03 - God King (49 page)

This is the world you have created. This is blood that will be spilled in
your name. Is it not better to leave this world and let the race of man fall
into decline? Your species resurgent is one that lives only for destruction and
uncertainty. It knows no other way. The dead do not squabble as this land’s
rulers do. The dead do not fight one another. The dead have no desires, no petty
jealousies or ambitions. A world of the dead is a world at peace…

Sigmar fought against the necromancer’s words, understanding that their
battle would be fought in the realm of the spirit as well as that of the flesh.
He closed his eyes, willing this vision away, knowing that Nagash would seek to
defeat him with lies cloaked in truths.

“This may be a true vision of the future Empire,” hissed Sigmar. “But a world
of death is a world of stagnation, without the change that makes it worthwhile.
What you call uncertainty, I call life itself.”

He fought down his revulsion at this vision and opened his eyes, no longer
seeing the bleak vision of an Empire at war with itself, but the spirit-haunted
hillside where a being of ultimate darkness opposed him.

“Show me what you will,” said Sigmar, planting his standard in the soft earth
and raising Ghal-Maraz over his shoulder. “This ends with me destroying you.”

So be it.

Nagash’s sword swept down and Sigmar lifted Ghal-Maraz to block. Blue fire
seared out from the impact and Sigmar’s arms almost froze with the blow. He
rolled aside as the sword slashed out again, catching him on the edge of his
pauldron and lifting him from his feet. The iron froze in an instant, cracking
apart in a rain of icy splinters as he landed. Cold blood streamed from Sigmar’s
shoulder as Nagash slipped through the air, fast as a winter squall. His sword
cut into Sigmar’s breastplate, shattering it like a pane of glass and piercing
his chest with icy splinters.

Sigmar rolled away before the blade could penetrate deeper, swinging
Ghal-Maraz around to deflect yet another swift riposte. The necromancer’s staff
slashed down and arcing bolts of lightning leapt up from the ground. Sigmar
screamed in pain as the energies enveloped him, burning his flesh with cold
fire. Though it had been his bane through the entire battle, the crown now came
to his aid. Its power was purest evil, but it was utterly directed in its
ability to resist sorcery. Nagash’s withering energy was drawn into the crown,
and Sigmar felt its rage to be so abused as the searing fire vanished.

Nagash’s leering skull face, too monstrous and enormous to ever have been
human, swept down and Sigmar threw himself to the side as black, corrosive
breath gusted from the necromancer’s jaws. The hillside withered and died
beneath its touch and Nagash spun around with his staff and sword raised to
destroy the foolish mortal opposing him.

The necromancer’s sword swung low and Sigmar leapt over it, bringing his
hammer around to block a slashing blow of the staff to his body. Once again, the
impact was enormous, and Sigmar knew he could not keep this up for much longer.
He spun inside the necromancer’s reach, but Nagash was fast and slid out of
range of his strike.

Sigmar leapt towards Nagash, and the necromancer lowered his staff to block
the wild blow. Ghal-Maraz slammed into the entwined snakes and the runic power
of the dwarfs blazed as it met the unnatural sorcery of Nehekhara. Sigmar poured
every fibre of his hatred into the blow and Nagash’s staff broke apart with a
screaming howl of released magic. Nagash reeled from its destruction, and Sigmar
saw the hand that had carried it was a shimmering metal, its surface like a
silver mirror with oil smeared across it.

Nagash drew himself up to his full height, the black smoke swirling around
his lower reaches spinning like an inverted whirlwind. The force of it drove
Sigmar back, billowing around him and throwing up grit and sand from the summit
of the hill. The hellish wind dispersed the shrieking spirits from the air,
hurling them away and revealing the battle in all its horror.

See the fate of all flesh and know despair!

The land between the city and the low hill was a charnel house of blood and
destruction. As Sigmar’s eyes had seen into the hearts of his people the night
before the battle, so now Nagash showed him the battle he had led them to.
Sigmar’s plan was simple, ride through the centre of the undead army and slay
the necromancer. He had known that many would die to keep the dead from
Reikdorf, but to see the scale of that bloodshed was shattering.

Sigmar was no stranger to battle and death. He had seen friends and loved
ones slain over the course of his life, and knew the grim cost of sending men to
war. He knew that his orders would see women widowed, children orphaned and
lovers forever parted. He knew all this, yet to see it happening all around him,
all at once, was a supreme horror.

The thousands who were fighting on this day were dying in droves. Their
initial successes against the army of the dead were meaningless as the cadavers
and ruined corpses rose to their feet once again. Those who had fallen in battle
now returned to tear at their former sword brothers, and what had once been a
magnificent host was now reduced to a few pitiful bands of survivors fighting
for their last moments of life.

Even if Sigmar triumphed and slew Nagash, this day would live in infamy as a
day of death and woe. There would be too many dead for it to be otherwise.
Sigmar heard grating laughter as Nagash revelled in this cavalcade of slaughter.
The Empire’s dead would be new acolytes for his host, enslaved to reduce this
world to a barren, empty wasteland.

Amid the fighting in the south, Sigmar saw Freya and Maedbh leading their
children back towards Reikdorf. A multitude of skeletons climbing the walls and
wading into the city via the corpse-choked river which blocked their route to
safety. Unberogen and Asoborns led by a baying, blood-covered youngster defended
them within a fragile shieldwall, but with dead wolves and flesh-hungry corpses
closing in on them, they had minutes of life left at best.

Nagash cruelly drew his gaze onwards, and in the centre of the battlefield,
Sigmar saw Teon and the Great Hall Guard enveloped by a horde of freshly-risen
dead as they rode for Reikdorf’s gates. Alfgeir slumped against Teon, barely
conscious and near death. It broke Sigmar’s heart to see the grievous wound his
old friend had suffered.

Yet Nagash was not done with him.

Onwards his gaze was drawn, and Sigmar saw a host of black knights riding
south towards the city, followed by hundreds of dead warriors marching in
perfect lockstep. Shambling corpses in their thousands followed them, a ravening
horde set to devour the living. A ring of dwarfs led by Master Alaric hacked at
a fallen giant in red armour, their weapons cutting the monster apart piece by
piece. It struggled as they fought it, though its body was ruined as though from
a thousand heavy impacts. A wrecked machine lay on its side as a tall warrior
with a heavy forge hammer stood over a fallen man in the leather apron of a
blacksmith.

Sigmar recognised Master Govannon and Bysen, but pale-bellied flesheaters
surrounded them. No matter how powerful Bysen’s swings of the forge hammer, he
would not be able to stop his father from being eaten alive. Sigmar heard the
howling of many wolves and despair touched his heart to hear this choir of
Ulric’s chosen lamenting the death of so many brave warriors.

You see… ? This is what flesh entails. Suffering. Bloodshed. Misery. Why
would you seek to perpetuate this horror? What creature in my service knows
fear, pain or desire? The legions of the dead want for nothing, care for
nothing, love nothing. End your foolish resistance and you will be a king of
death, a master of the world at my side. You will be my greatest champion and
together we will end the suffering of this world!

Sigmar dropped to his knees, as the pain and anguish of every living soul
upon the battlefield washed over him. What manner of man could allow such
suffering? What sane individual could wish such pain on a life? To strangle a
babe as it was born would be a kindness, and to end the plague of the living on
this world would be an act of mercy. Sigmar’s tears flowed freely and he looked
up into the hungry eyes of Nagash as he loomed over him. The metallic hand
reached out to him, the sharpened fingertips like silver claws as they reached
for the crown.

In that moment, the sound of wolves echoed from the treeline of the northern
hills, an ululating chorus that swept over the battlefield. Sigmar felt that
sound lift him and fill his mind with a cold wind that had its source in the
northern forests. This was a cry born in the forgotten places of ice and snow
where the wolves of Ulric made their lairs. He understood that this was no
lament for the fallen, but a savage affirmation of life. A war shout and cry of
defiance all in one.

Sigmar rolled away from Nagash’s outstretched hand, looking to the north as
tens of thousands of howling men streamed over the hillside. There were few of
them warriors, most dressed in rags and bearing spiked chains, spinning flails,
scythes, burning brands and clanging hand bells. Blood-smeared and screaming
incoherently, they had the look of madmen, a host of armed lunatics in search of
a battle.

Amongst them rode two warriors in red armour and wolf-pelt cloaks. One
carried a rippling banner of crimson and white, and Sigmar’s heart leapt as he
recognised the banner of the White Wolves.

“Redwane!” cried Sigmar, even as he realised that neither rider was the fiery
warrior who commanded that elite band of horsemen. His eyes were drawn to two
warriors at the forefront of this motley band of ragged madmen. Both were
bearded and wore muddy tunics that were torn and stained with old blood. These
men looked on the verge of death, yet charged with the ferocity of ten
berserkers, seemingly oblivious to the many wounds they had cut into their own
flesh. One man was unknown to him, but the other was as familiar as his own
reflection. It was Redwane, but the man Sigmar had known was gone, submerged
within a tortured madness that banished all thoughts of pain and fear of death.

The host of madmen struck the army of the dead and rolled right over them,
crashing them beneath their bare feet and tearing them apart with their
makeshift weapons. On they came in an unending tide, men and women gathered from
all across the Empire, seduced by doom-laden preachings until the host that had
set out from Middenheim had swollen to become this irresistible tide of crazed
fanaticism.

Following behind this screaming host came painted warriors in mail shirts who
marched beneath the banner of Count Otwin. Perhaps a thousand of the Berserker
King’s warriors came over the hills, following the deranged army led by Redwane
and his unknown companion. They bayed with the voices of wolves and to see them
coming to his aid gave Sigmar the strength he needed to face the necromancer.

Nagash drew himself up to his full, terrifying height, his fury at this turn
of events spreading from the hillside and empowering his army with fresh hate
for the living. The northern flank of the dead collapsed, smashed aside by the
army of madmen and Thuringians, yet there was still a virtually inexhaustible
supply of rotting flesh to replace those the mortals destroyed.

Sigmar swept Ghal-Maraz around, and faced the necromancer for the last time.
The crown blazed with silver light at his brow, exerting every last scrap of its
power to weaken him and drain his ability to resist. As Sigmar listened to the
howling of wolves, he knew it could not touch him. It had kept him safe from
Nagash’s magic, allowed him to smash through the ranks of the dead without
pause, but now it was time to be rid of it.

He tore the crown from his brow and held it up towards Nagash.

“You want this?” he bellowed, and Nagash turned his gaze upon him. Such
desire and obsession. Such aching need and devotion. Nothing else mattered to
Nagash, not the defeat of Sigmar’s army, not the destruction of all living
things. Nothing was more important to the necromancer than this crown. Sigmar
saw how much its power meant to Nagash and understood Eoforth’s last message to
him completely.

“You want this?” repeated Sigmar. “Then have it!”

He threw the crown onto the withered grass of the hillside and raised
Ghal-Maraz to smash it asunder with one, all-powerful blow.

Nagash bellowed in horrified anger and reached for the crown with
outstretched fingers, all thoughts save taking back his crown driven from his
mind. Nothing else mattered, and it was the moment Sigmar had been awaiting
since this fight had begun.

He leapt towards the necromancer, bringing Ghal-Maraz around in a thunderous
overhead sweep. The mighty hammer of the dwarfs smashed into Nagash’s cuirass,
breaking it into a thousand shards and powering into his chest. Green fire
flared from the impact and ribs fused with dark magic thousands of years before
shattered like ice as Sigmar drove his hammer into the heart of the
necromancer’s being.

Sigmar howled with the wolves and screamed his hatred of Nagash as the runic
script on the hammer’s haft shone with the purest light. Runes he had not even
known existed flared to life on the hammer’s head, filling Nagash’s hollow
existence with fiery beams of light and searing his immortal essence from
within.

The necromancer shrieked as his ancient sorcery fought to resist the powerful
magic of the dwarfs. Forces too titanic to be understood by mortals battled
within his body, easily capable of laying waste to this entire land. Sigmar held
onto Ghal-Maraz as the star-iron of its head burned brighter than the sun and
its grip burned his hands with its ancient fire.

“I will end you!” roared Sigmar, thrusting the hammer deeper into Nagash’s
body.