The End Times | Marienburg's Stand

Midmorning

‘This,’ said Count Mundvard firmly, arms crossed over his broad chest as he looked down over the canals and half-timber townhouses of the Old Money Quarter to the string of melees raging along both banks of the Rijk. ‘This is not happening.’

‘Believe it,’ came a woman’s voice from the darkness of the audience chamber behind him. Her voice was clipped and haughty, toeing the line between empathy and outright spite. ‘Can you not hear the temple’s bells cry it out?’

The count’s sunken face wrinkled still further with distaste. The clangour of steel and raised voices carried across the city on rot-scented winds. He had invested too much in this city – time and wealth, blood and soul. As he watched, an explosion bloomed amongst the warehouses on the Suiddock. He knew it well. He knew it all too well. He continued to look on as the blast settled. The north wind blew debris and the strange black moss of the Norscans deeper into his city. Buildings older than he was fell to rot and decay wherever it landed, blades blunting with rust and men choking on spores in the street. This was no mere Norscan raid. It was a full-fledged incursion. The aethyr reeked of plague magic, of a champion of decay.

Disorder. How he despised it.

He turned from the window, dismissing the chaotic scenes from his mind.

The audience chamber of his townhouse was dark due to the blackened glass that filled its windows, crafting the orderly illusion of perpetual twilight. The luxurious carpet was redolent with the spice of roasted Arabayan coffee. An ornate granite fireplace stood against one wall, but it was for appearances only and was unlit. Books in matching blood-red bindings were neatly ranked along the walls. Silk throws from Ind lay over armchairs made by Estalian masters. Daylit landscapes of lost Sylvania wallowed grimly in the dark. With a ruffle of moon-white feathers, a long-tailed bird dived from one of the bookshelves and swooped towards the mantelpiece above the hearth. It was a parakeet from the subterranean jungles of southern Naggaroth, rare and prized for a harmonious song that it would perform only by night. In the penumbral murk of the chamber, it trilled contentedly.

Alicia von Untervald watched it settle out of the corner of her eye like a cat. She was garbed in a gown of black lace ornamented with mother-of-pearl that was almost identical in hue and lustre to her flesh. Her eyes were as white as a blind woman’s and her fingers ended in long, delicate claws. The tilt of her jaw was regal, the curl of her lip proud. To a gentleman of a certain era she was passably attractive, but after four hundred years Mundvard found her increasingly loathsome on the eye.

And yet he loved her as he loved this despicable city – both were his beyond all doubt, and yet while a single burgher or errant thought remained beyond his control there could be no satisfaction. What fool could take pleasure from so partial a conquest?

‘You have been building a trap of this city for the past four centuries,’ she said, voice becoming suddenly as bitter as that coffee odour. ‘Is there no small pleasure in seeing all that patience come to fruition, watching the jaws of that trap close at last around mortal necks? Will it not be all the sweeter for watching the arrogance crushed from these invaders at the very cusp of their triumph?’

‘No,’ said Mundvard quietly. ‘It is not ready.’

‘You would push pawns around your board for eternity!’ Alicia hissed. ‘It is time we stepped out of the shadows, master. Our Sylvanian kindred rise again. Lady van Mariense whispers to me that Vlad himself fights this same scourge in the north.’ Her claws closed over her hips and she pushed out her chest with a repugnant pout. ‘Now there is a man.’

‘Insolence,’ said Mundvard, raising a hand ready to strike her and baring his fangs as Alicia presented an alabaster palm and slipped back. She ran her claws along the spines of Mundvard’s books. He snarled at the disturbance to the carefully cultivated pattern of dust. ‘Do you think I dote here, senile and blind? Was it mere chance that sent a ship and captain indebted to me following the elf fleet into the Sea of Claws? There was no guarantee that the elves would soon return to bring word of their triumph or defeat. Van Gaal however would be back as soon as he had looted enough wealth to repay the debt on his ship – if he survived.’

‘I assume he did not.’

‘And how blessed with good fortune we must be that the Zegepraal was on patrol this morn rather than at anchorage as was scheduled. What luck our stars shine upon us that the strength of Marienburg was already roused for exercises on the South Dock.’

Alicia shook her head. ‘It was in your power to do more than that, dear heart.’

‘And risk exposing myself? I told you, it is too soon.’

‘Marienburg is on the brink,’ Alicia spat, twisting around in a snap of lace to face him.

‘You exaggerate. The city I have built is better prepared than that which defeated Mannfred all those years ago. It will prevail, and we will continue. And I will succeed where our master faltered.’

‘It will not,’ said Alicia, fingers nestling over one red-bound volume amongst the hundreds and tilting it towards her. Count Mundvard’s cold flesh tightened as his consort slid it from the shelf, slipped off its leather exterior, and unmasked something far older and viler than anything the ignorant folk of Marienburg would believe lay within the bounds of even their sordid city.

The Black Tome of Vlad von Carstein.

‘How did you…?’ Mundvard ground his jaw shut. Knowledge was power and ignorance weakness. ‘It is too soon.’

‘Liliet van Mariense and her pale sisters are already in the dock. The beast stirs under the Rijk.’ Alicia held out the tome. ‘It is time, and if you will not act then I will.’

With a spine-splintering crash of wood, scores of Norscan longships ploughed into the docks, disgorging rabid berserkers and huge armour-clad champions onto the shore. Men dropped even as they ran, bodies marked not by arrow or spear but by blistering black abscesses on their throats. A block of Marienburger regulars fought on amongst the rushing shapes, striking out with halberds while their captain whistled furiously and their horn-blower sounded the order to rally and reform.

Marienburg stood, but without the mercenary auxiliaries and high elf naval power on which she had come to depend she stood alone, and one by one her soldiers fell.

‘Plague!’ Cazarro cried, tearing off his helmet in a bid to clear the cotton wool fug from his head and keeping shoulder-to-shoulder with his fellow Verezzians to either side as the company withdrew. They did so with flawless disciple: pikes low, shields front. Ordinarily, Cazarro would have been proud. A mercenary could fight for many things – wealth, the honour of his regiment and the reputation of his homeland.

But no man could fight a disease.

They fell into an alley. A warehouse loomed to the right and a shipwright to their left. The cramped air smelled of guts and sawdust. Cazarro had hoped that discipline and the narrow front would confer an advantage on their retreat, but if anything it was the reverse. Man-for-man, they had nothing to contend with the might and fury of what came after them.

A Chaos warrior in bulky armour scarred by boils and verdigris hoisted a weeping axe and led a score of howling warriors in a charge. Cazarro parried a sword thrust as the Verezzian to his left was cleft in two by a downward slash of the barbarian’s axe. The man to his right met a Norscan’s blade with a clang, then coughed blood and black spores as he fell in the grip of some seizure. Another man took his place before he too was split open from hip to hip by a deathstroke of that infernal warrior’s axe. Men were being carved open left and right. Even those to the rear were not spared, coughing and spluttering as they fell to be trodden on by those that followed. The horror was as inescapable as the stink.

‘Retreat. Run. Back to the road.’

Alvaro Cazarro cast down his sword and helm and ran.

Bats congregated above the townhouse roof. Some power compelled them, and more of them came flapping over the rooftops from all quarters of the city until their seething, squealing mass blocked out the sun and Count Mundvard threw back the doors and strode out. The riot of screams rose up in full force to assail him and he checked his stride with a grunt. The air was thick with blood, so much so that he could almost open his mouth and drink of it. It had been decades – centuries – since he had last killed with his own hands, but the sight of the Rijk running red was enough to threaten even his measured self discipline. He shook off the urge to flex his claws, walking slowly to the edge as he bore witness to the anarchy that had been unleashed upon his realm.

Alicia had been right. Curse her, she had been right.

The enemy’s shipping was so numerous that they choked the wide mouth of the Rijk with sails and a warrior so inclined could run deck-to-deck from the lighthouse-temple of Manann in the west, to the gothic sea-fort of Rijker’s Island to the north, and then on the slender spires of the Elven Quarter to the east. The mass of sails pushed further towards Hightower Bridge and the city’s heart. The river’s fortifications had been reduced to rubble, and of the Zegepraal and the Marienburger navy even his keen eyes could discern no sign amidst the haze of flies and spores.

Two thirds of his city had already been lost and tens of thousands had been slaughtered. Outnumbered, on the run, and under the scourge of this unnatural contagion, it was clear that the living were no longer in a position to defend their city.

‘So the defence of order must fall at last upon the undying.’

‘Did I not say, dear heart?’ said Alicia.

Offering nothing further, Count Mundvard held out an open hand, feeling an alien sensation coil like a constricting serpent through his breast as Alicia set the Black Tome in his palm.

Count Mundvard took a hard sniff of the air, disregarding now the charnel reek and focusing instead on the currents of magic that blew against and through the wind. The putrid laughter of daemons echoed through the aethyr – tiny things, mindless, too small even for a vampire’s eyes to perceive, but delighting like children in the plague they spread. Such a deadly disease could only have been the work of a master of spellcraft.

No matter.

With a word of power Mundvard blasted the clasps that held the Black Tome’s force sealed within and with a snarl peeled back the first page. The book held the accumulated knowledge of necromancy that Vlad, first and greatest of the Sylvanian counts, had accrued over his long life. In safeguarding the precious volume from Vlad’s warring get after his death – and then masking its existence from his successors – Mundvard had gleaned enough to approach, and even surpass, his former mentor in mastery.

‘Recite with me, Alicia,’ he said, planting one white-bone digit onto the page and beginning his recitation of the ancient Nehekharan script. A second voice twinned itself with his. Alicia von Untervald was a competent sorcerer only, but the addition of her power to his drove a beacon in the aethyr and set it aflame. Count Mundvard spread his hands wide to encompass his city and laughed as power unbound flowed from the page, through him, and out into the vastness.

And slowly, in the city’s dark and foetid places, things better left buried began to stir.

The screams of children, women and men rang through the marble arches and faux-Tilean palazzos of Marienburg’s centre of governance. Caspar Vosberger fought against the tide of humanity, his mind running to the stables he kept near the city’s south gate even as he was dragged under and pulled along with the flood. There were rich and poor men, as well as lords and their maids.

Their blood was equal now.

The clatter of arms echoed through the ornate stonework as the elite palace guards fought with the Norscans swarming up from the harbour. Screams came from every direction. Fires cast vast, daemonic shadows against the tall stone buildings. Black spores hung on the rot-scented air. People dropped like flies.

A scream started somewhere up ahead and found its way into Caspar’s mouth as Hightower Bridge emerged from the fog. One corner of the indomitable keep had crumbled into the Rijk under the onslaught of a thrashing mass of sickly black vegetation and a battle raged in the breach. With every minute that passed, more longships grounded themselves on the rocks that held the bridge’s struts and threw up grapnels and ladders.

Caspar’s mind whirled. His world was coming apart around him.

There was another scream, this one strikingly immediate, and Caspar watched as a young maid in a cotton shawl was cleaved in two by a Norscan’s axe. The warrior charged through the blood spray and more followed, streaming onto the main concourse and into the crowd with an outpouring of bloodthirsty laughter.

Heart hammering against his breast, Caspar fled into a side street with about a dozen others. It was lined with shops with fresh white walls – since Marienburg was forever being rebuilt – that hit Caspar with the sharp odour of wet paint and lime. Caspar sobbed for breath as he hurtled up the gradual climb. He wasn’t accustomed to the exertion, but the screams from behind were coming closer.

Sigmar, he thought, praying to the unfamiliar warrior god of the Empire, spare me.

An older man in front of Caspar stumbled on a barrow filled with pots of lime and ladders that had been abandoned in the path after the attack and he pushed the man aside. He was breathless and weak and in the brief second that their limbs were tangled, Caspar tripped and, with a panicked gasp, spun sideways into a shopfront wall. The fresh plastering where he hit cracked and expelled a rotten meat stench that closed Caspar’s throat as if a corpse had physically reached out from the wall to choke him.

A body had been interred here, Caspar realised. Judging from the smell, more than one. He looked past the panicked mob to the row of freshly whitewashed walls and swallowed.

A lot more.

A pair of arms punched through the wall either side of Caspar’s head and he dropped into a ball under a rain of plaster, squealing as a poorly coordinated hand with grey flesh hanging off its bone tore out the remaining wall from within.

Sigmar spare me, he repeated. Sigmar spare me.

The Norscan stumbled from the tinder ruins of the old Norse Quarter. He wore a bullhide shirt with metal plates sewn in and a cloak with a fur trim that was clotted with gangrenous slime. His beard was coming away in clumps and the face beneath undulated with the passage of maggots. What hair remained was brittle and crisp, and his skin was puckered as if from exposure to intense heat.

Markus Goorman, herald of the merchant privy council, watched dumbstruck as the corpse reached out with coal-black fingers and roughly took the envelope that he had forgotten he was still holding. Black flakes fell from the Norscan’s fingers as he clumsily broke the seal. One split eyeball and one socket that crawled with larvae examined the contents, then the zombie emitted a mournful sigh and drew an axe from his belt.

Mutely, Markus watched as more scorched bodies shambled from the mist.

There were hundreds of them, thousands, and with a collective moan that chilled Markus to his mortal soul, the army of the dead marched on the South Dock to wrest their city from the living.

Count Mundvard closed the Black Tome between shaking hands and stared across the rooftops of Marienburg’s old and wealthy. Flames tracked the paths of the canals, screams rising in their wake like smoke. As he watched, a canalboat caught alight, only to be crushed to kindling a moment later by the collapse of a wine shop. It had been owned by an Estalian family that Mundvard, seeing in that line a potential merchant councillor one day, had nurtured for almost fifty years.

The whole structure sank into the water in a column of sparks. Mundvard ground his teeth. Not since the defeat of Mannfred von Carstein at this city’s walls had he felt anger.

This, however. This was fury.

He turned to Alicia, marble-hard and cold, unmoved by the terror of the bats that flapped around his face.

‘Fetch my armour.’