by David Guymer
Stiffly Felix rose. He had it in his mind to chase after the ratman, but he ached like the end of the world and one look at the bristling wall of billhooks disavowed him of any thoughts of heroics. Mutant soldiers in leather and bronze limped past him, part of a weary counter-charge that was bludgeoning its way over the hold-outs and towards the breach. Felix bent, winced, and recovered his sword, wondering if it had always been this heavy, and joined them.
Blood was a great leveller.
The left side of Felix’s face was puffed around his black eye. Gore dyed his blond hair crimson and pasted it to his face. His gait was hunched, exhausted, his sword dragging like a broken limb. He appeared no finer than any within these walls – and in that he counted the dead no less than the living.
The sounds of continuing battle raged from beyond the wall.
Perhaps there was still hope.
With just a score of battered warriors at his side, Felix crested the breach to look out onto the killing field beyond. The cleared ruins and been cloven in two by the fissure that had demolished the walls. The great trench jagged towards a point at the centre of a crater on the far side of the clearing. It had split the Chaos host almost completely in two. It was difficult to see in the fog, but Felix judged anywhere between fifty and two hundred men retreated in a narrow line across the clearing. Their withdrawal was orderly, those still intent on fighting either inside the city already or bleeding into its soft ground.
The battle Felix had heard was being fought to his left, the direction of the riverside gatehouse. The Chaos forces there were being beaten back, confusion spreading as some other force assaulted their flank.
Felix caught a flash of orange hair and a familiar roar as a starmetal axe severed an arm from a mutant’s body. His mouth caught itself in a smile. He lifted his sword so the mutants beside him might see and be encouraged.
And then he charged into the killing ground towards an army of Chaos.
Panic was a contrivance of Chaos, if any facet of nature so universal ever could be. It snarled from the helms of billmen, displayed its vigour with bristling billhooks and the virile scent of saltpetre and sweat.
Buffeted by fleeing warriors, Morzanna watched in astonishment – and a little satisfaction – as the host of Golkhan the Anointed dissolved before her eyes.
‘It is one dwarf!’ Golkhan howled, loud enough to make Morzanna wince and raise her hands to her ears.
The warrior’s steed stamped and shook out its mane, until Golkhan finally exhausted his patience and hauled so hard on the reins that the daemon’s fore hooves were dragged from the ground. It snorted defiance until Golkhan smashed a gauntlet into its champron. Blood ran from the eye hole, streaming over the dried gore that caked its muzzle. It whinnied. Golkhan raised a fist and it fell silent.
‘It is afraid, black lord,’ said Morzanna, raising a placating hand that itself dripped with horseflesh.
‘Daemons are animals. They understand stronger wills, and pain when that will is defied. And like animals, they cannot fear.’
Morzanna’s lip curled before she caught it. The warrior’s ignorance was almost as stunning as his pride.
‘This dwarf is vision-sent, black lord. A champion of light and not here by chance. The weapon he bears is the bane of daemonkind. Your horse recognises this better than you.’
‘This champion is small, like a quail’s egg, and I will crush him as one.’
Morzanna bowed low. ‘It will be glorious, black lord.’
Golkhan caressed the neck of his now docile mount, steel scraping steel, then turned on Morzanna with a voice colder and no less hard. ‘I am new to your schemes, witch, but do not mistake me for a fool.’
Morzanna forced a smile, suddenly conscious of the grey cloaks and tinctured mail that surrounded her and their lord.
‘The bearded pest is not the only one with a destiny. I am to be Everchosen of Chaos. The herald of the End Times promises this is so.’
‘But, lord–’
‘But nothing!’ Golkhan roared, slamming his fist into his mount’s barding, then singling out one of the men at Morzanna’s back. The man stepped forward. His face was blackened with gunpowder smoke. The colour matched the thick curls of his head and the short crust of his beard.
‘I am not some mindless berserker to be tempted by a worthy foe, nor a hapless dilettante to be swayed by the forked tongue of a comely witch.’ Golkhan spat the last, before dismissing her from sight in favour of his summoned man.
‘Send the gladiator spawn to cover our retreat. Let our sorceresses witness the emptiness of their hearts.’
Felix fended a blow, creatures fleeing on all sides in a clattering blur of faces and weaponry. The mutant swordsman grunted and came again, lazily thrusting for the exact same spot on Felix’s chest. Felix caught the blade with his, deftly twisted it from the mutant’s grip, then kneed the creature in the groin. It doubled over Felix’s shoulder, a gasp of vile air washing past his ear and he rammed his pommel stone into its belly. It fell off him, crashing over a rump of rubble.
Felix shook hair from his eyes and, with a wince, tested out his knee joint.
The invaders were in full retreat, and Gotrek seemed determined to butcher his fill. The Slayer roared, axe spinning high above his head, a shining harbinger of blood-wracked ruin. By his side, two warrior-penitents howled like sinners at the stake. Their sackcloth coverings were torn, bloodied, riven with brick dust and ash, but the savageness of their appearance was as nothing to that which gripped their faces. The one-legged sister beat at the mutants with her stave and a ferocity that surpassed that of the abominations that fled before her. Her brother-in-faith lashed wildly with a mace, a trail of mangled fingers left in the Slayer’s wake. The three warriors cut a swathe into the Chaos ranks, mutants turning to the sound of bloodshed, only to be dispatched to their Dark Master by axe, mace, or splintered stave. Grey-cloaked lieutenants screamed into the spreading panic. Pistol-fire crackled across the line of retreat, masking the scenes of summary execution under a pall of smoke. The dwarf spotted Felix through the swirling carnage. He smeared blood from his one good eye and winked.
‘Good to see that you made it over that bridge in one piece, manling. For a time back there, I was worried.’
Felix sidestepped an axe-blow. The blade struck sparks from a crumbling length of wall. ‘You were worried about me? You were the one that fell in the river.’
‘Drop of water never killed anyone,’ Gotrek roared, slamming his axe so hard through a mutant’s skull that he had to strain to rip it out. ‘Hah! More’s the pity.’ A mutant fled past him. A sharp thrust from his axe’s shoulder shattered its spine and it spasmed and fell. Gotrek beheaded it before its knees were fully bent. He laughed, looking over its toppling shoulders to the two flagellants that battered gamely, if blindly, through the fleeing host.
‘Bit the worse for wear, but they do as they’re told if you tell them loud enough.’ As if to prove the point, the dwarf windmilled his axe above his vivid crest and bellowed at the two to rally to him. The woman crashed her stave across the back of a mutant’s neck and moaned. Gotrek shrugged. ‘Well, sometimes they do anyway.’
Felix parried another opportunistic thrust, actually grateful for the host of Chaos that kept his attention from the two mindless fanatics. A short time ago that had been him. But for the grace of Sigmar that might be him still. Within that anarchic swell, Felix could see the Chaos warrior, Golkhan, high on the saddle of his giant mount, as easily as if he rode a skiff across a bumpy lake. The warrior was surrounded by a cohort of grey cloaks mounted on more mundane steeds. One of them hoisted a slight woman into their saddle. She was garbed in black, hair as white as the chalk cliffs of Nordland, but with tanned skin like a Tilean corsair’s. There was something about her that was familiar. And then it struck him.
Nikolaus’s white lady. The visitor to his own dreams.
The glimpse came and passed in a moment, seen through the wave of billhooks like a co
rpse rising from the ocean’s depths. The withdrawing horde was sinking into the fog. In the path of their retreat, the fog wavered around a trickery of spidery silhouettes. A foghorn blared.
Felix noticed that those delicate shadows had grown very large.
A hairy limb like an articulated pike stabbed through the mist and crashed into the ground. Rock shattered. Another leg followed, this one multiply jointed and plated to a black mirror shine. On four more weaving, drunken, limbs, the creature’s bullet body heaved from the mist. Chitinous mandibles clacked hungrily either side of a clutch of tentacles that felt the air in place of eyes. A second monster emerged in the wake of the first. Its worm-like body was segmented and slimy, borne from the mist on the rustling of thousands of spike-like feet. A collar of spines bristled about a hugely armoured headsection that split on all sides into beaks to emit a redoubled foghorn bellow.
From the walls of Die Körnung, there came a command to fall back. The beasts of hell bore down. To Felix, the order seemed somewhat superfluous.
Gotrek’s one eye lit up, and he started forwards, parting a terrified mutant warrior from his legs with an impatient hack of his axe. He called back. ‘Which do you want, manling, the big one or the ugly one?’
In lieu of a forthcoming answer, Felix’s mouth simply hung open and waited for one to arrive. The creatures were huge, advancing together, crushing against the sides of the street and drawing screams from the mutants whose retreat bore them through the gauntlet of legs, spines, skewers and clicking mouthparts. He wondered which was the ugly one.
‘You decide,’ he managed, leaning wearily against a blackened stub of corner wall to catch his breath as Gotrek charged ahead with a roar.
The spider-spawn clicked its mandibles, scuttling about on the spot to meet the dwarf’s charge and sending out a maggoty scream of tentacles. Gotrek bellowed a war cry, his axe cleaving through a dozen, spraying himself and the spawn’s carapace with oily mucus. The spider-spawn squealed and lashed out with a bladed limb. Gotrek ducked. His axe tore a chip from its black carapace as it whistled by his crest.
The centipede rippled around its embattled cousin, weaving between the scraps of ruin towards Felix. There was a mindless deliberateness to its intent that curdled the contents of Felix’s stomach. He gripped his sword tight and retreated behind his stub of corner wall. The spawn paused before the wall, tapped it with one of its many beaks, then reared onto its hindquarters to peer over the top and hiss. Felix stumbled back, sword ready. The giant centipede watched him from the myriad holes in its armoured headsection that may have concealed eyes. It clacked periodically against the intervening wall, as though confounded by its very existence.
Felix gave a relieved laugh.
Big, but not too bright.
A ripple of segmented muscle swept back from the creature’s headsection, rearing it back. Felix’s grin faded. He had time enough to spin on his heels and run as, with a blistering torrent of bony clicks, the spawn smashed its skull through the wall. Masonry crumbled like soil.
‘Oh Sigmar,’ Felix panted, his companion’s pugnacious roar carrying over the rippling crunch of a thousand peg-like feet.
‘Why do you hate me?’
Not daring to look back, Felix just ran, vaulting the rubble that littered his path. The pursuing monster undulated between those same scraps of ruin like an eel. And it was gaining fast. At a particularly solid-looking bit of wall, Felix jumped, gripped the top and hauled himself up. Old masonry crumbled in his fingers, boots scratching uselessly against the brick face as his biceps strained. He cleared the wall, then dropped eight feet in a battered crunch of chainmail. He groaned with feeling, placing a hand to the wall to steady himself as he rose.
He could still hear it coming.
‘Felix! Back from the wall.’
Without pausing to think who would be screaming orders, Felix did as he was told. He took one step away from it and dived, the very instant that an armoured head came crashing through. A beak snapped inches shy of his toes, almost exactly where his neck had been the moment before. For the second time in as many seconds, Felix hit the ground with a grunt of pain. The centipede thrashed its head section. The wall crumbled like burned bark.
‘Down!’
Dark matter uncoiled like a whip. The taffeta veil of fog seemed to flex.
Felix pushed his face into the ground, gravel pouring the smell of char into his nose as a single black lance seared over his prone body. It was followed a split second afterwards by a thunderous crack and a long, drawn-out squeal. A wash of burned meat found his nostrils and settled there. Felix rolled onto his back. The centipede gave a strangled warble, its beaks scorched black, and pulled its head back through the wall.
Felix battled a wave of dizziness, mouthing a ‘thank you’ as he tilted his head back to address his saviour.
Leaning fully into the breastplate of one of his soldiers, Morschurle dismissed Felix’s gratitude with an exhausted wave. His robes were torn, plastered with ash and dust as well as blood, much of it his own. Both hands and the underside of his chin glittered like stars in clear water. Each pinprick was a shard of glass. The talismans around his neck were no more. He had lost every one contesting the sorcery that had shaken the walls of Die Körnung to their knees.
‘No thanks are needed,’ the sorcerer wheezed. Peeling himself away from his supporter, he sank down against a stretch of wall with a grateful sigh. He summoned his men with a loose flap of his fingers. ‘Go. Finish it off. But be wary. It is still dangerous.’ The soldiers saluted, clutched spear and shield, and ran in pursuit of the wounded spawn.
Once they were gone, Morschurle abandoned any pretence of vigour. He dabbed at his lacerated jaw with a piteous whimper. Felix cast an anxious look after the reeve’s soldiers. He could still hear Gotrek screaming curses. There was a crunch, as of a starmetal blade hacking through six inches of exoskeleton, followed by a belligerent roar.
‘Don’t leave me just yet,’ said Morschurle. The man panted through his mouth, his nose clotted with blood. His eyes were wide with pain, but there was a determined set to his jaw, as if what he meant now to do was a thing he had long vowed to do before he died. ‘I have something to tell you and,’ he gave a sickly smile, gesturing to his bloodied robes, ‘not long in which to do it.’
Felix began to protest. ‘I’ve seen graver wounds heal.’
‘Shut up and listen. I came to tell you about the Dark Master. About Be’lakor.’
Felix stilled his retort and nodded, crouching by his side.
‘Go on.’
‘I told you before that the daemon is without body, but he is everywhere and he is everything; air, soil and blood.’ Morschurle held up a bloodstained and glittering palm, face riven with pain. ‘He is the portents of death that I see in my mind.’
‘And the bones, the bones of its champion Kharduun, what does it want with them?’
‘That I do not know. But what Be’lakor craves even over his vengeance on the gods is freedom.’ He swept a bleeding hand across the sky. Pink clouds roiled. There was a chitinous crack like a thunderclap. ‘He is trapped here, damned as are we all.’
Felix pinched his lips, waiting for the man to continue.
‘Yes, Felix. I am a seer after all. I understand that in a sense I am already dead. That I died long ago. That was why I made my pact with the daemon prince.’ He grimaced at the accusing look that passed Felix’s face, waved a hand to bid him quiet. ‘I am no friend of Be’lakor. I fought him with every tool I could find. But all he wanted was for me to protect my people, to ensure that they did not try to leave and to take in any that crossed from the other side. Like you.’
‘If that’s all he wanted then why does he kill you now?’
‘I do not know that either. Only that his plans go beyond mere escape.’ Morschurle slumped back against the wall. He was clearly in great pain, but he looked content. ‘I kept my part. The daemon will keep his. It is what daemons do.’
Felix
gave an incredulous snort. An arachnoid shriek brought dust trickling over Morschurle’s silver hair.
‘You may not have noticed in the confusion of your home being ripped open from the ground up, but your honourable daemon has just about killed you all.’
‘The deal was not for my life,’ said Morschurle, eyes flicking to the violated ruin of Die Körnung. ‘And it was not for theirs.’
‘For Mori’s,’ Felix finished for him.
‘My daughter in exchange for every life in this city. Dark Gods demand a high price, but they are fair. Look me in the eye, Felix. Tell me that the Pious would have offered even this meagre an exchange. Tell me that and I will tell you I am sorry.’
Unable to say it and mean it, Felix said nothing.
Morschurle lay back and closed his eyes, crossing his arms across his chest in death’s repose.
‘Then do not judge me.’
Felix shook his head angrily and rose, slapping dust from his breeches.
‘The Dark Master’s soul is caged beneath the temple of Sigmar,’ said Morschurle, eyes fluttering open as Felix turned to leave. ‘It is the one constant in this place, the place that all roads lead. I cannot say with certainty what you will find there. Know only that Be’lakor cannot be slain. It is his curse. But maybe you can prevent his escape.’
‘How?’ said Felix.
Horror painted Morschurle’s features.
‘The Master is everywhere. He is everything. He knows you are coming. And he is not afraid.’
‘How do I stop him?’ Felix asked again, dropping to his haunches to give the man a shake, but the man had no answer.
Morschurle was dead.
Chapter 17
The Aftermath
The marble steps of the acropolis sang their praises to Golkhan’s return, the hooves of his daemon-steed sounding out like bells. The exaltation rang down the escarpment, resounding from the ramshackle bowl of his amphitheatre. From the temple’s colonnaded approach, daemonfire crackled from sconces, somehow rendering its flawless colouration black.