Blighted Empire

Chapter XI

Middenheim

Brauzeit, 1118

The alchemist stopped at a doorway far down the hall, very near the temple sanctuary itself. Unlike the other doors, this one bore no cross. Muttering prayers to both Verena and Shallya, Neist opened the door and walked right into a stream of Dwarfish invective.

Mandred followed Neist into the room, surprised to see a brawny dwarf lashed down to a stone bench. His torso was wound about in thick strips of bandages, and big black candles were arrayed all around his makeshift bed. Sticks of incense smouldered nearby, filling the room with a pungent scent.

‘Time for more of that snake-spit you call medicine?’ Kurgaz yelled at Neist. The dwarf thrashed against the straps holding him down.

‘Does it still itch?’ the alchemist asked. ‘You know you can’t scratch at it or any poison still in there will spread.’

Kurgaz glared murder at the alchemist. ‘If you were anything like a real healer…’ he started.

‘Your father seemed to be of the impression that a dwarf doktor would have fussed and studied so long that you’d be dead now,’ Neist told him in a placating tone. He had only a small idea of what it must have cost Kurgaz’s father to entrust his son to a human healer. The degree of despair that must have gripped the older dwarf would have been immense to force him into such a breach of tradition and propriety. It was humbling to be the recipient of such a trust, even if he was the option of last resort. Despite the sombre thoughts in his head, he kept his tone towards his patient jocular. ‘Maybe your own doktors were leery of incurring a grudge when they failed to help you.’

Kurgaz struggled against the bindings, the leather straps creaking ominously. ‘What does a manling know of grudges and honour!’

‘Nothing,’ Neist admitted. Stepping to the bench, he unstoppered the bottle and allowed Kurgaz to take a long pull from it. ‘That’s why I’m trying to help you… Even if I end up in a beardless grave with squirms gnawing my bones.’

The dwarf coughed and spluttered as he swallowed the medicine. When he found his voice again, it was perhaps slightly less hostile, though far from apologetic. ‘Squigs,’ he said. ‘It’s squigs that’ll be chewing on your bones.’ The dwarf twisted his head around, fixing his irate eyes on Mandred. ‘And I’m not some pickled abortion to be showing off to bored gawkers for a few coppers a peep!’

‘I thought dwarfs knew better than to cuss out royalty,’ the alchemist scolded Kurgaz. The dwarf’s eyes went wide with alarm for a moment, then he quickly subsided into a surly silence.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ Mandred asked. ‘Is he insane?’

Neist shook his head. ‘No, though I think the pain of what he’s endured would have driven any man insane.’ He wiped his hand on the hem of his cloak and reached into the pocket on the breast of his doublet. Carefully, he extracted an ugly looking blob of blackish green stuff. Mandred couldn’t decide if the thing were more like stone or metal. What he did know was that it had an evil look about it. ‘I took that out of him,’ Neist explained. ‘Seems there was a fight down in the Crack and Kurgaz was shot with this.’ He chuckled and shook his head again. ‘He claims it was fired at him by something called a skaven, though I think he’s just too proud to admit it was some lucky goblin that got him.’

‘Grimnir take all fool manlings,’ Kurgaz cursed from his bed. ‘Won’t believe anything unless they see it. Count your blessings you’ve never seen a skaven!’

Neist was laughing again, but Mandred looked at the dwarf with renewed interest. Underfolk, ratmen who lived beneath the world. Why wouldn’t the dwarfs be more familiar with such things, dwelling in the same places the monsters haunted?

‘Kurgaz, what do these “skaven” look like?’ Mandred asked, approaching the bench.

Before the dwarf could answer, Neist cried out in horror. The alchemist sprang away from the door as a hideous creature lunged at him. It was clad in a filthy brown robe, a heavy hood drawn close across its face, but there was no concealing the long naked tail that dragged behind it or the furry paws that gripped the rusty daggers it held. The thing was another of the verminous mutations Mandred had seen twice before!

The prince started to draw his sword to confront the first ratman when a second leapt into the cell, its daggers slashing at him. The filthy blades raked across the front of his coat, ripping it open and narrowly missing the man beneath it. Hissing and snapping, the monster pressed its attack, driving Mandred towards the corner of the cell with a flurry of attacks. The prince’s forearm was gashed and cut as he tried to protect his face from the monster.

The ratman’s speed was hideous, something Mandred remembered from his previous encounter. Recalling that fight, he also remembered that its strength was less formidable. Gritting his teeth, he prayed the same held true for this example of the breed.

The brute had him nearly to the wall now. Mandred could see a third monster slinking into the room, a heavy bludgeon in its paws. The thing uttered a happy squeak when it spotted the helpless dwarf lashed to the bench. The sight decided the prince. When his own foe slashed at him again, he pressed his body forwards, leaning into its attack. He felt the dagger cut deep into his arm, but at the same time he was able to catch the thing’s wrist. With a brutal twist, he felt he ratman’s bones snap. The vermin howled, springing away.

Mandred ignored the beast and whipped out his sword with his free hand. In one flash of steel, he raked the blade across the length of the bench, slashing through the leather straps. He heard the dwarf roar, the ratman with the club squeak in fright. Then he was too busy to worry about Kurgaz. His first adversary was back on the attack.

Holding its injured arm against its breast, the ratman sprang at Mandred, hoping to disembowel him with a rake of its blade. Years of fencing had driven home the proper response to such an assault, yet even as he darted backwards the monster’s great speed allowed its dagger to stab his thigh.

Despite the agony of the wound, Mandred was grateful. For an instant, the weapon caught in his flesh. For a moment, the ratman was defenceless and within reach of his sword. It was all the time he needed. With a backhanded riposte, he opened the ratman’s throat and sent it thrashing to the floor, coughing on its own blood.

Mandred spun about to confront the ratman attacking Kurgaz, but the dwarf already had the creature sprawled across the bench, its brains dashed in with its own club. Turning, he found the first ratkin, the one that had charged Neist. The brute was leaning over Neist’s body, its paws frisking the alchemist’s clothes. When it saw Mandred limping towards it, it bared its teeth and sprinted for the corridor.

The fiend never reached the hall. Before it could clear the doorway, a blade was thrust into its side. The ratman writhed on the impaling sword for an instant, then crumpled to the floor. Mandred noted that one of its paws was clenched, but as death claimed it the paw fell open and the strange bullet rolled from its fingers.

‘Ulric’s Axe!’ Beck cursed, stepping into the cell. The knight’s clothes were covered in blood. With an effort he tore his eyes away from the creature and looked to his prince. ‘Your grace, you are hurt!’

Mandred waved away his guard’s concern, tried to limp towards the corridor. Beck moved to help him despite the admonition. ‘Forgive me, but I couldn’t obey you. My first duty is to protect Prince Mandred von Zelt, even when it conflicts with your own orders.’

‘We have to help Sofia… Make sure…’

Beck frowned at the desperation in his prince’s voice. ‘You can’t help her now. These… things… were already there.’

All the vigour seemed to evaporate from Mandred’s body. If not for Beck’s support, he would have fallen to the floor. His mind whirled at the news, his heart cracked at the thought that Sofia had perished under the blades of such filth.

Why? Why had they killed her? His despairing gaze fell upon the weird bullet. Had the beasts been following that? Tracking it through the hospice, killing wherever it had been?

A gruff laugh thundered above the prince’s sorrow. Shuffling out from behind the bench, his hands still clenched tight about the club that had nearly killed him, Kurgaz Smallhammer regarded the mourning Mandred. ‘Aye,’ the dwarf said, spitting on the verminous corpse. ‘Now you know what skaven look like.’

Puskab Foulfur looked up from the mouldy tome he had been consulting. A flick of his claw sent the scabby slave holding his reading lamp slinking off into a darkened nook. The plague priest folded his paws across the ratbone lectern and regarded his visitors with pestiferous scrutiny. It was seldom that any but the plague monks dared the noxious caves Puskab had made his lair, and they only with the gravest business.

The skaven who stood before him was a black-furred killer, draped in a cloak that might have been skinned off a shadow, an array of exotic weaponry fixed to his belt. Puskab knew the weaponry to be mere adornment. The assassins of Clan Eshin never displayed the real tools of their trade.

‘Speak-squeak,’ Puskab ordered, a malicious gleam in his eye. One of the apprentices of Deathmaster Silke, Nartik Blackblade had fallen out of favour with his terrifying master and been given the hazardous duty of spying on the plague monks. Fortunately for him, Nartik had enough sense to turn the potential death sentence into a boon. Instead of spying on Puskab, Nartik was spying for Puskab.

‘Gutter runners failed to get the jezzail bullet,’ the assassin reported. ‘Warmonger Vecteek mad-hate! Ordered Silke to kill-slay all gutter runners that escape!’ Nartik chittered with amusement. ‘I listened to one of them before…’ He made a ripping motion with his claw across his throat. ‘Say-tell that man-thing king-pup knows about us now.’

Puskab’s tattered ears twitched in pleasure at the report. Things were going even better than he had planned. With Clan Mors on its way, he’d decided there was no good reason to delay infecting the humans with the Black Plague. Exploiting Nartik and the gutter runners, they’d been able to spread the disease without waiting for the direct route Vecteek thought necessary. The extra weeks would make the humans much weaker when the attack finally came.

Now, however, there was a new wrinkle to consider. The dwarfs were embattled below, but they’d be too stubborn to ask for help from the humans above. But if the humans were to offer that help without the dwarfs asking, would they refuse it?

Too proud to ask for help, but not too proud to take it.

Puskab chittered as he pictured the scene. Hundreds of humans marching off to help the dwarfs, leaving their own city as a helpless morsel to be devoured by Grey Lord Vecteek.

Yes, everything was certainly going much better than he’d imagined.

Carroburg

Jahrdrung, 1115

‘Don’t permit this.’ The plea was voiced by Princess Erna, spoken with a frantic vehemence. ‘You can’t do this. Even if the warlock’s magic works, how can you accept your life at such a price?’

Emperor Boris glared at the woman. He started to raise his hand to strike her, but desisted. It was for low creatures like Kreyssig to hit a lady. He had more dignity than that. Still, he wished she would stop nagging at him. He wasn’t without his misgivings. The girl wasn’t some peasant, she was of good breeding and background. He mourned the waste of a young woman of such attractiveness. It was tragic, but how much more tragic would it be if the Empire were to be deprived of its Emperor because of the plague?

He paced across the thick bearskin rug sprawled before the hearth in his bed chamber. Sometimes Boris would glance over at Erna seated at the edge of the bed. It wasn’t lost on him that for once she’d come to his room without an armed escort. It was clear what she was offering if he would indulge her entreaty.

Part of him wanted to. Part of him was sickened by what Fleischauer’s magic demanded. But that part of him wasn’t strong enough to overcome his fear. Not simply fear of the plague, but fear of losing control. The great and noble guests he’d assembled here formed the core of his power. Without their confidence he knew he wouldn’t be able to wield his authority in their domains. Enough provinces were already rife with open defiance; he couldn’t afford to lose any more.

Boris stopped pacing and scowled at the goblet of wine in his hand. ‘This is vile stuff,’ he declared. ‘It needs some honey to sweeten it.’ The cherubic amusement was back on his face as he turned towards Erna. ‘Did you know the Imperial Palace has an indoor apiary? Dwarfcraft, of course. Cost a small fortune to build, but it allows Us to have fresh honey even in the dead of winter.’

‘There has to be another way,’ Erna insisted, ignoring his talk of bees and honey.

The Emperor dashed his goblet to the floor. ‘The divine protection of Shallya?’ he scoffed. ‘Matriarch Katrina is as terrified as any of us! If she doesn’t have faith in the goddess, why should anyone? Or maybe We should trust Moschner and his peasant medicine?’

‘He’s kept you healthy this long,’ Erna said.

‘If medicine were the answer, the plague wouldn’t be killing three-quarters of Our subjects!’ He turned away and gazed into the fire blazing away in the hearth. ‘No, Fleischauer’s magic is the only answer. The Black Plague stinks of sorcery and Chaos, it only makes sense that similar means would counteract it.’

Erna rose from the bed, came close to the Emperor. ‘Then you know this is evil,’ she told him.

Boris rounded on her, his eyes blazing as fiercely as the fire. ‘Then you don’t have to partake!’ he raged. ‘Exclude yourself! Go ahead and catch the plague!’

‘Better that than the alternative,’ Erna stated.

‘If you catch the plague, We’ll have you thrown over the wall,’ Boris threatened. ‘Don’t think for a moment We won’t!’

Erna turned from him, retreating across the room and into the hall. ‘I’m certain your fear will spare no one,’ she said as she left him.

Otwin’s table no longer dominated the great hall, but the room was once again denuded of furnishings. The only object that reposed in the hall was a marble plinth in the very centre of the room. The statue that had once rested upon it had been removed, consigned to some distant corner of the castle. In its place stood an object of obscene horror.

In his desperation, this time Emperor Boris had allowed Fleischauer all the time he needed to prepare for his ritual. It had taken the warlock a fortnight to finish his conjurations and their attendant atrocities. Day and night the closed great hall had resounded with horrific screams and sinister incantations. Strange smells had seeped into the passageways, eerie lights had shone from under the doors. The icy emanations of sorcery had throbbed and pulsed and undulated. A foulness beyond the merely physical had emanated from the hall, warning people away far better than any diktat issued by the Emperor.

The end result of Fleischauer’s labours was propped up on the top of the pedestal, a cushion supporting its ghastly mass. There was some resemblance to von Kirchof’s niece Sasha, but the familiarity increased the horror rather than lessening it.

The woman’s flesh had taken on a chalky tone and texture. All the hair had been shorn from her scalp. Across her body, strange runes had been inked with a needle of daemonbone, the symbols encompassing even her face and scalp. Situated in the gaps between the runes, their slimy black bodies seeming to be extensions of the horrible tattoos, were bloodleeches. The parasites could be seen gorging themselves on something far weightier than merely the blood of their victim, drawing into their foul bodies slivers of her innocence, of her very soul.

Sasha herself looked like a leech. Through some unholy magic, her body had been altered in unspeakable ways. Her arms and legs had atrophied, withering into stick-like stubs that were folded in upon her torso. Her teeth had fallen out, leaving behind only blackened gums and a tongue so shrivelled that it could utter only a flat, croaking susurration.

It was an abominable, unspeakable fate, a misery no sane mind could endure.

As they filed into the great hall and saw the horrifying husk of the woman, many of the Emperor’s jaded followers sickened and excused themselves. Boris allowed them their moment of weakness. He knew they would be back. The magic Fleischauer offered them was too important to turn away. What man could say no to life, whatever the price?

‘Everything is in readiness, Your Imperial Majesty,’ Fleischauer declared with a bow. He waited for a nod from his patron, then crept across the hall to the pedestal. ‘Observe,’ he said. Reaching to his victim, he plucked a leech from her neck and popped it into his own mouth. More of the nobles fled as their stomachs revolted with this new horror.

‘The leeches draw the magic from her essence,’ Fleischauer explained when he had finished chewing the parasite. ‘When they are removed, the magic is passed on to whatever eats them.’

Emperor Boris took a wary step towards the pedestal. ‘This will prevent the plague?’ Almost he hoped his warlock would tell him it wouldn’t.

Instead, Fleischauer nodded his head in affirmation. ‘For a time,’ he said. ‘It will be necessary to replace the leeches with new ones. They act as a preventative, but not an immunisation, to employ the secular words of dear Doktor Moschner.’ The warlock paused for a moment, looking about to see if the physician was in attendance so he could gloat. He sighed when he didn’t see the man. ‘One leech each week should be enough. If it isn’t, I can create another host.’

Boris suppressed a shudder at the suggestion. ‘This is horror enough,’ he said. He turned and called von Kirchof to him. The swordsman’s stride lacked his usual confidence and his face was nearly as bloodless as that of his niece. Guilt, shame, self-loathing, all of these were etched upon his features and his eyes were as empty as those of a doll. When the Emperor ordered his champion to remove one of the leeches, he did so without looking at the thing Fleischauer had dismissed as their ‘host’.

One by one, the others came to follow von Kirchof’s example. Despite the horror of the situation, Boris felt a twinge of satisfaction when he saw Matriarch Katrina pluck one of the parasites from Sasha’s body. If the High Priestess of Shallya could be driven to such despair, Princess Erna would soon recant her lofty morals.

The tiny chapel of Sigmar within the Schloss Hohenbach displayed the signs of neglect everywhere. It had been generations since Sigmar had been venerated with much zeal in Drakwald. Older gods like Ulric, Taal and Rhya were of more prominence to the Drakwalders. Count Vilner and his son Konrad had had little reason to be kindly disposed towards a deity who enabled a man like Boris to wield supreme power over them. Dust lay thick upon the floor and altar, cobwebs clung to the granite comet and bronze hammer hanging upon the wall. Woodworms had bored holes in the pews and mice had gnawed at the rugs.

Despite the dilapidation of the chapel, Erna felt a sense of peace as she knelt before the altar. As a Middenlander, she too had been raised in the faiths of older gods; however, she had also seen too much to discount Sigmar’s power. She had need of that divine strength to endow her with the will to persevere. To endure as the shade of her father had told her she must.

Whatever the consequences, she wouldn’t partake of the obscenity fostered by Fleischauer. Sigmar was a god who decried witchcraft and sorcery. Perhaps He would respect her determination to shun the progeny of such unholy arts.

The creak of groaning wood turned her away from the altar. Erna was surprised to see Doktor Moschner seated on one of the wormy benches. The physician’s face was drawn, haunted.

‘I didn’t think anyone was here,’ he apologised. ‘Do you mind? I’d rather not be alone.’ He pointed towards the hammer above the altar. ‘Strength through unity. That is what Sigmar taught us. If only He had explained the lesson better.’

Erna studied the doktor as he sat in the pew, his body shaking like a leaf. ‘You’ve seen what the sorcerer did?’ she asked.

‘Do not ask,’ Moschner answered. ‘By all the gods, do not ask and do not look.’ He turned his head away from the altar and regarded Erna. ‘I know I am a mere peasant, but you must believe me. Spare yourself.’ He shuddered again and his body heaved as his empty stomach clenched. When the spasm passed, he again apologised.

‘His Imperial Majesty has feted his guests,’ Moschner hissed. ‘He’s fed and pampered them well!’

‘Did none refuse?’ Erna pressed him.

Moschner gave her a disgusted look. ‘Two,’ he said.

‘We must pray for them,’ Erna said.

‘It’s too late for that,’ Moschner said. ‘There’s no help for us. The gods will have nothing to do with us now.

‘We are the living damned.’