Blighted Empire

Chapter VI

Altdorf

Vorgeheim, 1114

Cold fire seared through Kreyssig’s arm, an agony that seemed to stab down into the very core of his being. When he thought he could take no more, the pain intensified, forcing him to endure.

‘Pain heals,’ the witch’s soft tones whispered through the desecrated chapel. ‘Pain is life. It is through pain that we find our strength.’

From the corner of his vision, Kreyssig could see the Baroness von den Linden pace around the room, her delicate fingers gliding across the ruined masonry and smashed statuary on the walls. As always, there was a fearful fascination about the witch. Her every step had a grace beyond mere woman. She was like some great feline on the prowl as she circled the stone altar.

‘How strong do you want to be, commander?’ the baroness mused. ‘What are your limits?’

Through clenched teeth, Kreyssig hissed an answer. ‘There… are… no… limits.’ He squeezed his eyes shut, clenched his jaw as spasms of suffering pulsed through his flesh.

An almost coy smile teased the corners of the witch’s mouth as she watched her patron’s ordeal. If the decision were left to him, she did believe he would allow the pain to mount until the aethyric harmonies caused his heart to burst. It was an impressive display of determination, and the baroness wasn’t one to impress easily.

‘The will may be a thing of iron, but the body is still mere flesh,’ the witch declared. She waved her hand, the obsidian gargoyle circling her forefinger blazing with an eerie light as she siphoned off the magical emanations surrounding the altar. Before they could build again, she stepped forwards and brushed away the herbs and offal surrounding Kreyssig. The Protector rose, grimacing as pain shot through his body.

‘I could have taken more,’ he complained, flexing his arm, the arm he had been told would never mend.

‘All things in their season,’ the baroness cautioned him, extending her hand and helping Kreyssig down from the altar. ‘Power must be marshalled slowly and with care.’

Kreyssig gave a pensive nod, deferring to the witch’s knowledge of the black arts. ‘These dalliances, pleasant though they are, have become somewhat dangerous.’ He marched across the chapel, retrieving his clothes from the dusty floor. ‘Just today, my Kaiserjaeger captured a man who was following me here. It didn’t take long to make him admit he was a spy in the service of Duke Vidor.’

‘You pulled the duke’s fangs when you made Soehnlein the new Reiksmarshal,’ the witch pointed out. ‘Surely there is nothing he can do to you now?’

Kreyssig paused as he buttoned his tunic, frowning as he noticed he was employing only his right hand. It was a habit he was going to break, a legacy of his former weakness he would purge.

‘Ordinarily, I would squash Vidor like a bug,’ Kreyssig said, enjoying the twinge of anxiety mention of insects provoked in his benefactress. ‘But it is too soon to act out of hand. The nobles need time to understand the new status quo, to appreciate the authority Emperor Boris has bestowed on me. As you have said, all things in their season. Vidor will attend the Scharfrichter. But until then he can make trouble.’

The baroness swept forwards, assisting Kreyssig as he dressed. She leaned close to his ear, her voice lowering to an alluring purr. ‘You are the Protector of the Empire, surrogate of His Imperial Majesty. What man would dare challenge you?’

‘Even an Emperor must beware the gods,’ Kreyssig said, recalling a bit of wisdom the departing sovereign had given him. It wasn’t a warning about impiety, however, but rather an admonition to pay close attention to the clergy. The Emperor was master of the bodies of his subjects, but their souls were claimed by the priests and their gods. The power of faith and superstition was one any ruler ignored at his peril.

‘The ravages of the plague have aroused strange ideas in the heads of the peasants,’ Kreyssig explained. ‘With every new outbreak, the people descend a little further into their morass of superstitions. They turn to plague doktors, bonesetters and leeches to preserve them from the disease. And when these measures fail them, they flee into the shadows of superstition. They cling to faith in the gods, hearken to the words of zealots and fanatics, in their despair.’

Kreyssig pulled away from the witch’s arms, turning around so that he could stare into her eyes. ‘Witch-takers stalk the streets of Altdorf, burning old midwives and herb-mongers, alchemists and astrologers. They have stirred the fears of the rabble and from that fear they have claimed their own brand of power.’

‘Your power is greater,’ the baroness said, a slight trace of fear creeping into her voice. ‘You could exile these murderers or hang them from the city walls.’

Kreyssig shook his head. ‘It is not so simple. These madmen have preyed upon the faith of the commoners, given them a new hope, however irrational. Hope dies hard, and never with more tenacity than among people with nothing left to lose.’

‘What will you do then?’ the baroness asked. The witch had good reason to worry. Rumours about her unnatural talents had long been a subject of gossip among the intimates of the Imperial court.

‘First, I must know how much longer I must attend these treatments,’ Kreyssig said. ‘Vidor’s next spy may prove more capable than his last one. I can’t have him using my connection with you to foment unrest among the rabble.’ A caustic laugh hissed through his teeth. ‘I’ll have to redirect the hopes of the peasants. Channel their superstitious fears away from the witch-takers and to a more respectable institution.’

The baroness reached out, stroking her hand along Kreyssig’s cheek. ‘And how will you accomplish such a feat?’

‘The Temple of Sigmar has been leaderless since the death of Grand Theogonist Thorgrad,’ Kreyssig stated. ‘The Sigmarite hierarchs have dallied over electing a replacement, citing the confusion wrought by the plague and the unrest among the southern provinces. That lack of leadership has fostered doubt in the hearts of their congregations, made their belief stray in strange places. A new Grand Theogonist could set things right, restore confidence in the Temple.’

‘Who will this new leader be?’ the witch purred, raking her fingers through Kreyssig’s hair.

‘Someone useful to me,’ he said. ‘Someone I can mould and control. Someone obligated to me.

‘Someone who will bow to the Protector of the Empire even before his own god.’

Slime glistened in the rushlight, dripping down from the subterranean walls. In the streets above the swelter of summer gripped Altdorf, but here there was only dank, clammy cold. Hacked from the limestone beneath the foundations of the Courts of Justice, there were many sub-levels and annexes to the dungeons of Altdorf, but none so infamous as those black vaults spoken of in hushed whispers as the Catacombs.

The Catacombs were the preserve of Kreyssig’s Kaiserjaeger, a private hell of their own creation. Torture theatres, execution chambers, isolation cells and dark oubliettes, interrogation rooms and mortuaries, the Catacombs piled horror upon horror. Even those who were released back into the world above never really escaped these crypts of terror. Within them there would always be the memory of this place, a black cloud to smother every happy moment they had ever known.

Moans and screams echoed through the black tunnels, a chorus of torment that was never silent. Since the attempt to usurp Emperor Boris, there had been no dearth of victims for the Kaiserjaeger to drag down into these depths. One and all were traitors, either by fact or by confession. Kreyssig’s men never failed to extract a confession when it was needed.

The commander emerged into the infernal glow of his private torture chamber, the room which he called the Dragon’s Hole. Its main feature was a great bronze dragonhead, its jaws agape, little iron rings dangling from its horns. The statue’s jaws were a cunningly designed oven, the iron rings clever shackles of exacting craftsmanship. A priest of Ranald couldn’t slip through those shackles. Kreyssig knew because he’d tested it several times.

Today, however, it was the servant of a different god who had attracted Kreyssig’s attention. Lector Stefan Schoppe was one of the scions of the Sigmarite faith in the Reikland, a man respected by his peers, almost deified by his congregation in the diocese of Helmgart. He was a cleric venerated by the faithful throughout the Empire, a priest above reproach. Exactly the sort of man to suit Kreyssig’s needs.

Kreyssig turned away from the dragonhead and the liveried torturers raking the smouldering coals in its oven. He cast an appraising gaze at the assortment of hooks and tongs, chisels and mallets displayed on the oak worktable which rested against one wall. Almost absently, he lifted one of the tongs, a vicious thing of spiked barbs and serrated edges. For a moment, he toyed with the mechanism, opening the jaws.

‘This looks uncomfortable,’ he said, setting the instrument down. He turned and, for the first time since entering the room, looked at his prisoner. ‘Do you not think so, your eminence?’

Lector Stefan was shackled hand and foot to the wall, an iron collar about his neck. Dirt and blood stained his priestly robes, the legacy of his abduction from Helmgart. The cleric’s eyes were wide with fear, roving between the torture instruments on the table and the bronze dragonhead.

‘You have been implicated in the plot against His Imperial Majesty,’ Kreyssig stated, glancing at the little desk set in one corner of the chamber. The wizened clerk sitting behind the table produced a scroll and began reading the indictment.

‘Lies! All lies!’ Lector Stefan shouted.

Kreyssig grinned at him, slowly crossing the room until he was only a few feet from his captive. ‘I know,’ he confessed in a whisper. ‘Down here, though, people will say what they are told to say. Even if it is sacrilege.’

Fresh horror gripped the priest. That fragile hope that his arrest had been a mistake deserted him in an agonised groan. Kreyssig feigned surprise at Lector Stefan’s reaction.

‘Be at ease, your eminence,’ he said. ‘These… barbarities aren’t for you.’ Kreyssig pointed to the table and the dragonhead. ‘What is the sense in torturing a priest? If they are truly sincere in their belief, then they would rather die than betray that belief.’

Kreyssig brought his hands crashing together in a loud clap that echoed through the chamber. In response, a pair of burly Kaiserjaeger came marching into the room. Between them they half dragged, half carried a sobbing shape dressed in a sapphire gown. Lector Stefan recognised that gown and the long blonde hair that fell about the woman’s face.

‘Gudrun!’ the priest shouted in a horrified wail.

‘I thought you might appreciate a familiar face,’ Kreyssig said. ‘When my men removed you from Helmgart, I arranged to bring your daughter as well.’ Snapping his fingers, Kreyssig motioned the Kaiserjaeger to take the woman to the bronze dragonhead.

‘You wouldn’t dare,’ Lector Stefan cried. ‘Whatever you think I have done, she is innocent. Touch her and you will bear the curse of our lord Sigmar!’

Kreyssig scowled at the bound priest. ‘His Imperial Majesty once told me that the gods have only as much power over us as we permit them to have.’ He looked at the grim stone walls around him. ‘I have heard many prayers uttered in this room. None of them did any good.’

Lector Stefan watched in mounting agony as the Kaiserjaeger shackled Gudrun to the horns of the dragon. An inarticulate moan escaped the gagged woman as she recoiled from the heat of the coals. ‘Curse your black soul! Let my daughter go!’

‘That,’ Kreyssig hissed, ‘is entirely the wrong attitude.’ Snapping his fingers again, he set the two Kaiserjaeger turning the wheels mounted at the base of the dragonhead. In response, the horns began to tilt, pulling the captive down towards the heated surface of the bronze head.

‘Stop this, Kreyssig!’ Lector Stefan thrashed in his chains. ‘Mercy of Sigmar! Don’t do this thing!’

‘I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to bring you here,’ Kreyssig said. ‘Far too much to stop now. At its highest degree, torture is an art unto itself. Did you know that, your eminence?’

‘Whatever you want! Whatever lies you want me to confess to! Just stop this!’ the priest pleaded.

‘Later, your eminence,’ Kreyssig told him. ‘There will be time enough to explain what I want from you later. For now, just enjoy the show.’

The ghastly demonstration continued for hours. Throughout the ordeal, Kreyssig was deaf to Lector Stefan’s desperate entreaties. Even the reason for inflicting this horror wasn’t explained. Between cries for mercy, appeals to Kreyssig’s humanity, anguished offers to be tortured in his daughter’s place, the priest called upon his god. If any prayer reached Sigmar’s ears, no miracle manifested to spare the priest.

Kreyssig smiled at the sobbing Lector Stefan, listening to the agony of a shattered heart and a broken faith. Again he snapped his fingers. One of the torturers crouched beside the mutilated body, lifting the head by its blood-spattered hair.

Lector Stefan gasped in incredulous wonder. For the first time he gazed upon the countenance of Kreyssig’s victim and it wasn’t the face of his daughter! The build, the hair, even the gown had been similar enough to deceive him.

In the midst of Lector Stefan’s exhilarated relief, Kreyssig clapped his hands together. While the first pair of Kaiserjaeger dragged the dead woman away, two more soldiers marched into the torture chamber. This time, there was no mistaking the identity of their captive.

‘Now you know what will happen,’ Kreyssig told Lector Stefan. ‘You know every stroke, every cut, every stripe that your daughter will suffer.’ He smiled coldly at the priest, seeing the abject defeat in his eyes. ‘I will give you a moment to ask yourself what you would do to spare her such a fate.

‘Then, I will tell you how you are going to serve your Emperor.’

Mordheim

Hexentag, 1113

The sound you hear is dripping blood. That thought brought a cruel twist to Baron Lothar von Diehl’s face.

This is the start of Hexentag.

The necromancer’s black cape billowed about his lanky body as he swept down the marble-floored aisle, his eyes darting from one wall to the other, assuring himself that the sacred icons flanking the hall had been properly defiled. Bound to a pillar, her body inverted so that the blood might flow more freely from her slashed throat, the last of the priestesses shuddered and died. Her once pristine robes were soaked crimson, the silver dove icon torn from her throat and in its stead the dead carcass of a carrion crow. Even in death, there was a look of shock in the woman’s expression. She shouldn’t have been surprised. In this age of plague and ruin, what place was more accustomed to death than the Temple of Shallya, the goddess of mercy and healing?

Lothar could feel those morbid energies, could almost taste them on the air. When he closed his eyes, he could see them as an after-image, a ghostly crackle that throbbed all around him. This was the power he sought, the power De Arcanis Kadon had promised him. The place, the hour and the sacrifice. All three had been brought together.

There was a dread potential within a defiled temple, an aethyric reverberation that turned a holy atmosphere back upon itself and could be exploited to magnify the powers of darkness. Lothar was disappointed that he’d never taken vows himself, for if the potential of a profaned temple was magnificent, it was nothing beside that of a heretical priest. Kadon had been a holy man, in his way, before he’d discovered the true path to power and domination. Before him, there had been Black Nagash, priest-king of Khemri until he created the forbidden art of necromancy.

Yes, it was a pity he’d never taken vows, but Lothar would overcome that impediment with determination and ruthlessness. Nothing would stand in his way, not convention, not tradition, not mercy. And not familial affections.

Stalking down the aisle, Lothar could feel the eyes of his men on him, fear in their gaze. Rogues and murderers, one and all, the scum of Mordheim recruited for him by Marko that he might seize the temple. These were the sort of villains who hadn’t balked at slitting the throats of old priestesses or clubbing the brains from helpless plague victims lying on the pews. Yet even these men were offended by the outrage their employer now intended.

Even Lothar had balked at first, shying away from the ritual he had uncovered. Some timid element within himself had cringed away from this crime. It had taken weeks to silence that last foolish vestige of morality. Morality was the refuge of cowards, something to excuse their weakness. A part of him had tried to cling to such idiocy to the very last, but his determination, his need to know had prevailed at last. He had progressed as far as he could with De Arcanis Kadon; now he must be far more daring if he would unlock the rest of its secrets.

The sacrifice was bound to the altar, tied hand and foot in hair cut from corpses, clothed only in a shroud stripped from a suicide’s grave. The alabaster statue of Shallya that stood behind the altar was draped in black, the head knocked from the stone shoulders to be replaced with a grinning skull. There was a symbol daubed upon the skull’s forehead, but it was a thing so terrible even Lothar couldn’t stare at it directly, only snatch the briefest of glimpses from the corner of his eye.

The killers were muttering nervously among themselves, shocked by what they had been told to do, frightened of what their master might do next. Standing at the foot of the altar, Marko alone understood the purpose behind it all. Perhaps that was why he looked even more anxious than the others.

Peasants! As though their thoughts and fears were of the slightest interest to a baron. Theirs were small minds and even smaller ambitions. To steal and drink and rut, perhaps at the very end try to make some atonement to the gods and redeem their pathetic souls. Such miserable desires placed them where they belonged — with the beasts!

Lothar would achieve far greater things. He had been born to a superior breed of man, endowed with a mentality that strove for something beyond crude urges and base lusts. Through his veins flowed the blood of thirty generations of von Diehls and the legacy of their great deeds. He had inherited the desire for knowledge, not as some abstract understanding or a means to some materialistic end, but as something precious in itself. If he could unlock the great secrets the gods had jealously kept from mankind, the nature of eternity, for example, then he would consider himself vindicated of all his failings. In that hour, he would be the greatest of the von Diehls.

Nothing would keep him from that achievement. Nothing.

The necromancer mounted the short flight of steps, holding a thin hand towards Marko as he passed the peasant. Marko hesitated for an instant, then with an uneasy expression, placed within Lothar’s grasp the ancient bronze knife. Clutching the arthame in his bony hands, the baron approached the altar.

The sacrifice looked up at him, eyes wide with desperate entreaty. Perhaps, once, Lothar would have been weak enough to submit to that appeal, to allow the petty affiliations of family to stay his hand. But that time was long gone. There was only one thing he wanted from his mother now. One swift strike sent the arthame plunging into her breast. Lothar could feel her agony flow up the dagger. Savagely, he twisted the blade. He was already a patricide, after all. Why should he hesitate now?

It was the work of a few minutes before Lothar rose from the gore-splattered altar and lifted his prize to the grinning skull. The empty sockets seemed to stare down into the shivering heart, watching as the last drops of blood oozed from its veins.

The necromancer could feel the power gathering about him. When he closed his eyes, his vision was ablaze with the glow of aethyric vibrations. His skin crackled as magic pulsed around his body. Lothar’s mind churned with weird images and phantom landscapes, ghostly voices hissed in his ears. It was an effort to subdue the force coursing through him, an effort only a spirit as focused and determined as his own could achieve.

When he closed his eyes, he could send his spirit hurtling down the long eternities, riding the deathly emanations through the ageless cycles of dissolution and decay. He could see the rise of kingdoms, the ebb and flow of empires. He saw the great necropolis of the desert, watched as megalithic pyramids rose from the sand of aeons, heard the intonations of priests more than half dead themselves as they made obeisance to the mummies of kings. He was there as the Black Pyramid reared up into the sky, a colossus spun from midnight and redolent with emanations of foulest sorcery and obscenity. He was witness to the Great Ritual, the apocalypse that heralded the eternal night and blotted out a mighty people in a single breath.

He smelt the rot of thousands, watched as a simulacrum of life crept back into withered flesh and ancient bone. In his vision, he saw the dead heaped in the streets, piled in palace and temple. He saw them stir, saw them stumble up onto fleshless feet, saw them stagger towards the pyramids and necropoli. An entire race, annihilated and resurrected in a single night. A people slaughtered and restored by a single dominating will and the magic discovered by that great and terrible intelligence.

The same magic that was the source of the necromancer’s art.

As Lothar stirred from his dark epiphany, he was aware of fresh vibrations, new stirrings of the death energy in the temple. Shouts and the clash of swords pierced the chorus of ghosts in his ears. Turning from the altar, he saw the doors of the temple had been flung open. A mob of ragged peasants and a mixture of armoured men in the livery of the watch had forced their way into the building and were fighting with Marko’s thugs in an effort to reach the sanctuary.

The necromancer inhaled the invigorating smell of spilled blood, then extended his hand. Flush with the power of his matricidal sacrifice, Lothar von Diehl fixed his mind upon a single purpose. Dropping his mother’s heart to the floor, he withdrew De Arcanis Kadon from beneath his robes. Almost with a volition of its own, the book fell open at the spell he intended to evoke.

‘We must flee, your lordship,’ Marko was pleading. ‘The mob will show no mercy, even to one of your rank!’

Lothar looked down at the little rogue. Marko had been very useful to him in the past, but that usefulness was at an end. Turning his gaze again to the aisle, he watched as the thugs were dragged down one by one, butchered beneath the avenging hands of the mob. Marko was right, they would do the same to him for what he had done here. That is, if they were given the chance.

Raising his voice in a cry that was almost reptilian in its slithering tone, Lothar intoned the dread names of ancient Nehekhara, drawing upon those primordial powers the liche-priests of Khemri had bound behind those names. The infernal energies that had been gathered about him were now loosed, transformed and harnessed into a conjuration far beyond what even Kadon might have achieved. The skull set atop the shoulders of Shallya’s decapitated statue burst apart in fragments as the necromantic energies were channelled through it, leaving only the bloody symbol suspended in the air. The levitating symbol was ablaze with a fell light, like some charnel star. Eldritch rays shot forth from the hieroglyph, streaking through the temple with snaky, sinuous motions.

The mob at the doors fell silent as the atmosphere within the temple became frigid and dark magic streamed down from the altar. The surviving thugs cried out in abject horror as they saw those bolts of sorcery seep into the dead plague victims strewn about the pews. Where before there had been only dead clay, now there came a stirring, a hideous awakening. Emaciated hands clutched at the benches, smashed heads rose from pools of gore.

Screams filled the temple as both invaders and defenders watched the dead lurch into ghastly life. Dressed in foul rags, their bodies shrivelled from malnutrition, their skin blotched with the black sores of the plague, the zombies shambled out into the aisles. Upon the pillars, the bound corpses of the priestesses flopped and flailed, trying to slip their ropes to assault the living flesh so near at hand.

The obscene intonation of Lothar’s spell intensified, the rays of pallid light emanating from the altar burst into a fresh frenzy, speeding through the temple, burning paths through walls and ceiling. The mob at the doors was in full flight now, Marko’s thugs fleeing alongside them. The wounded were abandoned, left to shriek as the zombies converged upon them with clawed hands and clacking jaws. Deep within the sanctuary, Marko attacked one of the stained-glass windows in a frantic effort to escape. He had just brought a heavy chair smashing through a glazed panel when the first zombie reached him, bearing him down with its dead weight. The rogue flailed and struggled as the thing tore at him with its teeth. Before he could free himself, a dozen other zombies were crouched over him, pawing at him with dead fingers, relenting only when the man was reduced to a shapeless pile of meat.

Lothar was oblivious to his erstwhile accomplice’s fate, focused entirely upon the mighty magic he had unleashed. All across Mordheim, tendrils of sorcery were snaking through the streets, seeking out the morbid harmonies of grave and tomb. Into the mausoleums of the Steinhardts and the crypts of the nobility and the unmarked plots of the destitute, the rays seeped. Coffins burst, sepulchres groaned open, marble doors gaped wide. From cemetery and plague pit, the dead of Mordheim were called forth, shuffling out into the streets on rotten feet and skeletal claws.

Not a living soul was abroad when Lothar von Diehl marched out from the defiled temple. The only things moving on the streets of the great city were undead — the cadaverous legion his sorcery had brought from their graves. He felt triumph swell inside him as he watched fleshless skeletons and decayed zombies troop past the steps of the temple. Centuries of Mordheim’s dead, all enslaved to the will of one man!

He could feel the living inhabitants of the city cowering behind locked doors and peering out from closed shutters. Their terror was an almost palpable thing. It would be so easy to crush them, to kill them all. A single thought and he could turn his undead loose against them and make himself master of Mordheim!

Lothar shook his head, letting the childish impulse fade. What need had he to rule a city, to carve a kingdom from the rubble of plague-ridden Ostermark? Such desires were simply a temporal delusion, a simulacrum of true power. Clenching his hand tighter about the scaly binding of De Arcanis Kadon, he knew that real power was at his very fingertips, if he could but unlock its secrets.

Though it stung his noble pride, Lothar was forced to concede his own limitations. Even the powerful magic the sacrifice of his mother had unleashed was puny beside the knowledge yet locked within the unholy tome.

There was one, however, whose ability in the black arts might be great enough to decipher De Arcanis Kadon. Raising the dead of Mordheim had been no arrogant display of power, there had been purpose behind Lothar’s feat. With an army of the undead at his command, he would march into Sylvania and confront Vanhal. The peasant necromancer would unlock the secrets for him. If he proved capable, Lothar might even deign to allow him to act as his apprentice afterwards.

Dreaming of the knowledge that would soon belong to him, Lothar von Diehl stepped out into the street, joining the walking dead as they began their long march south.