The End Times | Marienburg's Stand

Dawn

The shrill sea-whistles of the captains-at-arms called through the mist that hung over the city-port’s docks, mingling with the cries of the gulls and terns that circled the fog above Marienburg’s government district. Caspar Vosberger rose from his table in the members’ lounge of the exclusive Rijkside gentleman’s club and paced towards the window. The Rijkside was deserted at this hour. Portraits of merchant grandees and a proud ivory bust of Emperor Dieter IV – toasted on Secession Day – looked down from the oak-panelled walls as he slipped back the curtains and peered into the bay spread below.

A sore finger of red light was just pushing at the misted horizon. The private warships of the merchant elite swayed at anchor in the dim light, shadowed by the high stone bridge that joined the east and west halves of the city via the heavily fortified Hightower Isle. As the Rijk widened downriver, the view grew poorer. The vague, and at turns troubling, forms of ships plied the mist. The white spires of the Elf Quarter rose like the necks of cranes from the Cursed Marsh. On the poorer side of the water, the city’s main dockland, the South Dock, churned with indistinct activity. Caspar kept his gaze there for a second, the expensive glass cloistering him from the chill, reducing the foul odour to a tang in the nostrils and muffling the whistles that cried out from the docks.

It was easy to convince himself that it really was just the birds.

‘It is just an exercise,’ said the only other man in the room. He was reclined in a green leather smoking chair and swirled a twenty-five year old Estalian white in a crystal glass shaped like a scallop’s shell. The dawn light glittered redly across the rubies, garnets and spinels of his beringed fingers. Engel van der Zee held no rank or title that Caspar knew of – and being himself descended from the old Westerland nobility, he made it his pride to know – but Marienburg was a city like no other. Land and lineage counted for less than it should when the business that mattered was conducted through the intermediary of shadow. It allowed ghouls like van der Zee to grow rich. The man took a measured sniff of his wine. ‘General Segher assures me that this was all planned in advance.’ With a faint grimace of distaste, he set down the glass. ‘Leave thoughts of war to those it concerns. You should be more worried about that smell driving down the value of this place.’

Marienburg was renowned in ports the world over for its pungency, and had been for centuries. Caspar no longer even smelled it. This was different.

‘Most of my members are putting their money into fast ships or arms for their men.’ Caspar only half-turned from the window. Lights flashed in silence between the skeletal shards that drifted through the mists over the Rijk. ‘And you wake me before the gulls to make an offer on my establishment?’

‘This will blow over,’ said van der Zee, a dismissive wave towards the window. ‘Gold will still be gold and the future will be there waiting for us. But–’ A silken shrug of damasked shoulders. ‘–if it is men or ships you prefer then I am sure my employer can reimburse you accordingly. You do know who it is that I work for.’

‘Do you?’ asked Caspar, answering the man’s statement with a question. There were wealthy and influential men amongst the Rijkside’s regular patrons who thought the omniscient crime lord, that local myth called the Master of Shadows, was nothing but a conspiracist’s fancy dreamt up in the ale dens and meat markets of the South Dock. Caspar scanned his guest’s quietly arrogant face.

He suspected those men had been well compensated for their ‘beliefs’.

Caspar looked over the portraits and tapestries that adorned the walls. There was history here. The Vosbergers had been custodians of the most well connected institution in Marienburg since the days of the van der Maacht line when Westerland had still been a province of Nordland. He turned again to the window and shivered. The whistles had grown shrill, and the shouts of men reached out from the dockyard slums to touch the glass. It rattled softly in its frame.

Perhaps van der Zee was right. His family still held estates in the old country.

It was time to get out while he still could.

Captain Alvaro Cazarro blew his whistle until his cheeks were red and his temples ached. The Verezzo Twenty-Four Ninety-Five had just been engaged in a mock defence of the South Road Fishmarket Score crossroads against the combined force of the Drakwald Greyskins and a band of Erengrad kossars. As a result his men were scattered all over the intersection. Behind the sloping roofs of shops and tall riverside mansions, the masts and crow’s nests of ships in dock yawed to and fro. Urgent cries were filtering down through the mist. In the distance, cannons boomed like thunder.

Was this part of the exercise?

Soldiers in a confusion of colours clattered through the gelid mist that clung to the buildings as they sought to pick out their own captains and banners. Company honour ensured that there were plenty of genuine wounded amongst their number.

Cazarro drew the whistle from his mouth and almost gagged on the miasmic air that laced the morning mist. It was offensive even by the standards of Fishmarket Score, as if every fish in the Rijk had died and rotted over the course of the night. Strange black motes like drifting spores washed through the sky on the wind.

His company – with plumed helms lank and sodden, breastplates and brass mouldings prickling with condensation – coughed on the foetid mist and straightened their pikes to form a block roughly eight-by-six, while Cazarro cast about for somebody who knew what he was doing. All he saw were mercenary companies like his own. He met the gaze of his counterpart Herman Giesling, the broad-shouldered and wolf-pelted sergeant of the Greyskins, who answered his questioning look with blank eyes and a shrug.

Genuine Marienburger officers were rarer than ithilmar dust.

‘To the docks!’ yelled a bookish-looking youth in a gold-trimmed cloak and sleeveless doublet. He bore the coin and sceptre of Marienburg’s merchant council and was trying to push his way through the burly, heavily armoured sergeants surrounding him.

At last, thought Cazarro, pushing his way through the crowding soldiers to join the scrum of officers that already had the unfortunate herald pinned down under a barrage of questions.

‘Is it an attack?’

‘From where?’

‘How many?’

Breathless and angry, the young herald answered as curtly as he could. ‘A Norscan fleet pushes into the Rijk. Warriors have landed already on the northernmost docks. And in the Temple District.’

Cazarro looked north to where the great temple of Manann, lord of the oceans and patron of the sea-faring city-state, loomed somewhere within the fog. Over the shouts and whistles, he thought he could hear the temple’s bells tolling the alarm. He coughed, and then smeared blood from his palm onto his red cloak. ‘How did they breach the Vloedmuur sea wall? It has stood for a thousand years.’

More questions and a few jeers greeted that.

‘The docks, all of you!’ the herald spat. ‘On the word of Lady von Untervald, there’s a gelder in the pocket of every man when the Norscans are driven back into the sea.’

The men cheered, loosening enough for the herald to force his way through, heading northward along Suidstrasse.

‘You’ll find nothing in the Norse Quarter,’ Cazarro shouted after him.

The east-sider courtling clearly had no clue where he was going. That entire district had been put to the torch by a mob just weeks earlier, reputedly in retaliation for a raid by their countrymen on a flotilla of fishermen and their escort off the coast of Bretonnia. The Twenty-Four Ninety-Five were billeted near the docks, however, and Cazarro knew that there had been no fishing since the raising of the Auric Bastion had moved the war from Kislev onto the Sea of Claws. He was also travelled enough to know an instigated riot when he saw one and to suspect motives, darker than mere jingoism, behind the edict that the dead be denied Morr’s blessing and left in their hovels to rot.

Perhaps it also took an outsider to recognise the smell emanating from the quarter as the very same that native Marienburgers laughingly put down to bad goods or an unlucky wind blowing in from the Cursed Marshes.

‘I have my instructions,’ said the herald, flourishing an envelope bearing the wax seal of von Untervald. ‘And you have yours.’

Cazarro cleared his throat, bringing up black-flecked sputum. Whatever this black dust was, it was a devil on the throat. The Lady von Untervald was said to be the widow of a late member of the merchant council – although no one could say exactly which one – and she was certainly good for her promised coin.

Since their founding year, the Twenty-Four Ninety-Five had been putting the merchant princes’ coin towards an expedition back to their homeland. There were sailors locked in dock who claimed that Verezzo herself was besieged. Others claimed that all of Tilea and Estalia had fallen into the dark earth, and that rat-men now ruled amongst the ruins and turned their ravenous eyes north. Cazarro did not believe that. He would get his men home.

Cazarro emitted a rasping cough and pointed down Fishmarket Score towards the docks.

‘You heard the man.’

The great sea wall of Marienburg was called the Vloedmuur, a dwarf-built miracle of engineering that encircled the gaping mouth of the Rijk. The waves crashed against the buttressing monoliths of muscular mer-folk and the structure bristled with enough cannon to sink an armada. Built for the elves during the golden age of the dwarfs, it had withstood tide and trial since time immemorial – and now it crumbled into the Manannspoort Sea.

A tangle of mouldering vegetation crushed the life out of those fortifications that still stood and through the breach came the Norscans, hundreds of warships cleaving the seething waters under a cloud of black spores. The virulent munitions that had brought low the sea wall had left their sails rotten and black, but by some daemoncraft they still managed to catch the wind. Snarling figureheads depicting sea dragons and kraken rose and fell in sprays of brine as the longships rode the bow-waves of the colossal capital hulks that led the armada down the mouth of the Rijk.

They were huge teetering hulks with no earthly duty to remain afloat. Barnacles crusted their bloated hulls up to the load lines like iron cladding while vast mould-blackened sails tugged the foetid plague hulks towards the South Dock.

The largest of them, the flag of the invading fleet, was a lurching behemoth cloaked in green algal webbing and hanging spores, surrounded by an escort of longships. Its high deck bristled with catapults and ballistae, and a coterie of champions gathered around a warlord whose own sorcerous mana bathed the hulk’s bridge in a sickly green light. An ensign bearing the image of a pustulent and semi-decayed wolf wafted from the sterncastle while the same design flew from the topgallant and snarled in rotten wood from the figurehead.

A string of rocky islands peppered the delta, forcing what had previously been an unstoppable mass of warships to break up, while the brine-lashed bastions that had been erected upon them poured scathing volleys of Helblaster-fire and gouts of dwarf flame into the incoming fleet. Boats were blown asunder, shredded bodies staining the Rijk red between rafts of burning debris. Shoreside batteries poured ballista- and cannon-fire into the maelstrom. Loose cannonballs sent great geysers of seawater spuming over the hard-rowing Norscans.

The Greenwolf’s hull was riddled with iron bolts, its barnacle cladding splintered where cannonballs had scored direct hits, but it came on, unstoppable as a tidal surge.

More than half of the Marienburger navy were still in anchorage – those few sloops and schooners under weigh hurriedly ordering themselves into a bow-to-stern formation across the South Dock, presenting a wall of broadsides to the incoming armada. The defenders’ ships were outnumbered dozens to one, but their position was strong – the landside batteries were reaping a terrible harvest and the Norscans would be fighting against the wind as well as the Marienburgers’ broadsides in order to bring their own weapons to bear. The fleet took further heart from the indomitable presence at the centre of their formation of the Zegepraal, a seventy-four-gun dreadnought that in its sixty years as the flagship of Marienburg had yet to know defeat.

The Greenwolf sailed into a fusillade of such ferocity that the Zegepraal was pushed several yards out of formation. Angry black smoke drove back the mist and stung the smell of rot with honest saltpetre. Heavy iron rounds punched through the hulk’s prow in explosions of calcified crust and mildewed wood. Chain shot scythed through its rigging, the warriors crowding its deck screaming as masts splintered and fell. Quickly, Zegepraal’s well-drilled gunners reloaded while the smaller ships in the line of battle opened up with their own belching salvos.

But somehow, still, the Greenwolf endured.

The crew of the Zegepraal watched aghast as a mutant creature larger than a fisherman’s cottage loaded a heavy black urn into a catapult fixed into a forward firing position on the Greenwolf’s bridge. The creature’s muscle-bound frame was the green of rancid flesh and split by boils and buboes. Entrails hung from its hanging belly. One huge arm tapered to a bone-spike tip; the other ended at the wrist in a mouth rimmed by rows of teeth and suckered tentacles. Flies buzzed around its horns as it transferred its virulent payload to the catapult.

The life rafts from the Vloedmuur had borne a handful of survivors, and their tale had spread like a pox.

Plague!

The men of the Zegepraal cried out in unison as, with naught but its own strength, the brute hauled back the catapult arm and loosed.