This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage.

At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it is a land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests and vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reigns the Emperor Karl Franz, sacred descendant of the founder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder of his magical warhammer.

But these are far from civilised times. Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war. In the towering Worlds Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands of the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods.

As the time of battle draws ever near, the Empire needs heroes like never before.

TEMPLEHOF CRAG

Sigmarzeit, 2522

Today, the sun had not risen at all.

Standing high up on the crag, a bald figure robed in yellow stared hard at the horizon. His focus was such that it looked as if he was trying to bring the sunlight through willpower alone. The robed man had been there for hours, yet all that the day had to show for itself was a gradual thinning of the darkness. An insult to the dawn, the figure thought. An insult to the name Sunscryer, come to that.

It had started less than a week ago, the great darkness that had been drawn like a shroud across the province of Sylvania. No one truly knew why, not even Sunscryer himself. Most of the theories had to do with supernatural creatures. More specifically, most of them had to do with vampires.

Already vegetation was beginning to wither and die. The animals would be next, starving for lack of sustenance. Before too long, the men and the women would follow them. And the children.

Something had to be done.

THE CONCLAVE OF STATE

Imperial Palace of Altdorf, 2522

With a tremendous crash, a rain-sodden corpse burst through the stained glass dome of the Grand Atrium. It slammed onto the banqueting table, bouncing a foot into the air and shocking the assembled elector counts seated around it before landing sprawled across the enormous map in their midst.

The dignitaries barely had time to shout in alarm before daggers of leaded glass sliced down. Though the Emperor himself was unhurt, Wolfram Hertwig had looked upwards reflexively at the crash and lost an eye to a splinter depicting Sigmar’s Triumphs. Helmut Feuerbach’s yellow Talabecland silk turned red as coloured shards sank into his flesh. Boris Todbringer earned yet another facial scar. Gausser of Nordland stared in shock at the wedge of stained glass pinning his hand to the polished mahogany of the table, and a shattered image of the Empire’s warrior god stared back. At the glassy icon’s feet was a depiction of Nagash Defeated. The Great Necromancer’s orb-like eyes glinted in the misty rain that drifted from the broken dome above.

The aides and servants ranged around the electors fared even worse. Elder Kattarin’s hunched back had been sliced to the spine by a pane the size of a stable door. Rudiger had been neatly decapitated in the act of picking up claimant-scrolls that Count Ludenhof had scattered in a fit of pique a few moments before. Shouts, cries, and challenges filled the octagonal hall, its famous acoustics magnifying the din into sheer bedlam.

‘Order!’ bellowed Grand Theogonist Volkmar. ‘Order, for Sigmar’s sake!’ He gestured sharply for his arch lectors to tend the wounded. ‘Stop squawking and just listen!’

The old warrior priest’s frustration had been simmering for a while. Five hours of watching the electors bicker over geopolitical boundaries had been close to torture for him, and now his ire had boiled over. Whether at sermon or in battle, Volkmar could out-bellow a minotaur, yet even he was struggling to make himself heard.

Emperor Karl Franz picked up the massive Book of State from the mahogany table and slammed it back down with a cannonshot boom. The confusion of voices instantly ceased. All eyes went to the head of the table. The only sounds were the whimpers of the wounded and the slither of blades sliding from their scabbards.

‘Less panic, more thought, please,’ said Karl Franz, coolly. ‘This corpse – intended as a message, no doubt. But from whom?’

The Grand Theogonist leaned over the body in their midst. Rainwater drizzled down gently upon it, pattering from the warrior priest’s shaven head as he stooped to investigate. Volkmar had given a shout of alarm as soon as he had seen a winged shadow disturb the moonlight illuminating the vellum map, but his warning had come too late. Now the highborn blood of several elector counts had been spilt, and several servants had met a sudden and messy end. Yet despite the body’s impact, the rainwater pooling around the cadaver was completely clear.

Reaching over, Volkmar moved the corpse’s arm from its pallid face. He shook his head slowly. This man had clearly died in a great deal of pain. A roll of thin leather had been jammed deep into his gullet, forcing his mouth open in a permanent scream. Volkmar yanked the scroll out and tucked it behind his arm in one smooth motion, turning to face Karl Franz with a curt bow.

‘As you say, my lord, a macabre message,’ said Volkmar, his voice cold. ‘Your eminence will remember my petition to follow up the disappearance of one Gunther Stahlberg, a witch hunter I despatched to investigate the rumours about Drakenhof Castle two years ago?’ The Grand Theogonist closed the corpse’s staring eyes and made the sign of the comet upon his chest. ‘By the looks of it, his body has been drained of blood for a long time.’

‘Careful, dolt!’ interrupted Count Gausser, spitting in indignation at the nervous aide attending to his injured hand. ‘Drained of blood, eh?’ he said, turning to Volkmar with a face as sour as lime. ‘You can tell that without cutting him open, can you? I see no wounds. No doubt you think that vampires are to blame?’

‘A single vampire, to be precise,’ replied Volkmar. ‘Mannfred von Carstein.’

Several of the more flamboyant electors scoffed in disbelief. It was widely known that Mannfred, the last of Vlad von Carstein’s evil brood, had been slain at Hel Fenn over four hundred years before. The Sylvanian aristocrat had been cut down by an alliance of dwarfs and men, finally bringing about the end of the Vampire Wars.

To their credit, most of the electors from the east of the Empire remained silent. Graf Haupt-Anderssen of Stirland made the sign of Morr, his features solemn. ‘As I have said many times now, my Emperor, darkness is rising in Sylvania.’

‘And further afield, it would seem,’ replied Karl Franz. He motioned Volkmar to continue.

‘The rainwater around his body shows not even a trace of discolouration, my Emperor. In my experience only a vampire can drain a body of blood so completely,’ said Volkmar. ‘He was… delivered to us by a winged creature, one strong enough to bear a corpse and yet stealthy enough to evade discovery. The hellbats of Sylvania have long been under the curse of undeath. Those creatures are large enough to bear a horse, and even the living ones have a hunting strategy based upon surprise. Lastly, the corpse is sprawled across the part of the map that depicts Sylvania. I doubt that is coincidence.’

‘Really?’ sneered Gausser. ‘And are these monsters of yours also known for their impeccable aim? I see you’ve deftly leapt to the conclusion that this poor fellow’s arrival is not your own mistake coming back to haunt you, nor is it an unfortunate side effect of our beloved Emperor’s menagerie, but instead a message from a minstrel’s villain who even now flees Altdorf on the back of a giant bat.’

‘Yes,’ said Volkmar, holding up a tightly rolled tube of leather. ‘And I’ve come to that conclusion because it is Mannfred von Carstein’s seal upon the scroll I just removed from the corpse’s throat.’

Emperor Karl Franz ordered the scroll broken open and read immediately. Though the missive was still slick with rainwater, its thin leather held the words in crisp detail. Volkmar’s scalp had prickled with an odd sensation when he realised that the scroll was made from human skin. The words had been not so much inscribed as tattooed. As the Grand Theogonist scanned the elegant, but archaic, calligraphy, he felt his blood rise. The message had a formal tone, but it was a challenge through and through.

‘Fellow counts,’ read the Grand Theogonist, his teeth gritted in disgust at having to give voice to the words of the undead.

‘I hereby make eternal claim to that which is mine. Sylvania thus secedes from thy petty Empire, as do all who dwell within her borders. Mortal or grave-bound, they are mine by feudal law, and let none dispute it. Look to the east and thou shalt find I have drawn a shroud of night across my rightful realm. In this way I demark it from thine own lands, where sunlight and hope are still welcome guests.

‘If this fact displeases thee, think long upon this. As the last great count of Stirland, my claim to the throne of the Empire is as true as thine own. My lineage runs deep and red, undiluted by the blood of fools and whores. Only one amongst thee can claim the same. Yet despite his great and noble ancestry, thy priest is old and spent.’

Volkmar swallowed a hard knot of rage. He looked long at Karl Franz, eyes locked in silent communiqué, before reading the rest of the letter.

‘Perhaps I will attend thy yearly feast of words someday, and feast upon thee in turn. Worthless and brief as you are, it would be a mercy. I predict little nourishment, and little challenge. For how can the great leaders of the Empire protect its borders, when they are barely aware of what is taking place under their noses?

Yours eternal,

Count Mannfred von Carstein,

The True and Lawful Lord of Sylvania’

Volkmar let the letter fall away onto the banqueting table, his heart pounding at its implications. Under their noses – an odd turn of phrase. Perhaps that meant…

‘The vaults!’ shouted Volkmar, instinctively reaching for the blessed warhammer hanging at his waist. ‘We have to get down there, right now!’

Karl Franz’s eyes widened. ‘By Sigmar, you don’t think that…’ He looked to his right for a moment, and swore under his breath. ‘Zintler, take as many Reiksguard as you can find and accompany Arch Lector Kaslain down to the Temple Vaults with all haste. If you find Schwartzhelm on the way, send him up here at once. Go!’

The moustachioed Reikscaptain saluted smartly and strode out of the octagonal hall alongside Arch Lector Kaslain, their armour chinking as they broke into a run. At Zintler’s command, the Reiksguard detachment that had stood vigil outside the Grand Atrium since the last change of guard broke position and joined them. Soon the wide, vaulted corridors resounded to the clangour of metal, the sound diminishing as they pounded down the hall.

Back in the Grand Atrium, Volkmar read over the vampire’s missive once more before slamming his fists onto the banqueting table so hard the corpse at its centre jumped a full inch into the air.

Reikscaptain Zintler strode down the wide flagstone stairs that led from the Imperial Palace to the undervaults of the Great Temple, a dozen-strong detachment of Reiksguard behind him. Flanked by the authoritarian figures of Arch Lectors Kaslain and Aglim, the officer met only the most perfunctory of challenges from the warrior priests guarding the entrance to the sacred vaults below.

‘Any trouble down there, may I ask, gentlemen?’ inquired Zintler.

‘None that I know of, sir,’ said the eldest warrior priest, making the sign of the comet. ‘Sigmar Exalt.’

‘Sigmar Exalt.’

Behind Zintler’s back, Arch Lector Kaslain exchanged a baleful look with his opposite number, Aglim, but they kept their peace.

As the detachment entered the first circle of crypts, the torches that lined the underground passageways illuminated monolithic stone gargoyles carved in the likeness of beasts. Each was a depiction of a legendary creature Sigmar had slain over his lifetime. The cobwebbed statues did little to lighten the mood.

Scanning the dusty reaches of each vault as they passed through, the Reiksguard made the symbols of Sigmar and Morr against their chests.

‘Keep together, please,’ said Zintler, smoothing his waxed facial hair. ‘Maintain two paces, nothing more. I want eyes on every corner.’

His men murmured their acknowledgements, none wishing to disturb the silence any more than necessary. Down here were the bones of every Grand Theogonist to have taken office, their souls united in an eternal vigil over the Cache Malefact at the heart of the vaults. Faint ghostlights flickered on the edge of vision above each sarcophagus. Technically it was blasphemy even to speak in the presence of these strange guardian spirits.

The grandiose tombs of Volkmar’s predecessors fanned out in maze-like circles that the investigators passed through on their way towards the cache. There the Sigmarite cult kept every magical relic it had recovered over two thousand years of war against the dark powers.

The Reiksguard probed further into the murk, and the air became charged with indefinable energies. Soon it was difficult to draw more than a shallow breath. Arch Lector Kaslain hefted the Reikhammer, his symbol of office and chosen weapon both. The hulking warrior priest cast a grim glance at his fellow arch lector as they passed the obsidian statues guarding the inner circles.

‘That smell…’ whispered Aglim, his brow furrowed.

Kaslain nodded in assent. The cold, musty tang of limestone hid a definite undertone of decay.

As the investigators passed the threshold, the intermittent light cast by their torches illuminated splintered wood and broken stone scattered across the flagstones. Thrice-locked chests had been smashed to pieces and suspended glass orbs dripped luminous fluids onto the consecrated ground beneath.

Amongst the debris were severed arms, legs and heads that drooled congealing blood. Kaslain nearly tripped over a torso with only one leg still attached, its livery that of the Templar Inner Guard. He curled his lip in distaste, nudging the human remains out of their way with his foot.

‘A proper benediction will be held for these men,’ he whispered, ‘but it can wait.’

Judging by the disembodied limbs scattered around the chamber, the intruders must have been creatures of unnatural strength. Yet there was no sign of the force that had wrought this destruction. Bright shimmers of gold, pearls and even the sickly glimmer of wyrdstone punctuated the debris. Whatever had done this was evidently not interested in wealth.

A funnel-shaped hole gaped in the middle of the floor. As Kaslain looked down into it an oily, rotten odour wafted up to assault his nostrils. Something foul had burrowed up through the limestone at speed, a feat no man could have achieved without suffocating.

‘Weapons please, gentlemen,’ said Zintler, his civility incongruous in the charged atmosphere of the deep vault. Almost as soon as he had spoken, a low gurgling growl came from the alcove at the back of the cache.

Whatever had done this was still in there with them.

There was a sudden flash of corpse-flesh as two pallid monstrosities swung down from their hiding places in the vaulted ceiling. Though they stooped low, when standing straight each one would have dwarfed a dockyard ogre. From their backs jutted great crests of overgrown vertebrae. Their hairless heads were those of degenerate old men forced into a life of cannibalism. Hanging from the talons of the rearmost beast was an ornate crown that looked too large even for its own massive skull.

The ghostlights of the sanctum’s Sigmarite guardians swam around the creatures, attempting to banish them back to the hells from whence they came. The creatures swatted at them absently. Suddenly the vile apparitions gave a deafening screech and loped towards the Reiksguard, accelerating with simian speed. Even Kaslain took a step backwards at the sight.

The first of the monsters barrelled into the Reiksguard with such force it smashed eight of them to the ground, impaling itself upon half a dozen swords and losing one of its hands in the process. It thrashed and flailed, snapping its stinking jaws. Aglim was pressed up against a pillar by the ghoulish thing’s flank. A mass of white flesh sweated unclean fluids onto his formerly spotless tabard.

The beast reared up, its gangly arms raised. To Kaslain’s amazement the red wounds the Reiksguard had opened in its torso were already healing closed. A raw stump had sprouted from its severed wrist, the suggestion of fingers pushing out. It swept its forearms across the Reiksguard ranks like a champion swimmer, bowling over yet more of the knights and forcing Kaslain to take another step back. Something was wrong about this fight. Their attacker was making itself a target for as many warriors as possible. In the cramped confines of the Cache Malefact, it was huge enough to bar their advance completely.

Kaslain touched the head of the heavy Reikhammer on the flagstones behind him for a brief moment before bringing it over his head in a glimmering arc. It smashed into the creature’s clammy pate with such force that its head burst clean apart. Foulness sprayed over everyone nearby as the decapitated body toppled backwards, arms splayed wide.

‘Grow that back, you bastard,’ said Kaslain, spitting on its twitching corpse. ‘Anyone hurt?’

The fine plate of the Reiksguard knights had been dented and stained, and two of their number lay dead and broken against the pillars around the edge of the cache. The rest of the escort was more or less intact. They mumbled and picked themselves up as Kaslain and Aglim searched around the chamber and looked up in the ribbed vaults, weapons raised.

Of the second of the two monstrosities, there was no sign.

‘Shit,’ said Kaslain, grimly. ‘That’s not good.’

‘Excuse me, sir?’ said Zintler. ‘We drove the damned things off, didn’t we?’

‘That second one,’ replied Kaslain, peering down into the darkness of the narrowing hole in the middle of the vault. ‘It had the crown.’

‘But the Emperor has the crown. We just saw him at state.’

‘Not the Imperial tiara, you bloody moustache on legs!’ said Kaslain, his voice trembling. ‘The bloody Crown of Sorcery! The Crown of Nagash.’

As the forbidden name echoed around the silence of the crypts, the torches of the Reiksguard flickered green for a second and went out.

Zintler’s detachment had returned in shocked silence to report to the Emperor, but now the Grand Atrium was getting another chance to show off its acoustics. Volkmar’s rage was always impressive, no matter how many times Kaslain saw it. Today, it was incandescent.

The elector counts had the good sense not to interrupt whilst Volkmar filled the air with thunderclouds of invective. He paced up and down in front of the returned delegation, systematically stripping Reikscaptain Zintler of every ounce of his dignity. Even Kaslain, the closest thing Volkmar had to a friend, had already been pinned beneath Volkmar’s towering wrath for close to five minutes. It had not been a happy feeling.

The Grand Theogonist had every reason to be furious. Technically speaking, the artefacts in the Cache Malefact were under the sole protection of the Sigmarite cult. The blame for the disappearance of the Crown of Sorcery would be laid squarely at Volkmar’s door, and everyone knew it. Since his return from the wars in the north, the old man had more than enough detractors ready to tear him down. The loss of such a potent relic would be the last nail in his political coffin. If it was not recovered within a matter of days, it could see him banished from office forever.

The stolen artefact had been found ten years ago after the breaking of Waaagh! Azhag, a greenskin invasion of such scale and ambition it had collapsed a swathe of the northern Empire. Altdorfer spies had claimed that whenever Azhag the Slaughterer had worn the crown he had talked to himself almost constantly, often replying to himself in sepulchral tones. The hulking orc had begun to show displays of uncanny military genius as well as the ability to wield the energies of death itself. At the Battle of Osterwald, however, he had fallen to the charge of the knightly orders nonetheless.

Since that day the relic had rested in the depths of the great temple, theoretically as safe as sacred Ghal Maraz itself. In practice, the vault’s wards and guardians had been unable to banish the fleshy horrors that had burrowed into it like worms in the darkness. The chances of the Sigmarite cult recapturing the crown from one as cunning as Mannfred were vanishingly small.

‘It’s obvious what happened, you fool!’ roared Volkmar, his red-veined face a finger’s breadth from Zintler’s nose. ‘The vampire wanted his master’s crown, so he ensured he had our attention long enough to snatch it. Stahlberg here,’ he said, motioning towards the fallen body as it was carried away by liveried servants, ‘was a decoy. The true attack was taking place beneath our feet! And we fell for it! You fell for it!’

Zintler apologised for the twentieth time, eyes down, but Volkmar was in full flow. Only the interruption of the Emperor spared the Reikscaptain from death by spittle.

‘Volkmar!’ shouted Karl Franz, exasperated to the point of intervention. ‘We need more than strong words to fix this.’

The Grand Theogonist turned to face the Emperor, shoulders slumping in despair. Behind him, Zintler surreptitiously dabbed his face with a handkerchief.

‘I cannot allow rebellion in my Empire to go unpunished,’ said the Emperor. ‘Let alone an uprising led by a vampiric dynasty we presumed long gone.’

‘No, my lord,’ replied Volkmar.

‘We have been hearing for weeks that the situation in Sylvania is dire,’ continued Karl Franz. ‘And today, it has been made painfully clear that these claims of a magical darkness haunting the province are based in fact. This bizarre act of secession needs putting down, immediately and finally.’

‘Yes, your eminence,’ replied Volkmar with a bow. ‘You speak wisely.’

‘Dissent amongst allies is not the solution. And neither is mustering the Altdorf army, before you suggest it,’ said Karl Franz, casting a warning glance towards the assembled elector counts. ‘We have our hands full in the north. Besides, we want to ensure the extinction of that slippery bastard’s line once and for all. We cannot afford to announce our intentions until we have him trapped. A grand show of force will merely drive him back into hiding.’

Karl Franz turned his attention to the gathered electors, meeting their gazes one by one.

‘Our foe in Sylvania is functionally immortal. He has all the time in the world to play hide and seek. We, however, do not. So, I put the question to you all. What do you intend to do about it?’

‘I will attend to this crisis personally, my Emperor,’ said Volkmar. ‘I… I will lead my own army of the faithful into Sylvania.’

The old man seemed to straighten as he spoke the words, his rounded shoulders setting firm.

‘I will lead a crusade of light against the darkness,’ he continued. ‘A crusade of the righteous and the vengeful, united in faith. I swear to you now, with the great and the good to bear witness. I will hunt down and destroy the fiend Mannfred von Carstein and reclaim the Crown of Sorcery from his ashes, or I will die in the attempt.’

Meaningful glances passed between several of the elector counts, but no one spoke a word.

‘Fine words, old friend,’ said Karl Franz softly. ‘Though, I am not sure that they are wise ones.’

‘I must go, my lord,’ replied Volkmar. ‘I have no choice. I am Sigmar’s appointed representative in the Old World, and therefore I must act in his name, regardless of the danger.’

‘Very well,’ said the Emperor, his tone resigned. ‘You have a better chance than most. Faith is a powerful weapon against the powers of darkness. Though, you will need help. Help that my armies cannot give.’ Karl Franz paused for a second and scribbled something down on a nearby parchment before passing it to a uniformed aide.

‘Go, then, and prepare the muster of the faithful,’ said the Emperor, laying down his quill. ‘Take Kaslain with you. Arch Lector Aglim can tend the flock in your absence.’

‘Thank you, your eminence,’ said Volkmar softly, meeting Karl Franz’s level gaze for the briefest moment. The look that passed between the two dignitaries was as close to a fond goodbye as circumstances would permit.

‘Don’t be so quick to thank me. I only hope you make it back alive. The darkness gathers thick these days.’

Volkmar bowed his head for a moment before starting towards the door.

‘May I ask how you intend to find your quarry?’ said Karl Franz.

‘Ah,’ said Volkmar. ‘Well… there is… There is one of my witch hunters still active in Sylvania, my Emperor. A man who knows that benighted realm like his own reflection. You will not like it, but he truly is our best chance at finding the vampire.’

The Emperor sighed. ‘Let me guess. Alberich von Korden?’

‘Indeed, my lord,’ said Volkmar, taking a deep breath. ‘Alberich von Korden.’

THE CROW AND HAMMER

Konigstein, 2522

The witch hunter reloaded his silver-chased pistols at the top of the stairs of Konig’s Coaching Inn, pouring in gunpowder before priming the flints. He calmly slotted his powder horn back into his bandolier, taking his longboot from the neck of the troglodytic ghoul that had sought him out. The inhuman beast had stopped twitching a while back, but it was always better to be cautious when it came to the living dead and their kin.

One down, three to go.

Cutting through the ghoul’s neck with a sharp blow from his sabre, the hunter kicked its body down the stairs and hung its disembodied head on a butcher’s hook at his waist. He laughed softly to himself, fingering the still-smoking hole in the beast’s forehead. A brace of ghouls’ heads was always useful for keeping the roadwardens quiet.

He had the upper floor of the inn to himself, by the look of it. The sound of flintlock shots and the blood splashed up the walls would keep the inn’s patrons cowering in their beds, at least until the rest of the pack showed up.

Sure enough, another ghoul skittered around the corner of the upper corridor. The foul thing cried out in a strange gurgling yelp that the hunter recognised as a pack-call. He glanced backwards and shot the creature silently creeping up behind him without so much as a blink of surprise. His consecrated bullet passed into the thing’s open mouth and blasted out of its back in an explosion of brown blood.

The witch hunter turned back to confront the ghoul loping down the corridor just as it sprang for his throat. He shot it in the chest mid-leap. Deftly stepping to one side, he let its flailing body smash into the ghoul bleeding out behind him. A sweeping heel kick sent them both tumbling down to join their headless friend at the bottom of the stairs.

Three down, one left.

The last ghoul was always the largest of the pack, a mark of cowardice in a species too devolved to care. He could hear it scrabbling around on the layered straw of the roof above him. He ducked to avoid a taloned arm that shot through the thatch and swiped at his face. ‘Stupid cannibal bastards,’ the hunter said. ‘Never get your timing right.’

Dropping the spent pistols, the hunter grabbed the flailing arm and pulled hard. A muscular ghoul tumbled down into the corridor, dust and straw filling the air. It leapt to its feet with surprising agility for a creature that looked like it belonged at the bottom of a swamp. No time to regain the pistols and reload. No time to use the white ring, either, come to that.

The foul thing leapt forward, talons swiping out. It was fast, hellishly so. One of its dirt-encrusted claws went for the witch hunter’s eyes, knocking off his feathered hat and opening his lip instead. The hunter growled as he tasted his own blood.

Pink spit-flecks formed at the corners of the hunter’s mouth as he jabbed a witch-pin into the side of the beast’s neck. A kick to the chest shoved it backwards, buying a second of precious time. The ghoul recovered quickly, pouncing forward once more, but the hunter had recovered too. The beast leapt straight into a brawler’s forearm jab. The hardwood stake strapped to the hunter’s wrist punctured its breastbone with a sharp crack. The witch hunter pushed the beast backwards all the way to the end of the corridor, impaling it against the crude wooden panels of the inn’s rearmost wall. The ghoul writhed there like an insect pinned to a cork board.

The hunter nailed the squealing creature’s arms to the wooden planks with a carpenter’s precision, driving his witch-pins home with a small replica of Sigmar’s own warhammer. He drew his butcher’s knife and sliced the beast’s hamstrings before unhurriedly reloading his pistols in case any more of the foul things turned up. Once the flintlocks were primed and checked, the hunter put his jutting chin within biting distance of his captive’s needle-toothed maw. It was in too much pain to notice, its beady red eyes swimming with tears.

‘Yes, you feel that, don’t you?’ said the hunter, grinning. ‘Vampire, ghoul or common man, a length of wood stuck into the heart always hurts like hell. I left it nice and splintery, just for you and yours.’

The witch hunter stowed his butcher’s knife and drew out a pair of sharp filleting blades, running the edges along each other with a slight musical chime. His cold smile widened, blood staining his teeth.

‘Boss?’ came a timid voice from behind him.

‘What?’ shouted the hunter as he wheeled around. His face would have scared a daemon.

‘Message for you, boss,’ said the hunter’s lieutenant, Unholdt. The mercenary was cowering like a beaten dog, despite the fact he practically filled the corridor. ‘From the lads up at the watch. They says it’s from the Old Man himself.’

Turning back to the wall for a second, the witch hunter sucked in his breath before putting one of his pistols under the beast’s chin and pulling the trigger, blowing the top of its head off in a spray of gore. He shoved his way past Unholdt, snatching his hat from the floor as bits of the ghoul’s brain pattered down from the ceiling.

‘This,’ hissed Alberich von Korden, ‘had better be big.’

KONIGSTEIN WATCH

The Vale of Darkness, 2522

The witch hunter strode through Konigstein’s rural outskirts, Unholdt trailing in his wake. Together they made their way through the gloom towards the ramshackle watchtower they had taken as a base. Jutting from the foothills at the base of the town’s peak, the tower was a forbidding sight. Jawless skulls kept a vigil from each of its eight walls, and the giant metal skeleton that crested its battlements stared down impassively at their approach.

Brass sentinels, the effigies were called. Cleverly designed by the Colleges of Magic as a way to impart information over large distances, each construct’s arms could be positioned like the hands of a clock with the turning of a few cranks. When used correctly, specific signals and even individual words could be passed from hilltop to hilltop. Even a message from as far afield as the Imperial Palace could be relayed across the Empire in less than a day.

Von Korden’s fellow hunter Stahlberg had told him that the alloys used in each brass sentinel’s construction were brewed by the alchemist-mages of the Gold College. Those observers with the second sight could perceive signals sent days or even weeks before – the traces made by the skeletal hands lingered in the air for those with the wit to read them. Sounds like witch’s work, von Korden had said at the time. Give me quill and parchment any day. Stahlberg had laughed and cocked his head knowingly in response, an odd habit of his that always made von Korden’s trigger finger itch.

‘Why do they have to look like skellingtons?’ moaned Unholdt, picking up on von Korden’s thoughts about the brass sentinel. The big man could be unusually perceptive, sometimes suspiciously so. He cast a baleful glance around the scattered tombs and ivy-covered walls that dotted the lands around the watchtower. ‘Don’t make sense to make the place look even more nasty, if you ask me,’ Unholdt continued. ‘Enough skulls and bones in the vale already, eh boss?’

‘I didn’t ask you, you fat oaf,’ said von Korden irritably. The brass effigy’s form made perfect sense to the witch hunter, but then he was something of an expert in inspiring fear.

‘Huh. That’s sturdy and handsome oaf, to you,’ Unholdt muttered under his breath.

As the two hunters approached the watch, a figure looked over the battlements for a second. Its helmeted silhouette was barely visible against the darkness of the Sylvanian sky. Despite their walk from the inn taking them just past noon, the afternoon sky already looked more like dusk.

Since the great darkness had fallen three weeks ago the colour had slowly been leached out of the province. Even the tough, wiry bloodweed that usually thrived in the vale was slowly dying through lack of sunlight, and most of the peasants had sought refuge in neighbouring provinces. Von Korden scowled. Give it a week and his men would most likely be the only living things left.

‘Open it now!’ commanded von Korden as he approached the heavy wooden door of the watchtower. A series of clunks and thuds came from the other side in response. The door opened half a foot, exposing the scarred snout of a large and ugly pig. It sniffed the air for a moment before its porcine owner licked its lips and grunted the all clear. It looked up expectantly at its witch hunter master with its beady black eyes.

‘Hello Gremlynne, you fat old sow,’ said von Korden, pushing open the door and tousling the pig’s tattered ears. He held out a pair of ghoul’s ears on his upraised palm, and they were snaffled up greedily, leaving the witch hunter with a handful of stringy spit. Only a pig could dine on ghoulflesh and get away with it, and the old beast had developed quite a taste for it in her years as a witch-sniffer. Von Korden wiped the pig slobber on Unholdt’s greatcoat and absently made the sign of the comet as he crossed the threshold.

‘Any attacks, Steig?’ said the hunter, looking sidelong at the tall guard waiting beside the door.

‘Nah,’ said the lanky Stirlander, fiddling with his ruined teeth. ‘They might try for a kill when your back’s turned, but not even a corpse-eater’s stupid enough to attack us here.’

‘Don’t bet on it, or that line of thought will get you killed,’ said von Korden. He cleaned the soles of his boots with the pitted bronze sword the garrison used as a boot-scraper, flicking the mud into a grave-pit outside the door. ‘This is Mannfred’s lot we’re talking about, after all. I found Heinroth Carnavein chewed up in his bed this morning. That makes me the only one of the order left in the province.’

‘Bloody bells,’ said Steig, shaking his head sadly. ‘That’s a damn shame, that is.’

Unholdt looked over at his comrade, a puzzled frown on his broad face.

‘Bastard owed me for cards,’ said Steig by way of explanation.

Unholdt rolled his eyes and moved over to the fire, poking it with the head of his long-handled mace. ‘Just tell ’im the bloody news, Sticks,’ he said, staring into the flames. Behind him, Gremlynne lay back down on her dirty rug and began to snore gently.

‘You can tell me in a moment,’ said von Korden. ‘I’ve a feeling I’m not going to like it.’ The hunter hung his battered hat on the bat-like skull of the Templehof vargheist, its wide brim covering the bullet hole under the gruesome trophy’s eye socket. He sank into an old leather armchair that puffed out all the dust it had accumulated since his last visit, and swung his longboots up onto the lip of the crumbling well at the watchtower’s centre. Settled in, he lit a bone-handled pipe and raised his eyebrows at Steig. A fug of blue smoke curled around his greasy grey-blond hair.

‘Well?’

‘Well, you got a message from the old Volcano himself, boss,’ said Steig, scratching his armpit like a flea-bitten dog. ‘You’re needed back in Altdorf, quick and double-sharp. Freidricksen reckons them clueless ponces at the conclave decided the sun going out was important after all.’

‘Ha! So they want me back at court, do they? Short memories.’

‘Looks that way,’ said Steig. ‘All’s forgiven when the lights go out, as my pa used to say.’

‘Hmph. Reikland idiots. They’re all as corrupt as each other. Right,’ said von Korden, tapping out his pipe and rising to take his hat from the vargheist skull on the wall, ‘I’m off to the Stir, then to try and buy passage back west. Unholdt, try to keep this lot alive until I get back, or at least give them a proper burial when you balls it up.’

By the fire, Unholdt looked at his captain preparing to leave and shook his head in wonder. Less than a minute of rest and von Korden was already heading off on another near-suicidal journey.

‘And if you do see our charming friends, the brothers Ghorst,’ continued von Korden, ‘for Sigmar’s sake stay the hell out of their way. No one wants a berth on that godforsaken cart. Steig – is there anything else I should know before I leave?’

‘Nah,’ replied Steig. ‘The high-and-mighties just want information, by the sound of it.’

‘Oh, they’ll get it,’ said von Korden darkly, snatching his parchment case and a pot of ink from the mantle on his way out the door. ‘Finally. They’ll get it.’

THE OLD WEST ROAD

The Vale of Darkness, 2522

The slow toll of an ancient bell rang out through the mist shrouding the Sylvanian country roads. Its peals were like the plaintive cries of a trapped child who knew no one could hear it.

The foul carriage the bell was mounted upon shivered and slid through the muddy ruts. Though the cart would perhaps pass as a peasant’s wagon from a distance, the creatures that pulled it were not mules, and its cargo was unusual even for Sylvania.

Lurching at the carriage’s front were two pairs of rotting corpses, the cross-spars of the cart’s yoke protruding from their ravaged chests. Gruesome fluids seeped from their punctured lungs and opened hearts as they strained to pull the contraption along. Maggots spilled from their sides with every bump in the uneven road. Their bare feet squished through the mud at a plodding but relentless pace, their broken ankles and missing toes no hindrance.

Behind them, the cart’s chassis was fashioned much like a giant upturned ribcage. Heaped amongst the bony spars were dozens of corpses in various states of decay. Those at the bottom were black with putrefaction, their organs dribbling yellowish fluids into the puddles of the road behind. Blind, hungry rats nipped at baggy stomachs and distended guts, scurrying back and forth in their quest for edible meat.

Atop the heaped corpses sat a hunched figure, cross-legged and robed in the manner of a mendicant. He crooned a lilting song over and over, a farrier’s loop he had written long ago to enliven the making of horseshoes. He had sung it for his brothers in life. The least he could do was to sing it for them in death, too.

The cart hit a rut in the ground and lurched sideways, causing one of the cadavers piled atop it to slide into the mud in a jumble of floppy limbs. The hooded figure tutted and the cart ground to a halt. The corpses at its fore slumped in their harnesses as if exhausted.

‘Come on, lads,’ said the robed figure. ‘We’ve been over this.’ His reed-thin voice had a forced jollity to it, like an exasperated teacher with a difficult pupil. ‘If you hit the ruts at an angle, we usually lose someone, and then we have to stop the cart again.’

His brothers moaned and drooled mindlessly, gnashing their broken jaws and lolling their skinless heads. The figure sighed. They used to be so strong, so reliable. Before the Plague of Blue Roses came, of course. Then everything changed.

If only he had been able to court the plague’s kiss too, he would at least have some measure of peace. But for some reason the spores had left his flesh without their signature rosettes, and he had been unable to catch it.

‘Not for lack of trying, mind,’ the figure whispered to himself.

That was when he had first used the spell. The spell of… life. It was a spell of life, no matter what the voices said.

Blinking to clear away the unwelcome thoughts, the figure called to mind the words his new friend’s book had taught him. He was so lucky he had fled into forbidden Vargravia after the incident in the village. Such wonders he had seen since that day.

As the robed figure began to chant, the cadaver that had slid into the mud slowly untangled its limbs as if rearranged by an invisible hand. All of a sudden it jerked upright like a puppet. The bell on the back of the carriage tolled of its own accord as dark powers welled around the cart.

As the fallen cadaver approached the ribs at the cart’s side, hands writhed and twitched in the heap, reaching out and helping the corpse back up into their midst.

‘I just knew you were going to be trouble, Master Carnavein,’ muttered the necromancer, looking disappointedly at the half-eaten corpse as it climbed aboard and collapsed backwards onto the pile. The cadaver’s mouth was open in a wordless scream. As the figure looked down, a rat wriggled inside its open jaws. ‘That’s better,’ said the figure. ‘Wedge yourself in tight. We’re all friends here.’

Helman Ghorst raised his eyes up to the dark skies rumbling above. Night was almost upon them. His friend Count Mannfred would be very upset if they were late.

‘Honestly,’ he whispered to himself. ‘At this rate we’ll never get to Konigstein Watch.’

SYLVANIAN BORDER, THE RIVER STIR

Five days later

The Luitpold III chugged through the night at a deceptive pace, smoke billowing into the trees that lined the river. The forests on either side of the Stir were so ancient their canopies entwined above the watercourse, their twisted branches linked together like the fingers of suicidal lovers. Strange howls echoed in the depths, and the occasional flurry of movement caught the eye of the guards ranged along the giant barge’s length.

Ten handgunners from the Stir River Patrol had been stationed port and starboard, but nobody seriously expected any trouble. The bestial tribes and forest goblins that haunted the riverbanks were savage, but they were not stupid. The armoured steam barge was a leviathan almost a hundred metres in length, a river-going fortress that boasted nautical-grade cannons and handgun nests along both sides. Unlike its predecessors, the Luitpold III was built to last.

Volkmar stood on the barge’s upper deck in the morning air, breath frosting in the cold as he straightened out his aching back. Mighty as it was, the armoured barge was no Heldenhammer. He felt a pang of loss at the grand old warship’s theft earlier that year, taken by stealth mere hours after he had refused to aid the pirate lord Jaego Roth in his quest to slay the vampire Count Noctilus. Now another priceless relic in the care of the Sigmarite cult had been stolen from under him.

Instead of his four-poster bed in the galleon’s Grand Templus, the Grand Theogonist had to make do with a cramped cot stained by the sweat of a dozen former occupants. He had left his dubious berth to get some fresh air, sick of the fug below decks and unable to sleep with his imminent disgrace hanging over his thoughts. Killing something that was already dead would make him feel better, no doubt. He was almost looking forward to plunging into lightless depths of Sylvania, far from the accusing eyes of the Altdorf court.

Standing upon the prow of the barge was von Korden, booted foot on the rail and eyes fixed on the river ahead. As far as the Grand Theogonist knew, he had been standing up there all night. He was quite a piece of work, that one, and as driven as any man he had ever met.

Years back, Volkmar had tasked the witch hunter with rooting out Chaos worship from the nation’s capital. The covert operation had backfired spectacularly. The witch hunter had been mercilessly effective, stirring up a hornet’s nest of corruption that stretched all the way from Marienburg to Kislev. The latter stages of the debacle had seen von Korden burn an entire cult of Chaos-worshipping nobles at the stake. That was all well and good as far as Volkmar was concerned; the realm could use a few less traitors to the crown. The problem was that the witch hunter had also burned dozens of ‘accomplices’, family members and servants who had committed no crime other than being linked to the guilty parties by blood or even solely by profession.

That had been just the beginning. Before the year was out von Korden had a reputation for executing as many of the innocent as he did the guilty. Pressure was applied from the guilds to have the hunter disposed of, and events had spun even further out of control. Karl Franz himself intervened by having von Korden reassigned to Sylvania, where his pitiless attentions could be directed towards the restless dead instead of the living.

The Emperor’s course of action had proved wise. Despite the persecution of his order by the forces that haunted the Vale of Darkness, von Korden had thrived there. He had three vampire kills to his name already, and the fanged skulls to prove it. Earlier that day he had boasted to Volkmar that he fully expected Mannfred to be the fourth.

The forces of undeath were fighting back, though. According to the extensive journals the witch hunter had handed Volkmar in the Grand Temple, von Korden had been the only one of his order left alive in the entire province. The rest had been hunted down and killed in their beds.

Volkmar suppressed a surge of rising temper at the thought. Merciless killers or not, the witch hunters were operatives of the Sigmarite cult, and he could ill afford to lose them. To fight the monsters of the world, one must sometimes become a monster, or a madman at the very least.

His thoughts strayed to the brotherhood that called themselves the Tattersouls, busily whipping themselves bloody below decks as part of their morning prayers. Not madmen as such, just… fanatically zealous. Especially in the presence of a blessed relic like the war altar of Sigmar, or – say – the head of the Sigmarite cult. The Grand Theogonist blew a long, frosting plume of breath out of his cheeks. Perhaps that was another reason why he loved prayer time so much. It was about the only time the bloody maniacs left him alone.

‘Your holiness?’ came a respectful voice. ‘We’re approaching it now.’ Captain Vance of the Luitpold III, a heavily tattooed veteran of the River Patrol, moved up beside Volkmar and motioned him forward. Volkmar picked up the hem of his robes and stepped over the rope-stops until he got to the front of the barge, deliberately keeping a few paces between himself and von Korden. Whatever the witch hunter had in that pipe stank to high heaven.

The river wound on with majestic slowness, the forest eaves silent to either side. Volkmar was on the verge of asking Captain Vance what he was talking about when they turned a bend in the river and the scale of the curse affecting Sylvania became horribly clear.

A curtain of almost tangible darkness had been drawn across the horizon, or what they could see of it. The wall of grey-black gloom obscured everything on the other side – Volkmar could just about make out the waters of the Stir, but little else. He shook his head slowly. Von Korden had not been exaggerating after all.

‘It’s worse than it was,’ said the witch hunter, dolefully. ‘Even since I left, it’s got noticeably worse.’

‘Shadow magic, you think?’ asked Volkmar.

‘A corrupted version, perhaps,’ replied von Korden. ‘This has to be something far stronger, though. It’s killing the whole province from the bottom up. First the plants die, then the creatures that eat the plants die, and then, when the food runs out altogether…’

‘The people start to eat each other,’ finished Volkmar.

‘It happens,’ said von Korden darkly, his sidelong glance meeting the Grand Theogonist’s eye for a moment. ‘It happens more often than you’d think.’ The witch hunter’s face twisted into a mask of rage for a second, startling Volkmar with its intensity.

The hunter took a long draw from his pipe, masking his features with his hand before continuing. ‘The von Carsteins,’ he said. ‘They’ve always brought the night with them, especially when going to war. Swarms of bats, thunderclouds even. It’s something to do with their curse. They can’t stand direct sunlight. But this… this is something else.’

The two men stared out into the Sylvanian darkness, each lost in their own thoughts. Behind them, the barge’s crewmen were surfacing from below decks, a handful of the Talabheimers that Volkmar had requested as reinforcements from Leitzigerford in their wake. There were muttered comments and a few gasps as more and more men emerged onto the deck.

‘My apologies, your honour,’ said Captain Vance. ‘I’ve spoken to the lads. We respect what you’re doing and all, but we’re not much for this cursed murk. We’ll take you as far as Helsee, but that’s us done. The river widens enough even for the Luitpold to come about, down there. The idea is to be heading back before night falls. Well, proper night, if you take my meaning.’

Volkmar looked at von Korden for a second, his eyebrow raised.

‘Helsee’ll do fine,’ said the witch hunter quietly, his eyes still straining into the darkness.

‘Understood,’ replied Volkmar. ‘Captain, you’ve more than done your duty getting us this far this quickly. See us safe to Helsee and you can return to Altdorf with my blessing. The temple will reimburse you for your time, and for the coal.’

‘My thanks, your holiness,’ said the captain, sketching a bow and heading back to the steamhouse at the barge’s stern.

The curtain of darkness came closer with every passing minute. As the barge neared within a stone’s throw, the Grand Theogonist felt a powerful urge to head below decks so the unnatural darkness could not touch his skin. For a moment he even considered cancelling the whole crusade and heading back to the safety of the light. He fought the feelings off with ease, but they disturbed him nonetheless.

‘Felt that, did you?’ said von Korden, his humourless smile widening as they passed into the shroud of darkness.

‘I did indeed. Someone wants to be left alone.’

‘That someone,’ said von Korden, ‘is in for a surprise.’

HELSEE

The Vale of Darkness, 2522

Helsee, the vast body of water that fed into the Stir from the heart of Sylvania, was poorly named. It might well have seemed like a sea to the peasants that first discovered it, for it was larger than any other lake in the Empire, but according to Captain Vance it could theoretically be crossed with less than a day’s sail. Volkmar gazed out across the thin mist that covered the waters. The peasants had got the first part of the name right, at least. Woe betide the fool who plied it in anything less than a waterborne fortress.

The lake’s waters were black with some nameless curse. Grasping little waves clawed at beaches whose sands were little more than powdered bone. Scattered amongst the osseous dunes were the bleached remains of strange and indefinable monsters that prowled Helsee’s depths. Their skulls reminded Volkmar of the dragon bones he had gawped at as a boy in the Altdorfer Mausoleum; he had spent the rest of the day slaying invisible dragons with the wooden Ghal Maraz his father had carved him. Precious times, far too long in the past.

On the shores of the lake the crusaders were debarking from the Luitpold III with commendable efficiency. With the help of the barge’s crew and the strongest of the crusade’s warriors, even the war altar’s mighty carriage had made it to the shore without getting wet. Atop the barge’s foremost turret stood Captain Vance, shouting orders in a voice used to command. He had clearly performed similar operations a hundred times before. The upper parts of the fortified barge’s flanks had been splayed and pivoted to become great ramps that looked like they could support a steam tank. Nearby, Volkmar’s troops were filing out and forming up without complaint.

Volkmar surveyed the men on the bone-white beach, his pride at the efficiency of their disembarkation marred by the fact there was so damn few of them. Less than a hundred, all told, even with the reinforcements that Karl Franz had arranged to meet them at Leitzigerford. Still, what they lacked in numbers they more than made up for in faith. Volkmar and Karl Franz had made sure of it. Even the Talabheimers had been individually selected for the strength of their religious beliefs. In the war against the evils of the world, true faith was worth a dozen swords. In battle against the horrors of undeath, it was priceless.

By the shore were Sigmar’s Sons, a regiment of devout and reliable swordsmen that Volkmar had fought alongside against the Chaos worshippers of the north. They were helping to debark an Imperial great cannon that had begun its military career at the Gorstanford witch trial many years ago. At the foot of the ramp von Korden was briefing the champion of the swordsmen, Eben Swaft, along with Bennec Sootson’s artillerymen and the dark-skinned leader of the Knights of the Blazing Sun, Lupio Blaze. The Estalian officer’s knights wore polished black plate adorned with suns of solid gold, and the warhorses they led down the barge-ramps wore scalloped barding lacquered with stylised solar flares.

The Estalians worshipped the warrior goddess Myrmidia over Sigmar, but their faith was strong nonetheless. Preceptor Blaze had practically begged Volkmar to let his men join the crusade, and though the Grand Theogonist had initially refused them on grounds of divergent religions, he had eventually come round to the idea. A unit of heavy cavalry could be very useful indeed.

Down on the bone beach the Tattersouls were chanting devotional hymns as they carried the war altar up to the path. Once on firm ground the giant wheeled conveyance could be properly constructed, lashed to its warhorses, and its giant griffon statue restored to pride of place. Vance’s bargemen had already got a system of pulleys rigged up, but their calm methodical approach was lost on the wild-haired zealots that insisted on helping them. The ragged figures pushed and pulled with more enthusiasm than skill, warbling and bellowing praise to the Empire’s warrior god. Volkmar watched in horror as a pulley slipped the rope, sending the griffon swinging down to crush one of the doomsayers under its colossal weight.

‘O Sigmar, I come to thee!’ cried the dying flagellant, eyes wet with rapture and pain. ‘The end, the end!’

‘Don’t just stand there like eunuchs at an orgy!’ shouted Curser Bredt, marksman-sergeant of the Silver Bullets. ‘Give the clumsy bastards a hand!’

Four of Bredt’s men kissed the bullet talismans that hung around their necks and rushed forward, bodily wrestling the statue back up into place. It was too late for the unlucky zealot, though; his ribcage and right arm had been crushed into a bloody mass. Somehow he was still smiling gummily, his watery eyes fixed on some faraway paradise. Volkmar shook his head as Kaslain gave the final blessing to the dying man. The war altar was a source of great faith and determination, but by Sigmar, the damn thing was heavy.

The hubbub of the muster was pierced by a shout from one of the Tattersouls. Nothing special in itself, but there was a note of warning in its tone that made Volkmar spin round. Something was moving in the shallows. The Grand Theo-gonist took a few steps forward, brow furrowed. Sure enough, the skulls and bones on the bed of the lake were moving. Femurs shivered, claws twitched, and vertebrae rolled as if pulled by hidden threads. Piece by piece the skeletons were coalescing, coming together once more into the predatory beasts that once haunted the waters.

‘Form up!’ boomed Volkmar at the top of his voice as he strode down to the water’s edge. ‘We’re under attack!’

His men rushed towards their banners, some still tightening their bootstraps or hurriedly strapping on armour. The monstrous skeletons in the shallows were piecing themselves together faster and faster, spines clacking into place and arm bones reattaching to shoulder sockets like a dissection in reverse.

A three-eyed skull rose out of the shallows on a thick bony neck. Unclean water poured from crocodilian jaws as the skeletal titan rose up to its full height. Behind it the remains of a monstrous limbed fish lurched onto all fours with a splash, a weird crackling coming from its grinning skull. Behind it, five more misshapen skulls breached the surface. Along the waterline a dozen sets of bubbles began to boil.

The Silver Bullets were the first to act, sending a volley towards the largest of the skeletal creatures. A few of the shots hit home, but most went whistling straight through. Vance’s barge was next to fire, a cannonball blasting between two of the foremost creatures and taking out a third in a spray of shattered bone.

Volkmar pulled his warhammer from his back and splashed out into the shallows until the water lapped around his knees. Setting his feet in the shale, he bared his teeth and willed the beasts to come closer. Von Korden appeared at his side, silvered pistols drawn. To either side of them armed crusaders splashed into the water, shouting defiance as they formed a wall of blades.

Three of the undead beasts crashed into the Talabheimers at the shoreline, fleshless jaws snapping and tearing. Swords stabbed and slashed in response, but even the most determined attack did little but nick their algae-slicked bones. A three-eyed monstrosity loped towards Volkmar, jaws open as it reared back to strike. Von Korden blasted a pair of holes in its skull with such force and accuracy that it toppled backwards in a jumble of bone. Volkmar scanned the waterline during the second’s reprieve the hunter had bought them. The blades of his men were having little effect.

The Grand Theogonist took a deep breath as the fish-headed quadruped splashed towards him. He alone could break the magics at work here, and even then it would take a miracle. Yet he had little choice. Plunging his sacred warhammer into the cursed lake with both hands, he channelled all his hatred and revulsion into a blast of spiritual energy.

‘Die in the name of the Heldenhammer!’ he boomed, bloodshot eyes bulging. ‘Die, I command you!’

Golden light suffused through the waters like the spilt blood of some celestial being. Tendrils of pure energy spread outward from Volkmar’s gauntlets, touching the bony legs of the guardian beasts. One by one, the monsters collapsed back into the water, the binding magics that had animated them undone.

Volkmar straightened and thrust his arms into the air with a roar of triumph. Golden droplets sprayed out in all directions from his still-glowing fists.

‘Look upon this act, men of Sigmar, and find hope!’ he bellowed. ‘The evils of this realm, undone by strength of will and by the force of the one true faith!’

Standing in the shallows a few feet away, von Korden pulled a sour face, eyebrows knitted as he protectively dried his pistols with a lambskin cloth.

‘If you got any of that water inside these barrels, old man,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll kill you myself.’

KONIGSTEIN ROAD

The Vale of Darkness, 2522

Von Korden trudged along the roadways of Sylvania at the head of a small column of troops, the occasional crunch of shattered bone punctuating the squishing of thick black mud. The place had become even more dismal since he had left for Altdorf. Thin rain pattered down from the charcoal skies above, and the howls of the wind had taken on a very unsettling tone.

A rivulet of rainwater dribbled off the broad brim of the witch hunter’s hat, spattering his knees. The image of an armchair, a pig and a pipe by the fireplace swam to the surface of the hunter’s mind. He crushed it out with practiced ease. Not long now, a few more miles at most. And if he was fortunate enough to meet Ghorst and his brothers on the road, well, he had more men than ever to ensure they were cut down and burned to ash. He would warm his hands over the flames and be done with it.

The crusade’s victory over the monsters on the Helsee shores had raised the spirits of the men for a time. With von Korden leading the way, they had made good speed past the nearby cairn circle whilst its guardians were still dormant in their tombs, and avoided the quagmires of Grim Moor in the process. When they had finally reached the palisade walls of Uflheim that evening, the soldiery’s victory celebrations had drained every last barrel in the town. Most of the Talabheimers had to be kicked out of their beds the next morning. Von Korden ground his teeth at the recollection. Idiots all. It was premature indulgence at best, and a fatal mistake at worst.

Now the crusade was back to marching through the thick of the Sylvanian gloom. The unnatural darkness had a way of getting to the common man, but the witch hunter found it strangely relaxing. Behind him, nearly thirty state troops marched as best they could along the road, Blaze’s warhorses taking shifts to pull the great cannon in their wake. It was slow going, and morale was sinking with every passing hour. Many of the men were already complaining about the grim conditions of the march. Von Korden snorted in disdain. If a bit of mud and twilight was such a problem, then Sigmar help them when night fell.

Eben Swaft, the sergeant of the Sons, walked up level with the witch hunter. His gaze was fixed on the road ahead.

‘So tell me again the reasons we’ve split our forces up?’ the sergeant asked casually, flexing the blade of his rapier with a gloved finger. The witch hunter sized him up with a sidelong look. Swaft was a large man, and his body was tattooed so thoroughly with Sigmar’s Triumphs it would impress a Marienburg stevedore. Yet despite his muscular build, even when walking through thick mud the swordsman showed the poise and balance of a born duellist.

‘It’s as simple as you are, Swaft,’ the witch hunter growled. ‘Volkmar wanted to investigate Fort Oberstyre, whereas I thought that was a foolish waste of time and manpower. I’m going to Konigstein and that’s that. You rabble are coming with me.’

‘But… he’s the Grand Theogonist. The spiritual descendent of Sigmar himself, and all that.’

‘And?’

‘And surely what he says goes? Especially for one of you witch-botherers, right?’

Von Korden wheeled around to face Swaft, grabbing the man’s rapier by its razored blade and stepping inside its reach so the soldier could smell his breath. Blood dripped from between the fingers of the witch hunter’s gloved hand as the sword cut deep. In the mud below, leechworms writhed.

‘Listen to me, you self-satisfied little shit,’ hissed von Korden, ‘Oberstyre is riddled with ghosts, and not the kind you learned about at your grandmother’s teat. The last garrison of state troops that spent the night in its allegedly deserted chambers got ripped to pieces. Since our friend Count Mannfred has a twisted sense of humour, their tortured spirits are now bound into its walls alongside their killers. Perhaps you want to join them, eh?’

The swordsman recoiled a little, but to his credit he stood his ground.

‘With respect, sir, I never thought of you as a yellowgut.’

Von Korden swelled visibly, eyes staring death and nostrils flaring. The witch hunter bent the duellist’s sword close to breaking point, droplets of blood running fast down the blade. His other hand whipped upward, the point of a filleting knife less than a finger’s width from Swaft’s eye.

‘Konigstein is within the prowling grounds of Helman Ghorst, Mannfred’s accomplice,’ he said coldly. ‘If I get the necromancer under my blades, I’ll have the path right to von Carstein’s coffin within the hour.’

The witch hunter breathed out, lowered his knife and pushed the swordsman’s rapier away. He nodded towards its blooded blade. ‘Swords?’ he sneered. ‘Lances? Useful tools against Ghorst and his corpse-puppets. Bugger all use against ghosts. I found that out the hard way, boy. Faith’s the only weapon they fear. And Volkmar and his maniacs have plenty.’

‘Right,’ said Swaft, slowly and carefully. ‘Well, that does make some sense, I suppose…’

Von Korden turned on his heel and splashed off along the muddy path, shoving his pistol back into its holster and closing the hold-clip. The duellist returned to his men, his finger making circular motions next to his forehead.

The witch hunter pulled his hat low, grimacing in pain as soon as he was around a bend in the road. He was cold, he was wet, and his hand stung like hell. As soon as he had left the altercation with Swaft he had shoved a piece of lambskin into his glove to soak up the blood, but it still hurt to flex it.

The Talabheimer had a right to ask, truth be told. To a soldier, it made no real sense to split up their already pitifully small army. Yet judging by the thickening darkness, time was running short. They had to pick up Mannfred’s trail somehow.

To von Korden’s mind they had dallied far too long at Helsee, burying the fools who had rushed into battle. To make matters worse, some of the Talabheimers had thought that simply boiling the lake’s black waters would make them safe to drink. Idiots all. They had deserved to die in pain, clutching their bellies and gasping like beached fish. The Silver Bullets had insisted the corpses were buried face down. They had pressed pennies for Morr into the eyes of the dead, placed wild garlic and hawthorn in the mouth; the whole damn lot.

The witch hunter knew a quicker way to ensure against the dead coming back to life – cut their bloody heads off and throw them in the fire. Yet the suggestion had not gone down well. They had tarried so long that they had no choice but to spend the night at Uflheim, and even though they had set off early, the dim half-light of their second day on the road was already fading fast.

As the forlorn procession crested the crags that led to Konigstein, the town’s tumbledown temple of Morr came into view by the side of the road. Von Korden felt his spirits rise a little at the familiar sight. His hand strayed to the pocket that contained his pipe.

Around the temple’s graves the sprawling garden of black roses was turning brown, starved from lack of sunlight. Von Korden peered inside as he walked past. The font was dry and the cracked altar was dotted with fox droppings. Pale patches on the plaster showed where the temple’s holy symbol had once hung. Despite the potential value of the silver plating, no Sylvanian peasant or bandit would have been sacrilegious enough to steal it, especially not from the god of the restful dead.

To hear the gossips tell it, the icons of every last temple across the realm had been taken over the last few years. The work of Mannfred’s Strigany agents; von Korden was sure of it. Most likely the artefacts had already been melted down or buried somewhere where living men fear to tread. Sylvania had been without priests since the days of Mannfred’s bloodfather, Vlad von Carstein, so no one had been too concerned about their holy symbols. Now the abandoned temples were the only evidence that the gods of the Empire had ever had a home in Sylvania.

Down in the shallow valley von Korden could see the scattered buildings of Konigstein, but not a single light glimmered from their windows. Six hours since leaving Uflheim and they still had not seen a living soul. Even the hunter’s watchtower was a cold black silhouette bereft of any sign of life. The brass sentinel’s bony arms still jutted out in the same position as when the witch hunter had left it over a week ago.

A low moan echoed across the vale, making von Korden’s hackles rise. It was a noise he had learned to hate. He listened hard for the toll of a bell, but there was only silence.

‘Form up on approach!’ von Korden shouted down the trail, gesturing for his small army to spread out. ‘Battle line in less than three minutes!’

The state troops behind him fanned out over the other side of the crag, relieved to have some room to manoeuvre. As the last of the Knights of the Blazing Sun moved past with the great cannon in tow, Bennec Sootson waved the Estalian cavalrymen over to a crested ridge. His men began unshackling the artillery piece from the last of the warhorses with quick, practiced efficiency.

Lupio Blaze left his men and trotted over to von Korden on his massive war stallion, raising his helmet’s visor as he came close. It clicked neatly into place against a crest fashioned in the shape of a burnished metal sun, revealing a handsomely tanned face beneath. The triple plume of feathers that fanned out from the helmet was magnificent and bolt-upright despite the pattering rain. If anything, the rainwater made the knight’s burnished armour look even more lustrous than usual.

Von Korden decided he did not like him one bit.

‘You are expecting trouble?’ the knight asked, his lilting accent irritating to von Korden’s ears.

‘Yes,’ said von Korden dismissively.

‘The dead, they do not sleep well here,’ said Blaze in a mournful tone. ‘It is said by many.’

‘Many are right. Watch the ground as well as the road.’

The knight pursed his lips and nodded thoughtfully before continuing. ‘We say “Myrmidia shine upon our blades,” to give favour.’ He smiled widely as he shaped the rays of the rising sun with his fingers. ‘She is needed here, no?’

Von Korden snorted and made the sign of the comet against his chest instead. Myrmidia indeed. Soft southern gods, all face and no fight.

The knight took the witch hunter’s silence as a hint and wheeled his horse around, cantering back to rejoin his men.

‘There are wolves,’ Blaze called over his shoulder as he left. ‘The horses feel them.’

‘At least the nags are useful, then,’ muttered von Korden.

Von Korden watched the state troops taking their positions, and found himself quietly impressed. The Silver Bullets took up a staggered two-line formation on the left flank, just below the low ridge where Sootson had set up the Hammer of the Witches. Von Korden recalled the first time he saw the great cannon fired, during the burning of the twisted witch that Sootson’s fellow villagers called the Grey Hag. The witch hunter’s execution had gone badly wrong when the old woman had taken control of von Korden’s flames, rather than the other way round. Sootson, the town’s blacksmith at the time, had primed the newly-repaired cannon, shoved a bucketful of horseshoes into it, and finished the job by blasting the she-devil across the square. Quick thinking, but not quick enough to stop Gorstanford going up in flames.

Taking the front line on the right flank were Sigmar’s Sons, moving forward in ranks four deep with the Bullets covering their advance. Lupio Blaze kept his cavalry behind the leftmost ridge, patiently waiting for the cannon fire that was their signal to charge in.

Von Korden himself was leading from the front, as was his custom, the regiment of swordsmen a few paces behind him. The witch hunter peered through the thin mist of rain that shrouded the tomb-strewn wilderness around Konigstein Watch. The tower’s shuttered windows had been broken apart and the graves around the place gaped open to the night sky.

‘The spoor of necromancy,’ said von Korden to the swordsmen behind. ‘There are undead here, sure as those graves are empty.’

Suddenly there was a dull wooden crack and a cry of alarm from up on the ridge. The hunter scanned the area, but he could see nothing moving in the mists ahead. Looking back up to the Silver Bullets, he saw the handgunners’ musician, Lutiger Swift, standing lopsided. His left leg was knee-deep in the splintered coffin exposed by his one-man mudslide, and his free hand reflexively clutched the talisman around his neck.

‘Bloody balls,’ exhaled Swift, his city-born Talabheim accent unnaturally loud. ‘I knew I’d end up in a casket eventually, but this is a bit sudden!’ His comrades laughed and jeered as their comrade extricated himself from the wooden ruin of the grave. ‘Sorry, gents. One of the local girls was a bit lonely,’ the musician joked, shaking his leg to dislodge a shattered ribcage that clung to his foot. ‘Very hospitable, this lass.’

‘Didn’t know you liked ’em that skinny, Lute!’ said Ulf Weissman, propping the standard of the Sigmar’s Sons in the crook of his neck in order to make an obscene gesture in Swift’s direction.

Von Korden stormed back up the ridge, his face twisted into a wild-eyed snarl and his hand palming a filleting knife. Discipline would be restored, one way or another.

The hunter stopped suddenly, sniffing the air. Something foul lingered under the peaty smell of wet earth. A moment later the dull moaning that von Korden had heard minutes earlier drifted through the mist, coming from the tumbled walls just beyond the tower. The witch hunter listened carefully.

This time, he distinctly heard the low toll of an ancient bell.

Waving his arm behind him in signal, von Korden darted back to the front line and crouched down behind a shattered tombstone. Sure enough, there were ghostlights in the gloom. Strange figures began to coalesce in the misting rain, skeletal shapes that moved in jerky synchronicity. One by one, a clutch of dead things scraped and staggered their way towards the trespassers. They stalked with painstaking slowness around the yawning graves and jutting hillocks, forming up in front of a tumbledown wall. Their ranks were a mockery of a proper military unit. Slack jaws dangled from fleshless skulls and rusted armour clanked gently on ice-cold bone.

‘Sigmar’s sack, just look at ’em all,’ exhaled Swift.

‘Shut your damn mouth, Swift, you’ve embarrassed yourself enough already,’ growled Curser Bredt, taking a bead on the skeletal warriors with his rifle. ‘Concentrate. As soon as I give the order, make every one of those bullets count.’

Hastening back to the vanguard, von Korden gestured forward and right. In response Sigmar’s Sons double-timed as best they could towards the abandoned watch. It did not bode well that Unholdt and the rest of his men had not yet emerged onto the roof. Still, they needed to secure the tower, whatever horrors lurked inside.

The mist ahead thinned for a second. It revealed hunchbacked shadows that moved like long-limbed toads across the grass, leap-stop-leaping towards the swordsmen. Von Korden almost called out a warning, but bit his tongue. Ghorst would be close by, and the necromancer would flee if he knew his old persecutor was on the field. The hunter was relieved when Bredt spoke out a second later.

‘Change target, new marks below!’ shouted the gunner-sergeant. ‘Mind the Sons!’

The Silver Bullets swivelled as one, taking a bead on the ghouls in the mist below them as the Sons broke into a hunched run. The handgunners fired a sharp fusillade, hurling one creature backwards and taking another in the throat so hard it left its head dangling on its back. The ghoul kept going for a second before collapsing into a grave-pit. Von Korden met Sootson’s eye up on the ridge, and a few seconds later two more ghoul-things were blasted apart by the Hammer of the Witches. Two of the pallid creatures were ahead of the rest, leaping on the rearmost swordsman and tearing great strips of flesh from his back. The rest of the unit formed up, turning as one at a barked order from Eben Swaft.

The swordsmen fought hard to lock their shields, stabbing at sore-pocked faces and necks as the ghouls groped and slashed with their long, dirt-encrusted fingers. Arterial blood spurted in the mist, the hot red of the state troops splashing uniforms alongside the brackish brown of ghoul gore. Von Korden wished he was in the thick of it with them, but he had other matters to attend to.

Horses snorted and tack jangled to the witch hunter’s left as the Knights of the Blazing Sun galloped down into the fight. He waved them on, gesturing with a pistol in the direction of the skeletal warriors that were stalking towards the Silver Bullets. With the skeletons engaged against the knights on the left and the ghouls fighting tooth and nail against Sigmar’s Sons on the right, von Korden was free to pursue his own agenda.

Heldenhammer be praised. There he was.

Lurching through the mist ahead came Helman Ghorst, stooped atop his charnel cart. Four grotesque corpse-things pulled it forward in fits and spurts. The putrid stench of the cart’s rat-infested cargo was like a living thing in its own right. The witch hunter broke cover for a second and ran in a crouch from gravestone to tomb, a feral grin stretching his features. He gestured back to Sootson’s cannon, an open hand that meant ‘hold fire’. He needed Ghorst alive if they were to find Mannfred before the realm of Sylvania was lost altogether.

Ahead, Ghorst was scanning around, mumbling something that von Korden strained to hear. Suddenly the arcane words grew deafeningly loud. The necromancer stood up to his full height, eyes blazing with purple-black energy. Twin bolts of raw death shot out from his sunken sockets, narrowly missing Lupio Blaze and burning into the charging knights behind him. Two finely-armoured Estalians convulsed and writhed, falling from their saddles in explosions of ash. A pair of empty suits of armour clattered into the muddy grass.

The charge of the Myrmidian knights hit home nonetheless, slamming into the ranks of the skeletal warriors with tremendous force. Their lowered lances took skulls from necks and punctured rusted breastplates with ease, and the sheer weight of the armoured stallions and their plate-clad riders proved a powerful weapon in itself. Over a dozen of Ghorst’s skeletal warriors were smashed apart by the momentum of the charge. Blaze’s cries to Myrmidia rang out as fleshless limbs and scraps of armour were hurled in all directions. The back ranks of the undead regiment snapped into action as if waking from a dream, setting their shields and bracing just in time to stop their unit’s utter destruction.

Von Korden was within a stone’s throw of his quarry when he saw the slinking, malevolent shadows of giant wolves dart out of the scattered trees on the left flank. An unearthly howl keened through the mist, and the hunter caught a glimpse of rotten sinews and yellowed bone that gleamed under ragged patches of half-sewn skin. The undead pack would be falling upon the rear of the knights in no time at all, and they were too far away for von Korden’s pistols to count.

The witch hunter swore under his breath, taking off his gauntlet and pulling out the ivory ring he kept on a thin chain around his wrist. The artefact had been given to him by the white wizards of Templehof as a reward for slaying the vargheist that was preying on their town, and he had always intended to use its powers against Ghorst. Yet he could not afford to lose the knights, not yet.

‘Be banished!’ shouted von Korden, standing up from his tombstone cover and pressing the ring flat against his bare palm. A serpent of pure light streaked out from its centre into the midst of the undead wolves just as they were about to pounce upon Blaze’s knights. The luminous apparition wrapped around three of the canine creatures and squeezed them into nothingness. A moment later Curser Bredt’s voice rang out, and a volley of shot blasted the rest of the pack into chunks of maggoty meat.

Von Korden barely had time to smile before a tangle of pale limbs grabbed at him. Unclean fingers snatched his collar and dug painfully into his cheek. A moment later Ghorst’s foul carriage was upon him, bell clanging wildly. Rotten teeth bit hard into his shoulder a heartbeat before the cart’s wooden yoke knocked him into the dirt. The hunter tried to rise, but a clammy and twisted foot pressed the side of his face into the mud. Out of his other eye he could see a jagged wheel coming right for his neck.

There was a sharp Estalian war cry and Ghorst’s carriage veered suddenly to the right. Its wheel came on, ripping out a great hank of the witch hunter’s hair and nearly scalping him in the process. Through a haze of confusion and pain he could just make out the glinting armour of Blaze’s knights wheeling around through the damp grass. The mist thickened for a moment, and the toll of Ghorst’s bell faded away to be replaced by the thunder of hooves.

As the horses passed by von Korden stumbled back to his feet. Badly winded, bleeding profusely and spitting out a mouthful of grave-dirt, he still grasped a mud-covered pistol tightly in his good hand. Nearby, the Knights of the Blazing Sun had broken formation. Their warhorses were stamping down hard on the disembodied skeletal arms that had burst from the ground to claw ineffectually at their legs. Over by the watchtower, Sigmar’s Sons were chasing down the last of the ghoul-things, hacking at unarmoured backs and cutting heads from necks.

Ghorst’s macabre carriage was nowhere to be seen.

Von Korden swore a blue streak as he marched up towards the watchtower, smearing the worst of the grave-mud from his face and checking that his holstered pistol was still sound. His head rang with pain and one of his eyes was swelling shut, but the rage boiling inside him kept his mind sharp. Once his message was sent from the watch he could allow himself to tend his wounds, but not before.

‘Get the hell out of my way,’ he spat at the Sigmarite swordsmen still hacking the heads from the ghoul corpses outside the watchtower. They moved aside immediately, sensing that they were in more danger from von Korden than from any of the walking dead. ‘Swaft, Weissman, you’re with me.’

The two Sons exchanged a meaningful glance as the witch hunter strode between them. ‘Well, Volkmar did say,’ murmured Weissman, handing the regiment’s banner to a nearby comrade before following von Korden to the heavy wooden door of the watchtower. Swaft came reluctantly after him, wiping gobbets of thick brown blood from his blade.

The hunter pushed the door with an open palm, and it swung open on its hinges. There was no sound, no motion inside. The entire lower floor of the building was in total disarray. The writing desk was upturned, its inks spilled like black blood across the flagstones to pool around the shattered skull of the Templehof vargheist.

Suddenly Unholdt’s corpse lurched out from behind the door, bowling into von Korden with such force it knocked them both flailing onto the floor. Weissman pushed inside the doorway just as the thing that had once been Steig clambered out of the disused well, blood-covered tongue flapping. The Sigmarite soldier edged around the well, blade ready for a killing thrust, only to find another undead guard barrelling out from behind the tower’s grandfather clock to grab him in a biting, tearing bear hug. Swaft moved in, blade readied as he looked for his moment to strike.

Wrestling Unholdt to one side, von Korden discharged his pistol into his old comrade’s dead bulk. The corpse jerked upward for a second before falling back down again, teeth gnashing a few millimetres from the witch hunter’s eye. The grotesque thing’s rotten breath invaded von Korden’s nostrils, and strings of blood-laced drool draped across his cheek.

Setting his teeth and bracing his knee on the wall, the witch hunter jerked sideways. He rolled the corpse of his former lieutenant off him and pushed against it with one hand as he fumbled to draw his cutting sabre with the other. The scabbard was empty. The corpse pushed back, its weight tremendous. Von Korden’s muscles began to shake, then to give. Unholdt’s chomping, stinking mouth came closer, inch by tortuous inch.

A high-pitched squeal rang out, ear-piercing in the confines of the watchtower. A moment later a hairy mass of hogflesh burst out from behind the stairwell curtain and barged into Unholdt, knocking him bodily from von Korden. The corpse rolled with the impact, some vestige of its brawler past coming to the surface as it scrabbled to its knees. Its hands flew down to Gremlynne’s neck, sinking into the pig’s dense throat as von Korden regained his feet. With a roar, the witch hunter grabbed a splintered chair leg from the floor and slammed the sharp end right through his dead lieutenant’s back. The corpse shuddered for a moment and lay still.

Von Korden spun round to the Sons, but they had already despatched the animated cadavers that had once been Steig and Freidricksen. The whole altercation had taken less than half a minute.

‘You two, check upstairs,’ said von Korden, clutching his bruised arm. The Sons nodded in assent, moving past him and as they climbed up into the stairwell. Once they were gone, the witch hunter moved over to Unholdt and, with a great effort, rolled his body to one side. Gremlynne looked up at him with one watery eye, her front legs broken and her breath hissing in ragged gasps through the bloody ruin of her throat.

‘Oh no,’ said von Korden, anguish flooding his soul. ‘No, Gremlynne!’ He cradled the dying pig in his arms, stroking her ears as she wheezed bubbles of blood from her snout. ‘Not you as well,’ he said, trying to stem the red rivulets that poured from her neck. ‘Hang on, old girl, I’ll… I’ll get some bandages or something,’ he said, the words catching in his throat. He laid her down gently, frantically scanning for something to use as a tourniquet. A low rattle came from behind him, and with an effort of will he turned back.

He was too late. The pig had breathed her last.

‘You bastards!’ cried von Korden, kicking the stonework of the well so hard a part of it crumbled down into the darkness. He threw the shattered table leg across the room, and it clattered in the corner. ‘You’ll pay for what you did to us!’ he shouted, tears stinging in his eyes. He slumped into what remained of his armchair, hand questing for the cameo portrait that hung next to his heart. With his wife’s pig gone, the necklace was all that was left of the old days. It was the last remnant of the farm they had loved so much. Even Alberich von Korden – the man he had been – had died a long time ago.

‘Lynn, my dear,’ he gasped as he pried open the jewelled image, ‘Oh, Lynn, I’m sorry… I’m sorry I was too late to save the girls.’ Alberich shut his eyes hard, fighting to stay in control as a decade of suppressed emotion roiled inside. ‘I’m so sorry I never told you that I needed you, my love.’

His shoulders shook, but no sound would come.

‘I’ll make them pay, Lynn,’ said Alberich to the female portrait lying in his bloodstained hand. ‘I promise you.’

There came a cascade of footfalls from the stairway, and Weissman pushed his way in through the curtain.

‘Trouble?’ he asked.

Von Korden was standing in the middle of the room, facing away from the stairwell as he fussed with his pistols. He did not turn around.

‘No,’ he said, with a sigh. ‘Just… I just thought I saw one of them twitch, that’s all.’

‘Right,’ said Weissman, ‘Well, glad we got the bastards before they got us. Nothing much on either floor, up there. Bit o’ grub in the cupboards. You want to send the message whilst the going’s good?’

‘Yes. Get some lamp oil on the signal cogs, goose fat, whatever you can find. I’ll be up in a minute.’

‘Right you are,’ said Weissman, heading back upstairs.

Von Korden took a long and ragged breath, as deep as he could. He held it for a long time before heading upstairs to the battlements.

THE COLLEGIUM OF LIGHT

Templehof, east of the Vale of Darkness, 2522

There it was again. A glimmer of witch-light, tiny but distinct, emanating from the peaks on the other side of the vale.

Jovi Sunscryer of the Light Order squinted into the gloom, his heart quickening at the prospect that someone might be using Konigstein’s brass sentinel to communicate. He ran a hand across the brown leather of his pate and down over his eyes, gently humming the Seventh Rumination of Shem to help him focus. There was a message there, he was certain of it.

He leaned over the banister of the spiral staircase that led down into the Collegium’s library and tinkled the small bell that hung from the brass serpent at their top.

‘Fetch the scrying lenses, please, Khalep,’ he called.

There was no response.

He tried again, leaning over a little further. ‘Khalep, be a good fellow and fetch the scrying lenses.’

One… Two… Three… Still nothing.

‘Khalep!’ the old man bellowed, the wattle of skin on his scrawny neck wobbling. There was a scuffle, a creak and a thump from the floor below. A few moments later a blinking young man blinked up from the bottom of the stairs, hastily rearranging his ceremonial robes.

‘Yes, m-m-magister?’ stuttered the youth.

Jovi glowered up at the overcast skies. They glowered right back.

‘Khalep, I was wondering if you would be so kind as to fetch me the scrying lenses before I turn you into a legless toad.’

‘Certainly, m-m-magister, right away.’

The acolyte scurried off. There was some serious work ahead for that boy.

The elderly scholar turned his attention back to the glimmering lights on the horizon. They had changed, but the sigils of the previous communiqué hung behind them in time, a message that only one trained in the magical arts could read.

Less than a minute later the young apprentice staggered up the spiral staircase laden with a contraption made of brass rods and calibrators. Held suspended in their metallic web was a set of softly glowing lenses shielded by cups of beaten copper. Neftep, the second of Jovi’s two acolytes and arguably the least incompetent, was close behind, a blazing lantern in his hand.

‘Neftep,’ said Jovi, patiently. ‘This gloom,’ he gestured vaguely above his head, ‘hangs heavy in my soul, just as it does in yours, I am sure. I would dearly love to lift it from the skies. But when we are trying to perceive a distant light, a light close at hand is worse than useless.’

Neftep nodded once. ‘Yes, magister,’ he replied sagely.

‘So be a good fellow and toddle off back downstairs, before you ruin my night vision entirely and I am forced to hurl you from the balcony with a great shout of angst.’

‘Of course, oh master,’ replied Neftep, making his way back down the stairs.

Jovi Sunscryer blew out his cheeks, gathering his focus once more. Khalep, to his credit, had already assembled the scrying lenses and was busy focusing them on the light in the distance.

‘Ah, good show,’ said Sunscryer. ‘Might I perhaps be permitted to fine-tune the device, Khalep? Or would you prefer me to sit here and quietly die of old age?’

‘N-n-no, ma-magister,’ said Khalep. He stepped backwards, allowing his tutor to lean down to the eyepiece of the scrying device.

The flickering light was indeed a message, and a long one, too, by the looks of it. The magister recognised the personal sigil of von Korden at the message’s end, a circle of fire that symbolised the judicial pyres of the witch hunter. Jovi licked the end of his vulture-feather quill and inked it, writing down the message as he deciphered it.

MANNFRED CONFIRMED ACTIVE. CRUSADE ALREADY IN VALE. SEEKING END DARKNESS. FEW MEN. CRUSADE AND THEOGONIST LIKELY DOOMED.

REQUEST REINFORCEMENTS. ALTDORF. TEMPLEHOF. ANYWHERE.

SEND HELP. VON KORDEN

Sunscryer stared off to the peaks on the other side of the vale for a long minute before gathering his things and heading downstairs to the stables.

The wind moaned like a dying man as the wizards escorted the Collegium’s Luminark to the top of Templehof Crag. A pair of barded Stirland Punchers was yoked to the forebeams, slowly but surely pulling the wheeled war machine up the winding path.

Even without the Collegium’s warhorses lashed to its carriage the Luminark was massive. Half chariot, half enormous lens array, the thing dwarfed even the coaches of the Sylvanian aristocracy. The carriage’s central cabin was capped with a candle-strewn roof, atop which was a circular metal dais that held up a long and ornate construction of cast iron. Eight hoops of finely wrought silver were attached at regular intervals along its length, jutting up from the baroque framework in a manner reminiscent of a telescope. Each hoop held a convex disc of shimmering glass that sparkled greenish-yellow in the low light of Khalep’s lantern. Attuned correctly, the wyrdglass lenses could harness the invisible winds of magic and focus their aethyric energies into a searing lance of light that could burn a town to ash.

Once the Luminark had been hauled to the top of the winding path that girdled Templehof Crag, the acolytes pulled off the last of the dustsheets and busied themselves with adjusting screws and resetting glass lenses. Sunscryer hummed tunelessly to himself as he took measurements with his aethyric resonators and slide glasses, motioning for Khalep to revolve the contraption’s dais wheel a degree clockwise, then half a degree counterclockwise. There was precious little natural light left, but with the right incantations, even the fickle Wind of Hysh could be channelled from a wafting zephyr into a powerful beam. Neftep balanced precariously on an outcrop of rock in order to polish the last of the wyrdglass lenses with a lambskin cloth.

Deeming the alignments to be to his satisfaction, Sunscryer climbed the rungs that led to the cabin’s upper platforms and flexed the control levers with a sigh of appreciation.

A lone bat flitted through the twilight, its path seemingly random as it wound around the crag. Sunscryer’s expression soured. He called out an ancient phrase in Nehekharan, pitching the crescendo just as he gave the control levers a sudden twist. The machine thrummed for a moment before a beam of magical light shot out from the Luminark’s lenses. A moment later the remnants of a scorched wing spiraled down to rest at Khalep’s feet.

‘G-g-good shot, m-magister,’ said the young acolyte, eyebrows raised.

‘Why thank you, Master Sulenheim,’ replied Jovi, brushing a mote of dust from the cast iron of the Luminark’s frame. ‘Horrid little spies, those things. Though before this is over, I fear the bats we will be facing might be somewhat larger.’

Midnight was approaching, and the wizard’s coded message still flickered into the night. Each pulse would look much like distant lightning to a common man, but could be read as clear as day by one skilled in the arts.

Though the Luminark had been built as an engine of war, Jovi had long ago worked out the exact settings that would end in an instantaneous light-message to the Orbulus of his fellows in the Altdorf Colleges of Magic. From there, the message would be transferred to the offices of Balthasar Gelt himself. Though Gelt and Sunscryer had never seen eye to eye – it had been the Supreme Patriarch who had ‘suggested’ Sunscryer set up the collegium in Templehof in the first place – Gelt’s mastery over the alchemical arts was so great it might be able to help them in distant Sylvania. Whatever aid they could garner from their fellow wizards would be gratefully received. Better yet, Gelt had the ear of Karl Franz himself, and if anyone had influence enough to help them fight back against the darkness it was the Emperor.

Over the last few hours Jovi had adjusted every lens and screw to within a minute degree of accuracy, and his acolytes had joined him in a threefold chant designed to sharpen and increase intermittent pulses of magical energy.

Jovi pulled out a leather-bound telescope and focused it on the flickering beam that probed into the distance before making adjustments with his other hand: on, off-on, off-on-off. Over the last few hours, the stuttering pulses reached out across to the other side of the vale, but no further. It seemed to Sunscryer that the unnatural gloom itself was smothering the light-message like a witch suffocating a newborn.

Sunscryer had a nasty feeling that impression was disturbingly close to the truth.

‘M-m-magister,’ stammered Khalep, breaking the chant. ‘I think I n-n-need water, magister.’

The elderly wizard tutted and made a chopping motion, indicating that Neftep should stop. ‘No stamina, you lot,’ he croaked, testily. In truth he was glad of the reprieve; his own throat was getting raw too. He stared balefully at the thickening darkness on the horizon. ‘Very well. There’s a carafe in the cabin, bring it up when you’re done.’

Khalep slunk below, handing up a snake-handled jug and some wafers to his fellow wizards.

‘Dammit,’ said Jovi, rubbing his eyes and taking a sip of water. ‘There’s definitely something acting against us. This darkness was summoned by a ritual of some kind, I feel sure – and a powerful one at that. I’ve a book down in the library that tells of a similar event plaguing the rule of the Priest King Alcadizaar – a ‘great darkness’ that was unquestionably the work of the Great Necromancer himself.’

Neftep blanched and made the sign of the rising sun over his chest, fingers splayed.

‘For a spell of this magnitude to last this long, and continue to get worse with each passing day,’ continued Jovi seriously, ‘would require a power source of godly proportions.’

‘Is there any other way we can get the message out, master?’ said Neftep.

‘Well, the Deathknell Watches might work over time, though by the look of it our friend von Korden already has that side of things covered. And time is a commodity we do not have. Part of the Luminark’s genius is that its light-message is functionally instantaneous.’

‘So can we bolster it somehow, overcome the curse through sheer force?’

‘Theoretically speaking, yes,’ said Jovi. ‘If we could get the Luminark up higher still, and channel even more of the Wind of Hysh into it, we could potentially overcome even this unnatural darkness. I do recall seeing a lens that would do the job, in my youth. The end piece of a scrying scope. Impressive piece, though not as finely wrought as one of my own creations.’

‘We could fetch it for you, master,’ volunteered Neftep. Khalep looked over his master’s shoulder at his companion, his eyes wide and his head shaking from side to side.

‘Hmm? Ah, well, I think perhaps we should all go, Neftep,’ said Sunscryer, nervously. ‘It’s in Vargravia, you see. The hidden necropolis.’

THE GREAT WESTERN ROAD

The Vale of Darkness, 2522

Robed worshippers chanted their adulation as Volkmar rose above the stone circle, dark energies crackling around him. He was immense, and powerful beyond measure. Bound spirits whirled around him, shrieking his name. He would have his revenge upon his enemies and bind them to his will for the rest of time. His hand burned fiercely, but the pain merely invigorated him, making his hatred all the more potent. He breathed out a billowing cloud of death, and the mortal fools gathered in worship below him withered away to nothing.

The Grand Theogonist awoke with a start, jerking upward from the lectern of the war altar at the rear of the crusading host. The disturbing dream still clutched at him. His left hand throbbed with a strange mixture of numbness and pain, but his right flew to the sacred warhammer at his side, and the strange sensations quickly faded away.

Somehow, he had allowed himself to fall asleep. Volkmar chided himself, pinching the skin on his wrist so hard he left a red-black blister behind. To sleep at the lectern of the war altar was an unforgivable lapse, heresy even, especially after the events at Fort Oberstyre. Yet none of his men had noticed, thank Sigmar. Even Kaslain was intent on the road ahead.

A lucky escape, then. With the stakes as high as they were, Volkmar could not afford to show weakness, not even to his own men. He was expecting the same from them, after all.

The grand exorcism of Oberstyre had been mentally and spiritually draining. Those of the Tattersouls whose faith in Sigmar had not proven sufficient had died in terror, the cold claws of the fortress’s ghosts closing around their hearts. Many more had met grisly ends in the lightless maze of cellars beneath Oberstyre, fighting blind against the troglodytes that infested the underground tunnels.

They had not given their lives in vain. Not a single evil soul had dwelt there by the break of dawn. The spirit-bound guardians of that haunted keep had been obliterated forever, burned out of the walls by the sheer golden light of the Sigmarite faith. Those stone-gheists that had proved powerful enough to linger had instead met their demise at the end of Volkmar’s blessed hammer. Mannfred’s dark work had been undone, even if the vampire’s trail had long gone cold.

The remains of the Tattersouls continued their procession through the mud, wailing, muttering, even dancing wildly as they accompanied the war altar along the Great Western Road. Arch Lector Kaslain strode at the front of the procession, stoically ignoring the screeching and gnashing of the zealots behind him as he ploughed on through the muck towards Deihstein.

Coming from the other direction along the wide road was another procession of sorts, looking if anything even more desolate than Volkmar’s own tattered crusaders. Malnourished oxen drew carts full of pockmarked, disfigured children along the muddy ruts, the peasantry on the riding plates hunched under threadbare blankets. Those not berthed on a cart dragged mud-sleds along the road, their meagre possessions lashed to wooded slats. Pregnant women rode sidesaddle on cows and mules whilst slow-witted adolescents picked their noses and ate the dubious treasures they had unearthed.

It took some time for the presence of the war altar to register in the oncoming throng. When it did, whispers spread through them like wind through a blighted crop. Carts were wheeled over into ditches, young children and old crones alike spilling out with cries of protest. Goats were shoved bleating into dry brown hedgerows, and mules were led into fields of rotten crops in order to let the war altar pass. Many of the peasants went down on their knees in the mud, eyes downcast.

‘An omen! Sigmar is here to save us from the darkness!’ screeched a wizened old grandmother.

‘Bring back the sun!’ shouted a tiny girl child. ‘There’s no plants for Gurden!’

A group of the peasants surged forwards towards the war altar, arms outstretched and eyes alight with hunger. Their advance was met by the Tattersouls, the flagellants flowing forward in a line of unwashed bodies that blocked the road. The peasants pulled up short, cowed by the madness in the eyes of the men barring their path.

‘The End!’ screeched Gerhardt the Worm into the face of the nearest peasant. ‘The End is here! All shall die!’

‘Nothing new,’ replied the lowlander, his badly cleft lip blurring his words. ‘We grew up here, mate.’

‘Sigmar!’ shouted the zealot. ‘Sigmar shall deliver us if we fling ourselves bodily into the next life!’

‘We’re flinging ourselves bodily into Ostermark,’ said the peasant, drily. ‘Nothing here for us now but graves.’

‘And them wot used to lie in ’em,’ muttered a tangle-haired matron by his side.

The peasant looked up at Arch Lector Kaslain, ignoring Gerhardt as best he could. ‘Is that bald bloke s’posed to be the Lord Theogonite or something? Sigmarzeit festival’s cancelled, I reckon.’

‘It is the Grand Theogonist, simpleton. And you’d do well to keep your tongue civil in his presence,’ rumbled Kaslain.

‘Well swap me blind,’ said the peasant, making the sign of the hammer. ‘Temple’s hollow, holy symbols gone, but Shallya’s smalls, here comes the old Volcano himself. Using our road, no less. And scant hours after we see a bunch of humourless bastards all dressed up in uniform.’ He turned to the woman, touching the dried hound’s foot at his throat. ‘Something’s up, right enough.’

‘Uniform?’ said Kaslain. ‘Was it Talabheim, red and white?’

‘Aye, that’s them,’ slurred the spokesman, motioning his wife and fellows back. ‘City types, they were. Reckon you’ll catch ‘em up if you hurry. Watch the roads, though, and the fields. Bad types about.’

The peasant brushed his way past the Tattersouls, casting a remark over his shoulder as he went.

‘And if you lot find what you’re lookin’ for? Sigmar help you all.’

SOUTH OF TEMPLEHOF

The Vale of Darkness, 2522

Since leaving Templehof Crag for Vargravia the Light wizards had made slow but steady progress along the country roads. The light was fading to pitch black, and their spirits had faded with it. Neftep had grown sick of humouring his master’s attempts to keep up morale, and had pulled a greased leather over his head to keep off the drizzling rain. Khalep took a turn at keeping the old man occupied instead.

‘So w-w-w…’

‘The location we’re headed to, since you asked, Khalep, is the abandoned manse of an astromancer, built on the highest point of the Vargravian mountains. Riddled with ghosts, though, the whole place. They say the celestialist buried himself alive to escape them.’

‘W-wonderful,’ said Khalep.

‘We won’t be tarrying, never fear,’ said the elderly wizard, his tone dark. ‘I strayed in there once, when I was younger even than yourselves. The scythe-gheists that guard the place scared me half to death, quite literally. My hair turned white and fell out in clumps. No wonder the Sylvanians avoid the place like the plague. Still, at least it wasn’t Whispering Nell playing host.’

Silence stretched out before Khalep gave in.

‘W-w-w…’

‘Who’s Whispering Nell, you say, Khalep? Ah, but she’s a nasty one. Countess Emmanuelle von Templehof, to give the old bitch her due. Once the cousin of Konrad the Bloody. A femme fatale in life and even deadlier in death.’

‘How so?’ asked Neftep, fearing the answer.

‘Ah, well. They say that if she whispers your true name within earshot, your body dies and your soul is hers for all eternity. Horrid fate, she’s not the looker she once was. Too many maggots.’ Sunscryer took out his telescope and peered into the distance before continuing. ‘I’d be much obliged if neither of you referred to me by name when we’re within Vargravia’s borders. I’ll do the same for you, of course. Sound good?’

The acolytes shared a look. Shaking his head in despair, Neftep made to get off the Luminark, but Khalep grabbed him by the robes and pointed to the darkness that choked the skies above. Slump-shouldered, his comrade sat back down with a sigh.

The warhorses under the Luminark’s yoke ploughed on through the mud. The trio of wizards rounded a corner, and the loose hedgerow opened to reveal a large black building with shattered windows that bled gold in the night.

‘Is that…’

‘It is indeed! The Drunken Goat, arguably the most robust of Sylvania’s roadside taverns. Excellent pork. And it looks like old Bors left the lanterns on before he took to his heels.’

The three wizards approached the dripping eaves of the inn together, the sleeves of their robes held overhead to keep off the worst of the rain. The door was stout oak, though claw marks had gouged furrows into it. A piece of broken fingernail was still embedded in the jamb. Sunscryer reached out with his serpent-tipped staff and rapped hard on the studded planks of the front door.

There was no answer. He pushed, but the door was barred fast.

The elderly wizard held up a cautionary finger towards his acolytes before pulling a lodestone from his robes and moving the magnetic lump across the door. There was a solid, metallic thunk from the other side.

‘Ha! Gelt’s not the only master of magnetism in the colleges,’ said Sunscryer, pushing the heavy oak open with a creak.

A crossbow bolt thrummed through the air and embedded itself in the doorjamb less than an inch from the old wizard’s head. A dozen blades were thrust in his direction, including spears, farming implements and even the sharpened handle of a long skillet. Behind Jovi, Neftep began Shem’s Chant of Blinding, the Nehekharan syllables sounding raw and strange in the silence.

‘Oh, do put a sock in it, Neftep,’ said Sunscryer to his acolyte. ‘Is Bors about, gentlemen?’

A great cry of relief came from the huddled patrons of the inn. The wizards were roughly pulled inside and roundly slapped on the back, so much so that Khalep stumbled face first into the stained and wobbling chest of Big Delf the cook. Bors Ratsnatcher came out from behind the grandfather clock, cudgel in hand, and motioned for Long Cobb to pour each of the wizards a drink. Before a minute had passed the trio was seated at one of the oaken tables, foaming tankards of Troll Brew in their scrawny hands.

‘We thought you lot’d be long gone by now,’ said a brawny hard drinker with a smile only a tooth doctor could love.

‘Bernhardt!’ said Jovi, draining the last of his tankard. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Goat quite so busy.’

‘You say that,’ replied Bernhardt, ‘but this is it. This is everyone.’

‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘Pretty much everyone else in Sylvania has legged it, as far as we can make out. Headed for Ostermark, the Moot, even the mountains. It’s this bloody darkness. Everythin’s dyin’ off.’

‘And you fellows intend to make the difference, do you? Fight back?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Bernhardt darkly, pressing another tankard of ale into Sunscryer’s hands. ‘We intend to get drunk.’

DEIHSTEIN RIDGE

The Vale of Darkness, 2522

The wind rustled through the dying oaks of Deihstein Ridge, casting another handful of leaves onto the canopy of the canvas-covered wagon below.

‘Well? What do you wait for?’ asked Exei von Deihst, his thick Strigany urgent and low as he pointed at the witch hunter in the distance. ‘That him, Voytek. I tell you. Take shot.’

The sharpshooter scratched the underside of his stubbly jaw before bellying forward for a better angle. Below their hidden caravan at the side of the road, brightly-uniformed Talabheimers were fighting hard against the von Vassel clan. Eager as ever to prove themselves, the von Vassels had sprung the ambush too early. Still, the outlanders were too preoccupied fending off the ambush to pursue the corpse-laden cart escaping into the distance, let alone pay attention to the von Deihsts.

‘Hush, Exei. I like part where life and death hang in balance,’ grinned Voytek, his hunting rifle’s barrel poking out of the painted canvas of the wagon. ‘Savour it. Second best part of having long gun.’

‘Take shot, Voytek,’ said Alexei, a warning tone in his voice. ‘Pale count will not be happy if Ghorst caught. Feed you to wing-devil.’

‘Be still, little grandmother,’ mocked Voytek. ‘You shake so much you spoil aim.’

‘Voytek. Take shot.’

‘Just…give…second…’ said Voytek as a distinctive witch hunter hat bobbed in his sights. ‘There. Got him.’

The Strigany sharpshooter pulled the trigger.

There was a tremendous crash as the war altar thundered over the crest of the Deihstein Ridge and ploughed into the Strigany caravans hidden by the side of the road. Its colossal weight bundled over two of the hooded wagons just as the crack of a hunting rifle rang out. Two gangly men spilled out of the rear of the larger of the two wagons, screaming in shock as the iron wheels of the war altar ground through one’s midsection and crushed the other’s legs.

Volkmar sounded the Horn of Sigismund as his surprise attack hit home, the brazen roar of the war horn ringing out across the fields. It struck fear into the faithless – like the scum scattering below – and let the Talabheimers know help was on its way.

Heartened by the sound and the sight of the war altar, the Talabheimer state troops attacked with renewed purpose, slashing and stabbing at the dusky horsemen in their midst. Several of the nomads’ horses had bolted at the sound of Volkmar’s war horn, but many more of the Strigany had danced out of reach and taken a position by the side of the wooded ridge, puffs of smoke coming from their rifles.

A great maniacal shriek came from the wooded rise above the road and the Tattersouls spilled into view, hurling themselves from the lip of the ridge like cultists united in a mass suicide pact. Several of the crusaders smacked bodily into the horse nomads, bearing them to the ground before strangling them with their flails, ropes, even dirt-encrusted hands. Many more of the zealots missed their targets and thumped down hard into the muck, writhing as they cried out in an ecstasy of pain.

The remaining Strigany broke and galloped off, leaving their wounded and dying behind them in the dirt. On the road ahead, von Korden’s Talabheimers recovered themselves and saw to their own fallen, binding wounds and giving Morr’s grace to those who had died.

As he surveyed the situation from atop his pulpit, Volkmar saw a wounded nomad in the shattered remains of a covered wagon behind the altar. The Strigany pulled a knife from the stock of his long rifle and cried out in his strange language before taking the blade in both hands, turning it round, and plunging it deep into his own throat.

Placing his hand firmly on the chassis of the war altar, the Grand Theogonist leapt over the balustrade at the front of the pulpit. He landed deftly in the mud below, ceremonial robes billowing around him. Hastening over to the dying man, he kicked the thug’s knife into a ditch and knelt down, placing his hand over the pulsing wound. A golden light spilled from between his fingers. When he took his hand away, the gash had healed over, though it was still slick with arterial blood.

‘Not so easy, I’m afraid, young man,’ said Volkmar to the Strigany gasping for air beneath him. ‘I know someone who wants a few words with you.’

THE VARGRAVIAN MOUNTAINS

The Vale of Darkness, 2522

‘Oh for Shem’s sake, Khalep,’ said Sunscryer, testily. ‘I swear, you’ve got the bladder of a pregnant shrew.’

Robes hitched, Khalep was relieving himself against a boulder at the side of the winding road that led up to the borders of Vargravia. Behind him the Luminark creaked in the winds that whipped around the high peak road, wyrdglass lenses tinkling. At its rear, a few dozen of the Goat’s finest were taking advantage of the break to tap the barrels of wine they had hoisted into the rear cabin of the war engine. Sunscryer had not approved one bit, but a heavier load was well worth the thirty or so brawlers that they had convinced to fight at their side over the course of the night. Stirland’s Revenge, they called themselves, the last dregs of a province that had all but given up the fight. It was a rather grand name for such a scruffy collection of drunkards. The elderly wizard only hoped they could live up to it.

Even Jovi felt like perhaps a little Marienburg courage might not be such a bad idea, but he quickly quashed the thought. When involved in the business of spellcasting, a single mistake could lead to a painful death – or worse, a daemon-breach. As his acolyte Vorac had learned many years ago, a tipsy wizard could be more dangerous than an entire army of normal men. The Collegium’s rear wall was still missing to this day.

Ahead of them, Sunscryer could just about perceive the ironbone fencework that had been erected by some nameless mason to keep the peasants out – or more likely to keep the dead in. Behind the rotten borders were timeworn peaks, each dotted with tombs so ancient they had been eroded smooth and covered in clinging moss. The occasional statue rose bravely out of the slinking mists that haunted the sprawling necropolis, and in the distance, the silhouette of an astromancer’s dome was just visible against the glowering skies.

A ghastly howl wound out of the mists, getting louder and louder before stopping abruptly. Some of the peasants from the Goat made the signs of Sigmar and Morr. Others, including Khalep and Neftep, looked longingly at the barrels of wine at the Luminark’s rear.

‘Ready then?’ called out Jovi from the lens deck as his men milled about below. ‘Make your peace if you have to. Oh, and remember, no names. Names have power, and I’d rather not risk our souls as well as our lives.’

Mumbling sullenly, the ragtag expedition made their way through the tombs and sepulchres that dotted the outlying peaks of Vargravia. Ghostlights gathered in the holes and recesses that honeycombed the eroded limestone, glowing a sickly green wherever one of the trespassers got close. Sunscryer thought he saw the flicker of a haggard female face in a few of the holes, but he said nothing.

‘Ho!’ called Bernhardt, pointing at the gravel-strewn muck that formed a crossroads with the path they were following. Neftep halted the Luminark, the men milling around it. ‘Them’s recent tracks,’ continued Bernhardt, pointing to the faint shapes of horseshoes in the scree. The path led deeper into the maze of tombs, its edges delineated by the parallel grooves of a heavier carriage, a cart or similar construction that had passed that way not too long ago. A muddle of bare footprints cropped up in between the dusty ruts, some of which were clearly missing toes.

‘Reckon them’s dead men’s feet,’ said Bernhardt.

No one contradicted him.

‘Well then,’ said Sunscryer. ‘That’s where we’re headed.’

The expedition changed direction, hauling the Luminark around and following the tracks that Bernhardt had spotted as they wound further into Vargravia’s grave-dotted wastes. A scattered rearguard loitered at the back, absently testing the swords and cudgels they had acquired over the last few weeks. Tombstones and mausoleums broke the rolling mounds at irregular intervals, some of which yawned open to the sky as if waiting to be filled.

‘Look at that one, Ferd,’ said Long Cobb, pointing at a gravestone. ‘That’s one with your name on it there.’

‘Sigmar’s guts, you’re right enough – Ferdinand Lessner. That’s today’s date an’ all.’

Nearby, a starveling raven perched on the statue of a sightless angel, cawing softly. Its beady eyes gleamed green in the twilight as it followed the trespassers’ progress. Worms writhed in the rot at their passage.

‘Come to think of it, Breck, that’s yer actual proper name on that one, isn’t it? Johann Breckner?’

Breckner made the sign of Morr over his heart. ‘Not funny, Ferdy.’

Big Delf took a swig from his wineskin and stared back at the men behind him, his eyes narrowed. ‘Oi, Cobb. You heard what the old man said back there. Shut your bleeding traps.’

‘You shut yours, Delf Cook, or I’ll shut it for you.’

‘Hey!’ shouted Bernhardt, leaning around a scattering of twisted trees to look back at the rearguard making their way through the graves. ‘You lot at the back. Don’t think I can’t hear you natterin’ away.’

‘Yeah yeah,’ called out Delf, giving Bernhardt a two-fingered salute. ‘Here,’ he whispered, pointing a chubby finger at a statue-crested mausoleum to the east. ‘Look at that one, the big one there with the torch. ‘Here lies Jovi Sunscryer.’ Ain’t that the name of his holiness himself?’

‘Damned if I know,’ said Lessner.

‘Bloody hammer,’ swore the fat man. ‘I’m having second thoughts about all this. I keep expecting to see a stone with ‘Delf’ on it and my first wife lurkin’ at the bottom, all rotted up.’

‘Shut yer gabbin’, Cook. Bernhardt’s already pissed off at us,’ said Long Cobb. ‘And for Sigmar’s sake, stop sayin’ out names.’

Bernhardt led the expedition forwards as it made its way further into the peaks, climbing higher and higher by the hour. A thick mist had begun to coalesce around the tombstones and shattered statuary, white as a shroud and cold to the touch. Through a combination of leading by example and occasional accusations of cowardice Bernhardt was just about keeping discipline amongst his men, though it was just as much through their fear of turning back alone as it was through drunken bravado.

Up ahead, the wizard Sunscryer was fiddling with the lenses of his wagon’s glass contraption, turning screws and tweaking iron rods. His assistants were chanting quietly, eyes rolled back in their heads. Must be the way wizards prepare for trouble, Bernhardt mused. He could practically taste the tension in the air.

‘Weapons up, I think, lads,’ said the big man, coming to a halt. He took a swig from his wineskin and rolled his shoulders. The soft but insistent tang of Estalian brandy filled his mouth, making him glad he had brought something stronger than wine. The militiaman tested the edges of his swords against one after another before adjusting the tension on his crossbow and sighting down its length on a fanged skull half-buried in the dirt.

When Bernhardt looked back up the mist ahead was winding upwards, twisting and writhing as if alive. As he watched, it coalesced into a series of man-sized shapes, beggar-thin and clad in wisps of smoke.

‘All right lads, blades up!’ he shouted, dropping his wineskin and drawing his swords. ‘Look lively and hit ‘em hard!’

There was a thin shriek and a dozen gheists came forward, ectoplasm trailing like the clothes of drowning men. Bernhardt raised his crossbow and shot one in the face. It passed straight through the apparition’s misty skull as if there was nothing there at all.

A gurgling scream came from Bernhardt’s left as a robed spectre rose up from an open trench and plunged its blackened claws into Bruger Steick’s chest. Blood bubbled from Steick’s mouth as he toppled sidelong into the yawning grave that bore his name on its tombstone. Derrick Vance thrust a spear through the creature’s torso as it passed. The crow’s foot strapped to its shaft tore away a scrap of ectoplasm, but the blow achieved little else.

Bernhardt took a step forward and thrust his lucky blade through the neck of the creature drifting after Richter Swartz. It tore away the gheist’s head, but the body kept on going, wrapping its long arms around Swartz’s neck like a cloak and bearing him into a half-open tomb with a chilling screech.

All around the militiamen swords slashed into misted limbs and skull-thin faces. The weapons wielded by the Stirlanders passed right through, their wildly swinging blades unbalancing their wielders as they flailed ineffectually at the spectres attacking them.

Bernhardt risked a glance behind him, on the verge of making a break for it. More of the scrawny things were emerging from the graves to their rear, cutting off any chance of escape. The closest one floated towards the big man’s chest, rictus jaws agape.

‘Drop!’ came a cry from atop the Luminark.

To their credit every one of the surviving Stirlanders remembered to fall the ground, eyes covered. There was a sudden flare of light that curved around in a blistering circle, the heat of its passage burning away the mist and the gheists with it. Bernhardt could feel it crackle overhead, a wash of heat and light that reverberated inside him. He risked a glance upward. Every time the burning flare touched a gheist the damned thing would crackle and disappear with a whiff of brimstone.

A shocked silence descended as the Luminark completed its circuit.

One by one the surviving militiamen rose to their feet, eyes blinking and mouths open. There was no sign of any gheists, no living mists, nothing apart from the Luminark still humming and plinking gently on the path ahead. Sunscryer’s young assistants were applauding politely, the bald old buzzard himself taking a bow at the rear of the Luminark’s lens array.

‘Well swap me for a three-eyed fish,’ muttered Bernhardt. ‘That works pretty good, then.’

‘She is indeed most efficacious,’ replied Jovi Sunscryer with a grin. ‘But then I did design her specifically for adaptive banishment in battlefield conditions.’

‘You what?’ said Long Cobb, marching up from the rear with his sword hilt clenched tight. ‘Why d’ya wait for four of us to die before you used the bloody thing?’

‘Ah yes, my apologies. Had to harness as much of Hysh’s energies as possible.’

‘That wizard talk don’t mean nothin’ to me,’ said Cobb, pointing an accusatory finger. ‘Just that you let my mates die. How are we supposed to fight these bloody things?’

‘Aye,’ shouted Janosch Velman, stepping up behind Cobb. ‘How?’

‘With faith,’ said Neftep, pointing at the twin-tailed comet symbol emblazoned on Velman’s stained surcoat.

‘Oh, bloody wonderful,’ said Cobb, throwing his sword point-first into the rocky ground.

The unlikely procession wound onwards into the peaks, Bernhardt cursing himself for volunteering to take the lead. Still, it had been the only way to keep the peace after the battle with the gheists. Cobb and his lot were still sullen at the death of their drinking cronies, and Sunscryer seemed intent on making matters worse. Bloody wizards. So fond of their fancy ways.

Something on the path ahead was bothering Bernhardt, nagging at him even more than the atmosphere of chill sinking into his bones. That was it; there was something wrong with the shadows that pooled around each crypt and stone. They were… well, wriggling. That was the best way he could put it. Moving around. The ground underfoot was becoming stranger, too. Up this high in the peaks there should not really be any mud, nor earth to speak of. Yet the ground was soft and yielding, a bit like… well, a bit like meat. Rotten brown meat.

Bernhardt was jolted from his unsettling thoughts by a call of warning from atop the Luminark. He raised his blades, squinting into the mist. A swarm of glowing orbs were up ahead, like the ghostlights they had seen earlier, but moving in pairs, like eyes. They moved with a strange, flowing motion, up and down, back and forth.

The big man stifled a yawn. He decided to sit down on a nearby gravestone so he could better take stock of the lights dancing up ahead. He puffed out his cheeks as he sat, loosening his belt a bit so it did not bite into his stomach quite so much. These endless paths, they just stretched upwards forever and ever. The lads obviously felt the same, and had taken a break as well. Some of them were already lying down.

Even the old boy and his apprentices were slumped over on their wagon. Everyone needs a rest now and then, thought Bernhardt. Even a big lad like me. In fact, he deserved to have a little bit of a nap. Just to rest his eyes for a moment. No one would blame him making himself a bit more comfortable. The gravestone had his name on it, after all.

DEIHSTEIN RIDGE

The Vale of Darkness, 2522

The cries of injured men and the dying Strigany horse nomads punctured the silence as the crusaders gathered for the advance once more. Volkmar stood at the head of the gathered Tattersouls, glowering down the hill as von Korden made his way up the path to the top of Deihstein Ridge. The death toll had been low, comparatively, but tending to the wounded had cost them valuable time.

‘And so Ghorst escapes again,’ spat von Korden as he approached, his face twisted in barely suppressed anger.

‘Even a necromancer has allies,’ replied Volkmar, emerging from the lee of the war altar. ‘We cannot afford any more delays. We need to stay on track, find the von Carstein. Your friend Ghorst’s carriage-ruts will likely lead us straight to him.’

‘Unlikely,’ scoffed the witch hunter. ‘The necromancer may be slow but he’s not a fool. Plus a few dozen peasants have taken their wagons along this road since he passed. Tracking Ghorst’s cart won’t be so easy.’

‘In that case, there’s someone you should meet. Come.’

Volkmar turned and walked back to the leeward side of the war altar, von Korden behind him. In the shadow of the towering carriage, Gerhardt the Worm was keeping guard over a slumped form covered head to toe in mud.

The Strigany sharpshooter was bound hand and foot, a hessian rag stuffed in his mouth. His matted hair stuck out in all directions, and his leg was bloody where a spar of bone poked through. He glared fiercely at Volkmar as the old man approached, shouting muffled curses into the cloth.

‘Gerhardt the Worm’s underclothes,’ explained Gerhardt the Worm, grinning wildly.

‘Charming,’ said Volkmar. ‘Right. Von Korden, you like this sort of thing. Get some answers out of our guest here – who he works for, where his master is. Kaslain, keep your eyes open. I’m going to get the crusade up and ready to move as soon as you’ve procured the answers we need.’

‘Of course, my lord,’ said Kaslain, bowing his head as Volkmar departed.

Von Korden squatted down in the muck, pulling the Strigany up by the throat and pushing him against the wheel of the war wagon. Kaslain stood next to them as still as a statue, his face impassive. The witch hunter grinned with all the mirth of a corpse, ripping out the dirty cloth between his captive’s teeth and squishing his bloodied cheeks together with a pinch of his gauntleted hand.

‘We both know you’re going to talk, so I’ll let you keep your lips,’ he said. ‘For now.’

The Strigany let fly a complex curse, his bloody spittle pattering into von Korden’s face. Without taking his gaze from the nomad’s, the witch hunter grabbed hold of the bone sticking out of his captive’s leg and twisted it, eliciting a howl of pain.

‘I’m going to gouge your eye out with your own shinbone,’ hissed von Korden over the nomad’s screams. ‘What do you think of that?’

‘No!’ shouted the Strigany. He looked up at Kaslain, eyes wide. ‘Get maniac away! I talk!’

‘Back off, von Korden,’ said the Arch Lector, solemnly.

The witch hunter moved away, his face as dark as sin.

‘Right,’ said Kaslain, arms folded. ‘Where is he?’

‘Who?’

‘You know who.’

‘Pale count? He… He in Konigstein…’

‘Von Korden, the knives this time, please,’ said Kaslain, turning away. Von Korden stepped forward, sharpening his filleting knives against each other with a metallic chime.

‘No! No, the count… He is with wing-devils.’

‘Wing-devils?’ repeated von Korden, sharply. ‘The Devils of Swartzhafen?’

‘No, Empire man,’ croaked the Strigany, teeth bared in a bloody smile. ‘Konigstein.’

‘Swartzhafen. His eyes tell it,’ said the witch hunter, drawing a pistol from his surcoat and shooting the Strigany in the forehead in one smooth motion. Getting to his feet, he broke into a loping run down the ridge towards his Talabheimer escort.

‘Up! We march to Swartzhafen, right now!’

Kaslain shook his head in sadness. Touching his chest with the Reikhammer’s head, he knelt down in the mud, intoning a prayer to Sigmar as he closed what was left of the nomad’s eyes.

THE HIDDEN NECROPOLIS

Vargravia, 2522

A strangled cry came from behind, startling Bernhardt from his daze. One of them young wizard idiots, he thought. Probably worth a look.

The big man blinked away the clouds in his mind, and turned his head in the direction of the lens wagon. A white giant was looming out of the mist, ragged and corpse-like. It was so large the weird machine barely came up to its waist. It swung a fist the size of a barrel at the slumped-over wizard on the back plate. That will kill the old buzzard right enough, Bernhardt thought idly.

There was a sudden blaze of light, and something blurred around the bald wizard’s neck. Bernhardt watched as a glowing yellow shape floated out and caught the giant’s fist. The old man’s ghost, he thought, or something like it. Fighting with that giant.

‘Looks like it’s winning, an’ all,’ he murmured to himself.

‘Huh?’ said Cobb, sitting up next to him and picking gravel out of his cheek.

‘That glowy thing. Is’ tearin’ bits off that giant. Look.’

Sure enough, the golden figure that had emerged from Sunscryer’s robes was ripping great chunks of dead flesh and rotten bone from the giant’s frame. A second later the white monstrosity just fell apart, and the golden figure had vanished. The old man Sunscryer was up, now, pointing past Bernhardt and shouting some of his complicated wizard words.

There was a sudden flash of light, and as one, the militiamen spasmed from their trance. Bernhardt jumped up with a roar, shaking off the bony arms that had reached through the cold earth below him to grasp at his shoulders. He ran over to his men and yanked them to their feet, Cobb at his side. Together they kicked away the skeletal limbs and leering skulls that had been grasping and gnawing at their fallen comrades. One by one, the men regained their feet, stamping the bones back into the dust.

‘What the bloody hell just happened?’ said Delf, his jowls shivering.

‘S-s-site spell,’ said Khalep.

‘Indeed,’ added Sunscryer, straightening his robes. ‘Somewhat embarrassing, really. If it weren’t for my little helper I think we might all be dead as hobnails.’

‘What helper?’ asked Bernhardt, struggling to comprehend what had just happened. ‘That glowing thing? I thought that was your soul or something.’

‘Dear me, no! What you saw was a light-djinn, a kind of elemental.’

‘You’re a kind of mental,’ grumbled Cobb, brushing grave dirt from his jerkin. Bernhardt shot him a look as Jovi continued on. ‘It was bequeathed to me by a gifted but impractically rotund magus I befriended during my studies in El Khabbath,’ said the wizard. ‘We have mutual enemies in the von Carstein dynasty. But never mind all that. Shall we press on?’

‘Let’s,’ said Bernhardt sourly.

The Templehof expedition wound through the hidden necropolis of Vargravia. Still the hoofprints and cart ruts guided them, though the darkness was thickening. Bernhardt turned to face the rest of the Goat’s finest, trudging through the scree like condemned men heading towards a gallows. The taint of something foul hung in the air, a vile aftertaste on the back of each breath that promised evils yet to come.

Something writhed beneath Bernhardt’s boot. It was a thick, serpentine mass buried in the meaty earth, like a root, or a vein. Numbness spread up his leg, making his hands shake. Behind him, Derrick Vance went down with a cry, his habitually bare feet turned shocking crimson by a writhing mass of root-veins. Vance’s comrades rushed to help him, attempting to pull him free, but it was too late. Blood pooled in the hollow where his feet had been burrowed into by the vampiric roots. The rest of his lifeless body was white and pale.

‘To hell with this. We should go,’ said Bernhardt. ‘Get out of here fast, before any more of us get killed.’

‘I think you might be right, at that,’ said Sunscryer, biting his thumbnail and looking back the way they had come.

‘M-m-master!’ gummed Khalep, pointing at a break in the mist. ‘Isn’t that the m-m-manse?’

Sure enough, the domed top of a ruined manse was silhouetted against the rough glow of Morrslieb. It poked through the mist, its scrying scope glinting like a cyclopean eye. Its rough bricks were limned with a greenish tinge that emanated from behind the ramshackle building.

The expedition had reached the heart of Vargravia.

Gritting his teeth, Bernhardt boosted himself up onto the plinth of a nearby monument and peered into the mists. The manse was less than thirty yards away from him. Behind it he could just about make out something glowing a sickly green in the fog.

As he squinted, the thing seemed to resolve itself in greater detail. It looked like an ornate construction of black ironwork gates welded closely together, or perhaps a set of fused bones melded to look like a cage. It was glowing from within. Mounted on a series of carved stone slabs, the dark cage contained a shackled casket that positively thrummed with power. It hurt Bernhardt’s mind even to look at it.

The militiaman closed his eyes tight, but the after-image was still there, dancing behind his eyelids – the negative image of casket, its purplish glow encasing a hand of purest black.

At the fore of the strange construction was a lectern made from a human corpse that held a giant grimoire upon its back. The tome’s pages crackled with tendrils of purest darkness as they flapped back and forth. As Bernhardt watched, a gaunt figure rose up from the stonework and loomed over the book, his hissing syllables cutting through the mist. Low moans came from all around the expedition. The Stirlanders formed up tight, blades held ready.

‘That’s… no, it can’t be…’ said Sunscryer softly, peering into the mist. ‘That’s an unholy reliquary, it has to be!’

‘Whatever it is, there’s a black hand inside the middle of it,’ said Bernhardt, grinding his fists into his eyes. ‘I can’t stop seeing it.’

‘There is!’ Jovi hissed in triumph. ‘The book, the hand… I was right, Neftep! That cage holds the reliquary of the Great Necromancer himself!’

‘Surely that disappeared centuries ago, master?’ whispered Neftep.

‘Yet clearly Mannfred has found it! That tome on the front – it’s one of the Nine Books of Nagash, my boy. It’s where the darkness is coming from!’ he crowed. ‘It’s all powered by the thing inside that reliquary, a casket containing the disembodied claw of Nagash, cut from his wrist at the fall of Nagashizzar! That’s what’s behind all of this!’

As their necromantic master’s name was spoken out loud, the grave-things around the manse rose up as one. A milling swarm bore the reliquary aloft, shrieking loud enough to wake the dead.

‘Oh dear,’ said Jovi Sunscryer, his hand flying up to his mouth.

Khalep cracked the reins and sent the warhorses surging forward, the war machine juddering in their wake. Something white flashed on the other side of the machine, a brief flurry of lace and long hair that flitted from one grave to the next.

‘Delf Cook,’ came a ragged female voice. ‘Lie with me forever.’

By Bernhardt’s side, the fat militiaman clutched at his throat, gasping for air. Something vaporous slid out of his mouth into the mist, and he toppled over, stone dead.

‘Johan Breckner,’ it said. ‘Ferdinand Lessner. I claim your souls.’

Two of the Goat’s finest fell to their knees amidst the ranks of their fellows and slumped over, disappearing into holes in the ground that closed over the top of them like mouths.

Barely a few feet away a worm-eaten visage surrounded by a mass of floating black locks pushed out from the side of a slab of stone. The apparition stared straight at the knot of militiamen, cold malice bleeding from its empty sockets. The nearest Stirlanders cried out and lurched backwards, features twisted in shock.

‘Jonas Cobb. Rest with me in eternity.’

The tall halberdier’s eyes rolled up into his head before he fell over in a heap, his polearm clattering to the ground.

‘Bloody well do something!’ shouted Bernhardt up to the wizards. ‘That’s Nell! She’s killing us!’

He fired a crossbow bolt straight at the ghastly spectre’s head. It pinged off the rock behind, spinning off into the mist.

‘What, sorry?’ shouted the figure on the lens deck of the receding Luminark, cupping his ear.

At the sound of his voice, the ghost of Emmanuelle von Templehof turned to face the old wizard, arms outstretched.

‘Jovi Sunscryer,’ it said, tendrils of darkness pouring out from its mouth. ‘Die.’

ARFEIT/SWARTZHAFEN BORDER

Vale of Vain Hope, 2522

The crusade had made good time across the fordable point of Unterwald River and pressed on with its forced march, von Korden striding determinedly at their head. The witch hunter had not spoken a word nor slowed in the slightest since the battle against the Strigany at Deihstein Ridge. Every iota of his deadly conviction was focused on finding his quarry, and anyone who hailed him was met only with stony silence.

Volkmar, by contrast, was blinking away exhaustion. Flashes of memory from Fort Oberstyre assailed him whenever he closed his eyes, and the war altar was juddering along at such a pace it was impossible to get any kind of rest. The Tattersouls, having picked up on the urgency in the air, were chanting and lashing themselves with even more zeal than usual, some of them even breaking into short runs when their fervour overflowed.

The Grand Theogonist looked back through the thinning light at his unsteady flock. He did not know whether to be reassured or disturbed by their manic energy. He was sure they had grown in number since the crusaders had passed the refugee train. For a second, he thought he could make out the peasant with the cleft lip they had talked to, trailing at the back with his wife. They gabbled strange syllables and tore at their hair, eyes rolling.

‘Sigmar! Sigmar through the Great Fires!’ shouted Gerhardt the Worm, grinning up at Volkmar. ‘Plunge through the Great Fires and transcend to the world of glory!’

The Grand Theogonist muttered a prayer to the Heldenhammer and turned back to the road. Keeping this pace was madness. He wanted to sleep for a week, a year, maybe even to just lie down forever. But the trail was still warm, and Sylvania needed him still.

An hour of hard slog later, the steepled roofs of Arfeit hove into view. There were still a few windows with light in them, and the promise of decent beds. The town’s protective border of stakes bore many a corpse, each in a different stage of decomposition. Ravens picking at strings of decaying flesh stopped their feast to look up at the vanguard’s approach, cawing in disapproval. Arfeit was a defensible position without a doubt, and potentially a vital night’s sleep for the soldiery.

‘No time!’ shouted von Korden from the front of the marching column.

Volkmar’s shoulders sank down. ‘He’s right,’ he said in answer to Kaslain’s questioning stare. ‘We press on.’

Dawn should have arrived by now, even by the shallow standards of the last few days. Volkmar could taste the morning dew in the air, mouldy and chill. Yet the skyline remained as grey as a month-old corpse.

Up ahead the vanguard had spotted the von Swartzhafen mansion, its ruined and slouching walls a patch of pitch black on the horizon. Already the war altar had passed statuary and shattered stonework, and the decaying vegetation that had been lining the road had thinned out to sparse brown twigs. As the ground opened out Volkmar could see something else up ahead, barring their path. At this distance it appeared no more than a thin white line in the mist.

Volkmar looked up, his eye caught by motion from the mansion’s tower. Morrslieb’s wan glow broke through the clouds for a moment, and bat-winged things were illuminated in silhouette.

‘Fan out and form up,’ called Volkmar, his voice strained. Several of the Talabheimer men turned questioning looks in his direction. ‘Just do it!’ he shouted. ‘Now!’

The ragged crusade spread out, taking advantage of the open ground in front of Swartzhafen’s gates. A low cry cut through the air, a sound that a living man could not have made. Blades were drawn, but kept low.

In the distance, a bell tolled.

Von Korden span around to look straight at Volkmar, an expression of wild bloodlust in his eyes. Turning back, he signalled his Talabheimer escort to move forward, waving Bennec Sootson’s cannon crew up the field on the right. The state troops obeyed with surprising speed, hustling forwards towards the distant gates.

‘You faithful,’ said Volkmar, motioning to the Tattersouls below. ‘Forward, and fast.’

THE HIDDEN NECROPOLIS

Vargravia, 2522

‘I can’t hear you, I’m afraid, lads!’ bellowed Sunscryer as he trundled away from the shouting Stirlanders. ‘Candle wax in the ears! Just in case Whispering Nell makes an appearance!’

Dropping his swords and roaring in desperation, Bernhardt snatched something from his coat pocket and flung himself straight at the female gheist that was drifting around them. A small knot of his men charged after him. Militiamen thrust their spears and blades into the midsection of the gaunt horror, but they passed straight through. Bernhardt’s brawler instincts took over, his left jab passing straight through the gheist’s maggot-chewed face. Quick as a daemon his right hook came around in a haymaker punch that connected hard, tearing the hideous thing’s skull into a scrap of diffusing ectoplasm. There was a dwindling screech as the apparition sunk into the ground, mist roiling in her wake.

‘How in Sigmar’s name?’ said Janosch Velman, coming up to Bernhardt’s side.

‘Not Sigmar,’ said Bernhardt, unfurling his fist to expose a pair of smoking pfennigs. ‘Morr.’

Up ahead, the horses pulling the wizards’ contraption into the lee of the tumbledown manse struggled to make it the last few yards to the highest point of the peak. Bernhardt led his men in a loose run towards it, heedless of the ghastly faces roiling in the mist. High up at the manse’s dome, a glowing figure was wrestling free the scrying lens at the end of the astromancer’s telescope, bearing it down and angling it above the Luminark so that it glowed in sympathy with the glass discs ranged along the machine’s length. As Sunscryer shouted an arcane phrase of staccato syllables, a stuttering light shone out across the peaks – weak at first, then with increasing stridency – until the necropolis was lit with the strobing of the Luminark’s distress call.

The Stirlanders had reached spitting distance of the glowing Luminark when the air was split by a hideous screech. A group of hooded, flaming wraiths rode out from the wall of the ancient manse, their skeletal steeds passing straight through the rear carriage of the arcane war machine and heading down the scree towards the militiamen. The wraiths held their burning scythes high as they drove through the Stirlanders’ ranks, sweeping their blades low to cut into the men that flailed ineffectually at the flanks of the undead horses. The strange hooked scythes of the apparitions did not cut the flesh of their targets, instead passing straight through them. The wraiths galloped on, and five militiamen fell lifeless to the ground as if every tendon in their bodies had been severed at once. The rider-gheists wheeled around for another pass, screeching wildly as the unnatural green flames around them burned bright with stolen energy.

‘The Wind of Hysh repels you!’ shouted Jovi Sunscryer, standing on the riding plate of the Luminark and gesturing fiercely at the strange apparitions. The skies flashed white, and two of the wraiths were obliterated by lances of energy that darted from the gloom.

A second later a latticed net of light flickered into existence in front of the remaining wraiths. They galloped right into it and were held fast in the air, the strange magical trap curling around them as it threw dancing shadows everywhere. The fell creatures screamed curses in a language that Bernhardt did not understand, though the wizards were shouting louder and louder in a repetitive chant that sounded suspiciously similar.

There was a chime of glass as Khalep swung the apparatus around, releasing a searing blast that burned straight into the trapped wraiths. When Bernhardt blinked away his shock, the figures were no longer there, and the echoes of their dismayed shrieks were fading away to nothing.

Bernhardt breathed a shallow sigh of relief until he realised that the men guarding the far side of the Luminark were crying out in pain. Two of them staggered back in horror as a robed grave-gheist rose out of a nearby tomb and cut them open to the spine with its long, hooked scythe. The big man darted through the gravestones towards them, only to see a contorted knot of militiamen sinking in on themselves, their flesh darkening like fruit succumbing to a season’s rot in the space of a few heartbeats.

Drifting towards the dying men was the ironbone reliquary that Bernhardt had seen rise into the air upon their arrival. Ghostly forms whipped around it, bearing it forward at a slow but inevitable pace. The ropes of black energy that crackled around the casket at its heart reached out, extending like the tentacles of some undersea nightmare. At their caress, Stirlanders blackened to skeletal ash and blew away, scattered by ethereal winds that caressed Bernhardt’s sweating forehead with the chill of the grave.

‘Run! Get out of here!’ he shouted. ‘It’s hopeless! We’re all dead! We’re all dead!’

He sank to his knees, gibbering in misery and gouging at his eyes in an effort to remove the stain that the black claw inside the casket had seared into his sight. It was no use. It was still there, and getting bigger and more oppressive by the moment.

‘Run…’ he said, weakly, but everyone else had already fled.

The howling of gheists grew louder and louder as the cadaverous guardians of the claw rode slowly towards Bernhardt, their glowing blades raised for the kill. The militiaman’s head was torn upwards by an invisible grip, and was slowly turned around so he could fully appreciate the majesty of his oncoming doom.

Just as the reliquary filled his whole world, a blinding bolt of energy speared out from the lee of the manse, blasting into the stone carriage of the palanquin. A deafening, mind-numbing shriek of anguish rose up into the night as the magic binding the reliquary was shredded. The sound was like a thousand tortured souls all screaming themselves hoarse at once. It looked to Bernhardt’s addled perception as if the hellish thing was dissolving, shimmering into a river of greenish mist that wound away into the darkness like a serpent’s ghost.

The last thing he saw before he fell unconscious was the Luminark shuddering after it in pursuit, a trio of haggard wizards hanging grimly onto its wrought-iron chassis.

SWARTZHAFEN

Foothills of the Broken Spine Mountains, 2522

The crusade’s men, gathered into as tight a battle line as the outskirts of Swartzhafen would allow, padded through the darkness towards the settlement’s wrought-iron gates. Once a rich town jealously guarded by the reclusive nobleman that lived in its mansion, Swartzhafen had fallen into decay. Much of its defensive perimeter had been torn down by nameless assailants. As the mist thinned, Volkmar saw that another line of defence had been raised up, one far more dangerous than a mere gate.

Dozens of dead peasant bodies were packed tight in each of the gaps in Swartzhafen’s walls, some still clothed in flesh and rags, some no more than mouldering bone. They were caught in mid-stumble as if they had been abandoned by time itself. Dead wolves dotted the fore of the corpse army, frozen still as they prowled. Stretching into the mist by their side was a pack of ghouls, held fast in mid-lope as they had attempted to flank the approaching forces. Behind the gates leered the necromancer, Ghorst, atop his macabre cart. Even he was immobile. The entire tableau was disturbingly still.

With one exception.

At the head of the wall of undeath was a heavily built figure, mounted on the back of a giant stallion-corpse. It was clad in ornate armour, its plates fashioned as an overlapping series of bat wings, and in its gauntleted hands were long, bladed weapons that glowed dully in the gloom. A cloak of blurring shadow-spirits billowed around the figure’s shoulders, their tiny skeletal mouths open in silent screams.

The figure’s face was hideous, a mask of cruelty rendered in dead, dew-slicked flesh. Its hairless grey head tipped backwards as it bared its fangs slowly, cocking a hooked claw and motioning Volkmar to come close.

‘He looks like a von Carstein all right, in all that armoured finery,’ said Kaslain. ‘Wants to parley, by the look of things.’

‘Oh, there will be a parley, all right,’ spat the Grand Theogonist. ‘A parley of blades, and of fire.’

‘Old man!’ called an ancient, cultured voice through the mist. ‘Volkmar of the Hammer, who is called The Grim! Thou hast come to mine gate at last!’

Volkmar ground his teeth. ‘That’s him. Mannfred,’ he growled, the name a bitter curse.

‘I wish to discuss matters that thy… common folk need not hear,’ said the vampire, motioning dismissively at the state troops taking position opposite him. ‘Fools, kindly leave thy master and I to our grandsire’s talk.’

Several of the Talabheimers jerked as if they had been burned and made to flee, but their comrades held them fast, slapping them back to their senses and pushing them into the ranks once more.

‘Ha! So many true believers,’ said Mannfred, his tones appreciative. ‘So many thoughtful gifts thou hast brought me, my tired friend. Myrmidians, Sigmarites I see, even Morr’s playthings… and a new golden ornament for my halls.’ The vampire motioned towards the war altar as if it were no more than a trinket to be easily dismissed. ‘I cannot wait to gorge on the blood of the faithful – it has such a distinctive tang. Thine most of all, I am wagering, old man.’

‘We come to burn you in the name of Sigmar, fiend, and nothing more,’ said Volkmar. ‘Your sorcery has no hold over us.’

The von Carstein laughed incredulously, the sound surprisingly human from one so monstrous. ‘Thine years have been far from pleasant, old man,’ he said, wiping away a tear of blood as his smile faded into a mask of derision. ‘Thou art spent. As is thy rabble. The smell of defeat is upon thee. Let me release the strength that flows in thine veins. It is a rare vintage indeed, and I alone know the power it can bring.’

‘Fire!’ shouted von Korden from the Talabheimer flank.

The vampire snarled a strange syllable in response. A split second later the Hammer of the Witches boomed and a black cannonball streaked straight towards the von Carstein. The vampire exploded in black shadow, coalescing in the cannonball’s wake before flying towards the war altar at terrible speed.

‘Charge!’ shouted Volkmar as the motionless wall of undead suddenly unfroze and poured towards them. ‘In the name of all that’s holy, charge!

The Silver Bullets opened fire, and a heartbeat later a clutch of frozen ghouls were bowled backwards into the mist. Bounding through the remainder of the troglodytes came eyeless wolves with skin flapping from their jaws. Von Korden could see Ghorst on the far side, his cart’s cursed bell tolling loud. The witch hunter growled in disgust as the necromancer chanted his thrice-damned resurrection rite, summoning the dead ghouls back to their feet.

Well, if gunpowder was not enough to keep the undead scum down, he had other ways of dealing with them. The witch hunter peeled back his glove and placed the ivory ring that the wizards had given him against his bare palm. ‘Be banished!’ he shouted. A triple-headed serpent of light streaked out towards Ghorst’s cart like a sinuous thunderbolt.

The necromancer ducked down into his morass of corpses as the spell struck home, blasting apart the infernal bell and setting fire to the carriage’s rear. Von Korden gave a short cry of triumph, gesturing for the swordsmen behind to move forward as his attack drew the undead canines in close. When they were only a few feet away, the witch hunter calmly stepped back into the ranks of Sigmar’s Sons, their sharpened swords coming together in his wake.

The ghastly wolves leapt forwards just as von Korden had planned, skewering themselves on the Sons’ blades in their haste to snap and bite. Two sets of slavering jaws closed down hard, tearing Sigmarite heads from necks as they bore the front rankers down with their rotten weight. One was hacked into pieces as it sprawled amongst them, whilst the other was blasted free by one of von Korden’s pistols. The decapitated remains of the wolves’ prey fell slowly backwards, spurting blood over the red and white cloth of their comrades’ uniforms.

At the insistent tattoo of Redd Jaeger’s drum, Sigmar’s Sons shouted in unison and stepped forwards, pushing back with shields and stabbing through the gaps into the dead flesh of their assailants. Their frenzy spent, the undead beasts fell apart in a sloughing mass of worm-eaten meat. The Sons stumbled forward, leather shoes and bare feet alike squishing on the remains of their foes.

Cantering out of the darkness of the wooded right flank, the Knights of the Blazing Sun accelerated into a gallop, ploughing straight into the mass of pallid ghoul-flesh that was bearing down on the Silver Bullets. Lances speared sunken chests, and several of the ghouls were pinioned to the peaty earth, never to rise again. Frog-like, several of the hunchbacked things leapt up at the cavalrymen as they rode past. Their filthy claws and needle teeth scratched ineffectually at lacquered black steel before they were shoved roughly away with lance shafts or, in Lupio Blaze’s case, dislodged by a visored head-butt.

Von Korden called out a warning as three massive, winged figures fell out of the misted skies and screeched towards the Myrmidian riders. The fiends were huge, their leathery pinions expansive enough to cover a horse nomad’s wagon. Vargheists, the Sylvanians called them – lesser von Carsteins who had been altered to a form more pleasing to their elders’ desires.

The monsters threw their clawed legs forward as they landed, grabbing at the knights like swooping raptors seizing up vermin. Two of the armoured warriors were plucked from their saddles and borne screaming up into the air. The witch hunter fired a long-range pistol shot, blasting a chunk of hip from the largest of the beasts. The Silver Bullets followed suit, their volley of shot tearing the wing of one of the vargheists and slamming into the torso of another. The wheeling creatures screamed and released their prey, letting their captives drop into the battle below.

One of the falling knights ploughed into the ranks of the Tattersouls, bowling several of them over just as they charged into the corpses shuffling out of the town’s broken gates. The momentum of the charging zealots faltered as confusion broke out in their ranks. Some looked in rapturous awe at freshly broken bones, others looked skywards to see if Sigmar himself was throwing down reinforcements.

Scant yards away the corpse-horde lunged from the gates as if propelled by some unseen force, lopsided jaws gnashing and broken hands outstretched. The Tattersouls roared in delight, crying out about the mortification of flesh and the end of days. A handful of their number threw themselves bodily into the mass of corpses with a shout, bearing several of the cadavers to the floor. Their bellies and backs were pulled open by the claws of those undead milling behind, the martyrs dying in bloody agony. Taking advantage of the distraction, the front rank of the Tattersouls whirled their flails skyward and brought them down with crushing force, splitting open heads and tearing arms from bodies.

Still the dead things came on, crowding in. Yellowed teeth sank into tattooed flesh, farm implements jabbed spasmodically, and faithful blood spurted.

‘I am Sigmar’s Holy Worm!’ shouted Gerhardt, his eyes alight with madness. ‘Burrow into the grave and out the other side!’ He lashed out with his elbows and knees as he looped his bare foot around a fallen flail and flicked it up into a corpse’s face. ‘Burrow, damn you!’ he shouted, pushing his thumbs through the milky white eyes of another gnashing corpse and pulling its head free in a curving spray of grave-fluids. He used the disembodied head to smash another corpse-puppet’s head clean from its neck. ‘Burrow like a worm!’

Calmly reloading his pistols on the right flank, von Korden took stock of the mayhem unfolding around him. To the left he could see a mass of stalking bone emerging from the mists and charging into the Hammer of the Witches, rusted blades raised. The war machine’s crew valiantly defended their cannon for a moment before stumbling back into the woods, unintentionally exposing the flank of the Sons. The swordsmen he had left in order to close with Ghorst were too preoccupied to notice, fighting hard against the mismatched wolves that had somehow pieced themselves back together and attacked with renewed vigour.

Up above, the vargheist servants of the vampire were falling once more upon the sun-worshipping Myrmidians in a strange vertical battle that the knights were ill suited to fight. Through the tumbled gates of the town’s border, yet more corpses were staggering towards them through the mist. All around the battle hung in the balance, but it was the scene at the war altar that made bile lurch up into von Korden’s throat.

The Sigmarite war machine had ploughed forward so far into the ranks of the corpse-horde that it had become swamped, its wheels jammed with tangled limbs and dead flesh. Worse still, the vampire von Carstein had left his incorporeal steed and had leapt onto the pulpit of the great chariot. He was hunched over in a duellist’s crouch less than a few feet away from Volkmar. Von Korden watched in incredulity as the fiend become a blur of motion, his glowing sword looping in a figure of eight to send the old man’s sacred warhammer sailing from his grip. The vampire stood up tall, seeming to swell with dark power as wings of shadow blossomed behind him. Von Korden touched his pistols to the Sigmarite symbol hanging around his neck and took careful aim.

Volkmar’s fists flared white as he roared forward, staggering the beast with a blast of pure faith as he roared the First Catechism of Banishment. Mannfred fell back, weapons tumbling from his twitching hands. The count’s cloak of screaming souls whipped out at the Grand Theogonist’s face, driving him back in turn. Von Korden took his chance, hot silver flashing out as he fired with both pistols at once. Blurring downward, the vampire dodged behind the war altar’s lectern, claws clacking onto its topmost ledge. Yet the shot had bought Volkmar time. As the undead count hoisted himself upward to attack once more, Volkmar grabbed a solid-gold skull from the pulpit’s lectern shelf and brought it crashing down onto Mannfred’s bald pate.

Screeching, the vampire fell backwards from the war altar only to catch the balustrade and channel his momentum into a swinging leap. He vaulted over the pulpit and kneed Volkmar back against the war altar’s Golden Gryphon in one lightning-fast lunge. Weaponless, the von Carstein wrenched a length of ironwork frame from the timber of the war altar’s pulpit with a single claw, lifting it high to strike the Grand Theogonist down.

Suddenly a hundred screams filtered through the air from the east of the vale, chilling in their intensity despite being on the very cusp of hearing. Mannfred looked at the Vargavian Mountains on the horizon with an expression of utter shock before launching backwards off the pulpit. He landed with impossible grace, crouched like a Strigany horseman upon the saddle of his deathless mount.

The undead beast reared, hooves flailing, before thundering off eastwards at a pace no mortal steed could hope to match. In the murky mists above the battlefield, the vargheists abandoned their bloody persecution of Blaze’s knights and winged off into the night after their master.

‘Forge onwards!’ coughed Volkmar desperately, regaining his feet. ‘Don’t let them escape!’

His men gave a great roar and plunged into battle with renewed vigour, cutting down the slumping bodies of their suddenly listless foes. Within less than a minute, there was nothing left of the undead army that was not covered by ankle-deep mist.

Yet it had all been for nothing. Mannfred was gone.

THE STERNIESTE ROAD

South of the Vale of Darkness, 2522

The Sigmarite crusade staggered along the peaty road that led to Castle Sternieste, its limps, groans, and a general blood-splattered appearance giving it an uncomfortable resemblance to the undead army it had narrowly overcome at Swartzhafen. The war altar rolled along at its head, Volkmar standing braced against the lectern as he murmured the words of one of the carriage’s holy tomes. A few yards in front of him was von Korden, hunched almost double as he tracked a set of distinct hoofprints pressed at great intervals into the earth. Mannfred had headed east at great speed, though none of them knew quite why.

Arch Lector Kaslain was in the midst of the throng, spurring the men on with fiery imprecations and speeches to the glory of Sigmar. Volkmar had meant to attend to morale himself, but at the moment he just didn’t have the fire to be convincing. He had busied himself with cleansing the altar of the vampire’s touch instead. It was likely futile, said a despairing voice in Volkmar’s soul. Exhausted and with many of their number badly wounded, they likely marched to their deaths. The men knew it, and in his heart, so did he.

Yet there was no choice.

‘Your honour? A word?’ came a deep but respectful voice from below.

Volkmar looked down to see Eben Swaft, the duellist leader of the Talabheimer swordsmen he had fought beside in the north, walking alongside the war altar with sword drawn.

‘Swaft, well met,’ said Volkmar. ‘One moment.’

The Grand Theogonist made the sign of the hammer over the Tome Unberogen on his lectern, concluding the reconsecration ritual before making his way down the carriage and dropping down next to Swaft on the road. His knees spiked with pain, but he tucked it away with the rest of his burdens at the back of his mind.

‘We can’t keep on at this pace, your honour, if at all. We’ve got limbs falling off back there.’

‘I realise that, Eben,’ sighed Volkmar. ‘We can’t rest, though. Not when we are so close. One well-placed cannonball and this will all be over.’

‘With respect, your honour, the bastard could be miles away by now,’ said Swaft, fingering the tip of his blade. ‘Our men are dying. We need to stop.’

‘Kaslain has it in hand,’ said Volkmar crossly, screwing shut his eyes to shut out the pleas coming from the rear of the column.

‘Aye, the arch lector’s worked miracles back there, true enough. Temporary ones, though. We need sleep. More than that, we need hope.’

‘No sleep. We press on.’

A moment’s silence passed between the two men before Swaft spoke again.

‘You and the witch hunter ain’t so different after all, are you, your honour?’

Volkmar spun round in the mud, eyes aflame. His fists were raised in front of his heaving chest and his chin jutted out under his quivering moustache, giving him a distinct resemblance to a dockyard prizefighter from the Time of the Three Emperors.

‘That’s more like it, old man,’ said Swaft with a nasty grin, sheathing his blade and rolling up his sleeves.

‘You will address me with the proper respect,’ snorted Volkmar, ‘or I shall teach you some, here and now.’

‘Fine, then,’ replied Swaft. ‘I can punch some fire back into you if that’s the way it has to be.’

A cry of surprise and joy came from the rear of the procession, startling Volkmar and Swaft into a stalemate. Their altercation forgotten, they both rushed to the rear of the war altar, scanning the road behind. Over the crest of the hill a pair of banners fluttered in the wan light, proud and clean against the sky. One of them bore the red cruciform of the Reiksguard, the other royal colours of Karl Franz’s court.

Volkmar watched in stunned silence as two brigades of Altdorf’s finest cavalry crested the hill. All around him, the crusaders broke formation and rushed to new vantage points, filled with new energy at the prospect of good news. The wounded and their minders stayed behind, taking advantage of the interruption to tend dressings and re-bind broken bones.

First to ride up to the crusade were eight of the Reiksguard, Karl Franz’s personal elite. Their red-feathered crests bobbed bright above burnished silver plate that had been engraved with scenes of the Emperor’s greatest triumphs. From the vanguard of the crusade, Lupio Blaze called out in greeting, his lance raised high. At the head of the Reiksguard, Hans Zintler took off his helmet and saluted a response, his men raising their own lances in parade ground unison.

The only regiment that could claim equal status with the Reiksguard was the Royal Altdorf Gryphites, and they were not far behind. Three muscular veterans resplendent in shining steel tilted their cavalry halberds in salute to Volkmar as they approached. They were mounted on demigryphs, towering Drakwald monsters that were half eagle, half lion. They too were armoured, their powerful wingless haunches and barrel chests protected by finest Altdorf steel. One of the demigryphs barked a few bursts of aggressive avian noise before lowering its vicious beak and plucking at a roadside corpse.

‘Lord Volkmar!’ said Hans Zintler as the Reiksguard approached. ‘Karl Franz sends his best wishes, and eight of his finest swords. Also Richter Weissmund, no less,’ fiddling with his moustache as he nodded at his opposite number in the Gryphites.

Weissmund thrust the butt of his cavalry halberd into the mud and made the sign of Sigmar, bowing his head.

‘Grand Theogonist.’

‘Captain Weissmund. You and your noble beasts are a sight for sore eyes.’ said Volkmar.

‘That’s no way to talk about the Gryphites, sir,’ said Zintler, a wry gleam in his eye.

‘We lost nine good men to the Drakwald tribes in the last week, Zintler,’ said Captain Weissmund, grimly. ‘You would do well not to joke of men that act as beasts.’

Zintler inclined his head in half-hearted apology.

‘We answered your summons, your honour,’ Weissmund continued. ‘Where is the enemy?’

‘My summons?’ said Volkmar.

‘The message from the brass sentinels, your holiness,’ replied Zintler. ‘The Emperor got a message several days back, sent from Konigstein Watch. Well, we’re the reinforcements you asked for, sir. We damn near killed our horses getting here, but there’s fight in them yet.’

Weissmund gave a derisory snort. His demigryph started at the noise, a growl in its feathered throat as it looked around for something inhuman to kill.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, Zintler, but I’ll be honest – I’m thrilled to see you here. My thanks to Karl Franz,’ said Volkmar. ‘You two realise who we’re hunting?’

‘Aye,’ said Weissmund, gruffly. ‘The von Carstein. So what are we waiting for?’

‘Hold on a moment, captain, if you please,’ said Zintler. ‘Your holiness, may I present to you the Sunmaker.’

The leading Reiksguard opened their ranks with dressage precision to reveal the last two riders amongst their number. Each of their warhorses was yoked to a contraption of tubular rockets and ironwork structures built on top of a wheeled artillery carriage that faced backwards down the road. Its Talabheimer crew stepped off their perches on the carriage and saluted smartly.

‘A Helstorm rocket battery, if I’m not mistaken,’ said Volkmar. ‘Unreliable.’

‘Not this one, Grand Theogonist,’ said the largest of the crewmen, smugly patting the top of his machine. ‘This here’s the last work of Jurgen Bugelstrauss. The Sunmaker’s not just any Helstorm, your lordship. She’ll see you right.’

‘Fine, good,’ said Volkmar. ‘Any help is welcome. But we’re wasting time.’ He looked down the road to the vanguard, raising his hammer. ‘Von Korden!’ he bellowed.

‘What?’ said von Korden, stepping out from behind a twisted oak less than ten yards away.

‘Ah, there you are. A message from Konigstein Watch, eh? Good work. I’ll excommunicate you for going against my orders when we get back. Get a marching order together fast so we can make the most of our new arrivals. And sound the hunt.’

STERNIESTE

The Vale of Darkness, 2522

Mannfred von Carstein sped along the dirt road on the back of his deathless steed. Dark clouds grumbled above, but no living thing would make a sound. Even chirruping grave beetles fell silent at his approach.

As he cantered the last furlong towards Castle Sternieste, the vampire count bared his fangs in a lipless snarl. Closer to Vargravia than Swartzhafen by far, the castle was a welcome sight. He could feel the reliquary growing closer, and he had plenty of time to marshal his forces before the Child of the Heldenhammer and his fools came knocking. That they would come was beyond a doubt. This phase of the Great Work was almost complete.

Since his cousin Nyklaus von Carstein had met his end in the seas of the Galleon’s Graveyard, the shadowy energies drained by his cursed maelstrom had whipped loose across the world. Nyklaus, or Count Noctilus as the traitorous fool had liked to call himself, was never deserving of such power. Since his final demise Mannfred’s mastery of the aethyric winds had become more powerful than ever. Simply by clutching a family heirloom once treasured by his sea-loving kinsman, the count could transform himself and his steed into beings no more substantial than darkness itself.

Yet for Mannfred to leave no sign of his passage would defeat the purpose of his flight. Instead he’d pounded every ounce of his stallion’s weight into the road that led east to Castle Sternieste, leaving hoofprints that even a blind man could track.

The rolling hillocks that typified the Sternieste countryside punctuated the road in greater and greater number. Each one was a cairn from a bygone age. Mannfred could feel the dull but powerful throb of the dark magic that flowed like a stream into each mound. The lintels above each shadowed doorway had been gouged so badly the original runes were illegible, and the tomb doors lay cracked and mossy on the ground. His Strigany agents had done their work well.

Arms crossed over his ridged breastplate, Mannfred steered his steed through the hillocks with flickers of thought. Slowly, deliberately, it brought him to the burial grounds of the Reavers.

The soaring walls of Castle Sternieste loomed only a stone’s throw away. The crumbling citadel was impressive, almost as magnificent a sight as Fort Oberstyre. Though its lightning-blasted towers reached high, the ancient castle had no natural defences like the fortress in the west of Sylvania; no high plateau or deep moat to protect it. No, mused the count, tapping a long fingernail on the armoured collar of his steed. Sternieste’s defences were anything but natural.

Mannfred dismounted next to the largest of the cairns, his cruel features set in concentration as he set his glimmering blade on the wilting grass. When he spoke, the syllables crawled out of his mouth as if he were spitting out insects.

‘Nacafareh, Aschigar, vos maloth Nagashizzar…’

Red eyes glinting, the vampire raised his blade upward, one hand on either end, raising it parallel to the ground until he held it high. His chant was repeated three times, growing to a crescendo that echoed from the walls of the castle.

A few seconds later muffled, grinding sounds emanated from the tombs around him, the chink of metal cutting over the noise of shuffling bone and the rustle of ancient syllables.

One by one the skeletal, heavily armoured forms of the Sternsmen jerked themselves from their rest and stood up straight. Mildewed sockets gaped and scaled armour glinted, flashes of mouldering bone catching rare glimmers of light as Morrslieb peered down approvingly. Half a dozen warriors stood there, then a dozen, then two dozen, then more. Each faced towards Mannfred with its jaws open as if in silent joy.

The largest of the ancient warriors had come from the largest cairn, as was ever the way with the pre-Sigmarite tribes. It wore a high crown of bronze and a tattered cloak of holed green leather that fluttered and snapped in a breeze no mortal man could feel.

A rustling voice rattled in the von Carstein’s head as the ancient king turned its empty eyes towards him.

What is thy command, o lord?

‘Tarry a little longer, King Verek,’ said the von Carstein, ‘until the living ones approach. Then cut, and stab, and kill.’

For Sternieste, it shall be done.

The skeletal monarch brought its blade up in jerky salute. Mannfred shook the voice out of his head, breaking his mental bond to the ancient warrior with a snap of thought.

‘For Nagash, in fact,’ he muttered to the staring wights that stretched into the darkness, ‘and, more importantly, for me.’

Von Korden scanned the horizon as Volkmar’s crusade heaved the war altar up over the cusp of Licheburg Hill. The Reiksguard and Altdorf Gryphites formed an honour guard on either side – welcome reinforcements at a vital hour. In the distance, Castle Sternieste loomed on the other side of the valley. Its triple towers stuck up like a taloned hand ready to pluck Mannslieb from the dusky night, leaving only its sickly twin to haunt the skies.

Searching the countryside for movement, von Korden silenced the soldiers muttering around him with a sharp word and listened hard for the moans of the waking dead. He thought he saw a flash of light in the hills, but it was gone before he could place it. Only the chink of metal sounded in the distance, impossible to trace with the thin mist distorting the sounds in the valley.

A raindrop plipped onto the brim of von Korden’s hat, then another. The witch hunter grimaced. He thought he could see heavy clouds mustering on the horizon, though the darkness made it hard to tell. There was so little light left.

There it was again.

Something was illuminating the thin mist in the valley below, pulsing like a mischievous will-o’-the-wisp. On, off. On-off-on.

Like a signal.

Von Korden grinned wolfishly. This time, the smile reached his eyes.

The crusaders gathered at the base of the cairn-dotted hill, Castle Sternieste a black and forbidding presence up ahead. They could hear the chattering of travellers in the mist ahead, and the jangle of tack. Whatever form these newcomers took, they were alive. No undead creature made that much racket.

‘Volkmar!’ hissed von Korden, gesturing for the old man to join him on the top of a large and empty cairn. The Grand Theogonist puffed out his cheeks and strode up the hillock, his sacred warhammer held loosely at his side.

Lurching towards them through the misting rain was a flickering machine that very much resembled the Altdorf Luminark, though its lens cannon was longer and more elaborate. It was quite a splendid sight, rivalling the war altar itself in grandeur. Von Korden remembered the first time he saw one being unveiled. Balthasar Gelt had had some choice words to say about the things, at the time. It seemed to the witch hunter that a light-engine would be next to useless in the near-permanent darkness of Sylvania, but the arrival of a battle wizard was not to be turned away, and the Luminark’s heavy carriage could ride down a corpse or three if it came to it.

‘Ho there!’ called out the robed and leathery wizard standing up on the contraption’s lens deck. Ranged on the road below him were small knots of dangerous-looking men holding everything from farm implements to crossbows. Amongst them were primitive banners made from tavern signs nailed to timber posts, one bearing the sign of a stylised goat, another a pair of crossed keys, and yet another one a wagon and horses.

‘Ho there, friends!’ cried the old man.

‘A good day for us, it would seem,’ muttered Volkmar, turning to von Korden with eyebrows raised. ‘The Templehof collegiate. No doubt their presence is the result of that message of yours.’

‘Possibly,’ said the witch hunter, his expression inscrutable.

‘Alberich?’ hooted the elderly mage. ‘Alberich von Korden? Is that your hat I see gracing that hillock, you horrible old bloodhound?’

Von Korden could just make out two robed apprentices shrinking in embarrassment on the driving plate below. Their master carried on oblivious.

‘We’re hunting the claw, Alberich! The claw of you-know-who! Mannfred had it hidden in Vargravia!’

‘Keep it down, Sunscryer, you’ll wake the dead,’ said von Korden, scowling.

Behind Volkmar, the crusade was buzzing with rumours and questions. Von Korden listened to the hope build in the tones of the crusade’s voices as news of yet more reinforcements spread. He nodded softly despite himself. They might have a chance yet.

At the base of the hillock, the trio of robed wizards dismounted and made their way up towards the Grand Theogonist. A mob of heavily-muscled men came at their back, many of whom von Korden recognised. Militia gathered from villages all over the vale, by the look of it. As the newcomers approached, Volkmar stepped up to von Korden and put his hands on his shoulders, meeting the witch hunter’s gaze levelly.

‘Forget the excommunication, von Korden,’ he said under his breath. ‘If this lot make the difference and we take down Mannfred, I’ll beatify you instead.’

The crusaders fanned out across the barrows and cairns of Sternieste, its cavalry wing held back in reserve. Volkmar felt determination flare inside him as he watched the riders peel off from the vantage point of his pulpit. Three of the Empire’s finest knightly orders at his command, as well as two artillery pieces and a trio of wizards backed up by a core of veteran infantry. Thank Sigmar for human solidarity. With the horsemen, the Light Order and the Stirland militia factored in, the crusade numbered almost a hundred good and faithful men. Plus von Korden, Volkmar added to himself.

The rain that pattered out of the charcoal grey skies was clearly the prelude to something far more severe. The horizon was clustered with menacing black clouds, hanging low in the darkness. Green light flickered in their depths, and every few seconds a threatening rumble rolled across the downs.

Less than a hundred yards away from the crusade movement could be seen in the shadow of the great castle, an indistinct mass of bodies shifting in and out of pitch darkness. Bait, no doubt, thought Volkmar. Well, with a reserve as powerful as his, he intended to plunge right in after it. No better way to get Mannfred to show his hand, and in the process leave himself open to the cavalry reserve’s killing strike.

Something dark and huge emerged from the shadow of the castle walls. An armoured rider, his barded skeleton of a steed pawing the mossy ground. When the figure passed into a wan pool of light shed from Morrslieb above, the rider stopped his steed and smiled, rain pattering from his hairless, ridged pate. At this distance, its mouthful of bloodied teeth was a red slash in a white mask.

It was unquestionably Mannfred von Carstein.

‘Unberogen!’ bellowed Volkmar, sounding the Horn of Sigismund and whipping his altar’s warhorses forward. ‘Sigmar Unberogen!’

The war cry was echoed by the faithful throng that surged forward across the hilly field. The Tattersouls shrieked and clawed themselves in eagerness to die as the Talabheimer state troops marched forward, faces set in grim masks. Out on the left flank the Luminark clanked onto a low hillock, where its view of the battlefield had been judged optimal by the Light wizards chanting in unison upon its frame.

The clouds overhead rumbled deep, and the Hammer of Witches added its voice to the thunder as rain poured down. Its cannonball shot into the darkness, slamming into the base of the castle and sending a shower of masonry cascading into the milling figures below.

A mass of lurching corpses was lumbering downhill towards the state troops, mouths spilling maggots and twisted fingers clawing the air. To their right, rain-slicked skeletons stop-started their way across the field in sloppy synchronisation.

In the centre of the undead battle line, Mannfred drew something in the air with a long fingernail as a female gheist floated down from the towers above to join him. The vampire pointed at the Tattersouls, mouthing something evil. In the shadow of the war altar’s balustrade, the zealots aged decades in the space of seconds. Some of them cried out weakly as they shrivelled, turned grey, and fell away like ash in the rain.

‘Sigmar protects!’ bellowed Volkmar, slamming his warhammer’s head against the metallic frame of the pulpit. The rain turned golden around the Tattersouls for a second, and the curse was lifted, though many survivors were already bent double under the sudden weight of years.

The undead battle line was less than fifty feet away now. The moans of the undead that stalked through the dissipating mist could be heard even above the thunder. Now was the time, thought Volkmar. They could wait no longer.

Volkmar sounded the Horn of Sigismund once more. Behind him, a brace of rockets huffed into the air, fuses crackling. With a tremendous triple bang the artillery volley detonated high above the battlefield, the burning light of its explosions strobing against the slick black brickwork of Castle Sternieste. Their illumination remained as bright as the first detonation as the phosphoric rockets drifted downwards on wide canopies of silk. The luminescence was so bright that it lit the battlefield as clear as a summer day.

‘Sigmar!’ shouted Volkmar, cracking the war altar’s reins as hard as he could and sending the carriage surging forward. Answering his war cry, the entire line of crusaders charged headlong into the wall of undeath coming towards them. The war altar crashed bodily through a mass of skeletal swordsmen, crushing half a dozen to splinters in a second. Volkmar lashed out at skulls and bony wrists below him as the unliving warriors jabbed upward at him ineffectually. To his left the Tattersouls flung themselves into the fray, shattering yet more skeletons with their swinging flails. With the battlefield bright and the fires of righteous ire in their veins, the Sigmarites were cutting down corpses with every strike.

On the right flank, the cavalry thundered around the edge of a cluster of large hillocks to come out at full gallop. They slammed hard into the mass of bodies that boiled out of the lee of the castle, corpse-puppets sent to keep the horsemen from his main battle line. A dozen lances struck home into mouldering torsos, warhorses stamping their hard iron hooves into any that evaded them. Demigryphs screeched as they clawed and slashed and bit, flinging dead meat in all directions. Atop the eagle-headed beasts, Weissmund’s Altdorf Gryphites swung their cavalry halberds in great arcs, bisecting cadavers in twos and threes.

Too soon, thought Volkmar hopelessly. The fools had been stalled too soon.

Captain Weissmund’s body was ripped into two flailing halves as Mannfred burst out of the shadows and rode past, shearing his sword and his hooked blade through the Gryphite’s abdomen in a spray of blood. The Reiksguard knight riding next to him drew his sword and turned with a shout, but the vampire’s deathless warhorse swung its heavy skull sidelong into the rider with a clang, unseating him. Mannfred’s blade took another Gryphite’s head from his neck, the strike so powerful it sheared through without slowing and plunged deep into the throat of its steed. The vampire screeched in ecstasy as hot blood pumped out in great sprays, his ridged black armour stained as crimson as his maw. Lupio Blaze charged at full gallop towards him, lance lowered and a prayer to Myrmidia on his lips. His weapon’s tip hit only shadow as Mannfred dissolved into nothingness with a dark and mocking laugh.

Thunder boomed and a streak of green lightning shot out of the clouds, grounding on the highest of Castle Sternieste’s open towers. The crackling green bolt did not vanish away, but instead spread into eight smaller fingers; a distorted claw of energy with one fingertip dancing on each of the tower’s circle of pillars.

Out from the clouds above came the most terrifying thing Volkmar had ever seen.

Borne upon a palanquin of spectres was an artefact of such eldritch evil it assaulted the mind. Its open lead casket presented the terror of the relic inside to the world. The souls of ancient queens whirled around it, their screams forming a jarring discord that sawed on every nerve at once. The choking stink of mass graves assaulted the nostrils of the Empire line, forcing even Volkmar to gag painfully in disgust. But it was the vision blazing within the reliquary’s ironbone cage that offended the senses most of all.

At the heart of the reliquary was a giant taloned hand of purest black, the evil sight clutching at the eyeballs of every living creature that witnessed it. Something about the hand beckoned to Volkmar, making his soul feel filthy and used. A prayer spilled reflexively from the Sigmarite’s lips, and the feeling ebbed away.

The militiamen below the reliquary were not so fortunate. As the spectres that bore the palanquin brought their charge lower and lower, the claw’s fell energies stripped away the skin, then the muscles, then the tendons of the men underneath it until nothing was left but blood-slicked bone. The gory skeletons shivered and danced before plunging their bony claws into those of their panicked comrades that milled around them or curled into foetal balls.

Up on the hillock, the wizards of the Light Order were screaming their chanted magicks against the storm. Steam smoked from the Luminark’s lenses as lances of energy stabbed out again and again at the fleshless horrors stalking towards it. As the reliquary hovered low above the battlefield, the ironwork frame of the Luminark’s lens cannon juddered slowly round to point at it instead, the old man at the helm barking ancient syllables and pointing at the casket within.

A flash of white caught Volkmar’s eye through the storm as a hideous female gheist appeared next to the Luminark’s chanting acolytes. It cupped its hands to the youngest wizard’s ears for a second. The apprentice blanched and toppled forwards, dead as a rock. With his demise the wizards’ tripartite chant faltered and tumbled to a halt.

Sunscryer cried out in agony as the failed ritual backfired. A moment later he burst into a pillar of white flame so tall it nearly reached the clouds above. Every glass lens in the Luminark shattered at once, its jagged shards raining down onto the screaming acolyte clutching the dead body of his friend on the riding plate below. The human torch that had been Jovi Sunscryer fell burning from the lens deck into the mud with a searing hiss.

Above him, the ghostly palanquin hovered in close, its tortured gheists shrieking in dark joy as they pointed at the reeling figure sizzling in the muck. A cannonball ploughed through their midst, tearing away a few scraps of ectoplasm but slowing them not in the least. The surviving acolyte huddled on the riding plate of the Luminark cried out wordlessly in fear, his skin aging rapidly as the hellish engine grew closer.

Suddenly a bright flare of light burst out from Sunscryer’s blackened robes, coalescing to form the upper body of a glowing guardian angel. The giant figure flew upwards towards the reliquary, seizing its ironbone gates and wrestling it backwards whilst the palanquin’s ghostly forms shrieked and clawed at its insubstantial flesh.

Volkmar tore his gaze away and shoved a crawling skeleton away from his lectern with the end of his warhammer. Though half a dozen of the ghastly warriors were clambering up the war altar’s carriage towards him now, his attention was irresistibly drawn back to the spectacle unfolding atop the hillock. Whilst the luminescent figure was being torn apart by the palanquin’s gheists, a trio of ragged zealots had clambered up the chassis of the shattered Luminark. Picking out daggers of wyrdglass with bloodied hands and clasping them between their teeth, the Tattersouls leapt up to grab onto the reliquary’s plinth as it hovered above its prey.

Two of the flagellants missed and went flailing down into the skeletons advancing towards them, but Gerhardt the Worm managed to catch an ironbone strut and swing himself up onto the stonework. Gheists plunged through him again and again, wreathing him with unnatural green flame, but the zealot was too deep in his mania to care. He laughed as his flesh crackled and burned, stabbing his wyrdglass shard into the gaunt guardian that hunched protectively over the evil book. The smell of burned meat filled the air as Gerhardt flung his arms around the cowering corpsemaster, the zealot’s triumphant scream echoing over the rumble of the storm as emerald fires turned them both to ash.

Though Volkmar and his men were slaughtering the clumsy corpse-puppets wherever they appeared, the unclean things always staggered back to their feet and continued the fight a few moments later. Exertion burned in the Grand Theogonist’s arms as he swung his hammer again and again into the clacking skeletons below him. His men were crying out with effort instead of anger now, hacking their heavy blades again and again into dead flesh until their shoulders slumped and their voices gave out. Yet somehow the battle line held.

A cry came from the rear ranks of the Sigmar’s Sons, and Volkmar chanced a glance behind their lines. His eyes widened as he beheld dozens of ancient, armoured figures stalk out of the cairn hillocks with rusted bronze blades held high. Behind them mouldering horsemen were emerging through the mist, galloping eastwards at some unspoken command. The ancient tribe formed up on the skeletal king at their centre with uncanny speed and charged, ploughing into the rear of the Talabheimers and their Stirland allies with blades raised.

Eben Swaft bullied his way through the Talabheimer ranks to the rear of his shouting troops, elbowing and stabbing his way past the front rank of armoured skeletons to plunge his blade right into the ancient king’s ribcage. Once, twice, three times he jabbed with a fencer’s grace. The wight merely stared dolefully at him with its empty eyes before bringing its pitted blade down in a glowing arc. Thunder boomed above them as it cut straight through Swaft’s deft parry and sheared off the duellist’s head and right arm in a single blow.

The snap of wings sounded, and Volkmar whipped his head around once more to see three bat-like figures drop from their roost underneath a shattered tower. The Devils of Swartzhafen, screeching as they glided low towards him. A skeletal claw clutched at his ankle from the skeletons milling below, and he stamped down hard. By the time he looked back up, the winged vargheists were upon him, kicking him to the floor with their taloned feet. They were huge, filling his vision with their drooling, pointed faces and membranous wings. One of them reached out towards his sacred warhammer and wrenched it out of his grip before dropping it as if it were on fire.

Kaslain fell upon the wing-devils from above, leaping down from his perch atop the Golden Griffon to bring the Reikhammer down in a two-handed strike. The ancient warhammer hit one of the hulking, bat-like creatures right in the nape of the neck, shattering every bone in its torso and pulping it against the altar’s iron balustrade. Volkmar kicked its remains away into the skeletons below. At the same time its pack-mate lunged, biting into Kaslain’s face with a sickening crunch. Bellowing the Prayer Exalt, Volkmar summoned all of his rage into a white-hot ball and blasted the beast backwards, burning the beast’s flesh with the flames of his faith. It screeched and released the arch lector, Kaslain toppling backwards like a felled oak as the wing-devil lurched away on smouldering wings.

Suddenly Volkmar felt something sink into the back of his head, and everything went dark.

In the shadow of an empty cairn, Ghorst stood up to his full height atop his grisly carriage. Two points of burning black energy appeared in his eyes.

‘One last time, then, Alberich von Korden,’ croaked the necromancer.

Von Korden grabbed a Stirlander militiaman’s corpse and hefted it in front of him as twin bolts of darkness crackled out from the necromancer’s eyes, blasting the impromptu shield into black wisps of smoke. With his pistols already spent and with no time to reload, the witch hunter picked up a disembodied arm from the ground and sent it spiralling towards the necromancer’s head. Taking advantage of the momentary distraction, von Korden darted to the right as the cadaverous cart lurched towards him, swinging himself up into the morass of decomposing bodies held in the upturned ribcage of its chassis. Dead hands clutched at his legs, drawing blood with their bony grip, but nothing could shake the hunter’s focus.

Ghorst spat black sparks as he began another spell, but von Korden was on top of him before he could finish it. He grabbed the necromancer’s lank hair with both hands and pulled his head down sharply to meet his knee on the way up, crunching teeth and shattering his jaw in a spray of brown blood.

‘No more spells for you, Helman,’ gloated von Korden. Behind him, several of the cart’s passengers clambered up and sank their rotting teeth into his thighs, but the hunter blocked out the pain with an effort of will, pulling out his ivory ring and placing it against his palm. He thrust both hands downward and clamped them over the necromancer’s mouth. ‘My turn, bastard. Be banished!’

Searing light burst out from Ghorst’s eyes, mouth, ears and nose as the energies of the white ring burned him from the inside out. The necromancer spasmed violently, but von Korden held on with grim strength until white cracks appeared across Ghorst’s skin and the magical light burned him away completely.

Underneath von Korden’s feet the cart sloughed away into a compost heap of rotting flesh and bone. Extricating himself, the witch hunter kissed the cameo hanging around his neck, ignoring the grave-filth that covered his gauntlets.

‘That’s for you, Lynn,’ he murmured.

All around von Korden the battle raged on in the lashing rain. On the hillock behind, the Silver Bullets were firing frantically at a hooded gheist that was drifting towards them with its scythe raised. The handgunners’ pinpoint volleys blasted straight through it without effect. Curser Bredt barked a command and the men ripped off the silvered talismans they wore around their necks, reloading and shooting at point-blank range just as the wraith’s hooked blade cut down the first of their number. The gheist wailed and came apart as the blessed bullets burst through it. A heartbeat later a pack of incorporeal horsemen rode through the handgunners’ ranks from behind, their scythes flickering as they claimed soul after soul.

Ahead, the rest of the state troops were struggling hard against the dead rising up from the ground below them as Mannfred incanted his spells. Not only were half-rotten cadavers and corpses standing back up to clutch at the survivors of the grinding melee, but also the bloody-uniformed Talabheimer dead they had called comrades moments before. A sense of desperation seethed in the air, an imminence that drove men to acts of heroism and cowardice in equal measure.

The big man that had led the wizards’ rabble took up a fallen banner-sign from a mound of twitching dead and swung it hard at the vampire count from behind, breaking the goat-emblazoned sign across the back of his bald head. Blood puffed out, but the vampire merely snarled, catching the brawny Stirlander by the scruff of his neck and flinging him onto the lance of the Reiksguard knight that was charging him from the right.

In the lee of the corpse-heap left in Ghorst’s wake, von Korden reloaded his pistol with the last of his silvered shot. The vampire had them outnumbered now – at least three to one, by the look of it. Legs were buckling and sword arms flagging as darkness drew in once more, the Sunmaker’s flare-rockets dampened and then extinguished by the driving rain. With the cavalry committed, the battle of attrition was sliding dramatically in favour of the dead. Green lightning flashed overhead as the screams of pain and the cries of dying men punctuated the rolling thunder. Worse still, Mannfred was at the height of his power.

The witch hunter was readying himself for one last charge when a lambent flood of light rolled out across the battlefield from the west. It spread like running quicksilver, draining into the earth in seemingly random locations. A moment later the earth shook like the fur of a wounded beast.

Suddenly, miraculously, the earth burst open in a hundred different places. This time it was not the dead that emerged, but the buried symbols of the faithful. Stolen sigil-hammers, steel wolf totems of Ulric, Morrite pennies, even brass suns of Myrmidia burst out of their earthy graves to hang at head height across the field, each glowing with raw magical power.

Von Korden gave a shout of triumph. Mannfred’s agents had buried the stolen symbols deep, but not deep enough. His message had been intended for Karl Franz, in truth, but Sunscryer’s plan to convey it to the Colleges of Magic had borne fruit at the critical hour. Clearly, Balthasar Gelt, Supreme Patriarch and master of metalshifting, had heard of their plight and offered his own contribution just in time.

A roar of fierce elation was torn out of the surviving crusaders at the sight of their sacred symbols lifted high. All across the battlefield Mannfred’s incorporeal gheists were blasted into nothingness by the wave of raw faith that poured out across the field. Even the reliquary drew back into the storm clouds, its guardians crying out in unearthly pain.

A surge of vitality bloomed through the crusaders’ ranks at the sign of so much hope made manifest. Swords and axes were raised high once more, tired limbs were reinvigorated and battle-cries found new voice. United in rebellion against the pall of undeath that had threatened to bury them, the crusaders cut down the rotting host one after another until nothing was left but strewn chunks of meat and the stench of death.

Von Korden scanned the battlefield as the surviving crusaders gave thanks to their gods amidst the torn remains of their foes. Slowly his spirits sank, despair filling his heart once more. In the chaos, the vampire Mannfred had made his retreat. Worse yet, the war altar lay on its side, abandoned.

Volkmar was nowhere to be seen.

EPILOGUE

As the battle ground to a sudden halt outside Castle Sternieste, the light in the great open chamber atop its southern tower flickered fitfully. Inside, tree-trunk candles made from human fat spluttered and spat as if disgusted by the robed priest that had been flung into their midst.

A pair of bloodied vargheists paced hungrily around their prize, chattering to each other in their clicking tongue. Even in their dim animalistic minds, they had enough sense not to tread upon the gilded grooves that formed a rough outline of Sylvania upon the chamber’s floor.

As his dazed senses returned to him, Volkmar could feel magical power thrumming through the flagstones he was lying on. He raised his head and struggled blearily to focus. Blood pulsed out of the hole in his bald pate where one of the vargheists had bitten down hard. He dared not touch it, fearing he might feel something soft and spongy beneath his fingertips.

The walls around the priest were ranged with shackled figures, dazed by lack of blood or beaten to the point of unconsciousness. Amongst their number were a white-robed healer of Shallya, a bearded brute bearing the mark of Ulric upon his forehead, and a pallid devotee of Morr so badly whipped that he stood knock-kneed in sticky pools of his own blood. The Myrmidian Lupio Blaze was shackled opposite an elf maiden so regal that she was stunning even under a mask of blood and dust. A broken tiara hung from her tangled tresses, the symbol of the Phoenix Court emblazoned upon it. He recognised the symbol of the Everqueen next to it, something the elven envoys to Karl Franz’s court had always been proud to display.

Between each of the nine captives were lecterns wrought in the shape of daemons’ claws. Giant grimoires were bound in chains to several of the lecterns, their pages rustling as if by their own accord. At the heart of the chamber, the stolen Crown of Sorcery sat on a cushion of human skin, its priceless jewels winking in the candlelight. A flame of defiance burned in the Grand Theogonist. If he could only seize it and escape the chamber, maybe even return it to Altdorf, he could restore his reputation and start the crusade anew…

Volkmar’s aching mind struggled to make sense of his surroundings. Suspicions stalked him like thieves in an alley. To amass such an assemblage of dignitaries and artefacts from across the world was the work of months – years even. But to what purpose?

For a second, all the candles in the chamber guttered at once. A moment later, a tall armoured figure loomed over Volkmar. Swollen with arcane power and clad in bat-winged plate of purest black, the newcomer was a figure of ancient legend come to life. Mannfred von Carstein, Gravelord of Sylvania and scourge of the Sigmarite Cult, placed his metal boot on the Grand Theogonist’s back and pressed down hard.

‘Look at thee, wriggling on the ground,’ said Mannfred von Carstein, his voice cultured under its sneering tone. ‘The great Volkmar, high priest of the Heldenhammer. They say that the blood of Sigmar runs in thy veins, my friend. And perhaps they are right.’

Above Volkmar, the vampire count gestured to his vargheist minions. They fell upon the unconscious figures ranged around the wall of the chamber, ripping open their wrists with pointed teeth. Blood pattered onto the flagstones, pooling in the candlelight until it found its way into the gilded grooves that ran scant inches from each captive.

Volkmar cleared his mind of pain and thought only of the warrior god Sigmar, he who had banished the Great Necromancer when the Empire was young. The priest felt his bones knit and heal as a golden light flowed through him. He shucked his powerful shoulders, dislodging the armoured boot that held him prone.

Suddenly, an explosion of pain blossomed behind his eyes as the vampire count dug his claws into Volkmar’s gaping head wound and used the inside of his skull to pull him to his feet. A pallid, leering face swam in the Grand Theogonist’s blurring vision. Volkmar balled his fist and punched Mannfred hard in the mouth. He felt fangs break under his knuckles, even through the screaming black pain that was burning into his mind.

‘Now, now,’ said Mannfred, spitting a tooth onto the floor and smiling crimson in the candlelight. ‘It’s too late for such primitive nonsense, I’m afraid. Too late for you, and too late for the Empire.’

A fell wind raced through the arrow-slits of the chamber, snuffing out the candle flames. An instant later, the chamber became deathly cold, and a diffuse green light turned the blood that trickled around the flagstones jet black. Volkmar felt his tendons freeze and his mind grow numb. As the elements raged above, the night sky filling the chamber’s open roof was eclipsed by a howling tempest of ghosts that bore a cage of ironbone towards them. The vargheists raised their voices in supplication, howling in worshipful glee.

‘The blood of Sigmar,’ the von Carstein said, licking his fingers as Volkmar gazed up in horror. ‘The last ingredient I need to claim the realm that is rightfully mine.’

The vampire stalked around the stunned priest, talons flexing. ‘Great things can be accomplished with the life essence of true believers.’ A black and pointed tongue slithered along his lips, smearing traces of stolen blood. ‘Sylvania will soon become a realm where faith has no power, and your precious holy symbols are little more than trinkets. All because the blood of the faithful has been turned against them.’

At an unspoken signal from their master, the vargheists darted forwards and held Volkmar’s arms fast. With a single swipe of his claw, Mannfred slit open Volkmar’s wrist, and blood pulsed out.

Eyes glinting, the vampire squeezed the priest’s arm above the cut in his weapon arm, forcing the wound to open like a wet mouth. Ever more blood drizzled down the old priest’s hand, swiftly finding the grooves in the floor. It mingled with that of the holy men and women flowing around the chamber until the gold of the cartograph laid into the flagstones ran scarlet throughout.

Grinning vilely, Mannfred grabbed Volkmar by the neck and lifted him from his feet. He carried the struggling priest to the edge of the chamber without effort and slammed him bodily against one of the arches that formed the tower’s windows. In the far distance around the mountains that ringed the vale, the old man saw an unhealthy crimson light spread, its passage echoing the blood-filled borders cut into the flagstones below. Beneath the light were explosive eruptions of movement. A fortress wall of bone was bursting up from the ground wherever the crimson light touched the ground.

Volkmar burned with anger as Sylvania became completely drained of what little life was left to it. The old priest struggled for breath, a muffled roar of desperation and despair bursting unbidden from his lips. He pushed at the vampire with a surge of strength, channelling the raw power of his faith in Sigmar into one last great blast of defiance.

Nothing happened.

‘Too late,’ said Mannfred once more, his voice cold as death’s own claws as he slowly stalked closer. ‘No mortal can defy my will.’

The vampire count bared his fangs and lunged for Volkmar’s throat.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phil Kelly has been a devotee of myths, monsters and magic for three decades, the last of which has been spent working as a games developer in Games Workshop’s Design Studio. Over the years, Phil has made body parts as a sculptor, roamed the roofs of Nottingham as a free runner, played the stages of Glastonbury, dived shipwrecks in Thailand and discovered the time-saving joys of extreme ironing in his home county of Essex. Since meeting his wife at a Los Angeles beach party, Phil has begun to settle down a bit. He now leads a nice, normal life writing about fantastical armies, undead pirates and gribblies from outer space.

Wade – thanks for your help on this project. Powerful!

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Paul Dainton.

Map by John Michelbach.

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