by David Guymer
He checked himself, then winced, a dull ache like a coming migraine behind his eyes. This place had clearly muddled his thinking.
He would take the information to Captain Seitz and to Arch-Lector Gramm. Of course, that was what he had meant.
After several minutes squelching through filth, the ruins gave way to a wide gravel shore. The river shimmered beneath the fog, like a shield set above a frosty hearth. Felix could see the mutants toiling on the bar. He paused, watching the boatmen and the dredgers work the straits. Their calls rang hollow through the mists. As if they were not fully there. Circling his gaze to the outer, incurved, face of the bar, Felix saw a gang of dredgers working a net that snaked out into mists beneath an articulated boom. The wooden segments thunked together in the current, muffled by fog, like the falling of axes upon an executioner’s block. Ghostly in the murk, a black-hulled smack glided in silence, its single cotton sail trimmed, a silver hand glittering dully on its starboard prow. The boom tied it to the bar like an astral tether. Felix felt a sudden nausea.
The craft looked disturbingly familiar to one he had just seen destroyed.
The mutants bore him onto the shingle and he had little time to dwell on his disquiet. The shingle was littered with driftwood, around which gulls stalked the rock pools for mussels and stranded fish. The birds glowered as Felix crunched past and did not trouble themselves to flee. The odour was repellent, the chilling breath of the river as nothing to the stink of bird droppings, rotten kelp and the thinly disguised bite of corruption.
Morschurle and their escort were heading towards the riverbank and slightly upriver, towards a stub-nose jetty where a bonfire blazed upon the shingle by the decking. The fire burned silver-black and partially transparent. It gave off a smoke that coiled through the fog into strangely human forms and emitted no heat that Felix could feel.
He shuddered, telling himself it was the cold. There was a mugginess to the air, but the fog and the wind that gusted through it had teeth of ice. They brought whispers from the other side and the remembrance of cold. Shivering still, Felix followed Morschurle and the others to the fire.
The mutated river-folk clustered around it. Some sat in wicker chairs, but most were cross-legged on the pebbles. The air popped as the dried kelp packed beneath the fire sizzled and burst. The wind ruffled Felix’s long hair into tangles, and was cold enough to convince the mutants around the fire to keep their heads down and their mildewed shawls tight.
But it did not touch the fire at all.
Felix turned deliberately from that uncanny blaze, looking the short slope down to the jetty. A pair of two-man skiffs butted either side. Their hawsers floated in furry coils, long enough so as not to drag the boats under with each rising tide.
Morschurle moved to the fire, untroubled by its strangeness, and warmed his palms. His charms gleamed darkly.
The seated mutants murmured greetings to the reeve, and to the others as they moved to sit amongst them, but Felix felt their eyes linger on him. They counted his two arms and ten fingers, judged the symmetry of his face, the shade of his skin, the simplicity of his form.
He could feel their hatred, their envy.
They wanted to string him from the gate towers. They wanted to be him.
Despite himself, Felix moved nearer to the fire. Still he felt nothing from it. It was an illusion of flame.
One of Ologul’s warriors shoved Nikolaus into a chair. The flagellant mumbled through the oiling rag that a mutant had stuffed into his mouth and did not try to rise.
The young girl, Mori, dropped the sack of bones at her father’s side, then buried herself under his arm. She stared into the fire, and then at Felix, trying to pretend that she was not. She looked familiar but Felix was too beset by feelings of unease to figure out how.
‘Who would have believed it?’ Morschurle murmured, apparently for the attention of the fire. ‘The bones of Kharduun the Gloried exist after all.’
‘The bones belonged to a man?’ said Felix, trying to shake off the crawling unease and think. The name struck him as familiar but still he could not quite think. It took longer than he liked to remember. It had been mentioned in one of the forbidden texts belonging to Doktor Drexler, when the Nuln physician had been aiding him in his researches of the skaven. As hard as he forced, he could not recall the context. ‘Is Kharduun the Master?’
‘He was the Mashter’sh champion,’ said Ologul, leaning stiffly to deposit a blade-rimmed buckler from his back to the ground by the fire. ‘In the time after the punishment there were many warbandsh that fought for the city and itsh wyrdshtone, but Kharduun wash bleshed and none could rival him.’
Felix hugged his chest, exhaling a plume of fog. He noticed that mist shrouded no other mouth but his.
‘Clearly, someone defeated him,’ said Felix, unwrapping a finger to indicate the bone pile.
Morschurle looked up from the fire, finding Ologul’s gaze waiting and nodded, turning back to the silver flames.
‘It has long been believed by some that Kharduun was not just the Master’s champion, but that he was the Master.’ Morschurle gave a short laugh, and rubbed his daughter’s back, releasing her so as to squat down beside the black sack. He untied its neck and gazed inside like an oracle into a seeing pool. ‘So ambitious was the Dark Master, so it is said, that the Ruinous Powers united to strip him of his body, damning him to immortality without form. But Dhar is strong here, enabling him to claim a mortal host, Kharduun, and cheat the gods’ curse.’
Felix tilted his face from the chilling blaze, disturbed by the caw of the gulls that circled the clouded shallows.
‘It didn’t work out, I assume.’
‘His power was too great, even for a mighty champion of ruin. The body he took burned to naught but bones. Those bones were found, separated and taken, scattered throughout the city and beyond.’ Morschurle smiled, face aglow with a possessive lust, almost as if the bones themselves shone with their own dark power. ‘But now a fraction of the daemon’s power is mine to wield. Now we can fight back, retake our city and sway its followers back to Sigmar. We can be united when the Pious comes, impress upon him our conviction.’
‘You think a shcrap of the Mashter’sh hosht will help against the daemon himshelf?’ Ologul turned to Felix, as if seeking the support of a fellow sword. ‘They shay he tried to shet himshelf ash a god, to become the fifth great power, and that wash why he wash casht down. And thish is the daemon he would have ush fight.’
‘Better than fleeing across the water as you would have us do,’ Morschurle replied quietly. ‘Remind me how many of your scouts have returned from the other side?’
‘I would shtill take my chancesh with the Pioush.’
Felix put his hand to his forehead and closed his eyes, fending off the wave of unease.
Something here was wrong. The air was warm when Ostermark stole itself against the march of winter. At the same time, he alone shivered with cold. The Chaos moon was full in the sky. The mutants spoke in a cryptic dialect of Sylvanian, and spoke of the Pious as if expecting the revered saviour of the Empire to lead a flotilla upriver at any moment. Either they were ignorant of the passage of time or warpstone in water and soil had addled them in mind as much as in body. Likely, they simply conflated the threat posed by Götz von Kuber with that his ancestor had brought upon theirs. But that did not ring true, even to Felix. The mutants were certain. And something was wrong.
‘You believe the Pious is coming,’ he murmured. ‘Emperor Magnus the Pious?’
Morschurle pinched his lips, regarding him through arched brows. ‘His elevation by the electors will be a formality, I am sure, but yes. Our last missive said that the Great War was over, and that Magnus’s general, our own Baron Albrecht von Kuber, was escorting him here. First to Sigmarshafen to muster, and then…’
He trailed off. Ologul looked grim.
Felix felt a memory jostling for notice amongst the confusion of thoughts. He had read this somewhere, he knew it
. It was a forbidden history, and certainly not one he had learned in the libraries of Altdorf University. After achieving victory in Kislev, Magnus had returned through the northern provinces, Ostland or Ostermark had been the scholar’s guess, to destroy a city so lost to Chaos as to be beyond salvation. Every brick and every stone had been burned, every record of its existence and hence of its fall expunged. Well, nearly every record. Felix had definitely read of this somewhere.
But if he had read this…
And Emperor Magnus was two centuries dead.
Felix’s gaze washed over the mutants around the fire, those that sailed the straits and dredged for flotsam. He recalled the sentry towers, the warding stones, the patrols that swept the moors of Ostermark to this day, the salted earth that Nikolaus had diligently maintained, the insistences of Schlanger and Gramm that this place be forgotten. And he felt that same feeling; that his warm body shared the ground with the dead.
He returned to Morschurle, trying to keep his voice calm.
‘What year is this?’
Morschurle gave the question a depth of thought it surely did not deserve. Time enough for Felix’s mouth to run dry.
‘The year stretches interminably,’ he spoke at last, ‘yet the season does not change.’ He squinted skyward, as though a glimpse of the Chaos moon through the maelstrom could reveal anything that was true. ‘Sun and moons cannot lie, and by their measure it remains the month of Nachgeheim, in the two thousand three hundred and third year since the crowning of Sigmar.’
Felix closed his eyes, clutching himself tight.
‘No,’ he murmured. ‘No, no, no, that’s not possible.’
Was it possible?
He found himself thinking back to an old philosophy professor who would posit theory after theory to explain how magic today was so much weaker than it must have been in ancient times. The professor had once claimed to have acquired an ancient scroll, which he had proudly shown despite there being none amongst his students able to interpret the writings of the asur, which spoke of a great ritual performed when the world was young. It had been a working of the elves’ greatest masters and had drawn the magic from the world, sequestered it at the heart of the elves’ island home. As a consequence, he had claimed, those mages were now trapped in time, condemned to re-enact their earth-shaping ritual in perpetuity.
Felix had not been surprised when that professor was quietly relieved of his teaching duties.
But what if it were true. Could something similar have befallen the City of the Damned? Did the power to accomplish such a feat still exist in the world? Or rather, had it existed, two centuries past?
Which still left the question of why.
It was clear from the faces of the mutants around him that his question would find no answers from them. As far as they were concerned it was the year 2303. It had been for two hundred years, and it would continue to be until the end of days.
Little wonder that crossing the mists had stricken his mind.
Felix attended the gathered mutants more closely. He recognised them. Whatever damage the passage through time inflicted, it seemed to work both ways, for these were the mindless mutants he had seen slaughtered on the other side. And the boat, the sleek black shade that haunted the mist; he recognised that too. He understood now the shadows he saw upon these men and women, and the whispers upon the crackling fire. These people were dead.
They were going to flee this place as Ologul wished, and they were going to die.
Felix’s neck tightened. He trawled his thoughts for a more rational explanation but could find none.
A long blast from a horn scattered his attempts at thought like the startled gulls that lifted noisily to wing. Their harsh calls sounded like an evil chant, the rustle of the flight’s hundreds of wings beating the air like drums. Noisily they settled, skimming back to the shingle and to the water.
And Felix could still hear drums. He could still hear chanting.
A look of worry circled Ologul’s molten features and he turned due east, in the direction of the horn. His pincer snipped out a nervous tattoo.
‘It will be Iascu’s scouts returning home,’ said Morschurle. ‘It is one sound for friend, and two for–’
The horn blew a second time. The assembled river-folk fell still.
‘Two for the Dark Mashter,’ Ologul finished.
‘It will be another raid,’ Morschurle stated calmly, standing protectively over his precious bones. ‘Everyone should return to their homes.’
A handful of the seated mutants had begun to rise when Nikolaus suddenly thrashed in his chair, screaming into his gag. Felix pulled the oily rag from his mouth, almost losing a finger in the flagellant’s mindless determination to be heard.
‘To every man comes his time,’ he blurted, causing his chair to creak as his agitation grew. His withered torso shone with fever sweat. ‘Every time has a purpose. A doom approaches, the doom of all, so be courageous.’
The mutants stared as the prophet’s fit subsided. The shadows shaped masks of terror.
But Nikolaus was not quite done. He shivered as though, despite his sheen of sweat, the eldritch fire chilled him. He gazed east to where the march of witchfire was just beginning to sear the eastern parapet, showing a brilliant sliver of crimson like a false dawn.
‘The End Times come.’
Chapter 15
The Gloried
The clash of drums beat upon the walls of Die Körnung. The pound of feet and the harsh chants of the Damned made them tremble. From their ramparts, the horn sounded twice more in succession, the same outcry peeling down the length of the wall, racing from the source of the alarm in terror. Men galloped from barracks and guard towers to attend the walls. Their bronze armour rattled until, one by one, they stiffened and spun, shields fore, locking into a wall of oak and pine with a rolling shudder. Yelling curses and oaths, the defenders stamped their spears upon the battlements. Crossbow bolts whined from guard towers, horns blared from both sides of the wall, monsters bellowed, drums pounded like anxious hearts.
And into that din screamed the families of Die Körnung.
From balconies and revetments, roped ladders were flung, men and women leaping after them before the bottom rungs had hit the ground. Some clutched spears or battered swords, running with the lopsided gait of men buckling armour on the run. They were the selfless few and the majority fled, tiny rivulets running through the alleys to become streams that fed the panic into a surge for the river.
Directly in their path, Felix watched them come with a sinking feeling.
‘It ish not a raid,’ said Ologul, eyeing the twisting shadows that witchfire bade dance against the high towers of the township. ‘The Hand ish loaded and ready to shail. We have boatsh enough to get all to the other shide.’
‘No one leaves,’ said Morschurle, calmly rising to confront his fleeing people. ‘We are not defenceless. Get these people armed and get them to the walls.’
‘And what of your daughter?’ said Ologul, gesturing the girl with his crab-like hand. ‘Ish she to die by my shide?’
Morschurle twitched, but did not answer. He squatted down beside his daughter, stroked her hair down her cheek, then held firm her jaw as if fearful of letting go. ‘Take the bones and run home. Bar the door and do not open it until I return.’
‘I thought not,’ Ologul muttered, but hefted his buckler and turned into the coming crowd nonetheless.
Morschurle turned back, looked past his commander of the guard and gesticulated to the boatmen and gangmasters that crowded the shore.
‘Cast off. Nobody boards.’
‘Are you inshane? We’ll have no eshcape.
‘The walls, Ologul,’ said Morschurle, already hitching up his tattered robes and running up the shore.
Ologul scowled but, seeing no alternative started after him. His warriors, still dressed for battle, were quick to form up. Following their leader’s example, a handful of the running mutants fell in behind Ologul�
��s warriors, but most were still fanning across the shore like a swollen estuary, running wild for the open water. And a good number were coming towards Felix.
Just downriver, a mob blundered into the water alongside a laden skiff and dragged its pilot into the water. The craft tipped wildly as a dozen men and women each fought to board. Felix looked over his shoulder, through the transparent bonfire to where the two boats were still tethered to the jetty. Beyond it and the capsized wrecks that littered the boating lanes, the black wraith of the craft Ologul called the Hand drifted through the fog.
These people were going to die. He could not let them board that boat.
Leaving the wall to Ologul and the others, Felix retreated to the jetty. The planking creaked beneath his weight. A mutant man barrelled after him through the bonfire in a cascade of sparks. His wet clothes were singed, his hair like dank mould, his brow lathered with terror. And he was not alone. No sooner had Felix registered his appearance than five more charged around the fire and through. He saw Nikolaus thrown from his chair, disappearing under the stampede that followed.
Felix raised his sword high above his head as the mutants closed. Fear widened their eyes as they saw the blade gleam with a pink fire. This was madness. This was someone else’s madness.
And he would end it here.
The sword came streaking down. The lead mutant screamed as the blade clove through the sodden hawser tethering the first boat. Cursing Sigmar for these poor souls’ fate, he drove his boot into the craft’s side and shoved it out. The current bore it downriver. The mutants wailed and veered from the jetty, crashing into the water after it. A dozen pairs of hands had the skiff from both sides. The water seethed as more joined the fray.
‘You can’t leave,’ Felix yelled above the splashes and cries. ‘You mustn’t!’
They were too far gone to hear, and Felix doubted he could have made them heed his words even had he been able to explain.