Groot watched anxiously to see what the wizard would do. He expected an elaborate spell, or at least a dramatic flourish of his staff, but to the bürgermeister’s disappointment, Gabriel did nothing; he simply closed his eyes and remained stock-still.
Groot looked down at the struggling knights. Despite their general’s furious protestations, they were dropping at an alarming rate. Groot shook his head in dismay and peered at the cracked foundations of the hall. “He won’t have time,” he whispered, too quietly for Gabriel to hear. “What should I do?” Then he noticed something odd. The square was growing darker. He looked up, presuming that a cloud must be passing across the face of Morrslieb.
“What’s this?” he gasped, as a swirling black shape rushed over the town walls. It resembled a huge sack, miles wide and whipped by the wind as it sped towards them. He turned to Gabriel and repeated his question but, as the darkness approached, Groot’s words were lost beneath a deafening clicking sound.
Down below, the beastmen stumbled to a halt and looked up at the vast shadow forming over their heads. The reiksgraf rallied his men once more, trying to seize the opportunity, but the knights paused too, lowering their swords and muttering bitter curses as they studied the sky.
Groot flinched as Gabriel finally opened his eyes. They were featureless and black, like lumps of ebony sunk deep in his skeletal face. Then the sky began to fall, crashing down across the square in the form of millions of fluttering beetles. Their clicking grew even louder as they enveloped the beastmen, scurrying under their crude iron armour and scrabbling into mouths, ears and eye sockets. The Chaos horde became a whirling mob of flailing limbs as the beetles began to suffocate them.
As the knights realised what was happening, they howled in delight, brandishing their battered weapons and hacking down the few beastmen who managed to emerge from the boiling, black scrum.
Gabriel looked down at the mass of toiling shapes and shook his head. “Not enough,” he muttered, surveying the carnage. The beetles had stalled the vanguard of the beastmen army but there were still thousands more of the monsters pouring into the square. As they reached their struggling, smothered brethren, they simply clambered over them, hacking at their own kind in their eagerness to reach the stranded knights. He turned his gaze back to the tree-lined hills, considering all the vile, slithering obscenities they had encountered during the journey north. He wondered how far he could extend his reach. The storm of magic was still growing all around him, jangling in his fingers and crackling between his teeth. As his robes snapped around his slender frame, whipped back and forth by the screaming tempest, he realised he had never felt so alive, or so potent. He flexed his fingers and savoured the power. Then he gave a firm nod and raised his staff into the flickering tumult. “Perhaps…”
CHAPTER TEN
Caspar felt the storm growing wilder but remained focussed on his task, chanting his spell like a hymn and hauling himself up the drifting stones. As he climbed from one block to the next, it seemed as through the tempest was willing him on, wafting him from one piece of rock to the next like a leaf caught on the breeze.
With a final, reckless leap, he reached the shattered cupola and came to a halt. He was nearly fifty feet from the ground and the winds were deafening. The cupola was topped with a rusted iron spike and Caspar gripped it tightly with one hand, using his other hand to thrust his staff out into the flickering coils of lightning.
He caught a glimpse of the battle below and frowned in confusion. His words faltered as he saw the beastmen army draped in a shimmering mass of beetles. Clamping his eyes shut, he continued his spell, determined not to be distracted at this final, crucial stage. Even with his eyes closed, the light of Morrslieb burned into Caspar’s thoughts, filling his head with grotesque, oddly enticing images. He was no longer afraid though—only exhilarated. He felt like he was twenty, and full of youthful vigour. No, he corrected himself, he had never felt this powerful.
As he neared the culmination of the spell, the storm rose at his command, heaving and swelling in time to his words and spinning the tower around him like a flimsy toy. As the final syllable flew from his lips, Caspar felt like a god.
There was an ear-splitting roll of thunder, right overhead. The town shuddered, fell briefly into pitch darkness and then erupted with dazzling light. Windows cracked, lintels snapped and doors burst from their hinges as the tremor rolled through the blazing streets. Caspar howled in delight. Raw, untrammelled azyr screamed through his body, pouring into him from the heavens and flooding Schwarzbach with dazzling emerald fire.
Caspar’s moment of triumph was short-lived.
As the light of Morrslieb tore through him, he quickly realised it was passing on to a second point, lower down the tower. At first, he felt no fear, assuming this was the fulcrum that Gabriel had described—the great axis of power that had been prophesised. Then, as he reached out with his thoughts, his confusion turned to dismay. The presence below had a vile, lustful sentience. It was deliberately draining the azyr away from him. As the feeling grew, he opened his eyes and looked down through the spinning column of stones. To his horror, he saw a fast-moving figure climbing up towards him, attracting strands of lightning like a lodestone drawing iron. It was a hooded man, dressed in filthy, blood-red robes and he was scrabbling up towards him with a series of spasmodic, spiderlike movements.
Caspar howled and wrenched the current of azyr back towards himself.
The man below let out a strangled roar and looked up, clawing the air as strands of magic slipped from his grip.
As the stranger’s hood fell back, Caspar saw his face and groaned in horror. It was a grey, scarred mask of rotten flesh, with two smouldering embers for eyes. As lights flared and pulsed through the spinning tower, he saw that the man’s robes were embroidered with the foul sigils of the Chaos Gods. He cursed. A sorcerer must have followed him through the hills, hoping to steal the power of Razumov.
“It’s mine!” screamed Caspar, lifting his staff and wrenching more of the magic from the heaving clouds. As the power blasted though him, he began to feel drunk. It took incredible effort for him to focus on such prosaic matters as hanging on to the spire and not plummeting to his death. For a few dangerous seconds he forgot about everything: the tower, the plagues, Gabriel—all he could see was the intoxicating light piercing his mind. Then, just as he was about to let go of the spire and abandon himself to the experience, a woman’s voice rang out, jarring him from his trance. The voice was filled with such hurt and longing that, for a moment, he did not recognise the words, then, as the desperate cry was repeated, he realised the voice was calling a name: “Razumov!”
Caspar shook his head and looked down at the hooded figure. To his horror, the rotten-faced man was now only a few blocks below. He had paused though, to look back at the source of the awful screams. There was an old woman standing beneath the base of the tower, her matted grey hair whipped about by the storm and her frail body struggling to stay upright in the face of the ferocious wind. She was clutching a long black staff, crowned with a crescent of horns and she was waving it desperately.
“Razumov!” she wailed, her voice swelling and diminishing as the wind hurled it back and forth. She called out something else in an exotic eastern language, but the final word was clearly another name. “Natalya!”
Natalya? Caspar’s stomach lurched as he remembered Gabriel’s tale of the Kislevite sorcerer and his unrequited love. His dazed mind finally realised the implication of the woman’s cries and he looked at the man crouched a few feet below. The faded symbols on his robes were sewn in the same ornate style as the reliefs on the tower. Caspar moaned in despair, realising in one terrible instant the true nature of Gabriel’s prophecy. He had indeed summoned a great power into the world. He had summoned Razumov himself.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Gabriel slumped back against the shattered ruins of the town hall. As the storm of magic wracked his flesh, his eyes rolled back in their sockets and
his body began to shudder.
Groot shook his head in wonder. Schwarzbach’s buildings were pulsing with lurid energy. Torrents of arcane power were howling through the narrow streets. Razumov’s tower was spinning ever-faster overhead—sparking, shimmering and hurling stones across the sky. The army of beastmen was now so vast that it had overcome the plague of beetles and it was once again piling into the beleaguered ranks of knights. As Gabriel began to shake and drool, his staff grew incandescent with power, blasting shards of light across the town walls and into the hills beyond.
Seeing that Gabriel was no longer aware of him, Groot decided to edge back towards the drifting tower. There were now two figures clinging to the stone blocks and his heart pounded as he heaved his vast bulk through the cyclone. After a few steps, he halted. There was a new sound on the wind: a brittle, metallic screech, loud enough to cut through the din of the storm-lashed battle. He looked back at the town walls. Gabriel’s magic was still fanned out, like a shimmering net, but Groot could not locate the source of the terrible sound. It seemed to be originating from every direction at once.
At the foot of the steps, the beastmen faltered for a second time and looked around in confusion.
The screeching grew to an unbearable pitch and, just as Groot thought he could stand it no longer, a huge portion of the town walls exploded inwards, revealing a towering, flame-shrouded dragon.
“Gods preserve us,” gasped the bürgermeister as the dust settled.
The monster was over thirty feet tall, covered in thick, blood-red scales and drooling fire from its long, quivering snout. As it waded into the town, it rolled its huge head on its shoulders and flexed its enormous clawed fists. Its eyes mirrored the light pouring from Gabriel’s staff and the two of them were linked by great cords of diaphanous power. As it lurched across the flagstones, the town wall exploded behind it in several other places.
Groot’s panic grew as more dragons smashed into Schwarzbach, belching flames, tearing through walls and making straight for the town hall.
“Is this you?” he cried, grabbing Gabriel’s robes and trying to rouse him from his fit. “Have you summoned these things?” The bürgermeister howled in pain as electricity scorched his hands, throwing them back.
Gabriel slumped weakly to the ground and gave no reply, but as more of the dragons entered the town, his shaking grew more violent and needles of light began pouring through his translucent skin.
A deafening crash came from the foot of the steps and Groot whirled around to see that the first of the dragons had launched itself into the air and was now hanging directly over the battle, beating its vast, tattered wings with slow, booming strokes.
Some of the beastmen were still struggling with their shroud of beetles and, even if they had wanted to, they could not have fled. The rest of them were racing towards the town hall with such momentum that, even as they saw death looming overhead, they could do nothing to halt their charge. As the dragon’s ferocious breath blasted down on them, they erupted like kindling, with no chance of escape. Dozens of horned, blackened figures crashed into each other, wailing furiously before collapsing in smouldering heaps.
Other dragons swooped across the square, scorching the flagstones with rippling gouts of fire. Noise and heat filled the air and winged monsters struck from dozens of different directions, devouring the beastmen with piercing, hungry shrieks.
The dragons’ acrobatics whipped the storm into an even greater frenzy. As they banked and dived, they scored dazzling lines of magic across the sky, wrenching the winds to even greater violence.
The reiksgraf and his knights backed away from the madness, wide-eyed and speechless as they watched the colossal beasts at work. The dragons were quickly butchering the packed crowds of beastmen. It seemed for a while that they would destroy the entire army without any serious resistance; but then the leader of the beastmen climbed across the charred remnants of its kin and raised its two handed axe over its head, bellowing in defiance at the circling dragons. As its booming cry rang out, the other beastmen howled in reply, raising thousands of axes and spears as the dragons banked around for another attack.
As before, the monsters poured columns of flame across the army, incinerating swathes of beastmen, but this time, those who evaded the fire fought back, hurling a thick cloud of spears at their swooping attackers. Most of the weapons bounced away, but a few found their mark—piercing soft fleshy joints and huge amber eyes. One of the monsters veered off course with an agonised screech and demolished an inn, scattering bricks and barrels across the square. At the same moment, the bull-headed beastman leader hammered his axe into the wing of another dragon, sending it thrashing wildly to the ground. Hundreds of beastmen saw their chance and swarmed over it, hacking and jabbing with furious determination, until the thrashing ceased and the creature lay still.
As the dragons died, Gabriel’s eyes blinked open and he curled into a foetal ball. “Caspar,” he groaned, shedding the cords of light and sending them dancing up into the heavens. “It’s too much.”
As Gabriel writhed in pain, the bonds that linked him to the dragons broke free and the creatures faltered. Some of them swooped up into the heavens, leaving the battle completely, but others turned on their kin. Pairs of struggling dragons began tumbling from the sky, scattering chunks of scaled flesh through the air and hurling thick bolts of fire. The monsters’ frenzy blinded them to their danger and as they crashed to the ground, the bull-headed beastman led a furious attack, swarming over the flailing creatures with a chorus of howls.
As the battle grew more frenzied, the storm responded in kind. Groot had to grab a ruined pillar as the wind screamed across the steps. The houses that surrounded the square began to tremble and splinter. Roofs cracked and panes of glass began to explode from their frames. Groot realised that the ground itself was starting to shudder, as though straining to be free from the earth. Gabriel was lost in his pain, so the bürgermeister looked back at the tower. It was now impossible to make out any details. The ancient structure resembled a pillar of green fire, trailing dozens of luminous roots and reaching up towards the blinding face of Morrslieb.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Caspar felt the tower crumbling beneath his fingers. The building was spinning with such ferocity that he could no longer see the battle, or even the town. The world flew by in a whirl of magic and astral fire. His head pounded as he tried to keep his thoughts sane and fixed on the present. The power ripping through his mind was heady and irresistible, but he knew that a moment’s hesitation would see him hurled out into the vortex. Beneath him, he could still make out the jerking, irregular movements of Razumov, clambering across the drifting stones. The sorcerer—Caspar no longer doubted his identity—had ceased vying for control of the magic. At the sound of the old woman’s cries, he had abandoned the contest and begun climbing down towards her.
What a fool, thought Caspar as he watched the man clamber towards his centuries-old beloved. As the torrent of azyr poured through him, Caspar felt the years tumbling away. He straightened his back and flexed his muscles, groaning with pleasure. “I am the Grand Astromancer!” He saw now how ridiculous his fears had been. How could Gabriel ever have replaced him? The prophecy was ridiculous. Tylo Sulzer was a fool. As his words left his mouth, they formed a gout of green fire that snaked up into the heavens.
As he watched the pair of ancient lovers approaching each other, Caspar guessed at some of their story. He realised that the old woman must have bargained with the Ruinous Powers. How else could she still be alive after all these centuries? The strangeness that had overtaken Schwarzbach must be a result of her dark magic. Caspar couldn’t imagine what foul rituals she had performed to bring her plans to fruition.
As the old crone reached out to Razumov, her cries of delight sliced through the fury of the cyclone. Caspar shook his head at her incredible gall. She must have engineered this whole situation, bringing a powerful Celestial wizard to her lover’s grave, in the knowledg
e that no one else would have the power to channel the storm that was brewing. And all for nothing. With this much power, destroying Razumov would be no harder than crushing a beetle.
Caspar raised his staff and channelled a tiny portion of the storm into the knotted yew, then levelled it at the two figures below, preparing to end their romance in a funeral pyre.
Before he struck, Caspar paused to watch the bizarre turn of events that was unfolding. As Razumov reached his devoted lover, he knocked her down with a fierce backhanded blow, sending her sprawling to the ground.
Caspar shook his head, astounded by the sorcerer’s ingratitude.
Razumov ignored her protestations and snatched the horned, black staff from her hands. Then he let out a long, inhuman howl of ecstasy.
The old woman grasped at his robes, wailing with grief, but he simply kicked her away and clutched the staff to his chest, cradling it like a child.
Caspar shrugged and poured green flames down the centre of the spinning tower, aiming the rippling blast at Razumov’s head.
Just before the column of light struck home, Razumov looked up. There was a grin on his face as he raised his staff, catching the blast in the crescent of horns and hurling it back.
The world stopped.
The tower ceased to spin and the noise of the storm vanished as abruptly as if a door had been closed.
Caspar stumbled forwards, confused by the sudden lack of momentum and only just managing to grab the tower’s spire before he fell. The silence was horrendous. After the raging fury of the cyclone, to hear nothing was almost unbearable. He looked around in confusion and saw that, although the tower was now motionless, the world outside was not. Beyond the ancient masonry, a sickening torrent of scenes was pulsing in and out of view, and none of them made any sense. He saw virginal, frozen wastes and heaving, bottle-green oceans, but no glimpse of Schwarzbach.
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