by David Guymer
When would it all end?
A clamour of mailed boots rang from the grounds immediately beneath Konrad’s window, followed by urgent shouts from the hall. Still unsettled, Konrad swung from his bed and arranged his sheets into an order more befitting a captain just as the first of several fists hammered at his door.
‘Yes!’ Konrad snarled. ‘Bloody Sigmar, come in.’
The door swung inward to disgorge three grey-cloaked militiamen. They were dripping wet, breathless from an uphill sprint from the township to the fort. They must have been freezing, but pride would not let them shiver. Their familiar faces and the black bands at their biceps marked them as Konrad’s own feverishly loyal moralpolizei.
‘Captain,’ said one, cold frosting his wiry beard. ‘The pens have been broken, and the gate breached in the night.’
‘An attack?’ Konrad hissed.
‘No, from within,’ said another. ‘The dwarf and his man are gone. And they have taken Hartmann. Two of our men were found dead in the inn where they were staying.’
‘Two of mine? What were they…?’
Konrad shook his head violently, stalking to the window and the blanched offering it beheld. The City of the Damned festered in the distant fog, like a bruise on the earth’s dead flesh.
Remnants of the nightmare stirred his blood, imbuing the bone-white sink of misery with glory, terror, all the trappings of a righteous war. He was not even sure that it had truly been a nightmare. It felt so vivid even now, like a vision. Like a memory. He could still taste the blood, feel the warmth in his breast as the hideous get of Chaos were slaughtered like animals, the purging fires raging from horizon to horizon. The acclaim of his peasant army rang in his ears, the humble soldier who would be Emperor. It did not matter that it was not his name the memories sang. He would do just as much and more, and this time he would finish it. In Götz von Kuber’s name.
He would burn out the Dark Master.
‘Empty the town,’ he growled, voice hoarse from a night spent bellowing orders to his dreams, visions of dark lords and their white ladies triumphant in his mind. ‘Every child old enough to walk. Every woman strong enough to carry a blade.
‘We march on the City of the Damned.’
Chapter 18
Twisted
Felix walked stiffly along the deserted highway, sword low, muscles tired. The buildings either side stood tall and thin, shrouded in black like priests at a funeral. They were well back from the roadside, withdrawn behind walled gardens, twisted hedgerows, and weed-choked lanes. Apart, yet somehow close, and with every breath Felix took contriving to edge closer still. It was as if space were being constricted, gaps being closed. The air twinkled with malevolence. The city around grew dark, adopting a strange hyper-solidity as reality upon reality shivered into place, one atop another atop another, until every brick and stone was an amalgam of an infinite number of near identical others. No wonder everything was closing in.
There was not the space in one world to fit it all.
How long had they been walking? It felt like hours.
The road ahead seemed to twist as he watched, yawing side to side like a ship at sea. There was a lurch of nausea and he threw his gaze to the weed-choked slabs beneath his feet. He was thankful he had not eaten since Sigmarshafen.
But the worst part was the voices.
They were whispered and indistinct and, like the walls, inter-tangled with many times a thousand others. It was garbled madness hiding under the illusion of words. And it was slowly driving Felix mad.
‘Are you sure this is the path?’
Felix’s voice trembled as much as his hands. It was impossible to believe that a force of hundreds had just fled this way.
‘Aye,’ Gotrek grunted without turning from the narrowing, never-ending path. ‘You can see where these weeds have been recently trodden.’
Felix examined the weeds. He could see where they had been crushed under marching feet, where they were thick, where they were burned to brittle crisps. He could see where there were no weeds.
And the temple of Sigmar drew no nearer.
Every so often, Felix caught a clear view of the acropolis through breaks in the ruined buildings. Always ahead although, despite their path remaining straight, sometimes a shade to the right or to the left. Despite his best efforts his eyes were drawn to it. Streams of cloud circled its pinnacle, as if they too were slave to its might. That sky was the reason he had tried so hard to avoid looking at the temple. And it was the continual punishment for his weakness of will. It juddered like a stalled machine, the pink aurora that had troubled him so nothing but a facet of a vast continuum, every instant of which sought its place in the heavens. As well as pink, the sky was alternately and simultaneously blue, and black, and steely grey. Moons of every size and phase filled it. And across it all, blazing in an arc of golden majesty before bleeding to a violent crimson over the western sky, was the sun. Felix tried to make out an individual source of light but could not. A thousand suns shone from a thousand different times.
And still Felix felt cold.
Leaving Gotrek to forge ahead, he glanced back the way they had come.
The road behind them bent in what would have been a sickening contortion had it been performed by a worm, much less by brick and stone. It was endless ruin, a maddening allegory for the city’s damnation. The horizon twisted to a point infinitely compressed and indefinably wide. It roiled, inconstant, a degree too high in the sky. It was enough for Felix to question the plausibility of his own existence.
What was any man in a place where time and dimension meant nothing?
The three flagellants taking up the rear seemed of a one with the madness that surrounded them. Their eyes wandered with independent wills, their faces slack and lathered with perspiration, muttering to the voices as they stumbled on. Their words were gibberish, sentences changing halfway through as whatever madness gripped them at that moment passed over their mind to another.
‘Sigmar, hammer of man. Sigmar, hammer of man…’
Nikolaus muttered, over and over. The prophet seemed relatively coherent, or at least more constant. Every so often he would pause in his chant, stare into the shadows and rub his face in confusion before beginning afresh.
‘Sigmar, hammer of man.’
Felix looked away, hugging his sword arm to his chest for warmth. He heard the voices too, though he struggled to shut them out. The feeling that Rudi walked beside him was so powerful that he was surprised to turn around and see nothing but mist in vaguely human form. He shuddered.
It was like being haunted.
Rudi eyed the ground as he walked. It crunched where he trod. It was a strange sound. Not at all like brick or stone. And it was uneven, lumpy beneath his thin soles and brittle like chalk.
‘I find it hard to believe you are descended from the warrior-pilgrims of the Pious,’ came the voice of Caul Schlanger, out of sight but not of hearing a couple of paces ahead.
‘I am,’ Rudi whispered, angered and yet strangely not.
His body felt too far away to be reached by anger. His ancestors had been peasant warriors, uprooted by the Pious’s crusade and settling in Ostermark when it was won. He felt them around him, those forefathers that had fought to cleanse the City of the Damned. There were others too, his mother, his grandparents, folk of the moors, their remains again uprooted and brought here. They welcomed him.
As though he had returned home
‘A recent arrival perhaps,’ Caul went on. ‘A dung-gatherer’s son fled the greenskin siege of Osterwald?’
At last, anger smouldered through the fog that separated himself from his body. He looked up, saw Caul’s green eyes pass over him as if he were rotten.
‘I am of the blood of the Pious.’
‘Then act like you feel it. This will only get worse as we get nearer.’
Rudi shivered and looked to the horizon ahead. And gasped.
They stood upon a field of bones.
/> Rudi turned, shattering a rib to powder. Bones and fog as far as the eye could pierce. A dark wind glittered with a cruel will, making bones creak and the two men’s cloaks snap. He heard voices in it. All of a sudden, Rudi began to shake.
‘What happened to the road?’
Caul shrugged and continued on his way. Head spinning, Rudi stumbled after, shuddering with the snap and crunch that each step brought.
‘I see people I know,’ Rudi murmured. ‘I think Sigmar meant me to come here. To find them.’
‘There are thousands here,’ said Caul. The man’s calm was jarring, as if it was him, rather than the field of death, that had no place in this world. ‘Tens of thousands. They came for warpstone and riches and now they are all damned. It stands to reason you would recognise one or two. That they would recognise you.’
‘Can they not be saved?’
Caul shrugged again and walked on.
‘You know a lot, Herr Schlanger, can’t you tell me that?’
‘I know all I could learn. Gotz was not my only master. When I was young I was adopted by a vigilant brotherhood, and placed in his service to watch the City of the Damned.’
‘Truthfully?’
Caul did not turn, but Rudi saw a smile shape his jaw. ‘Truth is the chain by which fate makes each of us her whore.’ A gust of wind took Caul’s cloak and he turned into it, calming the snapping wool under one four-fingered hand. ‘When men accept that things are as they must be, then Chaos will always thrive. Remember that and that only, and you may yet prove yourself a son of Ostermark.’
Rudi nodded, trying to remember what Nikolaus had said about Sigmar being within every man, whoever that man was and wherever he found himself. It was difficult to imagine that his god could reach him in a place such as this, but he prayed all the same. He prayed for the chance to do his pious ancestors proud, for the strength to find Baron von Kuber, slay the Beast, and free the souls of the Damned. It was a lot to ask, but he was a man of Ostermark and he would see his country cleansed. He prayed that Felix and Nikolaus were alive.
And, almost as an afterthought, he prayed for his own life.
For what seemed like forever, Felix walked, passing one benighted ruin after another until they blended into a continuous smear. Hours passed. The band of sunlight throbbed but never shifted. The sky fluxed with a constant change that told him nothing.
And still the temple drew no nearer.
‘Stop dragging your feet,’ Gotrek growled.
Even the dwarf had lowered his voice, his scarred face, while not afraid, was nevertheless taut with worry. His axe glowered red, but the ruddy glare did not travel far, lost to the cracks between dimensions long before it could alight upon Gotrek’s face. The sight of those ancient runes glowing dully within the confines of their starmetal cells was the single most terrifying sight of all.
‘It didn’t look this far when we started.’
‘We’re not lost if that’s what you’re getting at.’ With a scowl, Gotrek glared back at the flagellants who muttered and raved, inconsistent in voice as the wind through the husks of the Damned.
‘I thought that you liked them,’ said Felix, one hand splayed across his collar. His throat felt like the street looked. It was closing, sinking into his belly.
‘They disappoint me as men so often do.’
‘It’s not their fault,’ Felix murmured. ‘It’s this place.’
‘Then why hasn’t it affected you?’
Felix swallowed with an effort. The shadows were closing, the voices getting louder. The road ahead stretched out, screwing up to an infinite horizon.
‘What makes you think it hasn’t?’
Felix unclawed his hand from his throat. Shadows overlay it like a second skin. Without even realising that he fell, he felt Gotrek catch him in one arm. The dwarf smelled earthy and raw, real, his sheer rigidity a barrier behind which a man might shelter. Gotrek held him steady.
‘Can you go on?’
Felix found it within him to laugh. Even to him it rang false. ‘I don’t see Brüder Nikolaus composing that epic.’
‘I suppose I can’t leave you behind then,’ Gotrek reasoned, apparently in all seriousness.
‘Trust in Sigmar…’ Nikolaus mumbled, lifting his tattooed arm to point at something over Gotrek’s shoulder. ‘Acknowledge him and see your paths made straight.’
‘Helpful,’ Gotrek grunted, but turned all the same. For a moment he was silent. ‘You seeing this, manling?’
Felix shook his head, keeping his face down. ‘Whatever it is I’d rather not see, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘You’re wetter than a wood elf sometimes,’ Gotrek growled. ‘If I didn’t think you’d want to see this, then I wouldn’t have wasted my breath.’
Felix looked up, over his companion’s shoulder.
Disorientation warred with disbelief, dragging him between them into a miasma of horror. They had been following the road for hours. They had never turned.
This was impossible.
And yet the five them were standing within an enormous amphitheatre. The arena was dusty and flat. There was blood in it, the sand broken by strips of gristle and bone that nodded like flayed rats in the focused howl of the wind. Felix spun around. The street was gone. Instead, stepped terraces of blotched, veined stone rose on three sides into a confusion of wood, as though the upper levels were fused from the workings of a mad bird and a giant spider.
‘Aye,’ said Gotrek, planting his hands on his hips to glare out across the fog-sated belly of the arena. ‘That was about what I was thinking.’
The plain of bone wavered at the edges, as though hazed by a heat Rudi did not feel. Figures drifted through the fog. Their voices reminded him of men he once knew.
Caul stopped walking abruptly, raising a hand in warning. Rudi stumbled into his back and stopped. It was becoming difficult to concentrate. There were too many voices, too many memories. Caul drew a knife into each hand and crunched forwards. After a few paces, he crouched amongst the jutting bones, like a reptile stalking through tall reeds. The shadowy figures were familiar, yet remote, seen through the gauze of a burial shroud. He struggled to understand their voices, moved to quiet tears by the garbled nonsense.
Caul tossed one of his knives into the air, caught it by the blade, and gauged the distance.
A blistering wind loaded with sand and chips of bone pattered against Felix’s mail. He felt it scratch his face as he turned on the spot, gaze tracking upwards to the tangled mess of wooden spars that sprouted from the upper tiers of the amphitheatre. It was deserted as only a structure meant for thousands could be. Balefire torches clawed at the wind, sending shadows to run and hide amongst silent stone terraces.
‘Did you not say all roads would lead to the temple?’ said Gotrek.
The runes of the Slayer’s axe glowered balefully in the dust storm swept up from the arena, his stiff crest buffeted this way and that.
Felix nodded dumbly, squinting into the full strength of the wind that drove through the frame of timber and stone that made the amphitheatre’s open side. And through it, he saw the acropolis. Like a bitumen shard its jagged edges rose from the ash and fog that clung to its base. Steps cut into the sheer sides followed its climb towards the marble-paved court at its summit. And there, so white amidst the ash and ruin that it glowed like Mannslieb against a black sky, was the temple of Sigmar.
Where all roads lead.
Unbidden, an instant of true faith flared within his breast. It was like nothing he had experienced, like a pure fire burned his heart clean. From those pristine walls there seeped a sickness and, inconstant as his faith was, it disgusted him. Every occasion that he had called to Sigmar for strength, to Shallya for protection, to Ulric for mild winters, he remembered in that moment. He was at once uplifted and appalled.
Be’lakor was a daemon that recognised no god. It was empty.
It was godless.
He stared, breath held lest the touch of t
he divine flee his chest on exhaled wind, the dust blowing across shapes that appeared almost human. Felix’s heart fluttered. He spared them a glance but no more, he had seen shades aplenty this day. It was Gotrek that rapped his arm with an open fist, grunted in the spectres’ direction and readied his axe. Felix slid behind the Slayer’s back with a habitual ease. What devilry did the Dark Master send now?
Man and dwarf watched, hands tight to their weapons as the apparitions drew nearer. They emerged from the dust, close enough to see a face. Felix’s eyes widened, sword lowering. Gotrek held his axe firm.
‘Schlanger!’ Felix laughed, unable to staunch the flood of relief that was making his chest shake as if with mirth. He rammed his sword into its scabbard. ‘What are you doing here?’
The man gave a bewildered cough, looking around as though the innards of an arena were the last place he expected to find himself. In his hand was a knife, which he self-consciously slid back into his baldric. He coughed again, shielded his mouth from the dust with a handful of his cloak, offered Felix a terse nod as though passing an acquaintance in the street, hissed ‘Jaeger’, and turned his back so as to regard the temple.
Laughter fading fast, Felix turned to Gotrek who met his look and shrugged, lowering his axe if only a fraction.
‘Some men are born pains in the arse.’
The second shadow, forgotten in Felix’s initial surprise, stumbled into view.
It was Rudi. Felix shook his head in disbelief and ran to greet him. At the last moment, he checked his stride. There was something wrong. The man’s brow was damp, his eyes unsteady, his face shadowed. It took him a few seconds but he noticed Felix’s presence, acknowledging it with an uncertain smile.
‘Rudi,’ Felix breathed.
‘Yes and no,’ Caul answered him, turning back around. With the four fingers of his left hand he pointed out Rudi and, muttering softly, the flagellants. ‘The pious fall first to the calls of the Damned. I don’t know why. Maybe their minds welcome the intrusion of another.’