By Vulkan, I hope this works…
Alone, Evangeline faced the daemon-engine. She quietened her fast-beating heart and recovered from her stumble into a kneeling position. She began to pray.
With each silent benediction, the abomination that had been summoned to sacrifice her soul to Khorne slowed. Whereas before, brute force and fury had driven the daemon-engine to impossible feats, now every step was an effort. The closer the machine came to Evangeline, the more it began to shrink. Its grotesque musculature withered and atrophied. The baleful lights in its eyes started to fade, like a candle starved of oxygen.
This was the Chapel of Divine Sanctuary – its borders were anathema to rage and fear. Here, peace and tranquillity held sway. Sister Evangeline was the paragon of that fundamental truth. She was order in place of chaos, serenity opposed to anger. There was nothing in this place or in her for the daemon-engine to feed upon. She had disarmed it, and by the time it reached her it had returned to its former size, hell-blade poised above her bowed head but unable to strike. Ichor was drooling from between the daemon-engine’s armour plates, its body seized as if fossilized. Impotent, dwindling rage smoked away to almost nothing in its eyes.
The blast door opened and in stepped Tsu’gan. His eyes were closed. He felt Evangeline’s aura brush against him, and envelop him, like a cool breeze. Reaching out, he found the thunder hammer in his grasp and released it without effort. He could hear everything, every heart beat, every shallow breath.
A spark ignited in the daemon-engine’s eyes. Hellish hope became neutered fury as it found nothing but calm in the warrior before it.
In a pure moment of awakening, Tsu’gan hurled the thunder hammer.
It spun, end over end, until his righteous blow broke open the machine chassis that bound but also girded the abomination within.
Free of its fetters, fire surged into the now unbound daemon’s eyes. Hellish claws reached out from the shattered rib cage as it pulled loose.
I will feast upon this world.
Evangeline opened her eyes and uttered the first and last words she would ever speak. A true name…
Khartak-shek-hlad-bahkarn…
The daemon shrieked before a harsh corona of light engulfed it. Hot winds, the stench of ash and blood tainted the air, then was gone, the daemon with it. The banishing spilled outwards like a droplet expanding in a massive pool, beyond the chamber, beyond the convent-bastion walls, across all of Sepulchre IV.
In the chapel, only a smouldering hunk of machine metal remained. The scorched remnants of the engine were lifeless and inert.
Praetor staggered in, bloody but with storm shield in hand.
It was over.
Father Lumeon had roused too and stumbled in behind Tsu’gan. What he saw made him weep.
Evangeline’s aura had almost faded.
‘Her grace is spent. By speaking, she violated the most sacred credo of the Order. Her unique gift is lost.’ The priest was distraught, but glad Evangeline was alive.
Tsu’gan saw it differently. ‘A daemon is banished and the Red Rage has been dealt a severe blow.’
Reports were flooding in through his comm-link. He read them aloud. ‘Their forces are in retreat. The skies are clearing and the blockade lifts.’
Praetor scowled. ‘It will not last. We have only a short opportunity.’
Going to the comm-bead in his ear, he contacted the Implacable with extraction coordinates. Praetor turned to the priest and novitiate. ‘You will ride with us.’
Father Lumeon nodded, holding Evangeline close like a child.
‘Brother-sergeant.’
Praetor took his thunder hammer from Tsu’gan and nodded.
‘A worthy blow.’
Tsu’gan saw the respect in his eyes and made the most of it. With Evangeline’s grace gone, the old anger was returning. He’d been a fool to believe it was anything more than a temporary reprieve.
‘What’s wrong, brother?’
‘Nothing,’ he lied. By the time the sound of the Implacable’s engines were overhead, his inner-pain, his rage had returned.
LEECHLORD
Frank Cavallo
The man who should have been dead opened his eyes just after sunrise. One of the scouts marching beside Jürgen von Sturm’s stretcher noticed him stirring, craning his neck and reaching out with languid arms. The ranger called out to his superior, a few paces ahead.
‘Sir, he’s coming around.’
The scout captain pulled back on the reins of his horse, slowing its pace until the gurney reached him. The haggard figure that lay upon it looked up at him with bulging, bloodshot eyes. He tried to speak, but the effort produced nothing more than a hoarse whisper.
‘Rest now, my friend. You’re safe,’ the captain said, handing him a flagon of water. ‘And fortunate, by Sigmar. If we hadn’t come upon you when we did, who knows what might have become of you.’
Von Sturm took it, clutching the jug to his lips and drinking every drop without a breath. The instant he was finished, he cast the empty bottle aside. His arms quivering, he grabbed at the captain’s leg, clutching the man’s leather boot with a trembling hand.
Von Sturm stared into the captain’s eyes with a haunted, empty gaze, as though looking right through him.
‘He’s mad, you know,’ he gasped. ‘Brilliant. Wise. So very wise… but quite, quite mad…’ His eyes rolled back. ‘The plague. The daemons. He cares for them like… like his own children.’
The forest trail opened into a clearing just ahead. The weathered battlements of Ferlangen rose up from the woodland with flame-scarred granite walls and a black gate of iron teeth. One of the scouts sounded a brass horn as the city came into view, blaring with the proper signal of three short notes and two long, alerting the sentinels atop the bastions. As the gates began to slowly roll open with the heavy clank of steel chains and pulleys, a pair of guardsmen marched out to meet the scouting party.
‘We have a man in need of attention here!’ the captain shouted. ‘Alert the citadel, and call for the Burgomeister’s doktor at once!’
Despite their disparity in rank, the guardsmen openly balked at the captain’s order.
‘The Burgomeister’s own doktor?’ one of them questioned. ‘With all respect, sir, you can’t expect us to send word to the citadel at the return of every wounded soldier.’
‘This is no common soldier,’ the captain replied.
Von Sturm lurched up from the gurney again, reaching out towards the guardsmen with bony fingers.
‘You’re all in danger here,’ he muttered. ‘The doktor… The rat pox… All of you are in danger…’
One of the guardsmen saw the insignia on von Sturm’s cloak. Though tattered, stained with blood and ripped across the centre, the emblem was unmistakable.
‘He’s one of the Black Eagle Guard?’
‘We think so,’ the captain replied. ‘He was wandering alone on the edge of the Forest of Shadows, babbling just as he is now, talking of daemons and poxes.’
‘The Black Eagle Guard?’ the other sentinel replied. ‘But weren’t they–’
The captain waved off their concerns.
‘That’s a discussion for another time. This man requires care. Take him to the citadel. He must be tended to by the chirurgeon. General Vormann himself will certainly wish to speak with him. He’s the only one who knows what happened to the missing regiments.’
Doktor Matthias Kohlrek shook his head. ‘It’s no use,’ the chirurgeon said. ‘The man’s totally unresponsive. Whatever horror he encountered in the wilderness, it has left him delirious.’
Von Sturm lay on a bed of wool and straw in the musty, crowded room of the Burgomeister’s personal physician. He stared up at the ceiling, apparently caring nothing for the fact that his presence had brought together some of the most powerful men in the city.
General Heinrich Vormann stared down at the pathetic wretch, at a man who had once been one of Ostland’s finest knights. He refused to a
ccept the doktor’s answer.
‘There must be something you can do,’ he said.
‘I’ve tried everything I can think of, for the last twelve hours. Nothing appears to work,’ the doktor replied. ‘It makes no sense. He shows signs of recent injuries, but they all appear to have been healed. If this fever passes and the rashes subsides, he should be just fine.’
‘We need to know what happened to this man, and to his brothers-at-arms,’ Vormann said. ‘Whatever savagery befell them, it still stalks the dark forests beyond these gates.’
Doktor Kohlrek, a hunched and withered old man, rubbed his fingers into his exhausted eyes. For a moment, the general did not press the physician. Then von Sturm turned from his mindless contemplation of the walls to stare directly at the warlord.
‘The enemy is within! Kill me now, or you will all die here,’ he said, before collapsing back onto the bed.
General Vormann’s stoic face paled. He dismissed everyone, sending away his own retainers and the court officials with a wave and a terse command. Once the room had emptied, he looked back to the doktor, now slumped in a chair.
‘There must be something more you can do,’ the general said.
Doktor Kohlrek did not respond.
General Vormann turned and grabbed the doktor by his dirty apron, yanking him from his seat.
‘The rest of the army is rotting out there in the cold mud,’ he seethed. ‘If there is any chance that he might be able to tell us how that happened, then we’ll do it. You’ll do it.’
‘There is a chance,’ the doktor replied. ‘But our only weapon now is patience. If his fever is going to break, it will do so overnight. If it worsens, I’m afraid no medicine in the world can help him.’
General Vormann released his grip. He looked over again at von Sturm, writhing in listless delirium on the bed.
‘How soon will you know?’ the warlord asked.
‘I will stay by his side tonight. Return in the morning. If he lives through the dawn, we may yet learn what happened to him out there,’ Doktor Kohlrek said. ‘Shallya only knows what horrors this man has witnessed. I imagine they will torture his mind as the fever burns itself out.’
Jürgen von Sturm stared into the darkness. He heard laughter, echoing in the distance. He smelled brimstone and torch smoke. He sensed a thousand things, all at once. Everything was a blur, every sight, every sound and every thought.
Then, in an instant, it all came back to him to him. And his ordeal began again…
He was in the forest. He was with his men, riding with his sword unsheathed, though he saw no enemy. On a light-armoured stallion he trailed his comrades as they drove deep into the murky forests of northern Ostland. The grim, familiar parade of the Black Eagle Guard marched ahead; an ordered line of three hundred battle-hardened veterans, always spoiling for a fight.
His fellow mounted knights flanked the marching column. Like him, they wore white tunics over their steel plate, emblazoned with the scarlet bull of the Grand Principality, all of them yellowed and frayed from exposure, caked in dust and soot. The bulk of the ranks were grizzled foot soldiers, pikemen with craggy faces and untrimmed beards. They marched in pairs with their longswords and bedrolls slung across their backs, in mail hauberks and gore-stained leather jerkins.
Strips of wool were tied around arms, legs and torsos, stained red with the blood of wounds endured over the long weeks of their campaign, battle after battle against an inhuman enemy horde that never seemed to tire.
Von Sturm clutched at his own bandaged injury when a gust of cold wind passed over the column. Every time he shifted in his saddle, the steel of his cuirass rubbed against the wound in his side. It brought a wince to his frost-burned face, sweating despite the cold. He grimaced and snarled against the pain, a constant effort to steel himself against the complaints of his own body.
He reached under his plate mail to feel the tender swath of broken flesh, where a dirty ratman blade had ripped across his belly. He inspected his hand – the palm of his glove was slick with bloody pus. The wound wasn’t healing, festering now for the better part of five days, since the cowardly vermin had stormed their camp by night, forcing him into combat without armour for the first time in years. But von Sturm shrugged off the infection, even as a chill sent a shudder through him that had nothing to do with the cold.
He looked ahead, squeezing his eyes tight to make them focus. He scanned the wintry woodlands, seeking any unnatural movement amid the copses of naked trees, clumped together and shivering in the icy wind. His ears caught every rustle in the thorny underbrush and every raspy squawk in the grey skies. A dead carpet of fallen leaves lay underfoot, layer upon layer of wet mulch and dry brambles. Every footstep and hoofbeat crackled and squished in the loam, sending up tiny divots of foul steam from the permanently composting ground.
None of it escaped von Sturm’s awareness, as he kept a mental note of his surroundings: the sights, the smells and the sounds. Ever growing, always changing. It was one of the habits that had kept him alive through more battles than he could name. And the more he concentrated on his environs, the less attention he paid to the pain in his side. Or the chills, the sweats and the cough that now burned in his lungs.
The further his column pressed into the Forest of Shadows, the more the haunted woods seemed to close in around them. Winter-shorn, sclerotic trees huddled in gaunt thickets, grown together in tangled clusters that merged into a low-hanging canopy overhead. The branches rattled with every turn of the wind, as if threatening to reach down and clutch at them as they rode beneath.
For all the macabre eeriness of the woods however, nothing von Sturm saw troubled him – not until an hour past midday. Then something caught his eye that banished all thoughts of his own pains.
It was just a hint at first, a shape in the distance.
The outline was hard to make out, only barely visible over a rocky knoll to the far left of his marching column. For a moment he thought it might be nothing but a twisted tree, half hidden in the mist and shadows. As he rode closer though, beyond the hill, he looked again. And this time von Sturm was certain.
It was a man.
A gauzy curtain of fog shrouded him. Von Sturm squinted, craning his neck and straining to see any detail. Though partly obscured by the dancing shadows of wind-tossed trees, he was able to make out the figure’s shape. What he saw made him shiver.
It was no lean warrior or muscular beast. The man’s height was stunted and his frame was fat; a slovenly girth bulging out of tattered robes that seemed to merge with the mist. Legends of the haunted forests had long spoken of such a watcher-in-the-woods. Von Sturm knew the tales well. He knew to dread the ghastly figure whose very appearance was the most grim of portents, an omen of disease and suffering known by many names.
The Plague-stalker. Old Sawbones. The Fecundite.
He studied the distant figure, mesmerised in a sort of morbid fascination. For a long, eerie moment the stout phantom stood perfectly still, until a shift in the winds broke the fog hanging around him, revealing the mad doktor’s walking staff. Twisted like a petrified black serpent, it was crowned with a daemonic skull marked across the forehead with a blood-rune. As von Sturm strained to see it through the haze, the mist continued to churn behind the ghastly icon, discoloured and fuming as though disturbed by the evil totem.
Von Sturm’s lungs seized up, tightening his chest and forcing a pained cough. As if in response, the skull turned its black, empty eye sockets to stare directly back at him.
His blood ran cold.
An instant later his chest seized again, worse this time. Von Sturm turned away to catch his breath, and to steady his quivering limbs. When he looked again, only a moment later, there was nothing. The strange figure was gone.
He gathered himself, taking several long, ragged breaths until his heart stopped pounding like a warhammer in his chest. Then von Sturm left his lieutenant in command of the rearguard, and he rode double-quick for the front of the
column.
He reined his galloping steed back to a trot when he came within a few dozen yards of the command retinue’s crimson and sable flags. The noble in charge of their expedition, Ludwig Ehrenhof, saw him, and called out to von Sturm as he approached. The youth was as unmistakable for his gaudy gold-plated helmet and matching cape as he was for his beardless chin and boyish face. Though he was seventeen years von Sturm’s junior, as the nephew of Count Valmir himself, the young equestrian had been awarded command of their prestigious order.
‘What brings you from your post this hour, Jürgen?’ Ludwig asked.
Von Sturm wasted no time with pleasantries, as he rarely did.
‘My lord, I saw something in the woods. Off to our left, about a mile back,’ he said.
‘Nothing troubling enough for you to sound a general alarm, I see,’ Ludwig replied, no hint of worry evident in his confident tone. ‘What was it?’
Von Sturm pondered the question for a moment.
‘A man,’ he replied at last. ‘At least, it looked like a man. I turned away for a moment, and when I looked back he… it was gone.’
‘Just one man?’ Ludwig joked. ‘I think our lads can handle that.’
‘I don’t know that it was a man. I don’t know what it was,’ von Sturm answered, his voice failing as the pain in his infected lungs grew worse. ‘It could have been…’
He let his voice trail off, unsure if he should continue. Ludwig prompted him.
‘It could have been what?’
‘Festus,’ von Sturm muttered, almost ashamed of himself for saying the name out loud.
Ludwig shook his head. ‘Festus? The mad doktor? Are you getting jittery in your old age? My uncle told me that you were the keenest officer he ever rode with. Not a man given to wild imaginings.’ He seemed to take a long moment to look over von Sturm, who was trying hard to fight against the fevered shivering that gripped his bones.
Von Sturm growled at the young noble under his breath, raising his voice in frustration.
‘I’m fine. And I’m telling you that we must be careful in these lands. Dangers of every sort lurk in these woods.’
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