Rosenberg nodded and unclasped a trumpet from his saddle.
As the long, wavering note filled the valley, the approaching knights drew their lances, raised their shields and brought their steeds to a clattering halt; all except Reiksgraf von Südenhorst, who kicked his horse into a gallop and sped to the captain’s side.
“What are you playing at, Stoltz? The Grand Astromancer has no time for delays! He does not expect us to quail at the sight of every stray horse.”
Captain Stoltz looked back at the carriage. Caspar and Gabriel had climbed out onto the road and were huddled together, deep in conversation and peering up at the hills.
“Begging your pardon, reiksgraf, but I think our patrons will appreciate the danger of the situation.”
“Danger?” cried the reiksgraf, squinting through his monocle at the hillside. “From horses?”
Stoltz shook his head. “If they are horses, then they’re horses without riders, mustering in orderly rows. That’s not quite the same as a ‘stray horse’, reiksgraf.” He looked again at the silhouettes massing on the hilltop. “And there’s something else odd about them.” He rummaged in his saddlebags and drew out a small brass telescope. As he focussed the lens on the horizon, he grunted a bitter curse.
“What is it, Captain Stoltz?” asked Rosenberg, not used to hearing his old friend sound so unnerved.
“I’m not sure,” he replied in a quiet voice, handing the spyglass to the scowling general. “I think you ought to take a look, reiksgraf.”
Von Südenhorst rolled his eyes as he took the telescope, but when he looked again at the horses he blanched and clenched his jaw. “Sigmar’s teeth. What are they, Stoltz?”
The question went unanswered as the creatures launched their attack, swooping down the hillside in a black tsunami of gleaming hides. The monsters vaguely resembled horses, but they were several feet taller than the knights’ chargers and had broad, leathery batwings ending in cruel, curved talons. Their heads were crowned with brutal, bull-like horns and their eyes blazed with a crimson fire. Their charge was made all the more unnerving by their silence: no war cry or trumpets accompanied them as they raced towards the knights; there was nothing but the thundering of hooves and the beating of hideous wings.
The knights raised their shields to meet the charge but, just before the impact, hundreds of the creatures spread their wings and launched themselves into the air, swooping above the soldiers like birds of prey.
For a few moments, it seemed as though the knights would be overwhelmed. The monsters had slammed into them at such a speed that their orderly ranks immediately collapsed and, with half of their enemy soaring overhead, the knights found themselves attacked from every direction. The daemonic beasts began a silent orgy of killing: lashing at the men with their talons, crushing them beneath their heavy hooves and gouging them with their horns.
“Regroup!” bellowed Captain Stoltz, kicking his horse into action and racing back towards the carnage.
The reiksgraf cursed and raced after him, elbowing the older man aside as he passed by. “Charge!” he cried, ducking as one of the huge black shapes hurtled overhead.
Gradually, the knights began to regain some semblance of order. The creatures made a terrifying sight, but they were not clad in good Reikland steel and the point of a lance halted them just as surely as any other foe.
With Captain Stoltz and the reiksgraf at their head, the knights charged into the fray, skewering dozens of the monsters before discarding their broken lances, drawing swords and hacking more beasts from the air.
“More of them,” granted Rosenberg, appearing at Stoltz’s side.
The captain rose up in his saddle and lashed out with his sword, sending one of the monsters crashing down onto the road behind him in a flurry of ink-black wings and clattering hooves. Before it could rise, Stoltz dropped from his horse, grabbed his sword in both hands and hammered it down through the thing’s neck, showering his armour with blood.
“What did you say?” he gasped, climbing back into his saddle and turning to his adjutant.
“There are so many of them,” cried Rosenberg, raising his shield just in time to prevent another one of the creatures tearing his face off.
Stoltz lashed out again with his sword. His blow was so ferocious that it took the monster’s head clean off, spinning it across the tightly packed crowds of combatants. He followed the direction of Rosenberg’s gaze and saw what he meant. Hundreds more of the winged beasts were charging down the hill. “Where are they coming from?” he asked, wiping the gore from his visor and preparing for the next impact.
As the hillside disappeared once more beneath an ocean of black muscle and pounding wings, Captain Stoltz glanced briefly at the general. The reiksgraf’s haughty features had been transformed by a feral snarl. Stoltz wondered if he might have misjudged the youth.
Before the next wave of monsters had reached the bottom of the hill, the clouds overhead suddenly rolled together into a single great thunderhead that hung right over the battle. Horse and man alike stumbled as a powerful wind struck up from nowhere and whipped the clouds into a funnel of lightning-charged power.
Captain Stoltz was about to cry out in confusion when he saw the cause of the strange weather. The two magisters had climbed on to the roof of their carriage and raised their staffs to the heavens. As they twirled their rods in unison, the cloud spiralled over their heads, the winds tearing cobbles from the road and rattling the knights’ armour.
As Stoltz and the others looked on awestruck, blinding arcs of lightning began to splinter from the shadows, shimmering in the whirlwind and flickering around the wizards.
The winged horses baulked as the air filled with electricity and the weather grew more ferocious.
Finally, as their storm seemed about to tear loose and destroy all of them, Caspar and Gabriel simultaneously cried out, holding the tips of their staffs together and levelling them at the approaching horses. Their words were lost beneath the sound of the storm, but the effect was impossible to miss. Spines of lightning came together in a brittle, dazzling tower before slamming into the hillside with such force that it seemed sunlight had briefly returned to the Empire.
The sound of the blast was incredible and the shock wave toppled half of the knights from their horses.
“By the gods,” gasped Stoltz, picking himself up from the ground as the echoes faded. With its energy spent, the whirlwind began to disperse, but the explosion had left a shrill ringing in the captain’s head and his skin was still tingling with static. He had seen celestial magic before, but nothing as potent as this. He looked over at the carriage and saw that Caspar Vyborg looked just as shocked. The Grand Astromancer was shaking his head in disbelief as he studied the crater they had carved in the hillside.
“Captain!” cried Rosenberg, shoving Stoltz to one side as one of the daemonic horses bore down on him. The beast was badly wounded and its eyes were rolling with fury and pain.
Rosenberg tripped and fell and, as the horse circled and swooped back towards Captain Stoltz, he realised to his horror that he had no weapon.
Reiksgraf von Südenhorst charged through the battle and drove his sword into the monster’s face. The beast crashed to the ground and, before it could rise, the general wrenched his sword free and struck again, pinning it to the ground with a determined grunt.
Stoltz clambered to his feet, readying himself for the next attack, but as he looked around he saw that the wizards’ light show had decided the battle. Two-thirds of the monsters were dead and the rest were galloping into the dark, with victorious knights pursuing them.
Stoltz nodded gratefully at the reiksgraf. “You saved my life.”
The young general gave him a stern nod, doing his best to appear calm and dignified, but as he looked around at the carnage, his eyes were gleaming with pride.
As the carriage lurched into motion, Caspar dropped heavily onto the bench. His hands were still aching from the blast and his skullcap had slipped to one side, sp
illing his hair over his face.
“I’ve never felt anything like it,” he said, looking warily at the younger wizard.
Gabriel was sitting motionless at his side with his eyes closed. “The air is thick with azyr. It responded to our presence. It was waiting.”
Caspar looked at his hands. The skin was blistered and raw. “Then we’ll have to be very careful when we reach the ruins of Razumov’s tower. The concentration of azyr will be even greater there.” Strangely, the thought did not worry him. The power of the storm had made him feel thirty years younger. It had gripped him like a drug, flooding his crooked old limbs with life. He had not felt so exhilarated since his first teenage experiments with magic. The idea of channelling even greater amounts of the stuff set his heart racing. He looked out of the window and saw that the mood of the rest of the company was very different from his own. The knights were riding in silence, their eyes scouring the hilltops as they continued north. The battle had been brief, but the knights’ losses had been heavy and the strangeness of the attack had unnerved them. Caspar followed their gaze and peered at the darkened hills. “I’ve never heard of pegasi so close to Altdorf. And such a strange breed. They seemed more bat than horse.”
Gabriel nodded. “Morrslieb’s orbit is unnatural. The heavens are in turmoil. The winds of magic are bending reality. The creatures of Chaos are displaced.”
Caspar nodded and tried to adopt a concerned expression, but all he could think of was the power he had felt when the storm took hold. He leaned back in his seat and tried to rest, but when he closed his eyes all he could see was his own face: young again and gilded by lightning, his eyes blazing with godlike power.
CHAPTER FIVE
Thaddeus Groot wheezed asthmatically as he made his way through the debating chamber of Schwarzbach Town Hall. One of his men was supporting him as he walked, but his face was still flushed and beaded with sweat. The room was long, rectangular and lined with faded banners. There was a large stained-glass window at one end that usually flooded the place with light, but with the Empire draped in a constant gloom, the bürgermeister had to rely on the light of a flickering candle to lead him down the central aisle.
At the far end of the ancient chamber was a locked door. Thaddeus drew a large bundle of keys from within his robes but paused before using them. The rattling of the keys echoed oddly around the rows of empty seats and Groot turned to the man by his side, a rangy, beak-nosed officer with glossy, ink-black hair swept back in a ponytail. “Someone’s in here, Zelter,” he snapped, shoving the soldier back down the aisle.
Groot watched anxiously as the soldier searched the room, but after a few minutes the man shook his head and announced that they were alone. Groot did not look entirely convinced, but he unlocked the door anyway and hurried on into a small library, locking the door behind him and leaving the soldier to wait in the hall.
The library’s shelves had once been crammed with municipal lore—hundreds of tithes, levies and Imperial statutes recorded in thick volumes of cherry-red calf leather—but now the folios were all empty; the foiled numbers had disappeared from their spines and the beautiful, illuminated letters had vanished from their pages. Fortunately, Groot was not interested in research. He locked the door behind him, set his candle down on a reading desk and approached a Sigmarite shrine that dominated the room. The shrine was far older than the rest of the building. It had allegedly been rescued from a nearby monastery during the Wars of the Three Emperors, but no one could be sure of its true origin. The centuries had not been kind to the God King. The stone had eroded so badly that Sigmar’s face was little more than a featureless mask and his powerful muscles had blurred into one hulking mass of stone. His thick, square fingers were still visible though, and they were spread out over a small, wooden table, placed there in more recent years by a local priest as a receptacle for offerings.
Groot was careful not to look at the statue’s face—even in such a ruined condition, he found it unnerving. The bürgermeister removed the table and reached around behind Sigmar’s back, grasping a crumbling column of rock that had once been recognisable as Sigmar’s warhammer. The bürgermeister grimaced as his pudgy fingers scrabbled over the ancient stone, unable to find purchase. After a few muttered curses, he finally found a tiny depression in the stone and jabbed his index finger into it.
The empty books trembled on their shelves as the shrine rolled back into the wall, revealing a gloomy stairway. Cool, fusty air rushed over the bürgermeister as he picked up his candle and stepped into the darkness.
The stairs led steeply down into damp, crumbling cellars and then deeper, beyond the foundations of the town hall and onto a narrow, partially excavated street. The subterranean road must once have been a wide thoroughfare, but only a sliver of its original width had been unearthed. Groot struggled to squeeze his vast stomach through some of the narrower bends, but the deeper he went, the more excited he became, rubbing his meaty palms together and muttering to himself as he scrambled over the ancient stones.
After a few minutes, he reached a door at the end of a long passageway. The light of his candle flickered over its surface, revealing an intricate array of carvings. The faces staring out of the wood might once have been heroic, or even beautiful, but centuries of decay had warped them into something far more sinister: tortured-looking, featureless grotesques, who seemed to cry out in pain as Groot shoved the door open and filled the tunnel with the sound of screaming, rusted hinges.
As the door opened, a mound of rats tumbled out, scattering from the bürgermeister’s light and scurrying into the shadows. Groot paid them no heed, but the second thing to emerge did cause him to falter—a thick, cloying charnel stink that filled his nostrils and left him retching into his ermine robes. For a few minutes he could do nothing but grimace and cough, then he pulled his robes up over his face and stepped through the doorway.
The darkness that smothered Groot was so profound that his candle could only illuminate a few feet in every direction. He shuffled slowly on through a series of empty rooms and down more stairs. Opening another door, he came to a halt in a small, rat-infested cellar. The room was so tiny that his candle finally managed to push back the shadows, revealing a slight, hooded figure waiting patiently in the corner.
The figure recoiled as Groot approached, but was clearly excited by his presence—twitching and fidgeting in the shadows and tapping the floor with a black spiked staff that ended in a crescent of talon-like horns.
“What news, Groot?” The shadowy figure had a voice like autumn leaves being crunched underfoot.
“My lady,” gasped the bürgermeister, attempting a bow, “they’re not here yet.”
“You’re wrong.” There was anger in the voice and Groot flinched, as though expecting to be struck.
“Are you sure, my lady? I’ve just spoken to Steffan, the captain of the watch, and he travelled several miles into the hills without seeing any sign of strangers.” He laughed. “They encountered quite a few other things though. I don’t think they will be—”
“They left Schwarzbach?” hissed the woman. “What for?”
Groot’s face twisted into a grimace. “They were just scouting the nearby hills, my lady. That was all.”
“How can you be sure?” The woman’s voice was verging on a scream. “What if they’ve learned something? No one must speak to the magisters before they arrive. We’re only two nights away from the full moon. Nothing can be allowed to go wrong.” She looked down at the floor. There was a pile of bones at her feet that gleamed faintly in the candlelight as she stooped down to stroke them. She spent a few moments placing the bones in various different arrangements on the floor, muttering under her breath. This seemed to calm her and when she turned back to Groot, her voice was softer. “The magisters will be here tomorrow night. Nothing can be allowed to disrupt our plans before then. Do you understand?”
“Yes! Yes!” Groot dropped to his knees, peering at the vague shapes on the floor. “What s
hall I do?”
The woman clutched her cruel-looking staff in both hands and stepped closer to the bürgermeister. As she stooped over him, his candle revealed a brief glimpse of her ashen skin and matted silver hair. “You must kill them, Groot—Steffan first, then his friends. Do it quickly.”
Groot nodded eagerly. “Of course, my lady. Anything you desire.” He massaged his quivering cheeks and frowned again. “It’s so difficult keeping everything on track though.” He looked hungrily at the staff. “Do you think you could lend me a little more strength? Just to see me through this last stretch?”
The woman sighed, then gave a grudging nod.
Groot closed his eyes and sighed with pleasure. Loosening the belt around his robes, he allowed them to fall open. His entire body was covered in bleeding, open sores and as he leaned towards the woman, some of them parted slightly, revealing rows of tiny, pointed teeth.
The woman raised her staff and placed the crescent of horns against his trembling chest. As she dragged it gently over his skin, a string of new sores erupted, causing Groot to moan even louder.
Just as the bürgermeister’s pleasure seemed about to overcome him, the woman snatched the staff away and withdrew into the shadows.
Groot tumbled to the floor, reaching after her with a pitiful whine.
“No more,” she hissed, “until they are dead.”
CHAPTER SIX
“Schwarzbach,” announced Captain Stoltz as the general dismounted and stood beside him.
The two knights were looking out across a wide, moonlit valley and on the opposite side was a fortified town, circled by a thick stone wall punctuated by squat, pugnacious-looking towers. Soldiers could be seen moving on the battlements and the Imperial standard was hanging lifelessly from the inner citadel.
“Still standing, at least,” said the general, squinting through the gloom. “The walls are manned too.”
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