The End Times | The Fall of Altdorf

ONE

The tent’s walls flapped in the cold west wind, making the fires in the torches spit and gutter. Its lone occupant knelt on mud-slick grass, bowing his head before a makeshift altar. A rich red cloak hung, rain-heavy, from his armoured shoulders. His gauntlets were crossed on the hilt of a proffered sword, thrust naked and point-down into the earth in the knight’s fashion.

His eyes remained closed. He was un-helmed, exposing a lean, noble face lost in prayer. His hair was close-cropped and mottled with the marks of the battlefield – mud, blood, lines of old sweat.

The altar was small, and had been carried with his baggage ever since his first days as a squire. It was made of rosewood, with a carved representation of twin griffons facing one another across the battered top face. It was a cheap thing, in truth. He could have had it replaced with a gold-plated one by now, or employed priests to pray on his behalf, but he had prayed before that same altar for thirty-two years, and was not about to change now. Not today, of all days.

‘My lord Heldenhammer,’ he whispered, his breath steaming in the dawn’s chill. ‘As I have ever been faithful, remember Your servant this day. I fear no death, no pain, no trial, if it be in Your service. I admit only one fear: to prove unworthy of the sword I bear, the armour I wear, the men I command.’

From outside the tent, the noises of a preparing army could be heard – horses being led to their riders, artillery pieces being hauled across the furrowed earth on iron-rimmed wheels. He could hear the muffled roaring of battle-priests, rivalled only by the parade-ground shouts of sergeants and captains.

He had heard such sounds all his life. Ever since childhood, the instruments of war had been around him. In that, if in no other way, this day was little different.

‘When I slay, let it be in Your name. When I face the darkness, let it be in Your name. And when the hour comes, and when my service ends, let it be that I reflected honour to You in the time that I was given.’

Rain started up again, drumming on the already sodden canvas. The downpour would make the earth well with water, hampering the charge of the warhorses.

‘Let it be,’ he prayed, near-silently, ‘that no man has cause to doubt my devotion, and that they will say nothing more of me, after I am gone, but that I fulfilled my vows.’

He opened his eyes, and stood stiffly. He took up his sword and sheathed the blade, then made the sign of the comet across his breastplate and bowed a final time. As he did so, the wind whipped around the tent-walls, brushing ice-cold rain under the skirts.

He reached for his helm, held it loosely in his left hand, and turned to the entrance flaps.

Outside, they were waiting for him.

Schwarzhelm glowered massively in the drizzle, his heavy broadsword already unsheathed, his great beard dank and draggled. Huss stood in his shadow, scarce less brutal in mien, moisture running in trickles down his bald pate. The boy Valten was beside him, grasping Ghal Maraz one-handed as if it weighed less than a stick of straw. Helborg stood apart, magnificent in his war-plate, steel-clad, hard and hawk-like.

Behind them were the generals, the warriors, the foot soldiers, the knights, the halberdiers, in white and red and yellow and chequered black and carrying the serried weapons of the Empire in readiness.

As one, they raised those blades.

‘Karl Franz!’ they roared.

At that, the Elector Count of Reikland, the Prince of Altdorf, the Bearer of the Silver Seal and the holder of the Drachenzahn runefang, Emperor of all Sigmar’s holy inheritance between the Worlds Edge Mountains and the Great Sea, nodded in acknowledgement.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Let us begin.’

Heffengen, like all towns in the upper Ostermark, was fortified. Thick stone walls enclosed its tight streets of wattle-and-daub dwellings, overlooked by steep tiled roofs. Those walls, though, had been left to rot by a neglectful burgomeister, whose body now swung from a high gibbet over the gates.

Perhaps the burgomeister had done the best he could. Perhaps the plague or the heavy draft of fighting men had made his job impossible. It hardly mattered now – an example had to be set.

With the walls in their state of disrepair, Karl Franz had decided that a defence of the town itself was impossible. In any case, the army he had mustered would have struggled to fit inside, and so the coming battle would be fought on the plains, out in the open, under the rain and the watchful eyes of whatever gods deigned to observe.

Squalls continued to drive hard from the north-west, bearing more moisture with them. The land stretched away to a steel-grey horizon, glistening with standing water atop soft black earth. A few blasted trees hunched over here and there, dark against the water-heavy sky.

Karl Franz had drawn his forces up on the wastelands a mile north of Heffengen’s limits. The battlefield was bounded on the east by the deep cleft of the Revesnecht river as it snaked north towards the greater flood of the Talabec. Over to the west, open ground slowly gave way to the straggling fronds of marginal forest.

The enemy would come at them from the north, just as they always did. They would sweep over the moors, fresh from their slaughter at the Auric Bastion, tearing up sodden ground under brazen hooves. The hounds would come first, loping with jaws agape; then the cavalry on their red-eyed mounts; then, striding on cloven hooves, the armoured behemoths with spiked helms and skulls hanging from blood-glossed armour.

Their formations would be ragged, powered onward by lust for slaughter. The one defence, the only advantage possessed by mortal men, was discipline. Just as had been the case for a hundred lifetimes, raw mania would be met by ordered lines of Imperial steel.

General Talb had petitioned hard for the honour of guarding the eastern flank. His ranks of Ostermarkers stood in place, arranged into squares of halberdiers and pikemen. They were supported by units of gunners and swordsmen, including a contingent of mercenary ogres who towered over the warriors around them. Huss had taken his fanatics with him to bolster Talb’s lines, though the warrior priest’s presence alone was worth more than all the zealots he brought with him. Valten, as ever, accompanied his mentor.

Karl Franz had watched them go. It remained uncomfortable to see the holy warhammer borne by hands other than his own. Gelt had counselled against it from the start, but the decision had not been his to make.

What brought you down? thought Karl Franz, ruminating on Gelt’s disgrace and departure. Pride? Weakness of will? Or just, like so many before you, despair?

So much had changed, and in so short a time. The mighty defensive bastion Balthasar Gelt had raised across the Empire’s northern borders had been breached at last, freeing the hordes of the Wastes to pour into Ostermark like blood fountaining from a wound. The strain of maintaining it had turned the Gold Wizard’s mind in the end, damning him to association with fallen souls he would not have so much as spat on while sane.

Gelt had not deserved his sudden fall from grace, not after the service he had rendered, but then so many did not deserve the fates that had befallen them, and there was no leisure to mourn them all.

You could have fought here with us. Your spells might have turned them back.

‘You will not ride out,’ grunted Schwarzhelm.

Karl Franz smiled. His bodyguard had been fighting solidly for weeks, first on the Bastion, now as part of the long retreat south from the breach at Alderfen. He was caked with grime, much of it flecked amongst the curls of his immense beard.

‘The choice is mine, Ludwig,’ he reminded him.

‘Ludwig is right, my lord,’ said Helborg. ‘They wish to draw you out. We may fall in battle, you may not. You are the Empire.’

You are the Empire. Those words always gave Karl Franz a cold twinge of unease, though he had heard them many times before.

It was a comfort, though, to hear his two lieutenants in agreement. Such had not always been the case.

‘The judgement will be mine,’ Karl Franz said, firmly. ‘As ever, Sigmar will guide.’

The three of them stood at the very centre of the Empire battle lines, set some way back from the front ranks. Ahead of them was arrayed the main force of Reiklanders, decked in white and red. Three whole regiments of the Palace guard had been assembled, flanked by greater numbers of regular troops. Like the Ostermarkers to the east, the halberdier squares formed the backbone, supported by ranged weaponry – bowmen, handgunners, light artillery pieces. The elite of the entire army, the Reiksguard cavalry, had formed up to the left, waiting for their lord Helborg to join them. Proud banners bearing the Imperial griffon and black cross of the knightly order hung limp in the drizzle.

It looked solid. Rows and rows of steel glinted dully in the grey light, close-serried and well-drilled. Sharpened stakes protruded from the earth in steed-killing lines, dripping dankly in the morning mist.

‘And Mecke?’ asked Schwarzhelm.

The west flank was held by Lord General Mecke of Talabheim, whom Karl Franz thought was an ambitious bastard with an unseemly enthusiasm for the coming slaughter. Still, his men were as disciplined as any of the others, and he had numbers. The red and forest-green livery of his infantry squares was just visible to the west, part-shielded by fringes of foliage. The greater part of the artillery pieces were there too, lodged on higher ground and with a commanding vantage over the open field.

‘He knows his business,’ said Karl Franz. ‘Nothing more to be done, now.’

Helborg wiped a sluice of rainwater from the visor of his hawk-winged helm. Karl Franz could see he was anxious to be gone, to saddle up and join his men. That man was only truly happy on the charge, his runefang in his fist and the thunder and crash of arms around him. He would have made a poor statesman, so it was fortunate he had never been charged with that role. Killing suited him better than bartering.

‘I can smell them already,’ said the Reiksmarshal.

Karl Franz turned his gaze north. Beyond the furthest ranks of the central defence, the land ran away, bleak and empty. Eddies of rain whipped across the mud.

‘You should go, Kurt,’ said Karl Franz.

Helborg pushed his cloak back, drew his sword and saluted. ‘This day will see the line restored.’

Always confident, always brash.

Karl Franz acknowledged the salute. ‘Should we lose the field–’

‘We cannot lose,’ muttered Schwarzhelm.

‘Should we lose the field, they will press for Altdorf. We discussed what is to be done then.’

‘Middenheim is closer, and stronger,’ said Helborg, repeating what he had argued in the war council two days ago. ‘I still think–’

‘I have spoken,’ said Karl Franz, holding the Reiksmarshal’s gaze calmly. ‘These are desperate times. I have no faith in electors, wizards have proven themselves unreliable, and I barely understand Huss’s motives.’ He smiled, clapping an armoured hand on Helborg’s shoulder. ‘We are the Empire. Men. Altdorf is the key. It always has been, and they know it too.’

Helborg looked, for a moment, like he might argue the point. Then he bowed. ‘It matters not – we will drive their bones into the earth. Here is where the tide turns.’

‘Well said,’ said Karl Franz. ‘Now go in faith.’

‘Always.’

Helborg strode off. As the Reiksmarshal walked down through the ranks, attendants hurried after him. Soon he would be mounted, blade in hand, poised at the forefront of the Reiksguard’s formation.

Schwarzhelm stayed put. His unsmiling eyes strayed over to the stockade behind them, where Deathclaw had been chained. The griffon’s scent penetrated through all the others – a wild, bitter aroma, suggestive of raw meat and frenzy.

‘I know what you’re thinking, Ludwig,’ said Karl Franz.

‘Listen to Kurt, if you will not listen to me,’ grumbled the old warrior.

Karl Franz laughed. ‘I don’t know what to worry about more – them, or the fact you’re both speaking with one voice. It’s almost as if Averland never happened.’

Schwarzhelm’s face did not so much as twitch from its mask of belligerent certainty. His trials in the south were almost forgotten now, washed away by the greater war of the north. Combat with an enemy he understood had restored him to his former self, it seemed.

He looked about to say something else, no doubt some plea for the Emperor to remember his place at the rear of the army, and not to go charging off into the fray like some avatar of Sigmar reborn. Such counsel was Schwarzhelm’s duty, of course, just as it was Karl Franz’s prerogative to make his own damned mind up.

In the event, Schwarzhelm said nothing. Any words he might have uttered were snatched from his lips by a clamour rising up out of the north. It started off low, like the growl of beasts at bay, then picked up in volume, carried by the skirling winds and wafted across the empty land.

Soon it was a howl, a mass of screaming and roaring. Drums underpinned it, making the standing waters shiver. The northern horizon darkened, as if storm clouds had boiled into existence in defiance of the law of nature.

Then Karl Franz saw the truth – the clouds were birds, thousands of them, flocking unnaturally. They blotted out the meagre sunlight in a fast-moving scab of ragged black, sweeping out of the mist and circling clear of arrow-range.

The howling continued, muffled by distance for the moment, but that would not last. All along the Empire lines, sergeants bellowed at their men to hold fast, to grip their halberds ready, to remember their vows, to take no damned backward step or their bones would be first to feel the crack of the maul.

Schwarzhelm’s grizzled face tightened. His burly hand crept automatically to the hilt of his great blade, the Rechtstahl, the famed Sword of Justice.

‘Here they come,’ he murmured.

Karl Franz heard Deathclaw’s agitated growling from behind the stockade. The war-griffon was eager to tear at the foe. The beast might not have to wait much longer.

‘Unto death,’ he breathed, feeling the weight of the runefang at his belt. ‘Never yield.’

The enemy charged under the shadow of crows.

The birds wheeled and dived across the Empire defences, cawing maddeningly. Detachment captains forbade the wasting of arrows against such fodder, and so the birds were left unmolested to crash and flap into the waiting soldiers. They clawed at faces and fingers, and soon the halberdiers were flailing at them, their exposed flesh running with lacerations.

Runners broke out of the mist next, hundreds of them, isolated and without formation. From atop his mount, Helborg watched them come. No Imperial gunner opened up at them yet, giving the runners an unimpeded charge at the Empire positions. They careered mindlessly, limbs cartwheeling, eyes staring. Some were naked and daubed with inks across their snow-pale flesh; others were riddled with disease, their eyes staring and red-rimmed. All were lost in battle-fury, triggered by the poisons they had been fed by their shamans.

Helborg curled his lip in disgust. The first of the baresarks hurled themselves into the outer lines of pikemen. He saw one skinny lunatic impale himself on the stakes designed for the cavalry, and writhe there in a kind of wild-eyed ecstasy. Others slammed into the waiting defenders, and the halberds rose and fell, slewing up tatters of plague-sick gore.

Helborg felt his steed twitch under him. The warhorse knew what was coming, and was eager for it. Cold wind, still laced with fine rain, hissed up against its barding, chilling the muscles beneath.

‘Easy,’ he murmured, keeping a light hold on the reins.

More runners emerged from the mists, screaming as they came. They charged down the centre of the battlefield, ignoring the flanks. Still the handgunners restrained themselves, letting the infantry squares deal with the threat as it emerged. The real enemy was still to show itself.

It did not take long. Norscans strode out of the grey haze, rain bouncing from thick, bronze-lipped armour. They carried heavy axes, or mauls, or gouges, or double-bladed swords with obscene daemon-headed hilts. Some had helical horns twisting from their helms, others tusks, or spikes, or strips of flayed skin.

As the mist flayed into tatters around them, the front rank of Chaos warriors broke into a lumbering charge. There was still no formation to speak of, just a broken wave of massive bodies, swollen and distended by disease and mutation. War horns, carved into crude likenesses of two-headed dragons and leering troll-faces, were raised amid the throng.

The Norscan infantry brought the rolling stink with them – like charnel-house residue, but thicker and more nauseating. It seethed across the battlefield, pungent and inescapable, making mortal soldiers gag and retch. Even before the first of them had entered blade-range, the Empire’s defensive formations began to suffer.

‘First rank, fire!’ came the cry, and the first squads of handgunners opened up. A second later, and the long rifles sent a curtain of shot scything out. A few Chaos warriors stumbled, borne down by those coming behind and trodden into the mud.

After frantic reloading, the gunners opened up again, then again, taking aim as soon as they could, and the air became acrid with the drifting stench of blackpowder. The great cannons opened up from Mecke’s western position, booming with thunderous reports and driving gouges into the emerging horde. They were more effective: dozens of warriors were dragged to a bloody ruin by the iron balls.

Even the thickest plate armour was no defence against such disciplined fire, launched in wave after wave. Norscans and baresarks alike were blasted apart, their armour-shards spiralling into the swooping flocks of crows. One huge champion, antler-horned and clad in overlapping iron plates the width of a man’s hand, took a cannonball direct in the throat, severing his head clear. He rocked for a moment, before the momentum of the charge dragged his body under.

It still was not enough. The howling screams became deafening as more warriors strode onto the battlefield. Soon the cacophony was so loud that it was impossible to hear the shouts of the captains. The earth reeled under the massed treads of iron-shod boots, and the northern horizon filled with the rain-shrouded shadow of thousands upon thousands of Chaos fighters.

By then the foremost of the Norscans had caught up with the baresarks, and they crashed into the static defenders. Most detachments initially held out as the battle-blinded enemy charged straight into thickets of angled halberds. Every impact, though, drove the defenders back a pace, until gaps began to form. Halberd-shafts snapped, arms were broken, legs slipped in the mire, and the squares buckled.

The blood would flow freely, now. The preliminaries were over, and the hard, desperate grind had begun.

‘Reiksguard!’ roared Helborg, raising his blade Klingerach, the fabled Solland runefang. Rain bounced from the naked blade. ‘On my word.’

Behind him, he heard the stamp and clatter of five hundred knights prepare for the charge. They drew their swords in a glitter of revealed steel, flashing against the darkening pall ahead.

Helborg looked out, tracing a path into the storm. A mass of Reikland halberdiers stood to his right, the artillery positions and Mecke’s contingent to his left. The knights would charge through the gap, emerging into the Chaos hordes just as the last of the cannon volleys rang out. After that, the fighting would be closer, grimier, harder – just as he liked it.

‘For Sigmar!’ he roared, brandishing his sacred blade in a wild circle before pointing the tip directly at the enemy. ‘For the Empire! For Karl Franz!’

Then he kicked his spurs in, and the mighty Reiksguard, driving on in a wedge of ivory and black, thundered into the heart of the storm.

TWO

Karl Franz strode up the wooden steps of the stockade, his armour clanking, and Schwarzhelm followed him up.

The Emperor could hear the incessant chants of the warrior priests. Huss had taken the best of them with him to the front, and those left behind to lead the prayers to Sigmar were the old and the wounded. Their dirges, normally strident with martial vigour, sounded feeble set against the horrific wall of noise to the north.

The Emperor reached the stockade’s summit, where a fortified platform rose twenty feet above the battle-plain. Standards of the Empire, Talabheim, Ostermark and Reikland hung heavily in the drizzle, their colours drab and sodden. Guards in Ostermark livery saluted as he approached, then withdrew to allow his passage. The only other occupants of the viewing platform were a group of extravagantly bewhiskered master engineers, peering out through long bronze telescopes before issuing orders for the artillery teams via carrier pigeon.

Karl Franz walked over to the platform’s edge and stared out across the windswept vista. His entire field of view was filled with the vast, sluggish movements of men. Whole contingents were advancing into the grinder of combat, trudging through an increasingly ploughed-up mud-pit to get to the bitter edge of the front.

The bulk of the fighting was concentrated in the centre, where the Reikland detachments held firm. Some infantry squares had already buckled under the force of the first charge, but others had moved to support them, sealing any breaches in the defensive line. The Chaos horde beat furiously at a wall of halberdiers, causing carnage but unable to decisively break the formations open.

With the enemy charge restricted to the centre, both Empire flanks had cautiously edged forward. Mecke’s gunners continued to launch their barrages, winnowing the reinforcing Norscan infantry before they could reach contact. Karl Franz fancied he could even hear Huss’s wild oratory rising over the tumult, urging the fanatics under his command to hold fast. The eastern flank had come under a weaker assault than the centre thus far, but an undisciplined charge by the flagellants so early would undermine the integrity of the whole defensive line.

Karl Franz gripped the rough-hewn edges of the platform’s railing, waiting for what he knew was coming. Then he heard the harsh bray of war-trumpets, and saw Helborg’s Reiksguard charge out at last.

He caught his breath. As ever, the Imperial knights were magnificent – a surge of pure silver fire amid the bloody slurry of battle. The packed beat of the warhorses’ hooves rang out as they powered through the very heart of the battlefield.

Karl Franz leaned out over the edge of the platform railing, peering into the rain to follow their progress. He saw Helborg’s winged helm at the forefront, bright and proud, glittering amid a flurry of Reiksguard pennants. His knights hit the enemy at full-tilt, cracking them aside and driving a long wedge into the horde beyond. Lances shattered on their impaled victims. Any who evaded the iron-tipped wave were soon dragged under by the scything hooves of the warhorses.

‘Glorious,’ murmured Karl Franz.

Shouts of joy rang out from the Empire ranks. The Reiklander infantry squares pushed back, given impetus by the Reiksguard charge. Huss at last relaxed the leash, and his zealots entered the fray from the east, followed more implacably by Talb’s state troopers. Mecke’s gunnery continued to reap a swathe from the west, now angled further back to avoid hitting the advancing contingents of Empire infantry.

The enemy reeled, struck by the coordinated counter-attacks. From west to east, Empire defenders either held their ground or advanced. The foot soldiers marched steadily through the angled cavalry stakes, held together in tight-packed formations by the hoarse shouts of their captains.

‘Not too far,’ warned Karl Franz, watching the detachments begin to spread.

Schwarzhelm nodded, and passed on the order. Runners scampered out again, tearing from beneath the stockade and out towards the command positions. An army of this size was like a giant beast – it needed to be constantly reined-in, or it would run away with everything.

Schwarzhelm rested a heavy gauntlet on the wooden parapet. His watchful eyes roved across the scene, probing for weakness. Like Helborg, he would have preferred to be in the thick of it, though his duty as the Emperor’s bodyguard prevented him entering the fray – for the moment.

‘They’re holding,’ the huge bodyguard said, cautiously.

Even as the words left his mouth, the sky suddenly darkened. Lightning flickered across the northern horizon, and the jagged spears were green and sickly.

A sigh seemed to pass through the earth, as if giants rolled uneasily underneath. Men lost their feet, and the beleaguered Norscans found fresh heart. The Reiksguard charge continued unabated, crashing aside swathes of Chaos foot soldiers and crunching them down into the mire.

‘Call him back!’ cried Karl Franz, watching Helborg’s momentum carry him deeper into the gathering shadow.

The storm curdled further, dragging ink-black clouds across a tortured sky and piling them high. More lightning skipped and crackled across the horizon, now a violent emerald hue and boiling with unnatural energies.

Shrieks echoed across the invading army – not mortal shrieks this time, but the fractured, glassy voices of the Other Realm. Karl Franz felt his heart-rate increase. No matter how many times he faced the creatures of the Outer Dark, that raw sense of wrongness never dissipated. No other enemy had such power over men’s souls. To fight them was not just to fight physical terror, it was to face the innermost horrors of the mortal psyche.

Schwarzhelm tensed as well. ‘The damned,’ he growled, balling his immense fists.

It was like the very ground vomited them up. They boiled out of the earth, seething and hissing with foul vapours. Tiny malicious sprites swarmed from the mud, clutching and snickering at the legs of mortal men. Stomach-bloated horrors lurched into existence amid gouts of muddy steam, their jaws hanging open and their lone rheumy eyes weeping.

Such apparitions were the least of the denizens of the Other Realm, mere fragments of their gods’ diseased and febrile imaginations. Maggotkin, they were called, or plaguebearers, or Tallymen of Plagues. As they limped and slinked into battle they murmured unintelligibly, reciting every pox and canker their addled minds could recall.

Beyond them, though, the skies drew together, laced with febrile flame-lattices. A crack of thunder shot out, shaking the earth, and the crows scattered.

Somewhere, far out across the boiling hordes of enemy troops, something far larger had been birthed. Karl Franz could feel it as a cold ache in his bones. The rain itself steamed as it fell, as if infected by the torture of the heavens themselves.

Karl Franz called for his helm-bearer.

‘My liege–’ began Schwarzhelm.

‘Say nothing,’ snapped Karl Franz. A servant brought over the Imperial helm – a heavy gold-plated lion-mask with sun-rays radiating out from the rim. ‘What did you expect, Ludwig? I fought at Alderfen. I fought at the Bastion. I am Sigmar’s heir, and by His Immortal Will I shall fight here.’

Schwarzhelm glowered down at him. Despite the vast gulf in rank, the grizzled bodyguard was physically far bigger than his master. ‘That is what they wish for,’ he reminded him.

Karl Franz glanced back towards the stockade behind him. He could hear Deathclaw raking against his prison. The creature was desperate to take wing, and instinctive war-lust permeated through the driving squalls.

With difficulty, he turned away. The battlefield sprawled before him again, shrouded in churning clouds and punctuated by the screams of men and the clash of arms. The stink of blood rose above it all, coppery on the rain-drenched wind.

He swallowed down his fury, and remained where he was. Schwarzhelm, satisfied, took the war-helm again.

‘For now,’ murmured Karl Franz, watching the clouds swirl into grotesque tumours. ‘For now.’

The impact of the first lance strike nearly unseated Helborg, but he dug his heels into the stirrups and pushed back, driving the iron point through the heart of a barrel-chested Norscan champion. The force of his steed’s momentum carried the creature of Chaos high into the air before the lance broke and the broken halves of its body crashed to earth again. By then, Helborg’s warhorse had already carried him onward, treading down more disease-encrusted warriors under its churning hooves.

The charge of the Reiksguard was like a breaking tide, sweeping clean through the very centre of the raging tempest and clearing out the filth before it. Helborg’s knights rode close at his side, each one already splattered with bile-tinged gore. Their pennants snapped proudly, their naked swords plunged, the horses’ manes rippled. There was no standing up to such a concentrated spearhead of fast-moving, heavily armoured killing power, and the enemy infantry before them either fled or were smashed apart.

Consumed by the power and fury of the charge, Helborg felt the change in the air too late. He did not see the clouds of crows rip apart and fall to the earth, thudding heavily into the mud. As he drew his runefang and sliced it down into the neck of a fleeing warrior, he did not see the columns of marsh-gas spew from the earth itself, coalescing rapidly into the fevered outlines of witchery.

The Reiksguard drove onward, scattering their foes before them. The air stank with blackpowder and blood, flecked with flying mud and storm-rain. By the time Helborg smelled the rank putrescence simmering on the air, his knights were half a mile beyond the Imperial reserve lines and far beyond the advancing ranks of halberdiers. He pulled his steed around, and the vanguard of his cavalry drew up in his wake.

Ahead of them, half-masked by shuddering walls of miasma, the rain was spiralling away from something. Like a glittering curtain of twisting steel, the deluge bulged outwards, veering clear of a scab of shadow at its core. Dimly, Helborg could make out a vast profile beyond – a heaped, piled, bulging mountain of flesh and blubber, crowned with antlers and split near the summit by a thousand-toothed grin. Flabby arms emerged, pushing out from swelling muscle with wet pops, followed by a rust-pocked cleaver that left trails of mucus hanging behind it.

Helborg’s mount reared, its eyes rolling, and he had to yank hard on the reins to pull it back into line. The remaining Reiksguard fanned out, forming up into a loose semicircle about their master. On the edges of the formation, cowed enemy troops regrouped and started to creep back into range, emboldened by the gathering diabolical presence in their midst.

Helborg stared at the abomination, and an icy wave of hatred coursed through him. ‘Knights of the Empire!’ he roared, throwing back his cloak and holding his blade high. ‘Break this, and we break them all! To me! For Sigmar! For Karl Franz!’

Then he kicked his steed back into the charge, and his warriors surged forward with him. Ahead of them, the enormous swell of the greater daemon fully solidified, shuddering into the world of the senses with a snap of aethyr-energies releasing. The ground rippled like a wave, rocked by the arrival of such a glut of foetid, corpulent flesh-mass. Cracks zigzagged through the mud as it schlicked open, each one spilling with clumps of scrabbling roaches.

The Reiksguard charged into contact. As they tore along, the ranks of enemy foot soldiers closed on them, narrowing their room for manoeuvre. Some succeeded in waylaying knights on the flanks, and the force of the charge began to waver. The rapidly undulating landscape accounted for several more, causing the horses to crash to the earth and unseat their riders.

Helborg, though, remained undaunted, his eyes fixed resolutely on the hell-creature ahead. He careered through the screaming hordes, his companions struggling to stay on his shoulder, his blade already whirling.

‘For Sigmar!’ he bellowed.

Ahead of him, still masked by the after-birth tendrils of the aethyr-vortex, the scion of the Plaguefather gurgled a phlegm-choked laugh, and licked a long, black tongue along the killing edge of its cleaver. Its grotesque body shivered with cold laughter.

Beckoning the mortals forwards like some obscene grandfather, it raised a flabby arm to strike, and vomit-coloured aethyr-plasma flickered along the cleaver-blade.

Karl Franz paced to and fro across the platform, never taking his eyes from the unfolding struggle ahead of him. His stockade felt less like a privileged viewing tower and more like a prison, keeping him from where he needed to be. Schwarzhelm remained silently at his side, offering nothing but a grim bulwark for his growing anger to break against.

‘Order Mecke to angle the guns higher!’ Karl Franz bellowed, sending messengers scampering through the rain. ‘And get Talb’s reserves further up! They’re useless there!’

The situation was dissolving before his eyes. Pitched battles always degraded into messy, confused scrums after the first few hours – formations collapsed and orders were misheard – but the foul conditions north of Heffengen were turning the encounter into a formless crush. He could only watch as Huss’s flagellant zealots tore headlong at the enemy Skaelings, losing all shape as their fervour carried them far beyond Talb’s supporting infantry. Karl Franz was a powerless spectator as the Reiksguard’s spectacular success took them out of reach of the Reiklanders in their wake, and as the daemon-allied northerners finally brought carnage to Mecke’s west flank.

The air vibrated with febrile derangement. Clouds of flies had taken the place of the crows, blotting out the thin grey light of the sun and turning the air into a grimy dusk. Artillery strikes had blasted apart some of the more prominent tallymen, but ravening knots of daemon-kind still stalked among the living, bringing terror in their noxious wake. The Norscan bulk of the army had been reinforced by fresh waves of other tribesmen, and already the dull mantra of Crom, Crom could be heard over the choir of screams.

Huss still stood firm, as did his protégé Valten. While they still laid about them with their warhammers, hacking through whole companies of Chaos troops, the eastern flank still had a fulcrum about which to turn. For all that, the balance of the battle still hung by a fragile thread. The bulk of the mortals could not stand against daemons – even being in proximity to one was enough to threaten madness – and so the bulk of the state troopers teetered on the brink of collapse.

‘They need me,’ said Karl Franz, unable to watch the killing unfold.

Schwarzhelm, this time, said nothing. He gazed out across the battlefield, his head lifted, listening. He sniffed, drawing the air in deep. Then a shudder seemed to pass through his great frame. ‘They are here again, my liege,’ he rumbled, looking utterly disgusted.

For a moment, Karl Franz had no idea what he was talking about. He followed his Champion’s stare, screwing his eyes up against the drift of smoke and plague-spoor.

Over in the east, where Talb’s troops struggled heroically amid a slew of shifting mud, a chill wind was blowing. The ragged clouds summoned by the daemon-kin blasted back across the wide field, exposing a clear sky. All along the horizon, black figures crested a low rise. Tattered banners hung limp in the drizzle, dozens of them, standing proud above whole companies of infantry. The figures were moving – slowly, to be sure – but with a steady, inexorable progress.

Karl Franz turned to one of the engineers and snatched a telescope from his trembling hands. He clamped the bronze spyglass to one eye and adjusted the dials.

For a moment, all he saw was a blurred mass of winter-sparse foliage. Slowly, his vision clarified, resting on an outcrop beyond the curve of the Revesnecht. As he examined it, he understood why Schwarzhelm had been so appalled.

Again, he thought, bleakly. But why, and how? And for whom do they fight?

He moved the telescope’s view down the long line of unkempt figures, resting on none of them for long. He swept north, aiming for their leader. Eventually, he found him, and the spyglass halted.

Karl Franz clutched the bronze column tightly. The rumours had swirled since Alderfen, and he had not wanted to believe any of them. It had been so long ago. The chroniclers and scholars could have been wrong – it might be an impersonator, a shadow, a lesser demagogue assuming the mantle of an older and more sinister soul.

As he nudged the dials to bring the focus into line, Karl Franz felt a hollow sensation in his guts. There could be no mistake. He saw a long, arrow-straight mane of pure white hair, hanging from a still-noble head. Eyes of purest obsidian were set in a flesh-spare visage, drawn tight across sharp bones. He saw armour the colour of a flaming sunset, blackened with old fires and old blood; a long, ebony cloak lined with finest ermine; fangs jutting from a proud, cruel mouth; a longsword, sheathed in an ancient scabbard.

And, most of all, the ring. Even at such a distance, its garnet-stone glowed like an ember, leaking smoke from its setting.

Karl Franz put the telescope down. ‘Then it is true,’ he murmured, leaning against the balcony railing heavily. ‘Vlad von Carstein.’

Schwarzhelm’s face was black with fury. He looked torn between rival hatreds – of the Chaos hordes that hammered at them from the north, and the undead blasphemers that had crept into view in the east. ‘There were rumours at Alderfen,’ he rasped. ‘They say the dead fought with us.’

Karl Franz felt like laughing at that, though not from mirth. ‘What surety can we place on that?’ He gazed up at the heavens, as if some inspiration might come from there. In days long past, it was said that the comet would appear to men at the times of greatest darkness, such as it had done for Sigmar and for Magnus. Now, all he could see was the scudding of pestilential clouds.

He reached again for his war-helm, and this time Schwarzhelm made no move to stop him. The undead continued to gather along the ridge. With every passing moment, their numbers grew. Soon there would be thousands. Between them, the armies of Chaos and undeath outnumbered the mustered Imperial forces.

‘What do you command, my liege?’ asked Schwarzhelm.

‘Talb’s flank is close to collapse,’ said Karl Franz, placing the helm on his head and fastening the leather straps around his neck. ‘Take any reserves you can find, join Huss and pull him out of there. Salvage what you can, stage a fighting retreat.’

Schwarzhelm nodded. ‘And you?’

Karl Franz smiled dryly, and his hand rested on the hilt of his runefang. As if in recognition of what was about to happen, Deathclaw let fly with a harsh caw from its enclosure.

‘We are between abominations,’ he said, his voice firm. ‘This is my realm. Once again, we must teach them to fear it.’

Then he started moving, ignoring the supplications from his field-staff around him. As he went, his mind fixed on the trial ahead. The whole army would see him take to the air. All eyes would be on him, from the moment Deathclaw cast loose his chains and ascended into the heavens.

‘Hold the line for as long as you can,’ he ordered, descending from the viewing platform with long, purposeful strides. ‘Above all, the daemon is mine.’

THREE

Helborg charged straight at the daemon, spurring his steed hard. The vast creature towered over him, a swollen slag-pile of heaving, suppurating muscle. It was now fully instantiated, and its olive-green hide glistened with dribbling excreta.

The stench was incredible – an overwhelming fug of foul, over-sweet putrescence that caught in the throat and made the eyes stream. Every movement the thing made was accompanied by a swirl of flies, sweeping around it like a cloak of smog. Under its hunched withers the earth itself boiled and shifted, poisoned by the sulphurous reek and ground down into a plague-infused soup. The daemon wallowed in its own filth, revelling in the slough it had created around it.

Helborg’s horse nearly stumbled as it galloped into range, betrayed by the shifting terrain, but its head held true. The daemon saw him approach and drew its cleaver back for a back-breaking swipe. Helborg drove his mount hard towards the target. The cleaver whistled across, spraying bile as it came. Helborg ducked as he veered out of its path, and felt the heavy blade sweep over his arched back; then he was up again, raised up in the saddle and with his sword poised.

Others of the Reiksguard had followed him on the charge, some still bearing their long lances. Two of them plunged the weapons deep into the daemon’s flanks, producing fountains of steaming mucus. The daemon let slip a gurgling roar, and swung its bulk around, tearing the knights from their saddles and flinging their bodies headlong across the battlefield.

Helborg’s warhorse shied as it tore past the wall of trembling hide, and Helborg plunged his sword into the daemon’s flesh while still on the gallop. It was like carving rotten pork – the skin and muscle parted easily, exposing milk-white fat and capillaries of black, boiling blood beneath.

The daemon’s cleaver lashed back towards him, propelled by obese and sagging arms, but Helborg was moving too fast. He guided his steed hard-by under the shadow of the other daemonic arm, slashing out with the runefang as he went. More gobbets of flesh slopped free, slapping to the earth in smoking gouts.

The Reiksguard were everywhere by then, riding their steeds under the very shadow of the daemon’s claws and hacking with their longswords. The creature throttled out another echoing roar of pain, and flailed around more violently. Its cleaver caught two Reiksguard in a single swipe, dragging them from the saddle. Its balled fist punched out, crushing the helm of another as he angled his lance for the cut.

The clouds of flies buzzed angrily, swarming around the beleaguered daemon and rearing up like snakes’ heads. They flew into visors and gorgets, clotting and clogging, forcing knights to pull away from the attack. Maggots as long as a man’s forearm wriggled out of the liquidised earth, and clamped needle-teeth to the horses’ fetlocks. Swarms of tiny daemon-kin with jaws as big as their pulpy bodies spun out from the greater creature’s armpits as it thrashed around, clamping their incisors onto anything they landed on and gnawing deep.

The Reiksguard fought on through the hail of horrors, casting aside the lesser creatures in order to strike at the greater abomination beyond, but the creature before them was no mere tallyman or plaguebearer – it was the greatest of its dread breed, and the swords of mortal men held little terror for it. Its vast cleaver whirled around metronomically, slicing through plate armour like age-rotten parchment. Helborg saw three more of his men carved apart in a single swipe, their priceless battle-plate smashed apart in seconds.

He kicked his steed back into contact, riding hard for the daemon’s whirling cleaver-arm. As he went, he pulled his runefang back for the strike, and the sacred blade shimmered in the preternatural gloaming.

The daemon saw him closing in, but too late. It tried to backhand him from his mount with the cleaver’s hilt, and Helborg swerved hard, leaning over in the saddle. As the eldritch blade whistled past again, Helborg thrust out with his own sword, ramming the point up and across. The runefang plunged in up to the grip, sliding into the putrid blubber as if into water.

The daemon roared out a gurgled cry of outrage, affronted by the audacity of the attack. Helborg grabbed the hilt of his sword two-handed, fighting to control the movements of his mount, and heaved. The rune-engraved steel sliced through sinews, severing the daemon’s arm at the elbow. A thick jet of inky blood slobbered across his helm visor, burning like acid, and he pulled harder.

With a sickening plop, the daemon’s entire forearm came loose, trailing long strings of muscle and skin behind it. Weighed down by the cleaver, the chopped limb thudded to the earth, sinking into the slurry of saliva and pus underfoot. The daemon bellowed, this time in real agony, stretching its wide mouth in a gargantuan howl that made the clouds shake.

The surviving Reiksguard pressed their attack. Noxious fluids slapped and flayed out from the stricken daemon, each lashing tendril studded with clots of biting flies. Helborg pulled his steed around for another pass, his heart kindling with raw battle-joy.

It could be hurt. It could be killed.

But then, just as he was about to kick his spurs back into his mount’s flanks, he heard it. War horns rang out across the battlefield, cutting through the surge and sway of massed combat.

Helborg had heard those horns before – their desiccated timbre came from the age-bleached trumpets of another era. No Empire herald used such instruments – they were borne by armies that had no right to still be marching in this age.

Helborg twisted in the saddle, trying to scry where the sounds came from. For a moment, all he saw were the grappling profiles of knights and plague-horrors, locked in close combat around the raging mass of the greater daemon. Swirling rain lashed across them all, masking the shape of the hordes beyond.

Then, as if cut through by the harsh notes of the war horns themselves, clouds of milk-white mist split apart, exposing for a moment the whole eastern swathe of the battlefield. Helborg caught a glimpse of huge crowds of mortals and aethyr-spawn, grappling and gouging at one another across the vast sweep on the eastern flank. And then, beyond that, on the far bank of the Revesnecht, he saw the cursed banners of Sylvania hoisted against the squalls, each one marked with the pale death’s head of that cursed land. At the head of the revenant host stood a lone lord clad in blood-red armour, his long white hair standing out as starkly as bone in a wound.

A shudder of disbelief ran through him. He knew who had worn that armour. He also knew how long ago that had been. It was impossible.

Vlad von Carstein.

The shock of it broke his concentration. As he gazed, spellbound, on the host of undead advancing into the fray, he forgot his mortal peril.

The daemon lumbered towards him, dragging its vast weight forward in a rippling wall of wobbling flesh. Its lone claw scythed down, trailing streamers of smoking poisons. Helborg’s horse reared up, panicked by the looming monster bearing down on it.

Helborg fought with the reins, trying to pull his steed away from danger, but the creature had been maddened and no longer heeded him. The daemon’s talons slammed into Helborg’s helm, ripping the steel from his head and sending it tumbling. Long claws bit deep into his flesh, burning like tongues of flame.

The impact was crushing. The horse buckled under him, screaming in terror, and he was thrown clear. Helborg hit the earth with a bone-jarring crash, and blood splashed across his face. He tried to rise, to drag himself back to his feet, but a wave of sickness and dizziness surged up within him.

He gripped his sword, trying to focus on the pure steel, but the dull ache of his wounds flared up along his flank. He saw the blurred shapes of his brother-knights riding fearlessly at the daemon, and knew that none of them could hope to end it.

He cried out in agony, trying to force his limbs to obey him. A wave of numbness overwhelmed him, racing like frost-spears through his bones. He heard the deathly echo of the war horns as if from underwater. The wound in his split cheek flared, and he smelled the poison in it.

Then his head thudded against the mud, and he knew no more.

Deathclaw soared high above the battlefield. The griffon’s huge wings beat powerfully, shredding the black-edged tatters of cloud around it. Its bunched-muscle shoulders worked hard, pulling the heavily built beast into the air.

Karl Franz leaned forward in the saddle, his blade already drawn. The griffon, once released from its shackles by fearful keepers, was a furnace of bestial power. Both of them had saved the life of the other more than once, and the bond that connected them was as strong as steel.

‘You have been kept collared for too long,’ Karl Franz murmured, running the fingers of his free gauntlet roughly through Deathclaw’s feathered nape. ‘Let your anger flow.’

The war-griffon responded, emitting a metallic caw that cut through the raging airs. Its pinions swept down, propelling it like a loosed bolt over the epicentre of the battlefield.

Karl Franz gazed out at the scenes of slaughter, trying to make sense of the battle’s balance amid the confused movements of regiments and warbands. The bulk of his forces were now locked close with the Chaos warriors, gripped by brutal hand-to-hand fighting. The western flank was still largely intact and Mecke had ordered his veteran Greatswords into the fray, where they grappled with ranks of plate-armoured warriors bearing twin-headed axes and skull-chained mauls. The centre remained contested. The bulk of the Reiklanders had no answer to the seething tides of daemonic horrors, though the Reiksguard knights still fought hard amid the raging centre of the field. Over to the east, the Ostermarkers were fighting a desperate rearguard action against utter destruction. Beyond them, the army of the undead was drawing closer to the battlefield, advancing in terrifyingly silent ranks.

Karl Franz’s task was clear. Mecke still held position. Schwarzhelm, Huss and Valten would have to salvage something from the wreckage of the eastern flank, whether or not von Carstein came as an ally or an enemy. The malign presence at the core of the Chaos army, though, was beyond any of them, and its baleful aura was spreading like a shroud across the whole army. From his vantage, Karl Franz could see its bloated bulk squatting amid the shattered Reiksguard vanguard, laying about with a gore-streaked fist. Such a monster was capable of ripping through whole contingents of mortal troops, and nothing else on the field was capable of standing against it.

There was no sign of Helborg. No doubt the Reiksmarshal had charged the creature, hoping to bring it down before its full strength was manifest. It was a typically reckless move, but the daemon still lived, despite the gouges in its nacreous flesh and an arm-stump spurting with ink-black blood.

‘That is the prey, great one,’ urged Karl Franz, pointing the tip of his runefang towards the daemon’s blubbery shoulders.

The griffon plunged instantly, locking its huge wings back and hurtling towards the horror below. Karl Franz gripped the reins tightly, feeling the ice-wet air scream past him. The landscape melted into a blur of movement, all save the bloated monstrosity below them, which reared into range like a vast weeping boil on the face of the earth.

Deathclaw screamed out its battle-rage, bringing huge foreclaws up. At the last moment, the daemon’s vast head lolled upward, catching sight of the two of them just as their fearsome momentum propelled them into it.

The griffon dragged its talons across the daemon’s face, slicing into its eyes. Its rear legs raked across the daemon’s slobbering chest, churning the foetid flesh into putrid ribbons. Karl Franz hacked out with his runefang, feeling heat radiate out from the ancient blade – the runes knew the stench of daemon-kind, and they blazed like stars.

Just as the daemon reached for them with its lone arm, Deathclaw pounced clear again, circling as expertly as a hawk. The daemon’s talons slashed at it, but the griffon ducked past the attack and surged in close again. Deathclaw’s beak tore at the daemon’s shoulder, ripping more skin from its savaged hide.

The daemon twisted, pulling its obese haunches clear of the slough below and reaching to pluck the griffon from the sky. Its claw shot out, and clutching fingers nearly closed on Deathclaw’s tail.

The griffon shot clear with a sudden burst of speed, and circled in for a renewed strike. As it did so, Karl Franz seized the hilt of his sword two-handed and held it point-down. He knew just what his steed was about to do, and shifted his weight in the saddle in preparation.

The daemon reached out for them again, and Deathclaw plummeted, evading the creature’s claws by a finger’s width before clamping its own talons into the daemon’s back. The griffon scored down the length of the daemon’s hunched spine, ripping through sinews and exposing bony growths.

Karl Franz, poised for the manoeuvre, waited until the nape of the daemon’s neck loomed before him. It was a foul, stinking hump, studded with glossy spikes and ringed with burst pustules. He aimed carefully.

The daemon twisted, trying to throw Deathclaw loose, but Karl Franz plunged the sword down. The tip bit clean between vertebrae, driving into the bone and muscle beneath. The magic blade exploded with wild light, spiralling out from the impact site and tearing through the drifting filth around it.

The daemon arched its blubbery neck, choking out cries of blood-wet agony. Karl Franz was nearly torn loose, caught between the sway of his prey and the bucking movements of Deathclaw.

He held firm, grinding the blade in deeper. Thick blood raced up the blade, crashing over his gauntlets and fizzing against the metal. Clouds of flies swarmed in close, trying to clog Karl Franz’s visor, but he held firm.

Deathclaw roared with bloodlust, steadying itself on the heaving spine of the daemon, and Karl Franz gained the leverage he needed. With a huge heave, he wrenched the sword across, severing the daemon’s neck.

With a coiled spring, Deathclaw leapt clear. The huge daemon reeled in a torment of snapping sinew. Weeping from a hundred lesser wounds, it thrashed and jerked, spewing vomit and bile. Rancid coils of greenish smoke spilled from its eyes as the dark magicks required to keep it on the physical plane unwound.

Deathclaw climbed higher. Karl Franz sensed its raucous joy, and shared in it.

‘The blood of Sigmar!’ he cried, gazing in triumph at the horror he had ended. Its death-throes were ruinous, carving up the earth and mingling it with gouts of acidic blood. The plaguebearers thronging around it held their elongated heads in their hands, and wailed.

Upon such moments did battles turn. Whole hosts could lose heart with the death of their leader, and the momentum of entire campaigns could falter with the removal of a talismanic figurehead. Deathclaw soared above the sea of fighting men, screaming its elation at the heavens.

Karl Franz scoured the ground below, searching for any sign of Helborg. He was about to order the griffon to circle about and swoop lower when a harsher cry echoed out across the battlefield. His head snapped up, and he saw a new terror sweeping in from the north. The Chaos ranks had been sundered by a vanguard of heavily armoured knights on brazen steeds, their pauldrons rimmed with gold and their helms underpinned with iron collars. They thundered towards the surviving Reiksguard, ploughing up the ground on spiked metal hooves. These newcomers rode with greater discipline and verve than most servants of the Fallen Gods, though their livery was as foul as any blood-worshipping fanatic from the frozen north.

Above them all came a truly vast flying creature that bounded through the air with an ungainly lurch. It was the size of a war-dragon, and its colossal wings splayed across the skies like motley sheaves of blades. Unlike a true dragon, no sleek hide of jewelled scales clad its flanks and no flames kindled against its twisting neck. Where tight flesh should have stretched, raw bone glinted from between a lattice of age-blackened sinews. Gaping holes punctured an open ribcage, exposing nothing but coiled shadow within. A heavy skull lolled at the end of a bleached spine, wreathed in wisps of inky smoke, and awkwardly flapping wings were held together by mere ribbons of atrophied muscle.

The monstrosity’s rider was scarcely less extravagant in grotesquerie – an ivory-white face, elongated to accommodate protruding fangs, jutting from heavy armour plates. Bat-wing motifs vied for prominence on the armour-curves with chain-bound skulls and stretched skins. The rider carried a straight-bladed sword as black as the maw of the underworld, and it rippled with blue-tinged fires.

Karl Franz smelled the foul aroma of death roiling before it, and arrested Deathclaw’s swoop. The griffon thrust upward violently, already eager to tear at a new enemy.

Karl Franz hesitated before giving the order. The daemon had been a daunting foe, but it had already been weakened by Helborg and the Reiksguard, and Deathclaw was lethal against such earth-shackled prey. The huge creature tearing towards them, carving through the sky with sickening speed, was far larger, and had the advantage of being battle-fresh.

Moreover, something about the rider gave Karl Franz pause. He looked into those dark eyes, still a long way off, and his heart misgave him. He looked down at his blade, drenched with the blood of the slain daemon, and saw the fire in the runes flicker out.

With a glimmer of presentiment, a terrible thought stole into his mind.

This foe is beyond me.

Karl Franz knew he could refuse combat. He could do as Schwarzhelm had advised, saving himself for another fight, one that he could win. He was the Emperor, not some expendable champion amid his countless thousands of servants. His captains would understand. They would come to see that the Empire came first, and that his preservation, above all, held the promise of survival into the future.

He imagined Altdorf then, its white towers rising proudly above the filth and clamour of its tight-locked streets. He saw the river creeping sluggishly past the docks, teeming with all the burgeoning trade and industry of his people.

That place was the fulcrum about which his Empire had always revolved. He had always assumed that if death were to come for him, it would take him there.

Deathclaw screamed at the approaching abomination, straining at the reins. Karl Franz looked out across the battlefield, at the desperate struggle of the faithful against the closing ranks of horror. With every passing moment, more of his subjects met a painful, fear-filled end, locked in terrified combat with a far greater enemy than they had any right to be taking on.

I will not leave them.

‘Onward, then,’ ordered Karl Franz, shaking the blood from his runefang and angling the tip towards the skeletal dragon, ‘and strike it from the skies.’

FOUR

Schwarzhelm strode out into the heart of the battle. As he went, he drew soldiers about him, and the solid knot of swordsmen advanced under the shadow of the racing clouds.

The last of the reserve detachments had been committed to the fighting. Whole infantry squares were being hurled into the maw of the oncoming storm, in the desperate hope that sheer weight of numbers could do something to stop the tide of plague-daemons.

Schwarzhelm advanced immediately towards Talb’s eastern flank, roaring out orders to the semi-broken warbands he encountered as the fighting grew fiercer.

‘Form up!’ he roared, brandishing his longsword and raging at the Empire troops around him. ‘You are men! Born of Sigmar’s holy blood! Fight like men! Remember courage!’

His words had an instant effect. Schwarzhelm’s voice was known to every last halberdier and pikeman in the army, and though he was not loved as Helborg’s flamboyance made him loved, no living fighter was more respected. Schwarzhelm was a vast bear of a man, clad in plate armour and bearing the fabled Sword of Justice before him, and the mere rumour of his presence on the field kindled hope in men’s hearts again.

With his trusted swordsmen beside him, Schwarzhelm cut a channel towards Talb’s last known position. The enemy came at them in waves – Skaelings, for the most part, an unruly rabble of fur-clad barbarians carrying the first signs of the sickness and staring wild-eyed from their shaman’s ravings. Under Schwarzhelm’s direction, the Empire halberdiers managed to restore something like proper defensive lines, and pushed back the hammering cycle of attacks. Ground was regained, and the momentum of the onslaught lessened.

The respite did not last long. Up through the ranks of the enemy came sterner opponents – Kurgan warriors in dark armour and chainmail, bearing axes and long-handled mauls, followed by the scrabbling flotsam of gibbering daemon-kin. Behind them lumbered the obscene bloat of the plaguebearers as they limped and stumbled into battle. Their rancid stench came before them, a weapon in itself, making men retch uncontrollably even before reaching blade-range.

Schwarzhelm laid eyes on the closest of the daemonic plaguebearers, and marked it out with a furious sweep of his blade. ‘To me, men of the Empire!’ he thundered, breaking into a heavy jog towards the scabrous horror. ‘They can be killed! Believe! Believe in the holy Empire of Sigmar, and fight!’

The Empire troops surged after him, smashing into the incoming Kurgans in a flesh-tearing, armour-denting, blade-snapping flurry of limbs and fists. Eyes were gouged, sinews torn, throats cut and throttled, ankles broken. A whole band of halberdiers was ripped apart by a single Kurgan champion; a massive Chaos warlord was dragged down by a dozen sword-wielding state troops, hacking away at their huge opponent like wolves on a bear.

Schwarzhelm drove them onward, kicking aside the scuttling daemon-kin that raced along the earth to sink fangs into his boots. A Kurgan chieftain squared up to him, hefting a twin-bladed axe in iron-spiked gauntlets. Barely breaking stride, Schwarzhelm slashed his sword crosswise, cutting him across the midriff. Before the Kurgan could bring his axe to bear, Schwarzhelm jabbed the sword back, ripping through addled flesh, then crunching his leading shoulder guard into the reeling Kurgan’s face. The warlord staggered, and Schwarzhelm punched him hard with his gauntleted fist, breaking his neck and sending his body crunching to the earth.

The men around him bellowed with renewed bloodlust, and surged after him. All around him, emerald lightning continued to spear down from the heavens. The ground underfoot seethed with a vile mixture of blood and rainwater, pooling in boot prints and gurgling in rivulets.

‘Onward!’ roared Schwarzhelm, eviscerating another barbarian with a lone thrust of his blade, clearing the last obstacle before the plaguebearer.

The daemon’s weeping body pushed past the armoured warlords around it, stalking eerily on painfully elongated limbs. Its whole torso ran with rivers of pus, dripping onto the mud at its cloven feet in boiling clumps. Its olive-green skin had burst open, exposing loops of entrails. It had no eyes, ears or other features, just a face-encompassing jaw rammed with incisors. As it sensed Schwarzhelm, it let out a phlegmy cry of challenge, and swung a long staff topped with rust-pocked spikes. Every time the spikes were jangled, foul vapours billowed out, creeping across the ground like morning mist.

Schwarzhelm charged straight at it, holding his breath as he closed in, whirling his sword around in a blistering arc. The plaguebearer swung its staff to intercept, and the two weapons clanked together with a deadening thunk. Schwarzhelm lashed out again, feeling vile gases creep up his armour. The daemon lurched towards him, snapping its distended jaws, and Schwarzhelm ducked to one side as the saliva slapped against his helm.

He shoved out with one fist, catching the daemon in the torso. His hand passed clean into disease-softened tissue, disappearing up to the wrist. He tried to shake it free, but the daemon caught him by the throat with its free claw, and squeezed. Schwarzhelm hacked back with his blade, carving deep into the plaguebearer’s raddled body, but the wounds just resulted in more suffocating waves of corpse-gas pouring forth.

Schwarzhelm began to gag, and lashed out furiously, aiming to sever the creature’s stringy neck. He missed his aim, hampered by the plaguebearer’s cloying embrace, but something else impacted, and the daemon’s skull was ripped from its shoulders in a welter of mucus and brown blood-flecks.

The headless body loomed over Schwarzhelm for a moment, held upright by its staff. Then it toppled over, bursting open as it hit the ground. A swell of brackish fluid swilled over his boots.

Schwarzhelm staggered away, momentarily blinded by the spray of thick pus. He wiped his visor and saw the robed form of Luthor Huss standing over the daemon’s prone corpse. The warrior priest’s warhammer was slick with bodily fluids, and his bald pate was covered in a criss-cross of bloody weals.

Schwarzhelm bowed clumsily. ‘My thanks, lord priest,’ he muttered gruffly.

Huss nodded curtly. ‘And there are more waiting.’

The fighting raged around them unabated. Empire troops grappled with Kurgan, Skaelings and worse. The air no longer stank of blackpowder, for the artillery had long ceased firing. In its place came the rolling stench of long-rotten bodies.

Schwarzhelm’s entourage pressed on, sweeping around him and clearing a little space amid the close-packed battlefield. He shook the worst of the bile from his sword, feeling the dull ache of weariness stir in his bones.

‘The Emperor sent you?’ asked Huss, already searching out the next fight. From nearby, Schwarzhelm could hear the clear-voice war cries of Valten, the mysterious boy-champion who was wielding Ghal Maraz with a youthful vigour.

‘This flank cannot hold,’ rasped Schwarzhelm. ‘We must fall back.’

‘Impossible,’ scowled Huss.

‘We are outnumbered.’

‘By faith we shall pre–’

‘Vlad von Carstein is here.’

That stopped Huss dead. He turned his baleful gaze onto Schwarzhelm. ‘That cannot be.’

Schwarzhelm snorted impatiently. ‘Use your eyes. The dead march against the damned, and the living are caught between them. I have my orders – we must fight our way to the Reiksmarshal, rally what we can, then hold the centre until we can fall back in good order.’

Huss looked agonised. Retreat was anathema to him – only surging onward against the foe was sanctified by his austere creed, and he would fight on until the end of the world, unwearied, his warhammer dripping with the gore of the fallen.

But even he was not blind to what was happening. As Schwarzhelm spoke the words, realisation dawned across Huss’s face. The stench was not that of disease, but of death.

‘Where is Helborg?’ the priest asked.

Schwarzhelm was about to answer, when a fresh roar of challenge rang out. The voices were different again – not the bestial screams of the Norscans, nor the chill war horns of the Sylvanians, but a bizarre amalgam of aristocratic human and blood-crazed baresark. Both warriors lifted their eyes to the north.

Fresh troops were piling into the fray, their armour arterial red and their steeds towering behemoths of iron and bronze. They were still a long way off, but they were driving all before them. Above the vanguard soared a hideous creature of the darkest myth – a dragon, emaciated and splayed with bone and talon, cawing like a carrion crow and ridden by a lone red-armoured knight. It flapped through the heavens, its vast body held aloft by ancient magic.

In the face of that, even Huss’s mighty shoulders sagged a little. Then, with a defiant curl of his mouth, he hefted his warhammer again. ‘You will stand beside me, Emperor’s Champion?’

‘Until the ends of the earth, priest,’ snarled Schwarzhelm, brandishing the Rechtstahl.

Huss cracked a thin smile then. ‘We will smash some more skulls before they drag us down.’

Schwarzhelm nodded grimly. Already the hordes around them were pushing back again, slaughtering as they came.

‘That we will,’ he growled, striding back into the fight.

Deathclaw surged towards the dragon. The undead creature saw it coming, and reared up in the air, its scythe-like claws extended. Skeletal jaws gaped wide, and a noxious gout of corpse-gas burst from its gaping innards.

Karl Franz brandished his sword. The blade was still inert, bereft of the fire that usually kindled along its runic length, and even amid the rush on oncoming combat, that troubled him. Perhaps the daemon’s blood had quashed its ancient soul.

The dragon rider hailed him then, his voice ringing out through the rain like a raptor’s shriek.

‘You are overmatched, warmblood!’ he cried. ‘Flee now, while your bird still has feathers!’

Deathclaw screamed in fury, and hurtled straight into close range. Its wings a blur, the griffon swept under the hanging streamers of yellowish gas and plunged straight at the dragon’s exposed torso.

The two creatures slammed together, both sets of claws raking furiously. The griffon’s fury was the greater, and whole sheets of age-withered flesh were ripped from the dragon’s flank. The abomination lashed back, tearing a bloody line down Deathclaw’s back, nearly dragging Karl Franz clear from the saddle. As the bone-claws scraped past him, Karl Franz cut down sharply with his blade, taking two talons off at the knuckle.

Then the two creatures, powered by momentum, broke apart again, each angling back for a return pass.

‘Do you see what is happening here, warmblood?’ came the dragon rider’s mocking voice. ‘Your world is ending. It is ending before your eyes, and still you fail to grasp it.’

Karl Franz had caught a glimpse of his enemy as their steeds had grappled, and what he had seen had been unsettling. The rider wore heavy plate armour of rich blood-red, gilded with fine detailing and bearing the ancient seal of the lost Blood Keep. His jawline was swollen with fangs, and his voice bore the archaic, prideful accent of Empire nobility. Everything about him, from his cursed mount to his imperious bearing, indicated that he was an undead lord, a powerful vampire of the knightly bloodline.

Yet Karl Franz had never faced a vampire like this one. He had never seen tattoos carved into a face like that, nor heavy bronze collars adorning such armour. The rider wore a crude eight-pointed star on his breast, as black as ichor, and his sword-edge flamed as if alive with violent energies.

Can the dead fall to corruption? he wondered as Deathclaw banked hard and sped towards the dragon again. Can even they succumb?

The two beasts crashed into one another, writhing and lashing out in a twisting frenzy of mutual loathing. Deathclaw clamped its hooked beak into the dragon’s neck and tore through weak-shackled vertebrae. The dragon pushed back with a blast of poison-gas before plunging down at the griffon’s powerful shoulders, whipping a barbed tail to try to flay it from the skies.

Deathclaw shook off the dragon’s foul breath and thrust back up, all four claws extended. The two riders were propelled close to one another, and for the first time Karl Franz was near enough to strike at his adversary with Drachenzahn.

The vampire was fast, as blisteringly fast as all his damned kin, and the two blades clanged together in a glitter of sparks. Despite his heavy armour, the undead lord switched his blade round in a smear of fire and steel, thrusting it point-forward at Karl Franz. The Emperor evaded the strike, but only barely, and the killing edge scraped across his left pauldron.

Deathclaw and the dragon were still locked in a snarling duel of their own, keeping their riders close enough to maintain a flurry of sword-blows. The blades collided again, then again, ringing and shivering from the impacts.

The vampire lord was a consummate swordsman, capable of the refined viciousness of his breed and animated by the unnatural strength that was the inheritance of that fallen bloodline. In addition to that, the marks of ruin emblazoned on his armour made the air shake – they were bleeding corruption, as if leaking dark magic from the Other Realm itself.

‘For Sigmar!’ Karl Franz roared, standing in the saddle and bracing against Deathclaw’s bucking flight. He rammed his blade down two-handed, aiming to crack the vampire from his mount.

The undead lord parried, but the strength of the strike nearly dislodged him. Karl Franz followed up, hacking furiously with a welter of vicious down-strikes. The vampire struggled to fend them all off, and his armour was cut from shoulder to breastplate. The contemptuous smile flickered on his tattooed face, and for a moment he lost his composure.

But his steed was nearly twice the heft of Deathclaw, and even in its deathly state was a far more dangerous foe. The dragon’s claws cut deep into the griffon’s flesh, tearing muscle and ripping plumage from its copper-coloured back. Karl Franz could feel the fire ebbing in his steed, and knew the end drew near. If he could not kill the rider, the dragon would finish both of them.

‘Why?’ Karl Franz hissed as the swords flew. ‘Why do you fight for these gods?’

The vampire pressed his attack more savagely, as if the question struck deep at whatever conscience he still possessed. ‘Why not, mortal?’ he laughed, though the sound was strained. ‘Why not take gifts when offered?’ His fanged mouth split wide in a grin, and Karl Franz saw the iron studs hammered into his flesh. ‘They give generously. How else could I do this?’

The vampire’s armour suddenly blazed with a gold aura, and the flames on his sword roared in an inferno. Karl Franz recoiled, and the dragon rider pounced after him. Their blades rebounded from one another, ringing out as the steel clashed. A lesser sword than the runefang would have shattered; even so, it was all Karl Franz could do to remain in position. Fragments of his priceless armour cracked free, and he saw gold shards tumbling down to the battlefield far below.

He pressed the attack again, resisting the overwhelming barrage of blows with blade-strikes of his own, when the dragon finally broke Deathclaw’s guard and plunged a man-sized talon of bone into the griffon’s chest.

Deathclaw screamed, and bucked wildly in the air. Karl Franz was thrown to one side, nearly hurled free of the saddle, and for a fraction of a second his sword-arm was flung out wide, exposing his chest.

The vampire needed no more than that – with a flicker of steel, he thrust his blade into the gap, unerringly hitting the weak point between breastplate-rim and pauldron.

The pain was horrific. Flames coursed down the length of the fell blade, crashing against Karl Franz’s broken armour like a breaking wave. His entire world disappeared into a bloody haze of agony, and he felt his back spasm.

He heard roaring, as if from a far distance, and felt the world tumbling around him. Too late, he realised that Deathclaw had been deeply stricken, and was plummeting fast.

Karl Franz looked up, fighting through the pain and fire, to see the rapidly diminishing outline of the vampire gazing down at him.

‘You could have had such gifts!’ the dragon rider shouted after him, his voice twisted and shrill. ‘You chose the path of cowardice, not I!’

Karl Franz barely heard the words. Deathclaw was trying to gain lift, but the griffon’s wings were a ravaged mess of blood-soaked feathers, and the creature’s great chest rattled as it strained for breath.

He fought to remain conscious, even as a hot river of blood ran over his own armour. As the two of them whirled and spun earthwards, Karl Franz caught a blurred view of the entire battlefield. He saw the limitless tides of the North hacking their way through what remained of his forces. He saw the deathly advance of the Sylvanians from the east, covering the Revesnecht valley in a veil of darkness. The rain hammered down, shrouding it all in a bleak curtain of silver-grey, drowning the Imperial colours in a sea of plague-infested mud.

He reached out, as if he could grasp it all in his fist and somehow reverse the tide of war.

I have failed, he thought, and the realisation was like poison in his stomach. There will be no return from this. I have failed.

Even as the earth raced up towards him, his pain-filled mind recoiled at the very idea. He felt the great presences of the past gazing down at him, lamenting his great negligence. He saw the stern faces of Magnus the Pious, of Mandred, of Sigmar himself, each one filled with accusation.

I was the custodian, he thought, his mind filled with anguish. The duty passed to me.

The foul wind whistled past him. Deathclaw was struggling to fly on, to evade the heart of the Chaos horde, but his pinions were broken, and with his last, blurred sight Karl Franz saw that they would not make it.

Karl Franz did not feel himself slip from the saddle, dragged clear by his heavy armour. He never saw Deathclaw try to retrieve him, before the griffon finally collapsed to the earth in a tangle of snapped bones and crushed plumage. He never even felt the hard thud of impact, his face rammed deep into the thick mud even as his helm toppled from his bloodied head.

His last thought, echoing in his mind like an endless mockery, was the one that had tortured him from the first, as soon as the vampire’s corrupted blade had pierced his armour and rendered the outcome of the duel inevitable.

I have failed.

From the beleaguered western flank to the shattered east, every Empire soldier saw the Emperor fall. A vast ripple of dismay shuddered through the ranks. They all saw the skeletal dragon tear Deathclaw from the skies, casting the war-griffon down amid a cloud of gore-stained feathers. They all saw the creature valiantly try to drag itself clear of the battlefield, fighting against its horrific wounds. For a moment, they dared to believe that it might reach the precarious safety of the stockade again, and that even if the Emperor was sorely wounded that he might still live. For a moment, all eyes turned skywards, hoping, praying fervently, demanding the salvation of their liege-lord.

When the griffon’s flight at last dipped to earth, still half a mile short of safety and surrounded by the raging hordes of the North, those hopes died. They all saw Karl Franz fall from the saddle, dragged down into the mire, far from any possible rescue. They saw the war-griffon follow him down, the proud beast dragged to earth as if weighed with chains.

A wild howl erupted from the Chaos armies. Even the undead, now fighting their way west through turbulent formations of Skaelings, paused in their assault. The remaining Empire formations buckled, folding in on themselves as if consumed from within. The weakest soldiers began to run, tripping over bodies half-buried in the mud. The stoutest detachments fought on, though their positions were now exposed by the cowardice of lesser men.

The undead dragon ran rampant, sweeping low over the Empire lines, scooping defenders up in its emaciated claws and hurling their broken bodies far across the plain. The other fallen vampires crashed into contact, borne by monstrous creations whose eyes smouldered with forge-fires and whose hooves were lined with beaten iron. Ranged against them were the last of Huss’s zealots, a horrifically diminished band, and what remained of Talb’s hollowed-out forces. The Reiksguard still fought on, guarding their fallen captain, but were separated from the rest of the Empire army by a swirling tempest of daemons and fanatical fighters. Even Mecke’s western flank now crumbled, its defenders panicking and turning on their tyrannical commander. The army of Heffengen finally subsided, sinking into the morass.

Schwarzhelm fought like a man possessed by the spirit of Sigmar, single-handedly accounting for scores of Kurgan scalps. Huss was scarcely less brutal, shouting out war-hymns as he laid into the enemy with his warhammer. For a time, those two warriors defied the encroaching tides, bolstered by the vital energy of Valten and Ghal Maraz. Amid a sea of seething corruption, the lights of faith endured for a little while.

But even that could not last. Schwarzhelm fought to within a hundred yards of where Helborg had been felled, but as the Empire formations around him melted away, he was forced to turn back at last. Gathering what remnants he could, he hacked his way south, veering east as he reached the curve of the Revesnecht. He, Huss and Valten were harried all the way, though the pursuit faded once the prize of Heffengen itself loomed on the southern horizon.

A few other scraps escaped the carnage – a kernel of the Reiksguard cut their way free, bearing the sacred Imperial standard and taking control of the army’s baggage trains before they could be looted. Many of the wagons were set aflame to prevent the enemy taking on fresh supplies, but a few were driven hastily south. The remnants were joined by the shattered Reiklander companies, plus any outriders from the Ostermarkers and Talabheimers who managed to escape the slaughter.

For those that could not escape, the end was swift and brutal. Champions of Chaos stalked across the war-scorched battlefield, breaking the necks of any who still lived. Spines were ripped out of the corpses and draped over the shoulders of the victorious. Daemonic grotesques capered and belched amid the charnel-debris, sucking the marrow from the bones and spewing it at one another. Though the greater daemon had been slain, its lesser spawn survived in droves, sustained by the crackling magicks animating the air.

The last to quit the field was the spectral Vlad von Carstein, whose presence at the conclusion of the battle remained as enigmatic as his arrival. His undead host had reaped a terrible toll on the Chaos army’s eastern extremity, but after the Empire contingents had scattered, they were exposed to the full force of the victors’ wrath. Whole regiments of skeletons and zombies were smashed apart by charging warbands of Kurgan, adding to the tangled heaps of bones already protruding from the blood-rich mud.

It did not take long for their dark commander to give the silent order to withdraw. The winds of death were driven east by the stinking fug of decay, and the black-clad host melted back beyond the riverbank just as mysteriously as they had arrived, their purpose still unclear.

Only one duel of significance remained. Few witnessed its outcome, for a strange vortex of shadow swept suddenly across the skies, its edges as ragged and writhing as a witch’s cloak-hem. The undead dragon tore into the heart of the vortex, its empty eye sockets burning with an eerie green light. Flashes of sudden colour flared from within, as if a whole clutch of battle wizards had been trapped in its dark heart.

At the end of whatever had taken place in that sphere of magicks, the dragon took flight again, lurching as awkwardly as ever over the bleak plain and following the undead army east. Its rider still wore crimson armour, though not the same as earlier, and he carried a severed, fanged head in one gauntlet.

With that, the legions of the dead quit the field, leaving the plaguebearers to scavenge and plunder what remained. A peal of corpulent thunder cracked across the vista, echoing with faint echoes of laughter. The tallymen trudged through the dead and dying, taking note of the contagions they came across on long rolls of mouldering parchment. Insects of every chitinous variety buzzed and skittered across the rows of corpses, seeking out juicy eyeballs and tongues to feast on.

Across the whole, drab vista, the rain continued to fall, as if the flood could bear away the filth that had infected Heffengen. No natural rain could wash such plagues clean, though, and the sodden earth reeked from it, steaming in the cold as a thousand new virulences incubated in every bloody puddle.

The Bastion was broken. The Empire had been routed across its northern borders, exposing the long flank of the Great Forest to attack. Not since the days of the Great War had the wounds been so deep, so complete. Even in those dark times, there had been an Emperor to rally the free races and contest the Dark Gods.

Now there was nothing, and the winds of magic were already racing. Not for nothing did men say, in what little time of sunlight and happiness remained to them, that the end of all things had truly begun. Not in Praag, nor in Marienburg, but in Heffengen – the dank and rain-swept battlefield where Karl Franz, greatest statesman of the Old World, had fallen at last.

FIVE

Helborg woke into a world of agony.

He reached up with a shaking hand, pressing cautiously against the seared flesh of his raked cheek, and even his old warrior’s face winced as the spikes of pain shot through him. He tried to rise, and a thousand other wounds flared up. After two failed attempts, he finally pushed himself up onto his elbows, and looked around him.

He was in a canvas tent, the walls streaked with mud and heavy with rainwater. He had been placed on a low bunk of rotten wooden spars, little better than wallowing on the sodden ground itself. From outside the tent he could hear the low, gruff voices of soldiers.

He reached for his sword, but it was gone. With a jaw-clenched grunt, he sat up fully on the bunk and swung his legs over the edge. His armour was gone, too – he was wearing his gambeson, covered in a mud-stained cloak.

He could not make out what the voices outside the tent were saying – it might have been Reikspiel, it might not. He searched around him for something to use as a weapon.

As he did so, memories of the final combat with the daemon flashed back into his mind. He remembered the stench of it, spilling from the wide, grinning mouth that had hung over him at the end.

I should be dead, he mused to himself. Why am I even breathing?

Then he remembered the clarion calls of the dead, and a shudder ran through his ravaged body. If they had taken him, then the outlook was even bleaker. The servants of the Fallen Gods might torture their prey before death, but at least death would come at last. If he were in the hands of the grave-cheaters then the agony would last forever.

The entrance flaps of the tent stirred, and Helborg searched for something to grasp. The tent was empty, and so he grabbed one of the rotten ends of a bunk-spar and wrenched it free. Brandishing it as a makeshift club, he prepared himself to fight again.

The canvas was pushed aside, and Preceptor Hienrich von Kleistervoll limped inside.

‘Awake then, my lord,’ he observed, bowing.

Helborg relaxed. As he did so, he felt a trickle of blood down his ribs. His wounds had opened. ‘Preceptor,’ he said, discarding the spar. ‘Where are we?’

Von Kleistervoll looked terrible. His beard was a matted tangle, and his face was purple from bruising. He was still in his armour, but the plate was dented and scored. The Reiksguard emblem still hung from his shoulders on what remained of his tunic, soiled by the wine-dark stains of old blood.

‘Ten miles south of Heffengen,’ von Kleistervoll said grimly. ‘Can you walk? If you can, I will show you.’

Helborg was not sure if he could reliably stand, but he brushed his preceptor’s proffered arm away brusquely and limped past him into the open.

The sky was as dark as river mud. A bone-chilling wind skirled out of the north, smelling of ploughed earth and rust. Helborg shivered involuntarily, and pushed up the collar of his gambeson tunic.

Ahead of him, over a bleak field of bare earth, men were moving. They limped and shuffled, many on crutches or carrying the weight of their companions. Some still had their weapons, many did not. All of them had the grey faces of the defeated, staggering away from the carnage with what little breath remained in their cold-torn bodies.

Helborg watched the long column trudge along. So different from the bright-coloured infantry squares that had marched up to Heffengen, their halberds raised in regimented lines. There could not have been more than a thousand in the column, perhaps fewer.

Von Kleistervoll drew alongside him. The preceptor’s breathing rattled as he drew it in.

‘This is all we retrieved from the Reiklander front,’ he said. ‘Some of Talb’s men, too. Mecke was driven west. No idea where he ended up.

‘Schwarzhelm?’

‘He was still fighting at the end. Huss too, and the boy-warrior. They dragged together what they could and headed east.’

Helborg hesitated. ‘And the Emperor?’

Von Kleistervoll’s stony visage, scabbed with black, did not flicker. ‘You did not see it?’

Helborg could not remember. His last hours of awareness were like a fever-dream, jumbled in his mind. He thought he recalled fighting alongside Ludwig, dragging their heavy blades through waves of enemy daemon-kin, but perhaps that was just his damaged imagination.

He dimly remembered a skeletal dragon breaking the clouds, a nightmare of splayed bone and tattered wings. He recalled a rider in crimson armour, surrounded by spears of aethyr-lightning. He saw the grin of the daemon again, bubbling with the froth of madness. All of the images overlapped one another, fusing into a tableau of fractured confusion.

‘Could he have survived?’ Helborg pressed.

‘The day was lost,’ said von Kleistervoll. ‘If we had stayed a moment longer... I do not know. We could not remain.’ The preceptor’s voice was strained. ‘You were wounded, Huss had been driven east...’

‘I understand,’ said Helborg. Von Kleistervoll was a seasoned fighter and knew his warcraft – if he had judged that retreat was the only option, no doubt he had been correct. ‘What are your plans?’

‘You gave the order, lord: Altdorf, with all haste. The enemy tightens its grip on the north, fighting with what remains of the living dead over the ruins. Heffengen is no place for mortal men now – we must save what remains.’

Helborg remembered his final words with Karl Franz.

Altdorf is the key. It always has been.

He pulled the ragged cloak around him. He would have to don armour again, to find a steed strong enough to bear him. The men needed a leader, someone who looked like a leader.

‘My sword?’ he asked.

Von Kleistervoll smiled, and gestured towards a line of heavy wagons struggling through the mud. ‘We have it, and your battle-plate. Now that you are restored to health, the runefang will lead the army once more.’

Now that you are restored to health. Helborg felt hollowed-out, his body shriven and his mind tortured. He was sweating even in the cold, and the hot itch of blood under his clothes grew worse. ‘I saw him, preceptor,’ he murmured, watching as the grim procession of wounded and bereft wound its way past. ‘A legend from the past, standing under the world’s sun. What times are these, when the princes of the dead walk among us?’

Von Kleistervoll looked at him doubtfully. He did not know to whom Helborg was referring. There was no surprise in that – so many horrors had assailed them over the past few months that it had become hard to choose between them.

‘Von Carstein,’ explained Helborg, spitting the words out. ‘The eldest of the line. It was he that broke us.’

‘They say the dead fought the northmen,’ replied von Kleistervoll, carefully.

Helborg laughed harshly. ‘Do they? Who are they? Who still live who witnessed this thing?’

The preceptor had no reply. The bitter wind moaned across the land, cutting through the scant protection of their cloaks. The whole world seemed drained of life and colour, sunk into a rotting mass of corpse-earth.

‘He came to feast on the remains,’ Helborg said. ‘I felt his fell magicks even at the heart of the fighting. These are our darkest enemies, preceptor – the corrupted and the undead. The day has come when they march in tandem.’

Von Kleistervoll looked unconvinced, but said nothing. Helborg’s voice was becoming firmer. The pain in his wounds still flared, but he would recover. He would grip the Klingerach again. Karl Franz had gone, but there were other powers in the Empire, and there had been other Emperors. A successor would be chosen, and new armies raised. The war was not over.

‘My order remains,’ Helborg told him. ‘We gather what we can, and we march on Altdorf. The other electors will gather now. In the face of this, they will put their rivalries aside. They will have to.’

As he spoke, a banner-bearer walked across the land before them, dragging a limp trailing leg through the mud. His face was a mask of effort – every last scrap of energy was devoted to keeping his rain-heavy standard aloft. The banner itself hung solidly, blackened from mould-spores but still bearing the griffon icon of the Empire on the fabric.

Helborg watched him go. Other marching men looked up at the rumpled griffon, and their glassy eyes fixed on it in recognition.

‘We must get that standard cleaned up,’ Helborg said. ‘Find other regimental flags, and find men to bear them. We will march with the sacred images held before us. We will not enter Reikland like thieves, but rightful owners.’ For the first time since awaking, he felt the urge to smile – to let slip with that wolfish grin he wore in combat. ‘We do not matter, Heinrich. That matters. When we are long gone in our graves, men will still carry those signs, and they will still fight beneath them. We are but their custodians. There are no End Times, there are only our times.’

The pain in his wounds was like a goad, giving him energy again. The road would be long, but the prize at its end was worth fighting for.

‘To Altdorf, then,’ he ordered, turning on his heel and walking towards the wagon where his armour had been stowed. ‘The eternal throne of Sigmar. If there is to be an end to us, we will meet it there.’

Only the living dreamed, he had discovered.

Death was a kind of dream all of itself, so there was no escape there. In truth, he remembered very little about being dead – just vague and horrifying impressions of an absolute, eternal nothingness that extended beyond imagination.

He had once heard it said, a long time ago, that the only thought a mortal was truly unable to entertain was that of his own oblivion. Now he was able to reflect on the deep truth of that. Perhaps it was still true even of him, even after all he had experienced beyond the gates of the living.

There were many levels of oblivion, after all. As far as the faithful of the Empire were concerned, he himself had been dead for a very long time indeed, but that supposition was based on a fearful level of ignorance. There was all the difference in the world between the cold, hard existence of the Curse and the utter, profound oblivion of bodily annihilation.

He was free to dream again, now. His mind had knitted together, and with it had come all the old images, all the old desires and lusts and fears.

Preeminent among them was, of course, her. She had come to him in his dreams, dressed in bridal white, her smooth neck exposed, her dark eyes glinting wetly in the light of candles. She still moved in just the way she had done in life. Isabella had never been capable of a clumsy gesture. The sight of her again, after so long, was just as intoxicating as it had ever been. He found himself extending a withered hand into the depths of his own visions, trying to pull her towards him.

Perhaps that was the only preferable aspect to oblivion – the torment of seeing her had been spared him.

Vlad rolled a near-empty goblet in his palm idly, watching the dregs pool in its base. The fingers that cradled the silver bowl were pearl-grey and as dry as dust. Since being restored to existence by Nagash, his body had not entwined together in quite the way he might have wished. Some aspects of his earlier presence had not carried over, others had changed in subtle ways.

He felt... scoured. Learning to use muscles again had taken a long time. First, there had been the numbness, which brought on its shameful concomitant clumsiness. Then the pain had come, the raw, burning pain of reincorporation. That had been welcome – it had proved his body was his own again. He had drawn breath, and felt the damp air of the Old World sink into his lungs, and known that it was no illusion, and that he was back again, alive, and with unfinished tasks in the world of the senses.

For a long time, he had wondered whether his heart might beat. He had lain awake during the long nights, expecting to feel the hot rush of blood around his veins, pulsing with the old immutable rhythm he could barely remember.

It never came. He had been restored to the state of semi-life, just as he had been in the last days with Isabella. He still felt the Thirst, and still commanded the same strain of dark magic, and still felt at home in the shadows and the dank hearts of decay. The souls of the living were still translucent to him, burning like torches in the dark, and he still salivated at the sight of a bared vein.

I am an instrument, he ruminated sourly, pondering the time that had passed since his restoration.

In his earlier incarnation, Vlad had been master of his own destiny. Armies had risen and marched at his command. Sylvania, the Empire itself, had trembled before his name.

Much of that old power still remained. The unquiet dead still rose at his bidding, but he knew, in his silent heart, that his will was now a mere proxy for a greater intelligence.

There was no resisting the Master. There never had been. Some souls were so great, so bloated with power, that they transcended the standard order of things, and even a pride-driven aristocrat like Vlad felt little shame in bending the knee to that.

Still, it rankled. Deep in his stomach, where the last vestiges of human pride lingered, it rankled.

He lifted his goblet to his grey lips and drained the last of the wine. It was foul. In his former incarnation, even Sylvania had produced better vintages. Truly, the Empire was a shadow even of its earlier, rotten, decadent and miserly self.

Around him, candles burned low, their thick stumps heavy with molten tallow. The stone chamber was dark, and the ever-present north wind moaned through the cracks.

Before him, set on a bronze table, was a severed head. Walach Harkon’s eyes had rolled up into his skull. His once elegant features had been defiled by tattoos and scarification, something that made Vlad’s lip curl in disgust. Only the fangs gave away his proud bloodline; everything else had changed.

When Vlad had spied Harkon bringing his Blood Dragons into combat during the climax of the battle at Heffengen, he had assumed that the task was near completion – the Chaos forces would be broken between his own and those of the Empire, crushing them utterly. It should have been a great victory, the first step in the long road of bringing the living and the dead together to fight the damned. He had already rehearsed his speech before the mortal Emperor, demonstrating how only an alliance of former enemies could hope to staunch the tide of corruption spilling through the Auric Bastion.

No one, least of all him, could have guessed that Harkon had turned. Somehow, during the Blood Dragon’s enforced exile north of the Bastion, his battle-hungry mind had been twisted to the service of the Blood God.

It was shameful. Embarrassing. Mortal cattle could have their heads turned by every petty shaman raving under a standing stone, but a lord of undeath, one of those capable of delivering the Kiss, one of the mightiest servants of Death in the entire world...

The thought made him furious. Harkon had driven a wedge between that which should by now be in unity. Far from gaining the trust of the mortal Emperor, he had slain him. Such rebellion, propelled by weakness, had earned him the torment of a thousand years. It had given Vlad some little pleasure to crush him, taking control of his draconian mount and using the tortured beast to end its own rider.

By then, though, the damage had been done. The Empire army had been routed, handing the servants of the Ruinous Powers an unbreakable momentum. Vlad himself had been forced to withdraw, an ignominy he had suffered too many times over his many lives.

He placed the goblet on the table next to Harkon’s shrivelled head and glowered at the blank-eyed face. ‘Glory-hunting fool,’ he hissed.

The setback was a grave one. Every day saw more corrupted souls flock to the hosts of the North. The Empire was in no condition to offer more than a token resistance – for all Gelt’s boasts, the Bastion was entirely breached now, and the hordes would soon pour through it like blood through a sieve. The scattered cities of the northern Empire, over which he had once cast covetous eyes himself, were as good as lost. No doubt the remnants of Karl Franz’s army would attempt to make some kind of stand at Talabheim and Middenheim, but if there was to be genuine resistance, a chance to recover something before all was lost, it would have to be mounted further south.

‘Altdorf,’ he murmured, remembering his last sight of those white towers. He had got close enough to smell the fish being landed on the quays. For a glorious moment, many lifetimes ago, he had stood on the battlements and seen the entire city spread out before him, supine as a lover, tense for the ushering in of a new age of living death.

He did not know how he would feel when he saw it again. Perhaps the old passions would stir, or perhaps that was all behind him now. That was the strange thing about being reborn – he had to learn about himself again.

He sighed, and shoved Harkon’s head from the table. It hit the stone floor with a wet thud and rolled away.

There could be no postponing the matter now. He had tarried long enough, uncertain how to break the news. There were few souls in the world that could make Vlad von Carstein hesitate, but the Master was one of them.

He sighed once more, pushed himself from his chair and arranged his cloak about him. The fine ermine settled on the polished crimson war-plate. He ran his fingers through his snow-white locks, ensuring not a strand of hair was misplaced.

From the chambers below, he heard the screams of living sacrifices as the last of the rites was completed. It was a waste to end mortal souls in such a way, and he took no great pleasure in it, but establishing a link with the Master over such distances could not be done without some trivial hardship.

Vlad made his way from the chamber and towards the lower levels of the tower. The disaster at Heffengen had to be recounted, and Nagash was not one to be kept waiting.

It was well, then, that he had something else to tell him – a new path to tread, and an old one to revisit. The future was just another aspect of the past, after all, which was yet another lesson his slumber in the halls of eternity had taught him.

The dead did not dream. Neither, it so happened, did their dreams ever die.