The End Times | The Fall of Altdorf

SIX

Gregor Martak, Supreme Patriarch of the Colleges of Magic, awoke from a fevered dream of ruin and terror.

He had done likewise for the past three weeks, and it made him exhausted and irascible. Previously, he had slept phenomenally well. Wizards of the Amber Order were accustomed to deep slumber – they had little to trouble their unwaking minds, and so they slept like the beasts they emulated: in brief, deep snatches, as dreamless as the empty vistas of the underworld.

Martak yawned and scratched his unruly beard. Then he lifted his coarse robe and scratched the rest of himself. Tufts of hay stuck out from every crevice of his makeshift nightshirt, a result of taking his bed in the Imperial Stables. As one of the three most powerful men in the Empire, he could have occupied the most opulent chambers of the Palace. He could have had a staff of hundreds, a whole series of willing and creative companions, and barrel-loads of fine victuals carted into his personal kitchens every morning.

His predecessor, the avaricious and brilliant Balthasar Gelt, had taken full advantage of such opportunities. Martak had always had a sneaking admiration for Gelt, in the way only a man of such completely antipathetic character could. The two of them had never been rivals, for Martak had spent most of his life in the wilds of Taal’s boundless forests, far from the labyrinthine conspiracies of the capital city. Where Gelt had been an accomplished puller of Imperial levers, Martak had been content to remain an uncultured savage, scavenging around the margins while his powers over beast and bower grew steadily stronger.

When news had come in concerning Gelt’s fall from grace, Martak had not been one of the many who had secretly rejoiced. Subsequently being named as Supreme Patriarch had come as a complete surprise. He had been stalking through the wildwoods of the northern Reikland when the summons had come. Six messengers had been dispatched to find him; only one made it, and he had been white from primal fear when he had turned up. The deep forest was no place for ordinary men.

Martak was under no illusions why he had been chosen: he was the least offensive candidate to the largest number of people. The Amber College was a filth-ridden backwater compared to the lofty Gold, Light and Bright Colleges, from whose precincts the Supreme Patriarchs were normally drawn, and that made him a non-contentious choice, particularly as the Emperor was not around to oversee a protracted dispute.

The Amber reputation did not worry him. If his colleagues were too preoccupied by their incessant feuding to see just how powerful the Lore of Beasts could be, and just how completely he had mastered it, then that was their fault to remedy. So he had taken the honour when it had been offered, even putting on a largely fresh robe to receive his staff of office. Then he had left the Palace for the stables, bedding down in the straw and breathing in the thick aroma of horseflesh.

For a while, surrounded by thoroughbreds, he had slept well. Then the dreams had come.

Martak ran his calloused hands through his long greasy hair, and belched. Moving stiffly after his troubled night, he staggered over to a water trough and splashed his face. He walked out of the stable doors, yawning again widely. It was the hour just before the dawn. The eastern sky was a deep blue, casting a weak light across the entire cityscape. Mist rose up from the ground, as white as cream and nigh as thick.

The stables were situated on the southern edge of the vast Imperial Palace complex, not far from the upper curtain walls. Martak strolled through courtyard after courtyard, loosening his limbs and rolling his shoulders as he went. By the time he reached the outer parapet, the first rays of the sun were slipping over the distant eastern hills.

He leaned on the stone balustrade, and took in the view.

Below him, a tangle of roofs tumbled away down the steep slope towards the river. Thin columns of dirty smoke spiralled up from the streets, bearing the wet, dirty aroma of Altdorfers’ hearths. Ahead of him, a quarter of a mile eastwards, the huge dome of the Temple of Sigmar thrust up from the clutter of houses, its copper skin relatively unscathed by the grime that affected every other building in the city.

Beyond the temple lay the wide curve of the river. The rising sun cast rippling lines of silver across its turgid surface. Barges were already plying the trade-ways, sliding like whales through the muck. Martak could hear the calls of merchants as they unloaded their cargo onto the wharfs.

Altdorf had a kind of rough, unregarded beauty to it. Perhaps Martak was one of the few to appreciate that, for he liked rough, unregarded things. The poet Heine Heinrich had once described Altdorf as having the looks of a toad-dragon combined with the charm of a threepenny harlot. Being strictly chaste, Martak could not attest to the latter, but as for the former, toad-dragons had their own kind of magnificence. They had certainly been around a long time, something that could also be said of the City of Sigmar.

He drew in a long, deep breath. The nightmares were fading. Soon the Palace would begin to stir in earnest. Night-watch soldiers would slope back to their barracks, hoping none had witnessed their snoozing in the shadow of the battlements, to be replaced by bleary-eyed, unshaven day-watch regulars. The great fires would be lit in the hearths, banishing the worst of the night chill, and pigs would be rammed on spits for the evening banquets. The refuse-strewn streets would fill with the harsh, jostling press of unwashed bodies, replacing the cutpurses and petty cultists who had stalked the night shadows.

Until then, Martak’s view would be largely untroubled by interruption. The city lay before him peacefully, barely touched by the burnishing rays of the world’s sun, as dank and sullen as fungus.

In his dreams, he had seen the city burning. He had seen the cobbled streets erupt in foul growths, and the walls collapse under the weight of rampant vegetation. He had seen monsters stalking through the ruins, their eyes bright green in the flame-lit dark. He had seen the river clogged with strangle-weed and the proud towers of the Imperial Palace cast down in flaming destruction.

He had seen the Emperor, alone, wandering across the lands of the dead, surrounded on all sides by the hosts of the damned. His armies were gone, and the sky had been alive with light of all shades, some hues having no name in the languages of mortal men.

Perhaps, if he had had such dreams a year ago, he would have disregarded them, putting them down to the strange ways of the wizard’s mind, but things had changed since then.

The city ran with rumour of imminent invasion. Armies had been sent north months ago under the command of the Emperor, who had taken his finest captains with him and most of the capital’s standing army. Since then, the news had been fragmentary and confused. Some reports had it that Kislev had been overrun, just as in the time of Magnus the Pious. Others faithfully recounted tales of carnage across Nordland and the Ostermark, where the dead pulled themselves from the earth to aid the ravening hordes of the Fallen Gods. Those stories had been the most numerous of all – that the necromancers had entered into unholy alliance with the practitioners of Chaotic magic, and that each faction planned to feast on the bodies and souls of mortal men.

None could be sure of the truth of such tales. Those few messengers who claimed to come south from the far north said contradictory things. Some had been driven mad by the journey, and others had always been, so all they brought were fragments – half-truths and whispers, none of which might be true, or all of which might be.

If Martak had not had the nightmares, he might have been inclined to dismiss the refugees as the usual doom-mongering End Times fanatics. He would have left the city and returned to the wilds, leaving the ordering of the Empire to its usual masters, the elector counts. Though they were as squabbling and infuriating as ever, they understood the deep complexities of Imperial government, something that Martak knew he would never comprehend.

In the light of his visions, though, he stayed his hand, and waited in the Imperial Palace, holding on for tidings he could trust. The Emperor would surely return soon, to whom he needed to give his tokens of allegiance as Supreme Patriarch. The latest rumours told of devastation in Marienburg, and the imminent return of the Reiksmarshal to the city. If either of those things were true, then even the most sanguine of the Empire’s servants would do well to worry.

Martak coughed up a gobbet of spittle and spewed it over the balustrade. His bodily aroma was strong, mixed in with faint overtones of horse-dung and mouldy straw. That was as it should be. The bestial spirits were strong in his blood, coursing like fine wine. As he drew in the cold, briny air, he felt his wilderness-toughened muscles respond. He would stay, observing, waiting for a signal, doing what he could to live up to the foreign responsibilities placed on his shoulders.

Below him, the city was waking up. He heard the first calls of the stall-holders setting up, the heavy clang of temple doors unlocking, and the clatter of quayside cranes unloading goods.

They were good sounds. They were human sounds, in all their inextinguishable variety. Altdorf was home to every vice and cruelty, but it also harboured joy, mirth and generosity. If you wanted to gain a picture of the race in all its messy, fragile and marvellous splendour and folly, there was no better place.

This is the heart of it all, Martak mused, leaning heavily on the stone railing. This is our soul.

By then, the sun had risen indeed, casting its thin grey light over the tops of the distant forest and gilding the temple dome. It was a faint, uncertain light, but just enough to lift the murk and fear of the long night.

Martak let it warm his limbs for a little while, before stomping back off to the stables. He had appointments with powerful men later on that day, which meant that he should make at least some effort to scrape the worst of the grime from his hands and face. He did not like the thought of it, but it had to be done.

As he padded back across the stone flags, his bare feet brushing soundlessly like a hunting cat’s, he felt the final shreds of terror dissipate from his soul. As the sun strengthened, he knew the memory would fade entirely.

Until the next night, when the visions would come back again.

The lamps were lit in Couronne every night. Teams of armed men patrolled the streets of the stone-walled citadel, keeping the fires going and banishing the shadows.

Bretonnia had become a land of nightmares. Witches were abroad, hideous apparitions crept across the devastated fields, daemons squatted in the ruins of burned-out watchtowers. The new king, the reborn Gilles le Breton, had restored a shell of order to the realm, but he presided over a shattered caste of exhausted knights and half-starved peasantry. Since announcing the start of a new Errantry War, he had been abroad for months at a time, hunting down the dregs of the Chaos armies that had vomited forth from Mousillon.

His regent at Couronne remained Louen Leoncoeur, master of the realm no longer but still a Paladin Champion of the Green Knight. The duke knelt in his private chapel at the summit of his ancestral castle. Tapestries hung in the candlelight, each one depicting great deeds of his ancient House across the generations. A stone altar stood before him, surmounted by a lone marble figurine of the Lady.

Leoncoeur knelt in his full plate armour. He clasped his naked sword, resting it point-down on the stone before him and crossing his gauntlets at the hilt. His long blond hair hung about his armoured shoulders, lank from the battlefield. Like all the knights of the realm, he had been at war near-ceaselessly since the times of strife had descended. On one such sortie, he had nearly met his end under the blade of his own bastard son Mallobaude. For a long time, lost in the far reaches of the Bretonnian wild country, he had walked a fragile path between death and life, teetering on the edge of oblivion.

It had been the Lady who had guided him back – she had spoken to him in the depths of his fever. Her voice, as soft as ermine and yet as firm as the blade he carried, had whispered to him throughout those dark, lost times, refusing him permission to yield. Leoncoeur dimly remembered begging her to let him go, to cast him loose, to let his service die even as the land around him died.

She had never relented. He could recall her stern face looming over him, refusing the command that he yearned for. A lifetime of chivalry and pious devotion had sealed his fate – he could never have refused a boon from her, and so he clung to life, refusing the seductive embrace of the underworld even as it grasped for him. His senses returned in time, and he wandered the lands, near-starved, barely more than a shade himself. When he at last found his way back to Couronne, he was nearly slain for a wraith by a grail knight, and only his mud-splattered emblems saved him.

By then, Mallobaude had been destroyed and Gilles le Breton was the new king, feted by all across the realm as a harbinger of a new dawn for Bretonnia. Leoncoeur had recovered his strength and his wits, recovering under the auspices of the white-robed Sisters of the Lady. It took longer for him to recover his pride. He had ridden out to face Mallobaude as unquestioned monarch of his domain. He had returned to find a legend from the past sitting in the throne-room to accept the acclamation of the masses.

There was no contesting the will of le Breton. The green-eyed king’s magisterial presence was unquestionable. A fey light shone in his ageless face, and his countenance bore the raw weight of centuries. All bowed the knee before him, including Leoncoeur himself.

That did not assuage the bitterness. In the long, sleepless nights as his body was restored to health, he found himself gnawing away at the injustice of it. He prayed, over and again, asking to be shown what fault he had committed, what aspect of chivalry he had transgressed that would warrant his kingdom being taken from him and his bloodline disinherited.

If le Breton himself was aware of such anguish, he did not show it. He was one of the Immortals, the avatar of the Green Knight himself, and matters of pride and propriety no longer concerned him. Even his voice was otherworldly, an archaic, haughty speech that belonged to another world. He existed now to take the war to the enemies of the realm: he was a weapon, forged from the myths of the past and given life by the unfathomable will of the Lady. Leoncoeur could not gainsay such commandments; neither, though, in truth, could he understand them.

So he knelt before the altar as the lamps burned, murmuring the words of faith he had known since childhood, seeking the answers that eluded him even in the midst of battle. Every night he did the same, and every night his prayers went unanswered.

As the first stirrings of fatigue ran through his battle-weary frame, his lips finally stopped moving. He opened his frost-blue eyes, and looked up at the image of the Lady.

A chill breeze rattled through the loose stained-glass windows, making the candle-flames shiver. The benign face of his divine mistress gazed down at him, serene and pitiless.

It was as he looked up at her, just as he had done in the dream-lands of his long near-death, that realisation dawned. There would be no answers from Her in this place. It was no longer his. Whether for good or for ill, the realm had been taken from him and given to another. To linger in Couronne like a ghost over its grave was pointless, and only grief could come of it.

Leoncoeur clambered to his feet, bowing again as he addressed the altar. He sheathed his sword.

‘Where, then?’ he asked, his deep voice soft. ‘What path shall I take?’

The figurine of the Lady gave no answer. The flames flared a little, stirred by the wind, but no other sign revealed itself. The faces on the tapestries, picked out by long-dead fingers and faded by time and trial, gazed sightlessly down on him.

Leoncoeur smiled faintly. The ways of the Lady were never easy. That was the point of Her – She was the trial, the anguish, the test. Weakness had no place in Her service, only undying devotion.

‘I will discover it, then,’ he said. He looked around him. He had prayed in the same chapel since boyhood, and the stones were as familiar to him as his own flesh. ‘This is no longer my realm. As you will it, I will find another.’

He bowed again, and turned away. Limping still from his last cavalry charge, the deposed king swept from the chapel, and the great oak doors slammed shut behind him.

In his absence, the candles still burned, and the draughts still swirled around the bases of the pillars. The figurine Lady stood in the flickering dark, her face still serene, her thoughts, behind the sculptor’s smooth smile, unknowable.

Marienburg had already fallen, but its torment was not yet over.

The streets that had once bustled with the commerce of a dozen realms were now knee-deep in reeking effluent. The great docks were shattered, their steam-cranes tilting into the brine, the loading chains already rusting into nothingness. The mighty sea-wall built atop the foundations of ancient elven ruins was smashed into lumps of subsiding masonry, and foul slithering creatures with many eyes and splay-webbed feet slapped and slid across its remains.

Bodies lay stretched throughout the ruins as far as the eye could see, and every corpse was swollen with a different strain of pox. Many cadavers had burst open, spilling nests of maggots and black-limbed spiders over what remained of the cobbled thoroughfares. The corpses were piled high at the strategic choke-points, their blood mingling with the dribbling sputum of the Plaguefather’s foul gifts. The sea itself was polluted, turned from a choppy grey into a dark-green slurry, as thick as tar and crowned with a crust of yellowish foam. The mixture lapped sluggishly against what remained of the old quay-walls, sucking and wheezing against the disintegrating stone blocks.

Above the fallen city, the clouds hung low, just as they had at Heffengen. The air carried a greenish tinge, and clouds of flies buzzed and droned through the miasma.

Everything was ruined. Every building was a hollow shell, bursting with rotting, preternatural growths. The great guild buildings in the dock-quarter were now temples of decay, draped with putrescent vines like giant entrails pulled from a body. The dull crack of thunder still echoed from the northern horizon, though the spell-summoned storms that had ravaged the city during the worst of the fighting were ebbing at last.

Through the very heart of the devastation, a vast army marched. Just as at Heffengen, they were drawn from the corrupted hosts of the North, and every tribe was represented in their tormented ranks. Norscans strode out, clad in thick furs and bearing ornately crafted axes with runes of ruin carved on the daemon’s-head steel. Skaelings and Kurgan came with them, as well as Khazags and Vargs and Kul, a collection of the whole of the Realm of Chaos’s sundered peoples, thrown together under a panoply of skull-topped banners.

It took a full day for the huge host to pass from the waterfront, through the dead city and out of the ruined eastern gates. As they marched, daemons flickered and wavered in the mournful half-light, hissing and drooling as they danced. All manner of pestilential beasts, from roaches to rats, scuttled under their feet, welling up like oil from the bubbling sewer-grates.

The host was beyond counting. Every soldier in it bore some mark of the Plaguefather, whether merely a pale pallor scored by throbbing rashes, or an entirely changed body, bloated with pox and bursting with mutations. Thick armour plate buckled outward over tumours, and ragged shirts of chainmail barely concealed festering wounds. Some clearly revelled in their diseases, leering as they crunched the bones of mortal men under their boots. Others limped along in agony, their ribcages protruding as they were consumed from the inside.

For hour after hour, the banners swayed past, each one daubed with a fresh sign of pestilence. The army was larger by far than the one that had broken the Bastion. It had been sent south by Archaon, hurled far out into the trackless ocean before sweeping back towards the Empire coastline. Ship after ship had disgorged its contents into Marienburg’s stricken harbour, overwhelming the defenders in a remorseless wave of foul sorcery and dogged blade-work. For many hours the resistance had been heroic, and the fighting had been heavy in the streets.

But the result had never truly been in doubt. Archaon had unleashed his armies on the effete lands of the South in such quantities that even Asavar Kul would have blenched to see them. Two more allied hordes were already grinding their way south, tearing through the Great Forest like blades ripped under the skin. Each one alone was larger than any prior army sent to bring punishment to the unbelieving. Taken together, there could be no stopping them.

The force sent to shatter Marienburg was the mightiest of them all, a tumultuous rabble of pustular, addled, filth-spreading, contagion-fanning glory. As rank after rank trudged east, demolishing the few remaining walls as they went, they were observed by three pairs of eyes.

In the semi-remembered past, those eyes had belonged to mortal triplets, born under the midnight sun of the frozen tundra. Their family name was Glott, though that had meant little at the time and nothing to them now. The eldest, though only by moments, was Otto, who came closest of all of them to being a warrior in the traditional sense – he was a pot-bellied monster with marsh-green flesh and the tripartite marks of the Plaguefather scraped in black ink across his pocked forehead.

Otto stood atop the ruins of the Oesterdock Temple, leaning casually against the broken cupola of the Chapel of Manann. His clammy fingers pressed against the stone, causing mould-spores to spontaneously spider out across it. He laughed throatily, watching his troops lurch and swagger, then reached down for a strip of moss that had sprung up between the bricks of the temple wall. He pressed the wiry fuzz to his slobbering chin in a mockery of an Empire Greatsword’s beard, and grinned.

Ethrac, the second triplet, saw him do it, and rolled his rheumy eyes in disgust. Like his brother, he was a wiry, spare figure, emaciated under blotchy robes of coarse wool. He clutched at a gnarled staff of oak heartwood, desecrated with columns of twisting runes, and picked his way through the rubble of the temple’s roof. As he moved, bronze bells shackled to the staff-tip clanged dully, and flatulent vapours wafted out from the hem of his torn robes. He kicked aside a few clumps of rubble, and spat at them as they tumbled down to the street below.

‘We could have lost this,’ Ethrac muttered.

‘No, we couldn’t,’ said Otto casually, picking flecks of plaster from what remained of the cupola.

Their voices were strange, wet rasps, almost like that of beasts, and filtered through mouths of blackened teeth. When they spoke, they overlapped one another constantly, as if each were just a part of one confused mind.

‘I did not foresee the dead,’ Ethrac said, pausing in his scrabbling search. ‘Why did I not foresee the dead?’

Otto picked at his nostril. ‘Does it matter?’

‘It matters, o my brother. Yes, yes, it matters. We are not seeing everything. There are portents withheld. Why? I do not know. I should be seeing the world turn, the minds of men open. I did not see the dead. I did not see them.’

Just as at Heffengen, the defenders of Marienburg had been bolstered by the sudden intervention of undead warriors, though, just as at Heffengen, the reinforcements had not proved enough to halt the onward march of Chaos. That bothered Ethrac. He had sent tidings north, hoping to warn Archaon’s war council that the Law of Death was proving more mutable than in past ages, and that it posed complications, but he had little hope of any of his messengers arriving alive. The Great Forest was as unforgiving to the damned as it was to the faithful.

‘You should learn to calm yourself,’ said Otto, scratching at a new and beautiful boil that had emerged under his chin. ‘Nothing stands between us and Altdorf now. Nothing of any note, anyway.’

Ethrac shook his bald head impatiently. ‘Does not matter! Mortals do not matter. But something has changed.’ He screwed his eyes into a frown, and the scabby skin of his forehead broke out in bloody cracks. ‘They are rising from the earth like new shoots. Why? Why is the wall between living and dead broken?’

Otto sighed and walked over to his brother. He took Ethrac’s cheeks in both hands and squeezed affectionately. ‘They are desperate, o my brother,’ he whispered. ‘Every witch-rattler between the Great Gate and the Hot Lands is flailing around for something to call up. You know why? Because we are here. They know this is the end. What if a few skeletons are thrown into our path? Do you think they will last longer at the White City than they did here?’

Ethrac nodded reluctantly, some of his agitation subsiding. ‘And there is Festus,’ he murmured. ‘We must not forget him.’

Otto released Ethrac. ‘It has been sewn up, tight as a burst stomach. The Leechlord is with us. Brine is with us, the Tallyman is with us. Stop worrying.’

Ethrac started to root around with his staff again, only half placated. ‘Festus has been working hard. I can smell it from here. Much joy, to see him again.’

Otto walked back over to the edge of the temple ruins. ‘Never forget, my favoured loin-brother, that we are three, and that we have not seen the finest of the Father’s plague-pots yet.’

As he spoke, a vast, rolling mountain of scabrous flesh lumbered into view. As tall as a guilder’s townhouse, the third of the triplets stomped past the teetering shell of the temple. His skin glowed a violent green, as if lit by weird lantern-light. Vast, muscle-thick arms hung, simian-like, from swollen shoulders. One terminated in a long, greasy tentacle that trailed along in the dust behind it. Catching sight of Otto and Ethrac, the monster cracked a wide grin, and a semi-chewed leg dropped from his jaws.

‘Good feasting, o my brother?’ asked Otto, reaching out to stroke the creature’s bald head.

Ghurk, the final triplet, nodded enthusiastically, and more half-chewed body parts slopped from his slack lower jaw. Eating made Ghurk happy, and eating warm human flesh made him even happier. Several hapless victims were still clutched in his clawed hand; some of them still struggling weakly.

Otto took a short run-up, and launched himself from the temple’s edge and into mid-air. He landed heavily on Ghurk’s shoulders, and shuffled into position. Ghurk gurgled with pleasure, and started chewing again.

‘Can anything stand against this, o my brother?’ called out Otto to Ethrac, proudly surveying the scene from atop his sibling’s unnaturally huge bulk. In every direction, the rampant desecration of the Plaguefather ran wild. Soon the last of what had been Marienburg would be overwhelmed entirely, a festering jungle on the western seaboard of the Empire, the first foothold of what would become Father Nurgle’s reign of corpulence on earth.

Ethrac gazed at his two brothers with genuine fondness, and his withered face cracked a toothy smile. ‘No, my brother,’ he admitted, making ready to join Otto on Ghurk’s back, from whence the two of them would begin the long march east. ‘You are quite correct. Nothing can stand against it.’

SEVEN

Drakenhof was not how Vlad remembered it. The centuries had not been kind to the ancient structure, and whole wings had fallen into ivy-covered ruin. The ice-cold wind from the Worlds Edge Mountains cut straight through the many gouges and gaps in the walls, skittering around the dusty halls within and shaking the ragged tapestries on their wall-hangings.

Since returning to Sylvania from the far north, he had done what he could to restore something like order to the ruins. He had raised the cadavers of the old castle architects, and they had soundlessly got back to work, ordering work-gangs of living dead to haul stone and saw wood, just as they had years ago.

There was no time to make the necessary repairs though, and so Vlad’s throne stood in an empty audience chamber with the chill whistling through open eaves. Sitting in his old iron throne gave him no joy, for his surroundings were scarce better than any common bandit-lord.

He deserved better. He had always deserved better, and now that he was a mortarch, one of the Chosen of Nagash, his surroundings were little more than a bad joke.

Beyond the castle’s crumbling walls, out under the sick light of Morrslieb, the entire countryside was alive with movement. A thousand undead did their dread master’s bidding, dragging old sword-blades from graves and fitting them with spell-wound hilts. Armour was pulled from cobwebbed store-chambers and dug out from long barrows, all to arm the host that would take Vlad from the margins of the Empire and back into its very heart.

Mortal men worked alongside their dead cousins, swallowing their horror out of fear of the new seigneur of Castle Drakenhof. In truth, it was not just fear that made them work – the old ties of loyalty still had purchase, and there was no doubt in their slow, brutish minds that their true lord had returned.

Vlad did not despise them for that. They were only performing what their station demanded, and he held no contempt for his subjects. When he slew them in order to drink their blood, he did so cleanly, taking libation through the magics of his sword rather than sucking the flesh like an animal. They were cattle, as necessary to his kind as meat and water were to the mortal lords of the Empire, and if they served him faithfully then their lives would be no worse than any other of the toiling peasantry across the hardscrabble badlands of the outer Empire.

Some, of course, refused to see that, which required more punitive action to be taken. Thus it was that the witch hunter hung before him, suspended in a writhing aura of black-tinged flame. His arms were locked out wide, his legs clamped together, his head thrown back.

Vlad regarded him coolly from the throne.

‘What do you think will happen to you?’ he asked.

The witch hunter, his scarred face taut with pain, could only reply through clenched teeth. ‘I will... resist,’ he gasped. ‘While I live, I will resist.’

‘I realise that,’ Vlad sighed. ‘But when your resistance ends, what do you think will happen then?’

‘I will be gathered into the light of Sigmar. I will join the Choirs of the Faithful.’

‘Ah. I am afraid not,’ said Vlad, feeling some genuine sadness. ‘Perhaps, in the past, you might have done, but the Laws of Death are not what they were. Perhaps you have not felt the change.’ He got up from the throne, and his black robes fell about him as he stepped down from the dais towards his victim. The witch hunter watched him approach, his face showing little fear but plenty of defiance. ‘The world is running out of time. My Master has wounded the barrier between realms. The long-departed will soon stir in the earth, and nothing your boy-God can do will have the slightest effect. I admit that, for a time, our kind were troubled by your... faith. Those days, I am happy to say, are coming to an end.’

Vlad walked around the witch hunter, noting with some appreciation how the mortal controlled the trepidation that must have been shivering through him.

‘You think of me as your enemy,’ Vlad said. ‘How far from the truth that is. In reality, I am your only hope. The paths of fate are twofold now: servitude before the ravening Gods of the North, or servitude before the Lord of Death. There is no middle way. I do not expect you to see the truth of it immediately, but you will, in time. All of you will. I merely hope the realisation comes before all is lost.’

The witch hunter struggled against the black flames, but they writhed more tightly, binding him as firmly as chains. Vlad needed to exert the merest flicker of effort to maintain them. Sylvania’s soil was now such a fertile breeding ground for magic that his powers were greater than they had ever been.

‘Lies,’ spat the witch hunter, with some effort. ‘My faith is unshakeable.’

‘I can see that,’ said Vlad. ‘And so I am willing to extend a great gift to you. You may join me freely. You may follow me as a mortal man, and learn the ways of my Master. Your life will be extended many times over, and you will accomplish far more against the Dark Gods than you ever would have done while in your current service. The pain can end. You can still fight evil. I have ever been a generous liege-lord – even your annals must tell it so.’

The witch hunter’s eyes narrowed, and the muscles on his jawline twitched. Vlad could feel the man’s willpower eroding – he had been tormented for hours, and every man, no matter how well-prepared, had his breaking point.

‘Never,’ he said, his voice nearly cracking with effort.

Vlad drew close to him. He extended a finger to the man’s throat, tracing the line of a raised vein. ‘Your Empire is over, mortal. I say that not to crow, for I take no pleasure in seeing the ruin of what I once aspired to rule. It is merely a fact. I saw your Emperor slain at Heffengen. I saw the Bastion break, and I saw what was behind that wall. You are an intelligent man: you can see for yourself what is happening. Plagues run free, wiping out whole villages in a single night. The forest comes alive, churning with unnatural growth. The rivers clog, the crops fail.’ He slid his finger alongside the man’s ear. ‘They say that Marienburg has already fallen. Talabheim will be next. Your house is crumbling around you – I offer a new home for your loyalty.’

The witch hunter’s face creased in agony. His fists balled. He was still fighting. Lines of magic-heated sweat ran down his temples and slipped to the floor, fizzing as the drops hit the cold stone.

‘Never,’ he said again, screwing his eyes closed as he struggled to fight on.

Vlad regarded him bleakly. The offer had been magnanimous, but even the patience of lords came to an end. ‘One thing, then,’ he said. ‘Just one scrap. Tell me your name. I will need it.’

The witch hunter’s eyes snapped open. He stared up at the open rafters, his expression proud. ‘Jan Herrscher,’ he said. ‘By the grace of our Lord Sigmar, that is the name I have always borne. I never hid it, and may it give honour to Him forever.’

Vlad nodded. ‘Herrscher,’ he murmured. ‘A fine name. And believe me, you have given him honour. Truly, you have.’

Then he withdrew, and snapped his fingers. The black flames flared into a coil, and fastened themselves around Herrscher’s neck. The coil contracted, snapping the man’s spine. For a moment, his eyes continued to stare upward, then he went limp in his bonds. Vlad gestured again, the fires flickered out, and the witch hunter’s body thudded to the stone.

Vlad gazed down at the corpse for a moment. It was a shame. Herrscher was the kind of man that made the Empire worth fighting for.

His thoughts were interrupted by a low cough at the chamber’s entrance. He looked up to see one of his white-faced servants hovering anxiously. This one was a living soul, and Vlad felt an involuntary pang as he watched the man’s blood vessels throb under his skin.

‘You pardon, lord,’ the servant stammered, clearly terrified, ‘but the first brigades are ready for inspection.

That was good. It would be a long and arduous task to create the army that Vlad required, even though Nagash had been quite insistent on the need for haste. The hosts of the North were converging on Altdorf already, and Sylvania was far further from Reikland than Marienburg. Even the expedience of raising the fallen to fight again would scarce suffice to meet the need, and so the scouring of Sylvania for living troops had begun in earnest.

‘Very good,’ said Vlad, pulling his robes about him, preparing to descend the winding stairs to the parade ground below. ‘I will attend shortly.’ His gaze alighted again on the body of Herrscher. ‘And do something with this while I am gone.’

The servant hesitated before complying. Even in death, a witch hunter could inspire terror in a Sylvanian. ‘Shall I burn the body, lord?’ he asked.

Vlad shook his head. ‘Do no such thing,’ he said. ‘Take it to my chambers and give it every proper burial rite.’

He swept imperiously out of the chamber. As he did so, the last of the black flames guttered out.

‘He is too good to waste,’ Vlad said. ‘We shall have to find ways for him to serve again.’

The Grand Chamber of Magnus Enthroned stood near the summit of the Imperial Palace’s main basilica. Vast walls of granite and ashlar stone soared above a wide marble floor. The pillars that held up the high vaulted roof were many-columned and banded with silver. Torches blazed, sending clouds of soot rolling into the heights. Statues of fallen heroes stood in alcoves along the walls, each graven from black veined stone. Magnus himself had been carved from a solid block of dark grey granite, depicted sitting in judgement on a massive throne. His image dominated the far end of the hall, fully twenty feet high, as stern and unbending as he had been in life.

Overlooked by such grandeur, the chamber’s few living inhabitants were dwarfed into near-insignificance. They stood in the empty centre in a loose circle, clad in the robes of finest silk and linen and bearing heavy gold artefacts of office – chains, amulets, crowns.

All but one. Martak had not had the time or the will to find something to wear less filthy than the robes he had slept in, and so stood apart from the others. He guessed that he smelled fairly bad to them. That was simply reciprocal – each of the others smelled truly repellent to him, with their thick-wafted perfumes and armour-unguents.

‘None have suffered more than I,’ said the sturdiest of them, a tall man wearing a fur-lined jerkin and long green cloak. His leonine face was crested with a mane of snow-white, and he wore a goatee beard on his age-lined face. Despite his advanced years, he carried himself with a warrior’s bearing, and his flinty eyes gave away no weakness.

Of all of them, Martak liked him the most. This was Theodoric Gausser, Elector Count of Nordland, and there was something attractive about his unflinchingly martial demeanour.

‘We have all suffered,’ replied a woman standing to his right. She was as old as Gausser, and draped in lines of pearls over a fabulously opulent gown of grey and silver. Her face was gaunt, though liberally rouged and slabbed with whitener. She carried herself perfectly erect, as if her spine might snap if she curved it.

This was Emanuelle von Liebwitz, Elector Count of Wissenland, as fabulously wealthy as her subjects were grindingly poor. Like Gausser, she was no one’s fool, though her imperious manner even with her peers made her hard to warm to.

‘Nordland has borne the brunt of the enemy for centuries,’ reiterated Gausser. ‘We have fought them longer and harder. I know what it takes to beat them.’

‘None of us knows what it takes to beat them,’ said a third figure, quietly. He was thinner than the others, as tall as a crane and with a pronounced nose. His attire was less flamboyant – a drab green overcoat and travel-worn boots. That would have come as little surprise to any who knew his province – Stirland was miserably poor, and far from the Imperial centre from which all patronage flowed. This one was Graf Alberich Haupt-Anderssen, a grand name that did little to disguise the poverty of his inheritance. ‘If we did, their threat would have been eradicated long before this day. They are unbeatable. All that remains is survival for as long as we can muster it.’

The other two glared at Haupt-Anderssen contemptuously. The first two were warlike electors, and their cousin’s blood was too thin for their liking.

Martak said nothing, but took some enjoyment from the incongruity of the situation. None of those assembled could remotely have been described as the finest the Empire had to offer. The greatest names were dead or missing – Gelt, Volkmar, Schwarzhelm, Helborg, the Emperor himself. Other Electors, such as the great Todbringer of Middenheim, were looking to their own defences. What remained in Altdorf were the outriders, those still obsessed enough with the Great Game to seek political advancement even as the wolves scratched at the door.

‘Your cowardice damns you, Graf,’ spat von Liebwitz.

Haupt-Anderssen shrugged. ‘There is no virtue in hiding behind fantasies.’

‘You shame this hall,’ said Gausser, gesturing to the towering image of Magnus.

Haupt-Anderssen sniffed, and said nothing.

A fourth figure cleared his throat then – Hans Zintler, the Reikscaptain. In Helborg’s absence he was the highest ranking military officer, and carried himself suitably formally, with a brass-buttoned jerkin and short riding cloak. His black moustache was neatly trimmed across a broad-jawed face.

‘With your pardon, lords,’ he interjected. ‘Only one task requires our attention this day. The news from Marienburg requires a response.’

‘Deserved everything they got,’ growled Gausser. ‘Dirty secessionists.’

‘Maybe so, lord,’ said von Liebwitz, ‘but the question is what to do about the army that laid them low.’

‘Nothing,’ said Haupt-Anderssen. ‘Look to our walls. That is the only hope.’

‘Carroburg stands in their path,’ pointed out Zintler. ‘If it is not to fall in turn, it must be reinforced.’

‘With what?’ grunted Martak, his first contribution to the debate. All eyes turned to him, as if the others had only just noticed his presence. Von Liebwitz’s elegant nose wrinkled, and she pressed a scented handkerchief to her mouth. ‘We can barely man the walls here. Send men to Carroburg and they’ll just die a little earlier.’

Gausser bristled. ‘We have wizards advising us on military matters now?’

‘You invited me,’ shrugged Martak. ‘I’d have been happier with the horses.’

Zintler coughed nervously. He was a good man, a fine soldier, but he did not like discord amongst his superiors. ‘Then, Supreme Patriarch, what would you suggest?’

Martak laughed harshly. ‘Gelt was Supreme Patriarch. I’m just a filthy bird-tamer.’ He looked at Gausser shrewdly. ‘Call the Carroburg garrison back here. Call them all back. Surrender the forest – it can look after itself. You can’t weaken this army, not out there. All we have are walls.’ He shot a glance at Haupt-Anderssen. ‘You’re right. We need to use them.’

Von Liebwitz took a short breath, trying not to sniff too deeply. ‘It is clear to me, master wizard, that you have little understanding of war. There are three armies making their way towards us. Once they reach the Reik valley, we will be without hope of reinforcement. If nothing is done to hamper their progress, the noose will tighten before the solstice falls.’

‘They won’t hurry,’ snorted Martak. ‘Do you not see it yet? Geheimnisnacht is the key. They will arrive then, when their powers are at their height and the daemon-moon rides full.’ He crossed his arms. ‘That is the hour of our doom. We can neither delay nor hasten its coming, so we should just make ready for it.’

Zintler looked uncomfortable. In normal times, Martak’s advice would have been balanced by the Grand Theogonist’s, but, as with so many others, Volkmar was missing, presumed dead, and the arch-lectors had not answered his summons.

‘Superstition,’ muttered Gausser, though with no great certainty.

Martak raised a dirty eyebrow. ‘You think so? I’ll remind you of that when the wind is screaming and the earth beneath our feet begins to move.’

‘That is already taking place,’ observed Haupt-Anderssen archly.

He was right – reports had started coming from across the city. Panicked residents had begun to flee the poorer quarters after wells had sprouted foul weeds overnight, and gutters had burst open with broods of writhing rats. The nights had been filled with unearthly screams, though the City Watch had never been able to track them down. Some even said that the river itself was changing, thickening up like broth over a stove.

‘And that is your task, wizard,’ accused von Liebwitz. ‘Let us look to the defences – your kind should be cleansing the city.’

Martak glared at her darkly. ‘We’re doing our part. It would help if I weren’t summoned to all these damned councils.’

‘We need to determine the order of defence,’ insisted Gausser, his cheeks reddening.

‘So you can master us all,’ sniped von Liebwitz.

Haupt-Anderssen laughed at that, and Gausser started to shout something about the noted cowardice of Wissenlanders, to which their elector vigorously responded.

By then, though, Martak was not listening, and neither was Zintler. Heavy crashes could be heard from outside the chamber, echoing up the long corridors. The Reikscaptain drew his blade, and slowly moved towards the double-door entrance. Two guards on either side of the portal did likewise. The commotion drew closer, growing louder on the far side.

Then the twin doors slammed back, and a band of heavily armed men broke in. They were plate-armoured, and bore the marks of a hard road on travel-worn garb.

‘Stand down!’ shouted Zintler, barring their passage with commendable bravery, seeing as how he was outnumbered eight to three. ‘This is a private council – who dares to interrupt?’

The intruders parted, allowing one of their number to stride to the forefront. Unlike the others, he was helm-less, exposing a hawk-like visage barred by a long, carefully lacquered moustache. There could be no mistaking the proud features that adorned coins and devotional lockets from Helmgart to Middenheim, though they had been badly disfigured by claw-marks along one cheek. The lines were still raw and bloody, making the Reiksmarshal look half daemonic.

‘What is this rabble?’ rasped Kurt Helborg, striding up to the electors. ‘Where is Todbringer? Where are the Reikland generals? And who is this beggar?’

Martak bowed clumsily. ‘The Supreme Patriarch, my lord. Or so they tell me.’

Helborg stared at him, incredulous, before turning to Gausser. ‘My lord elector, tell me this is some foul jest.’

Gausser shot him an apologetic look. ‘Times are not what they were, lord Reiksmarshal.’

Von Liebwitz drew up to Helborg then, a rapt expression on her aged face. ‘You are alive! Thank the gods. Now we can plan our defence in earnest – what of the Emperor? What of Lord Schwarzhelm?’

Helborg briefly looked lost then, as if the questions confused him. His gaze ran around the chamber, from Gausser to von Liebwitz to Haupt-Anderssen to Martak. ‘This is the war council?’

Martak sniffed noisily, dislodging a troublesome clot of dried mucus that had been plaguing him since waking. ‘Who were you expecting? You took every blade worth having north.’

Helborg repeated his incredulous stare, before shaking his head with resignation. ‘Then these are the tools I have. They must suffice.’ He turned to Gausser, the only figure in the room he seemed to have any rapport with. ‘I bring hard truths with me. The Emperor is slain. Our northern armies are scattered, and the enemy follows hard on my heels. We do not have much time, and the city must be secured. What preparations have been made?’

Gausser glanced at von Liebwitz, whose eyes strayed towards Haupt-Anderssen, who quickly deferred to Zintler.

‘We were debating our first moves, my lord,’ said the Reikscaptain, haltingly. ‘The news from Marienburg is just in, and we had not yet determined just where to concentrate–’

‘Taal’s teeth,’ swore Helborg. He beckoned to his preceptor. ‘Find out what forces are still in the city. Order the gates closed – no man leaves without my order. Secure the armouries. Appoint a quartermaster-general and place all water-sources and food-stores under his protection. See the Imperial standard is flown from the Palace summit, and spread the word that the Emperor has routed the enemy at Heffengen and will soon return. Make sure this is believed.’

His preceptor saluted, and departed to carry out his orders, taking the remaining knights with him. As he left, Martak chuckled softly. This was why Kurt Helborg was Reiksmarshal, and why fighting men worshipped the earth he trod. For the first time since his appointment, Martak wondered whether he actually might survive this war.

‘May I say, sir, your return seems timely,’ Martak said.

Helborg looked back at him doubtfully.

‘We will see,’ he muttered. ‘We will see.’

Deep in the foundations of the old city, far below the streets and avenues, the vapours never ceased. They curled along the brick-lined sewers, steaming from the surface of the foetid waters. They pooled in the dank, dark recesses of ancient cesspits and long-buried catacombs, curling like hair amid the endless shadows.

No natural light penetrated so far down, and the only illumination was the pale glow of phosphorescent mosses clambering all across the crumbling masonry. The moss had spread quickly since its introduction, racing down the winding shafts and choked tunnels, feeding on the filth that sank to the city’s base. It was everywhere now, smothering all other growths and lending the forgotten ways of Altdorf a ghostly sheen.

It got worse the lower one went, until the waterways were a thick soup of throbbing spore-clumps and the luminous tendrils hung from the low ceiling like stalactites. At the very bottom, in the deepest shafts of the undercity, the infestation was so complete that it felt like the entire structure was built from nothing more than fronds of softly iridescent lichen.

Down there, behind a locked door under a low stone archway, the noise of bubbling and hissing never ceased. The vapours poured out from the cracks in the door, seething out from between planks of long-rotten wood before drifting off down the myriad tunnels of the labyrinth beyond.

Within the chamber lay a bizarre panoply of instruments – copper kettles, alembics, condensers, cauldrons and mixing-pots. Concoctions bubbled in a dozen bronze jars, sending lurid coloured steam twisting up to the low chamber roof. Further in, the contents became more grisly – corpses, as thin and wasted as rabbits, hung from iron hooks on the wall, each one bearing the signs of horrific illness. Some had burst torsos, their entrails hanging from the rupture and dripping steadily onto the filth-strewn floor below. Others had no eyes, or obscene growths suspended from their agonised flesh. All bore expressions of unbearable horror on their drawn faces, the marks of their final struggles against the poxes that had killed them.

Further down, moving along narrow passageways, the sounds of bubbling and gurgling grew louder. Gouts of steam hissed from tangled iron piping, and an immense pendulum ticked back and forth as if counting time towards the end of the world. More jars and phials cluttered every surface, each one fizzing and boiling with an endless variety of lurid liquids.

Right at the far end of those chambers, deep down in the basement, a hunched figure worked steadily over a long, low bench. He was grotesquely fat, and the jowls of his under-chin wobbled as he moved. A thick-lipped mouth murmured and drooled, sending lines of yellowish sputum coursing over a boil-encrusted face. Perhaps once he had been a mortal man, for he still wore the remnants of Imperial garb amid the folds and sags of his overspilling corpulence. Now, though, he was changed, given unnatural bulk beyond the dreams of even the most assiduous glutton. Tiny creatures, no more than jaws and eyes attached to slug-like sacs of blubber, crawled all over him, wriggling between the grease-stained fabric of his clothes.

He hummed to himself as he worked, transferring frothing potions from vial to vial, mixing them, testing them, observing the results on a long, ink-stained ledger before stacking the glassware back amid the racks on the walls and starting again.

Behind him, huger than any of the others, a black iron cauldron stood, squat as a gravid sow and thick with the patina of ages. A daemon’s face had been hammered onto the swollen curve of the bowl, spewing excreta from a fanged mouth. Within that cauldron bubbled the strongest broth of all – a noxious brew that made the air above it tremble. The fat-slick surface broke, and a desperate hand burst out, clutching at the side of the cauldron and gripping tight.

The grotesque alchemist saw the fingers scrabbling for purchase and chuckled wetly.

‘Oh, no,’ he chided, reaching over and prising the hand from the cauldron’s edge. ‘Not again. Stay down, and drink it up. It will be over quicker that way.’

He shoved the arm back under and held it there. A flurry of bubbles plopped up, accompanied by what sounded like desperate gagging. After a while the bubbles ran out, and the alchemist withdrew his hand. He brought it up to his mouth, and licked the liquids from it with a long, prehensile tongue.

‘Almost there,’ he murmured, savouring the taste.

From further along, past the cauldron and into the shadows beyond, came the sound of desperate, furious weeping. The alchemist frowned, and looked up.

‘What is this?’

He shuffled past the cauldron, squeezing his heft past the cluttered work surfaces, wobbling over towards a series of iron cages bolted to the walls. Living men and women huddled inside them, their faces stark with terror. Most already showed signs of sickness. All were famished.

‘No more of this!’ the alchemist warned, brandishing a huge ladle like a weapon. ‘You are the lucky ones. You have been chosen. Show some respect.’

The captive mortals stared back at him, some with disbelief, some with rank fear, a few with some residual defiance.

They had seen what had happened to the others. They knew what was coming for them.

‘We are nearly there now,’ said the alchemist, his phlegmy voice almost tender. ‘Nearly there.’

He shuffled back to the cauldron, and started to stir. As he did so, the surface steamed and bubbled, filling the air with a hot, sweet, overpowering aroma of putrescence. Translucent slops hit the floor as the ladle stirred. Some of those slops were moving.

The alchemist leaned over the cauldron’s edge and took a long, deep sniff. As he did so, something stirred under the surface – a shadow moved, as if a creature of the deep had made its home amid the greasy soup of flesh and fat.

‘Quicken, now, great one,’ cooed the alchemist. ‘Festus calls you. The Leechlord smoothes the way between the worlds.’ His grin broadened, exposing flattened, butter-yellow teeth. ‘Altdorf awaits. It has no idea of the delights in store.’

He stirred faster, making the broth ripple.

‘But it will soon,’ he slurred, growing sweatily excited. ‘Oh, yes. It will very soon.’

EIGHT

Leoncoeur rode out, feeling the harsh wind brush against his face. His sword was already slick with the blood of the slain – no excursion into the countryside around Couronne passed without encountering the dregs of Mallobaude’s corruption. The land still crawled with sorcery, as dark as oil and stained deep into the soil.

Ahead of him, barren fields marched away to the north. To his right stood a scraggy mass of forest, choked with briars and bearing the dank smell of decay. The land fell away sharply as the trees clustered, tumbling towards the river Gironne as it wound its uncertain way towards the distant coast.

Leoncoeur leaned forward in the saddle, scouring the landscape ahead. His quarry could not be far off.

Then he saw it – a ragged bundle of robes, scampering madly, haring for the cover of the trees. Leoncoeur recognised the long pointed hat, the trailing wisps of a ruddy overgrown beard.

He kicked his steed into a gallop, hoping to run the hedge-witch down before he vanished into the shadow of the trees. Such wizards were petty necromancers and curse-pedlars, but in such straitened times even their trivial malice was cause for concern.

The hedge-witch sprinted hard, knowing his danger, nearly stumbling as he careered down the slope towards the woodland. He was already close to safety.

Leoncoeur spurred his mount on, kicking up mud as he went, tearing towards the rapidly approaching line of trees. He pulled his blade back, readying for the lean and swipe that would take the witch’s head off.

Just at the last moment, the man swerved aside, darting as if alerted by premonition, and scampered under the protection of the first gnarled branches.

Leoncoeur did not hesitate. Crouching low, he crashed through the forest’s edge after his prey, ignoring the whiplash branches across his face and arms.

‘Yield yourself!’ he commanded, made angry by the missed chance.

He could still see the hedge-witch ahead of him, swerving desperately between black-barked tree-trunks and slipping on the greasy leaf-litter. Soon the forest would grow too dense for the pursuit, and Leoncoeur’s charger would become useless.

With a savage kick of his spurs, Leoncoeur goaded his steed into a final burst of speed, sending it thundering across the rapidly-closing terrain. Just as the hedge-witch made for a screen of wickedly thorned brambles, Leoncoeur’s sword lashed down, raking across the man’s cloaked back and cutting down to the bone beneath.

The witch screamed, dropping to the ground and writhing. Leoncoeur pulled his steed around tightly and spurred it back towards the stricken wretch. The wizard tried to rise, to drag himself to his feet and somehow stagger out of danger, but it was too late. Leoncoeur rode him down, crushing his bloodied frame into the mire and silencing the shrill screams. Then he drew his horse to a halt, working hard to calm the enraged steed, before dismounting and striding over towards the remains.

He gazed down with disgust. The man was just another impoverished village trickster with delusions of power. It would have been better to have made an example of him, to have drawn his guts slowly out in front of a crowd of appreciative peasants. Out here in the wilds, the lesson was wasted.

Leoncoeur plunged his sword into the twitching corpse, just to be sure, then pulled the blade free, noting with distaste the stains along the steel.

He felt soiled. Running down such filth was a task barely worthy of his station. He needed something better, something grander, befitting the station he had once enjoyed.

Ahead of him, the Gironne churned at the base of a deep creek, its banks thickly cloaked with trees and creeping vines. The leaves had an unhealthy sheen to them, as if rot had penetrated down to the sap.

Leoncoeur tied his horse up and trudged down to the water’s edge. He slithered down the muddy bank and knelt down, dipping his sword into the murky water. Grabbing tufts of grass, he wiped the gore from the blade, working slowly and patiently. His sword was his life, and had been ever since he had been a raw novice with more bravery than sense.

He had always done things diligently. He had always served, and yet the reward had been snatched away.

His blade now a little cleaner, he replaced it in the scabbard. Then he knelt over the water’s edge, thirst kindling in his throat. He stared at the scummy surface, and changed his mind. Something foul was getting into the rivers – they were beginning to smell like sewers.

Just as he was about to pull away, he caught sight of his reflection gazing up at him. He looked haggard, his noble bearing thinned out by Mallobaude’s treachery and le Breton’s acquisition of his birthright.

Then, looking closer, he saw that it was not his reflection at all – he had not lost that much weight. The golden locks were too long, the face too slender. A face clarified below the filmy surface, one he remembered from the distant past.

‘My Lady,’ he breathed, falling to both knees.

The waters stirred, bubbling into a froth, then broke. A figure rose from the river, lithe and translucent. She wore a gown of purest emerald, and it flowed across her like cataracts. Her face was hard to look at for long – it had a fey, dangerous quality, as if touched by elven magic. She remained standing in the river, the weeds draped around her ankles, gazing benevolently down at the kneeling knight before her. The sunlight became a little less grey, and the leaves were touched with a golden sheen.

Leoncoeur felt his heart-rate pick up, and his face went hot.

‘Lion-heart,’ the Lady murmured, her voice as ephemeral as the wind in the reeds. ‘You were ever my favourite. My champion.’

Leoncoeur looked up at her, and the sight of her unfiltered beauty pierced his heart. ‘Then why, lady?’ he asked.

She knew what he meant. Her face did not give away pity – it would never do that – but understanding shone in her emerald eyes.

‘All things are changing,’ she said softly. ‘The world turns faster, and the old gods are passing. This realm is only one of many, lion-heart – you could not be contained by it forever.’

Leoncoeur struggled to hear her. When they had spoken before, so long ago that it seemed like a dream of infancy, she had been proud and imperious, a queen in her invincible realm. Now, she whispered as if sick, her otherworldly voice as faint as an invalid’s.

‘My soul is Bretonnia,’ Leoncoeur said, not understanding what she was telling him.

‘It was. The Green Knight has come to claim his kingdom. It has always been his. Your destiny is different. You will die alone, my champion, far from home. You will never take the throne again.’

The words were harsh, and they cut him deeply. Deep down, Leoncoeur had never quite lost the half-hope that le Breton was an apparition sent by the fell gods, some terrible shade who would be exposed in due time, leaving the throne free for him again.

‘Once, you told me different,’ he said, unable to keep the ghost of reproach from his voice.

‘I never tell false,’ she said. ‘I told you that you would lead your people into glory. That remains your destiny, should you be strong enough to seize it. Are you strong enough, lion-heart? Or has this bitterness quenched your fire?’

‘Never. Command me.’

A chill breeze made the river ripple, stirring the trees around them. The Lady shivered, and her impeccable features creased. ‘Great powers are moving. They converge on Sigmar’s city. The Fallen covet it, as do the Dead. Those who remain will not stand unaided. That is where the hammer will fall, and that is where the world will change.’

‘But my realm–’

‘It is no longer your realm.’

‘My people are hard-pressed.’

‘The Green Knight is their guardian now,’ the Lady said, almost sorrowfully, as if that alone presaged the end of her hopes for something better. ‘I tell you the truth. Is that not what you have been praying for?’

Leoncoeur looked at her intently. The beauty was still there, as was the ethereal power, but both were diminished. She was fighting against something. This apparition was costing her, and the price would be steep. ‘All lands are dying,’ he said, realising what made her sick. ‘They have poisoned the rivers.’

‘You asked for a way to serve,’ she said. ‘I have given it to you.’ She gave him a fond, faint smile. ‘If you spurn the offer, you might yet live. There might be some kind of service for you in safer places, of a meagre sort.’

Then it was Leoncoeur’s turn to smile. When their faces cast off the most oppressive lines of care, they looked so alike. ‘I never craved meagre service. I was a king.’

‘You still can be.’ The Lady began to sink, sliding down into the brackish waters. ‘The City of Sigmar, my champion. Already its foundations tremble. That is the anvil upon which the fate of man will be tempered.’

‘Then will you live, Lady?’ asked Leoncoeur, watching with concern as she slipped towards the Gironne’s tainted waters. ‘Can you be saved?’

‘Ask only of mortal fates,’ she whispered, her tresses sliding under the surface. ‘Look for me in pure waters, but the games of gods do not concern you.’

But they did. They always had. As Leoncoeur watched her subside into nothingness again, as the golden edges faded from the leaves and the air sunk once more into mud-stinking foulness, he felt as if his heart had been ripped out. He remained immobile for a long time, his knees sinking steadily into the mire, his hands limp by his sides.

‘The City of Sigmar,’ he murmured.

No force of the Empire had stirred itself when Bretonnia had been riven by war. Very rarely had the great and the good of Karl Franz’s realm given much thought to their chivalrous cousins over the Grey Mountains. Then again, it was foolish to assume that they had not been hard-pressed themselves. Leoncoeur had heard the rumours running through court – that disaster had overtaken Marienburg, that the north was aflame, that even the greenskins were terrified of something and remained hidden in their forest lairs.

He felt icy water creep under the skin of his armour plate, rousing him from his lethargy. He stood cumbersomely, hauling on looped creepers. No remnant of the Lady’s presence remained, and the Gironne looked as turgid and weed-choked as before.

Leoncoeur trudged back to his mount, slipping on the mud-slick riverbank as he went.

‘Altdorf,’ he said, musingly, already gauging the distances. ‘If that is where the fates are to be written, we must not be missing.’

He thought of the hot blood of his countrymen, and their desire to exchange the grim hunts after petty quarry for the blood-and-thunder of a real war. Many still looked to him; if he ordered them, they would ride with him still.

He reached his horse, and untied it.

‘So be it,’ he said to himself, smiling dryly as he prepared to mount again. ‘I asked for a path. I have been given one.’

He vaulted into the saddle. He turned one last time, gazing back to where ripples still radiated, and saluted.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

Then he kicked his mount up the slope, and was soon gone.

In his absence, the riverbank sunk into silence once more, broken only by the faint slap of the river-current against the shore, and the mournful wind in the twisted branches.

The deathmoon rode in the eastern sky, glowing with a sick greenish sheen. Its wholesome companion was nowhere to be seen.

Such as was foretold, Vlad thought, looking up into heavens.

The land around him was limned with a ghostly light, tainted as stomach-bile. Morrslieb had ever cast a corrupted illumination, but now its noxious effluence seemed worse than ever. Its scarred face was bloated, presaging the onset of Geheimnisnacht.

That should have made him glad. In the old days, when the deathmoon rode high on bitter, cloudless nights he had gloried in the visions it had brought him. He had raised scores of unliving to march under his black banners, and their bones had shone under the glow of the tainted heaven-spoor.

He stood before Castle Drakenhof’s ruined gates, his long cloak snapping in the night wind, and gazed out over the host he had summoned. As yet it did not compare to the vast armies he had once marched west with, but it was grand enough for now. Crowds of Sylvanian troopers, shivering in the cold, stood in decent approximations of Imperial infantry squares. They were dwarfed by the clattering ranks of skeletons and zombies, some pulled from the dark soil just hours ago by Vlad’s necromancers. Skinless horses walked silently along avenues between ghostly regiments, their skull-faced riders showing no emotion as they surveyed the lines of the undead host. Black banners flew, their tattered edges pulled by roving winds.

‘Will it be enough?’ Vlad asked.

No one answered. He stood alone. On his first such crusade, Isabella had been by his side, counselling him, encouraging him. Her absence made his heart ache – to the extent he had a heart, at any rate. The grief was real enough.

In the far distance, thunder cracked along the eastern horizon. The sawtooth edge of the mountains briefly became visible, black against the outer dark. Carrion crows cawed as they flocked above in huge swarms, ready to fly west ahead of the main host.

Vlad watched them mob and swirl. There were many hours left before the dawn, and they could make good time under cover of night. Though he planned to drive the army onwards even during the daylight hours, he knew they would struggle under the sun’s harsh glare. The mortals would need to be fed and rested, and even the dead would require constant supervision from his covens of spell-winders.

They would make for the Stir, taking any towns and villages on the way and turning their impoverished inhabitants to the cause. Since the Law of Death had been loosened, the many graveyards of his cursed province would readily yield up more fell troops for the host, and so the numbers of both mortal and unliving would swell with every league they marched. Once at the river, they would take barges downstream, riding the flood as the dark waters foamed and rushed west.

He did not expect any serious resistance before reaching the borders of Reikland. The Empire was like a rotten fruit – still intact on the outside, but eaten hollow within. The fortified city of Wurtbad might prove a temporary delay, but he had already taken steps to ease that potential barrier.

Behind him, he heard the howls of vargheists as they loped and swooped amid the ruins. He sensed the shuddering movements of ghouls, and saw the shimmer-pattern of unquiet spirits. Those spectral presences would soon send the entire realm into paroxysms of fear, just as they had done so long ago. And yet, this time he was not marching to bring the Empire to its knees. Far from it.

He looked down at the roll of parchment in his left hand, sealed with a great wax glob and marked with the signet-device of the von Carsteins. He remembered how difficult it had been to find the words to use.

I am aware that the mutual enmity between our peoples will make this proposal a hard one to entertain fairly. I have no doubt, though, given the circumstances, you will see past ancient prejudices and buried grievances. You will have seen the same auguries as we have, and you will know what is at stake. And, after all, do I not have some prior claim to this title? Or does right of conquest count for nothing in these debased times?

Vlad was not sure about those lines, but he had left them in. The detail of the law could be hammered out in person – the important thing was to make the approach now, before the city was cut off by the hosts of the North.

He looked up, just in time to see an enormous bat flutter down from the castle rafters. Its body was as big as a wolf’s, and its leathery wings had a downdraft like a hunting eagle’s. More bats followed their leader down, hovering in pack formation, until nine pairs of red eyes glowed before him in the night.

Vlad wrapped the parchment tightly in oilskin and tied the bundle with twine. He held it up, and the hovering bat took it in its powerful jaws.

‘Go swift, go safe,’ whispered Vlad, reaching up to caress the animal.

Then the whole flock of fell creatures shot upward into the night, spiralling high over the assembled army and heading west.

‘Their pride will be the greatest obstacle,’ he mused aloud. ‘Can the Empire humble itself enough to see sense? That is yet to be decided.’ Then he smiled coldly to himself, feeling his long fangs snick on his lower lip. ‘All men can change, and every mortal has a turning-point. We just have to find where that is. Would you not agree, Herrscher?’

The witch hunter stepped from the shadow of the gates, flanked by ashen-faced guards. His own skin was as white as bone, shrivelled dry onto his prominent skeleton. The clothes he had worn when fully alive now hung from him loosely, and his pistol-belt had slipped almost comically about his thighs.

Herrscher stared out at the host before them. Then he looked down at his hands. He was trembling.

‘The shock will pass,’ said Vlad, not unkindly. ‘You forget the worst of the pain, in time.’

Herrscher looked at him, a mix of horror and hatred on his face. For all that, he did not reach for his weapon. ‘How is it... possible?’ he rasped, and his once-powerful voice was as thin as corpse-linen.

Vlad sighed. He would have to get used to many such initiations into the half-life of undead servitude. ‘You do not need to know that. All you need to know now is that my will gives you breath. You will accept that. You will come to cherish it. The power of resistance you once commanded has gone, and you are my lieutenant now.’

Vlad regarded Herrscher with something approaching fondness. The witch hunter would never truly know it, but his position was one of the highest honour – other captains would be appointed, but he was the very first.

Herrscher looked like he wanted to scream, to dash his own brains out, to launch himself at Vlad and wring his neck, but of course none of those things were possible now. The witch hunter might be screaming on the inside, but he would do the bidding of the one who had raised him, just as Vlad did the bidding of Nagash who had raised him.

‘Now come,’ said Vlad, placing a gauntlet on Herrscher’s shoulder and leading him out from the gate’s shadow. ‘We march within the hour. Let me show you your new servants.’

Helborg woke with a jolt. He was still on his feet, propped up against a wall. He did not remember falling asleep. He had hardly been able to close his eyes for the three days since he had been back in Altdorf, and when he did his mind swiftly filled with nightmares. He saw, over and over, the Emperor felled above Heffengen, plummeting to the earth in a deathly spiral before disappearing from view.

The grief was still raw. Karl Franz had been the undisputed master of the sprawling Empire, the only man with the patience, the guile and the sheer presence to hold the fractious provinces together. Only Karl Franz could have faced down Volkmar in one of his tirades, or kept Gelt from flying off into another half-considered magical endeavour, or resisted the grim implacability of Schwarzhelm in his worst moods. Karl Franz had kept them all in line.

If Helborg was honest, only in the past few days had he truly understood what a titanic achievement that had been. The demands of electors, courtiers, wizards, engineers and generals were endless. Every hour brought new demands to his door, burdening him with both the vital and the trivial. For the moment, he had cowed the three electors into submission and ensured his mastery over the city defences, but it would only be a matter of time before they started scheming again. Both Gausser and von Liebwitz saw the present crisis as an opportunity for advancement, and even Haupt-Anderssen sniffed the chance to profit from the flux. Only the wizard Martak seemed to understand the Empire’s desperate straits, and he was little better than a pedlar, looked down on by his more elevated kin in the colleges and disregarded by the Palace staff who served him.

Helborg pushed himself from the wall he had been leaning against, cursing himself for losing consciousness. He was still in full ceremonial armour. He wore his Reiksguard symbols at all times to remind the populace – and, in truth, himself – that he was the last remaining link to the past. Out of all the great heroes of the Empire – Gelt, Volkmar, Schwarzhelm, Huss – only he remained, isolated and cut off from what remained of the northern armies. There was no knowing if any of them still lived, and to even contemplate mounting a significant defence without them felt alien and uncomfortable.

Helborg blinked heavily, hoping none had seen his lapse. The corridor around him was empty, a stone shell lined with torches. Through narrow slit-windows he could see that it was nearly dark outside, and the night’s chill was creeping through the granite. For a moment he could not remember why he had come this way, then it all came back – inspection of the northern gate with Zintler. He had made it as far as the fortified citadel above the gatehouse. He must have just paused for a moment.

He shook himself down, still feeling groggy from lack of rest, and went quickly up towards the parapet level. He climbed two spiral staircases, strode down a long archer’s gallery, then finally emerged into the open air again.

Zintler was waiting for him on the open summit of the gatehouse, a wide courtyard ringed with shoulder-height battlements. A huge flagpole stood in the centre of the space, hung with an Imperial standard. As he passed it, Helborg could smell the mould-spores on the fabric.

Even here, he thought grimly.

Zintler saluted as Helborg approached, not giving any indication that he had been kept waiting.

‘How stands it?’ asked Helborg, joining him on the northern edge of the courtyard.

‘Plague has reached the city,’ said Zintler. ‘Barely two-thirds of the men capable of carrying a sword can still lift one. It will only get worse.’

Helborg nodded grimly. Similar reports were coming in from all across Altdorf. Despite guarding the water supplies tightly, something was infecting the poorer quarters and spreading out to the garrisons. The air itself was foul, and carried an edge of bitterness when the wind blew.

‘The walls?’ Helborg asked, peering over the edge to look at them for himself.

The northern gate had been built up and augmented over hundreds of years, and was now a vast pile of age-darkened stone, crested with gunnery emplacements and the snarling golden gargoyles of griffons and lions. Bulwarks and kill-points jostled with one another in a cunning series of funnelling formations. By the time an enemy got anywhere close to the gates themselves, they would have been pummelled by artillery and ranged magic, doused in boiling oil and pelted with building rubble, then finally overwhelmed by sorties streaming out from hidden posterns all along the ingress way.

At least, that was how it had been in the past, when the Empire’s armies were more numerous than the sands on the grey Nordland shore. Now Helborg doubted whether he had enough able bodies to occupy more than half the defensive positions available to him.

‘The walls are crumbling,’ said Zintler flatly. He reached over to the top of the battlements and prised a section of mortar from the joints. It disintegrated between his finger and thumb. Once again, Helborg smelled the stench of rot.

‘It can’t be crumbling,’ Helborg muttered. ‘This is granite from the Worlds Edge peaks.’

‘The Rot,’ said Zintler, as if that explained everything.

They were already referring to the Rot in the streets – the malaise that seemed to spread through everything, spoiling milk, fouling foodstuffs, infecting living flesh.

‘Enough of that,’ snapped Helborg. ‘Summon the master engineer and get him to shore up the foundations. The gates must hold.’

‘Master Ironblood is already engaged–’

‘Summon him!’ Helborg snapped. ‘I don’t care what he’s tinkering with – the gates must hold.’

Zintler bowed, admonished. The Reikscaptain had the grey lines of fatigue around his eyes, just as they all did. Helborg wondered if he had had any sleep either.

‘What reports from the west?’ Helborg asked, running a weary hand over his cropped scalp.

‘The enemy draws close to Carroburg.’

‘Have the Greatswords been pulled back?’

‘The messages were sent.’

‘That is not what I asked.’

Zintler looked rattled. ‘I do not know, lord. We send messengers out along the river, and never hear from them again. We send fortified contingents in barges, and they disappear. I do not have enough men to chase them all down. We do what we can, but–’

‘So be it,’ growled Helborg, not wanting to hear any more excuses. Zintler was doing his best, but the inexorable tide of work was getting to them all. Carroburg housed some of the finest regiments in the Reikland – if they could be salvaged, then the city’s defences would look a lot more secure. If they decided to make a doomed stand at the western city, then things looked even bleaker. ‘There is nothing more to be done.’

Helborg’s cheek flared with pain. The daemon’s claws had bitten deep, and though the wound had closed over, it had never truly healed. He was aware how it made him look. He could feel poisons at work under the scabby skin, and knew that no apothecary would be able to salve them.

It is my penance, he mused bleakly. For failing my liege.

Zintler’s face flushed. ‘I can try again,’ he said.

‘Too late now,’ growled Helborg, cursing the luck that seemed ever against them. ‘If they come, they come. Until then, look to the walls. Organise details to begin work on the gatehouse this night, and bring me reports from the watch. We need clean water from somewhere, and I cannot believe all the shafts are tainted.’

Zintler saluted smartly, and walked across the courtyard to the stairwell. Helborg watched him go, noting the stooped line of his shoulders.

Karl Franz would have handled him better, he thought to himself. He would have handled all of them better.

Helborg limped over to the very edge of the parapet, and gazed moodily north. Out under the cover of the encroaching dark, the tree line brooded like a vast slick of tar. The foliage had been allowed to creep closer to the walls than it should have done. Everything seemed to be growing at a burgeoning rate, blooming in a mire of foulness far more quickly than it could be cut down again.

Above the jagged lines of the firs, Morrslieb rode low, its virulent orb glowing yellow-green. As Helborg’s eyes strayed towards it, the wound in his cheek throbbed harder.

Behind him, the soft light of lanterns flickered into life, one by one, as the citizens began the nightly chore of warding against the night-terrors. Bonfires would be lit at every street intersection, and patrols doubled up. That did not stop the regular disappearance of citizens, nor the growing spread of the pox, nor the uncontrollable nightmares that made children and adults alike scream in their sweat-sodden cots.

Out there, somewhere, the hordes of the End Times were coming, burning and hacking, and with only one goal in mind.

‘I will resist you,’ murmured Helborg, fighting against exhaustion, knowing how much labour still lay ahead of him. ‘We will not retreat. We will meet you with our blades and our hearts intact, for we are men, and you have never extinguished us, not after three thousand years of trying.’

As he spoke, his gauntlets curled into fists. He stood atop the pinnacle of the northern gate, with the entire city at his back, and cursed the darkness.

Out in the gathering night, nothing changed. The trees rustled in the distance, rubbing branches against one another as if they were greedy hands clutching weapons. The eerie calls of night-birds shrieked into the gloom, and the uncaring stars came out, just as they had done since the world was made.

Slowly, his body shot through with the gathering weight of exhaustion, Helborg turned from the vista, and limped back into the gatehouse. His tasks for the night were only just beginning.

NINE

The river Reik had once flown strongly west of Carroburg. It had plunged into a narrow gorge, foaming and hissing, before reaching the cataracts that sent it tumbling down forty feet of rock-strewn white water. The cliffs on either side of the valley soared up precipitously, clad in dark firs and dripping with a constant mist of spray. The famed citadel itself had been raised on the northern shore – a spur of black rock, wound about with tight circles of inner walls and close-packed towers. Carroburg perched above the drop like a crow poised for scavenging. The banners of Middenland hung from its sheer-angled tower roofs, bearing the device of the white wolf atop a blue ground.

Dominating the city was its fortress, built for defence, with soaring outer walls jutting from sheer cliffs of rain-slick rock. Only two gates broke the circle of the citadel’s lower walls, one looking east towards Altdorf, the other west towards Marienburg. In normal times both were kept open during the daylight hours, though for many weeks they had been barred and locked tight. A meagre force of Greatswords had issued out along the great western road to relieve Marienburg once news of its siege had come in, but no news had returned regarding their fate, and the city’s burgomeisters had feared the worst. After that, no living soul passed the cordon of the walls, and the populace huddled within their protection even as the nights were filled with lurid screaming and the waters around them seemed to thicken and spoil.

Travelling at the head of their vast host, Otto and Ethrac paused at the point the Reik curved steeply north towards the Carroburg gorge. They were both riding Ghurk, and had to yank his ears hard to get him to stop lumbering.

‘What do you make of it, o my brother?’ asked Otto, licking his lips.

‘Satisfactory,’ replied Ethrac, running a wizened finger around the lip of his plague-bells. ‘Better than I hoped for.’

In years past, they would have been staring up at a daunting defensive position, a natural funnel-point overlooked by formidable gunnery and backed up by the feared garrison of Greatswords. Now, the Reik was clogged with great mats of grey-fronded moss. In defiance of the strong current, the mats had floated upriver, lodging against the bank and blocking the flow. As the flood around them ebbed, more clots of foliage bumped and twisted upstream, further silting up the power of the waters.

Even as the river had choked on the thick layers of unnatural vegetation, the forest on either bank had burgeoned and burst its bounds, sending meandering tendrils snaking out into what had once been open ground. Tree-trunks had burst, exposing thick smears of throbbing mucus within. Briars had shot from the boiling earth, tangling and throttling anything they came across. The naked cliffs below Carroburg were now writhing with tentacles, spikes and suckers. The cataract itself was gone, replaced by a slithering slop of viscous algal slime.

Otto gazed up at the fortress. The base of its still-mighty walls was a hundred feet away. He reached for a copper spyglass at his belt, and placed it against his bloodshot eye. As he did so, the lens blinked.

‘They are locked up within it, o my brother,’ Otto observed, moving the spyglass across the battlements. He could see spear-tips moving across the parapets. There were still artillery pieces on the high battlements, and some of them might do a little damage. ‘They are not getting out now. Ghurk will feast on hot flesh this night.’

Ghurk chortled, making his rolling shoulders shudder. Ethrac stood up, shaking his bell-staff. ‘The foundations will moulder,’ he muttered, invoking the dark magic that welled up all around him so easily now. ‘The stone will break. The bones will snap.’

Otto joined his brother’s chuckling. He had not slain in earnest since Marienburg, and the blood on his scythe was almost dry. ‘It will be a mercy for them,’ he said. ‘Your medicines! They will splutter on them.’

Ghurk started to lumber onwards, his cloven hooves sinking deep into the muddy mulch below. He waded across the channel where the river had been, and sank barely up to his shins. All around him, the vanguard of the pestilential host advanced in turn, surging across what should have been a raging torrent. Norscan warriors strode out, swinging their cleavers in armoured fists, followed by the long ranks of disease-addled plague-zombies.

The trees around them shivered, and strange beasts crept out from the shadows – wolves with swollen bellies and sore-thick jowls, bears with split torsos and glistening ribcages, goat-like horrors with eyeless faces and dribbling withers. The whole of nature had been perverted, and the coming of the Glottkin roused them all from whatever dank pit of misery they had curled into.

Otto felt a savage joy kindle in his rotten heart. Ethrac’s magicks would do their work soon, and the citadel’s foundations would begin to crack. He could already see the results – poison-vines prising the block apart and freezing it into powder. The air stank with glorious virulence, ushering the numberless hordes up the gorge mouth and towards the high gates.

‘Faster, Ghurk-my-brother,’ Otto urged, slapping his brother on his shoulder. ‘We are dallying. Show some speed!’

Ghurk issued a joyous bark, and started to pick up the pace. His hooves splashed deep as he rolled up the choked riverbed. In his wake, the entire horde did likewise, shambling and surging like some colossal tide of incoming filth. A thousand parched throats croaked out battle-cries, and sonorous war horns boomed a hoarse, echoing dirge.

Far ahead, from atop the tallest tower, the trumpets of the Empire issued their counter-challenge. Puffs of white smoke rippled along the parapets, presaging the blackpowder volleys that would soon be cracking and spitting among them.

Otto cared nothing for that. The seamy air coursed through his lank hair as he held tight onto Ghurk’s yawing body. Soon they would be up among them, breaking skulls.

There were times when the resistance of mortals genuinely puzzled him. What could be better than indulging in the glorious foulness of the Plaguefather? What could be better than to be blessed with such noxious, bountiful gifts?

Still, for whatever reason, they failed to grasp the possibilities and held on to their dreary, grey lives surrounded by fear and privation. He could not be too miserable about that – it meant that there were wars to be fought, and so his scythe would always run with glutinous fluids, melting from the body and ready to be slurped down quick.

He grinned, seeing how quickly Ghurk ate up the ground and brought the doom of Carroburg closer. Ethrac continued to mutter, and inky clouds roiled across the beleaguered fortress, spinning out of the lead-grey sky like bile dropped into spoiled cream.

‘Onward, my creatures!’ Otto croaked, waving his scythe wildly and straining to catch the first sight of a terror-whitened mortal face. ‘Climb fast! Drag them down! Suck their marrows and squeeze their eyes!’

The host answered him with a chorus of eager roars. Like some enormous, unnatural flood breaking in reverse, the host of the Plaguefather surged up the gorge mouth, clambered up the rocky cliffs and swarmed up towards the walls, its eyes already alight with slaughter.

Leoncoeur stood on the balcony of the old stone tower south of Couronne and gazed out across the assembled throng. The rain hammered down, just as it seemed to do all the time these days, turning the turf below into a quagmire. The eastern horizon grumbled and snapped with thunder, heralding the latest storm to blight the eastern marches. It was just as the Lady had told him – the world was coming apart at the edges, torn like a worn saddlebag.

He had chosen to make his appeal outside the boundaries of the city. Gilles le Breton had given him leave to make the case for Errantry, but it would have been discourteous to do so within the confines of Couronne. So the tidings had gone out to every keep and knightly hold between the coast and the mountains. Despite the weariness of the long and grinding war, those tidings had been answered handsomely, and knights had ridden through the wild nights to answer the summons.

That alone gave Leoncoeur some respite from the doubts that had plagued him. He may not have been king any longer, but they still responded to the House of Couronne when it called.

‘My brothers!’ he called out, shouting hard to make his voice carry across the crowds. Several hundred faces, many wearing open helms, others with their long hair lank from the rain, looked up at him expectantly. A riot of colours was visible on the collected tabards and tunics – a chequerboard of knightly houses in azure, sable, argent and crimson. Beyond the crowd, squires stood with the horses, enduring the ice-cold rain with grim fortitude.

‘Much has changed since I last addressed you,’ said Leoncoeur. ‘The traitor Mallobaude is dead, and the kingdom rests again with its founder. We have seen signs and wonders in the night sky, and the curse of foul magic creeps across our realm. You know in your hearts that this is no ordinary war, such as we have endured for time immemorial. For once, the prophecies of End Times strike at the heart of it. My brothers, the final test is coming.’

As he spoke, he studied their reactions carefully. Bretonnian knights were hard-bitten warriors, some of the finest and most dangerous cavalry troops in the entire Old World. They were not given to flights of fancy, and took tales of woe and prophecy in their stride.

‘Daemons are abroad again, and the servants of the foul gods march south with the storm at their backs. But as the winds of magic stir, other powers rise to contest it. I have seen the Lady, my brothers. She came to me from the waters and told me of the trials to come. This is why I call you here, so that her summons may be answered. I call Errantry, a crusade to strike at the heart of the new darkness.’

The knights watched him intently. From any other mouth, they might have scoffed at claims to have spoken with the Lady, but they knew Leoncoeur’s past and none raised so much as a sceptical smile. As Leoncoeur spoke, he thought he even detected something like longing in their steady expressions. They had endured so much over the past months, and the prospect of something turning the tide of long, slow defeat spoke to their martial hearts.

‘The axe will fall, not here, but on the City of Sigmar,’ Leoncoeur told them. ‘Even now, the enemy burns its way south, turning forests into haunts of ruin. We do not have long. If we muster as quickly as we may, even an unbroken ride across the mountains will scarce bring us there in time.’

Some scepticism showed on their faces now. The Empire was far away, and far removed from the concerns of Bretonnia. Relations between the two foremost kingdoms of men had ever been distant, riven as they were by both tongue and custom.

‘I know what you feel!’ Leoncoeur urged, forcing a smile. ‘You say to yourselves that Altdorf is distant, and has armies of its own, and that the Emperor did not send his own troops to aid us when we were staring devastation in the face. All these things are true. If you refused this summons then no Bretonnian would blame you. None of your ladies would scorn you, and your people would not whisper of your honour in the shadows of their hovels.’

Leoncoeur leaned out, clutching the railing of the stone balcony.

‘But consider this! The fire is coming. The war that will end all wars is breaking around us, and no realm on earth will be free of it. The anvil, the heart of it, is Altdorf. Here will the fates of men be decided, and here will the trials of the gods play out. Would you miss that contest? Would you wish to tell your children, if any future generation still lives in years to come, that the flower of Bretonnia was given the chance to intervene, and turned aside?’

The crowd began to murmur. Leoncoeur knew what stirred their hearts, and what kindled their ever-present sense of honour.

‘There is glory to be had here!’ he thundered, striking the railing with his gauntlet. ‘When we swore our vows, we swore to guard the weak and cast down the tyrant. We swore to ride out against any creature of darkness that threatened our hearth and home, and to take the vengeance of the Lady to every last one of them.’

Shouts of agreement now, and a low murmur of assent. Their spirits were roused.

‘In these times, every realm stands as our hearth, and the whole world is our home!’ roared Leoncoeur. ‘The corrupted will make no distinction between them and us. If Altdorf falls, who can doubt that Couronne will be next? When we shed blood on the Reik, we shed it for Bretonnia; when we shield the Empire from the storm, we shield the vales and towers of Quenelles and Bordeleaux!’

‘Leoncoeur!’ someone cried out, and the chant was taken up. Leoncoeur! Leoncoeur!

‘I can promise you nothing but hardship!’ Leoncoeur went on. ‘We may not return from this adventure, for I have seen the hosts of the north, and they are vast beyond imagination. But which of us has ever shied from the fear of death? Which of us has ever shown cowardice in battle, or refused a duel against the mightiest of foes? If we are to die, then let it be where the storm breaks! If our souls are forfeit, then let it be fighting in the last battle of the Old World, where our sacrifice shall echo down the ages! And when the tally of years is complete and the reckoning made for all nations, let no man say that when the call came, Bretonnia failed to answer!’

They were roaring now, drawing swords and crying out for vengeance. Leoncoeur felt savage joy rise up within his gorge.

They are still my people, he thought. And I am still their master.

‘For the Lady!’ he cried, raising both arms high in defiance of the tempest that raged about the tower.

The knights before him replied without hesitation, shouting out their fealty in a single massed roar.

The Lady!

Leoncoeur relaxed at last then, knowing the first task was over. Errantry had been called, and the heavy cavalry that made Bretonnia feared throughout the world had been unleashed. The road ahead would be dark, but at least the path was set.

The Lady had spoken. Her crusade had begun.

The vampire army travelled fastest by night. Only the weakest of Vlad’s servants suffered under the glare of the sun, but as the skies were relentlessly overcast and dark with rain even they were able to make some progress. In any case, the forest around them had burst into incredible growth, and the trees snaked and throttled one another in an orgy of tumescence.

Vlad rode at the head of his skeletal vanguard, looking about with distaste at the corruption of his land. Creepers twisted across the road, all bearing virulent fruits that burst with acid when trodden down. The soil itself seethed with fungi and clinging mosses, all striving with perverted fecundity to assert themselves against the foul growths around them.

This was life in all its disgusting, liquid excess. Even as a mortal man he would have found such violent displays of fertility alarming. As a lord of undeath, committed to the austere night-world of his Master, it was almost more than he could bear to endure it.

If he chose, he could have halted the army and summoned his necromancers and lesser vampire lords. They could have shrivelled the growths and bleached the fruits white. If they committed themselves for long enough, they could have parched the land from the Stir to the mountains, draining it of the noxious mucus that leaked from every suppurating pore and returning it to the barren waste it deserved to be.

But there was no time, and his energies needed to be husbanded for the trials ahead, so he grudgingly suffered his homeland to be overrun.

Not forever, he thought darkly, running his ancient eyes over the tangle of vines. The cold fire will come, once all is accomplished.

Herrscher rode beside him. Both their steeds were skeletons, their bones knitted together by dark magic and held in place by Vlad’s will. The undead witch hunter looked a little less miserable than he had done, though he still slumped in the saddle.

‘How do you find your gifts?’ asked Vlad, trying to take his mind off the filth around him.

Herrscher shot him an incredulous look. ‘Gifts?’ He shook his emaciated head. ‘You have poisoned me.’

‘Learn to appreciate what you have been given. You are stronger than you were. You hear better, see better, and you will endure against all magic. Scorn this, and you remain a greater fool than when you lived.’

‘This is what you wish for,’ muttered Herrscher. ‘Slaves, all of us.’

‘Not quite. I wish for order. I wish for the weak to know their place, guarded over by their betters. Do sheep resent their shepherds? Or would they rather take their chances with the wolves?’

‘I would have done,’ retorted Herrscher, his face a picture of resentment.

‘And that would be a terrible waste,’ said Vlad. ‘You are better at my side, where your talents can flourish. Do not resent the past – soon you will have trouble even remembering it.’

‘So the past does not trouble you?’ asked Herrscher, his lips curling sardonically. ‘That is not what I heard.’

Vlad’s anger rose, and he made to turn on Herrscher, when he suddenly noticed a flash of white in the road ahead. In an instant, he saw Isabella riding to greet him, alone under the trees, a look of admonishment on her perfect alabaster face, and he froze.

The illusion faded. More than one figure emerged from the arboreal gloom – eight shades, each as thin and drawn as dried fruit, carrying between them a palanquin of shimmering glass. Silently, they set the carriage down, and three women emerged, all of them wearing lace-edged gowns of purest white. They seemed to glow like moonlight, and their footfalls left no tracks in the sodden earth. They curtsied archaically, and shuffled closer.

Vlad mastered himself. He knew the names of the ladies well enough, and which master they served, though he had not expected to encounter them so soon.

‘My lord von Carstein,’ said the foremost of the pale creatures, her voice as dry and hollow as a coffin-echo. ‘We had begun to worry. This land has become an abomination.’

‘All lands have,’ said Vlad, offering his hand for the lady to kiss. ‘Why are you here, Liliet? I did not seek to find you for days hence.’

The white lady gave him a dry smile. ‘Your servant Mundvard failed. Marienburg is a nest of writhing horrors, and the Empire has been driven back like whipped curs to Carroburg.’

‘They are moving fast, then. What strength do they have?’

‘They are led by three siblings – foul triplets, each blessed with grotesque gifts. One is the size of a house, and chews his way through fortifications like a fat child through sweetmeats. Their host is swollen beyond counting. Your servant did his best – I can vouch for that – but they will not be halted.’ She shuddered distastefully. ‘Such numbers. I would not have believed it, had I not seen it.’

Vlad pursed his fleshless lips together. ‘And where is Mundvard now?’

‘Gathering what forces he can. He sent us to you, and begs leave to join his army with yours north of Altdorf. He says that no action further west can delay the enemy now, and only a combined stand at the city holds the hope of resistance.’

‘Oh, he said that, did he?’ Vlad was irritated. Mundvard was a supreme fighter, but a poor general. More than that, it was not his place to dictate tactics to his betters – he should have delayed the Chaos forces for longer at the coast, giving time for Vlad to gather the greatest host he could. Now the need for haste, already pressing, had become overwhelming.

‘He fought skilfully, lord,’ said Liliet, a little coquettishly, given her cadaverous appearance.

‘Not skilfully enough,’ snarled Vlad. ‘You do not need to return to him. Remain with me, and together we will cut a faster path. I will send messages via other means, and if he still commands more than a rabble of zombies, he can meet us in the Reikland.’

Liliet bowed, then looked sidelong at Herrscher. ‘And who is this, my lord? Surely you have not been doling out the Kiss to mortals without the consent of the Master?’

Herrscher was looking at the three women with a mix of horror and fascination on his face. That was good – in the past, it would merely have been horror.

‘My new lieutenant,’ said Vlad kicking his horse into motion again and forcing the ladies to give way. ‘Ride with us awhile, and tell us tales of old Marienburg. We make all haste to Wurtbad, and I am sure he can learn much from you on the way.’

TEN

Captain Hans Blucher felt the stone crack before he heard it, and it made his blood freeze. The flags beneath his feet sprouted paper-thin fractures, which then widened to a blade’s width.

‘Maintain fire!’ he bellowed, striding along the ranks of gunnery pieces. ‘Let no man leave his station, or by Taal’s beard I shall break his head apart with my own hands!’

The walls of Carroburg had been under sustained attack for over an hour. In his worst nightmares, Blucher could not have imagined such an assault. The earth itself seemed to have been roused against them, and the forest in every direction now rang with the tramp of hooves and iron-shod boots.

The rain had started to fall soon after the enemy had arrived. At first it had been like any other deluge, though soon the drops became heavier and heavier, until it was like trying to fight under a hail of mud splatters. Every exposed surface became greasy and treacherous, fouling the cannon wheels as they were rolled out and making men slip and stagger.

Blucher was stationed on the south wall, in command of many of the bigger artillery pieces. Helblasters jostled on the narrow parapet alongside the bigger Great Guns, each one christened by their foundries in Nuln – Grosse Bertha, Todslingeren, Trollsbane. They had been firing without pause since the first emergence of the enemy, hurling their shot out at the horde and blasting great channels through the oncoming ranks.

‘Ulric damn you all!’ hollered Blucher, not paying too much attention to which god’s wrath he invoked, so long as it inspired a faster work-rate from his men. ‘Reload! They are pouring into the outer curtain!’

The blackpowder guns had reaped a terrible swathe, but it had merely sliced a tithe from the oncoming masses. They showed no fear, clambering over the twitching corpses of the felled, whooping and gurgling with glee. The driving mud-rain should have slowed them, washing them back down the steep cliff edges and into the grimy channel that had once been the Reik, but they seemed to thrive on it, slithering up through the deluge with the effluent streaming down their calloused faces.

Blucher’s guns were arranged on the inner wall, high up above the first ring of courtyards. From their vantage they had been able to rain mortars and cannonballs with impunity, but now it felt as if the fortress’s very foundations were shaking under them.

Blucher ran to the edge, skirting carefully around the red-hot maw of Grosse Bertha and taking care not to touch the metal. He reached the lip of the parapet and peered down.

What he saw took his breath away. The curtain wall was gone – overwhelmed, lost under a simmering carpet of limbs and tentacles. Shocked to his core, Blucher nearly lost his footing, and grabbed hold of the battlement’s edge to steady himself.

Mere moments ago, the outer perimeter had been held by companies of archers and handgunners, bolstered by the few Greatswords Aldred had left behind before marching out on his doomed attempt to relieve Marienburg. It had been a diminished company, to be sure, but it should have held out for longer than that. Now the walls’ summits were crawling with all manner of mutants and daemon-spawned horrors. Even as he watched, he saw the remaining defenders caught up in a rolling wave of tortured flesh, hacked apart and absorbed by the racing riptide of green and brown.

The enemy ranks were a bizarre assortment – some mortal men in plate armour and matted furs, some grotesque plague-victims carrying hooks and spike flails, some forest-beasts swollen to obscene proportions and slavering with unnatural hungers. Amid them all shimmered the faint outlines of daemons, screaming and shrieking amid the downpour.

There was no fighting against those numbers. They swarmed like rats, scrabbling up the sheer walls along living briars and thorn-tendrils. The stone underfoot gave way, crushed by their weight, but still they came on, chortling as they trod on the tumbling bodies of their own kind.

They would be across the inner courtyard in moments, and after that the great doors to the keep would not hold them for long, not if the outer walls had been demolished and surged over so ruthlessly.

‘Belay that!’ Blucher cried, unholstering his pistol and cocking the hammer. As he did so, he noticed his hands were trembling. He had been a captain for twenty years and a trooper for ten more, and was used to the sights and sounds of battle, and they had never shaken before. ‘Fall back to the towers!’

There is no resisting this, he found himself thinking even as he retreated across the parapet towards the tower beyond. This will be over within the hour.

All around him, men deserted their stations and fled for the last bastions of defence. As they did so, more stone flags cracked and splintered, sending shattered masonry flying high. The rain intensified, splattering green gobbets across the tortured citadel.

Blucher resisted the urge to run. The main gate to the tower was less than twenty yards away, and already clogged with gunnery crews trying to cram their way in.

‘In good order!’ he cried, trying to give his orders a clarity that his mind lacked. ‘Up to the top level, form up in the Great Hall!’

He was almost there – he could see the safety of the archway before him. Then, just as the last of the artillery crews slipped inside, the ground beneath him erupted.

He was thrown back, landing on his back several yards away. Dazed, he looked up, trying to make out what had felled him.

The parapet’s stone floor had burst open, and a fountain of mud and earth was jetting from the breach. Something huge was clawing its way to the surface, flinging aside stone flags as if they were children’s toys.

The entire wall-section groaned and tilted, listing out over the courtyard below. Blucher grabbed hold of a stone railing and hauled himself to his feet, bracing unsteadily as the world swayed and cracked around him.

The beast flailed its way into the open, tunnelling up from where the gunnery level had just been. It was vast, a leviathan of earth and rubble, surging up with the bulk and weight of a river-barge and slewing debris from its massive shoulders.

For a moment, Blucher did not have anything to aim at, just a shower of loose soil and broken stone pieces, but then the beast itself shook loose and turned on him.

He had never seen a monster so big. It was the size of the officer’s mess at his old parade ground, a nightmare of bulging veins and fat-slick limbs. Its pocked flesh was the green of rotten fruit. A tiny head protruded from absurdly muscled shoulders, drooling with butter-yellow saliva and grinning inanely. A low hhurr, hhurr rattled out from its vast lungs, and an overpowering stench of un-sluiced night-pans wafted out from its sweat-moist haunches.

Blucher raised the pistol, holding it two-handed to quell the shakes, then fired. The shot spun out, perfectly aimed, and hit the creature square in the forehead.

The monster stopped dead. For a moment, Blucher dared to believe that he had felled it, as a line of thin blood ran down the monster’s face. He saw it begin to topple, swaying amid the ruin of its ascent, before it blinked heavily, shook its head, and grinned again.

Blucher tried to reload. He scrambled for another shot, pulling it from the wallet at his belt and tipping it into the palm of his hand.

The monster lumbered towards him, shattering what remained of the stone floor under its tread. With a lurch of pure horror, Blucher saw that there was no stopping it. He could fire again and again, and still make no impression on that thick hide.

He pushed himself back towards the edge of the tilting parapet, and glanced down over his shoulder. Below him, a drop of over thirty feet, the courtyard filled with enemy troops. He could see Carroburgers being pulled limb from limb amid the cackling laughter of daemons. Others were being dragged before cauldrons of boiling liquid and forced to drink, gagging and screaming as the corrosive poisons boiled their innards away. Huge booms rang out as the enemy got into the blackpowder storerooms, sending cracks racing up the flanks of the tortured fortress.

It was already over. In the space of just a few hours, one of the oldest and proudest garrisons in the Empire had been overrun. Blucher’s fear was replaced by a deadening sense of shame. They should have done better. They should have fought harder.

By then, the behemoth was nearly upon him. Blucher cast his pistol aside and reached for a short sword, staring up at the monster as it loomed over him. As he did so, he saw two twisted figures crouching on the beast’s shoulders, one in dirty robes and carrying a bell-bearing staff, the other wielding a scythe. Neither of them seemed to have noticed him – they were both absorbed in the carnage bursting out all across the reeling citadel.

‘This is not the end!’ cried Blucher, holding his blade as firmly as he could. ‘The Emperor will have his vengeance! Sigmar protects the faithful! The fate of the fallen is–’

His tirade was cut off by a single down-stomp of the monster’s hoof. His body was smashed into the stone, crushed into a bloody pulp as the earth beneath was shivered into scree.

Atop Ghurk’s shoulder, Ethrac paused and turned to his brother. ‘Did you hear something?’ he asked.

Otto was in a frenzy of war-lust, barely sensible to anything outside his own world of slaughter. His red-rimmed eyes sparkled with delight as he surveyed the volume of destruction around him. ‘Hear what, o my brother?’ he asked, absently.

‘Never mind it,’ muttered Ethrac, preparing the next phase of the noxious deluge that would rip the roofs from the towers and expose the last of the cowering defenders within. ‘Press on, Ghurk. Break and shatter, snap and wither.’

Ghurk barked with enthusiasm, too enraptured with the joy of destruction even to scrape the remains of his last kill up to his mouth. Turning cumbersomely, he swayed drunkenly towards the pinnacles of Carroburg.

The sky above them lanced with flashes of green, exposing the shimmer-pattern of daemons in the air. All around them, a symphony of screams, flesh-schlicks, ribcage snaps and eyeball-pops swelled in the storm.

The battle was won. Now the true carnage could begin.

Another day dawned over Altdorf, as dank and rotten as all the others. The Reik’s flow had slowed to a grimy halt, and the stagnant waters now lapped at the edges of the streets above the quaysides. Insects multiplied on the filmy surface, and their massed buzzing drowned out even the cries of the merchants on the loading wharfs.

Martak strode down the winding streets through the poor quarter, trying not to slip on the grime-soaked streets. Altdorf’s thoroughfares were filthy places at the best of times, but the endless rain and damp and plague and misery had turned them into little more than rivers of mud. The drenched and half-starved populace shuffled around in the margins, hugging the dripping eaves of the wattle-and-daub townhouses and shivering in the cold.

For Martak, used to the wilds of the Great Forest, the confinement and the stink were especially trying. He had long since given up trying to get used to it, and had actively turned his finely honed sense of smell towards the task of detection. The plagues were being borne by foul winds from the north, that was certain, but there had to be a source within the city as well. Every chaplain of Sigmar was chanting nightly to banish the contagions, and the fact that they had failed suggested either that the power of faith was waning, or a greater power was at work, or both.

There was no shortage of places to look for the plague’s root – the City of Sigmar was built upon a warren of alleys, cesspits, warehouses and thieves’ dens, all of which were suitable nesting places for the Rot. There might be just one source or hundreds – it was impossible to know, not without tearing the entire poor quarter apart, brick by rotting brick.

Ahead of him stood the Temple of Shallya. It had been deliberately placed in the darkest and most impoverished district of the old city, and stood like a shaft of sunlight amid piled-high tenements. Very few inhabitants of Altdorf were free of the fear of being assaulted or pick-pocketed while abroad in that district, but the Sisters of the Goddess lived their lives unmolested in the very heart of the lawless slum-city. Every day they would receive long lines of supplicants, desperate for relief from the panoply of maladies that afflicted them. Since the full onset of the Rot those lines had grown fourfold, and the temple was now permanently besieged by a throng of blistered and scarlet-faced sufferers.

As he neared the temple precincts, Martak pushed them aside, using his staff to drive them from his path.

Sister Margrit, the head of the order in Altdorf, watched him struggle. Her stern, matronly face showed some disapproval as she waited for him at the top of a wide flight of stone stairs. By the time Martak had reached her, he was sweating like a hog in midsummer.

‘Tell me, sister,’ he panted, wiping his greasy forehead, ‘how do you stand it?’

‘Stand what?’ Margrit asked.

‘The smell.’

‘You are not that clean yourself.’

Martak ran his fingers through his clotted beard. ‘True enough. But you know why I’m here.’

Margrit nodded. ‘Come.’

The two of them passed from the crowded courtyard and walked under an open colonnade. Beyond the pillars lay a shaded cloister, free from the worst of the clamour outside. A fountain played amid a knot garden of carefully tended herbal plants. Martak felt like he had stepped into another world, and took a deep breath. The faint tang of corruption still laced the air, but it was less overpowering than outside.

‘It is rare, for one of your kind to come here,’ said Margrit, walking slowly along the cloister paths. ‘Wizards and priests – we have not always seen the world the same way.’

‘Times are changing,’ said Martak. ‘And I’m not a very grand sort of wizard.’

‘You are the Supreme Patriarch.’

Martak winced. ‘Come, you know that means nothing. The Reiksmarshal has more than a dozen better battle wizards on his roster.’

Margrit stopped walking, and regarded him carefully. ‘But they are not here.’

‘No, they are not.’

Margrit considered that. Then she swept a pudgy hand around her, demonstrating what she presided over. ‘We dwell in an island now – a drop of clear water amid a sea of pain. We guard it, and we tend it, but it cannot last forever. Mark it well, my lord. All gardens wither.’

‘Where is the sickness coming from?’ asked Martak. ‘Helborg has his eyes on the walls, on the Great Guns and the Knightly Orders. He looks out from the ramparts, searching for the coming storm, but he is blind to what is happening here. What is the source?’

Margrit smiled sadly. ‘Our masters are military men. What do you expect?’ The smile faded. ‘I cannot tell you where the Rot wells up from. We have made enquiries. The people tell us things, as long as we bandage their sores and listen to their sorrows.’

‘You have nothing?’

‘It comes from the sewers, but that will not help you. There are miles of them down there, and the City Watch does not send its men under the streets.’

‘They might need to.’

‘None would come back.’ Margrit looked at him sympathetically. ‘You don’t spend much time in the city, do you, wild-man? There are things under Altdorf that have lain undisturbed since the time of the old Emperors. Only a fool would venture far down there.’

Martak shrugged, scratching his neck. ‘Wise men have not got us very far. Perhaps fools are needed.’

‘Then take armed men,’ said Margrit, seriously. ‘Take whole bands of them. Flush the tunnels with fire – if you have a Bright magister or two, all the better. I would not venture down beneath the streets with less than a hundred troops at my back.’

‘A hundred,’ said Martak, amused by the thought of this stout, severe-jowled woman leading an expedition into Altdorf’s hidden underbelly. ‘I think you’d need less.’

‘This is just the beginning,’ Margrit warned, starting to walk again. As she went, she trailed a hand along the tops of severely-harvested medicinal herbs. There were not many fresh leaves left. ‘We can feel it growing. Shallya, may She be blessed forever, does not answer us. We have a gifted sister, a young woman from Wurtbad whose power for prophecy and healing is the most powerful I have ever known, and even she hears nothing now.’

‘Why not?’

‘She hears nothing because she dashed her head against the fountain you see over there. Before we got to her, she had polluted the sacred spring with her own blood. She had been sent mad, they tell me. She had seen what was coming, and it turned her mind.’ Margrit looked close to angry tears. ‘She would have been so powerful. She would have done much good.’

Martak halted her, placing his burly hand on her arm. ‘Listen, I have to speak to the Reiksmarshal,’ he said, his gruff voice as soft as he could make it. ‘I will tell him what you told me. He has men. I will tell him we need to purge the sewers, and I will tell him to send no less than a hundred men in each party. Plus a couple of Bright mages, which I can handle.’

Margrit nodded, looking grateful. ‘If you can do that, it would help. We need our health back. If the enemy comes on us now, we will be too weak to man the walls.’

Martak knew the truth of that. As much as Helborg struggled manfully with the thousand tasks at hand, he was blind to the fundamental truth. Altdorf was not like a Reiksguard regiment, full of superbly trained men in the prime of condition – it was home to the weak, the ragged and needy. They were being given nothing, and in the final test that would cost them.

‘Lord Patriarch, tell me one thing,’ said Margrit, glancing up at him with an odd expression in her eyes. ‘We were told the Emperor will return. If he were here, I could believe that the storm will pass, but the days go by and we hear nothing. Have you any news to give me?’

Martak looked at her for a long time. They were all under strict instructions to maintain the fiction that Karl Franz was on his way south, riding at the head of his armies with Schwarzhelm at his side. Helborg had been insistent on it, fearing uncontrollable panic if the truth of his loss got out.

Martak understood the strategy. He saw the need for it. Still, the falsehood stuck in his craw.

‘You want the truth?’ he asked, hoping to evade giving an answer.

Margrit’s gaze never wavered. ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘I need to know.’

Martak thought of his dreams. They had grown more vivid with every night, and he had seen the Emperor in them all, alone and cast adrift in the benighted north.

Then he thought of the young sister, smashing her skull against the stone fountain, all through despair. He thought of the deathly faces in the streets outside, all desperate for something to believe in. If the gods had deserted them, then all they had was each other. In the end, perhaps the stories now told by the city’s generals were as good as those once told by its priests.

‘He will return, sister,’ Martak told her, doing his best to smile. ‘He is the Empire. In the hour of greatest need, how could he not be here?’

All across the north, the campfires still burned.

A frigid gale howled over the blasted lands, tearing straight from conquered Kislev across the shattered provinces of Ostland and the Ostermark. The settlements of men in those places were now no more than smouldering mazes of half-walls and gaping lintels, their inhabitants slain or enslaved. Nightmare creatures limped across the far horizon, some as tall as watchtowers and carrying heavy crowns of antlers on their bulbous, swaggering necks. Thunder cracked across an uneasy horizon, echoing with the half-heard laughter of glowering gods.

The realm of dreams was expanding. Spreading like a cancer in the wake of its victorious armies, the warping misrule of the Realm of Chaos was gradually twisting and carving through the Realm of Nature. Rivers dried up, or turned to blood, or boiled into poisonous smog. Birds fell from the sky to roll blindly in the muck, and creatures of the earth sprouted wings and flapped around in pathetic confusion.

In the wake of the great victory, Heffengen had been plundered down to the bone. The armies of Chaos, freed from the attentions of the undead and with the Empire forces destroyed, had been given free rein to sack the city, and had applied themselves with gusto. Very little now remained, save the long rows of gibbets and wheels that lined the road south, each bearing the broken, twitching corpse of a hapless defender. The Revesnecht still ran red, though the cloying mats of greymoss and throttlevine had already started to knit together from its silty banks, choking what flow remained.

It had been that thirst for plunder that had saved him. For a long time he had lain insensible at the base of a pile of rotting bodies. The course of battle, as confused and blind as it ever was, had raged about him, driving south and fixing on the walled prize of living flesh. If fate had been otherwise, he would have been trampled by cloven hooves, his neck broken and his spine crushed into the mud.

But the fates had not abandoned him entirely. A huge, bloat-bellied champion had seen him come down and had charged over to finish him off. A massed volley of musket-shot had felled the champion before he could swing his cleaver, just as the barrages mowed down a whole warband of marauders on the charge. Their bodies thunked into the mire, overlapping one another in a bloody carpet of limp flesh.

The champion had been the one to preserve him, masking his prone body with a heavy, rotten corpse. The sweep and ebb of battle had passed over them both, tearing south with all its grinding momentum, leaving behind the corpse-gardens of the dead and dying.

He awoke much later, while the broken walls of Heffengen still rang with the screams of the captured and the battlefield itself had not yet been plundered of its riches. He pushed the still-warm cadaver from him, grunting from the pain as his cracked ribs creaked. He dragged himself out from under its shadow, feeling the sharp pang of a broken arm. His helm had gone, lost on the dreadful plummet earthwards. For an awful moment he thought Drachenzahn had gone as well, then he saw the hilt protruding from beneath the doubled-back arms of a slain Norscan.

Hobbling to his feet, he took up the blade again. If the weapon’s spirit recognised him, it gave no sign – the rune-etched steel remained blank and lifeless.

After that he trudged north, knowing the danger, grateful for the night’s cold shadows as they stole across the fields of slaughter. He found a ditch to shelter in, part-masked by brambles and with a sliver of blood-foul water at its base. He shivered there for the rest of the night, plagued by the howls and shrieks of raucous joy, parched and yet unable to drink.

Karl Franz, Sigmar’s Heir, lay shuddering in the filth, listening to the sounds of Heffengen’s agony. Only as the eastern sky brightened to a death-grey dawn did he creep forth again, trusting that the aftermath of the night’s debaucheries would give him some cover. He limped north again, then west, skirting the city and hugging the sparse patches of undergrowth that still remained.

In the days that followed, he brushed against death a dozen more times. He was almost discovered twice by armoured patrols. His wounds festered in the dank air, and he passed out from hunger and thirst more than once. He was forced to drink brackish water that made him vomit, and gorge on spoiled grain from plundered storehouses.

Only the amulet kept him alive – the silver seal at his neck that had been imbued with sustaining magic by the magister Tarnus. In the dark of the frigid night, he could feel its aethyric energies warming his chest, staving off the worst of the injuries that threatened to overwhelm him.

A few times, when the sickness raged and despair mounted, he was tempted to cast it aside. As fever raged thickly through his mind, tormenting him with visions of the laughing vampire lord, he listened to the voices that echoed within.

You do not deserve to live. You were slain, and now only prolong the agony. Let it go! Give it up!

He grasped the chain with sweaty hands, intending to rip it clear. Only weakness prevented him – he could barely lift his arms, let alone break the links.

So he lived. He kept walking, each day a fog of pain and confusion, somehow avoiding the enemy columns as they marched south around him. The enemy’s own contagions helped him, for the rampant vegetation that erupted across the conquered land soon gave ample cover.

Slowly, painfully, he recovered himself. The amulet worked its subtle power, and his body dragged itself back from the edge of death. He was still wracked with pain, and as weak as any of his sickly peasant subjects, but the worst was past.

He no longer entertained thoughts of giving in – that had been the fevers polluting his mind. He no longer considered heading away from the danger. In fragments, his memory came back, and with it his certainty.

Nothing substantial had changed. He was the Emperor. He was alive. His duty was to fight.

With that, and for the first time, Karl Franz’s thoughts turned from survival, to revenge.

ELEVEN

Otto lashed out with his scythe, ripping through the chest of the state trooper and ending his challenge. It had always been an unequal contest – Carroburg had been reduced to little more than rubble, and the only sport remained hunting the last holed-up defenders and rooting them out.

The man tottered for a moment, his legs not getting the message immediately that his heart had been ripped out, before he crashed face-first onto the stone floor. As soon as he did so, a dozen tiny daemon-kin leapt onto the corpse, tearing at it with their teeth and squeaking like excitable kittens.

Otto watched them indulgently. Twenty more corpses lay prone around the basement of the old brewery, all of them leaking guts onto the stone flags where the scythe had whirled. Their bodies would be dragged off at some point and added to the vast cauldrons simmering in Carroburg’s old town square. The army had to eat.

As he gathered his breath, Otto reflected coolly on the futility of opposing powers such as his. The fall of Carroburg had been achieved with almost embarrassing ease. Marienburg, a city over three times the size, had not been much more arduous. Perhaps the Empire had finally lost its spine. Perhaps there were no more mortals truly capable of standing against the destiny that, in truth, had always been theirs.

A frog-like daemon the size of Otto’s fist pounced onto the state trooper’s face and started to suck the eyes from their sockets.

‘Greedy, o little one!’ laughed Otto, feeling a wave of affection for it.

He watched it feed for a while, before turning from the scene of slaughter and retracing his steps up a long, winding stair. The brewery building he was in was a towering edifice of many levels, and the resistance there had been stouter than almost anywhere else in Carroburg.

The men of the Empire value their beer, Otto mused, as he clambered methodically towards the top level, his scythe-blade dripping over his shoulder as he went.

From outside the thick brewery walls, he heard the ongoing crash and thud of Ghurk’s rampage through the town’s shabbier regions. There were still morsels of living flesh to be found in some of the hidden pockets, and his corpulent brother’s hunger knew no limits.

He would have made his mother proud.

After a long haul, Otto reached the summit and entered a large vaulted chamber. Once it had been lit by rows of tall mullioned windows under a high ceiling, though now the windows were all smashed and the roof sagged. Great copper kettles stood on the tiled floor, each one capable of holding hundreds of gallons. A thick slime of grease and bloody lumps churned and bumped in them now, boiling amid a soup of altogether nastier fluids.

Otto sniffed deeply, appreciating the complex fug of aromas. He could have spent whole days in that place, revelling in the creations his brother had painstakingly piped and funnelled together, if only time allowed. Already, though, the appeal of Carroburg was beginning to wane, and the need to keep moving was making him impatient.

‘Where are you, o my brother?’ Otto called out, unable to see the far end of the chamber through the clouds of steam.

‘Here, o my sibling!’ Ethrac replied from the far side of the largest of the kettles, his voice muffled from chewing.

Otto sauntered over to him, noting the elaborate array of tubes that had been strung between the old brewery’s impressive range of glass vials. ‘What keeps you busy here?’ he asked. ‘Must be on the move soon.’

‘Come,’ said Ethrac, beckoning Otto over to where he stirred a thick slop of acrid matter. ‘This was worth the effort. We are far from home now, and need all the help we can get.’

Otto joined him at the cauldron’s edge. Ethrac mumbled a few incantations, and shook his bell-staff over the liquid. The cauldron’s contents popped and seethed, sending a lumpy lip of froth over the edge. At the very centre, shapes began to shimmer into life.

‘Observe our cousins,’ said Ethrac eagerly. ‘We are not alone.’

For a few moments, Otto struggled to see what he was being shown. The cauldron’s contents morphed into bubbling shapes, like wedges of the moss that had brought the Reik to a standstill. Then he understood – he saw the wriggling path of rivers, and the crumpled mounds of mountains. He was looking at a map, albeit one that fizzed like molten metal on the forge.

At the centre lay the object of their march – the city of Altdorf, clustered in a wobbling series of towers by the shore of a trembling Reik. Otto peered closer, leaning low over the cauldron.

‘Do not break the water!’ snapped Ethrac. ‘Ignore the city. It is the others I will show you.’

He extended his clawed fingers over the vista, and it began to zoom out. Forests and mountains swept into view, all of them picked out by the foaming bubbles of Ethrac’s sorcery.

‘We were three, when we set off,’ said Ethrac, pulling the portal expertly. ‘Autus Brine, Lord of Tentacles, hacks his way through the Drakwald, slaying the greenskin as he comes.’

As Ethrac spoke, Otto made out a long wound in the vast face of the forest. It might have been his imagination, but he thought he even saw tiny figures crashing their way through the thick foliage.

‘Is that–?’ he began, but Ethrac shushed him impatiently.

‘He has been slowed, but he picks up his pace now. He brings the Harbinger with him. You know of this?’

‘Who is it?’

‘A shaman. Beast-kind.’

Otto wrinkled his nose in distaste. ‘Reduced to such. Brine will be angry.’

Ethrac chuckled. ‘Allies are allies. They make a good pace now. The Drakwald is emptied, and they tear south with haste.’ The scope of the cauldron’s roving eye switched east, passing over more overabundant tracts of deep forest. ‘And the third of all – the Tallyman himself.’

Otto sniffed again. It was not good to be reminded of their rivals for the Urfather’s affections. If Archaon had not been so insistent on the need for an overwhelming, three-pronged attack, he would have preferred to have had no supporting armies at all. ‘Epidemius is foundering, it must be so,’ he said, grudgingly.

‘Wish it not, o my brother,’ chided Ethrac, shifting the cauldron’s eye over a vast crater set within the forest. ‘We will need his daemon-horde. Dharek rides with him, and they tear apart Taal’s city even as we linger here.’

Once again, Otto fancied he could make out infinitesimally small figures struggling across the face of the conjured map-face. It looked like driving rain was hammering against the walls of the rock-bound city. A great swathe of glimmering daemons was assaulting a beleaguered force of mortals. Otto screwed his eyes up, trying to gain a better view. ‘They are winning,’ he murmured.

‘That they are,’ said Ethrac, with some satisfaction. ‘Old allies fade, new allies arrive. Dharek will be at the walls of Altdorf in good time to meet us.’

Otto scratched a pustule on his cheek absently. ‘So many,’ he muttered. ‘Who will take the prize?’

‘Prizes for all,’ said Ethrac. ‘We should shackle Ghurk again – if he spends his strength on gluttony, we shall be late.’

Otto nodded. ‘I shall loop the chains around his neck. He will not be happy.’

Ethrac snapped his fingers, and the map zoomed out again, exposing the whole vast panorama of the Empire. In that instant, it was clear what was happening – the three great arms of the northern host were converging with inexorable, steady progress on the Reikland, smashing aside every obstacle in their path. It was unfolding just as the Everchosen had ordered, and the heart of the Empire was being slowly torn inside out.

‘And the dead?’ asked Otto, remembering Ethrac’s concern at Marienburg.

‘No skeletons here,’ said the sorcerer, sending the boiling visions slopping back into the cauldron. ‘Perhaps they have been seen off.’ He grinned at his brother. ‘Or maybe they turn on the living. What matter? What could stand against the three of us?’

Otto grinned back. Ethrac was right. It helped to be shown the full majesty of the plan. It helped with the nagging doubts that, every so often, snagged in his feverish mind. ‘That is good to see, o my brother,’ he said, clapping Ethrac on the shoulder. ‘So we should be off now.’

‘That we should,’ said Ethrac, gazing around himself wistfully, no doubt speculating what sport he could have had in such a place. ‘Festus will be waiting for us.’

Otto blurted a throaty laugh. He always forgot about Festus, but, in truth, the Leechlord was the pin around which the whole scheme revolved.

‘Then all hastens towards the purpose,’ he said, satisfied.

‘It does,’ said Ethrac. ‘Now fetch our brother, and feed the armies until their stomachs swell.’ He shot Otto a smile of pure, lascivious darkness. ‘Just one more march. That is all. One more.’

The knights of Bretonnia on the march was a sight unequalled in the Old World. Each warrior took with him three or four warhorses, all draped in fine caparisons and marked with the heraldic signs of a hundred different bloodlines. Squires and grooms came with them, and reeves, cooks, heralds, priests and a hundred other officials and servants. A vast train of baggage followed them all, carrying all the supplies and weaponry for a long campaign in the saddle. The whole cavalcade coursed through the countryside in a single, vast column, winding its way east from the fens of Couronne and into the highlands north of the Pale Sisters range.

Leoncoeur rode at the head of the column, pushing the pace hard. He had studied the maps long in the vaults of Couronne while the army had mustered, debating with his counsellors which path to take. Throughout, the mysterious Gilles le Breton had held his silence, offering neither blessing nor condemnation of the Errantry. Towards the end, exasperated, Leoncoeur had asked him outright what his counsel was.

‘The Lady ordained you,’ le Breton had told him, his green eyes as unfathomable as the sea. ‘I have no part in this.’

Le Breton spoke to him as if he were already dead – a walking ghost, just like so many that had been loosed across the realm.

So Leoncoeur had plotted his own course – south-east, across the highlands of Gisoreux, before descending into the borderlands of Montfort. They would cross the Grey Mountains at Axebite Pass, heading swiftly north and emerging into Reikland south of Altdorf.

That path was not the swiftest, but the news from the wasteland was now unequivocal – Marienburg had been destroyed and daemons loosed across the marshes. There was no profit in getting bogged down in fighting with such creatures when speed was of the essence. Since his vision of the Lady, Leoncoeur’s dreams had become ever more vivid, and he needed no scouts to tell him the scale of the host that was grinding its way east across the lower Empire.

Still, if the Bretonnians could maintain the blistering pace that he had set, the prospect still survived of reaching Sigmar’s city before the enemy had it completely surrounded and beyond hope of rescue. Once clear of the Grey Mountains, the race would truly begin.

For now, they picked their way up from the plains and into the granite highlands. Huge outcrops jutted into the sky on either side of them, pocked and striated from the racing winds. Lush pastures gave way to thinner grassland, littered with chalky boulders.

It was a relief to get away from the low country. The air became fresher as they climbed, rippling the pennants and making the colours flow across the flanks of the steeds. The skies above them never cleared of the oppressive grey mantle they had worn since the coming of Mallobaude, but the rains held, and the worst of the thunder growled away in the far north.

As he rode, Leoncoeur was joined by his lieutenant, Yves Jhared of Couronne, who had fought alongside him on many previous engagements and was as trusted a companion as the king had ever had. Jhared had the flaming red hair and ice-pale skin of a native of Albion, though no one had ever dared to suggest such ancestry to his face.

‘Hail, lord,’ said Jhared, pulling his horse level with Leoncoeur’s. ‘We make good progress.’

‘Needs to be faster,’ Leoncoeur replied, still preoccupied with the pace. With every passing day, the prospect of missing out on the battle loomed a little larger.

Jhared laughed easily. ‘We are the best of the realm. Command greater speed, and we will answer.’

‘I have no doubt of it,’ said Leoncoeur, scouring the skies ahead. The clouds remained blank and unmoving, which troubled him. He had not chosen the route across the Pale Ladies idly, but his hopes had not yet come to fruition.

‘Do you search for spies?’ asked Jhared, half-seriously. ‘Have the Dark Gods turned even the birds of the air?’

Leoncoeur snorted a bitter laugh. ‘Do not jest.’ He inclined his head a little, sniffing the air carefully. ‘But do you not sense them? You disappoint me.’

Jhared looked amused, then uncertain, and peered up into the skies in turn. ‘Pray, what am I looking for?’ he asked, just as the question became superfluous.

Ahead of them, where the land rose steeply towards a forked granite peak, the clouds suddenly swirled, like cream stirred in a pail. Leoncoeur held up his gauntlet, and the column clanked to a halt. He drew himself up in his saddle, turning to address the long train of knights behind him.

‘Stand fast, brothers!’ he cried. ‘You are not the only warriors to answer my summons.’

As the words left his mouth, the clouds were pierced by a dozen winged horses, swooping earthwards with the poise and grace of swans in flight. Their outstretched pinions gleamed like pristine ivory, and their proud heads tossed and bucked. More pegasi emerged in their wake, flying in formation. They wheeled around in a wide arc, galloping through the high airs just as their earthbound cousins did on the charge.

Jhared whooped with joy, as all Bretonnians did at the sight of such rare and prized steeds. ‘Never so many!’ he exclaimed, eyes shining. ‘In the name of the Lady, how did you achieve this?’

Leoncoeur could not stifle a laugh himself. It felt good, after so many months of brooding. The sky-host circled above them, four-score of the semi-wild pegasi of the mountains, each of them answering the call he had sent out, trusting to the Lady’s influence that the summons would be answered. ‘I was lord of this realm, once,’ he said, watching them soar. ‘That still counts for something.’

Jhared looked at him wonderingly. ‘So it does. But how did you give them the summons? These are wild creatures.’

Leoncoeur smiled. ‘I have one loyal servant who never lost faith.’

As the last of the pegasi emerged from the cloudbanks, they were followed by a far huger creature, a bizarre amalgam of raptor and horse, with a greater wingspan and a bulkier, more powerful body. Where the pegasi soared across the skies with an acrobat’s grace, this creature plunged through the air like a galleon crashing through breakers. It dropped rapidly, folding its huge wings as it extended four huge clawed legs beneath it.

Leoncoeur’s mount reared up, panicked by the plummet of the monstrous beast. ‘Fear not!’ Leoncoeur commanded, yanking hard on the reins. ‘This is your cousin, and it would no more eat horseflesh than I would.’

The huge hippogryph landed heavily before them, flexing its shaggy limbs and cawing harshly. Leoncoeur dismounted and raced over to it. The beast lowered its beaked head and nuzzled against its master’s embrace. Leoncoeur breathed in the familiar aroma again, and it instantly reminded him of past wars and past victories.

‘Beaquis,’ he murmured, feeling the plumage brush past. ‘Now I am complete.’

Then he turned to the assembled knights, and laughed again. It was a pure laugh, a warrior’s laugh, free of the care that had trammelled it for so long.

‘Can any doubt the favour of the Lady now?’ he cried. ‘With weapons such as these, what enemy will dare stand against us?’

The knights roared back their approval, hammering on their shields with the hilts of their blades. At the head of the column, Jhared saluted his liege.

‘Smartly done, my lord,’ he said, bowing as the pegasi circled above them all protectively.

Leoncoeur gave Beaquis a final affectionate thump on the thickly muscled neck, then strode back to his stamping, wide-eyed mount. ‘They will fly before us over the mountains. They will take saddle and halter when Altdorf is in sight, and not before. I will not have them wearied before time.’

Then he mounted once more, and kicked his horse back into motion. ‘Until then, the march continues. Ride on.’

The sun slanted weakly through the high windows of the Imperial Chamber of War, striking the veined marble floor in thin grey streaks. Columns soared up around the chamber’s circular perimeter, enclosing a vast auditorium of concentric seats. The hall’s capacity was considerable, for it had been designed to hold representatives from every elector’s staff, every senior ranking magister from the Colleges, the Grand Theogonist and representatives of the sanctioned Imperial Cults, the Engineering Colleges, the Knightly Orders and the standing regiments of the Empire, plus trading guild observers and members of the various diplomatic corps from all over the known world.

Looking up from his throne at the very centre of the chamber, Helborg noted how sparsely it was filled. Fewer than two hundred seats were occupied, and most of those by deputies and functionaries. The three resident elector counts sat in the inner circle, along with their official staff and some minor Imperial courtiers. The Colleges of Magic had sent four delegates, including the peasant-stock charlatan Gregor Martak, whose presence in the Imperial Palace continued to baffle Helborg. Zintler was there, as well as von Kleistervoll and a few dozen high-ranking generals. The Knightly Orders were headed by the brute figure of Gerhard von Sleivor, Grand Master of the Knights Panther, who sat brooding with eight of his peers in full plate armour. Several other delegates were unknown to Helborg, which in itself was an eloquent statement of how far the defenders’ numbers had been thinned.

‘Very well,’ he said thickly, feeling the weight of his eyelids as he looked down the long agenda. ‘What is next?’

‘The forest draws close to the walls,’ said Magister Anne-Louisa Trinckel of the Jade College, her grey hair falling messily around a droopy face. ‘It must be culled, for the growths are not natural.’

‘It is scheduled to be done, Herrin Magister,’ said Helborg, wondering how on earth such a woman came to be the head of her Order. ‘We are short of men, and the rebuilding of the outer walls takes priority.’

‘That is a mistake,’ said Trinckel, looking around her for support. ‘The enemy will use the trees. There is power in the trees. We have long counselled that the felling of the forest has been neglected – now the consequences have come to haunt us.’

Helborg shot a dark glance at Zintler. ‘Do we have any work details that can be spared?’

Zintler raised an eyebrow. ‘Spared?’

Helborg nodded, understanding his frustration. Every able-bodied man and woman in the entire city was being worked to exhaustion just to keep on top of the landslide of tasks. The state troopers were being drilled relentlessly, the engineers spent hours atop rickety scaffolds working on the fortifications, the gunnery crews ceaselessly practised running out the great cannons and re-arming the mortar launchers.

‘I am sorry, magister,’ Helborg said, remembering the courtesies with some difficulty. ‘At this time, we just do not have the hands for the task.’

Trinckel was about to protest, when she was overruled by Arek Fleischer, the acting Arch-Lector of the Church of Sigmar. ‘Forget the trees!’ he blurted impatiently. ‘The temples are falling into ruin. We are nothing without faith. My priests have been pressed into the service of the army, even those who do not carry the warhammer. This is unacceptable – they are not trained for war.’

Von Sleivor slammed his armoured fist on the table before him. ‘Where is Volkmar?’ he hissed. ‘He would have had you drawn and quartered for less – priests must do their part.’

‘The temples will be restored, arch-lector,’ explained Helborg, as patiently as he could. ‘Now, though, is not the time. All must take their turn on the walls. Surely you can see our weakness is in numbers?’ Fleischer did not look convinced. Helborg attempted to smile, knowing that it was more likely to emerge as a grimace. The arts of persuasion, rather than brute force, did not come easily. ‘I myself fought with Luthor Huss, your brother-in-arms. There is no finer warrior in the Empire. Surely he is the example we should be following here.’

At the mention of Huss, Fleischer’s face reddened, and he started to shout something unintelligible about heresies even in the bosom of Sigmar’s congregation. This was angrily contested by Magister Willibald de Champney, the ludicrously coiffured magister of the Celestial College, appointed following the departure to war of his superior Raphael Julevno. His fellow wizards soon piled in on his behalf, following by Haupt-Anderssen’s chief of staff and the Grand Master of the Knights of the Sable Chalice.

‘Silence!’ roared Helborg, standing up and smashing his gavel on the lectern before him. His voice rang around the chamber, quelling the restive quarrels before they became unstoppable. Looking down, he realised he had snapped the small hammer with the force of his strike.

A broken hammer. Oddly appropriate.

‘This is a council of war, my lords,’ said Helborg, his darkening visage sweeping the rows of occupied chairs before him. Not for the first time, he wondered just how Karl Franz had kept such a disparate and dysfunctional body politic operational for so long. ‘With every passing day, the enemy comes closer. Marienburg has already fallen. We have no word from Talabheim or Middenheim. The river-passages are closed to us, and our attempts to contact Nuln and Couronne have yielded nothing. If we are to survive this, we will have to start worrying less about trees and temples and more about blades and blackpowder.’

For the first time, Helborg let a little of the parade-ground earthiness into his speech, and his voice assumed the rasping quality it took on when ordering his knights into the charge. Some of the assembled worthies, like von Kleistervoll and Sleivor, appreciated that. Others, the electors among them, murmured unhappily among themselves.

‘Now,’ said Helborg, deliberately inflecting his words with as much calm, clear authority as he could, ‘let us take stock of what we have determined here. The remaining grain supplies will be removed to the main barracks, as will the surviving quantities of ale and unspoiled water. We will carry out the levy in the poor quarters, drafting any man who can stand into the reserve battalions under General von Hildenshaft. There will be no exemptions from the watch rotations. When the enemy gets here, I wish to see every able hand clutching a sword.’

Then he fixed his eyes on each of the delegates in turn, daring them to question the scant resolutions that had been painstakingly agreed. ‘Is there anything else?’ he asked.

Only one man had the gall to stand. With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, Helborg recognised Martak.

‘I come to speak of the Rot,’ said the Supreme Patriarch, speaking haltingly in his strangely accented Reikspiel. ‘It does not matter how strong we make the walls – the plague spreads from within. We must purge the undercity.’

Martak’s voice fell flat in the huge echoing spaces of the chamber. As soon as he mentioned the Rot, irritated muttering started up again.

‘There is no such thing,’ said von Liebwitz confidently. ‘If the peasants only bathed more and ceased their rutting, all this sickness would cease.’

‘It is carried by the air,’ opined de Champney, to much nodding from his fellow magisters. ‘It cannot be eradicated while the foul winds blow.’

‘It comes from the river,’ said Fleischer. ‘And we will not dam that.’

Helborg felt a vice of weariness settle like a yoke on his shoulders. Was there nothing they could agree on? ‘And just what do you suggest, my lord Patriarch?’ he asked. ‘As you can clearly see, every ready hand already has a task to perform.’

‘I need teams of armed soldiers,’ said Martak. ‘A hundred strong each, all to be led by a magister of my colleges. The Rot rises from the sewers. Only by purging them all can we reach the source.’

‘Purge them all?’ blurted Elector Gausser. ‘You are mad, Supreme Patriarch.’

‘It cannot be done,’ added one of the master engineers, a bearded man with a bronze-rimmed monocle and gold braids on his epaulettes. ‘The undercity runs for dozens of miles.’

Martak remained calm in the face of the scorn. Throughout the uproar, his steady gaze never left Helborg. ‘Something is working against us down there,’ he insisted. ‘Something that grows stronger. It must be rooted out.’

Helborg struggled to control his irritation. Martak had not bothered to pull out the straggles in his filthy beard. Helborg could smell the man from twenty paces away, and his robes, such as they were, were streaked with dirt. ‘I do not doubt you,’ Helborg said, trying not to let his jaw clench. ‘But there is no question of those numbers. They are needed on the walls.’

‘Just one company, then,’ said Martak, stubbornly. ‘I will lead it myself.’

‘Out of the question.’

Martak bristled. ‘You’re... banning me?’

The insolence was intolerable. For a moment, fatigue made Helborg think he was addressing some dishevelled soldier out on the fields of war, and he nearly drew his blade. ‘This is not a priority,’ he growled.

‘Have you been down to the poor quarter?’

‘Of course not. Do not deflect this to some–’

‘They are dying down there. Dying like dogs.’

‘I cannot be concerned about that now.’

‘Your whole city is dying, Reiksmarshal.’

‘Silence. You have had your–’

‘The city is dying before your eyes and you cannot see it.’

‘I said, silence!’

‘If the Emperor were here–’

‘Enough!’ Helborg’s raw shout echoed from the high vaults, shocking even the hardened warriors into startled looks. ‘Who are you? What pit of filth were you drawn up from, to be thrust into my face like some mockery of your ancient office?’

The words poured like water from Helborg’s mouth. The anger made him feel alive, after so many hours, so many days, biting his tongue and abasing himself before men he would have slain on the battlefield without a second thought. Once he started, he could not stop – it was cathartic, to vent his spleen again, to pour out all his pent-up fury and frustration at a single source.

‘You come here dressed like some peddler from the backwoods of Stirland’s foulest shit-hole and dare to address the Reiksmarshal of the Empire? You dare? I walked these streets for decades while you rolled in the muck of the Reikswood and sniffed the spoor-trails of beasts. This is my city! It is my city! If you wish to challenge that, then Sigmar damn you and you may leave it!’

The echoes lingered for a while after the spittle-laced tirade had ceased. No one spoke. A few mouths hung open.

Martak himself remained icily calm. His brown eyes never left Helborg’s, who stood, trembling with rage, his chin jutting defiantly.

Then, very slowly, Martak drew in a long breath. ‘So we understand one another,’ he said, his gruff, uncultured voice heavy with contempt.

He shuffled from his place, and clumped heavily down to the chamber floor. As he left, his shoulders held stiffly, his clogs clanked noisily against the marble. It took a long time for him to leave, and the clanks rang out uncomfortably until at last he had been ushered into the corridors outside.

Gradually, Helborg recovered his composure. Almost immediately, the loss of control shocked him. Part of him wanted to rush after Martak, to apologise, to explain that he had not slept for days and that the burden of wresting an entire city from its indolence and dragging it into a war that every instinct told him could not be won was more than any man could bear.

But he could not, not with the eyes of the entire council on him. He was still the Reiksmarshal, and a display of weakness now, any weakness, would see the electors onto him like wolves on a lamb.

There were always disagreements. They could be overcome later. For now, what mattered was control – keeping Altdorf together just long enough to give it a chance.

Moving stiffly, he sat down again. The silence in the chamber was total.

Clearing his throat, Helborg turned a leaf of parchment over, moving to the next item on the long agenda.

‘Now then,’ he said, forcing his voice once more into calmness, as if nothing untoward had just happened. ‘Where were we?’

TWELVE

It look Karl Franz a long time to find his quarry. Something had changed since his fall, and a kind of prescience seemed to have lodged in his mind. The world around him seemed a little more vivid than it had done, as if the colours and smells had somehow cranked up. He saw more, he felt more, and his dreams were as startlingly immediate as anything that happened when awake.

Chief among those dreams was the figure of the great antlered god, reeling under the influence of a thousand cuts. Like some stricken stag, the god stumbled in a fog of darkness, assailed from every side by hidden foes. When Karl Franz saw the wounds in the god’s flanks and limbs, he wanted to weep.

He saw other things, too. Every night he had the same vision – a bearded man in dirty robes pacing on the battlements of a far city. In the depths of his slumber, he would call out to that man, not knowing why. He never answered, lost in struggles of his own.

In his waking hours, Karl Franz nursed himself back to something like strength. The wilds of the north were vast beyond imagining, and even with the hordes of Chaos marching through them, there were still blank tracts where he could hide and gather strength. There was even food to be found for those with sharp eyes and a searching mind, and since his rebirth Karl Franz had never had sharper eyes.

He knew he needed to head south, tracing the path of whatever remained of his once-mighty armies. He had no idea how many of his generals had survived. Helborg, surely, was dead, since the greater daemon at Heffengen had been a foe beyond him. He could not quite believe that Schwarzhelm was also gone, nor Huss, but there were no clues as to where they had been driven by fate and the currents of war. His thoughts turned to Valten often. That youth had been the great hope for so many – an image of Sigmar for troubled times. Perhaps he still would be, though it was hard to see what he could accomplish now.

For the time being, though, Karl Franz did not hurry to quit the wasteland. He followed the trails of warbands, creeping close to the bonfires at night and doing what he could to divine the movements of the fractured hosts. He understood some of what they said to one another, picking up meaning from the guttural speech of the north in a way he had never been able to do before. One word was repeated over and over again – Glottkin – though he had no idea what it meant.

He heard other words he did recognise – Talabheim, Drakwald, Altdorf. The plan of attack was simple – striking towards the Empire’s heart, just as he had told Helborg.

He would never make it to the city, though, not alone and on foot. The leaguer had been broken, and he was already a long way north of the rolling battlefront. He was isolated, cut off in a desolate land of refugees and broken corpses.

As the sun set on another lonely day of foraging, Karl Franz crouched low amid a thicket of briars. With a twinge of wry amusement, he wondered how he must have looked – the Emperor of the greatest realm of men on earth, crouching like a beggar amid thorns, his beard ragged and his clothes torn.

Ahead of him, blood-red in the gathering dusk, burned another campfire. Armed men sat around it, grunting and slurping. Something turned on a spit above the coals, too big to be a hog, though with a similar stench to burning pork. There must have been over twenty warriors there, hulking tribesmen from the far reaches of the Chaos Wastes with bones hammered through their cheeks and god-marks inked on nearly every inch of exposed flesh.

They were careless, marching through a land they had scoured of enemies, and the watch was lax. Karl Franz saw a ramshackle corral on the far side of the camp, and noted the lack of guards. Just one sentry, half-asleep and resentful at being banished from the fireside, huddled against the driving wind, wrapped in a thick, fur-lined cloak.

Going silently, keeping low, Karl Franz crept away from the flickering light-circle and skirted around the edge of the campsite. Hugging the scant cover of the thorn-bushes, he edged closer to the lone sentry. Once within strike-range, he crouched down again, his hand on the hilt of his blade, and waited for the moment.

The sentry was a balding, bearded man with boiled leather armour and an iron ring through his nose. His head slid forward, his eyes half-closed.

Karl Franz moved. Padding softly, he sprinted over to the half-aware guard. Before he had had time to look up, Drachenzahn had slipped silently into his neck, killing him instantly. Karl Franz lowered the body to the ground, casting a wary eye over at the campfire.

The tribesmen were still eating, tearing chunks of meat from the spit and ripping it with their teeth. Karl Franz propped the sentry back up, making it look as if he was simply slumped against the cold earth, then moved towards the stockade.

It was a clumsy, makeshift thing, no more than shafts of wood nailed loosely together and crowned with a crude fence of twisted thorn-vines. By rights it should not have held its prisoner for more than a few moments. Karl Franz could already smell the familiar musk, though there was something else there too – the over-sweet tang of muscle rot.

He prised the planks of the stockade apart, and squeezed inside. Deathclaw immediately hissed, and tried to rise, but long leather bindings held the creature down. Karl Franz hurried over to the griffon, sheathing his blade.

‘Calm, great one,’ he whispered. ‘You know your master.’

The huge creature immediately relaxed, and the hissing turned to a low rumble within its cavernous chest.

The creature had been sorely abused. Both wings looked broken, and dozens of arrow-shafts protruded from its flanks. Clumps of plumage had been ripped from its haunches, leaving bloody weals glistening wetly in the faint light. It had been tied to stakes hammered into the ground, its limbs compressed into a permanent crouch.

As soon as Karl Franz had severed the last of the leather bindings, the griffon nearly collapsed, issuing a strangled caw of pain as its tormented muscles gave way.

Karl Franz hurried over to its head, cradling the thick neck in his arms. He reached for the amulet and pressed it against the creature’s rapidly beating heart.

Gradually, the griffon’s yellow eye regained focus. Its heartbeat slowed to normal, and something like firmness returned to its stance.

‘This will be painful,’ said Karl Franz, hearing the first noises of alarm from the campfire. ‘But it is better to be alive and in pain, yes?’

Deathclaw hissed an angry response. From outside the stockade, Karl Franz heard the tramp of boots running and the cries of the blasphemous northern tongue.

‘You have the strength for this?’ he asked, brandishing his runefang.

By way of answer, Deathclaw dragged itself to its haunches, staggered over to the corral’s wall and hurled itself into it. Freed from its bonds, it smashed through the wooden staves, ripping them up and tossing them aside with an imperious flash of copper-gold plumage. The Norscans halted in their charge, suddenly faced with a freed griffon, one whose anger they had stoked over long nights of torment and who now faced them with the flash of bestial fury in its eyes.

‘The vengeance of Sigmar!’ roared Karl Franz, charging into battle alongside the enraged Deathclaw. Even wounded, the unshackled creature was more than a match for its captors, and Drachenzahn knew it would drink deep before the night was done.

The Norscans charged straight back at them, bellowing their strange war-curses with flamboyant bravery. As Karl Franz scythed his blade around for the first strike, cracking heavily against a blunted axe-face, he felt a strange euphoria thrill through his ravaged body.

I am fighting again, he thought, as the runefang danced and the shrieks of the enraged war-griffon split the night. May it never cease.

The town of Wurtbad clung to the southern shore of the Reik, a sprawling conurbation built by the trading guilds who plied the great river barges down to Altdorf and the coast beyond. It was not distinguished by grand buildings or fine fortifications – it was a functional place, built by practical men for practical purposes. A thick stone wall ringed a motley collection of townhouses, inns, warehouses and loading derricks. Even by the standards of the provinces, it had always had a shady reputation, the kind of place a cunning man would make a fortune and a simple one would lose it. Taverns and bawdy-houses crowded the streets, jostling alongside temples, barracks and customs stations.

Since the start of the troubles, Wurtbad had been hit hard. First the barges had stopped coming down from the north. No explanation for the stop in traffic had ever been forthcoming, so the burgomeister sent members of the City Watch upriver to investigate. They came back on a single, empty vessel, hanging from meat-hooks amid piles of rotting pig carcasses.

Then news of the war in the north had come in, carried by draggled refugees from Stirland and the Ostermark. As the Empire’s creaking war-machine responded, some of the cannier Wurtbad merchants made a quick profit hawking supplies to desperate generals at inflated prices. For a time, the passage of arms wending its way up the river from Nuln and Altdorf kept the taverns and brothels in roaring business, and, also for a time, a steady flow of regiments kept coming to replace those ordered onwards.

Then the flow dried up. Every company due to be sent to the distant front was deployed, hollowing out the defences along the Reik and the Stir. The streets fell quiet and the warehouses were locked. Barges stood empty at their berths, waiting for trade to resume, just as it always had when the worst was over.

Except that, this time, no soldiers returned from the north. No proclamations came out of Altdorf celebrating deliverance in Sigmar’s name. The temples began to fill, as a previously ambivalent populace suddenly remembered its piety.

The plagues came next. No one knew from where – perhaps the thick miasmas churning in from the east, or the lines of impoverished peasants fleeing the blight in the fields, or the curdling waters themselves as they lapped the empty wharfs. Soon the bodies were piling up, and every dawn a new cart left the town gates, heaped high with cloth-covered lumps. After a while even those stopped – no one dared venture out to where the forest sprouted unnaturally under the endless sheets of rain, and so the dead lay festering in the rubbish pits where they had been dragged.

By the time the watchmen on the southern wall caught sight of black banners on the far horizon, few believed the newcomers brought salvation with them. A few zealots started chanting, taking a kind of perverse, vicious pleasure in the vindication of their endless prophecies of the End Times. The rest of the city’s survivors grimly took up arms. The gates remained locked and barred, and every surviving militia member was called to the armouries to equip. Then they waited, watching the sable-clad host creep closer through the cloying mists.

The new arrivals did not advance further while the sun shone. They waited south of the river, issuing no challenge and making no demands. Inside the town, a vociferous and terrified faction argued that the burgomeister should sue for peace, since the garrison was in no condition to resist a siege and the Empire, such as it still was, had clearly abandoned them. By nightfall, as the true nature of the attackers became horrifyingly clear, those voices subsided, and a gnawing, crawling fog of despair took over.

Ghouls flickered through the frigid air, screaming at a gravid Morrslieb above. Flocks of bats raced across the sky, their blood-red eyes glowing in the velvet dark. Rank upon rank of bone-white warriors advanced under death’s-head banners, never issuing a sound. Some warriors stalked by their own will; others glowed luminously from within with the flickering light of corposant, impelled by the necromancers who cried out in grave-scraped voices and whirled staffs hung with clattering human skulls.

Black-armoured knights nudged bony steeds through the undead throng, and wights wearing ancient tomb-garb limped and shuffled in their wake. Most horrifying of all were the vargheists, which loped into battle with huge, ungainly strides, half-flying, half-running, their animalistic faces twisted with bloodlust and their claws already extended.

At the sight of that onslaught, many of Wurtbad’s mortal defenders lost heart and fled, wailing that the gods had abandoned them, trying to find somewhere in the shadowy maze of the narrow streets to hide. Others stood firmer. The burgomeister, Jens Bohr, was a veteran of the state levy and had faced down larger armies of greenskins in his time. His warrior priest, a fervent Sigmarite by the name of Kalvin Wolff, whipped the remaining troopers into a frenzy of pious defiance. Huge fires were kindled across the walls, flooding the land beyond in a writhing aura of crimson. Every captain on the walls was given a flaming brand, and teams of runners kept the stores of wood replenished. Desperate battle-hymns rose up from the battlements, competing with the shrieks of the living dead.

That did not stop the vice closing. Gradually, the undead host spread out, moving up the southern bank of the Stir and crossing the flood on either side of the town. The still-living troops traversed using barges looted from further upstream, while the truly dead simply waded across the river bed, emerging on the far bank covered in a thick layer of slime and weeds.

Then, once Wurtbad had been fully surrounded, the assault began.

The night’s cacophony was broken by the snap and rattle of trebuchets. The warped machines, looking more like giant ribcages than engines of war, hurled clusters of human skulls high over the walls, and where they impacted, they exploded in gouts of greenish gas. Any defenders too close to the impacts immediately succumbed to the blooms, their skin falling in shreds from their bones. They died in agony, clawing at their own sinews as their bodies fell apart around them.

Next came the bats. Some were taken down by hurried volleys of arrows, but most got through, grabbing men from the parapet and sending them tumbling, their chests torn out. Ghouls and grave-shades followed, floating eerily over the defensive perimeter in shimmering clusters and latching their cold magic around any who dared face them.

As the walls were ringed with horrors, the greater mass of skeletons and zombies reached the base and started to raise siege ladders. Dozens were cast down by the defenders, but more were immediately hoisted up. Whenever a weakness was isolated, deathly warriors surged up into the breach, falling into soundless combat with the troopers who rushed to repel them.

For all the ferocity of the initial assault, however, the main ring of defence held firm. The roaring fires did their job, daunting the undead horde and preventing them from advancing recklessly. Wolff kept up his furious defiance, showing the way by smashing swathes of skeletons apart with his warhammer. Bohr used his limited corps of gunners well, picking out champions with as much accuracy as the fire-flared night would allow.

Ladders were cast down, smashing amongst the seething masses below. The zombies moved too slowly to evade the blades of determined defenders, who fought with the ferocity of men who knew their lives were forfeit if they faltered. Some of those who had fled at the first sign of the undead recovered their spirits and returned, shamefaced, to the fray, shuddering with fear but still able to clutch a weapon in their clammy hands.

Combat raged on the wall-tops for over two hours, with neither side able to land the killer strike. The fires continued to crackle, the hymns rang out, but the undead could not be shaken from their grip, and just kept on coming.

If any Imperial chronicler had been present on that night to witness the battle of Wurtbad, he would have noted, perhaps with some grim pride, that the end did not come from outside. Freed from the need to guard their backs, the defenders of Wurtbad might have held out through the darkness, perhaps using the dawn to clear their besieged walls and restore a solid line of defence. But just as the undead attack began to lose momentum, a fell prince in blood-red armour rose up in his saddle, standing high above the town on a rise north of the river. He raised a lone, clawed hand, holding it palm-upward, and cried out words in a language of the distant hot sands. Those words somehow cut through the clamour of fighting, piercing the soul of every mortal and sending the undead advancing with renewed energy. A ring blazed from his withered finger, sending coils of smoke churning out into the night.

For a few moments, nothing else happened. The deadly struggle continued, and the battle-cries kept coming. Wolff even managed to clear the enemy from the summit of the southern gatehouse, felling a vargheist with a savage blow from his hammer before launching himself at the lesser troops.

But then the earth began to boil. Sodden soils shifted, churning like molten oil. A wild snap rang out across the city, and the air buckled with actinic lightning.

The first hand shot up from the ground, withered and pale. Then another, then a dozen more. Corpses pulled themselves free from their graves, hauling their etiolated bodies out of the mire. The tottering cadavers swayed for a moment, then set off, shuffling blearily towards the noise of combat.

The people of Wurtbad had not been foolish – they had always buried their dead outside the city walls, facing down and with the marks of Morr set over their graves. But now the Law of Death had been breached, and those many hundreds who had died on the site of the town before Wurtbad had been established as an outpost of Sigmar’s Empire suddenly shifted in their cold slumber. With a shiver and a sigh, they came scratching and scrabbling back into animation. Arcane armour of lost ages and blades long-rusted into stabbing stumps cracked up through the topsoil, followed by creaking bodies slaved to a new master.

It took a while for the new arrivals to be noticed. Intent on keeping the walls free of attackers, the troops of Wurtbad resolutely devoted their attentions to the host at their gates. By the time the screaming from the heart of the town could no longer be ignored, it was too late.

Hundreds of living dead had been wrenched from their ancient graves, and they thronged in Wurtbad’s alleys and backstreets, twittering and hissing. With blank, rotting faces, they dragged themselves towards the living, their only desire now to drink the hot, dark liquor of mortal blood. They crept out of the town’s central courtyards and fanned out through the crooked streets, feasting on any unfortunates they were able to overwhelm. Even the river-rats, which had clustered in Wurtbad’s river-front, ran before them, streaming out towards the outer walls in a rippling wave of panicked grey.

Wolff was the first to notice the tumult. Dispatching a final skeleton into a clattering pile of bones, he plunged down from his position over the gates, leading a charge against the growing crowds of living dead within the town’s perimeter. Others joined him, and the fragile bodies of the newly-raised were soon being cracked and smashed apart.

That left the walls depleted, though, just as the shot for the gunners began to run low and the fires lost their vigour. The hordes outside sensed the presence of their kin on the inside, and the assault redoubled in ferocity. The real killers among the skeletal army took their chance, and armour-clad warriors wearing tattered cloaks and ornate liveries of forgotten, cruel ages pushed up the siege ladders and on to the parapets.

Dark magic raced across the night, reaching a crescendo in tandem with the greater mass of human screaming. The fires began to die one by one, doused and chilled by the advancing dead, and shadows welled and pooled more thickly, plunging Wurtbad into a slick of oily darkness.

The battle-hymns rang out right until the end, growing fainter as more and more defenders were cut down. Those mortals who were slain did not rest easily, but soon got up again, this time taking the fight to their erstwhile comrades, and so the advance of the undead grew ever stronger as the will of men was eroded.

Bohr was eventually killed after his position at the northern gate was overrun by ghouls. He died shouting in outraged defiance even as icy fingers were plunged into his thick chest and his heart was ripped out. With the death of the burgomeister, the last organised defence of the northern walls collapsed, and those who could ran for whatever temporary refuge they could find.

Knowing the futility of flight, and knowing too that hope had gone, Wolff was the last one standing. He cut his way back to his temple, gathering a few dozen of the stoutest defenders around him as he went. They made a stand before the dome of the Sigmarite chapel, overlooked by granite statues of griffons and with the final bonfires guttering about them.

Waves of undead swept towards them, chattering excitedly as they sensed the prospect of drinking the blood of the valiant, but all were repelled. Wolff’s band held the outer precinct against them all, hacking and smashing with desperate strokes until the ground at their feet was knee-deep in broken bones and parchment-dry flesh.

One by one, though, fatigue and ill-chance took their toll. The relentless numbers could not be defied forever, and in the end Wolff stood alone, his throat raw from war cries and his hammer as heavy as lead in his bloodied fists.

Just as the vanguard of the undead host was poised to launch a final push, though, a chill voice rang out. The undead fell back instantly, shuffling into the shadows and clearing a space before the temple gates.

Wolff stood under the lintel, his forehead sheened with sweat, breathing heavily. Between the parted crowds of lesser warriors, the Master of the Host strode out, his black robes rustling in the wind. Ice-white hair rippled about his shoulders, part-obscuring the scarred and cracked mask of his skin. The ring he had used to raise Wurtbad’s dead still smouldered on his finger.

The warrior priest did not flinch. His eyes fixed on the vampire lord’s, and never moved. He murmured battle-curses in an endless litany, and prepared to lift his hammer once more. He knew he was overmatched, but he could at least die on his feet, taking the fight to the enemy just as his immortal patron demanded.

Then Vlad von Carstein spoke.

‘You, too may serve,’ said the vampire, coming to a halt before the priest and folding his arms. He made no attempt to defend himself, even though he was in range of the warhammer’s strike. ‘This is why we do this. You are too good to be sacrificed to gods who appreciate nothing but mania.’

Wolff’s lip pulled back in contempt. ‘Your kind has come this way before,’ he snarled. ‘You were always turned back. You will be again.’

‘By whom?’ Vlad sighed. ‘There is nothing left. Look around you – you can see what ruins remain.’

‘From ruins come glory. From the darkness comes light.’

Vlad smiled thinly. ‘Come, you have fought enough. I always offer the valiant a place at my side – take the offer, priest. You can still fight against the greater darkness.’

‘At your side?’ Wolff laughed. ‘You know so little that you would even ask?’ He spat at the vampire, and the spittle landed on the crimson armour, sliding across its lacquered surface. ‘You have come amongst men, abomination. You may crush us for a time, you may tread across our broken bodies and burn our temples and strong places, but we will always come back at you. If I were given a thousand lifetimes, I would choose the same path every time – to smite you with the holy fire of my calling.’ He smiled with contempt. ‘And you came too close.’

He swung his warhammer. It was a fine strike, one that Huss himself would have been proud of – fast, hard, well-aimed. The hammer-head flew out, angled at the vampire’s neck.

At the same time, a single shot pierced the night, just as well-aimed. It struck Wolff clean in the forehead, penetrating the bone and punching a clean, round hole through his skull. The warhammer clanged to the ground, and the warrior priest tumbled backward, collapsing under the lintel of his own temple before coming to rest amid the shattered bones of his victims.

Vlad looked down at the corpse thoughtfully. The man’s zeal had been striking. Had he himself been capable of such fervour, once? Of course he had, but it was hard to remember just how it felt.

Herrscher emerged into the light, his pistol still smoking. The witch hunter had a tortured look on his face.

‘There,’ said Vlad, turning away from Wolff to look at him. ‘That was not so hard.’

‘I could not let you be harmed,’ said Herrscher, his voice shaking. ‘I killed... my own.’

‘He is not your own,’ said Vlad, impatiently. ‘Look around you. We are yours, you are ours. You have killed for us, and we will kill for you.’

Herrscher looked like he wanted to vomit, though his body was no longer capable of it. Before he could reply, the sound of overlapping laughter wafted across the temple courtyard.

Liliet and her sisters had climbed on to the dome of the temple. Their gowns were streaked with blood, and it dripped from their long fingernails like tears.

‘Rejoice!’ they chorused. ‘A thousand new blades for the army of the night-born! A thousand more to come before dawn-fall!’

All across Wurtbad, those of Vlad’s army with the self-command to respond lifted their parched voices in victory-cries.

Vlad laid a gauntlet on Herrscher’s shoulder. ‘The Empire trains its hunters well – that was a good shot.’ Then he turned on his heels, his cloak swirling about him, and strode away from the temple, back towards the river-front where the empty barges had been tethered, ready for the passage of the Reik. ‘Do not dwell on it. The night is still dark, and we have work to do. By the dawn, our new servants must be on the move.’

Martak’s fury took a long time to ebb. He had stormed up to his barely used chambers in the Imperial Palace and smashed a few things up in there. He gave a glimmering simulacrum of Helborg’s gaunt face to every item he hurled across the room before it smashed into the wall.

No one dared interrupt him. By then, every servant in the Palace had all heard tales of the half-feral Supreme Patriarch, and kept their distance. Gelt had been capable of rages, but at least he was vaguely understandable. Martak, deprived of even that measure of respect, took a grim satisfaction in causing fear instead.

Let them fear me, he snarled to himself. They deserve what is to come.

He did not mean that. No one deserved the horrors that lay ahead, not even the stiff-necked Reiksmarshal, and certainly not the flunkeys who struggled to do his impossible bidding.

By the time he had calmed down, his personal chamber was a mass of ripped parchment and broken crockery, and he was a sweaty, panting mess.

Martak cracked his knuckles, stomped over to the chamber’s narrow window and pushed the lead catch open. The window faced east, giving a view out over the great mass of the city.

He took a deep breath. The stench was becoming unbearable, even at such a height. He thought again of Margrit – sensible, dutiful Margrit. He had promised her that something would be done. Every hour that the Rot was allowed to swell and grow was another hour for the temple’s supplies to run down and the energies of the sisters to ebb a little further.

He propped his elbows on the sill and rested his chin gloomily on locked hands. Far below, the Reik was the colour of spoiled spinach and barely flowed at all. He could make out the sullen blooms of algae lurking just under the surface, and could smell the acrid stink of its steady fermentation.

He had made a mess of his short time as Patriarch. Helborg was making a mess of the city defences, and the electors were making a mess of assisting him. They were like children caught by the glare of a predator, frozen and witless, unable to do more than bicker in the face of oncoming disaster.

It is the city.

The realisation came to him so suddenly and so easily that he immediately wondered how he had not seen it before.

It is the poison.

Martak was a creature of the wilds, of the windswept tracts of unbroken forest. He had been known to spend months in the wilderness, kept alive by his arts and native cunning, eschewing all comforts and embracing the idiosyncratic path of his college’s disciplines.

I have allowed them to cage me. This is their world, not mine, and they have made me useless in it.

He was a sham Patriarch in a sham Empire, playing out his role in dumb-show as the world unravelled around them. He could not command men, and had no desire to. Helborg had been right about one thing: this was his city, not Martak’s.

He stood up again, and shuffled over to the writing desk he had just half-smashed. After a few moments scrabbling around, he found a scrap of intact parchment and a near-empty jar of ink. He pulled a quill from under a disarranged collection of broken-spined tomes, and started to write. Once he had finished, he folded the parchment and sealed it, stowing the letter in his grimy robes.

Then he moved over to Gelt’s old Globe of Transmigratory Vocalisation within a Localised Aethyric Vicinity – a bronze-bound sphere set atop an iron web of intricately-woven threads. It was a meagre device for one of such talents, but it had its uses.

Picking it up and setting it before him on the floor, Martak placed both palms on the cool surface of the sphere. Something like clockwork clicked inside it, and he felt the tremble of moving parts. Previously hidden runes glowed into life on the bronze, welling softly with a sudden heat.

Martak concentrated. This was Gelt’s toy, and he still was not sure he had mastered it properly.

‘Search her out,’ he whispered gruffly, imposing his will on the machine’s. ‘The soul of Sister Margrit.’

It resisted him. The device knew its gold-masked master, and resented being used roughly by a stranger. In the end, though, Martak’s presence prevailed, and the Globe performed its function. The air above it trembled, warmed, then parted, revealing a blurred and translucent image of Margrit’s garden. The priestess herself was standing with her back to the Globe’s view. As soon as Martak laid eyes on her, she stiffened, turned, and made a warding gesture.

‘Be at ease, sister,’ said Martak, knowing that he would appear to her as nothing more than a ghost, hanging above the herb-garden like a puff of steam in summer.

‘Patriarch,’ said Margrit, her voice muffled and distorted. She looked at him through the Globe’s portal, peering as if into murky water. ‘Could you not come in person?’

‘I am leaving the city,’ said Martak. A soon as he saw her face fall, he regretted his clumsy way with words.

‘All is lost, then,’ she said.

‘No, you were right – the Emperor is master. While he remains lost, we cannot stand. I go to find him.’

Margrit’s expression brightened into an almost childlike hope. ‘You know where he is?’

‘He is coming, sister. The stars foretell it, and the elements gather to witness it.’ Martak had no idea whether this was true. All he had to go on were his dreams, which had been getting more vivid with every sleepless night. He had dismissed them for too long, and knew now that he should have listened to the whispered voices much earlier. ‘It will not be easy, but yours will be the harder road. I can give you no promise the Reiksmarshal will act. I would stay, if I could, but...’ He struggled for the words. ‘This is not my place.’

Margrit nodded, accepting what he told her. ‘Then you can give me no sign.’

Martak racked his mind for something that would appeal to her. ‘When the hour is darkest,’ he said, hoping he sounded vaguely plausible, ‘look to the heavens above the Imperial Palace. Look for the sign of Sigmar reborn.’ It was poor stuff, this deception and fakery, but it was all he had. ‘In advance of that, endure, sister. Endure for as long as you are able.’

Margrit looked satisfied, and Martak found himself marvelling once again at her quiet resolve. Given the tiniest sliver of hope, she would hold fast to her station until the very ending of the world. If the Empire deserved any kind of salvation, it was for the ones like her – the faithful, the decent, the selfless.

‘Do not be long gone, Patriarch,’ Margrit said. ‘I liked the colleges better with a wolf at the helm.’

Martak laughed, and bowed at the compliment. He would have been happy betting that Gelt had never walked the streets in the shadow of the temple. ‘Go with Shallya, sister,’ he said, and lifted his hands from the Globe. Margrit’s image rippled into nothing, and the runes on the sphere faded back to blank bronze.

Back in the realm of the senses, Martak looked about him. His chamber looked as if an animal had got in and destroyed everything in its frantic efforts to escape again. Perhaps that was not so far from the truth.

He walked over to the heavy oak door and pulled it open. The corridor outside was empty, and he had to walk through two more antechambers before he found an official. The servant, wearing a crimson tunic marked with the sign of the griffon, looked startled to see the Supreme Patriarch back on the prowl.

‘My lord?’ he asked, shrinking from Martak’s malodorous presence.

‘Send this to the Reiksmarshal’s office immediately,’ said Martak, handing over the ink-stained letter. ‘Ensure that it is placed before him at the first occasion – he will want to read it.’

The servant handled the letter nervously, as if it might be a mortar primed to go off in his hands. ‘Very well, my lord. Where shall I tell him he may find you?’

Martak snorted. ‘Find me? He’ll have trouble.’ He looked around him. The corridors and chambers of the Palace were still mostly a mystery to him, a vast web of tunnels and spirals and shafts and towers. ‘But you can help me with one small thing.’

The servant looked up expectantly. Martak smiled darkly, already enjoying the thought of what he was going to do.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what is the quickest path to the Imperial Menagerie?’

THIRTEEN

The wind was bitter and never-ending, driving down from the high peaks with the shrieks of fell voices echoing in its wake. The skies had turned from a screen of blank grey into a churned mass of violent thunderheads, surging and boiling as if some immeasurably vast pair of hands was tearing the heavens apart.

As Leoncoeur rode up to the head of the pass, wrapped in his cloak, the deluge drummed on the rocks around him. Rivulets poured down from the rising land ahead, slushing and bubbling as the torrent picked up pace, and the stony track up to the entrance to Axebite Pass was now little more than a stream of gushing water.

Ahead of the Bretonnian column reared the mighty peaks of the Grey Mountains, piled up into the tortured sky in ranked visions of granite-headed immensity. To Leoncoeur’s left soared the double-headed summit of Talareaux, called Graugeleitet by the Imperials. To his right was the colossal bulk of Findumonde, which the Empire dwellers called Iceheart. Both summits were lost in the haze of storms.

Gales were always strong in the passes, but those during this passage had been unreasonably ferocious. Baggage wains and valuable warhorses had been washed away on the precipitous pathways, and at times every footfall had been treacherous. Progress had slowed to a grim crawl. Each night, Leoncoeur had sat sullenly around the campfires with his lieutenants, noting the growing gap between where they were and where they wanted to be.

Still, they had persevered. The highlands had slowly fallen behind, replaced by the jagged, hard country of the mountains proper. The last of the pasture disappeared, replaced by a stone-land of sheer, hard-edged severity. The rain stung like ice, and the wind whipped it into wicked eddies, creeping into every fold of fabric and armour-joint.

The raw enthusiasm of the crusade was hard to sustain in such conditions. Battered by the ferocity of the elements, the knights kept their dripping heads low, saying little. The hundreds of peasant workers in the baggage train suffered worse, their coarse woollen garments offering little protection, and many succumbed during the frozen nights, left behind in scratched, shallow graves by the roadside.

As the head of the pass loomed before them at last, Leoncoeur called a halt. He peered ahead towards the high entrance. Slushy snow lay in grey-white drifts higher up, draped across the striated shoulders of the mountains. The winding road ahead was overlooked by near-vertical cliffs of broken-edged stone, narrowing near the summit to a gap of less than thirty feet across.

His eyes narrowed. He sniffed. It was near-impossible to sense much in the shifting gales, but something registered. Something he felt he ought to recognise.

Jhared drew alongside him. Of all of them, the flame-haired knight had retained his humours the best, but even he looked windswept and rain-soaked. ‘Why are we halting, lord?’ he asked, shivering as the driving sleet bounced from him.

‘Can you hear it?’ asked Leoncoeur, inclining his head a little.

Jhared listened, then shook his head.

Leoncoeur was about to speak again, when a hard, massed roar suddenly broke out from up ahead.

Every knight in the entourage knew that sound – it had been engraved on their minds from their earliest days. The ancestral enemies of the Bretonnians could be purged, burned and driven back a thousand times, but they would always come back.

‘To arms!’ cried Leoncoeur, drawing his sword in a spray of rain.

The column’s vanguard formed up immediately, kicking their horses into a line and drawing weapons. Each knight carried a heavy-bladed broadsword, and they threw back their cloaks to expose moisture-slick breastplates marked with the livery of their houses.

Before the knights could charge, the gorge before them filled with what looked like a rolling tide of earth and rubble. It was accompanied by throaty bellows of challenge, rising quickly to a deafening crescendo that ripped through the scything curtains of sleet.

‘Charge!’ roared Leoncoeur, digging his spurs into his steed’s flanks.

With a hoarse battle-cry, the Bretonnian vanguard surged along the throat of the gorge, picking up speed rapidly despite the treacherous footing. Accelerating to the gallop, ten horses abreast, they thundered towards the landslide hurtling towards them.

Except that it was no landslide. A host of green-skinned monsters had burst from cover, their red eyes blazing with fury. The rubble that came with them was flung from their backs as they emerged from the ambush, and stones the size of fists thunked and rolled about them. There must have been hundreds of orcs before them, all jostling and tearing down the funnel of the gorge, sliding on the slippery rock and trampling their own kind like cattle on a stampede.

When the two forces collided, it was with a sick, hard smash that sent the bodies of both orc and human flying. Bretonnian warhorses were huge, powerful beasts, and their whirling hooves were quite capable of cracking skulls and snapping ribcages. The greenskins were battle-hardened monsters, each of them far larger than a man and with corded, muscled limbs that hurled axes and mauls around with plate-denting force.

Leoncoeur crashed through the hard glut of the toughest of the orcs, laying about him in flamboyant sweeps of his blade. He rode his mount with imperious perfection, compensating for every buck and rear. As the greenskins clawed for him, he laid waste to them, hammering with all the pent-up strength of the long ride.

Jhared remained close by, working his own blade furiously. ‘For the dead of Quenelles!’ he thundered, his lank hair thrashing around his un-helmed head. ‘For the dead of Lyonesse!’

Every knight of the company fought in the same way – with a cold anger generated by the many humiliations suffered by their realm. They were devastating on the charge, as pure and violent as the cascades around them. The orcs died in droves, and soon the rivulets at their feet ran black with blood.

Leoncoeur wheeled his steed around and thrust his sword point-first into the open maw of a slavering greenskin. He ripped the blade free in time to meet the swiped challenge of another, and a dull clang of metal on metal rang out. Two swift parries, and he had dispatched the next challenger.

The impetus of the orc attack was already failing. They began to retreat back up the gorge, desperate now to escape the close-serried Bretonnian onslaught. There was no escape for them that way, though, for the pegasi plummeted from the clouds, drawn by the scents and sounds of battle. Even without riders they were deadly, swooping low to lash out at the stumbling herd of greenskins.

‘Let none escape!’ shouted Leoncoeur, riding down a stumbling orc and spurring his mount towards the next. The Bretonnians loosened their formation as they gained momentum. Gilles de Lyonesse, a rider with a love of the chase that exceeded even his hunt-obsessed brethren, broke clear with a small band of like-minded brother-knights and galloped up the gorge’s flanks, aiming to cut off the rearmost greenskins. Leoncoeur and the main body of warriors advanced up the centre, cutting into the heart of the orc herd. The pegasi continued to dive and swoop, bludgeoning the slow-moving greenskins with impunity, and so the orcs were soon assailed from all sides.

The remainder of the fighting was little better than a slaughter, with the last of the creatures surrounded by a ring of stamping horses. Leoncoeur killed the last orc himself, as was his right, and lifted its severed head high in triumph. Gore slopped in a torrent from its serrated neck-stump, mingling with the deluge of crimson foam below.

‘First blood of the crusade!’ he shouted, and his knights returned the cry with genuine gusto. After so long suffering from the grinding cold, it was good to indulge in their proper calling again.

De Lyonesse soon returned, and the slower-moving infantry of the baggage train caught up, hauling their wagons over the broken ground.

In normal times the peasants would have been employed to drag the bodies of the slain for burning, for allowing the corpse of a greenskin to moulder in the open air was asking for trouble. On this occasion, though, Leoncoeur suffered none of them to waste time. The way was cleared for the passage of the largest wains, and the bodies of fallen knights were retrieved and buried with all honour, but no funeral pyres were lit.

Less than two hours later, the cavalry column was on the move again, snaking higher up into the mouth of Axebite Pass. The clouds above did not relent, but poured out their violence ever more intensely, washing the blood from the rocks and sending it tumbling down the throat of the killing ground.

Leoncoeur let his knights pass first, led by de Lyonesse, who had started singing hymns of praise to the Lady for deliverance. The old king remained at the site where he had slain the last of the greenskins, lost in thought.

‘You were right,’ said Jhared, nudging his mount past Leoncoeur’s and preparing for the final push towards the summit. ‘First blood. A good omen.’

For a moment, Leoncoeur did not reply. The severed head of his victim lay on the near-frozen earth, gazing blankly up at the heavens. ‘I do not recognise them,’ he said at last.

Jhared looked down at the piles of corpses, then back at Leoncoeur, then shrugged. ‘They look much the same as any I’ve killed.’

Leoncoeur leaned down in the saddle, poring over the piled heaps of the slain. Jhared’s confidence was misplaced – the orcs’ wargear was like nothing a greenskin south of the mountains would have worn. Leoncoeur had travelled far across the Old World and had fought in a dozen different lands. The different tribes of greenskin fought amongst themselves even more than they warred with other races. Each strain had their own territory, which was only breached on the rare occasion when an exceptional warlord would unite them into the rare explosions of aggression that gouged trails of carnage across the civilised lands.

This was not one of those occasions. The slain orcs’ wargear was in poor shape, and their armour – to the extent it could be called that – hung from their bodies in tatters. It was clear that many of them had been wounded before the fighting had even begun, and their bulk was far less than it should have been.

‘They did not come here to attack us,’ said Leoncoeur.

Jhared laughed. ‘Then why were they here?’

‘They are from north of the mountains. The Drakwald, I’d warrant. They have been driven south.’ Leoncoeur looked steadily at Jhared, letting him be in no doubt what had happened. ‘They were fleeing. Whatever waits for us, it has cleansed the forest of orcs.’

Jhared started to laugh again, but the sound trailed off. He forced a smile. ‘The forest can never be cleansed.’

Now that the fervour of battle had faded, Leoncoeur could reflect on how poorly the greenskins had resisted. He had never seen them give up, not so completely, not so quickly.

‘They were hunted,’ he said, finding himself strangely appalled by the thought. ‘They were scared.’

‘Of us.’

Leoncoeur smiled wryly. ‘Believe that if you wish.’ He kicked his horse’s flanks, and it began to move again. ‘I do not.’

He looked up, to where his knights wound their way ever northwards, passing under the night-dark shadow of Talareaux. It looked like they were snaking their way into the underworld.

Perhaps that is so, he mused. In which case, the Lady willing, we will soon set it alight.

The sun had only just risen, and its light was grey and diffuse, barred by the heavy layer of cloud that had hung over Altdorf for weeks. The parade ground was sunk into a kind of foggy twilight, part-masking the movements of the men out on the sand.

Helborg barely remembered the last time he had seen a clear sky. Ever since the first stirrings of the hosts in the north, the heavens had been masked by a grimy curtain, washing all the colour out of the world and plunging it into a dreary fog. Everything was dank, wet, sopping and grime-encrusted. Under such a constant weight of oppression, it was easy enough to believe that the gods had deserted the world of mortals at last, and that the little remaining light and heat was draining out of reality one sodden day at a time.

It got under the skin after a while, the lack of blue in the sky and freshness on the breeze. When the air tasted foul for day after day, and the nights were clammy and the days were humid, and the rain kept coming in a fine drizzle that made everything mouldy and turned the earth underfoot into a spore-infested mire, it crushed the spirit. Even if the tensions of the impending battle had not been there, the city’s people would have suffered badly under such unrelenting misery – their sleep would have been as fitful, and their nightmares just as vivid.

Reports were coming in of rioting in all quarters. Brawls started up over the most trivial of disputes, triggered by hunger, or despair, or the kind of futile anger that came simply from waiting for the axe to fall. Food shortages made the situation worse – unspoiled grain supplies were running low, despite the heavy guard placed on the remaining stores, and water was little better. Most of the populace avoided water in any case, preferring the strong beers brewed by the alemasters and the few dwarf refugees still lingering in the taverns. They said that beer warded against the Rot. Perhaps they were right.

Helborg had not had a decent drink in days, and it made his nerves brittle. The wounds across his face still had not healed, and the pain was getting worse. Whenever he found a scrap of sleep, the lacerations would flare up, waking him in sudden pain. His apothecaries could not do anything – their old remedies, never reliable, had long since ceased to work at all, and the best they could offer was to bandage the lacerations and apply a soothing salve.

Helborg refused. He would not walk around the Palace with linen strapped to his face, and nor would he seek to dampen the raw pain of the daemon’s wound with potions. The pain was a reminder to him of the price of weakness. Moreover, it kept him awake, which with his chronic lack of proper rest was becoming essential.

‘Make them do it again,’ he rasped, running his hands through days-old stubble and resisting the urge to scratch the itching weals.

Von Kleistervoll, standing by his side, barked out the orders, and together, he, Helborg and Zintler watched the drills unfold.

They were standing on a narrow balcony overlooking the parade ground. The sandy surface had begun to go black from rot, despite the incessant raking from the groundskeepers and near-endless prayers from the arch-lectors.

Down below, formations of men began to move. Sergeants yelled out the drill orders, and troopers formed up into squares and detachments. The orders kept coming, just in the same sequence as they had been for the past two hours, rehearsing the various defensive tactics set down in Robert de Guilliam’s great compendium of martial lore, the Codex Imperialis, that had provided the cornerstone of Imperial defence since the time of Mandred.

Helborg watched the detachments wheel around one another. He watched the halberdiers shuffle together, keeping tight in the first rank and holding their blades stiffly. He watched them perform the feints, the fall-backs, the rallies, all under the hoarse expletives of their taskmasters. Five hundred men moved across the parade ground, their every movement orchestrated like a masque in one of the old grand balls.

Except that there were no grand balls anymore, for the gowns had rotted away and the ladies’ rouge and face-paints had mouldered in their tins, and the glittering halls where they would once have been worn were carpeted with dust.

‘They are holding up,’ remarked von Kleistervoll, looking for the positives.

The Reiksguard preceptor had taken a personal interest in improving the readiness of the standard Altdorfer garrisons since the defeat at Heffengen. Cohesion was everything to an Empire army – in any conflict, an individual human trooper was likely to be weaker and less well equipped than his enemy, but coordination with the warriors on either side of him made up for this deficiency. A Chaos horde charged into battle in ragged bands of berserk ill-discipline, against which the only defence was tight-ordered rows of steel. If the enemy managed to breach Altdorf’s outer walls, as it surely would before the end, then such disciplined ranks would be needed to hold them up for as long as possible.

Zintler looked less sure. ‘They grow weary,’ he said, watching one squadron of pikemen fall out of step, and stumble as they tried to make it good.

‘We’re all weary,’ snapped Helborg, observing the proceedings with a critical eye. ‘Keep them at it.’

Then he turned away from the balcony’s edge and stalked back inside, followed by Zintler. Von Kleistervoll remained where he was, scrutinising his charges like a kestrel hovering over its prey.

Helborg strode down the long corridor leading away from the balcony and into the Palace interior, and Zintler hurried to keep pace.

‘How stands the gate repair?’ Helborg demanded.

‘The work was complete,’ said Zintler. ‘As soon as they finished, more defects were found. The engineers are working through the night. The West Gate will be complete by the end of this day; the others, a little longer.’

Helborg grunted. It was like trying to build with gravel – as soon as one wall was shored-up, another opened with cracks. ‘Did the Gold magisters answer the summons?’

‘They are working on the problem,’ said Zintler. ‘But in Gelt’s absence–’

‘Do not talk to me of Gelt. I do not want to hear his name.’

‘Understood. His deputy is Gerhard Mulleringen. I will speak to him again.’

Helborg felt light-headed as he walked. Chambers passed him by, one by one, their edges blurred and their doors gaping. He was vaguely aware of functionaries and knights bowing, and the muffled sound of orders echoing from other corridors, and the clatter of running feet. It might as well have been a dream – all that mattered was the army, the walls, the supplies and the defence plans. He had to remain focused.

Suddenly, he realised that one of the vague shadows flitting about him was not moving. He blinked, to see one of the Palace servants standing directly in his path. The man looked terrified, but remained where he was.

‘Your pardon, lord!’ he stammered, bowing low. ‘I was charged to deliver these as soon as I could, but you have been... hard to find.’

Helborg glared at him. The servant held two rolls of parchment, one in each hand. ‘What are they?’ he demanded, wondering whether he could face more ledgers and dockets to sign.

‘Letters, lord. One is marked with the seal of the Supreme Patriarch. The other was delivered from the Grey College.’

Helborg shot Zintler a dry look. ‘The shadow-mages. What have they laid hands on now?’ He grabbed both rolls, and broke Martak’s seal first. As he read, his reaction moved from curiosity, to disbelief, to fury.

‘He’s gone,’ Helborg said flatly.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Zintler.

‘He’s left the city. The damned traitor. I’ll have his eyes. I’ll rip his throat out and hang it from the Imperial standard. I’ll punch his–’

‘I can send a search party. We’ll bring him back.’

Helborg rolled his eyes. ‘He’s an Amber battle wizard, Zintler. Your men would limp back as green-eyed hares, if they came back at all. It’s too late – he broke into the Menagerie and worked some trickery on a war-griffon. They’re both long gone.’ He leaned heavily against the nearest wall, putting out a hand to support himself. Martak had been a pestilential fool, a peasant of the worst and most scabrous order, but he had been gifted, and his staff was needed. His loss was just one more blow amid a thousand other lesser cuts.

Zintler looked shocked, and for a moment did not say anything. When he did, his voice was weak. ‘Why?’

Helborg laughed harshly. ‘He thinks the Emperor lives. He’s gone to find him.’ His voice dripped with sarcasm. ‘The pressure’s got to him. I knew he was weak. Damn it all, what were they thinking, appointing a man like that?’

Zintler shook his head sympathetically. ‘Anything else?’

‘He advises me to perform a purge of the sewers – still on that old saw.’ Helborg snorted another bitter laugh. ‘Even now, he still presumes to advise me.’ He screwed the parchment up and hurled it away. ‘We do not need him. We still have magisters, and we still have priests, and I will not waste men on a fruitless trawl of the undercity.’

Even as he said the words, he realised how he sounded.

Desperate. I am clutching at any morsel of hope now.

He unravelled the second roll of parchment, finding himself yearning for some better news.

‘From the Grey College, you say?’ he asked, breaking the seal.

The servant nodded. ‘They told me it was found on the roof, surrounded by blood. They do not know how long it was there.’

Helborg raised a weary eyebrow – just one more portent of doom. The tidings had been so relentlessly horrific over the past few days – Carroburg lost, Talabheim silent, Nuln cut off. In the deep of the night, when he struggled for just an hour of sleep, he feared that even his iron-hard defiance was beginning to crack at the edges.

Let it be news of reinforcements – from somewhere. Anywhere!

He started to read.

To the most sublime and majestic Karl Franz, Prince of Altdorf, Count of the Reikland, Emperor of the Eleven Provinces and Heir of Sigmar (Or his deputy, given the uncertain times that have overtaken us.)

I have no doubt you will not wish to read a letter such as this, and from one such as me. You will be tempted to throw it into the fire as soon as you see the signature. I urge you to resist – I do not make this communication lightly, nor do I wage this war without urgent cause.

Your scryers will by now be telling you what all men of reason can see for themselves – the order of the world is changing. The Law of Death has been broken, and the remaining Seven Laws are straining at the edges. Powers that have stood firm for millennia are fading, while others are growing with unseemly haste.

Can any now doubt that the Gods of Ruin have put aside their ancient quarrels, and are now acting in concert? And, if that is so, can there be any further doubt that they must be victorious? The great heroes of the past are with us no more, for we dwell in a time of lesser souls.

And yet, not all is foregone. There is another way. Only one soul stands a chance of enduring the storm of Chaos: my Master, who even now strives to return from the banishment of ages. Already he has struck down enemies older than the stones you stand on, and soon he will turn his gaze northwards.

Your great ancestor once ended him in a duel that still echoes through the ages. And yet, if you wish to see the forces of Order prevail in this time, you will need to welcome him now. I am but an emissary, a forerunner of this greater soul, and I offer my services to you. My armies have already marched at the side of yours, though you may not have known it then. They will march alongside you again, should you consent to my offer, freely given and motivated by nothing more than mutual need.

The living and the dead have ever been at odds, but we are more alike to one another than to the corruptions of the Outer Dark. Where they would turn the world into a howling maelstrom of perpetual flux, we understand the principles of order, of command, of endurance. There is a future taking shape, one in which the foundations of reality are made firm again, where the weak are protected and the strong given dominion. It is not the future your priests were wont to pray for, but it is one in which humanity is preserved, and that, let me assure you, is the very best that can be hoped for now.

Make no mistake, my lord, this is the choice: alliance, or oblivion. Just as your ancestor Magnus swallowed his pride to make common cause with the elves of Ulthuan when they were denounced as witches by the ignorant, so must hard choices be made in our own time.

I demand nothing but that which has always been my birthright: Electorship of Sylvania, a province which has unfairly been denied its existence for too long. The rights and privileges of this station shall be the same as the others of that rank: a runefang, a place at the Imperial Council, the old exemptions from the common law and the freedom to raise and keep men-at-arms. I only ask one more boon of you: the chance to search the Reikland for the resting place of one who was dear to me. If the world is to be remade, then I must discover her before all is cast anew.

I am aware that the mutual enmity between our peoples will make this proposal a hard one to entertain fairly. I have no doubt, though, given the circumstances, you will see past ancient prejudices and buried grievances. You will have seen the same auguries as we have, and you will know what is at stake. And, after all, do I not have some prior claim to this title? Or does right of conquest count for nothing in these debased times?

I trust that this missive will reach you, despite all the turmoil that even now seeks to overwhelm us. By the time you read it, I will be on the march, heading along the path of the Stir towards Altdorf. By the time I arrive, I will command a host larger than the last time I camped outside your walls. I earnestly hope that I do not arrive too late, and that you will at least have the opportunity to make your judgement under clear skies and with a free heart.

Until then, I remain, as I ever have been, your loyal and ever-obedient servant,

Vlad von Carstein

Helborg took a long time over the words. When he had reached the end, he read it again, hardly able to believe what was before his eyes.

If he had not been at Heffengen, he might have assumed the letter was some malicious forgery, despite the authentic-looking seal and appropriately archaic hand. But he had been at Heffengen, and so could believe only too well that the provenance was genuine.

He remembered von Kleistervoll’s words after the battle.

They say the dead fought the northmen.

Helborg had not believed that then. He had seen von Carstein emerge, just as the battle remained in the balance. He had seen the skeletal dragon, and the onrush of the fanged knights in blood-red armour. Until he had arrived, the day had not been altogether lost.

Zintler hovered at his side, clearly itching to know what had been written. Helborg let him wait. His mind was racing.

Could he be trusted? Could I have been wrong?

As soon as the treacherous words entered his mind, he cursed himself for even thinking them.

He lives for nothing more than destruction! All of his kind do! They sense weakness, and circle for the kill.

Zintler could not restrain himself, and coughed delicately. ‘My lord?’

Helborg did just as he had done with Martak’s letter, and crumpled the parchment into a tight ball. He stuffed it into a pocket sewn on the inside of his half-cloak, and shoved it down deep. It would not do to have any but him aware of its contents. Just as with so many other things, he would have to bear the burden alone. Even the electors could not be told.

‘It is nothing, Zintler,’ he said, pushing himself clear of the wall. He dismissed the servant with a curt wave and started walking. ‘Nothing worth a damn.’

Zintler trotted to keep up. ‘And Martak? Can we do nothing?’

Helborg whirled on the Reikscaptain, fixing him with his hawk-dark eyes. As he did so, the wounds on his cheek spiked with fresh pain.

‘We do what we have to do,’ he snarled. ‘We prepare. We train. We fight the darkness. We never give in. And we do so alone. There is no salvation from outside these walls, Zintler – you understand that? We have everything we are going to be given, and it must suffice.’

He felt the thrill of mania begin to run away from him then, and he tripped over his words. When these dark moods came on him, he felt almost like laughing.

Zintler shrank back, anxiety written on his dutiful features. ‘Just so, my lord. But – forgive me – we are all mortals. There is also need for rest. When did you last take any?’

Helborg’s eyes flared at the impudence. ‘Rest?’ he blurted. ‘Rest? Did Mandred take rest? Did Magnus? Would Schwarzhelm, or Karl Franz?’

He started walking again. He could feel his joints ache, his ribs creak, his wounds leak blood in a thin trickle down his neck.

‘To the walls,’ he croaked, keeping his shoulders back, his neck stiffly upright. ‘Our labours are not yet done, and neither are the stonemasons’. I will see the works for myself, and if they have slackened from the task I will gut them with their own trowels.’

The cauldron overflowed, sending frothy, fatty matter splatting on the stone floor.

Festus stirred more vigorously, knowing the delicate juncture he had reached. He had been working for so long now, so patiently and so carefully that even a minute error now would be more than he could bear. As his flabby body sweated from the fires, the alembics and glassware funnels bubbled violently.

From one of the cages he could hear a woman weeping. Those cages were almost empty now – he would have to find a way to step up procurement before the final stage, which would not be easy. The City Watch was getting vigilant, and he had seen evidence of those damned Shallyans poking their noses around the margins of his domain.

The Shallyans were the only thing Festus truly had anything like fear for. A normal mortal could be so easily corrupted, since their appetites were so typically gross and their fear of sickness so habitually complete. The inhabitants of Altdorf were just like the inhabitants of any other Imperial city – petty, spiteful, grasping and timorous. Being turned into vessels of a greater sickness was the best thing they could possibly have aspired to, not that they ever evinced much gratitude for it.

But the sisters – they were tricky. They did not fear illness. How could they, since they spent their whole lives immersed in it? They did not suffer from gluttony, and they had no crippling fears. They accepted the world for what it was, and felt no need to change it, other than to ease the suffering of those stricken by its more painful aspects.

That, frankly, was perverse, and was just what made the Leechlord shudder. When his work was done here and the Tribulation was complete, Festus knew exactly where he was going and exactly what he was going to do. He could already hear the screams of the sisters as they writhed on the tip of his scythe. He would take his time killing them, one by one, letting them experience the full strength of what they had always denied.

It did not matter how strong or stoical they were – when confronted with the utter inevitability of defeat, they would all crack. They would be lapping up his potions sooner or later, and they would be thankful for it.

He sniffed a slug of mucus up and swallowed. Tiny daemon-kin scurried around at his hooves, licking the drops of yellowish sweat that coursed from his bulging muscles. They were excitable now. They could sense what was in the cauldron, and they knew what it meant.

All along the walls of the subterranean chamber, vials and jars rattled and shivered. The drones of tumour-sized blowflies hummed through every vaulted cavity and undercroft. His realm had spread quickly, and now occupied hundreds of forgotten shafts and pits beneath Altdorf’s foetid ground-level streets.

This was his kingdom, a foretaste of the greater kingdom of contagion to come, but it was still fragile. If he were discovered, if the mortals chose to look beneath their blocked noses and seriously try to track down the source of what ailed them, he might yet be vulnerable.

He stirred harder. Beneath the cauldron’s surface, the dark shape grew ever more solid. A misshapen antler-prong briefly broke the brackish water, before sinking again. A gurgling sigh echoed from underwater, potent enough to make Festus shiver with anticipation.

They were all looking to him. The Glotts, the Tallyman, the Lord of Tentacles, the beasts, the damned and the god-marked – they were all looking to him to unlock the Great Tribulation.

He sweated harder. He was no longer chortling as he worked, and he no longer took any pleasure in his allotted task.

Time was running out. The deathmoon was riding low, and would be full soon. The massed hosts of the Urfather were crashing through a tangled, twisted forest of nightmares, and would be hammering at the gates uncomfortably quickly.

If he failed... if any of them failed...

Festus wiped his forehead. A diminutive toad-creature nipped his foot, and he kicked it irritably away. From the cauldron, a bubbling fountain briefly erupted, but did not sustain.

‘Come on,’ Festus muttered, putting more energy into the endless stirring. ‘Come on...’

FOURTEEN

Martak hung onto the griffon’s neck and gritted his teeth. A range of terrors coursed through him.

This is the realm of birds, he thought grimly. I have no place in it.

It had been easy enough to break into the Menagerie. With the attention of the city locked on the walls and the impending arrival of the enemy, the internal watch had grown slack and undermanned. Martak had slipped into the vast array of pens and cages during the night, using every ounce of his art to placate the creatures that slavered at him from behind iron bars.

Initially he had hoped a Bretonnian pegasus might have been held there – he knew how to ride a horse, and guessed it would be much the same to control one of their winged brethren – but the only creatures capable of flight were the colossal Imperial dragon and the select herd of Karl Franz’s war-griffons. He had not even got close to the dragon before gouts of sulphurous smoke had forced him back, and even he was not boastful enough to think he could master that living furnace of scale and talon – the world would have to be ending around his ears for him to contemplate rousing that.

The griffons were scarce less fearsome, though, rising to over twice the height of a man at the shoulder and with flesh-ripping beaks that curved like scimitars. They all growled and hissed at him as he passed their pens, pawing at the straw beneath them and watching him with beady, unblinking yellow eyes.

In the end, he had selected a russet beast, marginally leaner than the others and with bands of crimson and gold on hawk-like wings. He had held its gaze and whispered words of control and reassurance. It had taken a long time before the griffon was calm enough for him to break the locks and dare enter, and then it still reared up, cawing furiously, and Martak was forced to delve deep into the Lore of Beasts to prevent it clawing his eyes out.

Eventually the creature suffered him to lead it by the halter, and the two of them walked out of the Menagerie’s main cage-chambers and into the dung-strewn exercise yards beyond. It took him three attempts to mount, during which the noble beast glared at him coldly with a mix of irritation and contempt. Eventually the commotion, punctuated with earthy swear-words of dubious origin, roused the less soporific members of the watch, and the thud of footfalls echoed down from the watch towers around the yard.

Cursing, Martak hauled on the reins. ‘Fly, then, damn you,’ he hissed, having no idea how such a creature was ridden. Griffon riders were vanishingly rare in the Empire’s armies, and they trained for years before mastering the tempestuous natures of their wild mounts. Very quickly Martak felt the spirit of the beast defying him – it was perfectly aware what he wanted, and perfectly aware that he had no power to compel it.

Faint lights blinked into life from the summit of the watch towers as torches were lit. A bell began to clang somewhere in the depths of the Menagerie’s guardhouse, and doors slammed.

Still the griffon remained on the ground, its wings unfurled, but resolutely unmoving. Martak cried out every word of command in his lexicon, racking his mind for the correct cantrip or word-form. Perhaps there was not one – griffons were not like the dumb beasts of the deep wood that could be charmed with a gesture, they were ancient and proud scions of the mountains, with souls as fiery and untamed as the peaks they circled.

‘Fly!’ he growled again, brandishing his staff over the creature’s neck as if the splinter of gnarled wood would intimidate such a colossal mount. The griffon hissed back at him, and strutted around the yard aimlessly. More shouts came from the surrounding buildings, at ground level this time, and the red glare of firelight spread from the barred windows. Men burst out of the doors leading back to the beast-chambers, each carrying a long spear and clutching nets between them.

A huge, burly figure, bald-headed and with an iron stud in his nose, roared up at them, his face puce with anger. ‘Get back in there, you flea-ridden fly-hog!’ he bawled, gesturing frantically at the other men to fan out and surround the griffon. ‘Sigmar damn you, you will suffer for this!’

At the sight of that man, the griffon immediately reared again, nearly throwing Martak from its back. Its forelegs scythed, and it let rip with a piercing shriek of fury.

The first net, weighted with iron balls, was thrown. With a coiled pounce, the griffon leapt into the air, flapping powerfully to gain loft.

More nets were thrown, then spears, but none reached the target. The griffon powered upward rapidly, climbing higher with every powerful down-beat of its huge wings.

Martak hung on, his heart racing, clutching to the beast’s plumage with fear-whitened knuckles.

‘Taal’s teeth,’ he swore, realising belatedly what he had taken on.

Altdorf fell away below him, a patchwork of faint lamplight amid the overcast gloom of the night sky. The griffon banked, and Martak saw the baroque sprawl of the Imperial Palace stretched out, glistening faintly from the light of a thousand lanterns. Even in the midst of his blind terror, it was hard not to be awed by the spectacle.

‘North, damn you,’ he hissed, trying again to impose his will.

The griffon did not listen, but headed east, instinctively heading for the mountains where it had been hatched. Martak persevered, reaching out to the beast’s mind and trying to quell its wilfulness.

Slowly, painfully, it began to respond. Martak whispered every scrap of the Lore of Beasts into its ears, piling on the words of command.

Eventually, with a frustrated caw of defeat, it began to listen. It toppled to one side and angled north, heading over the seas of dark-limbed trees and flying steadily.

Ever since that moment, Martak had battled with it, forcing it to obey him through sheer bloody-mindedness. There was no beautiful meeting of souls and no mutual respect between them – every wing-beat was a struggle, a draining battle of psyches. The griffon toiled through the air as if mired in it. Just staying mounted was a challenge in itself, and Martak nearly slipped from his perch more than once.

Somehow, though, they flew on until the sunrise, by which time they were far out over the forest and the Reik valley was a long way behind them. Both of them were exhausted, bad-tempered and stinking with sweat.

Martak gazed out over the vast expanse of land below. Although he had often tramped far and wide into the Great Forest, it was only from the air that one could appreciate just how immeasurably immense the Empire was. During the long flight they had barely passed any settlements, and yet the forest still stretched off towards the four empty horizons in an unbroken, daunting mass. Night-mists curled and boiled atop the crowns of the trees, spiralling into eerie columns that twisted up to meet the weak light of the sun. The eastern horizon was a weak strip of pale gold, glistering faintly under heavy bands of iron-grey.

The griffon cawed harshly. Ahead of them reared several outcrops of dark rock, thrusting clear of the canopy like leviathans breaking the ocean surface. Martak sensed the beast’s desire to set down, drawn perhaps by a landscape that reminded it of its mountainous home.

Martak allowed it to lose height, and soon they were circling down towards the nearest column of stone, angling with surprising dexterity through the chill dawn air. The griffon crouched as it touched down.

Martak gripped it tightly by the nape of the neck, and hissed into its ear. ‘You are mine, now. I do not release you. One way or another, we are bound to one another, so do not get any ideas.’

The griffon hissed back at him, and scraped its talons along the rock, but did not make any further protest. They understood one another, and a bond, however tenuous and irascible, had been established.

Martak dismounted stiffly and hobbled to the edge of the stone island. He stood fifty feet above the tallest of the trees, and could see nothing but a landscape of leaves in every direction – no rivers, no castles, no cultivated land. The forest reeked of slowly mouldering fruit. The more he looked, the more he felt the marks of slow corruption. The Great Forest had always been a perilous and dank place, but now it was truly festering.

Martak slumped to his haunches. He would have to make a fire soon. Somehow, he would have to find something to eat – if anything that still lived in the forest was worth eating.

He gazed out to the north, and at the sight of the endless ranks of trees, his heart faltered.

Is this a mistake? he ruminated. Should I have stayed? My absence will make Helborg spit blood.

He smiled grimly. That, on its own, probably made it worth the labour.

Behind him, the griffon began to preen itself, pulling at its tangled feathers with its hooked beak. Martak shuffled away from the precipice, and started to look for dry tinder. The fire would do more than keep them warm – it was the precursor to a spell, one that would allow his sight to roam far beyond the confines of his mortal vision.

It would not be easy to summon up the requisite power – scrying was not his strength, and the dreary tang of mutation hung in the air, thicker and more durable than the rolling mist.

‘But I will find you,’ Martak said aloud, startling the griffon. ‘By the Eight Winds, this journey will not be wasted.’

He hobbled across the bare stone, limping from muscle-ache and the cold, muttering to himself. Out in the wilds, the clouds hung heavily, and the plague-wind moaned.

It would be a long, cold day.

‘Consider it, o my brother,’ said Otto, softly.

‘I do so, o my brother,’ replied Ethrac, his voice hushed in awe.

Neither of them spoke for a little while after that. The two of them sat on Ghurk’s shoulders, lost in thought. Below them, their army waited for orders. They waited for a long time.

Ghurk stood at the summit of a bald, windswept hill on the north bank of the Reik. The close press of thorn and briar had given way a little there, exposing the vista to the east in all its untrammelled glory. Ahead of them, at last, lay their goal.

Just below Ghurk’s hooves, the terrain fell away sharply in terraces of foliage-clogged undulation. The Reik valley had widened since Carroburg, and was now a broad, shallow bowl. The land had once been cultivated across the flat floodplain, but now the crops rotted in their drills, reeking with a subtle aroma that Otto found immensely pleasing. Everywhere he looked, the forest had crept past its ancient bounds, smothering everything. The new growths had taken on a wild variety of hues – pus-yellow, olive-green, the pulsing crimson of blood-blisters. Above it all, the clouds still churned, making the air as thick and humid as half-warmed tallow.

A mile away, Altdorf lay, rising from the tormented plain like a colossus, straddling the wide river and thrusting its towers up towards the uncaring heavens. Far bigger than Marienburg, far bigger than Talabheim, it was the greatest of prizes, the jewel of the southern Empire.

It had never been a beautiful place, even before the Rot. It had none of the soaring grandeur of Lothern, nor the stark geometry of the Lustrian megalopolises. What it had was solidity – the huge, heavy weight of history, piled atop layer after layer of construction until the final ramshackle, glorious heap of disparate architectural and strategic visions reached up to scrape at the lowering rainclouds themselves. Mighty buttresses reinforced vast retaining walls, straining amid the lattice of bridges and causeways and spiral stairs and gatehouses and watchtowers, all surmounted by slender tiled roofs that poked upward like fire-blackened fingers. A thousand hearths sent sooty trails snaking over the tiles, casting a pall of smog that hung like pox over the entire gaudy display. Copper domes glistened dully amid the tangle of dark stone and grimy daub, and the noise of forges and manufactories could be made out even from so far away, grinding away somewhere deep in the bowels of the vast, vast city.

Its walls were intact. Otto permitted himself some surprise at that – he had been told to expect the masonry to have crumbled away. Perhaps the defenders were more capable than he had expected. They had certainly worked hard.

It mattered not. Walls of stone were of little impediment to the hosts he commanded. Altdorf was just a microcosm of the Empire itself – the true rot came from within. There was no point in reinforcing borders and bastions and parapets if the flesh contained beyond them was withering away with every passing hour. They were weak, now. Terribly weak. How many of them could still lift their weapons? How many even had the desire to?

A low crack and growl of thunder played across the eastern horizon. Great pillars of cloud were gathering, driven west by gales from the Worlds Edge Mountains. Stray flickers of lightning briefly flashed out across the grey, drab air, glinting on the Reik’s dreary surface.

The river had almost entirely turned into a glutinous slurry, and it barely lapped its own banks any more. Huge vines had slithered out of the encroaching tree-cover and extended into the water, making what remained even more viscous.

Otto smirked as he saw the transformation. The god he served was a mighty god indeed. The very earth had been poisoned, the waters thickened, the growing things perverted and sent thrusting into feral parodies of themselves. There was no resisting this – it was the wearing weight of entropy, the corruption of all purity, the glorious potential of the sick, the foul, the decaying.

‘We march now,’ Otto breathed, knowing how little time it would take. The army would sweep east, filling the valley before them from side to side, surrounding the city as the ocean surrounded its islands.

‘Not yet,’ warned Ethrac. ‘We wait for the others.’

Otto felt like snapping at him. Ethrac could be tediously particular. He loved his brother – he loved both his brothers – but Ghurk’s pleasing enthusiasms never ceased to be endearing, whereas Ethrac could, on occasion, be harder to like.

‘We may crush it now, o my brother,’ said Otto, forcing a smile. ‘Crush it like Carroburg.’

‘No, no.’ Ethrac waved his staff to and fro, and the bells clanged. ‘Not long to wait. The others grow closer. We will need all three – the Lord of Tentacles, the Tallyman, the beasts of the dark wood, the hosts of the far north.’

Otto rolled his eyes. ‘They are starved, o my brother! They are timorous.’

Ethrac shot him a crooked smile. ‘Not as starved as they will be, o my sibling. Not as timorous as they will be. While they still have a little of their native strength left, we must creep with caution. How many battles have been lost to impetuosity? Hmm? You can count them all?’

Otto was about to retort, knowing the argument was futile, when the clouds parted overhead. The fine drizzle that had accompanied them since making landfall at Marienburg guttered and trembled. A new light flooded across the valley, weaker than the shrouded sun, like a pale flame.

The hosts of ruin looked up. Otto did likewise.

He saw the flames of the comet flicker, masked by the shifting airs and made weak by the filth in the skies, but there nevertheless. Tongues of fire glimmered in the heavens, just as they had done in the half-forgotten days only recorded in forbidden books.

Otto made the sign of ruination. ‘The twin-tailed star,’ he muttered.

Ethrac chuckled. ‘It surprises you, o my brother? You have not listened to me. The comet was there to witness the birth of Sigmar’s realm, and it will be there to see it out. Such signs and portents were written into fate’s tapestry since before you or I were woven into it.’

Otto continued to stare at the comet uneasily. He could barely catch sight of it, and its light was washed out by the gloom of midday, but the brief snatches he did perceive made his stomach turn.

‘It presages nothing,’ he muttered, to convince himself as much as anything else.

‘That is right,’ said Ethrac, satisfied.

‘The full deathmoon is due.’

‘That it is.’

Otto drew in a phlegmy breath. He could sense the tension from the thousands of warriors waiting behind him. All they needed was an order.

‘Then we wait for it,’ said Otto. ‘We wait for the Night of Souls.’

‘We do.’

Otto grinned. His mood was oddly changeable. Why was that? Nerves? Surely not – he had been shown the future, and it was gloriously, infinitely putrid.

‘Not long now, then,’ he said, drumming his fingers on Ghurk’s leather-hard flesh.

Ethrac smiled contentedly, and looked up at the heavens.

‘Not long at all, o my brother.’

The wait was over. The scouts had returned from the forward stations, and the reports had been sent down from the Celestial College’s scrying towers.

In a way, it was a relief. The sham-war was over, the real one could begin. Whatever Helborg might have done better, it mattered not now. All that remained was the fight itself, the clash of steel against iron, and in that at least the Reiksmarshal had never been found wanting.

At the first sound of a warning clarion, he had donned his full battle-garb. Three menials were required to help him into it, and when they were finished he was encased from neck to knee in plate armour. They had polished it furiously hard over the past week, and the steel gleamed like silver. The scabbard of his runefang had been lovingly restored, and the icons of the griffon and the insignia of Karl Franz looked as pristine as they ever had done. The menials draped a new cloak over his shoulders, and it brushed against the stone floor with a sigh of fine fabric.

He banished them once all was done, and remained for a moment in his private rooms, donned for war.

From outside, he could hear the growing clamour of the city readying itself. Bells rang out from every temple tower, sounding the alarm and rousing the sick and the exhausted from their beds. Great arcs of lightning crackled across the rooftops as the magisters of the colleges readied their arcane war machines. Trumpets sounded in every garrison, calling the thousands of troops still in the employ of the Palace to their stations. Scaffolds cracked and groaned as huge cannons were winched into position and rolled forward on their parapet mounts.

Helborg smiled. They were the sounds he lived to hear. The troops were responding as he had drilled them to. They might have learned to curse him since he returned from the north, they might have spat his name with hatred when he had forced them into another exercise or commandeered another water-supply or made the engineers work through the night to keep the battlements intact and the foundations strong, but they were ready. The standards still flew from the turrets, and the cancer of fear had not undone them just yet.

He walked over to the door. As he did so, he caught sight of his reflection in a grimy window-pane, and paused.

He looked much the same as he had done in the past – the lean, aquiline face with its hook nose and flamboyant moustache. When he turned to one side, though, he saw the long rakes along his cheek, still flecked with scab-tissue. As if aware of the attention, the wounds flared again, hot as forge-irons.

‘Keep it up,’ Helborg snarled. ‘Keep the pain coming. It’ll only make me angrier.’

He swept out of the chamber and into the corridor outside. He walked swiftly, banishing the fatigue that had dogged him for so long. He still had not managed to sleep, but the adrenaline of the coming combat sustained him, flooding his muscles and making him itch to draw his blade.

As he went, commotion built around him. Palace officials ran to and fro, carrying orders and last-minute requisitions. Knights in full armour stomped from the armouries up to their stations, saluting smartly as they caught sight of the Reiksmarshal. Helborg saw the sigils of the Sable Chalice, the Hospitallers, the Knights Panther, the Order of the Golden Wolf, and there were no doubt more already stationed across the city.

And, of course, there were the surviving Reiksguard, restored to combat readiness following von Kleistervoll’s punishing regimen. Nine hundred were ready to deploy, counting those that had remained in Altdorf prior to Heffengen – a formidable force, and one that he would personally command when the time came.

He neared the high doors of his destination. When they saw him coming, the door-guards hurriedly pushed them open, bowing as he strode through.

On the far side, the circular Chamber of Ghal Maraz opened up in all its many-arched splendour. In times of peace, the priceless warhammer itself was hung on chains of gold from the domed roof, guarded by four warrior priests and ringed with wards from the Light College. Only the mightiest or the most faithful were ever permitted access to the chamber while the weapon hung suspended over its iron war-altar. That altar had been forged from the guns used in the defence of the city against the vampire lords of legend, and was as black and sullen as pitch.

Now the chains swung emptily, for Ghal Maraz, like so much else, was lost, borne by the boy-warrior Valten somewhere out in the wilds of the north. The city’s defenders still mustered before the altar nevertheless, as if some lingering aura of power still hung over the empty hooks.

They were all there: von Kleistervoll in his full preceptor’s regalia, Zintler looking very different in his ceremonial Reikscaptain’s war-plate, the grand masters of the Knightly Orders, the masters of the Colleges of Magic, the arch-lectors and the master engineers and the Imperial generals with their captains and lieutenants in tow. Von Liebwitz, Haupt-Anderssen and Gausser were present, all in their own ancestral battle-gear. They might have been quarrelsome, power-hungry schemers, but they each carried a runefang and had been tutored since infancy on how to use it.

The display of collected power was comforting. It would have looked better with Schwarzhelm there, or Huss, or Volkmar or Gelt, but it was still a daunting panoply. As the doors slammed closed behind Helborg, all head were lowered in deference.

‘So, the enemy has been sighted,’ said Helborg, standing before them and fixing each in turn with his gaze. ‘We know now that they are three: an army to the north that still marches; an army to the east that is almost upon us, and the largest host of all, fresh from the sack of Marienburg and within sight of the walls. They will wait until Morrslieb is full, or so the arch-lectors tell me.’

Fleischer bowed. The head of the Celestial College nodded in agreement – they all knew the power of the witching-night.

‘They outnumber us many times over,’ Helborg went on, his harsh voice echoing strangely in the huge chamber. ‘They bring foul creatures from the wilds on the edge of the world, and think to break us as easily as they broke Marienburg and – so we fear – Talabheim.’ He smiled wolfishly. ‘But they have not reckoned on the soul of this place. It is Sigmar’s city. It is our city.’

Gausser grunted approvingly. All the true fighters – the grand masters, the Reiksguard – appreciated words like this. They had spent their lives going into battle, often against horrific odds, and only needed to know that their liege was with them; that he suffered alongside them, and that, in the final test, he would stand in the mud and blood with blade in hand.

‘This is the heart of the Empire,’ growled Helborg, gesturing to the golden pilasters and columns surrounding the empty altar. ‘This is where the seat of power has always been, where the Emperors rule, where the Law was set down and where the source of our greatness was first delved. While Altdorf lives, the Empire lives. As fortune’s wheel turns, it is we who have been charged with the sacred task of keeping it secure for the next thousand years.’

As he spoke, Helborg could see doubt in the eyes of those he addressed. If even half the scouts’ reports were accurate, than the enemy was almost ludicrously vast – a host greater even than the swollen armies of Kul.

Let them doubt. What mattered was whether they stood up or fell to their knees, and there had never been a day of Helborg’s life when he had not faced his enemy on his feet.

‘Even as I speak, our troops are reaching their stations,’ he said. ‘They will remain firm so long as we remain firm. They will look to us, the masters of men, to lead the defence and show just what stuff the Empire is made of. They will not be afraid if we do not feel fear. They will not retreat if we hold fast, and they will not contemplate defeat if we do not let it enter our minds. So I say to you all this day: stand firm in Sigmar’s image! As night falls and the terror grows, stand firm in Sigmar’s image. As they bring fire from the firmament and summon horror from beyond the grave, stand firm in Sigmar’s image. He has not abandoned us, for He is a god of battle. Wish not for a world in which there is no strife or bloodshed, for that would be a pale reflection of the world of glory we have been given to dwell in.’

He grinned, feeling the seductive mania return, and his wounds broke open on his cheek. ‘And this will be the most glorious of days! Men will sing in after-ages of the heroes of Altdorf, and will curse their fortune not to have witnessed the deeds that will be done here. They will look up at the white towers of this city, standing prouder than they do today, and marvel at their eternal strength, just as they curse the darkness that thought to bring them low.’

Helborg drew his sword. ‘You know what this is!’ he said, brandishing the blade before them. ‘This is the Sword of Vengeance, the Klingerach, and it has drunk the blood of the faithless across every province in the realm. I have driven you hard, and I know the burden has been heavy, but now the Sword of Vengeance marches to war, and you will march with it.’

He lifted the sacred runefang towards the empty altar. Ghal Maraz may have been missing, but his own weapon was ancient enough to honour the sacred space.

‘And so, on this day, when the fates converge on Altdorf and we become the fulcrum of the war to end all wars, I pledge this,’ he swore, feeling the lines of blood trickle down his neck. ‘I will take no backward step. I will not retreat, I will not cower, I will not relent. I will fight. I will fight for this place with every breath and with every drop of blood in my body. And if the world is to end and if all is to be cast in the fire, then I will die in the service of the Empire as I have lived, as a warrior.’

He raised the sword high.

‘For the Empire!’ he roared.

As one, the assembled warriors raised their own weapons towards the altar.

The Empire! they cried in unison, and the massed voices soared into the dome above, echoing in fractured harmony. The Empire! For Karl Franz!

Helborg looked at them all, his blood pumping. They were as ready as they would ever be, each of them filled with the zeal of combat. This was what made the Empire great – that, for all its folly and corruption, when the storm broke they had never refused the challenge.

‘Now then,’ he snarled, feeling the dark swell of battle-lust throbbing through him. ‘The time for words and prayers is over. Take your positions, and may Sigmar guide your blades.’

FIFTEEN

More orcs came over the mountains after the first gang, jogging in loose bands, their maws drooling and their eyes rimmed with madness and fatigue. Every time they were dispatched, another herd would follow, not in huge numbers, but enough to slow the Bretonnians further.

The knights rode in full battle-gear all the time, keeping lances to hand and changing horses often. Snow began to fall, dusting the bare rock with a grey slush that made the horses’ hooves skid and slip, and they lost more precious steeds and men during the vicious, short-lived brawls.

‘They just run onto our blades,’ Jhared remarked. ‘It is as if...’

They no longer wish to live. Leoncoeur could have finished the sentence for him. That, beyond all he had seen since the rise of Mallobaude, filled his heart with foreboding. An orc was a crucible of nature’s wrath, a furious avatar of martial excess. They lived to fight, to scrap, to roar out their feral abandon into the world as they tore it apart. An orc feared nothing.

And yet now they were broken. Just as Jhared said, they stumbled blindly into combat, going through the motions in a kind of dumb rehearsal of their old terrible glory. For the first time in his life, Leoncoeur took no pleasure in slaying them. It began to seem... cruel.

The series of skirmishes slowed their passage through Axebite Pass, but did not halt it. Leoncoeur gave the column no respite, and they trudged on through the swirling, snow-laced squalls. Peasants who succumbed to the grinding cold were left where they fell, and the baggage train became steadily more and more undermanned. Soon they would have scarce enough hands to keep the carts rolling and the teams of warhorses guarded, but the pace never slackened.

Eventually, they cleared the worst of the bitter high path, and the road began to snake downhill again. The vast peaks of the Grey Mountains still rose impossibly high above them, their distant heads blocked by thick cloud, but the hardest portion of the traverse was over. The knights began to pick their way down the gravelly paths of scree and boulders, going carefully lest more horses go lame.

The purity of the high airs soon collapsed once more into the thick filth they had breathed in Bretonnia, except it was far, far worse on the northern side of the range. On the second day of the descent, the vanguard rounded a tight bend in a narrow gorge, and beheld for the first time the land beyond the mountains.

Barring their path a few dozen yards away was a thick snarl of tangled briars. Beyond that lay a seething glut of vines and throttle-weeds, all gently moving as if propelled by intelligences of their own. Trees studded the congested road, looking like they had sprouted from the living rock just moments ago, their gnarled roots frozen onto the cracked stone and their crowns gasping for air and light.

From his vantage at the head of the column, Leoncoeur could see that the thick undergrowth extended for miles. It ran away from them, close-bound and endless. To their right reared the old fortress of Helmgart, once a mighty citadel, but now abandoned to the clutching vines, its walls crumbled and its keep hollow. It looked like it had been empty for weeks.

Leoncoeur sensed the dismay from the warriors around him. The way was blocked, and it would take days to hack through just a tithe of it. The pegasi would soar above it all, of course, but they were merely the spear-tip of his force.

Leoncoeur whispered an order and his horse walked on, approaching the first clumps of moss that marred the stony path. As the rank wall of growths neared, he smelled the over-sweet stench of fermenting fruit.

This is the spawn of corruption, he mused, watching the polyps flex and swell under his mount’s hooves. If it comes from magic, it can be dispelled with magic.

To the left of the path, an ice-white cataract plunged down the mountainside, swollen from the storms in the peaks above. It remained pure when all around it was foetid. Leoncoeur halted before it, remembering the words of the Lady.

Look for me in pure waters.

The white river ran on ahead of him, foaming in its narrow course and throwing up a fine spray. Far ahead, it plunged under the shadows of the trees, hissing as if angered by the contagions around it.

Leoncoeur drew his blade, stained from greenskin blood, and held it high.

‘By the Lady we march!’ he cried. ‘And by Her grace will all taint be cleansed from the world!’

His warriors remained at a distance, unsure. They had been sorely tested by the passage of the pass, and Leoncoeur was not so deaf that he had not heard the mutterings of discontent. They had been promised glorious battle, not an endless slog through poison-vines.

They would need to be reminded just who they served.

Leoncoeur pointed his sword towards the river, holding the tip just above the gurgling surface. ‘They have not removed you from the waters just yet, my queen,’ he murmured. ‘I can sense your power here, just as it was in Couronne. Their faith wavers. I beseech you, humbly, restore it.’

Nothing happened. The rain started up again, drizzling down from the grey sky and making the standards heavy. The thick filigree of branches and vines seemed to tighten, drawing across the path ahead in a heavy wall of interlocking boughs.

Leoncoeur held his weapon in place, and closed his eyes. What do you demand of me, Lady? I have already pledged everything. What is there left?

He saw her then, in his mind, just as she had been in Bretonnia. If anything, her slender face seemed even more careworn.

Everything, my champion? she whispered back. You have barely been tested.

That hurt. He had lost a kingdom, and forfeited any chance of taking it back by following her command. He had already lost more than most men would ever have to give away.

The way is barred, he said.

All ways are barred, she breathed, her voice little louder than a child’s whisper. Are you sure you wish me to unlock it? If this road is made straight, you will never return along it.

Leoncoeur stiffened. She had already warned him of this. What did she expect – that he would forget his vow?

Do you wish me to live?

That startled her. She looked at him, a sudden desire playing in her immortal eyes. Of course, beloved, she insisted. I desire that of all things. Turn aside, and I will preserve you for as long as my power lasts. When you die, my heart will break.

Leoncoeur nearly opened his eyes. For a moment, he saw a future unravelling before him – the two of them, mortal man and wife, riding out across a wide grassland, the sun rising swiftly in a dew-fresh dawn. He saw her face turn to his and smile, the care wiped from it. She reached out, and their hands touched.

The vision made his heart ache. It had been forbidden even to countenance such a thing, and here she was, showing it to him.

He looked down, still locked in the dream-image. His steed’s hooves trod in the damp earth. In the marks of the hooves, tiny worms wriggled. They were white and blind, and their mouths were ringed with fangs.

There would be no escape, he told her, letting go of her hand. It would pursue us to the ends of the earth. You know this.

The Lady nodded, smiling sadly. And now you do, too. So ask me again, my champion. You wish me to give you a path to Altdorf?

He did not. He wished for nothing but the vision, even in its falsity and its deception. He wished only for a scrap of time alone with her, just as he had always dreamed of, even if it meant an eternity of damnation thereafter.

But wishes were for peasants, and he was a knight of the realm.

If it lies within your power, Lady, he breathed, make the road straight.

She bowed, her expression a mix of sorrow and satisfaction, and the vision ebbed away. Leoncoeur opened his eyes again.

Nothing had changed. His warriors gave no sign of impatience – however long the exchange had seemed to him, it had clearly been no time for them.

He straightened in his saddle, and turned to the foul morass ahead.

‘Your reach does not yet compass the world,’ he announced, gazing out at it with his fierce, blue-eyed glare. ‘While we may yet contest you, we will.’

His words rang out, echoing strangely on the air. The vines shivered, and straggling roots withdrew. The entire forest seemed to falter, as if stirred by a sudden gust of wind.

Leoncoeur smiled coldly. He could feel the divine power now, warm against his flesh like summer sun. She was weakened, to be sure, but not yet destroyed.

‘Rise,’ he commanded, raising his blade and pointing it ahead.

The waters began to surge, let loose like a dam breaking. The river burst its banks, welling up and flooding the path ahead. Leoncoeur backed up, never letting his blade waver, as the road ahead dissolved into foaming silt.

The trees immediately shrank back, and a thin hissing broke out from among the branches. The waters kept on rising, boiling up out of the ground in defiance of all natural law. Fresh springs burst through the open rock, gushing in plumes of white before crashing to the ground again and sluicing down the slope.

Leoncoeur backed up further, watching with some satisfaction as the river’s banks crumbled away, unable to accommodate the roaring torrent that now coursed through it. Boulders were dislodged, rolling along with the flow and crashing into the twisted trunks ahead. The roar of the waters mingled with the snap and crack of wood breaking.

Where the Lady’s water-magic hit the sorcerous forest, great gouts of smoke leapt into the sky, fizzing and spitting with emerald aethyr-energies. The raging river seemed to carve straight through whatever it touched, burning the foul woods away as if acid had been poured onto them. A stench like burning flesh rose up, harsh and acrid.

‘Stand firm!’ commanded Leoncoeur, working to keep his steed from panicking. The waters frothed and swirled around its hooves, causing no more harm to it than a non-magical river. Ahead of them, the torrent gouged deeper, cutting a path through the woodland and leaving ragged wound-edges on either side. The up-swell of water kept on rising, roiling and churning out from the fractured earth. The forest was ripped open, its roots torn up and its tight-wound growths carried away. As the waters smashed onwards, tearing ever deeper into the country beyond, the sound of a woman’s laughter could be heard over the thunder, faint but unmistakable.

Soon the sounds faded away, heading north as the magically roused river cut its way onward. An empty road stood in its wake, dripping and sodden, overlooked on either side by the surviving trees. The path was like a tunnel, overhung and hemmed in on all sides. The Lady’s power had only been sufficient to rid the river’s path of its filth, and the clear route extended no further than the road’s edge.

Leoncoeur looked into the shadows, his heart thumping. Witnessing the extreme release of such magic had been a mixed experience for him. On the one hand, being in close proximity to the divine strength of his lifelong queen was what gave him the reason for living. On the other, he was under no illusions that this march would be his last. The brief, snatched vision of another life had made the choice even crueller, though he knew the purpose of it.

She had to be sure. Even the slenderest chance that he would turn aside had to be discounted. He did not resent her testing him, for his whole life had been a test, and the knowledge that he had passed it made up for some of the grief.

Not all of it, though. It would take him a long time to forget the vision.

‘You have been shown the way,’ he announced, lowering his blade at last and sheathing it. His horse stamped in the waters. Ahead of them, the river level gradually subsided as the tide-face worked its way further north. ‘Now we begin the final march. Ride on, for Bretonnia and the Lady.’

The warriors about him saluted piously, and began to move. One by one, trooping in file, the knights of Bretonnia passed under the shadow of the plague-wood, and trod the last road to Altdorf.

The host of the undead grew ever larger, feeding from the slain of the battles and pulling corpses out of the ground every passing hour.

It was all so familiar. Vlad remembered doing the same thing just the previous year – gathering the lost souls to himself, giving them purpose, making them far greater than they ever had been in their first life.

Then he smiled to himself, embarrassed by the false recollection. It had not been last year – it had been over a thousand years ago, and everything in the world had changed. It was so easy to forget how long he had been away. His old enemies – Kruger of the Order of the White Wolf, Wilhelm the Theogonist – had been dead so long that no mortals outside the dusty archives still remembered their names. And yet, to him, it felt like mere months ago. He could still see the walls of Altdorf reeling before him, ripe for destruction. He could taste the blackpowder on the air, and feel the pressure of Isabella’s hand in his as they jointly planned the final assault.

She had been his strength, back then. Everything he had done had been through her, driven onwards by the raw passion that had so surprised him. To be alone, truly alone, never lost its bitter aftertaste. He could summon as many courtesans to his side as he liked, taking his pick from the cadavers of a thousand years of ossified beauty, and it would make no difference.

Perhaps, he had thought to himself in the lonely hours of the night, that was why the Master had been able to pull him back. In true death, Vlad must have been an unquiet soul, ripped untimely from the world and still hungering to return for the love he had left behind.

‘Now I am a mortarch,’ he said to himself dryly. ‘The titles he has given us, to usher in the reign of eternal order. I would have preferred Emperor, but such is fate. Perhaps I shall still be elector, which will be a decent consolation.’

He had not heard from Altdorf since sending his letter. He had not expected to, though to have no response at all, not even a denunciation, wore at his pride a little. As far as he was concerned, the offer remained open. He might have to wait until the walls were broken and the mortal armies were reeling, but waiting was something he had always been good at.

‘My lord,’ said Herrscher, sounding concerned. ‘Regard the river.’

Vlad snapped out of his thoughts, and looked up.

He sat on a throne mounted atop the high quarterdeck of a shallow-hulled river cruiser. Ranks of oars dipped and hauled into the murky waters around, dragging the ship south and west along the course of the Reik. Behind him, in a long procession of bleak ugliness, trade barges followed on, each one stuffed with the bodies of his servants. Every barge carried several hundred soldiers, and there were dozens upon dozens of them now, plundered from the destroyed Imperial settlements along the Stir and the upper Reik. The sable banners of Sylvania hung from every one, held aloft by cold hands. No sound came from those barges, save for the slap of oars in the water and the thump of reed-clumps hitting the solid bows.

Since taking to the river, progress west had been rapid. With the need to negotiate the clogged and treacherous forest paths negated, the entire army had slipped towards their goal without obstruction, travelling just as well by day as by night, pausing only to sack any of the riverside towns they came across. Kemperbad had been the last big one, a walled fortress to rival Wurtbad, and the fight to subdue it had been just as vicious. The outcome had been much the same, in the end – a cohort of newly dead and newly cowed to bolster the truly huge host now under his thrall.

Vlad had begun to relax then, safe in the knowledge that they would be there in time. He should have known better – the forces of Ruin were not led by fools, and they had formidable powers of their own.

‘I have never seen the like,’ said Herrscher.

Ahead of Vlad’s position, in the bows, the Pale Ladies stood on the very edge of the deck railing, peering into the gloom and exchanging exclamations of outrage. Even the reanimated Wolff, still sullen and moody, looked out at the approaching vista.

Half a mile downstream, where the broad flow of the river expanded into a wide, slate-grey expanse of choppy, wind-whipped froth, the forest had crept from its bounds. It had started a mile or so back – heavy clods of moss floating in mid-channel, fouling the oars and bumping against the hulls. As they had made headway, the clots and mats had grown more numerous, breaking free of the tree-lined banks even as he had watched them.

The barrier before them, though, was something else. The trees themselves had burst open, throwing obscene spears of rotten wood into the water. More had followed, building on those sent before. Vines had snaked into the splintered bulwark, binding it all tightly. More mosses had latched on to that frame, swelling and pulsing under the perpetual twilight.

Somehow, the forest had managed to block the entire river, throwing out tentacles and sinking deep into the main flow. Backed up by the obstruction, the Reik had burst its banks, filtering into the woods on either side and welling up in pools of fly-encrusted muck.

Vlad stood up. The blockage was not a temporary thing. It looked like the unnatural outgrowths continued far beyond the first barrier, breaking the flow of the Reik entirely. Leeches wriggled across the top of the arboreal dam, pale-skinned and red-eyed. The stink was even worse than it had been higher up the river, magnified by the standing water that now mingled with rotten roots.

‘We cannot break that, lord,’ said Herrscher.

The witch hunter at least had the grace to sound concerned. Herrscher had long since given up the pretence of anger at his predicament, and was now a loyal member of Vlad’s entourage. They all gave up caring, sooner or later, and settled into their new life. It was hard to sustain the old angers when one owed one’s existence to one’s enemy.

‘Of course we can,’ said Vlad, irritably, watching the twisted dam drift closer.

‘We should order the barges to halt.’

‘They will keep going.’

Herrscher looked exasperated. ‘We will run aground!’

From the bows, the Pale Ladies had started to laugh. Their chins were all glossy with blood. They had drunk too deeply the night before, and it made them giddy.

‘Who do you think you are with, Herrscher?’ asked Vlad, pushing his cloak back and raising a clawed hand. ‘I was mighty when I lived before, and I am mightier now. Nagash does not just give life, he also gives power.’

Vlad extended his arm before him. Knowing what was coming, the Pale Ladies giggled and scrambled for cover. Wolff and Herrscher looked on, one sourly, the other with interest.

The clouds above the forest-dam began to curdle. Thick slabs of stone-grey shifted, and flickers of silver lightning rippled across the horizon. The wind picked up, whipping the tips of the waves and making them froth.

Vlad began to recite words in a language he had never understood in his previous life. Now, though, they came easily, tripping from his dry tongue as if he had been chanting them since childhood.

The air shuddered, and the colour slopped out of it. Virulently green leaves crackled and shrivelled, turning black as if burned by fire. There were no flames – just a cold, cold gust as if from the maw of the underworld. The water turned slate-dark, and the trees beyond snarled and curled up. The wood dried and cracked, ageing lifetimes in mere moments. Vines unravelled from their clutch-holds and sprang back, their sap hardening and making them brittle.

With an echoing snap, the first of the bulwarks broke. Mighty tree-trunks, turning grey-white as if made of embers, dissolved away, splashing into the river below. Massive shivers ran through the entire structure. It began to give way, breaking back up into desiccated chunks. The leeches scurried for the safety of the banks, or plopped messily into the water below, screaming blindly.

Vlad smiled coldly. The unlocked Wind of Shyish surged through him, as chill as pack-ice. In the face of its limitless power, the perverted corruptions of life had no choice but to wither and collapse. In the end, that was the fate that awaited all mortal creation. The vagaries of life were impressive in their variety, but ultimately nothing compared to the bleak majesty of eternal death. Vlad had always guessed at the power of the Shyish Unlocked, but it had taken Nagash to truly reveal its potency to him. When victory came, as it surely would, this would be all that remained – empty lands, bled dry of filth and squalor, populated by the meek, whispering armies of the mortarchs. Even the sun and the moon would obey the new Law, bound into new circles and following regulated paths. There would be no more rebellion, no more misery, no more fecundity.

Herrscher shook his head in disbelief, watching the river-path open up once again. The waters rushed to fill the void, sweeping away the tinder-dry wreckage, and the river cruiser’s deck trembled as the current picked up once more.

The Pale Ladies laughed uproariously, pointing out to one another where the leeches thrashed in the waves, slowly drowning.

Vlad maintained the pressure. There were miles of matted effluent to clear, and the closer they got to Altdorf the worse it would become. ‘They are scared of us,’ he told Herrscher, as his ring boiled and coughed with magic. ‘They did not expect this on their eastern flank – all their prophecies were bound up with mortal men.’

Herrscher nodded slowly. ‘They know we are coming, then.’

‘Of course they do. They will rouse every pestilence against us, just as they always have done, and they will fail, for the dead do not sicken.’ He smiled at the witch hunter. Then he gazed across the deck of his commandeered vessel and smiled at all of his servants. They were so lucky. ‘Nothing will stop us, my friend. We will sweep towards Sigmar’s city like the cold wind over graves, and when we arrive they will see just how badly they have miscalculated by ignoring the scions of Sylvania.’

‘Who, lord?’ asked Herrscher. ‘The corrupted, or the mortal?’

‘In time, both,’ said Vlad evenly, resuming his place on the throne and keeping his claw extended before him. ‘But if the Emperor has the sense to take my offer, then all things are possible.’

He settled into position, watching the forest crumple and deteriorate before the waves of grave-magic. The display pleased him, just as it did the Pale Ladies, who still cackled like urchins.

‘Send orders to the barge commanders to row faster,’ he said. ‘I smell the first whiff of rotten fish on the air – the city must be close.’

The greater part of the enemy hosts had already moved south, but that did not make the north safe.

Deathclaw had partially recovered from its wounds, but not yet enough to take wing, and so Karl Franz and the griffon remained earthbound and vulnerable. They travelled by night, trusting to the overcast darkness to hide them against the iron-dark earth. The unlocking of ancient Law had freed all manner of foul spirits from their long-established shackles. Ghosts floated across the lurid skies, shrieking in long-forgotten tongues. Cadavers pulled themselves from the ground without the aid of necromancers, and limped off in search of living flesh to gnaw. Splinter warbands from the main Chaos armies roamed the ruined lands, hunting down what little mortal prey remained for food and torture.

Every village Karl Franz passed through was abandoned, its houses empty and its fields standing fallow. Even the fauna had fled, excepting those bloated, dull-eyed mutations that flapped and limped in place of birds and beasts. Deathclaw would kill them, but not eat them. All they had for sustenance were the rotting remains in grain-stores or the trodden-down remnants of bread and pastries in looted taverns.

Karl Franz had long since stopped hoping to meet any survivors. At first, soon after he had rescued the war-griffon, he had entertained dreams of coming across resistance fighters. He would rally them, day by day, and the news would spread. Soon he would find a way to link up with Helborg and Schwarzhelm, who surely still fought on somewhere, and jointly they would take the fight to the invader again. The enemy may have been mighty, but this was his land, and they were his people.

It had become slowly apparent, though, that there were no fighters left. The invaders had driven every one of them away, or killed them all, or had dragged them all into slavery. Every hovel was empty, and every townhouse echoed with silence. Karl Franz trudged through them all, rooting through the remains under the yellow light of Morrslieb, now a mere whisker from fullness.

It was the little things that struck at his heart – the broken looms, the cold anvils, the tin plates half-buried in the straw. He soon realised that he could not have faced any of his subjects, had they still lingered by their cold hearths. He would not have known how to meet their gaze. He was their protector, and he had failed more completely than any Emperor in the annals ever had.

During the day, when he fitfully slept, he would see them come up to him in his dreams, their plague-ravaged faces accusatory.

‘We toiled for you,’ they would say. ‘We cut land from the forest, and scraped crops from it. We built chapels, and armed ourselves, and served in your armies. We looked to you when the winter storms came, or the beasts tore up our fields, or the greenskins broke from the deep wood with blood in their eyes. We would say your name as we reached for our swords. That gave us all the hope we ever had. We would say your name.’

He would wake then, his breathing shallow and his heart pounding. He would lie in the twilight of the cloud-bound day, shivering as his body lay against the cold ground, wishing he had not seen those faces.

We would say your name.

Deathclaw was able to travel for miles without tiring, though his wings still hung broken by his harrowed flanks. Every night, they would break from whatever cover they had found the morning before, and set off. If they found stragglers from the Norscan hordes, they would kill them, and for a few moments the grief would be forgotten in the sudden heart-rush of combat. Karl Franz’s runefang would flash in the dark, wielded by angry hands, and the blood of the Fallen would spill on lands that still hated them.

He knew it could not last. Sooner or later, word of a lone griffon and its rider abroad in the wastes would filter back to whatever dark mind controlled the conquest of the north, and more serious forces would be sent to hunt them down.

Karl Franz found himself hoping for that day to come quickly. Better to die fighting than wither away from starvation, lost and unmourned amid an Empire he had allowed to pass into the hands of its ancient foes. Until then, though, he never stopped searching. He never stopped praying, even though the petitions became steadily bitterer. At the end of each fruitless day, he would kneel against the sickened soil, pressing his knees and fists into the earth, and offer his soul to Sigmar.

‘Anything,’ he would whisper. ‘Any suffering, any pain, just to be worthwhile. To serve again. The runes on my blade remain dark, the sun does not shine. What power remains in your people? Is Ghal Maraz still carried? I would know, surely, if it had passed into darkness.’

Silence. Always silence. He would fall into exhausted sleep with no answers being given, just the skirl of the wind and the stink of the foul woods.

He had lost track of how long it had been since Heffengen. On one particularly cold night, the clouds underlit with yellow-green and distant thunder crackling away in the far south, the two of them crawled along a choked river bed, hugging the shadow of the rising banks. Above them, strange lights played across the heavens, dancing like flames poured from an alchemist’s vial.

Deathclaw suddenly froze, crouching low against the ground. Karl Franz tensed, recognising his steed’s threat-posture, and gripped the hilt of his sword tight.

He sniffed. Experience had taught him it was easier to smell the enemy than see them in the dark. All he could detect was the filmy muck trickling at the bottom of the riverbed.

‘What is it?’ he whispered, reaching up to rub Deathclaw’s neck. ‘What do you sense?’

The griffon’s head rose. Its golden eyes glittered, and it opened its hooked beak. One wing extended, but the broken pinions did not unfurl. With a muffled cry of agony, the creature started to shuffle up the broken riverbank.

Karl Franz cursed. The land above the dry gulch was open, offering precious little cover, and a griffon was a big creature to hide, even at night. ‘Wait!’ he urged, struggling up after it.

They broke into higher ground, and the earth ran away from them in all directions, empty and featureless. The strange lights in the sky were more visible up there – they were like ripples of ink across the heavens, and it made him nauseous to look at them.

There were no troops marching across the ink-black wasteland, only the wind, as frigid and merciless as ever.

Deathclaw, however, remained agitated. It tried to flap its wings again, only to give up in agony. By then, Karl Franz could hear something for himself – a rhythmic beating on the air, followed by a faint tang of foulness.

He advanced warily, peering up into the unquiet skies, seeking out the source. He saw nothing, but the beating became stronger. The air shifted, stirred by some powerful force above him.

He gripped his sword-hilt two-handed.

So it comes at last, he thought, knowing that whatever approached would be far more powerful than the scattered warbands he had previously encountered. The word must have got out – he had a sudden mental flash of the zombie dragon tearing towards him, its empty eye sockets flaming.

Then something huge and dark burst from the clouds, plummeting fast. Deathclaw hissed, and rose up, its claws extended. Karl Franz crouched, his sword held point-up, coiling for the spring.

‘My liege, put your weapon down, if it please you!’ cried a gruff, part-panicked voice from above.

A second later, and the huge profile of a war-griffon emerged above them, holding position awkwardly less than twenty feet from the ground.

Karl Franz straightened. He knew that beast. He knew all the griffons stabled in the Imperial Menagerie. It was young, barely broken-in, hellish to control. It should have been unrideable.

With a sudden flare of joy, he realised what that meant – loyal men still lived. Even if all else had failed, even if his northern armies had been utterly destroyed, something still remained.

‘Declare yourself,’ Karl Franz ordered, keeping his blade raised. Deathclaw remained at his side, hissing angrily.

‘Gregor Martak, Amber College,’ came the voice from above, as harsh as rotten tree-bark. And then, as if he were strangely embarrassed by the addition, ‘Supreme Patriarch.’

Karl Franz remained wary. There had been too many deceptions for him to take him at his word, and he did not even recognise the name. ‘Supreme Patriarch, you say. Who authorised this?’

‘My fellows, as is the way of the colleges,’ came the defensive reply. ‘De Champney, Reichart, Theiss.’

Karl Franz frowned. ‘Those are deputies.’ The true Heads of the Colleges had accompanied him to the war at the Bastion, including Gormann, Starke and Kant. If they were no longer involved in decision-making, then that hardly boded well.

‘These are confused times, my liege,’ said Martak. ‘We do what we can. May I land?’

Karl Franz almost laughed at that. The wizard was a comically bad griffon rider, and his mount was quick to display its contempt, nearly throwing him from his seat as it laboured in position. ‘If you can manage it,’ he said, sheathing his sword and reaching out a calming hand to Deathclaw.

Martak’s mount crashed to earth, and the wizard slipped awkwardly from between its wings, losing footing as he landed and sprawling onto the ground. He picked himself up, swearing under his breath as he brushed himself down.

Karl Franz observed the man coolly. He was dishevelled, even for one of his wild Order. A matted beard hung from a grimy face, and his loose robes were streaked with mud. He hardly bore himself with the demeanour of a magister. Gelt would have descended from the heavens wreathed with coronets of fire and accompanied by a glittering staff of gold.

This is what we have been reduced to, Karl Franz thought grimly.

‘My pardon, lord, for taking so long,’ muttered Martak, retrieving his own knotted mage-staff from amid his griffon’s ruffled plumage. ‘The Winds are disarranged, and searching for a single soul, even one as mighty as yours, is no longer as easy as it was.’

Karl Franz folded his arms. ‘You come from Altdorf. It still stands?’

‘When I left it, it did. I don’t know for how long, what with an idiot of a Reiksmarshal in charge.’

‘So Helborg lives.’ The relief almost made his voice shake.

‘He does, aye.’

‘And Schwarzhelm? Huss?’

‘They were not there.’ Martak fixed him with a half-guilty, half-anxious look. ‘To be frank, it matters little – the city will fall. I have seen it, and I have seen the state of the defences. I could have stayed and died, but I chose to find you. While you live, something can be salvaged. There may be armies still intact somewhere. Middenheim, or Nuln, perhaps.’

Karl Franz lost his smile. ‘You are not speaking seriously.’

Martak sighed. ‘I knew this would be your response, but please, believe me. There is nothing to be done for Altdorf.’ His brown eyes stared out at the Emperor from the dark. ‘I have witnessed your death there, lord. Night after night, and the visions do not lie.’

‘Then why come to find me at all?’

‘Because fate can be cheated,’ said Martak, almost desperately. ‘You were never destined to die out here, alone. Nor do you need to die in the city. There will be other ways.’

Karl Franz smiled thinly. It was interesting how other men regarded their fate within the world. Some, he knew, cared greatly for their own preservation, or for glory, or for evasion of duty. He had never so much disapproved of those men as found them baffling. Not to be governed by duty – the iron vice of obedience to a higher power – was so far removed from his philosophy as to be almost unintelligible.

‘I thank you for searching me out, wizard,’ said Karl Franz, sincerely enough. ‘You have done what none of your fellows managed, and that alone earns you your rank. But if you have come here to persuade me to abandon the city, you are more a fool than you look. It is my place. I instructed Helborg to hold it, and if there is any chance I can join him in its defence, I must take it.’

The wizard stared back at him, looking like he was earnestly thinking of a way to change his mind. Then he shook his shaggy head. ‘You will not be persuaded.’

‘Persuasion is for debutantes and diplomats, wizard, and I am neither.’

That seemed to remind Martak of just who he was talking to. The wizard nodded wearily. ‘Don’t think I was running away,’ he muttered. ‘I’d have stood and fought, if I thought I couldn’t find you. There are... good people there, ones who don’t deserve to be abandoned.’

‘Good or not, none deserve that.’ Karl Franz turned to look at Deathclaw. The griffon was wheezing in pain, just as it had done since its rescue. It looked barely able to remain on its feet, let alone take to the skies. ‘But I fear your quest has damned one of us to remain in the north. My steed will not fly.’

Martak limped up to the griffon, studying it hard. He reached out with a calloused hand, and Deathclaw bucked.

‘Steady,’ whispered Karl Franz.

‘I can heal your creature, if it will let me,’ said Martak, running his hand down Deathclaw’s snapped pinion.

Karl Franz raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?’

‘I am a magister of the Lore of Ghur. I may be a weak scryer and a poor judge of visions, but I know beasts.’

‘You do not know how to fly them.’

Martak grimaced ruefully. ‘My feet were never meant to leave the earth.’ Then he looked more serious. ‘Come to that, I should never have been elected. If Gormann or Starke had been in Altdorf when the news of Gelt’s fall had come in, I would not have received so much as a vote. But consider this: as fate has it, you were found by an Amber wizard. None of them would have been able to make this creature whole again, but I can.’

Karl Franz considered that. Good fortune had been thin on the ground since his reawakening. For a long time, it had felt as if his immortal patron had vanished, withdrawing His presence from the world just as it was overcome by darkness.

And yet, the filthy wizard standing before him, scratching his cheek and running his thick fingers through Deathclaw’s flight-feathers, had a point.

Do I dare believe again?

He drew in a long breath. Above him, the vile lights danced in the skies, proof of the deep corruption of the world. Much of the situation had not changed – his Empire was overrun, his armies were shattered, he was far from refuge, and even if he were to make it to some safe city, it was not clear how the tide of war could possibly be turned back.

Still, it was a start.

‘Heal him, then,’ Karl Franz said, walking over to the other griffon and taking it by the halter. ‘Where we are going, we will need both.’