Discover more stories set in the Warhammer Chronicles from Black Library

• THE LEGEND OF SIGMAR •
Graham McNeill
BOOK ONE: Heldenhammer
BOOK TWO: Empire
BOOK THREE: God King

• THE RISE OF NAGASH •
Mike Lee
BOOK ONE: Nagash the Sorcerer
BOOK TWO: Nagash the Unbroken
BOOK THREE: Nagash Immortal

• VAMPIRE WARS: THE VON CARSTEIN TRILOGY •
Steven Savile
BOOK ONE: Inheritance
BOOK TWO: Dominion
BOOK THREE: Retribution

• THE SUNDERING •
Gav Thorpe
BOOK ONE: Malekith
BOOK TWO: Shadow King
BOOK THREE: Caledor

• CHAMPIONS OF CHAOS •
Darius Hinks, S P Cawkwell & Ben Counter
BOOK ONE: Sigvald
BOOK TWO: Valkia the Bloody
BOOK THREE: Van Horstmann

• THE WAR OF VENGEANCE •
Nick Kyme, Chris Wraight & C L Werner
BOOK ONE: The Great Betrayal
BOOK TWO: Master of Dragons
BOOK THREE: The Curse of the Phoenix Crown

• MATHIAS THULMANN: WITCH HUNTER •
C L Werner
BOOK ONE: Witch Hunter
BOOK TWO: Witch Finder
BOOK THREE: Witch Killer

• ULRIKA THE VAMPIRE •
Nathan Long
BOOK ONE: Bloodborn
BOOK TWO: Bloodforged
BOOK THREE: Bloodsworn

• MASTERS OF STONE AND STEEL •
Gav Thorpe and Nick Kyme
BOOK ONE: The Doom of Dragonback
BOOK TWO: Grudge Bearer
BOOK THREE: Oathbreaker
BOOK FOUR: Honourkeeper

• THE TYRION & TECLIS OMNIBUS •
William King
BOOK ONE: Blood of Aenarion
BOOK TWO: Sword of Caldor
BOOK THREE: Bane of Malekith

• WARRIORS OF THE CHAOS WASTES •
C L Werner
BOOK ONE: Wulfrik
BOOK TWO: Palace of the Plague Lord
BOOK THREE: Blood for the Blood God

• KNIGHTS OF THE EMPIRE •
Various Authors
BOOK ONE: Hammers of Ulric
BOOK TWO: Reiksguard
BOOK THREE: Knight of the Blazing Sun

• WARLORDS OF KARAK EIGHT PEAKS •
Guy Haley & David Guymer
BOOK ONE: Skarsnik
BOOK TWO: Headtaker
BOOK THREE: Thorgrim

• SKAVEN WARS: THE BLACK PLAGUE TRILOGY •
C L Werner
BOOK ONE: Dead Winter
BOOK TWO: Blighted Empire
BOOK THREE: Wolf of Sigmar

• THE ORION TRILOGY •
Darius Hinks
BOOK ONE: The Vaults of Winter
BOOK TWO: Tears of Isha
BOOK THREE: The Council of Beasts

• BRUNNER THE BOUNTY HUNTER •
C L Werner
BOOK ONE: Blood Money
BOOK TWO: Blood & Steel
BOOK THREE: Blood of the Dragon

• GOTREK & FELIX THE FIRST OMNIBUS •
William King
BOOK ONE: Trollslayer
BOOK TWO: Skavenslayer
BOOK THREE: Daemonslayer

• GOTREK & FELIX THE SECOND OMNIBUS •
William King
BOOK ONE: Dragonslayer
BOOK TWO: Beastslayer
BOOK THREE: Vampireslayer

• GOTREK & FELIX THE THIRD OMNIBUS •
William King & Nathan long
BOOK ONE: Giantslayer
BOOK TWO: Orcslayer
BOOK THREE: Manslayer

• GOTREK & FELIX THE FOURTH OMNIBUS •
Nathan Long
BOOK ONE: Elfslayer
BOOK TWO: Shamanslayer
BOOK THREE: Zombieslayer

Discover more stories set in the Age of Sigmar from Black Library

~ THE AGE OF SIGMAR ~

THE REALMGATE WARS: VOLUME 1
An omnibus by various authors
Contains the novels The Gates of Azyr, War Storm, Ghal Maraz,
Hammers of Sigmar, Wardens of the Everqueen and Black Rift

THE REALMGATE WARS: VOLUME 2
An omnibus by various authors
Contains the novels Call of Archaon, Warbeast, Fury of Gork,
Bladestorm, Mortarch of Night and Lord of Undeath

LEGENDS OF THE AGE OF SIGMAR
Various authors

HALLOWED KNIGHTS: PLAGUE GARDEN
Josh Reynolds

HALLOWED KNIGHTS: BLACK PYRAMID
Josh Reynolds

EIGHT LAMENTATIONS: SPEAR OF SHADOWS
Josh Reynolds

OVERLORDS OF THE IRON DRAGON
C L Werner

RULERS OF THE DEAD
Josh Reynolds & David Annandale

SOUL WARS
Josh Reynolds

CALLIS & TOLL: THE SILVER SHARD
Nick Horth

THE TAINTED HEART
C L Werner

SHADESPIRE: THE MIRRORED CITY
Josh Reynolds

BLACKTALON: FIRST MARK
Andy Clark

GODS & MORTALS
Various authors

MYTHS & REVENANTS
Various authors

HAMILCAR: CHAMPION OF THE GODS
David Guymer

GLOOMSPITE
Andy Clark

THE RED FEAST
Gav Thorpe

WARCRY
Various authors

GHOULSLAYER
Darius Hinks

BEASTGRAVE
C L Werner

To see the full Black Library range, visit the Kobo Store.

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer Chronicles

Geographical Map of the Empire

DEAD WINTER

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

BLIGHTED EMPIRE

Preface

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Epilogue

WOLF OF SIGMAR

Preface

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Epilogue

PLAGUE PRIEST

PLAGUE DOKTOR

A QUESTION OF FAITH

THE LAST MAN

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Warlords of Karak Eight Peaks’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

It is an age of legend.

It is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of unspeakable pacts and powerful magic. It is an age of war and of death, and of apocalyptic terror. But amidst all of the flames and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage...

At the heart of the Old World lies Sigmar’s Empire. Over a thousand years after the god-king’s passing, it is a land in turmoil. The corrupt and incompetent Emperor, Boris Goldgather, has bled the common folk of the Empire to keep himself in comfort, leaving his people to starve. The border forts, the Empire’s first line of defence against the many foes that threaten Sigmar’s lands, lie unmanned and the Imperial armies struggle to repel the barbarous northmen, savage greenskins and monstrous beastmen that rampage through the provinces.

None know that the gravest threat to the realm lies not in the darkness of the forests or the mountain passes, but beneath the feet of men. The sinister, ratlike skaven, long believed to be a myth, plot to destroy the Empire. Untold armies lurk in dank caverns deep below the earth, unnumbered skaven from the warrior clans ready to spread across the lands of men and wipe them out. And in the deepest vaults, the demented plague priests of Clan Pestilens brew a noxious contagion that will bring the men of the Empire to their knees.

The Black Plague.

DEAD WINTER

PROLOGUE

Skavenblight
Geheimnisnacht, 1111

The pungent smell of smouldering warpstone wafted through the blackened chamber, the corrupt fume slithering into every nook and cranny, oozing between the crumbling bricks, burning into beams of oak and ash, discolouring glass and tarnishing bronze. It was the stench of darkest sorcery and this was its night.

The noise of creeping rats inside the walls died out as the fumes incinerated their tiny lungs and liquefied their little brains. Beetles and roaches fell from the rafters, their bodies shrivelled into desiccated husks. Bats took wing, shrieking their fright as they desperately tried to flee the deathly miasma, smashing against walls and ceiling, raining down to the floor in battered, bloodied strips of quivering flesh.

Seerlord Skrittar’s whiskers twitched as the smell of blood flickered amidst the searing scent of warpstone. It was an unconscious, instinctive association. Skrittar’s mind was far too disciplined to be distracted in this, his hour of terror and triumph.

The Seerlord stood at the head of a ring of creatures dressed in grey robes. Like him, they were ghastly, inhuman things, abominable monstrosities that seemed to blend the most hideous qualities of man and rat. Great horns protruded from their elongated heads, terrible symbols were painted or branded into their furry foreheads; the eyes in their verminous faces blazed with malefic energies, glowing green in the omnipresent darkness. Their paws were folded before them, clawed fingers entwined, their fangs clashing together in a low chant of hisses and squeaks.

Seerlord Skrittar felt panic drumming inside his chest, as though any moment his heart might burst from sheer terror. The audacity of what he had thought to achieve! The arrogance! The impudence!

No! The Seerlord forced his nerves to quieten. There was danger, there was always danger when invoking the forces of darkness, when engaging in a conjuration beyond the blackest of the black arts. No other skaven would have dared what he had dared! Yes, the risk was great, but the reward was still greater!

His eyes narrowed as he gazed across the vast chamber. Eleven horned ratmen in grey robes, all of them the most potent of the Order of Grey Seers, with himself, the mighty Seerlord, and the Horned Rat himself symbolically assuming the sacred role of thirteenth intimate of the cabal. Each of the skaven sorcerers had imbibed in a potent mixture of wormroot and warpstone before the ritual, magnifying their own abilities yet further by devouring the still-living brains of their most gifted acolytes. The malign influence of Geheimnisnacht itself increased their powers still further, and whatever extra magic they needed they could draw from the warpstone fumes rising from six caskets arrayed about the edge of their circle.

Protection? Of course: a series of concentric circles composed of sigils and runes drawn in the blood of elf-things mixed with crushed warpstone and the powdered bones of dragons. The greatest protection, though, lay in numbers, playing the chance that if anything went wrong then the aethyric retaliation would claim a different ratman.

Skrittar gazed past his chanting minions, staring above them at the great window of stained glass. It was a relic left behind by the original builders of Skavenblight, the foolish man-things who had reared the Shattered Tower and engineered their vast city, only to have it taken from them by the Horned Rat and bestowed upon his favoured children - the skaven.

There was something of magic about that portal of stained glass set into a spider-web of iron. Only magic could have allowed it alone to survive the tolling of the thirteenth hour, when the Horned Rat’s divine malignance had struck down the humans like a mighty earthquake and left their great tower broken and crumbling. Only the most potent of sorcery could have allowed it to endure a million generations of ratkin, staring like a great unclean eye upon the teeming hordes of Skavenblight as they birthed, grew and perished.

Through the window, Skrittar could see the gibbous moon of sorcery, the ghoulish Morrslieb with its erratic orbit and eerie allure. This night, the Chaos Moon was ascendant, perched exactly at the centre of the thirteen constellations. Glancing away from the moon’s unsettling glow, Skrittar could see the fangs of the Big Rat and the long tail of the Little Rat, he could see the snarling muzzle of the Cornered Rat and the bloated carcass of the Drowned Rat, there were the feeble nubs of the Pink Rat and the murderous eyes of the Black Rat, and, whining off in the stellar shadows, was that cosmic buffoon, King Mouse, the meat that thought it was skaven.

Rare was such a conjunction. Maybe once in a thousand generations of skaven did moon and stars align in such a way. When such an alignment came to pass, there were certain spells and rituals, handed down from Seerlord to Seerlord, that could be performed. Magic of such awful potency that no other skaven was allowed to even suspect their existence. Yet there was only so much magic a single sorcerer could conjure, and Skrittar wanted far greater things.

The heathen vermin of Clan Pestilens were brewing some new contagion, a great plague they thought might finally bring the surface-dwelling man-things to their knees. Spies from every clan in Skavenblight had reported this to their warlords and now the whole Under-Empire was a seething hotbed of rumour and ambition. Outwardly, Skrittar dismissed the plans of the plague monks as diseased fantasies, delusions brought on by the maggots of madness burrowing through their brains. Inwardly, however, he feared that Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch really did have such a weapon. If he did, the balance of power in Skavenblight would shift, the other Lords of Decay would scurry to curry favour with the plague priests and forget their true allegiance towards the grey seers and the Horned Rat.

It was something to make the Seerlord’s glands clench, the thought that the plague monks would gain ascendancy over skavendom. It was a possibility that had led him at last to build this cabal and initiate the greatest feat of magic ever executed by skaven sorcery.

Skrittar raised his paws, invoking the thirteen secret names of the Horned Rat, scratching his god’s mark upon the great ritual. At once, there came a shift in the chamber’s atmosphere. It was not necessary to feel the power rising from the circle, he could smell it, almost see it, draining out from the grey seers like a tremendous shadow. Through the stained glass window, he could see the face of Morrslieb begin to darken, its ghoulish glow muffled behind the magnitude of dark magic assaulting it.

A squeak of anguish echoed through the chamber. Skrittar could smell black skaven blood on the air. He heard a body crash to the floor. A few instants later, there was a second shriek, a second crash. Then there came a third.

Fear coursed through the Seerlord’s heart. Had he misjudged the potential? Was this too much power for even an entire cabal of grey seers to command? Around him he could feel the air becoming charged with an ever-increasing pulse of eldritch energy. He could see the moon growing dim as its very essence was overwhelmed by skaven sorcery.

A fourth shriek! Now there came anxious squeaks and whines from the other grey seers. One more death and the survivors would panic and break the circle, fleeing like fool-meat despite the havoc such an abrupt break in the ritual would cause. Skrittar ground his fangs together at the cowardice of his treasonous underlings. They deserved a bloody and unnatural death for their lack of fortitude. By their sacrifice, the Order of Grey Seers would ensure its place as masters of skavendom! It was their duty to stand and die for the glory of the Horned Rat and his true prophets!

Skrittar nervously nuzzled his chin against the elven talisman he wore, hoping its magic would be enough to protect him if his craven hench-rats broke the circle.

Before that could happen, the air lost the charge that had been building up inside it. The moon’s glow was restored. The smell of aethyric malignity drained away.

The Seerlord ground his fangs, glaring at his nervous underlings. If he found out one of them had ended the spell prematurely, if he learned one of them was responsible for causing the ritual to fail…

Then there was a tremendous flash of light. The sky beyond the window was aglow with a spectral radiance, a great aura that surrounded Morrslieb. Skrittar hissed in triumph. The ritual had worked! By means of his sorcery, he had reached out and ripped chunks from the moon itself! Great shards of celestial rock that would now circle above the earth, waiting for that moment when Skrittar would call them down and claim them for his own! Because there was a secret about Morrslieb, one that even elven wizards treated as impossibility and which other skaven thought of as a wonderful myth with no basis in reality.

The Chaos Moon, dark Morrslieb, was composed of pure warpstone! The chunks Skrittar had torn from its face would be enough to drive the Under-Empire into a new era of might and power. It would be enough to make the skaven the uncontested rulers of the world. It would be enough to make Skrittar the wealthiest ratman in skavendom, able to buy and sell the other Lords of Decay as though they were sacks of goblin-meat!

Seerlord Skrittar smoothed his whiskers, savouring the excited squeaks of the surviving grey seers. They knew what they had done. The ritual had exhausted them, left them drained and weary, but still their hearts burned with avarice as they imagined all the warpstone waiting to be called down from the sky.

Skrittar bared his fangs in a savage grin. The parasitic whelps would never share in that wealth. It belonged to the Order of Grey Seers and the Seerlord, not to a rabble of overly ambitious schemers and traitors! It was really too bad they knew too much. A little knowledge was a dangerous thing. A lot of knowledge was a death warrant.

Fingering his lucky cat’s foot, Skrittar’s gleaming eyes drifted to the darkness beyond the circle of power. He could just see the shape there, and only because he knew where to look for it and had saved enough magic to allow him to see it. A wiry figure, stealing unseen and unknown upon the exhausted grey seers, its body draped in a cloak of black, a mantle woven from the scalps of changelings and daemons. He could see the dripping daggers clenched in the killer’s black-furred paws, the enchanted metal of the blades themselves saturated with poison so that the knives exuded a constant sweat of venom.

Deathmaster Silke, the supreme assassin of Clan Eshin, the finest murderer in the Under-Empire. His hapless minions should feel honoured. Skrittar had spared no expense to ensure that they wouldn’t tell anyone else what they had done this night. He wondered if they would appreciate just how costly the services of the Deathmaster were. It was the finest compliment one skaven could pay another - spending a small fortune to murder them.

Skrittar watched as the first of his underlings went down, both of the grey seer’s lungs pierced from behind by Silke’s blades. Before the first victim had even hit the floor, the Deathmaster’s invisible form was springing across the circle to open the throat of a second witless sorcerer. It was exciting to watch the slaughter, thrilling to watch an accomplished killer at work.

Just the same, Skrittar kept a good grip on his cat’s foot and made sure he had an escape spell ready.

There was no knowing if the Nightlord of Clan Eshin hadn’t made a mistake and ‘accidentally’ added an extra name to Deathmaster Silke’s contract.

CHAPTER ONE

Altdorf
Nachgeheim, 1111

Stewards dressed in rich doublets of crimson, their black boots polished to a reflective shine, hurried about the grand hall. Some circled the richly carved table of dark Drakwald oak which dominated the room, filling goblets and replacing victuals as the need arose. Others laboured to tend the three blazing hearths which opened upon the room, stuffing logs into the extravagantly sculpted maws of the fireplaces. Still other stewards, heavy black cloaks thrown about their shoulders, stood beside the mammoth picture window which stretched the length of the hall’s western approach. The cloaked servants each held a long pole tipped with ostrich plumes, employing the curious tools to fan smoke from the fires through small vents set just above the frosted panes of glass.

The men situated about the great table paid no notice to the stewards, taking it for granted that an empty plate would soon have a sliver of cold venison upon it and an empty goblet would be refilled with dusky Solland wine.

Upon the dais situated at the far end of the hall, however, sat one who gave more than passing notice to the stewards, particularly those standing about the Kaiseraugen, that vast window which offered such a magnificent view of the River Reik and the ancient city nestled against its banks. The window was a masterpiece, crafted by the finest glaziers gold could buy. Dwarfcraft, for only the doughty folk from under the mountains could create such astounding artistry. Glass itself was an expensive luxury only the temples and the wealthiest nobility could afford. Something of the scale of the picture window would have bankrupted any single province. Only the Emperor could afford such indulgence. Gazing upon the window, Boris could almost feel the magic of the dwarfs rushing through his bones. It was sometimes an effort to remove his attention from the window and look past it upon the stunning vista beyond.

The mighty span of the Reik, greatest river in the world, and the opulence of Altdorf, the greatest city in the world. It sent another thrill coursing through his bones when he considered the river and the city. More than the opulence of the hall, the finery worn by servants and courtiers, the husky aromas of Tilean perfumes and Arabyan spices, the sweet melodies of silver-stringed lyres, the cool feel of velvet cushions - more than any of these, the sight of the Reik and Altdorf spoke to him of wealth and power.

His wealth.

His power.

If those churls allowed so much as a single smudge of soot to defile the Kaiseraugen he would have each of them discharged and then lashed to a ducking stool and hounded through the streets of Altdorf. The swine could try their hand at farming or starving!

The Emperor’s brow knotted in puzzlement at that last thought. He raised a bejewelled hand to his chin and scratched at his thick black beard. Why should he care if discharged servants should starve? They were no concern of his. Still puzzled, he turned his eyes away from the distracting vista and returned his attention to the irritating babble rising from around the oak table.

The men seated about the table wore accoutrements to match the richness of their surroundings. There was a king’s ransom on display, a riot of blackwork and brocade, exotic calico and fustian, silver-threaded gipons and folly-bells crafted from the most lustrous gold. Count van Sauckelhof, envoy of the Westerland Court, sported a lavish cloak trimmed in sealfur and embroidered with fish and ships in cloth of gold. Baron von Klauswitz of Stirland wore a stylish tunic of russet, its sleeves broken by scalloped slashes to expose the fine material of the shirt beneath.

There were, of course, exceptions. No amount of finery, for instance, could make Chief Elder Aldo Broadfellow look anything but ridiculous. The halfling’s efforts to ape the styles of the Imperial court only made him look even more the buffoon, though at least the portly rodent had the good sense to keep his mouth shut and not draw further attention to his foolishness.

The same could not be said for Baron Thornig of Middenheim. Even in the Imperial court, the fellow affected the barbarous appearance of a half-civilised Teutogen, his shoulders draped with the snarling pelt of a white wolf, his hair and beard long and worn in the wildest state. The affectation of the backwoods savage was one designed to deliberately provoke the rest of the court, an effort to remind the rest of the Empire that the City of the White Wolf was full to brimming with wild warriors chomping at the bit to rush into battle once more.

It might do to remind Middenheim of her less than sterling record upon the battlefield in the most recent violence to disrupt the Empire. For all their vaunted prowess, for all their supposed woodcraft, the soldiers of Middenheim and Middenland had proven incapable of crushing the latest uprising of beastmen in the Drakwald. Perhaps old Ulric, god of wolves and war, had been caught napping.

A scowl flickered across the Emperor’s lean features. His eyes turned towards the foot of the long table where sat a bald-headed man dressed in a black robe trimmed in crimson, a golden hammer embroidered upon the breast. Arch-Lector Wolfgang Hartwich, representing Grand Theogonist Thorgrad and the Temple of Sigmar. Since the Sigmarites had relocated the headquarters of their faith to Altdorf after the fire that had destroyed the Great Cathedral at Nuln and claimed the life of the old Grand Theogonist, their presence in the capital had become increasingly prominent… and intrusive. The arch-lector was an insufferable annoyance, fairly exuding disapproval with his every glance and gesture. If Ulric could be caught asleep, it seemed Sigmar was infuriatingly vigilant, his clergy only too ready to insinuate themselves into matters which were none of their concern.

Emperor Boris tapped the gilded arms of his throne, pondering the question of Sigmar and his temple. He knew the Sigmarite faith was stronger in the south than in his native Drakwald, fairly eclipsing the worship of other gods when it came to Altdorf and the Reikland. The Grand Theogonist was the most powerful priest in the Empire, the pretensions of Ar-Ulric notwithstanding. Worse, the Temple of Sigmar had a structure and organisation beyond any other faith. They could use that organisation to disrupt production and trade as effectively as any goblin invasion or beastman uprising. Even an emperor had to treat them with deference and care, lest he offend the Temple and the thousands of zealots who placed devotion to Sigmar above their duty to their sovereign.

‘…but it remains to be determined how serious the menace is.’

Emperor Boris shifted in his throne, focusing on the gaunt, cadaverous figure of Palatine Mihail Kretzulescu. The envoy from the court of Count Malbork von Drak, Voivode of Sylvania, had risen from his seat in order to address the assembled dignitaries. Count Malbork was, ostensibly, the vassal of Grand Count von Boeselager of Stirland. Von Drak had purchased his title for a hefty contribution to the Imperial treasury and made little secret of his ambitions to make Sylvania an independent province in its own right. With tacit encouragement from Altdorf, von Drak had become too powerful for the grand count to simply remove. Stirland had to endure the voivode’s talk of an independent Sylvania while trying to counter von Drak’s bribes in order to ensure the Emperor didn’t grant the territory its freedom.

The palatine’s presence among the council was a vivid reminder to Baron von Klauswitz that Stirland had much to lose should its beneficence to the Imperial Treasury falter. A sycophant renowned for his oratory, Kretzulescu’s resonant voice would wax elegant for hours unless stifled by higher authority.

‘Sylvania will pay its portion,’ Emperor Boris said, his deep, caustic tones smothering Kretzulescu’s words. ‘Every province in the land has a responsibility to protect her neighbours. Sylvania is no different. Von Drak will have to pay his share.’

Kretzulescu turned and bowed before the Imperial throne. ‘But your Imperial Majesty, you have issued a diktat disbanding the Army of the Drakwald. Surely there is no further…’

‘The beastmen continue to raid and maraud throughout the province,’ snarled Duke Konrad Aldrech. The young nobleman’s face trembled with emotion, his eyes glistening with the simmering fires of hate. ‘It will take many soldiers to run the creatures to ground and wipe out their blot forever!’

‘More soldiers than is practical, I fear,’ stated Count van Sauckelhof. ‘You cannot expect the rest of the Empire to beggar itself trying to rebuild a backwoods frontier no sane man would try to settle in the first place! I should think removing the Norscans from Westerland would be of greater importance to the Empire!’ Van Sauckelhof’s face went pale even as the outburst left his lips. Timidly, he turned towards the enthroned Emperor Boris, belatedly remembering that His Imperial Majesty was originally from the Drakwald and that Duke Konrad was also of the Hohenbachs.

Fortunately for the Westerlander, the Emperor was of too practical a mindset to allow loyalty to his family and homeland to interrupt the prosperity of the Empire. ‘We all appreciate the suffering of Drakwald. The loss of Count Vilner is a pain that has touched us deeply. But this is not a time when we can allow emotion to rule above sense. We must look after the Empire as a whole, not allow the plight of any single province to weaken the others.’

Duke Konrad kept his face impassive, but his fist tightened about the stem of the goblet he held. ‘Your Imperial Majesty, the Drakwald is in ruins. The foul beastmen have burned and pillaged a third of the province…’

‘Then that leaves them damn little to destroy,’ laughed the porcine Count Artur of Nuln. He wiped his greasy fingers on the embroidered tablecloth and fixed his piggish eyes on the fuming duke. ‘Of course, if you’d like to arrange a loan, I’m sure we can come to terms.’

Before Duke Konrad could hurl his goblet into the chuckling Artur’s face, the man seated to his right rose from his chair. He was a short, stocky man, somehow maintaining a wiry build, his jaw firm, his blue eyes possessed of a piercing clarity. His vestments were subdued beside the flamboyance of the other noblemen, consisting of a tan-hued tunic and dark breeches. About his neck, however, he wore the heavy gold pectoral of and Reiksmarshal.

Baron Everhardt Johannes Boeckenfoerde, the Reikland’s most famous soldier and commander of the Empire’s armies. His promotion to Reiksmarshal had been something of a scandal - never before had so young a soldier been elevated to such a position of authority. Yet even the worst critics of Emperor Boris admitted that the controversial decision had been one of the few moments of genius displayed by His Imperial Majesty. Boeckenfoerde had led the Empire’s armies to victory against orc invasions in Averland and Solland, crushed a horde of goblins in Talabecland and defended the shores of Nordland against the longships of High King Ormgaard of Norsca. In the latest war, he had taken personal command of the campaign against the warherds of Khaagor Deathhoof. It had been the Reiksmarshal who conceived the elaborate trap which had lured Khaagor from the protection of the forest and into the pastureland around the ruined village of Kriegfels. He had ridden with the knights who charged the warherd and avenged Count Vilner by taking Khaagor’s head.

There was no man in the great hall who commanded more respect than the Reiksmarshal. When he laid a restraining hand upon Duke Konrad’s shoulder, the young nobleman’s face flushed with shame at his lack of control.

The Reiksmarshal turned his gaze towards the throne, locking eyes with his Emperor before speaking. The soldier’s jaw tightened. There was no need for Emperor Boris to remind him of what was expected of him. One look into the cold gaze of the seated sovereign made it clear.

‘The warherds have been broken,’ Boeckenfoerde said. ‘What are left are small packs of scavengers that pose no threat to any sizable settlement. The towns of southern Drakwald have nothing to fear from them. It is the logging camps and cattle ranches in the north that are imperilled.’

‘So you are saying the Drakwald still needs protecting?’ the bearded Baron Thornig asked.

‘Was it not by your suggestion that the Army of Drakwald was disbanded?’ Count Artur quickly pointed out. The Army of Drakwald had been hastily assembled from contingents drawn from across the Empire. Crossbowmen from Wissenland, spearmen from Ostland, horsemen from Averland, swordsmen from Reikland, knights from the Ostermark and Middenheim. Now those contingents were already marching back to their homelands.

‘Smashing the great warherds was work for an army,’ Boeckenfoerde stated. ‘What is left is a different kind of thing altogether. It will require…’

‘Time for Drakwald to heal her wounds,’ Emperor Boris declared. He motioned for Boeckenfoerde to be seated. ‘We have spent enough blood and treasure crushing the monsters. We will spend no more. The beastmen are ruinous things. Without their leader they will break apart now, scatter back into the forest.’ He turned his gaze again to the Kaiseraugen, watching the autumn leaves drifting down onto the slanted rooftops of his city. ‘The brutes will seek their lairs once winter is upon us. Ulric’s Howl,’ he grinned at the use of the old euphemism for the winter wind, ‘will thin out their numbers and come the spring there won’t be enough of them left to threaten a Mootland bawdyhouse.’

The jest brought the expected laughter from the assembled dignitaries. Chief Elder Aldo Broadfellow cackled like a hyena, though his amusement didn’t seem to reach his eyes.

‘Then why do we not redirect our armies northwards to Westerland?’ asked Baron Dettleb von Schomberg. The knight was an older man, his long moustaches faded to almost pure white, his head nearly as barren as the shell of an egg. But the physique beneath his black doublet remained a powerful one and there was a sharpness in his gaze that bespoke the keenness of his mind. As Grand Master of the Reiksknecht, he owed his loyalty to the Emperor but he owed his position to Sigdan Holswig, Prince of Altdorf.

The suggestion was quickly caught up by Baron Salzwedel. ‘That makes sense, your Imperial Majesty,’ the Nordlander exclaimed. ‘If the beastmen pose no serious threat, then the army could be sent to deal with the barbarians and avenge the outrages of Ormgaard upon our people.’

‘Ormgaard is dead,’ snarled Duke Konrad. ‘Or were you too drunk to see his head spitted on a pike on your way in here?’

Count van Sauckelhof glared at the Drakwalder. ‘Ormgaard and his fleet may be gone, but he left a son and hundreds of blood-crazed marauders behind. Do you know that Norscan animal is calling himself Jarl of Vestland? They’ve occupied almost the whole of Marienburg!’

‘Better to lose a single city than lose an entire province!’ Duke Konrad shouted back. ‘The beastkin have scattered my peasantry to the four corners of the Empire and slaughtered every steer and sheep they can find!’

‘Truly spoken!’ rose the thunderous voice of Baron Thornig. ‘The beastkin are a blight that we’ve ignored far too long! They’ve despoiled not just Drakwald but Middenland as well.’ The bearded baron waved his goblet at the fuming van Sauckelhof. ‘As for this Snagr Half-nose and his sea-wolves, they’ll lose interest in your fishing village soon enough and head back to their homes.’

‘You said that last year,’ van Sauckelhof hissed, ‘and the Norscans are still occupying my city! They’ve burned down the Tempelwijk and built a fort from the ruins of the Winkelmarkt!’ He turned his ire back upon Duke Konrad, wagging his finger at the nobleman. ‘And don’t think we aren’t aware of how you Drakwalders have been thriving off our suffering! With Marienburg in the hands of barbarians, the river trade has been stopping at Carroburg and filling your coffers with taxes and tariffs! I shouldn’t be surprised if you paid Snagr Half-nose to sack our city!’

‘Maybe he should pay the Norscans to get rid of the beastmen,’ quipped Count Artur, making no effort to hide his enjoyment of watching the argument.

‘Enough!’ The shout came from a hitherto silent man positioned at the end of the table. He was a lean, sturdily built man with piercing blue eyes and close-cropped blond hair. His vestments were of fashionable cut, but of simple material, the rings on his fingers boasting fine craftsmanship but unadorned by the jewels displayed on the hands of the assembled nobility.

The attention of the dignitaries turned towards the blue-eyed man. Count van Sauckelhof and several of the others made no effort to keep the scorn off their faces. Tradition allowed for members of the clergy to be treated as belonging to an equal station and the capricious decree of Emperor Ludwig the Fat had forced them to accept the Elder of Mootland as their contemporary, but there was no precedent forcing them to treat Adolf Kreyssig as anything but beneath their station.

Kreyssig was a peasant, a low-born ruffian who had managed to work his way into the graces of Emperor Boris and become Commander of the Kaiserjaeger. The Kaiserjaeger had originally been nothing more than woodsmen who organised hunts for the sovereign and his guests. Under Kreyssig’s leadership, however, their powers and responsibilities had been expanded. The Kaiserjaeger had become the private constabulary of Emperor Boris, the secret police of Altdorf.

Whatever his position, Kreyssig was still a mere peasant, and that was enough for some in the room to dismiss him entirely. To suffer his presence at the table, even if custom dictated he remain standing while his betters sat, was a vexation many of the nobles found difficult to ignore. For Kreyssig to have the impertinence to shout down two scions of the Empire was beyond an outrage.

‘You forget your tongue, churl!’ growled Baron Thornig, his hand dropping to where he would have worn his sword had such a weapon been allowed in the Imperial Presence.

‘I mean no disrespect, my lord,’ Kreyssig said, bowing to the Middenheimer. ‘However it ill becomes the decorum of this assembly for two noble peers of the Empire to make such hurtful and foundless accusations against one another.’ Kreyssig turned to regard Duke Konrad and Count van Sauckelhof in turn. ‘Your grace, I beg your indulgence if I have spoken out of turn. However I am thinking only of the unity and fellowship of our nation…’

‘Arguing over the Army of the Drakwald is useless at any event,’ Reiksmarshal Boeckenfoerde said. ‘The soldiers have been disbanded and are returning to their homes.’ Again, he shot a glance towards Emperor Boris.

‘The soldiers have been mustered out,’ Boris declared. ‘Even those who must return to Ostland and Averland should be home in time for the harvest.’ He waved a bejewelled hand, motioning for the stoop-shouldered man seated near the head of the table to speak.

Lord Ratimir stood, adjusting the spectacles perched upon his hawkish nose, and started to read from a vellum scroll. A sickly pallor spread among the assembled dignitaries. In forty years, none of them had ever looked forward to anything the Imperial Minister of Finance had to say.

‘Be it here decreed, on this day, the twelfth of Nachgeheim…’ Lord Ratimir began.

‘Just cut the pleasantries and tell us how much it will cost us,’ growled Count Artur, all joviality absent now from his rotund face.

Lord Ratimir grumbled, folding the scroll in his hands. ‘There will be a new war tax levied upon each able-bodied peasant. One schilling for all those aged between ten and fifty. One half-schilling for all those beyond the age of fifty or under the age of ten.’

The declaration brought protests from every quarter, the room descending into a bedlam of commotion.

‘You can’t expect us to pay this!’ shouted Baron von Klauswitz. ‘The Imperial levies on commerce are already straining the resources of our fields and farms! For every chilling that comes out of the ground, Altdorf is already taking five pfennigs!’

Emperor Boris rose from his throne, smashing his goblet to the floor. ‘Then you will have to manage your resources better!’ He smacked his hand against his chest. ‘We are responsible for defending the sacred empire bestowed upon mankind by Holy Sigmar himself! That is not a responsibility we will suffer lightly! And we will not allow any of our subjects to ignore their responsibility either!’ Boris turned his head, motioning to Lord Ratimir. ‘To guide you in your obligations, I have made an additional decree.’

Lord Ratimir unrolled the scroll and cleared his throat. ‘Let it be herewith noted that there shall no longer be granted an exclusion for that class of peasantry known as Dienstleute.’

The statement provoked an even louder expression of outrage from the noblemen. ‘You cannot be serious!’ roared Baron Thornig. ‘Middenheim alone keeps two thousand Dienstleute to defend the Ulricsberg and the forest around her!’

‘And why do you need so many soldiers to defend your city?’ Emperor Boris challenged. ‘The beastkin have left your forest to ravage the Drakwald! What of Nuln, where there hasn’t been violence in a hundred years? Count Artur has nearly four thousand Dienstleute, many of whom have probably never even held a sword! No! I shall not suffer the Imperial Treasury to be impoverished by greedy nobles trying to aggrandise their personal fortunes by declaring half their peasantry a dienstmann!’

‘We can’t possibly afford to pay for our soldiers as well as our serfs!’ protested Grand Duke Bela, Count of Talabecland.

‘Then don’t retain them as soldiers,’ Lord Ratimir suggested. ‘Put them to work in the fields. Increase the harvest and your yield. Every man who takes up the sword and doesn’t take up the plough is a drain upon resources rather than a creator of wealth.’

‘Many of these men know no trade but that of the sword,’ objected Boeckenfoerde. The Emperor gave his general a warning look, but the warning went unheeded this time. ‘The fathers of many of these men were soldiers, as were their fathers before them. These men wouldn’t know one end of a plough from the other.’

‘It should be an easy choice, then, for the masters of such wastrels to discharge them from service,’ Lord Ratimir said.

Several of the assembled nobles looked appalled at the suggestion. ‘Where would these discharged Dienstleute go? What would they do?’ demanded Baron von Schomberg.

‘Work or starve,’ was the Emperor’s cold answer.

Bylorhof
Nachgeheim, 1111

Temple bells rang through the town’s muddy streets, a doleful peal that echoed over the thatched roofs and far out across the fields and marshes beyond Bylorhof. In this time of calamity, it did not matter if the bells rested within a temple of Shallya or Morr, all the town’s religions were united by common purpose and the edicts of Baron von Rittendahl, the prefect of Bylorhof. The bells were to sound from dawn until noon, warning the peasants that the corpse collectors were making their rounds. It was a time for healthy people to shun the streets and keep behind locked doors, praying to the gods for deliverance from the evil stalking Sylvania. It was a time for those whose household had been reduced by the plague to leave the remains out upon the doorstep for the collectors to bear away.

Few people dared venture upon the streets of Bylorhof while the bells tolled. Even the baron’s soldiers kept inside their towers at such times. Abhorrence of the dead was instinctual in all men, but the fear was magnified if death was brought by some strange and unknown cause. The plague was something new to Sylvania, something unknown in that land of green hills and dense forests. The people cowered before the malignant disease, seeing it as a horror inflicted upon them by supernatural powers.

As he strode the empty streets, the priest felt the weight of his office like a great stone tied about his neck. His heart cracked a little more each time he passed a body lying strewn across someone’s threshold. His eyes misted with pity when he saw the ugly red crosses daubed upon mud-brick walls, marking another home where the plague had struck. He shared in the frustration of the peasants when he saw crude corn-doll effigies lying half-burnt in the mud or the carcass of a shaved cat nailed above a threshold. In their terror, the people turned to every superstition recalled by their Fennone ancestry, evoking any kind of magic to combat the forces of Old Night. Many of the dead lying in the street had ropes tied about their necks, marking them as offerings to Bylorak, the ancient marsh god whose worship persisted even in the face of kinder, more enlightened gods. These bodies would be taken not to the gardens of Morr, but to the quagmire of Bylorhof Marsh, consigned to the muddy deep and the keeping of the god who dwelled there.

The priest smiled sadly as he watched a hay cart come trundling down the lane, bodies piled in its bed like cordwood. He watched it stop outside a mud-brick hut and observed as the men pulling the cart set the yoke down and started lifting corpses from the street. They took no especial precautions, these collectors of the dead, and their wasted frames wore the same woollen breeches and jackets as any peasant. Only the black caps crunched down about their ears denoted their occupation, that and the hollow, sunken faces that stared out from beneath their hats. There was no need for precaution, not for these men. In the minds of friends and family, the corpse collectors were already dead. They were another reason why the streets were empty when the bells tolled. The men who dragged the cart through Bylorhof were already infected by the plague.

The men loaded their grisly burden into the cart. The plague left little of its victims, withering them into desiccated husks. Even for the sickly collectors, it took no great effort to carry their macabre cargo. There were twenty or thirty bodies in the cart this morning, but the collectors were still equal to the task of dragging it down the street in search of more bodies. After a bad night, they might make ten trips between town and the marsh. The priest hoped it hadn’t been a bad night.

Making the sign of Morr as he passed the cart, invoking the protection of his god for the souls of the dead, the priest proceeded through the deserted town, his black robes whipping about him in the crisp autumn breeze. The breeze brought the stink of the marsh slithering through Bylorhof, a smell which was ordinarily as unwelcome as a goblin but which was now considered far more wholesome than the reek of the unburied dead.

The priest, a servant of the god of death, was accustomed to the smell of corpses, but he shared the sentiments of the townsfolk. There was nothing wholesome about this plague and anything that would oppose it should be welcomed.

The priest rounded a corner, noting with some misgiving the gnarled old oak standing in the square ahead. A horrible crime had employed that tree as its centrepiece. In their terror of the plague, the townsfolk were ready to embrace any rumour or superstition. An old-wives tale about dwarfs being able to curse men with hairs from their beards had provoked a mob into lynching the three dwarf smiths residing at Bylorhof Castle. The crime had outraged Baron von Rittendahl and in his anger he had appealed to Count Malbork von Drak for aid. A second tragedy had resulted from that unwise decision. Too disinterested to uncover the perpetrators, von Drak ordered twenty peasants chosen at random and flayed alive, their skins sent to one of the dwarfholds high in the mountains.

It had fallen to the priests of Morr to attend and bury what von Drak’s men left behind. One of the dead had been a little girl not more than twelve winters old. The von Draks were infamous for their cruelty and the thought that Sylvania might break away entirely from Stirland with Count Malbork as its voivode was one that kept many people awake at night.

The priest hurried past the hanging tree, turning his thoughts away from lynchings and tyrants, even from plague and bells. It was Angestag and that meant he would break his fast with family. It was a ritual as old as his own childhood, the son of a sea captain in the great city of Marienburg. With so many of the family scattered all over the city or away on ships, it had been a strictly obeyed tradition among them that on Angestag, as many of the family as could would gather together for breakfast.

The priest stopped as he reached a narrow lane bordered on one side by the workyard of a cartwright and on the other by the stone walls of a granary. Further down the street rose a huddle of tall timber houses, the homes of Bylorhof’s more prosperous tradesmen and burghers. It was to one of these homes the priest’s path led. He smiled as he looked up at the threshold of his brother’s home. No shaved cat nailed above the door or appeal to ancient gods chalked up on the wall, only a simple iron fish tacked to the door itself, an old Marienburger custom meant to promote good fortune.

After his first knock, the door was tugged open and an exuberant boy with blond hair and deep blue eyes grinned up at the priest. ‘Uncle Frederick!’ the boy hailed him, then turned around to shout his news to the rest of the household. ‘Pappa! Mamma! Uncle Frederick is here!’

The priest stepped inside, setting his staff in a vase just within the entranceway. He turned and made the sign of Morr, a gesture meant to keep any wayward spirits from slipping into the house alongside him. It was always a good thing to be careful where restless ghosts were concerned. Especially in such unsettled times as these.

‘The prodigal brother returns!’ A tall, clean-cut man came striding towards the door, his face split in a broad smile. He bowed his head in respectful recognition of the priest’s rank before taking a brotherly jab at Frederick’s shoulder.

‘It is wrong to scold him, Rutger,’ a soft voice admonished the tall man. The speaker was a young woman, her golden tresses bound by a headscarf in the Sylvanian fashion, her slender figure pressed into a fashionable cotehardie gown after the Marienburg manner. Her pretty features formed a welcoming smile as she extended her hand to the priest. ‘With what is happening in Bylorhof, a priest of Morr must have much to do.’

Frederick bowed, kissing the woman’s hand. ‘I am sorry I brought you here, Aysha,’ he apologised. ‘This is a poor place…’

Rutger scowled at his brother. ‘If we’d stayed in Marienburg, we’d have been carved up by Snagr Half-nose by now. I’m only sorry more of the family didn’t leave when they had the chance.’ He smiled and reached to his neck, drawing out a brass pomander fitted to a chain. As he did so, his wife and son followed suit, displaying their own pomanders. ‘See, we are all protected against the plague. A lot easier than to dodge a Norscan’s axe!’

The priest couldn’t share in his brother’s jest. He’d buried too many people with posies in their pockets and pomanders about their necks to believe ‘bad air’ was the source of the plague and that a strong fragrance could protect against the disease. ‘I still feel responsible. If you’d gone to Altdorf or Wurtbad…’

‘There would have been no one there to welcome us and help us make a home,’ stated Aysha.

‘And from what I hear, the plague is there too,’ Rutger said. He frowned a little as he looked down at his son. He reached over and tousled the boy’s hair. ‘I think we should save this discussion for another time. As my wife points out, you are a busy man.’ The smile returned to Rutger’s face as he led the priest into his home.

‘Who knows when the brothers van Hal will have another chance to break their fast together?’

Nuln
Nachgeheim, 1111

Dead leaves crinkled beneath Walther Schill’s boots as he picked his way through the dark streets. The flickering glow of the rushlight he carried was just enough to reveal the half-timbered buildings squatting to either side of the narrow lane. This was an old part of Nuln, dating from the city’s infancy, when it was just a little trading town nestled in the marshland where the River Reik joined the River Aver. The plaster walls rose from thick stone foundation walls, relics of the roundhouses of ancient Merogen fishermen. The combination gave the structures a peculiar appearance, with curving ground floors of heavy limestone and clay supporting timber upper storeys which were sharply angular. In more prosperous sections of the city, the buildings had a more harmonious appearance, but no one in the Freiberg district had the resources to rebuild. Those few who did had already removed themselves to the wealthy Altestadt across the river or the growing sprawl of the Handelbezirk south of the Universität.

A warm breeze whistled through the deserted streets. Except for a pair of dung gatherers, Walther was alone. Any decent folk, common wisdom claimed, should be abed at such an unseemly hour. The powers of Old Night, the wise said, were at their most malignant just before the dawn and the rising sun forced them back into their netherworld lairs.

Walther scoffed at such old superstitions. He’d never seen any evidence of Old Night and the Ruinous Powers, any proof of vampires and werewolves prowling the countryside seeking whom they might devour or malevolent warlocks biding their time until they could use their magic to change the unwary into snakes and toads. He relegated such talk to nursery nonsense like the Black Boar and the Underfolk, fairy tales meant to frighten small children into behaving.

Walther shifted the heavy linen sack slung across his shoulders, smiling at the weight of his burden. All his life he had laboured in the dark, making his living during those cursed hours when other men slept. A hunter had to bide by the nature of his prey. If that creature was one of darkness, then he had to become a creature of darkness himself. It was as simple as that. Even Verena would concede the logic of such a conclusion.

As he strode past the dung gatherers in their grubby woollen hoods, one of them looked up at Walther, wrinkling his nose and making an expression of distaste. Walther glowered at the grimy man, shifting his step so that he could kick a loose stone at the muck-raker. ‘I’ll make more tonight than you’ll see all month,’ he grumbled at the dung gatherer.

‘At least it’s clean work,’ the hooded man snarled, wiping refuse from the back of his hand on a strip of soiled felt.

Walther scowled at the dung gatherer and marched on. What did the scum know? In a few more weeks, the fellow would be begging pennies and picking eggshells from the gutter! The harvest was in, no one would want manure for their fields until spring. The muck-raker would be reduced to surviving on the pittance Count Artur paid to keep the streets clean. In the best of times, that would be just enough to allow a man to starve his way through the winter, allowing he didn’t have a family to support. And these were anything but the best of times.

By contrast, there was always a demand for Walther and his profession. The very repugnance with which even a dung gatherer regarded his trade ensured there would always be work for a rat-catcher. It had always puzzled Walther why most people looked upon rats with such fear and loathing. Certainly they were noxious little pests, but hardly things to evoke horror. Still, if people wanted to be stupid and afraid, Walther was quite happy to exploit them. Five rat-tails would bring a bounty of two pennies from the city coffers, as much as a dung gatherer would be paid for an entire week of shovelling the streets.

The rat-catcher cast a backwards glance at the hooded men and their little cart filled with dung. They’d be hard-pressed selling the night soil this time of year. No farmer would need manure now. It was possible they might be able to sell some of it as fuel, but only the poorest of the poor in the shantytown beside the south docks would resort to such measures. Hardly the most wealthy clientele.

Again, Walther reflected upon the benefits of being a hunter. In addition to the bounty offered by the burghomeister, there was always a market for his catch.

From out of the darkness, a battered wooden sign swayed upon rusty iron chains. There was no lettering upon the board - few in this part of the city were literate - but the painted image of a hog’s head did a serviceable job of proclaiming the sort of business housed within. Walther shifted the heavy sack from one shoulder to the other. Using the haft of the pole he employed in his work, he knocked against the door.

It was a few minutes before the door was tugged open. A balding, overweight man dressed only in his nightshirt stood blinking in the doorway, a foul-smelling candle clenched in his fist. He stared bleary-eyed at Walther. The rat-catcher knew he must present quite a sight, his wool garments caked in the filth of Nuln’s sewers, his hands stained with blood, his face drawn and haggard from the long night crawling after rodents.

‘Are you going to let me in?’ Walther said, his tone gruff and impatient.

‘Schill,’ the fat man said, stepping aside to allow the rat-catcher entry. ‘I’ve told you before to come by the back way,’ the man grumbled as he closed the door behind his visitor.

‘I’m in too much of a hurry,’ Walther told him, blowing out the rushlight and stuffing the remains of the taper into a cowhide holster. ‘Hunting was good tonight. I lost track of time.’ He strode through the little shop, around bins of pig-feet and goat-ears, past racks of ham hocks and the plucked carcasses of chickens. With a sigh of relief, the rat-catcher set his bag down on a wooden counter at the back of the shop.

‘In a hurry,’ the fat man scowled, coming around the counter. He set the candle down beside a pair of bronze scales. Fumbling about behind the counter, he produced a number of tiny stone weights. ‘You mean you’ve been dry too long.’ He reached over and untied the twine closing the bag. ‘You should talk Bremer into making you a partner with all the money you drop at the Black Rose!’

Walther’s eyes narrowed with annoyance. Angrily, he drew the bag away. ‘I don’t go there to see Bremer and I don’t come here to be lectured, Ostmann!’

‘Have it as you want,’ Ostmann apologised. ‘Let’s see what you have.’ The butcher reached into the linen bag, removing the long furry body of a rat. He jostled the dead rodent for a moment in his hand, trying to estimate its weight before resorting to the scales. ‘A big one. Might be sixteen ounces.’ He cast a glance at the bulky bag. ‘Are they all like that?’

Walther nodded. ‘I said the hunting was good. Forty-three longtails and not a runt among them.’

Ostmann made an appreciative whistle, sliding the first rat over to the scales. ‘I’m afraid I can’t give you much coin,’ he said. ‘There’s not too much demand for dog fodder…’

‘You’ll pay what you always pay,’ Walther told him, reaching for the bag. Ostmann quickly laid a protective hand atop it. The rat-catcher drew back, waving his hand at the empty meat hooks hanging from the ceiling and the empty bins lined against the wall. ‘I’m well aware of what you need. This talk of plague has made the burghers nervous. Count Artur has outlawed the transport of cattle from Stirland to try and keep it from spreading into Nuln. The guildmasters assure that they can buy enough Reikland beef to make up for it, but one look at your shelves makes me think otherwise. The burghers might be peasants but they aren’t serfs. They want some meat with their supper.’

The butcher drew back, his face aghast. ‘Surely you aren’t suggesting…’

‘I might do more than suggest,’ the rat-catcher threatened.

Ostmann licked his lips nervously. He began drawing rats from the bag, setting each in turn on the scales, scribbling figures on a scrap of sackcloth. ‘Care for something to eat while I tally this up? Some sausage?’

Walther gave the man a crooked smile. ‘Ostmann, just because I catch them doesn’t mean I want to eat them.’

CHAPTER TWO

Altdorf
Nachgeheim, 1111

The meeting of the Imperial Grand Council broke apart some hours later, disgruntled noblemen slipping back to their private manors scattered about Altdorf’s Palace District, others retreating to their chambers within the Imperial Palace itself. There was no arguing with one of the Emperor’s diktats and nothing but anger and frustration to be gained by trying.

Some of the dignitaries, however, felt enough resentment to accept the invitation of Prince Sigdan Holswig. The titular ruler of Altdorf, much of Sigdan’s power was subordinate to that of Emperor Boris, leaving him with few duties and even fewer responsibilities. Since assuming the title from his late father, Sigdan’s chief concern had become soothing the tempers of those who had felt the sting of the Emperor’s decrees.

Situated overlooking the river, Sigdan’s castle was a relic of older times. It was said to have been built by Sigismund II as a bulwark to command the approach to the Reik. In those distant days, Norscan reivers had been bold enough to sail their longships down the river as far as Nuln and Pfeildorf. It had been the river castles built by Sigismund II which had finally ended the depredations of the longships.

Gazing down from the lead-lined window overlooking the river, Dettleb von Schomberg could almost see the longships coming again, Snagr Half-nose sailing down the Reik with a fleet of berserkers to plunder and pillage the heart of the Empire. Only a few years ago, the nobleman would have found such a thing impossible. Now, he wasn’t quite so certain. He’d just had a very forceful reminder that the greed of his Emperor knew no limits.

‘Of course they will discharge their warriors,’ Baron Thornig’s voice drew von Schomberg away from the window. A dozen or so noblemen and their retainers were gathered at Prince Sigdan’s table, picking at the remains of a roast boar and plates of pickled eel. ‘What other choice do they have?’

‘You make it sound as if you don’t intend to discharge your own soldiers,’ observed Palatine Kretzulescu. The Sylvanian dignitary looked even more drained and exasperated than he had in the Imperial Palace.

A wolfish grin spread beneath Baron Thornig’s beard. ‘I can speak for Graf Gunthar. He won’t pay this criminal tax!’

‘Don’t think Boris will let him get away with that,’ said Aldo Broadfellow. The halfling was sitting on a large cushion, massaging his hairy feet. He glowered at his toes. ‘Why that man insists on my wearing boots when I see him…’ he grumbled to himself.

‘The half-man speaks the right of it,’ cautioned Count van Sauckelhof. ‘Try to keep a schilling from Boris’s purse and he’ll lay siege to the Ulricsberg.’

‘With what?’ Baron Thornig growled. ‘He’s made it impossible to retain an army big enough to do the job!’

‘Don’t think he hasn’t thought of that,’ von Schomberg said as he returned to the table. ‘Boris has already granted a dispensation to Westerland and Drakwald in recognition of their ongoing travails.’

Van Sauckelhof drained his goblet of wine in a swallow. ‘I half expected him to make us pay for each barbarian,’ he snapped.

Kretzulescu caught the old knight’s meaning, his face growing even more pale. ‘You mean Drakwald?’

‘He’s a Hohenbach,’ von Schomberg said. ‘He could be expected to demand a certain loyalty from his homeland.’

‘He hasn’t shown any particular inclination to help the Drakwalders,’ Prince Sigdan said. ‘He even sent the Reiksmarshal home before the beastmen were entirely exterminated. That doesn’t sound like a man with any great devotion to his birthplace.’

‘Or it shows a man too shrewd to let emotion stand in his way,’ suggested von Schomberg. ‘While Drakwald is without a count, the province remains a protectorate of the Imperial Crown. All of its wealth belongs to the Imperial Treasury.’ The knight turned and nodded at Count van Sauckelhof. ‘If Snagr Half-nose had been a bit more successful, there might be two provinces in the same situation.’

Van Sauckelhof slammed his fist against the table. ‘Of all the outrages! Renting rooms in the Imperial Palace to commoners, allowing the gentry to buy new titles for themselves, these were villainies enough, but if what you say is true, then our Emperor is nothing more than a blackhearted traitor!’

‘Have a care!’ Prince Sigdan exclaimed, anxious at the turn the conversation had taken.

‘Why else would he refuse to bestow the title upon Duke Konrad?’ Baron von Klauswitz asked. ‘Why else would he tell Boeckenfoerde to disband the army before its job was done? The Reiksmarshal had orders to make certain the beastkin weren’t annihilated!’

‘That’s not true!’ The objection came from a young man in the white tabard of a knight, a member of the Reiksknecht. Baron von Schomberg had brought Captain Erich von Kranzbeuhler with him to the Imperial Palace as his adjutant. Always impressed with the captain’s forthright manner and honourable character, he hadn’t thought twice about bringing him to Prince Sigdan’s castle.

‘The Reiksmarshal is a loyal man and a fearless soldier,’ Erich continued, unperturbed to have the attention of so many of the Empire’s leaders focused upon him. ‘If the Emperor was using him, then it was from deceit.’ The young knight bristled at the incredulity he still saw on the faces of those around him. ‘Can anyone here say they haven’t been forced to do the same?’

Count van Sauckelhof smiled. ‘One of Boeckenfoerde’s officers has been carrying on with a shepster employed by my wife. It seems he was complaining about the Emperor giving them orders to finish the campaign before Mittherbst, then going and drawing off most of their cavalry to guard the Bretonnian frontier.’ The Westerlander shook his head. ‘I’d think such deceptions would be unnecessary if the Reiksmarshal was another of the Emperor’s sycophants like Ratimir and that peasant Kreyssig.’

‘What does it matter one way or another?’ Kretzulescu declared. ‘The problem right now isn’t the army. It’s this damn head tax or war tax or whatever the Emperor wants to call it! In Sylvania we’ve had three poor harvests in a row and enough ill omens to put a curse on Taal himself! I can name a dozen villages that have fallen prey to illness and half a dozen more that have been abandoned by both lords and serfs!’

‘Things stand much the same in the rest of Stirland,’ Baron von Klauswitz commented, a haunted look creeping into his eyes.

‘Plague?’ Prince Sigdan asked, giving voice to the dreaded word. It seemed to echo through the hall, sending shivers down the spine of every man at the table.

‘Shallya have mercy,’ von Schomberg whispered, invoking the goddess’s protection against the fearsome spectre of pestilence and disease.

Skavenblight
Nachgeheim, 1111

A cold, clammy smell wafted through the darkened halls. Furtive shapes scuttled and scurried against the ancient stone passageways, squeaking and chittering as they crept through the shadows. The rats clawed their way through piles of rags, swam through scummy puddles of swamp slime, prowled across jumbles of old bones and tumbledown masonry. They leapt across the many holes pitting the crumbling floor or swarmed across the stout cables spanning the worst of the gaps.

The entrancing scent of food drew the ravenous vermin deeper into the primordial gloom. They ignored the rank odours of the creatures which called the maze-like confusion of halls and galleries home. A starving scavenger learned to become bold around even the most rapacious predator.

It was the boldest of the rats who scurried along the wall towards the alluring smell. The rat hesitated a moment when its beady eyes spotted two flickers of green flame rising from the darkness ahead. But hunger soon overrode caution and the big grey rat hurried on towards the source of the smell.

The lump of blackened cheese was lying just within the glow cast by the nearest of the lights. Again the rat hesitated, but again its hunger drove it onwards. It hurried towards the beckoning cheese, leaping the last three feet to sink its fangs and claws in the enticing feast.

As soon as the rat lighted upon the cheese, a great furry hand snapped out from the darkness, closing about the animal and its prize. The rat squealed in terror, writhing in its effort to sink its fangs into the flesh of its captor. Its captor, however, gave the rodent no chance to retaliate. With practised ease, a clawed thumb pressed down upon the rat’s head, snapping its neck.

Krisnik Sharpfang stared down at the quivering carcass in his paw. Beady red eyes, hideously similar to the rat’s own, gleamed with hunger. Long fangs, monstrously enlarged versions of those in the dead rodent’s mouth, gnashed together in an expression of savage triumph. Whiskers twitched, ears shivered, a long naked tail lashed against the slimy wall. Uttering a famished whine, the skaven began to nibble at his catch.

‘Save-save some cheese,’ snapped a voice from the darkness.

Krisnik froze in mid-chew, turning a hostile glare at the speaker. Illuminated by the green glow of the farther worm-oil lamp was a black-furred ratman, his brutish frame encased in a hodgepodge of steel plates and strips of iron mail. A thick-bladed broad-axe was clenched in one of the creature’s paws.

‘Catch-take more rat-meat with cheese,’ the second skaven hissed.

Krisnik wolfed down the bite he had taken, then hurriedly closed his paw around the haft of his own broad-axe. ‘My-mine cheese,’ he snarled. ‘My-mine rat-meat!’

The other skaven bared his fangs in a murderous leer, his claws clenching tighter about the grip of his weapon. His greedy antagonist glared back at him. The two ratmen, armed and armoured for battle, took each other’s measure. The second skaven reluctantly backed down, casting a worried glance at the massive steel-banded door behind him. Krisnik noticed the gesture, his former bravado evaporating in a shudder of fright. Almost sheepishly, he tossed the hindquarters of his catch to his comrade.

It wasn’t that he was worried about fighting the other guard. He was bigger and stronger than his comrade, and better with the axe. Besides, if he wasn’t, there was that trick he’d learned about swatting an enemy’s groin with the flat of his tail. No, it wasn’t fear that made him relent; it was simply a matter of recognising the dignity and decorum which was proper for a ratman of his position. A warrior entrusted with the protection of the Shattered Tower didn’t lower himself to squabbling over morsels of cold, gamey rat-meat.

Especially when the Lords of Decay would expect to find two guards exactly where they had been posted. It didn’t appeal to Krisnik to consider what they would do should they find one of their guards missing. Clan Rictus had enough ways of dealing with traitors and shirkers, all of them hideous and unspeakable. He didn’t need to think about how much nastier the imaginations of the council members might be.

Taking the tiniest nibble from his sliver of cheese, Krisnik darted a furtive look at the massive door. He was thankful the door was as thick as it was. Whatever the Council of Thirteen had been discussing for so long was nothing for his ears! The Lords of Decay took great pleasure displaying the bodies of spies when they were through mutilating them. Several score decorated the spires of the Shattered Tower at present, but the rulers of skavendom were always able to find room for more.

Krisnik shivered in his armour. Maybe joining the elite Verminguard hadn’t been such a good idea after all. Which one of his jealous rivals had arranged to put him into such a predicament, he wondered?

Eerie green light cast strange shadows across the enormous hall, rendering its immensity a patchwork of darkness and illumination. The light streamed from a pair of gigantic crystal spheres bound in cages of iron and supported upon great pillars of bronze. A confusion of wires and hoses drooped from the pillars, writhing along the stone floor until they vanished into a huge copper casket. A wiry skaven, his fur dyed a deep crimson where it was not scarred with burns, scrambled about the casket with frantic, jittery motions. His gloved paws flew across levers and hastily adjusted valves, causing the green light to flicker and small bursts of glowing gas to billow from vents in the bronze pillars.

The warlock-engineer bit down on a curse as the mechanism resisted his efforts. The warp-lantern was a new invention, the latest in the techno-sorcery of Clan Skryre. A lamp that created light not from rat dung or worm-oil, but from warpstone itself! A magnificent creation that would illuminate the whole of the Under-Empire and bring much profit to the warlock-engineers - if they could only get the thing to work right!

Glaring through his goggles, the technician growled at the scrawny skavenslaves locked inside the generator, forgetting for the moment that his snarls were wasted. The slaves were blind, deaf and mute, a precaution against their learning any of the council’s secrets. Angrily, the warlock turned back to the copper casket, stabbing his claw against one of the buttons. A spark of blue electricity crackled from a coil set at the top of the generator cage, shocking the slaves and jolting them into motion. The slaves began scrambling inside the cylindrical cage, their momentum causing it to revolve. The energy of their terrified efforts raced along the wires, feeding the warp-lanterns and causing the green light to stabilise.

Tugging nervously at his whiskers, the warlock-engineer glanced across the cavernous hall to the great table where the masters of all skavendom were gathered. His glands clenched as his eyes roved across the concentrated gathering of evil and villainy. In all the Under-Empire, there were no skaven more fierce or ruthless than these twelve. As Luminary of the Shattered Tower, it was his duty to provide light for these merciless monsters, that they might better see their surroundings and so be assured that none of their rivals had broken with custom and brought assassins into the sacred confines of the Grey Chapel.

The Luminary darted an anxious glance at the supreme overlord of Clan Skryre, the cruel Warpmaster Sythar Doom. The wizened Sythar was hunched in his steel-backed chair, his paws folded against each other, his fingers stroking the copper wires embedded in his scarred fur. Sythar’s face was a patchwork of skin grafts and iron plates, his eyes a pair of enchanted rubies three sizes too big for their sockets and held in place by a confusion of sutures and stitches. There was a compact power-plant hidden somewhere beneath the Warpmaster’s flowing black robes, connected to the thick black cable implanted into the underside of his jaw. When his withered lips pulled back to expose his metal fangs, blue sparks crackled about his teeth. It was a vivid reminder to all around Sythar that he had survived several attempts to murder him and a promise that the next attempt would be quite costly to his killers. The power-plant was wired to his heart and should that organ stop beating the result would be quite explosive.

Warpmaster Sythar Doom didn’t seem to notice the flickering warp-lights or the Luminary’s efforts to stabilise them. His attention was fixed upon the other skaven seated about the council table, his ruby eyes gleaming as each facet focused upon a different ratman. In the deadly maze of schemes and intrigues that formed council politics, it was dangerous to ignore any of them. The weaker Lords of Decay were forever scheming to rise higher in the hierarchy of the Under-Empire; the stronger were equally determined to ensure that they retained their positions. Sythar cast a covetous look at the Twelfth Throne, a trickle of drool causing his metal fangs to throw sparks.

There were twelve seats upon the council. Here, within the Grey Chapel, the seats were arrayed about an ancient oaken table, each throne radiating outwards from the great stone chair which was the Black Throne, the thirteenth seat set aside for the Great Horned Rat. The most powerful Lords of Decay occupied the thrones to the left and right of their god, the first and twelfth seats. That on the right was the Seerseat, always occupied by the Seerlord, master of the grey seers and grand prophet of the Horned Rat. It was the Seerlord’s function to implement the edicts of the council and to interpret the will of the absent Horned Rat. Supposedly above the bickering and politics of the skaven clans, the Seerlord was as ambitious and greedy as any ratman and used his position to further his own power, exploiting the vacant Black Throne to give himself a double vote whenever the need arose.

Seerlord Skrittar was going to need that double vote now. The fact pleased Warpmaster Sythar. The priest had dominated the council for far too long and it was time that he was put into his place. The bells fixed to Skrittar’s long horns tinkled as the grey skaven tried to suppress the tremors of rage rushing through his body. With his ruby-eyes, Sythar’s vision penetrated the oak table to see the Seerlord’s tail lashing angrily against the side of his throne.

How it must vex the prophet to have all his careful alliances and treaties crumbling before his eyes! And to have them swept aside by the Seerlord’s most hated enemy, the bloated Arch-Plaguelord of Clan Pestilens, Poxtifex Nurglitch IV, only made the spectacle even more delicious!

‘The man-things fight among themselves,’ the whisper-thin voice of Blight Tenscratch rasped through the shadows. A creature as twisted as his noxious clan, Blight was the despised ruler of the bug-breeding Clan Verms. Worm-oil was only a small part of his clan’s fortunes, their real wealth coming from exterminating infestations of fleas and ticks, infestations most ratmen believed Verms themselves had caused.

‘Now is the time to fight-slay,’ Blight hissed, slapping one of his scabrous paws against the table. ‘Kill all man-things and take their land!’

‘The man-things won’t fight each other if given a common enemy,’ the sharp tongue of Shadowmaster Kreep slashed across Blight’s words. Leader of Clan Eshin, Kreep commanded the most vicious cadre of killers and assassins in the Under-Empire, making his one of the most feared names in skavendom. Sythar thought it was a shame Kreep had allowed religious fervour and steady bribes to make him Skrittar’s lap-rat.

‘They will set aside their animosity to fight us,’ Kreep pronounced, raising one of his black talons. ‘We cannot fight all of the man-things.’

‘Then why did we send Deathmaster Silke to kill the Vilner-man? Just to help stupid beast-meat?’ The angry snarl came from Rattnak Vile, High Vivisectionist of Clan Moulder. The burly Rattnak was twice the size of Kreep, with immense paws tipped in steel talons within the Master Moulders had grafted to their clanlord’s bones. Rattnak’s eyes were glazed from the frequent overuse of warp-dust, and his posture was always that of a cornered beast ready to pounce. Kreep’s paws vanished into the folds of his cloak, closing about whatever weapons he had hidden there. Unless the assassin had coated his blades in very powerful poison, Sythar didn’t rate his chances against the monstrous Rattnak.

‘Man-things fight, man-things die,’ the sepulchral moan of Warlord Nekrot sent a shiver through the room. Though he occupied a lowly place upon the council, the ghoulish master of Clan Mordkin presented a terrifying aspect, his fur bleached to the colour of polished bone, his armour adorned with the skeleton of his predecessor. Clan Mordkin had reached prominence during the wars against Nagash the Accursed and they had been obsessed with death and decay ever since. Nekrot’s black eyes gleamed from the skull-mask he wore, his fangs bruxing as he contemplated the death and destruction of an empire. If it came to war, the other council members would think in terms of plunder and loot, but Nekrot would care only for how much killing his clan would get to do.

‘Boris-man now Emperor,’ stated Raksheed Deathclaw, glowering from within his red hood, his face obscured by a strip of scarlet cloth. Murderlord of Clan Skully, Raksheed was the bitter rival of Kreep, envious of Clan Eshin’s power and prestige. He could always be counted upon to vote against Kreep and by extension, Seerlord Skrittar. With many warrens underneath the sands of Araby, it was also in Skully’s best interests to maintain favourable relations with Pestilens and their extensive Southlands powerbase.

‘Yes-yes,’ agreed General Bonestab, the steel-encased warlord of Clan Grikk. ‘My spies tell me Boris-man hated much-much by man-things. With no leader, man-things not fight!’

‘Dwarf-things more problem than man-things!’ snapped Warlord Manglrr Baneburrow, commander of the teeming hordes of Clan Fester. ‘Dwarf-things kill Graug-dragon, now try to steal Fester-warren in Karak Azgal! We must crush-slay all dwarf-things!’

‘We will kill-slay all dwarf-meat.’ The words came in a venomous hiss. The eyes of the council turned towards the Twelfth Throne and the malignant creature seated there. Lord Vecteek the Murderous, Warmonger of Clan Rictus, preened his silky black fur as he leaned back in his stone chair, plundered from the dwarf-halls of Karak Ungor. Clad in a suit of steel plates that sported an array of spikes that would have shamed a rose bush, Vecteek let his piercing grey eyes linger upon each of his rivals. Even those who habitually sided with Clan Rictus squirmed under the Warmonger’s scrutiny.

‘The dwarf-meat will be slaughtered,’ Vecteek pronounced, ‘but first we will enslave the humans. We will use their fields and their herds to make us strong, to feed new armies. Then we will annihilate the dwarf-things.’

‘The man-things are still too many,’ insisted Kreep. ‘We will lose too many fighting them. We will be too weak to conquer dwarf-things.’

‘Who said we will fight them?’ Vecteek chortled, his wicked laugh echoing through the Grey Chapel. ‘Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch has brought us a new weapon.’ Vecteek extended his claw, gesturing for the Poxtifex to speak.

Nurglitch reared up in his seat, his corpulent mass undulating in a loathsomely boneless fashion. The Arch-Plaguelord was cloaked in a decayed habit of leprous green cloth, split in many places where the diseased ratman’s buboes had swollen past the raiment’s ability to restrain. Great thorns sprouted from Nurglitch’s spine and shoulders, dripping a foul green sludge from their tips. Clouds of black flies swarmed over his rotten mass, crawling about the tattered hood which cast his face into shadow. When he spoke, the plaguelord’s pestilent breath sent squadrons of flies dropping to the floor.

‘Glory to the magnificence of the Horned One,’ Nurglitch coughed, ‘in His true aspect,’ he added, shifting his hooded face towards Seerlord Skrittar. ‘By his divine grace, we, His true servants, have discovered the most blessed of His contagions!’ Nurglitch unclasped the heavy tome he wore chained about his neck, pulling away mouldering pages until he exposed a hollow within the book. His warty paw emerged clasping a glass vial. The other Lords of Decay cringed away from the plaguelord, each waiting for one of the others to leap from his seat and start a rush for the many exits hidden within the Grey Chapel’s walls.

‘The Horned Rat brings to us a new holy plague!’ Nurglitch chortled, brandishing the vial aloft. His boast did nothing to ease the fears of the other lords. The slicing voice of Vecteek, however, reminded them that there were other things to fear.

‘Coward-trash!’ Vecteek snarled. ‘Sit-stay! Hear-listen! The plague is harmless to our kind. It will only kill man-things.’

First among equals, Vecteek’s word was law among his fellow Lords of Decay. It wasn’t belief, but obedience, that kept the council in their seats. Only the connivance of the Verminguard could have allowed Nurglitch to bring his poison into the Shattered Tower, and no ratman in Clan Rictus was insane enough to dare such a thing without Vecteek’s permission. As they stared at the vial, the council members saw not only the power of Pestilens, but the dominance of Rictus. The reminder wasn’t a pleasant one.

‘How do we know it will kill man-things?’ Rattnak Vile asked. His lips curled away from his fangs. ‘How do we know it will not kill skaven?’

Vecteek rose from his seat, clapping his paws together. At the sound, a gang of Verminguard came slinking into the Grey Chapel, wheeling a great glass cage ahead of them. Inside the cage, a motley confusion of scrawny ratmen and dirty human slaves moaned and whined, clutching weakly at the transparent walls of their cell. The assembled Lords of Decay shifted uneasily as they noted the markings on the pelts of the skaven locked inside the cage, finding a representative from each of their clans among the captives. One piebald ratman even displayed tiny horns, making him resemble the grotesque grey seers.

Another signal from Vecteek and Nurglitch oozed out from his chair and approached the cage. The plague priest dragged open a tiny portal, then dropped the little vial into the cage. The vessel shattered as it struck the floor, expelling a black fog into the cage. For a moment, the captives were lost within a veil of darkness. Then the veil fell away as the fog dissipated, condensing into a black soot. The skavenslaves continued to paw madly at the glass walls, squealing in terror. The human captives, however, lay strewn about the floor, their flesh marked with weeping sores and suppurating buboes.

‘No sickness,’ Nurglitch coughed. ‘Plague is for man-things. Won’t kill ratkin. My apprentice, Poxmaster Puskab Foulfur, test new plague on many man-things. Nine of ten die!’

The statement brought greedy glitters to the eyes of the assembled ratmen. Nine of ten? The humans would be so decimated that even if they were united they would pose no threat at all to the hordes of the Under-Empire! The ratmen would be able to sweep the humans aside and claim the surface for their own! Fat from the plunder of the man-things’ empire, they would be stronger than ever in the history of skavendom!

Sythar’s tail twitched as he studied Nurglitch. The plaguelord was a zealot, a religious fanatic whose clan had once tried to enslave the entire Under-Empire. If the plague priests truly had a weapon of such potential then the power of Clan Pestilens would grow beyond measure. He cast an envious glance at the Twelfth Throne. Wresting the seat away from Warmonger Vecteek would be hard enough, but to usurp control of it from Clan Pestilens might be impossible. He turned his gaze across the table to Seerlord Skrittar. As much as it galled him, Sythar would have to side with the grey seer when things came down to a vote.

‘I have seen the effectiveness of Puskab’s disease,’ Seerlord Skrittar declared, leaving unsaid whether such intelligence had come from sorcerous visions or flesh-and-blood spies. Nurglitch growled as he heard the grey seer bestow credit for brewing the disease upon his apprentice, an insult made all the more vexing for the truth behind it.

‘This new plague has the potential to leave our enemies helpless, to decimate them in their thousands,’ Skrittar continued. Sythar waited for the grey seer to twist these seeming strengths into reasons why the council must oppose Nurglitch’s new weapon. Instead, the grey seer shocked the other Lords of Decay by endorsing the contagion.

‘The Horned Rat displays His beneficence in strange ways,’ Skrittar said, tilting his head towards the empty Black Throne, almost as though he were listening to some unseen speaker. ‘He has overlooked the… eccentricities of Clan Pestilens and through them bestowed upon us the weapon which shall bring about the long-prophesied ascendancy!’ The prophet-sorcerer turned towards Vecteek, bowing his head. ‘We should ask the council to vote. I say we endorse this new weapon and use it immediately against the man-things!’ Again, Skrittar cocked his head towards the empty seat. If needed, there was no mistaking which way the Horned Rat would cast his vote.

Vecteek stared suspiciously at the Seerlord. At the moment, Vecteek seemed to be considering using his Verminguard and stopping whatever scheme Skrittar was hatching before it could start. However murdering the Seerlord was one of the few things beyond Vecteek’s power. It would give the many enemies of Clan Rictus the justification they needed to band together and overthrow the Warmonger. Nothing was more guaranteed to incite the rabble of skavendom like a holy war.

‘This new plague will achieve more than a hundred armies,’ Vecteek said. ‘The Boris-man has made the man-things divided and suspicious. That will make them vulnerable to the plague. Before they know what is happening, it will be upon them. Because they are divided, they will not be able to stop its spread.’ His black paw clenched into a fist. ‘They will be broken and beaten before our first warrior leaves the tunnels!’

With both Seerlord Skrittar and Warmonger Vecteek supporting the plan, the vote was purely ceremonial. In the end, only Warpmaster Sythar and Great Warlord Vrrmik of Clan Mors opposed the plan. Sythar couldn’t stifle the feeling of alarm that coursed through his glands every time he caught a sniff of Nurglitch’s gloating putrescence. The new plague might benefit all of the Under-Empire, but there was no question the plague priests would reap the dragon’s share of the plunder. Of course, there was the possibility he was certain had occurred to every warlord on the council: if Pestilens could make a plague to kill man-things, certainly they could create another one to turn against their fellow skaven. Whatever they were up to, Sythar was determined that Clan Skryre would be watching and waiting.

Warlord Vrrmik’s opposition was less complex - there was no creature above or below the surface he hated more than Grey Lord Vecteek. Sythar wondered if that would be enough to make him an ally against Clan Pestilens when the time came. Because there was no question the new plague would do what Nurglitch promised.

The uncertainty lay in what would happen after.

Nuln
Nachgeheim, 1111

The Black Rose sat perched along a hilly road in the riverside section of Freiberg. From its threshold, a patron could stare straight down the street to the clear waters of the Reik and see the grey rocky spires of Helstrum-oog, the little island rising at the joining of the rivers. The distant spires of the abandoned Cathedral of Sigmar were visible in the morning light, deserted since the great fire that had claimed the old Grand Theogonist and much of Wissenland’s Sigmarite priesthood. Beyond the ruined temple stretched its farmlands and pastures, desolate and unused after months of bickering among the nobles over who had the greater claim to lease the now tenantless land.

Walther sighed as he looked down the road. Nuln was a city in the grip of change. Emperor Boris had removed the capital to Altdorf following his ascension, removing the lustre from the place that had been called the ‘jewel of the Empire’. When Grand Theogonist Thorgrad was elected as head of the Sigmarite faith, he had stopped reconstruction of Helstrum Cathedral and relocated the seat of the temple to Altdorf. In the space of only a few decades, Nuln had lost its position as centre of both the Empire’s secular and spiritual worlds. A feeling of malaise and bitterness gripped the hearts of Nulners, an impression that their greatness was past and all that was left to them was a slow slide into decay and ruin.

The rat-catcher shook his head. There was nothing he could do about Nuln’s lost glory. That was for Count Artur and the Assembly to worry about. His own problems gave him trouble enough. They might not be the sort of thing to vex a baron or a duke, but to Walther they were more important than the Great Mysteries of Verena.

Dawn found the Black Rose almost deserted. The bushy-bearded Bremer was tending the bar, cleaning out clay tankards and leathern jacks. A few lamplighters and chimney sweeps were scattered about the tables. The real custom happened between sunset and midnight, when sailors and stevedores trooped up the hill from the docks and companies of students descended from the Universität. Then the place would be a bustling confusion of songs and jests, of hard-drinking river-traders and brawny lumpers, their clothes reeking of fish.

Walther preferred it quiet. He was used to silence, the stillness of the sewers where the only sounds were the crackle of his rushlight and the furtive skitter of the rats. Noise, the racket of too many people crammed into a small place, was to him a frightful thing. Sometimes he was happy that people shunned the company of a rat-catcher. It made it so much easier.

Except in one area. Walther’s pulse quickened as he looked out across the tavern and spotted the woman making her way from the kitchen with a platter of black bread and frumenty. His eyes fixated upon her shapely figure, upon the way her body pressed itself against the simple wool kirtle and linen apron she wore. Even in the tavern’s gloom, her long golden tresses seemed to shimmer like pieces of the sun. He watched as she rounded one of the tables, setting the platter before the grey-faced militiaman seated there. Walther’s gaze darkened when the soldier made a grab for the woman’s waist.

‘Just a little kiss, Zena,’ the militiaman suggested, starting to rise from his chair. The woman placed her hands on his shoulders, pushing him back down.

‘None of that, Meisel,’ she scolded him and twisted away from his clutch. ‘Eat your porridge and be content with a full belly.’

Meisel frowned at his meal. ‘I’ll miss your cooking, Zena,’ he said. ‘Almost as much as I’ll miss those big blue eyes,’ he added with a wink.

‘Leaving us, Herr Meisel?’ Bremer called out from behind the bar.

Meisel shifted his chair around so he could face the bar. ‘I’ve been discharged,’ he said. ‘Me and a hundred like me. Emperor Boris has placed a new tax for every dienstmann a lord retains.’ He dipped his spoon into the bowl of frumenty. ‘The nobles are scrambling to cut their expenses.’

‘They’ll cry a different song if the goblins come again,’ Bremer cursed. ‘Or if the beastmen decide to come down from the Drakwald. Then they’ll be begging you fellows to take up arms again.’

The militiaman clenched his fist. ‘They’ll be begging before then,’ he swore. ‘There’s a knight named Engel who is organising a march on Altdorf. We’re going to petition the Emperor himself and make our demands known!’

While Meisel and Bremer continued their exchange, Zena retreated back towards the kitchen. Walther knew she detested talk of politics and religion, of anyone wasting their time arguing about things over which they had no control. She might endure the groping fingers of a drunken dock-walloper, but she couldn’t abide a beerhall agitator.

Walther intercepted Zena just as she reached the kitchen door. ‘Zena,’ he whispered, catching her by the string of her apron. She spun around, her hand raised to strike her accoster. When she recognised the rat-catcher, her expression softened from anger to annoyance.

‘Schill,’ she sighed. ‘Of course. No night is complete without being pawed by a ratman.’

Walther winced at the reprimand, releasing the apron string as though it had suddenly been transformed into a hissing serpent. ‘I didn’t mean…’

‘You never mean anything,’ Zena said. Her eyes dropped to the rat-catcher’s hands, becoming hard when she saw the blood on them. ‘You might have washed a bit before coming here.’

‘I’m sorry. A few of them nipped me tonight,’ Walther explained, trying to wipe his hands clean on the rough wool of his breeches.

‘One of them is going to gnaw off your fingers,’ Zena warned him. ‘I’ve told you before you should find better work.’ Her eyes softened when she saw the ugly gash Walther’s efforts had reopened. ‘Oh! One of those filthy things is going to bite off your fingers!’

The rat-catcher made no protest when Zena unwound her scarf and ministered to his wounded hand. The sting of his torn flesh was nothing beside the warm rush that pounded through his heart.

‘No hunter is completely safe from his quarry,’ Walther said. ‘It is just one of the risks he accepts.’ He reached down, cupping Zena’s chin in his hand, lifting her face until her eyes met his. ‘I’m doing it all for you. I’ll make enough to support you, to raise a family.’

Zena pulled away, her expression becoming angry again. ‘A penny a tail?’ she scoffed. ‘You’ll raise children on a penny a tail?’

Walther smiled, reaching to his belt and removing the coins Ostmann had paid him. An exultant feeling filled him when he saw Zena’s eyes light up at sight of the silver. She snatched them from his hand and stared at them in wonder, almost as though she couldn’t believe they were real.

‘That’s just the beginning,’ Walther assured Zena. He was thinking of the steadily increasing numbers of rats he’d been seeing in the sewers. He was also thinking of Ostmann’s empty shelves and the embargo against Stirland.

Gently, the rat-catcher closed Zena’s fingers around the coins and kissed her hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told her.

‘The happy times are coming.’

CHAPTER THREE

Middenheim
Kaldezeit, 1111

Snarling wolves glowered down upon the oblivious men, stone fangs bared. The flickering fire of an enormous hearth cast weird shadows across the lupine gargoyles, the shifting play of light and dark lending the marble wolves a semblance of savage life.

Far below the stone wolves, two men sparred across a polished wooden floor. The boards creaked and groaned as heavy boots stamped down on them, as thrust and parry whirled the combatants along the empty gallery. The clash of steel against steel rang through the concourse.

One of the combatants was a middle-aged man, lean of build, his close-cropped hair in retreat, his thin moustache displaying a scattering of grey. His face was thin and hard, his eyes as sharp as the edge of a knife. He wore a simple leather tunic, his only affectation being the golden pectoral that hung about his neck. He wielded his sword with suppleness and surety, his every move bearing the cool confidence of long experience.

His opponent was much younger, little more than a boy. Thick black hair hung to his shoulders, catching in the high collar of his garment. Unlike the simple tunic of the older man, the boy’s gypon was extravagant, stripes of silver thread woven into the burgundy cloth, gold buttons crisscrossing the breast. An enormous buckle, cast into the profile of a running wolf, fastened a belt of dragonhide about his waist. The scabbard which hung from the belt was gilded across most of its length and engraved with elaborate scrollwork.

The boy’s face was handsome, stamped with all the finer qualities of noble blood and careful breeding. There was pride in his deep blue eyes and a swagger to the curve of his mouth that betokened an innate confidence that needed neither practice nor experience to engender it. The will to accomplish was enough to embolden the boy and drive him to success.

His swordsmanship displayed a less refined, more primal style than the studied motions of the older man. It was emotion rather than skill which governed his blade, but such was the fire of his passion, the quickness of his reflexes that his guard was impenetrable, his attacks avoided only by the narrowest margin.

The older swordsman smiled as he twisted his wrist and blocked a slash from his adversary’s blade. ‘That would have been an impressive feint - if you had intended it as such,’ he told the boy.

A smirk tugged at the corner of the boy’s mouth. ‘I don’t need feints to sneak past your blade, old man.’

The other swordsman smiled back, rolling his blade across the back of the boy’s sword and stabbing the point towards his breast. His foe dropped and shifted, swatting the thrust aside with the pommel of his own weapon. The older fighter nodded, impressed by the move. ‘Nice work. I’d think you’d been studying the tricks of the Estalian diestro - if I didn’t know you have no patience for books.’

The boy jabbed his sword at his foe’s left arm, then turned his entire body so that he followed through with a rolling slash at the man’s right leg. Both attacks crashed against the other swordsman’s intercepting blade.

‘Why read if there’s nothing more to learn, van Cleeve?’ the boy quipped.

The old man snorted with amusement, then brought his boot stamping down, not upon the floor, but upon his adversary’s foot. The boy danced back in surprise. For an instant, his guard was down. It was all the opening his instructor needed. The point of his sword pressed against the youth’s belly, the cork cap sinking into the cloth of his doublet.

‘If all you want to do is get killed, then there’s nothing more I can teach you, your grace,’ van Cleeve said.

Laughing, the boy brought his sword whipping around in a stunning display of speed and flourish, the edge pressing against his instructor’s neck. ‘That is a mortal wound, but not immediately fatal. We die together, old man.’ Smiling, he withdrew his blade, pausing to remove the nub of cork before returning it to its scabbard.

Van Cleeve sighed as he attended to his own weapon. ‘I think his excellency the Graf would take small comfort from knowing his only son dispatched his assassin before he died.’ The swordsman shook his head. ‘You have an impressive natural aptitude, Prince Mandred. If you would only apply yourself to the science of the sword…’

Mandred frowned. It was an argument he had heard many times and one that he didn’t appreciate, especially since it was a train of thought van Cleeve shared with his father. ‘Techniques and schools of sword would ruin me. Tame a wolf and you dull his fangs.’

‘A tame wolf lives longer,’ van Cleeve observed.

‘A wild wolf is happier,’ retorted the prince. Van Cleeve could see he would make no points sparring with his student’s wit. Clicking his heels together, the Westerlander bowed to the prince and withdrew from the gallery. Mandred waited only until the swordsman was out of sight before turning and dashing down the stairway at the far end of the gallery.

His sparring with van Cleeve had been frustrating today and the prince had been impatient to extract himself from the duel. There were more important things than sword practice going on within the halls of the Middenpalaz. Noblemen and dignitaries from across the city had been arriving all day. Something big was going on and he was determined to learn what it was.

Stealing through the brooding halls of the palace, Mandred avoided the most populous corridors. Using side passages and circling through empty chambers, he avoided encountering the small army of peasants who maintained the Graf’s household or the armed guards who saw to the royal family’s protection. The only one who noted his passing was Woten, the hoary grey wolfhound lounging in one of the banquet halls, but the dog was more interested in the warmth of a blazing hearth than Mandred’s activities. A wag of the tail was all the notice he paid the boy.

Creeping along the heavy, stone-walled corridors, Mandred reached his destination, a little waiting room adjoining the Graf’s council chamber. There was a secret to the room, one which only a few people knew. A painting set into the wall could be tilted outwards upon a hinge once a hidden catch had been unlocked. Behind the painting was a pane of cloudy glass. It corresponded with a large mirror in the council chamber, but the reflective surface was only upon the outside. From the waiting room, a person could peer through the glass and observe whatever went on in the other room. The whole thing was dwarf-work, as attested by the sharp runes carved into the edge of the glass. Mandred wondered about the trick behind the spyhole but had long ago given up on puzzling it out for himself. Dwarfcraft or witchcraft, it was enough that the trick worked.

Gazing into the council chamber, Mandred could see twenty or so of the city’s noblemen seated around the circumference of the Fauschlagstein, a great stone table carved from a single block of Ulricsberg granite. Among the city’s notables, he could see the glowering visage of Grand Master Arno Warsitz, his great red beard drooping against his chest; the stern countenance of Ar-Ulric, High Priest of the White Wolf, his wolfskin robes matching his snowy hair and the milky eye staring blindly from the right side of his face; Thane Hardin Gunarsson, chief of Middenheim’s dwarfs, his wizened face pulled into a perpetual frown. Beside such grim councillors, Graf Gunthar looked cheerful and vibrant, his dark hair swept back, his long houppelande of ribbed kersey flowing about him, the dark blue of the loose gown contrasting with the sombre blacks and russets of his council.

Any impression of cheer, however, did not reach to the Graf’s eyes. They were ringed by dark circles, their sapphire depths haunted by worry.

‘We are agreed then,’ Graf Gunthar told his councillors. ‘Middenheim will not be weakened to placate the diktats of a corrupt Emperor. We will not dismiss our soldiers and we will not empty the city treasury to pay an unjust tax.’

The statement brought nods of affirmation from the assembled nobles. Thane Hardin stroked his blond beard and scowled at the gold-grubbing effrontery of the manling Emperor. Even the worst gold-crazed dwarf wouldn’t have dreamed up such a crooked scheme as Boris’s plot to tax the human Dienstleute out of existence and leave his Empire disarmed and defenceless.

Graf Gunthar paced about the table, studying each of his advisors in turn. ‘You are all aware what defying Emperor Boris could mean. He might raise an army to seize what he feels is owed to him.’

‘Let him try,’ growled Grand Master Arno, clenching his fist. ‘The Drak-rat will never breach the Ulricsberg.’

‘He wouldn’t have to,’ cautioned Viscount von Vogelthal, the Graf’s chamberlain. ‘He could simply lay siege to the mountain and cut us off from the rest of Middenland. Whatever the quality of our warriors, Emperor Boris can field more than us.’

Graf Gunthar nodded, agreeing with the chamberlain’s observation. ‘That is why I have decided that we must lay stores against any punitive actions the Emperor might take. We must levy the farms and freeholds around the Ulricsberg, double their harvest tax. I want the storehouses full to bursting before winter sets in. We can depend upon Emperor Boris to wait until the spring before mounting a campaign in the north, but every day after the thaw he stays in the Reikland will be a boon from Ulric.’

‘The raugrafs and landgraves won’t appreciate having their obligations increased,’ objected Duke Schneidereit.

‘We face an emergency,’ Graf Gunthar snarled at the duke. ‘If we are to survive, every man must make sacrifices.’ He stopped pacing about the stone table and rested his hands against the cool granite surface. ‘To that end, I have issued orders that the Sudgarten and Konigsgarten are to be dug up. The ground is to be used as farmland. Whatever seed we can spare is to be sown at once, before the first frost.’ He sighed as he looked across the worried faces of his advisors. ‘It might not help us if Emperor Boris strikes fast, but if he delays, we may just bring in a crop before his army lays siege to the Ulricsberg.’

Many of the nobles nodded grimly at the pragmatic decision. They would grieve for the loss of the parks with their colourful shrubberies and flowers, but they would grieve even more if starvation descended upon their city.

‘There is another concern we should consider, your highness.’ All eyes turned upon the aged Ar-Ulric when the high priest spoke. He was much more than simply another of the Graf’s advisors. As the chief authority of the cult of Ulric, he was the most powerful priest in Middenheim, venerated by Ulricans across the Empire as the representative of their god upon the mortal coil.

Ar-Ulric rose from his chair, his one-eyed gaze sweeping across the chamber. ‘There is plague in the outlying provinces, in Sylvania and Stirland. If the disease spreads beyond their borders, into Talabecland and Hochland, or our own Middenland, then we must be prepared for refugees.’

‘We have already taken in three thousand Westerlanders,’ grumbled Viscount von Vogelthal. ‘And another two thousand Drakwalders. The city can’t hold any more squatters.’

‘Nor will it,’ Graf Gunthar declared. ‘We must protect Middenheim. Accepting those fleeing from enemies is one thing, but there is a point when mercy becomes irresponsible.’ He hesitated, collecting his thoughts, weighing the responsibility for his decision. ‘No, Your Eminence,’ he told Ar-Ulric, ‘Middenheim will not harbour refugees from the plague. Any trying to climb the causeways, any setting one foot upon the Ulricsberg, must be cut down like dogs. Anyone seeking entry into the city must be sequestered at the foot of the mountain.’

Ar-Ulric bowed his head. ‘If that is your decree, then do I have your leave to inform the Temple of Shallya of this decision? The priestesses will want to know and make their plans accordingly.’

‘You have my leave,’ Graf Gunthar said. ‘But you may also warn the temple that anyone who attends refugees will not be permitted back into the city. I will make no exceptions. Not even for a priestess.’

Shocked by the cruelty of his father’s decree, Mandred drew away from the spyhole, swinging the hinged painting back into place. It sickened him to think his father could be so unfeeling, to abandon the sick and the desperate, to turn his back upon those who needed help.

He had always admired his father’s wisdom, but wisdom was nothing without compassion.

When he was Graf, Mandred swore he would be both wise and compassionate. He wouldn’t be a cowardly tyrant like his father.

Altdorf
Kaldezeit, 1111

The wind blowing across the Reik into Altdorf had a cold sting to it, a reminder to all who felt it that the autumn was swiftly fading and that Ulric was already spreading his claws to claim the world. It would be a hard winter for the capital. Frightful rumours of poor harvests in Stirland and Sylvania had been given some veracity when the nobles of Pfeildorf and Wissenburg began to complain to the Emperor about the almost negligible amount of wheat and millet being exported down the river. Most of what trade had emerged from the provinces had gone no farther than Mordheim and Talabheim. Solland and Wissenland, their agriculture devoted principally to raising sheep and making wine, had become desperate to stock supplies for the winter. Food prices in Nuln had soared, diverting the harvest of many a Reikland lord southwards, away from the traditional markets in Altdorf.

The prospect of a hungry winter, however, was compounded in the last weeks of Brauzeit. It was then that the diktat of Emperor Boris against the Dienstleute bore its ugly fruit. Discharged from the service of their noble lords, unable to find work to sustain themselves, the dispossessed peasants had mobilised under the leadership of a grizzled old firebrand named Wilhelm Engel. A veteran of many campaigns, a soldier who had served as adjutant to generals and warlords, Engel organised his people with military precision and discipline. In those last weeks of Brauzeit, he led five thousand starving soldiers into the streets of Altdorf to seek redress from the Emperor in whose name they had fought.

From across the Empire, from every province, the Dienstleute continued to come. Every morning, a delegation from Engel would appear before the marble gates of the Imperial Palace with a petition, a request to treat with the Emperor and plead their cause before him. Engel’s demands were straightforward: bread to feed his men, work to sustain them.

Weeks later, Engel’s delegates were still seeking their audience with the Emperor. The ‘Bread Marchers’, as the discharged Dienstleute had come to be called, took to the fields and meadows of Altdorf, constructing shanty-towns from wattle and thatch. The largest of these took shape in the wide expanse of the Altgarten, overwhelming the tranquillity of the park with a labyrinth of squalor and poverty. Altdorfers contemptuously named the place ‘Breadburg’, and cursed both it and the scruffy squatters who infested it.

The presence of so many rootless and desperate men was a cause of concern to the inhabitants of Altdorf. The little family farms which helped sustain the city were the constant target of poachers and thieves. Herdsmen took to keeping their livestock inside their homes; granaries began to resemble armed camps with companies of guards patrolling around them night and day. For days, the people of Altdorf shuddered at accounts of the von Werra stables - the stablemaster’s entire stock being rustled in the dead of night. Cook-fires shining from the squalor of Breadburg told the rest of the story.

From the towers of the Reikschloss the extent of the shantytown could be viewed in full. Patrolling the battlements of their fortress, the knights of the Reiksknecht watched as the numbers of Engel’s Bread Marchers continued to swell. As more and more of the park was razed to make room for the expanding morass of shacks and hovels, the knights felt a coldness settle about their hearts. From their vantage, they could see the terrible menace that was growing right inside the city walls.

Baron Dettleb von Schomberg felt the tension in the air as he took his morning constitutional. Three circuits of the castle walls had been his habit since taking the position as Grand Master of the Reiksknecht. He felt that the combination of exercise and fresh air was conducive to good health and a clear mind. This morning, however, he was making his fifth circuit of the wall and still his thoughts were filled with dread.

Von Schomberg’s heart went out to the Bread Marchers and their cause. He felt a great sympathy for these men who had lost the security of their homes and positions. At the same time, he could not afford to ignore the threat these desperate, starving men represented to the peace and security of Altdorf.

Lost in his thoughts, von Schomberg didn’t see Captain Erich von Kranzbeuhler until he almost walked straight into the young knight.

‘My apologies, my lord,’ Erich said, snapping to attention.

Von Schomberg gave the knight a tired smile. ‘Entirely my fault,’ he said, then uttered a dry chuckle. ‘I should thank you. If not for your intervention I might have walked right off the parapet.’

‘Scarcely the heroic death worthy of the Grand Master,’ Erich replied, falling into step beside von Schomberg as the baron marched towards the edge of the parapet. The baron gazed out across the slanted roofs of Altdorf, concentrating his eyes upon the jumbled confusion of Breadburg.

‘There are many things beneath the dignity of the Reiksknecht,’ von Schomberg sighed. ‘But I fear we will be called upon to do them just the same.’

‘The Bread Marchers?’ Erich asked, following his captain’s gaze. ‘Surely that is a problem for Schuetzenverein?’

Von Schomberg shook his head, his expression turning even more grim. ‘Perhaps at one time the city guard could have handled Engel’s people, but the problem has grown too big for the Schueters.’ He slammed his palm against the cold stone of the parapet. ‘By Verena! Why didn’t Prince Sigdan take steps to stop this! Thousands of starving men swarming into his city and he does nothing!’

‘Perhaps he didn’t have the heart to turn them away,’ Erich suggested. ‘These aren’t a rabble of vagabonds; these are Dienstleute discharged by their lords without thought or provision. Men who risked their lives trying to keep the Empire safe.’

‘I share his sentiment,’ von Schomberg said. ‘Except for the officers, every knight in the Reiksknecht is a dienstmann, a vassal of Emperor Boris. I am not unfamiliar with the travails of belonging to such station, but a leader cannot allow sentimentality to cloud his judgment. Engel’s people should have been turned away.’

‘Maybe the decision wasn’t Prince Sigdan’s to make,’ Erich suggested. ‘Increasingly, the Emperor has come to view Altdorf as his own personal suzerainty. If it was his will to have the Bread Marchers repulsed, he would have ordered them removed by now.’

Von Schomberg lifted his eyes, staring out past the Altgarten, past the Great Cathedral of Sigmar to where the Imperial Palace sat upon its hill surrounded by its megalithic dwarf-built walls. The golden pennants of Boris Hohenbach fluttered from the spires of the palace, proclaiming to all and sundry that the Emperor was in residence. Safe behind the high walls of his palace, surrounded by his cronies and sycophants, it was just possible that the Emperor really was oblivious to the unrest gathering right on his doorstep.

The baron’s face contorted into a grimace of pain. There was another possibility, one that von Schomberg found much easier to believe. The Emperor was exploiting the crisis, allowing it to escalate. He thought back to the meeting of the Imperial Council and the outrage expressed by the dignitaries over the new taxes being imposed across the Empire. Special dispensation had been granted to Drakwald and Westerland, in recognition of the unrest in those lands. Conspicuously, the Emperor hadn’t extended such dispensation upon Altdorf and the Imperial Army. The Dienstleute who composed most of the troops would be taxed just like any other peasant, the monies levied to be applied to the Imperial Treasury.

For all his abuse of power, Emperor Boris was still answerable to the electors who had given him that power. He had made it his practice to play one province against another, ensuring that every elector had an enemy he hated more than his Emperor. He further ensured that his word and his power were the only thing preventing these smouldering hatreds from blazing up into outright warfare.

Now, however, it seemed he was playing a different game. Emperor Boris was using the distress of certain provinces to create a state of dependency between them and himself. Only by the largesse of Boris Goldgather would Westerland be empowered to reclaim Marienburg, only by his consideration would Drakwald recover from the depredations of the beastkin. Another emperor, a new emperor, might not be so sympathetic to their plight and impose upon them the same obligations as the other provinces.

It was a bitter kind of loyalty Boris would gain, but it was the only sort he would trust - a loyalty built upon need and dependence rather than respect and admiration.

The Bread Marchers. Von Schomberg could understand what the Emperor wanted with them now. Each Bread Marcher was a displaced soldier, one less sword in the arsenals of the other provinces. But his scheming went still deeper. Drawing the desperate men to Altdorf, to the Imperial capital, Boris intended to exploit them still further. He was deliberately allowing the shantytowns to grow. He was encouraging the despair and lawlessness taking hold of the city.

When the time came, when Boris was certain the size and scope of the thing would be unmistakable, then he would act. He would send out his soldiers to put down the rioters. The streets of Altdorf would run red with blood, the blood of valiant men who only months before had fought for the same Empire which would cause their doom. Afterwards, the bloodshed would be enough to silence the Emperor’s critics. He would have all the justification he needed to exempt the Imperial Army, Altdorf and perhaps even the Reikland itself from the head tax on their Dientsleute.

Von Schomberg turned away from the parapet. ‘The Emperor will act,’ he assured Erich. ‘He will act when there is no other choice but violence so that none can gainsay him. He will call out his Kaiserjaeger and his Reiksknecht and send them out to ride down starving men.’

Erich’s expression sickened at the image the Grand Master conjured. ‘Surely it won’t come to that! Knights don’t ride down defenceless men!’

Von Schomberg locked the young captain’s eyes in a cold stare. ‘We have guaranteed our honour through service to the emperor. Every knight of the Reiksknecht is sworn to obey the emperor without question and Boris is our Emperor. If he calls upon us to ride down the Bread Marchers, then that is what we will do!’

‘It will mean a massacre,’ Erich stated, shaking his head in disgust.

‘Yes,’ von Schomberg said, turning away to resume his walk along the battlements.

‘It will mean a massacre.’

Bylorhof
Kaldezeit, 1111

Shouts and howls resounded through the town. Peasants thronged the streets, gathered together to watch the macabre procession creeping through Bylorhof. Twenty men, their naked bodies glistening with sweat and blood, struggled through the muddy lanes. Before them they pushed a hideous altar mounted upon the bed of a wagon. It was a ghastly, semi-human effigy, the eidolon of Bylorak. The marsh god’s statue was a monstrous thing carved from green stone, a squat, broad-shouldered man-like thing with a gaping, toadlike mouth and a single hideous eye set into its forehead. Marsh reeds formed the eidolon’s hair and swamp moss served it for a beard. In its left hand it held a fish. In its right, a human skull.

The men pushing the idol through the streets weren’t part of Bylorak’s priesthood. Most of the under-priests were dead and the chief priest had fled to a hermitage somewhere in the marsh, abandoning his temple. In his absence, fanatics of the ancient religion had taken it upon themselves to act. They had broken down the doors of the temple and stolen the image of their god, that Bylorak might witness the devotion and faith of his disciples.

Through the streets the procession crept. At every sixth step, the men pushing the idol would stop. Crying the name of their god to the heavens, they would lash themselves viciously with scourges. The whips ripped at their flesh, spattering the street with blood. After some minutes, the flagellants would stop and resume their march through the town.

Frederick van Hal watched the procession with a feeling of horror. Some of the flagellants were men he knew, pillars of the community. Terror of the plague had driven them into the madness of fanaticism. Viewing the gods of the Empire as weak and impotent, they had turned back to the old gods of the Fennones. The Black Plague had brought a second disease to Sylvania. A plague of unbelief.

The priest of Morr could almost sympathise with the desperation of the peasants. They had watched their priests and priestesses die all around them, unable to stop the plague, unable to bring the beneficence of the gods to the stricken community. If Shallya and Morr would not protect their own servants, then what hope was there for a simple commoner?

Such was the attitude of the laity, but to a clergyman, things were not so simple. Frederick understood that the gods worked through faith, that at those times when all hope was lost was when it was most important to cling to faith. The gods tested men, tested the strength of their will and determination, for only through ordeal could the true quality of man be revealed.

The priest pulled his robe tighter about his chest as a chill swept through his body. Such were the ways of benevolent gods, but there were other gods as well, gods of such malevolence as to make the cyclopean Bylorak seem beneficent and kindly. These gods were ancient and utterly malignant, daemonic things lurking just beyond the light, forever straining to cast down the world of men. Frederick had learned much of such gods when he had studied in the great librarium of the temple in Luccini, eldest of Morr’s temples in the Old World.

He had learned more when he assumed the duties of high priest at the Bylorhof temple. There was a reason he had been chosen for that duty, why the lectors decided to install an outsider to this temple. The old priest, a Sylvanian, had been removed for practising the most obscene heresies. He and all his possessions had been consigned to flame, his very name purged from the temple records. The selection of a Westerlander to replace the apostate was to be a declaration that the previous infamy had been scoured from the temple.

It hadn’t, of course. The peasants still looked upon the temple of Morr with horror and made the signs of other gods when they passed Frederick in the street. The temple of Bylorak had revived the old rites, disposing of the dead in the mire of the marsh so that none need pass beneath the gateway of Morr’s garden. Baron von Rittendahl’s wife, upon her passing, had been interred within the castle crypt without ceremony, the infamy of Frederick’s predecessor making it impossible for von Rittendahl to have a Morrite ritual - if he even wanted one.

Father Arisztid Olt had left an indelible legacy behind him… and more. When the Black Guard had come for the apostate and consigned him to the pyre, they had missed the most prized of the heretic’s possessions. Beneath the temple, in the oldest crypts, Olt had maintained a secret library – a collection of forbidden tomes and occult grimoires that eclipsed even the Luccini temple’s collection of arcane lore.

A dream had led Frederick to the hidden library. Morr was god of sleep as well as death and employed dreams to guide his servants. It was a sacrilege for a priest of Morr to ignore any dream. When Frederick’s dream showed him the old crypt and the secret door, he had taken it as a sign from his god. When he descended into the crypt, he found everything as it had been in his dream. When he followed the winding marble corridors, he followed in the steps of his dream-self. When he reached up to brush the beak of the obsidian raven carved into the face of a pillar, he could see the spectral hand of his dream-self. When the entire pillar sank into the floor, exposing a hidden doorway, Frederick knew what he would find.

It had been ten years since that discovery. It was the reason Frederick appreciated the spiritual doubts and fears of the peasants, but it also gave him an understanding of the folly to which such doubt and fear could lead. The gods could fail men, but men could also fail their gods. Evil times need not be a token of good gods, but a sending of evil ones to tempt men into the clutches of Old Night.

Frederick stirred from his recollections, staring with rising anger as he watched the flagellants lash themselves, as he noted the rapt fascination, the hopeful desperation of the spectators. Bylorak was an abomination, a relic of days when men crawled before inhuman masters. There was no salvation to be found by grovelling before the marsh god, only a path to depravity and destruction. Better to perish of the plague than live in such obscenity!

‘Stop this!’ Frederick cried out, stepping into the street. He brandished his staff, holding it before him, blocking the way. The wagon shuddered to a stop, the cyclopean visage of Bylorak glaring down at him. The flagellants came out from behind the wagon, their scourges slashing into their own backs, their voices raised in moans of outrage.

‘Defiler!’ one of the fanatics wailed, his lips flecked with foam. ‘You dare stand before his sight!’

‘Bylorak watches us all!’ shrieked another flagellant. ‘He sees us, for we are his children! He hears us, for we are his children! He helps us, for we are…’

Frederick advanced upon the shouting flagellant. ‘You are fools, bowing to a stone effigy and worshipping a monster! All men die, but while they live they must do so with decency, with honour.’

The flagellant twisted away, prostrating himself before the eidolon. ‘He helps us, for we are his children!’ Tears rolled down the fanatic’s face as he pressed his lips to the webbed feet of his god. Frederick moved to pull the man away, to restore some dignity to the naked wretch. But as soon as he reached out, his body recoiled in pain. A stone struck him in the cheek, slashing his pale skin. A second stone crashed into his side. The priest retreated as more stones came flying at him.

The barrage came not from the flagellants but from the peasants lining the street. The procession had stirred their hopes as nothing had in the past weeks and now they were aroused to violence by Frederick’s effort to save them from themselves.

‘Go back to your carrion, jackal!’ one woman cried. ‘Are you so eager to fill your garden? Is Olt’s pup trying to outdo his master?’

The jeers and the barrage of stones increased, driving Frederick into flight. Rocks pelted his body at every step, dung and offal from the gutter plastered his robes. By the time he reached the safety of a covered pigsty, the priest’s body felt like one big bruise. It took him a moment to appreciate that he owed his respite not to the security of his refuge, but to the shifting attention of the mob.

Distracted to violence against the priest, the peasants of Bylorhof were once again under the spell of the flagellants. The fanatic who had kissed the idol’s webbed foot was still crouched before the wagon, but now his naked body had turned black. From head to foot, the flagellant was covered in pitch. The priest’s eyes widened in horror as the kneeling man began to cry out to Bylorak, begging the marsh god to forgive the desecration caused by Frederick. A second flagellant approached the praying man, a flickering rushlight clenched in his fist.

The pitch-coated flagellant ignited like a torch, his prayer rising in a single scream. The stunned spectators maintained an awed silence as the surviving flagellants circled behind the wagon and pushed the grinning idol over the blazing husk of their late comrade. Even from his vantage point, Frederick could hear the crack of the man’s bones beneath the wheels.

The priest hobbled away from his ignominious refuge while the crowd was still fixated upon the macabre procession. He shook his head sadly. There was one thing the gods could not save man from. That was man’s own folly.

It was something Frederick van Hal knew only too well.

CHAPTER FOUR

Nuln
Kaldezeit, 1111

Despite the thick wool coat he wore, Walther Schill found himself shivering as he walked along Fox Street on his way to the Black Rose. He’d be thankful for a good warm fire and a nice pot of ale, anything to drive the cold from his bones.

Winter had descended upon Nuln with the fury of an invading army. Wissenland was infamous throughout the Empire for its unforgiving winters, but this one was announcing itself with all the savagery of the White Wolf. Frost coated every brick and stone, the streets were a slush of snow and ice, dagger-like icicles dangled from every eave and cornice. The wind swirled between the buildings like a slinking predator, withering the faces of the unprotected with blasts of frozen malignance.

How different from the sewers, Walther thought. It was easy to forget it was winter down there in the hot, humid dark. Perhaps it was that very fact which had caused the numbers of rats to swell. Perhaps it was the cold that had forced the vermin below, seeking shelter in the damp warmth of the dwarf-built tunnels. Whatever the cause, their numbers had increased to such a state that Walther had purchased three ratters and been compelled to take on an apprentice. Hugo Brecht wasn’t the most likely lad, but there was a natural boldness to him that made up for his lack of experience.

Walther stifled a sniffle as he strode past a chandler’s shop and passed a huddle of ragged beggars. He closed his ears to their piteous pleas for alms. It was something that was becoming easier to do with each passing day.

Nuln was almost like a city besieged. Rumours of plague in Stirland had proven out and all commerce with the province had been suspended. Count Artur had tried to make up the loss in trade by making new compacts with noblemen in Reikland and Talabecland, but these overtures had yet to bring food into the city. Wissenland and Solland, provinces given primarily to producing wine and wool, could offer little in the way of supplies no matter the price. It was joked grimly that when the burghers agreed to pay a lamb’s weight in gold, the Wissenlanders might agree to send mutton instead of wool.

The threat of famine was becoming real enough that the Assembly had increased the bounty on rats, offering three pennies a tail. The storehouses and granaries were too important to suffer the menace of vermin burrowing their way inside and despoiling the stores. For a population faced with the possibility of rampant sickness, starvation was a complication it could not afford to entertain.

The plague. Walther shuddered at the very thought. He’d been in the Black Rose one night when a sailor had described its effects. His ship had been docked in Mordheim when a Sylvanian merchant had been discovered with the disease. The man had looked scarcely human, his body blotched with ugly black sores that dripped filth with every breath he took. The city watch had quarantined the merchant’s house and the entire block around it. The sailor had been lucky to slip away before the cordon was closed.

The Black Plague they were calling it. Spread by evil vapours, some said, while others claimed the hex-magic of witches was responsible. Whatever the cause, one thing could be agreed upon. Wherever the disease established itself people died. Not one or two, but by the bushel. The pyres outside the walls of Wurtbad, it was said, could be seen days before a ship came within the harbour.

The first incidences of disease had appeared in Nuln over the last few weeks despite the embargo against Stirland. Entire households in Freiberg and Handelbezirk had been placed under quarantine and the priests of Morr had been commanded to report any plague deaths to the Assembly. Mobs of militiamen, often without official sanction, prowled the streets looking for anyone who might be hiding symptoms of the disease.

Commotion in the neighbouring street drew Walther’s attention away from his fears about the future. Peering down an alleyway into Tanner’s Lane, he could see many people running along the street, their passing marked by the glow of rushlights and oil lamps.

‘Something’s going on over there,’ Hugo remarked, a factual if not particularly insightful observation. He shifted the bag of dead rats slung over his shoulder and stared his mentor in the eye. ‘Should we go see what that’s about?’

Walther deliberated for a moment. Rumours and stories were easy enough to come by, but this was a chance to see for himself what was happening. A sensible man could only trust half of what he heard, and less than that if his source was a sailor. But what he saw with his own eyes - that was different. That he could trust.

‘Let’s go,’ the rat-catcher decided, checking to see that the cowhide pouch where he put the tails of his quarry was secure. People were becoming desperate enough to steal just about anything, and from just about anyone.

The two men hurried down the alley, the terriers trotting along beside them. Once they were in Tanner’s Lane, Walther could see that a large crowd had gathered about one of the street’s many tanneries. Even from a distance, the angry murmur of the crowd had an ugly and murderous quality about it.

‘Quick,’ Walther hissed under his breath, breaking into a run. The crowd was showing every sign of degenerating into a mob. Before that happened, he wanted to find out why. Racing ahead of Hugo, who had managed to trip over one of the terriers, Walther was in time to see a body being carried from the tannery by several men in the leather aprons of tanners. Like the pallbearers, the body lying upon an improvised litter of uncured horsehide was garbed in a long leather apron and carried the pungent stink of a tanner. The neck of the corpse was twisted and savaged, a great mess of torn skin and bloodied flesh.

‘It was them that did it,’ a voice from the mob snarled.

‘They cut old Erwin’s throat,’ growled another.

Other angry shouts rose from the mob. Some of the men attacked the little fence outside the tannery, pulling out wooden stakes to employ as makeshift cudgels. Others pried stones from the street, brandishing them in their fists as though wielding Count Artur’s Runefang.

‘They did it!’ a nameless voice cried out. ‘They murdered Erwin because he was well and they weren’t!’

‘Sick in flesh, sick in soul!’ cried out another, and the shout was taken up by others in the mob. Yelling and screaming, the crowd drifted away from the tannery, marching down the lane towards a little stone house with a red cross marked upon the door.

Walther knelt beside the now forgotten corpse, the dead man in whose name the mob had abandoned itself to violence. He folded the cold hands across the body’s breast, then leaned forwards and examined the neck.

‘They’re crazy!’ Hugo exclaimed, joining Walther by the body. ‘They’ll kill somebody!’ he added, gesturing with his pole at the amok mob.

‘Right as usual,’ Walther said, peering intently at the gashes in the tanner’s throat.

‘Aren’t we going to try to stop them?’ Hugo asked.

Walther gave his apprentice a piercing stare. ‘They won’t listen to reason. Not now. When faced by a mob like that, you have three choices. Become part of it, be a victim of it, or stay the hell out of the way.’

Hugo turned his head, watching as the mob threw torches onto the roof of the house. ‘Maybe… maybe they really did kill this man,’ he tried to convince himself. ‘Maybe what they’re doing is right.’

‘They’re murderers,’ Walther told him. He pointed his thumb at the tanner’s throat. ‘This wasn’t cut. It was bitten. Gnawed.’

Hugo stared in shock at the body, unable to believe what he’d heard. ‘Bitten? We’re in the middle of Nuln! What kind of animal would be able to do this in the middle of the city and sneak away?’

The rat-catcher didn’t answer him. He was staring instead at the three little black dogs. Each of the ratters was trembling, their fierce little hearts filled with a conflicting mix of eagerness and fear. Their ears were flat against their heads, their bodies tense, poised for the attack. Despite the heavy odours of the tannery, the dogs had caught the scent of the man’s killer. What was more, they recognised it.

Walther rose to his feet and whistled for the dogs. Despite the evidence of his eyes, he wasn’t ready to believe. It was insane to even consider such a thing. If he was right, then Erwin had been killed by a rat, his throat gnawed to bits by the chiselled fangs of an enormous rodent, a monster the size of a full grown sheep! He wasn’t ready to permit the existence of such a horror!

Yet, as he walked away from the tannery, as he turned his back on the little stone house engulfed in flames, the rat-catcher’s mind mulled over what such a nightmarish creature could mean to him.

There was a lot of money to be made catching normal rats. How much more might there be in hunting down a giant?

Middenheim
Kaldezeit, 1111

Middenheim was unique among the city-states of the Empire, rising high above the forests and meadows of Middenland. The entire city was built upon the flattened stump of rock the dwarfs called Grazhyakh Grungni - Grungni’s Tower. Men called it the Fauschlag and the Ulricsberg, believing that once it had been a great mountain sacred to the god Taal. God of the wild places, Taal governed nature with his wife Rhya and a congress made up of all the animals. Because of the creature’s craft and guile, Taal expelled the wolf from this congress, an act which incensed Ulric. To bring peace between the gods, Taal gave his sacred mountain to his brother. In a fit of rage, Ulric struck the top of the mountain with his axe, shattering it and leaving the flattened stump behind.

The dwarfs had helped the ancient Teutogen tribes to settle upon the flattened peak, providing the humans with a natural fortress unrivalled in all the Empire. Over the centuries, four great causeways were built, rising from the plains below to converge upon Middenheim from each direction. Mighty walls were erected about the perimeter of the stump, forming an impregnable barrier against any enemy. For over a thousand years, Middenheim had stood inviolate, a bastion for humanity in the wild northlands.

Prince Mandred toured the battlements of the Ulricsberg, feeling the brisk mountain wind whip through his fur cloak. He often walked the battlements, enjoying the view the walls afforded. He could look out across the sprawl of Middenland, picking out the keeps and villages scattered across his father’s forested realm. Early in the morning, the mist obscured everything, making it seem as though the city was adrift upon a sea of cloud. Then would come that magical moment when the rising sun burned away the fog and the realm suddenly stood revealed before his eyes.

Normally, Mandred found that moment the most enchanting vision in the world, but today the sight was blemished, corrupted by feelings of guilt and shame. As the fog burned away, he could see the squalid cluster of tents and shacks sprawled at the base of the Ulricsberg between the northern and eastern causeways. Ar-Ulric’s prediction that the plague would spread had been borne out. Thousands of refugees had abandoned their homes, fleeing before the approach of the dreaded Black Plague. From places as far apart as Solland and Nordland they came, hoping to escape the creeping contagion. Some came because of the perceived strength and invulnerability of the Ulricsberg, many more came because Middenheim was the holy city of Ulric and they hoped to gain their god’s protection by being close to his great temple and the Sacred Flame.

Hope had drawn these people here, but that hope had been betrayed by Graf Gunthar. Mandred felt a cold rage building inside him every time he thought about his father’s cruel decree. There was enough room atop the Ulricsberg to shelter the refugees. The springs deep within the mountain provided Middenheim with more than enough water. True, food would be a problem, but through careful rationing that obstacle could be overcome. Many of the noblemen could do with skipping a few meals.

It galled Mandred to think of his father as such a callous tyrant. Even from the height of the city walls, the squalor and misery of the shantytown was obvious. The refugees had been condemned to a slow and shameful death, a death of neglect and starvation. The toll once the snows came would be hideous.

Mandred’s jaw tightened. He had reached a decision. Turning upon his heel, he called for his bodyguard, a hulking bald-headed knight named Franz. The boisterous dienstmann was the prince’s constant companion; ostensibly his protector, he seldom had the stamina to deny Mandred’s impetuous decisions. Graf Gunthar had often reprimanded the knight, decrying him as the prince’s accomplice rather than his guardian.

‘Fetch our horses,’ Mandred told the knight. ‘I’m going for a ride.’

An uneasy expression came across Franz’s face. He could see the direction of the prince’s gaze when Mandred had been looking down from the battlements. ‘Surely you’re not going to Warrenburg, your grace.’

Anger flashed in the boy’s eyes. ‘What did you call the refugee camp?’ he demanded.

The hulking Franz looked away, his face darkening with embarrassment. ‘The soldiers call it “Warrenburg”, your grace. Because it’s all confused and disordered. Like a rabbit warren.’

‘These people have suffered enough,’ Mandred said. ‘I don’t think their dignity needs to be insulted any more than it already has.’

‘Yes, your grace,’ Franz hastily agreed, clicking his heels together in stiff, soldierly fashion. ‘But I must ask why your grace wishes to go down there. It isn’t the sort of thing a prince should be doing.’

‘Those people came here looking for help,’ Mandred told the knight. ‘Now they have been betrayed and abandoned. Someone has to let them know they haven’t been forgotten, that not everyone up here is blind to their suffering.’

‘His highness won’t be happy, your grace,’ Franz said.

‘You let me worry about the Graf,’ Mandred said. ‘Just have the horses ready.’

Mandred felt proud as he rode towards the East Gate, proud to defy the unjust position adopted by his father, proud to be standing up for the dignity of his fellow man. There was a time, he knew, when Graf Gunthar would have been proud too. He could still remember the day when his father had stripped a despotic raugraf of his lands and title for the crime of abusing his peasants. The Graf had explained his actions to his son, observing that no matter how high a man’s station, he had to remember that he was still a man and answerable to the gods for his actions. The most noble house could make itself baser than the lowest virgater by its own deeds.

How base, then, had the Graf made his own house by abandoning the refugees? How much greater was his crime than that of the cruel raugraf?

Mandred would set things right. As much as it was within his power, he would atone for his father’s cruelty. But first he had to see for himself first-hand the situation in the refugee camp. Perhaps if he reported to his father the way things stood, he could make the Graf appreciate that these were people, not some faceless complication to be dismissed with a wave of his hand.

Franz was visibly uneasy as they rode through the market district towards the massive gatehouse which opened onto the eastern causeway. The bald knight kept looking over his shoulder, staring off in the direction of the Middenplatz and the Graf’s palace. Mandred felt a twinge of sympathy for his bodyguard. Franz had always been a loyal retainer, devoted to Mandred but obedient to the Graf. Never before had the prince placed him in a position where he had to choose between his loyalties. It made him happy to know Franz had sided with him.

The prince saluted the guards stationed at the gate. ‘Raise the portcullis,’ he called down to them.

The soldiers looked nervously at one another. The sergeant in command of the gate advanced towards Mandred’s horse. ‘Your grace, his highness the Graf has ordered that no one is to leave the city.’

‘That order doesn’t apply to me,’ Mandred said, adopting his most imperious tone, a tone of such arrogance that it brooked no defiance. Every peasant was born to obey such a voice, to defer to the superiority of their noble lords. The sergeant was no exception. Turning back to his men, he started to give the order to raise the gate.

What stopped him was the sound of galloping horses. Through the cobbled streets of the market district, a squadron of cavalry came thundering towards the gate. The snowy wolf-pelts and crimson armour the knights wore marked them as White Wolves. At their head, his dark blue robe fluttering about him, rode Graf Gunthar himself.

The sergeant saluted as the cavalry drew rein before the gate, but he went ignored by the Graf. His face crimson with anger, the Graf walked his horse between Mandred and the gate. ‘What do you think you are doing?’ Graf Gunthar snarled.

For an instant, Mandred cowered before his father’s wrath. Then the thought that right was on his side put steel back into his spine. The prince stared defiantly into his father’s eyes. ‘I’m doing what you should have done,’ he said. ‘I’m going down there and helping the refugees.’

Mandred wasn’t sure what kind of response he expected, but it wasn’t the one he got. Graf Gunthar’s face went white, his eyes shined with horror. Before Mandred could react, his father’s hand smacked against his face with such violence the prince was nearly knocked from the saddle.

‘Get back to the palace,’ Graf Gunthar snarled, his voice trembling. Mandred stared in confusion when he heard that tone. It was the voice of a man on the edge of panic. He looked at his father, noticing his body shivering under the rich blue robe. He’d left the palace in such haste he hadn’t even paused to don a cloak against the winter chill.

Remembering why his father had left the palace, all sympathy drained out of the prince’s heart. ‘I won’t,’ he growled back. ‘Someone has to help those people.’

Colour rushed back into the Graf’s face. His body stiffened as anger swelled up inside him. ‘You’d like to bring them inside our walls?’ he challenged. ‘Bring all those sick people up here, pack them in with our own, shelter them in our own homes? And when they bring the plague into Midden-heim what will you do then? What will you tell our people when they lie sick and dying in the streets? What will you tell our people when they throw their dead over the Cliff of Sighs?’

More than the slap against his face, the Graf’s words made Mandred reel. The prince shook his head, stubbornly trying to defy the ghastly logic of his father’s words.

‘Our duty is to our own people,’ Graf Gunthar told him. ‘Not to strangers.’ His expression softened, he reached to grip his son’s shoulder. ‘Believe me, if we could help those people without endangering the city…’

Mandred shook off his father’s hand, his mind refusing to accept the grim reality the Graf had resigned himself to. He had done his father an injustice when he had called him a tyrant. He wasn’t cruel. He was scared.

But that still didn’t make him right.

Without saying a word, Mandred turned his horse and started back into the city. Franz followed behind him. The boy scowled at his bodyguard. There was only one person who could have told his father about what he was doing.

‘You don’t have to come with me,’ Mandred told the knight. ‘I’ll behave myself now. You can stay with my father.’

Bitterness and a feeling of betrayal poured venom into Mandred’s voice as he galloped ahead of Franz.

‘You’ve shown me where your loyalty lies.’

Skavenblight
Kaldezeit, 1111

The stink of stagnant water and swamp seepage created an atmosphere almost sufficient to blot out the rotten odour of the plague priest. Within the confines of the stone-walled vault, the smell of the ratman’s mouldering green robes and mangy fur was enough to turn the stomach of even another skaven.

Perched atop a heap of broken masonry, Warlord Krricht pressed a blood-soaked rag to his nose in an effort to stifle the reek. The dozen armoured stormvermin surrounding the warlord weren’t so fortunate, coughing and wheezing as their keen noses rebelled against the stink.

The plague priest cared nothing for the discomfort of the other skaven, his warty lip pulling away from his fangs in an expression of contempt. The simpering flea-lickers of Clan Mors were no true children of the Horned One. They were ignorant of the true face of the Horned Rat, unable or unwilling to embrace the pernicious glory of their god. They would learn, however. Like the rest of skavendom, they would join the Pestilent Brotherhood or they would perish.

Poxmaster Puskab Foulfur pulled back the tattered hood of his habit, exposing a face hideous with decay. The patchy remnants of once-white fur were darkening into a jaundiced yellow. The bare flesh of his cheeks was rotten and leprous, strings of muscle gleaming wetly where the skin had peeled away entirely. A pair of crooked antlers sprouted from his scalp, stained with filth and pitted with decay. Only the priest’s eyes seemed alive, shining from the shadows of deep sockets, blazing with a fanatic intensity.

Warlord Krricht shifted uneasily upon his perch. He had selected this meeting place because he could arrive early and claim the high ground. Skaven respected height - they were naturally subservient to those who could look down upon them. In any negotiation, it was the wise ratman who assumed a dominant position without a single word being uttered or a single drop of musk being vented into the air.

Unfortunately, Puskab wasn’t fazed by the warlord’s dominant position and as for the musk of supremacy, even if Krricht had secreted it there was no chance the diseased priest would smell it over his own filthy odours. The warlord looked anxiously at his coughing bodyguard, grinding his teeth at their display of weakness in the face of the plague priest. He had counted upon them to present a formidable sight, to cow Puskab with their menacing presence if all else failed. They were a dozen to the three plague monks which had accompanied Puskab, that should have been enough to intimidate the representative of Clan Pestilens. Instead, his stormvermin made a pathetic spectacle of themselves instead of bracing up and performing their duty!

Krricht took another whiff of his bloody rag and stared down at Puskab through watery eyes.

‘We have heard much-much about the great Poxmaster,’ Krricht said, his voice drifting between a squeak and a growl. ‘Man-things call new pestilence “Black Plague”. It will kill much-much. Leave man-things ready for conquest.’

Puskab leaned his bloated bulk against the knobbly wooden staff clutched in his leprous paw. He peered up at the warlord through malicious eyes. ‘Why Clan Mors seek-want squeak-speak with Vrask Bilebroth?’ he snarled.

Krricht lashed his tail in amusement. For all their show of religious fanaticism and zealous devotion, Clan Pestilens was just as grasping and selfish as any other skaven, their ranks rife with rivalry and petty ambition. Bilebroth was Puskab’s chief rival - the spies Krricht had hired couldn’t quite agree if Puskab had stolen the secret of the Black Plague from Bilebroth or if Bilebroth had tried to steal credit for the new plague from Puskab. For his purposes, it didn’t really matter. It was enough that the feud was there and waiting to be exploited.

‘Clan Mors wants a friend in Clan Pestilens,’ Krricht explained. ‘We didn’t want to presume upon so renowned a skaven as Poxmaster Puskab, so we approached a lesser priest instead.’ The warlord bobbed his head in an appeasing gesture. ‘Great Warlord Vrrmik says even the Council of Thirteen speaks of Puskab Foulfur.’

Was that a flicker of alarm that passed through the plague priest’s yellow eyes? Krricht twitched his whiskers in amusement. Even the feared Puskab knew fear at mere mention of the Lords of Decay. Grey Seer Skrittar’s actions at the council meeting had aggrandised Puskab at the expense of Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch. Hardly the sort of thing to assure Puskab’s position as Nurglitch’s favourite.

‘What does Mors-meat want-want from Pestilens?’ Puskab growled.

‘Alliance,’ the warlord said, gesturing with his bloody rag at his warriors and Puskab’s plague monks. ‘Mors offers warriors to help Pestilens. You will help us by using the Black Plague against the dwarf-things.’

Puskab’s decayed lips exposed his blackened fangs in a sneer. ‘Lord Vecteek tell-say use-use plague against man-things. Council vote to do what Vecteek say-tell!’

‘Vecteek claim-want too much power!’ Krricht hissed. ‘Takes name-title of Grey Lord. He thinks he is better than council. Thinks Rictus-rats should rule all Under-Empire!’

A wracking cough shook Puskab’s bloated frame. It took Krricht some time to realise the plague priest was laughing at him. His fur bristled as he realised the filthy monk was mocking him.

‘Clan Rictus powerful. Mighty. Best warriors. Many black-furs.’ Puskab’s bulk quivered with renewed amusement. ‘Clan Mors not so powerful. Not so many black-furs.’

‘You could change that,’ Krricht hurriedly squeaked. He waved his claw through the air. ‘Change-fix plague so that it will sick-kill Rictus-rats. Break Vecteek! Vrrmik take much-great power without Vecteek. Share-gift some-much to Clan Pestilens.’

Puskab’s yellow eyes narrowed with suspicion. Krricht licked his fangs, waiting to see how the plague priest would react to such treasonous words. Clan Pestilens might be disinterested in helping Mors overwhelm the dwarfs, but no skaven could ignore the promise of a better position on the council.

‘Vecteek is friend-ally of Pestilens,’ Puskab snarled. The fat monk backed away from Krricht’s perch, his black teeth still threatening the warlord. ‘Lord Nurglitch plan-plot much-much to sick-kill man-things. Rictus have many-strong warriors to conquer-take surface.’ A hacking laugh oozed up from Puskab’s belly. ‘Mors not so many-strong.’

The plague priest let his last barb echo through the vault as he and his entourage made their retreat. Krricht glared after them, his fangs grinding together. It was tempting to leap down and cut the diseased vermin to ribbons, but too many within Clan Pestilens knew about the meeting and where to place blame should the Poxmaster fail to return.

Which was why Krricht had already made other plans. The crux of his pact with Vrask was the removal of Puskab. That was the real purpose of this meeting - to determine if Puskab might prove a better ally than Vrask. Now that the plague priest had made his mind known, Krricht would simply fall back on the original plan and fulfil his agreement with Vrask.

The warlord growled at two of his stormvermin. Chittering maliciously, the armoured warriors scurried away, darting down one of the narrow side-tunnels connecting to the vault. Krricht watched them go, lashing his tail in vicious anticipation.

Poxmaster Puskab would never sniff the Pestilent Monastery again.

Puskab Foulfur stalked along the dank, mucky tunnel, his splintered staff tapping against the bare earthen walls. The doleful chant of the monks accompanying him shivered through the stygian darkness, singing the praises of disease and decay. The rustle of rats creeping through the refuse littering the corridor was the only other sound.

The plague priest’s mind turned over the treacherous proposal made by Warlord Krricht. The hatred and rivalry between Clan Mors and Clan Rictus was well known. Several times the warlord clans had clashed in open conflict, great armies of stormvermin making war in the tunnels and burrows of the Under-Empire. But there were times when the two clans had cooperated as well, conspiring together to crush some third clan between their combined strength. There was a great danger in trusting too much in the antagonism between them.

Krricht had been much too forthcoming about the supposed scheme to unseat Vecteek. True, he had made it sound like nothing but the slip of an excited tongue, but Puskab wasn’t believing the subterfuge. The warlord’s body posture had been too restrained, too controlled to make his careless excitement believable. The ‘slip’ had been deliberate. The question was, what had Krricht hoped to gain by it?

Puskab ran a claw across his chin as a new thought occurred to him. The meeting had been arranged between Krricht and Vrask, but what if they had intended Puskab’s acolytes should intercept the messenger? What if they had planned on Puskab, not Vrask, leaving the Pestilent Monastery?

Vrask was ambitious and impatient, unwilling to wait for the Horned One to acknowledge his worthiness. The scheming efforts of Seerlord Skrittar to turn the Arch-Plaguelord against Puskab might have inspired Vrask to begin his own intrigues. With Puskab out of the way, Vrask would become Poxmaster and chief architect of the Black Plague’s further development.

The plague priest’s ears curled up against his skull. From the way Krricht had talked, it seemed Mors was aware of what shape the further development of the Black Plague would take. Pestilens had created a plague that would target humans. The next step would be to refine its properties so that it would strike down other races as well. Dwarfs, goblins, beastkin… and naturally any skaven that refused to accept the true aspect of the Horned Rat. Spies might have learned of the plague monks’ intentions, but there were few spies who could survive the noxious atmosphere of the Pestilent Monastery for long.

No, there was another possibility. Vrask might be trying to cultivate allies outside Clan Pestilens and the Pestilent Brotherhood. It was just possible he had disclosed plans for a wider-reaching plague to Krricht.

Which again left the question of why Vrask would want Puskab to meet with Krricht.

The plague priest whipped around, his staff clenched in his paws, his bloated body heaving as his frightened heart hammered in his chest. His eyes darted about the dank tunnel, gazing suspiciously at every darkened niche and shadowy hole. He snarled a warning to his entourage, stilling their cough-squeak chant.

There was a very good reason why Vrask would want Puskab to make the journey from the Pestilent Monastery. Uncertain if Puskab still enjoyed the favour of Nurglitch, Vrask needed a partner from outside to eliminate his rival.

Puskab now viewed the tunnel around him through the lens of paranoia. This far below the streets of Skavenblight, the corridor should be alive with skaven hurrying about their business. In winter, cold descended upon the surface, making the swampy lanes slick with frost and ice. But below, warmed by the fecund heat of thousands of ratmen, the tunnels retained an almost stifling heat. There should be hundreds of skaven scurrying through the corridor, squeaking and shoving as they hurried between warrens. Even allowing for the instinctive fear and abhorrence most ratmen displayed towards Clan Pestilens, there should have been at least some traffic present.

The plague priest raised his nose, sniffing for any trace of what had caused the other skaven to shun the tunnel. His mind raced with thoughts of warlock-engineers rigging the corridor to collapse or packmasters unleashing rabid wolf-rats into the passageway. Whatever was set to happen, news of it had spread among the skaven of this district and caused them to avoid the tunnel.

Puskab forced a slobbering orison from his throat, drawing upon the profane power of the Horned One. The air about his body began to grow murky, surrounding him in an aura of green smog. The rats creeping along the corridor squealed in fright as the scent of Puskab’s magic reached them, fleeing as quickly as they could from the plague priest’s presence.

‘Swords,’ Puskab hissed at the monks with him. The word had scarcely left his mouth before the tunnel was filled with fierce battle cries. From a dozen hidden holes and concealed pits, a mob of snarling skaven spilled into the dingy worm-light of the passage. They were ragged, hideous creatures, with scraggly fur and pallid skin. Scraps of filthy cloth and tatters of rusty mail clung to their scrawny frames, while stone-axes and bone knives were clenched in their paws.

The attackers had taken pains to smear themselves in dung to mask their scent, but the plague monks did not need to smell their foes to recognise them. Each of the attackers was malformed, huge flappy ears drooping from their skulls and enormous black eyes bulging from their faces. There was no mistaking the cave-rats of Clan Skrittlespike. Their kind dwelled in the warp-mines far beneath Skavenblight, eking out a troglodyte existence far from sun and surface. It was rare for them to ever venture higher than the under-warrens, and even then they did so only to scavenge supplies or steal pups from the brood-mothers of more prosperous clans.

Puskab snarled as the cave-rats rushed towards him. It seemed Vrask wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to be blamed for the Poxmaster’s murder. Krricht must have taken pains to engage the swords of Skrittlespike’s warriors. Already despised and outcast, the cave-rats didn’t have anything left to lose by murdering such a renowned skaven.

There was only one problem with Krricht’s plan. He had underestimated the strength of the Poxmaster.

Puskab stretched forth his claw, pointing his rotten fingers at the foremost of the charging ratmen. A sickly glow gathered about his fingers, then shot forth to pierce the cave-rat in breast and belly. The attacker crumpled, his fur turning pale and leprous where Puskab’s spell had struck. The stricken ratman cried out in terror, but his shriek was cut short as the skaven behind him trampled his body underfoot.

The spell had accounted for one cave-rat, but there were a dozen more to take his place. Fear of Puskab’s magic was not enough to overwhelm fear of their own clanlord. The plague priest’s spells might strike them down one by one, but the clanlord’s wrath would claim them all. In their craven hearts, each of the cave-rats was secure in the belief that it would be a comrade and not himself who would fall prey to the Poxmaster’s magic.

In focusing upon Puskab, the ratmen made a critical mistake. The spell had killed only one of their number, but it had done something more. It was a physical manifestation of the power of the Horned Rat, a reminder that the path of Clan Pestilens was the true faith. The noses of the plague monks twitched as the smell of divine disease erupted from Puskab’s fingers. Their ears filled with the anguished howl of the dying cave-rat, their eyes fixated upon the fast-spreading leprosy.

Before the cave-rats could reach him, Puskab’s entourage was leaping into their path. Foam flecked the muzzles of the enraged plague monks as they lashed out against the goggle-eyed skaven. With the maniacal zeal of fanatics, the green-robed ratmen brought their rusty blades crunching through fur and flesh. The anguished whines of the wounded rose in a shrill cacophony, echoing through the empty tunnel.

The enormous ears of the cave-rats were too keen to endure their own shrieks. Their faces twisted in expressions of agony, their paws clapping against their heads in an effort to blot out the sound. Though they outnumbered the plague monks four to one, the cave-rats were unable to withstand the frenzied resistance of the robed skaven. Their attack faltered and they began to retreat down the tunnel, leaving their dead and dying strewn across the floor.

Puskab watched the havoc with narrowed eyes. It was all too easy. Much too easy. There was a reason why Clan Skrittlespike was despised and outcast. It was because they were weak. No matter how desperate, no murder ring would depend upon them to finish…

The plague priest whirled about just as a brown-furred ratman brought his sword chopping towards his neck. Puskab’s staff intercepted the blow, the serrated blade of his adversary digging deep into the wood. His attacker snarled at him from beneath the brim of a steel helmet, his beady red eyes narrowed with hate. The powerfully built sword-rat brought one of his feet slashing upwards, kicking at the Poxmaster with his claws.

Puskab chuckled wickedly as the ratman’s claws raked harmlessly against the mail hauberk he wore under his green robes. Like most skaven, the sword-rat hadn’t given enough thought to what might be hidden under a plague priest’s robes. His effort to disembowel Puskab thwarted, the skaven thrashed about, trying to free his sword from the plague priest’s staff.

He discovered the deed to be more difficult than it should have been. The ratman strove with all his might to wrench the sword free, but instead there was only a grinding sound. Flakes of brittle red rust trickled from the edge of his blade. Horror filled the skaven’s eyes as understanding began to assert itself. He glanced down at his foot, gazing in disgust as the fur began to peel away, as the exposed flesh began to ripple with decay.

Puskab chittered with loathsome laughter as his would-be killer tried to flee. The skaven was experiencing first-hand the protective magic that had been summoned by the Poxmaster’s orison. The green smog surrounding Puskab was a concentration of the Horned One’s putrid majesty. Harmless to true believers, but corrosive and deadly to all infidel-meat.

The sword-rat whined in terror, abandoning his corroded blade and moving to disengage from Puskab. Before he could flee, the plague priest’s staff whipped around, cracking the skaven across the jaw. The rotten bone, weakened by Puskab’s magic, shattered like an eggshell. The stricken ratman wilted to the floor in a quivering heap as he choked on his own blood.

The blade of a halberd came chopping down at Puskab, snapping the tip of one of his antlers and missing the bloated priest’s head by a matter of inches. Puskab leapt back, moving with a frantic ease that belied his corpulent bulk. He found himself staring up at a snarling ratman looking down at him from a hole in the ceiling. No scrawny cave-rat from Clan Skrittlespike, but another brawny brown-furred warrior. It seemed Clan Mors had employed the cave-rats as a distraction and scapegoat, leaving the actual murder to their own stormvermin.

Puskab decided to show the vermin-meat the price of such arrogance. As the halberdier dropped down from his hole, the plague priest’s voice croaked out a glottal incantation. Green fire flared from his eyes, the air filled with the repugnant sound of buzzing flies. The armoured storm-vermin struck out with his halberd once more, trusting that the long reach of his weapon would keep him safely away from Puskab’s corrosive aura. He did not reckon upon the priest’s other spells.

From the very walls of the tunnel, writhing streams of maggots emerged. In the twitch of a whisker, their wormy bodies moulted, transforming into a legion of hairy flies. Clouds of the vile insects took wing, swarming about the stormvermin, ignoring his shrieks of pain as they bit into his flesh. The halberd clattered to the floor as the ratman tried to flee, his body now carpeted with gnawing flies. Blinded by the swarm, he crashed into the wall, toppling to the floor in a screaming heap. If there were other sword-rats lurking above the ceiling, the agonies of the halberdier made them reconsider challenging the plague priest’s sorcery.

Puskab Foulfur watched his enemies with vindictive amusement. So would die all his enemies - slowly and in great pain. The suffering of these would be but a prelude to what would come.

CHAPTER FIVE

Altdorf
Kaldezeit, 1111

The scene outside the Kaiseraugen was one of white tranquillity. The roofs of Altdorf were powdered with snow, the icy banks of the river shining like a field of diamonds in the early-morning sun. Tiny figures moved about upon the frozen docks, unloading cargo from the few ships still travelling upon the Reik. So small and frantic, they seemed like busy little ants.

Emperor Boris dismissed the men from his thoughts. Shifting his shoulders, snuggling his body deeper into the nest of warm furs draped about his throne, he restored his attention to the men seated around the table. Lord Ratimir was just finishing a particularly long-winded and tedious summation of the state of the Empire.

‘Half of the provinces have had a poor harvest this year, either through war or pestilence,’ Ratimir concluded. ‘Disease has run rampant among the peasants in six provinces, spreading faster than it could be contained. Many fiefs have been left without enough men to gather the harvest, forcing them to leave crops to rot in the fields. Worse, this misfortune has attracted vermin in unprecedented numbers… Mice and rats which gorge themselves in the abandoned fields and then turn their appetites upon such food stores as have been collected.’

Boris waved a jewelled hand, motioning his minister of finance to silence. ‘Exaggerations,’ he sneered. ‘A petty effort to cheat the Imperial Treasury. I want excise men sent into each province - outsiders, not natives - to evaluate the situation in each district.’ A cunning smile spread over the Emperor’s face. ‘Have taxmen from Nordland sent to evaluate Middenland, ones from Sylvania to inspect Stirland.’ He chuckled when he saw his smile infect Lord Ratimir’s lean features. He didn’t need to tell the minister to have provinces that already shared bad blood between them to police the accounts of the other. It would serve a twofold purpose. First it would ensure that each province would have its yields exaggerated by the inspectors dispatched by the enemy court. Whether such yields existed or not, the provinces would be taxed for them and the blame for this excess burden would fall upon the rival province, not the Emperor. Second, if a famine did develop, the Emperor could point to his tax records to show that ample supplies had been harvested and shift the responsibility over to greedy local lords engaged in speculation and hoarding.

‘There is another problem, your Imperial Majesty.’ Adolf Kreyssig rose from his seat, removing a scroll from a wooden tube as he approached the Imperial throne. ‘My Kaiserjaeger have discovered not less than six incidents of plague in the last two days. We have been able to remove the infected peasants to Mundsen Keep without even the Schueters taking undue notice. It is not uncommon for us to remove peasants for interrogation.’

‘Then there is no problem,’ Emperor Boris said.

Adolf Kreyssig shook his head and opened the scroll, unveiling a map of the city. ‘I’m afraid there is, your Imperial Majesty. The cases of plague we have found were in the vicinity of the south docks, the Niederhafen district; all of the victims were sailors of one stripe or another. That part of the city is cramped and overcrowded. Whatever fell influence brought the disease here, we can only assume that others have been exposed. It is only a matter of time before more incidents of plague begin popping up.’

‘What are you suggesting?’ Lord Ratimir asked. ‘That we burn down the Niederhafen district? Do you have any idea how much commerce enters the city from those docks?’

‘The plague may be entering the city from those docks,’ Kreyssig countered. ‘I have warned you that ships from Stirland and Talabecland should be turned away.’

‘Your point is noted, commander,’ Emperor Boris declared. The scheming gleam was back in his crafty eyes. A bejewelled hand drummed against the arm of his throne as his mind turned over the possibilities that now occurred to him.

‘I do not think you understand the potential here, Kreyssig,’ the Emperor said at last. He leaned forwards in his seat, pointing a finger heavy with rings at the commander of the Kaiserjaeger. ‘You didn’t find those people in the Niederhafen. They turned up near the Altgarten. The plague isn’t entering Altdorf from the docks, Engel’s rabble have brought it with them.’

Kreyssig’s head dipped in a grim nod. ‘I will have my men attend the peasants we have detained. It will look as though they died of the plague. We will leave the bodies close to Breadburg, conspicuous enough that someone will find them sooner rather than later. A bit of public fear will lend justification to future activities.’ Like Grand Master von Schomberg, Kreyssig was well aware that the Emperor was only biding his time before unleashing his knights against the Marchers.

‘Do not allow the panic to go too far,’ Emperor Boris cautioned. ‘I must be seen to be boldly leading the way, not reacting to the demands of peasants and petty lordlings. A day or so, then we ride against Engel’s rebels.’

‘I will have the Kaiserjaeger ready,’ Kreyssig declared, snapping his heels as he saluted the Emperor.

‘Notify the Reiksknecht as well,’ the Emperor ordered. ‘Get the Schuetzenverein too, if you think they will be needed.’ Boris waved aside the objection forming on the commander’s lips. ‘I don’t want Engel’s protest merely broken. I want an atrocity. I want a massacre. I want the Altgarten painted in blood. I want such a slaughter that it will make the Imperial Council scream in outrage.’ The Emperor chuckled as he settled back against the cushions of his chair. ‘It will be regrettable, but with more troops, such a massacre could have been avoided. Enough soldiers could have controlled the situation without bloodshed. The carnage could have been avoided.’

‘You will ask that Altdorf be granted a dispensation?’ Kreyssig asked.

The Emperor’s laughter swelled to a malignant thunder. ‘After their cries of outrage over the massacre, none of those crowned fools will dare deny my request!’

‘What about the plague, Your Imperial Majesty?’ Ratimir wondered.

All warmth left the Emperor’s eyes. ‘When Commander Kreyssig wipes out Engel’s rabble, there will be no more plague.

‘Is that understood?’

It was late in the evening before Adolf Kreyssig returned to his home, a plaster-walled townhouse in the wealthy Obereik district. Directing a stiff salute to the squad of black-liveried Kaiserjaeger standing guard outside the building, the officer mounted the narrow flight of stone steps and entered his home.

Kreyssig’s mind was awhirl with the conspiracy he’d become involved in. It was a measure of the confidence the Emperor placed in him that the execution of his plan had been entrusted to the commander of the Kaiserjaeger. He took a cruel pleasure from that display of trust. While barons and counts waved their airs and titles in his face, the Emperor himself recognised the capabilities of a mere peasant, choosing Kreyssig, not some pompous duke, to safeguard the city. He had been chosen over the highborn von Schomberg to lead the attack against Breadburg.

He had worked many years to build the Kaiserjaeger up into the force it had become, but now all of his toil was beginning to pay off. The only obstacle to his ambition was his status as a commoner, but Kreyssig had plans to remove that obstruction from his path. Baron Thornig of Middenland was the key to increasing his station. Kreyssig’s spies had uncovered certain indiscretions from the baron’s days in Nuln, indiscretions that would, at the very least, heap infamy upon the Thornig name. Fortunately for the baron, he had a very pretty daughter of marriageable age, Princess Erna. The Middenlander was proving to be stubborn, but eventually he would come to see that the only way he would safeguard his position would be to give Kreyssig his daughter’s hand.

The commander smiled as he imagined himself elevated to the ranks of the nobility. Absently, he noted his valet awaiting him in the vestibule leading off the entryway. The short, fat functionary was visibly agitated, his face flushed with excitement. Kreyssig thought at first that Baron Thornig had finally come around, but there was too much anxiety tugging at the valet’s thick features for whatever was bothering him to be good news.

‘What is it, Fuerst?’ Kreyssig demanded.

‘Commander, I have been waiting for you for hours,’ the valet stammered. He raised nervous eyes to the ceiling, seeming to stare through the timber planks to the floor above. ‘The bell in your sitting room, the one you told me to always listen for, the one you said to wake you no matter the hour should it ring…’

‘Yes, Fuerst,’ Kreyssig growled, losing patience with the peasant.

Fuerst folded his hands across his belly, and stared apologetically at his master. ‘The bell started ringing four hours ago.’ He cringed when he saw the sudden fury that leapt into the commander’s eyes. ‘I sent runners to find you, but nobody knew where you had gone.’ The valet found himself speaking to Kreyssig’s back as his master rushed down the hallway.

‘Someone said they thought you had possibly gone to Mundsen Keep,’ Fuerst explained as he followed after Kreyssig. His master jogged through the hall, crossing through a lavishly appointed dining room and into a stone-walled kitchen.

‘Mundsen Keep is clear across the city,’ the valet said, still talking to his master’s back. ‘And by the time the messenger got there, you had already…’ Fuerst blinked as Kreyssig opened the door to the root cellar, stepped inside and slammed the portal in his face. He could hear the commander lock the door behind him, then his heavy boots tromped down the stairway into the cellar.

Fuerst frowned, mystified by his master’s actions. Timidly, he pressed his ear against the door. After a moment, he thought he could hear voices. One belonged to his master, but the other was a shrill hiss. Although he couldn’t make out any words, the tone of that hissing voice sent the valet’s flesh crawling.

It was some minutes before the voices fell silent and he heard Kreyssig’s boots tramping back up the stairs. Fuerst hurriedly stepped away from the door, snapping to attention as his master emerged from the cellar.

‘Fetch some runners,’ Kreyssig told Fuerst. ‘Ones that know their job better than the buffoons you dispatched earlier. I want to send new orders to the captains of the Kaiserjaeger.’

‘Is something wrong, commander?’ Fuerst asked, unable to restrain his curiosity.

Kreyssig nodded his head. ‘The Emperor has ordered an attack against the Altgarten rebels,’ he said. ‘It appears there are traitors within the Reiksknecht who intend to stand with the rebels.’

Fuerst’s eyes went wide with shock, his mouth gasping in disbelief. ‘What… what will you do?’

There was a cold glint in Adolf Kreyssig’s eyes.

‘Kill them all,’ he said.

Bylorhof
Kaldezeit, 1111

Frederick van Hal paused at the threshold of his brother’s house. His eyes focused a grim gaze upon the red cross daubed across the door. Nearly every house in the street had similar markings as the plague rampaged through Bylorhof, but the priest had clung to the hope that the Black Plague would spare his family. Now that hope was gone.

The priest stretched forth his pale hand and rapped against the marked door. He waited a moment, listening to the snow settle upon the thatch roofs, watching rats creep along the gutters, smelling the charnel stink of sickness rising from the town. He shivered beneath his black robe, feeling the warmth draining out of him. Annoyance flickered across his dour features and he knocked again.

The door slowly opened. Rutger van Hal stood in the entryway, his hair rumpled, deep circles under his eyes. Always a robust, virile man, Rutger had become almost as pale as his priestly brother. He mumbled an apology to Frederick, then started to close the door. The priest jabbed his staff against the portal, holding it in place.

‘Do not think you can keep me out,’ Frederick snarled. He slapped the palm of his hand against the cross. ‘Not because of that.’

Hardness flared into Rutger’s tired eyes. ‘One of us has to live,’ he growled. The priest pushed his way past the merchant, shaking the snow from his shoulders as he stepped inside the house.

‘Yes,’ Frederick agreed. ‘One of us has to live.’ His sharp eyes fixed upon Rutger. ‘You are the one.’ He raised his hand to stifle the protest he saw forming on his brother’s lips. ‘My place is here, Rudi. I have read much. I know more than just how to put people in the ground and consign their spirits to Morr’s keeping. Whatever help I can give you, it is yours. Do not worry about me. Every day I am exposed to the plague. If I was fated to die by the Black Plague, it would have taken me by now.’ The last statement was made with a twinge of anguish. The plague had wreaked havoc through Bylorhof’s temple of Morr. All of the under-priests and two of the templars had fallen victim to the plague. The other survivors had cast off their robes and fled the town, leaving Frederick as the sole custodian of the temple.

‘If it was me…’ Rutger began, then stopped himself before he could say more. ‘I’m sorry, Frederick, but Aysha doesn’t want you here.’ He started to pull the open door wider. The priest’s staff cracked against the portal, slamming it closed.

‘Is she sick?’ Frederick demanded. There was a harshness in his voice that hadn’t been there for years, a harshness that surprised even himself. Aysha had made her choice long ago. That question was settled. He had no right to worry over the woman who was now his sister-in-law.

‘No,’ Rutger answered, his voice a hollow gasp, his eyes shining with dread. ‘It’s Johan.’

Frederick’s heart went cold when he heard the name of his nephew spoken in such a tone. However confused his feelings towards Aysha, he knew he had the right to love his nephew. ‘Where is he?’ the priest asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. The moment Rutger raised his eyes and stared at the ceiling, Frederick was marching towards the stairs.

‘You can’t go up there!’ Rutger yelled, hurrying after the priest. ‘Aysha doesn’t want you…’

Frederick rounded on his brother, transfixing him with an icy stare. ‘She made that clear in Marienburg,’ he said. ‘This isn’t about her, or me. This is about Johan and saving his life.’ The priest stormed through the little parlour, brushing past the porcelain and ivory the van Hals had preserved from their Westerland home. He started to mount the steps leading to the upper floor, but stopped when he found someone descending the stairs.

It was a ghoulish figure that met Frederick’s uplifted gaze, a plump-bodied man with scrawny limbs, his mismatched frame draped in a wax-coated cloak. The man’s face was hidden behind a wooden mask, its face pulled forwards to form a bird-like beak. Narrow green eyes squinted from behind the mask’s glass lenses.

The priest had never met this grotesque creature, but he knew him just the same. After their ineffectual courting of heathen gods had failed, the people of Bylorhof had turned to a new foolishness to save themselves from the plague. They had sent to Wurtbad for a plague doktor, one of the so-called physicians who specialised in treating the Black Plague’s victims and combating the spread of the disease. In response to their frantic call, Dr. Bruno Havemann had descended upon the town like a human vulture.

‘We are all interested in saving the boy’s life,’ Havemann’s muffled voice declared. ‘But the Black Plague needs more than prayers to defeat it.’ The plague doktor gestured with the copper-headed rod he held in his gloved hand, indicating the priest’s staff. ‘In Wurtbad and Altdorf, even the priestesses of Shallya have been unequal to the task. I fear that if the Goddess of Mercy cannot help, then what aid can we expect from the Lord of Death?’ Havemann shook his head, the beak of the mask bobbing up and down as he did so, sending the aroma of vinegar and cloves wafting about the stairway. He shifted his gaze to Rutger. ‘No, we must look to science to defend ourselves from this scourge. You did right, Herr van Hal, when you summoned me. The boy is very sick, but with proper care, it is my conviction that he may be saved.’

Rutger’s tired eyes lit up when he heard Havemann’s words. He rushed past Frederick, running to embrace the physician who had restored hope for his son. The doktor cringed from the merchant’s outstretched arms, fending him off with the point of his rod. Recalling the plague doktor’s abhorrence of physical contact, an abashed Rutger kept his distance.

‘What must we do?’ he asked in a sheepish voice.

The sight of his brother meekly deferring to Havemann brought Frederick’s blood to a boil. Angrily he slammed the butt of his staff against the steps. ‘Rudi! You’re not going to listen to this charlatan!’

The crow-faced mask shifted its stare back onto the priest. ‘Science can save the boy,’ Havemann stated. ‘Can you say the same of your god?’ The plague doktor returned his attention to Rutger. ‘I will need to prepare certain elixirs which must be given to rebalance the humours in Johan’s body. The plague is caused by black spiders, their poison is what brings the disease. It will be necessary to bleed the boy and drain the poison from his veins.’

The plague doktor paused, his shoulders sagging as a deep sigh left his body. ‘All of this will be time-consuming and expensive,’ Havemann apologised.

Rutger’s hand fell to the money pouch on his belt. The merchant didn’t count the coins he withdrew, but simply held them out to the physician. Frederick noted with bitter amusement that Havemann wasn’t so reluctant to touch his brother’s hand now that there was money in it.

‘The boy is resting now,’ Havemann said, his gloved hand closing about Rutger’s silver. The plague doktor rolled his wrist in a subtle effort to gauge how much he had been given. ‘Frau van Hal is with him. He should be given some broth when he wakes, but absolutely no meat. It might attract more spiders.’

Rutger climbed past Havemann, running through the upper hall to his son’s room, forgetting entirely the two men he left behind. Frederick couldn’t see the triumphant smile on Havemann’s face as the plague doktor continued his descent, but he knew it was there just the same. As he neared the bottom of the stairs, Havemann stared into Frederick’s face, waiting for the priest to step aside.

‘Take your money and forsake this imposture,’ Frederick warned.

‘You sound like all priests,’ Havemann sneered. ‘It doesn’t matter what god you serve, all of you resent progress and science. You allow faith to stand in the way of reason.’

‘Faith can move mountains,’ Frederick countered. The plague doktor’s eyes narrowed with anger. Using his rod, he shoved the priest out of his way.

‘How is faith at curing plague?’ Havemann asked as he stalked from the home.

Frederick turned to watch the doktor’s retreat. ‘Harm my family,’ he said, his voice a hollow whisper, ‘and you will find out what a man’s faith can do.’

Skavenblight
Kaldezeit, 1111

Megalithic in its proportions, the Abattoir was a relic of the dim past. Constructed from gigantic columns of limestone, the structure existed as a series of towering arcades piled one atop the other, circling around a central arena. In the time before the Thirteenth Hour, the structure had been at the heart of the human civilisation which once ruled over this land and had built the great city from whose ruins the decayed splendour of Skavenblight had arisen. The amphitheatre had been designed to seat tens of thousands of spectators, a testament to the power and expanse of its human builders.

What games and spectacles, what pageants and plays had once drawn crowds to the arena the lords of Skavenblight neither knew nor cared. Even the name of the structure had been lost in the dust of time. Its new masters had given it a new title, one that better reflected its new purpose. It was the Abattoir.

An arena that could seat sixty thousand humans was inconsequential to the masters of Skavenblight. Atop the stone arcades they had ordered new tiers to be constructed, rising ever higher above the limestone, each succeeding layer more rickety and ramshackle than the last. In their religious zeal, the ratlords demanded a further seven layers to be built above the arena, bringing the total to the sacred thirteen. The expansion made it possible to cram half a million squealing, squeaking skaven into the galleries. A deranged mass of braces and supports struggled to restrain the chaotic jumble of carpentry - rarely succeeding for long. With terrifying regularity portions of the wooden scaffolds would collapse, spilling hundreds of ratmen to their deaths. Twice in its history, the entire Abattoir had rumbled and groaned as all of the wooden tiers came crashing down.

Such catastrophes were taken as a matter of course by the skaven. Any disaster which affected someone else was of little concern to the individual ratman. The service provided by the Abattoir was too important to the denizens of Skavenblight to do without. For the weak and the downtrodden, the Abattoir offered an escape from the drudgery of their lives. For the more successful ratmen there was gambling and the thousand other vices that nestled close to the arena. For the Lords of Decay there was security, a novelty to distract the teeming hordes of Skavenblight and make them forget their hungry bellies and flea-infested fur.

Puskab Foulfur rested upon one of the stone seats lining the third ring of arcades. The limestone was worn smooth from generations of skaven crawling over it and the plague priest had to fight against the sensation that he would simply slide off and go careening down into the lower levels. He knew it was only a trick of the mind, that he was in no real danger. The dangerous seats were those below, close to the arena floor, well within the grasp of any beast or slave that managed to escape.

The plague priest lifted his grotesque face and scowled as a little body went hurtling earthwards from one of the upper tiers. He cringed as he waited to hear the groan of timbers and the snapping of ropes, but no such sound drifted down to him. The superstructure wasn’t collapsing - it was simply that one of the ratmen swarming about the cheap seats had taken a misstep and fallen. Or had been pushed, which was actually more likely. A network of posts and crossbeams rose above the stone arcades especially to intercept such falling bodies lest some prominent skaven be crushed by one of the hurtling wretches. The posts, however, didn’t always block a ratkin’s fall. Puskab breathed a bit better when he heard the crunch of the ratman’s body a few hundred yards to his left.

After escaping from Clan Mors’s killers and the intrigues of Vrask Bilebroth, it would be ignominious to be killed in a stupid accident. Or was that just what it would appear to be? Puskab squinted up at the wooden scaffolds, trying to gauge whether it would be possible to aim a body launched from such height with any degree of accuracy.

Puskab gnashed his fangs together. He was being paranoid. Vrask was gone, fleeing Skavenblight with his tail between his legs. Puskab had escaped the trap Vrask had laid for him. Knowing how Nurglitch would react to this attempt upon his favourite disciple, Vrask had fled before any action could be taken against him.

Still, Puskab was unwilling to feel too secure. Vrask possessed friends in high places, friends who had warned him before Puskab’s acolytes could come looking for him. And the traitor had allies outside Clan Pestilens. There was no saying how deep Vrask’s ties with Clan Mors ran, or how much he had promised them. Depending on what Krricht might hope to gain, the zeal with which his sword-rats might pursue Puskab could be considerable.

For this reason, Puskab had come to the Abattoir, to cultivate his own allies beyond the confines of the Pestilent Brotherhood. If Krricht had more to fear than the displeasure of Clan Pestilens alone, he might forget whatever compact he had formed with Vrask.

Squeaks of excitement shuddered through the Abattoir as hundreds of thousands of ratmen greeted the activity unfolding on the arena floor with bloodthirsty glee. A great pit had opened up in the sandy surface of the arena, exposing a patch of impenetrable blackness. The skavenslaves mopping up the blood and offal from the last event screeched in terror, scrambling towards the little iron gates set into the wall. Their wails grew even more despondent when they found the gates firmly shut, callous guards jeering at them from behind the bars.

From the pit, that which the slaves feared crawled into view and a hush fell across the spectators. The creature was as big as a bear, its ghastly body covered in shiny black plates of chitin. Eight clawed legs sprouted from the sides of a squat, elongated body. Immense arms tipped with hideous pincers protruded from the front of the monster. The beast’s face stretched across the front of its body without even the semblance of a head. Two clusters of lustrous eyes gleamed with a ruby glow above a gaping maw ringed with chitinous mandibles. Rearing from the monster’s back, arching above its body, was a long muscular tail, its tip swollen with a dagger-like barb. Poison glistened from the tip of the barb, dripping down onto the creature’s armoured back.

The hush passed. The crowd cried out in anticipation as the gigantic scorpion scuttled across the arena, charging straight towards the panicked slaves.

‘Magnificent, yes-yes,’ chortled the ratman seated above Puskab. Blight Tenscratch, Wormlord of Clan Verms, rested his twisted body in a high-backed chair, attended by a gaggle of tawny-furred slaves and ringed by a phalanx of armoured warriors. The wormlord seldom missed an arena fight. Next to worm-oil and beauty-ticks, the arena represented the most prosperous of Clan Verms’s ventures. The bug-breeders produced a loathsome menagerie of horrifying abominations for the Abattoir. None were so popular with the crowd as the giant deathwalkers.

Puskab kept his voice indifferent, all trace of intimidation from his posture. ‘It is scary-nasty, Most Murderous Tyrant.’

Blight chittered with laughter, raising a crooked arm and gesturing at the giant scorpion. The arachnid had reached one of the slaves, gripping the doomed ratman in its massive pincers while it stabbed its lethal sting into his chest.

‘Only a demonstration,’ Blight said. ‘The real spectacle begins when that gate opens.’ He pointed a claw at a massive steel-banded door set into the side of the arena just below the first row of the lower arcade. ‘Clan Moulder promises something new. Something they think can beat my deathwalkers.’ The Wormlord bared his fangs in a scornful sneer.

‘Clan Verms very-much powerful,’ Puskab agreed. He didn’t add that they were also the most detested and abhorred of the Greater Clans, blamed for the legions of fleas and parasites that beset skavendom. ‘That is why I want-like speak-squeak with your Despotic Magnificence.’

Blight’s ears were masses of scar tissue, overwhelmed by the cluster of multi-coloured ticks which had fastened to them. Even so, they were able to flatten themselves against the Wormlord’s skull, a gesture that bespoke the most condescending of humour.

‘I know-know why Poxmaster Puskab wants to speak,’ Blight said. From the arena, a shrill cry announced that the scorpion had claimed a second victim. ‘Pestilens need-take help with plague-plan.’

Puskab’s glands clenched as he heard Blight speak. If the skaven of Clan Verms knew how the plague was transmitted they could thwart all of Clan Pestilens’s ambitions.

Grinning, Blight reached a gnarled paw to his neck, picking about the fur for a moment. He displayed the black flea he caught. ‘This carry plague, yes-yes?’ The Wormlord lashed his tail. ‘My spies know plague monks want-buy many fleas. Not ratkin fleas, but man-thing fleas. Easy to guess-learn why.’

The crowd fell silent once more. Puskab shifted his gaze from the gloating Blight to watch as the wooden doors slowly drew apart, exposing a large cage. The thing within the cage was a monstrous brute, a hulking behemoth four times as tall as a skaven and covered from head to toe in shaggy brown fur.

‘Packmasters call this ogre-rat,’ Blight snorted. ‘Deathwalker will eat well from its carcass.’

The plague priest wasn’t so certain. When the door of the cage swung open and the brute lumbered out onto the field, its every step bespoke a primal strength and savagery. The ogre-rat slapped its clawed paws against its chest, snarling an unintelligible challenge to the monstrous scorpion.

‘Clan Verms know-learn much-much,’ Puskab said, letting a subtext of threat seep into his words. There weren’t many skaven who pried into the diseased secrets of the plague monks. Even a Lord of Decay should know such a practice was unhealthy.

‘We can help Pestilens,’ Blight said, his eyes still fixed upon the floor of the arena. The deathwalker and the ogre-rat had closed upon one another and were now circling each other in preparation for the first attack. ‘Verms breed better bugs than anyone in Under-Empire. Make stronger flea for Pestilens. Carry plague far-far. Infect many more man-things.’

Puskab shifted uneasily in his seat, uncomfortable that Blight knew so much about the Black Plague and how it was spread. ‘I talk-speak to Arch-Plaguelord,’ he said. ‘Listen-learn if he like-like help from Verms.’

Blight clapped his paws together in glee. The scorpion lunged at the ogre-rat, its pincers ripping into the brute’s flesh. He turned his gaze reluctantly back towards Puskab. ‘You came here to help yourself, but I must have something in return. If you want-like Verms to protect you, then you must give something. I want to share in credit for the Black Plague. Impress Plaguelord Vecteek with the might of Clan Verms!’

‘Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch…’

Blight leaned back, blinking in surprise. ‘I wonder at your lack of ambition. You are the Poxmaster, creator of the Black Plague. You kill-slay more man-things each day than a whole army of stormvermin! The council knows your name!’

The plague priest lowered his head, his mind awhirl with the Wormlord’s words.

‘Why talk-speak with Nurglitch?’ Blight whispered. ‘There can be only one Arch-Plaguelord on the council, after all. The other Lords of Decay are ready for a change.’

Puskab’s glands clenched at the magnitude of what Blight was proposing. To sit upon the council! To be one of the Lords of Decay! It was more than he had ever dared dream, more prestige than he had ever prayed for! An alliance between Clan Verms and Clan Pestilens would make the spread of the Black Plague much easier and it would provide Puskab with the extra layer of protection he needed. But to betray Nurglitch, to allow the heathen Verms to share the credit for developing one of the Horned One’s holy contagions… these were things he would have to meditate upon.

Blight leapt to his feet, cursing and slashing his claws across the snout of a nearby slave. He shook his fist at the arena below.

The ogre-rat had managed to free itself from the scorpion’s pincers, its brawn such that one of the claws had been torn in half. Now the brute had its arms wrapped about the deathwalker’s tail. While the arachnid scrambled to escape the hairy hulk’s grip, the ogre-rat’s powerful muscles flexed. With a ghastly popping noise and the rending of fibrous tendons, the brute tore the scorpion’s tail from its body.

Blight snapped commands to his entourage, his taste for the Abattoir lost with the turn of battle. ‘Think well upon my offer, priest,’ he snarled down at Puskab. ‘I will not make it again.’ The Wormlord clashed his paws together and his retinue began to scurry for the closest exit.

Puskab turned his eyes back to the arena, watching as Clan Moulder’s new monstrosity beat the huge scorpion with its own severed tail. The plague priest’s rotten face pulled back in a gruesome leer. Hurriedly he scrambled after Blight Tenscratch.

The Poxmaster had decided he would accept Blight’s offer of alliance.

CHAPTER SIX

Altdorf
Kaldezeit, 1111

Erich von Kranzbeuhler shifted uneasily in his saddle, watching as the morning fog rolled in from the Reik. He could just see the trees of the Altgarten - those the marchers hadn’t cut down - and the murky glow of campfires shining from the shantytown. The young knight reached down to his sword, his heart sickening as he felt the pommel between his fingers. He could not easily forget the motto engraved upon the blade of his sword. ‘Honour. Courage. Emperor.’

Today he would betray one of those solemn oaths. He would ask the knights under his command to break faith with the vows they had undertaken. It was an enormous responsibility, one the young captain still wasn’t sure he was equal to. He closed his eyes and prayed to Sigmar to lend him that strength.

‘They don’t really expect us to ride down our own soldiers, do they?’ The whispered question came from the knight beside him, a tall, stalwart warrior named Aldinger.

For one of the Reiksknecht’s veterans to ask such a question made Erich decide he had made the right decision. The only way the Reiksknecht could respect the first two oaths was to betray the last.

The captain peered through the grey veil, staring across at the massed ranks of cavalry. The entire strength of the Reiksknecht had been called out to supplement the Kaiserjaeger and the Schuetzenverein in quelling what had been termed ‘rebellion’ in their orders. The plan, as laid out by Adolf Kreyssig, was for the Reiksknecht to spearhead the attack, with the Kaiserjaeger and Schueters following on the flanks. The commander had made his intention clear. The knights were to drive Engel’s rebels into the river. No quarter was to be given.

Grand Master von Schomberg’s face had grown pale when he read the orders, but it had only made him even more determined to defy the Emperor. The plans he had discussed with his officers were much different from those Kreyssig had drawn up. The Reiksknecht would lead the charge, but only for a hundred yards. Once their backs were to the trees, they would turn about and stage a counter charge against the Kaiserjaeger and the Scheuters. It was hoped the surprise attack would throw the other forces into such confusion that they would disperse and retreat into the city.

After that, Engel and his people would have to fend for themselves. The Reiksknecht would have their own problems. The plan was to withdraw into the Reikschloss. There were food and provisions there to endure a lengthy siege. The longer they held out, the more embarrassment it would cause Emperor Boris and bring unwanted attention to the reasons why the Emperor’s most loyal order of knights had turned against him.

Erich turned around, trying to find Grand Master von Schomberg in the fog. He could just make out the figure of Othmar, the Grand Master’s standard bearer, but he couldn’t see his leader. It was just as well. If he saw doubt in the old baron’s eyes, he didn’t know what he would do.

‘Ernst,’ he called, looking over to see if his adjutant was close. He saw the burly knight lift a gauntlet to his visor in reply. ‘Stay close to me,’ Erich told him, pointing at the horn tied to the dienstmann’s belt. ‘I may need to signal changes in formation after we begin the charge.’

Again, the spectre of doubt tugged at Erich’s mind. Could he really go through with this? Was he really going to betray a direct command from his Emperor?

Still fighting his inner daemons, the sound of pounding hooves brought a curse to the captain’s lips. Some fool had started the charge early! Up and down the line, he could hear the other officers shouting in confusion, wondering who had given the order. Grand Master von Schomberg’s fierce tones barked out, ordering the rest to support the knights that had started the attack.

Like a single creature, the twenty knights under Erich’s command urged their warhorses into a gallop. The steel-clad destriers lunged forwards, charging out from the plaza where they had mustered into formation. Erich felt the thrill of the charge course through his veins, saw the fog break apart before his leaping steed.

Then, disaster! The plaza which had only a moment before echoed with the clatter of charging knights now descended into a bedlam of screaming men and horses. Animals crashed to the earth on broken legs, crushing their riders beneath them as they floundered upon the cobblestones. Men hurtled through the air as their mounts threw them, smashing into the earth like plummeting gargoyles. It was like listening to the roar of an avalanche, the maddened shriek of a volcano.

Erich’s horse buckled beneath him, pitching onto its side. The only thing that saved the captain from being pinned beneath his animal was the second floundering horse that reared up and pushed his own animal away. He was able to drop down from the saddle of his stricken destrier, scrambling away before the flailing hooves and hurtling bodies of the other warhorses could smash him down.

Like a great steel rat, the knight scurried away from the grotesque bedlam. As he did so, Erich saw the cause of the havoc. Under cover of the fog, someone had strewn spiked caltrops across the mouth of the plaza, leaving a field of jagged iron to impale the hooves of anyone trying to ride out.

He ripped his sword from its sheath, his first instinct being to place blame upon the obvious enemy. Wilhelm Engel and his Marchers! The scum had done this, used this churlish trick to cripple the Reiksknecht’s horses and maim the Reiksknecht’s men! Well, if Emperor Boris wanted a massacre, then Erich would be happy to oblige him now!

Then the captain saw the furtive figures stealing out from the buildings facing the plaza, peeking down from the rooftops and slinking down alleyways and side-streets. Kaiserjaeger! The horrible truth dawned upon Erich. It had been Kreyssig’s men who had strewn the road with caltrops. Many of them had been hunters and woodsmen, they would have the skills to sneak in and leave such a hideous surprise under cover of the fog!

In the hands of each of the black-clad soldiers the slender curve of a bow was held at the ready. The Reiksknecht inside the plaza were hopelessly surrounded; the only way open to them lay across the field of caltrops and the bodies of their own injured comrades.

Kreyssig had plotted well. Somehow he had learned of Grand Master von Schomberg’s intention to stop the massacre. With murderous planning, the commander had neutralised an entire order of knights. Screams rising from the Altgarten, raging fires blazing from the squalor of Breadburg showed that Kreyssig had even reserved enough of his forces to still carry out his original mission.

‘Knights of the Reiksknecht,’ a grating voice called out. ‘Lay down your weapons and submit to the Emperor’s justice!’

Erich could see the archers draw back their arrows, taking aim at the trapped knights. He looked around him for something, anything he could use to help his comrades. All he found was Aldinger trying to pull himself out from under the writhing body of his horse. A caltrop had stabbed through the flesh of his hand, three others piercing the body of his horse. Erich made his decisions at once, rushing to the knight’s aid. Maybe he couldn’t help the men in the plaza, but he could help Aldinger.

As he helped the pinned knight lift the body of his horse, Erich kept his gaze fixed upon the plaza. Grand Master von Schomberg was both brave and bold. He wouldn’t submit meekly to a tyrant.

‘Sigmar will be my judge!’ von Schomberg’s voice rose in a defiant shout. At his order, the knights in the plaza spurred their horses towards the caltrops, forcing the huge animals out from the trap, urging them to trample the bodies of wounded men and horses.

The command to loose arrows was given. The shrieks of horses and the screams of men rang out from the plaza as the volley struck. Others, however, came thundering out into the road. Many of the knights fell, the hooves of their horses punctured by the spiked caltrops, but others fought their way clear. Archers rushed over the rooftops to shoot them down, but the effort was too late. Erich could count at least twenty knights galloping away into the growing dawn, scattering into the streets of Altdorf.

He dragged his eyes away from the scene, closing his ears to the moans and cries of injured men. His arm supporting Aldinger’s weight, he led the wounded dienstmann into the shadow of an alleyway. He leaned the injured man against the plaster-covered wall.

The Kaiserjaeger would be coming soon, looking for survivors. There was only one way to foil such expert trackers. Erich knelt to the ground, brushing away snow until he uncovered the stone cover of a sewer drain. It took him valuable minutes to pick away at the grime caked around the cover. While he worked, he could hear the Kaiserjaeger moving among the fallen Reiksknecht, evaluating each of the wounded. A ghastly gurgle told when they found a knight they thought too injured to stand trial.

The cover came free just as the Kaiserjaeger began searching the field of caltrops. Hastily, Erich lowered Aldinger down into the reeking warmth of the sewer. The captain followed a moment later, dragging the lid back into place before dropping down into the darkness.

Just as the lid settled into place, Erich heard the voice of the Kaiser-jaeger officer again.

‘Leave that one,’ the officer snarled. ‘Commander Kreyssig will want him no matter how beat up he is. It isn’t every day you get to hang a Grand Master.’

Nuln
Kaldezeit, 1111

‘We live in an age of science and reason, not idiotic superstition!’

The statement was given voice by Lord Karl-Joachim Kleinheistkamp, a wrinkled old man, his bald head unconvincingly covered by a horsehair wig, the buttons on his broad coat displaying a veneer of tarnish and smut. He affected the pompous confidence of a man secure in his authority and with no time for anything that did not fit neatly into the world described in his books and papers. All in all, Kleinheistkamp was typical of the Universität’s professors.

Walther was discovering that frustrating fact. Klein-heistkamp was the third professor he’d managed to lure to the Black Rose and he was the third to openly laugh at the rat-catcher’s story. He cast a despairing glance towards Zena, but all she did was shake her head and vanish into the kitchen. Hugo might have been more sympathetic if he wasn’t too busy trying to teach the three ratters how to sit up and beg.

Bremer wore a big smile though, happily refilling the professor’s stein at every opportunity. Walther winced each time he saw the taverneer grab for Kleinheistkamp’s mug. For an old man, his lordship had a prodigious capacity, especially when Walther was paying. It seemed a noble title wasn’t enough to keep some people from guzzling another man’s beer.

‘What you describe is simply impossible!’ Klein-heistkamp declared, wiping foam from his moustache with the back of his hand. ‘This is an enlightened age! We know now that there are rules to spontaneous generation. A salamander is created by fire, flies generate from unburied corpses, but higher forms, things like cattle and swine, must be created in the proper manner. We know that maternal impression causes malformations in offspring, not the diet or habits of the mother as simple herb wives would have it. We know that a cockatrice is spawned from the egg of a rooster exposed to the rays of Morrslieb and that it is not, as our less educated forebears would have us believe, the result of a serpent having congress with a hen.’

Walther could feel the veins pounding in his forehead. The professor had been prattling on like this for the better part of an hour, straying into subjects beyond either his ability or his desire to follow. ‘That is all well, my lord, but about the rat…’

‘Such a creature is impossible,’ Kleinheistkamp said, tapping the wooden counter by way of emphasis. Bremer decided to take it as an appeal for the stein to be refilled. ‘A rat as large as you describe would be crushed under its own weight! It wouldn’t be able to move, much less launch itself at a grown man and bite out his throat!’

‘I’ve hunted rats all my life,’ Walther growled back. He held his hand out so that the professor could see the scars. ‘I know what a rat bite looks like.’

Kleinheistkamp smiled and shook his head. ‘I know you think you know what you saw,’ he explained, his voice adopting the condescending tolerance of a parent teaching a child. ‘But I’m afraid you just don’t have the understanding to make a judgement of that sort. Isn’t it more likely that the vigilantes were right? Somebody cut the fellow’s throat and your imagination did the rest. You are so accustomed to seeing the violent handiwork of vermin that you unconsciously made a similar creature responsible for the tanner’s murder.’ The old man took a long pull from the stein and rose from his chair. ‘I grant that the mob was impetuous blaming plague victims, but I guarantee that a human malefactor was responsible. Robbery, not monstrosity, was behind the tanner’s death.’

Chuckling under his breath, Lord Kleinheistkamp tottered off. Walther felt his stomach turn as he watched the pompous old man leave. The professor had marked his last chance to get somebody at the Universität to listen to his story. Entertaining the scholars while they smugly dismissed what he had seen with his own eyes had cost the rat-catcher the better part of twelve schillings. He would be weeks recouping the loss.

Bremer reached out to clear away Kleinheistkamp’s mug. The taverneer squinted at the stein as he lifted it. ‘His lordship left a bit,’ he said, turning towards Walther and offering the mug to him.

‘Drink it yourself,’ Walther hissed, clenching his fist in frustration. Bremer shrugged and downed the rest of the professor’s drink.

‘They’re fools,’ Walther snarled. ‘Blind idiots who won’t believe anything unless it’s written down in one of their precious books! They wouldn’t accept this monster as real unless it crawled up and bit them in–’

‘Then why keep bothering about them?’ Zena demanded. There was colour in her cheeks, a tremble of anger on her lip. She knew as well as Walther how much he had gambled on the scholars. The loss of money was one thing, but the loss of hope was something she knew the rat-catcher couldn’t afford. ‘The Universität aren’t the only ones who would want to buy such a beast.’

Walther stood, glaring at Zena, all the pain of his dashed dreams rising to his tongue. ‘Who else would buy the thing? Ostmann? At a penny a pound?’

Zena glared back at the rat-catcher, her own anger rising. It wasn’t just Walther who was depending upon a windfall from the monster. Against her best judgement, she cared about him. His defeat was her defeat. And she wasn’t going to allow that to happen.

‘Why not sell it to Emil?’ she asked, pointing a finger at Bremer behind the bar. The bearded taverneer backed away, a frightened look on his face.

‘You two fight all you want, but leave me out of it,’ Bremer said.

Zena wasn’t going to let her employer make such a gracious retreat. ‘You’re always saying you want something novel to drum up more business,’ Zena told him in an accusing tone. ‘What could be more perfect than this? A genuine monster for people to come in and gawp at!’

Bremer rolled his eyes. ‘I was talking about dancing girls, not giant vermin. Who’d feel like eating staring at a huge rat mounted over the hearth?’

‘I thought the idea was to sell drinks,’ Walther countered, warming to Zena’s idea. ‘Just thinking about this giant makes me want a jack or two to steady my nerves.’

The taverneer came forwards, resting his elbows on the counter, one hand scratching his beard. ‘There’s something to be said for that,’ he conceded. ‘A man would want a drink after looking at something like that.’ A hard glint came into his eyes and he stood back, turning his gaze from Walther to Zena and back again. ‘I’m not making any promises, understand. But if Walther can get this monster, I’ll have it stuffed and stood up right here on the bar. If it brings in any business, I’ll split the profit seventy-five twenty-five.’

‘Fifty fifty,’ Walther objected. ‘Remember, I’m the one actually going down there to get the thing.’

Bremer spit into his palm. ‘Done!’ he exclaimed, offering his hand to the rat-catcher. Walther spit into his own hand and clasped the taverneer’s, sealing the deal in the old Wissenland way. Zena withdrew hastily to the kitchen, leaving the two partners to discuss the details of their agreement.

‘Herr Schill,’ Hugo’s quite voice broke into the discussion. The rat-catcher turned to see his apprentice sitting by the fire. He’d managed to get all three of the terriers to stand up on their hind legs and wave their forepaws at him like street beggars. Walther felt annoyed by the interruption, much more so because it seemed Hugo wanted to show off a trick an addle-witted child could have taught the most moronic mongrel.

Hugo, however, had a different reason for interrupting his master. Gesturing at the begging terriers, he said something that sent cold fingers closing around Walther’s heart.

‘If we’re going after this giant,’ Hugo said, ‘won’t we need bigger dogs?’

Middenheim
Kaldezeit, 1111

The mountain wind whipped snow against the walls of Middenheim. A layer of ice and frost caked the jagged cliffs, transforming the entire Ulricsberg into a frozen pillar, the lights of the city shining from the heights like a phantom aurora.

The guards patrolling the benighted battlements huddled in their fur cloaks, cradling the skins of ale that were their best protection against the cold. The gibbous face of Morrslieb smirked down at them from the blackened sky, casting its sickly glow over the city. The moon’s cleaner, more wholesome brother Mannslieb was in retreat, slinking towards the horizon, abandoning the field to the eerie gleam of its ill-favoured companion.

Dozens of sentries patrolled the walls of Middenheim, each tasked with a different section of the battlements. It was dreary, thankless work, especially in the dead of night with a snow flurry sweeping the mountain. Not one of the soldiers didn’t wish himself warm in bed, a bottle of Reikhoch in his hand and a buxom tavern girl at his side.

Such visions, however, did little to cheer the men tasked with guarding the sleeping city. They tried to console themselves by considering everything that could jeopardise their comrades who were enjoying the taverns and bawdy houses of Middenheim’s Westgate district. There were the cutpurses and pickpockets, always waiting for an opportunity to steal from a soldier too deep in his cups. There was the menace of drunken dwarfs, ever ready to take umbrage at the slightest remark and with the brawn to back up their short tempers. And there was the more recent menace, the whispers that a few of the district’s denizens had come down with the plague.

For most of the soldiers patrolling the walls, rumours of the plague were disconcerting, but they placed no especial importance upon them. For the two soldiers whose patrol consisted of the stretch of wall between the west and south gates bordering the Sudgarten, such stories were much more. Other guards quieted their fears by telling themselves Graf Gunthar’s decree made it impossible for the plague to reach the top of the Ulricsberg. These men knew otherwise.

‘Halt and be recognised!’ one of the soldiers challenged as a shape lurched out of the darkness. His halberd trembled in his hand.

‘A friend,’ an oily voice coughed. From the gloom, a heavy-set man emerged into the moonlight, his body bundled in a thick bearskin cloak, his head concealed beneath the folds of a fur-lined hood.

The challenging soldier relaxed when he recognised his clandestine benefactor, Oskar Neumann. He withdrew his menacing halberd, leaning the weapon against the ground. Anxiously he grasped Neumann’s gloved hand. The clink of silver rewarded the brief contact.

The other sentry came forwards, likewise accepting a small leather purse from Neumann. A sour expression crossed the guard’s face as he juggled the purse in his hand. ‘It feels a little light,’ he complained.

‘It is the same as it has always been, Herr Schutze,’ Neumann’s greasy voice bubbled.

A malicious curl came to Schutze’s lip. ‘Yeah, but the risks aren’t exactly what they were before.’ Again he juggled the purse in his hand. ‘About double what they were when we agreed to this.’

Neumann shook his hooded head. ‘You want more money?’

Schutze stared into the dark shadow where the man’s face was hidden. ‘The captain has been asking questions. People say there’s plague down in the slums. People are wondering how it could get there.’

‘I thought you were doing this out of a sense of compassion,’ Neumann sighed. ‘I thought you were doing this to help those poor souls down in Warrenburg. I thought the money was just a secondary concern.’

Schutze laughed. ‘You thought wrong, Oskar. It’s all about the money. Don’t tell me you aren’t making a nice bit of silver off these people you’re smuggling up here. If you don’t want to lose out, just start asking more from your “poor souls” down there.’

Neumann shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘I ask nothing from those I help except their discretion. My motives are purely altruistic. By helping these people, I am doing only what my faith demands.’ A tinge of sorrow crept into his croaky voice. ‘If, however, you are only interested in money, then you shall have it.’

Schutze smiled as another pouch of silver appeared in Neumann’s left hand. As he reached out to take the money, however, he didn’t notice the man’s other hand. Before he could understand what was happening, a slender dagger punched into his side, sinking between the joins of his armour just under his armpit and stabbing deep into his heart. The soldier gasped once, then crumpled to the ground.

‘You aren’t going to give me trouble, Herr Brasche?’ Neumann asked, the bloodied dagger still in his hand. ‘I should hope that our arrangement can continue, despite this unpleasantness. Greedy men are a liability. They are… indiscreet.’

Brasche forced his eyes away from his comrade’s lifeless body. There was no mistaking the threat in Neumann’s oily voice. Even if he wanted to, he knew it would do no good to oppose the smuggler. With Schutze gone, he was alone now, while Neumann had an entire gang lurking somewhere nearby in the darkness.

‘What will we do?’ Brasche asked.

Neumann bent his burly body downwards, lifting Schutze’s body off the ground as though the armoured soldier weighed no more than a child. ‘When we are finished here, we will pitch Herr Schutze over the side. By morning, the snow will have buried him. You will report to your officers that he abandoned his post during the night.’ The smuggler chuckled, taking the pouch of silver he had used to lure the soldier to his death and tucking it into the dead man’s boot. ‘Even if they find him, they will think he slipped and fell.’

Brasche shuddered at the callous way Neumann draped the body against the crenellations. Footsteps and the clatter of equipment drew his attention away from the macabre scene. Neumann’s gang, seven men wrapped in a mismatch of furs and wool, came slinking along the wall. Four of them carried thick loops of rope over their shoulders, the other three struggled under the bulk of an enormous basket.

The soldier watched in fascination as the gang slapped together the pieces of a wooden windlass and fastened the coils of rope to it. The other ends they connected to the basket. In short order, they had the apparatus ready. The basket was lowered over the side of the wall, beginning its descent to the ground far below.

‘It is a noble calling,’ Neumann said, coming up beside Brasche. ‘Too rich for noble blood.’ The hooded head turned, staring up at the sky. ‘There are several hours yet. We should be able to retrieve a dozen before it becomes too light to work any more.’

Brasche shifted uneasily, remembering all too well how the smuggler had murdered Schutze without a moment’s hesitation. Still, he had to ask the question that was plaguing him. Just like Schutze, he had assumed Neumann was doing this because he was being paid to do it.

‘You make me grieve for mankind,’ Neumann answered. ‘Have we sunk so low that we cannot understand a motivation higher than our own base needs? I told your comrade the truth, Herr Brasche. I take nothing from the people I help. The knowledge that I have lifted them up from the squalor and misery and set them free in the warmth and safety of the city is all the reward I need.’

The hooded head turned towards Brasche, fixing him with an unseen stare. ‘We are doing the god’s work, you and I. One day, all Middenheim will understand the importance of our work.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Altdorf
Ulriczeit, 1111

Erich pressed back against the stone wall of the herbalist’s shop and watched as three men in ragged clothes ran down the street. Despite their scraggly looks, there was some trace of military precision in the way they moved. Erich decided they must be survivors from Breadburg, Dienstleute who had escaped the massacre.

At least for a time. While the knight watched, he saw three militiamen wearing the armbands of the Schuetzenverein come around the corner with bared swords, clearly in pursuit. As the two fugitives came past the herbalist, a pair of men in the black cloaks and tunics of the Kaiserjaeger drifted out from the mouth of an alleyway. One of them drew a sword from his belt, the other crouched in the street and took aim with a crossbow.

One of the rebels screamed and crashed into the snow, the iron spike of the crossbow bolt protruding from his chest. The second rebel hesitated, lingering for just an instant over his fallen friend. In that moment of indecision, the three Schueters came upon him, one from each side. The dienstmann’s only weapon was a hatchet, but the soldier employed it viciously, slashing open the arm of one militiaman and gashing the shoulder of a second before the Kaiserjaeger swordsman came upon him from behind and ran him through. The stricken rebel wilted into the snow, collapsing across the body of his slain comrade.

Erich carefully crept back into the gloom of a side-street. It wasn’t the sight of violence that made him retreat. In the weeks since the Bread Massacre, Altdorf had played host to countless such scenes. Many of Engel’s men had escaped the destruction of their camp, going to ground in the city. Plague had erupted in the poorer quarters, clearing out entire blocks of hovels. Ample space for desperate men to hide.

The Kaiserjaeger and the militia were untiring in their efforts to root out the rebels and street fights were the usual routine when they found their quarry. Poorly equipped and almost always outnumbered, the rebels still refused to surrender.

Serving with the Dienstleute of the Reiksknecht had vanquished any illusions Erich had that courage and valour were qualities exclusive to the noble classes. Still, he was impressed with the stubborn determination shown by Engel’s peasants. In the face of certain death, they refused to give up their honour. A man couldn’t ask for better from a comrade-in-arms.

He frowned as that thought came to him. What he had witnessed boded ill for his own comrade-in-arms. He had thought to secure woundwort and other curative roots from the herbalist to tend Aldinger’s wounds. But the sudden appearance of the lurking Kaiserjaeger had shown him the folly of such an idea. The Kaiserjaeger knew some Reiksknecht had escaped their trap, and they knew some of the knights would be wounded. It was only natural that they would be watching any place that might offer succour to an injured man. Erich realised he was indebted to the luckless rebels. If not for them, he would have walked right into the Kaiserjaeger ambush.

Stealing down the narrow street, his eyes watching every shadow for enemies, Erich quickly put distance between himself and the herbalist. After a lifetime of drill and battle, playing the part of hunted animal was a unique experience for the knight. One that he vowed he would make Kreyssig pay for.

A barren patch of street devoid of snow marked another entrance to Altdorf’s maze of sewers and subterranean culverts. The heat within the vaulted tunnels was enough to melt the snow that settled upon the hatch-like stone covers. Indeed, very often it was the only way to spot them, so cunningly had the dwarfs blended them into the cobblestones.

Erich crouched in the street, looking around to ensure he was unobserved. With the populace in a panic over the quickly spreading plague, there were few people on the streets, but the captain was cautious just the same. Only when he was certain he was alone did he lift up the stone lid and drop down into the murky darkness.

A simple rushlight lit his way once he was in the dank sewer. Erich crushed a perfumed cloth to his nose as he walked along the ledge bordering the stream of effluent coursing beneath the street. He took some comfort in the very loathsomeness of his surroundings. No one wanted to think about the sewers, dismissing the disgusting channels from their minds. Wilfully forgotten by most of the inhabitants of Altdorf, they made a perfect road for men who couldn’t afford to be seen.

Bloated rats scampered away from the flicker of the knight’s light, splashes rising from the culvert as the rodents decided to swim away from the intrusive glow. Erich felt his gorge rise in disgust at the skulking vermin. The rats of Altdorf had grown bigger and braver this winter, sneaking into houses stricken by the plague to gnaw at the bodies of the dead. The priests of Morr had gone so far as to hire rat-catchers to guard the mortuaries and ensure the departed were consecrated into the keeping of their god with all of their fingers and toes still attached.

Erich’s insides squirmed at the thought of those creeping brutes waiting in the darkness, biding their time like vultures before swarming over a man’s body and stripping it to the bone. Well had they earned the epithet of Khaine’s lapdog, for only the god of murder could have affection for such noxious scavengers. In all the world, there was nothing more repulsive than a rat.

The knight shuddered as he saw dozens of beady little eyes staring at him from the darkness ahead. The broken-down wall had become something of a landmark to him, a signpost letting him know he was near his hideout, but never would he grow accustomed to the horde of rats that nested among the shattered bricks and crumbling masonry.

As he approached the eyes withdrew, slinking back into their holes and burrows. By the time he was close enough to see the wall, the only trace of the rats was a long scaly tail vanishing into the gap between two stones. Erich shuddered just the same. He didn’t need to see the vermin to know they were there.

Watching.

Waiting.

The knight hurried on. A few hundred yards past the broken wall he stopped, turning to his left and following a narrow brick-lined tunnel. When the dwarfs had first built the sewers for Emperor Sigismund, they had burrowed into many natural cavities and passageways under the city. Rather than go around such fissures, the dwarfs had simply incorporated them into the construction, leaving occasional cross-tunnels opening onto the main culverts. Over time, as the cellars and vaults of the city above became ever more extensive, many of the old tunnels were breached. Often such openings were sealed up again, but sometimes, when it suited the purposes of the builder’s patron, these hidden tunnels were allowed to remain connected.

The refuge Erich had withdrawn to after the Bread Massacre possessed such a cellar. For several years he had enjoyed the companionship of Lady Mirella von Wittmarr, a ravishing beauty much favoured by Prince Sigdan. The lavish townhouse she inhabited was maintained by the prince’s generosity. Lady Mirella was quite happy to return that generosity, though Prince Sigdan was liberal enough not to mind if she had her own entanglements outside their affair.

Erich had to suck in his breath to fit through the narrow fissure opening into Lady Mirella’s cellar. It still amazed him that he had been able to squeeze Aldinger’s bulk through such a tight passageway.

A torch was burning in the stone-walled cellar. Erich saw one of Lady Mirella’s servants, an old retainer named Gustav, sitting beside the pallet where Aldinger lay. The peasant was applying some sort of compress to the knight’s injured hand. His brow rose in surprise at the sight, unaware that Gustav knew anything about medicine and even more surprised that Lady Mirella had failed to mention such an important fact.

Then a frightful thought occurred to him. Perhaps, moved by pity, Mirella had sent Gustav to a herbalist or a barber-surgeon. If she had, then there might be a platoon of Kaiserjaeger even now surrounding the townhouse.

‘Why the long face, captain?’

Erich’s hand dropped to his sword as he spun around to face the speaker. He hadn’t been aware of the men sitting there in the shadow of a wine rack. He was about to call out a challenge when one of the men leaned forwards into the light. He relaxed his hold on his sword as he recognised a fellow knight - Othmar, the Grand Master’s standard bearer. The man beside him was another knight, a grizzled veteran named Konreid.

Erich bounded over to the knights, clapping his arms about them in a fierce embrace. ‘How did you blackguards escape the Kaiserjaeger?’

Othmar grinned at the question. ‘Konreid here jumped the caltrops. I always said his horse was part pegasus.’

‘This idiot tried to fight his way out,’ Konreid groaned. ‘He looked like a hedgehog with all those arrows caught in his mail! Eventually even he realised the Kaisers were going to keep shooting him until one of their arrows did for him.’

‘So I turned my horse around and charged right through a wall,’ Othmar continued. ‘Smashed right through a kitchen, a sitting room and most of a vestibule before my horse went through the front wall. There was a whole squad of Kaisers waiting on the other side, but they were so shocked when I came busting through, by Ranald’s purse, they’re probably still standing there with their mouths hanging open!’

Erich laughed at the knight’s daring escape. ‘By Sigmar, it’s amazing to see you two, but how did you ever find us?’

‘You can thank your lady for that,’ Konreid said. ‘You know the Kaisers took the Reikschloss?’ Erich nodded, aware that the fortress had been captured by the Emperor’s forces only a few hours after the Bread Massacre. ‘Well, without the castle to fall back on, a few of us decided to try for Prince Sigdan’s manor. The prince was always a keen supporter of the Reiksknecht, but not so vocal about Goldgather’s policies as to be someone Kreyssig would be watching.’

‘There are ten of us staying with Prince Sigdan,’ Othmar said. ‘Including Seneschal Boelter. There’s a physician too, a doktor named Grau who got caught up in the Bread Massacre. He’s been tending Ernst Kahlenberg.’

‘Ernst was pretty bad,’ Konreid interjected. ‘If not for Grau, he would have died.’

‘Grau is who gave us the medicine and herbs for Aldinger,’ Othmar said.

‘Then we all owe him a great debt,’ Erich declared.

Othmar shook his head grimly. ‘The good doktor doesn’t seem too keen on our gratitude. In fact, he’s pretty eager to clear out of Altdorf. Says he will as soon as Ernst is out of danger.’

Konreid shot the other knight a look of disapproval. ‘I think it is the talk not the company that bothers him.’

‘What do you mean?’ Erich asked.

‘You know the Kaiserjaeger captured the Grand Master,’ Othmar said. His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘The Emperor has ordered his execution. They’re keeping him in the Imperial Courthouse.’

‘Tell him the rest,’ Konreid prompted.

Othmar’s face split in a broad smile. ‘Prince Sigdan has a plan.

‘We’re going to rescue the Grand Master!’

Bylorhof
Ulriczeit, 1111

A white shroud was wound about the little body when Frederick van Hal next set foot in his brother’s house. The priest placed a black rose upon Johan’s breast, a ritual intended to protect the young spirit from daemons and witches until the departed soul could be guided into the keeping of Morr. It was an expensive gesture; black roses were always rare and the plague had driven demand for them to unprecedented levels. They could only be used once. The flower would be burned when Frederick conducted Johan’s last rites, the boy’s spirit freed with the smoke, freed to be gathered by the ravens of Morr.

Frederick looked up from the body of his nephew, staring at the parents who survived him. Rutger’s face was a piteous display of anguished guilt, the face of a father who blamed himself for not doing enough. The pain carved upon the man’s features would never be erased, it was a brand he would carry with him always, a token of the black spot in his heart.

Aysha had an even more tragic appearance. Her pretty features were collected and refined, her lips pursed in a staid expression. She might be patiently listening to the latest of Guildmaster Patrascu’s long-winded speeches, or watching her husband haggle with a shepherd over the quality of his wool. There was no emotion in her face, only a terrible resignation. Frederick shuddered when he looked at her eyes, for the emptiness he saw there was so absolute there wasn’t even a place for sorrow. The eyes of a corpse had more life in them.

‘Thank you for coming, Frederick,’ Rutger said, each word quivering as it left him.

‘How could I not come?’ the priest said. He placed a hand upon the grieving father’s shoulder. ‘I would not leave him for the corpse collectors, to be dumped into their cart like a slab of meat. While it is in my power, Johan will have all the dignity a van Hal deserves.’

‘And when the time comes, will you do the same for us?’ Aysha’s voice was as careful and precise as the rigid poise of her face.

Frederick bowed his hooded head. He didn’t want to discuss such things. He had just lost one member of his family. He didn’t want to talk about losing the others. Rutger and Aysha were all he had now. He didn’t want to think about them being gone.

Yet he knew he must. He knew they must. The Black Plague was merciless and rapacious, a prowling wolf that glutted itself not with a single victim but with an entire household. Where the plague struck once, it soon reared its monstrous face again.

Frederick placed his hand upon Johan’s head, feeling the cold flesh of the boy through the shroud. For all of Dr Havemann’s vaunted knowledge and skill, the plague doktor had failed to save his patient. The barbaric treatments Johan had suffered had been for nothing.

A hideous suspicion suddenly flashed through the priest’s mind. His hand tightened about the shroud. His intense gaze swept across Rutger and Aysha. In their pain, they would have accepted whatever Havemann told them. Even if they doubted, they wouldn’t know what to look for.

Before he could question his action, Frederick ripped the shroud from Johan’s body. Aysha shrieked, her composure broken at last. Rutger wailed in disbelief, lunging at his brother. The priest held him back with one hand while pointing at the corpse with the other. ‘Look!’ he snarled.

Rutger peered past the priest, staring down with uncomprehending eyes at the pale, unmarked skin of his dead son. In his grief, his mind would not make the connection Frederick wanted him to see. He turned an imploring gaze upon the priest, beseeching him without words.

‘There are no marks,’ Frederick declared, raising the rigid arm to expose the armpit, rolling the head from side to side to emphasise the smooth, unblemished skin. ‘The stains of the Black Plague are not here. I have seen enough of it to know the traces it leaves behind.’ The priest’s speech faltered, dropping to a sorrowful whisper. ‘Whatever sickness Johan contracted, it wasn’t the plague.’

Rutger bit his knuckles to silence the moan of horror that rose from his throat. Aysha said nothing. She was again the imperturbable wife, her face like a wooden mask, her eyes empty as a puppet’s. Turning upon her heel, she sedately withdrew from the room. A few moments later, her footsteps could be heard mounting the stairs.

Rutger waited until the sound of Aysha’s steps faded along the upper hall, then he leaned close to his brother. The merchant’s jaw was set in an expression of grim determination. ‘How did my son die?’

Frederick shook his head. It could do no good to tell Rutger. There was only pain in that knowledge, and Rutger had been hurt enough. Ignoring the question, he pulled the shroud close over Johan’s body and started to fold the dead hands over the breast once more.

Rutger clasped Frederick’s hand, crushing it in a maddened grip. ‘How did my son die?’ he repeated.

‘Don’t ask me that,’ Frederick told him, trying to pull away.

‘How did my son die?’

Frederick’s heart sickened as he heard the frantic appeal in his brother’s voice. Perhaps not knowing would be a damnation as terrible as the truth. But he doubted it.

‘Too much blood was leeched from Johan,’ the priest said. ‘There wasn’t enough left to sustain him.’

Rutger twisted away, falling to his knees and being noisily sick, every fragment of his being revolted by what he had learned. And what it meant.

Never in all his life had Frederick felt more ashamed for being right. Even when he’d uncovered the patron’s deceitful bookkeeping back in Marienburg, an incident that had precipitated his exodus from Westerland, being right had never filled him with such regret. He’d said the plague doktor was a charlatan and a scavenger. Now Rutger understood that the priest had been right.

‘Havemann killed him,’ Rutger muttered, repeating it over and over, his voice rising from a hollow whisper to a vicious snarl.

Frederick listened to his brother’s outburst with the deepest concern. He groped through the corridors of his mind for something, anything, to say to him that might ease the pain and guilt he felt. But for all his education, for the thousands of books he had studied, for the dozens of secret rites and esoteric rituals he had learned, there was nothing to be said. Some grief was too well-fed to be appeased. Like a winter storm, it was something that had to be endured, not avoided.

A crash from upstairs stirred Rutger from his anguish. He lifted his face upwards, staring at the ceiling for a moment, a look of bewilderment on his face. Then what little colour was left in his features drained away and a groan of soul-stricken despair shuddered from the merchant’s lips. ‘She knows,’ he gasped. Rutger turned and glared at the priest. ‘Don’t you understand - she knows!’

Rutger didn’t wait, but dashed from the room, taking the stairs in a mad scramble as he raced to confront a horror he knew he was already too late to thwart. Frederick lingered behind him for only a moment, puzzling over the import of his brother’s words. Then in a chill of understanding, the priest pulled up his robes and raced after Rutger.

The plague doktor had killed little Johan through his barbarous fakery - but it wasn’t Rutger who had sent for Bruno Havemann. It had been Aysha!

Frederick was only a few steps down the hall from the door to what had been Johan’s room when the house was shaken by a piteous wail. The heart-wrenching sound came from just inside the room. It took every speck of courage the priest possessed to cross into that chamber. Like his brother, he knew what he could expect to find. Only now there was no question it was too late to stop the tragedy from unfolding.

Rutger sat upon the floor in the centre of the room, bawling like a small child, the beautiful figure of his wife clenched in his arms, her golden hair spilling across his shoulders.

And just a few inches away, lying where it had fallen from Aysha’s lifeless hand, was a fat-bladed knife, its edge coated in blood.

Skavenblight
Ulriczeit, 1111

The burrows of Clan Verms were derisively known to skaven of other clans as the Hive. Few of them understood how fitting the name was. The earthen walls of the warren were obscured behind crawling masses of insects, the muddy floor was a morass of wriggling life, immense cobwebs dripped from the low ceiling. The air was hot and foetid, stinking of unclean life and the foulness that sustained it. Every inch of the stronghold seemed to have been given over to the cultivation of every manner of scuttling vermin.

Puskab Foulfur shuddered as he prowled the murky tunnels, thankful that the pestilential blessings of the Horned Rat killed most of the insects as soon as the creatures dared take an interest in him. The lower orders of life were always the first to succumb to corruption. Still, there were some things that proved hideously resistant to the plague priest’s sacred mantle of disease. The most persistent was a strain of transparent gnat with an aggravating high-pitched buzz and a perverse obsession with crawling into noses.

The gnats had much in common with their creators. The skaven of Clan Verms were all obsessed with their loathsome livelihood. It went far beyond the simple dictates of commerce and megalomania. They didn’t see their insects as a means toward an end, but rather a purpose in themselves. To breed ever stronger, ever hardier varieties of beetles and spiders, to create new colours of flea or bigger kinds of ticks, such matters formed the meat of the mania that gripped Clan Verms.

The deranged rabble were much too far gone to appreciate the divinity of disease the way Clan Pestilens did. They would never understand the holy truths of corruption. Their kind would never embrace the one true aspect of the Horned Rat.

But they would make useful instruments of the Horned One just the same. For the moment, it did not matter if Verms believed. It was enough that they obeyed.

Puskab stepped around a pool of stagnant water, its surface alive with mosquito nymphs, ducking his hooded head as a huge yellow spider swung down from the roof of the tunnel. A word of power, a gesture of the plague priest’s paw and the arachnid shrivelled into a husk.

Ahead of him, Puskab could smell the comforting reek of pestilence and decay. It was only the most humble echo of the Pestilent Monastery, but it was enough to relax his glands. A few days of effort and he had made the cave Blight had placed at his disposal into a little patch of diseased corruption fit for a plaguelord.

The cave was aglow with the light of dozens of worm-oil lanterns, but the fug exuded by the oil was masked by the pungent smoke rising from several bronze incense cauldrons. Even the crazed ratkin of Clan Verms understood the wisdom in keeping their lice and beetles away from Puskab’s laboratory.

Puskab chittered maliciously as he marched past the armoured skaven flanking the entrance to his lair. They were big black-furred bruisers, their bulks stuffed into mail that looked to have been fashioned from the chitinous plates of enormous bugs - perhaps from Blight’s vanquished deathwalker or its spawn. The guards lowered their heads and exposed their throats in a gesture of submission as the plague priest passed. Puskab wondered how much of their servility was genuine and how much was show. There was a delicate line between the roles of bodyguard and jailor.

The plague priest dismissed the question for the present. His eyes gleamed with joy as he gazed across his laboratory. Dozens of low tables had been erected, each provided with shallow trays built from the brainpans of skulls. In each tray, a sliver of rotten meat floated in a toxic cocktail of unguents and poisons combined in exact accord with the seven hundred and thirty-first psalm from the Liber Bubonicus. Only the most exalted of plague priests were granted such knowledge - any creature of lesser standing would contract Crimson Shivers from merely reading the formula.

Puskab was one of the exalted. He had brewed the solution within a thrice-cursed kettle and spoken the secret words as he stirred the mixture. Now each of the little trays with their tiny islands of festering meat would provide a breeding ground for the bacillus he had developed. The invisible vapours of the Black Plague would gather about the meat, forming mouldy patches upon its surface.

Staring out over the tables with their hundreds of trays, Puskab felt his heart flutter with delicious terror. Here, in this one room, were enough plague germs to kill every man-thing on the surface! If there were a way to distribute it evenly and quickly, the skaven could annihilate the humans in a single night.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. The Horned Rat demanded ingenuity and cleverness from his disciples, and so he had imposed a flaw upon this most divine of plagues. The Black Plague by itself couldn’t be spread. It needed a host, a creature to act as its vector.

Puskab turned away from the tables, strolling past a series of cages built into niches in the wall. Hordes of rats glared back at him with their beady eyes. The rats weren’t the plague’s vector, however. They were simply hosts for the creatures that would carry the plague. The fur of each rat was crawling with fleas of the hardiest and most fecund breed developed by Clan Verms.

In his first experiments, Puskab had been careful to use only human hosts. The fleas that infested man-things had no appetite for the blood of rodents, eliminating any chance the disease could be spread to the skaven.

What Wormlord Blight demanded, however, was something far different. He wanted to alter the Black Plague so that it could be used against other skaven. What the Lords of Decay were doing to the humans, Blight intended to do to rival clans. It was a thrilling display of the most murderous and uninhibited ambition!

Of course, Puskab was under no delusion that Blight could be trusted to honour their agreement. The army of assistants Blight had provided him were always trying to ferret out the secret of creating the plague. If Verms could gain that secret, their need for Clan Pestilens would evaporate. But the deception went farther than that. Puskab was aware that his supposed subordinates were continually sneaking insects into the laboratory, furtively testing them to see which strains could survive close proximity to the Poxmaster. It didn’t take much imagination to guess what the objective of such experiments was.

Puskab bared his fangs at the leather-robed ratmen scurrying around the tables. None of them returned his gesture. Even alone, a plague priest was too formidable a foe for such cringing coward-meat.

Puskab regretted that he had been unable to bring a small pack of plague monks with him into the Hive, but as Blight told him, a secret was best kept by one tongue. It would have made the plague priest’s position precarious to have his fellows around. It might give Blight ugly ideas about his new ally.

The plague priest’s nose twitched as the aroma of the Wormlord struck his senses. He looked towards the doorway, watching as the twisted Blight Tenscratch and his retinue of sword-rats and lickspittles came trooping into the laboratory. Blight had draped his crooked body in a billowy robe of soft cloth he claimed was woven by worms. He held a little gold sphere in his paw, its sides split by narrow vents. As he approached, the Wormlord shook the ball, disturbing the beetle trapped inside and causing it to exude a sulphurous musk.

‘The work proceeds?’ Blight inquired, whiskers quivering with anticipation.

Puskab gestured across the laboratory to the cages. ‘Much-much work still,’ he answered. ‘Horned One make-give plague to use-kill man-things.’

A low growl rattled about at the back of Blight’s throat. ‘But you can change-fix. You promise-say plague can kill-slay skaven!’

‘Need-take time,’ Puskab confessed. He turned to a little wooden box, holding it so that Blight might see the pile of curled-up fleas lying inside. ‘Need-find flea that can live-carry Black Plague.’

‘We will find the flea,’ Blight hissed. ‘If we have to stop the worm farms and turn them into flea ranches, Clan Verms will find what you need.’ A crafty look crept into the warlord’s eyes and his fangs clashed together. ‘You must change-fix,’ he told Puskab, ‘or Clan Verms will not help you against Nurglitch-traitor.’

Puskab’s black teeth showed in a menacing leer. ‘Nurglitch powerful-strong! Too strong-mighty for Clan Verms!’

Blight reacted with a squeaky laugh. Waving his paw, he motioned for part of his retinue to come forwards. First was an armoured sword-rat shoving a trembling skavenslave ahead of him. Then came a sinister white ratman holding a big iron box. Finally, a pair of lean, wiry skaven brand-ishing strange worm-oil torches with long handles and a curious metal cup to cover the paws that gripped them.

‘Watch-learn,’ Blight commanded. As he spoke, the sword-rat ran the edge of his blade across the back of the slave’s legs, hamstringing the wretched creature. As the stricken ratman collapsed, the white skaven set his box on the floor. Setting a heavy paving stone in front of the box, the white ratkin pulled a metal door upwards.

At first the motion made no sense to Puskab. The white-fur had opened the box but the stone still obscured whatever was inside. Then the plague priest’s nose registered a sharp, acidic smell. While he watched, smoke began to rise from the stone and a low sound, like the sizzle of grease dripping onto an open flame, reached his ears. Before his eyes, the centre of the stone began to melt away. Soon a dark hole yawned at the middle of the stone and a cluster of hairy black legs emerged into the light.

The thing was a spider, a huge tarantula as big as Puskab’s fist. The abomination scuttled out from the hole its venom had bored through the stone, rearing upwards on its back legs, its forelegs and pedipalps quivering in the air. The collapsed slave shrieked in terror, but his crippled legs buckled beneath him when he tried to rise. Before the ratman could crawl away, the spider lunged at him. What the spider’s acidic venom could do to flesh was enough to sicken even a plague priest.

While the tarantula was still slurping up the melted flesh of the thrashing slave, the ratmen with the torches sprang into action. Displaying an agility honed by long practice and deadly necessity, the acrobatic skaven scurried around the spider, jabbing at it with their torches. At first the mindless arachnid simply reared back, waving its forelegs at its tormentors, but soon it gave ground, recoiling from the hot breath of the torches. Using the oil-lamps like goads, the two skaven drove the spider away from its meal and back into the metal box. As soon the tarantula was inside, the white ratman slammed the door shut.

‘We have many diggerfangs,’ Blight boasted, savouring the effect his display had on Puskab. ‘They will solve problem of Nurglitch. Burrow through walls of his sanctum. Eat him alive.

‘Then Puskab Foulfur will be Arch-Plaguelord.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

Altdorf
Ulriczeit, 1111

The Courts of Justice, the Imperial Courthouse of Altdorf, was a gigantic stone fortress, crouched almost in the very shadow of the Emperor’s Palace and facing towards the Great Cathedral of Sigmar. Its grey walls were built from massive blocks of ashlar, great bartizans looming out into the wide square that Altdorfers had grimly named the Widows’ Plaza. Soldiers in the gold-chased liveries of the Palace Guard patrolled the walls of the Courthouse. Dozens of halberdiers flanked the gatehouse, their weapons kept at the ready, their faces alert and resolute. From the heights of the Tower of Altdorf, the great round bastion rising above the Courthouse, a score of archers were held in reserve, men chosen for their unerring skill with the bow.

Such were the visible guardians of the fortress. Erich knew there would be others once they were actually inside. Traps and tricks devised by Emperor Sigismund’s dwarf engineers, as well as whatever new surprises Emperor Boris and his minions had added since. Everything had been done to ensure there was no chance of escape for those languishing in the dungeons below the fortress. Erich only hoped nobody had put as much thought into people wanting to break into the Courthouse.

The young captain shifted uneasily in the black robe he wore over his armour. As a concession to speed and mobility, the knights had adopted simple suits of brigandine instead of their scale mail. Erich couldn’t shake a feeling of vulnerability with only a cuirass of boiled leather with a few plates of steel woven between its layers. Even more uncomfortable, however, were the robes that formed their disguise. Wearing the raiment of a priest of Morr wasn’t the sort of thing that cheered a man’s spirits. There was just a chance that the god of death might take offence and decide to summon the perpetrators to his realm to discuss the transgression.

Erich shifted his gaze away from the forbidding Courthouse to inspect the disguises of his comrades. Even with the black robes, he thought they looked too big to pass for Morrite priests. ‘This isn’t going to work,’ Erich grumbled.

‘Have faith in Sigmar, my son,’ admonished the man at the head of the procession, the only one who actually looked the part of a priest. That was only natural, since the man was a priest. Erich didn’t know who he was; he’d kept his face hidden in the folds of his hood and Prince Sigdan had only introduced him as ‘an ally from the clergy’. By the man’s frequent invocations of Sigmar, however, Erich guessed he didn’t belong to the temple of Morr.

The priest set his hand against Erich’s arm, tugging at the coarse cloth of his robe. ‘People see only the habit. They hold Morr and his servants in too much dread to look too closely at the man beneath the hood.’ He nodded his head emphatically. ‘That is the key we will use to set your Grand Master free.’

Erich took the priest’s suggestion and silently asked Sigmar to pour conviction into his heart. While he was at it, he snapped his fingers to invoke the luck of Ranald. On an enterprise like this, the good favour of the god of tricksters couldn’t hurt.

Five knights and a priest. It was a ridiculously small force to try to storm the Imperial Courthouse. The Bread Marchers had tried it with two hundred men and been slaughtered. The very audacity of trying it with this few men gave the captain pause. Yet it was the very impossibility of their mission that gave them their best chance of success.

Emperor Boris, in a fit of rage, had ordered Reiksmarshal Boeckenfoerde to muster the Imperial Army and move against Talabheim. The city-state had offended His Imperial Majesty by breaking off all contact with Altdorf - a precaution against the plague and risk of contamination. Incensed at the audacity of Talabheim’s grand duke, Boris had ignored his generals and his advisors, dispatching the army to forcibly reopen the Talabheim markets, despite the logistical hazards of a winter march. The Emperor’s detractors said it was the loss of tax revenue rather than Talabecland food shipments that worried the greedy Goldgather.

To muster an army big enough to lay siege to Talabheim had required employing peasant conscripts and drawing down the Altdorf garrison. In that fact lay the reason Erich hoped that once inside the Courthouse they might be able to free Baron von Schomberg. As formidable as the troops on the walls appeared, Boris’s ransacking of the garrison meant there would be far fewer guards on the inside.

The six men in the sombre robes walked towards the gatehouse. The guards posted around the portcullis drew away as the Morrite clergy came near, conversation dying away as they shifted uneasily towards the reassuring solidity of the wall behind them. A nervous-looking soldier wearing the armband of a sergeant stepped forwards to accost the approaching priests.

‘You have business within the Courthouse, father?’ the sergeant asked.

The disguised Sigmarite clergyman bowed his head and addressed the soldier in a hollow voice that was midway between a snarl and a whisper. ‘I fear we have business throughout Altdorf, brother. The Black Plague has visited many and set many souls wandering. We are kept quite busy bringing the restless spirits peace and consigning them to the grace of Morr.’

Already anxious, the sergeant’s face went a few shades paler at mention of the Black Plague and the suggestion of ghosts of victims haunting the Courthouse unless they were laid to rest. It was a combination that killed any other questions the soldier might have had. He gestured to the troops in the gatehouse above, and the portcullis began to rise. Nervously, the sergeant waved the priests forwards. The Sigmarite crossed his palms over his breast, making the sign of Morr’s raven. The knights following behind him copied the gesture as they passed the sergeant.

‘They will be keeping the Grand Master in the tower,’ Erich whispered to the priest.

‘Indeed,’ the Sigmarite said. ‘The dungeons will still be crowded with Bread Marchers. Even the plague can’t kill them fast enough to suit Commander Kreyssig.’

Erich could feel his heart pounding against his bones as the invaders entered the inner bailey and stole through the winding passages of the Courts of Justice. Everywhere plaster statues of Verena in her aspect as goddess of justice glowered down at them, her right hand raised and holding a cornucopia for the innocent, her left lowered and holding a grinning skull - death for the guilty. It was a forbidding image, one that became ever more oppressive the more often the knights encountered it. Erich’s skin crawled, an icy trickle seeping along his spine. It was as if the goddess herself glared at him from the stern visage of her statues, promising that this trespass would not go unpunished. Verena, wife of Morr; because justice often demanded death.

It took a supreme effort of will for Erich to extricate himself from the toils of the superstitious dread that held him in its grip. Fortunately they had encountered no human opposition. The guards within the Courthouse seemed just as eager to ignore the grim procession of Morrite priests as those at the gate. Not until they reached the barred entrance to the Tower of Altdorf did they encounter serious opposition. The sentry behind the gate was more attentive than his fellows, with a frustratingly keen level of discipline.

Erich quickly assumed control of the conversation when he saw that morbid platitudes weren’t going to get the door open for them. Pushing the Sigmarite aside, Erich lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

‘Commander Kreyssig sent us,’ he told the guard. ‘He wishes us to offer the prisoner the grace of Morr. I need not tell you that in order to receive that grace, he must unburden himself of sin. The commander was quite interested in hearing that confession.’

The guard behind the gate nodded in understanding, but he still had his suspicions. ‘One of you may pass,’ he said. ‘It needs only one set of ears to listen to a traitor’s words.’

Erich shared a look with his fellow knights. As soon as the gate was pulled open, he stepped across the threshold. For an instant, the guard’s attention shifted to the priests he had told to stay outside. In that moment of distraction, Erich struck, seizing the guard’s neck with one hand and the edge of the gate with the other. Savagely he brought the two together with a sickening crunch. The guard didn’t utter a sound, he just collapsed in the doorway.

The others rushed into the tower, closing the gate behind them and dragging the stunned guard behind the curve of the structure’s spiral stairway.

‘Othmar, take Josef and spike the trap leading up to the guardroom,’ Erich said, his voice falling into his accustomed tone of command. ‘The last thing we need are all of those archers walking in on us. The rest of you will look for the Grand Master. Subdue any guards, but only kill if it is absolutely necessary.’

The knights quickly separated, hurrying to the tiered levels of the tower. Such resistance as they found was quickly vanquished. Erich winced at each conflict, fearing that the sound would alert the garrison, but here the ponderous construction of the Courthouse served them well. The thick walls smothered all noise. This close to the Imperial Palace, silence was an essential. Emperor Boris found the cries of his captives disturbing.

It was Konreid who located Baron von Schomberg’s cell. Erich knew something was wrong when instead of freeing their Grand Master, Konreid came went to find his captain.

‘The Grand Master says he won’t go,’ Konreid reported, tears in the old veteran’s eyes. It was with a sad desperation that he led Erich and the Sigmarite priest to the tower room where von Schomberg was imprisoned.

The Grand Master was thin, a pale shadow of the nobleman who had led the Reiksknecht through countless battles and had dared to defy a tyrant over a matter of conscience. He lay sprawled upon a bed of straw, his only garment a threadbare linen gown. His cell stank of filth, ugly black rats scurrying about in the dark corners. A pot of brown water that looked to have been dredged from the bottom of the Reik rested on the floor beside the captive’s bed. A wooden slop bucket was the only other accoutrement. If not for the rushlight Konreid had wedged between the bars of the cell door, the Grand Master would have been consigned to complete darkness. No window marked the walls of his cell.

Erich took one look at his leader and felt a cold fury blaze up inside him. His knuckles cracked as he gripped the bars, jostling the door in its frame, testing the strength of its construction. It was solidly built, but it wasn’t going to stop him from freeing the Grand Master.

‘Stop,’ the wheezing voice of Baron von Schomberg arrested his attack on the door. ‘That will serve no purpose. You must leave me. It is important that you leave me.’

The young knight peered through the bars, wondering what delusion gripped his master. He could not imagine what tortures von Schomberg must have endured at the hands of Kreyssig’s minions.

Feeble as he was, the Grand Master was still sharp-eyed. He could read the thought he saw etched upon Erich’s face. ‘No, I am not mad. But there are bigger things to concern you than preserving my life. Boris Goldgather has become a tyrant. If he isn’t stopped, he will tear down the Empire with his greed. You must find others, gather an alliance to depose him. That is the only quest left to the Reiksknecht now!’

Erich shook his head. ‘We will do all that,’ he vowed, pressing his shoulder against the door. ‘And you will lead us,’ he grunted as he tried to force the barrier.

‘I will be more valuable to your cause as a martyr,’ von Schomberg declared. ‘I am to be beheaded in two days by Gottwald Drechsler, the Scharfrichter of Altdorf. My death is intended to make the other nobles cower in fear before Emperor Boris. You must make my death have a different meaning. You must make it a lesson that none of them are safe, that if he dares execute the Grand Master of the Reiksknecht, then he will dare even greater outrages. You must make the great and the powerful understand that they can only be safe if they rise up against this tyrant!’

‘Prince Sigdan is already with us,’ Erich told von Schomberg, trying to make his master see that his martyrdom wasn’t necessary.

‘You will need more than just the Prince of Altdorf,’ the Grand Master said.

‘They have other allies,’ the Sigmarite priest declared. Throwing back the hood of his robe, Sigdan’s nameless clergyman friend revealed the face of Arch-Lector Wolfgang Hartwich. Erich and Konreid stood in stunned silence, never suspecting that the second-most powerful man in the Sigmarite temple had been their accomplice.

Hartwich came to the door, smiling kindly at the Grand Master. ‘You see, there is no reason to make this gesture. You can help this great cause much more as a living soldier.’

A ragged cough shook von Schomberg’s frail body. ‘It is too late for that, father,’ he said. ‘That choice has been taken from me.’ Panic shone in the Grand Master’s eyes as Erich made another attempt to force the door. ‘No!’ he commanded. ‘Stay outside! Do not come near me!’ His voice dropped to a mournful whisper. ‘Death sits here beside me. The Black Plague.’

‘You… you have the illness?’ Erich asked, instinctively recoiling from the door.

Grand Master von Schomberg nodded his head sadly. ‘At first Emperor Boris wanted to save my execution for the anniversary of his accession. Now he fears I will die before the Scharfrichter can take my head with his sword.’ The prisoner’s thin hands clenched into fists. ‘But I will survive that long. I must survive that long.’

Erich turned away from the cell door, his hand reaching for the sword hidden beneath his priest’s robes. He relaxed slightly when he saw Othmar and Josef come rushing into the hallway. The troubled expressions on their faces made it clear there wasn’t any more time to debate the question.

‘The archers know something is wrong,’ Othmar reported. ‘We could hear them trying to smash open the trap. It won’t be long before one of them decides to shout down to the courtyard for help.’

The captain turned back to the cell, a bitter taste in his mouth. Snapping to attention, he saluted the sickly von Schomberg. ‘The Grand Master has decided that he can best serve our cause by remaining here,’ Erich told the other knights. Othmar looked ready to object, but the sad resignation he saw on his captain’s face made him realise there was something more, something that made rescue pointless.

‘Get the others,’ Erich ordered. ‘We can use the cellar beneath the tower to gain entrance to the dungeons.’ The other knights nodded. They had studied the floor-plans of the Courthouse carefully before setting out. The dungeons connected to an older network of catacombs, which in turn led back into the dwarf-built culverts. The underground route had been too risky to effect entrance to the tower, but with the alarm raised, there was nothing to lose using it to escape.

‘Sigmar’s strength be with you,’ von Schomberg called out to his knights as they reluctantly left him to await his doom.

‘We will not forget your sacrifice, Grand Master,’ Erich vowed.

Nuln
Ulriczeit, 1111

Gaining access to poor old Erwin’s tannery wasn’t especially hard. After the man’s murder, the place had become shunned, more for the belief that plague victims had done the crime than any fear of the crime itself. A belief was taking hold that the plague was spread by the sickly breath of the diseased. There was a chance that the sickly exhalations of the killers might be lingering in some dark corner of the building. No one wanted to take any chances.

Walther wasn’t sure if he believed the plague was spread that way. What he was sure of was that Fritz hadn’t been killed by anyman, sick or not. His killer was a monster, a rat bigger than a sheepdog, with fangs like daggers. People might laugh at him for believing in such a beast, but when he caught the giant, he would drag it out into the light of day and make his detractors eat their words.

The tannery was a filthy shambles. Housed within a boxy building with mud-brick walls and a floor that was depressed a good three feet below ground level, the tannery had acquired a thin scum of ice along much of the floor. With none to maintain the place, run-off from melting snow in the street had seeped into the building to form a crust of dirty brown frost. The big clay pots where the tanner stored the acids he used to cure hides still exuded the stench of urine despite being frozen solid. A motley confusion of half-cured goatskins and ox hides drooped from ropes suspended from the ceiling while a stinking heap against one wall denoted skins Fritz had never gotten around to.

Rats had, however. The pile of skins showed every sign of being rifled and pillaged by the vermin. Pellets littered the floor around the hides, scraggly scraps of fur and hair were strewn about. Any hint of flesh clinging to the skins had been plundered by the marauding rodents. Nor had the animals contented themselves to the meagre pickings left by the tanner. Several dozen rat carcasses were lying frozen to the floor, their skins turned inside out as their cannibalistic comrades stripped them clean. Walther had no idea how a rat managed to so utterly devour another rat. He was fairly certain he didn’t want to know.

More important than the common vermin, however, had been the spoor of the giant. Walther had spotted a few of the monster’s paw-prints in the ice and the terriers had uncovered a rat pellet as big as his own hand. It was obvious the giant had marked out the tannery as part of its range. The giant would be back to forage, and the rat-catcher would be ready for it.

A dozen box-like traps had been set up around the tannery. One thing Walther had always noticed about rats was their tendency to scurry in straight lines, keeping one flank against a wall at all times if possible. Playing upon that verminous habit, he placed his traps against the edges of the walls, far enough away from any holes or windows the giant might use to creep into the building that it wouldn’t get suspicious. Each of the traps was the product of his own design, operating upon a counterbalance that would use the giant’s own weight to trigger it. The rodent would slink into the box to retrieve the scrap of beef placed inside as bait. The increased pressure would tip the counter-balance and release the taut bowstring suspended above the box. Walther knew the design would work. He’d spent several hours adjusting the counterbalance after normal-sized rats sprang some of the traps. The bowstring had sliced the inquisitive vermin clean in half.

‘Aren’t you going to arm the rest of the traps?’ Hugo asked when Walther rejoined him in their hiding spot between the wooden vats Fritz had used to soak the hides after curing them.

The rat-catcher sighed as he climbed down between the vats. He pushed away the affectionate welcome of the terriers and explained to his apprentice for the fifth time why some of the traps weren’t armed. ‘A rat is a clever brute,’ he reminded Hugo. ‘The traps will be new to him. He’ll study them a bit when he sees them, sniff about and then play it very careful. Now, if he nips inside real quick, he might get away. So I leave the traps closest to the windows and holes baited but unarmed. That way he can get inside and treat himself to a bit of beef. It’ll make him figure the other traps are safe too. And that’ll be his last mistake.’

At first Hugo nodded, but then he began to shake his head. ‘I don’t see how this giant can get inside unless we leave the door open. The windows are too narrow and those holes you are talking about wouldn’t let Alex wiggle through.’ Hugo patted the head of one of the ratters, provoking a frenzy of tail-wagging.

Walther sighed again and explained again some of the peculiarities of a rat’s physiology. ‘A rat’s skull isn’t solid,’ he said. ‘The whole thing can dislocate, sort of collapse inwards so the vermin can squeeze into tight places. If its flattened skull can fit, then the rest of the brute will follow. I’ve seen one-pound rats crawl out of holes no wider than my thumb. Our giant has lots of options to get back in here if he has a mind to.’

The explanation seemed to sink in this time. Hugo’s eyes roved across the walls of the tannery, staring at the narrow windows and peering into the dark recesses of the holes in the plaster.

Walther left his apprentice to his vigil, turning his attention to the cold meal Zena had prepared for him. A bit of rye bread, an almost shapeless nub of cheese and a sausage that he prayed hadn’t been bought from Ostmann. Not the most lavish supper, but it was the thought that counted.

As he moved to take his first bite of the bread, Walther’s face turned upwards. His hand froze before it could reach his mouth. His eyes bugged in shock. A grim pallor spread across his skin.

Staring down at him with beady red eyes was a creature spawned from a madman’s nightmare. Squatting among the rafters, its whiskers twitching, its hideous naked tail dangling obscenely from its hindquarters, was the giant rat. The smells of the tannery must have hidden its presence from the dogs and the rat-catcher’s labour with the traps had kept his own attention focused downwards, not upwards. How long the wicked thing had been sitting up there, watching Walther and Hugo, it was impossible to say. Perhaps it had been the smell of his supper that had lured the giant from whatever hole it had been hiding in. Whatever the circumstances, Walther was getting his first glimpse of the monster he had taken it upon himself to track and trap.

Hugo’s words about needing bigger dogs came back to him as an unheeded premonition. The rat seemed to Walther’s eyes to be as big as a pony, its back arched, its fur standing out in angry bristles. Its ghastly fangs, those chisel-like teeth which had visited such horrendous damage upon Fritz, glistened in the darkness.

The traps were a joke! This brute would never fit inside one of them! With those fangs it could gnaw its way clean through even if it did get caught. The bowstring wouldn’t make a scratch on all that bristly brown fur.

Walther was about to whisper a warning to Hugo when one of the terriers, noticing the rat-catcher’s fright and following the direction of his gaze, looked up and saw the giant. A low growl rumbled from the dog’s throat.

The giant rat’s beady eyes gleamed from the shadows, its hideous fangs clashing together. Walther had half-expected the monster to flee when the dog growled at it. For a second, disappointment flickered through his heart, fear that his quarry would escape.

Disappointment evaporated as stark terror raced down the rat-catcher’s spine. The giant wasn’t scampering off. Instead it launched itself from the beam, leaping straight at the littler dog. Horror flared through Walther’s mind as the verminous body hurtled past him, its bristly hair and scaly tail brushing against his cheek. The colossal rodent struck the terrier head-first, the momentum of its leap sending both itself and the dog crashing against one of the vats, knocking it over.

A sickening yelp escaped from the little dog before its life was crushed between the rat’s snapping fangs. The monster held its victim by the neck, shaking its own head from side to side to dig its fangs deeper into the terrier’s throat. Blood sprayed from the mangled dog, steaming on the icy floor.

Without thinking, the stunned rat-catcher struck out at the marauding rat. Walther’s pole cracked against the brute’s flank. The giant didn’t even squeak in pain as it dropped the dead dog and spun around to bare its fangs at the man who had dared attack it. Blood dribbled from the giant’s whiskers, flecks of foam oozed between its sharp teeth. There was an almost calculating malevolence in the rat’s eyes as it glared up at Walther.

The rat-catcher cringed away from the monster’s gaze, his mind reeling with horror. The image of Fritz with his throat torn out, the loathsome thought of the cannibalised rats with their innards eaten away and their skins turned inside out, these came crawling through his brain like black prophets of doom.

The giant was tensing itself to leap at the paralysed rat-catcher when the brute was suddenly struck from the side. This time it cried out, an angry chirp that sounded like steel scraping against steel. Hugo jabbed at it a second time with his pole and the brute spun around, springing at the man without any warning. Hugo screamed as the giant’s weight tore the pole from his grip and the fangs stabbed into his hand.

Hugo’s scream snapped the remaining ratters from their fright. Snarling, the two dogs fell upon the giant, one seizing an ear in its jaws, the other darting in to snap at the rat’s belly. The giant ripped away from Hugo, turning on these new attackers.

While the monster was busy trying to fend off the dogs, Walther drove in upon it. A thick hunting knife in his hand, he came at the brute from behind, stabbing its back again and again, thrusting the blade deep into the vermin’s flesh. Pained squeaks streamed from the rat as blood bubbled from its wounds. A terrible frenzy came upon it, enabling it to shake free of the dogs and drive Walther away with a lash of its naked tail.

The effort came too late to do the giant any good. The rat had taken too much damage; Walther’s knife had pierced past ribs to puncture the brute’s lungs. Wheezing, panting, it hobbled a few paces, then slipped on the icy floor. The dogs were on it in an instant, tearing at its throat and avenging their fallen comrade.

Walther shook with excitement, that curious alchemy of terror and jubilation familiar to any victorious soldier. ‘We did it!’ he shouted, his voice so loud they might have heard him back in the Black Rose. ‘Get ready, Bremer! You’re going to have a heart attack when you see what I’ve brought you!’

The rat-catcher turned towards his apprentice. Hugo was sitting on the floor, hugging his arm against his side. Walther clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Did you hear! Our fortune is made!’

Hugo nodded weakly, then his face contorted in a grimace of pain. ‘Very… nice… Herr Schill,’ he muttered. ‘But… do you think… you could… get my fingers… out of its mouth…’

Middenheim
Ulriczeit, 1111

‘Your grace!’

Franz’s cry had Mandred clenching his teeth. It was bad enough that he had been unable to shake his bodyguard, but now it seemed the knight was determined to let everyone in the Westgate district know that the Prince of Middenheim was walking the streets.

Mandred pulled his wool cloak a bit closer and ducked into the closest alleyway. For a moment, he thought about ducking out the other end of the alley but then decided that Franz would only catch up to him again. Or maybe the buffoon would start asking around the neighbourhood if anybody had seen the Graf’s son prowling about.

When Franz appeared at the mouth of the alley, Mandred grabbed him by the collar and pulled him up against the wall. The knight’s hand fell to the grip of his sword, but quickly relaxed when he recognised the prince’s features beneath the brim of the battered fur cap.

‘Your grace,’ Franz said, trying to affect a stiff salute within the narrow confines of the alley.

Mandred rolled his eyes and sighed. ‘You do understand that I’m trying to go unnoticed,’ he reminded the knight.

A bewildered expression came across Franz’s stony features. ‘Of course, your grace,’ he said. ‘You made that clear when we left the palace.’

‘Then can I ask you to stop addressing me as “your grace”?’ Mandred snapped. ‘And stop bowing and saluting every time I look twice at you. We’re supposed to be ordinary peasants, nothing more.’

Franz nodded. ‘Yes, your grace.’

Mandred felt an ache growing at the back of his skull. Rumours of refugees sneaking into the city had reached the palace, accompanied by rumours that incidents of plague had started cropping up in the poorer sections of the city. Graf Gunthar had already dispatched troops to investigate the rumours, even going so far as to request Thane Hardin send some of his dwarfs down into the old Undercity to see if someone had found a way up through the tunnels. His father would put a stop to the stream of refugees once he uncovered the source. Mandred was determined to keep that from happening.

No outsider could possibly manage to sneak into Middenheim without help, a native of the city who knew how to get around the Graf’s guards. Mandred was going to find that someone. Find them and warn them before his father could step in and stop the flow of refugees.

If he could only find one of the refugees and convince them of his sympathy, then Mandred might be able to learn who was helping them. But so far he had had no luck in finding anyone who didn’t belong in the city. And the longer he looked, the greater the chance that Franz’s blundering would give his presence away.

‘Perhaps we should go and check the Pink Rat again, your grace?’ Franz suggested, licking his lips at the thought of the notorious tavern.

Mandred closed his eyes and whispered a prayer to Ulric for guidance, or at least the self-control to keep him from strangling his own bodyguard.

The prayer for patience, it seemed, went unheeded, but a cry for help came drifting down the alleyway. It was the sort of appeal Mandred would have responded to anyway, but a thrill coursed through his body as he recognised a foreign tone to the shout. He opened his eyes and stared up into the grey sky. ‘Thank you, Wolf Father,’ he said before sprinting down the alley in the direction of the shout.

‘Your grace!’ Franz called after him.

Mandred didn’t slacken his pace. The cry hadn’t been repeated. Instead it had been replaced by the crash of steel and the inarticulate snarls of fighting men. The prince drew his own sword. He might have donned a simple horsehide sheath as part of his disguise, but the sword was the same keenly balanced dwarf blade with which he fought his duels with van Cleeve.

Through the maze of alleyways and side-streets, Mandred pursued the sounds of conflict until he burst out into a little square with a stone fountain at its centre. Dilapidated timber longhouses, their tile roofs groaning beneath a heavy snowfall, bordered the square on every side. Snow was piled high against their walls, almost to the very eaves, and a thick layer of snow carpeted the ground inside the little square. At once, the prince noticed the bright crimson splotches marring the ground.

Three men were sprawled in the snow, blades and bludgeons lying beside their bodies. Four ruffians in wool breeks and rough cowhide cloaks circled a lone fighter dressed in a heavy black cloak and wielding a fat-bladed broadsword.

It took Mandred only a moment to decide which side of the fight to make his own. ‘If it takes four of you rats to fight one man, maybe you’ve taken up the wrong vocation,’ the prince shouted. The combatants turned in surprise at his cry.

‘There were six of them when they started,’ the man in the black cloak boasted, his accent clipped and guttural, the mark of a Reiklander’s voice.

‘Stay out of this!’ one of the cowhide ruffians growled. He gestured with an ugly iron bludgeon at the Reiklander and again at the third body lying in the snow. ‘This scum has brought the Black Plague into the city!’

‘So you thought you’d avoid the plague by getting into a swordfight?’ Mandred said. He smiled with cool confidence at the four thugs. ‘A fine idea. I’ll be happy to oblige anyone who thinks six against two is honourable combat.’

‘Take the meddler,’ the thug with the iron club growled at two of his companions. ‘Hans and I will finish the outlander.’

The ruffians separated into pairs. While the man with the club and a brutish thug wielding a crooked long-sword converged upon the Reiklander, Mandred found himself opposed by a scar-faced rogue gripping an axe and a wiry villain armed with a horseman’s mace. Just from the way they came at him, the prince decided that the maceman was the more experienced of the two and therefore the more dangerous. Before his foes could quite get to either side of him, Mandred lunged forwards, seeking to take the maceman by surprise.

The villain drew back, but not quite with the shock Mandred had hoped for. Instead of leaving himself defenceless, the man twisted aside from the prince’s sword and delivered a hurried swipe of his mace that glanced off the boy’s shoulder. Had it landed more squarely and with more force, the blow might have staggered Mandred and left him open to a more conclusive attack. As it was, the prince’s body was simply jostled to one side, throwing his balance off for a fleeting instant.

Even that brief interval might have been too long if the axeman had been a more competent fighter. Instead the ruffian was still trying to get his mind around Mandred’s sudden attack. The prince didn’t give the man the chance to gather his wits. With the maceman momentarily on the defensive, Mandred swung around and slashed at the other ruffian. His sword rasped through the thug’s knuckles just beneath the head of his axe. The man shrieked as blood spurted from his maimed hand and severed fingers tumbled into the snow.

‘Ranald’s teeth!’ the maceman roared, swinging his weapon at Mandred’s head. ‘You’ll pay for that, churl!’

The prince easily ducked under the swipe, bringing his sword in a downward sweep that sliced across the ruffian’s thigh. ‘You’d better flee before you really get hurt,’ he taunted the thug.

The maceman’s face contorted with rage. Snarling, he flung himself at Mandred, bringing his mace hurtling downwards with enough force to shatter the prince’s shoulder. Unfortunately, he signalled the attack a little too broadly. As his arm came rushing down, his foe was darting forwards, thrusting the point of his sword into the ruffian’s throat. The mace fell into the snow as the thug clasped his wound, trying to stop the blood gushing from a severed artery. He staggered towards the fountain, then collapsed into the frozen pool.

Mandred wiped the gore from his blade and looked over to see how the Reiklander was faring. There was a fourth body lying in the snow now, and a cowhide thug fleeing down an alleyway. Like the prince, the Reiklander was cleansing the blood from his sword with the cloak of his fallen enemy.

‘One down and one in retreat,’ the Reiklander said, nodding behind Mandred where the maimed axeman could be seen creeping along a little side-street. ‘Seems we are evenly matched, friend.’

Mandred shook his head and sheathed his sword. ‘You forget that you accounted for two before I even got here.’

A troubled frown came onto the Reiklander’s face. The tip of his boot kicked against the body the ruffians had described as a foreigner. ‘This one was mine too. Defending myself against him was what brought those jackals.’ He chuckled grimly. ‘Like any scavenger, they smelled blood.’

The prince stared down at the dead man. His clothes had a Solland cut to them and his boots were of raw wool, something rarely seen in the north. ‘Why did he attack you?’

‘He was afraid I would talk to the wrong people,’ the Reiklander answered. A sharpness came into his eyes. For the first time Mandred appreciated the fact that the foreigner still had his sword drawn. ‘He was right. I do intend to talk to the wrong people.’

Mandred stared hard at the Reiklander. He appeared to carry himself with a military bearing, not surprising in a man who had just killed four enemies by himself. The clothes he wore were rough, an assortment of furs and wool such as any peasant might cobble together to survive the winter, but the sword in his hand was clearly a blade of quality, the surface etched with elaborate scrollwork. The overall impression was that, like the prince, here was a man trying to present himself as being of a much lower station than the one he belonged to.

‘Who would the wrong people be?’ Mandred asked.

‘Anyone interested in refugees and how they are getting into the city,’ the Reiklander answered. His body grew tense beneath the black cloak, his eyes watching Mandred for the slightest flicker of hostility.

‘If I told you I was one of the wrong people, would you lower your sword?’ the prince asked. He shrugged his shoulders when the Reiklander kept his blade at the ready. ‘As you would have it, but it strikes me that you could use a friend right now.’

The Reiklander relaxed slightly. ‘You have my gratitude for helping me against these jackals, but I am afraid I must make my own way. I need to see Graf Gunthar.’

Before Mandred could react to the Reiklander’s startling statement, there was a commotion in the alleyway behind him. Sword drawn, his face distorted by panic, Franz came rushing into the square. The knight drew up short when he saw the bodies strewn about the snow. He darted a vicious look at the Reiklander who returned it in kind, then focused his attention on the prince.

‘Your grace, are you all right?’

Franz’s slip had the Reiklander blinking in shock. ‘Your grace?’ he echoed the bodyguard.

Mandred ripped the tattered hat from his head. ‘Prince Mandred of Middenheim,’ he announced.

The Reiklander snapped his heels together and bowed to the prince. ‘Sir Othmar, late of the Reiksknecht, at your service, your grace.’

‘Well met, Sir Othmar,’ Mandred said, setting aside for the moment how and why a knight from the Reiksknecht had made the journey all the way from Altdorf to Middenheim. For the moment, he was only interested in finding out who was smuggling refugees into the city. More importantly, making that discovery before Graf Gunthar.

‘Now that introductions are out of the way, perhaps we should discuss what you wanted to see my father about. And why people are trying to kill you.’

CHAPTER NINE

Altdorf
Vorhexen, 1111

Thick storm clouds rendered the sky above Altdorf almost as black as night. A conspiracy of ravens circled above the Imperial Palace, their croaks echoing through the streets of the city. Many of the superstitious city folk hid in their homes, hiding from the eyes of Morr’s corvid messengers. With the Black Plague abroad, none wanted to tempt the grim god.

Only in one place was the city alive. A great crowd had gathered in the Widows’ Plaza, nobles and peasants alike drawn to the spectacle of the Grand Master’s execution. Never in the long and renowned history of the Reiksknecht had the order suffered a charge of treason. Never had a man of such heroic reputation as Grand Master Dettleb von Schomberg been condemned to the ignoble fate of public beheading.

The crowd gathered about the Widows’ Plaza gabbled excitedly among themselves. After the frightened solitude many of them had endured for so many weeks in an effort to escape the plague, this excuse to forget caution, to ignore peril had been seized upon with a desperate recklessness. A carnival-like atmosphere was the rule, peasants and nobles alike laughing and singing. Vendors circulated among the crowd, hawking withered fruits and scabby vegetables for grotesquely inflated prices. Halflings manoeuvred wheeled pushcarts through the mob, selling roasted rats to anyone willing to place frugality ahead of prudence. Unlike the fruits and vegetables, there was no shortage of rats in Altdorf.

All around the plaza, the black-liveried soldiers of the Kaiserjaeger were out in force, halberds and crossbows at the ready. Commander Kreyssig himself stood with a small retinue of officers and guards beside the wooden platform at the centre of the square. The low born Kreyssig bore a triumphant smile as he surveyed the mass of humanity that had gathered to watch the execution. It was more than the destruction of a traitor - it was the moment of his personal triumph. By proving Baron von Schomberg a traitor, by getting the Reiksknecht disbanded and outlawed, he had created a gap in the power structure of Altdorf, a gap he and his Kaiserjaeger would quickly fill.

Still smiling, he lifted his eyes from the babbling crowd, staring towards the Imperial Palace. Beneath the circling ravens, he could see the balcony which had earned the epithet of the Traitors’ View. From here, a denizen of the palace could stare straight down into the Widows’ Plaza and observe the executions. Emperor Boris was there, resplendent in his sable robes of state, the golden crown of Sigismund the Conqueror resting snugly about his head. Kreyssig chuckled inwardly. He was glad the Emperor had turned out to watch the execution. He’d arranged to provide his Imperial Majesty with quite a show.

The crowd fell silent as the gates of the Imperial Courthouse were raised. A phalanx of soldiers emerged, flanking a small wooden cart. Crouched inside the cart, his thin arms tied behind his back, his body shivering underneath the shabby linen robe he wore, was the man everyone had turned out to see. Grand Master von Schomberg, on his way to keep his appointment with fate.

Behind the cart marched the sinister Scharfrichter, the Imperial Executioner himself, Gottwald Drechsler. Dressed in black, his head hidden beneath a leather mask, he strode through the plaza like some primordial daemon. The Sword of Justice, a monstrous claymore nearly as tall as a man, was balanced across his broad shoulders, its pommel shaped into a leering skull of silver, its blade etched with curses and maledictions to damn the soul of those who felt its bite.

Kreyssig exulted in the hush that had come upon the crowd. He could fairly smell the fear rising from them. And in Boris Goldgather’s Altdorf, fear was power. Von Schomberg would make an object lesson to the others, an example of what they could expect if they dare defy the Emperor… or Adolf Kreyssig.

Drechsler mounted the steps to the scaffold, resembling some inhuman fiend rising from the Pit. As he reached the platform, he threw off the hangman’s cloak he wore, exposing a musculature of such proportions that it would have looked more at home on an ogre. Every inch of the Scharfrichter’s chest was swollen with muscle, his every motion sent a thrill of raw power rippling down his massive arms. Cheerless black eyes stared out from the holes in Drechsler’s hood, seeming to judge every face they happened to glance at, warning them that they too might feel the bite of the executioner’s sword.

Von Schomberg had to be helped from the cart, a task delegated to two prisoners from the dungeons. The Grand Master sagged limply in their grasp, his body wracked by a fit of coughing as they carried him onto the scaffold. No priest waited upon the condemned man. After the attempted rescue, Kreyssig had forbidden anyone contact with von Schomberg.

The doomed man was half-dragged, half-guided to the wooden block at the centre of the platform. He was made to kneel before the block, to rest his head against its notched and stained surface. A leather strap was fitted over his shoulders, securing him to the block and making it impossible for him to pull away.

The Scharfrichter hefted the immense Sword of Justice, holding it overhead and circling around the scaffold so that all in the crowd could see. Then, with a savage gesture, he plunged the blade into the earth at the base of the scaffold, hurling the huge sword as though it were a boar-hunter’s javelin. The spectacle brought gasps of astonishment from the crowd, both for the display of strength exhibited and for the breach of custom. Drechsler turned his cold eyes towards where Kreyssig and his officers waited.

For an instant, a tremor of uncertainty swept through the crowd. Was the Scharfrichter refusing to carry out the execution? Hope flickered into tremulous life in the minds of those who sympathised with the Reiksknecht and what they had tried to do.

Then that hope was smothered, crushed underfoot by the inventive cruelty of a despot. From among Kreyssig’s officers, a sergeant of the Kaiser-jaeger emerged. In his hands the soldier carried a huge double-headed axe.

It was not enough to kill von Schomberg. Kreyssig intended to humiliate him, to disgrace him before the eyes of all Altdorf. Tradition was clear, the law was firm. Nobles were executed beneath the blade of a sword. Only peasants suffered the kiss of the axe. It was a distinction understood by highborn and commoner alike, an insult even the lowest serf could understand.

Taking up the axe, Drechsler circled the scaffold once more. When he finished his third circuit of the platform, he turned towards the prisoner and the wooden block. Lifting up the axe in both hands, he brought its gleaming edge flashing down. A collective gasp rose from the crowd.

Screams of horror filled the Widows’ Plaza. The axe had missed, at least in part. Its keen edge had gouged the side of von Schomberg’s neck, but had failed to decapitate him. The stricken captive thrashed about in his bindings, a ghastly gurgle issuing from his mangled throat. Blood spurted from his wound, spraying across the scaffold.

The Scharfrichter leaned back, resting his hands across the butt of the bloodied axe. For the better part of a minute he waited while his victim writhed in pain. Then he took up the axe once more, bringing it sweeping down in a murderous arc.

There would be no need for a third blow.

For a moment, silence gripped the Widows’ Plaza once more. Kreyssig grinned at the effect the deliberately botched execution had had on the crowd. They would remember this, and they would fear suffering a similarly infamous end.

Then a voice cried out, loud and clear. ‘Shame!’ the voice shouted, and the cry was taken up by others, growing into a roar of outrage. Kreyssig had overplayed his hand. The travesty he had made of von Schomberg’s execution had incensed, not cowed, the crowd. The Kaiserjaeger struggled to contain the furious mob. Bricks and stones clattered about the scaffold as the enraged people of Altdorf tried to avenge the hideous death of a martyr.

Under the barrage, Kreyssig withdrew into the protection afforded by the thick walls of the Courthouse, the Scharfrichter and the officers of his Kaiserjaeger following close behind him. Before he withdrew into the gatehouse, however, the commander looked back at the Imperial Palace. Horrified anger flared through his heart. There was no one standing on the Traitors’ View. Emperor Boris had retreated back into the palace, distancing himself from Kreyssig and his misfired attempt to terrorise the people of Altdorf into submission.

Adolf Kreyssig could see all he had worked for slipping through his fingers. He would get it back. Whoever he had to denounce, whoever he had to imprison or execute, he would get it all back.

Bylorhof
Ulriczeit, 1111

The sepulchral silence of the temple of Morr was broken only by the sputter of a peat-moss lamp. Black shadows stretched across the marble-walled mortuary, throwing the fluted columns into sinister relief. The ebon statue of a raven peered down from its perch above the gateway connecting the chamber to the sanctuary itself, its beak open in a soundless cry. Darkened alcoves gaped in the walls, urns of incense smouldering in niches built into their sides, fighting a losing battle against the reek of death rising from the corpses stacked within.

The mortuary was filled beyond capacity. Even with the full complement of priests the temple normally possessed there would have been no way to keep pace with the decimation wrought by the Black Plague. By himself, Frederick van Hal was overwhelmed. In his blacker moods, he could almost be thankful for the slow slide back into heathenism many of the Sylvanians had abandoned themselves to. If not for the bodies dumped into the marsh, the dead would be piled not only in the niches, but everywhere in the mortuary and out in the sanctuary itself. There was simply too much work for one man, however much he pushed himself.

At the moment, however, Frederick wasn’t concerned with the dead townspeople lying in the niches, awaiting the rites that would commend them to the keeping of Morr. He wasn’t concerned with the dozens of newly dead the corpse collectors would bring him in the morning. He was concerned only with the piteous figure stretched out upon the stone table at the centre of the mortuary, its long blonde tresses fanned out around its still-beautiful face.

By custom and stricture, he should never have brought Aysha here. A suicide was a damned soul, a thing cursed by Morr and abandoned to the infernal hells of his murderous brother Khaine. The Sylvanians believed that the flesh of a suicide attracted ghouls from their forest lairs. The proper thing to do was to bury such a wretch in the middle of a crossroads, a great stone stuffed in the corpse’s mouth and the bones of its legs broken with a spade.

Frederick cared neither for custom or stricture. This was Aysha, his sister by marriage, a woman who, if he had remained in Marienburg, might have been even more to him. He was willing to commit sacrilege for her, to spare her anguished spirit the indignity of a nameless grave. For her, he was willing to do even more.

The priest looked over at the black candles laid out around the body. It had taken him most of the day to make those candles, a labour that still made his gut churn with disgust. He glanced over at the darkened niches, picturing the mutilated bodies hidden in the darkness. It was blasphemy for a priest of Morr to do such a thing, but the books of Arisztid Olt had been adamant regarding the corpse-candles and their necessity to the ritual.

Frederick stepped away from the table, slapping his hands together in nervous agitation. He had long studied the tomes of Olt’s secret library, studied them when he should have consigned them to the flames. Until now, he had never been tempted to exploit that occult knowledge. He had considered the esoteric secrets with the detached appreciation of a scholar. He had never intended to put such obscenities into practice.

It was heresy for a priest of Morr to even contemplate what Frederick was doing. If they hadn’t been taken by the plague, the Black Guard would have executed him for even thinking about such a thing. The servants of Morr had a connection to death and the world beyond the mortal plane, but the magic Frederick thought to invoke was something else entirely. It wasn’t part of death, but a blasphemous attack upon it. It wasn’t a connection to the world beyond, but rather a violent assault upon the gateway between planes.

With a moan of despair, Frederick rounded upon the table. His arm was raised to sweep the candles to the floor, to turn away from this heresy before he committed the ultimate sacrilege. But his eyes focused upon the pretty features of Aysha. Conviction faltered and temptation flooded into his heart. Instead of dashing the candles to the floor, he took a rushlight and ignited the hempen wicks. One by one, the corpse-candles sputtered into stagnant life, their eerie blue flame seeming to increase rather than lessen the darkness of the mortuary.

The priest circled to the foot of the table, staring up at Aysha’s shrouded form. He placed the edge of a stone knife against his palm, cutting deep into the flesh, gritting his teeth against the pain. With his own blood, he drew a symbol upon the floor, tracing from memory the ancient Nehekharan hieroglyphs. From a wicker cage, he retrieved a red-breasted wren. Sacred to Taal, killing a wren was an affront against the gods of nature. Frederick paused only a moment, then snapped the bird’s neck, tossing the pathetic body to the rats creeping among the corpses.

Frederick could feel the mortuary growing colder, a chill that was somehow more profound than the mere bite of winter. It was a chill that seeped down into the soul itself, the clammy clutch of dark magic and Old Night. He could almost see fingers of darkness reaching through the shadows, drawn to his rites of blasphemy and horror. He hesitated as he stared down at the last object required by Olt’s spell. The priest gagged at the thought of what he must do. Only the thought that he had come too far to hesitate now steeled him for the perversion. In one swift motion, he scooped up the gelid bit of flesh, trying not to visualise the empty socket from whence it had come, and popped it into his mouth. His body rebelled as he swallowed the abomination; he clamped his bleeding palm across his mouth and forced the sickness back down.

At once, the darkness came rushing in. Frederick could feel it pawing at his robes, slithering against his skin. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled and his face felt as though it had been plunged into the maw of an ice troll.

Frederick shook himself from the sensations crawling across his body, from the frozen talons clawing at his soul. He stared again at Aysha and from his lips streamed the harsh notes of an ancient tongue, the language of vanquished Khemri whose streets were dust a thousand years before the birth of Sigmar.

The peat-lamp sputtered and died, leaving only the blue flames of the corpse-candles and the sickly light of Morrslieb streaming through the mortuary’s single window to illuminate the room. Frederick’s flesh turned to ice as the eldritch emanations summoned by his spell came rushing in. Rustles and squeaks heralded the fright of rats as they scurried away from the fell energies summoned by the priest.

A cold glow suffused Aysha’s corpse. From her pursed lips, a smoke-like wisp began to rise. Seeping into the atmosphere like an uncoiling snake, the glowing mist assumed the rough semblance of shoulders and head, the faint echo of limbs and torso. Only the most fevered, deluded imagination could have said the ghost bore the slightest resemblance to the woman it had been. It was a thing of shadows and reflections, a memory and nothing more.

Frederick smiled as he looked into the face of Aysha. Forgotten was the horror and blasphemy. All that mattered was her presence and the chance to speak to her one last time.

‘Aysha,’ the priest whispered. The wisp shifted slightly as the name was spoken.

A thin, rattling voice, like the scratch of talons against glass, hissed through the room. ‘There are doors that must not be opened,’ the phantom words took shape in Frederick’s mind. ‘Powers that must not be invoked. Beware of calling that which you cannot dismiss.’

Frederick stared into the ghostly visage, doubt flickering through his heart. The enormity of this sacrilege pressed against him, squeezing him like the grip of a python, crushing the breath from his lungs. For any man to draw upon this unholy magic was crime enough, but how much worse was it for him, a priest of Morr, a man dedicated to the sanctity of the grave?

‘There are sympathies of spirit and mentality that must never be made,’ the ghost warned. ‘Do you wield the Power or does it wield you?’

Frederick closed his eyes, refusing to accept the spectre’s warnings. He knew what he was doing. It was evil, abominable, but it would only be this once. He would never draw upon this magic again. He would have no use for it. Just this one time, this once so he might speak to Aysha one last time. Just this once so when his time came, his soul might find peace.

The priest opened his eyes again, gazing into the cold wispy image of Aysha. Grimly, Frederick exerted his will over the ghost, forcing its doleful tidings to subside.

‘Why have you called me?’ the apparition demanded.

Frederick leaned against the table, remembering only at the last moment Olt’s precaution about not stepping out from among the symbols he had drawn upon the floor. ‘I had to see you, had to speak to you. I had to let you know.’

‘There is nothing to be said to the dead,’ the ghost admonished.

‘I had to let you know what I felt,’ Frederick persisted. ‘I had to tell you I have never stopped loving you. I know you had to marry Rutger, I know it was the right thing for you. I have never begrudged that decision and I have always been indebted to him for what he did. Both for you and for me.’ The priest turned his face towards the sanctuary. ‘I have placed Johan in the mausoleum of the templars, the most sacred place in the garden. He will be at peace there. Your body will rest there as well. I won’t let them take you away.’

The wisp shifted once more, at once seeming to swell and diminish. ‘You should not have called me. Johan and Rudi are waiting. They beckon to me. You should let me go to them.’

Frederick shook his head, tears in his eyes. ‘Every time I saw you, every time I saw Johan, I thought of what could have been. I like to think that I could have made you happy. I want to think I would have been a good father to Johan.’

‘He belongs to Rudi,’ the ghost spoke. ‘He is waiting with his father. You must let me go.’

The priest slumped away from the table, the magnitude of the ghost’s statement twisting in his gut like a knife. All these years, he had believed Johan to be his own. He had never dared speak of the matter with Rutger, had never pressed the point with Aysha. He had always believed it was for the best if Johan never knew. It had been a privation of the soul, to look on in silence, but his quiet suffering had given Frederick the strength to go on. Now that his pain was revealed to be a lie, all that was left was a terrible emptiness.

Through the melancholy of his mind, an alarm began to flash. Frederick stared hard at the ghost’s formless face. It was the second time she had spoken of Rutger waiting for her. But his brother was alive. He couldn’t be waiting…

‘Why do you speak of Rutger as one of the dead?’ Frederick demanded, horrified anger contorting his face. ‘My brother is alive! He is alive!’

‘Rudi waits for me with Johan. They beckon to me.’

Terror filled Frederick’s heart. He had left Rutger only the night before, when his brother had helped him bring the bodies to the temple. It was impossible that the plague had struck the merchant down in so short a time. Rutger was all the family he had left now.

‘How is it that my brother waits in the realm of Morr?’ Frederick demanded.

The wisp wavered. For an instant the eyes of Aysha gleamed from the flickering shape, imploring the priest to relent. Frederick squeezed his hand into a fist, sending more of his blood dribbling to the floor, strengthening the black magic he had evoked.

‘Rudi went to seek justice for our son,’ the ghost answered. ‘Havemann was ready for him.’

Frederick’s body sagged as the ghost’s words pressed upon him. The corpse-candles sputtered and died. As they winked out one by one, the ghostly wisp drained back into the body laid out upon the table.

‘The line has been crossed,’ the spectral voice whispered. ‘Sympathies of spirit and mentality have flung open the gate that can never be closed again.’

The priest didn’t even notice the apparition’s retreat. He was thinking of his brother.

And the man who had murdered him.

Middenheim
Ulriczeit, 1111

Night once more cast its sinister pall over the roof of the Ulricsberg, the clean light of Mannslieb warring against the ugly glow of Morrslieb for domination. The watchfires upon the walls of Middenheim stood stark against the black sky, clearly marking the locations of gatehouses and guardtowers. Smaller lights, flickering as they passed behind the battlements, revealed the lanterns of patrolling sentries.

From the Graf’s private hunting preserve, the little garden forest called the Ostwald, Mandred studied the revolving patrols. The prince crouched beneath the boughs of a snow-covered fir tree, waiting for the token Othmar had described, the beckon that would summon the smugglers to the wall.

‘You said we were going to get more men,’ Othmar whispered at the boy’s ear. Unlike Franz, the Reiklander was managing to refrain from invoking Mandred’s title. The fact that the prince had stubbornly refused to inform his father of this venture had grated against the knight’s sense of duty and it was hard for him to keep a touch of resentment out of his voice.

‘We aren’t sure they’re going to be there,’ Mandred whispered back. ‘We can get help later if we need it.’

Franz rubbed his calloused hand across his bald head, sweeping away the snow that had settled on his scalp. Anything touching his head made the knight uncomfortable - snow, rain, hats, even his own hair had been sacrificed to his sensitivity. At moments of stress or when his mind was anxious, that was when his scalp was at its most irritable.

‘I don’t like this, your grace,’ Franz coughed. ‘It might be wiser to tell the Graf what is going on.’

Mandred shot his bodyguard a stern look. It was enough of an irritation to have the Reiklander questioning his plan; he didn’t need one of his own subjects voicing doubts.

The prince was about to call Franz to task when a sudden change in the pattern of the lantern on the wall above the Sudgarten drew his attention. Instead of continuing along the regular route, the light suddenly came to a stop. Up and down it rose as the sentry holding it signalled to someone in the city below. The gesture was repeated thrice, then the light went out. If someone didn’t know what they were looking for, there was little chance of noticing the irregularity.

‘Looks like your friends will be heading for the wall,’ Mandred told Othmar. ‘You said they used ladders to climb up to the battlements?’

The Reiklander nodded. ‘That is how they brought us down from the wall,’ he said. ‘It stands to reason that would be how they got up there.’

Mandred stepped out from the cover of the fir, knocking snow from its branches. ‘Let’s see if the ladders are there. Then I’ll know better how to proceed.’ The look Othmar gave him made it plain to the prince that he still thought the Graf should be informed and more men sent to deal with the smugglers. Mandred felt a twinge of regret that he had to deceive the knight. In the little time he had known Othmar, he had been impressed by the man’s integrity. He rationalised the deceit by reminding himself that there were bigger things at risk than a single knight’s pride. The lives of countless unfortunates down in the shantytown were what was really at stake.

The three men crept through the garden forest, picking their way into the hedgerows and flower beds of the Sudgarten. Vast swathes of the park had already been ripped apart, cleared of trees and shrubs, getting the ground ready for the plough once the spring thaw came. The torn-up earth made Mandred think of a battlefield, the piled dirt evoking images of earthworks, the deep furrows resembling jagged trenches. It was a resemblance that made the prince uneasy. Middenheim was his home. The thought that war might soon be battering at its gates was not a pleasant one.

The bells were tolling in the temple of Shallya, the closest of Middenheim’s temples to the Sudgarten. There were no priestesses left in the temple; they had all taken Graf Gunthar at his word and left the city to tend the sick down in the shantytown. Only a single deacon had remained behind to maintain the temple and ring the bell, to remind the people of Middenheim that even without her priestesses, the goddess was still with them.

Such was the clamour of the bells that Mandred didn’t hear Othmar when the knight called to him. The Reiklander had to grab his arm to get his attention. He followed Othmar’s hand as the knight gestured towards the wall. As he had promised, a pair of tall ladders were leaning against the barrier. They were peculiar looking constructions, made of a soft white pine and with strangely spaced rungs. It took Mandred a few moments to realise what they were - trellises from the ruined park. The smugglers had scavenged them from the debris and lashed them together with ropes to create their ladders. It was an ingenious idea. When they were finished they could simply cut the trellises from one another and dump them back with the other debris from the park. No need to worry about dragging the things to and fro, the trellises would be waiting for them on the junk pile the next time they were needed.

‘Now we tell the Graf, your grace?’ Franz asked, anxiety in his voice, one hand rubbing his head.

‘Now we go up there and see who it is,’ Mandred said, still trying to play for time. He turned a commanding gaze upon each of the knights. ‘If we send for help and they don’t come in time, at least we will know what these smugglers look like.’

‘There were seven of them when I was brought up the cliff,’ Othmar reminded the prince. ‘And you’ll have to take into account the sentries they’ve bribed.’

‘We’re just going to have a look,’ Mandred promised. ‘They don’t even have to know we’re there.’ He felt guilty lying to these men, but he didn’t have time to make them see his point of view. Mandred’s motives were pure, but he knew from past experience that some men were too cynical to believe in simple humanity.

Franz led the way to the ladders, Mandred’s one concession to his bodyguard’s incessant demands for caution. The prince followed close behind, with Othmar climbing up the second ladder. The Reiklander had described in some detail the arduous climb, made all the more difficult by the irregular spacing of the rungs. Even so, Mandred found himself panting by the time they reached the top of the wall.

No light shone upon this section of the battlements. The bribed sentries had doused their lantern, leaving the smugglers to work by the light of the moons. This, it seemed, was more than sufficient. Mandred could see where a crude windlass had been constructed, thick ropes uncoiling from it to drop down over the side of the wall. Somewhere below in the darkness would be the basket Othmar had described, perhaps even now bringing another clutch of refugees over the cliffs.

Three men dressed in a motley assortment of furs attended the windlass, grunting with effort as they gradually brought the ropes winding back around the timber spool. Two soldiers in the livery of Wallwardens watched the operation, worry etched upon their faces. Another pair of men in cloaks paced back and forth, their every move betraying an attitude of wary vigilance.

There were two other men present. Like the sentries, they seemed intent upon watching the smugglers working the windlass. One was a broad-shouldered, stoutly built man, his head covered by a bearskin hood. There was an unmistakable air of authority about him; even without Othmar’s description, Mandred would have marked the man as the chief of these smugglers.

The chief’s companion was a little fellow, wiry and nervous, his scrawny body covered from head to toe in a ragged robe of dyed wool. He capered about the chief, seemingly unable to keep still, his head twitching from side to side beneath the folds of his hood. Mandred took an instant dislike to the little man, finding his every gesture somehow disturbing and repulsive.

‘We should get your father now,’ Othmar whispered.

Mandred glanced aside at the knight. Now was the time to act. He would have only one chance to show his companions how wrong they were. He only hoped they would give him the opportunity to make them understand. ‘Follow my lead,’ the boy told the two knights. Before either of them could react, Mandred strode boldly towards the smugglers, his hands open at his sides.

‘Peace,’ he called out as the two smugglers detailed as lookouts spotted him and came running forwards. Mandred noticed that each of the men had a sword in his hand. ‘I am not here to interfere.’

The prince’s appearance drew the attention of the chief smuggler. The broad-shouldered man turned away from his observation of the windlass. His face lost in the shadows of his hood, the fur-cloaked man marched forwards. The bribed soldiers and the little man in the wool robe followed behind him.

‘That is a good way to get your gizzard slit,’ Neumann’s oily voice intoned. ‘You shouldn’t scare people in the dark.’

‘People who are doing things the Graf doesn’t like, don’t do them in the light of day,’ Mandred countered, fixing his face in a companionable smile. A perplexed look came upon the face of one of the soldiers when he heard the prince speak, the look of a man who has recognised something but can’t quite place it. Mandred knew he had to convince the smugglers of his sincerity before the soldier remembered where he had heard his voice before.

‘I have heard about your operation,’ Mandred continued. ‘I wanted to see if I could help.’

Neumann chuckled as he heard the offer. There was an unpleasant cruelty in that laugh. The smuggler raised a gloved hand, gesturing behind Mandred, pointing a finger straight at Othmar. ‘That man led you here,’ Neumann grumbled. ‘I cannot abide indiscreet people.’

‘I asked him to bring me here,’ Mandred said, hoping to divert Neumann’s attention. ‘If not for him, you might be talking to the Graf’s men instead of me.’

The statement was a mistake. It seemed to jog the memory of the perplexed Wallwarden. ‘Prince Mandred!’ he exclaimed.

The two smugglers who had been closing on Mandred backed away in alarm, but Neumann only laughed. It was a low, evil mockery. ‘The prince,’ he hissed. ‘And he wants to help us.’

The soldier who had identified Mandred rushed to Neumann’s side, clutching at the smuggler’s arm. ‘That is the prince!’ he repeated. ‘You wouldn’t harm his grace!’

Neuman swung around, a dagger springing into his hand. ‘Watch me,’ he snarled, stabbing the blade into the soldier’s body with such force that it tore through the mail links and buried itself in his ribs. The dying soldier’s fingers tightened in the folds of Neumann’s cloak, dragging it from the smuggler’s body as he slumped against the battlements.

Mandred’s eyes went wide with horror as the smuggler’s face stood exposed. Neumann’s head was an oozing mass of sores and scabs, wormy strands of black hair scattered in patches across his scalp. A mouth, fat and puckered like that of a fish, drooled from the man’s right temple, its greasy slobber draining into the atrophied stump of an ear. The face itself was leprous and swollen with rot, jaundiced eyes staring piggishly from folds of dead skin. A pair of rotten teeth, like the fangs of a snake, gleamed from a lipless mouth.

‘With you as hostage,’ Neumann growled, wiping the soldier’s blood from his dagger, ‘the Graf won’t lift a finger against us.’ The mutant’s eyes glowed from his decayed face as evil thoughts swirled inside his skull. ‘If he does, then the Prince of Middenheim will make a fine sacrifice to Grandfather Nurgle!’

Mandred’s gorge rose as he heard the forbidden name of the Plague God uttered, feeling the sound burn inside his nose. The horrible truth dawned upon him. These men weren’t mere smugglers, they were servants of the Ruinous Powers! The realisation was like a physical blow, all of his ideals and noble intentions withering before the baleful eye of the Plague God.

Had his father been right? Could only evil come from helping the refugees? Was compassion the weakness these diseased cultists had been waiting to exploit?

‘Defend yourself, your grace!’

In his shock, Mandred wasn’t even aware that one of the cultists was rushing him. Left on his own, he would have been too late to stop the man’s descending sword. The blade seemed to chop down at him in slow motion, his eyes able to pick out every nick and notch in the corroded steel.

Then Franz was there, his sword crunching into the cultist’s shoulder, dragging away both the enemy’s sword and the arm that held it. The smuggler wheeled away, whimpering as thick gouts of blood spurted from his maimed body. Out of the corner of his eyes, Mandred could see Othmar fighting the other lookout, his training and skill quickly putting the cultist on the defensive. Even the surviving Wallwarden was taking a hand, flinging himself at Neumann and backing the chief cultist towards the edge of the wall.

A twitchy blur scrambled across the flagstones, ripping at Franz as the bald knight made to finish his enemy. He cried out in agony as a pair of crooked knives slashed through his legs. He crashed to the ground, rolling in pain, his sword thrusting uselessly at the wool-robed cultist. A shrill, hideous titter sounded from the villain as he darted in and stabbed one of his knives into Franz’s knee.

‘Get away from him, you scum!’ Mandred roared. Sword in hand, he rushed at the slinking killer. The cultist sprang away at the sound of his voice, displaying an unbelievable agility and speed. Mandred chided himself for shouting. If he’d kept quiet he might have taken the fiend by surprise.

The prince had no time to think about his mistake. With a snarl, the wiry cultist leapt at him, whipping the wool cloak from his shoulders as he did so. Mandred was forced to duck the flying garment, then hurriedly brought his sword whipping up to block a descending knife. The other knife glanced across his side, catching in the heavy furs the prince wore.

Mandred barely noticed the pain of the cut along his ribs. For the second time, the boy was horrified by the shape hidden beneath a cultist’s robes. The thing attacking him was utterly inhuman, more beast than man, and the most debased fusion of the two he had ever seen. Its face was pulled into a long, verminous snout, its hands were claw-tipped paws and its body was covered in mangy brown fur. The creature resembled nothing so much as an enormous rat.

The beastman gnashed its yellow fangs at Mandred, then jabbed its knife at his side once more. The prince twisted away from the stabbing blade, his free hand closing about the furry wrist. He felt his flesh crawl with revulsion at the contact. Utter disgust welled up inside him, overwhelming the careful discipline that had been drilled into him for years by instructors like van Cleeve. Howling, the prince brought his boot kicking up into the beastman’s lean body. Its paw held in the prince’s unyielding grip, the rat-creature could only partially twist away, taking the heavy boot against its leg instead of its belly.

The thing squeaked in pain, its scaly tail lashing out at Mandred as it tried to flee. The prince’s sword came chopping down, severing the tip of the loathsome appendage. The smell of its own blood seemed to drive the beastman berserk. Chittering malignantly, the monster lunged at Mandred, knocking him onto his back with the snarling rodent sprawled across his chest.

Mandred saw the creature’s arm twist, trying to bring its other knife into play. Pressing his boots against the flagstones, the prince pushed himself over, rolling onto his side and bearing the beastman with him. The creature squealed in panic as its hand was caught beneath the weight of both their bodies, the knife dropping from its numbed claws.

The panicked thrashings of the monster propelled both of them towards the crenellations looking out over the cliff. Mandred struggled to free himself from the monster’s tenacious grip, its scrabbling claws trying to tear through his tunic. The prince screamed in pain as the rat-creature’s snapping fangs sheared through the lobe of his ear.

Blood was streaming down the side of his face when the prince and his enemy at last crashed against the stone crenellation. Pressing his body against the solid stone, Mandred used it to gain extra leverage against his enemy. With his body anchored against the battlement, he heaved upwards with all his strength. For all its savage fury and ghastly speed, the rat-creature was sparsely built and weighed much less than a real man. Mandred’s brawn broke the thing’s hold, pitching it outwards between the crenellations. He saw its paws scratch desperately at the masonry as it hurtled head-first out into empty space. A shrill squeak of terror receded into the distance as the monstrosity fell towards the foot of the Ulricsberg.

Mandred’s shaking hand pressed against the crenellation, using it to support himself as he regained his feet. He stared across the fortification, the flagstones splotched in black beneath the moonlight. All of the cultists were either dead or had fled into the night. All except for the burly Neumann. The chief cultist had ended the valiant effort of the guard who had turned against him, but not before the soldier had crippled one of the mutant’s arms. Now he was looking for a way to get past Othmar’s flashing sword, finding the effort easier in concept than execution. Every time the cultist tried to circle past the knight, Othmar would press him back with a sweep of his blade. Gradually, Neumann was being pushed back towards the battlements.

Mandred reached down to the bloodied ground, retrieving the discarded halberd of one of the soldiers. He shifted towards Neumann’s flank, cutting off all possible chance of escape.

The mutant turned his deformed head, a sneer twisting his lipless mouth. Neumann gestured with his bloodied dagger at the windlass and the ropes hanging over the side of the wall. ‘There are people in that basket down there, just waiting to be pulled the rest of the way up. Innocent people, like this indiscreet Reiklander.’

Mandred’s blood went cold as he saw the cunning gleam in the cultist’s eyes. Neumann was much closer to the windlass than anyone. One quick slash of the knife and he could send the basket crashing down the side of the Ulricsberg.

‘We’ll let you go,’ Mandred said. He stared hard at Othmar. ‘You understand? This… man is to go unharmed.’

The evil chuckle again bubbled from Neumann’s lipless mouth. ‘It is charming that you expect me to trust you.’ His eyes narrowed with malicious spite. ‘And utterly moronic that you would trust me.’

Before Mandred could even start to move, Neumann raked the edge of his dagger across the windlass, breaking the pin which restrained it. Faint screams rose from below as the unwinding ropes, free and unfettered, sent the basket crashing to the ground.

‘Bastard!’ Mandred snarled, charging at the gloating mutant. The cultist’s body shuddered as the prince impaled him upon the spiked tip of the halberd. Hissing his defiance, Neumann tried to slash at the boy’s face with the dagger, only the length of the halberd preventing his blow from landing. Before he could rear up for a second try, Othmar’s sword hewed through the mutant’s arm, sending both it and the dagger clattering across the battlements.

‘You are all doomed,’ the dying mutant chortled as he wilted against the flagstones. ‘You can’t even surrender. Because they’ve already won.’

Mandred pressed the halberd deeper into the cultist’s body, sending a gout of blood bubbling from his mouth. The malicious light in Neumann’s eyes slowly faded. The prince looked up as Othmar came beside him.

‘Now can we see the Graf?’ the knight asked.

CHAPTER TEN

Altdorf
Vorhexen, 1111

Rats scurried through the rafters of the old warehouse while snow drifted down through holes in the roof. The bite of winter whistled through gaps in the walls, stirring up the thick layers of dust which lay everywhere.

The building had been shabby and poorly maintained even before its abandonment, owned by a Drakwald baron with a penchant for mercantile pursuits far beyond his finances. Since the ruination of Drakwald and the evanishment of the baron, the warehouse had been left to its own, quietly decaying into the riverfront. Even before the plague, Altdorf’s dispossessed had shunned the place, seeking less dilapidated environs in which to ensconce themselves. Since the onset of the Black Plague, there were too many houses and manors devoid of tenants for anyone to look twice at a crumbling ruin.

Its very ignominy made the warehouse the perfect setting for a midnight rendezvous. Never had the riverfront played host to such an assemblage as now congregated under the tattered tile roof of the old warehouse.

For the best part of an hour, a cross-section of the Empire’s lords and leaders had been discussing questions of loyalty and tyranny, of honour and conscience, of survival and destruction. Captain Erich von Kranzbeuhler, much as he had at that long ago meeting in Prince Sigdan’s castle, maintained a cautious silence, content to listen and observe.

The ghastly execution of Grand Master von Schomberg had backfired upon Emperor Boris and his scheming confederates. Instead of subjugating dissent through terror they had created a martyr, a rallying point for the many enemies of Boris Goldgather and his grasping policies. Despite the plague and the chill of winter, demonstrations against the Emperor had popped up in every quarter of the city. Walls throughout Altdorf had been marked up with the image of the Imperial eagle, a noose wrapped about its neck. An armed mob had even broken into the residence of Lord Ratimir, forcing the minister to flee and seek protection within the walls of the Imperial Palace.

As Erich looked across the desolate warehouse, his spirit thrilled at the great men who had joined their destinies to the cause of justice. The cadaverous Palatine Mihail Kretzulescu of Sylvania standing beside Baron von Klauswitz of Stirland, the animosities of their homelands set aside in this moment of mutual crisis. Baron Thornig of Middenheim and his daughter the Princess Erna. Duke Konrad Aldrech and Count van Sauckelhof, lords of lands reduced to ruins by the politicking and opportunism of their Emperor. Even the diminutive Chief Elder Aldo Broadfellow, representing the halfling dominion of the Moot, was present. The halflings owed their independence to the old emperor, but that debt hadn’t made them blind to the outrages of their benefactor’s son.

Beside the noble lords and dignitaries of distant lands, the Arch-Lector Wolfgang Hartwich was present. With him, the Sigmarite priest had brought several commoners, representatives of the peasant trade guilds and men from Wilhelm Engel’s scattered Bread Marchers. Sentiment against Emperor Boris wasn’t confined to the noble classes, and as Hartwich had stressed, any effort to overthrow the Emperor would need to be a popular revolt, not something seen as being imposed upon the people by a clique of ambitious aristocrats.

‘Then we are all of one accord,’ Prince Sigdan announced, his eyes roving from one face to another. ‘We have decided that Boris Goldgather is unfit to bear the title of emperor. His overthrow is essential to the continued survival of the Empire. We have decided that action must be taken against him and those loyal to him.’

Count van Sauckelhof shifted uneasily, his face growing pale. ‘It must be clear that we will act only if there is no way to constrain the Emperor. If we could force him to accede to our demands in a way that would compel him to relinquish some of his authority…’

‘A tyrant isn’t to be trusted,’ snarled Meisel, one of Engel’s Bread Marchers. His hard gaze bored into van Sauckelhof’s frightened eyes. ‘You don’t appease a snake, you crush its head. If that sits ill with you blue-bloods, then leave the dirty work to those of us without title and position to protect.’

The dienstmann’s harsh words brought cries of protest from several of the noblemen. ‘This is unacceptable!’ growled Baron von Klauswitz. ‘I will support any move to depose the Emperor, but I will not lend my name to regicide!’

‘Your stomach for treason has its limits,’ scoffed Mihail Kretzulescu, clearly siding with Meisel’s position.

Hartwich stepped forwards, waving down the tempers threatening to flare up. ‘Assassination is not being discussed here. It is the preservation of the Empire, not the murder of the Emperor. Boris Hohenbach must be compelled to abdicate, but his person must not be harmed. You may count on the support of the Grand Theogonist, but only if it is understood that the Emperor’s person is inviolate. The Temple of Sigmar cannot be an accomplice to murder.’

‘It seems to me that the temple isn’t doing much at all,’ Duke Konrad complained. ‘You tell us the Grand Theogonist will ratify Prince Sigdan as steward once Boris Goldgather abdicates, but what is the temple willing to do for us now, while we are struggling to make that event a reality?’

Hartwich shook his head sadly. ‘All we can do is pray,’ he answered. ‘If the temple is seen to stand with a conspiracy against the Emperor, the followers of other gods may rally to Boris Hohenbach.’ His eyes darted to Baron Thornig and his daughter. ‘The cult of Ulric harbours resentment against the temple of Sigmar. That resentment might cause them to support Boris if the Grand Theogonist were to be seen as the instigator of his deposing. You must be seen as liberators, not usurpers, if the Empire is to be preserved.’

Baron Thornig’s face wore a scowl, but the Middenheimer conceded the validity of Hartwich’s concern. ‘In Middenland, we hold that the Sigmarite faith is, at best, a beneficent heresy. Many of my countrymen hold even harsher opinions. There is no love of Boris Goldgather in Middenheim, but if Ar-Ulric thinks this uprising is an effort by the Sigmarites to impose a theocracy upon the Empire, he will denounce us. That would force Graf Gunthar to join forces with Boris.’ The ambassador from Middenheim ran his hand through his beard, eyes half-lidded as he contemplated the politics in the City of the White Wolf. ‘We should dispatch a messenger to Graf Gunthar’s court,’ he suggested. ‘The sooner Middenheim can be informed of what we plan, the greater Graf Gunthar’s involvement, the more legitimacy Prince Sigdan will possess as steward.’

Erich stepped forwards, bowing to the assembled lords. ‘Your absence would be noticed, baron,’ he stated. ‘It would be more prudent to send one of my Reiksknecht on this mission. My knights can be trusted with any confidence and will let no obstacle stand in their way.’

‘A sound suggestion,’ Prince Sigdan approved. ‘If I may expand upon it, I say we send messengers not only to Graf Gunthar, but to each of the neighbouring provinces. Count Artur has left Altdorf to return to his own lands.’

‘That could mean either Nuln or Wissenburg,’ Hartwich pointed out. As both Count of Nuln and Grand Count of Wissenland, Artur maintained palaces in both cities.

‘We send a knight to intercept Count Artur in both cities,’ Count van Sauckelhof stated. ‘Wissenland’s support will be vital to keeping the river trade routes open to us once Boris has been deposed. If Count Artur intends to stand by Boris Goldgather, then it is in his power to starve Altdorf.’ Sadness crept into his voice as he added, ‘It will be some time before Marienburg can fulfil its old position as provider.’

‘Knights must also be sent to Averland and Stirland,’ Baron von Klauswitz said. ‘We are no friends of Boris in Wurtbad, and there is no cause for Averheim to love him either.’ He shot a sharp look at Mihail Kretzulescu. ‘We can forward any appeal to Count von Drak if we think his inclusion is necessary.’

The Sylvanian dignitary smiled sourly. ‘On behalf of the voivode, I thank you for your courtesy.’

‘We must not forget Talabecland,’ Duke Konrad said. ‘The grand duke will surely support any move against Goldgather now that the Imperial Army is moving against him.’

‘Why stop there?’ Erich asked. ‘Why not send word to the Reiksmarshal? He is an honourable man, a soldier who understands the difference between a just and an unjust war. If we approach him, he may side with us.’ He could see the dubious looks on the faces of those around him. Defiantly, he returned those stares. ‘There is nothing to be lost in trying,’ he said.

‘And much to be gained,’ Prince Sigdan conceded. ‘Very well, we shall appeal to both the grand duke and the Reiksmarshal. Perhaps the first fruit this conspiracy will bear is the prevention of a useless war.’

‘That alone, your highness, would be enough to justify our cause,’ Hartwich said.

‘This is all well and good, my lords,’ Meisel said, ‘but we need men inside Altdorf. We need soldiers here and now, not away in Middenheim and Nuln. With the Imperial Army away, there will be no better time to strike!’

‘What about the Bread Marchers?’ Erich asked. ‘How many of you can we count on?’

Meisel sighed. ‘Not enough, I fear. We’ve been able to contact most of those who escaped the massacre, over four hundred men. But they’ve been hiding in the worst slums and shacks in Altdorf, constantly on the move to escape Kreyssig’s spies. A lot of them are sick.’ His eyes became like chips of ice. ‘The plague,’ he hissed, almost choking on the word.

‘We don’t need an army,’ Prince Sigdan said. ‘The right men in the right place will serve us better than a thousand swords. What we need is someone close to the Emperor. Someone who can get inside the Palace and inform us first-hand of his plans. There will be a time when it will be right to strike, when even a few men can seize the Emperor.’

‘Then perhaps I can be that man,’ Princess Erna said. The statement brought a grunt of amusement from Duke Konrad.

‘Boris would have to be blind to take you for a man,’ Konrad quipped.

Princess Erna scowled at the Drakwalder’s jest. Before her temper could rise, Baron Thornig came forwards, placing a hand on his daughter’s shoulder.

‘Hear her out,’ he said, his words heavy with regret and shame. ‘There may be a way to slip one of our own into the heart of the enemy camp.’

Erna gripped her father’s hand. Taking a deep breath, knowing that she wouldn’t have the courage to repeat what she had to say, the princess hurried to make her proposal. ‘For some time, Adolf Kreyssig has attempted to court me. He has spared no effort to secure my father’s blessing, from the most vile threats to the most tempting gifts. At any time, my father could pretend to be swayed by Kreyssig’s demands. As the wife of that monster, I could be the eyes and ears of this cause.’ She could see the disgust on the faces of the men listening to her. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘let me do this, let me make this sacrifice. All of you are willing to risk your lives, your names, your very legacies to depose a despot. Is what I risk so much more precious?’

‘Your highness, you cannot allow this?’ protested Erich. ‘You cannot sacrifice this lady’s virtue and honour this way!’

Prince Sigdan shook his head. ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘The very horror of the idea is what tells me Princess Erna is right. The enemy will never suspect her. She will be privy to confidences we should never be aware of otherwise.’

‘But to ruin a lady’s reputation?’ the knight persisted.

Erna smiled at Erich’s chivalry. ‘When the moment comes, you may avenge me upon my husband,’ she told him. ‘The person of the Emperor may be inviolate, but a scheming creature like Adolf Kreyssig deserves only a nameless grave. Send him there, my dashing knight, and give all of his victims justice.’

Erich’s hand tightened about the hilt of his sword. ‘I will,’ he vowed.

Frost clung to the stone walls of the cellar, twinkling in the glow of Kreyssig’s rushlight as he descended the stairs. An angry squeak from the shadows reprimanded him for leaving the light unshaded. The commander of the Kaiserjaeger grinned at the distempered vocalisation. It was always a good thing to remind his sneaking friends of their place.

‘What have you learned?’ Kreyssig snarled, arresting his descent at the foot of the stairs. He didn’t like being even this close to his subhuman confederates. They were useful, but that didn’t change how disgusting they were.

‘Prince-man meet with other-more traitor-meat,’ a nasally voice hissed from the darkness. Kreyssig could just pick out the scrawny shape with its hunched shoulders and hooded face. Even that much left too vivid an impression upon him. Only once had he gotten a good look at his slinking associates, an incident that continued to haunt him in his nightmares. The Sigmarites were right to burn mutants if such horrors as what he had seen could spring from a collusion of corrupt souls. He promised himself that once these vermin had ceased to be useful to him, he would hunt them down and destroy their lairs.

‘They spread-bring plague-cough,’ the voice said. ‘Make many-more sick-die. Weaken city-place, then make attack-slay!’

Kreyssig nodded as he heard his informant’s statement. Useful spies, these skulking mutants, and they had provided him with the information that had made him the most feared man in Altdorf. There was no one they had failed to dig up dirt on, no secret they had failed to uncover for him. The revelation that Prince Sigdan was moving against Emperor Boris, and that the rebels were behind the plague, was something Kreyssig had long suspected.

‘You can bring proof of this?’ Kreyssig demanded. In the shadows, he could see the mutant’s hooded head bobbing up and down emphatically. ‘Bring it then. Whatever support the prince thinks he can count on will wither and die if he is shown to be the source of the plague.’

‘More-more,’ wheezed the mutant. Kreyssig’s hair stood on end as the creature uttered a titter of ghastly laughter. ‘Saw-scent Sigmar-man meet-seek traitor-meat. Haart-witch, say-called.’

Kreyssig’s smile broadened. Arch-Lector Hartwich conspiring with rebels? It was almost too good to be true. For years he had struggled to find a way to put the temple of Sigmar under his thumb. Evidence of what had happened in Nuln hadn’t seemed enough for what Kreyssig needed, but combined with evidence of a more recent scandal it would be just the lever he needed to bring the Grand Theogonist down to his level.

‘Well done,’ Kreyssig told his spy. ‘Your Emperor thanks you for your service.’

A titter of inhuman laughter sounded from the darkness, then the mutant spy was gone, vanished back into the subterranean depths from whence he came.

Kreyssig turned and ascended the stairs with slow, deliberate steps. It was an effort not to run, to flee back into the clean world of light.

Yes, once these vermin had served their purpose, he was going to take extreme delight exterminating them.

Nuln
Ulriczeit, 1111

Walther leaned against the counter inside the Black Rose, a pleased smile on his face. The tavern was a bedlam of activity, people clustered about the tables, gathered about the bar or simply squeezed into any corner where there was room enough to stand. Every fist was filled with the handle of a tankard. The rat-catcher had it on good authority that Bremer had been forced to send to other taverns in the neighbourhood for more beer and Reikhoch to replace what he’d sold.

It made sense. Nuln was in the grip of plague. There was no denying that fact now. Panic had settled upon the city. There had been a crazed culling of cats and dogs after a rumour started that the plague was being spread by the animals. Walther had lost his two ratters to a mob of terrified peasants, helpless to do anything but watch while the wretches beat his dogs to death - all the while crying out to Shallya to preserve them from the plague. In their fear, none of them bothered to consider that all life, even that of a little dog, was sacred to the goddess of mercy.

The prudent folk of Nuln had taken to barricading themselves inside their homes, hoping that by sequestering themselves they could avoid contact with the disease. Others, without the affluence or temperament to be prudent, had thrown themselves into a frenzy of licentiousness, determined to indulge to excess before the shadow of Morr fell upon them. It was to such grimly exuberant clientele that the Black Rose and a hundred other taverns now catered, each struggling to capture the dragon’s share of the wilfully reckless libertines.

Thanks to Walther’s contribution to the Black Rose’s ambiance, Bremer was taking in the dragon’s share. The rat-catcher looked across the crowd, his eyes lighting upon the oak stand where the giant had been mounted. In a bit of irony, the brute had been stuffed by a tanner from Tanner’s Lane. The tradesman must have possessed a touch of the thespian about him, for he had posed the giant rat in an attitude of such ferocious aggression that the first impulse of all who saw it was to recoil in alarm, ready to defend themselves from the snarling monster.

The rat was well and truly dead, of course. Scattered on the stand about its feet were the bones of its skeleton. The tanner had improvised a wooden frame to support the rat’s skin, using only the creature’s skull when he stuffed it. Two bits of ruddy copper served the thing for eyes, shining sinisterly whenever the light hit them just right.

The effect was a bit spoiled by the crude sign hanging about the rat’s neck. Somehow a rumour had been started that rubbing the monster’s fur was a charm against the plague. In an effort to protect his new attraction, Bremer had placed the sign around its neck. It didn’t do any good. Most of his patrons couldn’t read and those who could, mostly students from the now closed Universität, ignored it anyway. A few spots on the monster’s hide were starting to look a little thin from the constant attention.

‘I tell you this is too important to simply be relegated to being a freakshow attraction!’

Walther took a slow sip from his beerstein before deigning to continue his conversation with Lord Karl-Joachim Kleinheistkamp. The professor stood at his elbow, his brocaded hat clenched in his white hands, beads of sweat on his wrinkled brow. The rat-catcher savoured the desperate quality in the nobleman’s expression.

‘The Universität will pay… three crowns for the specimen,’ Kleinheistkamp said, holding up his fingers. ‘Three gold crowns,’ he chuckled.

Walther joined in the professor’s chuckle, clapping the old man on the shoulder. Kleinheistkamp frowned at the overly familiar gesture, but quickly forced a wide grin on his face. ‘Three gold crowns. How many rats would you need to catch to earn that much?’

‘One,’ Walther said, taking another sip from his stein. He pointed across the tavern to the crowd circling about the stuffed giant. ‘That one,’ he elaborated. ‘That beauty is bringing them to the Black Rose in droves and I get half of the profit. Now, if I had a similar arrangement with the Universität - whenever Count Artur decides it is safe to reopen, that is - then perhaps we might come to terms. You are going to charge admission, aren’t you?’

All geniality faded from the professor’s face. ‘I want that specimen for scientific study, not for a bunch of peasants to gawp at!’

Walther shrugged his shoulders. ‘Too bad. It looks like I’ll make more leaving my monster right where it is.’ A hard edge crept into his eyes as he watched Kleinheistkamp angrily turn away and order a fresh drink from Bremer. ‘Be careful, your lordship,’ Walther said. ‘I’m afraid you’re paying for the drinks this time.’

Laughing at the baleful look Kleinheistkamp directed at him, Walther pushed his way through the crowd. Maybe it was the professor’s ire, but suddenly it felt a bit cold inside the tavern. The rat-catcher was eager for the warmth of the fire. As he walked through the busy room, he found himself cheered and toasted by the patrons. Perhaps not quite as renowned as the monster he had killed, Walther had nevertheless become something of a local hero. For the rat-catcher, accustomed to being shunned even by the lowest dregs of society, all of the attention was more exhilarating than anything Bremer kept behind the bar.

The patrons gathered about the Black Rose’s hearth cleared a spot for Walther. A big, broad-shouldered man with a warrior’s bearing and a distinct Reikland accent even offered the rat-catcher a drink. Politely declining, the local hero nestled close to the fire and tried to warm the chill from his hands.

A different chill crept into his body when he noticed the object nailed to the back of the hearth, almost hidden by the roaring flames. The jawbone of a hog, its tusk black with soot. Folk medicine from the days of the Old Faith, a talisman against evil spirits and disease. There were many hearths decorated with such talismans these days, but the one in the Black Rose was there for a specific reason. There was a specific sickness the talisman was intended to alleviate.

Walther stared into the flames, his thoughts turning away from the busy crowd, from the congratulatory cheers. He was thinking of the little room down in the tavern’s cellar and the man entombed there. The rat-catcher looked away from the fire, wondering if the Reiklander was still around and if the offer of a drink was still open. Instead he found himself looking into Zena’s pretty face. His pleasure at seeing her looking for him quickly faded. There was a fearful look in her eye and a tightness about her mouth. Over the last few days the chores of the tavern had increasingly been taken up by the other serving girls. Zena’s attentions had increasingly been needed elsewhere.

Walther didn’t speak, simply grabbing Zena’s elbow and guiding her towards the kitchen. His retreat with the shapely serving wench brought jovial catcalls and lewd gestures from some in the crowd, but they ignored the rude humour of Bremer’s patrons. Some things were too serious to bear distraction.

‘Why did you leave him?’ Walther demanded once they were in the kitchen. Zena cast a worried look at the cook and the kitchen boys. Catching the suggestion, Walther drew her into the larder and lowered his voice. ‘You should be with Hugo,’ he accused.

Zena winced at the anger in his voice. ‘I can’t do anything for him,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘It’s not that,’ Walther growled. ‘Ranald’s purse! Do you think I’d ask you to look out for him if it was that! It’s just a fever, an infection from that damn rat bite!’

Zena placed her hand against Walther’s neck, drawing his face close to her own. ‘It’s more than that,’ she whispered. ‘He’s getting worse. It’s more than fever now.’

Walther pulled away, uttering a pained moan. His fist lashed out against a sack of potatoes, disturbing an ugly grey rat that was hiding in a cranny behind the bag. Squeaking, it scurried off to find a new refuge.

‘He saved my life,’ Walther said. ‘When that thing turned on me, I couldn’t move. I froze. I just stood there. If Hugo hadn’t attacked it…’

The woman’s arms closed around him, hugging him to her body. ‘You’ve done all you could for him. If he has the plague, there’s nothing you can do.’

‘I can get him a doktor. I have enough gold for that, even with Bremer cheating me on my cut. I’ll get him a doktor.’

‘And you think Bremer will sit still for that?’ Zena scoffed. She jabbed her thumb at the door. The murmur of the tavern crowd was just audible. ‘You think he’ll risk losing the business you’ve brought him? How many of those people would be here if there was a red cross daubed on the door? They might scoff at death, but they won’t go courting it!’

‘Hugo saved my life! I won’t abandon him! I’ll find a way!’ Walther reached beneath the fancy new tunic he’d bought, retrieving a fat purse stuffed with coins. ‘Take these. Find a physician who will be discreet. We can do this without Bremer getting wise.’

Zena shook her head, but couldn’t refuse the purse when it was pressed into her hands. Walther leaned down and kissed her. ‘If you haggle, maybe there will be enough left for a new dress.’ The remark brought a smile to her lips. Her eyes looked up into his. For a moment, all worry and fear was forgotten. There was only hope and love.

A harsh knock at the door broke the moment. Walther and Zena pulled apart as Bremer’s frantic voice sounded from the kitchen.

‘Schill!’ the taverneer cried out. ‘I need you! There’s an idiot out here saying your rat is fake!’

Walther pressed Zena’s hand. ‘Take the money. Get Hugo a doktor.’ He didn’t wait for her to answer, instead turning and opening the door. A flush-faced Bremer stood just outside.

‘You need to stop this idiot, or our agreement is off!’ Bremer threatened.

Walther glared at his partner. ‘Hans and Schultz are the roughs!’ he snarled back at the taverneer, naming the two bouncers who had been hired on when business increased. ‘Have them kick the fool into the street!’

‘Look, I don’t have time to argue or wait for you to finish fondling the help,’ Bremer said, peering over Walther’s shoulder at Zena. ‘You either get this idiot to shut up, or we’re through!’

Walther stared hard at Bremer. Something was wrong here, he could feel it in his bones. ‘Why can’t Hans and Schultz handle this?’ he asked, menace in his voice.

Bremer backed away, all the bluster draining out of him. ‘What are we going to do?’ he wailed. ‘That idiot is going to drive away business!’

Walther stalked past the taverneer, his anger rising with each step. ‘If his argument is that that thing I killed isn’t real, then I’m going to make him eat his words! Whoever he is!’

The rat-catcher brushed past the cook and kitchen boys who were peering into the tavern from the cracked door. The patrons had fallen silent, all conversation stifled by the agitated cries of a single shrill voice. Walther could see the crowd backing away from the oak stand. Suddenly no one wanted to be close to the dead giant or rub its charmed fur.

‘This abomination is a cruel fraud!’ the voice wailed. ‘A hoax to gull fools into debauchery and licentiousness! You people should be ashamed of yourselves to be tricked away from your homes by such an absurd jest!’

Walther’s anger swelled as he heard the sceptical words and sneering tone, all the humiliation of his appeals to the scholars returning to him. He reached behind the bar, retrieving one of the cudgels Bremer kept there to cosh drunks. The feel of the heavy club brought a vicious leer to his face. The patrons around him must have noted his demeanour, clearing a path for him without a word leaving his lips.

‘Who says the giant is fake?’ Walther snarled as he emerged from the crowd. There was a man pacing before the mounted monster. At Walther’s challenge he turned. The rat-catcher groaned when he saw who the giant’s detractor was. Captain Hoffmann Fellgiebel of the Freiberg Hundertschaft, that element of Nuln’s city watch charged with policing the district. Suddenly it was very clear to Walther why the two bouncers wanted nothing to do with this particular trouble-maker.

Fellgiebel looked the surprised rat-catcher over. The captain’s face was lean and hungry, his eyes close-set and with all the charm of a snake about them. One of his gloved hands caressed the pommel of the sword sheathed at his side, the other gripped a bundle of fresh posies, a safeguard against the plague. He shook the flowers in Walther’s direction.

‘You must be the charlatan himself,’ Fellgiebel said, his voice like an audible sneer. ‘I charge you to confess to these people the imposture you have committed so that they might return to their homes and turn their minds to more righteous pursuits.’ The captain’s eyes gleamed with malice. ‘You will accommodate me,’ he stated. A pair of men wearing leather jacks and the dagged black and yellow sleeves of the Hundertschaft came stalking forwards from their posts at either side of the tavern’s entrance. Each of the men had a fat-bladed halberd in his hand.

The rat-catcher’s anger faltered for a moment. Then the thought of how close he had come to dying, of Hugo and the man’s suffering, poured fire back into his veins. Standing his ground, Walther glared back at Fellgiebel. ‘I’m the man who killed that monster and had it stuffed, if that’s what you mean.’

Fellgiebel blinked in shock. In this place, in this district, his reputation did not fail to precede him. Nobody stood up to him. They knew what would happen if they did. The captain’s eyes became even colder and more reptilian. ‘I think I heard you say it’s fake.’ He turned and cast his gaze across the crowd. ‘I think they heard you say so too. Why don’t you say it again so everybody can agree?’ His thin lips pursed into a menacing grin. ‘Say it while you still can.’

The two watchmen came marching towards Walther, their weapons lowered. A single gesture from Fellgiebel and they would use those weapons. Not to kill, Fellgiebel wasn’t so crude as that. All of his men were quite good at using their halberds to maim and cripple. One living wreck of a man was worth more as an example to others than a dozen graves in the garden of Morr.

‘He said it’s real and he killed it.’ The words were spoken with a gruff Reikland accent. Walther was no less surprised than Fellgiebel when a big blond-haired man stepped out from the crowd and slapped down the halberd of the nearest watchman with the bared sword in his hand.

‘That was a mistake!’ Fellgiebel hissed. The captain started to pull his own sword when the sound of steel scraping against leather sounded from all across the room. The big Reiklander, it seemed, had quite a few friends.

‘Was it?’ the Reiklander demanded. ‘I think it is you who’ve made the mistake. That rat looks pretty real to me.’

‘Stitched together from scraps,’ Fellgiebel snarled back. ‘I can get witnesses who will testify to that.’

Walther’s anger swelled as he heard the captain speak. He could well imagine how Fellgiebel would get such testimony. The Reiklander clearly didn’t have any idea what he was getting himself into, but Walther was going to put a stop to it. This was his fight and he wasn’t going to let anyone fight it for him.

‘Fake!’ Walther shouted, slapping the cudgel hard against his palm. ‘Stitched together from scraps!’ He marched past Fellgiebel and to the oak stand. His arm trembling with fury, he raised the cudgel and brought it slamming down against the stuffed monster. The verminous fur tore beneath the blow, the bits of copper flying loose and clattering across the tavern. The bleached skull of the rodent crashed to the floor, bouncing once and landing so its fanged grin faced the watch captain.

‘Tell me who made that for me!’ Walther yelled.

Fellgiebel stared at the rat skull, colour rushing into his cheeks. Angrily, he turned away, whipping his cloak over his shoulder. As he stalked towards the door, a chorus of jeers and taunts followed him out.

Walther frowned as he considered the damage his anger had caused. The damage to the monster was one thing, but the humiliation of a man like Fellgiebel was another.

‘It does me good to see that cur walk out of here with his tail between his legs.’ The speaker was the big Reiklander. There was a beerstein in his hand. Walther was grateful when the man offered it to him.

‘You shouldn’t have interfered,’ Walther said. ‘It was my fight.’

‘You looked like you needed the help,’ the Reiklander said. His jaw clenched tight as he stared after the departed Fellgiebel. ‘Besides, I didn’t like his arrogant tone. It reminded me too much of the Kaiserjaeger back in Altdorf.’

Walther nodded his understanding. Even in Nuln, news of the Bread Massacre and the Kaiserjaeger’s role in the slaughter had spread. The rat-catcher looked at the Reiklander with a new appreciation. Maybe he had been one of Engel’s Marchers. He might even know Meisel. He certainly had the look of a dienstmann about him.

‘Walther Schill,’ the rat-catcher introduced himself, laughing as he watched Bremer come racing from the kitchen to scoop up the rat skull before anyone could step on it.

‘Heinrich Aldinger,’ the Reiklander said, extending his hand. The smile faded from his face as he turned his eyes once more to the door. ‘I worry that perhaps I did you no favour just now. That seems like the sort of man who will bear a grudge.’ He sighed, a note of bitterness in his voice. ‘That is the trouble with being a soldier. You are taught to fight and ignore the consequences.’

‘Let me worry about the consequences,’ Walther said, trying to force some levity into his tone. It wouldn’t do to upset Aldinger. The man had meant well and, as the rat-catcher had said before, Fellgiebel was his fight.

However uneven that fight might be.

Skavenblight
Ulriczeit, 1111

Poxmaster Puskab Foulfur stared down at the quivering ratman, indifferent to the creature’s agonies. Using a long brass rod, the plague priest poked and prodded the skinny skaven, lifting his arms and turning his head. A satisfied hiss rushed past Puskab’s rotten fangs. Ugly black buboes clustered about the skavenslave’s throat and armpits, syrupy treacle oozing from the swollen sores. The slave’s breathing came in ragged, uneven gasps, flecks of blood staining his nostrils and whiskers.

‘Good-good,’ the plague priest pronounced. He withdrew the brass rod he had thrust into the slave’s cage. Stalking over to one of the flaming braziers which flanked the entrance to the laboratory, Puskab thrust the end of the instrument into the fire. He held it there until the tip glowed and any trace of disease had been purged.

‘The Horned One favours me,’ Puskab declared. ‘New-better fleas. Carry-bring plague fast-quick!’

The skaven assisting Puskab in his diabolical labours glanced anxiously at one another. Somewhere beneath their protective leather cloaks, glands tightened and the reek of fear-musk oozed into the air. They had been warned by Wormlord Blight what their fate would be if Puskab’s experiments were to fail, but now they wondered if perhaps success wasn’t even more terrifying.

Puskab scowled at the frightened ratmen. Unbelievers! Hedonistic little heathens! To be infected by one of the Horned One’s holy plagues was a fate to be embraced joyously! Only in the fevered fires of disease could the soul of a skaven be judged! The inferior were destroyed, the superior emerged stronger than before, endowed with something of the Horned One’s divinity and ferocity.

The plague priest stalked past his trembling assistants, peering at them with his rheumy eyes. Soon there would be only two kinds of ratmen in the world. The true believers and their slaves. Clan Verms would help to bring about that change. Willing or unwilling, they were now instruments of the Horned One’s design.

The clatter of armour warned Puskab that he had guests. He turned away from the tables and faced the entrance to his laboratory. A pack of burly warriors marched through the doorway. Behind them the twisted shape of Blight Tenscratch lounged upon the platform of a velvet-draped palanquin. Breeder-scent wafted from the curtains and the smell of goat-cheese and blood-wine was strong. From the smells lingering about the Wormlord and the vicious expression in his posture, it seemed some pleasant interlude had been disturbed.

‘I am told your work has succeeded,’ Blight snarled, baring his fangs.

Puskab gestured towards the cage where the infected slave struggled to suck breath into his lungs. ‘Early-soon, but look-smell good-good,’ he explained.

Blight’s malformed body contorted at a grotesque angle, his claws wrapped about a lead goblet. Furiously, he flung the cup at the cage, spattering the slave inside with blood-wine. ‘Not-not this test-meat!’ the Wormlord snapped. ‘What about the others? The ones outside?’

Puskab’s heavy frame wilted under Blight’s enraged glare, assuming a posture that was both abased and alarmed. ‘None-none,’ he squeaked, pointing again at the cage. ‘This one first! Swear-tell by Horned One!’

‘Bring the traitor-meat!’ Blight growled. Before Puskab could act the armoured ratmen pounced upon him, seizing his flabby arms in their powerful claws. The plague priest’s assistants watched in excitement as their fearsome master was dragged away into the darkness of the Hive.

Puskab was carried to a vast cavern far beneath Skavenblight. The air was moist and musty, stinking of mildew and pond scum. His keen ears could hear water dripping from the roof overhead, each drop landing with a soft plink upon some loamy surface. The cavern was dark, its blackness so perfect that even the eyes of a skaven couldn’t penetrate it. A snarl from Blight caused a green glow to gradually form. Puskab could hear the crackle of electricity and the laboured breath of panting ratmen. The first thing he saw was the bronze pillar and crystal cage of a Clan Skryre warp-lamp, a nest of cables leading back to an enormous treadmill.

The irony of Clan Verms employing one of Clan Skryre’s warpstone-powered lamps wasn’t lost on Puskab. The clan stood to lose a fortune in the trade of worm-oil should use of warp-lamps become widespread. Verms spared no opportunity to criticise the upstart warlock-engineers and argue against the safety of their erratic inventions. To find them using one of the very devices they were so vehement in denigrating brought an uncontrolled bark of laughter rushing past his fangs.

‘Blind-worms not like smell-scent of worm-oil,’ Blight explained, his face sheepish, his tone embarrassed. His lips pulled back in a vicious grin as he remembered who he was talking to and why. Imperiously, the Wormlord pointed across the cavern.

The floor of the cavern was, as Puskab had imagined, covered in a loamy surface, a mass of moss floating upon a great pool of foetid water. He could see things slithering through the sludge, just beneath the surface. Scrawny skavenslaves were wading through the muck, chasing after the things swimming around them. Sometimes they would dive into the morass to emerge with a writhing mass of slimy white flesh clenched in their paws.

Puskab knew the snake-like things to be blind-worms, an observation validated when he saw the slaves drag their catch to a floating workstation where a brawny brown overseer wrestled the flailing worms into a suspended harness. Other slaves equipped with wicked metal probes crawled under the hanging worms to tease milk from the soft tissues between each segment of the worm’s body. The stinking ooze was collected in a motley assortment of buckets and bowls.

The plague priest had only a few moments to observe the procedure. His attention was forcibly diverted when Blight’s guards shoved him into the pool. Puskab sank to his waist in the muck, thrashing about wildly until he appreciated the fact he couldn’t sink any deeper.

‘Explain,’ Blight growled.

Ahead of him, floating some distance from the platform, was a pair of bodies. They were skaven, their lean frames still draped in the tatters of leather cloaks. Unmistakably, they had been Puskab’s assistants. The way they had died was also unmistakable. Ugly black buboes clustered about their throats.

Puskab took a long look at the corpses, then rounded upon Blight, pointing a quivering claw at him. ‘Your work-rats!’ he coughed, spitting a blob of phlegm into the pool. ‘Spy-meat! Traitor-meat! Listen-steal for enemies!’

Blight scratched at his whiskers, surprised by the violence and rage he saw on display. The plague priest was playing the part of injured party with impressive gusto. Enough so that the Wormlord waved aside his guards, intending to hear more before he had them hack Puskab to bloody giblets.

‘Who would dare sneak into the Hive?’ Blight asked.

‘Eshin,’ Puskab answered. The assassins were always the obvious choice when it came to infiltrators and spies. But perhaps they were just too obvious. The plague priest bared his fangs as he mentioned another possibility. ‘Skully-sneaks,’ he said.

Blight’s ears curled back against his skull, his tail lashing the snouts of the slaves bearing his palanquin. A low hiss of hate rasped across his fangs. The murderlings of Clan Skully weren’t so skilled as the killers of Clan Eshin, but they were close allies of Clan Moulder’s beastlords. Of all the other clans, there was particular enmity between Verms and Moulder. The two clans both prided themselves on their ability to breed new and exotic creatures to serve the Under-Empire, but where the power of Verms was beginning to wane, that of Moulder was in the ascension.

‘Spy-meat try to filch-steal plague-fleas,’ Puskab explained. ‘Not know-think that extra fleas crawl-hop into fur. Kill traitor-meat quick-quick!’ The plague priest’s corpulent body shuddered with a titter of laughter.

Blight’s head bobbed from side to side as he considered Puskab’s theory. It did fit all of the facts, but what decided him was that Puskab himself had remained in the Hive, well within the Wormlord’s reach. If the Poxmaster were up to something, surely he wouldn’t be so foolhardy as to linger around.

Still, it wouldn’t do to let the plague priest grow too secure in his mind. ‘Maybe steal-take for Moulder-maggots,’ Blight mused. ‘Maybe they spy for Nurglitch. Look-fetch Puskab back to the Pestilent Monastery!’ A sadistic grin split Blight’s face as he saw terror flash along Puskab’s spine. The plague priest wasn’t the only one who could think up disturbing theories.

‘You need my protection,’ Blight reminded Puskab. ‘Nurglitch kill-slay quick-quick if you leave the Hive!’

Puskab bowed his horned head, the antlers brushing across the scummy surface of the pool. He turned and pointed a claw at the floating bodies. ‘Stash-hide plague-dead,’ he cautioned. ‘Other spy-meat must not know-find!’

‘Let them know,’ Blight sneered. ‘Soon Clan Verms will have the ultimate weapon thanks to you.’ He clenched his claw into a fist, shaking it at the dark ceiling. ‘Soon-soon all skaven grovel before Blight Tenscratch!’

‘Or all-all attack-fight,’ Puskab said. ‘Plague-fear great-much. Keep-hide secret until ready-strong.’

Blight’s eyes narrowed with cunning. The loathsome plague priest was right, it might be disastrous to let the other clans know what Verms was doing too soon. If the other clans rose up before Verms had enough of the bacillus and enough fleas to carry it…

‘Fetch-burn!’ Blight snapped at his guards, pointing his claw at the floating bodies. When they hesitated, he leaned out from behind the curtains of his palanquin, his voice a low whisper. ‘Fetch-burn, or I’ll burn you!’

The threat sent his guards splashing into the pool, stumbling over each other in their haste to reach the bodies.

Puskab watched them wade out, a sly glimmer in the depths of his yellow eyes.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Talabecland
Vorhexen, 1111

Baron Everhardt Johannes Boeckenfoerde, Reiksmarshal of the Imperial Army, tapped his fingers against the scroll of parchment resting on the little wooden camp table. His face was inscrutable, his eyes half-lidded and with a faraway stare. The crackle of the fire burning in his tent’s tin stove was the only sound.

‘This is treason,’ the Reiksmarshal said at length, his voice almost a whisper. His eyes fixed upon Konreid, studying the knight’s face. ‘I have sworn an oath to the Emperor. Every man in my army has done the same.’ His hand rose from the table and pointed the golden head of his marshal’s baton at the knight. ‘The Reiksknecht took the same vow. We obey our Emperor. It is not for us to decide if his rule is good or bad, it is only enough that we perform our duty. That is all.’

Konreid stood at attention, feeling the winter cold clawing at his back through the canvas tent flap behind him. Except for Boeckenfoerde’s adjutant, he was alone with the Reiksmarshal, a fact that gave him confidence even if the general’s words weren’t reassuring. By rights, he should have been arrested the moment he appeared at the army’s encampment. Konreid knew that Emperor Boris had outlawed the Reiksknecht, a diktat that Boeckenfoerde couldn’t help but be aware of. It would have been well within the general’s authority to have him seized and executed on the spot. That he hadn’t, that he had agreed to this conference, was all the proof Konreid needed to give him hope.

In his heart, the Reiksmarshal knew Boris Goldgather was a dictator and tyrant. If his conscience, if his sense of duty and honour could be overcome, if he could be made to see that his ultimate loyalty was to the Empire itself, not the man wearing the emperor’s crown, then his support would be won.

‘If we do not decide, Reiksmarshal,’ Konreid said, ‘then who will? Grand Master von Schomberg was every bit as loyal a man as yourself, yet he saw at the last that he had given that loyalty to a man unworthy of it.’

The Reiksmarshal shook his head. ‘He swore an oath and he betrayed it.’

‘For that, he was humiliated and murdered in the most obscene spectacle,’ Konreid said, his voice becoming as cold as the wind at his back.

Boeckenfoerde’s face became troubled. He rose from his chair, pacing across the tent’s small interior. ‘I have heard what happened,’ he said regretfully. ‘But it is not the Emperor’s doing. It is those animals around him, that peasant Kreyssig and that usurer Ratimir.’

‘They are the Emperor’s men,’ Konreid reminded. ‘If he was so disgusted with them, they would not be there.’

‘You are just a dienstmann,’ Boeckenfoerde said. ‘You don’t understand politics, how the old families can wield their influence to force their way into positions of importance. I tell you, the Emperor doesn’t believe in these sorts of things!’

‘What sort of influence does the family of a peasant wield?’ Konreid asked. ‘Boris keeps Kreyssig because he finds the man useful. How many of the great families have resented the power and reach of the Kaiserjaeger, and the fact that a mere commoner acts as their commander?’

The Reiksmarshal silently returned to his chair, turmoil written across his face. ‘I have taken an oath,’ he repeated.

‘And your loyalty has been betrayed,’ Konreid insisted. The knight waved his hand, indicating the trembling walls of the tent, the snow drifting under the tent flap. ‘This campaign against Talabheim is nothing more than greed and an abuse of authority. This army is nothing more than a gang of excise men dispatched to fill Goldgather’s coffers!’

Boeckenfoerde lifted his gaze, staring into Konreid’s eyes. ‘You go too far. I will not listen to any more treasonous talk.’

Konreid kept his face impassive, but inwardly he felt a sense of exultation. The general’s growing agitation was a sign that the doubts already inside his mind were rallying to the cause.

‘He sends an entire army out in the dead of winter to force Talabheim to keep its markets open, to countermand the grand count’s efforts to control the spread of the plague,’ Konreid declared. His voice lowered to a contemptuous hiss, each word twisting like a knife in the Reiksmarshal’s heart. ‘Yet when he might have kept your forces in the field to preserve what was left of the Drakwald, what was his command? He demanded the army be disbanded, the soldiers sent home so that they might help bring in the harvest! More taxes to line his own pockets!’

‘Enough!’ the Reiksmarshal growled. His fist closed about the parchment, crushing it between his fingers. Slowly he rose once more, marching to the stove. He stared into the fire, then thrust the crumpled message into the flames.

‘I was schooled in the teachings of Verena and Myrmidia,’ the general sighed. He turned and smiled grimly. ‘I was taught to value reason above everything. To understand why things are what they are and how to use the mind to change them.’ He began to pace once more, the marshal’s baton slapping against his leg with each step. ‘I was also raised to hold every oath as sacred and inviolate. Reason demands I support your coup, honour dictates that I cannot.’

Konreid felt his stomach sicken at the general’s decision. ‘That is your final word?’

Boeckenfoerde looked from the knight to his adjutant waiting beside the doorway. For a moment, his eyes took on the faraway gaze of an augur. Finally, he turned and approached the table. Removing a quill from its inkpot, he began to scribe a letter. ‘You may take this back to those who sent you,’ a flicker of a grin crept onto the general’s face, ‘and whose names I do not wish to know. I can suspect who they are, and that is bad enough.’

The knight stepped forwards and took the letter from the Reiksmarshal. A look of embarrassment came upon him. ‘I fear I cannot read,’ Konreid confessed.

The Reiksmarshal stepped away, approaching a large map of the Empire stretched across the wall of the tent. ‘I have agreed to meet your conspiracy halfway,’ he said. ‘I will not take up arms against my Emperor, but if he is deposed I will stand by the new Imperial Majesty you install.’ He tapped the map with his finger. ‘Further, your fears that you will inherit a war from Emperor Boris… on that front I can be of more direct assistance. Right now, we are marching along the River Talabec. Our supplies come to us by ship. This offers the most direct route to Talabheim, but the risk of discovery is great. I shall decide that the risk is too great, and so I will reroute our march around the Great Forest and along the River Delb until we near the Howling Hills. Much of that territory has been depopulated by Khaagor Deathhoof, but the terrain is familiar to many of my officers. It is the more prudent course to follow, and some of my more cautious commanders have already advised me to take it.

‘Of importance to your friends, however, the careful road will mean a two-month delay in laying siege to Talabheim. Your people will have two months to unseat the Emperor before I will be in a position to strike against Talabheim.’

Konreid bowed to the Reiksmarshal. ‘Thank you, baron. Two months will see an end to Goldgather’s tyranny. Your support will not be forgotten.’

The Reiksmarshal sighed and resumed his pacing. ‘I rather fear it won’t,’ he said. ‘Be sure when you stage your revolt, you get Kreyssig even if you can’t get his Imperial Majesty. I’d rather not have that peasant in any condition to come looking for me.’

Bylorhof
Ulriczeit, 1111

The desolation of Bylorhof struck Frederick more forcefully than ever before. Somehow, just knowing that Rutger and Aysha and Johan were out there, living their lives, had lessened the terrible reality. Now that they were gone, he appreciated fully how forlorn and devastated the town had become. Few doors failed to display the red cross scrawled across their faces. The dead lay piled against the walls, snow and ice plastering them to the street. There were only a few corpse collectors now that the town elders had stopped paying for the removal of the dead. The few who remained were little better than brigands, only bearing away those bodies grieving relations paid them to take away. Frederick saw one of these gangs load the dead children of a white-haired widow, taking several loaves of bread and a basket of vegetables as payment. The ruffians took their cargo only as far as the next corner, stopping their wagon and ditching the corpses in the snow as soon as they had pried the shoes off the dead feet.

Bylorhof’s woes had been compounded by the town’s noble lord. Locked within his castle, Baron von Rittendahl had seen to his own protection from the plague by engaging the services of a warlock. The enchanter’s magic hadn’t been powerful enough to keep the plague from the castle and in an ironic turn, he had been one of the first to die. Now the terrified baron had cut himself off completely, still hoping to escape the plague through seclusion. To ensure that seclusion, he had appealed to his feudal lord, Count Malbork von Drak.

Soldiers of the Nachtsheer, the mercenary troops of the von Draks, had arrived to impose a quarantine upon Bylorhof. Establishing armed camps just beyond the perimeter of the town, the soldiers ensured that no one entered or left the town. The bodies of those who tried were left hanging on a gallows as a warning to their neighbours.

Bylorhof was dying. Frederick could feel it decaying around him as he prowled the streets. He could almost see the ghosts of the departed hovering above their homes, beckoning to those left behind, beseeching them to forsake the suffering of life and embrace the oblivion of the grave. He could feel the preternatural chill of the tomb wafting down the lanes, roving like a hungry beast in search of prey. He could hear the mournful wails of the dead drifting away on the winter wind.

It was an effort to blot out the macabre visions, to deafen himself to the morbid wailing. Frederick wondered if this was some terrible legacy, a curse visited upon him for presuming to invoke the black arts beneath the roof of Morr’s temple. He wondered if this was madness, reaching out with long claws to rend his mind.

He wondered if he cared.

The priest paused in his ramble. Ahead, at the top of the street, he could see a dark shape emerge from one of the houses, a house with a red cross painted across the door. There was no mistaking the grotesque mask of the plague doktor. Bruno Havemann, making his rounds, fleecing those desperate souls who could still afford his dubious services.

Frederick’s hand tightened about his staff, his jaw setting in a rigid grimace of loathing. His family was dead, and this man was responsible. Havemann would answer for those deaths. Frederick would bring him to justice for his crimes, confront the people of Bylorhof with the true nature of the snake they had allowed into their midst.

The priest’s pace quickened. Up ahead, the plague doktor noticed Frederick’s rapid approach. The fat man with the scrawny limbs turned about, knocking frantically at the door he had just closed.

‘Murderer!’ Frederick snarled as he neared the plague doktor. ‘Charlatan!’

Havemann swung around, whipping the copper-headed rod at Frederick’s hooded head. The priest’s staff blocked the blow and pushed Havemann backwards. The physician stumbled, falling onto the snowy street.

‘I’ve done nothing to you!’ Havemann cried, his words muffled by the mask, his hands raised to protect himself from the priest’s staff.

‘Nothing!’ Frederick spat, his eyes shining with wrath. ‘You’ve lied and cheated people who believed in you! You’ve killed the sick and the weak and preyed upon their families! You’ve murdered those who found you out!’ The priest reached down, grabbing the front of Havemann’s waxed cloak and dragging the man to his feet. ‘You are a murderer and a fraud, Havemann, and by the gods, you’ll tell everyone before they hang you!’

The door of the plague-stricken house swung open. A pasty, wizened man stood in the doorway, his tired eyes staring in confusion at the strange spectacle unfolding on his doorstep. Havemann turned his beaked face towards the startled peasant.

‘Help! The priest has gone mad!’ he cried.

The cry was enough. The sickly man launched himself across the threshold, flinging himself at Frederick. Arms, wasted and weak, struggled to restrain the priest, to free Havemann from his grasp. Frederick strove to shrug off the infirm peasant’s pathetic efforts, but to do so would mean releasing his hold on the plague doktor.

The peasant was howling for help, his screams carrying across the deserted streets. In his panic, the peasant did not question Havemann’s assertion, did not think that maybe it was the plague doktor, not the priest who was his enemy. There was a hideous tragedy - one of Havemann’s victims fighting to protect his own tormentor.

From seemingly deserted houses a stream of peasants began to emerge. Withered by hunger, pallid from disease and seclusion, they were like a host of shades rising from a tomb, the merest echo of the vibrant community that had flourished here only a few months ago. Yet fear lent their wasted bodies strength, strength to race through the snow, to confront the man who persecuted the symbol of their one hope for survival.

Once before, Frederick had been driven from the streets of Bylorhof by an angry mob. Then it had been to protect himself from the rage of the peasants. Now he retreated to protect them from his own wrath. Looking at the wasted, sickly wretches, Frederick knew he could wipe the street with the entire mob. Not one of them, not five of them acting in concert, had enough strength to oppose him.

But that would not be justice. That would only compound the suffering Havemann had brought upon these people. They had endured enough. Frederick would not add to their misery.

Releasing his grip on the plague doktor’s cloak, the priest turned and fled. He did not stop running until he was back within the sombre halls of the temple and within the sanctuary. He bowed before the altar, and before the image of his god, Frederick van Hal began to weep.

He wept for Rutger and Aysha. He wept for little Johan, who might have been his son. He wept for Bylorhof and its people. He wept for himself, for the things he had done and the things he had wanted to do.

A noise from outside stirred Frederick from his sorrow. Distractedly, like a person in a dream, the priest rose and stepped to the window. Before him stretched the headstones and monoliths of Morr’s garden.

Frederick’s senses snapped from their somnolence. His attention was riveted upon a strange figure walking among the graves. The priest rubbed at his eyes, unable - unwilling - to believe what he was seeing.

The trespasser was caked from head to toe in dried mud, a long rope fastened around its neck. The thing moved with a ghastly, shuffling gait, its head crooked against one shoulder, its left arm dangling brokenly at its side. By the ghoulish light of Morrslieb, Frederick could see the discolouration of the thing’s wormy flesh, the ragged tears through which leathery muscle and bleached bone shone.

The thing moving among the graves wasn’t a living man! It was some nightmare horror, a walking dead man, one of the cursed undead!

The thing seemed to sense it was being watched. It turned and lifted its rotten face, staring at the window with eyes that were blackened by decay. It was impossible that the thing could see with such eyes, yet as it stared at the window, its lipless mouth pulled back in a gap-toothed grin.

For Frederick, this was the ultimate horror. The priest cried out, crossing his arms over his face to blot out the hideous vision. His body swayed as his brain recoiled.

A moment later, Frederick lay prostrate upon the floor, shocked into unconsciousness by the abomination he had seen.

An abomination that slowly, clumsily, made its way towards the temple.

Skavenblight
Ulriczeit, 1111

Even the perfume-balls, stuffed with honey and soaked in the most aromatic of insect ichor, couldn’t blot out the stench of the Pestilent Monastery. Many of the skaven from Clan Verms had resorted to binding urine-soaked rags about their noses in an effort to block the reek of the plague monks and their perfidious stronghold.

Puskab Foulfur observed the precautions of his allies with undisguised scorn. The Pestilent Monastery was a holy place, saturated with the diseased power of the Horned One. The air, the floors, the very walls exuded the malefic energies of another world. There was no defying the might of a god! Those who dared trespass would be tested in the flame of fever and the cauldron of contagion. The worthy would endure, becoming stronger than they had been. The unfit would sicken and die.

The plague priest reflected upon that truism, the great truth which set Clan Pestilens above all skavendom and marked them as the only true servants of the Horned One. Where the other clans were corrupt and decadent, their leaders nothing but avaricious megalomaniacs, the plague monks prostrated themselves before the sacred judgement of their god. No pup was born to privilege, no clanlord could worm his way to authority and greatness beyond his right, no grasping warlord could selfishly retain power when his time was past.

All those who carried the scent of Pestilens passed through the purifying fire of disease. The greatest were those that endured the most lethal sickness and plague. Any plague monk who felt his devotion and purity was strong enough could embrace one of the Seven Lethal Poxes, sacred diseases imprisoned within great golden cauldrons. The cauldrons were bound with spells of darkest sorcery, crafted by the obscene toad-things of Lustria. The sacred vessels had been carried by the plague monks throughout their long exodus out of the jungles, becoming the most holy of relics. Any skaven of the clan, no matter how lowly, might petition to have himself immersed in one of the contaminated cauldrons. If he survived the resultant infection, his status within Clan Pestilens would increase. Puskab had braved three of the cauldrons, more than most plague priests. Few of the plaguelords themselves had submitted to more than four of the cauldrons. No skaven had ever survived all seven.

Puskab raised his nose, sniffing at the air, trying to catch the smell of the Scabrous Sanctuary where the cauldrons were kept. He would draw comfort from the familiar odour of his clan’s sacred relics.

The distance was too great. Puskab had led his allies by an obfuscate and circuitous route into the inner sanctum of the monastery - a labyrinth of forgotten cloisters and disused passages. They had bypassed the moat of effluent which surrounded the stronghold. They had avoided the malarial maze where packs of half-living pus-bags roamed in fevered agony. They had crawled through the catacombs beneath the great dormitories where rabid poxbearers contemplated the forty-nine mystic symbols of the Final Pandemic. Through unused halls and forgotten corridors, Puskab led his allies, violating the secret knowledge entrusted to him as Poxmaster.

Wormlord Blight’s suspicions that Nurglitch was moving against Puskab had given the plague priest the leverage he needed to goad Clan Verms into action. The dead ratmen found floating in the worm pools might have been traitors bought by Nurglitch for the express purpose of striking against Blight. While Puskab had been working upon a strain of plague transmissible to skaven, Nurglitch could have had other plague priests working upon the same problem. With more resources at their command, the other plague priests might have solved the problem first, using that knowledge to infect two of their spies in Clan Verms.

Blight had seemed indifferent to the theory until Puskab pointed out that if the infection was deliberate, it would hardly have been his doing. No ratman set fire to his own nest and if the Black Plague were to escape into the Hive, then Puskab would be just as much at risk as his allies. And if Nurglitch had sent traitors to infect Clan Verms, then it was a certainty the Arch-Plaguelord would try again.

It was this, more than anything, which had finally decided Blight to move ahead with the assassination of Nurglitch. Puskab had suspected the proposal was simply a ruse to draw him deeper into the toils of Clan Verms, that Blight had no intention of going ahead with such a dangerous plot. Now the Wormlord’s paw had been forced. Killing Nurglitch had become a matter of survival, not bait to entice the loyalties of an ambitious plague priest.

Puskab grinned at the score of ratmen creeping down the narrow, earthen tunnel. White skaven carrying big metal caskets, their dyed fur proclaiming the dangerous cargo they bore. Brown skaven with the curious fire-prods that would drive the spiders to the attack. All of them moved with their backs hunched, their ears and tails low. They stank of fear and they were right to be afraid.

The catacombs they now travelled wound through the very walls of the Outer Temple. If they listened carefully, they could hear the abbots squeaking putrid psalms as they sawed off bits of their leprous bodies to place within reliquaries. These were the last guardians, the last ring of protectors before the Inner Temple and the sanctum of the Arch-Plaguelord himself.

There was no going back now. For any ratman outside the Pestilent Brotherhood to be discovered here was the ultimate in sacrilege. Such an outrage would bring frenzied packs of plague monks down upon them all. They would be slaughtered in an orgy of bloodshed.

So it was that when they reached the hidden doorway which connected the catacombs with the Inner Temple, none of his companions objected when Puskab used his magic to create a scout for them. Drawing upon his sorcery, the plague priest’s body convulsed in a fit of hacking and coughing. A black mixture of vomit and blood spilled from his mouth, forming a pool of foulness upon the floor. As Puskab wiped the filth from his whiskers, the pool began to undulate, forming itself into shapes. Great hairy flies emerged from the mess, their faces pinched and somehow ratlike. Their clawed legs scraped against their translucent wings, drying them of the priestly sickness.

‘Seek-see,’ Puskab hissed at the flies. He pressed his paw against the stone which served as the catch for the hidden door. The flies buzzed away into the black corridor beyond.

‘What will-will they do?’ gasped Swarmleader Thaglik, ostensibly commander of the mission. The clanrat’s eyes were wide with anxiety, his posture cringing and timid.

Puskab glowered at Thaglik. He pressed a claw against his eye, then against his ear. ‘Spy-flies see-hear much-much,’ the priest explained. ‘I see-hear all-all.’ He bared his blackened fangs in a savage display. If Thaglik had any more questions about the priest’s magic, he kept them to himself.

For several minutes, the skaven huddled in the murky darkness, shivering at every sound. After a time, the buzzing of flies could be heard through the narrow crack Puskab had left open. Six hairy black shapes came whizzing through the opening, landing upon the plague priest’s paw. One by one, the flies faced Puskab, buzzing and fluttering their wings, almost as if reporting to their master. As each fly fell silent, the ratman swallowed it, drawing back into his putrid body the noxious life his magic had spawned.

When the last fly vanished into Puskab’s mouth, the priest turned to his companions. ‘Safe-alone,’ he snarled. ‘Nurglitch pray-think in refectory.’ The plague priest’s eyes gleamed murderously. ‘Spider-things burrow-chew wall! Scurry-hurry straight to Nurglitch!’

The bloodthirsty excitement shown by Puskab seemed to infect the others. The magnitude of what they had been tasked with had depressed and frightened them - every skaven half-believed that the Grey Lords were immortal and unkillable. But the vicious confidence displayed by Puskab fanned the embers of their own fragile courage. If it was possible to kill the Arch-Plaguelord, then they would be handsomely rewarded by Blight Tenscratch. More importantly, if they killed Nurglitch, then they would be able to leave the horrifying Pestilent Monastery.

The skaven scrambled out from behind the wall, emerging into a dank hall of stone. Each of the mismatched blocks looked to have been dragged down from the surface, appropriated by Clan Pestilens to construct their stronghold. It was a sensible precaution - earthen walls could be breached by the fangs and claws of other ratmen given enough time, but solid stone could thwart such intrusions. Unless, of course, the intruders had creatures such as the diggerfangs to help them.

Puskab pointed at one of the walls, marking it as adjoining the refectory where Nurglitch made his prayers. It was the only time when the Arch-Plaguelord would be alone, that hour when he made direct communion with the Horned One.

The ratmen of Clan Verms hastened across the hall, the white rats setting down their metal caskets, the brown rats lighting their worm-oil torches. Thaglik and the two skaven appointed as his bodyguards stood well away from the spider-handlers. For a skaven, the biggest part of being a leader was avoiding the hazards delegated to underlings. At the moment, keeping close to Puskab was preferable to any proximity to his fellow clanrats.

Puskab watched as the spider-handlers made ready to loose the diggerfangs, his tail twitching expectantly. He held his breath as the white ratmen pushed the caskets towards the wall and raised the lids. The uneven, disordered state of the wall made it impossible to press the cages flush against the stone, so as the tarantulas scuttled into view, the torch-bearers leapt into action, goading the arachnids with the heat of their prods. Under their merciless direction, the spiders attacked the wall, using their venom to burn their way into the stone. Soon a half-dozen smoking craters pitted the face of the wall, each of the holes marking the passage of a ferocious killer.

The skaven chittered softly to each other. Now that the diggerfangs were on their way, the destruction of Nurglitch seemed assured. The spider-handlers rested beside the cages, leaning against their worm-oil prods. After the tension of manoeuvring the tarantulas, the ratmen had slipped into a state of exhausted relief.

A squeal of terror snapped the skaven from their idleness. Spinning around, the ratmen watched in horror as one of their comrades quivered on the floor, a huge tarantula fastened to his leg, its acids eating away his flesh. From the other holes, more of the spiders began to emerge, rushing with eight-legged rapidity towards the stunned skaven. The spider-handlers rushed at the creeping arachnids with their torches, but the creatures barely flinched from the flames. Displaying mindless disregard for their own safety, the tarantulas kept on coming. Their hair singed by the torches, still the scuttling vermin charged at the ratmen. First one, then a second handler was dragged down by the enraged tarantulas.

The other ratmen threw down their prods and scurried back to the hidden door. The white skaven watched the retreat of their fellows for only an instant, then followed them in flight. Yipping like a gutted weasel, Swarmleader Thaglik hurried after his routed minions.

Puskab lingered behind, his fangs bared as he watched the spiders feast upon the fallen skaven. Somehow Nurglitch had discovered the murder scheme. Through magic or cunning, he had thwarted it. Blight was committed now. There could be no more half-steps in his feud with the Arch-Plaguelord.

Eyes glowing with ambition, his mind awhirl with future schemes, Puskab made his way to the hidden door. He paused for only a moment as the seventh fly conjured by his sorcery came buzzing down the corridor and landed upon his arm. Quickly he snatched up the insect and swallowed it. There weren’t any eyes to see him, but Puskab was always careful in his intrigues.

Licking his fangs, the corpulent plague priest vanished into the secret passage. It wouldn’t do to give Thaglik and his rodents too much of a head start.

Altdorf
Vorhexen, 1111

Adolf Kreyssig bowed as he was conducted into the calefactory. Like the rest of the Great Cathedral, the chamber was magnificent in its air of opulence and grandeur. The walls were of gleaming marble, the floor a mosaic of contrasting black and white tiles. Great columns spiralled upwards to the heights of vaulted ceilings adorned with panes of stained glass. Tapestries depicting events from the life of Sigmar were displayed in abundance, only a handful betraying the sooty odour of relics rescued from the temple in Nuln.

At the centre of the chamber stood an analogion of wutroth, a massive copy of the Deus Sigmar resting upon the lectern’s slanted shelf. To either side of the lectern, two enormous fires blazed, fed by a quartet of solemn monks dressed in sackcloth, their shaven heads tattooed with the mark of the twin-tailed comet. Behind the lectern, seated in a tall throne of carved cherrywood, sat the most powerful clergyman in Altdorf, Grand Theogonist Thorgrad.

The Grand Theogonist was an old man, his hair the colour of new-fallen snow, his eyes listless and weary, his wrinkled skin as thin as parchment and bleached to an almost leprous hue, looking somehow ghoulish in a setting of black priestly robes. A jade talisman clung to the priest’s throat and about his finger he wore a matching ring. A corset of gromril, a fabulous girdle of dwarfcraft said to possess magical powers, circled his waist and upon the breast of his robe was woven the symbol of Sigmar’s hammer, the legendary Ghal Maraz.

Kreyssig stifled an impious snicker when he noted the priest’s proximity to the flames. It wasn’t the chill of winter that lured Thorgrad to such a conflagration. One of the most widespread stories about the Black Plague was that it was caused by the bites of little black spiders. The common remedy for keeping the spiders away was a good stout fire.

‘Thank you for receiving me, your holiness,’ Kreyssig said, his tone more mocking than deferential. It was a distinction that did not go unnoticed. The monks hesitated in their tending of the fires, staring at him with scandalised astonishment. Thorgrad shifted in his chair, an ember of life flaring up in his weary eyes.

‘Your insistence made a personal audience - how did you put it, commander - advisable.’ The Grand Theogonist made the last word drip off his tongue like venom. ‘I am in seclusion at present. Not to be disturbed. I am communing with Great Sigmar, meditating upon his holy creed and begging his aid in the crisis which besets our Empire. It will take divine aid to stamp out this plague which afflicts us in body and soul.’

A wry smile spread across Kreyssig’s face. The only body and soul Thorgrad was trying to save from the Black Plague was his own. ‘Forgive my disturbance of your meditation,’ he said. ‘However I came here not to impose, but to perform a service.’

Immediately Thorgrad’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. ‘To what does the Temple of Sigmar owe this sudden display of piety, commander?’

‘Evidence has come to me that there is a conspiracy against his Imperial Majesty. The name attached to this ring of traitors is that of Arch-Lector Hartwich.’

The Grand Theogonist half rose from his chair, his body trembling with anger. ‘You dare come in here and accuse one of Sigmar’s most devout and pious servants of such…’

‘I have my evidence,’ Kreyssig snarled back. ‘And I can get more, as much as I need. The threat of Drechsler’s axe can be most persuasive.’

Thorgrad’s anger intensified. ‘The Temple of Sigmar is not answerable to secular authority, and especially not the authority of an ambitious peasant who would aggrandise himself through blasphemy!’

Kreyssig shrugged his shoulders. ‘I feared that would be your attitude. Laws can be changed, but why should we scandalise the entire Sigmarite faith because of one treacherous priest?’ A cunning tone crept into the dienstmann’s voice. ‘Or is it only one treacherous priest?’

‘Now you have the affrontery to accuse me!’ the Grand Theogonist roared.

Kreyssig’s eyes gleamed like slivers of steel. ‘Not you, your holiness, but your predecessor. You see, I’ve heard some ugly rumours about Grand Theogonist Uthorsson. Some ugly ones about what happened to him as well.’

Thorgrad’s face went pale. The priest’s body collapsed back into his chair. He gestured to the attendant monks, motioning for them to leave the calefactory. Kreyssig watched them leave, triumph stamped across his smirking features.

‘How much do you know?’ Thorgrad demanded.

‘The Verenan inquisitors down in Nuln were quite… inquisitive,’ Kreyssig said. ‘For some time they had been investigating the excesses of your predecessor. They mentioned Uthorsson as having a connection to something called Slaanesh and intimated that the outrages against propriety unfolding after dark in the Nuln cathedral were not so much an expression of degenerate proclivities but a sort of obscene religious ritual.’ The commander’s smile became almost reptilian. ‘It was rather fortunate that a fire destroyed the cathedral and your predecessor before the Verenans decided to take matters into their own hands.’

The Grand Theogonist lost all appearance of power and authority, his shoulders slumping, his body wilting against the cushions of his chair. ‘What is it you want to keep this information secret?’

‘Only a small consideration,’ Kreyssig said. ‘Hartwich is an enemy of his Imperial Majesty, but as a priest he becomes a special case. As you observe, I have no strict authority over him. You, however, do. I am not saying that you have to denounce him publicly as a traitor. You can do whatever you like, just as long as he is disposed of. Quickly and permanently.’

Kreyssig looked over the raging fires, his lip curling in a sneer. ‘Say he died of the plague, if you like. There’s a lot of that going around right now.’

The Grand Theogonist nodded, conceding to Kreyssig’s demands. He was enough of a realist to know this was only the beginning, that the commander would exploit the secret shame of the temple as often as it suited his purposes. Blackmail was a crime without an end.

‘What will you do about the other conspirators?’ Thorgrad asked.

Kreyssig stepped away from the fires. ‘They will be rounded up and disposed of. My spies are quite thorough. Even now, we have taken a man into custody.’ He hesitated a moment, weighing whether he should disclose the name of his catch. Contempt for the old, frightened man perched between the flames decided him. Even if the priest grew the spine to warn the conspirators -allowing he knew who they were - their very effort to escape would reveal them to him.

‘My Kaiserjaeger found a plague doktor down in the docks who had an interesting story to tell. It seems he was treating a certain peasant, a man who has been hiding from me for some time now. It took a little persuasion, but the physician eventually led us to the hole this peasant had hidden himself in.

‘I have Wilhelm Engel,’ Kreyssig stated, watching to see if Thorgrad displayed any special reaction. He was disappointed to find none.

‘I have Wilhelm Engel,’ he repeated. ‘And through him, I will track down all of these traitors and put their heads on the Tower of Altdorf’s roof.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

Altdorf
Vorhexen, 1111

‘I can make the pain go away. I can make all the hurt and suffering stop. You can be whole again. Clean again. Why won’t you let me help you?’

The words crackled through the black corridors of Mundsen Keep, reverberating from the frozen slime caking the filthy walls. Somewhere in the darkness a maniac began to giggle, his chains clanking against the bricks of his cell.

Wilhelm Engel clenched his eyes closed, trying to hold back the tears. Kreyssig’s torturers had been at work on him, splitting open his diseased flesh with hot tongs, scalding his skin with boiling oil, piercing his fingers with copper nails. Somehow, through it all, he had kept silent.

Or at least given the Kaiserjaeger nothing better than inarticulate screams.

Now, however, the fiendish Kreyssig had unveiled a new torture. The torment of hope. The promise of life to a man already resigned to death.

Engel was strapped to a table, his mangled body held in place by long belts of leather. He could just raise his neck enough to see the hideous ruin the Kaiserjaeger had made of him, the raw glistening meat where his leg should be, the red wreck of his chest. He could also see the man who promised to undo everything that had been done to him. More than that - the man who promised to do the impossible. To save him from the plague.

It was easy to be brave when you were prepared to die. How much harder to die when you were offered a miraculous chance to escape death, to cheat Morr even as he reached out his bony hand to take you.

Karl-Maria Fleischauer, a scarecrow of a man, his face displaying hard angles beneath its thick growth of beard, his eyes glistening with an ophidian lustre. He wore an extravagant robe of silk, its foreign contours lent a further exotic flavour by the mystical symbols embroidered over its surface. Grinning moons and whirling stars, writhing dragons and fiery phoenixes, coiled serpents and roaring lions. Fleischauer, the pet warlock of Emperor Boris, a man both infamous among and feared by the peasants of Altdorf and common folk everywhere. The black arts were a thing to be shunned, their practitioners reviled and destroyed. Such sorcerers were debased, subhuman things, preying upon the innocent to call forth elementals and daemons, sacrificing the helpless to seal their unholy pacts with the Ruinous Powers.

Yet Fleischauer promised his magic could do something so wondrous that it was beyond even the priestesses of Shallya. He promised his spells could drive the plague from Engel’s body.

‘Perhaps you doubt my magic,’ Fleischauer said, a tinge of hurt seeping into his grotesque voice. He ruffled his arms, throwing back the voluminous sleeves of his robe. ‘I shall demonstrate. Then you will believe. You will know that you can trust my spells and my word.’

The frigid air of the dungeon became impossibly colder as the warlock worked his magic. Engel could feel the tears freezing to his eyelids, could hear the blood crystallising against his skin. His ears rang with the sinister sing-song incantation rolling from Fleischauer’s lips.

Then, before his amazed gaze, Engel saw the buboes marring the pit of his arm growing smaller. The discolouration of his skin faded, his flesh becoming smooth and unmarked, flush with the ruddy glow of health and strength.

‘I can take it all away,’ the warlock promised. ‘All you need do is tell Commander Kreyssig what he wants to know. Then I will take away the plague. I will fix all your injuries. You will be free. You will leave this place on your own two feet.’ The warlock’s hand brushed across the burnt, oozing mess where the iron boot had been used on Engel’s right foot.

Engel’s eyes rolled, a piteous moan of torment rising from his lips. He wouldn’t break. He would stay strong. He owed that much to all the Marchers he’d brought to Altdorf, the men who had died because he had been naïve enough to think the Emperor was a reasonable man. He had to protect Meisel and the others, engaged upon their great work, fighting to depose a tyrant.

Against his will, he looked at the spot the warlock’s magic had cleansed. Engel’s resolve shattered. Before he was even aware, words were spurting from his tongue. He tried to stop himself, but it was an effort he knew he couldn’t win. That part of him that was willing to die for the cause was too small beside the part of him that wanted to live. He heard his own voice telling the lurking Kaiserjaeger about Lady Mirella and her cellar. He damned himself as a traitor, falling silent before he could reveal any more than he already had.

Adolf Kreyssig’s evil laugh told Engel that what he had already confessed was enough. The commander stepped out from the shadows, his cruel face lit up by the glow of victory. ‘That is all I require, warlock,’ he said.

Fleischauer wiped his brow with the sleeve of his robe. ‘That is well,’ he said. ‘The enchantment is a taxing one to sustain.’ As he spoke, the atmosphere in the dungeon became noticeably warmer. Engel could feel the change in the air, a lessening of the nameless dread crawling over his skin.

In its place came pain and horror. Searing agony coursed outwards from his chest. Craning his neck, Engel could see the buboes popping back into noxious existence as the warlock’s illusion was broken. As he heard Kreyssig growl commands to the Kaiserjaeger, Engel knew he was worse than a traitor.

He was a fool.

Erich listened with growing disgust as Baron Thornig discussed the coming marriage of his daughter to Adolf Kreyssig. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t accept the woman’s shameful sacrifice. It was easy to get his head around the hazards of torture and death, even of disgrace. But something as unseemly as to exploit a woman’s virtue simply to learn the enemy’s secrets? It tainted the entire cause, took their noble purpose and dragged it through the mud.

Lady Mirella noticed the knight’s disquiet. Detaching herself from the conversation, she drifted over to where he stood against the curtained wall of her sitting room. ‘It disturbs you, such talk?’

The captain nodded, his eyes never leaving the chair where Princess Erna was seated. She was taking no part in the conversation, content to let Baron Thornig explain the arrangements that had been made, the nuptial vows that had been exchanged. No, he corrected himself. Content was too indifferent a word. One look at the princess made it clear she was anything but indifferent to her fate. Resigned was a better word to convey her sentiment. Resigned to her doom, a doom whose horror she fully appreciated.

‘How can Prince Sigdan and the others seriously allow this?’ Erich wondered. ‘What will become of her?’

‘If everything works out, she’ll be a widow before summer,’ Lady Mirella predicted.

Erich’s jaw tightened. ‘But everyone will still know. She’ll still have his stink on her.’

Lady Mirella gave the young captain a curious stare. ‘If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were jealous. Maybe her willingness to go through with this has aroused that knightly passion. Maybe you sense a kindred spirit, someone willing to sacrifice personal honour for the good of people who will never thank her, people she doesn’t even know.’

The captain turned away, pulling at the heavy curtain, peering through the frosted glass at the street outside. ‘I wonder when Konreid will be back,’ he said, brusquely changing the subject. ‘If we knew where the Reiksmarshal stands, we could make our plans accordingly.’

‘And what are your plans?’ Lady Mirella asked, resting her hand on the knight’s arm. ‘I mean beyond the overthrow. After Boris is deposed.’

Erich scowled as he heard the question. It wasn’t something he’d considered before. ‘Rebuild the Reiksknecht, I suppose. Try to get things back to what they were.’ His body suddenly stiffened, his eyes fixing on a dark figure he’d glimpsed on the street. He had seen the man for only an instant before he ducked back behind a corner, but he was certain he’d been wearing the uniform of the Kaiserjaeger.

Even as he turned to warn the rest of the conspirators, Lady Mirella’s manservant came rushing down from the garret. ‘Kaiserjaeger!’ Gustav gasped.

‘What?’ Prince Sigdan exclaimed. ‘Where? How many?’

‘In the street, your grace,’ the servant said. ‘At least a score moving to surround the house!’

‘They must know we’re here!’ bellowed Duke Konrad. All the poise drained out of the nobleman, leaving only terror behind. ‘We’ve been betrayed!’ he shrieked, casting an accusing eye over everyone in the room.

‘That’s impossible,’ grumbled Baron Thornig. ‘Everyone who knew about this meeting is here!’

‘Arch-Lector Hartwich isn’t,’ Mihail Kretzulescu observed.

‘Wilhelm Engel knew about this place too,’ Meisel confessed. ‘He was too sick to come, but as leader of the Marchers, I felt he should know.’ The statement brought a flurry of angry recriminations racing through the room.

‘It doesn’t matter who told them!’ Erich barked, trying to shout down the others. ‘What matters is that we get out of here before they can close the noose.’ He let the curtain fall closed. A disturbing thought occurred to him.

‘You say you saw only twenty Kaiserjaeger?’ he asked Gustav. The peasant nodded. ‘That’s not enough to rush the building. Kreyssig may be a demented madman, but he’s no fool.’

‘What are you thinking?’ Prince Sigdan asked.

Erich was already racing towards the kitchen and the stairs leading down into the cellar. ‘If he found out about the house, he may have found out about the cellar! The men in the street are just there to keep us in! The real attack will come from below!

‘They’re going to use our own tunnel to trap us!’

Nuln
Ulriczeit, 1111

Walther paced along the alleyway behind the Black Rose, his hands stuffed deep inside the pockets of his coat in an effort to defend against the cold, a thick scarf wrapped around his face to defend against the omnipresent stench of the streets. The snow falling from the sky was almost white, scarcely smirched by the smoke rising from the city’s chimneys. For the first time he could remember, the city was blanketed in white, not the dirty grey of soot.

The image was beautiful, but it was a terrible beauty. The reason the snow was white was because there weren’t enough fires left to stain it. There weren’t enough people. Nuln was dying. By day the corpse carts prowled the streets, men already sick collecting those who were dead. Great pyres blazed at the heart of every district. The priests of Morr had been dying by the bushel, leaving no one to bury the dead. The only solution left was to consign the corpses to fire.

The city was breaking apart into two camps: those who blamed the plague on spiritual corruption and those who believed it was just an ordinary disease, no more selective about who it struck down than Reikflu. The religious-minded either kept to their homes, fasting and praying, or else prowled the streets in penitent mobs, lashing themselves with whips and preaching that the judgement of the gods was upon mankind. The threat of the world’s ending, however, only made those less spiritually inclined increase the magnitude of their debauchery. ‘Eat, drink and love,’ was their mantra. ‘For tomorrow, we feed the rats!’

Walther gritted his teeth as he considered the horror of such a toast. As the people of Nuln became fewer, the number of rats had swollen to fantastic proportions. With the cats and dogs culled by superstitious peasants, the vermin roamed the streets with unprecedented boldness. There had been hideous stories of rats creeping into cradles and gnawing the infants inside. Bodies left out in the gutter would be picked down to the bone in a few hours.

The rat-catcher shook his head. At one time he would have considered the ferocity and fecundity of the vermin as good for his business. He didn’t feel that way any more. He appreciated the suffering of his fellow man better than before the plague had come. To profit from another’s misery would make him nothing better than a parasite. Besides, the Assembly had stopped issuing bounties for rats. The problem was simply too big to solve that way. Like everyone else in the city, the nobles had resigned themselves to sitting back and waiting for events to run their course.

In the alleyway, a big black rat scurried through the snow, so confident that it didn’t even twitch a whisker as it passed near the Black Rose. Walther watched the repulsive rodent wend its way towards the street, diverting its course only when it drew near a beggar slumped in a doorway. Apparently the wretch was still healthy enough to be a poor prospect for the rat’s appetite.

‘Herr Schill?’ a muffled voice called out from the darkness. Walther turned away from the retreating rat and turned around. A gasp of alarm automatically escaped him. As the speaker stepped out from the shadows, Walther found himself confronted by a tall figure enclosed within a black gown of waxed canvas. A wide-brimmed leather hat fitted to a waxed canvas hood covered the man’s head while a grotesque mask with a protruding beak concealed his face.

‘You… you are the doktor?’ Walther asked. The ghoulish apparition sketched a slight bow. The rat-catcher felt anger swell up inside him. ‘You were asked to be discreet, not come dressed like a raven of Morr!’

The plague doktor shrugged. ‘You cannot pay me enough to take any chances,’ he said, his words all but smothered by his mask. ‘The graveyards are filled with imprudent men.’

‘Get inside, before someone sees you!’ Walther hissed. He reached for the plague doktor, but the man brushed his hand away with the heavy walking stick he carried.

‘I said I do not take chances.’ The doktor pointed with his staff at the tavern. ‘Lead me to the patient, but do it without touching. I try to limit physical contact when I can.’

Fuming at the plague doktor’s condescending tone, Walther showed him through the tavern’s side entrance. At this late hour even the Black Rose was without a crowd. The cook and his assistants had retired, leaving just Zena to attend the few patrons still abroad. She nodded when she saw Walther appear at the door, motioning that it was safe to come in. The rat-catcher and the plague doktor swept past her. Walther pulled open the trap in the floor and climbed down the ladder into the cellar below. Zena and the plague doktor followed close behind him.

The cellar was filled with casks of wine and barrels of beer, provisions Bremer was hoarding against the day when quarantine conditions would kill all traffic from the rest of Wissenland and force Nuln to survive on what was already within the city walls. Walther circled through the confusion of boxes, making for a faint glimmer of light at the back of the cellar.

A section of the room had been partitioned off by a ragged curtain, behind which Hugo lay sprawled on a pallet. In his fever, he had pushed away the mass of furs and blankets Zena had provided to keep him warm. Despite the frosty chill which gripped the cellar, Hugo’s nightshirt was soaked with sweat, fairly plastered against his chest.

Walther shook his head sadly as he gazed down at his friend, then his lip curled back in anger. Several rats were circling around the pallet, gnawing away at the rushlights they had knocked down. One of the rodents had even started on the stem of the only light still held fast to its fixture. Walther shouted at the loathsome vermin, but the bold rats didn’t so much as glance in his direction. Only when he started forwards and caught one of the rats with a kick did the scavengers retreat, fading into the blackness with instinctive ease. They didn’t retreat far, their beady eyes gleaming from the shadows as they watched the people gather around the sickbed.

Walther hurriedly righted the remains of the rushlights, pushing them back into their stands with frustrated violence. ‘Why weren’t you watching him!’ he snarled at Zena when he had the tapers lit once more. ‘You should never leave him alone! The rats…’

Zena stepped to Walther’s side, laying her hand against his chest. She knew he didn’t mean the unjust accusation, that he was simply lashing out because of the helplessness he felt. He was powerless to stop Hugo’s decline and that was something Walther couldn’t accept.

While Zena consoled Walther, the plague doktor stood over Hugo, the glass eyes of his garish mask reflecting the fires of the rushlights. The invalid recoiled from the dreadful apparition hovering over him, but didn’t have the strength to ward away the doktor’s staff as it jabbed at his nightshirt. The copper talon at the end of the stick hooked the fabric of the nightshirt, peeling the garment back and exposing the sick man’s chest. A smell of vinegar exuded from the bird-like mask as the doktor peered closer at his patient.

‘Plague,’ the physician declared, tugging his stick free from Hugo’s clothes and retreating from the man’s bedside. He turned his back to the pallet and concentrated on holding the copper talon at the end of his staff in the fires of the rushlights.

Walther’s fists clenched at the plague doktor’s callous attitude. ‘Do something for him.’ He pulled away from Zena’s restraining arms. ‘You’re supposed to be a healer! Help him!’

The bird-like mask turned and the glass eyes fixed upon Walther’s enraged features. ‘I’ve heard too many pleas, too many threats, to feel anything. If you are appealing to the better angels of my nature, I’m afraid you are too late. They flew the coop months ago.’ The plague doktor drew the copper talon away from the flame, inspecting the hot glow of the metal. ‘After a dozen deaths, you learn not to care. After a hundred, you can’t even if you wanted to.’

‘You must be able to do something,’ Walther growled.

The plague doktor looked past the rat-catcher and his woman, staring at Hugo’s wasted frame. The physician’s gloved hands drew a tiny clay bottle from a pouch on his belt. Grimly, he set it down on one of the boxes. ‘You’ve paid me well, so I leave you this. It will make his going swift.’ He tapped the neck of the little bottle. ‘By Verena, if I only had more of it. Enough for everyone.

‘I won’t inform the Hundertschaft about this,’ the plague doktor said, his tone becoming harsh. ‘By law, I am required to. By conscience, it is my obligation. But, I suppose it makes no difference. The gods have decided that we’re all going to die. It is only a matter of time.’ He turned away, walking back across the cellar towards the ladder. On his way, he snatched a bottle of wine from a rack against the wall. ‘I’m going home to drink this and in the morning I will have forgotten I was ever here.’

Walther didn’t move until the plague doktor was gone. His eyes were fixed upon the bottle the physician had left.

‘Perhaps it is for the best,’ Zena whispered.

The rat-catcher stormed across the cellar, his hand closing about the bottle. With an inarticulate howl of rage, he threw it at the wall, shattering it into a hundred pieces.

‘There has to be a way!’ Walther shouted. ‘By all the gods, there has to be some hope somewhere!’

Tears were glistening in Zena’s eyes as she heard the pain in her man’s voice. Walther felt powerless to help Hugo. She felt powerless to help Walther.

From the shadows, the rats began to scurry back towards the rushlights.

Middenheim
Vorhexen, 1111

Graf Gunthar leaned back in his oaken throne and studied the foreigner his son had brought to the Middenpalaz. He tried to restrain the hostility he felt towards the man. Whatever the Reiklander’s intentions, the knight had inadvertently led his son into danger. Mandred’s excuses that it was he who had deceived the knight into taking such a risk had fallen on deaf ears. Grown men should know better than to bow to the whims of a mere boy, however great his noble station.

He had been tempted not to grant the audience at all, to have the knight sent into quarantine at once - or executed out of hand as Viscount von Vogelthal had urged. It was still a temptation. The Graf wasn’t so power-mad that he couldn’t forgive a man who defied his decree to further some noble cause. But the fear of the plague being unleashed inside Middenheim was too great to ignore. Even for this audience, he had commanded smouldering braziers placed at either side of where the knight stood in the hope that the pungent smoke would smother any pestilential fumes the Reiklander might have brought with him.

To his credit, Othmar had uncovered and helped destroy a hideous conspiracy. The plague cult could have brought destruction upon all of Middenheim - indeed, such could only have been their purpose. The Graf owed him a debt of gratitude for putting an end to the cult’s activities. Indeed, that was the only reason he had agreed to meet with the man.

‘Speak, while I am still of a mind to listen,’ Graf Gunthar told the Reiklander. His deep voice echoed through the narrow confines of the audience hall. A much smaller chamber than the palace’s council rooms and great hall, the vault-like room was used to receive dignitaries and visiting royalty in a more intimate and less public setting. The rich tapestries and fantastic hunting trophies lining the walls were intended to create a feeling of informality while at the same time reminding a guest of Middenheim’s splendour.

Othmar bowed to the throne, careful to keep himself between the braziers. A trio of armed guards were watching his every gesture. One false move and he would be expelled from the royal presence - alive if he was fortunate.

‘Your highness, I have had a long and perilous journey to reach you,’ the knight began. ‘You know already of the difficulty just gaining entry to the city.’

‘We are quite familiar with your flagrant violation of the Graf’s decree,’ von Vogelthal snarled. The chamberlain’s face was pinched with loathing, but in his eyes was a terrible fear. A big brass pomander hung about his neck and every time he even glanced in the knight’s direction, the viscount raised the ball to his nose and took a deep sniff of the aromatic spices locked inside.

Graf Gunthar motioned for his frightened chamberlain to be silent. What was done was done. Now that the Reiklander was here, the Graf would listen to what he had to say.

Othmar bowed his head in contrition. Catching the mood of the few advisors the Graf had brought with him to this audience, the knight hastily dropped the subject of his travels.

‘I do not know how much you are aware of what is transpiring in Altdorf,’ Othmar said. ‘The situation as it is, I can imagine that news from the outside is scarce and much of what you have heard has probably been dismissed as rumour or fancy. I have been dispatched by my masters to ensure that Middenheim has a clear and accurate picture of what has happened and the course of action we hope to pursue.

‘Boris Goldgather has shown himself to be a grasping despot unworthy of the title of emperor. In his ruthless drive to aggrandise his own wealth and power, he has increasingly perpetrated outrages upon his imperial subjects. The taxation of the Dienstleute, his callous massacre of starving men in the streets of Altdorf, the march against Talabheim, the abandonment of Drakwald, these are only the latest of his crimes. The Emperor’s tyranny will break the Empire apart if it is allowed to continue.’

‘We have heard that the Reiksknecht has already taken up arms against the Emperor,’ Graf Gunthar said. ‘That yours is an outlawed order, the lives of all its knights forfeit to the imperial crown.’

‘That is only partly correct, your highness,’ Othmar replied. ‘The Reiksknecht was commanded to undertake the slaughter of defenceless men in open defiance of every convention of chivalry and honour. Grand Master von Schomberg refused to besmirch the reputation of the Reiksknecht by being a party to such a crime. For his stance, a warrant was issued for his arrest and the entire order was commanded to lay down its arms. We refused.’

‘And now you plot against the Emperor,’ von Vogelthal sneered. ‘A hundred knights against the might of the Empire!’

Othmar bristled at the chamberlain’s derision, his fist clenching at his side. Quickly he turned his gaze away from von Vogelthal and back upon the Graf. He didn’t need to win the viscount’s support. The only man in this room he had to appeal to was Graf Gunthar.

‘We are not without our allies,’ Othmar stated. ‘You will understand that I cannot disclose their names, but I will say that they represent some of the most powerful men in the Empire. The tyranny of Boris Goldgather must be brought to an end.’ Othmar looked about the room, studying the faces of the Graf’s advisors, noting the scowls of distaste they wore. ‘Would it help to know that I was sent here not by my Grand Master, but by your own Baron Thornig? He said that the sons of Middenheim would never sacrifice their freedom, that they would take a stand against the oppression of Altdorf.’

‘One city against the whole Empire?’ scoffed Duke Schneidereit. ‘We would be swatted like a fly.’

‘Not one city alone!’ protested Othmar. ‘Others would stand with you! It needs only someone to show them the way and all the provinces will rise up against this despot!’

‘And you expect Middenheim to lead the way?’ Graf Gunthar asked, his voice as cold as steel.

Mandred could sense the anger boiling up inside the Graf. Limping towards the throne, the side of his head wrapped in bandages, the prince appealed to his father. ‘You know Sir Othmar to be a brave man, father. You can trust what he says.’

The Graf turned narrowed eyes upon his son. ‘Liars can be brave men too,’ he hissed, the meaning of his words causing Mandred to hide his face in shame. The Graf leaned back in his throne, shifting his cold regard back upon the Reiklander. ‘It happens that I believe you,’ he declared. ‘I believe you mean everything you say. But tell me, will this noble cause make Nordland forget their schemes to wrest control of the Middle Mountains from my realm? Will it make Ostland stop stealing timber from my forests? Will it make the robber barons of Westerland stop raiding my villages? Will we forget all of our differences and unite against the only thing that holds us together?’

‘Boris has schemed long to pit neighbour against neighbour,’ Othmar said. ‘He knows that by keeping the provinces divided he ensures his own rule. Talabecland feuds with Stirland, Averland quarrels with Solland over the price of wool, Wissenland places an embargo upon Reikland wine.’

Graf Gunthar nodded his head. ‘Then you do understand the impossibility of what you ask.’

Mandred turned back towards the throne. ‘But father, you yourself said that Middenheim must prepare for the Emperor’s armies to attack us!’

A pained sigh rumbled from the seated monarch. ‘If the Emperor attacks us, we will defy him.’ He stared hard into the face of his son. ‘Don’t you understand? What this man is asking of us is treason! To betray our oaths to the Empire! Saint or tyrant, Boris Hohenbach is our Emperor!

‘I am sorry,’ Graf Gunthar said, turning back to face Othmar, ‘but what you ask is impossible. Middenheim will fight if it is attacked, but we are not traitors.’ He motioned with his hand and an attendant in crimson livery blew a single note upon a curled hunting horn. This audience was at an end.

‘Take Sir Othmar to the Cliff Tower,’ von Vogelthal ordered. The Graf’s guards motioned for the knight to follow them, taking pains not to come too close to the man. Bowing once more to the seated monarch, Othmar allowed himself to be led from the room.

‘Is it necessary to lock him away like an enemy?’ Mandred asked.

‘Until we are certain he is not carrying the plague, he is an enemy,’ von Vogelthal told the prince.

‘He will be well looked after,’ the Graf promised.

Mandred shook his head at his father’s statement. ‘And what about the people down at the foot of the Ulricsberg?’ he demanded. ‘Will they be well looked after?’

‘The beastkin will soon solve that problem,’ von Vogelthal said, then immediately regretted his snide remark when he found Mandred glaring at him.

‘What does that mean, viscount?’ the prince snarled.

‘Our sentries have spotted beastmen gathering in the forest,’ Graf Gunthar told Mandred. Unlike von Vogelthal, there was sympathy in the monarch’s tone. ‘When they feel their numbers are strong enough, they will undoubtedly attack.’

‘And what are we going to do?’ Mandred demanded.

‘The only thing we can do,’ the Graf answered. ‘The only thing that can keep Middenheim safe.

‘We let Warrenburg burn.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Altdorf
Vorhexen, 1111

His heart was pounding as Erich von Kranzbeuhler led the way into the cellar. It was not fear for himself that sent terror racing through his veins, but the knowledge that if they were caught then their cause would die with them. No one else in Altdorf would dare to stand against Emperor Boris after them. It was that thought which made his fist clench tighter about the hilt of his sword and made him pause at the door, listening for the slightest sound from below.

Erich looked back, instinctively seeking out Prince Sigdan, the leader of the conspiracy. He waited until the nobleman nodded his head, then he wrenched open the door and leaped down the short flight of stairs. He braced his feet on the cold stone floor, his body tensed for battle, his eyes scouring the darkness for the faintest hint of motion. The only sound was the rustle of rats creeping among the boxes and nibbling the straw scattered about the cellar.

A rushlight threw rays of illumination across the cellar, driving the rats back into their holes but revealing no lurkers in black livery. Erich glanced back at the steps behind him, reaching back to take the burning rushlight from Baron Thornig.

‘It doesn’t look like they’re here yet,’ Erich said. ‘We can thank Sigmar for that, at least!’ The captain turned about, staring at the jagged opening to the tunnel. He frowned as he thought of asking aristocrats like Prince Sigdan and Duke Konrad to creep through the muck and mire of the sewers, and the idea of Princess Erna and Lady Mirella slinking through such filth turned his stomach. If there were a way to spare them such indignity… but, no, they would suffer far worse if they fell into Kreyssig’s hands.

That is, those of them who hadn’t already decided on such a fate. He felt his jaw clench as he imagined the lovely princess married to a reptilian peasant like Kreyssig. For a moment he hesitated, wondering if it wasn’t better to make a stand of it and go down in a clean fight.

‘What is it?’ Mihail Kretzulescu asked. ‘Why have you stopped?’

The darkness hid the twinge of embarrassment on Erich’s face as he answered the Sylvanian. ‘Thought I heard something,’ he answered lamely. ‘It must have been a rat.’ Without explaining further, the knight pressed on, rushing along the cramped passage, following the mephitic reek of the sewer. Gradually the air became warmer, the moist unclean heat of the steaming channel of waste flowing beneath the city.

Erich hesitated upon the ledge, watching and listening. In the distance, he could just make out the sound of voices. They were faint and indistinct and in the echoing sewer it was impossible to tell which direction they came from. All he could tell was that there were a lot of them and there was a rattle of armour any time the speakers were silent. Only one group of armed men would have any business in the sewers. It was the Kaiserjaeger, come to close Kreyssig’s trap.

‘Which way, my lord?’ asked Meisel, a notched blade gripped in the dienstmann’s hand.

Erich agonised over the answer, turning his head left and right, desperately trying to decide which direction the voices were coming from. If they waited long enough to see the lights the Kaiserjaeger carried, then their own rushlight would be seen. They had to move before then, before Kreyssig had a chance to spot them. But if he made the wrong choice, they would run right into the villain’s arms.

As he gazed into the murk of the sewers, Erich felt his skin crawl. Thousands of beady red eyes gleamed at him from the shadows, each burning with obscene hunger. Looking at them, he could picture his body lying in the effluent with a Kaiserjaeger sword through his gut and a horde of greedy rodents gnawing the flesh from his bones.

The knight froze as he noticed another pair of eyes watching him from the darkness. They were bigger than the rats’ eyes, higher off the ground and with a disturbing impression of a lanky shape behind them. Yet they reflected the glow of the rushlight with the same crimson gleam as the rats around them, an unholy ember of malice and hunger. Erich felt fingers of ice race along his spine as he locked eyes with the sinister apparition.

Then there was no more time to think about the dreadful spectre. Imagination or nightmare, Erich tore his gaze from the dark figure, twisting around in answer to the cries of shock and horror rising from behind him. His first thought was that the Kaiserjaeger had stolen upon them from behind somehow. An instant later, he was wishing what had ambushed them was Kreyssig’s thugs.

The walls of the sewer were alive with vermin, great bloated rats that scurried along the ledges and swam through the filthy channel. An army of squeaking, chittering rodents came swarming towards the fugitives. Meisel was shouting in disgust, using the flat of his sword to fend off the vermin scrabbling at his legs. Lady Mirella screamed as a black beast with enormous fangs gnawed at her shoe. Palatine Mihail Kretzulescu stamped frantically with his boots as a pack of squealing brutes rushed at him.

Erich lunged at the chittering horde, thrusting the rushlight full into the faces of the rats as they swarmed about the feet of Princess Erna. The horrified woman collapsed in his arms, her breath reduced to a terrified panting. The knight shifted her weight to his sword arm, pressing her against his shoulder as he waved the flaming brand across the snouts of the onrushing pack.

An anguished wail echoed through the sewer. Erich looked up to see the manservant Gustav clutching at his bleeding leg, a piebald rat gnawing at his knee. His mangled leg collapsed beneath him, spilling him face-first into the swarming tide of rodents. At once they were over him, a living carpet of gnashing fangs and flashing claws.

‘We can’t fight them!’ Erich shouted, waving his sword and rushlight. ‘Not with these! We have to run!’

‘Run where?’ demanded Prince Sigdan, trying to slash the vermin spilling around his feet with a jewelled dagger and a gromril sword. ‘What about the Kaiserjaeger!’

‘Khaine take the Kaiserjaeger!’ exclaimed Duke Konrad, his arm covered in gore from where a rat had leaped upon him. ‘Anything’s better than being eaten alive!’

Erich spun around, noticing for the first time that the way was clear to their left. For some reason there were no rats in this direction. Perhaps they had been scared off by the approaching Kaiserjaeger, but whatever the reason, he wasn’t going to squander the chance to escape those verminous fangs! Yelling to his comrades, hugging Princess Erna tight against him, Erich led the frantic retreat.

The rats swarmed after them, chittering and squealing, raising such a deafening, monstrous commotion that the echoing voices of the Kaiserjaeger were smothered by the noise. Erich couldn’t tell if they were moving closer to or away from their enemies. Nor did he care. All that mattered was to escape the horde of ravenous vermin.

For what seemed an eternity but couldn’t have been more than a dozen minutes, the fugitives fled through the sewers. It was a shameful, terrified retreat. Warriors who had faced ogres and orc warlords across the field of battle fleeing for their lives before such tiny, miserable animals! Yet there was no fighting such a swarm. For every rat Erich might crush underfoot, ten would rush in to take its place. There were only two choices to make: run or be devoured.

Finally, when he felt his heart must burst from the exertion, when his breath was a burning agony in his lungs, when sweat streamed from his brow and blinded his eyes, the sewers suddenly fell silent. Erich paused in his headlong flight, daring to look back. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and blinked, unable to believe what he saw.

The rats were gone! One instant the sewers had been filled with a swarming horde of vermin hungry for blood, the next there was only the ancient masonry and brickwork. Against all belief, the entire horde had suddenly decided to abandon the chase!

‘Where did they go?’ Erna gasped in wonder, almost unwilling to believe the evidence of her eyes.

‘Let’s not stick around to find out,’ Erich decided. His hand lingered against the silky smoothness of the princess’s fingers, then, with deliberate gentleness, he led her to her father. The knight nodded grimly as he saw the gratitude in Baron Thornig’s face. He didn’t feel he’d done the princess any favours. What waited for her was every bit as repulsive as an army of hungry vermin.

‘At least we seem to have avoided the Kaiserjaeger,’ observed Count van Sauckelhof, trying to staunch the flow of blood from the bites marking his legs. ‘But where are we?’

Meisel sheathed his sword slowly and looked about him. Gradually the dienstmann began to nod. ‘I think we must be somewhere near the waterfront.’ He jabbed a thumb at the mucky channel, indicating the fish bones sticking from the effluent, then he pointed down the tunnel. ‘This should let out to the Reik soon. The flow is getting quicker and the air is just a little colder.’

‘Who cares where it leads, so long as it gets us out of these damn sewers!’ Duke Konrad grumbled.

‘That, your grace,’ Erich said, ‘is the best damn idea I’ve heard all day!’

With unseemly haste, the small group of nobles and idealists hurried down the tunnel, eager for the clean air and the open sky. None of them looked back. None of them saw the gleaming pair of red eyes watching them from the darkness or heard the shrill, inhuman titter of laughter that rose from the lanky shape behind the eyes.

‘Find them,’ Kreyssig snarled, glaring at the Kaiserjaeger sergeant. The soldier executed a stiff salute and hastened back through the tunnel leading up into Lady Mirella’s cellar. Kreyssig scowled as he heard the shouts of the other men searching the sewer tunnels. Except for one dead man, they had found no trace of the conspirators. Even the corpse was useless, gnawed beyond all recognition.

‘Commander,’ a sharp voice hissed from the darkness. Kreyssig swung around, a dagger in his fist. He could just make out the shape crouched beside the rubble of a broken pillar. There was no mistaking that twisted, subhuman slouch. It was one of his mutant friends, the secret eyes and ears of the Kaiserjaeger.

Kreyssig kept his dagger ready, anger blazing in his eyes. ‘They’ve escaped,’ he snarled. ‘For all your talk about knowing the sewers, the traitors escaped! If you’d led us here quicker, if you’d found a more direct route, I could have had them all!’

The mutant cringed before Kreyssig’s wrath, pressing its ratty nose to the filthy ledge in a token of abasement. ‘Forgive-mercy, great-terrible commander!’ the mutant squeaked. ‘Try-help, yes-yes, try-help much-much!’

Kreyssig resisted the urge to kick the cowering abomination’s fangs down its throat. ‘They’ve escaped,’ he repeated.

The mutant reared up slightly, its eyes gleaming red in the light of Kreyssig’s oil-lamp. ‘Not all-all,’ the creature hissed, its body straightening with pride. ‘Catch-take one,’ it reported. ‘Kill-wound,’ it added, its tone becoming apologetic. ‘Crawl off to die-die. But find-take this before traitor-meat get away!’ The mutant reached into its filthy cloak, removing a scrap of parchment from some hidden pocket. It reached out with its furry paw to give it to Kreyssig. The commander’s face contorted in disgust. Angrily he pointed to the rubble, indicating the mutant should leave its prize there.

Kreyssig was annoyed by the failure of his subhuman confederates. He was just beginning to think the mutants had outlived their usefulness when he reached down and retrieved the scrap of letter. As his eyes read the fragmented sentences, he chuckled cruelly.

‘This is good,’ he said. ‘Your people have done well.’ The mutant bobbed its head as Kreyssig complimented it. He, however, had already dismissed the creature from his thoughts. He was too busy thinking about the letter and how he was going to tell Emperor Boris that his most favoured general was colluding with a conspiracy to depose him.

First his marriage to Princess Erna, then his destruction of Reiksmarshal Boeckenfoerde’s career. Great things were ahead for Adolf Kreyssig.

There was no limit to where a man with his kind of ambition could go.

Skavenblight
Vorhexen, 1111

Panic rippled through the streets and rat-runs of Skavenblight. Every eye glistened with fear, musk dripped from every gland. The stormvermin of Clan Rictus and their thrall clans poured through the sprawling confusion of dilapidated buildings and subterranean tunnels, viciously trying to maintain order. No less than a dozen slave uprisings had broken out in different warrens. Several lesser clans had exploited the anarchy to pursue vendettas against rivals, ransacking each other’s burrows and slaughtering enemy breeders and their pups.

The source of the unrest lay within the infested tunnels of Clan Verms. More ratmen had become victims of the plague, and this time Wormlord Blight hadn’t been able to keep news of the disease from leaving the Hive. The exuberance with which the Black Plague had been regarded as it decimated the man-things by the thousands now turned to absolute terror as the skaven came to understand the same plague might be loosed among themselves.

Blight Tenscratch had been present at the hasty meeting of the council. A vote had been taken to decide what measures must be instituted to control the plague. It came closer to any vote in the history of the council to being unanimous. Blight was the only one who was against the immediate seclusion of the Hive and the extermination of every living thing inside it. Only extensive bribes had allowed Blight to escape the fate of his warren. Except for himself and a cadre of cronies, the skaven dwelling in the Hive were to be sacrificed for the common good of skavendom.

By design, Puskab Foulfur was one of the few Blight selected to be spared. Each ratman allowed to escape the Hive had cost the coffers of Clan Verms dearly, but of them all it was the plague priest who Blight felt offered the most potential for reclaiming his lost fortune.

The Black Plague had struck almost immediately after the failed assassination of Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch. Blight didn’t think that was a coincidence. Puskab’s theory that Nurglitch was using traitors to spread the disease among Clan Verms had been proven. But Clan Pestilens had been more subtle than Blight had given them credit for. Rather than move against Verms openly, rather than depend on the plague to wipe them out, Pestilens had instead turned the whole of skavendom against them!

Puskab scurried through the winding passages of the Hive, keeping pace with the mob of chieftains. He was careful to keep a particularly sharp eye on Nakkal Blackfinger, the Treasure Hoarder of Clan Verms. Charged with cataloguing and protecting the income from worm-oil, Nakkal was among the most important of Blight’s functionaries. Even more so since there was no question that the treasurer had skimmed a fair portion of the clan’s profits for himself and squirreled his loot someplace far from the Hive. Blight would want to get his paws on that plunder, but to do that he would need Nakkal alive. At least for a little while. If any of the Wormlord’s minions had been given accurate instructions for how to escape the destruction of the Hive, it would be Nakkal.

There were several groups of chieftains and warlords racing through the tunnels, abandoning their underlings to the cruel fate that awaited them. The others, however, had been given false trails to follow. Their escape routes ended in tunnels bristling with black-furred stormvermin and withering fusillades of jezzail fire. The shrieks of those who had been betrayed by Blight’s deception echoed through the doomed burrows.

Puskab was thankful for the Wormlord’s foresight, even as his glands clenched at the notion that his group might likewise be hurrying to its own massacre. The lesser skaven of Clan Verms were hardly content to sit back and wait for death to claim them. Those that had not thrown themselves into a mindless rampage of looting within the main warren had gathered in large packs, stalking after the refugee chieftains, hoping to join them in escape.

Few skaven followed Puskab’s group. The plague priest had been viewed with fear and suspicion from the first, but now he was shunned as the source of all their woes. Their panic hadn’t risen to the point where they would forget their fear and try to attack the horned sorcerer; there hadn’t been enough time for hate to put some mettle into their spines. Before it could, Puskab intended to be far away.

Down the cramped tunnels, the walls crawling with bugs of every size and shape, the skaven hastened. Sometimes their little group would dart into a side passage as a larger pack of refugees came rushing past. Once they waited while a gigantic scorpion, loosed from its cage, came scuttling down the tunnel, a half-eaten ratman clenched in its claws. Twice they were forced to retreat before the waddling bulk of a skaven brood-mother, an entourage of eunuchs and slaves trying to guide the brainless females to some place of imagined safety. The husky scent exuded by the frightened brood-mothers was enough to compel even a few of the chieftains to forget about safety and rush after the females, instinct driving them to protect the breeders despite their certain doom.

The crack of jezzails ahead announced that the refugees were nearing one of the dozens of egresses from the Hive. The sharp tang of skaven blood, the acrid smell of warp-powder and shot, the musky reek of fear-smell, all of these joined to form a stench peculiarly redolent of merciless despair.

The narrow tunnel widened as it climbed towards an archway of stone. Dozens of skaven bodies, some of them still twitching, lay strewn about the gateway. Beyond, a phalanx of Clan Rictus ratmen, hulking in their patchwork armour of plate and chain, stood with spears at the ready. Between the spear-rats, their red eyes shining maliciously in the flickering light of worm-oil lanterns, weedy Clan Skryre sharpshooters huddled. Each of them clutched a massive tube of steel in his paws, the front spitted upon a triangular firing rest which had been driven into the ground. The jezzails were taller than the ratmen who carried them and it took two skaven to pour powder and shot down their cavernous barrels.

Puskab’s eyes narrowed as he saw the formidable cordon that had been thrown about the Hive. His magic would be useless against such numbers. He might slay twenty or thirty with a ball of burning putrescence, but after that his body would be shattered by the jezzails. His only hope now lay in his usefulness to Blight and whether the Wormlord had spoken truly about a way out.

‘Tenscratch eat-slay traitor-meat!’ Nakkal barked out, his voice shrill and terrified. It was the password that had been arranged between Blight and the fangleaders he had bribed. If the treachery had been discovered, or if the guards had reconsidered the agreement…

A scar-faced stormvermin, a battered human helmet crushed down about his skull, a nugget of glowing warpstone dangling from the lobe of his ear, stepped slightly forwards, pushing aside the spears of his henchmen. ‘Late-late, fool-meat!’ the fangleader snarled. He cast an anxious look over his shoulder, then waved his arm in imperious fashion. ‘Hurry-scurry or stay-burn!’

The warning didn’t need to be given twice. Puskab scrambled along with the Verms chieftains, shoving Nakkal out of his way as he reached the gap that had opened between the stormvermin. His haste was quickly justified. A sharp squeal sounded from somewhere up the tunnel - the cry of some unseen sentinel. In response, the fangleader’s warriors closed ranks once more, blocking the escape of the slower chieftains. Callously, the fang-leader growled a command. The stormvermin lashed out with their spears, skewering the refugees still before them. Those few who eluded the spears and tried to flee back into the Hive were shot in the back by the chittering sharpshooters.

Puskab could see the reason for the fangleader’s sudden sense of duty. From the broad tunnel beyond the archway a great mob of skaven was scurrying into view. Foremost among them were a number of huge cask-shaped carts pushed along by packs of emaciated slaves. Riding atop the carts were groups of leather-clad ratmen, their paws and forearms covered in thick oilskins, their heads encased in weird fur masks that had been soaked in something that was at least partly vinegar to judge by the smell. The scent of Clan Skryre lingered about the masked skaven and each of them fussed about a confusion of brass wheels and ratgut hoses.

‘Make way!’ the fangleader snarled, casting a warning look in Puskab’s direction. The plague priest did as he was told, scurrying aside as the weird carriages came trundling past him. A second pack of stormvermin followed, these bearing the red fur and scorched armour of Clan Volkyn. They fanned out as the bulky Clan Skryre carts passed through the archway and down the entrance into the Hive. Excited squeaks rose from the warriors as a ragged mob of skaven appeared at the far end of the tunnel. Anxiously they clashed swords against shields until the entire corridor boomed with the clamour.

The mob of Clan Verms skaven hesitated for only a moment, then gave voice to a savage howl. Like a crazed thing, the horde of desperate ratmen came charging down the passage. As they rushed towards the carts, the warlock-engineers mounted atop them began to work the machinery of their arcane contraptions. Some of them fiddled with pressure valves while others worked networks of pumps and windlasses. At the fore of each cart, a strongly-built ratman raised a heavy hose with a broad metal nozzle.

In response to the efforts of the warlock-engineers, smoke began to rise from the mouth of each hose. Then a tiny flicker of green flame sputtered into view. It danced about the metal nozzle for only an instant before it was drowned by a great rush of shimmering emerald fire.

The charging horde shrieked as the green flames washed over them. Ratmen leapt into the air, their fur blazing, their flesh melting from their bones. Dozens of them were reduced to piles of steaming meat in the blink of an eye. Scores more wailed in agony, trying to drag their mutilated bodies back into the darkness of the Hive.

The warlock-engineers laughed at the havoc wrought by their hideous weapon, the warriors of Clan Volkyn cheered at the spectacle of burning bodies strewn before them. Encouraged by the ease of the slaughter, the warlock-engineers shouted down at the slaves chained to the sides of the carts, ordering the wagons pushed deeper into the boundaries of Clan Verms.

‘They will burn out every inch of the Hive.’

Puskab turned about, surprised to see Blight Tenscratch standing beside him. He had been so fascinated by the display of Clan Skryre’s admittedly heretical techno-sorcery that he had failed to notice the scent of the Wormlord and his remaining guards.

‘Warpfire they call it,’ Blight hissed. ‘I am told it uses a mixture of worm-oil and warpstone.’ His head suddenly darted to one side, then the other, eyes searching among the ranks of the Rictus stormvermin.

‘Nakkal lost-gone,’ Puskab said, guessing who Blight was looking for. The plague priest felt a twinge of amusement as he stated that the chieftain had suffered an accident.

Blight’s lips pulled away from his fangs. ‘This is all that flea-sucking pimple-arsed Nurglitch’s fault!’ The Wormlord shook his fist at the roof of the cavern, muttering curses under his breath.

‘We will-must try-try again,’ Puskab said.

Blight fixed the plague priest with a crooked smile. ‘We?’ he snickered. ‘No-no, not we! You!’ The Wormlord’s claw trembled as he pointed it at Puskab. ‘You will kill-slay Nurglitch! Challenge him for his seat on the council! Take his place-pelt as Arch-Plaguelord!’

Bylorhof
Ulriczeit, 1111

When Frederick roused from his stupor, the monster was gone. Retrieving a spike-headed mace from the cells once inhabited by the templars, the priest made his way outside to inspect the temple grounds. The cold wind blew snow across the rows of graves, headstones vanishing beneath a mantle of white. In the distance, the mournful cry of a dog rose, invading the eerie quiet of the night. Mannslieb was nearly full now, the greater moon’s silvery light eclipsing the sickly glow of Morrslieb.

By moonlight and rushlight, Frederick circled the temple, the heavy mace always at the ready. Snow crunched under his feet as he scoured the ground for any trace of the undead creature he had seen. If the thing had left any tracks, they had been obliterated by the new-fallen snow.

The priest uttered a nervous laugh. If the thing had been there at all. If it hadn’t existed solely in his own mind. If he wasn’t going mad.

Then Frederick’s steps brought him to the side of the temple and the ornate window looking into the sanctuary. His skin crawled as he stared at the ground below the window. Sheltered by the eaves of the roof, the ground here had been spared the attentions of the latest snowfall. Pressed clearly into the snow were the marks of unshod feet, feet like none he had ever seen. Visible in the snow were the prints of toes, toes that were like scraggly claws. Toes from which all the flesh had been peeled away. As a final sign that the creature had been real, Frederick found a strip of decayed skin caught upon the window frame, left there when the undead horror had pressed itself against the glass and peered into the sanctuary.

Clenching the mace tighter, Frederick turned away from the window. His eyes scanned the silent rows of graves, wondering where the monster had gone. He felt an obligation to track down the abomination. Despite the heretical spell he had evoked, he still regarded himself as a priest of Morr and it was a priest’s duty to bring peace to the restless dead.

The open door of the old vault swayed in the wind, banging against the carved granite walls. Frederick felt a chill run down his spine. There was no one who would have opened that door. Even the most desperate looters shunned the gardens of Morr, if not from fear of the plague then from the dreadful memory of Arisztid Olt and his frightful abuses of the cemetery.

Forcing himself towards the mausoleum took more courage than Frederick believed he had. At every step he felt the urge to flee, to retreat into the temple and cower behind the altar. His flesh crawled, his breath came in icy gasps, his hair stood on end. Every part of his being could sense the unnatural aberration which had preceded him and left the door swinging in the wind.

Somehow he managed to reach the mausoleum. The priest hesitated upon the threshold, gazing in silence upon the confusion of prints which had disturbed the centuries of dust inside the vault. Clumps of marsh grass and mud littered the steps as they descended into the musty darkness. Furtive sounds rose to scratch at the edge of his hearing and Frederick did not need to be told it was not the noise of rats.

Frederick started to pray to his god, then hesitated. After what he had done, the blasphemy with which he had profaned Morr’s temple, he had no right to presume upon the god’s benevolence. He had failed his god. Perhaps this was a test, a trial to redeem himself. If so, he was determined he would meet the challenge on his own.

The darkness wrapped itself around Frederick as he descended into the ancient vault. The illumination of the rushlight lessened with each step, as though the tomb resented the intrusion of its flame. As the light began to fail, raw panic threatened to overcome the priest.

Again the furtive shuffling sounds slithered across Frederick’s ears. They were closer now, close enough to startle the priest. He had imagined his quarry to be deep within the catacombs by now, not lingering so near the entrance. Casting a worried glance at the doubtful flame of his rushlight, he strode towards the noise.

Before he had gone more than a few steps, a sweet, rotten stench struck his senses. From the gloom, a shape emerged into the faltering light. Frederick recoiled in shock as he found himself gazing into the decayed face of a Bylorhof peasant, the man’s visage reduced almost to a skull by the ravenous attentions of marsh vermin. Worms writhed in the peeling flesh, the scaly carcass of a scavenger fish protruded from the creature’s cheek, ugly water beetles crawled through hair matted with slime.

Frederick swung the heavy mace into the monster’s hideous face. The rotten skull shattered beneath the terrified blow, spattering the wall of the crypt with stagnant muck and slivers of bone. The creature swayed for a moment, as though unaware its brain had been pulverised. Then the thing collapsed on the dusty floor.

Zombie! The grotesque word came unbidden to Frederick’s mind. Walking revenants without purpose or motive, slinking horrors that were the antithesis of life and of death. They were the lowest form of undead abomination, mindless corpses devoid of either will or soul.

Yet, as Frederick’s mind turned back to the dark lore of Arisztid Olt, a troubling thought came to him. A zombie was a thing that existed because of dark magic, it could thrive only at the direction of some outside force, some greater will to sustain its empty husk. Suddenly he understood why these things had appeared. Some terrible fiend had descended upon the graveyard, might even now be lurking among the tombs. Witch or daemon, it was summoning the unhallowed dead, drawing them from their watery graves.

The priest’s heart pounded in his breast. Somewhere, in the black catacombs, a malevolent power was gathering its strength. It had to be stopped, stopped before it could threaten the town.

Frederick followed the sunken passages, the spiked mace held in a white-knuckle grip. His eyes struggled to pierce the gloom, strove to compensate for the increasingly poor illumination of the rushlight. The shuffling steps echoed ahead of him. He could tell they came from more than one source, but whether there might be a dozen or a hundred, he could not say. If fate favoured him, he might never need to know. There was only one enemy he had to face - the occult power that had summoned the zombies from the marsh.

On through the blackness the priest crept. Sometimes the decayed hulk of a zombie would loom out at him from the shadows. A blow from the mace quickly drove the things back, shattering decayed limbs and crushing rotten bones with each frantic strike. Frederick’s skin crawled as he noted the unnatural way the zombies reacted to his assaults. Making no move either to defend or attack, the things simply wilted beneath his blows, staggering aside as he forced his way past them.

Perhaps their sorcerous master was as yet unaware of the priest’s presence. Perhaps the fiend had exhausted its power resurrecting the dead and was now resting, trying to replenish its energies. Frederick hoped such was the case, that he could steal upon this malignance and destroy it before it was strong enough to oppose him.

Movement ahead arrested the priest in his tracks. Whatever was ahead of him moved with an energy and vitality absent from the shambling zombies he had encountered. Images of ghouls and vampires flashed through Frederick’s brain. Again, he felt the urge to flee. Again, he forced himself to be brave. Whatever was ahead of him might still be unaware of him. He might still be able to take it by surprise.

Wailing an inarticulate cry, the priest charged into the blackness, the mace flying forwards in a brutally violent sweep. Frederick cried out in pain as the mace crashed against some unyielding force, sending tremors throbbing down his arm. Reeling from the injury, he thrust the faltering rushlight at his antagonist.

An incredulous smile crept onto Frederick’s face as he looked ahead. There was no fiend in the darkness, only the smooth blackness of an obsidian pillar, a monument to some long-dead templar knight. The pillar was marked by a scratch, the best his mace could do when it had smashed into the immovable stone. The pillar had retained its polish down through the years, reflecting the glow of Frederick’s rushlight and the man who held it.

Trying to attack the fiend who haunted the catacombs, Frederick had attacked his own reflection. The absurdity of the thing brought bitter laughter to the priest’s lips.

His laughter died as the sounds of shuffling steps filled the passage behind him. Frederick’s attack on the pillar might have been absurd, but it had borne terrible fruit. The zombies were aware of him now, guided to him by the malignant power of their master. He could see them groping their way into the light, faces purple with rot, swollen tongues protruding from mouths clenched in the final rictus of death.

Frederick shifted the mace to his uninjured arm and braced himself to confront the undead horde. ‘Keep back,’ he warned the creatures.

To his shock, the zombies stopped advancing. Like ghastly statues, the things froze in place, their lifeless eyes staring emptily at the priest.

Raising the mace, trying to encourage the rushlight to greater effort, Frederick took a step towards the waiting zombies. The undead monsters moved not so much as a muscle. A dreadful cold settled around the priest’s heart, a suspicion so monstrous he refused to accept it.

‘Let…’ Frederick’s voice failed him. Licking his trembling lips, he tried again. ‘Let me pass.’

His mouth opened in horror as the ranks of zombies shifted, pressing their decayed bodies against the walls of the catacomb, clearing a path for the priest. The display of mute, unquestioning obedience sent a thrill of terror rushing through Frederick’s soul.

Without a sidewise glance, Frederick ran past the zombies, fleeing with all haste from the vault and the awful discovery he had made.

He could run from the zombies, but Frederick could not run from the truth. The undead had been called by a terrible power, a force great enough to bind them to his will. He was the fiend who haunted the cemetery. He was the malignance that called the dead from their graves.

Frederick van Hal had surpassed the legacy of Arisztid Olt.

He was now the necromancer of Bylorhof.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Altdorf
Vorhexen, 1111

Arch-Lector Hartwich walked slowly into the calefactory. The priest was dressed in a coarse linen robe, a simple rope belt tied about his waist, his shaved scalp grey with ash. Across his palms, the symbol of the twin-tailed comet had been cut, his blood still clotted about the ceremonial wounds. To either side of Hartwich marched an armoured knight, the steel scales of their mail etched in gold, their white surcoats displaying the skull and hammer heraldry of the Knights of Sigmar’s Blood, the templar guard of the Great Cathedral.

Before the humbled arch-lector, crouched in his chair between the roaring bonfires, Grand Theogonist Thorgrad stared sorrowfully at Hartwich. ‘Have you contemplated your heresy?’ he asked, his voice sounding more ancient than even his withered body should produce.

Hartwich raised his head. ‘I beg your indulgence, your holiness, but it is not heresy and I shall not recant.’

Thorgrad leaned forwards in his chair. ‘If you die with wilful sin blackening your soul you will be denied the grace of Sigmar. Your spirit will be cast out, condemned to wander until the daemons of Chaos claim it for their own.’

‘My heart is pure, your holiness,’ Hartwich insisted. ‘If I must die without ceremony, then so it must be. Sigmar will judge my deeds.’

A hint of pride crept into Thorgrad’s eyes. ‘A man may risk his life for what he believes to be right. It needs a saint to risk his soul for what he knows to be right.’

Hartwich rose from the floor, a puzzled expression on his face. Thorgrad laughed at the other priest’s confusion, but it was a mirthless, weary laughter.

‘When you say Sigmar will judge you, perhaps he has,’ Thorgrad said. He gestured to the roaring bonfires, to the trappings of his audience chamber that had been removed to the calefactory. ‘I am a frightened man. I am afraid to die. I am afraid of the plague. I am afraid to face Sigmar and answer for my crimes.’

Thorgrad reached to the neck of his robe, tugging it open, exposing the ugly black buboes. ‘Despite all of my precautions, the plague has found me. I will die. I know that now. Like you, I must face Holy Sigmar and atone for my heresies.’

‘Your heresies, Holiness?’

‘Yes,’ Thorgrad nodded. ‘I was the Lector of Nuln, you know. I served under Grand Theogonist Uthorsson. I saw his slow decline into degeneracy, blasphemy and idolatry. I watched as he turned away from the light of Sigmar and embraced the darkness of Old Night.’

The Grand Theogonist sank back into his chair, tears in his eyes, a rattle in his voice. ‘I was there when Uthorsson began to call upon the Prince of Pleasures. I stood by as he profaned the temple with the most unspeakable atrocities. I was afraid,’ Thorgrad stared into Hartwich’s eyes. ‘Do you understand? I was afraid to speak out against what I knew to be an obscenity because Uthorsson was Grand Theogonist and I feared his power! I hid behind oaths and vows, telling myself it was not my part to question the acts of the Grand Theogonist. I sat by and watched as Uthorsson’s outrages grew. I did nothing, Wolfgang, nothing to stop this vile degradation.

‘I did act, in the end,’ Thorgrad said. ‘When it was forced upon me. When I understood that if I didn’t oppose Uthorsson I would be branded as his accomplice. The inquisitors of the temple of Verena were investigating the rumours of midnight orgies and human sacrifice being committed in the cathedral. I knew they would uncover everything in time, and I understood that this was Uthorsson’s plan - to put such a stain upon the temple that the Sigmarite faith would be discredited and dishonoured for all time. This was the great offering he wished to make to Slaanesh.’

Thorgrad’s hands tightened about the arms of his chair. ‘I stopped him,’ he said. ‘Before his shame could become something more than rumour and suspicion, I stopped Uthorsson.’ A fanatical gleam filled the old priest’s eyes. ‘I waited until he and his filthy coven were practising their obscenities in the sanctuary. I locked them in, barring the door with cold iron that he might not call upon his daemons to set him free. Then I set fire to the temple. The flames consumed the defiled sanctuary and the foulness within!’

The strength drained out of Thorgrad and he slumped back against the chair. ‘Is it wrong to murder evil? That is something only Sigmar can judge. Like you, I am willing to let him decide.’

Hartwich shook his head, trying to digest the revelation he had heard. Certainly there had been stories about some heretical taint upon Grand Theogonist Uthorsson’s reign, but he had never imagined so monstrous an aberration, nor Thorgrad’s role in ending the fallen priest’s sacrilege.

‘I admire your courage, Wolfgang,’ Thorgrad said. ‘I wish that I had possessed such valour when I needed it. But it is too late now. My fate has been decided.’

‘And mine?’ Hartwich asked. It was an impertinent question. He had already undergone the rituals preemptory to a religious execution. He already knew that such a resolution had been demanded by Kreyssig and Boris Goldgather.

Thorgrad smiled. ‘Wolfgang Hartwich must die,’ he said. He lifted his hand and pointed to a corridor leading out from the calefactory. ‘He is lying in his cell right now, meditating upon his crimes against the Emperor. In the morning he will be consigned to the pyre.’

‘I don’t understand. What are you saying?’

‘It is strange how much Wolfgang Hartwich resembled one of my attendants, the unfortunate Brother Richter, who has contracted the Black Plague. After the fire, I do not think even Commander Kreyssig will be able to tell the difference.’ The Grand Theogonist smiled and gestured to a door at the other side of the room.

‘Through that door, you will find raiment and provisions, my son. These good knights will see you clear of the city and accompany you where you need to go. I am sorry there is nothing I can do to help Wolfgang Hartwich and his cause, but I will trust you to honour his name.’

Hartwich kneeled before the dying Grand Theogonist once more. ‘I shall make it my life’s work, your holiness,’ he said. ‘By Sigmar’s grace, I will carry on Wolfgang Hartwich’s work.’

Middenheim
Vorhexen, 1111

From the walls of Middenheim, Mandred had a clear look at the squalid shantytown crouched between the causeways. Miserable little cook-fires rose from the tents and shacks, scrawny pigs and goats shivered inside ramshackle pens made of sticks and thatch. Sometimes there would be a flash of white among the squalor, the robes of a Shallyan priestess as she made her rounds among the sick. Over the weeks, the sight of a priestess had grown more and more infrequent. The prince tried to tell himself it was because they were kept busy inside the barn-like infirmary. He didn’t like to think it was because they were succumbing to the very plague they were trying to stop.

Every day miserable caravans of wretched humanity came trudging through the snow. Most accepted fate and simply added their misery to the squalor of the shantytown. A few, however, made the long journey up the causeways. These were turned back at the bastions, warned that Middenheim was closed to all outsiders. Some few refused to accept this dashing of all their hopes, racing desperately past the bastions in a mad effort to storm the city gates.

Mandred always turned away before the mad fools were brought down by archers. A family of lepers who lived in a cave at the foot of the Ulricsberg would come later to clear the bodies away.

It sickened the prince to be able to see the suffering going on down below, to be so near and yet able to do nothing. His father had forbidden even the smallest intervention, telling his son that it was best to think of the refugees as already dead. He had to harden his heart against them. It was the only way to keep Middenheim safe.

Mandred refused to resign himself to such callous pragmatism. The Graf’s obligation might be to the people of Middenheim, but he had another and greater obligation to his fellow man. To turn his back on these people diminished him, made him something less than human in Mandred’s eyes. He had always been close to his father, but he no longer recognised the man who sat upon Middenheim’s throne and wore the crown of Middenland.

A blur of activity at the edge of the shantytown drew Mandred’s horrified attention. He watched as a pack of dark, shaggy shapes burst from the trees, charging towards a group of children at play. Before any of the adults could react, several of the children had been caught up by hairy claws and were being carried off into the forest. Mandred sobbed a prayer to Ulric, asking that the men rushing to stop the abduction would be in time.

For an instant, it seemed his prayer had been answered. Mandred whooped in triumph as a hulking refugee tackled a goat-headed monster, smashing the beast to the ground. The screaming girl squirmed out from the stunned monster’s clutch. Before the brute could rise, the enraged man straddled its body and seized it by the horns. With a savage twist, he snapped the beastman’s neck.

The triumph was short-lived. A second beastman charged at the heroic refugee, while a scraggly half-man circled around to grab the fleeing child. The hero clenched his hands into fists, refusing to flee before the goat-headed monster. The brute’s harsh bray carried all the way to the mountain. Swinging its stone axe, the beastman cut the refugee down where he stood.

Mandred forced himself to watch the tragedy play itself out, to look on as the beastmen retreated back into the forest, dragging the dead with them into the darkness. None of the refugees pursued them, stopping well away from the trees and shaking their fists in impotent rage.

It was a scene that had repeated itself over and over in the past weeks. At first, the beastmen had been skittish, rushing out from the trees only when their prey was alone and darkness cloaked their actions. Each success had made them bolder, however, and their raids into the shantytown had become more and more frequent. Realising the refugees were sickly and largely unable to defend themselves, the beastmen had claimed Warrenburg as their own private hunting ground. Not an hour went by that they didn’t rush out to snatch a child or drag a sick old woman from her bed. A hideous effort to placate the monsters with the bodies of the dead had only increased their lust for manflesh.

‘Maybe the filth will catch the plague and die,’ Mandred snarled aloud.

‘They won’t die off soon enough to do those people any good,’ observed Arno Warsitz, the brawny Grand Master of the White Wolves. Like Mandred, the knight frequently toured the battlements, staring forlornly at the cluster of shacks at the foot of the mountain. ‘The belly of a beastman is the toughest thing in the world,’ he added, his face twisting with distaste.

Mandred slammed his fist into his palm. ‘If we could just get weapons to them…’

‘It wouldn’t do them any good, your grace,’ Arno said. ‘Even if most of them knew how to use a sword or swing a hammer, they’re too weak to use them.’ He nodded his head sadly. ‘Those people down there are beaten, and they know it. They’re just waiting for the end now.’ The Grand Master’s eyes turned to the sprawl of the forest. It looked so beautiful, the firs covered in snow, icicles dripping from their branches. It was difficult to picture the monstrous evil lurking beneath such beauty.

‘The beastkin won’t wait long,’ Arno said. ‘Patience isn’t something those brutes understand. What they do understand is strength and weakness. Once they realise that Warrenburg can’t stop them and that we won’t help, they’ll come storming down out of the trees like the second coming of Cormac Blood Axe.’

The image of such a massacre brought a chill to Mandred’s heart. ‘We can’t let that happen.’ He stared hard into Arno’s eyes. ‘You understand, we can’t let that happen.’

The Grand Master scratched at his beard. ‘These monsters will be the dregs of their herds, the ones too weak or cowardly to join Khaagor Deathhoof’s warherd. Any show of real force might be enough to break them. Let them come out of the forest, show their faces in the open and fifty good men would be enough to send them bleating into the hollows.’

‘Find me fifty good men,’ Mandred told Arno. Colour flushed to the knight’s cheeks as he appreciated what he had been saying and how the prince had interpreted his words.

‘Your grace, I was just thinking aloud,’ the Grand Master protested. He pointed down at the causeway where the lepers were clearing away bodies. ‘Anyone who goes out there can’t come back. The plague can’t be allowed inside the walls.’

‘Take only volunteers,’ Mandred said. ‘Men who understand the risks.’ He pointed at the bastion on the eastern causeway. ‘Once the brutes have been routed, the men can take shelter in that bastion. There is food and drink to last the winter and staying there they will pose no risk to the city. The garrison can keep to the top floors of the tower and avoid any contact with the men who relieve the encampment.’

Arno nodded sombrely. ‘I will get your men. They can be billeted in the Altquartier, their animals stabled in the horseyards.’ A cunning smile spread across the Grand Master’s face. ‘If we are careful, we should be able to keep the Graf from finding out.’

Mandred gripped the old knight’s arm. ‘This is the right thing to do,’ he told him.

The Grand Master smiled. ‘I know, your grace. Sometimes the measure of a man isn’t his wisdom, but his courage.’

Mandred sighed when he heard those words. They were the exact opposite of his father’s philosophy. To him, cold reason was the only thing that could govern a leader’s actions.

Mandred only hoped he could show his father how wrong he was.

Altdorf
Vorhexen, 1111

‘Does everything meet with your approval?’

The question was asked in a frantic, almost panicked tone.

Princess Erna turned away from her cursory inspection of the master bedroom, making no effort to hide her distaste. Adolf Kreyssig had spent a considerable amount furnishing his home - far more than his income as commander of the Kaiserjaeger should have allowed - yet his peasant background was betrayed in every chair, every table, every blanket and pillow. Gold could buy possessions, but it couldn’t buy refinement and taste. Walking around the townhouse was offensive to her sensibilities. If she were in Marienburg and wandering about the tent of a Norscan jarl, she could have found her surroundings no less barbarous. At least the Norscan wouldn’t have any pretensions about himself.

‘No, it doesn’t,’ Erna told the manservant. Immediately she felt a twinge of regret as she watched Fuerst’s composure crack. From a tremulous optimism, his entire bearing crumbled into dejection. It was like kicking an enthusiastic puppy and despite her noble upbringing, she felt guilty for being the cause of such disappointment. She laughed at the ridiculousness of so petty a thing causing her concern. Here she was, married to the worst monster in Altdorf and she was agonising over the sensibilities of a peasant.

‘My lady?’ Fuerst asked, his voice timid, his mind confused by Erna’s sudden humour.

Princess Erna stepped away from the elaborately carved wardrobe dominating one wall of the room and strode purposefully towards the door. ‘It doesn’t matter, Fuerst. This is Commander Kreyssig’s room. I won’t be staying here.’ She gave the manservant a friendly smile. ‘I’ll depend on your help getting one of the other rooms fit for me.’

‘Of course, my lady,’ Fuerst agreed, bobbing his head in obsequious fashion. His earlier disappointment was forgotten and there was an excitement in his face as he turned away. The excitement died as he faced the doorway. Quickly, he bowed before his lord and master.

Adolf Kreyssig leaned against the open door, his eyes glittering with an ophidian gleam. ‘That won’t be necessary, Fuerst,’ he told his servant. ‘My wife will be staying here. Where she belongs. With her husband.’

Erna’s face turned crimson and she threw back her head in outrage, her long hair whipping about her creamy shoulders. ‘I do not intend to linger among this… this squalor.’

‘That squalor cost a lot of people a lot of pain,’ Kreyssig said. ‘Sometimes, people can be quite stubborn. Especially when they think they are better than… well, the man with the whip.’

The princess glared at her husband. ‘Don’t presume to threaten me, peasant,’ she warned. ‘I am not some schilling-a-tumble dock strumpet to be awed by your tawdry pretensions at society! I am the daughter of Baron Thornig of Middenheim, and you had best remember it! You’ve bought an option on a noble title, nothing more! And you had best remember it! Because a peasant born is always a peasant!’

Kreyssig turned his cold gaze on Fuerst. ‘Out,’ he hissed, stabbing his thumb at the hallway behind him. The manservant cast a shamed, apologetic look at Erna, then scurried from the room. Kreyssig closed the door behind him.

‘I’ve bought the whole damn thing!’ Kreyssig snarled. ‘The title, the wife, and everything that goes with it!’

‘Believe what you like,’ Erna said, her voice a withering lash. ‘But lay one of your filthy peasant hands on me, and you’ll regret it!’ The defiant words didn’t keep a pallor from Erna’s cheeks as she watched Kreyssig step away from the door and saw for the first time the coiled whip he’d been holding behind his back.

‘Now I will tell you something,’ Kreyssig hissed. ‘In a little while you will be begging to have peasant hands on your noble flesh.

‘Stubborn people always learn their place. Nobles just take a bit longer to teach.’

Nuln
Ulriczeit, 1111

There weren’t any answers in the stein of beer resting on the table but Walther stared into it as though all the secrets of the gods were to be found hidden within the foam. He’d lost count of just how many beers he had ordered since the plague doktor left the tavern. Sometimes he would call out to Bremer for an accounting, but whatever tally the proprietor rattled off it was soon forgotten by the rat-catcher.

That was the entire point. To forget. To forget about the man lying down there in the cellar. To forget about the reeking buboes spreading across his flesh. To forget that Hugo had saved his life. To forget that keeping the plague-stricken man here jeopardised himself and Zena and everyone who patronised the Black Rose.

Where were the gods? Walther hadn’t led a good life, but he knew many people who had. Old Petra the midwife, for one, a woman so open-hearted that she would adopt any baby whose mother didn’t want it. She had been as good and gracious and fine a person as could be found in Nuln. How could the gods allow the plague to strike her down? How could they let disease decimate her children, breaking her heart by inches and degrees even before the Black Plague stilled it forever?

If this was retribution, the vengeance of the old gods against those who had followed the creed of Sigmar, then why had this terrible curse not fallen when the Cathedral was still standing, when the music of the Grand Theogonist’s parties had echoed across the city? Why had the gods stayed their hand until now, now when so many people needed their benevolence, not their judgement?

Or were the gods as powerless as everyone else? Walther took a long draught from his beer as he considered that terrible thought. The priesthood of Morr was all but exterminated in Nuln, felled by the plague lurking in the bodies they had gathered for burial. The priestesses of Shallya had likewise perished in droves, unable to combat the magnitude of the plague with their rituals and prayers. Many of the acolytes of Verena, trying to augment the ranks of the overtaxed barbers and doktors, had also sickened and died. Even the druids of the Old Faith, calling upon the magic of Rhya and Taal, had been powerless to protect themselves. The death of the high druid had sent the rest of the Old Faith’s priesthood into retreat, scattering back into the countryside to hide in their sacred groves.

The world was crumbling all around him. Everything Walther had known and believed had been turned upon its head. It seemed impossible that such a chaotic upheaval could come about in so short a time. The luxurious greensward around the Universität had been overrun by refugees, transformed into a mire of tents and shacks. Count Artur, the bold ‘Lion of Nuln’, the city’s great master and benefactor, had forsaken his home to remain at the Emperor’s palace in Altdorf. The dwarf sewers, that wonder of engineering which kept the city pure and clean, had become a breeding ground for hordes of vermin, vermin that were unafraid of man.

It was all madness! Nothing made sense any more! Walther tipped back his stein, draining the last dregs from the cup. He started to wave to Bremer, then noticed Zena standing in the doorway to the kitchen. His cheeks flushed with shame. She wasn’t some prudish Verenan, but just the same she didn’t approve of a man who drank in some deluded effort to escape his troubles.

Anger flared up inside the rat-catcher. Who was she to disapprove of him! What else was there to do except drink! Drink and forget! Drink and forget.

Walther waved to Bremer, motioning for another stein. Zena stepped over to the bar and retrieved it from the taverneer, carrying it over to the table.

‘No lash of the tongue?’ Walther grunted when she set the beer beside his hand.

Zena stared down at him, pain etched across her face. Walther became sober almost at once. She started to speak, but he pressed his fingers to her lips. He didn’t want to hear what she had to say. If he didn’t hear it, then it wasn’t real. It he didn’t know what had happened, then it didn’t happen.

Hugo! He’d been a stupid, naïve boy, something of a country bumpkin. But he’d been brave and loyal, and Walther had owed his life to him.

The rat-catcher pushed the stein away and closed his hand around Zena’s. He looked up at her with eyes that had no hope in them, only a terrible emptiness. ‘I’m sorry,’ he told her. ‘I should never have asked… never have risked…’

Tears rolled from the woman’s eyes. ‘He saved your life,’ she sobbed. ‘I was indebted to him too.’

Walther felt his chest swell. Old Night could take the rest of the world, if it would only leave him and Zena alone. He’d allowed himself to agonise over things that were beyond him, he’d allowed himself to be distracted by his sense of obligation to Hugo. None of it mattered. All that mattered was the woman he loved and making sure she was safe.

‘Zena, I…’

The rat-catcher never finished what he was going to say. At that moment, the tavern door burst inwards. A squad of men in the rough brigandine armour and yellow sleeves of the Hundertschaft came rushing into the Black Rose. The few patrons tending drinks at this late hour cried out in fright and cowered before the menace of the soldiers’ halberds and swords.

Captain Fellgiebel sauntered into the Black Rose like a wolf trotting through a flock of sheep. There was a merciless, vengeful smile on his lean face when he spotted Walther. He glanced over the other occupants of the room, frowning when he didn’t see Aldinger the Reiklander.

‘Herr Captain!’ Bremer cried out, circling out from behind the bar. ‘What brings the Hundertschaft to Lord Plessner’s establishment?’ It was seldom that Bremer invoked the name of his liege-lord, the nobleman in whose service the taverneer operated the Black Rose and paid a portion of the profit. For him to resort to such a tactic was evidence of the fear pounding through Bremer’s veins.

Fellgiebel raised a gloved finger, making a warning gesture for Bremer to keep quiet. The captain turned and waved his hand at the stuffed rat. ‘Remove that abomination and burn it,’ he told his men.

Walther leapt to his feet and stormed towards Fellgiebel. ‘You can’t do that!’ the rat-catcher snarled.

‘Ah, the charlatan,’ Fellgiebel hissed. He nodded and one of the watchmen drove the butt of his halberd into Walther’s belly, knocking the wind out of him. As the rat-catcher doubled over in pain, Zena rushed towards him. A snap of Fellgiebel’s fingers sent a guard to restrain her.

‘You’ve been a busy dog, haven’t you?’ Fellgiebel sneered. He turned and watched as more of his soldiers marched into the Black Rose. There was a third man walking between the two guards, a man with a bloodied face and the torn remains of a long linen cloak. Walther groaned when he recognised the garment. Though he had never seen the man’s face before, he was certain the prisoner was the plague doktor who had visited Hugo. Belatedly, Walther recalled the lone beggar who stayed out in the cold. Doubtless a spy for Fellgiebel, charged with watching the tavern.

‘This establishment is hereby placed under quarantine!’ Fellgiebel declared, removing a parchment proclamation from his sleeve. He shook the parchment at Bremer. ‘You will nail this to your door and daub a red cross over every entrance and exit to this building. There has been plague in this place. No one here is allowed to leave for a period of thirty days. If any of you are seen upon the streets, my men have orders to cut you down on sight.’

Fellgiebel dismissed the entreaties and protests that followed his declaration. Still smiling, he watched his men remove the giant rat. Then he turned and stared down at Walther. ‘You will return to the watch station with us,’ he said. ‘There are… questions that need asking.’

A cry of horror rose from Zena’s throat. She struggled to free herself from the guard. ‘It was my idea! All mine! Hiding Hugo was my doing!’

‘Don’t lie to him,’ Walther coughed. ‘He knows it was me. I’m the only one he wants.’

Fellgiebel’s eyes were more snakelike than ever as he stalked towards the rat-catcher. ‘Very sensible,’ he said. The captain shifted his gaze to the frantic serving girl. ‘We are only interested in the rat-catcher. She can stay.’

The watch captain’s eyes became even colder as he hissed into Walther’s ear. ‘She can stay… for now.’

Altdorf
Vorhexen, 1111

The mangled body slammed down against the old oak table, causing the legs to creak and sway. Gasps of startlement and shock coursed through the dingy room, the basement of a candle maker who had been stricken with the plague. No one’s shock was greater than that of Erich von Kranzbeuhler. The features on the corpse’s pale face were ones he had seen many times before. Konreid of the Reiksknecht had fought his last battle.

‘Where did you find him?’ the captain asked the man who had brought the body into the hideout. The morbid courier was a rough-looking man with a military swagger, one of Engel’s Bread Marchers. He stared uncertainly at Meisel, the Nulner who in Engel’s absence had assumed leadership of the dispossessed Dienstleute. Meisel nodded, motioning for the peasant to forget his suspicions and answer the nobleman.

‘He was in the sewers,’ the dienstmann said. ‘The rats had been at him, but it was a Kaiserjaeger dagger that did for him.’ He reached into the grimy wool tunic he wore and tossed a steel knife onto the table, its hilt bearing the heraldry of Kreyssig’s enforcers. The dienstmann withdrew another item from his pocket, handing it to Meisel despite the man’s lack of letters.

‘He had that clenched in his hand,’ the dienstmann reported. ‘It looks like it was torn off.’

Meisel handed the scrap of letter across the table to Baron Thornig. The hairy Middenlander studied the murky ink, struggling to make sense of the faded letters. The muck of the sewer had effaced most of the writing, but he was certain it didn’t match the message the conspirators had sent to Reiksmarshal Boeckenfoerde. Then he uttered a sharp curse. Down near the bottom of the letter, partially effaced, was the general’s signature.

‘This is a letter from the Reiksmarshal!’ Baron Thornig exclaimed. His outburst brought the other conspirators rushing to his side, eager to see what little there was of the missive. It wasn’t a large group; only Palatine Mihail Kretzulescu and Count van Sauckelhof were present. Prince Sigdan was busy trying to get Lady Mirella out of Altdorf. Princess Erna was busy experiencing the nuptial bliss of her new life as wife to Adolf Kreyssig.

Erich pulled the scrap away from Kretzulescu’s bony grip and studied the jagged tear, trying to judge how much of the letter was missing. The Kaiserjaeger dagger made it clear who had the rest of the letter. If they had enough of it…

‘Two days ago a troop of Kaiserjaeger rode out from Altdorf,’ Baron Thornig said. ‘They might have been going to Talabecland. They might be looking for Reiksmarshal Boeckenfoerde.’

Erich crushed the remnant of the letter and stared down at Konreid’s corpse. ‘We have to assume they have. And depending on what was written on the rest of this letter, Kreyssig might know exactly who is conspiring against Boris.’

‘What do we do?’ Count van Sauckelhof asked, panic written across his face.

Erich stepped around the table, wondering if he had the authority to make such a decision. By rights, it was Prince Sigdan’s prerogative to sound the call to arms. To take that responsibility would be to flout the prince’s position and leadership. At the same time, to delay might be to give Kreyssig the time he needed to smash their uprising before it could even start.

‘We have to put our plans into action at once,’ Erich decided. ‘Have Aldo’s people get word to Prince Sigdan and the others. Meisel, you will muster as many of your Bread Marchers as you can reach. If we wait, we play right into Kreyssig’s hands. So we won’t wait. We’ll seize the Imperial Palace tonight!’

The declaration seemed to terrify the other conspirators. For as long as they had talked about it, the magnitude of their plot, the fact that they were really going to storm the Imperial Palace, had never really sunk in. Now, faced with the imminence of history, their courage began to falter.

Erich gestured down at the body of Konreid. First the execution of Arch-Lector Hartwich, now the murder of the old Reiksknecht veteran. How much blood would it take to stop a tyrant’s outrages? ‘It is too late to back out now. Too many people have sacrificed their lives and their honour to bring us this far. We will not fail them now. And if that isn’t enough, consider this. Right now, Kreyssig is reading the other half of this letter. He might be reading each of your names. If the thought of saving the Empire from a tyrant isn’t enough to make you commit to this cause, then fear for your own lives is!’

Baron Thornig leaned against the wall, his eyes haunted, his breath coming in frightened gasps. ‘There’s another way. Erna is with that monster right now. If I told her to, she could eliminate any threat from Kreyssig.’

Erich rounded upon the baron, grabbing him by his tunic and hoisting him to his feet. ‘We’re not using your daughter as a murderess!’ the knight snarled. ‘All of us are committed to this cause! We won’t back out now!’

‘But we’re not ready,’ protested Count van Sauckelhof.

‘Then we’d better get ready,’ Erich snapped, releasing his hold on Baron Thornig and turning his ire on the Westerlander. ‘Because time is running out. Not only for us, but for the whole Empire.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Altdorf
Vorhexen, 1111

In twos and threes, grim-faced men began to gather in the streets and alleyways bordering the Widows’ Plaza. They came with clubs and knives; hammers and axes; swords of every size, shape and condition; home-made spears and curved bows of Reikland elm wood. Muffled in fur cloaks and wool coats, the men braved the bite of a mid-afternoon snow flurry, using the falling snow to mask their approach and hide their numbers.

Meisel had drawn upon some three hundred survivors of Engel’s Bread March and to this core of experienced warriors he had added as many of Altdorf’s disaffected peasantry as he could muster. It was a considerable mob that moved against the Courts of Justice. Rumours that the popular Arch-Lector Hartwich had been executed on orders from Emperor Boris had found fertile soil among Altdorf’s suffering masses. Men who had silently endured all of the Emperor’s other diktats and abuses had found this last one insufferable. Now, it seemed, the Emperor was trying to extend his tyranny into the realm of the gods and that the commoners would not allow.

The watchmen high atop the Tower of Altdorf didn’t notice the approaching mob until packs of armed men emerged from the drifting snow and began marching into the Widows’ Plaza. At once they sounded the alarm bells, nocking arrows to bows. The officer in command of the archers hesitated, however, as the numbers of men in the square continued to increase. He didn’t want to make the decision to provoke the unrest further by shooting into the crowd. Precious minutes were lost as he awaited orders from his superiors to tell him what to do.

By then, the choice of drawing first blood was taken from the soldiers in the tower. Bowmen among the mob took aim and loosed arrows at the watchmen patrolling the walls of the Imperial Courthouse. Most of the soldiers had already taken shelter behind the battlements on the fortress walls, but their adversaries down in the square included men who had stalked the borders of the Laurelorn Forest and who had hunted through the wilds of the Drakwald, men who had honed their aim and their eye to a degree never imagined by the martial schools of Altdorf. A half-dozen soldiers were struck down by the precision shooting, many of them pitching into the fortress courtyard, as lifeless as the flagstones they smashed against.

When the command to loose arrows was finally given, the archers in the Tower of Altdorf found that their enemies were prepared for them. The mob hefted crude palisades crafted from doors and shutters, many of them bearing the chalk-mark warning against plague scrawled across their faces. The arrows slammed into these wooden panels, but were unable to pierce the men sheltering behind them. The vengeful marksmanship of hunters and targeteers sent a pair of the tower’s bowmen slumping against the narrow embrasures, arrows transfixing their bodies.

A great cry rose from the mob as a swarm of enraged humanity converged upon the scaffold at the centre of the square. Like a pack of rabid wolves, the rebels tore down the hateful platform, smashing it to splinters with their boots and bare hands when no other weapon was available. Perched atop the scaffold steps, Meisel shouted direction to his followers, ordering them to drag down the gibbet. Armed with the thick oak post that supported the gibbet, the mob swung back around and rushed at the massive gates of the Imperial Courthouse.

Alarm bells clattered, horns and trumpets blared as the besieged garrison announced its plight to the city. Drawn down to provide troops for Reiksmarshal Boeckenfoerde’s march against Talabheim, the garrison commander knew he didn’t have enough men to defend the fortress if the rebels should get inside. For the moment, the fools seemed content to use their improvised battering ram against the gates, but soon one of them would get the idea to employ ladders. When that happened, the Courthouse would be overrun. There weren’t enough soldiers to protect the walls.

The defenders of the Courts of Justice cast frantic eyes towards the nearby bulk of the Imperial Palace. There were hundreds of soldiers inside the palace, the Emperor’s own bodyguard and the elite Kaiserknecht. If those warriors would sally forth and break the revolt, then the Courthouse could be saved. Otherwise, Altdorf would play host to its second great massacre of the season.

Erich watched the attack on the Imperial Courthouse, waiting with bated breath for the moment when the violence of the mob would throw the defenders of the fortress into a panic. From long experience, he knew how soldiers reacted to the reduction of their foundation, how any battle assumed monstrous proportions when they were called upon to fight without their accustomed strength. When Meisel tore down the gibbet and the mob used it for a ram against the gates, it was the tipping point for the garrison commander. Horns and trumpets, bells and drums sounded from the fortress, appealing to any and all for assistance.

The closest help at hand was the Imperial Palace itself. Turning his gaze in that direction, he could see the confused agitation of the Palace Guard. Back and forth they rushed, reporting to their officers, then hurrying back to strengthen the defences at the Palace gate. For some twenty minutes, things continued in this manner, then a sharp clarion call echoed over the roofs of Altdorf. The inner gates withdrew into the ceiling of the gatehouse, the outer gates swung wide and a great company of knights came thundering down the marble walkway, the hooves of their mighty steeds striking sparks from the stones. Erich knew that golden tabard, marked with the hammer and laurel heraldry. The Kaiserknecht, Boris Goldgather’s personal retinue of knights, men who had been drawn not from noble families or the ranks of the Dienstleute, but rather foreign mercenaries who were bound to the Emperor by the only loyalty Boris understood: gold.

The captain of the Kaiserknecht shouted an order in his lilting, Bretonnian tongue and the riders behind him, with the precision of a machine, lowered the visors of their great helms. Each knight dipped his lance as he charged through the gate, then his huge destrier wheeled about and galloped through the streets towards the Imperial Courthouse.

Erich frowned as he watched the knights sally forth, wondering how long Meisel would be able to keep his rebels fighting against such awesome odds. Some measure had been made to delay the knights; barricades had been erected across many of the streets and marksmen waited on the roofs to snipe at their enemy. Still, as a knight himself, Erich knew the power of a cavalry charge and the psychological destruction it wrought even against disciplined troops. Many of Meisel’s rioters weren’t even that, simple peasants without any military experience. They would shatter like glass when the Kaiserknecht hit them. All Erich could hope for was that the knights would lose themselves in the thrill of slaughter. That when they realised they had been tricked, it would be too late.

‘Now, or never, your grace,’ Erich told the man beside him. Prince Sigdan nodded, but his expression was doubtful as he lifted his hands, the chains wound about them rattling against his armoured chest.

‘Sigmar preserve us,’ Prince Sigdan said.

‘And let’s not be too proud to ask Ranald for some help too,’ joked Baron Thornig. The shaggy Middenlander looked more comfortable in his chainmail and wolfskin cloak than he ever had in his robes of state. His hairy knuckles closed about the haft of an enormous hammer. ‘I still say you should let me have first crack at them.’

Erich laughed at the Middenlander’s impatience. ‘There will still be plenty to go around,’ he promised.

‘Unfortunately,’ observed Duke Konrad, looking somehow incongruous in his battered scale armour with a bright blue felt hat crunched down around his ears. ‘But at least we’ll get inside if this works. Trying to pass off that unwashed Ulrican beast as a Kaiserjaeger wouldn’t get us even that far.’

Baron Thornig’s eyes glittered menacingly. ‘When this is over, we should talk,’ he growled. ‘As Graf Gunthar’s emissary, I’m authorised to negotiate with other provinces.’

‘Enough talk,’ Prince Sigdan declared. ‘Those peasants won’t keep the Kaiserknecht busy for long.’ The reminder didn’t have to be repeated. Four of Prince Sigdan’s retainers, dressed in the armour and livery of the Kaiserjaeger, took hold of the nobleman’s arms. Erich, wearing similar uniform with the addition of a sergeant’s armband, took position at the head of the little procession.

The phoney Kaiserjaeger marched towards the gates of the Imperial Palace, herding the captive Prince Sigdan with them. Under his breath, Erich continued to whisper prayers to Sigmar. Now would be the most dangerous point in their plan.

The Palace Guard lowered their halberds as the men approached, suspicion on their faces. Summoning every ounce of command his voice could muster, Erich growled orders at the threatening guards.

‘We have arrested the traitor named Sigdan for inciting a revolt against His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Boris,’ Erich said. ‘Make way so that we can conduct this malcontent somewhere he will be safe.’

The guards continued to glare suspiciously at Erich. The knight could see one of them glance at a small bronze alarm bell set into the corner of the little watch post.

‘Why do you think those peasants are attacking the Courthouse!’ Erich snarled. ‘They think we’re keeping Sigdan there and they want to free him! Now let us in before they learn their mistake!’ Erich watched uncertainty grow on the faces of the guards. Before the soldiers could ask any questions, he decided to add a final remark to help decide them. ‘If this traitor gets away, I will see to it you answer to Commander Kreyssig.’

The threat worked. The sergeant in command of the gate waved his arms, motioning for the soldiers behind the walls to open the gate. Erich grinned when he saw the sergeant repeat the gesture for the benefit of the troops in the gatehouse. In his haste to get the prisoner inside, the sergeant was forgetting the most basic security. He was opening both gates at once.

‘I will tell the Emperor of your service,’ Erich promised. Then the knight’s armoured fist came smashing into the guard’s jaw, dropping him like a poleaxed ox. Instantly the other supposed Kaiserjaeger were leaping into action, rushing towards the inner gate before the stunned guards in the gatehouse could close it against them. The rest of the troops watching the outer gate were dragged down by the stealthy figures who stole upon them from behind. Soldiers from Duke Konrad’s retinue, these were men who had grown up stalking beastmen through the Drakwald. Sneaking up on the Palace Guard was child’s play to them.

‘Once we gain the inner courtyard we can use Sigismund’s escape tunnel to get into the Palace itself,’ Prince Sigdan said, casting off the chains that had been looped around his hands. Rulers of Altdorf in the long period when the emperor’s court had moved to Nuln, Sigdan’s ancestors had an intimate knowledge of the Imperial Palace from the days when it was under their stewardship. The old escape tunnel had become obsolete when the Palace was expanded beyond its original dimensions, but for some reason the passage had never been filled, simply bricked over. For a man who knew what he was looking for, it would be a simple task to open it up again.

Now that there was no need for subterfuge, the rebels came streaming towards the Palace. Some of them were Bread Marchers, but most were soldiers from the retinues of the conspirators themselves, Reikland swordsmen and Drakwald hunters, hairy axemen from Middenheim and grim halberdiers from Sylvania, archers from Stirland and flamboyantly attired sea-dogs from Westerland. Even a handful of halfling bowmen, Aldo Broadfoot’s contribution to the fight, came rushing along with the rest.

Erich gave the heterogeneous brigade its orders, pointing them towards the gatehouse where Prince Sigdan’s retainers struggled with the Palace Guard. The fake Kaiserjaeger already had the upper hand, but re-inforcements would quickly decide the fight.

‘Now if we can just get the Palace secure before Kreyssig brings his Kaiserjaeger here,’ Palatine Kretzulescu commented, his voice dour.

Baron Thornig clapped the cadaverous Sylvanian on the shoulder. ‘I shouldn’t worry about him. That problem has already been settled.’

Erich felt his blood run cold as he heard the Middenlander’s boast. ‘What have you done?’ he demanded.

The baron glared back at the knight, a smug smile on his face. ‘Erna is doing her part,’ he said. ‘And when that peasant scum is gone, no one will worry about how he died!’

Princess Erna gasped in pain as her husband’s fist smashed against her cheek. Blood dribbled from the corner of her mouth. Staggering back, she made a dive for the dagger that had fallen to the floor. Kreyssig lunged at her before she could grasp it, seizing her by the hair and wrenching her away with a savage twist. Again his fist lashed out, connecting with her belly and driving the breath from her lungs. Far from satisfied, he brought his fist smacking across her chin. Only the hand buried in her hair kept her upright.

‘My lord!’ shouted Fuerst, rushing towards his master. ‘Commander! You’ll kill her!’

Kreyssig turned and glared at his manservant. Blood was dripping from a long slash along the side of his face. ‘That’s the idea,’ he hissed.

Fuerst felt his gorge rise. A timid, even cowardly man, he had no stomach for bloodshed. That was why he had cried out when he entered his master’s bedchamber to announce a messenger below. Princess Erna had been standing over his sleeping master, the dagger in her hand. The distraction of Fuerst’s shout had caused her to falter for a moment, and in that moment, Kreyssig was able to roll away, his face suffering from a blade that was meant for his heart.

‘You can’t do that!’ Fuerst protested, rushing forwards as Kreyssig punched his reeling wife once more. The manservant reached out to stop him, but trembled at the thought of daring to touch his master. Instead, he pleaded for the woman’s life in the only way Kreyssig would understand. ‘If you kill her, you will never inherit the title of baron. They will never let you keep the dowry Baron Thornig bestowed on you. You’ll lose all the lands you would have inherited.’

Kreyssig’s face contorted into an almost inhuman snarl. Contemptuously he let Erna crumple to the floor. ‘Baron Thornig?’ he hissed. ‘That blue-blooded rogue was here today. He put her up to this!’ His eyes took on a reptilian quality as he wondered why the nobleman had desired his death so soon after the wedding.

‘Maybe it has something to do with the riot?’ Fuerst suggested.

The glowering commander rounded on his functionary. ‘What riot?’ he snapped. ‘Where? When?’

Fuerst backed away, flustered by his master’s barrage of questions. ‘An uprising outside the Courthouse,’ he said. ‘Not more than half past the last bell. There’s a messenger downst–’

Kreyssig snarled in rage, springing towards his wardrobe. ‘That is what this is about! They wanted me out of the way and used this witch to do it!’

Fuerst stared at his master, unwilling to believe his words. ‘Nobody… no one would dare…’

Shaking a boot at his servant, Kreyssig explained the one thing that would give an enemy the courage to strike at him in such a way. ‘They dare because they intend to remove the Emperor!’ he declared. ‘This riot is just a diversion!’ He pointed his finger at Fuerst. ‘Go tell that messenger to send word to all the Kaiserjaeger and any Schueters we can trust. The revolt isn’t at the Courthouse! It’s at the Imperial Palace!’

Eyes bugging from his face at the magnitude of what he was hearing, Fuerst scrambled downstairs to pass instructions to the messenger. Kreyssig continued to dress himself, already dreading he might be too late. He cast a hateful look at the unconscious woman strewn across the floor.

‘Before this is over, my dear,’ he said, ‘you will wish Fuerst had let me kill you.’

Skavenblight
Vorhexen, 1111

Thick coils of pungent incense veiled the vast hall in a smoky haze. Worm-oil lamps cast sickly green light from a great chandelier suspended from the soot-stained ceiling, conspiring with the smoke to cast weird shadows flickering about the walls. From the floor, an enormous glyph blazed with sinister brilliance, its sharp angles shining with a hellish luminance that rippled with echoes of flame and ruination.

Puskab Foulfur abased himself as he stepped towards the glowing symbol, the sigil of the Horned Rat. Though it was a false mask, the plague priest knew it was expected that he should prostrate himself before the symbol of the skaven god. Here, at the very heart of the Shattered Tower, the grey seers held sway and were zealous in punishing anything that smelled of heresy.

Piety, devotion to the Horned Rat. It was the final of the Twelve Tests and, in a perverse twist, also the easiest of them. Perhaps the grey seers really did depend upon their god to smite down any unbeliever. Or perhaps Seerlord Skrittar didn’t dare evoke some conjuration against Puskab and then claim it was a divine judgement. Whatever the case, the plague priest lifted his horned head and scurried across the floor, careful to carry himself with just the right mix of timidity and boldness the Lords of Decay would expect from a supplicant.

The plague priest scowled at the sigil as he stepped across it. One day Clan Pestilens would blot out the false superstitions of the grey seers. The plaguelords would reveal to the whole of skavendom the true aspect of the Horned One and cast aside once and forever the foolishness of deluded mystics. On that day, the ratmen would either bind themselves to the Pestilent Brotherhood, or they would be destroyed!

Taking a firm step across the angular horns of the sigil, Puskab lifted his eyes from the floor. The time of Clan Pestilens was coming. The Black Plague was already burrowing towards that day.

A raised dais dominated the far side of the hall. A pedestal draped in grey cloth loomed at the centre of the dais. Surrounding it, just dimly visible in the hazy mix of smoke and shadow, were thirteen stone seats, great thrones each adorned with the symbol of the Horned Rat. The personal banners of the council members hung suspended above each seat, displaying a chaotic confusion of glyphs, pictures and trophies.

Few skaven were ever allowed to enter the Shattered Tower, the megalithic structure which dominated Skavenblight and the whole of the Under-Empire. Fewer still were granted a glimpse of this place, the Chamber of the Thirteen, the great hall of the Lords of Decay!

Puskab struggled to focus his vision upon the figures seated upon the dais, but the effect of the incense and the flickering shadows made the effort impossible. The council members were always wary of assassination and so took pains to obscure their presence even within their most inviolate sanctums. For all the plague priest’s senses could tell, the creatures seated upon the dais might be no more than members of the Verminguard while the real Lords of Decay observed him from another room.

The plague priest scratched his muzzle while he waited for the masters of skavendom to acknowledge his right to stand before them. Anger briefly flickered through the ratman’s savage heart, resentment that despite the great service he had done, despite his discovery of the Black Plague, he had still been treated like a common clanrat by these lurking schemers!

The Twelve Tests were designed to slay any skaven desiring to challenge the Council of Thirteen. One test devised by each of the Lords of Decay. Some were cunning traps, others took the form of mind-wracking riddles while still others were composed of the most unfair and one-sided contests the vicious brain of a skaven could devise. All were alike in one respect - unless the challenger knew what to expect each of the tests was impossible.

There was only one way a challenger could prevail and that was how Puskab had done it. Through the sponsorship of a seated lord, and the use of his network of spies and informants, the challenger might learn the secret of each test before he ever set a paw within the black depths of the Shattered Tower. Blight Tenscratch had revealed to Puskab the trick to each trap, the answer to each riddle, the solution to each contest. Through the Wormlord’s connivance, Puskab had survived to make his challenge and demand a place among the council.

The figures upon the dais glowered down at Puskab for several minutes, their malignant scrutiny causing the plague priest to shiver and his glands to tighten. When they did deign to speak to him, it was the fierce tones of Warmonger Vecteek that boomed down from the shadowy thrones.

‘Poxmaster Puskab,’ Vecteek snarled. ‘We are pleased with your gift-offering. The man-things wither under the Black Plague. Their cities rot from within. They cower inside their burrows and hide from their own neighbours. They shall be easy-meat for our armies!’

Puskab bowed before the dais, crooking his head so he exposed his throat in the proper gesture of submission. ‘Happy-proud to serve-help great lords,’ Puskab said. ‘Black Plague kill-kill much-much. Many man-things sick-die! Bring-make glory to Horned One!’

‘Too many die!’ snapped High Vivisectionist Rattnak Vile. ‘Leave none to catch-take! No slave-meat to grow food and dig tunnels!’

‘And the plague strikes our own!’ growled Warpmaster Sythar Doom. ‘We have been forced to burn the burrows of Clan Verms because they caught your plague!’

Puskab quivered as the Grey Lords made their accusations. Any one of these tyrants could have him killed on the spot and none would be the wiser. He turned his eyes across the shadowy rim of the dais, trying to pierce the haze and appeal to his patron.

‘The infection of the Hive wasn’t the fault of Puskab Foulfur,’ Blight declared, his voice a threatening growl. ‘The Poxmaster has come here, braved the Twelve Tests to challenge the traitor who sits in our midst! He has come to topple this greedy maggot who has endangered all Skavenblight by his murderous schemes! The Horned Rat has allowed him into the Chamber of the Thirteen, that he may purge this council of the corruption within its ranks!’

The arguing Grey Lords fell silent as Blight’s words echoed through the great hall. ‘Is this true?’ the hacking tones of Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch rasped. ‘Have you come here to challenge a traitor for his seat upon the council?’

Puskab raised his horned head, pulling the tattered hood back from his decayed face. ‘Survive-win Twelve Tests,’ he growled. ‘Now-now want-take Thirteenth Challenge! Take-win name-rank of Lord of Decay!’

Hisses and snarls filled the shadows as the lords of skavendom reacted to the reckless effrontery of the plague priest’s demands. Tradition and the convoluted politics of the Under-Empire dictated that Puskab had earned the right to make his challenge, but the villainous despots didn’t appreciate the callous way he addressed them.

‘Puskab is right,’ Blight shouted down the other lords. ‘The destruction of my warren demands justice! Challenge the traitor-meat! Remove his stink from the Shattered Tower!’

Puskab’s lips pulled back in a feral grin, exposing blackened fangs and bleeding gums. ‘Claim-fight traitor-meat who sick-kill Clan Verms! Claim-fight heretic-spleen who think-want poison-slay all skaven!’ The plague priest raised his fat claw and pointed to one of the black thrones.

‘Claim-fight Blight Tenscratch!’

Bylorhof
Ulriczeit, 1111

Frederick sat in a wicker chair, his back to the wall of the mortuary, his priest’s robes pulled tight against the preternatural cold which surrounded him. He stared out across the morbid chamber. It was silent now; the gnawing and scratching of rats as they fed upon the dead had been absent these past few days. Even the vermin had been driven off by the fell energies converging upon the place. There was only one living thing in the entire graveyard now.

The priest stared at the stone knife resting on the floor beside his chair. Many times he had taken up that blade and set it against his wrist. Against the horror he had unleashed, death would be a welcome release. That is, if death was still an option for him. It lacked the same finality with which he had regarded it a week ago.

He raised his eyes from the knife and gazed upon the silent, unmoving shapes facing him. Frederick had ordered them here and they had come. He could order them to leave, and they would go. If he closed his eyes and pictured their arms raised in salute, the decayed arms would rise. His merest whim was unbreakable law to these zombies. Creatures with no will of their own, they were utterly enslaved to the necromancer’s desires. Frederick found the concept alternately fascinating and abominable. His mind whirled with thoughts of power and emotions of blackest despair.

Necromancer. Another word from the tomes of Arisztid Olt, the title of the most reviled heretic of them all - the magician who pierced the veil between life and death, who drew his sorcery from the very emanations of the grave. One of the insane monsters who followed the forbidden arts of Nagash the Accursed.

Frederick tried to tell himself he wasn’t such a creature, that a vast gulf separated him from an apostate like Olt. He knew the argument was a lie, a final desperate effort to cling to decency and morality, to keep faith with the gods he had betrayed.

There was a reason why, for all his cleverness, Olt had been discovered. The temple had been built upon a nexus point, a convergence of magical forces that magnified any act of sorcery. When Olt had practised his spells, he had opened a gateway he could not shut. The dark energies had swelled and grown until they could not be ignored. That had proven Olt’s downfall. It had also proven the source of Frederick’s curse.

When he had conjured the ghost of Aysha, the priest had opened the floodgates. The baleful emanations, once tapped, had refused to recede. They had spread, directionless and unfocused, acting upon the subconscious desires of the necromancer who had drawn upon them. Locked within his mind were all of Olt’s spells and secrets, the knowledge of generations of sorcerers and witches stretching back to the sands of Nehekhara. In his slumber, his dreaming mind had evoked those spells and the directionless energies had brought them into being. Frederick’s guilt and shame at being unable to save the people of Bylorhof from the plague had resulted in the unconsecrated dead rising again as zombies - a sardonic and aimless refutation of the Black Plague.

It was a feat to impress any warlock - conjuration without apparatus or gesture, magecraft by sheer force of will alone. Frederick had never imagined such ability to lie untapped within his mind. If he had, he should have killed himself long ago.

The necromancer scowled at the rotting zombies standing before him. He was tempted to tell them to jump in a lake, except that was exactly what they would do. There was no limit to their servitude. As an experiment he had ordered one of them to chew off its own arm. Neglecting to specify which arm, he had looked on in amazement as the zombie gnawed its way through each arm in turn.

Emperors and kings did not command such loyalty! Frederick shuddered at the hideous power he possessed. Yet might such horror not be turned towards benevolence? Must only evil arise from evil? He was still a decent man, moral and just. He could control this terrible power. He would not allow it to control him.

Frederick rose from his chair, stalking past his zombies. He faced one of the niches, the niches filled with the corpses of Bylorhof’s dead. These bodies had failed to reanimate under the influence of the necromancer’s subconscious. Shriven, protected by rituals sacred to Morr, these dead were already consecrated. The protection against evil had been enough to fend away his undirected magic. But what would happen, he wondered, if he were to wilfully concentrate his power upon one of these bodies?

The necromancer turned away. A snap of his fingers sent a pair of zombies shambling over to the niche. Without uttering a sound, the undead reached into the corpse pile and dragged out the body of a young woman. Still acting upon their master’s unspoken command, the zombies carried their morbid burden to the stone table, laying it prostrate upon the cold surface.

As he stared down at the dead husk, Frederick pictured Aysha’s body lying there. For a moment, he felt a surge of regret. He almost desisted in the horrible experiment, but a tremendous desire to know, to understand the limits of his magic, pushed him on. Aysha was safe within the mausoleum, beside Johan and the templars of old. She had no part in this. There was only Frederick van Hal and some nameless bit of peasant carrion.

He closed his eyes, visualising the dark power, drawing strands of black energy and weaving them around the prostrate corpse. His lips moved in a whispered invocation, calling upon one of the Nine Names of Nagash. The foreign note of that name seemed to make the room tremble. Frederick could feel it crawling off his tongue, slithering like something alive across the mortuary to settle upon the dead woman’s pale brow.

For a moment the necromancer could feel the corpse struggling to oppose his will. It was a fleeting defiance, brushed away as casually as a cobweb. Frederick opened his eyes and extended his hand towards the corpse. Clumsily, the dead woman began to rise from the slab. A thin smile of triumph flashed across Frederick’s face. Even the protection of the gods wasn’t enough to defy his power!

The necromancer returned to his chair, staring across his undead slaves. This was power, but he would not abuse it. He would use this magic in the cause of justice, a counterpoint to the cruel abuses of corrupt lords like Baron von Rittendahl and Count Malbork von Drak.

Frederick’s eyes became cold and hard, his hands clenching around the arms of his chair.

There was too much injustice, too much suffering in Sylvania, but he knew just where he would start. The plague doktor, Bruno Havemann, murderer and charlatan. He would be made to confess his crimes.

And then he would answer for them.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Altdorf
Vorhexen, 1111

The abandoned tunnel wasn’t as abandoned as Erich von Kranzbeuhler had expected. After battering their way through the stone blocks concealing the entrance, the rebels had been surprised by a squeaking horde of black-furred vermin. After their experiences in the sewer, it was a shock that had them shrieking in disgust and horror. For a moment, the rats rushed at the startled men, but it was flight not fight that motivated the animals. Soon their scaly tails were seen darting into bushes and behind outbuildings.

The conspirators breathed a collective sigh of relief, but as they stared down into the blackness of the tunnel, they wondered if perhaps they shouldn’t have stayed behind with the men holding the gates or the force staging a diversionary attack on the Palace doors.

‘If it has been sealed up all these years, how did the rats get in?’ Palatine Kretzulescu wondered. No one could give the Sylvanian an answer.

Erich took it upon himself to lead the way. Lighting a whale-oil lamp provided by Count van Sauckelhof, the knight reluctantly entered the forbidding darkness. At once the dank reek of the tunnel engulfed him, a choking foulness that brought a cough rumbling from his chest. He felt his pulse quicken as theories about miasma as source of the plague rose unbidden in his mind.

The walls of the tunnel were ancient, displaying the rough masonry and brickwork of Sigismund the Conquerer’s time. Bones and rat pellets littered the floor while cobwebs dangled from the vaulted ceiling. Here and there the bulk of a fallen slab of stone loomed in the darkness, a vivid warning that something more substantial than a cobweb might drop down into the passage.

As Erich crept through the tunnel, he found his thoughts straying to the daughter of Baron Thornig. The Middenlander had pressed upon Princess Erna first the role of spy and then that of murderess and assassin. It offended the knight’s sensibilities to exploit a beautiful woman in such a fashion, however noble the cause. For her sake, he hoped that Erna would ignore her father’s command.

A familiar stench brought an end to Erich’s ruminations. Ahead, the knight saw a yawning pit, bricks scattered about it. The smell was that of the sewers, evoking once more visions of horror. Rats scampered about the hole, dropping down into it as they recoiled from the light of Erich’s lamp.

Here at least was the answer to how the rats had gotten into a sealed tunnel. Part of the floor had collapsed into the sewers, which must run beneath the Imperial Palace. So much for the durability of dwarf architecture - though as he looked at the pit and the stones piled about it, he couldn’t escape the idea that something was very wrong. The hole looked like it had been caused by something burrowing up from below rather than stones collapsing into a passageway beneath.

‘We have to hurry,’ Prince Sigdan cautioned. He cast a dubious glance at the pit, then laid his hand on Erich’s shoulder and urged him onwards. ‘Every minute we delay is another minute of Boris’s tyranny.’

‘And more time for the Kaiserjaeger to show up,’ warned Baron von Klauswitz.

Baron Thornig’s harsh laughter echoed through the tunnel. ‘I’ve arranged to pull their teeth,’ he boasted. ‘Right now Commander Kreyssig is dining with Khaine in hell!’

Erich felt his blood boil at the baron’s bravado. So lost was he in what he considered a clever bit of scheming that Baron Thornig seemed oblivious to the danger he had placed his daughter in. The knight half-turned to berate the Middenlander, but Prince Sigdan’s silent urging kept him moving.

There would be time to settle all accounts once Boris Goldgather was deposed.

Middenheim
Vorhexen, 1111

The warbling clamour of crude horns rose from the darkened forest, a feral din that seemed to scratch at the stars and to drag down the moon. The discordant notes had scarcely started to fade before a confusion of animalistic howls, bleats and screams pierced the night. From the battlements of Middenheim, archers loosed flaming arrows into the treeline. By the flickering light of the arrows, a bestial horde could be seen rushing from the woods.

An alarm bell sounded, echoed a moment later by the clarion call of trumpets all along the wall. It seemed a useless gesture. The inhabitants of Warrenburg had to be aware of the attack already. They didn’t need the soldiers on the walls to warn them.

For hours the beastmen had been working themselves into a frenzy, the dull rhythm of their manskin drums pulsing from the forest, the growling chants of their savage shamans rising from the trees. There had been ample time for Grand Master Arno to gather his chosen men. Fifty knights in full armour, each of their steeds a gigantic warhorse clad in steel barding, mustered behind the portcullis of the East Gate.

At the clarion call of the trumpet, Arno raised his hand. Slowly the soldiers within the gatehouse began to raise the barrier. Arno watched the massive gate retreat into the roof of the archway with a fatalistic resignation. Once he went through that portal, he understood there was no coming back.

‘I didn’t expect you to lead the charge.’

The Grand Master turned in surprise at hearing the voice of Prince Mandred, though in hindsight he shouldn’t have been. It was, after all, the boy’s idea.

‘I couldn’t ask any of my men to risk themselves if I was too timid to go myself,’ Arno explained. A troubled frown came across his face. ‘You should stay behind, your grace. This is too perilous for the Prince of Middenheim.’

Mandred smiled at the knight’s protest. ‘If it is so dangerous, then we can’t risk the Grand Master of the White Wolves.’

Arno laughed. ‘Commander Vitholf can more than make up for my loss. The White Wolves might even be better off with him leading the pack.’ The troubled look returned to the knight’s face. ‘There is only one Prince of Middenheim,’ he said.

Mandred saw the Grand Master directing what he thought was a subtle signal to his knights. The prince watched as two of the warriors edged their horses closer to his own. Glancing at the rising portcullis, Mandred dug his spurs into the flanks of his warhorse.

‘Let it never be said the Prince of Middenheim asked his subjects to do something he was afraid to do himself!’ he shouted as his horse bolted forwards. Crouching his body low against the animal’s neck, he was just able to clear the spikes jutting from the underside of the rising gate.

Grand Master Arno gawped after him in astonishment, then roared at his knights. ‘You heard his grace!’ Arno bellowed. ‘Follow him to hell or victory!’ Spurring his own horse onwards, the Grand Master copied Mandred’s example, clearing the gate as it was still being raised. Behind him he could hear the thunder of hooves as the rest of the knights started after him.

The broadness of the eastern causeway gave the knights room to form ranks as they charged out from the gate. Above them, from the walls, the clarions sounded once more, singing out into the night, announcing the wrath of man to his inhuman enemies.

The beastmen had reached the hovels of Warrenburg, rampaging through the confused huddle of shacks with feral bloodlust. If they heard the trumpets sound, the brutes were too lost in their animalistic rage to care. The primordial hatred of beastkin for man burned in their savage hearts, feeding the fires of their fury. Not content to simply kill their victims, the raging beastmen mauled their victims, ripping them to shreds with tooth and claw. In their fury, they glutted themselves in an orgy of destruction.

Into this vision of atrocity, the warriors of Middenheim charged. The tents and hovels of Warrenburg crumpled beneath the pounding hooves of their steeds, parting before them like wheat before a scythe. Refugees scattered before the knights, but the blood-mad beastkin stood transfixed, their savage brains flung into confusion by the sudden appearance of the warriors.

Warhammers came smashing down into horned heads, great axes clove through furred flesh, iron-shod hooves crushed bestial bodies. The name of Ulric rose in a fierce war cry as the White Wolves brought the vengeance of man to the marauding forest beasts.

Mandred was in the thick of the battle, spurring his huge destrier into the heart of the shantytown. His sword slashed across the face of a fawn-faced beastling as it gorged upon the body of a slaughtered woman. The creature clapped furry claws to its mangled eyes, bleating in agony. Another sweep of the prince’s sword opened the monster’s throat and sent it crashing into the snow.

A second beastman rushed at Mandred, a wiry thing with ox-horns and an almost human visage. It brandished a dismembered human leg, wielding the macabre trophy like a club. Mandred waited for the thing to come close, then put spurs to his warhorse, urging the destrier to rear up, to lash out with its front hooves. The flailing legs struck the charging beastman, hurling it back and snapping its ribs.

A braying war cry was Mandred’s first warning that a third beastman was running towards him. It was a huge goat-headed monster, a rusted broadaxe clenched in its paws. The brute was charging towards him from the flank, at an angle where the prince wouldn’t be able to reach it with his blade. He tried to wheel his horse around to meet the monster’s rush, but even as he did so, he knew it would be too late.

Suddenly another rider appeared, crashing through the wall of a shack. The beastman was caught beneath the warhorse’s pounding hooves, smashed to the ground and crushed underfoot. Mandred could hear its bones snap as the horse charged over it. He opened his mouth to thank his rescuer, then laughed in disbelief as he recognised the rider.

‘Franz!’ the prince exclaimed. ‘What are you doing here? You should be in bed tending your wounds!’

‘I don’t need to stand to ride a horse, your grace,’ the bodyguard answered. He rubbed his hand over his bald scalp. ‘It was wrong to leave me behind,’ the knight said.

‘I was afraid you might tell my father,’ Mandred said.

Franz smiled and shook his head. ‘The Graf will learn about this foolishness soon enough.’ He looked away, peering through the nest of shacks and tents. ‘It seems they’re running, your grace. We’ll have to hurry if we want to claim a respectable contribution to the battle.’

Mandred grinned and brought his horse around. ‘Let’s make them wish they’d stayed in the Drakwald.’

The battle was a short but bloody affair. Fully a quarter of the shantytown was trampled by the time the beastkin broke and fled. At least a hundred of the brutes had fallen before the charge, but behind them they left scores of dead and dying refugees.

The herd had been broken, however. Grand Master Arno didn’t think they’d be back. It would take them a long time to lick their wounds and build up their courage. By then, perhaps, the threat of the Black Plague would be diminished enough for the Graf to allow the refugees inside Middenheim.

Jubilation at their victory was tempered by the knowledge that it was a pyrrhic victory. Everywhere in the shantytown the marks of plague were in evidence. Dead bodies swollen with buboes, living wretches with black treacle oozing from their pores. Contagion was everywhere, the stink of disease omnipresent.

The knights knew that through their bold charge they had exposed themselves to the plague. Somewhere in the squalor of Warrenburg, the source of the disease lurked. None of the warriors could say for certain that its deathly touch had not reached out for him. None of them knew if he carried the seed of the Black Plague in his body.

Mandred looked up the causeway, staring at the grim edifice of the bastion. That would be their home now, locked away behind those grim grey walls. There they would await the judgement of the gods, wait to see if the justice of their cause was enough to guard them against the clutch of the plague.

A sombre silence gripped the knights as they slowly rode towards the bastion. Each of them wondered if he would ever leave the place alive.

Mandred struggled to find some words of reassurance to bolster their flagging spirits, but nothing seemed profound enough to honour their sacrifice. It was a sacrifice he was proud to share with such men.

The sound of a horn cause Mandred to turn his gaze away from the bastion. For a moment the fear that the beastmen had regrouped flashed through his mind. Then he recognised the notes of his father’s hunting horn. Raising his gaze to the East Gate, he was shocked to see a company of cavalry slowly trotting their way onto the causeway.

At their head, resplendent in his blue cloak and gilded armour, rode Graf Gunthar.

Talabecland
Vorhexen, 1111

Reiksmarshal Everhardt Johannes Boeckenfoerde rose from his chair as his three visitors were bowed into the general’s tent. His adjutant, Nehring, offered to take the heavy cloaks from the visitors, but they declined his overtures with a brusque shrug.

‘We have come from Altdorf,’ the foremost of the men announced.

The Reiksmarshal gave Nehring a warning look. ‘It must have been a long and unpleasant ride,’ he said. ‘Perhaps not as unpleasant as moving an army under these conditions…’

‘You have been implicated in a plot against His Imperial Majesty Emperor Boris,’ the cloaked man continued. The three men began to fan out across the tent. ‘His Imperial Majesty offers you a choice. You can return to Altdorf, stand trial and be executed. Or you can remain here and fall on your own sword.’ A cruel smile flickered on the man’s face. ‘If you choose execution, Commander Kreyssig asks you to remember the traitor von Schomberg.’

The cruelty in Boeckenfoerde’s smile matched that of the Kaiserjaeger officer. ‘I have heard about the Grand Master. A shameful business. Only an animal would take pride in such work.’

The three Kaiserjaeger reached for their swords. Instantly, Nehring had his own blade unsheathed. The Reiksmarshal remained seated, motioning for his guests and his adjutant to be calm.

‘You came here to arrest me?’ Boeckenfoerde asked.

The officer’s voice was filled with scorn when he answered. ‘This tent is surrounded,’ he hissed. ‘I have twenty Kaiserjaeger outside and they only wait my word to butcher you like a pig!’

Boekenfoerde nodded, as though considering the threat posed by the Kaiserjaeger. ‘Has it occurred to you where you are?’ he asked. ‘Have you given any thought to where this tent is? I have four thousand soldiers out there and at the slightest sound of violence coming from this tent, they will take up arms and… as you put it… butcher you like a pig.’ He smiled as he watched the colour drain out of the officer’s face. ‘Nehring, take their swords. These gentlemen don’t need them any more.’

‘You won’t get away with this,’ the officer growled as Nehring plucked the sword from his unresisting grip. ‘That is the army of his Imperial Majesty! When I tell them you are a traitor…’

The Reiksmarshal rose from his chair and stepped out from behind his table. He tapped his finger on the map pinned to the wall of his tent. ‘His Imperial Majesty has just sent this army marching through the worst of winter with barely enough provisions to provide for half of them and winter gear for even less. And what enemy draws us to such reckless and heroic pursuits? Some new orc invasion or marauding Norscans? No, we march to force the Grand Duke of Talabecland to open the markets in Talabheim so Boris can get a few more crowns in tax revenue.’ Boeckenfoerde’s eyes were like daggers as he glared at the men from Altdorf. ‘I don’t think you’ll find too many here with any great love for Goldgather. Loyalty to me is the only thing that has brought them this far.

‘If you tell those men who you are and why you came here, they won’t leave enough of you left for the crows to pick at.’ The Reiksmarshal turned away from the map, retrieving his sword from where it leaned against his cot. ‘I suggest you ride back to Altdorf before I tell them myself.’

The Kaiserjaeger were quick to heed the warning, nearly falling over themselves as they scrambled out of the tent. Boeckenfoerde was an excellent judge of a man’s mettle, and he’d had these pegged as ambitious thugs the moment they stepped into his tent. Their kind would kill for their leaders, but they wouldn’t die for them. Faced with the choice of dying to accomplish their mission, they could only turn tail and run.

Nehring watched the Kaiserjaeger mount their horses and ride off, then slipped back inside the general’s tent. He was surprised to find the Reiksmarshal packing his gear. He gazed quizzically at the general.

‘Call the officers,’ Boeckenfoerde told him. ‘They’ll have to be told about this.’

‘But you said the men would stand with you,’ Nehring reminded.

The Reiksmarshal sighed. ‘Some of them might. I hope many of them will, but a lot of those men have families back in Altdorf and in the Reikland. If the conspirators have failed to depose Boris, then those families would be imperilled if these men took up arms against the Emperor.’

‘What about you?’ Nehring asked. ‘What will you do?’

‘I’m certainly not going back to Altdorf,’ the Reiksmarshal said. ‘I’ll take whatever men stand with me and head for someplace out of Boris’s reach. Talabheim would be a good prospect.

‘They might need an extra army soon.’

Nuln
Ulriczeit, 1111

The blaze of a rushlight drove back the darkness. Walther blinked against the harsh glare. For days now he had existed in perpetual blackness, the only sensations he could experience limited to the chill of his cell and the skittering of rats behind the walls. His eyes, deprived of vision for so long, burned with agony. The rat-catcher pressed his bloodied palms to his face in an effort to shield himself from the rushlight.

Fellgiebel stood in the doorway, his icy eyes studying the man sprawled on the stone floor. The cell, a little room buried beneath the Freiberg Hundertschaft’s watch station, was scarcely six feet across and only a little taller. It was without furnishing or accoutrement; the straw pallet had already been stolen by an opportunistic watchman to sell as fodder and the wooden slop bucket had met a similar fate.

When he told the guard to wait outside and closed the door, Fellgiebel and his prisoner were utterly alone and without distraction. The captain nodded when he saw the look of horror that crossed Walther’s features. Clearly the man appreciated the situation he was in. Officially, peasants were the property of their lords and the watch wasn’t allowed to mutilate them or render them any harm which would cause permanent injury. To do so would require compensation to the lord, something a simple Dienstmann couldn’t afford. Thus, by the letter of the law, there were limits to what tortures a militia like the Hundertschaft had recourse to.

Of course there were loopholes. An accident, for instance, would place the onus of compensation upon the peasant himself. It was frightening how many accidents there were in Nuln.

‘I grow weary of these discussions,’ Fellgiebel said, his gloved hands clasped together before him. The captain’s cold gaze fixed upon Walther’s bloodied face. ‘You are going to talk, you know. It is just a question of time and pain.’

Walther struggled up from the floor, using the icy stone wall to prop up his battered body. With every motion, broken bones ground against each other, bringing moans of anguish from the rat-catcher. By an effort of will that seemed to tax his very soul, Walther forced himself to meet Fellgiebel’s gaze and address his tormentor.

‘What… what has… happened…’ He closed his eyes, dredging up some last speck of courage to steel his faltering voice. ‘The Black Rose, how…’

‘The Black Rose is under quarantine,’ Fellgiebel said, his voice like a knife. ‘No one goes in, no one comes out.’ A cruel sneer curled his lip. ‘Plague, you know. The place is alive with it. At least for now.’

Walther sagged back against the wall, his broken body heaving as dry sobs racked his frame. ‘Zena,’ he groaned. In his mind he could picture her, alone and shunned in some corner of the tavern, her body covered in the black buboes of the plague.

Fellgiebel stepped out from the doorway and began pacing across the small cell. ‘Ah, yes, your girl. You’ve mentioned her a few times now. She must be very close to you.’ There was a menacing gleam in the reptilian eyes as the captain stared down at Walther. ‘Perhaps I should collect her for a little discussion. Just a short one. I doubt a woman would share your stamina, Schill. Or your stubborn endurance.’

Walther shook his head. The threat had been made so many times now that it held no further horrors for him. Fellgiebel had used that particular method of persuasion too often. If he had any intention of carrying through with it, he would have done so by now. The fact that he hadn’t convinced Walther that plague really had beset the Black Rose. Even Fellgiebel wasn’t so arrogant in his authority as to brave the Black Plague.

‘Do you want me to tell you what you want to hear?’ Walther said. ‘Or do you want the truth?’

Fellgiebel stopped pacing. His cheerless smile spread. ‘The truth, Schill. That is all I have ever wanted. The truth about your friend Aldinger and the others. Where they are. What they know. What they are planning to do.’ The captain’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Aldinger was a knight, you know. A refugee from the Reiksknecht. The others are probably Reiksknecht too. Our great and glorious Emperor has placed a bounty on all Reiksknecht. They are traitors and it is every man’s duty to turn them over to the Emperor.’ Fellgiebel tried to make his smile a bit friendlier. ‘If you tell me where they are, I’ll share the reward with you.’

The only answer from the prisoner was a miserable cough, the closest he could manage to a laugh. Fellgiebel ignored the gesture and resumed his pacing. ‘We shall forget the Reiksknecht, then. Tell me about the rat you captured. Why were the professors so interested in it? What did they tell you about it?’

Again, Walther tried to laugh. This line of questioning had been going on for a fortnight, always made with the same note of urgency. Even more than his denial of knowing Aldinger or the Reiksknecht, his insistence that he knew nothing special about the giant rat seemed to infuriate Fellgiebel. The captain wouldn’t believe Walther’s story that the professors hadn’t been particularly interested in the rat but more in the humiliation the existence of such a creature could deal to their reputations as scholars and their theories about the structure of life. As for any special information they had imparted to him, every one of the scholars had insisted the thing was an impossibility, later trying to justify their stance by claiming the giant Walther had caught was simply a one-time freak.

‘I grow tired of asking this,’ Fellgiebel said, coming to a halt and fixing Walther with his reptilian stare. ‘What do you know? What plans did you make with Aldinger? Who else is involved?’ The captain watched Walther closely, looking for any sign that his prisoner would speak. Walther just stared up at him with that mixture of fright and abhorrence with which the sane regard the mad.

‘Very well,’ Fellgiebel said. ‘I did warn you this would be the last time.’ The captain strode across the cell, not towards the door but to the bare wall at the end of the room. ‘I had hoped to spare you this. You do not believe it now, but I have been trying to help you.’ The coldness ebbed from the captain’s eyes, replaced by a quivering terror. His gloved hand reached out to the corner of the wall, his fingers brushing against the stone. His entire body trembling, Fellgiebel hesitated. Swiftly he wrenched his hand away from the wall and turned upon Walther.

‘Tell me, before it is too late!’ the captain demanded. ‘Hanging, the rack, whatever the Hundertschaft can do to you is nothing compared to what awaits if you don’t speak!’ Fellgiebel tugged away one of his gloves. Walther recoiled in loathing as he saw the captain’s hand. It was lean and hairy, covered in bony nodules, more like the paw of some hideous beast than the hand of a man. Despite the evidence of his own eyes, it took a moment for Walther to appreciate the hideous truth. The captain of the Freiberg Hundertschaft was a mutant!

‘They are not pretty, are they?’ Fellgiebel asked. ‘I was… contaminated helping the inquisitors of Verena cull mutants from the sewers. I couldn’t tell anyone about my… condition or I would have been burned.’ He cast a fearful look at the blank wall at the back of the cell. ‘But someone learned just the same. The price for silence was service.’ The captain’s lean face became flush with desperation. ‘Speak, Walther! Believe me when I tell you there are worse things than death in this world!’

The rat-catcher leaned forwards, forcing his eyes to meet those of his captor. ‘Do you want the truth, or just what you want to hear?’

Fellgiebel snarled in frustration, turning away and dragging the glove back over his hand. ‘On your head be it!’ he cried, stalking back towards the wall. ‘The gods have mercy on you,’ he said as he pressed his finger against a hidden catch. The wall shuddered as it pivoted inwards, retreating into yawning blackness. A foul, noxious reek wafted into the cell, an evil animalistic smell that caused every hair on Walther’s body to stand on end. Painfully, the rat-catcher started to drag himself away from the secret passage.

Fellgiebel walked away, turning his back to the tunnel. A mad giggle bubbled from his lips, only a supreme effort of will forcing it back down. When the captain was composed, he cast a final, pitying look at Walther. ‘Forgive me,’ he whispered.

Walther didn’t hear Fellgiebel. His attention was riveted to the tunnel and what was transpiring in those black depths. Beady red eyes gleamed from the darkness, and with them came a furtive rustling and chittering that was monstrously familiar to the rat-catcher. His body trembled as eyes and sounds drew closer, as shadowy figures emerged from the tunnel. He screamed as the flickering light revealed rodent-shapes with clutching paws and glistening fangs. He was still screaming when hand-like paws seized him and dragged him into the tunnel.

Fellgiebel kept his back turned, not watching as his secret masters dragged Walther away. He felt his heart sicken, his stomach roil with disgust. If there had been another way - but his masters were impatient and he had been left without a choice. No man deserved what he had done to Walther. No man deserved to become the captive of the skaven.

The sound of the hidden door sliding shut told Fellgiebel when it was all over. Only then did he turn around, making a careful inspection of the cell to ensure that no trace of the skaven had been left behind. The disappearance of Walther Schill would barely raise an eyebrow. Many peasants who succumbed to torture vanished. Without a body, the nobles had a hard time claiming their compensations.

An insane giggle returned to Fellgiebel’s lips as he started to leave the cell. It was some time before he was able to compose himself, to slip back into the emotionless personality of the cruel watch captain and subdue the terrified agent of the underfolk.

‘The rats caught the rat-catcher,’ Fellgiebel laughed. There was no amusement in the laughter, only the emptiness of a man who was a traitor to his own race.

Altdorf
Vorhexen, 1111

The Palace Guard slid from Erich’s blade, clutching at the crimson stain spreading across his golden livery. The knight pushed his dying victim aside, bounding forwards to confront a second soldier who had Mihail Kretzulescu pinned against the wall. The guard swung about in alarm as he caught the sound of Erich’s approach, but before he could bring his halberd around, the knight’s sword was slashing across the man’s eyes. The blinded wreck collapsed to the floor, shrieking in agony.

Erich helped Kretzulescu out from the little niche the Sylvanian had hidden himself in. The palatine’s shoulder was deeply gashed, his black tunic damp with blood. ‘I’m afraid I’m not much use in a fight,’ he apologised. ‘It’s a different thing fighting a man than it is hunting ghouls in the marshes.’

‘At least you stood your ground,’ Erich reassured him. ‘That is all one man can demand of another.’

The sounds of conflict gradually faded away, replaced by the moans of the wounded and the dying. Erich looked down the marble-walled gallery, feeling a twinge of sadness when he saw the lush tapestries hanging on the walls befouled with blood. The sudden appearance of the rebels in the very heart of the Palace had caught the defenders unawares, putting the element of surprise firmly on their side. He knew they couldn’t count on that advantage much longer. Already servants must be carrying word of their presence. Numbers were still on the side of the Palace Guard. If the rebels were to have any chance in achieving their purpose, they had to find Emperor Boris before an overwhelming force could be marshalled against them.

To that end, Prince Sigdan had split their force the moment they gained the Palace. One group, led by the prince, had headed upwards to search the apartments of the Emperor’s private residence. Another party headed by Duke Konrad had turned to the lower floors, where the audience chambers, reception halls and more functionary chambers of the Palace were situated.

Erich had been put in charge of a group of twenty men and sent to investigate the middle levels of the Palace, the trophy rooms and show rooms, the libraries and conservatories. The indecent extravagances of Boris Goldgather had sickened the knight at every turn. He’d discovered chambers that had been emptied so that stacks of expensive stained glass might be heaped inside, layers of dust caked about their silver frames indicating the neglect to which they had fallen. Rooms stocked with camel-skin divans and alabaster vases imported from Araby, artworks from Tilea, wondrous mechanical automata from the dwarf kingdoms, all of these had suffered similar abandonment. Erich even discovered a room filled with teakwood boxes containing little painted tiles and recalled the scandal surrounding the Emperor’s extravagant purchase of a famous Estalian fresco and the king’s ransom he had paid out to have the fresco painstakingly dismantled and transported across half the Old World. That had been nearly a decade ago and the Emperor had made no effort to reassemble the fresco. It seemed once the thrill of acquisition was gone, he took no further interest in the treasures he squandered the Empire’s wealth upon.

After scouring an entire floor without a trace of another living soul, it was impressed upon Erich the exact magnitude of their labour. He could have a hundred men and several hours and still not make a proper job of it. As it stood, he hoped that Count van Sauckelhof’s prayers to Ranald weren’t being ignored.

While Erich was taking a quick count of his small force, determining that two Sylvanians had fallen in the skirmish and besides Kretzulescu there were three wounded, a loud voice began shouting triumphantly from one of the chambers leading off the gallery. Erich recognised the bellow as belonging to Baron Thornig, but what had caused his excitement the knight was at a loss to explain. Fearing the worst, he motioned the two Reiksknecht in their little group to follow him and set off at a run to find the Middenlander.

The room the shouts came from looked like an armoury, so filled was it with weapons and armour. A half-dozen corpses wearing the gold of the Palace Guard were sprawled around the doorway, showing every sign of having made a vicious effort at defence. Beyond the doorway virtually every sort of armament was on display, lying placidly upon velvet-lined tables and stands. Erich saw the thin rapiers of Estalia and the brutish axes of Kislev, the heavy lances of Bretonnia and a thorny sword-like bludgeon of inhuman origin. There seemed no pattern to the assortment of weaponry, a dwarf axe resting beside a blade of elven make, a crude orc axe beside a curved scimitar from Araby.

Then Erich noticed a gruesome horned helm of blackened iron hanging upon a silver hook, the splinters of a shadow box dangling all around it. Erich could understand why the trophy had been hidden, and why whoever had smashed the shadow box had quickly retreated. There was no mistaking that helm, not for anyone who had examined an illuminated copy of the Deus Sigmar. The knight felt a sense of awe as he stared at this relic from the founding of the Empire - the helm of Morkar the Despoiler.

At once the smallness and unimportance of his own life pressed down upon the knight’s spirit. Who was he, captain of an outlawed order of knights, to challenge the authority and legacy of the emperors? Who was he to question a power that dated back to Sigmar himself?

Despair closed its claws about his heart as he stared up at the hoary battle trophy. Erich found his grip on his sword weakening, his sense of purpose faltering. Giving up now was the only thing that made sense any more. There was no hope of victory, no triumph waiting at the end of the ordeal. Only death and humiliation and shame.

Baron Thornig’s bellow snapped Erich from the pernicious influence of the helm. The knight glared at the lifeless iron mask, sensing its malignant mockery. Now that he was aware of its influence, it seemed weaker, unable to manipulate his fear, but Erich wanted to take no chances. Cautiously, he stepped away from the relic of the ancient Chaos warlord and made his way across the room to where Thornig continued to howl and shout.

‘You’ll bring the whole Palace down on us!’ Erich snarled at the Middenlander.

Baron Thornig just smiled and pointed his fist at the table beside him. The stand was richly carved from the lip of its recessed surface to each of the clawed dragon-feet at the ends of its legs. A casing of transparent crystal covered the display, and the surface beneath the trophy ensconced below looked to be nothing less than dragonskin.

But Erich paid scant attention to these trappings of opulence. His eyes were instantly locked upon the relic itself. Like the helm of Morkar, there was no mistaking what it was. Unlike that grim trophy, however, the relic’s draw was unmistakable. Looking upon it, Erich could feel vigour surge through his veins.

‘Ghal Maraz,’ Erich whispered.

Baron Thornig laughed. ‘I thought that would be worth seeing. But it’s too damn fine to leave with a leech like Goldgather.’ So saying, the Middenlander raised his own warhammer, a weapon that seemed small and crude beside the magnificent hammer which had once filled the hands of Sigmar himself.

Erich gasped in horror, lunging to restrain Baron Thornig. ‘You don’t mean to destroy it!’ he shouted.

Baron Thornig shook him off and raised his hammer once more. ‘Of course not!’ he shouted, bringing the warhammer smashing down and shattering the crystal casing.

‘I mean to steal it!’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Altdorf
Vorhexen, 1111

Erich wiped the blood from his blade, feeling a twinge of regret as the young soldier lay bleeding at his feet. The man had fought bravely and fiercely, and despite his years he had given the knight many close moments. Experience had prevailed, however, and in the end all it had taken was one ill-timed slash to allow Erich to slip past his adversary’s guard and run him through.

There were many such brave fighters lying strewn throughout the arcade overlooking the grand ballroom. Many of them wore the gold of the Palace Guard, but mixed among them were members of Baron Thornig’s retinue, several of Duke Konrad’s men and even a few of Erich’s fellow Reiksknecht. But for the timely intervention of Erich and his force, Prince Sigdan might have been repulsed and overwhelmed by Boris’s faithful defenders.

Now those defenders had been pushed back into the Harmony Salon, overlooking the ballroom. Bracing the doors with tables and chairs, the Palace Guard were making a staunch defence until Aldo Broadfellow made a suggestion. The halfling had no appetite for battle, and it took a mind such as his to conceive a better way to force entry into the salon. Instead of smashing their way into the room, the rebels piled tapestries, furnishings, paintings and anything else that looked like it might burn.

At Prince Sigdan’s order, the pile of battered finery and art was doused in lamp oil and set alight. Coils of thick black smoke boiled through the arcade, spilling out into the halls and almost choking the invaders until Duke Konrad ordered the doors to the connecting chambers thrown open and the windows smashed to vent the fumes. Count van Sauckelhof took vindictive delight in ordering the obliteration of the Emperor’s prized Kaiseraugen, hurling an iron sconce into the crystal panes as the first blow against the decadent opulence that had characterised Boris’s reign.

Before the next bell tolled from the spires of the Great Cathedral, the barricaded doorway had been reduced to smouldering rubble. The rebels shouldered their way past the flaming wreckage, pressing on into the mirror-walled room beyond. Every furnishing had been pushed up against the door, leaving only the massive hydraulis still standing. Too heavy to move, the immense water organ formed the Emperor’s last refuge. Sheltering behind its bulk, Boris Goldgather glared at his enemies as they stormed into the room.

‘Boris Hohenbach!’ Prince Sigdan shouted as he marched through the crumbling doorway, with boots scraping against the charred planks of the wood-covered floor. ‘For crimes against the Empire and its people, you are called upon to abdicate your throne and relinquish the powers you have abused and of which you are unworthy!’

The Emperor’s eyes narrowed with hate as he heard Prince Sigdan’s demand. He cast his gaze across the rebels filing into the salon, then looked over at his own depleted forces. Coughing, half-smothered by the smoke, his Palace Guard still formed ranks around him, raising their shields and drawing their swords. The black-armoured figure of Baron Peter von Kirchof stepped out from the ranks of the defenders. The Emperor smirked as he saw the faces of his enemies go pale. In all the Empire, no man was better with a sword than von Kirchof, the Emperor’s Champion.

‘I do not recognise your authority,’ Boris growled. ‘But if you think I am guilty of some injustice, then I give you leave to prove my guilt in personal combat with my representative.’

Von Kirchof acknowledge his sovereign’s words with a curt military bow. Then the champion’s sword was drawn from its sheath. A gasp of outrage rose from Duke Konrad’s lips.

‘Beast Slayer!’ the furious duke raged. ‘The Runefang of Drakwald! That blade belongs to the Count of Drakwald! You have no right to bestow it upon this… this hired killer!’

Emperor Boris leaned out from behind the water organ, his eyes glittering malignantly. ‘There is no Count of Drakwald,’ he sneered. ‘The trappings of that realm are forfeit to the Imperial Court.’

Duke Konrad started forwards, in his blind anger ready to confront even the incredible swordsmanship of Baron von Kirchof. Erich grabbed the Drakwalder by the shoulder, restraining his reckless advance.

‘We have collected trinkets too,’ Erich called out. He laughed as he saw Boris’s look of smug victory collapse as Baron Thornig held aloft Ghal Maraz. ‘What kind of emperor are you without the Hammer of Sigmar?’ the knight scoffed.

Boris reeled against the side of the organ, his face growing purple with indignation. A portly man in black robes and a physician’s cap dashed out from the little knot of courtiers who had taken shelter with their Emperor, fumbling about in his bags as he tried to administer a restorative to his sovereign. The stunned Emperor waved away the efforts of his personal physician.

‘You dare such sacrilege?’ Boris demanded, throwing his head back and fixing the conspirators with his withering gaze. ‘That is the holy hammer of our lord and saviour, Sigmar Heldenhammer, first emperor of the glorious Empire of mankind!’ A hint of a smile curled his lips as he saw doubt flash across the faces of some of the rebels. It seemed they hadn’t thought of their little revolt in terms of blasphemy and heresy. Ready to turn against Boris Hohenbach, they weren’t ready to defy Sigmar Heldenhammer. Inwardly, the Emperor sneered at their religious qualms, though outwardly he wore the mantle of pious outrage.

‘You are a fine one to speak of sacrilege,’ Erich challenged. ‘By whose order was Arch-Lector Hartwich killed?’

At once, any doubts of purpose the rebels felt were extirpated. Prince Sigdan, drawing the Runefang of Reikland from its scabbard, stalked across the charred floor. He stopped well away from von Kirchof, looking past the champion to the tyrant hiding behind the hydraulis. ‘Archers!’ the Prince of Altdorf cried and at his command ten Drakwald bowmen nocked arrows and took aim.

‘I will not play your games, Goldgather,’ the prince declared. ‘You will abdicate now, relinquish all claim upon the crown, or we will burn this room and every-one in it. Anyone who makes a move to stop us will be shot down.’ He turned his head at a flash of purple cloth amongst the courtiers. ‘If your pet warlock makes another move, if he even breathes wrong, he can be the first to die.’ Karl-Maria Fleischauer did a perfect impression of a statue as the threat reached the warlock’s ears.

Prince Sigdan smiled coldly as he saw the resignation on Boris’s face, as the Emperor’s shoulders slumped in defeat. ‘Fetch quill and parchment!’ he ordered Baron von Klauswitz. ‘His Imperial Majesty has one last diktat to write down.’

While the rebels were storming their way into the Harmony Salon, a different assault was unfolding at the gates of the Imperial Palace. The siege of the Courts of Justice having been broken, the Kaiserknecht, supported by troops from both the Schuetzenverein and the Kaiserjaeger, began a vicious attack. Bowmen loosed arrows at the rebels holding the gate while the knights brought the stout gibbet-post from the Widows’ Plaza to employ as a ram against the portals themselves.

Despite the viciousness and energy of the attack, the rebels soon discovered it was nothing more than a diversion. Having guessed the strategy of the conspirators, Commander Kreyssig decided to use their own tricks against them. While the rebels were looking outwards, Kreyssig led a force through the escape tunnels - those of modern vintage and with an entrance underneath a nondescript wine shop - to effect a clandestine entry to the Palace.

Once inside, Kreyssig sent the bulk of his troops to attack the defenders at the gates from behind. When the gates were thrown open, the rebels would have no hope of holding the Palace. Indeed, there was only one thing that could still carry the day for them. Detaching twenty men from his main force, including the hulking Scharfrichter Gottwald Drechsler, Kreyssig hastened to locate Emperor Boris.

He was under no delusion that his fate was not dependent upon the safety of His Imperial Majesty. Without the protection and patronage of Boris Goldgather, Kreyssig would be a man alone, cast out to suffer the retribution of the nobility. If he would save his own skin, he had to save the Emperor’s crown.

A frantic halfling messenger from the gate rushed into the salon, bearing word that they were under attack by the Emperor’s soldiers. The news sobered the jubilant conspirators. The inmates of the salon had been disarmed and herded against the wall. Emperor Boris had been coerced into signing his own abdication and affixing the Imperial Seal to it. A feeling of triumph had gripped them all, a sense that everything would soon be set right.

‘Give up now, and I promise you will only suffer exile,’ Boris said as he heard the report. He extended his ring-laden hand to reclaim the diktat held by Prince Sigdan.

Prince Sigdan laughed at the scheming tyrant. ‘I would expect the same mercy you showed Grand Master von Schomberg,’ he said. ‘And I wouldn’t be too excited. We anticipated this. You above all people should know how well stocked the cellars of the Palace are. I imagine we could endure a whole year under siege. And by then, your enemies - and I assure you they are many - will flock to Altdorf to ensure you abide by this proclamation.’

A snarl on his face, Boris leaned back against the water organ, sending a sickly note from the instrument as his elbow pressed down on the keys. Aldo Broadfellow grinned at the defeated tyrant, making a great display of his bare, hairy feet. The halfling elder turned to Prince Sigdan.

‘I have a request,’ Aldo said. ‘Now that he’s not emperor any more, I’d like to see him take off his shoes.’ The halfling wiggled his bare toes. ‘It’ll be recompense for all the times he made me wear boots.’

The request brought a much needed laugh to the rebels, but their laughter faded when a second messenger came racing into the salon.

‘The gates have fallen!’ the halfling squealed. ‘Somehow Kaiserjaeger got inside the Palace and attacked our men from behind!’

The conspirators went pale, the last flush of victory draining out of them like blood from a corpse.

Boris Goldgather rose from beside the water organ and held out his hand. ‘Give me that parchment,’ he told Prince Sigdan. ‘If you surrender before my men get here, I promise I will still be lenient. But I suggest you hurry. My offer will expire very shortly.

‘And then, so will all of you.’

Bylorhof
Ulriczeit, 1111

A great bonfire blazed in Bylorhof’s town square. Doors had been torn from the homes of plague victims and broken to splinters with sledges, used as kindling for the roaring fires. Long tables surrounded the blaze, their surfaces littered with trenchers of mutton and platters of steamed lamprey and boiled heron. Bowls of almond milk and suet, mugs of spiced cider and hot ale, great plates of blancmange - these were all arrayed in a great feast. A riotous confusion of chairs and divans, couches and benches was at the disposal of the banqueters.

The Plague had done its work too well in Bylorhof. The townsfolk had capitulated to the inevitable. Hoarded stores had emerged from their places of hiding, valuable stock had been butchered and cooked. All thought of tomorrow was forbidden, for the plague made it impossible to consider the future. The moment was all the Sylvanians could depend upon, and they seized it in a mad embrace.

Peasants danced about the flames while shepherds strummed a discordant melody upon battered mandolins. Men toasted one another with great swallows of ale, tearing at slabs of mutton with their knives and spitting the gristle into the bonfire. Tipsy revellers, assuming the duties of cupar and sluger, traipsed about the tables, filling cups and exchanging empty trenchers for full ones. Often they would pause beside a prone diner, kicking his chair to see if he was merely intoxicated or if the Black Plague had removed his presence from the feast.

There were many such chairs with pale, lifeless figures slumped against the table, the stink of their sores seeming to goad the other diners to further excess and gluttony.

At the head of the table, his chair raised slightly, sat the founder of the feast. Despairing of escaping Bylorhof and joining his master behind the stone walls of the castle, Cneaz Litovoi had orchestrated the wild abandon. Better a quick end amidst song and dance than a slow, wasting demise alone in the dark. Such had been his conviction and the glassy stare in his unseeing eyes as he slouched in his chair indicated that he had achieved his desire.

The Cneaz had surrounded himself with the most prominent of the town’s denizens, the merchants and guildmasters. Among these was the sinister figure of Dr Bruno Havemann. The celebrants had insisted the plague doktor wear his costume to the feast, by turns toasting him for his endless efforts to stop the Black Plague or jeering him for the same. The physician endured the mercurial affections of his hosts, his beaked face nodding in solemn recognition of their regard. Madness ruled Bylorhof now, and he was not one to question the whims of the mad.

His boot lashed out, kicking one of the enormous rats scurrying under the table, scavenging the scraps dropped by dead hands. The vermin squeaked in protest, scampering away, its scaly tail dragging behind it. Havemann watched the rodent flee with grim satisfaction. Perhaps he couldn’t stop the plague, but at least he didn’t have to suffer the presence of rats at his table.

The face behind the bird-like mask contorted in a grimace as his gaze drifted past the dancers and the bonfire. At the other end of the square, a mob of people had appeared. From the distance, Havemann couldn’t quite make them out, but there was no mistaking the black habit of a Morrite priest.

Frederick van Hal stalked across the square, his followers marching behind him with clumsy, uneven steps. As he advanced, the revellers fell silent. They cringed away from the dark priest and gazed with horror at the throng following behind him. Screams rippled about the square. Banqueters rose from the table and fled into the streets.

Havemann kept his seat. Even when the rotten, monstrous appearance of the priest’s congregation became apparent to him, the plague doktor was unmoved.

‘Have you come to collect me for your garden?’ Havemann asked the priest. The beaked face turned, regarding the dead guildmasters seated to either side of him. ‘I should think there is carrion enough to sate your god.’

Frederick van Hal glared across the table at the grotesque plague doktor. ‘There is always room for one more,’ he said, his voice a whispered snarl. ‘But first I will have justice for my nephew, who died from your fakery. Justice for my brother’s wife, who was driven to suicide by your deceit. Justice for my brother, who was murdered by your hand.’

The plague doktor took each of Frederick’s accusations with perfect nonchalance. ‘You are too late for justice,’ Havemann sneered. He reached a hand to the side of his mask, loosening the strap which bound it in place. The bird-like beak fell away, exposing a chubby, almost childlike visage. All across Havemann’s face were ugly black sores, the mark of the plague.

Frederick lifted a hand to his breast, ripping at the embroidered raven stitched to his robe. The symbol of his god frayed beneath his clawing fingers. A terrible resolve burned in the necromancer’s eyes.

‘The gods may have cheated me of justice,’ Frederick hissed. ‘But there is always time for vengeance.’

At his gesture, the zombies surged forwards, knocking over the table and converging upon the diseased doktor.

Bruno Havemann was a long time dying. The necromancer’s magic saw to that.

Dregator Miklos stormed from his tent, crushing his lynx-fur hat tight about his head as he emerged into the biting cold. The lord of the Nachtsheer glared at his soldiers, offended by their disturbance of his ablutions. The dregator considered adding a few of the soldiers to the gallows, but reflected that such draconian measures might be counterproductive. It wouldn’t do to let the peasants think there was disunity among Count von Drak’s troops. Such a supposition might give them hope and hope might encourage foolish ideas about breaking the quarantine.

The nobleman’s gloves creaked as he drew his baton of office from his belt, its jewels gleaming in the moonlight. He scowled as he marched past the Nachtsheer. These men were supposed to be the finest soldiers in Sylvania. If they couldn’t handle a sickly peasant rabble…

The sentries at the fence turned and saluted as Dregator Miklos came stalking towards them, leaning their crossbows against the piled logs and timber. Other soldiers in the red and black livery of the Nachtsheer maintained a grim vigil. Even as the nobleman curtly returned the salute, he saw them loose bolts across the field separating them from the infected town.

‘My lord,’ one of the sentries said. ‘The peasants are making an effort to withdraw from the town. We have warned them to turn back, but they keep coming.’

The scowl was still on the dregator’s face. ‘Try shooting into them instead of over their heads,’ he snapped. ‘The entire province is threatened by the plague. Now is no time for timidity!’

The scolded soldier bowed his head sheepishly. ‘My lord, we have targeted them,’ he objected. ‘We have loosed three volleys into them and they still keep coming!’

Dregator Miklos hissed in disbelief. He stared out across the barrier, watching the peasant mob stumbling its way through the snow. He’d watched the crossbowmen shoot, but he’d heard no outcry from the peasants. Either the fools weren’t aiming at them or they were all as blind as bats! His irritation mounting, the nobleman seized one of the crossbows leaning against the fence. Choosing one of the approaching peasants, he aimed and loosed, smiling cruelly as the bolt crunched into the peasant’s chest.

His smile faded and the dregator dropped the weapon. It was impossible that he could have missed! He had seen the peasant’s body jerk as the bolt slammed into it! Miklos reached to his neck, fingering the talismanic charms dangling at his throat. A feeling of superstitious dread ran down his spine.

‘Kill them!’ he snarled at the soldiers. ‘Kill them all!’ He glared at the soldiers around him, trying to hide his fear. His gloved hand slapped against the heraldic dragon on the sentry’s livery. ‘You are Nachtsheer,’ he spat. ‘Are you going to be frightened by a bunch of peasant scum!’ He reached down and drew the soldier’s sword from its scabbard, pushing the weapon into the warrior’s hand. ‘Get out there and cut them down!’

The Nachtsheer displayed no eagerness to carry out Dregator Miklos’s command, but they were too disciplined to question his authority. In short order a dozen armoured warriors were climbing over the fence, swords in their hands and murder in their faces. Growling the name of Count Malbork von Drak as their battle cry, the Nachtsheer marched upon the peasant rabble.

The moons decided at that moment to emerge from behind the black clouds dotting the sky. Silvery light bathed the town and its surroundings, illuminating for the first time the dark, shambling figures of the peasants.

Shouts of horror rose from the ranks of the Nachtsheer as they beheld the nature of their would-be victims. They were peasants, dressed in the crude homespun wool of Sylvanian serfs. But their flesh was decayed, rotten with worms and frostbite, their faces were leering skulls and their eyes were pits devoid of thought and emotion. Clawed hands gripped crude spears, bill forks and a score other rough weapons scavenged from farm implements.

Fear overwhelmed the discipline of the mercenaries. First one, then another, broke ranks and fled back towards the barrier. Prepared to slaughter peasants, the warriors were unprepared to face unliving monsters.

As the soldiers fled, a dreadful vitality swept through the shambling ranks of the zombies. Dry moans escaped ragged mouths, loathsome hunger smouldered in lifeless eyes. Strengthened by the darkest magic, the zombies pursued their routed foe, racing forwards with speed and hideous purpose. The fleeing soldiers were dragged down by the undead, mangled and butchered by the hatchets and knives clenched in desiccated hands.

Dregator Miklos could only watch in terror as his men were slaughtered. His mind whirled with strategy and tactics, urging him to spring into action, to call back his cavalry scouts, to summon the troops at the other watchposts, to do something to oppose the monstrous horror. Terror held him in an icy grip, all the arrogant self-assurance of the tyrannical dregator unable to break its frightful hold.

A dark shape strode through the ravening mass of zombies, a figure cloaked in the black habit of a Morrite priest, his pale hands clenched about an ebony staff. Beneath the hood of the priest’s habit, a mask fashioned from the face of a skull concealed the necromancer’s visage. Scraps of flesh and beads of blood still dripped from the macabre ornament, staining the exposed cheeks and chin of the fiend.

The necromancer stopped a few yards from the fence, his imperious gaze staring out from behind the sockets of his mask. He gestured at the logs, his lips moving in a whispered incantation. With a wave of his hand, a malevolent surge of energy crashed down upon the fence. Before the dregator’s horrified gaze, the timbers began to splinter and rot, crumbling into dust in the space of a few heartbeats.

Waving his hand again, the necromancer scattered the dust, leaving only the white snow between himself and the Nachtsheer encampment. The barrier removed, he strode towards Dregator Miklos. The lips beneath the skull mask spread in a malignant smile.

‘I am Vanhal, the fallen,’ the necromancer hissed. He pointed a bony finger at the nobleman’s chest. Miklos gasped as he felt his heart quiver, as the palpitations began to slow. Whatever entreaty was on his lips went unspoken as his body crashed into the snow.

‘I am Vanhal,’ Frederick snarled at the crumpled corpse. ‘And I bring hell to Sylvania.’

Skavenblight
Vorhexen, 1111

Puskab Foulfur pulled his bloated body onto the narrow ledge, his heart pounding as some of the ancient masonry crumbled beneath his weight. He wrapped his arm about the neck of a stone gargoyle, its face worn into a featureless lump by the centuries. The effort to keep from turning his head was too great and the plague priest risked a downwards glance. The side of the Shattered Tower descended hundreds of feet before vanishing into the fog. He could pick out the jagged fissures in the wall, could see the black lines of rain gutters spiralling about the structure. Balconies, so tiny at this height that they were almost unrecognisable, jutted from the lower tiers, worm-oil lanterns glowing from their balustrades.

His arduous ascent had taken him far. It was from one such balcony that he had started his climb, scrambling up the uneven face of the tower, trying to balance safety and caution against strategy and speed. A single misstep, a moment of carelessness and Puskab would lose his grip upon the aged masonry. He would plummet to the streets of Skavenblight hidden somewhere below the fog, hurtle like a falling star into the ruined desolation of the city.

The plague priest gnashed his fangs as he contemplated all the unfair advantages that had been given to his adversary. The window from which Blight had started his climb was a good hundred feet higher than Puskab’s balcony. The Wormlord had been equipped with steel climbing claws and a stout cord woven from skaven-tails. Before starting his climb, Blight had imbibed a full pot of skaven-brew, that potent mixture of blood and powdered warpstone which would excite the metabolism of any ratman and increase the swiftness of his reactions. Puskab knew his enemy had partaken of this mixture because he had smelled the discarded pot as it sailed past him on its way to the streets below, narrowly missing the plague priest’s head.

Still, Puskab contented himself with the one advantage the scheming Wormlord didn’t possess. That was a real and sincere faith in the Horned One. Plots and tricks were all Blight had to protect himself. Puskab had the divine power of his god to sustain him, to bring him victorious from any ordeal.

The corpulent ratman laughed as he recalled the sickly smell of Blight when the fool realised he had been manipulated. He had honestly expected a plague priest to turn against his own kind in favour of a heretic and unbeliever? The plague monks had their rivalries and hates, but these were never allowed to threaten the might of Clan Pestilens or impede the spread of the Horned One’s faith. Blight had arranged everything so that Puskab could challenge Nurglitch and claim his position as one of the Lords of Decay, little imagining that it was he himself who would suffer the challenge. Puskab wondered if the fool realised now that it had indeed been the Poxmaster who had loosed the Black Plague upon Clan Verms.

The flea-breeding Verms had been marked for destruction from the start. Puskab had developed parasites to carry the plague to other ratmen almost before Clan Pestilens had started experimenting on humans. He had carried his own fleas into the Hive, fleas bloated with plague germs, fleas that had spread among his guards and assistants. He had used his magic to preserve the lives of those skaven working in close proximity to himself in order to allay suspicion, but there had been no magic to guard the hundreds of ratkin the lab-rats came into contact with. The diseased fleas had spread and brought Clan Verms to its knees.

There had been a delicious irony when Blight sent Puskab to lead the assassins against Nurglitch. It was Puskab himself who had passed warning to the Arch-Plaguelord through the buzzing voices of his fever-flies. Informed of the primitive drives which motivated the diggerfangs, the plague monks had simply built great fires within the Inner Temple, heating the thick stone walls. The spiders, faced with an even greater heat than that of the worm-oil goads, had retreated, charging straight back into the faces of their handlers! So much for the murderous machinations of the Wormlord!

Blight would suffer for his impudence, trying to turn Clan Pestilens against itself, as though the disciples of the Horned One could be used and manipulated like some common warlord clan!

The plague priest’s bitter growl ended in a frightened yelp. A brick came sailing down out of the darkness, crashing against the side of the gargoyle and knocking chips from its folded wings. Puskab flinched, pressing a stinging paw to his mouth. He squeezed his bulk against the wall as another brick shot towards him. It glanced off the ledge, vanishing into the mists far below.

Blight had reached the top of the tower, using all of his advantages to beat the plague priest. The rules of the challenge dictated that the combatants could in no way strike out against one another until both stood within the belfry atop the Shattered Tower and heard the Broken Bell toll the midnight dirge. Neither by magic or force was either ratman allowed to attack his enemy before the bell struck the thirteenth stroke. But how could a skaven be held accountable if some unfortunate accident claimed his opponent before he could reach the belfry?

Puskab redoubled his efforts, a prayer to the Horned One wheezing through his lips as his claws dug at the broken wall. He scrambled upwards, exploiting the grip afforded by one of the jagged fissures running down the side of the Shattered Tower. His fingers and toes wedged into the crack, he scurried up towards the belfry.

A great slab of stone crashed against the side of the tower, sending a cascade of debris raining down into the fog. Puskab’s paws were knocked from the fissure, his body flailing backwards as his feet struggled to maintain their purchase. A second slab hurtled past, smashing his tail as it bounced against the wall. The plague priest howled in pain, a spasm of agony rushing through his veins. By a supreme effort, he pulled himself back to the wall, ignoring the broken, bloodied mangle of his tail.

Eyes narrowed with vengeful determination, Puskab drew upon his sorcerous powers. Green flame blazed up from his eyes, ribbons of mephitic vapour rose from his nostrils. Evoking the great name of the Horned One, the plague priest’s jaws opened wide, spewing forth a reeking miasma that swept upwards. He might not be able to use his magic directly against Blight, but he could use it to hinder any ‘accidents’. The Wormlord would have a hard time dropping a brick onto the head of someone he couldn’t see.

Like a living thing, the magical miasma crawled up the face of the Shattered Tower, engulfing the crooked belfry. Puskab was near enough to hear Blight’s snarls and curses as the mist surrounded him and blinded him to what was going on below. Hastily, Puskab abandoned the fissure he had been using, scrabbling along a rain gutter until he reached the tower’s sharp corner. He chittered softly as he watched another slab of stone shoot past, clearly directed against someone using the crack to make his ascent.

The belfry was just visible through the haze of sorcery, tilting at a steep angle away from the Shattered Tower, its crooked roof a shambles of cracked tiles and splintered beams. Octagonal pillars supported the steeply gabled roof at every side, forming narrow archways. Faceless gargoyles leered from the slender ledge which ran about the bases of the pillars, their toothless mouths open in silent roars.

As Puskab hurried to climb the last few yards between himself and the belfry, the entire tower began to shake. A thunderous note boomed through the heavens, its dolorous tone causing the ratman’s bones to vibrate. The quivering masonry beneath his clutching paws flaked and crumbled, forcing him to dig his claws even deeper into the stone.

A pause, a moment of silence, and then the deafening bellow was repeated, sounding across the night like the angry howl of a daemon king. The tower shook and shivered, the lone skaven clinging to its side struggled to maintain his hold against the violent clamour. Ears ringing, body trembling, Puskab clenched his fangs and waited for the din to be repeated. He understood what the thunderous scream was - the ringing of the Broken Bell. It would toll thirteen times. If he failed to reach the platform of the belfry by that time, then his life would be forfeit. Blight would be free to use any means at his disposal to kill the tardy challenger.

Hissing psalms of putrescence and decay, Puskab scurried towards the belfry, moving only in those moments of shocking silence between the tolls of the bell. Five. Six. Seven. Again and again the Broken Bell screamed out the notes of Puskab’s doom. The plague priest’s heart hammered in his chest, his glands expelled themselves in a burst of despair. His fat fingers fumbled at the stones, his broken tail lashed against the crumbling masonry.

Eight. Nine. Ten. The belfry seemed as far away as ever to Puskab. With each toll, the fury of the Broken Bell increased, the reverberations quivering ever more violently through the tower. A horned gargoyle snapped from its mooring, streaking past Puskab on its way to the street hundreds of feet below. A shower of cracked tiles came sliding away from the gabled roof, pelting the plague priest with stinging fragments.

Puskab clenched his fangs, averting his face against the deluge, and struggled upwards.

Blight Tenscratch was standing between two of the pillars when the bell tolled the thirteenth note, his eyes darting from side to side, trying to pierce the veil of miasma. A heavy chunk of stone, chiselled away from one of the pillars, was clenched in the Wormlord’s paws. He hissed triumphantly when he heard the final note sound.

‘Fool-meat!’ Blight growled. ‘Think-dare to challenge me!’ The Wormlord’s voice dropped in a peal of vicious laughter.

‘I am here,’ Puskab snarled, heaving his bloated bulk over the ledge and onto the platform. His eyes lingered for an instant upon the monstrous bell suspended beneath the roof, a great black mass of corroded metal, a jagged split down its side, strange symbols engraved into its rim. There was something unholy and unnatural about the Broken Bell, about the way it seemed to drain light from its surroundings, soaking the illumination into itself like a sponge. The effect was chilling and terrifying, setting Puskab’s fur on end.

Alone with the horrible bell for almost an hour, Blight had become accustomed to its malefic emanations to a degree. Enough so that he recognised Puskab’s distraction and pounced upon it. The Wormlord hefted the heavy chunk of stone, hurling it at the distracted plague priest. The block cracked against Puskab’s side, its momentum nearly pitching him over the side of the platform. He yelped in pain, twisting about to face the foe whose presence he had almost forgotten.

Blight chittered triumphantly as he saw the way Puskab’s arm hung limp and ragged at his side. He drew a fat-bladed dagger from his belt, twisting his paw so that light played across the edge. ‘I will wear-take your pelt,’ he growled. ‘Teach-learn all traitor-meat not to trifle with Clan Verms!’

Puskab fixed the Wormlord with a merciless sneer. ‘You will suffer-rot, liar-fool,’ he promised. Awkwardly, he pulled his gnarled wooden staff from where it had been bound across his back, removing it with his left paw. His right continued to dangle at his side, limp and bloody.

Blight didn’t hesitate. While the Broken Bell’s clapper was still swaying from the violence of its final toll, the Wormlord sprang at Puskab, lunging at the plague priest’s left side. His crooked sword slashed out, ripping through his enemy’s robe, blocked at the last instant by the intercepting sweep of the wooden staff. Blight used his momentum to rake the claws of his foot across his foe’s knee.

The plague priest lashed out with his staff, but the heavy wood whistled through emptiness. Blight sprang away, coiling about one of the pillars with his twisted body, using it as a fulcrum to propel himself at his enemy. The notched sword flashed at Puskab’s head, crunching through one of his antlers. The Wormlord’s other paw shot out, latching about the priest’s throat. The cloth of Blight’s robe rippled as a long, creeping thing slithered out from under his sleeve. Brightly marked in splotches of red and yellow, a huge centipede reared its fanged head, poised to strike at the priest’s throat.

Even as Blight’s malignant laughter hissed between his fangs, the centipede faltered. Its long antennae drooped, its legs became slack. Like a strip of gaudy ribbon, the bug flopped lifelessly from the Wormlord’s sleeve, its tiny organs unable to withstand the pestilential aura of the plague priest.

Before the treacherous Blight could pull away, he felt claws digging into his back, prisoning him against the plague priest’s fat frame. Puskab’s supposedly useless and broken arm held him in a merciless grip. The Grey Lord struggled to bring his sword to bear, but was unable to shift past the warding length of the priest’s staff.

‘Now see-learn power-might of Horned One,’ Puskab hissed, leaning towards Blight, savouring the stark terror filling his eyes. Drawing upon the sickly magic of his god, the plague priest opened his decayed jaws, letting a froth of bile and blood surge from his diseased guts.

Blight’s fur smoked, his flesh sizzled as the stream of corruption washed over his face. The notched sword clattered to the floor, the clawed fingers dropped away from Puskab’s throat. Howling in agony, the stricken Wormlord reeled away from the plague priest. Puskab lunged at his staggering enemy, leaping into the air and bringing his gnarled staff cracking down upon the crown of Blight’s skull in a double-pawed effort that had every ounce of his massive weight behind it.

The Wormlord’s head shattered like an egg, blood and brains splattering across the platform. Blight’s body swayed drunkenly on its feet for a moment, then toppled against one of the columns. Puskab hobbled over to it, prying the lifeless claws from the aged stone. Vindictively, he pushed it over the side with the butt of his staff.

When the council saw Blight’s broken body lying at the foot of the Shattered Tower, they would know that Puskab Foulfur was triumphant. They would know that the Wormlord was no more, his place as Lord of Decay forfeit to the Poxmaster of Clan Pestilens.

Puskab leaned against his staff, gazing out across the sprawl of Skavenblight. By the gleam of the moons and stars, he could see the taller buildings rising above the fog. He could see the vast morass of the swamps and marshes beyond the city, the paddies of black corn and the rickety barges collecting their sickly harvest. He could see the distant lights of the man-warren called Miragliano and the far-off peaks of the Irrana Mountains.

The sight brought an avaricious gasp from Puskab’s lips. Soon all of it would belong to Clan Pestilens, the marshes, the mountains, the man-warrens, all of it! They would bring the diseased glory of the Horned One to every corner of the earth! Nothing would oppose them this time, not the man-things, not the dwarf-things, not their own perfidious kind! The world would be crushed beneath the Black Plague, razed as it writhed in the decayed majesty of the Horned One!

The man-things of the Empire were only the beginning. Two seats upon the council now belonged to Clan Pestilens. The balance of power had shifted. The plague monks could now counterbalance the double-vote of Seerlord Skrittar all on their own. They would use that strength to draw other clans away from the heresies of the grey seers. And those who would not see the wisdom of embracing truth would suffer.

A new world was coming.

The world of the Black Plague.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Altdorf
Vorhexen, 1111

‘Kill him!’ The oath came snarling from the lips of Duke Konrad, his hand tightening about the grip of Beast Slayer, the sword which, like all the other trappings of rule, Emperor Boris had stripped away from him.

The suggestion was taken up heartily by many of the rebels. A gang of Westerlanders raced out into the hallway, returning with the knotted cord from one of the tapestries, holding their improvised noose aloft with terrible purpose. The formerly defiant Boris Goldgather cringed against the side of the hydraulis, only Baron von Kirchof moving to stand beside him in his moment of peril. The swordless champion’s bravado brought a sneer from Count van Sauckelhof, who simply ordered his men to fetch a second noose.

It was Prince Sigdan who rallied to the Emperor’s defence. Stepping before the enraged rebels, he interposed himself between them and their prey. ‘We can’t do this!’ the prince declared.

‘Kreyssig will be too late to stop us,’ Erich vowed. ‘They’ll execute all of us when they catch us. Regicide won’t make us any less dead.’

Prince Sigdan gave the vengeful knight a look of reproof. ‘This isn’t about him, or about us,’ he said. ‘This is about the Empire. With the Palace in our hands, with the Emperor deposed, we could have played for time, built alliances. We’ve lost that opportunity now. We’ve lost everything.’

‘We still have that pig,’ Mihail Kretzulescu stated. ‘Killing him might not do any good, but it’ll make me feel good on my way to hell.’

Again, Prince Sigdan shook his head and moved to retard the advance of the lynch mob. ‘Killing him won’t do any good, but it will do great harm. The unity of the Empire hangs by a thread and this scheming churl has seen to it that he is that thread. Kill him and you plunge the Empire into anarchy.’ The prince fixed his stern gaze upon Kretzulescu. ‘Tell me, without the Emperor’s promise that Sylvania will be made its own province, what will Count von Drak do?’

Kretzulescu’s cadaverous face coloured as the question drove itself home. Almost embarrassedly he stared at Baron von Klauswitz. When he spoke, he addressed his words to the Stirlander. ‘Without the Emperor’s promise, Count von Drak would seek to seize independence through force of arms,’ the palatine confessed.

‘That’s right!’ Boris shouted. ‘Without me you treacherous jackals will be at each other’s throats! Like starving rats at the bottom of a barrel!’

‘If he abdicated, our stewardship would have legitimacy,’ Prince Sigdan said. ‘The other provinces would hold to the hope that all the favours Boris has promised them will bear fruit. No one will trust regicides.’ He turned and glared hatefully at Boris Goldgather. ‘The varlet’s own crimes make it impossible to kill him. For the good of the Empire, we have to let him live.’

The sombre, horrible statement swept through the minds of the rebels. With a roar of impotent fury, Duke Konrad turned about and drove the Runefang into one of the mirrors on the salon wall, transfixing the reflection of the reviled sovereign. One of the Drakwald archers loosed an arrow at Boris, the missile striking the water organ he was sheltered behind, quivering in the wood as the Emperor ducked against the side of the hydraulis. Before the bowman could nock another arrow, he was subdued by his own comrades. Crying, the archer was dragged from the salon.

Prince Sigdan turned on the ashen-faced Emperor. ‘Your word that these men will go free,’ he said. ‘If anyone is to atone for this revolt, let it be me.’

Emperor Boris rose to his feet, grimacing as his shoulder brushed against the arrow that had so nearly ended his rule. ‘We, Boris I, Protector of the Empire, Defier of the Dark, Emperor Himself and the Son of Emperors, Baron of Kutenholz, Duke of Scheinfeld, Chief Defender of the Faith of Holy Sigmar, do avow that all those who submit to our judgement will be treated with honour and leniency.’ A cruel smile twisted its way onto the Emperor’s face as his eyes bored into those of the prince. ‘With one exception,’ he added.

‘You can’t trust him!’ Baron Thornig growled. ‘I’d sooner hand a knife to a goblin and ask it to shave me!’

Prince Sigdan walked over to the furious Middenlander, setting his hand on the baron’s shoulder. ‘I don’t trust him,’ he said. ‘That is why we must ensure his honesty.’ The prince let his hand drop to the ancient metal of Ghal Maraz, feeling the slumbering power of Sigmar’s hammer crackle beneath his touch. ‘There is no symbol more sacred to the authority of an emperor than Sigmar’s hammer. You will need to take it someplace safe, hide it until you are certain Boris has honoured his word. Take the decree of abdication along with it.’ Sigdan turned back towards the Emperor. ‘You understand the conditions?’

Boris Goldgather glared back at the rebel prince. ‘I have said I will accept your offer of surrender,’ he said. ‘Especially in one particular.’

‘Whatever we’re going to do, we’d better decide quick!’ Erich cried. From his place near the doorway the knight could hear sounds of fighting in the ballroom below. It would only be a matter of minutes before the Kaiserjaeger reached the upper arcade and the salon.

‘Captain, I rely upon you to get Baron Thornig and Ghal Maraz out of the Palace,’ Prince Sigdan told Erich. He turned his attention to Count van Sauckelhof, whose Westerland sea-dogs made up the bulk of the force which had stormed the salon. ‘Count, you will need to buy them as much time to get away as you can. Purchase it with blood if necessary.’

The Westerlander saluted Prince Sigdan. ‘We’ll give them as much time as they need,’ he swore. The sea-dogs were already filing from the salon, broadswords and cudgels clenched in their fists. Count van Sauckelhof cast his gaze across the other retainers who had accompanied their disparate group. ‘I’ll be thankful for any volunteers,’ he said.

‘I will need only ten men to help me here,’ Prince Sigdan said when he saw most of the rebels moving to help the Westerland count. ‘My own men and four others,’ he suggested. Three of the Sylvanians and one of the Reiksknecht turned away from the doorway, leaving van Sauckelhof with a force of some forty men, among them Baron von Klauswitz.

‘Archers form up along the arcade,’ Duke Konrad called. ‘Pick off as many of Kreyssig’s thugs as you can before they get close.’ The Drakwalder bowmen saluted their lord and marched off behind the other defenders.

‘We’ll keep them occupied as long as we can,’ Count van Sauckelhof promised Erich as he passed. ‘Ranald guide your steps.’

‘And Sigmar watch over you,’ Erich told the nobleman, feeling his heart sink. There was no delusion about van Sauckelhof’s chances against the Emperor’s troops.

Caustic laughter rippled across the room as the warriors marched out to the arcade. Boris Goldgather sneered at the assembly of rebels left behind. ‘You spend their lives needlessly. You have my word I will show leniency. There is no need for this subterfuge, I assure you.’

Prince Sigdan ignored the Emperor’s promises. ‘You’d better be going,’ he told Erich and Baron Thornig. ‘As soon as the Kaiserjaeger liberate this jackal, you can expect them to come looking for you.’

Baron Thornig bowed before the prince. ‘For a delusional Sigmarite, you’ve the heart of an Ulrican,’ he said. His hairy hand patted the haft of Ghal Maraz. ‘Don’t worry, the only way they take this trinket back is by prying it from my cold dead hands.’

‘You should come with us,’ Erich insisted, tears in his voice. ‘That maggot will never keep his word.’

‘He might,’ Prince Sigdan told him, ‘if you two quit gabbing and get Ghal Maraz somewhere he can’t find it.’ A wry smile flickered on his face and he jabbed his thumb towards the captive sovereign and his retainers. ‘Besides, somebody has to stay here and play nursemaid.’

Erich’s spirit was leaden as he turned and strode from the salon. For the second time, he was abandoning a brave man, a man he looked up to as leader and lord, to a cruel and merciless fate.

Grim in their black livery, the Kaiserjaeger trooped into the Harmony Salon, immediately confiscating weapons from the rebels. They had listened to the shouts of combat ringing across the arcade. The fight was over in a hideously short time. The answer for the brevity of the battle marched into the salon beside a vengeful Adolf Kreyssig.

Baron von Klauswitz had turned against his fellow conspirators. In the heat of battle, he and his Stirlanders had turned against the others, throwing the rebel ranks into confusion. Victory for the Kaiserjaeger had swiftly followed.

The other rebels glared at the double-traitor. Von Klauswitz squirmed under their gaze, keeping close to the immense bulk of Gottwald Drechsler, as though seeking protection from the vicious executioner.

‘You are unharmed, your Imperial Majesty?’ Kreyssig asked as he made his way across the salon.

Emperor Boris stepped out from behind the water organ, his expression shifting from relief to undisguised malignance. ‘Our dignity has been impugned, but we are unwounded,’ he said. His lip curled in a sneer as he watched the Kaiserjaeger disarming his former captors. He shifted his gaze to Drechsler. ‘You will be a busy man, Scharfrichter.’

The cold words brought a howl of rage from Duke Konrad. The Drakwalder hurled himself at the smirking sovereign, but before he could close with his hated foe, he was clubbed down by Baron von Kirchof. The duke’s blood dripped from the gilded pommel of Beast Slayer, which the Emperor’s Champion had recovered from the mirrored wall.

Emperor Boris shook his head reprovingly. ‘That is a poor show, baron,’ he said. ‘Duke Konrad is a Hohenbach. His blood is my blood. His home is my home.’ He turned his attention to the bloodied nobleman. ‘I am afraid I cannot let a mere duke possess so fine a weapon as a Runefang. Therefore, in my capacity as Emperor, I hereby instate you as Count Konrad Aldrech, Grand Count of Drakwald.’ He laughed as he saw the look of incredulity spread across his kinsman’s features. The laughter ended with a vituperative hiss.

‘Baron, return the count’s sword to him,’ Emperor Boris ordered.

Count Konrad’s death rattle echoed from the mirrors, his body twitching as life bled out from it. Baron von Kirchof slowly cleansed the gore from Beast Slayer with a strip torn from the dead man’s cloak. Sight of the callous murder brought a shriek of terror rising from Baron von Klauswitz’s throat. The Stirlander prostrated himself before the Emperor.

‘Mercy, your Imperial Majesty!’ von Klauswitz cried. ‘I have been loyal to you from the start! I only played along with these traitors to learn what that Sylvanian scum was plotting! I am loyal, your Imperial Majesty!’

‘I have no use for traitors,’ Boris said. ‘Especially those whose loyalty shifts with each change of the wind.’

The Emperor snapped his jewelled fingers and a pair of Kaiserjaeger seized von Klauswitz and dragged him from the salon. ‘The grand duke will pay a severe fine for inflicting a traitor upon my court, as will all those who are represented by this faithless rabble,’ Boris declared. ‘And they will pay well to keep their enemies from learning of this scandal and using it against them.’

‘You have broken your word,’ Prince Sigdan said, glaring daggers at the Emperor.

‘An empty promise given to a rebel and a traitor,’ Emperor Boris snarled, but his reply caused Kreyssig to stare anxiously at the renegade prince.

‘What promise?’ Kreyssig demanded, all deference vanished from his voice. The tone so shocked Emperor Boris that it took him some time to sputter out a reply.

‘He sent two of his rabble to sneak off with Ghal Maraz and a decree they forced me to sign,’ Boris reported. The Emperor’s voice grew more confident. ‘They were to return them to me if I allowed their friends to be released unharmed.’ He chuckled malignantly. ‘But now they’ll return them to keep me from hanging this scum.’

Hearing the Emperor’s oath, Prince Sigdan whirled upon the guards flanking him. His knee caught the leftmost Kaiserjaeger in the stomach, doubling him over and knocking the sword from his grip. Even as the other guards swung around to club the nobleman senseless, Sigdan was scrambling for the sword. Before any could stop him, the prince brought the sharp edge of the blade slicing across his throat.

‘There goes your bargaining chip!’ Kreyssig raged, shaking his fist at the dying prince. Noting their commander’s rage, the Kaiserjaeger forced the remaining rebels to their knees, ready to smash them senseless at the slightest move.

Emperor Boris walked forwards and scowled down at the dead Sigdan. ‘It is of no consequence. Sooner or later the pig would have died.’

‘His followers still have Ghal Maraz!’ Kreyssig yelled, astonished by his sovereign’s lack of concern.

‘A hoary old trinket,’ Boris scoffed. ‘I’ll have some dwarfs knock up another one. Nobody will know the difference.’

‘They will if those traitors show that hammer to anyone,’ Kreyssig hissed through clenched teeth.

Understanding suddenly dawned on Emperor Boris. Prince Sigdan had spoken of hiding Ghal Maraz, but if Baron Thornig decided to take it to one of the other provinces, combined with the decree of abdication, one of the elector counts would have enough justification to compel the others to depose him!

Emperor Boris grabbed Kreyssig’s arm. ‘You have to find them! Catch them! There were two of them! They can’t have gone far! They must still be in the Palace!’

Kreyssig shook off the Emperor’s grip. A crafty gleam came into his eyes. ‘No, I don’t think they’re in the Palace any more. But I know where they did go.’

Barking orders to his men, Kreyssig detached Gottwald Drechsler and five Kaiserjaeger to accompany him.

Boris Goldgather watched the soldiers run from the room, sweat beading his brow. If Kreyssig failed to find those two traitors…

Sharp laughter broke the Emperor’s gloomy thoughts. He looked aside to see Aldo Broadfellow’s fat frame bouncing with humour. ‘Where do you think they’ll take Ghal Maraz to? Wolfenburg or Mordheim? Who would you like to see as the next emperor?’

Boris glared at the defiant halfling, noting with particular distaste the hairy naked feet. ‘Get this animal some boots,’ he spat. ‘Iron boots,’ he added, the cruel smile working itself back onto his face.

‘His feet look cold.’

Middenheim
Vorhexen, 1111

Graf Gunthar didn’t say anything, he just leaned forwards in his saddle and stared down at his son. The look in his eyes conveyed such pain and fear that Mandred felt all the pride inside him wither and die. The Graf was still silent when a tall knight with a thick blond mane of hair addressed the riders on the causeway.

‘Grand Master Arno,’ he called out. ‘You and your men have violated the Graf’s decree. By the letter of the law, your lives are forfeit.’

The Grand Master bowed his head. ‘We understood that when we left the city, Grand Commander Vitholf. What we did was… necessary.’

‘As is what we must do,’ Vitholf said, emotion threatening to overwhelm his voice. He stiffened his posture, trying to compose himself. ‘Against the Graf’s orders, you have ridden into Warrenburg. You have been exposed to the plague and become a threat to Middenheim. You are hereby declared outlaw and exiled from the dominion of Graf Gunthar.’

Arno sighed as he heard the pronouncement. It was pretty much what he had expected to hear. ‘Serve the Order of the White Wolf well, Grand Master Vitholf,’ he said.

‘I will strive to bring the Order the same honour you have bestowed upon it,’ Vitholf swore.

Arno and his knights began to turn their horses about, to retrace their path back down to the shantytown. Mandred, unable to maintain his father’s pained gaze, started to follow them.

‘You have not been dismissed, Prince of Middenheim,’ Graf Gunthar’s deep voice barked. He spurred his horse forwards, descending halfway down the causeway before drawing rein again. He pointed at his son. ‘You have disobeyed my command. For that I strip you of rank and authority. Until you are old enough to act like the prince, you will not be prince!’

Mandred’s jaw clenched as he heard his father’s furious words. ‘Is that all, your highness?’ he growled.

Graf Gunthar clenched his fist, his arm pulling back as though he would reach across the span separating them and strike his son. Instead he pointed his hand at the gate. ‘Get inside!’ he ordered.

‘My place is with Grand Master Arno,’ Mandred stated defiantly.

‘Your place is where I tell you!’ Graf Gunthar shouted. His enraged eyes bored into those of the prince. ‘Are you enough of a man to go of your own volition, or must I have you carried in like an unruly child?’

Mandred glared at his father. For a moment, he considered calling the Graf’s bluff, but he couldn’t forget the pain he saw on his father’s face.

Turning in his saddle, Mandred nodded apologetically to Arno and his knights. ‘Come along, Franz,’ he said, spurring his horse up towards the gate. It took him only a moment to realise his bodyguard wasn’t following him. Wheeling his steed around, he found Franz hadn’t even moved.

‘I’m sorry, your grace,’ the knight said. ‘But I can’t go with you. It’s too late.’ He reached a hand to his tunic, pulling it open to display the black blisters marking his throat. Mandred stared in mute horror at the sign of the plague. He knew that sometimes it could strike quickly, but it seemed impossible to him that a man could be riding down beastkin one moment and in the next find himself a victim of the Black Plague.

Franz bowed and turned his horse around before the prince could say anything. Before Mandred overcame his shock, the faithful knight was already halfway to Warrenburg.

‘Goodbye, old friend,’ he whispered.

Now he understood what his father meant. But that understanding was too late.

The Graf’s entourage rode slowly through the streets of Middenheim. None of the riders spoke, their spirits subdued by the knowledge that they had abandoned brave men to the Black Plague, shamed by the know-ledge that it was what they had to do.

Mandred rode beside his father, feeling the guilt inside him growing with every step. It had been his idea to ride to the defence of Warrenburg; he had led the way. In his mind, he had accepted the possibility it would mean all their lives, that they might fall in battle or contract the plague. But actually seeing it, watching Franz ride back into the shantytown and certain death - that had sobered him in a way nothing else could.

‘You should have left me out there,’ Mandred said, his voice low and subdued.

The Graf smiled at him. ‘Do you think I could?’ he asked. ‘Is that what you think of me?’

‘It’s wrong,’ Mandred said. ‘If Franz… I was right beside him. I might be carrying the same pestilence with me.’ Panic crept into the prince’s voice. ‘Even now I might be bringing death into our city!’

Graf Gunthar nodded his head. ‘A wise leader thinks of his own people first. He puts their needs, their safety ahead of anyone. He lets nothing jeopardise that. He lets nothing come between himself and his obligation to his subjects. That is the difference between a good man and a grasping tyrant.

‘One day you will be Graf. One day you will lead our people.’ Graf Gunthar leaned over his saddle, drawing near his son so that Mandred couldn’t mistake his whispered words. ‘When that day comes, remember this day. Remember that I was weak. Remember that when the choice had to be made, I chose to save my son instead of my people.’

Bewilderment shone on Mandred’s face. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘My duty was to leave you out there,’ Graf Gunthar said. ‘To keep any chance of the plague from reaching my subjects. But you are my son! Ulric forgive me, but I’d see this whole city die before I abandoned you!’

Mandred shook his head, stunned by the passion in his father’s voice. ‘I never thought…’

‘You never thought your father was so weak,’ the Graf said. He sat straight in his saddle, turning his gaze from Mandred to the street ahead.

‘When the time comes, son, be a stronger leader than I was.’

Altdorf
Vorhexen, 1111

The dank stench of the sewers washed over the two fugitives as they hurried down the black tunnels. The beady eyes of rats gleamed as their lantern cast its rays into the darkness. It was always with profound relief that the men watched their verminous spectators slink deeper into the shadows.

‘Ranald’s own luck,’ Baron Thornig grunted as his foot slipped from the ledge and sloshed into the channel of effluent coursing beneath the Palace. Even a nobleman hardened to battle didn’t want to think about the sort of muck now coating his boot. The hairy Middenlander shifted the heavy bulk of Ghal Maraz where it was lashed across his shoulders and accepted Erich’s hand. Straining, the knight pulled the baron back onto the ledge.

‘You can thank Ranald that part of the floor in the old escape tunnel dropped down into the sewers,’ Erich said, yet even as he said it a flicker of doubt tugged at him. He still couldn’t escape the impression that the floor had been dug out, not fallen in.

Baron Thornig scowled at the muck on his boot. ‘I’d thank him better if he kept his gifts a bit cleaner.’

Better than you deserve, you manipulative bastard. Erich resisted the temptation to push the Middenlander back into the channel. He couldn’t forget that this man had used his own daughter as a sordid weapon against his enemies. A weapon who had clearly failed based upon the quick deployment of the Kaiserjaeger to the Imperial Palace. The hideous sacrifice Baron Thornig had allowed Princess Erna to make had been for nothing. Even if she had eliminated Kreyssig, Emperor Boris would just appoint another monster in his place.

‘Where the blazes are we?’ Baron Thornig grumbled, squinting at the murky walls. ‘It all looks the same to me.’

Erich turned the lantern around, shining it at the channel between the ledges. A faint current was detectable in the stream of filth. ‘If we follow the direction of the flow, we’ll eventually reach the ri…’

The knight bit off the last words. From ahead he could see the glow of moving lights and the murmur of whispering voices. Instantly, his mind was thrown back to the reckless escape from Lady Mirella’s cellar. There were Kaiserjaeger ahead of them, searching the sewers for them! They must have discovered the old escape tunnel.

‘We can’t go that way,’ Erich whispered to Baron Thornig.

‘Where do we go?’ the Middenlander asked.

Erich shook his shoulders. ‘It doesn’t matter, just as long as we keep Ghal Maraz out of their hands.’ Carefully, the knight backed away, leading his companion down one of the older culverts. The two fugitives raced along the ledge, hurrying to the next intersection, trying to put as irregular a path between themselves and their pursuers as they could.

So intent were they upon the Kaiserjaeger they had seen that they weren’t aware of the other group of hunters until they came around a slime-covered corner and saw a squad of black-liveried thugs marching in their direction. At their head, his face like the leering visage of a forest devil, was Adolf Kreyssig.

‘There you are,’ Kreyssig hissed. He pointed a finger at the two rebels. ‘Kill them,’ he growled at the thugs behind him.

Outnumbered and outguessed, the two fugitives turned and ran back into the darkness. Erich cursed himself for being outsmarted. Finding the sewer opening, Kreyssig had sent a gang of his thugs to the river entrance while he followed the route the fugitives had taken. Underestimating the peasant was a mistake Erich swore he would never make again.

If there was an ‘again.’

This section of the sewers, flowing beneath the manors and townhouses of the nobility, was a confusion of side passages and cul-de-sacs. If they could just put enough distance between themselves and their pursuers, Erich was certain they could lose them. The biggest factor against them was the glow of their lantern. The light was like a beacon, drawing the Kaiserjaeger on, yet neither of the rebels dared even consider dousing it.

Ahead, the tunnel twisted into a much narrower channel, the ledges disappearing entirely, forcing the men to slog their way through the filthy channel. They struggled to make way through the sucking mire, the sluggish current just enough to make each step a trial of balance and determination. All around them, they could see the glistening eyes of rats and hear the rodents slithering through the water.

Suddenly, something stepped out from a fissure in the tunnel wall. It was the same sort of shadowy, slouching shape Erich imagined he had seen before. Only now it stood revealed in all its loathsome horror. A twisted monstrosity, merging the verminous flesh of an enormous rat with the posture and build of a man. Grimy armour and a filthy cloak girded the obscenity’s body while in its claws it held a rusty sword.

Erich cried out in disgust and horror. Baron Thornig turned and staggered away, losing his footing and plunging into the muck. It took every ounce of courage he possessed for the knight to turn his back on the rat-fiend to help the foundering Middenlander.

Kaiserjaeger or no, the men fled back the way they had come. Whatever fate they might expect from Kreyssig, at least it would take place in the clean world of man, not the abominable realm of myth and legend. Better to die in the clutches of a tyrant than to slip into the paws of the underfolk!

Neither man could keep from looking back as they retreated. Erich shuddered at every turn, fancying he could see the ratman’s eyes shining in the darkness. Nor, if his impression was true, was the monster alone. The terrifying retreat from the vermin under Lady Mirella’s now repeated itself, only magnified a thousandfold. Erich called out to Sigmar, to Ulric, to Taal and Shallya, to any god that might hear for deliverance from such nightmarish abominations.

Around the next corner, the fugitives again saw the glow from Kreyssig’s lanterns. The triumphant shouts of the pursuing Kaiserjaeger stirred a last desperate urge for survival. With the ratmen at their back and the Kaiserjaeger ahead, Erich darted down the side-passage to their left, the only option open to them now.

The knight could feel his heart thundering against his ribs as he squirmed and squeezed his way through the narrow opening. He gripped Baron Thornig’s arm, pulling the Middenlander after him. For one terrible instant, the baron became caught. Shrieking in horror, he drew away from Erich. A moment of panicked activity, and the baron removed the impediment. Erich heard the metallic crash as Ghal Maraz was dumped unceremoniously onto the slime-coated flagstones.

‘We can’t leave it behind!’ Erich shouted, but the terrified baron was already forcing the knight forwards. Erich fought back, refusing to abandon the most sacred symbol in all the Empire. To an Ulrican like Baron Thornig, it might be just another dwarf trinket, but to a Sigmarite, there was no more holy relic in the entire world. Redoubling his efforts, the knight forced the panicked Middenlander back. The baron wrapped his hairy arms around Erich, trying to lift the knight and carry him.

In his struggle to resist, Erich dropped the lantern, plunging them both into darkness. Terror rushed in to flood the knight’s brain. Impelled by the panicked persistence of Baron Thornig, he shifted about and squirmed down the narrow crack.

The two men emerged into a rough chamber, its crumbling stone walls and piles of broken masonry making it seem like a cellar. A number of shattered stone sarcophagi made it clear they were in some sort of family crypt of incredible antiquity.

Erich had only a moment to take in his surroundings, however. The light was that being cast by the lanterns of the Kaiserjaeger. Kreyssig stood upon a sarcophagus, his arms folded across his chest, a contemptuous smirk on his face.

‘You should have used the main channel,’ Kreyssig said, nodding his chin at a broad opening in the southern wall of the crypt. ‘It’s quicker.’

Baron Thornig dropped to his knees, his eyes still wide with terror. ‘Adolf, please! You must listen! There are… things… following…’

The commander of the Kaiserjaeger chuckled malevolently. ‘Is that really my dear father-in-law? I would never have believed him a party to any conspiracy to depose our great and gracious Boris Goldgather.’ His voice lowered into a vicious hiss. ‘At least right up until the moment my wife tried to slit my throat. Tell me, father, after I execute you, how long do I have to keep her alive before I can claim the title?’

With every word, the horror in Baron Thornig’s eyes faded a little more, burned away by a swelling hatred. Kreyssig saw the change, dropping down from his perch and taking a few steps back. ‘Kill them and bring me the hammer,’ he said, waving his thugs forwards.

Erich drew his sword, prepared to sell his life as dearly as he could. He singled out the murderous bulk of Drechsler. If he could only take one enemy with him, he vowed it would be the Scharfrichter. He glanced aside at the baron, hoping the man’s senses would rally before he was butchered out of hand by the advancing Kaiserjaeger.

The Kaiserjaeger wore confident expressions as they stalked forwards, but before they reached Erich, those expressions changed. Colour drained from their complexions and they staggered back in gasping horror. Erich didn’t need to turn around to know what they had seen. Lunging for a nearby sarcophagus, the knight rolled into cover and watched as a swarm of chittering monstrosities came spilling from the narrow crack in the wall.

‘Forget the mutants!’ Kreyssig was shouting. ‘Get the rebels!’ But for once fear of their commander wasn’t enough to make the Kaiserjaeger obey. Ancient night-terrors, fables learned in the cradle, horror stories told about winter hearths, all of these came rushing through the minds of the soldiers. The instinctive loathing and fear of vermin of every breed and stripe gripped their brains. Crying out with the same disgust Erich had voiced, the Kaiserjaeger met the ratmen.

Erich watched as Reikland steel clashed against the rusted blades of the verminous monsters, as brawny men matched their strength against the wiry suppleness of ratkin. The speed of the monsters was unbelievable, only the spastic crudity of their swordsmanship allowing the Kaiserjaeger any chance at all.

Then Erich found his gaze wandering away from the general fray to focus upon one combatant. Gotthard Drechsler was fending off three of the ratmen at once. The executioner’s legs were slashed, his torso betraying a jagged cut, but already two ratmen lay broken at his feet. While the knight watched, the Scharfrichter caught one of his enemies with his huge sword. The ratkin’s body was flung across the crypt by the impact, bones cracking as it smashed against the crumbling wall. Even as the creature crumpled to the floor, Drechsler brought the flat of his blade smashing down upon the snout of another foe, shattering its muzzle and leaving the ratman twitching at his feet.

Where Erich might have sympathised with another combatant, rallied to their shared humanity against a subhuman abomination, he could feel only hate. In his mind flashed the memory of Grand Master von Schomberg’s humiliating and cruel execution, and the Scharfrichter’s role in that atrocity. Revenge decided his actions. Clutching his sword, Erich sprang from cover.

Drechsler was still engaged with the last of his adversaries when Erich came at him. The knight felt no dishonour in attacking such a butcher from ambush. Any right Drechsler had to chivalry had been forfeited in the Widows’ Plaza.

The knight’s sword stabbed deep in the executioner’s back, piercing him through the belly. Drechsler screamed in agony, spinning around and swatting Erich with the back of his hand. The knight reeled, feeling as though he’d been kicked by a horse. Through his spinning gaze he could see Drechsler lurching towards him, the tip of the sword still protruding from his body. By an incredible feat of stamina, the executioner ignored his wound and raised his massive zweihander for a murderous sweep. Erich saw death glistening in the Scharfrichter’s eyes.

Then a verminous shape pounced upon the executioner’s broad back, rodent fangs burying themselves in his neck. Drechsler howled in agony as blood spurted from torn veins, as his monstrous enemy worried at his flesh. The zweihander fell from his weakened fingers. He clutched feebly at the ratman on his back, but the creature squirmed away from his hands, dropping to the floor and watching with savage glee as the dying man slumped to his knees. A titter of malignant laughter rushed past the ratman’s fangs as Drechsler crashed face-first to the floor.

Erich staggered back, fumbling for the dagger in his belt, sickened as he watched Drechsler’s blood dripping from the ratman’s muzzle. Myth or monster, he would not die in such a way!

Above the sounds of battle and the squeaks of the monsters, the voice of Adolf Kreyssig continued to ring out, desperately trying to stop the chaos. His Kaiserjaeger, however, remained deaf to Kreyssig’s cries. There was only one man who noted the commander’s voice. Ignored by both ratkin and Kaiserjaeger, Baron Thornig rose to his feet. Glaring at Kreyssig, the Middenlander tightened his grip on his warhammer. With a fierce bellow of ‘Erna!’ the baron charged his enemy.

The war cry did not go unheard. Kreyssig noted the maddened Middenlander’s rush, darting aside as Baron Thornig swung his massive hammer at him. The weapon swept past the commander, smashing against the wall of the crypt instead. Masonry rained down from the crumbling wall as a jagged crack slithered its way up to the stone ceiling.

‘Relent, you fool!’ Kreyssig snarled, slashing his blade across the baron’s arm. Thornig ignored the cut, striking once more at the peasant. Again, the blow failed to connect with his enemy, crashing instead against the wall.

This time, the entire crypt shook. The ratkin raised their muzzles towards the ceiling, frightened squeaks rippling from their throats. In a single, chittering mob, they broke and scattered, clawing at each other in their haste to squeeze back into the fissure.

An instant later great blocks of stone came thundering down from the roof. Erich saw one of them smash into Baron Thornig, battering the enraged Middenlander to the floor. Another mass of rubble pulverised a wounded Kaiserjaeger, reducing him to a red smear on the ground.

The other Kaiserjaeger ran for the south exit. Erich could see Kreyssig start after them, then turn back towards Baron Thornig’s body. Stones smashed down around the commander as he darted through the collapsing crypt. There was an exultant look of triumph on his face as he ripped the warhammer from Thornig’s lifeless fingers. That expression quickly faded when he saw his prize wasn’t Ghal Maraz, just a heavy chunk of Middenheim steel. He just had time to appreciate his mistake before a mass of stone came crashing down. Kreyssig screamed, raising his arms in a futile effort to shield himself.

It was the last thing Erich saw before a stone slammed into the back of his head and his world collapsed into darkness.

Erich von Kranzbeuhler awoke to pain. His body felt like one enormous sore, hurting in places he didn’t even know existed. The smell and the darkness told him he was still in the sewers.

He was surprised to be alive.

A furtive rustling sound snapped him from bleary contemplation of his wounds to terrified awareness. There was a lantern resting beside him. Frantically, he reached for it, never questioning its presence. Feeding more oil to the flame, he found that he wasn’t in the crypt, but in an entirely different part of the sewers. Such understanding had barely registered, however, before he was pressing himself against the wall, stark terror racing through his veins.

Crouched only a few feet from him was one of the ghastly ratmen, studying him with its beady red eyes. The creature bared its fangs as the lamplight washed over it. Erich’s horror only increased when the thing spoke to him in a shrill, squeaky whisper.

‘Man-thing leave-go,’ the ratman said, pointing a clawed finger down the tunnel. ‘Scurry-hurry, quick-quick!’ it added, a long scaly tail slapping against the floor behind it, either in a display of annoyance or as an emphatic gesture. The creature lowered its finger, pointing at something lying on the ledge beside Erich. ‘Take-hide king-hammer,’ it squeaked, its body trembling in fear.

Erich forced himself to follow the ratkin’s pointing claw. When he did, he was shocked to see Ghal Maraz resting on the ledge. Somehow, for whatever reason, the ghastly ratmen had recovered Sigmar’s hammer and returned it to him.

Despite his horror and disgust, Erich tried to force words of gratitude. The monster, perhaps the same that had fought Drechsler, had no patience for such propriety. Again, it lashed its tail and pointed imperiously down the tunnel. ‘Take-go, quick-quick!’

Painfully, Erich rose to his feet and gathered up the warhammer. He noticed the flow in the channel was moving in the direction the ratman pointed. If he followed the passage, he would reach the river.

Wearily, Erich turned and made his way down the tunnel. When he looked back, the ratman was gone, the lantern failing to reveal even the shine of its eyes. Why the ratmen had brought him here, why they had saved him and helped him were mysteries he couldn’t fathom. Perhaps they weren’t so different from men and dwarfs and halflings, despite their monstrous appearance. Perhaps they too couldn’t abide tyranny and a world governed by fear.

Whatever their purpose, Erich was thankful. He would take Ghal Maraz far from Altdorf, far beyond Boris Goldgather’s reach. It would be the first blow in a new struggle to end the tyrant’s reign.

In the darkness, the skaven watched their pawn creep towards the river, malicious mirth hissing past their fangs. Adolf Kreyssig had been a useful pawn, but Erich von Kranzbeuhler would be an even better one. He would take the king-hammer away to another of the man-thing warlords. Then that warlord would declare himself emperor-thing and the man-warrens would make war against each other.

Whatever the Black Plague didn’t kill, the man-things would slaughter in their war, further draining their strength.

Whichever man-thing won didn’t matter. The skaven would be there to vanquish the exhausted survivor.

From the ruins, the skaven would inherit all.

BLIGHTED EMPIRE

PREFACE

That period of Imperial history preceding the stability brought by the ascension of Magnus von Bildhofen as Emperor in the year 2304 is a confused and frustrating time for the serious scholar. Many of the records from that era that have survived consist of accounts recorded by monks and friars and, by consequence, are couched in such a manner as to reflect and magnify the religious dogma of the author’s temple. Most secular works relating to this period were destroyed over the course of the centuries of warfare that gripped the Empire in what has been termed the ‘Age of Three Emperors’ and the Vampire Wars which briefly interrupted that vicious civil war.

What is left for the historian, then, is a large body of myth and legend. How much veracity there may be in accounts of Underfolk is debatable at best; however, in compiling this treatment of those years when plague decimated the Empire, it has been constructive to adopt an attitude of credulity.

In the first volume of A Folkloric History of the Black Plague and the Wolf of Sigmar, the conspiracy of Prince Sigdan of Altdorf and his allies against the despotic corruption of Emperor Boris I was detailed. Due in no small measure to the despicable Adolf Kreyssig, commander of the Emperor’s secret police, the conspiracy failed. In the course of their invasion of the Imperial Palace, Captain Erich von Kranzbeuhler of the outlawed Reiksknecht absconded with Ghal Maraz, depriving the Emperor of the ultimate symbol of his authority.

The Black Plague’s depredations across the Empire were nowhere as marked as in the region of Sylvania. In that ill-omened land, a distraught priest of Morr turned against his faith when his family succumbed to the disease. Frederick van Hal, drawing upon forbidden texts, resorted to necromancy in a desperate effort to reconnect with those he’d lost. By employing the dark art, van Hal opened himself to eldritch forces beyond his comprehension. Christening himself ‘Vanhal’, the terrible necromancer turned against his neighbours, unleashing the undead against the town of Bylorhof and slaughtering its populace.

Middenheim, the famed City of the White Wolf, was spared the brunt of the plague in those early years. Graf Gunthar, ruler of Middenheim, imposed harsh measures to protect his city, refusing refugees from other provinces sanctuary on the Ulricsberg. These draconian policies offended the ideals of his son, Prince Mandred, who struggled to help those he felt his father had abandoned. Ultimately, after a heroic charge to relieve the refugee camp at the foot of the mountain when it was attacked by beastmen, the young prince came to understand the cruel wisdom behind his father’s edict.

No account of the plague years would be complete without delving into the Underfolk, the rat-like skaven of many a nursery fable. The ratmen are often credited as the instigators of the Black Plague, and anecdotes about their treacherous manipulations can be found in dwarf records of the time. A plague priest named Puskab Foulfur is often associated with the genesis of the plague. After concocting this dread disease, the skaven were emboldened enough to make direct attacks on the cities of men. Displaying the cunning depravity of his breed, Puskab contrived to place himself on the Council of Thirteen, the villainous Grey Lords, by first allying with and then betraying one of the sitting Grey Lords. Together with his own leader, Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch, the pestiferous Clan Pestilens possessed two seats upon this Council, allowing them even greater influence over the verminous Under-Empire. At their instigation, the despotic Warmonger Vecteek commanded an ever-increasing deployment of the Black Plague.

In the grim year of 1111, the Black Plague was unleashed. Before it was finished, three of every four men in the Empire would be dead. In the midst of such widespread decimation, old evils stirred to take their place in the sun.

This second volume details the aftermath of that original dead winter.

– Reikhard Mattiasson,
A Folkloric History of the Black Plague
and the Wolf of Sigmar Vol. II
(Altdorf Press, Vorhexen, 2513)
Suppressed by order of Lord Thaddeus Gamow,
Jahrdrung, 2514

PROLOGUE

Skavenblight
Geheimnisnacht, 1112

The pungent smell of smouldering warpstone wafted through the blackened chamber, the corrupt fume slithering into every nook and cranny, oozing between the crumbling bricks, burning into beams of oak and ash, discolouring glass and tarnishing bronze. It was the stench of darkest sorcery, and this was its night.

Resplendent in silver robes woven from the scalps of man-thing she-breeders, Seerlord Skrittar perched atop the dais, his claw stroking the silky texture of his finery. The wealth displayed by such a garment! He could smell the envy in the scent of his subordinates whenever he donned it. It was a considerable expenditure to abduct the she-breeders, bear them back alive to Skavenblight and confine them in the blackest burrows beneath the city. They had to be kept in darkness, nurtured on a rich diet of glow-grubs and swamp maize for many seasons before their hair assumed the correct hue, scent and texture. It was a sad reality that only the smallest amounts of weirdroot could be used to keep the she-breeders tranquil or the drug would affect the desired properties in their hair. The breeders of the man-things were eccentric, excitable animals, entertaining pretensions of intelligence the Horned Rat had thankfully spared the brood-mothers of the skaven. They were given to crazed moods and had to be constantly watched lest they kill themselves in an unguarded moment.

Skrittar’s whiskers twitched in amusement as he pondered the perfection of the skaven mind. The Horned Rat had blessed his children with the divine spark, had created the ratmen in his own image and invested in them all the craft and guile of his own black spirit. The skaven were destined to dominate and rule over all others. It was a holy imperative. To do less was to betray their sacred duty. From the very first time the Shattered Tower’s bell had tolled the thirteenth note, the skaven had known it was their destiny to inherit the world.

The seerlord’s whiskers became still. His furred lips pulled back to expose his yellowed fangs, his naked tail lashed in annoyance against the cold stone floor. If not for the petty squabbling and bickering amongst the clans, the skaven should have dominated the world long ago. Short-sighted despots and craven-livered tyrants who could think only of their own pretensions of power and greatness. The Grey Lords had squandered the resources of the mighty Under-Empire on their internecine feuds and rivalries. If they could only put the welfare of skavendom ahead of their own ambitions, nothing could keep the ratmen from rising up and overwhelming the surface world. There was no force among gods or men that could stand against a united skavendom!

Skrittar shook his horned head, his nose crinkling in a sour expression as though a foul scent had filled his nostrils. There was a real prospect of skavendom uniting now. The past winter had seen Clan Pestilens unleash their hideous Black Plague against the man-things. The disease had run rampant, decimating the humans in numbers that were truly astounding. Virtually the entire Council of Thirteen had rallied behind Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch, even permitting a second plague priest to assume a position among the Lords of Decay, the diseased Poxmaster Puskab Foulfur, creator of the Black Plague! First Among Equals, Warmonger Vecteek the Murderous had showered the plague monks with gifts and honours, indulging them as the vicious warlord of Clan Rictus had never indulged any clan before.

If things persisted, all would march together under a single banner. But it wouldn’t be the divine light of the Horned One and his living prophets, the grey seers, who would guide the united hordes of the Under-Empire. It would be the pestilent minds and heretical creeds of the plague priests!

Skrittar stamped his paw against the floor, spinning around and scurrying to the gigantic mess of copper tubes and pipes that dominated one end of the vast, cavernous hall high within the holy confines of the Shattered Tower. The ancient stained-glass window that had been left behind by the original human builders of the city had been broken up and sold as scrap. It had been a necessary defilement to allow the great crystal lens of the hulking warpscope to focus upon the black tapestry of night.

A fabulous creation, that mountain of copper and bronze, glass and crystal. There were plates of polished warpstone deep inside the housing, sheets of the stone that had been ground so thin and fine as to be translucent. Exploiting a network of silver mirrors, the warpstone lenses would draw down the image of the night sky into the eye of the observer, permitting him such a view of the moons that it seemed he might reach out and grab them.

The seerlord chittered as the humour of such a thought occurred to him. Reach out and grab the moons? That was precisely what he had done. Not through the arcane technology of Clan Skryre; all their foolish contraption – itself shamelessly patterned after similar instruments developed by the dwarf-things – could do was offer a view of the moons. With his magic, Skrittar had done much more. Much, much more! He had stretched forth his tyrannical will and gouged his sorcerous claws across the face of Morrslieb, tearing great chunks from the dark moon’s surface. Chunks of raw, pure warpstone!

For a full cycle of seasons those boulders of warpstone had circled across the sky, becoming like little black stars, waiting for the moment when he, Skrittar, Voice of the Horned One, would draw them down to earth.

Skrittar’s paw brushed across the focusing mechanism, manipulating the little flywheel as he pressed his eye to the observation port. Supposedly the Skryre tinker-rats had insulated the viewing plate against the harmful energies of the warpscope’s lenses, but just to be safe the seerlord hissed a quick prayer to invoke the Horned Rat’s protection. Ordinarily he would leave the hazards of using any of Skryre’s contraptions to an easily replaceable underling or an overly ambitious subordinate, but at the moment there was no one to indulge such caution.

Looking away from the observation port, Skrittar cast his gaze across the long chamber with its arched ceiling high overhead, and its stone walls black and hoary with age. The floor was marked with a bewildering array of protective talismans and circles, each figure drawn with exacting precision in the blood of elves and griffons and even more dangerous beasts. Bronze braziers cast a fume of smouldering warpstone into the air, saturating the chamber’s atmosphere with the stuff of raw magic.

Skrittar had bided his time for a full year, waiting for the cosmic conjunction of moons and stars that was Gnawdawn. It was only during such a conjunction that the black energies of dark magic were magnified to their full. Even then, even with his abilities bolstered and heightened by warpstone elixirs and vapours, his spiritual aura strengthened by obscene rites to the Horned Rat, Skrittar had known the sorcery he needed to perform was beyond his ability alone. As he had one year ago, Skrittar had summoned a cabal of his underlings, a coven of twelve of his ablest and most wicked grey seers.

They had been wary and suspicious when they had submitted to Skrittar’s summons, calling them to the grand observatory. The entire Order of Grey Seers had been shaken by the deaths of twelve of their number exactly one year previously. Outwardly, none of them had been so foolish as to doubt Skrittar’s claim that their comrades had expired in a failed magical experiment. He didn’t think anyone had managed to ferret out the true nature of their deaths – Clan Eshin had a most un-skavenlike propensity for discretion. Still, there had been an inordinate number of assassination attempts on Skrittar’s life since that Great Ritual one year ago.

Skrittar ground his fangs together in irritation. Even among the grey seers, prophets of the Horned One, there was a woeful lack of vision. Any of them should be happy to become a martyr, to give his worthless life in the name of his god. Their sacrifice would be the stuff that would blot out the heathen taint of Clan Pestilens forever! Their blood would be the first waters of a tide that would sweep through the Under-Empire and establish a theocracy that would dominate skavendom for all time! Their deaths would bring supreme power to their master, Seerlord Skrittar!

There were twelve more martyrs to the cause now. Twelve grey-cloaked bodies strewn about the floor. All the protective wards and talismans they had carried, the spells and arcane safeguards they had evoked, hadn’t been enough to save them. The grey seers had lent their magic to Skrittar’s ritual, each of the greedy fool-meat imagining the wealth that would soon belong to them, presuming themselves a share of what belonged to the Horned Rat and his supreme servant Skrittar alone! Greed formed a chink in their defences, made their caution falter for just a brief moment.

It was the only moment Skrittar needed. The twelve had died in an especially agonising fashion as they inhaled the poison. The seerlord had been too crafty to use Deathmaster Silke as he had the previous year, just in case someone had learned of their connection. Instead, he had engaged the Deathmaster’s disciple Killmaker Nartik to dispose of his unwanted, untrustworthy minions. Nartik had been crafty too, tossing the pungent packet of poison into one of the braziers the instant the ritual was over and the cabal had outlived their usefulness. Skrittar had been told the effects would resemble the Black Plague to such a degree that only the most adept assassins in Clan Eshin would be able to tell the difference. The rest of Skrittar’s Order would be convinced the massacre had been the work of the heathen plague monks this time!

Skrittar turned back to the warpscope. Through the viewing lens he could see the chunks of orbiting warpstone, each of them radiating a faint nimbus of green light now. Before his gaze, he could see them being drawn downwards. Soon, the magic Skrittar had conjured would have the warpstone plummeting into the earth, smashing down as a rain of meteorites. He had been very careful in his calculations. He knew where the warpstone would come smashing down, a section of land barren enough to be shunned by most skaven yet not so distant as to make a journey there noteworthy. He’d already picked one of the less powerful warlord clans to provide the labour he would require, a clan with sufficient dread of the grey seers and enough pious terror of the Horned Rat that the slightest twitch of Skrittar’s whisker would have them scurrying to carry out his commands.

The seerlord leaned away from the warpscope, rubbing his lucky cat’s foot over the eye he had pressed to the observation port just in case. He bruxed his teeth as he consulted the ratskin map laid out on a bench atop the dais. The trajectory of the warpstone would draw it down to the bleakest backwater in the region of the man-thing Empire. When the warpstone shower struck, Skrittar would not be far behind. His lackeys would harvest the biggest bonanza of warpstone the Under-Empire had ever seen, wealth that would make even Vecteek and Nurglitch bow to Skrittar and kiss the tip of his tail!

With the man-things sick and weak, with the dwarf-things hiding in their mountains and the green-things fighting among themselves, there was no one who would oppose Skrittar’s invasion of Sylvania.

CHAPTER ONE

Altdorf
Pflugzeit, 1114

Slivers of agony raced through his arm, searing through his very bones. There was a sensation of scalding cold, the gnawing bite of hoarfrost sinking into his skin. Before his eyes, the hairs on the back of his hand turned brittle and crumbled into little motes of ice. He clenched his teeth against the torment, refusing to scream. This time I will not scream, he vowed to himself. It was a promise he had made many times. A promise he had always failed to keep.

As the pain became too great, Adolf Kreyssig spat the wooden block from his mouth and gave voice to a torturous cry. He screamed until he thought his lungs must burst and his throat would be stripped raw. He screamed and screamed, but there was no respite. He knew there would be none. There would be no relief until the ordeal had accomplished what it needed to accomplish.

Just as he felt consciousness slipping away, as black oblivion began to wrap its welcoming folds about his brain, Kreyssig felt the pain begin to abate. Gradually, the chill evaporated from his bones, the frost melted on his skin as blood coursed back into his arm. He watched as a cold mist rose from his warming flesh. Layers of frozen skin sloughed away as he flexed his muscles.

Through the lingering agony, Kreyssig smiled. He could feel his muscles respond, see the fingers of his hand clench and open. True, there was a certain lethargy about the motion, but it was less pronounced than before. Improvement! Reward for the torture he had been submitting himself to for over two years.

Two years! It had been two years since he’d pursued the traitors Baron Thornig and Captain Erich von Kranzbeuhler into the sewers trying to recover the relic, the Holy Hammer of Sigmar, which they had stolen from the Imperial Palace. In the very moment of his seeming triumph, tragedy had struck him down. Cornered, the two rebels were at the mercy of Kreyssig’s Kaiserjaeger when events had spiralled out of control. The disgusting, verminous mutants Kreyssig had been exploiting in secret as spies had also been hunting the rebels and rushed into the subterranean gallery. Before Kreyssig could stop them, his startled men attacked the monstrous creatures. The resultant fight had destabilised the ancient masonry, bringing the building above crashing down on all their heads.

Kreyssig had been fortunate to survive. None of the others did. Crushed beneath tons of brick and stone, he’d been more than half dead when some of his men discovered him lying in a cellar of the Courts of Justice. Some of the mutants must have pulled him from the rubble and taken him to where he would be found and given help. Even with the best attention, however, he had hovered at the Gates of Morr for several months. The attentions of priests, herbalists and even the Emperor’s personal physician had preserved his life, but his body had been left a broken shell. It had required stronger measures to make him whole.

Slowly, the Commander of the Kaiserjaeger, the man who was feared throughout the Reikland as ‘the Hound of Boris’, raised himself from the cold stone slab he rested upon. Dried weeds and the moist foulness of animal entrails fell to the floor as he moved. With a trembling hand, he started to wipe away the ghastly symbols that had been inked upon his naked flesh.

‘Your strength returns, commander,’ a soft voice purred. There was amusement and superiority in that voice, but also an alluring suggestiveness that sent a shiver rushing through Kreyssig’s body.

It would have taken more willpower than even he possessed to keep from looking at the possessor of that voice. Kreyssig felt the shiver rise as he stared at his benefactor. The little chapel built into the side of the Lindenhaus was a shadowy, vault-like hall, a place of nigh perpetual cold and gloom. Even the head of the Emperor’s secret police wasn’t entirely sure what might be hiding in the murky chapel. There were some secrets even he was shy of uncovering. For now, it was enough that the darkness disgorged the one person in all Altdorf who had the ability to heal his ravaged body.

She stalked from the shadows, her slim body draped in crimson folds, smooth milky skin bared by the scandalous cut of her raiment. Flowing tresses of fiery hair fell about her shoulders, more vibrant in the darkness than her red gown. A beautiful face, so fair it might have been carved from alabaster, smiled at him. There was a coy, teasing quality in that smile. The grin of a cat toying with its prey.

‘It does not hurt so much to move the arm,’ Kreyssig told her. He flexed the muscles again, managing not to wince as another tingle of pain rushed through him. There had been times when any betrayal of pain on his part had been cause to undergo a second regimen straight away. He had learned to hide his pain after a few such extended treatments.

‘That is good,’ the flame-headed woman said. She approached the stone table, her eyes straying to give an almost mocking look at the cobweb-shrouded statue of Verena standing beside the wall. ‘In time, you will be as strong as ever.’

‘How soon?’ Kreyssig asked, a quiver of uneasiness in his tone. He was both excited and revolted when the woman’s slender finger stroked his injured arm. Her beauty was enough to set his heart pounding whenever she was near. At the same time, he felt the very core of his being sicken at her approach. No man encouraged the attentions of a witch lightly.

Even when that witch bore the title of Baroness von den Linden.

The witch stopped pacing around the table. She fixed her intense gaze upon Kreyssig. ‘Your hurts are many,’ she said. ‘Even I cannot say how long it may take to heal them. You are lucky to be alive.’

Kreyssig turned his head as he heard something creeping among the dead weeds. Glancing down, he was revolted to see one of the witch’s cats chewing at a piece of intestine he’d knocked from the table. He’d given up trying to count the filthy creatures – every time he visited the baroness there seemed to be at least one cat he hadn’t seen before. This one, a great bloated beast, he was reasonably certain she’d called Grimalkin.

‘Man makes his own luck,’ Kreyssig retorted. He used his irritation to find the strength to pull away from the witch’s touch. The effort seemed to amuse the baroness. Laughing, she reached down and drew the great fat cat into her arms, cradling it against her breast.

‘An interesting perspective,’ Baroness von den Linden mused, scratching the brute’s head until a loud purr rumbled from its furry body. ‘Would you say that my decision to render aid to you was also of your own creation?’

It was Kreyssig’s turn to laugh. ‘If you didn’t think I was useful, you would have let me rot,’ he stated. ‘If I wasn’t the Emperor’s strong right hand, I think you would have let me wither and die.’ He flexed his own right hand, feeling the dull ache of old wounds. ‘I do not blame you, of course. Your family has a history of acquiring those who are useful. Your mother, as far as my investigators can determine, was a simple Nordland peasant who seduced your father when he was hunting in the Middle Mountains. Curious how he died so soon after their wedding.’

‘Perhaps he was no longer useful,’ the baroness suggested. ‘Perhaps his ambitions were too short-sighted.’

‘And what are your ambitions, Kirstina?’ Kreyssig wondered. ‘How far are you trying to go?’

The witch shook her fiery tresses as she laughed. ‘As far as I can go! As far as my magic will take me!’

‘Your magic?’ Kreyssig asked, strangely stung by the thought.

The baroness laughed again. ‘My magic brought you to me,’ she said. ‘It has protected both of us from the plague that runs amok through the city.’

‘I have wondered about that,’ Kreyssig confessed. ‘How is it that you have warded off the plague when even the priestesses of Shallya are powerless?’

‘They try to save too many,’ the witch said. ‘The greater the effort, the more power the spell demands. The priestesses don’t know how to make such magic. They would shudder at what such rituals require.’

‘But you aren’t afraid,’ Kreyssig observed.

The witch dropped the cat to the floor. The beast dashed back to the entrails lying about the table. ‘To work magic, one must be afraid,’ she said. ‘Those who do not fear the power are soon devoured by it. To master the dark arts, there must be a balance of respect and fear.’ She threw back her head. ‘I have found that balance,’ she announced proudly.

‘Every shield has its weakness,’ Kreyssig warned, thinking of the way Kranzbeuhler and Ghal Maraz had slipped through his fingers.

‘Wisdom lies in finding the limits of your strength,’ the baroness said. ‘The plague, it is said, is spread by swarms of black beetles. Long have I guarded myself with spells to drive away any insect, so already I am guarded against the plague beetles.’

‘And what is the limit of your strength?’ Kreyssig asked as he strode to where his clothing lay piled on the chapel floor. He pointed to the cobwebs shrouding the statue of Verena. ‘It seems the spiders don’t share your respect for magic.’

The baroness frowned. ‘The spell afflicts only the six-legged vermin,’ she said. ‘Though it has a peculiar effect upon ants. They flee from me, but if I trespass too near an ant hill, the brutes come trooping out in a frenzied swarm.’

‘Protecting their home,’ Kreyssig said. ‘Any man would do the same when threatened by a witch.’

‘Would he?’ wondered the baroness. In a few gliding steps she crossed the vault and plucked the breeches from Kreyssig’s hand. She laid her hand on his chest, running her fingers through his hair. ‘What would you do if threatened by a witch?’

Baroness von den Linden laughed as Kreyssig took hold of her and crushed her against him.

‘Kreyssig-man late-late!’

Adolf Kreyssig scowled at the scrawny, rat-like creature as it scurried out from behind a pile of rotten timber. With most of the river trade dried up because of the plague, the once bustling shipyards along Altdorf’s riverfront had become derelict and abandoned, shunned as reminders of better, more prosperous times. They made a perfect site for clandestine liaisons, even with bestial mutants. During his long convalescence, he had come to dislike the subterranean haunts these brutes preferred. Better by far to draw them out into more accommodating conditions.

‘You forget who is master here,’ Kreyssig snarled at the creature, his hand dropping to the sword at his side. The rat-creature’s head drooped as it followed the motion, then the beast leaped back, raising its paws in a warding gesture.

‘Calm-peace,’ it whined. ‘No harm-hate! Know you take-need time for breeder-witch.’

The sword left its sheath as Kreyssig stormed towards the retreating mutant. He had engaged these creatures to spy for him, not on him! His liaisons with Baroness von den Linden were a carefully kept secret, something that could explode into a ruinous scandal if it were made known. Married to a baroness himself, involvement with another noblewoman would be bad enough, but there were already enough rumours about Kirstina to make such talk doubly dangerous.

‘You’ve been spying on me,’ Kreyssig snarled at the retreating rat.

‘No-no!’ the creature whined as it crawled away. ‘Not follow-see!’ The creature lifted a paw and tapped its long snout. ‘Scent-smell cat-devil on Kreyssig-man!’

The abject terror in the mutant’s voice as it mentioned cats added a note of such absurdity to the scene that Kreyssig returned his blade to the scabbard. What possible menace could such cringing vermin pose? Even if they knew more than they should, they could hardly make it public. Even in the best of times, the men of the Empire would hang them as abominations… And these were far from the best of times.

‘What do you have to tell me?’ Kreyssig asked the mutant.

The beast came slinking forwards, paws folded before it. ‘Listen-learn much-much,’ it said. The creature’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial hiss. ‘Boris-king leave Altdorf-nest soon! Hide-stay in Carr-o-burg!’ The mutant’s chittering voice stumbled over the unfamiliar name.

Kreyssig’s blood froze as he heard the report. He owed his rank and position to the favour and indulgence of Emperor Boris. As a peasant, he was held beneath contempt by the nobles of Reikland and Altdorf. Without the Emperor’s backing, Kreyssig’s authority would be compromised, perhaps even supplanted entirely. The despot’s courage would pick this time to desert him! Not for an instant did he doubt the mutant’s report. Droves of nobles had already quit plague-ridden Altdorf to go into seclusion in country estates. It stood to reason that Boris would follow their example. With the execution of Baron Konrad Aldrech, the Emperor had inherited the holdings of the Grand Count of Drakwald, including the immense Schloss Hohenbach. No, the only surprising thing about the report was that Boris had waited so long to go into hiding.

The mutant’s next words, however, did come as a shock. ‘Boris-king leave-hide! Make-declare Kreyssig-man Protector when king-man is gone!’

He could only stare at the verminous mutant in disbelief. Kreyssig, for once in his career, was dumbfounded. Emperor Boris was abandoning Altdorf and making him, a peasant, Protector in his stead?

Adolf Kreyssig, Commander of the Kaiserjaeger, would soon be Adolf Kreyssig, Protector of the Empire. He would become, in effect, surrogate emperor, the most powerful man in Altdorf!

Drakenhof
Brauzeit, 1112

Wine dripped from the nobleman’s thick moustache, staining the ermine collar he wore and trickling down the sleek steel plates of his armour. He lowered the ivory chalice, jiggling it in an irritable fashion. Timidly, a young servant girl glided forwards to refill his cup. Despite her best efforts, she wasn’t nimble enough to transfer the wine from the jar to the moving cup without spilling some of it on the ground.

Immediately, the nobleman’s eyes were fixed on her, blazing like living coals within his swarthy face. His hand whipped out, smashing the chalice across the girl’s jaw, shattering the cup and gashing her cheek. The girl crumpled to the ground amid the broken ivory, sobbing more from terror than pain.

Count Malbork von Drak sank back in his chair, sneering at the woman’s fear. Imperiously, he stabbed a finger at the wine-soaked dirt. ‘Clean it up, wench,’ he snarled. When the still crying servant leaned forwards and started to sop up the mess with her skirt, the nobleman brought his armoured boot cracking against her skull, sending her sprawling.

It was an ugly, sadistic sound that bubbled up from Malbork’s throat as he congratulated himself on his callous brutality. Then he turned away from the bleeding servant and turned his vicious gaze on the courtiers gathered about the mouth of his tent.

‘A fine jest, your excellency,’ a fat, piggish man with foppish curls in his hair and a lisp to his voice whined.

Malbork ignored the man’s fawning admiration. With an irritated gesture, he waved him aside. ‘You are blocking my view of the castle,’ the count said. With indecent haste, the courtier scrambled away.

It was well that he did, for the vista that was visible from the opening of his tent wasn’t one conducive to an improvement in Malbork’s humour. Voivodes of Sylvania, the von Draks had administered their domain from the walls of Castle Drakenhof for generations. The brooding vastness of the fortress loomed over the green hills and rolling fields around it like some slumbering monster, casting its menacing shadow across the villages clustered about its foundations.

They were deserted now, those villages. Devastated by the cataclysm that had struck Sylvania, the disaster the simple peasants were calling ‘Starfall’. The night sky had, for a terrifying moment, become ablaze with eerie green lights, an uncountable multitude of ghoulish flames that winked down from the heavens. The length and breadth of Sylvania had been pelted with noxious green-black stones, the toxic embers of those ghoul-fires. The whole of the land had been afflicted by the dark sending: crops smashed flat, pastures poisoned, creeks turned foul with glowing scum, homes enflamed as the smouldering stones crashed through thatch roofs.

Nowhere had the destruction been greater than at Drakenhof. Elsewhere, the Starfall had consisted of tiny rocks, seldom bigger than a man’s hand. Drakenhof had proved the exception. Here the stones had been far larger. In one village the mill had been obliterated by a rock the size of an ox-cart, in another a watchtower had collapsed under the impact of a stone bigger than a warhorse. Even these star-sent missiles were insignificant beside the stone that had ploughed through the face of Castle Drakenhof to embed itself in the very heart of the Drakenfelsen, the great rock upon which the fortress stood. With grim humour, some of Malbork’s courtiers had christened the stone ‘the Jewel of Morrslieb’ after a superstitious rumour that it had been flung down at the castle by an angry moon.

The count took small amusement from such prattle. Several of those aristocratic jesters were even now labouring alongside the conscripted inhabitants of the stricken villages, working to clear away the rubble and repair the damage inflicted upon the castle by their ‘moon-stone’. It was hard, unrelenting and dangerous work. A relay of corpse-carts made a constant circuit of the Drakenfelsen, retrieving the corpses overseers tossed from the broken battlements. Fires yet burned unchecked in some of the galleries, and falling debris had turned some of the lower vaults into veritable ovens. Poisonous dust waited wherever the ‘Jewel’ had scraped the walls and floors. Unstable halls were prone to collapse, spilling tons of stone and masonry upon the peasants desperately trying to shore them up. To all of these had to be added the biting cold of the Drakenhoehenzug, the mountain winds whistling through the broken fortress like hungry wolves.

And above all the rest, there was the Black Plague. It cut down the workers by the bushel despite the best efforts of Malbork’s Nachtsheer to dispose of the sick as soon as they were discovered by the soldiers. The disease was unforgiving and insatiable, slaughtering the workers by the hundreds. The count was only thankful that it confined its depredations to men rather than more valuable things like horses and oxen. Even so, the mortality of his workers was becoming tiresome.

Staring up at the castle from his camp on the other side of the River Draken, Malbork frowned as he watched a peasant slip from the scaffolding that framed one of the towers. For an instant, the man clung to one of the gargoyles glowering from the edges of the tower’s sharply angled roof, then he lost his grip on the statue and went plummeting to his doom. It would take a judicious amount of whip-work to get more labourers into the tower after this accident. Malbork didn’t mind the violence, but peasants were less efficient after a beating.

He could almost find it in himself to envy that rebel maniac rampaging across the heart of the county. Some crazed priest unable to cope with the plague. The man had turned to black magic, and wielding such profane power he’d started drawing the dead from their tombs, creating an army of skeletons and corpses. By all reports, the madman’s legion was unstoppable, tireless and unquestioning. They marched across the heaviest snow, through the darkest forest, into the most pestilential marsh in obedience to their master’s murderous whims. With workers like that, Malbork would have Castle Drakenhof rebuilt in a month. Why, with an army like that he would deny his oaths to Stirland and make Sylvania a province in its own right, answerable to none save the Emperor – and perhaps not even him!

The smell of blood intruded upon the count’s daydreams. Irritably, he turned his gaze from the castle to regard the piggish Clucer Scarlat. The foppish courtier was holding a pomander under his nose, taking deep breaths to inundate his lungs with sweet-smelling air. Scarlat, like many of the boiers of Sylvania, subscribed to the theory that the plague was brought about by foul vapours and the surest defence against them was a healthy regime of pungent perfumes. It was a theory Malbork held in as much contempt as he did the peasant belief that the disease represented the punishment of the gods.

Irritably, Malbork snapped his fingers at Scarlat, motioning for the clucer to drop the pomander. Other courtiers hurriedly followed the clucer’s example, fear of their count far outweighing even their fear of the plague. ‘I believe I smell his grace,’ Malbork stated, not without some condescension in his tone. ‘Go and admit the prayer-peddler into our presence.’

Clucer Scarlat grimaced, but bobbed his head and scrambled down the slope. As a precaution, Count Malbork’s tent had been pitched behind a timber palisade, putting a wall between his personage and any sick enemies who might seek to deliberately infect him. He’d dispatched too many plague-ridden messengers to the grand duke’s court in Stirland to allow himself to be victimised by his own strategy.

The clucer returned presently, leading not one but two men. Malbork was mildly surprised to see the armoured figure of Dregator Petru Mihnea. The man was supposed to be leading a Nachtsheer expedition into the Haunted Hills to round up the peasants that had escaped there from their fiefs. Fear of the plague had stirred up a great many curious ideas in the heads of peasants, not the least of which was giving survival precedence over their obligations to the boiers who owned them.

The other man with Scarlat was no surprise at all. The stink of blood announced him as loudly as any crier. Armand Caranica, Arch-Druid of the Blood Circle, high priest of Ahalt the Drinker. The druid’s black robes stank of blood and death. The sickle tucked into the rope belt about his waist was stained with gore, for one of the strictures of his faith was that sacrificial blood was holy and must never be washed away. Armand’s face was lost behind the deer-skull mask he wore, only his thin lips and tapered jaw projecting beneath the yellowed teeth of the mask. From behind the sockets of the skull, fanatical eyes gleamed.

‘The plague still decimates my peasants,’ Malbork growled at the druid before he could finish bowing before him. ‘You promised me that this sort of thing was going to stop.’

Armand leaned upon his oaken staff, hands clenched tight. ‘The might of Ahalt flows through the sacred tree,’ he said in a confident tone. ‘Very soon the tree shall grow strong enough to shield the whole of the castle from the plague.’

‘That doesn’t do me any good here,’ Malbork said, waving his hand to indicate the camp. ‘Maybe you could conjure up a sacred shrubbery to protect me while I’m on this side of the river? Just to bide the time while we wait for the tree to take root.’

A bit of the fanatic gleam left the eyes behind the deer-skull. ‘Your… your excellency must allow the great god time to work his beneficence. Even Mighty Ahalt doesn’t–’

The count raised his hand, cutting off the druid’s explanation. ‘I am no credulous supplicant coming to you on bended knee, Caranica. I am Count von Drak! Everything in this land belongs to me, right down to the robes you wear and the prayers you mutter!’ He rose from his chair, stalking out from the shadow of the tent. Without turning around, he pointed over his shoulder, indicating a long line of stakes flanking his tent. ‘Others have made the mistake of trying to exploit religious gullibility.’ Malbork smiled as he saw Armand’s eyes dart towards the bodies impaled upon those stakes, bodies that still wore the tattered rags of Sigmarite, Shallyan and Morrite clergy. One corpse, arrayed in the leather and furs of a priest of Taal, was still fresh enough that a pair of ravens were pecking at it.

‘I hope you aren’t repeating the mistake of your predecessors,’ Malbork declared. ‘I am acquiring quite a collection of gods. It might be amusing to add yours.’

Armand bowed his head again. ‘The divine protection of Ahalt will preserve your excellency from the plague. It just needs more time to bear fruit, more nourishment to quicken its growth.’

Malbork chuckled at the druid’s words. ‘You are more murderous than an orc,’ he laughed. Spinning around, the count’s glove caught the hair of the servant girl who had spilled his wine. Brutally, he pushed her into Armand’s arms. ‘Here’s one to water your tree!’ he barked as the crying girl fell to the ground. ‘But I want results. Not at the turn of the tide or the dark of the moon, but now! Sacrifice and pray, but you had better pray hard. My indulgence has reached its limits.’

Mustering what authority he could, Armand made his retreat, one bony arm coiled about the girl’s waist as he dragged his screaming victim away with him. Malbork watched the druid for a moment, then turned his attention on Dregator Petru.

‘Shouldn’t you be in the hills?’ Malbork asked, his voice striking out like a lash. The dregator blanched at his master’s tone, but held himself with more dignity than Scarlat, who took the opportunity to slink back into the company of the other courtiers.

‘There are no peasants hiding in the Haunted Hills,’ Petru reported. Hurriedly he added an explanation. ‘They are gone, your excellency. They’ve either fled into Grim Moor or they’ve… joined Vanhal.’

‘I understood this madman didn’t take prisoners,’ Malbork said.

Petru’s voice was an audible shiver. ‘He doesn’t. Where his army marches, nothing lives. He leaves neither the quick nor the dead behind him. Those he kills he raises from their graves to join his unholy army. I have seen it. Thousands upon thousands, marching across the fields, silent but for the rattle of bones and the croaking of crows. Even with the whole of the Nachtsheer at my command, I could do nothing against such power.’

Count Malbork lowered himself into his chair, drawing the wine cup to his lips. He’d heard many such reports in the years since this sorcerer had risen to bedevil his land. Every force he’d sent to confront Vanhal had come back beaten and afraid.

Smoothing his moustache, Malbork waved at his bodyguards. The warriors advanced through the ranks of his courtiers, seizing Petru’s arms. The count was deaf to the dregator’s assurances of loyalty and pleas for mercy. He’d heard them all before. Petru Mihnea was almost beyond his usefulness. Now he would join the priests and the other generals who had failed their count.

Plague, gods, star-stones or sorcerers, the people of Sylvania had to understand that there was only one thing they had to fear: the displeasure of Count Malbork von Drak.

Sylvania
Brauzeit, 1112

Cries of terror rose from the village as its slumbering inhabitants awoke to their doom. Panicked knots of humanity scurried out into the road, shrieking as they turned their eyes to the fields beyond their wattle-and-daub huts. Frantically, the peasants raced to the far side of the settlement, thinking to flee from the annihilation that threatened them only to discover that it waited for them there as well. Like a flock of birds, the people surged from one direction to another, each effort at escape balked by a grinning circuit of fleshless death.

Standing atop a palanquin of fused bone and wormy flesh, Vanhal could appreciate the pathetic futility of their struggle for survival better than those within the village. There was no escape. Long before the first scream tore the night, he’d moved his army into position, locking the village within a ring of the undead. Only the slightest exertion of the necromancer’s will and that army would stir, would march down upon the village and release its inhabitants from their suffering.

Such power over life and death and that strange world beyond death! When he had been a priest of Morr, Frederick van Hal had never dreamed such power could exist. Certainly there had been the tales of the ancient necromancers, of Nagash the Black, who had been vanquished by Sigmar a thousand years past, but even after studying the forbidden work of Arisztid Olt, he’d still thought such stories to be nothing more than exaggerated myths. He had never imagined the true magnitude of such power. If he had, he would have cringed away from such study, terrified of the forces he sought to command.

But did he truly command them? That was a question that had troubled Vanhal’s mind since that day two years ago when he’d brought death to the people of Bylorhof. Then, he had believed what he was doing to be justified in the name of vengeance. Justice for his brother’s family, slain by the cruel deceptions of the plague doktor Bruno Havemann. Recalling the charlatan’s torturous death, Vanhal lifted a thin hand to the bone mask he wore, touching the splintered fragments of Havemann’s skull.

Vengeance had been his purpose then, vengeance against Havemann and Bylorhof, vengeance against the soldiers who cordoned off the town and left its inhabitants to die. But it was something darker than vengeance that drove him after that, a terrible compulsion that moved him to destroy village after village.

He had evoked powerful forces to work his magic, but the necromancer wondered, did he command them or did they command him? Was he the musician or the instrument? Sometimes, in the dead of night, when he closed his eyes, he could sense something just beyond his awareness. Something ancient and dead and in its death dreaming. Dreaming of a world quiet and still, devoid of pain and fear. A world as tranquil as the grave.

Vanhal exerted a small fragment of his power and the skeletal mound he stood upon shuffled forwards on the bony legs fused around its base. Like some monstrous beetle, the palanquin skittered towards the village. The necromancer’s black robes whipped about him in the night wind, a nimbus of witch-fire crackling about his lean body as he drew upon his magic.

He could spare this place, Vanhal reflected. He could show mercy to these poor wretches. On his command, the horde of skeletons and zombies surrounding the village would withdraw as silently as they had advanced. No one needed to die. He would be able to prove to himself that he was the master of the power that flowed through him, not merely its pawn.

Vanhal’s gaunt hand dropped to his belt, withdrawing the ugly black stone from a leather pouch. He stared at it, feeling its malign energies. The fields around the village were littered with these things, each one transmitting its aethyric poison into the earth. This place would soon become a twisted blight, a splotch of diseased horror.

Even if he hadn’t come here, this village was doomed. The true path of mercy was to spare these people a lingering death of diseased starvation.

Vanhal closed his eyes and the ring around the village began to close. As a single creature, skeletons and zombies marched across the fields, rusty swords and splintered spears at the ready.

It would be over quickly, the necromancer mused. The villagers would only know a moment of pain and fear, then they would be spared those agonies for all eternity. They would know the tranquillity of that grey kingdom beyond the grave.

A tranquillity Vanhal would bestow upon all of Sylvania.

One village at a time.

CHAPTER TWO

Middenheim
Sigmarzeit, 1118

Looming far above the loamy earth, the ancient trees of the Drakwald blotted out the sun with their intertwined branches, casting the forest in perpetual shadow. The only sunlight that filtered past their leaves was what snuck past as the boughs groaned and swayed in a cool spring breeze.

The men who rode beneath the trees did their best to avoid those rare patches of sunlight. The least reflection off a buckle or an exposed bit of armour would shine like a beacon in the darkened forest. The fell things that called the shadows home already had enough ways to detect strangers in their domain without making them a gift of still another.

They’d done their best to conceal their presence, limiting their numbers to half a dozen riders rather than a stronger company of horsemen. Under the guidance of Mad Albrecht, a trapper who had made his living off the Drakwald for decades, the riders had stained their leatherworks with the musky scent of forest buffalo and banded the hooves of their steeds with fur to muffle their steps. Anything that might make noise, from scabbards to loose bridles and straps, had been carefully secured lest they rattle against a bit of armour or a kicking spur.

Despite his attention to detail, Mad Albrecht didn’t think their chances of going unnoticed were very high. It truly was in the hands of Grim Grey Taal, Lord of the Forests, and the trapper whispered a constant prayer to his god as his eyes roved the forest, and his ears strained to catch every sound.

Watching the trapper from the saddle of his courser, Prince Mandred felt guilt pull at his heart. Mad Albrecht was the best woodsman in Middenheim barring one or two acolytes of Taal. A refugee from the Drakwald province, the man had an almost preternatural affinity for the forest. There was no better guide a patrol could ask for.

Which was why Prince Mandred felt the flesh behind his trim black beard flush with shame. Middenheim had lost several patrols to the forest, patrols that hadn’t been so fortunate to have a guide like Albrecht along. Patrols that hadn’t been so fortunate as to have Graf Gunthar making sure they had a man like Albrecht to guide them.

Mandred raised his eyes skywards, watching the branches rustle far overhead. He appreciated his father’s concern, was moved by his paternal devotion. At the same time, he resented being treated any differently from the brave men who risked their lives to keep the countryside surrounding the Ulricsberg secure. It was vital that the rural raugrafs and their peasants be protected. Without them, Middenheim and the refugee settlement of Warrenburg would starve. The patrols’ importance was why Mandred had insisted on leading some of them himself, as a gesture of solidarity with the rangers. But with his father showing him extra consideration, he was finding his presence to be detrimental rather than beneficial to morale.

The prince shifted in his saddle, glancing back at the other riders, catching them in a hushed conversation. They threw him a guilty look and quickly fell silent. A sense of regret tugged at him. He was an outsider to these valorous men, a pampered noble who could only play in their world, never actually share it. Mandred could almost curse his breeding, the vast fissure that separated noble from peasant, prince from dienstmann. The Black Plague hadn’t shown such distinction in its depredations. The turmoil and confusion left in its wake were similarly shared by all men regardless of class. Yet instead of drawing men closer, uniting them against the common adversity, it was rendering society ever more fractious and resentful.

‘I’ll report them to the graf,’ the stern voice of Beck growled, provoking a warning hiss from Albrecht up ahead. The burly knight just scowled at the wiry trapper. Quickly he turned his attention back to Mandred. ‘They have no cause talking about you.’

Mandred shook his head. Beck had been his bodyguard for six years now, ever since Franz had ridden with the prince to relieve the massacre of Warrenburg by marauding beastmen. Dear old Franz had contracted the plague in that expedition. He’d died down in the refugee camp, never again to set foot upon the Ulricsberg. Mandred was ashamed that it had taken the death of his friend to appreciate the meaning of sacrifice, of what it meant to put loyalty above one’s own life. A leader could command such loyalty. A good leader was one who would never abuse it.

Beck was a very different sort of man than Franz. He was a grim, hardened warrior, a veteran of the Knights of the White Wolf. He was a man of constant vigilance, ready to see threat in the most innocuous things. A surly look, an unguarded word, and he was ready to condemn a man as a traitorous dog. Right now, Mandred could almost see his bodyguard formulating the report he would give Graf Gunthar denouncing the three Dienstleute.

‘Let it be,’ Mandred told Beck. He forced a tone of levity into his voice. ‘A soldier who doesn’t complain is one who doesn’t understand his job.’

Beck frowned back at the horsemen. ‘As you will, your grace,’ he said.

‘I mean it, Beck,’ Mandred warned. With all the other problems afflicting them, he found it absurd that so much attention was still devoted to custom and propriety. The Empire was tearing itself apart, decimated by disease, brought to its knees by warfare. Barbarians still held Marienburg and much of Westerland. The province of Drakwald was an abandoned ruin, her countryside ravaged by beastmen, her great cities exterminated by the plague. Nordland was ablaze with civil war after the death of her grand count, grasping barons striving with one another to expand their own petty interests. Ostland was much the same, and the Ostermark was teetering on the brink of annihilation after a goblin horde descended upon the weakened land. As bad as things were in the north, Mandred had heard it was even worse in the south.

The Empire was in its death throes, and the scavengers were already gathering about the carcass.

Middenheim had withstood the worst of the plague, a fact that Mandred wasn’t too proud to attribute to the draconian policies of his father. Graf Gunthar had sealed the city against the tide of refugees, preventing the disease from gaining a foothold on the Ulricsberg. It had been a cruel, inhuman thing to do. Mandred still considered it vicious and villainous. At the same time, it had spared the people of Middenheim untold death and misery. Once, the prince had excoriated his father for such brutality. Now, he understood it, hoped that if such hideous necessity ever arose again he would have the strength to make the same decision.

Alone among the great cities of the Empire, Middenheim had emerged from the plague stronger than before. As the disease abated, refugees were accepted into the city. Warrenburg evolved from a shabby camp into an organised settlement. Regular patrols were dispatched to bring order to the surrounding country, stabilising much of Middenland and extending to its scattered villages the protection of the Ulricsberg. Something approaching normality had settled upon the province.

The price for that fragile peace was vigilance. Patrols such as this one constantly ranged through the forest, watching for signs of bandits, goblins and the ever-present threat of marauding beastmen. The abominable creatures had been beaten back time and again, but with small bands of refugees still braving the forest to seek the safety of Middenheim, the lure of easy prey kept the monsters creeping back. No man, even Graf Gunthar, could cleanse the Drakwald of all the evil hiding in its shadows.

A flash of white among the dark tree trunks brought Mandred’s head snapping around, his hand flashing to the sword at his side. As his eyes focused upon the shape loping out from the forest darkness, his grip on the sword faltered, his breath caught in his throat.

Trotting out from the trees was a great white wolf, the biggest Mandred had ever seen. It moved with a boldness, a nonchalance he’d never witnessed in a wolf before, as though it were completely indifferent to the armed riders less than a dozen yards away from it. The animal loped to within a few yards of the trail, then sat on its haunches and turned its head towards the prince. Mandred was struck by the piercing gleam of the wolf’s pale blue eyes, eyes that were like chips of frost cut from the peak of the Ulricsberg. There was more than an animal’s understanding in those eyes.

For a moment, man and wolf simply stared at one another, locked in each other’s gaze. Mandred felt his pulse quicken, his chest grow heavy. He felt the primal yearning for wild places, the howl of the wild primitive that lurks beneath the thin veneer of civilisation. He knew the thrill of the hunt, the ecstasy of the kill. The devotion of the pack…

In one smooth motion, displaying a lithe grace, the white wolf rose and dashed across the trail. Though it sprinted directly ahead of Mad Albrecht and caused the trapper’s horse to shy, the Drakwalder didn’t see the animal. Beck and the soldiers likewise gave no shouts of alarm or surprise. Mandred alone, it seemed, had seen the wolf.

‘Turn to the left,’ Mandred called out, an eerie feeling rushing through his body. The men with him directed questioning stares his way, wondering what strange impulse had come upon the prince. Mandred barely acknowledged them. Raising himself in the saddle, he peered into the forest, spotting the white blur of the running wolf.

‘You heard his grace,’ Beck snarled at the others. The knight did not know what reason Mandred had for his strange order, nor did he care. It was enough that the prince had issued a command. ‘Into the trees.’ Beck spurred his horse from the trail, charging into the forest.

Mandred smiled at the man’s unquestioning loyalty as he turned his own mount and left the trail. He could hear Albrecht and the others following close behind. Ahead, drifting between the trunks, its white pelt shining in the shadows, the wolf seemed to beckon.

For what seemed leagues, the rangers maintained their silent pursuit of a quarry only the prince could see. Several times, Mandred had despaired of the hunt, but always the white wolf would suddenly reappear, tantalisingly near yet frustratingly far away. He was reminded of old nursery fables about the hunter who had dared to pursue the sacred stag of Taal and been cursed by the god to forever pursue a quarry he would never catch. He thought of tales he had heard of the haunted Laurelorn forest and the fairy creatures that lurked within its borders.

Mandred felt the urge to pull rein, to stop this reckless hunt before he led his followers into disaster. There was magic here, try as he might he couldn’t dismiss that frightful realisation. Even as the decision to call off the chase came to him, he saw the wolf turn its head, stare back at him with its uncanny gaze. The prince’s determination faltered. He was reminded of another legend, one that wasn’t an obscure rumour or fable, but a part of everyday life in Middenheim. The white wolf, the sacred animal of Ulric.

The wolf dashed off among the trees, vanishing in the shadows. Mandred tried to catch some sign of it, standing up in his stirrups, craning his neck as he attempted to see through the thick cluster of trunks. Throughout the chase, he’d always caught sight of the wolf again after it had disappeared. This time, however, no trace of that lupine form rewarded his efforts.

‘Stop,’ Mandred called out, tugging at his reins. The command was quickly echoed by Beck, and soon the entire patrol was gathered about the prince. He could feel the sullen annoyance of the rangers as they stared at him with questioning eyes. None of them had seen the white wolf, so none of them understood the purpose behind this mad chase through the forest.

Mandred opened his mouth to explain when a strange smell struck his nose. It was the odour of smoke, and beneath it a loathsome stench he’d become horribly intimate with during the worst of the plague, when the refugees of Warrenburg had burned their dead. The stench was that of burning flesh.

Albrecht made a sound like the croak of a raven, a warning signal for the rest to remain silent. Dropping down from his saddle, the trapper gave his reins to one of the rangers and scrambled off into the forest gloom, his steps as silent as any beast of the wild. Beck drew his sword, one of the rangers unlimbered the bow strapped to his saddle. An expectant tension filled the air. These men were veterans of many patrols. This close to the Ulricsberg, they knew what the stink of cooking human flesh meant.

The Kineater was back in its old haunts.

Carroburg
Ertezeit, 1114

Carroburg had been the jewel in the crown of Drakwald. Less cramped and confined than Altdorf, more accessible than Middenheim, spared the foetid atmosphere of Marienburg, the city had been growing in prominence for the better part of a century. It had become a serious rival to Marienburg for trade on the River Reik, once even going so far as to blockade the river and exact a toll from all ships wishing to proceed northwards into Westerland. That practice had ended only after the elector of Westerland agreed to support the bid by a Hohenbach to become emperor.

The line of Drakwald emperors had continued to foster the growth of Carroburg, grooming the city to become a cosmopolitan jewel to rival Altdorf, Mordheim and even Nuln itself. Indeed, there had been many who thought the Imperial court would move to Carroburg when Nuln was abandoned by the Emperor. An old grudge between Count Vilner and the Emperor was rumoured to be the reason for Altdorf’s restoration as the capital.

War had brought the first blemish to the glories of Carroburg. When northmen attacked Westerland and occupied Marienburg, a veritable tide of trade was ended, decimating the coffers of Carroburg’s burghers and merchants. Worse was to come when the beastmen rampaged through the province, laying waste to the land. The brutes were never so bold as to lay siege to the city itself, but their depredations were felt almost as keenly. The agriculture of Drakwald was virtually annihilated, forcing the rich burghers to spend their hoarded wealth on the extra expense of importing food and wool. Waves of refugees flocked to the city, seeking protection behind its stone walls, further taxing the resources of the burghers.

Then the Black Plague struck. Already on the edge of disaster, the plague was the final push Carroburg needed to descend into the pit. The stream of food reaching the city from downriver slowed to a mere trickle while the waves of refugees increased tenfold. A vast squalor of shacks engulfed the fields beyond the walls, thousands of displaced peasants with nowhere else to turn. In these conditions, starvation ran rampant, disease flourished and the embers of despair grew into the fires of anarchy. Riots broke out across the city and shantytown, exploding into a conflagration of disorder and violence. For ten days the inferno raged, and before it exhausted itself a third of Carroburg was in ruins, a quarter of its people were dead. The shantytown was put to the torch, the land beyond the walls becoming a blackened desolation.

One tiny spark had pushed the dejected and the desperate to cast aside generations of obedience, adherence to the ancient distinctions between peasant and noble. They died by the hundreds in their futile revolt against a system that had enslaved and abused them, giving their lives to tear down the thrones of their callous masters. In the end, the revolt failed, crushed by the knights and soldiers of the Hohenbachs. The rebel dead were cast into an open pit beyond the walls, left exposed to feed worm and crow. Left as a lesson to those who survived that they should be thankful for what little they were allowed to have.

One tiny spark, a new tax upon a people already reduced to nothing, a fee upon each ear on each head. The penalty for non-payment was mutilation. No coin, no ear.

The tax was a penalty exacted upon the people of Drakwald for the role their last count had played in the conspiracy against the Imperial throne. The execution of Duke Konrad had done little to placate the ire of Emperor Boris. Others had to suffer for his cousin’s treachery, even if they’d had no part in it.

Emperor Boris drew back the velvet curtain covering the coach window. He sighed as he looked upon the blackened desolation ringing Carroburg. It seemed such a waste. After more than a year, he would have expected von Metzgernstein to have done something to reclaim the land, put it to some manner of usefulness. There was nothing that upset him more than seeing something that was unproductive, something that wasn’t being employed to the utmost to feed the Imperial treasury.

Boris looked away, a scowl on his face. ‘Remind us to reprimand von Metzgernstein,’ he told the wizened little man sitting next to him. The little man uttered a squeak of surprise and hurriedly drew quill and parchment from the bag he carried. The Emperor waited while his scribe started to write. ‘We find his management of the province to be lacking. Perhaps Count Vilner tolerated such laxity, but We will not.’ Boris tapped his chin as an idea occurred to him. ‘When we arrive at the castle, have his son arrested. Or his daughter,’ he reflected, uncertain what manner of relations the seneschal possessed. A lewd twinkle crept into his eye as he gazed across the carriage and stared at the young woman seated across from him. ‘Especially if she is pretty,’ he added.

Princess Erna’s skin crawled as she felt the Emperor’s eyes slither across her body. She struggled to keep the disgust from showing. Not from any sense of propriety or courtly decorum, but because she knew Boris enjoyed provoking her.

The effort was wasted. Boris laughed gustily at her expense. ‘Is it a crime that We desire to be surrounded by beautiful things?’ He laughed again as another thought occurred to him. ‘If it is, then as Emperor We will simply have to change the laws!’

‘As Your Imperial Majesty wishes,’ Erna answered, her voice demure. Years of suffering under Adolf Kreyssig’s hate had beaten the spirit from her.

‘That goes without saying,’ Boris chuckled. He pulled the curtain wide so that all within the carriage could see the burned desolation. ‘Everything exists only as long as it pleases Us. The moment it forsakes that sacred obligation to the Imperial crown…’ He snapped his fingers as though snuffing a rushlight.

‘A wise policy, Your Imperial Majesty,’ the rotund Doktor Wolfius Moschner agreed, his voice less that of a wolf and more like a yipping lapdog. ‘Noble and peasant alike must remember to whom they owe their loyalty.’

After so many years serving as the Emperor’s personal physician, Moschner knew exactly the right things to say to evoke his patron’s pleasure. Boris leaned back against the leather cushions lining his seat, smiling as he digested the doktor’s flattery. An impish smile teased the corners of his mouth as he considered the other occupants of the carriage.

‘What do you think, Pieter?’ Boris asked the man seated in the opposite corner. ‘Do you agree? Are the nobles as beholden to Us as the peasants?’

The man the Emperor addressed was Baron Pieter von Kirchof, a swordsman of such renown that his fame was known in every corner of the Empire. He had risen to become the Emperor’s Champion, defending the virtue of his master in judicial contests and private duels for more than a decade. Few who crossed sword with him had lived to tell the tale. None had ever left the field of honour without feeling the bite of his blade.

Despite the fame of his sword, the formidable reputation he had earned in mortal combat a hundred times over, it was a subdued man who answered his Emperor. Von Kirchof kept his eyes lowered, his tone deferential as he spoke. ‘All men are beholden to their Emperor,’ he said.

Boris laughed at his champion. ‘You more than most, eh? What sort of lands did your family possess before you entered Our service? A miserable demesne in the middle of a swamp with a few hundred inbred peasants to serve you!’ The Emperor’s eyes left von Kirchof, lingering for a moment on the young woman seated beside him. ‘Yes, Pieter, you owe much to Us.’

Von Kirchof’s niece looked away as the Emperor scrutinised her, unable to repress the shudder that swept through her.

‘We all owe you much, Your Imperial Majesty,’ Doktor Moschner said, trying to ease the tense atmosphere. Boris ignored the physician, turning to gaze out the window once more.

‘When you have advice about Our health, you may speak,’ he told Moschner. ‘Otherwise, if We want your opinion, We’ll tell you what it is.’

The Imperial procession was passing the gates of Carroburg now, but the scene beyond the window was hardly more cheerful than the blackened desolation outside the walls. The once opulent residences of the burghers were fallen into disrepair, plaster peeling away from timber walls, roofing tiles lying strewn in the streets. Iron lamp posts, an affectation absent even in Altdorf, bore the marks of rust and neglect. The road was pitted with holes, much of the masonry cracked and broken. Heaps of rubbish lay strewn in the gutters, and hordes of rats brazenly prowled the alleyways.

The city that had only a few years before been the great light of the Empire was now a wallow of decay. The handful of people walking the streets were ragged, scrawny apparitions that hid their faces as the Imperial procession rode past, the last dregs of self-respect scourged from them by the Emperor’s henchmen and his purges.

Emperor Boris reached to his jewelled belt and removed a few coppers from a leather pouch. Squinting at the coins for a moment, he turned back to the window and threw them into the street. He laughed as he watched the ragged scarecrows rush to retrieve their bounty, hobbling along on withered legs, groping in the gutter with skeletal hands. Still laughing, he took another clutch of coins and threw them in the direction of an old char woman leaning against a lamp post. Caught by surprise, the woman staggered back as the coins struck her. A mob of more observant beggars came running down the street, trampling the old woman underfoot in their hurry to gather up the money.

Boris clapped his hands together, his face glowing in a cherubic smile. He noted the revulsion on the face of the woman across from him. Reaching into his belt, he removed a few more coins. ‘Great sport,’ he told Erna. ‘Would you care to try?’ The woman shook her head, but Boris persisted. Reaching out, he took her hand and forced the coins into her palm. ‘Just once,’ he told her.

‘Perhaps I might try,’ Moschner offered.

Emperor Boris directed a withering look at his physician. ‘Pay for your own amusements,’ he said, then turned his attention back to Erna. ‘Go ahead,’ he prodded her. ‘They’re just peasants. They won’t bite. They wouldn’t dare!’ The levity drained from the monarch’s features; his voice became a low snarl, his hand tightened around Erna’s. ‘Do as you are told.’

Her cheeks flushing with shame, turning her head from the window, Erna cast the coins into the street. Emperor Boris leaned his head from the window, laughing at the bedlam as the beggars scrambled for the discarded coins.

‘A poor cast,’ he chuckled, then grinned as a thin shriek rose from somewhere behind them. ‘We’re afraid your coins landed in the street. One of the wretches has gotten himself crushed by the Count of Stirland’s coach.’ He leaned back inside and patted Erna’s hand.

‘We thank you for an amusing diversion,’ the Emperor told her, smiling as he felt the shudder that passed through Erna’s body.

Soon the urban mire of decayed Carroburg was behind them. They passed through the western gate, following the long causeway that reached out across the Reik, rising in a spiral of brick and mortar to the crest of a tall hill. Here, upon the natural spire, a succession of fortresses had been built by the old Thuringian kings, culminating in the great stone walls of the Schloss Hohenbach.

The mighty castle dominated the landscape, looming over the sprawl of Carroburg, commanding the approaches along the Reik. It was the situation of the Otwinsstein that had dictated the construction of the original timber tower and the first mud-hut village to shelter in its shadow. It was the existence of the castle that allowed Carroburg its command of the river trade and had many times earned its burghers the epithet of ‘pirate barons’.

Now, the Schloss Hohenbach opened its monstrous iron gates to admit a plunderer who made the grasping dealings of Carroburg’s worst burgher seem petty. Emperor Boris breathed deeply as he watched the imposing gatehouse with its bronze gargoyles and megalithic statuary draw close.

‘The ancestral seat,’ the Emperor commented with a smile. ‘It is good to be home again.’

‘I understood you had never visited this place before,’ Erna said. It was the first time she had spoken since the incident with the beggars.

Emperor Boris frowned at the woman’s insolence, but after a moment of consideration decided to overlook it. ‘One is never a stranger to one’s legacy,’ he pronounced. A moment of reflection and he motioned for his scribe to record the statement for posterity.

The carriage was soon within the walled courtyard. Emperor Boris waited until von Kirchof left the carriage before making any move to leave his seat. The attempt to usurp his throne had taught him to be cautious. To always let one of his subjects precede him. After a moment, von Kirchof appeared at the door. Bowing low, he waited while his sovereign disembarked. The rest of the occupants followed close behind.

The towers of the Schloss Hohenbach glowered down at them like primordial titans. They were cold and severe, devoid of the artistry and elegance that characterised the Imperial Palace. The castle had been built as a fortress, and ten generations of Hohenbachs had been unable to endow it with warmth or cheer.

Emperor Boris paced across the courtyard, shaking his head as he gazed up at the hoary battlements and ancient towers. Forcing a smile onto his face, he looked back at Princess Erna and Sasha, von Kirchof’s young niece. ‘Now, perhaps you ladies understand why it was necessary to bring some pretty things to this place.’ He turned away as the rest of the Imperial procession started to enter the gates. Twenty carriages conveying the highest echelons of Imperial society, the most affluent potentates in the whole Empire. The men and women hand-picked by Emperor Boris to be preserved from the plague, to share this refuge from the blight ravaging the land.

‘We may be here quite some time,’ the Emperor continued. ‘Long enough, I think, for all of us to become well acquainted.’

CHAPTER THREE

Altdorf
Sigmarzeit, 1114

‘A peasant appointed Protector of the Empire!’ The outburst was punctuated by the slamming of a mailed fist against the polished mahogany desk. The pink-faced man seated behind the desk winced as he saw the wood scarred by the blow. Almost immediately there was a cloth in his hand and he was rubbing at the injured surface.

‘You must curb your temper, Vidor,’ the man cautioned his guest. ‘There is no arguing with an Imperial decree.’ He leaned back and swallowed uneasily, darting a glance at the shelf-lined walls of his office. ‘It is also unwise to speak in anger. Your “peasant” has ears everywhere.’

Vidor von Tolkesdorf, Duke of Weissbruck and Margrave of the Helmwald, shifted the steel helm he held under his arm, brandishing it like a cudgel at the man seated behind the desk, provoking an uneasy squirm from the pink-faced noble. Duke Vidor sneered. Lord Ratimir was typical of the men who made up the Imperial court, decadent blue-bloods who had grown soft from the ease of luxury. The least display of force, the smallest threat of danger, and they capitulated to any outrage. Even that of taking orders from a low-born peasant.

‘I don’t care how many serfs that dung-scraping low-born has in his vaunted Kaiserjaeger,’ Duke Vidor growled. ‘The Emperor knows my loyalty. He knows there is no more staunch a supporter of his crown than myself!’

Lord Ratimir shook his head, making soft tutting sounds. ‘Things are quite different than when you left Altdorf to hunt the errant Reiksmarshal,’ he warned. ‘His Imperial Majesty has had two years to reflect upon the conspiracy that nearly took that crown away from him. Need I say that it has been Adolf Kreyssig and his Kaiserjaeger who have been investigating that conspiracy and dragging more traitors into the light? It would be unwise… and unhealthy… to make an enemy of the man. Whatever the quality of his blood.’

Duke Vidor turned away from the desk, pacing across the office of the Imperial Minister of Finance. ‘He knows my loyalty,’ he stated, conviction in his tone. ‘I chased that scoundrel Boeckenfoerde across the eastern provinces for eighteen months. Drove that rabble of Dienstleute clear into the Ungol wastes!’

Ratimir’s sickly countenance was made more grotesque by the smug expression he wore. ‘All true, Vidor, but what have you done lately for His Imperial Majesty?’ He leaned back in his chair, savouring the look of dawning awareness in his visitor’s eyes. ‘Yes, you’ve eliminated the threat of Boeckenfoerde marching his scum on Altdorf. That very accomplishment makes you dangerous. It means you are a strong strategist and a capable leader of men – both qualities that have proven treacherous towards the Emperor in the recent past.’

Frowning, the duke leaned across the desk. ‘What will the Emperor do?’ he scoffed. ‘Surround himself with incompetents simply because they are too stupid to be dangerous to him?’

‘No,’ Ratimir conceded. ‘He will surround himself with men who he himself has created. Creatures like Kreyssig who owe their status and position solely to the beneficence of His Imperial Majesty. Blood and breeding are becoming questionable assets, Vidor. The Emperor doesn’t trust men who feel they are entitled to wealth and station.’

Duke Vidor stood back, aghast at the implication. It was already well known that Emperor Boris had ordered the confiscation of all property owned by Prince Sigdan and his fellow conspirators, their titles abolished and their possessions forfeit to the crown. What Ratimir was suggesting went even further: outright suppression of the nobility!

‘He knows my loyalty,’ Vidor protested, rejecting the fears Ratimir had stirred up.

Ratimir laughed softly, the effort almost choking him. With a trembling hand, he removed a pomander from his frilled sleeve and drew deeply upon its fragrant vapours. ‘It is not the Emperor you must convince of your loyalty,’ he said when the fit had passed. ‘It is the Protector he leaves behind in his stead.’

‘I bow to no peasant,’ Vidor snarled. ‘No noble-born man will!’

Again, Ratimir shook his head. ‘After the example of Prince Sigdan, I think you will find that the nobles will put up with a great deal if it keeps them from the wrong side of an axe.’

The light streaming through the Kaiseraugen was like the glimmer of a thousand jewels, a dazzling display that caught the breath and captivated the soul. The stained glass was the handiwork of the finest glaziers in Karak Norn, produced and transported at enormous expense. A lesser monarch might have shuddered at the cost, but Emperor Boris wasn’t some petty border baron or country count. He was supreme leader of the mightiest realm of man in the known world and such insignificance was beneath his concern. If there were anything troublesome, it was the added expenditure to hurry the project along. It was never cheap to hurry a dwarf.

As he watched the diminutive craftsmen bustling about the half-restored window overlooking the Reik and the sprawl of Altdorf, Boris felt strength course through him. Only he could afford to exert such authority, to take an act of vandalous destruction and turn it into a thing more magnificent than before. The traitors who had smashed the original picture window were to be thanked for their mindless atrocity. The new Kaiseraugen would be even greater, a wonder of human achievement and artistry! The stained glass and silver panes would lend it an unparalleled glamour, like a rainbow bound and imprisoned against the face of the Imperial Palace. When it was complete, this hall would sparkle like a treasure vault.

Watching the dwarfs work, Boris’s gaze strayed to the open, incomplete section of the window. For a moment, he felt his attention drawn to the ugly blemish of the city below, the dilapidated structures and deserted streets, the sprawl of refugee camps beyond the walls and the hideous spectre of funeral pyres. Quickly he turned away. He would be happy when all the stained glass was in place and blotted out the noxious vision.

Composing himself, Boris marched across the hall and into the gallery beyond. It was unseemly to let something disturb his Imperial poise. When he returned from Carroburg, such things would be in the past. The plague would run its course soon and then things could get back to normal. And if not… Well, the dwarfs would certainly be finished with their work by then.

In the gallery, Boris was joined by a bodyguard of picked men from the Kaiserknecht and the menacing figure of Baron Pieter von Kirchof, the Emperor’s Champion. It was von Kirchof who had stood by Boris during the insurrection of Prince Sigdan. More than his unmatched prowess with the sword, it was this unwavering loyalty that had earned him the indulgence of his Emperor. Boris had heaped riches on his champion, allocating several of the confiscated lands to the von Kirchof family. Now, he was prepared to grant his favoured vassal another boon.

But first he wanted to hear von Kirchof beg.

‘The construction goes well, Your Imperial Majesty?’ the baron asked as the monarch and his retinue marched down the hall.

Boris took his time before acknowledging that he’d heard his minion speak. Von Kirchof was too well bred to dare decorum by addressing the Emperor again without some response. It was a useful thing, courtly breeding. It conditioned proud men to submit without question.

The Emperor halted before a long mural depicting one of the expansionist campaigns waged by his long-dead predecessor Frederick in the Ungol-infested oblast of the north. His guards immediately formed a circle around him, hands falling to the hilts of swords. Silently they waited for whatever fancy had made their sovereign pause to pass. Boris smiled at their impatience. They would never give it voice, never admit it even to themselves, but it was there and it was held hostage by nothing save his own authority.

‘Tell Us again of this girl, von Kirchof,’ Boris said at last, his eyes still studying the tapestry. He didn’t need to turn to know the desperate hope that shone in the eyes of his champion.

‘She is my niece, Your Imperial Majesty,’ the baron explained, an explanation he had made many times before. ‘There is plague in my sister’s fief. It has been most rapacious in her lands and I… She fears for the girl’s safety. I would bring her to Altdorf, but the plague is worse here and…’

‘And we are leaving for Carroburg,’ the Emperor finished for him.

Baron von Kirchof stiffened and made an embarrassed bow. ‘I was hoping that you would condescend to allow my niece to join the procession to Carroburg.’

Boris turned away from the tapestry, directing a hard look into his champion’s eyes, holding him in the grip of that stare until the baron was compelled to look away. ‘The plague is getting worse,’ he stated. ‘That is why We are leaving Altdorf and seeking the safety of seclusion in the Schloss Hohenbach in the Drakwald. With us We are taking the most powerful personages in the Empire. Grand dukes, arch-counts and great princes.’

Baron von Kirchof kept his eyes downcast. ‘I know it is…’

‘How old is the child?’ Boris asked suddenly, interrupting the apology.

Von Kirchof brightened at the inquiry. ‘She has just passed her nineteenth winter,’ he said.

‘Hardly a “girl” then,’ Boris scoffed, toying with the ermine fringe of his imperial robes. ‘If she is pretty, you may bring her along,’ he said, making the declaration sound as weighty as any affair of state. ‘The castle is quite gloomy, as We recall. We shall need a few pretty things to brighten it up while We are there.’ He raised a warning finger before the baron could thank him. ‘We warn you, the maiden had best be as fair as you attest her to be.’

Boris left the consequences of his disappointment unsaid. As Emperor, there were a great many things he could do to someone who displeased him. He had always found that it was more effective to leave his subjects wondering which of those things was to be their punishment.

No fear was greater than the terror born in a man’s own imagination.

Blinded by the flickering glow of a rushlight, it was some time before Princess Erna von Thornig realised she was no longer alone in her dingy cell. As the red blur that had flooded across her light-starved eyes gradually faded, she found two men standing beside the iron-banded door. The chill of her dungeon apartment was nothing beside the chill that gripped her heart as she recognised her visitors.

The stocky, overweight one with the frilled shirt and sombre livery was Fuerst. The other man, his sickly pallor and scarred face rendered still more grotesque by the shadows cast by the rushlight, was Fuerst’s master, Adolf Kreyssig, Commander of the Kaiserjaeger and now Protector of the Empire. The villain who had murdered her father and cast her into this prison.

The fiend who was her husband.

An ophidian smile stretched across Kreyssig’s face as he watched Erna cringe away from him, her trembling hands clutching the heavy length of chain that connected her to an iron ring set into the wall. He slapped a leather riding crop against his leg, savouring the fear he saw in his wife’s eyes. It had taken much time and effort to put that fear there, to beat the boldness out of her. Breaking Erna’s spirit had become something of a hobby for him. One that he had enjoyed immensely.

‘Don’t get up,’ Kreyssig hissed at her. ‘I am afraid that I don’t have much time to squander with you today. His Imperial Majesty is going to officially proclaim me Protector of the Empire in the Great Cathedral of Sigmar.’ For just an instant, he saw hate burn its way through the fear in her eyes. He slashed the riding crop at her, being sure to strike low enough that the brand wouldn’t be visible in public. The strip of sackcloth draped about Erna’s body did nothing to retard the blow. Still, his words had awakened some residue of noble pride and she bit her lip to keep from crying out. Kreyssig drew his arm back to whip her again.

‘Your lordship!’ Fuerst protested, grabbing Kreyssig’s arm. ‘His Imperial Majesty has ordered the baroness to attend him when he travels. He will be displeased if…’

Kreyssig rounded on his servant, turning the crop against him and slashing it down his back. He turned and glared at Erna, then returned his attention to Fuerst. ‘Get the bitch presentable,’ he snarled before storming from the cell.

Fuerst bowed until the door closed behind Kreyssig, then he turned back to the captive baroness. ‘I am sorry, your ladyship, but you know better than to bait him.’

‘The worst he can do is kill me,’ Erna stated, her awakened pride sinking back beneath a torrent of despair. She looked up at Fuerst, managing a weak smile for his benefit. ‘He would have killed me already if not for you.’

Fuerst glanced away, colour rising in his cheeks. ‘No, your ladyship, you pay me too much favour. The commander does nothing without reason. Even after you tried to… Even then he made no move to execute you, even petitioned the Emperor for clemency.’ Fuerst’s voice dropped to an embarrassed whisper. ‘With your father dead, you are now baroness. It is only through his connection to you that the commander may make any pretension of moving among the aristocracy. Without you, he is just a peasant.’

Erna leaned against the stone wall, her chains rattling against the floor. ‘He is a monster,’ she said, her voice hollow and bitter. ‘I thought I knew what he was when I agreed to kill him, but I didn’t. The barbarians who sacked Marienburg are more human than that beast!’ She held her hands across her face, shuddering as a new horror impressed itself on her mind. ‘Now this animal is going to be Protector of the Empire.’

Fuerst drew closer, excitement in his tone. ‘That is where you have a chance!’ he exclaimed. ‘Emperor Boris might trust the commander more than the nobles, but he doesn’t trust anyone fully. That is why he has decreed that you are to accompany him to Carroburg.’ Wearing a broad smile, Fuerst unfolded the clothes he carried across his arm, displaying for Erna one of her finest gowns. ‘The Emperor knows that it is through you that the commander is able to claim the status of a noble. He feels that by keeping you with him, it will give him a hold over the commander.’

Reaching forwards, Erna let her fingers slide down the soft smoothness of her gown. ‘So I trade one captor for another,’ she mused.

Fuerst shrugged and pointed at the dank walls of the cramped cell, at the straw pallet and sackcloth shift. ‘It can’t be worse than this,’ he said.

Erna took the gown from Fuerst, hugging it to her breast. ‘No, it can’t,’ she answered before her voice collapsed into an inarticulate sob. Years of torture and isolation – could they finally be at an end? Even as Fuerst unlocked the shackle from her wrist, Erna expected her husband and a gang of Kaiserjaeger to come bursting through the door. It was just the sort of cruelty that would appeal to Kreyssig’s humour, to build up hope and then smash it in the most brutal manner possible.

Only when she was dressed and unchained, being led by Fuerst out into the corridor beyond her cell, did Erna accept that her release was real. She had been traded, given into the keeping of Emperor Boris as hostage for her husband’s loyalty. Her life against that of every man, woman and child in the Empire.

Ulric have mercy, but to escape the clutches of Kreyssig, Erna was willing to make such a monstrous bargain.

Mordheim
Ulriczeit, 1112

Across the curtain of night, the ponderous notes of temple bells reminded the denizens of the city that even in the darkest hour, when the powers of Old Night waxed strong, the gods were still watching. It was a sound that had once brought comfort and solace to the simple, superstitious folk. The thought that the gods remained vigilant when the creatures of darkness were abroad, when ghouls stalked graveyards, when witches flew through the blackened sky and skin-wolves prowled under shadowed trees.

Of late, however, the voice of the temple bells had taken on a bitter, mocking quality. The Black Plague was abroad, slaughtering old and young, pious and impious, peasant and noble with equal rapacity. If the gods were still watching over mankind, not the wisest of priests could explain their indifference to its suffering.

Ensconced within the cold stone-walled fastness of his chambers, one of those suffering masses looked up from the documents spread across the table before him. He closed his eyes and listened to the bells tolling away the hour. There was another sound, softer yet nearer, a low wailing that filtered through the ancient halls. It was a haunting, melancholy sound, the animate voice of anguish and loss and regret.

Regret? That word brought a cynical curl to the man’s pale, pinched face. He swept a jewelled hand through a mane of luxuriant black hair and leaned back in his gilded chair. There was a suggestion of sardonic amusement in his eyes as he stared down at the scrolls and parchment sheaves piled before him. Like a dragon perched atop its hoard, he hovered above the heap. It would take the treasure of a dragon to rival the wealth laid out on the table, for it was a tangible representation of the lands and holdings that went with the title Baron von Diehl.

A title that had finally passed from Hjalmar von Diehl to his son Lothar.

That transition of wealth and authority had been a long time taking shape. The old baron had been a long time about dying. Towards the last, it had become something of a race to see whether the father would exhaust the legacy of the von Diehls on alchemists and physicians and generous tithes to the temples in a desperate bid to bribe the gods to intercede.

Many times, Lothar had despaired, wondered if he shouldn’t employ cudgel or dagger to effect his father’s speedy demise. Such impatient temptations were fought back only by the fiercest exertion of will. The spells were doing their work. Slowly but surely his father’s vitality had been ebbing, leeched away by phantom parasites neither priest nor physician could discover. When the old baron died, there were none who thought of murder. To even the most suspicious, there was never a notion that the baron was anything but another victim of the Black Plague.

Lothar set a covetous hand against the stack of deeds that represented ownership of three-quarters of Mordheim’s riverfront. He smiled as he saw a promissory note from Count Steinhardt himself peeking out from beneath the pile. Great and small, many were those who must credit the Baron von Diehl for their prosperity.

Rising from behind the table, Lothar paced across the cheerless confines of his study. Prosperity had become a bitter word to the people of Mordheim, a mocking echo of better times. With over half the city carried off by the plague, the fields beyond the walls invaded by starving refugees, the violence in Talabecland choking off what river trade still flowed into Ostermark, Mordheim was in the throes of her own slow death.

It was the natural order of things, Lothar mused. People and places were fated to grow, thrive and prosper for a season, but then must come that time when they would wither, decay and die. Not the gods themselves could defy the laws of fate.

A cold smile formed across Lothar’s face. The only way a man could ensure his accomplishments was to set himself outside the tyrannical dictates of fate. His grandfather had awakened to that revelation, but had lacked the fortitude to pursue his studies fully. His father, with pious horror, had rejected the researches of the elder von Diehl, burning his books and papers when the barony came into his possession. Hjalmar had been thorough in his fiery purge, but not perfect. A few tomes slipped his notice, and eventually those volumes of forbidden lore had found their way into Lothar’s hands. The seeds of the grandfather’s work found fertile soil in the grandson’s mind.

Staring up at a portrait of his father, Lothar sighed as he recalled all the years he had been compelled to secrecy, labouring away in the disused cellars and crypts beneath the castle, embezzling money from the von Diehl estates to fund his experiments, to procure the obscure books necessary to his research. With the support and understanding of his father, Lothar should have progressed in his studies with cosmic momentum. Lacking such assistance, he’d been forced to trudge away, content himself with the most restrained and insignificant advances. In those long hours, shivering in the clammy gloom of the castle vaults, he realised that if he were to succeed, he must become baron. When rumours drifted into Mordheim of a mighty sorcerer who had arisen in Sylvania and brought the von Draks to heel, a terrible envy took hold of Lothar’s heart. No longer would he wait for the power that must one day belong to him!

Turning away from the portrait, Lothar shook his head and tried to blot out the faint wail of professional mourners that wafted through the castle halls. What had been done was done. The bridge had been crossed, the decision made. It would, he vowed to himself, be worth it.

All at once, Lothar’s attention was drawn to a tall shelf sunk into the wall at the far corner of the room. The bronze figure of a wolf stood upon one of the shelves, a hammer and bell clenched in its rampant paws. While he watched, the statue revolved from side to side, causing hammer to strike bell and send a tinkling note through the chamber. Lothar watched the gyrations of the figure as he stalked over to a bell-pull beside the hearth. One sharp tug would set an alarm that would see a dozen men-at-arms swarm into the room.

Lothar bided his time, hand poised about the bell-pull, eyes fixed on the bronze wolf and the shelf it rested upon. While he watched, the shelf began to move, rotating away from the wall and exposing a dark passageway with stairs descending into the black depths beneath the Schloss von Diehl.

Lothar relaxed and walked back to his table when he recognised the figure who emerged from the darkness. He was a stocky, fat-faced man with ruddy complexion and bulbous nose. His raiment was simple, lacking the costly dyes and embroidery of the noble classes, yet of immaculate condition and quality. The overall impression was that of a man of means if not social position.

‘Marko,’ Lothar greeted the man in a cold, somewhat irritated fashion. When he’d heard the bell sound, he’d half expected his father’s ghost to come tromping up those steps, such was the morbid turn of his mind.

‘Baron von Diehl now, I believe,’ Marko addressed Lothar. He glanced about for a moment and, without awaiting an invitation, sank into a heavy chair opposite the table. His host scowled at the man’s temerity but kept his tongue. In their long association, he had been forced to a grudging acceptance of Marko’s discourteous habits.

‘Your sense of propriety leaves much to be desired,’ Lothar upbraided the man. ‘My father lies cold in his chambers and you choose tonight to visit.’ He made a pretence of examining the documents on the table, directing a dismissive wave at Marko. ‘Get out. Leave me to my mourning. Come again in a fortnight.’

Marko leaned forwards in his chair, an oily smile across his face. ‘Is that any way to speak to an old friend who has come to offer his sympathy?’

A caustic laugh was Lothar’s answer. Marko’s smile collapsed into a sullen frown.

‘Perhaps the word “friend” offends you?’ Marko asked. ‘There is another word I might use, but “accomplice” is such an ugly word that noble ears should be spared its utterance.’

Lothar set down the deed he had been feigning interest in and glared at his visitor. ‘You dare threaten me? Are you forgetting that I am now Baron von Diehl?’

The smile was back on Marko’s face. ‘Indeed I am not,’ he said. ‘It is because you are the baron that I have brought you something.’ Reaching into his coat, digging into the deep poacher pockets sewn into its lining, he withdrew a thick bundle wrapped in sheepskin.

Whatever annoyance Lothar felt was instantly supplanted by curiosity. Marko had been wrong to refer to himself as an accomplice. He was a facilitator, a provider of the magical treatises and implements needed for Lothar’s researches. The peasant had proven himself most capable in his illicit trade, braving the vengeance of both secular and religious law to secure the forbidden tomes Lothar required.

Tonight, however, Lothar could sense that the trader had brought him something special. Cynically, he wondered how long it had been in Marko’s possession, if the peasant hadn’t been biding his time, waiting until the title and wealth of Baron von Diehl passed into Lothar’s hands.

The new baron set dignity aside as he hurriedly unwrapped the package. Within he discovered a large book bound in some strange scaly hide. A golden skull was embossed upon the cover, and it was with a thrill of excitement that he recognised the hieroglyphics beneath it as belonging to the vanished civilisation of Mourkain.

‘You will appreciate it,’ Marko declared, ‘when I tell you that what you hold in your hands is the only known copy of De Arcanis Kadon.’

Lothar’s knees went weak, dropping him ungracefully back into his chair. There was a tremor on his lips, a shiver in his hands. Shocked by the artefact in his fingers, the baron’s heart pounded to the beat of both horror and exuberance.

‘You know the story, of course,’ Marko said, savouring the emotions warring for control of his patron’s mind. ‘Kadon was a shaman of the primitive tribes along the Blind River. Sometime before the birth of Sigmar, he built a great city in the Badlands, a place he named Mourkain.’ The peasant chuckled grimly. ‘In the Strigany tongue, it means “the Dead City”. Employing the black arts, he raised an army of the dead to make war in his name. With Mourkain at its centre, Kadon built the kingdom of Strygos. Those who submitted to his power became his slaves. Those who defied him were slaughtered… and became his slaves just the same.’

Marko paused, examining an old sword hanging on the wall, running one of his hands along the blade. ‘It is said that Kadon was the greatest sorcerer of his day, and that he used his magic to empower many strange and terrible relics. None, however, could equal the malignity of De Arcanis Kadon. Written upon skin flayed from the bodies of his children, scribed in the heart’s blood of his own wives, Kadon consigned onto these pages all of his arcane knowledge.’

Marko stared up at the portrait of Hjalmar von Diehl, watching as the flickering glow from the hearth cast strange shadows across the dead baron’s face. ‘There were nine copies of De Arcanis Kadon, patterned after the ancient Books of Nagash. Each copy was couched in its own cipher and entrusted to one of Kadon’s disciples. The disciples scattered when Strygos was overrun by a mighty orc invasion. Kadon himself perished when the city of Mourkain fell to the greenskins, but through his disciples and De Arcanis Kadon, his knowledge endured.’

Lothar ran his thumb along the book’s spine, feeling an icy sensation flow down his arm. ‘I understood that De Arcanis Kadon was lost when the Great Cathedral of Sigmar burned in Nuln,’ he said, his voice nothing more than an awed whisper.

‘One copy was reputed to be held by the Sigmarites in their vaults,’ Marko agreed, returning to the table and lowering himself into his chair. ‘Another was burned in Remas by the fanatics of Solkan. A warlock in the town of Mirkhof was reputed to be in possession of a copy when that community vanished from the face of the earth.’ Marko laughed. ‘The work of elves, some claim.

‘There was another copy somewhere in Bretonnia, but much like Mirkhof, the community harbouring it vanished in a night. Undoubtedly the work of the Great Enchanter. If so, then it will never leave the Grey Mountains.’

‘Where did this copy come from?’ Lothar asked.

‘It wasn’t easy to get,’ Marko assured him. ‘It is supposed to have been in the possession of a man titling himself “King of the Strigany” and was, perhaps, handed down from father to son since the destruction of Strygos. It is doubtful the man understood what he possessed, otherwise his caravan wouldn’t have been massacred when they tried to camp near an Ostland village. It seems there was talk that the Strigany were spreading the plague, so the men of the village rose up and massacred the entire caravan. Their fear of the plague didn’t keep them from looting the dead, however. Among the plunder, the villagers found De Arcanis Kadon. The miraculous thing is that they didn’t destroy it to steal its gold adornments.’ Marko laughed again, but it was an uneasy sort of laugh. ‘Maybe it was the book exerting its magic on their simple minds, protecting itself from their ignorance and fear.

‘Eventually the book found its way to Wolfenburg and into the hands of one of my… associates.’ Marko stood up, setting his hands on the table and leaning towards Lothar. His voice dropped into a warning hiss. ‘You will never be closer to such power, herr baron! The few who have truly understood that book have learned secrets that have been forbidden to men for a thousand years. They accomplished great things, feats of magic that have been immortalised in myth and legend.’

Lothar looked up from the ancient tome. His voice quaked as he questioned Marko. ‘What of those who couldn’t understand, who couldn’t unlock Kadon’s secrets?’

‘They were driven mad,’ Marko admitted with a shrug. He smiled and stood away from the table. ‘That is why, when I ask you for two thousand gold crowns, you will oblige me by paying before you begin your researches.’

Lothar’s expression became indignant. At the same time, he wrapped his arms protectively about De Arcanis Kadon. ‘Two thousand gold crowns! That is robbery. I will not pay it!’

‘You will pay it,’ Marko assured him. ‘I have never sold you false merchandise, never lied to you. Two thousand crowns is cheap for the knowledge that book can bestow on you.’ He looked down at the table, littered with deeds and promissory notes. He waved his hand over the heap of documents. ‘What is wealth except a means to power?’ he asked. ‘And what power is greater than knowledge?’

Lothar raised his head, listening to the faint wail of the mourners. It was true, what the peasant said. In trying to secure temporal wealth, he had stumbled upon true power – the power of magic and the arcane. What did lands and titles matter beside the ability to invoke death with a touch, the power to raise the dead from their tombs?

‘You will have your money,’ Baron von Diehl promised. ‘But let us wait a little.

‘I have a father I must bury first.’

Sylvania
Vorhexen, 1112

The smell of burning thatch and timber boiled across the air, the tang of man-thing blood laced with man-thing fear was borne upon the breeze, the stink of rat-fur and skaven musk rolled down the muddy lanes. They were exciting, invigorating smells that filled Seerlord Skrittar’s nose and teased his olfactory organs, but none of them were so enthralling as the burning scent of warpstone.

The seerlord’s grey paw closed tighter about the black nugget it held, a little wisp of smoke rising from his clenched fist as the warpstone singed his fur. He was oblivious to the caustic emanations of his prize, too absorbed in the enormity of what it represented. That nugget was the first, the first of a treasure so vast it would reshape the whole of skavendom!

A blood-chilling scream scratched across Skrittar’s hearing, causing him to turn and watch as a lone man-thing tried to fend off a pack of clanrats. The sword-rats of Clan Fester weren’t the mighty killers of Clan Rictus or Clan Mors, but they were more than equal to the hapless peasant they menaced. Warily, the skaven circled around the man, making little mock attacks that drove him steadily backwards. Each step he took allowed the ratmen to spread out, the skaven at either extremity fanning out to nip at the peasant’s flanks.

There was nowhere the man-thing could retreat to. The wattle-and-daub wall behind him was smoking away, cinders dribbling from its burning face. The building beyond it was fully engulfed, its roof a fiery pyre that blazed into the night sky. There were a few man-things inside the building – their screams made that clear – but bullets from Fester’s slingers were keeping the Sylvanians penned up inside the burnwing structure. No hope for the doomed peasant there.

Moved by some caprice, Skrittar stretched forth his horned staff, channelling magical energies into the warpstone talisman set between the curled horns. He chittered an invocation, drawing down the malignity of the Horned Rat. Despite the fires blazing away in the village, a chill crept into the air as he worked his sorcery. A green glow leapt from the talisman, flashing down the lane. One of the sword-rats squeaked in agony as the light slashed through him, boring a smouldering crater in his shoulder. Undiminished by its incidental victim, Skrittar’s spell struck onwards, slamming into the embattled peasant’s head and popping it like an engorged tick.

Skrittar chittered maliciously as the surviving clanrats scattered, terrified by the grey seer’s display of magic, leaving their stricken comrade to writhe and bleed in the mud. The seerlord savoured their fear. It was good to remind the vermin of Clan Fester who was in charge, who held the real reins of power in their little alliance.

The seerlord whipped his tail through the mud in annoyance. Left to his own devices, he would have preferred to avoid the inconvenience of an alliance altogether. But that ten-flea tyrant Vecteek had made decrees limiting the number of grey seers the Order could maintain and had further placed prohibitions on the Order possessing any warriors of its own. He had seen to it that the Order would never be self-sufficient, claiming that the grey seers must serve the needs of all skaven rather than their own selfish interests. Of course, the despot hadn’t made similar conditions to control the upstart heretics of Clan Pestilens! The plague monks were more powerful now than ever, with two seats on the Council and the entire Under-Empire squeaking their praises because of the Black Plague!

They would soon squeak a different tune. With the rat-power of Clan Fester’s teeming masses to provide him with the brute force he needed, Skrittar would fill the halls of the Shattered Tower with warpstone. He would curb the dictatorship of Vecteek and Clan Rictus, usher in a new age of balance and cooperation among the clans where no one voice was supreme among the skaven. All would hearken to the Voice of the Horned One through His chosen instrument, Seerlord Skrittar. The clans would be led by the wisdom of their god, and any that wouldn’t hearken to Skrittar’s words would be exterminated.

Casting his gaze across the burning village, Skrittar watched as Clan Fester’s slaves scurried about the fields and meadows, pawing at the dirt as they retrieved nuggets of raw warpstone from the ground. His spell had performed even more magnificently than he had dared dream. The land was littered with warpstone ripped from the moon, so much that he could see a green glow on the horizon when he squinted his eyes. It might take years to gather it all!

Not that Skrittar intended to be so patient. He’d contact Warlord Manglrr Baneburrow and demand he send more labourers. He didn’t care exactly where Manglrr got them. There were plenty of weaker clans Fester could conquer and enslave to deliver the workers he needed.

Manglrr would obey, too. There was no question of that. Sylvania was ripe for the picking, helpless at Skrittar’s feet. Half the province was dead because of the plague, and the other half had been poisoned by the warpstone.

Who was there left with the strength to oppose the skaven?

CHAPTER FOUR

Middenheim
Sigmarzeit, 1118

There were many stories about the Kineater, but the most popular held that the thing had been born to the family of a prosperous raugraf. The rural lord was desperate for an heir, and after giving birth to daughters for twelve years, his weary wife had prayed to the Ruinous Powers for a son. In their malice, the Dark Gods had answered her, but the son she bore was far less than human. For many years, the raugraf had kept the mutant child locked inside a hidden room in his castle, but with the coming of the Black Plague, his lands had become too desolate to feed the horrible monster. One night, wracked by hunger, the mutant had escaped, butchering its own family to sate its appetite. Since that time, the Kineater had prowled the Drakwald, preying upon any human it could catch.

It was only a few minutes before Albrecht returned, his face as pale as snow. Before he even acknowledged his prince, the trapper went to his horse and removed a clay bottle from the saddle bag. Taking a deep draw from the bottle to fortify himself, he related what he had seen. ‘There’s a small clearing ahead,’ Albrecht said. ‘Around a dozen beastmen. They’re cooking a couple of travellers.’

‘The Kineater?’ Mandred asked. Beastmen were primitive brutes, creatures that normally preferred their meat raw. It was the Kineater who was accustomed to cooking its fare.

Albrecht answered with a nod. ‘We’re downwind. I don’t think they’re aware we’re here.’

‘We can slip back to the trail then,’ Beck decided, an uneasy look on his face.

‘They’d be gone before we could come back with more men,’ Mandred cursed. Ending the depredations of the Kin-eater wouldn’t make the Drakwald safe, but it would avenge many a slaughtered traveller.

Albrecht took another draw from his bottle. He hesitated before speaking, knowing how the prince would react to the rest of his report. ‘They have two more travellers,’ he said. ‘Live captives.’

Mandred cast his gaze across the face of each of his followers. They knew what Albrecht’s words meant. Prisoners taken by the Kineater wouldn’t stay alive very long. If they went back for help, they would only find gnawed bones upon their return. Without a word, Mandred lowered himself from his saddle. The horses would be awkward to manoeuvre through the trees, even if the sound of hooves didn’t betray them to the beastmen.

‘Dismount,’ Beck called out, putting actions to words. Grimly, the rangers followed suit. They were brave, valiant men. They didn’t demur. Though the odds against them were high, they knew that if they didn’t try then none of them would be able to call himself a man ever again.

‘Stay downwind,’ Albrecht hissed, removing his bow from his saddle. ‘We’ve one chance to surprise them.’

‘Strike fast and strike hard,’ Mandred echoed the trapper. He frowned at the whalebone bow his aunt had given him. He’d been so impressed with the finery of the weapon he’d never stopped to consider its practicality. He hoped it wouldn’t fail him.

Emulating the ghostly silence of Albrecht, the men crept through the trees. It wasn’t long before the crackle of flames and the rough grunts of inhuman voices reached their ears. Soon, they were within sight of the clearing.

Mandred quickly looked away from the horrible vision of the campfire and what smouldered among the embers. He gazed instead at the monstrous creatures ranged about the clearing. They were a motley confusion of fur and horns, hooves and claws. Some of the brutes stood a full head taller than a man while others were short, hunched things. A few of the beastmen affected the rudiments of armour, strips of chain and plate plundered from those they had killed. Others had branded their fur with primitive glyphs and crude symbols, brazenly sporting the marks of their savage gods.

The prince gave a start when he spied a scrawny, slinking shape among the herd. While the other beastmen favoured goats and bulls and beasts of the field, this one had a verminous cast to it. He was reminded of the disgusting mutant he had fought on the walls of Middenheim so many years ago. The horror he looked upon now was very much made in the same loathsome image.

Memories of ratmen faded as Mandred’s gaze fell upon the prisoners Albrecht had seen. There were two of them, a slightly flabby middle-aged man and a rather comely woman. Both had been stripped and bound to the trunk of a tree at the edge of the clearing. As he watched, a gigantic beastman stalked towards the captives, a butcher’s cleaver clenched in an almost human fist.

Mandred knew this must be the Kineater. While a few of its herd affected strips of armour or simple loincloths, this brute draped itself in a primitive parody of a nobleman’s cloak, stitched together from a horse’s tabard and with a collar of human scalps. The thing’s hooves were polished to a bright sheen and the massive horns that spread from its forehead were decorated with a litter of silver chains, jewelled necklaces and other gaudy plunder. Below the horns, the monster’s face was horribly human, a maddeningly handsome visage, the countenance of some ancient forest god.

The Kineater’s lips pulled back in a grisly smile as it reached towards the woman. Mandred saw her flinch as the cold metal of the cleaver touched her bare back. The monster’s fingers pawed at her long hair. She struggled to avoid the brute’s touch, provoking a bray of laughter that had nothing human in it.

The whistle of a thrush reached Mandred’s ears, the sign Albrecht had positioned the last of the men around the clearing. The prince didn’t linger. In one smooth motion, he raised his bow and loosed a shaft into the Kineater.

The beast chief cried out in pain as Mandred’s arrow caught it in the small of the back. It reared back, throwing aside its cloak and exposing a left arm that was swollen into the clawed limb of a sea creature. The Kineater barked and howled, its fury throwing the rest of its herd into a frenzy.

More shafts came flying from the trees. The rangers struck true with their aim, every arrow hitting its mark. Several of the monsters collapsed, twitching in the dirt. Others whined in pain, struggling to pluck the shafts from their hairy hides. Albrecht had positioned the men well, catching their foe in a murderous crossfire. A second volley sent the beasts into a panic.

The luxury of picking off the monsters with archery, however, was one that the captives couldn’t afford. With three arrows sticking from its body, the Kineater turned once more towards the woman, its man-like face twisted into a mask of vindictive hate.

Before the beastlord could raise its cleaver, Mandred burst from the trees. Shouting at the top of his voice, he loosed one last arrow into the monster and drew his sword. The Kineater swung around, eyes glaring at the man who had dared attack it. The last arrow had hurt it, to be certain, but not enough harm to slow it down. Stamping its hooves, the beast charged straight at Mandred.

‘Aid the prince!’ Beck called out. From the trees, men were leaping into the clearing with drawn swords. Several of the beastmen that might otherwise have rallied to their chieftain turned about and leapt upon these new foes.

The Kineater wasn’t distracted. Straight as one of Albrecht’s arrows, the beastman came for Mandred, horns lowered and cleaver upraised. The prince awaited the brute’s charge, diving away as those jagged horns came at him. Lashing out with his blade, he caught the Kineater just inside the pit of its arm. Steel slashed tendon and muscle in a welter of gore. The beastman screamed in pain as its arm fell limp at its side, and the cleaver tumbled from nerveless fingers.

Mandred followed up the crippling blow with a vicious slash across the Kineater’s back, slicing a great flap of hide from its flesh. Before he could attack again, the brute’s claw came whipping around. The enormous pincer closed tight around him, only the mail beneath his coat preventing him from being cut in half by the jagged mass of chitin. His sword arm, however, was pinned to his side, locked within the pincer’s embrace. He could feel the bones grind together as the Kineater increased the pressure and dragged him to the ground.

Mandred glared up at the monster’s handsome face as it leered down at him. His fist slammed into the Kineater’s nose, splashing its visage in its own blood. The brute reared back, wailing in pain, but didn’t release the pressure of its claw. Savagely, it drove its hoof down upon Mandred’s free arm, pinning it to the earth. Bloodied lips pulled back in a malicious smile.

Slowly, the Kineater bent over Mandred, bringing its sharp fangs towards his throat.

Before the brute could strike, a white blur swept between it and its foe. Mandred turned his face as hot blood sprayed over him. He felt the claw’s pressure vanish, the imprisoning hoof lift away. Quickly he rolled onto his feet, raising his sword to fend off a renewed attack. What he saw made him marvel. The Kineater was staggering about the clearing, its claw clamped about its own neck trying to staunch the torrent of blood streaming from its torn throat. The brute stumbled about for a moment, then collapsed, its beauteous face slamming into the embers of the fire.

Mandred could only shake his head in wonder at his strange rescue. He didn’t have long to ponder it, however. The clamour of battle yet rang within the clearing. The Kineater was dead, but the fiend’s herd was still in the fight.

Ignoring the hurt of his battered body, Mandred rushed to help his embattled patrol.

‘Voller and Gustav,’ Mandred said, his voice sombre as he stared down at the dead rangers. Victory over the beastmen hadn’t come without a cost. Not one man of the patrol was without his wounds, but Voller and Gustav had made the ultimate sacrifice. ‘They will be remembered,’ he vowed.

Leaving the surviving ranger and Albrecht to prepare the bodies for transport back to Middenheim, Mandred walked across the bloodied battlefield. A few of the beastmen had escaped the destruction of the Kineater. He looked in vain for the carcass of the rat-like monster, so he knew at least that obscenity had gone free. It was just as well. The survivors would seek places in other warherds and take with them the story of this fight. It might make some of the chiefs think twice before straying so close to the Ulricsberg.

‘How are they?’ Mandred asked Beck as he approached the tree where the captives had been bound. The knight had already cut them from their bonds and the two prisoners were sitting huddled together on the ground. The middle-aged man was draped in Beck’s cloak and doing his best to share the warmth of the garment with the shivering woman beside him. Mandred noted with some interest the Kineater’s cloak lying in a heap a short distance away.

‘Cold and scared,’ Beck answered. He sighed and pointed at the woman. ‘She refused to wrap herself in the chief’s cloak.’

The woman looked up at Mandred. Despite her ordeal and the less than dignified condition she was in, there was a firmness, a pride in that gaze that impressed the prince. ‘Can you blame her?’ Mandred asked, unfastening the brooch that pinned his own cloak. With a courteous bow, he offered it to the woman.

Beck shook his head. ‘Damn foolishness,’ he grumbled. ‘Preferring to freeze.’

The woman shot him a scowling look. ‘You… didn’t have… the experience of… knowing your hair was going to end up adorning that… filth.’

The knight’s face flushed and he was unable to hold the woman’s glare. ‘I’ll... I’ll see about the horses, your grace.’ Almost unconsciously, he glanced back at the woman, then hurried away when she tightened Mandred’s cloak about herself with an angry tug.

The man paid no attention to the knight’s withdrawal, more interested in the address Beck had used. ‘Pardon my insolence,’ he begged in a voice that was at once cultured and deferential, ‘but that man called you “your grace”. Would I be correct in believing we owe our deliverance to Prince Mandred von Zelt?’

‘You have me at a disadvantage,’ Mandred answered. He smiled benignly at the two wayfarers. ‘I don’t know how my name is regarded in your land. I would be right in detecting the accent of Reikland in your words?’

The traveller chuckled and bowed. ‘There are some who are envious of Middenheim and would like to see her rulers strung up like a Sigmarsfest goose,’ he admitted. ‘But, that sort tends to stay in Altdorf.’ Mustering what dignity his state of undress allowed, he presented himself with such formality as circumstances would afford. ‘You see before you Friar Richter, a humble priest of Holy Sigmar and confessor to her ladyship, Mirella von Wittmar.’

Mandred nodded to the priest. ‘Brother Richter,’ he said. Turning to the woman, he found his eyes lingering on her proud face. ‘Lady Mirella,’ he said, bowing to kiss her hand.

‘I thank you for your gallantry,’ Mirella returned. She hadn’t blushed under Beck’s scrutiny, but colour rushed to her cheeks as the prince released her hand. Mandred pretended not to notice and quickly looked away.

‘Would I be correct in the belief that you are seeking refuge in Middenheim?’ he asked. It was a foolish question. There wasn’t any other reason for a Reikland noblewoman and her confessor to be traipsing about in the Drakwald.

‘We beg asylum from your father,’ Brother Richter answered. He sighed and seemed to shrink visibly as a great sorrow depressed him. ‘Circumstances make it imperative we surrender ourselves to the consideration of Graf Gunthar.’

Mandred stared hard at the priest, puzzled by his manner of speech. Perhaps it was an affectation of the Sigmarite temple, but for a mere confessor, Brother Richter spoke as though he were the social equal of Lady Mirella. His surprise must have shown on his face, for the noblewoman gave the priest a warning glance.

‘There is a price on my head,’ Mirella stated, trying to give Mandred something else to think about. ‘I was implicated in Prince Sigdan’s plot against Emperor Boris.’

Mandred smiled at her frankness. ‘Then you are doubly welcome in Middenheim,’ he said. He turned as he heard Beck coming back with the horses. A thought occurred to him. ‘I fear we’ll need one of the horses to carry our dead,’ he admitted with a touch of awkwardness. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to ride double.’

Brother Richter’s face curled in a sly grin. ‘I fear I’m a poor horseman,’ he confessed.

‘You can ride with me then,’ Mandred decided.

The flustered priest sputtered a protest. ‘Oh, I’ll be quite all right on my own,’ he said. ‘I just… Well… riding double might… be inconvenient.’ Rolling his eyes he nodded his head towards Mirella. Mandred smiled when he caught Brother Richter’s meaning.

‘Lady Mirella, may I offer you my saddle?’ the prince asked. Lowering her eyes, the noblewoman sketched the slightest nod of her head.

As they prepared to quit the grisly clearing, Mandred gave one last look at the carcasses of the Kineater and its herd. In accordance with custom, the head of each monster had been cut from its body and staked to the branch of a tree, a warning to others of their breed. Only the Kineater’s head had been kept, lashed to Albrecht’s saddle, a trophy that would bring a ray of cheer to the people of Middenheim when it was set upon the walls.

‘What’s wrong?’ Lady Mirella asked Mandred. Seated behind him in the saddle, she had felt the prince start. She followed the direction of his gaze, but saw only an old log lying just at the edge of the clearing.

Mandred, however, found himself staring into the frosty eyes of a great white wolf. A wolf with blood on its muzzle.

‘Those with a destiny are watched over by the gods.’ Seated upon Voller’s horse, Brother Richter was also staring in the direction of the log. Mandred glanced at the priest, but when he looked back, the wolf was gone.

‘It guided me here,’ Mandred told the priest, feeling a chill run through him. Even at its most benign, there was an unsettling wrongness about magic. ‘What does it mean?’

‘Only time may tell,’ Richter admitted. ‘But is it not reassuring to know that the good gods have not abandoned us?’ He nudged the flanks of his horse with his bare feet, urging the steed through the trees with a display of expert horsemanship. Mandred smiled and shook his head.

‘What was that all about?’ Mirella asked, confused by the exchange between prince and priest, and even more at its cause.

‘Your confessor claims I am meant for great things,’ Mandred said. Without any warning, he spurred his horse forwards, drawing a gasp of surprise from the woman. Mirella wrapped her arms around him, holding him tight.

Somehow, Mandred was sure the trip back was going to feel much shorter than the journey out.

Carroburg
Brauzeit, 1114

The appointments within Schloss Hohenbach had no part of the grim, imposing exterior of the castle. Inside, the halls were panelled in cherrywood and teak, the floors lined with expensive furs and exotic rugs, the ceilings bristling with chandeliers of silver and crystal. Lavish tapestries, exuberant sculptures and vibrant paintings were displayed in profusion wherever the eye was turned. Rich perfumes rewarded the nose, the melodies of master musicians delighted the ear, silks and satins caressed the skin. The plunder of an Empire had been poured into Boris’s palatial hermitage, exhibited in obscene splendour to astound and awe the chosen elite.

While a nation starved, while entire communities perished from want and disease, those within the castle were subjected to every delight they could imagine. Fine foods from every corner of the known world, dancers and performers, liquors and stimulants of every stripe and provenance. Each of the Emperor’s noble guests was nightly presented with a chalice of gold filled with elven wine looted from prehuman ruins by the most daring of adventurers. To enhance the richness of the flavour, a pearl of matchless colour and size was dropped into the cup, dissolved in the eldritch inebriant.

For most of his guests, the delights of the Emperor’s retreat were exhilarating, allowing them to abandon themselves in the pleasures of the moment and forget the horrors that raged beyond the castle. The Black Plague might reign in Stirland and Sylvania, in Averheim and Altdorf, but it had no place here. Here, the plague could not touch them.

Princess Erna could not share in such wanton indulgence. Each extravagance only increased her contempt for the Emperor and all that he represented. Only a monster could surround himself with such luxury while his subjects were decimated by famine and pestilence, while his realm was wracked by war and disease.

There were others, to be certain, who shared Erna’s loathing, but they were too afraid not to hide their disapproval. The castle offered sanctuary. If they displeased the Emperor, he might eject them from their refuge, cast them once more into the horrors of a world on the brink of apocalypse.

Erna knew she wasn’t alone. She saw the way Markgraf Luther von Metzgernstein glowered whenever the Emperor wasn’t looking, fuming over the imprisonment of his six-year-old son in the castle dungeons. She watched Baron von Kirchof’s alarm when the Emperor’s eyes lingered on the shapely figure of his niece. She saw the pious shock in the kindly eyes of Matriarch Katrina Ochs, the Empire’s supreme priestess of Shallya, when the Emperor cast aside decency in order to placate one of his jaded whims.

Unlike her, however, these dissidents hid their true feelings. Day by day, she saw their convictions slink deeper and deeper inside them, shrinking a little more with each outrage the Emperor presented. Whether it was making crippled halflings dance a waltz or forcing a stuttering buffoon to recite the line of emperors, Boris’s perverse amusements went unchallenged by the sycophants he had gathered to him.

It was strange that while the convictions of others should wither under the influence of Boris, her own courage should be awakened. Kreyssig had failed to beat the heart from her and the daily offences perpetrated by the Emperor and his court caused Erna to rediscover her idealism. From shuddering fear, she began to treat the Emperor with disdain, even insolence. She knew there would be punishment for her openness, her refusal to condone the Emperor’s wickedness.

What she didn’t know was the shape that punishment would take.

One day, after an opulent luncheon of roast pheasant and minced truffles, the Emperor led his guests out onto the parapet overlooking the approach to the castle. Servants waited upon the dignitaries, presenting the Grand Prince of Stirland with a goblet of Bretonnian wine, offering the High Duchess of Nordland a trencher of pickled sturgeon eyes, enticing the Arch-Count of Averland with a platter of smoked swan. Boris waited while his guests sampled the extravagant fare, then, with a smile that Erna knew was directed solely towards her, he strode to the battlements and beckoned his guests to join him.

‘A diversion to feast your eyes as you’ve just feasted your bellies,’ the Emperor announced. He brought his hands together in a loud clap when some of his noble guests were peering down from the parapet, ensuring that Erna was among them. ‘There are some of you who disapprove of frivolity,’ he announced, waving aside the protests from his more voluble sycophants. ‘There are some of you who think that all this pleasure is indecent and wasteful.’

Boris paused, looking straight into Erna’s eyes. Down below, a group of soldiers had appeared, escorting a mob of tatterdemalion starvelings that had been culled from the streets of Carroburg.

‘Oh, what means this?’ Palatine Istvan Dohnanyi, the dapper pretender to the Talabecland peerage, asked, leaning between the crenellations for a better look.

‘I think His Imperial Majesty has some clever amusement planned,’ the rotund Count Artur of Nuln laughed.

Gustav van Meers, a Westerland peasant who’d earned his place among the inmates of Schloss Hohenbach by dint of his immense fortune – a fortune looted from Marienburg during the Norscan invasion – waved a perfumed handkerchief at the wretches below. ‘Not the most appealing specimens,’ he observed, hoping to illustrate to his noble peers that he was far above such common beggars.

‘What are you going to do with them?’ von Kirchof asked. Knowing the Emperor’s distaste for the unsightly, he was at a loss to understand why Boris would have such a ragged mob assembled outside the castle. Because he found it disturbing, it was easy for him to forget the sadistic humour that his sovereign sometimes indulged.

Emperor Boris smiled at his champion, and again made a point of locking eyes with Erna. ‘Why, we are going to feed these poor creatures,’ he said. ‘Just as the Thuringian kings of old used to throw table scraps to their dogs.’ He waved his hand to the guards below. At his sign, they shoved some of the peasants forwards, allowing them to come close to the wall. Almost at once, the rabble sent whining entreaties to the nobles staring down at them.

Von Kirchof was the first to react to the pleas, reaching to one of the trenchers and tossing a cut of smoked eel to one of the ragged men. Von Metzgernstein followed his example with a slice of pheasant. A few of the noble guests started to likewise throw scraps of food to the beggars. Erna, however, made no move to the wall. She was watching Emperor Boris, watching as his face contorted again into that cherubic grin, as the imp of perversity once more asserted itself.

‘Friends! Friends!’ the Emperor shouted, motioning his guests away from the wall. ‘This is hardly a fitting spectacle! It lacks a sense of theatre. It is not a true representation of the Thuringian lords.’ His face still lit by his ghastly humour, he looked down at the hungry peasants. ‘It is not fit that such aristocratic sensibilities should be subjected to the presence of wretched beggars. That would be offensive. But if we were to feed a few stray dogs… Well, what man does not show compassion to a dog?’

The Emperor raised his hand, displaying a cut of venison. He waved it to and fro before the hungry eyes of the peasants. Back and forth he teased them until one of the wretches understood what was expected. Dropping to all fours, the man barked and panted and whined. Laughing, Boris dropped the venison to the ground near the peasant. ‘No hands,’ he warned when the man started to stand. ‘Be a good dog.’

The peasant froze, a despondent sob rising from him. Then, obediently, he crawled to the meat and retrieved it from the dirt with his teeth. Emperor Boris laughed and applauded. He turned to his guests. ‘Now you see how the game should be played. If they expect to be fed like dogs, then they should act like dogs.’

The Emperor’s injunction had the most jaded of his court dashing to the servants and retrieving handfuls of food to throw at the peasants after teasing a humiliating performance out of them. A few of the courtiers hesitated, but were too concerned about drawing Boris’s disfavour to restrain themselves. Some made a better show of enjoying the cruel performance than others, but they threw food down to the ‘dogs’ just the same.

Doktor Moschner mounted the only kind of protest. ‘Your Imperial Majesty, I think it is unwise to bring these people here,’ he confided to the monarch. ‘These are low-born peasants. They may be carrying the plague.’

The cherubic smile dropped from the Emperor’s face, the humour fading into glowering severity. ‘There is no plague in Carroburg,’ Boris declared. ‘That is why We removed Our court here, why We left that peasant rascal Kreyssig in charge of Altdorf.’

The physician flinched at the ire in his master’s voice. ‘Forgive me… I only thought…’

Emperor Boris was already moving away, turning his attention to Princess Erna. Like the doktor, she hadn’t taken part in his cruel jest. He stopped a few paces from the woman, a cold smile back on his face.

‘Be careful, my dear,’ the Emperor advised, staring at her expression of undisguised disapproval. ‘If you become too much a boor, then We might decide you don’t like Our company.’

The Emperor nodded his head towards the battlements where his sycophants laughed and joked as they tossed scraps to the begging peasants. ‘If We tire of you, We might have to throw you to the dogs.’

CHAPTER FIVE

Altdorf
Sommerzeit, 1114

The uproar within the council chamber was almost deafening. From his position at the head of the table, Adolf Kreyssig was afforded a good look at the bedlam. For all their outrage, he knew the fury of the councillors was all bluster. The presence of thirty armed Kaiserjaeger would make the nobles remember their place.

Lord Ratimir rose from his seat, smashing his lead drinking goblet on the table, trying to force some measure of order. ‘The Protector has spoken!’ he shouted, punctuating each word with a blow against the table. ‘He has made an Imperial diktat! His word is law!’

Count Holgwer von Haag shook his fist at Ratimir, then spun around to gesticulate at Kreyssig himself. ‘The Emperor will hear of this, you jumped up peasant scum! You have no right to–’

Kreyssig picked up the crystal ewer of wine resting before him and with a violent heave dashed it against the top of the table. Shards of glass exploded among the councillors, causing even the grizzled Duke Vidor to flinch back in alarm. A tense silence descended on the council chamber.

‘I have every right,’ Kreyssig growled at von Haag. He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb, indicating the empty Imperial throne standing upon its marble dais. ‘You were there, all of you, when His Imperial Majesty appointed me Protector of the Empire. Have you asked yourself why he chose me, not a count or a baron or a duke?’ He let the question linger, watching little flickers of anxiety play across the faces of his audience. It didn’t take an enchanter to know that these blue-bloods had been asking themselves that question every hour of every day since the ceremony at the Great Cathedral of Sigmar.

Kreyssig extended his hand, directing an accusing finger at the men seated around the table. ‘His Imperial Majesty chose me because he feels he cannot trust you nobles. The Prince of Altdorf was the ringleader of the conspiracy to depose him. The noble representatives of Stirland and Westerland and Drakwald were party to that treachery. The Graf of Middenheim bestowed his endorsement and support. The noble-born Reiksmarshal turned three-quarters of the Imperial army to treason and brigandry!’ Kreyssig’s lip curled back in a vicious sneer. ‘No, I think the Emperor will sanction my decision to reconstitute this council with men of my choosing.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘You are welcome to protest, but know that I will take any such move as seditious and the instigators of such action will be investigated. Do you feel your loyalty is equal to such scrutiny?’

‘Mine is,’ growled Duke Vidor. He wore the black and gold of the Imperial army’s highest echelon, a green griffon rampant embroidered across the breast and a jewelled pectoral hanging from his neck. Except for the Imperial signet, Vidor already bore the paraphernalia of Reiksmarshal. Kreyssig knew how keenly the nobleman desired to wear the signet on his finger.

Kreyssig also knew that there was no man he could less afford to place in that position. Duke Vidor was of the old families, the old blood, boasting a pedigree that went clear back to the age of Sigmar. He was an embodiment of the aristocratic mentality, the arrogance of class and breeding that regarded those of commoner origins as less than animals. No amount of accomplishment or ability could ever overcome the failing of parentage in the eyes of men like Vidor.

There was no warmth in the smile Kreyssig directed at the Duke. ‘Your loyalty is beyond question?’ he asked, his words dripping with mockery.

‘I pursued that traitor Boeckenfoerde across four provinces and routed his rabble into the Ungol wastes!’ Vidor roared.

Like a spider drawing in its web, Kreyssig seized his prey. ‘Your orders were to bring the traitor’s head back and set it at the foot of Our Glorious Emperor’s throne!’ Savagely, Kreyssig threw back his chair and sent it crashing to the floor. A few steps brought him to the base of the marble dais. His hand pointing at the three steps beneath the Imperial seat, he turned and glared at Vidor. ‘Where is Boeckenfoerde’s head?’

Duke Vidor glared back at Kreyssig. ‘Oh no… You’ll not bait me! I did all that was reasonable, chased the cur beyond our borders…’

‘Beyond the reach of Imperial justice,’ Kreyssig snarled back. ‘Some affectation of noblesse oblige, taking it upon yourself to give Boeckenfoerde the choice of exile over execution?’

Vidor was on his feet now, hands clenched at his sides. ‘You peasant dog! You dare accuse me!’

‘I have been appointed Protector of the Empire,’ Kreyssig replied, a menacing calm in his voice. ‘It is my duty to accuse those whose service to the Emperor has been… questionable.’ He stalked back to the table, waiting while two of his Kaiserjaeger righted the upset chair. Seating himself again, Kreyssig glanced around the table, then fixed his gaze on Vidor. ‘Your services will not be required,’ he told the nobleman. ‘I will be appointing Astrid Soehnlein as new Reiksmarshal. If you do not wish to take orders from a peasant, I suggest you retire to your estates. While you still have them.’

Duke Vidor glowered at Kreyssig, his hands closing into fists, his teeth grinding as he clenched his jaw. Without a word, he tore the pectoral from his neck and dropped it on the table.

Kreyssig watched the fuming noble depart. As the door closed behind Vidor, he turned his cold gaze back upon the other councillors. ‘I trust the rest of you who are being relieved of your duties will accept my decision with the grace befitting your station.’

The reptilian smile flashed over the Protector’s face. ‘Otherwise people might develop strange ideas about your loyalty to Emperor Boris.’

Ragged, emaciated, unkempt and unwashed, the denizens of Albrecht’s Close emerged from their hovels, drawn from behind locked doors by the commotion in the street. Many had taken refuge in their half-timber homes and earthen grubenhäuser months ago, trying to hide from the plague running rampant through the city. As they stirred from their seclusion and hobbled out into the street, they shaded their eyes against the sting of sunlight and coughed at the forgotten sensation of open air.

The plague had wrought havoc in Albrecht’s Close, once the domain of prosperous merchants and their peasant tenants. Many of the buildings were derelict, the white cross of disease daubed upon their doors. Many others had been allowed to fall into horrendous disrepair, their inhabitants not daring to summon craftsmen to effect repairs lest they bring the plague into their homes. One arm of the close was a blackened ruin, the residue of a winter fire that had consumed a dozen homes before its wrath was spent.

It was towards this swathe of charred timbers and soot-stained rock that the ragged crowd was drawn. Gaunt with hunger, feverish with fear, finery reduced to the rags of poverty, they were a typical sampling of what pernicious disease and malignant taxation had done to the common folk of Altdorf. They were a people who felt abandoned by gods and Emperor, cast into the unforgiving darkness of Old Night itself.

They were a people desperate to seize upon any hope. And for their sins, hope had descended upon the inhabitants of Albrecht’s Close.

He marched down the street, his powerful build swathed in a cloak of black, a heavy hood framing his sharp, birdlike face. About his neck hung an ornament of shining gold, the icon of a clenched fist. In one hand he bore a heavy book bound in leopard skin and banded in steel. In the other hand, raised high that its light might shine into the shadows of footpath and alleyway, he held a blazing torch. In a stern, booming voice, he compelled the people of the close to stir.

‘Altdorfers!’ the black spectre shouted. ‘The judgement of the gods is upon you! Too long have you wallowed in the sins of wantonness and luxury. Too long have you forsaken the virtue of humility, forgotten your obligations to the divine court! The weight of your inequities has visited pestilence and famine on this city. The gods have turned their faces from you. They have become deaf to shallow prayers issuing from shallow hearts. You beg their grace, but you do so without faith. Without conviction!’

The orator stopped, turning to stare accusingly at the throng filing into the street. He shook the torch, sending embers dancing into the shadows. He brandished the book, letting its pages rustle. ‘You implore the gods for solace, ask them to spare your petty lives. Yet you do not spare a thought for the quality of your souls! When the gods remain silent, you lend yourselves to confusion and blasphemy. You seek succour from those who do not believe in the authority of the gods. You despair and would give yourselves over into the deceit of those who cavort with the Ruinous Powers!’

On uttering his last condemnation of the crowd, the speaker turned, shaking his torch at a miserable-looking woman bound in chains and being dragged through the street by a pair of shaven-headed acolytes in the brown robes of flagellants. ‘This creature sought to lead you down the path of damnation. Sought to trap you in her profane lies. To cure your flesh by defiling your soul!’

‘You have chained Mutti Angela,’ a horrified onlooker exclaimed. ‘She is a healer…’

‘She is a pawn of daemons!’ the black spectre roared, his booming voice drowning out the peasant’s protest. ‘She is a corruption polluting the virtue of this community, a poisonous viper spitting her venom into the hearts of all she touches.’ He waved the torch overhead, letting embers shower down onto his hood, drawing the attention of the crowd away from the man who had spoken for Mutti Angela.

‘I am called Auernheimer,’ he declared. ‘I serve the great god Solkan, the divine fist of retribution. I am a witch-taker.’ He looked back at the chained woman. ‘This creature, this abomination that professes to protect you against the plague, is a witch.’

The statement brought gasps of alarm from the crowd. Several voices rose in objection, incredulous cries against Auernheimer’s claims.

‘Your deception is so great that even now you cling to this creature’s lies,’ the witch-taker declared. His fiery gaze swept across the crowd. ‘How long has this obscenity practised her witchery among you? Has it stopped the plague? Has it saved any of you? No! There is only one way to salvation. Submit to the authority of the gods. Bow to the judgement of Great Solkan!’

Auernheimer paused, studying the crowd. Slowly, he lowered the holy book, hooking it to a ring on his belt. Reaching beneath his cloak, he withdrew a long iron needle. ‘Still you doubt, but I shall prove to you the veracity of my words!’ In a single vicious motion, he thrust the needle into his own cheek. Blood bubbled from the wound as he worried the needle back and forth. The peasants watched in morbid fascination as he pulled the needle free.

‘A man will bleed,’ Auernheimer declaimed, shaking the bloody needle. ‘Should I prick any one of you, you too would bleed. But a witch,’ he turned and strode towards the chained woman, ‘a witch has no blood in her veins, only the filth of Chaos!’

Before anyone knew what he was about, Auernheimer stabbed the needle into the woman’s arm. The captive cried out in fright and pain, but her scream was drowned out by the horrified shrieks of the crowd. Where the needle had drawn blood from the witch-taker, the substance bubbling from the woman’s wound was a stinking brown sludge.

‘Witch!’ a horrified peasant exclaimed. The cry was soon taken up by others. Soon the shout was taken up by the entire crowd.

Auernheimer withdrew the needle, wiping it clean on his cloak before returning it to his pocket. ‘Purge the corruption of the witch!’ he roared. ‘Cleanse its blight from your community! Purify this fleshy vestment of evil!’ He waved his torch overhead once more, sending embers dancing through the street.

‘Cast out the daughters of Chaos by burning them!’

The witch-taker’s invective aroused the terrified mob. Peasants rushed upon the nearest of the derelict structures, ripping out shutters and pulling down doors. Furniture was smashed and broken, shingles wrenched from the edges of overhangs. Soon, a great mound of wood was growing amid the burned-out ruins. When it had risen high enough, the accused witch was thrust forwards, sent crashing into the pile.

Auernheimer waved his torch overhead one last time before sending the brand flying from his hand to sail into the piled wood. The debris quickly caught flame. Angela shrieked, scrambling to escape the fire. As she tried to crawl away from the pile, peasants thrust her back with pitchforks and spades. The woman’s efforts became more frantic as the fire kissed her flesh, but the more horrendous her injuries, the more determined the peasants were to keep her from escaping the conflagration.

When Angela’s strength failed and she at last collapsed amid the flames, Auernheimer unhooked the tome from his belt and led the peasants in a solemn psalm praising the grim beneficence of Solkan, Father of Vengeance.

For their sins, the people of Albrecht’s Close rallied to a new and terrible redeemer.

Middenheim,
Sommerzeit, 1118

Ar-Ulric cast an appraising eye over Brother Richter as the priest seated himself at the right hand of Prince Mandred. The High Priest of Ulric teased his snowy moustache with a wrinkled hand as he walked around the Fauschlagstein, the great stone council table carved from a single block of mountain granite, and took his seat near that of Graf Gunthar. Even when he was seated, the old cleric couldn’t keep his eyes from straying towards the Sigmarite or an amused expression from tugging at his face.

Mandred found Ar-Ulric’s demeanour puzzling and consequently annoying. The priest was getting on in his years, far older than any wolf-priest before him. Age had lent him a taciturnity that made a dwarf seem chipper by comparison.

Thoughts of dwarfs made him look over at Thane Hardin Gunarsson, chief of Middenheim’s dwarf population. More properly, the dwarfs lived beneath the city, deep inside the Ulricsberg – the mountain they called Grungni’s Tower – itself. The halls of Karak Grazhyakh ran through the whole of the mountain and, it was said, its mines delved deep into the bedrock below. Thane Hardin was a stoic, studious representative for his people, speaking rarely and then only with cautious deliberation.

Others gathered about the table represented the noble families of Middenheim, such as Duke Schneidereit and Margraf von Ulmann. The graf’s chamberlain, the pessimistic Viscount von Vogelthal, was also in attendance, wearing his usual cynical scowl. Grand Master Vitholf of the White Wolves, successor of Grand Master Arno, sat beside the chamberlain, trying to ignore Mandred’s presence. The knight blamed Mandred for Arno’s death, a grudge that hurt the prince all the more because he himself felt it to be justified.

All those seated around the Fauschlagstein stood as Graf Gunthar entered the room, dressed in the rich blue raiment he always affected at such meetings. The graf nodded respectfully to Lady Mirella and Brother Richter, then circled around to the wolf-armed seat at the head of the table. As he lowered himself into the high-backed chair, his councillors resumed their seats.

For the better part of an hour, the graf and his council listened attentively as Mirella and Richter described the situation in the south, the political climate in Altdorf and the status of the Imperial court. Rumours of much that they had to relate had reached Middenheim already, carried by the trickle of refugees who managed the dangerous journey, but to have the facts related to them by persons who had actually been there was accorded far greater import. Graf Gunthar was particularly struck by the theft of Ghal Maraz, the Hammer of Sigmar and one of the holy regalia that lent the Emperor the authority to rule.

‘Stolen by a young knight?’ the graf marvelled. ‘Right from under the nose of old Boris!’

‘Prince Sigdan’s intention, I believe, was to bring the hammer here, your highness,’ Lady Mirella said. ‘Baron Thornig was to conduct the thief, a captain of the Reiksknecht, to your court. Sadly, the baron was killed by the Kaiserjaeger.’

‘And this captain? You say that he escaped?’ Graf Gunthar asked.

‘He did, your highness,’ Brother Richter stated. ‘Adolf Kreyssig, the so-called Protector of the Empire, has posted a three thousand crown bounty on the head of Erich von Kranzbeuhler.’

The amount of the reward brought appreciative whistles from some of the councillors. Viscount von Vogelthal turned towards the graf. ‘With such a large bounty, it is obvious this von Kranzbeuhler still has the hammer.’ The chamberlain frowned and shook his head. ‘Or at least Kreyssig thinks he does. Just because he didn’t reach Middenheim is no reason to think he might not have sought asylum in the court of another count.’

Brother Richter shook his head. ‘He didn’t,’ he declared.

‘You seem rather certain of that,’ Mandred observed.

‘I am,’ Richter agreed. ‘Because not six months ago I encountered von Kranzbeuhler in a small village south of the Reikwald.’

‘Quite a risk, merely to consult a simple friar,’ Ar-Ulric commented, a knowing gleam in his eye. He smiled when Richter gave him a worried look.

‘Did he still have Ghal Maraz?’ Grand Master Vitholf wondered.

The priest nodded. ‘You see, I didn’t seek him out. He sought me. He wanted my advice on what to do, where to take the hammer.’

‘What did you tell him?’ Graf Gunthar asked, leaning forwards in his chair, his face anxious.

‘I told him to hide it,’ Brother Richter said. ‘I told him to keep it safe. That Sigmar would reveal to him when the time was right for Ghal Maraz to return.’

‘Outrageous!’ exclaimed Duke Schneidereit. ‘If you had access to the hammer, why not keep to the plan and bring it here? This entire story is preposterous!’

Graf Gunthar fixed Brother Richter with his gaze. ‘You understand that with Ghal Maraz I could have made a claim upon the throne? I could have cast this peasant tyrant from the Imperial Palace. I could have restored order to the Empire.’ His voice became a bitter growl. ‘But a Sigmarite wouldn’t stomach an Ulrican on the throne.’

Thane Hardin snorted derisively at the graf’s statement. From anyone else on the council, Gunthar would have taken it as a grave insult. Instead, he turned to hear what the dwarf had to say.

‘You really think holding Ghal Maraz would make all the other kings bow to you?’ Thane Hardin scoffed. ‘All you’d get would be a bunch of scoundrels yapping for your blood and calling you a thief. Few men have the honour to set aside their own interests to do what’s right. Even fewer when they wear crowns and titles. To be blunt,’ he added, as though his speech had been restrained, ‘I’m amazed your Empire has held together as long as it has.’

‘Thane Hardin makes a good observation,’ Margraf von Ulmann said. ‘There are many who would refuse to acknowledge any claim on the throne. With the example of Boris Goldgather, they might justifiably fear the domination of another tyrant of his ilk. Then there are men like this peasant Kreyssig, who won’t relinquish power unless it is pried from his dead fingers.’

‘Men must wallow in the depths of darkness before they will strive towards the light,’ Ar-Ulric said, quoting an ancient Teutogen parable. The wolf-priest’s wrinkled hands slowly came together, fingers entwined. ‘The strength of the pack is tenfold against the lone wolf,’ he told the other councillors. ‘But until that strength is needed, how much will the lone wolf struggle to keep his freedom?’

Graf Gunthar sat back, sober contemplation knotting his brow. ‘That is why you hid the hammer?’ he asked Brother Richter.

‘It is, your highness,’ the Sigmarite answered. ‘By itself, Ghal Maraz cannot bring unity. What it can do is bring legitimacy to that unity.’ He swept his gaze across the council. ‘The Empire is beset on all sides. The Northmen have razed Westerland and are encamped in the rubble of Marienburg. Drakwald is a depopulated shambles. This you know, but things are even more dire in the south. Sylvania is in the grip of the walking dead, stirred from their graves by a terrible necromancer. Averland is beset by orcs from the south. The city of Pfeildorf…’

Richter hesitated, wondering if he dared continue, if any about the table would believe him if he related the fate of Solland’s capital, a fate that had also descended upon Wissenburg and nearly claimed Altdorf itself. Would they believe him if he said the Underfolk had scurried straight from the pages of legend to become loathsome, hideous reality? Would he have believed it himself had Kranzbeuhler not shown him the severed paw of one of the monsters?

‘Pfeildorf has been lost to inhuman creatures,’ the priest stated. ‘Beastkin of the most abominable cast in numbers such as even the Drakwald has never seen. Entire villages and towns have been enslaved by the fiends, forced to toil for their monstrous masters.’

Mandred gave a start as he heard Richter speak. He was thinking of that ratty beastman in the Kineater’s herd, of the similar creature he had thrown from the walls of Middenheim years ago. A shiver passed through him, those old legends scratching at his mind. He started to speak, but decided better of it. He didn’t want to look foolish before his father and the council.

Beastmen came in all shapes and sizes. The ratmen had been nothing but especially degenerate examples.

After all, everyone knew there was no such thing as the Underfolk.

Far below the halls of the Middenpalaz and the streets of Middenheim, the subterranean darkness echoed with the crack of pick and hammer. The low grumble of an old miner’s chant whispered down rocky tunnels, catching in fissures and crevices to become a chorus of echoes. The glow of candles and coal-lamps cast a flickering island of light amid the black pits of Grungni’s Tower.

The dwarfs smelt of beer and sweat, leather and steel. The reek of the goat fat used to starch their beards was especially pungent, an odour that announced their presence even more loudly than the glow of their candles and the stink of their lamps. Under concealment of the Khazalid work song and the din of tools, dark shapes crept furtively through the tunnels.

Intent upon the little ribbon of gold they had pursued through the mountain for decades, the dwarfs were oblivious to the foe that stalked them through the tunnels. The vein had been entrusted to their clan by the powerful Engineer’s Guild, becoming not simply a source of wealth to them but a matter of pride and honour as well. The work itself was as important as the rewards to be reaped from the golden nuggets they chipped from the walls. A dwarf who didn’t put himself fully into his work wasn’t fit to wear his beard.

Such was the devoted concentration they put into their labour that the miners didn’t notice when one of the picks fell silent. They didn’t hear the soft gasp as a sharp dagger was thrust through dwarfish back to pierce dwarfish lung. They didn’t notice the change in their song as one of its voices was silenced. They didn’t see the shape cloaked in black that carefully lowered a limp corpse to the floor of the shaft.

One by one, the miners were dispatched. Sinister shapes stole upon them from the shadows, striking in deathly silence with the expertise of accomplished killers.

It was the rats that finally alerted the miners to their danger. The vermin were a constant presence in the shafts, an annoyance that the dwarfs endured for the pragmatic fact that the rodents had an eerie ability to sense vibrations in the rock. Even before a dwarf’s keen senses could warn him of a cave-in, the rats would be scurrying for safety. An experienced miner would even encourage a few rats to linger in any shaft he was working with scraps of food. Always he would keep half an eye on the animals, wary of any change in their habits.

A grizzled old dwarf rested his pick on his shoulder as he noticed the rats on the floor near where he was working. He’d never seen the creatures so agitated before. It wasn’t the mad scramble for safety a collapse would cause. No, the creatures were crawling about, low to the floor, looking for all the world like whipped dogs. Sometimes they would lift their heads and sniff at the air, only to chirp a frightened little squeak.

The old miner raised his gaze from the floor, and his eyes grew wide with alarm as he saw one of the candles further down the shaft snuffed out. The entire length of the tunnel behind him was in darkness, though he knew there should be half a dozen dwarfs between himself and the main shaft. Grimly, he shifted the pick from his shoulder, hands closing about it as they would around the grip of a battleaxe.

Before he could move, a mass of darkness swept towards the miner. His eyes picked out the hunched figure, the lean body of a bestial shape draped in the folds of a long black cloak. He saw beady red eyes gleaming from a furry face, the long muzzle twisted in a toothy snarl. He saw the hand-like paw lick towards him, a crooked blade clenched in its fingers. For an instant, he felt the sizzle of the poisonous blade as it slashed his throat.

The dwarf’s killer caught his body before it could collapse to the floor. Carefully, the assassin lowered the corpse to the ground, scattering the frightened rats. The murderer stared down at the ghastly slash he had inflicted, watching as the traces of warpstone from his dagger continued to burn and bubble at the edges of the wound.

Then the skaven reared back, turning his eyes away from the miner. In a single hop, he was at the little niche the dwarf had been working. The assassin’s paw flashed over the candle yet burning there, snuffing it out. As darkness enveloped the ratman once more, he cast his gaze further down the shaft, where the sounds and smells of dwarf yet prevailed.

Deathmaster Silke twitched his whiskers in amusement.

There was nothing quite like killing helpless prey to make a skaven feel pleased with himself.

CHAPTER SIX

Altdorf
Vorgeheim, 1114

Cold fire seared through Kreyssig’s arm, an agony that seemed to stab down into the very core of his being. When he thought he could take no more, the pain intensified, forcing him to endure.

‘Pain heals,’ the witch’s soft tones whispered through the desecrated chapel. ‘Pain is life. It is through pain that we find our strength.’

From the corner of his vision, Kreyssig could see the Baroness von den Linden pace around the room, her delicate fingers gliding across the ruined masonry and smashed statuary on the walls. As always, there was a fearful fascination about the witch. Her every step had a grace beyond mere woman. She was like some great feline on the prowl as she circled the stone altar.

‘How strong do you want to be, commander?’ the baroness mused. ‘What are your limits?’

Through clenched teeth, Kreyssig hissed an answer. ‘There… are… no… limits.’ He squeezed his eyes shut, clenched his jaw as spasms of suffering pulsed through his flesh.

An almost coy smile teased the corners of the witch’s mouth as she watched her patron’s ordeal. If the decision were left to him, she did believe he would allow the pain to mount until the aethyric harmonies caused his heart to burst. It was an impressive display of determination, and the baroness wasn’t one to impress easily.

‘The will may be a thing of iron, but the body is still mere flesh,’ the witch declared. She waved her hand, the obsidian gargoyle circling her forefinger blazing with an eerie light as she siphoned off the magical emanations surrounding the altar. Before they could build again, she stepped forwards and brushed away the herbs and offal surrounding Kreyssig. The Protector rose, grimacing as pain shot through his body.

‘I could have taken more,’ he complained, flexing his arm, the arm he had been told would never mend.

‘All things in their season,’ the baroness cautioned him, extending her hand and helping Kreyssig down from the altar. ‘Power must be marshalled slowly and with care.’

Kreyssig gave a pensive nod, deferring to the witch’s knowledge of the black arts. ‘These dalliances, pleasant though they are, have become somewhat dangerous.’ He marched across the chapel, retrieving his clothes from the dusty floor. ‘Just today, my Kaiserjaeger captured a man who was following me here. It didn’t take long to make him admit he was a spy in the service of Duke Vidor.’

‘You pulled the duke’s fangs when you made Soehnlein the new Reiksmarshal,’ the witch pointed out. ‘Surely there is nothing he can do to you now?’

Kreyssig paused as he buttoned his tunic, frowning as he noticed he was employing only his right hand. It was a habit he was going to break, a legacy of his former weakness he would purge.

‘Ordinarily, I would squash Vidor like a bug,’ Kreyssig said, enjoying the twinge of anxiety mention of insects provoked in his benefactress. ‘But it is too soon to act out of hand. The nobles need time to understand the new status quo, to appreciate the authority Emperor Boris has bestowed on me. As you have said, all things in their season. Vidor will attend the Scharfrichter. But until then he can make trouble.’

The baroness swept forwards, assisting Kreyssig as he dressed. She leaned close to his ear, her voice lowering to an alluring purr. ‘You are the Protector of the Empire, surrogate of His Imperial Majesty. What man would dare challenge you?’

‘Even an Emperor must beware the gods,’ Kreyssig said, recalling a bit of wisdom the departing sovereign had given him. It wasn’t a warning about impiety, however, but rather an admonition to pay close attention to the clergy. The Emperor was master of the bodies of his subjects, but their souls were claimed by the priests and their gods. The power of faith and superstition was one any ruler ignored at his peril.

‘The ravages of the plague have aroused strange ideas in the heads of the peasants,’ Kreyssig explained. ‘With every new outbreak, the people descend a little further into their morass of superstitions. They turn to plague doktors, bonesetters and leeches to preserve them from the disease. And when these measures fail them, they flee into the shadows of superstition. They cling to faith in the gods, hearken to the words of zealots and fanatics, in their despair.’

Kreyssig pulled away from the witch’s arms, turning around so that he could stare into her eyes. ‘Witch-takers stalk the streets of Altdorf, burning old midwives and herb-mongers, alchemists and astrologers. They have stirred the fears of the rabble and from that fear they have claimed their own brand of power.’

‘Your power is greater,’ the baroness said, a slight trace of fear creeping into her voice. ‘You could exile these murderers or hang them from the city walls.’

Kreyssig shook his head. ‘It is not so simple. These madmen have preyed upon the faith of the commoners, given them a new hope, however irrational. Hope dies hard, and never with more tenacity than among people with nothing left to lose.’

‘What will you do then?’ the baroness asked. The witch had good reason to worry. Rumours about her unnatural talents had long been a subject of gossip among the intimates of the Imperial court.

‘First, I must know how much longer I must attend these treatments,’ Kreyssig said. ‘Vidor’s next spy may prove more capable than his last one. I can’t have him using my connection with you to foment unrest among the rabble.’ A caustic laugh hissed through his teeth. ‘I’ll have to redirect the hopes of the peasants. Channel their superstitious fears away from the witch-takers and to a more respectable institution.’

The baroness reached out, stroking her hand along Kreyssig’s cheek. ‘And how will you accomplish such a feat?’

‘The Temple of Sigmar has been leaderless since the death of Grand Theogonist Thorgrad,’ Kreyssig stated. ‘The Sigmarite hierarchs have dallied over electing a replacement, citing the confusion wrought by the plague and the unrest among the southern provinces. That lack of leadership has fostered doubt in the hearts of their congregations, made their belief stray in strange places. A new Grand Theogonist could set things right, restore confidence in the Temple.’

‘Who will this new leader be?’ the witch purred, raking her fingers through Kreyssig’s hair.

‘Someone useful to me,’ he said. ‘Someone I can mould and control. Someone obligated to me.

‘Someone who will bow to the Protector of the Empire even before his own god.’

Slime glistened in the rushlight, dripping down from the subterranean walls. In the streets above the swelter of summer gripped Altdorf, but here there was only dank, clammy cold. Hacked from the limestone beneath the foundations of the Courts of Justice, there were many sub-levels and annexes to the dungeons of Altdorf, but none so infamous as those black vaults spoken of in hushed whispers as the Catacombs.

The Catacombs were the preserve of Kreyssig’s Kaiserjaeger, a private hell of their own creation. Torture theatres, execution chambers, isolation cells and dark oubliettes, interrogation rooms and mortuaries, the Catacombs piled horror upon horror. Even those who were released back into the world above never really escaped these crypts of terror. Within them there would always be the memory of this place, a black cloud to smother every happy moment they had ever known.

Moans and screams echoed through the black tunnels, a chorus of torment that was never silent. Since the attempt to usurp Emperor Boris, there had been no dearth of victims for the Kaiserjaeger to drag down into these depths. One and all were traitors, either by fact or by confession. Kreyssig’s men never failed to extract a confession when it was needed.

The commander emerged into the infernal glow of his private torture chamber, the room which he called the Dragon’s Hole. Its main feature was a great bronze dragonhead, its jaws agape, little iron rings dangling from its horns. The statue’s jaws were a cunningly designed oven, the iron rings clever shackles of exacting craftsmanship. A priest of Ranald couldn’t slip through those shackles. Kreyssig knew because he’d tested it several times.

Today, however, it was the servant of a different god who had attracted Kreyssig’s attention. Lector Stefan Schoppe was one of the scions of the Sigmarite faith in the Reikland, a man respected by his peers, almost deified by his congregation in the diocese of Helmgart. He was a cleric venerated by the faithful throughout the Empire, a priest above reproach. Exactly the sort of man to suit Kreyssig’s needs.

Kreyssig turned away from the dragonhead and the liveried torturers raking the smouldering coals in its oven. He cast an appraising gaze at the assortment of hooks and tongs, chisels and mallets displayed on the oak worktable which rested against one wall. Almost absently, he lifted one of the tongs, a vicious thing of spiked barbs and serrated edges. For a moment, he toyed with the mechanism, opening the jaws.

‘This looks uncomfortable,’ he said, setting the instrument down. He turned and, for the first time since entering the room, looked at his prisoner. ‘Do you not think so, your eminence?’

Lector Stefan was shackled hand and foot to the wall, an iron collar about his neck. Dirt and blood stained his priestly robes, the legacy of his abduction from Helmgart. The cleric’s eyes were wide with fear, roving between the torture instruments on the table and the bronze dragonhead.

‘You have been implicated in the plot against His Imperial Majesty,’ Kreyssig stated, glancing at the little desk set in one corner of the chamber. The wizened clerk sitting behind the table produced a scroll and began reading the indictment.

‘Lies! All lies!’ Lector Stefan shouted.

Kreyssig grinned at him, slowly crossing the room until he was only a few feet from his captive. ‘I know,’ he confessed in a whisper. ‘Down here, though, people will say what they are told to say. Even if it is sacrilege.’

Fresh horror gripped the priest. That fragile hope that his arrest had been a mistake deserted him in an agonised groan. Kreyssig feigned surprise at Lector Stefan’s reaction.

‘Be at ease, your eminence,’ he said. ‘These… barbarities aren’t for you.’ Kreyssig pointed to the table and the dragonhead. ‘What is the sense in torturing a priest? If they are truly sincere in their belief, then they would rather die than betray that belief.’

Kreyssig brought his hands crashing together in a loud clap that echoed through the chamber. In response, a pair of burly Kaiserjaeger came marching into the room. Between them they half dragged, half carried a sobbing shape dressed in a sapphire gown. Lector Stefan recognised that gown and the long blonde hair that fell about the woman’s face.

‘Gudrun!’ the priest shouted in a horrified wail.

‘I thought you might appreciate a familiar face,’ Kreyssig said. ‘When my men removed you from Helmgart, I arranged to bring your daughter as well.’ Snapping his fingers, Kreyssig motioned the Kaiserjaeger to take the woman to the bronze dragonhead.

‘You wouldn’t dare,’ Lector Stefan cried. ‘Whatever you think I have done, she is innocent. Touch her and you will bear the curse of our lord Sigmar!’

Kreyssig scowled at the bound priest. ‘His Imperial Majesty once told me that the gods have only as much power over us as we permit them to have.’ He looked at the grim stone walls around him. ‘I have heard many prayers uttered in this room. None of them did any good.’

Lector Stefan watched in mounting agony as the Kaiserjaeger shackled Gudrun to the horns of the dragon. An inarticulate moan escaped the gagged woman as she recoiled from the heat of the coals. ‘Curse your black soul! Let my daughter go!’

‘That,’ Kreyssig hissed, ‘is entirely the wrong attitude.’ Snapping his fingers again, he set the two Kaiserjaeger turning the wheels mounted at the base of the dragonhead. In response, the horns began to tilt, pulling the captive down towards the heated surface of the bronze head.

‘Stop this, Kreyssig!’ Lector Stefan thrashed in his chains. ‘Mercy of Sigmar! Don’t do this thing!’

‘I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to bring you here,’ Kreyssig said. ‘Far too much to stop now. At its highest degree, torture is an art unto itself. Did you know that, your eminence?’

‘Whatever you want! Whatever lies you want me to confess to! Just stop this!’ the priest pleaded.

‘Later, your eminence,’ Kreyssig told him. ‘There will be time enough to explain what I want from you later. For now, just enjoy the show.’

The ghastly demonstration continued for hours. Throughout the ordeal, Kreyssig was deaf to Lector Stefan’s desperate entreaties. Even the reason for inflicting this horror wasn’t explained. Between cries for mercy, appeals to Kreyssig’s humanity, anguished offers to be tortured in his daughter’s place, the priest called upon his god. If any prayer reached Sigmar’s ears, no miracle manifested to spare the priest.

Kreyssig smiled at the sobbing Lector Stefan, listening to the agony of a shattered heart and a broken faith. Again he snapped his fingers. One of the torturers crouched beside the mutilated body, lifting the head by its blood-spattered hair.

Lector Stefan gasped in incredulous wonder. For the first time he gazed upon the countenance of Kreyssig’s victim and it wasn’t the face of his daughter! The build, the hair, even the gown had been similar enough to deceive him.

In the midst of Lector Stefan’s exhilarated relief, Kreyssig clapped his hands together. While the first pair of Kaiserjaeger dragged the dead woman away, two more soldiers marched into the torture chamber. This time, there was no mistaking the identity of their captive.

‘Now you know what will happen,’ Kreyssig told Lector Stefan. ‘You know every stroke, every cut, every stripe that your daughter will suffer.’ He smiled coldly at the priest, seeing the abject defeat in his eyes. ‘I will give you a moment to ask yourself what you would do to spare her such a fate.

‘Then, I will tell you how you are going to serve your Emperor.’

Mordheim
Hexentag, 1113

The sound you hear is dripping blood. That thought brought a cruel twist to Baron Lothar von Diehl’s face.

This is the start of Hexentag.

The necromancer’s black cape billowed about his lanky body as he swept down the marble-floored aisle, his eyes darting from one wall to the other, assuring himself that the sacred icons flanking the hall had been properly defiled. Bound to a pillar, her body inverted so that the blood might flow more freely from her slashed throat, the last of the priestesses shuddered and died. Her once pristine robes were soaked crimson, the silver dove icon torn from her throat and in its stead the dead carcass of a carrion crow. Even in death, there was a look of shock in the woman’s expression. She shouldn’t have been surprised. In this age of plague and ruin, what place was more accustomed to death than the Temple of Shallya, the goddess of mercy and healing?

Lothar could feel those morbid energies, could almost taste them on the air. When he closed his eyes, he could see them as an after-image, a ghostly crackle that throbbed all around him. This was the power he sought, the power De Arcanis Kadon had promised him. The place, the hour and the sacrifice. All three had been brought together.

There was a dread potential within a defiled temple, an aethyric reverberation that turned a holy atmosphere back upon itself and could be exploited to magnify the powers of darkness. Lothar was disappointed that he’d never taken vows himself, for if the potential of a profaned temple was magnificent, it was nothing beside that of a heretical priest. Kadon had been a holy man, in his way, before he’d discovered the true path to power and domination. Before him, there had been Black Nagash, priest-king of Khemri until he created the forbidden art of necromancy.

Yes, it was a pity he’d never taken vows, but Lothar would overcome that impediment with determination and ruthlessness. Nothing would stand in his way, not convention, not tradition, not mercy. And not familial affections.

Stalking down the aisle, Lothar could feel the eyes of his men on him, fear in their gaze. Rogues and murderers, one and all, the scum of Mordheim recruited for him by Marko that he might seize the temple. These were the sort of villains who hadn’t balked at slitting the throats of old priestesses or clubbing the brains from helpless plague victims lying on the pews. Yet even these men were offended by the outrage their employer now intended.

Even Lothar had balked at first, shying away from the ritual he had uncovered. Some timid element within himself had cringed away from this crime. It had taken weeks to silence that last foolish vestige of morality. Morality was the refuge of cowards, something to excuse their weakness. A part of him had tried to cling to such idiocy to the very last, but his determination, his need to know had prevailed at last. He had progressed as far as he could with De Arcanis Kadon; now he must be far more daring if he would unlock the rest of its secrets.

The sacrifice was bound to the altar, tied hand and foot in hair cut from corpses, clothed only in a shroud stripped from a suicide’s grave. The alabaster statue of Shallya that stood behind the altar was draped in black, the head knocked from the stone shoulders to be replaced with a grinning skull. There was a symbol daubed upon the skull’s forehead, but it was a thing so terrible even Lothar couldn’t stare at it directly, only snatch the briefest of glimpses from the corner of his eye.

The killers were muttering nervously among themselves, shocked by what they had been told to do, frightened of what their master might do next. Standing at the foot of the altar, Marko alone understood the purpose behind it all. Perhaps that was why he looked even more anxious than the others.

Peasants! As though their thoughts and fears were of the slightest interest to a baron. Theirs were small minds and even smaller ambitions. To steal and drink and rut, perhaps at the very end try to make some atonement to the gods and redeem their pathetic souls. Such miserable desires placed them where they belonged – with the beasts!

Lothar would achieve far greater things. He had been born to a superior breed of man, endowed with a mentality that strove for something beyond crude urges and base lusts. Through his veins flowed the blood of thirty generations of von Diehls and the legacy of their great deeds. He had inherited the desire for knowledge, not as some abstract understanding or a means to some materialistic end, but as something precious in itself. If he could unlock the great secrets the gods had jealously kept from mankind, the nature of eternity, for example, then he would consider himself vindicated of all his failings. In that hour, he would be the greatest of the von Diehls.

Nothing would keep him from that achievement. Nothing.

The necromancer mounted the short flight of steps, holding a thin hand towards Marko as he passed the peasant. Marko hesitated for an instant, then with an uneasy expression, placed within Lothar’s grasp the ancient bronze knife. Clutching the arthame in his bony hands, the baron approached the altar.

The sacrifice looked up at him, eyes wide with desperate entreaty. Perhaps, once, Lothar would have been weak enough to submit to that appeal, to allow the petty affiliations of family to stay his hand. But that time was long gone. There was only one thing he wanted from his mother now. One swift strike sent the arthame plunging into her breast. Lothar could feel her agony flow up the dagger. Savagely, he twisted the blade. He was already a patricide, after all. Why should he hesitate now?

It was the work of a few minutes before Lothar rose from the gore-splattered altar and lifted his prize to the grinning skull. The empty sockets seemed to stare down into the shivering heart, watching as the last drops of blood oozed from its veins.

The necromancer could feel the power gathering about him. When he closed his eyes, his vision was ablaze with the glow of aethyric vibrations. His skin crackled as magic pulsed around his body. Lothar’s mind churned with weird images and phantom landscapes, ghostly voices hissed in his ears. It was an effort to subdue the force coursing through him, an effort only a spirit as focused and determined as his own could achieve.

When he closed his eyes, he could send his spirit hurtling down the long eternities, riding the deathly emanations through the ageless cycles of dissolution and decay. He could see the rise of kingdoms, the ebb and flow of empires. He saw the great necropolis of the desert, watched as megalithic pyramids rose from the sand of aeons, heard the intonations of priests more than half dead themselves as they made obeisance to the mummies of kings. He was there as the Black Pyramid reared up into the sky, a colossus spun from midnight and redolent with emanations of foulest sorcery and obscenity. He was witness to the Great Ritual, the apocalypse that heralded the eternal night and blotted out a mighty people in a single breath.

He smelt the rot of thousands, watched as a simulacrum of life crept back into withered flesh and ancient bone. In his vision, he saw the dead heaped in the streets, piled in palace and temple. He saw them stir, saw them stumble up onto fleshless feet, saw them stagger towards the pyramids and necropoli. An entire race, annihilated and resurrected in a single night. A people slaughtered and restored by a single dominating will and the magic discovered by that great and terrible intelligence.

The same magic that was the source of the necromancer’s art.

As Lothar stirred from his dark epiphany, he was aware of fresh vibrations, new stirrings of the death energy in the temple. Shouts and the clash of swords pierced the chorus of ghosts in his ears. Turning from the altar, he saw the doors of the temple had been flung open. A mob of ragged peasants and a mixture of armoured men in the livery of the watch had forced their way into the building and were fighting with Marko’s thugs in an effort to reach the sanctuary.

The necromancer inhaled the invigorating smell of spilled blood, then extended his hand. Flush with the power of his matricidal sacrifice, Lothar von Diehl fixed his mind upon a single purpose. Dropping his mother’s heart to the floor, he withdrew De Arcanis Kadon from beneath his robes. Almost with a volition of its own, the book fell open at the spell he intended to evoke.

‘We must flee, your lordship,’ Marko was pleading. ‘The mob will show no mercy, even to one of your rank!’

Lothar looked down at the little rogue. Marko had been very useful to him in the past, but that usefulness was at an end. Turning his gaze again to the aisle, he watched as the thugs were dragged down one by one, butchered beneath the avenging hands of the mob. Marko was right, they would do the same to him for what he had done here. That is, if they were given the chance.

Raising his voice in a cry that was almost reptilian in its slithering tone, Lothar intoned the dread names of ancient Nehekhara, drawing upon those primordial powers the liche-priests of Khemri had bound behind those names. The infernal energies that had been gathered about him were now loosed, transformed and harnessed into a conjuration far beyond what even Kadon might have achieved. The skull set atop the shoulders of Shallya’s decapitated statue burst apart in fragments as the necromantic energies were channelled through it, leaving only the bloody symbol suspended in the air. The levitating symbol was ablaze with a fell light, like some charnel star. Eldritch rays shot forth from the hieroglyph, streaking through the temple with snaky, sinuous motions.

The mob at the doors fell silent as the atmosphere within the temple became frigid and dark magic streamed down from the altar. The surviving thugs cried out in abject horror as they saw those bolts of sorcery seep into the dead plague victims strewn about the pews. Where before there had been only dead clay, now there came a stirring, a hideous awakening. Emaciated hands clutched at the benches, smashed heads rose from pools of gore.

Screams filled the temple as both invaders and defenders watched the dead lurch into ghastly life. Dressed in foul rags, their bodies shrivelled from malnutrition, their skin blotched with the black sores of the plague, the zombies shambled out into the aisles. Upon the pillars, the bound corpses of the priestesses flopped and flailed, trying to slip their ropes to assault the living flesh so near at hand.

The obscene intonation of Lothar’s spell intensified, the rays of pallid light emanating from the altar burst into a fresh frenzy, speeding through the temple, burning paths through walls and ceiling. The mob at the doors was in full flight now, Marko’s thugs fleeing alongside them. The wounded were abandoned, left to shriek as the zombies converged upon them with clawed hands and clacking jaws. Deep within the sanctuary, Marko attacked one of the stained-glass windows in a frantic effort to escape. He had just brought a heavy chair smashing through a glazed panel when the first zombie reached him, bearing him down with its dead weight. The rogue flailed and struggled as the thing tore at him with its teeth. Before he could free himself, a dozen other zombies were crouched over him, pawing at him with dead fingers, relenting only when the man was reduced to a shapeless pile of meat.

Lothar was oblivious to his erstwhile accomplice’s fate, focused entirely upon the mighty magic he had unleashed. All across Mordheim, tendrils of sorcery were snaking through the streets, seeking out the morbid harmonies of grave and tomb. Into the mausoleums of the Steinhardts and the crypts of the nobility and the unmarked plots of the destitute, the rays seeped. Coffins burst, sepulchres groaned open, marble doors gaped wide. From cemetery and plague pit, the dead of Mordheim were called forth, shuffling out into the streets on rotten feet and skeletal claws.

Not a living soul was abroad when Lothar von Diehl marched out from the defiled temple. The only things moving on the streets of the great city were undead – the cadaverous legion his sorcery had brought from their graves. He felt triumph swell inside him as he watched fleshless skeletons and decayed zombies troop past the steps of the temple. Centuries of Mordheim’s dead, all enslaved to the will of one man!

He could feel the living inhabitants of the city cowering behind locked doors and peering out from closed shutters. Their terror was an almost palpable thing. It would be so easy to crush them, to kill them all. A single thought and he could turn his undead loose against them and make himself master of Mordheim!

Lothar shook his head, letting the childish impulse fade. What need had he to rule a city, to carve a kingdom from the rubble of plague-ridden Ostermark? Such desires were simply a temporal delusion, a simulacrum of true power. Clenching his hand tighter about the scaly binding of De Arcanis Kadon, he knew that real power was at his very fingertips, if he could but unlock its secrets.

Though it stung his noble pride, Lothar was forced to concede his own limitations. Even the powerful magic the sacrifice of his mother had unleashed was puny beside the knowledge yet locked within the unholy tome.

There was one, however, whose ability in the black arts might be great enough to decipher De Arcanis Kadon. Raising the dead of Mordheim had been no arrogant display of power, there had been purpose behind Lothar’s feat. With an army of the undead at his command, he would march into Sylvania and confront Vanhal. The peasant necromancer would unlock the secrets for him. If he proved capable, Lothar might even deign to allow him to act as his apprentice afterwards.

Dreaming of the knowledge that would soon belong to him, Lothar von Diehl stepped out into the street, joining the walking dead as they began their long march south.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Middenheim
Nachgeheim, 1118

Prince Mandred directed a desperate look in Beck’s direction, but for once his bodyguard was proving inattentive. The phrase ‘dereliction of duty’ ran through his mind as he watched the knight ponderously scrutinising an old bit of Unberogen pottery that had been standing in the hallway. He promised there would be an accounting for Beck’s desertion.

Though he doubted it would be nearly so onerous as the one he was enduring. Finding no help from Beck, Mandred turned back to listen as Sofia lashed at him with words that he was surprised a lady of her breeding even knew.

‘Spending more time with that Reikland slattern!’ Sofia raged. Mandred cringed at the tone, silently whispering a prayer to Ranald that she wasn’t–

The prince ducked as a bronze candlestick went sailing past his ear. Though Ulric was his patron god, he reflected that he really should pay a little more consideration to Ranald, the fickle god of luck and good fortune.

‘Flitting all over the city with that vagabond doxy hanging off your arm!’ The mate to the first candlestick came flying across the room. Mandred yelped as it careened off his thigh and went rolling under a wardrobe. Hopping on one leg, he tried to muster an ingratiating smile. So long as Sofia didn’t employ formal address, he knew he could calm her down…

‘What charms has that whore favoured you with? The same perversions she used to seduce Prince Sigdan? And you, marching along to join her collection of princes!’ Venom crept into her tone as she added with a spiteful hiss, ‘Your grace.’

Mandred hobbled forwards as quickly as he could manage, hurrying to keep the enraged woman from reaching a heavy looking crystal decanter. ‘It isn’t like that…’ he protested.

Burggraefin Sofia von Degenfeld spun around with the speed of a viper, her dark tresses hanging across her face, her slender hands splayed into claws, each painted talon poised to wreak havoc. The breast of her gown trembled with the sharp, short breaths sneaking past her fury. With an angry shake of her head, she threw her long hair away from her face, exposing a pretty vision of forest-green eyes and delicately upturned nose. Even in her anger, Sofia’s skin possessed a soft, milky colour, like polished alabaster on a crisp winter morning.

‘Don’t you dare lie to me, Mandred,’ Sofia snarled at him. She flung her arms out in an exasperated flourish. ‘The entire court is talking about it!’ Her eyes narrowed to malicious pinpricks. ‘Though I can understand, stumbling on her in such a condition. She must have kept herself very trim, a hag of her age!’

‘Lady Mirella isn’t that old…’ Mandred started to say. He heard a snort of laughter from the hallway behind him. Even Beck knew it was absolutely the worst thing that could have rolled off his tongue. Yes, Mandred was certainly going to have a few words with his errant bodyguard. If he survived that long.

Sofia glanced over at the decanter, then turned a withering glare on the prince. ‘So the dashing young knight is going to sample the favours of his damsel in distress?’ she snapped. ‘Oh, I understand quite well her point of view! Coming to Middenheim without a stitch to her name, the son of Graf Gunthar must present quite a catch. After she seduces you she must remember to light a candle for the Kineater!’

Mandred could feel his temper rising. ‘Yes, I’m sure getting herself scalped and eaten by beastmen was all part of a grand plan to put herself in the Middenpalaz!’

‘Well, it worked, didn’t it!’ Sofia accused.

The prince glared back at her. It was three years ago that he’d first become infatuated with the beautiful burggraefin. If not for the difference in their social class, they would have been married by now. Of course, as the son of the graf, such a decision was beyond his control. When he wed it would be a matter of politics, not mutual affection, one of the sacrifices a ruler made for his subjects. It was an understanding between them, the knowledge that whatever love and happiness they shared could never last. Perhaps it was that knowledge that had inflamed their passion and their devotion.

Except when she got like this, Mandred thought, listening to another harangue from his lover. When Sofia fell into one of these jealous fits, she was deaf to all reason. She couldn’t be talked to, only endured until her temper cooled. Today, he decided, he didn’t have the patience for such theatrics.

‘I’m going,’ the prince told her, turning on his heel and marching towards the hall.

‘Where?’ Sofia demanded. ‘Back to your slut?’

‘That’s none of your concern,’ Mandred answered without turning around. He reached the doorway just as the decanter came hurtling towards him. Nimbly, he swung the door to block the heavy missile, suppressing a slight shudder when he felt the crystal shatter against the panel. He stood behind the door for a moment, letting his own anger drain out of him. It wouldn’t do for the Prince of Middenheim to go stalking through the streets of his city looking like he wanted to murder every person he saw.

Faintly, from behind the door, Mandred could hear Sofia crying. A twinge of remorse had his hand reaching for the handle, but the magnitude of her unreasoning rage stayed him. Let her sob, he decided. Maybe it would teach her to curb her temper in the future.

‘Everything all right?’ Beck asked, finally stepping away from that pot he’d found so interesting. Mandred shot his bodyguard a black look.

‘For me,’ the prince said, snatching his hat from Beck’s fingers. ‘I can think of an inattentive guard who won’t be able to say the same.’

Sheepishly, Beck followed his master as Mandred stormed from the von Degenfeld manse. ‘Where are we going, your grace?’

‘To the Middenpalaz,’ Mandred told him. He glanced back down the hall at the room he had so recently quit. ‘I think I’ll pay a call on Lady Mirella and inquire if she would like me to show her the rest of the city.’

‘You should have seen it before the plague,’ Mandred declared, waving his hand as he gestured towards the wide expanse of farmland that stretched away to the west. The tall stalks of wheat swayed in the mountain breeze. They were of a hardy strain that thrived in colder altitudes and possessed a magnificent coppery colour. Under the right conditions and with the right amount of sunlight shining down on them, the effect was like gazing upon a sea of gold. Indeed, the dwarfs who had first cultivated the strain had bestowed upon it a name that evoked gold somehow. Mandred’s familiarity with Khazalid and dwarf customs was sketchy at best, so he couldn’t remember the particulars of the name.

Beside him, one of her slender arms closed around his own, Lady Mirella gasped in admiration as a stronger gust of wind set the entire crop dancing. ‘It is beautiful,’ she declared.

Mandred shook his head. ‘In a few weeks the crop will be harvested, then there’ll only be empty black earth clear to the wall.’ He sighed, regret catching in his voice. ‘This used to be the Sudgarten and it was filled with trees and shrubs. Songbirds used to flock here and there would be rabbits and squirrels capering about in the brush. We even kept herds of deer and only hunted them on Ulric’s holy days.’

The grip on Mandred’s arm tightened in an expression of sympathy. ‘Nothing lasts forever,’ she said.

‘Some things should,’ Mandred answered, still seeing in his mind’s eye the forest that had stood where only crops now grew. ‘Those trees had been there since before the first Teutogen crawled up out of the tunnels and reached the top of the Ulricsberg. Losing them felt… felt like betraying a trust.’

‘You kept your people alive through the winter,’ Mirella reminded him. ‘How strong would Middenheim be today if you didn’t have the resources to provide for yourself?’

Mandred turned away from the Sudgarten, and led Mirella back into the narrow confines of the Westgate, the densely populated district at the extreme edge of the city. Many of the refugees who had been permitted to settle atop the Ulricsberg had built their homes here, simple buildings of timber and thatch. The Middenheimers had struggled to impose some degree of order on the confusion of shacks and huts, but had eventually abandoned the effort as causing more trouble than it was worth. The resentment engendered by the programme had left a lingering mark in the hearts of the settlers. Indeed, it was considered inadvisable for any of the Middenheim nobility to wander about the Westgate without an adequate guard.

The prince, however, was the one exception to that rule. The people here might resent the high-handed authority imposed by Chamberlain von Vogelthal, but they also remembered Prince Mandred’s bold ride to save Warrenburg from the beastmen. It was ironic that an event that had brought him such severity from his father, an act that had cost the lives of many brave men, a thing which he himself regarded with guilt and regret, should have earned him a hero’s welcome among the settlers.

‘Yes,’ Mandred said as he and Mirella walked back along the edge of the Westgate, ‘we are strong. But what has been the price for that strength?’

Mirella frowned at the dour note in her escort’s voice. Tugging at his arm, she tried to divert his thoughts in another direction. ‘You said you would show me the dwarfs today,’ she reminded him. ‘I am eager to see their temple. Do you think they would allow us inside?’

The question gave Mandred pause. ‘Don’t they have dwarfs in Altdorf?’ he asked.

‘Oh, certainly,’ Mirella said, ‘but not like here. Altdorf doesn’t have an entire city of them under its streets.’

Mandred smiled at the statement. ‘Karak Grazhyakh isn’t exactly a city,’ he corrected her. ‘It’s more of an outpost, one of their strongholds.’ He became pensive for a moment. ‘To be honest, I’m not really sure how many of them are down there. Thane Hardin isn’t one of my father’s subjects, more like a friendly neighbour.’ He paused, picturing the dwarf’s perpetually grim visage. ‘Well, a neighbour anyway. The dwarfs pretty much keep to themselves and so long as they abide by my father’s laws when their business brings them into Middenheim proper, we are content to leave them alone.’

‘They do have some presence in the city, though?’ Mirella asked.

‘Oh, certainly,’ Mandred replied. ‘A few craftsmen who have set up shop here, though apparently they are either apprentices at their trade or dwarfs who couldn’t match the standards of their guilds. Either way, no dwarf would have anything to do with the goods they turn out, though they’re very impressive if you ask anyone else. Then there is the Dwarf Engineer’s Guild. They have a big stone building down in the Wynd with a big walled-off yard attached to it. They do a lot of testing with some foul-smelling black dirt that explodes when exposed to fire. Probably too scary to play with down below, so they moved operations upstairs.’

‘And the temple?’ Mirella persisted.

‘That’s down in the Wynd too, if anything even bigger and more imposing than the Guildhall.’ Mandred turned and stared in the direction of the building, though it was hidden behind the sprawl of the Southgate district which lay between the Westgate and the Wynd. ‘The dwarfs call the Ulricsberg “Grungni’s Tower”, and even before the first stones were set down to build the Middenpalaz, they were at work building a temple to their god. I’ve never been inside it. I don’t think any man ever has. The dwarfs are more tight-lipped about their religion than they are about anything else. But I can say that the exterior is absolutely magnificent. The entire face is marble, the stones set so close together that you’d think it was carved from a single block. Two immense statues stand guard before the entrance, one holding a chisel and the other an axe. I’ve seen dwarfs bow to them, so I think they must be connected to Grungni somehow. A giant door of ironwood banded in gold opens into the temple, and there’s always a smell of oil and coal wafting out every time it is opened.’

‘But you’ve never been inside?’ Mirella’s voice was soft, her mind caught up in the picture Mandred’s words conjured.

The prince shook his head. ‘No human has,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t know if anyone has ever had the temerity to ask. I do know now isn’t the time to start. The dwarfs have been even more touchy of late. They’ve become almost reclusive. Withdrawn. Something’s bothering them, though I’m sure a human will be the last to know what it is,’ he reflected.

For a moment, Mandred’s troubled mood infected Mirella, her eyes taking on a pained expression. The prince found himself caught in those eyes, sensed the empathy between himself and this aristocrat from the south. He shifted uneasily as he thought of Sofia and the row they had had.

‘Come along,’ Mandred said, deliberately misinterpreting Mirella’s attitude for one of disappointment. ‘Perhaps I can’t show you the temple of Grungni, but I can show you the temple of Ulric.’ Before she could say anything, he was marching her towards the north.

‘We’re going to Ulricsmund,’ Mandred called back to their tiny entourage. Beck and Brother Richter had kept their distance during the stroll past the Sudgarten, trying to remain discreetly unobtrusive yet near enough to be at hand if they were needed. At the prince’s call, Beck went dashing up to join the two nobles. Richter hesitated, a tinge of worry pulling at the corners of his mouth. It was almost with reluctance that he followed after them.

A reluctance born of much more than simple religious differences.

Carroburg
Hexentag, 1115

The guests of Emperor Boris gathered around the immense ring of black drakwood. Legend held that the round table dated from the time of King Otwin and had been gifted to the Thuringian chief by the druids of Rhya. The chiefs of the tribe had held council around the great table, planning their wars against enemies human and inhuman. After the coming of Sigmar and the absorption of the Thuringians into his Empire, Otwin’s table had been removed to the ancient fortalice overlooking the River Reik. Many towers and forts had been built and razed since that time, but the relic had endured, a valuable prize for whichever noble was given dominion over the Drakwald.

Sometimes the round table had been drawn out from storage for some state feast or in observance of some celebration, but by and large it had been left to the seclusion of its own vault deep within the castle. Wondrously carved, magnificently fashioned, there was nevertheless a blemish about the round table, a nameless sensation that provoked uneasiness in those who remained in its presence for too long. It was the residue of eldritch magic, the taint of druidic sacrifice and ceremony that had soaked into the drakwood.

For Boris’s purposes, Otwin’s table was perfect. The Emperor couldn’t have asked for a better prop to adorn the festivities he had planned for Hexennacht. Hoary with age, steeped in legend and saturated with mysterious magics, the table would set the proper atmosphere. He was so pleased, in fact, that after von Metzgernstein told him about the table, he agreed to release the seneschal’s son from the dungeons. The gesture, however, proved a bit empty. The boy, it seemed, had taken ill and expired the month before.

Thinking of this, Boris glanced along the table until he found the dejected-looking seneschal. The fellow was being quite irrational over the loss of the stripling. Von Metzgernstein was still young, he could certainly sire another one. Perhaps the Emperor would offer to have his marriage annulled. A saucy new wife might help the man put things in better perspective.

Smirking, the Emperor patted the hand of the young woman seated next to him. As always, Princess Erna trembled at his touch. He could imagine her skin crawling under his fingers, feeling a thrill of power that he could command such fear in the headstrong wench. His arrogance wouldn’t consider the possibility that the reaction was one of disgust rather than fear.

‘We think this should prove very entertaining,’ Boris told her, wagging a finger at the uneasy dignitaries assembled around Otwin’s table. The matriarch of one of the Empire’s major temples, seven electors, dozens of landholders who between them controlled a third of all the agriculture in the Empire, even a few generals and the grand masters of several knightly orders were in attendance. Some of them had even brought along their wives; many more had the good sense to bring along their mistresses. Boris chuckled as he considered the power these men claimed to possess. For all their pretensions, when he’d invited them to seek safety behind the walls of Schloss Hohenbach, they’d come running.

Which of the wives should he seek to conquer next, Boris wondered? The months of isolation were becoming a bit tedious, even the performers he’d engaged were struggling to justify their continued presence with new entertainments. For all her charms, there were times when he tired of Erna’s defiant streak. Toying with an ambitious baroness or a wanton countess made for a nice break in routine and never failed to bring a frown of disapproval from the papess Katrina Ochs.

Still, the high priestess wasn’t the only member of their company with a set of strict, prudish morals. The Emperor gave Erna’s hand a tight squeeze and leaned close to her. ‘What do you think of von Kirchof’s niece?’ he asked, nodding his chin towards the dainty young lady seated opposite them. ‘Pure as new snow, We understand,’ Boris continued. ‘Her uncle has been keeping a careful eye on her for Us. Can’t have any of these blue-blooded degenerates plucking the rose.’ He chuckled as he felt Erna’s nails dig into his palm as her body became tense.

‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Leave her alone. Don’t befoul her.’

Boris leaned back in his chair. ‘What a treasonous thing to say,’ he observed with feigned shock. ‘As though she could aspire to any greater purpose in her miserable life than a dalliance with her Emperor.’ He turned one of his mischievous grins on Erna. ‘They can’t all marry a dashing young peasant, after all.’

The Emperor relished the pain his remark inflicted, then sighed and released Erna’s hand. It was too easy to provoke her on that subject, stripping it of any degree of satisfaction. Rising from his chair, Boris swept his Imperial gaze across the great hall. The usual furnishings had all been pushed to the walls to make room for Otwin’s table, but a path had been left clear to the connecting passage leading to the tiny chapel of Sigmar. He glared impatiently at the doorway.

‘What’s keeping that conjurer?’ Boris hissed. He turned his head, nodding to the two Kaiserknecht who attended him. The knights stalked away, their hands closed about the hilts of their swords. The Emperor watched as they walked down the passage. A few minutes later, the knights reappeared, dragging a tall, gaunt man between them. With a final shove, they deposited the man on the floor near Boris’s seat.

‘We are waiting,’ the Emperor stated in a tone as cold as steel.

The man on the floor looked up at his sovereign with panic in his eyes. He was of indeterminate age, his long beard yet displaying streaks of black among its white, his face devoid of wrinkles beyond the crow’s feet attending the corners of his eyes. He wore a long blue robe, its folds adorned with stars and moons and yet more obscure esoteric symbols. In his arms he held a battered teakwood casket.

‘Forgive me, Your Imperial Majesty, I was readying my paraphernalia for the experiment,’ the bearded man apologised. ‘Under ideal conditions, it takes a month to prepare for…’

Emperor Boris waved away his warlock’s excuses. ‘We are already becoming bored with your magic. If We are expected to wait a month for your conjurations, We may reconsider your usefulness to the court.’

Karl-Maria Fleischauer shivered at the Emperor’s threat. His studies of the black arts were well known, and only the protection of the Emperor kept the Inquisition of Verena and the witch-takers from burning him at the stake. To lose the Emperor’s favour would be a death sentence for the warlock.

‘Of course, of course,’ Fleischauer whined. ‘I shall make everything ready at once.’ He stared at the teakwood casket, doubt flickering across his face. Quickly he composed himself and scrambled to the high-backed seat that had been reserved for him.

Boris watched with undisguised impatience as the warlock took his place and opened the casket after a few muttered incantations and passes of his hands. Fleischauer removed an orb of polished crystal from the box, winding a strip of gauzy cloth around it before setting it on the table before him. The cloth gave off an offensive odour, and Boris realised it had been cut from a funeral shroud. Again he sighed. It was so like a warlock to collect such noxious trappings.

Holding a séance had seemed like such a novel idea when it occurred to Boris two days before. It would be just the sort of scandalous entertainment that would appeal to sensibilities that had become jaded to more mundane diversions. Now, however, he was becoming annoyed by the warlock’s foolish theatrics. He knew the peasant could work magic. It was time he stopped dawdling and got down to it.

After a few minutes, Fleischauer asked that the doors to the hall be closed and all the lights extinguished save two candles, one set to either side of the crystal ball. A murmur of anxiety passed through the guests assembled about Otwin’s table as the room was plunged into darkness.

‘All must link hands,’ Fleischauer said. ‘Those who would call upon the spirits of the dead must form an unbroken circle. Whatever you see, whatever you hear, do not break the circle!’ His warning given, the warlock began to chant in a sibilant, slithery language. His body went rigid, his eyes rolling back until only the whites were visible.

A clammy cold filled the hall. The crystal ball began to glow with a spectral blue luminance.

Boris couldn’t decide if the moan preceded the wispy, vaporous spectre or if the apparition formed before the sound. Certainly one impressed itself upon him before the other. The moan was a ragged, grisly noise, like a corpse being dragged across gravel. The ethereal image was no less uncomfortable, reminding the Emperor of the grave cloth Fleischauer had wrapped about his crystal ball.

Gradually, both the moaning sound and the apparition began to change, becoming somehow more distinct. Even with this impression of change, when the final resolution came, it was shockingly abrupt. The moan became the dry, brittle voice of a woman. The nebulous spectre became the semblance of a plump rural duchess.

‘Artur! Artur, you murderous cur!’ the ghost wailed, spinning around where she hovered a few inches above the table until she faced the trembling ruler of Nuln. The apparition raised a phantom finger and jabbed it at Count Artur. ‘I wait for you in the gardens of Morr, assassin! Adulterer!’

Boris chuckled as he listened to the ghost’s harangue. It seemed Count Artur had removed his domineering first wife through the expedient of poison, disguising it to look as though she’d succumbed to the plague. A delicious bit of scandal that the woman’s wealthy relations would be interested to learn. The Emperor was annoyed that he hadn’t had the foresight to have his scribe attend the séance.

After a time, Count Artur’s wife faded away, her voice evaporating back into the speechless moan, her form melting into the formless wisp. Soon another spirit manifested itself through the medium, another voice rising from the moan, another figure emerging from the wisp. Brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, friends and servants, many were the ghosts evoked by Fleischauer’s magic. Many were the dark secrets the wraiths related. Boris chuckled at each embarrassing revelation, promising himself he would make good use of all he learned when he was back in Altdorf. Indeed, he’d never imagined magic could be so useful. If Kreyssig wasn’t such a capable and dangerous man, he might suggest he add sorcery to his intelligence network. Handing such a tool to such a man wouldn’t be wise, however. Perhaps if he were removed and a more pliable commander put in his place…

Distracted by his plotting, Boris didn’t see the wisp form itself into the barbarous figure of Baron Thornig, Erna’s father. He didn’t hear much of what the ghost had to say to his daughter. What little he did hear made him curse his distraction.

‘Endure,’ Thornig moaned. ‘The night will end. The dawn will come. Wickedness and corruption will be purged from the Empire. He who loves you best will return. He will return what was stolen. Together you will have justice. Endure, and know you suffer so that Light may shine once more.’

The Emperor tightened his hold on Erna’s hand as the spectre of her father started to fade. Viciously, he twisted her arm, provoking a gasp of pain. ‘What did he say?’ Boris growled. ‘What did that hell-damned traitor say!’

Lost in his anger, Boris was again inattentive of the spirits. He didn’t see the wisp reform. Only when a familiar voice called to him did the Emperor turn away from Erna. He quivered as he found himself staring into the mournful countenance of his own father, the man who had been Emperor Ludwig II.

‘Woe, my son,’ the shade wailed. ‘You bring ruin to the House of Hohenbach.’

Emperor Boris cringed away from the apparition. Frantically, he broke the hold of those seated to either side of him and leaped away from his chair. Almost at once, the ghostly image winked out and the hall was plunged into darkness as the candles sputtered. Screams of alarm filled the darkness until servants threw open the doors and brought more candles.

‘I think we’ve had enough amusement for one night,’ Boris declared, sounding anything but amused. His sardonic composure rattled, he hastened from the hall without so much as a glance at the prostrate form of his warlock. The abrupt disruption of the séance had sent the aethyric energies snapping back into Fleischauer’s body, breaking his trance and leaving him more dead than alive.

Princess Erna glanced from the stunned warlock to the fleeing Emperor, unsettled by her own ordeal. Against her will, she felt sympathy for Boris. Where her own father had returned to bestow words of hope, his had offered only condemnation.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Altdorf
Nachgeheim, 1114

The chambers of the Holy Synod of Sigmar had been unused since the completion of the Great Cathedral some hundred years ago. It had only been the death of Grand Theogonist Uthorsson and the transplantation of the Holy Seat from Nuln to Altdorf that brought the vast hall of marble and alabaster into prominence. For years, the chambers had been made ready, prepared for the ecumenical council of theologians, priests and augurs who would debate the election of a new Grand Theogonist.

Plague had kept the Holy Synod empty, the fear of the strange death that was laying waste to the Empire. To gather the leadership of the Temple in one place, to expose them all to the threat of dissolution, was something the Sigmarite elders would not countenance. Since the founding of the man-god’s cult by Johann Helsturm over a thousand years ago, never had the prospect of annihilation been more pronounced. An orc invasion, religious warfare with one of the other temples, natural and arcane catastrophe, these were things that might wipe out a city or devastate a province, but never were they so widespread as to threaten the whole of the Empire. The Black Plague had spread its pestilential grip into every corner of the land. Nowhere was safe. Like the locust, it might seem to recede only to bide its time and explode afresh with renewed vigour. This plague had neither pattern nor rhyme. It was unpredictable. It was a thing of Chaos.

Seeing the hand of the First Enemy in the Black Plague, the Sigmarite elders had deferred the election of a leader until such time as it was considered safe to convene in sacred council. To do otherwise, they felt certain, would be to tempt the profane Ruinous Powers into exerting their hideous strength and wiping out the very foundation of the Temple. They must wait, wait until the plague began to abate and the power of Chaos waned once more.

Waiting, however, was an option that was no longer available to them.

It was a small group that was gathered in the Holy Synod, a feeble echo of the great congregation for which the vast hall had been built. The rows of cherrywood pews, rising in tiers and surrounding the central nave, were empty. The stained-glass windows depicting Sigmar’s victories over beast, monster and man stared down upon only a tiny clutch of robed figures gathered before the jade altar in the sanctuary at the front of the chamber. Their voices echoed through the deserted room.

‘What you ask is impossible.’ The words were spoken in a carefully measured tone, a voice struggling to smother the intense emotion stirring in the heart of the speaker. Arch-Lector von Reisarch was the Consultator of the Sacred Rites, successor to Arch-Lector Hartwich and, with the death of Grand Theogonist Thorgrad, the highest-ranking priest in the whole of Altdorf. Known as a jovial father of the faith, he was held with almost paternal fondness by the Sigmarites of Altdorf, a warm and friendly face to a religion that could at times be cold and distant.

It was a very different expression von Reisarch wore now from that jocular visage known to his diocese. The priest’s face was severe, his jaw set in defiance, his eyes smouldering with unspoken rage. The exuberant old man who wasn’t above slipping a jest about the foibles of priesthood into a sermon was gone, subsumed beneath the angered patriarch who glared at the Imperial personage who had intruded upon the sanctity of the Holy Synod.

Adolf Kreyssig’s expression was no less severe. ‘I ask nothing,’ he said. ‘I am the Protector of the Empire, invested with the authority of the Emperor… Authority bestowed upon him by immortal Sigmar himself.’

‘Secular authority,’ von Reisarch countered. ‘The power of the Emperor is secular, not spiritual. You have no jurisdiction over the politics of the Temple.’

Kreyssig glanced across at the vicar-general and the other priests attending von Reisarch. ‘You must be very important now, your beatitude. The Arch-Lector of Altdorf, once the hierophant of all Sigmarites in the Imperial capital, at least until Grand Theogonist Thorgrad relocated the Holy Seat. Then you were simply reduced to another functionary, a number-two man. How you must have missed the taste of power! The second son of an old and privileged estate. No inheritance from his family, so he must seek his fortune by taking up holy vestments.’

‘You dare,’ von Reisarch gasped. ‘You dare utter such blasphemies in this sacred place!’

‘I would dare anything to preserve the Empire,’ Kreyssig retorted. He pointed to the great stone hammer suspended above the shrine. The symbol was more than simply that of Sigmar as god, but of Sigmar as uniter of mankind.

‘I am versed in the symbolism of faith,’ von Reisarch growled, his voice like acid.

‘But do you understand it?’ Kreyssig challenged. ‘Your refusal to convene the Holy Synod and elect a new Grand Theogonist threatens the unity of the Empire. The people look to the Temple of Sigmar for hope and guidance, to assure them that despite the plague and unrest there is stability. Faith in Sigmar is the bedrock of the Empire, the rope which binds the people together and endows them with a sense of unity. When the Temple is seen to be strong, the spirit of the people is strong. When the Temple is seen to be weak, the people lose faith. Their hearts stray into strange places.’

‘You are a fine one to speak of faith,’ von Reisarch accused. ‘It was on your orders that Arch-Lector Hartwich was arrested and would have been executed had he not fallen victim to the plague. It was through your scheming that the Bread Massacre brought bloodshed overflowing in the streets. It was your barbarous murder of Grand Master von Schomberg that pushed men like Prince Sigdan into revolt. Tell me, who has done more to break the spirit of Altdorf?’

‘I can tell you who will restore that spirit, and how,’ Kreyssig said. He removed a folded proclamation from his tunic, setting it down on the altar. ‘You will convene the ecumenical council. You will elect Lector Stefan Schoppe as Grand Theogonist.’

Von Reisarch’s eyes blazed. ‘You not only demand the impossible, but you add the sacrilege of dictating the decision of Holy Sigmar!’ The other priests with the arch-lector began to whisper angrily among themselves, horrified by Kreyssig’s arrogant blasphemy.

‘I demand what is necessary to keep the Empire intact,’ Kreyssig stated. ‘As Protector, that is my duty. The people need a strong Temple to unite them. The Temple needs a Grand Theogonist to make it strong.’

The arch-lector removed the scroll from the altar, casting it to the floor with a contemptuous gesture. ‘This Temple is answerable to the will of Sigmar, not the machinations of a power-mad peasant. There will be no ecumenical council!’

Kreyssig’s eyes blazed as he stared down at the discarded scroll. ‘There will be an ecumenical council,’ he said, his voice dropping to a venomous, threatening tone. ‘Do not make the mistake of dismissing the “machinations of a power-mad peasant”. I have been most thorough. My Kaiserjaeger have pursued inquiries in many places. I am quite aware of the Temple’s dirty little secrets, of what happened that night Grand Theogonist Uthorsson burned with the cathedral in Nuln. Tell me, how do you think the people would react if they learned Uthorsson was a servant of the Ruinous Powers, or that Thorgrad was a murderer?’

Von Reisarch’s face turned as pale as his white robes. The priest wavered, his attendants rushing forwards to support him before he could fall.

‘They might think the Sigmarite clergy was responsible for bringing the Black Plague upon us,’ Kreyssig continued. ‘They might rise up, tear this place down with their bare hands. Betrayal can make even the most loyal dog turn on its master. Then there are the other temples to consider. The wolf-priests of Ulric would be quite happy to see the Sigmarite faith abolished and, of course, the inquisitors of Verena are most zealous in their persecution of Chaos.’

The arch-lector leaned against the altar, vitality seeming to visibly drain from his body. ‘It will take time to bring the other arch-lectors to Altdorf,’ he said. ‘Three have already been claimed by the plague. It will take months for the others to make the journey.’

‘Then you will do without them,’ Kreyssig said. ‘Issue a decree reducing their authority, subsuming them to the Altdorf temple. If you present it as divine will necessitated by the crisis threatening the faith, I think you can make them understand. A little power is better than no power, after all.’

Kreyssig nodded his head at the scroll lying on the floor. ‘You seem to have dropped my proclamation, your eminence.’ He darted a withering glare at the vicar-general as the cleric bent to retrieve the scroll. ‘I want that pious blue-blood to get it,’ he growled.

Chastened by the threat hanging over his head, the arch-lector knelt on the floor and picked up the proclamation. ‘Sigmar will not forgive this,’ he warned.

‘The gods are only as powerful as the Emperor allows them to be,’ Kreyssig sneered. ‘You would do well to remember that, von Reisarch.’

‘Is that a lesson you have already taught Lector Schoppe?’

Kreyssig smiled. ‘He understands something you have yet to learn. You will either be my ally, or you will be my victim. It took some persuasion, but his holiness made the right choice in the end.’

The distant tolling of temple bells sounded faintly in the distance as Adolf Kreyssig marched through the empty halls of the Imperial Palace. At such a late hour, there were few functionaries about; even the overworked clerks under Lord Ratimir had slipped away to steal a few hours of rest before poring over the records of tax revenue from the eastern provinces. Emperor Boris had imposed a fine against the Grand Duke of Stirland for the reduction in grain and timber tariffs being collected in the province. Excuses about some necromancer running amok in Sylvania had only made the Emperor more determined to see the fees collected. Allow Stirland an indulgence and every warherd raid or goblin mischief would have the other counts begging for a reduction in their Imperial tithe.

A pair of armoured Kaiserjaeger flanked the doorway leading into Kreyssig’s chambers. Regarded as peasant rabble, Dienstleute by the nobles of the court, the Protector of the Empire preferred them to the more prestigious and esteemed Kaiserknecht and other knights at his disposal. It wasn’t so long ago that the Reiksknecht had been disbanded and outlawed. There was no knowing how many friends the outlaws might still have among the knights of the other orders. No, it was far safer to look to his own men to safeguard him.

Kreyssig gave a brief nod by way of acknowledging the stiff military salute his guards gave him as he approached. Arguing with that pious ass von Reisarch had worn him out. As satisfying as it had been to sink the cleric’s superiority, it had tested Kreyssig’s restraint to the utmost. He’d dearly have liked to kill the priest then and there, but without the arch-lector’s subjugation, he knew he could never proceed with his plans.

‘Commander!’ Fuerst beamed as Kreyssig stepped into the lavishly appointed anteroom that separated his bedchamber from the hall. The servant rushed forwards to relieve his master of hat and gloves. Kreyssig shrugged out of his cloak as Fuerst ministered to him.

‘It has been a trying day,’ he told Fuerst. His face contorted in an expression of disgust as he considered how even with the threat of ruinous scandal hanging over his cult, von Reisarch had imposed conditions and terms upon his capitulation. The end result would be the same, but von Reisarch wanted these concessions so that he and his god might save face. It was a contemptible display of hypocrisy.

‘I am going to retire early,’ Kreyssig said, waving his servant away. Fuerst bowed out, retreating to the little door concealed in the side panelling that led to his own quarters. All of the Imperial apartments were similarly appointed, doors disguised in the panelling to provide ingress for wardrooms, servants’ quarters and other such unseemly places whose presence was convenient but whose existence was best unobserved and unobtrusive.

Kreyssig withdrew into his chamber, sinking into sleep almost as soon as he lay down in the enormous bed.

It was still dark when he was awakened. Groggily, Kreyssig stared up at the velvet canopy, a dim blur in the shadowy murk of the room. The temptation to retreat back into slumber was almost irresistible, but even in his semi-coherent state his mind was vexed. What was it that had disturbed him?

The smell. There was a foul, animal stink in the room. That was what had disturbed him.

It was a smell that wasn’t unknown to Kreyssig. Furtively, he slipped his hand beneath his pillow, reaching for the dagger he kept there. Careful as he was, his action still evoked a warning hiss from the darkness.

Turning over in the bed, Kreyssig could make out a set of beady red eyes glistening in the darkness. The creature those eyes belonged to was only a dark outline, a black shadow behind the murk. He wasn’t sure which was worse, seeing the mutant or not seeing it.

‘I did not send for you,’ Kreyssig snarled at the shadow. ‘This is the Imperial Palace. You don’t belong here.’

The creature chittered, a sound that was unsettlingly like laughter. ‘Kreyssig-man want-need talk-talk,’ the mutant hissed. ‘Friends of Kreyssig-man listen when he talk-talk with god-man. Friends not like-like.’

Kreyssig snorted with contempt at the creature’s expression of displeasure. Was this sewer-crawling vermin actually trying to dictate terms to him? Angrily and without care for the mutant’s warning, he fished the dagger out from under his pillow.

‘I don’t care what you like and what you don’t,’ Kreyssig declared. ‘You should feel fortunate I tolerate you mutants to exist at all. My dealings with the Temple of Sigmar are my own affair. I employ you to spy for me, not on me!’

The mutant growled at him from the darkness, Kreyssig had the impression of fangs gnashing angrily. ‘Kreyssig-man promise much-much,’ the creature said. ‘Gift-give grain. Want-need more.’

Kreyssig fingered the hilt of his dagger, his skin crawling at the close proximity of the ratman in his chambers. He would never have given the slinking little beasts credit for such audacity as to violate the Imperial Palace itself. Now the loathsome mutants were compounding audacity with impudence. ‘You’ve already been given grain for your people,’ Kreyssig said. ‘Two storehouses. Enough to feed all of Altdorf for the winter.’

‘Want-need more,’ the mutant repeated its demand.

A horrible thought came to Kreyssig as he listened to that monstrous, insolent hiss. Enough grain to feed Altdorf for three months, yet these mutants already needed more. If their numbers were as few as he’d been led to believe… But could he believe? How many of the verminous things were actually down there?

Kreyssig shifted to the far side of the bed, setting his feet on the floor and taking a firm grip on one of his pillows with an idea to exploit it as a makeshift shield. ‘Why do you need more grain?’ he demanded.

The rat-mutant chittered again. When it spoke, its voice was more measured, each word unhurried and distinct. ‘Need more grain. If Kreyssig-man will not give, then we will take. Need god-priest to stay dead. If Kreyssig-man makes new god-priest, then we will kill.’

‘Will you?’ Kreyssig cried, lunging forwards, his dagger flashing at the darkness. The blade slashed only shadows. The red eyes were gone, vanished as though they had been no more than a phantom. Before Kreyssig could consider where the mutant had retreated, light was streaming into the room from the open doorway. He spun around, but nothing more menacing than Fuerst greeted his gaze.

‘I heard you cry out, commander,’ Fuerst said, a cudgel clutched in one hand, a candle in the other.

Kreyssig waved Fuerst inside, motioning for him to raise the candle high and illuminate as much of the room as he could. The two of them made a thorough search, but there was nothing to find. Kreyssig’s visitor had evaporated into the night.

‘You can go to sleep,’ Kreyssig told Fuerst. When his concerned servant lingered, he made the suggestion an order.

Despite the disturbing visitation, Kreyssig wanted to be alone. He wanted time to think, to consider his dealings with the mutants, to balance his experiences with them against the dim fables of childhood. He wasn’t so sure now if his subhuman spies really were mutants. At least human mutants. The old legends spoke of other things, other things shaped like rats that could walk and talk and think like men.

The cold clutch of fear closed around Kreyssig’s heart, that organ that so many of his victims had described as black and immovable. Now it was a sick, frightened thing, a thing plagued with doubt and foreboding.

What if they truly were what Kreyssig now feared they might be? Not mere mutants or monsters, but the ghastly Underfolk themselves!

Again he thought of those storehouses. He would have the Kaiserjaeger open them tomorrow, check to see how much the mutants had already taken. It was one way to estimate their numbers.

Because Kreyssig was afraid that there might be more ratmen under Altdorf than he would find in his darkest nightmares.

Sylvania
Nachexen, 1113

The satisfying stink of fear filled Seerlord Skrittar’s nose as he strode down the muddy lane. There was a panoply of other delectable scents in the air. The smell of grain and dried meat, cheese and bread. The man-things of this village had been quite industrious. The formidable palisade they’d erected around their village was a clear indication of how much they intended to keep the fruits of that industry. They’d been better armed than most Sylvanian settlements too, and better prepared to fight.

None of which had, of course, availed them in the end. It never ceased to amuse Skrittar how much faith humans put into walls to protect them. It was only a matter of hours for Clan Fester’s skavenslaves to burrow under those walls and bring them crashing down. Before the man-things were fully aware of what was happening to them, the ratmen were upon them, cutting down those who tried to defy them. With the humans’ enemies already inside their defences, the struggle was exactly the way Skrittar preferred – brief and one-sided.

Those man-things that had displayed the good sense to cower before the skaven had been spared, at least for a time. It wasn’t just the satisfying smell of their fear, but simply a matter of good policy. Man-thing slaves were generally stronger than their skaven counterparts, and when they eventually did wear out they made for much better eating.

A little trickle of drool fell from Skrittar’s fangs as he considered the various ways man-meat could be prepared. He’d have Manglrr’s sword-rats fetch him a nice young human for dinner. The young ones were so much more tender, and their flesh seemed to absorb spices much more readily than that of older specimens.

Turning his attention to the clanrats swarming through the streets, Skrittar lashed his tail in annoyance. Miserable tick-sucking wretches! If they could think past their bellies, then they might be worth something! These constant diversions to gather provisions were becoming intolerable. They were distracting them from their real purpose: collecting the warpstone. He hadn’t expended so much magic, arranged the martyrdom of twenty-four of his most powerful grey seers, simply so Clan Fester could traipse about Sylvania glutting their insatiable appetite!

Irritably, Skrittar struck a passing clanrat with his staff, knocking the ratman into the mud. Before he could rise, the seerlord was snatching the radishes from the skaven’s paws. Spinning about, the clanrat stopped short of baring his fangs when he saw who had assaulted him. Squeaking with fright, he scurried off, leaving Skrittar to gnaw at the purloined food.

As he digested the radishes, Skrittar became aware of a change in the air. There was a new tang to it, a rotten stink of spoiled meat and crawling worms. It was not unlike the reek the skaven had found clinging to those humans who died from the Black Plague, but this was much stronger. The grey seer was just starting to wonder if some of Manglrr’s over-eager vermin had excavated a man-thing bury-hole when a new smell crept into the air.

It was the smell of fear, but far thicker and pungent than that exuded by humans. Skrittar knew that smell quite well, might even have admitted to producing it himself if such an admission wouldn’t be a sign of weakness. The reek was that of skaven musk, spurted from their glands in times of agitation. Why Manglrr’s mangy minions were frightened now, when the village was already subdued, was an absurdity the grey seer couldn’t understand.

‘Mighty-great seerlord!’ a shivering voice yelped. Skrittar caught the scent of Manglrr Baneburrow long before he saw the warlord. To smell one of the Council of Thirteen in such agitation brought a contemptuous flicker to his whiskers. Truly it could never have been the Horned One’s intention that such weak-livered mice should have a share in ruling the Under-Empire! Such conniving cowards were fit only for exploitation by their more intelligent peers. It was the main reason Skrittar had chosen Clan Fester to assist him in recovering the warpstone.

Manglrr’s posture was hunched and cowed when he came scurrying up to Skrittar, the burly stormvermin accompanying him displaying a similarly meek and abased attitude. The seerlord was wary of accepting such appearances, but a whiff of their scent was good indication that their despair might be genuine. There was no question that the frightened attitude of their warlord had sent a thrill of panic sweeping through the ratmen ransacking the village.

‘Honoured mage-rat, Supreme Prophet of the Horned One!’ Manglrr whined, almost touching his nose to the dirt as he bowed before Skrittar. Such grovelling from one of the Grey Lords filled Skrittar with disgust… and not a little anxiety.

‘Speak-squeak!’ Skrittar demanded, wondering what catastrophe the warlord was about to relate. If Warmonger Vecteek had discovered this expedition, the whole of Clan Rictus might even now be marching after them! If that was the case, Skrittar would have to start thinking about how he could place all the blame on Manglrr’s tail.

‘Man-things!’ Manglrr shuddered, licking a carved toe-bone he wore about his neck as he gave voice to his fear. ‘Many-many man-things marching to village-nest! Kill-slay all-all try to stop!’

In his terror, Manglrr was slurring his words, letting them trip over each other like any common ratman. Skrittar forced his own voice to be more controlled. ‘Man-things?’ he sneered. ‘You squeak like a runt dragged from its mother’s teat! Get your craven sword-rats over there and kill-slay! Must Mighty Skrittar do everything for you?’

Manglrr’s fangs clattered and he directed a look over his shoulder. The panic that had set in was definitely spreading now, augmented by the ragged, bloodied skaven streaming back into the village from the outlying fields. It didn’t matter to the ratmen that they hadn’t seen for themselves what had caused their warlord’s fright. The musk of fear alone was enough to drive them into unreasoning flight.

‘Man-things,’ Manglrr repeated, one claw clinging desperately to the hem of Skrittar’s robe. ‘Won’t die-dead when sword-rats attack! Won’t stop-die! Slash-stab much-much, but man-things stand-live!’

Skrittar glared at his fellow Grey Lord. It was so tempting to stretch forth his hand, conjure up a spell and burn the idiot’s head from his shoulders. What sort of insipid babble was he spewing? Man-things that his sword-rats wouldn’t fight because when they did fight, the humans just shrugged off their blows? It was too absurd to be believed. Even an orc respected a decent stab to the gut or a nasty slash to the back of the head, and there were few things tougher to convince to stay dead than an orc.

‘Fool-meat!’ Skrittar snarled, snatching his robe from Manglrr’s paws. ‘There are no dead-things! It is a human trick. They want to take back village-nest!’ A kick from the seerlord’s foot sent Manglrr stumbling back. Skrittar directed a warning look at the warlord, but he just sat on his haunches staring at the grey seer with frightened eyes. The seerlord gnashed his fangs in annoyance. ‘I’ll see-scent for myself,’ he growled, motioning with his claws for two of Manglrr’s stormvermin to lift him onto the roof of a nearby hut. Fortunately, they weren’t so subdued by fear that they forgot the advisability of obeying a grey seer.

As his paws found purchase on the thatch roof, Skrittar cast his gaze down into the streets. The panic Manglrr had incited was everywhere – he could even see skaven discarding their plunder as they fled! The seerlord cast a sideways look at the warlord below, wondering who would replace Manglrr should he suffer an accident. Certainly it couldn’t be a bigger fool!

A twinge of alarm crept into Skrittar’s mind as he turned towards the north, the direction the bedraggled war-rats had been streaming from. From his position, he had a good view of the fields beyond the village. The tall stalks of wheat were swaying violently, and it soon became apparent that what was disturbing them wasn’t foraging skaven. Through gaps in the crop, Skrittar could see human shapes, shapes that moved in a disturbing, awkward fashion.

Squeals of terror from the opposite end of the village set Skrittar’s heart pounding even faster. Reluctantly, he cast his enhanced senses to the south, dreading what he might find. His projected gaze raced above streets teeming with frightened ratmen, swept out into the pastures and fallow fields to the south. There, ranked across the landscape, was an unbroken line of rotting humans. Silently, they marched towards the village; together with the fiends in the fields they moved to close a ring that would see the skaven trapped at its centre!

Skrittar thumbed a nugget of warpstone into his paw, feeling the reassuring burn of its energies sizzle against his fur. His mind raced, pondering the possibilities. He didn’t like the idea of pitting his magic against so many foes, and he wasn’t keen to trust his safety to the dubious valour of Clan Fester. They didn’t seem aware of his importance and their own expendability. If it wasn’t for the warpstone, he’d use his magic to get away and leave the vermin to fare as they would. The loss of the warpstone, however, was too awful to countenance. Somehow, Skrittar had to salvage the situation.

The clash of steel diverted Skrittar’s attention back to the north. He focused his gaze on the road beyond the fields, surprised to see a great host of humans marching down the path. At first he suspected they were simply reinforcements for the ones already ringing the village, but then he noticed that the newcomers were assaulting the creatures forming the cordon. Immediately Skrittar likened the action to that of his own factious race: two rival clans of man-things were struggling for dominance! In the resultant confusion, there would be opportunity for escape!

Taking a moment to preen his whiskers and assure himself that his scent was relaxed, Skrittar dropped back into the street. With an imperious bark, he ordered Manglrr to his feet. ‘Fetch-gather Fester-rats,’ Skrittar snarled. ‘Through me, the Horned One has set my enemies against one another! My magic has made the dead-things fight. While they kill, we will return to the tunnels with my warpstone!’

Manglrr looked dubiously at Skrittar, but some of his suspicion fled when he heard excited squeaks passing back down the street. The cordon was breaking apart. The man-things were fighting each other!

‘Back-back to tunnels!’ Manglrr chittered, drawing his sword and waving it overhead to emphasise his command. ‘Back-back to Rotten-Hole!’

Skrittar caught Manglrr by the scruff of the neck before the warlord could make any more bold commands. ‘We’re not going back to your burrow!’ the seerlord snarled, baring his fangs. ‘You’ve barely gathered any warpstone! There’s too much still out there. I’m not leaving it behind!’

The rasp of blades being drawn reminded Skrittar that he was threatening the warlord of a clan he happened to be surrounded by. A clan so frightened that they might even forget all the curses they’d acquire if they killed a grey seer. Carefully, he released Manglrr, giving the warlord’s neck an affectionate pat for good measure.

‘I’ll get more help,’ Skrittar promised. ‘More sword-rats to kill-slay man-things!’

Manglrr brought his sword flashing down, letting the blade slice the space between himself and the seerlord. ‘Bring-fetch plague monks!’ he demanded. ‘Use Black Plague to kill-slay stink-things!’

The seerlord felt his fangs grind as he heard the demand. Involve Clan Pestilens? Let those heretics take a share in the treasure that rightfully belonged to him? It was obscene! Profane! He wouldn’t do it!

Of course, without Clan Fester, he’d need to get another clan to help him. The more clans who learned about the warpstone, the more likely the secret was to get out. Once the story spread, half the Under-Empire would be swarming over Sylvania stealing his treasure. No, he had to keep Clan Fester, whatever it took to appease them and allay their fears.

‘Yes-yes,’ Skrittar hissed through clenched fangs. It was unspeakable that this ten-flea warlord would have more faith in the heretical concoctions of Clan Pestilens than the divine protection of the Horned Rat. ‘We will use the Black Plague to make stink-things die. I will get-fetch plague monks to help us.’

Manglrr bobbed his head happily. Snarling orders to his stormvermin, he joined the general exodus of skaven streaming from the village. Seerlord Skrittar stalked after him, already wondering how he would keep his promise while at the same time turning it to his advantage.

From atop his palanquin, Vanhal supervised the tightening of the noose around the village of Bistra. At his command, the skeletons and zombies began their slow march towards the settlement, cutting down the strange creatures foraging in the fields. They were vile, abominable things, upright, man-sized rats that wore crude armour in outrageous mockery of humanity. Never had he imagined such unclean things could walk the land. Exterminating them was more than simply expedient; it felt almost ordained, as though some ancient wrong were being set right with each of the vermin his undead slew.

Of all the terrors he had seen besetting the people of Sylvania, from plague to tyranny to starvation, this was the most loathsome. To be preyed upon by disease and famine or even the soldiers of the von Draks was awful enough, but to be preyed upon by humanoid rats was a perverse abomination. Vanhal’s magic would spare the Sylvanians such horror and humiliation. Human prey and verminous scavenger alike would be struck down by the cleansing blades of his army.

While his undead troops converged upon Bistra, a new disturbance drew Vanhal’s attention. Through his witchsight, he could see the black cloud of sorcery drawing down from the north. Before the first skeleton marched into sight, he knew the nature of what was coming. Even as mortal kings must struggle over their domains, so his arcane power had drawn a rival to contest his might.

Dourly, Vanhal waited while the rival force marched ever closer. The other necromancer possessed some skill; the spells that had cloaked his army’s advance for so long proved that even more than the immense size of that army. There were tens of thousands of zombies and skeletons in that host, far beyond the capability of a mere dabbler in the black arts.

In eerie silence, the undead troops struck Vanhal’s battle line. Rusted swords chopped down into desiccated flesh, corroded bludgeons smashed rotten skulls. The intruders stormed across the outer ring of Vanhal’s army. It was a weird, ghostly fight, devoid of blood and screams. No cries for mercy or shouts of triumph, only the march of bony feet and the cleaving of decayed flesh. Deathless, fearless, the two undead hosts collided.

With reluctance, Vanhal drew his forces away from Bistra to confront this new foe. He watched as the intruders continued their violent advance, biding his time as he studied the tactics of his enemy and attempted to judge the extent of his magic. There was a callousness and arrogance in what he saw, an almost sneering contempt that bespoke either supreme ability or colossal over-confidence.

At last, as the intruders were storming across the fields, Vanhal found what he had been waiting for. In the midst of the horde was a great black coach drawn by skeletal steeds. Seated within the coach, wrapped within the folds of a black cape, was his rival. Vanhal could see the streams of power coursing through the other necromancer, could sense the enormity of the aethyric energies he had harnessed. Strangely, the very magnitude of that power emboldened Vanhal. The sorcerer was an amateur after all, despite his pretensions. No truly knowledgeable practitioner would dare invest such a magnitude of power within his own body. Simply looking at the man, Vanhal could see his own power eating him, withering his flesh and thinning his hair. Every breath he took leeched his essence of an hour. Simply by withdrawing from the field, Vanhal could overcome his enemy.

Pride refused such action. It had been pride that drove him into exile as a boy, set him on the path that would bring him to Sylvania and ultimately to embrace the black arts. Pride did not relinquish its hold now. Exerting his will, Vanhal set the multitudinous legs of his palanquin scuttling across the fields towards the decayed ranks of the enemy. At the same time, he stretched forth his hand and focused his will upon the carcasses lying strewn behind that advancing horde. Drawing upon his magic, Vanhal concentrated upon the little wisps of spirit energy escaping from the twice-slain corpses, gathering them together, knitting their disparate energies into a single whole. Bit by bit, he drew the wisps into a monstrous energy, a phantom juggernaut of howling spectres. Ghastly faces gibbered and screamed from the ectoplasmic colossus, skeletal arms clawed and groped from the swirling mass. Like the surge of some ghostly hurricane, the spectral host crashed through the ranks of skeletons, scattering them like leaves before a storm. The black coach was pulverised, its deathly chargers shattered into bony shards, its passenger flung through the air.

Vanhal saw his rival crash amidst the splintered wreck of his conveyance, sensed the expenditure of energy that preserved him from more serious harm. Closing the fingers of his hand, Vanhal drew the raging spirit-storm back upon the necromancer, directing its full fury against him. Ghoul-fires and ghost-lights flashed from the embattled necromancer as he strove to defend himself against the phantom tempest. In his panic, he neglected the great army he had summoned.

Vanhal did not forget them. Maintaining the spirit host, he was still able to direct his own undead legion. Steadily they cut a path through the intruders, each wisp of essence speeding away from the destroyed husks to replenish the energies of the spectral storm raging around the necromancer.

Bit by bit, Vanhal could see his rival’s great power waning. Before the sorcerer’s energies could falter entirely, the spirit host was dispersed by an unspoken command from the former priest. By now, Vanhal’s legion had cut completely through the intruding army. As the swirling apparitions faded into nothingness, a vanquished foe found himself staring up at a palanquin fashioned from animated bone, and a masked man clad in the habit of a Morrite priest.

‘When you die,’ Vanhal told the defeated necromancer, ‘your flesh belongs to me.’

Raw terror filled the man’s eyes. ‘Spare me, great master!’ he pleaded. Frantically, he dug beneath his robes to produce De Arcanis Kadon, holding the book towards his vanquisher.

Vanhal’s eyes narrowed behind the skeletal mask, his lips moving as he silently read the hieroglyphs on the cover. ‘What is to prevent me from simply taking the book from you?’ he asked.

‘This book contains all the secrets of Kadon,’ the man announced. ‘I came to seek your help unlocking its secrets. Much… much of it is beyond my comprehension,’ he admitted. ‘It may even be beyond your skill,’ he added, then hurried to continue. ‘Together, perhaps, with our combined knowledge…’

Vanhal raised his hand, and a bony arm emerged from the face of his palanquin to snatch the tome from the man’s grasp. Shifting through the mass of the palanquin, the arm finally thrust itself from the skeletal floor beside the necromancer, holding the book for him as he perused it.

‘I will allow you to live,’ Vanhal decided, still studying the bloody pages. ‘Not because of your gift, or because I am impressed by your mastery of the black arts.’

The other necromancer stared in frank astonishment at Vanhal, disbelief in his face. ‘Why then do you spare me?’ he asked.

Vanhal looked away from the tome, fixing his new apprentice with a weary gaze. ‘I need someone to talk to,’ he confessed.

‘Someone I didn’t conjure from the grave.’

CHAPTER NINE

Middenheim
Ertezeit, 1118

There was deception about Kurgaz Smallhammer’s name. The weapon clenched in the dwarf’s brawny hands was taller than he was and nearly equal to his own weight. Gromril runes were etched into its massive head, flowing across it in an intricate spiral of heritage, tradition and magic. Drakdrazh, it had been named in the long ago, crafted by the ancient runesmiths for the War of Vengeance. Wyrms had died beneath that hammer, their reptilian skulls shattered by the force of runemagic and dwarfish determination.

After the War of Vengeance, Drakdrazh had never again been inflicted upon such tremendous foes, a circumstance that provoked endless grumbling around the hearths of the Smallhammers. For generations, the family had been forced to settle for lesser enemies, adversaries unworthy of facing them in battle, unfit to stand before the might of Drakdrazh.

As Kurgaz brought his hammer swinging around, the gromril runes burned with eldritch fire. The effect when the weapon connected with his foe was an apocalyptic spectacle. The creature didn’t crumple, didn’t collapse. Instead, its carcass was splashed across the wall in a welter of black blood and furry meat.

The magnitude of the skaven’s destruction brought shocked silence to the subterranean gallery. Dwarf and ratman alike paused in their battle, their attention riveted by the thunderous clap as Drakdrazh slammed into its victim. The obliteration of the unfortunate ratkin sent a thrill through all who witnessed it. For the embattled dwarfs, it was a fiery rush of exhilaration. For the skaven, it was the stuff of raw terror.

The dwarfs had descended into the lower workings after it became clear that something was preying upon their miners. No survivors had reached the halls of Karak Grazhyakh, leaving the exact nature of the predator unclear. Loremasters and greybeards had speculated on everything from night goblins to a basilisk. It was surprising that none of them had considered skaven as the culprits. Perhaps if they had, the punitive expedition they sent into the mines would have been larger.

Leaping across the residue of his splattered foe, Kurgaz was thankful for the elders’ lack of foresight. Skaven were a cringing, cowardly enemy. They never revealed themselves unless they felt certain of easy prey and a quick kill. Much larger an expedition and the foul vermin might never have stirred from their hidey-holes.

That was something no dwarf worth his beard would have liked.

Drakdrazh ploughed into a second ratman, a bulky brute in scraps of plate and chain. To its squeal of horror was added the shriek of shorn metal as its body was obliterated. Steam now rose from the runes carved into the hammer, black blood boiling as it splashed across the letters.

‘The Hammer of Doom is upon you!’ Kurgaz roared. There would be at least a few of the scuttling vermin who understood what he was saying. They could take his war-cry back to their burrows, a horror story to tell their pups in the dead of night.

The dwarf’s bellow and the utter havoc visited by his hammer cured the skaven of their desire for battle. When they had swarmed out of the mine shafts and tunnels in their hundreds, they had smelt easy prey. Just a few dozen dwarfs in a lonely gallery, a place they could easily surround and isolate. Honourless vermin, they had no compunctions about engineering a massacre.

Now, however, it seemed they were the ones courting a massacre. Glands clenched, spilling the musk of fear into the air. Frightened squeaks dripped past shivering fangs. Those ratmen closest to the tunnels and shafts quickly deserted the gallery. As the first fled, the rest quickly followed. Rodent shrieks echoed through the mine as some of the vermin threw themselves down open shafts in their mindless terror, hurling themselves and those climbing below them to an ignominious doom.

Growling their own battle-cries, the other dwarfs charged the retreating skaven. Scores of the beasts were cut down before they could desert the gallery, hacked to pieces by dwarfish axes and battered to paste by dwarfish hammers.

Kurgaz stepped away from the mess of pulp that had been the last enemy to fall before him. He glanced around, but there were no ratkin within his reach. He spat at the fleeing vermin in contempt. Lower than greenskins, these filthy skaven. At least an orc had the spine to stand and fight. There was no glory in a battle like this, victory against such an easily routed foe rang as hollow as an elven promise.

The dwarf swung Drakdrazh onto his shoulder, grunting as its weight pressed down on him. He wondered if the weapon shared his disappointment, his frustration that the fight was over before it was properly begun. A runeweapon had a spirit all its own, a divine spark pounded into it by the runesmiths who forged it. How the hammer must lament the fall from ancient glories to the culling of slinking ratkin!

‘Victory, Kurgaz!’ a sallow-bearded dwarf warrior shouted, sprinting towards the champion. Blood dripped from the warrior’s torn ear and there was a gash in his forearm where a skaven spear had pierced him, yet he seemed to give small consideration to his hurts, gripped by the jubilation of victory. ‘The skaven will think twice before they defile Grungni’s Tower again!’

Kurgaz scowled at the younger dwarf’s enthusiasm. ‘They turned and ran before the fight could even start,’ he cursed, kicking the rodent mush at his feet.

‘The honour is yours, Kurgaz,’ the warrior told him. ‘If not for you, the ratkin might have overwhelmed us. Broken out into the upper workings.’

‘What honour in slaughtering vermin?’ Kurgaz shook his head and patted the haft of his hammer. ‘They were unworthy of Drakdrazh.’

At that instant, a loud report echoed through the gallery. Kurgaz staggered as he was struck from behind, the shot slamming into him with such force that his mail was shredded by the impact. Acrid smoke and a torrent of blood rose from the wound. The dwarf took a stumbling step, then slammed face forwards onto the floor.

The dwarf warriors clearing out the last knots of lingering ratmen looked up, stunned to see a lone skaven dangling from one of the ventilation shafts. The creature was suspended by ropes, hanging upside down above the gallery. Clutched in its paws was the lethal bulk of a jezzail, smoke rising from its muzzle. Before any of the dwarfs could react, the verminous sniper slung its gun across its back and scampered back up the ropes, a chitter of sadistic amusement drifting down as it made its retreat.

‘The filth has shot Kurgaz Smallhammer!’ The shout echoed through the gallery almost as loudly as the shot had. In a matter of heartbeats, a ring of grave-faced dwarfs surrounded the prostrate form of their hero. They stared at the horrible wound in Kurgaz’s back, at the smouldering hole that had burned its way through layers of chain and leather to strike the flesh within.

One of the dwarfs, an old veteran with flecks of silver in his crimson beard, lifted Kurgaz onto his side and pressed his ear to the hero’s chest. ‘Take him to the stronghold!’ he called out. ‘Take him to his father while there is still breath in him!’

Solemnly, the dwarf warriors lifted their champion from the cold floor. Many of them had never seen a skaven jezzail before, but all of them recognised the corrupt nature of Kurgaz’s wound. The triumph of only a moment before was gone, stolen by this cowardly act that condemned a bold hero to an inglorious death.

The fortress-like façade of the temple of Ulric dominated the Ulricsmund, the flanking watchtowers and central spires rising far above the cluster of chapels, archives and rectories that crouched in the shadow of the main sanctuary and the Great Tower. The temple had been constructed in the earliest days of Middenheim’s founding, built by Wulcan, first to bear the title of Ar-Ulric. Dwarf architects had lent their expertise to the construction, affording it a brooding solidity not seen in human designs. In those bygone days, when the summit of the Ulricsberg was yet dominated by unexplored forest, when the Teutogens were but a primitive tribe of hunters, the temple had acted as refuge as well as sanctuary, it walls built to defy the assaults of beastmen, goblins and giants.

There was still a martial feel to the temple complex, something that was only natural given that Ulric wasn’t simply a god of winter and wolves, but of warfare as well. Knights of the Teutogen Guard stood duty before the great oak doors of the temple and patrolled the parapets of its walls. Many of the wolf-priests wore breastplates of steel or bronze as part of their clerical regalia. Upon the walls of the sanctuary, interspersed with the pelts of wolves and the skulls of giants, a wild profusion of swords, hammers and axes were displayed in places of honour, wooden placards announcing the deeds of each weapon. Where the image of Ulric was represented in human rather than lupine form, he was always depicted with his great axe, Blitzbeil.

As a Sigmarite, Brother Richter found the overall effect disturbing. Sigmar too was a god of war, but for his followers warfare was a sombre, brutal affair. It was grim necessity. The Temple of Ulric gloried in war, revelled in it, extolled it as a virtue in and of itself. For the Sigmarite, war was a means to defend civilisation. For the Ulrican, war needed no excuse. It was an elemental force as powerful as the sea and the forest, as vital and omnipresent as life and death, luck and fate.

The Ulrican faith had been the bedrock of the Empire. Sigmar had worshipped Ulric, had used the god of war to build his Empire and drive the enemies of man beyond its borders. Yet that had been long ago. Civilisation had grown from the barbarism of those days. Sigmar had ascended to take a place among the gods, and through his wisdom he had bestowed upon mankind a better way than the violent path of Ulric.

Brother Richter was sensitive to the nature of his thoughts. His personal misgivings about Ulric would certainly be considered blasphemous by the wolf-priests, just as their own misgivings about Sigmar’s divinity would be anathema to himself. It was, he supposed, a doctrinal impasse that could never be bridged.

Having no desire to intrude upon the Ulricans in their own temple, Brother Richter lingered at the entrance to the sanctuary while Prince Mandred, Lady Mirella and the knight Beck walked towards the altar, a great slab of alabaster that resembled a block of arctic ice. Richter could hear their footfalls echoing down from the vaulted ceiling. Dwarfcraft, that was the only explanation for such incredible architecture. The ceiling was over a hundred feet above the floor, and designed in such a fashion as to magnify and project the sounds coming from the fore of the temple. A speaker standing in the pulpit might send his slightest whisper rebounding to every corner of the sanctuary.

The Sigmarite didn’t contemplate the ceiling for long. Almost against his will, he felt his eyes drawn to the area beyond the altar, the spot of bare stone which was, in truth, the heart of both the temple and the city of Middenheim. Richter was uncomfortable gazing at it, feeling as though its very existence was a challenge to his own beliefs.

The cause of his discomfort was a great pillar of flame, a cold, white fire that blazed from the bare rock. It was one of the divine proofs the Ulricans espoused as evidence of their god’s dominance. The fire was called the Sacred Flame and was said to have been started by a spark from Ulric’s axe when the god cleaved the top from the Fauschlag and left the plateau upon which Middenheim was built. The fire had burned for thousands of years, without any visible source. It was claimed that so long as it burned, Ulric would protect Middenheim. The most aggressive of the wolf-priests challenged the clerics of other gods to present such evidence of their own deity’s presence.

‘The pure of heart may step within the Sacred Flame and suffer no hurt,’ a quiet voice spoke almost in Brother Richter’s ear. The Sigmarite gave a start, turning to find Ar-Ulric standing at his elbow. There was a curious, almost mischievous twinkle in his eye. ‘Would you care to test your virtue, brother? Or do you hold too many secrets to tempt the fire?’

Brother Richter smiled uneasily. ‘Only a proud man believes himself virtuous,’ he said. ‘And pride is the handmaiden of the Ruinous Powers.’ Boldly, he met the high priest’s gaze. ‘Have you made the test yourself, holiness?’

Ar-Ulric laughed and stroked his beard. ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Like you, I believe testing a god is the best way to show that you are unworthy of him.’ His smile again became cunning. ‘I would be interested to discuss questions of dogma with you some time.’

‘I fear I am unworthy of such consideration,’ Brother Richter answered with a bow. ‘As a simple friar, how could I fairly debate with the High Priest of Ulric?’

‘And if you were Arch-Lector Wolfgang Hartwich?’ Ar-Ulric asked. ‘Might you debate me then?’ He raised his hand to silence whatever protest was on the Sigmarite’s lips. ‘I may be old, but my memory is keen as a razor. Better than your own, it seems. You forget that we met when that monster Boris was elected Emperor.’ He chuckled again as he added, ‘I was one of those who didn’t condone his ascension.’

Hartwich felt the barb as though it were a dagger thrust. It was true, the Temple of Sigmar had voted in favour of Boris Hohenbach. Another of the many crimes inflicted upon the Temple’s dignity by the late Grand Theogonist. In his own way, he’d done his best to atone for such ecclesiastical misdeeds.

‘Remember my invitation,’ Ar-Ulric said, proceeding down the central nave towards the altar and the Sacred Flame. ‘I stand ready to receive Brother Richter or Arch-Lector Hartwich whenever they might call upon me. And there’s no need for worry. I don’t have any friends in Altdorf interested in hearing of your miraculous resurrection.’

The high priest laughed again. ‘Now that should be a most illuminating topic for discussion, don’t you think?’

The atmosphere within the cavern was stifling, rife with the stink of thousands of furry bodies, hot with the breath of swarming skaven. The might of Clan Rictus, most powerful of the warrior clans, was gathering faster than new burrows could be excavated to contain them. The excess had started to spill over into the dwarf mines, threatening to expose the magnitude of the skaven presence.

Upon a throne crafted from the pelts of vanquished rivals, Grey Lord Vecteek, self-appointed High Tyrant of Skavendom, watched the multitude sweep past his perch. These were his chattel, his slaves. The greatest army in the whole Under-Empire, the hordes of Clan Rictus! Until now, he had been content to conserve the power of his clan, to allow others on the Council to weaken the man-things, to carve their petty victories from the carcass of the man-thing Empire.

The time for such intrigues was over. Now Clan Rictus would bare its fangs, show its despised rivals the only measure that mattered: power! Raw, merciless, brutal power! The other Lords of Decay would learn their place – laprats to their master, Vecteek the Vanquisher! Vecteek the Victorious!

The black-furred skaven scowled down from the rocky outcropping, drumming his claws against the spiked breastplate he wore. How many spies were down there, he wondered? How many ears had the other Grey Lords turned against him?

‘Dread tyrant, Plague Lord Puskab Foulfur kneel-bow before you.’

Warmonger Vecteek turned about in his throne, directing his scowl at the bloated apparition that genuflected before him. His nose wrinkled in revulsion at the necrotic stink wafting from the plague priest’s foul robes and diseased antlers. He resisted the temptation to have his Verminguard butcher the filth out of hand. Clan Pestilens still had a role in his plans and killing one of their Grey Lords was a good way to incite the whole of the clan against him. Far better to bide his time until they no longer had any value.

‘Speak-squeak,’ Vecteek demanded, lashing his tail against the rock. ‘When will man-nest fall to Black Plague?’

‘Soon-soon,’ Puskab promised. The plague priest had earned his place on the Council by creating the Black Plague, after the small detail of defeating a disgraced Grey Lord in ritual combat. There was no one else in the Under-Empire more familiar with the disease and its spread. Still, Vecteek was growing tired of the plaguelord’s assurances. For thirty food-cycles, the skaven had been sneaking into Middenheim, trying to spread the plague without any noticeable results. ‘Need-want direct passage to city. Must-must,’ Puskab twitched his ears nervously. ‘Dwarf-things in way,’ he confessed.

Vecteek bristled at the excuse. ‘Kill-kill all dwarf-things!’ he raged, tearing his sword from its sheath as he reared up from his throne.

Puskab’s rheumy eyes glittered in the illumination of a worm-oil lamp. ‘Mighty-wise Vecteek,’ he said. ‘You lose-die many clanrats fighting dwarf-things. Hurt-harm attack on man-things.’

The Warmonger’s fangs peeled back in an expression of savage challenge. ‘Think-think Clan Rictus weak?’

‘No-no!’ Puskab whined, bowing still lower, trying to placate the enraged tyrant. ‘But why waste-use Rictus-rats fighting dwarf-things?’ His tail twitched as he made a suggestion, one he knew would appeal to the paranoid despot. ‘Use-waste Mors-mice!’ he said.

Vecteek settled down in his throne, his sword across his lap. Use Clan Mors to attack the dwarf-things? Clan Mors, the most despised of Rictus’s rivals! He could order Warlord Vrrmik to bring his warriors to the Wolfrock, use them in the wasteful fight with the dwarfs. Meanwhile, the strength of Clan Rictus would be unleashed in its full fury upon the weak, plague-stricken humans. Clan Rictus would claim the victory and Clan Mors would be bled dry by the dwarfs!

A wonderful plan, Vecteek reflected, dismissing Puskab with a wave of his claw. He was happy he had thought of it. But, then, that was simply another reason why he was superior to the rest of the Grey Lords.

Carroburg
Nachexen, 1115

There were fewer of his guests on the battlements when it came time to distribute food to the peasants of Carroburg. Where only a few weeks before none of his subjects would have dared offend him by staying away, now only the most weak-willed of his sycophants stood upon the walls. The weak-willed and those who genuinely shared the Emperor’s vicious humour.

Boris blamed the séance and the spectre of his father. The ghost’s words had diminished him in the eyes of his subjects, made them doubt the power and authority of the living Emperor. It was tempting to thrust the ingrates from the castle, but that would only spread the discontent when they returned to their own provinces. No, he had to reinforce to them that he was in control, that he wasn’t going to be ruined by some phantom’s words of doom.

Down below, the soldiers herded a group of peasants towards the walls. By now, the beggars were accustomed to the humiliating ordeal. They didn’t need to be goaded into dropping onto all fours and acting like dogs in order to retrieve the scraps the nobles threw down to them. Their acceptance provoked the Emperor, cheating him of his enjoyment of the scene.

‘Stop!’ Boris growled at his guests, arresting several of them in the very act of throwing food to the peasants. The Emperor smiled at their quick obedience. Still smiling, he leaned out between the crenellations. His gaze swept across the ragged mob, finally picking out one of them to persecute. ‘You! Woman! Stand up!’

Hesitantly, the peasant woman gazed up at him. She was either too frightened or too stupid to obey him at once, so Boris snapped his fingers and brought one of the soldiers hurrying forwards. Roughly, the dienstmann jerked the peasant to her feet.

‘Let’s have a look at you,’ Boris declared. There were a few titters of amusement from his hangers-on. Again, he had to motion for the soldier to take a hand. The hood was pulled away from the woman’s head, exposing a dull, plain face.

One of the other peasants stood suddenly and approached the wall. ‘Please, Majesty,’ the man said in a tremulous voice. ‘She’s my wife.’

Boris grinned at the statement. ‘That is pitiable,’ he said. He glanced aside at the nobles around him. ‘You must be poor beyond words if you are reduced to bedding such a creature. Look at that cow! She must have been sired by an orc! A blind one if her mother looks half as bad as she!’

The cruel jest brought raucous laughs from the nobles on the wall. The peasant man lowered his face, hiding the tears of shame and impotent rage streaming down his face.

Boris smirked and shouted down to his soldiers. ‘We desire to know if the rest of that thing is as revolting as what We’ve seen.’ He laughed when the woman tried to pull away from the dienstmann’s grasping fingers. The solider tore her shawl as she twisted from his grip, sending her tumbling to the ground.

The peasant man took a step towards his wife, hesitated as he saw more of the soldiers coming towards her. Desperately he looked to the beggars around him, but one and all they turned their heads. Helplessly, he appealed to the gloating Emperor above.

‘Have mercy, Majesty!’ the peasant cried.

A sadistic chuckle was the man’s answer. ‘We just want a peek at that curious specimen you brought to Us,’ Boris called down. ‘If she’s interesting enough, there might be a piece of silver waiting for you. The Imperial menagerie has been a bit anaemic of late.’ The Emperor’s jeering brought cruel mirth raining down on the man. Sobbing, the peasant fell to his knees and began pounding the dirt with his fists.

The soldiers had caught the woman and waited for the Emperor’s command. When he favoured them with a curt nod, one dienstmann started to rip away the peasant’s dress. Almost at once, the soldier jumped back, gasping. The other men released their prisoner, likewise drawing back in horror.

Boris frowned, his view obscured by the first soldier. ‘What’s wrong? Is that half-orc even more vile underneath those rags?’ The sneer left his face when the soldier moved and he had a look at the woman’s partially clothed body. Ugly black boils marred her flesh, the buboes of the Black Plague!

‘Plague! Gods preserve us, it is the plague!’ Count Artur shuddered. The cry was taken up by others, threatening to become a panic.

The Emperor glared down at the soldiers. ‘What do you mean bringing… bringing that…’ He spun around, snarling orders to the troops inside the castle. ‘Guards! Seal the gates! Archers… To the walls!’

Before the soldiers or peasants below could react, bowmen replaced nobles on the battlements. Arrows pelted the wretches, sparing none. On the Emperor’s command, the archers sent volley upon volley stabbing down until the bodies lying strewn before the wall resembled pincushions.

‘Merciful Shallya,’ Palatine Dohnanyi cried. ‘The plague is in Carroburg!’

‘We are doomed!’ wailed Gustav van Meers.

Emperor Boris waved the archers away from the walls and confronted his guests. ‘The plague might be in Carroburg,’ he conceded, ‘but it isn’t here. We have provisions enough. The gates are closed and shall remain so. No one can come in and if they can’t come in, they can’t bring the plague with them.’

Palatine Dohnanyi shook his head. ‘The spiders!’ he cried. ‘The plague is carried by hordes of black spiders! One bite! How can you keep out spiders?’

‘No! It is ravens, harbingers of Old Night!’ argued Count Artur. ‘They piss in your drinking water and give you the plague! What do castle walls mean to birds?’

Emperor Boris rounded on the terrified men, turning his own doubt and fear into a show of contemptuous anger. ‘We promised you protection,’ he reminded them. ‘This refuge was prepared against the plague! Priestess, doktor and warlock, we have defences against whatever would bring disease here.’ His lip curled in a sneer. ‘Or would you prefer to take your chances down there?’ He jabbed his thumb downwards, indicating the arrow-riddled corpses below.

‘Gods! Doktors! We’ve tried them all before,’ Gustav van Meers objected.

‘Then we will try the warlock’s magic,’ Boris growled back. He saw the terror in the Westerlander’s eyes, saw it mirrored in those of the others. If he were to maintain control of them, he had to do more than offer them hope. He had to remind them that there were other things beside the plague they had to fear.

‘Gustav is leaving us,’ the Emperor declared, waving his soldiers forwards. The merchant knew what was coming. Uttering a frightened yelp, he tried to flee back into the castle. The guards caught him before he could reach the door. Savagely they dragged the man to the battlements and threw him over the edge. Gustav’s scream ended in a sickening crunch. Groans drifted up to the parapet. The fall might not have killed him, but he wouldn’t be going anywhere with his broken bones.

Count Artur gawked at the callous incident. ‘He was a wealthy man…’

‘He was a peasant,’ Emperor Boris sneered. ‘No loss to anyone. There’s no shortage of scum just like him, even with the plague.’ He stared hard into the count’s face. ‘Did you want to argue about Our ability to keep the plague away from this castle?’

The rotund noble blanched at the threat in Boris’s tone. ‘No, I have every confidence in Your Imperial Majesty.’

‘Good,’ Boris said as he made his way back into the castle. ‘Ease your minds, friends. We mean what We say. The plague will never touch us here.’

The dungeons of Schloss Hohenbach had been neglected for some time. Pushed to the limit by the depredations of the beastmen and the plague that followed, the lords of Drakwald had been unable to maintain the luxury of prisoners. Mutilation, exile and execution had become the punishments of choice. Until the confinement of von Metzgernstein’s son, the vaults had been without human occupant for two years.

If humans no longer inhabited the dungeons, there were things that did. Rats and spiders, beetles and slugs. And sometimes larger vermin. Vermin that padded through the cellars on two feet, that cloaked their crook-backed bodies in raiment of black and grey. Creatures that chittered to one another in a language of squeaks and hisses.

The skaven would have been amused to hear Emperor Boris’s assurances to his guests. There was always something funny about prey that deluded themselves that they were safe.

As though anywhere in the Empire was safe from the ratmen and the plague they had engineered.

The Horned Rat had promised His children that they would one day inherit the surface world.

The time of the Great Ascendancy would soon be at hand.

CHAPTER TEN

Middenheim
Brauzeit, 1118

Mandred paced angrily outside the von Degenfeld manse. He’d had everything plotted out so carefully in his mind that he was having a hard time accepting that his plan wasn’t working the way he had imagined. After that day escorting Lady Mirella around the city, he’d realised that perhaps Sofia’s concerns weren’t so unfounded as he’d initially thought them to be. Mirella von Wittmar was a charming, intelligent and exceedingly brave woman, just the sort that would turn any nobleman’s fancy.

To be certain, he’d had dalliances before, but never with anyone he could be serious about. There had never been any real threat to Sofia… until now. Perhaps she had seen it first, some sixth sense of the female that warned her of a rival. Lady Mirella was of the upper strata of the Altdorf aristocracy. Maybe not of the breeding that a prince could marry, especially not with things as confused as they were in Altdorf, but Sofia might not be aware of that. What was it she’d said? ‘Add him to her collection of princes?’ It was only now, with the stirring of emotions in his heart, that Mandred appreciated the import of those words, the undercurrent of fear behind them. Sofia wasn’t as resigned to losing him as he’d believed, as they both had professed over the years. Lady Mirella might have been only a consort to the Prince of Altdorf, but in her fear Sofia had imagined she might do much better with the Prince of Middenheim.

‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ Mirella asked him.

Mandred hesitated before answering, his resolve wavering when she asked the question. They’d discussed it, of course. Been quite blunt, actually, in their discussion of their mutual regard for one another. At the same time, he still held Sofia in his heart. Decorum and simple decency demanded he make a choice between the two women. It had hurt him deeply to make that choice, but he felt chivalry called for him to stay true to Sofia. As he’d explained to Mirella, there was every chance that her regard towards him was simply gratitude for saving her from the Kineater. He felt it wasn’t fair to exploit an affection built upon such traumatic soil.

No, the thing to do, he’d decided, was to bring Mirella to see Sofia, to tell her that there was nothing between them. It was a dangerous ploy, but they had Brother Richter to act as chaperon. Mandred was hoping that the presence of a priest, even a Sigmarite one, would at least restrain Sofia’s temper.

‘I am sorry, your grace, but Burggraefin Sofia is indisposed.’ It was the second time the major domo of the burggraefin’s manse had come back with that answer. Mandred directed a glowering gaze upon the servant. He wasn’t about to be balked at this stage by some peasant.

‘You can move aside,’ Mandred told him, ‘or I can have you moved aside.’ He nodded towards Beck. The bodyguard dropped a hand around the hilt of his sword when the servant looked in his direction. ‘I’ll let you make the decision.’

Swallowing a knot that had suddenly formed in his throat, the major domo stepped aside and bowed the prince in. ‘Please forgive me, your grace. I was simply obeying the orders given me by my mistress.’

Mandred waved aside the servant’s apology. ‘Where is she?’ he inquired as he stepped into the hall.

The servant demurred for a moment, even at this stage trying to figure out some way to preserve the burggraefin’s privacy. Beck noticed the man glance towards the broad oaken stairway at the left. Brushing past the major domo, he marched to the stairs. ‘This way, your grace,’ the knight said.

Mandred glowered at the servant one last time and followed Beck. The major domo was close behind, his tongue still stumbling over an assortment of appeals that did nothing to dissuade the prince. If anything they only made him more determined to see Sofia.

The von Degenfeld manse was an old haunt of the prince’s, and Beck knew the way to Sofia’s chambers almost as well as Mandred himself. Many had been the cold night the bodyguard had spent outside that room. Now, however, he strode boldly to the engraved panel of dark Drakwald timber. Beck knocked once, waited a moment, then looked to his master.

‘I told you, the burggraefin is indisposed,’ the servant declared. Mandred frowned and nodded at Beck. The bodyguard stepped away from the door and brought his boot smashing into it. The first impact merely rattled it on its hinges. The second kick sent the door slamming inwards. His hand falling instinctually to the hilt of his sword, Beck stormed into Sofia’s bedchamber.

An instant later, the knight was back in the hall, a hand clasped around his nose and mouth. His eyes were wide with fright. Mandred felt his pulse quicken as the fear in his guard’s eyes infected him. Hurriedly, ignoring the protests of the major domo and the puzzlement of Mirella, he rushed to the room. Beck caught at him, trying to keep him in the hall, but he pulled free of the knight’s clutch.

The room, luxuriously appointed in the best Middenland style, seemed indistinct to Mandred’s gaze. It was as if his vision were blurred by the foul, sick-house stink in the chamber. Like Beck, his first action was to cover his face. Unlike his guard, however, he didn’t retreat into the hall but swept towards the canopied bed. Dreading what he would find, he reached for the embroidered curtain and drew it back.

A pale, wizened figure stared up at him, and somewhere beneath that nest of black boils a face squirmed into the semblance of a smile. ‘I’m afraid I’m not receiving… today… my prince.’

‘She has the plague, your grace,’ Beck called from the doorway. The knight had failed to keep Mandred from the room, but he was more successful in keeping Lady Mirella from the chamber.

Mandred didn’t need Beck to tell him what hideous affliction had descended upon Sofia. He’d seen the Black Plague at work in Warrenburg. He knew its stink, he knew the marks it left upon its victims. He knew even breathing the same air as the afflicted was to tempt Grandfather Pox.

A hundred thoughts stampeded through his mind, but only one roared so loudly as to command his body. Clenching his jaw tight, Mandred reached down and bundled the pathetic scarecrow-figure in a heavy blanket. Ignoring Beck’s frantic warnings, the prince rose from the bed, Sofia in his arms. ‘How long has she been like this?’ he snarled at the major domo.

‘Three… No… Four days, your grace,’ the servant answered.

‘Then there’s not much time,’ Mandred growled back, marching from the room with Sofia.

‘Ulric’s sake, your grace,’ Beck cried. ‘The woman’s going to die anyway. You can’t jeopardise yourself like this!’

Mandred stared at his guard, at the frightened cast of Mirella’s features. ‘This time mine will be the only life I risk,’ he said, thinking back to that fateful ride when he’d led brave men into the plague’s domain. ‘Take Lady Mirella back to the Middenpalaz.’

‘Where will you go?’ Mirella demanded, tears forming in her eyes.

The prince looked down at Sofia’s wasted frame. ‘There’s an alchemist who has taken over the old hospice of Shallya. He’s reputed to be something of a wonder worker. I’ll take her there.’

Beck stepped forwards, blocking the prince’s way. ‘I can’t let you risk yourself. Give me the girl. I’ll take her.’

Mandred shook his head. ‘This is my burden,’ he said. ‘You’ve always been a loyal knight. Do as you are ordered.’

Reluctantly, Beck stepped aside. Along with Mirella and the major domo, he watched Mandred walk away, eighty pounds of plague swaddled in his royal arms.

Mandred could think only of the draconian quarantine measures his father had undertaken the last time plague had threatened Middenheim. Great and small, Graf Gunthar had spared none who bore the marks of the Black Plague on their skin. He’d banished all those who’d even come in contact with the disease from the Ulricsberg, condemning them to the squalor of Warrenburg. Virtually the whole of the Shallyan sect had perished because of that edict. They’d refused to abandon the plague-stricken refugees and so had decamped en masse for the shanty town at the foot of the mountain. Most had died there, victims of the plague or marauding beastmen. The few survivors had remained in their little wooden chapel down below, resolute in their determination to stay where they felt most needed.

Graf Gunthar’s cruelty had been the salvation of Middenheim, Mandred knew that. An ugly truth was a truth all the same. Because it was truth, he knew how his father would react if he were to learn the plague had returned. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to spare the city, to honour what he felt to be a sacred trust between ruler and ruled.

No, Mandred corrected himself, guilt gnawing at his belly. There was one thing that would make his father forsake that trust. The graf wouldn’t sacrifice his own son, no matter who was at risk.

The stone walls of the hospice seemed to exert a preternatural chill, an atmosphere of desolation. The humble folk of Middenheim shunned the place: nobles complaining that it was in disrepair, peasants claiming that when her priestesses deserted the hospice, Shallya’s beneficence departed with them.

Mandred prayed that such wasn’t the case. Forgetting the dignity of his position, he bent on one knee and begged the goddess to intercede on Sofia’s behalf. The alchemist, a silver-haired Nordlander named Neist, ignored the prince’s lack of decorum as he examined the sick woman. It wasn’t long before he rose from beside the pallet and replaced his tools in the little leather bag he carried. Mandred sprang to his feet as the alchemist started to leave the tiny cell.

‘Where are you going?’ Mandred demanded, his fist tightening about the capelet fringing the alchemist’s cloak. ‘You have to make her well!’

Neist favoured the prince with a tired, indulgent smile. ‘It’s the Black Plague,’ he explained, not quite managing to keep his tone from possessing a patronising quality.

‘I know what it is,’ Mandred retorted, tightening his hold. ‘Make her better.’

The alchemist laughed, a bitter and cheerless sound. ‘If I knew how to do that I’d be the richest man in the Empire!’ He held his hands out for the prince to inspect. Mandred automatically released the man, recoiling when he saw the pox-scars all along Neist’s skin.

‘It caught me six years ago in Wolfenburg,’ Neist said. ‘I don’t know how I survived when so many didn’t, but I know it wasn’t anything of my doing.’

‘How can you be sure?’ Mandred asked, despair almost choking his voice. The alchemist beckoned to the prince, motioning him to withdraw into the corridor. Glancing one last time at Sofia’s bed, staring into her wide, fearful eyes, Mandred forced himself to follow Neist.

The alchemist closed the door when the prince had withdrawn. Sighing, Neist removed a piece of chalk and scratched a crude cross on the panel. ‘I’m sure,’ he said, gesturing with his arm to the rest of the long hallway. Both sides were lined with similar doors. Once this place had acted as a dormitory for the priestesses and their servants. Now it provided a refuge for Neist’s patients. As the alchemist pointed, Mandred found his attention riveted by a detail he’d been too distraught to notice when he was bringing Sofia here. Dozens of the doors were marked with the white crosses that indicated plague.

‘I’ve had ample opportunity,’ the alchemist declared. ‘First in Wolfenburg, then in Talabheim, then in Nuln.’ He wiped his scarred hand across his brow. ‘It seems if you somehow live through it, the plague can’t touch you again. A horrible feeling, to watch a city dying around you, knowing you’ll be the only one left.’

Horror was coursing through Mandred’s veins. ‘When?’ he managed to ask.

‘Three weeks ago, the first ones came. Two little boys.’ The alchemist shook his fist. ‘They died. Then there were more. They died too. I had to burn them in the old garden. Couldn’t risk dumping them over the Cliff of Sighs, Morr forgive me.’

‘How many?’ Mandred pressed, feeling his fear swell with each heartbeat.

Neist scratched at his beard. ‘Nearly a hundred now. I’m not surprised they haven’t noticed in the Middenpalaz, though.’ He jabbed a thumb at the door to Sofia’s cell. ‘She’s the first Von to catch it. The rest have just been peasants.’

Almost at once, Neist regretted his choice of words. More than most nobles, he knew Prince Mandred’s reputation for helping his people regardless of class. ‘I apologise, your grace,’ he said. ‘That was an unjust thing for me to say. I saw the city of Carroburg put to the torch by nobles afraid of the plague. That isn’t an easy memory to forget.’

‘Manling quack!’ a gruff voice bellowed through the hall. ‘A beardless grave for all your clan!’

The alchemist flinched when he heard the cry. Mandred followed Neist as he hurried down the corridor. ‘That was a dwarf? I understood they couldn’t catch the plague.’

Neist didn’t look at the prince as he answered, too busy rummaging in his bag for a slim bottle of blue glass. ‘Kurgaz Smallhammer’s affliction is quite different, I assure you.’ Another bitter laugh as he hurried on. ‘It is quite an honour for a human to be allowed to treat a dwarf. Though in hindsight I think a seasick troll would have made a more pleasant patient.’

Altdorf
Brauzeit, 1114

A brisk autumn breeze wafted through the narrow streets of Altdorf, bearing upon it the infamous stink from the riverfront slums that had caused Emperor Siegfried to curse the city as ‘the Great Reek’ and remove his throne to Nuln. Emperor Boris had returned the throne to Altdorf, but that hadn’t changed the odour that crawled up from the river, slinking into the manses and palaces of the Empire’s great and good.

Walking along the cobblestone lanes winding between the half-timbered residences of the nobility that clustered around the Imperial Palace, Adolf Kreyssig dipped his hand beneath the folds of the heavy cloak he wore, fishing the silver pomander from his pocket and inhaling its perfumed vapours. It was more than a concession to discomfort – one of the prevailing theories about the origins of the Black Plague had it emerging from noxious odours. A pomander stuffed with cinnamon was, supposedly, a sure-fire preventative. Kreyssig scowled at the pomander as he tucked it back into his pocket. The fact that only the wealthy could afford cinnamon might have had more to do with the prescription than any medicinal value. Physicians were a special kind of thief, stealing more with a gloomy word than any cutpurse could with a knife.

These were the same men who had told him he would be crippled, Kreyssig reflected. He flexed his arm, feeling the powerful muscles ripple beneath his doublet. Ignorant charlatans! Fortunately he had found a better way to heal his wounds. If the Black Plague should try to take him, he would know how to beat it back.

Kreyssig stopped in the street, alarmed by the turn his thoughts had taken. All of his life he had learned never to rely on anyone. The beneficence of a master, the loyalty of a friend, the fidelity of a servant, none of these could be trusted. Yet he was becoming dependent on the magic of a witch, an ambitious noblewoman at that. He was too clever to be taken in by her intrigues, or deceived by her amorous attentions. She was using him, exploiting him to get closer to the Imperial throne. Even knowing this, however, he couldn’t escape the fascination she held over him. At times he felt like a fly caught in a spider’s web, every effort to escape only drawing the trap tighter about him.

He cast a wary glance at the street around him. At this hour, the lane was nearly deserted. The days of early-morning productivity were long past, casualties of a rumour that held the plague was most active during the threshold hours of twilight and dawn, those moments midway between night and day. Only the harshest stewards were able to rouse their households at such times and even then to little effect. Those shops that still had wares to peddle wouldn’t be open until well past the dangerous time.

What companions Kreyssig had as he ventured through the streets were those too dejected or desperate to cling to shelter. Beggars rummaging in the gutters, muck-rakers shovelling night-dirt, rat-catchers clearing out their traps before hungry cats or even hungrier peasants did the job for them. By rights, such rabble should be restricted from the districts of the rich and powerful, kept to their shanties and hovels beyond the walls and across the river. But, like so much since the plague had struck, the diligence of the Altdorf city guard, the Schuetzenverein, had diminished. The Schueters were suffering the same shortages as the rest of the city, losing men to plague, murder and outright desertion. Most of their best had been drawn away by conscription into the army Duke Vidor had used to chase the traitor Boeckenfoerde, the confused horde Altdorfers alternately called the ‘replacement army’ or ‘Vidor’s Graues Haufen’. What was left were the old, the young and a thuggish rabble too undisciplined for soldiering. Given the choice between beggars and patrols of the Schueters, most of the nobles had brains enough to risk catching disease from a tramp over a knife from a guard.

Even in such lowly company, Kreyssig was careful. The shabby cloak he wore enveloped him from head to foot, making him seem just another peasant scavenging in the streets. No armed escort, no panoply of attendants, nothing that would make anyone suspect that the Protector of the Empire was abroad. A few Kaiserjaeger in the nearby streets watching for spies was the only entourage he needed. The best defence, he had always felt, was to be inconspicuous.

With a last look around, Kreyssig shifted direction, darting into the cramped alleyway between two houses. He had passed this spot several times already in his circuitous ramble through the neighbourhood, allowing his Kaiserjaeger ample opportunity to catch any tails he had acquired. Now he would delay no longer.

Reaching an iron-banded door set into the wall bordering the alley, Kreyssig fished a key from his pocket. The portal groaned as he opened it and slipped into the shadowy environs of a small wood room. Piles of logs, heaps of kindling littered the floor – and something more that came to his attention only as he locked the door and started to walk towards the opposite entrance. It was a curious object to find, a single leather shoe sitting in the middle of the room. It was enough for Kreyssig to puzzle over, but not enough to alarm him.

In the kitchen beyond the wood room, Kreyssig found the other shoe. It was still attached to the foot of a liveried servant, the steward of Baroness von den Linden’s household. The man was lying sprawled before the brick oven, his head mashed into a red paste. From the way the rug he was sprawled upon was curled, it looked as though the man had been struck down in the wood room and dragged here.

Kreyssig’s fist closed about the dagger he wore beneath his cloak, dragging the blade from its sheath. He spun around, intending to retreat back through the wood room, but even as he started to move, the route was cut off. The door of the pantry exploded outwards, disgorging a trio of tatterdemalion figures with drawn, starveling faces and a vicious gleam in their eyes. Each of the men held a cudgel in his hand.

The men from the pantry blocked the entrance to the wood room. As Kreyssig turned towards the other doorways leading out from the kitchen, he found more antagonists rushing towards him. Some were less ragged than the three from the pantry, some weren’t quite so haggard and sickly in condition, but there was the same rage smouldering in each eye.

The mob descended upon Kreyssig in a mass. The first to reach him howled as his dagger slashed out, a forearm cut to the bone. A second foeman pitched to the floor, clutching at a stabbed belly. Then they were on him, smashing him down with wooden clubs and the iron hilts of knives.

‘Don’t kill him!’ a commanding voice boomed. From beneath the confusion of kicking boots and flailing clubs, Kreyssig saw a hulking shape in a black cloak descend the half a dozen steps between dining hall and kitchen. ‘This creature must burn with the witch!’

The witch-taker’s words brought fresh savagery to the mob. Brutally, they dragged Kreyssig to his feet, ripping away the concealing cloak in the process. One of the rabble, his tones more cultured than the rest, gasped in horror as he recognised the face of their captive.

‘Commander Kreyssig!’ the man wailed, drawing back in fear. His fright spread to the rest of the mob, who relented in their violence, cringing away from their terrible foe.

It needed but a moment more and the mob should have fractured and fled. But that moment was denied Kreyssig. From the doorway, Auernheimer berated his followers for their fear. ‘Seize this spawn of Chaos!’ he roared. ‘Do you fear a man more than you fear the gods?’

Kreyssig tried to break away as Auernheimer’s oratory poured courage back into his mob. He was too slow. With an angry growl, the rabble was on him again, catching him and pinning his arms behind his back.

‘This is treason!’ Kreyssig raged. ‘Your heads will rot on the palace walls for this!’

Auernheimer sneered from the shadows of his hood. ‘What matter a man’s head when his soul belongs to the gods?’ He pointed at his prisoner. ‘Solkan has guided us here, set us to where we might fight the canker that rots the Empire. You, the so-called Protector! You, the pawn of daemons and witches! The corruption that makes the gods turn their faces! The wickedness that would damn us all to plague and famine!’

The witch-taker swept his hand, waving the mob into the dining hall. ‘Bring this heretic,’ he snarled. ‘Solkan has given us the honour of purging this blight from our Empire. This creature burns with his mistress!’

Struggling against his captors, Kreyssig was dragged up from the kitchen and marched across the dining hall. The great table that had once dominated the room was gone, smashed into kindling and piled along with other pieces of furniture at the centre of the room. The bodies of several servants lay draped about the base of the pile. More servants, bound and gagged, lay higher up on the heap. At the very top, her body fairly smothered in rope and chain, her mouth banded about with choking straps of leather, Baroness von den Linden fixed a despairing gaze upon Kreyssig.

‘There is purity in fire!’ Auernheimer declaimed as the mob began to tie Kreyssig’s arms behind him and lash his legs together. ‘By fire did Great Solkan cleanse the fog-devils from Westerland, by fire were the heathen Kurgan driven into the Wastes!’ The witch-taker brandished a steel mace adorned with razor-edged flanges. ‘By fire will we purge this place.’ He glared into Kreyssig’s eyes. ‘The flames will consume your evil, your pain will cry out to Great Solkan and draw His eye upon our suffering! He will know the justice of our cause when we deliver to him the souls of an arch-traitor and his witch!’

Thrashing against the rough hands that bore him, Kreyssig was carried over to the pyre, dumped with all the ceremony of a sack of rubbish next to the trussed figure of the baroness. Auernheimer gestured with his flanged mace again, motioning several of his mob towards the fire blazing away in the hearth. The witch-taker’s eyes reflected the flames, shining with the chilling fanaticism of the true zealot. He cocked his head to one side, his brow knitting as a sudden thought occurred to him. Swinging his mace around, he waved a few of his peasant followers back into the kitchen. ‘Remove the last of the witch’s minions,’ he commanded. ‘All must be consumed in the holy flame.’

Kreyssig watched the men shuffle away, dread pounding in his heart. Once they recovered the body, added it to the base of the pile, the witch-taker would order the pyre put to the torch. He rolled his eyes, managing to meet the panicked gaze of the baroness. For all her vaunted mastery of charms and enchantments, her magic hadn’t preserved her against her enemies. She was trussed like a Sigmarsfest goose and just as helpless. There was no help to be had from that quarter, and he cursed himself for thinking there could be. His relations with the witch were the root of his destruction, not the source of deliverance. He had come here in secret, even his Kaiserjaeger didn’t know his destination. There was no prospect of rescue, no one to deliver him.

Only a miracle would prevent the Protector of the Empire from the mob justice of the rabble.

Sometimes, however, miracles did manifest. It was a dark miracle that delivered Adolf Kreyssig from his doom.

Soon after the peasants Auernheimer had sent to retrieve the steward withdrew into the kitchen, there arose chilling screams. The men tried to flee up the steps and back into the dining hall, but not one of them managed the attempt. They were struck down from behind, pierced by jagged spears and slashed by rusted swords. The mangled peasants pitched and fell, their shrieking bodies dragged back into the darkness of the kitchen.

A moment of horrified silence followed, a silence that was broken by an explosion of inhuman chitters and growls. From the blackness, a grotesque swarm of verminous shapes flooded into the dining hall. The muck of sewer and cellar clung to the ragged strips of cloth they wore and the mangy brown fur that covered their lean, hungry bodies. Their hand-like paws clutched a motley confusion of swords and axes, spears and knives. Long scaly tails whipped behind them as they charged, and froth bubbled from the fangs of their rat-like heads.

The mob stood stricken with a paralysis of superstitious terror as the bestial swarm descended upon them. Only Auernheimer was unfazed, unperturbed in his stalwart zealotry. Swinging his mace overhead, snatching a brand from the nearest of his followers, the witch-taker roared his defiance of the monstrous horde. ‘Daemons of the witch! Rejoice, brethren, in this test of our sacred conviction!’ He added deeds to words, bringing his mace smashing down into the snout of the first ratman to draw near him. The monster squeaked in agony, collapsing in a shivering mess at his feet.

The witch-taker’s rabble rallied, charging at the oncoming monsters, meeting them at the middle of the hall. Swords clashed, knives slashed and screams human and inhuman echoed through the house. Some of the combatants broke away, fleeing down passages, hotly pursued by vengeful foes. In the space of only a few heartbeats, a dozen bodies littered the floor.

Auernheimer seared the eyes of another ratman, blinding it before bashing its skull with his mace. The witch-taker looked beyond his collapsing foe, watching with grim fatalism as more of the monstrous vermin swarmed up from the kitchen. ‘Ernst! Andreas!’ he shouted. ‘Light the pyre! These daemons shall not save their mistress!’

The peasants Auernheimer called out to broke away from their enemies. Alone among his rabble, these two had been soldiers, Dienstleute that had survived the massacre of Engel’s Bread Marchers. They had the skill at arms and the martial discipline to carry out the witch-taker’s command. What they didn’t have was the opportunity.

Ernst and Andreas snatched glowing brands from the hearth, but as the men rushed towards the pyre, their destruction climbed the kitchen steps. A tall, wizened ratman dressed in black robes, its visage a confusion of scars and metal, tubes and wires dangling from its face and jaw. The monster’s eyes were enormous rubies that bulged from its sockets. The fangs in its mouth were metal, and blue sparks crackled from them as the strange creature snarled at its minions.

The robed ratman raised one of its withered paws, displaying a brilliant green jewel embedded in its palm. The creature pointed the jewel in the direction of Ernst and Andreas. More sparks crackled about its fangs as it squeaked an incantation.

A bolt of coruscating energy burst from the ratman’s jewel, searing a path through the hall. Vermin and human alike were caught in the path of that beam, burning fur, charring skin and boiling blood. The robed ratman cared not for these incidental casualties, and upon Ernst and Andreas it directed the full malignity of its magic.

The two Dienstleute weren’t burned, weren’t charred or singed. Their bodies seemed to simply evaporate within that beam of unholy power. In that searing flash, their chests turned to vapour, leaving the extremities to crash to the floor. The brands they carried fell from dead fingers to smoulder on the bloody rugs.

The obscene sorcery shattered the fragile courage of Auernheimer’s mob, their zealotry unequal to this display of magic. The ratmen fell upon the terrified peasants, dragging them down and butchering them where they fell.

Only the witch-taker himself maintained some measure of composure. Smashing down three ratmen as they lunged at him, Auernheimer turned and threw himself straight into the stained-glass window that fronted the hall and offered a prospect of the street outside. The fanatic’s plunge brought him through the window in a shower of shattered glass and fractured lead. For an instant, he lay crumpled in the street, but then he was on his feet and fleeing down the lane.

Some of the ratmen rushed to the broken window, eager to cut down their wounded prey, but a sharp bark from their robed leader brought them slinking away from the window.

Kreyssig could only marvel at this incredible escape. He had berated these mutants for keeping tabs on him, but now he was almost prepared to forgive them their audacity. Almost, for his relief was mitigated by a new, fearful appreciation for the abilities of his verminous agents. The display of magic executed by their leader was more intimidating than anything he had seen from Baroness von den Linden or even old Fleischauer, the Emperor’s pet warlock.

Some of the mutants began to turn away from their butchery of the zealots. With hungry squeaks, they approached the pyre, dragging away the bodies of dead servants. One of the ratmen scrambled nimbly up the pile and crouched over Kreyssig. Deftly, the creature brought its knife slashing across the ropes binding him.

‘Kreyssig-man free-safe!’ the vermin squeaked, its muzzle flecked with blood from some peasant it had killed.

Painfully, Kreyssig reached one of his numbed arms to his mouth and removed the gag. In his joy at being rescued, he was almost prepared to feel gratitude to these ghastly mutants. They had proven themselves far more capable than he had imagined.

Then, he noticed that the ratmen weren’t freeing any of the servants. The creatures were leaving them bound as they carried them down from the pyre. Even Kreyssig’s calloused heart was moved to pity when he beheld the raw horror in their eyes as the ratmen bore them off into the darkness of the kitchen. The partially devoured bodies of Auernheimer’s men left little doubt as to their eventual fate.

‘Those people are not my enemies,’ Kreyssig told his rescuer, pointing at the bound servants.

The ratman’s ears wiggled and its body shivered with an amused chitter. ‘See-know much-much,’ the creature explained with a wave of its paw. ‘Never say-tell what they see-know!’

Kreyssig spun around as more of the ratmen swarmed up towards him, his heart going cold as he considered that they might bear him away to their lair along with the doomed servants. Instead, the creatures reached out with their paws for Baroness von den Linden.

Kreyssig saw the witch’s eyes go wide with raw terror, compelling him to action. Heedless of their numbers, he dived at the ratmen, pushing them away. The mutants leapt back, their tails lashing and their fangs bared.

‘You will not have her!’ he shouted at the vermin, the leg of a broken chair clenched in his fist.

The ratmen glared back at him, their whiskers twitching, fangs glistening. The ratman who had cut his bonds circled him, waiting until it was behind him before pouncing. Kreyssig felt the rusty edge of the knife press against his throat.

The ratmen surged upwards once more, closing about the helpless baroness. One of them, a crook-backed thing with sores across its muzzle, leaned over her, snuffling loudly as it nuzzled her body with its nose. A moment of this loathsome action and the ratman reared back, chittering in a bestial approximation of laughter. It squeaked something in what might have been a language of sorts, bringing similar snickers from the rest of the verminous throng.

‘This is your breeder?’ the mutant holding a knife to him asked. Kreyssig was struck by the calm directness of the question, devoid of the fawning excitement with which the creatures usually treated him. He wondered how much of their ignorant subservience was merely pretext.

‘She is my woman,’ he told the mutant. Again the ratman laughed.

‘Kreyssig-man take new breeder,’ the ratman declared. The baroness screamed into her gag as the vermin began to lift her from the pyre. Kreyssig tensed, mustering himself for a desperate rush against the ratmen.

‘Leave breeder-meat,’ a raspy voice snarled from below. The ratmen carrying the witch dropped her instantly with a frightened squeak and scampered back down the pile. The mutant with the knife withdrew with similar haste.

Kreyssig rushed to the baroness’s side, fumbling at the knots that bound her. He paused when that grisly voice called out again. Turning his gaze downwards, he wasn’t surprised to find that the speaker was the ghastly rat-sorcerer.

‘Kreyssig-man may keep his breeder,’ the monster said. ‘He will remember-know his friends. He will do when he is told what to do.’

It didn’t take a flash of the creature’s sparking fangs to drive home the threat in its words. Kreyssig kept his eyes on the grotesque monster until it shuffled off into the kitchen, withdrawing back into the cellars and sewers and whatever black burrows the vermin made their lairs. The rest of the ratmen did not linger after their leader, slinking after him in a bestial procession.

Only when the monsters were gone did Kreyssig think to remove the baroness’s gag. When he did, the witch’s dry mouth could cough only a single word, a word she invested with every ounce of horror her voice could command.

‘Skaven!’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Middenheim
Brauzeit, 1118

The alchemist stopped at a doorway far down the hall, very near the temple sanctuary itself. Unlike the other doors, this one bore no cross. Muttering prayers to both Verena and Shallya, Neist opened the door and walked right into a stream of Dwarfish invective.

Mandred followed Neist into the room, surprised to see a brawny dwarf lashed down to a stone bench. His torso was wound about in thick strips of bandages, and big black candles were arrayed all around his makeshift bed. Sticks of incense smouldered nearby, filling the room with a pungent scent.

‘Time for more of that snake-spit you call medicine?’ Kurgaz yelled at Neist. The dwarf thrashed against the straps holding him down.

‘Does it still itch?’ the alchemist asked. ‘You know you can’t scratch at it or any poison still in there will spread.’

Kurgaz glared murder at the alchemist. ‘If you were anything like a real healer…’ he started.

‘Your father seemed to be of the impression that a dwarf doktor would have fussed and studied so long that you’d be dead now,’ Neist told him in a placating tone. He had only a small idea of what it must have cost Kurgaz’s father to entrust his son to a human healer. The degree of despair that must have gripped the older dwarf would have been immense to force him into such a breach of tradition and propriety. It was humbling to be the recipient of such a trust, even if he was the option of last resort. Despite the sombre thoughts in his head, he kept his tone towards his patient jocular. ‘Maybe your own doktors were leery of incurring a grudge when they failed to help you.’

Kurgaz struggled against the bindings, the leather straps creaking ominously. ‘What does a manling know of grudges and honour!’

‘Nothing,’ Neist admitted. Stepping to the bench, he unstoppered the bottle and allowed Kurgaz to take a long pull from it. ‘That’s why I’m trying to help you… Even if I end up in a beardless grave with squirms gnawing my bones.’

The dwarf coughed and spluttered as he swallowed the medicine. When he found his voice again, it was perhaps slightly less hostile, though far from apologetic. ‘Squigs,’ he said. ‘It’s squigs that’ll be chewing on your bones.’ The dwarf twisted his head around, fixing his irate eyes on Mandred. ‘And I’m not some pickled abortion to be showing off to bored gawkers for a few coppers a peep!’

‘I thought dwarfs knew better than to cuss out royalty,’ the alchemist scolded Kurgaz. The dwarf’s eyes went wide with alarm for a moment, then he quickly subsided into a surly silence.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ Mandred asked. ‘Is he insane?’

Neist shook his head. ‘No, though I think the pain of what he’s endured would have driven any man insane.’ He wiped his hand on the hem of his cloak and reached into the pocket on the breast of his doublet. Carefully, he extracted an ugly looking blob of blackish green stuff. Mandred couldn’t decide if the thing were more like stone or metal. What he did know was that it had an evil look about it. ‘I took that out of him,’ Neist explained. ‘Seems there was a fight down in the Crack and Kurgaz was shot with this.’ He chuckled and shook his head again. ‘He claims it was fired at him by something called a skaven, though I think he’s just too proud to admit it was some lucky goblin that got him.’

‘Grimnir take all fool manlings,’ Kurgaz cursed from his bed. ‘Won’t believe anything unless they see it. Count your blessings you’ve never seen a skaven!’

Neist was laughing again, but Mandred looked at the dwarf with renewed interest. Underfolk, ratmen who lived beneath the world. Why wouldn’t the dwarfs be more familiar with such things, dwelling in the same places the monsters haunted?

‘Kurgaz, what do these “skaven” look like?’ Mandred asked, approaching the bench.

Before the dwarf could answer, Neist cried out in horror. The alchemist sprang away from the door as a hideous creature lunged at him. It was clad in a filthy brown robe, a heavy hood drawn close across its face, but there was no concealing the long naked tail that dragged behind it or the furry paws that gripped the rusty daggers it held. The thing was another of the verminous mutations Mandred had seen twice before!

The prince started to draw his sword to confront the first ratman when a second leapt into the cell, its daggers slashing at him. The filthy blades raked across the front of his coat, ripping it open and narrowly missing the man beneath it. Hissing and snapping, the monster pressed its attack, driving Mandred towards the corner of the cell with a flurry of attacks. The prince’s forearm was gashed and cut as he tried to protect his face from the monster.

The ratman’s speed was hideous, something Mandred remembered from his previous encounter. Recalling that fight, he also remembered that its strength was less formidable. Gritting his teeth, he prayed the same held true for this example of the breed.

The brute had him nearly to the wall now. Mandred could see a third monster slinking into the room, a heavy bludgeon in its paws. The thing uttered a happy squeak when it spotted the helpless dwarf lashed to the bench. The sight decided the prince. When his own foe slashed at him again, he pressed his body forwards, leaning into its attack. He felt the dagger cut deep into his arm, but at the same time he was able to catch the thing’s wrist. With a brutal twist, he felt he ratman’s bones snap. The vermin howled, springing away.

Mandred ignored the beast and whipped out his sword with his free hand. In one flash of steel, he raked the blade across the length of the bench, slashing through the leather straps. He heard the dwarf roar, the ratman with the club squeak in fright. Then he was too busy to worry about Kurgaz. His first adversary was back on the attack.

Holding its injured arm against its breast, the ratman sprang at Mandred, hoping to disembowel him with a rake of its blade. Years of fencing had driven home the proper response to such an assault, yet even as he darted backwards the monster’s great speed allowed its dagger to stab his thigh.

Despite the agony of the wound, Mandred was grateful. For an instant, the weapon caught in his flesh. For a moment, the ratman was defenceless and within reach of his sword. It was all the time he needed. With a backhanded riposte, he opened the ratman’s throat and sent it thrashing to the floor, coughing on its own blood.

Mandred spun about to confront the ratman attacking Kurgaz, but the dwarf already had the creature sprawled across the bench, its brains dashed in with its own club. Turning, he found the first ratkin, the one that had charged Neist. The brute was leaning over Neist’s body, its paws frisking the alchemist’s clothes. When it saw Mandred limping towards it, it bared its teeth and sprinted for the corridor.

The fiend never reached the hall. Before it could clear the doorway, a blade was thrust into its side. The ratman writhed on the impaling sword for an instant, then crumpled to the floor. Mandred noted that one of its paws was clenched, but as death claimed it the paw fell open and the strange bullet rolled from its fingers.

‘Ulric’s Axe!’ Beck cursed, stepping into the cell. The knight’s clothes were covered in blood. With an effort he tore his eyes away from the creature and looked to his prince. ‘Your grace, you are hurt!’

Mandred waved away his guard’s concern, tried to limp towards the corridor. Beck moved to help him despite the admonition. ‘Forgive me, but I couldn’t obey you. My first duty is to protect Prince Mandred von Zelt, even when it conflicts with your own orders.’

‘We have to help Sofia… Make sure…’

Beck frowned at the desperation in his prince’s voice. ‘You can’t help her now. These… things… were already there.’

All the vigour seemed to evaporate from Mandred’s body. If not for Beck’s support, he would have fallen to the floor. His mind whirled at the news, his heart cracked at the thought that Sofia had perished under the blades of such filth.

Why? Why had they killed her? His despairing gaze fell upon the weird bullet. Had the beasts been following that? Tracking it through the hospice, killing wherever it had been?

A gruff laugh thundered above the prince’s sorrow. Shuffling out from behind the bench, his hands still clenched tight about the club that had nearly killed him, Kurgaz Smallhammer regarded the mourning Mandred. ‘Aye,’ the dwarf said, spitting on the verminous corpse. ‘Now you know what skaven look like.’

Puskab Foulfur looked up from the mouldy tome he had been consulting. A flick of his claw sent the scabby slave holding his reading lamp slinking off into a darkened nook. The plague priest folded his paws across the ratbone lectern and regarded his visitors with pestiferous scrutiny. It was seldom that any but the plague monks dared the noxious caves Puskab had made his lair, and they only with the gravest business.

The skaven who stood before him was a black-furred killer, draped in a cloak that might have been skinned off a shadow, an array of exotic weaponry fixed to his belt. Puskab knew the weaponry to be mere adornment. The assassins of Clan Eshin never displayed the real tools of their trade.

‘Speak-squeak,’ Puskab ordered, a malicious gleam in his eye. One of the apprentices of Deathmaster Silke, Nartik Blackblade had fallen out of favour with his terrifying master and been given the hazardous duty of spying on the plague monks. Fortunately for him, Nartik had enough sense to turn the potential death sentence into a boon. Instead of spying on Puskab, Nartik was spying for Puskab.

‘Gutter runners failed to get the jezzail bullet,’ the assassin reported. ‘Warmonger Vecteek mad-hate! Ordered Silke to kill-slay all gutter runners that escape!’ Nartik chittered with amusement. ‘I listened to one of them before…’ He made a ripping motion with his claw across his throat. ‘Say-tell that man-thing king-pup knows about us now.’

Puskab’s tattered ears twitched in pleasure at the report. Things were going even better than he had planned. With Clan Mors on its way, he’d decided there was no good reason to delay infecting the humans with the Black Plague. Exploiting Nartik and the gutter runners, they’d been able to spread the disease without waiting for the direct route Vecteek thought necessary. The extra weeks would make the humans much weaker when the attack finally came.

Now, however, there was a new wrinkle to consider. The dwarfs were embattled below, but they’d be too stubborn to ask for help from the humans above. But if the humans were to offer that help without the dwarfs asking, would they refuse it?

Too proud to ask for help, but not too proud to take it.

Puskab chittered as he pictured the scene. Hundreds of humans marching off to help the dwarfs, leaving their own city as a helpless morsel to be devoured by Grey Lord Vecteek.

Yes, everything was certainly going much better than he’d imagined.

Carroburg
Jahrdrung, 1115

‘Don’t permit this.’ The plea was voiced by Princess Erna, spoken with a frantic vehemence. ‘You can’t do this. Even if the warlock’s magic works, how can you accept your life at such a price?’

Emperor Boris glared at the woman. He started to raise his hand to strike her, but desisted. It was for low creatures like Kreyssig to hit a lady. He had more dignity than that. Still, he wished she would stop nagging at him. He wasn’t without his misgivings. The girl wasn’t some peasant, she was of good breeding and background. He mourned the waste of a young woman of such attractiveness. It was tragic, but how much more tragic would it be if the Empire were to be deprived of its Emperor because of the plague?

He paced across the thick bearskin rug sprawled before the hearth in his bed chamber. Sometimes Boris would glance over at Erna seated at the edge of the bed. It wasn’t lost on him that for once she’d come to his room without an armed escort. It was clear what she was offering if he would indulge her entreaty.

Part of him wanted to. Part of him was sickened by what Fleischauer’s magic demanded. But that part of him wasn’t strong enough to overcome his fear. Not simply fear of the plague, but fear of losing control. The great and noble guests he’d assembled here formed the core of his power. Without their confidence he knew he wouldn’t be able to wield his authority in their domains. Enough provinces were already rife with open defiance; he couldn’t afford to lose any more.

Boris stopped pacing and scowled at the goblet of wine in his hand. ‘This is vile stuff,’ he declared. ‘It needs some honey to sweeten it.’ The cherubic amusement was back on his face as he turned towards Erna. ‘Did you know the Imperial Palace has an indoor apiary? Dwarfcraft, of course. Cost a small fortune to build, but it allows Us to have fresh honey even in the dead of winter.’

‘There has to be another way,’ Erna insisted, ignoring his talk of bees and honey.

The Emperor dashed his goblet to the floor. ‘The divine protection of Shallya?’ he scoffed. ‘Matriarch Katrina is as terrified as any of us! If she doesn’t have faith in the goddess, why should anyone? Or maybe We should trust Moschner and his peasant medicine?’

‘He’s kept you healthy this long,’ Erna said.

‘If medicine were the answer, the plague wouldn’t be killing three-quarters of Our subjects!’ He turned away and gazed into the fire blazing away in the hearth. ‘No, Fleischauer’s magic is the only answer. The Black Plague stinks of sorcery and Chaos, it only makes sense that similar means would counteract it.’

Erna rose from the bed, came close to the Emperor. ‘Then you know this is evil,’ she told him.

Boris rounded on her, his eyes blazing as fiercely as the fire. ‘Then you don’t have to partake!’ he raged. ‘Exclude yourself! Go ahead and catch the plague!’

‘Better that than the alternative,’ Erna stated.

‘If you catch the plague, We’ll have you thrown over the wall,’ Boris threatened. ‘Don’t think for a moment We won’t!’

Erna turned from him, retreating across the room and into the hall. ‘I’m certain your fear will spare no one,’ she said as she left him.

Otwin’s table no longer dominated the great hall, but the room was once again denuded of furnishings. The only object that reposed in the hall was a marble plinth in the very centre of the room. The statue that had once rested upon it had been removed, consigned to some distant corner of the castle. In its place stood an object of obscene horror.

In his desperation, this time Emperor Boris had allowed Fleischauer all the time he needed to prepare for his ritual. It had taken the warlock a fortnight to finish his conjurations and their attendant atrocities. Day and night the closed great hall had resounded with horrific screams and sinister incantations. Strange smells had seeped into the passageways, eerie lights had shone from under the doors. The icy emanations of sorcery had throbbed and pulsed and undulated. A foulness beyond the merely physical had emanated from the hall, warning people away far better than any diktat issued by the Emperor.

The end result of Fleischauer’s labours was propped up on the top of the pedestal, a cushion supporting its ghastly mass. There was some resemblance to von Kirchof’s niece Sasha, but the familiarity increased the horror rather than lessening it.

The woman’s flesh had taken on a chalky tone and texture. All the hair had been shorn from her scalp. Across her body, strange runes had been inked with a needle of daemonbone, the symbols encompassing even her face and scalp. Situated in the gaps between the runes, their slimy black bodies seeming to be extensions of the horrible tattoos, were bloodleeches. The parasites could be seen gorging themselves on something far weightier than merely the blood of their victim, drawing into their foul bodies slivers of her innocence, of her very soul.

Sasha herself looked like a leech. Through some unholy magic, her body had been altered in unspeakable ways. Her arms and legs had atrophied, withering into stick-like stubs that were folded in upon her torso. Her teeth had fallen out, leaving behind only blackened gums and a tongue so shrivelled that it could utter only a flat, croaking susurration.

It was an abominable, unspeakable fate, a misery no sane mind could endure.

As they filed into the great hall and saw the horrifying husk of the woman, many of the Emperor’s jaded followers sickened and excused themselves. Boris allowed them their moment of weakness. He knew they would be back. The magic Fleischauer offered them was too important to turn away. What man could say no to life, whatever the price?

‘Everything is in readiness, Your Imperial Majesty,’ Fleischauer declared with a bow. He waited for a nod from his patron, then crept across the hall to the pedestal. ‘Observe,’ he said. Reaching to his victim, he plucked a leech from her neck and popped it into his own mouth. More of the nobles fled as their stomachs revolted with this new horror.

‘The leeches draw the magic from her essence,’ Fleischauer explained when he had finished chewing the parasite. ‘When they are removed, the magic is passed on to whatever eats them.’

Emperor Boris took a wary step towards the pedestal. ‘This will prevent the plague?’ Almost he hoped his warlock would tell him it wouldn’t.

Instead, Fleischauer nodded his head in affirmation. ‘For a time,’ he said. ‘It will be necessary to replace the leeches with new ones. They act as a preventative, but not an immunisation, to employ the secular words of dear Doktor Moschner.’ The warlock paused for a moment, looking about to see if the physician was in attendance so he could gloat. He sighed when he didn’t see the man. ‘One leech each week should be enough. If it isn’t, I can create another host.’

Boris suppressed a shudder at the suggestion. ‘This is horror enough,’ he said. He turned and called von Kirchof to him. The swordsman’s stride lacked his usual confidence and his face was nearly as bloodless as that of his niece. Guilt, shame, self-loathing, all of these were etched upon his features and his eyes were as empty as those of a doll. When the Emperor ordered his champion to remove one of the leeches, he did so without looking at the thing Fleischauer had dismissed as their ‘host’.

One by one, the others came to follow von Kirchof’s example. Despite the horror of the situation, Boris felt a twinge of satisfaction when he saw Matriarch Katrina pluck one of the parasites from Sasha’s body. If the High Priestess of Shallya could be driven to such despair, Princess Erna would soon recant her lofty morals.

The tiny chapel of Sigmar within the Schloss Hohenbach displayed the signs of neglect everywhere. It had been generations since Sigmar had been venerated with much zeal in Drakwald. Older gods like Ulric, Taal and Rhya were of more prominence to the Drakwalders. Count Vilner and his son Konrad had had little reason to be kindly disposed towards a deity who enabled a man like Boris to wield supreme power over them. Dust lay thick upon the floor and altar, cobwebs clung to the granite comet and bronze hammer hanging upon the wall. Woodworms had bored holes in the pews and mice had gnawed at the rugs.

Despite the dilapidation of the chapel, Erna felt a sense of peace as she knelt before the altar. As a Middenlander, she too had been raised in the faiths of older gods; however, she had also seen too much to discount Sigmar’s power. She had need of that divine strength to endow her with the will to persevere. To endure as the shade of her father had told her she must.

Whatever the consequences, she wouldn’t partake of the obscenity fostered by Fleischauer. Sigmar was a god who decried witchcraft and sorcery. Perhaps He would respect her determination to shun the progeny of such unholy arts.

The creak of groaning wood turned her away from the altar. Erna was surprised to see Doktor Moschner seated on one of the wormy benches. The physician’s face was drawn, haunted.

‘I didn’t think anyone was here,’ he apologised. ‘Do you mind? I’d rather not be alone.’ He pointed towards the hammer above the altar. ‘Strength through unity. That is what Sigmar taught us. If only He had explained the lesson better.’

Erna studied the doktor as he sat in the pew, his body shaking like a leaf. ‘You’ve seen what the sorcerer did?’ she asked.

‘Do not ask,’ Moschner answered. ‘By all the gods, do not ask and do not look.’ He turned his head away from the altar and regarded Erna. ‘I know I am a mere peasant, but you must believe me. Spare yourself.’ He shuddered again and his body heaved as his empty stomach clenched. When the spasm passed, he again apologised.

‘His Imperial Majesty has feted his guests,’ Moschner hissed. ‘He’s fed and pampered them well!’

‘Did none refuse?’ Erna pressed him.

Moschner gave her a disgusted look. ‘Two,’ he said.

‘We must pray for them,’ Erna said.

‘It’s too late for that,’ Moschner said. ‘There’s no help for us. The gods will have nothing to do with us now.

‘We are the living damned.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

Altdorf
Brauzeit, 1114

Under cover of night, Kreyssig’s Kaiserjaeger removed the Baroness von den Linden and her paraphernalia to the abandoned residence of Lady Mirella von Wittmar. Mistress of the traitor Prince Sigdan, the noblewoman had fled Altdorf in the aftermath of the disastrous coup against Emperor Boris. Her townhouse had stood vacant and desolate since then, not even the most desperate peasant willing to seek shelter beneath such an ill-regarded roof.

The witch was far from her usual composure. Her appearance betrayed no sign of her recent ordeal. To the eye she was as ravishing and seductive as when Kreyssig had first met her. He wasn’t sure if it was cosmetics or magic that covered her bruises, but whatever the cause, the baroness’s vanity was intact.

No, it was a more subtle air of tension and unease that clung to the woman as she stalked through the dusty chambers of her refuge. She snapped curt commands to the men carrying her effects, alternately urging them to greater care or greater haste.

When the last of her things had been brought in, she drew near Kreyssig, gripping his arm in a clutch that was almost as cold as ice. ‘Get rid of them,’ she whispered into his ear.

Kreyssig bristled at the assumed authority in her tone, but his defiance wilted as he met her intense gaze. Clapping his hands together, he dismissed his troops, ordering them out into the street. When the last of them marched away, he motioned for Fuerst to close the great oaken doors and seal off the entry hall.

The baroness stared at the portly servant, causing a flush to creep into his face. Fuerst couldn’t hold her gaze, turning his eyes to the floor and shuffling his feet anxiously.

‘Fuerst is dependable,’ Kreyssig reassured the witch. ‘You can trust to his discretion.’

‘It is not I who must fear his tongue,’ the baroness retorted.

Fuerst bowed in his master’s direction. ‘I can wait outside…’ he started to offer.

‘Stand where you are,’ Kreyssig snapped. It was a small, even petty thing, but he wasn’t inclined to submit to the baroness’s demand. He had to prove, even if only to himself, that he could defy the witch.

Her jaw clenched, the baroness spun around and stalked upstairs. Kreyssig smiled and followed her.

The witch led him into what had been the master bedchamber. Now it was littered with boxes of books – the hastily removed contents of her library. She glanced at the boxes for a moment, then descended upon one of them like a hawk swooping down on a dove. Without hesitation, she removed the topmost volumes and retrieved a heavy tome banded in black leather. Watching the proceeding, Kreyssig felt his hair stand on end, discomfited by the uncanny way the witch was drawn straight to the book she wanted.

A piebald cat came creeping out from some corner as the baroness settled onto the musty bed sheets. The brute sat beside her feet, becoming as still as a statue. ‘He will warn us,’ the witch said, ‘if there are rats in the walls.’ She extended her hand, beckoning Kreyssig to join her.

Careful to keep his distance from the feline sentinel, Kreyssig positioned himself at the head of the bed. He glanced at the cobwebbed walls, unsettled by the woman’s mention of rats. Better than anyone, he knew the efficiency of verminous spies.

He was soon to learn how little he really knew.

The baroness laid the book in her lap, folding her hands across its cover. ‘You have heard of the Underfolk?’

There was an absurd quality in such a ridiculous question being asked with such grim severity. Despite his feeling of unease, Kreyssig laughed at the witch. ‘What child hasn’t been threatened with fables about the Underfolk!’

The baroness did not share his humour. ‘A truth too awful to accept is quickly dismissed as a fable,’ she warned. ‘The Underfolk are real, Adolf. They are what the dwarfs have called “skaven” and fought many wars against in their long history. They are the fiends that lurk and slink in the darkness, watching and waiting to usurp the realms of men.’

Again, Kreyssig laughed, but this time it was forced laughter. ‘Conquer the realms of men? Those disgusting mutants?’ he scoffed.

‘It has happened before,’ the baroness cautioned. She opened the tome in her lap, displaying pages of illuminated text. The words were written in a cramped, spidery script, the drawings crude and horrible. A glance at the frontispiece was enough to make Kreyssig’s stomach churn. ‘This is an ancient Tilean text, written before the time of Sigmar. In Reikspiel, its title would be The Tower Falls. It describes an ancient city of men, the most powerful in the world, a kingdom that shone like the sun. For all its might, for all its magic, the city was brought to ruin by the skaven, razed so completely that even its name has been lost to legend.’

‘More fables,’ Kreyssig declared.

The baroness shook her head. ‘Not fables – a warning. The book describes how the ancient kingdom was destroyed. The skaven didn’t assault the walls with armies. Instead they burrowed beneath those walls, ferreted out men whose ambition they could exploit. Meek and fawning, they offered their services to those who would betray humanity for power. Through their proxies, they set brother against brother, fragmented society until it festered with enmity and hate. Then, when the kingdom was sufficiently weakened from within, they rose up from their hidden burrows.’

Kreyssig scowled at the baroness. The fable she was relating drove too close to his own dealings with the mutants – the skaven as she named them. He couldn’t forget their demands for more and more food, food far beyond even the most gluttonous demands of the small handful of ratmen he had been led to believe dwelled beneath Altdorf. No, even without the evidence of his own eyes when the vermin had rescued them from the witch-taker, Kreyssig knew the creatures were duplicitous, pretending to be something they weren’t. It was all too easy to believe the baroness when she said their ultimate ambition was to visit ruin upon mankind.

‘If these creatures are what your book tells you they are,’ Kreyssig said, ‘then what does it say about stopping them?’

He could tell from the hollow look in the witch’s eyes that whatever knowledge was inside her book, how to overcome the ratmen wasn’t one of its secrets.

Kreyssig was silent for a moment, mulling over everything the ratmen had done for him. Had done for themselves. For the first time, he appreciated how the vermin had used him to their own ends. Exposing Prince Sigdan’s conspiracy, the treason of Reiksmarshal Boeckenfoerde, this information hadn’t been given to benefit himself or the Emperor. The skaven had done it to weaken the Empire. They had used him as their pawn.

Kreyssig had a peasant’s resentment at being used. He would pay his duplicitous allies back, and in their own coin. It would need bold, immediate action to salvage the situation.

‘Tell me all you can about these skaven,’ Kreyssig told the baroness. He glanced out the room’s window, watching the faint glow of dawn shining through the shutters. ‘Then I must arrange a meeting with the new Grand Theogonist. We will need the support of the Sigmarites in the coming battle.’ He favoured the witch with a cold smile. ‘It is never wise to underestimate the ability of faith to motivate men.’

‘In my time of need, my faith faltered.’ The thunder of Auernheimer’s voice was muted to a contrite rumble. The witch-taker’s head was lowered, his eyes staring at the lavishly embroidered rug under his feet. His arms were folded across his breast as he sketched a half-bow towards the man he addressed.

That man leaned back in an enormous chair carved from a single piece of Drakwald timber. His jewelled fingers drummed against the clawed arm rests. When he spoke, Duke Vidor’s voice was anything but low or humble.

‘You worthless peasant scum!’ Vidor roared. He leaned forwards, clenching his fist and shaking it at Auernheimer. ‘I arranged everything for you. I practically gave them to you as a Sigmarsfest present. All you had to do was kill them. You admit they were in your hands!’ Vidor snatched the dagger he wore on his belt and angrily dashed the weapon to the floor. ‘Draw a blade and slash their throats. Nothing elaborate. Just kill them and be done!’

‘Death would not purge the evil,’ Auernheimer said, his voice still subdued. ‘The corruption must be cleansed, burned away by fire. Only that will appease Great Solkan.’

‘Old Night rot Solkan and all heathen gods!’ Vidor raged, rising from his chair. He stalked across the hunting hall, glaring balefully at the witch-taker. He pointed at the stuffed heads of boars and wolves that adorned the walls. ‘Dead!’ he snapped. ‘Dead! Dead! Dead! That was all you had to do. Dead, this scum Kreyssig would no longer be able to defile the Empire. He wouldn’t be able to profane the halls of the Imperial Palace with his peasant’s feet!’ Vidor sneered at Auernheimer. ‘He wouldn’t be able to transgress upon the sacred traditions handed down to us by most holy Sigmar.’

Auernheimer kept his eyes on the floor. ‘I have failed and I shall atone for my mistake.’

‘How?’ Vidor scoffed. ‘It was merest luck that my spies discovered that Kreyssig was meeting with the witch to begin with. Now he will have her hidden someplace we’ll never find her.’ He stared carefully at Auernheimer, a suspicion growing. ‘Don’t think you can attack the Protector without evidence,’ he warned. ‘If there is no evidence linking him to the black arts, you will be denounced as an assassin. The Emperor will have you drawn and quartered – when the Kaiserjaeger tire of torturing you.’

Auernheimer raised his head, turning a pair of cold eyes upon Vidor. ‘I am prepared to die for my god,’ he said. ‘I will not fail Solkan again.’ With a flourish, the witch-taker drew back his hood, exposing a bald head that was a patchwork of grey scars. Slashing across the scars, blood streamed from fresh cuts.

Vidor stared aghast at the fanatic’s display, finally tearing his gaze away. ‘Cover yourself,’ he hissed in a trembling tone before he remembered his noble bearing. Forcing himself to glare back at Auernheimer he added, ‘You are dripping all over my floor.’

The witch-taker replaced his hood. ‘The heretic must burn,’ he stated simply.

Duke Vidor grimaced at the remark. When he had conceived the idea of employing Auernheimer as his cat’s paw, he hadn’t realised the twisted mentality at work inside the man. He had assumed he was simply some charlatan, some opportunistic sadist playing on peasant fears to aggrandise himself. Auernheimer and his rabble had seemed the perfect instrument to destroy Kreyssig, able to act where Vidor dared not. If Kreyssig’s death were laid at Vidor’s door, there would be scandal at the very least. Disgrace and banishment should the Emperor decide to make an example of him.

Now, for the first time, Vidor was realising the mistake he had made. Auernheimer was no charlatan. He was that most dangerous of men – the true believer. His fanatical devotion to Solkan was no pretence, it was horrible, hideous reality. There was no outrage such a man would not commit if he believed it were the will of his god, and he would do so without a moment’s thought of his own life. That the witch-taker had failed once would only make him that much more determined to become a martyr and make amends before his god.

The witch-taker’s death wouldn’t bother Vidor, but if he should murder Kreyssig without the evidence to make even the Emperor incapable of punishing the Protector’s killers…

Vidor sat back in his chair, taking a firm grip on the rests as he spoke in soft tones to the bleeding fanatic. ‘Auernheimer,’ he said. ‘It does no good to kill Kreyssig. We must get the witch too. If we leave her alive, then she will simply bewitch someone else and use them to corrupt the Imperial court.’ He smiled as he watched the witch-taker’s expression fade from one of fatalistic determinacy to uncertainty. ‘We must leave Kreyssig alive for the moment, wait for him to draw her back out. Only when we can get them both can we act.’

Auernheimer looked undecided. ‘What of her daemons? The witch summoned a horde of daemons to rescue her. She may set such monsters loose upon the city if we don’t stop her.’

‘We have to find her first,’ Vidor said, his words slow, patient and patronising. Reasoning with the fanatic was like reasoning with a stubborn child. He didn’t believe a word of Auernheimer’s story about being thwarted by a horde of rat-faced daemons. More likely, Kreyssig’s Kaiserjaeger had burst in while the witch-taker was lingering over his superstitious rituals. Unable to admit that he had fled from mere men, Auernheimer had decided it was a host of daemons that had made him forsake his duty.

‘Leave things to me,’ Duke Vidor said. He reached again to his belt, but this time it was a sack of coins he tossed at Auernheimer’s feet. ‘Take that and find yourself a place to keep out of sight. When the time is right to act, I will send for you.’ He saw the doubt on the witch-taker’s face. ‘My spies found the witch once, they will do so again.’

As he watched Auernheimer walk from the hall, Vidor wondered about his own words. Kreyssig would be doubly careful now, and after his dismissal he had few friends in the Imperial Palace. The only one of any importance was Lord Ratimir, who had retained his position as Minister of Finance.

That a weakling like Ratimir could offer any help, however, was doubtful.

Lord Ratimir cringed against the wall behind his desk, his eyes clenched tight, every muscle in his body trembling in terror. He was like a frightened child, hiding his head under the blankets to blot out some nightmarish bogey in the innocent supposition that if something went unseen then it wasn’t really there.

Ratimir didn’t need to see the thing to know it was still there. He could hear its paws slapping against the floor, the scrape of its tail against the cold stones. He could hear its short, wheezing breaths and the guttural coughs it uttered. He could smell the rank, mangy stink of its fur. He could feel its abhorrent presence tainting the air, turning it to foul slime that dripped against his skin.

‘Rati-man,’ a monstrous, scratchy voice squeaked in debased Reikspiel. The words ended on a note of chittering laughter.

‘Go away!’ Ratimir pleaded. He could hear the thing creeping closer. He tried to blot out the memory of its appearance, of that verminous shape slinking out from the passageway hidden behind the wall. Desperately he tried to wish away those fangs and claws, the wicked inhuman understanding shining from those beady red eyes.

Unseen, the thing crept closer. Ratimir could feel its foetid breath against his neck.

‘Not leave, Rati-man,’ the thing squeaked. ‘Want-need speak-squeak with Rati-man. Can-will help Rati-man,’ the monster promised. ‘Rati-man can-will help,’ the thing added with a threatening growl.

‘No… No…’ Ratimir sobbed. He raised his hands to cover his ears, to block the sound of that verminous voice. He wailed in disgust as furry paws seized his wrists and pulled his hands away.

‘Rati-man listen-learn,’ the skaven growled. ‘Make Rati-man rich-strong!’ A chitter of malevolent humour rippled from the monster’s throat. ‘Or make Rati-man Rati-meat!’

Sylvania
Sigmarzeit, 1113

Here I shall build my tabernacle.

The words still sent a shiver rushing down Lothar von Diehl’s spine. After only a few hours consulting De Arcanis Kadon, Vanhal had instilled a new purpose in the vast horde of undead. They had turned away from the northern reaches of Sylvania, marching back into the interior, circling down along the banks of the Eschenstir, past the battlements of Fort Tempelhof and into the verdant plain between the vastness of Grim Wood and the Grey Forest. For weeks the walking dead, now including the reanimated bodies of Lothar’s own army, prowled through abandoned fields and pastures, passing desolated villages whose sickly inhabitants cowered behind locked doors and prayed to unheeding gods.

Lothar had felt something akin to panic growing inside him as he observed the increasing desolation. The noxious star-stones that had rained down on Sylvania were more prevalent here, turning the land foul with magical emanations. He could almost see the vegetation withering, watch the magic seeping into its roots to twist and destroy. It was a blight that would never be erased, a corruption that would befoul these lands for all time. Even if the Black Plague passed, Sylvania would never recover from this poison from the sky.

Yet it was here, deep within this corruption, that the senior necromancer led his new pupil. Lothar knew better than to question Vanhal’s actions, even as he knew he must swallow his pride and accept the humiliation of a noble being apprentice to a peasant. The fallen priest’s power was too great, his sorcerous knowledge too vast to challenge. His only choice was obedience or death… And even death wouldn’t free him from Vanhal’s domination.

As he stared out across the plain, he could see the ancient ring of dolmens rising from the yellowed weeds and blackened grass. The weathered stones were a relic of elder ages, perhaps reared by prehuman hands. Even in such eldritch epochs, there must have been power here, a force that even inhuman minds had recognised and paid homage to. The Starfall had visited an inordinate amount of its fury upon this ancient site, fairly plastering the landscape with glowing black rocks, altering the very terrain with the magnitude of its celestial violence.

Now that terrain was being altered still further. Lothar watched as thousands of zombies and skeletons laboured around the dolmens, heaping great blocks of stone about them, transforming the standing circle into a solid ring. The blocks were quarried from hills deep within the Grim Wood, dragged by the tireless undead miles through the forest to the site of the construction. Before each block was laid into place, a patina of crushed star-stone was placed upon them, the noxious dust sizzling as it seeped into each block.

Lothar had enough magical aptitude to feel the power of this place, and to appreciate why Vanhal had been drawn here. The site of the dolmens was a sorcerous confluence, a wellspring of aethyric energies where the arcane and the mundane crossed and blended. It was what some erudite scholars had called a ‘window area’, a place where the veil between physical and metaphysical was worn thin. In such an environment, the power of evocations would be amplified, fed by the fountainhead itself. Here, it would be possible to effect conjurations that would make even his matricidal ritual seem insignificant!

But Vanhal intended even more than simply tapping that wellspring. The construction he had initiated would bind and harness the aethyric power, magnifying its potential a thousandfold. The castle he was building would act as a magical fulcrum, a nexus of arcane energies. With such power to draw upon, he would be able to perform feats of sorcery not seen since Nagash the Black strode the earth.

It was both a frightening and awesome prospect.

Lothar turned away from his observation of the undead labourers and studied the source of the tremendous will that drove them on. Vanhal was seated upon his morbid palanquin, legs folded beneath him, De Arcanis Kadon lying open in his lap. The necromancer’s eyes were closed, his breathing so shallow that no frost formed in the chilly air. To all appearances, he seemed more lifeless than the zombies building his castle.

Carefully, Lothar stole towards the palanquin, concerned that Vanhal’s magic had sent his spirit somewhere that made it impossible to return to his body. For all his injured pride, the possibility alarmed the baron. There was so much he still needed to learn. To be cheated now, when he had gained an inkling of how vast his mentor’s abilities and ambitions were, was too awful to contemplate.

He was just climbing onto the palanquin to check for evidence of life when Vanhal’s cold voice brought his pulse racing. Startled, Lothar dropped back to the blighted ground.

‘Separate a thousand workers from the construction,’ Vanhal said, the words coming more as a ghostly vibration than an actual voice. ‘Send them to scour the bogs and graveyards. I will need more hands to build my tabernacle. Have them bring me those hands.’

Lothar looked back at the construction, fear once again asserting itself. Vanhal already had more undead under his control than any magician Lothar had heard of outside of legends. Indeed, he was amazed that the necromancer could maintain command of so many. To try to raise and control still more was madness.

‘Do as I say,’ Vanhal’s phantom tones demanded, as though taking note of Lothar’s hesitation and reading his mind. ‘All must be prepared before Geheimnisnacht.’

Mention of the night of sorcery explained the urgency behind Vanhal’s command, but only served to increase Lothar’s uneasiness. He expected the castle to be built in only a few months! It would take an army several times greater than the one already under his control to achieve such a feat. Surely Vanhal didn’t intend to try and control so many undead?

One of the eyes behind the necromancer’s mask opened and directed a baleful look at Lothar. ‘All will be in readiness before Geheimnisnacht,’ he said, this time in a deep and menacing voice. Lothar’s objections withered before that stare and that voice.

‘It shall be as you desire, master,’ Lothar said, bowing before the sinister necromancer.

Vanhal closed his eye, refocused his mind to manipulating the undead labourers. Lothar shuddered, wondering if his master were mad. There was, of course, another possibility: that he could do everything he believed himself capable of doing. The idea of such power vested within one man’s mind and body rekindled Lothar’s faltering determination. Bowing again, he hurried from the presence of his master. He would detach some of the undead, send them to steal corpses from graves. He would see how far Vanhal’s abilities could stretch.

It would be a good lesson. An indication of how far his own ambitions might rise.

In normal circumstances, the smell of rotting meat mixed with warpstone would have been a delicious combination to the nose of any skaven. The promise of food and wealth all in the same sniff! Somewhere along the way, however, some insidious fiend had turned the normal state of existence on its tail. Seerlord Skrittar wasn’t certain what malefic force was behind this cataclysmic reversal, but he was certain this calamity was directed solely against himself.

His careful plans, his elaborate rituals to break pieces from the moon and seed them in the earth had been so perfectly flawless. The man-things were sick from the plague, the other Grey Lords were busy plundering the nests and warrens abandoned by the humans. Nothing should have interfered!

Then the stinky-things started showing up. Since that first encounter, when the cowards of Clan Fester had tucked their tails between their legs and scurried off in abject terror, the skaven had been unable to range more than a few food-stops before running into the wormy man-things! What was worse, the filth-things had started to gather warpstone. They were stealing Skrittar’s treasure out from under his very whiskers!

It was enough to make a less disciplined skaven grind his fangs to stumps. Skrittar, however, wasn’t about to concede defeat. Magnanimously setting aside his personal disagreements with their… unique… interpretation of the Horned Rat, he had invited Clan Pestilens to take a hand in gathering the warpstone. Vrask Bilebroth and his disciples weren’t quite outcasts, but with Vrask’s rival Puskab Foulfur on the Council of Thirteen, they weren’t the most popular plague monks. It had been embarrassingly easy to entice the plague priest from hiding by promising to lend him the protection of the grey seers against any retaliation his pestilential enemy might be planning.

Vrask had better be worth the effort Skrittar had expended on him! Watching the plague priest and his disciples sneak across an open field, the seerlord had to concede that the fanatics had a certain amount of bravado. Mad as bedbugs, but brave. It was a combination he might wish his other lackeys possessed, but Warlord Manglrr was such a craven mouse he wasn’t even present to watch Clan Pestilens at work – he’d left that duty to a sub-chief while staying behind in the comfort of the tunnels. It was an outrageous dereliction – especially after his loud demands that the Black Plague be brought to bear against the stink-things!

The stink-things were just beyond the fallow field Vrask and his disciples were crawling across. There was a man-thing bury-plot there. They had been busy for some time excavating the graves, piling the desiccated bodies on carts. It was a mad sort of exercise; there couldn’t be more than a few bites of meat on any of the bodies, and what was there would be tough and chewy. Certainly the stink-things weren’t very smart if this was their idea of foraging.

Skrittar lashed his tail in frustrated anticipation, waiting for the plague monks to confront the enemy. Vrask had promised a great deal with his new strain of plague, a refinement of the disease concocted by Puskab. The grey seer was anxious to see if Vrask’s boasts were justified.

After what seemed an eternity, the enemy appeared to finally notice the plague monks. First a few, then several dozen of the stink-things turned around to stare with glazed eyes at the fallow field. It took the creatures almost a minute to react to the approaching enemy, but when they finally did it was with chilling purposefulness. The stink-things advanced in a shambling mass towards the creeping skaven.

As the foe began to emerge from the graveyard, Vrask rose to his feet and snarled a command to his green-robed fanatics. The plague monks rose from the earth, the foremost of them bearing massive poles of brass and bronze, a metal ball suspended from the tip by a length of chain. Chittering their heretical psalms, the ratmen tore away the thick folds of cloth bundled about the cage-like orbs. With the covering removed, noxious fumes billowed from inside each censer as strips of plague-ridden meat slowly dissolved beneath a coating of acid.

Even from a distance, Skrittar could sense the deadly properties of those pestilential fumes. He could see the exposed arms of the plague monks shedding fur, could smell their naked skin blistering in the caustic clouds. Corrosion dripped down the metal poles and from the spiked frames of the censer balls. Nothing living could withstand such a lethal admixture!

Skrittar’s thrill of triumph faded as the plague monks charged into the slowly advancing zombies. Swinging their censers like enormous flails, the skaven fanned the fumes full into the faces of the stink-things. Flesh peeled and blistered, the foul sores and buboes of the Black Plague spread across enemy skin. It was a hideous, magnificent sight! But that magnificence soon transformed into horror. The ghastly damage the censers visited upon the stink-things, the corrosive disease that should have slaughtered an entire city of humans, did little more than slow the creatures down. The odd bit, an arm here, an ear there, dropped away when the flesh binding it to the body became too corroded to restrain it, but the loss scarcely phased the stink-things. With monotonous, steady tread, the undead closed upon Vrask’s disciples.

The Black Plague, that much touted super-weapon of Clan Pestilens’ had failed! For an instant, Skrittar wondered if the plague priest had tried to trick him, to fob off some fraudulent strain of pox as the infamous Death, but a single sniff of the abject horror in Vrask’s scent told him otherwise. Vrask was genuinely shocked at the plague’s ineffectiveness. He stood in the field, watching as the stink-things advanced towards his disciples and began to drag them down one after another, rending them with rotten hands and smashing them down with rusty spades. His shock was such that only when his disciples began to flee past him did Vrask’s instinctual self-preservation kick in.

Manglrr’s chieftain and the other representatives of Clan Fester were already scurrying back to the tunnels, the plague monks close behind. Skrittar, however, lingered. There were two reasons for such a display of courage. First, it would drive home to the vermin that the seerlord was far above them, so mighty he need not fear the things that brought them terror. Second, he’d already noticed that the stink-things weren’t pursuing the plague monks, but instead were shambling back to the graveyard.

A third reason for lingering on the field of battle presented itself as Vrask Bilebroth went scurrying by, his decayed robes fluttering behind him like the tattered wings of a cave bat. Skrittar’s eyes narrowed, lips peeled back from his fangs. Extending his staff, he sent a bolt of power smashing into the fleeing plague priest. Vrask was sent tumbling snout over tail with such violence that one of the horns fitted to his cowl snapped off and went spinning into the night. Skrittar scowled at the presumptions of Clan Pestilens. The heretics were required by custom to deliver the horned skaven born to their breeders to the grey seers for indoctrination and training, but they were boldly lax about such obligations. Many of the plague priests and festering chantors within their clan sported horns and antlers in open challenge to the grey seers, some of them natural growths, others affectations of their costume. Vrask, it seemed, was one of the latter, a mundane skaven posing as a mage-rat.

Skrittar covered the ground between himself and the sprawled Vrask in a series of bounding hops, bringing his staff crashing down on the plague priest’s head before he could rise. He heard fangs splinter under the blow, smelt skaven blood oozing from Vrask’s mouth.

‘Mercy-pity!’ Vrask whined. ‘Not kill-slay loyal-true Vrask!’

Skrittar glared down at the cringing plague priest. ‘You lied to me, flea-nibbler!’ he spat, raising the staff for another strike. ‘Promise-say that the plague will kill all stink-things!’ He waved a paw at the graveyard where the creatures were already resuming their excavation. ‘Does that look like you killed them? I needed you to reassure those mice of Fester, now I’ll be lucky if the whole inbred clan doesn’t go scurrying back to Skavenblight!’

Vrask folded his paws over his head, trying to protect himself from the coming blow. ‘Yes-yes, I take-take blame-fault! That is why you need-want Vrask!’

The staff froze a hair from Vrask’s horned cowl. A cunning gleam crept into Skrittar’s eyes. It was true, the fault did lie with Vrask. He’d failed to destroy the stink-things and thereby he had proved that Manglrr’s faith in the efficacy of Clan Pestilens was misplaced. More than anything Skrittar could have said or done, Vrask had exposed the limitations of his heretical clan. The rats of Fester would be confused and dispirited by the plague’s failure, but if Skrittar struck quickly and boldly, he could turn that to his favour. He could redirect that disillusion into a more zealous adherence to the Horned One’s true dogma and His sacred voice on earth – Seerlord Skrittar!

‘On your feet, tick-licker!’ Skrittar snarled, kicking Vrask until he obeyed. ‘You are right, I can use you to show Manglrr where his faith should rest.’ The seerlord sucked at his fangs as he glanced back at the graveyard. Disgracing Clan Pestilens was all nice and wonderful, but that still left the problem of what to do about the stink-things.

A hideous thought occurred to Skrittar. Ignoring the whining Vrask, he raised his snout and sniffed again at the air. Yes, there was something wrong about that decayed smell, that tang of dark magic he could detect running beneath the stink of skaven fear musk. It was the smell from the fields, and it was a smell he didn’t like. It was a smell that made him think of abhorrent moments from countless generations past, when the Under-Empire made war against the Curse-thing of Cripple Peak.

Just the idea of that horrifying place made Skrittar’s glands clench. For generations entire clans had perished trying to seize the warpstone mines under Cripple Peak, vying for control with a terrifying mage-thing and the dead-things at its command. The tale of that conflict had passed into legend, a parable to warn future litters.

The foes they fought now, these decaying thieves who stole his warpstone, they were like the dead-things of Cripple Peak! They were the undead, creatures immune to the plagues of Pestilens because they weren’t really alive. Unleash a thousand poxes, and the monsters would keep coming.

As he considered the problem, Skrittar gnashed his fangs. There was a solution, of course, but it would mean letting other paws into the food stash. He didn’t like to invite further complications into what had already become an overly complicated scheme, but there was no getting away from the fact that if he didn’t then he’d never gather the warpstone before the entire Under-Empire was aware of it.

Clan Fester was afraid to fight the undead. Clan Pestilens was unable to fight them. But there was one clan who had built their very identity around their legacy as killers of the dead. They were the last clan to leave Cripple Peak, the survivors of the long war against the Accursed One.

Yes, Skrittar decided, it was time to form an alliance with Warlord Nekrot and the grave-rats of Clan Mordkin.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sylvania
Nachgeheim, 1113

They sat within a hall of black stone, the walls climbing higher around them as the indefatigable undead pursued their ceaseless labours. With each layer of stone, Vanhal could feel the energies of the site swelling, magnified, like the current of some invisible river being funnelled into a smaller channel. Idly, he wondered if this place had known such power in the distant age of Kadon, when primitive tribes had congregated here to commune with the spectres of their tribal totems. Were his efforts increasing the energy or simply restoring them to levels they had once enjoyed?

It was a debate for philosophers. The answer to such a question could only be inconsequential to Vanhal’s pursuits. What mattered to him wasn’t the power this site had once possessed, it was the power with which it might again be endowed. Power to remake the world, to strip away all the misery and confusion and bestow true peace upon all mankind.

Vanhal glanced over at his companion, the noble von Diehl. The baron was busily studying the plans for the construction, blueprints drawn by a phantom hand during the séance the two necromancers had conducted under the dark of the moon. From Lothar’s changing expression, the wonder in his eyes, it was apparent that the intricacies of those designs were not lost upon him. This building would be unlike any other, engineered not as a home or fortress, tomb or temple. It would be devoted to an arcane purpose, its every stone set in such a way as to evoke an aethyric resonance and bolster the magical harmonies.

The séance chamber had been one of the first rooms Vanhal’s legion completed, built with seventeen angles to do homage to the gods of Nehekhara, twelve doors to allow passage of netherworld winds, and a single great mirror of obsidian to form a permanent window into that netherworld. Sixteen circles were etched into the floor, each ring demarked by a series of intertwining glyphs, runes, sigils and pictograms – all invocations or proscriptions towards unseen forces. Each ring was broken by a narrow door, a gap that would be sealed with lines of saltpetre and myrrh when powers were to be evoked. The least entities would require only the small, inner circles to be sealed. The outer rings, pressing almost to the walls of the chamber, would guard the conjurer against even the mightiest of principalities.

The spirit Vanhal had evoked last night had required the sealing of six of the circles. From the dust of ages, the necromancer had summoned the shade of Hotepk, grand priest and chief architect to Settra the Imperishable, mighty pharaoh of lost Khemri. When he had first manifested, the ancient spectre had affected the appearance of a lion-headed godling, hurling curses and threats down on the heads of the mortals who had dared intrude upon his slumber. Lothar had been cowed by the ghost’s malignity and might, but Vanhal was unmoved. Using formulae he had deciphered from De Arcanis Kadon, invoking names unspoken for two thousand years, he subjugated the apparition, binding it to his will. The lion-headed godling dissipated, leaving behind it a glowering, dusky man in the robes and kirtle of ages past. After another threat, drawing on the fearsome rage of Usekhp, the Dreaming God, the ghost acquiesced into grudging servility and drew up the plans for Vanhal’s tower.

Hotepk’s brilliance in life hadn’t been diminished in death. Under the command of Vanhal, the spirit designed a structure that would at once increase, focus and contain the powerful aethyric energies coursing through the site. This place would become a magical fulcrum like no other, surpassing even the dread potentialities of the Black Pyramid and Castle Drachenfels.

As he studied the designs, Lothar von Diehl was awakening to that scale of power. ‘This upper gallery,’ he exclaimed in an awed gasp. ‘It is like a permanent manifestation of Zahak’s Ritual of Sendings! And this… This concentric ring of cells aligned to a central arcade overlooking the core of the tower. With the proper specimens restrained in those niches you would be able to create a soul cage of unprecedented scope. The blackest daemon would be a plaything inside such a trap!’

Vanhal simply nodded and turned his gaze to the zombies shambling about the scaffolding, levering the heavy blocks of stone into place. ‘Pride is a wasteful thing,’ he said, his voice a cold whisper. ‘The braggart is the lowest form of erudite. For those who truly understand, there is no need to boast. Accomplishment is the end in itself.’

Lothar stared at the former priest, an expression of incredulity on his thin face. He ran a hand through his decaying scalp, a clump of greying hair coming away with his fingers. ‘Humility is the refuge of those without courage,’ he protested. ‘I have moved among the nobility, I have watched those who command and those who obey. It has taught me one thing: the only thing that matters in this world is power. Raw, merciless power. The ambition to acquire it. The ruthlessness to use it.’ He slapped his hand against the blueprints. ‘This is power such as the world has never seen. Vanhaldenschlosse will become the throne of the Empire, all men will bow down before the threat of this place!’

The baron’s words faded in a pained choke. Clutching at his throat, he dropped to the floor, gasping for breath as spectral fingers tightened around his neck. Vanhal stared at his apprentice, observing his struggles with cold indifference. ‘Already I can make any man I wish bow down before me. What does such a thing accomplish? It feeds the ego, dulls the mind with delusion and attachment. Fear and hate… love and loyalty, what are these things measured against the long march of history?’ He paused, studying the changing shades of Lothar’s face, watching the pleading hands groping towards him. ‘Your mind is deluded. You still think of this power as something to exploit and use, to conquer others and dominate them. Such blindness,’ he said, shaking his head. With a flick of his hand, he dispelled the ghostly coils about his apprentice’s neck. The constriction removed, Lothar collapsed to the floor, sucking great breaths into his starved lungs.

For an instant, murder gleamed in the baron’s eyes. He should have suffered no peasant to lay hand on him! Quickly, Lothar turned his face, forcing himself to be composed. Fighting down his pride, smothering his very identity, he crawled across the floor on his knees and grovelled at the foot of Vanhal’s skeletal chair. ‘Please, master,’ he pleaded. ‘Help me to see. Help me to understand as you understand!’

A cold, knowing smile crawled across Vanhal’s lips. ‘First,’ he warned his apprentice, ‘you must learn to control the spirit inside you if you would aspire to control the spirits outside. If you cannot be true to yourself, then you are doomed to ignorance.’

Lothar backed away from the seated necromancer, a feeling of horror pounding through him. Again, he wondered at the limits of the man’s power, wondered if Vanhal were able to peer into the mind and soul of his apprentice. Wondered if what was residing within the flesh of his mentor was merely the spirit of a fallen priest or if something else, something from beyond, had seeped into that body.

‘I will… I will supervise the construction,’ Lothar promised. ‘Under my direct guidance, the pace will increase. Vanhaldenschlosse will be completed as you command.’

Vanhal nodded, accepting his apprentice’s display of rekindled servitude. ‘Raise another multitude. Beyond the Grim Wood you will find Hel Fenn. The bogs are heavy with the Fennone dead buried there. Call them up, bring with them their grave goods, the weapons and armour entombed with them.’

‘You talk as though you expect an attack,’ Lothar said. ‘Have your powers given you a premonition? Is Count Malbork moving against us?’

‘I have been given warning,’ Vanhal said. ‘From the first, I have seen that it would be necessary to give battle to the enemy. Not the Sylvanians, but an enemy who is also so blind as to think dominance is the only purpose of power.’ Waving his hand, Vanhal dismissed his apprentice.

Staring again at the rising walls of his tower, Vanhal considered the name Lothar had given this place. Vanhaldenschlosse, ‘Vanhal’s Castle’. Somehow, the name managed to send a shiver through the necromancer. He was thinking of another place, another site of power that had become the namesake of its builder.

The doubts lurking in Lothar’s mind, the suspicion that there was something else within the body of his master – these were questions that brooded within the deepest recesses of Vanhal’s soul. Sometimes his own thoughts seemed alien to him, rising from some influence he didn’t understand. The pain of his family’s destruction was still there, but what of the love that had brought that pain? It was but a distant echo, devoid of intimacy. Try as he might, he couldn’t revisit those memories without an inexplicable aloofness.

When he had conjured the ghost of his brother’s wife, the woman he himself had loved what seemed a lifetime ago, Vanhal had been warned. Raising Aysha’s shade had been his first act of necromancy. In that moment, she had tried to warn him. Sympathies of spirit and mentality have flung open the gate that can never be closed again.

Sympathies, but with what was he supposed to be in sympathy?

Dressed in armour made from the bones of their own clan-kin, the skaven host scurried through the sacred grove of ash and yew overlooking the sprawl of Tempelhof’s graveyard. The ratmen reeked of death, their scent carrying a carrion stench not unlike that lingering about vultures and jackals. It was a scavenger stink imbued from a diet of rotten meat and bone marrow, a smell generations of grave-rats had cultivated until it oozed from their glands.

Seerlord Skrittar had always found that stench both nauseating and threatening. Clan Mordkin was something of an enigma within the Under-Empire. They had been the last to stand against the Curse-thing in the burrows beneath Cripple Peak. For generations they had warred against the dead-things when the rest of skavendom decided to abandon the mountain to the undead. Mordkin had become isolated and alone, scratching an existence at the very fringes of civilisation. When at last they had conceded defeat and retreated from the pits of Nagashizzar, their return had been a frenzy of carnage. Instead of crawling back with tails between their legs and throats exposed, Mordkin had prowled about the edges of the Under-Empire, attacking weak clans and seizing their burrows. Only when they grew formidable enough to stand on their own had the grave-rats allowed themselves to be properly restored to society.

As a pup, Skrittar had heard the stories of Mordkin. They were the bogey-beasts of skavendom, the dark menace every warlord invoked to intimidate his minions. ‘Don’t rat on your chief or Mordkin will invade your warren and eat you all!’ It was a threat that was well founded. Where other clans would subdue and subjugate those they defeated, absorbing them into their own ranks as slaves, Mordkin took no prisoners. Every ratman they conquered was butchered – left to rot until the meat was putrid enough to satisfy creatures accustomed to the flesh of zombies and ghouls.

Insular and mysterious as they were, Mordkin had one saving grace, at least in the eyes of the grey seers. Generations fighting against the Curse-thing had rendered them devout worshippers of the Horned Rat, hearkening to the words of the grey seers a bit more attentively than clans like Rictus and Mors. If it weren’t for their peculiar belief in achieving a greater connection to the Horned Rat by nibbling the bones of His prophets, they might have been a formidable weapon in the seerlord’s arsenal. Instead, they simply presented a convenient way of disposing of troublesome grey seers. Even the most wily didn’t last more than a few months in a Mord-kin burrow.

Even now, surrounded by Warlord Manglrr and the copious bodyguard of stormvermin which accompanied him, Skrittar felt his fur crawl every time the eyes of Bonelord Nekrot glanced his way. Such worshipful piety was horrifying when accompanied by that hungry twitch of Nekrot’s whiskers. Skrittar kept one paw tight about the mummified cat’s paw in his pocket, a talisman that never failed to bring him good luck. In case the paw decided now was a good time to betray him, the seerlord kept reciting the formula for a particularly potent spell under his breath and hoped Nekrot didn’t have a mummy paw in his pocket!

Bonelord Nekrot was a grisly sight. It was the tradition of Clan Mordkin that their leaders wore the bones of their predecessors; indeed, it was the first act expected of any warlord after usurping the position. Any too weak after such a fight to strip the bones from their fallen leader would be quickly killed by some ambitious underling of their own. That was how Nekrot had gained his own supremacy, waiting until his chief, Hussk, killed Bonelord Karkus in single combat, then falling upon his injured master.

It was the bones of Hussk that Nekrot wore, tribute to the half-minute the chief had been warlord of Clan Mordkin. The bleached fangs of Hussk’s skull framed Nekrot’s furless snout and narrow head. The ribs and spine of his betrayed master enclosed Nekrot’s torso, and sectioned halves of other bones guarded his limbs. Hussk’s tail had been stretched and dried, forming a ghoulish belt. A broad-bladed sword of bronze, a khopesh that had been plundered from one of the Curse-thing’s Dark Lords, hung from Nekrot’s belt, sheathed in a scabbard wrapped in the pelt of Karkus.

Everything about Nekrot’s scent and appearance screamed death. Not the cold, efficient death promised by the cloaked adepts of Eshin or the slinking stranglers of Skully. It was the hungry, unreasoning threat of a rabid wolf-rat, the predatory gleam of a prowling cat, the scavenging stare of a hovering vulture.

‘Watch-see, Holy One,’ Nekrot’s sepulchral moan wheezed across the fangs of his helm. His black, hungry eyes again turned to Skrittar. ‘My grave-rats will kill-kill all dead-things.’ He rubbed his pale, almost colourless, paws together and shifted his gaze to Manglrr. ‘We show-tell Fester-rats how to fight.’ Lips peeled away, exposing yellowed fangs in a threat-display as Nekrot gazed past Manglrr and studied the cloaked figure of Vrask Bilebroth. ‘Show-tell why Fester-rats should stay true to Horned One,’ he added with a touch of contempt. Vrask glared back at the bonelord, but the plague priest was wise enough to keep his tongue.

‘You promise much-much,’ Skrittar sneered, gnashing his fangs. ‘One third of my warpstone goes to your bone-lickers,’ he added, nearly choking on the words. ‘But only if they can really protect from the dead-things!’

‘Watch-see!’ Nekrot repeated, fur bristling. Huddled under the nest of interwoven branches that roofed the little shrine built by the man-things inside the grove, the skaven warlords observed as the ghoulish army emerged from the cover of the trees and descended upon the graveyard beyond. The cemetery was far older and larger than the one in which Vrask’s plague monks had failed to subdue the foe. Consequently, the undead defiling the graves were much more numerous. Even so, Clan Mordkin rushed at them with almost un-skavenlike boldness and ferocity. The way they ripped into the zombies was like watching a pack of starving wolf-rats.

Skrittar bruxed his fangs. That, of course, was the trick! Reared on a diet of decaying flesh, the grave-rats of Mordkin associated that smell with food. The odour of the zombies was throwing them into a frenzy born of hunger, driving out even their basest fears! It was an impressive exploitation of his underlings’ psychology on Nekrot’s part, and staging this display was having the desired effect upon Manglrr and the leaders of Clan Fester. After this slaughter, their confidence would be restored.

They would need it! After weeks drawing upon his store of divination spells and augury rituals, Skrittar had discovered the source of the undead infestation. Destroying that source would be a formidable task, one that would require the full might of both Clan Fester and Clan Mordkin to overcome. Certainly, there would be awful casualties, but afterwards they would have a free hand in Sylvania.

Besides, Skrittar reflected, if anything did go wrong he could blame it all on Vrask.

With that happy thought in mind, the seerlord settled back and enjoyed the spectacle of Nekrot’s ravening horde.

Middenheim
Kaldezeit, 1118

‘Does anyone want to argue with that?’ Kurgaz Smallhammer bellowed, hefting the filthy skaven carcass onto the Fauschlagstein. Fleas hopped from the loathsome carcass as it slammed down. The assembled councillors recoiled in disgust, von Vogelthal jumping from his chair and scrambling to the far side of the room.

Graf Gunthar sighed at the dramatic display. He’d seen the carcass some hours before, when Mandred had returned to the Middenpalaz with both the dwarf and the thing that had tried to kill him. It had certainly done much to impress upon him that a strange and sinister threat was menacing Middenheim.

Even so, he’d hoped to present the evidence in a more diplomatic fashion, to prepare his court for the horror of what they faced. Instead, the council’s bickering had grated on Kurgaz’s patience. Thane Hardin had warned him about the warrior’s volatile temper.

Grand Master Vitholf was the first to recover his poise. Leaning across the table, he poked at the body with his sword. ‘It’s a ratman,’ he conceded, nodding first to Kurgaz, then to Thane Hardin. ‘You say your people have been fighting these things for months?’

‘The grudge with the ratkin is ancient beyond human reckoning,’ Thane Hardin corrected him. ‘The present infestation afflicting Grungni’s Tower began four moons ago.’

Vitholf digested that information. The dwarfs had discussed much about these skaven, putting flesh to the old human fables about Underfolk. It was a disgusting thing for a man to contemplate. A society of humanoid rodents dwelling under their feet, plotting the downfall of civilization itself. The dwarfs insisted that such was the truth.

The story was borne out by Prince Mandred, who related his earlier encounters with representatives of the breed. Once in company with the Kineater and once lurking about with a cult of plague-worshippers on the walls of Middenheim. The implications of that first incident were almost too horrific to contemplate.

‘The outbreak of plague in Middenheim would coincide with the infestation in Karak Grazhyakh,’ Mandred said. His wounds had been dressed and bathed in healing unguents, but he was still weak from loss of blood, lending his voice an uncharacteristic air of fatigue. ‘The two must be related.’

‘I agree, your grace,’ Brother Richter pronounced. ‘The southern provinces have been beset by entire armies of these things. The brutes that enslaved Averland and Solland, burned Wissenburg and Pfeildorf were kin of this vermin. History tells us that Sigmar once drove this abomination from the Empire, but even His priesthood has ignored the veracity of His deed, finding it more politic to treat the account as mere legend.’

Ar-Ulric scowled at the carcass, knocking its tail away from where he was sitting. ‘Men would find it hard to sleep at night knowing things like that were scurrying around in the dark,’ the old priest declaimed. ‘It is one thing to accept the beastmen, the northmen and greenskins. Those are enemies out in the wild or beyond the borders.’ He brought his hand slapping against the table. ‘These… These strike at where we live. Even a wolf must feel secure in its den.’

‘His holiness is right,’ von Vogelthal stated. Slowly the chamberlain returned to the table, a visible shiver coursing through him at every step. ‘The peasants would revolt if they found out such things were prowling about under their toes! Why toil for their noble lords if those same lords cannot protect them from walking vermin?’

Thane Hardin nodded sadly. ‘That is why my people did not warn you about the fight in the tunnels. We feared you would flee Middenheim, abandon the city out of terror.’

‘Your opinion of men must be very low,’ Graf Gunthar said, pain in his voice.

‘You squabble and bicker among yourselves so much already,’ Kurgaz grumbled, ‘that any crisis is apt to set you at each other’s throats. Is it any wonder we prefer to do our own fighting?’

Brother Richter turned towards Kurgaz. ‘That is an injustice,’ he stated. ‘To be certain, humanity is more fractious and turbulent than dwarfkind, but our differences make us stronger, not weaker. Sigmar united twelve tribes, bound twelve different peoples into a single purpose. Through Him, the divergent traditions and ideas of the tribes were disseminated, spread throughout the Empire. The adversity of war brought men together in a way that peace and tranquillity never would. You fear that a crisis will bring out the worst in men. I reject that idea! I tell you that it is through crisis that you find the best in men.’

Kurgaz looked away from the Sigmarite, staring instead at Mandred, recalling how the prince had exposed himself to attack in order to cut the dwarf’s bonds. ‘I think I’ve already seen that,’ he admitted.

‘Karak Grazhyakh will need the resources Middenheim can provide,’ Graf Gunthar said. ‘Food, timber, cloth and fur. Soldiers too.’

Thane Hardin shook his head at the last offer. ‘My people are accustomed to fighting in the tunnels and understand something of the foe. We will drive the skaven back. It is only a matter of time.’

‘With all due respect, thane,’ Mandred said, ‘time is the one thing we don’t have. If these fiends are behind the plague, then every hour they infest the Ulricsberg allows them to spread disease among the people of Middenheim. This battle may be fought in your domain, but this fight doesn’t belong to dwarfs alone. Our people are at risk as well. You must allow us to help purge the mountain of these vermin.’

Ar-Ulric took up the call for battle. ‘A decisive thrust against the skaven, delivered by men and dwarfs. The reinforcements could be just the edge needed to tip the balance. Moreover, if we wait to fight we risk losing the battle to the plague.’

Thane Hardin and Kurgaz held a brief consultation in Khazalid, their words unintelligible to nearly all of the men around them, only Richter being versed enough in that language to follow some of what they were saying.

‘All right,’ Thane Hardin declared. ‘We will allow human troops in the tunnels. But we want their commander to be someone we can trust.’ He pointed a stubby finger at Mandred.

Graf Gunthar rose from his chair, glowering at the dwarf leader. ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘My son is still healing from his wounds.’

‘He’ll get better,’ Kurgaz observed. ‘We’ll bring up some medicinal ale that’ll have him spry in no time.’ He flexed his stiff arm, wincing as a flash of pain from his wound shot through him. ‘Better than anything you have up here,’ he added. Without the worry of incurring a grudge, dwarf doktoring could work wonders in a very short time.

‘Father, I want to go,’ Mandred said. ‘The dwarfs helped build Middenheim. Even if we were sure of our own safety, we’d be obligated to help. Honour demands nothing less of us.’ He glared at the carcass. ‘Besides, I have a personal reckoning with these monsters.’

Reluctantly, Graf Gunthar settled back in his seat, lines of worry wrinkling his brow. Without a word, he nodded at his son.

‘Only the soldiers accompanying his grace should be made aware of the kind of enemy we face,’ von Vogelthal suggested. ‘If the knowledge were to become public it would spread panic just when we can afford it least.’ He bowed in apology to Brother Richter. ‘Not to contradict your speech about strength in adversity, but it is a wise man who prepares for the worst possibility.’

‘Then prepare we shall,’ Graf Gunthar declared. ‘No public speech, I agree with you there. That would breed panic. What we must do is to be subtle.’ He cast his gaze from one councillor to another. ‘Each liege lord will take his vassals into confidence. His vassals in turn will disseminate the truth to his subjects. From master to servant, piece by piece, we spread the word. We feed each man’s pride with a sacred trust instead of fostering a general panic. Frightened men panic, proud men fight.’

Proud, stubborn, the dwarfs fought to the last warrior to defend the lower workings. It took the hordes of Clan Mors three days and a thousand slaves to overwhelm the thirty dwarfs who made their stand in the gallery. By the time it was over, the floor was caked in black blood and fur.

Warlord Vrrmik gnawed on the severed finger of a dwarf as he surveyed the carnage. It wasn’t the loss of life that upset him – there were always more slaves to be had. Clan Mors was renowned for ferreting out weaker clans and enslaving them. The toughness of the enemy didn’t bother him either – he’d fought dwarfs often enough to know they were always more trouble than they were worth.

No, the burr in Vrrmik’s fur was the indignity of it all! Any victory he achieved was bitter and hollow, as empty as a dried-out flea. Warmonger Vecteek had summoned Clan Mors to Wolfrock under false pretences. Vrrmik had imagined he would share in the victory, that some of the triumph enjoyed by Clan Rictus would rub off on Clan Mors. Now, as Vecteek mobilised Mors, Vrrmik was discovering the depth of the tyrant’s duplicity.

Clan Mors was nothing but a diversionary force, meant to distract and draw off the dwarfs while Vecteek was leading the main body of skaven by a circuitous route into the heart of the dwarfhold!

Vrrmik was a horrifying sight as he prowled among the dead, his white fur standing stark against his black armour. Forged by the artisans of Clan Skryre, the steel plates had been steeped in powdered warpstone, lending it a horrendous capacity for damage. Some among the chiefs of Clan Mors had seen a hydra break its fangs on that armour, more than a few had cursed it for deflecting the blades of their hired assassins. Out of his armour, Vrrmik was formidable, huge and powerful even by the standards of a clan known for breeding hulking warriors. In his warp-plate, Vrrmik felt almost invincible.

‘Splendid victory, Great Warlord Vrrmik,’ Puskab Foulfur’s phlegmy voice coughed in the white skaven’s ear. The warlord almost choked on the finger he was gnawing. Springing away, he bared his fangs at the plague priest. One of the handicaps of his armour was that so much warpstone close to him had rendered his sense of smell quite feeble.

‘Plague-spitter,’ Vrrmik hissed at the antlered priest. ‘Go back to Vecteek. His paws might need licking. Hurry-scurry!’

Puskab coughed in a diseased semblance of amusement. ‘The Horned One favours Vecteek,’ he said.

Vrrmik gnashed his fangs. It was another point that disgusted him, the way the grey seers fawned over Vecteek and declared him the Horned Rat’s favourite pup! Just thinking about it made him want to kill something. He hoped his scouts would find some more dwarf tunnel fighters soon.

‘Clan Rictus steal-take all glory for itself,’ Puskab continued. ‘Leave nothing for Clan Pestilens. Less for Clan Mors.’

‘What do you speak-squeak?’ Vrrmik wondered aloud. It occurred to him that the plague monks were dire enemies of the grey seers and had their own brand of heretical religion. To date, they had been supportive of Vecteek and prospered by that alliance. Perhaps, however, Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch wanted something more than simple wealth for his clan.

‘Vecteek has his plan,’ Puskab said, creeping closer, his eyes glittering in the torchlight. ‘We will have our own plan,’ he chittered.

The plague priest’s voice dropped to a low whisper as he described what those plans would be.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Altdorf
Brauzeit, 1114

Flanked by dour warrior priests, sombre in their black robes and grey cloaks, Adolf Kreyssig felt distinctly ill at ease as he strode through the echoing marble halls of the Great Cathedral. Alabaster busts of Sigmarite scions frowned down at him from niches carved into the forest of stone columns supporting the vaulted ceiling hundreds of feet overhead. Sprawling tapestries depicting the victories of Sigmar stretched across the walls, commemorating the triumphs of Sigmar the man. Stained-glass windows towered above the tapestries, each scene recalling a different miracle visited upon the Empire by Sigmar the god. Kreyssig had long ago cast aside his credulity for gods and miracles, but even he felt small surrounded by the grandiose iconography of the temple.

The warrior priests conducted their charge down a set of marble steps and into a wide corridor that led away from the main sanctuary and past the monastic cells of their own militant order. The few persons they passed wore the brown habits of mendicants or the white cassocks of friars. None of the higher clergy, the temple elders, were in evidence.

The Protector of the Empire shifted uncomfortably as the cat he led on a leash rubbed against his leg. One of the baroness’s creatures, of course, intended to warn him if there were skaven about. He hesitated a moment as the feline perked up its head and glanced about the hall. After a moment, it subsided, returning to that lazy indolence that had characterised its attitude since he’d acquired it. He stared uneasily at the animal, then glared at the curious faces of his guides. It wasn’t for men of their station to question the habits of their betters.

Mounting a spiral stairway, Kreyssig was led up into the great spire that rose high above the cathedral. Narrow windows cut into the exterior wall overlooked the city, affording an almost breathtaking view of Altdorf. He could see clear to the Reik, watch the few ships stubbornly plying the river trade navigating between the mid-channel islands. He could see the vast sprawl of the Kaisergarten, the scorched wreck where Breadburg had once stood, the ramshackle slumland that had grown up in the shadow of the capital’s walls. He could see the Courts of Justice and the Imperial Palace. From this height, even these imperious structures seemed small.

When he thought they could climb no higher, one of the silent priests motioned for Kreyssig to wait. Stepping ahead of the Protector, the priest drew a heavy key from around his neck, thrusting it into a door that blended in so perfectly with the wall that Kreyssig was unaware it was even there until the cleric began to draw it open. With a bow, the priest gestured for Kreyssig to enter.

Kreyssig’s breath caught in his throat as he beheld the magnificence of the chamber. Inwardly, he chided himself for ever being awed by the Kaiseraugen. Emperor Boris’s picture window was a crude, crass thing compared to what he now saw. Except for the floor and a hip-high stripe of wall, the entire chamber seemed composed of glass, only the steel framework spoiling the transparency of the curved ceiling overhead. The effect when he walked into the room was like stepping onto the clouds themselves. He felt his head swim for a moment as a feeling of vertigo tugged at his brain.

It didn’t take an architect to recognize that no human hand had built this chamber. There was something esoteric, magical about it. Dwarfcraft, but on a far more magnificent scale than Boris Goldgather’s windows and apiary. Those had been constructed with no greater ambition than the gold the Emperor was paying. The dwarfs who had laboured on the Great Cathedral had done so for far more profound reasons, repaying ancient debts of honour and friendship.

‘Welcome to the observium,’ a dolorous voice pronounced.

By force of will, Kreyssig turned his gaze from the dizzying vista beyond the transparent walls. He stared at the speaker, the cleric in his golden robes, a massive pectoral of jade hanging about his neck. Stefan Schoppe wasn’t the same man who had begged and pleaded in the Dragon’s Hole. His ascension from mere lector to Grand Theogonist had transformed him into the most powerful cleric in Altdorf. There was fire in his eye as he met Kreyssig’s gaze, an almost palpable and entirely understandable animosity.

Kreyssig bowed his head. ‘I bring affections from your daughter, your holiness,’ he greeted the Grand Theogonist. With all the majesty of his surroundings, all the power he now wielded, it was prudent to remind Stefan that his daughter was still a guest of the Kaiserjaeger.

The fire flickered in the priest’s eyes, but did not go out. The Grand Theogonist slowly stepped away from the cherrywood lectern and the vellum star chart he had been perusing. Gripping the long stave that formed part of his regalia, he approached his impious petitioner, sweeping past the ordained astrologers who bustled about the set of parchment-strewn tables that dominated one side of the room. For an instant, he paused, turning his head and glancing at the other side of the room. Here there were no tables, only a number of small stone benches spaced equidistantly along the length of the chamber. Upon each bench there knelt a woman dressed in thick cream-coloured robes. Each of the women was bald as an egg, a thick blindfold wrapped about her face. Rumour claimed that there were no eyes beneath the blindfolds, that in exchange for their divine vision the Sigmarite augurs removed their real eyes as an offering to their god.

‘The augurs have told me much about you, Kreyssig,’ the priest said as he came closer, unmistakable threat behind his voice.

Kreyssig nodded, appreciating that there were other ways of learning things beyond spies and traitors. The Temple howled for the blood of witches and warlocks, but they had no compunction about exploiting such abilities for themselves. They just called their witches augurs and prophets.

‘Perhaps we would be better discussing these things in private, your holiness,’ Kreyssig suggested. The Grand Theogonist didn’t hesitate, but brought the end of his staff against the marble floor. At the sound, the warrior priests withdrew and the astrologers quit their labours and quietly filed out onto the stairway. The blind augurs, however, remained where they were. If they had truly disclosed his secrets to Stefan, there was small point in demanding they leave.

‘Rumours have reached these holy halls,’ the Grand Theogonist said. ‘The streets of Altdorf whisper that the Protector of the Empire is a heretic, that he consorts with witches and daemons. They say that he has used spells to corrupt the Emperor and force him from his palace. They say it is because of him that the gods shun these lands and plague runs rampant through the city.’

‘Lies and fabrications,’ Kreyssig snorted derisively. ‘Peasant babble that means nothing and threatens less.’

‘The common folk are starving,’ the Grand Theogonist observed. ‘Their families sicken, they count their dead by the bushel. They feel their Emperor has deserted them and that their gods punish them for the wickedness of their noble lords. They seek out a cause for their troubles, something they can understand and fight. At the moment they are too afraid to act upon the rumours they spread. But there comes a moment when fear burns itself out, leaving only hatred and resentment behind.’

The Grand Theogonist’s hand clenched tighter about the haft of his staff. ‘And, of course, even the most humble man has an obligation to Sigmar. A duty to root out heresy, to destroy those who would call upon the Ruinous Powers, to purge the land of all tainted by the touch of Chaos.’ He closed his eyes, reciting a passage from the Deus Sigmar. ‘Accursed be they who treat with the witch, for they abandon themselves to obscenity. Blessed be they who suffer not the abomination among them, for they shall be known as the pure.’

‘There is a time for dogma and a time to be practical,’ Kreyssig hissed at the priest.

Opening his eyes, the Grand Theogonist glared at Kreyssig. ‘A mandate from the divine,’ he cried. ‘A holy duty to overwhelm and destroy heretics like yourself, no matter where they be found!’

Kreyssig scowled at Stefan. Almost absently, he removed a fold of cloth from under the sleeve of his doublet, a strip cut from the dress of Stefan’s daughter. He laughed darkly when he saw the irate priest flinch at the sight. ‘For all your pious doggerel, there is a man under those robes, the heart of a father beating in that breast. You have invoked the name of your god, I call upon the name of your daughter… and her continued good health.’

The Grand Theogonist seemed to wilt against his staff, despair draining the rage from his eyes. ‘I should never have become hierophant of Mighty Sigmar,’ he muttered. ‘I am too weak to do His work.’

‘But not too weak to serve the Empire,’ Kreyssig stated. He waved his hand at the silent augurs. ‘Haven’t your harpies told you? There is a greater threat menacing Altdorf than a lone witch and her spells.’ He studied the dispirited Stefan. In choosing the lector as the new Grand Theogonist, he had chosen well. A man who was too weak-willed to oppose him. As Emperor Boris always said, a ruler must never let the gods become more powerful than himself.

‘They have told me,’ the Grand Theogonist said, his voice low. ‘They have told me that the forgotten enemy has returned, the creeping pestilence Mighty Sigmar exterminated from these lands.’ The priest’s body straightened, a trace of fierceness crept into his voice. ‘They have told me you have allied with these horrors, encouraged their vile presence in the city.’

Some of Kreyssig’s assurance faltered as he heard the growled accusation, too much truth in the priest’s words for him to deny. ‘That is why I am the only man who can save Altdorf. I admit, I made a mistake. I treated with these monsters without knowing who and what they really were. That damage is done, but if they had not worked through me they should have found themselves someone else. Perhaps, it was Sigmar’s will that it was I they thought to work through.’

‘You dare invoke Sigmar’s name?’ The Grand Theogonist shook his head.

‘Call it what you will, then,’ Kreyssig snarled back, ‘but the fact remains that I have spoken with these vermin. I know something of how they think, how they work.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘That knowledge is the only thing that can save this city.’

Again, the Grand Theogonist stiffened. ‘The grace of Sigmar is our only salvation.’

Kreyssig smiled at the remark. ‘Indeed, I shall need Sigmar to help me. I will need his sanction to prepare this city for the battle that is coming. I will need you to bestow the god’s blessing upon my edicts as Protector.’

The Grand Theogonist scowled at Kreyssig. ‘That would be blasphemy, a violation of this holy office.’

‘If we are to save this city – and your precious temple – you will have Sigmar sanction all that I do,’ Kreyssig said. ‘Otherwise, we will all be at the mercy of these monsters. In a few hours, I will deliver the first in a series of edicts. My first step will be the seizure of noble property.’

‘They will never stand for it,’ the Grand Theogonist warned. ‘No matter your position or the blessing of the Temple.’

‘The Vons will submit,’ Kreyssig said. ‘They will submit because they don’t want to be torn apart by the starving masses of Altdorf’s peasantry. They will submit because it is the only way any of them will survive.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘You see, there is going to be a great scandal, a few traitors in the Imperial court who have been siphoning off food stores and selling them to the nobles in Talabheim. After a little blue blood is shed, the rest of the nobles will stay quiet.’

‘I cannot lend my authority to such a murderous falsehood,’ the Grand Theogonist stated.

‘You will do more than lend your authority to it,’ Kreyssig said. ‘You will publicly accuse these nobles of heresy! The Temple of Sigmar will rouse the peasants, stir them until their howls for blood echo in the ears of the Vons. While the other temples sit idle, the Sigmarites will rally the people of Altdorf.’

‘To what end? How do these lies prepare us for a confrontation with the Underfolk?’

Kreyssig smiled, amused by the priest’s lack of vision. It seemed there were things his augurs couldn’t tell him. ‘We will pursue a new war against Talabheim. I will initiate conscription to rebuild the Imperial army, requisition arms from the guilds and knightly orders. When I am finished, the army of Altdorf will be the strongest force in the Empire. All it will take is a bit of cooperation from the Temple.’

‘Blasphemy, you mean,’ the priest said.

‘A necessary evil,’ Kreyssig stated. ‘An ill-tasting morsel to digest if we are to save Altdorf.’

The Grand Theogonist glared back at him, a flame of fervour in his eyes. ‘I am no longer Stefan Schoppe,’ he said in a voice as hard as granite. ‘A Grand Theogonist takes on a dwarfish name when he dons the golden robes. You may call me Gazulgrund.’

Kreyssig chuckled at the severity with which the priest intoned his adopted name. Perhaps to a Sigmarite such ceremony was important, but to him it was just so much superstitious nonsense.

‘Call yourself whatever you like,’ Kreyssig said. ‘So long as you do not fail me.’ He studied the Grand Theogonist a moment, then turned away. ‘I suggest you get yourself a cat,’ he called as he strode from the observium. ‘They’ll warn you if any ratty ears are around.’

Even after Kreyssig was gone, Grand Theogonist Gazulgrund continued to glare where the man had stood, hate burning in his eyes.

Sythar Doom reclined on a mattress stuffed with mouse-down and wrapped himself more tightly in a ratskin rug, a precaution against the clammy chill seeping into the warren from the river. He turned his ensorcelled gaze upon the stalactite ceiling far above, watching as bats flittered about the roof. His tail lashed from side to side as he watched a clutch of skavenslaves creeping about the ceiling, trying to catch the flying rodents. Batwing soup was a delicious delicacy, but only if the wings weren’t torn. For some reason they lost their taste if they weren’t intact. Hence the best way to gather the wings was to climb up and snatch the beasts from their roosts.

The Warpmaster of Clan Skryre lashed his tail in amusement as one of the slaves lost his grip and went crashing to the cavern floor. There was no cry; like any good hunting slave his tongue had been cut out long ago. No scream disturbed the bats, only the meaty thump of the ratman as he smacked into the unyielding limestone floor. The twitching corpse was quickly dragged away by a Clan Mors quartermaster. With an army as large as the one Sythar Doom had assembled, every little bit of meat was a blessing.

Sythar ran a paw along the tube fastened to the underside of his jaw, checking it for ticks. The filthy parasites sometimes congregated there, incinerating themselves as soon as they bit into the warpstone-infused lining. The shrivelled husks were a tasty titbit with a delicious crunch to them. Sadly, none of the insects rewarded Sythar’s preening. They’d become noticeably scarce in Skavenblight since the collapse of Clan Verms. It was almost enough to make him regret the Wormlord’s demise. Almost.

Metal fangs gleamed as Sythar shifted himself around to face the massive warp-lantern that towered beside his pillowed bed. The Luminator scrambled about the many dials and flywheels, making certain the sliver of warpstone providing the eerie green light didn’t exude too much energy. Early experiments with the warplight had resulted in some unfortunate accidents, but those incidents had become noticeably less frequent over time. Since the Luminator was chained to his machine, Sythar was very confident the skaven would do his utmost to ensure the warplight’s stability.

‘Report-talk from Rati-man.’ The whining voice of a Clan Skully rodent drew Sythar’s attention away from the warplight. The jewelled eyes gleamed balefully in the green luminance as he stared down at the spy.

‘Speak-squeak,’ Sythar declared, a note of annoyance in his posture.

‘Abin-gnaw Hakk,’ the skaven said, affecting a loathsomely human bow. Sythar glared at the piebald creature, his body draped in the scarlet cloak of Raksheed Deathclaw’s elite cult of murder-rats. Whatever expression there was on Abin-gnaw’s face was hidden behind the crimson cloth wrapped across his muzzle. From the arrogance of the spy’s posture and the boldness with which he announced his identity, it was obvious he was trying to draw attention to himself.

Sythar chittered happily. Any messenger who declared himself to his superiors could only be the bearer of good news. Most likely, the original message had started much lower on Clan Skully’s food chain before Abin-gnaw snatched it for himself.

The Warpmaster sprawled back on his mouse-fur cushions and flicked one of his claws at Abin-gnaw, motioning him to speak.

‘Man-things train-teach army,’ Abin-gnaw squeaked. ‘Take-bring much weapons. Much armour.’

Sythar rose from his cushions, sparks flashing from his fangs. What was this fool-meat babbling about! The humans were raising an army. They were taking up arms. By what mental deficiency did this low-grade mouse-fondling moron think this was good news!

Abin-gnaw wasn’t fool enough to ignore Sythar’s anger. With an almost boneless motion, he flopped to the floor and twisted about so he could bare his throat to the Warpmaster in the universal skaven gesture of submission. ‘Listen-wait!’ the spy squeaked. ‘Man-things make war on other man-thing nest!’

The Warpmaster stood for a moment, digesting the frantic report. He glanced at the armoured warpguard who flanked his throne, stared up at the slaves slinking about the ceiling, at the confusion of sycophants and underlings who littered the floor of the cavern, waiting to attend the merest twitch of his whisker. Sythar could smell the excitement in their scent, knew the same odours were spilling from his own glands.

The humans were going to fight one another! He would have to take credit for this before one of the grey seers declared it a beneficence from the Horned Rat!

Abin-gnaw slowly rose to his feet, bowing again to Sythar Doom. This time the Warpmaster took no notice of the humanlike gesture. He was thinking instead about the abilities of Clan Skully’s murder-rats, their proficiency with the strangler’s noose. At the moment, there were three leaders of the expedition to conquer Altdorf. Clan Mors had their General Twych, established by Ratlord Vecteek himself as commander of the mission. Then there was that odious Deacon Blistrr from Clan Pestilens. While he was at it, he might add Grey Seer Pakritt to his wish list. Without those three, Warpmaster Sythar Doom would be supreme commander of the campaign.

With the prospect of a protracted war evaporating, with the humans getting ready to fight among themselves, Sythar no longer saw any reason why he should allow these incompetent underlings to leech off his glory!

‘Attend,’ Sythar hissed, motioning Abin-gnaw closer. Only when the murder-rat was so close that the sparks from Sythar’s fangs singed his fur, did the Warpmaster whisper his plans. To Clan Skryre would belong the prestige of conquering the man-thing nest, and Clan Skully would be paid well to eliminate the few obstacles in their way.

Kazad Migdhal
Kaldezeit, 1113

An uncanny coldness had settled into the great hall of Kazad Migdhal, a chill that refused to be expelled however high Bori Wodinsson stoked the fire roaring within the hearth. Keeper of King Skalf’s hearth, it was a terrible disgrace to Bori that this chill had been allowed to infest the hall. He kept his gaze downcast, not daring to meet the eyes of the dwarfs assembled about the king’s table.

Bori’s apprentices, under his direction, dutifully fed more logs into the blaze. The heat of the flames singed their young beards and sent streams of sweat pouring down their foreheads. Bori had already removed his drenched hat and had stripped away his baldric. He was absolutely at a loss to understand how he could feel so cold yet have his body react as though he’d been dropped into an inferno.

‘I can still see my breath!’ one of the thanes at the table laughed, punctuating his remark by expelling a great cloud of mist. The display brought raucous laughs from the other dwarfs in the hall.

‘Leave Bori be!’ quipped another thane, gesticulating with a white-capped mug of beer. ‘The cold is good for the brew!’

‘But not my beard,’ grumbled a silver-haired elder. He brought a gloved hand stroking down the length of his face, and held the fingers up for those seated around him to inspect. ‘Look! Frost!’

Bori’s face turned crimson beneath his own beard. The shame of this night was going to humiliate his family for three generations. It would take a great deal of valour to extirpate this embarrassment, and over so ridiculous a thing. A room that wouldn’t grow warm if an entire forest was fed into its hearth!

He risked turning away from the fire for a moment, directing a covert glance at King Skalf’s throne. His sovereign sat in stony silence, jewelled fingers closed tight about the stem of a golden goblet. There was just the slightest trace of discomfort on the king’s face, a condemnation Bori felt all the more keenly for its subtlety. Bonds of friendship between himself and the king had earned him his position. It was shameful that those same bonds should restrain King Skalf’s rightful displeasure. It was an imposition on Bori’s part, one he doubted he could ever make amends for.

‘Build it higher!’ Bori snarled at his helpers, shoving yet another log into the blaze. A finger of flame reached out, searing his fingers and causing him to jump back. Sucking at the burned skin, he glared vindictively at the blaze. What would it take to warm this cursed hall!

Bori never knew what compelled him to raise his eyes to the marble mantle above the hearth or the trophy bolted to the wall above it. Some primitive instinct, some animalistic foreboding of danger, whatever it was alerted the dwarf to something far more horrible than a stubborn chill.

Skalf had made himself king by stealing into the abandoned halls of Karak Azgal and slaying the mighty dragon Graug the Terrible. Karak Migdhal had been established in one of the abandoned stronghold’s gatehouses, a dwarf outpost in lands long lost to their kind. The outpost was rich, however, made wealthy by the treasure reclaimed from the dragon’s hoard. Skalf had earned not only the title of king, but also that of Dragonslayer, and far more than his crown, he valued the gigantic reptilian head displayed in his great hall.

The head of Graug had been bolted to the wall, hung there as a mark of Skalf’s strength and courage. It was something to awe visitors and impress dignitaries. To the dwarfs who had cast aside old allegiances to make their fortune in Karak Migdhal, it was a symbol of dwarf perseverance against all foes.

Now, however, it was a thing of terror. Before Bori’s horrified gaze, leathery lids pulled back from the glass eyes taxidermists had set into the dragon’s skull. Scaly lips retreated from sword-sized fangs. The withered stump of a forked tongue flicked out, shivering in the air.

Bori cried out once, then the reanimated head lurched down from its fastenings, tearing the bolts free as it crashed to the floor. The Keeper of the Hearth vanished in the dragon’s maw, caught by those immense, snapping jaws.

Dumbstruck thanes and guildmasters looked up from their drinks, staring in disbelief at the revived head. Oaths and curses spilled from their mouths as they watched the huge head flop about on the floor with ghastly life, trying to propel itself towards fresh prey.

‘Fetch my axe,’ King Skalf snarled, casting aside his goblet and unfastening the royal cloak pinned to his shoulders. He glared at the monstrous head, feeling rage as he watched Bori’s blood drip down its fangs.

‘I don’t know how many times I must slay you, monster!’ he roared. ‘But by Grimnir, I swear this time I will make a better job of it!’

The captain of Skalf’s bodyguard rushed to the king’s side, Wyrmbiter clutched in his hands. One look at his king told the dwarf it was useless to try and dissuade him from this battle. Reluctantly, he pressed the weapon into Skalf’s hand.

The instant Wyrmbiter was in his hands, King Skalf was no more. The stoic dignity demanded of a ruler fell away, succumbing to the reckless determination of the adventurer and fortune-seeker. Again, he was simply Skalf Hraddisson, determined to earn the name of Dragonslayer.

Graug’s head flailed about on the floor, turning to fix its glass gaze on the advancing dwarf. A loathsome, dry cough rasped up from the stump of neck remaining to the reptile, spraying bits of Bori across the floor.

This final indignity inflicted upon his friend sent icy rage coursing through Skalf’s veins. Roaring an inarticulate cry of vengeance, the dwarf flung himself at the dragon. In a great leap, Skalf brought his gromril axe flashing down. The blade crunched through scaly flesh and draconic bone, hewing through Graug’s forehead, cleaving down along its snout. When he ripped his blade free, the dragon’s skull had been nearly cut in half, bisected down the middle.

Skalf glared down at the mutilated head, watching in disgust as its wreckage continued to wriggle with obscene life. ‘Burn it,’ he growled at his awestruck subjects, setting Wyrmbiter across his shoulder as he stalked from the hall.

Sylvania
Kaldezeit, 1113

Baron Lothar von Diehl ran his hand across the bare expanse of his scalp, finding even the last trace of his black mane had deserted him. The powers of a necromancer did not come without a price, he reflected, and the greater the power the more taxing that price became. He could feel dark magic flowing through his body, inundating every speck of his being with sorcery. The sensation had only increased as Vanhaldenschlosse came nearer to completion. How much greater might his power become once the tower was finished?

Could mere flesh endure long enough? It was a question he feared to ask himself. The toll such magic was taking upon him was tremendous. Since submitting to Vanhal’s tutelage, Lothar’s body had aged decades, withering from that of a young noble at the prime of life to a scarecrow semblance of elderly decrepitude.

It had cost him much to learn what he had, but Lothar would pry still more secrets from his mentor. Watching the ancient dead rise from the muck of Hel Fenn, seeing those legions of bog-men enslaved to his every command – that was power! It was power that belonged to him, power greater than any man had wielded before.

Any man, except one. How much greater must be the secrets Vanhal yet kept to himself, that he would bestow so casually such spells into the keeping of his apprentice? Lothar had always doubted the wisdom of gods, but to allow such knowledge to be possessed by a mere peasant was proof that whatever gods there were, they must be idiots. By his own words, Vanhal had proven he was an unfit vessel for such powers. He spoke of ability as its own achievement, but of what use was a blade if it were never drawn? What did it matter if one could do a thing if there were no purpose behind it?

As he stalked through the gates of the half-formed castle, his legion of bog-men shambling after him, Lothar felt uneasy. Something was wrong. He could feel a tremendous energy in the air, a force so powerful that it seemed to pluck at his own spirit, as though eager to drag it from his flesh. It was a frightful, abominable sensation, a sickening violation of his innermost being. For all the revulsion it evoked, the experience was even more horrible because Lothar knew it wasn’t even directed against him, he simply happened to be within its reach. He was inconsequential to it, nothing more than a hapless bystander.

Anger flared inside the necromancer. Evoking spells of protection, girding his soul in spectral armour, Lothar dashed inside the unfinished fortress, racing down the length of the vast assembly hall. With every step, he could feel the aethyric vibrations growing, a dull hum of energy that caused his ears to ring and a trickle of blood to stream down his nose. A wave of nausea swept through him, threatening to flatten him as he mounted the spiral staircase and began to climb to the séance room. Lothar dabbed his finger in the blood draining down his nose, using the sanguine medium to strengthen his spells of protection. Refortified, he rushed up the steps.

The séance room was a howling tempest of sorcerous energies, gales of spectral power whipping about the chamber. The circles on the floor were struggling to contain that force; Lothar could see the discordant harmonies whirling about inside each ring, his witchsight giving him a glimpse at formless things struggling to possess shape.

This, however, was the least manifestation of the power being drawn into this place. Arrayed about the séance chamber were the tops of the pre-human menhirs. The ancient stones were ablaze with eldritch emanations, tendrils of light that crackled and danced as they ascended through the half-formed tower. Lothar craned his head, following their gyrations until they were lost in the night sky. For an instant, each stream would flicker, divert itself inwards. With a feeling of dread, he realised that there was a rhythm to those diversions, a horrible suggestiveness. It was like watching the pulsations of a beating heart.

‘Vanhal!’ Lothar cried out. The peasant necromancer had been cagey, dispatching his disciple on a meaningless errand before beginning some forbidden rite he wished to keep secret! Bitterly, the baron reflected on his foolish appreciation of the power he had evoked at Hel Fenn. Beside this, such magic was nothing.

‘Vanhal!’ he shouted once more, making no effort to hide the anger in his tone. The fallen priest had played him for a fool with his talk of enemies and armies. As though any foe would be so mad as to challenge the necromancer in his citadel.

‘Vanhal!’ Lothar roared a third time. There was hesitancy in his voice now. With a full appreciation for the power of this site, he wondered if even Vanhal could manipulate such energies. Perhaps his master had been too ambitious, had initiated an invocation he couldn’t control? The pleasure of seeing Vanhal brought low was tempered by the realisation that if he expired, his secrets would pass with him. Having had a taste of such power, to lose all chance of making it his own was a horror too ghastly to contemplate.

Panicked, Lothar mounted the scaffolding and ascended the rickety framework. For the first time he realised that none of the workers were around. The absence of Vanhal’s undead gave the baron pause. Where had they gone? Had they slipped past the necromancer’s control and simply wandered off, or had they been consumed by the magic he had unleashed? It was a terrifying prospect, to be annihilated by a surge of undirected vibration, consumed so completely that not even dust should remain.

Hundreds of feet above, Lothar could see the pulsing streams of light bowing inwards. Again, he could not shake the impression of a beating heart. There was only one heart that could have provoked such resonance. Whether he was still in control or not, Vanhal was alive.

How long he could remain that way was something Lothar didn’t know. No man could tap into such forces, channel them through mere flesh and spirit for long. Whatever his purpose, Vanhal had to be restrained before the power he had unleashed consumed him.

The altar of bones rotated upon a nimbus of wailing emanations far above the framework of Vanhaldenschlosse’s highest tower. The stone roof below was rendered almost transparent by the phantom harmonies, its substance taking upon itself something of the spectral essence of the forces rushing through it.

Lothar could feel his own flesh fading, evaporating into an ethereal shadow. Only by fierce exertion of his will was he able to maintain his grip on corporeal substance. As he climbed onto the half-circle of the roof, he stared up at Vanhal’s levitating altar above him, at the grotesquery of the necromancer himself, his black robes whipping about him as daemon winds clawed at his spirit. He stood in a nimbus of ghostly fog that blazed with fearful fires. Green ghoul-lights blazed from Vanhal’s eyes, ghostly flashes of energy rippled from his outstretched arms. With each pulsation of the energies rising from the menhirs, the necromancer appeared to flicker, to phase out of reality only to reappear before he could entirely fade away.

Vanhal was doing more than simply harnessing the magic rushing up through his tower – he was becoming one with that power! As impossible as such a thing might seem, when Lothar lifted his gaze to stare at the sky above the skeletal altar, he received an even bigger shock. The stars were aligned differently than they had been when he entered the tower. Somehow, Vanhal had caused the castle to slip through time, to fall into the vacuity between seconds and emerge in another. In the rest of the world, the stars sat in the month of Vorhexen. But the tower had leaped ahead. It existed in the dark hours of Hexentag!

The baron nearly lost his concentration, that fragile link that kept his flesh from fading into a ghostly vapour. The enormity of such a feat was beyond anything he had believed possible. Yet there must be some motive behind Vanhal’s act, some dire need that had pushed him to such a supreme and dangerous evocation.

Hexentag! That was the answer. The aethyric current flowing through the tower would be even more potent in the haunted hours of that ominous day. Yet the answer itself begged another question: why did Vanhal need all this arcane energy?

Casting his gaze away from the stars and the necromancer’s altar, Lothar looked down to the plain far below. At once he saw the massed formations of Vanhal’s undead legions, arrayed across the landscape like chessmen on a board. The size of that army would have impressed him had it not been for the still greater host scurrying towards the silent ranks of walking dead. Skaven! The verminous Underfolk of myth turned into hideous reality. This was the enemy Vanhal had tried to prepare for, but the monsters had come too soon. Their multitudes were innumerable. They were a chittering colossus descending upon the puny army arrayed against them.

Lothar could hear the first bestial shrieks as the ratmen struck the front ranks of zombies, hacking and clawing their way through decayed flesh and bleached bone with murderous fury. The undead tried to repel the vermin, but their numbers were too small to hold the foe back.

‘The gnawing rat will not befoul the dream,’ Vanhal’s words slashed across Lothar’s ears like a knife. ‘Not this time,’ the necromancer vowed, his eyes blazing more brightly.

‘Nothing can stand against that,’ Lothar protested, waving his hand at the swarming vermin below. ‘You must use your magic to make the tower disappear!’

‘I have used my magic,’ Vanhal hissed. ‘But it is the skaven who will disappear.’ The necromancer raised his hand, ribbons of spectral light rippling along his fingers, making the bones glow beneath his wizened flesh.

Lothar followed the pointing finger of his master. What colour was left in his pale countenance drained away as a gargantuan shape soared down from the heavens, blotting out those incongruous stars. As it descended towards the tower, the luminescent tendrils of power revealed its monstrous form, a scaly leviathan of muscle and sinew, of decayed flesh and exposed bone. Tattered pinions held it aloft, fanning a necrotic stench across the tower. A great tail undulated behind it, the forked tip flashing through the streamers of aethyric vibration. No face, no matter how horrific, could have matched the grisly stump of neck that projected from the gigantic shoulders. The head had been cut clean away long ago, leaving only a gaping wound dark with clotted blood and wriggling worms.

It was a dragon. Vanhal had used his magic to raise the bones of a dragon as one of his undead slaves! This was the weapon the necromancer’s sorcery had drawn to destroy the skaven horde.

‘The most recently killed of dragonkind,’ Vanhal pronounced. ‘He will be your warhorse. Strike down the skaven. Leave none alive.’

As he stared up at the zombie dragon, Lothar almost felt sorry for those slinking creatures down below.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Altdorf
Brauzeit, 1114

Kreyssig turned away from the empty throne and slowly descended the steps leading up to the dais. He ignored the pair of armoured Kaiserknecht who flanked the throne Boris had left behind when he retreated from the plague-stricken city. For their part, the knights did their best to ignore him too. Their grand master had made no secret of his displeasure over taking orders from a commoner.

Still, whatever his feelings, Grand Master Leiber had too many ideas about honour and duty to refuse Kreyssig’s commands. So long as Kreyssig wore the regalia of the Emperor’s chosen Protector, he could depend upon the unwavering loyalty of the Kaiserknecht – whatever he asked them to do.

Half a dozen of the armoured warriors came trooping into the Winter Audience Hall, their steel clattering as they filed through the frescoed entry and passed beneath the magnificent lattice of silver and ivory that hovered between the ornamental pillars lining the entry. Between them, looking dishevelled and unruly, the left side of his face purple with a fresh bruise, Duke Vidor loped into the hall, his arms laden down with iron manacles and a great collar locked about his neck.

A thin smile formed on Kreyssig’s face as he observed Vidor’s humiliation. There was something supremely satisfying about seeing a noble brought low, humbled and humiliated as they humbled and humiliated the thousands of peasants they exploited. Given the chance, he would see all of the blue-bloods in chains, dragged through the streets like cattle before being strung up by their perfumed necks.

Only for a moment did Kreyssig relish that vision of an Empire free from the parasitic nobility, free from the tyranny of breeding and pedigree. An Empire where even a mere peasant might become ruler if he were cautious enough. Ruthless enough.

For the moment, Kreyssig had to balance the two, caution and ruthlessness. The nobles were too entrenched to depose. Nor was it desirous to discard them out of hand. Not when they might still prove useful.

‘Leave us,’ Kreyssig told the duke’s escort. The knights saluted stiffly, then filed from the room. Kreyssig turned his head, repeated the order to the Kaiserknecht beside the throne. Without a word, the armoured warriors withdrew.

Kreyssig waited until the knights were gone before approaching the shackled duke. ‘Now we can speak more freely,’ he said.

Vidor’s face contorted into an expression of withering contempt. ‘If you expect me to beg, you may as well just kill me now. I’ll not grovel before a peasant.’

‘If I wanted to hear you beg, I would never have brought you to the palace,’ Kreyssig said. ‘You would have gone to the Courts of Justice with all the other profiteering traitors.’

‘What happened?’ Vidor scoffed. ‘Couldn’t your Kaiserjaeger fabricate enough evidence for you? Or did somebody warn you that you have already gone too far? The nobility won’t sit idle while you cart them off on trumped up allegations of treason!’

‘I have only purged the Imperial court of a few villains who were seeking to aggrandize themselves while their liege lords are away,’ Kreyssig said, though he made little effort to put any conviction in his voice. ‘I don’t think Altdorf will miss a dozen or so grasping counts and barons, do you?’

Before Duke Vidor could answer, Kreyssig was walking back towards the Emperor’s throne. Vidor gasped in shock as the Protector sat in the Imperial seat. Kreyssig smiled at the noble’s offended dignity. Deftly working his fingers under the throne’s armrest, he pulled at a concealed knob.

Vidor’s shock was redoubled when the entire throne began to pivot, swinging out from the dais and exposing a flight of stairs concealed beneath the throne. ‘The entire palace is a maze of hidden corridors and secret passages. Prince Sigdan was fortunate to catch Emperor Boris in one of the few chambers without a hidden exit.’ Kreyssig laughed. ‘Actually, the Harmony Salon did have a hollow wall, but the Emperor had it filled in because he felt it was detrimental to the acoustics.’

The commander rose and stepped away from the throne, posting himself at the head of the hidden stair. Vidor watched him with growing nervousness, tempted to bolt and run while Kreyssig was seemingly distracted. The indignity of such a retreat stifled such intentions. He might cower before an Emperor, but he would be damned if he were going to flee from a peasant.

Kreyssig bent over, reaching down into the hidden stairway. A slim hand, gloved in purple, reached up from the passage beneath the throne, accepting the commander’s waiting grip. Soon he was escorting the Baroness von den Linden, svelte in a close-fitting gown the colour of ambergris, down the steps of the dais. Behind them, the Imperial throne rotated back to its former position.

‘What… what is that… witch…’ Vidor gasped, fear for the first time unseating the enforced calmness demanded by his noble bearing.

‘Have a care, Vidor,’ Kreyssig snarled. ‘It is by her ladyship’s grace that you are here and not down in the Dragon’s Hole.’

The baroness stepped away from Kreyssig as she reached the floor. Stroking the kitten she held in the crook of her arm, she approached the chained Vidor. The aristocrat began to shiver as the witch drew near, Auernheimer’s story about summoned daemons rising unbidden in his memory.

‘He will be more useful to us here,’ the baroness declared. Her gaze was cold as she locked eyes with Vidor. ‘Having failed once, he won’t be so foolish as to move against us a second time.’ She wagged a finger at the shackles and collar. ‘I think those are unnecessary. You must speak to your Kaiserknecht about their zeal.’

Kreyssig reached into a pocket, removing a large brass key. He contemplated it for a moment. ‘I should scold them for their laxity,’ he observed, tossing the key at Vidor’s feet. ‘It doesn’t appear they broke any bones when they collected his grace.’

Vidor stared in confusion from the key to Kreyssig and then to the baroness, wondering what sort of trap they had set for him.

The witch noted his hesitancy. ‘There is no trick, your grace,’ she said, demonstrating the claim by leaning down and retrieving the key, slipping it between Vidor’s fingers. ‘Adolf has demonstrated his reach. This little display was arranged to impress upon you that, whatever his parentage, you are subject to his authority.’

‘My Kaiserjaeger weren’t able to find that fanatic you set after us,’ Kreyssig grumbled. ‘Otherwise you’d have a much more memorable display to impress you.’ His voice dipped, losing its element of forced charm. ‘When I find him, I’ll be sure to send the pieces to you.’

Vidor fumbled at the lock to his shackles, still expecting some kind of trick. When the chains fell from his wrists, there was a look of disbelief in his eyes. Quickly, he repeated the procedure with the heavy collar.

‘That should convince you of our sincerity,’ the baroness said.

Vidor looked from her to Kreyssig, uncertain which of them was in control. Which of them he needed to placate. ‘What about the others?’ he asked.

‘I told you, they are profiteering traitors,’ Kreyssig declared. ‘They will be publicly tried and executed. Their titles will be abolished and their holdings forfeit to the crown.’ Again, he reached into his pocket, removing a ruby-encrusted signet ring. He scrutinized it for a moment, before returning his gaze to the duke. ‘Baron von Forgach’s lands in the Ostermark have been something you’ve wanted for a long time.’ With a last look at the signet, he tossed the ring to Vidor. The duke wasn’t surprised when he saw the von Forgach coat of arms emblazoned on the jewel.

‘Von Forgach was a traitor,’ Kreyssig stated boldly, ‘leaving all of his lands to the crown for redisposition.’

‘You have proof of this?’ Vidor asked.

Kreyssig laughed darkly. ‘The best. A signed confession.’

Duke Vidor grimaced at the peasant’s lack of candour. Just the same, he drew a merely ornamental ring from one of his fingers and slipped the signet in its place. ‘Do not think you can buy my loyalty.’

Kreyssig’s grim humour expressed itself in a grotesque smile. ‘If I cannot buy it, then I will compel it,’ he warned. ‘When you say that there would be an uproar if I were to try and prosecute you, it was something that had occurred to me. I wouldn’t presume to try such a thing. Not at all. If it comes to it, you will be dragged before the proctors of the Temple of Sigmar and tried for…’ Kreyssig paused, looking at Baroness von den Linden.

‘You will be arrested for heresy, your grace,’ the witch said. There was a dark gleam in her eyes as she added, ‘Anyone can be made to sign anything given the right incentive.’

‘And even your staunchest supporters will desert you if it is the Temple of Sigmar, not Protector Kreyssig, who prosecutes you,’ Kreyssig stated.

Vidor glared at his enemies, realizing how utterly he had fallen into their clutches. ‘What is it you want of me?’ he demanded.

Baroness von den Linden smiled slyly. ‘One last present for you. The Protector is going to reverse his earlier decision. You will be appointed the new Reiksmarshal and given command of the army we are building.’

‘I need to use the veterans of your previous campaign as the core of this new force,’ Kreyssig said. ‘As soon as my programme began, I realized Soehnlein was out of his league. I don’t have time for my soldiers to adapt themselves to a new leader. I need a leader they already know and respect. That makes you necessary.’

It was Vidor’s turn to laugh, appreciating now the reason for such gracious treatment from Kreyssig and his witch. ‘You must be planning to move against Talabheim soon,’ he stated, guessing now the source of all the inflammatory rhetoric that was upsetting the commoners and even ruffling the feathers of some of the nobility.

Again, the duke was due to be surprised. ‘The enemy we prepare for isn’t Talabheim,’ the baroness said. ‘The real enemy is much closer.’

Vidor was puzzled by her statement, and by the nagging familiarity with which she said it. Suddenly he recalled a sermon given by Grand Theogonist Gazulgrund, something about ‘the inhuman enemy in our midst’. Indeed, of late the priests had been making quite a point about warning their flock about Old Night and its monstrous progeny.

What sort of enemy, Vidor wondered, was it that these two were afraid of? What threat hovered over them that they needed an entire army to guard against it?

And, more disturbing, how soon did they expect that threat to be realised?

Abin-gnaw bent almost double as he abased himself before Sythar Doom. The Warpmaster’s gemstone eyes reflected the green luminance of the warplight as he turned away from the piebald tinkerer, who was filing his metal fangs and cleaning them of rust. The Grey Lord’s lips peeled back, exposing those fangs in a threatening snarl.

‘Disturb me, murder-rat, and you will feed the burrow-worms,’ Sythar hissed. He started to turn back to the tinkerer when his nose twitched, detecting a scent that had been nearly stifled by rat-dung and skaven blood. He peered down at Abin-gnaw, noticing for the first time the trembling cloaked shape huddled beside the ratman. Now that he focused upon the figure, he could tell that here was the source of the scent – the smell of frightened human.

Abin-gnaw had done an expert job of concealing the creature’s smell, hiding its presence from the other skaven in the warren. That didn’t, however, explain why the murder-rat had brought a man-thing into the presence of a Lord of Decay. Suspicion flared through Sythar’s mind. Had one of the other leaders bribed Clan Skully to remove him as he had had Deacon Blistrr eliminated? General Twych wasn’t keen enough for such insight, but Grey Seer Pakritt might be! Hurriedly, Sythar swung around, tilting his head so that his groom-mechanic could reconnect the power cable to his jaw. At the same time, he gestured wildly with his paws, waving his warp-guard to surround Abin-gnaw and the human.

‘Great Sythar! Most Exalted of Tyrants! Most Potent of Calamities! Most Fertile of Sires!’ Abin-gnaw had his nose to the floor now, arms extended in an appealing gesture. ‘This humble-loyal servant wish-want to squeak-speak!’

Sythar Doom’s fangs crackled with sparks as he turned. His electrified bite could burn through any garrotte the slinking murder-rat might carry. Then again, the killer might be clever enough to have something else in mind. Yes, it would be good policy for Clan Skully to use a poisoned throwing star and blame the assassination on Clan Eshin! Before the same idea could occur to his tinker-dentist, Sythar caught the hapless ratkin by the neck and dragged him between himself and Abin-gnaw.

‘Woe! Peril, Most Terrible Despot!’ Abin-gnaw wailed as the warpguard pointed their halberds at him. The murder-rat flinched away from the sharp blades. The human beside him moaned in terror and tried to bolt. Abin-gnaw must have noticed the motion out of the corner of his eye, for his scaly tail whipped out, tripping the man as he started to run.

‘Squeak-speak!’ Sythar Doom growled from behind the thrashing body of his living shield. The idea occurred to him that a dead shield would be just as viable as a living one. The tinkerer’s fur sizzled as Sythar’s metal jaws clamped down around his neck.

‘Man-things try to trick-lie!’ Abin-gnaw squeaked. ‘Kreyssig-man make army to fight-fight skaven!’ The murder-rat turned quickly, almost earning himself a jab from the closest halberd. Nimbly, the ratman seized the prostrate human and pulled him to face Sythar Doom. ‘Speak-squeak, Rati-man!’ he growled, kicking the human with his clawed foot.

Shivering from head to foot, every hair on his body bristling with fear, Lord Ratimir, Imperial Minister of Finance, related to the ghastly Warpmaster what he had discovered. He told of the irregularities in the treasury, the diversion of taxes and tribute not towards the army but to bribes sent to Talabheim’s ruler, Grand Duke Cvitan. Even a human wasn’t stupid enough to send treasure to an enemy right before attacking him. No, that bribe was to convince the grand duke that for all the antagonistic posturing, Altdorf wasn’t going to march against Talabheim.

Why, then, was Kreyssig building up an army? It wasn’t paranoid to guess the answer. With a snarl, Sythar Doom pointed his claw at Lord Ratimir. Abin-gnaw chirped in terror and dived away as the Warpmaster sent a bolt of searing energy from his hand into the human spy. Ratimir’s body crumbled into a jumble of charred stumps and blackened ash.

‘Kill-kill! Slay-slash! Burn-maim!’ Sythar Doom roared, glowering at Abin-gnaw. ‘Take-fetch all murder-rats!’ he ordered. ‘Find Kreyssig-meat and kill it!’

Sythar Doom barely noticed Abin-gnaw’s genuflection as he scurried off to carry out his orders. The Grey Lord’s mind was awhirl with fresh plans, remoulding his carefully conceived intrigues to fit the changing situation. He’d have to cancel the assassinations of Twych and Pakritt. He’d need both of those mouse-sniffers now! The army that had been gathering under Altdorf would have to march at once, strike against the humans before they were ready.

The Grey Lord’s fangs crackled as he licked them with his tongue. At least, he reflected, the warpcaster was finished. Unleashing the full potential of the invention in something more than a fratricidal field-test would mark a new level of achievement for Clan Skryre, would demonstrate to all of skavendom the enormity of their might and malice. They might even allow the other clans to buy their own warpcasters, with a few modifications so that regular maintenance by a warp-engineer would be essential.

Exterminating several thousand humans would make quite an impressive demonstration. One Sythar Doom would make certain Vecteek and the rest of the Council didn’t soon forget!

Middenheim
Ulriczeit, 1118

In all his life, Mandred had never imagined anything could be as dark as what he found filling the vaults of Karak Grazhyakh. It was a blackness that seemed to have mass and substance, a cloying presence that pressed in all around as the humans marched into the depths. He could feel the weight of the mountain above him, on all sides of him. The impression of walking into a vast tomb was almost impossible to shake.

Entrance had been effected through a tunnel hidden beneath the temple of Grungni. No more did the prince have to wonder about what lay behind those massive doors. It was somehow anticlimactic, really. The dwarf temple had been brooding, ponderous even, but it fell far short of the megalithic construction Mandred had seen in the dwarf stronghold itself. Those regions illuminated by oil lamps and sputtering torches had been beyond magnificent. Great pillars of stone soaring up to meet arched ceilings in a seamless harmony that made him wonder if the dwarfs had carved them out of the living rock when they’d first dug the halls. Gigantic statues of ancient ancestors and mighty kings frowned down at them from niches gouged high upon the walls. Great stretches of runescript adorned entire tunnels, prompting Mandred to wonder what the Khazalid script said and what had been so important that the dwarfs had set it into solid rock to withstand the ages.

No marching songs roused the humans into quickening their step as they descended deeper and deeper into the mountain. The same oppression of spirit that gripped Mandred was shared by those he led. Occasionally, the tones of a whispered prayer might be heard, but that was all. Some of them might have wondered about this world beneath the streets of Middenheim, but none of them had ever imagined they would actually probe its depths. To their credit, despite the fear that dogged their steps, not a man of his expedition turned back. Noble or Dienstleute, the soldiers kept true to their oaths. Not since that fateful ride to relieve Warrenburg had Mandred felt such pride, such kinship, with those he would someday rule.

Would that pride withstand the real test, he wondered? These men had been told the sort of enemy they would face here in the dark beneath Middenheim, but could any warning really prepare them for the hideous reality? Would they stand before the skaven, or would they break and run?

‘A cheerless lot,’ Kurgaz Smallhammer opined. Marching beside Mandred, guiding the column into the depths, the dwarf cast a suspicious look over his shoulder. The same thoughts that had bothered the prince had likewise afflicted the dwarf. ‘Not a laugh, whistle or fart among them. If they’re trying to sneak up on the skaven they needn’t bother. The ratkin will smell them even if they don’t hear them.’ Kurgaz slapped the haft of the hammer he carried, a vicious-looking weapon he’d brought down from the temple. ‘Wish I had Drakdrazh with me,’ he grumbled for the hundredth time. Mandred rolled his eyes, bracing himself to hear another complaint about how Kurgaz’s younger brother Mirko had availed himself of the chance to bear the magic hammer into battle. Even now, he was down in the mines helping fend off the skaven incursion with Kurgaz’s preferred weapon.

Fortunately, Mandred was spared the bitter relation of that story. With an abruptness that startled the prince, Kurgaz fell silent. The dwarf lifted his hand, motioning for those behind to stop marching. His normally gruff voice became a hissed whisper. Soon the other dwarfs accompanying the humans came dashing forwards, joining Kurgaz at the head of the column. There was a brief consultation, then the dwarfs fanned out across the tunnel, axes and hammers at the ready. Kurgaz turned back to Mandred.

‘Get your soldiers ready,’ the dwarf warned.

‘Trouble?’ Beck asked, the bodyguard as ever keeping close to the prince. The knight’s sword was already in his mailed fist.

Kurgaz tilted his head to one side. ‘The rock sounds wrong,’ he stated. His eyes hardened as he focused on a particular patch of the tunnel. ‘Hollow sound. Like something moving behind the walls.’

Belting out orders to the other dwarfs, Kurgaz unlimbered his warhammer and scratched a line in the floor with the iron toe of his boot. ‘This far and no further,’ he vowed. The fact that the oath was made in Reikspiel rather than Khazalid wasn’t lost on Mandred.

‘The enemy is coming, men!’ he shouted to the soldiers behind him as he drew his sword. ‘We hold them here. Steel yourselves. Let the fury of Ulric pour into your hearts. This is where we turn back Old Night and make its children wish they’d kept to the dark!’ The prince’s voice brought blades rasping from sheaths, jaws clenching in grim resignation. It wasn’t the defiant enthusiasm Mandred had hoped to evoke, but at least the men were standing firm. In the ponderous gloom of the Crack, he supposed that was more than he should have expected.

The dwarfs maintained their vigil over the wall, a tense silence gripping the men who watched them. No one knew what to expect, and all were looking to the dwarfs for the first warning.

Hearkening to every scrape and scratch their sharp ears detected behind the wall, Kurgaz and his dwarfs kept the Middenheimers aware of what was happening. When the dwarfs suddenly scrambled away from the wall, scattering a few yards down the tunnel, Mandred knew the attack was imminent.

The wall came crumbling down, big blocks of stone tumbling into the corridor. Gritty dust billowed through the tunnel, stifling the torches and lamps the men carried, making the subterranean darkness still blacker. Through the cover of that blackness, inhuman creatures spilled into the passageway. Mandred could hear their scuttling claws, their bloodthirsty squeaks. He could smell their mangy fur and rotten breath. The skaven were upon them.

In that first flurry of viciousness, the ratmen dragged down a score of soldiers and even a few of the dwarfs. The skaven exploited the confusion of their assault to the full, attacking with such savagery that many of their own kind perished in fratricidal thrusts of spear and blade.

If the vermin had broken their discipline in that moment of horror, Mandred doubted any of his troops would have survived. They would never outrun the skaven and any sign of weakness would only embolden the monsters. Their only hope was to maintain the line, defy the panic that clawed at their hearts.

‘Khazuk!’ Kurgaz’s roar boomed through the tunnel, echoing from every wall and pillar. ‘Khazukan Kazakit-Ha!’ The war-cry was taken up by the other dwarfs, rolling like the boom of cannon.

‘For Ulric!’ Mandred added his own shout to the bedlam. ‘For graf and wolf!’ He lunged through the blackness, slashing at a figure he could only dimly see. There was no mistaking the skaven for anything human or dwarf, even with nothing but a shadowy outline to attack. His sword sang true, hewing through the beast’s forearm and eliciting a feral bleat of misery. A second slash of the blade had the thing flopping on the floor.

Soldiers rallied around the prince, taking up his war-cry. Soon the shout of ‘wolf and graf’ drowned out the bestial snarls and squeaks of the enemy. With spear and axe, sword and mace, the men pressed the vermin back towards the wall. Fresh torches were lit, more lanterns were brought forwards and light streamed down the tunnel.

There were well over a hundred of the skaven, with more of them spilling into the tunnel from a jagged tear in the wall. The ratmen were a motley sight, ranging from armoured brutes with black fur to scrawny, starved wretches with protruding ribs and only the simplest bone knives and wooden spears in their paws. However ragged and foul, the vermin fought with savagery, hurling themselves at the men with desperate ferocity.

In those brief flashes when he wasn’t cutting down an enemy or shielding himself from slashing blades and snapping jaws, Mandred thought his force must be overwhelmed. The floor under his feet was slippery with black skaven blood, the bodies of dead vermin littered the floor. Scores, perhaps hundreds of the beasts had been butchered and yet still they came rushing from the hole. It was a vision from the hells of Khaine, the Murder God’s infernal legions boiling up from the netherworld.

On, on they fought, until their arms grew weary from the killing, until their lungs sickened at the stink of blood and their ears were deafened by the wailing song of slaughter. Tears of despair rolled down Mandred’s cheeks. Pride in the valour of the soldiers beside him turned to bitterness in the knowledge that bravery could never stem such a horde. The skaven would drown them all beneath their swarming hosts.

In the midst of his despair, Mandred’s blade flashed out and for once didn’t sink itself in furry flesh. Dimly he reconciled the shock with the vision in his eyes, hordes of ratmen scurrying back to the hole. Squeaks of fright replaced screams of battle as the skaven retreated, abandoning their wounded and dead.

Mandred drew upon reserves of strength he didn’t know he had. Shaking the weariness from him, he rose and whirled his bloody sword overhead. ‘After them!’ he shouted, swinging the sword downwards, thrusting its point at the ratmen scrambling into the wall. ‘Let none escape!’ The soldiers, every bit as weary as their prince, marched forwards, a vengeance on every face.

Before they could reach the hole, their path was blocked by Kurgaz and the other dwarfs. The bearded warriors were caked in gore, their armour foul with the blood of skaven. There was more than mere vengeance in their faces; it was the genocidal hate of millennia, a fury that would be sated by nothing less than total extermination.

Even so, the dwarfs barred the Middenheimers from pursuing the fleeing ratmen. When one incredulous knight tried to shove Kurgaz aside, the dwarf dropped him by driving the haft of his hammer into the man’s gut.

‘They’re escaping!’ Mandred roared at the dwarf. Had their allies gone mad?

A dull roar shook the tunnel, not quite drowning out the shrill scream of hundreds of inhuman voices. A column of dust to rival what came before rushed out from the hole as tons of earth and rock slammed down to seal the fissure.

Mandred and his soldiers were thrown to the floor by the tremor, blinded and nearly smothered by the thick cloud of dust. When he regained both vision and feet, Mandred saw Kurgaz still standing between the men and the dirt-choked crack in the wall. The dwarf looked like some horrible wraith, coated from crown to toe in grey dust.

‘Never chase a skaven into his burrow,’ Kurgaz said, spitting dirt from his mouth. ‘Other ratkin always make sure you can’t follow.’

Mandred felt a chill run through him as he understood what Kurgaz was saying. The collapse had been engineered, designed to prevent pursuit. He thought of those terrible squeals. How many hundreds of their own had the skaven murdered with that cave-in?

‘You’ll learn, princeling,’ Kurgaz assured Mandred. ‘Before we’ve driven the skaven from Grungni’s Tower, you’ll be wise to all their tricks.’ The dwarf looked across the dirty, tired countenances of the other Middenheimers. ‘First thing you’ll need to do is work up some stamina. Can’t have you burned out after a small fracas.’

Beck stepped forwards, tugging links of mail from the slashed edge of his coif. ‘That wasn’t their main force?’ he asked in a tone of piteous despondency.

Kurgaz threw his head back in a booming laugh. ‘Just a skirmish!’ He jabbed a thumb at the floor. ‘The real fight is down there, in the workings and the deeps. This was just some larcenous ratlord with a sneaky idea to slip upstairs and nab some plunder before anybody got wise to him. If his own lot didn’t drop the roof on his head, he’ll know better than to try it again.’ Kurgaz turned around, swinging his warhammer up onto his shoulder. ‘Come along manlings, we’ve a long way to go. You can rest up on the way.’

Mandred felt the sting of the dwarf’s gruff words. No gratitude, no praise. No appreciation. Just a casual dismissal of the entire fight as inconsequential. It grated on his pride as a human, was an offence to his honour as a noble and a slight upon his ability as a leader. He was tempted to turn around and lead his men back into the city, leave the dwarfs to hold the Crack on their own.

Instead, he threw back his shoulders and turned to shout commands to his followers. ‘Dispatch the wounded topside! Officers, reform your companies.’ He thought about the ferocity of the attack and the suddenness of the skaven ambush. ‘Spears to the fore and flanks. Archers behind.’ He watched for a moment as the soldiers adjusted to the new formation, then called out in a voice loud enough to carry back to the surface. ‘Let’s show these beardies how men can really fight!’

When he turned back around to lead his army into the subterranean gloom, Mandred saw Kurgaz looking at him. He wasn’t sure if it were his imagination, but he thought he saw Kurgaz smiling before the dwarf turned away.

Dwarfs! He doubted if any human could ever really understand them. Too proud to ask for help, too stubborn to praise it when it was given. Yet help them Middenheim would.

Because in helping the dwarfs, they would be keeping the skaven away from their city.

Warmonger Vecteek preened his whiskers and squeaked contentedly as the dust-covered messenger made his report. The little force had broken into the dwarf tunnel when the sniffer-moles became agitated. The moles had become accustomed to the smell of dwarfs, so their handlers knew it was something different that upset their keen senses. Breaking into the tunnel, they’d discovered a few dwarfs leading a great company of humans down into the stronghold!

Vecteek didn’t care about the details of the ensuing fight. With an angry snarl and a flick of his tail, he set a pair of Verminguard pouncing on the messenger. There was an amusing look of entreaty on the hapless ratkin’s face when his head was chopped from his shoulders.

The humans were reacting just as he’d planned. They were rushing down into the tunnels to help the dwarfs. And while they were busy slaughtering Vrrmik’s treacherous scum, they’d be leaving their city wide open. Helpless prey for Clan Rictus and the genius of Vecteek!

The Grey Lord’s eyes narrowed suspiciously as he leaned over the side of his palanquin. He bared his fangs as he saw Plaguelord Puskab watching him from the shadows. The diseased priest had been arguing for delays, trying to play for more time. He claimed the Black Plague needed a few more weeks to truly spread. Vecteek wasn’t fooled by such puerile attempts at deception. Vrrmik and the weaklings of Clan Mors would never hold out that long. The dwarfs would overwhelm them and the humans would return to their city. Vecteek’s careful plan to divide and conquer would be undermined!

Or, perhaps Puskab was being truthful. Vecteek licked his fangs as he mulled over that possibility. In that case, the plague would ravage Middenheim, destroy the city without the loss of a single skaven life.

Vecteek’s tail lashed out in a fit of fury, slapping one of his Verminguard. The second possibility was even more abhorrent. No great battle! No chance to display the genius of the Warmonger against a formidable enemy! It was insufferable. If it cost a thousand, ten thousand of his clanrats, he’d have his battle. There was no glory in a bloodless victory. The plague was there to weaken and debilitate, but it couldn’t be allowed to claim credit for the final triumph!

‘Diggers! Sap-rats!’ Vecteek snarled, his voice cracking down the length of the earthen tunnel. Criers scattered through the maze of passages and burrows winding behind the walls of Karak Grazhyakh took up his shout, ensuring it reached the ears of every skaven bearing the brand of Rictus on his pelt. ‘Man-things go below to help the dwarf-meat. Now Rictus-rats will strike! Now Rictus will conquer! Now Rictus will reign!’

He leaned around, glaring once more at Puskab, fairly daring the plaguelord to protest his orders. Vecteek considered that the degenerates of Clan Pestilens must have at least a pawful of brains when Puskab wisely kept silent.

‘Dig-smash! Break-crush!’ Vecteek howled. ‘Up! Up into man-thing nest! Up to their streets and their cellars! Up to their granaries and their stockyards! Up to their homes and their temples! All-all belongs to Rictus! All-all belongs to Vecteek!’

Vecteek savoured the clamour of claws on bare rock as his underlings hurried to obey his diktat. The approaches were already prepared; before the next feeding cycle his sappers would be through. The tunnels would break up into the sewers beneath Middenheim. From the sewers, the skaven would filter into every cellar, dungeon and crypt.

The walls of Middenheim were tall and strong, built to keep out any foe. Any foe except the one who chose to ignore them. Now those same walls would imprison the people of Middenheim.

Would ensure that none of Vecteek’s prey escaped.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Altdorf
Kaldezeit, 1114

‘Open in the name of the Emperor!’ The command was shouted in a thick voice, punctuated by the hammer-like blows of a mailed fist against old timber. The speaker was a stocky, heavy-set being, shorter than a man but with a stoutness of build that lent him a decidedly powerful appearance. Heavy plates of steel were strapped above the mail he wore, and over his bearded head he wore a close-fitting helm adorned with swirling runes of silver and gold. Rings of gold were threaded through the plaits of his thick beard.

Beset by plague and disease, the collection of revenue had become a logistical nightmare for the Ministry of Finance. Taxmen died by the droves as they succumbed to the illness of their victims, their ranks decimated even more savagely than those of physician and priest. An attempt had been made during the spring of 1112 to employ men already struck by the Black Plague as excise collectors, but the effort had failed miserably. The plague-stricken collectors had spread the disease to every quarter of the city. Worse, with the spectre of Morr already hovering over them, they had proven less than stalwart about turning over the revenue they collected to Imperial coffers, skimming most of the money to squander on such pleasures as they might enjoy before the plague took them.

It was Emperor Boris himself who came up with a solution. Aware that the plague had ignored the halfling population, he had seized upon the theory that the Death was only affecting humankind. Soft-hearted and inoffensive, halflings didn’t have the stuff to act as tax collectors. Fortunately, there was another non-human community dwelling in Altdorf that did.

Their own business failing as the plague devastated their customers, many of Altdorf’s dwarfish community had responded to the Emperor’s summons. Soon an entire cadre of dwarf taxmen were stalking the streets of Altdorf, exacting the Imperial tribute from great and small with the stubborn, harsh tenacity of their dour breed. True, the services of the dwarfs were more expensive than those of human taxmen – for one thing the dwarfs refused to accept Imperial coin after the gold content was reduced, forcing their wage to be drawn in raw nuggets and dust – but their role was essential to maintaining the financial stability of Imperial government.

The dwarfs adopted the grandiose title of ‘The Imperial Guild of Excise, Custom, Honour and Fidelity’, but to the people of Altdorf they were simply ‘Goldgather’s Goldgrubbers’. Though they were hated and despised universally, it was still a rare thing for anyone to raise their hand against one of the dwarfs. More than merely the act of defying Imperial law, it was the vindictive nature of the dwarfs themselves that held the abused populace silent. Injure a dwarf and the whole race would persecute the offender’s family unto the tenth generation. Dwarfs recorded their grudges in great tomes so that even the slightest insult would never be forgotten.

The few peasants abroad in the streets didn’t even turn their heads at the commotion on the doorstep of a once prosperous moneylender. They had become accustomed to shunning the house ever since the warning cross had been chalked across the door. Few even knew if the man or any of his household still lived, nor were any willing to risk the plague to find out. Once a week a corpse-cart would pass down the street and knock at each door. They would find out if anyone were still in there – it was what they were paid to do. The corpse-collectors earned a copper from the Temple of Morr for each nose they brought to the cremation pits outside the city wall.

Grumbling into his beard, the dwarf glanced down at the moneylender’s name on the list he carried, noting the balance beside it. It was an appreciable sum, derived from the earnings the man’s business had enjoyed before the plague. A small thing like a pandemic would hardly justify a reduction in taxes. Besides, if the man felt the sum was unreasonable, he could protest to his noble lord. Allowing that his liege had survived the plague and hadn’t already fled the city.

Either way, the dwarf’s job was to collect. He repeated his summons, banging his fist so forcefully against the door that he bruised the wood. He drew back, waiting for any trace of activity. Frowning under his beard, the dwarf tilted his helmet up and pressed an exposed ear against the door. Years of mining in the Grey Mountains had honed the dwarf’s hearing to a superhuman degree, enabling him to detect the presence of ore simply by the sound his pick made when striking the wall, warning him of a cave-in by the softest groan from a support beam hundreds of yards up the shaft. By comparison, listening at a keyhole was simplicity itself.

Immediately, the dwarf’s ear caught the sounds of furtive shuffling inside the house. He leaned back, adjusting his helmet in place. Pejorative crept into his grumbling. So the cheats thought to hide in there and pretend they weren’t home, did they? Well, if they thought a dwarf could be dissuaded from his duty by such a facile deception, they were sorely mistaken.

Stepping away from the door, the dwarf thrust his shoulder towards it and lunged at it. The portal shook in its frame as his armoured weight slammed into the wood. Unfazed by the impact, the dwarf stepped back into the street, allowing himself a better start before charging into the door again.

This time the door collapsed under his impact, flying back on its hinges. The dwarf was propelled into the dingy parlour beyond.

Eyes adapted to the murk of mines and tunnels stared in disbelief at the scene within that parlour. If plague hadn’t claimed the moneylender and his household, they would have been better off if it had. The monsters that filled the decrepit building now certainly wouldn’t have been merciful to any occupants they found.

The parlour and what he could see of the rooms beyond were swarming with hundreds of skaven.

The dwarf drew his axe, set his feet and roared a prayer to Grungni. Then the vermin rushed at him in a chittering tide of fangs and blades. He cut down ten of them before he was crushed to the floor. After that, despite his heavy armour and his powerful build, it was only a few moments before the dwarf was reduced to an unrecognisable heap of dripping meat.

Dejected and dispirited, the peasants walking the streets had paid only the sketchiest notice to the dwarf’s invasion of the house. They paid far more attention to the horde that flooded out through the broken door. A few of them even had time to scream before the ratmen fell upon them.

It was a scene that was repeated all across Altdorf. From sewers and cellars, from abandoned homes and boarded warehouses, even from the holds of derelict ships, the ratmen came. With sword and fang the seemingly numberless horde rampaged through the streets. Wherever the skaven appeared, death and destruction reigned. The monsters were merciless in their depredations, devoid of any semblance of pity or restraint. Temples filled with the sick and dying became abattoirs in the wake of the chittering horde. Refugee camps erupted in flames as the ratmen surrounded them and put them to the torch, the agonies of those trapped within the ring of fire echoing hideously across the icy waters of the Reik.

Through the Kaiseraugen, the men assembled in the council chamber could see the pillars of smoke rising from the burning city. Screams, roars, the bedlam of a city being torn apart wasn’t quite muffled by the thick panes of glass. Several Kaiserjaeger stood watch, shouting to the leaders gathered about the table whenever they spotted the enemy in the streets below.

Adolf Kreyssig considered the grim-faced men gathered around him. They were solemn, hardly daring to speak as the magnitude of the attack was borne home to them with each fresh report that made its way to the palace. One of them, the bewigged fop Emperor Boris had installed as burgomeister of Altdorf, sat slumped in his seat, sobbing loudly into a laced handkerchief. Fortunately for the city, the rest of its leaders were made of sterner stuff. Kreyssig had made certain of that when he’d purged the council and made his plans for war.

Duke Vidor shook his head and cast aside the slip of parchment he had been reading, a report from a captain in the Schuetzenverein. ‘The area east of the river is cut off,’ he declared. ‘The ratmen have demolished the bridges. Two-thirds of the army had their billets there.’

Grand Master Leiber pulled at his long moustache, eyes closed as he pondered the dire news. ‘At least the heavy horse is stationed on this side of the river,’ he stated. ‘That leaves us roughly three hundred knights. More if we call upon the templar orders.’

‘The Black Guard have been surrounded by the cremation pits outside the walls,’ a wizened old count reported. A haunted look crept into his eyes as he considered the full message he had received. ‘Thirty knights against hundreds of those things. They won’t leave enough for Morr’s ravens to find!’

Prelate Arminus nodded in sympathy at the sacrifice of the Black Guard, closing his hand about the whalebone icon he wore around his neck. The priest’s voice was apologetic when he addressed the other leaders. ‘I fear that the Knights of the Storm are largely absent from the city. With the plague ravaging the river trade, many of them have been serving as marines on those vessels still braving the Reik. Merciful Manann watch over them all.’

Inquisitor Fulk of the Verenan temple drew back the heavy hood he wore, letting his sharp eyes rove across the faces of the men around him. ‘My temple stands ready to assist the city, but our strength is sadly diminished. The Black Plague has been most attentive.’ The grim priest tapped his fingers on the breast of his robe. ‘At best we might rally seventy swords if we left the temple unprotected.’ It was clear from his tone that he considered such a move to be sacrilegious.

Kreyssig decided to reject the inquisitor’s offer. The Verenans weren’t a martial order, their forte was hunting heretics. Torturers and executioners were quite capable of killing in cold blood, but he doubted if many of them were equally capable of hot-blooded killing, of fighting against an armed adversary. No, it was better to leave them in their gloomy temple and let them fare as their god saw best.

‘We have almost three thousand foot soldiers this side of the river,’ Kreyssig declared. ‘At the moment, they are scattered throughout, clumped in their training camps and isolated in their billets.’ He raised his eyes, staring out through the window. One of those training camps was built over the wreckage of Breadburg. From here, he could see a great column of smoke billowing up from that vicinity.

Vidor stood up from his chair, addressing the various nobles seated at the table. ‘By themselves, the knights will be of little use. The strength of heavy horse lies in the charge and there will be little opportunity for such tactics in the close confines of city streets.’ He turned, locking eyes with Kreyssig. ‘If we are to have any hope of driving the ratmen from the city, we have to mobilise our scattered foot troops, concentrate them into a single battle group. The ratkin may outnumber us, but those same close quarters will counter that advantage. Man for monster, even the lowest dienstmann is more than a match for the vermin. If we can concentrate our troops into bodies large enough to resist the numbers of the ratmen…’

Kreyssig nodded. From what he had seen of the skaven, they were a craven breed. They relied upon subterfuge and ambush to fight their battles. They had little stomach for a real fight. So far, the monsters had enjoyed success because they hadn’t encountered anyone in a position to seriously oppose them. Upset that tide of success even a little and it might hurl the entire horde into disarray.

‘What is your plan, Reiksmarshal?’ Kreyssig asked.

‘First we will use the Kaiserknecht and as many footmen as are available to penetrate down to the river,’ Vidor said. ‘Any peasants they find will be drafted as labourers. Once they reach the Reik, they will take every ship, scow and barge and lash them together. The ratmen destroyed the old bridges, so we’ll build a new one.’

‘It will take time to construct a pontoon bridge,’ one of the other generals objected. ‘I can appreciate the need to bring the rest of the army across the river, but until they are across the ratmen will have an even freer hand on this side of the Reik.’

The Reiksmarshal shook his head. ‘Not so,’ he stated. ‘Because while they are building the bridge, we will be using the rest of our knights to get messages to the brigades on this side of the river. If we can get all of them to converge upon a single position, concentrate our strength, we can resist the vermin until reinforcements can be brought across the Reik.’

‘You said the knights would be useless in city fighting,’ Grand Master Leiber pointed out.

‘I don’t need them to fight,’ Vidor returned. ‘I need their mobility, their stamina to win clear of the ratmen and reach our scattered troops. A humble task, I grant, but there will be time for valour and glory after we have the strength to mount a credible offensive.’

‘Where do you want the troops to go?’ Inquisitor Fulk wondered. ‘It will need to be somewhere central, well within reach of each brigade.’

‘It needs to be a landmark that can be seen from some distance,’ one of the barons mused. ‘Something visible from wherever the soldiers may be.’

A brief debate ensued, many of the noblemen arguing for the Imperial Palace while others argued that doing so would cause the ratmen to bring their full force to bear against the palace.

It was the heretofore silent Arch-Lector von Reisarch who ended the debate. ‘The Great Cathedral,’ he said. ‘The spire can be seen from anywhere in Altdorf, and it is built at the very heart of Old Reikdorf. Rally the troops to the temple of Holy Sigmar, that they may take courage from His divine beneficence.’

Inquisitor Fulk and Prelate Arminus looked as though they wanted to challenge von Reisarch’s suggestion, angered by what they viewed as the Sigmarite’s shameless effort to aggrandise his god in the midst of this calamity. At the same time, neither of the priests could ignore the compelling logic behind the arch-lector’s argument. The Great Cathedral was ideally located and the peasants would take heart from the idea that they were defending Sigmar Himself by rallying to the temple.

‘The Great Cathedral, then,’ Kreyssig decided, ending the discussion. He nodded to von Reisarch. ‘You may tell Grand Theogonist Gazulgrund to expect me.’ It grated on Kreyssig’s pride to indulge the Sigmarites in this fashion. Condescending to the Grand Theogonist was to make a public display of the priest’s authority – authority that would appear greater than that of the Emperor or his appointed Protector. Still, it would be even more disastrous to allow the priest to fight the coming battle by himself. The people would remember who fought to save them and who stayed safe behind fortress walls.

Kreyssig was just about to dismiss the council when he happened to notice Baroness von den Linden’s cat. The brute had been lazing about on top of the table throughout the meeting, indifferent to the momentous events unfolding around it. Now, however, the cat was upright, its back arched and its every hair standing on end. As the animal began to hiss and spit, Kreyssig followed its frightened gaze.

He was just in time to see the dark shapes drop outside the Kaiseraugen, swinging on ropes from the roof of the palace. Before even his Kaiserjaeger could shout a warning, the swinging skaven smashed through the window. Kreyssig covered his face as slivers of glass flew through the chamber.

The chittering shrieks of skaven drowned out the shouts of alarm and confusion that rose from the surprised councillors and generals. Moans of agony sounded from the direction of the windows as the fast-moving ratmen attacked the startled Kaiserjaeger. Other skaven rappelled through the shattered glass, hurling tiny orbs into the room. As each orb crashed to the floor, it expelled a billowing mass of choking fumes. The men reeled in the noxious vapour, struggling to escape the debilitating fog. The skaven, their faces wrapped in thick folds of cloth, scampered through the chamber, lashing out with crooked blades.

Kreyssig staggered back, trying to draw his own sword even as his body shuddered in a fit of violent coughing. One of the assaulting vermin uttered a feral growl as it spied him. Leaping to the top of the table, the murder-rat charged at him.

Abin-gnaw stuffed his scimitar back beneath his rat-gut belt and drew the lethal coils of his sacred strangler’s cord from beneath his crimson cloak. Squeaking an invocation to the Horned One, a murderous charm taught to him by no less than the Old Rat Under the Mountain himself, the killer cast the noose through the air, looping it about his victim’s neck.

Kreyssig gasped as the cord was drawn taut, as the little warpstone talisman sewn into the lining dug into his neck. He could feel his throat constricting, feel the air being squeezed out of him. Nimbly, Abin-gnaw jumped from the table, dropping down behind Kreyssig and forcing the human down into his chair. Pressing one foot against the back of the seat, the skaven used it for extra leverage, extra force to increase that deadly constriction.

Kreyssig struggled to reach the monstrous creature behind him, tried to twist his body so that he might at least slip free from the chair. Abin-gnaw, however, was too crafty to allow himself to fall within reach of the human’s groping hands.

Just as his vision was beginning to darken, as the thunder of his own pulse became a deafening roar in his ears, as his starved lungs began to burn, Kreyssig felt the air around him become cold. It was a cold that had nothing to do with winter. It was the spectral chill of sorcery.

The pressure around his throat suddenly slackened. Kreyssig pulled himself away from the chair, felt the strangling cord drag free from weakened claws. Frantically, he reached to his throat and ripped the noose free, hurling it to the floor in disgust. Drawing his sword, he turned to face his would-be assassin.

Abin-gnaw lay prone, his face-wrappings soaked in blood. Black blood bubbled from the skaven’s eyes, the flow increasing with each ragged breath he drew into his dying body. While Kreyssig watched, the murder-rat expired, expelling its last vitality in a grotesque liquid gargle.

Turning away from the dead assassin, Kreyssig looked to intercede in the melee unfolding around him, only to discover that it had largely abated. The top of the table and much of the floor was stained with a greasy, grey film. The room was littered with bodies, both the verminous carcasses of skaven and the corpses of men.

‘Commander, are you all right?’ The question came from the last man Kreyssig expected to see, his servant Fuerst, a heavy club clenched in his chubby fist. Beyond the peasant, he could see Baroness von den Linden, her silver robes still writhing in the magical energies she had invoked.

‘I live,’ Kreyssig told Fuerst, brushing aside the servant’s concern. The skaven had taken their toll upon the council and the assembled generals, butchering nearly a quarter of them in the brief melee. Many of the survivors continued to cough thick grey phlegm from their throats – the residue of that strange smoke the ratmen had used. The grey filth staining the chamber would account for the rest of that smoke, congealed by the witch’s spells.

Kreyssig frowned as he gazed at the baroness. His relief at her timely intervention was tempered by an appreciation that it was no natural force that could have warned her of his peril. Even when it was beneficial, there was something disturbing about witchcraft, something that offended men on an almost primal level.

Studying the faces of the other survivors, he could see the same mix of gratitude and fear. The expressions of Arch-Lector von Reisarch and Inquisitor Fulk were outright malignant.

‘On behalf of His Imperial Majesty,’ Kreyssig said, loud enough that his tones drowned out any murmurs of misgiving, ‘we thank you for your most opportune assistance, your ladyship.’

Baroness von den Linden bowed to Kreyssig. ‘It is the duty of every subject of the Empire to defend the realm,’ she stated, glancing at the councillors. Kreyssig didn’t like the little smile she wore. Most of these men knew he had been visiting her, even if they couldn’t guess the nature of those liaisons. In a single act, she had both saved him and condemned him. There would be no more rumours linking the baroness with witchcraft among the council. There would only be simple fact. Kreyssig was now inextricably bound to the witch. He would have to support her in everything, because the same men who would persecute her as a practitioner of the black arts would also damn him as a heretic.

With a predatory, cat-like grace, the baroness stalked through the shambles and joined Kreyssig at the head of the table. ‘You must move quickly,’ she advised him. Like the Protector, she ensured her voice was loud enough for all to hear. ‘The same divination that warned me of your danger also revealed to me an even greater threat.’

The witch wore a bemused smile as she retrieved the agitated cat from the table and stroked its fur. ‘Like yourselves, the skaven are concentrating their forces. They are marshalling for a direct attack against the Great Cathedral.

‘In one assault, the ratmen intend to break the spirit of every soul in Altdorf,’ the baroness warned. ‘When the temple burns, the fire will be seen in every quarter of the city. When that happens, men will know that their dominion is finished.

‘When that happens, the vermin shall inherit the earth.’

Sylvania
Kaldezeit,1113

Seerlord Skrittar drew a deep breath, filling his nose with the smell of victory. The musky scent of aggression dripping from the glands of thousands of skaven warriors; it needed only the appetising aroma of fresh blood to make it properly delicious. That was the downside of fighting these dead-things. Even when they were torn to shreds the walking corpses refused to disgorge anything like proper blood. At best there was syrupy treacle, more often just a pinch of scabby dust.

Clan Mordkin were certainly proving their worth. The grave-rats charged into the ranks of zombies with such feral savagery that even those tick-sniffing mice of Clan Fester were growing bold and mounting their own attacks. Vrask Bilebroth and his surviving plague monks were taking a hand as well, scurrying about the edges of the conflict and supporting Fester wherever it looked like they might be suffering morale problems. As exterminator of the undead, Vrask had proven an abject failure, but as a disciplinarian he was quite useful. Then again, having the decayed snout of a plague monk shoved into your face and snapping orders at you was something most skaven would respond to.

From his position at the back of his army, Skrittar could see the ebb and flow of the battle. It was exactly the kind of conflict that suited him – overwhelming massacre! His warriors outnumbered the undead by ten to one, odds to turn the most spineless mouse vicious. If the dead-things had any sense of self-preservation, they should have been routed at the first sight of the awesome host of ratmen swarming down upon them. Instead, they just maintained their positions and forced the skaven to butcher them where they stood. The outcome would be the same, it was only a delay of the inevitable.

Skrittar bruxed his fangs and uttered a contented hiss. It would only be the matter of a few hours before the skaven broke through their enemy. Then the path would be clear to the jagged tower the dead-things defended. It was a massive structure and exuded a sorcerous taint that sent a thrill through the grey seer’s fur. Somehow it reminded him of the Shattered Tower in Skavenblight. There was an auspicious smell about the place, a tantalising odour that went beyond the warpstone sandwiched between the black blocks of stone. He could almost feel the presence of the Horned One, expectant and impatient! It was a humbling, terrifying feeling, yet at the same time filled Skrittar’s gut with greedy anticipation. What could be more auspicious an omen for the success of his plans than the attention of his god?

Fixing his gaze on the tower, Skrittar could see the whorls of energy coruscating around it, flickering about the structure like steam from a lava pit. Every wisp of ghostly light was a tendril of magic, a ribbon of sorcery sucked from the void and spewed into the atmosphere. Skrittar felt his pulse quicken as he contemplated the magnitude of what he sensed. If the mage-man was so powerful as to evoke so much magic, then he must prove a fearsome foe! The grey seer’s paw tightened about the haft of his staff, feeling the warpstone runes etched into it sizzle against his skin, filling his veins with arcane might. The human knew a trick or two, that was all. If he were truly powerful, his pathetic army wouldn’t be demolished so easily! No, the mage-man was just another slab of meat waiting to be cut down by the rightful masters of the world!

Skrittar turned his eyes from the tower, looking instead at the fresh timbers of his conveyance and the massed ranks of stormvermin arrayed about it. The work-rats of Fester had scrambled to build the wooden platform, stealing the iron-banded wheels from dozens of man-thing nests. They were motley and mismatched, causing the platform above to be lopsided in places and requiring an even greater effort from the warriors to move it. Such concerns, however, mattered little to Skrittar. The stormvermin of Manglrr Baneburrow were the strongest skaven in Clan Fester and they would not fail the seerlord. Not if they wanted to live long.

The grey seer preened himself as he stalked across the platform, glaring down at the ranks of brawny stormvermin. He grinned murderously as he drew near the real might of his conveyance. Bound between an arch of stone plundered from an elf-thing temple, a great bronze bell was suspended at the far end of the platform. That bell had been consecrated in the darkest chambers of the Shattered Tower, engraved with runes of ruin and havoc. A piece of pure warpstone, crafted from the biggest chunk they had collected in Sylvania, formed the bell’s clapper. The second-largest chunk was the basis of the enormous striker held in the paws of Skrittar’s personal slave. The combination of striker, clapper and runes would create an invocation to the Horned One, an appeal that the dreaded god would be certain to answer. A bridge would be formed between mortal supplicants and divinity, a bridge that under the guidance of the seerlord would take shape as spells of unimaginable destruction!

Lashing his tail in amusement, Skrittar stared back at the battle. His army was already halfway through the ranks of the undead. It was time that he put in an appearance and forcibly reminded them that their victory was due solely to his brilliant tactics and selfless leadership.

‘Tell your scum to get moving,’ Skrittar snapped at Manglrr. Perched at the front of the wheeled altar, the warlord bobbed his head and turned about, ready to crack his whip at his warriors. Even as he did so, the warlord’s posture became anxious and his face turned upwards, sniffing at the air nervously.

Soon, the pungent stench of fear musk despoiled the altar. Skrittar rounded on the frightened warlord, smashing him low with the horned head of his staff. ‘Fool-meat! Mouse-sniffer!’ the grey seer raged.

Manglrr was old by the standards of the skaven, his vigour preserved by a cocktail of alchemy and warpstone transfusions. When he spoke, however, it was in the sort of frightened squeak a litter-pup might make. ‘Burn-thing!’ the warlord whined. ‘Burn-thing!’

Skrittar sighed and brought his staff up to bash the deranged brains from Manglrr’s skull. The warlord’s senile panic was threatening to upset the stormvermin. More importantly, it was interfering with the seerlord’s display of divine favour and tactical acumen! It was a sorry thing to see a Lord of Decay reduced to such a simpering state – he’d have to remember to have everyone who’d seen the spectacle killed.

Before he could deliver the killing blow, however, a loathsome stink swept through Skrittar’s nose. It was a rotten, sour smell, decayed meat mixed with reptilian musk. At once, he realised this was the smell that had reduced Manglrr to a cowering flea, but where such a scent could come from, he was at a loss to explain.

Then, with a feeling of dread, Skrittar lifted his head and stared up at the sky. No skaven liked the open sky, that vast emptiness that was so strange and alien beside the cramped comfort of their burrows and tunnels. He was unusual among his race in his tolerance for it, yet in this instant he shared their terror of the heavens more fully than he would have believed possible, primitive instincts racing through his veins and sending a wave of fear through his entire body.

There was something descending from the sky. Something vast and unspeakable! It stank of death and putrefaction, of dried scales and shrivelled flesh. There was no mistaking that awful shape, the powerful pinions and mighty claws, the barbed tail and armoured body of a dragon. No head graced its stumpy neck, however, only a ragged hole and the gleaming tip of exposed spine!

As he watched, the deathly dragon swooped down upon one of the Mordkin formations. From the jagged stump of neck a boiling torrent of rotten meat and writhing maggots showered down upon the massed grave-rats, searing them in their bony armour. Then the dragon’s claws were scything into them, tearing skaven apart like some gigantic hell-cat!

Perched upon the dragon’s shoulders, looking like some black tick embedded in its decayed hide, a wizened figure stood and gestured with a skeletal staff. Sorcerous energy crackled about the head of the staff, expelling itself in a stream of wailing darkness. The malefic magic gouged into a regiment of Fester’s clanrats, withering dozens into mummified husks in the blink of an eye.

Skrittar’s lips peeled back from his fangs as he watched the mage-man attack. He would not stand for this. He would not suffer this filthy meat to cheat him of his triumph. Whatever his powers, the creature was still merely human, insignificant beside the austere might of a race crafted by the godliest of gods!

The seerlord popped a small sliver of warpstone into his mouth, feeling its power rush through him as his fangs ground it into dust. Flush with the grandeur of his enhanced prowess, he sent a green bolt of destruction searing down into the stormvermin massed about his altar, cooking one hapless warrior where he stood. ‘The Horned Rat will suffer no coward-meat!’ Skrittar roared, scurrying across the altar from side to side to ensure the whole regiment was aware of his anger. Certain of their terrified attention, he leaped onto the stone arch and scrambled up to the top of the bell.

‘Scurry-hurry!’ Skrittar shouted, pointing forwards with his staff. ‘I shall kill-slay the mage-meat!’ he proclaimed, evoking cheers from the stormvermin. ‘You will gloriously slay-kill the dragon!’

In the dead silence that greeted that pronouncement, it was easy for Skrittar to hear the cowards who tried to break ranks. Burning them to a cinder restored the enthusiasm of the survivors.

Verminous flesh shrivelled into dust as Lothar von Diehl stretched forth his hand. He exulted in the power that flowed through him, felt a sense of rapture as he watched ratmen crumble before him. Never before had he imagined such power! All his conjurations, the magic he had learned and practised in secret all those years, they were nothing beside this.

Beneath him, he felt the ancient majesty of Graug the Terrible – a primal force of almost elemental fury revivified as nothing more than a puppet, an extension of some small fragment of the necromancer’s will. At his merest whim, the zombified beast would lash out with its claw and extinguish a dozen lives or bring withering death to scores with a blast of corrupt gases and wormy meat. Spears and swords crumpled against the wyrm’s armoured hide, and those few that did pierce became lodged in rotten, unfeeling flesh. Hundreds of monstrous creatures swarmed about the dragon, yet they were as helpless and puny as ants.

This, Lothar imagined, must be how Vanhal felt. The raw power of annihilation coursing through his mind and soul, waiting there just beneath the surface, lurking unseen and unguessed until it was called upon. No wonder the necromancer was so contemptuous of conquest and dominance. Truly, what was the power of an Emperor beside that of a living god?

Lothar reached out with his hand, plucking a squirming ratman from the horde arrayed around him. Coldly, he sent tendrils of necromantic energy slashing at the creature, stripping its fur away in ribbons, leaving wet bones glistening in the starlight. He could feel every inch of the creature as death spread through its mangled frame, savouring it as he once might have savoured a Mootland delicacy.

That a low-born peasant such as Vanhal should unlock this miraculous potential within him was something that no longer stung Lothar’s pride. It was enough that the potential had been unlocked. Glutted on the power flowing through him, the baron hadn’t even felt slighted when Vanhal relinquished control of Graug to him and dispatched him to confront the skaven. Anything that would maintain this power, any impudence or insult was of no consequence. Nothing mattered, nothing except this power!

The baron felt his skin wither against his bones. Flesh, he thought with contempt. Such a poor vessel to clothe the indomitable will of a soul such as his. The flame of mortality was too weak a candle to illuminate the great secret. He could see it now, as he sent phantom energies searing into the ratmen, each death fitting another piece into the cosmic puzzle. All he must do was extend his power a little further, commit those last reserves that sustained him, and he would see it all!

A blast of aethyric malignance slammed into Lothar von Diehl, causing the magical shield he had woven about himself to flicker. The impact sent blood flowing from his ears, nearly pitching him from Graug’s mighty shoulders. Dazed, the necromancer shook his head. The reckless, drunken excess of a moment before evaporated as logic subsumed emotion within his mind. Horror flowed through him as he appreciated where his power-crazed desire had nearly led him. Flesh might be a poor vehicle for such power, but it was the only one he had.

Another lash of green lightning smacked into Lothar’s defences. He spun around, focusing his attention on draining off the malevolent energies. To his witchsight, the lightning left behind it a glowing ribbon of magic, a trajectory he followed back to its source. What he saw was a blazing bubble of deranged energies, a confusion of aethyric vibrations banded and bound by a crazed medley of strange sigils and bizarre runes. At the centre of that energy was a ramshackle altar mounted on a wheeled platform. A great bell stood above the altar, its clapper shining like a knot of concentrated magic. Above the bell, a horned ratman capered and gestured, energies whipping about it as it snarled and chittered.

Lothar sneered as he saw the skaven sorcerer. He was indebted to the monster for breaking him from his trance. Now he would reward the filthy brute with a quick death. Extending a fraction of his power, he willed Graug into the air, the dragon’s tattered pinions smashing low scores of ratmen as it took wing. The dragon’s headless bulk soared above the battlefield, hurtling with meteoric fury towards the enemy warlock.

A doleful note rang out as the dragon dived towards the skaven sorcerer. Lothar recoiled as a blast of arcane energy smashed into him, crushing him against the dragon’s scaly shoulder. His ears rang, blood streamed from his nose as the sorcerous cacophony from the hellish bell struck. He could feel scaly plates and blobs of meat tear from Graug’s rotten hide. The dragon reared back, its wings fanning the air, its claws scraping against an invisible shell of sorcery.

Lothar stared incredulously at the horned ratman, watched in horror as the infernal bell drew back to strike another note. The power of the thing was atrocious, far beyond the aethyric harmonies crackling about the creature. With something approaching fright, he commanded the dragon to lash out with its decayed breath.

The mixture of corpse-gas and maggot-broth spattered across the skaven pushing the bell. Scores of the creatures collapsed, writhing in their death agonies. Yet still the altar and the hideous creature perched atop it remained unscathed. Lothar just had time to digest that fact when the bell tolled again. This time he could see the energy erupt from the clapper and snake its way upwards into the ratman’s staff. A lance of searing light crackled from the horned tip, stabbing across the sky.

Even the dragon’s mighty frame shook beneath such an assault. The beast’s breast exploded in a burst of splintered scales and shattered bone, its left wing nearly sheared from its body. The behemoth plummeted from the sky, slamming into the swarming skaven below, crushing dozens beneath its bulk. The reptilian zombie shuddered and fell still as the eldritch animation motivating it flickered away.

Lothar fared little better. A shattered arm, a broken leg, these were the marks of his own descent. He could feel the shock of the impact in his throbbing bones. Pain pulsed through his body, reverberating through his withered veins. It was an effort to force some manner of coherence into the confusion of thoughts that swirled about inside his skull. His ears still ringing from the dolorous notes of the bell, he couldn’t hear his own incantations as he tried to reanimate the dead dragon. A crackle of green lightning scorched the night, driving him to shelter behind Graug’s immense claw. The skaven warlock, it seemed, was intent on finishing the job.

Lothar forced a small measure of control back into his senses, driving the distracting buzz from his head. He could hear now the triumphant squeaks of the enemy, rejoicing in the destruction of the dragon. With Graug eliminated, their victory seemed assured.

To Lothar, it was inexplicable. Vanhal had so much power at his command, how could he allow himself to be overwhelmed by these vermin?

Then, into the baron’s ears came new sounds. The triumphant chittering was replaced by squeals of panic. An almost arctic chill gripped Lothar, the residue of some mighty sorcery. Raising his eyes skywards, he marvelled at what he saw.

Graug wasn’t the focus of Vanhal’s conjurations. The undead dragon had simply been a small fragment, a distraction to delay the enemy. The true enormity of Vanhal’s power was only now appearing in the sky over Vanhaldenschlosse.

Again, Lothar was humbled by the limitations of his own comprehension. He had thought the summoning and control of a single zombie dragon was a power that should set him amongst the gods.

What words, then, to describe a force that had called scores of the beasts back from the dead?

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Middenheim
Ulriczeit, 1118

Lady Mirella stood on the veranda overlooking the marshalling yard within the walls of the Middenpalaz. It was here that Prince Mandred had assembled his expedition into the heart of the Ulricsberg before marching off to the temple of Grungni on the other side of the city.

She had watched them go, every man filled with a grim determination to do his duty, to lay down his life in the name of justice and goodness, to defend civilisation against the monstrous creatures of Old Night. Mirella knew she should have found it an inspiring sight, should have felt pride when she had gazed down into Mandred’s face and seen that noble resolve etched across each line and curve. He had saluted her, before turning to lead the soldiers away, a gesture as heavy with meaning as that of a Bretonnian knight seeking a damsel’s favour.

Mirella hadn’t been able to acknowledge Mandred’s show of affection. Quickly she had turned away, unwilling to let him see the dread in her eyes. For she had seen other men, moved by similar motives of justice and goodness. Right had been on their side, their enemy no less monstrous than these fiends from beneath the world. Despite the nobility of their cause, the selfless virtue in their ambitions, they had failed. Death, not victory, had been the price Prince Sigdan and his allies had paid for defying Emperor Boris.

Watching another prince, another man she loved marching off to battle had been more than she could bear. Mirella cursed her weakness, berated herself for the fear that clawed at her heart. Yet try as she might, her courage had deserted her. She thought of that horrible moment, in the sewer beneath Altdorf when they had fled Kreyssig’s Kaiserjaeger, that terrifying moment when the rats had swarmed all around them in the dank filth. If she closed her eyes she could still feel their loathsome touch, hear their scurrying, chittering tide rushing through her ears. It was an awful, nightmarish memory, but how pleasant compared to the horror of what Mandred now sought to confront. Hordes of vermin, not mere rats but creatures of malignant intelligence and abominable spirit, things of Chaos spat up by the black pits of the earth!

No, Mirella had been unable to watch as the army moved off. By the same token, she was unable to leave now that they were gone. She lingered upon the veranda, staring out into the empty square, picturing that last sight of Mandred as he waved to her. She had feared he would resent her, would feel she was somehow responsible for Sofia’s illness and death. Whatever feelings had developed between her and the prince, she worried that he would deny them in his mourning, reject them afterwards from a sense of guilt. Even so slight a gesture of regard gave her some hope that Mandred’s heart was yet tender towards her.

Such a foolish, selfish thing to ponder when the fate of Middenheim itself was in question. Perhaps the whole of the Empire, for where but in the City of the White Wolf could the strength be found to rebuild the shambles left by Boris Goldgather? The fate of mankind lingered at the edge of darkness, yet she was worried about…

Perspective asserted itself upon Mirella’s reflections in the most dramatic and hideous manner she could have imagined. Down in the yard, among the paving stones, a heavy iron grate shuddered in its fastenings, the cover of a drain. The motion drew her attention, but as her eyes focused on the grate, she recoiled in fright. There were fingers clutching at the grate from beneath – furry, clawed talons. Something was down in the drain seeking to escape!

Before she could cry out, Mirella saw the cover flung upwards. Even as the grate clattered against the stones, a lean figure lunged up from the drain. She had seen that revolting carcass Kurgaz had thrown before the graf’s councillors. She recognized this thing for another of that breed.

Mirella cringed away from the sight, stumbling back against the palace wall as more and more of the beasts boiled up into the yard. Faintly, she could hear shouts and screams echoing from the city beyond the walls of the Middenpalaz. The thought that this scene must be repeating itself all across Middenheim spurred her to action. It wasn’t courage that drove her, but terror of the most dire cast.

The woman’s scream turned rodent heads upwards, caused beady eyes to narrow. The skaven froze for an instant, like so many rats startled by a sudden candle. The instant passed, the monsters scattered, leaping at the walls where human guards had been alerted by the shriek. Several of the guards were shot down before they could even raise their weapons, picked off by ratkin snipers armed with long jezzails.

A few of the vermin rushed at the palace itself, launching themselves from the yard in an effort to reach the veranda. Most of the creatures fell short, crashing back to earth with snarls and squeaks. One of the monsters, however, caught the balustrade with its paws. Briefly its legs scrabbled at the edge of the veranda, then it was pulling itself upwards, fangs bared in a vicious snarl.

Mirella found herself unable to move, unable to do anything but gaze in horror at that verminous face. The skaven chittered at her. She could see the muscles under its piebald fur tense as it prepared to spring at her.

Death caught the ratman before it could attack. A ball of spiked steel slammed into its face, splitting its skull and sending a spray of fangs and blood across the veranda. Brother Richter swung the footman’s mace he held a second time and sent the corpse tumbling down into the yard. In the next instant, the priest grabbed Mirella and pulled her inside the palace.

Dazed, confused by her astounding escape, Mirella was slow to appreciate the bloodstains on the cleric’s robe or the sounds of conflict echoing through the interior of the Middenpalaz. Then it struck her. What she had seen in the yard must be happening everywhere, anywhere there was a grate or drain leading into the sewers. The skaven were bypassing every fortification in the city by attacking from below!

‘Graf Gunthar is rallying his warriors,’ Richter was telling her as he helped a cluster of servants barricade the door opening onto the veranda. ‘They’ve fought their way down to the cellars and are closing up the entrances!’

Mirella listened to the priest, but his words made little impact on her. Her thoughts were somewhere else. If the skaven were able to reach the city, if they had already prevailed below…

‘What about Mandred?’ she gasped.

Brother Richter shook his head. ‘The graf believes it was a trap to draw the army below. The skaven must have been waiting.

‘Prince Mandred must be dead.’

‘Khazuk!’ Kurgaz bellowed, staving in the face of a ratman with the head of his hammer. The dwarf laughed boisterously as the carcass went flying backwards, toppling several of the skaven behind it.

Mandred slashed the throat of the monster he fought, nearly decapitating it. ‘A fine cast, friend Smallhammer.’

Kurgaz cracked the skull of one of the skaven that had tripped over the corpse of his previous victim. A fierce shout sent several others scurrying away in fright. ‘That’s naught,’ he grumbled. ‘You should see me with the real thing!’

It didn’t take any explanation for Mandred to know what the dwarf was talking about. It was impossible not to note the fearsome power of Drakdrazh. The temptation to sit back and watch Kurgaz’s brother ply the enchanted hammer back and forth among the vermin was almost overwhelming. It was like seeing one of the dwarf ancestor gods in action. Mandred couldn’t help but think of Ghal Maraz, the Hammer of Sigmar, and its legendary might. He wondered where the outlaw knight had taken it after it was stolen from Emperor Boris. He wondered if he would ever see it wielded in battle as he now saw Drakdrazh being wielded.

The dwarfs were already locked in pitched battle when the Middenheimers reached the caverns and mines of what the denizens of Karak Grazhyakh called the Fourth Deep. Skaven had swarmed up from the smaller shafts and tunnels radiating out from the Fourth Deep. Fighter for fighter, the ratmen were vastly inferior to the rugged dwarfs, their crude armour and scavenged weapons woefully primitive beside the steel plate and keen axes of their foes. The dwarfs, however, were unable to match the speed of the ratkin, an advantage that enabled the skaven to bring their prodigious numbers to bear upon the foe. The dwarfs presented a solid rock, steady and impenetrable, but the skaven were like a raging sea, sweeping in from every quarter to pound at their defences.

How easy it would have been to lose heart when they reached the battle, when they saw the seemingly endless horde flooding through the great hall, scurrying across overturned mine carts and scampering down skeletal gantries. It was one thing to hear how numerous their foe was, but to see it before one’s eyes was a thing terrible to contemplate. Mandred felt his own heart buckle when he saw that verminous sea crashing around the small knots of embattled dwarfs scattered through the cavern. Yet seeing those doughty warriors, unperturbed despite being outnumbered and surrounded, combating their enemy with a stubborn defiance, made an even greater impression. Watching a grizzled old dwarf smoking calmly on his pipe as he mashed ratmen with his axe, or listening to a young beardling singing a Khazalid tune as he plied his hammer sent a fire coursing through their veins. Such courage in such conditions was a magnificence of valour that belonged in legend. No man could abandon such courage to be overwhelmed and destroyed. Whatever time he bought by such abject cowardice wouldn’t be life, but merely a hollow existence of shame.

To a man, the Middenheimers had charged into the Fourth Deep, the fatigue of their long march forgotten as the roar of battle thundered through them. Shouting ‘wolf and graf!’ they had fallen upon the flank of the skaven horde. The ratmen, already locked in combat, were taken by surprise, forced to give ground before the humans.

If they prevailed, they would be hailed as heroes when they returned to the surface, paraded through Middenheim as champions of order and light. If they could turn the skaven back here, they would break the siege of their homes before it could even start.

The tide of battle was turning against the skaven. Steadily the humans were driving them back, fighting their way across the cavern to relieve the embattled dwarfs one group at a time. Ratmen still swarmed from the shafts and passageways, but now they did so fighting a trickle of skaven seeking to flee the conflict. The sight reassured Mandred. If his army could maintain the momentum, they would make that trickle into a raging torrent that would sweep the verminous horde away.

‘We’ll soon join your brother!’ Mandred called out to Kurgaz, nodding to him.

The dwarf turned away from the mushed remains of an armoured ratman, frowning as he tried to peer over the shoulders of the knights and soldiers around him. ‘I’ll take your word for it, princeling,’ he growled, then hurled himself at another foe.

Beside the prince, Beck was fending off the frenzied assault of a snaggle-toothed ratkin draped in a tattered cloak and wielding knives in both its paws. The filthy creature reminded Mandred of the gutter runners that had rampaged through Neist’s hospice. He felt no qualms as he drove his sword into the thing’s back. Many more would die before Sofia was avenged.

‘Thank you, your grace,’ Beck huffed, winded by the hard fight. He had barely drawn a breath before he was lunging forwards again, striking down an opportunistic ratkin that was leaping at Mandred’s back. The rodent fell in a pool of spilled entrails.

The ebb of battle flowed away from the prince’s position. For a moment, he was able to gaze across the cavern, to appreciate the havoc that had been wrought against the skaven. Even as Mandred was feeling the glow of their accomplishment, he saw something that turned him sick inside.

Kurgaz’s brother, that great champion with his fabulous warhammer, was beset by a mob of armoured ratmen. Black-furred brutes, they bore great halberds in their paws. While Drakdrazh struck one down, another slashed at Mirko, catching him in the back of the knee. The dwarf’s mail blunted the impact, but he staggered just the same. The blazing runes on the haft of his hammer flickered for a moment.

In that moment, a huge white skaven wearing black armour lunged at Mirko, a sword clutched in either paw. The massive ratman brought both blades stabbing down, driving them with such force that they penetrated the mail between neck and shoulder. The monster put his full weight behind the stabbing blades, pushing them down until only the pommels projected from Mirko’s shoulders.

The dwarf champion collapsed and Drakdrazh tumbled from his fingers. One of the black-furred skaven grabbed at the hammer, but before he could reach it his white-furred warlord lunged at him, tearing out his throat with gleaming fangs. Mandred’s view of the skaven warlord was obscured as the armoured skaven surged forwards to oppose the dwarfs seeking to avenge Mirko.

Another surge of skaven swept towards Mandred’s forces, pushing them back and away from Mirko’s company. Kurgaz cursed and raged, throwing himself with reckless ferocity against the monsters. He’d heard the great wail set up by Mirko’s comrades. He knew his brother was dead.

Mandred redoubled his own efforts, striving for every inch of ground. As the skaven began to give way, as they fell before the swords and spears of the Middenheimers, the prince kept an eye out for the white rat, dreading to see Drakdrazh blazing in the creature’s paws.

‘Your grace! Your grace!’ The cry came from a sweat-drenched man clad only in a linen tunic and woollen breeks. He pushed his way through the reserves behind the prince. Mandred shook his head at the man’s curious raiment. He didn’t look like one of his soldiers, which left the question of where he had come from.

‘Your grace!’ the man shouted again, his cry ringing over the fray. There were more words, but they were garbled in the clamour of battle. Something of their import must have impressed Beck, however. The knight pressed close to Mandred, fending off the prince’s foes so that he could disengage.

Mandred fell back, listening with horror as the man’s words became clear. He was right, the man wasn’t a part of the army. He was a messenger from the surface. From Middenheim.

‘We are undone,’ the messenger cried. ‘Skaven are attacking the surface!’

The report was like a cold knife sinking into the prince’s heart. Skaven on the surface! Skaven in Middenheim!

‘Your grace, what do we do?’ The question came from one of the commanders, a nobleman who had been fighting at the prince’s side.

Grimly, Mandred turned back to the battle. ‘We fight on,’ he said. ‘We gave our word to help the dwarfs, we will not forsake them.’ He choked back the dread that made his voice falter. ‘If we can’t turn the enemy back here, we won’t be able to save our homes anyway.’

Carroburg
Mitterfruhl, 1115

Plague ravaged Carroburg. Daily, from the towers and parapets, the denizens of Schloss Hohenbach could see the decimation of the city. Corpse-carts prowled the streets, bodies lay stacked in the gutters. White crosses were marked up on the doors of the afflicted, and even from the heights of the Otwinsstein the nobles could pick out the figures of plague doktors, their faces hidden behind their birdlike masks, making the rounds. The trickle of trade still braving the river to reach Carroburg vanished entirely, plunging the stricken populace even deeper into the grip of need and want.

Within the castle, however, a much different world existed. Here the Black Plague held no dominion. Here there was no spectre of starvation, no threat of death and disease. Here there was only indulgence and luxury, the excesses of extravagance. All the vices the plunder of the Empire could buy were brought forth by its Emperor to impress upon his guests once and again the magnificence of his might and his wealth. To make them forget the horror that had become their salvation.

It was a venture doomed to failure. What melody, what dance, what farce, what harmony, what delicacy, what eroticism could make a mind forget what had been done? Never could those who had partaken of the obscene inoculation drive that knowledge from their minds. Not the strongest spirit, not the most potent herb, not the most ardent lover could bring a moment’s respite. Yes, Emperor Boris had saved their lives, but their salvation was a tawdry thing, ever haunted by the thing Fleischauer had made.

Emperor Boris brooded upon the problem, watching as the very thing he had hoped to stop was instead accelerated by the warlock’s magic. The great men of the Empire were growing to hate their Emperor, not because he couldn’t protect them but because he had.

This inverted logic finally placed an idea in Boris’s cunning mind. The schemer who had played nobles and provinces against one another, who had ensured that no man was without some potent enemy only the Emperor could protect him from, now set his insidious intellect to this crisis. The answer that came to him was almost an epiphany. If he could not make his guests forget the cause of their good fortune, then he would compel them to embrace it!

The great hall was lavishly adorned, draped with festive garlands and colourful banners. Priceless artworks by the old masters were placed upon the walls, and a band of the most skilled musicians Boris had commanded to the castle assembled at the far end of the chamber. Broad tables displaying poached quail eggs, broiled cormorant and dozens of other items of costly fare lined the other end of the hall. It was the last of the fresh food. After this night, they would have to endure the pickled and preserved stores. This night, however, indulgence was to be the rule.

As the strains of a jaunty waltz rolled through the castle, the noble guests sauntered into the chamber, festooned in an opulence of frill and lace, each face hidden behind a feathered domino mask. Cloaked in the anonymity of their costumes, they entered the hall with a measure of bravado they might otherwise not have shown. Each feared to find accusation and recognition in the face of their peers – even more in the eyes of the thing itself. Wrapped in their disguises, however, they felt no such trepidation.

Boris himself made small attempt to conceal his identity, striding into the hall dressed in a costume that affected the ostentatious regalia of the proscribed godling Vylmar, lord of debauchery and decadence. The small silk mask that covered his eyes did nothing to conceal the impish smile. Even the dullest mind couldn’t fail to recognise the griffon-headed walking stick with which he swaggered about the hall, for all had seen that item many times in Boris’s possession.

The timid, quiet woman who accompanied Boris made a better effort at concealing her identity, but she was betrayed by the company she kept. It had been several weeks since the Emperor had devoted his attentions to anyone except Princess Erna.

The Emperor made a single circuit of the hall, a gesture that had all the judgemental posturing of an inspection tour; then he turned his back upon his guests and stared directly at the thing that none of them dared acknowledge, the thing they could look at only with shy, quickly averted glances. Boldly, Boris defied the taboo his guests had agreed upon.

The thing’s eyes were open, but there was no awareness in its gaze. A line of drool trickled from the corner of its toothless mouth, dripping down its breast to bathe one of the leeches fastened to its pallid flesh. The trunk of the thing was inanimate, only the rise and fall of its chest indicating that it was alive at all.

Brazenly, Boris walked up to the pedestal. From beneath the breast of his brocaded tunic, he brought forth a fold of gaudily coloured cloth adorned with tiny bells. While his shocked guests watched, Boris rose onto his toes, stretching to the utmost to set the fool’s cap onto the thing’s shaven head.

Music fell silent, conversation died. The atmosphere in the great hall became charged with tension, a dreadful expectancy. All eyes were turned to the Emperor and the grotesque thing resting upon the pedestal.

The shaven head tilted to one side, setting the little bells sewn to the cap jangling. In the silence, the tinkling note sounded like a peal of thunder.

As the thing’s head rested against its shoulder and the bells were quiet once more, a boisterous laugh boomed. Emperor Boris pranced about the fearful apparition, genuflecting before it in mocking deference. With his antics, he demonstrated to his guests that the thing they feared was no ill omen, no token of damnation and guilt. It was simply an idiot thing to be made sport of, a mindless buffoon that could accuse no one and nothing of any sin.

The Emperor’s laugh spread through the hall, at first half-heartedly echoed by his most spineless sycophants, but soon growing into genuine bursts of amusement. Into that laughter the nobles poured their relief, their last pangs of fleeing guilt. When the musicians again took up their instruments and sent the strains of a waltz flowing through the hall, the celebrants paired off, dancing through the hall, their opulent gowns and coats bustling and swirling around the pedestal and the drooling wreckage perched atop it. With each pass, the dancers jeered at the thing, pointing and laughing, letting their fear become contempt.

Emperor Boris cast his gaze about the revellers, searching for Erna, intent upon joining the celebration. His guests thought they were applauding restored freedom, liberation from the mortal terror that had dominated them since Fleischauer’s ritual. In truth, they were enslaved by fetters far more insidious. The Emperor had led them from the shackles of their own conscience, had roused them to embrace the perversity that preserved them from the plague. He had led, and they had followed. So it would always be.

His eyes hardened behind his silk mask as he found Erna near the door leading to the Sigmarite chapel. The princess had distanced herself from the throng, was keeping away from the revelry. Her mask couldn’t hide her almost pious disdain for the scene. Here, Boris knew, was one who hadn’t followed him, who refused to follow him.

Seated beside Erna was the besotted ruin of Doktor Moschner, dressed in the deerskin of a Thuringian druid, his mask cast aside so that he might partake more liberally from the jar of wine resting beside him. The physician looked up when he saw his Emperor approaching. He tried to rise, to bow before his master, but liquor had already weakened his legs and he instead slumped back in his seat.

‘You are a disgrace,’ Boris snarled at Moschner. ‘We should have you removed from the castle.’

Moschner blinked up at Boris, a flicker of awful hope passing through his eyes. ‘Would you? Can I leave, Your Majesty?’ He waved his hand at the dancers, trying to point a finger at the thing on the pedestal. ‘You don’t need me. You don’t need a doktor. You don’t need medicine!’ He slumped over, as though his bones had suddenly turned to jelly. ‘You have magic to preserve you...’ The last words were drawn from him in a low sob.

Boris glared down at the physician. He’d come to confront Erna, but where he might be prepared to indulge her defiance, he would brook none from Moschner. ‘You’ll be cast out,’ he vowed. ‘Dumped over the wall and left to fend with the rest of the peasant rabble.’

‘Please, he is drunk. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.’ Erna caught at the Emperor’s arm. All that pious disdain was gone now, unseated by raw panic.

‘A drunk man speaks the truth in his heart,’ Boris told her in a cold voice, reciting a bit of wisdom disseminated by the god whose raiment he wore. ‘He speaks treason against Us and will be punished.’

Erna’s grip on Boris’s arm tightened. She turned him around so that he again faced the crowd, could see them dancing and jeering. ‘You don’t need to. Can’t you see that you’ve already won?’

The Emperor stared into her eyes and when he spoke, his words were sombre. ‘Have We? We came over here to ask why you do not dance, why you do not share the cheer We have demanded from Our subjects.’

The princess withdrew her arm, recoiling from the tone in Boris’s voice. ‘I cannot…’

‘You defy Us openly,’ Boris accused. ‘You set a poor example for the others. Why We permit this, We do not know, but it ends now. It ends here.’

The colour drained from Erna as she appreciated what it was that the Emperor commanded. ‘You won’t punish the doktor?’ she asked.

Boris reached out, took her hand in his and led her towards the revellers. ‘We will spare him. He is a peasant. Nobody cares about peasants,’ he added with a cruel chuckle.

The celebrants parted as the Emperor and Erna danced about the hall, watching as their sovereign led his companion in a graceful pirouette. Again and again, they circled the pedestal, drawing near to the idiot thing. At each pass, Erna felt her skin crawl, her soul sicken. Boris saw her revulsion, smiled at the power it implied. He had at last broken her to his will. Even this bulwark had crumbled before his siege.

In the course of one of their passes, with a deft flourish of his hand, Boris plucked a bloated leech from the tattooed thigh and presented the parasite to Erna. ‘A pill to preserve the doktor’s health,’ he whispered to her.

Erna could feel everyone watching her as she took the foulness from Boris’s hand. Quickly, before she could think about what she was doing, she put the leech in her mouth.

Laughter rippled through the hall. Emperor Boris had displayed to his guests that no one could resist his authority. Within the castle, he was absolute. Neither men nor women nor the gods themselves could defy him.

Long into the night, the music of the waltz echoed through the castle. Strains of melody drifted down from the Otwinsstein, rolling down from the hill into the desolate streets of Carroburg.

There were few in the plague-blighted ruins to hear the revelry.

Even fewer who listened did so with human ears.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Altdorf
Kaldezeit, 1114

Sythar Doom gnashed his fangs, sending blue sparks flitting across the massed warpguard surrounding him. A few of the skaven spun around, baring their teeth at whatever had singed their fur. Their ire wilted when they saw it was the Grey Lord himself who had burned them. The hulking warriors cringed, hurriedly returning their attention to the verminous throng surging through the narrow street ahead.

The Warpmaster of Clan Skryre lashed his tail angrily, the hairless appendage whipping across the scarred pelts of the mute, lobotomised slaves who carried his palanquin. The slaves were perfectly matched for size, limbs elongated or cropped when the creatures had been mere whelps. The arms that gripped the runners supporting the palanquin were massive, burly things, swollen to monstrous proportions through injections of warpstone dust. The other arms, superfluous to the only labour demanded of the litter bearers, were absent entirely, amputated in the name of nutritional efficiency.

One day, Sythar Doom vowed, Clan Skryre would remake all of skavendom as he had remade his slaves. They would cast down the old superstitions and foolishness that had retarded skaven development for thousands of years. Reason, the cold brilliance of intellect and imagination, would become the new foundation of the Under-Empire. Beneath the leadership of the Warpmaster, the old clan systems would be abolished. All skaven would belong to a single nest. The thinkers of Clan Skryre would oversee the breeding pits, use spells and potions to reshape the pups as they were forming in the wombs of their brood-mothers. They would create strains of brilliant, intellectual skaven to further the arcane technology that would make the ratmen masters of the world. They would make strong, fierce skaven to serve as warriors for the new order, being careful to strip them of those mental processes that would lead to ambition or defiance. They would bring into being a pliable underclass of workers, docile and subservient, devoid of even the capability to rebel.

It would be a glorious day, a day when Sythar Doom, Grey Lord and He Who Is Sixth, wasn’t scratching his fleas while two packs of miserable clanrats argued over which of them had prevalence at a crossroads!

Treachery! That was the first thought that crept into Sythar Doom’s mind. General Twych or Grey Seer Pakritt was behind this, unless of course it was some intrigue set into motion by the late and unlamented Deacon Blistrr. The battle for the man-thing nest-city called for the destruction of their chief temple. Once that was destroyed, the man-things would be a broken rabble utterly at the mercy of their conquerors. The skaven who commanded the attack on the temple would be the victor, acclaimed by the Grey Lords and Arch-Tyrant Vecteek.

That triumphant leader would have to be Sythar Doom. Anything less was an outrage!

‘Burn them clear,’ Sythar snarled at the captain of his warpguard. The hulking ratman bobbed his head in acknowledgement, and scurried off to growl orders at the rest of the Clan Skryre strike force. In short order, the warpguard were scrambling clear, making way for the fire-throwers. Gigantic casks of worm-oil mixed with warpstone, the wheeled contraptions were dragged forwards by a small army of scrawny slaves. Warp-engineers dressed in oilskins scurried about the arcane controls, throwing levers and pushing buttons, urging the volatile liquid to flow through ratgut pipes and bat-bone tubes. At the fore of each wagon-like barrel-cart, a villainous ratman clothed from snout to tail in wormskin coveralls twisted open the nozzle of a thick hose.

Green fire belched from each nozzle, inundating swathes of bickering clanrats. The skaven shrieked in agony as their fur erupted into flames, as the meat melted from their very bones. The ignited clanrats fled blindly into the packed masses of their own comrades, spreading the flames beyond the murderous streams being vomited from the fire-throwers.

As their first victims burned, slaves pushed the fire-throwers forwards, persecuting the skaven choking the crossroads in a fratricidal holocaust. Burning ratmen leaped onto the walls of buildings, dived through windows and smashed down doors in their desperate efforts to escape. Those not yet within the killing zone turned to flee back up the street, pleading and clawing at the ratkin who blocked their way.

Through it all, the skaven of Clan Skryre continued to advance, pressing their advantage. The fire-throwers continued to take a horrendous toll upon the clanrats, blasting them until even their bones were scorched into cinders. One corner of the crossroads, that facing towards the fire-throwers, had become an inferno, the structures at its periphery blazing like torches as the eerie green flames seared through their walls.

Sythar Doom’s entourage hesitated, the bloodthirsty eagerness of the fire-rats curbed by their fear of the very destruction they had inflicted. There was good reason for their caution – if the flames from the buildings should be blown back towards the fuel-carts then the volatile mixture inside might very well combust! In such a conflagration, there would be no survivors.

The Warpmaster had little patience to spare, even for caution. ‘Fetch-bring the warpcaster!’ he raged, slashing the claws of his feet across a slave’s shoulder. When the palanquin sagged momentarily as the slave winced in pain, Sythar was tempted to blast the wretch with warp-lightning. Only the thought that the slaves were a matched set stayed his violent impulse. Instead, he selected an unfortunate warpguard who caught his eye, cooking the ratman in his own armour with a coruscating beam of sizzling light.

The rhythmic hum of machinery, the groan of creaking wood and the anguished huffs of toiling slaves warned of the warpcaster’s approach. Sythar shifted about in his seat, whiskers twitching as the arcane weapon came trundling down the street behind him. It was a gigantic construction, a wheeled carriage of timber pulled by a hundred slaves. Great boilers and engines were bolted to that carriage, placed ahead of an angled crossbeam. A long arm of steel topped with an immense bowl of cast bronze stretched down the centre of the carriage. Behind the machine, staggered at intervals, teams of warp-engineers pushed large wooden carts, sealed crates to which wheels had been fitted.

As the warpcaster trundled into position, the slaves pulling it sank wearily to the street. A gang of warp-engineers scurried about the machine, hammering great iron spikes into the road, chaining the enormous engine to the ground. When they had driven a dozen spikes into the street, they gestured frantically at their comrades pushing the carts. One of these came rushing forwards, and in short order the ratmen smashed open the top of the box-like cart and removed pawfuls of curled wood shavings from inside.

For all the haste of their early actions, now the warp-engineers became plodding and methodical in their labour. Gingerly, four of the ratmen used iron hooks to reach into the cart. Slipping the hooks into metal eyes, they lifted a crystalline sphere from the box. With great care, the skaven bore the globe towards the warpcaster, setting it down in the cold-cast bronze bowl.

Sythar Doom’s jewelled eyes gleamed as he stared at the sphere, watching the rampant energies crackling behind the crystal facets. The harnessed fury of raw warpstone, imprisoned in the delicate framework, its ravenous appetite for destruction held in check by the art of Clan Skryre! Biding its time until its masters chose to unleash it upon their foes!

The warp-engineers leapt away from the bronze bowl as soon as the sphere was in place. Cast into the semblance of an outstretched claw, the fingers of the bowl closed around the massive crystal orb. Electricity rippled about the bronze talons as they closed tight. A masked skaven, his body insulated by thick layers of cloth and fur, rushed to a mechanism embedded in the side of the carriage. For an instant, the ratman’s paws flew across the maze of buttons and levers, adjusting them in a frenzy of activity. The artillerist glanced once at the burning buildings ahead, then threw a final lever.

The warpcaster shuddered as the enormous swing-arm lunged into motion. Propelled by the engines fitted to the carriage, the arm slammed upwards into the arched crossbeam, the impact causing the entire engine to bounce, held in position only by the stakes chaining it to the road. As the arm smashed against the crossbeam, the bronze talons opened and the crystalline sphere was flung from the bucket.

There was an eerie lack of noise when the sphere crashed into the buildings. No explosive detonation, no billowing wall of fire and wreckage. There was simply a flash of eerie green light, a horrendous luminance that washed out the glow of flames. When the light faded, when vision was restored, the conflagration was gone, evaporated by the disintegrating energies inside the crystal globe. A black, charred slime and a few bits of scarred stone were all that remained of a city block, the ground itself gouged and scooped away into a concave depression.

Sythar preened himself as he heard the clanrats squeak in terror and redouble their efforts to flee. The musk of fear rose from the glands of even his own clan-kin. The warpcaster was the most terrifying war machine ever conceived. It would smash the pathetic human resistance and demonstrate to the other Lords of Decay the might of Clan Skryre and its overlord!

‘Forwards! Hurry-scurry!’ Sythar growled. Obediently, his warpguard marched out into the glowing desolation left behind by the sphere. Behind him, mobs of slaves pulled the stakes from the road and began to drag the ponderous weight of the warpcaster. Sythar watched them for a moment, then slapped his tail against the shoulders of his bearers, urging them into motion.

Victory would belong to Clan Skryre. The warpcaster would guarantee it!

After all, Sythar had ensured there was enough ammunition for the machine to not only demolish the human city, but to exterminate any ratmen who thought to take credit for his triumph.

Grim-faced, Grand Theogonist Gazulgrund stood upon the broad steps of the Great Cathedral and watched as the verminous horde came flooding into the square. Three sides of the temple were embattled now. It could only be a matter of time before the skaven came swarming down from the north and completed the encirclement. Once they were surrounded, he knew there would be no escape.

That thought brought a bitter smile to the priest’s face. For him, escape wasn’t an option anyway. Abandoning the temple would be to abandon his faith, and he would do neither. In a long life of fear and confusion, there was only one thing he was certain of, one constant that provided him with strength. That was his faith in Mighty Sigmar. Trust in the man-god had sustained him through his darkest ordeals, had carried him through moments when he felt he could endure no longer. Even in the cruel machinations of Kreyssig, he saw the hand of Sigmar. Because of Kreyssig, he had become Grand Theogonist. He had been entrusted with the leadership of the temple in this, its darkest hour. Another man, a man less secure in his belief, a man less firm in his convictions, such a man might have fled and abandoned the temple.

He was not such a man. His faith had been tested in the horrors of the Dragon’s Hole. He had been forced to question everything he held dear, forced to evaluate what was most important in his life. He had come through the anguish of that process a different man. A man who could stand upon the steps of the Great Cathedral and gaze upon his own death without fear. A man could honour his god all his life, but it was in the way in which he embraced death that he paid his final tribute to the divine.

In his hands, clothed in the dragonskin gauntlets worn by the prophet Ungrimvolg during the Third Battle of Black Fire Pass, the Grand Theogonist held the gem-encrusted haft of Thorgrim, the gigantic mattock crafted for Grand Theogonist Jurgen II by dwarf runesmiths five centuries after the ascension of Sigmar. The mattock was so large that few men could wield it in battle – in life Jurgen had been nicknamed ‘Ogreblood’ for his prodigious size and strength. The current Grand Theogonist harboured no delusions that his physicality was on a par with that of his ancient predecessor. It wasn’t as a weapon he had brought the mattock down from its place of honour on the walls of the Heroes’ Hall. Thorgrim was more important as a symbol, a reminder of the awe and might of Holy Sigmar. It was an echo of that great warhammer once wielded by the man-god when he forged his Empire from scattered tribes of savages and brought the light of civilisation to mankind.

Gazulgrund turned his gaze from the swarming horde of monsters to the massed ranks of those who had rallied to the temple to defend it against the ravening fiends. They were a disparate, motley amalgamation of people from all walks of life. He could see simple peasants armed with nothing more than shovels and sickles. There were merchants in the tattered remnants of their finery wielding knives and swords. A great throng of flagellants, whips and flails clutched in their bloodied hands, their monk-like habits tied around their waists to better display their self-inflicted scars. Genuine monks and friars, many of them unversed in the ways of warfare, clinging grimly to staves and clubs.

Mixed among these determined but untrained defenders were small pockets of martial discipline. Bands of Scheuters and former Dienstleute, ranks of soldiers who had managed to fight their way to the square. A handful of mounted knights, their warhorses towering above the foot soldiers all around them. Proud in their habits of black and gold, the Templars of Sigmar held themselves at the fore of the battle line, determined to claim the glory of being the first to confront the foe.

Gazulgrund felt his heart swell as he gazed out over the men who had come here, banded together in defence of their faith. Certainly, some were motivated by the refugees who had flocked to the cathedral and even now filled the sanctuary, but many others had come out of devotion to Sigmar. The priest had watched them, watched them approach the immense doors of the temple and prostrate themselves before the ancient statue of Sigmar that rested in a niche above those doors. Certainly, there was a resignation, a fatalism in the pious display, but there was also a steadfastness, a devotion that brought tears to the priest’s eyes.

He caught a slight motion near the base of the steps. Staring down, Gazulgrund saw a small boy, no older than his ninth winter, bowing to the statue and making the sign of Sigmar with his left hand. In his right, he held an old wooden sword, stolen no doubt from some training field. Seeing the look of fear in the boy’s eyes as he bowed, observing the look of defiance that blazed across his face as he turned back towards the oncoming enemy, Gazulgrund felt warmth flood through his veins.

‘Men of Altdorf!’ Gazulgrund shouted in a voice that seemed as if it were forged from thunder. ‘Men of the Empire! Brothers all! Behold the steel in your hearts! Behold the fire of your faith! Behold the magnitude of your valour! When others flee, when others cower and hide, you stand tall! You stand proud! You stand as free men! You carry the Light of Sigmar within you, and it shall not be quenched by the vermin of Old Night!’

Despite its tremendous weight, Gazulgrund lifted Thorgrim over his head, brandishing it like a standard. ‘For Sigmar!’ he roared, his voice booming across the plaza, echoing from the spires of the cathedral. He turned to his left, raising the huge mattock a second time. ‘For Sigmar!’ He turned to the right, repeating the gesture. ‘For Sigmar!’

The shout was taken up by the defenders, growing into the clamour of an angry ocean. The verminous host paused, hesitated at the edge of the square, cringing back from the ferocity of that cry. It was only a moment that the monstrous army delayed, then the threats and whips of their leaders drove them on once more. But it was a moment that had broken the spell of terror that had threatened to overwhelm the men. They had glimpsed the craven, slinking nature of their enemy and with that glimpse grew utter contempt for this vile foe. Against such scum, none worthy of the name ‘man’ would retreat.

‘For Sigmar!’ Gazulgrund repeated, again raising the enormous bulk of Thorgrim. He did not ponder the impossibility of that action, the uncanny lack of strain that accompanied the feat.

Alone among all those in the square, human and skaven alike, the Grand Theogonist did not see the golden aura that surrounded him or the shining light that gleamed from his robes.

Sylvania
Kaldezeit, 1113

Chittering triumphantly, Seerlord Skrittar drew the screaming vibrations of the holy bell through his body. He could feel the dreadful energies throb through his bones, sense the residue of warpstone in his blood twine about the malignant harmonies as they gathered and swelled. Bending the rampaging power to his own murderous will, he focused the magic into the horned head of his staff.

One exertion of his fierce abilities and it would all be over. He’d destroyed the stupid mage-man’s dragon. Now he would do the same to the puny mage-meat. He might keep the fool’s bones as a chew toy for his pups back in Skavenblight. Then again, he didn’t believe in playing with his food.

Before Skrittar could extend his staff and unleash his spell, he became aware of a disturbance in the sorcerous harmony. Turning his eyes skywards, he spurted the musk of fear.

The sky was black with dragons! Dozens of undead, decayed bulks, their scaly hides clinging in strips to bleached bones and scabrous flesh, bat-like wings fanning the air in torn tatters. Unlike the first dragon, great reptilian heads snarled from long, serpentine necks, profane fires burning in the pits of their decayed skulls.

Necrotic black vapours spewed from the fanged maws of the dragons as they came hurtling down. Swathes of skaven were annihilated, their bodies crumbling into desiccated husks. Survivors tucked tails between their legs and scurried away in abject terror.

Skrittar shifted his staff and sent the bolt of crackling warp-energy stabbing upwards. He was rewarded by watching the lightning smash through the skull of one dragon, sending the reptile crashing earthwards. For all their hideous power, the beasts weren’t invulnerable!

He tried to keep that thought as he watched tendrils of dark magic stream down from the broken tower. Glowing fog engulfed the destroyed dragon, seeping into its rotten bones. Soon, with awkward jerks, the reptile was lurching back onto its feet! Even more horrible, the skaven the behemoth had smashed in its descent were moving, dragging their crushed bodies towards their living comrades!

Eyes wide with horror, Skrittar realised the awful mistake he had made. The mage-meat he’d attacked wasn’t the enemy, just a minion sent out to bait the seerlord into committing himself. His true adversary was still in the tower, directing the magic emanations that had summoned a flight of dragons from their graves and which now sustained their obscene semblance of life!

That realisation sent a new determination raging through the seerlord’s black heart. To retreat now would be to accept defeat. He’d never get those craven mice of Clan Fester to take the field again, and even Clan Mordkin might lose their appetite for rotten meat after this fiasco. The secret of the warpstone would be out, all of Skrittar’s careful planning reduced to nothing as every clan in the Under-Empire came swarming into Sylvania to plunder the wealth that rightfully belonged to him!

No! He wouldn’t concede such ruination! He was the Voice of the Horned One, Supreme Prophet of He Who Is Thirteen! He wouldn’t allow the ignominy of defeat, not now when the Order of Grey Seers was so vulnerable. He’d spent the lives of twenty-four of his most powerful underlings to make this happen. He owed it to their martyrdom to seize the warpstone and make himself Grand Despot of Skavenblight!

‘Ring the bell,’ Skrittar snarled down at his slave. The hulking skaven leaned back, driving the warpstone striker against the bell. Another blast of arcane energy swept through Skrittar’s body, this time manifesting as a great crevice that snaked its way across the earth. The crushed, crawling skaven zombies vanished in the ruptured earth, the twice-restored dragon toppling into the great pit conjured by the tolling of the bell.

‘More bell!’ Skrittar shrieked, warp-lightning crackling from his fangs. ‘More bell!’

Again, the warpstone striker smashed against the bell, sending another blast of power through Skrittar’s body. A storm of lightning sizzled from his staff, slamming into one of the dragons, tearing its wings to shreds and sending its rotten bulk slamming into the earth. The seerlord paid no notice to the hundred or so Mordkin warriors pulverised beneath the behemoth’s bulk. What he did notice was the treacherous way his army was disintegrating, quitting the battlefield in panicked mobs! Such infamy was unbelievable! These flea-fondlers were engaged in the most important work of their miserable lives. They should feel honoured to die for the glory of Skrittar!

‘Got-want more bell!’ Skrittar hissed. He ignored the protest of the slave with the striker, baring his fangs at the wretch until another burst of power roared up from the grim tolling of the holy bell. Biting down on a nugget of warpstone, the grey seer redoubled the energies, transforming the swirling eddies of power into arching fingers of compulsion that reached out and burned their way into thousands of frightened skaven minds. Viciously, Skrittar probed that facet of their rodent brains devoted to hunger, stirring that lobe until what had been a fleeing mob was transformed into a starving swarm of frenzied monsters.

Froth dribbled from verminous fangs, blood dripped from glazed eyes as the rabid ratmen turned upon the dragons. With savage brutality, the skaven flung themselves at the decayed reptiles, swarming over them in a clawing, biting horde. First one, then a second dragon was dragged down by the sheer weight of its tormentors. Caring nothing for the hundreds smashed by the dragons’ claws or obliterated by necrotic breath, the crazed horde continued its rampage, slaughtering its own when there were no enemy near enough to slay.

Skrittar chittered maniacally as he watched the skaven swarm. He would teach the mice to fight! His lips curled and his tail lashed angrily against the stone arch. There were still too many dragons, and his enemy was keeping them away from the ground and the gnashing fangs of the skaven. To burn them all out of the sky would be impossible, but Skrittar realised that it wouldn’t be necessary. The only enemy he had to kill was the mage-man who had conjured up the dead-things to begin with.

Glaring at the tower, ignoring the scattered packs of fleeing skaven who had escaped the death frenzy he had inflicted upon their fellows, Skrittar snarled down at the bell-ringer. ‘Need-want more bell!’

The slave cried out in terror, protesting his master’s latest command. Skrittar stretched out his paw, crushing the ratman’s mind between his claws, reducing him to a fleshy puppet. With clumsy, spastic motion, the slave brought the striker cracking against the bell one final time.

Skrittar’s fangs bit down upon another chunk of warpstone, adding still more arcane energy to the reverberations of the spell. The seerlord focused his thoughts, directing the magic into a snaking chasm that would reach out and undermine the tower, send it crashing down. The magical fulcrum and the mage-man who had conjured it would be broken in one stroke of divine fury!

Such was his intention, but as Skrittar tried to focus his spell, he heard something crack inside him. Looking down, he saw his arm bend back upon itself in a fashion he was certain should be physically impossible. An instant later, all the fur on his left side turned into pulpy, twitching feelers, like the legs of a million fat spiders.

Skrittar tried to scream, but by that time it was too late to stop the runaway magic ravaging his body.

From the top of Vanhaldenschlosse, the metamorphosis of Seerlord Skrittar was like a blazing eruption of volcanic fury. The tower shook from the aethyric vibration and the unleashed Chaotic energies. The whirling current of vibrations faltered for an instant, their harmonies disturbed by the discordant inflection.

Vanhal stirred from his conjuration, his breath coming to him in shallow gasps. Returning his concentration to the three dimensions of mortal space was an ordeal to one who had sent his mentality soaring through vistas beyond the barriers of time and dimension. His consciousness had ridden astral tides, striding at once across powers and principalities to effect his mighty evocation. He had done more than simply form a spell from his will – he had effectually become the spell, channelling his essence into the enchantment.

The zombie dragons drawn from forgotten caves across half the world, the resurrected skaven, the walking dead of Sylvania, these had become more than simply puppets animated by his magic. They had become extensions of himself, extra fingers of his outstretched hand, physical manifestations of his soul. Vanhal had been more than an identity; he had become a multiplicity, an existence that transcended all concepts of mortality and divinity.

What he had discovered was so much more than mundane appreciations of life and death. He had tasted eternity, an eternity of tranquillity devoid of pain and sorrow. He had experienced a world without oppression and fear – a world where all the discord was forced into harmony, all the frayed edges had been mended.

His focus lost, Vanhal could feel the magical vibrations coursing through the tower ebbing. The stars overhead assumed their natural positions as time reasserted its tyranny. Blocks of stone, held in place solely by the aethyric vibrations, fell away, crashing from the walls. The levitating altar dropped to the roof, smashing into bits of bone. Vanhal himself dropped away, landing with a jarring impact on the splintered wreckage.

Beyond the walls of Vanhaldenschlosse, he could hear the frightened squeaks of the fleeing skaven. Briefly, the necromancer sent a little tendril of power into the remaining dragons, enough to sustain their decayed frames while they harried the ratmen back to their burrows. When he had time, he would perform a more complete ritual to reduce the transience of their animation. Alongside the droves of dead the skaven left behind, the dragons would make short work of completing his tower.

A surge of discordant emanations drew Vanhal’s attention to the base of his tower. Far below he could see a colossal shape scrabbling up the stones, dragging itself with gravity-defying malignance on a confusion of what seemed at once both legs and tentacles. The thing’s shape was that of some insane insect, yet there was also that about it that suggested both crabs and spiders. A motley, piebald fur stretched across most of its grisly body while across its broad back, elongated into an absolute of madness and horror, was the visage of a huge horned rat.

The ghastly residue of Seerlord Skrittar, the foul spawn born of his arcane apotheosis, squirmed up the tower with such swiftness that Vanhal was unable to direct even the most minor of incantations against it before the thing had reached the roof. Whips of aethyric energy crackled about the thing as it clambered up to meet him, the distorted skaven face grinning idiotically as the residue of the grey seer’s mentality tried to remember why it was here. One paw, the only portion of the monster that was unchanged, pointed its claw at the necromancer.

‘Die-die!’ the giant, rat-like head bellowed.

The whips of energy lashed out at Vanhal in a withering discharge of amok magic. The stones beneath the necromancer’s feet turned to jelly, the shattered bones of the altar took flight as rainbow-winged insects. Where the energy glanced across his robe, the garment sprouted gritty, coral-like encrustations.

‘I have too much to do before that happens,’ Vanhal told the insane Skrittar-spawn. The necromancer’s eyes blazed with power as he drew the waning energies of the fulcrum into his mind…

Lothar von Diehl stepped around the mess of putrid, steaming fur. No need, then, to ask his master what had become of the monster he had seen climbing the tower. Having sensed the power of the creature, he had worried that Vanhal might not be able to defeat it on his own. Now he felt foolish for having hurried back to render aid.

Turning away from the loathsome puddle, Lothar bowed before his seated master. No sense in wondering how Vanhal had brought his palanquin up from the halls below. Perhaps he’d been inspired by the monster’s ascent and simply had the thing climb up the side of Vanhaldenschlosse.

‘The enemy is in full retreat, master,’ Lothar reported. ‘Between the dragons and the destruction of their leader, I think they won’t be back.’

Vanhal was silent for a time, eyes closed behind the skeletal contours of his mask. ‘Never underestimate the foolishness of mortality,’ he said, his voice like an icy whisper. ‘The living can only be trusted to do the unpredictable, be they men or rats.’

‘What then is the answer?’ Lothar asked.

Vanhal opened his eyes, but there was a faraway quality in their gaze. Whatever the necromancer stared at, it was nothing his apprentice could see.

‘The answer is to bring them peace,’ Vanhal declared.

‘The only peace any of them will ever need.’

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Middenheim
Ulriczeit, 1118

Vrrmik bared his teeth at the vengeful dwarfs as they struggled to reach him. The stormvermin of Clan Mors were among the strongest and most vicious warriors in the Under-Empire. A fortune in food and armour, weapons and warpstone had been spent to make them an elite force without equal. Entire burrows had been enslaved to cultivate the warpweed that supplemented their carnivorous diet and caused their muscles to swell. They were the terror of a hundred warrens, a thousand burrows. Entire clans of slaves quivered at their very scent.

It was, therefore, quite a shock to the warlord when his super-skaven broke before the vicious assault the dwarfs mounted. The white ratman’s eyes went wide with fright when he appreciated that the only thing standing between himself and a throng of enraged dwarfs were a handful of opportunistic clanrats who had thought to loot the corpses left by the stormvermin. As the stormvermin scattered, the clanrats found themselves staring straight into the snarling masks of the dwarfs’ helms.

For an instant, the fury of the dwarfs was turned against the looters. They had the misfortune to be discovered in the act of cutting rings from the fingers of the dwarf champion Vrrmik had slain. What the dwarfs did to the scavengers was horrible enough that the warlord forgot himself and expelled his glands. Nervously, his claws tightened about the haft of Drakdrazh.

Scurrying away from the dwarfs, Vrrmik tripped over the corpse of a ratman who had treacherously died in such a fashion as to make himself an obstacle for his warlord. Angrily, Vrrmik swung the stolen hammer at the carcass. He was shocked when the head exploded into a mist of blood and gristle. A mad titter of awe hissed from his clenched fangs. In his panic, he’d almost forgotten the reason he’d taken such risks and involved himself directly in the attack.

Jumping to his feet, Vrrmik met the charging dwarfs. There were five of them. He swung the warhammer full into the side of the first dwarf, crumpling his steel shield as though it were a mouldy leaf, hurling the dwarf across the cavern with such force that his armoured body left an impact crater inches deep in the rock wall. The other dwarfs tried to put up a better fight, but the dire combination of Drakdrazh and Vrrmik’s vicious, warpweed-enhanced strength was too great for them to overcome. One by one, they died.

Vrrmik exulted in the carnage, savouring the smell of blood as he reduced his enemies to pulp. What need to hide behind his stormvermin (though those treacherous flea-licking mice would suffer for abandoning him) when he was a veritable demigod of battle! An avatar of the Horned One raining death and destruction upon all those mad enough to oppose him!

The last dwarf turned and ran, even the stubborn courage of his kind incapable of enduring Vrrmik’s murderous havoc. The warlord watched him flee, debating whether he should allow the wretch to tell others of what he had seen or whether to smash him into paste as he had the dwarf’s comrades. Vrrmik wondered if he could swing Drakdrazh lightly enough to merely maim the dwarf. That would give him the best of both choices.

The scent of human in the air caused Vrrmik to hesitate and allow the dwarf to flee back behind the ranks of his kind. The warlord’s whiskers twitched as his cunning restrained his bestial bloodlust. There were far more important things to consider than the slaughter of a few dwarfs. Oh yes, much more important things!

Vrrmik hefted the great weight of Drakdrazh onto his shoulder and scampered back towards one of the mine shafts, watching as more of his monstrous warriors swarmed up into the Fourth Deep. Most of them were mere slaves, axe-fodder to wear down the foe. Vrrmik didn’t think twice about spending their lives, yet at the moment there was no purpose to further fighting. This sally against the dwarfs had achieved what Grey Lord Vecteek expected. Now it was time to give the verminous tyrant what he deserved.

Raising a curled horn that had once adorned the head of a grey seer, Vrrmik blew a doleful note, a manic cachinnation that rippled across the cavern. At the sound, the skaven withdrew from their enemies, fleeing down the shafts and passages in a panicked rout of such suddenness that it left the dwarfs and their human allies too stunned to react.

Vrrmik lashed out with Drakdrazh, slaughtering a dozen of his minions as he cleared a place for himself in one of the tunnels. The gory example wasn’t one he needed to repeat. The ratmen gave their warlord all the room he needed.

Vrrmik savoured the smell of their fear. Soon all the Under-Empire would fear him the same way. There would be changes in Skavenblight when Vecteek failed to return. Changes that Vrrmik – with the support of Clan Pestilens – would exploit to the full.

Poor Vecteek, Vrrmik thought. With the human army down in the deeps, he would think himself safe to launch his attack on Middenheim. What would the despot do when that army suddenly came rushing up at him, trapping him between the enemies on the surface and the ones in the dwarfhold?

It was an amusing image, one Vrrmik was almost sorry he wouldn’t see for himself.

Fires raged through parts of Middenheim, thick plumes of smoke rising into a darkened sky, columns of flame reaching up to paint the twilight a hellish crimson. Entire neighbourhoods were burning, put to the torch by attackers and defenders alike, both sides using fire to constrain and contain the other. The hovels of the Westgate district were an inferno, the tortured screams of those trapped within the maze-like warren echoing across the city.

Graf Gunthar watched the conflagration with fatalistic resignation. The ratmen had plotted and planned well. They were inside the city’s defences before anyone was even aware of the peril. Their hordes seemed to be everywhere, making a feeble mockery of Middenheim’s thick walls and numerous defence strategies. What assembly for the militia when the skaven already controlled the streets, when the vermin swarmed through the squares? They pillaged across the fields and gardens, stealing the crops Middenheim had taken such pains to cultivate in the cold mountain air. They ransacked homes and shops, plundered inns and temples. Wherever a man’s eye turned, he found the skaven already there.

Now it was Warrenburg’s turn; Graf Gunthar’s thoughts turned bitter. Middenheim had watched from the safety of the mountain while the shanty town at the foot of the Ulricsberg burned, thankful that they had been spared such catastrophe. Now, it was Warrenburg’s turn to be thankful, to look up and shudder at the fiery glow high on the mountain.

‘Your excellency, what are your commands?’

The graf looked aside, his eyes not seeming to see Grand Master Vitholf seated upon a hulking black destrier. Master horsemen, the Knights of the White Wolf had remained in the city when Mandred led his army into the bowels of Karak Grazhyakh. Now they formed the core of the motley defenders who had rallied around the Middenpalaz. Watchmen, templars, hunters, foresters, rangers and mercenaries, they were a ragged collection from across Middenheim. Every man who could hold a sword or string a bow had, it seemed, converged upon the palace, looking to Graf Gunthar for guidance, trusting in their noble lord to lead them to victory.

Victory? There was a truly bitter thought. What victory could there be for Middenheim against such a horde? What victory for Graf Gunthar when he knew his only son lay dead somewhere in the dark beneath his feet?

A wolf dies on its feet, a dog on its belly. The words of the Ulrican proverb rang through the graf’s mind, reverberating through his very soul. Choking back his own despair, he answered Vitholf in a grim voice.

‘We ride to our doom,’ he told the knight. ‘We ride into the flames of vengeance, into the cauldron of slaughter. We ride to reap and slay, to kill and die. We ride to seek an end that will not shame us in the eyes of Ulric.’

Sombrely, the ragged host followed their graf as he led them from the bloodied courtyards of the Middenpalaz and past the burning manors of Teutogen nobility. Across the blasted fields of what had been the Konigsgarten they marched, cavalry at the fore, footmen behind. Sometimes tattered groups of men would stagger out from the rubble to join the grim procession. More often they would find only clumps of pillaging skaven. Seldom did the creatures linger to fight so large a company, but instead turned tail and fled.

All of that changed when the graf and his followers reached the streets of the Eastgate district. Here, among the despoiled homes and savaged shops, the skaven gathered in a great mass, chittering and hissing at the humans in triumphant mockery. Snipers hidden in garrets and clinging to spires picked off victims with impunity, the great range rendering them immune to the archery of Middenheim’s defenders. To fight the ratmen, the humans would be forced to take the battle to them.

Graf Gunthar looked back at his army, feeling his heart tighten as he saw the expectant, hopeful light in the eyes of his men. Surely they knew the fight was hopeless, that there would be no victory here? Yet none of them, from the highest noble to the lowest beggar, glared at him in accusation, held him to account for the doom that had come upon them all. Even in this hour, they looked to him as their leader.

It was a realisation that made Graf Gunthar feel unworthy. What was this quality within him that deserved such loyalty? What was this divine ember that invested him with such right? And as he gazed into the faces of his people, he understood that the answer to those questions didn’t lie within himself. It was in those he ruled, it was their faith and their trust that ennobled him.

In this last hour, Gunthar vowed he would not betray that trust. Sitting straight in his saddle, throwing back the wolfskin cloak draped about his shoulders, he drew his sword from its sheath. Like a finger of daylight, the graf’s sword burned in the night. Legbiter, one of the famed runefangs forged by the dwarfs for the twelve kings who united under Sigmar, the blade had ever been the symbol of Middenland’s count and Middenheim’s graf. As its ancient magic rippled across its surface, even Gunthar felt a sense of awe. It was as though Ulric – or perhaps Sigmar – were reaching down, letting the warriors of Middenheim know that they had not been forsaken.

Swinging his sword overhead, Gunthar shouted his defiance of the scuttling vermin infesting the streets of the Eastgate. ‘Death!’ he howled. ‘Death and ruin! Death and havoc! Death! Death! Death!’ Spurring his horse, the enraged graf charged the skaven. The earth shuddered as the knights and horsemen he led urged their own mounts to the attack. The snipers in the rooftops desperately tried to blunt the charge, but their efforts were like casting pebbles into the sea. Nothing would stop the surge of Middenheim’s vengeance.

Into the streets Graf Gunthar led his men, hewing ratmen asunder with Legbiter at every turn. The mockery of the skaven collapsed into frightened squeaks as the humans rode them down. Knights drove their horses through shops and homes in pursuit of the ratkin, spearmen ranged through alleyways to skewer hiding skaven, archers loosed arrows into the backs of vermin seeking to escape down side streets.

What started as a desperate fight became a bloody slaughter, slaughter gave way to massacre. The warm thrill of victory roared in Graf Gunthar’s breast. Despite the numberless hordes of the enemy, they had no stomach for battle. Middenheim might yet be saved.

Then, as quickly as the prospect of victory danced before his eyes, Graf Gunthar saw it snatched away. His men had pursued the fleeing skaven deep into the Eastgate district, towards the great theatre of marble and alabaster that marked the cultural heart of the city. The once glistening walls were foul with soot and blood, the statues toppled, the glass dome shattered and smashed.

The wanton, savage destruction was cruel enough, but crueller by far was the deception that had brought the avengers here. As the cavalry charged into the wide plaza before the theatre, hordes of skaven erupted from every quarter. No alleyway or side street failed to disgorge a chittering swarm. From cellars and sewers, the beasts emerged, from wrecked homes and ruined towers they scurried. Out of the defiled halls of the theatre, a great horde of hulking armoured ratmen marched, cruel halberds and great axes clutched in their filthy paws.

At the centre of these armoured vermin, the ratkin carried a great palanquin fashioned from the smashed wreckage of a royal carriage. Gunthar recognised the heraldry as that of his chamberlain, von Vogelthal, and wondered what manner of death had claimed his old friend.

Lounging amid the cushions of the shattered carriage was a horrific skaven clad in armour that might have been fashioned from a thorn bush. He was a huge brute of a creature, his fur midnight-black. Heaped about the monster on his carriage were the spoils he had claimed as his own, a mad confusion of rubbish and treasure. Panes of glass rested beside bolts of cloth, sacks of grain were sprawled across a pile of swords. The carcass of a fresh-slain sheep lay at the warlord’s side, its hide peeled back that the ratman might nibble at its innards like a gourmand with a plate of sweetmeats.

Even from a distance, Gunthar could see the evil glitter in the warlord’s eyes as the creature stared at him.

For an instant, as the trap swung closed behind them, silence gripped the plaza. Gunthar saw the skaven turning uneasily towards their hideous overlord, their bestial bloodlust cowering before their terrible king. Even the snipers fell silent as they waited for the attack to begin.

The rat-king lifted his nose, sniffing the air, drinking in the scent of fear wafting up from Gunthar and his soldiers. Then, his lips peeling back to expose clenched fangs, the warlord brought his claws crashing together.

In response to the signal, the skaven hordes set up a deafening chorus of squeaks and shrieks.

An avalanche of fur and fangs closed upon the surrounded men of Middenheim.

Carroburg
Pflugzeit, 1115

For those within the Schloss Hohenbach, the spectre of the plague remained an omnipresent threat. Despite the horrible curative their Emperor had procured for them, despite the isolation of their palatial hermitage, despite everything, they were ruled by fear. Daily, rising from the city below, they would hear the dirge being rung by the temple bells. From the parapets they could see the processions of corpse-carts in the streets, the proliferation of white crosses upon the doors.

It was an affront to the might of Emperor Boris, a slight against his supreme authority. He had delivered these people from the plague, yet the plague refused to abandon its prey. Like a wolf just beyond the firelight, it circled and snarled and snapped.

Emperor Boris, with cruel deliberation, decided to remove the wolf from the castle gates. One afternoon, when the bells below had been particularly active, he gave orders. As a fortress designed to command the River Reik, the walls and towers of Schloss Hohenbach were littered with catapults. The war machines had been poised to lob death and destruction upon any ship so brazen as to flout the sovereignty of Drakwald. Now, at the Emperor’s command, the siege engines were removed, redeployed so that they might visit destruction upon a much different victim.

Encouraging a festive air among his guests, Emperor Boris led the great men of his Empire onto the battlements. Von Metzgernstein’s Dienstleute, supplemented by those Kaiserknecht and palace guards who formed Boris’s own retinue, manned each of the catapults. A great brazier of smouldering coals stood ready beside each machine and nearby were bales of straw drawn from the castle stores.

Swaggering along the parapets, the Emperor addressed his subjects. ‘We brought you here as a retreat from the tawdry concerns of commonality. Here you have feasted and revelled, savoured all the delights of the world. As your Emperor, We have treated you in manner as befits the friends of the Imperial throne. In the harmony of this refuge of royalty, We have allowed no discordant note, no blemish upon the rich tapestry of Our accomplishments.’

The Emperor turned abruptly, pointing at the clustered streets of Carroburg. ‘This is an offence to the cultured tastes of you, Our most noble friends. It is a blight, a scourge upon Our delicate sensibilities.’ The impish smile worked its way onto Boris’s features as he turned back towards his audience. ‘We will remove this outrage, and in the doing offer to Our loyal subjects a spectacle such as none of you have ever seen.’

At a gesture from the Emperor, the soldiers manning the catapults loaded bales of straw and hay into the bowl of each engine. Other soldiers brought kegs of pitch and, employing long-handled brushes, painted each bale with the incendiary. After the men with the pitch withdrew, a lone knight advanced with a blazing torch. Gingerly, the warrior leaned towards the catapult and ignited the material loaded into the bowl.

Boris raised his hand up high. For a moment, his eyes glanced over at Erna. He could see the unspoken appeal written on her face. He grinned at the woman’s temerity. Since her capitulation during the masque, he’d found her far less interesting. Whatever charm she’d exerted over him had been rendered impotent. He knew she had broken at last to his will. There was nothing else to interest him now.

Savagely, the Emperor brought his hand slicing down. In time with the gesture, the arms of the catapults snapped upwards and hurled their flaming missiles into the air. Boris’s guests rushed to the edge of the walls, watching in rapt fascination as dozens of burning missiles descended upon Carroburg. Like fiery rain, the incendiaries came crashing down, exploding into little fingers of flame as they struck streets and rooftops. Wooded shingles and thatch ignited under the provocation, the fire quickly spreading among the semi-deserted neighbourhoods.

Again and again the incendiaries came raining down. The bells in the temples rang not with the slow notes of a dirge but with the rapid clamour of an alarm. From boarded homes and dilapidated hovels, the people of Carroburg rushed into the streets. Frantic mobs swarmed towards the river, gathering buckets, jars, pots, anything that might fetch water to oppose the flames.

Emperor Boris laughed at the peasants and their futile efforts, his jaded courtiers quickly warming to the cruel mockery. Wagers were soon placed on where each salvo would fall, the nobles watching with bated breath to see if their guesses would prove accurate. Jests were made over the pathetic fire brigades, the soldiers manning the catapults encouraged to lob their missiles wherever it seemed the peasants might turn back the flames. When a ring of flames began to close upon a stables that had been given over as a hospice for the sick, the nobles were treated to a parade of crippled humanity scrambling from the building, trying to hobble and crawl to safety before the fire could reach them.

Rare amusement this! Boris congratulated himself on this novel entertainment. Who but an Emperor could command such a performance? Who but an Emperor could afford to lay waste to an entire city? If nothing else had impressed his guests with the extent of his power, this would emblazon it upon their very souls! Once the spectacle was past, once the wonder and emotion had cooled into the reflections of cold reason, they would understand and appreciate what they had been witness to. He was thankful that the Black Plague had finally reached Carroburg. Without it, he might never have considered such a display of unrestrained power.

The conflagration quickly spread, entire districts blazing, the afternoon sky blotted by thick pillars of smoke. Before the gawking, jeering spectators assembled on the castle walls, Carroburg died.

Emperor Boris, tiring of the fiery display, turned from the battlements, seeking to find Erna. The woman’s helpless disapproval would, he decided, still add a much needed spice to the banquet of Carroburg’s destruction. He scowled when his roving eyes failed to find her. She’d retreated back into the castle, hiding herself away as she had when the nobles would feed the beggars. Boris chuckled at the absurdity. As though by not seeing a thing she could make it any less real.

He was debating whether to send someone to fetch Erna from wherever she had hidden herself when a note of alarm rose from the nobles on the parapet. Thinking perhaps he had missed some rare incident of unique tragedy, Boris rushed back to the battlements. He was surprised, even disappointed to find that his guests weren’t watching the fire but had instead turned their attention to something close to the base of the castle wall.

It was then that the Emperor became aware of the sounds, sounds that perhaps had been present for some time but had been deadened by the applause of his guests and the din rising from burning Carroburg. The sounds were strange, a confusion of dozens of small bells that seemed to have been selected for their disharmony. Beneath and around the chaotic notes were the tones of many chanting voices.

But such voices! Boris felt his pulse quicken at the loathsome noise. They were shrill, scratchy voices – the squeaks of vermin trying to contort themselves into the patterns of speech. He thought of the reports from the southern provinces, the appeals for monetary and military aid against hordes of horrific ratmen.

The Emperor’s guests pointed with trembling hands at a ragged line of sinister figures in tattered green robes. They were somehow monk-like despite the uncanny wrongness of their every step, the surging scurry in their gait that belonged to nothing human. It was from these figures that the eerie chant arose, and clenched in the furry talons of many of them were bells of every stripe and size.

Around and around the Otwinsstein the inhuman monks marched, filling the winding road with their pestiferous numbers. Every fifth monk bore aloft a metal censer fitted to a long pole, swinging it with crazed fervour overhead. The ball-like censers expelled clouds of grimy smoke, filth that was borne towards the castle by the winds sweeping across blazing Carroburg.

Emperor Boris heard the frightened mutters of his guests, the superstitious fears of men who now repented their mockery of the gods.

‘We stand protected,’ Boris called out to his guests. ‘The enchantment will shield us.’ Even as he spoke, he waved soldiers away from the catapults, sent servants hurrying to ready bows and arrows.

‘The magic will protect us,’ Boris scolded the terrified men around him as he watched a noxious green fog slither its way up the castle walls. ‘The gods are powerless to harm those who reject their power.’

Inwardly, however, the Emperor doubted his own words.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Middenheim
Ulriczeit, 1118

The skaven horde closed in around Graf Gunthar’s troops. The plaza rang with the clash of swords, the screams of terrified horses and the cries of dying men. Upon the roofs, skaven jezzails pelted the embattled soldiers, cackling viciously as warpstone bullets slammed through steel plate to explode inside human flesh. Mobs of scrawny slaves wrenched knights from their saddles, packs of clanrats thrust spears into horses and chopped down infantry with crooked swords and rusty bludgeons.

Before the pillars of the theatre, the Verminguard butchered their way through nobles and peasants, hacking them down with their wicked blades. At their back, Vecteek the Tyrant roared with sadistic mirth, relishing every scream, savouring the stink of blood in the air.

This night belonged to Clan Rictus and their despotic Warmonger! Before dawn shone down upon Middenheim, the humans would be exterminated. A few, perhaps, might be taken back to Skavenblight, trophies of his supreme victory. Most, however, would die. The armies of Rictus were vast and hungry.

Vecteek hissed with satisfaction as he watched his Verminguard cut down a knight and his destrier, reducing man and animal to a mangled heap before they were finished. Yes, his triumph would send terror coursing through not only the foolish hearts of the man-things, but through the perfidious minds of skaven as well. Where other Grey Lords had failed, he would return in victory! All would bow to his tactical genius, his incomparable might as general and warlord!

Baring his fangs, Vecteek swung around as a black shadow dropped towards him from the charred roof of the theatre. The Warmonger’s bronze mace in his paws, his foot kicked out, sending one of his palanquin’s bearers stumbling towards the shadowy apparition. It was only when the cloaked figure sprang forwards and sent the bearer reeling against the side of the palanquin with a graceful drop kick that Vecteek recognised the fearful presence as his faithful retainer, Deathmaster Silke of Clan Eshin. Just to be careful, he kept the stunned bearer between himself and the infamous assassin.

‘More man-things come,’ the Deathmaster reported, his voice like the whisper of a knife. ‘Dwarf-things too.’ Silke lashed his tail in anger. ‘Vrrmik betrays us!’

Vecteek snarled in outrage. Raising his mace he started to lunge at the Deathmaster. Silke, however, was one of the few messengers even Vecteek knew he couldn’t destroy. Instead, he contented himself by smashing the skull of his hapless bearer. ‘That tick-licking spider-pizzle!’ Vecteek roared. ‘Vrrmik-meat shall suffer much-much! Slow-die long-long!’

Other shadows dropped down from the roof, the menacing shapes of the Deathmaster’s apprentices. Briefly they whispered into the ears of their master, careful to keep their gaze averted from Vecteek’s enraged notice. The restraint he showed to Silke might not extend to themselves.

‘Men and dwarfs come,’ Silke told the Grey Lord, waving a paw towards the south.

Vecteek followed the gesture, whipping his tail in anger as he saw the assassin’s warning play out. The ratmen holding that part of the Eastgate were scurrying into the plaza, streaming from the streets and alleys in a confused panic. Behind them, rushing after them like hungry cats, came the armies of both Middenheim and Karak Grazhyakh, the armies Vrrmik and his treacherous scum were supposed to be holding down inside the Wolfrock!

The Grey Lord swung around to demand Silke and his assassins do something, anything that might stave off the disaster. The cloaked killers were already gone, evaporated back into their shadows. Vecteek gnashed his fangs and looked around for Puskab, thinking perhaps the plaguelord might have some pox or contagion that would strike down the avenging armies. Like the assassins, however, Puskab had vanished.

Fortune was abandoning Vecteek, and with it went his allies. The Grey Lord quivered in fury, brought his mace slamming down into the skull of another bearer. His improvised palanquin crashed to the street as the remaining bearers fled.

Crawling from the wreckage, Vecteek sniffed the air, drinking in the scent of his fleeing slaves. He would find them and they would pay. So would Puskab and Silke and that mould-furred dung-slime Vrrmik! All of them would suffer the wrath of Vecteek’s vengeance!

The Warmonger turned his keen nose towards the south, picking out from the riot of scents and smells the familiar scent of Middenheim’s pup-king. The prince was certain to be leading these enemies. Therefore, if Vecteek was to prevent the collapse of his own army, the prince must die!

As he led his men into the plaza, Mandred’s heart froze. Even their grisly march through the ravaged streets of the Wynd as they emerged from the temple of Grungni hadn’t prepared him for the carnage unfolding before them. That embattled ring of men at the centre of the plaza and the verminous horde that surrounded them. He had imagined the host down in the Fourth Deep to be formidable, but they were nothing beside the legion of ratkin he now gazed upon.

The men in the plaza were in a hopeless position unless they could be relieved, unless Mandred’s troops could fight their way to them.

‘Wolf and graf!’ The war-cry thundered from the throats of a thousand men. Even some of the dwarfs took up the cry, a show of solidarity that even in the bedlam of battle impressed the Middenheimers with the severity of its depth. It was no empty gesture, that adoption of the human cause. The humans had been ready to die in defence of the Crack; by joining the fight for Middenheim the dwarfs were promising to pass a grudge debt to ten generations of descendants should the city fall.

The dwarfs were sparing with words of gratitude. For them, deeds spoke louder than any words, and Mandred’s decision to honour his oath and drive the skaven from Karak Grazhyakh even when his own home was threatened had struck to the core of what a dwarf valued: honour.

With the help of the dwarfs, Mandred’s troops drove the skaven before them. The monsters died by the score as they wreaked a terrible vengeance. Revenge, however, wasn’t the passion burning in the prince’s heart. Rising above the heads of the men trapped in the plaza, he had seen his father’s banner, the heraldry of the castle and the wolf which only Graf Gunthar could bear.

He didn’t know if his father yet lived, but he did know that when those brave men had marched against the skaven, it was the graf who had led them.

Beside the prince, Beck cursed as the flailing body of a ratman fouled his sword and nearly dragged the blade from his hand. The knight looked around anxiously, observing that they were perhaps being a little too eager in their advance. They were striking deep into the skaven formation, but at the same time they were becoming separated from the bulk of their own forces.

‘Use the edge, not the point,’ Kurgaz Smallhammer scolded Beck. The dwarf hero had insisted on accompanying Mandred when they struck out for the surface. Many ratkin deaths would be needed to balance the murder of his brother Mirko. The theft of Drakdrazh, he claimed, was a grudge that no amount of blood could wipe away. Each skaven skull he smashed was a dirge to his brother and a vow that he would find the white vermin that had stolen his hammer.

Beck snarled at the dwarf. ‘I know how to use a sword,’ he snapped, tearing the blade free just as a ratman leaped for his throat. The brute knocked Beck onto his back, its claws raking his cheek. Before the thing could do any worse damage, Kurgaz’s hammer came crashing down.

Beck blinked up at his saviour from a mess of vermin blood and rodent brains. Kurgaz shook his head at the knight. ‘If you fight like one of them, you may as well smell like one of them.’

Mandred chopped the paw from his own adversary, the creatures behind it losing their appetite for battle when they heard the squeals of their maimed comrade. The prince struck the injured ratman across the neck as it tried to flee, dropping it in a quivering heap. The other skaven fled, struggling to wriggle past the press of warriors behind them.

‘Beck! Kurgaz!’ the prince shouted as he saw the nature of those warriors. They were tall, black-furred skaven clad in imposing armour of plate and chain. Rending axes and murderous halberds were clenched in their paws.

Mandred’s comrades rallied to his side, guarding his flanks as the Verminguard charged at them. Slippery, treacherous foes, the huge skaven married their bestial strength to the depraved tactics of the lowest street fighter. Mandred thought of his many mock-battles with his instructor, van Cleeve. The swordmaster would have been appalled at the feckless, vile methods employed by these monsters.

Kurgaz was nearly beheaded after a Verminguard smashed the butt of its halberd into the dwarf’s groin, eliciting a shrill gasp Mandred would never have believed him capable of. Beck’s left eye was an oozing mess of blood and jelly after a skaven jabbed one of its claws into his face.

His own turn came when a Verminguard was practically thrown onto his sword by one of the skaven’s treacherous kin. Mandred’s sword was wrenched from his grasp by the shuddering body impaled upon it. As the armoured ratman crashed to the ground, its betrayer moved in for the kill.

Its fur was even blacker than that of the Verminguard, its armour cast from some strange alloy and adorned with a riot of spikes. There was a stamp of such unreserved evil in the thing’s aspect that Mandred reflexively recoiled from the ratman’s approach. The monster’s eyes glowed with an eerie luminance as it bared its fangs.

‘Prince-meat,’ the skaven hissed in debased Reikspiel. ‘Die-die for Vecteek!’

The Grey Lord jumped at Mandred, bringing a huge spiked mace smashing towards the prince’s skull. Mandred managed to throw himself to one side. Instead of having his brains dashed in, his shoulder was merely clipped by one of the spikes. Even that slight cut sent burning agony roaring through his veins. As Mandred reeled away, trying to fend off the skaven with nothing but a dagger, he realised the monster’s weapon was coated in some loathsome poison. Vecteek didn’t need to land a telling blow; even a glancing hit might deliver enough poison into his system to drop him!

Vecteek raised his muzzle, snuffling as he inhaled the smell of fear wafting from Mandred. The Verminguard had distanced themselves from the fight, concentrating on Beck and Kurgaz and the others trying to aid the prince. The ratmen seemed confident their overlord could settle Mandred on his own.

That display of contempt, executed by such lowly creatures, was a slight that made Mandred forget his weariness, forget the burning pain of skaven poison throbbing along his shoulder. Even the fate of his city, the rescue of his father were forgotten. All that was left was outrage.

Snarling like one of Ulric’s wolves, Mandred dived at the gloating Vecteek. His drive brought him upon the monster almost before the fiend could react. He felt the mace slam against his back, felt the sting as some of its spikes pierced his mail. But he also felt his dagger slice against furry flesh, felt hot blood ooze down the blade.

Vecteek leaped away from the prince, snarling in pain. The skaven pawed at the cut across his forearm, hissing as black blood bubbled up between his claws. There was an almost human expression of disbelief on the monster’s face, as though he refused to accept that anyone could be so bold as to strike him.

Mandred exploited Vecteek’s distraction. Fighting against the pain that coursed through his body, he threw himself to the ground in a sprawling dive. Vecteek reacted swiftly to the prince, bringing the spiked mace crashing down. The blow narrowly missed Mandred, slamming into the paving stones and pelting him with chips that cut his face.

The ratman reared back to strike again, but his opportunity was lost. Mandred’s dive had brought him to where a skaven carcass lay. Snatching the rusty sword from the dead paw, the prince rolled onto his back and thrust the point of the blade upwards at the same instant that Vecteek dived down upon him.

The point of the sword caught the monster in the belly, Vecteek’s own impetus driving the sword through the spiked mail he wore. The skaven’s fierce howl of bloodlust disintegrated into a pained yowl of agony.

Vecteek’s foot raked across Mandred’s face when he tried to drive the blade deeper. Instinctively, the prince flung his arms across his face to protect his eyes from the vermin’s claws. The instant the grip on the sword was gone, the skaven staggered back, his own mace falling to the ground as he clawed at the impaling blade.

Squeaking in agony, Vecteek wrenched the sword free, his glowing eyes glaring vindictively at Mandred. For an instant, the wounded monster seemed determined to rejoin the battle. Then the hate-filled eyes widened, the bestial head whipped from side to side in frantic, erratic motions.

A keening wail of sheer terror rolled across the plaza, erupting from a thousand skaven. The scent of Vecteek’s fear, the sound of their invulnerable tyrant squealing in pain, these had resonated through the senses of every ratman, driving black terror into their craven hearts. Moaning, bewailing their own imminent doom now that the despot was defeated, a wretched rout began. Wherever Vecteek turned his head, he saw the same thing. Hundreds of warriors throwing down their weapons, clawing and trampling each other in their desperate efforts to escape back into the streets. Men and dwarfs pursued the creatures, butchering them as they tried to flee.

The terror of his minions infected Grey Lord Vecteek. His eyes widened with fear. Whipping his tail at Mandred, forcing the prince to again shield his face, the Warmonger turned and fled, dashing towards the burned shell of the theatre.

Vecteek the Tyrant never reached the safety of the ruin. As he fled, a lone figure stood in his path, a blazing sword clenched in his mailed fist. Much of his speed and agility had bled out of the wounded skaven. When Legbiter came slashing at his head, Vecteek wasn’t quick enough to escape the runefang’s bite.

Bloodied, his finery reduced to rags in the long fighting, his wolfskin cloak dragging behind him, Graf Gunthar spat on the twitching corpse of Grey Lord Vecteek. A kick of his iron boot sent the vermin’s head bouncing across the plaza.

The graf cast his eyes across the battlefield, nodding to himself as he watched the defenders of Middenheim pursue the fleeing skaven back into the streets. The battle was over, now the cleansing would begin.

From the corner of his eye, Graf Gunthar noticed movement. He watched as a man rose painfully from the ground. Until that moment, he hadn’t realised that Vecteek’s foe had been his own son.

Across the bloodied battlefield, father and son looked to one another. The eyes of the son were filled with love and adoration, exhilarated to find the father alive. The eyes of the father beamed with pride, exalted to know that his son had become the man he had always prayed he would become.

For a moment, the lords of Middenheim stood, not speaking, words too clumsy to convey what they would say to each other.

The moment ended as a sharp crack boomed from one of the rooftops. A puff of smoke, a flash of flame and a slinking shape retreated into the darkness.

The graf cried out, threw up his arms as the warpstone bullet slammed into him, chewing through armour and flesh like a hot knife. The agony of his wound sent him crashing to his knees. From his knees, he pitched forwards onto the ground.

Mandred rushed forwards, cursing the pain that slowed his steps, that tried to drag him down before he could reach the body lying sprawled face-down on the cold stones. A tangle of soldiers and noblemen had already gathered around the graf, but the solemn circle parted at the prince’s approach.

Sickness bubbled in Mandred’s stomach as he stared down at the horrible hole in his father’s back. He recognised the evil black bullet sizzling at the centre of the wound. It was such a bullet that had almost killed Kurgaz Smallhammer – the poisonous bullet from a skaven jezzail.

His hand trembling, the prince reached down and gently rolled his father onto his back. A gasp of pain shuddered its way from the graf’s lips. Mandred’s heart raced. The graf yet lived!

‘Quickly!’ Mandred shouted at those around him. ‘Lift up the graf!’ He hesitated for a second, wondering where they could take him. The Sisters of Shallya were below in Warrenburg. The alchemist Neist was dead. It might take days to stir any of the physicians of Eastgate from their hiding places, assuming any of them had survived.

The life of his father hung by a thread. There was only one power to which Mandred could appeal for mercy, the same power that he felt had delivered Middenheim from the skaven.

‘Take him to the temple of Ulric!’ Mandred ordered, praying that the Lord of Wolves would again lend his aid.

Carroburg
Sigmarzeit, 1115

The green fume crept up the walls of the Schloss Hohenbach, rising like some fog spewed from Khaine’s black hell. The nobles, only moments before mocking death and plague, now trembled in terror, rooted to the spot in fascinated horror as the noxious cloud came for them.

Archers loosed volleys of arrows down into the fume, hoping to strike down the inhuman monks that menaced the castle. Blinded by the green smoke, the bowmen had to trust to luck rather than skill. Only a few pained squeaks rewarded their frantic efforts.

Emperor Boris recoiled from the battlements, retreating as the odious fog rolled up between the crenellations. Baron Pieter von Kirchof – the Emperor’s Champion, the most famed swordsman in the Empire, the man who had offered his own niece to stave off the plague – was the first to be touched by the foul fog. Slow in withdrawing from the battlements, he suffered the caress of one of those ghastly wisps. The effect was both immediate and ghastly.

Von Kirchof’s skin blackened, his face vanishing beneath a confusion of hideous boils. He took a few staggering steps, then collapsed, a wheezing, coughing wreck. Blood bubbled from his lips, gore dripped from his nose. In a matter of heartbeats, the man grew still, his body heaving in a final agonised gasp.

The Emperor’s guests degenerated into a panicked riot, converging upon the door leading back into the castle as the fog swept up over the parapet. They stampeded the archers who stood in their way, trampled the bodies of peasant servants unfortunate enough to impede their escape. In their hour of death, the great and good of the Empire, the scions of culture and society, the paragons of government, showed their quality.

Boris, first and greatest of them all, anticipated the rout. First through the door, first to abandon the walls for the security of the castle, he slammed the portal closed even as Count Artur of Nuln came racing towards him. The Emperor could feel the count’s fists beating on the heavy oak frame, could hear the muffled pleas spilling from his lips. He could hear Count Artur’s entreaties become screams as the maddened rush of nobility crushed him against the unyielding door.

The Emperor shivered as the cries of the doomed hammered against the door. The green fog was boiling across the wall now, bringing its loathsome death with it. The vapour wasn’t simply smoke and mist, but a concentration of the plague itself, a concentration so vicious that it did its deadly work not in days or hours but in minutes. The green monks had brought it to the castle, had brought it to smite the Emperor and his minions.

Boris retreated from the door. The impact of fists against the heavy oak had become weaker as more and more of those on the wall fell victim to the fume. It was a stout door, designed to repulse invaders in a siege. Even the strongest man would need something better than his fists to bring such a door down. But what good was a door against something without substance or shape?

Seeping under the door, glowing in the gloom of the corridor, the ghastly fog crept into Boris’s refuge, almost as though in pursuit of the man who had escaped it.

Moaning in terror, the Emperor turned and fled. It was impossible! All of it impossible! Fleischauer’s spell, the warlock’s magic! He had been assured it would work, that he would be defended against the Black Plague!

The warlock had deceived him. It was a realisation that made the Emperor’s stomach turn sour. As he fled through the empty passages of the castle, Boris screamed for Fleischauer. If he were to die, then he would demand an accounting from the feckless conjurer!

Boris found Fleischauer in the great hall. The warlock was lying on his side, prostrate before the pedestal. One of the enchanted leeches was clenched in his hand, but he would never draw its magic into his body. The man was dead, a look of such abject horror frozen on his face as to make even von Kirchof’s agonies seem timid.

Lying atop the sprawled warlock, its toothless mouth slobbering impotently at his neck, was the tattooed thing, the violated husk of Sasha. It hadn’t been left to the thing to visit any real harm upon its tormentors, but in some caprice of fate Fleischauer’s mind had collapsed when Sasha fell upon him from the pedestal. The warlock’s heart had burst from sheer fright.

Gazing in horror at the obscene vista, the Emperor fled once more. There was no pattern or motive to his retreat now, simply the blind panic of a man who feels the cold claws of death reaching out to claim him.

Through chamber and corridor, down stairs and steps, the most powerful man in the Empire raced to preserve even a few scant moments of his corrupt life. He passed the collapsed forms of servants and soldiers, their bodies disfigured by the attentions of the Black Plague. Within the whole of the castle, he alone yet drew breath. All around him were the marks of death.

Approaching the dungeons in his desperate flight, Boris at last encountered something alive. It was a creature that carried itself in crude mockery of human shape, a verminous abomination cloaked in the habit of a monk, the cloth unspeakably foul and tattered. From beneath the hood, the fanged muzzle of an enormous rat projected. Its whiskers twitched as it drank in the Emperor’s scent, and its beady eyes glittered with obscene delight. Waving a disfigured paw that was bloated with pustules and lesions, the ratman summoned others of its breed from the stygian darkness.

Boris shrieked. His retreat before had been frightened. Now it was the product of madness. In his derangement, the Emperor fled back the way he had come, matching step for step as he tried to elude the ghastly ratkin.

Chance brought the Emperor into the little forsaken chapel of Sigmar. Rushing into the sanctuary, he slammed the stout door shut behind him. Sweating, the seams of his finery splitting as he dragged the crumbling remains of a pew against the portal, Boris did his utmost to block the entrance. The first pew was followed by a second, and then by a dusty tapestry he tore down from the stone wall and stuffed beneath the edge of the panel.

Panting, huffing from his exertions, the Emperor turned away from the blockaded door. It was only then that his panicked mind appreciated that he wasn’t alone in the chapel. Two other survivors had found their way here: a noble and a peasant knelt before the altar.

‘There are… things out there,’ the Emperor stammered. He rushed to the noblewoman, turning Princess Erna around to face him. ‘Vermin… Underfolk!’ he wailed, imploring her to believe him. He wilted under the accusation in her eyes. She’d begged him not to bombard Carroburg and he’d been deaf to her pleas.

Unable to maintain her gaze, Boris turned to the peasant, gripping Doktor Moschner’s arm in a desperate clutch. ‘They’re all dead!’ he wailed. ‘The Black Plague. The ratmen brought it. They mean to kill us all. We’re next!’

Doktor Moschner shrugged free of the Emperor’s hold. ‘If we are meant to die, then we will die, Your Imperial Majesty,’ he told Boris. He turned back towards the altar, raised his eyes to the hammer on the wall. ‘Only a power higher than even an emperor can help us now.’

The Emperor cringed away from the altar, horrified by the fatalistic acceptance adopted by his companions and their retreat into the facile comfort of faith. All his life he had doubted and mocked the gods. To think they had real power, to believe that they truly governed the world around men – it was a concept as abhorrent to him as his own mortality. Yet, in this hour, was it not his own mortality that confronted him? Where would all his power, all his authority go if he were to die? What would be the legacy he would leave behind?

In his despair, Emperor Boris knelt down beside Princess Erna and Doktor Moschner. All through the night he added his prayers to theirs, when he wasn’t confessing his many sins to the gods he had reviled all his life. Many were the vows he made, the oaths he swore as he beseeched Sigmar to spare him his life.

Every moment, the Emperor expected to hear his companions admonish him for his many crimes, waited to hear the ratmen scrabbling at the chapel door. Neither voice nor sound disturbed him through the long hours of darkness.

The vermin had too many victims readily available to bother about sniffing out the Emperor’s refuge.

The survivors were too shocked by Boris’s confessions to offer either comment or accusation.

There were some things too despicable even for the gods to hear.

Bright sunlight streamed into the chapel as dawn broke above the ruins of Carroburg. The first rays stabbed down, piercing through the shadows to illuminate the holy hammer mounted behind the altar. Despite the patina of dust covering it, the daylight shone from the bronze icon bolted to the hammer in an almost blinding brilliance. It was an instant only, then the sun shifted position and the blaze of light was gone.

The three survivors who had sat praying through the night rose slowly, their legs weak from cramps and impaired circulation.

‘We’ve survived the night,’ Boris observed, the words spoken in a timid whisper.

Erna shook her head. ‘Is that a blessing or a curse?’ she wondered, staring at the comet and hammer behind the altar.

‘While there is life, there is hope,’ Doktor Moschner offered. He started to move down the connecting passage leading to the great hall. He saw the fright that rushed into Erna’s eyes. They’d heard the Emperor’s description of what they might find waiting for them outside. ‘Someone has to go,’ the physician stated. ‘Besides, I’m only a peasant,’ he added, directing a glare at the Emperor.

Erna watched the doktor withdraw down the passage, creeping up on the barricade as though he were a hunter stalking prey. Timidly, he began shifting the pews Boris had used to blockade the door.

‘We are alive,’ the Emperor said, this time in a louder voice. His expression was no longer meek, but instead uplifted, the cherubic smile once more dominant. ‘Even the gods don’t dare kill Us.’

‘Do not tempt fate,’ Erna warned him. ‘You made many promises, pledged to undo the crimes…’

‘Crimes?’ Boris sneered. ‘An Emperor is the law itself. We can commit no crime!’ He brought his bejewelled hands clapping together. ‘We can use this,’ he mused. ‘If We act quickly, position the right people, We can fill the vacuum left by the ones the plague has taken. We can put Our people there, make the leaderless domains Our own! It might take a show of force to–’

A far different show of force came crashing down upon the Emperor’s skull. Boris collapsed before the altar, blood gushing from his fractured head. Erna stood above the tyrant and brought the stone hammer crashing down a second time.

A third.

A fourth.

‘Sasha and Fleischauer aren’t in the hall. The ratmen must have carried them away…’ Doktor Moschner’s report trailed off as he stared at Erna and at the mangled heap sprawled beneath her. Both were barely recognizable as the people he had left behind. Erna’s hair was bleached white, her face contorted into a fearful rictus. The Emperor had no face that could be recognised as such.

When Erna finally lifted her eyes from the man she’d murdered and saw Moschner, she let the heavy stone hammer fall from her fingers.

Doktor Moschner said nothing, simply advanced and tenderly led Erna away from the dead tyrant.

‘We must leave this place,’ the doktor declared. ‘Go somewhere there are people. People we can tell this to.’

Erna stiffened, tried to pull away from his grip.

Doktor Moschner smiled at her and shook his head. ‘You’ve done nothing,’ he told Erna. ‘His Imperial Majesty has expired from the plague. I am his personal physician. I should know such things. That is what I intend to tell people. If an idealistic young princess tells them otherwise, we will both visit the headsman.

‘You’ve done what no one else was brave enough to do,’ he told her. ‘Come, we must hurry from this place. There is an entire Empire waiting to hear that Boris Goldgather is dead.

‘In dark days such as these, the people can use a reason to celebrate.’

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-one

Altdorf
Kaldezeit, 1114

An avalanche of fur and fangs, swords and spears, the skaven crashed into the Altdorfer battle line. Men died upon the points of rusted spears, were dragged down by verminous claws, or slashed and stabbed with blades of every description. In that frenzied charge, the speed and ferocity of the ratmen, the bestial bloodlust pounding through their brains, took a butcher’s toll of the untrained peasants. The few clusters of seasoned warriors, the templars and the groups of soldiers, were spread too thinly to blunt the murderous impact of that initial charge.

The skaven revelled in the slaughter, trampling dead and wounded beneath their paws. Many of these had been the same fiends who had marauded through the towns and villages of the south, depopulating entire swathes of country in Averland and Solland. They had seen first-hand the breaking point of humans such as these. Any moment, they expected the confused rabble opposing them to break and flee, to turn tail and try to escape. In that moment, there would be a real reckoning. Even the lowest skavenslave looked forward to a full belly after this day’s work.

The ratkin soon found they didn’t know their enemy at all. The humans held their line. Peasant after peasant was dragged down, mutilated by the ferocity of the skaven, yet for each that fell, another grimly stepped forwards to take his place. After that initial frenzied charge, the monsters found themselves locked in close combat with an adversary who refused to falter. Caught between the human battle line and the press of their own reinforcements rushing up from behind, the skaven lost the room to manoeuvre, their advantage of speed and agility negated. The fight became a test of muscle and endurance, qualities where men had the advantage.

The tide of battle began to turn. First around the knots of templars and soldiers, then across the whole of the perimeter, the ratmen began to die. Vengeful swords smashed verminous skulls, vicious bludgeons dashed rodent brains, cruel knives opened ratty bellies. Squeaks of fright sounded above the snarls of fighting men, at first only a few but then growing into a terrified din. The pungent stink of spurting glands washed across the battlefield.

Across the line, the imposing black-robed hulks of Sigmar’s warrior priests shouted encouragement to the faithful. Swinging their warhammers, the priests splashed bestial blood across the paving stones, their voices raised in echo to the battle-cry of the Grand Theogonist. ‘For Sigmar!’

The skaven host, only moments before an almost elemental force of unstoppable destruction, broke before the stalwart valour of the defenders. Initially, only a few ratmen turned, but their panic spread like wildfire through the packed vermin. The craven nature of their slinking breed subdued the feral bloodlust of moments before. Wailing and whining, the skaven began to flee.

‘Run them down!’ a bold warrior priest shouted, swinging his hammer overhead to draw the eyes of his compatriots to him. ‘Run them down!’ he repeated, rallying those close to him to the pursuit.

Before the priest could chase after the fleeing skaven, a sharp crack sounded from the window of a building overlooking the square. A few keen-eyed men saw a flash of flame and a puff of smoke, a glimpse of the lurking jezzail hidden inside the house. None, however, could fail to see the gory effect of the ratman’s shot. The priest’s bald head exploded like a melon, leaving his headless corpse to flop to the ground.

More shots cracked from the buildings as other jezzails fired into the defenders, seeking to blunt the impetus of their pursuit. The snipers targeted mounted knights and shouting priests, the plumed helms of Imperial officers and the ruffled collars of nobles. It was a concentrated effort to eliminate the commanders, to slaughter the leaders behind the human opposition. The skaven were only too familiar with the kind of rout that would result should their own teeming swarms be deprived of the malefic threat of their chiefs.

Again, the vermin failed to understand their foe. Instead of blunting the attack, the cowardly sniping only evoked a dull roar from the charging humans, a savage cry of rage and indignation.

Then an opportunistic jezzail-wielding sniper, perhaps more calculating than others of his kin, fired at the glowing priest standing upon the steps of the Great Cathedral. The report of the shot seemed to somehow ring out above the din and clamour of battle, reverberating through the ears of all in the square. On the steps, the Grand Theogonist’s body was thrown back by the impact, blood flying from the wound. Knocked against the huge doors, his body slumped against the twin-tailed comet carved there, Gazulgrund’s arms drooped, the bulk of Thorgrim hanging limp in his hands.

All eyes turned to the doorway, man and skaven alike appreciating the enormity of that single shot. A hush fell upon the battle, both sides watching with bated breath, one with eagerness, the other with dread. After the hideous havoc wrought by the other jezzails, there were none who doubted that the Grand Theogonist would fall.

Gazulgrund defied their expectations. Pushing himself away from the door, his body surrounded by a nimbus of light, he strode out to the edge of the topmost step and raised Thorgrim on high once more, hefting the immense mattock as though it weighed nothing. ‘For Sigmar!’ he roared, his voice like the bellow of a titan.

A mighty cheer sounded from the defenders, drowning out the shrieks of terror that rose from the ratmen. The skaven were now thrown into complete disarray, fleeing in a crazed crush of furred heads and scaly tails. Awed by the divine aura of the Grand Theogonist, the jezzails didn’t dare fire again, but quit their sniper nests with obscene haste.

As the skaven scurried back into the streets, abandoning the square and their siege of the temple, it seemed the battle belonged to Altdorf. Then, from those skaven trying to flee southwards, there sounded a new note of terror. The beasts began to scatter, many of them turning and trying to dash through the very ranks of their pursuers. A moment later, the reason for such abject desperation made itself known.

Great sheets of green flame shot out from down the street, incinerating those skaven who had not yet fled the avenue. Dozens of men were caught in the vicious blast, their bodies bursting into flame as the fiery green vapours engulfed them. Behind the fires, two wagon-like machines were dragged into the square, burly ratmen working the nozzles of hoses to spray the caustic demi-fluid across any who tried to approach the street they guarded.

The fire-throwers made no effort to advance, nor did the armoured warp-guard who assumed positions on their flanks. Their orders didn’t include capturing the temple or killing the humans. Those tasks were being left to the warpcaster.

Shortly after establishing their perimeter, the vanguard of Clan Skryre heard the crackle of Sythar Doom’s voice barking orders to his warp-engineers. A moment later, the ground shuddered as the siege engine arm was sent crashing against the crossbeam.

The crystalline sphere hit high upon the face of the cathedral, flashing with ghoulish luminescence as its malignant energies vented themselves against the façade. Sculptures withered in that burst of corrosive power; gargoyles were sheared from their moorings and sent plummeting to the plaza far below. Glass melted, dripping down in grisly streams that marred the once unblemished marble. It was a terrifying display, but far less than Sythar Doom had hoped for. The Grey Lord’s whiskers twitched as he wondered if, just perhaps, some divine power did defend this man-thing temple.

Irritably, the Warpmaster snapped fresh orders to the crew of the warpcaster. He hadn’t failed to notice the shining aura emanating from the Grand Theogonist. They would put the power of this man-thing god to a real test – by unleashing the might of the warpcaster against something far less resilient than marble and stone.

Adolf Kreyssig dug his spurs into the flanks of his destrier, sending the great warhorse bolting down the narrow street. The animal’s steel-shod hooves stove in the verminous bodies of the skaven that blocked the way, crushing them beneath its bulk. His sword licked out, slashing right and left at the ratkin who snapped at him in their dying agonies or who thought to clamber up into the saddle with him to escape the destrier’s stamping hooves. Behind him, a squadron of Kaiserknecht and mounted Kaiserjaeger slaughtered the maimed monsters he left behind.

It was a desperate gamble, risking all in this frantic effort to relieve the siege around the Great Cathedral. Given his own choice, Kreyssig would have tried to hold the Imperial Palace, a structure that had been built for defence, not worship. The choice, however, wasn’t his own. Bitterly, he reflected that it had been he himself who had allowed the decision to be taken from him. By seeking to control and exploit the Sigmarites, he had caused their faith to regain much of its faltering prominence among the peasants of Altdorf. He had used Sigmar to rally the people. Now he had to back his wager. If they lost the Great Cathedral, then they would lose everything.

Kreyssig struck out with his boot, kicking fangs down the throat of a lunging skaven. The brutes they encountered now were less organised, more frantic than the packs of looters they had seen up on the hill. It occurred to him that these might be refugees from the battle unfolding around the Great Cathedral, that against all reason and odds the Sigmarites had somehow turned the tide.

Then his gaze was drawn skywards by a bright flash of light. Kreyssig saw the sphere crash against the temple wall, watched in mute fascination as the very stones began to corrode beneath the unleashed energy. His hopes of only a moment before were dashed. Some of the skaven might have quit the field, but others were still on the attack and they had brought with them some unholy weapon.

‘We must hurry,’ Baroness von den Linden called out from behind him. It was uncanny, the horsemanship she displayed, urging her slender mare to feats that even a destrier would balk at. Further evidence of the witchcraft at her command. Witchcraft, she seemed to think, was no longer a thing to keep hidden.

Kreyssig frowned and urged his own mount further into the swarming press of skaven. Half a dozen of the beasts crumpled under his lunging horse, two others fell beneath his sword and still the path ahead was engulfed in vermin. ‘We’ll never get through!’ he cursed. There were other streets they might try, but that would mean falling back, retracing their steps to the Imperial Palace. The idea of turning his back to the ratmen made the flesh between his shoulders itch, almost as though it felt the point of a skaven spear pressing against it.

Baroness von den Linden shook her head. ‘I will save this city,’ she vowed in a voice that was like a razor. Once again, Kreyssig felt the deathly chill of magic in the air. The witch’s eyes faded into pools of amber light, her crimson hair flowing about her in a spectral breeze. Thrusting her hand forwards, she pointed at the ratmen.

The witch’s voice rose in a keening wail, a sound that had in it the shattering of glass and the shriek of quenched steel. It was a banshee cry that sickened the comparatively dull ears of men. To the hyper-keen senses of the skaven, it was an aural torment, a scourge that set them squeaking in agony. Wracked by pain, clamping their paws over their ears, the ratmen turned and fled, hacking their way through their own kin in their desperate rout…

When they had ridden from the palace, Kreyssig had contrived to remove all the other prominent leaders from the effort to reach the Great Cathedral, sending Duke Vidor to coordinate his fragmented army, dispatching Grand Master Lieber to the river and warning Arch-Lector von Reisarch to keep inside the fortress lest the ratmen claim all the hierarchs of the temple in one fell swoop. He hadn’t been able to resist the baroness’s demands to accompany the group, however. It had been enough of an ordeal just to get her to keep to the rear ranks. He knew that if they succeeded the leader of the charge would be adored as a hero by Altdorf. He would be that hero.

Now, however, he found himself pushed aside by the witch. Baroness von den Linden urged her mare down the road, her eyes still aflame with the power of her sorcery. The monsters didn’t make any more attempts to scurry up the street, but instead decided the witch was more terrible than whatever they had fled in the square.

The plaza around the Great Cathedral was a chaotic scene. Ratmen swarmed seemingly everywhere, some intent on fleeing, others, cornered like the rats they so resembled, putting up a vicious fight. Corpses littered the square, the stones soaked with the red blood of men and the black filth of skaven. Upon the steps of the cathedral, his body aglow with an unearthly nimbus, stood Grand Theogonist Gazulgrund, his voice booming out in a paean of battle. At one corner of the square, a disciplined brigade of armoured skaven fended off the ragged assaults of peasants and flagellants. Assisting them in their efforts were two grisly, flame-belching contraptions.

In the street behind the fire-throwers, Kreyssig could see the palanquin of the spark-toothed rat-sorcerer. There was no mistaking that disfigured abomination. Towering behind the sorcerer was what looked like a clockwork catapult constructed on a monstrous scale. Even as he watched, the long arm of the machine sprang forwards, slamming into the crossbeam and flinging another sinister glowing sphere into the sky.

As the sphere came hurtling earthwards, Kreyssig was nearly blinded by a flare of brilliant blue fire close beside him. Overhead, the orb exploded in a burst of similar brilliance, showering a dark miasma that crackled with green lightning onto the heads of the armoured skaven and across the bulks of the fire-throwers. The skaven wailed in agony and terror in the brief instant they had to grasp what had happened.

A third flare of blinding light, but this one wasn’t silent as those from before. The crackling miasma that rained down upon the skaven sizzled on their armour, incinerated their flesh and ignited the combustible fuel that fed the fire-throwers. Green fire blossomed from the wooden casks, immolating the entire corner of the square. Hundreds of skaven were reduced to embers in the firestorm, the fire-throwers exploded into charred splinters.

Kreyssig looked from the skaven to the persistent glow beside him. In horror he beheld the body of Baroness von den Linden seemingly wrapped in a mantle of blue fire. The witch’s hair and gown billowed about her wildly, caught in a tempest that was so confined that even the mane of her steed failed to suffer its touch. Whatever she had done to the sphere, there was no concealing her magic now. Hundreds of awestruck peasants and clergy were watching her as she calmly trotted her horse towards the flames.

Cursing under his breath, Kreyssig spurred his warhorse towards her. ‘Are you mad?’ he growled, trying to catch her reins. ‘Everyone will see. Everyone will know!’

The witch pulled away from his approach. She favoured Kreyssig with that familiar coy smile. ‘Let them see,’ she said. ‘After I save this city, not the Grand Theogonist himself will dare touch me.’

Rushing masses of peasants came charging across the square, eager to come to the aid of their miraculous saviour. Savagely, they cut down the few skaven who had escaped the holocaust. Somewhere, someone gave voice to a shout, a cry that became a frenzied chorus: ‘The Lady of Sigmar!’

Kreyssig could only stare in wonder as the baroness rode towards the flames. He could see the skaven beyond that wall of fire, frantically trying to reload their catapult. He saw their spark-mouthed sorcerer threatening and shouting at them. The jewel-eyed rodent glanced back, flinching as he saw the glowing witch approach. Self-preservation overwhelmed his lust for victory. With a loud yelp, he leaped from his palanquin and scurried off down the street.

The skaven operating the catapult weren’t so fortunate. Raising both her arms, thrusting her palms in the direction of the strange siege engine, the baroness invoked a spell of devastating potency. The orb being loaded into the catapult shattered as it was being set into the bucket. The rampant energies flashed into a blinding coruscation. Other flashes of light followed the first, one after the other, as steady as footfalls. The detonation of the first sphere had caught the ones behind it, igniting them inside their wooden boxes.

Kreyssig could only marvel at the devastation, the utter decimation of the skaven. With her magic, Baroness von den Linden had broken the back of the skaven assault.

As he was considering what that meant, what the chorus of shouts from the mob might mean, Kreyssig was suddenly seized and pulled from his saddle. He crashed to the ground, landing on his side in a painful sprawl.

He expected to feel the fangs of a ratman at his throat; instead, he saw a man in the hooded habit of a monk looming over him. ‘You brought the witch here!’ his attacker accused. ‘You brought her here to deceive the people with her sorcery! But Solkan is not fooled so easily…’

In those murderous tones, Kreyssig recognised the voice of the witch-taker. Once before the fanatic had tried to kill him. Then he had been thwarted by his own penchant for ritual and the timely intervention of the skaven. This time, Kreyssig knew neither factor would sway the killer’s hand.

Instead, rescue came from the most unexpected source Kreyssig would have imagined. As Auernheimer brought his sword arm up to deliver the killing blow, he was himself struck from behind. The witch-taker crumpled, the back of his skull shattered like an egg. Bits of the Solkanite’s brain dripped down the jewelled haft of Thorgrim. Grand Theogonist Gazulgrund stared down at the man he had just rescued, a strange look in his gaze.

‘You rescued me,’ Kreyssig said, not daring to move while the priest held the mattock over him. The nimbus of divine energy was fading from the Grand Theogonist, but there was still a terrible power in those eyes.

‘It was the will of Sigmar,’ Gazulgrund said. ‘You brought relief to the temple. You saved the house of Sigmar from profanation.’

The priest’s voice was far from grateful. Kreyssig felt his spine tingle when he noticed that Gazulgrund’s awful stare wasn’t directed at him. He was looking past the prostrate Protector. He was looking at the cheering mob surrounding Baroness von den Linden. Listening to those blasphemous chants.

‘I saved you because you are the only one who can do what needs to be done,’ Gazulgrund said. ‘You are the one who can save the people from delusion.’

Kreyssig guessed what the priest expected. His answer was a sneer. ‘She is my ally and my mistress, why would I side against her?’

The Grand Theogonist impiously kicked the corpse of Auernheimer. ‘As long as she lives, you will never be free of such fanatics. The cult of Solkan, the Inquisition of Verena, even the zealots of my own Temple. They will not abide such overt witchery. They will not rest until it – and those tainted by it – have been destroyed.’ He gestured with Thorgrim at the cheering mob. ‘Today the people cheer, but tomorrow they will remember the holy manifestation of Sigmar. A true miracle leaves its mark on a man’s soul. Sorcery, even employed benevolently, leaves only nightmares.’

Gazulgrund’s shoulders sagged, the great weight of Thorgrim causing him to hunch over. Whatever sacred power had briefly manifested within him was draining away. Still there lingered that terrible power in his eyes, in his voice. ‘Choose your side well, Protector. You may either profit by what has happened here today, or become a victim of it.’

Kreyssig watched the priest slowly withdraw towards the temple, his last words echoing through his mind. He turned his head, studying the mob, seeing them cheer and praise Baroness von den Linden. To them, the witch was nothing less than a living saint, a miracle worker. The Temple of Sigmar wouldn’t dare refute such beliefs because to do so would be to admit that sorcery had succeeded where the power of their god had failed.

No, the Sigmarites wouldn’t dare act against her now.

Middenheim
Ulriczeit, 1118

The Ulricsmund had been spared the worst of the skaven assault. The Teutogen Guard and the wolf-priests themselves had proven more than the pillaging verminkin wanted to contend with. With their tyrannical leader rampaging across the Eastgate, the ratmen had simply bypassed the Ulricsmund to find easier prey.

Avoided by the skaven, the district had become a sanctuary for the people of Middenheim. Refugees clustered in the rectories and barracks, filled the gardens and sacred grove. The sanctuary of the great temple itself was packed with ragged groups of humanity, noble and peasant alike. In the face of annihilation, distinctions of blood and breeding had been forgotten. Westerland burghers sat beside Talabecland farmers, Middenland foresters huddled against Drakwald craftsmen, all united in their despair and fear.

That sense of doom had started to lift when messengers arrived describing the rout of the skaven horde in the Eastgate. Dread descended once more when Prince Mandred came marching into the temple, battered and bloodied, looking as though he had clawed his way from his own grave. Behind the grim prince, Grand Master Vitholf and Beck carried the body of Graf Gunthar between them. A sombre procession of dwarfs and men followed after the graf, the banners they carried not held aloft in triumph but lowered in a gesture of mourning.

Among the refugees gathered in the temple were those who had left the Middenpalaz, sent to the safety of the Ulricsmund before Graf Gunthar embarked upon his desperate sally against the skaven. When they saw their liege lying lifeless in the arms of the knights, a great wail of agony rose from the royal retainers and servants.

Only one among the palace refugees had eyes for son rather than father. Lady Mirella stirred from her bench, her heart breaking when she saw the anguish on Mandred’s face, the crippling pain in his every step. She started to rise, to rush to the prince, to offer him what relief it was in her ability to bestow.

‘He will not welcome a friend right now,’ Brother Richter spoke into her ear. Mirella turned towards the Sigmarite, hurt and confusion in her eyes. The priest bowed his head, and then continued in a sympathetic tone. ‘He seeks a miracle. Comes here to beg before his god. Do not intrude upon his sorrow.’ Richter gazed sadly at the sombre procession making its way towards the altar. ‘The last ember of hope must burn itself to ashes.’

Tears were in Mirella’s eyes. ‘Why?’ she asked Richter.

The priest’s gaze became distant, his voice a mere whisper. ‘Because it is on the anvil of pain that the gods forge heroes.’

Mandred was only dimly aware of the multitude crammed into the temple. The sound of wailing, the sobs of despair and alarm, these reached him as though from a great distance. Even the altar and the Eternal Flame seemed hazy and indistinct. When Ar-Ulric came bustling down from the pulpit whence he had been addressing the assembly, the prince could discern only an old man in wolfskin robes, his mind incapable of reconciling the sight with his memories of Ulric’s high priest.

There was only one thing that was real to the prince. That was the near-lifeless body being carried behind him. In his mind, he thought he could hear the beating of the graf’s heart, a dull drum-like rhythm that grew weaker with every breath. His father’s fate was all that mattered to him now. Not Middenheim, not the people, not even the poison rushing through his own veins. Again and again, as he limped through the sanctuary, he begged the gods to take him and spare his father.

If the gods heard, if Ulric was listening, they gave no sign.

‘Your grace,’ Ar-Ulric was speaking, clutching at Mandred’s arm. ‘You are injured!’ The old priest turned, shouting across the temple, for the first time in his long years forgetful of decorum within the sanctuary. He shouted for those wolf-priests versed in the healing arts, for the handful of herbalists and doktors who had trickled into the Ulricsmund amongst the other refugees.

Mandred pulled free from Ar-Ulric’s grip, continued to hobble down the aisle. He would reach the altar, abase himself before Ulric, offer that last flicker of his own life in return for his father. Nothing would sway him from his purpose.

Vitholf and Beck spoke with Ar-Ulric as they passed him, bearing the graf towards the altar. Mandred knew they were talking about him, explaining that grief had disturbed the mind of their prince. They enjoined Ar-Ulric to get his healers and to likewise bring some of his Teutogen Guard to restrain the prince. As servants of Ulric, they were beyond the prince’s authority, a duty which bound both of the knights to follow Mandred’s commands regardless of the madness behind them.

There was no anger in Mandred’s heart when he heard his subjects speak of him in such manner. They were concerned that he was neglecting his own welfare. In their minds, they had already abandoned Graf Gunthar to Morr’s gardens of death. The prince would not.

The altar loomed before him. Mandred dropped to his knees, pressing his forehead to the floor. An inarticulate sob wracked his abused body as he cried out to Ulric. There were no words in it. There was no need for them. Ulric knew what Mandred prayed for and what he was prepared to offer in exchange.

A shriek pierced the solemnity that had fallen upon the temple, soon followed by other cries of fear and horror. Mandred raised his head just in time to see the cloaked shapes that dropped down from the beams overhead. Verminous voices chittered in obscene delight as three black-furred skaven lashed out with dripping blades, cutting down wolf-priests and refugees with abandon. Mercilessly, the monsters fought their way towards the altar.

Deathmaster Silke and his apprentices, the master killers of Clan Eshin, had come to avenge their dead overlord and reclaim the honour of their murderous order.

Silke slashed down a knight who stood in his way, leaping over the sprawling man and lunging towards the altar in a seamless blur of lethal fury. His apprentices followed after him, keeping the way clear. One of them was borne down when he was set upon by Kurgaz Smallhammer, the dwarf’s brawny arms driving his warhammer into the beast’s spine. The other parried Grand Master Vitholf’s blade, struggling to hold the knight back.

Mandred rose to meet the Deathmaster. His weakened grip would never have drawn the sword hanging at his side, the blade Beck had given him as they withdrew from the Eastgate. The skaven assassin was beyond the swiftness of the most hale and hearty man. Silke would fall upon him before his hand even closed around the hilt.

A ragged, bleeding figure flung himself between the assassin and his prey. Exhibiting a sudden spark of vitality, a burst of unguessed strength, Graf Gunthar pulled free from Beck’s arms and propelled himself into Silke’s path. The Deathmaster’s sweeping blade hewed across the man’s chest instead of finding the neck of his son. The ratman blinked in disbelief at the unexpected intrusion that had cheated him of his intended prey.

In that instant, while Silke freed his poisoned dagger from the collapsing body of Graf Gunthar, Mandred freed his own sword from its scabbard. A brilliant light blazed from the edge of the blade as it was drawn. No common sword had Beck given to the prince, but no less a weapon than Legbiter, the runefang of the Teutogens!

Deathmaster Silke cringed before the enchanted sword. All skavendom had lived in terror of Warmonger Vecteek, and here was the sword that had killed that dreadful tyrant. An emotion that the Nightlord of Clan Eshin had tried to torture and burn from the glands of the Deathmaster returned to assail the ratman’s pounding heart. Fear, so long rejected and denied, came flooding back into Silke’s body.

The surviving apprentice saw the change in Silke’s posture, the bristling of the assassin’s fur, the weak flick of the killer’s tail. Nartik’s lips curled back in a snarl as he saw fear overcome his hated master. In a contemptuous display of skill, Nartik ended his duel with Vitholf, springing past the grand master’s guard to slash the muscles of his sword arm and leave the limb hanging limp and useless at his side.

Before another opponent could close upon him, Nartik dashed towards the altar where Silke was turning to flee from Mandred. Chittering malignantly, Nartik dived at the combatants. His poisoned blade flashed out, slicing through flesh and bone.

Deathmaster Silke squealed as he crumpled to the floor, the tendons in his leg slashed by Nartik’s blade. The treacherous apprentice glared at him for an instant, then went racing away, dodging past men and dwarfs as the fleet-footed killer made good his escape.

Mandred ignored the fleeing Nartik, intent only upon the sprawled Silke, the slayer of his father. The prone assassin lay limp and helpless as the prince stabbed down with Legbiter, driving the sword at the vermin’s back.

In a blur of motion, Silke rolled aside before Legbiter could strike him. The Deathmaster’s motion continued in a reverse twist that caught the edge of the blade in his cloak and wrenched it from Mandred’s weakened hands. At the same time, the skaven’s paw came sweeping out from beneath his leather tunic, flinging a clutch of ugly black throwing stars into the prince’s body.

Mandred crumpled atop the monster, sprawling across Silke before the Deathmaster could twist away. Every speck of his being cried out in pain, the venom tipping the edges of the stars adding to the poison already in his veins. Mandred was deaf to the misery of his flesh, hearkening only to the misery in his soul. Fiercely, he forced his hands to close about Silke’s throat, willed his numb fingers to tighten, to crush the life from the inhuman murderer.

Deathmaster Silke flailed beneath Mandred’s strangling hands. Twisting and rolling, the skaven threw his attacker to the ground, yet still the hands would not release their terrible grip. The ratman’s claws raked the prince’s body, his fangs closed upon his shoulder, yet still Mandred wouldn’t relent. All the strength in his battered frame was focused into the fingers clenched about Silke’s throat.

Men were rushing to help the prince now, shouting and roaring at the skaven pinned beneath him. Kurgaz kicked his boot into the side of Silke’s head, trying to force the skaven to loosen his fangs. Desperate, the Deathmaster twisted from his tormentors, rolling himself and the prince across the floor. Their bodies glanced from the altar, bounced across the patch of bare earth beyond it.

A gasp of horror rose from every man, woman and child gathered in the temple as the two struggling combatants rolled into the blazing fire of the Sacred Flame.

For an instant, the flame burned brighter, blinding the panicked observers. Then they could make out the shadowy shapes of Mandred and Silke lying within the pillar of fire. The prince’s hands were yet wrapped about the ratman’s throat, even in the midst of the Sacred Flame.

As the stunned assembly watched, Silke’s body began to disintegrate, charred into ash by the spectral energies of the fire. Soon there was nothing left of the Deathmaster.

Silence dominated the temple as the remaining combatant emerged from the midst of the Sacred Flame. Where the fire had obliterated Silke entirely, it hadn’t so much as scorched the tattered cloak hanging from the prince’s shoulders. When he stepped from the flame, Mandred’s step wasn’t the limp of a cripple, but the steady march of a conqueror. There was no blood on his face, no wounds marring his body. An almost ethereal glow burned behind his skin, slowly fading as he approached the stone altar.

It was Brother Richter who was the first to find his voice, the first to cry out in recognition of the miracle they had all witnessed. ‘Hail the Wolf of Sigmar!’ the priest shouted, his words booming like thunder within the crowded temple. The cry was taken up by the multitude, shouted with the passion of a delivered people towards their saviour.

Only Mirella was silent. She alone looked beyond the miracle, looked beyond the triumphant saviour. She looked at the man himself, the man who didn’t hear the cheering voices, the man who didn’t look at the jubilant throng.

Mandred stared down at his father’s corpse sprawled before the altar. As he gazed into Graf Gunthar’s cold eyes, he felt a bitterness boil up inside of him. Why had the gods refused his prayer? Why him and not his father?

The answer seemed to shine in his father’s dead gaze, in the beauteous peace that had settled upon his face.

The son’s prayer had been rejected.

The father’s had not.

Mandred looked up as he found Beck approaching him. The knight bowed and offered him Legbiter once more. Solemnly, the prince took up his sword, the sword which was now his right to bear as Graf of Middenheim. Holding the Runefang aloft, he faced the cheering crowd and this time he heard their adoration.

‘Hail the Wolf of Sigmar!’

EPILOGUE

Altdorf
Jahrdrung, 1116

Months after news of Boris Goldgather’s death reached the Imperial capital, a festive quality lingered in the streets. The gigantic statue of the dead Emperor, a dwarf-crafted colossus that dominated the Königplatz and which had been funded by a special bread tax, had been pulled down and demolished by the citizenry, the rubble carted off and dumped into the Reik. For weeks, jubilant processions had marched through the streets of Altdorf burning dung effigies of Boris. Even now, ribald and scathing ballads about the last of the Hohenbachs were favourites in the city’s taverns.

Adolf Kreyssig, Protector of the Empire, had deemed it politic to leave the peasants to their celebrations. His position was a precarious one. As a man of humble birth, he had no birthright to the power now at his command. It was only through the indulgence of the late Emperor that he enjoyed his position as steward of the Imperial throne. At the moment, the good people of Altdorf were happy to overlook that fact. Kreyssig had led them in the defence of their homes, had saved the city from conquest by the abominable Underfolk. To the commoners, he was a saviour.

Better than any noble, Kreyssig knew how fickle the mood of peasants could be. Today’s hero became tomorrow’s tyrant. Without the support of the Emperor there was no legitimacy behind his rule, only the clamour of the mob kept the Reikland nobility from casting him from the palace. He knew that the nobles would do their utmost to sow discontent among their peasants. Once the populace turned on him, it would all be over.

Kreyssig stalked through the cold halls of the Imperial Palace. Many of the paintings and tapestries had been stripped away, sold off to rebuild the depleted Imperial coffers. Diamond goblets, emerald chairs, an entire armoire made of polished amber, thirty-seven matching sapphire brooches, a cloak of gold leaf over leopard skin, a tub fashioned from pearl – the list of Boris’s extravagances was as extensive as any dragon’s hoard. Kreyssig knew he hadn’t been able to sell the Emperor’s luxuries for even a quarter of their worth, but at the moment bread and beer were far more essential than gold and silver.

‘You needn’t fret over the mood of the people,’ Baroness von den Linden scolded her paramour as she joined him along one of the deserted galleries. The witch had adopted a lavish gown of imperial purple, a colour reserved only for an empress or an emperor’s consort. Apart from the scandalous impropriety, Kreyssig was worried about the subtle implication, the implied threat to the nobles. If the baroness wore purple, then maybe the nobles would think he was sizing himself for a crown. At the moment, he didn’t need the Vons thinking about such things.

‘Let them think what they like,’ the witch laughed, resting her hand in the crook of Kreyssig’s arm. ‘The peasants are behind you and they have greater numbers than all the nobles. The blinders are off now and men like Duke Vidor will find it difficult to put them back on again. The commoners have been awakened.’

Kreyssig frowned at his companion. ‘Easy for you to say. They adore you as some divine instrument of Sigmar Himself. Even the Grand Theogonist is afraid of you.’ He turned away from the mural he had been inspecting, a fifth-century piece depicting the Battle of Black Fire Pass. Once it might have been a priceless heirloom, but Emperor Boris had contracted vandals to alter the work so that Sigmar’s face bore a closer resemblance to his own. Many of the paintings in the palace had suffered such destruction.

‘Stefan isn’t fooled,’ Kreyssig continued as he walked with the baroness. ‘He knows your powers owe nothing to his god. He knows there is witchcraft behind you.’

The baroness smiled. ‘He may know much, but what can he prove? Can he make the people believe?’ She laughed, a bitter spiteful note. ‘Would he dare? If he exposes me, if he denounces me, what will that mean for his precious Temple? How will the peasants react if they know their homes were saved not by Holy Sigmar but by a heretical witch?’

Kreyssig led them down one of the arcades overlooking the extensive gardens, scowling at the great glass windows. Another vestige of Boris Goldgather’s extravagance, and another that wasn’t so easily traded to provide the essentials the city so badly needed. ‘After the battle with the ratmen, the Sigmarites are more influential than ever before. They have resources beyond anything the other temples can match. The bread they distribute to their faithful has won them even more converts than your miracle in the plaza.’

The baroness stopped and glared into Kreyssig’s face. ‘And where have they acquired such resources?’ she demanded. A faint glow crept into her eyes and a chill slithered into the air as she continued to hold her companion close. ‘What have you been doing with the money Boris’s hoard has brought you?’

‘I need allies,’ Kreyssig answered readily. He knew the witch could pluck the thoughts from his mind. There was no need to hide this from her. Not when there were other things in far greater need of secrecy. ‘The Temple of Sigmar is the strongest in Altdorf. With them behind me, the nobles don’t dare move against me. I provide them with the gold they need to buy bread, they feed all those who will bend the knee and swear upon the hammer.’

‘You don’t need them,’ the witch declared. ‘The people worship me and the Sigmarites don’t dare do anything about it! I am the only ally you need.’ Her tone softened, her expression lightened into a coy smile. ‘Together, Adolf, we can rule the Empire. We can gather up all the pieces and make it greater than before. You and I, Emperor and Empress.’

Kreyssig walked on in silence for a moment, his eyes staring down the long corridor. ‘That is a bold ambition,’ he said.

‘Tell me it is one that you haven’t harboured deep down inside,’ the baroness challenged him. ‘A lowly peasant rising to become greater than them all.’

‘You’ve been peering into my mind again,’ Kreyssig snarled. He quickened his pace, marching down the arcade. Baroness von den Linden matched his angered step, her scandalous gown rustling about her velvet slippers.

‘It can all be ours,’ she told him. ‘No one will stand in our way. Not Vidor, not Gazulgrund. None of them.’

Kreyssig stopped, resting his hand against a golden door set into the inner wall. Another example of Boris’s excessive luxury. ‘You make it sound appealing.’

Baroness von den Linden smirked and shook her head. ‘As though you weren’t already thinking such things. That is why I took you in, healed your wounds. I saw the dreams in your heart.’

‘Did you?’ Kreyssig asked.

Something in her lover’s tone brought a flicker of doubt sweeping across the witch’s face. For the first time she was aware of a dissonance within Kreyssig’s thoughts, a mental partition that resisted her.

Before she recovered from her surprise, Kreyssig tore open the golden door with his left hand and with his right swung the purple-gowned witch into the chamber beyond. Frantically, he slammed the door shut behind her, fearing every instant that she would unleash some spell against him.

The baroness shouted at him from behind the door, but the first shout quickly faded into an inarticulate shriek of horror. The witch had realised what room she was in.

One of the most expensive of Boris Goldgather’s luxuries had been the construction of an indoor apiary, that he might be provided with fresh honey even in the deep of winter. Dwarfcraft and magic had gone into the building of the chamber, with pipes behind the walls to maintain a constant temperature and beds of enchanted flowers that never lost their bloom. A dozen hives, each in a box of crystal and gold, resided in the apiary to indulge the late Emperor’s sweet tooth.

The apiary was one of Boris’s extravagances that Kreyssig hadn’t demolished. He had a use for it. A use he was now putting into effect. He remembered the enchantment Baroness von den Linden had placed upon herself, a spell that offended insects and frightened them away. He also remembered that she’d said ants, with homes to protect, wouldn’t flee but would instead turn and fight.

As for ants, so with bees. Even through the thick door, Kreyssig could hear the angry buzzing of the insects as they rose from their hives. He heard the terrified screams of the witch as the swarm descended upon her, a stinging tide of rage. In her panic, the baroness forgot all her magic, all the spells and conjurations that might have saved her. All the cold discipline, all the manipulative cunning, all the careful plotting and politicking, none of it served her in that final terror.

The muffled pleas, the desperate entreaties that became less articulate as venom swelled her flesh and terror assailed her mind – Kreyssig savoured each one. He felt a thrill course through his hand as he felt the witch’s impotent fists pounding at the door, nails scratching uselessly at the golden panel.

‘It wouldn’t have worked,’ Kreyssig said, pressing his mouth against the door. He could hear the impact of bees against the panel as they struck at the witch, knew that for each insect that missed there would be many more that would strike true. ‘You are a Von, after all.’ He heard a dull moan from inside the chamber, felt the door shake as a body slumped against it. He stepped away from the door, a regretful expression on his face. ‘And I am but a lowly peasant.’

Kreyssig turned and marched back down the arcade. He’d have Fuerst brick up the apiary. With Boris gone, there wasn’t any reason to squander expenses on year-long honey. After the room was sealed, no one would ever find the body. Baroness von den Linden had simply vanished, walked off into the mists of legend like Sigmar had done. It would be something to elicit mourning but not unrest among the peasants. The Temple of Sigmar wouldn’t be connected in any way. The conditions of his arrangement with Grand Theogonist Gazulgrund would be satisfied. Removal of the witch in exchange for the Temple’s support. He might, of course, have used the Grand Theogonist’s daughter to sway him, but as it happened, eliminating the witch had suited his own purposes. The baroness thought she could control him; in her eyes he would never be anything but a peasant. He just couldn’t afford such an attitude so close to the Imperial throne.

Not if he would make it his own.

The orison the Sigmarites had taught him had served to conceal his intentions from the witch right until the last. He must remember to thank Stefan – Gazulgrund – for that bit of assistance.

Kreyssig paused, glanced out through the windows and towards the distant spire of the Great Cathedral. Something Fuerst had told him, an unsettling bit of trivia he’d heard a few of the dwarf goldgrubbers discussing. It was tradition for the Grand Theogonists to adopt a dwarf name, but the one Stefan had chosen was unsettling.

Loosely translated, it meant ‘the Death God’s hammer.’

Skavenblight
Vorhexen, 1118

Supreme Warlord Vrrmik of Mors settled into the coveted Twelfth Throne, that chair adjacent to the empty seat reserved for the Horned Rat himself. The symbols of Rictus had been removed, relegated to the lower position Vecteek’s successor had assumed. Vrrmik bared his fangs as he glanced at the simpering Kreptitch. He was a twitchy, nervous piebald ratman typical of the underlings the Warmonger had surrounded himself with. Any warlord of too great an ability was quickly eliminated from the ranks of Clan Rictus; it was one of the ways Vecteek had preserved his own position. Now, however, his plan was suffering from the resultant lack of leadership. Too much of their power had rested in the paws of a single skaven.

There had been many changes in the Shattered Tower. The Verminguard had been expelled from the fortress, replaced by a mixture of Clan Mors stormvermin and Clan Pestilens plaguevermin. The shared responsibility for safeguarding the Council of Thirteen had been a concession the Grey Lords had accepted with qualms. Happy to be rid of Vecteek’s troops, they weren’t so keen on allowing a single clan to assume the duty. In the end, it was decided to pit Mors and Pestilens, the two most powerful clans, in the adversarial role of dual protectors.

Even as Vrrmik congratulated himself on seizing the Second Throne, he couldn’t help but have a flicker of anxiety when he thought of the plague monks. Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch might be content with a lesser seat, but he now effectively controlled three votes on the Council. Poxmaster Puskab Foulfur, progenitor of the Black Plague, had been the first of his disciples to acquire a seat on the Council, killing Wormlord Blight Tenscratch of Clan Verms and assuming his seat. Now another of the plague monks, a plaguelord named Vrask Bilebroth, had gained a seat on the Council, acquiring the position forfeited by Warlord Manglrr Baneburrow of Fester. There had been many twitching whiskers at the unusual transfer of power, but with Clan Fester entering the Pestilent Brotherhood and becoming little more than a thrall clan to the plague monks, there was little difference whether Manglrr kept his seat or handed it over to his masters.

Grey Lord Vrask had risen to prominence after the ill-fated expedition by Seerlord Skrittar, bringing a copious amount of warpstone back to Skavenblight to enrich the coffers of Clan Pestilens and dragging the once powerful Clan Fester along with him like a bat on a leash. The same mysterious expedition had decimated Clan Mordkin, forcing Warlord Nekrot to invest in new breeders to accelerate the repopulation of his strongholds. However, the most pronounced difference, the thing that probably did more to aggrandise the position of Clan Pestilens than even a hoard of warpstone and a third seat on the Council, was the death of Seerlord Skrittar.

The most defiant and outspoken of Nurglitch’s adversaries, Skrittar had been viewed with a mixture of religious awe and superstitious terror by the rest of the Council. Even the decimation of the grey seers, the loss of twenty-four of the most skilled of the Horned Rat’s prophets, had done little to reduce the fierce reputation of Skrittar. His death in the human lands of Sylvania, however, had cast the entire Order into doubt. The new seerlord, a grizzled half-blind creature named Queekual, was a sinister figure of few words and fewer friends. Since rising to the Council, he’d been content to sit, listen and observe, like some black spider at the centre of its web. None of the Grey Lords knew what the new seerlord might be planning, but none of them desired to become his pawn.

Vrrmik glanced across at the hunched shape of Queekual. It had already been suggested to him that the grey seers be removed from their traditional occupation of the Twelfth Throne, that the dogma of Clan Pestilens had been proven the true path of the Horned One. The flattery of such a suggestion, that he was now in a position to abuse his power in the same manner as the despotic Vecteek, was somewhat diminished by the realisation that such an act could only earn him powerful enemies. There was a reason why the question hadn’t been put to an open vote in the Council. Nobody was sure how much of the grey seers’ power had perished with Skrittar.

No, the white-furred warlord reflected as he preened his whiskers, now wasn’t the time to upset the already disordered ranks of the Council. Now was the time to marshal their forces, to secure the gains they had already made on the surface. To plan their future campaigns.

And to see which of his hated rivals Vrrmik could arrange a violent demise for on the field of battle. Vecteek should have some company in the Horned Rat’s belly, after all.

Wissenland
Nachexen, 1119

A hairy, dishevelled shape clad in furs crept out into the bright light of a new morning. It straightened and stretched as it quit the narrow forest cave that had been its shelter. As the shape unfolded amidst the greenery of the clearing, it resolved itself into the figure of a man.

Erich von Kranzbeuhler rubbed a calloused hand across the thick mat of beard that covered his face. After six years, he imagined he might be able to impress a dwarf with his facial hair. His effect upon the ladies might be less profound.

The outlaw knight shook his head. There was only one lady he was interested in impressing and for all he knew, she was dead. Coerced by her father into a despicable marriage with Adolf Kreyssig, Princess Erna had failed to assassinate her husband. What vengeance the sadistic brute might have visited on her was too terrible for him to contemplate. If only he’d managed to kill Kreyssig in the sewers beneath the Imperial palace so much might have changed.

Thoughts of the sewers did nothing to ease Erich’s mind. He couldn’t forget the ratmen, those ghastly creatures that had first attacked him, then saved him. More than saved him, they had helped him escape, to keep Ghal Maraz out of the hands of Boris Goldgather.

At the time he hadn’t understood. Now he did. The skaven hadn’t helped him. They had tried to help themselves. With Ghal Maraz, any count in the Empire could declare himself Emperor and plunge the whole country into civil war. The skaven had depended on just that, to further weaken the lands of men so they could rise from their burrows and conquer the world. Already the vermin had claimed vast swathes of countryside, decimated cities in Wissenland and Solland. How much greater would their assault have been if the Empire had been decimated by war as well as plague?

Erich was thankful he’d encountered Arch-Lector Hartwich after his escape from Altdorf. The priest had given him important advice concerning Ghal Maraz and the terrible damage it could do in the wrong hands. He’d suggested Erich hide the hammer and keep it safe until the time was right, the time when men were most in need of a symbol to lead them.

For six years he had been waiting, leading a hermit’s existence in the wilds of Wissenland.

The knight stirred from his musings, sighing as he watched a young doe limping her way into the clearing. The animal stared at him as she approached, drawing to within a few paces of him before lowering her head, almost as though bowing before an altar.

Erich lifted his eyes skywards. ‘This isn’t what I would call sport,’ he complained aloud.

‘Nor is it meant to be,’ a voice intoned from the trees. Stepping into the light was a tall, powerfully built man dressed in buckskin, the hollowed head of a bear masking much of his features. The exposed skin of his muscular arms was leathery and scarred, the beard spilling down his chest twisted with burrs.

Haerther, the half-wild priest of Taal, had adopted the role of guardian of Erich when the knight was sent to him by Hartwich. It was only through the aid of the Taalite that Erich had managed to survive so many years of isolation beyond the frontiers of civilisation. He was grateful to his benefactor, but there were times when he resented some of Haerther’s peculiar attitudes.

‘I meant that I would prefer to hunt my own game,’ Erich explained to Haerther. He glanced over at the injured doe. ‘This way, I feel ashamed.’

The priest glowered at him. ‘Are you ashamed to be alive? Think of all the creatures that have surrendered their existence to sustain you this far. All the plants that have been uprooted, all the birds plucked from the skies. Your life is their gift to you. To shun that is an abomination.’

Erich flustered at Haerther’s reprimand. ‘I just mean that it would be better to give the poor creature a chance.’

The priest nodded. ‘I understand, but you must know this little one has reached her end. She has gone lame in her rear leg and would soon fall prey to another predator. I have spoken to her and explained that you are in need of sustenance. She understands.’

‘Couldn’t you… I mean with all your knowledge…’

Haerther frowned. ‘That would be to violate the great cycles that Taal placed to govern all the wild things. No, her time has come. Take her gift to you. You will have need of your strength.’

Erich blinked in surprise. In six years it was the first time Haerther had ever said something that might allude to the future. ‘Something has happened? You have heard something?’ Haerther had brought him news before, had told him of the attack on Altdorf and the death of Boris Goldgather. Always such news had been accompanied by an admonition to wait, to bide his time. This time, Erich could sense, it was different.

‘You must share your prey with the hunter who would have caught her,’ the priest said. As he spoke, Erich was shocked to see a great white wolf stalk out from the trees and march purposefully to Haerther’s side. The priest scratched the beast behind its ears.

‘After you have eaten, we must discuss what has been happening in the north,’ Haerther explained.

‘The time is coming when Ghal Maraz will be needed to rekindle the hope within men.’

WOLF OF SIGMAR

PREFACE

In this third and final volume of A Folkloric History of the Black Plague and the Wolf of Sigmar, I have striven to retain the same attitude of credulity that has been characteristic of previous volumes. It is difficult for the learned reader in this more enlightened age to imagine the Empire as it was in the early 1100s. Myth and superstition were the governing forces of men in the darker days of the Black Plague. The disease had struck particularly hard among the cultured and the lettered; the clergy and physicians with the knowledge to combat the contagion frequently became its victims due to their heightened exposure to it. Under such conditions, it was the common and unlettered who survived in disproportionate numbers. In many cases, feeling that religion and the gods had failed them, these simple people reverted to traditional legends to explain the catastrophe afflicting their land. When a traveller told them that distant Pfeildorf had been overrun by verminous underfolk, he was well and sincerely believed.

The previous volume of this work recounted the horrific rise of the necromancer Vanhal, an all too historic monster whose existence is ratified in the records of both the Sigmarite and Morrite temples as well as the Doomsday Canticle kept in the Waldenhof Museum. From his tragic fall from serving Morr as one of his priests, Vanhal embraced the black arts to become the most fearsome necromancer of his age. With an army of the undead, he ravaged the county of Sylvania, driving the Voivode Malbork von Drak into the southern areas of that region. Seeking to emulate Vanhal, the perverse Mordheim nobleman Baron Lothar von Diehl likewise became a follower of the profane rites of necromancy, eventually accepting service with Vanhal as his apprentice. Together these human fiends raised the cursed tower of Vanhaldenschlosse through magics both eldritch and obscene, creating a sorcerous fortress whose ruins even to this day are shunned and considered haunted.

Here established history gives way to mythic fancy as Vanhal and von Diehl find themselves beset by the skaven armies of Seerlord Skrittar and Bonelord Nekrot. In contest are the poisonous rocks that have rained down upon Sylvania in the Starfall. Useful to the necromancers in their unspeakable sorceries, the rocks are held sacred by the chittering ratmen. A war between the shambling undead and the skittering skaven rages about Vanhaldenschlosse, ending with the destruction of Skrittar and the retreat of Nekrot.

Adolf Kreyssig, the ruthless commander of the Kaiserjaeger, the secret police of Emperor Boris, is appointed Protector of the Empire when Boris flees plague-ridden Altdorf for the seclusion of Schloss Hohenbach. With the help of the witch Baroness Kirstina von den Linden, Kreyssig secures his power, removing from the Imperial council those who oppose his rule. Kreyssig gains control over Lector Stefan Schoppe by capturing his daughter and has him appointed Grand Theogonist.

Kreyssig’s power, however, comes under attack when his skaven allies prove duplicitous, seeking to weaken the city by playing different factions against one another. Realising their peril, Kreyssig musters the city’s forces and leads the effort to drive the skaven back when the hordes of Warplord Sythar Doom erupt from beneath the streets. The glory of defeating the ratmen, however, has to be shared with Baroness von den Linden and Stefan, who had taken the dwarfish name Gazulgrund as Grand Theogonist. Worried about the witch’s ambitions, Kreyssig colludes with Gazulgrund to eliminate her, treacherously sealing her alive in a chamber filled with enraged bees – one of the most eccentric murders attributed to the Imperial palace.

Emperor Boris, fleeing to escape the Black Plague, makes Schloss Hohenbach outside Carroburg his refuge. Surrounding himself with all the noble leaders of the Empire, Boris intends to sit out the plague in decadent opulence. His intentions are thwarted, however, when the skaven strike. Plague monks visit disease and destruction upon Carroburg, then turn their attentions to the castle where Boris has hidden himself. The Emperor is the final victim of the disease unleashed by the ratmen. Only Princess Erna of Middenheim and the Emperor’s physician, Doktor Moschner, survive.

Although spared the first attacks of the plague in 1111, seven years later Middenheim finds itself experiencing the slow creep of the disease into its midst. The dwarf community deep inside the mountain experiences attacks by the ratmen and is compelled to accept the offer of aid from their human neighbours. Prince Mandred, whose heroic exploits include the rescue of Lady Mirella and Arch-Lector Hartwich from beastmen, is particularly zealous in his offer to help Kurgaz Smallhammer against the skaven, having lost his lover Sofia to the blades of the ratkin.

Warmonger Vecteek, however, is playing a treacherous game of deceit, intending to lure the human armies into the tunnels within the mountain while he conquers the city on top of it. He employs the brutal Warlord Vrrmik to bait his trap, while the plagues of Poxmaster Puskab Foulfur weaken the city. He hasn’t planned on the treachery of his minions, however. When Vecteek attacks Middenheim, he finds far less of the population stricken by the plague than Puskab had promised. Down below, Vrrmik withdraws his warriors early enough that Mandred is able to lead his army back up to the surface and relieve his embattled father Graf Gunthar.

Though Gunthar and Mandred are able to destroy Vecteek and vanquish the skaven army, their victory turns bitter when Gunthar is shot down by Deathmaster Silke. Desperate to save his dying father, Mandred takes Gunthar to the Temple of Ulric to beg his god for divine aid. Silke strikes again while the prince is in the temple, intending to kill both son and father. In the ensuing struggle, Mandred and Silke pitch into the Eternal Flame of Ulric. While the skaven disintegrates into ash, Mandred emerges from the flame completely healed of his wounds. The miracle amazes those watching and Arch-Lector Hartwich proclaims Mandred ‘the Wolf of Sigmar’, a man who is blessed by the gods.

With his father’s death, Prince Mandred becomes Graf Mandred. Now lord of his realm, he musters his army. He is determined to scourge the land of the skaven infesting it. And in so doing he earns the title Mandred Skavenslayer.

Delving into these curious admixtures of myth and history, one almost regrets that this heroic character has become more commonly known as ‘Mandred Ratcatcher’ in modern historical texts.

– Reikhard Mattiasson,
A Folkloric History of the Black Plague
and the Wolf of Sigmar Vol. III
(Altdorf Press, Nachexen 2514)
Suppressed by order of Lord Thaddeus Gamow, Jahrdrung 2514

PROLOGUE

Skavenblight
Geheimnisnacht, 1120

Reeking of decay and corruption, Poxmaster Puskab Foulfur climbed the steps of the raised dais, his scabby hand clenched about the gnarled wooden staff he bore. The plaguelord’s tattered robes befouled the ancient stone steps, leaving behind a glistening trail like the slime of a slug. As he made his ascent, the ratman lifted his rotten snout and drew in the perfidious atmosphere of what had been the Grand Observatory of the grey seers.

A liquid, glottal chuckle shook the skaven as he reflected upon how far the once-mighty grey seers had fallen. Their order was archaic, a relic that had endured past its time. Soon it would be swept away into the gutter, cast off into an oblivion that was long overdue. As the plague monks had supplanted the atavistic horned prophets in the halls of the Shattered Tower, so they would soon expunge them from all Skavenblight. From all skavendom!

Puskab settled his scrawny body into the throne of bone and sinew that rested atop the dais. Briefly he gazed up at the great gaping hole in the wall of the chamber, the place where the grey seers had housed their villainous star-eye. A creation of the equally abhorrent heretics of Clan Skryre, the construction of warpstone lenses and crystal plates, bronze pipes and copper tubes, had allowed the Seerlords to gaze upon the stars themselves. In their heresy, the grey seers had believed they could sniff portents and omens from the alignment of stars, as though the Horned One would consign His wisdom to such a frivolous pursuit.

The Poxmaster stroked the long tuft of fur sprouting from the side of his chin, a lone wisp of white fur on his otherwise wrinkled and furless face. He took a vain pride in that sickly patch of fur. It resembled nothing so much as some mouldy growth, and it exuded a wondrously wretched smell. Many among the acolytes of Clan Pestilens took it as a mark of the Horned One’s favour, a divine reward for the conquest Puskab had made possible. Fabricator of the plague, engineer of the decimation of the man-things, destroyer of their surface realm!

Puskab bruxed his fangs as he pondered his accomplishments. From a minor plague priest he had risen to assume a seat on the Council of Thirteen, to join the insidious ranks of the Grey Lords. He had risen to become second only to Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch within the hierarchy of Clan Pestilens.

The Poxmaster’s beady eyes became embers of hate as he reflected upon his position and how his own authority had been usurped. His great rival had always been Vrask Bilebroth. For a time, Puskab had been certain in his supremacy, sure that the merest twitch of his whisker would be enough to destroy his rival. But Vrask had proven too cunning to eliminate. He’d sought protection from Seerlord Skrittar, joining the Seerlord’s mysterious expedition into the east. Skrittar had perished in that journey, betrayed by Vrask. Through his poisoned counsel, Vrask claimed to have arranged the death of the Seerlord. More, he had stolen the great treasure that had caused Skrittar to stir from the Shattered Tower: enough warpstone to bribe the Horned One Himself! Vrask had even brought the once-mighty Clan Fester with him as a gift for Nurglitch. Their bodies wracked with contagion, Fester had sworn allegiance to the plague monks in a desperate bid for survival. Clan Fester had joined the circle of thrall clans known as the Pestilent Brotherhood, their autonomy crushed between the claws of the Arch-Plaguelord.

Always keen to scent an opportunity, Nurglitch had installed Vrask on the Council, placing him in the seat vacated by Warlord Manglrr Baneburrow of Fester. Vrask had been given honours and power equal to those enjoyed by Puskab. It was a manoeuvre to ensure Nurglitch’s own position, once again raising the two enemies to equal standing, setting them against each other and ensuring that each was too busy protecting the position they already possessed to allow them time to consider loftier ambitions. Nurglitch was already a hoary old monster, but with the cocktail of elixirs and arcane rituals he employed, he might endure for another century and more before age and infirmity claimed him. He was taking pains to protect against any early diminishment.

The clamour of slaves breaking apart the heretical warpscope of Clan Skryre brought Puskab’s attention back to the great hall before him. Packs of emaciated skaven, their fur mangy with disease, laboured with sledgehammers to break apart the mammoth construction. Green-robed plague monks scrabbled at the floor with their claws, pulling up the intricate mosaic that had depicted the star charts and constellations of the grey seers’ astrology. Other plague monks assaulted the walls, tearing down elaborate frescoes and murals. Censer bearers circled the hall, the toxic fumes emanating from the baskets of their staves billowing across the room, blotting out the lingering stink of a millennium’s incense. Great banners flayed from the hides of especially diseased skaven hung from poles scattered about the chamber, each daubed with the insignia of the fly-scratch and adorned with the formulae for the most potent plagues.

Puskab caught the distinctive smell of one plague banner, the twisted wreck of his tail twitching happily as the scent blazed through his memories. It was the hide of Wormlord Blight Tenscratch, despot of Clan Verms, the Grey Lord Puskab had defeated in single combat to secure his position on the Council. But that was only part of his achievements. Scratched into the preserved hide was his true power: the formula for the Black Plague, the Horned One’s gift to His favoured son!

The Poxmaster nodded his antlered head. Yes, it was his destiny to lead Clan Pestilens to complete domination of skavendom, to usher in a new age of glory and decay! He would fulfil the role the Horned One had given him, despite the obstructions of his fellow skaven and even the short-sighted interference of Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch.

Nurglitch did well to fear his Poxmaster! From the moment when he had colluded with Warlord Vrrmik of Mors to depose and destroy Warmonger Vecteek of Rictus, Puskab had been laying the foundation for his master’s downfall. Vrrmik wasn’t more powerful than Vecteek, but he was equally cunning. He had stirred the imaginations of the other clans, driving them into campaigns not merely of conquest but also occupation of the surface world. Each warlord was spending the strength of his clan to secure his own kingdom on the surface, vying with the scattered man-things for control of their land. It was such a vast expenditure of resources that it could only be likened to a rich warpstone strike and the resultant rush of ratmen to stake their claim.

Through it all, Clan Pestilens would keep to the shadows, conserving its own power. Let the warlords squabble over the ruins of the man-things, the plague monks would be secure in their service to the Horned One. If the rush to the surface was allowed to take its natural course, the plague monks would be able to overwhelm a skavendom engaged in hundreds of petty wars. That would secure Nurglitch’s legacy.

Puskab would never allow it to go so far, however. When he judged the moment to be right, he would use Vrrmik to steer the warlord clans against Nurglitch’s acolytes and Vrask’s minions. The other skaven would rally to the cause, refighting the civil war in the belief that they were throwing off the shackles of domination.

In truth, they would be casting their own chains. Nurglitch’s pride and arrogance blinded him to the true pinnacle of power. It wasn’t the ratman who called himself Supreme Grand Warlord, the skaven who was first among equals on the Council. No, the true power was with the faceless, unknown figure that stood behind the thrones, who ruled the rulers from the shadows. True power did not announce itself with thunder and steel. True power was the whispered threat, the unspoken fear that could set even the mightiest empire trembling.

Puskab Foulfur would have such power.

It was his destiny.

CHAPTER ONE

Carroburg, 1119

The ratman’s sharp fangs snapped about the steel bill of the helmet, worrying at the metal as the creature thrashed about in a paroxysm of viciousness. Froth mixed with the putrid black blood of the skaven streamed from the monster’s mouth. The filthy drool dripped into the warrior’s face, burning against his cheeks and nose, discolouring his beard. The sick stink of the vermin’s spittle threatened to choke the man. Only a determination born of the mightiest resolve kept him from reeling, from disengaging with the loathsome brute.

Instead of recoiling in disgust, the armoured warrior ripped the dagger from his belt and brought its edge sawing against the ratman’s neck. The creature squealed and flailed, skewering itself still deeper on the sword thrust into its gut. The beast’s violence threatened to spill both fighters from the back of the stomping warhorse. The man pressed his legs tighter against the barrel of his steed, refusing to loose his hold on either dagger or sword.

Animalistic panic shone in the eyes of the skaven as the dagger sawed through the rotten flaps of its leather helm and into the matted fur beneath. The man it had attacked glared back at it, raw hatred blazing in his gaze. Neither pity nor mercy stayed him as his blade chewed into the vermin’s throat and sent a spray of blood jetting from its arteries. As strength drained from the beast, the armoured warrior tried to fling it to the ground. The creature’s fangs clenched tight to his helm, the final death agony causing them to punch through the metal. It took repeated blows from the pommel of his dagger to break the ratman’s jaw and dislodge its tenacious grip.

The rider glared down at the quivering carcass strewn across the cobblestones. It was an unseemly thing, but he brought his rearing warhorse around to stamp its hooves against the skaven’s skull and splatter its head into gory ruin. One tiny grain of satisfaction in an ocean of hatred.

Other ratmen swarmed around the lone rider, scuttling out from the shattered debris that had once been a great city. They snarled and snapped, squealed and chittered, thrusting at him with jagged spears and crooked swords. Watching their leader being butchered had curbed some of their taste for battle. Their verminous courage hung by the merest thread. The rider scowled at them from beneath the bill of his helm. He didn’t want them running.

The warrior straightened in his saddle, waving his sword and sending drops of black blood spattering across the ground. ‘I am Mandred von Zelt,’ he called out in a bitter tone. ‘Graf of Middenheim. Lord of Middenland. Defender of the Eternal Flame.’ His eyes narrowed into slivers of rage. ‘Scourge of the Skaven,’ he declared in a low snarl, baring his teeth at the ring of monsters.

The boldest of the skaven lunged at him, swarming towards Mandred in a burst of animalistic fury. A spear snapped against his horse’s barding, another broke against his pauldron as he leaned down to receive his attackers. The blade of Legbiter, fabled Runefang of the Teutogens, burned with magical brilliance as it sheered through the shoulder of the spear-rat and sawed across the beast’s ribs. Mandred was already turning away from the mutilated monster, striking out at a ratman thrusting at him from the other side of his horse. The edge of the runefang raked across the skaven’s face, leaving a gory slash where its eyes had been.

Voices rang out above the shrill squeaks and screams of the skaven, hard voices that bellowed jubilantly. ‘The graf! It is the graf!’ they shouted. ‘Rally to Graf Mandred! Strike down the ratkin!’

Mandred dug his spurs into the flanks of his warhorse, urging the beast forwards, charging it full into the pack of ratmen before they could slink back into their burrows and escape. Stamping hooves pulverised rodent bones, flashing steel split verminous flesh. Like some vengeful god of the forsaken north, Mandred pursued his foes, strewing the ruined street with butchered heaps of skaven. As his warriors came charging forwards to join him, to relieve their leader and join him in his battle, a sense of resentment filled his heart. Who were these men to share in his revenge?

Resentment collapsed into shame. Mandred drew back on his steed’s reins, allowing the knights and soldiers to pursue the routed skaven through the rubble of Carroburg. He felt guilty as he watched the warriors cut down the ratkin, many of them shouting the cry that had poured fire back into the hearts of a defeated people.

‘For the Wolf!’ the fighters shouted as they wrought havoc among the monsters. ‘For the Wolf of Sigmar!’

A tear slowly crawled through the skaven filth caking Mandred’s face. Who was he to command such loyalty? Who was he to inspire such hope when he had none inside his own heart?

‘We nearly lost you in this maze,’ a knight declared as he rode up beside Mandred. Beck’s face was haggard, drawn with concern for his liege and sovereign. Despite the gore coating his own armour and the leaking wound across his own scalp, the knight reached into his belt and handed a cloth to Mandred that he might wipe his face. ‘You must be more careful, your highness.’ Beck forced a laugh from his exhausted body. ‘I can’t protect you if I can’t find you.’

Mandred clapped the knight’s shoulder in a display of appreciation. His mind retreated to years before, when his assigned protector had been Franz. How often he had delighted in slipping out from under Franz’s watchfulness. How often he had obliviously made a mockery of the knight’s sense of duty.

Beck smiled at his lord, a new vigour blotting out the weariness of only a moment before. The regard of his leader was a greater tonic than any elixir conjured from an alchemist’s cauldron. It didn’t matter who Mandred believed himself to be. What mattered was who his people thought him to be.

‘See to yourself,’ Mandred ordered, handing Beck’s cloth back to him. The graf raised an armoured finger to his eye. Beck followed his example, frowning when he found that his eyepatch had been lost somewhere during the battle. A skaven blade had taken that eye, leaving Beck mutilated for life. Just another tiny reminder of how much mankind owed the vermin. Mandred looked away from Beck, looked out across the desolation of Carroburg.

How dare he believe himself special, that his pain was somehow unique. He had lost his father to these monsters, but how many other men had lost entire families to the slinking fiends? His city had been ransacked and devastated by the ratkin, his home defiled. What was that beside the horrors endured by Carroburg, once the jewel of Drakwald, now reduced to a stinking mire of rubble and filth? For almost four years the ratmen had ruled the city, herding captives here to slave in muddy fields and squalid mills for their inhuman masters. Could he, for a moment, even imagine the terrors the people of Carroburg had endured?

‘We will drive the ratmen out,’ Beck swore, beating his fist against his breastplate to signify the gravity of his vow. ‘Most of the streets are already clear. The only real concentration of ratkin left is up in the castle.’

Mandred raised his eyes, staring up at the hill and the sombre battlements of Schloss Hohenbach. The castle had been the final refuge of Emperor Boris in his vain attempt to flee the Black Plague. Boris had sought to escape his doom by hiding in the fortress. Instead the castle had become his tomb. Now the tattered banners of the ratmen fluttered from its walls, the noxious sigils of the vile skaven.

‘Kurgaz said the dwarfs have a plan to breech the castle,’ Mandred mused as he studied those imposing walls.

Beck frowned and shook his head. ‘Their plan would undermine the foundations and send the whole fortress toppling into the river,’ he reminded the graf. ‘The castle will be an important asset if your highness is to administer this region once the skaven have been driven out.’

It was the old argument again. The Council of Middenheim had been unanimous in their support when Mandred told them of his intention to relieve Carroburg. Their motives, however, had been anything but united. Some could look no farther than political opportunism, seeing in Carroburg’s distress an opportunity to claim the whole of the Drakwald as their own. Some, like the Sigmarite Arch-Lector Wolfgang Hartwich and old Ar-Ulric urged the more humanist ambition of freeing those enslaved by the ratmen.

And his part? What was it that moved him to send men into battle? Mandred felt a chill settle around his heart as he stared at the castle and imagined all the men who would be lost taking it back.

‘Tell Kurgaz I approve the dwarf plan,’ Mandred declared. He fixed Beck with a stony gaze. ‘Don’t tell anyone except the dwarfs,’ he warned. He wasn’t in the mood for another debate with the blue-blooded scavengers who could only see profit where others found tragedy.

Beck stared uneasily at his master, making no move to turn his horse about. Slowly, Mandred returned Legbiter to its scabbard. ‘Even if I wanted to go looking for another fight, my horse has earned a rest,’ he told the knight. Satisfied, Beck bowed his head and rode off down the street towards the fields where the Middenheimers had formed their encampment.

Mandred watched Beck until he vanished around a rubble-strewn corner. Then he lifted his gaze back to the grim mass of Schloss Hohenbach. If what Kurgaz had told him was true, the dwarfs would send the top of the rock sliding into the Reik. It was sobering to think that the dwarfs had such power at their command. But a more important concern gripped the graf’s mind. It was the thought of how many lives would be saved by avoiding a siege.

Sending men to die that Carroburg might be liberated had been no easy thing, but at least it was a noble cause. To waste men in a pointless battle was something else. Deep down inside, Mandred wanted to break open Schloss Hohenbach, to cut down the slinking ratmen with his runefang, to hurl their shrieking bodies from the highest tower.

That wasn’t war, however. That was nothing more than revenge.

As Graf of Middenheim and Lord of Middenland, he could command his people to do many things, but he wouldn’t order them to die for his own revenge.

Skavenblight, 1120

The stink of fear musk released by the clenched glands of a hundred skaven overwhelmed the thousand other smells in the air. It was a scent that spoke louder than fawning words and empty flattery. The tongue of a ratman was duplicitous and born to treachery. It was only in his scent that truth could be found.

Scorned, derided and mocked, the ancient Order of Grey Seers was a waning power in the vicious hierarchy of Skavenblight. The heretical plague monks had seized dominance through a blend of terror and greed. The lesser clans flocked to their diseased, abominable corruption of the Horned Rat’s dogma, some hoping to protect themselves from the might of Clan Pestilens, others trying to ingratiate themselves with the plaguelords and share in their vast power. The plague monks had often been openly antagonistic towards the grey seers, but now their sentiments were echoed in the chittering tones of dozens of warrior clans both within and without the noxious Pestilent Brotherhood. It was the way of skaven from time immemorial to sniff out any sign of weakness and pounce on it.

Let them squeak, Seerlord Queekual thought as he marched through the grimy tunnels beneath the streets of Skavenblight. His gleaming eyes prowled the darkness, watching the slinking shapes that cowered in the shadows cast by worm-oil lamps. Let the vermin hiss and howl all they wanted, in their craven hearts they knew better. Their souls still belonged to the Horned Rat – the true Horned Rat! They knew that the only ones who could intercede with their terrible god were the grey seers. For all the lies told by the plaguelords, the teeming hordes of skavendom recognised the truth!

Queekual paused as a yellow-robed slaveherder of Clan Moulder came scurrying towards him. The ratman was grotesquely proportioned, his obesity compelling him to scurry sidewise in a shuffling fashion. A string of dirty goblins, their necks shackled together, came trooping along behind him.

The Seerlord glared at the slaveherder, waiting for the fat creature to bow his head in obeisance. Instead, the slaveherder’s lip peeled back in a gleam of fangs. ‘You are Queekual?’ he asked, his tone and posture insolent.

‘Seerlord Queekual,’ the grey prophet corrected him. He raised his paw, spreading his claws in one of the thirteen gestures of destruction. Before the slaveherder could even blink, Queekual’s talons blazed with an unholy glow. Malefic energy leapt from the Seerlord’s fingers, striking out at the insolent ratman. In the silence that filled the tunnel, the sound of rending flesh was like the roar of ocean waves. For an instant, Queekual held his claw poised, before the glow faded from his fingers. Absently he discarded the windpipe his spell had torn from the slaveherder’s body, wiping the ratman’s black blood on his cloak. The heavy charcoal-grey robe seemed to drink in the gore, absorbing it with hungry rapacity.

The string of goblins shrieked as the slaveherder fell dead. The wizened green monsters struggled to pull free, to flee down the tunnel. In the shadows, lurking skaven pressed themselves closer to the walls and emptied their glands.

Queekual hefted the horned staff he bore, pointing it at one of the cowering ratmen. When he spoke, his voice was like a blade of ice. ‘You will go and announce me to Slavemaster Skuzzyl. Tell him to send an escort worthy of a Grey Lord.’ Queekual allowed the ratman a heartbeat to overcome his fear and do as he was commanded. When he found the wretch still frozen with fear, the Seerlord stretched forth his hand and again made one of the thirteen gestures.

Wiping the gore from his talons, Queekual fixed his burning gaze on another cowering ratman. ‘You will go and announce me to Slavemaster Skuzzyl…’

The skaven didn’t need to hear anything more. With a squeak of fright, he leapt into the middle of the passageway and hurried to carry out the Seerlord’s command. He made a wide detour as he passed the carcass of the slaveherder and the string of goblins sadistically mutilating it with a jagged piece of stone.

Seerlord Queekual hissed with satisfaction. Let the lies of Pestilens fare where they would, the hordes of skavendom would not forget the power of the grey seers. When the time came, they would flock once more to the true faith of the Horned Rat, would seek the salvation only Seerlord Queekual could deliver to them.

Yes, he thought as he watched a pack of rats scurry out of the darkness and begin feeding on the skaven he had slain. Yes, skavendom would once again grovel before the grey seers. They would grovel, or they would all die!

The network of burrows was dank and slimy even by the loose standards of Skavenblight. The walls were caked in mud and black water dripped from the ceiling. Slime seemed to coat everything, almost growing before an observer’s eye. The smells were those of sweat and blood and fear. Not the scent of ratkin, but the stink of lower creatures. The stench of man.

Queekual’s escort of grizzled stormvermin marched alongside him in enforced silence. The flesh-shapers of Clan Moulder were careful about their elite guard, taking no chance that they might betray the secrets of their masters. About the neck of each guard-rat a thick iron collar had been locked, but they weren’t so extensive as to completely obscure the jagged scar along each throat where the slavemasters had slashed the vocal cords of their minions. The Seerlord’s eyes strayed to the twisted, bestial claws of each stormvermin. Even if the brutes were able to understand written Queekish, they’d have a hard time scratching out a message with such disfigured claws.

It mattered little. Let Clan Moulder cling to their petty secrets. It was only by some caprice of the Horned Rat that such a lowly and insignificant clan had weaselled their way onto the Council. What were they but semi-clever animal breeders? They might be capable enough to create larger varieties of rat, encourage certain cosmetically appealing turns of scent and pelt, nurture a particularly delectable sort of taste, but were such activities essential to the teeming hordes of skavendom? Their more audacious creations, the art of their vaunted flesh-moulding, were vicious horrors no ratman could control. The image of an entire mob of Clan Moulder skaven being torn apart by the wolf-rats they were exhibiting for the Grey Lords was vivid in Queekual’s mind. So was the savagely impressive performance of their new ogre-rat against one of the deathwalkers of Clan Verms in Skavenblight’s Abattoir many years ago. He could still see that enormous brute standing, bloodied and poisoned, perched atop the dismembered carcass of Blight Tenscratch’s gigantic scorpion.

Maybe it was a bit hasty to dismiss the peculiar art of Clan Moulder out of paw.

The Seerlord shook aside any thought about Clan Moulder’s potential. It was too soon to consider the value of any lesser clan. The exploitation of under-vermin would have to wait until the threat posed by Clan Pestilens had been eliminated. It would be a shame to hatch plans for a new pawn before knowing if they would be survivor or victim of what Queekual intended to unleash.

For now, it was enough that the slave-herders of Moulder could help Queekual further those plans. Even if they didn’t know it yet.

The slimy tunnel opened into a great cavern, its floor littered with cages of iron, wicker, wood and bone. More cages swung from the ceiling, suspended by a deranged network of rope and chain. The walls themselves were pockmarked with the barred doorways of cells and pens. The stink of man was even thicker here, the reek of subjugation and slavery. Queekual could hear the miserable creatures whimpering and moaning in their cages, cowering before the supremacy of their masters.

The ratkin of Moulder were everywhere, crawling about the cages, forcing fodder onto their charges, checking them for obvious signs of disease. The dead, the sick and the insane were dragged from their cages and hauled to a great pit yawning in the centre of the floor. Queekual could smell the butcher-stink rising from the hole. He applauded the practicality of Slavemaster Skuzzyl. Feed the useless to the useful. A commendable disposition of resources.

Skuzzyl leered down at Queekual from atop a heap of man-thing bones. He was a grotesquely obese ratman, his pelt greasy with animal fat, his ears notched with a confusion of jewellery, his fingers swollen with a multitude of rings. Even more than his belly’s appetite, Skuzzyl had a consuming hunger for shiny trinkets. As a favoured underling of High Vivisectionist Rattnak Vile, Skuzzyl had plenty of opportunity to indulge all his gluttony. Few dared call him ‘Packrat of Hellpit’ within his hearing.

Queekual stared back at Skuzzyl on his bony perch. The Seerlord let just a slight edge of sorcerous light shine from his narrowed eyes, a reminder to the slaveherder that he wasn’t dealing with some ten-flea warlord or fungus-licking adept. The display pierced Skuzzyl’s arrogance, the pile of bones teetering as he recoiled from the Horned Rat’s prophet.

‘We are honour-pleased by your visit, most great-mighty Queekual…’ Skuzzyl addressed his guest with a nasal paean of flattery.

A dull rumble throbbed through the cavern as Queekual brought the butt of his staff slamming against the floor. Bottles bounced from the tables, crashing against the floor. Clods of earth crumbled from the walls. Dirt rained down from the roof. Humans in their cages cried out in terror as they felt the ground shudder. Skaven vented their glands as the tremor of Queekual’s magic throbbed through their bodies. A small, even petty display, but it spoke louder than any words the Seerlord might have used. He was in no mood for empty praise or mercenary squabbling. He had a purpose, one that would brook no interference.

‘Your flea-fondlers have what I want, yes-yes?’ Queekual asked, his hiss sharper than the crack of a slavemaster’s whip.

Skuzzyl shifted uncomfortably, knocking a skull and a femur from his perch. ‘Yes-yes, Most Horrible One!’ he tried to reassure the Seerlord, ears laid back in an expression of sincere submission. A flick of his claws sent a pack of skaven scrambling about the barred door to one of the pens. With a viciousness that bordered on panic, the slavers forced a tangle of humans stumbling into the cavern.

Queekual sniffed at the captured humans, watching them with his beady eyes. ‘These?’ he snarled, his tail twitching with annoyance.

The wattle of flesh that hung from Skuzzyl’s lower jaw flopped as he swallowed the horror that rose up in his throat. ‘We do best-good!’ Skuzzyl protested. ‘Not find-catch many man-things clever-learned! Many die-sick from Black Plague! Many die-sick when bring to Skavenblight!’

The Seerlord didn’t look at the simpering Skuzzyl, but continued to study the humans the slaveherder’s minions had brought. They were a pathetic sight, scrawny and wrinkled, their hides blotched with age, their fur pale and matted. Under ordinary circumstances such slaves would have been chopped up weeks ago and fed to the stronger specimens. But these weren’t ordinary circumstances and, if Moulder had done what was expected of them, these weren’t ordinary slaves.

‘That breeder-thing,’ Skuzzyl wheezed, pointing a claw at a wizened old woman who had caught Queekual’s eye. ‘It think-know way to eat-chew plant-herb. Heal sick-things.’ Finding he had the Seerlord’s attention, Skuzzyl pointed at another slave, a dusky specimen with a great patch of fur under his nose. ‘That one find-catch in sand-land. It think-know way to stab flesh-body. Make pain leave.’

Skuzzyl felt confidence seeping back into him as he noted the keenness with which Queekual responded to his descriptions of the special slaves. The slaveherder snapped his claws and had his minions push one particular slave to the fore. He bruxed his fangs when he saw the scrawny, elderly human stumble and fall at the Seerlord’s feet.

‘Best of all!’ Skuzzyl chortled, his laughter dislodging a few more bones from his perch. ‘Just what Seerlord Queekual ask-want! That was-is doktor-thing of old king-man!’

Queekual felt a surge of excitement pulse through him as he heard Skuzzyl’s speech. Eagerly, almost half-afraid it was simply the empty boast of a slave-seller, Queekual seized the human’s jaw in his paw and forced the man to stare up at him.

‘You, doktor? Know-serve Boris-man?’ the Seerlord snapped in faltering Reikspiel. ‘Say-speak, quick-quick! Lie-die slow-slow!’

The half-starved human cringed beneath Queekual’s terrifying scrutiny. ‘Yes! Yes! I ministered to the Emperor! I am Doktor Moschner, personal physician to Emperor Boris Hohenbach!’

Queekual’s lips pulled back to expose his long fangs. The audacity of the man-thing, trying to intimidate him by evoking the name of his king! Even if the Boris-man were still alive, the temerity of the animal to think Queekual would be impressed.

The slavemasters of Clan Moulder had impressed upon their chattel the consequences of displeasing a skaven. Moaning in horror, Moschner abased himself before Queekual, wrapping his hands about the ratman’s foot. ‘Please, don’t send me back! Don’t leave me here! I’ll serve you, I’ll be loyal! Don’t leave me here!’

The Seerlord kicked the begging human away. Slavemasters pounced on Moschner, lashing him back into line with the other slaves.

‘They please you, yes-yes?’ Skuzzyl asked, one paw preening the fur covering his fat throat. ‘Much-hard to find-catch. Cost much-much!’ Queekual glared up at him. How easy it would be to tear that greedy gizzard from the slaveherder’s corrupt bulk.

‘Do not think to cheat-lie,’ Queekual hissed. This time his eyes fairly burned with an unholy green light. ‘The Horned Rat listens,’ he snarled. ‘The Horned Rat knows.’

Skuzzyl grinned down from his perch. ‘Does the Horned Rat care?’ he challenged. ‘Does the Horned Rat love Clan Pestilens more?’ The slaveherder chittered with a peal of mockery. ‘Why do grey seers need-want healer-things? Why not ask the Horned Rat to protect-save from Black Plague?’

A bolt of green lightning licked out from Queekual’s paw. The base of Skuzzyl’s perch exploded in a burst of black smoke and bone fragments. The fat ratman squealed as he came crashing down, slamming into the cavern floor and rolling nearly to the lip of the pit. Skuzzyl’s minions blinked in shocked horror, both at the violence of Queekual’s magic and its startling abruptness.

‘The price stays as agreed,’ Queekual growled at the prostrate Skuzzyl. He pointed his staff at the slaveherder. ‘You ask many questions of the Horned Rat. Would you like-want to see Him and get answers?’

Bobbing his head, crawling along the floor in an expression of grovelling contrition, Skuzzyl made every assurance his conniving mind could conceive to placate the ire of his customer. Seerlord Queekual barely heard him. It was all he could do to keep the amusement from escaping his body in a peal of laughter.

So, Skuzzyl thought the grey seers needed these slaves to help protect themselves from the Black Plague and the heretical sorcery of Clan Pestilens? Such a misconception fitted Queekual’s plans more perfectly than he could have hoped. When Skuzzyl inevitably informed the plague monks of what Queekual was doing, it would deceive those vile heretics completely. It was a small thing to suffer the contempt of mouse-sniffers like Puskab and Vrask for a season or three, a minor burden to be carried on the road to victory.

If the plaguelords deceived themselves with Skuzzyl’s report they would be oblivious to Queekual’s true purpose.

At least until it was too late to be stopped.

CHAPTER TWO

Carroburg, 1119

The blast shook the whole of Carroburg, spilling rubble into the desolate streets and sending a black cloud wafting over the city. The wretched survivors of the city, those who had endured plague, starvation and the bestial tyranny of skaven masters, lifted their faces and watched as the forbidding battlements of Schloss Hohenbach collapsed. A ragged cheer rose from the huddled masses of dejected humanity. The castle had become the symbol of their verminous overlords. Watching it crumble into the river was something that spoke to their very souls. Graf Mandred’s army had liberated them, but it was only as they watched the castle topple into the river that the people understood.

It was over. The years of cruel captivity and slavery were finished. They were free.

Within the marble sanctuary of what had been Carroburg’s Cathedral of Verena, the sound of the cheering Drakwalders almost drowned out the rumbling echoes of the explosion. Trickles of dust fell from the ruined ceiling, a charred beam crashed to the floor in some forlorn corner of the temple. The defiled altar, scarred and chipped by skaven axes and hammers, vibrated in sympathy to the tremor emanating from the Otwinsstein, the great rock upon which the Hohenbachs had raised their fortress. The noble lords assembled within the cathedral, the only major building to survive the skaven occupation, and brushed dirt from the long table about which they were assembled.

‘That is that then,’ grumbled Margraf Udo von Ulmann. The forest baron had been the most vocal critic of demolishing the castle. Now he was trying his best to accept Mandred’s decision with a show of good grace. He wasn’t quite succeeding.

‘There is more to ruling a land than seizing a castle,’ observed Duke Schneidereit. ‘Indeed, it may be better destroying the castle in such remarkable fashion. It demonstrates to the Drakwalders that the old order won’t be coming back. Impresses on them where the power now resides.’

Mandred listened to his councillors discuss the administration of Drakwald, how they would partition the province and carve new fiefdoms for Middenland nobles and those of the old Drakwald order who proved sufficiently amenable to the purposes of their new lords. Some of the noblemen argued for outright annexation of Drakwald while others urged the more prudent course of installing a puppet ruler to administer the region for them. Such a gesture would ease any misgivings in neighbouring provinces.

As he listened, Mandred felt his stomach turn. The people of Drakwald had welcomed his army as liberators. Some of the same men he now heard speaking of exploitation and annexation had fought the hardest to free those people. In the midst of battle they hadn’t thought of profit and plunder. They’d been driven by nobler purpose and loftier ambition. How then, when the fight was won, could they bring themselves so low?

‘The heart of man is a fickle thing.’ The words were spoken almost at Mandred’s shoulder. He looked away from the callous debate of his nobles, attending to the priest seated beside him. Arch-Lector Wolfgang Hartwich still affected the simple monk’s robe he had worn when he’d arrived in Middenheim disguised as the erudite Brother Richter. The only change to his raiment was the large silver hammer that hung about his neck on a jewelled chain of jade and gold.

The Sigmarite shook his head sadly as he continued the thought. ‘In turmoil, men seek only brotherhood, a comrade to share their struggle. In peace, men lust after dominance. Tragedy reveals the best in men. Prosperity exposes the worst in men.’ Wolfgang fingered the talisman he wore. ‘Only the wisdom and beneficence of the gods can protect us from ourselves, can keep us from destroying the gifts they have bestowed upon us.’

‘A bleak sentiment,’ Mandred remarked.

‘A harsh lesson,’ the priest corrected him. He gestured at the ruin in which they sat. ‘A building, a city, even an Empire can be rebuilt. Anything raised by mortal hands may be torn down, but so too can it be restored. Only the profanation of the soul is eternal. Only a defiled spirit is lost forever.’

Mandred was familiar enough with Wolfgang to recognise that the priest was leading him into some philosophical trap. It was far safer to debate morality and theology with Ar-Ulric, his wisdom was pragmatic and straightforward. Wolfgang’s was more esoteric, filled with nuances of meaning that bore two questions for every answer. The Sigmarite also possessed an uncanny facility for judging Mandred’s moods and the thoughts behind them.

‘Men did not destroy this city,’ Mandred said. ‘Or would Sigmar absolve the skaven of their outrages?’ The graf at once repented the anger he allowed to creep into his voice. The priest didn’t fail to notice the emotion and its source.

‘Perhaps they are sent to test us, to find what strength is left in an Empire brought low by corruption and greed,’ Wolfgang said. ‘In every catastrophe, the seeds of great things are sown. It is up to men to let them grow.’

‘What can grow from such wholesale misery?’ Mandred scoffed. ‘First the plague, then the skaven! How many thousands have perished because of the indifference of the gods?’ His gaze became a bitter stare, boring hatefully into the priest’s countenance. ‘If the gods have any power at all, why do they not ease the suffering of their people?’ He waved in disgust at his councillors. ‘Listen to them! Like vultures picking at a carcass.’

Some of the nearest of the nobles cast an anxious look towards their sovereign when they heard his outburst. The intensity on Mandred’s face caused them to discreetly pretend they had heard nothing.

Wolfgang smiled benignly. ‘Ar-Ulric told me a curious parable before we marched from Middenheim. He said that there are two wolves living in each man’s heart. The name of one wolf is Life. He provides sustenance for his pups and comfort to his mate. The other wolf is Death. He defends his territory from intruders and brings destruction to his enemies. A man who acknowledges only Life will wither; he will fade into a cowardly shadow. The man who feeds only Death becomes a monster, existing only to kill. To be strong, a man must nurture both the wolves in his heart equally. He must never favour one above the other.’

‘That sounds like a warning,’ Mandred accused.

‘Wisdom, even Ulrican wisdom, only sounds threatening to those who already know the truth but refuse to accept it,’ the priest returned. ‘Every man is keeper of his own soul. The gods may show us the road, but it is left to each man whether he will walk the path.’ Wolfgang looked across the squabbling nobles. ‘Sometimes men need a leader to walk the road ahead of them.’

Mandred rose from his seat, ignoring the bows and genuflections of his subjects as he stalked away from the meeting. ‘My path is my own,’ he told Wolfgang. ‘I ask no one to walk it with me.’

As he marched from the ruined sanctuary, the arguing voices of the nobles echoed in Mandred’s ears. Each word, each syllable, stirred the anger in his heart. He hadn’t brought his army to Carroburg so his barons could loot the rubble. He’d marched his troops here to liberate an enslaved province.

His steps faltered as he found the shattered image of Verena staring down accusingly at him in stony silence from the wall. There was no deceiving the God of Truth and Learning. Mandred hastened his step, putting the image behind him as quickly as he could. The lies a man might tell himself fell empty when he tried to justify them to a god.

Footsteps pursued Mandred as he quickened his pace. For a few steps, the irrational fear that Verena had jumped down from his wall and was pursuing him filled the graf’s mind. Reason beat down superstitious fright, however. When he stopped and turned around he was greeted not by a judgemental stone god, but by the sympathetic softness of a lovely woman.

‘I was told you stormed out of the council meeting,’ the woman said. When she added a demure smile, a crimson flush rose into Mandred’s face. However rich her clothes, however luxurious her surroundings, whenever Lady Mirella smiled at him like that he could only picture the beautiful damsel he’d rescued from the Kineater… and the distress of her wardrobe when he’d first met her.

‘They wanted to make me Count of Drakwald,’ Mandred said. ‘I told them no.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘What these people need is help, not a new set of rulers telling them what to do.’

Mirella was pensive for a moment. ‘Maybe they just need the right ruler telling them what to do,’ she said, stepping forward to embrace the man she loved. She drew back when she felt the tension in Mandred’s body, found him unwilling to take comfort in her arms.

‘I’m not the one,’ Mandred stated, a terrible weariness in his voice. ‘Everyone thinks I am, everyone looks up to me for something I don’t know how to give them. Thanks to Wolfgang, they all think I’ve been chosen by the gods to lead them gods know where.’

‘You walked from the Sacred Flame of Ulric, unharmed and unscathed, every wound and scar on your body healed,’ Mirella reminded him. ‘That speaks louder than any sermon Wolfgang or Ar-Ulric could ever preach.’ She lifted a hand to Mandred’s cheek. ‘The people believe in you. I believe in you.’

Mandred pulled away. ‘Beware what you trust. It could betray you.’

‘You would never betray your people,’ Mirella assured him. Mandred turned from her and marched away.

‘Perhaps I already have,’ he said. As he continued down the ruined corridor, he dreaded to hear Mirella’s footsteps in pursuit of him. It was easier to disappoint a god than a woman.

The darkness of the forest folded itself around the lone rider, seeming to conspire with him against his pursuers. He could hear their voices calling to him as they thundered down the trail. The panic in their tones stabbed at his heart. He wasn’t deserving of such concern. They looked to him as a leader, but he was so much less than that. A leader forgot about himself, set aside his own needs and desires so that he might do what was best for his subjects.

That was how Graf Gunthar had ruled Middenheim. Only once in his father’s long reign had he seen Gunthar allow selfishness to threaten his subjects. That was when he had ordered an idealistic, reckless youth back into the city after being exposed to the plague-ridden squalor of Warrenburg. For his son, Gunthar had betrayed his people.

Mandred watched from the shadows while Beck and a squadron of knights galloped past. They were good vassals, stalwart warriors, but poor woodsmen. If Beck hoped to pick up his master’s trail then he would be well-advised to fetch Mad Albrecht or one of the rangers. Left to his own devices, Beck would have a hard time tracking a mammoth across a mud flat.

As the shouting voices faded into the distance, Mandred wheeled his horse around. He’d ridden into the forest hoping to run down some skaven stragglers. The reports from the quartermasters who maintained the army’s supplies made it clear that small bands of ratmen were creeping into Carroburg to steal food. A few of the vermin had even been caught, but the persistence of the thieving made it clear that there were still more of them out there.

The prospect of killing ratmen was a lure Mandred couldn’t resist. The skaven wouldn’t risk a fair fight, but if they thought they held the upper hand they might show themselves. The fewer the hunters, the greater the chance of drawing the cowardly creatures from hiding. One was the smallest number Mandred knew of.

He smiled bitterly. The example of Beck and his knights following him into the forest epitomised the turmoil in Mandred’s heart. Because of who he was, everyone wanted him to lead them. They didn’t seem to care where he took them.

Mandred cared, however. That was why he felt only disgust for himself. He’d led this great army to liberate Carroburg, but he hadn’t done it to save the people or enrich his domains. He hadn’t even done it for the gods. He’d done it for himself and no one else. He’d brought his army against Carroburg for one purpose: to kill skaven.

Vengeance. It was the meat with which Mandred was feeding the wolf in his heart. Revenge for the father the ratmen had taken from him. How could he offer his subjects hope when all that was inside him was hatred? How could he ask men to die for something that belonged to him and him alone?

The baseness of his motives disgusted him, made him recognise himself as a traitor to the expectations of thousands. Yet how could he bring about the great things they saw in him when he couldn’t see them?

Mandred’s horse suddenly reared, neighing in alarm. He reached one hand over to pat the animal’s neck and quiet it. His other hand reached for Legbiter. If there were skaven near, the horse would smell them long before its rider was aware of them.

The graf froze, his fingers just touching the sword’s hilt. Ahead of him, sitting beside a berry bush, was an enormous white wolf. The beast was watching him with piercing eyes. Though it had been over a year, the image of the white wolf that had led him to the Kineater’s camp, that had intervened when the monster was about to kill him, was vivid in his memory. It was impossible for him to doubt that this was the same animal.

The wolf seemed to wait until it was certain Mandred had recognised it. Then it rose to its feet and curled back its lips in a snarl. The predator’s sudden show of ferocity threw the horse into greater panic. Mandred fought to keep the bucking steed under control, but soon found himself hurtling from the saddle.

Mandred slammed into the ground, the impact driving the wind from his body. More than the physical impact, however, it was the sound of his horse galloping off through the brush that elicited a pained groan from him. It would be a long walk back to Carroburg.

A low growl reminded him of the cause of his predicament. Again his hand snatched at Legbiter. He had regarded the white wolf as some kind of omen, a divine benefactor, but it seemed the creature was only a hungry animal after all.

Drawing his sword even as he scrambled to his feet, he looked about for the beast. He found it seated once more on its haunches beside the berry bush. Somehow, it seemed to exude a sense of amusement as it watched him.

Mandred lowered his sword. The wolf confused, annoyed and puzzled him, but strangely he felt no fear of it. He was certain that it had deliberately scared his horse, yet it made no move to menace him.

‘What do you want?’ he demanded, feeling more than a little foolish shouting at a wolf.

The animal rose to its feet and turned its back to him. Before loping off into the brush, it looked back at him over its shoulder, seeming to beckon him.

Mandred returned his runefang to its scabbard. As he had a year before, he accepted the strange animal’s unspoken invitation.

Alone, he followed the white wolf into the dark of the forest.

Sylvania, 1120

Under the merciless lashes of the Nachtsheer, the grim battlements of Castle Drakenhof began to take shape once more. Hundreds of peasant slaves toiled to drag the heavy blocks of stone up earthen ramps to the towering castle walls. Indentured artisans, masons and architects culled from every settlement within reach of the Nachtsheer, both within and without the county of Sylvania, laboured with hammer and chisel to give form to those blocks. Day and night they chipped away until the blocks were reduced to jagged, fang-like crescents. Only then were they hoisted onto the parapets and made fast with staples of steel.

From the windows of the Red Spire, Malbork von Drak watched his fortress being reborn, restored after the devastation wrought by the terrifying Starfall seven years ago. The largest of the noxious black stones was still embedded deep beneath the castle dungeons, lodged too securely for even a thousand slaves to remove. Even if the Sylvanian voivode had been prepared to accept the loss of workers due to the sickening miasma the so-called Jewel of Morrslieb exuded, his best architects had assured him removing the stone would compromise the foundations of the castle. Malbork trusted the judgement of his engineers, especially when, after executing three of them for possessing a defeatist bearing, the fourth engineer told him the exact same thing. He’d rewarded the man’s honesty with a purse of gold.

The Voivode of Sylvania prided himself on his impeccable sense of justice.

‘Your excellency must understand that the transition in Wurtbad does not change the duties incumbent upon the county whose governance you have been entrusted with.’ The words were those of Baron von Waldberg-Raabs, envoy from the Grand Count of Stirland. Sylvania had enjoyed five years without interference from their liege lord. Already decimated by plague, Stirland had further suffered in the aftermath of the former grand count’s death. Along with most of the electors of the Empire, Grand Count von Boeselager had perished in Carroburg when plague struck the fortified refuge of the late Emperor Boris. No direct heir had been left behind by von Boeselager, and for four years the streets of Wurtbad and the countryside of Stirland had witnessed vicious battles between half a dozen claimants. Only in the last spring had Karl von Oberreuth prevailed over his rivals and established himself as the new Grand Count.

Malbork stroked the thick moustache that drooped from his upper lip. It was so terribly tempting simply to push the irritating Stirlander out of the tower window. Rising far above the rooftop of Drakenhof’s central keep, the Red Spire offered more than simply a stunning view of the construction below. Immediately to the west of the tower yawned a great pit, a natural fissure that tradition held had once been the home of a dragon. Tradition also held that the pit was without a bottom. Certainly it was deep enough that no body had ever been recovered from it. For generations, the von Draks had used the Wyrm’s Gizzard to dispose of people they didn’t want to see again.

The voivode smiled when he saw the look of horror on the face of Clucer Scarlat when the courtier saw his lord gazing at the tall window overlooking the pit. For the moment, the heavy shutters with their engraved dragons were closed, but it would only take a word from von Drak and his soldiers would fling them open… and fling the envoy to his doom. The ramifications of such an incident made the foppish Scarlat sick with horror. Some men had no stomach for war.

Malbork turned away from the window and scrutinised his noble visitor. Von Waldberg-Raabs was a middle-aged man, the prime of health slowly draining from what had once been a robust physique. There was a strength of character about the man’s features that Malbork always found suspicious in his minions and frustrating in his peers. It denoted a propensity for defiance in the former and a decided lack of corruptibility in the latter. Any thoughts of offering the envoy a bribe would be as inadvisable as putting the Wyrm’s Gizzard to use.

‘It pains me, but these lands have been harder hit than most,’ Malbork told the baron. ‘Sylvania was among the first to suffer the misery of plague…’

Von Waldberg-Raabs offered the voivode a thin and utterly insincere smile. ‘As the first to suffer the plague, you must also be the first to emerge from its shadow.’ The envoy pointed to the battlements far below and the construction gangs labouring to restore the castle. ‘Forgive me for observing, but there seems no shortage of peasants in your fiefdom.’

Malbork glared murder at the Stirlander for his insulting turn of phrase. ‘Get out,’ he hissed in a low, vicious tone.

Baron von Waldberg-Raabs blinked in confusion, unable to process the voivode’s abandonment of protocol. ‘Excuse me, your excellency?’

The voivode turned about, stroking his moustache as he looked to the shuttered window. ‘Get out or you will be shown out.’

Clucer Scarlat, all colour drained from his face, hooked an arm around that of the envoy and began a hasty retreat from the Red Spire. ‘His excellency needs time to consider the logistics of your request,’ the courtier explained. Soon, the two men were out in the corridor descending the spiral stairs leading down into the keep. Malbork von Drak was alone in the ancient execution chamber.

Or so the voivode’s reason told him. His senses told him otherwise. As soon as the sound of Scarlat’s conversation grew distant enough that the clucer’s voice was nothing but an indistinct murmur, there came a new sound just at the edge of Malbork’s hearing. It was a strange, eerie noise that defied all efforts to determine its source. He could liken it only to the prolonged tearing of some old and rotten cloth, thin and porous with age. From everywhere and nowhere the noise came, until it seemed the Red Spire was saturated with the clamour.

It was then, when the noise had grown to its most antagonistic, that Malbork saw the shadow. Rising from the corner of the room closest to the shuttered window and the Wyrm’s Gizzard, the shade was indistinct at first, merely a blot on the join between floor and wall. But with each passing breath, the shadow grew, becoming both denser and more distinct. It began to take on man-like shape, a manikin of darkness, robed in a veil of black.

An awful fascination imprisoned Malbork. He could neither move nor speak, only watch as the spectre assumed form. The tyrant of Sylvania, the despot who lorded over thousands of lives, was as helpless as a sparrow caught in the serpent’s gaze.

Ice crackled on the tower’s stone floor as the shadow stepped out from the wall and became three-dimensional: a lean, withered body draped in a cloak ribbed like the wing of some monstrous bat. Against the folds of a high, crimson-hued collar, a vulturine face regarded the voivode with malignant intensity. Malbork felt his skin crawl under the scrutiny of those blood-shot eyes.

‘Vanhal,’ the count gasped. Malbork was reckoned a fierce, formidable warrior by those who had met him on the battlefield, yet the spectral visitation had sapped even his courage. Tales of the necromancer’s terrifying sorceries were never far from the thoughts of any Sylvanian, far less the man who nominally reigned over them all. That the dreadful warlock should be able to violate the defences of Castle Drakenhof so easily was a horror he had never dared imagine.

The cadaverous face pulled back in a thin, sneering smile. ‘If I were him, you would be dead right now,’ the morbid intruder declared in a scratchy, withered voice. ‘I am the Baron Lothar von Diehl of Mordheim. I tell you this in order that you might understand it is an equal and not some unwashed peasant who treats with you.’

Malbork stepped back, one hand closing about the dagger hanging from his belt. ‘I have heard of you,’ he said. ‘You are Vanhal’s creature, his minion. You too have despoiled my lands and stolen my people from their graves!’

‘Graves you so obligingly filled,’ Lothar said, bowing his shrivelled head in acknowledgement. ‘But I did not come so far to dwell upon the past, excellency. I came here to discuss the future.’

‘What demands does Vanhal make of me?’ Malbork asked, managing to keep the fear he felt from his voice. With the skaven sniffing at the borders of his lands, with Stirland growing increasingly onerous in their demands for past duties and tithes, now was the worst time for the necromancer’s deathless legions to stir from Vanhaldenschlosse.

Lothar blinked, surprised by the voivode’s question. ‘Vanhal makes no demands,’ he laughed. ‘Were he able, he would simply take what he wanted.’ He raised an almost skeletal finger to indicate the significance of the point he was making. ‘Were he able,’ Lothar repeated. ‘But I fear my mentor still recovers from his exertions. Decimating the skaven, annihilating their sorcerer-priest, violating the governance of time-space, these have extracted their toll from my master.’

Malbork’s hand eased away from the dagger, his brows knotted in keen interest. ‘What is it that Lothar von Diehl wants? And why?’

The Mordheimer gave Malbork another of his ghoulish smiles. ‘I have come to offer you my services. In return, you will agree to show me certain considerations.’

‘What considerations?’

A theatrical flourish of his emaciated hand brought a streamer of shadow expanding from Lothar’s hand. In a few breaths, the darkness became a tiny yet precise miniature of Vanhaldenschlosse’s crooked battlements. ‘I want Vanhaldenschlosse,’ he said. ‘The tower and a promise of non-interference as I pursue my studies.’ A grisly chuckle wracked the scrawny necromancer. ‘I can afford to procure any materials I might require on my own.’

The voivode eyed his visitant with hostile suspicion. He could guess what kind of materials the necromancer referred to and the sort of obscenities that would be conducted within Vanhaldenschlosse. ‘What services do I buy for such considerations?’

Lothar snapped his fingers, dispelling the shadowy miniature. ‘As I have said, Vanhal has been recuperating from his exertions. His power is diminished. After the battle, he could maintain but a scant thousand of his legion, only a handful of his zombie dragons. Have you not wondered why he doesn’t stir from his castle? Why his undead do not threaten your towns and villages?’

‘So you are telling me now is the time to strike?’ Malbork curled his lip in contempt. ‘If it is so easy, why do you not dispose of him yourself?’

‘You misunderstand me. I said that Vanhal was recuperating. He has already regained a formidable degree of his power.’

Anger coloured Malbork’s face, overwhelming the fear Lothar’s eerie entrance had provoked. ‘Then you are saying it is already too late to strike!’ He shook his fist in frustration.

Lothar merely smiled. ‘Too late now. But I have studied my master’s recovery most carefully. I have a better understanding of his abilities now. Of what he can do and what may again drain him to the point of vulnerability. The proper crisis, a conflict to draw him from his lair…’

‘I will not risk my army on some fool’s venture,’ Malbork growled.

‘Then we will not use your army, excellency,’ Lothar said, a cunning gleam in his eye. ‘Surely, between us, we could turn Vanhal’s ire towards another antagonist. Say, for instance, your liege lord, Grand Count von Oberreuth?’

Malbork marvelled at the perfidy of the necromancer. Pit one enemy against the other? Whichever emerged victor, the true winner would be Sylvania. ‘You seem certain of your influence over your master.’

Lothar shrugged. ‘As he recovers, he depends upon me for the little, mundane matters. Attending to invaders for instance. I can tell him such foes are from Stirland as easily as Sylvania.’

The light of suspicion crept back into the count’s gaze. ‘And all you want is the tower?’

‘The tower, freedom to conduct my researches and the protection of your soldiers against those who might take a dim view of my researches.’ Lothar paused, looking at the ceiling for an instant. When he continued it was as though remembering a minor detail that had almost slipped his memory. ‘I will also require a slight bauble, a bit of bric-a-brac recovered from the Inquisitorium of Verena in Mordheim. Certain… shall we say inimical concentrations of ideology make it difficult for me to get it myself.’

‘A sorcerer can’t trespass on holy ground,’ Malbork scoffed.

‘Something of the sort,’ Lothar admitted nonchalantly. ‘But I think it would be wise to act upon my request. Just in case Vanhal should prevail over your other enemies. Neither of us wants him coming back. This trinket will ensure he doesn’t.’

Malbork nodded as he carefully considered the necromancer’s claims. ‘Discuss your plans in more detail, sorcerer. It may be that we can form a compact.’

In sober tones the two noblemen made their plans of treachery and slaughter, secure in the isolation of the Red Spire. Unaware of the verminous ears lurking behind the walls, sharp to catch every nuance of their intrigues. Lips peeled away from inhuman fangs as the ratkin listened and plotted their own revenge.

CHAPTER THREE

Drakwald, 1119

For what felt like hours, Mandred followed the white wolf through the forest. Whenever he felt foolish, whenever doubt crept into his mind, the beast ahead of him would pause and look back at him. There was such an aura of expectancy in those piercing blue eyes that the nobleman would feel a surge of determination swell up inside him. Wherever the wolf was leading him, he was resolved to see the end of the trail.

The sun was sinking from the sky, the pale sliver of Mannslieb just beginning to cast its silvery rays into the shadowy forest. A cool, crisp wind moaned through the trees, sending dead leaves rustling across the ground. The white wolf trotted on, its pale pelt stark as a beacon in the gloom. A sudden increase in its pace left Mandred well behind. A flicker of alarm coursed through the noble. He sensed he was near wherever it was the animal was leading him. If he lost it now, he feared he would never learn the wolf’s secret.

One hand closed about his sword’s scabbard to keep the weapon from jouncing against his leg, Mandred rushed after the wolf. The animal broke into a steady run, weaving between the trees with an incredible grace. It wasn’t long before Mandred lost sight of the beast entirely. For an instant, he ran onwards, thinking he might pick up the animal’s trail again. Then reason asserted itself and he stopped running. He was alone in the twilit wood, chasing after a beast that was clearly anything but natural. An idiot could see the foolishness of pressing on.

Frustrated, angry at himself for allowing the wolf to lead him so far from the trails he knew, Mandred took stock of his surroundings. The trees and bushes around him looked much like any other in the Drakwald, but he recalled an old bit of woodcraft that claimed moss would grow only on the northern side of a tree. Or perhaps it was the southern side. Either way, unless some divine perversity caused the sun to set in the east, he’d be able to get his bearings by examining which way the moss grew.

He was just kneeling down to inspect one of the trees when he noticed the cave. A craggy lump of rock jutting out from the forest floor, its surface almost completely obscured by dead leaves and weeds; its would have been easy to miss but for the grim blackness of the cave mouth. As he continued to stare, he became aware of a dull, flickering glow deep within the darkness, the light of someone’s fire.

Mandred drew Legbiter from its sheath. The presence of fire indicated the presence of a thinking creature, one entirely different from the wolf he had followed so far and for so long. The most pleasant prospect his imagination could conjure was a band of brigands; at least they would be human. More likely the cave was infested with goblins, perhaps even a pack of skaven stragglers. The irony of that last possibility almost made him laugh.

Warily, he approached the cave. He strained to hear any sound, the scratchy whisper of goblin voices, the nasty hiss of skaven squeaks. The only noise that rewarded his alertness was the crackle of the fire. Tightening his grip on his sword, muttering a prayer to Ulric and another to Taal, Mandred made his way into the darkness.

The fire was a small one, burning in a little pit that had been gouged in the floor at the back of the cave. By its fitful light, Mandred saw that some manner of thinking creature had made the cave its home. Strings of dried herbs hung from the rock roof; animal skins covered the floor. One wall was given over to an assortment of gourds, woven baskets and old bones, their arrangement suggesting a deliberation beyond the witless whims of goblins and the bestial impulses of gors.

Mandred walked over to the assemblage of baskets and gourds. Removing the plug that sealed one of the gourds, he found the hollowed inside had been filled with a collection of wolf teeth. Carved into each fang was a sign, a rune that he recognised from the oldest Teutogen relics.

‘Would you have your doom revealed to you?’

The voice caused Mandred to drop the gourd, scattering teeth across the animal skins on the floor. He glared at the darkness near the mouth of the cave, sword held at the ready.

The speaker emerged from the shadows, gliding towards him with an almost soundless tread. Mandred stared in astonishment as a beautiful woman stood revealed in the firelight. She was tall, her limbs well-muscled, her long hair endowed with a silvery-blonde hue he’d never seen before. There was a timeless quality about her face, a fusion of strength and softness that set his pulse trembling. Hers was a visage beyond the worldly pretensions of princesses and queens, a defiance of the mortal laws of age and decay. If he were a priest and allowed the distinction of communing with the goddess Rhya, he imagined her face would be akin to the woman he now gazed upon.

‘I see you have cast the bones already,’ the woman stated as she strode towards Mandred. She was near enough that he could smell the musky scent of her hair. She wore a simple garment of deerskin, cinched at the waist with a belt of dried gut, the brief skirt cut well above her knees. The luxuriant folds of a wolfskin cloak hung about her shoulders, tightened about her throat by a moonstone clasp. No shoes fettered her feet, yet Mandred could find neither scratch nor bruise upon her bare toes.

In a movement more graceful than Mandred would have thought possible for a human body, the woman knelt on the floor and quickly examined the teeth he’d upset from the gourd. Her hands passed over the wolf fangs, turning them over with the merest brush of her palm. Her eyes darted across the runes, flickering from one to another with the hungry fascination of a cormorant stalking fish.

‘These tell me much about you, Mandred von Zelt,’ the woman declared. In a single sweep of her hands, she gathered the teeth into her palm.

Hearing her speak his name broke the strange fascination that had gripped him. Mandred shook his head, but made no move to return Legbiter to its scabbard. ‘What are you?’ he demanded. ‘A witch?’

The woman smiled up at him from where she knelt on the floor. ‘Perhaps,’ she purred. ‘Or perhaps the fame of the Wolf of Sigmar is such that he is recognised even in the middle of nowhere.’

Mandred glowered at the woman. ‘I am a follower of Ulric,’ he declared. ‘I have no truck with witches.’

Reaching to her breast, the woman pulled her deerskin vestment down, exposing the swell of her breasts and the symbol tattooed between them. It was the wolf-head emblem of Ulric, the same symbol that was woven into the ceremonial robes of Ar-Ulric himself.

‘There are many ways to follow the White Wolf,’ she said. Her choice of words sent a chill rushing along Mandred’s spine. Was it mere chance that made her refer to Ulric by such title? Did she somehow suspect the strange path that had led him to her lair?

Mandred lowered his eyes, waving his hand at the witch. ‘Cover yourself,’ he commanded. The order brought a laugh bubbling from her lips, but she did as he asked.

‘A man of violence, a dealer of death and slaughter, a warrior steeped in the blood of his enemies, yet you blanch at nakedness,’ she mocked him.

‘There are such things as decency and propriety,’ Mandred stated. It was his turn to mock. ‘They are the things that make men civilised. That set us above beasts… and witches.’

The woman jostled the teeth she held, sending an eerie clicking noise echoing through the cave. ‘You may call me Hulda,’ she declared. ‘I am the Howl of Ulric. In better times, many sought my counsel. Now there are only a few.’

Mandred felt a curious sympathy when he heard the sorrow woven into her words. ‘The plague has taken many,’ he said. As he spoke, for the first time he considered the true extent of what had been lost to the plague. The toll in lives had been abominable, but now he contemplated what else had been lost with those lives: the ancient wisdom and traditions that had been exterminated with the people who kept them. This tradition of a forest oracle, a peculiarity of this part of Drakwald, how many were left who would keep it? How many of them had perished of the disease or fallen to the skaven who followed?

Hulda stopped rattling the fangs in her hand. ‘The plague has taken many,’ she agreed. ‘Some through sickness, some through fear.’ Cocking her head to one side, the seeress studied Mandred for a moment.

‘The fangs have shown me where you have been, Graf of Middenheim,’ she said. ‘I have seen the road you travelled to get here… and why.’ In a motion that was part lunge and part pounce, Hulda sprang across the floor, catching up the gourd in one hand and returning the teeth to it with the other. ‘There is a terrible hunger inside you, Wolf of Sigmar,’ she said. ‘A hatred that burns for blood but which will never be quenched by blood.’

‘How can I lead men?’ Mandred asked, his voice betraying a note of despair. ‘How can I ask them to follow me when all I can offer them is hatred?’

Hulda dipped her finger back into the gourd, removing a single fang. She held it up for Mandred to see the slash-like rune etched into the enamel. ‘This is your sign. I read it when it fell to the floor. It is called Winterfire, the flame that freezes, the cold that burns. Never have I seen this rune matched to a man’s soul. It betokens greatness.’

Mandred shook his head. ‘I don’t want greatness. I am unworthy of it.’

‘Men do not choose the doom the gods have proclaimed,’ Hulda said. ‘Their destiny is written in the stars, in the mountains, in the song of the bird and the howl of the wolf. To deny destiny is the gravest insult to the gods.’ Hulda smiled at him, a surprising tenderness in her manner. ‘A small man seeks greatness, lusts after it, cheats and lies and murders to steal it. A great man shuns it, hides from it, begs it to pass to another. Which of these are you, Mandred?’

‘But I am no leader,’ Mandred said. ‘I want nothing but to kill skaven. There is no hope, no future I can offer my people. Your bones have shown you. All that is in my heart is hatred. Men deserve more than that.’

Hulda set down the gourd. ‘Then give them more. Give yourself more. Be the Winterfire, use the flame of hatred to bring hope, use the chill of rage to build tomorrow. That is the riddle of the rune, to use the power yet deny the essence of that power.’

‘I am only a man,’ Mandred insisted, clinging to that simple truth, trying desperately to deny the miracle of the Sacred Flame.

Hulda sprang to her feet. In a single bound she was beside Mandred, pressing the fang of Winterfire into his hand. ‘Become something more,’ she told him. Her eyes glittered as they stared into his. ‘Destiny is a web that connects us all. If one strand fails, the skein may be undone. The fate of all men may rest upon the choices you make.’

Mandred clenched his fist, feeling the fang dig into his palm. ‘It is a grim burden,’ he shuddered. His body felt as though a great weight were pressing down on him, threatening to smash him flat against the floor of the cave. Somehow, he felt that if he simply let the tooth fall out of his hand, the onerous duty would pass from him and he would be free.

Mandred tightened his hold on the fang. Hulda stepped back, her face aglow with admiration.

‘A leader makes the right decisions,’ she said. ‘Not the easy ones.’

It was early morning when Mandred left the cave. Strangely, it seemed only a matter of minutes before he was back on the old familiar trail, the path he had quit when he’d started his pursuit of the white wolf. Had the beast led him in circles or had he simply imagined the chase to be far longer than the reality? He turned to look back, to find any glimpse of Hulda’s cave, but the trees seemed to have closed in, blotting out even the trace of his own tracks.

‘Your highness!’ an anguished voice cried out from somewhere nearby in the forest. Mandred recognised the cry as belonging to his bodyguard Beck. Taking a last look in the direction where he thought Hulda’s cave must lie, he cupped a hand to his mouth and called out to the knight. Immediately he heard the crash of armed men rushing through the tangled undergrowth. In only a few moments, the graf was surrounded by a bedraggled yet relieved group of rangers and woodsmen. Beck, it seemed, had appreciated his own limitations after all and gone to recruit those who knew the forest to conduct the search.

The men gathered around him as Mandred described his pursuit of the white wolf. When he came to relate his discovery of the cave, however, he found himself reluctant to mention Hulda, instead leaving it a mystery who might have made the fire or dwelt in the cave.

When he had finished, the men around Mandred celebrated his adventure and its happy outcome. Only Mad Albrecht, the veteran poacher and hunter was uneasy. A native Drakwalder, he professed to know these woods better than any of them. Gravely, he pronounced that Mandred was fortunate to have emerged from the forest alive.

‘In Middenland, perhaps, the white wolf is a good omen,’ Albrecht explained, ‘but in Drakwald it is an ill sending. Long have the people of the forest whispered tales of a bloodthirsty monster that cloaks itself in the pelt of a great white wolf. It is a beast of unnatural cunning and impervious to mortal weapons. Many generations has it haunted these woods, and on nights when the moons are full its terrible howls can be heard even in the streets of Carroburg.’

Beck was quick to laugh at the poacher’s story. ‘A child’s myth,’ he said. ‘A useful fable for keeping folk away from where the game is plentiful, eh?’ The joke brought laughter from the other men.

Mandred didn’t join the merriment. He looked back into the shadowy forest. He thought about what he had experienced. He thought about Albrecht’s story.

And he wondered.

Altdorf, 1121

He never failed to feel the magnitude of his superiority whenever he stood upon the balcony and gazed upon the palaces of the noble and wealthy. They were his. Not just one of them, but all of them. The illusion of possession and ownership was a useful deceit, something to keep the old order pliable and complacent, docile and oblivious while their world was steadily and inexorably collapsing around them.

It was true, the nobles and aristocrats still had much power. Even in the midst of crisis and plague their wealth commanded respect. Too many commoners were accustomed to deferring to their blue-blooded masters. Servitude was all they had ever known, ambition had been as carefully culled from their minds as a mutant steer from a herd of cattle. They were too afraid of change to aspire for anything more. The promise of food and shelter was enough to kill their pride and smother their dreams. Like so many vampires, the nobility battened upon the complacency of their peasants.

But that world was changing. Before the Black Plague struck, the first seeds of change had been sown. In his merciless greed, Emperor Boris Goldgather had planted the crop, the tax upon the peasant soldiery, the Dienstleute. Unwilling to pay, many of the nobles had simply dismissed the peasant soldiers in their service, loosing upon the Empire thousands of embittered men. Commoners who had dutifully served their noble lords had been cast aside with utter disregard the moment their presence became an inconvenience to the treasuries of their masters.

Most of the displaced Dienstleute had descended upon Altdorf, petitioning the Emperor himself for food and work. The result of their protest had led to the Bread March and the massacre that followed. Those who had escaped the slaughter dispersed among the city’s peasantry, each man spreading the word of revolution and a new society: one without aristocrats and nobles; a land where a man would earn his place by deeds, not breeding.

Adolf Kreyssig was the exemplar of such philosophy. Peasant-born, he’d risen to become the commander of the Kaiserjaeger, transforming it into the secret police of Emperor Boris. His position had become so powerful that he’d married into the House Thornig, noble landholders from Middenland. When Emperor Boris fled Altdorf for his Carroburg retreat, it was Kreyssig who’d been appointed Protector of the Empire in his absence.

Kreyssig smiled at the irony of such a title. Now that the reins of power were in his hands, now that Boris had so conveniently expired from the plague, the last thing he intended to do was protect the Empire. By inches and degrees he was going to tear it down and rebuild it in his own image.

He was indebted to Boris for more than just the authority he now wielded. More than any other man, Kreyssig had been privy to the machinations by which Boris had ruled. Assuming the throne while little more than a boy, Boris had been installed by the elector counts because he would be young and weak, the absolute opposite of the elderly and despotic Ludwig II. Boris, however, had a finely honed instinct for survival. If he was weak, he would use the strength of those around him, pitting one against the other, using their own power against themselves. Emperor Boris had built his tyranny simply by making himself indispensable as arbiter between rival princes and potentates. That many of these rivalries had been exacerbated by the Emperor himself never seemed to occur to those he manipulated.

What had worked so well for the Emperor now served the Protector. Kreyssig had commanded the attack that led to the Bread Massacre, earning him the regard of the nobility, or at least such regard as they might confer upon a commoner. But he had also carefully cultivated the unrest being spread by the survivors. At first simply as a way to expand the power of his Kaiserjaeger, presenting an enemy that would reinforce the necessity for the vicious organisation. Later, with Boris gone, Kreyssig had taken a deeper interest in the peasant movement. He’d acquired as much prestige as the nobles would allow him on their own. Indeed, Duke Vidor and other powerful nobles wanted to curtail Kreyssig’s authority as Protector. It was the threat of peasant unrest and uprising that had stifled their efforts.

Then, almost like a gift of Providence, had come the skaven invasion. Kreyssig’s erstwhile allies had proven themselves far more than a mere handful of degenerate mutants and far more duplicitous than he could have imagined. Their assault on the city had very nearly succeeded. But it had been turned back, and in such fashion that Kreyssig became a hero to the commoners, the man who saved them from monsters straight out of legend. The impression that the nobles would have abandoned Altdorf and its people to the skaven was unfair, but it was a sentiment that played into existing resentments. It was a story Kreyssig’s agents spread among the peasants, exacerbating their jealousy and distrust of their lords. More and more, the nobility was recognising the might of the commoners they had looked down upon all their lives, the strength of the peasant mob to tear down even the oldest and greatest of them.

It was Kreyssig, hero of the people and surrogate for the dead Emperor, the man with connections to both the world of the peasant and the realm of the noble, who alone could mediate between the disparate groups. He alone was there to play the part of the arbiter…

A scowl worked itself onto Kreyssig’s face. No, it wasn’t quite true. There was another element at play. The Temple of Sigmar had been an important tool in establishing his support among the peasants. Through his efforts the Sigmarites had become the dominant force among Altdorf’s religions. The bread the Temple distributed to the starving masses had earned them the favour of the peasants, allowing it inroads into every corner of the city. There was also a solid core of zealots, those who had been there to witness the battle against the skaven outside the very walls of Sigmar’s Grand Cathedral. They were the ones who related in awed tones the bold stand of the Grand Theogonist upon the steps of the temple, the mighty hammer Thorgrim blazing with holy light as he brandished it on high. They were the ones who spread the legend of the Lady of Sigmar, calling down divine power to annihilate the skaven and scourge them from the city.

Kreyssig looked down at the grey cat he held in the crook of his arm as he thought about the Lady of Sigmar. She had been instrumental in that victory, without any doubt. Her magic, her arcane knowledge of the ratmen, her ability to play pious priest and arrogant noble like pieces on a game board. The cat Kreyssig held was part of her legacy, a way to warn him if skaven spies were around. Yes, Baroness von den Linden had been an important player in the salvation of Altdorf. But she’d been too ambitious. She would have set herself up as Empress, and Kreyssig had no illusions that she would have kept him around once that position was hers. Everything he had built up over the years she would have exploited, twisted to suit her own ends.

It was with the aid of Grand Theogonist Gazulgrund that Kreyssig had been able to escape the witch’s coils. Baroness von den Linden, as the venerated Lady of Sigmar, had become a heroic figure to the people of Altdorf, eclipsing both the Imperial palace and the Temple of Sigmar. Her sorceries were anathema to the Sigmarite priesthood while her ambitions were a threat to the Protector of the Empire. With Gazulgrund’s help, Kreyssig had eliminated the baroness. Using holy orisons to conceal his intentions from the witch, he’d locked her inside Boris’s extravagant indoor apiary, leaving the enraged bees to destroy her.

Baroness von den Linden was gone. That still left Gazulgrund. Kreyssig was wary of the influence the Grand Theogonist had over the peasants. Even as he built up the Temple of Sigmar to suit his own purposes, Kreyssig was aware that he was endowing Gazulgrund with more and more power. It was becoming a bit less clear which of them was dependent upon the other, the Temple or the Palace.

Kreyssig lowered his gaze, staring down from the balcony at the imposing parapets of the Courts of Justice. Buried beneath that imposing fortress were the secret dungeons of the Kaiserjaeger. Locked within one of those cells was his guarantee that Gazulgrund would do as he was told. So long as the Grand Theogonist’s daughter remained a ‘guest’ of the Kaiserjaeger, the priest belonged to Kreyssig.

Through the Grand Theogonist, Kreyssig controlled the Temple. Through the Temple, he controlled the peasants. Through them both, he controlled the nobles.

In time, he would control the entire Empire.

Slowly, Grand Theogonist Gazulgrund walked across the sparsely furnished cell that served as his private study, advancing upon the little wicker cage resting atop a small side table. The animal inside the cage hissed at him as he stretched his hand towards it. The priest frowned at the black-furred brute. There was no love lost between cleric and cat. In the strictures of the Temple, cats were symptomatic of witchcraft and ill omen, described as emissaries of Old Night in the apocalyptic writings of Arch-Templar Dyre. No priest of Sigmar could feel entirely comfortable around cats after reading Dyre. The animal, for its part, had picked up on Gazulgrund’s hostility and returned it in kind, yowling and scratching at him whenever he came close.

Keeping the animal at all had been an act of submission on Gazulgrund’s part, a concession to the decree of Protector Kreyssig. Worried that the skaven might yet have spies in Altdorf, that they might be planning a second invasion, Kreyssig had ordered all persons of position to keep a cat with them. The brute would warn if a skaven were near. Gazulgrund’s objections that the divine grace of Sigmar was all the protection the Temple needed had fallen on deaf ears. He’d sent a troop of Kaiserjaeger to the cathedral to deliver the Grand Theogonist’s cat, making it clear in no uncertain terms that debate was not an option. That he’d selected a black cat for the priest, an animal even more closely associated with Old Night, was a calculated insult that wasn’t lost on Gazulgrund.

The priest stared down into the hateful yellow eyes of the cat before drawing the heavy backcloth down across the cage, hiding the animal from view. He didn’t like the reminder of Kreyssig’s authority, of his dominance over the Temple. He could speak more freely without feeling the beast’s hostile gaze upon him. And, especially this night, he needed to speak freely.

Returning to his desk, Gazulgrund sank down into his chair and tapped a tiny brass hammer against a bronze bell. A shrill, piercing note echoed through the study. In response, the door slowly opened and a shaven-headed monk peeked his head into the room.

‘I will see him now,’ Gazulgrund said, each word sinking like a leaden weight as he spoke. The enormity of what he was about to do, the implications of what he would order done, they were a burden not lightly contemplated.

The monk withdrew. The door opened wider and a man entered. He was garbed in black leather, from his gloves to his boots to the long cloak he wore. A heavy hood was drawn up over his head, obscuring his features in shadow. There was the clink of mail rattling with each stride the man took. As the door closed behind him, he reached up and drew back the concealing hood, displaying intense, hawkish features.

‘It is my supreme honour to attend you, holiness,’ the visitor declared, bending to one knee before the desk and the priest behind it.

Gazulgrund motioned the man to rise. ‘You may find little honour in this audience after you have learnt why I summoned you,’ he announced gravely. ‘My words will test your resolve, they will push your faith in Lord Sigmar to the utmost. Men, pious and true, have stood where you stand now and they have recoiled in horror at my words. It is condemnation of neither your courage nor your belief if you choose to depart now. If you stay to attend me and would hear my command, know that the consequences must be severe.’ He waited a moment, but his visitor remained standing. The hawkish features displayed no trace of anxiety, only curiosity. There was none of the trepidation he’d encountered before. Gazulgrund took that for a good sign.

‘Templar-Captain Reinhardt Holz, you have served dutifully in the Order of the Silver Hammer for ten years. Your career has been one of honour and fidelity. You have devoted yourself to the Temple, to rooting out the enemies of Sigmar and destroying them, whatever abominable form they might take. The Warlock of Darckenburg, the Vampire of Morrfeld, the obscene Cult of the Purple Hand in Nuln, these have you exposed and exterminated in the name of Mighty Sigmar.’ Gazulgrund stared intently at the templar. ‘However horrific the foe, you have never strayed from the guiding light of Sigmar.’

‘What nobler purpose can a man hold than to serve Lord Sigmar,’ Holz stated.

Gazulgrund glanced at the covered cat cage. It was curious that Holz should quote from Dyre. Perhaps it was a sign that he’d found the man who would not shrink from what he would have him do, the atrocity that must be done if the Temple were to endure.

‘You have removed many threats to the Temple,’ Gazulgrund said. ‘Your bravery has never been questioned. Fearlessly you have confronted evil and your valour in that arena is beyond doubt. But it needs a different sort of valour to protect the Temple now, a courage that demands far more strength than anything that has come before.’

‘The Temple is mother and father, what threatens it must perforce threaten me,’ Holz said, this time quoting from the sermons of Wolfgart Krieger, the man who had founded Holz’s order in the days when Sigmar walked among men.

Gazulgrund was silent for several moments. He pondered the verse Holz had recited, impressed once more by the strange appropriateness of the choice. In his mind, in his heart, Gazulgrund had no doubts. He knew the course he was set upon was the correct one. If there had been any question, he would never have reached the grim decision he had made.

‘To destroy evil is rewarding work,’ Gazulgrund declared. ‘It ennobles the soul, swells the heart with pride, eases the mind with accomplishment. There is no more satisfying labour than such good work.’ The priest’s expression darkened, his eyes becoming pinpoints of intensity. ‘The task I would charge you with will bring no such reward. It will haunt you through your years, it will prey upon your mind and sicken your heart; your soul will be blackened and befouled. But know that it is necessary. Nothing you can do in this life will ever be more important. No threat to the Temple could ever be more perilous than the one I charge you to eliminate.’

The gravity of his tone, the weight of his words shook Holz, Gazulgrund could see that by the way the templar’s eyes briefly widened, by the sudden breath he drew into his lungs. When Holz answered, it was with his own words, not those of some long-dead luminary of the Temple. ‘Ask what you will, holiness. Whatever sacrifice I can make is too little to fulfil my obligations to the Temple.’

Gazulgrund opened a small teak box lying atop the desk. From within, he removed a large jade ring. He saw Holz recoil slightly as he recognised it. He had often seen that ring on the finger of Grand Master Fahlenberg, the head of his order.

Gazulgrund stepped out from behind the desk. Solemnly he gripped Holz’s left hand and slid the jade ring onto his finger. The priest nodded when he found it was a perfect fit. Surely another omen that his course was true, the path ahead right.

‘You are now Grand Master of the Order of the Silver Hammer,’ the priest decreed. ‘The Templars are now at your command. They will acknowledge your command when they see you now bear the grand master’s ring. I now burden you with the commandment that forced Fahlenberg to depart from the Temple. Some secrets, once learned, must either be embraced or…’ He left the alternative unspoken. Far beneath the cathedral, bricked up behind one of the walls, Fahlenberg was perhaps even now breathing his last. It would have been too cruel to execute the old grand master without allowing him time to make his peace with Sigmar.

Holz nodded his head. ‘The Grand Theogonist speaks with the voice of Sigmar,’ he said, again reverting to scriptures, this time that of Grand Theogonist Marius. ‘No man may deny the words of a god.’

‘It is not evil that threatens the Temple,’ Gazulgrund stated. ‘It is not witch or warlock I charge you to destroy, but innocence. Those who are the stewards of Sigmar’s faith, the leaders of his Temple are weak. They are creatures of the flesh, even as any man. That weakness jeopardises the Temple, tempts them to prostitute the name of Lord Sigmar. Such obscenity cannot be allowed! Such temptation must be scourged from the Temple!’

Gazulgrund set his hand on Holz’s shoulder. ‘It is a dreadful duty I entrust to your order. There are wicked men who would seek to dominate this Temple through its priests. They would dominate those priests by threatening those they love. It is a cruel wisdom I have learned, but a man may love either flesh or god. If he would serve Sigmar truly and faithfully, he must deny the loyalties of flesh and blood.

‘The Order of the Silver Hammer will cut the weakness from the Temple of Sigmar. The Templars will go forth and scourge the families of arch-lector and lector, prelate and bishop. Root and branch, the flesh must be culled. To protect the Temple from those who would exploit it, we must wash the Empire in the blood of innocence.’

Holz’s face paled at the ghastliness of Gazulgrund’s commandment, but he bowed his head in acceptance. ‘Your will be done, holiness,’ he said in firm voice.

‘Send forth your men,’ Gazulgrund told him, ‘but there is one special task I will entrust to you and you alone. Here in Altdorf, beneath the Courts of Justice, there is a black pit of terror called the Dragon’s Hole. You will descend into that pit. You will kill what you find there.’

The templar nodded gravely. The Order of the Silver Hammer was one of the few organisations outside the Kaiserjaeger who knew about Kreyssig’s secret prison. Holz might not know who it was that the Protector had imprisoned, but the fact that she was noteworthy to both Kreyssig and Gazulgrund impressed her importance upon him.

A tear rolled down the priest’s cheek as he quickly turned away from Holz. It was the last tear he would shed for his daughter, for the hostage Kreyssig had taken to bend him and the Temple to the will of a tyrant.

‘Do your work swiftly, grand master,’ Gazulgrund said. ‘Do not let her suffer.’

CHAPTER FOUR

Carroburg, 1119

Mandred watched as his council seated themselves around the charred, splintered table. They had Kurgaz and his dwarfs to thank for that bit of furnishing, a survivor from the demolition of Schloss Hohenbach. By some freak of chance, or perhaps some unfathomable whim of Ranald the Trickster, the table had been thrown clear when the castle went crashing down into the Reik. The dwarfs had discovered it lying at the foot of the Otwinsstein caught in the branches of a hoary old oak.

Despite the damage inflicted upon it, the quality and craftsmanship of the table was still abundantly evident. It was something that had been made for kings, perhaps even for emperors.

The Graf of Middenheim frowned at that last possibility. He’d hoped the table would lend a certain dignity and nobility to his meeting with his councillors. In such a savage setting as the ravaged rubble that had once been Carroburg the baser ambitions and greed of his vassals had been much too quick to be expressed. Thoughts of chivalry and duty seemed to have been forgotten in a realm ruined by war and decimated by plague. Trying to evoke, even in some small way the grandeur of a proper court, Mandred had hoped to arouse the nobility within his nobles, not encourage their lust for power with Imperial pretensions.

His humour only darkened further when two visitors to Mandred’s council were escorted into the ruined temple by his knights. Gaudily arrayed heralds announced the richly dressed guests. The thin man in the ermine-trimmed cloak and sealskin boots was Count van der Duijn of Westerland. The woman in sky-blue gown and delicately coiffured hair was Baroness Carin of Nordland. Both of them had brought extravagant gifts for the Graf of Middenheim and his court. Some of his nobles had protested when Mandred refused to accept presents from the delegations.

Westerland was a realm that had been wracked by war long before the Black Plague visited death and destruction upon the rest of the Empire. The barbarian hordes of Jarl Ormgaard had descended upon the province in a fleet of dragonships. The Norscans had sacked, pillaged and burnt much of the land, killing and despoiling anything they couldn’t steal. The once great city of Marienburg had been reduced to a shattered ruin, the lords of the land forced into their fortress on Rijker’s Island while the barbarians dominated the rest of the province.

Nordland had fared equally poorly. The Black Plague had been especially disastrous to the coastal province, killing almost three-quarters of the populace. Norscan marauders had come from the sea to plunder and kill all along the coast. Beastmen had emerged from the great forests to ravage farms and villages, driving the survivors into the supposed security of the towns. As the towns filled with refugees, the plague wrought its grisly toll, slaughtering the Nordlanders by the thousands in the overcrowded conditions. The decimated communities had been easy prey when the skaven burst from their underground burrows. Most of the province now languished under their insidious lash.

These weren’t lands that could afford gifts. Only the stubborn pride of their rulers made them think they could still indulge the extravagance of tradition. A chill ran through Mandred’s veins as he pondered how nearly Middenheim had shared the fate of these lands. But for the harsh wisdom of his father, the stalwart courage of its people and the beneficent grace of Ulric, the City of the White Wolf would have been reduced to a wretched shambles.

‘We welcome you,’ Mandred addressed his visitors on behalf of his council, rising and extending his arm towards them in a show of friendship. ‘Long and perilous has been your journey. We are humbled by the hazards you have risked and we are saddened by the dire circumstances that made those risks necessary.’ As he spoke the formalities, evoked the almost cabalistic proprieties laid down by the etiquette of generations, Mandred could almost imagine himself back in the Middenpalaz listening to Viscount von Vogelthal conducting representatives of the Imperial court to his father.

The dignitaries waited until Mandred resumed his seat before they returned his greeting and assumed their own chairs. It was Baroness Carin who finally spoke, her prim, precise voice carrying with it only the slightest hint of accent.

‘On behalf of Nordland, I thank you for such a warm greeting, Graf Mandred,’ she said. She looked out across the faces of his courtiers, studying them before she spoke again. ‘There is, however, a distinction between a true welcome and mere courtesy. I can see the concern that troubles your minds but which civility keeps from your tongues. Let me ease your doubts about our intentions in making this journey you so rightly adjudge long and perilous.’ She looked aside at Count van der Duijn, waited for a nod from him before she continued. ‘It is no secret that our lands have suffered terribly from calamity, but we do not come here as beggars seeking charity. The gifts we sought to bestow upon this court are given freely, without thought of restitution.’

‘You come to us as equals then?’ scoffed Duke Schneidereit. ‘Your lands in ruin, your cities overtaken by monsters and barbarians and you claim…’ The duke’s fury wilted beneath the glower of his sovereign.

‘It is hoped that her ladyship will forgive those among us whose pride is greater than their candour,’ Mandred’s tone was apologetic as he bowed towards the baroness. He directed a warning glance at his other nobles. ‘After any conquest, in the wake of any battle, there burns a flame in some men. In the heat of the fray a man must be gripped by a certain boldness if he is to prevail. It is regrettable that this same boldness should cause some to forget that humility too is one of the knightly virtues.’

‘A charitable sentiment, your highness,’ Count van der Duijn remarked. ‘But I must echo the words of my Nordland allies. It is not for charity that we have braved the Forest of Shadows and crossed the ruins of Drakwald.’ This time it was the count who looked to the baroness for permission before continuing. ‘We have come to do homage to the Wolf of Sigmar,’ he said, his voice becoming as firm as stone and loud as thunder. ‘We come to offer fealty to the mighty lord we would call our liege.’

From some among the council, the count’s speech brought gasps of surprise, from others only scornful chuckles. Mandred maintained a stoic silence as he considered both reactions. The less farsighted among his nobles were thrilled by the prospect of controlling these neighbouring lands. To their imaginings of new fiefdoms in Drakwald they now added the vision of rich estates in Westerland and Nordland. Others among his council, those whose minds were of a more practical turn or more farsighted vision, could appreciate the onerous obligation the fealty of these lands would place upon Middenland and Middenheim. They would become responsible for these realms, bound to their protection and their defence. If they needed any example of how burdensome such responsibility would be they had only to look around them at the wreckage of Carroburg.

‘The wolf who suckles the stray pup accepts it into the pack,’ Ar-Ulric declared. ‘But it must be wary lest the pack be weakened by its compassion.’ The old priest looked over at Mandred. ‘Too many mouths to feed brings ruin to the whole pack.’

At the graf’s right hand, Hartwich countered Ar-Ulric’s cautious philosophy. ‘The pack must grow if it is to survive,’ the Sigmarite said. ‘If it abandons its own, then it is already a thing dead.’

‘Try to save everything and you will save nothing,’ Ar-Ulric countered, his statement echoed by many wise nods from the seated nobles.

Again, Mandred considered both views. When he was a youth, his tutor had encouraged him to be careful in his deliberations. Grooming the young prince to one day rule a great city, his teacher had cautioned him that every problem had two sides. As he matured, however, Mandred realised how wrong such thinking was. Most of the world’s problems were too complex to be limited by only two possibilities. He thought about Ar-Ulric’s position. The wise old wolf urged caution, advising him to protect what was already won. He warned against reaching for more and thereby risking all. By the same token, he could see through Hartwich’s counsel. The Sigmarite was a disciple of the first Emperor and to him the dream of that Empire was more than politics and power, it was a sacred duty. Mankind united beneath one crown, one voice and one throne. Such was the destiny Hartwich believed in. It was the vision towards which he strove to guide the man whose fate he believed was to rule.

Mandred thought of his strange meeting with the witch in the woods. He pondered the doom Hulda said the gods had proclaimed for him. He remembered her words, that a man who fled from power was the only man fit to wield it.

When the Graf of Middenheim voiced his decision, it wasn’t the mere echo of the priests seated to either side of him, it wasn’t the ambition of his nobles or the caution of his vassals. His choice was his. It belonged to him alone.

‘I must reject the fealty of Westerland and of Nordland,’ Mandred decided. He fixed his gaze upon the representatives of those realms. ‘To accept your fealty would be to assume dominance over your people and your lands. That is something which I must reject.’ He gestured to Hartwich seated beside him. ‘There are some who would see me as Emperor, but I own no such ambition. The dream of Empire is not my own.’

With each word, Count van der Duijn sank a little lower in his chair, his face became a little more drawn and filled with despair. He had placed all his hopes in the army Mandred had raised, an army he had prayed he could turn towards the west, to use to drive the Norscans from his city as they had driven the skaven from Carroburg. Dejected, it took all of his dignity to keep from weeping before the nobles of Middenheim.

Baroness Carin was more composed, finding anger rather than despair in Mandred’s denial of her offer. ‘What then are your dreams, Wolf of Sigmar?’ she demanded, challenge in her voice.

Mandred stood away from the table. Slowly he drew Legbiter from its sheath, displaying the runefang to the Electress of Nordland. ‘Middenheim is realm enough to rule,’ he said. Chastened, the baroness tried to look away from his fierce gaze, but found herself caught by the fire of his eyes.

‘My dream,’ Mandred said, slowly marching around the table, his footfalls like his words echoing through the wrecked temple, ‘is a bold one. It is a vision that speaks for all men. It is a vision of lands fractured by divisions of greed and heritage brought together by shared hope and shared dignity. It is a vision built not upon the thrill of conquest and the desires of dominance, but one founded upon the pride that burns inside all men, be they noble or base.’ His march brought him around to where the representatives were sitting. Mandred stared down at Count van der Duijn.

‘I reject the fealty of Westerland,’ Mandred repeated, then extended his hand to the distraught count. ‘Instead, I beg the friendship of my brotherland. I ask that they accept the fellowship of Middenheim.’

Stunned silence held the room. Tears were in Count van der Duijn’s eyes as he rose and seized Mandred’s hand in his own.

‘This is my vision,’ Mandred declared. ‘Not an Empire reforged in the flames of conquest, but of neighbours united in a coalition of mutual protection and respect. Look about you and see the destruction that is harvested by a people who stand alone. The same vile pestilence afflicts other lands, enslaves other peoples! Can we ignore their cries? Can we abandon them to the same vermin that sought to despoil our own homes? I say to you that the man who would contemplate such craven cowardice is a disgrace to his father and his grandfather and all the ancestors before him that ever walked proud beneath the sun.’

Mandred brandished Legbiter, letting its edge gleam in the sunlight filtering down through the temple’s broken roof. ‘Need we an Emperor?’ he asked. ‘That is a question for all men, all lands to decide. And it is a question that shall wait until the last skaven has been scoured from those lands!’ Savagely, he thrust downward with the runefang, driving the blade into the charred surface of the table.

Their sovereign’s passion brought the nobles from their chairs. They thrust their fists in the air, cheering this man who had walked through the Sacred Flame, this hero who had saved their city, this champion who had led them in the liberation of Drakwald. Perhaps they were too selfish, too small to share the vision that guided him, but it was enough that Mandred could see the path ahead. Where the Wolf of Sigmar led, they would follow.

Baroness Carin sat in silence as the nobles of Middenheim praised their graf. She too had been moved by Mandred’s words and, as she gazed up at him, the flames of ambition were kindled in her eyes.

Lady Mirella was waiting for him beside the shattered image of Verena. There was a warmth in her smile that Mandred could feel in his very bones.

‘When they built this place, the architect must have been well versed in the arcane secrets of acoustics,’ Mirella stated. ‘Even in here, I was able to hear you.’

Mandred shook his head. ‘We’ll have to find a different place to hold council,’ he mused. ‘Somewhere better able to keep its secrets from stray ears. I can’t have the whole camp learning what kind of simple-minded asses some of their noble lords are.’

Mirella closed her arms around him in a tight embrace. ‘Then they couldn’t take pride in the greatness of some of their noble lords,’ she said, pressing her lips against his ear. He started to pull away as her kisses became more passionate.

‘There is much still to do,’ Mandred said. ‘I must meet with Baroness Carin and Count van der Duijn to discuss plans for the campaign to relieve their peoples. I have to discuss the logistics of moving the army, of organising the Drakwalders who are able to fight and providing for those unable to march with us…’

His words were silenced by the soft fingers Mirella pressed against his mouth. ‘Later,’ she told him. ‘It will all be waiting for you later. For now, there is this moment, this peace within the storm. Don’t let it slip away. Let me share it with you.’ She shook her head, apology in her voice. ‘I’m not a powerful ruler or wealthy potentate. I don’t have the wisdom of sages or the philosophy of priests. I’ve never worn armour or carried a sword. I am just a landless refugee, like so many others.’ She set her head against his chest. ‘There is so little I can offer you.’

Mandred’s hand closed about her chin, tilted her face upwards so that he could gaze down into her eyes. ‘More than gold and swords and philosophy,’ he told Mirella. ‘What can anyone offer another that is more precious than the love within their heart?’

The woman in his arms tightened her embrace, clinging to him with the desperate fear only love can know. Soon, she knew, he would again ride to war. Again he would be in the thick of battle, waging his crusade against the obscene enemies of mankind. Perhaps the gods would again bring him back to her unscathed, but after experiencing the tyrannies of Emperor Boris, she knew how fickle the beneficence of the gods could be.

No, she couldn’t think of tomorrow. There was only now. This moment. This fragment of time they could share. This small sliver of life that belonged not to gods or nations, but to them and them alone.

Sylvania, 1121

Over the barren desolation of a haunted land, the silent height of Vanhaldenschlosse lorded over the terrain. A mad spiral of ancient stone steeped in the corruption of Morrslieb and the foulness of darkest sorcery, the tower emanated its own atmosphere of horror, the rank miasma of the eldritch and the profane. For all its aura of hoary age and primordial evil, the fortress was a recent construction, raised less than a decade earlier. Black magic and legions of supernatural labourers had erected the great tower in only a few months.

Those legions now lay strewn about the walls of Vanhaldenschlosse, exposed bones bleaching in the sun, rotten flesh drying and hardening into leather, acres of bonefields, thousands upon thousands of the unburied dead. The slaughtered husks of armoured Nachtsheer lay strewn beside the mangled shapes of Sylvanian peasants and the desiccated shells of prehistoric bog-men. Among the corpses were the inhuman carcasses of skaven by their thousands, elongated skulls rife with sharp fangs. Hulking among the legions of dead, rising from the bonefields like morbid hills, were the saurian vastness of vanquished dragons, strips of scale and flesh still clinging to their reptilian frames.

High overhead, carrion crows cawed and vultures wheeled. The scavengers were drawn to the stench of death and the sight of such a necrotic feast. Yet a force more primal even than their hunger kept them from descending, kept the wolves and jackals from stealing out from the woods. The beasts of field and sky could sense the arcane ember that lingered within each carcass. They could recognise the loathsome taint of sorcery that had once endowed these dead things with an abominable simulacrum of life. Their instincts warned them away, lest the natural life within their own flesh should stir those lingering embers. For what had once risen to the necromancer’s call would never rest easy and might at any moment hearken to some sinister summons.

Birds and beasts shunned the wastes around Vanhaldenschlosse, but other things were more daring. Flitting across the bonefield, slinking from shadow to shadow, was a clutch of wiry figures draped in black. The shapes sometimes paused in their stealthy advance, sometimes made gestures to one another with hand-like paws before resuming their cautious journey. Like ghosts, the figures flitted through the desolation, converging upon the ominous majesty of the tower itself. Yet these were no ghosts, but creatures alive and driven by grim purpose.

Despite appearances, there was life within the black vastness of Vanhaldenschlosse. Life these black-draped killers had travelled far to extinguish.

Behind the sombre walls of Vanhaldenschlosse there existed a great hall, a mammoth vault with soaring ceiling perched upon the tips of pre-human dolmens. The eldritch vibrations of the standing stones sent a wailing crackle of aethyric energy swirling about the room. Like the pulsations of an unseen heart, the vibrations throbbed and ebbed. Each pulsation flickered as it was drawn out from the ancient dolmens, pulled to the centre of the hall where a crystal dais stood. Atop the dais stood a great seat, a throne built on a titanic scale. Skulls were the fabric of that throne, fused together with blackest magic, each brow stamped with arcane sigils and obscene hieroglyphs. In each eye socket, the dark flicker of a warpstone nugget lent its corrupt radiance to the profane power saturating the throne.

Nestled upon the throne like a black spider at the centre of its web was the master of the tower. No giant or titan, yet there was about the dark-robed figure such an aura of power that he was not diminished by his gigantic setting. The robes were those of a Morrite priest saturated in the vapours of betrayal and heresy. About his face was a mask of bone steeped in the horror of vengeance. And within the eyes, within the terrible eyes that stared from the sockets of the mask, there shone the glimmer of abominable purpose.

Am I the dream or the dreamer? The question had vexed the man who had once been Frederick van Hal the priest these past months. Van Hal, the man who from misery had turned his heart from Morr, god of death, and set his foot upon the black path of the necromancer, remaking himself as Vanhal, Scourge of Sylvania.

Long years had Vanhal rested upon his throne, allowing the vibrations of the dolmens, the vapours of warpstone, to seep into his spirit. By his sorcery he had harnessed the might of the magical fulcrum upon which Vanhaldenschlosse had been raised. His power had been such that he had turned forward time itself, hurling the fortress ahead many months to that moment when stars and moons were in their most propitious alignment. The resultant energies had been the fuel for spells not dared by mortal flesh in a thousand years. He had called the great wyrms from their graves, enslaved their decaying husks to his will, and unleashed them against the verminous foe that thought to destroy him.

The Battle of the Plague Dragons had annihilated the skaven host, but it had also drained Vanhal’s powers, taxed his vitality. It had brought him to the borderland between life and death, the shadow world between the spheres. As he stood upon the edge of mortality, he could feel his passions crying out to him, striving to draw him back to the world of the living. Across the threshold he could see the shades of loved ones beckoning to him. Almost he could put names to once familiar faces, almost he could recall the emotions that had set him upon a path of horror and atrocity. Almost he could remember those who had been his family.

Between himself and the gardens of the dead, he imagined two mammoth pillars. One barred his way, stern and implacable. The other beckoned to him, drawing him to it like a moth to flame. As he approached, he found himself in a vast desert, a waste of sand dunes stretching to the far horizon. The pillars had dwindled to a pair of colossal stone feet, the statue they had once supported toppled and buried beneath the shifting sands. Between the feet was an inscription in the hieroglyphs of lost Khemri: a name so steeped in evil and horror that it was spoken only in whispers even a thousand years after the thing that had worn it was destroyed.

Vanhal felt an obscene affinity for that name, a ghastly kinship that leeched the warmth from his flesh. It was a name he had worn or would wear. The name of the black dreamer upon its black throne.

‘No,’ the necromancer hissed, raising himself from the seat of skulls. He was neither dream nor puppet. His will was his own; his mind was his own! He had chosen this path, it had not been chosen for him.

Vanhal looked about him, staring in wonder at the vast hall around him. He could see the aethyric vibrations dancing from the standing stones, could watch the skein of their energies swirling and dancing about him. He could see them twisting and writhing, fashioning themselves into hieroglyphs as they flittered through the chilly air. There were secrets wrapped in those symbols, obscenities too vile to be consigned to even the most degenerate tome. There were past and present, the dim shades of the future and the grotesque oblivion of eternity.

As the profane knowledge crawled into his brain, Vanhal could feel the embers of his humanity dying inside him. The last vestiges of kinship to man were being smothered, crushed with the bony talon of a monster that had made itself a god.

Only the dimmest, most primal part of Vanhal’s brain was still conscious of the purely mundane nature of the hall around him. It was through veils of sorcerous distractions and esoteric thought that he saw the cloaked shapes creeping along the walls. Masked by a mental fog, the assassins pounced upon their prey.

The foremost of the killers leapt into the air, throwing its body into a tumbling roll. As it did so it threw forth its hand-like paws, flinging a menagerie of angular throwing stars at the necromancer. Iron saturated with warpstone powder, the missiles dripped corrosive poison, pitting the floor with their noxious venom as they hurtled towards their target.

Detached from the purely temporal, for Vanhal, the assassin’s shuriken flew absurdly slowly. Even in his distracted state, it was a small thing to conjure a corpse wind to buffet the little slivers of murder, to cast them back into the face of his would-be killer. The skaven assassin shrieked as it saw the throwing stars reverse direction. Its amazing reflexes allowed it to throw itself flat, but even its speed was unequal to the capricious magic of Vanhal. With but a thought, he shifted the angle of the necrotic wind and sent the shuriken slicing downwards into the prone assassin.

While he was disposing of the first killer, a second monster dropped at Vanhal from the ceiling, crooked blades clenched in both fists, a third knife wrapped in the coils of its naked tail. The assassin didn’t cry out, didn’t make any sound to betray its intention. Just the same, its advent didn’t go unnoticed. Midway in its descent, the skaven was caught in the air, held in place as though an unseen hand gripped it. The ratman writhed and struggled as the restriction closed tighter about it. Soon squeals of agony and flecks of blood flew from its mouth. The sickening crunch of grinding bones shuddered through the hall, yet still the pressure didn’t abate. The coils of spectral force were without mercy, clenching tighter and tighter until the pulverised assassin dripped to the floor in lumpy puddles of gore.

A third killer sprang out from the darkness. In its paws it clutched a great brass globe. Vanhal could perceive the sorcerous weapon as a baleful glamour, a hellish bonfire of malignant enchantments. The weapon never left the ratman’s paws. Before it could hurl the sphere at the necromancer, his spells were already at work, crawling through the assassin’s brain like so many maggots. Mesmeric paralysis held the skaven for a moment, then, with shuddering resistance, it lifted its paws on high and dashed the brass sphere at its very feet.

The assassin vanished in a coruscating ball of destruction, wrenched from reality and hurled bodily into the void between worlds, even its screams unable to escape the vacuum.

More assassins came leaping, crawling, slinking and stalking from the darkness. Singly and en masse, they strove to slaughter their terrifying foe. Singly and en masse, they were slaughtered.

When it was over, when his spells told him the tower was once more stripped of life, Vanhal muttered a lesser conjuration, endowing the least mutilated of his adversaries with a mockery of animation. The zombie skaven shuffled and staggered, stumblingly obeying their killer’s commands. The undead began gathering up the remains of their less complete comrades, to cleanse the hall of the detritus of battle.

Vanhal leaned back in his throne, the fight already forgotten as he studied once more the profane hieroglyphs only the eyes of a master necromancer could see.

Deathmaster Nartik didn’t stop until he was well beyond sight and smell of Vanhaldenschlosse. Sole survivor of the dozen master-killers Clan Eshin had dispatched to murder the necromancer, Nartik knew it was only the cape of elf-hair that had protected him, hiding him from Vanhal’s magic. His faith in the cape’s protection, however, only went so far. The vision of his death squad’s massacre, of his own apprentices being butchered like mice, was enough to shake even the Deathmaster’s confidence.

The contract Eshin had made with Bonelord Nekrot would have to be nullified. That would displease Grey Lord Kreep, but what else was there to do? Vanhal’s magic was too much for the assassins to overcome. The lone killers Nartik had sent into the tower had all disappeared and now this mass attack had met with disaster. The necromancer was simply too terrible to die. Nartik didn’t like to think about Nekrot’s claims that this was a weakened Vanhal they had been trying to kill. The very idea that the man-thing could be even more powerful was enough to make him forget the strict bodily control of an Eshin assassin and spurt the musk of fear.

Nartik ground his fangs together as he scampered through a dead forest and hurried to the hidden tunnel that would bring him back into the sprawl of the Under-Empire. Nekrot must have known! He didn’t want the necromancer dead. It had all been a ploy on Mordkin’s part to humiliate and belittle Clan Eshin! Yes-yes, that was the truth of the matter. It had all been a treacherous trap to kill the best of Eshin’s assassins! Such was the report he would make to Kreep. Nartik hadn’t failed in killing the target, he’d succeeded in escaping the trap!

The Deathmaster cast one last, hateful glance in the direction of Vanhaldenschlosse. If Nekrot really wanted the sorcerer dead, the Bonelord would have to do it himself!

CHAPTER FIVE

Carroburg, 1119

It was something of a shock to Graf Mandred, Hero of Middenheim and Saviour of Carroburg, when he pulled back the horsehide flap and started to walk into the tent. His face flushed with embarrassment and he started to withdraw. From the corner of his eye, however, he saw his helm standing atop a wooden stand. There was no mistaking that piece of armour, not with the fangs of a skaven chieftain still embedded in it.

‘Forgive me,’ Mandred addressed the woman sitting in one of his chairs and whose unexpected presence had thrown him into such confusion. ‘I believe you have the wrong tent.’

Baroness Carin’s face contorted into a disappointed pout. ‘Do not say that you are turning me out.’

An awkward smile tugged at Mandred’s mouth. It was difficult not to compare the baroness sitting in his tent with the one who had spoken to his council. As a visitor to his court, her costume had been restrained, only allowing such concessions to femininity as decorum allowed. She had been a noble, even regal figure but at the same time distant and chaste.

It would take a man with ice in his veins to offer the same opinion as she appeared now. The crimson gown she wore wasn’t the billowy affair of court but a sleek garment that accentuated the delicate curves of her figure. If there was a bodice beneath that gown, the baroness had left it much looser, affording it no chance to hide the contours of her amply female form. The coiffure of before had been abandoned, leaving the noblewoman’s hair to hang about her shoulders in a dark cascade. Paints and powders complemented a face that was already possessed of a natural gracefulness, changing the features from striking to stunning.

Mandred felt guilty about letting his gaze rove across the baroness’s body for as long as it did. Even more so when he noticed her sullen pout had softened into just the barest suggestion of a smile, demure rather than wanton in its expression of invitation. With the taste of Lady Mirella’s lips still on his own, he felt uncomfortably like a traitor for the sensation that pulsed through his body.

He could see in Baroness Carin’s eyes that she fully appreciated the impact her appearance made. Mandred wasn’t so naïve as to think her change of wardrobe and presence within his own tent was mere happenstance. The base ardour rushing through his veins cooled as he considered the audacity of the noblewoman.

Reaching behind him, Mandred drew back the horsehide flap. ‘It has been a long and trying day,’ he said.

Baroness Carin sighed and shook her head. ‘We cannot all of us fight our battles with sword and shield,’ she said. ‘Some of us must make do with such weapons as the gods have seen fit to provide.’

Mandred couldn’t help but laugh at the frankness of her words. ‘I think few opponents could deny you the field with such an arsenal at your command.’

‘Only those who matter most,’ the baroness said. She’d made no move to leave the chair. ‘Those who can help my people.’

Mandred let the horsehide fall back across the doorway. His eyes searched the baroness’s face, trying to find any hint of duplicity there. Had her words, like her costume, been carefully calculated, an invention to appeal to him? Or was it a genuine concern he heard in her voice?

‘You inherited the title from Baron Salzwedel,’ Mandred recalled. He turned his head towards the wall of the tent, staring in the direction of the Otwinsstein and the demolished castle. Salzwedel had been among the electors who had joined Emperor Boris in his refuge and who had perished with the tyrant when plague penetrated the walls of that refuge. He looked again at the baroness. How old was she? Perhaps twenty? Not much older, certainly, than when his own father had died and he had inherited the heavy burden of leading his people. It was one thing to grow into the obligations of leadership, quite another to have the role suddenly thrust upon you without warning.

‘My younger brother was to inherit,’ the baroness said. ‘As far as my father was concerned, I was around only to tempt his most powerful vassals. He kept them loyal by dangling the prospect that one of their sons might marry into our family.’ There was more than the mere suggestion of a smile now, but it was bitter and cheerless. She plucked at the bosom of her gown, wrinkling the material. ‘I’ve had a lot of practice,’ she said. ‘It was only when the plague took my brother that my father thought of me instead of what he could buy with me.’

Pity for the baroness boiled up within Mandred. Before the emotion could overcome him, he strangled it. A man could be moved by pity, but it was a luxury a leader couldn’t afford. Everything since he’d stepped into his tent had been plotted and strategised. Her clothes, her appearance, the coy hints that teased when they briefly flickered on her face, even the musky odour she wore, all of it had been designed to entice him. Why should he think her words any different? What was it she was trying to buy now?

Mandred paced away from the baroness. Stepping over to the upturned box, he laid his hand on his battered helm. Even if he’d failed to pry the skaven fangs loose, Beck had done a commendable job polishing the steel. It was like gazing into a mirror. He could see Baroness Carin sitting there behind him. He studied her reflection, watching her expression.

‘The noblest are those who would sacrifice all for their people,’ he said. His voice was soft and comforting but his eyes were steely glints as he watched the baroness’s image. ‘It is so rare to find a kindred soul. Long have I sought someone who would share my vision for the Empire.’

It was only for a heartbeat, but Mandred caught the triumphant smirk that broke through the baroness’s carefully calculated ploy. His suspicions were justified. Unable to entrap him through passion, she now sought to snare him through his ideals. His hands were clenched into fists of rage as he rounded on her.

‘The lowest slattern is the one who seeks to climb the highest,’ Mandred snarled at her, his words clipped and cruel.

Baroness Carin didn’t even blink at his accusation. ‘For my people, I would seduce the gods themselves,’ she told him. There wasn’t a trace of vulnerability in her tone now. Her voice was like the rasp of an iron blade across a whetstone, unyielding and unbowed. Posture and expression changed in subtle ways, stripping away the enticing invitation she had worn as though it were another garment. Her visage, her bearing, everything about her had an unmistakable aura of command.

‘Get out,’ Mandred growled, all civility and propriety gone. When she didn’t move, he stormed across the tent. His hand closed about her arm, drawing her to her feet with a savagery that surprised even him.

‘Not until you listen to me,’ the baroness said.

‘I’ve heard all I care to hear,’ Mandred told her, dragging her towards the door.

‘But not all I have to say.’ Mandred wasn’t certain how she managed it, but a simple twist of her wrist and she slipped free of his grip. She stood there, massaging the spot he had held so roughly. Briefly, he felt shame that he had done her harm, imagining the bruises that must even now be forming underneath the sleeve of her gown. Then he reflected that a seductress would be accustomed to rough use. Certainly she was accomplished at slipping free from a man’s fingers.

‘Do I need to have you removed?’ Mandred asked, matching the glare his visitor directed at him.

‘I will leave,’ the baroness said. ‘But not until you’ve listened to me. I want to explain to you why the Electress of Nordland so brazenly steals into your tent.’

Mandred smiled coldly. ‘I’ll find out who admitted you,’ he assured her. ‘If I limit myself to just staking them out for the wolves, they may consider themselves blessed by Shallya.’

‘My purpose coming here wasn’t what you think,’ the baroness told him. She laughed cynically. ‘Thanks to my father’s guile I have learned that the surest way to influence a man is to make him love you.’

‘And what did you intend to accomplish with such influence?’

‘The salvation of my people,’ she answered without hesitation. ‘Believe nothing else I have said to you this night if you will only believe that. Your army is the only power in the north with strength enough to save us. You can free Nordland and Westerland both.’

‘I have said my army will do so,’ Mandred told her.

Baroness Carin shook her head. ‘How will you free us?’ she asked. ‘As conquerors, or as liberators? Will you toss us our freedom like a bone thrown to a dog?’ She waved her hand, gesturing at the walls of the tent. ‘Look out there at the people of Drakwald. You’ve freed their land from the skaven, but you haven’t given them what they most need. What I’ve come here to beg you not to deny my people or the people of Westerland!

‘Something given away has no value,’ she explained. ‘What pride can the Drakwalders take in the freedom you’ve brought them? They had no part in it. They didn’t earn it. They didn’t win it for themselves.’

She saw the impact her words had made, the doubt that had struck at Mandred’s vision. Like a predator scenting prey, she pounced upon that vulnerability. ‘Allow my people and the people of Westerland to share in what you would win for them. Let them hold their heads in pride and declare that they too played their part.’

‘Your lands are broken, your people scattered or enslaved,’ Mandred pointed out. ‘What part would you have them play?’

‘It is true,’ the baroness admitted. ‘Our peoples are scattered and broken. We need the strength of your army if we are to be free. We need the sword only that mighty host may wield. But let it be Nordland, let it be Westerland that guides that sword. Together with Count van der Duijn, I have conceived a plan that will free both our lands and allow our peoples their portion of the glory.’

Mandred motioned her back to the chair. ‘You are right,’ he told her as she sat down. ‘You aren’t leaving until I’ve heard what you have to say.’

He was reminded of Warrenburg as he walked through the squalid refugee camp. The misery of Warrenburg had been born in the plague; the misery he saw around him had been inflicted by the skaven. It was difficult to decide which was worse. Wherever Mandred turned, he seemed to find some new horror. An old woman dragging herself along the ground like some sort of human slug, the scabrous stumps of her legs scarred by the marks of verminous teeth. A little boy shivering at anyone who came near him, cowering in the corner of a broken wall, crying out not with a whimper but with the rodent squeaks of the monsters who had enslaved him. The broken wreckage of a once hulking man, scarred holes where his eyes had been, his face branded with the scratchwork letters of the skaven.

Everywhere the bestial cruelty of the ratmen was on display, a parade of atrocities that stabbed at Mandred’s conscience. If he had acted sooner, if he had stirred his army from Middenheim earlier, how much of this misery could these people have been spared?

As he looked around him, Mandred saw too the evidence of what Baroness Carin had told him he would find: the listless shame of survival when so many others had perished, the apathy of men who had lost everything, the guilt of a people stripped of their pride. He wasn’t so credulous that he failed to see that Baroness Carin and Count van der Duijn would profit greatly by his implementation of their plan. By insinuating themselves so intimately with the liberation of their provinces, they would strengthen the foundations of their own power. Yet he could not deny that a people who found pride in their leaders was a people who found pride within themselves. He thought of how his father had made Middenheim strong through his leadership.

The plan Baroness Carin and Count van der Duijn had hatched between them appealed to Mandred. It possessed the right mixture of boldness and cunning. Mandred’s army would march into Nordland, striking for the port of Dietershafen. Once the town was liberated from the skaven infesting it, they would use the shipyards there to restore Nordland’s navy, refitting the ships that had been savaged by the ratkin. The army would winter in Dietershafen while the people of Nordland made ready their ships. In the spring, the revitalised fleet would carry the army to Marienburg. Jarl Snagr Half-nose and his barbarians would expect an attack by land, but they imagined only their own kind still roamed the Sea of Claws.

It was the Marienburg part of the plan that rested ill with Mandred. The Norscans, however barbarous, at least were men. With so much of the Empire in the thrall of the ratkin, it offended him to expend time and resources – to say nothing of lives – fighting his fellow man. Indeed, his misgivings were such that he’d left their meeting without giving the baroness a firm decision. He had to think about the campaign ahead, had to ask himself if his zeal to free Dietershafen and his reluctance to attack Marienburg owed itself to the arena of logistics and tactics or if it was simply the hatred inside him, the burning hunger to destroy the ratmen wherever they could be found. He thought again of Hartwich’s warning about the two wolves.

As he walked among the human debris of Carroburg, Mandred closed his eyes and prayed to Ulric for the wisdom to do what needed to be done.

When he opened his eyes, the first person he saw was a grubby, filth-covered woman. Tattered rags draped loosely about a body that had been starved into a scarecrow shape. The face was worn and haggard, ravaged by the twin evils of brutality and privation. The hair was grey from dirt and dust, but here and there a patch as white as driven snow managed to peek through. The piteous wretch was wandering amid the rubble, turning over fallen stones, peering behind broken windows.

She was just another of the flotsam discarded by the crimson tide of war, yet something about her drew Mandred. There was some unshakable feeling of familiarity, almost a sense of kinship. He watched her for a moment as she stumbled about the ruins, calling out in a weak, cracked voice. ‘The doktor! Have you seen the doktor?’

Mandred went to her. The accent in her voice wasn’t that of Drakwald, it belonged to Middenheim! When he joined her beside the burnt-out husk of a barn, she looked at him with dazed, confused eyes.

‘The doktor. Have you seen the doktor?’ she asked him.

As he stared down into her pleading face, Mandred felt a shock course through him. He knew this woman! She had been a regular visitor to the Middenpalaz. Her father had been Baron Thornig, Middenheim’s representative to the court of Emperor Boris.

‘Princess Erna?’ Mandred asked, almost frightened by the idea that this ragged, starveling creature could be the vibrant, kindly woman from his memories. He saw the confusion on her face become panic when she heard her name. Before she could run, Mandred grabbed her arm. He shuddered at its bony thinness, comparing it in his mind to the fleshy vitality he had felt beneath his hand when he had caught hold of Baroness Carin.

‘The doktor said he died from the plague!’ Erna cried, her eyes wide with terror. ‘He died from the plague!’

Mandred kept his grip on her. With his free hand he drew back the hood of the cloak he was wearing. He had borrowed the simple wool garment from Beck, using it to shroud himself in anonymity as he moved among the refugees.

Erna flinched as he threw back the hood, then a little ember of recognition seemed to shine in her eyes. Suddenly she dropped to the ground, falling to her knees in courtly deference. ‘Your Grace!’ she gasped. It was strange to hear himself addressed in such a manner, but he reflected that when she’d left Middenheim, she’d known him as Prince Mandred, not Graf Mandred.

The genuflection of the ragged, tattered figure drew the notice of the refugees around them. Timidly, they crept towards Mandred, maintaining a wary distance, unable to believe their liberator was among them. First one, then another of the wretched figures fell to their knees, their heads bowed.

Mandred raised Erna to her feet, hoping that by doing so the others would also stand. Their obeisance made him feel guilty. After all they had endured, that they should still remember to humiliate themselves at the feet of a noble was perhaps the cruellest barb of all.

‘It’s all right now,’ Mandred soothed Erna. ‘You’ve come home.’

She started to pull away, fright again filling her wasted features. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I mustn’t. I have to find the doktor.’ She lowered her voice, leaning close to Mandred. ‘He’s my friend,’ she whispered. She nodded as though to convince herself. ‘We have a secret,’ she added. ‘One I can’t tell anyone else. I must find him so I can tell him our secret. He has to know I haven’t forgotten.’

Mandred remembered the young princess he knew, tried not to let that memory become the sad creature he now held. ‘What is the doktor’s name? I’ll help you find him.’

Erna blinked at him, puzzled by his words. ‘We can’t find him,’ she said. ‘They took him away.’ A horror shone in her eyes as her wounded mind connected the words she spoke to the memory they represented. Sobbing, she collapsed against Mandred’s chest. ‘They took him away,’ she repeated. ‘He didn’t want to go, but they took him down into their burrows. They took him into the dark and he didn’t want to go.’

Gently, Mandred led the sobbing woman away. He praised Ulric that he’d found her, that he’d been led to this single mote in a sea of suffering. A face and a name had been given to those languishing under the verminous tyranny of the skaven. He had seen what it meant to fall into their clutches: Erna the kindly princess reduced to the crazed creature he now held. Whatever could be done to restore her body and her mind would be done, he made this vow to himself.

He made another vow too. He would exterminate the skaven, whatever the cost. It wasn’t hatred now; it wasn’t Hartwich’s Wolf of Death. No, it had grown beyond that, become something greater and more terrible.

Something that could lead him only to victory or death.

Skavenblight, 1121

‘Choose three.’

Seerlord Queekual’s snarl echoed through the murky cave, catching in the shadows and crawling into every crack and crevice. Doktor Moschner trembled at the sound, shivering in the filthy ratskin robe the skaven had given him to protect against the subterranean chill. He looked over the dozens of naked, scrawny humans. Once, as personal physician to Emperor Boris, he had been accustomed to consorting with only the highest strata of society, the very elite of the Empire, those of only the noblest blood and pedigree. In the black depths of Skavenblight such petty distinctions as class and breeding quickly crumbled away. Men were naught but chattel to the verminous underfolk, livestock to be exploited to the fullest and then, ultimately, consumed. The skaven cared nothing if the man being subjected to their horrors was once a wealthy baron or lowly mendicant. All were the same to the inhuman monsters: prey.

Moschner stepped away from the crude stone table he had been labouring at, careful to keep his eyes averted as he passed Queekual, bobbing his head in the deferential manner that conveyed respect to a high-ranking ratman. He had always been quick to adapt to the fashion and style of the Imperial court in Altdorf, to adopt whatever wisdom was en vogue at the moment when prescribing for the Imperial household. He had thought he’d overcome that facility for self-preservation when he’d turned against the excesses of Boris Goldgather. But whatever pride, whatever righteous indignation at the abuse of his fellow man had emboldened him against the cruelties of a human emperor had evaporated before the tyrannies of an inhuman sorcerer. It wasn’t necessarily a fear of death that made Moschner submit – it was fear of the kind of death Queekual could bestow.

Nervously, the doktor walked towards the black-furred guards flanking the group of humans. They bared their fangs at him, claws clenching more tightly about the hefts of their spears. Moschner quickly covered his mouth with his hand, hiding the nervous smile that had worked itself onto his face. Among themselves, a show of teeth was a sign of challenge so the skaven were quick to read the same in the smiles of their slaves. If not for the presence of Queekual, Moschner knew he would have been beaten for his lapse of verminous etiquette.

‘Three,’ Queekual hissed again, the Seerlord’s tone crackling with impatience.

Moschner nodded his understanding and hurried to inspect the slaves. They were dirty, reeking of the filth and squalor of the pens. Most bore the bruises and lesions of their captivity, a few sported still more serious hurts. Wounds, however, were the least of Moschner’s concerns. Using a long stick, he poked and prodded the naked wretches, examining armpits and throats for any trace of the plague. He felt ashamed that he hoped the slaves were infected. The disease might be cruel, but it would kill them much quicker than the skaven.

‘Well?’ Queekual demanded, his ire vicious enough to make the skaven guards squeak.

Moschner turned his head, risking a glance that almost met the Seerlord’s gaze. ‘What happens to the ones I don’t accept?’ he asked, surprised that he didn’t choke on his own bold words.

Queekual slammed the butt of his horned staff against the floor. ‘Pick-quick,’ he growled, a green glow creeping into his eyes as his temper rose.

‘Why only three? I may need even more help,’ Moschner persisted. ‘What you ask of me isn’t easy!’

The Seerlord slammed his staff against the floor again. He held up his other paw, displaying a crooked claw. ‘Now doktor-thing picks only one!’ he declared. ‘Speak-squeak again and I kill-burn all-all!’

There was no doubt in Moschner’s mind that the ratman meant what he said. The skaven were callous with the lives of their own kind – he had seen that often enough. They thought no more of killing a slave – be it man, dwarf or goblin – than a man thought of squashing a bug. Bobbing his head in deference once more, Moschner looked again at the slaves arrayed before him. He tried to ignore the pleading, hopeful stares. The slaves were too cowed to implore him with their voices, but they could still beg with their eyes. That was torture enough for the doktor as he studied them.

‘Him,’ Moschner finally said, pointing his hand at a tall blonde-haired man standing at the back of the company. Despite the cruelty and privation the skaven must have imposed on him, the man’s physique still conveyed a sense of power. More importantly, there was still a gleam of pride in his eyes. Alone of all of them, he didn’t beg Moschner with his eyes.

Queekual brought his claws together in a hollow clap. At his gesture, the guard-rats began to herd the other slaves away. The Seerlord turned back to Moschner. ‘You have a helper now. I expect-want progress. Fast-quick!’ To emphasise his command, Queekual lashed the floor with his naked tail. Moschner kept his head lowered until the terrifying ratman exited the cave.

‘Thank you.’ The words came in a parched whisper. Moschner looked around to find the tall slave beside him. He motioned for the man to stay where he was and hurried to the niche in the wall where he kept the provisions Queekual allocated to him. He came back with a water-skin. Greedily, the slave quenched his thirst, only relenting when the skin was half-drained. A guilty look crossed his features and he thrust the depleted skin towards Moschner.

‘It’s all right,’ Moschner assured him. ‘Our beneficent masters keep me well supplied. Drink all you want.’

The slave took him at his word. Only when the last drop had been wrung from the skin did he return his attention to Moschner. ‘Thank you again,’ he said, his voice rendered more human this time. ‘I am called Schroeder. Until three months ago I was a knight in the Order of the Black Rose.’ A flicker of pain shot through him and he pressed a hand to his forehead. ‘Was it three months? Can a man suffer so much in so little time? Can the gods allow such hell to persist?’

Moschner stared in alarm as Schroeder’s wits began to wander. He cast an anxious glance at the mouth of the cave where Queekual’s warriors stood guard. He wasn’t certain if the beasts understood Reikspiel the way their master did, but even so they could not fail to notice a madman whatever language he spoke. After so long alone, Moschner didn’t want his only companion taken from him.

‘I am Doktor Wolfius Moschner, lately of Carroburg,’ he introduced himself, approaching Schroeder with extended hand. The absurdity of such formality in such circumstances brought a hearty laugh from the knight. More importantly, it focused his straying mind.

‘Pfeildorf was my home,’ Schroeder declared. ‘Before the underfolk came,’ he added with bitterness. He stared hard at Moschner, suspicion erasing the gratitude in his eyes. ‘Why do they treat you so well? What service do you provide them?’

Moschner could not mistake the challenge in the knight’s tone. A soldier thought in very simple terms. His worldview was limited to ideas like friend and enemy… and traitor.

‘The ratkin captured me in Carroburg after they seized the city,’ Moschner explained. ‘The horned one is a sorcerer. He is taking any healers he can find among their captives and using them to conduct research.’

‘What kind of research?’ Schroeder demanded.

Moschner motioned with his hand, leading the knight deeper into the cave. ‘It will be faster if I show you,’ he explained. Schroeder followed his lead, every muscle in his body twitching with the expectation of treachery.

‘This is what he wants me to study,’ Moschner said, waving his hand at the confusion of cages scattered about the back of the cave. Inside each cage a living slave had been stuffed. Not a human slave, nor a dwarf nor even a goblin. These were slaves culled from the dregs of skavendom, ratkin who had been subjugated by their own kind. It took Schroeder only a moment to recognise what common bond the imprisoned skaven shared.

‘They have the plague,’ he gasped in fright.

Moschner nodded. ‘That is what Queekual wants me to study. Apparently the underfolk aren’t immune to the disease that has wrought such havoc among humanity, though the symptoms are far less pronounced.’

‘And this Queekual wants you to find a cure?’ Schroeder growled, not bothering to mask the contempt in his voice. ‘How could any man agree to help such monsters when his own people are being slaughtered and enslaved?’

‘You don’t understand!’ Moschner snarled back, bristling at the horrible accusation. ‘The ratmen are already resistant to the plague! Left on their own, only one in ten would die, though the paranoia of their kind ensures the sick aren’t given such a chance if they’re discovered.’

‘What does your sorcerer expect then?’ Schroeder asked.

Moschner repressed a shudder. ‘Something that goes against every oath I swore when I joined the Guild of Physicians. He wants me to make the plague more lethal. Not for men,’ he hurried to explain when he saw the knight clenching his fists. ‘He wants the plague’s qualities against the ratkin improved.’

Schroeder was silent a moment, letting Moschner’s words sink in. When he spoke, it was to utter a bark of laughter. ‘Truly the gods favour us, doktor! These long months I have prayed for a way to strike back against the ratkin and now, through you, I am given an opportunity beyond my prayers!’

‘I don’t understand,’ Moschner stated, alarmed that the knight’s wits might be deserting him again.

‘This task the sorcerer has given you!’ Schroeder said. ‘Can you not see? Do you not understand? The fiend intends to unleash a plague against his own kind!

‘Work hard, doktor. Tell me what I must do to help. Because together we are going to kill a lot of skaven!’

CHAPTER SIX

Nordland, 1119

The Army of Middenland marched with lighter step once the desolation of Drakwald was behind them. They were passing through their own land now, the trees that pressed close to the Old Forest Road were familiar to them, the songs of the birds that flittered through the sky were ones they knew. Many a soldier cast a wistful, longing look down one of the small tracks and trails that joined the road, picturing the comfort of hearth and home that waited for him somewhere down that path.

There were no deserters. However fierce the longing for their homes, even the lowliest spearman nursed within him an equally fierce sense of duty. Drakwald, the destruction of Carroburg, the suffering of those enslaved by the ratmen, these were lessons burnt into their hearts. Fighting the skaven, purging them from the lands they had conquered, had taken on the aspect of a crusade. Prevail or perish, those were the thoughts in every man’s mind. Destroy the skaven so that the homes they left behind would not suffer the fate of Carroburg.

It was with pride that Mandred rode in the vanguard of his army. He rode in the company of the Knights of the White Wolf, the elite of Middenheim’s warriors. They presented a fearsome aspect, their bodies locked within plates of red-painted steel. Hammers of iron hung from their saddles, vicious mauls that in the hands of a knight could pulp a skull in a heartbeat. Their warhorses, all of them enormous destriers selected for strength and stamina by the horse-breeders of Middenland, were adorned in quilted caparisons that hung down to their fetlocks. The steel barding that would normally have guarded the powerful animals was stowed away during the long march, a concession to the strain the added weight would impose even upon such steeds. In gentler times, against more civilised foes, squires would have led the warhorses to the battlefield. The knights would ride simple coursers until the time when battle was nigh. Only then would they mount the giant destriers, unleashing the full force of the animals in the brutal spectacle of a cavalry charge.

These were dark times, however, and the enemy was insidiously savage. No man who had fought in the Battle of Middenheim could forget the murderous cunning of the skaven, their penchant for deception and trickery. Honest battle was anathema to them. The creatures preferred ambush to battle, massacre to combat. Only with their grisly warlords threatening and goading them, only with the advantage of numbers and terrain, would the vermin be induced to fight.

Such an enemy knew nothing of honour, of the proprieties of war. They would gleefully exploit any advantage, no matter how churlish and vile. The only defence against an enemy who might strike from anywhere was vigilance and preparedness. As the column moved north, Mandred’s knights wore their armour and rode their destriers. His bowmen kept their bows strung and at their sides. Spearmen marched with their shields loosely strapped to their backs, so that in case of a sudden attack the man behind might swiftly avail himself of the shield of the soldier in front. Macemen marched among the wagons, each dienstmann encased in full armour. A series of rotations allowed some of the macemen to rest in the wagons, but never more than a quarter of their number at any time. Swordsmen and axemen, restricted by far less cumbersome mail, were expected to march without such periodic respite.

Rangers, poachers, bandits and woodsmen ranged along the sides of the column as it marched, stealing into the trees, scouting the land for any sign of a lurking foe. They came from the depths of Middenland and from the forsaken interior of Drakwald. Nordlander scouts accustomed to prowling the Forest of Shadows and who had come to join the Baroness Carin. Veteran Hochland hunters, fleeing their own skaven-infested lands to lend their blades and bows at the service of Graf Mandred.

As grave as his concerns for flank and rear, it was the path ahead that most worried Mandred. Dozens of his best trackers had been sent before the army, men who could trail a vole through a briar and follow the week-old path of a beetle over a slab of granite. Several times Mad Albrecht or some other sentinel in forest-green would come drifting back to the column to report activity ahead. Sometimes it was merely to say they’d seen a herdsman moving his flock across the road, at others it was to announce that some small band of Nordlanders was waiting ahead either to join the army or to sell it provisions.

Nothing, no matter how inconsequential, escaped the notice of Mad Albrecht and his scouts. It was therefore a shock when the horses at the front of the column suddenly began to buck and whinny. The knights in their saddles tried to quieten the frightened steeds even as archers moved forward, nocking arrows to their bows as they watched the trees.

The fright of the horses persisted long enough that the entire column came to a halt. Try as they might, the knights couldn’t calm their normally disciplined destriers. With each passing moment of delay, Mandred’s patience wore a little thinner. Beside him, Beck easily read his master’s mood.

‘Let me see what’s wrong, highness,’ Beck suggested. ‘You shouldn’t expose yourself…’

The advice, however, only increased Mandred’s displeasure. Annoyed, he spurred his white stallion forwards, bulling his way through the press of knights. As he neared the front of the column he could see the frightened horses stamping the earth, shaking their heads and gnashing their teeth. He was reminded of a hunting expedition when he was little. They’d hobbled their horses in a meadow while cleaning the deer they’d brought down. The horses had suddenly started to panic, much as the destriers were now doing. The cause of their fear had been a large panther, the predator revealing itself only when it rushed across the meadow and sank its claws in one of the animals.

Riding to the front of the vanguard, Mandred almost expected to see the same panther come lunging out from the trees. There was something ironic about an entire army being forced to stop its march because a hungry cat was spooking their horses.

Here was another irony too: for all the distress the destriers were experiencing, his own mount didn’t so much as nicker. Mandred found that as he moved forwards, the other horses also became quiet. He was about to make a comment to Grand Master Vitholf, congratulating him on finally getting the animals under control, when he noticed movement on the road ahead. He gazed in disbelief at the lone figure that came prowling towards the column. Such was his doubt that he glanced to the knights around him, wondering if they could see it too or if the presence was only in his mind. The way some of the warriors gawked in fascination, he knew they saw her too.

It was Hulda, the witch from the woods, self-professed oracle of Ulric. How she could have travelled so far and so fast, crossing hundreds of leagues from the Drakwald to this place, was something that made the hairs on his neck stand on end. Magic, whatever shape it took, was an unsettling thing.

‘Hail to you, Wolf of Sigmar!’ Hulda called out.

Mandred looked around uneasily to see if Ar-Ulric was nearby before he returned the woman’s salutation. He doubted if the old priest would appreciate a witch in their camp. At best, it would strike him as heretical. Mandred wasn’t so certain. The powers of the gods weren’t so limited as to be restrained by the dogma of their temples. Was it so impossible that Ulric might speak through this woman in some way? The wisdom she had shown in their previous meeting caused Mandred to believe Hulda was exactly what she claimed to be.

‘Hail to you, Howl of Ulric,’ Mandred greeted her. He nodded his head towards the knights around him. ‘Was it you who frightened our horses and brought my army to a halt?’

The witch came striding forwards, each step exhibiting the same graceful, almost unearthly flow that Mandred remembered so well. Hulda didn’t deign to answer his question. Of course it had been her magic that had upset the horses, just as it had been her magic that allowed her to slip through Mad Albrecht and his pickets.

‘I would speak with you and give you counsel,’ she declared. Her eyes suddenly shifted away from Mandred, focusing instead on the clutch of riders who came galloping out from the column to join the graf.

It was a mixture of Middenland nobles, Dienstleute officers and knightly commanders who had ridden up to join their leader. Among them, Mandred was surprised to see Baroness Carin and several of her retainers.

‘Witch! Harlot of Old Night!’ Ar-Ulric’s voice trembled in the fury of his outrage. Mandred feared the old priest would tumble from his saddle, so violently was he shaking. Beck actually rode over to him, reaching up to keep him from falling. Ar-Ulric shrugged him away, not even deigning to look at him as he continued to stare balefully at Hulda.

Before the priest could unleash another stream of invective, Hulda made a gesture with her hand. Mandred didn’t quite catch what it was, but its effect upon Ar-Ulric was dramatic. It was as though he’d been poleaxed by an ogre. The fury that had gripped him but a moment before seemed to evaporate. He stared at the woman with an expression of confusion and wonder. Not another word did he say. He simply turned his steed’s head and rode back into the body of the column.

Hulda watched him for a moment, and then turned her eyes upon Mandred. ‘You intend to follow the Old Forest Road?’ she asked, though from her tone, it was apparent she already knew the answer.

‘We are taking the army into Salzenmund,’ Mandred told her. The fortified town had become the centre of Baroness Carin’s diminished realm. Before she’d made her perilous ride to Carroburg, she’d had her vassals assemble provisions and supplies for the army she hoped to bring back with her. They’d be dearly appreciated by an army that had been marching across three provinces.

Hulda frowned at his statement. ‘You must not go to Salzenmund,’ she said. ‘The skaven know what this woman has planned,’ she pointed a finger at Baroness Carin. ‘Their spies know about your army. They wait and watch for it to arrive.’

‘Impossible!’ the baroness shouted. ‘My people are loyal! They wouldn’t betray me to the ratkin!’

Mandred gave the baroness a sympathetic look. He’d seen for himself the perfidious ways of the skaven. No place was safe from their prying ears. It didn’t need a human traitor for them to have discovered her plans.

‘It would be like them to turn your own stronghold into a snare for us all,’ Mandred told the baroness. He thought of the fight deep within the dwarf halls below Middenheim. ‘I have seen such trickery before.’

Baroness Carin threw up her hands in exasperation. ‘Then what do we do? Turn back? Abandon my people to these monsters?’

‘If you follow the road and go to Salzenmund, the skaven will be waiting for you,’ Hulda repeated. ‘But there is another way. A way to turn their trap against them.’

‘Ridiculous!’ the baroness exclaimed. ‘The only path an army can navigate is the Old Forest Road and it passes through Salzenmund.’

‘There is another way,’ Hulda said. ‘A way unknown to the ratkin. While they wait in ambush outside Salzenmund you can strike at their nests in Dietershafen.’

Baroness Carin turned towards Mandred. ‘Your highness, this is my land. Believe me when I tell you there is no trail such as this witch has imagined.’

There was a challenging quality about the smile Hulda turned upon the baroness. ‘There is the Laurelorn Forest,’ she said. The words were almost a whisper, yet they had an impact upon the Nordlanders as though they were the roar of a titan. Their faces grew pale, their eyes darted anxiously from one another, a few of the men even made the signs of Taal and Manaan to ward them against ill omen.

‘The… the Laurelorn is haunted,’ Baroness Carin explained. ‘Any who stray within it never return. Not alive. Not sane. Better the skaven than whatever horror lurks within the forest.’

Mandred appreciated the fear in the baroness’s voice and the effect that fear was having upon his own men. Before it could grow and spread further, he quickly turned towards Hulda. ‘Can you protect us against the ghosts of the forest?’

Hulda nodded ‘I can guide you. The path is perilous. Those who lose their way…’ She left the warning unspoken. ‘But you will be unseen by the skaven.’

Mandred smiled at that last point. It would be richly satisfying to take the skaven by surprise for once.

Baroness Carin waved the riding crop she held at Hulda. ‘Surely you aren’t going to listen to her? You’re not going to trust a witch to lead us?’

Mandred’s voice was loud when he answered her, loud enough to carry far down the column. ‘She isn’t leading this army, I am,’ he said. ‘Many of these men have invested their trust in me before. They have trusted me to tell them where to fight and how to fight. They have trusted me to ride with them into battle. Now I ask you, I ask them to trust me again. If we fight the skaven at Salzenmund, even in victory we are undone. It will take time to re-gather our strength, time the ratmen infesting Dietershafen will use to make ready for us.

‘The Laurelorn offers a way to cheat the ratmen, to attack them where they think themselves safe!’ Mandred shook his fist in the air as though strangling a skaven throat. ‘I mean to teach them nowhere is safe while one man yet draws breath! I will teach them that lesson, even if I must ride alone through the forest!’

The thunderous cheer that rose from his soldiers told Mandred that whatever might await him in the haunted Laurelorn, he wouldn’t face it alone.

Stirland, 1121

Screams tore the night air, cries of agony and horror that echoed through the darkness. It was the death rattle of Kleinbad and eighty-four of the eighty-seven who called the village home. Rugged, hardy specimens of Stirland’s peasantry, they had survived the worst onslaught of the plague, they had endured years of famine and marauding masterless Dienstleute, they had escaped the depredations of opportunistic goblins and prowling beastmen. After nearly a decade of survival, Kleinbad had begun to think of itself as protected by the gods, shielded by the sympathy of Rhya and the indulgence of Taal.

If the gods had protected Kleinbad, then such beneficence had run its course. Nothing stayed the black riders who swooped down upon the community, swords slashing out in butchering sweeps, hooves stamping down in bludgeoning blows. Down the muddy lane between the sunken wattle-and-daub grubenhausen the invaders rode, killing anything that tried to flee. After them came dismounted attackers, spears crashing against barred doors, mailed fists dragging terrified peasants from their homes. The villagers wailed and shrieked, crying out for mercy. The headman braved the stamping hooves to reach the square at the centre of the community, to dig with his bare hands at the base of an old oak tree. Desperately he pulled the treasure the peasants had hidden, the bribe with which they hoped to buy their lives.

One of the riders paused, eyes blazing behind the visor of his steel helm. The headman raised his hands towards the invader, showing him the fistfuls of grain. The rider’s hesitation came to an end, his sword chopping down into the peasant’s shoulder. The mortally wounded man flopped at the base of the tree, his life’s blood soaking into the grain scattered across the ground.

No inhuman threat could have visited a more complete doom upon Kleinbad than that which was inflicted upon the village by monsters who were all too human. The Sylvanian Nachtsheer, the sell-sword army of Count Malbork von Drak, were more thorough than any beastman, more vicious than any goblin, more exacting even than the ratkin as they annihilated the little farming community.

There was no pity on the face of Dregator Iorgu Turul as he watched his footmen herd the peasants into the square. He had served the von Draks too long to have any pretensions of conscience. To survive in the service of a cruel and ruthless master, a soldier learned to be as callous as those issuing his orders. Though he had himself been born in a village not terribly dissimilar to Kleinbad, the dregator felt no kinship with these people. He had risen above his peasant beginnings and he would take a certain amount of pleasure in displaying just how far he had come by carrying out the voivode’s commands to the letter.

The wailing sobs, the pleas for mercy as the peasants were shoved and clubbed into the square only increased the dregator’s contempt for them. These were the snivelling curs who would rule over Sylvania? These cowardly Stirlanders, begging to crawl on their knees when they should be willing to die on their feet? The ancient hatred of Fennone for Asoborn burned in Iorgu’s veins, the call of barbarian ancestors hungry for blood.

Blood they would have. Count von Drak’s orders would allow nothing less. Iorgu pointed with the gilded baton he bore, the dragon-headed symbol of his rank. A moment he let his gaze linger upon the weeping, terrified villagers. Savagely he slashed the baton through the air.

‘No survivors,’ he growled. The black-clad Nachtsheer were swift to execute Iorgu’s command. Horsemen came galloping back into the square, chopping down peasants with their swords. Those who tried to flee back into the streets were spitted on the spears of footmen or smashed into bloody ruin by steel maces and oaken cudgels. The massacre continued for what seemed an eternity. Each scream brought a cruel smile to the dregator’s scarred face. Justice for the oppression of Sylvania.

When the carnage in the square reached its peak, Iorgu called out to the sergeants among his footmen. ‘Bait the trap,’ he hissed. The dregator’s eyes glittered in the blaze of burning hovels as the Nachtsheer put Kleinbad to the torch. A detachment of grim-faced soldiers, their uniforms hidden beneath the folds of long leather aprons, stalked among the dead, hacking and chopping with the massive cleavers they bore. Each group was accompanied by a mercenary with a monstrous spiked mace. Wherever the butchers encountered a victim who wasn’t quite dead, the maceman would finish the job before they started their desecration of the dead.

Horsemen prowled about the village, reaching into saddle bags and dropping rusty trinkets and scraps of mouldering cloth on the ground. Rubbish culled from an ancient Styrigen barrow mound, it was this hoary garbage that would be the final proof to bait the Stirlanders.

Iorgu scowled and wheeled his horse around that he might stare down at the villains who would bring the first evidence to Wurtbad and the grand count. If his regard for the slaughtered peasants had been one of contempt, it was a thousand times worse for these men. A traitor, even a useful one, was an abomination. How much worse when the traitor was moved not by ideal or emotion, but by simple greed. These three men had betrayed their community, their families and neighbours for the promise of gold. Only a fool would trust such men. Neither Count von Drak or Dregator Iorgu was a fool.

‘Have we not served you well, your lordship?’ the oldest of the traitors asked. They were very much alike in their appearance, dusky men with long noses and pale blue eyes. An uncle and two nephews, shepherds who had lost their livelihood when the village headman ordered their flock killed so that the peasants might survive the harsh winter of 1118. Revenge had perhaps played its part when they responded to the intimations of a wandering Sylvanian tinker, but it was von Drak’s gold that had won their cooperation in the end.

‘A traitor is a double-edged blade,’ Iorgu mused as he glared back at the scruffy peasant. ‘Trying to cut with it, one must be careful about getting nicked by the reverse edge.’

The peasant was unctuous in his protestations. ‘We have taken the voivode’s coin,’ he stated, injecting a tone of injured pride to his words. ‘We know what is expected of us. We will alert Baron von Kleistern, tell him that a legion of skeletons and zombies descended upon the village and killed everyone.’

Dregator Iorgu nodded as he heard the peasant recite the story he had been told to deliver. ‘And what, pray, would happen if Baron von Kleistern should offer you more gold to tell him what really happened here?’

All three of the peasants looked at one another, their faces betraying the same look of disbelieving shock as that of a deer that suddenly scents a lurking hunter. One of the younger men turned to run. Before he got twenty paces, an arrow from a Nachtsheer archer brought him tumbling into the mud.

The old shepherd threw himself to the ground, hands clenching tight about the stirrup holding Iorgu’s boot. ‘Mercy, your lordship! We are loyal!’

The dregator kicked the man away, sending him sprawling into the muck. ‘Save your words! The voivode wants something more substantial to ensure your fealty!’ He raised his gilded baton. The little dragon sculpture glittered in the firelight as Iorgu waved it overhead. From the darkness, a cloaked figure emerged. Leaning heavily upon a gnarled oaken staff, Arch-Druid Caranica marched towards the dregator and the men cowering before him. High priest of Ahalt the Drinker, bloodthirsty god of wild places, Caranica’s features were hidden behind the hollowed out deer-skull he wore. A sickle, shapeless beneath the patina of gore coating it, was tucked beneath the sash he wore. As he approached, a stink of blood and death preceded him.

‘They will obey,’ the druid promised in a voice that was like the rustle of dead leaves. Removing the sickle from his belt, Caranica walked over to the writhing peasant with a Nachtsheer arrow in his breast. A moment of bloody work and the sickle was slick with the man’s lifeblood.

A foul smile curled the wizened face visible beneath the jaw of the deer-skull. Slobbering growls rasped past the druid’s sharpened teeth, sounds more akin to those of beasts than men. As Caranica growled, a fell vapour began to gather around the bloody sickle, endowing it with an obscene light. The fresh blood upon the ceremonial blade began to steam and bubble, writhing as though possessed of some atrocious vivacity.

The treacherous peasants retreated when the druid advanced towards them. Only the spears of the Nachtsheer kept them from fleeing. Forced to stand their ground, the men screamed as Caranica slashed their forearms with the glowing sickle. Their screams grew louder as the enchanted blood crawled off the blade and into their veins, vanishing into their bodies like a crimson maggot.

‘The mark of Ahalt is upon you,’ Caranica told the men. ‘Your lives belong to the Drinker now! Defy him, betray him, and the beasts of forest and field shall make sport with your bleached bones! You may escape the eyes of men, but there is no escaping the eyes of a god!’

Caranica laughed as the terrified peasants were released. The men fled into the night, thinking only to escape the presence of the ghastly druid. Later, as they felt the Blood of Ahalt crawling inside them, they would remember what was expected of them. They would tell their liege lord what Count von Drak wanted.

‘How will you remove Ahalt’s curse?’ Iorgu asked. He had no liking for sorcery and even less when it masqueraded as religion. In better times, his Nachtsheer would have been hunting down animals like Caranica, not working with them.

The druid cocked his head and stared up at Iorgu, bewilderment in his eyes. ‘Remove the mark of Ahalt?’ he asked, as though it were the stupidest question in the world. ‘It was my understanding that we only need these men for a few days, a few weeks at the most. After that time…’ He made a helpless gesture with his arms. ‘Blood will have blood and the Drinker is always thirsty.’

Dregator Iorgu shuddered at the calm way Caranica explained what he had done. What the druid would do again, for there were other villages with other traitors that had a role to play in Count von Drak’s plan, his scheme to make Grand Count von Oberreuth believe Stirland was being invaded.

Invaded by the undead hordes of the necromancer Vanhal.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Laurelorn Forest, 1119

Fear, anxiety, uneasiness, whatever name he chose to call it, not a soldier in the column was unmoved by the fearsome tales the Nordlanders related to their allies in hushed whispers: stories of ghoulish lights that could be seen dancing among the woods; accounts of ghostly shadows that stood watch just within the forest, waiting for their prey; discoveries of bloodless corpses, torn and mangled in unspeakable ways, dangling from the treetops. The descriptions from the Nordlanders became more grisly with each step they took towards the shunned forest.

When the army finally came within sight of the Laurelorn, many of the soldiers laughed at the horrors the Nordlanders had conjured. In their minds they had pictured gnarled trees with skeletal branches clawing at the sky, vast swathes of bramble and thorn, stinking quagmires of slime. What they found instead was lush greenery, vibrant and fulsome. Birds sang from the branches of mighty oak and stalwart ash. Rabbits scampered beneath berry bushes, bees buzzed about patches of marigold and daisy. There was nothing untoward about the forest, no festering terror. If anything it was more pleasant and marvellous than any forest they had seen before.

The horror of the Laurelorn, however, wasn’t a thing that could be seen. It was something that had to be felt, something that had to be experienced.

‘I have prayed to Lord Sigmar that you are right about this…’ Lady Mirella’s voice faded, reluctant even to whisper the word that had formed in her mind.

Beside her, Graf Mandred felt the doubt in her voice stab at him. ‘Witch,’ he finished. ‘You’ve been talking with Arch-Lector Hartwich again.’

Colour flushed into the noblewoman’s face. ‘He’s been too busy ministering to the needs of Princess Erna to consult me,’ she said. ‘But it is no secret that he doesn’t trust your friend. I don’t either. There are many who don’t.’ As she said the last, her gaze strayed to the Nordlanders and their leader, Baroness Carin.

‘She’s very beautiful,’ Mirella stated, her voice soft and tinged with melancholy.

‘Hulda?’ Mandred frowned. ‘There’s something compelling about her. Compelling… yet also frightening.’

Mirella turned away from her scrutiny of the baroness, pouncing upon Mandred’s words. ‘Then you don’t trust her,’ she gasped.

Mandred was quiet a moment. It was so difficult to put his feeling into words. ‘No, it’s something deeper than trust. Faith, perhaps. Maybe that’s why she frightens me. I’m not the only one though. Ar-Ulric can’t say three words when she’s near, yet at the same time he can’t take his eyes off her.’ He pointed to the edge of the forest where the old priest stood alone, watching the trees. Hulda had trotted off into that forest less than an hour before, warning Mandred to keep his army out of the Laurelorn until she returned. Throughout her absence, Ar-Ulric had maintained a silent vigil. It was hard to read the priest’s attitude. Was he concerned that Hulda wouldn’t return or was he more concerned that she would? Ar-Ulric had been a fixture of the Middenpalaz and Middenheim for as far back as Mandred could remember. In all that time he had never seen the priest in such a light. For the first time, there was an uncertainty in his manner, a hint of doubt in his dogmatic resolve.

‘Perhaps your highness would be advised to heed the council of Baroness Carin,’ Beck suggested. The knight remained at a respectful distance from Mandred and Mirella, yet near enough that the bodyguard could defend his master at a moment’s warning.

Mandred arched an eyebrow at Beck’s interruption. ‘You appear to have taken an interest in the baroness,’ he said. ‘Someone admitted her to my tent before we left Carroburg. I’ve wondered who could be so bold as to forget themselves like that.’

Beck turned towards his master, the scar running beneath his eyepatch vivid against his skin. The puckered wound seemed to point accusingly at Mandred when the knight spoke. ‘My duty is to the Graf of Middenheim. It has always been my duty,’ Beck stated. He inclined his head slightly towards Mirella. ‘If I pay undue consideration to Baroness Carin, it is because others close to your highness exhibit their own concern.’

When Mandred looked at Mirella, he saw the rush of colour that rose to her cheeks, the hasty downward cast of her eyes. He smiled at his misunderstanding. It wasn’t the beauty of Hulda that worried her.

Before Mandred could reassure his lover that nothing existed between himself and Baroness Carin, a commotion at the front of the column drew his attention. Mad Albrecht and a few of his scouts, posted just ahead of the main body of the army were breaking from their cover, bows drawn as they slowly worked their way back to the column. The wiry Drakwalder shook his head anxiously as he approached his sovereign.

‘It’s too quiet, your highness,’ Albrecht reported. ‘All of the little rustlings and noises of the small animals scurrying about have gone silent. Even the birds have flown away.’ He saw the confusion on Mandred’s face. Albrecht pointed to a starling clearly visible in a tree nearby. ‘Not here,’ he explained, then pointed a not-quite-steady hand back at the edge of the Laurelorn. ‘There,’ he said, his voice just falling to a whisper.

Almost in concert with Albrecht’s report, the lone figure of Hulda came prowling out of the forest. As before, her approach had gone unobserved by the scouts, lending her appearance an eerie suddenness. She paused only once, glancing at Ar-Ulric, before she walked in sinuous grace to Mandred.

‘The way has been prepared,’ she stated. ‘You may enter the forest. The horsemen must walk their steeds and take pains to keep them calm. There must be no fire of any sort. The path will be marked. Any who stray from it… must be left to the forest. Take neither wood nor game, even a single fallen leaf will be perilous.’

Mirella faced Hulda, staring hard into the witch’s eyes. ‘If this place is so dangerous, why do you lead us there?’

‘It is because it is dangerous that I lead you here,’ Hulda said. ‘It is because it is dangerous that it offers safety.’ Teeth gleamed white as she smiled at the Reikland noblewoman. ‘Those who remember their respect, and my warnings, will see the other side.’ She turned away from Mirella, regarding Mandred with a severe expression. ‘You must go first,’ she told him.

Beck bristled at the very suggestion. ‘If you think we’re going to allow his highness to walk alone…’

Hulda rounded on the angered knight, her own gaze blazing with such fierce challenge that Beck was taken aback. ‘I did not say alone. The graf may bring whomever he chooses. But he must go first. Only then may the column follow.’ She turned, glancing back at the Laurelorn. ‘It is what the forest demands.’

Mandred nodded slowly. ‘Then it is what I must do,’ he said. ‘Whatever awaits us here can be no worse than running into the skaven at Salzenmund.’ He reached to his belt, checking that Legbiter slid free in its scabbard, the only display of uneasiness that broke his otherwise firm demeanour. ‘Pass Hulda’s warning to the officers. Tell them to ensure that every man in the column has been instructed how to behave.’

‘You must take a guard with you,’ Beck insisted, still watching Hulda with his one good eye. ‘We cannot risk our leader.’

Mandred heard the anxiety in his knight’s every word. Despite the peculiar feeling of belief he had in Hulda, he couldn’t help but share Beck’s doubt. From her manner and her words, Mandred felt that they were dealing with something that went beyond her control, something that had to be appeased before they could proceed.

‘Volunteers only,’ Mandred told Beck. ‘No men with families,’ he amended his statement. The order brought a grim nod from the knight.

‘Volunteers,’ he repeated, staring past the graf to the forest beyond. For all its apparent beauty, it was quickly becoming the imposing place the Nordlanders had warned about.

Slowly, Mandred and his escort approached the forest, following Hulda as the witch led them towards a pair of immense oaks, their branches twining and merging into a living archway. Moss hanging from the trees created a green veil.

What lay behind it, Mandred felt, was something beyond the ken of men.

The atmosphere within the forest was murky, the light subdued by the verdant canopy overhead. Graf Mandred’s small group had walked only twenty paces into the Laurelorn before they were met. His escort consisted of Beck and Ar-Ulric, Kurgaz Smallhammer and Mad Albrecht, half a dozen Knights of the White Wolf, an exceedingly terrified liaison from the Nordland contingent and a few rangers from Drakwald. Leading the way was Hulda, picking a path through the lush undergrowth with an ease that made even Albrecht and the rangers seem clumsy. By command of their sovereign, the men entered the forest without drawn weapons, but there wasn’t a hand that didn’t keep an easy grip about the heft of a hammer or the grip of a sword.

Seemingly from nowhere, three figures appeared ahead of Mandred’s group. They were tall, slimly built people, human in form but endowed with an almost ethereal quality of beauty and poise. When they moved it was with the same careless grace as water flowing in a stream or sunlight filtering through a cloud. They were arrayed in smooth breeches of emerald green, loose shirts of jade and light boots that appeared smoother and finer than the softest calfskin. Curious cloaks, apparently woven from leaves, clung to their shoulders, bound by neither clasp nor chain, but simply merging with the shoulders of their shirts.

The humans were dumbstruck, unable to do anything but gaze in wonder and admiration as these almost spectral creatures manifested from the lush greenery. It was Kurgaz who found his voice and gave a name to the forest people. ‘Elves,’ the dwarf growled, spitting the word off his tongue as though it were the vilest abomination.

The elves turned their heads almost in unison, first directing an indifferent stare at Kurgaz, then turning back to Hulda. ‘We did not agree to the presence of diggerlings,’ one of the elves intoned, his reproach carrying with it a sharpness that somehow accentuated the mercurial tonalities of his voice, rendering his command of Reikspiel at once precise yet conveying a curious accent, as though perhaps the elf hadn’t spoken this tongue in so long that his command of it belonged to generations long dead and buried.

Hulda stared back at him. ‘I was unaware that it was your decision to make,’ she countered. Turning, she gestured to Mandred. ‘This is the one they have named “Wolf of Sigmar.” It is he who seeks passage through the forest.’

The elf didn’t bow or acknowledge Mandred’s rank in any way, though it was obvious he was fully aware of the titles the human held. ‘You would bring dwarfs into this place?’ the elf challenged. He deliberately ignored the burst of hostility that streamed from Kurgaz’s mouth and the warhammer the dwarf had started to pull free from the sling across his back.

Mandred met the elf’s strangely piercing gaze. For all their beauty, there was a ghastly alien quality about the eyes of an elf, a window into a mind as different from that of a man as a man’s was from a lowly ant. He could feel the weight of incredible depths of time studying him, weighing his every twitch and breath, judging him in ways he couldn’t begin to imagine, much less understand.

Some of the old idealism rose to his tongue, the impulsiveness that had once caused him to ride into the plague-infested squalor of Warrenburg and to fight depraved cultists on the very walls of the Ulricsberg. Mandred forgot all the careful diplomacy and candour of his court and his position, falling back upon the one thing he felt was all too easily obfuscated by the proprieties of state. What he told the elf was the simple truth.

‘I march against the foul ratkin who infest the lands of men,’ Mandred told the elf. ‘Those who would help me in this noble work, I am honoured to call friend. Those who would forsake their own homes and their own people to help mine reclaim their homes from this vile enemy are more than friends. They are brothers.’

No flicker of expression crossed the elf’s face, but it was clear from his speech that he had caught the barb of accusation in Mandred’s words. ‘All creatures have their obligations to the land,’ he said. ‘It is how we choose to interpret those obligations that defines us. We have forsaken the path of smoke and the wheel. To embrace those who yet walk that path is not permitted to us.’

Kurgaz spat on the forest floor. ‘The perfidy of elves. Tell you to shove off and then make you feel like the one who should be ashamed!’

‘Of all peoples, the dwarfs should appreciate what we have sacrificed to find a place for ourselves,’ the elf retorted, for the first time a flicker of emotion crossing his serene features. ‘We have withdrawn from the world that would have consumed us, found our own sanctuary.’ The elf looked away, becoming attentive as the trees creaked and groaned. Calm settled onto his face as he addressed Mandred once more.

‘We are sympathetic, but we will not fight your wars,’ the elf stated. ‘It is enough that we do this for you. We have begged the forest permission to allow you passage. Know that you trespass here under the strictest sufferance. The path has been marked, but understand that any who allow themselves to be lured from the path will not return. Do not look for them. Do not tarry. If you once stop, if you once linger, there is no protection we can offer you.’

‘Protection?’ Mandred asked. ‘Are your people so hostile to my kind that they would attack us?’

‘It is not my people who threaten you here,’ the elf said. The creaking groans of the forest seemed to swell to louder volume though none could feel any wind rustling through the woods. ‘Stay on the path. Do not stop. Do not linger.’

Mandred shook his head. ‘It is impossible. It will take us weeks to cross your forest. The army will need to camp, to rest.’

The elf was unmoved by the statement. ‘Do not stop,’ he warned. ‘You move in the eye of a storm. If it descends upon you, you will be lost.’ His expression became impossibly grave, more dour than the most doleful Morrite priest Mandred had ever seen. ‘There is something more, something you must do to appease the forest.’ An actual shudder passed through the elf’s body. He gestured to the undergrowth the men had trampled in their advance. ‘There must be recompense for the scars left by your passing. The forest demands a sacrifice.’

A wail of horror escaped the Nordland liaison, and the man had to be restrained by two of the White Wolves to keep from running away in a fit of abject fear. Kurgaz drew his hammer, glaring at the elves, fairly daring any of them to move towards him. Mandred stared accusingly at Hulda.

‘You knew of this?’ he demanded. The anger in his voice was fed by a feeling almost of betrayal.

‘It comes easy to tyrants to demand sacrifice from others,’ Hulda stated. ‘It comes harder to those who would be leaders. To sacrifice themselves is less bitter to them.’

Mandred stood in silence for a moment, fuming at Hulda’s deception. Before he could say anything, before he could decide between forcing a path through the forest regardless or going around and daring the attentions of the skaven, Albrecht had loosened his sword belt and let it drop to the forest floor. Hesitantly, the former poacher walked towards the elves.

‘Albrecht!’ Mandred shouted at the man.

The Drakwalder turned and gave his sovereign a wistful look. Then he threw back his shoulders and walked more boldly to the elves. Exhibiting a surprising degree of respect, two of the elves led the man off into the trees where he was soon lost to sight.

Mandred drew Legbiter from its sheath. Before he could order those around him to rescue Albrecht, he felt a firm hand close on his shoulder in a restraining grip. He almost expected Hulda’s hand to be there and was surprised to find that the hand was Ar-Ulric’s.

‘Do not cheapen what your friend has done for you,’ the priest said. ‘Allow him this moment to repay what you have done for him. An act of pure selflessness is the most sacred thing. The gods themselves will pay tribute to Albrecht.’

The groaning of the trees was becoming more agitated now. To Mandred’s ears there seemed an unspeakable suggestion of hunger woven into the cracks and pops of swaying branches. He shuddered at the loathsome expectancy of the noise. Mad Albrecht, the refugee from shattered Drakwald, a man just crazed enough, beholden enough, to give his life for his adopted monarch.

There was no scream, no cry, no sign of what happened to Albrecht. The poacher’s fate was something that was felt, a mocking shudder that seemed to course through the grass beneath their feet and the leaves overhead. Mandred knew his friend was gone, knew it as certainly as if he had watched Albrecht’s throat slit before his eyes.

‘The skaven will pay,’ Mandred swore. ‘They will pay for every drop of Albrecht’s blood.’ He glared at Hulda, then at the elf. ‘My army is going to cross your forest. You have warned us, now let me warn you. Let anything try to stop us at its peril.’

The elf bowed in acknowledgement of the message. ‘Your words have been heard. I will try to make their meaning understood. If you are fortunate, they will be satisfied with what they have already taken.’

As the army moved into the forest, the trees seemed to close in around them. Soldiers muttered anxiously to one another, scarcely daring to raise their voices in more than the feeblest of whispers. The horses were led by their dismounted riders, blankets thrown over their heads to prevent the animals from seeing anything that might set them into a panic. The normally stoic dwarfs marched in a tight phalanx, weapons at the ready, eyes scanning the enclosing greenery fearfully. At Hulda’s urging, the dwarfs left their pipes in their pockets, heeding the witch’s warning against even the slightest flame.

There was no question of scouts or rangers creeping ahead of the force. Even the most misanthropic of the former poachers and huntsmen longed for the presence of his fellow man. They clung to the column with the same eagerness as the infantrymen and camp followers, taking some slight comfort from those around them.

Comfort, but not security. The elf’s allusion to the eye of a raging storm struck Mandred as a chillingly precise appreciation of what their passage through the forest was like. The ‘path’ the elf had told the army to follow wasn’t anything visible. It was instead a sensation, a feeling that squirmed through the mind of man and beast alike. A soldier would know when he strayed from the path allowed to him by the forest when he felt the hairs on his arms prickle, when his pulse suddenly quickened. It was all the warning given. It was all the warning needed. None who felt it failed to divert their march back into the unseen cordon laid out for them.

Beyond the invisible barriers of that cordon, the trees pressed close to the path. Their branches reached down like skeletal talons, their roots spilled across the earth like giant serpents. Leaves fluttered down from their boughs, evoking in Mandred’s mind the memory of an angry mob throwing garbage at a criminal locked in a pillory.

Small animals and an amazing variety of birds regarded the column from the branches, an eerie sentience seeming to shine in their eyes as they watched the men march by. Beyond the trees, there were ponderous crashings and thrashings as though mammoth shapes were stirring in the depths of the forest. Sometimes, just from the corner of his eye, Mandred fancied he saw a face peering at him, inhuman countenances of weathered wood and moss. Sometimes he saw a gnarled arm beckon to him. Always, when he stared directly at these apparitions, they would assume the innocuous form of a tree trunk or a fallen log. Mandred wasn’t sure which vision, however, was the illusion.

Shouts of alarm, cries of panic sounded throughout the march as men discovered comrades who had gone missing. Despite the terror around them, there were some who allowed themselves to be lured from the path. Mandred even caught Beck straying towards the trees, convinced he’d heard a woman’s soft voice calling out to him. It was a voice Mandred, walking just beside him, had been unable to hear.

As the day began to darken, all in the column dreaded the thought of spending a night in the ghastly Laurelorn. The Nordlanders were especially upset. It took a cordon of White Wolves and dwarfs to keep Baroness Carin from ordering her men to make a break for the countryside. Mandred sympathised with her. The idea of camping in the forest was terrifying. At the same time, he had come to appreciate the awful power of this place. He was convinced that if the Nordlanders did try to force their way out then none of them would ever be seen alive again.

As the terror of spending the night in the Laurelorn was reaching the proportions of a general panic, as Mandred was debating the impossibility of the injunction not to stop and not to tarry given to them by the elves, there came a sudden lessening of the brooding intensity of their surroundings. With a suddenness that was as unexpected as it was unanticipated, the forest opened out into a grassy plain.

At first, Mandred believed they had simply reached some incredibly vast clearing deep in the forest. Then the cries of disbelief and incredulous moans that sounded from the Nordlanders made him aware of the truth. Some of the natives of the province recognised this terrain, knew it to be land far from where they had entered the Laurelorn. Impossibly far. They recognized the hills and valleys of the northern fiefdoms, the burned-out shells of windmills and the toppled heap of an old Jutone castle.

In only a handful of hours within the haunted forest, the Army of Middenland had crossed a distance that should have taken them weeks. They had entered the Laurelorn at the southern extremity of Nordland. Now they found themselves only a day’s march from Dietershafen on the coast.

‘Do not question ancient magic,’ Hulda advised him. Mandred gave a start, unaware that the witch had come up beside him.

‘This is why you wanted us to go through the Laurelorn?’ he asked, gesturing to the sprawl of countryside before them. ‘You knew this would happen?’

Hulda bowed her head. ‘The forest was eager to be rid of you, so it sped your passage through it.’

Mandred scowled. ‘Not all of us,’ he said, thinking of Albrecht and all those who had been lured from the path. How many had there been? Dozens? Scores? It would need an accurate head count, a roster of the army to be certain. Mandred dreaded knowing how many the forest had claimed. How many he had led to such a strange death.

‘The price of such magic is high,’ Hulda conceded. Her expression became grave as she added. ‘It is a price that must always be paid.’

‘The cost is too high,’ Mandred said.

Hulda cocked her head to one side, puzzled by his attitude. ‘How many would you have lost had you walked into the skaven waiting for you at Salzenmund? Even with my warning? And you would still be far from your objective. The hunger of the Laurelorn has been cheap. Or are the only deaths you can accept those which happen on a battlefield?’

Mandred turned away from her, his fists clenching at his sides. ‘The only deaths I can accept are those of skaven.’

Altdorf, 1121

Already it was being called ‘the Night of the Holy Knives’. Messengers from across Reikland and from as far away as Nuln had been riding into Altdorf to bring tidings of the wave of murder and massacre that had exploded across the land. In an Empire already ravaged by plague and war, a few isolated deaths would have gone unnoticed. This, however, went far beyond something that could be ignored. Hundreds were dead, killed in a single night. Given the size of the Empire and the perils of travel, the dead might number in the thousands if the same slaughter had been carried out in Averland and Nordland, Sylvania and Ostermark.

Kreyssig sat on the Imperial throne, feeling his stomach tighten as the officers of his Kaiserjaeger marched into the council chamber and delivered each new report as it was brought to the palace. He could easily picture each victim; it was no stretch of the imagination, simply a quick consultation of his own memory. A week before he’d been summoned to the Courts of Justice by the gaoler who maintained the Catacombs, the private dungeons of the Kaiserjaeger. The guards who had been posted in the Dragon’s Hole were dead, dispatched by sword and dagger. Kreyssig had worried that his prize prisoner, Grand Theogonist Gazulgrund’s daughter Gudrun Schoppe had been rescued by some agent of the priest’s.

What he found instead was far more disturbing. The woman was laid out in her cell, her throat slit from ear to ear. It was obvious someone had dallied to compose the body, folding her hands across her breast and placing a simple wooden icon between her dead fingers. It was a Sigmarite hammer, and the message being conveyed couldn’t be any clearer. An agent of Gazulgrund had been here, but he hadn’t come to rescue Gudrun. He’d come to break the hold Kreyssig had over the Grand Theogonist, to break it in such a way that he would never be able to reclaim such power again.

If Gazulgrund’s decision to execute his own daughter was chilling, what followed was absolutely terrifying. Across the city other murders were discovered. Murders of little men, murders of important men, some killed by blade, others by bludgeon. The uniting factor in the deaths, beyond the synchronicity of their timing, lay in the little wooden hammers their killers had placed in their folded hands. It was only when Kreyssig learned that the wealthy von Reisarch family, relations of Altdorf’s Arch-Lector von Reisarch, were among the dead that he suspected an even more horrible connection. It took only a short investigation for his spies to confirm his suspicions. All of the dead, or at least those who had been the targets of the attacks as indicated by the icons stuffed into their dead hands, were the kinfolk of highly placed members of the Temple of Sigmar. They had been fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, wives and children of Sigmarite priests.

Gazulgrund had severed the hold Kreyssig had over him and, with the same stroke he was ensuring that no other priest in the Temple could be coerced in similar fashion. The utter ruthlessness, the cold-blooded calculation of a massacre on such a scale was horrifying even to someone of Kreyssig’s amoral ethics. These weren’t strangers the Grand Theogonist had ordered killed; these were the families of his own priests. His own daughter.

The scale of the massacre grew with each passing hour. Beyond Altdorf, Gazulgrund’s killers had seemingly been at work in every town and village. Anyone with direct blood ties to one of the Temple clergy had been murdered, always with the same little wooden hammer in their dead hands. The lengths to which Gazulgrund had gone to protect the Temple from outside influence went beyond anything a sane mind could conceive.

As more reports reached his ears, Kreyssig appreciated the terrible mistake he’d made when he’d thought Lector Stefan Schoppe would make a pliant and easily dominated Grand Theogonist. Normally a keen judge of character, he’d grossly underestimated the man he himself had made supreme authority of the Sigmarite faith. He’d never suspected that beneath the priest’s humility there might burn the fire of a true religious fanatic.

How could he control a man who genuinely believed he was the instrument of his god’s will? How could Kreyssig reason with a man who had ordered the slaughter of entire families? In elevating Stefan Schoppe, Kreyssig realised now that he’d created a monster he couldn’t control.

The Temple of Sigmar had been made strong with Kreyssig’s help. He knew only too well how strong. He’d planned to use the clergy to rouse the peasants for the eventual overthrow of the nobles. He appreciated fully the hold the Sigmarites had over the commoners now. While it had been firmly under his control, he had been pleased to let the Temple’s power grow.

Now, things were different. Gazulgrund had even delivered a sermon in the Great Cathedral, admitting to what he called the ‘Sacrifice of the Innocents’. He spoke of those murdered by his killers as martyrs, justifying every drop of their blood as an offering to Sigmar. He disparaged the worldly ways of the clergy and spoke of a need to return to a spiritual purity in order to revitalise the Temple and renew the sacrament between Sigmar and the Empire he had built. The great famines, the terrible Black Plague, the insidious skaven themselves, all of these were tribulations set upon the people as a warning that they must repent their iniquities and return to the faith of Sigmar. The priesthood, being nearer to Sigmar, naturally had to aspire to a greater piety and selflessness than their flock. The earthly ties of blood and family had to be severed that their minds might be focused solely upon the divine.

Strangely, while there was dissension and even outrage among the clergy – and many of the most outspoken of these dissenters mysteriously vanished in the weeks after the massacre  – Gazulgrund’s sermon found fertile soil in the hearts of the commoners. When the Grand Theogonist spoke of martyrs and sacrifice, he gave the impression that all was done for the good of the peasants, to relieve the suffering that ravaged their communities. By restoring the grace of Sigmar to the Empire, he promised to scour away these calamities, to bring back the days of peace and plenty for those who would keep the faith. The very barbarity of the massacre cried out to the peasants in a voice of thunder. This was the length to which Gazulgrund would go to ease their suffering, to intervene with Mighty Sigmar. The other temples might promise similar things, but Gazulgrund had done more than simply make promises, he had put action behind his words. He had given his own daughter’s life that his own soul and his own mind might be made pure enough to facilitate a greater communion with their god.

The peasant mob, that great weapon Kreyssig had thought to wield against the nobles, now belonged to Gazulgrund.

There was no power in Altdorf that could oppose the Grand Theogonist now. Kill him? The thought brought a bitter laugh to Kreyssig’s lips. That would only make him a martyr as well, and his death might ignite the peasants into full revolt. Even if he could put down such an uprising, it would mean the end of Kreyssig’s authority. If he were forced to neutralise the peasants, he would lose the threat that kept Duke Vidor and the other nobles under his thumb. They would fall on him like a pack of wolves and carve him to ribbons.

The cat resting in Kreyssig’s lap became agitated, raising its head and arching its back in a sudden display of alarm. The Protector rose from the throne, looking anxiously around him for any secret place one of the ratmen might be concealed. His anxiety turned to a disgusted sneer when he saw the animal swatting at an insect. He watched the cat for a moment, leaping to and fro as the bug buzzed around its head. A bee of some sort. They were a nuisance in the palace, persisting despite strenuous efforts to eradicate them. Kreyssig suspected they were coming from Boris’s old apiary, some tiny hole in the walls. It was tempting to send someone down there to cleanse the chamber, but doing so would mean breaking down one of the walls and Kreyssig wasn’t anxious to explain what they’d find inside. Baroness von den Linden should be left to rest in peace. The last thing he needed was the Lady of Sigmar’s corpse reappearing while the Grand Theogonist was whipping up the rabble.

Kreyssig sat back on the Imperial throne. Killing the witch might have been a mistake. Though her own ambitions had been dangerous, she at least was strong enough to oppose Gazulgrund. The Grand Theogonist knew it too, that was why he had persuaded Kreyssig to dispose of her. Even then, Gazulgrund had been preparing for the Night of the Holy Knives. He’d been preparing for it ever since he’d taken the name Gazulgrund, christening himself after the dwarf god of death. He knew killing Gudrun would break Kreyssig’s hold over him. Baroness von den Linden had represented the only threat to him. With the peasants championing her as the Lady of Sigmar, the witch could fight Gazulgrund on his own ground.

To break Gazulgrund’s power, Kreyssig would have to engage the priest in that spiritual arena. It was a fight he was ill-equipped for. His were the weapons of fear and intimidation, not hope and faith. He might be a hero to the people of Altdorf for vanquishing the skaven, but they would never entirely forget that he was also the Commander of the Kaiserjaeger and the man who had been the Emperor’s Hound.

Kreyssig drummed his fingers against the pearl-inlaid arm of the throne as a thought came to him. He might not have the ability to fight Gazulgrund on his own terms but perhaps there were others who could. Reports had reached him from Drakwald and Middenland about the Graf of Middenheim. There were wild stories about some sort of miracle relating to Graf Mandred, and his subjects had taken to calling him the ‘Wolf of Sigmar’. He was reported to have fought the skaven in Nordland and was marching his army into Ostland. Such was his hatred of the ratmen that many claimed he was going to drive them from every province in the Empire.

Such altruistic pretensions didn’t fool Kreyssig. Mandred was making a bid to make himself Emperor, to buy the Imperial crown with skaven carcasses. It would be only a matter of time before he turned his army towards Altdorf and tried to realise that ambition. A healthy greed for position and power was something Kreyssig could understand and exploit far more readily than the religious mania of Gazulgrund. To eliminate the Grand Theogonist, he was prepared to make overtures to Mandred. After all, the Middenheimer would need a powerful ally in Altdorf if he were to legitimise his rule. To ensure his own survival, Kreyssig had to ensure that ally was himself.

Yes, he would pit the Wolf of Sigmar against the High Priest of Sigmar, match them like two dogs in a fighting ring, play the heroic campaigns of the one against the pious sermons of the other.

Kreyssig struck at the bee as it came buzzing past his face. Angrily he kicked the cat away as it came leaping into his lap in pursuit of the insect. The bee made one last pass, and then went buzzing off down the hall. The Protector of the Empire chided himself for allowing the bug to capture his attention.

He had far greater annoyances to dispose of than an errant bee.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Nordland, 1119

After the terrifying ordeal of the Laurelorn, it was with profound relief that the Army of Middenland made camp in the Rol Valley. Once the valley had been home to dozens of villages, farming communities which had prospered in the rich soil. Vast swathes of grain had filled the slopes, transforming the valley into a swaying sea of gold whenever a brisk northern breeze blew down into it. Entire flotillas of Nordland ships had set out for Marienburg with their holds filled with grain, bearing back the wealth and wares of Westerland’s capital. It was a lucrative trade, one that would have made Nordland the breadbasket of the whole Empire had dark times not conspired against the province. First had come the Norscan conquest of Marienburg and Westerland, denying them the rich market that had served them so well. Then had come their invasion of Nordland itself. Though the barbarians had been thwarted in their ambitions for Nordland, the havoc they wrought had left terrible scars on the land. The Rol Valley had been the scene of Jarl Ormgaard’s last stand, the rich farmlands scorched black in the flame of war. The nobles of Nordland had just set their peasants to clearing away the wreckage of Ormgaard’s marauders and restoring the prosperity of the valley when the Black Plague came. The soil might be as rich as ever it had been, but now there were too few to work it and too few to buy the crop to make such labour worthwhile. The Rol had been abandoned to rot.

The stands of grain growing wild in the valley were quickly trampled under by the great host of men and beasts that now marched into the depression. The blackened husks of huts and granaries became bivouacs for soldiers; the decaying frames of barns became stables for horses. Weed-choked shrines to Taal and Rhya and seafaring Manaan were cleared by pious warriors, gathering about them small encampments of men desperate to placate the gods and beg some token of divine protection from them.

Mandred established his own headquarters in the toppled husk of a timber fort that had been ransacked by the Norscans almost a decade before and never rebuilt. Two of the outer walls remained sturdy and serviceable, affording at least some small measure of protection against any sudden attack. Though there were no signs that the skaven had afforded the Rol any degree of interest, it was never foolish to take precautions where the ratkin were concerned. The rangers and scouts attached to the army were even now patrolling the edges of the valley, watching for any sign that their presence had been noticed and that the enemy was stirring from their nests in Dietershafen. Hard, capable men one and all, they followed their orders with less enthusiasm than they had shown before. More than most, these men of the wilds had been unsettled by their experience in the Laurelorn and to that shaken confidence the sacrifice of Mad Albrecht had to be added. The Drakwalder had become something of a leader to these men and it was only in his absence that his importance was truly felt.

Mandred considered that sacrifice and the disappearance of nearly a hundred others during their passage through the Laurelorn. The appreciation of such loss poured iron into his heart, making it impenetrable to the cautious advice of his council. His generals urged for a respite of three days, time for the army to recover from their long march and the ordeal in the forest. To take the men into battle as they were, with only a single night’s rest, was perilous they warned.

‘It would be more perilous if the skaven learn we are here,’ Mandred countered. He thrust his finger at the map of Nordland stretched across the table before him. It was a remarkably detailed illustration of the province, executed by one of the Tilean masters fifty years ago, commissioned no doubt on monies earned off Rol Valley grain. Beneath the graf’s finger, the slashed course of the valley snaked its way towards the coast, ending well before the cliffs and salt marshes. Near its far end, depicted as a tower of blue ink, stood the city of Dietershafen. ‘While we keep to the valley, we may be safe from their eyes and noses, but we cannot trust too much in such security. Kurgaz warns that the ratkin are steeped in black sorceries and witchcraft. What man can say how such fell magics may be employed?’

‘But if we march now…’ Grand Master Vitholf threw up his hands. ‘Even among my White Wolves, morale is low. It is worse among the Dienstleute and the peasant conscripts. The Nordlanders are close to desertion and the Drakwalders look as if they would rather fall on their own blades than…’

Mandred slammed his fist against the blue tower of Dietershafen. ‘They are men, and no man worthy of the name will forget what has been done to his land. Middenheim, Nordland and Drakwald, all have suffered the scourge of the ratkin. This army is weary because it has marched long and hard, its courage has faltered because it has experienced unnatural horrors. Yet where you see weakness, I find strength. These men have endured all of this. They have pushed themselves this far. You say push them no farther. You say that their strength is spent. I say let these men but see the enemy, let them but smell his rancid stink, and a fire shall burn within them! They will remember why they fight and they will glory in the opportunity to do so!’

Many of Mandred’s nobles nodded in agreement. They had seen before the extraordinary efforts their sovereign could summon from his warriors. They had seen him push men beyond their endurance, pushed them past any reasonable expectation. And they had seen him prevail through such methods.

‘Where will you be?’ Baroness Carin wondered. Since quitting the Laurelorn, she had recovered much of her carefully calculated composure. There was just the right balance of royal indifference and emotional concern in her tone to do homage to both her position as Electress of Nordland and her personal interest in Mandred.

Mandred didn’t hesitate in his answer. ‘I ask no man to go where I wouldn’t lead him,’ he said. The Nordland and few Drakwald nobles on the council protested his intention to take personal command of the army, but those from Middenheim were resigned to their sovereign’s convictions. Whether riding with the Knights of the White Wolf or marching shoulder to shoulder with Kurgaz’s dwarfs, the graf would be there in the thick of battle. Though they hated to see him put himself at such risk, none of them could deny the effect his mere presence had on the soldiers. Never had they seen peasants fight so fiercely as those who saw Mandred’s banner flying before them and knew their great hero was near.

Baroness Carin smiled at his statement. ‘You risk much for Nordland. It is one thing to see you risk your army to return Dietershafen to me, but I am humbled that you would endanger your own life. What reward can I offer such bravery?’

‘Let us first win back Dietershafen,’ Mandred said. He drew back the map of Nordland, exposing a second map detailing the city and its environs. He looked up, meeting the baroness’s gaze. ‘You are certain of the fog?’

‘Only priests are ever certain of anything,’ she countered, ‘but at this time of year the fog has always rolled in with the dawn. The Breath of Stromfels, they call it, for it has brought many a ship smashing upon the breakers.’ The baroness leaned across the table, tracing her finger along the perimeter of the city. ‘Often the fog will crawl beyond the walls, leaving only the highest towers clear. They can be seen, like castles in the clouds, from leagues away.’

Mandred frowned as he considered that point. ‘If the skaven post sentries in the towers they can see us advancing no matter the fog.’

‘The ratkin have poor vision in daylight,’ Kurgaz said. ‘They are vermin of the dark.’

‘They might have human sentries,’ Arch-Lector Hartwich cautioned. His time with Princess Erna had sapped the Sigmarite’s stamina, leaving him looking withered and drained. His ministrations to the noblewoman had been beneficial to her, restoring her physically and repairing some of the damage dealt to her mind. At the same time, his attentions were sapping his own vitality.

‘I have learnt much about our enemy from Princess Erna,’ Hartwich explained. He bowed deferentially to Kurgaz. ‘No offence to our dwarf friends, but the princess has lived among these creatures. She knows the way these vermin conduct themselves. They are arrogant in their strengths and paranoid in their weaknesses. If a human would serve them better in these watchtowers, then you will find a human there serving them.’ The priest shook his head sadly. ‘Many men would gladly serve these monsters to spare themselves even a fraction of the cruelties these beasts would inflict upon them.’

Mandred turned his eyes back to the map, pondering the terrain beyond the city. ‘The skaven have established fields outside the walls,’ he mused, tapping his finger against the marks drawn by Baroness Carin’s scouts. ‘Crops to feed their teeming hordes.’ He stepped away from the table, waving his hand at a stalk of wild wheat sprouting up from the cracked foundations of the tower. ‘Tunnel-crawling vermin would know nothing of sowing and reaping. They would leave such tasks to the slaves they have taken.

‘The fields outside Dietershafen must be at least as ripe as this,’ Mandred said. ‘Ready for the harvest.’ He laughed. ‘Ulric favours us! Let every soldier in this army gather the wheat that grows wild in the Rol. Let him weave it into his armour, into his surcoat, into the barding and mane of his steed. Let him conceal himself in a cloak of wheat. The sentries, be they human or vermin, will be watching for the glint of steel, but they will think it is only the wind should the fields be disturbed by naught but moving grain.’

‘A bold plan, your highness, but it will deceive none once we draw close to the city,’ Duke Schneidereit objected.

‘When we are close enough to be seen, the fog will conceal us,’ Baroness Carin said. Her eyes shone with approval and admiration. ‘The first the ratkin will know of their peril is when we are already within the walls. Nordland owes you much, Graf Mandred.’

Mandred chose to ignore the suggestion that was laced into the baroness’s voice. Instead he continued to describe his plans for his generals. Baroness Carin barely seemed to hear him, though her attention remained riveted upon him.

From his place on the periphery of the council, Beck watched the baroness as she gazed upon Mandred. As he listened to the graf make his plans, Beck began to quietly make some of his own.

Ar-Ulric climbed the wall of the valley, scrambling up the slope with an agility that belied his years. The priest was a servant of a fierce and warlike god. To allow his physicality to decay, to allow his vigour to deteriorate would be to be unfit to serve his god. When a priest of Ulric felt his years overwhelming him, he would choose a successor and make a pilgrimage into the wilderness. If he was wrong about himself, he might return. Otherwise it was better to die alone in the wild rather than become an embarrassment to Ulric.

When he reached the top of the slope, Ar-Ulric looked back into the Rol. No campfires betrayed the presence of the army nestled within the defile. Mandred had ordered a cold camp, concerned that light and smoke would betray their presence to the skaven. A cautious leader, shrewd and wary as his father had been. Truly it was a remarkable man who had been baptised in Ulric’s Sacred Flame.

The Wolf of Sigmar. Ar-Ulric almost laughed at the presumptuous title Hartwich had bestowed upon Mandred, yet at the same time it felt strangely appropriate. He hesitated to use the word ‘ordained’, yet such was his personal conviction. The Ulrican faith didn’t accept the divinity of Sigmar, but they did revere him as a mighty champion of their god. Whatever Hartwich’s own intentions, the title he had given Mandred worked from either perspective.

He turned away from the valley, lifting his eyes to the heavens above. Sickly Morrslieb was but a faint glimmer on the horizon while Mannslieb blazed full and bright. Ar-Ulric could hear wolves howling to the moon from their distant forest lairs. It was a chilling, primordial sound, one that unsettled the blood of any man. Especially those who were of the Teutogen race.

Ulric was a god of men, but he was also god of the wolves. In the dim days of their ancient past, the Teutogens had struggled for the favour of Ulric, vying against their rivals in the forest. Man and wolf. Wolf and man. Ever the competition for territory and game, ever the struggle to dominate. In those ancient times, many strange compacts had been forged between wolves and men, between mortals and gods.

Ar-Ulric threw back his head. From the depths of his lungs, a fierce howl pierced the night. He waited for a time, letting silence wrap itself around him. The wolves in the distant forest had stopped howling, instead breaking into rapid, frightened yips as they withdrew deeper into their territories. The sound of their retreat gave Ar-Ulric pause. What he cried to was as abhorrent to beast as it was to man, a thing with one foot in each world.

It took all of Ar-Ulric’s courage to repeat the howl. How he remained where he stood, waiting alone in the dark for the summons to be answered, he could never say. Perhaps it was Ulric lending him strength. Perhaps it was simply that he was too afraid to move.

She came trotting out of the darkness, a great white wolf. There was a terrible cunning in her eyes, an understanding that went beyond the instinct of beasts. They were eyes Ar-Ulric had seen before. As she came towards him, the wolf didn’t snarl or growl, didn’t bare her teeth. She simply loped along until she was a few yards away. Settling down on her haunches, the wolf watched Ar-Ulric with an eerily human attitude of expectation.

It wasn’t lost upon Ar-Ulric that he was within leaping distance of the powerful animal, that one spring would set those jaws about his throat. Such knowledge didn’t disturb him. It wasn’t the prospect of death that made his blood curdle, it was the shape that death had taken.

‘I hoped, I prayed that I was wrong,’ Ar-Ulric told the wolf. ‘I had even dared believe your kind a mere myth, an old parable, allegory for the viciousness inside all men.’ He paused, staring gravely into the icy eyes of the wolf. He didn’t feel foolish conversing with this animal. He knew she understood his every word.

‘Your kind are recorded in the oldest legends, those from before the Ulricsberg was discovered, before we made friends of the dwarfs. Ulricskinder, the Children of Ulric, those able to walk between the shapes of men and wolves. Things both beast and man yet neither.’

The white wolf licked her fangs, ears flicking in a twitch of irritation. The fearsome intelligence in her gaze bore into Ar-Ulric’s face.

‘My ancestors believed your kind blessed by Ulric,’ the priest continued. ‘They rendered up their children to you, sacrificed them as Mad Albrecht was surrendered to the Laurelorn. When the moon was bright, they would cower in their caves and wait while your kind prowled the night, taking what they would. It took a long time for them to learn the truth. To understand that your kind weren’t blessed by Ulric, but cursed by him. It took them many generations to recognise the werewolf and drive it from his lands, whatever shape it chose to wear.

‘Now you return from the dark of legend to dominate men once more.’ Ar-Ulric reached into his robe, withdrawing a sprig of holly. The white wolf cocked her head and stared at the little plant. ‘I will not let you destroy Mandred. He is the chosen of Ulric. He is the hope of men. I deny your claim as an oracle. I deny your claim to speak for Ulric. Most of all, I deny you Mandred. I will not…’

In a white blur, the wolf sprang at Ar-Ulric, her great weight dashing the priest to the ground. One of her paws raked against his hand, sending the sprig of holly tumbling down into the valley. The fur where the paw had brushed against it was singed, a little wisp of smoke rising from the scorched toe pads and claws.

Ar-Ulric felt the wolf’s fangs at his throat, pressing against his skin. ‘Kill me, monster,’ he hissed at the animal. ‘Destruction has ever been your way. Kill me, and there will be none to know you for what you are.’

The jaws about his throat didn’t tighten. Instead he felt the harsh rasp of the wolf’s tongue as it licked his skin. Slowly, the animal loosened her grip. Just as slowly, she backed away, never letting her eyes stray from the prostrate priest.

Ar-Ulric pressed his hand to his neck, stunned to find that the skin wasn’t even broken. ‘You will have cause to repent your mercy,’ he said. ‘I will not be deceived. I know you for what you are and I will remain vigilant. I will not let you harm Graf Mandred.’

The white wolf bent low on its forelegs, approximating an eerie semblance of a curtsey. She fixed Ar-Ulric again with her pale eyes, then turned and dashed off into the darkness.

Ar-Ulric continued to rub his neck. ‘I pity you, woman,’ he said, his voice soft and sombre. ‘But pity will not keep me from doing what must be done.’

Sylvania, 1121

Ghoulish silence dominated the macabre corridors and ghostly chambers of Vanhaldenschlosse, the eerie desolation of an open grave.

Cautiously, Lothar von Diehl approached the morbid throne of skulls. His magically attuned eyesight could see the streams of energy rising from the ancient dolmens about which the walls of the chamber had been built. He could see the coruscating bands of obscene force wrapping themselves around the gruesome entity ensconced upon that ghastly seat. He could read a little of the eldritch symbols that the energy formed itself into as it was drawn to the body of the master necromancer. Like whispers from a dark and primordial epoch, they sent Lothar’s very spirit shuddering. Some things were too profane for even a matricidal heretic to contemplate.

The litter of mutilated assassins had been cleansed from the hall, but Lothar could feel the violence of their deaths clinging to the stones. He could hear the ghostly echo of their bestial screams; he could smell the noxious tang of their polluted blood. In a place like Vanhaldenschlosse, the residue of death had a firmer foundation in reality than the vibrancy of life.

‘Speak,’ Vanhal commanded as his apprentice crept towards the throne. The master necromancer’s voice was an eerie hiss, a tone from beyond the mortal veil.

For a second, Lothar’s noble pride resisted the order. To be spoken to in such fashion by a mere peasant was an insult beyond bearing. He was more than some simple grave-robber! He was Baron von Diehl of Mordheim, able to trace his high-born ancestry almost to the time of Sigmar! Who was this fallen priest to treat with him as an equal, much less a superior?

Lothar swallowed his pedigree and bent his knee before the ghoulish throne. With bowed head, he addressed the one man in all the world who could fill his heart with fear.

‘Master, an army poises itself to move against us,’ he reported. He cringed as he saw one of Vanhal’s eyes staring down at him from behind the necromancer’s mask of bone. ‘Not an expedition of Sylvanians, master, but an army from Stirland!’

Vanhal made a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘They are men. They are mortal,’ he declared.

Lothar nodded his head, but his words weren’t entirely in agreement with the fallen priest. ‘Surely the Stirlanders know this. For them to be so bold as to threaten our – your – occult power…’

Vanhal lifted himself from the throne, dissipating the bands of energy coiling about him. Slowly he descended towards his apprentice. ‘Continue,’ he told Lothar.

‘They would not dare such action if they did not have, or at least think they possess, the means to oppose your magic.’ Lothar raised his head, meeting the ominous gaze of his master. ‘It has happened before. Great Kadon was destroyed by brutish orcs. Mighty Nagash was vanquished by a naked savage calling himself a god.’

Vanhal stalked towards his apprentice. ‘What is your counsel? What do you advise so that your master might be spared the fate of Kadon and Nagash?’ There was a sneer, a challenge in his voice, a threat as keen as a naked blade.

‘You must confront them before they are ready,’ Lothar said. ‘Don’t wait here for them to come to you and unleash whatever magic they believe can overwhelm your power. March your legions out to them. Strike them down in their own lands; slaughter them in their own homes. Make your vengeance so terrible that not for a thousand generations will the men of Stirland dare to whisper your name!’

Lothar could feel the piercing gaze of his mentor, feel the necromancer’s power probing the corridors of his mind. He trembled under that fearful scrutiny, struggled to maintain the mental barriers, which were his only defence. At his full power, Vanhal would have easily stripped away Lothar’s defences. In his current diminished capacity, however, there was just a chance that the apprentice would be able to retain his secrets. It was a chance he had gambled more than simply his life upon. Punishment from Vanhal would extend well beyond the grave.

‘That is the course you advise,’ Vanhal mused. There was a trace of suspicion in his voice that made Lothar shudder inwardly. He reassured himself that it was only suspicion and nothing more tangible. Nothing certain. Vanhal didn’t really know of Lothar’s betrayal.

Vanhal marched through the great chamber. A wave of his hand evoked phantom spheres of light to illuminate his way. A spectral wind swept through the hall as the master necromancer made his withdrawal. He hesitated at the winding stair that climbed to the roof of the tower. ‘Come, Lothar,’ Vanhal beckoned, his pallid hand standing stark against the sombre folds of his robe. ‘Together we shall set an example to remind all mortals of their place in this world.’

With faltering step, Lothar followed his grim master. Even diminished, there was a terror burning inside Vanhal, a malignance that was beyond measure. He was nightmare made flesh. The vessel of apocalypse.

Lothar’s heart quivered as he mounted the steps and ascended with the diabolic force he had accepted as his master. The fiendish power he had been insane enough to think he could betray.

Vanhal stood upon the parapets of his fortress, his form reduced to a shadow by the gibbous light of Morrslieb overhead. It was with sickness in his stomach that Lothar looked upon the sky, recalling the awful vision he had seen here, the fearful testament of his master’s power. It was impossible to forget a sorcerer who could shred the fabric of time itself in order to feed his enchantments. The echoes of that terrifying invocation were all around him, whispering and moaning in the stones of Vanhaldenschlosse. The necromancer had promised to make the fortress a permanent magical fulcrum, an eternal engine of arcane power.

What Lothar could do with such resources made his heart swell with avarice. What Vanhal would do with such power made his soul shrink in terror.

All around the tower, from the base of the foundations to the fog-wrapped forest in the distance, stretched a vast bonefield. The decaying debris of war, the residue of carnage, the sprawl of bleached bones and blackened flesh was of an enormity that beggared contemplation. The dead from the Battle of the Plague Dragons, both the vanquished and the victorious, lay strewn about Vanhaldenschlosse like the neglected toys of a morbid god. Lothar knew the carrion affected the aethyric vibrations, colouring the magical energies flowing through the fortress, transforming them into necrotic vapours and spectral whispers. Death was both the result and the source of Vanhal’s power, a ghoulish spiral that fed upon itself.

Ever growing.

Ever hungry.

Vanhal stepped to the edge of the roof, balancing himself upon the precipice. He stretched forth his pallid hand. Years of aethyric energies had leeched his flesh of all colour, leaving the skin translucent. Veins and arteries were visible beneath his ghostly skin, yellow bones pressing close against the surface. Yet there was no sense of weakness in the necromancer’s emaciation, only an awful and irresistible sense of destiny. Fate made manifest.

The master necromancer hissed the hoary words of dim antiquity, shaping the Khemran tongue into patterns never imagined by the liche-priests of lost Nehekhara. A mosaic of obscenity wove itself around Vanhal as he evoked his magic. The chill of sorcery caused frost to gather about the black masonry of Vanhaldenschlosse and sent an aurora of witchfire crackling across the sky.

A ghostly gale plucked at Vanhal’s robes, snapping the tattered vestments about him like the wings of some mammoth bat. The necromancer ignored the menacing pull of the wind, ignored the precipitous fall only a hairsbreadth from his feet. The physical world had faded from his consciousness. All that remained was his great conjuration.

Upon the deathly desolation below, a terrible activity now became manifest. An undulation swept across the bonefield, the unburied dead shifting like the waves of some ghastly tide. Skeletal arms reached to the heavens, fleshless jaws snapped and clamped. One by one, then hundred by hundred, the slaughtered and the slaughterers raised themselves upon bony legs and turned inwards to face the tower. A silent horde of abomination, profane legions from beyond the grave. By their hundreds, by their thousands, the undead awaited the command of their master.

Vanhal stiffened. For the first time Lothar had an inkling of weakness in that awful personage. A bead of sweat dripped from the fallen priest’s palm, a quiver snuck into his invocations. Small things, but they spoke to Lothar of a strain he had never seen before. Below, he watched as four of the great necrotic mounds that had once been dragons shifted and stirred. The headless bulk of Graug was the first to rise. Two of the other dragons, the most recently dead of the beasts Vanhal had summoned from the fabled Plain of Bones beyond cursed Nagashizzar, also reared into a macabre semblance of life. The fourth dragon, however, collapsed back to the earth, its bones flaking and crumbling into ash as the dark energies that had attempted to revive it dissipated and fled back into the aethyr.

During the battle with the skaven, Vanhal had conjured dozens of the mighty wyrms to do his bidding. Now it was beyond him to maintain even four of the beasts. Lothar tried to hide the thrill of excitement, the lustful anticipation that swelled inside him.

Vanhal turned from the edge of the roof, his eyes boring into Lothar’s. The master held his hand towards the apprentice. Lothar tried to resist, but there was no defying the imperious demand in that gaze. Step by reluctant step, he crossed the roof and joined Vanhal. The moment he reached the fallen priest, Vanhal’s icy clutch closed about his own hand.

Instantly, Lothar felt himself reeling. He could feel something draining out of him, flowing from his spirit into that of his master. The ghoulish embers of Vanhal’s eyes blazed with revivified fire. The master necromancer turned back to the bonefield and the thousands of slaves awaiting his command.

New words rasped from Vanhal’s lips. Like some human parrot, Lothar found himself repeating those intonations without any conscious volition. Dimly, faintly at first, phantom strains of melody impacted the nobleman’s hearing, a cacophony of eerie melody that seemed to crawl into the blackest corridors of his soul.

Lothar knew this music, the cadence from the beyond. It was a conjuration of Vanhal’s own devising, a ghastliness he called the Danse Macabre. Lothar had witnessed its effect before, watched it impart upon the risen dead a horrifying vivacity.

‘Oh thou profaner of souls. Oh thou defiler of the tomb. Thou Mighty One of Uatep.’ The invocation boomed like thunder from the parapets of Vanhaldenschlosse, the voices of master and apprentice merging into a single tone. ‘Let not these limbs be without movement. Let them not pass away. Let them not suffer from corruption. Make supple these limbs. Make strong these sinews. Refill these hearts with persistence. Restore these souls with perseverance that they may walk again the kingdom of Khem in all thy majesty and terror and wear once more the mantle of life.’

A tremor passed through the deathless legions below. With awful vitality, they turned away from the tower, forming themselves into companies of fleshless warriors, snatching up splintered shields and rusty blades from the bloodied battlefield around them. Decayed roars wheezed from the leathery carcasses of the dragons as they lifted themselves into the night on ragged pinions.

‘Now they will know the terror that waits in the darkness. Now they shall see the doom that waits for them in the shadows. Blind, ignorant, they shall all die for presuming to defy the might of a god.’

The words were Vanhal’s. The tongue that gave them voice was Lothar’s.

In that tiny corner of his mind that hadn’t been subsumed by the essence of his master, Baron Lothar von Diehl screamed.

CHAPTER NINE

Dietershafen, 1119

Much of the ground floor of the Seafarer’s Guild had been gutted, doors torn down, walls knocked out, pillars toppled. Sections of the floors above had come crashing downwards during the demolition, precipitating a crazed network of support beams and rigging to keep the rest from collapsing. One exterior wall had been blown out entirely, the room extended into a rickety expansion cobbled together from discarded lumber and deck planks scavenged from Dietershafen’s shipyard.

The purpose behind such deranged architectural adjustments reposed in the middle of the cavernous sprawl of the Guild’s ground floor. It was a hulk of copper pipes and tubes, bronze flywheels and iron gears, crystal lenses and ratskin belts. Enormous tread-wheels bulged in haphazard disarray among the confusion of machinery, scrawny ratmen locked inside the cages as they frantically used their legs to propel the revolving platforms beneath their feet. A great curl of wire, spiralling upwards into a set of horns, loomed above the contraption, crackling with electricity as the slaves spun the tread-wheels.

As it danced between the horns, the electricity took on the shrill, squeaky intonations of a distorted skaven voice.

‘Man-dread not come,’ the disembodied squeak whined. ‘Can’t sniff-see man-army. Sword-rats get hungry-bored. Want-like sack Salzen-nest soon-soon. Want-like much-much.’

Sythar Doom, Warplord of Clan Skryre and Grand High Techno-tyrant, bruxed his fangs in annoyance as he heard the report. The nugget of warpstone that powered his mechanical heart burned a bit hotter as the ratman’s rage surged through his veins. After his humiliating defeat in Altdorf, he wasn’t about to let the humans trick him again. Before, he had made the mistake of considering the urgings of his minions, listening to their treacherous counsel. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. They would bide their time, they would adhere to his plan and if any of the mouse-fondling maggots dared spring the trap early…

Energy crackled about Sythar’s metal fangs as he turned towards the nearest of the slave-wheels that powered the Warpsqueaker. His own invention after he had appropriated the research of an almost-clever underling, the machine allowed transmission of vocalisations uttered by those who’d undergone the proper surgeries. One day, devices such as the Warpsqueaker would be found throughout skavendom, wherever the shining brilliance of Clan Skryre had established a presence, allowing instant communication between the far-flung hench-rats of the Grey Lords. It was to be regretted that warpstone poisoning took such a toll on the slaves needed to power the device. A human would last roughly an hour, a dwarf three or four times as long and an orc longer still, if one could keep the dumb brute motivated. No, the most efficient were skaven slaves, and even these would suffer fatal exposure after two days. Watching the occupants of the nearest cage, Sythar considered it was probably getting close to the stage where their fur would fall out and the sores on their skin start to ooze. He’d have to remind the warlock-engineer responsible to have them switched out as soon as this annoying report from his minions under Salzenmund was complete.

Sythar Doom’s natural eyes had rotted away long ago, replaced with lenses of polished warpstone and arcane technology. They burned with a grisly crimson light as he focused them upon the Warpsqueaker. The machinery was a dull, scarlet shadow in the ratman’s synthetic sight, the arcs of electricity appearing as grisly green flashes.

‘Listen-obey!’ Sythar snapped, his fangs crackling with energy as they gnashed together. ‘Wait-watch! The army of Man-dread will come. The man-things have no tunnels. They must use roads, must crawl across the surface. My spies will see-sniff them. They will tell when the humans near Salzen-place! Man-things need rest and food and think to find both in Salzen-place. Instead, they will find death!’

Sythar chittered happily as he envisioned the carnage when the human army walked into his trap. The might of Clan Skryre and half a dozen vassal clans would rise from their burrows to exterminate the feared Man-dread. Killing the feared slayer of Vecteek the Despotic would be an accomplishment to shake the halls of the Shattered Tower. The Grey Lords would bare their throats to the skaven who killed the despised Man-dread. Though Sythar was far too sensible to risk himself in a direct engagement with the terrifying warrior, it would be his plan, his genius, that brought about the human’s doom.

A great tumult rose from the streets outside, a clamour of confusion that drowned out the response crackling from the Warpsqueaker’s transmitter. Sythar Doom spun away from the immense invention, murder in his posture. Someone would pay for this interruption! If they were human, he’d have their bones ground into bread! If they were skaven, he’d wear their pelt as a scarf… and have their bones ground into bread!

Glaring at the attendant warlock-engineers, the fierce warplord began to stalk to the great doors of the guildhall. He had only gone a few paces, however, when his ears began to twitch and his tail began to squirm. The sounds of disorder were growing louder and more persistent. He could hear the boom of explosions, the whoosh of warp-fire being expelled from flame-spitters, the crack of jezzails being fired.

Sythar Doom spun back around, baring his fangs at the Warpsqueaker. Those treacherous flea-maggots! They’d been whining about impatience and boredom, complaining that they wanted to attack the humans. All of it was lies! They’d allowed Man-dread and his army to march right past them without raising a paw to stop him!

The humans weren’t in Salzenmund, they were attacking Dietershafen!

‘Destroy that… that foolishness!’ Sythar roared at the warlock-engineers. The technorats stared at him in confusion for a moment. When their cruel overlord drew an oversized pistol from his belt and sent a sizzling lance of warp-lightning burning through one of them, they quickly regained their sense of priority. With hammer and spanner, the skaven threw themselves at the offending Warpsqueaker, savaging it with the viciousness of starving rats.

Sythar Doom wished he hadn’t been so hasty killing the inventor of the treacherous device, because he dearly wanted to kill him now. A brilliant device, one that would reshape all skavendom! An instrument for treasonous underlings to work their betrayals from afar, to squeak their lies without hiding the duplicity in their scent and the deceit in their posture!

This betrayal wouldn’t succeed. Sythar was too cagey to place all of his trust in anything or anyone. Plans within plans within plans had been the philosophy that had allowed Clan Skryre to prosper. Let the humans enter the city; let them carve their way deeper into Doom’s domain. Every step would bring them only closer to their own destruction.

When Sythar had claimed Dietershafen for Clan Skryre, it had been with a definite purpose in mind. The shipyards had been quickly converted for the use of his allies, the ship-rats of Clan Skurvy. Even now, a flotilla of Skurvy ships equipped with the murderous inventions only Clan Skryre could provide was sitting at anchor in the bay. They watched for enemy ships, fleets from across the Sea of Claws, but it would be a simple thing to turn them around and bring their weapons to bear against Dietershafen.

That thought brought another chitter of malignant laughter from the warplord. Not only the weapons of Skurvy’s ships could be turned away from the sea. Seizing upon that idea, leaving his underlings to complete the demolition of the Warpsqueaker, Sythar scurried from the guildhall, intent upon reaching the defences he had prepared for the protection of Dietershafen.

Defences he would now use to smash the city flat!

Legbiter flashed in a butchering sweep, cleaving down to crush the collarbone of the skaven halberdier who leapt out from the fog. Black blood exploded from the ratman’s torn flesh, the creature wilting to the roadway to be crushed beneath the stamping hooves of Graf Mandred’s destrier.

‘No quarter! No mercy!’ Mandred shouted, bringing his sword stabbing into the breast of a second ratman. A kick of his boot flung the flailing creature from his blade, knocking down a cluster of skaven charging behind it. Mandred spurred his warhorse into the tumbled creatures, splintering bones and smashing skulls before the monsters could recover. All around him, frightened squeaks and bestial screams rang out, wailing from the thick grey mantle of fog that blanketed the city.

There was no blessing the gods could have bestowed upon Mandred’s army that could have been more welcome than the fog. The Nordlanders held that they had never seen the Breath of Stromfels range so far inland, and seldom had they seen it so thick. Visibility was measured in feet, all beyond that range reduced to vague shapes behind the mist. The wet dankness of the fog confounded the keen noses of the skaven. For the first time in their war against the vermin, the Middenheimers found themselves on a level field with their monstrous foe.

Or nearly so. The beasts were still inhumanly quick and agile, capable of frenzied bursts too swift for the human eye to follow. At the same time, they were cowardly, cringing creatures devoid of any loyalty to anything greater than their own skins. The ratmen wouldn’t press an attack once they saw their enemy wasn’t to be overwhelmed easily.

From the start, the skaven had been taken by surprise. Under cover of the fog, Kurgaz Smallhammer and his dwarfs had stolen right up to the walls of Dietershafen, crept right to the great gates of the city and planted the explosive charges that sent those gates hurtling into the sky. The thunderous blast had been the clarion call for Mandred’s army. Into the fog had charged his cavalry, a thousand horses and more spilling down the streets of Dietershafen in an avalanche of steel and flesh. After the cavalry came the host of footmen and peasant conscripts, some clambering onto the walls to clear them of stunned skaven sentries, others smashing into the houses and shops to clear them of any verminous occupants.

The fog, the great and glorious fog, made the human advance swift and irresistible. The skaven, their keen senses stifled by the mist, were disorganised and confused. As they swarmed out to meet the attack they did so as individual packs and mobs. The weight of numbers wasn’t there, the cruel discipline of their despotic leaders wasn’t behind them to drive them into the terrified desperation that alone could make them press home their attacks. When they came boiling out of the fog, they did so without any concept of how numerous their foes might be. Vision and smell dulled, all they could do was to listen to the cries of battle. And when those cries were the fierce roars of enraged men and the dying whimpers of butchered skaven, the monsters would break and run, scampering back the way they had come, blocking those still with the heart to bring battle to the humans.

Great was the slaughter as Mandred led charge after charge into the packed masses of ratmen. The white caparison of his warhorse was black with the blood of vermin, the surcoat of his standard bearer became foul with the fluids of dying skaven, and his own beard became matted with clots of gore. Still the slaughter continued. The crunch of warhammers splitting skulls and smashing ribs, the crack of bones pulverised beneath the iron-shod hooves of warhorses, these became like a perpetual roar in his ears. Resistless as the pounding tide, the Knights of the White Wolf followed their sovereign down the streets of Dietershafen.

Narrowly did Mandred escape disaster. Pressing one routed pack of skaven too closely, he discovered the fratricidal brutality of these monsters. A great sheet of green flame came rolling out from the fog, sweeping over the ratmen, incinerating them in a wash of molten fire. So great was the heat that for an instant the fog itself was burnt away. Before it could come sweeping back in, Mandred saw what looked like a beer-monger’s wagon at the end of the street, a clutch of skaven swarming about it, pushing it up the lane. Stalking before the wagon, its body draped in an all-enclosing smock of oiled leather, was a muscular ratman with a strange metal nozzle gripped in its paws. Hoses led away from the nozzle back to the immense wooden barrel in the bed of the wagon.

The operators of the fire-thrower hadn’t been able to see the humans through the fog, instead they had targeted the panicked squeaks of their own comrades. Unleashing the caustic flames of their weapon at the sound, they had trusted they could destroy the enemy along with their own fleeing troops. By a slender margin, their ghastly tactic had nearly succeeded.

Mandred forced himself to wait while the fog closed in again, watching as the skaven worked frantically to push their grisly weapon forwards. As soon as the curtain of fog came back, he turned his horse and bolted down a side street. ‘To me! To me!’ he cried, his shout taken up by Beck and his standard bearer. The Knights of the White Wolf followed after him, the Dienstleute behind them galloping after. Mandred took the first turn, wheeling his horse about to the north. His steed trampled the skaven jezzails they found lurking in the lane, smashing them before the beasts could bring their guns to bear. The graf cursed even so slight a delay as he turned his horse again, charging down a street parallel to the first diversion. From the scorched road he had retreated from, screams of men and horses sounded, accompanied by the fiery whoosh of the insidious skaven weapon. Mandred tried not to think about the men who’d been caught in that grisly green fire. Instead he focused on the path ahead, the path that would see those men avenged.

Mandred burst from the fog like some phantom nemesis from the gardens of Morr. He was back on the street he had originally fled, but his diversion had brought his command around behind the skaven fire-thrower. He glared at the wagon, at the shackled ratmen pushing it forwards, at the chittering engineers operating its murderous mechanisms. The vermin were gloating in their fiendish massacre of human horsemen, frantically trying to bring their weapon forwards to slaughter the cavalry filling the street beyond those they had already immolated.

Clenching his teeth, Mandred galloped into the skaven war machine. Legbiter carved a gory path along the slaves chained to the left side of the wagon. Across from him, he could hear Beck’s blade at work on those to the right. The leather-cloaked ratman at the fore of the wagon spun around, eyes going wide behind the goggles it wore. Frantically, the beast aimed the nozzle of its weapon at Mandred and the knights galloping behind him. Oblivious to the way its spin had twisted the hose behind it, the skaven drew back the lever fitted to the top of the metal nozzle.

The ratman shrieked as the twisted hose burst behind it, showering it in an oozing green demi-fluid. The leather coating it wore resisted the splash for a moment, then greasy smoke rose from its body. The skaven flailed about frantically as the caustic filth burnt through the leather and sizzled into the fur and flesh beneath. Mandred reined back his warhorse, content to watch this monster experience the same agony it had visited upon the men it had slaughtered. Around him, Beck and the other knights massacred the other skaven engineers, working their own vengeance upon the vermin.

‘To me, men of Middenheim! To me, men of Nordland!’ Mandred shouted into the closing fog, calling out to the horsemen he had left behind. ‘We have but sipped from the chalice of slaughter! There is much work ere the cup be drained!’

There was much slaughter, as Mandred had vowed. Every street, every corner was infested with skaven. The momentum of the human assault was blunted by the fear that following the vermin too closely would lead them into the waiting mouth of another fire-thrower. Twice, they saw the grisly glow of green fire shining behind the fog as the skaven turned their war machines against their own. Each time, Mandred took his knights down a side street and led his men against the flank or rear of their foe.

There were other horrors waiting in the fog. Packs of jezzails, unable to snipe their targets from afar, instead emptied their weapons in withering fusillades before scampering back into the concealing mist. Mandred’s horse was shot from under him in one such attack, a replacement drawn for him from among the chargers of his knights. More perilous were the grisly, almost insect-like ratmen who carried huge casks strapped to their backs and sent plumes of green smoke spilling from the hoses they carried. The fog seemed to catch the smoke, depriving it of the impetus it needed to reach any but the nearest of foes. After watching one knight coughing up flecks of his own lungs after inhaling the green vapour, Mandred gave a prayer of thanks that the fiendish weapons were denied their full potential.

Such obstacles weren’t enough to turn the battle. Street by street, the humans were cleansing Dietershafen. When their advance brought them to the canals separating the Old City from the New City, they herded hundreds of routed skaven before them. The panicked creatures shrieked and whined as they were pushed into the canal. Men looked on as the brutes were swept away by the current or dragged under by their own arms and armour. Many of the creatures were drowned by their own flailing comrades, shoved under by panicked ratmen trying to pull themselves clear of the water.

It was a grim spectacle, but one that Mandred watched with a feeling of vindictive satisfaction. The sensation was spoiled, however, by the sight of some ratmen managing to drag themselves onto the docks on the far side of the canal, scrabbling up the steps into the New City. Sternly, the graf gave the order that sent his knights galloping across the bridges into the New City. The skaven rout was such that the bridges were undefended. That alone was enough to tell Mandred his enemy was beaten.

Victory, however, wasn’t enough. The skaven had to be exterminated. He couldn’t claim the day to be won until he had seen the last of the beasts put to the sword.

Spurring his own horse onwards, Mandred charged into the New City. Here, even more than in the Old City, the marks of skaven defilement were everywhere. Houses had been gutted, plundered of wood and thatch until only the stones of their foundations remained. Plaster walls were gnawed and stained with the scratch slashes that served the skaven as script. Human bones hung from dead trees on cords of rat-gut, a grisly warning to the slaves of the ratmen. Mandred vowed that for the skull of every man hanging from those trees, the heads of a dozen skaven would be spitted on the harbour wall.

Those ratmen who were caught in the streets of the New City were dispatched with the rekindled ruthlessness of an avenging scourge. The soldiers and knights who now roved the streets had their rage rekindled with every mark of skaven defilement. They forgot their fatigue and their wounds in their lust to see the enemy destroyed.

It was then, in the midst of overwhelming triumph, that a new terror descended upon the human army. From within the fog came a great whirring sound, the shriek of metal grinding against metal. Then, from some corner of the New City, a deafening crash, the obscene sound of wood and stone being crushed. Screams of men and horses and even skaven wailed through the streets.

Mandred spurred his horse towards this calamitous sound, urging the men behind him to new effort against whatever outrage the skaven now loosed upon them. Whatever he had expected, he was stunned when he galloped through the fog and his horse stumbled into a great crater. The graf was rattled by his fall, landing hard on his side. His destrier snorted and thrashed, struggling to regain its feet. The beast had slid a dozen feet along the side of the pit, its sideward twist sparing it from crashing headlong to the bottom another dozen feet below.

‘Your highness!’ Beck cried, leaping from his saddle and hurrying down to render what aid he could to his master.

Mandred struggled free from his horse, the loose earth beneath him allowing him to slide clear as the animal tried to right itself. He started to wave Beck back, to let his bodyguard know that he was all right. Words and gesture were lost, however, when his eyes strayed upwards.

Through the fog, a horrific sight was descending. Impossibly gigantic, vaster than any dragon or giant told of in the most outrageous legend, a great claw came hurtling downwards to rip at the streets of Dietershafen and bring destruction to Mandred and his army.

Skavenblight, 1121

The enormous warp-lantern cast its green glow across the Grey Chapel, the masked Luminary attending the device leaping frantically about the confusion of controls littering the contraption. It was a matter of life or death for the warlock-engineer that this invention function as it should: a shining example to the Lords of Decay that the techno-sorcery of Clan Skryre would light the way to skavendom’s future.

There had been over a dozen Luminaries of the Shattered Tower since the embarrassing defeat of Warpmaster Sythar Doom in the man-thing warren of Altdorf. The Grand Technorat of Skryre had been vicious enough following that humiliation, killing underlings in especially gruesome fashion for even the least provocation. The failure to achieve the victory entrusted to him by the late Supreme Despot Vecteek had resulted in a serious loss of face for Clan Skryre at a time when the warlock-engineers could least afford it. Their cold science was losing the fight for the minds of skavendom, beaten back by the promises of Clan Pestilens and their diseased superstitions.

The Luminary risked a quick glance across the chamber, easily spotting his dread master sitting among the villainous Lords of Decay. Sythar Doom’s mechanical jaws flashed as sparks rippled about his fangs, the enchanted rubies that served him for eyes glowed from the shadows. A ghoulish glow shone beneath the folds of his black robes, the dull susurrus of the power plant wired to his heart wheezing in time to his pulse. The arcane bionics had suffered from the latest tragedy to afflict Clan Skryre. Aiding the ship-rats of Skurvy to secure a man-thing port and their shipbuilding facilities, the warlock-engineers had been routed by the army of a creature whose name was being heard more and more in the halls of the Shattered Tower. A king-thing called Man-dread, the same king-thing that had slain Vecteek and Deathmaster Silke. Now the king-thing was making war against the skaven, driving them from the surface lands they had won by right of conquest.

Sythar Doom drummed his claws against the cold stone council table, barely heeding the schemes and intrigues of his fellow Grey Lords. He was brooding on the falling fortunes of his clan and the diminution of his own power. He was thinking of who was to blame, who he should take vengeance upon. When he raised his head and sniffed in the direction of the warp-lantern, the Luminary made certain to look as busy and indispensable as possible, careful to keep his breathing soft and shallow. His predecessor had perished for no greater slight than that of breathing too loud.

To the Luminary’s relief, Sythar Doom soon forgot his flunky, turning instead to regard the Grey Lord now addressing the rest of the Council. His paws folded together, the Warpmaster turned a careful ear as Seerlord Queekual spoke. Like Skryre, the fortunes of the grey seers had suffered from the rapid advancement of Clan Pestilens. With the death of Seerlord Skrittar, the ancient prophets of the Horned Rat were in a position of vulnerability for the first time in living memory. Unable to defy the heretical dogma of the plague monks, unable to overcome the great treasure brought back by Plaguelord Vrask Bilebroth, unable to deny the efficacy of Poxmaster Puskab Foulfur’s Black Plague, the grey seers were a waning power. It was only a matter of time before Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch petitioned for himself to assume the Seerseat beside the vacant throne reserved for the Horned Rat Himself, only a question of when the plague monks would declare themselves the true voice of the skaven god.

Seerlord Queekual was in an even less enviable position than Sythar Doom. The question that rose to the Luminary’s mind was whether the Grand Technorat would seek to join his resources with those of the grey seers in alliance against the plague monks or if he would pounce on the weakened sorcerer-priests and take from them what power they still possessed.

Knowing his fearsome master as he did, the Luminary imagined Sythar Doom might be scheming to do both.

‘This Man-dread is a warning, a portent of doom visited upon us by the Mighty Horned Rat! He is a scourge sent to remind all skaven that they have strayed from the true faith,’ Seerlord Queekual paused in his pronouncement, letting his gaze linger on the three green-robed heretics sitting at the other side of the crescent-shaped table. ‘We have allowed strange ideas and alien beliefs to pollute us. At the very moment when the Horned Rat offers us our inheritance, we spurn him and chase after the diseased delusions of lunatics.’

‘Those diseased delusions have done more to further our conquests than all your prayers stacked from snout to tail!’ growled Bonelord Nekrot, his sepulchral moan sending a chill through the Grey Chapel. ‘Prayers did not bring Skrittar victory against the dead-things! Prayers did not burn the wyrm-wings out of the sky!’ Nekrot gnashed his fangs, flecks of foam dripping to the floor. ‘Tell me, Queekual, will prayers bring back my dead warriors? Will they call back their corpses from the mage-things that now enslave them?’

Seerlord Queekual glared at the grisly Nekrot, the warlord’s bleached fur and bone armour showing stark amid the shadows. Only a few years ago the Bonelord of Mordkin would never have dared speak to a grey seer in such a manner, much less the Supreme Seerlord. Queekual could understand Nekrot’s misguided resentment, blaming the entire Order of Grey Seers for the tragic miscalculations of Skrittar. What he couldn’t understand was the morbid rodent’s boldness. After the Battle of the Plague Dragons, the cream of Mordkin’s fighting strength had been decimated. The grave-rats weren’t prolific enough to have bred back that strength already and Queekual had heard no rumours of Nekrot enslaving weaker clans to replace the difference.

A quick glance towards the three plaguelords made Queekual lash his tail in fury. He saw the wicked gleam in Vrask’s eyes, the momentary arrogance of his posture. Pestilens was behind Nekrot’s boldness, offering Mordkin some hellish alliance. Perhaps even now Mordkin was being initiated into the pestiferous Pestilent Brotherhood, that assemblage of deluded clans who believed themselves equal partners in the fortunes of Pestilens when in truth all they shared were the diseases and heresies of their new masters.

It was a ghastly thought, Mordkin in thrall to Pestilens. The plague monks would then control a third of the seats on the Council – more if Warmonger Vrrmik decided to allow Nurglitch to sit upon the Seerseat and interpret the will of the Horned Rat!

Queekual stilled the tremor of panic pounding in his heart. Let the heretics have their moment. The higher they climbed, the more inevitable their fall. Nothing nurtured hatred, envy and fear so much as success. Once the rest of skavendom saw the plague monks exposed for what they were, once they appreciated that they would have no share in the triumph of Pestilens, the whole rotten burrow would come crashing down!

The Seerlord twitched his whiskers and turned away from Nekrot. ‘It was the cowardly, treacherous lack of faith in the Horned Rat on the part of Mordkin that brought disaster upon Skrittar. Your dalliance with the strange beliefs that have been allowed to take root in the Grey Chapel.’ Again, he made a point of drawing attention to the three plaguelords.

Great Warlord Vrrmik leaned across the table from the Tyrant’s Chair at the left hand of the Black Throne, his eyes glistening with malice. He was a hulking, brutish skaven, black warpstone armour guarding a pelt that was white as snow. With the decline of Rictus and the death of Vecteek, it was Mors and Vrrmik who were ascendant now, dominating the Council in much the way his predecessor had. Queekual had spent great wealth on Eshin spies trying to learn which way Vrrmik would lean in a contest between the grey seers and Pestilens. Like Vecteek, Vrrmik was proving too cunning to fall into any direct alliance, preferring to work through puppets and proxies.

‘The Black Plague has brought the kingdoms of men low,’ Vrrmik hissed. ‘Even the grey seers must admit the service Poxmaster Puskab has provided the Under-Empire. My armies range across the surface, seizing food and slaves. My loyal subjects prosper as never before.’

Queekual was silent a moment, studying the other Grey Lords before continuing. ‘The clans grow too attached to their conquest. They act like man-things, carving out fiefdoms and dominions on the surface.’

‘There is much-much meat above,’ Rattnak Vile chortled, rubbing his paws together in a display of unashamed greed.

‘We are breaking the man-things to our will,’ Murderlord Raksheed Deathclaw snarled through the red cloth hiding much of his face. Warlord of Clan Skully’s legions of killers, ‘The Old Rat Under the Mountain’ was the deadly rival of Shadowmaster Kreep and the assassins of Clan Eshin. The loyalty of Eshin always brought with it the enmity of Skully. ‘They till their fields, grow their crops for us now. Would the grey seers have us eat mushrooms and mice?’

Queekual leaned back in his chair. ‘I would have you remember the misfortune of Clan Verms. Remember the price paid by those who dally with heresy. The power that conquers may also destroy.’

Poxtifex Nurglitch stirred from his seat. ‘It is only the enemies of the Horned One who need fear the power of Pestilens.’ The plaguelords seated to either side of him quickly echoed the thinly veiled threat.

The Seerlord didn’t answer Nurglitch. Instead he cocked his head towards the Black Throne. He waited until the murmur of conversation dropped away, until the tension in the Grey Chapel was thick enough to gnaw. He waited until he was certain every member of the Council was watching him commune with the Horned Rat. For all their antagonism and hatred, none of them was certain that the grey seers weren’t touched by their god.

Queekual let the silence drag on. Abruptly he bobbed his head in deference and tilted his neck to expose his throat to the Black Throne. It was a gesture of abject submission, the sort of thing expected of a slave, not a Lord of Decay. The impact of such a sight didn’t go unappreciated by the Seerlord’s audience.

Rising from the Seerseat, Queekual cast his condemning gaze across the ranks of the Council. ‘Persist in your confusion at your peril,’ he declared. ‘We have given you our warning.’

As he turned his back to the Council and marched from the Grey Chapel, Queekual knew the Lords of Decay would remember this prophecy of doom. They might doubt his intentions, question his ambitions. But it wasn’t the Seerlord they were watching. Their eyes were on the empty Black Throne.

And in their minds the Council of Thirteen wondered if the Horned Rat had truly spoken to His High Prophet.

It was the first seed of doubt. Soon that seed would grow into a mighty tree and its roots would stretch throughout the Under-Empire.

CHAPTER TEN

Dietershafen, 1119

Like the talon of a rampaging god, the claw reached down from the fog. There was another ear-splitting cacophony of destruction as it obliterated another street, as it crushed men and horses between its mammoth extremities.

‘Ulric have mercy!’ Beck gasped. Mandred shared the knight’s horror as they watched the claw retreat upwards into the fog, its talons opening to shower debris and bodies across the New City. What beast was this that the ratmen now turned against them? What daemon conjured from the blackest pit?

Mandred throttled the fear inside him, strangling it before it could overwhelm him. ‘Ulric listens only to the brave,’ he told his bodyguard as he started to climb from the pit. Whatever abomination the skaven had brought against them, they couldn’t allow it to drive them from the city. If victory was snatched from his army now, he knew there would be no coming back. Dietershafen, indeed this whole part of Nordland, would be lost, conceded to the skaven.

‘We cannot fight that!’ Beck declared, pointing his hand at the sky.

Mandred looked away from the scarred knight, staring up at the rim of the pit where more of his warriors had gathered. There was no mistaking the terror in their faces. Only their fierce loyalty and belief in him had kept them from fleeing. Even that devotion was hanging by a thread. When the graf spoke, his words were meant for them as much as they were for Beck.

‘This is not our home,’ Mandred said. ‘We can turn away and leave it to the skaven. We can abandon our brothers to slavery and atrocity at the paws of these beasts. We can go crawling back to Middenland. And when the skaven again come, when they bring this great horror against our homes, who will there be to stand with us? Who will help us fight?’ He shook his head, his voice descending into a defiant growl. ‘No, it is here we make our stand. A man can die but once. Do we die on our feet or on our knees?’

There were no cheers, no shouts of admiration, but Mandred could see that the conviction of his words had impressed itself upon the hearts of his men. He saw it in the clenching of their jaws, in the tightening of their fists. He saw it in the fatalistic gleam in their eyes. It wasn’t hope he had kindled in these men. It was duty, the ancient pride of every warrior that makes him understand that a man’s death can be more important than his life.

Again, they heard the whirring grind of metal hissing from the sky. The mighty claw struck downwards once more, bringing with it havoc and carnage. With a ghoulish groan, it rose through the fog, discarding those it had destroyed like so much offal.

‘I go to find the monster, to sell my life choking on its blood,’ Mandred declared. ‘Who walks with me through the Gates of Morr?’

It was a grim company who followed Mandred through the ravaged New City. Everywhere they saw the marks of the skaven monster, the horrendous craters gouged by its claws. Debris and mangled bodies were everywhere. The metal shriek of the gargantuan talon as it tore at Dietershafen was obscene in its steady rise and fall as it wrought still greater havoc.

As Mandred’s followers advanced through the fog, they gathered to themselves small bands of survivors hiding amid the devastation. It was the same devotion to the graf that drew these men out from the grip of their fear. It was the same appeal to duty and honour that bound them to him as he pressed deeper into the New City, hunting the murdering titan.

The hunt yielded only a few bands of terrified skaven, frantic vermin who were quickly cut down. For all its enormity, there was no sign of the giant monster itself. Mandred could hear the whirr it made as it moved through the fog, the ghastly din as its claw ravaged the city. Was the thing some flying beast, some vast kindred of dragon and griffon? If so, how had the tunnel-haunting ratkin found it and mastered it?

As the whirring clamour again shrieked overhead, Mandred motioned his followers to silence. Carefully he studied the dreadful noise, listening intently to its cacophony. He almost laughed when he understood the truth. Turning to his men, he told them his suspicion. ‘That is no beast of flesh and blood the ratkin set upon us. It is one of their damnable machines. I know not what shape it takes. I do not pretend to know how it operates. All I know is that the creatures who command it are naught but more of the vermin. Find them, kill them, and their machine will kill no more.’ He paused, forcing himself to forget the devastation being wrought. Closing his eyes, Mandred tried to imagine what sort of ghastly machine the vermin could have built. The image of the hoists on the walls of Middenheim, employed to haul heavy loads of timber and stone up from the base of the Ulricsberg, their jibs reaching far out over the side of the mountain. The most splendid of these devices, built by the dwarfs of Karak Grazhyakh, was powered by a windlass and able to pivot upon its base so that the angle of ascent could be adjusted to accommodate larger loads. Once, however, the load of stone had been too great, snapping the hooks and sending the cargo plummeting back down the side of the mountain. The destruction inflicted upon the earth below reminded Mandred of the devastation now being wrought against Dietershafen.

‘Is there some high place, some vantage from which the skaven can command this part of the city?’ Mandred asked his warriors.

One of the men who had followed Mandred through the fog, a Nordlander, stepped forward. ‘There is Manaan’s Lantern,’ he said. ‘It is a hill that overlooks the harbour. A tower sits atop it and a light was always kept burning there to guide ships through the fog.’

Mandred doubted the ratkin had kept up the practice. No, he suspected the vermin had put the hill and the tower to a far different purpose. ‘Can you lead us to this place?’ he asked the Nordlander. The soldier looked around him, trying to get his bearings. The destruction was too vast, however. Ashamed, he finally shook his head.

The grinding shriek of the claw growled overhead through the fog. Mandred scowled at the violent din as the talon wrecked further ruin upon the city. ‘Then we will let the snarl of this infernal machine guide us to its masters,’ he decided. Grimly, he led his men into the grey rubble of Dietershafen, pursuing the ghastly shriek of the war machine. By degrees, the men began to appreciate the cadence of the sounds, associating different pitches with the claw’s ascent and others with its hideous descent. Each man held his breath when he heard the claw ascend, dreading that when it came hurtling downwards once more it would strike the very ground he stood upon.

Gradually, Mandred noted that what parts of the street had been spared the ruinous attentions of the claw were beginning to slant upwards. The ground was sloping towards some height. Perhaps Manaan’s Lantern itself. The sun was beginning to burn away the fog and as the misty veil was withdrawn, he could make out the vast shape of a rocky mound looming above them. As more of the fog cleared, the blocks of an ancient tower were revealed. Once it might have acted as a beacon for ships at sea, but the skaven had set the building to more fiendish purpose.

The top of the tower had been levelled, expanded into a sprawling wooden platform, a deranged confusion of support beams slanting down from its bottom to grip the walls of the tower. Most of the platform was consumed by a great framework of metal, thrusting up and out like the skeletal arm of a steel giant. Huge tread-wheels operated the pulleys fixed to great chains, strange motors that belched black smoke were fitted to the turntable upon which the crane was based. With a grinding roar, the whole base would rotate, spinning the arm around, turning it so that it stretched out across a different section of the New City. On the end of the arm was the gigantic claw, each talon the size of a river barge. Chains coiled away from each of the immense digits, snaking their way back to a network of smaller tread-wheels attached to the sides of the arm. In each basket-like tread-wheel, tiny figures could be seen scampering, running forwards to open the talons, running backwards to close them.

‘There is our monster,’ Mandred hissed, glaring up at the tower. Beckoning to his men with the deadly length of Legbiter, the Graf of Middenheim led them around the base of the hill to the causeway leading up to the tower.

Fortune favoured the attackers. Manaan’s Lantern had never been conceived as a defensive fortification by its builders, so neither wall nor gate protected the approach to it. The skaven had neglected to erect any defences of their own when they transformed the lighthouse into a ghastly weapon. All that blocked their path as Mandred led his men charging up the sloping road was a pack of skaven spear-rats. The vermin fought savagely at first, but their bestial ferocity was no match for the fury of men who had been tormented by the mechanical claw, had watched comrades butchered by the insidious weapon. Upon the narrow confines of the hill, the greater numbers and speed of the ratmen counted for nothing, the discipline and strength of the humans for much. As the fight descended into a massacre, many of the skaven threw down their weapons and flung themselves over the rocky sides of the hill in a desperate bid to escape.

The fight was still raging around the hill when Mandred and several of his knights broke through into the tower itself. Only a handful of ratmen tried to stop them as they rushed up the winding stairway. The black-furred monsters were bigger than their kin outside, but fared no better. Their mangled carcasses tumbled down the steps behind Mandred’s irresistible momentum.

When they reached the roof of the tower, the enormity of the mechanical claw was impressed upon the men. The great steel arm towered over them, thrusting itself into the sky as though it might impale the sun. The turntable upon which it moved was on a cyclopean scale, hundreds of human slaves toiling to turn the great winch that operated it and made the whole crane rotate. Dozens of vicious skaven, whips clenched in their paws, prowled on a walkway above the slaves, snarling down at them in a debased mixture of Reikspiel and their own foul tongue.

Mandred’s men launched themselves at the slavemasters, cutting many of them down before they were even aware of the attack. Mandred himself targeted the grotesque ratman who seemed to be master of this infernal machine, a corpulent monster attired in a heavy fur robe and with a strange confusion of wires and tubes running from its scarred snout to a box lashed across its chest. The creature’s paws were flying about a riotous confusion of levers and pulleys scattered across a broad console that seemed to have been crafted from the remains of a harpsichord. Pipes and tubes slithered away from the console, snaking upwards into the metal crane.

Some betraying sound caused the fat skaven to spin around as Mandred rushed at it. The monster bared its fangs in a savage snarl, one paw digging into the bag it wore hanging from its shoulder. A glass sphere was soon in its claws and the beast chuckled evilly as it hurled the strange missile at Mandred. The chitter of vicious anticipation turned to a squeak of terror when the sphere crashed through the ramshackle flooring of the platform to plummet into the tower below. Whatever grisly death lurked within the globe went with it into the darkness.

Mandred leapt over the gap in the floor, swinging his runefang in a cleaving stroke as he lunged at the ratman. Wires and tubes snapped as his sword slashed across the monster’s neck and sent its scarred head flying from its shoulders.

As the brute’s twitching corpse collapsed to the floor, Mandred glared up at the ghastly machine. It would visit no more death upon his army.

Even as he made that vow to himself, a flash of light drew Mandred’s eyes back to the city below. The fog was clearing rapidly. He could see the full extent of the havoc wrought by the claw upon the New City. Now, however, there was another menace, one that threatened the much larger Old City. Sorcerous green fire blazed among the houses. While he watched, a second fire erupted, then a third and a fourth. Orbs of glowing green light, eerily similar to the sphere the dead ratman had hurled at him but far greater in size, were raining down upon Dietershafen. It took but a moment, a single turn of his head, to find the source of the gruesome barrage. A dozen ships floated in the harbour, ugly warships whose lines displayed the same deranged principles of construction and vandalism as they had seen visited upon Manaan’s Lantern. Each ship in the skaven fleet had upon its decks an enormous catapult. It was from these that the wicked creatures loosed destruction upon the city.

Victory, so near, was being stolen from Mandred’s army. The perfidious ratmen had decided to burn Dietershafen rather than lose it to the humans. Out in the harbour, the skaven ships were impervious to attack. There was nothing the humans could do to oppose them.

Unless…

Mandred looked back at that tower of steel and down at the turntable beneath his feet. He smiled as the thought came to him. The ratmen had built this gigantic claw to defend Dietershafen, to use it against attackers from the sea. Now, by the mercy of Ulric, he would put this obscene weapon to the purpose for which it had been intended.

‘Beck!’ Mandred shouted as he saw the knight rushing up to join him. His bodyguard had been caught in the fighting on the hill and had only now broken free to find his master. The reunion was destined to be a short one.

Mandred waved his hand down at the rubble of the New City, to a square where the stolid shapes of Kurgaz and his dwarfs could be seen hacking their way through a mob of skaven. ‘I need you to bring Kurgaz here,’ he told Beck. ‘Have him bring his engineers, anyone who might have some idea of how to operate the claw.’

‘Your highness, I do not…’

Mandred brushed aside Beck’s concern. Now wasn’t the time to worry about any one man, even a graf of Middenheim. Not when an entire city was at stake. ‘Bring the dwarfs,’ he ordered. ‘If we can’t turn this claw against those ships, all will have been for naught. We’ll be powerless to do anything but watch Dietershafen burn.’

From the deck of Fleetmaster Skarpaw’s Vengeful Fang of Avenging Violence and Inevitable Domination over Clan Sleekit Warplord Sythar Doom watched as his minions rolled another cylinder of burning death into the basket of the warpcaster that was bolted to the roof of the ship’s wheelhouse. After the slight design flaw encountered during his attack on Altdorf, Sythar had set his most capable warlock-engineers to increasing the safety of the warpcaster. The machine itself, of course, was perfect. It was a design of Sythar’s own creation only slightly adapted from the catapults deployed by lesser races. Adjustments to the warpcaster itself weren’t negotiable; even the mere suggestion was treasonous and a quick way for a mouse-livered opportunist to get himself carved up into burrow-pork.

A particularly crafty underling named Toksik Gnaw had provided the answer. Since the skaven conquest of Wolfenburg, Toksik had been collecting the man-things calling themselves alchemists. He had been using them to further his own researches, providing him with new insights into the very nature of warpstone. His studies had helped to ease the concerns about the warpcaster. Instead of redesigning the machine, he’d redesigned the ammunition. The warpstone explosive was now housed in a casing of lead, rendering it docile. After being loaded into the basket, however, an artillerist would smash a flask of acid over the projectile. The acid would eat through the lead and, as it dripped into the warpstone explosive, cause a violent reaction. Not only did Toksik’s solution make the ammunition safer to handle, but it also enhanced the destructive ability when the missiles crashed into their targets.

Sythar almost regretted hiring Deathmaster Nartik to dispose of Toksik, but any minion that clever was simply too dangerous to keep around.

‘Burn-burn! Kill-kill!’ the slurred squeaks of Fleetmaster Skarpaw were more like listening to a cat being strangled than someone speaking. The grizzled pirate was prancing about the warpcaster, savouring every turn of its gears, every whine from its motors. Whenever he thought he could get away with it, he stroked the wooden framework with the few fingers still clinging to his right paw.

Sythar felt a surge of disgust at his erstwhile ally. Skarpaw had been outraged at the prospect of destroying Dietershafen and its shipyards, irrationally demanding that Clan Skryre expend its resources to recapture the place. At some point in the argument, the foolish Fleetmaster remembered he was talking to a Grey Lord, one of the despotic Lords of Decay. There was a subtle change in the ship-rat’s scent as he took his dissension into the bottom of a bottle. The fermented mushroom juice had done wonders for his attitude if not his wits. From angry protest he’d descended into drunken exuberance as Clan Skryre’s weapons levelled the city.

The fog was clearing quickly now. Sythar had waited until it started to burn away before ordering Clan Skurvy’s ships to attack. He wanted to see with his own optics the extent of the destruction a concentrated barrage from half a dozen warpcasters could inflict. If he had to lose Dietershafen, at least he could exploit the opportunity to its fullest and conduct some field tests. There was also the practical side to consider: the more extensive the destruction the better his sales pitch would be to the next clan he offered the warpcaster to.

Sythar gazed out across the ships in the harbour. There hadn’t been enough time – or warpstone in Clan Skurvy’s coffers – to outfit more than six of the ships with warpcasters. Most of the vessels were simply captured human ships. Only Fleetmaster Skarpaw’s flagship was one of the new ironclads Clan Skryre had designed. Immense plates of iron bolted to its sides, two gigantic paddlewheels fastened to its sides and powered by a warpstone furnace buried deep in the ship’s hold, the flagship represented a new height of design, surpassing anything that had ever put to sea. Sythar was more than a little angry that he’d sold it for as little as he had, but he consoled himself that the next one would be far more expensive. If Clan Skurvy didn’t buy, then of course there was no reason he couldn’t approach Clan Sleekit. Indeed, maybe the plague monks would be interested. They certainly had the warptokens to pay for such advanced engineering.

Thoughts of advanced engineering caused Sythar to turn his head back towards Dietershafen. This time he didn’t look out over the Old City, where the incendiary warpstone missiles were setting the streets ablaze. Instead he looked at the New City, at the cratered moonscape that had devastated nearly the whole of the waterfront and much of the residential and market districts. The Far-Claw, a magnificent achievement, a murderous feat of engineering and fiendishness! It was a pity such a weapon, by its very size, was compelled to be a fixed installation.

Observing the carnage caused by the Far-Claw, Sythar regretted he’d never been able to use it the way it had been intended. From the hill, the claw could command the whole of the harbour.

If he’d still possessed organic eyes, Sythar would have blinked in surprise as the Far-Claw began swinging around, turning away from the city. The long steel crane stretched out over the harbour, the enormous metal talons poised above one of Clan Skurvy’s ships. Before the crew fully appreciated its peril, the chains holding the claw were loosed and the gigantic mass came slamming downwards like the fist of an angry god.

The destruction was incredible. The ship was pulverised, its hull pitted, its back broken. Fore and aft snapped, drifted away in separate masses of splintered wood before slowly rolling belly up. Shrieking skaven were thrown into the sea, scrabbling frantically at the wreckage floating around them in an effort to escape the water. Slowly, the huge claw rose from the depths, bits of the ship it had annihilated clinging to its fingers as the chains lifted it back into the air.

Horrified silence settled across the harbour. The warpcasters on the other ships no longer hurled their missiles at Dietershafen. Instead, their captains unfurled sails, broke out banks of oars and began a frantic retreat out to sea. The crew of the flagship started to do the same. Sythar was forced to gun down three of them before they decided to listen to the enraged Grey Lord.

The audacity! To use his own weapon against him! To turn the Far-Claw on his allies! Sythar’s blood boiled at the thought that some treacherous underling was even now helping the man-things bring the Far-Claw against Skurvy’s ships. Vengefully, he ordered the warpcaster crew to load the catapult and target the hill. He hissed in disgust when the first shot fell short, impacting against the rocks well below the base of the tower.

Before a second shot could be hurled at the tower, the Far-Claw came hurtling down from the sky. The seamanship of the ironclad’s crew was admirable. Even in the face of such a terrifying assault they managed to manoeuvre their ship. Instead of smashing clean through the vessel, the huge claw simply grazed the side, catching one of the paddlewheels. The wheel was ripped from its moorings, sent to the bottom as a twisted mess of metal impaled upon the Far-Claw’s talons.

Loss of the paddlewheel caused the ship to develop a rapid list to starboard as the imbalance of the remaining wheel’s weight threatened to roll the vessel. Frantic ship-rats armed with hammers, axes and anything else they could get their paws on rushed to the paddlewheel, thinking to break it free. The desperate effort, however, came to naught.

As he fought to keep his footing on the pitching deck, Sythar watched in horror as the warpcaster’s ammunition was sent rolling towards the bottles of acid. Even in the depths of drunkenness Fleetmaster Skarpaw appreciated the threat, hurling himself at the lead balls to intercept them. However, in his drunkenness, the pirate failed to appreciate what the heavy lead balls would do to a body of flesh and bone.

Sythar Doom dove for the ironclad’s side, racing away from the disaster he knew must follow the collision of lead sphere and acid flask.

The entire aft end of the ironclad vanished in a burst of green fire, a pillar of flame that soared hundreds of feet into the air. Its entire back blown to atoms, its buoyancy hopelessly obliterated, the forward section of the ship vanished beneath the waves, the suction of its sinking dragging many of the skaven survivors with it into the briny darkness.

The surviving skaven ships conspired to still greater efforts to escape into the Sea of Claws, spurred on by the violent demolition of their flagship.

The Battle of Dietershafen was over.

Stirland, 1122

The town of Silberwald was swollen with refugees. Even at the height of the plague and the skaven depredations that had followed, the settlement had never suffered from such an inundation of humanity. Shacks and tents stretched all around the town’s timber palisade, engulfing the fields and pastures beyond the walls. Acres of forest had been felled to feed the fires and build the hovels of the refugees. Every effort by the town militia and the handful of Dienstleute in the service of Silberwald’s liege lord, Duke Reinhard, to restrain the tide had been thwarted. Against such numbers there was nothing so few men, no matter how well armed and disciplined, could do.

For many years, tales of what was going on in the neighbouring province of Sylvania had been trickling into Stirland. Wild stories of marching skeletons and armies of decayed zombies had met with derision and scorn. Morrite priests and secular authorities had dismissed such tales as exaggerations, fables to frighten the Stirlanders and make them forget the duty owed to them by their Sylvanian subjects.

Now those black fables had exploded across the frontier and plunged Stirland into panic. Villages all along the border had been decimated by midnight marauders, exterminated by the deathless hordes of Vanhal.

Vanhal! The name once considered nothing more than the bogey of ignorant, inbred rustics had become anathema. Few among the peasantry dared even whisper the name now lest by speaking it they should draw the attentions of its merciless owner. Publicly, the nobles did their best to discredit the fearsome mythology that had grown up around the necromancer, claiming him to be nothing more than a murderously clever warlock preying upon the weak. In private, however, the nobles spent small fortunes acquiring talismans and charms that might fend off Vanhal’s sorceries.

Invaded first by the refugees, the mass of humanity gathered about Silberwald had brought a second invasion. The knights and soldiers of Grand Count von Oberreuth and his vassals marched to the town. Where the local authorities had failed to bring order to the ragged host, von Oberreuth’s army soon took charge. Sergeants prowled among the refugees, detaching those hale enough to carry a spear. A simple armband of green was all it took to mark the startled peasants as soldiers. After a dozen hangings, none of the chosen men dared to desert. It didn’t need Vanhal’s advance to visit death upon them.

‘An impressive muster,’ observed Dregator Iorgu as he studied the sprawl of the military encampment that had displaced much of the refugee squalor outside Silberwald. He pointed his baton towards an open field where barrel-chested sergeants tried to drill some discipline into their newly recruited peasant soldiers. ‘A bit rough around the edges. Do you think these peasants will fight?’ The dregator looked aside at the mounted warlord beside him. The cold gleam of the voivode’s eyes sent a chill down Iorgu’s spine. People tended to die in very unpleasant ways when Count von Drak was in such humour.

‘They will fight,’ Malbork declared. ‘They will fight because they have no choice. Von Oberreuth has chosen a good place to fight. He intends to engage Vanhal in Fellwald. The trees are dispersed enough to allow for cavalry yet still thick enough to provide shelter from Vanhal’s dragons.’ The voivode paused, stroking his thick moustache as he considered the prospect of facing dragons on the field of battle. It was the sort of conceit that belonged to legends, the fabric of heroic ballads. But then so did an entity of such terrible power as Vanhal.

‘They will run,’ Iorgu sneered, trying to mask his own trepidation.

Malbork bestowed upon the dregator a withering smile. ‘They will fight,’ he repeated. ‘They will fight because their wives and children stay behind in Silberwald. If we do not turn back Vanhal, if they do not fight to their utmost, the necromancer will butcher their families. Root and branch.’ He barked a vicious laugh. ‘It never ceases to amaze how those with the least quality in their blood will struggle hardest to perpetuate their line.’

Dregator Iorgu shifted uneasily in his saddle. To ensure the loyalty of his Nachtsheer, Count von Drak made it a custom to take the children of his officers hostage. He scowled as he glanced back at the Stirlander peasantry training in the field. For all his rank and privilege, he was no better off than these unwashed clods. The approach of riders gave him a distraction from his grim thoughts.

‘Excellency, it seems Count von Oberreuth has at last taken note of our arrival,’ Iorgu said, directing the voivode’s attention to the horsemen.

Count von Drak drew a sharp breath through clenched teeth. It had been insult enough that his liege lord had kept the Sylvanian force waiting for the better part of an hour, but now when von Oberreuth finally deigned to receive Malbork it was by way of Baron von Waldberg-Raabs. Sending a tax collector out as his emissary was a gesture eloquent in its calculated diminishment. Von Oberreuth was reminding Malbork of his subservient position.

The voivode curled his lip in a sneer. Let the damnable grand count enjoy his supremacy while he could. Once the armies of Stirland and Vanhal annihilated each other, there would be no force strong enough to deny Sylvania the independence she had so long coveted.

Baron von Waldberg-Raabs drew his horse up short before Malbork and Iorgu. ‘Greetings from his lordship Grand Count Karl von Oberreuth, Prince of Wurtbad, Margrave of Waldenhof, Duke of Woerden, Overlord of Sylvania.’ The emphasis on the last title wasn’t lost on the voivode. While he was still scowling at the reminder, the baron cast an appraising glance at the black-clad footmen and cavalry arrayed on the road behind von Drak. ‘His lordship was waiting for the rest of your company to arrive before receiving you.’ He waved his hand at the Nachtsheer. ‘Surely these aren’t all the men Sylvania is contributing.’

‘These are soldiers,’ Iorgu growled at the baron, forgetting the deference due the man’s noble rank. ‘Veterans of ten long years of fighting the undead. Each of them is worth a dozen of your peasant trash.’

Baron von Waldberg-Raabs didn’t deign to respond to the dregator’s agitation. Instead he made a show of trying to count the number of Sylvanians. ‘Three hundred? Surely a man of Count von Drak’s leadership could rally more fighters to his banner? Why I saw more men toiling away at fixing your castle!’

‘I should strip my lands bare and leave them defenceless?’ Malbork snapped. ‘What if this invasion is only a clever ruse? What if Vanhal intends to draw us out, then strike at the very heart of Sylvania? How would I meet my obligations to his lordship then?’

The baron shrugged. ‘I suppose we shall have to make do with your, frankly, distressingly small contribution to the cause. Fortunately his lordship has less timid allies.’

The statement brought a narrowing of Malbork’s eyes. He had paid little attention to the man who rode up with Baron von Waldberg-Raabs before. Now he made a careful study of the fellow. He was a big almost brutish specimen, his hair long and unruly, his beard thick and plaited in an almost dwarfish manner. The pelt of a white wolf was draped across his armour and the massive destrier beneath him was of a breed foreign to the Empire’s eastern provinces.

‘Grand Master Vitholf of the White Wolves,’ the baron introduced the knight beside him. ‘He is the representative of Graf Mandred von Zelt of Middenheim. It seems Graf Mandred’s army has been scouring the skaven from Ostland. Now he offers to put his troops at Count von Oberreuth’s disposal that we may purge Stirland of the undead scourge.’

Count von Drak bowed his head to Vitholf, everything in his manner the very picture of appreciative courtesy. Only Dregator Iorgu wasn’t fooled. He could see the expression in Malbork’s eyes. It was well for Vitholf and the baron that they were in Stirland and not Sylvania.

It was that fact alone that kept them among the living.

‘Aid-help, yes-yes?’ the frightened squeak issued from the dejected little ratkin who grovelled at the warlord’s feet. ‘Promise-say mighty Mordkin save-guard brave-loyal Skab!’

Bonelord Nekrot brought his foot smacking against the beggar’s snout, claws raking across the thin fur of the ratman’s nose. The emissary leapt back, yelping in pain. An intoxicating mix of fear and blood saturated the skaven’s scent. The smell filled the underground grotto, the plundered ruin of an ancient barrow. The beady eyes of Nekrot’s warriors shone in the darkness, reflecting the gleam of worm-oil lanterns, illuminating their grisly hunger.

A flick of his claw and Nekrot let his grave-rats pounce upon the stunned messenger. The Skab-rat was gory ribbons almost before he could shriek, ripped asunder by the cannibalistic fangs of Mordkin.

Clan Skab! The fool-meat had thought to prey upon Mordkin’s vulnerability after their battle against the mage-thing Vanhal! They had wrested from Mordkin some of the surface holdings bestowed upon them by Vecteek. They had seized some of Mordkin’s lesser burrows and warrens. Now, when their warriors were being decimated, when they were being driven from the surface by the Man-dread, now they sought alliance with Mordkin? Such audacity deserved to end in catastrophe!

Nekrot ran his paw across the bleached bone armour covering his body. Crafted from the butchered remains of the last Bonelord, the armour was a symbol of the permanence of his clan. Mordkin had defied the fearsome power of the Accursed One and emerged from the bowels of Cripple Peak stronger than before! What did they need to fear from their fellow skaven?

Naturally, it helped when their fellow skaven were credulous enough to accept words of treaty and alliance. When Man-dread first set upon Skab’s holdings, Mordkin had promised them aid. If the Skab-rats had been stupid enough to believe Nekrot intended to honour such promises, that was their problem!

The Bonelord turned away from his feasting grave-rats, settling himself in the smashed crypt he had adopted as his personal nest-throne. The sepulchre’s cool stone surface felt inviting, the pleasant scent of lingering decay made his mouth water. It was a testament to how hungry his warriors were that they’d devoured Skab’s messenger so quickly. Normally they would keep a carcass for a few weeks so it could properly ripen.

There would be chance enough to indulge such appetite soon, however. Clan Eshin had proven incapable of killing the Vanhal, but at least they had maintained a careful watch on the hated mage-thing. Deathmaster Nartik’s blades might be dull, but his eyes were proving sharp.

Nartik had brought back word that Vanhal was marching against the man-things. There was the promise of a great battle soon. The prospect pleased Nekrot no end. Let the humans and undead batter themselves into pulp. Once both sides were weakened, once the two armies were reduced to bloodied tatters, Mordkin would sweep in and destroy them all!

A string of drool dripped from Nekrot’s fangs as he imagined what the marrow inside Vanhal’s bones was going to taste like.

Nothing had a better savour than vengeance.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Dietershafen, 1119

Mandred paced across the confines of his tent, feeling as though the canvas walls were closing in on him. Several times his foot got caught in one of the furs strewn across the ground, nearly tripping the distracted Graf of Middenheim. Even here, on the plain beyond Dietershafen the stink of skaven hung heavy in the air. The reek was stifling, obscene in its persistence. Given the extent of the ratmen’s assault on the Empire, there were some who now speculated that the vermin had inflicted the Black Plague on mankind in some unholy fashion. To Mandred’s mind, the stench of the skaven themselves would have been enough to spread sickness among men.

That Baroness Carin and her retinue could bear to be down in the old palace, a place that was absolutely filthy from years of verminous infestation was something Mandred found astounding. The polluted rubble was worlds away from the splendour of her castle at Salzenmund, yet she condescended to surround herself with this squalor. It was a testament to her iron resolve and her political acumen. She knew the bold message her habitation of the palace would send. The proper lords of Nordland were back; Dietershafen was once more in human hands.

The message was noble, but the reality was bitter. Dietershafen was almost as ruinous as Carroburg had been. Three-quarters of the city had been obliterated by either the giant mechanical claw or by the fires started by the naval bombardment. Before Mandred led his army into Dietershafen, the skaven had packed the city with human slaves. The blessing that so many had managed to escape the carnage of battle had become a curse now that the logistics of feeding such a multitude had been added to their problems. The former slaves were packed into every building that had survived the fighting, sometimes in such numbers that they slept upon the floors in great heaps, like so many exhausted dogs.

Simple humanity demanded that the supplies Baroness Carin had stockpiled in Salzenmund be brought to Dietershafen. Only the most callous of his advisors had demurred. Among them was Count van der Duijn. He insisted that the supplies be devoted solely to the troops. The Westerlander clung to the old plan of using Dietershafen to stage a naval assault against the barbarians in Marienburg. He was blind to the many ways the situation had changed, refusing to see or hear anything that would delay the liberation of his homeland.

Mandred could sympathise with Count van der Duijn to a degree. It was a terrible thing to have your land occupied by foreign conquerors. Taken within the whole, however, Marienburg was fortunate its conquerors had been at least a debased sort of humanity. The scope of atrocity perpetrated by the skaven against those they’d conquered was almost beyond comprehension. To the thousands of starved, beaten and maimed slaves the ratmen had left behind must be added the thousands more who, like Princess Erna’s doktor, had been dragged away to the subterranean world of these monsters. Even more horrifying were the accounts and evidence of how the ratmen dealt with those too weak or sick to toil for their verminous masters. However debased they might be, the Norscan barbarians weren’t eating their captives. Mandred had argued with his council that Marienburg would have to wait while the ratmen still infested so much of the Empire. It was an argument that he won easily.

Beyond the immediacy of freeing those enslaved by the skaven there was the bald fact that the plans developed by Count van der Duijn and Baroness Carin were no longer practical. To mount an attack on Marienburg, they would need a great fleet and a port that could service such an armada. Baroness Carin was the first to confess that Nordland could no longer provide either. The destruction inflicted upon Dietershafen would take years to repair; certainly the shipyards couldn’t be put in order until the next summer, at earliest. Replacing the ships demolished or stolen by the ratmen would take even more time. In three years, perhaps, they would have the resources to liberate Marienburg from the sea.

Three years for the army to sit idle, bivouacked in Nordland while they waited for the ships to be built. Three years to allow the enemy to recover from their defeat, to marshal their forces and strengthen their defences. Three years for still more men to be slaughtered by their bestial overlords.

It was a situation that Mandred wouldn’t allow. Brooking no dissension, he’d made his position clear. The army would secure Dietershafen and recuperate through the winter from the long march and the fierce battle. During that time, detachments would range across Nordland to clear out such pockets of skaven as might yet be lurking in the towns and villages.

Once the spring thaw came, they would move eastwards. While the great city of Mordheim, crown jewel of the Ostermark was yet in human hands, defended by a vast army of Ungol mercenaries, Roppsman horse archers and Dienstleute from across the Empire, much of Ostland and Hochland were in the possession of the foul ratkin. The mountain city of Wolfenburg had been under siege by the skaven for two long years. Breaking the siege, liberating the capital of Ostland, would be the next objective of Mandred’s army.

It was his decision, one that he shared with no one else. The enormity of that choice rested heavily on Mandred’s shoulders. He had listened to the arguments against such action even if he hadn’t allowed his convictions to be swayed by them. Count van der Duijn’s position was clear, but there were other voices who raised more reasonable objections. Some felt that they should consolidate what had already been won, warning Mandred against over-extending his advance. Others cautioned that to bring sufficient forces to bear on Wolfenburg would mean a perilous reduction in the troops left behind to garrison Nordland. If the skaven did return, they might win Wolfenburg only to lose Dietershafen.

Surprisingly, it had been Baroness Carin’s voice that spoke loudest against such reserve. With the evidence of what skaven dominance meant, she felt any hesitation was unconscionable. Wolfenburg would be rescued; Ostland would be freed. If it meant the loss of Nordland, then her people would die fighting rather than submit to the ratmen again.

Arch-Lector Hartwich had enjoined the council to have faith in Sigmar and the other gods, to remain true to the nobility within the blood of man. Ar-Ulric had echoed Hartwich’s sentiments, though the old priest lacked his usual fire and verve, seeming unsettled in mind and spirit. It had been the Sigmarite’s rather than the Ulrican’s appeal to religious sensibilities that finally impressed Mandred’s council. He watched as the gaze of each noble strayed from Hartwich to their graf. It was easy to see the thought burning behind each man’s eyes, the memory of that instant of miraculous intervention. Those who had been there, who had watched Mandred step from the Sacred Flame unharmed while the skaven assassin was utterly consumed, had no doubt in the power of the gods. They had seen it.

It was somewhat ironic then that the man who had been the direct focus of that miracle should be so plagued with doubt and fear. The esteem of his fellow man, their willingness to accept his commands, to stake their lives on his words, these were like millstones chained about him. Mandred could feel their weight dragging at his every step, stifling his breath, smothering his brain. What was it Hulda had said? A tyrant glories in power, a leader is humbled by it?

As though thinking of the wolf-witch had conjured her from the darkness, Hulda emerged from behind the hanging tapestry that partitioned Mandred’s tent. The graf shook his head, throwing up his hands in frustration.

‘Beck must fear for the perpetuation of my line,’ Mandred declared. ‘Every time I turn around he’s letting a beautiful woman sneak into my tent.’

Hulda paused, tilted her head back and sniffed at the air. There was an amused sparkle in her eye when she returned her gaze to Mandred. ‘Was it he who invited the Lady Mirella?’ the witch wondered.

Colour rushed to Mandred’s face and there was more than a touch of embarrassment in his laugh. ‘No,’ he admitted, ‘her ladyship was here by my invitation. I rather think Beck disapproves.’

‘No doubt he believes Baroness Carin to be a companion more befitting your station,’ Hulda said. ‘Even the Graf of Middenheim must observe certain proprieties,’ she cautioned.

Mandred shifted uncomfortably. He was willing to give of himself for his people and he had accepted that there were sacrifices he would be called upon to make. Even so, he didn’t like being reminded about those obligations. Determinedly, he changed the subject.

‘You have scouted Salzenmund?’ he asked. When Mandred had determined to bring Baroness Carin’s supplies to Dietershafen, a chief concern had been the disposition of the skaven hidden there. He didn’t pretend to understand what sort of magic the witch possessed or how she had discovered the skaven ambush to begin with, but he hoped she could use those same powers to discover if the monsters were still there.

‘The ratkin are gone,’ Hulda reported. She smiled, displaying her strong white teeth. ‘They learned what happened here. They didn’t want to share the same fate, so they retreated back into their tunnels. You may have the caravan sent whenever you like.’

Mandred started pacing again, his mind working out the details of how best to handle moving so much food through a starving land.

‘Let tomorrow’s daemons fight among themselves,’ Hulda suggested to the troubled graf. ‘The evils of the future will wait for you to find them.’ The sparkle came back into her gaze. ‘You might ask Lady Mirella’s counsel. Her smell is strong. She can’t have been gone long. Certainly not long enough to be already abed. She wouldn’t be disturbed if you sent for her.’

Perhaps because the suggestion was so appealing to him Mandred took umbrage at Hulda’s words. Directing a stern gaze on the witch, he spoke his mind. ‘What is it between you and Ar-Ulric? You seem to have a terrible fascination for him. I’ve known the priest since I was a boy and I’ve never seen him so… uncertain. There are some in the camp who say you have bewitched him. Is that true?’

Hulda’s gaze matched the harshness of Mandred’s accusation. ‘Idle tongues work more mischief than idle hands. The discord between myself and Ar-Ulric is a matter of doctrinal differences. We each honour Ulric in our own way. I know his way. He believes he knows mine.’

‘And what does he believe?’ Mandred asked.

‘Ask him,’ Hulda said as she stepped towards the doorway. ‘I would be very interested to hear how much he dares tell someone else.

‘I’ve already heard how much he dares to tell himself.’

Skavenblight, 1122

Locked within the dank burrows beneath Skavenblight, the only illumination coming from worm-oil lamps and candles rendered from rat-fat, Wolfius Moschner had degenerated into a living scarecrow. In those rare moments when he saw his image reflected in a bucket of water or mirrored in the glazed eyes of a dead skaven, the physician found it hard to accept that the person he gazed upon was indeed himself. His arms had shrivelled into bony sticks, ribs pressed against his pallid skin; his face was a wrinkly mess of loose skin and blotchy sores.

‘The gods pay me back for my hedonism,’ Moschner said, his voice a scratchy whisper. He ran a skeletal hand along one cheek, watching the process in the reflection of a blood-filled bowl. The sanguine fluid made the image both horrible and fascinating. Like the fabled stare of the gorgon or the compelling gaze of a serpent.

‘Oh how proud I was of my fine things!’ Moschner declared, shifting around on his wooden stool to speak directly with Schroeder. ‘The Emperor provided me with everything. The best clothes, the most delicate sweetmeats! I was attended by the Barber Imperial and my tresses were shorn with golden shears. I wanted for nothing… save perhaps my dignity.’

Schroeder reached into the wickerwork cage, employing a barbed hook to drag out the corpse lying inside. He shook his head at the despair in the doktor’s voice. These morose fits had become more frequent of late. It wasn’t hard to guess the cause. The reason was impaled on the end of the knight’s hook. Dissatisfied with the progress Moschner had been making, Queekual had expanded the doktor’s field of study. The inhuman fiend had provided Moschner with a new kind of specimen for his studies – human slaves. Something to compare the progress of the plague on Moschner’s skaven test subjects.

The hideous results of that strategy languished in cages all around them. When the captives had first been brought to Moschner, their screams and cries had pressed him to the edge of madness. Queekual had solved that distraction, however, in typically fiendish fashion. The mouth of each captive had been sewn shut with cords of rat-gut, leaving just enough space between the lips that the sludge-like swill the skaven gave them to eat might be forced down their throats. Utterly without empathy for their own kind, the skaven could not understand the pity the lot of these wretches evoked in other men. It was, Schroeder felt, the most chilling aspect of the underfolk.

‘Now I have nothing,’ Moschner declared. ‘When I watched Emperor Boris die, when I defied him and cast aside the honours he had bestowed on me, I thought at least I might regain my dignity. I thought I might be able to walk the streets of Altdorf with my head held high. But the skaven leave nothing, dignity least of all.’ He stared down into the bowl of blood, not the black filth of skaven veins but the humour found within human ones. He tried not to think of the man the blood had been drawn from, to forget the weakness that would afflict him as his body withered under the caprices of maladjusted humours. He tried to focus as Schroeder told him to. He tried to think only of the work, only of the end result his labours must yield.

‘Is… is the herdsman well?’ Moschner asked, setting down the magnifying crystal and covering the blood bowl with the clay tablet on which he had been scratching his notes.

Schroeder pretended not to hear the question, concentrating instead on removing the dead captive. If he dragged the body to the cave entrance, the guard-rats would remove it. He didn’t like to think what they did with the corpse when it was gone.

‘I asked if the herdsman is recovering,’ Moschner repeated, anger creeping into his tone. ‘Check on him!’ he added, slapping his withered hand against the table.

The knight released the hook and let the corpse flop to the floor. Grimly, he stalked towards the cage where the man in question was kept. ‘You need to forget about these people,’ Schroeder scolded him. ‘None of us matters. We are already dead. Have been since we were brought into Skavenblight. All that matters is your work and what you can do here.’

‘Look in on him,’ Moschner shouted, the effort wracking his body in a fit of coughing. He could hear agitated squeaks in the tunnel outside, but he didn’t care if he upset Queekual’s guards. All that mattered now was assuaging his own sense of guilt.

A sour look on his face, Schroeder navigated the tangle of cages, recoiling when an especially lively skaven slave tried to nip at him from behind the bars of its prison. When he reached the herdsman’s cage the knight threw back the bolt and opened the tiny door. A moment only he lingered there, before turning back to Moschner. ‘He’s dead,’ Schroeder reported, his voice conveying all the emotion of solid stone.

Moschner reeled, almost falling from the stool. Dead? Another victim! Another black mark upon his soul! Drawing the man’s blood had been too much, one abuse too many for him to endure. Moschner thought back to when the herdsman had been brought to him. Rendered mute by the skaven, rendered illiterate by the indifference of his noble liege lords, the prisoner had been clever enough to draw in the dirt beneath his cage to convey his story. Such cleverness in the face of brutality that had broken knights and nobles had impressed the doktor. It had spoken to him of some indomitable endurance deep within the human form, a quality he prayed he might find hidden somewhere inside himself.

Now the man was dead, killed by Moschner’s own cruelty, by the abominable demands of his studies. For what had he died? To placate the insane ego of Queekual? To further research that profaned every oath sworn by every doktor who ever lived?

‘No more,’ Moschner whispered. He stared at the bowl of blood he had been studying. ‘No more,’ he cursed in a louder voice. With a sweep of his arm he sent the vessel flying from the table, spattering the floor with gore. ‘No more!’ he raged, flinging himself to his feet. Dimly he heard Schroeder shout at him, could hear the big knight crashing against the cages as he rushed for the doktor.

How many times had they helped one another so? The knight and the physician, pulling one another back from the brink of madness, reminding each other of the purpose that drove them on. Not this time. Moschner wouldn’t let Schroeder’s words pull him back. He could endure no more. Better a gruesome death than an obscene life.

Moschner rushed to the mouth of the cave, screaming his defiance. The guard-rats scurried into his path. Not daring to enter the cave itself, they pointed their spears at him from the edge of the tunnel, hissing and squeaking in their loathsome parody of speech.

The doktor did not relent. A red fury propelled him into the waiting guards, a crazed recklessness that would have impressed a Norscan berserk. The ratmen recoiled before the deranged human. Moschner had always suspected they’d been given orders not to harm him, just to keep him in his prison. Now he exploited their reluctance. When one of the skaven lowered its spear, he lunged at the vermin. Wasted as he was, he was still able to wrap his arms about the beast’s neck, to squeeze and strangle. Positioned as he was, the ratman could bring neither fangs nor spear against him. The agony of verminous claws raking his back only sent him into a greater fury.

‘Look out!’ The warning came from Schroeder. Before Moschner could react to the warning, he felt a terrific impact against his skull. The other guard had slammed the butt of its spear against his head. His grip on the choking skaven slipped away as he wilted to the floor. The next instant he felt a clawed foot kick against his ribs.

Before he could be abused further, a shrill bestial scream rang through the tunnel. Through his bleary gaze, Moschner could see Schroeder standing over the sprawled body of one guard-rat, a bloodied pestle clenched in his fist. The other guard-rat, the one the crazed doktor had half-strangled, was coughing and sputtering on the ground. Before it could recover, Schroeder caught up one of the spears and ran the creature through.

The knight turned away from the dead skaven and pulled Moschner to his feet. The doktor tried to turn around, to flee into the tunnel, but Schroeder’s grip was too tight. ‘It’s no good!’ he yelled at the physician. ‘There’s no escape! There are leagues of tunnels, thousands upon thousands of underfolk! The only chance, the only hope is to complete your work. That’s the only thing you can do to make restitution to all the victims of these fiends.’

Moschner glared at Schroeder and tried again to pull away.

‘Please, doktor, you must do this for me,’ Schroeder said. ‘Make my death worth something. Kill as many of these bastards as you can.’ The next instant, the knight buried his fist in Moschner’s gut. He carried the stunned doktor back into the cave, laying him down beside the table.

The doktor had an impression of Schroeder staring down at him, then the image faded into the blackness of unconsciousness.

When Moschner awoke, it was the terrifying figure of Seerlord Queekual standing over him. In the sorcerer’s paws was Schroeder’s severed head. Queekual said the knight had killed the guards and tried to escape while Moschner was asleep. He hadn’t got very far before skaven trackers sniffed him out and brought him down.

Queekual left the head with Moschner as a reminder of what would happen should he try to follow the dead man’s example.

It was a needless lesson. With Schroeder’s last words still ringing in his ears, the last thing Moschner wanted to do now was escape.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Averland, 1123

The mood within the hunting lodge Mandred and his commanders had taken over for their headquarters was tense. After the long campaign through Ostland, the liberation of Wolfenburg, the fighting against both skaven and Vanhal’s undead in Stirland, many of his nobles had grown weary of the war. They urged Mandred to secure what had been gained, to disperse the army and send the men back to their homes.

It was an argument Mandred had heard many times, and it was an argument that never failed to fill him with contempt for those who made it. Only a week before, these same men had walked the streets of Woerden, seen with their own eyes the misery the town had been reduced to by their skaven conquerors. The ratmen weren’t simply a rival baron, a mortal human enemy to be fought between spring and the harvest. They were an insidious pestilence, a plague every bit as heinous as the Black Plague itself. Where they conquered, they despoiled, stripped the land bare, enslaving the populace and taking many of them down into their burrows – never to be seen again. There was no question of coexistence with this vermin, no possibility of simply conceding territory to them and hoping they would be content. No, the skaven had to be hounded out, pressed relentlessly, exterminated until not a single one remained. Nothing less could ensure the security of the Empire or even just a small corner of the Empire. It had to be all or nothing, because this inhuman foe would never relent. Given the chance to recover, allowed any respite at all, they would be back. Kurgaz said the dwarf Book of Grudges was riddled with wars against these monsters, wars that stretched back thousands of years.

The peasants understood. Their ties to the land were more intimate than those of their noble lords. It struck Mandred as bitterly ironic that the men who owned the land had less understanding of it than those who served them. Not simply how to till the soil or bring the cattle to pasture, but an actual appreciation of the land as a living, vibrant thing. For too many of the nobles, their holdings were merely something to generate an income; their interest in it began and ended with the coin each harvest generated.

Then there were the opportunists, those like Baroness Carin who saw in the conflict a way to gather power for themselves. Mandred had been impressed by the noblewoman’s strength and determination, but her calculating politicking was something that evoked his contempt. Wherever his army marched, Baroness Carin ensured that concessions were made to Nordland and Middenland, pacts and treaties that would favour those realms once the fighting was done. She sought to profit from the war, that was clear enough, and her inclusion of Middenland in those spoils was also obvious. She’d made it clear several times that her interest in the Graf of Middenheim was more than platonic.

There were many who were already whispering that Mandred should become the next Emperor, that the House von Zelt should be the new keepers of the Imperial crown. Baroness Carin was cautious in voicing her own support for such a future, probably because it would be unseemly for a woman who hoped to become Empress to inveigle herself in the question.

Mandred glanced in her direction and saw Baroness Carin return his gaze with a stalwart nod of approval. Whatever her ambitions for the future, now, in the present, she was a staunch ally. He turned his gaze towards General von Weichs, the commander of the Stirlander contingent, and Dregator Vladislav from the Sylvanian levy. Both soldiers were obviously ill at ease, uncomfortable with marching their troops into another battle, yet at the same time well aware that inaction would threaten their homelands.

Elder Boldo Hoop from Mootland was more reserved than the delegates from his neighbours. Possibly since the Black Plague had limited its attentions to humans and failed to infect halflings, the skaven had avoided any intrusion across the boundaries of the Moot. That had engendered among the halflings an isolationist attitude, most of them content to remain in their peaceful oasis while disease and war raged around them. At the same time, the Moot’s good fortune had turned it into a potential breadbasket for Mandred’s army. The supplies of food he’d negotiated for would be far more vital than any military support the halflings could offer. Even so, Mandred had welcomed the hundred-odd archers who formed the All Volunteer Mootland Anti-Rat Brigade.

Less helpful were the contingents from Talabecland and Ostland. They were eager to return to their homelands now that neighbouring Stirland had been cleansed of the ratkin. With their borders secured, these forces felt their part in the war was finished. Count von Drexler of Talabheim had even argued that Mandred’s force should turn to Hochland, scourge the skaven from that province and secure the whole of the north before attending to the infested south. Count van der Duijn, of course, continued to press for a strike against the Norscans in Marienburg, even in the face of reports that the barbarians were withdrawing of their own accord, their ranks decimated as the Black Plague finally reached their enclave.

Mandred listened to all the arguments. His decision was already made, had been made before he set foot in the lodge. The council was here to argue for the positions of their respective lands, to make their voices heard. Mandred knew it was important that the rulers of Ostland and Talabheim felt their opinions had been heard, that their advice had been given due consideration. Indeed, if a good enough reason could be made, Mandred did not believe himself so conceited in his power that he couldn’t be swayed by a solid argument.

No such argument had been offered, however. Leaning across the table, Mandred thanked the assembled generals and nobles, paused a moment to honour the counsel of Ar-Ulric and Arch-Lector Hartwich, and paid his respects to Kurgaz and his dwarfish allies.

Then, the Graf of Middenheim settled back in his chair and declared what he intended to do. ‘The skaven infestation of Averheim threatens this entire region,’ he said, directing his words particularly at the Stirlander and Sylvanian emissaries as well as Elder Hoop. ‘It is the core of the ratmen’s occupation of Averland, the nest from which their armies plunder the province and enslave its people.’ He turned and nodded to Kurgaz. ‘It has been opined that the skaven armies that have been assembled here are so large because the ratkin seek to make an assault against Zhufbar and engage their hereditary foes, the dwarfs. However, it is equally possible, now that so much of the north has been cleansed of their evil, that the skaven will loose these armies into the very lands we have spent so much blood to liberate.’ He pointed at the leaders from Ostland and Talabecland. ‘Do not think the skaven will be content with simply holding Averland and the rest of the south. Do not even think they will be satisfied with retaking Stirland or capturing Sylvania. Even if you are so craven as to allow your fellow men to languish in bondage to the ratkin, you will not be safe. In a month, a year, the skaven will come for your lands and there will be no one to stand and help you defend them.’

‘If you are wise, you will attack while the skaven are massed in Averheim,’ the suggestion came from Kurgaz. ‘I’ve seen that city. I know how tightly it is packed inside its walls. The numbers of the ratkin will work against them if they are trapped inside those walls.’

‘Nor can the vermin afford to bring their complete strength against an attacker.’ For the first time since the meeting had started, the wolf-witch Hulda approached the table. Ar-Ulric gave her a stern glance, but too many of the other commanders at the table had benefited from the accuracy of her prognostications to gainsay her a place among them. The wild-looking woman swept her piercing gaze across the table. ‘The skaven have yet to break the defenders within the Averburg. The old quarter remains in human hands and continues to endure the siege of the underfolk. Several times the Averlanders have managed to sally from behind the old walls, wrecking havoc among the ratmen. If Averheim is attacked from without, the skaven will still fear an attack from within.’

Count von Drexler remained unconvinced. ‘From what I have heard, the skaven massed in Averheim are more numerous than anything we have seen. A larger army of the monsters than conquered Carroburg and Dietershafen or laid siege to Wolfenburg. It will take a massive effort to relieve the city, and we face the very real prospect that, even if we are victorious, our army will be too weak to remain an effective fighting force.’

Mandred nodded. ‘I agree, that is a possibility. But if the army is too weak to fight the skaven at Averheim, how will it be strong enough to stop the ratkin when they eventually leave Averheim and strike north?’ He let the question linger for a moment, letting the truth of his words impress itself on each mind. ‘No, if we cannot break the monsters here, we won’t be able to break them later when our forces have been dispersed to guard our homelands. It must be now if we are to prevail.’

As he walked away from the hunting lodge towards his own tent, Arch-Lector Hartwich was struck by the appearance of several armed riders moving through the army’s encampment. Throughout their long march, the army had added small bands of fighters to its ranks. Usually these were the retinues of some petty lord, small companies of mercenaries or displaced Dienstleute, even the occasional bandit gang. The riders he now observed were markedly different.

There were about three dozen of them, all kitted out in heavy suits of plate armour, the metal blackened to a dull, sooty colour. As striking as the black armour was, it was the ghoulish masks each of the horsemen wore that made them so remarkable. The steel masks of their helms were cast in the semblance of leering skulls.

A quick enquiry from a passing Middenheim officer revealed to Hartwich that these men called themselves the Knights of the Black Rose. They had ridden all the way from Wissenland where they had been campaigning relentlessly against the skaven around Pfeildorf. Their leader was a man named Aldinger from Nuln, though his accent was that of Reikland.

As he watched the sombre procession ride past him, Hartwich was struck by the familiarity of the way they marched their horses, how they held their lances at a slight tilt with the butt resting against the left stirrup. It was like watching Grand Master von Schomberg’s Reiksknecht on parade.

While Hartwich was watching the knights, one of the armoured riders broke ranks and galloped towards him. Dipping his lance respectfully towards the priest, the warrior addressed him in a precise, clipped tone. ‘You are Arch-Lector Wolfgang Hartwich?’ the knight asked.

‘I am,’ Hartwich said. ‘Would I be speaking to Grand Master Aldinger of the Knights of the Black Rose?’ It was a guess, but the trace of Reikland in the rider’s voice made Hartwich think it a good guess.

‘Captain Aldinger,’ the knight corrected him. ‘The Knights of the Black Rose are too poor for a grand master. A captain suits our needs well enough.’ From behind the sockets of his steel mask, Aldinger’s eyes took on a cunning aspect. ‘There is a second captain who rides with us, though he is not of our order. He is waiting for you in your tent. I must ask a question of you, your excellency. Is he safe there? Is what he has brought safe?’

Hartwich was silent for a moment. The import with which Aldinger asked his question, the gravity of his voice told him exactly who this other captain must be and the nature of what he had brought with him. ‘Sigmar has brought them this far,’ Hartwich said. ‘I do not think we will lose either of them now.’

Aldinger saluted the priest, satisfied with his answer. Wheeling his horse around, he galloped to rejoin his command. Hartwich watched him ride off for a moment, then hastened down the rows of tents and pavilions to where his own shelter had been erected.

Throwing open the flap, Hartwich found himself looking on a man he hadn’t seen in nearly a decade. Captain Erich von Kranzbeuhler looked as strong and vibrant as the day he’d encountered an outlawed Hartwich in the backwaters of Reikland. Both of them had been beyond the law then – Erich had been a commander in the abolished Reiksknecht and a chief participant in the plot to overthrow Emperor Boris.

More than the man’s escape, it was what he’d escaped Altdorf with that made him important. As Hartwich looked at him, the priest didn’t need to say a word. Erich already knew the question that was uppermost in the priest’s mind.

Carefully, the knight unwrapped the bulky object he had carried across half the Empire, the treasure he had hidden for ten years in the wilderness.

Hartwich dropped to his knees and gasped in awe as he found himself staring down at the holiest of Sigmarite relics: Ghal Maraz, the Hammer of Sigmar Himself.

‘We must keep this,’ Hartwich gasped. ‘No one must know. No one must see.’

Erich frowned. ‘I thought you would bestow Ghal Maraz upon Graf Mandred. There are many who already call him Emperor. The warhammer would make that claim still more legitimate.’

Hartwich nodded. ‘Yes. And that is why it must remain hidden. Be kept secret. We cannot allow its presence to be felt until the right moment. The man who holds Ghal Maraz can make himself Emperor, but first he must build the foundations for that Empire.’

Beck scowled as he stood outside Graf Mandred’s tent, listening to the soft voices of his master and the Lady Mirella. The knight scratched at the scar running down from his missing eye. When he was irritated the old wound would begin to itch. It was a complaint he’d noticed ever since the liberation of Woerden. Of all the fresh scrapes and bruises, the ugly gash left by a spear in his right thigh, he found it ironic that an injury suffered years before should be the one to vex him.

The graf! Beck couldn’t understand what his master was thinking, dallying with Mirella, a landless vagabond from Altdorf when Baroness Carin could be his for the asking. She was a woman of his own station, a ruler who would bring the wealth of Nordland with her. With the shrewd baroness at his side, Mandred could well and truly become what many were already calling him: Emperor.

Yet he spent his few quiet moments with Mirella! It was a situation Beck couldn’t understand. Mandred wasn’t like other men, free to follow the whims of his heart. He understood that he was first and foremost the ruler of Middenheim, that when he wed it must be to the advantage of his people. Growing up, he’d been reminded again and again of his duty to the people he ruled. How he could forget that, forsake his obligations simply to lie in the arms of a…

Beck left the thought unfinished. The graf might know what he was doing. He might be toying with Mirella in order to excite the jealousy of Baroness Carin. Yes, now that he considered the idea, the knight was certain he had the truth of it.

To take his mind away from the voices inside the tent, Beck reached into his pocket and dug out the trophy he’d claimed from the skaven warlord of Woerden. It was a curious stone, when the light hit it just right it shone a brilliant green, at other times it seemed blacker than black. The skaven had worn it on a chain about its neck. Beck had taken it because its shape reminded him of a wolf’s head. As a good Ulrican, he’d taken that as a good omen and kept the stone as a lucky charm.

It felt strangely warm in his hand as he turned it over in his palm. Absently, Beck reached his finger up to his eye and began to scratch at the scar.

The old wound was itching again.

Stirland, 1122

Fear. Since becoming voivode and merciless despot of Sylvania, Count Malbork von Drak had thought he understood all there was to know about fear: how to evoke it; how to inflict it; how to use it; how to control it.

Now, as he sat astride his warhorse and watched the obscene legions of Vanhal marching across the fields bordering Fellwald, Malbork appreciated for the first time how little he really understood about fear. His heart was pounding against his chest as though it would burst. His breath came in short hot gasps while the blood in his veins seemed to have been turned to ice water. He could feel his stomach churning beneath his mail, threatening to make him sick even before battle was joined.

The Sylvanian troops had been positioned on the left flank of von Oberreuth’s army, delegated to the position of least concern to the grand count. Despite Malbork’s hopes that Stirland and Vanhal would decimate one another, his noble pride chafed at the blatant insult in such a deployment. Louder than any decree, the grand count was proclaiming his distrust of the voivode.

The Great Host of Stirland was arrayed along the tree-line, its pickets clearly visible to the approaching undead, but not so far from the forest as to be beyond the defence of its thick canopy. Von Oberreuth’s troops were largely peasant conscripts, commoners drafted from every village and farm between Wurtbad and Waldenhof. They made for a sorry spectacle, their only uniform a strip of green tied about the sleeves of their woollen tunics, their only weaponry a shaft of sharpened ash or yew. The conscripts were ranked in great square blocks, living walls of humanity arrayed to deny the advance of Vanhal’s deathless horde.

The real strength of von Oberreuth’s army was hidden behind and between the massed conscripts. Footmen, Dienstleute armoured in mail and bearing cruel maces and vicious axes, their kite-shaped shields quartered in the green and gold of Stirland. Horsemen, their lances held at the ready, their steeds draped in the panoply of war. Most impressive of all were the knights, their scale armour covered by gaudy tabards declaring the noble lords to whom each warrior owed fealty. Malbork had heard that the knights had been promised fiefs of their own should Stirland carry the day. Von Oberreuth was no fool. He was looking beyond today’s battle, preparing for the future when he might need a new class of petty noble to support him against the ambitions of the old aristocracy.

In the vanguard of the army were the White Swords, resplendent in their snowy tabards, the plates of their armour painted a milky colour to match the coats of their magnificent destriers. The White Swords were the elite of Wurtbad, a martial society that drew its membership from the oldest Asoborn families. They were the paladins of Stirland, sworn to defend the province with their dying breath. Upon the nasal of each helm was daubed the sign of Rhya the Mother and Taal the Father, eternal emblems of the gods who watched over the Land Across the Rivers. Von Oberreuth belonged to the White Swords and had taken his place among the paladins for the coming battle. It was a gesture meant to inspire the army he led. Whatever dangers they must face, the grand count would face them first.

Of course, those who followed the grand count wouldn’t have the benefit of two Morrite exorcists riding beside them, but that was a small detail von Oberreuth didn’t think they needed to know.

Malbork turned his sceptical eye from the White Swords and his liege lord and instead gazed across the assemblage of troops that formed the Great Host’s right flank. He had to confess that Graf Mandred had dispatched an impressive force to aid Stirland. Two, perhaps even three thousand infantry, all of better calibre than von Oberreuth’s peasant conscripts, many of them rivalling the Dienstleute for quality. Here were hairy Middenlanders with cowhide armour and brutal mattocks, grizzled Middenheimers with chain shirts and steel swords, pale Nordlanders with barbed spears and tall helms, dusky Drakwald archers and grim Hochland axemen. A company of boisterous Ostland spearmen broke into bawdy song, defying the hideous undead with a show of scornful cheer. Their jest was muted by the sombre chants of a flagellant mob, blood dripping from their bare backs as the fanatics lashed themselves with scourges.

The cavalry of Mandred von Zelt was equally diverse. Dour Verenan Templars draped in black, savage Roppsmen from the icy wastes of Kislev, the lightly armoured lancers of Wolfenburg and the heavy horsemen of Krudenwald. Like von Oberreuth, Mandred had his elite troops, in his case the crimson-armoured Knights of the White Wolf. It was easy enough to spot the Graf of Middenheim among his men. He alone was without the white wolf pelt that swung from the shoulders of his knights. Perhaps such an affectation was unnecessary. The men in Mandred’s army were already calling him ‘the Wolf of Sigmar’.

All told, the Great Host was equal to its name. Never had Malbork seen such a vast army. At least not of living men…

The foe that now marched indefatigably towards the forest was more numerous than Malbork had believed possible. Rank after rank of bleached bone and rusted armour, troop after troop of fleshless horses carrying skeletal riders. Vanhal’s legion was as numberless as the stars in the sky. Tattered banners and rotten flags waved above the undead horde, crows and vultures circled above them, drawn by the omnipresent stench of death. Spear and sword, bow and axe, lance and flail, the skeletons came, giving voice to no shouts, no song, no chant. Only the dry rustle of leathery flesh against decayed bone, the clatter of crumbling armour jouncing against morbid frame.

At the core of the legion, like the hub of some obscene wheel, was the necromancer himself. Malbork could see the fiend’s black cloak and the skull-like mask. Even from a distance, his skin crawled at the impression of malefic power emanating from the sorcerer. Vanhal was borne aloft upon a writhing, wailing nimbus of spectral energies, a great pillar of enslaved spirits, their essences fused to form an abominable chariot beneath the necromancer’s throne.

Vanhal raised his arms high and as he did so, three vast and ghastly forms swept down from the sky, the wasted, putrid carcasses of dragons, preserved and animated by the necromancer’s foul arts. Shouts of alarm greeted the descent of the dragons, cries of horror that were silenced by the blare of trumpets. At the signal, the Great Host retreated into the shelter of the trees while bowmen advanced between the ranks and loosed a volley into the hurtling monstrosities.

Arrows by the hundreds whistled up into the reptiles, stabbing into their withered scales and corrupt flesh. The beasts responded with gouts of stinking putrescence, a brew of diabolic corruption that seared its victims to the very marrow. Scores of men fell shrieking beneath the toxic breath. Unable to drop the beasts with their arrows, they were left helpless before the rampaging dragons.

The sacrifice of the archers provided an opportunity for a particular element within Graf Mandred’s force. Rushing onto the field and taking up a position to the flank of the swooping dragons, a regiment of burly dwarfs hastily brought their curious weapons to bear. The dwarfs aimed their weapons – long tubes of steel fixed to stocks of wutroth – skyward. Each warrior set the end of a smouldering cord of hemp against a small opening just behind the steel tube. A moment later, a deafening roar boomed from dozens of firearms as each gunner sent a ball of lead exploding into the decayed dragons. Where the undead brutes had shrugged off the impact of arrows, the dwarfish bullets pulverised bone and shredded flesh. One of the wyrms plummeted to the earth, gouging a great pit as its mass pounded into the field. The sound of the reptile’s bones breaking brought a resounding cheer from the Stirlanders and their allies. The remaining dragons wheeled away, retreating back across the line of Vanhal’s advancing legion.

Malbork looked back at the necromancer, hoping to see some reaction from the fearsome Vanhal to the routing of his foul dragons. The skull-masked sorcerer remained implacable, as emotionless as the skeletons he commanded. A gesture and the dragons began circling over the undead host. Not routed, simply withdrawn. It occurred to Malbork that their foe had more tactical acumen than he would have credited him. The dragons had been a probing attack, simply a test of the Stirlander line. Mandred’s deployment of the dwarfs had exposed one of the teeth hidden inside von Oberreuth’s army.

At another gesture from the necromancer, the entire deathless legion came to a halt with preternatural precision. One breath they were moving, the next they were as still as a mountain, a solid mass of carrion arrayed before the forest. Vanhal leaned forwards upon his spectral throne. For an instant, it seemed to Malbork that the fiend stared directly into his eyes. He shuddered at the contact, feeling the devilish mockery in the necromancer’s glare.

Then there came a flurry of motion from the centre of the undead host. Marching out from between the ranks of silent skeletons were scores of armoured monsters. Flesh blackened and withered by millennia clung to the ancient bones, the bronze armour caked in verdigris, crumbling a little more with each step the horrors took. There was something troubling about that armour, something naggingly familiar. Malbork’s vexation resolved itself when he heard Dregator Iorgu draw a frightened gasp.

‘Impossible!’ Iorgu exclaimed. ‘It wasn’t real! It wasn’t real!’

The wights continued to march, and from the Stirlanders a despairing moan rose. ‘The old kings,’ they wailed. ‘The old kings march to reclaim their land!’

Malbork stared again at Vanhal, understanding now that terrible mockery. He had thought to provoke war between his enemies by convincing Stirland that Vanhal had set the ancient Styrigen dead upon them.

Now, Vanhal was making Malbork’s lie a reality. He had called the dead from their barrows. The Styrigen wights had risen to take their revenge against the Asoborn conquerors.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Averland, 1123

Arch-Lector Hartwich led the outlaw knight down a winding path between the pavilions of the great and the mighty. Clustered at the very core of the encampment, the tents of the nobles and dignitaries were a spectacle, their gaudily painted banners snapping in the winds, bright pennons fluttering from support poles. Soldiers wearing the liveries of a hundred noble houses stood guard outside the tents, leaning against spears and halberds as they watched each passer-by with a suspicious glare. The enticing aromas from a dozen private kitchens wafted through the air, almost blotting out the omnipresent stink of horse dung and human sweat.

‘Where are we going?’ Erich asked the priest for what seemed the hundredth time since they’d quit Hartwich’s own pavilion. This time, however, instead of brushing him off with an injunction to be patient, Hartwich stopped and turned towards the knight. There was a worried look in his eyes.

‘I am taking you to where I think you can work a great good,’ Hartwich said after a moment of inner reflection. ‘Yes, I think Sigmar must indeed have guided you here, in His mercy. But now that we stand upon the precipice, I find myself wondering if I have the right to ask this of you.’

Erich smiled and slapped his gauntlets against his armoured thigh. ‘You’ve asked nothing of me so far. Aside from hiding in a cave for years on end, my only human contact a Taalite priest.’

‘Haerther is a wise man. I knew he would keep you safe,’ Hartwich said.

‘He stayed with me for a time after I took shelter with the Knights of the Black Rose, but mysteriously left us one day, vanished as completely as if he’d never been,’ Erich said.

Hartwich nodded knowingly. ‘Haerther is more comfortable among the trees and meadows, the wild places where he can be closer to Taal. He’s little good around people for very long.’ The priest frowned as his mind turned back to the subject at hand.

‘Erich, I am going to ask your help to heal a great hurt,’ Hartwich said. ‘I’ve tried my best, but it needs a strength more profound than what I can bestow.’

The knight slapped his gauntlets against his thigh again, this time with a bit of irritation behind the gesture. ‘You’re speaking in riddles again,’ he accused.

‘Princess Erna Thornig is in this camp,’ Hartwich stated, his words blunt and to the point. ‘She was rescued from the skaven in Carroburg. Graf Mandred himself found her.’ The priest felt a pang of guilt when he saw the way Erich’s face lit up at the mention of the princess. He remembered watching them together, all those years ago when they’d all been involved in Prince Sigdan’s conspiracy against the Emperor. He’d been praying the light he’d noticed then hadn’t been dimmed by the cruelties of time.

Now that he saw it yet burned, at least in Erich’s heart, Hartwich felt his guilt increase a hundredfold. He reached out and set his hand on Erich’s shoulder. ‘Prepare yourself,’ he cautioned. ‘The princess isn’t the same woman you left in Altdorf.’

Erich shook his head and said sombrely, ‘The woman I left in Altdorf I thought to be dead, murdered by that maggot her father arranged for her to marry.’ He knew it was vile to hold a grudge against the dead, but he still resented Baron Thornig’s callousness in using his own daughter as a means of removing Adolf Kreyssig.

‘There are some things worse than death,’ Hartwich warned. ‘Things that make even a priest lose hope.’ He stared hard at the knight. ‘If there is any feeling for you left in her, it may awaken when she sees you, and in awakening stir the rest of her mind. She may need your strength to support her for a very long time.’

‘She will have it for as long as she wants it,’ Erich vowed. Hartwich nodded and led him on towards a tent that stood by itself. Even the fact that she was being supported by Graf Mandred wasn’t enough to make anyone pitch camp next to a madwoman. Two dwarf guards stood before the tent, the only warriors in the camp with the stomach for such duty.

Hartwich led Erich past the sentries and into the sparingly appointed space beyond. The knight gasped in disbelief when he saw the white-haired, pallid woman. It was like looking at the echo of the Erna he had known in Altdorf. She was lying upon a pile of furs, idly rocking back and forth while pulling clumps of goose-down from a pillow.

‘She has suffered much,’ Hartwich explained. ‘First at the hands of Kreyssig, then as a witness to the cruelties of Boris. Finally there came the long years as slave to the skaven.’

Erich felt the flicker of hope die inside him. ‘What can be done?’ he asked.

‘Pray,’ Hartwich said, but the priest was looking past the knight, watching the woman rocking back and forth. At the sound of Erich’s voice she had perked up. Now she was looking in their direction.

‘Captain? Is it my captain?’ Erna asked. When she saw Erich turn back around, a piteously jubilant smile stretched across her face. Dropping the pillow, she lurched onto her feet and stumbled on her stiff legs towards him.

‘Go to her,’ Hartwich encouraged the perplexed knight. Erich nodded and did as the priest said, meeting Erna halfway across the tent, catching her in his arms.

‘It is you,’ the princess cried, tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘Adolf said he killed you.’

Erich smiled at that. It would be just like the swine to claim he was dead just to inflict that little extra measure of torment on his wife. ‘I don’t die so easily,’ he told her.

Erna drew away from the embrace, staring intently into Erich’s eyes. ‘I killed him,’ she said.

The knight smiled awkwardly. It was common knowledge that Kreyssig was alive and well in Altdorf, still acting as Protector of the Empire. Indeed, he was something of a hero to the people there after fending off a skaven attack.

Erna understood the incredulous expression. Her brow knitted angrily. ‘I killed him,’ she insisted. ‘Doktor Moschner was there. He saw me do it.’ She glanced around warily. ‘I wouldn’t tell anybody because it is a secret but I want you to know. I killed him.’

‘That is all she worries about, this man she says she killed,’ Hartwich explained. ‘She always says it is a secret only the doktor knows. Sometimes she also explains that the doktor was taken away by the skaven.’

Erich sighed. ‘The things Kreyssig must have done to you for you to murder him in your mind,’ he said, his voice almost reduced to a sob as he reached out to stroke Erna’s colourless hair.

Again, the princess pulled back. Ironically, there was an uncomprehending look on her face. ‘Not Adolf,’ she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. Her next words, soft as they were spoken, still had an impact like thunder as they left her lips.

‘I killed Emperor Boris.’

Graf Mandred paced about the confines of his tent, listening again to the report that had just reached him from his scouts. It was about the worst news he could have expected. For this reason, he’d summoned only his closest confederates, the men who had been with him the longest. Even his most ardent supporters like Baroness Carin were excluded from this select group.

‘You’ve heard the reports,’ Mandred challenged his councillors once the scouts finished repeating the information. ‘What is your advice?’

‘An army marching behind us on our flank,’ Ar-Ulric said. ‘It threatens the entire campaign against Averheim. Instead of catching the skaven between us and the Averburg, this force would trap us against the walls of Averheim.’

‘Do we know who they are,’ Duke Schneidereit asked. ‘Perhaps it is another volunteer force from Stirland or Sylvania?’

‘More likely a skaven column,’ Grand Master Vitholf suggested. His face grew grave as he voiced another possibility. ‘It could also be a fresh army from Vanhaldenschlosse.’ After their battle with Vanhal, not a man in Mandred’s army liked the prospect of fighting the undead a second time.

Kurgaz growled into his beard as he suggested yet another dire prospect. ‘Most of the greenskins have been battering away at the dwarfholds in the mountains,’ he said, ‘but it’s always possible some horde of goblins decided to call it quits and look for easier prey.’

Mandred’s fingers clenched about Legbiter’s grip. ‘Whoever they are, we can’t have them on our flank.’ He grimaced as he thought of the other problem at hand. ‘We can’t delay the attack on Averheim. Any delay and I think the contingents from Ostland and Talabecland will go home. We have to strike, and strike soon.’

Grand Master Vitholf stepped over to his graf. ‘There’s only one thing to do then. You’ll need to send a company of cavalry to engage these troops on our flank. Attack swiftly, retreat quickly and lead them off away from the army.’

‘It will be a dangerous duty,’ Mandred cautioned.

Vitholf laughed. ‘That, your highness, is why I am volunteering the Knights of the White Wolf for the job.’

The shrieks of a score of skaven scratched at the air as a jagged chunk of masonry came hurtling out from behind the towering walls of the Averburg. Packed in tight formations around the besieged fortress, every rock lobbed by the defenders wrought a hideous toll from the attackers.

Great Warlord Vrrmik, He who is Twelfth, bruxed his fangs in satisfaction when he caught the scent of the dead and dying ratmen. The humans had directed their artillery against Clan Skab’s positions again, proving Vrrmik’s wisdom in rotating them there. It would make for a formidable object lesson if Skab’s warriors were decimated here. The scum should have stood their ground in Woerden and fought to the last fang instead of turning tail and scampering away after their warlord was killed.

Vrrmik leaned back in his palanquin, a massive throne that had been stitched together from a number of tapestries plundered from the homes of the nobles and then lashed to a jumbled frame that included the altar from a shrine to the goddess Rhya. The altar stone was a bit onerous for Vrrmik’s bearers to shoulder, but the warlord found the smell of the stone as delightful as the texture of the tapestries, so the slaves really had no choice in the matter.

Well, they had one choice, Vrrmik reflected, running his white paw down the haft of the enormous mattock he’d stolen from the dwarfs inside the Ulricsberg. He’d named the thing Skavenbite in recognition of his new position as Vecteek’s successor. With the diminished power of the grey seers, more than ever the occupant of the Twelfth Throne was ruler of the Grey Lords and master of the Council of Thirteen.

There were challengers of course, chief among them the other great warlord clans, Skab and Rictus. Several thousand warriors from each of those clans had been brought to Averheim, determined to win for their warlords some measure of the victory when the Averburg finally fell. It was important to them that Vrrmik and Mors be denied the credit for subduing the city.

Such scheming, however, played right into Vrrmik’s paws. Between Averheim and Woerden all the towns were defended by skaven from Clan Mors, skaven who wouldn’t engage Man-dread’s army as it moved southward but would instead retreat. Vrrmik would open the way for Man-dread to reach Averheim. There, the man-things would obligingly slaughter the treacherous clanrats of Skab and Rictus. Once the decimation of his rivals reached a point where they could safely be considered no longer a threat, Vrrmik would attack with the full might of Mors and the diseased weapons of his ally, Poxmaster Puskab Foulfur.

The humans would think themselves winning a great victory in Averheim, but in fact they would merely be stepping into a carefully laid trap. Prey just waiting for Vrrmik to pounce.

Altdorf, 1124

Adolf Kreyssig and an honour guard drawn from the ranks of the Kaiserknecht sat their horses beneath the ponderous stone arches of the Reikstor, the great gate on the western bank of the River Reik that afforded entrance to Altdorf from the province of Reikland. Rain pounded against the battlements overhead, streaming down from the maws of stone gargoyles and lead-lined culverts. The downpour had sent all but the most determined travellers retreating indoors. What little traffic remained, largely traders desperate to reach the city before market day and refugees from the eastern provinces seeking the security of the capital, was being diverted away from the Reikstor by companies of armed militia. Kreyssig wanted the gate kept clear for a very special visitor from the east.

The years since the Night of the Holy Knives had been eventful. The dominance of Gazulgrund and the Temple of Sigmar had grown despite Kreyssig’s clandestine efforts to undermine it. Even when he’d cut off the supplies of grain being diverted to the Temple, the Grand Theogonist’s power had continued to grow. His cynical belief that a policy of ‘bread for prayer’ was behind the dramatic rise of the Sigmarite congregations had proven woefully wrong. There was much more at work than the disbursement of food to hungry peasants, a force that was so alien to the opportunistic Kreyssig that while he could recognise it and even exploit it he was unable to understand it. That force was simply faith, the stubborn perhaps even desperate willingness of the commoners to believe in something greater than their noble lords and their servile existence.

Elsewhere, however, other forces were at play. Forces Kreyssig was able to understand. Graf Mandred’s campaign against the skaven had swept through Nordland and Ostland, down into Stirland and Sylvania. Wherever the Wolf of Sigmar gave battle, the ratkin were deposed, sent scurrying back to their subterranean lairs. Mandred was hailed as hero and liberator by those he freed from the cruelties of the skaven. Even in the Imperial court there were those who said Mandred von Zelt was the man to reunite the shattered Empire.

Mandred’s army had been active in Averland, campaigning to break the skaven occupation of Averheim. The latest reports to reach Kreyssig had the army turning northward now, marching towards Talabecland and Hochland. If Mandred added these territories to those already beholden to him, there would be no stopping any claim he made upon the Imperial crown.

Kreyssig had ambition, but he was shrewd enough to know when it was useless to stand against the tide of history. Unless he fell in battle, Mandred would become the next Emperor. The Hohenbach dynasty was gone, it would be the von Zelts who would build the future. If he wished to occupy a place of prominence in that future, Kreyssig knew he had to act swiftly. He’d dispatched emissaries to Mandred’s army, sending the graf overtures indicating the Protector’s willingness to support him and help pave the way for his coronation as Emperor.

Those emissaries had returned, bringing back word that Mandred was sending his own messenger to discuss the details of an alliance with Altdorf. Kreyssig’s agents had followed the progress of that messenger, bringing back word at every step of the man’s journey. The last report to reach him made it clear that the expected dignitary would arrive by way of the Reikstor this day unless he stopped somewhere to take shelter from the rain.

Kreyssig wasn’t willing to gamble on the timidity of Mandred’s representative. There were those in Altdorf, chiefly Duke Vidor and his cadre of nobles, who would see any contact between the Protector and Mandred as a show of weakness. They would seize upon any perceived vulnerability to depose the hated commoner from his position. Until he had established a new role with the graf, made secure a new position in the coming regime, Kreyssig couldn’t afford for anyone but himself to have access to Mandred’s emissary or for anyone to even be aware of the man’s presence in Altdorf.

Hence, the powerful and despotic Adolf Kreyssig sat beneath the archway, listening to the rain and watching the road. He drew the folds of his bearskin cloak tighter around himself against the chill in the air. The rain might be good for the crops, but it was eroding his patience.

On the road ahead, two riders appeared, immediately arresting Kreyssig’s attention. One rider was a tall man bundled in a rain-soaked woollen cloak. The other rider, mounted upon a mule, was shorter but far broader of shoulder. Even at a distance, it was clear the second rider was a dwarf. Kreyssig’s spies had told him that the emissary was travelling in the company of a dwarfish bodyguard. The keenest anticipation held Kreyssig as he watched the militiamen wave the two riders towards the Reikstor.

Spurring his own steed, Kreyssig rode out from the shelter of the arch to greet the emissary. It would help establish a thread of commonality if he exposed himself to the elements as the messenger had done, showing the man that whatever Kreyssig’s position he was eager to work with the Middenheimers and their allies. All his life, Kreyssig had seen how much easier people were to manipulate when they believed in the existence of a common bond.

‘Welcome to Imperial Altdorf,’ Kreyssig announced, removing his hat with a flourishing sweep of his hand. As he bowed his head, his sharp eyes studied the two riders. The dwarf was a grim, cheerless figure, his head shaved into a single strip of hair that had been stained a brilliant crimson and greased into a spiky crest. In defiance of the elements, he travelled with neither cloak nor cape, nor indeed any shirt upon his back, instead preferring to journey bare-chested in order to display the whirling tattoos inked into his skin. The Protector’s greeting brought only a brusque huff of acknowledgement from the dwarf as he blew drops of rain from his beard.

The other rider, the human emissary, was covered by a grey cloak, the hood drawn up over the man’s face. As Kreyssig stretched out his hand in welcome, the emissary drew back the hood. The colour drained out of Kreyssig’s face when he saw who it was.

‘It has been a long time, Adolf,’ Erich von Kranzbeuhler said, each word spoken with such cold precision as to curdle the blood.

Kreyssig recoiled, waving his hat in a frantic gesture to summon the honour guard to his side. Von Kranzbeuhler! A man who by all rights should be dead. He was a member of the outlawed Reiksknecht, the order of knights who had opposed the massacre of the Bread Marchers and later conspired to depose Emperor Boris. When he’d last seen von Kranzbeuhler, it had been in the sewers beneath the Imperial palace trying to escape with Ghal Maraz. The rebels had stolen it from the palace and were trying to keep it from the possession of Boris Goldgather, thereby stripping his reign of some of its legitimacy. Kreyssig had nearly lost his life trying to recover the relic.

The outlaw knight smiled coldly when he saw the shock on Kreyssig’s face. ‘No ghost, Adolf. I am real.’ He reached beneath his cloak, bringing out a roll of vellum. Carefully, shielding the scroll with his body from the rain, Erich unrolled it just enough to expose the waxen seal fixed to the bottom of the document. There was no mistaking that seal. It was the insignia of Middenheim’s royal house, the symbol of Graf Mandred.

‘Call back your dogs,’ Erich warned as the Kaiserknecht started to draw their blades. ‘As you can see, I am the man you have been expecting.’

A thin smile worked itself onto the Protector’s face. His shock at seeing his old enemy was profound, but even more profound was the message Mandred was sending by dispatching this knight as his representative. Very few people would know about what von Kranzbeuhler had stolen. Mandred must know that Kreyssig was one of them. Without saying a word, he was letting Kreyssig know where Ghal Maraz was and announcing his intention to claim the Imperial crown. If von Kranzbeuhler had brought Sigmar’s Hammer to Mandred, his claim would be seen as ordained by the gods themselves. No one would even try to stand in his way.

Kreyssig waved aside his guards, snarling at them to withdraw back under the archway where the noise of the rain would deafen them to the words he would trade with von Kranzbeuhler. ‘I will not insult you by protesting that what I did I did for the Empire, that I was only following the orders of Boris Goldgather.’

Von Kranzbeuhler nodded his appreciation of such courtesy. ‘A villain who takes pride in his accomplishments is a rare thing. Such honesty in a blackguard is rarer still.’ It was not lost on Kreyssig that the knight’s hand had dropped to the hilt of his sword.

‘You would dearly like to kill me, wouldn’t you?’ Kreyssig taunted. ‘But you are in service to Graf Mandred now and your sense of duty won’t permit you to indulge yourself. Mandred’s army must be stretched thin after so many conquests. I don’t think he would risk war with Altdorf. Certainly not over some personal grievance harboured by a vagabond outlaw. However fine the presents that outlaw might have brought him.’

The knight’s hand clenched into a fist, striking against his thigh in a show of frustrated anger. ‘His highness desires friendship with Altdorf,’ Erich stated. ‘He is concerned with exterminating the skaven threat and is worried that he will lose precious time if he has to conquer Altdorf as well.’

‘And what does he offer for Altdorf’s friendship?’ Kreyssig asked. ‘I suppose that he won’t allow me to remain as the Emperor’s steward. But I’m not a greedy man. I would be content with a less lofty title.’ He sneered at von Kranzbeuhler. ‘I believe the role of Prince of Altdorf is still vacant.’

Erich bristled at the remark, fully aware that it had been Kreyssig who had thwarted Prince Sigdan’s coup against Emperor Boris and thereby had been responsible for the prince’s death. He retaliated for the mocking barb with one of his own.

‘Your wife sends her tender regards,’ the knight hissed.

Kreyssig flinched as though he’d been physically struck.

Erich laughed at the despot’s surprise. ‘Yes, Princess Erna is alive. She escaped the fate of Boris Goldgather and his guests. As we speak, she is the welcome guest of Graf Mandred’s court. She is eager to see you again. You will find her quite changed, Adolf. She’s not the same woman you tortured and imprisoned.’

Kreyssig turned his horse about. ‘Come,’ he ordered as he walked towards the Reikstor. ‘You must be tired after your long journey. The courtesies of the Imperial palace are at your disposal. After you have rested, we will discuss what Graf Mandred is willing to offer and what I can provide in return.

‘Affairs of state first. Old reunions will have to wait until a more providential time.’

Von Kranzbeuhler followed Kreyssig through the Reikstor. ‘I am at your convenience,’ he promised. ‘I look forward to it with the keenest anticipation,’ he added as his fingers again closed about the hilt of his sword.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Averland, 1123

Against the night sky, the fires burning inside Averheim cast a hellish glow. It was akin to staring into the maw of a gargantuan dragon, the ruined towers and temples of the city standing in black silhouette against the flames like the jagged fangs of the monster. The dull, distant clamour of battle raging about the besieged Averburg was transformed into the reptile’s hiss and roar, distorted and strangely magnified by its circuitous passage through the streets.

Mandred had learned long ago the wisdom of engaging the ratmen in the clean light of day whenever possible. Since they were tunnel-haunting beasts, the skaven eye was especially sensitive to sunlight. Given their preference, the vermin would fight in darkness. At Wolfenburg, the creatures had gone so far as to drag grass and timber to the walls of the city, burning it so that they might wage their siege beneath a mantle of smoke. It seemed the ratkin were following the same tactics here.

Desiring every advantage over the foe, Mandred ordered a halt when his army neared Averheim. With the day nearly spent they would need to wait until daybreak before starting their attack against the skaven. Timber palisades were quickly erected against any assault by the ratmen across the plain outside Averheim and a battery of scouts and sentries was dispatched to watch for the enemy while the rest of the army struck camp.

Most curious among Mandred’s precautions were the iron rods his troops pounded deep into the ground. Twenty feet long, the rods were struck again and again until only two feet remained poking up from the earth. At each sunken rod, a dwarf was stationed, with one hand resting on the top of the rod. It was a precaution that had been adapted from the methods used by the dwarfs to warn them of the presence of skaven in their tunnels. Vibrations in the earth would be conducted through the metal rod and detected by the hand resting against it. If the ratmen were burrowing beneath the encampment, the dwarfs would feel the vibrations.

It was towards midnight when the dwarfs gave the alarm. Sleepy-eyed men spilled from their tents, hurriedly strapping on their swords and donning shirts of mail. The alert spread swiftly through the encampment. Kurgaz himself rushed to Mandred’s tent to warn the graf.

‘Skaven,’ the dwarf said, investing the name with such hatred that he had to spit after uttering it.

Beck helped Mandred into his armour, strapping the steel breastplate about the nobleman’s chest. Mandred frowned at his bodyguard’s own wardrobe, a linen nightshirt and a pair of boots. ‘See to your own armour,’ he told the knight.

Beck shook his head as he removed a vambrace from the armour rack. ‘My duty is to guard your life,’ he said, then rapped his knuckle against the steel plate he held. ‘This will do a better job than I could ever do.’

‘See to your armour,’ Lady Mirella ordered Beck, rushing forward to take over the outfitting of her lover. Beck was hesitant to relinquish his labour. The noblewoman scowled at him. ‘Many are the times I helped Prince Sigdan into his armour before a tourney,’ she told the knight. ‘He never suffered for my attentions.’ Reluctantly, Beck withdrew, hurrying off into the night to find his own tent.

While Mirella strapped him into his armour, Mandred spoke with Kurgaz. ‘Can you tell how close they are, or how many?’

‘There’s some miners could tell you how heavy each rat in the pack was by the way the stake wobbles,’ Kurgaz said. ‘But we don’t have anybody that good with us. All we know is that they’re close enough to make the ground shiver, and that’s a damn sight too close.’

Mandred nodded grimly. ‘If we knew where they’d break surface, we could cut them down as they brewed up from their hole.’

‘Aye, that we could,’ Kurgaz said. ‘As it stands, however, we’ll just have to wait for them to poke their noses out.’

At that moment, screams and shouts rang out from across the encampment. The skaven had poked their noses out, not from a single hole but from dozens. Cursing bitterly, Kurgaz unslung the warhammer from his back, the brutal weapon he’d adopted ever since Drakdrazh was stolen by the skaven.

Mandred hastily pulled away from Mirella. Catching up Legbiter from where it rested alongside the armour stand, he ripped the runefang from its scabbard and tossed the sheath aside. The echo of his hatred blazed up in his eyes, but it was subdued by a far more important feeling – concern for the men whose lives were imperilled by the skaven assault.

‘Ulric grant me strength,’ Mandred prayed as he followed Kurgaz out into the carnage of battle.

‘Ulric grant me strength!’ the cry whistled through the bloodied face of Ar-Ulric as the old priest brought his axe cleaving down into the verminous skull of his attacker. A stagnant, retched broth of foulness bubbled up from the robed ratman’s head, a treacle too pestiferous to be called blood. The stricken thing collapsed at his feet, gnashing its fangs violently as it snapped impotently at its killer. While the thing was yet in its final death throes, another of the vermin sprang forward, trampling the dying skaven underfoot in its rabid fury to close with Ar-Ulric.

The wolf-priest was all but surrounded now. Four of his Teutogen Guard were down, slain not by the rusted blades and cudgels of the robed skaven but by the diseased fumes billowing from the grisly censer one of the monsters bore. As the foulness had wafted across them, each of the brave warriors had collapsed, vomiting up blood and flecks of tissue as the filth scorched their insides and corrupted their flesh.

The censer bearer itself had fallen soon afterward, overcome by the fumes of the very weapon it carried. The hooded ratman lay in a heap beside the men it had slaughtered, like a dog laid out at the feet of an ancient hero. The creature’s death, however, had done little to cheer the men fighting to defend the shrine of Ulric. Four of their number were killed almost at the onset of the fray, leaving only six to hold the shrine. Already they had cut down a score of the ratmen, yet for each skaven they killed, three more seemed to boil up from the hole to take their place.

By accident or design, the burrow the plague monks had been digging had opened up almost directly beneath the shrine. The stone statue of Ulric in his manifestation as the God of War had nearly fallen into the pit as it opened. Indeed, the statue had been purposefully toppled from its plinth by Ar-Ulric to prevent it from being knocked into the stygian darkness. With more of the creatures swarming from similar holes throughout the encampment, Ar-Ulric and his Teutogen Guard found themselves alone.

The heavy armour of the Teutogen Guard preserved them against the snapping fangs and stabbing blades of the ratmen. The plague monks threw themselves upon the warriors with a reckless ferocity they’d never encountered in skaven before. Foam dripped from the mouths of the ratmen, their eyes glazed with a feral madness. Again and again they would fly at the men, regardless of their own hurts. When one of the guards was finally overcome, felled by a slash across his neck, the skaven pounced upon him, hacking his warm flesh until the shrine was coated in blood.

Sight of the bestial savagery enflamed the outrage of Ar-Ulric and his remaining men. Howling the name of their god, they surged into the plague monks. Over and again, the priest’s axe flashed down, hewing asunder the diseased bodies of his foes. For an instant, the slaughter wrought by Ar-Ulric seemed to impress even the crazed minds of the rat-monks. The frenzied attack faltered. The creatures turned back towards their hole.

Before the plague monks could rout, another of their number crept out from the pit. He was a wizened, shrivelled-looking ratman, his green robes embroidered with strange sigils and arcane runes. Great antlers spread from the sides of his skull-like head. The creature glared balefully at Ar-Ulric with blemished eyes that looked like scabrous pools of pus.

A tremor of fear pulsed through Ar-Ulric as he beheld the monster. From those who had been rescued at Carroburg had come stories of this noxious beast: Puskab Foulfur, the loathsome Poxmaster of the skaven. The Black Plague, the survivors whispered, had been crafted by this inhuman sorcerer. If true, Ar-Ulric gazed upon a monster that was responsible for more death and destruction than any mortal creature since the age of Nagash the Accursed.

Puskab chittered malignantly at his fleeing minions. He stretched forth his paw and one of the plague monks collapsed, the flesh across its body bubbling like water brought to a boil as buboes erupted across its hide. The plague priest’s object lesson had its effect on the other skaven. Squeaking and snarling, the monks returned to the attack.

More than the effect Puskab’s profane magic had upon his verminous minions, it was the effect it had on Ar-Ulric’s own guards that incensed the priest. Where but a moment before the warriors had been viciously throwing the ratmen back, now they recoiled before the monsters, falling back step by tremulous step. Ar-Ulric strangled the fear inside his own breast. Hefting his axe, he brought it cleaving through the neck of one plague monk and broke the jaw of a second with the return sweep of the weapon. Throwing back his head, he howled the name of Ulric.

The howl was answered by a white-furred fury. A great white wolf with pale eyes leapt out from the darkness, lunging into the ratmen with tooth and claw. The creatures, only a moment before emboldened to the point of frenzy by Puskab, now squealed in fright. Ar-Ulric froze, gazing in open wonder at the wolf’s avenging assault. Alone among the stunned men who watched the wolf butcher a path through the plague monks, he recognised the creature as the other self of Hulda the Ulricskind. Horror at the witch’s transformation warred with gratitude for her defence of Ulric’s shrine in the old priest’s heart.

Puskab Foulfur spun around at the onset of Hulda’s attack. The plague priest drew away from the rampaging white wolf, seizing one of his acolytes and holding the squirming monk between himself and the huge animal. At the same time, however, Puskab began to work his own magic. Grisly green flames erupted from the tips of his branching antlers; his blemished eyes glowed with a spectral light. Throwing open his jaws, Puskab spewed a stream of corrosive magic at the wolf. Instead of his foe, his foul magic caught two of his skaven instead, melting the screaming monks into steaming puddles of fur and bone.

Ar-Ulric rushed at the plague priest before he could send a second bilious gout at Hulda. His axed hewed into the monk Puskab was using for his shield, striking the wretch down. Even as Ar-Ulric drew back his arm for another attack, Puskab opened his jaws and sent a stream of caustic filth splashing into the old man’s face. Ar-Ulric’s scream became a liquid bubble as he collapsed to the ground, his face reduced to the smoking ruin of a skull.

A low growl brought Puskab spinning around. The plague priest squeaked in terror as the white wolf pounced at him. Exhibiting ability far beyond his wasted appearance, Puskab leapt back into the hole, hurtling down into the blackness of the burrow below. As he did so, Hulda’s jaws clamped tight about the plague priest’s naked tail. A twist of her lupine head as Puskab fell into the burrow and the scaly appendage was torn out by its roots.

The other plague monks quickly followed their leader in retreat. Hulda and the Teutogen Guard let them flee. Men and wolf alike gathered about the corpse of Ar-Ulric. While the warriors gathered up the priest’s body, the wolf sank down onto her haunches and raised her head to the heavens.

Hulda’s mournful howl echoed above the encampment, ringing out above the din of battle, commending the spirit of a brave man into the keeping of his god.

Mandred sank down onto his knees, pounding his fists into the bloodied ground inside his tent. Beside him, Kurgaz and the other warriors who had fought with him in the battle kept silent.

The plague monks had been driven from the encampment, routed before they could wreak much havoc. The purpose of their attack seemed to have been to get at the food stores, but in this they had been thwarted by the fast action of Captain Aldinger and his Knights of the Black Rose. Overall, the ratmen had inflicted few casualties, with fewer than a hundred dead and not many more than that wounded. Among the casualties, however, was the spiritual centre of the Middenheim host, Ar-Ulric, the grizzled old High Priest of Ulric. His loss was one that shook the entire complement, a loss scarcely alleviated by the tales of the Teutogen Guard, stories about a great white wolf that had suddenly manifested and tried to save Ar-Ulric.

Mandred was stunned by the death of his old councillor and spiritual mentor, and even more alarmed by the eerie manifestation of the white wolf associated with the priest’s death. The animal that had so often crossed Mandred’s path once again appearing from nowhere and returning just as suddenly into the aethyr. It was a circumstance that vexed his mind with both regret and dismay. He’d thought the wolf a sending of Ulric, yet the beast hadn’t been able to save the old priest from the skaven.

Within Mandred’s tent, however, was the mute evidence of the cruellest cut the monsters had inflicted upon the army’s leader. It was difficult at first to make out precisely what the gory heap of meat lying on the floor was. When the outlines of a body revealed themselves, few were grateful for such resolution.

Beck pushed aside the flap of the tent and hurried to his master’s side. He stopped short when he saw the butchered corpse on the floor. ‘The skaven,’ he said, his voice less than a whisper.

Mandred looked up, his eyes blazing with rekindled hatred, with the malignance of unbridled vengeance. ‘Form the men into their companies,’ he ordered. ‘Let every soldier gird his armour and take up his sword. I want anyone able to bear a weapon ready to march at first light.’

The graf turned his eyes back to the mutilated body that had been Mirella less than an hour before.

‘We ride with the dawn,’ Mandred growled. ‘Woe to the man who shows these vermin any mercy, for he will find none in me.’

Stirland, 1122

The Great Host’s battle-line faltered as the ancient wights marched forwards. An aura of unspeakable and primordial evil clung to the Styrigen dead, the accusation of ancient revenge and forgotten outrage. Ghostly fires blazed from the sockets of each skull, shining with the infernal hatred of a vanquished race.

Terror closed upon the hearts of the Stirlanders, Grand Count von Oberreuth’s army stood upon the edge of panic. It needed but a moment more to rout the entire force.

From the Great Host’s right flank, a small company of riders emerged. Foremost among them was a bearded man, the open face of his helm resembling the jaws of a wolf. The crest that rose above that helm was a new symbol, that of a rampant wolf holding a great hammer in its paws. It was the symbol of the leader who had rallied the whole of the north to his cause, the man who styled himself the Wolf of Sigmar. With Graf Mandred rode two old men, one dressed in the vestments of a Sigmarite arch-lector, the other wearing the high robes of Ulrican priesthood.

‘Men of Stirland!’ Mandred’s voice rang out as he drew rein before the faltering Great Host. Some trick of acoustics or magic magnified that voice, projecting it deep into the forest, causing it to ring even in the ears of Count Malbork’s Sylvanians far on the left flank. ‘Fear no darkness, sons of Queen Freya! The blood of the Asoborns burns pure in your veins! Do not betray that legacy! Show Ulric and Sigmar, Taal and Rhya that you are worthy of your ancestors!’ With a flourish, Mandred threw back his cloak, exposing the bared length of Legbiter. The runefang shone with arcane brilliance as he held it aloft. Grimly, he pointed the blade at the advancing undead. ‘Do not fear these grave-cheating ghouls! Remember it was your ancestors who sent them there! Remember that Sigmar gave this land to you, not to them!’

From throats that had been frozen in fear a moment before there now rose a thunderous cheer. Peasant conscripts and armoured Dienstleute brought spear and sword crashing against their shields, a sound of such violence that it boomed like the bellow of an avalanche. Upon his spectral throne, Vanhal gazed in wonder at the spectacle. For an instant, the entire deathless legion was still as the master necromancer puzzled over this mere mortal who would defy all the powers of Old Night.

The cheering army fell silent when Vanhal raised a wizened hand and pointed his bony finger at Graf Mandred. All could sense the hideous power when it erupted from the sorcerer’s talon. A phantasmal force sped towards the Middenheimer, gathering a miasma of shape and form as it hurtled towards him. As it swept through the ranks of unmoving skeletons, bones exploded into dust, the decayed powders drawn into the morbid cyclone.

Mandred’s panicked horse threw its master from the saddle and galloped away. The steeds of both priests bolted as Vanhal’s deathly spell came hurtling onwards, withering the grass beneath it as it flew towards its victim.

Rising from his sprawl, Mandred poised himself upon one knee and held Legbiter before him. There was no fear in the graf’s eyes, no doubt upon his countenance, only the grimmest resolve.

The necromantic bolt crashed against the ensorcelled blade of Legbiter, evaporating like so much mist and fog. A patina of bone powder drifted to the earth, sizzling for a moment before the last dregs of arcane power faded into nothingness. Mandred stood, glowering down at the ectoplasmic residue. Then he glared across the field, locking eyes with the ghoulish gaze of Vanhal. Defiantly, Mandred again pointed his runefang at the necromancer.

A second cheer erupted from the mortal army, dwarfing the first shout to insignificance. ‘For Stirland!’ Count von Oberreuth roared as he spurred his destrier forwards. The White Swords charged after him, the rest of the Stirland horse following suit. Boldly they rode towards the Styrigen wights. In a crash of armour and bone they slammed into the ghastly creatures. With lance and sword they brought the loathsome undead a second and more final death.

The Battle of Fellwald had been joined.

Malbork von Drak scowled as he watched the carnage unfold. Von Oberreuth’s horses were decimating Vanhal’s undead, exterminating them on an appalling scale. It had been his plan to have the two forces decimate each other, not have the Stirlanders simply walk over the monsters.

‘Excellency, shall we assist the grand count?’ the question came from Dregator Iorgu. Malbork clenched his fist, more angry at the appropriateness of the question than anything else. The way the battle was shaping up, the necessity of protecting the left flank was vanishing. Already Graf Mandred’s troops were closing from the right and engaging the undead. If the Sylvanians didn’t follow the Middenheimer’s example, it was certain that von Oberreuth would demand an accounting.

The voivode started to answer Iorgu, to give the order for the Nachtsheer to advance, when a cold shiver ran through him. Looking away from his henchman, he studied the battlefield. Something was happening there, something that the commanders in the thick of the melee couldn’t see. The dead that Graf Mandred and the grand count had left littering the ground behind their advance were stirring. Shattered bone was knitting itself back together; mangled skeletons were raising themselves from their own dissolution.

It didn’t take the witchsight of a warlock to see the sorcerous power exuding from Vanhal’s body. It was like gazing upon the emanations of some black and necrotic star, ebony tatters of power that snaked and slithered along the ground to restore a profane mockery of life to the undead and the mortal men they had vanquished.

Cries of terror and warning rose from the infantry still sheltering in the woods, but the alarm came too late. The fire from human archers and dwarf gunners was too little to stem the disaster. Hurtling down from the sky, a headless dragon vomited burning putrescence from the stump of its neck onto the phalanx of Middenland foot knights who would have marched to the relief of their embattled comrades. Under the dragon’s assault, the infantry fled back into the forest.

Malbork shuddered, appreciating now the diabolical tactics of the necromancer. Vanhal had allowed his forces to be decimated, drawing his mortal foes ever deeper into an infernal trap. With every yard they advanced, the cavalry left a yard of corpses behind them. Now, as the necromancer’s baleful power saturated the land, the attackers found themselves enmeshed in a solid ring of enemies. A cordon of merciless skeletons now converged upon the horsemen from all sides. As he watched, Malbork saw the second of Vanhal’s dragons come diving down, incinerating dozens of knights, indifferent to the scores of skeletons that melted beneath its breath. Even as they fell, the steaming bodies of the dragon’s victims stirred and lurched to their feet.

‘I think,’ Malbork said as he stroked his thick moustache, ‘we shall stay precisely where we are.’ The voivode didn’t bother to restrain his laughter. After today, at least von Oberreuth would no longer be a problem and if Lothar von Diehl managed his side of their compact, Vanhal wouldn’t be a worry much longer either.

So rapt was he in watching the havoc unfolding before the eaves of Fellwald that Malbork didn’t see the frantic Sylvanian scouts when they came galloping towards their voivode. His first awareness of their approach was when his bodyguards formed ranks around him, wary that some disloyal peasant might have taken it in mind to assassinate their despotic master.

The scouts, however, had a different enemy in mind. As the foremost of the riders drew rein before the voivode, he began to stammer a confused account of being attacked in the hollow they were watching. Malbork listened to the terrified babble for a moment, then spurred his steed forwards, brushing aside his protectors. ‘Make sense or I’ll hang your guts in a tree,’ he growled at the scout.

By way of explanation, the frightened man turned around in his saddle and pointed a shaking hand towards the hollow. As he did so, scurrying shapes emerged from the shadowy vale. Shouts of alarm rose from the Nachtsheer when they saw the things, watched the fading sun glisten from bleached bone and rusty steel.

A flank attack? Had Vanhal added such a deployment to his strategy? The thought chilled Malbork, but as he watched more of the enemy come out of the darkness, the truth seemed even worse. These were no undead, the exposed bone they saw wasn’t the skeletons of wights and wraiths but rather the macabre armour worn by living creatures, things every bit as monstrous as Vanhal’s obscene creations.

It seemed another faction had seized upon Malbork’s idea of letting Stirlander and undead exterminate one another. Seized upon it and made it their own.

The creatures lurking underneath that bony armour were unmistakable. The same monsters that had ravaged and plundered most of the Empire. The loathsome ratmen were come to destroy both armies.

The only thing standing in their way was the tiny company of Sylvanians.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Averland, 1123

Graf Mandred sat upon his white destrier before the massed ranks of his cavalry. The horsemen would make a probing attack against the walls of Averheim to determine where the fortifications were weakest and where their siege engines – catapults from the human realms, cannon brought down from the mountains by dwarf mercenaries – would be most effectively concentrated. The infantry, kept busy through the night assembling the massive towers of hide and timber that would allow them to assault the battlements directly, were catching a much-needed rest. Their part would come after the cavalry and artillery had done their jobs.

Mandred stared at the sprawl of Averheim. By night it had looked like some hellish inferno aglow with daemonic fires. The sight by day was even more disheartening. The once great city looked like a blackened wound, the burnt-out rubble strewn about the landscape like a great carcass. Already a thick plume of smoke stretched into the sky from the bonfires the skaven were setting. Closer to the city, Mandred knew the smoke would blot out the sun, affording the verminous monsters the darkness that was their element.

‘Gaze upon this place, my brothers,’ Mandred enjoined the troops who followed him. ‘Lock this vision in your hearts; bury it in your souls. Look on the corpse of Averheim and know that this will be the fate of your cities and your homes. If we falter, if we fail this day, all we have fought for will be for naught. The ratkin will be resurgent, their hordes will sweep across the land in a great blight and usher in a darkness even the gods will not wipe away. We are the last shield of mankind, the last sword of the light. To us is given the honour of breaking the shadow of the rat. To us is given the glory and the burden. Let each man prove worthy of the task the gods have entrusted to him!’

A fierce cheer rose from a thousand riders, a roar that boomed across the plain like thunder. Like thunder too was the pounding of hooves as the horsemen galloped towards the blackened city.

As he rode towards the walls, Mandred could see the skaven sentries scurrying about behind the battlements, squeaking and shrieking the alarm to their commanders. The vermin had no archers – in the blighted underworld they infested there was no need for such skill. The absence of bowmen among their swarms was keenly felt by the ratmen now. The bark and crack of a handful of jezzails was the only opposition the monsters could offer as Mandred’s cavalry swept across the plain. It was only when they got within a few horse-lengths of the walls that masses of emaciated ratkin armed with crude leather slings appeared on the walls and were able to offer any sort of challenge. Their bullets, however, were hastily loosed and poorly aimed. The skaven slaves had no hunger for battle, no great heart to defend their cruel masters. Moreover, their courage evaporated when they saw the human riders galloping straight towards the battlements, armour shining in the sun, pennants fluttering in the breeze. The awesome sight made the creatures shrink back against the crenellations, stirring themselves only when the abusive whips of their overseers forced them into action.

Across the length of the walls, Mandred saw much the same scene. Focusing upon the besieged Averburg, the skaven had left only the dregs of their army to defend the walls behind them. More, the ratkin had done little to repair the damage inflicted upon those walls in their initial attack. A gatehouse in the western approach had been so sloppily mended that one of its walls was simply a pile of rubble that had been dragged out from the city and heaped against the side of the fortification. One look at the slovenly construction and Mandred knew where his army would make its attack. Even the moat that ran along the western wall had been drained, its bottom sown with what looked like a crop of runty corn stalks. If it didn’t suit his own purposes so well, Mandred would have been appalled by the sheer arrogance of the ratkin.

‘Sound the recall,’ Mandred ordered the trumpeter riding beside him. While the knight blew into his horn, the graf turned in his saddle and motioned to the banner bearer following behind him. The knight nodded and pulled a cord on the standard he carried, unfurling a yellow flag. It was a sign that would be seen by the artillery assembled across the plain, alerting them that the graf had chosen their target.

Even as Mandred’s cavalry galloped away from the wall, the catapults and cannon began their barrage. He smiled at the craftiness of the dwarfs. To deceive the skaven about their intentions, the artillery would be directed against several places along the wall. Only a quarter of the total barrage would be focused on the real target until the advance of the infantry and their siege towers made such deception pointless. Then the full might of the barrage would pour down upon the gatehouse and the wall around it. If everything worked to plan, the skaven defenders in that position would be pounded into complete disarray and the monsters would be too late to rush reinforcements to secure the area before Mandred’s forces came pouring in.

The graf watched as the first boulders and cannonballs came slamming into Averheim. He reached to his arm, fingering the strip of bloodied cloth tied about his armour, a piece cut from Mirella’s bloodied dress. There would be a reckoning this day, he swore it by all Ulric and Sigmar and any other god who would listen. The ratmen had much to atone for, but this day, this day he consecrated to the woman he had loved and who had been taken from him by the cringing monsters.

Whatever god the skaven owned, that foul being would be meeting a great many of his pestiferous children soon.

Vrrmik kept to his subterranean burrow, listening with keen anticipation as each messenger brought more details to him about the battle being fought overhead. The great warlord stroked his whiskers and chittered in delight. Everything was proceeding exactly as his brilliant plan had anticipated.

The midnight assault by Clan Pestilens against the human encampment had achieved its purpose magnificently even if Puskab Foulfur had failed to poison the army’s food stores. Vrrmik had anticipated that it would take the threat of starvation to goad the humans into swift and desperate action. He was surprised that it had needed nothing more than the attack itself to provoke Man-dread into immediate attack. It was an important lesson to bear in mind, this recklessness of the humans to react to any attack by staging one of their own. Vrrmik could liken their reaction only to the mindless belligerence of ants when their nest had been disturbed.

Whatever the cause and whatever the reason, Man-dread was playing right into Vrrmik’s paws. As each scout came scampering back to him, the Grey Lord chortled a little more loudly. The slaves holding the outer walls had been overrun; the humans had brought up their foot troops and were invading the city.

He almost wished he could be there to smell the terror in the scents of Warlord Hakrr and Warlord Ransik when they found humans pouring into the rear of their armies. The hordes of Clan Rictus and Clan Skab were ringed around the Averburg, so keen to steal the victory from Clan Mors that they’d completely ignored the thinning of Vrrmik’s own forces laying siege to the stubborn human fortress. Most of those Vrrmik had left behind were slaves and warriors from thrall clans, losses that Mors would easily replace.

But it wasn’t the decimation of his skaven rivals alone that excited Vrrmik. Soon he would cut the pelt from Man-dread, this annoying human who had caused so much distress to the Under-Empire. In some ways, Vrrmik felt obliged to Man-dread. Indeed, if the human hadn’t already existed he thought he would have had to invent him. Man-dread’s attacks had sapped the strength and injured the pride of many clans, among them even the mighty Pestilens itself. He had proven useful in curtailing the reckless ambitions of lesser skaven, of reminding them of their place within the hierarchy of Skavenblight.

Now, however, Man-dread had made the mistake of crossing claws with Clan Mors. His usefulness was almost at an end. Having been built up as the great threat to skavendom, it was time for the human to be sacrificed to the greater glory of Vrrmik.

Vrrmik closed his paws tighter about the heft of Skavenbite as he listened to the frantic report from the exhausted messenger who had scurried all the way from the cellars near the Averburg to the great warlord’s hidden lair. He bruxed his fangs together in delight as he heard the news. Man-dread’s troops had reached the rear of Warlord Ransik’s clanrats. Even better, the humans within the fortress were sallying forth to engage Warlord Hakrr’s stormvermin.

Vrrmik reared up to his full imposing height. A steady diet of specially prepared meats and cheeses infused with warpstone dust had swollen his musculature to a degree where his fur had abandoned the effort to clothe the bulging biceps and triceps, leaving great patches of his body naked to the skin. His armour, festooned with spikes and warpstone charms, exuded the scent of slaves slaughtered only that morning so that none of his warriors could fail to detect the smell of their warlord. A bladed tail-ring encircled the scaly appendage as it lashed to and fro behind the monster’s back.

‘Attack-maim! Destroy-die!’ Vrrmik growled at his clanrats. The murderous hammer he bore came smashing down, reducing the head of the messenger into a bloody mist with a single blow. The violent display urged his warriors into a frenzy of activity.

Light streamed down into the tunnels as the skaven pulled aside the camouflaged covers. Hidden by the stalks of black corn growing in the loose layer of dirt strewn over them, the mats were dumped into the burrow and the skaven swarmed up into the dry moat outside the walls of Averheim. Warning trumpets blasted from the human encampment far across the plain as the teeming hordes of Clan Mors surged up onto the surface.

The warning was sounded too late. Even as the human soldiers who had stayed behind to protect the breach turned to see why the alarm had sounded, the skaven were among them. Not the weak, half-starved slaves who had defended the walls, but armoured clanrats and stormvermin. The horde swept across the horrified men in a tidal wave of slashing blades and snapping jaws.

Vrrmik advanced with his warriors, exulting in the raw power of Skavenbite. A sweep of his hammer and a human was flung twenty feet into the air, his body crashing to earth in a puddle of splintered bone and ruptured flesh. An overhand blow of the warhammer and an armoured knight was driven into the ground like an iron nail, his feet so firmly embedded in the flagstones that a second strike from the weapon ripped his legs off at the knees.

More than the havoc inflicted by his hammer, it was the terror the carnage evoked that set Vrrmik’s blood racing. The savoury smell of fear in the scent of his minions, the stink of terror in the sweat of the humans. Vrrmik was a demigod of death and destruction, a living engine of slaughter and ruin.

Furiously, Vrrmik drove his horde on into the human ranks. His trap was sprung; Man-dread’s army was caught inside Averheim, pinned between the stone walls and the hordes of Rictus and Skab. Mors would press the humans further into the toils of the other clans, equally happy with whichever side suffered losses. There was only one death Vrrmik refused to concede to the other skaven, one death that he would deny even his own warriors.

The keenest noses among the scavenging troglodytes of Clan Skrittlespike followed close beside Great Warlord Vrrmik, their senses trained to pick out one scent from among the countless smells and odours in the air. Their purpose was to sniff out Man-dread himself and guide Vrrmik to him.

When Man-dread perished, it would be beneath the mangling sweep of Skavenbite. When the hope of humanity was slaughtered, all would recognise Vrrmik as the butcher of that hope.

Man and skaven alike would bow in terror before the might of Vrrmik.

Skavenblight, 1122

‘Scurry-hurry! Quick-quiet!’ the squeaking hisses of Queekish came uneasily to Moschner’s tongue. He felt unclean even trying to shape such sounds. Squeamishness, however, was a quality he didn’t have the luxury of indulging. Not anymore. Not if he was going to reduce Skavenblight to a charnel house of disease and destruction.

He watched as the three skaven slaves, scrawny specimens that had been supplied to him as test subjects, attacked their labour with frantic urgency. Moschner watched them carefully, wary lest their haste should blot out their sense of caution. Previous experience had taught him that a single reprimand from him would send the slaves into fratricidal frenzy. If any of them thought another was going to spoil its chance to escape, the results would be swift and brutal.

The skaven were secured in a large cage at the back of the cave. The walls were much too tough for a human or dwarf to excavate barehanded, but a skaven could gnaw through iron with its fangs if given enough time and incentive. To the best of his ability, Moschner had endeavoured to provide the creatures with both.

Every hour, Moschner expected his plans to collapse around him. The audacity of his scheme frightened even himself. Every time he was visited by Seerlord Queekual he was certain the ferocious sorcerer had seen through his ploy. However, the abject terror he felt during such visitations served to encourage the ratman’s megalomaniacal pride. In his arrogance, Queekual was oblivious even to the possibility that this terrified little slave might have the courage to plot against him, that so frightened a wretch would be bold enough to lie to his face.

The lie still held, but Moschner knew he was on borrowed time. There was only so long he could rotate the skaven test subjects from cage to cage before Queekual noticed. There was only so long he could pass off specimens not yet exposed to the plague as early-stage victims of the disease.

The secret hidden by the lie was one that would have thrilled Schroeder. Moschner could take no such pleasure. He felt like a Shallyan acolyte shaking hands with a diseased disciple of the Fly Lord. What he was doing represented the sundering of every oath he’d sworn as a physician and healer. That he had succeeded in his ghastly labour only made it worse.

The improved strain of Black Plague Queekual demanded had become reality several weeks ago. That was the secret Moschner couldn’t afford to let his terrible patron discover.

He still had only the vaguest idea of what the Seerlord intended. That the monster wanted this disease to unleash against his own kind was obvious, but what Queekual hoped to achieve was a mystery to Moschner. Whatever it was, he was certain that it brooked no good for mankind.

That was why Moschner had been playing for time. That was why he had removed the healthiest of his skaven specimens to the rear cages, had given them crude digging tools fashioned from the fangs of their dead kin. That was why he had encouraged the ratmen to dig, had helped them hide the loose earth in the bellies of dead slaves. The earth below Skavenblight was a labyrinth of tunnels and passages. It couldn’t be long before the ratmen broke through to another chamber. When they did, they would be free, free to scatter and hide among the teeming hordes of their monstrous society.

Free to escape and bring the new strain of plague to the rest of the ratkin. For what none of the slaves knew was that they’d already been exposed to the disease, that they were in fact simply the latest in a long chain of skaven that had been pressed into the doktor’s plot. If they broke through before the worst symptoms crippled them, they would go free. If not, Moschner would move their sick carcasses to different cages and wait for a fresh batch of specimens to take up the work.

‘Scurry-hurry,’ Moschner repeated as he marched away from the diggers.

He would give Queekual his plague, all right. But not in the way the sorcerer expected.

Seerlord Queekual clutched the mummified cat’s-paw tighter. A relic from the ancient tombs of Khemri, it was a powerful talisman against sickness and decay. Warlord Nekrot had worn it once and Queekual’s agents had secured it for him when the unlamented Bonelord met his end before the malefic magics of Vanhal. He was certain of the talisman’s efficacy, having tested it on a dozen apprentices and adepts. They’d resisted exposure to the very worst diseases, so Queekual was prepared to accept that the talisman performed in the manner expected of it.

Even with the talisman’s protection, the horned ratman cringed when he leaned down and scrutinised the miserable captives sprawled at the bottom of their cages. He held a brick of pungent cheese to his nose to blot out the offensive odour of rot and disease. The stench of plague was as unmistakable as the physical symptoms. While he watched, one of the captives twitched violently and was still.

‘That one has just died,’ Moschner-man reported. The slave consulted his clay tablet, nodding his head in deference to the Seerlord’s exalted position. ‘The specimen was exposed to the new stock only eighteen food cycles ago.’

The report had Queekual leaning close to the bars despite the smell and his own fear of the plague. Eighteen food cycles? Twenty-four hours as humans reckoned time! The sorcerer wiped a string of drool from his fangs. It was astounding, to think the disease could kill so quickly! It went beyond his greatest expectations.

‘I was smart-wise to keep you alive when all the others disappointed me,’ Queekual declared, preening his whiskers with two claws while the rest continued to grip the block of cheese. He gestured with the paw gripping the mummified talisman. ‘All the others, witches and priests, herbalists and barbers. All of them failed. All of them died.’

Moschner bowed in the expected gesture of submissive gratitude. He lifted the clay writing tablet. ‘I have written down the formula for you,’ he said. ‘You understand how to read Reikspiel as well as speak it?’

The skaven swung away from the cage, his fur bristling at the condescension in Moschner’s tone. ‘Give-bring!’ Queekual snarled, flinging the block of smelly cheese to the floor. The doktor was the very model of a humble slave as he crept forward and deposited the tablet in Queekual’s waiting paw.

‘Follow those instructions and you will be able to create more of the plague any time you like. All you need is some fleas and polluted blood. And a little patience.’

Queekual stared down at the tablet, his mind awhirl with the possibilities, the potential he gripped in his paws. He held a force mightier than anything Clan Pestilens possessed, a force powerful enough to bring all skavendom to its knees! Yes, the hordes of the Under-Empire would learn what it meant to defy the word of their god! Queekual would loose this new disease on all those who stood in his way. He would reshape the Under-Empire as a theocracy led by the grey seers with himself as Ultimate Hierophant!

The Seerlord’s eyes narrowed. His tail twitched in the dirt behind him. Of course, if he were to deliver skavendom from calamity, there couldn’t be any evidence linking him to that calamity.

Queekual shifted the tablet under his arm. Retrieving his staff from where it leaned against the wall, he regarded Moschner with a fanged smile. ‘You have done good-good,’ he hissed. ‘Now I gift-give your reward!’

The head of Seerlord Queekual’s staff blazed with coruscating bands of arcane energy. The blinding dazzle of light leapt from between the metal horns, striking out and immolating Moschner in a burst of sizzling annihilation. When the light faded, all that was left of Queekual’s hapless slave was a pile of smoking ash and a few charred bones.

‘Destroy-burn!’ Queekual snarled at the guard-rats outside as he marched from the cave. ‘Burn everything! Leave nothing!’

Soon, all traces of Moschner and his work would be obliterated. Then Queekual could begin his great work, the task entrusted to him by the Horned Rat Himself. There could be no question of his triumph, of the ruination of his enemies.

If he had noticed an empty cage at the back of Moschner’s cave, if he had seen the tiny, crude tunnel leading away from it, Queekual might not have felt so confident.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Averland, 1123

Terror swept through the human forces as a second mighty host of skaven appeared at their rear. The breach in the walls of Averheim was now sealed up by a solid mass of verminous flesh. The ratmen attacked in a great chittering horde, driven to the point of frenzy by the threats of their leaders and the smell of fear on their foes. While the vanguard of Mandred’s army, the knights and mounted warriors, slammed into the skaven besieging the walls of the Averburg, striving to link up with the defenders within the old fortress, the infantry supporting his assault threatened to collapse. Peasant militia, mendicant flagellants, mercenaries and bandits, the troops had the will to fight, the heart to follow Mandred on his quest to free the Empire from the shadow of the ratmen, but they lacked the training and discipline which alone could stand before the bestial onslaught of Clan Mors.

There was one exception, one rock that stood steadfast before the sea of despair and panic that raged around it, a stolid wedge of defiance that spread across the streets. Fleeing men broke before the immovable walls of flesh and steel, funnelled down side streets and alleyways, channelled off in directions where their route wouldn’t reach the soldiers battling around the Averburg and make a shambles of their efforts to smash the skaven lines.

The ratmen pursuing the fleeing humans crashed against the shield-walls like a loathsome tide. Like a tide, too, they broke against the unyielding rock they crashed against, flowing backwards and rolling forwards in an unending wave of feral savagery.

‘Khazukan Kazakit-Ha!’ the fierce cry boomed through the streets as each wave of skaven crashed against the shield-wall. The dwarfs of Grungni’s Tower, the hardest and most steadfast warriors in Mandred’s army, had been unable to maintain the pace of the long-legged humans in their rapid advance through the city. By degrees, the dwarfs had been left behind by the spear of Mandred’s assault forces. Now they assumed a new role: that of the army’s shield.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with his kinsmen, Kurgaz Smallhammer glared at the oncoming skaven with eyes that were ablaze with hate. These beasts had killed his brother, had profaned the halls of Karak Grazhyakh, had stolen the great hammer Drakdrazh. Many were the grudges for which these vermin would atone and not the blood of a thousand of their pestiferous kind would be enough to wash away that debt.

Kurgaz brought his axe flashing down into the skull of a crook-nosed ratman, splashing its brains across the beasts behind it. He slammed the spiked boss of his shield into the breast of another skaven, feeling the spike pierce its squirming flesh as he drove it back upon the bodies of its comrades. His boots became sticky with the black, stinking blood of the vermin, his beard clotted with the gore of the beasts he killed and still it was not enough.

‘Khazukan Kazakit-Ha!’ Kurgaz repeated. ‘Beware! The dwarfs come for blood!’ The ancient war-cry resonated through the bones of each bearded warrior who heard it, swelling their hearts with ferocity. It echoed through the glands of the skaven, withering their valour and sending fear pulsing through their veins. Foot by foot, yard by yard, the indomitable shield-wall advanced, throwing the skaven back, pushing them in upon themselves. The bodies of hundreds of ratkin lay strewn in the wake of the dwarfs, crushed beneath their steel-shod boots as they marched ever forwards.

Inevitably, the reeling ratmen threw more forces into the fray. The vermin squeaked in horror as robed plague monks came charging through their ranks, swinging censers that exuded noxious vapours. Scores of ratmen perished as the corrosive smoke seeped down into their lungs, scorching their insides and leaving them to choke on their own blood. Frantic ratkin flung themselves with renewed desperation at the dwarfs, but despite the savage desperation in their attack, they found the shield-wall as impregnable as ever.

As the last of the panicked clanrats fell, a small group of dwarfs rushed out from the shield-wall. They charged towards the censer bearers, seeking to keep them and their deadly smoke away from the rest of the formation. Several of the plague monks fell as the dwarf skirmishers flung hand axes into their diseased bodies, others perished under the heavier battleaxes and warhammers of their enemies as they charged into the lethal clouds of decay. The brave warriors knew they would perish with the monsters, brought down by the noxious smoke, but they died gladly in the knowledge that by their sacrifice, the rest of the formation should be preserved.

The failure of the plague monks brought a new tide of skaven swarming down the street. Brawny, black-furred monsters wearing heavy armour and wielding an assortment of cleavers, axes and halberds, the elite of Clan Mors crashed into the dwarf line. Foam dripped from their fangs, blood dripped from their eyes and noses as the abhorrent black hunger drove them into a murderous frenzy. The stormvermin threw their own comrades onto the blades of the dwarfs, using them as living shields so that they might leap forwards and drag the embattled dwarfs down.

Into this carnage, this maelstrom of death and butchery, stalked a monstrous white skaven. Kurgaz froze when he saw the beast, his mind retreating back through the years to the dark mines of Karak Grazhyakh and the ratkin warlord that had killed his brother and stolen Drakdrazh. He was uncertain if this was the same creature, for if it was then the monster had become still more massive and muscular in the years since their last encounter, swelling into something that resembled a troll as much as it did a skaven.

Then Kurgaz saw the immense hammer the creature bore, saw the havoc the ratman dealt when he brought it crashing down into the dwarf line. Armoured warriors were tossed into the air as though they weighed nothing, iron shields folded as though made from tin beneath the sweep of the ratman’s hammer. Kurgaz’s lip curled back in a snarl of outrage as he realised that the weapon was Drakdrazh, its splendour and dignity defiled by bands of warpstone and the scratch-mark sigils of skaven runes.

Roaring his outrage, Kurgaz bulled his way through the stormvermin, smashing them down, crushing them beneath his boots. Desperately he forced his way towards the white warlord. The huge ratman swung around, its lips peeling back from its yellowed fangs. The brute uttered a mocking chitter as it brought the head of Drakdrazh sweeping around.

Kurgaz, in his fury, had forgotten the incredible speed with which the skaven could move, even a monster such as the white warlord. Drakdrazh crashed into the dwarf’s chest, flinging him high into the air. He crashed in a heap among the bodies of his slain comrades, blood bubbling up from his mouth. Blinking through the pain, Kurgaz struggled to regain his feet. His grip on his axe broken by his fall, he groped among the dead for a weapon.

The mocking chitter again sounded in Kurgaz’s ears. Groggy from his injury, he struggled to focus his eyes on the hulking beast as the warlord lumbered over the dead and the dying. The ratman’s eyes glittered malignantly as it came to finish the prey who had somehow survived the blow of its hammer.

Kurgaz lurched to his feet, spitting a mouthful of blood onto the ground. If he were to die this day, by Grimnir, he would do so on his feet!

The warlord turned suddenly, its snout raised as it sniffed the air, its ears pressed close against the sides of its head as it detected a scent both familiar and frightening. Any thought of finishing Kurgaz was abandoned as the warlord started to back away.

Dimly, through ears still ringing with the violence of Drakdrazh’s strike, Kurgaz heard the sound of hooves and the blare of a trumpet.

The skaven had taken too long to break through the dwarfs. Mandred was bringing forces around to engage the ratmen closing in upon the rear of his army.

Great Warlord Vrrmik shook his head in disbelief as he caught the scent of Man-dread in the air. There was no mistaking that smell, hadn’t he engaged the best thieves Clan Eshin could provide to steal garments cast off by the human warlord so there could be no mistaking the creature’s scent? What alarmed Vrrmik was that the scent was so near. Man-dread should be off fighting Rictus and Skab, obligingly annihilating Warlords Ransik and Hakrr for him. He should be so far away that only the heightened sense of smell of Skrittlespike cave-rats should be able to pick him out.

It was part of Vrrmik’s great plan that he should be the one to kill the feared Man-dread and wear the creature’s pelt as a trophy, but that plan called for the human’s army to be overwhelmed and annihilated, crushed between the valiant warriors of Clan Mors and the scabrous traitors of Clans Rictus and Skab. The plan was to decimate the human’s followers, leaving them strewn about him in mounds of dead and wounded, to sow despair and terror in Man-dread’s heart, to shatter his mind with the understanding that his army was destroyed and that everything he’d fought for was lost.

This… this wasn’t the way Vrrmik had expected things to be. The smell of horses and man-thing knights, the clamour of hooves as the cavalry came charging towards his stormvermin. The fatigue and exhaustion of his warriors as they reeled from the effects of the elixir they’d imbibed to help them smash their way through the dwarfs.

The dwarfs! Their stubborn defiance had spoiled Vrrmik’s cunning plan, yet why should Man-dread leave such bold warriors so far from his assault forces? Unless of course he knew of Vrrmik’s trap! Unless some simpering traitor had warned the humans, perhaps so that Rictus and Skab would be spared the full fury of their attack! Or maybe it went still deeper than that. Puskab Foulfur and his less than fruitful attack on Man-dread’s camp, his inability to poison the human food stores and drive them into the panicked desperation that was key to Vrrmik’s battle plan! Yes, that was it! Clan Pestilens jockeying to usurp Vrrmik’s position! Not content with three seats on the Council of Thirteen, the plague priests coveted the Twelfth Throne itself, to sit beside the Great Throne of the Horned One!

From the rear of Vrrmik’s warriors, in the direction of Averheim’s outer walls, came the stink of fear musk and the frightened screeches of hundreds of skaven. Something was unfolding at the walls, some new threat to Vrrmik’s elaborate trap! The flicker of a suspicion grew in the great warlord’s mind. The horsemen Man-dread had sent away from his camp. Where had they gone? To fetch new forces? To bring another human army against Vrrmik’s rear?

The clatter of hooves was nearer now. Snarling, Vrrmik roared at his stormvermin to fling themselves at the enemy as a company of knights came charging down the street. Their advance was hindered somewhat by their timidity, trying to circle around the surviving dwarfs. The skaven suffered no such weakness, trampling their dead and dying underfoot as they rushed at the enemy.

Vrrmik rushed towards the hated scent of Man-dread. If he could kill the human leader, he might yet overcome the man-things, route them from the field even as they tried to close their trap around him!

The great warlord lashed out with Skavenbite, the mighty hammer smashing down the only knight between himself and Man-dread. He snarled as he looked upon the human warlord, rage boiling up inside him as he realised that even he, Mighty Vrrmik, was intimidated by this infamous adversary.

Man-dread’s eyes narrowed when he saw Vrrmik and he dug his spurs into the flanks of his steed. The man came galloping towards Vrrmik, the sword in his hand aglow with magic.

Skavenbite struck out as Man-dread came charging towards Vrrmik. The awesome power of the magic hammer obliterated the head of the horse, sending its carcass crashing against the wall at the other side of the street, pinning its rider beneath its dead weight.

In the same instant, however, Man-dread’s blazing sword came slashing down. Vrrmik felt his head exploding in pain, blood gushing down his neck. He clamped a paw to his head, felt the jagged gash where his right ear had once been. Chittering in pain, the smell of his own blood now combining with the musk of fear rising from the glands of his followers, Vrrmik’s savagery collapsed into blind panic.

He might have fought down the horror coursing through his veins. Indeed, Vrrmik took a few vindictive steps towards Man-dread’s fallen horse. Then he saw the human pull himself out from underneath his dead steed. He saw the unbridled rage in the man’s face, the blazing fury in his eyes, the malevolence in his scent.

It was too much for Vrrmik. Uttering a frenzied howl, ordering his minions to shield his retreat, Vrrmik rushed back towards the moat. Gone was the idea of victory and glory, of punishing traitors and eliminating rivals. The only thought in Vrrmik’s bleeding head was escape. To live to plot and fight and kill another day.

For there would be another day. Vrrmik would make certain of that. Man-dread would suffer for the audacity of striking skavendom’s greatest warrior!

When next they met, there would be no mistakes. Vrrmik would make certain of that!

Altdorf, 1124

The private chambers adopted by the Protector of the Empire were situated at the very heart of the Imperial palace. They had been designed as a vault to hold treasure, engineered as a stone box with thick walls and stout double-doors of iron-banded oak. Ceiling and floor were of granite blocks some three feet thick. The walls were thicker still and reinforced with iron rods.

Despite the efforts at refinement, the lavish rugs and tapestries arrayed about the vault, it was still a cold and cheerless place. There was no hearth, so heat and light were entrusted to bronze braziers. Circulation was poor in the tomb-like chamber and it needed a strange contraption that was part bellows and part windlass to keep the fresh air flowing and disperse the smoke from the braziers. That device was an invention of the dwarf revenue collectors who continued to serve Kreyssig as they had the Emperor before him. Reviled as ‘gold grubbers’ by noble and peasant alike, the dwarfs had been engaged for such duties by Boris when it was discovered that they couldn’t contract the Black Plague and so could venture boldly among even the most severely afflicted districts in Altdorf. They still performed their duties with exacting precision and fidelity. If not for their strange codes of honour, Kreyssig would have happily inducted the dwarfs into his Kaiserjaeger. As it stood, he had to limit them to tasks that wouldn’t offend their exacting sensibilities.

Kreyssig leaned back in his chair, tapping his foot impatiently as his manservant Fuerst scurried about him with a razor and scraped the stubble from his cheeks. The servant was nervous, fussing over his master with only the most timid, delicate strokes. Fuerst scowled at the braziers and the sputtering light cast by their flames. He cursed the numbing cold of the vault. He lashed out with his foot as one of Kreyssig’s cats rubbed up against his leg, nearly causing him to stumble and nick his master with the razor.

‘I wish you would take other accommodations,’ Fuerst complained. ‘It feels like being buried alive down here.’

‘You know my reasons,’ Kreyssig reproved his servant. Fuerst grimaced, closing his eyes against the image of ratmen creeping behind the walls. Here, in the vault, they were safe from such intrusions. The only way the skaven could reach this chamber was by way of the door, and Kreyssig had a dozen of his best Kaiserjaeger standing guard in the corridor outside. The same held true for any human assassins, be they from Gazulgrund, Vidor or Mandred.

Fuerst bowed in apology. ‘It is difficult to attend you properly here,’ he said. ‘The light is poor, the cold makes my hand shiver…’

‘And your thoughts are troubled,’ Kreyssig stated, craning his head back so that his servant could shave his throat.

Fuerst hesitated. ‘What you are doing… are you certain it needs to be done?’ He hurried to appease the irritated glare Kreyssig directed at him. ‘It is not… I know you’ve thought it through. You always do. But the danger involved…’

‘A man who risks all may gain everything,’ Kreyssig told Fuerst. ‘By sending that outlaw to me, Mandred has made it clear that he is not going to negotiate with me. He will dictate terms. He has Ghal Maraz now, and coupled with what he has already done – not to mention that ridiculous “miracle” he supposedly benefited from in Middenheim – even Gazulgrund won’t be able to deny him the Imperial crown.’

‘You might still be given something,’ Fuerst said. ‘The people of Altdorf celebrate you as a hero. That has to be worth something.’ He hurriedly pulled the razor away as Kreyssig shook his head.

‘Too many tongues have already poisoned Mandred against me,’ Kreyssig said. ‘Von Kranzbeuhler, that strumpet Erna, even that scum Hartwich. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted Thorgrad when he said plague had taken Hartwich. Mandred has more dead men in his court than that necromancer in Sylvania!’ He chuckled grimly. ‘No, I shall be fortunate if Mandred’s beneficence extends so far as to spare my life.’

‘But to break your alliance with him…’

Kreyssig gave a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘You forget, it will not be me who breaks the faith. Why do you think I kept von Kranzbeuhler and the dwarf here and sent one of my own men to carry the treaty back to Mandred?’ All the humanity evaporated from his face, leaving only a reptilian visage of mercilessness. ‘I have two problems: Gazulgrund and Mandred. I must remove the first and prevent the second from becoming Emperor. The only way to accomplish that is to assassinate the one and place the blame on the other.’

Fuerst drew back, his hand trembling again. ‘You don’t mean to use that, that thing?’

‘Too unpredictable,’ Kreyssig said. ‘I couldn’t trust it to do what needs to be done. No, I’ll make it look like von Kranzbeuhler did it. The fool conveniently still wears the armour of the Reiksknecht and we have plenty of that lying around from when Grand Master von Schomberg was executed and his rabble outlawed. It will be easy enough to disguise one of the Kaiserjaeger. He’ll strike down Gazulgrund and escape in the confusion. Von Kranzbeuhler will be captured and blamed.’

‘He will protest his innocence and Graf Mandred will support him,’ Fuerst objected.

Kreyssig laughed. ‘He won’t have a chance to say anything. After he’s captured, he’ll accidentally fall into the hands of the peasants. As attached as they are to Gazulgrund, they’ll rip him to pieces with their bare hands before he can say six words to them! When I accuse Mandred of ordering his man to kill the Grand Theogonist, the peasants will turn on him too. Murdering the High Priest of Sigmar will blot out all the victories, all the omens. Mandred will be fortunate if he can keep Middenheim from deposing him, much less become Emperor.’

‘If something should go wrong,’ Fuerst persisted.

‘Nothing will go wrong,’ Kreyssig declared. ‘Nothing will be left to chance. The Palace Guard are even now taking charge of von Kranzbeuhler and the dwarf. They’ll be removed to safer accommodations until I need them.

‘All I need now is for Mandred to finish mopping up the skaven in Hochland. Then the final pieces will fall into place.’

Blood was dripping down the side of Erich’s face as he was half-pushed, half-dragged down the corridors of the Imperial palace. A leather cosh had opened his scalp and rattled his senses. It was difficult for him to focus his gaze or get the ringing to fade from his ears. By contrast, the tang of blood in his mouth from the tooth he had knocked out when he struck the floor was shocking in its distinctness and there was a weird smell in his nose, which his muddled mind kept telling him was the aroma of the colour blue.

‘Come to your senses, manling!’ a gruff dwarfish voice bellowed. The rattle of chains punctuated the dwarf’s angry outburst.

Erich managed to turn his head and focus his vision enough to see his comrade being dragged along beside him. Kurgaz Smallhammer’s brawny body was wrapped in heavy chains, his face bruised and bloodied. Despite the chains coiled around the dwarf, the four guards who had taken charge of him were taking no chances. As they walked, one of the soldiers kept the edge of his blade against Kurgaz’s throat.

Painful memories rose from the fog inside Erich’s skull. It was his fault that the dwarf had been captured. Left to his own devices, Kurgaz would have chosen death over surrender. When the Palace Guard burst into the room the emissary and his bodyguard had been given, Kurgaz had been the first to engage them, braining one soldier with a chair and breaking the leg of another with a powerful kick of his boot. While the slayer was on the attack, Erich made the mistake of trying to reach the table where his sword was resting. One of the guards caught him before he could reach the weapon, stunning him with a blow to the head.

Though the shamed dwarf longed for death in battle, he submitted to capture when he saw Erich helpless before their enemies. More important than Kurgaz’s vow to redeem his honour with a glorious death was the duty that had been entrusted to him by Graf Mandred. He was Erich’s protector and as such couldn’t allow harm to come to the knight.

‘Manling! Do you hear me!’ Kurgaz growled.

Erich had to spit blood from his mouth before he attempted to answer. ‘My apologies, friend,’ he said. ‘I overestimated Kreyssig’s sense of honour.’ His statement ended in a grunt of pain as one of the soldiers carrying him brought a fist cracking against the knight’s head.

‘Silence, traitor!’ the guard snarled. ‘It is by Protector Kreyssig’s mercy that you are still alive.’

A grim grin crossed Erich’s features. ‘Then he must have a good reason for needing us alive,’ he sneered at his captors. ‘I already know Kreyssig doesn’t know the meaning of mercy.’

The guard struck at Erich again, this time smacking his fist into the knight’s face. The assault brought fresh thrashings and curses from Kurgaz. The soldier brutalising Erich turned and glared at the slayer. A cruel glint came into his eyes.

‘Protector Kreyssig said to keep the traitor,’ the guard mused. ‘He didn’t say anything about needing the dwarf.’

The Palace Guard stopped their march through the halls. A wicked laugh spread through their ranks. There were seven of them. The two holding Erich maintained their grip on the knight, turning him around so he could watch the murder of his companion. The guard with the sword at Kurgaz’s throat drew his arm back while the four men holding the chains tightened their grip.

The soldiers stopped at the sound of armoured troops marching down the hall. They turned and looked in confusion as half a dozen dwarfs slowly walked towards them down the gloomy corridor.

‘What do you gold grubbers want?’ one of the guards demanded. He looked over at the two captives and added in a sardonic laugh. ‘These two already paid their taxes.’ The jest brought laughs from the other soldiers. Kreyssig had maintained Emperor Boris’s policy of using the plague-resistant dwarfs to collect taxes in Altdorf. It was the only thing the men in the Palace Guard felt the creatures were good for.

The dwarfs continued their slow, silent march towards the soldiers. They didn’t share in their laughter. Indeed, the expression on their bearded faces was anything but jovial.

‘Khazukan Kazakit-Ha!’ As the fierce cry echoed through the hall a heavy hammer came sailing through the air, smashing into the arm of the swordsman. The guard shouted in pain, his weapon clattering to the floor.

The dwarfs suddenly charged down the corridor, dragging weapons from their belts. ‘Gold grubbers!’ one of the guards cursed, ripping his sword from its sheath and lunging forwards to receive the first of the attackers. His slashing sword glanced off an armoured pauldron while the dwarf’s return with a vicious axe stroke left the man lying disembowelled on the floor.

The reluctance of the Palace Guard to abandon their prisoners and meet the dwarf attack in force made the fight woefully one-sided. First two, then three of the soldiers were felled by the axes and hammers of the dwarfs. The last man trying to hold the chained Kurgaz was dropped by his own captive when the slayer suddenly lunged at him and brought his thick skull crashing into the soldier’s forehead. The stunned guard wilted to the floor, dragging the chained Kurgaz down with him.

The last guard holding Erich drew his dagger and pressed it to the knight’s throat. Defiantly, he glared at the dwarfs. ‘Back!’ he snarled. ‘Back or I’ll kill him!’

There was a chilling indifference in the expressions of the dwarfs. Their leader, a broken-nosed fighter with a long black beard simply shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Kill away,’ he said. He jabbed a thumb at Kurgaz lying on the floor. ‘I owe a debt to Smallhammer here, not the manling.’

From the floor, the slayer cried out to the dwarf leader. ‘Dharin, I have given my word to protect the human!’

Dharin nodded and fixed his stony gaze on the guard. ‘That makes it different,’ he declared. ‘Cut the manling, and my clan will swear vengeance on your bloodline. We’ll not rest until your children’s children’s children have cause to curse your name.’ He shrugged again. ‘Or you can drop the knife and run away.’

The guard licked his lips nervously. His eyes flashed from one dwarf to another, finding the same brooding malignance on each face. He watched helplessly as two of the dwarfs began to free Kurgaz from his chains. Imagining what the slayer would do to him if he made good his threat was what decided him at last. Shoving Erich towards the dwarfs, the soldier turned and fled up the corridor.

‘Looks like we’re out of a job,’ Dharin said, reaching to his left arm and ripping off the armband that marked him as an Imperial revenue collector. The other gold grubbers chuckled at the remark and removed their own armbands.

One of the dwarfs had recovered the keys to Kurgaz’s chains from a dead guard. The moment he was free of the bindings, the slayer stomped over to Erich and used the keys to remove the knight’s own manacles.

‘It was lucky for us that your friends happened along,’ Erich said, bowing to Dharin in gratitude.

Kurgaz quickly corrected the knight. ‘Dharin Rockhome is no friend. He’s the most bitter enemy my family owns.’

‘And the Smallhammers are recorded in our Book of Grudges for their insults,’ Dharin declared. ‘Your blood will not be enough to wash away that debt, but at least it will be a start.’

Erich blinked in disbelief. ‘You… you saved us just so you could kill Kurgaz?’

Kurgaz shook his head. ‘It’s not that simple, manling. I’ve taken the Slayer Oath. If Dharin kills me, he must take up my vow. He’s too fond of gold to do that. All the Rockhomes are.’

‘I can still give my ancestors the satisfaction of watching you die,’ Dharin snarled back. ‘Just knowing there’s one less Smallhammer in the world will ease their burden.’ He shook his head. ‘We must be quit of this place. The guard who ran away will be sounding the alarm.’

‘They’ll already have closed the gates then,’ Erich observed. ‘And I doubt if Kreyssig has left the old route to the sewers open after my last escape from this place.’

‘Those tunnels were built by dwarfs,’ Dharin said. ‘Do you think any shoddy human construction can keep us out of them?’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Averland, 1123

At Arch-Lector Hartwich’s urging, Graf Mandred agreed to receive the representatives from Altdorf in the tiny Sigmarite chapel within the old fortress of Averburg. Only days after his fight with the skaven warlord, Mandred’s body felt like one big bruise. The rush of battle, the rage of war had carried him through the fray after the beast’s magic hammer decapitated his noble steed. With the battle won, those revitalising energies had deserted him, making him keenly aware of the hurts he had suffered.

Mandred stared at the Sigmarite iconography on the walls. For an Ulrican like himself, he still found it strange to be surrounded by the trappings of a god he had always considered something of a foreigner. It was only through his travels across the Empire that he had begun to appreciate the importance of what Sigmar represented, the greater meaning the god held for mankind as a whole. The old gods, deities like Ulric and Taal and Rhya, were in many ways localised gods. Middenland was the home of Ulric; he was their patron. Nordland and Westerland claimed Mannan; Stirland favoured Rhya; Talabecland and Drakwald venerated Taal; here in Averland it was Verena. Each land, each people, claimed a different god as their own. Sigmar alone was a god for the whole of the Empire, a god meant to bring unity rather than divisions. He was the god a broken land needed now more than ever.

Mandred smiled as he considered what Ar-Ulric would have said about such an idea. Most likely, he would have regarded it as some manner of heresy, a slight against the White Wolf’s power and authority. After all, he would have reminded Mandred that in life Sigmar himself had venerated Ulric.

Even so, Mandred had to admire Hartwich’s cunning. From the first, the priest had manoeuvred him into a closer relationship with Sigmar, proclaiming him as ‘the Wolf of Sigmar’ when he emerged from the miracle of the Eternal Flame. Peoples and lands who might have felt threatened by a manifestation of Ulric, lands with long histories of strife with the Teutogens, had more readily accepted a miracle that could be attributed to Sigmar instead. Hartwich the priest wasn’t half so clever as Hartwich the politician.

Now the delegates from Altdorf and the Imperial court had arrived. Mandred had heard much from Princess Erna about her husband, Adolf Kreyssig, the man Emperor Boris had proclaimed Protector of the Empire in his absence. Since the arrival of Erich von Kranzbeuhler in the camp, Erna had recovered much of her mind and her memory. What she’d revealed to him about Kreyssig, what parts of her story both Hartwich and Erich could substantiate, made him cool in his reception of the delegates.

Even without Erna’s story, Mandred couldn’t forget that Kreyssig’s emissaries had waited until after the Battle of Averheim was decided before riding out from their camp to meet with him. Hulda said that from the look of their encampment, they had been there for more than a week. They could have met with Mandred well before the battle had they been so inclined. Most likely, they had been told to wait, to see which way the battle went, to see how weak Mandred’s position was before they came to him.

Mandred smiled as the Reiklanders came marching into the chapel. He’d taken care to fill the place with representatives from all the lands he had liberated, with the men and women he could count as his friends and allies. He ensured that they would see the Count of Averland, his head bandaged from the injuries he had received in the last hours of the battle to free his capital. He made certain that the exiled Reikmarshal von Boeckenfoerde had a prominent place on the dais where Mandred waited to receive his visitors. It had been von Boeckenfoerde’s mercenary army riding out from Mordheim to join forces with Mandred that had so alarmed him days before and caused him to dispatch Grand Master Vitholf and the Knights of the White Wolf to intercept them in the belief they were a skaven column or a fresh legion of undead from the necromancer Vanhal. The sudden appearance of von Boeckenfoerde’s forces outside Averheim had helped to break the ratmen and send them into full retreat. Von Boeckenfoerde hadn’t sat back to see how the battle would end, he had ridden into the fray to help turn the tide.

The Altdorf delegation bowed as they approached the dais. One of the noblemen displayed the signet ring on his hand, a ring that bore the Emperor’s seal. Only two men were permitted to entrust that seal to an emissary, the Emperor and his appointed Protector. ‘We bring greetings from Protector Kreyssig of the Imperial Throne to Graf Mandred of Middenheim,’ the Altdorfer said.

Arch-Lector Hartwich stepped out from the front pew and walked across the chapel until he stood between Mandred and the delegates. ‘By what authority do you wear that ring?’ he demanded.

The nobleman bristled at the scorn in Hartwich’s tone. ‘By the authority of Protector Kreyssig!’ he snapped.

‘And by what authority is he Protector?’ the priest demanded.

‘By decree of the late Emperor Boris!’ the Altdorfer snarled back.

‘Then your authority comes from pretenders and dead tyrants,’ Hartwich declared. He pointed at Mandred. ‘There stands a ruler whose authority has been bestowed by the gods.’

The Altdorfer smiled. ‘Even in the Imperial Palace we have heard stories of fables… I mean miracles.’

‘The incredulous will not believe a miracle unless they have seen it with their own eyes,’ Hartwich said. ‘That is why Lord Sigmar has granted Graf Mandred a sign of His favour no man can contest!’

Even Mandred was stunned by the vehemence in Hartwich’s voice, surprised by the belligerence of his tone. Certainly he understood the priest’s loathing of Kreyssig and the murderous Grand Theogonist the Protector had installed as the highest cleric of Sigmar in the land, but this went beyond what he could accept. Diplomacy demanded that care was taken in how Kreyssig’s men were received. In his proper wits, Hartwich would have been the first to acknowledge that fact.

Mandred was about to admonish Hartwich before the assembled nobles and dignitaries when he suddenly stopped. The priest had turned away from the Altdorfers and was walking towards Erich who had risen from his seat. The knight held a bulky object wrapped in a purple cloth. Reverently, Hartwich took the object from him and marched back towards the dais.

‘Tell me, what is the living relic by which an Emperor’s rule is sanctified? What is the link that binds him to Sigmar?’ Hartwich could see the confusion on the faces of most of the emissaries, but the man wearing the signet ring had grown pale. He at least knew the answer to the priest’s question. Hartwich turned away from Kreyssig’s men. Lifting his voice, he instead addressed the nobles gathered in the chapel.

‘Ghal Maraz!’ he declared, whipping away the purple cloth, exposing the ancient warhammer forged over a thousand years before for Sigmar himself. Richly etched and engraved, the head of the hammer supported by carved griffons, the pommel at the end of its spiralling grip fashioned into a conclave of skulls, the relic blazed with an inner light, a golden glow that suffused the air around it with a divine aura. ‘Skull-splitter!’ Hartwich’s voice rose into a roar. ‘The Hammer of Sigmar!’

An awed silence held the assembly, a silence that wasn’t broken until Hartwich turned and dropped to his knees before Graf Mandred. ‘Ghal Maraz, come to us by the will of Sigmar into the hands of the man who will lead His Empire out of darkness and back into the light!’

Almost timidly, Mandred approached the kneeling priest. Hesitantly, he reached down to take up Sigmar’s Hammer, wondering to the last if he dared such a thing, if he was truly worthy of such honour.

Then, as his hand closed about the spiral grip, as Mandred felt the magic within the hammer flow into him, he knew he would never doubt again. It was the same sensation he had felt in the Eternal Flame, the holy power of the gods.

Raising Ghal Maraz in one hand, Mandred basked in the jubilant cries of those who had followed him, those whose lands he had liberated and whose people he had saved.

Only the men from Altdorf were silent, their faces pale with fear. Even if they didn’t feel it, they recognised the power of the symbol Mandred held.

The power to unite the whole Empire.

Kurgaz knelt amid the ashes outside Averheim’s west gate, the place where the city’s rulers had cremated the carcasses of the skaven dead. He could think of no better place to do what he had to do.

Grimly, the dwarf drew the knife from his boot. Tears of shame streamed down his face as he stared at the earth. A ritual such as this was supposed to be observed within a proper shrine, preferably the Great Shrine in Karak Kadrin. It was a magnification of his guilt that such a pilgrimage was impossible for him. Any day might see Mandred’s army resume its campaign against the ratkin. When the humans marched, Kurgaz would march with them. He had little enough honour left to him; he wouldn’t allow that to slip away as well.

The dwarf closed his eyes, seeing again the ghoulish white skaven, the defiled Drakdrazh in its paws. The creature that had killed his brother, that had stolen the sacred relic of his clan, a weapon that had been handed down from father to son since the War of Vengeance ages ago. He had vowed to find that monster, to kill it or die in the attempt. He had succeeded in neither. He was alive, and so too was his bestial nemesis.

There was only one answer for such shame.

Kurgaz brought the knife against the side of his head, pressing it against his scalp until he could feel a trickle of blood running down his neck. His voice lowered to a respectful whisper, he prayed to Grimnir, begging the ancestor god to accept the offering of his hair, his honour and his life. From memory, Kurgaz recited the Slayer Oath as he used his knife to scrape the hair from the sides of his head.

Life had no value to him now. The only redemption Kurgaz could still claim was to die a noble death, to set before Grimnir the carcass of some mighty foe. Only then could he hope to enter the halls of his ancestors. Only then could he blot away the shame he had allowed to stain the name of his clan.

Cautiously, Beck picked his way among the tents and pavilions erected by Mandred’s triumphant army. Amid the vast host it was impossible to go anywhere unobserved, but he wanted to avoid anyone who might recognise him if possible. There might be awkward questions later if somebody remembered seeing him where he was going.

The knight turned his face and inspected a stack of spears when a pair of White Wolves went marching past. The warriors seemed caught up in their lively debate over the combat abilities of Aldinger and his Knights of the Black Rose, but there was always a chance that they might be more aware of their surroundings than they seemed. Beck preferred not to tempt fate even with the most remote opportunity to work mischief. Too much depended on his success.

Beck scratched at his scarred face, trying not to think too closely about what it was that his eye patch now concealed. He knew there were those who would call it the Dark Stigmata and condemn him as a disciple of Old Night should they learn of the strange changes that had come over his wound.

The knight had his own ideas about the cause of his affliction. He’d seen the way Ar-Ulric regarded the ‘oracle’ Hulda. There were many in the camp who held her to be more witch than priestess and several who laid still more sinister accusations against her. For his own part, however, Beck wasn’t certain. It was undeniable that Hulda’s strange powers had been beneficial to Graf Mandred. The possibility that those same powers were protecting the graf from the same sort of affliction as the one his bodyguard was suffering had so far restrained Beck from taking any action. It was enough to keep a sprig of wolfsbane in his pocket next to his stone talisman.

Proceeding through the camp, Beck hurried towards a different sort of affliction, one that he could and would protect Mandred from. He’d been there after Hartwich’s dramatic presentation of Ghal Maraz to the graf, been privy to the far more private audience he’d held with the emissaries from Altdorf. He listened as the emissaries offered an alliance between Kreyssig and Mandred. The Protector would support any claim Mandred made upon the Imperial throne in exchange for certain concessions. Baroness Carin had encouraged the alliance, pointing out that with the certain support of the electors whose provinces Mandred had helped liberate and the endorsement of the Protector, there was no force in the Empire that would prevent him being installed as the next Emperor.

The argument might have swayed Mandred but for the venomous counsel of Princess Erna. Why the half-crazed adulteress should hold any influence over the graf was a mystery Beck couldn’t explain. All he did know was that without her, Mandred would be more open to an alliance with Kreyssig. The wedge that had come between himself and Baroness Carin would be removed.

Beck’s hand tightened about the grip of his sword as he approached Erna’s tent. He paused outside for a moment, listening to the sound of voices inside. She had her lover in there, that outlaw knight Erich. So much the better. He’d need someone to blame for her murder, and the knight would make a perfect patsy.

Carefully, Beck slipped into the tent. He could see the princess seated on a divan, her feet propped in the air. Erich was waiting on her, bringing her wine and cold mutton from a table set against the side of the enclosure. His back was to the entrance; her eyes were on him. Quickly, Beck drew his sword and rushed at the knight. He could afford for Erna to make some noise – everyone knew she was mad and they wouldn’t think too much of a few screams – but he couldn’t have Erich giving an alarm. Not until the deed was done, anyway.

Erna’s startled gasp as she saw Beck rushing towards Erich gave her lover just enough time to turn. Instead of crashing against the back of his skull, the iron pommel of Beck’s sword slammed into the side of his face. The result was the same, dropping the man to the ground, though instead of being insensible, the blow only stunned him.

Beck kicked Erich as he started to rise and then rushed towards Erna with his sword. He found his charge turn into a sprawl when Erich’s hands clutched at his foot and tripped him.

‘Damn you, Reiklander!’ Beck cursed. ‘I need you alive!’ He punctuated the statement with a brutal kick to his foe’s head.

‘Why, murderer?’ a voice snarled from behind Beck. The knight looked up to see Hulda standing between him and the princess. ‘Did you decide there weren’t any skaven you could blame this atrocity on?’

Beck rose to his feet, a vicious smile on his face. He reached into his pocket. ‘I don’t know how you got here, witch,’ he said, ‘but I came prepared for you just the same.’ He held the sprig of wolfsbane towards her and laughed as she drew back. ‘Ar-Ulric was right, wasn’t he?’ the knight laughed.

‘Now you will kill us all?’ Hulda accused, keeping Erna behind her, preventing the princess from rushing to her injured lover.

Beck nodded. ‘Him because now he’s heard too much. Her because she stands between Graf Mandred and the greatness that should be his.’

Hulda eyes gleamed hatefully at Beck. ‘You have killed for that reason before,’ she said. ‘Your scent was on Lady Mirella’s body, and there was no smell of skaven around her. I had no proof I could bring to Mandred, but from that moment I have watched you.’

‘For all the good it has done you,’ Beck said. ‘If you meant to avenge Mirella, you’ve failed, monster.’ He nodded his head, reaching a decision. ‘You are as much a threat to Graf Mandred as any of them. If the people found out what you are, Hartwich could bestow a hundred relics on the graf and they’d never make him Emperor!’

Hulda looked away from Beck, staring past the knight at something over his shoulder. ‘You heard?’ she asked.

‘I heard,’ Mandred’s voice was little more than a hiss. Beck spun around at the sound of his master’s voice. ‘You killed Mirella?’ he snarled at his bodyguard, then disgust curled his lip as he remembered another woman who had been close to him. ‘Did you kill Sofia too?’

‘You were beside yourself with grief,’ Beck explained. ‘She had the plague. You’d have caught it yourself if I…’

‘Enough!’ Mandred roared. ‘I have heard enough, murderer!’

Beck cringed at the fury in his master’s voice. ‘Please, highness, all that I have done I did for you!’ The knight recoiled when he saw no pity in Mandred’s enraged gaze. When the flap of the tent was pulled back and half a dozen Teutogen Guard swarmed into the tent, Beck turned and threw himself at the far wall of the enclosure. His sword slashed out, cutting a great gash in the wall. Before any of the guards could seize him, Beck was through the gap and running off into the rubble of Averheim.

Mandred glared at the rent in the wall. ‘I want him found,’ he snarled, tears in his eyes.

‘I want him to answer for his crimes.’

Stirland, 1122

Bonelord Nekrot, Corpsemaster of Clan Mordkin, gnashed his fangs together with such fury that it rattled the teeth in the jaws of his skeletal helmet. Worthless, treacherous grave-rats, incapable of restraining their pestiferous hunger for a few hours more! He should have the entire pack skinned alive and their bones made into toys for newborn pups! They’d allowed the scent of rotten meat and decayed bone to overwhelm their brains, rushing up from their concealed burrows to glut their hunger on the dead-things. In so doing, they’d run straight into a lurking force of humans.

Nekrot glared at the embattled ratmen. He was sorely tempted to leave the treasonous vermin to their fate. Only the realisation that to do so would mean cancelling his plans to visit gruesome revenge on Vanhal dissuaded him from such a course. The ambush was spoiled; the only option now was to attack in force, quickly, savagely and with all the merciless terror of starving rats.

A snap of his claws and the gang of slaves cowering at the warlord’s feet lifted to him the dragon horn. Plundered from the carnage outside Vanhaldenschlosse, the armourers of Clan Mordkin had pounded slivers of Seerlord Skrittar’s sacred bell into its sides. A hollowed nugget of warpstone served as a mouthpiece and when Nekrot wrapped his lips about it he could feel the raw magic sizzle against his flesh. It was no light thing to call upon the divine power of the Horned Rat.

When Nekrot blew into the mammoth horn, a dolorous note shuddered through the hollow. Each passing breath intensified the sound, causing trees to crack and the earth to tremble. Skaven were thrown from their feet as the cacophony washed over them, but their enemies fared even worse. Horses toppled, smashing their riders against the ground. The baggage train beyond the Sylvanians was scattered like so much rubbish, thrown to the four corners of the forest by the violent susurrus.

Nekrot ripped the horn from his lips, shreds of burned skin clinging to the poisonous mouthpiece. The warlord clenched his paw against his smouldering lips, trying to ease the pain. Absently, he kicked one of the slaves, feeling a little better when he heard something snap. With the paw not massaging his muzzle, he waved the warriors of Mordkin forwards. If they struck fast, they could slaughter the humans before they recovered from the Whispering Horn. As he watched the horde scurry past, Nekrot wondered how many of the over-eager vanguard lying strewn across the ground would be trampled underfoot.

The Bonelord hoped the casualties were high.

His belly felt empty.

Raw horror gripped Count Malbork von Drak as he struggled to free himself from the thrashing weight of his toppled horse. All around him the screams of panicked men and animals impacted against the discordant ringing in his ears. Instinctively, he tried to look past the prone bodies of his guards, trying to see what Vanhal was doing, what the necromancer had done to wreak such magical havoc. Only when the chittering horde of skaven was descending upon the reeling Nachtsheer did the voivode appreciate that the dreadful magic had been unleashed by the ratmen themselves.

Isolated bands of soldiers fought to hold the verminous mob back. Theirs was a hopeless struggle, but Malbork hoped they might delay the skaven long enough to afford him some chance to escape. To die in battle was something he was prepared to accept, but to be butchered beneath the paws of such filth! That was a peasant’s death!

The stricken horse continued to thrash above him, grinding his right leg against the ground, refusing Malbork’s every effort to bring the beast back to its feet. In despair, he drew his dagger and slashed it across the animal’s throat. The horse screamed and crumpled against its master. Malbork cried out in agony as the dead weight pressed against him, but without the horse’s struggles he at least had some hope that he might pull himself free.

A glance over his shoulder robbed him of that hope. A snarling ratman, its muzzle flecked in blood, the spiked mace in its paws caked in clumps of gore, came skittering past the beleaguered soldiers. The creature chittered malignantly at Malbork, then dove in for the kill.

The voivode shifted away from the descending bludgeon and stabbed upwards with his dagger, catching the beast in the groin. The skaven uttered a yelp of shock and collapsed in a writhing heap, black blood spurting from its punctured body. Malbork forced himself to look away from the hideous brute, to concentrate on wrenching his leg from beneath his fallen steed.

As he began to despair, the weight against him seemed to dissipate. Malbork blinked in wonder as his horse began to twitch, as the animal kicked its legs and started to rise. His wonder turned to horror when he saw the dead glassy eyes and the rictus-like grin. Now he could see the snake-like ribbons of unholy power seeping into the animal’s body, endowing it with a profane semblance of animation.

Before the zombie steed could lift itself fully from the ground, Malbork dragged his leg from the stirrup. Panting in terror, he watched as the animal stumbled onto its hooves and pawed at the earth. More snakes of sorcerous power were slithering along the ground, sinking into whatever dead flesh they encountered. Frozen with horror, Malbork watched as the skaven he had killed staggered into grotesque life and retrieved its mace from the ground.

A firm grip seized the voivode from behind. Malbork whipped around with his dagger, but Iorgu caught his hand before he could deliver the blow. ‘Excellency, you must call the retreat!’ the dregator yelled, his words barely penetrating the ringing in the voivode’s ears. ‘Vanhal has turned his legion away from von Oberreuth. If we do not run now, we shall be caught between the skaven and the undead!’

Malbork’s lip curled in an ugly snarl. ‘Let the Nachtsheer die! That is what they are paid to do! Their deaths will allow us the opportunity to escape.’

Iorgu’s grip tightened about Malbork’s hand. Cold fury blazed in the former peasant’s eyes. ‘You can’t abandon your men!’ he roared.

With a twist of his wrist, Malbork broke Iorgu’s hold and sent the dagger plunging into the dregator’s breast. ‘Stay with them then,’ he hissed at the dying man. Even as the words left his tongue, the voivode saw the tendril of darkness seeping into the murdered man’s flesh. Crying out in terror, Malbork reeled away from the revivified dregator.

Dragging his injured leg, Malbork fled across the field towards the trees, praying he might reach their shelter before the deathly legions of Vanhal came crashing down upon the Sylvanian camp. Behind him, even through the clamour of the skaven horn, he could hear the stumbling steps of Dregator Iorgu as the zombie pursued its killer into the forest.

The skeletal horde marched away from the Stirlanders and their allies, ignoring the mortal foes as though they weren’t even there. The surrounded cavalry broke free, riding back into the shelter of the trees. A ragged cheer went up from the allied camp as Graf Mandred returned to them. For the Stirlanders there was only a limping steed with an empty saddle to mark the fate of their grand count.

Vengeful archery punished the undead as they turned northwards and away from Fellwald. Dwarf gunners emerged from the trees, firing their weapons at the dragons overhead, peppering the beasts with bullets until they flew beyond the range of their weapons. Behind them, like the track of some vast and decayed snail, the undead left a litter of broken bones and mutilated bodies.

Upon his spectral carriage, upon his throne of wailing ghosts, from behind his mask of bone, Vanhal watched as his legion marched towards the real battle. The deceptions of Malbork von Drak and Lothar von Diehl, the challenge of Graf Mandred and Grand Count von Oberreuth, these had been useful to the necromancer. They had provided the bait that would draw his greatest enemy from hiding. Once before, he had dismissed the verminous ratmen as being of no consequence. That had been a mistake, one that had cost him dearly. One thousand years of shapeless oblivion.

Vanhal shook his head, trying to clear the weird image from his mind. An illusion of memory, a nightmare struggling to make itself real. Yet where had it come from? Some ancestral spark, some mad delusion conjured by the brain of Lothar von Diehl?

The necromancer dismissed the distraction. The provenance of the illusion was of no consequence. What did matter was the annihilation of the skaven. Once they were extirpated there would be no more assassins slinking into the halls of Vanhaldenschlosse, no more thieves stealing into his fortress to plunder the warpstone from its walls. There would be only peace and silence, the quietude of the grave.

The ratmen were engaged with the remnants of the Nachtsheer and the newly risen dead Vanhal’s magic had animated. Even so, their numbers were vast, mighty enough to form a battle-line to oppose the tide of undead he was bringing to bear upon them. The necromancer made a pass of his hand through the air, bidding the abhorrent dragons in the sky above to swoop down and shatter the skaven formation.

As the dragons descended, the destructive cacophony of the horn sounded once more. The blast of magic caught both dragons, sending their wormy bulks crashing to earth, bowling them across the ground like a landslide of reptilian flesh and saurian bone. Hundreds of skeletons were pulverised as the dragons rolled over them. What had been a vast legion of the undead was shattered.

Vanhal stretched forth his hand as one of the dragons came tumbling towards him. The vast bulk exploded into a shower of decay, passing to either side of the necromancer like ocean waves crashing about the base of a rock.

The necromancer glared across the carnage. He paid no notice to the squeaking, jeering swarm of skaven who now skittered across the battlefield and dragged down those pockets of undead yet standing. His eyes were focused on the morbid warlord who had conjured such magic. There, he knew, lay the real threat.

Mustering his energies, Vanhal sent his phantom palanquin shrieking across the terrain, boiling over shattered undead and marauding skaven alike. Whatever the wailing spirits touched was scorched and withered, left rotting upon the barren ground. The jubilant squeaks of the ratmen turned to howls of horror and they broke before the advance of the ghostly throne.

Bonelord Nekrot was just putting his scorched lips to the horn to evoke its magic for a third time when Vanhal’s enslaved spirits brought the necromancer raging through the skaven lines. Before the skaven warlord could react, a blast of arcane power caused the Whispering Horn to crumble in his paws. The vengeful ratman squealed in terror as spectral hands lifted him from the ground and dragged him to the ethereal mound of enslaved ghosts. He was dumped at the very feet of the man he had struggled so hard and for so many years to kill.

Vanhal smiled behind his mask. Now all the old betrayals would be avenged. Stretching out his hand, he began to draw the life from Nekrot’s body, leaching his vitality like a sponge. He held the warlord in his power, killing him inch by inch, letting the once mighty skaven hear the shrieks of terror rise from his minions, letting him watch as they scampered back to their holes.

Before he had drawn the last dregs of life from Nekrot’s body, Vanhal broke the spell. The Bonelord was doomed, he had only moments to live, but they were moments the necromancer intended to savour.

Nekrot knew he was dying, and that knowledge fired his ratty heart like no other power could. With all the viciousness of a cornered rat he lunged at the necromancer.

In the moment before Nekrot’s fangs closed about the necromancer’s throat, Vanhal withdrew his consciousness from the body of his apprentice Lothar, the shape he had worn like an old cloak while his own body rested within the walls of his fortress.

He wanted Lothar to experience with his own mind the last murderous seconds of Nekrot’s vitality. It was really the least Vanhal could do to repay his apprentice’s clumsy effort at betrayal.

The last sound Vanhal’s spirit heard before it went hurtling back to Vanhaldenschlosse was Lothar’s anguished shriek as he understood what his master had done to him and felt Nekrot’s fangs sink into his flesh.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Averland, 1123

The great hall of Averburg’s keep bore the scars of the skaven siege. Once a grand arcade of marble pillars and tiled floors, now only the soiled echoes of its past opulence remained. Graf Mandred recognised the putrid corrosion left behind by the impact of a warpcaster’s glowing pellet. Whatever infernal magic the skaven poured into those spheres when they slammed into a target they had the power to melt stone and vaporise iron. The less thought given to their effect upon flesh the better.

Still, despite the savageries of the skaven, Mandred could feel the lingering majesty of the place, the sense of legacy that seemed to exude from the very walls. He understood why the von Orns had wanted the graf to meet with his council here. It was their way of demonstrating to Mandred and his allies that Averland had been a great and prosperous land. It would be again, now that the skaven were in retreat.

The scope of that retreat had confused Mandred at first. In other lands, any great victory had been followed by almost innumerable small skirmishes as contingents of his army were dispatched to force the skaven from every village and town. In Averland, despite the magnitude of the skaven infestation, virtually every settlement had been abandoned by the monsters after they lost Averheim.

The answer came by way of intelligence culled from the few ratmen taken prisoner. Under none-too-gentle interrogation from the dwarfs, the vermin revealed the identity of the white skaven Mandred had fought and whose ear Legbiter had cut away.

He was Vrrmik, and they referred to him by a variety of grandiose titles, the most prominent of which was Great Warlord. Vrrmik, it transpired, was the successor of Vecteek, the skaven overlord Mandred and his father had slain during the Battle of Middenheim. With the Great Warlord himself present in Averheim, it seemed clear to Mandred that the rapid abandonment of the rest of Averland could only have been accomplished under Vrrmik’s orders.

The question was, why? To what end would Vrrmik concede the whole province to his enemy? Try as he might, Mandred couldn’t wrap his mind around whatever treacherous strategy the skaven were trying to implement. To try to outguess the skaven would be to think like one of the monsters. No matter how vile, he could think of no man, not even the escaped murderer Beck, who was so debased as one of the skaven.

‘The major strongpoint of the ratkin in Solland is Pfeildorf.’ The speaker was Captain Aldinger of the Knights of the Black Rose. He was addressing the lords and generals gathered in the great hall. The map he pointed to was a great sprawling tapestry depicting the entire southern half of the Empire, a gift bestowed upon the von Orns by the dwarfs of Zhufbar. ‘They’ve turned the city into a distribution point for the slaves they capture when they raid into Talabecland and Wissenland.’

The explanation brought angry snarls from many in the room. Mandred was pleased to hear that anger. It meant that his forces were seeing beyond the limitations of their own people and their own lands. They were thinking in terms of the Empire as a whole, in mankind as a single…

Cries of surprise and confusion rose from the back of the hall, interrupting both Aldinger’s explanation of the situation around Pfeildorf and Mandred’s thoughts. He turned away from the extravagant map, trying to see the source of the disruption.

The cause was a dusty, bedraggled man in the livery of the von Oberreuths, the ruling house of Stirland. More than the man’s alarming appearance and dramatic entrance, it was the words he spoke that made an impact on the assembly.

‘Woerden is lost!’ the messenger cried. ‘The skaven have slaughtered everyone in the town!’

Mandred watched as Hulda made her esoteric preparations for the ritual. He wondered if it was a sign of weakness or desperation that he should turn to the witch, or if perhaps it was evidence of stubbornness and superstition that he hadn’t consulted her before. Whatever his feelings, he knew that this was certainly his last recourse. If this didn’t work, there was nothing else left to try.

The great hall in the Averburg fortress was empty now. Mandred and Hulda were the only ones inside. The great map Aldinger had referenced was laid out on the floor now, combined with a second massive tapestry depicting the northern provinces. At each corner of the map, Hulda had set a tallow candle, ringing it round with a circle of dried herbs and crushed leaves. A great wooden framework had been suspended over the map and from this a wild array of tiny stones had been tied, the loop of each cord fastened in such a way that it could slide along the wooden runners.

At the base of the map, however, was the most macabre instrument in Hulda’s conjurations, the hollowed-out skull of a ratman, inverted over an open fire. A strange concoction boiled away inside that skull, sending a strange and nauseating smoke wafting through the hall. Hulda squatted beside the skull dressed only in a thick robe of wolfskin. Beside her on the floor rested the severed tail of Poxmaster Puskab Foulfur and the severed ear of Great Warlord Vrrmik.

Oh, it had been fiendishly clever, Vrrmik’s plan. Mandred had to concede a certain monstrous brilliance to the verminous creature. He’d withdrawn his forces from Averland so that he could deploy them elsewhere. Not for conquest, but simply to destroy. Woerden had been almost razed to the ground, virtually its entire population massacred. Vrrmik could have conceived no better way to shatter the army that had driven him from Averheim. The disparate forces that made up Mandred’s army, so close to that unity of purpose he had struggled so long to invest them with, were once again becoming fractured. Every nobleman, every peasant was worried about his home now, wondering when Vrrmik’s vengeful horde would rise up to annihilate his city or town.

The skaven didn’t need to bring some mighty army to conquer Mandred in the field. Vrrmik could simply stage terror raids in the lands the humans thought safely liberated and bleed away Mandred’s forces piecemeal as each province scurried home to protect their own land.

There was only one chance, one way to outguess Vrrmik and beat the rat at his own game. If Mandred could predict where Vrrmik would strike next, if he could get his army there ahead of the skaven, then he would restore the confidence of his commanders and rekindle their faith in the vision of an entire Empire freed from the ratkin.

If he guessed wrong, however, nothing would keep Mandred’s force united. They would scatter and, eventually, the skaven would pick off each province one at a time.

Hulda motioned for Mandred to stay where he was. She’d cautioned him earlier that any movement, any sound could prove disastrous. At best, the divination would be spoiled. At worst, her magic might unleash a denizen of the aethyr, the malignant forces all men knew as daemons.

Mandred listened as Hulda invoked the name of Ulric, her voice dropping in tone and distinction until it was little more than a bestial growl. The inhuman timbre of her voice set the hairs at the back of his neck crawling, yet worse was to come. From where he stood, he could only see the back of the witch, her wild mane of hair and the heavy wolfskin cloak. It was only when she reached to the floor beside her that he saw anything more, and what he saw made him shudder. The hand that picked up the scaly skaven tail was scarcely a hand at all. It was covered in white fur, the fingers distended into long bony talons, each digit tipped by a blackened claw.

A foul sizzling noise rose from the skull as Hulda dropped the tail into the boiling liquid. It seemed to Mandred that he could see a weird mist drift away from the skull, wafting above the map and slithering among the suspended stones. There was no mistaking, however, when one of the stones began to shudder and dance, shivering at the end of its tether as though it were a thing alive. The cord slid along the framework, the stone beneath it straining at the end of its tether at an angle.

Hulda reached for Vrrmik’s ear, this time her hand little more than a lupine paw. Again, Mandred heard the sizzling sound as the ear followed the tail into the ghoulish cauldron. Once again he fancied he could see a mephitic vapour rise up and blow across the map. Another of the suspended stones shivered, its cord sliding along the wooden runners until it took up position near the first stone. Both of the tiny rocks strained at the ends of their tethers, pointing to a spot on the map below.

‘Hergig,’ Hulda’s distorted voice growled. ‘At the time of the next new moon, the skaven will attack Hergig.’

Mandred nodded. Hergig, the capital of Hochland. It made a fiendish amount of sense. Hochland was at the very centre of most of the provinces that had joined with Mandred. If Vrrmik struck there, he would exhibit in no uncertain terms that he could strike the neighbouring provinces as well.

Hergig. It would be a long, hard march from Averheim.

Altdorf, 1124

The slime-coated walls of the Catacombs glistened in the rushlight as armed soldiers stalked through the cramped dungeons far below the Courts of Justice. Inarticulate moans, the rattle of rusty chains, desperate cries for mercy or death echoed through the dank corridor but did nothing to stir whatever dregs of sympathy still lingered in the hearts of the gaolers. Already hard and brutal men, the intrusion of Gazulgrund’s killers had made these men even more vicious. Though the Kaiserjaeger had doubled their guards and increased their defences, the gaolers couldn’t shake the feeling that death might strike at them without warning at any time. Savagery went far to make them forget their own fears.

Kreyssig stalked along the corridor behind his soldiers and the guiding gaolers. He wanted a particular cell and a particular captive: someone he had entombed in the darkest corner of the Catacombs.

The Protector cursed the desperation that made him resort to such an extreme, but there was nothing else to be done. Von Kranzbeuhler had escaped and the Kaiserjaeger had yet to turn him up. Should the knight reach Graf Mandred and disclose Kreyssig’s treachery then all of his careful plans would be for nothing.

Fortunately, the very urgency that drove him to this black pit beneath Altdorf was also working in Kreyssig’s favour. His spies reported that Mandred’s army was on the march again, driving towards Altdorf. They could be expected almost any day. Von Kranzbeuhler didn’t have much time to get to Mandred and warn him. The Kaiserjaeger had Altdorf sealed as tight as a drum, so Kreyssig was certain the outlaw was still somewhere in the city. The loss of Ghal Maraz all those years ago had been a painful, but profitable lesson.

The gaolers didn’t bother to hide their fear when they reached the cell. They hesitated before the door, none of them making a move to turn the key. Kreyssig had no patience with the trepidation of his men. Angrily he pushed past his guards and took the ring of keys from the head gaoler. Turning the key in a lock that almost seemed a solid block of rust, he pushed open the door and thrust the rushlight he carried into the cell beyond.

The light cast by the smouldering brand revealed a ragged creature chained to the slimy wall. It lifted its head as Kreyssig stepped inside. The Commander of the Kaiserjaeger struggled to keep his composure as the thing stared at him with the glistening clutch of spider-like eyes that pockmarked the left side of what was left of its face. The right side was a shapeless mush of flesh, as though it were made of wax and had been left too close to a flame. The entirety of the creature was a mismatched patchwork of mutation. The fingers of one hand were hard and calcified, resembling nothing so much as the thorns on a rose. The creature’s other arm was split into two spindly limbs at the point where its elbow had been. The thing’s back was crooked, yet at the same time its overall mass and build was that of some misshapen giant.

Gazing upon the abominable thing, Kreyssig felt the temptation to withdraw. Instead he held his ground and called it by the name it had possessed when it was still human. ‘Beck,’ he called to the creature. ‘How would you like a chance to get revenge?’

The mutant had been captured months before by one of the rural nobles. The fact that it had been carrying a charm fashioned from one of the black rocks the skaven coveted had brought the creature to the notice of the Kaiserjaeger. They in turn had brought the thing to Altdorf. Under the tortures of the Dragon’s Hole, the mutant had confessed all. It said its name was Beck, that it was a knight from Middenheim, bodyguard to Graf Mandred in fact. Beck had been devoted to his master, serving him with absolute selflessness, or at least that was what the mutant insisted. There had been a falling out between master and servant when he’d been caught murdering Mandred’s lover, the Lady Mirella. Beck’s intention had been to clear the field so that his master might pursue Baroness Carin of Nordland, a relationship that had far more to offer the graf by way of political alliance and territorial gain. Mandred hadn’t seen things that way, and Beck had been forced to flee for his life.

He’d been making his way back to Middenland when he’d been caught. The taint of mutation had started when he was in Averland, but it had accelerated dramatically after he left Mandred’s army. Beck’s belief was that the deformities that afflicted him were caused by the curse of Hulda, a witch who had ingratiated herself into the graf’s confidences. Kreyssig was less sure; he’d seen for himself the strange effect the skaven stones had on things. Beck’s belief in the witch’s curse, however, was something the Protector could use.

Chains rattled as the mutant raised its head. The spidery eyes shifted in their orbits, fixing Kreyssig with their multitudinous gaze. ‘Revenge,’ the thing hissed, the word almost unintelligible as it was pushed past the creature’s jutting fangs.

‘Graf Mandred, your old master, is coming here,’ Kreyssig informed the mutant.

Beck tried to lunge forwards, what was left of its face contorted in rage. Kreyssig noted with dismay that the iron staples set into the wall shuddered in their fastening. Just a little more force and the mutant might break free all on its own.

‘Good,’ Kreyssig laughed with more levity than he actually felt. ‘I see that we are of one mind.’ Beck settled down, sinking onto its haunches like some pensive predator. The eerie eye-cluster watched him with sinister intensity. ‘I might be persuaded to give you a chance, if you can convince me I can trust you.’ That, of course would be impossible, but if he could get the mutant to behave itself until it was no longer useful, Kreyssig would be content.

‘Mandred,’ Beck snarled, foam dripping from the mutant’s jagged teeth.

Kreyssig nodded. ‘Yes, you could kill him. But I think your, our revenge needs more than that. Mandred dreams of making himself Emperor. We can snatch that dream from him the moment he reaches out to take it. He would have to live with the knowledge of what almost was.’ He pointed at Beck. ‘You can make it happen.’

‘Kill,’ the mutant growled, savouring the word as though it were the name of a lover.

‘Kill the dream and damn the man,’ Kreyssig said. ‘What has been done to you by his witch is more horrible than any clean death. Why should you show Mandred any mercy?’

The eye-clusters lost their intense focus as Beck considered that point. The mutant lifted the bisected length of its arm, studying its abominable malformation. ‘Yes,’ it said. ‘Worse.’

It was a genuine smile Kreyssig wore now. He’d worried about how much intelligence, how much sanity, was left in Beck after his grisly transformation and the attentions of the Kaiserjaeger’s torturers. There was enough there, he decided, enough left to remember the cup of hate and want to drink its fill from that malignant chalice.

‘Listen to me, Beck, and I will tell you how you can take your revenge. I’ll tell you how you can kill Mandred’s dream.’

True to their word, it had taken the dwarfs less than ten minutes to demolish the stone wall blocking the entrance to the palace sewers. It took them even less time to find and neutralise the pitfall the Kaiserjaeger had excavated and left as a surprise for intruders. The dwarfs were careful about resetting the trap once it had been bypassed, leaving it as a surprise for any pursuers.

Walking through the dank tunnels, Erich felt himself transported back thirteen years. He was again fleeing the Imperial palace with Baron Thornig, bearing away Ghal Maraz so that the despotic reign of Boris Goldgather might be stripped of its legitimacy. He thought too of how he’d finally escaped from Kreyssig’s pursuing Kaiserjaeger through the help of the insidious ratmen.

‘We’ll need to leave the city,’ Erich said as the dwarfs marched through the muck of the sewer. ‘Maybe a boat or a barge we can hide in.’

Dharin turned to him, shaking his head. ‘There’s no getting out of Altdorf.’ He looked over at Kurgaz, waiting for the other dwarf to nod in agreement. ‘Not for you,’ he added. ‘Ever since the skaven attack, Kreyssig has kept the whole city under lock and key. Nothing gets in or out without his Kaiserjaeger knowing about it.’ He spat into the slime around his feet. ‘This city is shut tighter than Karaz-a-Karak.’

Erich glared down at the dwarf. ‘Then what do we do? Go back and surrender?’

‘We die fighting,’ Kurgaz snapped at the knight, a fierce fire in the slayer’s eyes. ‘Better a clean death than whatever that grobi-fondler has in store for you.’

Dharin listened to the slayer’s outburst, and then barked out a condescending laugh. ‘The Smallhammers were always weak of mind,’ he said. ‘Always ready to fight, never ready to think.’ He pointed the haft of his axe at the other gold grubbers. ‘The debt between us is between us,’ Dharin stated. ‘Do you think I’d involve these lads if I didn’t have a plan?’

Erich stepped forwards, motioning Kurgaz to wait before pouncing on Dharin and trying to smash the sneer off his face. ‘What’s your plan?’ the knight demanded.

‘You can’t leave the city,’ Dharin repeated. ‘But you can hide. There’s one place that even Kreyssig can’t get at: the Great Cathedral. Your Grand Theogonist is his bitter enemy, and one who’s too powerful for Kreyssig to do anything about. Take sanctuary with him and you’ll be as safe as you can be in Altdorf.’

The knight considered that option. Grand Theogonist Thorgrad had been a weak man, easily bent to the demands of Emperor Boris, but from what he’d heard the new Grand Theogonist Gazulgrund was far different. He was a religious fanatic, a firebrand who refused to compromise his principles for anyone or anything. He was also the man who had conceived the Night of the Holy Knives. To entrust their safety to a fanatic and mass-murderer was a cheerless prospect, but it seemed the only option left to them.

‘Do these sewers run beneath the Great Cathedral?’ Erich asked.

Again, the question brought gruff laughter from Dharin and his tax collectors. ‘Any time a manling wants an important building raised, he has dwarfs build it for him. When we build, we dig tunnels to ease the movement of workers and supplies. When the work is done, the manlings have us turn the tunnels into sewers. At least until they want a new building, then we have to turn them back into tunnels.’ He wagged his axe at the dripping walls around them. ‘Yes, human, these sewers connect with the tunnels under the cathedral. All we have to do is follow this main passage and wait for it to branch off into a tunnel walled with red limestone. That’s the path that’ll lead us right under the cathedral.’

Erich nodded his understanding. He looked at Kurgaz. ‘It sounds like a plan,’ he told the slayer. ‘We can hide there until we figure out some way to get a warning to Graf Mandred.’

Kurgaz scowled. ‘I don’t like hiding and sneaking,’ he said.

‘Always ready to fight, never ready to think,’ Dharin laughed. Before the slayer could lunge at him, the gold grubber was already walking off down the tunnel, waving his axe to beckon the others to follow him.

It seemed like hours before they reached the red limestone tunnel. Several times Erich had been suspicious that Dharin had become lost. He was wise enough in the ways of dwarfs, however, to avoid mentioning his suspicion aloud. He had enough to worry about without adding a dwarfish grudge to his troubles.

Finding the red limestone was a relief to Erich’s mind. Soon, he consoled himself, they would be safe from the Kaiserjaeger and protected by the sanctuary of the Great Cathedral. It was just as his worries began to lessen that the dwarfs leading the way stopped dead in their tracks. By the glow of their rushlights, Erich could see what had caught their attention. The wall of the tunnel was broken, exposing a crude earthen passageway.

‘Skaven,’ Dharin hissed, punctuating his statement with a blob of spit.

Erich stared at the burrow-like hole. He felt a chill run down his spine at the thought that the ratmen had been here. But, of course, why shouldn’t they? In preparing for their attack on Altdorf, the monsters had probably pitted the whole sewer system with tunnels and burrows. He said as much to the dwarfs.

The dwarfs, even Kurgaz, turned around and stared at him with incredulous expressions. Dharin jabbed his axe at the hole. ‘That’s new construction,’ he said, speaking as though to a particularly dull and backward child.

‘What would fresh skaven burrows be doing here?’ Erich wondered, a feeling of dread building up inside him.

Kurgaz slammed one fist against the other, a murderous gleam in his eyes. ‘The ratkin tried to destroy your cathedral from above. Maybe they’ve come back to try again from below.’

The implication sent a rush of horror through Erich. He thought of the ghastly weapons he had seen the skaven deploy, remembered the treacherous strategies they employed on the battlefield. If they were planning something for the Great Cathedral…

‘Mandred,’ the knight gasped.

‘Aye, manling,’ Kurgaz agreed. ‘They might be waiting for Mandred before working their devilry.’

‘What do we do?’ Erich asked. ‘We have to warn somebody!’

Dharin scowled. ‘Warn them about what? We don’t know what the vermin might be planning. It might not even have anything to do with your cathedral.’

Kurgaz grinned. ‘Then we go down there and pay the skaven a visit. Spoil their game before it gets started.’ He turned his head and glared at Dharin. ‘And say one word about putting fighting before thinking…’

The other dwarf shook his head and fingered his axe. ‘No, Smallhammer, I was going to ask if you’d like some help. It’s been too many years since I split a skaven skull. I’d rather not get out of practice.’ The other gold grubbers echoed Dharin’s words, all of them eager to bring battle to the perfidious enemies of their race.

Taking a hand axe from one of the gold grubbers and the rushlight out of Dharin’s hand, Kurgaz led the way into the earthy gloom of the tunnel. What they would find waiting for them at the end, none of them could say. All they knew was that they would fight to the death against whatever it was.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Talabecland, 1124

Across fields glazed with frost and through forests dripping with ice, the columns of soldiers and cavalry marched. The vast plains of Averland and the rolling hills of Stirland had given way to the immense woodlands north of the Talabec River. Unlike the thick, wild forests of Nordland, the woods in Talabecland were less a single monstrous sprawl and more scattered stretches of growth with grasslands and marshes intersecting them. It was a region that a determined army could navigate without the sinister aid of elves and ancient primal forces.

Mandred frowned at that last thought. Was his army truly beyond the reach of powers beyond mortal ken? He glanced aside to where Hulda trotted near the head of the column, her every step exhibiting a grace that made even the most veteran scout seem a clumsy buffoon. He tried not to think about the stories circulating about her in the camp, stories that he’d ignored while Ar-Ulric was alive, but which now left him ill at ease. He’d known, of course, that she was a witch. Whatever her claims about being a servant of Ulric, an oracle and voice for the White Wolf, Mandred knew her powers were witchcraft. Faced with an enemy as inhuman and vile as the skaven, however, even the prospect of using witchcraft against the fiends hadn’t troubled his conscience.

What did trouble him was the idea that Hulda was more – or perhaps less – than a witch. He couldn’t shake the image of her – change – during the divination ritual. He couldn’t forget the lupine paw that had reached out for Vrrmik’s ear or the bestial voice that howled an incantation into the darkness. If he’d stirred from where he’d watched the ritual, what might he have seen? Would he have found the beautiful features of Hulda staring down into the cauldron or would it have been the fanged muzzle of a wolf?

Even the Graf of Middenheim, growing up inside the luxury of the Middenpalaz, had heard the shuddersome stories of the Ulricskinder, the half-human beasts who wore their fur inside their skin except at such times as they reverted to their animalistic selves. The werewolf, the loping horror that stalked the night, raging and ravening for human prey. It made even Mandred’s heart quiver to think that Hulda might be one of the Children of Ulric.

He shook his head. His fear was unworthy of him, forged from myth and superstition. He must judge her by her own deeds, not the fables told him by his mother when he was a babe in swaddling. Hulda’s counsel had been a source of strength to him, her eldritch knowledge a boon to the whole army. She’d warned them of the skaven ambush in Nordland, guided them through the haunted Laurelorn. She’d exposed Beck’s murderous treachery.

Mandred let his eyes linger on the witch, forcing himself to see the woman, not the beast he’d half-glimpsed during her divination. Yet, if she was the beast, why should that disturb him? The white wolf had sought only to bring good to him. The animal had led him to the camp of the Kineater, enabling him to save Arch-Lector Hartwich and Lady Mirella from the beastman before they could become its next prey. The wolf had saved his life, savaging the Kineater before it could kill him. Later it had led him to Hulda’s cave, where her counsel brought him the confidence he needed when self-doubt might have sent him scurrying back to Middenheim. And, more recently, it had been the white wolf that had fought to protect the shrine of Ulric and save Ar-Ulric during the skaven attack on Mandred’s camp.

No, Mandred decided. He couldn’t doubt Hulda. Whatever she was – prophetess, witch or werewolf – he had to trust her. If he doubted her now then he must also doubt her vision of the next skaven attack. He’d gambled everything on the accuracy of her divination. If Vrrmik didn’t make his attack on Hergig, if the vermin instead struck somewhere else, everything would come falling apart. His army would scatter, returning to defend their homes. That would be the end of his crusade against the ratmen and, he knew, must eventually see the end of the Empire. Piecemeal, the skaven would pick off each province. It was only as a united force that they had any hope of survival.

Through the steel of his gauntlets, despite the chill in the air, Mandred could feel a warmth emanating from the golden head of Ghal Maraz. The ancient warhammer was lashed before him across his saddle where it was both within quick reach and clearly visible to the men marching around him. Hartwich had underestimated the hammer’s potency as a symbol. It had given the soldiers a new sense of purpose, a new feeling of pride that made them accept even the ordeal of this long march without complaint. In every fiefdom they had crossed, peasants had appeared to bring such food and clothing as they could spare, selflessly sacrificing what little they had to aid Mandred’s cause. When these humble folk, the simple clay of humanity, gazed upon Ghal Maraz, the look of awe and wonder in their faces told him why they did what they did.

Mandred prayed that he might prove worthy of their awe, that within him beat the heart of the hero who could deliver the Empire as Sigmar had done over a millennium before. He had grown beyond the hatred, the base brute lust for revenge that had driven him when he’d first marched his army into Drakwald. He knew now that this crusade against the skaven was bigger and more important than simple hatred. It was a war that had to be fought to ensure human survival, from the most blue-blooded nobleman and esoteric priest to the humblest peasant. Class meant nothing when the foot of skaven oppression was on the neck of all men.

Riding beside him, General von Boeckenfoerde, the renegade Reikmarshal, struck ice from the branch of a tree standing beside the trail. ‘This is the gentlest winter I’ve seen in my sixty-four years,’ he remarked. ‘The gods must favour this enterprise. By rights we should be knee deep in snow right now.’

Mandred nodded. After almost a decade of unremittingly harsh winters, this respite was like a gift from Ulric. As god of both winter and war, perhaps the old wolf had set aside the one so that he might facilitate the other. But it would all depend on how accurate Hulda’s divination was. It would only hasten the destruction of his army if they made this long march with no enemy at the end of the trail.

‘Forgive my impertinence, highness,’ von Boeckenfoerde continued, ‘but what reception do you expect your dignitaries to receive in Altdorf?’

‘I am not counting on the army of Reikland to come marching forth to aid us,’ Mandred confessed. ‘All I have heard of Protector Kreyssig makes him out to be as much of a monster as Boris Goldgather was.’ He let his hand fall again to Ghal Maraz’s reassuring warmth. ‘No, I think a calculating villain like him will sit back and wait to see what happens.’

‘Yes, I think that swine will do just that,’ von Boeckenfoerde said. ‘He was always as cunning as a weasel. He had to be to rise so swiftly in Boris’s service.’ The general arched an eyebrow as a question that had been nagging at him found its way to his tongue. ‘Do you think it was wise sending Captain von Kranzbeuhler? The man is Kreyssig’s mortal enemy, after all.’

‘He’s the only man for the job,’ Mandred said. ‘Kurgaz will keep him safe, and Kreyssig won’t dare make a move until he knows how our campaign in Hochland fares. He’ll need to know if he is in a position to dictate terms or if he’ll be the one being dictated to.’

Mandred looked away, turning his eyes again to Hulda and the long road ahead of them. ‘I have room in my heart right now for only one enemy,’ he said. ‘When that enemy has been vanquished, then I’ll turn my mind to the problem of Adolf Kreyssig.’

Water dripped from the vaulted ceiling of the old dwarfish tunnel, splashing against the toppled pillars and broken statues that had once lined this branch of the Ungdrin Ankor, the great Underway between the dwarf strongholds. Breached and shattered by both the elements and invaders, the tunnels had become a haunt for noxious creatures, few more vile than the beasts the dwarfs reviled as thaggoraki – murderers.

Among the ratkin, there could be no monster more murderous than Great Warlord Vrrmik. The hulking white ratman sat perched atop the headless shoulders of an ancient dwarf statue, slowly wiping the blood coating his claws into his pale pelt. His motions were slow, deliberate, designed to induce the maximum amount of fear in his followers. This stretch of the tunnel was almost a sea of furry bodies, beady skaven eyes glistening in the green glow of worm-oil lamps.

Vrrmik savoured the stench of their fear. He cast his gaze down to the twitching body at his feet, the simpering emissary from Clan Skully and the Old Rat Under the Hill. The villainous Murderlord Raksheed Deathclaw had defied Vrrmik’s command, turning his slinking killers against the dwarfs of Karak Kadrin instead of responding to the warmonger’s demand for fresh troops. Nor was Raksheed the only one to defy Vrrmik! The hordes of Clans Grikk and Skab had refused to send more than a few hundred emaciated slaves, citing their own attacks against the dwarfs as an excuse for their infidelity. Clan Mordkin, Clan Fester, even the minor clans like Gnaw and Fylch had refused to answer Vrrmik’s muster.

There was a reason of course, one that made Vrrmik angry enough that he brought the enchanted head of Skavenbite slamming down into the body at his feet, splattering the corpse’s brains across the tunnel.

Treachery! Base and vile treachery of the lowest and most miserable sort! Directed against the mighty Vrrmik, He Who is Twelfth, the right-paw of the Horned Rat!

Vrrmik’s nose twitched as he sniffed at the dank air of the tunnel. He had dozens of Skrittlespike troglodytes and Moulder-bred rat-wolves sniffing around too, weeding out the sick and infected from his army, sick and infected with the great plague that Clan Pestilens had unleashed against the humans!

The plaguelords had grown powerful since unleashing their creation, but so too had Vrrmik. Now it seemed they wanted to try to topple him, to seize complete dominance for themselves! They’d turned their plague against skavendom. It was easy to understand how it had been achieved. Begin in Skavenblight and the contagion would swiftly disseminate across the Under-Empire, for wasn’t the old adage that all tunnels lead to Skavenblight true?

Vrrmik gnashed his fangs and dropped his hammer into the mush at his feet a second time. As annoying as the lethality of the disease among the ratmen was, an inconvenience to his demands for bigger and vaster armies, it was the foolish rumours that spread which had wrought the most havoc. The credulous flea-brains were claiming the plague was being turned back on the skaven by Man-dread’s curse, that the humans were now infecting them! Hence the lack of enthusiasm for pressing their attacks on the man-things, for expanding their control over the surface, the sudden interest in redirecting their forces and resources against the dwarfs, the blatant defiance of Vrrmik’s own orders!

Vrrmik glowered to his left where Poxmaster Puskab Foulfur came creeping into the tunnel. The plaguelord presented a ridiculous sight, hobbling along in a rolling, surging gait as he tried to adjust his balance for the tail he’d lost. The antlers projecting from his skull kept threatening to drag his whole body face first into the ground.

Still, as ridiculous as Puskab might look, at the moment he was Vrrmik’s best and truest ally. It was Puskab’s magic that had created the Black Plague, now it was his magic that kept the disease at bay. Like Vrrmik, the Poxmaster didn’t for an instant believe the stories about Man-dread’s curse and human transmission of the plague. No, he saw the paws of his fellow plaguelord, Vrask Bilebroth behind this calamity. His rival was jealous of Puskab and taking extreme measures to discredit and destroy him.

Puskab’s advice was for Vrrmik to turn his army against Skavenblight, to destroy Vrask. The Supreme Warlord of Skavendom, however, was too cunning to allow himself to fall into such a trap. Getting involved in the feud between the plaguelords would only bleed his own resources. There was always the chance it was all just a plot to weaken Clan Mors so that Clan Pestilens could assume complete control.

No, Vrrmik had a much better idea. He’d planned to whittle away Man-dread’s army by threatening their warrens, but now he didn’t have that luxury. He had to force a confrontation with the human, butcher him in the open field before the eyes of all skavendom. With Man-dread’s blood soaked into his fur, Vrrmik would quell the rumours of a curse and the imbecilic fear that had spread among the ratkin. He would show them that the only thing they should fear was the ire of Great Warlord Vrrmik and the crash of Skavenbite against their skulls!

Even now, he had spies following Man-dread’s army. Once Vrrmik was certain of their course, he would pick a place to confront them. Ground of his own choosing. Ground that would become a killing field under Vrrmik’s merciless command.

Skavenblight, 1123

Seerlord Queekual’s procession forced its way through the teeming hordes of ratmen. The streets and tunnels of Skavenblight were crammed to bursting with the terrified masses. In places the skaven were heaped atop one another five and six deep, uncaring that those on the bottom of the pile would be crushed or smothered. The vermin feared a different sort of death, a death that stalked their burrows and warrens like a marauding beast, slaughtering great and lowly with indiscriminate abandon.

The Black Plague was loose in Skavenblight. It was raging in the lower depths, infesting the subterranean tunnels and warrens. Outbreaks had erupted in the most squalid of the surface areas, principally the mud-caked menagerie of docks and piers that stretched out into the foggy swamps. The gangs of slaves and farm-rats who tended the stands of black corn in the marshes had been decimated by the disease, entire barges leaving the city only to be found weeks later reduced to floating death ships with nary a twitch of life among the crew.

Fear gripped the hordes of Skavenblight, an enormity of terror such as the city had never seen. The skaven knew how the plague had exterminated the man-things, the agonising death to which Clan Pestilens’s creation condemned the creatures. Now that hideous weapon had been turned back and unleashed upon their own kind. Hoary old ratmen recalled the long-ago affliction of Clan Verms and the quarantine of their stronghold underneath Skavenblight. They urged the warlock-engineers of Clan Skryre to purge the afflicted regions with their warpfire projectors, to burn the disease from the city.

It was too late for that, however. The plague had spread beyond any single clan, had established itself too broadly to be isolated and destroyed. In their desperation, some of the ratmen turned to the plague priests for salvation, abandoning themselves to the diseased heresy of Pestilens in the hope that doing so would save their lives. Many, the vast majority, took the opposite view. They saw Pestilens as the enemy. They saw Nurglitch as an ambitious tyrant and Puskab as a murderous betrayer. In such a stew of panic, confusion and outrage, the skaven fell back upon the beliefs and tradition of the past. They recanted their opportunistic rush towards the power promised by the plague monks and grovelled once again before the might of the Horned Rat.

Such a flood of despair and turmoil was like a font of limitless power for the skaven ruthless enough to tap into it. Seerlord Queekual was such a skaven.

While the other Grey Lords had retreated to their surface-world dominions, joining Vrrmik in his quest to destroy the Man-dread and quell the creature’s uprising, Queekual had steadfastly refused to quit Skavenblight. Let the others squander their strength chasing after an uncertain fortune. Queekual knew better. He knew the past held the key to domination. The ancient proverb that ‘all tunnels lead to Skavenblight’ was a simple truth and behind it was the wisdom that only from Skavenblight could a ratman control the teeming hordes of the Under-Empire.

A canopy of weasel-skin was held above Queekual’s horned head by a retinue of docile acolytes. A cloud of antiseptic incense wafted about him, surrounding him in a luminous fog as the grey-cloaked adepts bore smouldering braziers before him. A small army of red-armoured stormvermin, their fur stained snowy white, their musk glands withered by special unguents to lend them a cold emotionless quality, formed the outer cordon of the Seerlord’s procession. Mixed among the stormvermin were lesser grey seers, paw-picked by Queekual for their oratorical ability. From their fangs flew a ceaseless stream of condemnation and excoriation, the accusing voice of a god most of skavendom had thought to neglect.

Behind them all, carried upon the bed of an enormous carriage with thirteen sets of iron-banded wheels, nestled within a casement crafted from the bronzed skull of a giant, was the holiest relic in all skavendom: the Black Ark, the compact between the Horned Rat and the first Seerlord. Imprinted upon a block of purest warpstone, its quality unsurpassed by the richest ores ever found, were the thirteen tyrannies, the sacred dictates by which the skaven might placate their terrible god and achieve the promise He had made to them: that one day the ratkin would inherit the whole of the world.

The scent of the Black Ark, the aethyric pulses of energy rippling from its warpstone heart, excited the senses of the ratmen, hurling the weakest into apoplectic fits and reducing even the strongest to worshipful fright. The Black Ark was the foundation of the Order of Grey Seers, the rock upon which they had built their power. It was the holy of holies to those who cowered before the malign divinity of the Horned Rat. Rarely did the grey seers bring it forth from the secret vault at the heart of the maze deep beneath the Shattered Tower, and when they did it was a portent of gravest moment.

Seerlord Queekual drank in the intoxicating scent of the Black Ark, feeling its power flow through him like a dark shadow. For all their pretensions and heretical claims, the plague priests were nothing but charlatans playing at holiness. This was the true manifestation of the divine, not the febrile plagues and poxes brewed by the sickening Pestilens.

Queekual cocked his ears back in bitter amusement. There was nothing miraculous about the accomplishments of Poxmaster Puskab! Had he himself not smelled with his own nose a miserable, pathetic man-thing slave-meat re-create the vaunted Black Plague? Had he not himself unleashed this concoction against the impious vermin of Clans Scruten and Gangrous?

That thought gave Queekual pause, so much so that his step faltered. The acolytes carrying his canopy actually went ahead two paces, leaving their master’s horned head exposed to the hated sky. They glanced at one another, glands clenching as they expected the wrath of their vicious Seerlord, but for once he had a worry taxing at his brain more dire than even his pronounced agoraphobia.

Scruten and Gangrous! Scum who dwelt in the lowest depths of Skavenblight! How then had the plague advanced into the warrens of Clan Grikk and the wharfs of Clan Sleekit? How had it spread so quickly into the burrows of Skab and Gnaw? Certainly it was to be expected that the disease might bleed over into the squalor of vermin like Skrittlespike and Feesik, but how could it strike into the enclaves of Ferrik and even Rictus?

Somehow the plague had slipped beyond Queekual’s ability to control. If he hadn’t taken such pains to destroy everything in the Moschner-man’s laboratory, if he could credit mere slave-meat with such cunning, he’d almost be prepared to think the plague had somehow been released directly into the tunnels! But that was impossible! He’d taken pains to execute the stormvermin who burned Moschner’s lab and collapsed the roof onto the remains. Their executioners too had been obliterated in the flames of a warpfire thrower and Queekual himself had attended to the warpfire operators, ensuring that there were no survivors at any level who could even hint at the nature of his grand scheme.

Yet, however impossible, the plague had defeated his careful protocols. A few times Queekual had even entertained the loathsome thought that perhaps the spread of the disease had been the work of Pestilens themselves or their daemonic god.

If so, the strategy devised by their diseased brains had spun around and nipped them in the nethers! The unleashed plague hadn’t cowed the skaven into meek subservience to the plaguelords! Far from it!

The mewing, chittering pleas of the hordes lining the streets of Skavenblight were a cacophony of terrified devotion, prayers to Queekual begging him to intercede with the Horned Rat and save the doomed masses. At every step, his armoured bodyguards were compelled to stab and beat the desperate crowd back, and even so there were those who slipped past the white skaven, risking their lives in an effort to touch the Seerlord’s robe in the belief that his holy raiment might endow them with some manner of divine protection.

Queekual wasn’t pleased by such signs of devotion, alarmed by the proximity of afflicted skaven to his person. It was true that he’d equipped himself with the most potent protective talismans before venturing forth into the streets, but there was no wisdom in forsaking caution. He’d made examples of many of the offenders, obliterating them with spells of such horrific violence that even his acolytes cringed and looked away. No matter how thoroughly he annihilated the trespassers, however, there were always more to take their place.

Faith – it was a thing little removed from fear in the mind of a skaven. And like fear, it was something a clever manipulator could twist to his own purposes. Queekual gloated over the magnitude of that exploitation. With each death, with each fresh outbreak of the plague, the very fabric of skaven society threatened to come crashing down. The Council of Thirteen was impotent to either contain or harness the terror of their vast horde of subjects. Only the grey seers could do so, only they could entice the masses away from unrest. Only they could offer the one thing that would stifle the turmoil. Only they could offer hope.

Queekual listened to the grisly crunch of bone being pulverised beneath the Black Ark’s carriage. The iron-shod wheels smashed the bodies of the ratmen thrown beneath them with merciless violence. It was a variant upon the delusion that touching the Seerlord’s robe would bring divine blessing. A sacrifice offered to the Black Ark was said to bring good fortune. There might be no truth in the myth, but the horde thronging the street was taking no chances. Again and again, ratmen were pushed out from that mass, thrown beneath the wheels by their fellows. A trail of black blood, like the slime of some titanic slug, stained the path behind the Black Ark.

The devotion and despair of Skavenblight’s populace had been willingly surrendered into the paws of Queekual. From them, the Seerlord would forge a weapon even mightier than the Black Plague, a weapon that would tear down the arrogance and heresy of Pestilens.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Hochland, 1124

The rocky slopes of Hochland’s Howling Hills were pitted and scarred, slashed by ravines and gorges. It seemed as if the gods had simply dumped all the leftovers from the Middle Mountains onto the plains, a deranged jumble of limestone and granite stretching across leagues in a grotesque sea of stone. Blighted, barren of tree or shrub or any green thing, the rugged stone run was a lifeless wasteland.

Or at least it had been.

From their tunnels deep below the earth, the skaven had crept and crawled up into the Howling Hills. Swarms of the vermin lurked in each ravine and defile, their bestial squeaks and snarls rumbling up from the depths like the snarl of some subterranean behemoth. The noxious fug of skaven fur and musk slithered across the rocks in a pervasive stink, emboldening the ratkin with the scent of their overwhelming numbers.

Every ratman Vrrmik could coerce, bully or threaten had been marched into the Howling Hills. The Supreme Warlord of Skavendom wasn’t satisfied with the horde, of course. It should have been ten times its size, a swarm of skaven that would have made the Horned One himself spurt the musk of fear to watch it sweep across the land.

Naturally, such a concentration of ratkin had brought severe logistical problems. Entire thrall clans had been set upon as ‘tunnel pork’ during the march, their flesh sustaining Vrrmik’s more valuable warriors. Whole tribes of goblins had been attacked and devoured by the rapacious rodents. Hordes of scavengers had been loosed upon the farms, fields and forests of Hochland to strip the region bare of every last scrap of food. Tree bark, grass roots, beetles and fleas, no source of sustenance had been spared.

Standing upon a stone column, a natural finger of rock protruding above the stone sea, Vrrmik could gaze down into the nearest of the ravines. It was like a pool of fur and gleaming skaven eyes, the clanrats packed so tightly that he suspected some of those closest to the walls of the fissure had been crushed by the press of their comrades. Such casualties wouldn’t linger long; they’d be soon devoured by those around them. Indeed, a few more food-cycles and Vrrmik would have to demote another thrall clan from ‘ally’ to ‘support’.

The massive white skaven preened his whiskers, dismissing the possibility with a shake of his head. It wouldn’t come to that. Vrrmik’s spies, the best sneaks and stalkers warpstone bribes could entice away from Clan Eshin, were even now filtering back to him and reporting the nearness of Man-dread’s army. He could imagine their horror when they found the land stripped bare, offering nothing to sustain them or their horses. After their long march, the humans would be hoping to rest and fatten themselves before giving battle. The depredation of the land would give them no such chance. They would have to either fight or disband. Either way, Vrrmik would claim victory.

Of course, the great warlord hadn’t left anything to chance. He’d been pleased by the way Man-dread had reacted to Puskab’s attack on his camp. To that end, he’d ordered the scavenger bands to forsake some of the fodder they’d encountered. In each village and hamlet the ratkin had attacked, they’d left little stacks of decapitated heads to greet Man-dread’s troops. Just the thing to make the deranged fool-meat too angry to think. The trail the scavengers left behind them was obvious enough for a troll to follow – straight from the scene of each atrocity and back to the Howling Hills.

Vrrmik stroked the gore-crusted head of Skavenbite, feeling the hot sizzle of the warpstone spikes singe his fur. The Howling Hills would become an abattoir. It was ground created for slaughter such as Vrrmik envisaged. The rocky, crumbling slopes were impassable for horses, stripping the man-things of their mobility. The ravines and gorges offered shelter from their archers and the dwarf thunderers who had joined them. The only choice left to Man-dread was that of attacking the skaven directly, he couldn’t wait for the ratkin to come to him. Vrrmik could simply order the more useless of his troops butchered to feed his warriors; the man-things were too stupid to be so pragmatic. They’d waste away and starve instead.

No, Man-dread would come to Vrrmik. He would march his men straight into the Howling Hills where the vast tide of the skaven would exterminate them all.

The last hope of the man-things would die beneath Vrrmik’s hammer.

After marching through the ravaged countryside of Hochland, through forests of denuded trees and villages of slaughtered men, the bleak desolation of the Howling Hills presented a culminating horror for the army that had marched so long and so far to save this land. Gazing up at the stone run from the plain below, the soldiers felt oppressed in spirit and mind by the hellish sight. The sounds and stink of the skaven told them that somewhere in that desolation their inhuman enemy lurked, waiting for the men to dare to trespass upon the craggy slopes of stone.

Mandred felt the mood of his army falter at the edge of despair. All this way, across half the Empire, these men had followed him, taking heart from the hope he offered them. The vision of a land freed from the ratkin, the dream of a world liberated from the tyranny of monsters – these were the promises that had spurred these men on, made them persevere in the face of cruellest hardship and adversity. Now the faith that had sustained them for so long was fragmenting, crumbling away before his very eyes. The hope of victory was gone, vanished like a mocking illusion. To fight the skaven in open battle would have been hard enough, but to fight them in such terrain as this, to engage them in the desolate stone flow with its concealing ravines and gorges, seemed a hopeless prospect.

There was no going back. Mandred knew that. To turn away now would see his army scatter to the wind. The only choice he had was to fight. They had to fight here on the ground the skaven had chosen, ground that robbed the humans of two of their advantages over the ratkin: the mobility of cavalry and the reach of archery. The ratmen, with their greater speed and numbers, sheltered among the rocks, able to manoeuvre by scent around the confusion of boulders and ravines, held every advantage now. It was only through such superiority that the beasts would countenance any battle. If their leader, Vrrmik believed there was any possibility the humans could win, his force would never take the field.

Only one advantage still remained to Mandred, an edge that Vrrmik could never take from him. The soldiers who marched behind his banner were men and it was the hearts of men that beat within their breasts, hearts that could be moved to selflessness, could be stirred to valour and fired with courage. However numerous Vrrmik’s horde, they were skaven, they were cringing beasts driven by fear and greed, incapable of believing in anything more vital than their own skins. Terror and avarice were the forces that drove them on, but such things could only stretch so far, overcome only so much. Mandred’s troops could endure more than Vrrmik’s monsters. That was the one strength the skaven could never equal.

Mandred marched before his troops, eyes roving over the face of each man, matching each gaze, peering into each soul. ‘The road has been long to reach this place,’ he told his men. ‘Never have men endured so much, come so far for such noble purpose. You have not marched here for plunder, you have not taken up sword and spear in the name of conquest, you have not left behind your homes and families simply to fill the coffers of kings and lords. No, it is nothing so base that has led you here but rather a nobility of spirit that drives you to seek a dream greater than yourselves. In your veins burns the fire of a glory mightier than gold, a splendour greater than that of kings and courts! In you I see the majesty of mankind, the foundation upon which the future will stand! You are the pillars of a thousand tomorrows; on your deeds will your children and your children’s children upon their many generations look back in awe and wonder. They will whisper of your valour, of the strength in your arm and the boldness in your heart, and they will marvel that such might could be contained within mortal clay!

‘Our enemy is vile, obscene in their foulness! You have seen their savagery! You have seen their cruelty! You have marched through the lands they have despoiled, heard the people they have enslaved! Hochland has been razed by these monsters, transformed into a lifeless desert by their hunger! Such will be the fate of your homelands if the vermin prevail!’

Mandred clenched his fist, shaking it at the heavens. ‘The skaven will not prevail!’ he told his troops. ‘Here they will be broken, shattered upon our steel! They fight for domination, to sate their greed. We fight for our homes, for our families, for those we would keep safe from the horrors of Old Night. It is our cause that is just; it is our fight that is righteous!’

He watched as he saw the old determination settle once more on the faces of his men as they rallied to his words. Mandred felt his pride swell as he saw the unyielding set of one Nordlander’s jaw, the defiant scowl on the face of an Averlander, the cold fury in the eyes of a mercenary Roppsman. He pointed his hand at the soldiers, waving his finger at them. ‘Do not let the enemy frighten you with their numbers. However overwhelming they may seem, remember that they are but vermin. However many they are, each of them fights alone. You fight with comrades! You fight knowing the man beside you guards your back! You fight knowing that your deeds will be remembered, that if you fall your sacrifice is not in vain! You fight for the Empire and the gods themselves will praise your valour!’

Mandred raised the bulk of Ghal Maraz high, letting the glow of the warhammer shine out across his soldiers. He brought the weapon swinging down, pointing it at the Howling Hills, at the great spire of broken stone where the tattered banners of Vrrmik and Clan Mors fluttered in the breeze. ‘I march to bring death to the ratkin,’ he snarled. ‘I march to strike terror in their craven hearts. I march to show them that they are not masters of men, but simply vermin to be crushed underfoot. Who marches with me?’

A great shout rose from Mandred’s army. He could feel the ground shudder under his feet as thousands of soldiers followed their commander up onto the broken sea of stone. They knew the enemy was waiting for them, that theirs was to be the most dangerous and vital role in the battle, yet they marched boldly into the battle knowing that their leader, the valiant Graf Mandred, marched with them. Mandred asked none of them to brave danger that he shunned for himself, demanded no risk greater than his own.

Behind them, the soldiers left the archers and cavalry, the artillery and the whole of their camp. They had their own part to play in the battle, but first the infantry must spring the skaven trap.

Mandred would see that trap turned in upon itself, that it might catch the hunters instead of the prey.

Either way, the Howling Hills would soon become the greatest graveyard in the Old World. For man or ratkin was the matter that remained in question. And upon the answer rested the fate of the whole Empire.

Sylvania, 1123

From the shadows of the forest, eyes burning with hate studied the silent battlements of Vanhaldenschlosse. The fortress was as still as the tomb. For a year there had been no sign of life within its grim halls, yet such was the terrifying aura that clung to the name of the place that even the boldest grave-robber had shunned it like the plague. Even in death, the power of Vanhal held Sylvania in a grip of fear.

A withered hand clenched into a bony fist. All the world believed Vanhal dead, slain at the Battle of Fellwald by the skaven. Only one soul in all creation knew better, knew the venomous intellect that even now reposed upon his skeletal chair replenishing his arcane power.

Vanhal was so confident in that power, so arrogant in his mastery of the black arts that he had become dismissive of any rival. So far above any other sorcerer or warlock was he that he allowed himself to forget that these too were wielders of magical power. In orchestrating the humiliating destruction of his apprentice, he had ignored the fact that Lothar von Diehl was a necromancer in his own right.

It had taken every reserve of magic he could call upon to stave off death when the fangs of Nekrot ripped into his flesh, but Lothar had survived. He had dragged himself from the field of battle, hidden himself in a place so benighted and forsaken that even the skaven couldn’t find him. There, over the long months, he had nursed the embers of life clinging to his ravaged body into a blazing furnace of hate.

The filthy peasant had left him for dead. Now Frederick van Hal would rue that mistake. He would discover in his last moments that whatever power he could command, Lothar von Diehl was still better than him. Nobility would always be superior to base-born scum.

Lothar pictured his hated mentor ensconced upon a throne of skulls. In his memory, he retraced the corridors, re-walked the stairs that climbed to Vanhal’s sanctum. Every step, every turn, was etched indelibly upon his memory.

The necromancer raised his withered claw, making sorcerous passes he had studied in the profane pages of De Arcanis Kadon. The tome had brought him to Vanhal, elevated him from a mere dabbler in the occult to a true practitioner of the black arts. Vanhal had expanded his own power with the eldritch knowledge of Kadon, had profited greatly by the forbidden secrets. Now that profit was at an end. Now Vanhal would become a victim of the very spells he had plundered from the shadows of Mourkain.

The grisly thing standing beside Lothar shuddered into a semblance of life as the necromancer’s magic saturated its decayed flesh and corrupt bones. The Voivode of Sylvania, the merciless Count Malbork von Drak. Lothar had found the nobleman’s corpse lodged under the roots of an old oak tree. Some vindictive foe had torn open the tyrant’s chest and removed his black heart.

It was inconsequential. Malbork’s body didn’t need a heart to respond to his commands. Malbork’s spirit didn’t need a heart to whisper its secrets in the necromancer’s ear. Through the reanimated husk of the voivode, Lothar had acquired what he needed: the weapon that would spell Vanhal’s doom.

Lothar pointed to the massive lead casket resting on the ground beside him. As a living man, it had been necessary for Lothar to remove the sacred chains and holy seals with which the Verenan priesthood had protected the casket. That was as far as he would go, however. What was within the box was reputed to be so deadly that the slightest brush against it was to invite death. No, it was not for the necromancer to tempt fate. That was the duty of his undead slave.

Dutifully, as when claiming the casket from the vaults beneath Castle Drakenhof, the zombified carcass of Malbork von Drak bent down and fumbled at the catches. It took the creature some time, but at last its rotting fingers threw back the slide. A mephitic vapour vented into the air as the lid was thrown back. Inside, wrapped round with the mouldering shreds of a holy tapestry, was a wicked blade of blackened metal, not iron or steel, but some infernal ore that exuded a foul atmosphere of malice.

Even before he’d acquired De Arcanis Kadon, Lothar had known of this sword. His grandfather had tried to bribe a lay priest at the temple to steal it, but the thief was discovered by the inquisitors before he could make good his crime. According to his grandfather’s notes, the sword was enchanted, endowed with the most murderous magic ever conceived by man. So steeped in death was this sword that it would drain the life from the very hand that wielded it.

This was the magic he would pit against Vanhal. Lothar knew all the secrets of the fortress, all the traps that lay in wait for the unwary. It would be almost as easy as murdering his father in the family castle.

A snap of his bony fingers sent Lothar’s slave shambling off, the black blade clenched in its decayed fist. Malbork staggered at first, but Lothar infused him with greater energy, conjuring the very same incantation Vanhal had termed his ‘Danse Macabre’. With firmer step, guided by the terrible resolve of its master, the zombie marched into the haunted halls of Vanhaldenschlosse.

The dark fog of dream and nightmare bound itself about the essence of Vanhal. Each pulsation of aethyric power brought with it new images of might and horror. He could see great vistas of desert oblivion, awesome obelisks and titanic temples lying shattered and forlorn in the drifting sand. The phantoms of a thousand yesterdays distilled into a single moment of terror, the gestalt scream of a murdered world its echoes rippling across all the tomorrows that might ever be.

Amid the panoply of death there was the silence and serenity of the eternal. Pain, suffering, the slow decay of toil, the cruel deceit of hope, the malign mockery of achievement, the ceaseless pursuit of wealth – these were abolished, exterminated to plague man no more. Nothing was left but the peace of oblivion.

Vanhal winced as shadows drifted through his soul. He felt the presence of others, others beyond that black fire which blazed within the core of his being. They were faint, fleeting shapes, faces almost half-forgotten: a man, a woman and a child. They beckoned to him with desperate severity, crying out to him. They did not beg for themselves. They begged for the man who had been Frederick van Hal.

Agony erupted through Vanhal’s wizened body. He could feel the poisoned blade being thrust through the back of his throne, breaking his spine as it gouged its way sideways to skewer his heart and crack his ribs. When he opened his eyes, he could see the black tip of the blade protruding from his chest, his blood steaming upon its corrosive edge.

He knew that blade. Something inside him knew the searing pain, recalled it with cold and merciless memory. There was a cruel, terrifying irony that this blade should have endured from the age of antiquity, survived to again play such a part. Even the magic of a god was unequal to the loathsome magics that had been infused into the assassin’s sword. It was the very finger of Death itself.

Vanhal could hear the spectres in his mind crying out to him, striving so hard to bear his spirit away with them. Ghostly tears fell from the woman’s eyes. Almost he could put a name to her. Anya? Alyssa? She had been important to him. Once.

Invoking the last of his sorcery, the necromancer forced his cold flesh to move, to turn his head and face his killer. The assassin already lay upon the floor, the husk that had been Malbork von Drak was rapidly decaying into a pool of corruption. Vanhal could sense the ribbons of magic yet clinging to the corroding zombie, a familiar pattern that lent fresh vigour to his fading spirit. The flame of vengeance banished the beckoning wraiths, leaving only a fearsome determination. Across the evaporating ribbons of energy, Vanhal projected his hatred, following the trail of the conjured back to the conjurer, back to where his erstwhile apprentice Lothar was exulting in his murderous accomplishment, the triumph of his undead assassin over his terrifying mentor.

Lothar’s jubilation collapsed as Vanhal’s hatred made itself felt. The voice of the master necromancer whispered in the mind of the apprentice. ‘When you die,’ it said, ‘your flesh belongs to me.’

Vanhal’s hate dissipated, leaving Lothar curled up upon the barren earth, shuddering and weeping in the grip of his horror. The apprentice knew he had succeeded, knew he had destroyed his master’s body and sent his spirit into the darkness of the beyond.

But how long would the hate of Vanhal remain in the void? That was the question that would haunt Lothar the rest of his days.

How ever many the ghost of Vanhal saw fit to allow him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Hochland, 1124

Great Warlord Vrrmik chittered in delight when he saw Man-dread’s troops begin climbing up onto the broken slopes of the Howling Hills. The fool-meat had divided his forces, leaving many of his soldiers on the plain below. He could see the long line of archers, the little blocks of horsemen, the squads of dwarfs scurrying about the encampment assembling their catapults, as though they might lay siege to the hills above them! The boulder-strewn river of stone would make a mockery of their pathetic efforts. What did it matter if they added a few more rocks to the natural rubble, if they crushed a few dozen hapless ratmen here and there? For that matter, how well would Man-dread’s archers fare trying to pick off skaven in those brief intervals when there was neither crevice nor boulder to conceal them? Their only real chance would be to loose their arrows when the skaven rushed Man-dread’s infantry, and Vrrmik knew from past experience how squeamish the man-things were about shooting into their own forces. Better for the fool-meat to have armed the bowmen with knives and brought them along as a meat-shield to act as a buffer between Vrrmik’s clanrats and his more valuable fighters.

Vrrmik’s tail lashed in anger as he considered the cavalry below, waiting behind the line of archers in squadrons of lancers and knights. The arrogance of such deployment infuriated him. Man-dread was so confident of routing the skaven that the cretin actually held his horses in reserve, hoping to use them to run down the ratmen when they broke and tried to flee! The pomposity! Vrrmik would butcher his way through Man-dread’s infantry and then unleash his entire horde upon the dispirited knights when they turned to flee. Their steeds would make excellent eating after weeks of roots, tree bark and tunnel pork.

First would come the destruction of Man-dread. Vrrmik snarled at the chieftains around him, sending the vermin scurrying off to rally their clanrats. The great warlord had been very careful about calculating how many warriors to unleash against Man-dread’s troops. Too few and the humans would simply march right over them. Too many and the humans might be overwhelmed. There had to be just the right amount of skaven in the first assault to hold the humans and weaken them. When it was time for the kill, when Vrrmik was certain Man-dread had been weakened enough, it would be himself and Clan Mors that would strike the final blow.

‘Puskab,’ Vrrmik snarled, glaring at the decayed plague priest as the noxious creature scuttled into view. ‘Bring-fetch your monks. They will take the position of honour when I lead the final attack.’ Puskab looked less than enthusiastic about using his remaining followers as the vanguard of Vrrmik’s attack, but a display of the warmonger’s fangs improved his attitude drastically. Bobbing his horned head, the plaguelord scampered off to carry out his orders.

Vrrmik laughed as he watched the plague priest slither back into the ravine and bully his way through the massed ranks of armoured stormvermin. Puskab was a useful idiot for the moment, but once this battle was finished Vrrmik would need to reassess the Poxmaster’s usefulness. With the Black Plague beyond the ability of Clan Pestilens to contain or control, Vrrmik was reconsidering the advisability of associating with them. The grey seers and their leader Seerlord Queekual were enjoying a resurgence of influence and popularity in plague-ridden Skavenblight. Offering them the pelt of the Poxmaster would go far in winning their friendship.

The great warlord turned his baleful gaze back to the slope and the pathetic human force climbing up to confront his mighty horde. First things first; he would scratch these fleas out of his fur and then worry about the Pestilens-tick.

As the first swarms of clanrats rose up from the rocks and charged into Man-dread’s ranks, the delicious smell of blood and slaughter struck Vrrmik’s nose. It mattered little that much of the blood carried the tang of ratkin, the odour was intoxicating just the same. It excited his metabolism, made his mouth salivate with the hunger for battle. He knew the same sensations would be pulsing through the bodies of his stormvermin, goading them into a fury that would be sated only with the flesh of fallen foes in their bellies and the taste of man-thing blood on their fangs. That there were so few of the humans would goad his warriors to fight all the harder for there wouldn’t be enough manflesh to go around.

Fool-meat Man-dread, who dared to think he could match wits with Mighty Vrrmik! The great warlord was almost ashamed that the battle was so one-sided.

Not that he would have had it any other way.

The glowing head of Ghal Maraz came smashing down into the armoured head of a skaven war-chief, shattering both the steel helm the beast wore and the skull beneath. The creature crumpled into a gory heap at Mandred’s feet, its rancid blood spilling across his boots. The graf stepped over its twitching carcass and brought his warhammer swinging around into the chest of the sword-rat lunging forwards to exploit the gap left by its slaughtered leader. The creature uttered a terrified squeak and was flung back into the swarming ranks of its verminous kin.

Another skaven dove in from the side, flecks of foam dripping from its fangs as it tried to spit Mandred on the end of its spear. The attack ended in an agonised squeal and a welter of black blood as the cleaving edge of Legbiter came slashing down, ripping the ratkin from shoulder to collar. Arch-Lector Hartwich wiped the skaven gore from his face and smiled at Mandred.

‘Don’t you trust Sigmar to look after his Wolf?’ Mandred laughed at the priest.

Hartwich raked Legbiter’s edge across the face of another charging skaven, sending the ratman stumbling back and pawing at the ruin where its eyes had been. ‘Just putting the sword you loaned me to good effect,’ he said.

‘A runefang’s place is in battle,’ Mandred returned, smashing the legs out from under an armoured ratman. ‘And I have my hands full with the gift you bestowed on me,’ he added, bringing Ghal Maraz hurtling down to crush the head of the wounded ratman.

‘Save your praise for Lord Sigmar,’ Hartwich advised. ‘I am but his instrument.’ The priest’s words ended in a grunt as one of the ratmen hurled the thrashing body of its wounded kin and brought its blade slashing down into his shoulder. The mail beneath his priestly vestment thwarted the biting edge, but the impact left him staggered. Before the skaven could capitalise on its foe’s impairment, it was itself spitted by a spearman, one of the peasant troops who had flocked to Mandred’s banner. The creature collapsed to the ground, trying to push its entrails back into its belly. A second thrust from another spearman transfixed its throat and ended its loathsome struggles.

All around him, Mandred bore witness to the veracity of his words to his men. Noble, priest or peasant, they fought together, comrades-in-arms, each soldier watching out for his fellow. The ratkin had no such camaraderie. They attacked alone, they died alone and their wounded were trampled beneath the paws of their own kind. They were unleashed against the humans in bestial packs and like beasts they fought. It was the coordination, the mutual support of the humans that repulsed them time and again, forcing them back, breaking each successive wave.

There must come a tipping point, however. No matter how coordinated his troops, Mandred knew there would come a moment when the superior numbers of the skaven would overwhelm his men. For each ratkin they killed, six more seemed to come scurrying out from the rocks. The skaven reserves seemed limitless, while each casualty the monsters inflicted represented an irreplaceable loss. For the nonce, the formation was holding, the outer ring of shields and swords protecting an inner core of spears. Like a steel turtle, the armoured shell was protecting the soft body within, allowing the formation to creep slowly up the jagged slope. Once that shell was punctured, Mandred knew the cohesion of his command would be finished.

Desperately Mandred wanted to look back down to the plain below, wanted to see if the other half of his plan was being put into action. General von Boeckenfoerde knew his orders, knew he couldn’t act too soon or it would all be for nothing. Mandred’s infantry had to climb far enough into the Howling Hills to break through when the tide turned. He had to be near enough to exploit the confusion when it came, to charge straight up into the mouth of the trap. They had to assault that high point where the ratkin banners had flown, the peak where Hulda assured him that the scent of Vrrmik was at its strongest. If the great warlord escaped, there could be no victory here, all they could win was a reprieve.

Jubilant cheers sounded from the men at the centre of the formation. It was the first indication to Mandred that von Boeckenfoerde had ordered the attack. As he pulped the body of a skaven warrior, the graf could see a ball of fire hurtling overhead to his left. The mass of vermin assaulting the formation blocked his view of the missile as it came crashing down among the rocks, but the cacophony of squeaks and squeals told him of its impact and the impact of dozens like it all across the stone river.

The Howling Hills, that jumble of broken rock and jagged boulders, were like a natural fortress, a place teeming with hiding places for the skaven to lurk in ambush. To try to unleash a barrage against the entire range would have been futile, instead Mandred had conceived the plan to strike along a very narrow front – the flanks of his own advancing force. As the skaven came swarming to the attack, creeping and crawling through the ravines and gorges, they brought themselves into the killing ground. More, by the route of their advance they exposed to the men below their hiding places, providing the artillery with still more targets.

The missiles thrown by von Boeckenfoerde’s catapults weren’t stones. They were fireballs cobbled together from broken-up wagons, dead trees, tents, blankets, spare clothing – anything in the army’s supply train that would burn. Gunpowder from the dwarfs was added to some of the missiles, bags of pungent dung to others, anything to further confuse and disorient the ratkin whether by sound or smell. As the burning missiles slammed into the stone flow, they shattered, raining down into the ravines and gorges, filling them with heavy black smoke.

All along the stone flow the raucous squeals of the ratkin became deafening. Deep down inside their ravines, the skaven didn’t know the reason for the blazing debris that rained down on their heads, the distant crack and boom of gunpowder reverberating among the rocks, the noxious stench of the blinding smoke that billowed across their positions. They were unable to appreciate the magnitude of the attack. Isolated and alone, communication severed by the assault of the catapults on the plain below, the skaven were only aware of their own small piece of the battle.

Panic reigned as the besieged ratkin began to flee their hiding places, scampering back down the narrow fissures running throughout the Howling Hills. As the assaulted positions broke, they charged headlong into their own warriors further back among the hills. Like an infection, their panic spread to the other skaven, the scent of their fear impacting against the other vermin and sending them likewise into full retreat.

The tide was turning, but Mandred’s infantry were still merely a tiny island in a sea of ratkin. Victory was anything but assured.

‘Fool-meat! Dung-sniffing flea-fondlers!’ Vrrmik brought the murderous head of Skavenbite slamming down into one of his sub-chiefs, obliterating the ratman’s rib cage and sending his maimed body spinning down among the rocks. The rest of the great warlord’s retinue cringed away from their enraged overlord, chittering anxiously to one another, sometimes trying to push a despised rival just a little closer to Vrrmik and his hammer.

Vrrmik licked the blood of his slaughtered minion from his muzzle and glared down at the shifting battlefield. The Howling Hills had taken on a hellish appearance, smoking as though a lava flow were running through its ravines. More and more of the burning missiles were hurtling down into the stone sea, pelting the ratkin in the ravines with flaming debris and filling the crevices with smoke. Many of the weak-livered vermin were in full rout, scampering away through the ravines, hurrying back to the tunnels that would lead them back into the underworld.

As infuriating as that was, Vrrmik found the actions of his bolder warlords and chieftains still more aggravating. Perhaps more aware of what was happening than the routed ratkin, these chiefs were leading their warriors down the slopes to attack the humans on the plain below. Vrrmik could easily imagine the moronic thirst for glory and favour that motivated these weak-minded dolts. They thought they could jockey for better position by ending the barrage and recovering the situation for the great warlord. What they were actually doing was leaving the safety of their cover and scurrying straight into the murderous archery of the man-things below! That nine of every ten of these suicidal mobs carried the banner of Clan Mors or one of its thrall clans only added to Vrrmik’s fury.

Two of the swarms actually reached the plain with some strength left in them. From the height of the hilltop, Vrrmik could see that their success had only brokered them a different kind of death. The human archers fell back as the skaven came leaping down from the rocks, drawing aside and allowing the waiting cavalry to come charging in. The resultant massacre was like watching a troll wrestle a goblin.

Vrrmik gnashed his fangs. His carefully conceived plan was coming apart all around him. The strength of Clan Mors was bleeding away between his fingers, threatening his position as He Who is Twelfth and his authority as Supreme Warlord of all Skavendom!

Drastic measures were called for if he were to snatch survival from the fangs of destruction!

Imperiously, Vrrmik pointed the dripping head of Skavenbite at Puskab Foulfur and his plague monks. ‘Poxmaster!’ the white skaven snarled. ‘You will attack now! Kill-slay all man-things! No worry-fear. Great Vrrmik will follow you into battle!’

Suppressing a shudder, the plague priest snapped commands to his followers and the green-garbed monks began scurrying down the slope towards Man-dread’s warriors. Vrrmik let them gain a good lead before ordering his own stormvermin to advance.

It wouldn’t do to follow too closely. There was just a chance that Puskab might have his own ideas about exploiting the confusion of battle to remove an ally he no longer found beneficial.

The successive waves of skaven crashing against Mandred’s troops finally began to falter. The vermin on the flanks and at the rear of the human wedge broke away, slinking back into the rocks. Von Boeckenfoerde’s barrage had driven off their reserves and depleted the press of fresh ratkin rushing to bolster the assault. Without the hordes of ratmen at their back, the attackers finally lost heart, their ferocity collapsing into fright. First by ones and twos, then by the score, they turned tail and fled.

It was a near thing. The human battle-line had been savaged, most of the men in the outer ring sporting at least one wound. The bodies of many comrades lay strewn in the wake of Mandred’s advance, littering the slope below. The tightness of the contracted formation told Mandred better than words how severe the casualties had been. Perhaps as much as a fifth of his force lay dead among the rocks. The strength of those who remained was starting to ebb.

Yet there was still much killing to be done. Seeing the skaven on the flanks and to the rear falter, Vrrmik pressed home the attack at the fore, throwing armoured, black-furred monsters at the humans. The brutal killers hacked away at Mandred’s troops, pushing them back, forcing them in upon the lightly armed peasant troops at the core of the formation. Wielding Ghal Maraz, Mandred found himself becoming separated from the line, the warhammer’s magic enabling him to prevail where the swords of his comrades faltered.

Only Arch-Lector Hartwich remained at Mandred’s side. The two men guarded each other’s back, Legbiter and Ghal Maraz taking a butcher’s toll from the ratkin. The havoc wrought by the magic weapons became too much even for the black-furred monsters. They began to cringe back, whining and refusing to listen to the threats of their chieftains.

Finally, the stormvermin broke away entirely, falling back and leaving a gap between their ranks and the ground Mandred and Hartwich defended. Before the two leaders could start to withdraw back towards their own troops, the black wall of stormvermin parted, opening a path for the ghoulish creatures that came charging to the attack.

Mandred recognised the diseased stink of these creatures as much as their decayed green robes. Plague monks, the pestilential progenitors of death and disease that had wrought such havoc among the great cities of the Empire, the foul monsters that had decimated Carroburg and enslaved its populace. The plague monks rushed forwards with rabid ferocity, wielding wooden staves and rusty swords in a frenzied assault. Behind the robed monsters, Mandred saw a creature he recognised from the reports of the Teutogen Guard, the antlered plague priest that had killed Ar-Ulric.

Roaring with the fury of the vengeance that burned in his heart, Mandred brought Ghal Maraz whipping around, pulverising the first clutch of plague monks as they leapt towards him. Their pulped bodies were hurled through the air, crashing down among their comrades, tripping them up as they charged forwards.

‘Now is our chance!’ Hartwich urged Mandred, tugging at his shoulder, trying to pull him back towards their own troops.

The graf shrugged the priest off. Grimly, he stalked forwards and brought the blazing hammer swinging around again. Roaring in rage, he crushed the skull of one plague monk and collapsed the chest of a second. Oblivious to the fate of their kin, the rest of the diseased monsters continued their attack, a grisly green light blazing in their putrid eyes.

Mandred staggered back at the force of the attack, pressed back by the intensity of the plague monks. He could see the horned priest behind them, its talon raised in a scabrous benediction, each claw glowing with the same baleful light that burned in the eyes of its disciples. Witchcraft! Some abominable sorcery driving the other plague monks to suicidal fury. Mandred howled at the monstrous injustice. To come so close only to be cheated by such perfidious magic.

The howl seemed to echo among the rocks, answered by a still more savage cry. The ranks of stormvermin lifted their heads, sniffing at the air and chittering nervously. The plague priest turned its head, a tinge of fright playing about its eyes. Leaping out from among the rocks, hurtling above the heads of the massed ratkin, was a creature more bestial than them. A great white wolf, an animal Mandred had seen many times before, a beast he knew only too well.

The wolf landed among the plague monks, ripping at them right and left with its snapping jaws. The fright in the eyes of the plague priest grew into outright terror as it beheld the beast that had bitten its tail off. The glowing claws of its outstretched hand blazed with even greater intensity. The ensorcelled plague monks desisted in their attack on Mandred, turning instead to attack the wolf. One of their cudgels smashed against the animal’s head, driving it low.

Before the monsters could fall upon the stunned wolf, Mandred was among them. Ghal Maraz crushed them like insects, spattering the hillside with the filth of their bodies. Legbiter clove through the verminous brutes that slipped away from Mandred’s assault as Hartwich rushed forwards to support the nobleman’s advance, refusing to abandon the graf.

‘Guard her,’ Mandred snarled at Hartwich as Ghal Maraz sent the carcass of the last plague monk spinning through the air. He waited only to see the Sigmarite nod before he turned towards the horned plague priest.

The glow had faded from the creature’s claws. It glared malignantly at Mandred, snapping at the stormvermin around it, ordering the armoured skaven to attack and defend it from the human. The other ratkin weren’t so eager to rush within reach of Ghal Maraz after seeing it in action.

Snarling in its wrath, the plague priest spun around. Its jaws opened wide, vomiting forth a stream of corrosive vileness such as it had used against Ar-Ulric. This time the ratman loosed its magic against its own kind, burning down a dozen stormvermin and sending scores of others scampering off in terror.

Mandred was confused by this treacherous, fratricidal attack until he saw the hulking white-furred ratman standing amid the steaming carcasses of its murdered warriors. He recognised the skaven warlord whose ear he’d clipped in Averheim, recognised too the stolen Drakdrazh clutched in its paws. Some fell magic had preserved Vrrmik from the plague priest’s magic, merely disorienting the monster where those around it had been killed. The horned priest was presenting Mandred with a choice: attack it and sate his vengeance or attack Vrrmik and win his battle.

The choice was a bitter one, but Mandred knew which path he must take. As he charged across the corroded bodies of the stormvermin, he could hear the plague priest chitter in amusement. It was no stretch of imagination to picture the fiend skittering away.

Great Warlord Vrrmik reeled as his world was suddenly enveloped in steaming, searing pain. The anguished squeaks of his own bodyguards filled his ears, the stink of their melting flesh filled his nose. He tried to blink away the gibbous green blaze of Puskab’s magic.

Traitor-meat! No fawning excuse or flattering lie would save the Poxmaster now! Vrrmik knew the scent of the worm-eater’s sorcery. He’d feed the maggot his own spleen, make him eat his own paws one by one before he allowed the mouse-livered scum to die! No hole in the Under-Empire would be deep enough, no burrow in all skavendom remote enough to hide Puskab from his wrath! He’d…

As vision returned to Vrrmik’s eyes, he forgot about vengeance against Puskab. Charging through the parted ranks of his stormvermin, trampling the steaming corpses of his slain warriors, was Man-dread, an enormous warhammer clenched in his hands!

Vrrmik leapt back, narrowly avoiding the downward sweep of Man-dread’s hammer. Baring his fangs, growling his fury, he swung out with Skavenbite, investing his attack with all the outrage and wrath Puskab’s betrayal had sent coursing through his heart.

Man-dread blocked the downward sweep of Skavenbite, locking the haft of his own hammer against that of Vrrmik’s before the brutal enchantment locked inside the warlord’s weapon could shatter every bone in his body. They stood there a moment, man and skaven, each struggling to push the other back. Vrrmik’s raw, brutal strength began to tell, his warpstone-enhanced musculature overwhelming the brawn of his human foe. The ratman squeaked in delight, not even bothering to call in his warriors to assist him.

When Man-dread suddenly rolled away from Vrrmik, the overlord’s hammer came smashing down, pulverising the stones and sending little slivers of rock scything into the air. The skaven reared back, springing back to the attack with the inhuman swiftness of his verminous breed.

Man-dread’s hammer was already swinging towards him. Skavenbite’s destructive magic, dragon-slaying runes engraved upon it by dwarf runesmiths in ages past and further magnified by bands of pure warpstone, collided with the enchantment of Ghal Maraz’s glowing head.

Vrrmik was thrown through the air as Skavenbite shattered against Ghal Maraz. Fragments of the broken hammer slashed through the ratman’s flesh and fur, digging deep furrows in his body as they pierced his warpstone armour. Tattered, bleeding and broken, the Great Warlord of Clan Mors, the Warmonger of Skavenblight, the Supreme Warlord of all Skavendom, lay sprawled among the rocks. He struggled to lift himself, to crawl away, but severed nerves and torn muscles refused to obey him. He could only gnash his fangs when he saw Man-dread standing above him. As he watched the human lift Ghal Maraz overhead, Vrrmik hissed only a single word, a curse he wished upon the head of the ratkin who had brought him to such an end.

‘Treason!’ Vrrmik snarled in the instant before Ghal Maraz came crashing down.

Mandred turned away from the twitching carcass of Great Warlord Vrrmik, casting his smouldering gaze across the ranks of skaven warriors who had just watched him reduce the head of their leader into a bloody smear. One step towards them was enough. Squeaking in terror, the ratkin fled, scurrying back into the ravines and crevices.

Slowly, Mandred made his way back to Hartwich. He noted with some confusion that the priest no longer wore his vestment over his armour. Instead the arch-lector’s robe was thrown about the body he knelt beside.

The Sigmarite was visibly pale as he met Mandred’s questioning gaze. Hartwich didn’t speak, he simply nodded.

‘No one must know,’ Mandred said. ‘Whatever she is, she has served all men, all gods this day.’

‘You cannot keep this secret,’ Hartwich said.

‘Together we can try,’ Mandred told him. He stared down the slope, watching as his troops drove off the last skaven assaulting their line. ‘Take her down the hill. Hide her in the camp. Whatever it takes, whatever power Sigmar has given you, don’t let her die. I’ll see you after I have thanked my soldiers for this victory.’

Hartwich nodded again. He watched as Mandred strode down to join his troops, and then the priest took up the body lying wrapped in his robe, the body he had watched change from the white wolf into the form of Hulda the witch. As he held her close, he knew it would be simplicity itself to let her die. Mandred would never question him, he trusted the Sigmarite too much to doubt him.

It was because of that trust that Hartwich carried Hulda down the hill to where he could tend her wounds.

The ways of the gods, Hartwich realised, weren’t always as simple as men or even priests would like them to be.

As he descended towards the camp, Hartwich could hear the troops cheering Mandred. They hailed him as ‘Skavenslayer’, liberator of the Empire. The first title he had already earned, but Hartwich knew there were things still to be done before the Empire could be truly declared liberated.

Skavenblight, 1124

A ragged pack of ratkin slunk through the streets of Skavenblight, keeping to the least frequented alleys and passages. At every turn, they were met with furtive chitters and subdued snarls. From every crack and crevice, beady eyes watched them with hateful scrutiny. Sickly scavengers scurried away at their approach, running with such indecent haste that they cast aside their miserable pickings, leaving the gutters strewn with old bones and scraps of soiled ratskin.

Puskab Foulfur scratched at the boils clustered about his antlered scalp. He hadn’t dared to hope his small retinue could creep back into Skavenblight ahead of the calamitous news. Defeat in the Howling Hills, the ruination of all the skaven had achieved in the past thirty-nine birth cycles. It was all that pompous braggart Vrrmik’s fault, of course. A flea-licking goon with pretensions of grandeur, imagining himself to be Vecteek’s successor! The Man-dread should have made the mouse-livered trash suffer for such delusions! As though Vrrmik were even a patch on Vecteek’s despotic pelt! The Supreme Tyrant of Rictus should never have allowed the armies of skavendom to be dealt such a resounding defeat!

The stink of disaster infested the scents of Puskab and his companions – the few plague monks who had escaped the Howling Hills. It wasn’t a paranoid imagining, but a vile odour secreted by the glands, a vile broth that conveyed both fear and submission. How despicable that such a smell should affix itself to a Grey Lord, to the mighty Poxmaster of Pestilens! It was an indignity that he found almost impossible to endure, an imposition that had caused him many times to turn on his small entourage. Decimating their numbers, however, had done nothing to assuage the tremors in his glands. If anything, it had made the noxious fug even worse. For a time, it had been possible to blot out the smell with pestiferous incense sticks, but the supply had run out long before they reached Skavenblight.

Puskab hesitated as he heard a particularly loud snarl rise from the shadow of a partially toppled archway. His baleful glare sent the utterer scampering off with his tail tucked between his legs, but the mere occurrence of such an incident bespoke an unbelievable boldness of impudence. He was a Grey Lord! The Grand-High Poxmaster of All Skavendom! Architect of the Black Plague and Favoured Spawn of the Horned One! For a common gutter-haunter to possess the spleen to dare snap at him – whatever impropriety might exude from his glands – was outrageous beyond belief!

His claws tightening about the gnarled staff he carried, Puskab vowed to avenge these indignities. The scum of Skavenblight would learn what it meant to trifle with the plaguelords of Clan Pestilens!

Snapping commands to his retinue, Puskab hurried them through the decrepit back streets. Now, more and more, the plague monks found eyes watching them from the shadows, furtive figures scampering along the rooftops.

Rounding a corner that connected to one of the city’s main runs, Puskab was startled by the sight of hundreds of bodies lying rotting in the street. The evidence of violence was everywhere, a gory litter of carnage that stained the ground and spattered the walls. A diseased stink rose from the carrion, a stink Puskab knew only too well. It was the corruption left behind by the Black Plague.

A tremor of alarm raced through the Poxmaster’s glands. The plague, his plague, running rampant through Skavenblight? It couldn’t be! Only the plaguelords had the necessary knowledge to inflict such catastrophe upon their fellow ratkin. Yet why would they? There was no sense in slaughtering the very creatures they had invested such effort towards enslaving!

‘The Bilious Basilica, scurry-hurry!’ Puskab growled at his entourage. The plague monks turned away from the piles of dead, the hacked remains of skaven driven mad with disease and despair. They rushed down the narrow lanes, scurrying along ancient boulevards reared by the hands of men and dwarfs long before the first skaven stirred from its hole. Decayed pillars and broken masonry choked many of the pathways, compelling the ratmen to scurry over and around the obstructions. Here and there, heaps of dead skaven lay clustered about the rubble, their pelts blistered with the sores of plague.

Sinister whispers now pursued Puskab through the confusion of avenues. He didn’t need to threaten his minions to greater speed. It was all he could do to keep from falling behind. There was no denying the presence of lurking skaven on the rooftops, no questioning the skulking shapes that watched them from behind boarded windows and locked doors. Every rodent instinct in Puskab’s body was alert to the threat that hovered nearby, the brooding menace that seemed to swell and grow with each passing breath.

The Bilious Basilica, the fortress-monastery of Clan Pestilens, their most prominent holding on the surface of Skavenblight, reared up before Puskab’s gaze as he scurried out from the cramped morass of tottering tenements and collapsed storehouses. Once it had served as a factory of some kind, but the imposing stone structure with its tiered levels and soaring parapets had long been the domain of Clan Pestilens. The plague monks had erected a massive wall around their monastery, a fortification thrice as tall as any skaven and nearly a dozen feet thick. The Poxmaster breathed slightly easier when he saw the ragged banners of Pestilens displaying the triple pimple symbol of the Horned One flying from the battlements. He could smell the sentries prowling the walls and hear the sharp cacophony of their scratchy chant.

Instead of reassuring him, the sentries brought a renewed sense of disquiet to Puskab. There were too many guards on the walls, far more than he could ever recall seeing. There were other smells too, the pungent tang of plague fumes rising from incense burners, the necrotic decay of neglected corpses. Drawing nearer, Puskab could see the heaps of dead ratmen piled outside the walls. The evidence was as obvious as it was incredible: the feckless hordes of Skavenblight had tried to storm the basilica!

Controlling the panic rising within him, Puskab marched towards the great double-gates of the monastery. He waited a moment, the stump of his tail twitching with imapatience as he waited for the guards to admit him. When, after a moment of inaction he lifted his gaze, he found the sentries still at their posts, not so much as twitching a whisker to open the doors.

‘Poxmaster Puskab Foulfur command-demands entrance to basilica-nest!’ he growled with a flash of yellowed fang.

‘Poxmaster Puskab can rot with the dead,’ an oozing voice growled back. Puskab knew that oily inflection, the tones of his hated rival Vrask Bilebroth. Sniffing the air, it was an easy thing for him to pick out the other plaguelord’s scent. Craning his antlered head back, he could see his enemy perched upon one of the upper parapets.

‘I return from battle-fight,’ Puskab declared, trying to keep his voice firm and superiority in his posture. ‘Vrrmik-meat is dead.’

Vrask’s attitude remained challenging even in the face of the important news Puskab brought with him. ‘Much skaven-meat dead-dead,’ Vrask announced, his words slashing like claws. He pointed a scabby paw at the carrion heaped about the walls. ‘Black Plague,’ he hissed. ‘Kill-slay much-much.’ He curled back his lips, exposing his sharp fangs. ‘Too much-much!’

Puskab didn’t like the accusation in Vrask’s voice. He could imagine the delusional maggot taking it into his head that Puskab was behind the contagion. Certainly Vrask had been envious of the trust and honour accorded to the Poxmaster by Vrrmik, but certainly he must understand how Vrrmik’s death changed all that? Puskab was concerned only with increasing the strength of Clan Pestilens, not petty personal ambitions and jealousies.

‘I want-need speak-squeak with Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch,’ Puskab said. Nurglitch would support him and punish Vrask for showing such temerity.

Vrask chuckled, a sound like the slopping of swamp water in a rusty bucket. ‘Nurglitch gone-gone. Left Skavenblight. Take-want pilgrimage to Blisterdeep.’

Puskab blinked in disbelief. Nurglitch had abandoned Skavenblight, had made the arduous journey back to Blisterdeep? Blisterdeep was the most distant of Clan Pestilens’s strongholds, a jungle pit far to the south, beyond the great deserts and the vast savannah. What could compel Nurglitch to stage such an unseemly retreat?

‘Black Plague kill-take many skaven!’ Vrask howled down at Puskab. ‘Kill-take Skurvy and Skab, Fester and Ferrik, Gnaw and Scruten, Rictus and Mors! Kill-slay Moulderkin and Skullykin, leave none to watch-guard slave-meat! Slave-meat fight-flee in lowest tunnels, kill-steal much-much!’

What Puskab had mistaken for arrogance and supremacy in Vrask’s voice was quickly becoming exposed as fright. The plaguelord slurred his words together in the terrified squeak of a lowly clanrat. It wasn’t the Poxmaster’s return that evoked such fear. No, Vrask was afraid of something else, something so formidable that Nurglitch had fled Skavenblight, leaving Vrask behind holding the bag.

Puskab stared again at the heaps of dead. He cocked back his ears, listening to the chorus of squeaks and whispers in the streets he had so recently abandoned. The hordes of Skavenblight, the teeming thousands who dwelt within and beneath the mighty city! Surely they couldn’t be so foolish as to think Pestilens had deliberately loosed the plague on them!

A glance at the piled dead convinced Puskab that the hordes of Skavenblight were indeed that foolish. More, he noted for the first time the crude patches and emblems adorning many of the dead, the brands marking their fur. They wore the cross-bone symbol of the Horned Rat, the same symbol employed by the grey seers to denote their archaic order.

‘Queekual…’ Puskab snarled as the realisation struck him. No plaguelord, not even Vrask would have been so unwise as to loose the disease among the teeming hordes of Skavenblight. Their knowledge of plague was too extensive, their appreciation of the difficulties of containing and controlling an outbreak in such conditions too acute. The Black Plague was too lethal in its effects to leave enough survivors for the plague monks to convert to the true path of the Horned One. But an outside force, an interloper who didn’t understand the workings of sacred plagues, he might be so insane. Certainly it was obvious the Seerlord had been exploiting the disaster to restore the prestige of his antiquated religion.

The Poxmaster’s fur bristled as his senses were thrown into a paroxysm of alarm. A sniff of the air told him that hundreds of skaven were advancing upon the basilica. A glance over his shoulder brought the image of scraggly figures creeping out from the streets, clubs and blades clenched in their emaciated paws. Puskab looked back to the parapet, desperately hoping Vrask would relent and open the gates before it was too late. His rival simply glowered down at him, displaying his fangs once more in a murderous grin.

‘The Shattered Tower!’ Puskab snapped at his cringing retinue. There was no sanctuary for him here, but however bold the mob might have grown they wouldn’t dare to violate the sanctity of the Shattered Tower, the very heart of skavendom.

Angry whispers rose to vengeful howls as Puskab and the plague monks fled from the walls of the basilica. Back into the winding streets they ran. From every cellar, from every rooftop, mobs of enraged skaven appeared. Doors were smashed open, shuttered windows battered to splinters as diseased ratmen rushed to intercept the fugitives. Skaven from scores of clans, chittering in a maddened discord of dialects and accents, flooded the avenues. Their cries were for blood and vengeance, shrieks that bespoke the outrage of the doomed and abandoned.

‘Puskab die-die! Die-die Puskab!’ the mob roared in a thousand-fold voice of thunder.

The plague monks with Puskab were forced to cut their way through knots of ratmen, slashing them down with murderous sweeps of their swords. The dying ratkin pawed at them, trying to drag their killers down with them into the gutter. Several times a plague monk would linger too long freeing himself from the grip of a skaven he had slain. Their shrill wails as the enraged mob caught them lent new speed to the feet of the survivors.

After what seemed an eternity of twists and turns, Puskab could smell the brackish water in the basin of the shapeless fountain that bordered the broad plaza at the base of the Shattered Tower. Only a few plague monks remained with him now, the others dragged down by the mob which was close behind. With sight of the fountain and the near-formless lump of bronze poised above it, Puskab knew precisely how far it would be to the steps of the Shattered Tower. Too far to outdistance the mob.

Without a second thought, Puskab brought his staff cracking against the knee of a plague monk. The stricken creature yelped and crashed to the ground, his momentum causing him to slide along the cobblestones and slam against the base of the fountain. Puskab didn’t spare the betrayed wretch another glance. Slaughtering the plague monk would delay the mob for a few breaths. Long enough for the Poxmaster to reach safety.

Racing into the plaza, Puskab’s heart leapt into his throat. Every street was choked with enraged ratmen. Word had spread through every quarter of the city, drawing the terrified masses together into a vengeful tempest of fangs and claws. The Poxmaster gnashed his fangs at the sight. The last of his retinue made a break for a darkened alleyway only to be brought low by a skulking gang of red-cloaked Skully murder-rats.

Drawing upon his sorcerous power, Puskab set a pestilential torrent spilling from his fangs, spattering the nearest mob with sizzling acid. The agonised victims staggered back, their pained seizures impeding the advance of those behind. The Poxmaster seized upon the space he had gained. Springing forwards, he leapt towards the great stone steps at the base of the tower.

A lone figure stood there, sombre and sinister in his charcoal robes. Seerlord Queekual’s eyes glittered with arcane power as he glared down at Puskab. The prophet pointed a claw at the plaguelord. ‘The Horned Rat has judged! You are guilty of heresy! You and your spawn shall be cleansed in blood!’

Puskab threw forth his paw. From each splayed claw a ribbon of noxious green light sped towards the Seerlord. ‘Eat-gnaw heresy!’ he spat.

Queekual flinched as the green light crackled about him. His paw clenched tight about the mummified talisman hanging about his neck. For an instant, the green light started to collapse towards him. The next moment, Puskab’s spell was shattered in a spray of bile and worms.

The Seerlord’s staff blazed with fire as he brought it swinging around. From the horned head, a bolt of malignant energy leapt. There was a flash of leprous yellow miasma as the bolt shredded through the protective barrier Puskab tried to invoke. Then Queekual’s magic slammed into the Poxmaster, tearing the staff from his claws and hurling him through the air.

Puskab landed in a heap, his head ringing from its impact against the unyielding stone. He found himself staring up at the top of the Shattered Tower, the steeple where he had won his duel with Wormlord Blight and claimed his position on the Council. For an instant only did the memory flicker, then it was blotted out by the dozens of savage skaven faces that crept into view and glared down at him.

‘Fear your tormentor no more!’ Seerlord Queekual shouted from the steps. ‘The beneficence of the Horned Rat has delivered the Poxmaster unto your paws! Cleanse your warrens of his plague with his blood!’

Queekual lingered over the scene, savouring the shrieks rising from Puskab Foulfur’s tortured carcass as the panicked mob tore the fallen Poxmaster limb from limb.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Altdorf, 1124

For the better part of an hour, Kreyssig could hear the jubilant crowds cheering Graf Mandred as the Middenheimer made his entry into Altdorf. The details of the Battle of the Howling Hills might not be known to the peasants; even the accomplishments of his army during its march through Averland and Stirland were probably unknown to these people. Yet something, some force made them respond to this man, cheering his procession as it rode past the Königplatz and headed towards the rebuilt bridges.

Kreyssig fumed at the sound of those cheering mobs. He’d sent agitators to poison the commoners against Mandred, engaged them to spread the most obscene rumours about the Middenheimer. Given their newfound adoration of the Sigmarite faith, Kreyssig’s spies had told the peasants that Mandred intended to abolish the Temple and establish an Ulrican priesthood in its stead. He’d told the peasants that Mandred intended to conscript every fifth man to be sent to Middenheim and rebuild the City of the White Wolf. He’d even gone so far as to spread Beck’s stories that Mandred cavorted with witches and took counsel from followers of the Ruinous Powers.

All of that, and still the people cheered. Sitting astride his horse outside the gates of the Imperial palace, it was an ordeal for Kreyssig to keep calm and wait. It would be beneath the dignity of his position as Protector of the Empire to ride out to meet Mandred. No, since Kreyssig was the Emperor’s surrogate, it was Mandred who must ride to meet him.

‘The people seem to be pleased with their new Emperor,’ Duke Vidor observed. As one of the most important nobles in Altdorf, not to mention Reikmarshal, Kreyssig had felt obligated to include Vidor among his own retinue. There was still no love lost between the two men, as Vidor lost no opportunity to remind him. ‘Peasants can sense noble blood. They know who is a legitimate lord and who is simply a poseur.’

‘He isn’t Emperor yet,’ Kreyssig hissed through clenched teeth.

Duke Vidor feigned a look of profound surprise. ‘Really? I thought he had the hammer! I thought he had the blessing of the gods! I thought he just purged half the Empire of ratmen!’

Kreyssig leaned around in his saddle and glowered at Vidor. ‘Apparently he is simply returning Ghal Maraz to where it belongs,’ he told the duke. ‘As for the rest, gods are even more fickle than people about who they give their favours to.’

Vidor shook his head. ‘The peasants don’t seem to think so,’ he said, waving his hand as the sound of cheers drew nearer.

Kreyssig did his best to look regal and composed as Mandred’s procession came into view, rounding the street and marching past the Courts of Justice. The attempt faltered when he saw the hero riding a great white stallion adorned in a crimson caparison. Mandred wore a suit of glistening plate armour that seemed to fairly blaze in the sun. His helm was the open-faced visage of a snarling wolf, the nobleman’s own face framed by the steel jaws. At his side, he wore Legbiter, the runefang of Middenland, but resting across his left shoulder was the magnificence of Ghal Maraz itself. The warhammer of Sigmar really did seem to exude its own brilliance, a shine that had nothing to do with the sun overhead.

All of this, Kreyssig took in at a glance, trying to get the measure of his enemy. But it wasn’t Mandred’s appearance that told him what sort of man the Empire had made into a hero. It was the long line of foot soldiers who flanked either side of the procession. They seemed to have been carefully selected in their arrangement, a Middenlander marching beside an Averlander with a Stirlander and a Nordlander following behind. Every land, every province Mandred’s army had fought in was represented, a visible manifestation of the unity and solidarity that had allowed him to rout the ratkin from the territories they had conquered.

There was more, however, a display that had muffled every rumour and story Kreyssig’s agents had spread, an exhibition that had subdued even the fiercest of peasant malcontents. Each of the marching soldiers held a pole in his hands and stretched across the frame atop each pole was the pelt of a skaven. Every soldier marching into Altdorf bore with him a talisman of Mandred’s conquests, a token of the enemy that they had fought and destroyed.

In a city that had suffered an attack by the filthy monsters, no one was about to jeer at a man who had killed so many skaven.

Kreyssig forced a smile onto his face and spurred his horse away from his retinue as he moved to meet Mandred. ‘Your highness, I welcome you to Altdorf.’

Mandred stared back at Kreyssig, no warmth in his gaze. ‘I thank you for your welcome, Protector, for the welcome of all Altdorf’s people. But I fear I must delay my expression of gratitude.’ He patted the jewelled haft of Ghal Maraz. ‘First I would return Sigmar’s Hammer and honour him for his part in my victories.’

Inwardly, Kreyssig bristled at this insulting breach of tradition and respect. ‘Of course, your highness. It is only right that you should do honour to Lord Sigmar.’ He wheeled his horse about, turning in the direction of the Great Cathedral.

‘If you would follow me, highness,’ Kreyssig said. He could afford to choke on his pride a little longer. After all, if Mandred wanted to speed himself to his own death, why should he stand in the fool’s way?

‘Hurry-scurry! Quick-quick!’ As he shrieked at his underlings, Sythar Doom gnashed his fangs in frustrated fury. He dearly wanted to kill a few of the incompetent wretches, but there were too few of them to kill out of hand.

There were maybe a hundred skaven in the cave, scrambling about the apparatus, rolling sealed cylinders of powdered warpstone to the periphery of the contraption. Masked ratmen took charge of the cylinders from there, slipping them into copper casings arrayed across the ovoid surface of the machine.

It was a design of Sythar’s own creation, appropriated from a moderately competent warlock-engineer named Zaprik just before he suffered an extremely fatal accident with a set of whisker-pluckers. If it functioned as the plans promised it would, the resultant explosion would make a hold-full of warpcaster ammunition seem like a firecracker.

Sythar shivered at that image and immediately regretted making such a connection. He could still smell the saltwater in his fur after all these years. The prestige he’d lost after the fiasco at Dietershafen had cost Clan Skryre much of its power. Many of their allies had deserted them; some warlock-engineers had even gone rogue. Worst of all, there was the plague, marauding through skavendom with the same rapacity with which it had decimated the lands of men. Skryre had been especially hard hit, nearly eight of every ten of the clan catching the disease. Sythar had been forced to employ the most extreme measures to ensure the ratmen he associated with were free of contagion.

Dimly, Sythar noted the sounds of some commotion among his workers. If one of them had started to exhibit the marks of plague he’d have to kill the whole pack and fetch new workers! Such inconvenience was intolerable!

Clan Pestilens and their brave new ideas! Puskab Foulfur, the rat who would bring the world of men to its knees! Well, the traitor-meat had neglected to mention that his wondrous creation was going to do the same to skavendom!

The warplord forced himself to grow calm. Puskab and Pestilens were problems that would wait for another day. Today he needed to concentrate on an entirely different sort of revenge. His warpstone heart nurtured a special hatred for the man-nest of Altdorf. He bared his fangs as he cocked his head to one side and stared up at the ceiling. Overhead was the Great Cathedral, that miserable little temple that had defied his efforts to destroy it during his attack on the city, indeed, that had seen his defeat unfold at its very doors.

Well, it wouldn’t stand much longer, and when it vanished in a warpstone cloud, it would take with it another enemy Sythar Doom longed to destroy – Man-dread, the foul king-thing who had treacherously bypassed Sythar’s carefully prepared ambush and attacked Dietershafen without warning, the filthy little human who had the audacity to turn the Far-Claw against its own inventor.

Yes, it was a shame Sythar could only kill Man-dread once, but at least he could do so in such a manner that all humans – all skaven – would cower before the might of Clan Skryre!

Sythar Doom’s whiskers twitched as an unexpected smell reached his nose. He turned around, causing the scaffolding he was on to shift and wobble. His tail lashed from side to side as he stared at one of the tunnels leading into his secret grotto.

Why were there dwarfs here? And why were they attacking his workers? And why, above all, were those spineless vermin running away?

Sparks flew from the warlord’s fangs as he drew the pistol from his belt and aimed at one of the ratmen fleeing before the dwarfs. As he pulled the trigger, a crackling band of green lightning sizzled into the fleeing skaven, dropping him to the ground as a smouldering husk.

‘Fight-fight or die-die!’ Sythar roared at his minions. Some of those closest to the dwarfs were still intent on running away, but the others started grabbing up tools and weapons, whatever was near at hand. Their posture remained timid, however, and Sythar didn’t like the fear in their scent. He glared across at the mouth of the tunnel. Unless there were more enemies hiding somewhere, all he could see were seven dwarfs and a lone human. Sparks flew from his metal jaws as he gnashed his fangs in frustration. ‘There’s only eight of them!’ he shrieked, holding up one of his paws with all five fingers displayed. Given the quality of the minions he’d been forced to take, Sythar realised very few of them would notice the numerical discrepancy.

The first pack of skaven were rushing over to confront the dwarfs when they ran smack into a bare-chested, orange-furred dwarf. Instead of retreating before the pack of skaven, the dwarf charged into them, hacking them apart with his hand axe. The crazed fury of that single dwarf’s assault broke that first mob of skaven, sending the survivors scampering off towards the tunnels.

Sythar lashed his tail in frustration. He wondered how many more of his underlings he’d have to shoot before they understood they weren’t allowed to run away.

The sanctuary of the Great Cathedral was filled with a vast throng of people, a mixture of the elite of Altdorf and Reikland and the Sigmarite clergy. Such was the excitement and awe caused by Mandred’s entry into the city and his return of Ghal Maraz to the cathedral that for once no distinction had been made between noble and commoner, wealthy merchant and humble monk. All had been welcomed into the sanctuary to observe the restoration of Sigmar’s Hammer to his people.

Kreyssig had kept close to Mandred during his ride to the temple. It could only be beneficial for him to be seen with the popular hero, after all. The inconvenience of Ghal Maraz turning up in Mandred’s possession had been neatly blamed on the late Emperor Boris, though the exact details had been left nebulous. Kreyssig would work them out with the people who knew the truth, find some mutually satisfactory compromise. Even idealists like Hartwich would have their price. Preservation of the Empire, stability of the state, that sort of thing would pull at the arch-lector’s heartstrings.

As soon as the procession entered the temple, Kreyssig slipped away. He lingered at the back near the door, his bodyguard of Kaiserknecht ensuring he had a clear view down the central aisle. He didn’t want to be too close to Mandred now, but he most certainly wanted to see everything that was about to happen.

At the end of the aisle stood the altar where Ghal Maraz would be reconsecrated. Standing behind the altar with his censer bearers and attendants, as well as Arch-Lector von Reisarch, stood Grand Theogonist Gazulgrund. Kreyssig smiled when he found he had such a clear view of the hated priest. Yes, he certainly wasn’t going to miss anything.

Mandred’s procession continued their unhurried march towards the altar, Ghal Maraz held across the graf’s chest. Beside him walked Arch-Lector Hartwich and a scarred knight his spies told him was Grand Master Vitholf of the Knights of the White Wolf. Between priest and knight walked a stunningly beautiful woman in a fur cloak. Kreyssig’s spies had been unable to learn much about her, but Beck had told him all he needed to know. That was Hulda, the wolf-witch. That Mandred would have the graciousness to bring the witch here with him was almost too good to believe. Once the bloom fell off the rose, Altdorf would see for themselves that their mighty hero consorted with witches and the Ruinous Powers.

Kreyssig looked away for a moment as a bee buzzed around his head. It took him most of a minute to shoo the annoyance away. When he looked back, his smile was almost diabolical in its vicious amusement. Mandred’s procession had nearly reached the spot where the Kaiserjaeger had posted Beck. The mutant was disguised as a mendicant monk, his entire body concealed beneath a heavy hood and thick robe. He’d been standing there for most of the morning awaiting his old master. A few yards more and the procession would be near enough to Beck that everyone in the sanctuary would believe Kreyssig’s claims that Mandred had given the mutant a signal to attack Gazulgrund.

Before Mandred’s group could close those last few yards, however, Hulda left her place in the procession, darting ahead of the graf. Her attitude was tense and alert, her head shifting from side to side as she seemed to sniff the air.

‘Beware!’ she shouted to Mandred. ‘There is treachery here!’

Too many things happened then for Kreyssig to put them in their proper order. The area around the altar quickly became a mass of clergy as warrior priests and templar knights rushed to protect the Grand Theogonist. Beck sprang into the aisle, throwing back his hood and glaring at the wolf-witch with his clutch of spidery eyes. Hartwich and Vitholf seized Mandred and tried to pull him back.

Beck’s claw hand licked out, cracking against the face of the witch who’d sniffed him out. The blow sent her flying into the pews, delivered with such inhuman force that her momentum smashed down the spectators she landed among. The mutant risked one look at the altar, but decided that there was no way it could reach Gazulgrund through the cordon of his protectors.

Instead it stepped towards Mandred. ‘If I can’t kill the dream,’ Beck growled. ‘Then I’ll kill the man.’ The mutant punctuated its words by drawing the sword it had hidden beneath its robes, holding it in one of its bifurcated hands.

Mandred tore free from the hold Vitholf and Hartwich had on him. Brandishing the brutal mass of Ghal Maraz, he strode towards the monster that had once been his bodyguard.

‘You’ve killed enough dreams, Beck,’ Mandred growled back, the venom of hatred dripping from every word. ‘Now it’s time for you to die.’

Erich gaped in awe at the immense machine the skaven had assembled deep beneath the streets of Altdorf. It was shaped like a gigantic metal pumpkin. Ribs of copper stretched down its sides while spurs of what looked to be ceramic projected from its top in a sort of crest. Ugly black stones, glowing with a greenish light, were embedded amid clusters of gears and pistons arrayed about the machine’s base. What something of such size and complexity could be intended for, the knight couldn’t begin to guess. If Dharin and the other gold grubbers were right, they were directly beneath the Great Cathedral. The knight wasn’t terribly familiar with dwarfs, but he had always heard their skill at navigating underground, even in total darkness, was almost preternatural.

He might not know what the machine was for, but he agreed with the dwarfs that whatever it was, its purpose boded ill for the city above. Arming himself with a hand axe Dharin gave him, Erich charged out of the tunnel with the dwarfs, falling upon the skaven before they were even aware that they were under attack. The pungent stink of oil and pitch and noxious unguents explained the ease of their ambush. Their noses filled with the stench of the chemicals and compounds they were working with, the ratmen were disoriented. As the dwarfs dove into them, as Erich lashed out with his borrowed axe at a piebald skaven wearing an oily apron across its body, the knight found the creatures erratic and confused. Their speed remained incredible, but their coordination was muddled. It was easy to slip around scratching paw or snapping muzzle to slash at the creature’s body.

The impetus of the initial attack quickly petered out as many of the ratmen turned tail and started to run. Kurgaz, the fury of the slayer upon him, rushed headlong after the vermin. Erich started to go after him, but his attention was drawn to a ghastly-looking ratman standing on a wooden scaffold overlooking the immense machine. The creature’s eyes were like crimson lamps, its jaws a mass of metal that sparked and crackled with electricity. The monster was snarling at the skaven below, emphasising the importance of its commands by drawing a strange weapon from its belt and loosing a bolt of lightning into one of the fleeing ratkin.

More ratmen came boiling out from around the side of the machine. Unlike the first monsters the dwarfs and their companion had set upon, these creatures were armed, exhibiting a riotous array of hammers, spanners and blades in their paws. Kurgaz didn’t hesitate an instant, but flung himself straight into the monsters, laying about him with the hand axe with such savagery that he was soon coated in the foul black blood of his victims.

From the scaffold above, the metal-fanged ratman continued to shriek and snarl orders at its fellows. Again the creature fired a bolt of green lightning from the bulky weapon in its paws, but in its rage, the monster didn’t think to fire at one of its enemies. Instead it loosed destruction upon another of its cowardly kin.

The murderous discipline did its work. Scores of skaven came charging around the side of the machine. Even Kurgaz would have been quickly overwhelmed, but his methodical slaughter of the wounded ratkin left behind by the first rat pack delayed him long enough for Erich, Dharin and the other dwarfs to join him. Together they formed a solid line, defying the vermin as they came lunging forwards. Appreciating that other lives depended on him, Kurgaz held his own death wish in check, guarding the flank of the small formation. Erich caught up a rusty sword one of the dead skaven had been using. With his height and the reach of the sword, he stayed behind the dwarfs, chopping down at the ratkin when they tried to climb over their own comrades to reach the dwarfs and hacking away at any of the vermin who managed to slip past the axes in front of him.

The slaughter was abominable. Many times the ratkin tried to break and run, but whenever they did, the metal-fanged monster on the scaffold drove them back to the attack with a bolt of lightning.

‘We’ll never break them with their leader shooting them down every time they try to run!’ Erich shouted.

‘That’s good, manling!’ Kurgaz growled. ‘Means we don’t have to chase after them!’

Erich couldn’t share the dwarf’s view. They’d killed maybe thirty skaven already and there seemed no diminution in the numbers attacking them. Meanwhile their own losses were all too noticeable. Two of the gold grubbers had been dragged down by the ratmen, one with a spear in his belly and the other when a seemingly dead skaven erupted into life and hamstrung him with a knife. As he pitched forwards, the crippled dwarf had been stabbed by at least half a dozen of the monsters.

If they kept trading blow for blow with the skaven, the superior numbers of the vermin would prevail. That might have been fine for the dwarfs, a testament to their stubbornness and courage that they had stood their ground and defied so many. For Erich, there could be no victory in such a gesture. If they were killed, the skaven machine, whatever it was, would be left to wreak its havoc upon the city above. After what he’d seen in Averheim, the most grisly possibility that occurred to him was that the thing was some kind of bomb. The thought sent ice running down his spine, the image of the Great Cathedral being obliterated in an explosion was too hideous to contemplate.

Erich made his decision. The next time the dwarfs drove the skaven back and their cringing resolve faltered, the knight rushed through the ranks of the gold grubbers. The sudden attack only drove the ratmen into further dismay. He heard the metal-fanged monster shrieking and snarling, then he uttered his own shout of alarm as one of the ratman’s lightning bolts crackled against the ground beside him. The near miss actually proved a blessing, scattering the skaven ahead of him, making them scramble out of his way lest they be hit by another near miss from their chieftain.

The knight screamed the war-cry of the Reiksknecht as he flung himself at the base of the scaffold. He had seen the way the platform shuddered and shifted every time the rat-chief stomped across it. Now he slashed at the ramshackle construction, splintering wooden planks and severing ropes with every thrust.

The chief-rat shrieked again, but this time there was a note of fright in its tone. With its perch bucking and shifting beneath it, the murderous brute was calling to its minions to save it. Even if they were of a mind to help, the chance was denied them. Rushing ahead in the confusion were Kurgaz and the other dwarfs. They drove into the flank of the startled skaven, reminding them that they had other enemies besides Erich. The dwarfs fanned out in a semicircle, working to keep the skaven at bay while Erich demolished the scaffold.

A few more cuts and the structure came crashing down. So abrupt was its fall that even Erich was taken by surprise. The knight found himself smashed flat beneath a mass of rotten beams and splintered planks. He tried to move, but all he succeeded in doing was bringing more of the weight pressing down on him. He was pinned, trapped in the debris.

Through the cloud of dust and dirt thrown up by the collapse, Erich could see a pair of lights burning behind the murk. Beneath the lights he could see the glow of electricity crackling along metal fangs. The lights were the ghastly eyes of the skaven warlord. They turned towards the knight and stared directly at him. Erich felt his blood curdle when he heard the monster’s savage hiss. With its crimson optics, the ratman could see the trapped human quite clearly. Nothing pleased a skaven more than helpless prey.

The weight on top of him became even greater as the skaven leapt down from wherever he’d landed when the scaffold came down. Erich suspected the nimble creature had simply ridden the wreckage as it fell, letting the platform absorb most of the impact. Certainly the skaven gave no evidence that he was injured. He hopped down onto the wreckage directly above Erich, leaning forwards so that the rubble pushed down on him with the ratman’s full weight added to it.

‘Fool-meat!’ the skaven snarled, foam sizzling as it evaporated against the monster’s electrified fangs. ‘Think-dream you can oppose-fight the mighty Sythar Doom, Great Warplord of all Skavendom!’ Sythar raked the claws of his foot across Erich’s face, slashing open his cheek and nearly piercing his eye. ‘All man-things learn-listen! All man-things shiver-tremble!’ Uttering a chittering laugh, Sythar shook one of his paws at the huge machine. ‘Sythar Doom fetch-take revenge on man-things! God-house will die-burn! The Man-dread will die-burn! All-all die-burn!’

Erich felt his heart freeze as Sythar boasted of his intentions. The machine was some kind of bomb, and the monster intended to use it to blow up the Great Cathedral. Not only that, but it was cunning enough to wait to wreak its revenge. Somehow it had learned that Graf Mandred was coming to Altdorf, that he would return Ghal Maraz to the cathedral. The skaven was waiting for that auspicious moment to detonate the bomb, inflicting in a single instant a blow that would annihilate the entire leadership of the Empire and the man many were already cheering as the new Emperor.

The knight struggled to free himself, putting every scrap of his strength into a supreme effort to break loose and hurl himself upon the gloating Sythar. The ratman chittered as he saw the futile struggle. Viciously, he raked his foot across Erich’s forehead, one of the claws digging a hole in the side of his nose.

‘All-all die-burn!’ Sythar Doom laughed.

‘Then let’s start with you, ratkin!’ From out of the dust, Kurgaz’s brawny frame lunged at Sythar. The dwarf’s massive arms coiled about the ratman, bowling him over in a savage tackle. Skaven and dwarf rolled through the debris, their bodies smashing through planks and rotten beams, their momentum carrying them to the edge of the rubble.

Sythar broke away from Kurgaz, fiendishly pounding his paw against a huge sliver of wood lodged in the dwarf’s bicep. The blow drove the sliver still deeper, wrenching a snarl of pain from the slayer. Before Sythar could scamper away, however, Kurgaz lunged at him again, catching the warplord’s tail. Savagely he tugged at the tail, jerking Sythar off his feet and slamming him to the ground. Even as he started to rise, Kurgaz was on top of him, smashing him down into the dirt.

‘We’ll start with the dying part,’ Kurgaz growled at the monster. ‘I’ll see what I can do about burning what’s left later.’

Sythar growled back at the dwarf, worming his body out from under the slayer, twisting his head about so that he could sink his electrified fangs into Kurgaz’s forearm. The dwarf’s body snapped back, twitching and flailing as the electricity crackled through his body. The sickly smell of burning flesh permeated the air, the grease in the slayer’s spiked crest of hair caught fire, blood streamed from nose and eyes, ears and mouth. Never, even in Kreyssig’s dungeons, had Erich seen such utter and total agony inflicted upon a living creature.

Somehow, through the anguish sizzling through him, Kurgaz managed to hold onto his hatred. With Sythar’s jaws still clamped in his forearm, delivering their lethal charge, the slayer reached with his other hand to the sliver of wood in his bicep. ‘Grimnir!’ the dwarf roared as he ripped the piece of wood from his flesh. Reversing his grip on it, he slammed his fist into the skaven’s chest, impaling the monster.

Sythar’s jaws tightened, the fangs digging down to the bones in Kurgaz’s arm. The ratman’s claws raked at his attacker, but it was a spastic, unfocused effort. Already the vitality of Sythar Doom was draining out of him. The sliver of wood had impaled the warlord’s black heart. The warpstone-powered heart of Sythar Doom.

The dwarf only had a moment to understand that his enemy was dead before the vindictive trap built into Sythar Doom’s mechanical heart activated. It exploded with the force of a blasting charge, reducing both the ratman and his killer to ribbons of bloodied meat. The force of the explosion sent dirt and rock raining down from the ceiling, making the walls tremble. Erich thought the entire cavern must collapse in upon itself.

The knight wasn’t the only one. Squealing in terror, more at the thought of being buried alive than any sadness at their leader’s death, the surviving skaven fled the cavern. Erich could hear the squeaks fading down the tunnel as they vanished in the dark.

The prospect of being abandoned even by such monstrous enemies, left to rot alone in the subterranean blackness, spurred Erich to greater effort. Again, all of his strength wasn’t enough to dislodge the rubble.

‘You seem to be in a spot of trouble, manling.’ When he heard the words and turned his head to see Dharin and his surviving gold grubbers climbing down the wreckage, Erich felt such a wave of relief that tears streamed from his eyes.

Dharin misunderstood those tears. ‘Don’t cry for Smallhammer, manling,’ the dwarf said as he shook his head. ‘It was a fine death he found. The sort of death that every slayer longs to find.’

Erich felt a profound sense of shame when he heard those words, guilty that the tears hadn’t been for Kurgaz, a hero who had not only saved Erich’s life, but those of Graf Mandred and all who would be with him in the Great Cathedral.

‘Come,’ Dharin said, lifting one of the beams imprisoning Erich. ‘Let’s get you out of there.’

The crowd within the sanctuary, those closest to where the mutant had suddenly emerged to challenge Graf Mandred, tried to scatter, to flee the hideous monstrosity and the violence that was certain to unfold soon. Those further back in the pews strained forwards, trying to see the reason for the commotion, blocking the retreat of those who only wanted to get away. In that bedlam of shouts and screams, the two enemies glared at one another in silence.

Mandred thought of Lady Mirella, cut down by this monster. He thought of Burggraefin Sofia, murdered in her sick bed by this creature. He thought too of Princess Erna and how close she had come to sharing their fate. Beck, the man he had trusted, the warrior he had considered friend and confidant, was nothing more than a cowardly assassin.

The mutant had its thoughts too. Memories of how it had swallowed its pride, debased its honour to serve Mandred. It had forsaken its own dreams, its own hopes in order to serve the von Zelts. It had believed there could be no greater purpose than to make Middenheim strong. Strong leader, strong land. All it had done was in service to the Middenpalaz. In the end, its reward had been betrayal, the ruination of its name and its very humanity.

The mutant spun around as Hulda came rushing out from the crowd where Beck had thrown her. Her face was almost feral in its ferocity, her eyes burning like those of a beast. The people standing near her had the impression of strange ticks and twitches going on just under her skin. Those nearest almost swore they saw long fangs glistening in her mouth.

Hartwich rushed forwards, a look of horror on the priest’s face. ‘Hulda! No!’ he cried. Better than anyone, Hartwich knew what would happen if she lost control here of all places. He knew how the Sigmarites would react if they saw her other self. They might have accepted the Lady of Sigmar, but they would feel only terror at the Daughter of Ulric.

In his rush towards the witch, the arch-lector came too near Beck. The mutant’s claw lashed out, severing the fingers of Hartwich’s outstretched hand. The maimed priest was sent sprawling by the blow, crashing in a tangle against the pews. Hulda rushed over to him, her concern for him forcing the lupine rage into abeyance.

Mandred blocked Vitholf and his other retainers from rushing Beck. ‘The monster is mine,’ he declared in a voice like steel cutting ice. ‘If it kills me, then it’s yours.’

Beck’s mouth stretched into a jagged smile. ‘If I kill you, nothing else matters,’ he snarled, springing at Mandred. The mutant’s claw flashed down, slicing across the graf’s shoulder, ringing as it nearly crumpled the steel pauldron. As it landed on its feet, Beck’s sword licked out, slicing at Mandred’s face.

The graf blocked the sword with the jewelled haft of Ghal Maraz and then brought the peen of the warhammer cracking against Beck’s bifurcated arm. The blow snapped one of the mutant’s wrists, sending the sword flying from its broken hand. Before he could bring the massive head of the hammer swinging around, Beck sprang to one side in a display of alarming agility.

The mutant drove in on Mandred, thinking to charge him while the momentum of his strike held him off balance. Beck didn’t consider that his foe had honed his fighting instincts for four years battling skaven, creatures far quicker and more agile than any man… or a thing that had once been a man. Mandred turned his missed strike into a spin, turning his body with the hammer in a motion that was almost reflexive to him. When the mutant rushed at him, the head of Ghal Maraz struck it. Golden light blazed from the ancient relic, the divine ire of Sigmar made manifest.

The sound of Beck’s arm shattering boomed through the cathedral. The mutant was flung down the aisle, tumbling and rolling as though it had been launched from a ballista. It landed in a broken huddle, mewing painfully as it tried to regain its feet. It turned its misshapen face towards the enraged man storming down the aisle towards it. ‘Everything was for you, all of it for you,’ Beck snarled.

Mandred brought Ghal Maraz cracking down, smashing one of the mutant’s legs and hurling the creature further down the aisle. Those watching from the pews couldn’t decide which was more terrible, the monstrousness of the mutant’s face or the fury that held Mandred’s visage.

Again, Beck struggled to rise. ‘Sofia threatened you,’ it growled. ‘She was sick. Plague-ridden. You would have caught it if you…’

Ghal Maraz struck the mutant’s bifurcated arm, crushing it into a pulpy mess. Once more Beck was hurled down the aisle.

Coughing blood, the mutant rose once more. ‘You let your affection for Mirella blind you to what marriage to Carin would bring to…’

This time Mandred didn’t swing the warhammer, he merely drove it into Beck’s chest. The crack of splintered ribs accompanied Beck as the mutant was tossed back.

Defiance, the pride of hate, made Beck rise again, its spidery eye-cluster glaring balefully at the advancing Mandred. ‘Erna threatened your alliance with Kreyssig,’ the mutant spat. ‘She would have set you against the man who promised to make you Emperor.’

Mandred drove the head of Ghal Maraz into Beck once more, breaking more of the mutant’s ribs and flinging it through the great doors of the cathedral. Beck landed in a bloody heap on the steps, those same steps where Gazulgrund had rallied the people of Altdorf against the skaven hordes. As there had been on that day years ago, a vast crowd filled the plaza, the teeming multitudes of the city who couldn’t fit inside the sanctuary. They gasped in shock as the mutant came tumbling down the steps, then an awed hush fell over them as Mandred came striding out of the cathedral, Ghal Maraz glowing with golden light.

Beck didn’t try to stand, even hatred could only command so much from its broken body. From the steps he sneered at his old master. ‘Graf Gunther charged me to protect his son, even from himself! All I have done, I have done for Middenheim!’

Mandred stood over the mutant and raised Ghal Maraz up high. ‘One more thing then, you may do for Middenheim,’ he told the creature. Ghal Maraz came smashing down, obliterating Beck’s head in one brutal strike.

EPILOGUE

Altdorf, 1124

The observium high atop the Great Cathedral of Sigmar was a marvel of architecture, a miracle spun from steel and glass. Transparent walls looked out over the sprawl of Altdorf, offering a vista of the Imperial palace and the Courts of Justice, the River Reik and the Königplatz across the river. The glass ceiling above the grand hall opened out upon the stars. The room had been constructed by the dwarfs, taxing even their near-magical engineering abilities, a gift to the Temple of Sigmar in honour of the First Emperor, the man their High King had honoured with the revered title ‘dwarf-friend’.

Like many before him, when Arch-Lector Hartwich stepped out into the observium he felt as if he was walking among the clouds. A strange vertigo threatened him, making his steps uncertain and unsteady. He leaned against one of the tables where the temple astrologers normally worked, studying the heavens and interpreting the positions of stars and comets within the dogma of their faith. The tables were vacant now, the astrologers all dismissed, granted a holiday to celebrate the coronation of Emperor Mandred. The benches where the blind augurs commonly sat in meditation were likewise empty, they too dismissed from their divinations to pay respect to the new Emperor.

One man alone waited for Hartwich in the observium. Grand Theogonist Gazulgrund sat in silent contemplation of the stars when the arch-lector entered. At the sound of his visitor’s arrival, he slowly lowered his head and turned towards the other priest.

‘You came,’ the Grand Theogonist declared.

‘You summoned me, holiness,’ Hartwich corrected him. Though he tried, he couldn’t quite keep the disgust from his voice or the contempt from his face. One of the things he’d desperately tried to believe was that the Night of Holy Knives had been some atrocity concocted by Kreyssig. His return to Altdorf had shown him otherwise. The massacre had been carried out by Sigmarite witch hunters on the orders of the Grand Theogonist.

Gazulgrund saw the loathing in Hartwich’s eyes, heard the scorn in his tone. ‘My ascension to this post was a mistake,’ he said, his voice low and humble. ‘It was the will of a tyrant that put me here, not the will of Lord Sigmar. I have tried to make the best of that accident, tried to conduct myself in a manner that would not disgrace our god and our Temple.’

Hartwich pushed away from the table, took a few faltering steps towards Gazulgrund. ‘Many have died for Sigmar,’ he said. ‘Our faith has been watered with the blood of martyrs, but never did I think those martyrs would die by the hand of their own holy father.’

Gazulgrund nodded. He reached to his neck and removed the jade talisman on its golden chain. Reverently, he ran his fingers over the sculpted griffon. ‘I am a weak man. Through my weakness, a tyrant gained power over me. Through me he thought to gain power over Sigmar’s Temple. I did what I had to do to cut away that weakness.’

‘Thousands of innocents are dead,’ Hartwich said, his words cutting into Gazulgrund like a knife. ‘You have murdered the families of your own priesthood. For what? Some mad vision of purity?’

The Grand Theogonist set the talisman down on one of the benches. ‘I did the only thing I could to stop Kreyssig,’ he said. ‘I was too weak to see any other way.’ Slowly he tugged the golden ring from his left hand, the jade ring from his right and set them too upon the floor.

An uneasy feeling grew in Hartwich’s breast as he watched Gazulgrund strip away the badges of his holy office. ‘You are still Grand Theogonist. Whether by the hand of a tyrant or no, Sigmar works and speaks through you.’ He thought of his words to Lady Mirella in the Temple of Ulric when Mandred wept over the body of his father. ‘The gods may build great things from tragedy.’

Gazulgrund’s eyes were damp with tears as he listened to Hartwich explain how pain was the medium through which heroes were born. ‘Your words gladden my heart,’ he said. ‘But I can have no part of them. For every villainy there must be a reckoning. There is a price to be paid for every cruelty. Sigmar will build great things, but He will need strong servants to act as his hands, wise leaders to speak his words. I am neither. I was a frightened, weak creature who did the only thing he could do to keep a monster out of the temple. I became a bigger monster.’

Hartwich rushed forwards when he saw Gazulgrund take up the immense hammer Thorgrim, the weapon he had used to rally the peasants of Altdorf during the skaven attack. The Grand Theogonist waved him back. ‘The tyrant will be no more. Emperor Mandred is a good man, a great man. He will not allow the disease of Kreyssig to linger. You must show the same kind of strength. The Temple needs a good and great man to lead it. A man who is strong enough to remove the monster from his house.’

‘There is always penance,’ Hartwich said. ‘Redemption. Salvation.’

Gazulgrund sighed. ‘There is too much blood on my hands. When I am alone, I can hear the voice of my daughter and the voices of all the others I had killed. They are waiting for me at the Gates of Morr. Redemption isn’t something for me to seek, but for them to allow.’

Turning towards the closest window, Gazulgrund brought Thorgrim smashing against it, shattering the centuries-old glass and crumpling one of the steel frames. Wind whipped through the hole, plucking at the priest’s raiment. He threw the warhammer to the floor and again raised his hand to ward off Hartwich. ‘Let me atone for my sins,’ he said. He smiled, a cold and forsaken expression. ‘If Sigmar forgives me, His mercy will bear me aloft.’

The next moment, Gazulgrund was through the window. Hartwich rushed to the edge of the gap and stared down. The Grand Theogonist had plummeted hundreds of feet before impaling himself on one of the spires below. He could see Gazulgrund moving, writhing like a bug on the end of a pin. Faintly, the priest’s voice drifted up to the observium, groaning out a prayer of apology to Sigmar and those he had killed.

It took three days before a ladder tall enough to reach Gazulgrund could be built and raised. In all that time, it seemed to the people below that the impaled man’s voice never faltered; his prayers never fell silent. When they pulled him down, he was dead, but even then many claimed the sound of his prayers lingered on, a ghostly warning that would rise when a northern wind blew across the spires of the Great Cathedral.

The bricked-up framework that had once housed Emperor Boris’s extravagant Kaiseraugen flanked the former council chamber. The great table of Drakwald wood had been removed, the carved chairs of the council taken away. The raised dais remained, rising on marble blocks from the tile floor, but no mighty throne reposed upon it. Instead there was only a simple stool of horsehide, a bit of furniture that had travelled from Middenheim across the whole of the Empire as Mandred hounded the ratkin from land after land and city after city. It was a relic of his campaign to cleanse the Empire of evil and it was as a symbol of that fight that he had ordered it brought here and set upon the dais. He could think of no more majestic seat from which to watch the final battle.

Emperor Mandred Skavenslayer settled himself on the chair, the Imperial crown upon his brow, the purple robes draped about his shoulders. Across his lap rested Ghal Maraz, behind him Grand Master Vitholf held the Standard of Middenheim while the reinstated Reikmarshal von Boeckenfoerde held the Griffon-Rampant of the Imperial Throne. Between them, its stink subdued by a saturation of perfumes and unguents, was the stretched hide of Great Warlord Vrrmik carried by Captain Aldinger of the Knights of the Black Rose.

All the panoply of Empire surrounded the dais. Mandred’s closest allies were gathered about him, Baroness Carin of Nordland, Arch-Lector Hartwich, even the witch Hulda.

Before him, on bended knee, was Adolf Kreyssig, the Protector of the Empire. The commander of the now disbanded Kaiserjaeger tried his best to present a confident and imperious presence, but he couldn’t quite hide the sweat beading his brow or the tremor in his limbs. He’d been abandoned by all of his friends and allies after his connection to the mutant Beck had been exposed. Only his manservant Fuerst remained with him, bearing his regalia as he was summoned before the new Emperor.

Emperor Mandred didn’t give the murderous villain the dignity of courtly language or politic dialogue. When Kreyssig entered the hall, when he knelt before the dais, Mandred only glared down at the killer. ‘It would give me no greater pleasure than to have you taken from this place and beheaded,’ Mandred told Kreyssig. ‘I would set your head on a spike as a warning to all despots.’

A thin smile crawled onto Kreyssig’s face. He’d been afraid of his standing, afraid that Mandred’s popularity as the Skavenslayer would trump his own popularity as the Hero of Altdorf. Because the new Emperor expressed himself the way he did, Kreyssig felt his fear lessen. Even Mandred appreciated the support Kreyssig enjoyed among the peasants. ‘Kill me, and you will have an uprising on your hands,’ he warned.

Mandred returned Kreyssig’s smile, but it was as cold as a daemon’s grin. ‘I am going to give the people of the Empire too much to do for them to worry about the echoes of old tyrannies. I am going to rebuild this land and make it greater than it has ever been. There will be no place in my Empire for a monster like you.’

Kreyssig rose to his feet, pointed his finger at Mandred. ‘Yet even you do not dare to execute me,’ he snarled.

‘That is because he is leaving that honour to me.’ The words were spoken by the knight who came marching into the hall, resplendent in his shining suit of plate, the tabard of the Emperor’s Champion draped across his chest. At Erich von Kranzbeuhler’s side was the formidable runefang Legbiter. At his other side walked the graceful figure of Princess Erna Thornig. When she lifted her eyes to stare at Kreyssig, she at first looked away. It took her a moment to gaze again at her husband, but when she did, all the fear was gone; the set of her jaw was as firm as that of the knight who stood beside her.

Kreyssig laughed. ‘A whore and her lover!’ he sneered. ‘Truly the Imperial crown has fallen far that such a mongrel should be made Emperor’s Champion! The lie of noble blood proves itself once again. Deeds make nobility, not breeding!’

‘Deeds make monsters too,’ Erich challenged. ‘The Emperor has given me the honour of trying your crimes through combat, Hound of Boris! To me he has bestowed the right of avenging the good men you murdered. Grand Master von Schomberg, Prince Sigdan,’ he glanced aside at Erna. ‘Baron Thornig, your own father-in-law. All the thousands of others who have suffered by your cruelty and tyranny. Their blood calls out for justice!’

‘And they choose an adulterer to wield their blade?’ Kreyssig sneered. He turned his back on Erich and Erna, staring instead at Emperor Mandred. ‘Am I to understand that if I kill this swine I will be granted my life and my liberty?’

‘It is trial by combat,’ Mandred said. ‘The gods themselves will decide. Even an Emperor can’t deny divine judgement.’

Again, Kreyssig laughed. ‘Then I will be leaving your court, Dog of Middenheim!’ he hissed. Snapping his fingers, he motioned Fuerst forwards. Timidly, his retainer handed Kreyssig the sword he carried among the Protector’s other regalia. It was another of the runefangs, one of Legbiter’s sister blades forged in the days of Sigmar for his twelve chieftains. The name of the sword was Beast Slayer, the sword traditionally held by the Elector of Drakwald. With the murder of the last count of that realm, the blade had been passed down to Kreyssig.

‘You see, whoremonger?’ Kreyssig snarled at Erich. ‘We are matched, blade for blade!’ He whipped Beast Slayer from its scabbard, making a grand flourish with it. The muscles in his arm, the arm that had been healed and strengthened by the witchcraft of Baroness von den Linden made the heavy blade feel as light as a feather in his hand. ‘But mine is the greater skill! We’ve crossed blades once before. I would have killed you then but for the meddling of the skaven. This time, no vermin will preserve you.’

Erich glared back at the tyrant. Handing Legbiter’s scabbard to Erna, he advanced towards the gloating Kreyssig. ‘Your wife is anxious to be a widow,’ he hissed as he leapt to the attack.

With contemptuous ease, Kreyssig warded away Erich’s strike. He laughed as he saw the knight reel from the impact of his parry. He hadn’t expected the superhuman vitality behind that swing. Kreyssig laughed again as he saw the righteous confidence drain out of Erich’s eyes. Now the fool understood how things really stood. No divine judgement, no innocent blood crying out for justice. Only skill and strength, qualities that were on Kreyssig’s side.

As he brought Beast Slayer up for a slashing strike at Erich’s shoulder, Kreyssig reeled back, swatting his left hand at the bee that had suddenly flown before his face. The buzzing annoyance harassed him again as he blocked Erich’s riposte, forcing him back.

Kreyssig drove in at his foe, slashing for the knight’s head, rolling Beast Slayer around Legbiter’s intercepting steel and hacking at Erich with a vengeful return for his midsection that he could answer only by retreating back and hastily bringing his blade crosswise against his own hip. Swiftly, Kreyssig brought his sword up, and then Beast Slayer came slashing down once more, this time towards the knight’s leg. Again Erich was forced back. Kreyssig ducked beneath Legbiter as the runefang came flashing at his head.

Viciously, Kreyssig whipped his blade at the overextended knight’s belly. With an awkward twist of his body, Erich pulled himself back, the enchanted edge of Beast Slayer raking across his armour, knifing through it as though it were made of cheese and leaving a deep gash in the steel plate. Again, he retreated before Kreyssig’s assault, narrowly intercepting another strike at his head.

Kreyssig smiled. Each step he forced Erich back drove the knight closer to the bricked-up window. Once his foe’s back was to the wall, the mobility that had preserved him thus far would be lost. He saw the mounting panic in Erich’s face, knew that the knight also appreciated his predicament and how swiftly it would plunge him into disaster.

Erich caught the downward sweep of Kreyssig’s sword, fending off Beast Slayer with a rolling twist that spun his enemy’s body around. Snarling his fury, he pressed the attack, slashing at the villain’s knees. Kreyssig jumped the scything sweep of Legbiter, the toes of his boots just clearing the runefang’s keen edge. The savage chop he directed at the knight’s skull was fended off only by Erich’s sudden shift to the left, Beast Slayer’s edge coming so near that the wind of its passing tousled the man’s hair.

Erich lunged at Kreyssig, thrusting Legbiter at him in a long drive. His adversary blocked the runefang, but found his shoulder seized by the knight’s other hand. Using the momentum of his attack, Erich threw his weight behind the clutching fingers. Kreyssig became a fulcrum, propelling Erich forwards while spinning the villain back. In an instant, their positions were reversed. Now it was the former Commander of the Kaiserjaeger who had his back to the wall.

Snarling in outrage, Kreyssig slashed at his foe. Rage replaced caution and no longer did he try to conserve his strength and wear down his enemy. Instead he threw the full might of his sorcerously strengthened arm behind the attack. Beast Slayer crashed against Legbiter once more, but this time Erich’s parry was swatted aside with a humiliating ease. The knight staggered back, reeling from the power behind Kreyssig’s renewed assault.

Abruptly, a sharp pain flashed up Kreyssig’s sword arm. Risking a glance, taking his eyes from his enemy for the briefest instant, he gazed upon impossibility. The harassing bee had thrust itself between the links of mail at his elbow, stabbing its stinger deep into his flesh. The deliberateness and intelligence of the attack sent horror rushing through his mind. Baroness von den Linden, the witch he had murdered in Boris’s apiary – in what shape might her curse be visited upon him?

Erich’s renewed attack drove Kreyssig back. The superhuman strength of his arm was deserting him, boiling away as the bee’s venom infected his veins. Beast Slayer became a ponderous weight in his hand. He could almost feel his arm withering inside his armour, shrivelling back into the withered limb Baroness von den Linden’s magic had healed.

When the finish came, when Legbiter’s edge came cleaving down into his skull, Kreyssig couldn’t even raise his sword. He had been called the Hound of Boris by his enemies and like a dog he died upon the floor of the Imperial Palace.

Erich stared down at the dead despot. Leaving Legbiter buried in Kreyssig’s skull, he embraced Erna as she came rushing to him. ‘Now we have each killed a monster,’ he whispered to her as he held her close to him.

Behind them, on the dais, Emperor Mandred rose to his feet and brought his hands together in applause, an applause that was soon echoed by the rest of his court.

PLAGUE PRIEST

A little wooden shrine stood just outside the clay-walled farmhut. Devoted to the nature spirits whose caprices could inflict such hardship upon the Reikland’s virgaters, the altar-like assemblage of logs was festooned with a bizarre array of offerings to appease the malignant forces. The cracked beaks of crows and shrikes were lined across the surface of the shrine, flanked by a stone bowl of barley and a bunch of wheat stalks. The withered paw of a fox, killed while stealing chickens, was tied to the narrow upright suspended above the shrine. A human finger, cut from the hand of a vagabond trespasser, was lashed to the top of the shrine, pointing upwards into the sky and the ancient gods of wind and storm.

Beady black eyes watched from the shadows beneath the shrine as two men began removing heavy sacks of grain from a barn. The watcher stifled a little chitter of amusement as the men loaded their burden into an ox-cart. The smell of sweat and toil rolled off the brawny serfs, mixing with the scent of their oxen and the fug of the farm’s other animals.

Another smell, a more subtle smell, went unnoticed by the serfs. It was more important than any of the other smells, because it was the smell of death. The reek arose from the sacks of grain the men handled.

Right beneath their noses and the fools couldn’t even smell it!

Skritsch lashed his long naked tail through the dirt, a feeling of withering contempt flaring through his brain. Humans were such contemptible creatures – blind, odious things without the wit of a flea! Their vision, their hearing, these were feeble enough, but their sense of smell was practically nonexistent! They couldn’t even recognise their own scent, much less that of another creature! Truly these weak, pathetic things endured only through the sufferance of the Horned One!

As the men finished their labours, Skritsch scurried from his refuge. Had either of the men turned about in that moment, he would have observed the grotesque sight of an enormous rat-like creature dressed in filthy black rags scrambling on all fours across the muddy ground as it darted for the shelter of a pigsty. They might have noted the rusty blade tied to the monster’s waist with a cord of ratgut or observed the malignant intelligence gleaming in its black eyes. Old fables of the underfolk, the inhuman inhabitants who dwelt in the eternal darkness of the underworld, might have occurred to them and sent them fleeing in horror.

But Skritsch was too cunning to be seen, moving only when he was certain the men would not notice him. The skaven thrived upon the ignorance of men, exploiting their anonymity to steal and scavenge off the prosperity of mankind. Weapons, clothing, food and slaves, all of these the hapless humans provided their secret neighbours. In their foolishness they blamed the thefts and abductions on bandits and wolves and ghosts of every stripe, little guessing the true cause of their misfortunes.

Skritsch dove to the wicker wall of the sty, squirming his body through a narrow opening. The ratman dropped into the muck of the pen, whipping around to fix his attention back upon the serfs. He kept an ear cocked, listening to the agitated swine squealing about his intrusion into their enclosure. If the animals became too noisy, he would silence them with a quick jab of the pronged dagger he carried. The blade was poisoned and the swine would succumb almost instantly. When the stupid man-things investigated, they’d see the forked cut of the dagger and think that a viper had struck.

He didn’t think the men would bother about the noisy swine, however. They were much too busy trying to get their grain loaded. Skritsch could tell from their posture and scent that they were anxious and stressed. He had observed the serfs often enough to know the cause. Their packleader, the human who owned them and their land, was demanding his tribute a bit earlier this season than usual. Skritsch had seen what happened when serfs were slow responding to their master’s demands.

The skaven’s eyes glistened with an evil light. The serfs would soon have new masters to slave for.

That is, if any of them survived.

Skritsch waited until the ox-cart left the little farm before scurrying from the pigsty, satisfied that the deadly cargo was on its way to the man-master’s manor. The humans would unwittingly bear their own doom straight into the heart of the village.

The skaven’s mouth watered at the idea of an entire village decimated by the vicious weapon the ratmen had loosed upon them, a weapon that would strike them down with all the cruelty and malignance of the Horned One himself. The man-things would learn their place. The skaven would teach them.

Keeping to the shadows, slinking from wall to tree, crawling under bushes and hedges, Skritsch followed the ox-cart along the path into the village. At every step, the ratman stifled a squeak of malicious laughter. Everything was going according to plan. He had a moment of fright when the cart drew close to the timber wall which surrounded the village. The guard-men came marching out from the gatehouse, scowling at the serfs, irritated by this interruption of their idleness. They challenged the farmers, bullying them with a petty savagery that Skritsch knew only too well. Sometimes it was frightening how skavenlike some human mannerisms could be.

The real moment of concern came when the guards began poking and prodding the sacks of grain with the butts of their spears. Skritsch held his breath as he watched the sackcloth tear and tiny trickles of grain come running out. If the men looked too closely at the bags, if they noticed that the skaven had substituted their own crop for that grown by the serfs…

No, the moment passed. The guards didn’t discover anything unusual and they turned away. Skritsch gnashed his fangs in excitement as he saw the spearmen wave the cart through the gate.

Springing from his hiding place, the skaven scurried around the edge of the wall, making a wide circle to avoid the grotesquely carved scare-masks lashed to the timbers to frighten away wolves and evil spirits. His clawed hands closed about a post that had been set unevenly on the southern boundary of the village. In the twitch of a whisker, the ratman shimmied up the timber and dropped down into a turnip patch on the other side. He pressed his body close to the earth, lifting only his nose as he inspected the smells of the village, his ears straining for any sound that might indicate that his entry had been observed.

Satisfied that his presence was still unknown, Skritsch scurried to the nearest of the village’s clay-walled hovels. Selecting the closest corner, he sprang at the building, climbing up its side as nimbly as he had the timber wall. He was more careful creeping across the thatch roof. Experience had taught him how treacherous and fragile such constructions were. If he would succeed in his task, then he couldn’t afford any accidents.

And he had to succeed. Skritsch didn’t like to think about what Warlord Nashqik might do to him if he failed. His glands clenched as another thought came to him. Perhaps it wasn’t Nashqik he had to worry about. The ratman bruxed his fangs, trying to dislodge the hideous thought. He had work to do; he didn’t have time to worry about what might happen. He had to make certain that it didn’t happen.

The closeness of the village’s squalid huts made it easy for Skritsch to jump from one roof to another. In this way, the skaven was able to make quick progress through the settlement unobserved. From the little hovel just inside the wall, he worked his way to the village square, selecting the flat roof of the blacksmith’s shop for his hiding place. The smoke from the forge would help hide his scent. While there was little chance of a human noticing him, the threat of dogs was one he couldn’t afford to ignore.

Just as he was settling himself on the roof, Skritsch spotted the ox-cart entering the village square. The skaven licked his fangs. It wouldn’t be long now!

The village square was bordered on one side by the immense stone manor house where the lord’s servants dwelled and governed his estates. Another side was dominated by a cluster of timber warehouses and barns, the repositories of the lord’s tribute and the village’s wealth. Opposite the warehouses was the cluster of clay-walled buildings which served as the village tavern and hostelry, the blacksmith and herbalist squashed close beside the tavern on its left. The last face of the square was given over to a narrow wooden building with a tall spire rising from its vaulted roof, a plaster fountain bubbling before its doors. Skritsch understood this building was where the man-things paid homage to their strange gods. The skaven sneered at such puny gods, for they were nothing beside the might and glory of the Horned Rat. Yet he was prudent enough to be a bit scared of them.

Even as his eyes strayed toward the chapel, Skritsch found that he had good reason to be afraid of the place. The smell issuing from the temple continued down into the square where a lone figure stood in the middle of the path. The skaven could tell from her scent that she was one of the man-thing’s breeders. A mantle of pure white billowed about the woman as she hurriedly made her way across the square. A smell of incense clung to her garments and wafted from her long dark hair.

Skritsch watched with growing apprehension as the woman stepped in front of the advancing ox-cart, arms outstretched to block the way. In a stern voice, she ordered the cart to keep away. Such was her tone of authority that the labourers walking out from the warehouse were stopped in their tracks. The serfs seated on the cart she commanded to stay where they were.

‘These men have brought death inside these walls,’ the woman pronounced. She pointed her slender hand at the sacks of grain. ‘These bags must be burned at once! Praise to the Mercy of Shallya that we are in time!’

Each of the labourers removed a straw fetish doll from beneath the breast of his tunic, spitting on the ugly things as a protection against ill omens. This done, they hurried back into the warehouses to gather wood to construct a pyre. The serfs on the cart glanced anxiously at one another, their faces growing pale. They watched the construction of the pyre with mounting alarm.

When the pile of wood had grown large enough, the woman called out to the two men on the cart. ‘You have brought this evil here,’ she told them. ‘It is your penance to destroy it.’ She waved her hand from the bed of the cart to the pyre.

‘It is not their property to destroy!’ a gruff voice bellowed.

The speaker was a heavy-set, broad-shouldered man, his once-muscular body just beginning to give way to fat, his blond hair beginning to fade into grey. His raiment was opulent beside the sheepskin tunics and breeches of the villagers, a finely brocaded burgundy coat and matching trousers. About his neck the man wore a ponderous steel pectoral, its surface etched with an elaborate coat of arms. Flanking him were two men in weathered suits of chain, their badges of office proclaiming them the village reeve and beadle.

‘My lord bailiff,’ the woman addressed her accoster. ‘I do not think you appreciate—’

‘I do not appreciate my lord’s property being destroyed,’ the man grunted at her. ‘You may have forgotten, Sister Kathryn, but the village of Morberg, the people in it, the lands around it, all of these belong to the Baron von Greitz. It is my duty to safeguard his lordship’s property!’

The only sign of irritation the priestess made was the slightest clenching of her jaw. She did not bother to argue her position to the bailiff, understanding that it would need more than words to convince him. The serfs drew back as she approached the cart, the whisper of a prayer to Shallya falling from her lips. An unearthly glow began to surround her hand, growing more vibrant as her prayer became more intense.

The bailiff watched as Sister Kathryn pressed her glowing hand through one of the holes in the grain sacks. When she withdrew her hand, the glow had faded, its vibrancy corrupted into a grey dinginess that clung to her fingers. She held her hand outward so that the baron and all the people in the square could see. The bailiff’s outburst had brought many curious faces to the windows and each of the spectators gasped in alarm. They had seen the priestess draw illness from sick men before, but never had they seen her use magic to draw sickness out of a sack of grain.

Sister Kathryn closed her eyes, willing the magic of her goddess to cleanse the corruption she had drawn into herself. The vibrant glow again gathered about her hand, though it did not come so quickly as before. The grey dinginess shrivelled before the purifying light, gradually vanishing altogether. The effort almost brought the priestess to her knees, her entire body shivering from the toll the magic had taken upon her.

The bailiff scowled, uncomfortable with the display of magic and the vivid reminder that there were powers greater than him. He glanced at the crowd of serfs, at the awed faces of his own guards. There was no doubt that Sister Kathryn’s display had won them over. For that very reason, the bailiff was not about to back down. The situation had become more than a question of a few sacks of grain. It had become a question of who was master of Morberg.

‘A nice trick,’ the bailiff said, slowly clapping his hands. ‘I saw a warlock in Mordheim conjure up the same illusion.’ The man’s face contorted into a menacing snarl. ‘They strung the creature up by his thumbs and cut him from gizzard to groin. Ever watched a warlock squirm while fifty bulbs of garlic are stuffed up his–’

‘There is no sorcery here, only the divine grace of Shallya,’ Sister Kathryn told him, a tremble in her voice. Many a priest had been brutalized by their flock when a suggestion of sorcery attached itself to his magic. Forcing herself to be calm, she straightened her back and pointed at the ox-cart. ‘There is sickness in those bags.’

The bailiff frowned as he heard a frightened mutter pass among the villagers. ‘I’m not going to burn our crop over a conjurer’s trick! Emperor Boris has raised a new merchet due before the first snow and the baron has ordered me to ensure that Morberg can pay it and any other duty the Emperor sees fit to levy on us this winter!’ he snarled. Snapping his fingers, he waved his guards forward. With obvious reluctance, the reeve and beadle closed upon the cart. Setting down their spears, they took hold of a sack and began to lift it from the cart.

Already weakened by the guards at the gate and by Sister Kathryn’s inspection, the bag split open as it was being lowered, spilling its contents into the square. The onlookers shouted in horror. Mixed in with the grain, buried deep within the bag, were several masses of hair. Human scalps!

The bailiff made the sign of Ulric as he backed away from the ghastly sight. ‘Mercy of the gods!’ he exclaimed.

‘Plague,’ Sister Kathryn said, her voice low and hollow. ‘I could feel it lurking in those bags, but I never imagined it had been placed there wilfully.’ Her expression became grim, her eyes hard as she stared at the two serfs who had brought the cart into the village. ‘Only the minions of the Fly Lord would dare such wickedness.’ As she named the foul daemon-god, the priestess folded her fingers into the sign of the dove lest the Grandfather should notice itself being invoked. The villagers made similar warding gestures, their eyes wide with horror at the very mention of Old Night and the Ruinous Powers.

One of the men from the cart fell to the ground, grovelling before the priestess, protesting his innocence. ‘We have no idea how those scalps got in there! Someone else must have done it!’

The bailiff glared at the terrified man. ‘Every heretic is innocent when he’s found out. Seize the scum! We’ll burn them along with their filth!’

The officers were only too happy to get away from the ox-cart. But as they seized the two serfs, the reeve cried out in horror. He sprang away from his prisoner as though the man were on fire. In leaping back, the reeve tore the sleeve from the serf’s tunic, exposing the left side of his body.

Plainly visible to all in the square were the ghastly black buboes clustered about the serf’s armpit. There was no question now. The cart had been carrying plague, and it was not the grain alone that had been afflicted.

‘Burn them!’ the bailiff growled again, shaking his fist at the officers. The guards moved with obvious reluctance, using their spears to herd the two serfs towards the pyre.

Sister Kathryn stepped between the men and the piled wood. ‘Do not do this,’ she said. ‘This is an abomination. Would you commit such violence at the very doorstep of Shallya’s dwelling place? Would you offend the goddess now, when we shall all have need of her mercy?’

‘Get out of our way,’ the beadle ordered. ‘These men tried to bring plague into our village.’

‘Perhaps they did not know,’ the priestess said. ‘Perhaps they were unaware of what they carried. They could be innocent.’

‘Whether they knew or not, they brought plague into my village,’ the bailiff snapped. ‘One of them, probably both, carries the plague already. The only way to keep this village safe is to burn them. Them and everything they brought with them!’

The bailiff’s roar evoked the quiet fear gnawing at the belly of every man in the village. A shouting mob surged into the square, rushing to light the pyre.

Sister Kathryn turned away in disgust. She would be no part to what these people had been goaded into doing. Shallya was a goddess of mercy and humanity and all life was sacred to her. No matter the logic, Sister Kathryn could not accept the callous murder of two men.

She would retire to the chapel and pray to her goddess, pray that she would show pity upon these wretched, frightened fools. For they would have need of pity. Because even if the bailiff’s draconian measures worked, there was no question that someone was deliberately trying to infect the people of Morberg.

There was no reason to think they wouldn’t try again.

Skritsch scurried away from Morberg, waiting only until the pyre had been lit before making his retreat. Fear pawed at his glands as he considered the deaths of the two farmers and the burning of their crop. Warlord Nashqik wouldn’t be too happy when he heard that the first effort had failed in so spectacular a fashion.

It was all that stupid breeder-thing’s fault! If she’d only kept her nose out of things! Skritsch would have to remember that in future. The nose of a breeder was keener than that of a normal man-thing!

The ratman hurried across the pastures surrounding Morberg, creeping on all fours along a manure trench until he reached a stand of thorn bushes. Darting under the bushes, Skritsch clawed away a mass of dried weeds and brambles, exposing a narrow hole. Pausing to sniff the scents rising from the hole, the skaven dove headfirst into the opening.

The burrow was a tight squeeze, even for a skaven, but by wriggling shoulders and hips, Skritsch was able to force his way forwards. He was reassured by the thick smell of skaven scent and the comforting feeling of earth against his whiskers. Then dirt trickled down upon him as he descended, sparking a tremor of fear. Being crushed by a collapsing burrow was one of the more common deaths menacing any ratman. Skritsch hissed a few prayers to the Horned Rat asking him to keep the tunnel from falling down until the next skaven came crawling through it.

Skritsch’s heart was still pounding when he reached the end of the burrow. The bolthole dropped down into a broad tunnel some twenty feet across. Old bones and mats of shed fur littered the floor of the tunnel, giving it a decaying, homey stench. What little light illuminated the corridor was provided by foul-smelling lamps set into niches scattered haphazardly along the walls. A skaven might be perfectly capable of navigating through the pitch dark, but few preferred to do so, liking to see as well as hear and smell what might be lying in wait for them. Still the noxious smoke that billowed from the smouldering rat-dung, created a reek that offended even a skaven’s nose. Clan Filch was too poor to afford luxuries like worm-oil and warplight, so they had to make do with such primitive artifices.

It wouldn’t always be that way. Warlord Nashqik had ambitions, ambitions that would set Clan Filch among the most powerful in the Under-Empire!

Skritsch lashed his tail, feeling a sense of pride that he had been taken into the warlord’s confidence. There weren’t many in the warren who knew about the secret alliance with Clan Pestilens. The plague monks had some idea about a new strain of plague that would decimate the surface-dwelling man-things and leave them easy prey for the skaven. To perfect that strain, the plague monks needed to test it not merely upon human slaves but upon free-roaming humans. That need had brought them to the Slashscratch Deep and Clan Filch. As one of the lesser clans enjoying a position among the grey lords, Pestilens was hard-pressed to stave off the hostile intentions of ambitious warlord clans like Skab and Rictus. For all their fanaticism and resistance to disease, the plague monks were puny beside the hulking warriors of Skab and Rictus. If it came to a fight, Pestilens would be crushed unless they found allies among those clans that had been unjustly kept from a place in the Shattered Tower.

Fool-meat! The brains of the plaguelords must have rotted out! There was no other explanation for the imbecilic deal they had made. Forty barge-loads of grain to be paid out to Clan Filch for their services! It was more food than the warren had ever seen before, enough that Warlord Nashqik had extended breeding privileges and ordered more eunuchs to tend the rat-wives and their litters. The population of Slashscratch Deep would swell. In a few years, Nashqik would have the numbers to overwhelm other warrens.

More pointedly, however, was the fact that Clan Pestilens had effectively allowed this potent man-killing bacillus to fall right into Clan Filch’s paws! Only a few dozen plague monks and a single plague priest had been dispatched to conduct the tests. They would be a small obstacle when the time came to wrest their secret away from them.

Skritsch felt his glands clench. Perhaps they wouldn’t be such an easy conquest. Puskab Foulfur, the plague priest, was the most terrifying creature he’d ever encountered, including Warlord Nashqik. When the plague priest looked at another skaven, you could almost feel the monster’s eyes peeling away flesh and fur, trying to peer into the guts beneath.

Skritsch shuddered. There was no need to worry about that. When Nashqik did decide to rid himself of his allies, Skritsch would just make sure he had very important business to attend to elsewhere. One skaven more or less wouldn’t make a difference if it came down to a fight. Besides, Nashqik would be very upset if he lost Skritsch’s valuable services and keen insight.

Suppressing thoughts of treachery and violence for the moment, Skritsch continued down the tunnel. He was careful to keep his whiskers comfortably against the left-hand wall. A skaven always felt a bit more secure knowing there was at least one direction any enemy couldn’t attack him from.

As he neared the more populated burrows and chambers of the warren, Skritsch encountered other skaven scurrying through the tunnel. He eyed them carefully, drinking in their scent with his nose. They certainly smelled like Clan Filch, but there was another smell about them, something he couldn’t quite place his paw on. Skritsch found himself lingering in the tunnel, studying the traffic around him.

It didn’t take Skritsch long to determine there was something wrong with these skaven. Their gait had a shambling, subdued quality to it. Their tails hung limp behind them, dragging through the dirt and muck. Even the black-furred stormvermin, Nashqik’s brutal enforcers, had an uncharacteristic weakness of posture about them.

A terrible thought occurred to Skritsch, a thought so awful he felt his glands spurt the musk of fear. What if the plague Puskab was working on had got loose in the warren?

Panic rather than reason drove Skritsch to seize the next ratman who passed him by. The wretch squeaked and struggled in his grip, but the efforts to escape were too feeble to succeed. Remembering the ugly buboes the serf had displayed, Skritsch ripped the tattered cloak from his captive’s body.

The next instant, Skritsch flung his captive away. In a single swift motion, he drew his sword and brought it chopping down into the neck of the diseased ratman. There was a pungent, sickly smell about the black blood oozing from the wound. Horrified, Skritsch did his best to shake the gore from his sword and took off running down the passage.

It was true! Puskab’s plague was out of control, already making inroads into the population of Slashscratch Deep! How the disease had gotten loose, Skritsch didn’t know, but if it wasn’t stopped quickly Clan Filch would be decimated. Even if they survived the plague, they would be so weakened that another clan might invade the warren.

Skritsch raced through the winding tunnels, cringing every time he encountered another skaven. He had to warn Nashqik! If the warlord acted fast, they could stop Puskab from creating more of the bacillus and prevent the spread of infection. Nashqik would reward him richly for such a warning; appoint him a chieftain at the very least!

Now that he was aware of the plague, Skritsch thought he could smell its foul taint everywhere. For all of their treachery and paranoia, skaven were a naturally gregarious breed, never quite comfortable unless surrounded by their own kind. Skritsch rebelled against his communal instincts, keeping to the most neglected ratruns and boltholes as he navigated the warren. His fur crawled every time he came near another ratman, his nose twitching in a spasm of frantic effort, trying to smell the faintest sniff of plague. Any skaven might be a carrier, a walking herald of a slow and hideous death.

Scrambling along a narrow ledge which curled above one of the main throughfares of Slashscratch Deep, Skritsch had a good view of the afflicted warren. The listless masses of skaven shuffled about through their burrows, only a few displaying the speed and vigour which was normal. Most of them were so gripped with malaise that they didn’t even react when a gang of skavenslaves dropped one of the bribe-bags which formed Clan Pestilens’ tribute to Clan Filch. Grain exploded from the ruptured bag, scattering across the floor of the tunnel. Such a windfall should have provoked a frenzy of squeaking, grasping ratmen. Instead, only a few of the skaven pounced upon the free meal, the rest simply trudging along, oblivious to the fodder they crushed beneath their paws.

It was a chilling, unnatural sight, one that made Skritsch’s ears fold close against his skull. There was something almost apocalyptic in the eerie scene, as though the ratmen he saw had already died and they were only going through the motions of life.

Skritsch froze in place. Something about the scene reminded him of Morberg and the humans. There was an uncanny similarity between what he had witnessed in the village square and the morbid affliction of the warren.

Could it be the grain? Had some thief stolen some of the infected grain intended for the humans? Or had Puskab deliberately loosed the infected grain upon the warren? Skritsch had to find out. If Puskab was responsible, then the reward Nashqik would give him for such information would elevate Skrtisch to the highest ranks of Clan Filch.

Yes! He’d have to sneak into Puskab’s lab and find evidence that the plague priest was responsible. Even if Skritsch had to make the evidence himself!

Eyes boggling as he contemplated the riches and power which would soon be his, Skritsch turned about and wormed his way into a narrow ventilation shaft. The cramped shaft was alive with rats, but the little vermin scurried away in fear as the skaven came rushing down the passage. Skritsch navigated the mad disorder of intersections and cross-tunnels with an ease born of long practice. There was always an advantage to be had spying on other skaven and the ventilation shafts offered the best opportunity for lurking ears and eyes.

In a short time, Skritsch was crawling along the shaft connecting to the chamber Nashqik had allocated to Puskab and the plague monks. He could smell the sickly scent of Clan Pestilens long before he reached the end of the shaft; a musty, evil reek that was redolent of mange and rot. It made his glands clench, his mind swarming with visions of the decayed plague monks.

The sight which stretched below the opening of the air shaft was worse. The chamber the plague monks had been given was once used as a nursery for skaven whelps and the stench of the pups was still noticeable. Nashqik had probably intended the inconvenience of such a burrow as a subtle way of reminding his guests of his authority over them. If so, the gesture had been lost on the plague monks. Nothing short of a troll’s backside could smell worse than the disease-ridden zealots. They shambled about the chamber cloaked in their filthy green robes, their fur falling out in greasy clumps, their skin marred with lesions and boils, their eyes cloudy with cataracts, their faces drawn and necrotic. Some of the plague monks paced through the filth piled upon the floor of their cell, lashing their bodies viciously with barbed whips, others carried scrolls of ratskin and slobbered strange and obscene prayers. One of the plague monks, his face lost beneath the thick folds of his cowl, clanged a rusty bell, taking perverse delight in the discordant notes.

A few of the plague monks, however, were more deliberate in their madness. They were clustered about a cage of scrawny human slaves, poking and jabbing at the pathetic captives with hooks and skewers. A single sniff was enough to tell the humans were all diseased, their naked bodies sporting the black buboes Skritsch had seen on the man in Morberg.

As the plague monks prodded their slaves, they were observed with the utmost scrutiny by their grotesque master. Poxmaster Puskab Foulfur, plague priest of Clan Pestilens. He was a corpulent ratman, his tattered green robes straining to contain his bloated bulk. The fur that lingered on his body had just a suggestion of white to it, though mostly it had faded into a jaundiced yellow. His skin was leprous, mottled with hideous splotches that wept translucent ooze. The priest’s face was rotted, bits of muscle showing through the desiccated flesh. A pair of antlers protruded from his skull, framing his hideous visage like some blasphemous parody of the Horned One.

Puskab prowled around the cage, leaning heavily on a staff of gnarled jungle-wood. Sometimes he would pause to snap an order to his minions. The plague monks would spring into action, dragging one of the captives from the cage. So wasted with disease were the slaves that they hardly put up any fight at all, simply lying upon the floor while the skaven picked ugly brown fleas from their hair.

Skritsch felt his hackles rise when he saw the despicable insects. They were as fat and bloated as Puskab himself, and the stink of disease was about them. The plague monks were especially diligent as they removed the fleas, dropping them onto little pads of hair which had already been prepared for them. Once the disembodied scalps had received a few score of fleas, another plague monk carefully removed them. He walked to the other side of the chamber, where a number of grain sacks stood. Uttering a villainous squeal, the deranged ratman thrust the infested scalp into the grain.

The spy felt his stomach turn at what he beheld next. Puskab removed a bottle from beneath his voluminous robes and shambled over to the grain. The sacks on the left he ignored, but those on the right, he doused with the contents of the bottle. The smell of pungent perfume struck Skritsch’s nose. The plague priest was masking the scent of the infected grain! There was no need to bother with such caution if the sacks were intended for the humans! No, such attention could only mean one thing. The grain was going to be given to other skaven!

Clan Pestilens was deliberately betraying Clan Filch!

Puskab Foulfur suddenly turned around, his yellow eyes glaring straight up at the air shaft. The plague priest’s rotten lips curled back, exposing his black teeth in a savage snarl. Skritsch felt the earth around him shudder, crumble beneath his paws. He scrabbled for purchase, but the ground seemed to wither under his fingers. Uttering a wail of terror, the spy found himself hurtling down into the lair of the plague monks.

Skritsch struck the floor hard. He could feel one of his front legs snap under the impact. The skaven screamed in agony, ending in a cough as dust dirt rushed down his throat. His eyes blinked back tears, struggling vainly to pierce the dust cloud which billowed up around him.

Puskab had caused the collapse. The priest had used some foul, despicable sorcery in an attempt to kill the spy. But Skritsch had defied the heretic’s efforts! He had survived the worst Clan Pestilens could throw at him!

The cloud suddenly cleared, exposing Skritsch to the merciless eyes of Puskab. The plague priest pointed a leprous claw at the wounded spy. ‘Infidel-meat!’ the priest growled. The words brought a shriek of outrage from the other plague monks. However seemingly crazed or disoriented, the vermin responded to Puskab’s cry, rounding upon the stunned Skritsch.

The monks came charging at Skritsch, lashing at him with barbed whips, clubbing at him with corroded maces and spiked flails. The muzzles of the decayed skaven dripped with froth and filth, their eyes clouded with a rabid fury.

Sheer terror caused the spy to whip out his sword. The blade slashed through the forearm of the foremost plague monk, sending the limb leaping away on a fountain of blood and pus. The mutilated monk continued towards him, necessitating a second slash across his throat before the fanatic wilted to the floor in death.

Skritsch knew it was hopeless to fight against so many frenzied foes. He gave up trying to strike down the monks, instead directing his efforts towards fending them off until he could find an opening and escape. The black-garbed spy ground his fangs against the pain pulsing through his body, forcing himself to bite down on the agony of his broken front leg. A broken leg was something a skaven could recover from if he was lucky. There was no coming back from what the diseased monks would do to him.

The opening finally presented itself. One of the plague monks, his colourless eyes blinder than a bat, stumbled into a scrawny zealot whose face was lost under a coating of boils. The blind monk, lost in the frenzy of religious outrage, struck out at the skaven he had stumbled into, popping a clutch of boils on the second monk’s snout. The boil-faced madrat reacted by driving his clawed foot into the belly of his blind antagonist.

Soon the two monks were at each other’s throats and Skritsch darted into the gap their melee presented. The skaven spy leapt over the wrestling ratmen and dashed towards the mouth of the chamber. There was only a single plague monk standing guard at the entrance to the lair, a creature Skritsch quickly settled with a cut to the sentry’s groin.

Panting, wheezing, his heart pounding in terror, Skritsch scurried down the tunnel, putting as much distance between himself and the diseased lair of the plague monks as he could. There was only one place that could offer him refuge against the vengeance of Clan Pestilens. Skritsch had to reach Warlord Nashqik and beg his protection. The warlord was sure to give it once he learned what was really going on. Nashqik would soon deal with Puskab’s treachery.

Skritsch had a sense that something was wrong when he approached the warlord’s nest. The customary pack of armoured stormvermin outside the entrance to Nashqik’s burrow was absent. There was also a heavy stench of perfume in the air, far more than the warlord would customarily employ to hide his scent from assassins and enemies.

The spy had a moment of doubt, wondering if he should abandon the entire warren. It was a near suicidal thing for a skaven to leave his clan, however. Without a clan to protect him, he would soon fall prey to the many predators which lurked in the underworld, not the least of which were skaven slavers. No, Skritsch would have to stay, and to do that, he’d need the protection only Nashqik could offer him.

Biting down on his suspicions, Skritsch crept into the burrow of his warlord. Once again, the ratman’s hackles rose. The last time he had been in the presence of his warlord, Nashqik’s lair had been filled with hoarded plunder. Bolts of cloth looted from human villages, kegs of beer stolen from dwarf breweries, boxes of savoury mushrooms pilfered from goblin caverns. Where all of the warlord’s loot had been, there was now only emptiness. Nashqik’s nest had been ransacked!

The explanation soon revealed itself. Crouched down upon the few furs and blankets that hadn’t been stolen from him, the once mighty Warlord Nashqik wheezed and coughed and drooled into his whiskers. The warlord had tried to hide the smell of disease and weakness by drenching himself in perfume, but one look at the wretch was enough for anyone to see he had contracted the plague. Massive black buboes riddled his body.

A titter of malignant laughter brought Skritsch spinning around. Behind him, at the entrance to the nest, he saw the horned foulness of the plague priest grinning at him. The spy brandished his sword at the leering monster. Puskab’s lip curled back in a sneer. A ghoulish green light flamed for an instant in the priest’s eyes, a surge of power swept outward from his claw. Skritsch reeled back in horror as his sword crumbled apart in his hand, worn through with rust and rot.

‘I came-seek Slashscratch Deep to test-find new-good plague,’ Puskab said, his voice like a rotten bubble. ‘Make-make good-great plague for Horned One.’ The plague priest’s paw suddenly slapped against his breast, then withdrew again, a bloated black flea pinched between his fingers. ‘Find good-nice carrier,’ Puskab chortled. ‘Kill much-much man-things!’

The plague priest’s eyes gleamed with wickedness. ‘Know-learn long ago,’ he said. ‘Need-find flea to make skaven sick-die like man-things.’

Skritsch cringed before the crazed plague priest. Clan Pestilens hadn’t come to Slashscratch Deep to test their plague on the humans at all! Slash-scratch Deep had been the test! The plague monks didn’t want a disease that killed humans, they wanted a disease that would kill other skaven as well!

‘Soon-soon all ratkin see true face of Horned One,’ Puskab declared. ‘Know-learn true name of Horned One! Find-seek true glory of Horned One!’ The plague priest squinted at Skritsch, then jabbed a wizened claw at the spy. ‘You learn-find soon-soon,’ he hissed.

Skritsch looked down at his broken front leg, squealing in terror at what he saw.

All around his shoulder were oily black growths, the foul buboes which heralded the most lethal of plagues.

The Black Death!

PLAGUE DOKTOR

‘Is he dead?’

The question was expressed with curiosity, but no real emotion. Ernst Kahlenberg always hated the cold, acid way Manfred Grau spoke, making his words less an observation than an audible sneer. Grau had a manner of making even the darkest of life’s moments just that little bit more unpleasant by injecting a tone of bitterness and contempt.

The body strewn beside the road didn’t care. It was past all caring, death rendering it immune even to Grau’s morbid humour. Kahlenberg turned the corpse onto its side, rolling it over so that his companion could see the long, vicious slashes. The body’s back resembled something from a butcher’s shop, many of the wounds so deep that bits of bone stood exposed.

‘Yes, I imagine that would be enough to kill somebody,’ Grau quipped, turning his eyes away from the gruesome sight. ‘What do you think, Ernst? Was our friend here killed by wolves, or maybe a panther?’

Kahlenberg shook his head. ‘He doesn’t look to have been gnawed on,’ he reported. As he spoke, Kahlenberg’s body stiffened, his legs clicking together with studied military precision. The gesture brought a wry smile to Grau’s face. Kahlenberg quickly relaxed, chiding himself for slipping into old habits. There was no reason for such formality, not with Grau. Not with anybody.

‘I’d say the wounds were made by a blade,’ Kahlenberg continued.

‘Nonsense!’ Grau protested. ‘The man’s been cut up like mutton.’ Seated in the box of a ramshackle wagon, Grau made an expansive gesture with his arm, indicating the rest of the roadway. The road was littered with a motley collection of oddments – coils of rope, bolts of cheap cloth, bits and pieces of battered tinware. A small oxcart leaned against the bole of an oak, its yoke cracked but otherwise looking quite serviceable. ‘There isn’t a bandit or goblin in this corner of Talabecland that would leave all this loot lying around!’

Kahlenberg walked towards the wagon. He was a tall, powerfully built man, tall enough to stare Grau in the eye, even with the older man seated atop the wagon. ‘I think I know a thing or two about sword wounds. I should know one when I see it.’ He pointed a finger back at the body. ‘You should know a few things too, unless you’ve managed to drink that away too. Go have a look at him yourself if you don’t trust me.’

Grau scowled, his sharp features displaying the disgust Kahlenberg’s suggestion provoked. He cast a wary glance at the corpse, then turned away. ‘I’ve put that sort of thing behind me, Ernst,’ he said. Grau reached beneath the wooden seat and retrieved a clay bottle. With practised ease, he removed the stopper with his thumb and pressed the vessel to his lips. ‘I’ve no more stomach for that kind of work. His Most Beneficent Excellency Emperor Boris saw to that.’

‘So now you hide in a bottle,’ Kahlenberg challenged.

Arching his eyebrow, Grau directed a withering stare at the big man. ‘And you? Is your hiding place any purer than mine? Don’t moralise with me, Ernst! I know you too well for that.’

Kahlenberg glared at Grau, the last shreds of dignity and self-respect struggling to assert themselves. It was a battle he knew was lost even as he started. He didn’t have enough honour left in him to argue, not least because the viper-tongued Grau was right. Kahlenberg was hiding, hiding from his past, from the things he had done and the things he should have done. Hindsight was the most terrible curse the gods could lay upon a man’s mind.

‘When you are through deciding if you want to wring my neck,’ Grau said, ‘you might go and have a look at the bric-a-brac our friend has left all over the road. Perhaps some of it might be worth selling.’

‘Don’t we have enough already?’ Kahlenberg asked, waving his hand at the bed of the wagon. The platform was piled high with dented helms and rusty bits of armour, notched swords and splintered shields. The pile represented the pickings of numerous battlefields and graveyards. Grau was a scavenger as cunning as any vulture, seemingly able to smell out a fresh corpse a league away.

Or perhaps that was giving the old villain too much credit. With plague rife throughout the land, it didn’t take any exceptional skill to find death. Morr’s scythe had reaped a grim harvest from Sudenland to Sylvania, depopulating entire towns and turning the cities into diseased charnel houses. Kahlenberg felt his gorge rise at the obscenities which were part and parcel of the scavenger’s trade. Ostensibly, Grau was a wandering peddler, selling second-hand weapons and armour. Exactly how second-hand his wares were was something his patrons were better off not knowing.

‘Emperor Boris has the fattest purse in the land and he shows no sign of being content,’ Grau said. ‘Are you suggesting that we poor vagabonds are more altruistic than our beloved Emperor?’

‘Save the speeches,’ Kahlenberg said, his voice bitter with shame. He started gathering up the rubbish littering the road.

‘Don’t forget his pockets,’ Grau called down from the wagon, pointing at the body beside the road.

Kahlenberg threw down the ratty sheet of linen he was holding. ‘Do your own dirty work,’ he snapped.

Grau stared at the corpse, his face twisting with revulsion. He took a swallow from his bottle. Wiping beads of alcohol from his moustache, he turned his gaze on Kahlenberg. ‘We’re going to have to discuss our working arrangement. I think you’ve forgotten who’s in charge.’

‘You need me more than I need you,’ Kahlenberg retorted. ‘How long do you think you’d last travelling from town to town by yourself?’

The suggestion caused some of the flush to drain from Grau’s cheeks. He tried to brush aside his companion’s threat. ‘I can find another sellsword anytime I like.’ Suddenly he forgot his argument with Kahlenberg. Standing up, he gestured excitedly at an object lying under the oxcart.

Kahlenberg responded with calculated slowness, knowing every moment of delay would infuriate Grau. The old scavenger hopped up and down, hock spilling from the clay bottle as he entreated his bodyguard to hurry.

Eventually, Kahlenberg reached the cart. Stooping, he crawled behind the cart wheel and dragged a heavy box out from under the wreck. His calloused hand stroked the fine leather covering, his eyes lingered over the gilt lettering and the little steel clasp locking the box. The lettering meant nothing to him, but he could appreciate the finery of the workmanship. He’d been playing the role of looter and scavenger too long not to have gained a thief’s eye for valuables.

‘Bring it here!’ Grau ordered.

This time Kahlenberg acted without reluctance, as eager as his employer to see what they had found. He handed the box up to Grau. The older man gave it a cursory glance, then brought a dagger scratching against the steel clasp. It was the work of a few minutes to get the box open, the blade scratching and slashing the expensive leather.

When the box was open, Grau uttered a snarl of outrage.

‘Cut yourself?’ Kahlenberg wondered.

‘No,’ Grau hissed back. His lean hand dipped into the box, removing a black leather hat. Kahlenberg recognised the style as that employed solely by the Physicians’ Guild, though he’d never seen one of them in black before. Grau had worn such clothes once.

‘Any gold?’ Kahlenberg asked.

‘No,’ Grau repeated. ‘No silver either, just a bunch of crude medical instruments, waxed cloak and gloves.’ The old man laughed bitterly, reaching down into the bag again and removing a strange leather mask that resembled the beaked visage of a raven. ‘Our late friend appears to have been a plague doktor.’

‘Plague doktor?’

Grau stuffed the ugly mask back into the box. ‘I don’t suppose you saw their sort at the Reiksguard barracks. You had the services of the Temple of Shallya and real physicians to hold back the plague. Well, for all those villeins and peasants who don’t have the privilege of nobility and wealth, they try to stave off the plague with plague doktors. A rabble of quacks and charlatans who fleece the desperate and the dying.’

‘Sounds profitable,’ Kahlenberg observed.

Grau fixed him with a withering stare. ‘The people we injure are already dead,’ he snapped, closing the box and dropping it into the bed of the wagon. Angrily he cracked the reins and the wagon jolted off down the road.

The wagon sloshed its way along the muddy mire that passed itself off as the main street of Amorbach. Chickens scattered before the hooves of Grau’s horse, cackling in protest as they darted through the gaps in wattle fences or fluttered up onto the earthen roofs of half-buried grubhuts. A fat old sow waddled indolently across their path, pausing to nose about in the mud until the wagon was almost upon her. A splotchy cat, lazing in the brick doorway of a storehouse, twitched its tail and watched as the two strangers rode deeper into the town.

Of any human inhabitants, however, there was no sign.

‘This place looks abandoned,’ Kahlenberg said, his fingers drumming against the sword sheathed at his side.

Grau simply uttered one of his grim chuckles. ‘You need to get out more,’ he berated his companion. ‘See a bit of the world.’ The scavenger’s voice dropped to a venomous pitch. ‘Spend some time in Sylvania where the Death has been at work. You’ll see plenty of deserted villages there. You’d know what desolation looks like. The houses smashed in and ransacked, the streets strewn with garbage, wolves prowling about. There’s a feeling to such places that can’t be forgotten and can’t be mistaken.’

‘Then where are all the people?’ Kahlenberg persisted. ‘We can’t exactly sell swords to chickens and pigs.’ He looked across the buildings on either side of the road. Most of them were grubhuts, crude shelters sunk into pits with a simple gabled roof rising above it. There were only a few real buildings, most of them built from wattle and daub. Interspersed among the buildings was a crazed confusion of pig sties, chicken coops, turnip patches and cabbage fields. A handful of sheep were even in evidence, grazing in a little field bordered by hedges.

Grau raised his hand, motioning Kahlenberg to keep quiet. The old man turned his head to one side and closed his eyes. ‘Do you hear that?’ he asked, a smug smile on his face.

With Grau’s prompting, Kahlenberg found that he did hear a faint noise, a murmur of voices coming to them from some distance away.

‘They sound angry,’ Kahlenberg offered.

‘Good,’ Grau said, cracking the reins. ‘Angry people will be interested in swords and armour.’ He cast a despairing look over the sprawl of grubhuts and gardens. ‘Though whether any of them can afford to patronise us looks to be questionable.’

The wagon rattled off down the muddy lane. Neither of the men noticed the cat in the doorway suddenly spring to its feet, arching its back and spitting at something in the shadows beside the storehouse. The cat’s fright sent it yowling off across a cabbage patch.

Beady red eyes watched the animal flee, then returned their interest to the wagon. Only when it disappeared around the corner did the eyes withdraw, slipping back into the darkness.

The wagon came to a stop when it reached the sprawling mire which served Amorbach as its town square. A big old oak tree, its trunk discoloured by fungus and rot, loomed above the muddy morass, a wooden gibbet swinging from its thickest branch. The crumbling remains of a skeleton grinned from inside the cage, its eyeless sockets staring down at the people gathered below.

No question now where the denizens of Amorbach had gone. The growling mob scattered about the square numbered in the hundreds. Kahlenberg saw husky farmers brandishing pitchforks and wizened weavers waving bludgeons over their heads. A tangle of shepherds dressed in woollen breeks and sheepskin boots had begun fashioning torches from strips of cloth and slats torn from the roof of a grubhut bordering the square. A handful of men in armour were visible, their simple suits of brigandine sporting the heraldry of Baron von Greitz, but these worthies didn’t seem inclined to stop the unrest. Far from it, their voices were among the loudest in the mob.

The focus of the violence was a lone man dressed in a black cassock trimmed in scarlet. A heavy chain circled his waist and from one of the links a large copper hammer hung. The brand of a twin-tailed comet was burned into the man’s shaven pate, the mark made all the more visible as blood from his bruised scalp trickled into the old scar. Rocks, heads of cabbage, even live chickens pelted the man as he tried to face the mob. Each time he raised his voice, he tried to read from the book clenched in his hand, but a fresh barrage of rubbish forced him to retreat.

‘Take Sigmar back to Altdorf!’ a snaggle-toothed cotter roared. ‘Or has Boris taxed all the gods from the capital?’

‘Sigmar is the light and the shield,’ the beleaguered man declared. ‘He is the protector–’

‘Tell that to my Hilda!’ raged a wart-nosed woman, her face contorted with pain and fury. ‘Tell that to all the children who’ve died!’

‘Where’s your god’s mercy?’ mocked one of the shepherds. ‘Where’s Sigmar’s protection when we need it? Why can’t he stop the plague?’

A hulking virgater, his beefy hands wrapped about the heft of a double-headed wood axe swaggered from the crowd. ‘Things are worse than ever because of you! You and all your talk about Sigmar! What have we to do with Sigmar? Taal and Rhya are our gods, not some mouldering old Emperor none of us has seen!’

‘You brought the plague upon us!’ snapped a wiry little sokeman. ‘You stirred up the spirits of the night and caused them to set a miasma upon the town!’

The Sigmarite shielded himself with his arms as a rain of rocks clattered around him. He tried to shout down his accusers, but even as he moved to defend himself, the mob closed upon him. The hulking virgater drove the peen of his axe into the Sigmarite’s belly, doubling him over. A pair of shepherds moved to seize their helpless prey.

Grau cursed under his breath as the wagon suddenly lurched. Kahlenberg leapt to the ground, his sword in his hand almost before his boots sank into the mud. ‘Let it be, man!’ Grau called out. ‘This isn’t Reikland, and by the gods this isn’t our business!’

Kahlenberg ignored his comrade. Boldly he shoved his way through the mob. Surprised villeins and cotters scrambled out of his way, the sight of a sword, not to mention the grim air of authority which the tall man exuded, making them give ground. He was beside the oak in only a moment, his powerful hand closing about the wool hood of one of the shepherds moving to seize the embattled Sigmarite. Savagely, Kahlenberg pulled the peasant away, flinging him to tumble across the muddy square.

The other shepherd forgot about the Sigmarite and rushed at Kahlenberg, swinging his heavy crook at the interloper. It was the sort of manoeuvre that had crippled wolves and warded off panthers, but this was a different kind of foe. Kahlenberg’s blade licked out, slashing through the crook and splitting it in half. The shepherd staggered back, eyes wide with shock. Kahlenberg watched him carefully, waiting for any sign that the peasant still wanted to fight.

‘Who be ye?’ growled the husky virgater. Though the man still held his axe, he had taken a good number of steps back, putting himself closer to the rest of the mob.

‘Someone who doesn’t like seeing priests abused by a superstitious rabble,’ Kahlenberg growled back. It was the wrong thing to say. The insult struck fire in the still smouldering embers. Angry murmurs spread through the crowd. The bodyguard was, after all, only one man.

‘Stay behind me, father,’ Kahlenberg told the Sigmarite. Slowly the two men began backing away from the advancing mob. They could hear Grau cursing lividly as some of the peasants converged upon his wagon. Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t keep them from rifling his wares.

‘Your bravery will not go unnoticed,’ the Sigmarite told Kahlenberg. ‘We shall both sit at Sigmar’s right hand this night and shine in the glory of the divine personage.’

‘I’d prefer if Sigmar would do something to extend my time in this life,’ Kahlenberg said.

Suddenly, a cry went up from the peasants around the wagon. They scurried away from Grau like a pack of whipped curs. One of them ran over to the hulking virgater and held a quick conference with him and the wiry sokeman. Both men raised their voices in angry shouts, calling the mob to keep its peace. Kahlenberg and the priest could only watch dumbfounded as the ringleaders of the mob marched over to Grau’s wagon. The sokeman knelt in the mud, recovering the leather box from where the rummaging peasants had dropped it. He glanced inside, then hurriedly closed the case. Deferentially, he strode over and handed the box up to Grau.

‘Forgive us, herr doktor,’ the sokeman said. ‘But how could we know it was you!’

Kahlenberg stared in confusion at the peasant’s words, but if Grau was surprised, the old scavenger gave no sign. A scowl on his face, he reached down and took the box from the sokeman. ‘Did you expect me to come riding into this town dressed in black?’ he challenged. ‘That would help the reputation of Amorbach! Let every village and hamlet in the province know there’s a beak doctor in the town and see how quick they find a new market for their crops!’

The words had their desired effect. A new fear worked its way onto the faces of the mob. They hadn’t considered that the presence of the plague in their community would make their neighbours shun them. With so many of the townsmen stricken, Amorbach was more dependent than ever upon trade with the outside world. The wisdom and foresight of Grau’s discretion impressed them almost beyond words.

‘Forgive us, Herr Doktor Tanz,’ the big virgater pleaded. ‘We didn’t think.’ He waved his huge hands, gesturing at the crowd. ‘Fifteen have already fallen to the Death and another thirty are sick. We didn’t know what to do! We were afraid you weren’t coming! That you took our retainer and decided to stay in Morburg…’

‘I am here now,’ Grau announced. He reached into the box, removing the black physician’s hat and setting it on his head. ‘Who is in charge here?’ he asked.

‘The bailiff’s dead,’ the little sokeman said. ‘And the beadle is sick.’ A nervous twitch pulled at his face. ‘I… I guess that means… I’m in charge.’

‘And you are?’ Grau demanded, arching one of his eyebrows in an expectant glower.

‘Fechner,’ the little man answered. ‘I’m the cart-reeve.’

‘He’s the only able-bodied man left in the town who was appointed by Baron von Greitz,’ the virgater explained. ‘But if you need anything done, just ask me.’ He tapped a hand against his brawny chest. ‘Gottlob Boltzmann.’

Grau favoured the self-important Boltzmann with a thin smile. ‘Very well, friend Boltzmann. I will need suitable accommodation for my assistant and myself. I take it you have initiated steps to sequester the infected? Good. You will see that my quarters are established away from the area where the sick are housed. I will need chambers large enough to conduct my examinations and a place to secure my… instruments,’ he said, gesturing to the scavenged weapons and armour in the wagon behind him.

‘Everything will be done, herr doktor,’ Fechner said, bowing low before the wagon. ‘You will have the finest Amorbach has to offer.’

‘I am accustomed to nothing less,’ Grau told the cart-reeve.

‘When will you begin your work?’ Boltzmann asked.

Grau shot the virgater an annoyed look. ‘In the morning,’ he stated. ‘The road has been long and I am weary. Moreover, the reception we received did not agree with my assistant. He will need time to compose himself before he can aid me in my examinations.’

The attention of the mob drifted back towards the centre of the square where Kahlenberg and the priest stood with their backs to the oak. Slowly, the bodyguard sheathed his sword.

‘I think you’ll be safe now,’ he told the Sigmarite, clapping his hand on the cleric’s shoulder. The priest pulled away, glaring at his former protector.

‘Keep your unclean foulness off me!’ the man spat. ‘Plague doktors! Vultures! Graveyard rats!’ He clenched his hands into fists, shaking them at the sky. ‘Is it not enough that misery has set its talons upon this community, must you compound their misfortune!’

The crowd stared icily at the raging priest. ‘What do you want us to do about that fool, herr doktor?’ Boltzmann asked Grau.

Grau smiled and rubbed his chin, a malicious twinkle in his eye. ‘It is bad form to strike priests and madmen,’ he said. ‘Even when they are one and the same. Let him talk. It doesn’t mean any of you have to listen. After all, his god hasn’t stopped the plague.’

‘That is why I am here.’

Grau stretched out in the enormous bed, sighing contentedly. He reached over to the taboret set beside the bed and wrapped his hands around a flagon of wine. A shaky hand brought the vessel to his lips and managed to pour more of the red liquid into his mouth than onto the fur blankets. Grau smacked his lips when the flagon was empty, hurling the depleted vessel away with exuberant gusto.

‘By Ranald!’ he roared. ‘Did you ever see such a spectacle! The whole town eating out of my hand like I was the Emperor himself!’ He leaned up from the bed, focusing his stare on Kahlenberg seated in a chair near the window. Grau wagged his finger at the warrior. ‘Do you know I could have asked any one of those superstitious wretches to send his daughter up here tonight and they would have called it a great honour! By Ranald, if I could have been sure they weren’t sick, I’d have tried it!’

Grau sat up straighter, a frown forming. Through the veil of alcohol, he was slow to appreciate the sullen disapproval exuding from his comrade. ‘Oh cheer up, you idiot!’ he snarled. ‘Too much marching and discipline has ruined you! I knew you’d been in the Reiksguard a damn sight too long!’

Kahlenberg rose from the chair, his fists clenched at his side. ‘You go too far, “herr doktor”. I’d mind my tongue.’

A caustic chuckle answered the threat. ‘If not for me, you’d be lying in the Kaiserplatz with your belly split open. Just another victim of the Bread March.’

‘Bread Massacre,’ Kahlenberg growled. ‘Emperor Boris turned out his Kaiserjaeger on the petitioners. Rode them down.’ He smashed his fist against the wall. ‘Gave them steel instead of rye.’

‘It was the Reiksguard’s duty to stand beside the Kaiserjaeger,’ Grau declared, his tone like a lash. ‘Not to support the rioters. Can you blame the Emperor for treating you like a traitor?’ The sardonic levity drained from Grau’s voice. ‘Of course I’m a traitor too. Helping a dying knight when I should have left his carcass in the street for the muckrakers to haul away. But for that failing of conscience, I might be attending the capital’s great and good, a respected chiurgeon…’

‘So instead you decide to play at being a plague doktor,’ Kahlenberg said. ‘What was it you told me about looting the dead? That we can’t injure them any further?’

‘These people are already dead,’ Grau rose from the bed, swaying unsteadily on his feet. ‘They just don’t know it yet.’ He kicked the leather box which bore the name of Doctor Tanz. ‘There’s no curative for the Black Death, even the Sisters of Shallya can’t stop it. If the gods can’t put an end to the plague, what can mere men do?’

Grau opened the box and removed the leather mask, his hand caressing the grotesque beak. ‘What can men do? We can help the doomed by giving them hope, making them believe they can be saved.’

‘And for that, you will charge them handsomely.’

‘Everything,’ Grau said. ‘Everything this town has to offer. I’m not some vagabond scavenger now, Ernst! I’m Herr Doktor Tanz, master of life and death!’

Kahlenberg stalked from the room, feeling sickness growing in the pit of his stomach. ‘How does it feel, Manfred? How does it feel to be so damned important?’

Grau removed another bottle from the taboret. Unable to manipulate the stopper, he smashed the neck across the bedstead. ‘Good, Ernst,’ he chuckled, taking a swig from the bottle. ‘It feels damned good!’

The plague doktor sank back onto the fur-strewn bed, laughing as the outraged knight left the room. However much Kahlenberg detested him, Grau knew the knight would stay by his side. There was a debt of honour between them, an obligation that Kahlenberg couldn’t cast aside. No, his comrade would help him carry out this charade. And when Amorbach had given Grau all it had to offer, Kahlenberg would accompany him to the next town, and the one after that. And the one after that. That was one good thing about the plague – there was no shortage of desperate people willing to do anything and believe anything to escape its toils.

As he drifted into an inebriated slumber, Grau fancied he heard the shutters over the window creak open. He had the impression of scratchy voices whispering from somewhere inside the room. He tried to make out what they were saying, but couldn’t make sense of the sounds. The effort only fatigued him all the more and soon he was asleep.

The people of Amorbach kept their distance the next day as Grau and Kahlenberg marched down the muddy street. Grau had donned the regalia of the late Tanz, his lean body cloaked in the black raiment of the plague doktor. A long black coat swathed his body, covering him from shoulders to ankles. Thick black leggings, heavy boots and long gloves covered what parts of his body the coat left exposed. A hood covered his head, over which Grau wore a physician’s wide-brimmed hat. Coat, hood, leggings, boots and gloves were all fashioned from waxed leather, glistening with a watery sheen as the sunlight struck the plague doktor’s costume.

Over his face, Grau wore the raven-like mask, its long beak stuffed with roses, camphor and orange blossoms, their pleasant aroma intended to counteract the infectious reek of pestilence and decay. Tiny glass lenses set to either side of the beak provided the plague doktor his view of the world.

As Grau marched through the streets, vinegar-soaked sponges jounced from straps fastened to the shoulders of his coat and tiny copper bells jangled from the fringe of his hood. Waxed parchment seals, some bearing the symbols of Shallya the goddess of healing and mercy, others invoking grim Morr, god of death and dream, fluttered from the belt circling Grau’s waist. In his hand, the plague doktor carried a slender wooden cane carved into the shape of a cormorant, one end taking the shape of the bird’s curled beak, the other formed into a spread talon.

Kahlenberg followed close behind Grau, carrying the plague doktor’s leather box. Reticent about aiding his companion in this cruel deception, the knight couldn’t quite keep his distaste for the task ahead from his face.

‘Cheer up,’ Grau advised, his voice muffled by the mask. ‘We’ll visit a few sickhouses, mutter a bit of impressive doggerel, play up to a few peasant superstitions and then be on our way. Just remember, don’t touch anything when we get where we’re going.’

‘Shallya have mercy on us,’ Kahlenberg groaned.

Grau stopped, turning to stare at his comrade. Though his face was obscured by the mask, Kahlenberg knew there was a sneer on the plague doktor’s face. ‘Why won’t she? Isn’t that her job?’

The men proceeded down the street. Turning down a narrow lane, they noticed a change in the atmosphere, an air not simply of squalor and poverty, but one of decay. The sunken grubhuts now bore white chalkmarks upon their doors. As they walked along, they saw a pair of men hauling a body from one of the huts, employing meathooks to speed their labour. Unceremoniously the men dumped the body onto a cart, then stripped off their gloves and threw them after the corpse.

‘They’ll be off to soak themselves in vinegar next,’ Grau said, tapping one of the sponges hanging from his coat. ‘It’s supposed to fend off miasma, though I imagine some vinegar merchant was the first to make such a claim.’

Kahlenberg watched the corpse-cart slowly creep down the lane. ‘Monstrous,’ was the only word he could use to describe the scene. He’d seen much brutality over his life, but there was something chilling about the callous way the peasants had treated their dead neighbour.

‘I dare say before the local priest of Morr died, they treated corpses with a bit more formality,’ Grau observed. ‘Of course, when that worthy himself died of the plague it may have diminished the appeal of pomp and ceremony.’ The beaked face turned suddenly, focusing on one of the few half-timber structures rising above the grubhuts. ‘Ah, here we are!’ Grau announced. ‘Let’s see if we can’t do something to help Amorbach’s beadle. I dare say it would be amusing to get somebody more competent than Fechner running things here.’

Using the beaked head of his cane, Grau rapped on the door, knocking chalk dust from the mark scrawled across the portal. After a few moments, the door was opened by a young girl, her face retaining an element of beauty despite the paleness of her skin and the leanness of her features. By the quality of her dress, it was obvious that she was no mere domestic but someone of standing within the household.

She drew back in alarm when she found Grau’s ghoulish figure standing beyond the doorway, but the girl quickly recovered. Everyone in the town knew the plague doktor had come to help them. However frightening his appearance, she recognised Grau as a messenger of hope, not menace.

‘Forgive me, herr doktor,’ the girl said, curtseying before him. ‘Please, come inside. I cannot thank you enough for coming.’

Grau slipped across the threshold, motioning for Kahlenberg to follow. ‘I am given to understand that Otto Sandauer is an important man in Amorbach. Where better to begin than with the town’s most important inhabitant?’

The girl lowered her eyes in a demure fashion. ‘You are kind to say so, but my father was only the beadle. He wasn’t very important at all… until… until…’

‘We understand,’ Grau said. He stopped himself before reaching out to comfort the upset girl. ‘The plague has spared neither great nor small. But perhaps we can prevent Death from claiming your father.’ He gestured with his cane, pointing down the narrow hallway. ‘If you would take me to your father.’

The flash of hope that stirred in the girl’s eyes stabbed at Kahlenberg’s heart like a dagger. He grabbed Grau by the shoulder, hissing a warning into his ear.

‘Leave?’ the plague doktor scoffed. ‘And disappoint this poor waif? Now which of us is being cruel?’

Grau let his bodyguard digest that question while he turned and followed the young woman down a clay-walled hallway and into a small chamber at the rear of the house. The room was dark, heavy curtains blocking the only window, but at Grau’s suggestion, the girl quickly produced a candle.

By the flickering light, Grau saw his patient. He was thankful for the aromatic smells rising from the beak of his mask, because he certainly didn’t think he’d like the smell of his patient. What sort of man Otto Sandauer might have been before he took sick it was impossible for Grau to say, but what lay sprawled among the soiled bedclothes was a withered scarecrow with wasted features, toothless gums and only a few thin strands of hair clinging to his scalp. His limbs were almost as thin around as the plague doktor’s cane and Grau could almost count the wretch’s ribs through the grimy material of his nightshirt.

‘Can you help him?’ the girl pleaded, tears welling up in her eyes.

Grau gestured with his cane, motioning for her to pull the sheet away from her father. ‘I must first determine what is wrong with him,’ he said. ‘The effects of miasma can take many forms.’

The plague doktor stepped over to the bed. The man lying there barely seemed to register Grau’s presence, simply staring up at the ceiling. His breathing was laboured, each ragged gasp appearing to come with only the greatest exertion.

Grau reversed his grip on the cane, using the clawed foot to tilt Sandauer’s head, allowing him to see the swollen throat. A loud scrambling noise from overhead distracted the plague doktor. He stared intently at the ceiling, listening as the raucous sounds continued. It was as if a gaggle of children were scurrying across the roof. Remembering he was in a proper house, not a sunken grubhut, Grau dismissed the image.

‘Rats,’ the girl apologised. ‘They are all over Amorbach these days. Bigger and bolder than they have ever been.’

Grau nodded and returned his attentions to his patient. Using the cane, he pulled back Sandauer’s nightshirt, exposing his chest. Prodding the sick man’s body, he was soon afforded a good view of the swollen black buboes clustered about the armpits. A dark liquid was oozing from the sores. Grau had seen enough of the plague over the last year to be surprised the man had lasted this long in such a condition.

‘It is the Death,’ the plague doktor pronounced. His statement brought a moan of horror from the girl. Grau shifted his gaze to Kahlenberg, who was standing just outside the doorway of the squalid little room. Annoyed by his companion’s glowering disapproval, Grau made a quick decision.

‘All hope is not lost,’ Grau assured the girl. ‘There are measures which we can take to combat the miasma.’ He snapped his gloved fingers, waving Kahlenberg into the room. Approaching his reluctant assistant, Grau opened the leather box, removing a small wooden case. From this, he removed a bloated toad. Setting the noxious creature on the floor, he gestured with his cane for the girl to take it. ‘We must try to rebalance your father’s humours. Tie this reptile to your father’s sores. It will draw out the pernicious effects of the miasma.’ The plague doktor nodded his beaked head. ‘You must also take steps to prevent more malignant vapours from entering this house.’ He raised his finger, emphasising the importance of this point. ‘Soak cloth in vinegar and place it beneath every door and across every windowsill. The purifying scent of the vinegar will stave off the miasma.’

A stream of gratitude exploded from the girl as tears welled up in her eyes. She moved to take Grau’s hand and kiss it, but the plague doktor held her back with a jab of his cane. The eyes behind the glass lenses of the mask were wide with terror.

‘Open your bodice,’ Grau ordered. He heard the sullen growl of protest Kahlenberg uttered but gave his guard no notice. This wasn’t some lascivious abuse of his authority. There was a much more important reason for voicing such a command.

Timidly, the girl pulled at the drawstring and opened the front of her dress. Irritated by the slowness of her compliance, Grau reached out with the beaked head of his cane and pulled the garment away. He didn’t give any regard to the milk-pale curves and contours that stood exposed, his eyes instead fixed upon the swollen black bumps beneath her arms.

‘Please, don’t… don’t tell anyone,’ the girl pleaded. ‘There is an old cotter-wife who brings us food. If she knew I was sick too, she would stop coming.’

‘Don’t worry, we won’t say anything,’ Kahlenberg told her.

Grau reached into the wood case and removed a second toad, setting the creature down on the floor. ‘Follow my prescription and in a few days you will be out of harm,’ he told her. Again, he noted the scratching noises from overhead. ‘Once you are both back on your feet, you should do something about your rat problem.’ Grau tapped the end of his cane against the floor, and waved his hand in the age-old sign of good fortune.

‘My associate will collect our fee,’ Grau said.

Kahlenberg maintained a sullen silence as the two men withdrew from the doomed household and returned to the muddy streets of Amorbach. Grau walked ahead of the glowering knight, growing more irritated with his companion with each step. Pangs of conscience were something Grau couldn’t afford, not since his exile from Altdorf. If a man was going to survive in the world, then he had to be just as ruthless as it was.

‘They’re both going to die anyway,’ Grau stated. ‘At least I gave them a little hope to cling to in their final hours.’

Kahlenberg didn’t say anything, simply glaring daggers at the plague doktor.

‘You’re upset about the money, aren’t you?’ Grau asked. ‘If I hadn’t charged her a fee, she wouldn’t have believed a word I said. There’s a certain propriety about these things.’ The plague doktor swatted a stone from the street with his cane. ‘You would prefer I left everything for Boltzmann and Fechner to squabble over? If you want a pair of vultures, there’s a matched set for you!’

‘It isn’t right,’ Kahlenberg growled. ‘You took advantage of them in the most cruel way…’

‘Right?’ Grau shouted. ‘Who are you to decide what is right! You rode out to help starving people stand up against a grasping tyrant and for that you were left to die in the gutter! Is that right? Learn one thing if nothing else, Ernst. The gods care little for men and even less for the suffering we endure. To survive, you have to take every opportunity that comes your…’

Grau left his cynical wisdom unspoken, his words trailing off into a scream of pain that even the heavy beak mask couldn’t muffle. The plague doktor collapsed to the muddy street, his gloved hands clutching at the jagged wound in his side, his eyes staring in disbelief at the blood coating his fingers.

Kahlenberg threw down the heavy leather box, the apparatus of the late Doktor Tanz spilling across the ground. The knight ripped his sword from its scabbard, a motion that was driven more by instinct than by thought. For as he gazed upon the monstrous apparition standing over Grau, terror welled up inside the warrior’s breast and fear thundered through his veins.

They had been passing down a dingy lane that coiled its way through a cluster of grubhuts. Except for a few wandering chickens, the street had been devoid of any sign of life. Here, nearly every door bore the chalkmark sign of infection and if there were any still living in this part of town, they kept themselves behind closed doors.

One denizen, however, had not stuck to this rule. As Grau walked near to a particularly ramshackle and decayed grubhut, a shape had burst from the structure’s rotten roof. A blur of motion and it was upon the plague doktor, steel flashing from a long hairy hand.

No, not a hand. A paw, a filthy, verminous paw covered in greasy brown fur, each finger tipped with a long dirty claw. Grau’s attacker wasn’t human, or indeed any sort of creature endowed with life by any god of sanity. It was a rat, a huge chittering rodent that compounded its obscenity by affecting the posture of a man and clothing its furry body in tattered rags and bits of armour. The curved sword in the monster’s paw was rusty with neglect, its edge notched and pitted with corrosion. Blood dripped from the blade, the blood of Manfred Grau.

Kahlenberg had fought orcs and goblins and the foul beastkin of the wilds, but never had he imagined so repugnant a nightmare could walk the earth. The ratman bared its sharp fangs at him, its beady eyes gleaming with unbridled malignance. A long, hairless tail lashed through the mud, writhing with loathsome exuberance.

A pained moan from Grau snapped Kahlenberg from the spell of terror that gripped him. He owed his life to the physician, whatever crimes and misdeeds stained the plague doktor’s soul. Roaring the name of Ulric, god of warriors, Kahlenberg charged the leering monstrosity.

The ratman snarled at him, whipping its sword at Kahlenberg’s face with a speed that was nothing short of incredible. Ironically, it was the very speed with which the creature made its assault that caused the blow to miss its victim, the bloodied edge of the sword flashing inches before the charging knight’s eyes. The warrior drove on, sweeping in before the ratman could recover from its mistake. Kahlenberg brought his heavy steel chopping down at the monster’s skull.

Again, the amazing speed of the ratman was displayed. Uttering a squeal of fright, the hideous creature dropped to all fours and darted to one side. Kahlenberg’s sword cleaved through nothing more substantial than thin air, the fury of his attack almost causing the knight to flounder and topple into the mud.

His foe was instantly rushing him, trying to exploit the advantage of an off-balance and vulnerable adversary. Kahlenberg kicked out with his boot, smashing the monster’s fanged muzzle. The ratman was hurled backwards, whining and squealing as it spit out broken teeth.

Kahlenberg raised his sword, prepared to deal final justice to the cringing ratman. As he turned towards the creature, however, he felt a flash of pain in his back. The warrior spun about, his blade slicing through the air. A second ratman ducked and scurried, a chitter of laughter hissing through its fangs. It held a ripple-bladed dagger in its paw, a dagger that was dark with blood. Kahlenberg’s blood.

The warrior could feel strength and vitality draining out of his body. The slinking attacker had struck a mortal blow. But while there was still life in his bones, the knight would fight on his feet. Honour would demand nothing less.

‘We are even now,’ Kahlenberg told Grau. He made a weak wave of his hand, motioning the plague doktor to hurry down the street. Feebly, Grau regained his feet. He gripped the slender cane in his hands, holding it as though to brain one of the creeping ratmen. Kahlenberg noted the gesture and shook his head. ‘Run,’ he ordered. ‘I won’t be able to keep them back long.’ A bitter laugh bubbled past his lips. ‘I’m already dead.’

Hearing his own words thrown back at him was enough to break the heroic resolve that had so briefly risen inside Grau’s breast. The plague doktor knew Kahlenberg was right. Standing beside his friend would only see them both die needlessly. Pragmatism drove Grau into headlong flight. Behind him he could hear the clash of steel as battle was rejoined.

The plague doktor didn’t look back.

Every step sent fresh agony searing through Grau’s body. He cast aside his cane, clapping both hands to the wound in his side. He could feel fresh blood spurting between his fingers, defying his efforts to pinch the jagged tear closed. Without help, Grau knew he couldn’t last long.

However long the plague doktor thought he had, he found himself cheated. As he limped down the muddy lane, a scraggly shape draped in ratty rags scurried from its hiding place inside a haystack. There was a sword gripped in the thing’s paws, the edge serrated like the blade of a saw.

Grau recoiled from the ratman, terror pounding in his heart. The creature raised its muzzle, its nose twitching as it drank the smell of his fear. A peal of merciless laughter shook the hunched vermin.

‘Leave me alone!’ Grau pleaded as the ratman crept towards him. ‘I’ve done nothing to you!’

The monster paused and again its body shook with laughter. To Grau’s mounting horror, the thing spoke to him in a debased Reikspiel. ‘Doctor-thing,’ the ratman accused, pointing a claw at the man. ‘No-not forget smell-scent! Kill-slay one doctor-meat! Now-now kill-kill two doctor-meat!’

‘Why!’ Grau persisted. ‘Why kill me? I haven’t hurt you!’

Cocking its head to one side, the ratman fixed Grau with beady red eyes. ‘Listen-hear much-much!’ the creature spat. ‘Know-learn doctor-thing help-heal man-things. Stop-stop pretty plague!’

Furry lips pulled back, exposing sharp fangs in a savage grin. ‘Doctor-meat no-not stop-stop plague!’

The ratman retreated a few steps as Grau began to laugh. Its bestial mind wouldn’t have appreciated the irony the way Grau did. He was going to die because of a lie, because when he told the people of Amorbach he could save their town, they weren’t the only ones who had believed him.

The ratman quickly recovered from his confusion. Whatever sounds Grau made, they didn’t change the fact that the man was wounded and alone. Those were odds to spark the ferocity of any murderer.

It wasn’t long before the plague doktor was nothing more than a heap of bloodied flesh lying in the mud. The townsmen would blame the murders of Grau and Kahlenberg on the Sigmarite missionary, remembering the priest’s antagonism towards the plague doktor. Under the instigation of Boltzmann and Fechner, they would mob the priest and burn him on a pyre.

No one in Amorbach considered that the plague doktor had fallen victim to a different enemy.

None of them would have believed that Grau and Kahlenberg had died under the swords of the skaven.

A QUESTION OF FAITH

It wasn’t the most romantic location to hold a tryst, but the narrow gap between Rolf Wehner’s storehouse and Xaver Maucher’s chicken coop had exhibited the necessary isolation for a clandestine rendezvous. The cackling of Maucher’s chickens wasn’t nearly so annoying as the sharp tongue of Emil Stuckart’s mother and far less painful than the wrath of Renate Altstoetter’s father.

Emil closed his eyes, trying to will away the worry nagging at his mind. He tried to lose himself in the moment, to savour the touch of Renate’s fingers as they combed through his hair, to revel in the happy little laugh that shuddered across her pursed lips. They had to be careful about noise. If they were too loud, they would upset the chickens and then there’d be a mad scramble to escape before Wehner or Maucher came to investigate the commotion. Strangely, the very danger of discovery made the excitement of being with Renate even more thrilling.

‘Do you love me?’ Renate asked, her voice a soft whisper. It was a timid tone, a question that was almost afraid of an answer. Emil saw the dread lurking at the depths of his woman’s lustrous blue eyes. She was a few years younger than him, yet had developed the confidence that Emil possessed, the strength to have an identity beyond the expectations of her parents. A frown flashed across his visage and he held her close against him.

How many times had she asked him that? Always with that same timidity, always with that same uncertainty. What assurance could he make to her that what they shared was real? Why could he not make her understand that it was no whim, no cruel trick, that he really was devoted to her? What would it take to overcome the poison Juergen had poured into his daughter’s mind?

He was just letting an answer creep onto the tip of his tongue when the sound of raised voices swept into their little refuge. For a hideous moment, both of the young lovers thought they had been discovered. When that initial terror died away, when the threatened doom failed to close in, a different sort of fear pressed upon them. The commotion was coming from the centre of the village near the temple and Baumann’s tavern. At such a distance, few words were intelligible, but one stood out as though it had been branded into the air with a hot iron.

Plague!

Emil felt Renate shivering against him. Exhibiting far more confidence than he felt, he smiled at her and stroked her shoulders. ‘Old Hans trying to scare people again,’ he scoffed. ‘Father Anton will have him quieted down soon enough. I’ll slip down there and see if he needs any help.’

There was a dubious cast in Renate’s eyes as she listened to Emil. She didn’t believe a word of what she’d been told but was shrewd enough to know that nothing good would come from proclaiming the fact. After Emil’s father had died, the village priest had taken great pains to help the Stuckart family recover, assisting them even when no one else would. There was no argument Renate could make that would speak louder than the debt Emil felt he owed to the priest. Instead she gave her lover a fierce kiss farewell. ‘Be careful,’ she said, her heart quivering with an intimation of dread.

Emil didn’t trust himself to look back as he worked his way down the narrow gap and out onto the dirt road. The little wattle-and-daub huts of Helmstedt flanked the lane to either side, defining it far more than the edging of riverstones some long-ago village reeve had ordered erected and which every reeve since had maintained. Collecting the stones from the River Sol had become something of a festival for the villagers, so few complained about keeping up the tradition.

Ahead he could see the village square with the hoary old oak planted at its centre, the baron’s granary – the only stone building in the village – stretching along the far side. Baumann’s tavern had been deserted by its usual crop of idlers and the doors to the temple were standing wide open, a circumstance that was unheard of except on religious observations. However, it didn’t take more than a glance to discover the reason for these disturbances.

A disparate crowd had gathered in the square, converging upon a lone rider leading a heavily laden mule. Strangers in Helmstedt were unusual enough, but this man presented an especially grim aspect. From crown to toe he was draped in black, his body indistinct beneath the oily sheen of a leather coat, his head lost beneath the brim of a physician’s cap. It was the grotesque mask that hid the rider’s face that completed the sinister aura that surrounded him. It was a long beak of leather, like the bill of a rook, with bulbs of garlic and sprigs of holly dangling from its sides.

Emil’s pace quickened as his mind registered what the stranger was – a plague doktor, one of the macabre healers who pitted their medicine against the ravenous appetite of the Black Death. Like the vultures they resembled, the plague doktors were harbingers of destruction and woe. No omen could have boded greater ill for Helmstedt than the appearance of a plague doktor.

That sentiment seemed to be the point of contention among the villagers. As Emil drew nearer he could better make out the words his neighbours were grumbling and growling. It was bad enough that the plague doktor had ridden into the village, but no one was eager to compound their misfortune by allowing the man to dismount.

‘There’s been no plague here,’ Oskar Heitz was snarling, the wart on his forehead turning a livid purple as his temper rose. ‘We don’t need any truck with your kind!’

‘Jackals! Assassins!’ Klaudia Mueller was shrieking at the man. ‘We’ve heard stories about your treatments. We’ve heard about how you scavenge those too sick to beat you off!’

Though his face was hidden behind the birdlike mask, Emil could almost see the plague doktor’s sneer when he growled back at the mob. ‘Peasants! As though any here have the coin to tempt a rat catcher, much less a learned physician.’

‘Do not mock those blessed with humble means, for they are nearer to the grace of Sigmar than any who covets gold.’ The reprimand came in a low whisper that struck with the keenness of a knife. The plague doktor turned in his saddle, cringing somewhat when he saw that this new challenge had been voiced by a man wearing the black robes of a Sigmarite priest. Father Anton was of an unimposing build, a far cry from the robust warrior priests even in his younger years. Yet there was a force of personality etched upon his stern countenance that commanded respect from even the most jaded parishioner. The plague doktor tried to hold Father Anton’s reproachful gaze, but it was an effort beyond his mercenary convictions.

‘There are important people in Pfeildorf who need my services,’ the plague doktor explained. ‘It is vital that I reach the city as quickly as possible.’ He waved his gloved hands in an imploring gesture. ‘If these folk will give me the supplies I seek, I will be on my way.’

Father Anton’s gaze remained unsympathetic. ‘You ride in here stinking of death, fresh from picking over the carcass of some other town or village. You come here with your face hidden against pestiferous vapours, expecting that here too you will find death. Yet is it in your heart to tarry, to render such aid as you might bestow? Holy Sigmar taught that men must be united if we are to overcome the enemies that threaten us. He taught us that we must value one another more than material riches and prideful power.’

The plague doktor shifted uncomfortably. ‘Father, there are many in the city I will be able to help…’

‘Do not spit your lies at me!’ the priest snapped back. ‘You go to Pfeildorf not to heal but to loot! Begone, foul buzzard! You will find no succour here! The pious have no truck with scavengers!’

Before the plague doktor could deny Father Anton’s accusation, a rock went sailing past the brim of his hat. More stones quickly followed, virtually every peasant in the square throwing rocks at the intruder and his animals. Cursing into the bill of his mask, wincing as rocks struck against his oil-slick coat, the plague doktor wheeled his horse about. A moment later he was galloping out of the square, his mule racing after him.

The people of Helmstedt hurled jeers at the fleeing stranger long after he was beyond the range of their rocks. Father Anton took the opportunity to preach to the gathered villagers, leading them in a prayer of gratitude to Mighty Sigmar that their god had preserved the village and kept the plague from their community.

Emil bowed his head, but he couldn’t keep his mind on the prayer. He couldn’t shake the image of the plague doktor, or stop wondering if there might come a time when Helmstedt would be thankful to see such a stranger ride into the village.

‘Burn it!’

The fierce words came boiling across Janos Unger’s flabby lips in a seething hiss. The reeve of Helmstedt’s hand was clenched tightly about the bronze pectoral he wore, the emblem of his position as the baron’s steward. His other hand was a knotted fist that slapped violently against his thigh. In better times, Unger relished the authority he wielded, exhibiting the brand of petty tyranny that made him such an effective administrator for the baron. Now, however, the reeve was sickened by his own commands.

Two days after the plague doktor was expulsed from the village, the first of the peasants fell ill – Gunthar Starkweiter and his children. They were followed the next day by Kaspar Valten and Ottilia Schenk. From the first, the villagers had feared it was the plague. By the second day, those fears were given voice. Terror swept through Helmstedt, crawling into every hut and hovel.

As reeve, the peasants had demanded Unger act to protect them from the plague. A simple man, unschooled and unlettered, he was ill-prepared for such action. He was a farmer, not a scholar or physician. He didn’t have the learning to fight a plague. All he could do was resort to the resources of his agrarian experience. When a herd of cattle showed signs of sickness, the diseased animals had to be culled so that the healthy might be preserved.

Gunthar and his brood, Kaspar and Ottilia, and all those who lived under the same roofs as those stricken, had been dragged from their homes and herded into an old barn at the edge of the village. ‘Quarantine’, Unger had called it, hoping the scholarly word would impress his neighbours. Whatever the efficacy of his high-handed posturing, the reeve’s orders had been carried out by a mob too frightened to disobey.

It was a different matter now. The peasants glanced guiltily at one another as they heard Unger’s draconian pronouncement and the desperate wailing from the condemned within the barn. Isolating the sick, forcing them from their homes, that had been easy enough to justify. But to burn them, to commit deliberate murder? Such dignity as their fear had left inside them quailed at such a crime.

Unger swept his eyes across the crowd. He could easily read the reluctance in their expressions. He wasn’t an inhuman monster, he had the same qualms. If there was another way he would take it. But as far as he knew, there wasn’t. The sick had to be destroyed so that the healthy would survive. It was as simple and brutal as that. He unclenched his fist and pointed a finger at Rolf Wehner. ‘Put the barn to the torch,’ he said. Unger frowned when Rolf hesitated. ‘The baron will exempt you from the tithe next season,’ he promised, appealing to the farmer’s greed. He knew Rolf’s crop had been poor the previous year and that the peasant was still scrambling to pay back the debts he had incurred over the intervening months. Forgiveness of his next tithe would be a considerable boon for him.

Displaying no great enthusiasm, Rolf approached the locked barn, a torch blazing in his hand. Before he could reach the building, he was intercepted by Emil Stuckart. The young peasant pushed him aside with a violent shove, almost knocking Rolf to the ground. Emil glared at the farmer then swept his stern gaze across the rest of the crowd.

‘Have you gone mad?’ he growled. ‘You can’t do this thing! These are friends and family, not animals!’

Unger reached for the sword he wore, another mark of the office he held. ‘It is you who have gone mad, Emil!’ he accused. ‘The plague must be kept from spreading! Would you see the whole village infected?’

The spectre of doom enflamed a mob that had only a moment before been cowed with shame. Snarling like wolves, the villagers converged upon Emil. He tried to fight back as they closed upon him, fending off the first to reach him. When he found himself staring into the enraged face of Renate’s father, Juergen, however, he hesitated. Juergen scowled at Emil, the old hate in his eyes blazing like the flames of a torch. Emil’s father had been the village beadle and Juergen’s back still bore the scars from Otto Stuckart’s whip. The peasant’s hate for the father had simply transferred itself to the son when the beadle died.

Juergen planted his fist in Emil’s belly, doubling him over in pain. The defenceless Emil was quickly set upon by the other peasants. Beneath a barrage of kicks and punches, he was driven to the ground. Before he was beaten senseless, an imperious voice thundered above the turmoil, commanding the people of Helmstedt with an authority that enjoyed far more respect than that afforded to the baron’s reeve.

‘Stop!’ Father Anton cried as he stormed down the street, his black robes billowing about him like the wings of some fearsome raptor. Such was the severity of his expression that none who met his gaze could hold it. One by one, the peasants lowered their eyes and slunk away from the priest’s approach. As the mob fell quiet, the cries of those locked inside the barn filled the silence. Father Anton shook his fist at the crowd.

‘You call yourselves men,’ Father Anton scoffed in contemptuous tone. ‘I see only frightened rabbits, too mindless and too terrified to remember what it means to be a man. Where is the dignity that separates man from the beasts of the field and the greenskins of the waste? Where is the valour that endows man with the strength to withstand the evils of Old Night? Where are mercy and charity, the rock of civilisation itself, the foundation upon which Holy Sigmar forged our Empire?’

Rolf gestured with his torch at the barn. ‘The plague… they are… we will all…’

Father Anton turned on the farmer, his eyes blazing like embers. ‘You fear the plague more than you fear the judgement of Mighty Sigmar. Is your faith so hollow that it crumbles at the first challenge?’ The priest turned away and wagged his finger at the rest of the mob. ‘To save your flesh you would defile your souls?’ He shook his head. ‘That is the way of the barbarian, the path of those who would be slaves of darkness! Sigmar loosed us from such shackles. Would you so readily put them back on?’

The priest helped Emil up from the ground while the people of Helmstedt stood around in shamed silence.

‘The plague will not be warded off by sermons,’ the reeve declared in faltering tones. ‘We must do whatever must be done to protect ourselves and our families!’

Father Anton glared at Unger. ‘Faith will defend Helmstedt. Faith in Lord Sigmar is the only protection we need!’

Instead of wilting before the priest’s conviction, Unger’s defiance was emboldened. ‘Faith in Sigmar did not protect them in Pfeildorf and Nuln, or Wissenburg and Averheim,’ he said. ‘They had lectors and arch-lectors to call upon Sigmar, yet the god didn’t save them. What makes Helmstedt more important than those great cities?’

Unger’s thoughts disturbed the learned priest. The crowd saw the flicker of uncertainty on the priest’s face and at once the spell he had held over them was broken. Angrily, the peasants began to converge on the barn once more. Father Anton raised his arms, crying out for his parishioners to listen.

‘Even the wisest cannot know the minds of gods,’ the priest declared. ‘All we can do is abide by our covenant with them. Perhaps we are not worthy of Sigmar’s intervention – only a charlatan promises miracles. But I can promise that if you murder your neighbours, then this village will be accursed in the eyes of Sigmar.’

‘What do we do with the infected?’ Juergen’s voice rose from the mutters of the mob.

Father Anton smiled benignly at the farmer. ‘Bring them to the house of Sigmar,’ he said. He looked aside when he felt Emil’s hand on his shoulder, giving the youth a reassuring nod when he saw the worry in his face. ‘Let the temple become a refuge for the sick.’

‘If you are afraid to have them among you, then I am not afraid to be among them,’ said the priest.

An atmosphere of desolation clung to the temple more tenaciously than the creeper vines growing along its walls. From the centre of the community, the massive building had become a shunned place. It had become a physical manifestation of the terrible doom that hung over the village: the threat of the Black Plague embodied in mortar and stone. Ominous silence clung to the stone walls, disrupted only by the ringing of the prayer bell. The wails of the sick, the cries of the doomed, the shrieks of the dying, these were mercifully muffled by the thick stone walls. Not a day passed that some family didn’t bring a stricken relation to Father Anton, entrusting their sick to the priest’s care.

Entrusting? That word brought a scowl to Emil’s face. It was far too fine a concept with which to endow the people of Helmstedt. It invested the village with qualities of faith and hope that had long since been lost. The souls of Helmstedt were barren soil for such beliefs. The people who brought their sick to Father Anton didn’t do so from any faith in Sigmar’s mercy or divine clemency. They weren’t entrusting their sick to the priest, they were abandoning them – divesting themselves of a burden they were too afraid to take on. It was better to let the stricken languish and die in the temple, locked inside those stone walls, away from the good folk of Helmstedt.

It was enough to turn Emil’s stomach. To save themselves, children abandoned parents, brothers turned against sisters, husbands condemned wives. Terror of the plague had stripped away everything decent until even the last shred of compassion was gone. If this was what it meant to be human, then Emil didn’t wonder that Sigmar and the gods were indifferent to mankind’s suffering.

Emil frowned at the bitterness of his thoughts. Father Anton wasn’t like that. He wasn’t afraid to help the sick, even if he had become a pariah in his own village. By the same token, Emil could credit himself with the courage to stand by the priest, sneaking food and water to the temple in the dead of night. If he was caught, he knew he could expect a beating from Unger and his men at the very least.

He hesitated in the shadow of Baumann’s tavern, glancing up and down the road to see if the reeve or the harvest-hands he’d impressed as militiamen were around. When there was no sign of Unger or his enforcers, Emil hurried across the road, grunting beneath the weight of the heavy sack of millet he bore across his back. He cursed as he stumbled over a rock and water sloshed from the bucket he carried.

The little door at the side of the temple creaked open as he approached. Father Anton had become accustomed to Emil’s visits at this time of the night. By arrangement, the priest was always close to the door to receive his midnight guest.

Even before he was climbing the few steps up into the sanctuary, Emil could tell something was wrong. On his previous visits, Father Anton had come outside to help him with his burden. This night, the priest remained close beside the door. As he entered the sanctuary, Emil could see the weary sag of the cleric’s shoulders. There was a haggard, exhausted quality to his face. Konstantin Vogel was the oldest man in the village, nearing his seventy-fifth winter. This night, Father Anton could have passed for Vogel’s elder.

‘Just lay it inside,’ the priest told Emil in a tired whisper.

Emil laid down his burden, but made no move to leave. ‘I’ll help you make the porridge,’ he said.

‘I’ll do it,’ Father Anton said, shaking his head. The priest had adapted his own cell to serve as a kitchen for his charges, its window acting as a chimney for the smoke from the fire. Where he slept – if he slept – Emil didn’t know.

‘You take too much onto yourself,’ Emil reprimanded him. He waved his hand at the darkened interior of the sanctuary where the benches had been removed to admit pallets for the sick. ‘You need more help here.’

The priest smiled sadly at the implied offer. ‘If you stayed here, they’d never let you leave. They’d be too afraid. Then where would our food come from?’ Emil noticed the gleam of tears in Father Anton’s eyes as he turned from the doorway, the rush lights shining upon his face. ‘Three more today,’ he sighed, turning his eyes towards the altar and the stone hammer suspended above it. ‘When will it end?’

Father Anton swung around, facing Emil once more. ‘Sigmar has forsaken this village,’ he stated, anguish in his voice. ‘You must leave this place. Take that girl you love and never look back. Go far away. Find someplace clean. Someplace the gods haven’t forgotten.’

Emil shuddered at the despair he heard. At the same time, he felt the pangs of guilt. Leaving Helmstedt had been something he’d discussed with Renate many times. Even now the only thing that kept him from running away was her hesitance to leave her family. It was a shameful thing for him to admit that he’d forsake Father Anton and the sick villagers if it meant taking the woman he loved someplace she’d be safe.

For now, however, she refused to leave, and Emil was committed to doing what he could for Father Anton. ‘Let me help while I can,’ he told the priest. He looked again at the rows of pallets, at the moaning forms laid out upon them. ‘You can’t take on so much by yourself. It is a miracle you haven’t taken sick yourself.’

The priest’s reply was a grave whisper. ‘There are no miracles here,’ he said. ‘Sigmar has forsaken this place.’ He reached a trembling hand to the linen robe he wore, pulling it back to expose his neck. Emil recoiled at what he saw. From throat to shoulder, Father Anton’s flesh was blistered and blackened, disfigured by the stinking buboes of the Black Death.

‘I was a poor shepherd for this flock,’ Father Anton declared. ‘It is only right that I should be punished with the rest.’

Keeping to the shadows, Emil crept down the pathways of Helmstedt, the carcass of a goose tucked under his arm. It was a thin, scraggly creature but the only reward from a day spent scrounging through the village for food. This meagre prize had been kept locked in a shed by Xaver Maucher; if not for a few specks of feed scattered around the little structure, Emil should have missed it entirely. He smiled as he considered his good fortune. Perhaps it was a mark of Sigmar’s favour, a sign that the man-god hadn’t entirely deserted the village. Maybe he would ask Father Anton about it when he delivered the loot at the temple. Certainly there was none in Helmstedt better able to explain the handiwork of the gods.

Whatever favour Sigmar had shown Emil vanished when he left the shadow of Baumann’s tavern. Unger’s men were waiting. Emil’s string of thefts had roused the reeve’s anger as the peasants of Helmstedt badgered him to find the culprit. Most of the villagers preferred to ignore the very existence of the temple and its diseased inmates, but Unger hadn’t forgotten them. The reeve wondered about their survival and so he had set his men to wait and watch.

The reeve’s men had expected the thief to emerge from the temple and at first they refused the idea of the thief sneaking into the sick house. As they stirred from their hiding places, they stared in bewilderment at Emil. Their confusion didn’t last long. The goose tucked under the youth’s arm was damning evidence.

‘Get him,’ Unger hissed as he stepped from the darkness. Before Emil could flee, three men were converging on him. One snatched the goose from him while the others subdued him with the clubs they carried. Unger marched across the road, fixing Emil in a cold glare, watching as the militia-men beat him. ‘Teach the swine a lesson,’ he snarled.

Emil’s world exploded as the militiamen redoubled their savage attentions. The bludgeons hammered away at him, smashing against his ribs and cracking against his legs. His antagonists kept a firm grip on his arms, holding him upright when he would have collapsed to the ground. Despite his resolve, cries of pain shuddered from his lips, bringing callous laughter from his tormentors and a sneer of satisfaction to Unger’s face.

Unger’s sneer disintegrated in a crimson smear as the heft of a hammer came cracking across his face. The reeve toppled, spitting teeth as he tried to shriek with a broken jaw. Standing over the screaming man, a heavy warhammer clenched in his withered hands, a black cassock draped over his emaciated body, was Father Anton. Even more than the blood dripping from his hammer, the priest’s face was a thing of horror. All the vibrancy and colour seemed to have been leeched from the cleric’s skin, bleached to a leprous pallor by the plague. Hideous sores and lesions spotted his flesh, and eyebrows and eyelashes had fallen out to leave his face as bereft of hair as his denuded scalp. His mouth was distended, stretched out of normalcy by the agonies of disease.

It was his eyes, however, that Emil found most terrifying of all. The stern yet sympathetic light that had always coloured the priest’s gaze had been burned away, replaced by a gleam of awful determination. Father Anton had always claimed that a man’s eyes were a window to his soul. If the belief held true, then Emil shuddered at what ghastliness had consumed that of the Sigmarite.

Father Anton cast his pitiless eyes across the militiamen and their victim. ‘Dogs!’ he spat. ‘Faithless curs! Is this the legacy of Mighty Sigmar? In the Hour of Judgement are we so proud that we would turn against our own to ease our own doubt and fear?’ He raised an almost skeletal finger, gesturing at the steeple above his temple. ‘None so blind as they who will not see!’ he shouted. ‘The plague you fear… it is not the doom of men! It is our salvation!’

More awful than the judgemental scorn of the priest’s words was the distorted smile that stretched his face as he spoke. The militiamen surrounding Emil trembled in fright. Since childhood they had been taught to revere the priests of Sigmar and afford them their respect and obedience even the same as they did their own noble lord. Now, all they had been taught was collapsing, corroded by the poison of fear.

First one, then another of the militiamen backed away. It took only a few paces before their slow retreat descended into a full route. Emil turned imploring eyes on them as they fled, terrified at the prospect of being abandoned, left alone with the horrible spectre of Father Anton. As he watched, however, he saw shadows reach out from the darkness and drag down the fleeing men. He closed his eyes and covered his ears as he heard their screams, the violence of a brief and futile struggle.

When he dared to open his eyes again, Father Anton was staring down at him. Some of the fire had dimmed in the priest’s gaze, the faintest echo of his old kindness fought to express itself. ‘Go,’ he said, pointing his hammer down the road. ‘You have already shown Sigmar your worth.’ He glanced aside, watching as Unger started to move. The reeve thrashed feebly in the grip of two black-cloaked figures that were dragging him towards the temple.

‘Go,’ Father Anton repeated, his voice louder now, echoing across the square. ‘Fear no darkness, for there is no harm within it for those who keep faith with Lord Sigmar.’

Shivering, Emil was only too happy to obey the priest’s command, to flee from those ghastly figures. There had been something twisted and obscene about those abductors and there had been no mistaking the stink of plague that clung to their black cloaks.

‘We have to leave the village,’ Emil told Renate. The lovers had concealed themselves in the gloom of Rolf Wehner’s hayloft. It was a place guaranteed to offer privacy – Rolf had died from the plague two weeks ago, his hut and outbuildings were all daubed with the white cross to denote the infection. There were none in Helmstedt who trespassed upon the domain of Morr.

Or at least, that was the way things had been. Emil repressed a shudder as he thought of that horrible night when Father Anton emerged from his temple to take Unger and the militiamen. None of the vanished peasants had been seen again. The reeve, however, had just been the beginning. Other people had been disappearing, entire households vanished in the dead of night. Whether the homes bore the cross of plague or were yet unmarked, nowhere seemed safe from the menace that now prowled through the village.

‘I won’t leave my family.’ Renate gave voice to the old objection. There was love and regret behind the tears that filled her eyes as she kissed Emil’s hand. ‘I can’t leave them, not with things the way they are.’

Emil pulled away from her embrace. He’d tried to be understanding, tried to be reasonable, but he just couldn’t make her understand. His frustration turned him cold. ‘You don’t see it, do you?’ he growled. ‘If we stay here, we’re going to die! That is the way things are!’ He rose and threw open the shutter overlooking the road. Almost at once the caustic voice of Father Anton reached them from the distance.

‘You hear that!’ Emil snapped. ‘That’s what the plague has done to the finest man in Helmstedt! It’s made him a crazed monster! Where once he spoke of hope and the mercy of the gods, now he preaches about judgement and Sigmar’s cleansing flame!’

Renate shook her head, her voice cracking with a sob. ‘Please, Emil. I can’t abandon them!’

Emil frowned at the anguish in her words. For a moment, his resolve faltered, but the very love that made him hesitate gave him the strength to persist. ‘Those people who are missing, Maucher and his family, Unger, even old Katrina? They aren’t missing! Right now I could find them,’ he said, snapping his fingers for emphasis. ‘They’re in the temple, locked away so that Father Anton can purify them for Sigmar!’

As he spoke, Emil glanced out across the village. In the growing twilight, cloaked figures could be seen slithering through the streets; Father Anton’s ‘faithful’ gone to collect another household of sinners for the priest to redeem. The sight sent a chill coursing through his heart and bile rose to his throat.

‘I can’t go,’ Renate persisted with a wail.

‘Listen to the boy,’ a stern voice barked. The two lovers spun around, shocked to see Juergen Altstoetter standing beside the ladder leading up into the hayloft. Before either of them could speak, the farmer was walking towards them.

‘Herr Altstoetter…’ Emil began to speak. Juergen flashed him a murderous glare.

‘I don’t know how long you have been dallying with my daughter,’ Juergen snarled. ‘Dirtying her with your filthy Stuckart hands…’ He paused, closing his eyes as he fought for composure. ‘I don’t care about any of that. Not if you are serious about taking her away from here.’

‘Papa!’ Renate cried, rushing towards her father. ‘I won’t leave you and Mama!’

Juergen brushed her aside, not even looking at her, keeping his hostile glare fixed on Emil. ‘Get her out of Helmstedt,’ he said. ‘Do that and you have my blessing, no matter who your father was.’

Emil stood in stunned silence, his mind reeling from the shocking turn of events. There was no mistaking the barely repressed fury in Juergen’s manner. It was despair that made him turn to the son of a man he considered his worst enemy, nothing less could overcome Juergen’s bitter hate.

‘I won’t go!’ Renate protested as she understood the compact that was being arranged between her father and her lover. Seeing the unyielding set of Juergen’s jaw, knowing her father’s intractable moods, she hurried to Emil, to appeal to him instead. As she threw herself at Emil, wrapping her arms about him, Renate’s body became tense. Looking past his shoulder, she could see the cloaked shapes slinking through the streets. What is more, she could see where those skulking marauders were going, the home they were converging upon.

‘Mama!’ Renate wailed. She flung herself away from Emil and raced to the ladder before her father could intervene. Juergen was after her in an instant, but Emil tarried just long enough to glance at the village and see what had precipitated Renate’s flight. He saw Father Anton’s followers, watching as they converged upon the hut belonging to the Altstoetter family.

Cursing, dread pounding inside his heart, Emil rushed to the ladder to join Juergen in pursuit of Renate. If they couldn’t catch her before she got home… if she reached the hut when Father Anton’s men were there!

Emil tried to vanquish the image from his mind. A prayer started to form on his lips, but died unspoken. Somehow, he didn’t think Sigmar would help a mere peasant against one of his own priests.

Frantic, Emil ran towards the Altstoetter home. He shouted for assistance as he ran, imploring the villagers, pleading with them to help him stop the abduction of their neighbours. His only answer was barred doors and closed shutters. The peasants knew what was happening in Helmstedt, but they had made the choice weeks ago to hide from that truth rather than confront it.

Sounds of violence told Emil he was too late even before he rounded the corner and saw the cloaked man standing above Juergen’s body. The fanatic held a stout cudgel in an impossibly hairy, deformed hand. Before Emil’s horrified gaze, the zealot raised his cruel weapon and brought it smashing down a second time onto Juergen’s bloodied head.

The sight of such wanton brutality, even against a man he hated, incensed Emil. Alone, the rage that was kindled inside him might have been enough to hurl him upon the cloaked attacker. There was more, however, to spur him on. He could see more of Father Anton’s henchmen behind the one who had murdered Juergen, and Renate’s sister and mother struggling in their merciless grip. He could see Renate herself being dragged away by a pair of the sinister fanatics.

The cloaked murderer flinched in surprise as Emil came charging at him. Before the killer could even think to defend himself, Emil’s vengeful hands were at his throat, squeezing with furious force. The flailing fanatic dropped his cudgel and clawed at the choking grip, trying to remove the avenger’s hands. It was then Emil’s turn to receive a shock.

Though he was only inches away, Emil couldn’t see the fanatic’s visage beneath the shadow cast by the hood of his cloak. What he could see were the hands that scratched and clawed at his own – and they were horrible enough. To call them hands was almost a mockery, for they were more akin to monstrous paws, each digit thinner and longer than a proper finger, tipped in a sharp claw that was more talon than nail. The whole was covered in fur rather than hair, a reeking growth of brown fur that completed the bestial semblance.

Horrified, Emil loosened his grip, revolted by the nature of the thing he held. Displaying despicable agility, the cloaked creature squirmed free, springing away with an animalistic hop. He could feel its eyes glaring at him from the darkness beneath its hood.

Before Emil could nerve himself to confront the creature a second time, an explosion of pain slammed through his skull. As he crumpled to his knees, he saw an additional cloaked figure wielding a heavy cudgel. The thing had struck him from behind and while he watched it the creature brought the club slamming down a second time.

There was a brief flash of agony, the impact of his face crashing into the road, and then Emil’s world vanished in merciful oblivion.

The mercy of unconsciousness slipped away from Emil as awareness crept back into his skull. His first impression as he stirred was that of sound, the clamour of people moaning and crying. Next came the abominable smell, the stink of disease and human foulness, the obscene reek of the Black Death. Last of all, the haze cleared from his vision and he could see the manner of hell into which he had been thrust.

Emil knew he was in the temple, though the sanctuary bore only the most remote resemblance to the quiet place of contemplation and worship he had known all his life. The benches had been broken up, cobbled together into tiered racks onto which filthy pallets of straw and thatch had been lashed. Each crude bed bore its miserable inhabitant. Some of the wretches moved, moaning in their agony, struggling feebly against the disease that wracked their blotched, bubo-ridden bodies. Others were still, staring at the ceiling with sightless eyes, left to rot on their death beds.

The cloaked creatures scurried amidst the ghastly tableau, hoods drawn back to expose their verminous heads. Emil felt his stomach churn when he saw the elongated muzzles of the ratmen sniffing at the sick peasants. His mind reeled as he heard the things chittering to one another in a mocking semblance of speech. One of the monsters carried a sheet of skin upon which it made notations with an ink-stained claw. It was like watching his father examine the baron’s livestock, noting each fault and infirmity. The resemblance set raw terror pounding through his veins.

Trying to gain his feet, to flee the foul monsters, Emil appreciated for the first time that he was bound hand and foot. All he could do was writhe helplessly on the cold stone floor. His frantic efforts to free himself only succeeded in drawing the attention of the ratmen. One of their number, a pestiferous creature with diseased antlers sprouting from its head, grinned down at him with its fangs. It snarled something at its fellow monstrosities, then trotted off towards the altar.

A few moments later, the horned ratman was back. Emil could only stare in anguish at the man who accompanied the monster, all sympathy and friendship gone from the priest’s gaze.

‘Why?’ Emil demanded. Even now his mind struggled to understand the cleric’s horrifying transformation from saint to daemon.

Father Anton sighed and shook his head. ‘Even you, Emil? Even your faith is so poor that you do not see? Do you share the delusion with these others?’

‘The only delusion I see here is your madness!’ the youth spat. ‘Can you not see the horror around you?’

Anger flickered on the priest’s face, but when he spoke it was in the patient, indulgent manner of an adult trying to reason with a particularly stupid child. ‘Listen to me, Emil. Try to understand. What you think, what you believe, it is all wrong. It is the wantonness and sin inside you tainting your mind. It blinds your soul to what is real.’

Father Anton opened his arms, gesturing to include the whole of the temple. ‘Could a wise and benevolent god be oblivious to such suffering?’ The question left his lips with withering contempt. ‘No, it is impossible! Absurd to even contemplate! Yet small, faithless souls wail that the gods have abandoned mankind! Yes, Emil, even you doubt, but you will understand how wrong you are.

‘This plague is no natural sickness. It is from the divine, but it is not the curse of the gods.’ Father Anton shook his raised hand to emphasise the point. ‘This tribulation is their blessing, man’s redemption from his own damnation! What men have cursed as the plague is truly Sigmar’s cleansing flame, visited upon the land to purify it.’

‘You are mad,’ Emil shuddered.

The priest continued as though he hadn’t heard the outburst. ‘In their wickedness, men hide from this great test of their virtue. In their heart of hearts, they know the foulness with which they have stained their souls. They understand that they must perish in the cleansing fire, but rather than repent their evils they cling to them. As if evil might lend them the strength to oppose Mighty Sigmar!’

The statement brought a shrill, chittering laugh from the horned ratman standing beside Father Anton. The priest pointed at the monster. ‘Behold the visage of Sigmar’s servants! Cast in monstrous form, rendered in revolting majesty. Sent to teach men humility, to scour away their pride. Look upon their verminous visage and see the reflection of mankind’s soul! Such is how low we have fallen. Such is how despicable the state of our souls.’

Father Anton looked away from Emil, nodding his head to two of the ratmen. The creatures fell upon the peasant, raising him from the floor. Emil struggled in the clutch of their paws, his skin crawling beneath their loathsome clutch.

‘Do not resist,’ Father Anton said, his diseased countenance contorted in a grisly smile. ‘Those who are worthy – whose faith is unsullied by the corruption of this world – they will endure the test of Sigmar’s fire. They will emerge from the ordeal, cleansed of all doubt and fear. They will be reborn as a true vessel of Sigmar, even as I!’

Emil sobbed in horror as he appreciated what the priest intended. Not content to merely collect Helmstedt’s sick, Father Anton had taken it upon himself to help spread the disease, to visit his ghastly ‘cleansing’ upon the whole community, one household at a time. A new terror, greater than anything that had come before, now ravaged his mind. He made one last appeal to whatever humanity lingered in Father Anton.

‘Whatever you want,’ he declared. ‘Just release Renate.’ Emil groaned when the priest’s expression remained unchanged. ‘Renate Altstoetter!’ he shouted. ‘Your vermin abducted her tonight!’

The priest nodded sadly. ‘I thought you were different, Emil. I was so wrong. Even now you covet the delusions of flesh and sin.’ He beckoned to the ratmen holding the peasant. ‘Come, we will take him to the girl.’

‘For pity’s sake!’ Emil wailed as the ratmen carried him down the aisle. ‘Let her go!’

Father Anton stopped beside one of the pallets. He turned and faced Emil. ‘Only the virtuous warrant pity.’

‘Who are you to determine virtue?’ Emil raged at the madman.

‘I do not judge,’ the priest said. ‘I leave judgement to Great Sigmar.’ As he spoke, Father Anton looked down at the body sprawled across the pallet. Emil sobbed when he followed the cleric’s gaze and found himself looking upon Renate. The girl was lying on her back, arms and legs lashed to the wooden pallet. Her skin had a milky pallor to it where it wasn’t blotched with black buboes. Her face was contorted in pain, teeth clenched tight in a rictus of agony. In the blue depths of her eyes, however, there was only a chilling emptiness.

Renate was dead.

‘Her sins must have been many for Sigmar’s fire to consume her so swiftly,’ Father Anton declared, noting in only the most distant fashion the distraught weeping of his captive. Again he nodded to Emil’s monstrous guards. Grunting with effort, the ratmen lifted their burden and dumped him onto the pallet. Verminous fingers tied the peasant to the corpse, defying the peasant’s frantic efforts to spare himself this ultimate horror.

‘The fire will leave her dead flesh,’ Father Anton declared. ‘It will pass into you. If you are worthy, Sigmar will spare you.’

‘Please!’ Emil wailed. ‘Try to be sane!’

The priest shook his head sadly. ‘I will pray for you, Emil,’ he said before turning his back and withdrawing back down the aisle.

Emil wept as he tried to free himself from his bonds, clenching his eyes tight against the sight of Renate’s cold figure lying beside him.

Soon Emil could hear Father Anton’s voice booming out in a vitriolic sermon, declaiming the might of Sigmar and the divine purification of the world.

The priest was oblivious to the mocking titters that rose from the monsters his madness had adopted as messengers of the divine.

THE LAST MAN

The streets of Wartenhof were a foul mire of mud and icy slush, desolate and deserted. Shuttered windows faced the troop marching through the town, the door of each hovel locked and barred. The soldiers of the Nachtsheer, calloused veterans long in the employ of the tyrannical Voivode Malbork von Drak, took a sardonic pleasure in the fright they evoked in the peasants. To them these people were little more than dumb animals, creatures to be subjugated. Mercenaries from realms as distant as Nordland and Solland, they felt neither kinship nor pity for the people of Sylvania. It was why Count von Drak employed them. Foreign troops wouldn’t balk at any atrocity that was asked of them.

The lean, russet-cloaked man who accompanied the black-garbed Nachtsheer almost wished he could share the mercenaries’ callous disregard for the denizens of Wartenhof. It was well enough for the soldiers to sneer at the fears of peasants, at the impotent hostility that shone in people’s eyes when they saw them approach. For them, the town was simply another posting, a place that would be left behind and forgotten when the crisis was over and new orders were issued to them. They didn’t call this place home.

For Vincent Rabe, it was different. He’d spent all his life around Wartenhof. As far back as could be remembered, his family had lived in the town. His father had been a forester in the service of the ruling cneaz and his father before him. Vincent was the fifth Rabe to hold the posting, acting as steward of Cneaz Vaclav Rezachevici’s extensive holdings. It was a position of honour and respect, even if it made him the sworn adversary of every poacher in the district. The resentment of poachers, however, was something he could accept. The scorn of his neighbours was something different.

A bitter smile crept onto Vincent’s lean features as his gaze strayed to the cross chalked across the door of a nearby hut. Every day there were fewer neighbours to despise him for colluding with the Nachtsheer, and fewer ears to listen to his protests that he’d been seconded to the brutal mercenaries by order of Cneaz Vaclav.

‘Quiet as a tomb,’ one of the Nachtsheer cursed, spitting into the slush of ice beneath his feet.

‘Keep it that way,’ snarled the commander of the squad, a burly Ostlander named Andreas. The soldier’s hair was parted by a livid white scar, the legacy of a boyhood encounter with a goblin’s knife. A collection of leathery green ears hung from his belt, a silent testament that he’d revenged the injury many times.

Vincent could tell from Andreas’s voice that the soldier was uneasy. It didn’t take any great stretch of imagination to understand why. Plague was abroad in Wartenhof. Normally, the Nachtsheer would simply cordon off an infected community and let it starve. Here, however, because of the strategic location of the town and the influence of Cneaz Vaclav in Drakenhof, the mercenaries had been compelled to take a more intimate interest in the town’s fate. A renegade priest, a madman calling himself Vanhal, was inciting rebellion in the west. The von Draks intended to use Wartenhof as a staging area for their campaign against the rebels once the spring thaw came. For that they needed a living town, not a dead one.

Andreas scowled at the buildings lining the street. His hand brushed against the tangle of dried goblin ears as he removed a strip of leather from beneath his belt. He glimpsed at the crude map of the town inked into it. Looking back at his troops, he jabbed a finger at one of the huts. The mercenaries shied when they saw the cross marked on the door – the warning that plague had visited the household. The Ostlander repeated his gesture, this time with a surly growl.

Accustomed to serving as gaolers for doomed villages, the Nachtsheer were having a difficult time accepting their new role as corpse-collectors. It took armed warriors to enforce the voivode’s edict demanding that the dead be burned as soon as they were discovered. The serfs of Sylvania were prepared to endure much from their noble lords, but denying their dead the dignity of resting in the gardens of Morr was going too far. Several soldiers had been wounded trying to take corpses away to be burned in the plague pit outside the town. In their sorrow, even the most docile serf might become a raging lion.

‘You’re sure?’ Andreas’s question was directed at Vincent. His men were still reluctant to approach the door, each soldier’s face turned to the forester with an expression of anxious hope.

Vincent sighed. Even among his new comrades, he had no friends. With a nod, he crushed their hope. ‘It has been three days since Mircea and his wife were last seen by anyone. When I knocked on their door this morning, there was no answer.’

‘Break it in,’ Andreas ordered his men. The mercenaries glared sullenly at Vincent, but carried out the command. It took only a single kick to smash in the wooden door. Hands closed about the grips of their swords, the soldiers swarmed into the little hut.

What they found sent gasps of alarm and horror ringing out in the street. Vincent hurried into the building with Andreas to see what had provoked such shock, and sickened at the grisly sight. Once again, the Nachtsheer had the advantage over the forester. They didn’t know the actors in the ghastly tableau set before them. They couldn’t put names to the gore-spattered faces that were turned towards them. Neither did they recognise the chewed wreckage strewn across the floor as belonging to a friend and neighbour.

Plague had decimated Wartenhof, but to this had been added an even worse calamity: hunger. The sinister starfall that had rained foul rocks down upon the Sylvanian countryside was an even greater bane to the town. Fields had been flattened by the noxious star-stones, the soil poisoned by their foul vapours. Crops had withered and livestock sickened. An already poor harvest had been ravaged by this ill sending, reducing the ability to sustain the town much less the regiment of Nachtsheer.

It was small surprise, then, that such food as the town was able to gather went to Cneaz Vaclav and the Nachtsheer. The people were left to fend for themselves, reduced to subsisting on tree bark and cooking the filthy black rats that infested the town. Count von Drak no longer ruled Wartenhof alone. He was forced to share his reign with an even greater tyrant: King Hunger.

The obscene result of perpetual starvation stared at the soldiers from the gloom of the hut. Discovered in the midst of their loathsome repast, the disturbed peasants sprang at the Nachtsheer, brandishing dripping bones and bloodied knives in their gore-streaked hands. Viciously, the mercenaries struck out against the corpse-eaters, cutting them down with their slashing swords.

Vincent watched the scene unfold, unable to reconcile his memories of the people he had known all his life with the degenerate cannibals being killed before his eyes. As though he were moving through some awful dream, he drew the heavy axe from his belt and defended himself as a blood-spattered thing that had once been a swine-herd named Dumitru came leaping at him with a cleaver. His axe caught the cannibal in the midsection, opening his belly and knocking the howling wretch to the floor.

Andreas stabbed the point of his sword into Dumitru’s throat, silencing the dying man’s howls. Grimly, the Ostlander wiped his blade clean on the dead man’s goatskin boots. There was a look of disgust on his face as he gazed over the carnage his men had witnessed. ‘Take them all to the pit,’ he ordered and started to turn away.

The motion was arrested in mid-step. Andreas’s face paled until it was the same lifeless shade as the scar running through his scalp. The other Nachtsheer followed the direction of their commander’s gaze. Vincent’s stomach sickened when he saw the thing that had so horrified these hardened warriors.

Mircea’s gnawed remains were strewn across the floor. The cannibals must have been feeding on the corpse for at least an hour. It was impossible there could be any trace of life in what was left. Yet, before the incredulous eyes of soldier and forester alike, that human detritus was moving! With abnormal, abominable vitality, it was struggling to lift itself from the floor with the stump of arm still clinging to its shoulder. Its mouth flopped open and closed like a gasping fish. Its eyes rolled about in the pits of its face, staring balefully at the men gawking at it.

It didn’t take an order from Andreas to send the soldiers scurrying out into the street. Soon the structure was in flames, put to the torch by one of his men.

As they watched flames engulf the hut and the horror inside, the Nachtsheer felt relief. Vincent wished he could take comfort in the destruction, but it was impossible. The soldiers didn’t have to live here. They didn’t have to wonder about what they had seen. It was enough for them to simply destroy it.

Vincent Rabe didn’t have that luxury.

‘It is better not to ask why.’

Those words of wisdom came to Vincent from one of the few men in Wartenhof he could still count as a friend. Though by rights there should have been nothing but bitter enmity between Cneaz Vaclav’s forester and Wartenhof’s most capable poacher. Vincent’s father had never been able to catch Szalardy Dozsa and the son had fared as poorly as his predecessor. Out of their antagonistic relationship a strange kind of mutual respect had grown. It was still Vincent’s duty to catch Szalardy and of course it was the poacher’s job to avoid getting caught, but that didn’t mean the two men couldn’t feel a professional admiration for each other.

Vincent shook his head and sipped at the cup of watery beer his host had provided him when he’d come to Szalardy’s hut and started to relate the harrowing experience of that afternoon. ‘I can’t let it go,’ he said. ‘I have to wonder why the gods could allow such… such horror.’

Szalardy paced about the simply furnished room, the nimble fingers of his hands folded across his emaciated belly. ‘Hungry men don’t ask. They take,’ the poacher replied philosophically.

‘That isn’t what… It’s the other… That thing, that dead thing trying to move, trying to live again.’

‘Even the priests don’t know the ways of the gods,’ Szalardy stated. He forced a laugh to his lips. ‘I’ve spent most of my life amusing Ranald and I’m still never sure if the Trickster God is going to steer me away from one of your traps!’

Szalardy saw that his attempt at levity had no effect. It was a decidedly more dour man who seated himself on the stool facing Vincent. ‘You’ve heard what they are saying? The stories about Vanhal? That he is a necromancer, and wherever he goes he calls the dead from their graves?’ The laugh that he now uttered was thin and bitter. ‘Would a mere man dare defy the Von Draks?’

Vincent stared at his friend. ‘But why? Why would anyone evoke such terrible forces?’

The poacher shrugged. ‘He’s evil,’ he answered simply. ‘Or he’s mad. Maybe both.’ His expression became grave and he glanced across the hut, looking at a section of the floor. ‘Maybe he lost someone, someone he would do anything to get back.’

The forester repressed a shudder as he heard the mournful pain in his friend’s voice. Szalardy had lost both his sons and his wife when the plague struck Wartenhof. Except for his aged mother, the poacher had no family left to him.

‘One more hour,’ Szalardy said. ‘One more day. Wouldn’t that be worth anything?’

Vincent rose from his stool, every muscle in his body tense. Few men would have heard that slight scratching sound, but Vincent’s hearing had been sharpened by a life spent in the wilderness. His ears were acute enough to pick up that furtive scratching – a scratching he knew wasn’t the work of rat claws.

Szalardy grabbed his friend’s arm as he started to move towards the sound. ‘Please,’ he asked. ‘Leave her for me. She’s all I have.’

Horror pounded in Vincent’s heart as he pulled away and rushed across the room. For a moment he hesitated, staring at the floor. How often had he searched for Szalardy’s hiding place, that secret spot where he cached the furs from his traps? Now he knew he had found it.

He wished he hadn’t.

Szalardy didn’t move to stop him as Vincent’s fingers closed about the edge of the concealed door sunk into the floor. The poacher watched in silence as the forester exposed his hiding place and the thing which was its only occupant.

Scrawny, pallid arms reached up at Vincent as he threw open the door. He could see the blotchy marks of the plague that discoloured the decayed flesh and smelled the stink of the disease even over the funk of rot. There was no question of how Szalardy’s mother had died.

‘The one you saw wasn’t the first,’ Szalardy said, his voice soft and resigned. ‘There have been others. Some think it is Morr’s punishment because of the cannibals, others say it is Vanhal’s sorcery reaching out to claim Wartenhof. A few think it is the poison from the starfall.’ The poacher rose to his feet and faced his friend. ‘I don’t care what it is. It’s given me back my mother.’

There was a dagger in Szalardy’s hand as he approached Vincent. Cautiously, the forester backed away from his friend and the hole where the corpse of his dead mother scratched and clawed.

‘Szalardy…’ Vincent called to the poacher in a soft, placating tone. He continued to back away, careful to avoid the gaping hole. ‘This… It… Can’t you see the horror of it?’

The poacher paused, his eyes misty as he considered his friend’s question. ‘Yes. Oh, yes. I know the horror. Haven’t I lived with it these many weeks?’ He looked down at the dagger in his hand, the blade he had used so often to flense the hide from a trapped rabbit. He glanced back at Vincent. ‘Horror is all that is left now.’

‘Please, Szalardy, try to be sane,’ Vincent pleaded.

A sad smile formed on the poacher’s face. ‘We were friends, weren’t we?’ He raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘All these years and you never caught me. Now you have something Cneaz Vaclav will be happy to hear.’

‘He doesn’t need to know anything,’ Vincent said. ‘No one need know of this, but we cannot… That thing down there isn’t your mother any more.’

Szalardy shook his head. ‘I think you would lie for me,’ he told Vincent. ‘Do they hang men who harbour monsters, or do you burn for such a crime? I wouldn’t let you take such a risk.’ The dagger fell to the floor as he strode towards the hole.

‘Besides, it still looks like mother.’

Vincent moved to stop Szalardy, but he was too late. Like a plummet, the unarmed poacher dropped down into the cellar and the waiting talons of the undead thing below. As he fled the hut, Vincent thought his friend’s screams would never stop ringing in his ears.

Before the next bell tolled, he returned with Andreas and a Nachtsheer patrol. Szalardy’s hut and the decayed monster beneath it were put to the torch. A macabre pyre for the man who’d refused to accept the cruelty of King Death.

The scene at Szalardy’s was repeated many times in the days that followed. The plague wasn’t through with Wartenhof and as quickly as the Nachtsheer quarantined one hovel the disease would pop up somewhere else. Even burning the structures did nothing to halt the corruption. Corpse carts trawled the streets twice a day, the dead heaped like cordwood as they bore their diseased cargo to the flames of the plague pit. Still, there were many bodies that went unburied: those with none to care if they went undiscovered and those with relations who cared only too much. Several times the Nachtsheer had uncovered some hidden attic or sealed room where families had concealed their dead, too horrified by the ghastliness of the plague pit to give up their beloved.

Such scenes were made still more horrible when the corpses shambled from their concealment, animated by some obscene semblance of vitality. With rotten fingers and clawed hands, the undead struck out at the living, even those who had loved them so dearly in life. Vincent had been there when a woman had been clawed apart by the rotten husks of her own children, and had watched as the shrivelled shell of an old man bit through the throat of his own son.

Day in, day out, there was no refuge from the horror that had descended upon Wartenhof. One by one, the men of the Nachtsheer began to drop away. Some deserted, deciding that even gold wasn’t adequate compensation for what was asked of them. Some were killed by the crazy and the desperate, mobbed by gangs of cannibals or knifed by looters. Many, however, were taken by the plague itself.

Sense of duty bound Vincent to the survivors, at least until providence deserted him. He’d been fortunate to escape the fate that had claimed so many of his comrades. His household wasn’t so fortunate. One morning, his wife Mircalla awoke to discover the stinking black boils of the plague at her throat and on her armpits. The plague had come for her.

Vincent had seen the plague take victims in only a few hours, while with others the flicker of life might linger for days. He knew there was no hope, that those visited by the plague were doomed to die. His obligation to the community was to announce Mircalla’s affliction, to alert the Nachtsheer, to have the white cross chalked upon his door to warn his neighbours away from his hovel.

It was no easy thing, refusing that obligation. It was an onerous weight that pressed down upon Vincent’s body, compelling him to obey the edicts of the voivode and cneaz. Defiance was a thing that had been periodically starved and beaten out of the minds of Sylvania’s peasants. Obedience was something that had become almost instinctive to men of Vincent Rabe’s station.

Yet, as he looked down into his wife’s eyes, he saw the last embers of her love for him shining out from behind the pain that blighted her flesh, and Vincent knew he could never consign her to the horror of the plague pit and its infernal fire. To tell anyone of Mircalla’s sickness would be to condemn her to such a fate. Mustering his courage, denying his duty to Cneaz Vaclav, he determined that his obligation to the woman he loved was greater than anything his noble lord and his peasant neighbours could expect of him.

The forester stayed at his wife’s side throughout the illness, shirking his work with the Nachtsheer. There was no sense to those hideous excursions through the town. Nothing they did, no matter how ruthless, had any effect on the spread of the plague. It was useless, an empty and fruitless labour. At least by staying with Mircalla, Vincent might ease her suffering, ensuring that she didn’t slip away into Morr’s keeping alone and unlamented.

Day and night, Vincent maintained his vigil. His senses became inured to the sick-room reek and blind to the horror of the sores and boils. It was harder to deafen himself to Mircalla’s pained gasps. Sometimes he would berate himself for being selfish, for greedily trying to possess every last moment of life she had left. Sometimes he would hear her cry out and wonder if he should do something to speed her passing. Then he would look down into her eyes and see that same light in her eyes. Even at the price of such pain, she was determined to have every last moment she could with him.

When the end finally came, Vincent tried to deny it. For long hours, he continued to hold Mircalla’s hand, feeling the last warmth drain out of the lifeless flesh. It was only when he heard someone pounding at the door of his hovel that he finally stirred from beside her deathbed.

Vincent felt his heart turn cold with fear as he opened the door. In the midst of his despair over Mircalla, he’d been too distraught to worry about the consequences of his grief. Now, the forester had a very vivid reminder of the obligations he’d cast aside. Standing outside his hovel, draped in armour as black as night itself, was the Nachtsheer sergeant, Andreas.

The soldier’s expression was stern as he stared down at Vincent. One hand rested on the pommel of his sword, ready to rip it from its scabbard on the slightest provocation. Andreas wrinkled his nose as the sick-house stink of Vincent’s hovel drifted out into the street. It was a stench the Ostlander had smelled many times before, a diseased reek he couldn’t fail to recognise.

Vincent braced himself, certain that his duplicity had been discovered. In that moment, his only regret was the knowledge that Mircalla’s body would be carted away to the fires of the plague pit. That he would suffer the same fate, possibly without the mercy of being dead first, seemed almost trivial to him beside the horrible image of the flames consuming his wife’s cold flesh.

For an instant Andreas glowered at him, then the soldier’s grip on his sword relaxed. ‘The Nachtsheer has missed you these past five days,’ Andreas said, his voice a low growl.

‘Five days?’ Vincent blinked. Somehow it didn’t seem that it had taken so long for Mircalla to die.

‘I’ve come to tell you that your services will no longer be needed,’ Andreas continued. ‘You are released.’

Again, Vincent felt confused by the soldier’s words. ‘Cneaz Vaclav needs me to guide the Nachtsheer,’ he said, though his tone lacked the display of emotion that might make the statement a protest.

‘Cneaz Vaclav needs no one now,’ Andreas said. ‘The plague took him last night.’ His face twisted into a bitter smile. ‘Even if it hadn’t, there is no one left to carry out his orders. My men are either dead or deserted. I knew when I was sent here that Wartenhof would be the end of us.’

He reached up, pulling away the scarf wrapped about his neck. Vincent recoiled when he saw the black marks on Andreas’s throat.

‘When?’ was all Vincent could think to say.

‘Yesterday,’ the soldier answered. ‘Almost the same time the cneaz was drawing his last breath.’ Andreas stiffened, turned a haunted face to the forester. ‘I will be staying at the tavern. When the pain gets too great I have a good knife of Nordland steel. My passing will go easier if you will make a promise to me.’

‘If it is in my power.’

Andreas nodded, accepting Vincent’s tenuous commitment. ‘I want you to take my corpse to the pit. Burn me. Better the fire than…’ He waved his hand in a helpless gesture. ‘They come back, you know. Not just some of them like in the beginning. All of them. Things from a nightmare. The undead.’ Suddenly his hand was clenched tight about Vincent’s shoulder. ‘I won’t come back like that. Put me in the fire! Promise me!’

Vincent twisted under the soldier’s grip, his body shuddering in revulsion. Somehow the same man who had held the diseased fingers of Mircalla for days now cringed from the infected touch of Andreas. Fear is never the slave of logic.

‘I will. I will!’ Vincent vowed, squirming free from Andreas. The scarred Ostlander stepped away from the door, ostentatiously replacing the scarf around his neck.

‘The tavern,’ he reminded Vincent. Andreas pointed at the room behind the forester. ‘If she’s gone already, you’d better burn her too,’ he warned. He frowned when he saw Vincent shake his head. ‘She’ll come back if you don’t. But it won’t be your wife; it’ll be some monster wearing her flesh.’

‘Thank you for your advice,’ Vincent said, his voice cold as a razor.

Andreas shrugged. ‘Don’t get yourself killed until you’ve burned my corpse,’ he said. ‘The tavern. Don’t forget.’

Vincent did forget. There were so many other things that occupied him in the days afterward that a promise extracted from him by a man he had feared and hated was far from his foremost thoughts.

Wartenhof was dying. There was no one to gather the bodies, to mark the places of infection, to toll the bell in the shrine of Morr and no one to usher the spirits of the dead into the netherworld. In the first days, the wailing of the bereaved, the moans of the afflicted were the only sounds rising from the stricken town. When Vincent stirred from his hovel in search of food, there was no one on the streets, only the stray dogs who nibbled at the unburied corpses scattered about. At first the curs were timid and easily frightened away, but with each day the mongrels became bolder. Where they had once retreated from the forester, they now stood their ground, snapping and snarling with bared fangs as they crouched over their hideous fodder.

Food was scarce before the plague, but now it took only a little searching to find enough to sustain himself. Every hovel and hut had its hidden cache of grain and seed, secreted away in defiance of Cneaz Vaclav and his decrees. Though never enough to feed an entire household through the winter, it was more than sufficient to sustain a single man.

Rarely did Vincent encounter anyone on these scavenging expeditions. But there were times and experiences that Vincent knew he could never forget.

The wattle-and-daub hovel that belonged to Petru, one of Wartenhof’s farmers, seemed to Vincent like any of the other abandoned structures. He couldn’t say when Petru had been taken, though he did remember visiting the place with the Nachtsheer to collect the body of his son. The white cross was chalked up on the door which swung open in the wind. Vincent knew that with the wild dogs prowling the streets, no inhabited building would leave its door unbarred. With this wisdom in hand, he descended upon the hut to see if Petru had left anything behind.

As he stole through the open door, Vincent came within an inch of losing his life. From the darkness there was a flash of steel. The forester darted back as sharpened metal whistled past his face. His hand fell to the grip of his hatchet, a tool that had served him well against marauding wolves and panthers.

It was, of course, no such animal that wielded cold steel. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw his attacker standing defiantly in the centre of the room, shoulders hunched, hand locked about the splintered grip of a meat cleaver. There was a feral, vicious gleam in the eyes that glared at Vincent. Even a starving wolf had never looked so bestial to the forester.

The hideous situation was compounded by Vincent’s recognition of the man. He was, or had been, a swineherd named Razvan. Even as he stared at the half-crazed savage, it was hard for him to credit the evidence of his eyes. Razvan had been an exuberant, cheerful neighbour. How many times had Vincent watched children clustered about him in the town square, listening with fascination as he regaled them with some old Fennone legend or some new fable of his own concoction? How often had he swapped lies with the man over mugs of ale in Lucian’s tavern?

There was no recognition in Razvan’s fierce stare, only violent challenge. Keeping a grip on the hatchet tucked in his belt, Vincent retreated back into the street, content to leave the madman to whatever plunder he’d found. The lesson, however, wasn’t lost on the forester. Before entering another structure, he would check the earth around it for signs of life. Never again would he assume a place unoccupied, no matter how desolate and forlorn.

And he would start bearing a sword as well as a hatchet.

Prowling through the shambles that had been Ghenadie’s mercantile, Vincent again found himself far from alone. There had been tracks outside the big half-timber building – as soon as the threat of Nachtsheer patrols was gone those who still lived in Wartenhof had descended upon the mercantile to steal supplies. The looters were gone, however – they had fled the town or else succumbed to the plague themselves. The only trace of them beyond their tracks was the corpse of a farmer with half his head caved-in; a victim of some disagreement among the vultures.

Vincent didn’t have much hope that the scavengers had left anything, but there was always the chance that they might have overlooked something. It transpired that they had.

In one of the rooms of the mercantile’s upper floor, Vincent discovered the pale, wasted frame of Tereza. Even a few weeks ago, Ghenadie’s wife had been the beauty of Wartenhof. Now it was an emaciated, near lifeless thing that lay stretched upon the enormous fur-trimmed bed. Vincent wouldn’t have recognised her except for the emerald band around her finger and her long golden hair. He wouldn’t have realised she was still alive if not for the trembling hand that rose from the bed and pointed at him.

There was too much desperate emotion in that gesture for Vincent to confuse it with the vacant, horrible action of the undead. When he looked at Tereza’s face, there was entreaty in her eyes, not the ghastly emptiness of a zombie.

He started to approach her, but the woman gave a violent shake of her hand, warning him back. He could see the splotches blemishing her delicate skin. She warned him back and when he had retreated a few paces, she made a stabbing motion with her finger. When Vincent gave her a questioning look, she repeated the gesture, raising her sickly body from the pillows as she jabbed her finger at the wall behind him.

Meekly, Vincent turned and tried to see what the sick woman was pointing to. After a moment’s confusion, he drew aside the heavy tapestry fastened to the wall. Tereza’s pointing hand became more emphatic, waving him towards the floor. He crouched down, almost flattening himself along the boards. Even with his nose a few inches from the wall he would have missed the hidden catch without Tereza’s guidance. A deft turn of the almost invisible hook and a secret panel opened in the wall.

From the sickbed, Tereza uttered a relieved gasp. Vincent looked back to see her slump back in the pillows, her arm dropping and dangling limply along the side of the bed. The relieved gasp collapsed into a death rattle, the woman finally conceding her long fight against the plague. It seemed she had lingered only to impart the knowledge of Ghenadie’s secret hiding place. With the task done there was nothing left to hold her to the mortal plane.

Vincent reached into the hiding place, dragging out a large bronze coffer. It took three blows from his hatchet to smash open the lock. When he did, and when he let his eyes fall onto the contents of the coffer, a bitter laugh rose from his throat.

The coffer was filled with coins. Gold and silver, the treasure of Ghenadie skimmed from the produce of Wartenhof, stolen before it could reach the hands of Cneaz Vaclav. It was more wealth than any man in the town could have hoped to see, enough to buy Wartenhof ten times over. Ghenadie must have spent decades amassing such a fortune without alerting Vaclav to his larceny. But, then, Ghenadie had been a crafty man well suited to sharp dealings and daring ventures.

Vincent ran his hand through the coins, feeling their weight as they poured through his fingers. He glanced back at the bed and the plague-marked corpse of Tereza. Treasure hadn’t helped her or her husband. Death was a force that respected neither wealth nor breeding. Death struck down rich and poor, noble and peasant, with equal disdain. There was no bribing the heralds of Morr, no paying away the claws of plague.

The forester left the coffer where it lay. Gold and silver! These were useless things. Could a man eat them? Could a man burn them for heat? Could he drink them? Vincent would have happily traded the entire coffer for a few ounces of venison and a bag of beans.

As he left the mercantile, Vincent wondered if some other scavenger would find the treasure. Perhaps some soul would use the money to escape Wartenhof and buy his way to a land where the plague was unknown. He wished such an adventurer the grace of Shallya and the luck of Ranald.

He wished he could escape Wartenhof, but he knew he could never leave the town. The ties that bound him to his home were too terrible to escape.

Two days after she died, Mircalla’s body stirred. The obscene echo of life poured back into her, causing her eyes to open, her mouth to move, her muscles to flex. Vincent had waited beside her deathbed to see if his wife would share the monstrous fate that had stolen upon so many of Wartenhof’s dead. He thought he had prepared himself for such a ghastly eventuality, but when it came he could only shudder and cringe in terror.

He almost died then. Vincent appreciated that fact even as he cowered against the wall of his hovel, unable to do anything but gawk at Mircalla’s ghoulish resurrection. Dead hands groped towards him with clawed fingers, jaws snapped in grisly menace. Had she been able, Mircalla would have killed him and he would have been helpless to stop her.

Foresight saved Vincent. Before the unclean simulacrum of life settled into his wife’s corpse, he’d taken the precaution of lashing her down to the bed. As he took the precaution, he’d tried to tell himself it wasn’t needed, that Mircalla would remain at peace. He would justify his decision to spare her the fires of the plague pit.

It was a long time before Vincent was able to rouse himself from his grief and horror, to tear his eyes away from the thing thrashing about in its bindings. He reached for the hatchet at his belt. How many times had he played the scene out in his fears? The undead husk of Mircalla and the abominable duty he must perform!

His fingers tightened about the hatchet and he moved away from the wall and approached the bed. As he raised the axe to bring the blade chopping down into the prisoned thing, Vincent’s resolve faltered. For all the horror of it, for all his understanding that what was tied down on the bed wasn’t his wife, it still looked like her. It was her flesh it wore. What if he were wrong, what if there were some remnant of her identity locked away inside that dead flesh?

Stricken with doubt, Vincent let the hatchet fall to the floor. He retreated from the bound zombie, escaping out into the silent streets of Wartenhof. Later, perhaps, he would have the strength to return, to do what he knew he must do, but for now he could only flee. He would find some other place to give him shelter, some refuge away from the empty eyes of the woman he had loved.

It was dark when Vincent abandoned his home to the ghastly echo of his wife. The image of Mircalla staring at him with that lifeless gaze, the sound of her thrashing in her bonds, these were memories that tortured him anew with each step he took, a physical agony that turned his blood cold and his stomach sick. He felt that he must scream or go mad.

He had actually stopped in the middle of the street, had started to sob when some sixth sense warned him to be silent. Instinctively, Vincent turned to the source of his unease. At first it was difficult to make out the shape in the shadow of a peasant hut. When he did, he wished the sight had remained indistinct. What he saw was a feral dog and the corpse of a plague victim. The corpse was horrible with the marks of the disease, made still more hideous by the depredation wrought by the dog. Great bites disfigured its limbs; its left cheek was a twist of gnawed flesh, its belly eaten out clear down to the spine.

Yet for all the damage inflicted upon it, the corpse moved! It raked its decayed hands through the gory mush of the slaughter dog, mindlessly strewing the street with the animal’s organs. There was a terrifying deliberation in the zombie’s savagery, a thoroughness of hate that needed no mentality to guide it. The unreasoning enmity of the dead for the living.

For a moment, Vincent hesitated, lost in the horror of what he was seeing. Then he felt himself gripped by a profound loathing – a disgust for this ravening abomination. Was it not enough that the plague had decimated Wartenhof? Must the town suffer the further misery of these loathsome fiends?

Snarling the names of Taal and Rhya, the gods of forest and meadow, Vincent drew the sword from his belt and rushed at the zombie. The creature was just turning away from its dismemberment of the dog when the cold steel slashed across its neck. The mushy flesh parted almost to the bone, leaving the head to flop obscenely against its shoulder, dangling by a flap of skin.

Vincent called upon his gods again as the mutilated zombie staggered towards him. A second chopping blow sent the rotten head rolling along the ground and the corrupt body pitched over, its vile vitality extinguished.

The forester gazed upon the twice-slain corpse, feeling his fury mounting with each breath he drew into his body. Again and again he brought his sword down into the rank flesh, butchering the zombie beyond anything recognisably human. With each blow, Vincent thought of Mircalla tied down to the bed, his Mircalla, who was now a thing such as this. As he hacked apart the undead, he tried to ignore the shame buried inside him, guilt that he wasn’t strong enough to do the same for his wife.

Panting from his exertion, his clothes stained with the decayed filth from the zombie’s rotten veins, Vincent recoiled from the carcass, disgusted not only at the corrupt nature of the thing he had destroyed, but also at his own bestial viciousness. He thought of Razvan, the cheerful storyteller who had descended to a state of brute madness. Was that same horrible gleam in his eye now? Did his face curl into that mask of primitive savagery? With a cry of revulsion he fled from the zombie he had destroyed. His retreat was a futile effort. It wasn’t the monster in the street he feared, but the one that might be growing inside his own mind.

As his new home, Vincent selected the ostentatious apartment of Wartenhof’s only moneylender – a man who’d fled the town long ago to seek the supposed safety of Drakenhof itself. Behind him he’d been forced to leave rich furnishings and opulent accoutrements that even Cneaz Vaclav might have envied.

The richness of his new refuge proved a most insidious trap. That was something he’d discovered the third night he spent in the place.

Trying to sleep in the richly upholstered bed, Vincent was gripped by uneasiness. It was the same sort of nebulous anxiety that he’d felt many times in the forest when the panther or wolf he’d been tracking turned about and began stalking him instead. Despite the precautions he’d taken to secure the doors and windows, he felt a nagging sense of impending danger. Something he’d overlooked. Something he’d forgotten.

Unable to sleep, Vincent finally rose from the bed. The moneylender’s townhouse had been built on two floors, private chambers above with utilitarian rooms such as the kitchen and study below. Just as he approached the stairs, his sharp ears caught the creak of a wooden step. Like a statue, he froze – every sense alert for another sound. He didn’t have long to wait before the creak was repeated. Somewhere in the darkness below, someone or something was mounting the stairs!

Vincent drew the sword from his belt, eyes straining to penetrate the shadows. His heart pounded in his chest. Vainly he tried to reason away the dread clawing at him. Perhaps the rats were back, scampering about in the dark. Perhaps it was another survivor he heard, come to loot the moneylender’s vault.

Vault! Nausea welled up inside the forester as he recognised the worry that had been nagging at him, the sense of omission that refused to let him feel secure. When he’d made his inspection of the building and fortified it against invasion from outside, he’d neglected to check one place – the cellar underneath the larder.

The forester backed away from the stairs as his mind made other terrible connections. The moneylender had fled Wartenhof and left most of his possessions behind, yet there was no cross mark upon his door to indicate the plague had visited his household. Had some miracle preserved his home when all around him was afflicted, or had he simply hidden the fact from his neighbours? The moneylender’s household had been large, a big family and many servants. How many of them had felt the touch of plague? How many of them had he left behind, or hidden away in the cellar like Szalardy’s mother?

A beam of moonlight streamed down through a hole in the roof, bathing the stairway in silvery light. Every muscle in Vincent’s body began to tremble when he saw the silent procession stalking up those steps towards him. The moneylender had apparently left a very large household behind. Some of the advancing zombies looked so corrupt and decayed that they must have been weeks rotting down there in the darkness. The fresher ones were even more gruesome, their decayed flesh marred with the marks of nails and teeth. The horrible inference struck Vincent like a physical blow – when the moneylender abandoned Wartenhof, he had cast his still-living servants into the cellar to be slaughtered by the undead!

The foremost zombie was almost upon Vincent before his shrinking mind recovered its focus. With a cry of anguish, he brought his sword slashing into the decayed monster, breaking ribs and leaving bloated organs to spill from its torn flesh. The creature staggered back, upsetting the approach of the zombies behind it. For an instant, the forester hesitated, debating whether he should defend the ground he held.

The sight of the zombie he had struck, the rotten corpse with its dripping organs and shattered ribs lurching back towards him – it was this that made the courage of a man who had once hunted a crazed bear by himself buckle and break. With abject terror, Vincent turned and fled, retreating into the opulent chamber he had thought to claim as his own. Gasping for breath, shivering from crown to toe, he slammed the door shut and dropped the beam across it.

He was still leaning against the door when he heard the zombies staggering down the hall. His hands were pressed down upon the beam, trying to hold it in place when he felt the impact of rotten fists against the panel. The door shuddered ever so slightly under the impact. Then other fists were added to the assault and the commotion became more pronounced. Like blows from a hammer, the fists struck again and again, battering away at the barrier.

Tireless and remorseless, the zombies maintained their attack on the door. Vincent could feel the tremor of the repeated blows, which made the hinges shudder and the hard wood panels splinter. How long would the barrier hold? How long before it collapsed and left him helpless before the undead horde?

Vincent glanced over the room. There was no window, no connecting door. He was like a hare trapped in a box, waiting for the poacher to lift the lid and drag him out to be butchered.

A grim smile flickered on the forester’s face and he lifted his gaze upwards. There was a way out! But would there be time enough to take it?

Reluctantly, Vincent pushed himself away from the door, going sick as he watched the way the bar shuddered in its frame without his weight to reinforce it. There was no help for it; he had to trust that it would hold, that it would defy the zombies long enough for him to escape. Forcing himself to turn his back to the trembling door, he leapt onto the bed. Stretching, he brought his sword stabbing into the ceiling. Desperately he hacked away at the weave of thatch that formed the roof.

Progress was agonisingly slow, the thatch resisting his efforts with a stubbornness that seemed deliberate. The sound of the door rattling on its hinges, the pounding drum of undead fists against wooden panels, these boomed in his ears like the roar of thunder. It was all he could do to keep from turning away from his task, to stare at the shuddering portal. He knew that he dare not give in to such a compulsion. He didn’t need to know. Either he would force a hole through the ceiling or he would die. There was no help in knowing how long he had left before one or the other came to be.

Vincent uttered a jubilant bark of triumph as moonlight streamed into the room through the hole he had finally gouged through the thick layers of thatch. His victory crumbled as a new noise crackled from the door. It was the sound of splintering wood. The zombies were starting to break down the door.

Frenziedly, the forester attacked the ceiling, raw terror burning through his veins. Bit by bit, the hole began to widen enough to allow a small child to press through. Vincent shook his head. Too slow, it was all coming too slow!

With a ghastly din, the brutalized door sagged into the room, its upper hinges torn away from their fastenings. The undead clawed and fumbled in the resultant gap, mindlessly trying to force their way in despite the obstacle presented by the lower half of the door, oblivious to the long splinters of wood embedded in their decayed hands.

Vincent took one horrified look at the doorway. Under the weight of the zombies, he knew the remaining hinges would soon give way and the bar would soon buckle. He had only a matter of moments before the undead were inside and their cold talons ripped the life from his flesh.

Thrusting the sword back into his belt, Vincent jumped from the top of the bed, flinging himself into the hole he’d made. Head and shoulders thrust up into the cold Sylvanian night, hands scrambled at the surface of the roof before his own weight dragged him back down. From below, he heard the door at last give way. Frantically he fought to pull himself through the close-fitting hole and force his body through the cramped space.

For a moment, he was caught, and then he felt something grabbing at his feet. Flailing wildly, sobbing in horror, Vincent exerted muscles he didn’t even know he had, throwing every scrap of his being into one terrified effort. The thatch scratched him savagely as his body was wrenched upwards and the grip on his boot was broken.

Vincent lay upon the roof for what seemed like many minutes, listening to the zombies shambling about in the room below.

It was nearly dawn before the jitters that wracked him subsided enough that he felt composed enough to stir. Weakened by the violence wrought against it, he was careful lest more of the roof collapse and send him into the waiting claws of the zombies.

Gingerly, the forester crept to the raised centre of the roof where the timber support beam projected. As carefully as he could, he lifted himself onto the beam. Only then, with the hard solidity of the beam beneath him, did he take a moment to appreciate the narrowness of his escape. His understanding of how fortunate he was became magnified when he turned his eyes downward and saw the great mob that had gathered outside the building. Scores of rotting corpses animated by the most unholy magic, all of them drawn by some obscene sense to his refuge, to seek out the little ember of life yet to be extinguished in a town that had become Death.

The desolation of Wartenhof was complete when the rains came. Structures neglected for months began to collapse under the pounding torrent. Thatch roofs, having gone without mending for so long, crumbled down into peasant hovels, leaving only the skeletal beams standing stark against the grey sky. Wattle-and-daub walls cracked and split, strips of plaster fell from half-timber frames. The streets, simple lanes of dirt, became mires of mud and decay.

Even the rains couldn’t blot out the stench of death. The town was ripe with the smell of corpses, an all-pervasive stink that seemed to soak into the very earth. There was no relief from the reek, for it found a way to crawl into even the most firmly shuttered room. Vincent’s nose became adjusted to the offensive odour, growing accustomed to it until at length it became almost unnoticeable. Such familiarity bore with it danger of the most awful sort.

Feral dogs no longer prowled Wartenhof. Even the swarming rats had become a rare sight. The desertion of even these hardy scavengers marked the final abandonment of the town. A force more terrible than even the plague had closed its bony talons about the place. The corpses whose stench pervaded Wartenhof might be unburied, but they weren’t at rest. With shambling, stumbling steps they prowled the town as zombies, snuffing out the flame of life wherever they came upon it.

Vincent had deluded himself in those early days. In his time with the Nachtsheer, the monstrous affliction that caused the dead to rise again was a freak abnormality, but it could never be so widespread as to claim the entire town. He knew better now. It was true that certain bodies reacted more quickly, assuming their new obscene semblance of life more readily than others, but in the end none of Wartenhof’s dead remained at rest. From the vantage of the spire above the abandoned chapel of Shallya, he had even seen half-burned cadavers dragging themselves from the plague pit in the fields beyond the town, crawling on the blackened stumps of arms, their charred skulls blindly staring up into the sky. A ghoulish procession of mutilated undead, bodies the fires had been too weak to incinerate.

The chapel of Shallya – the peasants of Wartenhof had turned their back on the goddess when her power failed to save them from the plague. An angry mob had tried to burn the little temple down but were driven off before their mayhem could go too far, defeated not by the might of the goddess but by the threat of the Nachtsheer. Shallya had failed to protect even her clergy from the plague, why would a simple structure of timber and stone demand her attention?

It was necessity rather than faith that drove Vincent to seek out the chapel. For several days after quitting the moneylender’s house he had crept from one place to another, always trying to avoid the packs of undead that seemed to be everywhere now. The rooftops had become his thoroughfare, leaping from one building to another, cutting holes so that he could drop down inside and search for provisions. Dangerous, these expeditions, but necessary. All too often he found his hunting grounds infested with zombies. Sometimes he would fight the abominations, trying to bring to them a more lasting brand of death. He soon gave up such aspirations. Unless the body was destroyed entirely, the undead simply rose again within a few days. It was simply beyond his resources.

After his experience at the moneylender’s apartment, Vincent despaired of finding shelter that offered both security and openness. He wouldn’t put himself in a little box again, however secure it might seem. If the zombies breeched the defences of his refuge, he wanted a way to escape. For several days his solution had been to sleep on the rooftops, to endure exposure to wind and rain rather than tempt the prowling zombies.

A better solution came to him after observing one of the undead trying to extricate itself from a hog wallow. Despite the little ladder leading up from the swine pit, the zombie was unable to free itself. The coordination to mount a flight of stairs still belonged to them, but not the intelligence to manipulate a simple ladder successfully.

The steeple above Shallya’s chapel could be ascended only by means of a tall ladder adjacent to the vestry. As a further precaution, however, Vincent drew the ladder up behind him when he climbed into the steeple. In the little attic above the chapel he had room enough to store the victuals he’d been able to find, the protection of walls and the shelter of a shingle roof. The open face of the steeple offered easy egress should it be necessary and he fastened a length of rope to facilitate a quick drop to the ground.

Vincent could see all of Wartenhof from his new refuge. It was a sight that made him feel empty inside. In the entire town, he was the only living thing. He’d seen the gnawed remains of Razvan on one of his supply hunts. The crazed scavenger had found adversaries who weren’t intimidated by a meat cleaver.

He was the last man in Wartenhof. For all he knew, he might be the last man in the Empire, in the world. The plague had taken so many and those it left behind seemed doomed to perish in the claws of the undead.

Truly the gods had forsaken mankind. What awful thing he had done to make them spare him when everyone else was taken, Vincent didn’t know. All he knew was that he was alone.

And that was a misery worse than death.

Weeks passed in the ruins of Wartenhof. Vincent’s existence settled into a routine of prowling the desolation, scavenging supplies from the homes of the dead. Whenever he felt strong enough he would return to his old home and spend hours sitting beside Mircalla. By degrees loneliness and isolation made him numb to the ghastliness of her condition. Almost, he could imagine her as she had been. He took to talking to her, relating the events of the intervening days. Deep down inside he knew it was madness, these visits to the mindless husk of his wife. But he also realised that without even this shabby semblance of companionship he would succumb completely.

Hope blossomed one dreary winter day as Vincent was on his way to visit her. Leaping across the rooftops, he noticed something unusual on the ground below. Clinging to a chimney for support, the forester stared down into an alleyway and rubbed his eyes.

No, what he saw was no cruel trick of his eyes. There was a body lying there, the decayed carcass of a zombie. A spear had been thrust through its chest and the top of its skull had been sheared off with a blade. Such violence was beyond the paltry intelligence of the undead. Someone else had done this – a living person.

Desperately, Vincent scurried above the decaying streets. Here and there he would see further evidence that someone had been active in the town – the dispatched carrion of more zombies. Yet as hard as he might he could find no trace of them. Fear whispered inside his brain, setting a terrible doubt at work within him. Perhaps there was no one, perhaps he had assaulted the zombies himself and then, in his madness, forgotten his own actions!

The prospect was too monstrous. Despite the danger, Vincent dropped down to the street and rushed to where one of the zombies lay. His trained eyes studied the ground, his spirit becoming more wretched the harder he looked. He could find no footprints, at least nothing that belonged to anyone alive. There was no mistaking the dragging, clumsy print of the zombies. The only other tracks were those of animals.

Before despair could fully tighten around his heart, Vincent reflected that someone had killed the handful of zombies he had found. He might have missed their tracks, but he couldn’t refute their handiwork. They had to be somewhere, and he would find them!

Climbing back onto the nearest roof, Vincent resumed his search. It wasn’t long before his hunt bore results. From the mercantile’s roof he could see the tavern. The absence of active zombies in the streets was explained. A great mob of the undead had surrounded the tavern, cordoning it off in a ring of decayed flesh. There could be only one reason for such activity, one motivation that could stir the zombies to such effort. There was someone alive inside the tavern.

Hastily Vincent rushed across the roofs, reckless in the hope and urgency that now ruled him. Whoever was inside the tavern was trapped. If they didn’t think to cut an opening in the ceiling, to use the roofs as he had done…

Vincent fought down the horror such a possibility presented. To find someone after all this time only to lose them before he could even hear the sound of their voice! No, it was too abominable! The gods couldn’t be so cruel.

Nearing the tavern, Vincent found the area swarming with the undead. His stomach clenched as he recognised the faces of people he had known amidst the rotten tatters of the zombies. The decayed mob converged upon the timber walls of the building, some residue of mentality drawing them towards the doors and windows. Unfeeling fists pounded against the barricaded portals, relentless in their effort to get inside.

From his perch atop an adjacent roof, Vincent stared down at the zombies. It would take a desperate leap to reach the roof of the tavern; the slightest slip would send him hurtling to the street and the merciless talons of the undead. For an instant he hesitated, tempted to slink away, to leave the men trapped in the tavern to their fate. The awful spectre of loneliness overwhelmed his fear with a still greater terror. The risk of death wasn’t so terrible when life held nothing to make it precious.

Whispering a prayer to Taal, Vincent flung himself from the roof. His hands scrabbled at the wooden shingles as he nearly missed his target. Teeth clenched against the sting of splinters stabbing into his fingers, he fought to keep from slipping, from losing his tenuous grip. For a moment he hung suspended above the rotten ranks of zombies. His blood turned cold when he dared to look down, finding many of the creatures drawn away from their assault on the doors and windows. They were gathered below, reaching up to him with clawed hands, clutching at the feet hanging just beyond their reach. With a moan of horror, he forced the muscles in his arms to a supreme effort, pulling himself up onto the roof and away from the hideous throng below.

Gasping from his exertions and the ghastly death he had so nearly succumbed to, it was several minutes before Vincent was able to stir himself from where he lay among the shingles. It was the sound of splintering wood, the sharp distorted tone of a shriek that was inhuman in its agony, which provided the urgency that roused him to action. Desperate violence characterised his attack on the shingles, ripping them up with the head of his axe until he had gouged a hole in the ceiling of the room below.

Vincent didn’t delay. The moment the hole was wide enough for him to drop into he did so. Urgency didn’t allow him to look first, to exhibit the caution that had kept him alive these many weeks. It was a mistake that nearly cost him everything.

The room below had been a bedchamber, now an abominable stench of decay clung to it bringing tears to Vincent’s eyes. As he tried to blink away the stench, he didn’t see the figure that awkwardly rose from the bed and lurched towards him. The first he was aware of its presence was when tearing fingers gouged into his arm.

Vincent cried out in pain as he felt the talons sink into his flesh. He tried to whirl about, to bring his hatchet chopping down into his attacker. Yet at the last instant, he froze. Even with maggots squirming through the wreckage of its face there was no mistaking the visage of Sergeant Andreas. More horrible, however, was the recognition that flared through the zombie’s eyes, the way its rotten face contorted into a hateful snarl.

Vincent had forgotten the promise Andreas had exacted from him, but even in its obscene condition, the zombie remembered. Remembered and demanded revenge!

Before Vincent could bring the hatchet crashing down, Andreas grabbed his hand and froze the weapon in mid-swing. Now, with both arms immobilised by the zombie, it was all the forester could do to avoid the snapping teeth of his undead foe. He found himself locked in a ghastly dance, shifting and stumbling about in the dark reek of the closed room with the vicious monster clamouring for his death. At every step he could feel his strength ebb, draining away with the blood that flowed from his savaged arm.

Reeling across the room, Vincent stopped trying to writhe free from Andreas’s grip. Instead, mustering such reserves of strength as hadn’t already bled out of him, the forester locked his fingers about the zombie’s rotten flesh, securing his own hold upon the monster. Lunging forward in a fierce charge, he propelled himself and his foe in a drive towards the locked door.

Both man and monster crashed through the panel, splintering the board that had been used to lock the zombie inside. The momentum drove them across the landing and against the balustrade overlooking the hall below. The wood splintered beneath the impact of their bodies as Vincent and Andreas pitched to the floor below. With the zombie beneath him, Vincent was able to force it to bear the brunt of the impact. He heard bones splinter as Andreas smashed into the hard wood floor.

His own condition was little better. Vincent felt something snap in his left leg and screamed as his wrist bent back upon itself as he hit the floor. Rattled and battered, he tried to pull away from the crushed zombie, only to find its loathsome grip as powerful as ever.

Despite receiving the brunt of the violence, Andreas was oblivious to the damage inflicted upon it. The zombie lurched up at Vincent, snapping at him with jaws knocked askew by the fracturing of its skull. The forester cringed away, trying to escape the vindictive glare of the monster’s eyes.

As he pulled the zombie up with him, Vincent shouted, appealing to the survivors barricaded somewhere nearby. If only they would help him and come to his aid before Andreas could deliver his terrible revenge.

The zombie’s rotten breath washed over him as it leaned down to snap at his throat. Desperately Vincent pushed the thing back, but he knew it wouldn’t be long before the indefatigable strength of the undead prevailed against his own reduced vitality.

Suddenly, the zombie stiffened. A spearhead erupted from its chest in a spray of desiccated corruption. Like a bug on a pin, the zombie struggled for a moment before its mangled head was knocked from its shoulders by the slashing sweep of a sword.

He was saved! The survivors had heard his cry. Vincent laughed at the irony. He had come here to save these men, but instead they had saved him.

His laughter was echoed by a shrill, high-pitched chitter. Vincent’s eyes went wide with disbelief as he stared at his rescuer. He’d risked everything to rescue fellow men, but the life sheltering inside the tavern wasn’t remotely human.

An abominable shape that blended the revolting aspects of a huge grotesque rat with some vague suggestion of human shape stood above the corpse of Andreas. Bits of armour and strips of rag swaddled the beast in crude semblance of raiment. In its hand-like paws, the thing held the gory length of a spear and in its beady red eyes there was a profane gleam of mocking intelligence.

Vincent’s shock was so complete that he didn’t even feel the spear when it was thrust into his chest. Even when a second ratman approached with upraised sword to decapitate him, he could scarcely acknowledge what was happening to him. The plague, the zombies, all of them had been horror enough, but to see these things was something else. Truly the gods had abandoned the Empire and condemned the world to madness.

The skaven chittered with vicious amusement as it brought the edge of its sword hacking into Vincent’s neck. The chittering degenerated into an angry snarl when the blade failed to shear through what the ratkin expected would be flesh weakened by rot and worms. It took three strokes to remove the head and claim its trophy. It lifted its prize, sniffing at the unexpected aroma of fresh blood. Renewed squeals of fright from the barricade behind the tavern doors made the swordrat drop Vincent’s head to the floor.

The warriors of Clan Fester were finding it no easy prospect annihilating the zombies that infested the town, but such had been their orders. No ratman defied the commands of Seerlord Skrittar twice! The Seerlord wanted Wartenhof, therefore the town would fall.

Unwittingly, the swordrat had finished part of the conquest, its blade had cleansed Wartenhof of its human presence. Down to the very last man.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

C L Werner’s Black Library credits include the Age of Sigmar novels Overlords of the Iron Dragon and The Tainted Heart, the novella ‘Scion of the Storm’ in Hammers of Sigmar, the Warhammer novels Deathblade, Mathias Thulmann: Witch Hunter, Runefang and Brunner the Bounty Hunter, the Thanquol and Boneripper series and Time of Legends: The Black Plague series. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written the Space Marine Battles novel The Siege of Castellax. Currently living in the American south-west, he continues to write stories of mayhem and madness set in the Warhammer worlds.

An extract from Warlords of Karak Eight Peaks.

In his carriage, Kaspar Wollendorp shivered. Cold prodded at his flesh with iron fingers. It scraped the inside of his nose with its nails. It dragged his breath from his throat in plumes, tugging it out of the carriage window to merge with the fog blanketing Averheim. Outside, the torches either side of the barrack doors were orbs of yellow, marsh-lights deep in the city. Black shadows of men in the yard slapped at their arms and rubbed their hands round a smear of brazier flame. Dawn was some time away. This was not an hour Wollendorp was accustomed to.

He was well fleshed, Wollendorp, but in weather like this, that only meant there was more of him to freeze. His long cheeks ran off his face to form jowls, giving his face a lugubrious expression. His lips were full and downturned. Together with his hooded eyes, he had a look of sorrowful disapproval to him. Those who were acquainted well with Wollendorp knew he was a kindly man; his face did not match his heart at all, but for once it displayed his emotions accurately.

He blinked. His eyeballs ached with the chill. His hat did little to keep the cold from his bald head. He pulled his chin further into the fur collar of his coat and let out a shuddering groan. His hands found each other within his muff. Touching his own fingers was as pleasant as grabbing ice. This would not do, not at all. He tried to doze. The cold battled his efforts until his thoughts blurred into dreams and he sank into an uneasy place of cold moors and inexplicable noises.

Squealing iron dragged him back to full wakefulness. He leaned forward as the door of the carriage jerked open, nearly banging heads with Captain Aldous Meisen of the Scarlet Blades. The carriage rocked. Sharp clips of hooves on cobbles sounded thinly in the fog.

‘What cursed hour do you call this, Wollendorp?’ growled the captain. He threw himself into his seat. He was a singularly ugly man, huge and bullish with a squashed nose and a scar across his forehead. He was not yet into his thirties, yet already his hair was thinning, and Meisen had taken to wearing it cropped close to his skull to hide the fact. The white roads of old blade wounds were stark on his scalp. A gaudy earring hung from his right ear. His clothes were of rough suede, the red of the Scarlet Blades, and he stank. He stank of beer and cheap Tilean wine and dwarf tobacco and the faded glory of the Blades. ‘I should have stayed abed and let you freeze out here alone.’

Wollendorp was not fond of Meisen. He made little attempt to hide his dislike. ‘He is awake, and he is lucid,’ he said.

‘What of it? Surely the ravings of a madman can no longer be of interest to the city. There is too much to be done here, half the place is in ruins still. Let the aldermen look to their own, not be casting their gaze over the mountains.’

‘Lord Osthammar thinks it worthwhile,’ said Wollendorp. He pulled his left hand from his muff, picked up his cane and banged its brass top on the carriage ceiling. ‘On, driver! On!’

‘Sigmar blast Osthammar,’ grumbled Meisen. ‘Last thing the city needs now is wretched foreign adventure.’

‘Nevertheless, it is he who commissioned us,’ said Wollendorp.

Meisen muttered something unintelligible and spat out of the window.

‘I think you are still drunk, captain.’

The carriage clattered into life, rumbling along Fleischstrasse. The Scarlet Blades, Averheim’s darlings during the time of Countess Ludmilla, had fallen far in the city’s affections. When the Neumarkt had been commissioned in the wake of the city’s recent unrest, to be built back up from the river, the Blades’ barracks had not been relocated, and that spoke volumes as to exactly how far their fall had been. The stink of cattle and slaughter hung about this district now. It did little to mask the malodour of disgrace emanating from the barracks.

With a freezing finger, Wollendorp lifted the leather flap covering the unglazed window. Cranes and the frames of unfinished buildings loomed suddenly out of the dark like grotesque skeletons. Somewhere to the left of them rose the great bulk of the Averburg, invisible in the fog. The lights on the nearest buildings were visible as cottony balls; further away they pulled themselves out into nothing. The fog glowed with the collected flames of Averheim, eerie and illuminating nothingness. The fog pressed hard around the carriage, and Wollendorp had the uncomfortable feeling they were travelling a sorcerous road, condemned to ride it forever. A shiver ran up his spine. He’d always had too much imagination.

In truth he found it hard to argue with Meisen, this was a waste of time. The man in the asylum, Bickenstadt, had been raving for months. Two years since their employment, and Wollendorp’s initial enthusiasm for Osthammar’s project had waned; he was bored and impatient to get back to his own studies. At the least, this meeting should be the end of it. His report was nearly done.

A cry of ‘Ware!’ went up. The carriage slowed. They were approaching the Geisttor. There was some conversation as the driver handed over Osthammar’s letter of patronage to the Averguard. Passage through the city walls at this time of night was not easily achieved. There was a slight delay, the Geisttor creaked open and the carriage clattered on.

Brickwork passed by inches away. Geisttor was one of the smaller gates bored through the thick city walls. Then they were out, back into the fog. Wollendorp looked up but could not see the tops of the walls, only that diffuse, horrible light. Nor could he see the moons, which was for once a small mercy. Morrslieb would be approaching full, and Wollendorp was glad it could not see him more than he was glad he could not see it.

They passed the ward, that broad zone outside the walls kept free of buildings, and then were into the outer city. Narrow lanes and alleyways led off the highway into warrens of timbered housing, all dead ends tonight, stoppered by the fog. A man stared at Wollendorp as the carriage passed, causing the academic to shift in his seat uncomfortably.

Streets gave way to scattered buildings, then to farms. The fog became a wall of grey, lit only by the carriage lamps. The road leading out from Geisttor became little better than a track. It was too early for the farmers who used it to be making their way in to market. The road was empty.

Of human traffic, at least.

Above Wollendorp’s head came a pair of clicks as his footman and driver pulled back the hammers on their blunderbusses. Even this close to the city, it paid to be careful.

Meisen snored opposite him.

He sat lost in thought for an hour or so, until the way grew less smooth, the track rutted. The cab swayed on its leather straps. Despite the lurch and bang of potholes, despite his mind going over what might be out there in the fog, Wollendorp was lulled to sleep by the creak of the carriage.

Once, he had loved travelling by carriage for that soporific song of wood and leather, but that had been a long time ago.

‘Herr doktor! Herr doktor!’ A hand was shaking him gently. Wollendorp awoke with a start.

‘Herr doktor? Are you awake?’

‘Dieter? Yes, yes, I am awake.’

Wollendorp’s footman bobbed a bow. ‘We have arrived, herr doktor.’

Wollendorp squinted past Dieter. It was growing light. His joints cracked as he pulled himself out of the carriage. The footman moved to support him. He waved the hand away. ‘I am growing older, but I am not yet old, Dieter.’

‘Yes, herr doktor.’ Dieter moved aside, and Wollendorp stepped out.

The carriage was in the bailey of a castle. A stable boy aided Wollendorp’s two footmen and driver in unhitching the horses and stripping them of their gear. Another gathered the tack, looping it neatly about his arms, and took it away to be oiled. The carriage, noted Wollendorp with annoyance, was filthy with mud.

He took in his surroundings. It was early morning. The fog had gone, clinging on only as wisps here and there. The sky was a flat white, the sun an irrelevant circle behind it. The cold lingered.

The castle was arranged at the summit of a knoll. To the north-east, where the curtain wall dipped down, Wollendorp could see into a sparse wood of pine and, beyond that, the flat plains of the province, thick with grain. The rolling nature of the land accentuated the modest height of the castle’s perch. The keep, a long lozenge-shaped affair, stood on the highest point of this promontory of rock. The castle was a compromise between luxury and military consideration. It had many decorative turrets. Blue slate tiles clad its roof in a diamond lay. An ornate lantern window crowned the octagonal roof, a bronze of Sigmar’s comet at its apex.

These days the luxury was fading, and the keep served to keep people in, not out. The windows sported heavy iron bars, rust from them streaking the fine ashlar. Stone additions to the buildings were obvious by their lighter colour. All were the badges of Shallya – hearts and doves – and before the keep’s main entrance was a small garden with a statue of a woman: Shallya herself, mother of mercy. Her face smiled and her hands were held out in blessing, stone tears on her stone cheeks.

He felt eyes on him, and looked to a wide oriel window on the first floor. Wan faces peered back: the inmates. After a lifetime of study, Wollendorp’s eyes were no longer good, and he could not pick out their individual features. Each was an identical ghost, dressed in white. They stared at him sadly until a stout female figure waved them back.

Wollendorp turned from them with a shudder.

Meisen stood by the stables, urinating upon a pile of dung and straw. He was staring upwards at the white sky, a cloud of his own steam wreathing him. He glanced back.

‘You’re awake.’

‘I am.’

‘Nice defensible spot,’ said Meisen. He hitched himself up and shook his shoulders. He did not pause to adjust himself, refastening his codpiece strings even as he walked to join Wollendorp. ‘Good wheat lands, good horse country too, down there.’ He pointed his chin down the hill.

‘Schloss Werdentraum was gifted to the order by the Alptraums seventy years ago,’ said Wollendorp. ‘I believe they still own the estate.’

‘And now it is a madhouse? Such a waste.’

‘Seeing as you know little of it, I doubt it had much military significance, and they are much blessed with large houses,’ he said drily. ‘Ah, here comes our welcoming committee.’

A dumpy priestess of Shallya passed through the keep’s double doors and came down the steps to the garden. She was one of those waistless women, all hip and bosom, whose form seem ill-suited to movement, but who nevertheless move with the bustle of those with a great many things to do and a low tolerance for those who would interrupt them. She puffed as she walked, cheeks red in the harsh morning air. A large bunch of keys chinked at her side.

‘Herr Doktor Wollendorp?’

Wollendorp put out his hands and dipped his head in a courtly bow. ‘It is I. Thank you for your message, blessed mother.’

‘Oh, no need for all that,’ she flapped a chapped hand. ‘I’m a lay sister, a nurse. The priests and priestesses have rather too much on their hands to receive visitors,’ she said, the subtext ‘as have I,’ stamped all over on her soft face. ‘Morrslieb waxes full two days hence, a busy time for us.’ She looked them up and down disapprovingly. ‘I am Sister Tabatha. And, there are two of you.’

Wollendorp gave a weak smile. ‘I am sorry for the inconvenience. I promise we will be brief and silent in our investigation.’

‘We? Your instructions said nothing about “we”,’ she huffed.

‘May I present Captain Meisen of the Averheim Scarlet Blades?’

‘Are they still clinging on?’ she said. Whatever merits Sister Tabatha might possess as a madhouse warden, tact was not among them.

‘The scandal did not quite finish us off, sister,’ said Meisen. ‘There are a few of us left who desire to restore our regiment’s honour.’ He held out his hand to take the sister’s in his own to kiss it. She looked at him as if he were mad and pulled it back.

‘I will see to it that your servants are fed. This way, please,’ she said, and turned on her heel.

The schloss was the picture of faded glories. Tapestries hung on the walls, yet they were dirty and torn. The windows held a small fortune’s worth of glass, but were smeared, and carpets were upon the floor, but threadbare. Lunatics wandered the halls freely. Some stared, some cowered, one hissed something at them in a tongue intelligible only to himself, another held spastic hands before her face and leered at them most horribly.

‘Do not fear them. They are, for the main part, harmless,’ said Sister Tabatha.

‘I do not fear them,’ replied Wollendorp.

‘Then why do you recoil, herr doktor?’ said Meisen. Wollendorp found the man’s swaggering most disagreeable. He jumped almost as much as the shuffling lunatics when Meisen made to scare them.

‘I cannot help it. We men keep our place and life by dint of reason shackled to the cart of our efforts. Without reason we are nothing. To see a man bereft of reason is one of the greatest tragedies this cruel world has to offer.’

A lunatic shrieked as Meisen pulled a face at her.

‘Oh, do stop that, Meisen!’

‘As you wish.’

‘Thank you, herr doktor,’ said Tabatha under her breath.

‘Meisen is an uncouth man,’ said Wollendorp loudly. ‘I can only apologise on his behalf.’

They passed into a broad hall, the one with the window Wollendorp had seen from the courtyard. Trestle tables were set up in rows and the afflicted sat there, quiet, loud, weeping, laughing – a carnival of human emotion, unfettered by custom or sanity.

Wollendorp found it all too tragic and looked out of the window. The view was quite astonishing, endless miles of golden wheat and horse farms, the broad bands of the River Aver coiled carelessly across the land in the distance.

‘You must have money to stay here,’ said Meisen. ‘I’ve seen a few madhouses in my time. Not like this at all.’

Probably as an inmate, thought Wollendorp, but he was too much of a gentleman to say so.

‘It is true,’ said Sister Tabatha. She reached another door, unhitched her keys and turned them around their iron ring until she found the one she required. ‘Our wards’ relatives give generously. Many here are the scions of noble and merchant families. A proportion of our income goes to the poorer houses the order runs in Averheim, but still… inequity was ever the way of the world.’ She looked at Wollendorp as if he were the source of said inequity. ‘Madness unites those we treat. All are equal before the mercy of the mother.’

A young man with drooping hair and huge eyes pawed at Wollendorp. ‘Oh, kind sir, kind, kind sir, please, I beg aid of you. You see,’ he looked from side to side, ‘I’m not mad,’ he said in a stage whisper.

‘Away with you, Maximillian!’ Tabatha said. A glance motivated two lounging orderlies, huge, unfriendly men, to move the boy away.

‘No, no, no! Please sir, please! I am not a madman, I am sane! I have seen them! I see them! Green things! Green in the night! Why will you not listen?’ The boy’s words choked off into sobs as he was hauled backwards.

‘I urge you to be careful, gentlemen. We are entering our secure section. Those confined within are less biddable than the inmates you have thus far seen. Are you ready?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Wollendorp and waved an impatient hand. Meisen sneered at his nerves, much to Wollendorp’s annoyance.

On the other side of the door sat a desk, and behind the desk sat a man with an avian face, lank hair as black as raven feathers, and button eyes of similar hue.

‘I must leave you here. Krest will show you to Bickenstadt’s accommodation.’

Tabatha returned through the door without acknowledging Wollendorp’s thanks.

Krest smiled warmly, belying the hardness of his features. ‘Come to see our playwright, have you, sirs?’

Wollendorp indicated that this was so.

Krest took up a bunch of keys even larger than that carried by Sister Tabatha. He stuck his head into a doorway and instructed someone within to man the desk. ‘This way, gentlemen.’ He led them down a long corridor, the drawing rooms, libraries, and ballrooms of the old schloss converted into quarters for the inmates. Heavy doors occupied each doorway, a barred window allowing the warders to look within. ‘Stay away from the doors, do not answer the inmates, do not give them anything.’ He gave them a reassuring look. ‘Best ignore them altogether, if I was you. Leave them to us, eh, sirs?’

‘Of course.’

Krest took a turn into a side corridor, and brought them to a narrow servant’s staircase. ‘Might I inquire as to what your interest is in Herr Bickenstadt?’

‘You may. I am Doktor Wollendorp.’

‘Ah, we could always use an extra doktor or two here, sir. Perhaps you’d like to tour the wards when you’re done?’

Wollendorp gave a wan smile. ‘You are mistaken. I am a doktor of philosophy. I am particularly interested in the habits and history of the green races. Orcs, goblins, suchlike creatures.’

‘Ah! Goblin expert are you, sir?’ said Krest affably. ‘Next left, sirs.’

‘Yes, you could say so. I am the author of Die Geheimnisse der Grunne Mannenm. Are you aware of it?’ The question was a habit, Krest would not have read it, few had.

They emerged onto a landing lined with more doors. The sounds of the mad could be heard, soft moans and weeping, the shuffle of feet accompanied always by the rattle of chains. ‘Can’t say I have, sir,’ said Krest apologetically. ‘I’ve not much time for reading, sir, although I can, and well.’

‘No matter. I and Captain Meisen here have been commissioned by Graf Osthammar of Averbad and Nord Wissen to investigate the wicked creatures that so bedevil the Border Princes. The duke has holdings there and wishes to learn more of the threats his lands over the mountains might be subject to. We understand that Bickenstadt has some information regarding certain of their tribes. We have been waiting a long time for an opportunity to interview him.’

Krest gave a little chuckle. ‘Oh, if he’s to be believed, sir, he knows all about that. He was picked up, him, mad and penniless in Wissenland over, oh, I’d say twenty-five or so years ago now. His family’s been paying for his keep ever since. They’re quite wealthy, or so I understand. Brother’s a merchant, I think; done better for himself than his poor Jeremiah here.’

‘I hear he has not been lucid for some time,’ said Wollendorp.

‘He has not, sir. But he has been here nearly as long as I have, and I’ve heard plenty from him when he’s been feeling more himself, sir, if you understand my meaning. Then he won’t stop going on about it sir, oh! About the mountains and caves, his work and some green monster by the name of Scheersnekken or some other such outlandish label. Says he was held captive by this creature, in his mountain hall at that. Could you credit it? You hear all sorts in here, but his story is among the most astonishing. I quite enjoy listening to him, if I may be honest with you.’

‘Wait!’ Wollendorp grasped Krest’s shoulder. Excitement coursed through him. ‘What was that name?’

Krest blinked his bird eyes. ‘Oh, I don’t know, sir? Have I got it wrong? Scheersnekken or Schnaksnek or something. Outside my area of knowledge, sir, sorry if I have it mistaken.’

‘Could it possibly have been Skarsnik?’

Krest beamed. ‘Why, yes! That’s the one, sir. Well, you are an expert and no mistake. Herr Bickenstadt will be so glad. Come on now, we’re just down here.’

‘What was all that about?’ hissed Meisen in Wollendorp’s ear. His breath was ripe with sleep and yesterday’s Tilean wine. ‘Why are you pawing at the servants, man?’

‘“Skarsnik”. He said that, he said Skarsnik!’

‘What are you blathering about, Wollendorp?’

‘The dwarfs. I have spoken with many of those who reside in Averheim and Nuln, their knowledge of the greenskins is second only to their hatred of them. They…’

‘This way, sirs,’ Krest beckoned them to a door. Outside it, on a three-legged stool, sat a boy whose pale face said he would rather be anywhere else than by that door.

‘What?’ said Meisen.

‘This might not be such a waste of time as we thought,’ said Wollendorp.

‘Now sirs, before I let you in, I must say that although Herr Bickenstadt is quite together today, he can turn quickly. He is restrained, but I advise you to stay away from the grille, and if he is taken out of sorts, I’d recommend leaving with some haste, poor man. He can’t reach you, but he has a sharp tongue on him, and a good aim. I have provided writing materials as requested in your letters, but please do not leave anything within reach of the bars. He can be a little troublesome, although I’m sure if it came to the worst, yon captain there would have the measure of him, wouldn’t you sir?’

‘Troublesome how?’ said Meisen, folding his arms.

‘Oh, you know, he rants, he raves, he fights. He might take you for some agent of this Scheersnekken… Skarsnik, I mean.’ Krest nodded, pleased with himself for remembering. ‘Some of the younger lads swear they can hear him talking of a night to something in there in some ungodly tongue. A couple of them won’t come up here on their own, but that’s just silly. Being in this place can affect you, I’m afraid to say, and there’s worse in the world outside these walls than there is within, that’s what I always say to them, not that they listen, sirs. The young, eh?’

‘Surely a man jabbering away at night is not out of the ordinary in an asylum?’ said Meisen.

‘Of course, captain sir! But they do say that something answers back, that’s the problem of it.’ Krest gave an apologetic grin. ‘There’s been talk of green lights and other such too, but I don’t put stock by that. The young y’see, they let this place get to them. Not me, I’ve been here far too long. Now, he does not like the sun, so we keep the drapes pulled at his insistence. There’s an oil lamp in there, but don’t light up any more if you please, and keep it burning low. Now, I’ll leave the boy up to sit outside the door. You need anything, or if, Shallya forfend, anything should go awry, you give the bell on the table in there a ring and Jurg here will get you whatever you need. Now, are you ready, sirs?’

‘Yes, yes, we are ready.’ Wollendorp struggled to maintain his composure. ‘Meisen,’ he whispered while Krest spoke through the grille. A raspy, old voice answered him, the words muffled. ‘Beyond that door could be a man who could give me… us… an insight into one of the most famed of all the greenskins, and information about the elusive cave goblin to boot.’

‘That may be so,’ said Meisen. He cracked his neck and yawned. ‘Or he could be a madman. What do you think the most likely?’

‘I refuse to let you deflate my enthusiasm, captain.’

‘Sirs,’ said Krest, holding the door open. ‘The playwright says you may enter.’

Wollendorp recoiled. The smell wafted towards him by the door was intense: stale air, cabbages, old chamber pots and skin unwashed for far too long. Wollendorp paused.

‘Smell bother you, Wollendorp? I’ll bet you’re one of those effete parchment scratchers who bathe once a week. I’ve carried a far worse scent myself on campaign.’ The captain pushed past into the room.

Wollendorp was indeed in the habit of bathing often. His annoyance at Meisen, never fully subdued, flared up.

‘Let us be about our business with some courtesy, captain,’ he said icily. The captain grunted. Cautiously, Wollendorp entered the room. Krest followed behind, and shut the door.

Foetid though the room was, it had once been opulent, and as Wollendorp’s eyes adjusted to the dimness inside, he saw that the ghost of luxury haunted the place. Oak panelling clad the walls, a frieze of wild animals and leaves round the top, the faces of Taal and Rhya peeking out from behind them in inscrutable, godly fashion. A large fireplace occupied one wall, likewise decorated in lordly style, although the fire held a pauper’s measure of coals behind its wire mesh. Tilean stucco work covered the ceiling, or rather it had, for a large portion of it had come away, revealing the lathes beneath. The room was altogether ghastly. Notwithstanding the smell, the dirty straw, the chipped and splintered furniture, the clashing styles of its decoration was simply appalling.

And then there was the iron grille running across the room, segregating a good third of it from its larger part. If the room was poorly maintained (and Wollendorp supposed it would look far worse in a strong light), this grille was not.

A table and two chairs were bolted to the floor out of arm’s reach of the grille. A ewer of water, a couple of horn cups, an oil lamp of indifferent manufacture and a pile of writing materials – paper, inkpot, blotter, sand and quills – were arranged neatly on its uneven surface.

‘There he is, sir,’ whispered Krest. He gestured to a shape in a high-backed chair on the far side of the fireplace. The playwright. Bickenstadt faced away from them, toward the windows as if he were taking in the view, even though all vestige of daylight was blocked by heavy, black curtains. A table stood next to this chair, upon it a large bundle of papers, roughly bound. A wizened fist, lit orange by the fire where it was not shrouded in shadow, rested atop this manuscript. That, and a glint of light off his bald scalp, was all that was visible of him.

The man in the chair spoke, causing Wollendorp to jump. He barely restrained himself from clutching at Meisen’s sleeve.

‘Are you the academic?’ His voice was raspy, metal rusted from too little use.

‘I–’ Wollendorp’s own voice came out a little high. He coughed again, and spoke more forcefully. ‘I am Kaspar Wollendorp von Averheim zu Heisenstadt, doktor of philosophy, formerly of the University of Altdorf, yes.’

‘Aha! Altdorf, I knew it well. I attended the university myself, you understand. And you are a gentleman also,’ the playwright coughed. ‘Although the Heisenstadts I understand are much richer than my own people.’

‘We are but a minor family sir, three generations ago nothing but simple merchants,’ said Wollendorp modestly.

‘We have much in common.’ The playwright conducted his conversation facing away from the two visitors but in all other respects he was as genial as a man meeting for debate and the pleasant passing of time in the better sort of tavern.

‘Indeed we have,’ said Wollendorp. He eased himself into one of the chairs and took up a quill. Its nib had not been cut into a shape he favoured, and naturally there was no penknife to be found to allow him to refashion it.

‘I want some wine. Do you want some wine?’ said Meisen. ‘Let’s ring for some wine.’ He looked pointedly at Krest. The warden nodded, and went to rouse the serving boy. ‘I hear you’ve some far-fetched tale of greenskins and the like.’

‘This is Captain Meisen, sir,’ said Wollendorp. ‘Of Averheim’s Scarlet Blades. We are here at the behest of Graf Osthammar to interview you.’

‘I know, I know, and I have waited so long for someone of your expertise to speak with. I fear few others would understand. I am disappointed it has taken you such time to come to me.’

Meisen and Wollendorp shared a glance. It was they, not Bickenstadt, who had been kept waiting, to the order of several months.

Meisen bent low to Wollendorp’s ear. ‘The man is oblivious to his periods of raving.’

‘I have been waiting, not raving,’ said Bickenstadt querulously. ‘It is you who has done me a discourtesy, not the other way. Still, it has at least given me time to work upon my book,’ said the playwright, and patted the manuscript. A smile entered his voice. ‘I hear very well, you know. It is the damnable darkness of this place. All those places. But it is the dark they like the best, and so I keep it that way, although it is hard on my eyes.’

Krest coughed and gave an understanding look to the visitors. Wollendorp had no idea why. He bobbed his head and left the room, gesturing to the bell.

‘If you need it, sirs,’ he whispered.

Sensing that the matter at hand was coming to the fore, Wollendorp picked up his pen and dipped it into the ink briskly. He was prone to indolence at times, but liveliness was his ruling trait when working. He tried not to let his excitement show. ‘Tell me, sir, are we speaking of the greenskins? Are we talking perhaps here, of the cave goblin or moor boggart? The lesser types? All are known for their love of dark places. Why, the lesser type can often be found in tree hollows,’ he spoke quickly, as he always did when expounding on his favoured subject. ‘Like owls,’ he added helpfully.

When Bickenstadt spoke next, Wollendorp began to set down everything the playwright said in a shorthand of his own devising. Try as he might to still it, his hand shook. Now was coming the revelation, whether or not this man had actually visited with Skarsnik, one of the most notorious goblins in the entire world. At least the dwarfs so reckoned him, and as far as Wollendorp could tell, the dwarfs had a tediously thorough system for categorising their enemies. It was to his disappointment that they had declined to share more with him.

‘Ah, no, no,’ said the playwright. ‘Cave goblins perhaps, for they live in caves, it is true. No, I speak of the night goblin. Do you know it, sir?’

Wollendorp blinked. ‘Why of course, although I prefer the term cave goblin. It is more fitting in my generic classification of the green races, I worked it through myself and–’

‘Well I, sir, can tell you that they do not like the name!’ The playwright’s voice rose to a hard bark. For the first time, Wollendorp heard the fractures of madness in it, like the warning creak seemingly solid ice makes before it gives way underfoot, tumbling the unwary into directionless, freezing blackness.

Wollendorp shuddered. He licked his lips. ‘Excuse my ignorance, night goblins then,’ he said.

Bickenstadt was mollified. ‘I must insist on the name, for he insisted. They find the name cave goblin rather offensive. “Cave runt” is what the orcs call them.’

‘Who insisted?’ The anticipation was an agony to Wollendorp.

‘Why, Skarsnik, of course! It is he of whom I will speak. I am of course working upon my own play about his life, as he requested. It is nearly finished now, but I thought it would refresh me to talk on the matter, especially with so eminent an expert.’

Wollendorp blinked. ‘He requested?’

There was a chink of chain as Bickenstadt shifted in his chair. ‘Yes, requested,’ he said reasonably. ‘First, before I divulge how he came to request this of me, I must tell you a little of myself.’

And so Bickenstadt began his tale. There were digressions, and long moments of silence, and times when Bickenstadt seemed to forget where he was or who he was talking to. In those moments Wollendorp came close to ringing the bell and summoning help, fearing the old man would leap up from his chair and hurl himself against the bars, but he was loath to leave his writing in case Bickenstadt should master himself and continue. This he invariably did, at least until the tale’s conclusion.

To Wollendorp and Meisen’s surprise, Bickenstadt was a lusty storyteller. He spoke with the offhand eloquence of the well-educated, and his metaphor tended to the florid, as one might expect from a habitué of the low theatre. As he became engrossed in his story, he would act out the various parts he described. He was a fine mimic of accents, human or otherwise, his thin voice adapting itself to the cant of an Estalian, or swelling to fill out the grunting baritone of an orc, or shrieking out the ludicrous squeaks of the goblins.

‘Well,’ a shaken Wollendorp would say to himself over and again, striving to rediscover his poise after the encounter had run its course, ‘what should we have expected? He was a playwright, after all.’

What follows here then is Wollendorp’s report of Bickenstadt’s account, tidied and edited by Wollendorp himself, yet otherwise unaltered from the lunatic’s own words, and presented here for your edification by I, Guido Kleinfeld, your humble servant. The passages concerning Wollendorp’s experiences at the Schloss Werdentraum are based on the doktor’s own recollections, related by himself to me, before his unfortunate death last year.

As to the truth of the tale, and the threat posed to our good Emperor’s realm by such a small and insignificant creature as a goblin, the debate on that matter has yet to be resolved.

A Black Library Publication

Plague Doktor first published in 2012.
Dead Winter first published in 2012.
Blighted Empire first published in 2013.
Plague Priest first published in 2013.
Wolf of Sigmar first published in 2014.
A Question of Faith first published in 2014.
The Last Man first published in 2014.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Jon Cave.
Map by Nuala Kinrade.
Internal illustration by Kevin Chin.

Skaven Wars: The Black Plague © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. Skaven Wars: The Black Plague, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78030-785-5

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

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