The End Times | The Fall of Altdorf Read online

  So the Reiksguard ran hard. Helborg’s face streamed with blood, and the pain spurred him on. He fought with an angry, vicious fury now, forgetting any pretensions at strategy or finesse and giving in to the raw violence that had threatened to overwhelm him for so long.

  As they raced across the Griffon Bridge, its wide span crawling with whole clusters of desperate duels, he kicked and hacked his way through the throngs. The Klingerach lashed out, taking the head clean off a leering plaguebearer, before he spun on his heel and smashed the hilt into the face of an oncoming marauder. Then he was running again, his brother-knights hard on his heels.

  Ahead of them, the Palace reared up into the storm, now covered in a thick layer of corrupted growths, its outline obscured and its lines tainted. White-edged flames licked across its broken back, fuelled and perverted by the poisons now freely coursing through the vegetation. Laughter still resounded in the storm-wind – the laughter of an amused, sadistic god that cared little how the battle fared so long as misery and misfortune continued to spread thickly.

  ‘My lord!’ cried Zintler, panting hard. ‘The skies!’

  Helborg looked up sharply, loath to be distracted from the chase. When he did so, however, his heart leapt.

  A star burned brightly in the morning sky, only partly obscured by the roiling clouds. Its light was austere and hard to look at – a shifting flicker of pale flame. Behind it trailed two lines of fire, snapping and twisting like streamers.

  He halted, suddenly held rapt by the vision.

  The twin-tailed star.

  ‘What does it mean?’ asked Zintler.

  Helborg laughed. ‘I have no idea. But it is here.’

  As he stared at it, it seemed to him that two tiny specks of darkness fell from the skies, racing out of the light of the star one after the other, plummeting like peregrines on the hunt-dive.

  He blinked, trying to clear his sweat-blurred vision, and they were gone. For a moment, it had looked like two mighty eagles had dropped from the heavens, falling fast towards the open carcass of the Imperial Palace.

  ‘We have to get there,’ he said, snapping back into focus. The bridge terminated less than fifty yards ahead, after which the land rose sharply, crowned with the mansions and counting-houses of the nobility. Most were aflame, or slumped into rubble, or blazed with unnatural light, and what little remained was now contested by the two ancient enemies of mankind who now struggled for mastery.

  It would be hellish. They would have to fight their way through a mile of steep, switchbacked roads before reaching the processional leading towards the gates. That was where the concentration of Chaos warriors was greatest, and where even the undead had toiled to make progress. They would be lucky to make it halfway, and unless the twin-tailed star looked kindly on them, they might not even get that far.

  Helborg found himself grinning with a kind of fey madness. Everything he cherished was already gone. All that remained was the last, desperate sprint towards the heart of it all, to where he had always been destined to meet his end. The comet showed the way, lighting up the path with its flickering, gold-edged light.

  The End Times, he thought to himself grimly as he broke into a run once more. So this is what they look like.

  Leoncoeur did not have time to speak to the priestess for long – the courtyard was still crawling with plaguebearers. Many had been banished by the shock wave of the greater daemon’s departure, but others lingered, re-knitting their aethyr-spun bodies together and advancing once more towards the huddled group of guardsmen and priestesses.

  He could barely stand. The fight against the creature of Chaos had drained him to the core, and even with the timely aid of the blessed water he had scarcely prevailed. He backed away from the daemons’ advance, gathering his strength for renewed fighting.

  The priestess came with him, unarmed now but unwilling to leave his side.

  ‘What is your name, lord?’ she asked, her eyes never leaving the hordes of daemons creeping through the ruined outer wall.

  ‘What does that matter now, sister?’ Leoncoeur replied. ‘We are all fighters.’

  She looked satisfied by that. ‘I was hoping for an Emperor,’ she said dryly. ‘Perhaps a king will do.’

  Then, barging aside the lesser creatures of Chaos, the obese and horrific scythe-bearer clambered over the wreckage of the gates and fixed them both with a gaze of pure loathing. Though dwarfed by the slain greater daemon, this new creature was scarce less foul, and he stank just as badly. His jowls wobbled as he raised an accusing finger.

  ‘You,’ the monster drawled through bloody lips. ‘You killed it.’

  ‘As I will you,’ warned Leoncoeur, remaining inside the line of the water. ‘You have seen it already – come no closer.’

  From outside the walls, sounds of battle had broken out again. Leoncoeur could hear the unearthly cries of the plaguebearers as they took on an unseen enemy. Perhaps some of the pegasus riders still fought on, though he guessed there were few of them left now. He caught the faint whiff of something sepulchral on the air, vying with the stench of decay, and wondered what it meant.

  ‘You killed it!’ screamed the Leechlord, advancing across the line of sacred water as if it were not there. Though it had proved a barrier against the least of the Chaos warriors, it did nothing to halt those most steeped in the twisting powers of the aethyr. ‘Such beauty, gone from the world!’

  Leoncoeur pushed the priestess behind him, shielding her with his body. The tumult of combat from beyond the walls grew louder. With a sudden realisation, Leoncoeur knew the reason for the creature’s fury – the tide had turned. Against all hope, his army of fleshy horrors was being driven back, though by whom or what he could not yet see.

  He allowed himself a smile of dark contentment. He had done what he had come for. The temple was secure, and a chink of light would endure amid the darkness. Whatever happened now, the journey had not been in vain.

  ‘Your spells unravel themselves,’ Leoncoeur taunted, edging warily closer. ‘You will not take this place now, and it turns your mind to see it.’

  That proved the final straw. The Leechlord lumbered towards him, raving and spitting, his flabby arms cartwheeling. Leoncoeur raised his sword, and their weapons clashed – steel against iron. They traded blows in a furious whirl. Leoncoeur shattered the creature’s scythe with a single swipe, then pressed the attack by driving his blade deep into his overspilled stomach. Entrails flopped out, hanging like strings from the burst skin-sac.

  Somehow, that did not stop him. The Leechlord swayed back into the attack, pulling a bone-saw from his belt and slashing wildly. Every blow that landed felt like a warhammer-strike – heavy and deadening. Leoncoeur could feel his arms ache. The long ride, followed by the battle at the gates, then the grinding duel against the greater daemon – the toll was too heavy.

  ‘For the Lady!’ he cried, redoubling the blows from his blood-smeared broadsword. He managed to drive another thrust deep into the creature’s midriff, further opening the wound and showering the flagstones with speckled gore.

  But the Leechlord was immune to pain, and his raddled body could absorb the most horrific levels of punishment. Unlike the daemon, he was a creation of flesh and blood, and would not be banished back to the aethyr. He opened his vast maw and vomited straight at Leoncoeur’s chest.

  The deluge was horrific, splattering into his eyes and making him gag. He staggered away, blinded by the foul matter. Unable to defend himself, he felt the sharp cut of the bone-saw as it punched into his throat.

  He jerked away, flailing wildly with his sword, but he could already feel the hot cascade down his chest. The cut was mortal, and black stars spun before his eyes.

  He crashed to the ground, fighting hard to stay conscious. The Leechlord towered over him triumphantly, his whole body sagging open from the wounds he had taken, but with the vicious light of victory in his porcine eyes.

  Leoncoeur’s blurred gaze wandered over to where the pries
tess stood, watching in horror, unable to intervene with no weapon to hand.

  But she had done enough. The gift of water had proved sufficient, and the irony only then occurred to him.

  Look for me in pure waters.

  ‘She has blessed you indeed,’ he murmured, just as the Leechlord brought the saw down and cut deep into his chest.

  Leoncoeur’s back arced in agony. He felt his ribs sever and his muscles part. Fighting back against the pain, he stared straight into the face of his killer, and cracked a grin.

  That enraged the Leechlord further, but before he could twist the saw in deeper, he suddenly went rigid. A look of panic flashed across his features, and his arms thrust out, shivering. He tried to turn, but his body was rapidly turning into something else – hard, bark-like matter that burst out from under his pustulent hide.

  ‘What... is...’ he stammered, but then his tongue solidified and his whole body shuddered into rigidity.

  His awareness slipping away, Leoncoeur just had enough time to see the cause. A tall warrior wearing crimson armour stepped from the shadow of the Leechlord, a bloody stake in his hand and a smoking ring on his pale finger. The two of them looked at one another, and the crimson-armoured lord inclined an ice-white, long-maned head.

  With his last sight, Leoncoeur saw the remainder of the daemons being driven from the courtyard, pursued by grey-skinned warriors in archaic armour. With the Leechlord’s downfall, there was nothing to bind them together – a new force had arrived, one with the power and the will to take them on.

  Leoncoeur’s head lolled. When it hit the stone, it felt almost like the feather bolsters of his old cot in Couronne’s castle. An overwhelming feeling of numbness shot up his limbs, stifling the pain.

  The priestess was at his side then, cradling him. He managed to shoot her a final smile.

  ‘My lady,’ he whispered.

  So it was that, courteous to the last, Louen Leoncoeur died in the precincts of the Temple of Shallya, ringed by the living and the dead.

  The Glottkin tore up to the Palace gates, surging like the unleashed force of nature they had always been. Undead warriors tried to block their path, forming a cordon before the open doorway, but they were swept away like chaff. Ghurk picked up several with one sweep of his fist. Disgusted that he could not eat them, he hurled their bony bodies away.

  The cavernous interior of the Palace beckoned. Once it would have stood proudly, a masterpiece of baroque excess, soaring into the skies and ringed by graven images of gods and heroes. Now, mere hours after their arrival, the entire complex ran wild with an overabundance of reeking foliage. Mosses, vines and weeds sprouted from every crevice, prising apart the stone and bringing down pillars and buttresses. The entire structure now listed uneasily on its slime-glossed foundations, and entire wings had collapsed under the weight of the mucus-deluge and the burgeoning plague-growths.

  Otto beat Ghurk’s hide harder, forcing him to gallop into the heart of the great sprawl of ruination. The undead were everywhere now, spilling from balconies and clawing up from the sewers underfoot. Festus’s plague-rain was already beginning to lessen, and the assault teetered on a knife-edge. Seizing the Palace was now imperative – the scryers had all foretold that the end would come there, and that he, Otto Glott, paramount servant of the Plaguefather, would be the one to land the killing blow. It would take place at the very centre, the oldest and the grandest edifice of humanity on earth, and no sudden apparitions nor ghosts from the blasted wilds could be allowed to halt that now. They had destroyed the undead at Heffengen, they had destroyed them at Marienburg, and now they would destroy them at Altdorf.

  ‘Onward, on, o my brother!’ Otto commanded, thrashing Ghurk madly with his scythe-butt.

  Ghurk chortled happily, and crashed through a whole string of vine-strewn courtyards, lashing out with his tentacle-arm and crunching apart any skeletons unwary enough to oppose him.

  Ethrac was busy too, hurling blast after blast of aethyr-lightning from his staff. Revenants were blown into slivers of spinning bone, their armour shattered and their swords crushed into spiralling shards. He had seen the twin-tailed star again, and this time the omen seemed to trouble him. He uttered no cries of victory, but mumbled an endless series of cantrips and summonings, ringing them all in a lattice of writhing witch-light.

  The hosts of Chaos that had accompanied them on the long charge into the Palace grounds now fanned out, taking the fight to the scions of Sylvania. Every corridor, every passageway and bridge-span was clogged with struggling warriors, locked in a pitiless struggle for mastery. The storm raced above them, lashing the combatants in the plague-rain and drenching the few remaining open spaces. Everywhere else, the foul garden bloomed, spreading its poisons into the very depths of the city vaults.

  ‘I saw them come down,’ muttered Ethrac, hurling more green-laced fire from his staff-tip.

  ‘Who?’ asked Otto, preoccupied with directing Ghurk towards the centres of resistance.

  ‘The fallen king. I saw him, under the light of the comet. He will be there.’

  Otto let a grin slide across his sore-thick lips. ‘We knew he would. That is the sacrifice, the one to usher in the end.’

  ‘Cut him deep, o my brother,’ said Ethrac, letting rip with a blast of aethyr-energy that blazed across the rain-thick air and exploded in virulent swirls against a formation of wights. ‘Cut him so deep that the world beneath him is severed. Nothing else matters.’

  The Glott siblings broke into a wide muster-yard just under the shadow of the Palace’s colossal main dome. It was less than two hundred yards towards the smashed doorway inside, beyond which they could already see the marble and gold interior glinting.

  Before them, though, was arranged the last defence. No living soldiers still guarded the inner Palace, but they were no longer needed. A whole army of zombies waited for them, clambering over one another in a press of squirming limbs. They seemed to be swarming out of the ground itself, piled up in a heap of wriggling, necrotic flesh that looked more like a single organism than a mob of hundreds.

  Ghurk barrelled onwards, undeterred. Ethrac began to shriek new chants, and Otto built up momentum with his scythe. The Army of Corruption charged along beside them, pouring into the muster-yard.

  With a high-pitched scream, the glut of zombies burst outward, cascading like a lanced boil. The tangled web of undead stumbled and staggered towards them, as thick as the slime-rain, a whole forest of grasping fingers and rusting blades. The two armies slammed into one another, and the muster-yard was immediately filled with the scrabbling, sickening sounds of dry flesh tearing and plague-riddled sinews ripping.

  Ghurk waded into the melee, lashing out with his tentacle-arm and scooping up dozens of zombies. Ethrac blasted more of them, infesting their dead hides with virulent parasites that punched out from within, crippling them and leaving them writhing on the stone.

  Nothing stopped them completely, though – they came on with inexorable purpose, groaning and reaching, ignoring blows that would have ended a mortal warrior. Zombies latched on to Ghurk’s legs and began to climb. Many were kicked away, but others quickly took their place. Soon Ghurk was wading waist-deep in a morass of undead, and still they came on, clambering over one another to get at the creatures riding on his back.

  Ethrac began to spit out his frustration, burning the undead with balefire, torching whole bands of them as they reached out to pull up higher. Otto reached down, swinging his long scythe to dislodge those who had dragged themselves into range. A tumbling rain of severed limbs clattered down to the seething mass of bodies below, eliciting not a sound from their stricken owners.

  But that was not the worst – the zombie plague was just a foretaste. With an ear-splitting scream, the vampire the triplets had fought – and defeated – at Marienburg flew down from the high parapet of the looming dome, his arms stretched wide and lined with tattered batwings. Other fell creatures came in his wake – a vast winged horror with a skeletal
ribcage and bony claws – a terrorgheist – egged on by three shrieking ladies in bone-white lace. Clouds of corpse-gas billowed out as they swooped in, reacting with the plague-growths and hissing like snakes.

  Ghurk instantly lunged for the winged creature, whipping his tentacle-arm up to haul it down from the skies. He connected, wrapping his arm around the beast’s spiny neck, but had underestimated its strength. The terrorgheist remained aloft, and began to drag Ghurk across the ground, pulling him further into the writhing knots of zombies.

  The first of the undead clambered onto Ghurk’s back, and soon Otto and Ethrac were both fighting them off. They became separated from their own warriors, pulled by the terrorgheist deeper into the scrabbling pall of flesh-eaters.

  ‘Wither them!’ cried Otto, hacking his scythe down with frantic abandon.

  Ethrac obliged, turning a whole gang of zombies into crackling torches of emerald flame, but it was not nearly enough. The terrorgheist continued to haul Ghurk along, forcing the compressed crowds of zombies up to chest-level.

  Otto looked up, seeing the vampire lord preparing a spell of his own. Dark shadows began to crystallise around him, sucked out of the air and transfused into the Wind of Death.

  ‘The vampire!’ Otto shrieked, too far away to prevent it. ‘He is the master! Snap his neck! Blind his eyes! Crack his bones!’

  Ethrac, riding Ghurk’s lurching back with difficulty, immediately saw the truth of it. The sorcerer lashed out with his staff, making the bells clang wildly. He spat out words of power, and the vampire’s spell immediately inverted, turning on its owner in a vortex of ragged shadow. The vampire, taken by surprise, cried out in alarm, suddenly feeling the cold touch of his own magicks, but Ethrac was now in control, and the Chaos sorcerer shook his staff again with real venom.

  Mundvard the Cruel’s body exploded, flying outward in a welter of tattered strips. His skeleton hung together for an instant, then clattered down to the muster-yard’s surface. As soon as the bones hit, they were crushed into the stone by the hundreds of criss-crossing boots. Once the vampire’s grip was broken, the terrorgheist immediately lost its momentum, and the pressure on Ghurk abated.