The End Times | The Fall of Altdorf Page 22

  Karl Franz almost laughed at that. The wizard was a comically bad griffon rider, and his mount was quick to display its contempt, nearly throwing him from his seat as it laboured in position. ‘If you can manage it,’ he said, sheathing his sword and reaching out a calming hand to Deathclaw.

  Martak’s mount crashed to earth, and the wizard slipped awkwardly from between its wings, losing footing as he landed and sprawling onto the ground. He picked himself up, swearing under his breath as he brushed himself down.

  Karl Franz observed the man coolly. He was dishevelled, even for one of his wild Order. A matted beard hung from a grimy face, and his loose robes were streaked with mud. He hardly bore himself with the demeanour of a magister. Gelt would have descended from the heavens wreathed with coronets of fire and accompanied by a glittering staff of gold.

  This is what we have been reduced to, Karl Franz thought grimly.

  ‘My pardon, lord, for taking so long,’ muttered Martak, retrieving his own knotted mage-staff from amid his griffon’s ruffled plumage. ‘The Winds are disarranged, and searching for a single soul, even one as mighty as yours, is no longer as easy as it was.’

  Karl Franz folded his arms. ‘You come from Altdorf. It still stands?’

  ‘When I left it, it did. I don’t know for how long, what with an idiot of a Reiksmarshal in charge.’

  ‘So Helborg lives.’ The relief almost made his voice shake.

  ‘He does, aye.’

  ‘And Schwarzhelm? Huss?’

  ‘They were not there.’ Martak fixed him with a half-guilty, half-anxious look. ‘To be frank, it matters little – the city will fall. I have seen it, and I have seen the state of the defences. I could have stayed and died, but I chose to find you. While you live, something can be salvaged. There may be armies still intact somewhere. Middenheim, or Nuln, perhaps.’

  Karl Franz lost his smile. ‘You are not speaking seriously.’

  Martak sighed. ‘I knew this would be your response, but please, believe me. There is nothing to be done for Altdorf.’ His brown eyes stared out at the Emperor from the dark. ‘I have witnessed your death there, lord. Night after night, and the visions do not lie.’

  ‘Then why come to find me at all?’

  ‘Because fate can be cheated,’ said Martak, almost desperately. ‘You were never destined to die out here, alone. Nor do you need to die in the city. There will be other ways.’

  Karl Franz smiled thinly. It was interesting how other men regarded their fate within the world. Some, he knew, cared greatly for their own preservation, or for glory, or for evasion of duty. He had never so much disapproved of those men as found them baffling. Not to be governed by duty – the iron vice of obedience to a higher power – was so far removed from his philosophy as to be almost unintelligible.

  ‘I thank you for searching me out, wizard,’ said Karl Franz, sincerely enough. ‘You have done what none of your fellows managed, and that alone earns you your rank. But if you have come here to persuade me to abandon the city, you are more a fool than you look. It is my place. I instructed Helborg to hold it, and if there is any chance I can join him in its defence, I must take it.’

  The wizard stared back at him, looking like he was earnestly thinking of a way to change his mind. Then he shook his shaggy head. ‘You will not be persuaded.’

  ‘Persuasion is for debutantes and diplomats, wizard, and I am neither.’

  That seemed to remind Martak of just who he was talking to. The wizard nodded wearily. ‘Don’t think I was running away,’ he muttered. ‘I’d have stood and fought, if I thought I couldn’t find you. There are... good people there, ones who don’t deserve to be abandoned.’

  ‘Good or not, none deserve that.’ Karl Franz turned to look at Deathclaw. The griffon was wheezing in pain, just as it had done since its rescue. It looked barely able to remain on its feet, let alone take to the skies. ‘But I fear your quest has damned one of us to remain in the north. My steed will not fly.’

  Martak limped up to the griffon, studying it hard. He reached out with a calloused hand, and Deathclaw bucked.

  ‘Steady,’ whispered Karl Franz.

  ‘I can heal your creature, if it will let me,’ said Martak, running his hand down Deathclaw’s snapped pinion.

  Karl Franz raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?’

  ‘I am a magister of the Lore of Ghur. I may be a weak scryer and a poor judge of visions, but I know beasts.’

  ‘You do not know how to fly them.’

  Martak grimaced ruefully. ‘My feet were never meant to leave the earth.’ Then he looked more serious. ‘Come to that, I should never have been elected. If Gormann or Starke had been in Altdorf when the news of Gelt’s fall had come in, I would not have received so much as a vote. But consider this: as fate has it, you were found by an Amber wizard. None of them would have been able to make this creature whole again, but I can.’

  Karl Franz considered that. Good fortune had been thin on the ground since his reawakening. For a long time, it had felt as if his immortal patron had vanished, withdrawing His presence from the world just as it was overcome by darkness.

  And yet, the filthy wizard standing before him, scratching his cheek and running his thick fingers through Deathclaw’s flight-feathers, had a point.

  Do I dare believe again?

  He drew in a long breath. Above him, the vile lights danced in the skies, proof of the deep corruption of the world. Much of the situation had not changed – his Empire was overrun, his armies were shattered, he was far from refuge, and even if he were to make it to some safe city, it was not clear how the tide of war could possibly be turned back.

  Still, it was a start.

  ‘Heal him, then,’ Karl Franz said, walking over to the other griffon and taking it by the halter. ‘Where we are going, we will need both.’

  SIXTEEN

  Festus cracked a wide grin as he sensed the elements come together at last. Somewhere up above street level, the last of the paltry sunlight was fading and the stars were beginning to come out. The clouds would be splitting open, ready to usher in the sick light of the deathmoon, bathing the land below in the yellow glare of putrescence.

  He had stopped stirring, staggering back in exhaustion from the cauldron’s edge. The last of the mortal sacrifices had been added to the infernal stew, dragged from their cages by drooling daemon-kin. Smoke poured out from the bubbling surface, as green as bile and thick like rendered fat. The flames reared up, licking the sides of the vast kettle and making the liquids inside seethe.

  Festus wiped a sweaty hand across his forehead, wincing as pustules on his skin burst. After toiling for so long, he hardly knew what to do. Should he just watch? Or was there some other rite to perform, now that the power had been unleashed?

  A child-sized daemon with webbed feet and a head entirely taken up by jaws capered in front of him, laughing uncontrollably. Festus chuckled himself, finding the laughter contagious.

  ‘I know it, little one!’ he agreed, reaching out with a burly hand. The daemon clasped it tight, and together they danced a lumbering jig around the laboratory. ‘I share your joy!’

  All through his subterranean kingdom, vials were shattering, spewing their steaming contents across the brick floors. The glassware ran with bubbles, and the valves burst their sleeves in puffs of skin-curling heat.

  Festus cast off the attentions of the little daemon, and wobbled over to the next chamber along. The cages stood empty where he had left them, their doors swinging open and the soiled straw within buzzing with flies. Beyond the final set of arches, a wide shaft ran upwards, lined with mouldering brickwork and heavy with moss.

  Festus entered the shaft, standing at the base and looking upward. The circular vent soared straight above him, unclogged and ready to vent his fumes into the world beyond.

  ‘Are you ready?’ he cried, his throaty, phlegm-laced voice echoing up the circular space. ‘Do you know the bliss that awaits you? Are you prepared?’

&nbs
p; Of course they were not. They would be retreating to their tiny hovel-rooms now, ready for the night terror to begin. They should be out on the streets, ready to witness the coming storm. They should be revelling in it.

  From the cauldron chamber, huge booms were now going off. The reactions had started, bringing to fruition months of work. Every carefully placed jar of toxins was now exploding in sequence, kindling the baleful smoke that even now surged and blundered its way along the interconnecting tunnels.

  Festus pressed himself to the shaft’s edge, breathing heavily. His jowls shivered as he began to get the shakes, and a mix of terror and pleasure shuddered through his flabby body.

  ‘You are coming!’ he cried. ‘At last, you are coming!’

  The sound of metal snapping resounded down the tunnels, followed by the hard clang of the fragments bouncing from the keystones of the arches. A vast, earth-shaking roar boiled up from the depths of Festus’s realm, making the water in the sewer-depths bounce and fizz.

  Festus spread his arms wide, pressing his fingers into the mortar, and closed his eyes. Steam rushed past him, coiling and snaking up the shaft. He felt the heat of it blistering his skin, and relished every pop and split of his facial boils.

  ‘It begins,’ he breathed.

  The bells tolled across the poor quarter, puncturing the increasingly fervid air. The Bright College had sent menials to light pyres at every street corner in the hope of rallying the populace in the face of the mounting terror, but all that did was send more smoke pluming up into an already polluted dusk.

  Margrit dragged herself up to the balcony overlooking the Rathstrasse, feeling the age in her bones begin to tell. She had been working non-stop for weeks, coping with the gradually mounting toll of sick and dying. After so long resisting the contagion in the air, the endless filth had begun to overwhelm her at last. She wheezed as she leaned against the railing.

  Below her, the city was burning. Bonfires blazed in every platz and strasse, throwing thick orange light up against the grime-streaked daub of the townhouses. She watched as a regiment of Reikland state troopers marched through the street immediately below the temple’s east gate, clearing the lame from their path with a brutal military efficiency.

  She hardly had the energy to be outraged anymore. They were just doing their job – strutting off to wherever they were destined to die – and the sick were everywhere, blocking the doorways, the drains and the marketplaces.

  She breathed deeply, feeling her heart pulse. She felt light-headed, and the charnel stink in the air made it worse. Something was coming to a head. Whenever the clouds briefly split, the sickening illumination of Morrslieb flooded the rooftops, making Altdorf look like a forest of spikes set against an ocean of yellow-green.

  Where are you? she found herself wondering. For a moment, I believed you were different. You came down here, at least. Perhaps that told you all you needed to know.

  The image of the bearded wizard still hung in her mind. There was something about him – a rawness, a lack of cultivation – that she had found appealing.

  Too late, now. This thing, whatever it is, is beginning.

  Her head started to ache. The air was like it was before a summer thunderstorm, close and clammy. The smoke of the fires made it worse. She looked down at her hands, and saw that they were trembling.

  Then she sniffed. There was something else in the air. Something... alchemical. She looked up, screwing her eyes against the drifting smog. Over to the north-east, across the Unterwald Bridge and towards the slaughterhouse district, a column of smoke was rising. Unlike all the others, it glowed green from within, glimmering in the night like phosphor. While the fires of the Bright magisters burned fiercely, this column rose into the sky like oil poured in reverse, slinking and sliding upward in violation of nature’s order.

  ‘There you are,’ she said out loud, vindicated, though far too late. The column continued to grow, piling on more and more girth until it loomed over the entire district. Flashes of light flared up inside it, flickering and spinning, before guttering out. The hunchbacked roofs of the abattoirs were silhouetted, flashing and swinging amid the riot of colour. ‘It was under us the whole time,’ she murmured. ‘Just one regiment would have sufficed.’

  A dull boom rang out, making the earth shake, and plumes of emerald lightning lanced upward, shooting like geysers in the gathering dark.

  Margrit swallowed, trying to remember the words of the Litany Against the Corruption of the Body. She knew, perhaps better than anyone else in the city, just what strain of magic had been unleashed in the depths of the city. It had been there for months, cradling slowly, growing like an obscene child in the dripping sewers, and now it had been birthed under the light of Morrslieb and with the hosts of Ruin camped outside the walls.

  ‘Blessed Mother,’ Margrit whispered, watching the column lash and unfurl, ‘preserve us all.’

  Ethrac was the first to see it.

  ‘There it is!’ he shrieked, jumping up from his long-held crouch and nearly losing his position on Ghurk’s back. ‘He has done it!’

  Otto roused from a half-sleep, in which dreams of sucking the marrow from living victims had been making him salivate, and looked blearily at his brother. ‘Who has done what?’

  Ethrac cracked him over the head with his staff, making the bells chime. ‘Festus! His spell breaks!’

  Otto clambered to his feet, rubbing his forehead absently, trying to see what the fuss was about.

  Then he did. Altdorf lay under the night’s thick cover, lit up along its walls by a thousand grimy lanterns. The towers soared darkly into the void, black on black, each crowned by a slender tiled roof. Just as before, he was struck by the sheer vastness of it, like a mound of rotting fruit ready for gnawing on.

  The roofs were overhung by lines of smoke, just as always, except that one of them was glowing green and curling like burning parchment edges. It towered over the city, rearing up like a vast and vengeful giant, swelling and bloating into flickering excess. Its green light, as gloriously lurid as anything Otto had witnessed, sent shadows leaping across the landscape. Half-defined faces rose and sank in the smoke, each one contorted into mutating expressions of agony and misery.

  ‘It is beautiful,’ he murmured, absently letting his hand fall to his scythe-stave.

  A low rumble from below told him that Ghurk agreed. The triplets stood, lost in admiration, as the first mark of Festus’s Great Tribulation began.

  ‘I can feel the aethyr bending,’ said Ethrac appreciatively. ‘He has been working on this for a long time.’

  Otto chuckled darkly. ‘He enjoys his labours.’

  ‘As do we all.’

  The column continued to grow. The clouds above the city responded, sending down tendrils like stalactites, and soon a vortex began to churn over the battlements, glowing and flickering like embers. The growl of thunder rocked the valley, though this time it was not the world’s elements that stirred. Lightning snapped down from tormented clouds, flooding more emerald light over the sacrificial city.

  ‘It is fitting, is it not?’ mused Ethrac. ‘That the first strike should be self-inflicted? The City of Sigmar will gnaw its own innards out, and all before the first standard is lifted.’

  Otto was barely paying attention. The column of smoke was twisting like a tornado, only far vaster and slower, rotating ominously as it gathered girth and momentum. The rain started up again, as if triggered by the pillar of aethyr-energy churning up out of the city’s innards. Droplets pinged and tumbled down Ghurk’s vast bulk.

  A rumble drummed across the land, lower than the thunder, like the unsteady foundations of the world grating together. The rain picked up in intensity, sheeting down in thick, viscous gobbets of slime.

  Otto lifted his head and grinned, feeling cool mucus run down his cracked features.

  ‘And do you see them?’ asked Ethrac, his bony face twisted into a look of ecstasy. ‘The others? Look out, o my brother, and observe what th
e beacon has summoned.’

  Otto blinked the slime from his eyes and peered out into the gloom. The sun was nothing more than a red glow in the far west, but all across the northern horizon, crimson pinpricks were emerging from the forest. First a few dozen, then hundreds, then thousands. ‘I see it, o my brother,’ he said. ‘That is the Lord of Tentacles, and the scions of the beast-forest. So many! So, so many.’

  ‘And, though you do not see it yet, Epidemius is closing from the east. The river will be blocked from both compass points.’ Ethrac reached down to playfully tug at Ghurk’s lone eyebrow. ‘You will be feasting on live flesh again soon, great one!’

  Ghurk chortled eagerly, and his shoulders rolled with mirth.

  Over Altdorf, the column of green fire burst into ever more violent life, revealing a twisting helix of luminescent power coursing at its heart. The heavens responded, and the storm overhead rotated faster in sympathy, a vast movement that spread out over the entire forest.

  Altdorf was now the fulcrum on which the heavens themselves turned. As the thunder ramped up and the slime-rain fell ever more heavily, a delicious air of terror lodged firmly over the Reik, seeping up from the slime of the earth and bleeding into the churn of the ruptured skies. The column of green fire punched a hole through the heart of the swirling vortex, fully exposing the damaged face of Morrslieb, hanging at the very heart of the heavens like a severed tumour set among the stars.

  ‘My people!’ Otto cried out, turning from his vantage to face the colossal army that had waited for so long within sight of the prize, held in place by the triplets’ peerless command. Ranks of grizzled Norscans, wild Skaelings, gurning lesser daemons, plague-afflicted mortals and corrupted beast-mutants lifted up their sore-pocked faces and waited for the order. A thousand banners were hoisted into the dribbling rain, each one marked with a different aspect of the Urfather. Cleavers were pulled from leather slip-cases, mauls unhooked from chains, blunt-bladed swords from human-hide sheaths. ‘The sign has been given!’