The End Times | The Fall of Altdorf

SIXTEEN

Festus cracked a wide grin as he sensed the elements come together at last. Somewhere up above street level, the last of the paltry sunlight was fading and the stars were beginning to come out. The clouds would be splitting open, ready to usher in the sick light of the deathmoon, bathing the land below in the yellow glare of putrescence.

He had stopped stirring, staggering back in exhaustion from the cauldron’s edge. The last of the mortal sacrifices had been added to the infernal stew, dragged from their cages by drooling daemon-kin. Smoke poured out from the bubbling surface, as green as bile and thick like rendered fat. The flames reared up, licking the sides of the vast kettle and making the liquids inside seethe.

Festus wiped a sweaty hand across his forehead, wincing as pustules on his skin burst. After toiling for so long, he hardly knew what to do. Should he just watch? Or was there some other rite to perform, now that the power had been unleashed?

A child-sized daemon with webbed feet and a head entirely taken up by jaws capered in front of him, laughing uncontrollably. Festus chuckled himself, finding the laughter contagious.

‘I know it, little one!’ he agreed, reaching out with a burly hand. The daemon clasped it tight, and together they danced a lumbering jig around the laboratory. ‘I share your joy!’

All through his subterranean kingdom, vials were shattering, spewing their steaming contents across the brick floors. The glassware ran with bubbles, and the valves burst their sleeves in puffs of skin-curling heat.

Festus cast off the attentions of the little daemon, and wobbled over to the next chamber along. The cages stood empty where he had left them, their doors swinging open and the soiled straw within buzzing with flies. Beyond the final set of arches, a wide shaft ran upwards, lined with mouldering brickwork and heavy with moss.

Festus entered the shaft, standing at the base and looking upward. The circular vent soared straight above him, unclogged and ready to vent his fumes into the world beyond.

‘Are you ready?’ he cried, his throaty, phlegm-laced voice echoing up the circular space. ‘Do you know the bliss that awaits you? Are you prepared?’

Of course they were not. They would be retreating to their tiny hovel-rooms now, ready for the night terror to begin. They should be out on the streets, ready to witness the coming storm. They should be revelling in it.

From the cauldron chamber, huge booms were now going off. The reactions had started, bringing to fruition months of work. Every carefully placed jar of toxins was now exploding in sequence, kindling the baleful smoke that even now surged and blundered its way along the interconnecting tunnels.

Festus pressed himself to the shaft’s edge, breathing heavily. His jowls shivered as he began to get the shakes, and a mix of terror and pleasure shuddered through his flabby body.

‘You are coming!’ he cried. ‘At last, you are coming!’

The sound of metal snapping resounded down the tunnels, followed by the hard clang of the fragments bouncing from the keystones of the arches. A vast, earth-shaking roar boiled up from the depths of Festus’s realm, making the water in the sewer-depths bounce and fizz.

Festus spread his arms wide, pressing his fingers into the mortar, and closed his eyes. Steam rushed past him, coiling and snaking up the shaft. He felt the heat of it blistering his skin, and relished every pop and split of his facial boils.

‘It begins,’ he breathed.

The bells tolled across the poor quarter, puncturing the increasingly fervid air. The Bright College had sent menials to light pyres at every street corner in the hope of rallying the populace in the face of the mounting terror, but all that did was send more smoke pluming up into an already polluted dusk.

Margrit dragged herself up to the balcony overlooking the Rathstrasse, feeling the age in her bones begin to tell. She had been working non-stop for weeks, coping with the gradually mounting toll of sick and dying. After so long resisting the contagion in the air, the endless filth had begun to overwhelm her at last. She wheezed as she leaned against the railing.

Below her, the city was burning. Bonfires blazed in every platz and strasse, throwing thick orange light up against the grime-streaked daub of the townhouses. She watched as a regiment of Reikland state troopers marched through the street immediately below the temple’s east gate, clearing the lame from their path with a brutal military efficiency.

She hardly had the energy to be outraged anymore. They were just doing their job – strutting off to wherever they were destined to die – and the sick were everywhere, blocking the doorways, the drains and the marketplaces.

She breathed deeply, feeling her heart pulse. She felt light-headed, and the charnel stink in the air made it worse. Something was coming to a head. Whenever the clouds briefly split, the sickening illumination of Morrslieb flooded the rooftops, making Altdorf look like a forest of spikes set against an ocean of yellow-green.

Where are you? she found herself wondering. For a moment, I believed you were different. You came down here, at least. Perhaps that told you all you needed to know.

The image of the bearded wizard still hung in her mind. There was something about him – a rawness, a lack of cultivation – that she had found appealing.

Too late, now. This thing, whatever it is, is beginning.

Her head started to ache. The air was like it was before a summer thunderstorm, close and clammy. The smoke of the fires made it worse. She looked down at her hands, and saw that they were trembling.

Then she sniffed. There was something else in the air. Something... alchemical. She looked up, screwing her eyes against the drifting smog. Over to the north-east, across the Unterwald Bridge and towards the slaughterhouse district, a column of smoke was rising. Unlike all the others, it glowed green from within, glimmering in the night like phosphor. While the fires of the Bright magisters burned fiercely, this column rose into the sky like oil poured in reverse, slinking and sliding upward in violation of nature’s order.

‘There you are,’ she said out loud, vindicated, though far too late. The column continued to grow, piling on more and more girth until it loomed over the entire district. Flashes of light flared up inside it, flickering and spinning, before guttering out. The hunchbacked roofs of the abattoirs were silhouetted, flashing and swinging amid the riot of colour. ‘It was under us the whole time,’ she murmured. ‘Just one regiment would have sufficed.’

A dull boom rang out, making the earth shake, and plumes of emerald lightning lanced upward, shooting like geysers in the gathering dark.

Margrit swallowed, trying to remember the words of the Litany Against the Corruption of the Body. She knew, perhaps better than anyone else in the city, just what strain of magic had been unleashed in the depths of the city. It had been there for months, cradling slowly, growing like an obscene child in the dripping sewers, and now it had been birthed under the light of Morrslieb and with the hosts of Ruin camped outside the walls.

‘Blessed Mother,’ Margrit whispered, watching the column lash and unfurl, ‘preserve us all.’

Ethrac was the first to see it.

‘There it is!’ he shrieked, jumping up from his long-held crouch and nearly losing his position on Ghurk’s back. ‘He has done it!’

Otto roused from a half-sleep, in which dreams of sucking the marrow from living victims had been making him salivate, and looked blearily at his brother. ‘Who has done what?’

Ethrac cracked him over the head with his staff, making the bells chime. ‘Festus! His spell breaks!’

Otto clambered to his feet, rubbing his forehead absently, trying to see what the fuss was about.

Then he did. Altdorf lay under the night’s thick cover, lit up along its walls by a thousand grimy lanterns. The towers soared darkly into the void, black on black, each crowned by a slender tiled roof. Just as before, he was struck by the sheer vastness of it, like a mound of rotting fruit ready for gnawing on.

The roofs were overhung by lines of smoke, just as always, except that one of them was glowing green and curling like burning parchment edges. It towered over the city, rearing up like a vast and vengeful giant, swelling and bloating into flickering excess. Its green light, as gloriously lurid as anything Otto had witnessed, sent shadows leaping across the landscape. Half-defined faces rose and sank in the smoke, each one contorted into mutating expressions of agony and misery.

‘It is beautiful,’ he murmured, absently letting his hand fall to his scythe-stave.

A low rumble from below told him that Ghurk agreed. The triplets stood, lost in admiration, as the first mark of Festus’s Great Tribulation began.

‘I can feel the aethyr bending,’ said Ethrac appreciatively. ‘He has been working on this for a long time.’

Otto chuckled darkly. ‘He enjoys his labours.’

‘As do we all.’

The column continued to grow. The clouds above the city responded, sending down tendrils like stalactites, and soon a vortex began to churn over the battlements, glowing and flickering like embers. The growl of thunder rocked the valley, though this time it was not the world’s elements that stirred. Lightning snapped down from tormented clouds, flooding more emerald light over the sacrificial city.

‘It is fitting, is it not?’ mused Ethrac. ‘That the first strike should be self-inflicted? The City of Sigmar will gnaw its own innards out, and all before the first standard is lifted.’

Otto was barely paying attention. The column of smoke was twisting like a tornado, only far vaster and slower, rotating ominously as it gathered girth and momentum. The rain started up again, as if triggered by the pillar of aethyr-energy churning up out of the city’s innards. Droplets pinged and tumbled down Ghurk’s vast bulk.

A rumble drummed across the land, lower than the thunder, like the unsteady foundations of the world grating together. The rain picked up in intensity, sheeting down in thick, viscous gobbets of slime.

Otto lifted his head and grinned, feeling cool mucus run down his cracked features.

‘And do you see them?’ asked Ethrac, his bony face twisted into a look of ecstasy. ‘The others? Look out, o my brother, and observe what the beacon has summoned.’

Otto blinked the slime from his eyes and peered out into the gloom. The sun was nothing more than a red glow in the far west, but all across the northern horizon, crimson pinpricks were emerging from the forest. First a few dozen, then hundreds, then thousands. ‘I see it, o my brother,’ he said. ‘That is the Lord of Tentacles, and the scions of the beast-forest. So many! So, so many.’

‘And, though you do not see it yet, Epidemius is closing from the east. The river will be blocked from both compass points.’ Ethrac reached down to playfully tug at Ghurk’s lone eyebrow. ‘You will be feasting on live flesh again soon, great one!’

Ghurk chortled eagerly, and his shoulders rolled with mirth.

Over Altdorf, the column of green fire burst into ever more violent life, revealing a twisting helix of luminescent power coursing at its heart. The heavens responded, and the storm overhead rotated faster in sympathy, a vast movement that spread out over the entire forest.

Altdorf was now the fulcrum on which the heavens themselves turned. As the thunder ramped up and the slime-rain fell ever more heavily, a delicious air of terror lodged firmly over the Reik, seeping up from the slime of the earth and bleeding into the churn of the ruptured skies. The column of green fire punched a hole through the heart of the swirling vortex, fully exposing the damaged face of Morrslieb, hanging at the very heart of the heavens like a severed tumour set among the stars.

‘My people!’ Otto cried out, turning from his vantage to face the colossal army that had waited for so long within sight of the prize, held in place by the triplets’ peerless command. Ranks of grizzled Norscans, wild Skaelings, gurning lesser daemons, plague-afflicted mortals and corrupted beast-mutants lifted up their sore-pocked faces and waited for the order. A thousand banners were hoisted into the dribbling rain, each one marked with a different aspect of the Urfather. Cleavers were pulled from leather slip-cases, mauls unhooked from chains, blunt-bladed swords from human-hide sheaths. ‘The sign has been given!’

Otto raised one arm, holding his scythe aloft in triumph. The heavens responded with a violent crack, and green lightning exposed him in sudden vividness, his mutated face broken by a manic grin of pure battle-lust. ‘You have waited long enough! The deathmoon swells full, the Tribulation has begun. Now for the final neck to snap!’

A guttural snarling broke out from the limitless hordes, and they began to shuffle forward, impatient for the command.

Otto laughed out loud, and lowered his scythe towards the epicentre of the maelstrom.

‘To the gates!’ he commanded.

Helborg stood with Zintler on the towering summit of the North Gate, overlooking the walls below. The two of them were surrounded by a twenty-strong detachment of Reiksguard, as well as the usual panoply of senior engineers, battle-mages and warrior priests. Below then, the parapets were stuffed with men. Every soldier on the walls held a bow or long-gun, and all eyes were fixed to the north, where the plague-forest had crept ever closer. They felt the tramp of massed boots long before they saw the vast array of torches creep towards the perimeter. They heard the brazen blare of war horns, and the low chanting of dirges to the god of decay.

When the rain began, Helborg had initially ignored it. The droplets felt heavier than normal, and splatted wetly on his helm’s visor before trickling down the steel edges. His gaze remained fixed outward, ready to give the command to open fire.

The great cannons had been wheeled into position. Many were manned by the infirm and the elderly, for the plague had thinned out the gun-crews terribly. He would never have tolerated such a state of affairs in the normal run of things, but this was not, as had long been evident, in any way normal.

‘Ready for the order,’ he said, watching the enemy emerge from the tree-cover, barely three hundred yards from the outer walls.

Zintler passed on the command, which was relayed to the master engineer, which was sent down to the gunnery captain in the firing vaults, which was dispatched by the wall-sergeants, which was finally picked up by the dozens of crews standing ready by the piles of shot and blackpowder kegs.

Helborg’s mind briefly ran over the order of defence for the final time. He and half of the Reiksguard had been stationed in the north, where the assault from the Drakwald was expected. Von Kleistervoll had taken the West Gate with most of the remaining Reiksguard force, bolstered by the sternest of the Altdorfer regiments. The East Gate defence was dominated by the Engineer’s School, which stood just inside the walls to the north of the gate itself. The engineers had somehow coaxed four steam tanks into operation, which stood ready inside the gate itself, surrounded by companies of handgunners and artillery pieces. Magisters had been deployed in every formation, mostly drawn from the Bright College where possible, as well as warriors of the Church of Sigmar and priests of Ulric. The Knightly Orders had been mostly stationed in the north, though, as in all things, Helborg had been obliged to spread them thinly.

The vast majority of the state troop defenders were arranged on the walls, and given any ranged weapons that could be drummed up. The scant reserve forces stood further back, ready to be thrown into the fray whenever a section looked in danger of being lost. Scattered bands of pistoliers stood ready at all the main platzen, operating as a fast-reaction force.

It was as well-organised as it could have been, given the time and circumstances. Most regiments stood at no more than two-thirds strength, but every man who could stand on his own feet had answered the summons. Even those that could not had dragged themselves into the streets, clutching a sword and preparing, with feverish minds and sweaty hands, to do what they could to staunch the onslaught. They knew that there would be no prisoners taken, and nowhere to flee to if they failed.

‘My lord,’ said Zintler, hesitantly.

‘Not now,’ growled Helborg, scrutinising the growing horde ahead as it crawled into position. He saw trebuchets being hauled into position, and heavier war engines grinding through the forest, dragged by teams of obscenely huge creatures with slobbering jaws. There were so many of them, more than he had ever seen in all his years of battle.

‘My lord, you should see this,’ insisted Zintler.

Helborg whirled on him, ready to tell him to stand down and attend to his own station, when he caught sight of the green light flooding the parapet.

He turned slowly, dreading what he was about to see.

A massive tornado had erupted from the heart of the poor quarter, over in the cramped south-eastern sector of the city. The rain whipped and danced around it, seeming to fuel the accelerating movement of the immense aethyr-walls. Already it had snaked high up into the skies, glowing like corpse-light and casting a foul sheen to every surface under it.

‘What, in the name of...’ Helborg began, lost for words.

Lightning scampered down the flanks of the enormous pillar. It boiled and massed and thrust ever upwards, making the rainfall heavier, driven by ever-faster winds that howled with the voices of daemons. The dense cloud cover above it broke, exposing the sickening light of the deathmoon. As the two lurid lights mingled, a booming crack rang out across the entire city, shaking it to its foundations. The war horns of the enemy rose up in answer, and a deafening wall of noise broke out from every quarter. Drums began to roll wildly, and the rain started to slam down with ever greater intensity.

‘Where are the magisters?’ roared Helborg. ‘Order them to shut it down!’

He had a sudden, terrible recollection of Martak then, but there was no time to dwell on it – the column exploded into light, thundering into the heavens with the roar and crash of aethyr-tides breaking. Huge streamers of blistering coruscation shot down in answer from the skies, laced with white-edged flame, and he had to avert his eyes.

The rain now thudded around them in thick eddies, pooling and sliding on the stone. It was not water but a kind of milky slime that loosened footing and seemed to dissolve the surfaces it slopped over.

A vast, rolling laugh broke out across the city, resounding from one end to the other. No mortal being laughed like that, nor even the daemon-servants that stalked among the enemy armies – it was the laugh of a horrific, eternal and infinitely malevolent presence of the divine plane.

The twisting column broke open, bursting like a lanced boil, spilling multi-hued luminescence into the night and banishing the last of the natural shadows. The entire city swung and lurched with crazed illumination, dazzling the eyes of any who looked directly into it.

The battle-mages were already sending counter-spells spinning up at the raging tempest, but their hastily contrived wards had little effect on the gathering inferno.

The laughter picked up in volume, but this time it spilled from more than one mouth. Within the writhing pillar of steam and fire, dark clots emerged, galloping into reality with terrifying speed. They burst from their aethyr-womb and were flung out over the city, their limbs cartwheeling and their mouths wide with mirth. Every contorted, wizened and twisted denizen of the Other Realm vomited forth – horned-faced, bulbous-bellied, wart-encrusted, boil-bursting, cloven-hoofed and rheumy-eyed, the daemons had come. They spilled out of the gap in reality like a swarm of insects dislodged from the darkest corner of the deepest dungeon, snickering and dribbling as they came.

There was no time to respond. Before Helborg had a chance to rally his forces to resist the horrors capering among his own streets, the charge was sounded from outside the walls. The war horns reached an ear-ripping crescendo, and tens of thousands of hoarse voices lifted in lust and expectation. The trebuchets opened up, hurling strangely glowing projectiles into the walls, where they shattered in foul gouts of marsh gas. The enemy hosts to the west, north and east charged simultaneously, crashing towards the perimeter in a sweeping tide that soon joined up into a seamless scrum of jostling, hard-running, weapon-brandishing hatred.

The numbers were overwhelming, both inside and outside the walls. It was as if the world had split open and thrown every monstrous servant of the plague-god into the same place, replete with daemons and half-breed terrors and mutated grotesques. It was unstoppable. It was never-ending. They would just keep on coming, smashing aside any resistance, fuelled by the unclean magicks that played and burst above them in vortices of pure destruction.

Zintler froze. The gunnery captains looked to him, lost in shock. Even the warrior priests seemed uncertain how to react to such sudden, shattering force.

Helborg, his heart beating hard, his armour running with slime-rain, thrust himself to the very edge of the parapet where he knew he would be seen by the greatest number of his troops.

‘Open fire!’ he roared, bawling into the inferno with every ounce of strength. ‘By Sigmar’s blood, open fire!’

That seemed to galvanise the others. Zintler shouted out orders to the captains, most of whom were now moving again, relaying instructions to the firing vaults. The first of the great cannons detonated, sending its shot whistling out into the seething press beyond the walls. The crack of pistol and long-gun fire rippled down the walls, followed by the hiss of arrows leaving bows.

The magisters responded to the sea of sorcery with spells of their own, and soon the raging skies were riven with the arcs and flares of unleashed magic. More cannons boomed out, shaking the walls with their recoil and hurling lines of iron balls deep into the heart of the onrushing enemy. Whole sections of the walls disappeared behind rolling curtains of blackpowder discharge, further adding to the cacophony.

The heavens were broken. The laws of reality were shattered. Men and daemons fought on the streets, while the engines of war blazed at one another across a battlefield already choked by death and madness. The rain scythed down, drenching everything in curtains of sickness, and the deathmoon presided over a lightning-flecked, smoke-barred picture of devastation.

At the heart of the storm, Helborg stood proudly, his fist raised in defiance of the arrows that already clattered and rebounded from the stone around him.

‘Stand fast!’ he bellowed, knowing he would need to stay visible. This was the hammer-blow, the hardest strike. If they faltered now, it could be over in hours – they needed to fight back harder than they ever had, and keep fighting harder. They were all that remained, the final redoubt, and that knowledge had to keep them on their feet. ‘Men of the Empire, stand fast!’

SEVENTEEN

The Bretonnians rode clear of the worst of the plague-forest as the sun was setting. They had been moving without pause the whole time, unwilling to make camp under the eaves of such diseased trees. The knights had remained in full armour, ever watchful for attacks from the shadows. In the event, none came. It was as Leoncoeur had surmised – even the greenskins had been driven from the woodland, something he would have thought impossible had he not witnessed it himself.

The harsh pace had taken its toll, but they were now in range of the city. The pass was behind them, as was the worst of the Reikwald. Each knight could call on no more than two horses each, and some now rode the mount they planned to take into battle. They would arrive weary from the road and scarred from repeated encounters with the orcs. It was not ideal preparation for the battle to come, but the need for haste had always been the overriding concern.

As Leoncoeur rode out from under the plague-forest’s northern fringe, he whispered a silent prayer of thanksgiving. The last of the river waters had dissipated, sinking back into the earth in gently steaming wells, leaving the original watercourse just as it should have been. At least this stream still ran clear – so many were now little more than polluted creeks, black with drifting spores and mutated, blind inhabitants.

The standards of Couronne and the other principalities were raised under the twilight, unfurled to the full once more as the trees gave way. A bleak land of scrub and heath undulated away from them, looking more grey than green under the failing light. Behind them rose the now-distant crags of the Grey Mountains.

One by one, the Bretonnians emerged to join him. The knights removed their helms and ran tired hands through sweat-slick hair. The peasantry did as they always did – hauled on their loads, shouldering the brute burden of the now much-diminished supplies.

Leoncoeur watched his fighters assemble, and let himself feel a glow of pride. They were intact, and still ready to fight. Their losses had been regrettable, but containable. Several thousand knights of the realm still marched with him, enough to count against any conceivable foe. When displayed in such concentrations, it was easy to forget the Lady’s warnings.

These are my brothers, Leoncoeur thought. There is no certainty in any fate. We will fight, and, who can tell? We may prevail.

Above them, the pegasi still flew, shepherded by Beaquis. They had remained in close contact through the long trek, swooping low so as to remain visible through the filigree of clutching briars. They circled lazily now, saving their strength for what was to come. Beaquis snarled and snapped at the winged horses, as much their master as Leoncoeur was master of his men.

Jhared was one of the last to emerge, having ridden to the rear of the column to guard the vulnerable supplies. He greeted his liege with a rakish grin.

‘A place to sleep, at last,’ he said, saluting. ‘I had begun to forget what that felt like.’

Leoncoeur smiled tolerantly. Resting his head against moss and grass rather than dozing in the saddle would be a welcome change.

‘We must ride a little longer yet,’ he said, casting a wary glance back towards the brooding forest-edge. ‘I will not rest this close to those woods.’

‘And you will have no argument from me.’

The last of the big wains trundled into the open, hauled by lines of peasants. The carthorses that should have pulled them had been lost in the passes.

Leoncoeur and Jhared rode on. The air smelled... foreign. It was not just the taint of corruption on the wind – this was a land as alien to them as any other, populated by strangers with strange ways. Many of those who rode with him would never have strayed across the border before. Their lust for adventure would be enough to fuel them over the last leg of the trek. Whether it was strong enough to make them fight as they would for their homeland, that had yet to be tested.

‘All this way, for visions,’ he murmured.

Jhared looked at him, surprised. ‘Doubts, my lord?’

Leoncoeur smiled. ‘No, not doubts. Never doubts.’ That was not quite true. He had had plenty. ‘And you saw Her power for yourself. Can any doubt that we were meant to be here?’ He lost his smile. ‘But still, the sacrifice. I do not remember the Empire being so swift to come to our aid.’

Jhared shrugged. ‘This war would have come to us, in the end. So you said, at any rate, back home.’

Leoncoeur was about to reply, to agree, when the north-eastern sky was suddenly illuminated by a flash of pale green.

Every warrior immediately went for their weapon, and the horses whinnied in alarm. A cold gust of wind rustled across the brush, making the gorse shiver.

‘In the name of the Lady...’ began Leoncoeur, spurring his horse onward.

In the distance, to the north-east, a slender line of emerald was snaking up into the heavens. More flashes of pale light burst out, accompanied by the sporadic dart of lightning.

‘What is that?’ asked Jhared gazing up into the sky with uncharacteristic trepidation. Even as he did so, the earth shuddered underfoot, causing the warhorses to stumble. The bloom of unearthly green grew stronger, streaming heavenwards in a slender column.

‘The city,’ breathed Leoncoeur, feeling a terrible fear strike at him. ‘We are come too late.’

Though far away, the luminescence kept growing, spreading across the fast-moving cloud cover in vile shades of pale jade. It must have been massive. It must have been more than massive.

‘Hold firm!’ ordered Leoncoeur, unable to resist looking at the baleful flame. As he did so, it seemed as if the storm above it coalesced into a vast, misshapen face, leering earthwards with lust in its blurred and fractured features. If it was a storm, then it was no storm of the earth.

Some of the peasants threw themselves onto the ground then, burying their heads under their arms and whispering hurried prayers. Even the seasoned warriors were unsettled by the vision, and struggled to control their steeds.

For a moment, Leoncoeur himself was unsure what to do. He had planned to make camp for the night, giving the chargers and their riders precious rest before leading them into battle. That was no longer possible – if they waited even an hour more, they would arrive at Altdorf to see nothing more than charred stone.

As he vacillated, Beaquis swooped down from its position, cawing furiously. There was no uncertainty in its feral eyes, just a rapidly kindled battle-lust. The hippogryph was under no illusions about what had just taken place, or what to do about it.

Leoncoeur reached up to grasp the beast’s reins, which hung below its feathered jowls. The hippogryph flapped down lower, coming level with Leoncoeur’s mount, and he leapt across the gap and hauled himself into position. Once righted, he drew his blade.

‘We are not too late!’ he cried as Beaquis gained loft. ‘Had it not been for the Lady’s grace, we would still be hacking through the forest, but we have been given a chance.’

Every warrior in his entourage looked up at him as he circled higher. The pegasi, following their master’s lead, remained in close formation. None of them yet had a rider, but that would quickly change.

‘You are weary,’ Leoncoeur told them. ‘You have already ridden hard. If you were any other people, I would not dare to ask more of you now.’ He shot them a savage smile. ‘But you are not any other people – you are the finest knights in the world, and you have been given one final chance to prove your mettle.’

By now every rider had controlled his steed, and the column was already forming up into battle order. The sky continued to glow with an ever more intense shade of sickness, but the first shock was already wearing off.

‘We ride together!’ Leoncoeur roared. ‘The winged and the earthbound, united unto the walls of Sigmar’s city!’

It would be brutal riding. The ground between them and the city walls was unknown and no doubt crawling with the enemy. By the time they arrived, they would have to move straight into battle, with no rest and no chance to prepare. It would be a desperate race.

‘You have followed me this far,’ Leoncoeur thundered, climbing into the tortured heavens. ‘If we stumble now, then all is for naught, so ride now, with me at your head, and we shall yet break the darkness with our valour!’

Vlad sensed the build-up of sorcery before he saw the tempest erupt over Altdorf. For over an hour, as the river had slipped past, he had felt the gathering of an almighty conflagration. It was like the beating of some immense heart, just beneath the surface of the world, but gathering strength with every pulse.

When the towers of smoke poured up at last from the western horizon, accompanied by the distant sound of war-drums, his fears were confirmed in full.

They have worked some great spell, he thought to himself grimly. Well then, what did I expect? That they would walk up to the gates and beg for entry?

Herrscher still had the presence of mind to be shocked. It was a difficult time for him – still caught between his old residual ties to the Empire and his new allegiance to Nagash. Vlad remained confident he would fall on the right side of the argument when the test came, but his transition had taken place in such a short period, and he had had much to absorb.

‘What is that?’ the witch hunter asked, appalled.

Vlad sat back in his throne, drumming his fingers on the armrest. ‘Your first sight of the enemy. Mark them well – if we fail here, you will be seeing a lot more of this.’

The smoke curled and writhed over the tops of the trees, burning its way into the sky. Vlad’s army was still many miles away, hampered by the Reik’s sluggish pace. As fast as his magic had cleared the river-path, more creepers and moss-mats had reached out to drag them back again.

Even the Pale Ladies looked impressed by the fires ahead. They gazed up at the gently turning storm, mouths open, watching as the heavens burned.

‘We must go faster,’ hissed Herrscher, his voice tight with impatience.

‘Calm yourself, witch hunter,’ said Vlad. ‘Look at what else approaches.’

The cavalcade of barges was still in convoy, a huge train of heavily-laden troop carriers, following like cattle in the wake of Vlad’s flagship. The entire convoy was passing around a wide bend in the river, curving from right to left as the watercourse opened up for the long straight passage towards Altdorf’s eastern wharfs.

As they neared the curve’s outside bank, a grey strand appeared, pale under the dusk shadow of the trees beyond. It widened rapidly, exposing a marshy beach on the northern shore, dotted with mottled reeds and studded with plague-webs.

The plain was not empty. Ranks of soldiers stood waiting, organised into disciplined infantry squares and carrying flaming torches. Black banners fluttered in the contrary winds, exposing old devices of Marienburg and silver death’s-head emblems against a sable ground.

One lord stood apart from the others. Even for one of his lineage, he carried himself with a studied arrogance, his cloak flung back over one shoulder and his pale chin raised.

Vlad sighed, and motioned for his ghoulish steersmen to ground the cruiser on the shoals ahead. The vessel ground to a halt, and undead menials immediately splashed into the knee-deep water and locked their hands together. Vlad rose from his throne and descended a wooden stairway hastily lowered over the side, then used the interlocking arms of his servants to avoid getting his boots wet. He alighted at the far end of the silent processional, stepping lightly onto dry sand. Behind him came Herrscher and the Pale Ladies, who were already cooing with delight.

‘My dear Mundvard,’ said Vlad, extending his ring-finger.

The vampire lord before him looked at the garnet jewel with distaste, before stiffly bowing and kissing it. ‘We are in danger of missing the party,’ he said.

Mundvard the Cruel was one of the most powerful vampires outside Sylvania. For years uncounted he had plied his grisly trade in Marienburg, only leaving once the doom of that city had become assured. He bore the marks of the degenerate aristocracy he had once been a member of – an excessively thin frame, sharp bone-structure, decayed attire harking back to a forgotten age of elegance. His lean fingers were studded with golden jewellery, and he wore a velvet frock-coat.

‘I had expected you to bring more guests,’ said Vlad, casting his eye over the forces Mundvard brought with him. Some were the dead of Marienburg, still arrayed in tattered remnants of their old uniforms. Others must have been raised on his march east, and others still were creatures of Mundvard’s old hidden retinue. At the rear of the throng, hissing under the leaves, lurked a greater beast, one that had once terrorised the Suiddock, and now slithered abroad again under new magical commandments.

Mundvard affected a look of disinterest. ‘We do what we can. Times are not what they were.’

Vlad shot his deputy a dark look. Mundvard was a skilled killer, one of the finest exponents of the dagger-in-the-dark school of murder, but his long sojourn in Marienburg had made him flighty and high-strung. If there had been time, Vlad might have been tempted to give him a lesson in command, a painful one, but Morrslieb was now full and the gaps between the worlds had already been punctured.

He withdrew his claw.

‘Tell me what you know.’

‘Three hosts assail the city,’ said Mundvard. ‘They have already started the assault. Some hex has been enacted, and daemons are falling from the sky.’ He wrinkled his slender nose in distaste. ‘Altdorf is a rotten corpse. It will not last the night.’

‘And that is why we are here,’ said Vlad, patiently. ‘Is your army ready to march?’

‘Whenever I give the word.’

‘Then give it.’

Mundvard looked at the barges, which were coming in, one by one, to ground on the beach. ‘Should we not take the river?’

Vlad shot him a contemptuous look. ‘I will enter the city when I am invited.’ He drew closer to Mundvard, pleased to find that he was a half-head taller than his lieutenant. ‘Let me instruct you in how this thing is to be done. I will not sneak into Altdorf like some beggar, fighting up from the quays and the sewage-bilges. I will demand my electorship before I raise so much as a sword to aid them. When their desperation finally forces them to crack, I will ride through the gates atop a war-steed, my head held high, and I will take the salute of the Emperor himself. They will invite me in. Do you see this? Nothing less will suffice.’

Mundvard looked at him doubtfully. Vlad could read the thoughts flickering across his elegant face. Is this what Nagash intended? Can it be worth the risk?

Eventually, though, the vampire nodded in acquiescence. ‘So be it,’ Mundvard said, as if he cared not either way. ‘The North Gate is the quickest route from here. The forest is crawling with daemons, mind.’

Vlad raised an eyebrow, and gestured to where his troops were making landfall. Shades fluttered overhead, their long faces breaking into piercing moans. Ghouls slipped between the shadows of the trees, and hulking undead champions trudged through the lapping surf, uncaring if the brackish waters slopped over the tops of their age-crusted boots. Greater beasts were waiting on the barges in iron cages – skeletal leviathans, raving vargheists, crypt horrors wearing bronze collars marked with runes of control. Thousands had already landed, and thousands more would come.

‘Daemons are but the dreams of mortals,’ Vlad said, witheringly. ‘Just wait until they clap eyes on us.’

The underworld kingdom was breaking apart. Sewer arches collapsed under the strain, showering broken bricks into the steaming channels. The air burned, throbbing with released magic that bounced and swerved through the honeycomb of chambers.

Festus went as quickly as his sagging muscles would carry him, sloshing through the turbulent slurry and making his way back to the cauldron chamber. It had been a magnificent thing to witness – his Great Tribulation, soaring up the shaft and breaking into the city above, rupturing the skin of the heavens and ushering in the deluge of daemon-kind. He could feel unreality flex and buckle around him, warping the very fabric of the undercity.

Such complete success did not come without risks. He had unleashed forces that now ran far beyond his capability to control. If he did not get out soon, he would be buried by the destruction he had caused. All he had been charged to do was start the process, and like fermentation in a barrel, it would now bubble away without his further involvement, taken over by an intelligence far greater and subtler than his own.

He stumbled along the sewer-path, kicking past a gurgling gaggle of half-drowned daemon-kin. More of the masonry around him collapsed, sending dust spiralling through the echoing tunnels. Ahead of him stood the cauldron chamber, still lined with popping vials.

This was the crowning achievement of his long art. Most of the petty daemons summoned by the Tribulation would be ripped from the tortured skies by the plague-tempest, but that would not suffice for the greatest of the breed. For such titans of contagion, a more direct route was required.

Festus hurried over to the cauldron, wincing as more glassware exploded above him. The liquids within still bubbled as violently as ever, even though the fire at the cauldron’s base had long gone out. Truly gorgeous aromas spilled from the lip, exuding freely as globular slush dribbled down the obese flanks.

A vast hand thrust up from the boiling broth. That hand alone should have been far too large to fit inside the vessel – it was a scaly, clawed and mottled hand, steaming gouts from its immersion and still wrinkled from the moisture.

Festus clapped his palms together in joy, watching as another claw shot out from the far side of the cauldron. Two enormous fists clamped onto the edges of the vessel, and flexed.

The broth spilled over, cascading to an already swimming floor, and a pair of antlers burst into view. Two enormous yellow eyes, slit-pupilled like a cat’s, blinked at Festus.

‘Plaguefather!’ cried Festus, taking a hesitant step towards the emerging monster.

Like all its kind, the daemon had many names in many realms, all of which were but a distant mockery of its true title, which was unpronounceable by all but the most studious of mortal tongues. In Naggaroth it was cursed as Jharihn, in Lustria feared as Xochitataliav, in destroyed Tilea hated as Kisveraldo the Foul-breathed, in distant Cathay reviled as Cha-Zin-Fa the Ever-pustulent. In the Empire it had earned the moniker Ku’gath the Plaguefather, and its ministrations had ever been most virulent in those lands.

Festus cared little for true names, for he was no scholar of the dark arts, just a meddler in potions and the delicious fluids of sickness. He did recognise the enormous power erupting before him, though – an unstoppable mountain of gently mouldering hides, crowned with a grin-sliced face of such exquisite ugliness that it made him want to reach up and chew it.

Ku’gath looked around, seemingly a little bewildered. It hauled itself up higher, and a truly colossal bulk began to emerge, flopping over the side of the now absurdly tiny cauldron. The daemon’s bulk was far greater than the mortal vessel could possibly have contained, a conceit that Festus found particularly amusing.

‘Where... is this?’ growled the daemon, its slurred, inhuman voice resonating throughout the gradually disintegrating kingdom.

‘Altdorf, my prince,’ said Festus, wobbling for cover as a whole rack of vials crashed to the floor, scattering the glass in twinkling fragments. ‘The Tribulation. You remember?’

That seemed to clarify Ku’gath’s mind. The giant mouth curled as it snorted up remnants of the broth, before it vomited a pale stream of lumpy effluent straight at Festus. The Leechlord revelled in the slops hitting him, sucking up as many as his purple tongue would reach.

Then Ku’gath dragged its quivering flanks clear of the cauldron. A vast foot extended, terminating in a cloven hoof and trailing long streamers of pickled gore. Laboriously, puffing and drooling, the enormous creature extracted itself from its tiny birth-chamber, standing tall before its summoner.

Unfurled to its full extent, the greater daemon was immense. Its antlers scraped the high arched vault, and its withers slobbered over broken potion-racks. When it turned around, whole shelves of priceless liquors were crushed against its sloping flanks, streaking down the steaming flesh like thrown dyes.

‘We have to leave,’ said Festus, shuffling out of the daemon’s path and knocking over an empty prey-cage as he did so. ‘This place is no longer... commodious.’

Ku’gath grunted, and started to shuffle through the chambers, smashing and crushing as it went. ‘I can smell the fear,’ it slurred, spitting through the flecks of vomit still clinging to its lower lip. ‘They are... above.’

‘Yes, yes!’ agreed Festus, doing what he could to usher the beast towards the only exit large enough to accommodate it. ‘Follow the stink! They are lucky to have lived to witness you.’

Ku’gath spat a gobbet of mucus the size of a man’s fist, and it splattered stickily against the wall. ‘I hunger,’ it gurgled.

Festus smiled lasciviously. ‘As do I, bringer of ruin, but it is just a little way now.’ He thought ahead, wondering how he would direct such a leviathan to its true target. ‘Plenty of souls to suck up, plenty of guts to slip down your gullet. They are lining up, one by one.’

‘I hunger,’ the daemon drawled, as if it were incapable of saying anything else.

‘I know you do,’ said Festus, rubbing its lower spine affectionately. ‘Your ache shall be sated.’ His smile broadened as his plans crystallised. ‘To the temple, great one. To the Temple of Shallya.’

EIGHTEEN

The army of the Urfather tore across the final stretch of open land, charging en masse towards the reeling walls. Altdorf was directly ahead, just a few hundred yards away, looming up into the madness of the Tribulation. The Glottkin’s hordes spread out into an immense swarm of churning bodies, bearing torches as they ran and screaming the death-curses of the uttermost north.

Ghurk was at the forefront, leaping and blundering towards the vast West Gate. His breathing was already frantic and wheezing, his lust for flesh overtaking everything. His distorted right arm flailed around, and in his other hand he clutched an enormous maul that was still viscous with blood from older battles.

The city reared up before them, a soaring black silhouette amid the sheeting plague-rain. The towers starkly framed a cracked sky beyond, shrieking with daemon cries and the swirling power of the aethyr unlocked. Banked ramparts flashed and smoked with blackpowder weapons, and the hard snap of cannon-fire, followed by the boom of the report, briefly punctured the background roar of the winds and the flames and the screaming. Petty mortal magic flared in the night, shimmering with every colour of the spectrum, something that made Ethrac snort with derision.

The first ranks were already at the walls. Teams of plate-armoured Norscans strode up to the foundations bearing siege ladders. Wooden poles were hoisted up, swaying in the gales, before being shoved back by desperate hands on the high battlements. Boiling pitch was hurled down at the first rank of attackers, sending huge columns of steam spiralling up as the liquid burst over its targets.

The fighting quickly spread all along the western walls, before joining up with Autus Brine’s assault from the north. Soon the outer perimeter, extending for miles in both directions, was completely besieged. The Chaos host surged up to it, bearing yet more siege ladders, crashing against the thick stone base like the tide.

War horns rang out, one after the other, overlapping in a maddening, glorious assault on the senses. The horns were soon matched by the bellows of the fell beasts that had been driven out of the forest – scaled and tusked monsters with flame-red eyes that ground their hooves into the mud and blundered in their madness towards the looming behemoth ahead of them.

In all directions, across the churning fields of war, battle-standards swung and swayed, crowned with skulls and lined red by the fires that had already kindled in defiance of the hammering squalls. Massive war engines were dragged out of cover and into range – trebuchets with thirty-foot throwing arms, lashed by chains to the ground and daubed with runes of destruction; bronze-wheeled cannons shaped with snarling wolf’s-head barrels; siege towers pulled by teams of massive, six-horned oxen that lowed and thundered from shaggy throats even as they inched their immense burdens towards the distant target.

Otto gazed out across the measureless horde, and raised his scythe in salute. His heart was full to bursting, his whole body animated by a raw war-lust that made him want to scream aloud to the lightning-scored heavens. His forces compassed the earth in every direction, mile upon mile of battle-maddened warriors, each with only one purpose – to maim, to slay, to choke, to break bones.

Aethyric thunder snarled across the skies, making the tormented earth shake further.

‘Death to them!’ Otto bawled, waving his scythe around him wildly as Ghurk galloped towards the beleaguered gates. ‘Death! Death!’

The cry began to spread through the army, and the myriad different tribal chants and curses moulded into one, repeated, terrible word.

Death! Death! Death!

The drums matched the beat, thudding like hammers on anvils, driving the hordes on and making their eyes roll and their mouths froth with drool.

Death! Death!

Further north, where the Reik’s broad flow poured westward under the shadow of the great watchtowers, the Chaos forces leapt into the sludge and started wading towards the gap between the walls. The defenders had blocked the way with slung chains, each the width of a man’s waist, and had lined up ships, hull-to-hull, to deny passage across the unnaturally viscous Reik. Otto saw the first warriors reach their target, braving showers of arrows and blackpowder shot to clamber across the chains. They died in waves, but the tide of corpses crept closer with every surge, clogging the river further and turning it into a semi-land of trodden cadavers.

Death! Death!

The first of the big hellcannons opened up, ripping the night apart and sending flaming streamers arcing high above the toiling masses. Enormous iron-spiked balls crashed into the walls, smashing the parapets apart and showering the ground below with powdered masonry.

Death! Death!

A siege tower reached the walls, the first to do so, and drawbridges slammed down onto the battlements. A team of wild-eyed Skaelings tore across the narrow span, charging straight into the defenders on the high parapet. They were repulsed, and the siege tower was stricken with flame-bearing arrows, going up like a torch in the fervid night. Otto laughed as he watched his slaves leap from the burning tower, smashing into the ground thirty feet below before being crushed by the iron-shod boots of the advancing thousands.

Death! Death!

The West Gate drew closer, and Ghurk began to wade through the screaming bodies of his own forces, shoving them aside to get closer. Two mighty towers thrust out from either side of the massive gatehouse, each one flying the Imperial standard from iron poles. The rounded battlements were ringed with furiously firing cannons, causing angry weals of smoke to tumble and drift across the raised portcullis.

Death! Death!

Beyond the blackened walls, already charred from the sorcerous fires flung against them, Festus’s aethyric column was now glowing bright green, leering maleficently like some eerie phosphorescence thrust into the night. Otto could hear the knife-thin screams of the daemons as they tumbled from the rift, slapping and thudding onto the streets beneath and causing terror.

He could smell that terror most of all – more than the blood, the blackpowder, the stink of the corrupted river and the Rot that ran through the city’s arteries. The mortals were gripped by it now, frozen by it, and with every second the vice twisted tighter.

Death!

For the first time, Otto saw torches on the far eastern side of the valley. That meant Epidemius the Tallyman had thrown his forces into the fray. Altdorf was surrounded on all sides, brought low like a stag being dragged down by hounds.

Death!

He looked up, sweeping his joyous gaze to the summit of the gatehouse tower. A huge Imperial standard flapped wildly in the preternatural gales, half-tearing free from its pole. Men clustered beneath it, firing pistols and letting fly with arrows. There must have been dozens on the battlements, given heart by the image of the griffon that rippled above them.

‘O my brother,’ said Otto, turning to Ethrac.

The sorcerer nodded, seeing what was intended. He raised his scrawny arms, lifting his staff above his head. The bells clanged, spilling dirty smoke from their insides as the hammers hit. Ethrac mumbled words of power, the first that he had uttered since the assault had begun, then shook the staff a second time.

The standard, over two hundred yards away and separated by howling gusts of plague-rain, burst into green flames. It flared brightly, dropping fragments of its disintegrating fabric over the defenders at its base. Every scrap seemed to kindle where it landed, and the battlements were soon in confusion as men ran from the fires or tried to stamp them out.

Otto grinned. Few had died, but the mortals attached great importance to their little flags. One by one, they would all be turned into crisped piles of ash, and each loss would be like a dagger-strike to their weak hearts.

‘Very good, o my brother,’ Otto murmured, running a finger along the edge of his scythe. The gate was now close, and Ghurk was pushing his way towards it with ever greater zeal. ‘Now for the doors.’

Ethrac was already preparing. Battering rams were being brought up, dragged by blind and diseased river-trolls. The portal itself, twenty feet high and barred with crossed iron over age-seasoned oak, waited for them. It might resist force for a while, or even magic, but not both, and not in such strength.

It had stood for so long, that gate. Otto could sniff out the age in the timbers, in the granite foundations, in the ancient ironwork that clad and bound it. He could sense the waning power of faith stained deep in its fabric, and could feel the spells of binding laid across it by Empire magisters. The mortals still manned every battlement and pinnacle above it, furiously determined to hold on to it.

The very idea made him smirk.

‘Break it,’ he ordered.

The North Gate had been hit as hard as the rest. The army raging against it was a mix of Chaos warriors and beastmen dragged out of the Drakwald’s deepest pits, and the infernal alliance poured out of the storm-lashed gloom in an endless torrent.

Helborg paced the battlements, his fist clenched tight on his undrawn sword-hilt, his cheek almost unbearably painful, his mood black. The foul slime-rain continued to lance down from the churning skies, swilling across every stone surface and making footing treacherous. Archers slipped when they loosed their darts, gunners lost their footing with every recoil. The deluge got into eyes, wormed its way under collars and beneath breastplates. When it touched bare skin, it burned like acid, and several troopers had fallen to their deaths while frantically trying to rip the armour from their bodies.

‘Tell the master gunner to angle his great cannons by two points,’ ordered Helborg, furious at the delays.

The cannon crews were struggling just like everyone else. Aside from the plague-rain and the almost unbearable howl of the vortex above them, they could all hear the agonised screams of men being torn apart by daemons within the city. Helborg had dispatched every wizard and warrior priest he could to try to buy some time against them, but it was a desperate gambit, and it weakened the wall defences further.

Out in the dark, the enemy started to chant a single word, over and over again.

Shyish! Shyish! Shyish!

He knew what it meant, and needed no Amethyst magister to tell him.

Huge creatures were now stalking to the forefront of the host, barging aside or treading down any that barred their path – hulking, misshapen beasts with lone eyes and twisted horn-crowns, bellowing in cattle-harsh voices. They were followed by grotesque amalgams of dragon and ogre, which were so horrific that even the Chaos warriors around them gave them a wide berth. The stench of rotting meat washed over the whole army, sending those defenders still able to fire a pistol gagging and retching.

Helborg screwed his eyes up, leaning against the battlements, and peered into the tempest. Out in the murk, past the first detachments of infantry, colossal engines were being pulled into position. He recognised a gate-breaking ram in the centre of the cluster, hauled by centaurs.

He turned to Zintler. ‘If that gets close...’

Zintler had seen the same thing, and nodded, wiping a patch of plague-mucus from his helm’s visor. ‘We’re losing the battlements around the gate,’ he noted grimly.

On either side of the vast gatehouse, men were struggling under the relentless onslaught of the slime-rain and thick clouds of projectiles from the trebuchets and war engines. Some sections already looked close to being abandoned. If the enemy managed to get siege towers closer, then the remaining defence would be hard-pressed to hold out.

Helborg drew in a deep breath. They were assailed on all sides, and any hope he had of maintaining a tight grip on the outer walls was fast dissolving. ‘It had to come,’ he said grimly. ‘Just sooner than I’d have liked. The Reiksguard are ready?’

Even amid the carnage, Zintler could still smile at that. Of course they were.

‘General, you will oversee the defence of the gatehouse,’ shouted Helborg to Graf Lukas von Mettengrin, the grizzled Altdorfer assigned to the wall defence once, as they had always planned, Helborg was called to take the fight directly to the enemy. ‘May Sigmar be with you.’

The general saluted, as did his staff and the other members of the field command still on the parapet. De Champney was one of the few magisters still present on the outer walls, though he was far too busy summoning up pyrotechnics to respond.

Helborg and Zintler hurried down from the parapet, jogging down winding stairways into the heart of the gatehouse. Once away from the edge, the sounds of battle became muffled by the thick stone, but there was no dousing the lingering screams and cries from within Altdorf itself.

‘This must be swift, and it must count for all,’ said Helborg, testing the straps under his helm and pulling the leather tight.

‘The Knights Panther and of Morr are assembled,’ reported Zintler, rolling his lance-shoulder in readiness for the sortie.

‘Good,’ said Helborg, noting, almost for the first time, how quietly efficient Zintler had been throughout. He was unassuming in the flesh, but once in his Reikscaptain’s armour and given an order, he was the model of quiet resolve. ‘Well done.’

Zintler looked at him, startled. He did not seem to know how to reply.

He did not need to. The two men broke out at ground level on the inside of the gatehouse, into a wide marshalling yard. The full strength of the North Gate’s inner defence waited for them: nine full companies of Imperial knights, all saddled up and bearing lances. The white of the Reiksguard mingled with the black of the Knights of Morr and the blue and gold of the Knights Panther. Their warhorses were arrayed in full barding, each one adorned with the gilt emblems of their order. Every rider saluted as the Reiksmarshal and his captain emerged, and two chargers were led towards them.

Beyond the Knightly companies stood the reserve regiments of state troopers – some of the best men still at Helborg’s command, several thousand of them, drilled mercilessly in repulsion manoeuvres, almost all armed with halberds and pikes.

Helborg mounted, adjusted his battle-plate, flicked down his visor, and took his lance. His heart was hammering hard, driving blood around his battered body. For the first time ever, he felt a spasm of guilt at leaving the command station to take the charge. In the past, there had never been any conflict – he had been there to fight, to break the enemy’s will, to drive them from the field. Now his duties were many. The city needed him. They all looked to him, and he could not be in all places at once.

He remembered his last words with Karl Franz, back in the cold morn at Heffengen.

We may fall in battle, you may not. You are the Empire.

Would he be as indispensable? Surely not. Once again, Helborg felt the burden of measuring up to the real Emperor.

‘Open the gates,’ he growled, turning his horse around to face the coming tempest.

As he did so, every knight in every company readied himself. Lances were lowered, visors were closed. Final prayers were whispered, and the sign of the comet was made across breastplates and leather jerkins.

A huge clang broke out as chains were hauled over iron wheels. The mighty gears of the gate-doors shunted into position, and steam vented from the brass valves. The doors ground open, running on their iron rails across stone flags. The heavy portcullis was released, and fell open with a dull thud against the earth.

On the far side was a vision of pure madness. The sky danced with fell energies, and the earth boiled with countless bodies. The front ranks of the enemy saw the gate opening, and surged towards it, weapons in hand. They looked infinite.

Helborg picked his target, lowered his lance, and tensed.

‘For the honour of the Empire,’ he roared, ‘charge!’

‘Seal the gates!’ shouted Margrit, hurrying from the garden and towards the temple’s entrance. ‘For the love of the Lady, seal the gates!’

The order wrenched her heart – there were thousands still trying to push their way into the temple enclosure, praying that the building could give them some kind of respite from the hells unravelling outside the walls. When the plague-rain had started, the sisters had done what they always did – ushered as many wounded and infirm into the healing gardens, assessing the grades of sickness, binding wounds and whispering prayers of restoration.

But then the daemons had come, gibbering and slobbering, dropping out of the sky like hailstones. They were flung from the shrieking walls of the vortex, crashing into the sides of houses and smashing straight through mould-weakened walls. Shards of green-edged lightning danced amid the tempest, skewering men even as they ran for cover, and the sound of maniacal voices rang down every reeling alleyway.

The defenders had been caught wanting. With the emphasis on the walls, whole areas of the city had been stripped of watch-patrols and state troopers. Margrit had been forced to watch from the safety of the temple as swell-bellied grotesques had chased down and slain those who were left behind – the old, the children, the weak. Her every instinct had been to storm out onto the streets, raging, doing what she could to banish the stalking nightmares that were literally falling out of the sky.

She resisted. The powers of Shallya ran deep, but they were not martial powers. Her duty was clear – to endure, to resist, to remain pure. Once the storm hit in full, Margrit ordered the shutters to be locked, the doorways to be sealed, the precincts to be purified. The last of the temple’s priceless blessed water was handed out to the remaining sisters, carried in earthenware vials to be sprinkled around the temple’s perimeter. That might halt them for a while – as painfully insignificant as it looked, such gestures had proved their worth in the past.

All was at risk, though, as the panicked crowds outside surged towards the temple walls, ripping down the tents in which they had been tended to and wailing for sanctuary. The outer doors had been forced open, and the mob now beat at the gates to the inner courtyard, which were only lightly barred.

Margrit rushed along the walls, crying out more orders. From her vantage on the top of the battlements she could see down into the inner courtyard, where the temple guards were struggling to barricade the gates with whatever they could find – wooden planks, heavy metalware from the sacred chapels. She could also see outside, across the heads of the milling crowds and over the roofs of the houses beyond. The volume of screaming was terrific, and the stench of human fear nearly masked the ever-present musk of the Rot.

As she neared the main gatehouse, the air was ripped apart once again by the stink of magic. Bright magisters, three of them, had appeared on the far side of the grand platz before the temple, and were unleashing withering bursts of flame against the daemons that ran amok. At the same time, finally, a troop of soldiers charged into the square from the north, where the streets ran towards the river’s-edge. They bore the white and red of Altdorf’s own, and looked disciplined and prepared. Defying the slime-deluge, they barged their way through the crowd towards the clots and gluts of daemonic creatures, crying out prayers to Sigmar and Ulric as they came.

The new arrivals broke the momentum of the crowd. Caught between the battle wizards and the aethyr-creatures, many of the sick broke for easier cover, limping into the shadows of the burning townhouses. Those that remained were easier to repel, and the pressure on the inner gates lessened.

Margrit reached the gatehouse, where Gerhard, her guard captain, and many of her priestesses were gathered. All of them had pale faces.

‘Will they hold?’ asked Margrit, panting heavily.

‘For now,’ said Gerhard, watching the battles breaking out across the square with some trepidation. ‘But if they rush us again...’

Margrit turned to one of the sisters, a dark-skinned woman named Elia from the distant south whose Reikspiel had never been perfected. ‘And the well?’

Elia shook her head. ‘Some waters remains. We did not wish to make all dry now.’

‘Draw the rest. All of it. Take every last drop and make a seal around the inner sanctum. They will not cross the line, not if the ring is unbroken.’

Elia bowed, and was about to rush off down to the sacred wellsprings, when a fresh bellowing broke out from the far side of the square. All faces on the gatehouse snapped around, ready to witness whatever fresh terror had been unleashed.

Something was emerging from the eastern end of the platz, pouring out of the narrow, overlooked streets and into the rain-drenched open. Margrit saw petty daemons spill from the shadowed openings of burned-out houses, their jaws streaked with blood and their claws dragging clumps of entrails.

The Bright wizards, who had by now taken the fight to the centre of the square, rushed to staunch the new invasion. Flares of crimson flame shot out into the gloom, making the daemons squeal and pop as they were caught. The Altdorf state troopers rushed to support them, forming a ring of halberds around the three magisters.

‘My place is there, sister,’ said Gerhard, strapping his helm tight and making ready to descend to ground level.

‘Your place is here, captain,’ said Margrit, her voice hard. She could sense something coming, something far greater than the squalid daemons that had so far shown themselves.

‘They are fighting back,’ protested Gerhard, gesturing to where the Bright wizards were going on the offensive, backed up by their company of bodyguards.

‘Stay in the temple,’ Margrit ordered. She turned to the other assembled sisters. ‘No one leaves. We have done what we can – now we tend to the wards and keep the gates locked.’

As she finished speaking, a great crack rang out from the square’s eastern end. With a boom, one of the massive wooden-framed houses disintegrated, its beams snapping and its brickwork dissolving into a cloud of reddened dust. Something was thrusting up through it, tearing it apart from the foundations. The wizards retreated, launching bolts of fire at the house’s carcass. As the smoke and dust cleared, something enormous waddled into view.

Its girth was phenomenal, far greater than any mortal creature had any right to possess. Slabbed flanks of grey-green, pocked with warts and sores, overflowed in a pyramid of scarce-contained blubber. The monster crashed through the remains of house, crushing the rubble under two stump-like legs. An obese belly dragged in its wake, mottled with sticky residues. A flat, grinning head emerged from the ruins, topped with a heavy coronet of slime-slicked antlers. In one claw the creature carried a thick-bladed cleaver; the other was free to clutch, rip and maim.

Gerhard’s mouth fell open. The wizards immediately launched all they had at the greater daemon, bombarding it with flurries of starburst-pattern flames. It roared at them, flooding the entire square in yellow spittle. The flames would not catch on its hide, and the wizards retreated steadily, loosing more bolts as they fell back.

The monster lumbered after them, accompanied by the last remnants of the house it had crashed through. Despite its phenomenal size, it moved with unnerving speed, seeming to flicker and shift out of reality, suddenly lurching closer before rearing up high again.

It lunged, managing to catch one of the magisters as he fled. The daemon picked up the struggling wizard effortlessly, breaking his spine with a squeeze of his massive claw.

The remaining two redoubled their efforts, dousing the creature in a rain of rippling liquid fire, causing clots of ink-black smoke to curl from its hide. That seemed to hurt it, and it wobbled backward, hurling aside the broken body of the slain wizard and roaring angrily. The halberdiers rushed in close, displaying insane bravery, poised to thrust their long staves into the daemon’s flesh.

They never made it. Before they had got within twelve feet of the monster, their torsos burst open, spraying entrails across the rain-drenched flagstones. Screaming, they fell to the ground, rolling and clutching at their shredded skin.

A second figure emerged from the shadow of the fire-bound daemon. This one was still massive, more than twice the height of a normal man, though barely a quarter the size of the greater beast beside him. He was dressed in a parody of normal garb, though torn apart by his flabby belly and wobbling jowls. A similarly crooked grin disfigured a bloated face, stuffed with yellowing and rotten teeth. Pots hung from straps over his sloped shoulders, each one boiling with noxious fluids or stuffed with bloody clumps of human flesh.

The newcomer gestured to the two remaining wizards, and their bodies were instantly consumed with fronds of clutching vines. The strands burst from the ground below them, grasping and clutching at their throats. The wizards fought back furiously, crying out counter-spells and tearing at the tendrils.

By then, it was too late. Freed from the wizards’ fiery attentions, the daemon surged back towards them. It did not even use its claw this time – it simply rolled into them, crushing them both under thick skirts of suppurating flesh. Even then, half-wrapped in clutch-vines and crushed under the oncoming avalanche of stinking daemon-hide, they fought back, but only for a few, futile moments. With a sickening snap of bones breaking, they were both sucked under the daemon’s foul bulk.

The creature sat atop them for a moment, grinding itself over their pulverised bodies, gurgling with what looked like vile pleasure.

Margrit looked on, her jaw set defiantly. The surviving mortals in the square below, whether soldiers or supplicants, scattered. Lesser daemons scampered and scuttled after them, licking cracked lips in anticipation of the feasting to come.

The two larger horrors remained where they were. The lesser creature gazed up at Margrit, catching her directly with his rheumy gaze. His grin never went away, and a thin line of excited drool spilled from his lower lip.

‘Hide while you can!’ the creature screamed. ‘Walls will not aid you!’

Then the two of them started lumbering towards the gate, crunching bodies underfoot as they came, a leering light of conquest in their addled faces.

Margrit could sense Gerhard’s fear. She could sense the terror in her sisters. She thought of the rows of bunks inside the temple, each one occupied by at least two sick charges. She thought of the gardens, and the young acolytes fresh from the villages, all of whom she had trained herself.

It was all so, so fragile.

She made the sign of Shallya across her chest, then clutched the battlements with both hands. ‘Faith is always to be tested,’ she said. ‘We fight for every last chamber.’

That seemed to rouse the others. Gerhard barked orders to his men, and the other sisters hurried down the stairwells to draw more sacred water from the wells.

Margrit barely noticed them go. Her temple was now a lone bulwark against a miasma of degradation. In every direction, the creatures of Chaos had free rein, burning, stabbing, infecting. Flames licked ever higher, reaching up like questing fingers to the pus-thick storm above. The vortex continued to twist and curl, bringing more destruction in its wake.

The two daemonic horrors began to move again, dragging corpulent bodies ever closer. The jowly creature with the jangling collection of plague-pots was laughing uncontrollably. He looked deranged by hatred, and drew a wickedly spiked meathook from a loop around his straining waist.

‘In all things,’ Margrit murmured, working hard to control her fear, trusting even then, against the face of pure loathing, that something would intervene to save them, ‘Shallya be praised.’

NINETEEN

Martak lurched awake, panting like a terrified animal, his skin clammy. Shadow lay heavily on him, and he could smell burning. He scrabbled for his staff, and his hands clutched at nothing.

Then, finally, his fingers closed over the reassuring weight of the wood, and he clutched it tight. The smell of burning came from the night’s fire, which they had let smoulder down as they slept. He was lying on the floor of a cave, little more than a scratch in the side of a moss-overhung cliff.

The dream-visions remained vivid. He saw Altdorf burning, and knew that all he was being shown was reality. More than that, he saw the antler-crowned god again, writhing in agony, his body covered in lesions. He saw vistas of pure devastation, mile after mile of land tortured and twisted into sickening pools of endless decay.

And, as always just before waking, he saw Karl Franz dying, his agonised face lit by the light of the deathmoon. That was the worst of all. It was all futile – such dreams did not lie.

Martak hacked up the night’s phlegm, and dragged himself up onto his haunches. When he looked up to the cave-mouth, he saw the huddled silhouette of the Emperor, staring out over the forest below their vantage. Did he ever sleep? Had he taken any rest since Martak had rescued him?

Martak shuffled up to join him, hawking and spitting to clear his throat.

‘Bad dreams?’ asked Karl Franz.

Martak reached for the gourd of water they shared. It was almost empty, and neither of them had dared refill it from the polluted forest streams they had passed. He poured a dribble of it down his parched gullet, and felt the temporary pleasure of the liquid against his cracked lips.

‘No change,’ he said, settling down on the rock and rubbing his hands against his face.

They were high up above the forest. Since Deathclaw’s recovery they had made use of every exposed patch of stone and earth amid the mind-bending vastness of the forest. The outcrops were like tiny islands, ringed by impenetrable overgrowth and sundered from one another by almost unimaginable distance. If they had not had the two griffons to bear them, they would be far to the north still, trudging through the brambled mire, hopelessly distant from their destination. As it was, Martak reckoned they were less than a day away.

‘Even a wizard may dream without it coming true,’ said the Emperor.

‘I never dreamed before,’ grumbled Martak. ‘Perhaps it comes with the position.’

Karl Franz looked at him carefully. ‘You are a strange Supreme Patriarch. I ask myself, would I have let them choose you?’

‘It would not be your choice – the colleges decide.’

‘What a quaint idea.’ Karl Franz stretched out. His face was still gaunt from the long sojourn in the wilds, but he had gained in strength during the flight south. There was a steely light in his eyes, something that both impressed and worried Martak.

He knows he won’t survive this. Does he look forward to death? Is that what this is about?

‘I will not ask you again, lord,’ said Martak, gathering himself for a final effort. ‘For all we know, Middenheim still stands. Schwarzhelm may have made for it. Of all your cities, it has the greatest defensive potential.’

‘Defensive potential? You sound like an engineer.’ Karl Franz shook his head. ‘We have been over this. I will not skulk around the margins. It is my city, and I will be there.’

Martak considered asking again, but decided against it. Once the Emperor’s mind was made up, he had no doubt it was impossible to shift.

He watched the sun struggle to rise, its wan light filtering slowly through the grimy soup of the night’s cloud cover. Palls of mist boiled clear of spiny conifer tops, tinged with yellow from the poisons now gnawing the roots. The stench was getting worse, like fungus unearthed from dank cellars.

The southern horizon had glowed throughout the night, a sick green that flickered and pulsed without rest. The clouds were being pulled towards the source like a gigantic blanket, rippling and furrowed in a vast, gradual rotation. At least there was no doubt over where they were headed.

‘And here they come,’ remarked Karl Franz, who had studiously avoided looking south. The two griffons were on the wing, returning from whatever hunting they had been able to find in such ravaged country.

Martak watched them approach. He took a little pride in seeing Deathclaw restored to something like its full prowess. The Emperor’s beast was far larger than his own, with a raw power to its movements that betrayed an enormous aptitude for killing. If it was still in pain from his earlier ministrations, it gave no sign of it, and now flew as strongly as an eagle.

With a whirl of claws and feathers, the two creatures landed on the ledge just below the cave-mouth, cawing at them both in what Martak guessed passed for a greeting. The Emperor acknowledged his mount’s arrival gracefully. Martak scowled at his, already dreading the prospect of riding it again.

‘You have seen the light, I take it?’ asked Karl Franz, almost casually.

Martak grimaced. ‘How could I miss it?’

‘Not the burning. The other light.’

Martak looked up. The skies were just as they always were – a sea of dirty, dingy grey, tinged with an unhealthy bruise pallor. Not knowing if he were being made fun of, he searched for something more. When he failed, he shot Karl Franz a suspicious look. ‘You mock me?’

Karl Franz shook his head, looking quite serious. ‘The twin-tailed star scores the heavens. I see it even when my eyes are closed. They can mask its light for a while, but it will burn through eventually.’ He smiled wryly. ‘What do you suppose that means? A sign of hope?’

Martak snorted. ‘What you propose is not hope but folly.’

Karl Franz looked at him tolerantly. Perhaps, in the past, wizards would have been put to the rack for such impertinence, but there were no henchmen out in the wilds, and the Emperor had proved surprisingly indulgent of Martak’s irritable ways.

‘It would not be here if our course were not sanctioned. I would perceive that.’ Karl Franz nodded towards his sword, propped up in its scabbard against the cave wall. ‘The runefang no longer answers, my armies are scattered, the sun’s light is quenched, but Sigmar’s star still burns. That is something to be cherished, I think.’

Martak did not say exactly what he thought of that. His empty stomach growled, souring his mood. They would have to be gone soon, straddling their half-feral mounts and heading towards deaths that were as certain as the rising of the moons. His counsel to head to Middenheim had been scorned, and the only consolation was that he stood a chance of fulfilling his vows to Margrit, which was very little to cling onto, since the chance of her being alive when they returned was slim indeed.

‘I am sure you are right, lord,’ he muttered, pulling his dirty cloak around him, thinking of what lay ahead, and shivering.

The knights of Bretonnia crested the last rise to the south of the city, and beheld the end of the world.

The vortex unlocked by the Leechlord was now a raging tornado, twisting its way through the lower city, ripping up roofs and throwing the tiles around in hailstorms of shattering clay. Flames roared around the walls, leaping up against the towering stone like sails in a gale, fuelled and spread by racing winds. Blooms of rot and canker flourished in spite of the inferno, glowing eerily in the fervid night and matching the unclean glare of the deathmoon, which presided over the carnage like some obscene god peering through the torn curtain of the skies.

Dawn was close, but the nearing sun made no impression on the mottled patchwork of magicks and sorcery. Altdorf was a lone rock amid a raging furnace of unrestrained madness. The Realm of Chaos had come to earth, and to witness it was to witness the birth of a new and horrific order.

The first rank of warhorses lined up on the ridge, marshalled by Jhared, de Lyonesse and the other knight commanders. The fleur-de-lys standard was unfurled, and it snapped madly in the tearing winds.

Leoncoeur himself flew above the vanguard, mounted on Beaquis. The remaining pegasi all now carried riders, each one hand-chosen to command the powerful beasts. The last of the lances had been distributed, and the clerics had cried out their benedictions. Every horse was already lathered with sweat from the desperate ride, and now yet more trials awaited them. The foremost were already stamping impatiently, tossing their manes and itching for the charge.

Leoncoeur urged Beaquis to climb, surveying the battle. The West Gate was closest, and was already tightly surrounded. An army of such immensity that it defied the senses stretched all around the walls, hammering at the perimeter amid a storm of projectiles and flashing spell-discharge. Trolls lumbered through the swarms of lesser warriors, crazed by mushrooms and waving flaming brands, only matched in ferocity by the towering, one-eyed beastmen from the deep forest. The noise was incredible – a wild chant of Shyish! bellowed out to the roll and slam of endless drums.

Already the defences were reeling. Leoncoeur could see the gates begin to buckle, the first siege ladders hitting their mark, the great engines crawling closer to unload their lethal contents. The topmost towers rose precariously above the tumult, looking impossibly fragile set against the hurricane that had enveloped them.

There would be no returning from this. To enter that maelstrom was to give up hope, to strike a single blow before the tide crushed them.

Leoncoeur looked down at his army, forged in haste and driven mercilessly across the mountains. Knight after knight took his place on the ridge, resplendent in plate armour and bearing the sigils of his heritage. It was a devastating force, one that Leoncoeur would have trusted to match any foe of the known world – until this day.

Now all had changed. The old rules had been ripped up and discarded, lain waste before the all-consuming hunger of the Ruinous Powers.

‘Jhared, lead your blades west!’ he cried. ‘Cut to the gate, and slay all before you! Teach them the fear of Bretonnia!’

The flame-haired knight saluted, still grinning as he slammed his visor down.

‘De Lyonesse, ride east, cutting off the assault on the southern walls! Hold them as long as you can, then break for Jhared’s position. Hit them hard! Hit them fast! They shall die choking on their laughter!’

The last of the vanguard drew up, over a thousand fully armoured warriors, each bearing a heavy lance. More waves readied themselves behind, forming a devastating series of thundering charges.

Leoncoeur surveyed the lines one last time, feeling pride mingle with raw grief.

They were beautiful – brave, vital and vivid, a flash of flamboyant bravado amid a world of gathering decay.

You will die alone, my champion, far from home.

Leoncoeur pulled Beaquis’s head north, facing the burning city head-on, and flourished his blade.

‘Now, the final test!’ he roared. ‘Unto death! Unto the end! Ride, my brothers! Ride!’

The charge took them clear of the gate, hurtling northwards under the first pale rays of the shrouded sun. Helborg lead the vanguard, driving his steed hard and balancing the long lance against the buck of the gallop. The Reiksguard came with him, just as they had in the north, an ivory wedge of steel-tipped murder carving its way through the heart of the mustered enemy.

For a few moments, it looked as if the beastmen did not see the danger. They lumbered towards the walls as before, roaring and bellowing in a stinking fug of battle-madness, but then even they seemed to see their fate unravelling, and sudden fear kindled in their feral eyes. By the time they recognised their peril, the lances were among them.

‘Sigmar!’ Helborg cried out, taking a raw pleasure from the surging pace of the charge.

Behind him, a thousand knights spread out across the battlefield, sweeping in an all-consuming line across the fire-flecked plain. Every rider lowered his lance, selecting a target and guiding his steed with unerring precision.

The two forces collided with a crack and whirl and thud of limbs breaking, shafts splintering and bones shivering. The Reiksguard vanguard hit as one, smashing into the ragged lines of beastmen and northmen, driving a long wound through the body of the horde.

Helborg speared a raging gor in the heart, and felt the impact radiate along his arm as he lifted the monster bodily from the earth. The shaft plunged deep, eviscerating it cleanly, before breaking mid-length under its weight. He discarded the remnants and drew his runefang, circling it into position before plunging it into the neck of another war-gor.

The Reiksguard were followed out by more Knightly Orders, each sweeping after the Reiksmarshal’s spear-tip in successive waves. Most rode mighty warhorses, but some lumbered into battle astride the ferocious demigryphs, land-bound scions of the larger griffons, with all their cousins’ furious temper and scything claws.

The main charge thundered on, plunging further into the rotten depths of the limitless hosts. The momentum was savage, carrying the horsemen in a wild hunt of speed, flair and unshackled bloodlust. Having had to watch powerlessly for days as their city was slowly consumed by Rot and sorcery, the pride of Altdorf’s mighty armies was now cut loose.

Helborg pressed northwards, slashing out with his blade to slice down two fleeing beastmen, before his steed trod three more into the slurry underfoot. Ahead of him, he could see greater concentrations of heavily armed warriors trudging into battle, each company bearing a skull-topped standard bearing sigils of the plague-gods. The truly vast creatures of Chaos – shaggoths, ogres, cygors – bellowed as they swayed towards the interlopers who dared to take the fight to the open.

Then the direction of the charge veered westwards, bludgeoning its way out towards the straggling fringes of the forest. Helborg guided them away from the core of the enemy host, leading his squadrons of knights among the rumbling war engines.

As they galloped through the towering constructions, each rider sheathed his sword and reached for a gift from the College of Engineers – a small spiked ball, stuffed with blackpowder and crowned with a small brass lever. The warhorses weaved between the trundling battle-towers, evading the flame-tipped arrows that shot down from the topmost platforms.

Helborg waited until the last of his cavalry warriors was under the shadows of the siege machinery before giving the order.

‘Let fly!’ he roared, hurling his own device at the skin-wrapped flanks of a battering ram.

As one, the knights loosed their tiny spheres. Where they hit the edges of the war machines, tiny clamps locked them fast, and the faint tick of clockwork started to whirr down.

Helborg maintained the ferocious pace, drawing the vanguard ever further west and breaking clear of the main enemy advance. Out on the flanks, the killing became easier, as the bulk of the heavy warriors remained north of the main gates.

With a flurry of sharp bangs, the grenades thrown by the horsemen went off, cracking into multi-hued explosions. Those devices were the final creations of the colleges – an ingenious fusion of engineer’s art and wizard’s cunning. An unholy concoction of blackpowder mechanics and Bright magic resulted in violent explosions far out of proportion to the devices’ size, and the hulking battle-engines rocked under the assault. Chain reactions kicked off, crippling heavy artillery pieces and sending trebuchets folding in on themselves, hurling smoke up into the lightening skies.

Helborg hauled on the reins then, bringing the long charge to a halt. He was joined by the vanguard of Reiksguard, and quickly followed by the other Knightly Orders. Their numbers had been thinned during the perilous ride, but they still remained cohesive. The charge had punched through the enemy vanguard and taken them a long way west of the horde’s core advance, a fact which had not been lost on the heavy concentrations of Chaos infantry and warbands of Drakwald beastmen. Assuming the knights were breaking for safety, they had continued to advance south, leaving their siege towers to burn and opting to press the assault on the city. The gates, now undefended, lay before them, too far away for the Imperial knights to give defensive cover to before the infantry got within blade-range.

With a lustful roar, the bulk of the northern host’s infantry broke into a shambling charge, heading towards the undefended gates. Isolated out on the western flank, Helborg could only watch them go. Zintler rode up to him, flicking his bloodstained visor open as his exhausted mount whinnied and stamped. ‘They could not resist,’ he observed.

Helborg nodded. The northmen were brutal foes, but they could never leave easy bait alone. ‘Give the signal.’

Zintler drew a long-barrelled pistol and aimed it above his head. He fired, sending a blazing flare spiralling into the twilit murk above.

The signal was received. The infantry held in readiness inside the walls now advanced en masse, pouring through the open gates and out onto the battlefield beyond. Whole sections of artillery, concealed until that moment, suddenly opened up from the parapets, sending cannonballs and rockets ploughing into the onrushing hordes. The defence that had looked so shaky now presented its true shape – ruthlessly drilled, impeccably disciplined, and marching in the knowledge that only the most desperate fighting would stave off their encroaching fate.

The Chaos vanguard had advanced too readily, trusting in the flightiness of the mortals and deceived by the knights’ sham bolt for freedom. Despite their huge numbers, they were now poorly positioned – caught between a stern defence at the walls and a powerful cavalry force on their right flank already mustering for the return strike.

‘Now we take them,’ said Helborg.

Zintler shouted out the orders, and the knights quickly formed up again. As soon as they were marshalled, the counter-charge began, driving back towards the exposed flank of the enemy.

Helborg did not lead the charge this time, opting to survey the battlefield more fully before following the Reiksguard back into the fray. He rode a short way towards higher ground, accompanied by his immediate bodyguard of Reiksguard, then pulled a spyglass from his saddlebag and placed it against his eye, sweeping across the expanse of the field.

As he did so, a sick feeling grew in his stomach. The manoeuvre had been executed impeccably, and he watched thousands of enemy troops being ripped apart by the combination of high-density artillery fire from the walls and the returning cavalry attacks. The pressure on the gates had been relieved for the moment, allowing the entire northern battle line to recover and restore a semblance of order.

But even as he watched the carnage unfold, he knew it would not be enough. He could see the west gates burning, and the enemy pouring in through the gap. He could see evidence, from the far side of the city, that the east gates had gone the same way. Pillars of smoke from all over the interior of Altdorf betrayed the desperate fighting taking place in every street and every courtyard. The Palace itself was wreathed with the greatest plumes of oily smoke. With the first shafts of sunlight angling through the murk, the whole edifice seemed to be covered in a film of grasping vegetation.

Helborg felt his heart sink. He might have saved the North Gate, but he could not be everywhere. The Reiksguard were spread too thin, the magisters were overwhelmed by the daemons in their midst, and the fragile protection of the outer walls was breaking apart.

‘Lord, what are your orders?’ asked Zintler.

The Reikscaptain was anxious to be riding again. They were exposed, and if they did not return to the battle soon then they risked being cut-off entirely. Already, enemy reinforcements were massing on the forest’s edge, creeping out from the shadows and lining up along the northern horizon. Their numbers seemed to be limitless – for every warband that was destroyed, three more took its place.

Helborg slammed his spyglass closed and stowed it away. He took up the reins and prepared to give the order to fall back to the gates. If death awaited him, he would meet it inside the walls, fighting alongside those he had worked so hard with to avert the inevitable. Perhaps they could still salvage something, a last-ditch defence of the Palace, retreating in the face of the hordes but preserving just a fragment of defiance until some relief force – he had no idea where from – could somehow reach them.

It was then, just before he spoke, that he noticed the strange devices on the armour of the reinforcements steadily bleeding out of the forest. Unlike the first wave of attackers, their banners were pure black, with none of the sigils of contagion. Their troops were neither bloated nor mutated, but looked painfully thin in ill-fitting armour. They came on silently, with none of the feral roars of the wild tribes of the Chaos Wastes.

And then, finally, he realised the truth. Just as at Heffengen, he was staring straight at the armies of the undead. With a cold twinge of horror, he recognised the fell prince at their head, wearing crimson armour and riding a skeletal steed. Helborg froze, compelled to witness the same forces that had brought down Karl Franz, and the same monster that had broken the Empire armies while the Auric Bastion still stood.

‘My lord...’ urged Zintler, increasingly anxious to be gone.

Fury gripped Helborg. He still had the letter, crumpled up on the inside of his jerkin. The daemon’s wounds, forgotten about in the heat of battle, suddenly spiked again, sending agonising bursts of pain flooding through his body.

Now his failure was complete. Now there could be nothing – nothing – preserved. He felt like screaming – balling his fists and raging at the heavens that had gifted him such an impossible task.

He gripped the runefang’s hilt, and drew it shakily. He could still ride out, alone if need be, and bring vengeance to the slayer of his liege-lord. Slaying von Carstein would do nothing to arrest the collapse of the city’s defences, but it would be a tiny piece of revenge, a morsel of sheer spite to mark the passing of the greatest realm of men between the mountains and sea.

Before he could kick his spurs in, though, his mind suddenly filled with a new voice, one he had never heard before but whose provenance was unmistakable. Von Carstein was addressing him from afar, projecting his mind-speech as amiably and evenly as if he had been standing right beside him, and the dry, strangely accented tones chilled him more than anything he had seen or heard until that moment.

‘My dear Reiksmarshal,’ the vampire said, somehow managing to sound both agreeable and utterly, utterly pitiless. ‘It is time, I think, that you and I came to terms.’

TWENTY

Leoncoeur swooped low, plunging into the horde below and tearing it up. The hippogryph extended its claws, tearing the backs of the mutants that shambled to get out of its path. It picked up two, one in each foreclaw, ascending steeply, then flung them back to earth.

Leoncoeur watched the bodies tumble away before crashing into the seething mass of filth below. The pegasus riders were doing the same – tearing into the horde from the skies, skewering the enemy on lances or letting their steeds crush skulls with flailing hooves.

To the west, Jhared’s cavalry had already struck, smashing hard into the main bulk of the enemy host. The Chaos forces had seen them approach too late, caught up in the slaughter ahead and desperate to reach the broken gates to the city. They were attempting to turn now, to form up in the face of the brutal assault from the south, but it was too little, too late. Jhared’s knights ran amok, slaughtering freely.

Leoncoeur pulled Beaquis higher, angling across the battlefield and gaining loft. He hefted his bloodstained lance, still unbroken despite the kills he had made. Over to his right stood the towering mass of Altdorf, still deluged by the driving squalls and burning furiously from a thousand fires. The west gates had been driven in, overwhelmed by the concerted charge of hundreds of vast, plague-swollen horrors. The stones themselves seem to have been prised apart, and now boiled with tentacles and obscenely fast-growing fungi. The Chaos host was so vast that only the prized vanguard creatures had yet squeezed through the ruined gates, leaving the miles-long train of lesser warriors outside the stricken walls.

This was the filth that the Bretonnians now preyed upon, reaping a horrific harvest as their lances and blades rose and fell. Over to the extreme east of the battlefield, the second wave had already hit, with de Lyonesse leading a valiant charge into a shrieking mass of daemons and mutated soldiery. They were having equal success, cutting deep into the enemy and laying waste.

But the momentum of the charge could not last forever – the sheer numbers would slow them in time. Sensing the tide about to turn, Leoncoeur dived again, aiming for a great plague-ogre stumbling in a blind, spittle-flecked rage towards the breach. Beaquis folded its wings, plunging straight down like a falcon on the dive. The creature only pulled up at the last moment, sweeping low over the heads of the marching warriors and streaking towards the greater beast in their midst.

Leoncoeur leaned over in the saddle, gripping his lance tight. The plague-ogre turned to face him, swinging a heavy warhammer studded with smashed skull-fragments, and bellowed its challenge.

Beaquis adjusted course, darting up and out of reach. Leoncoeur adjusted his aim, going for the creature’s throat. The lance-tip punched cleanly, severing arteries, before the hippogryph’s momentum carried them swiftly out of reach of the whirling hammer-head.

The ogre clutched at its severed gullet, staggering on now-fragile legs, dropping its hammer from twitching fingers. Then it crashed onto its back, choking for air, crushing more than a dozen mutant warriors beneath it.

By then Leoncoeur was already searching for more prey. Riding through the foul mucus-rain was hard work, and it was difficult to see more than a few dozen yards in any direction. Beaquis’s wings began to labour as the beast struggled to gain height.

‘Stay strong,’ urged Leoncoeur. He need a better vantage. Slaying mutant beasts was satisfying, but it would not halt the momentum of the assault – there were too many of them, and they were not in command.

The hippogryph beat harder, climbing high above the swirl and crash of combat. Leoncoeur twisted in the saddle, peering out over the beleaguered city, trying to make some sense of the pattern of battle.

He had expected to find the enemy hammering at the gates, expending its rage against the walls that had stood for over two thousand years, but it was clear that fighting was already rampant across the entire city. Whole sections were burning, collapsing in piles of stinking rotten timbers. He saw daemons swarming over the ruins, chasing down the last of the mortal defenders or fighting furiously with dwindling bands of battle wizards and priests. They were everywhere, as profligate as the rain-showers that splashed around them and covered the streets knee-deep in slime.

We come too late, he realised.

He drove Beaquis even higher, desperately searching for something to use to his advantage. The earthbound knights were committed now, locked in combat with a far greater foe, but he could still choose his prey.

The vast bulk of the Imperial Palace reared up out of the gloom. It was still immense – a mighty gothic pile of imposing stone and iron, ringed with huge statues to the Imperial gods – but already thick with corrosion and unnatural growth. Just as the forest had been, the Palace was raddled with foetid plant-matter, and the austere walls and domes were heaving with clinging grave-moss. The causeways leading to the Palace precincts were rammed tight with advancing warriors, led by a truly enormous troll-like creature bearing two lesser warriors on its back. The surviving defenders were doing what they could to halt it, firing the last of their blackpowder weapons from the high walls, but it would not be enough.

Leoncoeur considered swooping down on that horror. He might be able to pluck the riders from their mounts and break their backs. Then his gaze swept east, over the tight-packed rooftops and towards the wan light of the rising sun.

The concentration of daemons was greatest there. They were streaming towards a lesser temple dome, one surrounded by the slumped hovels of the poor. A truly titanic greater daemon was lumbering directly for the temple, its echoing bellows of rage rising above the tumult.

As soon as he saw it, he knew that was the prize. Time seemed to slow down around him, isolating the creature of darkness as the true quarry of his long hunt.

He could not save the city – that was beyond any mortal now – but battles could still be won.

He wheeled back to where the pegasi still plunged and dived into the hordes below. Their attacks were lethal, but isolated, and they were doing little to blunt the momentum of the colossal army below.

‘Brothers!’ Leoncoeur bellowed, straining to make himself heard even as he raced back into their midst. ‘The prize lies within the city! Follow me!’

He banked hard, dragging Beaquis back towards the burning walls. The pegasus riders immediately fell in behind him, and the sky-host shot over Altdorf’s flaming walls.

Leoncoeur looked over his shoulder as he flew over the shattered gates, over to where Jhared’s knights fought on. They were still causing devastation, but the net was closing on them. It was only a matter of time before their unity was broken. A pang of guilt struck him, and he almost turned back.

They will die as they lived, came a familiar voice in his mind then. As warriors. They slow the attack on the Palace, and thus their sacrifice will serve.

Leoncoeur flew on, and Altdorf blurred below as Beaquis picked up speed. The pegasus riders caught up, and the phalanx burned towards its target.

And me? he asked, almost without meaning to. Just to hear Her voice in his mind again gave him comfort.

But She did not speak again. Beaquis started to plunge earthwards, and the grotesque daemon lurched up to meet them, still unaware of the danger from the skies. Lesser daemons rampaged around it, tearing at the walls of the temple and beating on the locked gates. The dome itself seemed to have some power to resist them, and alone of all the structures in that quarter of the city remained free of the creeping vines and grave-moss.

Leoncoeur fixed his eyes on the daemon, trying not to fixate on its sheer size and aura of terror. This was what he had come to slay – just one contribution amid a host of other duels that would seal the fate of humanity. Next to that, the loss of kingship felt like a trivial thing indeed.

‘Follow me down!’ he shouted to his fellow knights.

Then he shook the blood from his lance, crouched for the strike, and spurred his steed down towards the horror waiting below.

On a blasted hill to the north of the burning city, Kurt Helborg and Vlad von Carstein stood alone. Helborg’s bodyguard, fewer than a dozen mounted knights, waited further down the slope on the Altdorf-facing side. The vast army of the undead waited to the north, arrayed for the advance but still making no move. In the distance, Altdorf’s spires stood starkly against the plague-rain, now lit grey by the slowly strengthening light of the sun. Spidering strands of dark-green could be made out across the stone, strangling and crushing the ancient structures. Cannon-fire still boomed, and the crackle of magic could be made out sporadically, but the main sounds were the cries of the dying and the guttural chants of the victors.

‘You never replied to my letter,’ said Vlad.

Helborg felt light-headed and nauseous. Days of no sleep and constant toil had finally caught up with him, and simply to be in the presence of a vampire lord would have crushed the spirits of a lesser man. As he gazed up at von Carstein’s spectral face, he saw something like eternity reflected back at him. The dark orbs of the creature’s eyes barely flickered. In an instant, Helborg recognised the gulf in years between them – it was like staring down a god, one who had trodden the paths between the worlds and who had returned to usher in the destruction of them all.

At least the pain had faded. In the vampire’s presence, the legacy of the daemon’s claws seemed to lose its potency.

‘What was there to reply to?’ asked Helborg, trying to muster at least a show of belligerence.

‘That you recognised the wisdom of my offer,’ said Vlad, as smoothly as if he cared little one way or the other. ‘I have gone to some trouble to assemble the army you see before you. It will march on my command.’

Helborg smiled cynically. ‘And your price?’

‘You know it. I wish to be Elector of Sylvania. I wish to preside over my people in peace. I wish to look you in the eye as...’ He returned a colder smile. ‘...an equal.’

Helborg could still hear the sounds of battle. They were impossible to blot out, like constant reminders of everything he had done wrong.

‘That power lies with the Emperor,’ he said.

‘He is here?’

‘You know he is not.’

Vlad raised an eyebrow. ‘You credit me with too much foresight. Harkon has been disciplined for what he did – I had no part of it. As to Karl Franz’s survival or otherwise, a veil remains over it. Even my Master does not know his fate.’

Helborg wished he had something to lean on, to prop up his failing strength, but dared not show the slightest shred of weakness. Everything began to blur, like some nightmare that he had been plunged into. Contempt filled him, both for himself and for the creature he spoke to. That he had been reduced to negotiating with such a horror was humiliation enough, and he sensed there was more to come.

‘Why ask, von Carstein?’ Helborg asked, bitterly. ‘You have your armies.’

For a moment, fleetingly, Vlad looked genuinely hurt. ‘You always saw us as merely adversaries. You never stopped to ask what might be accomplished, were certain truths acknowledged.’ He shrugged. ‘The northern gate is the only one you still control. Allow me to enter it, and it will be enough. You will have invited me. That is important. I can aid you, but you must say the words.’

Helborg blurted out a sour, disbelieving laugh. ‘You... prey on us! You drag the dead from their graves and make them march beneath your banners. If Karl Franz were here–’

‘Which he is not, Reiksmarshal, and more’s the pity, because his wisdom is greater than yours.’ The vampire drew a little closer, and Helborg smelled the dry aroma from his armour. ‘You are a fighter, Kurt. Your soul is not made for governing. Already you have erred – the storm that tears your city from within could have been prevented. Do not let this thick neck lead you into more error.’ His dust-pale face creased in what might have passed for kindness, though it exposed wickedly long fangs. ‘Your time is up. I bring you power beyond your wildest hopes. Give me the word, and I will deliver your city.’

Helborg found he could not rip his gaze away from the vampire’s. There was no insulating himself from the sounds of destruction, though, nor the acrid smell of burning that drifted across the whole landscape.

Part of him burned to reach for his sword, just as he had planned. If he were quick enough, a single strike might suffice – the runefang had slain mightier creatures that this.

For some reason, he found himself thinking of Schwarzhelm. The gruff old warrior would never have got this close – the very prospect of talking to such a foul creature would have enraged him. Huss would have been the same. Helborg felt their eyes on him then, the great and the exalted of the Empire he venerated, judging him, accusing him.

But they were not there. They did not have to endure the screams, nor witness the slow destruction of all he had lived to preserve. He was alone and exhausted, and defeated.

There was nothing else. There were no other roads to take, no other allies to call on.

He looked into the darkness of the vampire’s eyes, and felt the footsteps of damnation catch up at last.

‘Then you will have what you demand,’ Helborg said, the words dragged out from his lips and tainted with loathing. ‘Save my city.’

The effect was immediate. All across the city, from the burning tenements to the moss-strangled walls of the Imperial Palace, the slime-covered soils started to shift. Just as at Wurtbad, at Kemperbad, and at every other staging-post along the great rivers, Vlad’s command of the Wind of Shyish was total. Whatever lingering power of faith that had existed over Altdorf had long been shattered by the Leechlord’s spells, and so the very fabric of Chaos came to the vampire’s aid.

The first to lift themselves were those slain in the night’s fighting. Cadavers rose from the mud, shaking off the wounds that had ended them and lurching instinctively towards the unwary servants of the plague-god. Huge piles of the dead had been dragged together before the two occupied gates, all of which suddenly began to twitch and stir.

The newly-killed were soon joined by those who had been in the cold earth for far longer. Forgotten graveyards trembled and shifted, their soils broken by dozens of clawed hands. With a sigh of ghostly half-breath, a new army arose amid the terror of the plague-rain, unaffected by fear and undaunted by the driving torrents of pus. They locked blank eyes onto the daemons, and marched towards them. All but the weakest of the aethyr-born were able to dispatch them easily, but the numbers soon rose, clogging the already claustrophobic streets with gangs of silent, eerily calm fighters.

Altdorf had been settled since the time of Sigmar, and had roots going back to the very dawn of human civilisation. With every passing moment, older warriors emerged from the slurry underfoot, tunnelling up from deep catacombs beneath lost chapels and warrior-temples. Armour that had not been seen for generations was exposed again to the uncertain light, and long-lost sigils of fallen houses were illuminated by the ravening flames.

Last of all, dredged up from the river itself, came the first inhabitants of the old Reik homesteads, the tribesmen who had marched with Sigmar himself as he forged his empire in blood. They crawled out of the stinking muds of the viscous waters, clutching onto the chains that still hung across the great wharfs. They emerged into the open, grim-faced, shaggy with stiff beards and long hair, their arms marked with bronze rings and their weapons beaten from iron. Unlike the later generations that had been raised, these looked as hale and strong as they had in life, save for the dull lack of awareness in their faces. They did not gaze in amazement at the enormous structures around them, despite their last living view of the city as a tiny fortress of wooden walls and stockades. All they had retained from their former existence was a primordial hatred of the enemies of mankind, and they raised their blades against the daemons without a moment’s hesitation. The blades that had once been borne alongside the living god retained more potency against the daemonic than any others, and soon the fighting was joined all along the riverbanks. Implacable undead took on the foul denizens of the Other Realm in bloodless, bitter combat.

The ranks of living corpses were quickly joined by Vlad’s host, which marched through the North Gate in triumph, dipping their sable banners under the portcullis and heading straight into the depths of the inner city. The surviving mortal defenders fell back to allow them passage, staring in horror at the ranks of vampires, ghouls and crypt horrors as they loped through walls that had defied them for a hundred lifetimes of men. For some, the sight was too much, and their will broke at last. They cast aside their weapons and fell to the ground, weeping with despair.

For others, though, the sight of such unnatural allies came as cause for sudden hope. Though the sight of the living dead may have turned their stomachs, witnessing them taking on the vast hordes of corrupted savages was enough to prove their worth. Those defenders remained at their posts, carving out a defence of the North Gate, hanging grimly on to the one slice of territory they had been able to keep unsullied.

Of Helborg himself, though, there was no sign. Leaving the command of the North Gate, the Reiksmarshal headed towards the river, his face a picture of harrowed resolve. Nor did Vlad von Carstein stay with the bulk of his host for long. Like the shades he commanded, the vampire melted into the shadows, leaving the prosecution of the battle to Mundvard and his other lieutenants. The bulk of the undead fanned out into Altdorf’s vast hinterland of criss-crossing alleys and thoroughfares, and soon the entire city was gripped by the murderous conflict of perverse life against preternatural death.

Margrit was unaware of all of this as it happened. With the last of the sacred waters sprinkled about the perimeter of the temple, she had taken up arms at last, determined to fight for as long as her strength allowed her. Mumbling litanies over and over, she had joined the remnants of Gerhard’s temple guard in the courtyard inside the gates. No more than three-dozen guards remained, the rest having succumbed at last to the contagions that now ran rampant even in the infirmaries. Fewer than a hundred sisters were still able to stand with them unaided, and they clustered close behind Margrit, each bearing whatever weapons had been to hand.

Before them, the inner wall’s gates shivered as the creature beyond them hammered on the wood. The defenders inched back across the courtyard, assembling on the stairs leading up to the garden colonnade.

‘Courage,’ urged Margrit, despite the fear that rose up in her gorge and nearly throttled her.

They all felt fear. They were all trembling. The difference lay in how they dealt with that.

‘Can it cross the threshold?’ asked Elia, her hands visibly shaking.

Margrit did not know. The line of sacred water snaked across the courtyard in front of them, barely a hand’s width wide. It looked so completely insubstantial – a child could have skipped across it without ever noticing it.

And yet, the temple endured while everything around had been reduced to smouldering, slime-boiling rubble. She had held her faith for her whole life, and the precepts had never failed her. The great and the good of the Empire had always looked down on the Sisters of Shallya, seeing them as matronly mystics and little more. And yet the proud Colleges of Magic were now shattered haunts of the daemonic, and the mighty Engineering School was a smoking crater.

‘The threshold will endure,’ Margrit said, trying to sound like she meant it.

The doors shuddered again, and a gurgling roar echoed out. The creature was becoming frustrated, and its maddened fury was spilling over into raw mania. The stones of the outer wall were rocked, sending trails of dust spiralling down to the earth. Another blow came in, almost snapping the main brace across the doors.

More blows came in, faster and heavier. A crack ran down the oak, splitting it into a lattice of splinters. A clawed fist punched clean through, breaking the heavy beams at last and rocking the iron hinges.

A sister screamed. Margrit turned on her. ‘No retreat!’ she shouted. ‘We stand here! We are the blessed ones, the chosen of the Earth Goddess! No creature of the Outer Dark may–’

Her words were obscured by a huge crack as the gates gave way at last. With a throaty bellow of triumph, the greater daemon smashed its way through the remains, hurling aside the severed residue and sending the ragged-ended spars spinning.

Margrit shrunk back, her defiance dying in her throat. The creature was enormous – far bigger than it had seemed when she had first caught sight of it from the walls. Surely nothing could stop it – no power of magic, no power of faith. She looked up at it as the monster swaggered and hauled itself through the gap, and its enormous shadow fell over her.

Some of her sisters vomited, overcome by the incredible stench. Temple guards dropped their blades, staring slack-jawed at the vision of hell approaching. The behemoth rolled towards them, shedding slime down its flanks as the foul rain washed it into the mire beneath.

It took all her courage, but Margrit managed a single step forward, her blade clutched in two shaking hands. She glared up at the creature of Chaos, planting her feet firmly.

‘Go back!’ she cried. ‘Take one more step, and, by the goddess, it will be your last!’

The daemon looked down at her, and laughed. Huge yellow eyes rolled with mirth, and drool the length of a man’s arm spilled from its gaping maw. Moving deliberately, with an exaggerated, mocking studiousness, it lifted a cloven hoof and placed it, heavily, over the line of sacred water.

The liquid steamed and hissed as it was defiled, and Margrit smelled rotten flesh burning. For a moment, she dared to hope that the slender barrier would be enough.

Then the daemon chortled again, and hauled itself closer, dragging its flab through the smeared puddles of water.

Margrit stood her ground, her heart thumping, her last hope gone. Sliding like oil on water, the putrid shadow of the daemon fell across her once more.

TWENTY-ONE

Ghurk galloped onward, smashing his way up the long causeway to the Palace. Resistance was crumbling now.

Atop his habitual perch, Otto urged his outsize sibling harder, cracking the heel of his scythe across Ghurk’s scaly neck.

‘No time!’ he blurted, feeling a mix of exhilaration and consternation. ‘No time at all! Smash and break! Crush and stamp!’

The battle for the West Gate had been a frustratingly slow business, with the defenders lingering at their posts far longer than they had any right to. The cannons had caused havoc with his best troops until Ethrac had finally got close enough to burst their barrels with a few choice spells. Even then, the mortals had stupidly and annoyingly remained in place for much too long. They were led by a redoubtable captain wearing white and black who had roused them to almost insane levels of bravado. Otto had been forced to kill that one himself, leaping from Ghurk’s back and going at him with his scythe. They had traded blows on the summit of the gates with green lightning crackling around them. The human had fought well, wielding his broadsword two-handed with both speed and power.

It had done him little good in the end. Otto may have looked bloated in comparison, but his muscles were infused with the raging power of the Urfather. He did not even need Ghurk to come to his aid this time, and his scythe ripped through the knight’s stomach, slicing through the breastplate as if being dipped into water.

Once that warrior was thrown down, the defenders’ resolve melted, and the resistance began to crack. The gates were broken and the biggest and best of Otto’s serried host had flowed into the walls of the city. Just as at Marienburg, the glorious blossoming of the Urfather’s pestilential delights followed them in. The place was ripe for it – half-consumed by spores and moss-growths already, it was fertile ground for Ethrac’s conjurings.

Otto clambered back onto Ghurk’s shoulders, and the onslaught continued. Columns of chanting Norscans surged up the twisting streets, torching the overhanging houses as they went. Bands of marauders broke from the main charge and rampaged through the whole district, greeted with joy by the gangs of petty daemons squatting and slavering on the eaves.

The remaining defenders were driven back, slain in swathes every time they attempted to mount a resistance. Reserves were called up, and were swept away. Lines of artillery, placed in the courtyards on the approach to the Palace, were briefly effective but soon overwhelmed.

It would have been faster if the damned horsemen had not appeared and dragged half his army away into a desperate battle outside the walls. Ghurk had wanted to turn back and take them on himself, and only Ethrac threatening to shrink his stomach to the size of a walnut had persuaded him to keep going. Combat could rage for as long they liked on the plain west of the walls, and it would still not suffice to keep them from their true goal. They would approach the inner city with diminished numbers, it was true, but they still had enough to accomplish their divine task.

Now it approached. The Palace itself reared up into the flame-streaked murk, already covered in a creeping jacket of twisting fibres. Its vast gates were cracked and thrown down, its mighty domes gaping like smashed eggshells, its immense towers burning. Daemons leapt and scampered across its long, rangy battlements, pursuing the few living defenders with commendably spiteful zeal. Lightning snapped and twisted across its shattered vistas, licking like whips along the ragged profile.

‘There it lies, o my brother!’ shouted Otto, standing up on Ghurk’s heaving shoulders. ‘You see it? There it lies!’

Even Ethrac was grinning then. He stood too, leaning on his staff. The Imperial Palace – the very heart of the mortals’ realm – lay broken before them. No invading army had ever come this far. This was the throne of the boy-god, the very heart of his foul and decadent kingdom, and they were on the cusp of it. They had slain and slain and slain until the mud-mires of the streets were the colours of spoiled wine, and this was the reward.

Otto looked up at the colossal edifice, and began to laugh. The laughter split his lips, burbling like a torrent from his mouth. His ribs ached, his shoulders shook. There was nothing left – they had done it.

Ghurk cantered happily up the long straight road towards the Palace, crashing into the statues of old heroes that lined the processional. Behind him came the tribesmen of the wilds, driven into a frenzy by the savage joy of sacking the home of their ancestral enemies.

Otto was the first to spot the newcomers. In defiance of all reason, more defenders were clustering around the Palace’s outer walls. As if plucked from the air, they were lining what remained of the parapets and waiting for the onslaught. At first, he could not believe it – thinking it a trick of the flickering half-light.

Then, slowly, he realised the truth.

‘The dead,’ he muttered.

By then, Ethrac had sensed it, too. ‘I knew it!’ the sorcerer snapped. ‘Did I not warn you?’

Otto glowered at him. More skeletons and living cadavers were taking up position across the Palace approaches, blocking the head of the processional in ever greater numbers. Unlike the mortals they replaced, they showed nothing but implacable dedication, standing silently before the oncoming horde, their pale faces empty and their eyes unblinking.

‘Do they fight us for the carcass of this Empire?’ blurted Otto, furiously. ‘Is that it? We must lay low two armies this day?’

Ethrac spat messily onto his brother’s hide and started shaking his staff. ‘They have joined against us, o my brother. They are united in weakness.’ The sorcerer smiled grimly. ‘But two rotten planks do not make a life-raft. They will both be swept away.’

At that, he brandished the staff two-handed, and the bells clanged wildly. More forks of aethyr-tempest slammed down, breaking up the cobbles and sending the stones flying. The Leechlord’s vortex accelerated further, hurling great slaps of mucus into the waiting ranks of undead. The vines and grave-moss that had shot up from every mortar-joint writhed out like snakes.

Ghurk bellowed, pawing the ground like a giant bull. The Norscans at his feet roared in hatred, furious that an easy prize had been snatched away at the last moment.

‘We broke the mortals!’ cried Otto, his face purple with rage. ‘Now we break the immortals!’

And with that, the horrific vanguard of the plague-god surged up the processional, beating for the Palace gates like a sluice of boiled blood flung down an abattoir’s drain. With a final roar, the host of the Glottkin charged against the gathering might of the undead, and unholy battle was joined at last in the grounds of Sigmar’s Palace.

The scale of the catastrophe had been apparent for miles. As Deathclaw had neared the Reik valley, the column of fire and storm-wind had loomed ever vaster, climbing like a mountain into the skies. It was twisting in a vast, glacial rotation, as if an immense vice were being applied to the city below, gradually squeezing the life out of it like a wine-press eking out the blood of the grapes.

Neither Martak nor Karl Franz said anything for a long time. There were no words to describe the sheer size of it. The heavens themselves were being ripped open, and the fury of the Other Realm poured down onto the land below. Nothing, surely, could stand against that degree of power. Whatever spells had been recited to unleash such devastation must have been beyond any that had been spoken before.

The world was indeed changed. Martak could sense it in his blood – the Laws that governed his art were twisting, buckled under enormous pressure. They had whispered this past year that the bonds of Shyish had been loosened, thinning the boundaries between life and death, but now it seemed that all the Eight Winds were running amok.

‘This cannot be halted, lord!’ Martak blurted out at last, unable to contain his frustration at what they were doing. He felt insignificant – a mere speck against an infinite sky, hurtling headlong into a maelstrom of terrifying size and power.

The Emperor did not reply. As the scale of the plague-storm had become steadily apparent, he had retreated into himself, driving Deathclaw hard. The griffon still bore the wounds it had taken at Heffengen, and was clearly losing strength, but Karl Franz gave the beast no respite.

Below them, the forest was scored with the paths of mighty armies. Whole swathes had been trampled down, betraying the routes the enemy had taken to beat down Altdorf’s gates. The river itself was a thick, olive-green sliver of mud, its energy stripped from it. Even up high, the stench was incredible – an overpowering melange of death, sickness and mortal fear.

‘You said you dreamed of this?’ shouted Karl Franz at last.

Martak nodded grimly. Everything was as he had foreseen – the flames running riot through the lower portions of the city, the terrible slaughter all around the walls, the burgeoning vegetation rearing up against the Palace walls and breaking them open. As they neared, he could see pitched battles spreading out across the entire valley. To the west and east, mounted horsemen were fighting a desperate rearguard defence against a sea of Chaos infantry. At the North Gate, Empire troops were grimly holding onto a narrow stretch of territory against a tide of war-maddened beastmen. Inside the walls, the fighting was more confused, and appeared to be a messy three-way tussle between corrupted Chaos warriors, the hemmed-in remnants of Empire soldiery, and a host of undead, who had taken whole chunks of the poor quarter and were advancing, street by street, across the city.

The entire world, it seemed, had come to Altdorf – Sigmar’s city had sucked them in, from Bretonnia, from Sylvania, from the Wastes of the north and the depths of the forest. All had come to feast on the Empire’s harrowed corpse.

‘I dreamed of more than this,’ Martak cried back. ‘You know of what I speak.’

Karl Franz maintained the pace, forcing Deathclaw lower. The city swept closer, spread out below them in all its ravaged glory. ‘And yet you tell me the Law of Death is weakened.’

‘It is,’ replied Martak, struggling to make his own wilful steed follow the Emperor closely. ‘But what of it? I am no necromancer – we cannot raise the slain.’

Karl Franz looked up then, a strange expression on his face. Martak had never seen a look quite like it – there was no fear, not even anger, just a kind of resignation.

‘Surely even you see it now,’ said the Emperor, gesturing towards the heavens.

Martak followed his gaze. Above them, still shrouded by the turning gyre of the heavens, a new light was now visible. Shorn of the competing glow of Morrslieb, the twin-tailed star could be made out, riding high above the drifting filth of the world below. Martak watched it burn, captivated by its strange, otherworldly light.

It was not a comforting light. There was nothing homely or warming about it – Sigmar’s star had ever been a harbinger of great trials, and of the changing of ways, and of the passing of one age into another. The flames rippled along behind it, hard to focus on yet impossible to ignore.

Martak felt his heart miss its beat. All citizens of the Empire had been raised on tales of the comet. Men made its sign against their breast before going into battle; mothers made the gesture over the cots of the newborn, warding them against the terrors of the night. It was their sign, the mark of humanity, lodged amid a world of war and madness that had hated them for all eternity.

‘What does it mean?’ Martak asked.

Karl Franz flew on. The city was approaching quickly now. Below them, the gaping great dome of the Palace drew into focus. Vast forces were converging on it now, fighting against one another for the prize. Deathclaw began to plummet.

‘That death is not to be feared,’ said the Emperor, his voice trailing off as he descended.

Martak hovered above him for a moment longer, unwilling to commit to the dive. Everything below him reeked of corruption and insanity. Screams still mingled with the howl of the plague-wind, and the burning pyre of Altdorf loomed ahead like a festering scar on the hide of a gods-forsaken world.

‘What does that mean?’ he muttered, holding position, unable to share the blithe conviction displayed by his master. ‘What has he seen?’

He could still get out. He had delivered the Emperor to the city, just as he had promised, and that was where his duty ended. Even if Altdorf were to be scrubbed from the earth, there might still be places to hide, refuges in the mountains where a man like him could scratch some kind of a living.

He laughed at himself harshly. They really had appointed a terrible Supreme Patriarch.

‘I broke you out of that cage,’ he said to his griffon, grimacing wryly. ‘Time I took you back.’

He gave the command, and the griffon cawed wildly, before furling its wings and following the Emperor down into the inferno below.

Just as the daemon reached out for Margrit, something moving incredibly fast shot out of the skies, streaking like lightning from the storm. She had the vague impression of wings, blurred with speed, and the cry of a human voice speaking a language she did not understand. She scrambled backward, out of the path of the clutching claws, and saw what looked like a massive eagle diving straight at the daemon’s face.

But it was not an eagle – it was a beast out of legends, a hippogryph, part-horse, part bird, with griffon-like claws and a long, lashing tail. Its rider thrust his long lance straight into the daemon’s heart, and its hide broke open with a hideous rip.

The daemon screamed, and clutched at the lance. The rider’s momentum carried him onward, and the steel tip drove in deeper, causing black blood to fountain along its length.

The daemon ripped the lance out, hurling both rider and steed clear. With a crash of armour, the hippogryph slammed into the courtyard wall, cracking the stone. The daemon reeled, the skin of its vast chest hanging open in strips. Blood continued to gush freely, pouring like an inky cataract down its sloping stomach and fizzing where it spread across the ground.

Possessed by a sudden impulse to come to the rider’s aid, Margrit rushed forward, whirling the blunt blade in her hand. She stabbed it into the daemon’s hoof. It took all her strength just to pierce the thick layers of hide encrusting the cloven foot, and she heaved down on the hilt to drive the rusting sword home.

To such an immense creature, the blow must have been little more than a scratch, but it brought fresh bellows nonetheless. The daemon leaned forward, bending double to clutch at her. Margrit staggered out of its reach again, feeling raw fear bubble up inside her. Her attack now seemed more an act of incredible rashness than bravery. Up close, the incapacitating stench was even worse than before, and she nearly retched as the claws reached out for her.

She felt the first talons scrape down her back, dragging at her sweat-stained robes, and prepared for death.

At least I bloodied it, she thought vindictively as she was hauled back.

But then the grip released, and she was dumped to the stone again. Twisting around, she saw the reason – the hippogryph rider had charged back into the fray, his lance gone but now bearing a broadsword.

Even amid all the terror and all the filth, Margrit was struck by his sheer beauty. His blond hair seemed to shimmer like gold, and his armour, though streaked with blood, still glittered with a high sheen. He charged straight at the daemon, spitting words of challenge that sounded like some strange music, working his blade in blistering arcs and hacking into its loose flesh. He moved so fast, shrugging off wounds and taking the fight straight to the creature that loomed over him in an almost comical mismatch of sizes. He had to leap into the air even to land a blow, driving his sword once more into the daemon’s ribs and twisting the blade as gravity wrenched it out again.

The daemon, howling in rage and frustration, swept its sword at him in a massive, earth-breaking lunge. The knight, incredibly, met the strike with his shield, though the clang of metal-on-metal thrust him back six paces and nearly crushed him back against the wall.

Margrit shuffled further out of reach, on her knees, frantically searching for another weapon – something she could use to aid the knight. More cries of battle rang out from elsewhere in the courtyard, and she had the vague, blurred impression of other daemons racing through the broken gates, joining in combat with the rest of the sisters and their guards.

The greater daemon, though, consumed all her attention. It traded huge blows with the knight. Each one, by rights, ought to have broken him, but he just kept on fighting, hammering back with wild strokes, making up in speed and guile what he lacked in stature. He seemed to dance around the daemon’s lumbering frame, giving it no time to crush him under its massive fists. The lance-wound in the daemon’s chest still pumped blood, visibly draining it as the fight went on.

The monster howled with fury, and launched a backhanded swipe straight at the knight’s chest. He managed to get his shield in the way, but the force of the impact slammed him to his knees. The daemon, sensing a kill, raised its other fist high and prepared to slam it down.

With a savage scream, the hippogryph hurtled across the courtyard, flying straight into the daemon’s face and lashing out with its claws. The two creatures grappled with one another, gouging and tearing, and the daemon was once more rocked back onto its bloated haunches.

Eventually the daemon managed to scythe its heavy blade around, catching the hippogryph on its wing-shoulder and sending it tumbling back against the courtyard floor. Its wings broken and its chest leaking blood, the beast hit the stone with a wet snap, crumpled to the ground, and moved no more.

But it had given the knight time to recover. He rose again, blade in hand, and cast his battered shield to one side.

As Margrit looked on, both rapt and horrified by the spectacle, her roving hands finally closed on something. She looked down to see an earthenware pot, of the kind used by the sisters to carry the sacred water up from the wells. By some strange chance it was half-full, somehow overlooked when the rest had been poured around the perimeter. She grabbed it and dragged herself to her feet again.

‘Master knight!’ she cried, then threw it to him.

He caught the pot in his shield hand, more by instinct than anything else. He had no time to guess what it was, nor to protest, for the horribly wounded daemon bore down on him, reaching out to throttle him where he stood.

The knight lashed out with his blade, severing the hooked fingers as they closed, then raced forward, grabbing on to the daemon’s slabbed stomach and climbing up its ravaged chest.

The daemon tried to rip the knight away, but was hampered by its own clumsy blade. The knight hurled the pot at the ragged wound-edge, where it smashed open, dousing the bloody flesh-pulp with sacred water.

Huge gouts of steam immediately erupted, engulfing both combatants. The daemon’s screams were deafening now, and it clawed at itself in agony, opening up the flesh-rent further and exposing a huge, black heart within.

The knight took up his sword two-handed, holding it point-down above his head, bracing against the sway and twist of the daemon’s writhing. With a cry of vindication, he plunged it straight down, bursting the creature’s heart open in an explosion of boiling ichor.

The daemon thrashed and bucked, its entire body convulsing in a rippling wave of fat and torn muscle. Its horned head swung from side to side, narrowly missing goring the knight, who clung on somehow, twisting the sword in deeper, ramming it in up to the hilt and pressing it home.

With a horrific shudder, the daemon’s struggles gradually gave out. Aethyr-lightning burst into life across its body, snapping and tearing at the fabric of reality. It bellowed again, a sound of pure spite, but now its frame was unravelling fast, dissipating back into the realm from whence it had been summoned.

Still the knight clung on, never letting go of his sword. A huge bang resounded across the courtyard, shattering stone and making the earth ripple like water. Margrit was thrown onto her back, and she hit the ground hard. There was a rush of wind, hot as flame, and a long, agonised shriek.

The wind blew out, tearing itself into oblivion almost as soon as it had arrived. Margrit looked up, feeling blood in her mouth. The courtyard was half-demolished, with the bodies of men, women and daemons lying prone in the rubble. A huge slime-crusted crater had opened up where the daemon had been. In the centre of it stood the knight, his shoulders bowed, keeping his feet with difficulty, his armour coated in gobbets of thick black slime.

He limped over to her, pushing his visor up, a weary smile on his drawn face. He bowed low, displaying more courtesy in that one gesture than any Empire soldier had ever given her across a lifetime of service, and addressed her in broken, heavily accented Reikspiel.

‘My good lady,’ he gasped, breathing heavily, ‘you have the thanks of a king. By all that is holy, that was well done.’

TWENTY-TWO

Helborg ran through the burning streets, fighting when he had to, hugging the shadows and sprinting hard when he did not. Only Zintler and nine of his most trusted Reiksguard had come with him; the rest had been left to hold the precarious line to the north.

Altdorf was now more populated than it had been for generations. A bizarre mix of Empire citizens, state troops, northmen, daemons and undead warriors fought one another in a bitter and fractured melee, breaking down into a thousand little battles over every scrap of unclaimed terrain. The arrival of von Carstein’s army had thrown everything into confusion, locking the previously unstoppable march of the Chaos armies into a grinding stalemate. Across the devastated townscape, the various factions lost, gained and held ground, all under the continuing howl of the plague-storm.

In truth, the petty defeats and conquests now mattered little to Helborg. The city was lost, either to the still-massive hosts of the Ruinous Powers, or to the similarly gigantic force of raised slain that marched against them. Each enemy was as horrifying as the other. The daemons retained their unearthly powers, able to leap and shimmer through reality before bringing their spell-wound weapons to bear, while the dead had terrible strengths of their own. Helborg had seen the wight-kings tear into battle wearing the armour of ages and carrying blades forged at the very birth of the Empire. Ghosts and crypt horrors threw themselves into the fray, each capable of causing terrible damage before being dragged down. They were met by tallymen and plaguebearers, just as dire in combat and with the same lack of fear and preternatural devotion to their cause.

The result was that the mortals were being pushed to one side. Exhausted by weeks of plague, fatigued by the long siege preparations, shocked by the ferocity of the initial assault, the surviving Empire troops clung on to what little ground they could, increasingly only spectators before the real battles between the Fallen and the dead.

That was not enough for Helborg. He had not suffered so long to see his city torn apart by rival invaders. Vlad could protest as much as he liked – there was no honour in the scions of Sylvania, and as soon as the battle was done the vampire lord would revert to type. Even amid all that had taken place, there were still things that had to be accomplished.

He had to get to the Palace. That had not yet fallen in its entirety, despite the forces that fought their way towards it, street by street, kill by single kill.

So the Reiksguard ran hard. Helborg’s face streamed with blood, and the pain spurred him on. He fought with an angry, vicious fury now, forgetting any pretensions at strategy or finesse and giving in to the raw violence that had threatened to overwhelm him for so long.

As they raced across the Griffon Bridge, its wide span crawling with whole clusters of desperate duels, he kicked and hacked his way through the throngs. The Klingerach lashed out, taking the head clean off a leering plaguebearer, before he spun on his heel and smashed the hilt into the face of an oncoming marauder. Then he was running again, his brother-knights hard on his heels.

Ahead of them, the Palace reared up into the storm, now covered in a thick layer of corrupted growths, its outline obscured and its lines tainted. White-edged flames licked across its broken back, fuelled and perverted by the poisons now freely coursing through the vegetation. Laughter still resounded in the storm-wind – the laughter of an amused, sadistic god that cared little how the battle fared so long as misery and misfortune continued to spread thickly.

‘My lord!’ cried Zintler, panting hard. ‘The skies!’

Helborg looked up sharply, loath to be distracted from the chase. When he did so, however, his heart leapt.

A star burned brightly in the morning sky, only partly obscured by the roiling clouds. Its light was austere and hard to look at – a shifting flicker of pale flame. Behind it trailed two lines of fire, snapping and twisting like streamers.

He halted, suddenly held rapt by the vision.

The twin-tailed star.

‘What does it mean?’ asked Zintler.

Helborg laughed. ‘I have no idea. But it is here.’

As he stared at it, it seemed to him that two tiny specks of darkness fell from the skies, racing out of the light of the star one after the other, plummeting like peregrines on the hunt-dive.

He blinked, trying to clear his sweat-blurred vision, and they were gone. For a moment, it had looked like two mighty eagles had dropped from the heavens, falling fast towards the open carcass of the Imperial Palace.

‘We have to get there,’ he said, snapping back into focus. The bridge terminated less than fifty yards ahead, after which the land rose sharply, crowned with the mansions and counting-houses of the nobility. Most were aflame, or slumped into rubble, or blazed with unnatural light, and what little remained was now contested by the two ancient enemies of mankind who now struggled for mastery.

It would be hellish. They would have to fight their way through a mile of steep, switchbacked roads before reaching the processional leading towards the gates. That was where the concentration of Chaos warriors was greatest, and where even the undead had toiled to make progress. They would be lucky to make it halfway, and unless the twin-tailed star looked kindly on them, they might not even get that far.

Helborg found himself grinning with a kind of fey madness. Everything he cherished was already gone. All that remained was the last, desperate sprint towards the heart of it all, to where he had always been destined to meet his end. The comet showed the way, lighting up the path with its flickering, gold-edged light.

The End Times, he thought to himself grimly as he broke into a run once more. So this is what they look like.

Leoncoeur did not have time to speak to the priestess for long – the courtyard was still crawling with plaguebearers. Many had been banished by the shock wave of the greater daemon’s departure, but others lingered, re-knitting their aethyr-spun bodies together and advancing once more towards the huddled group of guardsmen and priestesses.

He could barely stand. The fight against the creature of Chaos had drained him to the core, and even with the timely aid of the blessed water he had scarcely prevailed. He backed away from the daemons’ advance, gathering his strength for renewed fighting.

The priestess came with him, unarmed now but unwilling to leave his side.

‘What is your name, lord?’ she asked, her eyes never leaving the hordes of daemons creeping through the ruined outer wall.

‘What does that matter now, sister?’ Leoncoeur replied. ‘We are all fighters.’

She looked satisfied by that. ‘I was hoping for an Emperor,’ she said dryly. ‘Perhaps a king will do.’

Then, barging aside the lesser creatures of Chaos, the obese and horrific scythe-bearer clambered over the wreckage of the gates and fixed them both with a gaze of pure loathing. Though dwarfed by the slain greater daemon, this new creature was scarce less foul, and he stank just as badly. His jowls wobbled as he raised an accusing finger.

‘You,’ the monster drawled through bloody lips. ‘You killed it.’

‘As I will you,’ warned Leoncoeur, remaining inside the line of the water. ‘You have seen it already – come no closer.’

From outside the walls, sounds of battle had broken out again. Leoncoeur could hear the unearthly cries of the plaguebearers as they took on an unseen enemy. Perhaps some of the pegasus riders still fought on, though he guessed there were few of them left now. He caught the faint whiff of something sepulchral on the air, vying with the stench of decay, and wondered what it meant.

‘You killed it!’ screamed the Leechlord, advancing across the line of sacred water as if it were not there. Though it had proved a barrier against the least of the Chaos warriors, it did nothing to halt those most steeped in the twisting powers of the aethyr. ‘Such beauty, gone from the world!’

Leoncoeur pushed the priestess behind him, shielding her with his body. The tumult of combat from beyond the walls grew louder. With a sudden realisation, Leoncoeur knew the reason for the creature’s fury – the tide had turned. Against all hope, his army of fleshy horrors was being driven back, though by whom or what he could not yet see.

He allowed himself a smile of dark contentment. He had done what he had come for. The temple was secure, and a chink of light would endure amid the darkness. Whatever happened now, the journey had not been in vain.

‘Your spells unravel themselves,’ Leoncoeur taunted, edging warily closer. ‘You will not take this place now, and it turns your mind to see it.’

That proved the final straw. The Leechlord lumbered towards him, raving and spitting, his flabby arms cartwheeling. Leoncoeur raised his sword, and their weapons clashed – steel against iron. They traded blows in a furious whirl. Leoncoeur shattered the creature’s scythe with a single swipe, then pressed the attack by driving his blade deep into his overspilled stomach. Entrails flopped out, hanging like strings from the burst skin-sac.

Somehow, that did not stop him. The Leechlord swayed back into the attack, pulling a bone-saw from his belt and slashing wildly. Every blow that landed felt like a warhammer-strike – heavy and deadening. Leoncoeur could feel his arms ache. The long ride, followed by the battle at the gates, then the grinding duel against the greater daemon – the toll was too heavy.

‘For the Lady!’ he cried, redoubling the blows from his blood-smeared broadsword. He managed to drive another thrust deep into the creature’s midriff, further opening the wound and showering the flagstones with speckled gore.

But the Leechlord was immune to pain, and his raddled body could absorb the most horrific levels of punishment. Unlike the daemon, he was a creation of flesh and blood, and would not be banished back to the aethyr. He opened his vast maw and vomited straight at Leoncoeur’s chest.

The deluge was horrific, splattering into his eyes and making him gag. He staggered away, blinded by the foul matter. Unable to defend himself, he felt the sharp cut of the bone-saw as it punched into his throat.

He jerked away, flailing wildly with his sword, but he could already feel the hot cascade down his chest. The cut was mortal, and black stars spun before his eyes.

He crashed to the ground, fighting hard to stay conscious. The Leechlord towered over him triumphantly, his whole body sagging open from the wounds he had taken, but with the vicious light of victory in his porcine eyes.

Leoncoeur’s blurred gaze wandered over to where the priestess stood, watching in horror, unable to intervene with no weapon to hand.

But she had done enough. The gift of water had proved sufficient, and the irony only then occurred to him.

Look for me in pure waters.

‘She has blessed you indeed,’ he murmured, just as the Leechlord brought the saw down and cut deep into his chest.

Leoncoeur’s back arced in agony. He felt his ribs sever and his muscles part. Fighting back against the pain, he stared straight into the face of his killer, and cracked a grin.

That enraged the Leechlord further, but before he could twist the saw in deeper, he suddenly went rigid. A look of panic flashed across his features, and his arms thrust out, shivering. He tried to turn, but his body was rapidly turning into something else – hard, bark-like matter that burst out from under his pustulent hide.

‘What... is...’ he stammered, but then his tongue solidified and his whole body shuddered into rigidity.

His awareness slipping away, Leoncoeur just had enough time to see the cause. A tall warrior wearing crimson armour stepped from the shadow of the Leechlord, a bloody stake in his hand and a smoking ring on his pale finger. The two of them looked at one another, and the crimson-armoured lord inclined an ice-white, long-maned head.

With his last sight, Leoncoeur saw the remainder of the daemons being driven from the courtyard, pursued by grey-skinned warriors in archaic armour. With the Leechlord’s downfall, there was nothing to bind them together – a new force had arrived, one with the power and the will to take them on.

Leoncoeur’s head lolled. When it hit the stone, it felt almost like the feather bolsters of his old cot in Couronne’s castle. An overwhelming feeling of numbness shot up his limbs, stifling the pain.

The priestess was at his side then, cradling him. He managed to shoot her a final smile.

‘My lady,’ he whispered.

So it was that, courteous to the last, Louen Leoncoeur died in the precincts of the Temple of Shallya, ringed by the living and the dead.

The Glottkin tore up to the Palace gates, surging like the unleashed force of nature they had always been. Undead warriors tried to block their path, forming a cordon before the open doorway, but they were swept away like chaff. Ghurk picked up several with one sweep of his fist. Disgusted that he could not eat them, he hurled their bony bodies away.

The cavernous interior of the Palace beckoned. Once it would have stood proudly, a masterpiece of baroque excess, soaring into the skies and ringed by graven images of gods and heroes. Now, mere hours after their arrival, the entire complex ran wild with an overabundance of reeking foliage. Mosses, vines and weeds sprouted from every crevice, prising apart the stone and bringing down pillars and buttresses. The entire structure now listed uneasily on its slime-glossed foundations, and entire wings had collapsed under the weight of the mucus-deluge and the burgeoning plague-growths.

Otto beat Ghurk’s hide harder, forcing him to gallop into the heart of the great sprawl of ruination. The undead were everywhere now, spilling from balconies and clawing up from the sewers underfoot. Festus’s plague-rain was already beginning to lessen, and the assault teetered on a knife-edge. Seizing the Palace was now imperative – the scryers had all foretold that the end would come there, and that he, Otto Glott, paramount servant of the Plaguefather, would be the one to land the killing blow. It would take place at the very centre, the oldest and the grandest edifice of humanity on earth, and no sudden apparitions nor ghosts from the blasted wilds could be allowed to halt that now. They had destroyed the undead at Heffengen, they had destroyed them at Marienburg, and now they would destroy them at Altdorf.

‘Onward, on, o my brother!’ Otto commanded, thrashing Ghurk madly with his scythe-butt.

Ghurk chortled happily, and crashed through a whole string of vine-strewn courtyards, lashing out with his tentacle-arm and crunching apart any skeletons unwary enough to oppose him.

Ethrac was busy too, hurling blast after blast of aethyr-lightning from his staff. Revenants were blown into slivers of spinning bone, their armour shattered and their swords crushed into spiralling shards. He had seen the twin-tailed star again, and this time the omen seemed to trouble him. He uttered no cries of victory, but mumbled an endless series of cantrips and summonings, ringing them all in a lattice of writhing witch-light.

The hosts of Chaos that had accompanied them on the long charge into the Palace grounds now fanned out, taking the fight to the scions of Sylvania. Every corridor, every passageway and bridge-span was clogged with struggling warriors, locked in a pitiless struggle for mastery. The storm raced above them, lashing the combatants in the plague-rain and drenching the few remaining open spaces. Everywhere else, the foul garden bloomed, spreading its poisons into the very depths of the city vaults.

‘I saw them come down,’ muttered Ethrac, hurling more green-laced fire from his staff-tip.

‘Who?’ asked Otto, preoccupied with directing Ghurk towards the centres of resistance.

‘The fallen king. I saw him, under the light of the comet. He will be there.’

Otto let a grin slide across his sore-thick lips. ‘We knew he would. That is the sacrifice, the one to usher in the end.’

‘Cut him deep, o my brother,’ said Ethrac, letting rip with a blast of aethyr-energy that blazed across the rain-thick air and exploded in virulent swirls against a formation of wights. ‘Cut him so deep that the world beneath him is severed. Nothing else matters.’

The Glott siblings broke into a wide muster-yard just under the shadow of the Palace’s colossal main dome. It was less than two hundred yards towards the smashed doorway inside, beyond which they could already see the marble and gold interior glinting.

Before them, though, was arranged the last defence. No living soldiers still guarded the inner Palace, but they were no longer needed. A whole army of zombies waited for them, clambering over one another in a press of squirming limbs. They seemed to be swarming out of the ground itself, piled up in a heap of wriggling, necrotic flesh that looked more like a single organism than a mob of hundreds.

Ghurk barrelled onwards, undeterred. Ethrac began to shriek new chants, and Otto built up momentum with his scythe. The Army of Corruption charged along beside them, pouring into the muster-yard.

With a high-pitched scream, the glut of zombies burst outward, cascading like a lanced boil. The tangled web of undead stumbled and staggered towards them, as thick as the slime-rain, a whole forest of grasping fingers and rusting blades. The two armies slammed into one another, and the muster-yard was immediately filled with the scrabbling, sickening sounds of dry flesh tearing and plague-riddled sinews ripping.

Ghurk waded into the melee, lashing out with his tentacle-arm and scooping up dozens of zombies. Ethrac blasted more of them, infesting their dead hides with virulent parasites that punched out from within, crippling them and leaving them writhing on the stone.

Nothing stopped them completely, though – they came on with inexorable purpose, groaning and reaching, ignoring blows that would have ended a mortal warrior. Zombies latched on to Ghurk’s legs and began to climb. Many were kicked away, but others quickly took their place. Soon Ghurk was wading waist-deep in a morass of undead, and still they came on, clambering over one another to get at the creatures riding on his back.

Ethrac began to spit out his frustration, burning the undead with balefire, torching whole bands of them as they reached out to pull up higher. Otto reached down, swinging his long scythe to dislodge those who had dragged themselves into range. A tumbling rain of severed limbs clattered down to the seething mass of bodies below, eliciting not a sound from their stricken owners.

But that was not the worst – the zombie plague was just a foretaste. With an ear-splitting scream, the vampire the triplets had fought – and defeated – at Marienburg flew down from the high parapet of the looming dome, his arms stretched wide and lined with tattered batwings. Other fell creatures came in his wake – a vast winged horror with a skeletal ribcage and bony claws – a terrorgheist – egged on by three shrieking ladies in bone-white lace. Clouds of corpse-gas billowed out as they swooped in, reacting with the plague-growths and hissing like snakes.

Ghurk instantly lunged for the winged creature, whipping his tentacle-arm up to haul it down from the skies. He connected, wrapping his arm around the beast’s spiny neck, but had underestimated its strength. The terrorgheist remained aloft, and began to drag Ghurk across the ground, pulling him further into the writhing knots of zombies.

The first of the undead clambered onto Ghurk’s back, and soon Otto and Ethrac were both fighting them off. They became separated from their own warriors, pulled by the terrorgheist deeper into the scrabbling pall of flesh-eaters.

‘Wither them!’ cried Otto, hacking his scythe down with frantic abandon.

Ethrac obliged, turning a whole gang of zombies into crackling torches of emerald flame, but it was not nearly enough. The terrorgheist continued to haul Ghurk along, forcing the compressed crowds of zombies up to chest-level.

Otto looked up, seeing the vampire lord preparing a spell of his own. Dark shadows began to crystallise around him, sucked out of the air and transfused into the Wind of Death.

‘The vampire!’ Otto shrieked, too far away to prevent it. ‘He is the master! Snap his neck! Blind his eyes! Crack his bones!’

Ethrac, riding Ghurk’s lurching back with difficulty, immediately saw the truth of it. The sorcerer lashed out with his staff, making the bells clang wildly. He spat out words of power, and the vampire’s spell immediately inverted, turning on its owner in a vortex of ragged shadow. The vampire, taken by surprise, cried out in alarm, suddenly feeling the cold touch of his own magicks, but Ethrac was now in control, and the Chaos sorcerer shook his staff again with real venom.

Mundvard the Cruel’s body exploded, flying outward in a welter of tattered strips. His skeleton hung together for an instant, then clattered down to the muster-yard’s surface. As soon as the bones hit, they were crushed into the stone by the hundreds of criss-crossing boots. Once the vampire’s grip was broken, the terrorgheist immediately lost its momentum, and the pressure on Ghurk abated.

Ghurk hauled back hard with his tentacle, digging his hooves in and tugging. The terrorgheist’s bony neck broke, and the creature gasped out a glut of corpse-gas from its gaping jaws. Its sinewy wings flapped pathetically, and it thudded to the ground. With the creature’s momentum broken, the mob of zombies collapsed around Ghurk, scattering in twisted piles of confusion at his feet.

‘There is no time for this!’ hissed Otto, using his scythe to clear the last of the clinging zombies from Ghurk’s hide. ‘Clear them out!’

Ghurk obeyed, bounding after the remaining enemy, swinging both arms like jackhammers.

The three women in lace leapt down from their vantage then, spitting curses. Ethrac was too busy breaking the remainder of the zombies to respond, so Otto hauled his scythe back, swung it around three times, then let go. The blade flew towards the leader of the trio, rotating in a blur of speed. Before she could evade the missile, it sliced clean across her neck, decapitating her in a single strike and spraying blood in broad spatters against the walls of the yard.

‘Return!’ cried Otto, reaching out with his right claw.

The scythe immediately swung around again, still spinning, and dropped back into his waiting palm.

That broke the spirit of the remaining undead horde. Bereft of the guiding will of their vampiric masters, the zombies lost all cohesion, and were soon mopped up by the oncoming tribesmen. The two remaining ladies fled back into the Palace depths, wailing like infants. Ghurk rampaged through the remaining throng, treading the last survivors into the stone underfoot. He crashed over the carcass of the terrorgheist and repeatedly stamped on it, powdering the bones and trampling the meagre scraps of sinew that still clung to them.

‘Is this really the best they can do?’ muttered Otto, still busy with his scythe.

‘We killed the master,’ said Ethrac, hurling more plague-slime about him with great heaves. ‘Why do any still stand? The dead return to death when the master is killed.’

Otto shrugged. The Palace now lay before them, its doors gaping open and its riches clustered within, and lust was already overtaking his fury. ‘Who knows? Perhaps there is another to be found.’

Ethrac kept up the barrage of raw sorcery, exploding zombies at a terrific rate. The broken dome of the Palace loomed up massively, a cyclopean structure even in its ruin. Flames still guttered around it, fuelled by the unleashed lethal energies, and the storm-pattern of clouds formed an immense cupola over the whole scene.

The devastation was now total. Every building in the city had been demolished or dragged into ruins. The death-toll was incalculable, and would never be recovered from. In a sense, it mattered not what happened now – they had done what no warlord of the north had ever done. They had broken Sigmar’s city, wreathing it in fell sorcery and drenching it in the blood of the slain.

But there was still the final blow to be struck. The human Emperor still lived, and had come back to his den in time for the denouement. Such had always been predicted, and the Plaguefather had never guided them awry.

‘He is in there,’ said Ethrac, barely noticing as his troops slaughtered and smashed the last remnants of the defence. ‘I can smell him.’

Otto grinned back at him, his face sticky with blood.

‘Then we go inside,’ he said triumphantly. ‘And bring this dance to its end.’

Margrit looked up at the vampire, not knowing whether to thank him or curse him. His fell warriors had cleared the courtyard of daemons and were now pursuing the remaining Chaos forces out of the square beyond. The surviving humans emerged from whatever places they had managed to barricade themselves behind, mistrust etched on their faces.

Vlad von Carstein was still gazing at the body of Leoncoeur. There was a sadness on the vampire’s face.

For all that, the creature’s aura still made Margrit shudder. For her whole life, she had been taught to fear and hate the grave-stealers. If any force of the world was truly anathema to hers, it was the bringers of everlasting death.

‘And what of us, lord?’ she asked, staring up at him defiantly. ‘Now you have your victory, what is your purpose?’

Vlad turned to her, as if seeing her for the first time. Margrit could not help noticing that his gaze flickered instinctively down to her throat.

‘If there were time, lady, I might show you all manner of wonders,’ he said. ‘You can see for yourself, though, that none remains.’

He looked up, past the temple dome and towards the Palace hilltop. His eyes narrowed, as if he were focusing on things far away.

‘This is your temple again, for a time,’ he said, coldly. ‘Bury your dead and look to your walls. If all goes well, I will be back.’

Then his whole body seemed to shimmer like a shadow in sunlight. The ring on his finger briefly flared with crimson light, and his gaunt frame dissolved into a flock of squealing bats. They fluttered skywards, spiralling into the rain-lashed skies.

Margrit watched the bats go, slumped against the stone of the courtyard with the dead knight leaning against her. The noises of combat were falling away as the undead drove the daemons back from the temple’s environs and into the maze of the burning poor quarter.

She looked up. The plague-rain was beginning to lessen, as was the tearing wind. Though the slimy droplets still cascaded, their force was already beginning to fade.

‘But what is left?’ she murmured to herself, looking around her destroyed temple, at the pools of blood on the stone, at the corroded and gaping rooftops beyond her little kingdom. ‘What is there to be salvaged now?’

No answers came. She smoothed the bloodied hair from the knight’s brow, and closed his eyes. It would have been nice to have known his name.

TWENTY-THREE

Deathclaw landed on the marble floor, its claws skittering on the polished surface. Karl Franz dismounted just as Martak’s beast landed on the far side of the chamber.

The place had once been a chapel to Sigmar the Uniter. In its prime, a hundred priests a day would perform rites of absolution and petition, processing up the long aisles with burning torches in hand. The high altar was draped in gold and surrounded by the spoils of war – trophies from a hundred realms of the earth, the bleached and polished skulls of greenskins, the wargear of the northmen’s many tribes.

Now all was in disarray. The chapel’s arched roof had collapsed under the weight of pulsating mosses, and loops of pus-glistening tendrils hung from the ragged edges. The chequerboard floor had been driven up, exposing masses of writhing maggots beneath. The altar itself was broken, cracked in two by a creaking thorn-stump, and blowflies swarmed and buzzed over every exposed surface.

Karl Franz pulled the reins from around Deathclaw’s neck and cast them aside. The very action of laying eyes on the devastation was enough to make him feel nauseous, but there was no time to linger over the desecration. From beyond the listing doorway at the rear of the long central aisle, he could already hear the echoes of fighting. The Palace was rife with it, from the high towers to the deepest dungeons. Even from the air he had seen how complete the defeat was – a huge army of Chaos tribesmen and mutated beasts had cut its way deep into the heart of the complex, resisted only by a motley mix of Palace guards and warriors of Sylvania’s cursed moors.

It was just as it had been in Heffengen – the dead fighting with the living. How such allies came to be within the sanctity of the Palace grounds, though, was a question for another time.

‘Now what?’ asked Martak, dismounting clumsily and skidding on the polished floor.

‘The Chamber of the Hammer,’ replied Karl Franz, striding out towards the doors with Deathclaw in tow.

Martak took a little more time to persuade his steed to follow suit, and had to haul on its halter to bring it along. ‘What of the Menagerie, lord?’ he asked. ‘The dragon! Can you not rouse the dragon?’

Karl Franz kept walking. He could have done that. He could have opened all the cages and let the beasts loose, but it would not accomplish anything now. There was only one course open to him, one he barely understood, one that could only bring him pain.

‘Time is short, wizard,’ he said, reaching the doors and peering out through their wreckage. A long corridor stretched away, empty of enemies for the moment and ankle-thick with fungus spores. ‘You will have to trust me.’

Martak hurried to catch up. ‘Trust you? You have told me nothing! You saw the armies, you know how close they are.’ He fixed the Emperor with a look of pure exasperation. ‘What will this serve?’

Karl Franz looked back at him with some sympathy. There were no easy answers, and it was not as if his own intentions filled him with any certainty. All he had now were feelings, stirred by the sight of the comet and prompted by vague premonitions and old whisperings.

It could all be futile – everything, every step he had taken since the disaster at the Auric Bastion. But, he reflected, was that not the essence of faith? To trust in the promptings of the soul in the face of all evidence to the contrary?

He would have to dig deeper, to drag some surety from somewhere. In the meantime, there was little he could do to assuage the wizard’s doubts.

‘If you wish to rouse the beasts, then I will not prevent you,’ said Karl Franz. ‘You have delivered me to this place, and for that alone I remain in your debt. But I will not join you – the time is drawing closer, and I must be under the sign of Ghal Maraz when the test comes.’

He forced a smile. The wizard would have to follow his own path now.

‘You may join me or leave me – such is your fate – but do not try to prevent me.’ He started walking again, and Deathclaw followed close behind, ducking under the lintel of the chapel doors. ‘This is the end of all things, and when all is gone – all magic, all strength, all hope – then only faith remains.’

The spell guttered out, and Vlad reconstituted deep in the heart of the Imperial Palace.

For a moment, it was all he could do not to stare. He had dreamed of being in this place for so long – more than the lifetime of any mortal. The yearning had stretched through the aeons, as bitter and unfulfilled as the love he had once borne for her. For Isabella. He had often imagined how it would be, to tread the halls as a victor, drinking in the splendour of aeons. Long ago, so long that even he struggled to retain the memory, he had imagined himself on the throne itself, presiding over a whispering court of black-clad servants, the candles burning low in their holders and the music of Old Sylvania echoing in the shadowed vaults.

To have accomplished those long hopes should have made him glad. In the event, all he felt was a kind of confusion. Nagash had given him what he needed to get here at last, but it turned out that all that remained was a ruin of foliage-smothered stonework and gaping, eyeless halls. It would never be rebuilt, not now. He had accomplished his goal, only to find that he was a master of ashes.

‘My lord,’ came a familiar voice.

Vlad turned to see Herrscher and a band of wight-warriors in the armour of the Palace. They must have been raised recently, for their greaves and breastplates were still mottled with soil. Further back stood silent ranks of the undead, interspersed with ragged-looking groups of zombies.

‘Where are the rest?’ asked Vlad.

‘Mundvard and the ladies rode out to halt the plague-host before it reached the Palace,’ said Herrscher. ‘They did not come back.’

Vlad nodded. Perhaps he should have expected it – the Ruinous Powers had always been too strong for his servants to take on.

‘Then their commanders will be within the walls now,’ said Vlad.

‘They have taken the southern entrance,’ said Herrscher. ‘They are heading for the centre, and we are in their path. If we leave now–’

‘Leave?’

Herrscher looked confused. ‘We cannot stay here, lord,’ he protested. ‘Your army is spread throughout the city, but they have broken into the Palace in force. They cannot be stopped, not by us, not without summoning reinforcements.’

Vlad smiled tolerantly. Herrscher looked genuinely perturbed at the prospect of harm coming to him, which was as good a sign as any that his transformation was complete.

‘You are right, witch hunter,’ said Vlad. ‘The longer this goes on, the worse things will go for us. To bring this beast low, we must sever it at the head.’ He smiled thinly. ‘The savages of the north lead their armies from the front. If we wish to find the authors of this plague, look to the vanguard.’

Herrscher looked doubtful. ‘We are so few,’ he muttered.

‘Ah, but you have me with you now.’ Vlad glanced up and down the corridor, trying to get his bearings. ‘I wonder, do any of your old kind still live, or do we have this place to ourselves?’

As if in answer, there was a huge, resounding bang from the corridor running away to the south, like a massive door had been flung back on its hinges. Following that came the sound of a low, slurring panting. The floor shook, trembling with the impact of heavy footfalls.

Herrscher drew his blade, as did the wights, and they fell into a defensive ring around their master.

Vlad unsheathed his own sword with a flourish, finding himself looking forward to what was to come. The footfalls grew louder as the beast smashed its way towards them.

‘So the hunt is unnecessary – they have come to us.’ Vlad raised his sword to his face, noting the lack of reflection in the steel. ‘Now look and learn, witch hunter – this is how a mortarch skins his prey.’

With some regret, both Otto and Ethrac had to dismount from Ghurk as he barrelled on into the Palace interior. Their huge steed now scraped the roof of the corridors, bringing down chandeliers and ceiling-panels as he lumbered ever closer to the goal.

Otto and Ethrac ran alongside him now, both panting hard from the exertion. Ghurk himself seemed as infinitely strong as ever, his bulging muscles still rippling under his mottled hide. The vanguard of their suppurating horde came on behind, wheezing through closed-face helms and carrying their axes two-handed before their bodies.

As they came, they destroyed. Paintings were torn from their frames and ripped to pieces, statues were cast down and shattered. Ghurk’s hooves tore up the marble flooring, and his flailing fists dragged whole sections of wall panels along with him. They were like a hurricane streaking into the heart of the enemy’s abode, breaking it down, brick by brick, into a heap of mouldering refuse.

As they rounded a narrow corner, Otto was the first to catch sight of fresh enemies. A thrill ran through him, and he picked up the pace. ‘Shatter them!’ he cried, his voice cracking with enthusiasm. ‘Smash them!’

Just as at the Palace gates, the warriors lined up against them were no mortals, but more of the undead that had dogged their passage ever since the breaking of the walls. Otto began to feel genuine anger – they just could not be eradicated. They were like a... plague.

Ghurk bounded ahead, and Ethrac matched pace, his staff already shimmering with gathering witch-light. The undead wights rushed down the wide passageway to meet them, racing into battle with their unearthly silence. Soon the corridor was filled with the echoing clang of blades clashing. Zombies and skeletons went up against marauders and tribesmen in a mirror of the desperate combat still scored across the entire cityscape.

There was only one opponent worthy of Otto’s attention, though – a crimson-armoured vampire lord bearing a longsword and wearing a long sable cloak. That one towered over even the mightiest of his servants, and swept arrogantly into battle with the poise of a true warrior-artisan.

Otto swung his scythe, clattering it into the vampire’s oncoming blade even as Ghurk and Ethrac blundered onwards, reaping a swathe through the undead ranks beyond.

‘You are the master, then,’ Otto remarked, parrying a counter-blow before trying to skewer the vampire with his blade’s point. ‘Do you have a name?’

‘My name is known from Kislev to Tilea,’ replied the vampire distastefully. ‘Vlad von Carstein, Elector Count of Sylvania. You, though, are unknown to me.’

Otto laughed, whirling the scythe faster. ‘We are the Glottkin. We come to bury the Empire in its own filth. Why not let us?’

Vlad sneered, trying to find a way through Otto’s whirling defence. The vampire carried himself with an almost unconscious arrogance – the bearing of a creature born to rule, and one who knew how to use a sword. ‘You would cover the whole world in your stink. That will not be allowed to happen.’

‘It cannot be stopped now. You surely know that.’

Vlad hammered his blade into the attack. ‘Nothing is certain. Not even death – I should know.’

Otto laughed out loud, enjoying the artistry of the combat. Ghurk would never have understood it, nor Ethrac, but their gifts had always been different. ‘You are rather good, vampire,’ he observed.

‘And you... fight with a scythe,’ replied Vlad, contemptuously.

As if to demonstrate the weapon’s uselessness, the vampire suddenly changed the angle of his sword-swipe, catching the hook of the blade and pulling it out of Otto’s hands. Otto lunged to reclaim it, but it fell, clanking, to the floor. The vampire trod on the blade, advancing on his prey with a dark satisfaction in his unblinking eyes.

Otto let fly with a punch, hoping to rock the vampire, but Vlad was far too quick – he caught Otto’s clenched fist in his own gauntlet, and twisted the wrist back on itself. Caught prone, Otto was forced round, his spine twisted.

Before he could do anything else, the vampire’s blade punched up through his ribcage, sliding through his encrusted skin with a slick hiss. Vlad lifted him bodily from the floor, held rigid by the length of steel protruding from his torso. The pain was excruciating.

‘And so it ends, creature of the Outer Dark,’ said Vlad, bringing his sword-tip up to his lips. As was his wont with the defeated, he licked along the sword’s edge, drinking deep of the blood that ran freely along the cutting edge.

As soon as he had gulped it down, though, he released his grip. His hands flew to his throat, and his eyes bulged.

Otto laughed, freeing himself of the blade and sauntering over to his scythe to retrieve it. The pain was already passing, thanks to the gifts of the Urfather. ‘Drink my blood, eh?’ he asked. ‘Now, I wonder, have you the stomach for it?’

By now Vlad was retching. He staggered against the wall of the corridor, his cheeks red, bile trickling down his chin. A look of horror flashed across his tortured face as he realised what he had imbibed. ‘You... are...’ he gasped.

‘Very unpalatable,’ said Otto, reaching for his blade. ‘My lord, I fear your appetites have undone you.’

Vlad gazed back at him, all the arrogance bled from his face. He vomited, hurling up a torrent of stinking black ichor. In his eyes was the full realisation of what he had done. He was poisoned to the core. He had taken in not blood but raw pollution, the very essence of plague, and now it was eating him from the inside. Once that finished him, all the souls raised by his arts would collapse back into their state of true death – every wight, zombie, skeleton and ghoul would shiver away, their reanimated corpses disintegrating back into the essence of dust.

Otto raised the scythe, appreciating the imagery of the reaper ending the necromancer. ‘That was enjoyable, vampire,’ he said, taking aim. ‘Almost a shame it has to end.’

With a snarl, the shivering Vlad crossed his shaking arms over his chest, still retching uncontrollably. There was a flash of dark matter, and his body disintegrated into a cloud of fluttering bats.

Otto swiped, but his scythe passed harmlessly through the flock, scraping against the floor in a shower of sparks. He laughed again, admiring the vampire’s art. He really had been a worthy opponent. The bats lurched and flapped down the corridor, heading for the outside and too flighty to catch.

With Vlad gone, the rest of his forces melted away. Otto turned to see the skeletons collapsing and the wights slumping to the floor. Ghurk paused in his rampage, his fists stuffed with bones, his mighty head swaying back and forth in confusion as his enemies clattered into tiny heaps around him.

The last to remain on his feet was an oddly mortal-looking warrior in a long coat and with a pair of pistols strapped to his waist. He stared at the spot where Vlad had been, his face a mix of loathing and regret. For a moment, he appeared to fight the inevitable, as if, having been reacquainted with unlife he was now loath to leave it.

But the end had to come. The man’s jaw fell open with a sigh, his eyes rolled up into their sockets, and he collapsed to the floor. Once he was down, his body withered quickly, reverting to its true state in seconds.

Otto looked up at Ethrac, and grinned. The vampire’s wound had already closed over, sealed with a line of glistening bile. There were advantages to being constituted of such glorious poisons.

‘Then we are almost done, o my brother,’ Otto remarked, brandishing his scythe.

Ethrac nodded. ‘One by one, we devour them all. Now for the final meal.’

TWENTY-FOUR

Karl Franz and Martak entered the Chamber of Ghal Maraz. It had been abandoned long ago as the battle for the Palace was lost, and now stood as silent and as corroded as every other hall in the colossal complex.

The walls were weeping now, dripping with thick white layers of pus that fell in clots from the domed ceiling. The supporting pillars were covered in a hide of matted plant-matter, all of it shedding virulent pods that glowed and pulsed in the semi-dark. The great cupola over the circular space was half-ruined, with ivy tresses suspended like nooses from the broken stonework. Rain still spattered down through the gap, adding to the slick of mucus that swam across the chamber floor.

The two men both hurried to the high altar, the only structure to have remained relatively unscathed. The two empty chain-lengths still swayed from their bearings, hanging over the heavy iron table below.

Martak had no idea why they were there. The Imperial Palace had hundreds of chambers, many of them grander and more ornate that this one. If they had to select a place to die, why opt for the ancient resting place of the warhammer, a weapon that was now lost in the north and borne, if at all, by the boy-champion?

Karl Franz drew his runefang and backed up towards the altar’s edge. Deathclaw remained protectively by his side, growling all the while from its huge barrel chest. Martak took up position at the other end of the iron structure, his own griffon remaining close by and snarling with customary spite.

‘I do not–’ he began, but then the words died in his mouth. Whether they were being tracked, or whether fate had simply decreed that the end would come then, the doors at the far end of the chamber slammed open, ripped from their hinges and flung aside like matchwood.

Three grotesque creatures burst inside, each one a distorted corruption of a man. The first was a slack-fleshed warrior bearing a scythe in two claw-like hands. His green skin, criss-crossed with bleeding sores and warty growths, glinted dully under the reflected glare of the pus-cascades.

The second was a similarly wizened creature clad in dirty patched robes and brandishing a staff nearly as gnarled as Martak’s own.

The third was a true giant, barely able to shove itself through the huge double doors. Once inside the chamber he stood erect, one tentacled arm slack at his side, the other clenched into a hammer-like fist. His greasy, stupid face was deformed into a loathsome grin, and long trails of blood ran down from his mouth like warpaint.

Behind them, jostling for position, came more Chaos warriors, some in the furred garb of the far north, some bearing the mutated marks of more recent conversion. Their three leaders all bled horrific amounts of power from their addled frames. They were living embodiments of corruption, as vile and virulent as the Rot itself.

Karl Franz, unfazed, stepped forward, his blade raised towards them as if in grim tribute.

‘I will not repeat this warning,’ he said, and his calm voice echoed around the chamber. ‘Leave this place now, or your souls will be bound to it forever. The spirit of almighty Sigmar runs deep here, and His sign shines above us. You do not know your danger.’

There was something about the deep authority in that voice, the measured expression, which gave even the three creatures of madness pause. They held back, and the huge one looked uncertainly at his companions.

The sorcerer was the first to laugh, though, breaking the moment. The warrior with the scythe joined in quickly.

‘You did not need to be here, Emperor,’ said the scythe-bearer, bowing floridly before him. ‘We could have destroyed your city well enough on our own, but your death makes the exercise just a little more rewarding.’

The sorcerer bowed in turn, a mocking smile playing across his scarred face. ‘We are the Glottkin, your excellency, once as mortal and as sickly as you, now filled with the magnificence of the Urfather. Know our names, before we slay you. I am Ethrac, this is my brother Otto, and this, the greatest of us all, is the mighty Ghurk.’

Ghurk emitted a wheezing hhur as his name was recited, then crackled the knuckles of his one true hand.

Martak clutched his staff a little tighter, allowing the Wind of Ghur to flow along its length. The chamber was electric with tension, just waiting for the false war of words to conclude – nothing would be settled now by rhetoric.

Karl Franz’s face remained stony. His self-control was complete. Even in the heart of his annihilated kingdom, his visage never so much as flickered.

‘I do not need to know your names,’ he said, letting a shade of contempt dance around the edge of his speech. ‘You will die just as all your breed will die – beyond the light of redemption, forever condemned to howl your misery to the void.’

Otto glanced over at Ethrac, amused, and shrugged. ‘Then there is nothing to say to him, o my brother,’ he remarked.

Ethrac nodded. ‘It seems not, o my brother.’

They both turned back to face the altar, and the three of them burst into movement.

Otto was quickest, sprinting over to Karl Franz with his scythe whirring around his head. Ethrac was next, his staff alight with black energy, all aimed at Martak. Ghurk lumbered along in the rear, backed up by the charge of the northmen.

Deathclaw pounced in response, using a single thrust of its huge wings to power straight into Ghurk’s oncoming charge. The griffon latched onto the huge monster, lashing out with its claws and tearing with its open beak. The two of them fell into a brutal exchange of blows, rocking and swaying as they ripped into one another.

Ethrac launched a barrage of plague-magic straight at Martak, aiming to deluge him in a wave of thick, viscous choke-slime. Martak countered with a blast from his own staff, puncturing the wave of effluent and sending it splattering back to its sender. Ethrac lashed his staff around, rousing the vines and creepers hanging from the chamber vaults into barbed flails. Martak cut them down as they emerged, summoning spectral blades that cartwheeled through the air.

Martak’s own griffon took on the bulk of the tribesmen, bounding amongst them, goring and stabbing, leaving Otto and the Emperor to their combat undisturbed. The chamber rang with the sound and fury of combat, the runefang glittering as it was swung against the rusted scythe-blade.

‘I saw you come back,’ said Otto, letting a little admiration creep into his parched voice. ‘Why did you do that? You know you cannot beat us.’

Karl Franz said nothing, but launched into a disciplined flurry with his blade, matching the blistering sweeps of the scythe.

Martak, kept busy with his own magical duel, only caught fragmentary glimpses of the combat, but he could hear the taunting words of the Glotts well enough. The mucus-rain continued to fall, tumbling down from the gaping roof and bouncing messily on the torn-up marble.

By then Ghurk was getting the better of Deathclaw. The griffon savaged its opponent, but the vast creature of Chaos was immune to pain and virtually indestructible. With a sickening snap, the griffon’s wings were broken again. Deathclaw screamed, and was hurled aside, skidding into the chamber walls.

Martak backed away from Ethrac, fighting off fresh flurries of dark magic. The sorcerer was far more potent than he was, able to pull the very stuff of Chaos from the aethyr and direct it straight at him. With growing horror, Martak saw the first pustules rise on his forearms, and felt his staff begin to twist out of shape. His essence was being corrupted, turned against him and driven into the insane growths that had blighted the Empire from Marienburg to Ostermark.

Karl Franz fought on undeterred, matching Otto’s blows with careful precision. He carried himself with all the elegance of an expertly-trained sword-master, adopting the proper posture and giving himself room to counter every blade movement. Otto, by contrast, came at him in a whirl of wild strokes, trying to unnerve him by flinging the scythe out wide before hauling it back in close. In a strange way, they were oddly matched, rocking to and fro before the altar, hacking and blocking under the shadow of the swinging chains.

Martak fell back further, bludgeoned by the superior magic of Ethrac. The pustules on his skin burst open, drenching him in foul-smelling liquids. He unleashed a flock of shadow-crows, which flew into Ethrac’s face and pecked at his eyes, but the sorcerer whispered a single word, bursting their bellies and causing them to flop, lifeless, onto the chamber floor. More globules of burning slime were flung at Martak, and he barely parried them, feeling their acidic bite as they splashed across his face.

With a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, Martak knew he was overmatched. Nothing he summoned troubled the sorcerer, and he could barely keep the counter-blasts from goring straight into him. Even as he retreated further, driven away from the altar and towards the chamber’s east door, he saw the futility of it all, just as he had warned the Emperor.

There is no glory in dying here, and he wants to die.

Martak found himself snarling at the stupidity of it all. Noble gestures were for the aristocracy, for those with knightly blood or jewels spilling from their fingers. There were still other ways, still other weapons. If the Emperor would not give him leave, then he would go himself. The Menagerie was so close, and stocked with creatures that would chew through even the greatest of Chaos-spawned horrors.

His griffon, now bleeding heavily from a dozen wounds, suddenly turned and launched itself at Ethrac. The sorcerer, caught off-balance, had to work furiously not to be sliced apart, and for an instant turned away from Martak.

Seeing the chance, the Supreme Patriarch glanced a final time over at Karl Franz, uncertain whether his instincts were right. The Emperor fought on blindly, hugging the shadow of the altar. He was consumed by the duel, and Martak saw the look of utter conviction on his face. Karl Franz would not leave now, and nor could Martak reach him to drag him out.

Martak turned, and fled the chamber. Once outside, he tore down the narrow corridor beyond, his robes flapping about him. Soon he heard the sounds of pursuit as the northmen followed him, and he picked up the pace.

At least I have drawn them away, he though grimly, battling with incipient guilt at his desertion even as he struggled to remember the quickest way down to the cages. That will buy him a little more time, and I will return.

Otto watched the wizard flee with a smirk on his face. Given the choice, mortals always took the easier path. That was what made them so easy to turn, and so easy to kill. They had no proper comprehension of hard choices, the kind that would lead a tribesman to give up everything in the service of higher powers.

Sacrifice was the key. Learning to submit before the strenuous demands of uncompromising gods was the first step on the road to greatness. As he slammed the scythe towards the human Emperor’s face, he began to feel excitement building.

He would be the one to end the dreams of humanity. He would be the one who would bring the City of Sigmar down, its every stone cracked and frozen by the abundance of the plague-forest, its every tower squeezed into cloying dust by the strangle-vines and barb-creepers. Soon all that would be left would be the Garden, the infinite expression of the Urfather’s genius, swamping all else and extending infinitely towards all the horizons.

Heady with glee, he cracked the scythe down further, now aiming for the Emperor’s chest. Karl Franz blocked the blow, but he seemed to be going through the motions now. A strange expression remained on his haggard face – a kind of serenity.

That bothered Otto, and he pressed harder. With a wild swipe, he managed to knock the runefang aside. He pounced, driving a long gouge down the Emperor’s arm and eliciting a stark cry of pain.

Karl Franz staggered back against the altar, half-falling to his knees. Otto rose up triumphantly, holding his scythe high.

‘And so it ends!’ he screamed, and dragged the blade down.

Just before it connected, though, a sword-edge interposed itself, locking with the curved scythe-edge and holding it fast. Otto looked down to see an Empire warrior in the way, his blade held firm and his eyes blazing with fury. He wore elaborate plate armour, and his hawk-like face was half-hidden by a voluminous moustache.

For a second, Otto was transfixed with shock. All the mortals were supposed to be dead or driven far away from the Palace. He turned to see other armoured Empire warriors charge into the chamber and launch themselves at the remaining northmen.

So there were some humans with the spine to fight on.

Otto twisted his mouth into a smirking leer, and yanked the scythe free. The Emperor, bleeding profusely, fell to his knees, his place taken by the newcomer.

‘You come here,’ snarled the moustached warrior through gritted teeth, drawing himself up to his full height. ‘You bring the plague, you bring the fires, you bring the pain.’ His scarred face creased into an expression of pure, unadulterated hatred. ‘Now I bring the reckoning.’

Martak panted as he ran, feeling his battered body protest. They were already on his heels, and he could almost taste their foul breath on his neck.

He careered down the spiralling stairs, hoping that he had remembered the way, trying to think and not to panic. He ought to have been able to smell the beasts by now, but the festering mess in the Palace made it hard to tell the stinks apart.

He reached the base of the stairs, almost slipping on the tiles but managing to push on. He shoved through a thick wooden door, and at last heard the sounds he had been hoping to pick up.

The beasts were roused – they were pawing in their pens, driven mad by the spoor of Chaos within the Palace. The griffons would be tearing at their cages, the demigryphs and manticores would be slavering with fury. And down at the very heart of it all, the mightiest of creatures, the one that only Karl Franz had ever been able to tame, would be waiting, its old, cold mind roused to thoughts of murder.

Martak felt something whirr past his ear, and veered sharply to one side. A throwing-axe clanged from the wall ahead of him, missing by a finger’s breadth.

He kept going, trying to keep his shoulders lower. A pair of iron gates loomed before him, still locked and looped with chains. It was all he could do to blurt out a spell of opening before he stumbled into them, pushing through and staggering into the darkness beyond.

From all around him, he suddenly heard the snarls and growls of the caged animals. It was uniquely comforting – he had spent his whole life among beasts, and now they surrounded him once more.

He smiled, and kept running. He knew where he was going now, and there was no hope of stopping him. He could already smell the embers, and hear the dry hiss of scales moving over stone.

Almost there.

Karl Franz watched helplessly as Helborg took the fight to Otto Glott. He had been cut deep, and felt his arm hanging uselessly at his side. The Reiksguard knights Helborg had brought with him threw themselves into battle with the sorcerer and the behemoth, roaring the name of Sigmar as they wheeled their blades about.

Karl Franz could only look on. It was staggeringly brave. He had last seen Helborg on the eve of Heffengen, and could only imagine what trials he had faced in the meantime. He looked a shadow of his earlier, ebullient self – his face was lean, disfigured by long gouges and etched with fatigue. It looked like he could barely walk, let alone fight, but somehow he worked his blade with all the old arrogant flair, driving Otto back with every blurred arc of steel, giving him no room to respond.

Karl Franz wanted to speak out, then – to tell him that he had got it wrong, and that no force of arms could possibly make a difference now. If the Glotts were slain in this chamber, nothing would change – the armies of Chaos would still run rampant, the city would still be lost, the Reik would still be corrupted. For his whole life, Karl Franz had drilled into his subjects the need to fight on, to never give in, to reach for the blade as a first resort. He could hardly tell them any different now, but as he watched his chosen Reiksguard being hacked to pieces by the dread power of Ethrac and the sheer brute force of Ghurk, it made him want to weep.

Moving stiffly, he shoved himself onto one elbow, panting hard as the pain kicked in. He could not move from the altar. That was the key – the great sacrificial slab that had been placed under the dome for a reason. The light of the comet streamed down through the gap, bathing everything in a candle-yellow sheen. He had learned to accept that only he could see the light properly, that even Martak had not been able to perceive it truly, and that to others it was a pale flicker in a scoured sky. To him, it was the light of the sun and the moon combined, a brilliant star amid the sour corruption of the earth. It was calling to him even now, reminding him of the great trial, whispering words of power that only he could hear.

Karl Franz stood up, wincing against the pain. It was as Helborg had told him – he was not a man like any other, one whose soul was bound by mortal limits. He had always been set apart, devoted to a purer calling.

You are the Empire.

Helborg was tiring now. He could not sustain the fury, and Otto was beating him back. Karl Franz looked on grimly, knowing that Helborg had to be beaten, but nonetheless barely able to watch it unfold.

The Reiksmarshal launched into a final series of devastating strikes, throwing everything into them. The way he moved the runefang then was magnificent, as good as he had ever been, and against any other foe it would surely have brought the kill he was so desperate for. For an instant, Helborg threw off his long weariness, his disappointments and his inadequacies, and became the perfect swordsman again, a vision of pure speed and power. It was all Otto could do to avoid being smashed aside and hacked to pieces, and for the first time a sheen of sweat burst out across his calloused brow.

Karl Franz could have joined him then. He could have limped over, adding his runefang to his Reiksmarshal’s, and perhaps together they could have slain the beast. Instead, he remained bathed in the light of the comet, loathing every moment of inaction but staying true to the duty that compelled him.

When the end came, it was swift. Helborg overreached himself, leaving his defence open. Otto pounced, jabbing the point of the scythe down hard. The wickedly curved edge bit deep, cracking Helborg’s breastplate and driving into the flesh beneath. With unnatural strength, Otto dragged Helborg off his feet and hurled him to one side, ripping out his heart as he did so.

Helborg skidded across the marble before crashing into the altar, his chest torn open. With his final breath, he looked up at Karl Franz, and there was still a wild hope in those pain-wracked eyes. He shivered, his arms clutching, his body rigid and his back arched.

‘Fight... on,’ he gasped.

Then he went limp, slumped against the altar’s edge, his armour drenched in blood. The last defender of Altdorf died at the heart of his city, gazing up at the empty dome above, his haunted features at last free from the pain that had consumed him for so long.

With Helborg slain, Otto advanced on Karl Franz once more, a wide grin on his face. In the background, the Reiksguard were being cut down, one by one.

‘You people do not know when to give in,’ said Otto. ‘It becomes tiresome.’

Karl Franz watched him approach, preparing himself, knowing how painful the transition would be, dreading it and yet yearning for it to come.

‘But surely you can see that this thing is over now,’ said Otto, drawing back the scythe. His green eyes glittered with triumph. ‘There is nothing more to be done, heir of the boy-god. Listen to the truth: the reign of man is ended.’

He swung the blade, and the tip, still hot from Helborg’s blood, sliced into the Emperor’s chest.

Karl Franz staggered backward, his breath taken away by the agony of it, struggling to keep his vision. Otto ripped the scythe-blade free, tearing up muscle and sinew and leaving a long bloody trail across the altar’s side.

The Emperor slid further down, his body pressed against the altar-top, the runefang falling uselessly from his open palm. Each of the three Glott brothers, their enemies destroyed now, shuffled closer, peering with morbid curiosity as the life ebbed out of their victim.

Karl Franz looked up at them, gasping for air, feeling the blood clog in his throat.

They were not even gloating. They suddenly looked like children, shocked at what they had done, as if only now could they contemplate what it might mean.

That made him want to smile. He gripped the altar’s edge, and ceased fighting. Everything went cold, then black, and then became nothing. It was like tipping over the edge of a precipice, then falling fast.

And so it was that, under the shattered dome of the Chamber of Ghal Maraz, Karl Franz, Elector Count of Reikland, Prince of Altdorf, Bearer of the Silver Seal and the holder of the Drachenzahn runefang, Emperor of all Sigmar’s holy inheritance between the Worlds Edge Mountains and the Great Sea, died.

TWENTY-FIVE

Martak reached the very base of the Menagerie’s dungeons, his breath heaving and his lungs burning. The last cage was buried deep, surrounded by huge walls of stone and ringed with iron chains. The air stank of flame and charring, and every surface had been burned as black as coal.

He could hear the footfalls at the top of the stairs. They had almost caught him, right at the end, and he could sense their bloodlust burning like a beacon in the darkness.

He reached the iron lattice, slamming into it and fumbling for the great lock. It was the size of his chest, and took a key the length of his forearm, but that would not be necessary now. Stammering over the words, he spoke the spell of unbinding, and the lock fell apart.

Heavy clangs rang out as iron-shod boots thudded down the steep stairs, and Martak barely pushed his way into the cage before metal gauntlets reached out to haul him back.

He wrenched himself free, skidding over to one side as he scrambled for safety. For a terrible moment, grovelling in the dark, he wondered if he had made some awful mistake, and the vast cage was already empty. If so, all he had done was lead his pursuers into a dead end, one from which there was no escaping.

A second later, though, twin gouts of flame lit up the shadows, and he allowed himself a gasp of relief.

The bursts of fire illuminated a curled, twisted and writhing mass of scaly hide, snaking in loops at the rear of the huge pen. Enormous wings folded up against the arched roof, leathery and as thick as a man’s hand. Two great eyes, slit-pupilled like a cat’s, blinked in the dark, exposing yellow depths that seemed to go on forever.

Blind to the danger, the warriors of Chaos blundered into the cage after Martak, only realising their error too late.

The Imperial dragon opened its vast jaws, sending a stream of crimson flame roaring into them. The marauders screamed, clawing at their own flesh as the dragon’s fire tore through them. Those that could tried to retreat, but the curtains of immolation overtook them all, ripping the armour from their backs and melting it across their blistered skin.

Martak pressed himself flat against the cage’s curving inner wall, feeling the furious heat surge across his face. He screwed his eyes shut, barely enduring the ferocious blaze even as it thundered past.

After only a few moments, the torrent guttered out. Martak coughed and gasped, falling to his knees as smoke billowed out from the dragon’s jaws. He glanced back to the cage entrance, where dozens of bodies lay gently steaming, as black as burned offerings.

He allowed himself a twisted grin, and shuffled up to the dragon’s great iron collar.

‘That was well done, dragon,’ he said, reaching up for the mighty lock.

The dragon hissed at him, sending a fresh burst of flame-laced hot air blasting into his flushed face. Martak whispered words for the quieting of the animal spirits, drawing on the Wind of Ghur that eddied throughout the whole Menagerie. He had no chance of truly mastering a dragon’s mind, but he could do just enough to persuade it that he was no threat, and that freedom was a small step away, and that the horrors running amok in the Palace above were the real prey.

He placed his hands over the massive padlock, and exerted his will. The lock clicked open, and the iron chains fell to the ground with a resounding clang. Though still hampered by the confines of the cell, the great creature stretched out, its head rising up to the roof and its wings unfurling around the walls. A grating, iron-hard growl emerged from its chest, and its clawed forelegs pawed at the straw.

‘Now, take the fight to them!’ urged Martak gazing up at the creature’s snake-like neck and marvelling at just how huge it was. ‘You are free – let me guide you.’

The dragon did not move. Though released from its chains, it remained where it was, curled up in a dungeon at the very base of the vast Palace. Its old, old face seemed lost in thought, its eyes narrowing and its nostrils flared.

Martak began to lose patience. If the Emperor still lived, there would be little time to save him. Every moment saw more of the city destroyed, and more lives lost.

‘Come on!’ he commanded, infusing his voice with as much beast-mastery as he could. ‘What are you waiting for?’

As soon as he uttered those words, though, he realised what was happening. The dragon was waiting for something. It had no intention at all of leaving its cell, and its huge head remained motionless, slightly inclined, as if listening.

It was only then that Martak felt it himself. He had been so preoccupied with survival, so fixed on his goal of releasing the dragon, that the tremors had passed him by completely, but now, with his hunters slain and the mighty beast standing before him, he wondered how he had missed them.

The ground was vibrating. Not strongly, as if in an earthquake, but with a steady, persistent harmonic. The straws under his feet were trembling, and lines of dust were falling from the brickwork roof. A low hum filled the chamber, reverberating just on the edge of hearing. It sounded like it was coming from everywhere – the stone, the earth, the air itself.

Martak backed away from the dragon. Whatever he sensed was nothing like the sorcery that had infused the city since the beginning of the siege. It felt... older, somehow, as if it belonged to Altdorf’s very bones. After witnessing the dead raised and the order of nature turned against itself, it should have been impossible to conceive of more potent magic coming to the Reik, but Martak was enough of a mage to recognise true power when he felt it.

‘What is this?’ he murmured, looking up at the roof of the dragon’s cage, any thought of trying to use the creature now abandoned. ‘What comes now?’

For a moment, nothing changed.

Then the first shafts of light angled down from the open dome, harsh and piercing. The Glottkin looked up, as did their surviving troops in the chamber. More shafts lanced through the gaping breach, shimmering like spun gold. They focussed on the altar, seeming to soak into the iron.

Otto started to back away. Ethrac stared at the growing pool of gold, a gathering unease on his face.

‘And what?’ Otto demanded. ‘What is this?’

Spinning points of gold coalesced over the altar-top, clustering together and glittering like stars. Far above, the clouds broke at last, burned away by the lone star riding the high airs. Across the city, beleaguered defenders suddenly stared up into the heavens, noticing the strange play of light dancing across the shattered townscape. The marauders paused in their plunder, and daemons shrunk back, their laughter halted.

‘Just a star!’ protested Ethrac, outraged. ‘You told me – it was just a star!’

The light kept growing, building up into a column of iridescence that hurt the eyes to look upon. A column of pure gold shot down onto the altar where Karl Franz’s body lay like the sacrifice it had been. Shimmering luminescence shot out in all directions, trembling with a blaze of metallic light.

Otto was forced back from the altar, his eyes streaming. Ethrac’s staff shattered in his hands, and its bells rolled across the marble.

With a roar like distant thunder, the rain of gold turned into a torrent, cascading down from the comet and smashing against the altar-top. Rays of severe iridescence radiated outward, refracting and spinning, making the columns around them glisten as if newly gilded. The stained-glass windows blew out, sending shards of diamond-like glass flying into the plague-storm beyond.

Bathed now in a pillar of shifting gold, the Emperor’s body began to change. The harrowed expression left his face and the lines of care smoothed out. His corpse rose, suspended in an aegis of fire. The chains above the altar thrashed and twisted, buffeted by a new wind.

His eyes opened, and golden brilliance flared from the sockets. He righted himself, now floating directly over the altar, and swept his blinding gaze across the cowering mutants below. He seemed to augment, to grow, becoming far more than a man. The last of his armour fell away, exposing a shifting phantasm of pure coruscation beneath. Shafts of gold danced around him, reflecting from the now-dazzling surfaces of the chamber.

It was hard to make out what manner of being now hung above the black iron. Karl Franz’s face could be made out amid the sparkling clouds of light, blurred and fractured, but older faces were there too, coexisting in a merger of souls. A series of Emperors gazed serenely out from the blistering fires, unharmed by them, sustained by them, before the vision shifted once more.

Otto’s flesh began to burn, curling away from the bone in crisping flaps. Ethrac and Ghurk followed, their withered muscles scorched by the rays of light surging from the gathering inferno of gold. The being that had once been the Emperor continued to expand, until an argent titan hung in the chamber’s heart, blazing like the dawn rising.

A voice echoed around the shimmering space, redolent of the old Emperors, but containing a choir of others with it, all speaking in a harmony of different accents and timbres.

‘The Law of Death is broken,’ it announced, and the words echoed among the roar of golden flames. ‘All worlds are now open.’

The titan’s face began to flicker, changing from one to another, now bearded, now smooth, now old, now young. A new visage came to the fore – a ruddy-cheeked youth with a mane of long blond hair, laughing with warrior’s eyes. The intensity of the golden aura became truly blinding, spreading out across the entire chamber in shimmering curtains of brilliance.

‘We are the Empire,’ announced the flickering avatar, its flaming eyes sweeping across the burning vista. ‘We have always been the Empire.’

It raised its hands high, and it seemed that a mighty warhammer now hung from the clanking chains. The titan took it up, and the weapon blazed with the same intense light that filled the chamber.

‘And now,’ it said, portentously, ‘let all things change.’

A hard bang rang out, blowing what remained of the glass out of the windows and making the earth shake. The heart of the golden being exploded, filling the vaults with white-hot illumination. A racing wave of energy surged out from the epicentre, sweeping and ethereal, consuming all before it. The burning bodies of the Glotts were devoured, seared to ash and blown away by the racing storm-front.

A radial wave smashed through the walls of the chapel, rising up in a dome of unleashed power. The hemisphere, swimming with translucence, spread across the entire city, a wall of gold, tearing out from the Palace at its heart and scouring everything it touched. The scorching barrage of flame destroyed every lingering creature of Chaos as it thundered outward, stripping the layers of slime and filth clean from the stone beneath and immolating them into nothingness. The fallen undead were blasted apart, their dry bones turned to powder and thrown into the wind.

Above the city, the last of the plague-storm clouds were torn away, exposing a clear sky above. The comet burned vividly now, linked to the earth by the roaring column of gold. The expanding fire-dome ground its way outward across the entire valley, rising into the heavens and encompassing the fields of war below. At its edge, the corrupted forest burst and burned, and its foul taints were stripped clear of the raw earth.

For a moment longer, the entire Palace shimmered from the golden storm within, its every portal bleeding pure comet-fire. The dome of Sigmar’s temple flared in answer, reflecting mesmerising rays across a glittering sky. The Reik, for so long a turgid well of slime, burst into cleansing flame, revealing pure waters boiling under the skin of filth. Aeons of grime were scrubbed from the ancient stone walls, revealing Altdorf as in the days of old – the city of white stone, the home of kings, the birthplace of Emperors.

And then, with a final roar, the dome of light shimmered out. The city below it seemed to shudder, and then fall still.

The dead were gone. The corrupted were consumed. Amid the wreckage and the ruins, the surviving human defenders crept out of whatever cover they had found, shading their eyes against the glare that still lingered on the waters.

The air was cold and clear. For the first time in months, the wind tasted fresh. The spores were gone, the cankers had been stripped away.

With a growing sense of awe, they began to realise what had happened. The enemy was destroyed, burned on the altar of wrath, its limitless powers exposed for the sham and trickery they were. Something new had emerged, something unprecedented.

The Palace still glowed from within. Whatever had been unleashed there still lingered, though none dared approach its burning precincts.

All they could do was stare up at the listing battlements and the broken towers, and guess at what new and terrible god now dwelt amid the graven images of the old.