The End Times | The Fall of Altdorf Page 7

  Perhaps, if he had had such dreams a year ago, he would have disregarded them, putting them down to the strange ways of the wizard’s mind, but things had changed since then.

  The city ran with rumour of imminent invasion. Armies had been sent north months ago under the command of the Emperor, who had taken his finest captains with him and most of the capital’s standing army. Since then, the news had been fragmentary and confused. Some reports had it that Kislev had been overrun, just as in the time of Magnus the Pious. Others faithfully recounted tales of carnage across Nordland and the Ostermark, where the dead pulled themselves from the earth to aid the ravening hordes of the Fallen Gods. Those stories had been the most numerous of all – that the necromancers had entered into unholy alliance with the practitioners of Chaotic magic, and that each faction planned to feast on the bodies and souls of mortal men.

  None could be sure of the truth of such tales. Those few messengers who claimed to come south from the far north said contradictory things. Some had been driven mad by the journey, and others had always been, so all they brought were fragments – half-truths and whispers, none of which might be true, or all of which might be.

  If Martak had not had the nightmares, he might have been inclined to dismiss the refugees as the usual doom-mongering End Times fanatics. He would have left the city and returned to the wilds, leaving the ordering of the Empire to its usual masters, the elector counts. Though they were as squabbling and infuriating as ever, they understood the deep complexities of Imperial government, something that Martak knew he would never comprehend.

  In the light of his visions, though, he stayed his hand, and waited in the Imperial Palace, holding on for tidings he could trust. The Emperor would surely return soon, to whom he needed to give his tokens of allegiance as Supreme Patriarch. The latest rumours told of devastation in Marienburg, and the imminent return of the Reiksmarshal to the city. If either of those things were true, then even the most sanguine of the Empire’s servants would do well to worry.

  Martak coughed up a gobbet of spittle and spewed it over the balustrade. His bodily aroma was strong, mixed in with faint overtones of horse-dung and mouldy straw. That was as it should be. The bestial spirits were strong in his blood, coursing like fine wine. As he drew in the cold, briny air, he felt his wilderness-toughened muscles respond. He would stay, observing, waiting for a signal, doing what he could to live up to the foreign responsibilities placed on his shoulders.

  Below him, the city was waking up. He heard the first calls of the stall-holders setting up, the heavy clang of temple doors unlocking, and the clatter of quayside cranes unloading goods.

  They were good sounds. They were human sounds, in all their inextinguishable variety. Altdorf was home to every vice and cruelty, but it also harboured joy, mirth and generosity. If you wanted to gain a picture of the race in all its messy, fragile and marvellous splendour and folly, there was no better place.

  This is the heart of it all, Martak mused, leaning heavily on the stone railing. This is our soul.

  By then, the sun had risen indeed, casting its thin grey light over the tops of the distant forest and gilding the temple dome. It was a faint, uncertain light, but just enough to lift the murk and fear of the long night.

  Martak let it warm his limbs for a little while, before stomping back off to the stables. He had appointments with powerful men later on that day, which meant that he should make at least some effort to scrape the worst of the grime from his hands and face. He did not like the thought of it, but it had to be done.

  As he padded back across the stone flags, his bare feet brushing soundlessly like a hunting cat’s, he felt the final shreds of terror dissipate from his soul. As the sun strengthened, he knew the memory would fade entirely.

  Until the next night, when the visions would come back again.

  The lamps were lit in Couronne every night. Teams of armed men patrolled the streets of the stone-walled citadel, keeping the fires going and banishing the shadows.

  Bretonnia had become a land of nightmares. Witches were abroad, hideous apparitions crept across the devastated fields, daemons squatted in the ruins of burned-out watchtowers. The new king, the reborn Gilles le Breton, had restored a shell of order to the realm, but he presided over a shattered caste of exhausted knights and half-starved peasantry. Since announcing the start of a new Errantry War, he had been abroad for months at a time, hunting down the dregs of the Chaos armies that had vomited forth from Mousillon.

  His regent at Couronne remained Louen Leoncoeur, master of the realm no longer but still a Paladin Champion of the Green Knight. The duke knelt in his private chapel at the summit of his ancestral castle. Tapestries hung in the candlelight, each one depicting great deeds of his ancient House across the generations. A stone altar stood before him, surmounted by a lone marble figurine of the Lady.

  Leoncoeur knelt in his full plate armour. He clasped his naked sword, resting it point-down on the stone before him and crossing his gauntlets at the hilt. His long blond hair hung about his armoured shoulders, lank from the battlefield. Like all the knights of the realm, he had been at war near-ceaselessly since the times of strife had descended. On one such sortie, he had nearly met his end under the blade of his own bastard son Mallobaude. For a long time, lost in the far reaches of the Bretonnian wild country, he had walked a fragile path between death and life, teetering on the edge of oblivion.

  It had been the Lady who had guided him back – she had spoken to him in the depths of his fever. Her voice, as soft as ermine and yet as firm as the blade he carried, had whispered to him throughout those dark, lost times, refusing him permission to yield. Leoncoeur dimly remembered begging her to let him go, to cast him loose, to let his service die even as the land around him died.

  She had never relented. He could recall her stern face looming over him, refusing the command that he yearned for. A lifetime of chivalry and pious devotion had sealed his fate – he could never have refused a boon from her, and so he clung to life, refusing the seductive embrace of the underworld even as it grasped for him. His senses returned in time, and he wandered the lands, near-starved, barely more than a shade himself. When he at last found his way back to Couronne, he was nearly slain for a wraith by a grail knight, and only his mud-splattered emblems saved him.

  By then, Mallobaude had been destroyed and Gilles le Breton was the new king, feted by all across the realm as a harbinger of a new dawn for Bretonnia. Leoncoeur had recovered his strength and his wits, recovering under the auspices of the white-robed Sisters of the Lady. It took longer for him to recover his pride. He had ridden out to face Mallobaude as unquestioned monarch of his domain. He had returned to find a legend from the past sitting in the throne-room to accept the acclamation of the masses.

  There was no contesting the will of le Breton. The green-eyed king’s magisterial presence was unquestionable. A fey light shone in his ageless face, and his countenance bore the raw weight of centuries. All bowed the knee before him, including Leoncoeur himself.

  That did not assuage the bitterness. In the long, sleepless nights as his body was restored to health, he found himself gnawing away at the injustice of it. He prayed, over and again, asking to be shown what fault he had committed, what aspect of chivalry he had transgressed that would warrant his kingdom being taken from him and his bloodline disinherited.

  If le Breton himself was aware of such anguish, he did not show it. He was one of the Immortals, the avatar of the Green Knight himself, and matters of pride and propriety no longer concerned him. Even his voice was otherworldly, an archaic, haughty speech that belonged to another world. He existed now to take the war to the enemies of the realm: he was a weapon, forged from the myths of the past and given life by the unfathomable will of the Lady. Leoncoeur could not gainsay such commandments; neither, though, in truth, could he understand them.

  So he knelt before the altar as the lamps burned, murmuring the words of faith he had known since childhood, seekin
g the answers that eluded him even in the midst of battle. Every night he did the same, and every night his prayers went unanswered.

  As the first stirrings of fatigue ran through his battle-weary frame, his lips finally stopped moving. He opened his frost-blue eyes, and looked up at the image of the Lady.

  A chill breeze rattled through the loose stained-glass windows, making the candle-flames shiver. The benign face of his divine mistress gazed down at him, serene and pitiless.

  It was as he looked up at her, just as he had done in the dream-lands of his long near-death, that realisation dawned. There would be no answers from Her in this place. It was no longer his. Whether for good or for ill, the realm had been taken from him and given to another. To linger in Couronne like a ghost over its grave was pointless, and only grief could come of it.

  Leoncoeur clambered to his feet, bowing again as he addressed the altar. He sheathed his sword.

  ‘Where, then?’ he asked, his deep voice soft. ‘What path shall I take?’

  The figurine of the Lady gave no answer. The flames flared a little, stirred by the wind, but no other sign revealed itself. The faces on the tapestries, picked out by long-dead fingers and faded by time and trial, gazed sightlessly down on him.

  Leoncoeur smiled faintly. The ways of the Lady were never easy. That was the point of Her – She was the trial, the anguish, the test. Weakness had no place in Her service, only undying devotion.

  ‘I will discover it, then,’ he said. He looked around him. He had prayed in the same chapel since boyhood, and the stones were as familiar to him as his own flesh. ‘This is no longer my realm. As you will it, I will find another.’

  He bowed again, and turned away. Limping still from his last cavalry charge, the deposed king swept from the chapel, and the great oak doors slammed shut behind him.

  In his absence, the candles still burned, and the draughts still swirled around the bases of the pillars. The figurine Lady stood in the flickering dark, her face still serene, her thoughts, behind the sculptor’s smooth smile, unknowable.

  Marienburg had already fallen, but its torment was not yet over.

  The streets that had once bustled with the commerce of a dozen realms were now knee-deep in reeking effluent. The great docks were shattered, their steam-cranes tilting into the brine, the loading chains already rusting into nothingness. The mighty sea-wall built atop the foundations of ancient elven ruins was smashed into lumps of subsiding masonry, and foul slithering creatures with many eyes and splay-webbed feet slapped and slid across its remains.

  Bodies lay stretched throughout the ruins as far as the eye could see, and every corpse was swollen with a different strain of pox. Many cadavers had burst open, spilling nests of maggots and black-limbed spiders over what remained of the cobbled thoroughfares. The corpses were piled high at the strategic choke-points, their blood mingling with the dribbling sputum of the Plaguefather’s foul gifts. The sea itself was polluted, turned from a choppy grey into a dark-green slurry, as thick as tar and crowned with a crust of yellowish foam. The mixture lapped sluggishly against what remained of the old quay-walls, sucking and wheezing against the disintegrating stone blocks.

  Above the fallen city, the clouds hung low, just as they had at Heffengen. The air carried a greenish tinge, and clouds of flies buzzed and droned through the miasma.

  Everything was ruined. Every building was a hollow shell, bursting with rotting, preternatural growths. The great guild buildings in the dock-quarter were now temples of decay, draped with putrescent vines like giant entrails pulled from a body. The dull crack of thunder still echoed from the northern horizon, though the spell-summoned storms that had ravaged the city during the worst of the fighting were ebbing at last.

  Through the very heart of the devastation, a vast army marched. Just as at Heffengen, they were drawn from the corrupted hosts of the North, and every tribe was represented in their tormented ranks. Norscans strode out, clad in thick furs and bearing ornately crafted axes with runes of ruin carved on the daemon’s-head steel. Skaelings and Kurgan came with them, as well as Khazags and Vargs and Kul, a collection of the whole of the Realm of Chaos’s sundered peoples, thrown together under a panoply of skull-topped banners.

  It took a full day for the huge host to pass from the waterfront, through the dead city and out of the ruined eastern gates. As they marched, daemons flickered and wavered in the mournful half-light, hissing and drooling as they danced. All manner of pestilential beasts, from roaches to rats, scuttled under their feet, welling up like oil from the bubbling sewer-grates.

  The host was beyond counting. Every soldier in it bore some mark of the Plaguefather, whether merely a pale pallor scored by throbbing rashes, or an entirely changed body, bloated with pox and bursting with mutations. Thick armour plate buckled outward over tumours, and ragged shirts of chainmail barely concealed festering wounds. Some clearly revelled in their diseases, leering as they crunched the bones of mortal men under their boots. Others limped along in agony, their ribcages protruding as they were consumed from the inside.

  For hour after hour, the banners swayed past, each one daubed with a fresh sign of pestilence. The army was larger by far than the one that had broken the Bastion. It had been sent south by Archaon, hurled far out into the trackless ocean before sweeping back towards the Empire coastline. Ship after ship had disgorged its contents into Marienburg’s stricken harbour, overwhelming the defenders in a remorseless wave of foul sorcery and dogged blade-work. For many hours the resistance had been heroic, and the fighting had been heavy in the streets.

  But the result had never truly been in doubt. Archaon had unleashed his armies on the effete lands of the South in such quantities that even Asavar Kul would have blenched to see them. Two more allied hordes were already grinding their way south, tearing through the Great Forest like blades ripped under the skin. Each one alone was larger than any prior army sent to bring punishment to the unbelieving. Taken together, there could be no stopping them.

  The force sent to shatter Marienburg was the mightiest of them all, a tumultuous rabble of pustular, addled, filth-spreading, contagion-fanning glory. As rank after rank trudged east, demolishing the few remaining walls as they went, they were observed by three pairs of eyes.

  In the semi-remembered past, those eyes had belonged to mortal triplets, born under the midnight sun of the frozen tundra. Their family name was Glott, though that had meant little at the time and nothing to them now. The eldest, though only by moments, was Otto, who came closest of all of them to being a warrior in the traditional sense – he was a pot-bellied monster with marsh-green flesh and the tripartite marks of the Plaguefather scraped in black ink across his pocked forehead.

  Otto stood atop the ruins of the Oesterdock Temple, leaning casually against the broken cupola of the Chapel of Manann. His clammy fingers pressed against the stone, causing mould-spores to spontaneously spider out across it. He laughed throatily, watching his troops lurch and swagger, then reached down for a strip of moss that had sprung up between the bricks of the temple wall. He pressed the wiry fuzz to his slobbering chin in a mockery of an Empire Greatsword’s beard, and grinned.

  Ethrac, the second triplet, saw him do it, and rolled his rheumy eyes in disgust. Like his brother, he was a wiry, spare figure, emaciated under blotchy robes of coarse wool. He clutched at a gnarled staff of oak heartwood, desecrated with columns of twisting runes, and picked his way through the rubble of the temple’s roof. As he moved, bronze bells shackled to the staff-tip clanged dully, and flatulent vapours wafted out from the hem of his torn robes. He kicked aside a few clumps of rubble, and spat at them as they tumbled down to the street below.

  ‘We could have lost this,’ Ethrac muttered.

  ‘No, we couldn’t,’ said Otto casually, picking flecks of plaster from what remained of the cupola.

  Their voices were strange, wet rasps, almost like that of beasts, and filtered through mouths of blackened teeth. When they spoke, they overlapped
one another constantly, as if each were just a part of one confused mind.

  ‘I did not foresee the dead,’ Ethrac said, pausing in his scrabbling search. ‘Why did I not foresee the dead?’

  Otto picked at his nostril. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘It matters, o my brother. Yes, yes, it matters. We are not seeing everything. There are portents withheld. Why? I do not know. I should be seeing the world turn, the minds of men open. I did not see the dead. I did not see them.’

  Just as at Heffengen, the defenders of Marienburg had been bolstered by the sudden intervention of undead warriors, though, just as at Heffengen, the reinforcements had not proved enough to halt the onward march of Chaos. That bothered Ethrac. He had sent tidings north, hoping to warn Archaon’s war council that the Law of Death was proving more mutable than in past ages, and that it posed complications, but he had little hope of any of his messengers arriving alive. The Great Forest was as unforgiving to the damned as it was to the faithful.

  ‘You should learn to calm yourself,’ said Otto, scratching at a new and beautiful boil that had emerged under his chin. ‘Nothing stands between us and Altdorf now. Nothing of any note, anyway.’

  Ethrac shook his bald head impatiently. ‘Does not matter! Mortals do not matter. But something has changed.’ He screwed his eyes into a frown, and the scabby skin of his forehead broke out in bloody cracks. ‘They are rising from the earth like new shoots. Why? Why is the wall between living and dead broken?’

  Otto sighed and walked over to his brother. He took Ethrac’s cheeks in both hands and squeezed affectionately. ‘They are desperate, o my brother,’ he whispered. ‘Every witch-rattler between the Great Gate and the Hot Lands is flailing around for something to call up. You know why? Because we are here. They know this is the end. What if a few skeletons are thrown into our path? Do you think they will last longer at the White City than they did here?’