Ludwig’s bare face flushed. He kicked his mount ahead, near enough to reach out and grab von Sturm by the cloak, pulling him close enough to whisper.
‘You may have known me since I was a child,’ he said. ‘But you must never speak to me as one in front of the men. Do you understand?’
He released the knight only a moment later, taking a moment to look him over a second time, closer now.
‘Is it the fever?’ Ludwig continued. ‘You look pale, old friend. And you’re drenched with sweat on the coldest day we’ve had out here. Let the apothecary have a look at you.’
‘I said I’m fine. Maybe it was nothing. Let me send out a party, so we know for certain,’ von Sturm said.
‘No, our orders are clear. This is not a scouting expedition. My uncle gave us one mission. Search out the warband that savaged Salkalten and destroy every last one of them before they reach any of the villages further south. That’s exactly what I intend to do to those mongrel beasts.’
‘If you’d just allow me to–’
They both stopped. A horn sounded from somewhere in the woods. It was a low-pitched, moaning call and it echoed between the barren trees. The ghostly howl raised a murmur from the men.
‘Steady, men,’ Ludwig called out.
The horn faded away. A tense silence descended, but only for a moment. A shuffling, skittering noise replaced it. The pitter-patter of a thousand footsteps, seeming to come from every side this time.
‘On your guard, men!’ von Sturm commanded, his training and experience taking over. ‘Form up the lines, prepare defensive formation!’ The infantry responded with practised skill – shifting in position, drawing blades and strapping down their shields.
They were just in time. The haunted forest came alive an instant later. A chittering horde teemed out of the mist, as though spawned from the foul earth itself.
Their lean bodies were covered in coarse, prickly fur. Most were pale brown or the dull grey shade of peat smoke, with inhuman snouts flanked by bristle-like whiskers.
Ratmen.
They attacked with the same speed with which they scampered out of the shadows, leaping and pouncing from different directions with every slash and thrust. Most carried no shield, instead whirling rusted blades in each claw-like fist. Most were dressed in filthy rags, with only a few sporting small iron breastplates and coats of rusted mail.
Upon reaching the battle-line, the horde broke off into smaller groups, setting upon knights or pikemen in parties of three or more. Though each stood about the height of a man, the rats preferred to swarm their enemies, shrinking from single combat and striking from multiple angles at once. Von Sturm drew his blade and slew two of the vermin in short order. The third attacker did not press the fight; instead he yelped, threw a handful of dirt in the knight’s face and slunk back into the shadows in their common, cowardly fashion.
Though still coughing and sweating, the ardour of battle brought a surge to von Sturm’s creaking bones. He bounded into the fray atop his stallion, cutting a path through the heart of the swarm. He hacked down at the foul attackers from his saddle, swinging his longsword in a series of practised, deadly arcs. Each punishing sweep ended with the wet thump of edged steel chopping through muscle; the same cruel sound no matter the victim, human, greenskin or beast. Rodent blood splattered across his armour, soaking his riding gloves until every clench of his fists sent red rivulets down his arms.
A single lethal stroke felled two ratmen with one swipe, the first disembowelled and the other decapitated. The moment of respite offered him a chance to pull back his steed, and to once again survey the fight, this time from the far side of the field.
The distraction cost him.
Von Sturm felt his horse lurch and stagger. He turned to find a jagged lance blade sticking through the stallion’s neck. Swathed in warm blood, the halberd was thrust clean through the horse’s flesh, the serrated edge only barely missing von Sturm’s belly.
He saw three ratmen howling in triumph underneath, still twisting the shaft of the spear, trying to direct the great, dying stallion to the ground like a felled cedar. He reached down, grabbing one by the throat, hauling it across the saddle like a rag doll.
He stared at the whimpering ratman for an instant. Even in the midst of battle, with blood-stink filling the air, von Sturm could smell the nasty sewage reek that clung to its fur. A nest of fleas infested its hide, spilling out from its undercoat as von Sturm tightened his fist into a strangling death-grip. Choking as its larynx collapsed, the ratman hissed, opening its mouth to threaten its captor with two pairs of pointed yellow incisors. Von Sturm held fast, grimacing at the rotten-egg breath and the flecks of bloody saliva it spat with every wheeze, until the ratman finally fell still.
Only an instant later, the front legs of his whinnying horse buckled, trapping von Sturm’s left ankle in the stirrup as it twisted on the way down. Von Sturm tried to pull his leg free as the steed fell, and to clutch at his sword simultaneously.
He accomplished neither.
The murdered stallion did not obey the path the ratmen sought for it, instead crumpling into the gully of a dead riverbed, barrelling von Sturm underneath its great girth like a catapult. Agony tore through him – he felt his thighbones snap as the massive beast rolled over him, pulling his ruined left leg from its socket.
He let loose the deepest, longest scream he’d ever uttered.
Then everything went black.
It was hours before von Sturm’s wits returned to him.
He came around slowly, looking out through blurry eyes and muttering what he expected to be his final prayers to Sigmar.
The woodlands were littered in every direction with the remains of his comrades, their corpses hacked to pieces in a wasteland of broken armour and mutilated flesh. Mud and blood blended in putrid puddles. Flies swarmed and carrion birds cried overhead, circling the fields before their rancid feast.
Still trapped under the carcass of his steed, his broken legs had gone numb. His fever swelled. Every breath burned like cinders in his lungs. Lingering somewhere near the edge of delirium, his eyes wandered over the desolation, overwhelmed by the terrible sights, the awful smells and the pained whimpers of those other cursed few who were not yet dead.
But there was something else. Something worse stalked the fields of ruin.
A strange flock of creatures fanned out around him, leaping and crawling over everything in sight; some no larger than horseflies, others as large as hounds. The herd was horrific. Some of the beasts were nothing more than torsos dragging themselves along with claw-like hands. Others rubbed exposed organs and intestinal tracts against the rocks, slurping and lurching and drooling as they moved about. Smaller, faster creatures crept between them, neither insect nor reptile nor bird, but bastardised hybrids of all these things. Some had bulging, bullfrog eyeballs dripping with viscous tears; others were without eyes altogether. Prickly grey tongues dangled to the side of maws lined with broken teeth, nestled beside up-turned fangs, the sharp ivory coated in layers of dried mucus. Those daemons not sniffing for carrion or picking through the human debris mounted their packmates, stroking and grooming one another in unnerving displays of affection.
A familiar, shambling figure trailed the daemon swarm, ragged and moth-eaten.
He ministered arcane rites to the dead and the dying. Carrying his skull-topped staff, the macabre old doktor studied several of the corpses in particular, fiddling with disembodied limbs and scraps of bloody meat like a fishmonger at market.
Festus.
His immense girth was swaddled in grimy, tattered robes; the demands of his grossly distended physique had ripped and stretched everything he wore. The woollen threads were browned with age, their natural colour soiled in shades of dried excrement and crawling with cultures of green and black mould. Barefoot in spite of the cold, his toes were uncommonly large, dirty and tipped with ingrown, thickened nails.
A rusty bandolier chain was slung over his shoul
der, dangling boiled human skulls. It was tied with braided scalps to an enormous wooden chest he wore like a rucksack. The open pack rattled with the clinking of dozens of glass vials, most half-filled with milky, bubbling fluids, a few glowing with a poisonous luminescence.
Hissing snakes slithered around the enormous crooked staff he clutched in his left hand. The daemonic skull that had fixed its ghostly sights on von Sturm hours earlier still moved with a sinister, sentient independence.
His own face was a diseased mess – a bulbous nose dribbled slow, sticky mucus onto chapped lips, while cysts drooled pus down his fat cheeks, pock-marked with open sores of necrotic flesh and mouldering ulcers. His jowls slobbered, submerging his jaw under a neck that bulged like a toad’s.
Von Sturm watched him, surrounded by the daemon host, sifting through the bodies of the dead. It was clear that Festus was no thief. He took nothing from the corpses he examined, but he was looking for something. It was only when von Sturm coughed again that he realised what that was.
Festus was looking for him.
Festus turned at the raspy sound of von Sturm’s straining lungs. Even from a distance, in the dim of the gloaming von Sturm could see his wild eyes lighting up at the sound of the putrid phlegm coughed out from the dying knight’s throat.
The fat, dishevelled old doktor ambled closer, navigating the fields of the dead with uncommon grace. He stopped a few feet from von Sturm, looking down at him buried under mud and rotting horseflesh. The mad doktor said nothing; he seemed only to study him, listening to the tortured wheezing that came with every breath, sampling the odours of decay. He appeared to take an interest in even the smallest details of the fallen knight’s predicament, but without any apparent regard for his suffering.
‘I know you,’ von Sturm finally said, his voice hoarse and faltering. ‘I know who you are.’
There was no reply.
‘You’re Doktor Festus,’ he continued. ‘They say you were… the greatest physician in the Empire. That there was no ailment you… couldn’t cure. Yet now, it seems…’
The bloated figure smiled with a wide, crooked grin, exposing irregular rows of rotten teeth, some worn down to stumps, some stained urine-yellow and coated in brown plaque. When he lowered his filthy, green hood his misshapen head was exposed: pallid, veiny skin that had rarely seen the sun, sprouting matted locks blackened from years of sebaceous grease and infested with lice.
He lifted his porcine nose like a bloodhound, sniffing over von Sturm’s hands, then his chest and finally all around his face. As if searching for a scent, or following an invisible trail, he nodded with peculiar satisfaction after every different breath.
‘High fever. Cold sweat,’ he said, as though cataloguing rather than explaining. ‘Dark yellow mucus. Pale green rash spreading outwards from the face and throat, covering the extremities. A raspy cough, high in the chest. Yes, it’s just as I suspected. So very rare, and so very beautiful.’
‘Can you… help me?’ von Sturm muttered. ‘Whatever has become of you now… If it is true that you once mastered the medicine and remedies of every realm… Can you heal my wounds?’
Festus sneered. Rather than answer he continued to study the knight’s symptoms. This time he reached in close and stroked his chubby finger along the edges of von Sturm’s deep, infected wound. A slather of congealed pus and clotted blood coated his digit, which he promptly brought to his lips. Tasting the foetid mélange, Festus nodded again, now with a more certain expression.
Von Sturm feebly brushed his hand aside. ‘I ask again… do you know how to heal me?’
Again there was no reply, other than a derisive shake of the doktor’s bloated head.
‘Please,’ von Sturm begged. ‘Long have I served the Count of Ostland. Whatever you desire, I will see that he makes it yours, but I implore you, if the power is within you, cure me of these foul afflictions!’
The plea brought a snarl from Festus. His eyes bulged with wrath. He recoiled from von Sturm as though taunted by the deepest of insults. For a long, quiet moment the old doktor looked away, clenching his fat fists and muttering to himself. Finally he turned back to the knight, a devious glimmer in his eyes.
‘Have you any children?’ he asked.
Von Sturm puzzled for a moment, afraid of giving away more information than necessary to the deviant, disturbed figure.
‘I did,’ he said. ‘A son and a daughter. They died some years back.’
‘Died... or were killed?’
The question jolted von Sturm as no blade could have. A tear came to his eye.
‘Murdered. During a greenskin raid on our village,’ he answered, barely above a whisper.
The suggestion brought an even more scheming glare to the doktor’s face. ‘It must have been a horrible end,’ he said. ‘Tell me, did you see them die?’
The memory brought an ache to von Sturm’s chest worse than any caused by his injury.
‘No, I was on a campaign north of Kislev when it happened,’ he said.
Festus drew closer, near enough that von Sturm could smell the ammonia fumes of his foul breath with every word. ‘If I told you I could run the sands of time in reverse,’ the mad apothecary began, ‘to wind back the years and let you watch their demise… would you? Would you watch your beloved children being killed?’
Von Sturm recoiled, shaking his head to rid himself of the images, straining to control the anger they sparked in his heart. He clenched his fists, shook his head and whispered under his breath. He looked up at Festus, staring back at him with a knowing, sad glare. Then he looked down to the boils festering on his hands, the pus drooling from the wound in his side, the bloody phlegm he’d coughed up onto his own chest.
‘I would no sooner cure you than you would watch your own children put to the sword,’ Festus said.
The mad doktor turned from von Sturm, raising his staff and muttering under his breath once more, but this time in a foul, dark tongue. In response, the daemon swarm coalesced, drawing inwards to the call of their master’s strange summoning. The motley horde jammed together, scrambling over one another with scaly tails and claws, all eyes turned to Festus, like a pack of docile wolves panting in anticipation of a command.
The Leechlord did not speak. He lowered his staff, pointed it towards von Sturm and nodded. As if in response, the throng surged, lifting themselves in a tide of warped flesh. Roused to action and moving with a single purpose, they descended as one upon von Sturm.
The trunks of two massive oaks stood side by side, intertwining as they rose so that the upper branches had grown together. Like a sentinel of the woods, the twins stood apart from the otherwise dense foliage in a wide clearing.
The conjoined trunks were thick, bloated and bulging outwards with growths sagging from the grey bark. Few branches grew lower than the height of two men. Those that did sprout off the main rise were as wide and round as full trees themselves, reaching out in weird perpendicular growths. Their joining blotted out all but a few slivers of moonlight. It felt like the interior of a cavern, but the whole of the area reeked – the rank, heavy stench of excrement mixed with the stale smell of death.
The daemon-swarm brought the crippled von Sturm there, ferrying him through the woods like a colony of giant ants.
A scream howled through the dimness. It wailed as if suddenly roused to agony, then lapsed, fading into a voiceless whimper. A greenish-yellow gleam ignited at the death-knell of the scream. Von Sturm could see the source of the light and the wail, for they were one and the same – a man hung suspended in an iron gibbet, his limbs shackled and his grey, naked flesh pierced with corroded rods. Fitted around his skull like a battle-helm, the top of the iron coffin merged with his head, fused into one being by some black sorcery.
It was from there that the sickly light emanated, from a translucent, plasma-churning globe that grew from the poor wretch’s brain. Festus was standing beside him, and quite clearly found no horror in the display.
The glo
w revealed the true nature of his camp. While there were no permanent structures to be seen, it was clearly more than a mere haven in the wilderness; to von Sturm it seemed more like a makeshift workshop, though for only the most foul of experiments.
A dozen human effigies lined the periphery. As far as the green light penetrated, rows of corpses hung suspended from the tree limbs. Rotting away in different stages of decomposition, maggots oozed through the flesh of some, while others, the skin desiccated and blackened, were falling to pieces.
Each body was suspended on hooks and rusty chains, like slabs of slaughtered chattel in a butcher’s pen. Many were incomplete specimens, missing whole limbs, pieces of limbs or merely other, smaller assets – eyes, noses and ears having been severed and stitched over in gruesome acts of surgery.
The swarm laid von Sturm down on a flat section of stone, almost like an altar or a physician’s examination table. He could feel nothing in either leg. Every minute brought new kinds of agony from the wound in his side. His fever had swelled. His vision betrayed him, focusing in and out and settling on a blurry medium, while the cough and the burning in his lungs made him shiver and convulse.
Festus stood over him yet again, dismissing the beast-swarm with a wave. The doktor then set down his massive wooden pack. It opened like a cabinet, revealing a portable laboratory stocked with all manner of foul gear.
Countless vials, tubes and flasks hung in niches, bubbling and fuming. Hundreds of age-worn scrolls were crammed into slots carved from human skulls beside them, the parchment and vellum yellowed and frayed. There were scalpels of varying sizes, along with needles, clamps, pincers and hooks and a pair of bone-saws with dried blood crusting the teeth.
When von Sturm saw the macabre implements, his heart began to race.
‘Foul trickster! What do you intend for me?’ he demanded.
Festus ignored him, tending to his vials and rusty tools.
‘If you mean to torture me for information, I will give you none. Do with me as you wish, but I am a loyal servant of the Empire and I would rather die than betray my lord!’
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