The End Times | The Fall of Altdorf Read online

  Herrscher rode beside him. Both their steeds were skeletons, their bones knitted together by dark magic and held in place by Vlad’s will. The undead witch hunter looked a little less miserable than he had done, though he still slumped in the saddle.

  ‘How do you find your gifts?’ asked Vlad, trying to take his mind off the filth around him.

  Herrscher shot him an incredulous look. ‘Gifts?’ He shook his emaciated head. ‘You have poisoned me.’

  ‘Learn to appreciate what you have been given. You are stronger than you were. You hear better, see better, and you will endure against all magic. Scorn this, and you remain a greater fool than when you lived.’

  ‘This is what you wish for,’ muttered Herrscher. ‘Slaves, all of us.’

  ‘Not quite. I wish for order. I wish for the weak to know their place, guarded over by their betters. Do sheep resent their shepherds? Or would they rather take their chances with the wolves?’

  ‘I would have done,’ retorted Herrscher, his face a picture of resentment.

  ‘And that would be a terrible waste,’ said Vlad. ‘You are better at my side, where your talents can flourish. Do not resent the past – soon you will have trouble even remembering it.’

  ‘So the past does not trouble you?’ asked Herrscher, his lips curling sardonically. ‘That is not what I heard.’

  Vlad’s anger rose, and he made to turn on Herrscher, when he suddenly noticed a flash of white in the road ahead. In an instant, he saw Isabella riding to greet him, alone under the trees, a look of admonishment on her perfect alabaster face, and he froze.

  The illusion faded. More than one figure emerged from the arboreal gloom – eight shades, each as thin and drawn as dried fruit, carrying between them a palanquin of shimmering glass. Silently, they set the carriage down, and three women emerged, all of them wearing lace-edged gowns of purest white. They seemed to glow like moonlight, and their footfalls left no tracks in the sodden earth. They curtsied archaically, and shuffled closer.

  Vlad mastered himself. He knew the names of the ladies well enough, and which master they served, though he had not expected to encounter them so soon.

  ‘My lord von Carstein,’ said the foremost of the pale creatures, her voice as dry and hollow as a coffin-echo. ‘We had begun to worry. This land has become an abomination.’

  ‘All lands have,’ said Vlad, offering his hand for the lady to kiss. ‘Why are you here, Liliet? I did not seek to find you for days hence.’

  The white lady gave him a dry smile. ‘Your servant Mundvard failed. Marienburg is a nest of writhing horrors, and the Empire has been driven back like whipped curs to Carroburg.’

  ‘They are moving fast, then. What strength do they have?’

  ‘They are led by three siblings – foul triplets, each blessed with grotesque gifts. One is the size of a house, and chews his way through fortifications like a fat child through sweetmeats. Their host is swollen beyond counting. Your servant did his best – I can vouch for that – but they will not be halted.’ She shuddered distastefully. ‘Such numbers. I would not have believed it, had I not seen it.’

  Vlad pursed his fleshless lips together. ‘And where is Mundvard now?’

  ‘Gathering what forces he can. He sent us to you, and begs leave to join his army with yours north of Altdorf. He says that no action further west can delay the enemy now, and only a combined stand at the city holds the hope of resistance.’

  ‘Oh, he said that, did he?’ Vlad was irritated. Mundvard was a supreme fighter, but a poor general. More than that, it was not his place to dictate tactics to his betters – he should have delayed the Chaos forces for longer at the coast, giving time for Vlad to gather the greatest host he could. Now the need for haste, already pressing, had become overwhelming.

  ‘He fought skilfully, lord,’ said Liliet, a little coquettishly, given her cadaverous appearance.

  ‘Not skilfully enough,’ snarled Vlad. ‘You do not need to return to him. Remain with me, and together we will cut a faster path. I will send messages via other means, and if he still commands more than a rabble of zombies, he can meet us in the Reikland.’

  Liliet bowed, then looked sidelong at Herrscher. ‘And who is this, my lord? Surely you have not been doling out the Kiss to mortals without the consent of the Master?’

  Herrscher was looking at the three women with a mix of horror and fascination on his face. That was good – in the past, it would merely have been horror.

  ‘My new lieutenant,’ said Vlad kicking his horse into motion again and forcing the ladies to give way. ‘Ride with us awhile, and tell us tales of old Marienburg. We make all haste to Wurtbad, and I am sure he can learn much from you on the way.’

  TEN

  Captain Hans Blucher felt the stone crack before he heard it, and it made his blood freeze. The flags beneath his feet sprouted paper-thin fractures, which then widened to a blade’s width.

  ‘Maintain fire!’ he bellowed, striding along the ranks of gunnery pieces. ‘Let no man leave his station, or by Taal’s beard I shall break his head apart with my own hands!’

  The walls of Carroburg had been under sustained attack for over an hour. In his worst nightmares, Blucher could not have imagined such an assault. The earth itself seemed to have been roused against them, and the forest in every direction now rang with the tramp of hooves and iron-shod boots.

  The rain had started to fall soon after the enemy had arrived. At first it had been like any other deluge, though soon the drops became heavier and heavier, until it was like trying to fight under a hail of mud splatters. Every exposed surface became greasy and treacherous, fouling the cannon wheels as they were rolled out and making men slip and stagger.

  Blucher was stationed on the south wall, in command of many of the bigger artillery pieces. Helblasters jostled on the narrow parapet alongside the bigger Great Guns, each one christened by their foundries in Nuln – Grosse Bertha, Todslingeren, Trollsbane. They had been firing without pause since the first emergence of the enemy, hurling their shot out at the horde and blasting great channels through the oncoming ranks.

  ‘Ulric damn you all!’ hollered Blucher, not paying too much attention to which god’s wrath he invoked, so long as it inspired a faster work-rate from his men. ‘Reload! They are pouring into the outer curtain!’

  The blackpowder guns had reaped a terrible swathe, but it had merely sliced a tithe from the oncoming masses. They showed no fear, clambering over the twitching corpses of the felled, whooping and gurgling with glee. The driving mud-rain should have slowed them, washing them back down the steep cliff edges and into the grimy channel that had once been the Reik, but they seemed to thrive on it, slithering up through the deluge with the effluent streaming down their calloused faces.

  Blucher’s guns were arranged on the inner wall, high up above the first ring of courtyards. From their vantage they had been able to rain mortars and cannonballs with impunity, but now it felt as if the fortress’s very foundations were shaking under them.

  Blucher ran to the edge, skirting carefully around the red-hot maw of Grosse Bertha and taking care not to touch the metal. He reached the lip of the parapet and peered down.

  What he saw took his breath away. The curtain wall was gone – overwhelmed, lost under a simmering carpet of limbs and tentacles. Shocked to his core, Blucher nearly lost his footing, and grabbed hold of the battlement’s edge to steady himself.

  Mere moments ago, the outer perimeter had been held by companies of archers and handgunners, bolstered by the few Greatswords Aldred had left behind before marching out on his doomed attempt to relieve Marienburg. It had been a diminished company, to be sure, but it should have held out for longer than that. Now the walls’ summits were crawling with all manner of mutants and daemon-spawned horrors. Even as he watched, he saw the remaining defenders caught up in a rolling wave of tortured flesh, hacked apart and absorbed by the racing riptide of green and brown.

  The enemy ranks were a bizarre assortme
nt – some mortal men in plate armour and matted furs, some grotesque plague-victims carrying hooks and spike flails, some forest-beasts swollen to obscene proportions and slavering with unnatural hungers. Amid them all shimmered the faint outlines of daemons, screaming and shrieking amid the downpour.

  There was no fighting against those numbers. They swarmed like rats, scrabbling up the sheer walls along living briars and thorn-tendrils. The stone underfoot gave way, crushed by their weight, but still they came on, chortling as they trod on the tumbling bodies of their own kind.

  They would be across the inner courtyard in moments, and after that the great doors to the keep would not hold them for long, not if the outer walls had been demolished and surged over so ruthlessly.

  ‘Belay that!’ Blucher cried, unholstering his pistol and cocking the hammer. As he did so, he noticed his hands were trembling. He had been a captain for twenty years and a trooper for ten more, and was used to the sights and sounds of battle, and they had never shaken before. ‘Fall back to the towers!’

  There is no resisting this, he found himself thinking even as he retreated across the parapet towards the tower beyond. This will be over within the hour.

  All around him, men deserted their stations and fled for the last bastions of defence. As they did so, more stone flags cracked and splintered, sending shattered masonry flying high. The rain intensified, splattering green gobbets across the tortured citadel.

  Blucher resisted the urge to run. The main gate to the tower was less than twenty yards away, and already clogged with gunnery crews trying to cram their way in.

  ‘In good order!’ he cried, trying to give his orders a clarity that his mind lacked. ‘Up to the top level, form up in the Great Hall!’

  He was almost there – he could see the safety of the archway before him. Then, just as the last of the artillery crews slipped inside, the ground beneath him erupted.

  He was thrown back, landing on his back several yards away. Dazed, he looked up, trying to make out what had felled him.

  The parapet’s stone floor had burst open, and a fountain of mud and earth was jetting from the breach. Something huge was clawing its way to the surface, flinging aside stone flags as if they were children’s toys.

  The entire wall-section groaned and tilted, listing out over the courtyard below. Blucher grabbed hold of a stone railing and hauled himself to his feet, bracing unsteadily as the world swayed and cracked around him.

  The beast flailed its way into the open, tunnelling up from where the gunnery level had just been. It was vast, a leviathan of earth and rubble, surging up with the bulk and weight of a river-barge and slewing debris from its massive shoulders.

  For a moment, Blucher did not have anything to aim at, just a shower of loose soil and broken stone pieces, but then the beast itself shook loose and turned on him.

  He had never seen a monster so big. It was the size of the officer’s mess at his old parade ground, a nightmare of bulging veins and fat-slick limbs. Its pocked flesh was the green of rotten fruit. A tiny head protruded from absurdly muscled shoulders, drooling with butter-yellow saliva and grinning inanely. A low hhurr, hhurr rattled out from its vast lungs, and an overpowering stench of un-sluiced night-pans wafted out from its sweat-moist haunches.

  Blucher raised the pistol, holding it two-handed to quell the shakes, then fired. The shot spun out, perfectly aimed, and hit the creature square in the forehead.

  The monster stopped dead. For a moment, Blucher dared to believe that he had felled it, as a line of thin blood ran down the monster’s face. He saw it begin to topple, swaying amid the ruin of its ascent, before it blinked heavily, shook its head, and grinned again.

  Blucher tried to reload. He scrambled for another shot, pulling it from the wallet at his belt and tipping it into the palm of his hand.

  The monster lumbered towards him, shattering what remained of the stone floor under its tread. With a lurch of pure horror, Blucher saw that there was no stopping it. He could fire again and again, and still make no impression on that thick hide.

  He pushed himself back towards the edge of the tilting parapet, and glanced down over his shoulder. Below him, a drop of over thirty feet, the courtyard filled with enemy troops. He could see Carroburgers being pulled limb from limb amid the cackling laughter of daemons. Others were being dragged before cauldrons of boiling liquid and forced to drink, gagging and screaming as the corrosive poisons boiled their innards away. Huge booms rang out as the enemy got into the blackpowder storerooms, sending cracks racing up the flanks of the tortured fortress.

  It was already over. In the space of just a few hours, one of the oldest and proudest garrisons in the Empire had been overrun. Blucher’s fear was replaced by a deadening sense of shame. They should have done better. They should have fought harder.

  By then, the behemoth was nearly upon him. Blucher cast his pistol aside and reached for a short sword, staring up at the monster as it loomed over him. As he did so, he saw two twisted figures crouching on the beast’s shoulders, one in dirty robes and carrying a bell-bearing staff, the other wielding a scythe. Neither of them seemed to have noticed him – they were both absorbed in the carnage bursting out all across the reeling citadel.

  ‘This is not the end!’ cried Blucher, holding his blade as firmly as he could. ‘The Emperor will have his vengeance! Sigmar protects the faithful! The fate of the fallen is–’

  His tirade was cut off by a single down-stomp of the monster’s hoof. His body was smashed into the stone, crushed into a bloody pulp as the earth beneath was shivered into scree.

  Atop Ghurk’s shoulder, Ethrac paused and turned to his brother. ‘Did you hear something?’ he asked.

  Otto was in a frenzy of war-lust, barely sensible to anything outside his own world of slaughter. His red-rimmed eyes sparkled with delight as he surveyed the volume of destruction around him. ‘Hear what, o my brother?’ he asked, absently.

  ‘Never mind it,’ muttered Ethrac, preparing the next phase of the noxious deluge that would rip the roofs from the towers and expose the last of the cowering defenders within. ‘Press on, Ghurk. Break and shatter, snap and wither.’

  Ghurk barked with enthusiasm, too enraptured with the joy of destruction even to scrape the remains of his last kill up to his mouth. Turning cumbersomely, he swayed drunkenly towards the pinnacles of Carroburg.

  The sky above them lanced with flashes of green, exposing the shimmer-pattern of daemons in the air. All around them, a symphony of screams, flesh-schlicks, ribcage snaps and eyeball-pops swelled in the storm.

  The battle was won. Now the true carnage could begin.

  Another day dawned over Altdorf, as dank and rotten as all the others. The Reik’s flow had slowed to a grimy halt, and the stagnant waters now lapped at the edges of the streets above the quaysides. Insects multiplied on the filmy surface, and their massed buzzing drowned out even the cries of the merchants on the loading wharfs.

  Martak strode down the winding streets through the poor quarter, trying not to slip on the grime-soaked streets. Altdorf’s thoroughfares were filthy places at the best of times, but the endless rain and damp and plague and misery had turned them into little more than rivers of mud. The drenched and half-starved populace shuffled around in the margins, hugging the dripping eaves of the wattle-and-daub townhouses and shivering in the cold.

  For Martak, used to the wilds of the Great Forest, the confinement and the stink were especially trying. He had long since given up trying to get used to it, and had actively turned his finely honed sense of smell towards the task of detection. The plagues were being borne by foul winds from the north, that was certain, but there had to be a source within the city as well. Every chaplain of Sigmar was chanting nightly to banish the contagions, and the fact that they had failed suggested either that the power of faith was waning, or a greater power was at work, or both.

  There was no shortage of places to look for the plague’s root – the City of Sigmar was built upon
a warren of alleys, cesspits, warehouses and thieves’ dens, all of which were suitable nesting places for the Rot. There might be just one source or hundreds – it was impossible to know, not without tearing the entire poor quarter apart, brick by rotting brick.

  Ahead of him stood the Temple of Shallya. It had been deliberately placed in the darkest and most impoverished district of the old city, and stood like a shaft of sunlight amid piled-high tenements. Very few inhabitants of Altdorf were free of the fear of being assaulted or pick-pocketed while abroad in that district, but the Sisters of the Goddess lived their lives unmolested in the very heart of the lawless slum-city. Every day they would receive long lines of supplicants, desperate for relief from the panoply of maladies that afflicted them. Since the full onset of the Rot those lines had grown fourfold, and the temple was now permanently besieged by a throng of blistered and scarlet-faced sufferers.

  As he neared the temple precincts, Martak pushed them aside, using his staff to drive them from his path.

  Sister Margrit, the head of the order in Altdorf, watched him struggle. Her stern, matronly face showed some disapproval as she waited for him at the top of a wide flight of stone stairs. By the time Martak had reached her, he was sweating like a hog in midsummer.

  ‘Tell me, sister,’ he panted, wiping his greasy forehead, ‘how do you stand it?’

  ‘Stand what?’ Margrit asked.

  ‘The smell.’

  ‘You are not that clean yourself.’

  Martak ran his fingers through his clotted beard. ‘True enough. But you know why I’m here.’

  Margrit nodded. ‘Come.’

  The two of them passed from the crowded courtyard and walked under an open colonnade. Beyond the pillars lay a shaded cloister, free from the worst of the clamour outside. A fountain played amid a knot garden of carefully tended herbal plants. Martak felt like he had stepped into another world, and took a deep breath. The faint tang of corruption still laced the air, but it was less overpowering than outside.