The End Times: The Return of Nagash

NINE

Mannfred lifted the pale arm from his lap and sent it and the bloodless body it was attached to thudding to the ground with a negligent gesture. The body had belonged to a young woman: a peasant from one of the villages they had taken the night before, he thought. Now it belonged to the worms, until he decided to add her pitiful carcass to his legions. He brushed his thumb across his lips and said, ‘Bring Duke Forzini forward, if you please. I would speak with our host.’

Count Nyktolos nodded shallowly and stepped out of the tent that Mannfred had claimed for his own. The Vargravian’s features were a distorted parody of a man’s – too wide and flat by far, his flesh the colour of a bruise. A shark-like mouth stretched from pointed ear to pointed ear, and his eyes bulged unpleasantly. He resembled a puppet, with his monocle and his hair greased flat against his stoat-like skull. Looks aside, he was deadly with a blade and had a keen mind, two things Mannfred appreciated. Even better, his ambitions were just petty enough to be amusing, rather than annoying.

‘Since when do you palaver with food, cousin?’ Markos asked, from where he stood, examining the hide map stretched across a wooden frame in the corner of the tent.

‘Speak of the annoyingly ambitious,’ Mannfred murmured. He looked around the tent, taking in the rough decor. It had all the pomp and panoply he expected of the frontier nobleman he had borrowed it from two nights before. Tapestries and animal furs hung from the support poles of the tent, and a quadrupedal, low-slung iron brazier, filled with coals which had long-since gone cold, occupied the centre beneath the smoke hole cut into the top of the tent. A rack of spears – boar, wolf and other more esoteric varieties – stood behind the crudely carved wooden stool he now occupied. He looked down at the staff laid across his lap, and the withered, iron-wrapped thing that had been lashed to the top in ages past: the Claw of Nagash. The thing was a hand – or, more accurately, a claw. It was larger than a man’s, and it seemed to ooze a sorcerous miasma. As he looked at it, the long, skeletal fingers seemed to twitch, as if they yearned to grasp his throat. And perhaps they did. Something of Nagash’s spiteful spirit was trapped in this claw, just as it was in his crown and his books.

He’d brought the Claw so that it might lead him to the object of his search – the skaven-forged Fellblade – the very weapon that had severed Nagash’s hand from his wrist and ended his Great Work the first time. There was a sympathetic vibration between the two, and with a bit of coaxing, the one pointed the way to the other. The Claw whispered to him, and he listened and set his legion marching towards Mad Dog Pass.

It had taken him centuries to discover Kadon of Mourkain’s staff and the Claw, hidden as it had been, in the vaults of that lost city. Ushoran, fearing its power, had sealed it away in the deepest, blackest pit he could find, though he’d taken the Crown for himself. Then, perhaps the ancient vampire had thought that he could master one artefact of Nagash’s but not two, more fool him. Ushoran’s will had not proved equal to the task, though he’d come closer than any save Mannfred himself. Mannfred stroked the staff, and the Claw curled and twitched like an appreciative cat. ‘Poor Ushoran. If only you had listened to me,’ he murmured. ‘I told you that she couldn’t be trusted.’

‘What?’ Markos asked. He sounded annoyed.

Mannfred glanced at him lazily. ‘Nothing, brave cousin. Merely talking to myself.’

‘An old family trait,’ Markos muttered.

‘What was that?’ Mannfred asked, even though he’d heard Markos quite clearly. ‘You have something to say, Markos?’

‘I said that this map is out of date,’ Markos replied smoothly.

‘It’s Tilean. What did you expect? Cartography is one of the few arts that they do not claim to have invented,’ Mannfred said. ‘And in answer to your impertinent query, cousin… This is no mere hunting party, whatever our host claims. Why else bring a troop of armoured horsemen and spearmen?’

‘Spears are used in hunting,’ Markos said. Mannfred could tell from the glint in his eye that he was being deliberately obtuse. Markos’s mood had been positively acidic since they entered the Black Mountains, and hadn’t abated with battle. They’d encountered the small force as they descended the mountains and entered the Hvargir Forest. Mannfred had obscured the movements of his forces through sorcerous means as they travelled through the mountains, but Markos and the others had been growing restive when the unfortunate Duke Forzini had crossed their path with his simple ‘hunting party’. Forzini was one of a multitude of minor, self-proclaimed counts and dukes who ruled the petty fiefdoms of the Border Princes.

‘True,’ Mannfred said. ‘But what hunting expedition requires a hundred such, as well as cuirassiers, fully armoured knights, and what I believe is called a – ah – “galloper gun”, hmm? What were they hunting for, cousin?’

Markos opened his mouth to retort, but Nyktolos returned, and shoved a bedraggled figure through the tent flap. The man, bound in chains, and stinking of blood and fear, fell onto the ground at Mannfred’s feet. Mannfred clapped his hands. ‘Ah, and here he is now! The man of the hour, Duke Farnio Forzini, of the demesne of Alfori. They make a fine millet in Alfori, I’m told. Of course, the prime export, as with so many of these tiny mountain realms is violence.’ Mannfred smiled. ‘Something I myself am well acquainted with.’ He stood and hauled his prisoner to his feet. ‘Up, sirrah, up – on your feet. I am a count, and you a duke, and neither of us should kneel.’

Forzini flinched away from Mannfred’s grin. The Tilean was a big man, with the muscle of a trained knight. He had fought hard, even after he realised what it was he faced. It had taken two days to beat a sense of fear into him. Forzini saw the dead body of the maid and his face went pale. Mannfred followed his gaze and asked, ‘Oh, was she one of your peons? My apologies. I was peckish, you understand. I so rarely allow myself to indulge, but, well, you put up quite a fight and I built up a hellish appetite.’

He looked at the beaten man. He had to reach Mad Dog Pass before the first snows of the season, and that meant moving quickly through the Border Princes. He had no time to indulge in unnecessary battle. If the petty aristocracy of these lands had learned of his approach, and were mobilising to meet him in battle, he needed to know, and sooner rather than later. ‘Where were you marching to?’ Mannfred hissed. ‘Tell me, and I won’t gut you and feed you to my horses.’

‘S-skaven,’ Forzini mumbled, his eyes tightly closed.

Mannfred grunted. ‘How many?’

‘Thousands – more maybe,’ Forzini said. He looked at Mannfred. ‘We were riding to aid my neighbour, Count Tulvik, at Southern Reach. His fortress had come under siege.’

‘Then you were going in the wrong direction,’ Nyktolos said mildly, cleaning his monocle on his sleeve. ‘I was once a… guest of old Tulvik.’ He blinked. ‘Well, his grandfather, actually.’

Mannfred growled. He caught Forzini by the throat. ‘I don’t care for lies, Forzini.’

‘W-we were! I swear!’ Forzini choked out. ‘But then, a runner brought word that my own hold was under siege. So I turned back – my wife and children, my people!’ The last exploded out and Forzini broke free of Mannfred with a convulsive surge of strength. Mannfred let him go. Forzini lunged for the hilt of Mannfred’s sword. ‘I have to save them!’

Mannfred casually dropped his fist onto the back of Forzini’s skull and knocked him sprawling to the ground. He pinned the cursing duke in place with his foot and looked at Markos. The other vampire nodded grudgingly. ‘That would explain what we’ve seen, wouldn’t it? This isn’t an isolated raid we’re talking about, cousin. It’s an invasion.’

When they’d descended into the foothills of the Black Mountains, the plains and fenland and forest should have been dotted with proud, if small, cities and fortified outposts as it always had been. What they had seen instead was a land in ruins. Castles were scorched piles, and towns were reduced to smouldering embers. And everywhere, the signs of plague – bodies choked the ditches and mass graves lay full, yet uncovered.

At first, Mannfred thought it was simply the aftermath of one of the interminable border wars, which occasionally flared up and then died away. But the devastation was too extensive. Memories of the portents of doom that he had witnessed in his scrying so many months ago had come rushing back, of the fates of Tilea and Estalia, and he knew that the end that he had witnessed was drawing closer. The weft and weave of the world was realigning and time was running out. That was the only thing that could draw the skaven from their twilight burrows in such numbers as Forzini and his own scrying had described.

He had faith enough in Elize’s ability to maintain control of Sylvania in his absence, but he knew that no other could defend his realm better than he could. If the skaven were truly massing in such numbers in the Border Princes, he couldn’t count on his sorceries seeing him unmolested to his goal. Better then not to even try, now that he had passed beyond the borders of the Empire.

‘How many prisoners did we take?’ he asked, after a moment.

‘Ah, one, two, three… Fifty or sixty,’ Nyktolos said, ticking off his fingers. ‘Mostly the duke’s household guard. They fought hard for a band of jumped-up bandit-knights.’

‘Due to my friend Forzini here, I have no doubt,’ Mannfred said. He caught hold of the chains binding Forzini and pulled him close. ‘I am not ordinarily in the habit of giving choices, Forzini. It sets a bad precedent, you see, for royalty to allow the dregs to think that they get a say in their own fates. But, if there are thousands of skaven slumping and sneaking through these lands, I’ll need every sword I can get, dead or… otherwise.’ Mannfred licked his lips. Though the girl’s blood had quenched his thirst, he could still detect the erratic thump of Forzini’s pulse. Mannfred tightened his grip on the chains. ‘Swear fealty to me, Duke Forzini, and I shall save your lands for you. Indeed, you can be the hero who saves the entirety of the Border Princes, if that is your wish. Or die here, and ride at my side regardless as a nameless and mindless thing. Serve me in life, or in death. But you shall serve me. Name your preference.’

He heard Vlad’s sibilant chuckle as he gazed down into the flushed, sweating features of the duke. Those are familiar words. You honour me, my son, Vlad murmured. Mannfred could almost see him out of the corner of his eye. He blinked, and Vlad vanished. ‘Well?’ he snarled, hauling Forzini close. ‘Make your choice.’

‘Y-you will save my people?’ Forzini asked.

‘I will save everyone,’ Mannfred said.

Forzini closed his eyes and nodded jerkily. Mannfred gave a satisfied growl and sank his fangs into the Duke’s throat. As he drank, his eyes met Nyktolos’s and the ugly vampire nodded sharply and left the tent. When he had finished, he let the duke’s body slump to the ground. Crouching over him, Mannfred used a thumbnail to slit his palm, and then squeezed several drops of blood into the ragged wounds he had made in Forzini’s throat.

As he rose, his hand was already healing. ‘Is this wise, cousin?’ Markos asked, looking down at the not-quite-dead man. ‘Also, I hope you aren’t expecting us to turn his servants. Such a thing is below even my slight dignity.’

Mannfred smiled. Screams echoed from outside. ‘The Vargravian is already handling it. By the time we reach our destination, I shall have a bodyguard worthy of an emperor of the dead, cousin.’

Markos was about to reply, when the air was suddenly split by the howl of a wolf. The sound ratcheted through the tent, drowning out even the scream’s of Forzini’s men. Markos drew his blade and rushed to the tent opening. ‘The alarm,’ he barked.

Mannfred followed more sedately, wiping his lips with his fingers. It seemed he wasn’t going to have to go looking for the skaven – they had come to him.

The castle on the crag had once been one of the great bulwarks upon which the might of Brionne had been built, guarding the province’s border against all enemies. Now, it was a fire-blackened ruin, long since picked over by scavengers of all varieties, human or otherwise.

Heinrich Kemmler, the Lichemaster, lifted his staff and thumped the end of it on the ground, calling the dead of the ruined keep to attention. The crackle of bones pushing through the ash and the wreckage of their own flesh filled the air, and Kemmler closed his eyes and moved his hand and staff like the orchestral conductor at the Imperial opera. The dead rose at his cajoling, reaching towards him like penitents in a temple, and a harsh, croaking laugh slipped from Kemmler’s lips.

Arkhan watched the Lichemaster draw the dead from their too-brief slumber, and felt no little surprise at the obvious power the elderly necromancer now seemed to wield. When he had last seen Kemmler, in the waning months of the Bretonnian civil war, the Lichemaster had been a mumbling, muttering wretch, barely cognisant of the world around him. Now, Kemmler resembled the Lichemaster of old, full of cold, dark reservoirs of power.

Those reservoirs had barely been tapped in the Vaults, Arkhan knew, when he and Kemmler had cracked open the web-strewn, elf-sealed tombs that lined the high reaches of those mountains months earlier. Kemmler had swept aside the antediluvian magics that chained the wild, selfish spirits that clustered in those mausoleums as if they had been nothing more than cobwebs. Arkhan had done the same, but he knew the origins of his own strength. He knew what lay at the bottom of the inner wells from which he drew his power. Kemmler’s newfound strength, on the other hand, was a puzzle and a concern. His wrinkled frame swelled with the winds of death and dark magic, and the dead responded to his smallest gesture. Kemmler’s glittering gaze met Arkhan’s, and the old man smiled widely, exposing a crooked cemetery of brown and black tombstone teeth.

Arkhan gave no sign that he had noticed the smile. Instead, he let his gaze slide past the puppet to the puppetmaster. Krell the Undying. Krell of the Great Axe, who Arkhan knew of old, and who had served as Nagash’s right hand, as Arkhan was his left. The ancient wight, clad in his ornate armour, which was stained a rusty hue by the oceans of gore that he had waded through over the centuries, loomed over Kemmler, his terrible axe hanging from his hand. Krell met Arkhan’s gaze, and his great horned helm twitched slightly. Had that been a nod of greeting, a gesture of respect, or simply an idle shudder of the wretched berserker spirit that fuelled the wight, Arkhan wondered. There was no way to tell. Krell’s mind was a roiling storm of battle-lust and blood-greed at the best of times.

If Kemmler was a worry, then Krell was a fixed point: the unassailable rampart upon which the future could be erected. Nagash had wrested Krell’s mighty soul from the clutches of the Dark Gods, and bound it to him as inextricably as he had Arkhan’s. They were his hands, his sword and shield, and his will made flesh.

But was that all they were? He thought again of the Everchild’s taunt – had it been a taunt? – that he was, in some way, still the man he had been. He leaned against his staff, gnawing over her words. The effects of Morgiana’s glamour had long since faded, but he could still feel the wounds it had wrought in his psyche. It had stirred the embers of a fire he’d thought long since extinguished. And if those embers still existed within him, what of Krell?

He gazed at the armoured bulk of the enormous wight. If there was some part of Krell as he had been left in that powerful husk, what might it do if it awakened? Would even Nagash be able to control such an entity, if its ire was aroused?

And what if it already had been? Krell met his gaze, and the two dead things stared at one another across the courtyard. Whose puppet are you? Arkhan thought. Kemmler laughed, and Arkhan turned towards him. The Lichemaster was directing two of the newly risen dead to fit a scavenged bridle and saddle onto the resurrected body of the lord of the keep. Then, if Krell broke his leash, he suspected he knew where the Great Axe would fall first. The thought was almost amusing. If anyone deserved to be savaged in that way, it was Kemmler.

‘What is he doing?’ Ogiers asked. ‘Is he mad?’ Arkhan looked back at his coterie of servants. The necromancers stood nearby in a nervous cluster, watching as Kemmler worked his sorceries. Even amongst the desecrators of the dead, the Lichemaster was in a league of his own. None of them had wanted to come, and Arkhan could tell that even the normally phlegmatic Fidduci was bothered by the company he now found himself in.

‘You have eyes. What do you think?’ the latter asked. The Tilean was furiously cleaning his spectacles, something he did when he was nervous. ‘Of course he’s mad. He’s always been mad.’

‘But useful, yes?’ Kruk tittered, stroking his wispy beard. He hunched forward over his cousin’s rotting shoulder and stroked the dead man’s mouldering features affectionately. ‘And it is no strange thing. A horse is a horse, of course – two legs or four, yes?’ The crippled midget bounced in his harness and laughed at his own words.

Across the courtyard, Kemmler forced the dead lord to fall onto all fours. Kemmler laughed again, and raised his staff. Dark energy crackled along its length and bodies shuffled towards the kneeling lord. They knelt, linking arms and legs, and his intended mount climbed atop them. The whole twitching mass resembled nothing so much as an awkward pyramid for a moment. Then Kemmler swept his staff out and barked a guttural phrase, and the dead men began to sink and slide into one another with a variety of unpleasant sounds. Bones burst through sloughing meat and crashed into one another, splintering and reforming as flesh melted into flesh, and organs were discarded in splashes of blood and fluid.

A moment later, a conglomerate horror that reminded Arkhan of a spider, if a spider were made of writhing human bodies, pushed itself up on its multitude of hands and feet. Kemmler climbed into the saddle and hauled on the reins, forcing the thing to rear. He laughed again as it dropped down, and leered at Arkhan. ‘Well, liche? What do you think of my new pet?’

‘Very pretty, Kemmler. You’re welcome, by the way. A less genial master might not have allowed you to indulge your appetites for flesh-craft,’ Arkhan said. He was rewarded by a scowl from the necromancer. While Krell’s loyalty was certain, Kemmler had a distaste for servitude that bordered on mania.

‘Allow? We are partners, Nehekharan,’ Kemmler said. ‘You need me.’ He grinned at Ogiers and the others. ‘My power far outstrips that of your cat paws. Between them, they might just manage to summon a small horde, but you’ll never take La Maisontaal Abbey without me.’ He spat the name of their destination like a curse. Then, for Kemmler, perhaps it was. He had tried to assault the abbey more than once in his sordid career, and failed every time. Arkhan wondered if Kemmler could feel the call of the artefact hidden in the abbey’s vaults even as he himself could. He suspected that Nagash whispered in the Lichemaster’s ear, whether Kemmler knew it or not. Else how could he have controlled Krell – if he truly did.

‘Whatever you need to tell yourself, so long as you do as I say,’ Arkhan rasped. Kemmler made a face. He was different. Arkhan could not say why, or how, but it was as if something had been awakened in the necromancer. And Arkhan did not like it. He did not like Kemmler’s newfound lucidity, or the threads of power that ran through him. ‘We are both servants of a higher power. All of us here serve that power, lest anyone has forgotten.’

He turned, taking in the other necromancers, and the lazing vampires, who met his gaze with glittering red glares. ‘Do not think that you can stray. Time runs slow for the dead, but it runs all the same,’ he said, his voice carrying to every corner and ear capable of hearing and comprehending. He raised his staff and gestured to the sky, which boiled like a storm-tossed sea of green and black overhead. Sickly coronas rippled across the shroud of the night, and green scars carved through the black, streaking down towards distant mountains. It reminded Arkhan of the pearlescent flesh of a corpse succumbing to decay.

The world was rotting inside and out. It was dying. But it would linger on its deathbed for millennia, if the thrones and dominations that stood arrayed in his path had their way. The gods of men and daemons fought to own a world that had one foot in its grave. Only in death would it be redeemed. Only by the will of the Undying King.

The cat, in its usual place on his shoulder, stretched, bones and ligaments popping audibly as it dug its claws into his robes. He felt a surge of purpose in him as he continued to speak, though he wondered, deep in the secret places of his mind, whether those words were his, or those of Nagash. ‘We all serve the will and whim of the Undying King, and it is his hand that guides us on this road. It is by his will that we all exist. Vampires were born from his black blood as surely as you walkers of the deathly way follow his wisdom and hearken to his teachings, as certainly as it was by his will that I persist in my task. We owe him our service, our loyalty, for without him, we would be dust and forgotten. Instead, we stand at the threshold of the world’s heart and knock. We were the meek, and now we are the mighty. We serve the King of the World.’ He looked at Kemmler. ‘All of us. Remember that.’

Kemmler snarled and opened his mouth to reply, when a black horse galloped into the courtyard, hurtling through the shattered portcullis with preternatural grace. Its rider slid from the saddle as the horse came to a stop near Arkhan. The vampire gestured over his shoulder and barked, ‘Company!’ The vampire was one of a number Mannfred had insisted he take as an honour-guard. This one was called Crowfiend, he thought, though he resembled neither a crow nor a fiend as far as Arkhan could tell. Nonetheless, Arkhan preferred his company to that of Anark, the brutish commander of the armoured blood knights. That one stank of ambition and impatience, two things that Arkhan no longer understood or tolerated.

Arkhan cocked his head. ‘Beastmen?’ His scouts had reported that a sizeable herd of the Chaos creatures were nearby, laying waste to a village in the valley below. Whether they desired battle, or merely wanted to scavenge in Arkhan’s wake, he couldn’t say.

‘Bretonnians,’ Erikan Crowfiend said. ‘They’re flying the flag of Quenelles.’

Arkhan felt a twinge of surprise. His forces had skirted Quenelles’s southern border despite the fact that their goal lay in the strand of the Grey Mountains that marked the eastern edge of that province. Instead, Arkhan had led his followers further south, coming down out of the mountains into Carcassonne, rather than risking the wrath of Athel Loren.

The southernmost provinces had been the most heavily devastated in the civil war, stripped of foodstuffs and able-bodied men. He’d done so intentionally, hoping to leave himself a clear path to reach the abbey when he wished. But evidently, the province had not been as devastated as he thought.

‘Tancred,’ Kemmler snarled. There was an eagerness in that sound that disquieted Arkhan. He recalled suddenly that it had been a previous Duke of Quenelles who had defeated the Lichemaster during one of his periodic attempts to take La Maisontaal Abbey. It was the same duke, or perhaps his son, who had harried the Lichemaster out of Bretonnia and into the Grey Mountains.

‘Possibly, or it could be any one of a hundred other displaced aristocrats from that province,’ Arkhan said, gesturing sharply. ‘It matters little. They are in our way. We will smash them, and continue on. Nagash must rise, and none will stand in our way.’

TEN

When Snikrat saw the tents, arrayed so temptingly on the blighted plains that hugged the edge of the forest, he immediately began to salivate. It looked like yet another of the petty man-thing princelings was attempting to flee. It was the perfect target – big enough to give a fight, small enough that the fight wouldn’t last very long, thus presenting him, Snikrat the Magnificent, with the perfect opportunity to cement his heroism in the minds of his followers, without actually risking himself too much.

‘Forward, brave warriors,’ he chittered, flourishing his blade. ‘Forward for the swift-glory of Clan Mordkin! Forward, at the command of me, Snikrat the Magnificent.’ Clanrats stampeded past him, most of them already intent on looting the collection of tents and supply wagons, the latter seemingly unprotected. His stormvermin bodyguard, the aptly named Bonehides, knew better than to leave his side. Partially it was because it was their job to see that he survived, and partially because the wiser among the black-furred skaven knew Snikrat’s reputation for sniffing out the best loot. Snikrat grinned and gestured towards the supply wagons. ‘There! We must flank them, in their side, there, so that none escape, by which I mean flee and thus possibly evade us,’ he hissed out loud, just in case any of Feskit’s spies were listening. ‘Come, my Bonehides – double-fast-move-move!’

Feskit had returned to the clan’s lair with the bulk of their army, and the bulk of the loot a few days before, leaving Snikrat to pilfer the scraps and escort the slowest of the hundreds of filthy human slaves Clan Mordkin had taken in their ravaging of the Border Princes. Feskit likely thought he was being generous. Snikrat would show him true generosity soon enough – Feskit would have all the sharp steel he could stomach. The thought of vengeance, ill-defined and unlikely as it was, filled Snikrat with a surge of confidence. First he would kill any humans who tried to flee, as they inevitably did, being inveterate cowards, then he would loot the wagons – and then, yes, then, at some point, inevitably, after a suitable period of time, he would kill Feskit and wrest control of Clan Mordkin from his unworthy paws.

Granted, there were probably some steps in there he was missing, but he’d work those out when he came to them.

He led his stormvermin towards the wagons, looking forward to the screams of the man-things. But instead of screams, all he found was… Quiet. He stopped, and his warriors clattered to a halt around him. Snikrat’s hackles itched, and he sniffed the air. It stank of blood and rot, which weren’t the usual odours one associated with humans.

Snikrat heard the sounds of his warriors attacking the camp. To his finely attuned ears, it did not sound like a slaughter. At least, not the good kind. His musk-gland tightened and he fought down a sudden surge of irrational fear. What was there to be afraid of? Was he not Snikrat the Magnificent, heir to Feskit, whether the latter admitted it or not?

‘Come-come, let us take the wagons, by which I mean these wheeled conveyances here, for the greater glory of skavenkind,’ he said. His next words died in his furry throat as the air quivered with a low, harsh growl. That growl was joined by several more. Black, lean shapes moved across the top of the wagons or behind them, and Snikrat looked about, suddenly aware that the wagons weren’t as undefended as he’d assumed.

Wolves crouched on the wagons or slunk from beneath them. Each bore numerous wounds, any one of which should have laid such beasts low, Snikrat saw as he extended his blade warily, his stormvermin clustering about him. Yet they didn’t seem bothered by the broken shafts of arrows and spears that poked from their sagging hides. ‘Dead-dead things,’ a stormvermin squealed.

‘Nonsense,’ Snikrat blustered. ‘Spears!’

His warriors levelled their cruelly barbed spears and locked shields, forming a rough hedgehog. He’d learned the tactic from a Tilean slave when he was but a pup. Sometimes he regretted eating the old man as quickly as he had. Nothing alive could break a Bonehides square, especially not a pack of quarrelsome curs.

Something laughed.

There was a promise implicit in that sound. Snikrat recognised it, for he himself had often laughed such a laugh while advancing on wounded or unwary prey. It was the laugh of a wolf-rat on the hunt, and his fur bristled with barely restrained terror as his eyes rotated. There, on the top of the wagons, something purple-faced and dead crouched, eyeing him through the lens of a monocle. The thing grinned, displaying row upon row of serrated, sharp teeth. Snikrat swallowed.

‘Oh happy day. A-one, a-two, a-three… So many little rats for me,’ the vampire snarled. Then, faster even than Snikrat the Magnificent could follow, it sprang upon them, its sword whistling down like the stroke of doom.

The spear thrust out at Malagor from the depths of the hay loft. He swatted the rusty head aside with his staff and thrust one long arm into the hay, seizing the spear-wielder and dragging him screaming into the firelight.

The village had already been burned once, but that hadn’t stopped the beastmen from trying to burn it again. Malagor drew the wailing man towards him and calmly silenced him by slamming his head into a nearby post. Then, with a flap of his wings, he flew up and out of the barn, carrying his prize.

He caught an updraught, and rode the hot wind above the burning village. It had been prosperous, as such places went, before the war that had recently rocked this land. Malagor’s lips peeled back from his fangs in a parody of a smile as he looked down and saw his warriors pursuing frightened peasants. There was little enough sport in this land, and he was glad enough to provide his followers with some small bit, before they went into battle.

The herds he led had been growing restless for lack of entertainment or battle. They chafed beneath his will, and he had been forced to meet more than one challenge in the days preceding the slaughter below. The village had been a gift from the Dark Gods; he’d been running low on chieftains, forced as he was to kill any who brayed a challenge.

But the gods were watching over their favoured child, and he felt their hands lift him up and their breath fill him, as they lent him strength and clarity. Their whispers had only grown stronger as he led the herds away from Athel Loren and into the human lands of Carcassonne, burning and pillaging the pitiful remnants of a once proud province along way. At their whim, he had held fast to the reins of the herd, and not unleashed them against Arkhan’s forces when the bone-man and his followers had crossed the Vaults and into Carcassonne. Instead, he had followed them, keeping pace but never allowing the forces under his command to attack the dead legions marching across the landscape. He had been confused at first, but he now saw the truth of the gods’ plan, and found it good.

His captive squirmed and Malagor tightened his grip. The man was screaming still, and pleading with him in the incoherent babble of the man-tongue. Malagor ignored it. He hadn’t brought the creature up into the sky for a conversation. He had brought it to send a message.

Malagor growled in pleasure as his wings carried him out over the village and away. He saw the serpentine length of the River Brienne and the slumped ruin of the fortress that occupied the crags above the village. A column of smoke extended above the latter, blacker than the night sky it rose to meet. The screams of the dying carried on the wind, sped along by his sorceries. After all, what use a beacon if no one noticed?

And the village was a beacon. A signpost for the army that even now advanced towards it, riding west from Quenelles. Malagor could hear the horns of the Bretonnian host, and knew that they were close. His wings flapped, carrying him to meet them. The gods whispered to him, telling him what he must do, and he did it, happily. He swooped upwards, wings beating, and tore open the belly of his captive. Its screams were like music, and he howled in accompaniment as he gutted the squirming, hairless thing.

The bone-man and his creatures were close by, in the castle on the high hill overlooking the village and the river. They had been there for some time, and to Malagor’s eyes, the ruin glowed with the faint phosphorescence of necromantic sorceries. He could feel the dead stirring, and something else as well – something that drew the attentions of the gods. Whatever it was, it was powerful, and the gods approved of that power. A surge of envy washed through him as he went about his task, and he bit and tore at the now limp body with more ferocity than was necessary. Blood splattered his muzzle and chest, and gore matted his hair.

Butchery complete, he plunged down, wings folded, cutting through the air like a missile fired from a ballista, his burden dangling behind him, its slick intestines looped about his gnarled, hairy fist. At the last possible moment, he banked, hurtling upwards again even as he released the mutilated corpse, and let it tumble gracelessly to the ground before the front ranks of the approaching army. Then Malagor was streaking upwards, across the face of the moon and back towards the village. His warriors would need to be on the move when the Bretonnians arrived, or they would become bogged down in battle.

They would lead the humans on a merry chase, and right into the bone-man’s army. The will of the gods caressed his thoughts, soothing his envy and anger, as if to say, See? See what we do for you, oh best beloved child? See how we spare your lives? See how we deliver victory unto you? And all we ask is that you claim it, as we command.

The bone-man’s army would be weakened by battle, like a stag after it has fought off a rival, if it was not destroyed outright. Malagor could smell the stink of strange magics on the human army. But if the bone-man triumphed, then, like wolves, Malagor and his followers would harry them as they marched on. The gods whispered of living men amongst the dead, whose will kept the legions marching. They would be Malagor’s prey. Without them, Arkhan would be forced to use more and more of his power to keep the dead moving, and less of it to protect himself.

And then, when he was stretched to his utmost, Malagor would strike. The bone-man would die again… And this time, he would stay dead.

Tancred spurred his horse forwards, his heart hammering in his chest. He felt weighed down by fear and excitement, by glorious purpose. He let his lance dip and it rolled in his grip as he angled it towards the massive, red-armoured shape of Krell of the Great Axe, one of a pair of curses that had haunted the ducal line of Quenelles for centuries. The lance struck like a thunderbolt and exploded in a cloud of splinters. The remnants of it were ripped from his hand and he let it go as his destrier galloped past the reeling wight. Krell roared like a wounded lion and made a flailing grasp for his horse’s tail.

Tancred and his men had left La Maisontaal Abbey weeks earlier, in an effort both to conserve what supplies the abbey-garrison had, and to hunt down a particularly pernicious band of beastmen, which had been haunting the border country since the end of the civil war. The survivors of their attacks spoke of one with wings, which had interested Tancred. Such a beast was bound to be important in some fashion, for obvious reasons.

He put little stock in the whispers of the peasantry, who murmured the name of Malagor, for that creature was nothing more than a fairy tale. While the beastmen did have their war-leaders and shamans, they were brute things, no more dangerous than the orcish equivalent. To think that there was one whom all such dark and loathsome creatures would bow to was laughable.

Tancred had brought Anthelme with him on the hunt, leaving the defence of the abbey in the hands of Theoderic and the others. He had had his misgivings at first, but he knew that such a hunt might help ease the chafing boredom of garrison duty his restive knights were already complaining of. Now it was beginning to look as if he were being guided by the Lady herself. When they’d sighted the motley horde of braying beastmen, the creatures had broken and fled rather than giving honest battle, and in pursuing them, Tancred and his warriors had crashed right into the mustering forces of the very enemy he had been preparing the abbey’s defences against.

Arkhan the Black had returned to Bretonnia, as Lady Elynesse, Dowager of Charnorte, had foretold, and he’d brought with him an army of the dead: an army that was Tancred’s duty, and honour to destroy here and now, before it reached the abbey. He had ordered his men to charge before the undead could organise their battle line, and, like a lance of purest blue and silver, the knightly host of Quenelles had done so, driving home into the sea of rotting flesh and brown bone. He had lost sight of Anthelme in that first, glorious charge, but he could spare no thought for his cousin, not when the cause of so much of his family’s anguish stood before him.

Tancred bent and snatched up his morning star from where it dangled from his saddle. It had been his father’s, who had wielded it in battle against Krell and his cackling master decades ago. Now it was the son’s turn to do the same. ‘Father, guide my hand,’ Tancred growled as he jerked on his warhorse’s reins, causing the animal to rear and turn. He spotted Krell immediately. The wight was already charging towards him, bulling aside the living and the dead alike in his eagerness to get to grips with Tancred. The black axe flashed as Tancred rode past. He slashed at the beast with his morning star.

Krell roared again, a wheezing wail that nearly froze Tancred’s blood in his veins. The dreadful axe came around again, braining Tancred’s mount even as the animal lashed out at the dead man with its hooves. Krell staggered. The destrier fell, and Tancred was forced to hurl himself away from it and avoid being caught under the dying beast. He landed hard, his armour digging into him. He clambered to his feet as Krell lunged over the body of his horse.

Tancred stumbled aside, narrowly avoiding Krell’s blow. The axe hammered into the ground. Tancred whirled back and sent the head of the morning star singing out to strike Krell’s wrist. The wight let go of his axe and grabbed for the mace. He seized the spiked ball and jerked it from Tancred’s grip. He hurled it aside as he grabbed for Tancred with his free hand. Armoured fingers dug into Tancred’s helmet, causing the metal to buckle with an ear-splitting whine. Tancred clawed for the sword at his waist as Krell forced him back, his heels slipping in the mud. The wight was impossibly strong, and when he fastened his other hand on Tancred’s helmet, Tancred knew he had to break the creature’s grip before his skull burst like a grape. He drew his sword and slashed out at Krell’s belly in one motion. Blessed steel, bathed in holy waters by the handmaidens of the Lady herself, carved a gouge in the bloodstained armour.

Krell shrieked and stepped back, releasing Tancred. The latter tore his ruined helm from his head as Krell turned to retrieve his axe. ‘No, monster! You’ve escaped justice once too often,’ Tancred bellowed. He cut at the wight’s hands, forcing Krell to jerk back. Tancred knew that if the undead warrior got his hands on his axe, there would be little chance of stopping him. He slashed at him again, driving the monster back a step. He felt the strength of purpose flood him, washing away his earlier doubts and spurring him on. His father had gone to his grave, cursing the names of Krell and Kemmler. They had been a weight on his soul that had never been dislodged, and it had dragged him down into sour death at the Battle of Montfort Bridge. But now, Tancred could avenge his father, and Quenelles as well.

He hammered at Krell, and witch-fire crawled up his blade with every blow. He heard the singing of the handmaidens of the Lady, and felt their hands upon his shoulders, guiding him. Every blow he struck was with her blessing, and Krell staggered and reeled as strange fires crawled across his grisly armour and ichors dripped from the sharp, jagged plates like blood. His fleshless jaws gaped in a bellicose snarl and he swatted at Tancred, like a bear clawing at leaping hounds. Men joined Tancred. He still saw no sign of Anthelme, but he had no time to worry. All that mattered was Krell. Spears stabbed at the beast from every side, digging at the wounds Tancred had already made.

The wight flailed about like a blind man, splintering spears and driving back his attackers, but more pressed forward. Tancred growled in satisfaction and looked around. Kemmler would be close by. If he could find the madman, and put an end to him, then Krell would be easier to dispatch once and for all.

‘Tancred!’ a voice shrieked. Tancred spun, and only just interposed his sword as a stream of crackling, sour-hued fire swept towards him. The flames parted around the blade. A wizened, crooked figure strode through the press of battle as if it were no more important than the squabbling of vermin. ‘Duke of Quenelles, I thought you gone to the worms at Montfort Bridge,’ Heinrich Kemmler snarled. He swept out his staff and his blade. The skull atop the former chattered like a berserk ape as Kemmler drew close.

‘My father, necromancer,’ Tancred said. He felt strangely calm. It was as if every moment of his life had led to this point. As if this single moment of confrontation were his reason for being. He felt a weight upon him that he had never felt before, save the first day he had taken up the burden of his ducal duties and privileges. ‘I am the son, and it falls to me to see that you at last pay your debt to the world.’

Kemmler cackled and weird shadows wreathed him, obscuring him from sight as Tancred attacked. Tancred struck out at him, but his blade bit nothing but air again and again. ‘What’s the matter, Tancred? Too long off the tourney field?’ Kemmler hissed, as though he were right beside him. A blow caught Tancred in the back and he lurched forward. He turned, but the flickering shadow-shape was gone before he could so much as thrust. More blows came at him. One of his pauldrons was torn from his shoulder, and rags of chainmail were ripped from his torso. His surcoat was in tatters and his pulse hammered in his head painfully. He couldn’t breathe, could barely see for the sweat, and his muscles trembled with fatigue.

‘I’ve been waiting for this for centuries,’ the necromancer said, circling him, his form rippling like a rag caught in a wind. ‘Your father and grandfather – your whole stinking line – has harried me from the day I first had the misfortune to set foot in this pig’s wallow of a country. Again and again I have been forced to flee from you, but no more. Today your line ends screaming…’

Out of the corner of his eye, Tancred saw the old man’s shape waver into solidity. The necromancer raised his sword for a killing blow, his face twisted in a leer of satisfaction. Tancred spun and his blade pierced the old man’s side, tearing through his flickering cloak. Kemmler screeched like a dying cat and he flailed at his enemy with his blade. Tancred avoided the wild blows and moved in for the kill. He could hear Krell roaring behind him, but he concentrated on the hateful, wrinkled, fear-taut features of the necromancer before him. He drove his shoulder into the old man’s chest and knocked him sprawling. ‘No, old devil, this is the end of you,’ Tancred said. He stood over Kemmler, and raised his blade in both hands. ‘For my father, and in the name of all those whom you have slain and defiled, you will die.’

Before he could strike, however, he felt a sudden ripping pain, and then everything was numb. The world spun crazily. He struck the muddy ground, but felt nothing. He couldn’t feel his legs or his arms. He saw a headless body – whose body was that? – totter, drop its sword, and fall nearby. Everything felt cold now, and he couldn’t breathe. He saw Krell, axe dripping with gore, kick the headless body aside, and drag Kemmler to his feet. Whose body? he thought again, as darkness closed in at the edges of his vision. Whose body is that?

Then, he thought nothing at all.

Heinrich Kemmler watched as Tancred’s head rolled through the mud. He tried to smile, but all he could muster was a grimace of pain. He levered himself awkwardly to his feet with his staff, its skulls, hung from it with copper chains long ago gone green with verdigris, dangling grotesquely. It was a potent artefact, his staff, and he drew strength from it as he gazed down at the wound Tancred had left him as a parting farewell. Blood seeped through his coat and dripped down into the dirt. The wound hurt, but he’d suffered worse in his lifetime. He scrubbed a boot through the dirt. ‘That’s the last taste you’ll have of me,’ he hissed. He looked up as a shadow fell over him.

Krell, coming to check on him, like a faithful hound. Or perhaps a hound-master, checking on his pet. As he gazed up at the scarred and pitted skull of the wight, Kemmler wondered, and not for the first time, if he was fully in control of his own fate. He thought of the shape he sometimes saw, that seemed to lurk in Krell’s shadow – a phantom presence of malevolent weight and titanic malice. He thought that it was the same shape that padded through his fitful dreams on those rare occasions when sleep came. It whispered to him, indeed had been whispering to him all of his life, even as a young man, after he’d first stumbled upon those badly translated copies of the Books of Nagash in his father’s haphazard ancestral library.

Those books had started him on his journey, the first steps that had seen him defy death in all of its forms, benign or sinister. He had fought rivals and enemies alike, striving to stand alone. The Council of Nine and the Charnel Congress – rival consortiums of necromancers – had faded before his might, their petty grave-magics swept aside by his fierce and singular will. He had pillaged the library of Lady Khemalla of Lahmia in Miragliano and driven the vampiress from her den and the city, and in the crypts beneath Castle Vermisace he had bound the liches of the Black Circle to his service, earning him the sobriquet ‘Lichemaster’.

He had counselled counts, princes and petty kings. He had gathered a library of necromantic lore second only to the fabled libraries of forsaken Nagashizzar. He had waged a cruel, secret war on men, dwarfs and elves, prying their secret knowledge from them, and with every death rattle and dying sigh the voice in his head, the pressing thing that had encouraged him and driven him, had purred with delight. Until one day, it had gone silent.

It had abandoned him to a life of scurrying through the hills, a broken, half-mad beggar, his only companion a silent, brooding engine of destruction, whose loyalties were unfathomable. He had thought, once, that Krell was his. Now he knew better. Now he knew that they had been at best, partners, and at worst, slaves of some other mind.

Kemmler’s eyes found the tall, thin shape of Arkhan the Black, as the liche oversaw the rout of the remaining Bretonnian forces. With Tancred’s death, they’d lost heart. In some ways, the living and the dead were remarkably similar. He glared at the liche and then stooped to retrieve his sword. He grunted with pain, but hefted the blade thoughtfully.

Arkhan heard the same voice he had, Kemmler knew. Krell as well; both liche and wight were slaves to it. And that was the fate it intended for Kemmler. Just another puppet. He could hear it again, though only faintly. But it was growing louder, becoming a demanding drumbeat in his fevered brain. It was inevitable that he would surrender.

Kemmler looked at Krell. He spat at the wight’s feet and sheathed his sword. ‘Inevitability is for lesser men.’

ELEVEN

Mannfred brought his blade down on the rat ogre’s broad skull, cleaving it from ears to molars. The beast slid away, releasing its grip on Mannfred’s mount, as he jerked his blade free in a welter of blood and brains. Two more of the oversized vermin lumbered towards him, growling and giving high-pitched bellows. He spurred his mount towards them, his teeth bared in a snarl. As his skeleton steed slipped between the two creatures, he swept his sword out in a single scythe-like motion, sending the heads of both monsters flying.

‘A heady blow, cousin,’ Markos crowed, from nearby. The other vampire’s armour was drenched in skaven blood, and his blade was black with it from tip to the elbow of his sword arm. Markos, like the other Drakenhof Templars, had been at the centre of every recent battle.

‘Shut up and see to our flanks, Markos,’ Mannfred snapped, shaking the blood from his sword. ‘I tire of this.’ He stood up in his saddle and looked around. When his scouts had brought him stories of the lands ahead literally swarming with the rat-things, he had thought they were exaggerating. But in the past weeks, he had seen that, if anything, his spies had been conservative in their estimates of the number of skaven running roughshod over the Border Princes. This was the fifth – and largest of them all by far – horde in as many weeks to bar his path, and he was growing frustrated.

It was as if some unseen power were seeking to block him from getting to Mad Dog Pass. He’d thought it was the skaven, at first, but the hordes he faced were more intent on pillage and loot than on stopping him. They inevitably attempted to retreat when they saw the true nature of the forces at his disposal, as had the first such band they’d encountered.

He had taken the time to question the spirits of the deceased ratmen, and had found the dead ones no less deceitful than the living vermin. In his frustration, he had torn apart more skaven souls than he had slain living ones. But in the end, his suspicions had been confirmed – the Under-Empire had risen, and the skaven were at last united. They had eradicated Tilea and Estalia, and Araby was even now under siege from above and below.

No, it wasn’t the skaven; it was something in the air itself. Arkhan was right. Forces were moving in opposition to them, and not merely those from the expected quarters. Mannfred was playing dice with the Dark Gods themselves. The thought did not frighten him. Rather, it invigorated him. If the Chaos gods were taking a hand in affairs so directly, then he was on the right path. He had faced the servants of Chaos before, and emerged triumphant. This time would be no different.

He looked up at the dark sky, where strange green coronas still swirled and crawled, like flies on the flesh of a corpse, and laughed. ‘Come then,’ he said. ‘Come and set yourselves against me, oh powers and principalities of madness. Let the heavens themselves crumble in, and the earth turn to mud beneath my feet, and I will still triumph. Send your daemons and proxies, if you would, and I will show you that in this fallen world there is one, at least, who does not fear you. I have beaten gods and men before, and you will be no different. The veil of perfect night shall fall on this world, and order and perfection shall reign, according to my will and no other.’

The air seemed to thicken about him for a moment, and he thought he saw cosmic faces stretched across the sky above, glaring down at him in tenebrous fascination. He felt the weight of their gaze on his soul and mind, and he swept his sword out in a gesture of challenge.

A screech alerted him to the skaven retreat, and he looked down. The ratkin were fleeing with all the orderly precision of their four-legged cousins. He fancied that more of the pestilential vermin died in the retreat than in the battle itself. Then, considering the sheer size of the horde in question, perhaps that wasn’t all that surprising.

‘They flee, my lord,’ Duke Forzini said as his horse trotted past. His armour, like Markos’s, was dripping with blood, and his sword dangled loosely in his grip. ‘If we press forward, we might catch them.’ The duke had taken to vampirism with admirable rapidity, and his mouth and beard were matted with gore. Forzini had personally inducted most of his household knights into a state of undeath, binding them to him with blood where before they had been loyal only to his gold.

‘No need,’ Mannfred said. He sheathed his blade. ‘They are going in the same direction we are, and the fear they carry with them will infect those who stand between us and our goal.’ He looked about him, and smiled cruelly. Then, with a gesture, he drew the corpses of the two rat ogres he’d slain to their feet. ‘Besides, we have a wealth of new recruits to add to our ranks.’ More skaven followed the rat ogres’ example, their torn and mutilated bodies sliding and shuffling upright.

Despite his bravado, and despite the sheer number of skaven corpses that were even now being washed away down the roaring waters of the Skull River, the battle had been a close one – this swarm had been the largest his forces had yet faced. An ocean of squealing bodies and ramshackle war engines that had momentarily blanketed the horizon. Mannfred had been forced to rouse the dead of three ravaged fortress towns to throw at the horde.

Speed and subtlety alone was no longer going to serve, he thought. The closer they drew to Mad Dog Pass, the greater the likelihood that he would find himself facing similarly sized hordes of skaven. He needed every corpse he could find to throw at them.

He felt a tremor, and glanced up at the Claw of Nagash, where it sat atop the staff strapped to his back. The fingers twitched and stretched, as though gesturing towards the mountains rising in the distance. It seemed that its movements were becoming more agitated the closer they came to Mad Dog Pass, almost as if it were impatient to be reunited with the blade that had severed it from Nagash’s wrist, once upon a time. Mannfred could almost feel the dark magics radiating from the Fellblade. His palms itched to hold it, and he could sense the hum of its deadly energies. His hand clenched.

You don’t have it yet, boy. You still have a million ratmen between you and that dark blade, and you’d best not forget it, Vlad said. Mannfred opened his hands and looked resolutely away from the shifting shadow-shape that scratched at the edges of his attention. Vlad’s voice had only become stronger as they came closer to the Fellblade. When he fought, there was Vlad, watching him as though he were still a boy on the proving ground, fumbling with his blade. Vlad had always watched him that way.

‘Nothing I did was ever up to your standards, was it, old man? I never measured up to you or your blasted queen, or the bloody champion. And you wonder why I stole that cursed bauble…’ he muttered, running his hands over his scalp. ‘Yet here I sit, on the cusp of victory. And where are you? Ash on the wind.’

Better ash than a body rotting in a bog, Vlad said. Did you enjoy it? Sunk in the mire, a hole in your heart, unable to move or scream. I wonder, did something of that tainted place creep into your veins? Is that why you changed? You were always so vain, and now, you are as foul and as bestial as any of those treacherous animals I locked away in the vaults below Castle Drakenhof. Why, you’ll take to wing any day now, I’d wager. You’ll shed all pretence, just like Konrad, and succumb to the madness in your blood…

Mannfred snarled. His hand flew to the hilt of his blade and he drew the sword, twisting around in his saddle to face the shade of his mentor. The tip of his blade narrowly missed Markos’s nose as he rode up. The other vampire jerked back and nearly fell from his saddle. ‘Are you mad?’ he snarled.

‘Mind your tone, cousin,’ Mannfred growled. He fought to control his expression. ‘You shouldn’t sneak up on me while I am concentrating.’ He looked about, and saw that every dead thing around was standing at attention, empty eyes fixed on him. He could feel the power of the Claw mingling with his own as it spread outwards and roused the inhabitant of every grave for miles around, be it skaven, human, orc or animal. More, he could feel them stumbling forwards at his call, answering his summons. Thousands of rotting corpses and tormented spirits were coming in response to his command.

‘How many more cadavers do we require?’ Markos muttered, looking around at the swaying dead who surrounded them.

Mannfred smiled nastily. ‘Enough to drown the skaven in their burrows, cousin. I will bury them in the bodies of their kin. Come – time slips away, and I would not have my prize do the same!’

When it came time to make camp, the village had seemed the best spot. It was still mostly intact, if all but abandoned. They had seen smoke rising up into the overcast and cloud-darkened sky, and Anark, the Crowfiend and the other vampires had ridden pell-mell to claim whatever living blood remained in the village. Unfortunately for them, all of the villagers who had not fled were piled up on a pyre in the centre of the market square, burned to a crisp.

Luckily, the vampires had glutted themselves during the battle several days before. But Arkhan had been hoping to add the inhabitants to his host. Too many of the dead had been irretrievably lost in that battle. If they were to take La Maisontaal Abbey, and then escape Bretonnia in the aftermath, they would need a host of considerably larger size than they currently had.

‘No blood, no corpses of any worth – it’s almost as if someone got here ahead of us,’ Erikan Crowfiend said as he rode up to Arkhan to deliver his report. A gaggle of ghouls gambolled after his horse. The Crowfiend had an affinity for the flesh-eaters and he had begun to assert some control over the numberless cannibals that haunted the meadows of Quenelles. ‘I’ve sent out scouts, but none of them have come back yet.’

Arkhan pondered his comment silently. Every graveyard and town they had come to since crossing the border into Quenelles had been razed to the cellar stones, and the bodies of the dead mangled or burned beyond use. Some of that, he knew, was down to the ghouls, who spilled across Bretonnia like locusts, feeding on the dead left behind by the civil war. But he could not escape the feeling that potential lines of supply were being cut one by one by unseen enemies.

In all the centuries of his existence, Arkhan had learned much of the arts of war. The back-alley gambler had become a hardened battlefield general, who knew the way of the refused flank, the feint and the coordinated onslaught. He knew when he was facing a planned attack, even if it looked like coincidence or random chance.

There was a mind working against his, and he suspected he knew where it hid. More than once, he had caught the creeping moth-wing touch of dark magics at the edges of his senses. Not necromancy, but something older and fouler by far. The magics of ruination and entropy. The magics of the Dark Gods. He could taste them on the air, as he had when he’d breached the wall of faith in Sylvania. They were gathering their strength, as the winds of magic writhed in torment. Even now, the air stank of the breath of the Dark Gods. It hung thick and foul and close, obscuring his sorcerous senses.

He glanced up, and saw a shape, circling far above. For a moment, he mistook it for an unusually large carrion bird. Then, he realised that he had seen that dim, flapping form before. It had harried his host for leagues. It never drew too close, but it had pursued them relentlessly. It was this thing that radiated the magics he sensed, he was certain. It followed him, and a horde of beastmen followed it, the very beastmen who had led the Bretonnians upon him, and now loped in his wake like wolves haunting the trail of a dying stag. They had been shadowing the undead since the battle with Tancred’s forces.

Arkhan had dismissed the creatures at first, thinking them little better than the ghoul packs that now loped in the wake of his host. But his scouts had brought him reports that the creatures had followed them from the battlefield, shadowing his forces, never engaging in conflict, and always fleeing if challenged. The herd was also growing in size. Worse, it was doing so more quickly than his own forces. He felt as if he were being driven forwards, like the beast before the hunters, and there was nothing for it but to run as quickly as possible.

‘Bah, we will find blood and corpses aplenty if we but follow Tancred’s army and destroy it. They’ll make for Castle Brenache. With the forces at our disposal we can tear it down stone by stone,’ Kemmler said. Arkhan ignored him. ‘Are you listening to me, liche?’ Kemmler snapped. He grabbed Arkhan’s arm.

Arkhan knocked Heinrich Kemmler sprawling. ‘You are a fool, old man. Your obsession has almost cost us everything. We are done with your fantasies of vengeance.’ The liche pinned Kemmler in place with his staff. Krell moved towards them, axe not quite raised. Arkhan fixed the wight with a glare, and the cat perched on his shoulder hissed at the wight. Krell hesitated, seemingly uncertain who to strike. Arkhan decided not to press the issue.

He lifted his staff and stepped back. ‘You have cost me an asset, and burdened us all, in the name of bruised pride and ego.’ Kruk had died in the battle with the Bretonnians. Kemmler had abandoned his position to attack his old enemy, leaving Kruk exposed to the lances of the knights, and the little necromancer had been dislodged from his harness somehow. He’d subsequently been trodden into a red pulp by the galloping hooves of the knights’ horses. Ogiers and Fidduci had been able to keep those dead under the little man’s control upright, but only just. With Kemmler distracted by Tancred, Arkhan’s army had nearly disintegrated.

If the Bretonnians had not routed when they had, Arkhan knew, it was very likely that his mission would have been over before it had even truly begun, so devastating had their initial charge been. Luckily, the core of his army was still intact – the wights and skeletons he’d drawn from the molehills and tombs of the Vaults, and the blood knights who Mannfred had foisted on him. And he too had recovered the ancient canopic jars that he had cached on the border of Quenelles, which housed the dust and ashes of the Silent Legion.

Over the course of centuries, Arkhan had carefully seeded many desolate and isolated places with unliving servants, so that should he ever find himself in need, he would have warriors to call on. The Silent Legion were one such group. In ages past, they had served Nagash, and it was only the increasing strength of the winds of magic that would enable Arkhan to restore them to fighting vigour and control them. But he needed time to prepare the proper rites to do so. Time that Kemmler had cost them.

‘You promised me Tancred’s head,’ Kemmler snarled as Krell helped him to his feet. The old man stank of blood and indignation, and he pressed a hand to his side, which was stained dark. Tancred hadn’t died without leaving his enemy a painful reminder of their dalliance. That wound had weakened Kemmler, and slowed down their advance considerably. ‘I was merely taking my due, and I won you the battle in the process.’

‘It should not have been a battle,’ Arkhan said. ‘It should have been a slaughter. We should have drowned them in a sea of rotting flesh and mouldering bone, and swept them aside in minutes. Instead, we were drawn out into a pointless struggle that lasted more than a day. We have no time for this.’

‘Maybe you don’t,’ Kemmler spat. ‘But Bretonnia owes me a pound of flesh and I intend to collect!’ He gripped his staff so tightly that the ancient wood creaked.

‘What you think you are owed is of no concern to me,’ Arkhan said. ‘La Maisontaal Abbey is only a few days’ march from here, and I would give our enemies no more time to prepare. I care nothing for Brenache, or your grudge. We have wasted enough time.’

‘Time, time, time,’ Kemmler mocked. ‘You act as if you still live, and that one day is different from another. What matters when we do it, so long as it is done. Let Nagash wait.’

The zombie cat twitched and fixed Kemmler with a glare that the old necromancer didn’t seem to notice. Arkhan reached up to stroke its head. ‘Nagash isn’t what I’m worried about. How long do you think we have before the new king of this ravaged land notices that we’ve invaded? Or the rulers of Athel Loren? They are occupied, for now, but that will not last forever. And there are more enemies abroad than just men and elves.’

‘Who would dare challenge the most mighty and puissant Arkhan, eh?’ Fidduci broke in, before Kemmler could spit what was certain to be an acidic reply. The Tilean took off his spectacles and began to clean them on the hem of his filthy robe.

The spear caught him just between his narrow shoulder blades and punched through his chest in an explosion of gore. Ogiers, who’d been standing beside him, fell back with a yelp. Arkhan looked up as a howl echoed through the air. The flying shape had drifted lower, and he saw then that it was no bird, but instead a winged beastman. It swooped upwards with a triumphant roar and he knew then that it had thrown the spear. Kemmler had distracted him, and he had not seen the beast’s approach.

Fidduci coughed blood and reached out, weakly, towards Arkhan. The liche ignored him, and began to ready a sorcerous bolt. He intended to pluck the flying beast from the sky for its temerity. A shout drew his attention before he could do so, however. He saw Anark and the other vampires riding back towards him, smashing aside zombies in the process. ‘Beware!’ Anark bellowed. ‘It’s a trap!’

Horns wailed and Arkhan cursed as beastmen came charging out of hiding in a rush, exploding from the meadows around the village, and out of the seemingly empty shacks, howling and snarling. They tore through the ranks of the unprepared dead like starving wolves, with crude axes and chopping blades. Arkhan whirled around, and black lightning streaked from his eyes, incinerating a dozen of the malformed creatures. It wasn’t enough. A gor, foam dripping from its muzzle, leapt over the burning, smoking remains of its fellows and brought a blade down on Ogiers’s skull, splitting the Bretonnian’s head from crown to jaw.

As the necromancer fell, Arkhan obliterated his killer. Power roiled within him, and spewed out in murderous waves, laying beastmen low by the score. But still they came on, their eyes bulging and froth clinging to their lips. They had been driven beyond the bounds of madness, and there was no fear in them. Magic had hidden their presence from him, magic wielded by the flying creature that even now circled above him, its jeering laughter drifting down like raindrops. It was all Kemmler’s fault. The Lichemaster had tarried too long, playing his games of spite with Tancred, and been wounded for it. They’d lost half of their army at a stroke, as Fidduci fell, bleeding and hurting. And now, the children of Chaos were attempting to take advantage of their weakened state. He could almost hear the laughter of the Dark Gods, echoing down from the storm-stirred heavens.

Arkhan was forced to fall back. The cat yowled and hissed as it clung to his shoulder, and he drew his tomb-blade, only just in time to block a blow aimed at his skull. He spun, crushing his attacker’s head with the end of his staff. For a moment, he won clear. But it didn’t last.

The minotaur was the largest of its brutish kind that Arkhan had ever had the misfortune to see. It rampaged towards him, bellowing furiously, bashing aside its smaller cousins heedlessly as it came closer to him, the great axe in its hand licking out towards him. Arkhan thrust his staff and his blade up, crossing them to catch the blow as it fell. The axe was the same size as his torso, and it was all that he could do to catch the blade. The force of the blow drove him down to one knee. He strained against the weight of the axe as the minotaur hunched forward, trying to break his guard through sheer brute strength.

Then, suddenly, a red-armoured form bulled into the creature from the side, rocking it away from Arkhan. The minotaur stumbled back, lowing in confusion. Krell stomped forward, pursuing the creature. The two axes met in a crash of steel again and again as beast and wight fought. The minotaur was the stronger of the two, but Krell was by far the better warrior, and the wight’s greater skill with the axe began to tell. The minotaur staggered in a circle, pursued by Krell, who opened wound after wound in its hide. Blood splashed onto the ground as the giant, bull-headed beast sank down onto all fours and gave a piteous groan. Krell planted a boot against its shoulder and sent it flopping over onto its back.

As Krell finished off the minotaur, Arkhan shoved himself to his feet and looked up, hunting for the flying creature he’d seen before. That one was the true danger, he knew. That one had the ear of the Dark Gods, else why would it be able to fly?

But the creature was nowhere to be seen. It had vanished, and, as Arkhan watched, its followers departed as well. Crude horns wailed and the beastmen began to retreat in ragged disorder, streaming back into the night, not altogether reluctantly. They had been eager enough for a fight when they’d arrived, but the dead made for bad sport.

He looked around. Fidduci had finally succumbed to the spear that had pinned him to the earth. His spectacles had fallen from his nerveless fingers to shatter on the ground, and his black teeth were wet with blood. Ogiers lay nearby, still twitching in his death throes. Arkhan felt the weight of his army settle on his shoulders, like a sodden blanket.

He wondered, as he leaned against his staff, if this had been his enemies’ intent all along. His trusted servants were dead, and his effectiveness lessened. Now he had only Kemmler to help him. Kemmler, who had already proven himself as unreliable as ever. Kemmler, who was more powerful now than Arkhan had ever seen him.

Kemmler cackled nearby as he jerked Fidduci’s and Ogiers’s bodies to their feet. He appeared unconcerned about the state of affairs, and his coarse, chilling laughter echoed over what had, only moments before, been a scene of slaughter.

Arkhan watched him, pondering.

Volkmar was on the plain of bones again, the stink of a hundred thousand charnel fires thick in his nose and lungs. His hammer hung broken and heavy in his hands, and his armour seemed to constrict about him like a giant hand clutching his torso. He was tired, so tired, but he couldn’t give up. He refused to surrender.

Catechisms sprang unbidden to his lips and rattled through the stinking air. Passages and entire pages from holy books shot out into the grey emptiness. He shouted out Sigmar’s name, and shrieked out the story of the Empire’s founder.

Sigmar.

Sigmar.

Sigmar!

The name pierced the emptiness like a well-thrown spear, and it hung quivering there for a moment, gaining strength. Then, as it had before, the ground began to move and shift, as if something vast were burrowing beneath it. The bones rattled and fell as the thing drew closer to the surface and ploughed after him.

He heard Aliathra’s voice, somewhere far above and behind him. Though he could not make out her words, he knew that she was calling out to him, pleading with him not to fight this time, but to run.

Volkmar hesitated, and then did as she bade. The thing, the force, the daemon, wanted him to fight. He knew it in the marrow of his bones. It wanted him to fight, so that it could sweep over him and bowl him under. So he ran. And it followed him. A hideous voice, as loud and as deep as the tolling of the monstrous bells of Castle Sternieste, smashed at him, trying to force him to make a stand.

Instead, he ran harder, faster, forcing his body to keep moving. And he shouted Sigmar’s name as he ran. Every time the word left his lips, the terrible voice seemed to weaken a little bit. But it did not cease its hunt.

Bones slipped and rolled beneath his feet. The hands of the dead clawed at his legs as they always did, dragging him down. Fleshless jaws bit down on him, and bony fingers tore at him, and he swung about with his hammer, trying to free himself. Too late, though. Always too late.

A mountain of bones rose over him, blotting out the grey light. The bones shifted and squirmed, shaping themselves into a vast countenance, titanic and loathsome. Eyes like twin suns blazed down at him, and a breath of grave-wind washed over him, searing his lungs and withering his flesh. He felt his skin shrink taut on his bones, and his marrow curdle as the wind enveloped him. He lifted his hammer, too weak to do anything else.

And then, Volkmar the Grim woke up.

Volkmar stirred groggily in his chains. Sleep still held him in its clutches, and the faintest ghost of a distant howl rippled through the underside of his mind. He felt the air stir, and knew that they had a visitor. He smelt the stink of old blood, and stale perfume, and knew that the new mistress of the castle had come to visit.

Mannfred was gone. Where, he could not say, but he had suspicions aplenty. That left a castle full of vampires still, and there was no hope of escape. That realisation had come to him slowly but surely, with insidious certainty. There was no hope, of escape or even survival. But perhaps whatever Mannfred was planning could still be thwarted. Perhaps the Empire could be spared whatever monstrous evil the vampire sought to unleash.

Then, perhaps not.

He heard the vampire as she drew close, passing amongst Mannfred’s collection. Did she linger over the Crown, perhaps, and let her fingers drift over the books?

‘What would you give me, if I were to kill one of you?’ the vampire asked, without preamble. She looked up at Volkmar with something approaching loathing. The Grand Theogonist hung in his chains like a side of beef, his eyes not quite closed, his breathing shallow. ‘That being the only way to defeat our lord and master, of course. He had nine. Now he has eight. He can do nothing with seven.’ She cocked her head like a falcon sighting prey, and her eyes slid towards Aliathra, who hung nearby, head lolling, her blonde locks spilling over her pale face, matted with blood and filth. ‘I know that you are conscious, elf. I know that you are listening.’ Her eyes slid back to Volkmar. ‘As are you, old man. Pretending to be unconscious will avail you nothing.’

‘Your kind only bargains for two reasons,’ Volkmar rasped. He had nine… Lupio Blaze was dead, then. They had come and taken the knight in the evening. They had not brought him back. He had suspected that the Tilean was dead. ‘Either you are bored… or afraid,’ One blood-gummed eyelid cracked wide. ‘Which is it, Elize von Carstein?’ The old man laughed as her eyes widened slightly. He allowed himself to feel a brief surge of pleasure at her momentary discomfiture. ‘Oh yes, I know you, witch. I know all of your cursed clan, root and branch. The witch hunter Gunther Stahlberg and I even made a chart, before Mannfred killed him. The Doyenne of the Red Abbey, Handmaiden of Isabella von Carstein, cousin to Markos von Carstein, of the red line of Vlad himself, rather than by proxy. You are as close to royalty as your kind gets.’

‘Then you know that I can give you what you wish,’ Elize said. ‘I can help you, old man.’ She turned towards Aliathra. ‘I can help you as well, elf. I can free you. I can kill you now, to spare you pain later. I can kill your fellow captives, if you are too proud to ask for yourselves. All I require is that you ask.’ She glided towards him and leaned close, her palms to either side of his head. Volkmar glared at her with his good eye. ‘Ask me, old man. Beg me, and I will put you out of your misery, like an old wolf caught in a trap.’

‘Frightened, then,’ Volkmar coughed. His lips cracked and bled as he smiled. ‘You are frightened, and I think I know of what. Something so dark and hungry that you pale in comparison. You can feel it, can’t you? In whatever passes for your heart,’ he said. He closed his eye. ‘Mannfred has left you here, and now, like a rat that scents a snake, you want to squirm away. So be it woman. Kill us, and run.’

‘Beg me,’ she growled.

Volkmar wheezed hoarsely. It wasn’t quite a laugh, but it was as close as he could manage. ‘No, no, I think not. Run away, little rat. Run and hide before the snake gobbles you up.’

Elize raised a hand, as if to tear out his throat. It trembled slightly, and then fell. Volkmar said nothing. He opened his eyes to watch the vampire leave. ‘You should have let her do it, priest. You should have asked her to kill you,’ someone croaked, as the chamber door rattled shut. ‘You should have begged.’

‘Be quiet, witch,’ Volkmar rasped. It was hard to get air into his lungs, hung on the wall as he was. It was all he could do to speak. The manacles bit into his flesh, and he felt his blisters pop and weep as he shifted in his chains.

‘Your arrogance has doomed us, Volkmar. And you most of all – I am damned, but you will be doubly damned,’ the Bretonnian witch yowled. Volkmar heard her chains rattle. ‘He is coming for you, old man.’

‘I said be silent,’ he snarled, trying to muster something of his former authority. He knew he’d failed when she began to laugh and wail.

There was no hope.

Volkmar closed his eyes and tried not to sleep.

Elize stood staring at the wall opposite the door to the chamber for some time. She could feel the burning gazes of the two wights, who now guarded the chamber, on her back, but she didn’t move away. They were no threat to her. Mannfred had seen to that.

She considered simply going back in and killing one of them – the nature priest, perhaps. He was little more than a mindless husk, after all this time in captivity. There were ways that it could be done that would leave no one the wiser. Mannfred would assume that he’d simply expired, despite the sustaining spells he’d etched into the prisoners’ flesh. Unless he didn’t, in which case she’d have some explaining to do.

Elize didn’t fear Mannfred’s wrath any more than she had feared Isabella’s incandescent and unpredictable tantrums, or Vlad’s quietly menacing disappointment. She knew which strands to pluck to see her safely out of the von Carstein web, and which to pull in order to get back in, should it be necessary. Mannfred was guileful and cunning, but not especially subtle. He strode across the landscape like a warrior-king, and expected his opponents to fall at his feet in awe of his majesty and political acumen.

He was, in short, a barbarian. Vlad had been much the same – a man out of time. The difference between them lay in the fact that Vlad had had an almost childlike delight in learning the ways of the Imperial court, and navigating the choppy political waters of the Empire. Vlad had been subtle: patient and unswerving. Mannfred was not patient. He never had been. He was a creature of passions and selfish demands, and he only understood those things in others. Patience, to Mannfred, was simply fear. Dedication was foolishness. Subtlety was hesitancy.

But this time, Mannfred had bitten off more than he could chew. They could all see it, even if the sisters of the Silver Pinnacle hadn’t been whispering it into every ear. It was madness, what he planned, and in everyone’s best interests to see that he failed.

Elize looked back at the door, thoughtful now. The old man hanging on the wall in there was no different, really. An obstinate, obdurate relic, sitting athwart the stream of history, determined to bend it to his will. Again, the temptation to simply kill him rose. But… no. Best to wait, until there was no other option. Best to wait until all of the pieces were in place.

‘Think carefully, child. Think, before you do something we will all regret.’

Elize turned. Alberacht Nictus lumbered down the corridor towards her, more or less a man. His wings had shrivelled to flaps that could easily be folded in the narrow corridors and he wore a set of armour purloined from somewhere. His face was still a tale of horror, but his eyes shone with kindly madness. He held out a taloned paw. ‘Come away, my sweet girl. Come away, and let the Sigmarite rot in his tomb.’

Elize took his claw gingerly. Alberacht pulled her close, like a doting uncle. ‘You always were a risk-taker, my little stoat. Always going for the throat,’ he gurgled. ‘That is why Isabella loved you best.’

‘Unlike Mannfred,’ Elize said. She allowed Alberacht to guide her away from the chamber. The big vampire chuckled harshly.

‘Mannfred heeds your words,’ Alberacht said. ‘After all, we are here, are we not?’

Elize tensed. ‘What do you mean? Speak plainly, Master Nictus.’

‘Oh, is it Master Nictus now? Have I offended you, cousin?’ Alberacht peered at her owlishly, and showed his teeth in a ghastly smile. ‘You were here, at Sternieste, before the wall went up, and before Mannfred made his bid for secession. It was you who advised him to raise the Drakenhof banner and call the order to war. You asked him to set the black bells to ringing, while you rode out to find your pet and Markos.’

‘Anark is hardly my pet,’ Elize murmured.

‘Was I speaking of him?’ Alberacht leaned over and kissed the top of her head. ‘You are as clear as glass to these old eyes, my girl.’

Elize pushed away from him carefully. They had come to one of the places where the wall of the keep had crumbled away, and she leaned against the gap, looking out over the courtyard far below and the plains beyond. The dead were still mustered amongst the barrows, waiting for an invasion that might never come. Screams echoed up from the courtyard, where Mannfred’s court were engaged in their early evening amusements. She’d had to put a guard on the larder once Mannfred departed, to keep the greedy parasites from emptying Sternieste’s dungeons of every breathing human in an orgy of indulgence and slaughter.

‘He left me,’ she said softly, after a few moments.

‘Aye, he did,’ Alberacht said. He loomed behind her, his claws on her shoulders. ‘Though I think he regrets it. I think the Crowfiend regrets many things.’

‘I care not whether he regrets it,’ she hissed. ‘He. Left. Me. I made him and he left. No one leaves me. I leave. I go where I will. Not him!’

‘Ah,’ Alberacht breathed. He was silent for a time. Then, he said, ‘Sometimes, I think that Vlad did us a disservice. There is something in the von Carstein blood that encourages duplicity and madness. Konrad, Pieter, Nyklaus with his ambitions of admiralty… Isabella.’

‘I am not mad,’ Elize said.

‘I am,’ Alberacht said. ‘Then, I was a von Drak, and they were all mad.’ He leaned close. ‘I was speaking of your duplicity, in any event. All of this, simply for the Crowfiend?’ He leaned around her, so that he could peer up into her face. ‘Tomas – dead. Anark elevated to a position he is unsuited for. Markos’s predilections with succession encouraged, and Mannfred warned of that burgeoning treachery. Are any of us out of your web, my child?’

‘You and the Vargravian,’ she said, smiling slightly.

‘Ah,’ he murmured. ‘Am I to feel slighted, then?’ She tensed again. There was no way of telling which way the old monster would jump at the best of times. His mind was lost in a red haze.

‘No,’ she said carefully. ‘But you are impossible to predict. And the Vargravian is an unknown quantity. I know him only by reputation. Tomas elevated him to the inner circle. The others I know.’ She pounded a fist against the crumbling edge of the gap. ‘They are fixed points, and I can weave my web, as you call it, about them.’ She smiled thinly. ‘Mannfred taught me that.’ She looked at Alberacht. ‘It is not all for Erikan. It is for us, as well. For the future. For too long we have clung to this place. Sylvania was a prison even before the wall of faith surrounded it. There is a whole world out there, past the borders, where we can spread and take root. But before we can flourish, certain branches must be pruned.’

‘And what of Mannfred’s plans, child? You know what he intends. You know what awaits us, when they return.’

Elize turned away. ‘It will not come to that. Even Mannfred is not so blinded by ambition that he would risk unleashing the Undying King upon the world.’ She smiled. ‘Anark will do his part, and Markos as well. Nagash will not rise, but when this farce is done… we will.’

TWELVE

The skaven screamed and died as the bodies of the Iron Claw orcs, torn and savaged by the ultimately futile battle that had seen the entire tribe decimated by the forces under Mannfred’s command, launched themselves through the crude pavises of wood and rope, and hacked down the clanrats manning the ballistae behind. More zombies shoved through the gap created by the dead greenskins, flooding the tunnels beyond the chamber where the skaven sentries had chosen to make their stand.

Mannfred urged his skeleton mount through the sea of carnage that his servants had left in their wake, his face twisted in an expression of disdain. This was the tenth such cavern he had ridden through in as many hours, and impatience was beginning to eat at him like acid.

Never before had he felt so pressed for time. It had always seemed a limitless commodity for him. But he felt it closing in on him now, cutting off his avenues of manoeuvre. It was as if he were being surrounded by enemies on all sides, trapped in an ever-tightening noose. He clutched Kadon’s staff to him, and took comfort in the Claw of Nagash, its withered fingers twitching and gesturing mutely.

Power. That was what it was all about. That was what it had always been about. The power to see his journey to its end. The power to control his own destiny. Too often had he been at the mercy of others, his desires supplanted by the whims of those who considered themselves his superiors. Vlad, Neferata, his father… They had all tried to keep him from achieving his destiny. But no longer. He had outlived, outfought, outschemed them all. He had thwarted his enemies at every turn, and thumbed his nose at every empire.

That you have, my boy. Your famed subtlety has deserted you, it seems. Or perhaps you deserted it, eh? The skies are blood-red, the gallows scream hungrily and Mannfred von Carstein has come into his own, Vlad murmured.

Mannfred snapped his reins, causing his mount to gallop through the cavern. The drumming of its hooves blocked out Vlad’s voice. Nevertheless, he could hear the quiet conversation of his Drakenhof Templars behind him, as they urged their steeds to keep up with his. They were talking about him, he knew. Scheming most likely, but then, they were von Carsteins. None of them would dare try anything, save perhaps Markos.

He scanned the cavern and caught sight of the latter, dispatching a squealing skaven warrior with a casually tossed sorcerous bolt. Markos was almost as good a sorcerer as Mannfred himself. He, like Mannfred, had learned much under the tutelage of the bat-faced nightmare known as Melkhior, when Vlad had employed the latter to teach them the finer arts of necromancy. Mannfred remembered the thin-limbed horror, in his stinking rags, with his fever-bright eyes as he showed them the formulas of the Corpse Geometries. There was much of W’soran, Melkhior’s primogenitor, in him, from the way he spoke, to his apparent disdain for even the most basic aspects of hygiene.

It was from Melkhior that he had discovered the origin of the dark magics that empowered the ancient ring that Vlad wore, and it was from the old monster that he learned of how it held the secrets of the resurrection of the Undying King. Melkhior had whispered of certain rites that might stir Nagash, and of the shifting of the Corpse Geometries that had seen Nagash come back and wage an abortive campaign to reclaim his pilfered crown. Then the Night of the Restless Dead, in which Nagash’s ravening spirit had managed only a single night of terror. Even diminished and shrunken, Nagash was the sort of power that caused the world to scream in horror. But he was a power without true thought. Nagash himself, as he had been, was long gone to whatever black reward awaited such creatures. All that was left of him was something less even than Arkhan the Black – blind impulse, and the fading echo of a once mighty brain.

Or so Melkhior had sworn. Mannfred knew better than to trust the words of any of W’soran’s brood. He had felt a great sense of relief when Melkhior’s student, Zacharias, had put paid to whatever subtle schemes his master had been weaving. Not that Zacharias was an improvement; if anything, he was just as devious and as arrogant as Melkhior, and W’soran before him. Indeed, Zacharias had openly opposed Mannfred’s schemes from the moment of Melkhior’s death, striving to unravel stratagems that had taken him centuries to forge. He could not fathom the other vampire’s intent, save that Zacharias feared what Mannfred might do once he gained the power of Nagash. Or, perhaps he feared what would happen should Mannfred fail.

Mannfred frowned. He considered the Claw of Nagash, where it lay across his saddle. He could feel the power it held, power enough to carve out a nation, if he wished. Once, that would have been enough for him. He had vied for thrones before. But something had changed in him. A throne, a city, a province – these were no longer good enough. Even an empire was but a drop in the ocean of his ambition.

Those ambitions were the root of every plan he had concocted since he had dragged himself from the mire of Hel Fenn, revivified by the blood of a dying necromancer. They drove him on, into the reeking tunnels, and he, in his turn, drove on the dead with the lash of his will. Vlad was right. He had discarded subtlety; there was no use for it here. The only tools of worth were the press of bodies and the savage tactics of attrition.

In the hours that followed, Mannfred willed wave after wave of zombies into the labyrinthine network of tunnels. Through the eyes of his flesh-puppets, he mapped out the safest route for him and his Drakenhof Templars to take towards the heart of the festering pit. He lost hundreds of zombies, but gained twice their number in new recruits from among the skaven dead. Entire squealing tribes of the vermin were stifled and silenced beneath the tide of rotting meat, and then dragged upright to serve beside their slayers. It was necromancy as applied brutality, sorcery wielded like a blunt object, as Mannfred battered himself a path through the enormous burrow.

He led his knights deeper into the tunnels, which grew grand in scale. The burrow was a tumour of stone and darkness. Foul poisons dripped from filth-encrusted stalactites, and the rough walls of rock were marked by generation upon generation of crude skaven-scrawl; the caverns were choked with ramshackle structures of warped wood and rust-riddled metal. And everywhere, the skaven. Some fled his approach, others tried to resist. Sometimes they even fell upon one another in vicious displays of compulsive betrayal that startled even Mannfred, who took advantage of such incidents with bemusement.

Deeper and deeper he pushed his forces. He could feel the Fellblade now, like a wound in the world, pulsing, calling to the claw it had hacked from Nagash’s wrist. It called to him, and Mannfred went gladly, driven by the devils of his ambition.

The Fellblade would be his, and with it, the power of Nagash.

‘It’s a fairly innocuous sort of place,’ Erikan Crowfiend murmured. He leaned over his horse’s neck and ran his fingers through the matted mane of the ghoul crouched beside him. The rest of the pack swirled about him, yapping and snarling like dogs on the scent. There were hundreds of them, drawn from all over Bretonnia to the meadows of Quenelles by the scent of death. The other vampires seemed perturbed by the presence of so many flesh-eaters, especially Anark von Carstein, who glared at the Crowfiend with barely repressed fury.

‘It is nothing more than a slightly fancy tomb,’ Kemmler said. The ghouls gambolling about the legs of Erikan’s steed avoided the Lichemaster and Krell, who stood just behind him, his Great Axe in his hands.

‘A tomb whose inhabitants are barred to us, thanks to Bretonnian witchery,’ Arkhan said. He stood on the back of his chariot and looked at his commanders, examining each one in turn. Then, he turned his attentions back to the object of their discussion.

La Maisontaal Abbey sat on the slopes of the Grey Mountains, its walls the same hue as the tumble-down stones of the cliffs around it. Its walls were half finished, but it was an imposing structure nonetheless, built to protect its inhabitants from any who might wish them harm. It had been built in the early years of Gilles Le Breton’s first reign, its construction funded by a mysterious nobleman from the east, who had claimed that the abbey was the repayment of a debt owed. Arkhan, who had once lost his head to the sword of the nobleman in question, suspected that there was more truth to that tale than not.

In the fading, grey miasma of the day, the abbey was a flickering nest of fireflies as torches, lanterns and bonfires were lit. He wondered if the inhabitants thought that firelight would be enough to keep back the host he had arrayed on the plains before La Maisontaal. ‘What do your spies tell you, Crowfiend?’ he asked, after a moment.

The vampire glanced down at one of the ghouls, who gave a warble and licked broken fangs in the parody of smile. The Crowfiend looked at Arkhan. ‘Much meat,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘Asking them to count is useless. Past one, it goes “many”, “much” and “most”. That’s as accurate as they get.’ He straightened in his saddle. ‘They’re keeping close to the walls and the torches, however. That much they could say. Plenty of weak points, jammed with frail, trembling meat, ready to be torn and squeezed dry of life.’ The Crowfiend smiled crookedly. ‘A better sort of battlefield than Couronne, I will say.’

‘If you must,’ Arkhan said. He looked at Anark. ‘You, vampire. Mannfred spoke of your military experience. Analyse and explain,’ he said.

The vampire grunted and shook himself. ‘Traditional Bretonnian tactics. A shieldwall of peasantry in front of artillery, knights on the flanks to crush the attack once it becomes hung up on the fodder.’ Anark lifted himself slightly in his saddle, and his brutal features slackened into something approaching consideration. ‘Trebuchets and archers. The bonfires mean fire-arrows,’ he added, his lip curling away from a fang.

‘What is fire to the dead?’ Kemmler asked, running his fingers through his tangled beard. ‘Let our army carry an inferno into the heart of their army, if that is the fate they choose.’

Arkhan ignored the necromancer. He let his gaze drift across the ragged ranks of his army. The vast majority of it was composed of the graveborn victims of war and plague. He disliked relying on such chattel – zombies were little more than ambulatory shields for better, more reliable troops. Unfortunately, he had precious few of the latter.

The Silent Legion stood ready for battle, clad in ancient armour and bearing weapons not seen since the height of the Nehekhara. He had seen to their resurrection from their essential salts upon his arrival on the fields before La Maisontaal Abbey, and Nagash’s nekric guard stood ready to wage war on the living once more.

Arrayed about the Silent Legion were the warbands Arkhan and Kemmler had dragged from their slumber in the Vaults. Composed of wights and skeletons, the warbands were possessed of a savage bloodlust second only to Krell’s, and without the sorcerous chains that compelled them to obey Arkhan, they would have already begun the attack.

Beyond them, and scattered before and around the host were the ghoul packs that had followed them from the borderlands and into the hills. A harsh winter and a bloody spring had added to their numbers, as villages throughout southern Bretonnia became little more than haunts for newly christened cannibal clans. Such pathetic beasts were drawn to the stench of necromancy like iron filings to a lodestone. Like the zombies, they were of little practical use, but Arkhan was confident that they could readily take blows meant for more valuable troops as easily as any staggering corpse.

And last – the Drakenhof Templars. The armoured vampires were eager for war, none more so than the brute Mannfred had named Grand Master. Anark met his gaze and looked away quickly. Was he nervous, Arkhan wondered, or bored? Neither would surprise him. That Anark intended treachery was almost certain. The creature was barely competent, save in military matters, and openly defied Arkhan at every opportunity, eliciting chortles from his fellow leeches. All save the Crowfiend, whom he seemed to despise even more than Arkhan.

Arkhan dismissed the thought. He had no time to worry about traitors. He looked up at the night sky, and for a moment, immense, terrible shapes seemed to claw down towards him, like hungry birds. The cat on his shoulder hissed softly. He’d almost forgotten that the animal was there, so quiet had it become since they’d arrived. He stroked its greying flesh gently.

No time, he thought. There was no room for error now, not with the delays and losses they’d suffered. The beastman attack they’d fought off some days before had taught him that. Though they had driven the creatures off, the damage had been done. The unassailable horde he had assembled had dwindled to its current state. It was still an ocean of corpses, but he was forced to see to their control himself, along with Kemmler.

His options had been forcibly limited. There was no time for grand strategy now, only brute speed. ‘So be it,’ Arkhan rasped. He swung his staff out and pointed it at Krell. ‘Krell will take the fore. He will lead the Silent Legion, and the tribes of the dead into the centre of the enemy line. They shall be the head of my spear and the stumbling dead shall be the haft, driven forward by Kemmler and me.’

‘That is exactly what they are counting on,’ Anark protested. ‘Even a dried up old thing like you should have the wit to see that. The knights will fold into your flanks like the jaws of a trap!’

Arkhan looked at the vampire. ‘That is what you are for, von Carstein. Besides, it would be rude of us to ignore such a heartfelt invitation, would it not?’

Kemmler cackled wildly. ‘Oh, there’s hope for you yet, liche! Come, hurry! I have waited centuries to tear this rotting heap of stone apart, and I can wait no longer.’ He gestured sharply, and Krell broke into a trot. As the wight moved, the Silent Legion fell into step with him. The skeletal warbands joined them, rasping battle-cries issuing from the long-withered throats of their chieftains.

Arkhan stepped down from his chariot and made to join Kemmler, where the latter waited amidst a knot of zombie knights, still clad in bloodstained armour and clutching broken weapons. He paused as the Crowfiend interposed his steed. Arkhan looked up at him.

‘A word of advice,’ the vampire said, not looking at him. ‘Kemmler stinks of ambition.’

‘As does your companion Anark,’ Arkhan said.

‘Not my companion,’ the Crowfiend said. The vampire looked at him. ‘The Drakenhof Templars were ordered to escort you to La Maisontaal Abbey. And that is what we shall do.’

‘And afterwards?’

The Crowfiend kicked his horse into motion. He galloped away, followed by his ghouls. Arkhan watched him go. Then he joined Kemmler.

‘What did the leech want?’ the old man grunted.

‘Merely to pass on the compliments of Mannfred von Carstein,’ Arkhan said. The dead twitched into motion, lurching forwards. Arkhan and Kemmler moved with them, lending sorcerous speed to the slower corpses.

‘Ha! That’s a poisoned chalice if there ever was one,’ Kemmler spat. He peered after the Crowfiend, eyes narrowed. ‘I remember that one. He served in Mallobaude’s army. He followed that fool Obald around. Fussed over the old pig-farmer like a nursemaid,’ he sneered. He smiled nastily. ‘If he’s here, the Bone-Father must have finally died.’

‘You sound pleased,’ Arkhan said.

‘Merely satisfied, I assure you,’ Kemmler said, and tittered. ‘Obald was a fool. Just like the idiot Ogiers, or that black-toothed sneak, Fidduci.’ He glanced at Arkhan, his eyes sly. ‘They were but pale imitations of their betters. Useless chattel, fit only to be used and discarded.’ He made a fist. ‘Power belongs only to those strong enough to wield it. It belongs to those who can survive its use, and those who can take it for themselves. I’m a survivor.’ He licked his lips. ‘Pity Nagash wasn’t, otherwise we wouldn’t be in this mess, would we?’

Arkhan said nothing. Kemmler laughed and turned his attentions back to the dead. The vampire had been right – Kemmler was up to something. He couldn’t help but to boast. He resolved to keep an eye on the old man, even as the night sky above was suddenly lit up by a rain of fire.

‘Arrows,’ he said, raising his staff. A quickly conjured wind plucked away those missiles that drew too close to him and Kemmler. But even as Arkhan readied himself to deal similarly with the next volley, he saw that they were not the target.

The forward elements of the undead host had crossed no more than half the field before the Bretonnian bombardment began. A second volley of flaming arrows pierced the darkness and tore into the ranks of skeletons and wights. Again and again, the Bretonnian archers fired. Only scant seconds passed between each volley, testament to the skill of the longbowmen. Peasants though they were, Arkhan was forced to admit that their skills were on par with the archers of Lybaras.

With a flick of his fingers, he willed those of his minions who possessed them to raise their shields. Nonetheless many were still set alight by glancing or lucky shots, and the shields were of little help against the larger fireballs launched by the massed trebuchets. As the great war engines found their range, more and more impacts occurred, tearing great ragged holes in the undead ranks.

But the undead marched on, driven forwards relentlessly by the combined wills of Arkhan and Kemmler. Dark magic flowed from the fingers of both necromancer and liche, rousing the fallen dead to continue the march, no matter how badly damaged they were. There were few in the world more attuned to the winds of death than he and his troublesome comrade, Arkhan knew. Dieter Helsnicht, perhaps or Zacharias the Ever-Living, but no others possessed the mastery of broken bone and torn flesh that he and Kemmler did.

The dead fell around him and rose again; shattered skeletons swirled and danced back into motion, to rejoin the unwavering advance. The attrition caused by the bombardment slackened, drew to a crawl and then ceased. Arkhan spat black syllables into the greasy air, and every iota of concentration he possessed was bent to thrusting his warhost forward, as if it were a single weapon, and his the hand that wielded it.

It would have been easier with the others – the battle-line more fluid, the tactics less primitive. But Arkhan was forced to admit that it would not have been nearly as satisfying. It had been decades since he had dirtied his hands with war in this fashion. He had stayed on the sidelines of Mallobaude’s rebellion, a fact he regretted, if only for the squandered opportunities.

His attention was drawn by screams. Krell had reached the enemy. With a roar audible only to sorcerers and lunatics, Krell unleashed the Silent Legion upon the Bretonnian lines.

The killing began.

THIRTEEN

‘The dead-things… followed you,’ Warlord Feskit hissed. He was old, for a skaven, and his fur was the colour of ash. He tapped the hilt of the wide, jagged-bladed cleaver that was stabbed point first into the bone dais supporting his throne. The latter was a trophy taken from a fallen dwarf hold in years past, and it overflowed with pillows and cushions made from the hair and beards of men, elves, dwarfs and unlucky skaven. Feskit himself wore a necklace of orc tusks, goblin noses and human ears, all of which he’d pilfered from the various battles he claimed credit for. ‘You ran, and they followed.’ Every word was enunciated slowly, drawn out like the flick of a torturer’s knife across cringing flesh.

‘No-no, Snikrat the Magni– Snikrat the Loyal came to warn you, mighty Feskit,’ Snikrat chittered. He knelt before the throne, his loyal Bonehides arrayed behind him – far behind him – and gestured towards Feskit imploringly. ‘They seek to invade our lair, oh perspicacious one, by which I mean our tunnels, the very heart of our fortress, this place here,’ he continued, sweeping his arms out. ‘That they followed me is only incidental, by which I mean unrelated, to my own headlong plunge to assure myself of your wellbeing, because you are my warlord and I am your loyal champion.’

In truth, Snikrat had no idea whether or not the dead had followed him. It was certainly possible, but he suspected otherwise, given his cunning and the stealthy nature of his retreat across the plains, back to the mountains. He had seen other clans attempt to match claw and blade with the undead, and he had, briefly, considered lending aid. But it was imperative that he warn Feskit about the enemy; and if that enemy was destroyed before he got back… Well, the credit would be ripe for the claiming, wouldn’t it?

As it happened, he had managed to lead what was left of his warband past the undead at the entrance to Mad Dog Pass, while the charnel horde was otherwise occupied with the Iron Claw orcs. The greenskins hadn’t been faring particularly well, the last Snikrat had seen. He decided not to mention it. Clan Mordkin and the Iron Claws had waged a war for control of the pass for decades, and Feskit respected their strength inasmuch as he respected anything. If he knew that they had been beaten, he might decide to abandon the lair, rather than fight, and Snikrat’s continued survival hinged on the latter.

‘Hrr,’ Feskit grunted. He sat back, his eyes narrowed to mere slits. Snikrat tensed. He glanced at the armoured stormvermin, who crouched or stood arrayed about Feskit’s dais, ready to lunge forward to slaughter at their claw-leader’s command. The Mordrat Guard were Feskit’s personal clawband and they were loyal to a fault, thanks mostly to Feskit’s generous patronage, which ensured that they saw little in the way of actual combat while claiming the bulk of the loot. Feskit was too smart to risk them in open combat, where they couldn’t protect him from treacherous rivals, or, in certain cases, each other. They were also indolent, lazy and far from as skilled as most thought them.

Snikrat knew all of this because he had, once upon a time, been the commander of the Mordrat Guard. He had profited from Feskit’s indulgence, and then, when he had climbed as high as he could, he had made the obvious decision. Granted, it had been the wrong decision, and it had ended with him flat on his back and Feskit’s teeth in his throat, but it had seemed obvious at the time. Snikrat rubbed his throat nervously. Feskit had spared him that day, though he’d never said why.

Snikrat thought – Snikrat hoped – that it was because Feskit was canny enough to know that he was getting old, and that if Clan Mordkin were to continue to flourish, it would need a suitable skaven to lead it. A magnificent skaven, a great warrior and cunning to boot. But that skaven had to prove himself worthy of Feskit’s patronage. He had to acquire victories, follow orders and serve the clan in all those ways that most skaven simply could not, whether due to their inherent untrustworthiness or simple weakness.

As Feskit stroked his whiskers, deep in thought, Snikrat surreptitiously took in the gathered chieftains. Those Feskit considered the most loyal sat near the dais, surrounded by their bodyguards. The rest were scattered throughout the great cavern or hadn’t been invited. There were more than a dozen missing. Some were likely still out plundering the Border Princes, he suspected. Which was just as well – more opportunities for him. He needed to reclaim his place at the foot of the throne, if he was to have any chance of successfully challenging Feskit a second time. He scratched at his throat again. Unless Feskit simply had him executed.

A sudden, discordant clamour of bells echoed through the caverns. The upper tunnels had been breached, Snikrat knew. A wave of relief washed aside his worries. He’d timed his return perfectly. Death shrieks drifted down from the vaulted roof of the cavern, slithering through the numerous flue holes that marked the rock. They echoed and re-echoed about the cavern, and a nervous murmur swept through the gathered chieftains. Snikrat, who was already far too familiar with the enemy even now bearing down on them for his liking, shivered slightly.

Feskit glared at him. Then he waved a paw at the knot of trembling slaves who cowered at the foot of his throne. ‘Bring me my armour and weapons.’ He gestured to the black-clad gutter runners who lurked nearby, waiting to carry forth Feskit’s decrees to all of the small clans within his realm. ‘Summon the conclave of chieftains. The burrow must be defended.’ His eyes found Snikrat again, and his lips peeled back from his fangs. ‘It is lucky that you returned when you did, Snikrat. Where would I be without my greatest champion?’

Snikrat stood, his chest swelling. ‘Snikrat the Magnificent lives only to ensure the greater glory of Clan Mordkin, mighty chieftain,’ he said.

‘Of that I am certain, yes-yes,’ Feskit said. He flung out a paw. ‘Go then! Defend our lair from these intruders, Snikrat. Prove yourself worthy of my faith, yes,’ he chittered.

Snikrat hissed in pleasure and whirled, gesturing to the gathered chieftains. ‘You heard our most merciful and wise clan-leader! Gather your warriors and war engines. Awaken the beasts,’ he snarled. ‘It is time to drive these dead-things from the lair of Mordkin!’

Anthelme slumped in his saddle, aching, exhausted beyond all measure, burdened by tragedy and fear alike. Nonetheless, the newest, and perhaps last, Duke of Quenelles led his companions north, to war.

He closed his eyes as he rode. His cousin’s face swam to the surface of his thoughts, and he banished it with a curse. He had failed Tancred. It hadn’t been for lack of trying, but it had been a failure regardless. At the battle’s height, his steed had been struck with terror and had fled, taking him with it. By the time he’d brought the beast under control, Tancred was dead, and his muster shattered and shoved aside by the undead host as it made its way north.

Anthelme had made his way to Castle Brenache, where he’d found Fastric Ghoulslayer and Gioffre of Anglaron and the rest of the Companions of Quenelles attempting to rally the remaining knights. Their joyful greetings as he’d ridden shame-faced into the castle courtyard had torn his heart worse than any blade. They’d thought him dead; he wished that were so. More, he wished that Tancred were alive and that he had fallen in his cousin’s place.

Instead, Quenelles was his, and the weight of it felt as if it would snap his spine. The province was in ruins – beset by beastmen and worse things. Calls for aid came every hour, and Anthelme was inundated with inherited troubles. He did not know what to do. Would the defences of the abbey hold, or would aid be required? He had sought the counsel of the Lady of Brenache, the Dowager of Charnorte. She had warned Tancred so many months before, and he’d hoped that she might help him now. And she’d tried.

Her scrying had proven a troublesome affair, marred by what he could only describe as daemonic interference. Anthelme shivered in his saddle as he remembered how the clear waters of her scrying bowl became as dark as a storm cloud, and leering faces formed in the ripples. Fell cries had echoed from the stones and the Lady’s voice had been drowned out by the laughter of the Dark Gods.

He had been ushered from her chambers then, with a promise that she would find an answer for him, and for three days she took neither food nor drink. Her chamber had rocked with the sounds of madness – strange laughter, scratching on the stones and foul smells that lingered in the corridors of the castle. The knights began to mutter that the Lady had deserted them – why else would Tancred have fallen? Why else would the realm be beset by so many enemies at once?

As Anthelme sat and waited for the Lady Elynesse to come out of her room, knights had demanded that he ride out to face one foe or another. Anthelme refused them all, though it hurt him to do so. Some knights left, sallying forth alone to confront the horrors that afflicted their ancestral lands. Others stayed, their natural impetuousness tempered by the memory of Tancred’s fall.

On the third day, their patience was rewarded. Lady Elynesse staggered from her chambers. The Lady’s voice had at last pierced her fevered dreams, and given her a dire warning to pass on – if Anthelme did not go to La Maisontaal, Bretonnia itself would fall.

‘Stop thinking,’ a voice said, rousing Anthelme from his reverie.

‘What?’ he asked. Gioffre of Anglaron grinned at him, and slapped him on the back, causing his mail to jingle.

‘I said stop thinking so hard. You’re spooking the horses.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense.’ Anthelme looked around.

‘No, but it got you to pay attention, didn’t it?’ Gioffre said. ‘We’re but a day’s hard ride from the abbey, and you look as if you’d rather be anywhere else.’

‘It’s not that,’ Anthelme said quickly. Gioffre laughed.

‘Oh I know. Anthelme, you are a true knight, as was Tancred. I fought beside you during Mallobaude’s rebellion, remember? I know that you are no coward. Just as I know that you only fear failure.’ He smiled. Gioffre wasn’t especially handsome, but his face became almost pleasant when he smiled. ‘We will not fail. Troubadours will sing of the day the Companions of Quenelles sent the dead back into the dark, and saved Bretonnia.’ He clapped Anthelme on the shoulder. ‘Now, heads up.’ He pointed upwards. ‘The Ghoulslayer and his flock of overgrown pigeons are back.’

Anthelme couldn’t resist a smile. Gioffre had a distaste for the winged stallions that Fastric Ghoulslayer and his fellow pegasus knights rode. Anthelme suspected that it had less to do with the fact that he felt the surly beasts were unnatural, and more to do with their habit of befouling the ground beneath them as they swooped through the air. Horse dung wasn’t pleasant, especially when it was coming at you from above, and very quickly.

‘Ho, Duke Anthelme,’ Fastric shouted as his steed swooped lazily through the air. The pegasus whinnied as it descended, and it tossed its head and trotted arrogantly towards Anthelme and Gioffre. Their own steeds snorted and pawed the ground as the beast fell into step with them. Normal warhorses didn’t get along with pegasus, even at the best of times. Gioffre’s stallion nipped at Fastric’s steed, and the former planted a fist between his mount’s ears. ‘Keep that bad-tempered nag of yours under control, sirrah,’ Fastric said.

‘It’d be easier if that beast of yours didn’t provoke the other animals,’ Gioffre said.

Before the old, familiar argument could begin again, Anthelme said, ‘What news, Ghoulslayer?’

‘Beasts,’ Fastric growled. ‘Hundreds of them. They’re moving north, but much more slowly than us.’

‘Has Arkhan the Black made common cause with the creatures, do you think?’ Gioffre asked. ‘I wouldn’t put anything past that creature, frankly.’

Anthelme frowned. ‘They’ve been following us for days. If they were allies, wouldn’t they have attacked us by now? Even creatures like that should have no difficulty in divining our destination.’ He thought briefly of the beast-herd that had led Tancred into the ambush that had cost him his life, and wondered if this was the same one, before dismissing the idea. There were dozens of such warbands prowling the province now. ‘No,’ he said, straightening in his saddle. ‘No, they’re scavengers. They’re following us in hope of an easy victory. Well, let them. All they’ll find is death.’

He twisted in his saddle and looked back at the column of knights that followed him. Standards of every design and hue rose over the assembled force. Warriors from every province and city were counted amongst the Companions of Quenelles, and for a moment, just a moment, Anthelme felt the shadow that had been on his heart since Tancred’s death lift. He felt a hand on his shoulder, and looked at Fastric. ‘He would be proud,’ the older knight murmured. ‘As are we all. Where you lead, Anthelme, Duke of Quenelles, your Companions will follow.’

Anthelme nodded brusquely. ‘Then let us ride. La Maisontaal Abbey is in need of defenders, and I would not have it said that the Duke of Quenelles fell short in his responsibility.’ He kicked his horse into a gallop, followed by Gioffre. Fastric set spurs to his steed and the pegasus sprang into the air with a neigh.

Horns blew up and down the column, and the Companions of Quenelles hurtled north.

Theoderic of Brionne growled in satisfaction as the line of shields buckled, but did not break. ‘Hold, you filthy pigs,’ he rumbled as he watched the peasants resist the undead advance. ‘Hold.’ The peasants did not love him. He knew this, and accepted it as a consequence of his position. But if they did not love him, they at least feared him, and they would do their duty, dreading the price of failure.

Tancred had cautioned him against meeting the enemy in open battle, should they arrive in his absence. The dead could not be smashed aside so easily, he’d said. But Tancred hadn’t heeded his own advice, and now, if the message his cousin had sent was to be believed, his body was somewhere out there in that lurching horde.

It was almost enough to make him doubt himself. The newly christened Duke of Quenelles had sent riders from Castle Brenache, where he was taking the counsel of the Lady Elynesse, the Dowager of Charnorte. The riders had only just managed to outpace the dead, and they had brought word of Tancred’s fall and of Anthelme’s intention to ride to La Maisontaal’s aid with the Companions of Quenelles. Anthelme had advised him to retreat behind the abbey walls, and to hold the dead back, but not to meet them in pitched battle.

A sensible plan; behind the walls, the muster of La Maisontaal could more readily rely upon the magics of the three sisters of Ancelioux. At the thought of the trio of damsels, he glanced towards the shieldwall, where they stood, clad in shimmering damask and furs against the chill of evening. He knew little of the women, and what he did know, he didn’t like.

It was rare to have three daughters chosen by the Fay Enchantress, as poor Evroul of Mousillon had, and even rarer to see them after the fact. It hadn’t been a happy reunion, by all accounts – Evroul, unlucky in fortune as well as family, had chosen the wrong side in the civil war, and his own daughters had killed him. Nonetheless, their magics would come in handy in the battle to come, he thought.

Anthelme’s advice aside, Theoderic had no intention of waiting for rescue. Right or wrong, he was a man of tradition. The darkness was not to be feared, or avoided. It was to be confronted head on, and smashed aside with blade and lance. Under his command, the garrison at La Maisontaal was more active than it had been, even under Tancred’s father. It was larger, with more men than had ever before manned its walls.

As soon as his scouts had reported the host approaching the cleared plains before the abbey he had sworn on the tatters of his honour to guard, he had known that the moment he had been seeking since he had given up his ancestral lands and titles had arrived. Before him was a chance for redemption, a chance to atone for the failings of mind and body that had tarnished his family name.

‘This… is a glorious day,’ he murmured. He looked around at the knights who surrounded him. Anticipation was writ on every face, and their horses shifted impatiently, as eager as their riders to be at the charge. He knew that similar looks would be on the faces of the knights waiting for his signal on the opposite flank.

He rose up in his saddle and lifted his axe over his head. On the other side of the field, a horn crafted from the tusk of a great wyrm wailed. Theoderic knew that horn, and the man who wielded it – Montglaive of Treseaux, slayer of the wyrm Catharax, from whose cooling corpse he had hacked the tusk he had made into his horn. Montglaive commanded the right flank, as Theoderic commanded the left. As the horns on the right sounded, so too did the horns on the left, and Theoderic felt his soul stir.

He was not a man for speeches, inspiring or otherwise. It was not in him to rouse or incite, but he knew that something must be said. He felt the weight of the world’s attention on him. The air vibrated with some inescapable pulse, some fateful pull, which sharpened his attentions and tugged at his heart. He might die this day, but he would not be forgotten. He would not be remembered as a sozzle-wit or a failed knight, but as a hero. As a champion of the Lady, and of the realm. Songs would be sung, and toasts raised, and the name of Theoderic of Brionne would stand through the ages to come.

That was all he had ever wished.

‘This is a glorious day!’ he roared, spreading his arms. ‘We honoured few stand between holy ground and a black host, and the Lady stands with us! Our fair land writhes in pain, assaulted by daemon, outsider and ill-roused corpse. But we few stand here, to prove not simply our courage, or our honour, but that though all Bretonnia is besieged, hope has not yet forsaken the realm eternal! Hope, which echoes in the rattle of swords and the thunder of hooves! Ride, defenders of La Maisontaal! Ride, knights of Bretonnia! Ride and sweep the enemy before you – ride for the Lady and the world’s renewal!’

All around him, his knights gave a great shout, and then thrust back their spurs and joined the battle, Theoderic at their head. The ground shook as the pride of Bretonnia hurtled towards their enemy, lances lowered.

Theoderic bent forward over his charger’s neck. He carried no lance, but instead wielded his axe. The weapon was his only reminder of who he had been, before his disgrace. He had carried it in glory and in folly, and he would not be parted from it save in death. Its blade had been anointed in the holy font of La Maisontaal, and as it spun in his grip, it began to shine with a blessed light.

The darkness retreated before him, and he could see the dead where they stumbled, mindless and remorseless. To him, in that moment, they were a sign of all that had afflicted Bretonnia. He raised his axe, roared out an oath and struck out as his steed smashed into the flanks of the dead and pierced them like a spear. His axe licked out, shining like a beacon, and took the head from a zombie.

Then the rest of the knights struck home, and the twelfth and final battle for La Maisontaal Abbey began in earnest.

FOURTEEN

Markos von Carstein did not consider himself unduly ambitious. Indeed, he liked to think of himself as something of an idealist. Vlad had been an idealist, and Vlad was his model in most things. Vlad was a paragon, the vampiric ideal made flesh. The King of Blood, the Emperor of Bones, his ghost was tangible in every speck of Sylvanian soil.

Markos bent away from the thrusting spear, and flicked his wrist, bisecting the squealing ratman’s skull with his sword. He twisted in his saddle, chopping another in half, and swatted away a smoke-filled globe with the flat of his blade, sending it tumbling back towards the skaven who’d thrown it. It shattered and the skaven died, choking on its own blood.

It was Vlad who had elevated him from the common muck, and made him a Templar of the Drakenhof Order. It was Vlad who had nurtured his natural gifts for sorcery and strategy. It was Vlad who had given him purpose.

And it was Mannfred who had taken it all away.

Mannfred the liar. Mannfred the schemer. Mannfred the acolyte. Mannfred, who had come from somewhere else to join Vlad, who was no Sylvanian, who sometimes spoke in an accent that Markos had yet to recognise, despite his travels.

Vlad should never have trusted him. But that too was part of the ideal. Vlad had worn his honour like armour, and it had dragged him down in the end. Markos had learned from Vlad’s mistakes and when Mannfred had set his feet on the path of empire, Markos had absented himself. Mannfred was not Vlad, and he lacked Vlad’s patience, something that inevitably led to his downfall. His attempt at conquest had ended with him sinking into Hel Fenn, and the shattering of the Drakenhof Order. They had all gone their separate ways, eager to put their defeat behind them.

Markos had spent years building up his own network of spies and informers. He had schemed and plotted dynastic marriages and political alliances, all to ensure his ultimate success. Elize, he knew, had been doing much the same, as had Tomas and the others. The Game of Night had lasted for centuries, as the remaining von Carsteins wove plot and counter-plot against one another and the Lahmians.

And then Mannfred had ruined it all by coming back.

Markos growled and parried a rust-edged cleaver. He thrust down, pinning the skaven to the cavern floor. There were seemingly thousands of the beasts, and they just kept coming in wave after wave of squealing fodder. He jerked his blade up out of the dying skaven and looked around. The cavern resembled the bowels of some vast, nightmarish engine – immense cogs, corroded pistons and acid-pitted flywheels projected from the walls at all angles, and rose from deep grooves in the cavern floor. The mechanisms were still in motion, despite the battle, and as Markos watched, a skaven warrior got too close to one and was whisked into a clanking maw, to be pulverised instantly.

The cavern was so choked with machinery that it was impossible for the combatants to fight more than five or six abreast, and the skaven suffered for this inability to bring their numbers to bear. Horns wailed and bells clanged somewhere far back in one of the tunnels, and those skaven closest to the exits began to flee the cavern.

Markos wheeled his horse about and galloped back towards the knot of undead horsemen who surrounded the Drakenhof Templars and Mannfred. As he passed through the ranks of the former, he examined them enviously. The Doom Riders had been legendary even in Vlad’s time. Supposedly, they had first ridden forth from whatever barrow had held them at Nagash’s command, and after his defeat at Sigmar’s hand, they had ridden into the depths of the Drakwald, from whence they had haunted the surrounding lands for centuries until Vlad had sought them out and bent them to his will.

The undead horsemen wore corroded armour of a bygone age, and carried lances wreathed in cold flame. They watched him as he threaded through them, and his flesh felt as if it were covered in crawling spiders as they tracked his progress with hell-spark eyes. When he reached the others, Mannfred glanced at him. ‘Well?’

‘They’re falling back,’ Markos said. He leaned back in his saddle. ‘We’ll have the cavern cleared within the hour, unless they bring up reinforcements. Which they don’t seem inclined to do, if you want my opinion.’

‘I don’t,’ Mannfred said, turning away.

Markos bit down on the reply that sprang unbidden to his lips. He turned away from Mannfred and settled down to wait, one hand resting on the pommel of his blade. His anger simmered, but he wrestled it down.

Striking now would be disastrous, whether he succeeded or not. They were miles beneath the surface, and dependent on Mannfred for guidance to find their way through the seemingly endless labyrinth of twisted and reeking warrens. He’d considered trying his luck when the skaven had attacked Forzini’s camp, but Elize’s words of caution had restrained him. Mannfred was wary, ready for treachery right now. But, when he’d achieved his goal, Markos would have his chance, or so Elize swore. With the Claw and the Fellblade in his possession, Mannfred would be distracted, drunk on victory and his own power. It was a window of opportunity, albeit a narrow one.

Strike swiftly, before he has the chance to acclimate himself to the power of the artefact, she’d said, and he had to admit that it wasn’t bad advice. Not that he trusted Elize farther than he could throw her. She was likely hoping that he and Mannfred would kill one another. So be it. He couldn’t find it in his heart to blame her. Elize had her own games, just as he did.

Mannfred had ruined them all by coming back. Arrogant, assured of his superiority, he had smashed their delicately woven webs to shreds and tangles, and demanded that they kowtow to him, as they once had. As if their ambitions meant nothing compared to his own.

Well, Markos intended to show him the error of his ways.

Mannfred was as mad as Konrad had been. Oh his madness took a different form, to be sure, but he was just as much a lunatic. His time in the mire had rotted his brains, and he endangered them all with his current obsession. Markos shivered slightly as he looked at the staff Mannfred clutched, and the withered thing that occupied its head. He could feel the malignancy of the Claw in his bones.

Markos was not one to lie to himself. He knew what he was, and what he had done in his centuries of bloodletting. But there were things in the world far worse than him, and the Claw was the tool of one of them. Mannfred was caught up in its whispers and promises. They could all hear the voices – the voice – of the artefacts that Mannfred had gathered. A wheedling, demanding susurrus that permeated Castle Sternieste and haunted them. Every vampire felt the call of Nagash in their blood, whether they admitted it or not.

Most, however, knew better than to give in to it.

He looked at Mannfred again, and blinked. For a moment, in the flickering of the great globes of warpfire that hung from the roof of the cavern, he thought he’d seen something looming over the other vampire. A dark shape, far darker than any shadow, and colder than the depths of a mountain lake.

Markos shuddered and looked away.

Heinrich Kemmler didn’t flinch as the knights struck the vast sea of the dead. He felt the reverberations of that impact in his bones, but he ignored it. He had more important matters clamouring for his attention. His magics were growing less precise, and less effective. At first, he’d thought the culprit was Arkhan. He wouldn’t have put it past the liche to strike while he was otherwise occupied, and try to wrest control of the dead from him.

Arkhan didn’t trust him, Kemmler knew. Nor did he blame the liche. Kemmler had no intention of allowing Nagash to return, whatever Arkhan’s desires. Nagash’s time had passed and good riddance to the creature. Hundreds of arch-necromancers had risen and fallen with the tide of years since the Undying King had been gutted on his own basalt throne, each of them worth more than any old dead thing.

The very thought of it incensed him. The drumbeat – the heartbeat of the Great Necromancer – in his head threatened to drown out all of his hard-won coherency. It had driven him mad, that sound. He knew that now. It had forged him, and fed his hungers. It had been the rhythm that had guided his steps, and set him on the path he had trod for centuries. It was the voice inside his head, whispering the secrets of power and the wielding of it; and then, when he had needed it most, it had taken all of it away. That was something Kemmler could not forgive.

Fresh rage flooded him, and he clawed at the barely visible skeins of magic that flowed about him, trying to find the source of the interference. He could feel the heat of Krell’s growing battle-lust, and he focused on it, using it as a touchstone. The wight had been his constant companion for more years than he cared to count, and he had woven innumerable spells with Krell at his side. The creature was at once a sump and a sponge for dark magic. Sometimes, he even thought that he could hear Krell speak. Or perhaps not Krell, but something that clung to his brutal husk like a shadow.

When Krell was near, the drumbeat was almost impossible to ignore. But that was not the only sound in his head. There were words as well, whispers and wheedling, plaintive murmurs, which rose and fell with the winds of magic. Kemmler had first heard those voices in the hour of Krell’s resurrection, when they had offered him aid if he would bend the wight to certain tasks. And he had, and the voices too had grown quiescent. But now, as the drumbeat grew louder, so too did they, as if the initiators of each were attempting to drown out the other.

Strange currents of power flowed through him now, beneath the old familiar shroud of deathly sorcery. Like an adder beneath the water, this new power warmed him to his joints, and buoyed him. It had healed his mind and memory and soul, though it had taken centuries to do so. Centuries to clear out the rot of Nagash, Kemmler knew.

Nagash had used him. It was Nagash who had used him to build an empire, and Nagash who had guided him to Krell, but not for Kemmler’s sake. That was what the whisperers had told him. And it was Nagash who wanted to use him now. It was Nagash who stalked him in the dark hollows of memory, hunting the tatters of his soul.

Fear, now, warred with rage. He flailed as a thread of magic slipped between his fingers. A nearby zombie flopped down, inert and inanimate. More followed suit, and Kemmler hissed in mounting frustration. Concentrate, he had to concentrate. Between the hammer of the drum and the mounting agitation of the whispers, he heard the telltale cackle of the skull atop his staff.

Kemmler turned, and his eyes narrowed. He caught a pale wisp of rising magics – not the ashy smoke of the wind of death, but the gossamer effluvium of the raw stuff of life – and saw a trio of women standing behind the embattled shieldwall of peasantry. His lips writhed back from his teeth in a snarl of disdain.

The women were marshalling the magics of life to counteract his sorceries of death. Behind them, moss and flowers crawled across the stones of the abbey walls, and thick vines and roots crawled across the battlefield about them. The impertinence of it assaulted his sensibilities, and he slammed the end of his staff down, planting it like a standard.

‘This is my ground, witches,’ he hissed. And it was, in every way that mattered. He had bought it in blood and time. Every time he had made war in this place, on the abbey, he had shed his life’s blood and soured the ground with the stuff of death. They could plant all of the trees and flowers they liked, remove all of the bodies, weave every protective enchantment known to elf or man, but the ground was still his and would be forever more.

As if they had heard his words, three pairs of eyes, violet and alien, met his own dark ones. He felt a jolt as three minds, trained to think inhuman thoughts and bent to inhuman goals, reached out to him. They were powerful, these witches. The cursed elves of Athel Loren had taken their natural gifts and forced them down unnatural paths, moulding them into weapons to be used against their own kind.

Thoughts like claws tore at his connection to the winds of magic, severing his links with brutal efficiency. He snarled and champed like a beast in a trap, and every vein stood out in his neck and arms as he reached for his staff with his free hand. A wind sprang from nowhere, tearing at him, hot and cold all at once. His bones felt heavy, but hollow, and things that might have been maggots squirmed beneath his flesh and dripped from the unhealed wound that Tancred had dealt him. The soil churned beneath him, as if in pain, and there was moss growing on his staff. He swept it off angrily.

They had minds like trees with ancient roots: anchored and arrogant. He lashed out at them, attacking them mind to mind, and was rebuffed. Kemmler ground his teeth in growing frustration. His rage turned incandescent and burned away all hesitation.

The whispers rose, drowning out the drumbeat. Warmth – true warmth – flooded him, filling the cold emptiness that Nagash had left in him all those centuries ago when his voice, his spirit, had abandoned Kemmler on the eve of the Battle of Ten Thousand Skulls. Yes, they whispered. Yes, yes, yes, it is all yours for the taking. You do not serve us, but we will serve you. And he knew that they lied, because they were crafted from the very stuff of falsehood; but he also knew that what they offered was real – and that Arkhan, and his phantom master, offered nothing at all save the very thing that Kemmler had fled from down through the long, winding nightmare road of years.

No, better damnation than oblivion.

Better madness than servitude.

Better to fight and fail than surrender and be nothing.

‘Mine – the abbey, the air you breathe, the ground you stand on, all of it mine,’ Kemmler snarled, as the fire surged in him. He dug the end of his staff into the ground the way a torturer might dig a blade into the flesh of his victim. ‘So listen and listen well to the master of La Maisontaal, witches.’ Power flooded through him as he gripped his staff with both hands and channelled the new, destructive magics that hummed through his veins into the earth. Pockets of dark magic and old, sour death awoke at its touch, and the ground lost its colour as he sent the awakened power burrowing through the soil. ‘I am not the intruder here. You are.’

He felt, rather than saw, the panic begin to creep in and undermine their inhuman calm. They could feel the very earth beneath their feet rejecting their petty magics. Steam escaped from the cracked and dying soil, rising up to mingle with the smoke of the fires. Three pairs of hands began to weave a complicated counter-spell, but it was too late.

Kemmler smiled as he felt their mystical defences fall away, as if they had built them on sand. Then, the sky spoke harshly, and a bolt of black lightning lanced down through the dark sky to strike the three women and the men who protected them. Kemmler felt their deaths and he threw his head back and expelled a cackle.

‘Thus to all who would deny me my proper due,’ he roared. ‘Heinrich Kemmler yet lives!’ He swept out his hands and felt his ebullience fill the dead around him, driving them faster and lending strength to their faltering limbs.

For a moment, he stood in an eye of calm amidst the chaos of battle. He felt strong – stronger than he had ever felt before. He was cloaked in magic, and his wound was healed. He sucked in a breath.

The dead hesitated. Empty eyes turned towards him, and lipless mouths flapped as though in warning. His skull staff was silent. The rush of confidence, of self-assurance, faded. Kemmler licked his lips, suddenly nervous. Though many corpses were looking at him, they were all doing so with the same set of eyes. And they were neither as dead nor as empty as he had first thought. They were dark with anger, and with promise.

Kemmler pushed through their ranks. One or two reached out for him, but he clubbed them aside with his staff and his will. More and more of them turned to follow him, but not in the way they had before. He felt his control slacken, and knew then what he had given up.

It was time to get what he had come for.

It was time to put an end to things.

FIFTEEN

‘Again! Burninate them again – quick-rapid!’ Snikrat shrieked, beating one of the warpfire gunners about the head with the flat of his blade. ‘Immolate, by which I mean set fire to, the cursed twice-dead, but still somehow moving and, more importantly, biting, things!’

Things were not going as well as Snikrat had hoped.

The gunner chattered curses as he aimed the warpfire thrower and unleashed a second belch of crackling green flames into the mouths of the tunnels that opened up onto the cavern. The fire lashed out indiscriminately, spraying the walls and those skaven too slow in retreating as well as the inexorable dead. Skaven flooded out of the tunnel past Snikrat and his warriors, squealing and slapping ineffectually at their fur as they sought to escape the hungry grasp of the flames.

The undead came on at a remorseless pace, pushing through the flames. Some fell, but these were replaced by more. And those that had fallen continued to crawl or slither forward until they were consumed entirely by the snapping flames. They inundated the upper tunnels, marching blindly into the spears and swords of the skaven, dragging down their destroyers as they were hacked apart. No matter how desperately the skaven fought, no matter how ferociously or cunningly, they could not match the dead, nor the unbending will that forced them on, metre by metre, tunnel by tunnel. Little by little, the warriors of Clan Mordkin were being driven back to the very heart of their domain.

‘More! More-more-more!’ Snikrat wailed, battering away at the unfortunate gunner with his blade for emphasis. ‘Hotter! Faster! Quicker! Don’t look at me idiot-fool – look at them!’ The warpfire gunner snarled and hunched, trying to avoid the blows. The warpfire throwers burbled and a third roar of green flame spewed out, momentarily obliterating the mouth of the tunnel. ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ Snikrat bounced on his feet, sword waving over his head as the front rank of corpses vanished, utterly consumed. ‘Fall and cease, dead-dead things. Snikrat the Magnificent commands you in his most commanding and authoritative manner to die, by which he means die again, and to thus stop moving!’ Behind him, his Bonehides began to cheer in relieved fashion. The stormvermin hadn’t been looking forward to fighting the undead again, especially in the cramped tunnels.

The cheers died away abruptly as the first stumbling, staggering torch lurched blindly out of the tunnel mouth. It was followed by another and another and another, until it seemed as if hundreds of burning corpses were squirming towards Snikrat’s ragged battle-line. A snorting undead boar, still girded with the legs of the orc who had ridden it in life, barrelled towards the warpfire throwers.

Snikrat yelped and, in his haste to scramble out of the way, his sword accidentally chopped through the hose. Green liquid sprayed everywhere as the burning pig lunged at the hapless gunners. The resulting explosion picked Snikrat up by the scruff of his neck and sent him hurtling away from the tunnel mouth, his fur crisping and his flesh burning.

He hit the cave floor hard and rolled, snuffing the flames that had caught him in the process. The cavern rumbled as fire washed the walls. Timber props, weakened by the gushing warpfire, gave way, and some of the tunnels collapsed, burying the living and the dead alike.

As Snikrat scrambled to his feet, clutching his burned tail to his chest, he saw the few surviving warriors of the Bonehides fall, dragged down by the burning dead. The air stank of fear-musk as the remaining warriors began to stream away from the cavern, pelting into the various tunnels, swarming away from the groping dead.

The tunnels were lost. Feskit was not going to be happy. Nonetheless, it was Snikrat’s duty to report on his sad failure, in person, to his liege lord. He ran with heroic alacrity, his injured tail whipping behind him as he pelted down the tunnel. He used his weight and strength to smash aside fleeing clanrats, and when the tunnel was so packed with squealing skaven that such tactics proved impossible, he scrambled up onto a clanrat’s shoulders and bounded across the heads of the others as they fought and bit for space.

Snikrat burst out of the crowded confines of the tunnel and sprinted towards the Mordkin lair’s final line of defence – a vast chasm, which split the outer tunnels from the great central cavern that was the rotten heart of the burrow. A long and winding bridge spanned the chasm. Composed of planks, spars, tar-clogged ropes and other detritus fit for purpose, including but not limited to panels of metal, bones and sheets of filthy cloth, it was the very pinnacle of skaven efficiency and engineering, and the sight of it lent Snikrat speed.

There was no other way across the chasm, not for leagues in any direction. Feskit had long ago ordered all other routes undermined to better prevent infiltration or attack by rival clans or ambitious greenskins. Skaven were clustered about the bridge, some trying to organise themselves into something approaching military readiness, while others were squealing and fighting to cross the bridge before their fellows. Snikrat charged headlong into the disorganised knot of clanrats, laying about him with his fist and sword until he reached the bridge and began to scramble across.

He heard the communal groan of their foes echo through the cavern as he ran. Skaven began to scream and the bridge swayed wildly as clanrats followed him, pursued closely by the swarming dead. Snikrat whirled as something grabbed his tail. A zombie, blackened by fire and missing most of its flesh, had lunged through the confusion and latched on to him. Snikrat shrilled in terror and lopped off the top of the thing’s grinning skull. It slumped, and its weight nearly pulled him from the bridge. As he extricated himself, he saw that those skaven who had been following him had not been nearly so lucky. They fell or were hurled into the chasm by the stumbling corpses, as the latter pressed forward, crawling along the bridge. The whole ramshackle structure shuddered and swayed wildly, and Snikrat had a sudden vision of himself plummeting into the darkness below.

Fear lent him wings, and he fairly flew towards the opposite side. A small army of clanrat weaponeers were gathering there, beneath the watchful eyes of several other sub-chiefs. Warpfire throwers and jezzail teams assembled along the edge of the chasm, weapons at the ready. As Snikrat hurtled to join them, he screamed, ‘Burn it! Burn the bridge – hurry, hurry, hurry!’

With somewhat unseemly haste, the warpfire throwers roared, the tongues of green flame barely missing him as they struck the centre of the span. He crashed onto solid ground and rolled to his feet, teeth bared and sword extended in what he hoped was a suitably heroic pose. ‘Yes, yes! Watch, minions – my grand strategy unfolds! See how cunningly Snikrat the Magnificent wages war,’ he cackled as the bridge began to groan and shift. Then, with a shriek of rupturing wood and tearing cloth, it toppled lazily into the chasm, carrying the dead with it.

Snikrat’s cackles grew in volume, and he was joined in his triumphant laughter by the other skaven as more and more zombies flooded out of the tunnels and were pushed into the depths by the mindless ranks coming behind them. The dead were stymied by the chasm, just as he had cunningly planned. Now was the time to unleash the full fury of Clan Mordkin’s arsenal. He shrieked orders to that effect, and the warpfire teams and jezzail gunners opened fire in a cloud of black powder and scorched air.

Snikrat watched in satisfaction as the dead were plucked from the opposite side of the chasm by a barrage of warpstone bullets, which whined and crashed across the divide. Zombies slewed off the edge and spiralled into oblivion, or collapsed burning. With a hiss of triumph, he sheathed his blade and strutted back towards the tunnels that led to the fortress-lair to inform Feskit of his triumph.

By the time Snikrat made it back through the gates of the fortress-lair, however, his ebullience had begun to sour. The clangour of alarms still choked the air, and clanrats scampered past him, running far more quickly than he would have expected. He could hear screams as well, and once, the dull crump of a warpfire thrower exploding.

Snikrat began to run. He had to explain to Feskit that whatever was happening wasn’t his fault. The weaponeers had disobeyed his orders – the clanrats had broken and run – the chieftains were fleeing – only Snikrat was loyal enough to stand beside Feskit, as he had in times past. His hand clenched on the hilt of his blade, as, in the depths of his twisty mind, the thought surfaced that merciful Feskit would surely be distracted enough to accept Snikrat’s blade at his back. He would need all of the loyal servants he could get, would old Feskit.

Snikrat had visions of himself courageously stabbing the tyrant of Mordkin in the back as Mordkin’s arsenal of weapons and beasts exterminated the dead. They carried him all the way to Feskit’s throne room, where chieftains and thralls scurried about in varying levels of panic. The alarm bells were deafening here, and they were ringing so ferociously that one snapped loose of its line and plummeted down, crushing a dozen slaves into a pulpy mess as Snikrat watched.

‘You failed,’ Feskit hissed from behind him. Snikrat spun, his paw still on the hilt of his sword. Feskit was surrounded by his Mordrat Guard, and Snikrat jerked his claws away from his sword as they levelled their halberds.

‘No! Successes unparalleled, oh merciful Feskit! Snikrat the Faithful, Snikrat the Dutiful, was failed by faithless, cowardly clanrats and irresponsible underlings; I-I came to warn you that the dead-dead things advance towards the gates even now,’ Snikrat babbled, his mind squirming quickly as he tried to stay on top of the situation. ‘They-they have crossed the chasm somehow – magic! They crossed it with magic, foul sorcery – and Snikrat came back to see to your defence personally.’

‘Did he?’ Feskit said. ‘I feel safer already.’ His eyes glinted. He glanced at one of his stormvermin. ‘Rouse the packmasters and the remaining weaponeers. Summon the turn-tail chieftains who enjoy my gracious hospitality, and scour the barrack-burrows for every stormvermin,’ he snarled.

‘And… and what of Snikrat, oh most kindly lord?’ Snikrat squeaked hesitantly. He rubbed his scarred throat, and wondered if he should make himself scarce.

Feskit glared at him, and then said, ‘You… Hrr, yes, I have a special task for you, Snikrat.’ He turned and grabbed another stormvermin by his cuirass and jerked him close. ‘You – tell the slaves to fetch… the Weapon.’

The stormvermin paled beneath his black fur. Feskit snarled again and shoved him back. ‘Fetch it now, quick-quick!’ Snikrat smelt the spurt of fear-musk that rose from the assembled stormvermin at the thought of the Weapon. The Fellblade, with its blade of glistening black warpstone. Could Feskit mean to give it to him to wield? He felt his courage return. With that blade in hand, Snikrat knew he would be invincible.

‘I will not fail you, Lord Feskit,’ Snikrat hissed, head full of the victories to come.

‘No, you will not,’ Feskit said. Then, with a lunge that would have put a wolf-rat to shame, he sank his yellow, chisel teeth into Snikrat’s throat. Snikrat tumbled back, clutching at his ruined jugular. Through a darkening haze, he saw Feskit chew and swallow the lump of gristle and flesh. ‘The Fellblade drains its wielder. You shall sustain me through the efforts to come, loyal Snikrat,’ Feskit said, cleaning his whiskers as his stormvermin raised their blades over Snikrat, to complete his butchery. As everything went dark, he heard Feskit say, ‘Thank you for your contribution.’

Arkhan’s mind was like a spider’s web, stretched to its breaking point by a strong wind, covering the battlefield. In the north, he urged Krell on about his bloody business. In the south, he goaded the shuffling dead to keep pace with the rest of the army. What remained of his attentions were fixed on Kemmler, and when he felt the surge of power, he knew that his suspicions had been proven correct.

The Lichemaster was more powerful now than ever before, and that power had not come from Nagash. The decaying cat on his shoulder hissed as a bolt of black lightning cut down through the night sky and struck a point on the battlefield. ‘What are you up to, necromancer?’ Arkhan said, out loud.

The winds of death suddenly thrashed about him, as if they were ropes that had been pulled taut. He felt the air pulse with indefinable motions and saw things not born of the world move through the shifting gossamer aurora of magics that hung over the battlefield. Daemonic voices cackled in his ear, and gloating phantom faces gibbered at him and vanished. His attentions snapped down, retracting to focus on Kemmler. But before he could do so fully, he was brutally interrupted.

‘Death to the dealers of death!’ the knight bellowed as his horse bulled through Arkhan’s skeletal bodyguard and drove the blade of his axe down through the liche’s ribcage, before the latter could react. The blow lifted Arkhan from his feet and sent him to the ground in a heap. The laughter of the Dark Gods roared in his head. He could see the trap now, in all of its crooked cunning. The beastmen, Kemmler, all of it… He was caught in the jaws of a hungry fate. Even now, with more than half of the knights who had crashed into the flanks of his host dead, there were still enough Bretonnians left on the field to carry the day, if Arkhan fell.

Something – not quite panic – filled him. It wasn’t desperation either, but frustration. To have come so close only to be denied. He saw the cat streaking towards him. It had fallen from his shoulders when he was knocked down, and he felt bereft, though he could not say why. Above him, in the smoke, faces leered down at him, mouthing the vilest curses, and devilish shapes capered invisibly about the knight, kept at bay by the light emanating from his axe. The Dark Gods wanted Arkhan in the ground, and more, it seemed that they wanted to watch him being put there.

Under other circumstances, he might have felt flattered. As the knight urged his horse forward, Arkhan’s shattered, brown bones began to repair themselves. The knight growled in satisfaction as he closed in. Arkhan tried to heave himself up. ‘Oh no, evil one. That will not do. The Lady has tasked Theoderic of Brionne with giving you the long overdue gift of death, and you shall accept it in full,’ the knight roared as he raised his axe. His armour was battered and stained, but the blade of his axe glowed brightly as the dawn broke over the battlefield.

Before the blow could fall, a blur of red iron interposed itself between axe and bone, and the knight was toppled from his saddle. Arkhan was somewhat surprised to see Anark von Carstein there, blade in hand, armour torn and stained with the detritus of hard fighting. Another slash and the knight’s horse screamed and fell, hooves kicking uselessly in its death throes. Arkhan watched in satisfaction as the knight gasped as he tried to gather his feet under him. His fall had broken something in him, the liche knew. The man spat blood and groped for his axe. He caught it up, while Anark’s blade descended for his skull. He swatted the blow aside and dragged himself to his feet.

‘Give me your name, devil, so that I might tell it to the troubadours who will sing of this day in years to come,’ Theoderic rasped, hefting his axe. Anark lunged without speaking, his blade moving quicker than the knight could follow. He interposed his axe, audibly swallowing a groan as whatever had broken inside him shifted painfully, and the edges of both weapons bit into one another. Arkhan watched the battle, somewhat amazed that the mortal was still on his feet. A raw light seemed to infuse him, as it had his axe, and it forced him up and on, lashing at him like a slave-driver’s whip. The Bretonnians called it a blessing, but Arkhan knew it for what it was. Nagash had used similar spells to invigorate and drive forward the Yaghur in those dim, dark days of the past. Whatever the Lady was, whether she was some goddess of elves or men, or something else entirely, she was as desperate as the Chaos gods to see Arkhan stymied.

Theoderic smashed the vampire in the face with his elbow and knocked him to one knee. He drove his axe down, crumpling a blood-red pauldron and gashing Anark’s neck. He drew his axe back and swung, knocking the vampire sprawling. ‘Tell me your name, beast! Let it ring over the field!’ he roared, swinging his axe up to take a two-handed grip on the haft as the beast clawed for its blade. The vampire moved so quickly, Theoderic’s words had barely left his lips before Anark launched a blow that severed both of Theoderic’s arms and his head as well.

‘My name is Anark von Carstein, meat,’ the vampire spat as he glared down at his fallen foe. Arkhan dragged himself upright. He touched the spot where the axe had caught him, and felt the bones click back into place. The weapon had been blessed, to do such damage, but he had survived worse in his time.

‘Indeed it is. It seems that I owe you a debt, von Carstein,’ Arkhan said as he retrieved his staff. The cat leapt up and hauled its way back onto his shoulder, its eyes glowing faintly. Most of the flesh was gone from its skull, and its spine rose above its sagging hide like a battlement. It felt as heavy as ever, and it gave an impatient miaow as it wrapped itself about his neck. He stroked its bony shoulder and set his staff. All around him the fallen dead, including what was left of Theoderic, began to slide and slither and stumble upright. Waste not, want not, after all.

‘One that I will be only too happy to collect from you, but not until this affray is ended,’ Anark growled. He gestured with his sword. ‘Which shouldn’t be too much longer, from the looks of things.’

Arkhan followed the gesture just in time to see the Bretonnian shieldwall shatter. Here and there, groups of men kept their order and fought against the tide that sought to overwhelm them. But most of them gave in to their terror and fled towards the dubious safety of the abbey walls. Krell’s wights pursued, taking advantage of the breach in the line. The lines of archers and war engines were overrun by slavering ghouls, led by the Crowfiend, and embattled knights were surrounded by skeletons and clawing zombies. The battle was breaking down, becoming a slaughter.

The greater part of the Bretonnian army was dead or fleeing. Those who remained would not survive long. La Maisontaal Abbey was as good as theirs. The staff of Nagash would soon be on its way back to Sylvania, to be reunited with the other relics. Satisfaction filled him such as he had not felt in centuries.

The end was coming. The end of his road, of all struggle and strife. Lamps extinguished, story finished and finally… sleep. Blessed eternal sleep. He swept his staff through a curl of smoke full of silently snarling faces. ‘Arkhan still lives, little gods. You have failed. And Nagash will shatter your petty schemes and hurl you back into the void that gave birth to you,’ he rasped, hurling his bravado at the wispy shapes like a javelin.

But his moment of satisfaction was brief. Kemmler was nowhere to be seen. And Arkhan knew where he had gone. He saw hazy daemonic shapes, small, stunted things, scampering towards the grounds of the abbey, invisible to all eyes but his. He looked at Anark. ‘Finish this. Kill everything that lives.’

The vampire looked at Arkhan as he started towards the abbey. ‘And what about you?’

Arkhan didn’t stop or turn. ‘I go to claim our prize.’

SIXTEEN

‘It’s really quite amusing, in its way,’ Markos murmured as he leaned against the tunnel mouth, arms crossed. ‘They just keep wandering into the flames, don’t they?’

‘It’s a waste of materials,’ Count Nyktolos grunted. He plucked his monocle from his eye and cleaned it on the scorched hem of his cloak. ‘We only have three thousand, six hundred and fifty-three zombies left.’

‘Did you count them?’ Markos asked, brow arched.

‘No,’ Nyktolos said. Then, ‘Yes, possibly.’ He put his monocle back into place and sniffed. ‘There is very little to do down here but kill skaven or count zombies.’

Markos shook his head, and looked at Mannfred, where the latter stood in the tunnel mouth, hands clasped behind his back, gripping the staff of Kadon with the Claw of Nagash mounted atop it, held parallel to the ground. ‘Well, cousin? You heard the Vargravian – we’re running short on fodder. How do you intend to get us across that chasm?’

Mannfred ignored Markos. His eyes were fixed on the chasm ahead, rather than the group of vampires behind him. He heard the hiss of the bloodthirsty steeds of the Drakenhof Templars, and the soft clatter of his own skeletal mount. The former were as impatient to taste the blood of their enemies as their masters were.

He lifted the staff, and the Claw flexed. The power it radiated throbbed in him like the ache of a sore tooth. The Fellblade was close – too close to allow such a minor obstacle to stymie him. A slow smile crept across his face, as he came to the obvious conclusion. Ignoring Markos’s pestering, he strode out of the tunnel, towards the chasm. The zombies ceased their mindless advance as he took control of them directly once more, the reins of his will snapping taut about the husks, and pulled them in his wake.

Mannfred could feel the dregs of raw magic that still lurked in the warpfire-blackened stones, and in the shards of expended warpstone fired from the skaven weapons. He went to the edge of the chasm, where the anchors for the bridge had been torn free of the rock. He held the staff in both hands, and focused on drawing the residual magics from the warpstone all about him. The air bristled with energy, which only grew as the skaven began to fire at him. Warpstone bullets whistled past his head, and he drew their energy from them as they drew close. A corona of crackling magics swirled about him, and the burned and shattered dead scattered in heaps and piles began to stir.

The dead behind him moved towards the chasm, their rotting bodies shuddering as Mannfred gestured sharply. The dead flesh of the zombies split and tore as their bones began to lengthen and grow. Hooks of bone sank into the rock as the dead toppled forward. More zombies, some little more than burned skeletons, climbed over these, their bones going through a similar transformation. A symphony of bursting flesh and cracking bone overshadowed the crack of skaven weaponry as the gruesome bridge took shape.

The skaven’s rate of fire grew more intense, and Mannfred’s smile grew as a warpfire thrower, pushed past its limits, exploded and consumed its crew. Pistols and jezzails snapped and snarled, and bullets struck the bridge or hissed past Mannfred. More weapons began to misfire. The skaven began to retreat in ragged formation as the bridge drew closer and closer to the opposite ledge. Some continued to fire as they fell back, but most simply dropped their weapons and ran.

‘Oh well done, cousin,’ Markos said from behind Mannfred. He led his own mount and Mannfred’s by their reins. ‘Not subtle, mind, but we’ve dispensed with subtlety, haven’t we?’

‘Markos… shut up,’ Mannfred growled, fixing Markos with a glare. He hauled himself up into his saddle. ‘All of you, mount up. We are close to our goal, and I would tarry no longer. I want this business done. I grow tired of these reeking tunnels.’

So saying, Mannfred jerked his mount’s reins and galloped over the bridge. Markos and the others followed suit. The bridge squirmed beneath the pounding hooves of their fiery-eyed horses. Seeing the onrushing knights, the remaining skaven turned to flee. But not one of the vermin made it to the dubious safety of the tunnels as Mannfred and his followers laid about them with their blades, lopping off heads and tails, and shattering spines as they crushed the ratkin to a red mulch beneath their hooves.

The dead flowed after them. Howling spectres led the way, filling these new tunnels as they had the others, flowing through every flue, nook and cranny that the skaven had dug. Hastily erected barricades of wood and metal were no barrier to immaterial beings, and skaven clanrats died in droves, unable to fight back or even flee. Zombies too pressed forward, flooding those passages wide enough to accommodate their sheer numbers. The dead skaven left in Mannfred’s wake staggered up to join the advancing host, adding to the sheer bulk of corpses that choked the inner tunnels of the skaven stronghold.

As the dead fulfilled their function, Mannfred led his Templars on through the crooked burrow, Kadon’s staff held out before him like a standard pole. The Claw of Nagash pulled him on, drawn inexorably towards its nemesis. Over the hours that followed, Mannfred and his warriors fought their way through waves of mutated beasts, armoured stormvermin and limitless ranks of skaven warriors. Some vampires were pulled down, but even outnumbered seven to one, Mannfred and the others were more than a match for the best that the ratkin could throw at them. Where blade and muscle would not suffice, Mannfred, supported by Markos, unleashed volley after volley of devastating spellcraft, scouring entire tunnels and caverns of all life before drawing their victims to their feet and sending them ahead to attack their fellows.

So it went for hours, until at last, Mannfred, at the head of his host, stood before the walls of the fortress-lair of the skaven. The walls were, like all skaven constructions, a derelict mismatch of materials, most of which had never been intended for such a purpose. The gates were a different, and much more interesting, matter. They were made from the bones of what appeared to be a great dragon, and as Mannfred examined them, he smiled.

‘We can take the walls,’ Count Nyktolos said, calming his restive steed. Mortar fire and warp lightning began to streak from the lopsided towers, as if in reply to his statement. He whistled. ‘Or not,’ he added.

‘I lack the patience for a siege,’ Mannfred said.

‘Then what – surely you don’t mean to parley with vermin?’ Markos asked. Mannfred’s smile spread. The other vampire sounded affronted.

Mannfred lifted the Claw of Nagash, and black lightning began to spit and spark from the twitching, spidery fingers. He chuckled. ‘No, Markos. I have a more… elegant solution in mind.’

Erikan bounded through the line of trebuchets, his blade singing out to open up an unlucky peasant’s throat. The man fell, gagging on his own blood, and the ghouls that had followed Erikan pounced on him, ending his troubles with a few well-placed bites. Erikan watched them feed for a moment, and then continued on, pursuing the fleeing peasantry. More ghouls followed him, baying hungrily as they knuckled across the uneven ground.

The true dead were barred from the abbey grounds for the moment, leaving only creatures like himself and the ghouls capable of crossing the boundary stones in pursuit of the peasants. He’d left his horse somewhere amongst the abandoned artillery pieces. He’d never been very comfortable fighting from the back of a steed. He felt like too much of a target. Let Anark and the others play at hammer and anvil with the flower of Bretonnian chivalry. He would hunt amongst the stones and take his share of scalps there.

The air sizzled with sorcery, and he heard a thunderclap, which shook the ground beneath his boots as he moved. In the next moment, Krell bulled into the line of archers, his great black axe chopping through armour, flesh and bone with ease. Men died screaming. Smoke coiled through the air, obscuring his vision for a moment.

When it cleared, he saw a hunched shape hurrying towards the abbey. Kemmler, he realised, after a moment. The necromancer was far ahead of them, and moving more quickly than Erikan had thought possible for such a broken-down wreck of a human being. Another curl of smoke obscured the Lichemaster, and when it cleared he was gone. Erikan considered pursuing him, and then decided that it wasn’t even remotely his problem.

An armoured knight, unhorsed and bare-headed, charged towards him. He shouted unintelligible oaths and awkwardly swiped at the vampire with his blade. He was barely more than a youth, and his eyes were wide with fear and determination. Erikan parried his next blow, and for a moment, duelled back and forth with the young knight. He felt no satisfaction when his blade slid through his opponent’s guard and crunched into his throat. He kicked the body off his sword and spun in time to chop an inexpertly wielded halberd in two.

He stepped back as the man who’d thrust it at him was bowled over by a ghoul sow and her mate. The two creatures smashed the wailing peasant to the ground, but didn’t kill him. The sow shrilled a question at Erikan. He looked at her, and then at the cursing, struggling man she held down. Men just like him had taken Erikan from the only home he knew, and put his parents to the torch. The knights had ordered it, but men like this one… They had taken pleasure in it. They had enjoyed seeing his family die.

For a moment, as he stared down at the pale, frightened features, he remembered that night – the stink of torches cutting through the comforting miasma of the tunnels, his mother shrieking in anger and fear as his father bellowed and hewed at the invaders with his fine sword. He remembered his brothers and sisters fleeing into the darkness as men rode the slower ones down. He remembered a white sun on a red sky turning black. He remembered Obald saving him from the flames, and a red-haired woman – had it been Elize, even then? The memory was fuzzy and he couldn’t be sure – tending his burns.

But mostly, he remembered fire and blood.

Erikan snarled and hacked the helpless man’s head from his shoulders. He lifted his blade and licked the blood from it, as the ghouls fell to their feast. He looked about him, watching as the battle became a massacre. A new day was dawning, but the skies were mournful, as if the clouds were weeping for the fate of the defenders of La Maisontaal.

He smiled, amused at the thought. Let the world weep, if it wished. Crying never made anything better. The first drops of rain had begun to fall when he heard the horns. He turned, and his eyes widened. A curse flew from his lips as he saw the standards rising over the melee.

The new arrivals came by the south road, as if they’d followed in the footsteps of the dead. Ghouls scattered before them, and zombies were trampled beneath the hooves of their steeds as the column of knights plunged deep into the undead ranks, further fracturing an already divided army. The knights struck the dead like a battering ram, their lances thrust forwards to catch the enemy. When the lances had done their work, swords came into play, hacking apart rotting limbs and splintering ancient bone.

The undead reeled, and those with any spark of initiative converged on the newcomers. Erikan saw Anark and the other Drakenhof Templars fighting their way towards the knights, and Krell as well. Satisfied that he wasn’t needed, he turned back, ready to order his ghouls into the abbey. Before he could do so, a shadow fell over him.

He looked up as the ghouls scattered, wailing. A lance crashed into his shoulder and knocked him sprawling. The pegasus swooped overhead as its rider released his shattered lance and drew his sword. ‘Filthy flesh-eater,’ the knight roared as his flying steed dived back towards Erikan. He scrambled aside, narrowly avoiding the blow. He snatched up his sword from where it had fallen and flung himself into the frame of a trebuchet. The pegasus galloped past, wings snapping like thunderclaps. More pegasus knights plunged through the air, attacking the ghouls and wights.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Krell swat one of the newcomers from the air, killing both pegasus and rider with a single blow. The wight was steadily chopping his way through enemy and ally alike as he fought his way towards the knight in the fanciest armour. From long, bitter experience, Erikan knew that one was likely the leader. He silently wished Krell luck, though he doubted the creature would either need or appreciate it.

Erikan skinned up through the frame of the trebuchet, climbing towards the arm. His attacker circled the trebuchet, rising back into the air as Erikan burst out into the open, and as quick as lightning, climbed the arm. He ran upwards, sword held low, and sprang into the air as the pegasus passed overhead. His hand snapped out and caught hold of the saddle.

With a twist of his shoulder, he flung himself up and landed on the back of the snorting, bucking beast. The knight twisted in his saddle but not quickly enough, and their blades locked. Erikan’s lunge carried him and his enemy off the pegasus, and they hurtled towards the ground.

Erikan struck the earth first, and he shrieked as he felt bones crack. Thrashing wildly, he sent the knight flying. The man climbed awkwardly to his feet, his armour rattling. Erikan slithered to his feet, his body already healing. The knight had lost his sword in the fall, as had Erikan. The former scooped up a spear and lunged smoothly, faster than Erikan expected, and caught him in the belly. With a single, powerful thrust, he shoved Erikan back and up. Erikan howled and grasped at the haft of the spear.

‘When you get to whatever damnation awaits you, tell them it was Fastric Ghoulslayer who sent you,’ the knight roared, shoving the vampire back. The point of the spear burst out from between Erikan’s shoulder blades, punching through his armour and pinning him to the frame of a trebuchet. He screamed in agony. The spear had only just missed his heart, but agony sizzled through him, causing his limbs to spasm helplessly.

‘Do it yourself,’ Erikan spat, through bloody teeth. He kicked out and knocked his enemy sprawling. He tore the haft of the spear to flinders and fell to the ground. With a snarl, he ripped the splinter of wood from his chest and flung himself onto the knight before the latter could get to his feet. He clawed at the man’s helm as the latter struggled, and shoved the edge of it up, exposing a small expanse of flesh. With a triumphant howl, Erikan plunged the splinter of wood into the soft flesh just below his opponent’s jaw, and shoved until the tip scraped metal. The man shuddered beneath him, and went still.

Erikan rolled aside and looked up into the cold, burning gaze of Arkhan the Black. ‘Kemmler… Where is he?’

Erikan pointed weakly towards the abbey. Arkhan nodded and stepped over him. Erikan watched the liche stalk towards the abbey. ‘You’re welcome,’ he coughed, and shoved himself to his feet. Then he began to search for his sword, one hand pressed to the wound in his chest.

There was still a battle to win.

SEVENTEEN

The gates twisted and then shrieked, the dark spirit that still clung to the ancient dragon’s bones giving voice to its frustration and rage. Ropes snapped and wood ruptured as the creature tore itself free of the fortress walls that rested upon it, and the dragon’s skeleton rose to its full terrifying height for the first time since its death at the hands of the skaven. The walls sagged and crumbled as the great beast thrust itself into the lair of its murderers, seeking vengeance on the descendants of those who had long ago feasted on its flesh. Skaven died in droves as they tried to flee.

The reanimated dragon reared up and ripped an artillery tower apart. Its whip-like tail curved out, the sorcerously hardened bone cutting through stone and wood like a scythe through wheat, and part of the outer wall exploded into ragged fragments.

‘Elegant, he says,’ Markos muttered, as he stared at the ensuing devastation.

‘Perhaps we have different definitions of the term,’ Mannfred said, smiling thinly. ‘Regardless, we have our path.’ He raised the staff. ‘For Drakenhof! For Sternieste! For Sylvania – ride!’ He drove his spurs into the fleshless flanks of his horse of bones, and it shot forward, galloping faster than any living creature. His knights, vampire and wight alike, followed in his wake. They charged towards the shattered walls and on through, riding hard amidst the dust and smoke. Zombies poured through in their wake, hungry for the flesh of the living, as Mannfred allowed his control to lapse. Let the dead go where they would, and cause what mischief they wished. The more confusion, the better for him.

Skaven weapons overloaded and exploded as the gunners on the walls tried to bring down the reanimated dragon. Warp lightning arced out, destroying the ramshackle buildings and obliterating knots of skaven who rushed to repel the invaders.

Mannfred gave vent to a primal howl as he rode down a mob of clanrats. In the days since he’d entered the tunnels, he’d refrained from engaging in battle more than was necessary. But now he was free to unfetter his accumulated frustrations. His knights scattered, similarly hungry for carnage. Their lances and swords tore the life from the clanrats and stormvermin who sought to keep them at bay, or else escape them.

Mannfred unleashed baleful magics and laid about him with his blade, following the pull of the Claw. The Fellblade was close. He could feel it, like an itch behind his eyes. He pursued the sensation, galloping down the central thoroughfare of the fortress-lair, eliminating anything that dared cross his path.

Then, at last, he saw it. The Fellblade seemed to blaze with a darkling light, as its wielder swept it through the air in a gesture of command. The skaven warlord – for so Mannfred judged the heavily muscled, grey-furred beast to be – crouched atop a heavy shield, carried by four of its black-furred bodyguards. It was surrounded by a phalanx of stormvermin, and as it caught sight of him, its eyes bulged with rage. It gestured at him and chittered shrilly. The stormvermin began to advance cautiously towards him. Mannfred brought his steed to a halt and watched them come.

He considered simply charging into their midst. Kill a few, and the rest would flee. And, as big as the warlord was, it was little more than a beast and no threat to him. But the presence of the Fellblade in its paw gave him pause. Craven though its owner might have been, the blade was still dangerous. Even a lucky blow might harm him greatly. So… the oblique approach, then.

Mannfred slid from the saddle. Then, mustering the quicksilver speed of his bloodline, he sped towards the advancing skaven. But rather than attacking them, he sprang aside, skirting them and winnowing through their ranks faster than their beady eyes could follow. He let his blade lick out, and the shield-bearers who held the warlord’s makeshift palanquin aloft fell, blood spraying from their wounds. The warlord was spilled to the ground with a wail. The other stormvermin reacted much as he’d predicted, and panic swept through them. He ignored them, and circled the warlord as the beast struggled to its feet.

It whirled with commendable speed, launching a blow that, under other circumstances, might have split him crown to groin. But to Mannfred, the beast was moving in slow motion. He watched the blow descend before casually stepping into the arc of the swing. He grabbed the warlord’s forearm, and snapped it with a twist of his wrist as he slid the point of his own blade through the creature’s rusted breastplate and scabrous chest.

The skaven gave a shrill, agonised cry, and sank down to its knees. The Fellblade fell from its worthless paws and clattered to the ground. With a final whimper, the creature toppled forward, and kicked in its death throes. Mannfred watched it die, and felt little satisfaction.

Well, he was hardly a worthy opponent, was he? A bit anticlimactic, wasn’t it? Vlad laughed. More like pest control than a true battle.

Mannfred ignored the shadowy presence and scooped up the Fellblade. It seemed to writhe in his grip for a moment, like a spiteful cat, before it grew still. He peered down the length of the sword, studying the eerie patina of the black blade. Then he shoved it through his belt without flourish and remounted his steed.

He summoned his remaining knights and Templars to him as he rode back through the ruined gates of the fortress-lair, ignoring the battle that still raged all around him. The reanimated dragon and the zombies would serve to keep the skaven occupied for several days to come, until the magic he had used to reanimate them at last faded. After that, let the skaven do as they would. He couldn’t care less whether they survived, flourished or perished. Whatever their fate, they were no longer of any importance.

Mannfred bent low over his steed’s neck as he began the long trek back to the surface. He had his prize, and there was much work yet to be done.

Nagash would rise, and Mannfred would rule.

‘Kemmler!’

The aged necromancer turned as Arkhan’s challenge echoed through the darkened crypt that lay in the bowels of the abbey. The bodies of the brothers of La Maisontaal lay about him on the floor, slain when they’d made one last desperate attempt to defend the malevolent artefact long ago given into their care. Arkhan paid no heed to the crumpled corpses as he stepped into the chamber.

Kemmler smiled and lifted the Great Staff of Nagash, Alakanash, in triumph. ‘Too late, puppet. Too late,’ he said. ‘I’ve found it, and I have claimed it.’

‘If I am a puppet, I am not alone in that,’ Arkhan rasped. He had foreseen Kemmler’s betrayal. Subtlety had never been the Lichemaster’s strong suit. But he had never expected the old fiend to possess enough courage to take up Nagash’s staff for his own. He could practically hear the shard of Nagash in the staff writhing in animal fury, and Kemmler’s knuckles were white as he tightened his grip on his prize.

‘Indeed. I have been a puppet for more years than I care to remember, liche,’ Kemmler said. ‘Not as long as you, but long enough to know that I do not wish to end up like you – a hollow, thin thing of ashes and scraps, haunting its own bones. Nagash is as much a vampire as the von Carsteins. He feasts on us, taking and taking, until there’s nothing left. And then he drags us up to take yet more. Creatures like you and Krell might have no will of your own left, but Heinrich Kemmler is no dead thing’s slave.’ He circled the sarcophagus slowly, leaning on Nagash’s staff. Even now, he was playing the tired old man, though Arkhan could see the power flowing through his withered frame, and the invisible daemons that capered about him like eager children. ‘I am the master here. Not you. And certainly not Nagash. He might have his hooks in you and in the fanged fop, Mannfred, but the Lichemaster is no dogsbody. I have found new patrons.’

‘New masters, you mean,’ Arkhan said.

‘Partners,’ Kemmler said, flashing rotten teeth in an expression that was as much grimace as grin. It was a lie, and a vainglorious one, and Kemmler knew it. ‘They recognise my power, liche. They see me for what I am, what I have always been, and they shower me with their gifts where Nagash would grind me under.’ He smiled in a sickly fashion. ‘And oh, they hate him. They hate him more than any creature that has yet walked this world. They hate him for his hubris, and they hate him for what he would do to this world.’

‘They hate him. And they fear him,’ Arkhan said. ‘Otherwise, this conversation would not be taking place. They fear him, and you fear him. The Dark Gods are mice, scrabbling in the holes of time, and Nagash is the cat who will drive them out.’ As he moved forwards, his thoughts reached out to the freshly slain bodies of the monks, and they began to twitch and scrabble at the floor. If he was quick, he might be able to overwhelm Kemmler before he became attuned to the power contained within the staff.

‘Not without this he won’t,’ Kemmler said. He lifted the staff and brought it down, so that the butt struck the floor. The stones hummed with a black note as mortar and dust cascaded down. Several of the bodies flopped back into motionlessness. ‘Answer me honestly, Arkhan… Do you truly want him back?’

Arkhan stopped. ‘What?’

‘It’s a simple enough question,’ Kemmler said. ‘Do you want him back? Have you ever questioned that desire? Are you even capable of doing so?’ He shook his head. ‘What am I saying? Of course you aren’t.’

Arkhan said nothing. Kemmler’s words echoed through him. That was the question, wasn’t it? He had never truly considered it before. He wanted to throw the Lichemaster’s assertions back into his face, but he couldn’t. The cat dug its claws into his shoulder. It seemed to weigh more than it had, as if death had lent it mass.

Before he could muster a reply, the beast yowled and sprang across the distance between Arkhan and Kemmler, raking the latter’s wizened face. The necromancer screamed and batted the animal aside with the staff. The cat’s body struck the wall and fell in a tangle of broken bones and rotting flesh, but it had accomplished its goal. Arkhan threw aside his staff and lunged with all the speed his long-dead frame could muster. Skeletal palms struck the staff in Kemmler’s hands and, for a moment, liche and Lichemaster stood frozen. Living eyes met dead ones, and a moment of understanding passed between them.

Arkhan understood Kemmler’s rage, his fear and his obsession. But he could not forgive it. Once, maybe. But not now. For now, Arkhan understood what was truly at stake. There were only two paths available to the world as it stood here in this moment – one led to madness and the destruction of the natural order, as the world was remade by the Dark Gods in their image; the other led to a cessation of everything before those horrific changes could be wrought. Had he not already had his destiny chosen for him, Arkhan knew which he would have preferred. At least Nagash might let him rest, eventually.

‘You have always been a selfish, short-sighted creature, Heinrich,’ Arkhan rasped. Kemmler grimaced and began to mouth a spell, but Arkhan swung him about and smashed him back against the sarcophagus that had contained the staff. ‘Driven by petty desires, unable to see the bigger picture even when it is laid out before you. The Great Work must be completed, and no turncoat beggar with delusions of grandeur will stop it. Nagash must rise, and if you must fall to serve that end, so be it. You call yourself the Lichemaster… Well then, prove it.’

Kemmler howled and the raw stuff of magic erupted from him, cascading over Arkhan, searing his bones and blackening his robes. But the liche refused to release his grasp on the staff. His will smashed against Kemmler’s, probing for some weakness. The old man’s will was like unto a thing of iron, forged by adversity and rooted in spite, but Arkhan’s was stronger yet. He had conquered death more than once, clawing his way back to the world of the living again and again. ‘Prove it,’ he said again, dragging Kemmler towards him. ‘Prove your boasts, old man. Show me the fiend who almost cracked the spine of the world at the Battle of Ten Thousand Skulls.’

‘I’ll show you,’ Kemmler screeched. He shoved Arkhan back, and they strained against one another, the staff caught between them. ‘I’ll not be your slave! I am Kemmler – I have broken cities and empires. I have slain armies,’ he shrilled. ‘And I will kill you, once and for all!’

Spell clashed against spell and magic inundated the chamber, splashing across the stones like blood. Arkhan could feel it building, growing in strength as the magic fed on itself and its surroundings. There were too many dangerous artefacts here, and they all resonated with the power that poured from him and Kemmler, even while the staff did.

The chamber around them began to shake. There was a thunderous crash as the windows upstairs succumbed to the growing pressure and exploded outwards. Green fire licked out from between the stones, rippling around them as they struggled. A tornado of wild magic swirled, and La Maisontaal Abbey shuddered like a dying man. One of the holiest sites in Bretonnia was being ripped apart from the inside out, but Arkhan spared no thought for such trivialities. It was all he could do to maintain his grip on the staff. Kemmler shrieked and cursed as magical flames caressed his flesh, billowing up around him and from within him as his new gods filled him with their power. Arkhan held on grimly, ignoring the sorceries that tore at him.

Kemmler’s flesh bulged and split like a blooming flower, and shapes squirmed in the dark within the raw redness of him. They were strange, terrible shapes that cursed and railed as they lashed Arkhan with fires of many hues and sweetly scented lightning. Kemmler’s eyes protruded, and the determination in them faded, swallowed by fire and intent. The skull-headed staff, which had been screaming the entire while, fell silent as it exploded into fragments. Caskets exploded out of the crypts around them, wreathed in fire. Arkhan felt ethereal talons tear at him and hideous voices wailed in his head, but he ignored them all, concentrating on the staff and his enemy. Kemmler’s eyes widened still further, as if he’d seen something over Arkhan’s shoulder, but Arkhan ignored the sudden babble of his voice.

And then, it was done. There was a roar, as of ocean waves smashing across rocks, and a great, sudden motion as if all of the earth had been thrown into the sky; a fire without heat filled Arkhan’s vision. He heard Kemmler wail, and it was a sound full of horror and hopelessness and frustration. Then he was on one knee, leaning against Alakanash, amidst the crater that had once been the vaults of La Maisontaal Abbey.

Arkhan chuckled grimly and rose to his full height. Ash drifted off his ravaged robes. He heard the thunder of voices and the blare of horns, and knew that what was left of the Bretonnian army was retreating.

He looked around, searching for the cat. There was nothing left of the beast, save a pile of ash and, rising above it, an enormous shadow, which had been burned into the ravaged stones. There was something unpleasantly familiar about that shadow, and Arkhan felt a pang of unease. Then, with a skill born of long experience, he brushed the feeling aside.

Nagash would rise.

EIGHTEEN

Mannfred coughed and rolled over onto his back, smoke rising from where the sorcerous blast had caught him. His fur cloak was burning and his armour was scorched. He knew by the taste of the magic who had attacked him, and he cursed himself. He had expected it to come sooner, and he had become distracted by the thrum of power that emanated from the Claw and the Fellblade. The hum of the ancient sorceries had lulled him, and now he was paying the price. His attacker strode towards him, casting aside his cloak of elegant haughtiness.

‘I expect Anark has made his move by now, the sullen fool. He won’t succeed, you know. And Erikan won’t help him. The Crowfiend knows better than to get between creatures like you and the liche,’ Markos said, stopping a short distance from Mannfred.

‘A wisdom that you do not seem to share, cousin,’ Mannfred said, as he rose to his feet. He cast a glance at the Fellblade where it lay, considering. Then, with a grunt, he turned away from it. He didn’t need it.

‘The Crowfiend knows his limits, as do I. Mine simply… extend a bit further than his,’ Markos said, gesturing lazily.

‘Have you chosen a side then, Markos? Picked a new master, perhaps?’ Mannfred asked. He considered a spell, and then discarded the idea. Markos was not his equal, but there were certain traditions to be honoured. Markos had made his challenge, and the battle would be settled in the proper way – blade to blade.

‘Hardly,’ Markos said. ‘If Anark fails, then I will see to the liche, never fear. Your rival will not long outlive you, Lord Mannfred.’

‘My heart swells,’ Mannfred said. ‘You cannot win, Markos.’

‘No? I rather fancy my chances.’ He drew his sword. ‘I had this forged for me, by a certain swordsmith in Nippon.’ He smiled. ‘You call yourself a god, cousin.’ Markos extended his sword. ‘In Nippon, they say that if you meet a god, if he is real, he will be cut by this steel,’ Markos said. ‘It is the finest, sharpest steel that can be made in this world. A man can be cut by it and not know for several hours, such is its keenness.’ He smiled and spun the blade. ‘Don’t worry, cousin. I’ll make sure you know when it’s time to die.’

Markos moved forward smoothly, with a grace and poise that Mannfred couldn’t help but grudgingly admire. He’d learned more than sorcery in his time in Cathay and Nippon, it seemed. His first slash came so quickly that it had opened up Mannfred’s cheek before he saw it coming. Mannfred scrambled to his feet, the taste of his own blood on his lips. He drew his blade, blocking a second blow.

‘You choose the most inopportune times to exert yourself, cousin,’ Mannfred hissed as he and Markos circled one another. The other Templars were staying out of it, Mannfred noted. Vampires respected little, save for the sanctity of the challenge. ‘We are on the cusp of ultimate victory, and you seek to rock the boat now?’

‘You are on the cusp of ultimate victory, and so, yes, now seems like a good time,’ Markos said. ‘I’ve read the same tomes, cousin. I’ve read the scrolls and the grimoires, and what you’re planning is madness. You can’t control what you intend to unleash, and I’ll not be the slave of some long-dead necromancer, first of his kind or otherwise.’ He fell into a defensive stance, blade angled parallel to his body. ‘You would damn us, and the world that is ours by right of blood, to servitude at the feet of a dusty god. For the good of all of us, in the name of Vlad von Carstein, I will gladly, and cheerfully, strike off your head.’

Hark at him, the supercilious little weasel, Vlad’s voice murmured in Mannfred’s ear, as if he were right over his shoulder. Familiar bit of rhetoric, though, you must admit. It wasn’t so long ago that you were framing similar arguments, right about the time my ring went missing, eh, boy?

‘Shut up,’ Mannfred hissed. Vlad laughed. ‘Shut up!’ Mannfred howled, and flung himself at Markos. Their blades crashed together with a sound like a wailing wind, and sparks slid from their edges as they scraped against one another, separated and came together again. Markos laughed tauntingly and pressed Mannfred back.

‘I’ll be silent the day I lose my head, cousin,’ he sneered. ‘I was of Vlad’s get, the same as you. My blood runs as pure as yours, and flows with the same power!’

‘Your blood,’ Mannfred spat. He caught a blow on the length of his blade and rolled into it, driving his shoulder into Markos’s chest who staggered back. ‘Your blood is gutter-froth, compared to mine. I was born in a palace, cousin. I was born the son of kings, and Vlad did not make me the creature I am. He merely honed me, the way that blade you boast of was honed.’

Vlad’s laughter faded in Mannfred’s ear drowned out by the sound of his own blood thundering in his veins, as he harried Markos back, wielding his sword as if it were a feather. His rage lent him strength, as it always had, and his arrogance as well.

He was not meant to fall here. He was meant for greater things. Better things. He had no illusions about the kind of man he was. He had sacrificed more on the altar of ambition than a guttersnipe like Markos could ever guess, all to reach this moment, this crossroads. He had been denied a throne once, in the dim, fell reaches of the past. And the world owed him a debt for that insult.

Markos’s confidence began to crumble as they traded blows. He had squandered the advantage of surprise in order to grandstand. That was the perennial flaw in Vlad’s blood, the urge to monologue, to make the enemy recognise your superiority, before the first blow had fallen. Mannfred fell victim to it himself, but he at least came by it honestly. Markos had been the son of a vintner, and not even a wealthy one.

‘You think a sword, or a bit of knowledge, makes you special, Markos? You are not,’ Mannfred said, sliding around a blow and catching Markos in the belly with a shallow slash. Armour peeled back like flesh as the blade danced across Markos’s torso. ‘You are no more special than Hans or Pieter or Fritz, or poor, sad Constantin, buried in his books. Just another funeral pyre to light the way of your betters.’ He attacked Markos again and again as he spoke, striking him with all of the speed and strength he possessed. Blood poured down Markos’s arms and legs, and his armour fell to tatters. Efficiently, ruthlessly, Mannfred cut ligaments and tendons, the way a butcher would ready an animal for sale.

Markos stumbled and sank to one knee, bracing himself with his blade. He coughed blood, and his free hand was pressed to his belly. His blood pooled about him, and the greedy earth drank it up thirstily. His lips began to move, and Mannfred felt the winds of magic stir. With a single word, he cut Markos off from them. He saw the other vampire’s eyes widen. A pall of resignation crept over Markos’s narrow features as he realised what had happened. ‘I waited too long,’ he said.

Mannfred nodded and said, ‘The approach of death lends a certain clarity.’ He caught Markos’s chin with the flat of his blade and lifted his head. ‘You went after me with a blade for the same reason Tomas did, all those months ago. You thought I was a better sorcerer than a swordsman.’

‘No, I thought you were mad. I see no evidence to the contrary,’ Markos coughed. ‘You will destroy us – all that Vlad built, and for what?’

‘For me,’ Mannfred said. ‘Always, for me. This world is mine. It did not belong to Vlad and it does not belong to Nagash or the Dark Gods. It was promised to me in my cradle, and I will have what I am owed.’ He lifted his blade in both hands. ‘Close your eyes, cousin. No man should have to see his body after his head has left his shoulders.’

Markos continued to stare at him. Mannfred shrugged and let the blade fall. Markos’s head came away, and his body slumped. Do you feel better now? Konrad always felt a bit better after a good bloodletting, Vlad hissed. Mannfred looked down, and saw something that might have been Vlad’s face – or perhaps a skull – reflected in the blood spreading away from Markos’s body.

He didn’t reply to the taunting voice. He had given in to that urge entirely too often, of late. It was stress and nothing more. The ghost of his fears and worries. Vlad’s spirit was gone from this world.

True enough, though you especially should know that beings like ourselves do not go gently into the darkness. You came back, after all, Vlad murmured. Mannfred could almost see him, circling, hands clasped behind his back, speaking the way a master speaks to a pupil. Then, perhaps I am not Vlad at all, and perhaps you did not come back all on your own, hmm?

Mannfred cleaned his blade on his cloak and sheathed it. The presence continued to speak, as if it took his silence for an invitation. He wondered, briefly, if there might have been some truth to Markos’s words. Was he going mad?

Do you care? Vlad asked.

Mannfred had no answer.

The town had been called Beechervast. Now, it was nothing. Flames crackled and buildings collapsed with rumbling groans as the dead marched through the dying settlement, adding to their number. Erikan watched as a screaming woman was dragged from the ruins of a hostel by two of his order. Her screams faded to moans as the two vampires fed greedily.

Erikan let his gaze drift to where Arkhan the Black stood near his chariot, watching what his magics had wrought. After the wood elf ambush at Parravon, they’d lost most of what was left of their army, including Krell, who’d held off their attackers while Arkhan and the others made for the dubious safety of the mountains. Whether Arkhan had attacked Beechervast simply in order to replenish his forces, or to wait and see if Krell caught up with them, Erikan couldn’t say, and hadn’t asked.

They’d lost much to acquire the shroud-wrapped shape strapped to Arkhan’s back. His eyes were drawn to it. It was a staff, he thought, much like the one Arkhan carried. To Erikan, it seemed to pulse with a sour light. It was like a wound in the world, and something in it pulled at the thing he was. There was power there, but he knew that if he tried to take it, it would consume him the way a moth is consumed by flame. Arkhan was welcome to it, whatever it was. He looked away from it, and saw Anark ambling towards Arkhan. Subtle as a brick to the head, he thought. He’d been wondering when Anark was going to give it a go.

Anark sprang into motion. He leapt towards the liche and shrieked a war-cry as he swung a wild, overhand blow. The liche whirled and swatted aside the tip of the sword with his staff and drove a bony fist into Anark’s face, sending him flying backwards.

Erikan winced, as the Grand Master of the Drakenhof Templars hit the ground with a clatter. To his credit, Anark was on his feet a moment later. He charged towards Arkhan, who had stepped down from his chariot. Arkhan side-stepped the vampire’s lunge and caught him in the back of the head with his staff, sending him stumbling to his hands and knees.

Arkhan looked at Erikan, who still sat atop his horse. ‘Well, vampire?’ the liche croaked.

‘Not me,’ Erikan said, holding up his hands. ‘Not my fight, Black One.’

‘Traitor,’ Anark snarled as he regained his feet.

‘From here, it looks like you’re the one attacking our ally for no reason,’ Erikan said, settling back in his saddle, thumbs hooked in his sword belt. ‘What would Lord Mannfred say, I wonder? Or Elize, for that matter?’

‘I could hazard a guess as to what Lord Mannfred would say,’ Arkhan said, planting his staff. ‘Tell me, vampire… What did he offer you? What could possess you to act so foolishly?’

‘This is positively cunning for Anark, sad to say,’ Erikan interjected. ‘What happened, Anark? Did Elize bat her pretty lashes and ask you for one little favour? I remember those days, when I was her favourite.’

‘Shut your filthy mouth,’ Anark howled. He leapt for Arkhan again. There was no subtlety to him, only raw power. He was nothing but one big muscle, all killer instinct without the cunning to mediate it. His armour creaked as he swelled with murderous power. Arkhan caught the blow on his staff, and for a moment, liche and vampire strained against one another.

Then, the moment passed. Black lightning crackled along the length of Arkhan’s staff and caught hold of Anark’s sword. A moment later, the blade shivered into fragments, and its wielder was tossed back into the dust, bloody from the metal fragments that had spattered his face. Before Anark could get to his feet, Arkhan drove the end of his staff into his skull with all the precision of a trained spearman. There was a wet, unpleasant sound, and Anark went limp.

‘Effective,’ Erikan murmured.

‘I have dealt with treacherous vampires before,’ Arkhan said. He turned and looked at Erikan. ‘I assume that you were not part of this less-than-devious stratagem, then?’

‘I had no idea that it was even in the offing,’ Erikan lied. ‘Thick-headed as he is, that blow won’t keep him down long. Anark isn’t much, but he’s a fighter. I fancy he could keep going, even missing the whole of his head. And he won’t give up.’

‘What would you suggest?’

Erikan couldn’t say why he was helping the liche. He thought, perhaps, it was simply that Anark had been a constant source of annoyance. Or maybe he’d grown tired of the way Elize seemed to shower the brute with affection. Let her get a new, hopefully smarter, pet. ‘Chain him to the postern of the Sigmarite temple I noticed when we rode through the gates. Let the flames or the sun have him, and that’ll be the end of it.’

‘A more merciful death than I intended,’ Arkhan said. He gestured, and a trio of wights came forward and hefted Anark’s limp form. They carried him off.

‘But still a death,’ Erikan said.

‘Yes,’ Arkhan said. The liche examined him silently for a moment, and then turned away. They left Beechervast not long after, riding out at the head of an army newly swollen by the addition of the population of the town, slaughtered and resurrected.

No one seemed too put out by Anark’s death. Then, he hadn’t exactly gone to great lengths to make friends amongst the order. Neither had Erikan, but he supposed he was more tolerable than a swaggering bully any day. As a member of the inner circle, leadership of the remaining blood knights had fallen to him, and he rode at their head for lack of any better ideas. He wondered how Elize would receive the news of Anark’s death. Would she be angry, sad, or… nothing. The latter, he thought, would be the most unpleasant. Vampires could love, but it did not come easily. And sometimes it was not recognised as such until it was far too late.

The Lahmians had songs, spread by the Sisterhood of the Silver Pinnacle, about lost loves and immortal tragedies. They turned troubadours and poets just to keep those songs and verses alive and circulating amongst the living. It made things easier, sometimes, if the cattle thought love, rather than thirst, was the norm for vampires.

As they rode towards the Sylvanian border, Arkhan communed with the spirits of the dead from atop his chariot, seeking any word on Krell. Wailing ghosts and shrieking spectres circled him like pigeons in an Altdorf plaza. Erikan rode beside him.

The spirits scattered abruptly. ‘Any word?’ Erikan asked.

‘Krell yet persists. He will rejoin us when he can. He is leading the Wild Hunt away from our trail.’ Arkhan shook his head, a curiously human gesture. ‘Beastmen, wood elves, Kemmler… Enemies at every turn.’

‘Rats in a sinking barrel,’ Erikan muttered.

Arkhan looked at him. Erikan shifted uncomfortably. ‘Why do you serve the von Carstein, vampire?’ Arkhan asked suddenly. ‘Love, fear… boredom?’

Erikan didn’t look at the liche. He didn’t like the twin witch-fires that flickered in the dead thing’s eye sockets. He’d only ever seen Arkhan at a distance; up close, the sheer wrongness of him, of something once human bent and twisted into something new, something abominable, something that should not walk upon the earth, was all too easy to see and to feel. Arkhan’s presence, the undiluted necromantic energies that emanated from his skeletal form, made Erikan’s head ache, as if he had a sore tooth.

But it wasn’t simply the liche’s noxious presence that made him hesitate. The question wasn’t an easy one. Why had he answered the call? Why had he left Sylvania in the first place? The questions were like the strands of the same cloth; as he tugged each one, another came loose. Arkhan looked at him. ‘Well? We have nothing but time, Crowfiend. Why not pass it in conversation, rather than silence?’ Arkhan cocked his head. ‘Are you upset about the other? What was his name – Anark?’ The liche made a rattling sound that Erikan had come to associate with his attempts at humour. ‘That one was not fated to find himself on the right side of history, I’m afraid. But you… You are a survivor, I think. A scrambler on the edge of destiny. When all is said and done, why do you serve von Carstein?’

Erikan hesitated. And then, he said, ‘Power. Not over the world, but over myself – my own fate. As long as others were stronger, I would never be master of my own fate. That is why I studied necromancy.’

‘I smell no stink of grave sorcery about you,’ Arkhan said.

‘I was a terrible student,’ Erikan said, smiling slightly. ‘Plenty of inclination, but no aptitude. So I sought out the next best thing…’ He bowed his head. Arkhan gave a raspy chuckle.

‘A woman, was it? And then?’

‘It wasn’t enough. I climbed one tower, to find myself at the bottom of another. So… I left.’ His smile faded. ‘From the moment I was born it was a loveless life. I lived out of spite, and it wasn’t enough. So I turned into something worse than death, and tried to take from the world until there was nothing left to take. But the world was bigger than I thought.’ He looked up at the forest canopy overhead. ‘I am tired of surviving. I am tired of the world. I want an end, and I want to watch it all fall into the grave with me. I do not want fire. I want ash, and silence. I want night, silent and eternal, stretching from pole to pole, heaven to earth.’

Arkhan looked at him for a long time. Then, as if uncertain of his own intent, he reached out and clasped Erikan’s shoulder. ‘You will have it. Nagash rises, and the world descends. We will all know the peace of oblivion.’

‘Will we?’ Erikan asked softly. ‘Or will we be puppets, for an eternity?’

Arkhan’s grip tightened. ‘No. Nagash despises anything that is not him, or of him. He hates and fears that which he did not create. We will be dust on a nightmare wind, vampire, when we have fulfilled our purpose. We will be nothing.’ He released Erikan’s shoulder. ‘Or so I hope.’ He turned away. ‘I am tired, vampire. I am so tired, but I cannot lay aside my burden, until the end of all things. I was a gambler once. I gambled and lost. And this is my debt.’

Erikan said nothing. Arkhan fell silent. They rode in silence, two weary souls, bound in chains of night and servitude.

NINETEEN

‘Treachery,’ Mannfred intoned grandiloquently. ‘Treachery most vile.’

‘Which treachery are we speaking of – yours, or mine?’ Arkhan asked, not bothering to look at the vampire. Mannfred glared at the liche’s back. The two stood at the top of Castle Sternieste’s tallest tower. Arkhan had arrived a few days before Mannfred, and had awaited his return at the tower’s pinnacle, as if in anticipation of a confrontation. Mannfred saw no reason to deny him such, if that was his wish.

Despite the fact that they had both been victorious in their respective endeavours, and that both Alakanash and the Fellblade were now in their possession, Mannfred saw little reason for celebration. Neither, apparently, did Arkhan. Mannfred wondered whether the liche was even capable of such an emotion.

On the ride back through the Border Princes, Mannfred had managed to half convince himself that Arkhan had somehow encouraged Markos’s failed coup. He hadn’t thought the liche would actually admit it, but he’d hoped to see some sign of concern. Instead Arkhan had seemed almost… relieved? He wondered what had happened on Arkhan’s campaign in Bretonnia. The vampires who had ridden with the liche spoke of a rain-lashed battle on the Lieske Road with a herd of beastmen, and an attack by the fierce elves of Athel Loren, which had seen the loss of Krell. Whether the ancient wight had truly been destroyed, or merely separated from his master for the moment, Arkhan had not seen fit to share. Mannfred shoved the thought aside. ‘Yours is the only treachery I see, liche,’ he snarled.

‘Then you are as wilfully blind as you are ignorant, vampire.’ Arkhan glanced over his shoulder. ‘Your assassin failed.’ Mannfred let no sign of his annoyance show on his face. Elize had sworn to him that her pets could accomplish the task he’d set for them, but they’d failed. Anark was dead, and the Crowfiend had either thrown in with Arkhan or chosen discretion over valour. If it was the latter, Mannfred found it hard to blame him. If it was the former, he fully expected Elize to deal with it before he next saw her.

‘As did yours,’ Mannfred hissed. Arkhan didn’t react. Mannfred glared at the fleshless face, and wondered what he had expected. Denial, perhaps, or denunciation. That was how a vampire would have reacted. Instead, the liche simply turned away. Mannfred shook his head, frustrated. ‘And I am not speaking of overly ambitious underlings, in any event, as you well know.’

‘Illuminate me then, I beseech you.’

Arkhan stared out at the horizon, his fleshless hands clasped behind his back. He stood at the edge of the crumbling battlement, at his ease and seemingly unconcerned. Mannfred’s hands twitched, and he considered unleashing a spell to send the liche tumbling from the tower like a skeletal comet. But he restrained himself. If Arkhan wanted to play the fool, fine. He would treat him as such.

‘The protective spells I wove about my land are failing,’ he ground out. ‘You told me that losing one of the nine would have no effect.’ Elize had reported as much to him as soon as his mount clattered into the courtyard of Sternieste. She had practically flown to his side to warn him that the omnipresent clouds that swirled overhead, blanketing his kingdom, had grown thin in places. The cursed light of day was returning to Sylvania. Slowly, but it was returning. And when it had, so too would come the zealous priests and fanatical witch hunters, to harry his subjects and tear asunder all that he had worked so hard to build. Worse, Gelt’s wall of faith still stood as strong as it ever had, and showed no sign of failing.

‘I told you that it would have negligible effect. And such is the case. Your enchantments still hold – the sun is kept at bay and your empire of eternal night yet stands. Rejoice,’ Arkhan said. Mannfred snapped at the air unconsciously, like a dog provoked beyond endurance.

‘With every day that passes, the spell grows weaker, and I can do nothing to stop it. We have weeks, or perhaps only days, before the enchantment fails entirely. And then what, bag-of-bones?’ Mannfred demanded, pounding a fist into the battlement. Stone cracked beneath the blow and fell, tumbling down, down, to smash onto the courtyard so far below. Arkhan watched the stone fall, and then looked at Mannfred.

‘By then, Nagash will have risen. By then, it will be too late.’

‘You knew,’ Mannfred hissed. He leaned towards the liche. ‘You knew. You tricked me.’

‘I am but a bag-of-bones. I am dust and memory. How could I trick you, the great Mannfred von Carstein?’ Arkhan gave a rattling laugh. He looked at Mannfred. ‘How it must have galled you to take that name, eh? How it must have pricked that monstrous pride, that abominable vanity that you wear like a cloak. Tell me, did you weep bloody tears when you surrendered your silks and steel for wolf-skin and crude iron?’

Mannfred heard Vlad’s chuckle. He had hoped that he’d heard the last of the memory, or the ghost, or whatever it was, in the Border Princes. You did. I remember it quite clearly. You whined for weeks – weeks! – and over a bit of frayed silk.

‘Quiet!’ Mannfred snapped. He saw Vlad’s face, hovering just behind Arkhan. His mentor’s smile cut him to the quick, and he longed to unleash the most destructive spells he could bring to mind, just to wipe that mocking grin away.

‘Were you talking to me, or to him?’ Arkhan asked. The liche cocked his head. ‘Who do you hear, vampire? I can hazard a guess, but I would not wish to offend you.’

Mannfred spun away with a snarl, fighting to regain his composure. His hands balled into fists, and his claws cut into the flesh of his palm. ‘You have already offended me,’ he said, not looking at the liche. ‘And I hear nothing but your hollow, prattling lies.’

‘Then I shall continue… Time is our enemy. It has turned on us. The enchantments I laid upon the Drakenhof banner yet hold. But they too will eventually fade. And our work is not yet done.’

‘The Black Armour of Morikhane,’ Mannfred said. He closed his eyes. Somewhere behind him, he heard Vlad applaud mockingly. Oh well done, boy. I see you were paying attention. Then, you always were a quick study, Vlad said. Mannfred opened his eyes and turned. ‘Heldenhame,’ he said. He looked out over the battlements, towards the northern horizon, where Heldenhame Keep stood silent sentinel over Sylvania.

He felt a pang as he took in the realm he had claimed by right of blood and conquest. In the beginning, he had never truly thought of Sylvania as anything other than a stepping stone. It was a backwater, full of ignorant peasants, barbaric nobility and monsters. He had never seen its potential the way Vlad had. But as he waged war after war, shedding blood for every sour metre of soil, he had come to see what the other vampire had seen, all those centuries ago. He had come to understand why they had taken up new names, and sought to burrow into the vibrant, if savage, flesh of the young Empire.

There was a rough beauty to this land, with its dark forests and high crags. It was a cold land, full of shadows, as far and away from the land of his youth as it was possible to get. But where that land had cast him out, this one had taken him to its bosom, and he felt his pulse quicken as he gazed out over it.

This was his land now. He had died to defend his right to it, and its waters ran in his blood. Nothing would take it from him. Not Nagash, and certainly not Karl Franz. But they weren’t his only enemies. He’d seen the portents, but hadn’t truly believed, not until his march across the Border Princes. The world was in upheaval. Everything was changing. His spies had learned much while he prosecuted his campaign against the skaven. There was a war-wind blowing down from the north, and drums beat in the Troll Country, rousing the lost and the damned to war. Kislev was gone, and the northern provinces of the Empire were in flames.

As he stared out at his land, Mannfred thought of the being he had seen in his scrying, the one to whom even daemons bowed, and he felt a cold determination settle over him. If this was the end, better Nagash than nothing. ‘Heldenhame,’ he said aloud, again.

Heldenhame was the Empire’s first line of defence against any army coming from his lands, and he had wasted more than one legion on its walls. But then, so had many others – including the barbarous orcs. ‘Its walls are strong, but they have their weaknesses.’

‘And you know what they are?’ Arkhan asked.

‘I have known what they are for the better part of a year. My spies within Heldenhame tell me that the city’s western wall was badly damaged last year, during a greenskin attack. Leitdorf has spared no expense in conducting repairs, but such a thing cannot be rushed, especially when you have naught but frail men as your labourers. It will be easy to breach, with the proper application of force.’ Before Arkhan could speak, Mannfred held up a hand. ‘However, the garrison of that wall has been reinforced with cannons, fresh from the forges of Nuln, thus rendering any assault there costly.’

‘You have a plan,’ Arkhan said. It wasn’t a question.

Mannfred chuckled. ‘I have many plans. The western wall is the obvious point of assault. But to strike there is predictable, and sure to be more arduous than we would like. However, the appearance of predictability is as valuable as its absence, if properly employed. We must take the oblique approach to this.’ He stretched out a hand, and curled his fingers. ‘With one hand, we shall show them what they expect.’ He raised his other hand. ‘And with the other, we shall crack their walls.’

‘Your confidence is inspiring,’ Arkhan said.

‘And your mockery is forgivable, this time,’ Mannfred said, with a mildness he didn’t feel. ‘You were right before. We need each other, liche. We are surrounded by enemies, and time, as you said, is not on our side. So let us cease wasting it. We will march north, now. And we will rip the last piece of the puzzle from the guts of Heldenhame.’

He turned and set one foot on the battlement. He flung back the edges of his cloak, raised his hands and began to speak. Overhead, the clouds swirled as Mannfred cast his voice and his will to the winds. He called out to every creature, dead, alive or otherwise that owed him allegiance. In his mind’s eye, he saw bat-winged monstrosities flop from dank caves and ghoul packs emerge from their burrows. He felt his mind touch the ephemeral consciousness of every chill-hearted spirit within his demesne, and rouse them to abandon their haunts and hurtle through the black sky towards Sternieste.

Before the ancient bells of Sternieste struck midnight, he knew that a mighty army would be assembled before the walls of the castle. And when it marched north, the world would tremble.

Amused by Mannfred’s display of unbridled sorcerous dominion, Arkhan watched in silence as the vampire called his forces to war. He let his mind drift as Mannfred lashed the world with his will. He had more pressing concerns than Mannfred’s petulance.

He had brooded on Kemmler’s betrayal and what it meant since the obliteration of La Maisontaal Abbey. He had suspected Kemmler’s treachery, but not the reasons behind it. Nagash’s hold on the necromancer had not been as certain as Arkhan had thought, and that disturbed him. Kemmler’s taunts haunted him.

That the Dark Gods would intervene so directly in order to prevent Nagash’s resurrection seemed unbelievable. But he knew what he had felt and seen. And it hadn’t merely been Kemmler. His return to Sylvania and Castle Sternieste had seen him lead what remained of his forces through the Great Forest. After departing Beechervast, Arkhan had taken the Lieske Road, and it seemed as if every Chaos-touched creature in those woods had been drawn to him, like moths to a flame. Howling, malformed monsters had pounced from the shadows, or swooped through the branches above. Chimeras and jabberslythes and worse things had thrown themselves into battle.

There had also been the beast-herds. Frothing, goat-headed beastmen had launched ambush after ambush, culminating in a final, bloody affray during a storm that Arkhan suspected was of no natural origin. During that battle, he had again seen the winged beast that he had first spotted in Quenelles. Clad in ragged robes, it had bellowed in a crude tongue as it tried to stem the inevitable retreat of the beastmen, once their courage had been broken by Arkhan’s spellcraft and the ferocity of the Drakenhof Templars, led by Erikan Crowfiend.

Arkhan had recognised his winged foe, in that moment before it too had fled. Like Mannfred, he had his spies and for years he had gathered information about the powers that might place themselves in his path. The thing called Malagor was a true servant of the Dark Gods, in the same way that he served Nagash. Its presence would have spoken volumes as to their intentions, if he did not already suspect their meddling.

With betrayal, and obstacles, however, came clarity. Misfortune had dogged his trail for months prior to coming to Sylvania. And not only his. Every being, however removed or reluctant, who might serve Nagash had seemingly been marked for death by the Chaos gods. When he had first begun to groom Mallobaude for his task, even providing for the would-be king to receive the blood-kiss of vampirism from an old, long-established Bretonnian line of the creatures, his stronghold of Mousillon had been beset by a horde of daemons. Though the creatures had gone on to assail the realm at large, Arkhan’s plans had nonetheless been interrupted. When he had arrived in Sylvania, he had learned that Mannfred had suffered similar attacks.

His study of the mystical wall of faith forged by Balthasar Gelt had also led him to wonder just how the wizard had come by the knowledge he’d used to forge the cage that now encompassed Sylvania. Brilliant as the Supreme Patriarch was, at least as far as mortals went, Arkhan couldn’t help but question the timing.

Sylvania had been a thorn in the Empire’s flank for centuries. Why suddenly move to contain it now? Unless, perhaps, Gelt was also an agent of the Dark Gods, in some capacity. Not an active, aware one of course, otherwise he could not have so effectively shackled the power of Sigmar. But he could easily be a pawn of other powers.

Had Kemmler been telling the truth – were the gods of Chaos so frightened of Nagash’s return that they were actively attempting to prevent it? Was Nagash truly so powerful that he incited such terror in entities as vast and as unknowable as the Dark Gods? And if so, what was Arkhan truly bringing back into the world? Was it the Nagash he remembered, the petty, spiteful, stubborn Undying King, who had killed his own people because they refused to bow… Or was it something even worse?

Arkhan looked down at his hands. They had been free of flesh for more years than he could count. He had sacrificed his mortality, his flesh and his hope on the altar of Nagash’s ambition. If it came down to it, he knew that he would sacrifice all that remained. He had no choice in the matter.

Or did he?

Elize von Carstein traced the rough bark of the dead tree with her fingers. The garden was empty, save for a few carrion birds perched here and there on the battlements. The castle itself was a hive of activity, as it had been since von Dohl’s failed assault a week earlier. The self-proclaimed Crimson Lord had ridden right up to the gates and demanded that Elize turn Sternieste and all of its treasures over to him.

Von Dohl had been accompanied by Cicatrix of Wolf Crag, and the heir of Melkhior, Zacharias. The Necrarch, in particular, had seemed unusually intent on getting into Sternieste’s vaults. When Elize had denied them entry, von Dohl had been beside himself with rage. The battle that followed had been brief but brutal.

Long-dead warriors had clashed amidst the barrow-fields as the Drakenhof Templars held their lord’s fortress against his enemies. She had duelled with Cicatrix atop the gatehouse, trading sword blows with the other woman. Von Dohl had ever let his harlot fight his battles for him, and he had only retreated when Elize had struck her shrieking head from her shoulders. What was left of Cicatrix still decorated one of the stakes mounted on the gatehouse battlements, and had greeted the master of Sternieste when he returned.

Arkhan the Black had returned a few days after the battle, and Mannfred not long before him. Their confrontation had been brief, and from what her spies claimed, heated, but now the great bells were tolling and the forces loyal to Mannfred were gathering. The time had come to take Heldenhame, and the murky air of the castle was tense with anticipation.

She heard Erikan Crowfiend enter the garden behind her. She knew it was him by the sound of his footsteps and the scent of him, sweet like overripe flowers or spoiling meat. She recalled that she had once tried to teach him how to use perfumes to mask his predator’s scent, but he had never taken to it. ‘Markos,’ he asked, simply. His voice tugged at her. It was not a purr or growl, but placid like the burr of treacherous waters.

‘Dead,’ she said. ‘Just like Anark.’ She dug her claws into the bark. Impossibly, the tree had begun to flower. Its skeletal branches were covered in putrid blossoms, which stank of rotting meat. She turned away from it, and fixed Erikan with her gaze. ‘Why didn’t you help him?’ she demanded.

‘And how would I have helped Markos? I wasn’t with him.’

‘Don’t play the fool,’ she snapped. ‘I meant Anark. Why didn’t you help him?’

‘Why should I have? He was attacking our ally – the very ally we were sent to protect, in fact,’ Erikan said. ‘He’s lucky I didn’t kill him myself.’

Elize snarled. ‘Are you truly so foolish? Do you understand what you’ve done? The liche is dangerous!’ She took a step towards him, her hands curling into fists. ‘What could possess you not to seize that opportunity?’

‘I did,’ he said, flatly.

‘Then why is he still here?’

Erikan smiled. ‘I would have thought that was obvious.’

Elize stared at him. For the first time in a long time, she was uncertain. She had thought that Erikan would have seized his moment and struck Arkhan down, as Anark kept him occupied. Surely, she’d thought, he would see what was so clear to her – if Nagash returned, they were doomed. Perhaps not immediately, but soon enough. She knew enough about the Undying King to know what it was he wanted, and how badly that would end for her kind. When the last mortal had died, what would they feed on?

Mannfred had likely never even considered that, she knew. He thought he could control the force he sought to unleash. But Arkhan knew better, and that made him more dangerous. ‘What do you mean?’ she demanded. ‘Speak sense!’

‘Nagash must rise,’ Erikan said. ‘And I intend to see that he does. If that means I must keep the liche in one piece, so be it.’

Elize shook her head. ‘Are you mad?’

He was silent for a time. She wanted to grab him, and shake him, to force him to speak. But something in his gaze held her in place. When he finally spoke, his voice was rough. ‘I think I have been. But I’m sane now.’ He reached for her, and she jerked back. He let his hand fall. ‘For the first time, in a long time, I see things as they are, rather than how I wish them to be.’ He looked up at the sky. ‘Can’t you feel it, Elize? Can’t you smell it on the air?’ He looked at her. ‘Then, maybe it’s only obvious to someone who was raised by the eaters of the dead.’

‘What are you talking about?’ she growled, shaking her head. A lock of red hair fell into her face and she blew it aside impatiently.

‘The world is already dead,’ Erikan said. He stepped forwards swiftly, before she could avoid him, and he took hold of her. She considered smashing him to the ground, but stayed her hand, though she couldn’t say why. ‘All of our struggles, all of our games, have come to nothing. Whatever purpose you conceived for me the day you bestowed your blood-kiss upon me will never be fulfilled. The petty schemes of Mannfred, von Dohl and even Neferata in her high tomb are done, though they may deny it.’ He pulled her close, so close, as he had done so many times before he had gone, before he had left her. ‘The world is dead,’ he repeated. ‘Let Nagash have it, if he would.’

She stared at him. She tried to find some sign in his face of the young man she had turned so long ago, thinking to make him a king in his land the way Mannfred had made himself king in Sylvania. What had happened to him, she wondered, in all their years apart? What had made him this way? She reached up and stroked his cheek. ‘Why did you leave?’ she asked softly. ‘Oh my sweet cannibal prince, why did you leave me?’

He looked down at her, his face twisting into an expression of uncertainty. ‘I… wanted to be free,’ he croaked, with what sounded like great effort. Then, ‘I want to be free.’

She grimaced. Her lips peeled back from her fangs and her claws dug into his cheek, drawing blood. He staggered back, a hand clapped to his face. She lunged forward with a serpent’s grace and struck him. He tumbled onto his backside, his eyes wide with surprise and shock. ‘Freedom,’ she spat. ‘Freedom to – what? – slide into oblivion? That isn’t freedom, fool. That is surrender.’

He made to scramble to his feet, and she kicked him onto his back and pinned him in place with her foot on his throat. She glared down at him, her fingers dark with his blood. ‘If I had known that you would give up so easily, I would never have bothered with you in the first place,’ she hissed. ‘Fine, fool. Have your freedom, and enjoy it while it lasts.’

‘I–’ he began. She silenced him with an imperious gesture.

‘Since you feel so strongly about it, you will stay here and guard Sternieste. I will lead our brethren to war in your place, Crowfiend,’ she spat. Then Elize left him there, staring after her. There was an army to ready for the march, and the castellan of Sternieste had much to do. As she stalked through the corridors, snarling orders to scurrying ghouls and lounging vampires, her mind pulsed with dark purpose.

The world was hers, and she would not surrender it – or anything of hers – without a fight.

Nagash would not rise. Not if she could help it.

TWENTY

Hans Leitdorf, Grand Master of the Knights of Sigmar’s Blood, tossed the scroll aside with a weary curse, and rubbed his aching eyes. ‘I’m not as young as I used to be,’ he said.

‘None of us are, old fellow,’ Thyrus Gormann said, emptying a decanter into his cup. ‘What was that one – bill of sale? An invoice for lumber, perhaps? Or something more interesting.’ Gormann spoke teasingly. He was the only man who could get away with poking Leitdorf, and he indulged every opportunity to do so. He glanced towards the frost-rimed window. The sun was rising. It had been a long night, and they were almost out of ale. Still, it was nearly time for breakfast, a thought that cheered him considerably.

‘Elves, actually,’ Leitdorf said, leaning back in his chair. He and Gormann were in his office in the high tower of Heldenhame Keep. The office had a certain rustic charm, which spoke more to its owner’s disregard for the subtleties of interior decoration than any longing for simpler surroundings. Gormann took a swallow of wine and gazed at the other man with keen eyes. The Patriarch of the Bright College was, despite his bluff exterior, a man of quick wit and political acumen. It was something he shared in common with Leitdorf, who was more a political animal than he let on.

Gormann grunted. ‘Elves… in Altdorf?’ he guessed. ‘Ulthuani, I’m guessing.’

‘Yes. They’ve come to petition Karl Franz for aid, apparently.’ Leitdorf said. He rubbed his face. ‘Fill me a cup, would you?’

Gormann did so. ‘Well, they picked the right time, didn’t they?’ he asked, as he handed the cup to Leitdorf. ‘It’s not like we have a war to fight, after all.’

‘I don’t think they particularly care about our little disagreements with our northerly neighbours,’ Leitdorf said. He emptied half the cup and set it aside. ‘Karl Franz is keeping them at a distance, for the moment. He placated them by sending a rider to Karak Kadrin – I’m guessing to see if the dwarfs were interested in taking them off his hands.’

‘Ha! That I’d like to see,’ Gormann laughed. He tugged on his beard. ‘Old Ironfist is no friend to the elves, nor in truth to us. We’re allies of convenience, nothing more.’ He cocked his head. ‘Did your spies happen to mention what it is they want?’

Leitdorf gave Gormann a hard stare. ‘I don’t employ spies, Thyrus.’

‘My mistake. Did your… friends happen to say what the elves wanted?’

Leitdorf made a face. ‘No. Nor do I particularly care. We have enough troubles of our own.’ He swept a heavy, scarred hand out to indicate the stack of reports scattered across his desk. ‘Reports from the Border Princes, Bretonnia, Tilea… It’s all going to pot.’

‘When isn’t it?’ Gormann asked.

‘This isn’t a joke, Thyrus,’ Leitdorf growled. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d swear von Carstein had escaped Sylvania somehow.’

Gormann’s mouth twisted into a crooked smile. ‘No such luck, I’m afraid. Gelt’s wall of faith still holds.’

Leitdorf sighed. ‘Admit it, Thyrus. That was the whole reason you came to visit Heldenhame, wasn’t it? To examine Gelt’s thrice-cursed enchantment.’ He shook his head. ‘I know what goes on behind the doors of your colleges. They’re worse snake pits than the Imperial court.’

‘Well, I admit, it wasn’t for your company, splendid as it is, Hans,’ Gormann said, opening a second decanter. He gave the liquid within a sniff and filled his cup. ‘Gelt’s a funny one – always has been. Powerful, but dodgy. Even Karl Franz, Sigmar bless and keep him, doesn’t like the scrawny alchemist much.’

‘Which was it that saw him usurp your position as Grand Patriarch? The power or the dodginess?’ Leitdorf asked. He held up a hand as Gormann made to reply. ‘I know, I know – it wasn’t a usurpation. It was a transition. That’s what wizards call it, isn’t it?’

‘He beat me fair and square, Hans. Truth to tell, I was getting tired of the job anyway. There’s precious little fun in it. The uptight little alchemist is welcome to it.’ Gormann took a drink. His duel with Gelt was the stuff of legend, though not for the reasons he’d wish. Gelt had been more cunning than he’d expected, though he’d heard plenty of stories about the younger man’s little tricks – turning lead to gold and the like. When the dust had cleared, he’d been out of the job, and the Gold Order had outstripped the Bright Order in prominence.

He didn’t bear Gelt a grudge – not too much of one, at any rate – but he’d come to learn that the new Grand Patriarch wasn’t adverse to cutting corners. He was cunning but sloppy, with a compulsion to tinker when he wasn’t cheating his creditors. That sort of man needed someone trailing after him, making sure he wasn’t causing too much of a mess. Gormann chuckled to himself. That he’d been elected to that position by his fellow patriarchs would be amusing, if it weren’t so sad. Then, if Gelt grew suspicious, they could simply claim that Gormann was driven by vindictiveness.

He’d come to Talabecland to study the wall of faith. The magics that Gelt had employed to create his wall were old, and far outside of Gelt’s area of study. Someone, it was assumed, had helped him. Gelt was keeping mum, but the other patriarchs, especially Gregor Martak, master of the Amber Order, were concerned, and Gormann didn’t blame them. It wouldn’t be the first time one of their own had used forbidden magics. Traitors like van Horstmann were few and far between, but their actions were indelibly engraved on the collective memory of the Colleges of Magic. Gormann didn’t like to think of them, though. As much as he disliked Gelt, he didn’t think the alchemist would willingly turn to the dark. He cleared his throat and asked, ‘What news from the rest of the Empire?’

‘The same as it’s been for a year. Kislev is gone, and her people with her, save those who fled south to warn us of the invasion,’ Leitdorf said. ‘Only Erengrad remains yet standing, and that only because of von Raukov and the Ostlanders. Men from Averland, Stirland, Middenland and Talabheim march north to bolster our defences on the border.’

He looked tired, Gormann thought. Then, he always had. Being brother to a man like the deceased and infamously insane former Elector of Averland had a way of ageing a man prematurely. Leitdorf had stayed out of the succession debacle, claiming that his duty was to the Knights of Sigmar’s Blood. In truth, Gormann was one of the few who knew that it was actually because Leitdorf was convinced that the Empire of his father and grandfather was being bled white by callow nobles and politicking aristocrats. He included Karl Franz among the latter, though he’d been wise enough never to say so where anyone important could hear him.

Gormann often feared for his friend. Leitdorf was a man of blood and steel, for whom patience and politesse were vices. Gormann had never been very good at the glad-handing his former position had required, but even his limited skills in that regard far outstripped Leitdorf’s. If the Knights of Sigmar’s Blood hadn’t been so influential, it was very likely that someone would have put something unpleasant and surely fatal in Leitdorf’s wine.

Leitdorf went on. ‘Beastmen still rampage across ten states, including this one. Plague ravages the western provinces, and our sometimes allies across the mountains are beset by their own foes.’ He drained his cup and stared at it. ‘The dwarfs have shut their gates. Tilea and Estalia are overrun.’ He smiled sadly. ‘I fear that we are living in the final days, old friend.’

‘Plenty before you have said as much, and as far back as Sigmar’s time, I’d wager,’ Gormann said. He drained his own cup. ‘We’re no more at the End Times than they were then.’

Before Leitdorf could reply, the clangour of alarm bells sounded over the town. The bells echoed through the room, and Leitdorf leapt to his feet with a curse. ‘I knew it!’ he snarled. He hurled aside his empty cup. ‘I knew it! Gelt’s wall has failed.’

‘You can’t know that,’ Gormann said, but it was a half-hearted assertion. He could feel what Leitdorf couldn’t – the rising surge of dark magic that caused a sour feeling in the pit of his gut. He knew, without even having to see, why the bells were ringing. He tossed aside his cup and snagged the decanter as he followed Leitdorf out of his office.

Outside, men ran through the courtyard of the keep, heading for their posts. Leitdorf stormed to the parapet, shoving men aside as he bellowed orders. Gormann followed more slowly. The sky was overcast, and a cold wind curled over the rooftops of Heldenhame. Flocks of carrion birds were perched on every roof and rampart, cawing raucously.

‘You told me I didn’t know that Gelt’s wall had failed, Thyrus? There’s your proof. Look!’ Leitdorf roared as he flung out a hand towards the approach to the western wall. It was thick with worm-picked skeletons, clutching broken swords and splintered spears, and steadily advancing towards the wall. Further back, on the edge of the tree line, Gormann could make out the shape of catapults. Their silhouettes were too rough to be wood or metal, and Gormann knew instinctively that they were bone.

He took a long drink from the decanter. As he watched, the torsion arms of the distant war engines snapped forward with an audible screech. The air ruptured, suddenly filled with an insane and tormented cackle that cracked the decanter and made Gormann’s teeth itch. Most of the missiles struck the wall. One crashed into the ramparts, and smashed down onto a regiment of handgunners who’d been scrambling to their positions. A dozen men died, consumed in eldritch fire or simply splattered across the rampart by the force of the impact.

‘They’re aiming for the blasted scaffold,’ Leitdorf growled. ‘The Rostmeyer bastion is still under reconstruction. There’s no facing stone to protect the wall’s core. It’s nothing but rubble.’ He whirled to glare at Gormann. ‘If they destroy that scaffold, the whole wall will come down.’

‘That’s why you put the guns there, isn’t it?’ Gormann asked, taking another slug from the cracked and leaking decanter. ‘See? There they are – happily blazing away.’ And they were. The sharp crack of the Nuln-forged war machines filled the air, as in reply to the enemy’s barrage. Round shot screamed into the packed ranks of skeletons, shattering many.

But even Gormann could see that it was like punching sand. Every hole torn in the battle-line of corpses was quickly and smoothly filled, as new bodies filled the breaches, stepping over the shattered remains of their fellows.

‘Kross is a fool,’ Leitdorf said, referring to the commander of the Rostmeyer bastion. ‘They need to concentrate on those catapults. Infantry, dead or otherwise, will break itself on the walls. But if those catapults bring it down…’ He turned and began shouting orders to his men. Gormann peered out at the battlefield. Gun smoke billowed across the walls and field beyond, obscuring everything save a vague suggestion of movement.

‘I think they figured it out,’ Gormann said. The smoke cleared for a moment, and the wizard saw one of the catapults explode into whirling fragments and flailing ropes as a cannonball struck it dead on. Men on the ramparts cheered. Leitdorf turned back, a fierce grin on his face.

‘Ha-ha! That’s the way!’ he shouted. ‘I knew Kross was the right man to command that bastion. Damn his pickled heart, I knew he wouldn’t fail me!’

Gormann said nothing. He finished the bottle. His skin itched and his eyes felt full of grit as he sensed a tendril of dark magic undulate across the field. He heard the cheers began to falter and didn’t have to look at the tree line to know that the shattered engine was repairing itself.

‘By Sigmar’s spurs,’ Leitdorf hissed.

‘All these years sitting on their doorstep and you didn’t expect that, Hans?’ Gormann asked dully. He examined the decanter for a moment, and then flung it heedlessly over his shoulder. He heard it smash on the cobblestones somewhere far below. ‘This battle won’t be as quick as all that.’

The cheering atop the battlements faded as the wind slackened and the fog of war descended on Heldenhame once more.

Wendel Volker staggered through the smoke, eyes stinging and his lungs burning. Flames crackled all around him. A shrieking fireball had crashed down onto the tavern, and it was ready to collapse at any moment. He resisted the urge to sprint for safety and continued to clamber through the wreckage, stumbling over bodies and searching for any signs of survivors. So far he’d found plenty of the former, but none of the latter.

The roof groaned like a dying man, and he heard the crack of wood surrendering to intense heat. Fear spurted through him, seizing his heart and freezing his limbs, but only for a moment. Then his training kicked in, and he whispered a silent prayer of thanks to the man who’d taught him swordplay. He knew the fear was good, and it had sobered him up. He had a feeling he was going to need to be sober. He could hear the bells of the keep, and the roar of the cannons on the western wall, punctuated by the harsh rhythm of handguns firing at an unknown enemy.

Kross would be up there, he knew, unless he was still sleeping off his drink from the night before. A brief, blissful image of Kross, asleep in his bunk as a fireball landed atop his quarters, passed across the surface of Volker’s mind. His joy was short lived. A burning mass of thatch tumbled down, nearly striking him. Ash and sparks danced across his face and clothes, and he swatted at himself wildly. He heard someone scream, and a flurry of curses. He wasn’t the only one in the tavern. He’d led as many as would volunteer into the burning building.

That they’d been close to hand was less luck and more circumstance – Volker and the men he’d led into the inferno had only just left the tavern, after all. He’d wasted an entire night swilling cheap beer rather than dealing with the stacks of make-work that the seneschal of Heldenhame, Rudolph Weskar, insisted his underlings produce. Those who could read and write, at any rate. Since Kross could do neither, his records and logs were handed over to Volker, who suspected that Weskar was still attempting to stir the pot. The seneschal had made his disdain for both men clear in the months since their last confrontation, and Volker had done all that he could to avoid Weskar and Kross, as well as Kross’s lackeys, like Deinroth.

Volker saw a bloody hand suddenly extend from beneath a fallen roof beam and flail weakly. He shouted, ‘Here!’ He coughed into a damp rag and shouted again. Uniformed men swarmed forwards through the smoke and Volker helped them shift the roof beam. He recognised the barmaid from his previous night’s carousing and scooped her up. Ash and sparks washed down over him as he grabbed her, and he heard the groan of wood giving way. ‘Everyone out,’ he screamed. The barmaid cradled to his chest, he loped for the street. Men bumped into him as they fled, and for a moment, he was afraid that he would be buried and immolated as the tavern roof finally gave way and the building collapsed in on itself.

Volker hit the open air in a plume of smoke. His skin was burning and he couldn’t see. Someone took the girl from him and he sank down, coughing. A bucket of water was upended over him and he gasped. ‘Get his cloak off, it’s caught fire,’ a rough voice barked. ‘Someone get me another bucket. Wendel – can you hear me?’

‘M-Maria,’ Volker wheezed. ‘Is she…?’ More water splashed down on him. He scraped his fingers across his eyes and looked up into the grim features of Father Odkrier.

‘Alive, lad, thanks to you.’ Odkrier hauled him to his feet. ‘Can you stand? Good,’ he said roughly, without waiting for a reply.

‘We’re under attack, aren’t we?’ Volker asked. The streets were packed with people. Some were trying to put out the spreading fires, but others were fleeing in the direction of the eastern gate. Volker didn’t blame them.

‘Sylvania has disgorged its wormy black guts and the restless dead have come to call,’ Odkrier said. Volker saw that he held his long-hafted warhammer in one hand.

Volker shuddered and looked west. The boom of the cannons continued, and he saw men in Talabecland uniforms hurrying towards the Rostmeyer bastion. He swallowed thickly, and wished that he’d managed to save a bottle of something before the tavern had gone up in flames. ‘Kross isn’t going to be happy.’

‘No one will be happy if our visitors get in, captain,’ a harsh voice said. Rudolph Weskar glared about him, as if he could cow the burgeoning inferno by sheer will. Then, Volker wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if it had worked. ‘Especially you, captain. Why aren’t you at your post?’ He raised his cane like a sword and tapped Volker on the shoulder. Excuses flooded Volker’s mind, but each one died before reaching his lips. Weskar frowned. ‘Never mind. Go to the eastern walls and bring as many men as you can. We’ll need them if the western wall comes down.’ Weskar’s hard eyes found Odkrier. ‘The men at Rostmeyer bastion are in need of guidance, father.’

‘I’ll wager they could use my hammer as well,’ Odkrier growled. He slapped Volker on the shoulder. ‘Take care, lad. And don’t dawdle.’ Then the warrior priest turned and hurried off.

Volker watched him go, and wondered if he would ever see the other man again. He looked at Weskar and asked, ‘How bad is it, sir?’

Weskar looked at him, his eyes like agates. ‘Get me those men, Volker. Or you’ll find out.’

Hans Leitdorf cursed for the fourth time in as many minutes as a merchant’s cart was crushed beneath the thundering hooves of his warhorse. The man screamed curses from the safety of a doorway as the column of heavily armoured knights thundered past. Leitdorf longed to give him a thump for his impertinence, but there was no time. Instead, he roared out imprecations at the running forms that blocked the path ahead. ‘Blow the trumpets!’ he snarled over his shoulder to the knight riding just behind him.

The knight did as he bade. Whether the blast of noise helped or hindered their efforts, Leitdorf couldn’t actually say. He felt better for it, though. No one could say that the knights hadn’t given fair warning. Anyone who got trampled had only themselves to blame.

Still, it was taking too long to reach the southern gate. When the messengers from the Rostmeyer bastion had reached him, Leitdorf had already been climbing into the saddle. A sally from the southern gate was the most sensible plan – it would enable the knights to smash into the flanks of the undead unimpeded. If they ever got there. A night soil cart was the next casualty of the horses, and Leitdorf cursed as bits of dung spattered across his polished breastplate.

He’d brought nearly the entire order with him. Those who remained he’d left to watch over Heldenhame Keep, or were abroad on the order’s business elsewhere. He felt no reluctance in bringing every man who could ride with him. He’d left the defences of the city and the keep itself in Weskar’s capable hands. Even if the enemy got into the city, the keep would hold. The walls were thick, and the artillery towers manned. No barbaric horde or tomb-legion had ever cracked those defences, and this time would be no different.

Fireballs shrieked overhead, striking buildings. Bits of burning wood, thatch and brick rained down on the column as they galloped through streets packed with panicked people. Men and women were scrambling for safety like rats, and the roads were becoming progressively more impassable. The rattle of handguns echoed through the air. The dead had drawn within range then, which meant they were close enough to scale the wall.

The enemy had no siege towers and no ladders for escalade, but Leitdorf had fought the undead often enough to know that they had little need of such. If there was a way in, they would find it. ‘Damn Gelt and his gilded tongue,’ he spat out loud.

‘You’re not the first to say that,’ Gormann said. Leitdorf looked at the Patriarch of the Bright College. The wizard rode hard at his side, clad in thick robes covered in stylised flames. He wore no hood, so his white-streaked red hair and beard surrounded his seamed face like the corona of the sun. He carried his staff of office, and he had a wide-bladed sword sheathed on his hip.

‘Nor will I be the last, I think, before our travails are over,’ Leitdorf said. ‘I knew his blasted cage would fail. I knew it.’ He looked away. ‘I argued long and hard that his sorcery was only a temporary measure at best – that it afforded us an opportunity, rather than a solution. We should have seized the moment and swept Sylvania clean with fire and sword. And now it’s too late. The muster of Drakenhof is at our gate, and the Empire is in no fit state to throw them back if we fail.’ He pounded on his saddle horn with a fist.

‘Doom and gloom and grim darkness,’ Gormann said. A fruit vendor’s stall toppled into the street as people made way for the knights, and cabbages and potatoes burst beneath his horse’s hooves. He looked up as another fireball struck home. ‘If this is an invasion, it’s a fairly tentative one. A few mouldering bones and artillery pieces do not a conquering force make. Where are the rest of them? The rotting dead, the cannibal packs, the spectres and von Carstein’s detestable kin?’

‘Sometimes I forget that you’ve been living in Altdorf, getting fat all of these years,’ Leitdorf said. He ignored Gormann’s outraged spluttering. ‘You are fat, Thyrus. I’m surprised you fit into your robes. Those dead things out there are to soften up our walls for the rest of them, when night falls. Then we’ll be on the back foot, unless we smash them here and now, and send von Carstein back over the border with our boot on his rump.’

‘You never told me you were a poet, Hans,’ Gormann said.

Leitdorf growled and hunched his shoulders. ‘Will you for once in your sybaritic life take things seriously?’

‘I take everything seriously, Hans,’ Gormann said. ‘I’m more concerned about how von Carstein circumvented Gelt’s cage. That enchantment was like nothing I’ve ever encountered, and if von Carstein managed to break it, then old Volkmar’s wild claims about that leech getting his claws on the thrice-cursed Crown of Sorcery might be more than some dark fantasy.’

‘Or Gelt’s spell wasn’t as permanent as he claimed. I ought to wring that alchemist’s scrawny neck,’ Leitdorf barked. He looked at Gormann. ‘Of course, you’ve considered the obvious…’

Gormann made a face. ‘I have.’

Leitdorf frowned. ‘What do we really know about Gelt, Thyrus? I’d always heard that he cheated you of the staff of office, but you’ve never said what really happened.’ He snapped his reins, causing his mount to rear as a pedlar scurried out of his path. ‘Out of the way, fool!’ he roared. He glanced at Gormann. ‘There are rumours about Gelt. Dark ones… What if this is part of some scheme? He caged Sylvania, right after Volkmar – one of his most influential critics – vanishes into its depths, and then claims that nothing can escape. As soon as we’ve turned our eyes and swords north, that inescapable cage is suddenly no more effective than a morning mist.’

Gormann didn’t look at him. Leitdorf had known the Bright Wizard for a long time. He could tell that what he was saying wasn’t new to Gormann. Even knowing as little as he did of the internal politics of the Colleges of Magic, he knew that Gelt’s eccentricities weren’t as universally tolerated as Gormann’s had been. Why else would they have sent Gormann to investigate the wall of faith, unless they suspected that something was amiss?

Before he had a chance to press his friend further, he saw the blocky shape of the southernmost gatehouse and barbican rising over the tops of the buildings to either side of him. His trumpeter blew another note, and the men manning the gate hurriedly began raising the portcullis. He spurred his horse to greater speed, and pushed aside his worries.

There would be time to worry about Gelt after the dead were successfully driven back.

‘Well?’ Mannfred hissed, from where he lurked beneath the trees. His eyes were pinpricks of crimson in the shadows, and his fingers tapped against a tree trunk impatiently.

‘Well what?’ Arkhan asked. He gestured and a shattered catapult began to repair itself. An easy enough task when the engine in question was composed of bone, dried flesh and hair. It was child’s play for a creature like Arkhan – barely worth the effort it took to accomplish it. In fact, none of what he was now doing was worth his attention. Any halfway competent hedge-necromancer could keep the mass of skeletons attacking a wall, and the catapults and their crews functioning.

‘Don’t taunt me, liche.’

‘I wasn’t aware that I was. I am trying to concentrate, vampire. You are disrupting that concentration. Unless you have something pertinent to say, I’ll thank you to keep quiet.’ Arkhan gestured again, resurrecting a pile of shattered skeletons moments after a cannonball tore them to flinders.

He’d spent most of the night before stalking the steep slopes beneath the distant western wall of the city, drawing those selfsame skeletons to the surface. The worms had fed well the previous year, and thousands of bodies, both human and orc, had been buried in mass graves on the field before the wall. Their spirits, only barely aware, were restless and eager to rise and fight again. Arkhan was only too happy to give them that opportunity.

The catapults had been a stroke of genius on his part. He had found a spot where the dead had lain particularly deep, and manipulated their remains to form his war engines, as he had so long ago in the Great Land. Frames of twisted bone and ropes of hair and stretched ligament worked just as well as iron and wood. His magics supplied the ammunition as well – great, cackling balls of witch-fire.

‘Do not bandy words with me, sirrah,’ Mannfred snapped. ‘Have we drawn them out?’

‘You can hear the trumpets as well as I,’ Arkhan said. In his mind’s eye, he could see what the dead saw. Balls of lead hammered into the dead ranks as they advanced up the muddy slope towards the western wall, fired by the increasingly desperate ranks of handgunners on the parapet. The men loaded and fired with an almost mechanical precision and, for a moment, Arkhan almost admired them. They displayed a courage and dedication that rivalled that of the legions of Khemri at their height. But it would buy them nothing. ‘The knights are exiting through the southern gates, as you predicted. They will crush my fleshless legion and the artillery with ease, when they get around to charging.’

‘Not too much ease, one hopes,’ Mannfred said, glaring up at the sun. It was riding low in the sky, and obscuring clouds clawed at its edges. ‘We need to keep them occupied for another few hours.’

‘Easily done. You know where the Black Armour rests?’ Arkhan looked at him. Mannfred’s cruel features twisted into a smile.

‘I’ve known for months, liche. It is sequestered in the vaults of the castle from which this detestable little pile takes its name. While you keep them occupied here, I shall seize my– Your pardon, our prize. My forces but await the weakening of the sun’s gaze.’

‘Good,’ Arkhan said.

‘That said, you should keep an eye socket tilted further west,’ Mannfred said, watching the skeletons march into the teeth of a cannonade.

‘Reinforcements?’

Mannfred’s smile widened. ‘Of sorts,’ he laughed. ‘A herd of beastmen are gambolling towards us, even as I speak. I have set wolves, bats and corpses on them, to occupy them for the nonce, but they are heading this way.’ He examined his nails. ‘They’ve come a long way, for such blissfully primitive creatures. Almost as if they were looking for something, or someone.’

Arkhan felt a cold rush of frustration. ‘Was there a winged creature leading them?’ he demanded, after a moment’s hesitation. Mannfred’s gleeful expression told him that the vampire had been expecting that question.

‘Oh yes, your crow-winged pet is amongst them. Why didn’t you tell me you’d made a new friend in Bretonnia? My heart aches,’ Mannfred said as he placed a hand over his heart. ‘It simply bleeds for the distrust you continue to show me.’

‘Now who’s mocking who?’ Arkhan said. Frustration lent strength to his magics. He raised his hands, the sleeves of his robes sliding back from the bone. Black smoke rose from the pores that dotted the bones of his forearms, and drifted towards the battlefield. Where it drifted, dead things moved with renewed vigour. ‘I did not tell you because it was not important.’

Mannfred drifted towards him. He drew his sword and Arkhan felt the edge of the blade rest against the bare bone of his neck. ‘Oh, I believe that it is, liche. We are so very close to our goal, and to have it endangered thus… aggravates me sorely.’

‘Is the Grave Lord of Sylvania afraid of a few mutated beasts, then?’ Arkhan ignored the blade and kept his attentions fixed on the western wall. At a twitch of his extended fingers, the skeletons closest to the wall surged into fresh activity. Gripped by Arkhan’s will, they climbed over one another like a swarm of ants, building ladders of bone that grew taller and taller by the moment. Soon, skeletal hands were grabbing the ramparts. Handguns and cannons barked and flamed, shattering sections of the growing constructs, but Arkhan’s magics repaired them as quickly as they were broken. The pace of the ascent barely slowed.

‘It is not the beasts that concern me, but what they represent,’ Mannfred said. ‘You were attacked by beastmen and the cursed inhabitants of Athel Loren on your journey, liche.’ He did not lower his sword. ‘We are seemingly beset by enemies.’

‘I told you that time was not on our side. The Dark Gods fear Nagash. They fear his power and his wrath. The events which even now grip this world are a sign of that.’ He looked at Mannfred. ‘Did you think it was coincidence that saw Sylvania caged right at the moment that Kislev fell to northern steel? Did you think the daemon-storms that ravaged your lands were but an odd turn of weather? Those were distractions, just like this is a distraction. Of course we are beset, fool… We seek nothing less than the unmaking of the world, and the overthrowing of the old order. They will do everything in their power to delay and hinder us. They will send beasts and even men and elves to assail us. They will aid our enemies, and undermine our allies, all to buy a few more hours of existence.’

Arkhan turned away. In his mind’s eye, he saw what was taking place on the distant wall. A doughty man, old and steeped in faith, whose aura blazed like the light of a comet, had thrust himself into the fray, sweeping the dead aside with great swings of his warhammer. Men cheered, heartened by his presence. Arkhan knew him for what he was – a priest of Sigmar – and at his impulse, the dead turned their attentions to dealing with this new threat. The warrior priest was plucked from the bastion and torn apart. The defenders began to flee, in ones and twos at first; and then, all at once, organised fighting men became frightened cattle, stampeding for the dubious safety of the second bastion on the western wall. Satisfied, Arkhan turned his attentions back to Mannfred.

‘We are at war with life itself, vampire. All life, however corrupt and insane. Without life, the Dark Gods do not exist. Without life, they will gutter like candles in the wind, and as the gods of men and elves do. They must stop us, or they face extinction.’

Mannfred stared at him. Then, almost absently, he lowered his sword. His head tilted, as if he were listening to some inner voice berate him. Mannfred shook himself. In a quiet voice, he said, ‘I do not wish the death of all things.’

‘What you wish is inconsequential,’ Arkhan said, after a moment of hesitation. Mannfred looked at him, and for a moment, the mask of von Carstein slipped, and was replaced by an older, yet somehow younger, face. The face of the man who became the vampire. The face of one who had known grief and strife and eternal frustration. Of one who had seen his hopes dashed again and again. Some spark of pity flared in Arkhan. He and Mannfred were more alike than he had thought. ‘Nagash must rise,’ he said.

The mask returned crashing down like a portcullis, and Mannfred’s eyes sparked with fury. ‘At the moment, Nagash is dust, liche. And my wishes are anything but inconsequential. He will rise, but at my behest, at my whim,’ he snarled, striking his chest with a closed fist. He flung out a hand. ‘Bring that damnable wall down. I would be done with this farce.’

‘As you wish,’ Arkhan said.

TWENTY-ONE

Volker and the men he’d procured from the eastern bastions reached the foot of the inner wall just in time to see the entirety of the western wall give way. The battlements lurched like a drunken giant, and Volker could only stare in mounting horror as, with a great rumble and an explosive gout of dust, the centre of the wall collapsed in on itself, scaffolding and all. Rubble and crushed bodies spilled across the ground in front of him.

‘Back!’ he yelped, waving at his men. ‘Get back!’ With the scaffolding’s support removed, destruction rippled along the sturdier sections of the wall, buckling the ramparts and causing them to collapse. Men and skeletons alike were hurled from the battlements, their bodies vanishing into the ever-expanding cloud of dust and smoke.

Shock was replaced by fear, as Volker saw skeletons clamber through the dust-choked breach. He tore his sword from its sheath and lurched forward. His men followed, forming up around him more out of well-drilled instinct than inclination. As he moved over the rubble, he brought his sword up. It was made of the finest Kriegst steel, and had been a gift from his mother. He quickly kissed the twin-tailed comet embossed on the hilt and, without a word, pointed the blade at the approaching skeletons.

Someone shouted something vile, and a litany of epithets and curses boiled out of the ranks around him. It wasn’t quite the sort of battle cry the bards sang of, but it would do in a pinch. Volker gave voice to his own string of curses, firing them from his lips like shots from a helblaster volley gun as he began to run up the newborn slope of rubble towards the invaders.

A skeleton hacked at him with a broken blade and he swept it aside with a blow from his sword. As Volker reached the top of the slope, he wondered if he ought to shout something inspiring. He opened his mouth and got a lungful of dust, so he coughed instead. His men followed him up, battering aside skeletons in order to join him at the crest of the breach, where they formed a ragged line of spears and swords. Sergeants bellowed orders and a defensive formation took shape. Volker, who knew better than to interfere with sergeants, settled for looking heroic. Or as close to heroic as he could get, covered in dust and blood, and smelling of the previous night’s booze-up.

The line was barely formed when the next wave of skeletons ploughed towards them through the breach. Volker swung and chopped at the undead until his arm and shoulder were numb. For every three skeletons they hacked down, six more replaced them. They attacked in total silence, providing an eerie counterpoint to Volker and his men, who expelled curses, cries and wailing screams as they fell to ragged spears and rusty blades.

Volker stumbled, sweat burning his eyes, his lungs filled with dust. The rubble beneath his feet was slick with blood and covered in fragments of shattered bone. The enemy catapults continued to launch shrieking fireballs into what was left of the walls and the city beyond. Most of the artillery fire was directed at what was left of Rostmeyer bastion, where the surviving handgunners fired down into the melee in the breach. Volker felt bullets sing past his head and wondered which would get him first, the skeletons or his own comrades. He pushed the thought aside and concentrated on the work at hand.

A fireball struck the side of the breach and crackling flames washed over the line of men. Soldiers screamed and died. Volker screamed as well as fire kissed the side of his face and body. He staggered into a soldier, slapping at the flames that clung to him. The man stumbled as Volker fell, and nearly lost his head to a skeleton.

By the time he put the fire out, half of the men he’d brought were dead. Volker pushed himself to his feet, using his sword as a crutch. A skeleton lunged out of the smoke to thrust a jagged spear at the man Volker had fallen into. Volker intercepted the blow, catching the spear by the haft. He jerked the dead thing towards himself with a yell and smashed its skull with his sword. He heard men cheer, and looked around blearily, thinking Leitdorf or Weskar had finally arrived with reinforcements.

It took him a moment to realise that they were cheering for him. He shook his head, bemused. He dragged the man he’d saved to his feet and propelled him back into line. ‘Form up,’ he shouted. ‘Back in line, back in line!’

More skeletons stalked through the breach, and many of the shattered ones began to twitch and rattle. The cheers died away. Volker spat and raised his sword. ‘Sigmar give me strength,’ he said, even as he wondered where Leitdorf was – where were the Knights of Sigmar’s Blood?

‘Sound the trumpet,’ Leitdorf growled. ‘Let the cursed dead know that the hand of the god is here to send them back to the grave.’ He drew his sword and levelled it at the mass of thousands of skeletons advancing on the breach in the western wall. When the knights of the leading brotherhoods had rounded the southwestern corner of the city wall and beheld the horde that awaited their lances, not one had hesitated, which caused the gloom that enveloped Leitdorf to abate slightly.

The loss of the city’s outer wall was a failure on his part. He had been too distracted to see personally to the repairs, as he should have done. He’d left it to the fat pig, Kross, and Weskar, when he knew the former was allergic to hard labour and the latter had no interest in such menial tasks. It was his fault that it had come to this. It was his fault that men – his men – had died. But he could see to it that no more did so. He could see to it that the dead were punished and thrown back across the border into their dark county once more.

Mannfred von Carstein’s head would be his. He would take it in a sack to Altdorf and hurl it at Balthasar Gelt’s feet, just before he took the alchemist’s lying tongue as well.

‘Sound the trumpet again,’ he bellowed. ‘The Order of Sigmar’s Blood rides to war!’ The world became a whirl of noise and sensation as the knights around him began to pick up speed. There were nearly twelve hundred warriors gathered, spreading to either side like the unfolding wings of an eagle as they urged their horses from a canter to a gallop. Once loosed to the charge, they were nothing short of a wall of destruction that could level anything in its path.

The ground shuddered beneath them. He caught sight of Gormann hunched over his horse’s neck, his staff held up like a standard, a swirling ball of fire floating above it. The wizard caught his eye and grinned widely. Leitdorf couldn’t help but return the expression. It had been too long since they had fought side by side – the Battle of Hel Ditch, he thought, and the razing of the Maggot Orchard – and he looked forward to seeing his old friend in action once again.

The closest skeletons had only just begun to turn when the charge struck home with a sound like thunder. To Leitdorf, it was as if he and his men were the curve of some vast reaper’s scythe. One moment, there was an unbroken sea of bleached or browning bone, marching beneath ragged, worm-eaten banners; the next, a wave of shining steel crashed into and over the dead in a massive roar of splintering bone and pounding hooves.

Leitdorf roared out the name of Sigmar as he hewed a corridor through the dead, making way for the knights behind him. As he took the head of a grinning skeleton, he jerked his stallion about and raised his sword. His standard bearer, close by, raised the order’s banner in response, and the trumpeter blew a single, clarion note. The men who’d been with Leitdorf wheeled about and smashed their way clear of the skeletal phalanxes that sought to converge on them. They would reform and charge again, each brotherhood picking their own targets in order to render the horde down to a manageable size and destroy it piecemeal.

He’d learned from hard experience that the dead didn’t care about numbers, or morale. If his knights became bogged down amidst the mass of corpses, they’d be swarmed under in short order. The only way to defeat the dead was to pummel them to nothing with mechanical precision. To hit them again and again, until they stopped getting back up. He looked around for Gormann and saw that the wizard’s horse had gone down in the first charge. Gormann was on his feet, however, and fire swirled about him, like silks about a Strigany dancer. His face was flushed, and his eyes looked like glowing embers as he spun his staff about, conjuring dancing flames. The air about him thickened, becoming the eye of a nascent firestorm.

Leitdorf found himself unable to tear his eyes away. It had been years since he had seen Gormann’s power unleashed. Normally the wizard contented himself with parlour tricks – lighting his pipe or conjuring a fire in the fireplace. But here was the true majesty of the Bright College, the searing rage of an unfettered inferno.

He pulled his men back with oaths and furious gestures. The knights formed up and cantered to what he hoped was a safe range. The dead closed in all around Gormann, who did not appear concerned, and for good reason. Even at a distance, Leitdorf felt the heat of what came next.

There was no sound, only fury. No flames, only incredible, irresistible heat. Bone and rusty armour fused into indeterminate slag as the heat washed over the ranks of the dead. Bleached bone turned black and then crumbled to fragments of ash as Gormann began to stride forward, encased in a bubble of devastation. The bubble shimmered and began to grow, as if every skeleton consumed by it was a log added to a fire. Tendrils of flame exploded outwards from his palms at Gormann’s merest gesture, and consumed the dead in a maelstrom of fire and smoke.

Leitdorf looked up as one of the enemy catapults fired at the wizard. Without looking up, Gormann raised his hand and his fingers crooked like claws. The cackling fireball slowed in its descent and finally stopped right above its intended target. Gormann gave a great, gusty laugh, wound his arm up and snapped it forward, like a boy hurling a stone. The fireball careened back towards its point of origin, and the catapult and its crew were immolated instantly.

More catapults fired, and Gormann slammed his staff down. The fireballs jumbled before him like leaves caught in a strong wind. He raised his staff and they followed the motion of it. With a sharp gesture, he sent them hurtling back the way they’d come. Gormann turned as smoke rose from the tree line behind him and called out, ‘Well? What are you waiting for, Hans? Get to work.’

Leitdorf laughed and signalled his trumpeter. Another note, and two unengaged brotherhoods galloped towards the tree line and the remaining artillery pieces, crushing any skeletons who tried to bar their path underfoot.

The catapults fell silent a few moments later, and he allowed himself to feel a flush of victory. The battle had been costly, but he had done it. He made to call out to Gormann when the wind suddenly shifted. The breeze, which had played across the city all morning, increased in speed and strength, becoming a roaring gale. The sun faded as dark clouds gathered, filling the sky. Instinct made him turn in his saddle.

The clouds were thickest and darkest around Heldenhame Keep. ‘No,’ he said, in disbelief. The enemy had got past them, somehow, some way, and they were in his city. He thought of Weskar, and the few men he’d left on the walls and knew that they would not be enough, brave as they were. ‘Sound the retreat,’ he snarled to his trumpeter, jerking his horse about and driving his spurs into its flanks. ‘We have to get back to the city – now!’

But as he said it, he knew it was too late.

The vargheists went first, as was their right and their duty. They hurtled down from the teeth of the storm onto the battlements of Heldenhame Keep, unleashing a frenzy of blood-soaked death upon the men who manned them. Handguns flamed, and here and there, a bat-like shape plummeted with an animal wail. But such occurrences were few and far between. The remaining vargheists took the fight across the battlements and into the passageways and barrack-rooms of the towers, drawing defenders after them into a nightmarish game of cat and mouse, just as Mannfred had intended.

Astride his steed of twisted bone and leathery wings, Mannfred watched the battle unfold with a cruel smile. His strategy had worked to perfection. Leitdorf and his cursed knights had been unable to resist the bait Arkhan had dangled before them, like meat before a lion. They had denuded the castle of defenders, and he intended to make them pay for that error in blood. ‘You thought me caged, Leitdorf? There is no cage built or conjured that can hold me!’ he roared, spitting the words down at the battlements as his mount swooped over them.

Well that’s simply not true, now is it?

Mannfred grimaced. Even here, amidst the fury of the storm, Vlad haunted him. Or perhaps not Vlad. Perhaps something else, something worse. He shook his head. ‘I say what is true. I make my own truth, ghost. Go haunt Arkhan if you wish to play these games. I grow tired of them and you.’

Clouds billowed around him, and he could almost see the outline of a face, the same face he’d glimpsed so many months ago in the garden, and from out of the corner of his eye many times since. It smiled mockingly at him and he snarled in annoyance. Vlad’s voice was loud in his head, as if the long-dead Count of Sylvania was right behind him. This isn’t a game, boy. It’s a warning from a teacher to a student – do you remember that night? The night it all began, the night I opened the Book of Nagash and set us on this path? Do you remember what I said then?

Mannfred twitched and tried to ignore the voice. At his unspoken command, spectral shapes descended through the storm or flowed up through the rocks of the castle. These were the ghosts of madmen, warlocks, witches and worse things, conjured by his skill and impressed into his service by his will. He felt their cruel desire to abate their own sufferings by inflicting pain and death, and encouraged it. At a thought, they swept into battle with those who still manned the walls and artillery towers, killing them in droves. Such things could not be harmed by mortal weapons and as such made effective shock troops.

I asked you a question, little prince… Maybe you didn’t hear me. Or maybe you are afraid to answer…

‘I am fear itself, old man. I cause fear, I do not feel it,’ Mannfred hissed, watching as the defenders of Heldenhame died in their dozens. He longed to join the battle, to drown out Vlad’s needling voice in blood and thunder, but he had to be patient. He could not risk himself, not now. He was too close to victory.

He could feel the Black Armour calling to him as the other artefacts had. It longed to rejoin them, and he could hear its whispers in his mind, imploring him to come and find it. Luckily, he didn’t have to. That was what the ghosts and vargheists were for. They would locate the armour, and when they had, he would strike.

You see it, don’t you? Or are you so blinded by ambition that you cannot temper it with common sense? Vlad hissed. What did I tell you? Answer me!

Mannfred closed his eyes and ground his fangs together. ‘You said that Nagash was not a man, but a disease that afflicted any who dared use his works. A pestilence of the mind and soul, infecting those who sought to use his power.’ His eyes opened. ‘And maybe he is. But just as he used a plague to wipe the Great Land from the ledger of history, I will use him to clean off the world and remake it in my image. His Great Work shall be superseded by mine, and I shall do what you never could – what Ushoran and Neferata never could. I will seat myself on the throne of the world and rule unto eternity. My people will worship me as a god and I shall serve them as a king ought,’ he said. ‘I have waited so long for this moment. I shall wait no more.’

Then you will be broken on his altar, as Kemmler was. As Arkhan is, so shall you be, my son, Vlad said, softly.

‘I am not your son,’ Mannfred shrieked, bending forward in his saddle, his eyes glaring at the clouds about him.

But you might have been. Now you are… what you are, and I am dead. Yet still, you conjure me to beseech me for my advice, as a son would. I am you, boy. I am your wisdom, your wariness given voice. In this moment, you know that you can still escape the trap that yawns before you. You can still be free of the shadow of Nagashizzar and its legacy, Vlad said intently. Only now, it wasn’t Vlad’s voice he heard, but his own. His own thoughts, his own worries and suspicions given shape and voice.

‘I am free,’ he said.

The words sounded hollow.

In his head, something laughed. Not him, not Vlad, but something else. Something that had shadowed him since he’d returned from the muck and mire of Hel Fenn. He closed his eyes, glad that he had left the Drakenhof Templars to safeguard Arkhan.

Freedom is an illusion, his voice murmured. Power carries its own chains. But you can slip this one now… Run. Retreat… Go anywhere else. Fly to the farthest corner of the world until its reckoning. Live out what remains of these final days as your own master. Leave Nagash to rot in whatever hell holds him. Just… leave.

‘I will not die,’ Mannfred said. ‘I shall not die. I shall not perish a beggar. I was born for greatness…’

Your mother was a concubine. You would never have ruled your city of jewelled towers and tidy streets, and you know it, his voice said. You were born and you died and you returned. You have ever meddled and sought to control the uncontrollable, and what has that brought you, save strife and madness?

‘I am not mad. Konrad was the mad one, not me!’ he shouted.

Then why are you talking to yourself? Why pretend it was Vlad’s ghost haunting you when it was your own fear? Run, fool. Fly from here. Leave everything behind. Do not die again for a fool’s dream!

Down below, there was a flash of light. Aged blades, blessed long ago, blazed like torches as the castellans of the castle rallied. The blessed weapons drove back the confused spirits, cutting their ethereal flesh. It was time for Mannfred to take a hand, if he still wished for victory.

Did he still wish it? That was the question. Some part of him, wiser perhaps than that to which he’d given voice, screamed that it was already too late, that he was being pulled in the wake of a black comet that could not be stopped from reaching its destination. An undercurrent of laughter greeted this and he looked up, trying to read the future in the skeins of the sorcerous storm clouds he had summoned.

He saw the moments of his life, spread across the tapestry of the wind-wracked sky. Every scheme and hope and mistake. A life lived in pursuit of one overriding goal.

If he gave it up now, what was he? What could he ever be?

The voices fell silent. The laughter faded. Determination replaced hesitation.

‘It is not the dream of a fool. It is not a dream at all, but destiny. I was born to rule, and I shall, one way or another,’ he said as he raised his hand. At his gesture, two massive shapes cut through the swirling storm clouds and dropped down into the castle courtyard below with twin shrieks so piercing that every window, goblet and mirror in the structure shattered all at once. The two terrorgheists had no fear of the blessed weapons that some of the defenders wielded. Driven by a ravenous hunger that could never be sated, the two beasts knuckled and lurched their way across the courtyard, snagging swordsmen and handgunners, and dragging the screaming men into their decaying gullets.

Mannfred’s mount touched down on the blood-washed stones a moment later. He could feel the song of the Black Armour trilling through his mind, washing aside his suspicions and fears. He would not die again. He would triumph and stride the world like a colossus. Still in his saddle, he turned as one of the terrorgheists squalled.

He saw a limping knight duck under a flailing wing and bring his sword around in a brutal two-handed blow, which shattered the beast’s malformed skull. As the creature collapsed in a shuddering heap, the knight extended his blade towards Mannfred in challenge. ‘You shall defile this place not one second more, vampire. So swears Rudolph Weskar.’

‘I’d be inclined to worry, if I had any idea who you were,’ Mannfred said, leaning back in his saddle. He laughed. ‘Well… come on. Some of us have a schedule.’

Weskar charged. And men followed him, knights and swordsmen. A desperate rabble, making their last stand. Mannfred was only too happy to oblige them. He kicked his steed into motion and rode to meet them, drawing his sword as he did so. He gave a mocking salute with the blade as he met them. Then, with barely a flicker of effort, he took Weskar’s head. His next blow cleaved through two of the knights, his sword ripping through armour and flesh with ease. For a moment, he crested a wave of violence as he took out his frustration and worry on the men who sought to bring him down.

He slid from the saddle as the last of them fell. The castle echoed with the sounds of horror and butchery as those defenders who yet lived fought on against his servants. He ignored them all, his eyes fixed on the great iron-banded doors that marked the entrance to the castle’s vaults, where his prize sat waiting for him to come and fetch it.

Nagash would rise, and the world would kneel at last to its rightful ruler.