03 - God King (12 page)

“To arms!” he shouted as the doors to the longhouse burst open and a swirling
gale of icy wind blew inside. The fire was snuffed out in an instant, its fitful
embers glowing dully with all the heat that remained to them. Frozen gusts of
dead air flew around the longhouse like poisonous zephyrs, carrying with them
the scent of death and far off lands that baked beneath an oppressive sun.

A lone figure stood silhouetted in the doorway, a tall warrior in silver and
gold mounted upon a hellish black steed with rippling flanks and eyes of
smouldering red. Stinking steam like marsh gasses gusted from the beast’s flared
nostrils. The rider walked his nightmarish mount into the longhouse, its
iron-shod hooves sparking from the flagstones like heavy hammer blows.

He dismounted with easy grace and folded his arms across a gleaming
breastplate. His manner was confident to the point of arrogance and a white
cloak flowed like snow from his shoulders. The knights drew their swords and
roared in anger, moving to surround the elegant warrior, his long dark hair
swept back over his ears and his swarthy complexion cut from a cruel mould. His
eyes were black and without pupil, his mouth twisted in a malicious grin of
spiteful mischief.

Alfgeir took a step towards the intruder, but Sigmar held him back.

“No,” said Sigmar. “This man is death.”

“Your Emperor is a wise man,” said the warrior, his voice liquid and
seductive. “I have heard that about him. You should listen to him, for I would
kill you before you could even swing that lump of pig iron in your hand.”

“You talk big for a man surrounded by twenty warriors,” said Alfgeir.

“Then that should tell you something about how good I am.”

Sigmar stepped towards the warrior, his hand tight on the grip of Ghal-Maraz.
Everything about this warrior sent pulses of anger and hate from the ancestral
hammer of the dwarfs into his hand. The weapon longed to be unleashed, but
Sigmar kept his urge to fight in check. He knew this man was no ordinary foe.

“I am Sigmar Heldenhammer, Emperor of these lands,” he said. “By what right
do you come before me into my longhouse?”

The warrior bowed elaborately. “I am Khaled al-Muntasir, and I bring a
message to you, Sigmar Heldenhammer.”

“A message from whom?”

“My master, the lord Nagash,” said Khaled al-Muntasir.

“You lie!” hissed Alfgeir, making the sign of the horns over his heart.
“There’s no such being; he’s just a story to frighten children. You can’t scare
us with old ghosts.”

“Can’t I?” laughed Khaled al-Muntasir. “I beg to differ.”

Sigmar had heard the tales of Nagash, there were few in the Empire who had
not. No two stories were the same, lurid tales of walking corpses, fallen
warriors stirring from their tombs and legions of the living dead marching to
the howls of carrion wolves as darkness covered the land and the living cowered
in terror.

But all the tales agreed on one thing. Nagash was the supreme lord of the
undead, an evil king from an ancient land far to the south where a
world-spanning empire had once risen from the desert sands. That empire had been
destroyed in an age long forgotten, and only dusty tales and half-remembered
legends survived from those times.

Sigmar knew from bitter experience that the dead could indeed rise from their
graves. He and his warriors had destroyed a sorcerer of the undead many years
ago, but if even half the tales of Nagash were true, then his power dwarfed that
of the necromancer of Brass Keep.

“You are not welcome here, Khaled al-Muntasir,” said Sigmar. “So deliver your
message and begone.”

“No threats?” said Khaled al-Muntasir. “No promises of a swift and brutal
death?”

“I sense you are not a man cowed by threats.”

“True, but that doesn’t stop the foolish from making them,” said Khaled
al-Muntasir. He gave Sigmar an elaborate bow and threw his cloak back over his
shoulder. The knights tensed, but made no move against the warrior, as a blade
that shimmered with dark power was revealed at his side.

“You have something that does not belong to you,” said Khaled al-Muntasir. “A
crown forged by my master over a thousand years ago. You know this crown belongs
to another, yet you keep it from its true lord. It will be returned to him.”

“I know this crown can never be allowed to fall into the hands of evil men.”

“I was not offering you a choice.”

“The crown remains where it is,” said Sigmar. “If your master wishes to try
and take it back, he will find all the armies of the Empire ranged against him.”

Khaled al-Muntasir smiled, a winning smile of pristine white teeth. Sigmar
was not surprised to see two sharpened fangs at the corners of his mouth. His
heart beat a little faster as he knew he faced a vampire, a creature of the
night that fed on blood and murder.

Sigmar saw the monster’s eyes widen a fraction and knew it could sense the
increased flow of blood around his body. The hunger was upon this creature—he
could no longer think of Khaled al-Muntasir as a man—and the danger of every
one of them dying within the next few moments was very real indeed.

“You cannot stand against my master,” said Khaled al-Muntasir.

“Others have said similar things, yet the Empire endures.”

“Not against the legions of the dead it won’t,” promised Khaled al-Muntasir.
“Your friend Markus, king of the Menogoths, is already dead. He and his family
and his tribe have swollen the ranks of my master’s army and more will follow.”

Sigmar sensed the furious shock of Khaled al-Muntasir’s revelation sweep
through his knights. They badly wanted this warrior dead.

“Hold!” cried Alfgeir, also seeing the angry urge to attack in the faces of
his knights.

Sigmar’s voice was colder than the Norscan ice as he met the blood drinker’s
gaze.

“Get out,” he said. “And if you return you will be killed. This is the word
of Sigmar.”

Khaled al-Muntasir turned and vaulted onto the back of his terrible steed.
Its eyes flared brightly and it reared up onto its hind legs. He rode from the
longhouse and Sigmar’s knights ran after him with Alfgeir at their head.

No sooner was the vampire beyond the walls of the longhouse than a pair of
wide black wings of impenetrable darkness unfolded from the steed’s sides. The
beast leapt into the air and its wings boomed with the sound of a mainsail
catching a stormwind. It rose swiftly into the night sky, a bat-like slice of
darkness against the black vault of the heavens.

Alfgeir watched it vanish over the hills and treetops, his face pale and
fearful.

“Do you think he was lying?” he asked. “About Markus, I mean.”

Sigmar shook his head. “I fear not, my friend.”

“Damn,” whispered Alfgeir. “The Menogoths gone…”

Sigmar turned and re-entered the longhouse, barking orders as he went.

“Bring every scribe and runner in Reikdorf here,” he said. “I want word of
this on its way to every one of the Empire’s counts before sunrise. Eoforth,
search every scroll in the library for tales of Nagash. Sift what facts you can
from the legends. We’re going to need to know what we’re up against. Draft
orders for sword musters to be gathered in every town and village from the Grey
Mountains to the Sea of Claws. I want to be ready for these monsters when they
come at us.”

Alfgeir nodded. “I’ll make it happen,” he said. “I take it we’ll not be
heading south now?”

“I cannot, but you must lead these knights and Cuthwin to find what the
dwarfs buried. Find it and bring it back here. I swore an oath and I mean to see
it kept, even if I cannot do so myself.”

“I’ll see it done, my Emperor,” promised Alfgeir.

“And Alfgeir?” said Sigmar. “Be swift.”

“The crown is really that important to Nagash?” asked Alfgeir.

“You have no idea,” said Sigmar.

The madmen chanted and danced with wild abandon, like Cherusen Wildmen in the
grip of a bane leaf frenzy. Redwane shifted uncomfortably in his saddle, trying
to gauge the right moment to ride in and end this. He glanced at the rider next
to him, a wide-chested warrior in red plate and thick mail with a sodden wolf
pelt cloak draped over his shoulders.

Like every White Wolf, Leovulf didn’t wear a helm, and his wild mane of black
hair was plastered to his skull by the rain. Apparently to go bareheaded into
battle was considered an act of bravery, openly displaying a warrior’s contempt
for the foe. Redwane wasn’t so sure that going without a helm was a good idea,
but since the White Wolves he’d recruited from Middenheim followed Leovulf’s
lead in all things, he couldn’t very well go against it.

The man had carved himself a legend in the fighting that had raged through
the streets of the northern city, and though he was lowborn, Count Myrsa had
decreed that station was no barrier to entry into the ranks of the White Wolves.
Courage was all that mattered.

“Madness,” said Leovulf, watching the madmen with bemused distaste. “Why
would anyone do such a thing?”

“I have no idea,” said Redwane, wincing as he watched a screaming man jam a
long iron nail through the palm of his own hand. “But Myrsa wants it stopped.”

“
Count
Myrsa,” said Leovulf.

“Of course,” replied Redwane. He’d known Myrsa for a long time, and still
couldn’t get used to the idea of calling him count, though he’d more than earned
that title during the siege of Middenheim. “Force of habit.”

He returned his gaze to the centre of the village, shaking his head at the
sight before him.

Two hundred men dressed in rags filled the centre of Kruken, a gloomy,
stockaded miners’ settlement a day’s ride to the west of Middenheim. Built upon
ancient dwarf ruins, Kruken nestled in an undulant range of hills in the midst
of the Drakwald Forest. It had found prosperity with the discovery of tin
beneath the high ground, but that prosperity had quickly faded as it became
clear the seams were nowhere near as deep and rich as had been thought.

Wailing and moaning, the madmen whipped their bare backs bloody with lengths
of knotted rope bound with thorns and fishhooks. Some cut into their chests with
gutting knives, while others jammed splinters of sharpened wood beneath their
fingernails.

Each man chanted meaningless doggerel interspersed with monotone dirges in an
unknown tongue that sounded part gibberish, part incantation. A wooden log had
been hammered into the ground near the centre of the square and a pile of
kindling set at its base, though Redwane wasn’t sure what they were planning to
burn.

A drizzle of rain drained the life from the day, and only made the
utilitarian nature of the soot-stained buildings, mine-workings and dormitories
of Kruken all the more depressing. Perhaps a hundred people were gathered in the
town square, watching the carnival of madness at its centre with varying degrees
of dour amusement. Children threw stones at the chanting men, while yapping dogs
snapped and bit at their bloody ankles.

In the days since the defeat of the Norsii horde, the people of the north had
suffered great hardship; the forest beasts that had fled the destruction of
Cormac Bloodaxe’s horde had returned to hunting men as their prey, banditry had
increased, harvests had gone uncollected and famine was widespread. In the
aftermath of the fighting, outbreaks of pestilence in the settlements around the
western foothills of the Middle Mountains stretched the resources of the land
still further.

Life in the north was always hard, but this last year had been especially
hard, so any diversion, no matter how absurd or bloody, was welcome.

No one had noticed these wandering bands of madmen at first, for the Empire
was a land of strangeness, of the bizarre and dangerous. They had been tolerated
as an aberration that would soon burn itself out, but as the year grew darker
and life harder, it became obvious that, far from dying out, these roving bands
of lunatics were growing in strength.

The largest of these bands was said to be led by a man named Torbrecan, a man
who—depending on which fanciful tale you listened to—was either a warrior
driven mad by a life of bloodshed or a priest of Ulric who’d spent too long
alone in the winter woods. Torbrecan’s host marched in bloody procession from
the isolated towns and villages north of the mountains, curving in a southerly
bow towards Middenheim. Pestilence marched alongside them, and thus Middenheim’s
warriors blocked the roads to the city. Something had to be done, and so Myrsa
had despatched Redwane and the White Wolves to break up this band and take
Torbrecan prisoner.

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.