He stood silently, watching the smoke billowing up from the city. The city would fall, broken, like the bodies of its defenders crushed beneath the rain of boulders.
The siege towers rocked into place snug up against the high walls and the dead poured from them, zombies burning and falling away where the Altdorfers soaked them with oils and ignited them with flaming arrows, and skeletons shattered beneath the battery of warhammers and maces as the defenders fought desperately for their lives.
Their desperation gave them strength; they fought like savages.
And still, fresh horrors came, mocking their defence. The onagers and mangonels launched rotting body parts riddled with plague and pestilence over the walls, and the dead followed them with hideous battle-cries, throwing themselves at the city walls as arrows and oil and fire rained down on them. The dead hauled themselves up the giant siege engines and onto the battlements where they were met by Altdorfers steel. Swords clashed with bone and steel, the archers were joined by axmen on the wall-walk. They fought side by side. Men screamed and cried out, fell and were sickeningly raised again by the dark magic von Carstein had woven over the battlefield, parts of their bodies smashed beyond all recognition, bloodied, cut, ruined.
Vengeful death descended on the city of Altdorf and all along the walls the exhausted men knew dawn offered no respite. The sun would not rise to save them.
This was the last stand.
Already the battlements were slippery with blood and the foot of the wall cluttered with bodies. As the defenders threw the fallen off the battlements they poured oil onto the corpses and lit them with flaming arrows, the oil and flame searing the flesh from the bones of the dead. And still the skeletons rose, charred, lumps of flesh clinging to the bones where it hadn’t burned away.
It was a glimpse of hell on earth.
Bloody hour followed bloody hour as the dead surged up the ladders of flesh and bone and the siege engines lobbed horrors from the sky. It was endless: hacking, slashing, tearing, rending, clawing, biting, flaying, dying and burning. As more and more zombies spilled onto the wall-walk more and more of the dead went unburned and rose jerkily to join forces with them. Always though, they were beaten back, albeit barely. Sheer weight of numbers, coupled with the exhaustion of the Altdorfers, would drag the city down eventually. Skellan judged the defenders had perhaps another few hours worth of spirited resistance left in them as it stood, but von Carstein had held back his vampires. Unleashed now, the humans wouldn’t stand a chance.
The hours were filled with agony and the screams of death.
The siege engines were ablaze, the living dead fused in the skeletal towers crying out in agony as the flames consumed them. The defenders poured hot oil on the towers, stoking the fire. It made no difference. The towers were only constructs, the day had yielded enough deaths to build twenty more towers if von Carstein so desired.
One by one the towers collapsed in on themselves and toppled over, giving the defenders precious minutes to catch their breath before the onslaught redoubled.
One man strode like a giant along the battlements though, clad in the white of Sigmar, his huge axe bloodied, defying the dead, encouraging the defenders to stand and fight once more even when exhaustion threatened to betray them, tapping on reserves of strength they didn’t know they had: the Grand Theogonist, Wilhelm III. The man had a warrior’s soul. He may have taken to prayers but he was a fighter. Two decades older than some of the men at his side, the priest shamed them with his stamina and determination.
“Vampires! To me!” von Carstein commanded. It was almost as though he had read Skellan’s mind but of course he hadn’t, the count was a supreme tactician and an excellent reader of men. He knew the defenders were weakening.
He pointed at the walls.
Skellan grinned wolfishly. Beside him Jerek nodded.
It was time.
Finally there would be blood enough to satisfy even his darkest thirst.
Skellan threw his head back and howled at the flawless black sky.
The others took up his cry as their features twisted and mutated into the bestial muzzles and elongated jaw-line of the beasts they carried within them.
The vampires answered Vlad von Carstein’s call.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Fallen
ALTDORF
Winter, 2051
“They’re coming again!” someone yelled.
The men were beaten. Exhaustion lay heavy on them. The damned dark would never lift. The respite had been pitifully brief. The Grand Theogonist hefted his axe and walked along the allure, offering words of encouragement to the men in the face of the nameless death swarming up the ladders and over the battlements. He braced himself against a splintered merlon and watched the dead charge.
“Sweet Sigmar…” an archer beside him said, seeing the bestial faces of the vampires as they swept forward, von Carstein himself in their midst.
“Stand tall, soldier. The next few hours determine whether we live or die today.”
The archer nodded sickly. “Aye, we’ll fight the devils “til we drop, an’ then…” he let the thought trail away bitterly.
The priest’s shoulder burned and his knees were aflame; every step cost him but he couldn’t afford to let the men see his weakness. That was why he had worn the white of his god over his mail, so that every man along the wall-walk could see him and take heart from his presence even as the darkness overwhelmed them. He was an old man and he was dying. Both were irrefutable facts, yet when they looked at him they saw Sigmar himself striding down the battlements, smiting foes and lifting hearts.
He would not fail them.
Blood spattered his white tabard and the silver rings of his mail. None of it, blessedly, was his.
He looked at the archer. The man’s eyes were red-rimmed with tiredness. He looked like a beaten dog. Along the line men sat with their backs to the wall, recovering what little strength they could. A few had closed their eyes and dozed, taking advantage of the lull in the fighting. With the siege engines buckled and destroyed they believed themselves safe for the moment. Others stood, staring out at the vampires as they swarmed toward them, looks of sheer horror frozen on their faces as they squared up ready for the fighting to begin again in earnest.
“Look at them, tell me what you see?” the priest said, resting a steadying hand on the archer’s shoulder.
“The end of the world.”
“Not while I live and breathe lad, not while I live and breathe. Look again.”
The archer scanned the lines of the vampires, his gaze drawn back to von Carstein himself. “He looks… like a daemon possessed.”
“Better. It is the blood lust. That and fear. We’ve done that to him, soldier. He looks up at us and he knows fear.”
“You think?”
“Oh, I know, believe me.”
The vampires reached the wall and began scrambling up it like flies swarming over a corpse. They scuttled up the stonework.
The priest laughed bitterly.
“What’s so funny?” the archer asked. It was obvious the priest’s lack of fear horrified him.
“My own stupidity,” the priest said. “I thought we had bought ourselves a few hours. Instead we face death again, grown faster and more lethal even as we have tired and weakened. So be it. Up, soldier, let’s make them earn our corpses, shall we?”
The priest sent a runner down the stairs to warn the reserves that the fighting was about to begin again, and had them divided into three groups, ready to plug any gap in the wall should it be breached. There would be no escape from the wall for him or the men around him. He had resigned himself to dying on the walls, the only comfort being that he would be dying free and that had to be enough for him. He coughed, a hacking tubercular rattle, and spat out a wad of blood and phlegm. The bout of coughing served as a wake-up call; he wasn’t going to live forever, instead he had to make his death count. Make it meaningful.
“Oil!” he yelled, sending the m
essage down the line. In seconds the last few clay jars were being thrown down at the monsters scaling the city walls, some bounced while others broke. The thick black oil splashed down the stonework and covered some of the vampires. “Fire!” Arrows dripping flame skidded down the wall, igniting the oil with a dull crump. A dozen of the vampires fell away from the wall blazing like human torches as the oil caught light and seared away their flesh. Their screams were terrible as the flames engulfed their bodies. The others came on, like demented spiders, faster, stronger.
The priest drew himself to his full height and hefted his huge double-headed axe.
“Come on then, my beauties, sooner you get up the wall sooner we send you back to hell.”
The men around him stood, bracing themselves for the attack.
They knew what was coming and yet not one of them gave in to the instinct to run. He was more proud of them then than he had been for a thousand days through a thousand different circumstances. They were good men. They were going to die like heroes. Each and every one of them. He felt a swell of grief and pride at knowing them, being part of this with them. It was one thing to share your life with someone, it was quite another to willingly share your death.
“For Sigmar!” he bellowed suddenly, holding his axe overhead.
“Altdorf!” someone answered down the wall-walk. The cry went up:
“Altdorf! Altdorf! Altdorf!”
They might not have been spiritual men but their words shook the foundations of the city wall. Spear butts and sword hilts clanged off the stonework adding to the chant.
“Sigmar help us,” the young archer said as the first of the beasts crested the battlements. A spear thrust in its face sent the creature spinning away from the wall, clutching the bloody weapon where it stuck between soft flesh and hard bone.
The next vampire over the wall was one he knew, a man he thought dead. In another life Jerek Kruger had been a friend. Now the priest stared at the lord of the White Wolves, still dressed in his ceremonial armour and furs, huge warhammer in hand, his face pallid and tinged blue, and knew that his friend was gone. The thing that stood in his place was a cold-blooded killer. The Wolf howled and threw himself into the thick of the fighting, his warhammer cracking the skull of the first man to get in its way. More vampires surged over the walls even as the defenders hacked and slashed at them, trying desperately to drive them back.
The preternatural speed of the vampires coupled with their awesome strength made them a deadly foe. On the narrow wall-walk where the press of bodies made it almost impossible to swing a sword, they were overwhelming. They fought like daemons possessed. For every one vampire slain eight, ten, twelve, defenders fell.
The priest swallowed back his rising horror.
This was why Sigmar had chosen him. He was a fighter first, a man of god second. He threw himself into the fray. Against the fury of the vampires he fought with curious detachment, instinct governing his actions; he caught a sword blow on the shaft of his axe, turned it against his would be killer and drove the flat of his axe head into the vampire’s face, bursting the cartilage of the creature’s nose and staggering it back the step he needed to roll his wrists and deliver a killing blow, slamming the honed edge of the axe blade into the vampire’s throat. It was a massive blow, the priest’s full strength behind it. The metal sheared through dead flesh and crunched into the bone vertebrae. The creature’s head rolled back, half decapitated, hands fluttering up weakly to clutch at its throat even as its body collapsed under it.
He kicked the monster from the wall and met the next attack head on.
Around him good men died.
He couldn’t allow himself to mourn them.
The wall had to hold. If they lost ground here von Carstein would be inside the city. Images of slaughter filled the priest’s mind as he hammered the twin-headed blade of his axe into the chest of another fiend, opening the creature up from throat to sternum. The vampire’s guts spilled onto the wall-walk. The beast clung to the handle of the priest’s axe as it died, its face shifting back to that of a handsome young man. The priest fancied he saw, in that death mask, a look of peace that defied the vampire’s violent death. A third vampire fell beneath his axe, its head splitting like an overripe pumpkin as the axe bit into it.
Ducking beneath a slashing sword, he turned and disembowelled a leering vampire with a staggering backhanded sweep of his massive axe.
He stepped over the dead body and moved in to support part of the wall’s defence that was crumbling under constant assault from the dead.
A flaming skull shattered at his feet, splashing fire up in front of his face.
The priest backed up a step, waiting for the flames to abate.
The sounds and the stench of death were terrible. It was a bloodbath.
Defenders fell from the wall, broken and bloody, their bodies torn to shreds by tooth and claw, slit open by cold steel, shattered by the crushing blows of warhammers and smashed by falling stones as the catapults renewed their barrage.
Here, at the end of his life, on the walls of Altdorf, he was returning to what he had been before Sigmar saved him and raised him up: a killer. He had come full circle. Though not quite, in taking the name Wilhelm III he had left behind the brute he had been, a drunk, shunned by family and friends, given to rage and violence. He had been shaped by the will of Sigmar, forged by the fires of worship and atonement, to die here, giving his life in defence of the greatest city mankind had ever known. He was Sigmar’s hammer made flesh.
“I will not fail you,” he pledged, stepping over the dying flames.
He saw von Carstein.
If ever he had wondered about the lord of the dead’s humanity, this ended it. Von Carstein was no man; he was everything the priest had feared, a daemon possessed.
A killing machine.
The enraged Vampire Count was fighting his way along the battlements to face him.
The sounds of battle crystallised in his ears. He remembered them, each and every one, as though they were the last he would hear: cries, screams, curses, pleas, steel on steel, steel on flesh. Another blast of fire roared around his head, black smoke curdling his vision. The priest forced himself to go through it. As the smoke cleared he saw he was standing in a swath of burned and blistered flesh as men lay wounded and bleeding. They had been caught in the fire. Smoke curled up off their bodies. Strips of their flesh were charred black. The priest shielded his nose with his arm. Still it smelled sickeningly of roasted meat.
A scorched face, weeping blood and pus, cracked and completely unrecognisable, reared up in front of his, a ruined hand reaching out imploringly for his help.
He stepped over the fallen. There was nothing he could do for them.
Von Carstein cut down two defenders, his wailing blade cleaving through the right arm of one, severing it just below the elbow, and the head of another.
“I see you, priest!” he yelled above the tumult.
Out of the cacophony the priest heard a whistling shrillness followed by shattering impacts and screaming. Below the wall-walk men were running, shields over their heads. Some had already fallen. Others were trying to reach them, drag them away, destroy them, before they could rise and turn against them. Small fires burned everywhere.
“Come to me then! Come and face your doom, vampire!” the priest rasped, trying to stop his voice shaking as he moved to meet the vampire.
Flying splinters of rock and dirt sprayed him; he felt their sting as they cut his face.
The vampire barged another soldier aside.
They were fifteen feet apart on the wall-walk, the allure slick with blood and dust. The Grand Theogonist hefted his axe, feeling its reassuring heaviness in his hands.
Behind him, a chunk of masonry fell, cracking the wall-walk. More rocks and stones followed as the machicolations caved in beneath the barrage of debris. Part of the wall-walk broke away.
Ten feet apart.
The Vampire Count’s mouth opened; he r
oared his anger and hurled himself at the priest. The priest let the monster’s momentum carry him through as he brought his axe up to anticipation of the savage blow. The beast hit him full on, staggering him back four steps. He drove the butt of the axe handle up toward von Carstein’s face, catching the vampire a glancing blow on the cheek. Von Carstein bellowed, driving the priest back with the sheer force of his anger as he hit the man, three times, with dizzying speed. The blows snapped the priest’s head back three times in quick succession. The Vampire Count was rabid.
The Grand Theogonist shook his head. His own blood from his ruined nose sprayed his arms. He winced, tasting blood where it spilled into his mouth.
“Time to die, holy man,” von Carstein rasped vehemently.
The vampire launched a double attack, swinging the wailing sword high and wide with his right hand and slamming his left into the priest’s face. It was a punishing blow but physical pain didn’t follow. He was numb to it. There was no feeling. The priest grunted at the impact and cracked the shaft of his axe off the vampire’s elbow, bringing the flat head of the axe round to hammer into the side of von Carstein’s head. The vampire vaulted backwards, easily avoiding the wild blow—but it bought the priest precious breathing space.
“You talk a lot for a dead man.”
“The same could be said about you.”
The priest pressed his offensive, windmilling his axe forward. Von Carstein ducked under two blows but two more rocked him, one cracking against his jaw the other crunching into his left shoulder. The vampire rubbed a hand across his mouth; it came away slick with blood. He countered with a lightning-fast jab that nearly took the priest’s eye out. Blood ran from the gash in his brow, into his left eye. The eye socket itself swelled up purple and bloody quickly. Half the world blurred as he lost most of his vision from it.
“How does it feel to be mortal?” von Carstein goaded. The count laughed deeply and whipped his blade out in a slashing arc, keeping the priest on his back foot.
“You tell me?” the priest said contemptuously. He swatted away the vampire’s lunge with the butt of his axe. “Without that damned ring of yours how are you going to come back this time?”
Warhammer - [Von Carstein 01] - Inheritance Page 25