the ratsh retreated to a ruin, and took their captivesh with them.’ The mutant drooled grimly, moistening his neck. ‘Morschurle brought it on their headsh with magic. Killed everyone inshide. I should know becaushe I had to take Mori through the rubble to find hish bonesh.’
Felix looked up, tracking the column on its downriver march to where the reeve and his young daughter took point.
‘A little dangerous for a child.’
‘She ish a sheeresh ash powerful ash her father. It wash her vishion that forecasht the croshing of the Beasht. It ish she that feelsh the power in the bonesh.’
‘So there is some power to them,’ Felix mused. ‘I wonder what the skaven want with them.’
Ologul said nothing, nodding in time to his lopsided stride. Felix fell silent, listening to the tramp of feet and the clatter of bronze. The river whispered softly, drifting past with a pace only slightly swifter than their own. The air was warm, but the wind that gusted across its body cut like a knife of edged darkness.
‘Brüder Fritsch, what answers do you seek in the fire? Is it not enough to know only that it burns?’
Ologul gave a soft slurp. He sounded wearied, his claw dragged in the sand as he shoved the flagellant away from the water.
‘The ratsh are shlavesh to the Dark Mashter. Shome of our own kind sherve him gladly, but it ish shaid the ratsh do sho in return for wyrdshtone. Hish temple ish to the easht.’
The mutant directed his human left hand that way. Spires and towers were visible in the fog like the spines of some slumbering beast. There was no sign of any temple. But he felt something, an emptiness in his gut, that made him shiver. It was that name.
Dark Master.
It had been muttered by the mindless within their cage in Sigmarshafen. He had heard it from the lips of a statue in the Retterplatz. Now it came in the slobbering rasp of a mutated brute beneath a burning sky and in the presence of… something he could only feel and not begin to describe. It had never yet chilled him more. Arch-Lector Gramm had spoken of a daemon in the city. One that fire could not purge. He had not spoken the name Master, but it was likely that the two were the same. The understanding was not a reassuring one.
For Felix had no desire to be alone with a madman in a haunted city that was ruled by a daemon even the Pious could not slay.
‘Who… what is the Dark Master?’
‘A daemon from the dawn of man. We know where he liesh but he ish too powerful and in any cashe hash no body to shlay. All we can do ish wait, maybe one day run, brave the misht ourshelvesh.’
Felix shivered and said no more. He had learned enough to worry him to his core.
A single horn sounded from up ahead and Felix looked up.
Caught in a wide meander the river ahead broadened into a horseshoe-shaped vastness of shimmering pink half a league across. Within that bow of water there was a crescent bar of gritty sand. It crawled with distant figures, as did the sheltered straits between it and the riverbank. The slow-moving water was crowded with nets, lines, flat-bottomed craft and wading men. Beneath the tenacious cawing of gulls, they worked to haul the detritus of the river into a half-flooded district of ruined stone that these mutants called home. It clung to the bend of the river like a scab to a man’s elbow.
The mutants called it Die Körnung, the grit, and the name was apt.
The horn had sounded from a tall building that had been fortified and converted into a guard tower. It was part of a square array of such structures, connected by sloping walls of compacted rubble. The fiery sky caught off crossbow bolts and javelin heads across its length. Directly ahead of the returning warriors, abutting the river, there was a gate. It seemed to be the only one
‘And Magnus did find a sickness in that place,’ Nikolaus murmured. ‘He returned to them with faith and with fire and did say to them: repent, for the kingdom of Sigmar is come to you.’
‘Shut him up,’ Ologul slurped gesturing to one of the warriors with his more-human left hand. ‘I don’t want to hear that name shpoken.’
‘Sigmar will wipe away every tear, and with death then death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain. For the End Times come, and all that came before will pass away.’
‘What’s he saying?’ said one of the mutant soldiers.
‘Pay him no mind. He’sh mindlesh.’
A vile chant filled the city’s streets, following the flickering line of braziers and steel that snaked into the maze of ruins and all the way back to the acropolis. Its length bristled with billhooks and pikes like a barbed serpent, armour shimmering as if it was sheathed in mail. To the rear of the host, bunched like a club tail, ratmen were goading huge spawn from Golkhan’s amphitheatre. They bristled with twisted strength, confused by the change on the wind, their warped bellows igniting the sky like lightning to the chanting mutants’ thunder.
Their voices were raised in discordant praise of the Dark Master. Chaos was his essence and he was revered by many names.
He was the godless; the accursed divine. And he would rise.
Morzanna shifted, uncomfortable in the saddle of the massive sable-coated destrier. It had been offered as a token from one of Golkhan’s pathetically devoted subordinates, given with the air of one for whom horsemanship was as natural a part of life as drinking and whoring. The condescension, the ill-tempered lust; it reminded her of the Sigmarites whose dreams she often shared. How she despised them. She could have smote the man’s eyes with Tzeentchian flame.
She allowed herself the slenderest smile, patting her mount’s powerful neck. Her claws knotted through its mane and she tugged cruelly.
In a multiverse of infinite probabilities, all things were possible.
The horse snorted in fright. Its eyes were wide, alighting in dull, animal horror upon the misshapen monsters that marched alongside.
She had lived here.
Some distance ahead yet, the river reflected the sky’s aurora, a ribbon of amethyst and tourmaline that wound between the ruins of home. It was not just the telltale broadening of the water that told her they were close. She remembered these streets, how they had looked and how they had smelled in every one of a hundred times. A storm of mortal memories caught her unawares.
She had lived.
Here.
A dull ache clenched her jaw. Golkhan rode ahead with, at the warrior’s demand, Nosta at the rear. Morzanna had risen too far to show weakness to either now. The ruins of Die Körnung had been settled at the Dark Master’s subtle behest, its expansion according to a fate he conceived, its survival a consequence only of his desire. Its people had lived the dream of freedom, but were about to waken to learn just how provisory was the benefaction of a god.
For if Morzanna could not destroy her home, then those other champions assuredly would.
The gate of Die Körnung was a hole in the wall, barred by a pile of timber lashed together by a corroded chain. The gate was
open now, hoisted by a group of obscenely muscular mutant guards with the aid of a straightforward block and tackle. The column tramped through the gate, the guards reserving a wave for Morschurle and then for Ologul at the party’s rear. There was a whistle from the gate tower, there was a zip of cord as the pulley was released and the stack of logs unravelled to come crashing down behind them.
Felix could not shake the feeling that he was being sealed into a tomb.
The place stank like a sewer and likely was. The faecal damp was everywhere; in the rocks that sagged into the soft earth, upon the children that picked over the morass for anything that did not fall apart in their hands. On every wall a brownish crust five feet from the ground marked high tide and under every algae-stuffed crack there lingered a shadow. Felix’s gaze swept side to side, Ologul shoving him forward whenever he hesitated.
The settlement’s most disturbing aspect was not something he could see, nor even smell.
Shadows thrown by nothing living followed him. Walking these streets, these men around him, made the hairs on the back of his neck tingle with disquiet. It was like looking upon a grave, feeling the dead man’s hand upon his shoulder.
Felix wondered what he was doing here. The Beast had been slain and Gotrek had earned a doom worthy of his deeds in the doing of it. He supposed he still had to remind himself that battling daemons was no longer his responsibility. And it was true, that his mind was still not working quite as it should. He would stay for a time, he decided, get some food, get some rest, learn what he could about the Dark Master and, when he figured out how to broach the subject, about the whereabouts of von Kuber. He would take what he learned back to Sigmarshafen and to the ears of the Pio–