Sword of Vengeance, page 40
Leitdorf stood before her. He held the book in his trembling hands. He kept reading. Just as it had done for her birth, the bloodfire in the chamber flared up at the sound. ‘Bedarruzibarr’zagarratumnan’akz’akz’berau!’
‘Cease speaking, worm!’ screamed Natassja, and her hands burst into blue flame.
‘Bedarruzibarr!’ thundered Volkmar, echoing Leitdorf’s cry.
The Theogonist raised his staff and sent a flurry of crackling bolts into Natassja’s torso. They impacted heavily. This time they seemed to damage her, and she staggered back towards the Stone.
‘Cease!’ she cried, still wreathed in bands of shimmering golden flame. ‘This is forbidden knowledge!’
‘Abbadonnodo’neherata’gradarruminam!’ shouted Leitdorf, his voice growing in confidence, tracing the words from the pages of his father’s diary. With every syllable, Natassja seemed to recoil further.
Volkmar sent fresh volleys of faith-fire at her, his face alight with furious relish.
‘Hear your name, spawn of Slaanesh!’ he roared in triumph. ‘Feel the powers at your command unravel!’
Buffeted by a wall of spitting fire, Natassja rocked back. The calm assurance of her superiority was gone. The syllables of her true name echoed around the chamber, fuelling Volkmar’s torrent of righteous fire. She reeled under the onslaught, screaming as the fire tore at her.
Then Helborg was on her too, no longer seeming so diminutive. He hauled his blade round in a mighty arc, scything at Natassja’s legs. The runefang connected, and a blaze of pure white light leapt up. Blood sprayed through the air, as black as the Stone behind it, sparkling like beads of onyx.
Natassja screamed again, her voice now filled with pain and frustration. She lashed out with her left fist, catching Helborg on his breastplate and sending him lurching backwards. She opened her other hand and let loose the full power within her.
The chamber shuddered, rocked to its foundations by the blast. The bloodfire blazed purple, roaring into a frenzy. Volkmar was knocked from his feet, and the Staff spun from his grasp. Cracks ran up the walls and the iron bands around them broke open. Wards were shattered, and the howling of the lesser daemons boomed down the shaft.
Leitdorf jumped aside just as the floor disintegrated under him. The marble rippled like a wave and cracked open. From below, the thunderous roar of the deep engines rolled upwards.
Natassja staggered towards Leitdorf, the last of Volkmar’s golden fire streaming from her shoulders. She was badly wounded, and great gashes had opened on her flanks. They wept black essence, as dark and pure as jet.
‘Worm!’ she rasped, and her voice was fractured with hatred. The choir within her had begun to come apart. ‘Utter not words beyond your comprehension.’
Leitdorf scrambled away from her, stumbling around the edge of chamber.
‘Malamanuar’neramumo’klza’jhehennum!’ he shouted, keeping up the recital even as he fled from Natassja’s wrath. The very sound of it seemed to wound her.
He couldn’t escape forever. The chamber held no hiding places, and Natassja still had the power to move quickly. She stood over the elector, towering above his paltry frame, poised to silence the words that cut through her power so completely.
Leitdorf kept shouting the words out, right until the end. Natassja pulled her hand back, wailing in agony as each syllable resounded around the chamber. A curved dagger unrolled into existence, extending from her flesh like smoke and firming into a wicked, twin-bladed instrument.
Helborg clambered to his feet and charged towards her. Volkmar hauled the Staff back into position. It was far too late. The dagger plunged down, seeming to cleave the very air around it. It lodged deep in Leitdorf’s chest, pinning him to the stone beneath.
The elector screamed, and his body arched in agony. The book fell from his hands. As it hit the ground, Natassja glared at it and the parchment burst into green-tinged flame, shrivelling and curling into nothing.
But then Helborg was close enough. With the last echoes of the daemon’s name still lingering in the shaft above them, he raised the Sword of Vengeance high above his head. The runes blazed in the bloodfire, reflecting the fury of the Stone, bending the rays of contamination back at it.
Natassja whirled to face the new threat, but her aura of invincibility had gone. She bared her fangs again, fixing Helborg with a look of such malice and terror that a lesser man would have crumbled under it.
Helborg’s shoulder wound burst open, drenching his chest with blood. For a moment, Natassja’s face rippled into Schwarzhelm’s, and a bizarre mix of daemon and man screamed its hatred at him.
He didn’t flinch. The blade came down in a mighty, crushing sweep. The edge bit true, carving through aethyr-wound sinews as readily as real flesh. A ball of brilliant light radiated from the impact, rushing across the chamber and swirling into the heights of the shaft. The bloodfire guttered in its wake. Fresh cracks radiated from the Stone, rippling across the floor and releasing gouts of smog from the furnaces below.
Natassja cried out with agony, and her many voices rebounded from the iron walls around her. Her face returned to its normal shape, transfixed in pain and fury. She twisted away from the runefang, exposing the huge, jagged wound in her torso. It gushed a torrent of bile, foaming and fizzing as it poured out into the world.
Helborg ducked under a vicious swipe from her dagger hand and swung the Klingerach back at her. The blade sunk deep, cleaving Natassja’s stomach open and jarring on the bones beyond.
The daemon fell to her knees, weeping blood. The bloodfire shuddered and veered away from her, suddenly averse to the failing presence in its midst. She dropped down further, bracing herself with a blood-streaked arm.
Natassja looked at Helborg, her face now level with his. Her expression was a mix of scorn, fury and astonishment.
‘You have no idea what you’ve done, mortal,’ she rasped, her voices jarring as they overlapped. ‘You have no idea...’
Helborg didn’t listen. The Sword of Vengeance rose high, glimmering in the firelight.
‘I see enough,’ he snarled, and brought the blade down.
For a moment, nothing happened. Natassja’s severed head rolled from her body, coming to rest close to the stricken form of Leitdorf. The bloodfire continued to roar, the engines continued to grind, the wind continued to howl.
Then the daemons came, tearing down the shaft, screaming like vengeful harpies. Helborg stood up to them, and the runefang blazed with a holy fire. All weariness had fallen from his shoulders. Just as before, he looked like one of the heroes of old, clad in sacred armour and wearing the hawk-wing helm of the Reiksmarshal. He waited for them to come to him, his cloak rippling in the bloodfire, still bearing the Sword of Vengeance in both hands.
The first of them hurtled down from the pinnacle, teeth bared, arms outstretched. A second later, she lay on the floor next to her mistress, her body broken by Helborg. Another fell to the same blade, carved in two by the holy metal. The rest of them halted in their onslaught, suddenly looking with horrified eyes at the ruined body of their mistress. They hovered in the air above the Stone, frozen in terrible doubt.
As they surveyed the scene, Volkmar recovered his footing.
‘The tide has turned, whores of Slaanesh,’ he cried, reaching for his staff and fixing them with a vengeful glare. ‘Leave while you can, or the Sword of Vengeance will tear every one of you apart.’
They looked at him, then at Helborg. The Reiksmarshal stared back, grim-faced and resolute. The blade in his hands glowed with residual energy, and the runes resonated. The sword was back with its master, and its thirst for killing was not yet sated.
Then they fled, screeching as they went, buoyed aloft by the surging bloodfire. The shaft echoed from their screeches, dying into nothing as they spiralled towards the distant pinnacle.
The Tower creaked ominously. Pieces of iron and stone detached from the walls and trails of dust ran down from the high places.
Helborg watched the daemons go, then stumbled across to Leitdorf. Volkmar joined him, limping heavily. As they went, the floor cracked further. Great booms rang out from far below, muffled by the layers of rock beneath them.
Leitdorf’s face was pale. Natassja’s dagger had dissolved into nothingness with the demise of its mistress, but the wound was ugly and hadn’t closed. There was no blood, just a dark-edged hole. Leitdorf struggled to breathe. As Helborg approached, he tried to push himself up on to his elbows.
‘Remain still,’ said Helborg, coming to his side and looking anxiously at his wound. ‘Can you do anything, Theogonist?’
Volkmar crouched down next to the Marshal. He placed his calloused hands on the incision, and Leitdorf recoiled in pain. The Theogonist closed his eyes, probing for aethyric residue. When he opened them again, his expression was grave.
‘No lies between us, Rufus Leitdorf,’ he said. ‘This wound is mortal.’
Leitdorf smiled thinly.
‘How stupid do you think I am?’ Then he broke into coughing. There was blood in his throat, flecked on his armour.
‘You have triumphed, elector,’ said Helborg, his severe face drawn with pain. ‘Do you remember your words in Drakenmoor? You have proved the bane of her.’
Leitdorf cast his weakening gaze over to the broken body of the daemon prince. It lay just a few feet away, huge, ravaged, and yet for all that still perversely alluring.
‘I truly believed that I loved her,’ he croaked. His face went from grey to white, and a slick of sweat broke out over his forehead. ‘Can you believe that?’
Helborg and Volkmar said nothing. The sound of stone and iron grinding against each other grew from below. More debris showered down from the shaft and the roar of the bloodfire became intermittent. The Tower, bereft of its guiding will, was cracking.
‘I thought she would deliver more than Averland to me,’ said Leitdorf, his breath ragged, still gazing at Natassja. ‘I thought she would give me what I wanted. A son, Lord Helborg. Blame that desire, if you still need blame. My line dies with me here. I am the last.’
Helborg grasped the dying man’s hand.
‘You have saved the city,’ he said. ‘Your deeds will be remembered.’
‘No,’ Leitdorf replied, and blood ran from his cracked lips. His voice shrank to barely a whisper. ‘Tell them what my father did. He discovered her name. Tell them–’
Leitdorf broke into coughing again, and black fluid bubbled up his throat. His hand clenched Helborg’s tightly as he recovered himself. In his last moments alive, his face was a mask of pure determination.
‘Tell them he wasn’t mad,’ he said.
Then Leitdorf’s eyes went blank. He stiffened, and the fingers of his free hand clutched at the air wildly. He took one last shuddering breath, and then fell still. His pudgy face, speckled with blood and ash, relaxed. In the shifting firelight, the resemblance to Marius was striking.
More debris began to fall from above. A great iron spar tumbled down the shaft, clanging from the walls as it spiralled before crashing to the earth on the far side of the chamber. Flames, real flames, began to lick up from the cracks in the floor.
‘We need to go,’ said Volkmar.
‘I will take the body,’ said Helborg, reaching for Leitdorf’s prone corpse.
‘Leave it.’ Volkmar stood up. ‘It will slow you. This is his victory, and his realm. No tomb in Altdorf would be finer.’
Helborg hesitated, then ran a hand up to his bleeding shoulder. More cracks ran up the walls, lifting the plates of iron and exposing raw, pulsing aethyric matter beneath. The Tower was suffused with it, a conduit of baleful energies.
He rose, stooping only to retrieve Leitdorf’s sword from where it had fallen.
‘A pup no longer,’ he said, looking bitterly at Leitdorf’s body. ‘You should have lived to wield this.’
Then Helborg and Volkmar left the chamber, hurrying under the doorway as the Tower began to fall apart. Behind them, the room was marked only by the corpses on the floor and the sinister presence of the Stone in their midst. It glowed in the darkness for a while, as if revelling in one last lingering expression of power.
Then it died, failing back to dull grey. The bloodfire flared around it, swirling in one last angry eddy, and went out.
The bodies were slumped on the earth as if sleep had stolen upon them all. Bloch was dead, and his muscles had grown cold. Verstohlen still lived, but his pulse was shallow and his flesh pale. He lay next to his comrade, insensible to the thunder of battle around him, lost in a private struggle against the poison within.
Standing over them, holding the line against the ravening horde beyond, Schwarzhelm heaved his sword back, dismembering a dog-soldier with the trailing edge of the Rechtstahl. All around him, his men fought on. The line was intact but thinning. Any pretence at an advance had long been given up. The Imperial forces were exhausted, driven to the utter reaches of fatigue by the unending masses of enemy troops before them. The walls of the city were no closer than they had been hours earlier, and the plain still swarmed with lilac-eyed soldiers. Averheim would not be taken by force. The best they could hope for was to hold for the dawn and organise some kind of withdrawal. In the face of the surviving war engines, the retreat would be ruinously blood-soaked.
‘We’re losing this fight!’ came a familiar voice.
Kraus fought his way to Schwarzhelm’s side. He’d lost his helmet in the melee and his forehead was shiny with blood. A hasty battlefield tourniquet had been wrapped around it, but it didn’t do much to staunch the bleeding.
‘You forget Helborg.’
Kraus snorted, and launched into the enemy troops before him. The wound didn’t seem to have slowed him down much.
‘He’s one more sword,’ he spat, his arms working hard. ‘Just one more sword.’
Even as he finished speaking, though, something changed. A vast, rumbling boom resounded from the city, still half a mile distant and shrouded in smoke.
All felt it. Some stumbled as the earth reeled, their tired limbs no longer able to absorb the shock. The dog-soldiers halted in their tracks. The cultists around them went limp. Weapons fell from their slack hands.
Another boom. The bloodfire, that vast column of thundering, writhing flame, shuddered. The massive pillar of aethyric matter wavered like a waterfall cut off at its source. More crashes resounded out from the city walls. Above them all, the Tower loomed darkly, still wreathed in its corona of fire.
‘Stand fast, men of the Empire!’ roared Schwarzhelm, raising both swords above his head.
All down the exhausted lines, halberdiers and swordsmen looked up in sudden amazement. The enemy had stopped attacking. Grosslich’s mortal troops stood immobile and listless. In the heavens, the circles of cloud broke open, exposing the dark blue of the sky beyond.
There were more distant rumbles, and a cloud of ash and dust rose up from beyond the city walls. The lesser towers crumbled, one by one, falling back in on themselves with stately majesty.
‘What is this?’ asked Kraus. His face betrayed his hope. Before them, the dog-soldiers fell to their knees and began to claw at their faces. The dread power that had animated them had been withdrawn, and the agony of their twisted bodies now flooded into them. All across the plain, the Army of the Stone descended into a frenzy of pain and self-destruction.
Schwarzhelm didn’t smile. He spun round, looking east. The night sky was stained with a faint blush of grey.
‘This is the dawn,’ he said. His raised blades caught the first glimmers of light.
The Iron Tower, huge and dominating, began to shed its high spars. Cracks ran up its massive flanks, stained red like the wounds of a living thing. Plumes of black soot rolled up from its foundations, effluent from the mighty machines still turning in the deep catacombs. As vast as it was, the withdrawal of the malign intelligence that had built it was too great a strain to bear. It was falling apart.
Men, freed from the incessant fight for survival, gaped up at the sight, their jaws hanging open. Some wept with relief, falling to their knees and crying praises to Sigmar and Ulric. Others vented their pent-up rage, wading into the supine rows of the enemy, laying waste to the defenceless thousands who still stood on the plain.
Kraus sheathed his sword, watching with dismay as the dog-soldiers in front of him clutched at their ruined bodies. Some ripped off their iron masks, revealing their horribly stretched faces. The Empire soldiers around him looked up at him uncertainly, caught between their hatred and confusion.
‘What are your orders, my lord?’ asked Kraus, looking as torn between instincts as they were.
Schwarzhelm sheathed the Averland runefang, keeping the Rechtstahl naked in his right hand.
‘Keep the men together,’ he said. ‘The bodies of Verstohlen and Bloch are to be taken from here and preserved. If any apothecaries still live, tell them to minister to the counsellor. I would not see him die. Not now, not after all has been accomplished.’
‘And what of you?’
Schwarzhelm began to stride through the writhing mass of dog-soldiers towards the city. None hindered his passage.
‘The field is yours, captain,’ he said, and his voice was free of the anguish that had marked it since the Vormeisterplatz. ‘My brother-in-arms has been victorious, and homage is due.’
Ahead of him, the titanic pillar of flame faded and flickered out. The thrum of its burning died away, exposing the charred and crumbling spires of Averheim beneath. Free of the crushing, oppressive weight in the air, a cleansing wind tore across the battlefield. Tattered standards rippled back into life. Shattered detachments of soldiers regained their feet.
With an ominous creak, the Tower listed to one side. More spars fell from it, raining down on the shattered cityscape below. More cracks raced up its sides, breaking open the sigils of Chaos and cracking their symmetry. Real fire flared up from the dungeons beneath the base of the mighty columns, licking at the buckling iron, replacing the sorcerous flames that had wreathed the metal for so long.
