The End Times | The Fall of Altdorf Read online

  She had been his strength, back then. Everything he had done had been through her, driven onwards by the raw passion that had so surprised him. To be alone, truly alone, never lost its bitter aftertaste. He could summon as many courtesans to his side as he liked, taking his pick from the cadavers of a thousand years of ossified beauty, and it would make no difference.

  Perhaps, he had thought to himself in the lonely hours of the night, that was why the Master had been able to pull him back. In true death, Vlad must have been an unquiet soul, ripped untimely from the world and still hungering to return for the love he had left behind.

  ‘Now I am a mortarch,’ he said to himself dryly. ‘The titles he has given us, to usher in the reign of eternal order. I would have preferred Emperor, but such is fate. Perhaps I shall still be elector, which will be a decent consolation.’

  He had not heard from Altdorf since sending his letter. He had not expected to, though to have no response at all, not even a denunciation, wore at his pride a little. As far as he was concerned, the offer remained open. He might have to wait until the walls were broken and the mortal armies were reeling, but waiting was something he had always been good at.

  ‘My lord,’ said Herrscher, sounding concerned. ‘Regard the river.’

  Vlad snapped out of his thoughts, and looked up.

  He sat on a throne mounted atop the high quarterdeck of a shallow-hulled river cruiser. Ranks of oars dipped and hauled into the murky waters around, dragging the ship south and west along the course of the Reik. Behind him, in a long procession of bleak ugliness, trade barges followed on, each one stuffed with the bodies of his servants. Every barge carried several hundred soldiers, and there were dozens upon dozens of them now, plundered from the destroyed Imperial settlements along the Stir and the upper Reik. The sable banners of Sylvania hung from every one, held aloft by cold hands. No sound came from those barges, save for the slap of oars in the water and the thump of reed-clumps hitting the solid bows.

  Since taking to the river, progress west had been rapid. With the need to negotiate the clogged and treacherous forest paths negated, the entire army had slipped towards their goal without obstruction, travelling just as well by day as by night, pausing only to sack any of the riverside towns they came across. Kemperbad had been the last big one, a walled fortress to rival Wurtbad, and the fight to subdue it had been just as vicious. The outcome had been much the same, in the end – a cohort of newly dead and newly cowed to bolster the truly huge host now under his thrall.

  Vlad had begun to relax then, safe in the knowledge that they would be there in time. He should have known better – the forces of Ruin were not led by fools, and they had formidable powers of their own.

  ‘I have never seen the like,’ said Herrscher.

  Ahead of Vlad’s position, in the bows, the Pale Ladies stood on the very edge of the deck railing, peering into the gloom and exchanging exclamations of outrage. Even the reanimated Wolff, still sullen and moody, looked out at the approaching vista.

  Half a mile downstream, where the broad flow of the river expanded into a wide, slate-grey expanse of choppy, wind-whipped froth, the forest had crept from its bounds. It had started a mile or so back – heavy clods of moss floating in mid-channel, fouling the oars and bumping against the hulls. As they had made headway, the clots and mats had grown more numerous, breaking free of the tree-lined banks even as he had watched them.

  The barrier before them, though, was something else. The trees themselves had burst open, throwing obscene spears of rotten wood into the water. More had followed, building on those sent before. Vines had snaked into the splintered bulwark, binding it all tightly. More mosses had latched on to that frame, swelling and pulsing under the perpetual twilight.

  Somehow, the forest had managed to block the entire river, throwing out tentacles and sinking deep into the main flow. Backed up by the obstruction, the Reik had burst its banks, filtering into the woods on either side and welling up in pools of fly-encrusted muck.

  Vlad stood up. The blockage was not a temporary thing. It looked like the unnatural outgrowths continued far beyond the first barrier, breaking the flow of the Reik entirely. Leeches wriggled across the top of the arboreal dam, pale-skinned and red-eyed. The stink was even worse than it had been higher up the river, magnified by the standing water that now mingled with rotten roots.

  ‘We cannot break that, lord,’ said Herrscher.

  The witch hunter at least had the grace to sound concerned. Herrscher had long since given up the pretence of anger at his predicament, and was now a loyal member of Vlad’s entourage. They all gave up caring, sooner or later, and settled into their new life. It was hard to sustain the old angers when one owed one’s existence to one’s enemy.

  ‘Of course we can,’ said Vlad, irritably, watching the twisted dam drift closer.

  ‘We should order the barges to halt.’

  ‘They will keep going.’

  Herrscher looked exasperated. ‘We will run aground!’

  From the bows, the Pale Ladies had started to laugh. Their chins were all glossy with blood. They had drunk too deeply the night before, and it made them giddy.

  ‘Who do you think you are with, Herrscher?’ asked Vlad, pushing his cloak back and raising a clawed hand. ‘I was mighty when I lived before, and I am mightier now. Nagash does not just give life, he also gives power.’

  Vlad extended his arm before him. Knowing what was coming, the Pale Ladies giggled and scrambled for cover. Wolff and Herrscher looked on, one sourly, the other with interest.

  The clouds above the forest-dam began to curdle. Thick slabs of stone-grey shifted, and flickers of silver lightning rippled across the horizon. The wind picked up, whipping the tips of the waves and making them froth.

  Vlad began to recite words in a language he had never understood in his previous life. Now, though, they came easily, tripping from his dry tongue as if he had been chanting them since childhood.

  The air shuddered, and the colour slopped out of it. Virulently green leaves crackled and shrivelled, turning black as if burned by fire. There were no flames – just a cold, cold gust as if from the maw of the underworld. The water turned slate-dark, and the trees beyond snarled and curled up. The wood dried and cracked, ageing lifetimes in mere moments. Vines unravelled from their clutch-holds and sprang back, their sap hardening and making them brittle.

  With an echoing snap, the first of the bulwarks broke. Mighty tree-trunks, turning grey-white as if made of embers, dissolved away, splashing into the river below. Massive shivers ran through the entire structure. It began to give way, breaking back up into desiccated chunks. The leeches scurried for the safety of the banks, or plopped messily into the water below, screaming blindly.

  Vlad smiled coldly. The unlocked Wind of Shyish surged through him, as chill as pack-ice. In the face of its limitless power, the perverted corruptions of life had no choice but to wither and collapse. In the end, that was the fate that awaited all mortal creation. The vagaries of life were impressive in their variety, but ultimately nothing compared to the bleak majesty of eternal death. Vlad had always guessed at the power of the Shyish Unlocked, but it had taken Nagash to truly reveal its potency to him. When victory came, as it surely would, this would be all that remained – empty lands, bled dry of filth and squalor, populated by the meek, whispering armies of the mortarchs. Even the sun and the moon would obey the new Law, bound into new circles and following regulated paths. There would be no more rebellion, no more misery, no more fecundity.

  Herrscher shook his head in disbelief, watching the river-path open up once again. The waters rushed to fill the void, sweeping away the tinder-dry wreckage, and the river cruiser’s deck trembled as the current picked up once more.

  The Pale Ladies laughed uproariously, pointing out to one another where the leeches thrashed in the waves, slowly drowning.

  Vlad maintained the pressure. There were miles of matted effluent to clear, and the closer they got to
Altdorf the worse it would become. ‘They are scared of us,’ he told Herrscher, as his ring boiled and coughed with magic. ‘They did not expect this on their eastern flank – all their prophecies were bound up with mortal men.’

  Herrscher nodded slowly. ‘They know we are coming, then.’

  ‘Of course they do. They will rouse every pestilence against us, just as they always have done, and they will fail, for the dead do not sicken.’ He smiled at the witch hunter. Then he gazed across the deck of his commandeered vessel and smiled at all of his servants. They were so lucky. ‘Nothing will stop us, my friend. We will sweep towards Sigmar’s city like the cold wind over graves, and when we arrive they will see just how badly they have miscalculated by ignoring the scions of Sylvania.’

  ‘Who, lord?’ asked Herrscher. ‘The corrupted, or the mortal?’

  ‘In time, both,’ said Vlad evenly, resuming his place on the throne and keeping his claw extended before him. ‘But if the Emperor has the sense to take my offer, then all things are possible.’

  He settled into position, watching the forest crumple and deteriorate before the waves of grave-magic. The display pleased him, just as it did the Pale Ladies, who still cackled like urchins.

  ‘Send orders to the barge commanders to row faster,’ he said. ‘I smell the first whiff of rotten fish on the air – the city must be close.’

  The greater part of the enemy hosts had already moved south, but that did not make the north safe.

  Deathclaw had partially recovered from its wounds, but not yet enough to take wing, and so Karl Franz and the griffon remained earthbound and vulnerable. They travelled by night, trusting to the overcast darkness to hide them against the iron-dark earth. The unlocking of ancient Law had freed all manner of foul spirits from their long-established shackles. Ghosts floated across the lurid skies, shrieking in long-forgotten tongues. Cadavers pulled themselves from the ground without the aid of necromancers, and limped off in search of living flesh to gnaw. Splinter warbands from the main Chaos armies roamed the ruined lands, hunting down what little mortal prey remained for food and torture.

  Every village Karl Franz passed through was abandoned, its houses empty and its fields standing fallow. Even the fauna had fled, excepting those bloated, dull-eyed mutations that flapped and limped in place of birds and beasts. Deathclaw would kill them, but not eat them. All they had for sustenance were the rotting remains in grain-stores or the trodden-down remnants of bread and pastries in looted taverns.

  Karl Franz had long since stopped hoping to meet any survivors. At first, soon after he had rescued the war-griffon, he had entertained dreams of coming across resistance fighters. He would rally them, day by day, and the news would spread. Soon he would find a way to link up with Helborg and Schwarzhelm, who surely still fought on somewhere, and jointly they would take the fight to the invader again. The enemy may have been mighty, but this was his land, and they were his people.

  It had become slowly apparent, though, that there were no fighters left. The invaders had driven every one of them away, or killed them all, or had dragged them all into slavery. Every hovel was empty, and every townhouse echoed with silence. Karl Franz trudged through them all, rooting through the remains under the yellow light of Morrslieb, now a mere whisker from fullness.

  It was the little things that struck at his heart – the broken looms, the cold anvils, the tin plates half-buried in the straw. He soon realised that he could not have faced any of his subjects, had they still lingered by their cold hearths. He would not have known how to meet their gaze. He was their protector, and he had failed more completely than any Emperor in the annals ever had.

  During the day, when he fitfully slept, he would see them come up to him in his dreams, their plague-ravaged faces accusatory.

  ‘We toiled for you,’ they would say. ‘We cut land from the forest, and scraped crops from it. We built chapels, and armed ourselves, and served in your armies. We looked to you when the winter storms came, or the beasts tore up our fields, or the greenskins broke from the deep wood with blood in their eyes. We would say your name as we reached for our swords. That gave us all the hope we ever had. We would say your name.’

  He would wake then, his breathing shallow and his heart pounding. He would lie in the twilight of the cloud-bound day, shivering as his body lay against the cold ground, wishing he had not seen those faces.

  We would say your name.

  Deathclaw was able to travel for miles without tiring, though his wings still hung broken by his harrowed flanks. Every night, they would break from whatever cover they had found the morning before, and set off. If they found stragglers from the Norscan hordes, they would kill them, and for a few moments the grief would be forgotten in the sudden heart-rush of combat. Karl Franz’s runefang would flash in the dark, wielded by angry hands, and the blood of the Fallen would spill on lands that still hated them.

  He knew it could not last. Sooner or later, word of a lone griffon and its rider abroad in the wastes would filter back to whatever dark mind controlled the conquest of the north, and more serious forces would be sent to hunt them down.

  Karl Franz found himself hoping for that day to come quickly. Better to die fighting than wither away from starvation, lost and unmourned amid an Empire he had allowed to pass into the hands of its ancient foes. Until then, though, he never stopped searching. He never stopped praying, even though the petitions became steadily bitterer. At the end of each fruitless day, he would kneel against the sickened soil, pressing his knees and fists into the earth, and offer his soul to Sigmar.

  ‘Anything,’ he would whisper. ‘Any suffering, any pain, just to be worthwhile. To serve again. The runes on my blade remain dark, the sun does not shine. What power remains in your people? Is Ghal Maraz still carried? I would know, surely, if it had passed into darkness.’

  Silence. Always silence. He would fall into exhausted sleep with no answers being given, just the skirl of the wind and the stink of the foul woods.

  He had lost track of how long it had been since Heffengen. On one particularly cold night, the clouds underlit with yellow-green and distant thunder crackling away in the far south, the two of them crawled along a choked river bed, hugging the shadow of the rising banks. Above them, strange lights played across the heavens, dancing like flames poured from an alchemist’s vial.

  Deathclaw suddenly froze, crouching low against the ground. Karl Franz tensed, recognising his steed’s threat-posture, and gripped the hilt of his sword tight.

  He sniffed. Experience had taught him it was easier to smell the enemy than see them in the dark. All he could detect was the filmy muck trickling at the bottom of the riverbed.

  ‘What is it?’ he whispered, reaching up to rub Deathclaw’s neck. ‘What do you sense?’

  The griffon’s head rose. Its golden eyes glittered, and it opened its hooked beak. One wing extended, but the broken pinions did not unfurl. With a muffled cry of agony, the creature started to shuffle up the broken riverbank.

  Karl Franz cursed. The land above the dry gulch was open, offering precious little cover, and a griffon was a big creature to hide, even at night. ‘Wait!’ he urged, struggling up after it.

  They broke into higher ground, and the earth ran away from them in all directions, empty and featureless. The strange lights in the sky were more visible up there – they were like ripples of ink across the heavens, and it made him nauseous to look at them.

  There were no troops marching across the ink-black wasteland, only the wind, as frigid and merciless as ever.

  Deathclaw, however, remained agitated. It tried to flap its wings again, only to give up in agony. By then, Karl Franz could hear something for himself – a rhythmic beating on the air, followed by a faint tang of foulness.

  He advanced warily, peering up into the unquiet skies, seeking out the source. He saw nothing, but the beating became stronger. The air shifted, stirred by some powerful force above him.

  He gripped his sword-h
ilt two-handed.

  So it comes at last, he thought, knowing that whatever approached would be far more powerful than the scattered warbands he had previously encountered. The word must have got out – he had a sudden mental flash of the zombie dragon tearing towards him, its empty eye sockets flaming.

  Then something huge and dark burst from the clouds, plummeting fast. Deathclaw hissed, and rose up, its claws extended. Karl Franz crouched, his sword held point-up, coiling for the spring.

  ‘My liege, put your weapon down, if it please you!’ cried a gruff, part-panicked voice from above.

  A second later, and the huge profile of a war-griffon emerged above them, holding position awkwardly less than twenty feet from the ground.

  Karl Franz straightened. He knew that beast. He knew all the griffons stabled in the Imperial Menagerie. It was young, barely broken-in, hellish to control. It should have been unrideable.

  With a sudden flare of joy, he realised what that meant – loyal men still lived. Even if all else had failed, even if his northern armies had been utterly destroyed, something still remained.

  ‘Declare yourself,’ Karl Franz ordered, keeping his blade raised. Deathclaw remained at his side, hissing angrily.

  ‘Gregor Martak, Amber College,’ came the voice from above, as harsh as rotten tree-bark. And then, as if he were strangely embarrassed by the addition, ‘Supreme Patriarch.’

  Karl Franz remained wary. There had been too many deceptions for him to take him at his word, and he did not even recognise the name. ‘Supreme Patriarch, you say. Who authorised this?’

  ‘My fellows, as is the way of the colleges,’ came the defensive reply. ‘De Champney, Reichart, Theiss.’

  Karl Franz frowned. ‘Those are deputies.’ The true Heads of the Colleges had accompanied him to the war at the Bastion, including Gormann, Starke and Kant. If they were no longer involved in decision-making, then that hardly boded well.

  ‘These are confused times, my liege,’ said Martak. ‘We do what we can. May I land?’