Dead Winter

by C. L. Werner

  The plague priest dismissed the question for the present. His eyes gleamed with joy as he gazed across his laboratory. Dozens of low tables had been erected, each provided with shallow trays built from the brainpans of skulls. In each tray, a sliver of rotten meat floated in a toxic cocktail of unguents and poisons combined in exact accord with the seven hundred and thirty-first psalm from the Liber Bubonicus. Only the most exalted of plague priests were granted such knowledge – any creature of lesser standing would contract Crimson Shivers from merely reading the formula.

  Puskab was one of the exalted. He had brewed the solution within a thrice-cursed kettle and spoken the secret words as he stirred the mixture. Now each of the little trays with their tiny islands of festering meat would provide a breeding ground for the bacillus he had developed. The invisible vapours of the Black Plague would gather about the meat, forming mouldy patches upon its surface.

  Staring out over the tables with their hundreds of trays, Puskab felt his heart flutter with delicious terror. Here, in this one room, were enough plague germs to kill every man-thing on the surface! If there were a way to distribute it evenly and quickly, the skaven could annihilate the humans in a single night.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. The Horned Rat demanded ingenuity and cleverness from his disciples, and so he had imposed a flaw upon this most divine of plagues. The Black Plague by itself couldn’t be spread. It needed a host, a creature to act as its vector.

  Puskab turned away from the tables, strolling past a series of cages built into niches in the wall. Hordes of rats glared back at him with their beady eyes. The rats weren’t the plague’s vector, however. They were simply hosts for the creatures that would carry the plague. The fur of each rat was crawling with fleas of the hardiest and most fecund breed developed by Clan Verms.

  In his first experiments, Puskab had been careful to use only human hosts. The fleas that infested man-things had no appetite for the blood of rodents, eliminating any chance the disease could be spread to the skaven.

  What Wormlord Blight demanded, however, was something far different. He wanted to alter the Black Plague so that it could be used against other skaven. What the Lords of Decay were doing to the humans, Blight intended to do to rival clans. It was a thrilling display of the most murderous and uninhibited ambition!

  Of course, Puskab was under no delusion that Blight could be trusted to honour their agreement. The army of assistants Blight had provided him were always trying to ferret out the secret of creating the plague. If Verms could gain that secret, their need for Clan Pestilens would evaporate. But the deception went farther than that. Puskab was aware that his supposed subordinates were continually sneaking insects into the laboratory, furtively testing them to see which strains could survive close proximity to the Poxmaster. It didn’t take much imagination to guess what the objective of such experiments was.

  Puskab bared his fangs at the leather-robed ratmen scurrying around the tables. None of them returned his gesture. Even alone, a plague priest was too formidable a foe for such cringing coward-meat.

  Puskab regretted that he had been unable to bring a small pack of plague monks with him into the Hive, but as Blight told him, a secret was best kept by one tongue. It would have made the plague priest’s position precarious to have his fellows around. It might give Blight ugly ideas about his new ally.

  The plague priest’s nose twitched as the aroma of the Wormlord struck his senses. He looked towards the doorway, watching as the twisted Blight Tenscratch and his retinue of sword-rats and lickspittles came trooping into the laboratory. Blight had draped his crooked body in a billowy robe of soft cloth he claimed was woven by worms. He held a little gold sphere in his paw, its sides split by narrow vents. As he approached, the Wormlord shook the ball, disturbing the beetle trapped inside and causing it to exude a sulphurous musk.

  ‘The work proceeds?’ Blight inquired, whiskers quivering with anticipation.

  Puskab gestured across the laboratory to the cages. ‘Much-much work still,’ he answered. ‘Horned One make-give plague to use-kill man-things.’

  A low growl rattled about at the back of Blight’s throat. ‘But you can change-fix. You promise-say plague can kill-slay skaven!’

  ‘Need-take time,’ Puskab confessed. He turned to a little wooden box, holding it so that Blight might see the pile of curled-up fleas lying inside. ‘Need-find flea that can live-carry Black Plague.’

  ‘We will find the flea,’ Blight hissed. ‘If we have to stop the worm farms and turn them into flea ranches, Clan Verms will find what you need.’ A crafty look crept into the warlord’s eyes and his fangs clashed together. ‘You must change-fix,’ he told Puskab, ‘or Clan Verms will not help you against Nurglitch-traitor.’

  Puskab’s black teeth showed in a menacing leer. ‘Nurglitch powerful-strong! Too strong-mighty for Clan Verms!’

  Blight reacted with a squeaky laugh. Waving his paw, he motioned for part of his retinue to come forwards. First was an armoured sword-rat shoving a trembling skavenslave ahead of him. Then came a sinister white ratman holding a big iron box. Finally, a pair of lean, wiry skaven brandishing strange worm-oil torches with long handles and a curious metal cup to cover the paws that gripped them.

  ‘Watch-learn,’ Blight commanded. As he spoke, the sword-rat ran the edge of his blade across the back of the slave’s legs, hamstringing the wretched creature. As the stricken ratman collapsed, the white skaven set his box on the floor. Setting a heavy paving stone in front of the box, the white ratkin pulled a metal door upwards.

  At first the motion made no sense to Puskab. The white-fur had opened the box but the stone still obscured whatever was inside. Then the plague priest’s nose registered a sharp, acidic smell. While he watched, smoke began to rise from the stone and a low sound, like the sizzle of grease dripping onto an open flame, reached his ears. Before his eyes, the centre of the stone began to melt away. Soon a dark hole yawned at the middle of the stone and a cluster of hairy black legs emerged into the light.

  The thing was a spider, a huge tarantula as big as Puskab’s fist. The abomination scuttled out from the hole its venom had bored through the stone, rearing upwards on its back legs, its forelegs and pedipalps quivering in the air. The collapsed slave shrieked in terror, but his crippled legs buckled beneath him when he tried to rise. Before the ratman could crawl away, the spider lunged at him. What the spider’s acidic venom could do to flesh was enough to sicken even a plague priest.

  While the tarantula was still slurping up the melted flesh of the thrashing slave, the ratmen with the torches sprang into action. Displaying an agility honed by long practice and deadly necessity, the acrobatic skaven scurried around the spider, jabbing at it with their torches. At first the mindless arachnid simply reared back, waving its forelegs at its tormentors, but soon it gave ground, recoiling from the hot breath of the torches. Using the oil-lamps like goads, the two skaven drove the spider away from its meal and back into the metal box. As soon the tarantula was inside, the white ratman slammed the door shut.

  ‘We have many diggerfangs,’ Blight boasted, savouring the effect his display had on Puskab. ‘They will solve problem of Nurglitch. Burrow through walls of his sanctum. Eat him alive.

  ‘Then Puskab Foulfur will be Arch-Plaguelord.’

  Chapter VIII

  Altdorf

  Ulriczeit, 1111

  The Courts of Justice, the Imperial Courthouse of Altdorf, was a gigantic stone fortress, crouched almost in the very shadow of the Emperor’s Palace and facing towards the Great Cathedral of Sigmar. Its grey walls were built from massive blocks of ashlar, great bartizans looming out into the wide square that Altdorfers had grimly named the Widows’ Plaza. Soldiers in the gold-chased liveries of the Palace Guard patrolled the walls of the Courthouse. Dozens of halberdiers flanked the gatehouse, their weapons kept at the ready, their faces alert and resolute. From the heights of the Tower of Altdorf, the great round bastion rising above the Courthouse
, a score of archers were held in reserve, men chosen for their unerring skill with the bow.

  Such were the visible guardians of the fortress. Erich knew there would be others once they were actually inside. Traps and tricks devised by Emperor Sigismund’s dwarf engineers, as well as whatever new surprises Emperor Boris and his minions had added since. Everything had been done to ensure there was no chance of escape for those languishing in the dungeons below the fortress. Erich only hoped nobody had put as much thought into people wanting to break into the Courthouse.

  The young captain shifted uneasily in the black robe he wore over his armour. As a concession to speed and mobility, the knights had adopted simple suits of brigandine instead of their scale mail. Erich couldn’t shake a feeling of vulnerability with only a cuirass of boiled leather with a few plates of steel woven between its layers. Even more uncomfortable, however, were the robes that formed their disguise. Wearing the raiment of a priest of Morr wasn’t the sort of thing that cheered a man’s spirits. There was just a chance that the god of death might take offence and decide to summon the perpetrators to his realm to discuss the transgression.

  Erich shifted his gaze away from the forbidding Courthouse to inspect the disguises of his comrades. Even with the black robes, he thought they looked too big to pass for Morrite priests. ‘This isn’t going to work,’ Erich grumbled.

  ‘Have faith in Sigmar, my son,’ admonished the man at the head of the procession, the only one who actually looked the part of a priest. That was only natural, since the man was a priest. Erich didn’t know who he was; he’d kept his face hidden in the folds of his hood and Prince Sigdan had only introduced him as ‘an ally from the clergy’. By the man’s frequent invocations of Sigmar, however, Erich guessed he didn’t belong to the temple of Morr.

  The priest set his hand against Erich’s arm, tugging at the coarse cloth of his robe. ‘People see only the habit. They hold Morr and his servants in too much dread to look too closely at the man beneath the hood.’ He nodded his head emphatically. ‘That is the key we will use to set your Grand Master free.’

  Erich took the priest’s suggestion and silently asked Sigmar to pour conviction into his heart. While he was at it, he snapped his fingers to invoke the luck of Ranald. On an enterprise like this, the good favour of the god of tricksters couldn’t hurt.

  Five knights and a priest. It was a ridiculously small force to try to storm the Imperial Courthouse. The Bread Marchers had tried it with two hundred men and been slaughtered. The very audacity of trying it with this few men gave the captain pause. Yet it was the very impossibility of their mission that gave them their best chance of success.

  Emperor Boris, in a fit of rage, had ordered Reiksmarshal Boeckenfoerde to muster the Imperial Army and move against Talabheim. The city-state had offended His Imperial Majesty by breaking off all contact with Altdorf – a precaution against the plague and risk of contamination. Incensed at the audacity of Talabheim’s grand duke, Boris had ignored his generals and his advisors, dispatching the army to forcibly reopen the Talabheim markets, despite the logistical hazards of a winter march. The Emperor’s detractors said it was the loss of tax revenue rather than Talabecland food shipments that worried the greedy Goldgather.

  To muster an army big enough to lay siege to Talabheim had required employing peasant conscripts and drawing down the Altdorf garrison. In that fact lay the reason Erich hoped that once inside the Courthouse they might be able to free Baron von Schomberg. As formidable as the troops on the walls appeared, Boris’s ransacking of the garrison meant there would be far fewer guards on the inside.

  The six men in the sombre robes walked towards the gatehouse. The guards posted around the portcullis drew away as the Morrite clergy came near, conversation dying away as they shifted uneasily towards the reassuring solidity of the wall behind them. A nervous-looking soldier wearing the armband of a sergeant stepped forwards to accost the approaching priests.

  ‘You have business within the Courthouse, father?’ the sergeant asked.

  The disguised Sigmarite clergyman bowed his head and addressed the soldier in a hollow voice that was midway between a snarl and a whisper. ‘I fear we have business throughout Altdorf, brother. The Black Plague has visited many and set many souls wandering. We are kept quite busy bringing the restless spirits peace and consigning them to the grace of Morr.’

  Already anxious, the sergeant’s face went a few shades paler at mention of the Black Plague and the suggestion of ghosts of victims haunting the Courthouse unless they were laid to rest. It was a combination that killed any other questions the soldier might have had. He gestured to the troops in the gatehouse above, and the portcullis began to rise. Nervously, the sergeant waved the priests forwards. The Sigmarite crossed his palms over his breast, making the sign of Morr’s raven. The knights following behind him copied the gesture as they passed the sergeant.

  ‘They will be keeping the Grand Master in the tower,’ Erich whispered to the priest.

  ‘Indeed,’ the Sigmarite said. ‘The dungeons will still be crowded with Bread Marchers. Even the plague can’t kill them fast enough to suit Commander Kreyssig.’

  Erich could feel his heart pounding against his bones as the invaders entered the inner bailey and stole through the winding passages of the Courts of Justice. Everywhere plaster statues of Verena in her aspect as goddess of justice glowered down at them, her right hand raised and holding a cornucopia for the innocent, her left lowered and holding a grinning skull – death for the guilty. It was a forbidding image, one that became ever more oppressive the more often the knights encountered it. Erich’s skin crawled, an icy trickle seeping along his spine. It was as if the goddess herself glared at him from the stern visage of her statues, promising that this trespass would not go unpunished. Verena, wife of Morr; because justice often demanded death.

  It took a supreme effort of will for Erich to extricate himself from the toils of the superstitious dread that held him in its grip. Fortunately they had encountered no human opposition. The guards within the Courthouse seemed just as eager to ignore the grim procession of Morrite priests as those at the gate. Not until they reached the barred entrance to the Tower of Altdorf did they encounter serious opposition. The sentry behind the gate was more attentive than his fellows, with a frustratingly keen level of discipline.

  Erich quickly assumed control of the conversation when he saw that morbid platitudes weren’t going to get the door open for them. Pushing the Sigmarite aside, Erich lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

  ‘Commander Kreyssig sent us,’ he told the guard. ‘He wishes us to offer the prisoner the grace of Morr. I need not tell you that in order to receive that grace, he must unburden himself of sin. The commander was quite interested in hearing that confession.’

  The guard behind the gate nodded in understanding, but he still had his suspicions. ‘One of you may pass,’ he said. ‘It needs only one set of ears to listen to a traitor’s words.’

  Erich shared a look with his fellow knights. As soon as the gate was pulled open, he stepped across the threshold. For an instant, the guard’s attention shifted to the priests he had told to stay outside. In that moment of distraction, Erich struck, seizing the guard’s neck with one hand and the edge of the gate with the other. Savagely he brought the two together with a sickening crunch. The guard didn’t utter a sound, he just collapsed in the doorway.

  The others rushed into the tower, closing the gate behind them and dragging the stunned guard behind the curve of the structure’s spiral stairway.

  ‘Othmar, take Josef and spike the trap leading up to the guardroom,’ Erich said, his voice falling into his accustomed tone of command. ‘The last thing we need are all of those archers walking in on us. The rest of you will look for the Grand Master. Subdue any guards, but only kill if it is absolutely necessary.’

  The knights quickly separated, hurrying to the tiered levels of the tower. Such resistance as they found was quickly vanq
uished. Erich winced at each conflict, fearing that the sound would alert the garrison, but here the ponderous construction of the Courthouse served them well. The thick walls smothered all noise. This close to the Imperial Palace, silence was an essential. Emperor Boris found the cries of his captives disturbing.

  It was Konreid who located Baron von Schomberg’s cell. Erich knew something was wrong when instead of freeing their Grand Master, Konreid came went to find his captain.

  ‘The Grand Master says he won’t go,’ Konreid reported, tears in the old veteran’s eyes. It was with a sad desperation that he led Erich and the Sigmarite priest to the tower room where von Schomberg was imprisoned.

  The Grand Master was thin, a pale shadow of the nobleman who had led the Reiksknecht through countless battles and had dared to defy a tyrant over a matter of conscience. He lay sprawled upon a bed of straw, his only garment a threadbare linen gown. His cell stank of filth, ugly black rats scurrying about in the dark corners. A pot of brown water that looked to have been dredged from the bottom of the Reik rested on the floor beside the captive’s bed. A wooden slop bucket was the only other accoutrement. If not for the rushlight Konreid had wedged between the bars of the cell door, the Grand Master would have been consigned to complete darkness. No window marked the walls of his cell.

  Erich took one look at his leader and felt a cold fury blaze up inside him. His knuckles cracked as he gripped the bars, jostling the door in its frame, testing the strength of its construction. It was solidly built, but it wasn’t going to stop him from freeing the Grand Master.