‘He’s alive?’ asked Maedbh.
‘Barely,’ said Freya, her voice cracked and faint. ‘We have to get him back to Reikdorf.’
‘We all need to get back,’ said Cuthwin. ‘We’ve seen this lot off, but there’s more of them coming this way.’
Maedbh looked to the east, and the flame of hope was smothered in her breast as she saw thousands more skeletal warriors marching in lockstep towards them. They had weathered this attack, but the dead had many more warriors to send into battle.
‘Everyone back!’ she shouted. ‘To Reikdorf!’
Krell’s axe slashed down, but instead of cleaving through armour and flesh as it had done in his slaughter of the Red Scythes, this time his blade was halted by gromril armour and the strength of mountains. The towering monster paused in its butchery and looked down at the stout forms opposing it. The furious light in the champion’s eyes burned even brighter, as though recognising the stunted forms before him from battles fought thousands of years ago.
Master Alaric felt the power of Krell’s blow throughout his body, his great-grandfather’s shield almost bent in two by the force. The shock reverberated through his armour and he thanked Grungni that he’d thought to strengthen himself with several firkins of beer.
‘Is that the best you’ve got?’ he sneered at the long dead champion. ‘No wonder Grimbul Ironhelm was able to beat you.’
Krell roared with renewed fury, and his axe came up as a hundred dwarfs charged him. Alaric hurled himself at the ferocious champion whose name was entered countless times in the Dammaz Kron, his every transgression written in the blood of the High Kings of the age. He hammered his axe against Krell’s blood-red form, feeling the star-iron of his axe bite a hair’s breadth into the skull-etched plates of armour. Krell roared and slammed his axe down on a dwarf warrior’s head, cleaving him from skull to groin. Blood sprayed the armour of his comrades, and they attacked with renewed fury.
Like the great pistons of Zhufbar, the dwarf axes beat the black armour of Krell, cutting shards of cursed iron away from his body, but leaving the giant, skeletal body beneath unharmed. Alaric circled behind the undead champion, rolling beneath the return swing of the black axe that left six dwarfs bisected at the waist. The ring of iron and gromril tightened around Krell, but the sheer weight of numbers only seemed to drive him to greater heights of frenzied delight.
Krell’s axe swept left and right, and those it didn’t kill were hurled away to land with the butchered human horsemen. An injured warrior, the one Alaric had spoken to, watched the fight in pained amazement. Alaric would sooner eat grobi dung than fail in front of a manling. The shameful life of a slayer awaited such unfortunates. That was not going to be Alaric’s fate.
Yet more of the undead were moving up behind Krell, pushing forward in giant blocks of marching skeletons and lurching corpses. Hundreds of bats wheeled overhead and ghostly wisps of howling shades swirled around them. One way or another, this fight would need to end soon, for there was no way his dwarfs could hold against such numbers.
Alaric waited until Krell swung his axe in a low arc, killing another four dwarfs, before throwing aside his shield and leaping onto the dead champion’s back. He wrapped his hand around a broken hunk of armour and beat his axe against Krell’s shoulders.
Plates shattered under the assault, and Krell arched his back as he felt Alaric’s presence. He roared and spun around, seeking to dislodge Alaric as the remaining dwarfs pressed their attack, battering his thighs with axe blows and hammer strikes. Sparks flew from the red armour, like metal fresh from the forge on an anvil. Alaric fought to hold on as he thundered his axe against the metal of Krell’s armour. He felt his grip slipping and slammed his axe though a weakened plate, wedging himself in place by gripping an exposed rib within the unclean iron.
It felt like plunging his hand into an icy lake, and Alaric felt the cold of the other side seeping into his hand, a frozen touch of utter lifelessness and doom. He tried to snatch his hand back from Krell’s essence, but it was stuck fast. The cold slithered through his hand, oozing through the veins and meat of his wrist. Alaric knew that when it reached his heart, he would become no better than Krell.
‘Master Alaric, sir!’ shouted a loud manling voice. ‘Da says you got to get clear!’
Alaric knew he had only one chance to live and grimly freed his axe from the weakened plate of broken armour.
‘Alaric the Mad, eh?’ he said. ‘Maybe they’re right.’
He brought the axe down upon his wrist, the razored edge easily slicing through his flesh and bone. Alaric grunted in pain and kicked out on Krell’s armour, throwing himself as far away from the champion as he could get. He landed on a dead horse and rolled behind it as he heard a series of snapping hammers being pulled back.
‘Left one’s out of alignment,’ he grumbled, as the world filled with fire and noise.
Govannon pulled the leather firing cords, elated and terrified at the same time. He couldn’t see much of the battle, which was a relief to him, yet out of the shadows one shape was terrifyingly clear. The blood red form of Krell loomed in the darkness, a monster of nightmare come to hunt the living.
The first hammer struck the side of its brass cauldron, slowing enough to prevent the flint from sparking, and Govannon’s heart sank. The hulking champion of Nagash loomed over the war machine and Govannon cursed himself for a fool in wishing to be part of this fight. Krell would kill them all; nothing could stand against this horror from an ancient age.
He cursed his naïve belief that he could repair a machine of the dwarfs, bitter that he could have spent these last weeks far more productively. Armour, swords, shields, axes, arrowheads–
The second hammer struck true, and puffs of smoke and fire frothed from the brass cauldrons at the back of the machine. The barrel erupted in a booming storm of shot and fire, another a few seconds later. Govannon’s ears rang with the concussive force of the detonation and his eyes watered with the brightness of the fire erupting in thundering booms from the barrels. Then the fourth barrel fired. As the hammer slammed down in the powder cauldron of the barrel he had repaired, Bysen lifted him away as the Thunder Bringer rocked back with ferocious recoil.
The barrel held firm and erupted with a blizzard of iron shot and, clear as day, Govannon saw the towering champion fall, his blood red armour ripped to shreds by the hurricane of fire and iron. Bones were shattered and torn away, the horned helmet little more than a ragged lump of pulverised iron hanging from a torn leather chin strap.
Part of Krell’s head was gone, the left side of his skull a shattered ruin. Blackness gaped within, yet the fire in Krell’s right eye blazed as the dwarfs fell upon his ruined body with sharp axes and vengeful hearts.
‘It worked!’ shouted Govannon. ‘In Ulric’s name, it worked!’
‘Aye, da, it worked good!’ said Bysen happily. ‘Big, big bang! Bysen’s ears hurt!’
Khaled al-Muntasir rode at a leisurely pace towards the north, watching as the army of the dead began to fully envelop these mortals who dared to stand against Nagash. He had ridden with all speed towards where the red-armoured cavalry had fought the black knights to a standstill, but halted upon feeling Markus’s death.
For a mortal, Markus was a tremendous swordsman, but enhanced with the power of undeath, he had been superlative—better even than Khaled perhaps. Yet he was dead, his soul consigned to oblivion by a mortal. The unease that had stirred in the vampire’s belly all night returned, stronger this time, and he cursed himself for succumbing to such a mortal sensation.
Yet no sooner had the painful empathic horror of Markus’s destruction passed than he felt Siggurd’s pain as weapons blessed in the name of the god of all living things pierced his immortal flesh. He winced with each wound, unused to such pain, and felt Siggurd’s anger as he was forced to flee. His two unbeatable warriors had been defeated, one destroyed, the other wounded almost to the point of dissolution.
Khaled al-Muntasir f
orced the anger at their incompetence aside and turned his attention to the rest of the battle, trying to regain his impregnable confidence. Thousands more dead warriors were advancing towards the city, pushing past the tiny islands of resistance that had met with some fleeting success. The battle line of mortals arrayed before the walls was fighting with admirable courage, but no hope of victory. They took backward step after backward step, and it was only a matter of time until they broke. Yet in the centre of the battle, cut off from the rest of his army, Sigmar drove for the low hillside where Nagash awaited him. Less than a hundred warriors still rode with the Emperor, yet they charged as though all of mankind were with them.
The vampire looked to the black form of Nagash, who stood with his enormous sword and twisted-snake staff in his hands. Black light flickered from the staff and blue fire wreathed the blade of his ancient sword.
‘What are you waiting for?’ hissed Khaled al-Muntasir. ‘Just kill him and be done with it.’
Yet even as he said the words, he knew Nagash could not kill Sigmar with his black sorcery while he wore the crown. Its incredible power would protect any wearer from virtually all forms of magic.
Khaled al-Muntasir watched as Nagash raised his staff and arcing bolts of lightning forked downwards, striking the gems inset along its scaled length. A storm of dark energy surrounded the necromancer and he slammed the staff into the ground. With senses beyond those of mortals, Khaled al-Muntasir watched the energy flow from the staff and into the hillside, spreading like the roots of a poisoned tree beneath the earth.
‘That’s more like it,’ he said.
These black roots sought the bleak places of the land, the abandoned graveyards long since paved over, the forgotten plague pits covered in quicklime and the sites of murder and mayhem. Drawn to these places like rats to a cesspit, Nagash’s sorcery infused the earth with the dark magic of undeath.
And the unquiet dead rose from their ancient graves to claw their way to the world above.
The earth rumbled with the sound of digging claws and moaning hunger, the churned grass rippling as the dead of centuries before rose to the surface. Hands long devoid of meat erupted from the earth and hauled fleshless corpses back to the land that had consigned them to the ground. From the southern fork of the river to the city gates, a huge tear opened in the earth and a thousand or more dead warriors from the time before men had dwelled in cities and towns lurched unsteadily to their feet.
The Asoborns and the people of Reikdorf fleeing the onward march of the dead abandoned all pretence of an ordered retreat at the sight of this new horror. They ran for the city gates, terrified at being surrounded and cut off from their home. Even Freya, whose courage was unquestioned, fled along with her sons, Maedbh, Ulrike and Cuthwin. Daegal, with his newfound courage, formed a rearguard with the few surviving Queen’s Eagles, and if any of them thought it strange to be taking orders from one so young, none remarked upon it.
Within the walls of Reikdorf, the ground broke open as the dead climbed from below, pushing their way into the half-light as Nagash’s sorcery compelled their grisly remains to rise up and slay the living. Hundreds of dead things stalked the streets of the city, fighting anything warm and feasting on their flesh.
Alfgeir and Teon were trapped within a closing ring of undead, their retreat cut off by a newly emerged phalanx of the dead. They were unarmed, these dead men, but they swiftly picked up the weapons of those the Unberogen had already destroyed. Ragged, disorganised and freshly risen, they were formidable in their numbers if not their skill as fighters.
In the north, yet more dead arose, surrounding Govannon, Bysen and the dwarfs as they hacked at the indestructible corpse of Krell. Though their axes were sharper than any weapon forged by the hands of men, they could not easily undo armour worked in the forges of smiths who gave praise to the bloody gods of the north.
The mortal army was surrounded and doomed.
Sigmar smashed aside a pair of skeletal warriors, champions in ancient, verdigris-stained armour of a thousand years ago. Hundreds of these undying creatures surrounded him, and yet still they pushed on. Ghal-maraz flickered with silver fire and shimmering sparks flew from his every blow. Hundreds of the dead had fallen before him, but hundreds more still awaited destruction.
Beside him, Wolfgart hacked through the dead with great sweeps of his sword, each blow weaker than the last as his strength grew less and less. Where Ghal-maraz imparted a measure of its power to Sigmar, Wolfgart enjoyed no such boon. Wenyld fought mechanically, slumped low over his saddle, though Sigmar’s banner still flew above the heroic warriors who rode with him.
Ghal-maraz swept out to either side, breaking the dead warriors apart with brutal cracks of shattered bone. As the last ranks of the dead were crushed beneath their horses’ hooves, Sigmar’s Unberogen, fifty warriors in total, rode onto the clear ground before the low hillside where Nagash awaited them. Its base was encircled by tall warriors in heavy hauberks of black iron, who carried long halberds with icy blades. A host of swirling spirits gathered in the air above the necromancer, and the darkness around him was total. Sigmar had no idea how fared the rest of his army, but knew that unless he could end this now, it would be slaughtered by morning’s light.
A trail of broken bodies littered the ground behind them, and though thousands of the dead were within reach, none turned towards them, as though their presence was an irrelevance.
‘Almost there,’ said Wolfgart, twisting in his saddle to make sure no more of the dead were moving to attack them.
‘Aye,’ agreed Sigmar. ‘One more push and I’ll have him right where I want him.’
Wolfgart gave him a sidelong look and then burst out laughing.
‘Damn me, Sigmar,’ he said. ‘I’m tired worse than I was at Black Fire, and that’s saying something, but you can still make me smile.’
Sigmar nodded, feeling the weight of the crown at his brow grow heavier with every step his horse took towards the hillside. He felt its anger at him surge, a fury that a mere mortal dared to wield it and not partake of its power. Its maker was at hand, and it renewed its assault on his mind, battering him with dreams of pleasure, nightmares of failure and temptations of wealth, power and godhood.
None could reach Sigmar, for he had reached that place where all thoughts of self were extinguished. All that was left to him now was service to his people, and not even death could keep him from that duty. Piece by piece, Sigmar had shed all his earthly desires, putting them aside for the greater good of the Empire.
Nagash’s crown had nothing left with which to tempt or intimidate him, for his entire being was dedicated to one ideal. That was something no necromancer could ever understand, the dedication of the self to a higher purpose, where the one man could make the difference between life and death, success or failure.
In this world, at this time, Sigmar was that man. He had believed that from the day he had walked amongst the tombs of his ancestors on his Dooming Day, but had known it when he passed through the fire of Ulric unharmed.
Everything he had done had driven him to this moment, and he knew this foe was his to face alone. Sigmar swung his leg over his saddle and dropped to the earth as a sudden stillness and silence spread outwards from the hillside. Though battle still raged beyond, Sigmar could hear nothing beyond his own laboured breathing and the distant howling of wolves.
He walked over to Wenyld and lifted his hand towards the red and gold banner.
‘Time to pass it on, my friend,’ said Sigmar.
Wenyld nodded, too weak from blood loss to resist as Sigmar took the banner pole from his blooded grip.
‘What in Ulric’s name are you doing?’ demanded Wolfgart, walking his horse alongside him and dismounting. ‘Get back on your horse, you fool!’
‘No,’ said Sigmar. ‘I’m going to end this now.’
‘What? You’re just going to walk up to the bloody necromancer on foot?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m doing,’
replied Sigmar, turning and making his way towards the hillside. ‘And don’t follow me. This is something I need to do alone.’
‘Why, for the love of the gods? Tell me that at least.’
Sigmar said, ‘Because this is how it has to be. You know how it goes. At the end of all the sagas, the hero always stands alone or else he’s not a hero.’
‘Damn the sagas,’ swore Wolfgart. ‘I’m not leaving you.’
‘Yes you are,’ said Sigmar as the ancient warriors at the base of the hill parted to allow him passage. ‘Wenyld needs you.’
Wolfgart turned and caught Wenyld as he fell from his saddle. Once again the howl of wolves sounded from over forested hills and shadowed valleys, carried to Reikdorf by cold northern winds. As Wolfgart lowered the dying Wenyld to the ground, Sigmar turned and climbed the hill towards Nagash, his banner in one hand, Ghal-maraz in the other.
He heard Wolfgart shouting his name, but didn’t dare look back.
Twenty-Three
The End of All Things
Every step was a battle, each yard he drew nearer to the necromancer a struggle against his mortal inclination to flee this abomination. The summit of the hill was wreathed in spirits in black, ghostly revenants of lost souls doomed to attend upon Nagash from now until the end of all things. Sigmar felt the dead light of Nagash roam across his body, learning in a heartbeat how he had grown and was now edging his way to the grave.
A black miasma swirled around the base of the hill, isolating him from the mortal world beyond, and Sigmar felt his flesh recoil from the vile presence of the immortal necromancer. His armour creaked in the frozen air and webs of frost spread across his breastplate and shoulder guards. Ghal-maraz was his only warmth, the language beaten into its haft by master runesmiths glowing with fierce light beneath his grip. Sigmar held tight to its warmth, for the crown at his brow felt like an ever-tightening fist of ice.