by David Guymer
Stefan eyed that axe warily. As well he might. It had taken more lives in the last few weeks than Kolya’s brother had in a lifetime fighting greenskins and kyazak. ‘I am Stefan Taczak,’ he said. ‘Marszałek of Kislev.’
The dwarf grimaced as though something had landed in his mouth and tasted foul. His axe angled indecisively between the two men. He ground his teeth until a giant blue vein bulged from his temple. Kolya wondered when the dwarf had last opened his mouth to do anything more wholesome than scream his battle cry and feast on the spoils of the slain.
‘I was there the day the Ice Palace burned,’ spoke the dwarf at last in twenty-four-carat Reikspiel. Then he spat on the ground. ‘So pull the other one. There is no Kislev.’
‘What is your name, friend?’
Again, the effort of dredging speech. ‘My name is meaningless to you, manling. If you are Kislevite then be on your way. If you are not…’ He cracked a smile full of broken and yellowed teeth and what hint of hurt there had been in his voice was gone. He hefted his axe meaningfully. ‘Then my axe still thirsts.’
‘You are lost, Slayer,’ said Marzena. She silenced Stefan with a hand on the lancer’s shoulder. Her words prickled the spine like prophecy, like a spider running down one’s neck. The dwarf glowered, but said nothing. ‘As Kislev is lost. Your story is that of the Old World itself. With its ending comes your own, or perhaps it is the reverse? Prophecy is ever treacherous. The world cries out for a hero, for the Magnus of this age. And yet you are here. Surely you are lost.’
The dwarf grunted, then shrugged. ‘Breaks my heart.’
To Kolya’s consternation and surprise, the crone smiled as though amused. ‘You have a destiny, Slayer, one that is known even to the spirits of my land. It was they who guided you to me. They speak to me in one voice, and of nothing but doom.’
Interest glittered in the dwarf’s one eye. Kolya felt his guts knot, as if they were all stood on some precipice awaiting the slightest twist of fate, a gust of wind, to push them all into blackness.
‘If you will not go south, then go north.’ Using Stefan’s unwounded shoulder as a support, Marzena pointed across him, north and west. ‘The King of Praag gathers an army the like of which has never been seen, a host to whet the blood of any Trollslayer. And I see death there. One for you, and one for your companion.’
The dwarf’s glower knotted tight. ‘I have no companion.’
‘Perhaps that is as you see it,’ murmured Marzena, but the dwarf was not listening. He planted the shoulder of his axe to his own and turned to look north.
‘Then just what is the King of Praag?’
‘A favourite of the Dark Gods. He calls himself the Troll King, but I see no more clearly than that: he is jealous of his gifts and resentful of the spirits that would spy on him. What I know is what these dead men knew.’ She waved dismissively over the fallen Kurgan. ‘He seeks wizards of every race and kind and will trade them for a winter in his city. That is why warbands scour the oblast while their kin besiege the Auric Bastion.’
‘Why does he want wizards?’ said Gotrek. Marzena shrugged to indicate that she did not know.
‘Wise woman,’ Stefan cut in while the dwarf glared thoughtfully at the crone. ‘This dwarf is a champion sent by Tor himself. With his aid we can hold this tirsa until spring. Easily.’ He turned to Kolya, extended his unwounded hand, beseeching. ‘Tell her, brother.’
Lips pursed, Kolya bent to pick up his stolen bow. His hands had left bloody prints on it. It was Kasztanka’s blood, and already cold. ‘Kislev is done. All that remains is to decide how the last of us will die.’
‘Kolya–’
‘Is dead. Mourned by a family that is dead.’ His gaze fixed on the dwarf. The dwarf glared back. ‘At least this way, I will get to see the dwarf die.’
For some reason, the dwarf seemed pleased.
‘Then it is settled,’ said Marzena, silencing Stefan’s protest before he could utter it. Her eyes glittered like spiders in ice. ‘Dzie dobry, Gotrek son of Gurni.
‘You will have the mightiest doom.’
Six
Let there be Life
Three weeks of lengthening nights and worsening weather saw Felix, Ulrika, and Damir arrive at Bechafen.
The state capital of Ostermark cut an impoverished picture; a mezzotint of grey stone walls and millet skies. Smoke sputtered from chimneys in gasping fits, the rooftops layered with white powder, seeded with the promise of Kislev’s fate by the clouds that rolled over the Auric Bastion to the north. Through the snow, across the Upper Talabec, the great barrier was just the glim-ghost of a shimmer. But it was enough to take Felix’s breath. Even from afar its power was palpable.
The three of them stayed just the one day, an arranged stop during which Felix was introduced to a succession of captains and counts – all of them half his age and as bemused by the purpose of his visit as Felix was – and whisked away to speak about his own war-time experiences at various garrison posts and inns throughout the city.
He had spoken hesitantly at first, the grim stares of men who slept in the same billet as death like lead weights on his tongue. He was a writer not an orator, and it was painfully apparent that if any of these men had seen one of his books they would have burned it for warmth. After a few fumbling anecdotes about his time in Praag he grew into the role, and actually started to enjoy the experience of recounting the tales of his adventuring days to rooms full of strangers who had never heard them and whose own lives more closely paralleled his own than anyone he could meet in Otto’s circles in Altdorf. Here a rousing tale of battles against mutants and fiends on the streets of Mordheim, always a crowd-pleaser in Ostermark, there a bawdy reminiscence of his time touring the brothels of Araby hunting the so-called ‘Lurking Horror’, and come the evening, voice hoarse, Felix had the warm feeling that he might inadvertently have done some good here after all. The Ostermarkers were a hardbitten lot, underfed and underslept, faces blighted by battle and pox. They had earned what brief smiles Felix’s tales could grant them.
No sooner had Felix pulled up a stool in his final venue, a tavern called the Hog’s Head, and summoned the barmaid for an ale to soothe his throat than Ulrika reappeared and they were moving again. They beat the closure of the city’s gates by minutes.
Three weeks from Altdorf to Bechafen.
With that knowledge and a map of the Empire, a man might then con himself into believing the last few dozen miles up the course of the Upper Talabec, the Empire’s boundary with Kislev, would be a journey of days, but arrival in Ostermark marked the drawing out of their journey rather than its drawing in.
The roads in the north had suffered the war as gracelessly as the men and even beforehand had been poor relations to those that bore the wealthy and the powerful across the fields of Reikland and Averland. Brambles scratched at the undercarriage as if pleading to be taken away. The ruts left in the muddy track by every other preceding cart had been frozen in for the winter to make every turn of the wheels a gambit of axle-shattering courage. More than once they found the track blocked by a fallen tree, the sort of thing one expected for the dense tangle of the Gryphon Wood at this time of year, but on one occasion the smashed remnants of a wagon train indicated an ambush. There were no bodies left behind, but enough hoof-prints to suggest beastmen. Felix watched the treeline warily, knowing the herd that he and Kat had destroyed on the Barren Hills had been just one dead leaf in a forest, but nothing attacked. Nothing even moved.
Felix wondered how much of that was due to Ulrika. It didn’t matter who your gods were: seeing a woman move a felled oak with her bare hands would make any would-be ambusher think twice. How armies of mere mortals could be moved under these conditions was a mystery.
It took another week to travel the Upper Talabec to its source in the foothills of the Worlds Edge Mountains, where the famed hot baths of Badenhof had once entertained noble
s and royals.
Time enough for a Kislevite winter to welcome Felix to the north.
Felix tapped his ring on the pommel of his sword and watched the black coach rattle down Badenhof’s swampy main street towards the Breden Bridge and the looming rock talon on the eastern skyline that was Castle Rackspire. He had not been exactly heartbroken when Ulrika had suggested that she go on and announce them to Commandant Roch without him. Being alone with her in a carriage for the last month had been disconcerting. Not unpleasant, definitely not that, but confusing, as if he couldn’t quite remember who or what he had been before Ulrika had come back into his life and didn’t really want to either.
He was curious though. What kind of a man – being – was this mysterious Roch? And why would a man with a hundred miles of battle line, the mustered strength of at least three provinces, and the service of the likes of Ulrika care about the fate of one kidnapped wizard? He chuckled sourly. These were thoughts above the station of washed-up former adventurers and war-poets. Right then he was simply grateful for a few hours of peace in his own head. The chill helped. Sleet blustered into the town down that east-west thoroughfare and contributed to dousing the hot-coal warmth that Ulrika’s nearness seemed to bring out from under his skin. He shivered, longing, and wrapped himself into his cloak.
On balance he was happy to squelch into Badenhof in ignorance.
The town’s old stone prosperity was braced into the confluence of two rivers, an unpaved and provincial-looking market square squeezed on two sides by the torrent of water where the brash waters of the Breden foamed into the shoulder of the Upper Talabec. A bridge of native grey stone straddled each river. The square itself was buried in sleet and snow, tracked through with footprints from Empire soldiers and displaced kossars hardy enough to brave the cold. What light made it through the sky’s grave-dust pallor was supplemented by seepage from the shuttered windows of inns and late-closing shops. Stone-fronted and half-timbered, they closed on the other two sides of the square as if hoping to push it into the river. The weathered stone mass of Badenhof’s famous bathhouse brooded amongst them, evocative, made somehow cruel by past glories.
Huddled out of the sleet under the bathhouse’s projecting second storey, a group of miserable-looking men in the burgundy and gold of Ostermark shared the slim warmth of a pipe. They looked like the retinue of some lord or other, left to guard the pair of monstrous destriers tethered by the entrance beside them. The horses snorted wetly, occasionally flicking their tails through the sleet. Suppressing a shudder that he couldn’t explain, Felix turned from the bathhouse towards the row of tall properties that stood against the more resigned waters of the Upper Talabec. After a few minutes trying to peer through boarded windows marked with the black cross of plague or the old guardian magicks of hawthorn sprigs and garlic, he found what he was looking for.
The wet sign that creaked above the front gate announced it as Jaegers of Altdorf. Felix smiled. The provincial branches of Jaeger and Sons frequently traded under that name, the allusion to the Emperor’s seat carrying profitable weight in faded, out of the way backwaters like Badenhof. There was no sign of a black cross. He let out a sigh of relief. That was something.
Mopping his fringe from his eyes, Felix swept his cloak free of his sword arm and used his foot to nudge open the little wooden gate. It creaked inwards and he walked to the front door. It was boarded, as were the windows. Felix tilted his head back and squinted up into the sleet. The upper storey too. He ran his hand over the boards that had been hammered over the door frame, then put his ear against it and listened.
Nothing but the white rush of the Breden.
He thought about knocking but then quietly chided himself for being an idiot. The thing was nailed down. Nobody was about to open it, were they?
‘Gustav?’
No answer. The whole building was dead.
If only Ulrika had been able to give him more details about the difficulties his nephew had managed to get himself into. It had been nearly two months now since Ulrika had carried Gustav’s letter to Altdorf and who knew what could have happened between now and then. For a moment, Felix wondered if Gustav could have abandoned the office altogether, perhaps relocated to the marginally safer and more salubrious company branches in Osterwald or Bechafen, but rejected the thought out of hand. Felix knew that for a certainty because he wouldn’t have left. Gustav had inherited his grandmother’s stubbornness, had confidence enough to land just the right side of arrogant and, not unlike his old fool of an uncle, would beat his head against whatever obstacle this town could present him with until it killed him.
Backing up to take a more measured look at the building, he noticed a side gate leading around the back to the riverside. He tried the latch, but it too was locked. He looked up to the top of the gate and sighed. Typical.
He was getting too old to be climbing fences.
‘Do you ever wonder what it is they do up there?’ said General Matthias Wilhelm von Karlsdorf, studying the hazed ring of figures within the standing stones upon the adjoining hill. Sleet pattered across his view as he scrolled his eyeglass across the stones. Men old enough to be even his grandfather stood under the rain and snow, their rich raiment of gold and pearl now sodden wet. He focused the lens on their faces. The weather had flattened their beards to their chests. Their mouths shaped a chant that the secular magic of the eyeglass made silent. Even without the words, he could feel the hairs on the insides of his ears prickle.
Lowering the glass, he turned to the man beside him, giving himself as long as was politick for a brother-in-law of Ostermark’s Elector and a distant cousin of the house of Wilhelm to remember the fellow’s name. ‘Well, do you, gunnery sergeant?’
Sheltered under a rippling canvas roof, the artilleryman leaned back against the muzzle of his mortar and shrugged. The weapon was a thirty-inch calibre monster made possible by the latest casting techniques of the Engineering School. Her carriage was muddy from its slow subsidence into the hilltop. The barrel glistened with moisture. From the black feather in the man’s cap and the gold trim to his overalls, the sergeant was one of the hundreds on permanent attachment from the Nuln regiments. From his nonchalant mien and pox-scarred features, he was a veteran of his fair helping of human misery and failed to share his general’s enthusiasm for more.
‘Sigmar, may it continue,’ he stated simply, voice roughened by powder inhalation and the general moral lassitude of the common-born.
General von Karlsdorf chose not to respond. It was, he thought, rather chivalrous of him.
Matthias Wilhelm was a hawkish man, fleshy in the face, and with a congenital bend to his hips that gave him a stoop and a painful awkwardness in the saddle. A burgundy greatcoat fringed with gold hung off his shoulders and a damp fur colback was pulled down over his ears. A brace of pistols were holstered at his hip and a Hochland longrifle with a carved walnut stock was bound within a leather sash across his back. For this was how a modern gentleman waged war.
At range.
The open veldt of the new North Ostermark was a patchwork of dykes, drystone walls, and the tents and regimental standards of the citizen levies, all in the foothills of a series of massive and wholly artificial earthworks that were a true marvel of the age. Between them they boasted enough firepower to face down a dragon charge. Together with the mortars here on the hill, the arquebusiers, crossbowmen, and archers camped under the walls and farmsteads, and the almost four thousand infantrymen picketed on the veldt that had survived the beastmen raids and plague, von Karlsdorf doubted that Archaon Everchosen himself could make it past him to the Empire in one piece.
And if the Auric Bastion were to come down anywhere between Rackspire and Bechafen then General von Karlsdorf was well prepared for the Chaos forces’ inevitable first target.
The standing stones.
The locals called them Trzy Siostry, or the Three Sisters, for the wea
ther-pitting of the three sandstone blocks on its summit did render them vaguely feminine. So not much of a stone ‘circle’ then on any erudite consideration, but then that was Kislev all over – numerically inferior, semi-barbaric, and womenfolk barely distinct from their men. Well, now Kislev was dead.
Long live North Ostermark.
The hill on which von Karlsdorf had embedded his prized field pieces and carved out his own command post from the dozen-or-so other generals that answered to Commandant Roch didn’t have a local name, being little more than a shoulder of Trzy Siostry raised in a characteristically defeatist shrug. Amongst its Imperial occupiers it had come to be known as Wilhelmshügel. General von Karlsdorf took that as testament to the popularity of his command. He returned his attention to the Three Sisters, wiping condensation from the viewing lens of his eyeglass and then peering through.
‘Is it me or are they fewer than usual?’
‘Conclave with Commandant Roch,’ supplied the gunnery sergeant.
‘Arch-Hierophant Sollenbuer is gone,’ von Karlsdorf mumbled to himself, sweeping the eyeglass along the hill’s rugged crown and counting at least a dozen magisters that he could not see. ‘Can they carry on with so few?’
The gunnery sergeant did not know, so he did not try to answer. He sucked on his teeth and watched the snow fall.
‘General!’
Von Karlsdorf turned as a youngish man in a burgundy-bright travelling cloak led his horse through the natural rock barricade and scree that would make Wilhelmshügel such a daunting prospect for an attacker. Breathless from his climb, he passed his reins to an aide before stepping under the thin canvas shelter and shivering sleet-water from his doublet.
‘Missive from Badenhof, general.’