Redwane shook his head as he watched a man drag his dirt-encrusted fingernails down his face then drop to his knees and plunge his scarred features into the mud. Was he Torbrecan? Who could tell? Each man looked just as ferociously insane as the next.
Leovulf shook his head. ‘We’ll need to move if we want to stop this getting out of hand.’
‘Aye,’ said Redwane. ‘But I want to make sure we don’t start trouble going in too early.’
‘Trouble’s started already. We’re just limiting it.’
Leovulf’s gloomy assessment of the situation wasn’t far off the mark. Like most northern tribesman, Leovulf had a grim worldview, one born out of years of harsh winters and the constant struggle for survival in the inhospitable wilds of the northern marches. The people of the north were tough and hard as oak, but weren’t noted for their lightness of spirit.
A tall figure in a mud-spattered robe that might once have been white, but which was now a grimy brown danced towards the centre of the square. His shoulders were stained red, and he carried a metal-studded switch that dripped blood. Matted and unkempt hair hung lank and limp to his shoulders and his beard was tied in a number of braids like tangled tree-roots. Each burned with a small coal that sent acrid fumes into his nostrils.
‘You think that’s Torbrecan?’ asked Leovulf.
‘Must be,’ agreed Redwane. ‘He looks mad enough.’
The man walked a ragged circle around the square, his eyes wild and staring, his mouth open in a silent scream. He beat himself over the shoulders with his switch and laughed hysterically with each blow. His followers gouged and tore at themselves with each crack of his switch.
‘People of Kruken!’ howled Torbrecan. ‘Listen well to me, for I speak of your doom! It is the doom of us all, for the gods have turned their faces from this world! Who among you has not seen the signs of the End Times? Who among you has not seen heralds that portend our extinction from this world? Plague destroys your towns, beasts hunt your children and ungodly men seek to take what is not theirs with blade and bow! We are doomed, and it is no one’s fault but our own. We turned from our proper devotions and led the gods to abandon us. The terror that stalks the land is one of our own making, for we are a godless people, condemned to die unless we can wash away our sins in blood and pain.’
The crowd jeered him, but not as many as Redwane expected. Some looked like they were seriously entertaining this insanity, and some were even nodding their heads like he was making some kind of sense.
‘The gods are far from us,’ went on Torbrecan, jabbing a scabbed fist at the sky, ‘and they grow farther with every passing day. Only through the ecstasy of pain shall we draw their attention to us. Only by the exquisite wails of our suffering shall we turn their gaze back upon us.’
Redwane shook his head, unable to believe that folk weren’t simply laughing this man out of their village. Surely life was hard enough without people like this wanting to make it worse?
‘This has gone far enough,’ said Redwane, jabbing his spurs into his mount’s flanks.
‘Aye,’ agreed Leovulf. ‘Bloody lunatic needs to be shut up for good.’
Redwane shook his head. ‘No killing. Myrsa, Count Myrsa, was very specific about that.’
Leovulf nodded and passed the word through the ranks. The White Wolves shucked their pelt cloaks from their right shoulders to clear their hammer arms. Ustern unfurled the banner, a glorious piece of red linen with a wolf picked out in silver thread, and Holstef blew two rising notes on his clarion.
Redwane led his riders into the village, the crowds parting as their heavy horses plodded through the mud towards the centre of the square. Torbrecan saw them coming and aimed his switch at them. For a second, Redwane wondered if he was going to charge him, but instead he threw his hands up as if in praise.
‘The very warriors who serve the doombringers come to silence my words! They fear the truth and the knowledge that they are blind fools serving a master who cannot see the forces ranged against him. They have not the strength to suffer as we suffer, to bleed as we bleed. Brothers, show them the strength of true belief! Show everyone!’
A dozen men ran from the mob of ragged lunatics towards the stake hammered into the earth. They fought to climb the stacked kindling, biting and punching each other in their desperation to reach the upright log. Two fought harder than the others, and clutched the tall log as close as a lover. One carried a set of hooked chains and he wrapped these around their waists, binding them fast to the wood. Those denied the chance to reach the log took up lit torches and Redwane’s jaw dropped open as he realised what they were going to do.
‘Ulric’s mercy, no!’ he yelled, but it was too late. The torches were thrust into the kindling, which lit with a rushing whoosh of ignition. Redwane smelled the oil and not even the misting sheets of rain could dampen the flames as they leapt high. The two men clung to one another as the fire took hold of their robes and set them alight from head to foot. So swiftly did the flames leap to life that Redwane knew their bodies must have been doused in oil too.
The crowd pulled back in horror as the two men shrieked in agony. Their robes vanished and Redwane watched in revolted fascination as their flesh blackened and blistered in seconds. As though to aid this martyrdom, the rain ceased, and the air filled with the reek of burning meat and hair. The men screamed as they were consumed, fatty smoke pouring from their melting flesh.
Their fellows danced around the flames and the burning men sagged against the log, their lower limbs little more than blackened stumps of bone. The smoke would surely have killed them by now. At least Redwane hoped so.
He spurred his horse to greater speed and rode through the ragged mob of chanting madmen. They clawed at him with broken fingernails, screaming and howling without words or sense. They weren’t attacking as such, more clamouring to be punished. Redwane obliged one man with a filth-encrusted face, slamming the haft of his hammer down and sending him sprawling to the mud. The man screamed as the horse rode over him, but Redwane didn’t spare him a glance.
His horse barged through the crowd of raving lunatics, scattering them as he angled a course towards the ringleader. Keeping the reins loose in his hand, he steered his mount towards Torbrecan. The laughing madman’s switch beat against his chest and a triumphant stare of vindication bored into Redwane’s eyes.
‘Deliver me unto the arms of the gods!’ yelled Torbrecan, hurling himself to the ground in front of Redwane’s mount. Redwane hauled back on the reins and his horse reared up, its front legs pawing the air. The gelding’s hooves stamped down into the mud, inches from the madman’s head. Redwane kicked his feet free of the stirrups and jumped down. He dragged the mud-covered man to his knees and slammed the butt of his hammer into his face.
Torbrecan’s nose burst across his face, but he laughed as blood spilled into his mouth. Redwane hauled him to his feet as the screaming mob pressed in. Ustern’s horse came alongside him and the weak sunlight caught the red of the banner like a flash of glorious crimson.
Redwane drew himself up to his full height and yelled, ‘Enough! In Ulric’s name, enough!’
His voice cut through the baying mob of lunatic screeching, and the blood-smeared men dropped to the ground, moaning and yelling in equal measure. Redwane realised they were waiting for the White Wolves to ride them down, to crush their skulls with hammers or trample them beneath the hooves of their mounts.
‘Hold!’ he yelled. ‘White Wolves hold!’
His warriors pulled up, circling their horses around the madmen and corralling them away from the villagers. Realising they weren’t to be killed, many of the madmen sprang to their feet and sprinted off into the forest. Redwane watched them go, knowing most of them probably wouldn’t survive more than a day alone in the forest.
The people of Kruken cheered, amused by the spectacle as much as anything. The fire burned brightly at the centre of the village, but the black smoke from the damp kindling thankfully obscured the rav
ages of the fire on the dead men’s flesh. Melting fat fizzed in the fire and sharp cracks sounded as bones split in the heat.
Redwane hauled Torbrecan to his feet and thrust him towards Leovulf.
‘Get him out of my sight,’ he said.
Night had closed in on Kruken, and Redwane sat with Ustern and Holstef in what passed for the village tavern. To ride through the forest now would be too dangerous. The night belonged to the beasts, and even thirty armed warriors would likely never be seen again were they to travel its haunted paths in the dark.
The tavern was a high-ceilinged building built of heavy timbers atop square-cut blocks of stone that were clearly of dwarfcraft. A fire burned within an inglenook that had once been a doorway, with faded angular runes carved into its lintel. Redwane guessed the tavern was normally sparsely populated, but today’s drama had brought the locals out in force. A number of hard-bitten men sat in huddled corners nursing their dark beer and casting furtive glances their way.
The beer was peaty and flavoursome, but it was too strong for Redwane’s tastes. The other White Wolves seemed to like it though. Conversation had been muted, for Kruken wasn’t a town that welcomed outsiders much, even ones in the service of Count Myrsa.
‘I reckon we’ve seen the last of those idiots,’ said Ustern between puffs on his pipe, a long-stemmed piece with a bowl in the shape of an upturned drinking horn. Ustern bore the White Wolves banner, and was always the first to venture a grim opinion. ‘Aye, the beasts’ll do for them and no mistake.’
‘I’d not be too sure,’ said Holstef. ‘They survived this long, what makes you think that just because we got Torbrecan they’ll end up beast food?’
One the youngest White Wolves, Holstef was an eternal optimist, which made him a perfect foil for the banner bearer. He and Ustern argued like an old married couple, though neither seemed to mind, as though it was all part of their friendship. Ustern leaned forward and jabbed his pipe at Holstef.
‘How d’you even know it’s Torbrecan who we got?’
‘He was the leader, stands to reason doesn’t it?’
‘You think that lot care about “reason”?’
‘Why was he the one doing all the talking then? Why would a leader let someone else talk?’
‘So he wouldn’t be caught by the likes of us,’ suggested Ustern.
‘Crap,’ replied Holstef. ‘Someone that mad wouldn’t think like that.’
‘How d’you know? Touched by a bit of moon-madness are ye?’
‘Must be,’ said Holstef. ‘Why else would I fight alongside you?’
Redwane let them bicker and watched the tavern’s patrons as they drank and argued. They were a motley bunch, miners and woodsmen mostly by the look of them. None looked like they’d worked in a while, though that hadn’t stopped them coming in here to spend their coin. Redwane recognised an underlying connection between the snatches of conversation he heard, knowing a familiar thread ran through every one.
Fear.
Their expressions spoke of fear of one sort or another. Fear of poverty, fear of starvation, fear of being alone, fear of the dark and, worst of all, a fear that the madmen in the square today were right.
In the last year, Redwane had seen the same expression on many faces throughout the northern marches, a pinched desperation for things to be better. Sigmar’s Empire had promised great things, but for many of its people it had yet to deliver.
He followed one of the tavern’s serving girls, a good-looking woman with a body that time hadn’t yet caused to sag and a face in which bitterness had its claws, but hadn’t yet won the battle. She wore a black bow tied around her wrist that told him her man had been killed, most likely in the war against the Norsii, though in the north he could have met his end in any number of ways. She sensed his gaze and looked over, a thin smile creasing her full lips. She couldn’t quite keep the grimace from her face, but she nodded and her eyes flickered towards the stairs.
Redwane sighed and nodded back to her. Was this what it had come to, a fumbled liaison in a cold tavern room, loveless and bought with copper coins? He remembered having the pick of the girls, a different one every night if he’d wanted. But that was before the battle at the centre of the Fauschlag Rock when he’d swung his hammer at the daemon lord. He could still feel the searing pain as it had exploded against its infernal armour and sent red hot shards of iron into his face.
Now no woman would look at him unless he paid them.
A cold wind gusted into the tavern and the locals grumbled as candles flickered and the fragile heat in the building slipped outside. Their mutterings ceased at the sight of Leovulf in his armour and heavy wolf pelt cloak. Redwane’s second stamped the mud from his boots on a threadbare mat and pulled off his cloak. Still clad in his armour, he sat next to Redwane and shouted at the tavern keeper to bring him some beer.
‘Everyone bedded down?’ asked Redwane.
‘Aye,’ agreed Leovulf. ‘I’ve told them to keep the gambling and drinking to a minimum and that I’ll take my hammer to anyone who isn’t ready to ride out at daybreak.’
‘Good, I want to be back at the Fauschlag before nightfall,’ he said. ‘There’s an evil feel to the forest just now.’
‘Isn’t there always?’ put in Ustern.
‘More than normal I mean,’ said Redwane.
‘It’s the pox,’ said Leovulf. ‘Gets everyone on edge. It’s an enemy you can’t fight. Show me a beast or a greenskin and I’ll break it in two with my hammer. But the pox… that’s something a man should be afraid of.’
‘You sound just like Ustern,’ said Redwane.
‘Ulric save me, but things must be bad,’ said Leovulf with a shake of his head. He removed a thin pipe from his belt and lit it on the candle at the centre of their table. More beer arrived on a platter, and the White Wolves each took a tankard.
‘To Ulric,’ said Redwane, raising his beer.
‘To Ulric,’ echoed the White Wolves.
Their conversation turned to the logistics of their journey home, but Redwane’s attention was fixed on the serving girl. She finished her rounds and spoke a few words to the tavern keeper, who glanced over at their table. He grunted something and waved her away. She looked over at him and headed upstairs.
Redwane drained the last of his beer and said, ‘I think I’ll leave the rest of the drinking to you northerners.’
‘See,’ said Ustern, nudging Holstef. ‘Told you the southern tribes couldn’t hold their beer.’
Redwane knocked over his empty mug. ‘You call that beer. Harder stuff than this falls from the sky over Reikdorf. Our pigs drink better than this.’
‘That’s no way to talk of your women,’ said Holstef, emboldened by several beers.
‘Easy, soldier,’ cautioned Leovulf. ‘Watch that tongue of yours.’
Redwane left them to it and made his way towards the stairs, climbing to the upper level where the girl was waiting for him. She stood in a doorway of the corridor and threw him a smile. He knew it was false, but didn’t care.
She looked at him, trying to conceal the horrid fascination she had of his scars. She reached up to touch them, but he grabbed her hand before her fingers touched his face.
‘Don’t,’ he said, turning his head away. ‘Please.’
She nodded and led him into the room.
Wolves howled at the moon and feasted on the dead as carrion birds lined every rooftop or billowed in sweeping clouds of feathered bodies. Death had come to Hyrstdunn and not a single soul had lived through the battle to break down its walls. With their dead king now fighting in the ranks of the enemy, the defence of the city had been without heart and the mortals had fought with desperation born of knowing they could not win.
Khaled al-Muntasir walked the darkened streets of the city, revelling in the sounds of its doom as a conductor might enjoy a musical recital. The sounds of death were familiar to him; as well they should be after centuries of inflicting them upon the living. He made out the sound
of splintered wolf teeth tearing at human meat, the peck, peck, peck of beaks battering at skulls to get to the soft matter within. Beyond that, he could hear screams of the last survivors as they were dragged from hidden cellars or attics.
King Markus walked listlessly behind him, his flesh pale and dead, his eyes flickering with green embers as the vampire’s will remade him. Dried blood caked his ravaged neck, and though he bore the semblance of the man he had once been, nothing now remained of that mortal vessel. Khaled al-Muntasir had delivered the blood-kiss to the Menogoth king, knowing the effect it would have on mortals to see their fallen leader fighting alongside the army of the dead. Markus would soon emerge from this catatonic state, and a new blood drinker would walk the land. It gave Khaled al-Muntasir perverse pleasure to see the panicked faces of mortal cattle as they realised that neither prince nor pauper was safe from death’s touch.
The sound of crying children drifted on the midnight wind, and this was the most exquisite sound of all. Innocent blood was the sweetest elixir, and though his hunger was long sated on the blood of warriors, there was always desire for such epicurean delights.
The city itself was a poor specimen of architecture: a random collection of muddy timber structures built upon older ruins. No two were alike, a mishmash of prosaic, peasant architecture that offended his cultured eye. His lips curled in distaste as he looked up at the count’s dwelling, a ridiculous hall of crudely hewn stone with a thatched roof and laughably childish daubings of antiquated gods on timber panels.
‘To think that you, a king of men, lived in this hovel is absurd,’ said Khaled al-Muntasir, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘I was but a lesser prince and I grew to manhood in a sun-kissed palace of marble towers, glittering fountains and triumphal domes that enclosed vast spaces of such beauty that they could move a man to tears. You primitive savages could never achieve something so magnificent.’