The End Times | The Fall of Altdorf Page 4

  The daemon arched its blubbery neck, choking out cries of blood-wet agony. Karl Franz was nearly torn loose, caught between the sway of his prey and the bucking movements of Deathclaw.

  He held firm, grinding the blade in deeper. Thick blood raced up the blade, crashing over his gauntlets and fizzing against the metal. Clouds of flies swarmed in close, trying to clog Karl Franz’s visor, but he held firm.

  Deathclaw roared with bloodlust, steadying itself on the heaving spine of the daemon, and Karl Franz gained the leverage he needed. With a huge heave, he wrenched the sword across, severing the daemon’s neck.

  With a coiled spring, Deathclaw leapt clear. The huge daemon reeled in a torment of snapping sinew. Weeping from a hundred lesser wounds, it thrashed and jerked, spewing vomit and bile. Rancid coils of greenish smoke spilled from its eyes as the dark magicks required to keep it on the physical plane unwound.

  Deathclaw climbed higher. Karl Franz sensed its raucous joy, and shared in it.

  ‘The blood of Sigmar!’ he cried, gazing in triumph at the horror he had ended. Its death-throes were ruinous, carving up the earth and mingling it with gouts of acidic blood. The plaguebearers thronging around it held their elongated heads in their hands, and wailed.

  Upon such moments did battles turn. Whole hosts could lose heart with the death of their leader, and the momentum of entire campaigns could falter with the removal of a talismanic figurehead. Deathclaw soared above the sea of fighting men, screaming its elation at the heavens.

  Karl Franz scoured the ground below, searching for any sign of Helborg. He was about to order the griffon to circle about and swoop lower when a harsher cry echoed out across the battlefield. His head snapped up, and he saw a new terror sweeping in from the north. The Chaos ranks had been sundered by a vanguard of heavily armoured knights on brazen steeds, their pauldrons rimmed with gold and their helms underpinned with iron collars. They thundered towards the surviving Reiksguard, ploughing up the ground on spiked metal hooves. These newcomers rode with greater discipline and verve than most servants of the Fallen Gods, though their livery was as foul as any blood-worshipping fanatic from the frozen north.

  Above them all came a truly vast flying creature that bounded through the air with an ungainly lurch. It was the size of a war-dragon, and its colossal wings splayed across the skies like motley sheaves of blades. Unlike a true dragon, no sleek hide of jewelled scales clad its flanks and no flames kindled against its twisting neck. Where tight flesh should have stretched, raw bone glinted from between a lattice of age-blackened sinews. Gaping holes punctured an open ribcage, exposing nothing but coiled shadow within. A heavy skull lolled at the end of a bleached spine, wreathed in wisps of inky smoke, and awkwardly flapping wings were held together by mere ribbons of atrophied muscle.

  The monstrosity’s rider was scarcely less extravagant in grotesquerie – an ivory-white face, elongated to accommodate protruding fangs, jutting from heavy armour plates. Bat-wing motifs vied for prominence on the armour-curves with chain-bound skulls and stretched skins. The rider carried a straight-bladed sword as black as the maw of the underworld, and it rippled with blue-tinged fires.

  Karl Franz smelled the foul aroma of death roiling before it, and arrested Deathclaw’s swoop. The griffon thrust upward violently, already eager to tear at a new enemy.

  Karl Franz hesitated before giving the order. The daemon had been a daunting foe, but it had already been weakened by Helborg and the Reiksguard, and Deathclaw was lethal against such earth-shackled prey. The huge creature tearing towards them, carving through the sky with sickening speed, was far larger, and had the advantage of being battle-fresh.

  Moreover, something about the rider gave Karl Franz pause. He looked into those dark eyes, still a long way off, and his heart misgave him. He looked down at his blade, drenched with the blood of the slain daemon, and saw the fire in the runes flicker out.

  With a glimmer of presentiment, a terrible thought stole into his mind.

  This foe is beyond me.

  Karl Franz knew he could refuse combat. He could do as Schwarzhelm had advised, saving himself for another fight, one that he could win. He was the Emperor, not some expendable champion amid his countless thousands of servants. His captains would understand. They would come to see that the Empire came first, and that his preservation, above all, held the promise of survival into the future.

  He imagined Altdorf then, its white towers rising proudly above the filth and clamour of its tight-locked streets. He saw the river creeping sluggishly past the docks, teeming with all the burgeoning trade and industry of his people.

  That place was the fulcrum about which his Empire had always revolved. He had always assumed that if death were to come for him, it would take him there.

  Deathclaw screamed at the approaching abomination, straining at the reins. Karl Franz looked out across the battlefield, at the desperate struggle of the faithful against the closing ranks of horror. With every passing moment, more of his subjects met a painful, fear-filled end, locked in terrified combat with a far greater enemy than they had any right to be taking on.

  I will not leave them.

  ‘Onward, then,’ ordered Karl Franz, shaking the blood from his runefang and angling the tip towards the skeletal dragon, ‘and strike it from the skies.’

  FOUR

  Schwarzhelm strode out into the heart of the battle. As he went, he drew soldiers about him, and the solid knot of swordsmen advanced under the shadow of the racing clouds.

  The last of the reserve detachments had been committed to the fighting. Whole infantry squares were being hurled into the maw of the oncoming storm, in the desperate hope that sheer weight of numbers could do something to stop the tide of plague-daemons.

  Schwarzhelm advanced immediately towards Talb’s eastern flank, roaring out orders to the semi-broken warbands he encountered as the fighting grew fiercer.

  ‘Form up!’ he roared, brandishing his longsword and raging at the Empire troops around him. ‘You are men! Born of Sigmar’s holy blood! Fight like men! Remember courage!’

  His words had an instant effect. Schwarzhelm’s voice was known to every last halberdier and pikeman in the army, and though he was not loved as Helborg’s flamboyance made him loved, no living fighter was more respected. Schwarzhelm was a vast bear of a man, clad in plate armour and bearing the fabled Sword of Justice before him, and the mere rumour of his presence on the field kindled hope in men’s hearts again.

  With his trusted swordsmen beside him, Schwarzhelm cut a channel towards Talb’s last known position. The enemy came at them in waves – Skaelings, for the most part, an unruly rabble of fur-clad barbarians carrying the first signs of the sickness and staring wild-eyed from their shaman’s ravings. Under Schwarzhelm’s direction, the Empire halberdiers managed to restore something like proper defensive lines, and pushed back the hammering cycle of attacks. Ground was regained, and the momentum of the onslaught lessened.

  The respite did not last long. Up through the ranks of the enemy came sterner opponents – Kurgan warriors in dark armour and chainmail, bearing axes and long-handled mauls, followed by the scrabbling flotsam of gibbering daemon-kin. Behind them lumbered the obscene bloat of the plaguebearers as they limped and stumbled into battle. Their rancid stench came before them, a weapon in itself, making men retch uncontrollably even before reaching blade-range.

  Schwarzhelm laid eyes on the closest of the daemonic plaguebearers, and marked it out with a furious sweep of his blade. ‘To me, men of the Empire!’ he thundered, breaking into a heavy jog towards the scabrous horror. ‘They can be killed! Believe! Believe in the holy Empire of Sigmar, and fight!’

  The Empire troops surged after him, smashing into the incoming Kurgans in a flesh-tearing, armour-denting, blade-snapping flurry of limbs and fists. Eyes were gouged, sinews torn, throats cut and throttled, ankles broken. A whole band of halberdiers was ripped apart by a single Kurgan champion; a massive Chaos warlord was dragged down by a
dozen sword-wielding state troops, hacking away at their huge opponent like wolves on a bear.

  Schwarzhelm drove them onward, kicking aside the scuttling daemon-kin that raced along the earth to sink fangs into his boots. A Kurgan chieftain squared up to him, hefting a twin-bladed axe in iron-spiked gauntlets. Barely breaking stride, Schwarzhelm slashed his sword crosswise, cutting him across the midriff. Before the Kurgan could bring his axe to bear, Schwarzhelm jabbed the sword back, ripping through addled flesh, then crunching his leading shoulder guard into the reeling Kurgan’s face. The warlord staggered, and Schwarzhelm punched him hard with his gauntleted fist, breaking his neck and sending his body crunching to the earth.

  The men around him bellowed with renewed bloodlust, and surged after him. All around him, emerald lightning continued to spear down from the heavens. The ground underfoot seethed with a vile mixture of blood and rainwater, pooling in boot prints and gurgling in rivulets.

  ‘Onward!’ roared Schwarzhelm, eviscerating another barbarian with a lone thrust of his blade, clearing the last obstacle before the plaguebearer.

  The daemon’s weeping body pushed past the armoured warlords around it, stalking eerily on painfully elongated limbs. Its whole torso ran with rivers of pus, dripping onto the mud at its cloven feet in boiling clumps. Its olive-green skin had burst open, exposing loops of entrails. It had no eyes, ears or other features, just a face-encompassing jaw rammed with incisors. As it sensed Schwarzhelm, it let out a phlegmy cry of challenge, and swung a long staff topped with rust-pocked spikes. Every time the spikes were jangled, foul vapours billowed out, creeping across the ground like morning mist.

  Schwarzhelm charged straight at it, holding his breath as he closed in, whirling his sword around in a blistering arc. The plaguebearer swung its staff to intercept, and the two weapons clanked together with a deadening thunk. Schwarzhelm lashed out again, feeling vile gases creep up his armour. The daemon lurched towards him, snapping its distended jaws, and Schwarzhelm ducked to one side as the saliva slapped against his helm.

  He shoved out with one fist, catching the daemon in the torso. His hand passed clean into disease-softened tissue, disappearing up to the wrist. He tried to shake it free, but the daemon caught him by the throat with its free claw, and squeezed. Schwarzhelm hacked back with his blade, carving deep into the plaguebearer’s raddled body, but the wounds just resulted in more suffocating waves of corpse-gas pouring forth.

  Schwarzhelm began to gag, and lashed out furiously, aiming to sever the creature’s stringy neck. He missed his aim, hampered by the plaguebearer’s cloying embrace, but something else impacted, and the daemon’s skull was ripped from its shoulders in a welter of mucus and brown blood-flecks.

  The headless body loomed over Schwarzhelm for a moment, held upright by its staff. Then it toppled over, bursting open as it hit the ground. A swell of brackish fluid swilled over his boots.

  Schwarzhelm staggered away, momentarily blinded by the spray of thick pus. He wiped his visor and saw the robed form of Luthor Huss standing over the daemon’s prone corpse. The warrior priest’s warhammer was slick with bodily fluids, and his bald pate was covered in a criss-cross of bloody weals.

  Schwarzhelm bowed clumsily. ‘My thanks, lord priest,’ he muttered gruffly.

  Huss nodded curtly. ‘And there are more waiting.’

  The fighting raged around them unabated. Empire troops grappled with Kurgan, Skaelings and worse. The air no longer stank of blackpowder, for the artillery had long ceased firing. In its place came the rolling stench of long-rotten bodies.

  Schwarzhelm’s entourage pressed on, sweeping around him and clearing a little space amid the close-packed battlefield. He shook the worst of the bile from his sword, feeling the dull ache of weariness stir in his bones.

  ‘The Emperor sent you?’ asked Huss, already searching out the next fight. From nearby, Schwarzhelm could hear the clear-voice war cries of Valten, the mysterious boy-champion who was wielding Ghal Maraz with a youthful vigour.

  ‘This flank cannot hold,’ rasped Schwarzhelm. ‘We must fall back.’

  ‘Impossible,’ scowled Huss.

  ‘We are outnumbered.’

  ‘By faith we shall pre–’

  ‘Vlad von Carstein is here.’

  That stopped Huss dead. He turned his baleful gaze onto Schwarzhelm. ‘That cannot be.’

  Schwarzhelm snorted impatiently. ‘Use your eyes. The dead march against the damned, and the living are caught between them. I have my orders – we must fight our way to the Reiksmarshal, rally what we can, then hold the centre until we can fall back in good order.’

  Huss looked agonised. Retreat was anathema to him – only surging onward against the foe was sanctified by his austere creed, and he would fight on until the end of the world, unwearied, his warhammer dripping with the gore of the fallen.

  But even he was not blind to what was happening. As Schwarzhelm spoke the words, realisation dawned across Huss’s face. The stench was not that of disease, but of death.

  ‘Where is Helborg?’ the priest asked.

  Schwarzhelm was about to answer, when a fresh roar of challenge rang out. The voices were different again – not the bestial screams of the Norscans, nor the chill war horns of the Sylvanians, but a bizarre amalgam of aristocratic human and blood-crazed baresark. Both warriors lifted their eyes to the north.

  Fresh troops were piling into the fray, their armour arterial red and their steeds towering behemoths of iron and bronze. They were still a long way off, but they were driving all before them. Above the vanguard soared a hideous creature of the darkest myth – a dragon, emaciated and splayed with bone and talon, cawing like a carrion crow and ridden by a lone red-armoured knight. It flapped through the heavens, its vast body held aloft by ancient magic.

  In the face of that, even Huss’s mighty shoulders sagged a little. Then, with a defiant curl of his mouth, he hefted his warhammer again. ‘You will stand beside me, Emperor’s Champion?’

  ‘Until the ends of the earth, priest,’ snarled Schwarzhelm, brandishing the Rechtstahl.

  Huss cracked a thin smile then. ‘We will smash some more skulls before they drag us down.’

  Schwarzhelm nodded grimly. Already the hordes around them were pushing back again, slaughtering as they came.

  ‘That we will,’ he growled, striding back into the fight.

  Deathclaw surged towards the dragon. The undead creature saw it coming, and reared up in the air, its scythe-like claws extended. Skeletal jaws gaped wide, and a noxious gout of corpse-gas burst from its gaping innards.

  Karl Franz brandished his sword. The blade was still inert, bereft of the fire that usually kindled along its runic length, and even amid the rush on oncoming combat, that troubled him. Perhaps the daemon’s blood had quashed its ancient soul.

  The dragon rider hailed him then, his voice ringing out through the rain like a raptor’s shriek.

  ‘You are overmatched, warmblood!’ he cried. ‘Flee now, while your bird still has feathers!’

  Deathclaw screamed in fury, and hurtled straight into close range. Its wings a blur, the griffon swept under the hanging streamers of yellowish gas and plunged straight at the dragon’s exposed torso.

  The two creatures slammed together, both sets of claws raking furiously. The griffon’s fury was the greater, and whole sheets of age-withered flesh were ripped from the dragon’s flank. The abomination lashed back, tearing a bloody line down Deathclaw’s back, nearly dragging Karl Franz clear from the saddle. As the bone-claws scraped past him, Karl Franz cut down sharply with his blade, taking two talons off at the knuckle.

  Then the two creatures, powered by momentum, broke apart again, each angling back for a return pass.

  ‘Do you see what is happening here, warmblood?’ came the dragon rider’s mocking voice. ‘Your world is ending. It is ending before your eyes, and still you fail to grasp it.’

  Karl Franz had caught a glimpse of his enemy as their steeds had grappled, and w
hat he had seen had been unsettling. The rider wore heavy plate armour of rich blood-red, gilded with fine detailing and bearing the ancient seal of the lost Blood Keep. His jawline was swollen with fangs, and his voice bore the archaic, prideful accent of Empire nobility. Everything about him, from his cursed mount to his imperious bearing, indicated that he was an undead lord, a powerful vampire of the knightly bloodline.

  Yet Karl Franz had never faced a vampire like this one. He had never seen tattoos carved into a face like that, nor heavy bronze collars adorning such armour. The rider wore a crude eight-pointed star on his breast, as black as ichor, and his sword-edge flamed as if alive with violent energies.

  Can the dead fall to corruption? he wondered as Deathclaw banked hard and sped towards the dragon again. Can even they succumb?

  The two beasts crashed into one another, writhing and lashing out in a twisting frenzy of mutual loathing. Deathclaw clamped its hooked beak into the dragon’s neck and tore through weak-shackled vertebrae. The dragon pushed back with a blast of poison-gas before plunging down at the griffon’s powerful shoulders, whipping a barbed tail to try to flay it from the skies.

  Deathclaw shook off the dragon’s foul breath and thrust back up, all four claws extended. The two riders were propelled close to one another, and for the first time Karl Franz was near enough to strike at his adversary with Drachenzahn.

  The vampire was fast, as blisteringly fast as all his damned kin, and the two blades clanged together in a glitter of sparks. Despite his heavy armour, the undead lord switched his blade round in a smear of fire and steel, thrusting it point-forward at Karl Franz. The Emperor evaded the strike, but only barely, and the killing edge scraped across his left pauldron.

  Deathclaw and the dragon were still locked in a snarling duel of their own, keeping their riders close enough to maintain a flurry of sword-blows. The blades collided again, then again, ringing and shivering from the impacts.

  The vampire lord was a consummate swordsman, capable of the refined viciousness of his breed and animated by the unnatural strength that was the inheritance of that fallen bloodline. In addition to that, the marks of ruin emblazoned on his armour made the air shake – they were bleeding corruption, as if leaking dark magic from the Other Realm itself.