The End Times | Marienburg's Stand

Noon

From false doorways and forgotten cellars throughout the old city, Marienburg’s dead rose to oppose the Norscan invaders. Skirmishes raged across nearly every street. In Hightower Keep, thousands of skeleton warriors in clinking mail rose from a mass grave to those lost in the Bretonnian occupation of 1597 in order to sally forth and drive the astounded Norscans back to their boats. It was on Suidstrasse however that the main southward push of the Chaos forces met the army of undead in pitched battle.

Before the Bretonnian civil war and the closure of the sea lanes, goods from every corner of the globe had poured in through the South Dock on their way to the markets of Altdorf. The wealth of the world had paved it, if only figuratively, with gold, and tall, brightly painted mansions and offices had risen along its way. Count Mundvard had watched it grow as an expansion of the docks as the city had risen in prominence under his stewardship as a sovereign state – a powerhouse in world trade.

He no longer recognised it.

The proud buildings were riven with varicose lines of black mould, and the highway that only yesterday had been filled with wagoners and bawdy seamen now heaved with warriors. Ranks of Norscans – more disciplined than their berserker reputation gave them credit for – pushed against a resolute cordon of skeletal warriors and zombies. The battle line bulged in the centre. There the strongest and bravest bellowed their war cries in the hope of attracting the blessings of the pestilential champions of decay that fought beside them. In the crush of combat, surrounded by screams and the rattle of bone, it was impossible to distinguish those heavily armoured warriors from the worm-eaten cadavers they waded through.

How could so many lives, so many ambitions and plans, be overturned in such a short time? Chaos, it seemed, was the sunlight in which the night’s dreams were burned away.

Well this, thought Count Mundvard, observing with crossed arms amidst a coterie of acolytes and retainers, is where this anarchy stops. It was an odd feeling to be in armour after so many years and the winged scarlet plate was freckled with rust. He felt immediate, connected to the moment in a way that, for all his influence, he now realised that he had not been in a long time.

With a stab of anger he bolstered the battle line with freshly fallen warriors, delighting in the barbarians’ horrified cries as their own dead rose against them. A pulse of will quickened stiff muscles and hardened bone and Mundvard watched with bared fangs as the Norscan push came to a standstill. He was tireless and the dead unlimited – a stalemate would end only one way.

The certain outcome left his blood still hot, his fury strangely unfulfilled. He knew he should have limited his intervention to the reinforcement of his lines, let the inevitable play out, but for once in his long and circumspect unlife the voice of reason found itself appealing to a dead heart.

There was no victory to be had here. Too much had already been destroyed, catspaws he had cultivated over generations slaughtered, and with the clarity of prescience he saw the future: a city shattered and leaderless, an Empire on its border that had waited seventy years to bring its wayward province to heel. He saw witch hunts, reckoners of the Imperial treasury in every counting house, the all-powerful merchant companies brought firmly under the yoke of the house of Wilhelm. He could win a crushing victory here and still be set back another five hundred years.

Mundvard extended a hand towards the battle line and turned his palm up. Anger burgeoned into power, black eddies swirling around his arm. Then he clenched his fist with a snarl and the road split in two with a calamitous crack that broke the Norscan ranks and sent them reeling backwards. Mundvard voiced a command and the buildings shuddered, the fissure emitting an existential scream before ejecting a legion of rabid, inhuman spirits that tore into the terrified Norscans from below.

‘Too much,’ moaned Alicia von Untervald. While Mundvard worked his magicks to bolster their forces, the rest of his coterie were engaged in countering the enemy’s sorcerers. His consort’s face was drawn with the effort, fingers twitching like divining rods attuned to the flows of the aethyr, and she had until now been bewitchingly silent. ‘You will draw attention.’

Good, thought Mundvard as the stones underfoot began to rattle and the water to churn.

He pushed his hands towards the river, then tucked them into his chest and strained as if to raise a great weight. The crimson waters frothed white and the Norscans’ longships began to groan. He hoped the Chaos warlord would come for him. Mundvard wanted to see the look on the plague-dog’s face as he tore its head from its neck with his bare hands and drank.

The vampire bared his fangs as dark energy flashed before his pallid eyes.

He had only just started.

They would learn why even Mannfred von Carstein had once seen fit to dub him Mundvard the Cruel.

Every sailor had his own tale of the South Dock beast, a winged horror – by some accounts, at least – that was rumoured to roost amidst the sunken wrecks at the bottom of the Rijk and to feast upon those who defied the Master of Shadows.

They were good and grisly tales. And every word was true.

The terrorgheist burst from the river in a foaming pillar of water and splintered longships, flinging out skeletal bat-wings and issuing a scream that hit the docks like the wave of an explosion. Norscans and Chaos warriors alike spasmed and bled from their eyes as their minds were blown apart. Ships bowed away from the monster as the power of its voice filled their sails.

Then the monster beat its wings, air hissing through the bare bones of its jaw as it glided to where the great hulk, Greenwolf, had been run aground. The decking groaned as the monster flapped onto the prow and proceeded to demolish the ship with a furious combination of teeth and claws. Hurling a length of mainmast from its jaws, the terrorgheist issued a frustrated shriek at finding only dead prey and bunched rotten muscles to launch itself into the air once more.

The violent imperative to hunt down the Chaos warlord and rend him limb from limb filled its small, dead mind. It sniffed the air, recovered the trail, and soared towards the scent of battle.

The large warehouse window shattered under the sudden onslaught of sound and burst inwards, showering Alvaro Cazarro and the surviving Verezzians with broken glass. The men screamed, covering their ears as the flying terror beat its wings and made the roof over their head tremble.

‘Out!’ the captain yelled, glass tinkling from his shoulders. He pulled himself from the ground and threw himself through the gaping window just as the ceiling gave way, dropping a tonne of diseased spores onto the storage chamber beneath.

He came up in the alley outside in a coughing fit. Cazarro almost choked on the stink of death and disease. It was as if the air itself had been infected and was slowly dying. The sky seemed to writhe in torment, and the mercenary captain noticed that the noonday sun had been swallowed by a cloud of bats. Their frenetic flapping left the darkness foetid and warm.

The warehouse collapsed slowly from the inside, coughing out a cloud of dust. Cazarro retreated to the other side of the alley as a column of shambling troops in the garb of Erengrad kossars marched silently through the hanging dust. He glanced up as two men in tarnished breastplates brushed glass and mould from their doublets and coughed. Only two – all that remained of the Twenty-Four Ninety-Five. Even the banner of Verezzo had been lost in the rout from the docks. Their eyes were bloodshot, with pupils that seemed far too wide. Their cheeks were pox-marked, their skin laced with black veins. He laid a hand upon his own face, and brushed numb and blistered flesh.

The doomed reality of their situation finally settled. They were not going home. ‘What do we do?’ shouted one of the two between heaving coughs.

‘Fight,’ Cazarro coughed. ‘For the Lion of Verezzo and the honour of Tilea.’ Cazarro drew his cinquedea from its scabbard and thrust the short stabbing sword into the air. He tried to deliver a war cry, but ended up spluttering into the back of his elbow as he staggered from the alley and into the madness of Suidstrasse.

It was like falling into the ocean. The bluffs of tall buildings rose high through the haze of dust and flapping shadows, flanking a turbulent cauldron of death and life. The three men fought with the strength of drowning men, as if, knowing in their hearts that they were the last men of Tilea, they sought vengeance for their own deaths in advance. One went down to an axe across the throat, another was doubled over by a spiked mace that ruined his belly. Cazarro rammed his cinquedea through the Y-shaped split of a Norscan’s barbute helm and emitted a scream that crackled from his lungs. Through a break in the maelstrom, he saw Sergeant Goesling and the Drakwald Greyskins. They were dead. Everyone was dead. Except for those who wanted to kill him. With a cry of despair, Cazarro buried his fist-wide blade into a Norscan’s armpit.

A terrible roar shook the street to its guts and a great cry went up from the Norscans. The dead fought on, unperturbed, but Cazarro looked up to see a hideous mutant beast bull through the Norscan ranks towards the battle line.

‘Glöt!’ the warriors roared, shaking weapons and standards in the air as the beast stormed nearer. ‘Glöt! Glöt!’

Cazarro felt its footfalls through the paving slabs and as the beast finally reached the front rank he realised that this Glöt was not one creature but three. Between the monster’s shoulders rode a hideously obese warrior with a rusted scythe and, sheltered behind his corpulent bulk and cracked armour, a three-armed hunchback whose quivering flesh was surrounded by a halo of flies. This final figure held his crooked frame on its perch with the aid of a staff and wore fluttering green robes, woven with runes seeping with disease and gum that seemed to shut the eye that dared to try and read them.

The Glöttkin hit the undead rank like a steam tank, bones flying asunder as the skeletal warriors were smashed high and wide.

Cazarro was still watching when he felt a blow like a punch to the ribs. He looked down to find a Norscan spear spitting his chest. The warrior twisted the haft. He heard rather than felt his own ribs split and he finally produced a gasp, pulled to his knees as the blade was yanked from his diseased flesh. His eyesight glimmered out as the strength left him, but there was a prickling at the edge of consciousness, something of shadow and terror just waiting for the last spark of life to fade. To the very last Alvaro Cazarro fought the darkness, his mind living just long enough to shiver from the unlife that suffused his dying muscles. The last of the Verezzians, he staggered to his feet to plunge his cinquedea into his killer’s heart and moaned.

Like Marienburg, Cazarro was dead, but his suffering had only just begun.

‘Sewer rats and festering gulls, come!’

Count Mundvard brought his hands together as his entourage retreated like whipped dogs before the onrushing mutant. Let them. He would take retribution with his own hands. Power laced through his fingers and from hand to hand, tracing a shell within that manifested a grinning black skull. The apparition screamed, shattering its magical caul, and then rocketed forwards, leaving a tail of ectoplasm in its wake. The robed hunchback on the mutant’s back pointed his staff at the missile and the skull disintegrated back into the aethyr with a wail.

Mundvard snarled. Here then was the plague-sorcerer at last. A congealed stream of gibberish ran from the mage’s lipless gums and a sickly green aura seeped from the pinnacle of his staff. Mundvard glared at Alicia, but his consort was too busy getting out of the way to work a counterspell. With an intricate sequence of gestures and phrases, Mundvard drove back the light with such vehemence that the staff was almost knocked from the plague-sorcerer’s hands.

‘I fear neither disease nor decay,’ Mundvard roared as the big mutant slowed its charge, blinking in idiot confusion at its master’s hiss of pain. The huge creature flexed its muscles and drooled. The corpulent champion moved protectively in front of the sorcerer and brought up his scythe. With a chuckle, Mundvard turned his gaze to a growing point of blackness in the sky behind the champion’s back. ‘There is nothing in your god’s power to move one such as I.’

The sorcerer placed a steadying hand on the hanging meat of the warrior’s shoulder and turned. As he did so, the terrorgheist dropped out of the sky further up the street, flung wide its wings just before hitting the road and ripping forward with bony claws spread through the Norscans in its path. With a hiss, the sorcerer clutched his staff, that gangrenous glow returning before Mundvard haughtily dispelled it with a wave. He turned to watch his mighty thrall-beast tear through the Norscan ranks. Soon. Soon. Even the mutant giant was a runt by comparison. Too late, Mundvard noticed the sorcerer’s third hand, hidden behind the tumourous mass of boils and rolling eyeballs that hunched the sorcerer’s back and frantically tracing a separate web of arcane symbols.

Count Mundvard bellowed in outrage – that he, the Master of Shadows, should be deceived by such sleight-of-hand – and spat out a counterspell, but it was too late. A nova of yellow-brown mould swallowed the terrorgheist whole and the monster shrieked as decomposition long held in abeyance ran riot: in the span of moments flesh liquefied and fell away, bones turning brown and crumbling. A second later all that fell upon the plague-sorcerer and his retainers was powder.

‘Even bone must become dust,’ spoke the sorcerer in the breathless wheeze of a lanced boil.

Mundvard’s eyes whitened with fury. The sorcerer would die last, and in ways that Mundvard had spent centuries conceiving.

‘Ghurk,’ said the enemy sorcerer, sagging to his haunches and addressing the mutant beast beneath him, who responded with a sonorous belch and a dribble. ‘Otto.’ A grunt from the fat warrior. ‘Get this over with. Then we three brothers can move on, and nuture our own garden of plagues within Altdorf’s walls.’

The creature, Ghurk, lumbered forward and lashed out with its hawser-like arm while Otto struck down with his rusted scythe. Mundvard’s lip curled as he danced easily from the swollen goliath’s blind swipe, then parried the scythe as though it had been swung by a centenarian knight and cut a riposte across Ghurk’s neck that sent pus dribbling through the folds of its chest. The stench would have poleaxed an orc, but with neither the need to breathe nor a stomach to upset Mundvard ignored it. Otto struck again and again with strength enough to cut down a barded warhorse, but Mundvard was swift as a viper and cagey as an old fox. He fought as he had always lived – with guile and forethought, and instants of subtle incision deliberated several exchanges in advance. Driven by cold-boiling rage the vampire beat through Otto’s guard in a keening blizzard of swordplay, then plunged his blade up to the hilt in Ghurk’s belly. The monster grunted in pain.

‘Suffer,’ Mundvard hissed.

A single tear ran down the mutant’s one, sad-looking eye and Mundvard twisted the blade deeper before wrenching it from the monster’s guts. His cruel laugh became a snarl as a rotten tide of bile and viscera gouted from the wound and slapped him in the face. He spluttered, blinded for just one second before he could twist his head out of the torrent and clear the muck from his eyes. A rusty scythe struck towards his neck. With superhuman speed he twisted, but for the third time in one short day he had seen the danger too late.

Pain as he had forgotten he could still feel exploded in his shoulder. The warrior’s scythe cracked the bone, speared his heart, and tore through the wizened organs that filled his gut.

The vampire sank to the ground with an unbreathing gasp, paralysis creeping through his body from his riven heart

Impossible, he thought. Impossible. His thoughts fractured under a pain he could not vocalise as the plague champion pulled his weapon free. Before he could fall, the monstrous Ghurk wrapped his tentacle limb around the vampire’s chest. Mundvard felt his breastplate buckle and his ribs creak. Desperately, he willed blood to the damaged heart to speed its healing, but he couldn’t so much as blink, and the monster dragged him towards a single eye full of hurt and opened its drooling maw.

It had been human once. Before Chaos had quashed its dreams too.

‘Suffer,’ Ghurk belched.

The huge mutant tightened his grip, then whirled the vampire once overhead and loosed. A foetid wind whipped through Mundvard’s long white hair as he flew. On the road beneath him he saw the army five hundred years in the making collapse as his driving will abandoned them. Then there were no more fighters. He was over water, the unsettled surface whispering and calling and glittering mirthfully with firelight.

The Rijk.

Horror filled him. A stake through the heart could take a vampire’s strength, the sun could claim his life, but the running water would do neither of those things. It was only torture; an evisceration of his very soul.

Count Mundvard summoned the last of his strength to drive a desperate plea into the wind of Death, but no one heard his scream as the water lapped up and took him.