Markus didn’t answer of course, and Khaled al-Muntasir waved his thin hands at the hall’s swaybacked roof. ‘Such inelegant design is so utterly primitive for a land that claims to be the greatest empire of man. The notion that you people actually believe that to be true is so ludicrous that it makes me want to laugh. Or maybe weep, I haven’t decided. Oh, how the race of man has fallen.’
He shook his head in sadness and moved on, keeping to the centre of the cobbled thoroughfares to avoid the sewage leaking down the edges of the road. He held his white cloak draped over his forearm to keep it clean. Filth encrusted every surface of the city, and thousands of dead bodies lay strewn around like burst sacks of grain. A pack of wolves ran through its streets, fighting over scraps of flesh. Flocks of crows followed them, eager for their leavings.
Khaled al-Muntasir climbed the steps towards the king’s longhouse, smelling the aroma of fresh-spilled blood from within. The doors were splintered and sagging, and skeletal warriors in rusting armour of bronze stood like silent guardians of a tomb. He turned to look back into the city, watching as the army of Nagash completed its destruction.
Beneath the light of the moon, armoured skeletons marched between the buildings, gathering the dead and dragging them into the open, where they were deposited on rotted carts pulled by shambling animated corpses. Ghoulish scavengers loped through the streets, fighting the rotten-furred wolves for warm flesh torn from the bone. Pale-fleshed and scabbed with open sores, these carrion feeders hissed and bit with grave-dirt claws, their bodies thin and wasted, yet ravenous and tenacious.
And holding court over this glorious tableau of death was its lord and master.
Nagash himself was surrounded by ghostly flocks of revenants, howling wisps of light and shadow that curled in supplication around his monstrous limbs. Krell, the hulking champion of the northern gods marched at Nagash’s side, a physical manifestation of his master’s rage and aggression. Darkness went with them, a shroud of bleak misery that invigorated Khaled al-Muntasir, but which sapped the living of their courage and filled their hearts with fear. More than just the fear of death, it spoke of an eternal life of servitude to a cruel master, of paradise denied and the promise of a life that would go unrewarded by the gods.
The vampire stood on the highest point of the city and watched with relish as his personal retinue of warriors climbed the steps towards him. Each skeletal champion dragged a screaming child behind it, none older than six or seven summers. They wept and fought, but the dead men who carried them to their doom were as inexorable as their fate was inescapable.
His fangs tingled with anticipation, his eyes filling with killing red as the first dead warrior pushed a struggling girl-child towards him. He lifted her head with a finely manicured nail, tracing its razor edge around her chin.
‘Hush, child,’ he said. ‘Do not cry. There is no need for tears, they are a waste of something precious.’
The girl looked into his eyes, and she saw his hunger.
Before she could scream, he sank his fangs into her neck and began to feed.
Khaled al-Muntasir dropped the shrivelled husk of the last child, glutted on innocent blood and his senses afire with the rush of undiluted life energy. His eyes beheld the world around him with greater clarity than before, every living thing glinting with its own internal fire. To his eyes, the world was ablaze in silver light.
He smiled, feeling the rush of another’s blood filling his atrophied veins and unused organs with a semblance of life. Sensuous, erotic and deliciously painful, it was a fleeting sense of wonder, absolute knowledge of the thoughts and life of another living being as they were extinguished forever.
Yet as soon as it was drunk and revelled in, it was gone. The curse of the blood drinker was never to know satiety, to always crave the blood of the living. He wiped the droplets from his chin, licking his fingers clean and enjoying the last sensations of life as a starving peasant would relish the crumbs of a prince’s discarded meal.
His vision was already returning to its more mundane outlook as he saw the great lord of the undead climb the steps towards him, his pall of shadow like a soothing balm of radiant energy. Nagash towered over Khaled al-Muntasir, his power straining at the boundaries of existence, almost too intense for his undying frame to contain. Even with sight far beyond that of mortals, Khaled al-Muntasir could see only a fraction of the great necromancer’s power. It was immense and unstoppable, an energy that existed in worlds beyond understanding, crossing the gulfs of death and empowered by a dark wind whose source had been a mystery to even the greatest practitioners of the arts in his sand-swallowed city.
The necromancer’s shimmering metallic hand glimmered with power, a reservoir of untapped energies drawn into its mysterious structure by the slaughter of this pitiful city and its inhabitants. Walking its streets, Khaled al-Muntasir had laughed to feel the stirring spirits below his feet, knowing that this land was already a tomb.
This region of the Empire was awash with forgotten sepulchres and barrows of long dead warriors. The people of this place lived atop a great mound of corpses, buried beneath the earth thousands of years ago, and didn’t even know it.
Khaled al-Muntasir closed his eyes and let his senses flow out around the city, searching for any sign of life, any living thing that had somehow escaped the killing. There was nothing, and he looked up into the emerald fire of the necromancer’s eyes.
He shook his head and the necromancer thrust his hand towards the sky.
A blazing pillar of green light filled the heavens with its necrotic glow, piercing the clouds and unnatural darkness with its brightness. The light built within Nagash’s body, a lambent glow that slithered down through his invisible flesh. It filled the necromancer’s skull, infused his dried bones, formed phantom organs and coursed through his debased body into the heavy plates of his armour. A black wind sighed, and the silver light that suffused the earth was snuffed out in an instant. The ground shook as the impossibly powerful will of Nagash spread through the land, reaching deeper than the roots of the mountains and out into the wilds far beyond.
The wolves of the city threw back their heads and howled. The darkness was suddenly lit by thousands of pinpricks of green light as the dead of Hyrstdunn were dragged from their rest to serve in the army that had slain them. Bloody men, half-eaten wives and murdered offspring screamed as their dead flesh was filled with horrid animation.
Dead Menogoths climbed to their feet, reaching for weapons that had lain beside their brutalised corpses. Those without weapons wrenched sharpened timbers from their former homes, gathered up meathooks, gutting knives or cleavers from butcher’s blocks.
At some unseen command, they shuffled towards the northern gate of the city, moving with dreadful purpose and monotonous unison. The army of the dead, already thousands strong, swelled by thousands more. And all across this degenerate empire, the dead would be stirring in the damp earth that contained them, roused to wakefulness by the most powerful necromancer ever to rise from the lost kingdom of Nehekhara.
High above Nagash, a black miasma saturated the heavens, a roof of oppressive coal-dark cloud that roiled outwards from its boiling epicentre. The dark of night was nothing compared to this, for it was an umbra of complete emptiness, the oblivion of light not just its absence.
The dread blackness slipped over the sky like a slick of oil on a lake, creeping towards the horizon in mockery of the coming sunrise and life itself.
Death had come to the Empire.
BOOK TWO
Down Among the Bone Men
Some, though headless, stood erect,
From some the arms were hacked,
Some were pierced from front to back.
And some on horse in armour sat,
Some were choked while at their food.
Some were drowned in flood,
And some were withered up by fire,
Some raving mad and others dead.
Merciful Shallya of the sorrow
r />
pours bright tears from her eyes
Weeping and wailing the fate of Men
Alas my grief that ye did not heed her cries.
Seven
Portents of Death
A cold, salty wind blew off the ocean and a bell chimed high on the Tower of Tides. Gulls wheeled over the docks of the lower town, and Count Marius of the Jutones took a moment to savour the smells of his city. Unlike many cities in the Empire, those smells were not shit and refuse and livestock. Jutonsryk smelled of wealth, prosperity and contentment.
The buildings of his city were a haphazard mix of stone and timber, the oldest jutting from the cliffs and spurs of the rock forming the natural bay that made it such a perfect location for a port. Dominating the city was the Namathir, the leaf-shaped promontory of dark rock upon which Marius’s castle was built. Crafted of pale stone with many slender towers and shimmering roofs, the fortress of the Jutone count was a curious mix of power and grace. High walls of stone surrounded the city on its landward side, patched and rebuilt by dwarf masons hired at ruinous expense in the aftermath of Sigmar’s siege.
Always a nautical city, most buildings of Jutonsryk sported some recognition of the sea that had made its fortune. Tall masts with billowing sails jutted from numerous rooftops, while figureheads from wrecked ships, cargo netting and entire forecastles made up frontages, roofs and gables. Effigies of Manann in his aspect of a bulky man with an iron crown were common, as were images of crashing waves and sea creatures. Warehouses and loading bays for the hundreds of ships that berthed here every week crowded the seafront, finely-built structures paid for by the wealthy merchants and traders who had grown fat on Jutonsryk’s prosperity.
Hundreds of ships filled the harbour, a myriad of sails of many colours and different kings. Udose ships sat alongside those of the Endals and ones bearing flags of nations that most people in the Empire had no knowledge of. Ships of all size and shape jostled for space on the quayside and a forest of lifting hoists worked in a never-ending procession of unloading and loading.
Trade was Jutonsryk’s lifeblood, and it had brought undreamed-of wealth to Marius’s city.
Yet only a few years ago, it had come to the edge of destruction at the hands of the man to whom Marius now gave homage as Emperor. Smiling to himself, he knew he should have allied with Sigmar a long time ago, but not for the reasons the Emperor would have liked to hear.
Always independent, the Jutones had stood apart from Sigmar’s burgeoning Empire, but as Marius looked at how his city and people had benefited from that alliance, he knew it had been a worthwhile investment. The streets were clean, part of an initiative proposed by his physicians as a means to alleviate sickness among the poor, as was the building of a new almshouse to care for the ailing and needy. Taxes on incoming trade ships had paid for these institutions, and such was the influx of new trade that followed his Sword Oath with Sigmar, that each year brought more gold than he could spend.
Marius rode past the Tower of Tides on a white stallion, a gift from Sigmar’s warrior friend, and its caparison was of fine blue and green cloth woven by Thuringian women as a tribute from the Berserker King. He leaned back in the saddle as he negotiated the winding, cobbled streets that led down to the old town and the docks. Citizens of Jutonsryk bowed as he passed and he favoured them with his most magnanimous smile.
Yes, it was a good day to take the air, though a smear of darkness on the horizon portended storms to come. He shivered, pulling his exquisite cloak of bearskin tighter about his shoulders. His clothes were finely made, a tasteful mix of eastern silks and hard-wearing Ostogoth tanned leather that gave him the unmistakable appearance of wealth, yet retained the look of a man who knew how to wield the sword buckled at his waist.
A troop of lancers accompanied him, their pale blue cloaks falling tidily over the rumps of their mounts. Spoiling this image of perfection was the wobbling form of Vergoossen, his latest aide, who rode his chestnut gelding about as well as a bale of hay might.
Ever since Bastiaan had stabbed him at Middenheim in the height of the fighting, Marius had forbidden his aides to bear arms. Looking at Vergoossen, it didn’t look like he knew one end of a dagger from another, yet he had a head for numbers and a total lack of ego to be bruised by Marius’s frequent tirades and verbal abuse. All of which made him a perfect aide.
‘My lord,’ said. ‘If you’ll just look over these documents…’
Marius sighed, his good mood evaporating in the face of Vergoossen’s pleadings.
‘What is so important that you need to spoil a perfectly good day?’ he demanded.
Vergoossen held out a sheaf of papers. ‘My lord, I have petitions from a number of merchants, and–’
‘Let me guess, Huyster and Merovec.’
‘Amongst others, but yes, the majority of correspondence is from them.’
‘So what do they want, as if I can’t guess?’
‘Master Huyster wishes to bring to your attention the latest increase in berthing fees and the imposition of the new import tariffs,’ said Vergoossen. ‘And Master Merovec asks if you have had time to consider his request for permission to extend his warehouses along the north shore.’
Marius felt his anger grow at these foolish, greedy merchants. Their coffers were already swollen with gold, yet still they wanted more. It seemed a lust for gold wasn’t simply confined to the mountain folk. What angered Marius most was that he saw a reflection of his old self in their grasping, transparent greed. He took a calming breath.
‘Tell Huyster that the berthing fees are paying for additional docks to be built along the shoreline, which will allow him to double his revenue within the year. And if he wants it known that he feels aggrieved with the berthing fees, then he is only too welcome to bring that to the attention of the stevedores’ guild. I’m sure they would be happy to hear of his dissatisfaction.’
‘Really?’ said Vergoossen, missing his sarcastic tone. ‘I would have thought it a recipe for disaster to say such a thing.’
‘Of course it is,’ snapped Marius. Vergoossen was efficient and thorough when it came to organising Marius’s affairs, but he had no head for understanding people. ‘The stevedores’ wages are paid from berthing taxes, and any shipmaster who wants to pay less will find a greater than usual percentage of their cargoes inexplicably lost or accidentally dropped into the sea.’
‘But that’s blackmail, my lord,’ exclaimed Vergoossen.
‘All trade is blackmail of one sort or another,’ said Marius. ‘But that is a lesson for another day.’
‘And what shall I tell Master Merovec?’
‘Tell him that I know he already owns more quayside frontage than city regulations permit. He may fool others with his straw men, but I was finding new ways to earn gold while he was soiling his swaddling clothes. Tell him that if he really wants me to have you investigate his assets to adjudge his property holdings with a view to his future expansions, then I am more than happy to oblige him.’
‘I understand, sir,’ said Vergoossen. ‘He wouldn’t want that.’
‘No,’ agreed Marius. ‘He wouldn’t. Now is there anything else that needs my subtle hand of diplomacy, or do you think you can actually do your job and handle the minutiae of running a busy sea port?’
‘There is one other matter, my lord,’ said Vergoossen.
‘Go on then, what is it?’
‘Some sailors from Tilean lands are refusing to pay their berthing fees.’
‘Typical bloody Tilean,’ said Marius with a shake of his head. ‘Their coin purses are sealed tighter than a Brigundian virgin’s legs. Why are they refusing to pay?’
‘They say they don’t have any cargo to unload, so they don’t see why they should pay a berthing fee.’
‘No cargo? Then why are they here?’
‘They claim they were attacked and had to ditch their cargo to escape.’
‘Pirates?’
Vergoossen consulted his notes, as though reluctant
to voice the reason the sailors had given.
‘Well, in a manner of speaking, my lord,’ stammered Vergoossen.
‘Oh, just spit it out, man!’ ordered Marius.
‘Yes, my lord. Sorry. They claim they were attacked by ships crewed by dead men.’
‘This is the place?’ asked Alfgeir. ‘You’re sure of it?’
Cuthwin gave the Marshall of the Reik a look that said he was sure, and that he’d have liked to see the knights find this place again. Instead he simply nodded. A life lived in the wilderness was a solitary, silent one, and even when in company, Cuthwin found himself limiting his speech to short answers.
‘Yes, this is the place,’ he said.
‘There’s nothing here,’ said Orvin, dismounting from his gelding and looking around. ‘You said there was a fight here.’
‘There was,’ said Cuthwin. ‘You’d see that if you looked.’
Orvin stepped towards him. ‘Are you cheeking me, scout?’
‘Leave it,’ warned Alfgeir, and Orvin backed off, returning to his horse’s side. Twenty of the Empire’s finest knights stood at the edge of the road, where Cuthwin had forced them to dismount lest they spoil the tracks. It had taken them two days to reach the road, much less than it had taken Cuthwin to reach Reikdorf, but then he’d been on foot and had a wounded dwarf to carry.
He squatted at the edge of the road where he and the dwarfs had fought the goblins and wolves. He could picture the wagons, where he had come out of the forest and how he had moved through the fight. The road was empty now, no sign of any bodies or wagons to indicate that a life and death struggle had played out here.
At least to the untrained eye.
Alfgeir stepped onto the road, moving from smudged track, to discoloured patch of earth and broken branch. He moved well for an old man, kneeling to dust earth from a stone and follow the course of the fight through the telltale marks such a struggle inevitably left behind.