Conquest Unbound, page 20
Mannfred gestured wearily towards the priestess.
‘Kill the woman,’ said Mannfred. ‘Break the machine. Ransack the room. Whoever presents me with the Witchglaive of U’hor can count upon a thousand years of my esteem.’
The vampiric knight nearest to the machine hastened to obey.
Settrus’ grip on Mannfred’s forearm suddenly tightened, forcing the Mortarch to look him in the eye.
‘That which Sigmar forbade shall never be wielded.’
Mannfred dangled the Lord-Celestant like a piece of meat. ‘And how do you intend to prevent it, nameless wretch?’
‘I… command you… die.’
With his one free arm, the Lord-Celestant reached up and thrust a hand into the cosmic orrery.
His scream, then, was the first and last time I ever heard him raise his voice.
The spinning spheres took his hand off at the wrist. His head snapped back, and he howled. Blue fire erupted from the mouth and eye slits of his helmet. The breath of Dracothion. The Apotheosis fire of the Stormcast Eternals. Mannfred dropped him with a scream of his own. He flapped his hand, flinging droplets of metal from what had previously been a gauntlet all over the floor. But Settrus did not fall. He hung there, cruciform, like a Celestian Vortex, lightning spitting from him as his body dissolved. Where bolts struck the Penumbral Engine it juddered. The room spun. Suddenly I was standing. My halberd in the other hand. Mannfred dragging himself backwards towards the door. Another bolt hit. Another leap forward. I was on the ground. Mannfred on top of me, red-eyed and bestial, ripping at my gorget with his teeth. An arcai dashed Nassam into the wall. The next moment the Jerech was beside me, putting bullet after bullet into Mannfred’s body. My memory was in pieces. Settrus was the only constant to that room then as Sigendil is to us all. Lightning poured out of him. His cries grew. He was no longer a man, nor even the shape of one. He was lightning. The fires beneath his helmet began to waver.
And still, he would not submit.
‘He is not strong enough for this,’ I heard Ansira shout over the storm.
‘Watch!’ I yelled back. ‘Settrus is the strongest soul I know. He can survive any–’
With a final scream the Lord-Celestant broke apart.
Lightning sprayed to the eight corners of the cosmos. Blood knights dropped instantly to ash. Morghasts lost their animating power and became lifeless bone. Mannfred crumpled like a set of clothes with no wearer, red steam rising off his bones as lightning arced across the Penumbral Engine, bored into the walls, and made the entire mountain shake.
I took a rather nasty sunburn too, let me tell you.
‘Settrus?’ I bellowed.
But he was gone. Really gone. Deep down, I knew that. Broken into a billion pieces to feed the Penumbral Engine with a few lost and stuttering seconds of faith. Grungni himself could hammer at what was left of him, but until Khorne grew tired of blood, nobody was putting him back together after that.
‘His power was a gift,’ Ansira wept.
What she must have endured to keep the Penumbral Engine running for so many centuries was brought home to me with Settrus’ end. I was awed by it. Had my muscles not been so stiff I might have bent the knee, as Nassam had been wise enough to do from the outset.
‘If Sigmar could have driven the engine with his own power then he would have.’ She shook her head. ‘So much sacrifice.’
‘It is all right, my lady. I have it from here.’
I advanced unsteadily to where Mannfred scrabbled in a pool of his own blood and howled like an injured wolf.
‘No,’ she said, sadly. ‘You don’t.’
I glanced back to see her ease Nassam’s protective arm from hers and then lift herself far enough to ease back into her iron chair.
‘No, my lady. You don’t have to.’
After seeing for myself what had happened to Settrus, I understood what the Penumbral Engine demanded of her.
I took a step towards Mannfred, halberd up like a sealing spear.
‘You can win this battle,’ she said, crossing her arms over her chest with a clink of chain, ‘but Sigmar would keep this fortress forever.
‘Only I can do that,’ said Ansira.
And closed her eyes.
‘… We all serve Sigmar in our own way, you see, each according to our strengths. Not even the Stormcast Eternals. Hah. Yes. Not even me. And what was that at the back there? What became of Mannfred…? Were we talking about Mannfred?’
ANCIENT DUARDIN EMPIRES
THE DEAD HOURS
David Guymer
Nieder Pedsen had been watching the drunk since before the doors had shut them all in for the night. The drunk’s hobnailed boots hung from the spectrewood stool, the iron toecaps swinging like gibbeted knights across the stretcher beam. The pale wood had been carved to resemble a human bone. Nieder was not learned enough in anatomy to know which bone, only that it looked sufficiently realistic to him. Back in the days that his thrice-great grandfather had walked as a living man, the denizens of Skeltmorr had made such objects from the real thing. The local craft shops had been famous for the things they could do with bone. But times changed. It was the way of the living to change with them.
Oblivious, the drunk snored on. His broad, bullied face lay in a puddle of ale. The table was strewn with the restless corpses of supper: empty flagons, dirty platters, intestinal loops of fried cabbage. Dried yolks clagged his orange-dyed beard and his snores rattled the cutlery. The aelf, fortunately, had left her drunken companion an hour previously. Hamnil had won the snap of the wishbone on that score, and had followed her. He was not back yet. But Nieder wasn’t worried. Hamnil was careful and thorough. Nieder didn’t expect to see him before Hysh-rise ushered out the dead hours.
He wasn’t concerned so much as disappointed.
His gaze slid to where the duardin’s axe lay on the floor under the dangling right boot. The fire bound to its uncanny metals scraped greedily at the bare stones. It had already taken off the straw, and frightened the gheist-roaches deeper into the folds of the oubliette dimensions that existed beneath the skirting boards. Black Mals had wanted to put his foot down where the axe was concerned, but there had been something in the duardin’s swagger as he had come in, caked in bone dust and strange gore, shouting for ale, food and lodging – and in that particular order – that had made the old man bite his tongue and bide his time.
Nieder wasn’t a worldly man, but he reckoned himself to be about as large as men came anywhere in the Princedoms. Traders passing through Skeltmorr were few these days, and tended to come in well-armed groups with big men as bodyguards. And Nieder had even been called on to subdue the occasional flesheater that wandered into the Bone Drake Inn with strange ideas in its head.
He eyed the drunk. And his axe.
Neither looked as though they would be dealt with easily.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Black Mals’ voice rasped like a hair shirt over ghoulflesh. His eyes were large and sunken. His skin was papery. His head was crowned with a lank string of nuisance hair. Some said it was for the colour of his hair that he had earned his name. Others, and that was Hamnil and Nieder included, suspected it was because if you cut him then that would be the colour he would bleed.
‘The size of him, though…’
‘He’s not grown any since closing time. And nor will you. Not even if you wait until the Nadir swallows the Drake with all of us still here inside.’
‘We should send for Hamnil.’
‘Hamnil will be preparing the aelf for the Tithekeeper. He’ll be busy all night.’
‘You could lend a hand, old man.’
Black Mals polished the countertop with a spirit-soaked rag, as though it were the skull of a particularly loathed ancestor for display above the privy shed.
‘He’ll wake if I have to pull him to the door,’ Nieder said.
‘Kill him here, then. But keep it clean. That axe of his has taken off the sawdust and I don’t want a mess to deal with before serving the breakfast crowd.’
Nieder frowned, then nodded to himself and eased out of his corner.
He rolled his shoulder, limbering up the stiff joint, and pulled the wooden maul from the loop strap on his belt. He weighed it in his hand. Eyeing up the duardin’s broad skull. Picking his spot. Hands of the Bone King, the duardin was even more massive up close than he had appeared from the corner. His feet may not have touched the floor, but the breadth of him was sprawled across the full width of the table.
‘Enough tiptoeing.’
Nieder started.
Black Mals scowled and went on. ‘Club him and be done with it.’
Nieder turned back to the table.
He found one bloodshot, madly inhuman eye glaring back up. ‘Club who?’ its owner slurred.
Nieder made a choking sound.
This, he promptly learned, was due to a fist the size of a corpsing shovel squeezing tight around his throat. The duardin hauled Nieder over the table and through the culinary wreckage. Nieder put up a fight, but it was like resisting a horse. The duardin drew him in until Nieder was at his eye’s level. Stale beer dribbled like saliva from the creased skin of his ruined face. His beard was a drowned mess of congealed fats and mustard stains. His eyepatch sat askew, revealing a scarred hollow underneath, and his breath was so potent that being close to it was like being held face down in a barrel of ale.
Nieder remembered the maul in his hand. He struck the duardin over the head with it.
The stranger grunted. His one eye crossed. He staggered half a step, a dent in his stark crest of orange hair, but without ever loosening his grip on Nieder’s throat.
Tingling in his face and in his fingers, Nieder lifted his maul for a second attempt.
Nieder was close to twice the duardin’s height, but when the drunkard shoved him off he tumbled the half-dozen yards to the bar and slammed into it with a knucklebone rattle of blunt knives and broken crockery. He lay there on his side, too winded and dazed to even try and crawl away.
‘Who were you calling old man?’ said Black Mals, his ancient wheeze from beyond the countertop punctuated by the bolt-snap of a breech-loading rifle. ‘It’ll be your bones for the Tithekeeper if you don’t take better care.’
The duardin stumbled as though the act of propelling Nieder so hard had upset his balance. One windmilling fist caught his table’s corner and, like any wobbling drunk groping after something solid to hold on to, he pulled it hard towards him and hauled it off the floor like a huge, two-hundred-pound shield. The handful of unbroken plates and tankards still on it crashed to the floor. It just happened to be the exact moment that Black Mals took his shot.
The blast obliterated half of the table.
The duardin glowered over the jagged edge of the lower half, wood splinters and metal shrapnel sticking to the cooking fats that coated his jaw like glue. He hurled the table to one side, clear across the wide taproom, and advanced unsteadily on the bar.
Black Mals cursed. The rifle rattled in arthritic claws as he fought to clear the breech and reload.
A brief scuffle. A scream. A muffled thud.
The sound of an antique rifle stock being buried in an old man’s skull.
Then a gurgle.
Blood trickled over the counter’s edge and pattered the back of Nieder’s neck.
Nieder wriggled determinedly along the ground towards the duardin’s greataxe. There would be some collateral harm. The Tithekeeper would just have to take the duardin in two pieces instead of one.
A heavy-bottomed boot pressed on his shoulder, driving his cheek and brow into the bare stone and leaving his fingers worming impotently shy of the axe’s haft.
The duardin cleared the gravel from his throat.
‘I would have it known, manling, that Gotrek son of Gurni is not in the habit of brawling with the common townsfolk. His axe thirsts after redder meat. But, as has been made plain to him on one occasion too many, the rules of this time continue to escape him.’ The duardin leant over his propped thigh. Nieder groaned under the added weight. ‘I freely admit to making it up as I go, and shan’t deny enjoying myself on occasion.’
‘I–’
‘Shush, manling.’ Gotrek gave his head a shake, and looked blearily around the empty tavern. ‘I appear to be missing a companion of mine.’ He raised one bloody haunch of a hand to about the flat top of his crest of hair. ‘Poisonous-looking thing. All skin and bones. About yay big.’
‘I’ll never– Arrrgh!’
Gotrek reached across to retrieve his greataxe, the duardin’s full and enormous weight crushing down on Nieder’s shoulder and chest.
‘Forgive me, manling. You were saying something.’
The fire bound to the two monstrous blades licked at the duardin’s face like a skin hound delighted at the return of its master. The grease stuck to his face popped and sizzled, but made no clear mark on his skin. Nor even his hair. The golden rune that was embedded in his wide chest appeared to brighten with the near touch of its sister flame, muttering and scowling in a voice like beaten metal and molten rock. Half heard. Wholly felt.
‘Hamnil.’ Nieder kicked himself inwardly, but didn’t stop himself from saying it again, louder. ‘Hamnil took her.’
‘What does he want with my aelf? Why would anyone take an aelf?’
Nieder’s eyes slid to the door.
Gotrek followed his look. ‘All right then.’ He took his weight from Nieder’s back.
Nieder gasped, clawing his way back towards the bar and freedom, only then to cry out again as the duardin picked him up by the ankle and dragged him towards the door.
The duardin butted open the heavy doors and hauled him over the door jamb. A pair of lightless moons hung from the sky above like skulls mounted on posts. Behind, the grey brick façade of the Bone Drake loomed into horned shadow. The night was starless and bitter.
Gotrek let go of Nieder’s ankle. He looked up and down the deserted street. Not a gheist or rasp moved. Every door was locked, every window shuttered.
‘Which of these hovels has my aelf in it? Grungni alone amongst your pantheon of false gods and pretenders knows how many times I have sought to be rid of her. And she of me. But to have her snatched from my side in the dead of night by some backwater potboys with a grisly trade on the side…’ The duardin seemed to harden in the dark, muscles creaking like cooling metal. ‘It would sit ill with me. And she swore she’d guide me on to Thanator’s Manse, and still owes me for the night’s board.’
‘She’ll have been taken to the Tithekeeper.’
‘Who, or what, is that?’
‘The town champion. He gathers the tribute we owe and delivers it.’
‘Where?’
Nieder shook his head. ‘Only the Tithekeeper truly knows. Beyond the Marrow Hills and across the Sunken Sea, to a dread regent of the Undying King. He rules from a seat of bone and in exchange for the yearly tithe sends his fleshless legions elsewhere. We emptied our crypts, handed over our reliquaries, dismembered every crook in our gaols. But it wasn’t enough. We took to disposing of travellers. There was a time when Skeltmorr saw a lot of travellers.’
‘Few of them come back a second time these days, I’d wager. Does the aelfling live?’
‘These are the dead hours. Not even the Tithekeeper would labour through Nagash’s time. She will be drugged and bound, ready for the Tithekeeper come morning.’ He bit his lip as if to keep himself from saying more, then blurted out. ‘It was Black Mals who told me to kill you there in the tavern. I only meant to hand you over to the Tithekeeper with the aelf.’
The duardin startled him with a huge laugh. The broken lengths of old, fire-damaged chain bolted to his wrists rattled like wraiths bound in spirit iron. ‘I have lost count of all the things that have sought my death, and long ago ceased taking such attempts personally, or mourning their failures.’ Gotrek leant in close, threatening to smother Nieder again with his odour. ‘And where did you mean to drag this corpse of mine when the shameful deed was done?’
Nieder stammered. Playing for time. Selling out Hamnil was one thing. Crossing the Tithekeeper was an altogether darker step to take.
Even now, he knew who he feared most.
A shutter banged open from across the street. Gotrek lifted his one-eyed gaze. Nieder looked up. A white-haired woman in a cryptsilk gown leant from her window. She looked across the street, silent as the night, her expression too distant to make out.
‘Back to your bed, old mother,’ Gotrek growled. ‘Unless you’re the Tithekeeper I’ve heard so much of then my quarrel is not with you.’
The woman disappeared back inside. The shutters banged closed.
‘Nosy wench,’ said Gotrek.
‘I can’t betray the Tithekeeper,’ Nieder hissed, low enough that the words would carry no further than the duardin’s ears. ‘The Bone King will come looking for his missing tithe and then the whole town will die.’
‘Maybe they will. Maybe your Tithekeeper’s been lying through his teeth and they won’t.’ The duardin shrugged. ‘Where’s my aelf?’
From across the street a door creaked open. It was the old woman. She emerged into the street, her white gown fluttering in the thin breeze like the death shroud of a ghost. Unheard and barely seen, several more doors breathed wide and exhaled their occupants into the night.
None of them moved. They watched.
‘Go back to your homes. This is no business of y–’
Gotrek grunted sharply, and Nieder’s gaze travelled up to see an arrow sticking out from the side of the duardin’s thick neck.
