The Resting Places, page 12
The houseboy looked at her bloodied finger, then at the bubbling stew. The cook glared at him meaningfully and wiped the finger on her apron.
‘You tell anyone about this, boy, and it’ll be the death of you,’ she said, selecting a fresh spoon and stirring hurriedly. ‘I ain’t startin’ from scratch.’
After his meagre meal and the strange incident in the kitchen, Arnvoe returned to his duties. He would tell no one of the cook’s indiscretion, naturally. Who would listen to him if he did? With most of the staff gone, his remaining responsibilities included beating the tapestries, changing the master’s stained bed linen and pressing his robes with a hot iron. One especially vile task, normally attended to periodically by the maids, was the skimming of algae and dead skin from the tub of Aqua Ghyranis in which Lord Schreikwood bathed twice daily. The master had squandered much of his ancestral fortune in recent years to keep the thing permanently topped up, though he seemed oblivious to the possibility that most of its contents were of dubious provenance. Pure Aqua Ghyranis, Arnvoe considered, was unlikely to have things squirming in it.
All this was in addition to the houseboy’s customary routine – emptying the privies, scrubbing the hearths and polishing the replica ornamental armour styled after the Ghyran Guard. The black moss, also, required his unrelenting attention. The afternoon wore on into evening. The shadows of Schreikwood Manor grew deeper.
Perhaps it was sheer exhaustion that led Arnvoe to find himself wandering aimlessly down the maze-like passageways of the west wing in a daze. Or perhaps it was the unaccountable sighing that had drifted on the edge of hearing all day, disturbing his attention ever more with the passing of each hour. Either way, he failed to notice the sound he had been avoiding since dawn until it was too late.
Footsteps.
Every shred of warmth in Arnvoe’s body fled to his pounding heart, rendering his flesh ice-cold. His chest tightened. The footsteps grew louder, closer. A thousand pinpricks blossomed in the soles of his feet, every nerve screaming at him to run – but run where? Would there be time to sprint into an antechamber before the footsteps turned the corner? Would he be heard? Seen? Would the footsteps follow? Caught between fight and flight, Arnvoe stood rooted to the spot, unable to drag his eyes from the shadowy intersection of the passageway. Again and again the image of the dread form emerging from behind the corner of the adjacent passage forced itself into his mind’s eye, but no rehearsal could match the awful reality for sheer terror when it came. The footsteps were upon him.
‘Explain yourself, boy.’
The words were thick with venom. Kratchloc emerged from the shadows like a wraith and turned to face the houseboy, his billowing black frock coat making him appear to glide around the corner. He stopped so close that Arnvoe could smell the vile unguents the steward used to treat his sores. His throat tightened.
‘Speak!’ the steward snarled. ‘Or I’ll have your tongue. Why did you not report to me this morning? What was the meaning of that impudent delinquency in the tower? Out with it.’
Arnvoe’s mind broke.
‘I… I’m sorry, Mister Kratchloc! I didn’t mean to do anything wrong, sir, honest I didn’t! It’s just that I haven’t been outside the walls in so long and I don’t ever go down to the villages like the rest of them, sir, and from up there I… I can watch the dawn come, sir – see the light touch the mountains and the forest. It… it makes the day go a bit better for me, sir, if you take my meaning? I didn’t mean any harm, sir, please! Please…’
The steward looked down his crooked nose at the terrified boy. His stare was like ice; his expression barely flickered. There was not a crack of emotion in the granite exterior. Without shifting his gaze, the steward reached to his thick leather belt, unfastened the buckle and removed it slowly. Arnvoe trembled as the steward folded the belt in two, held it before his face and then – crack!
It was several minutes before the steward replaced the belt. Arnvoe lay huddled on the floor, whimpering, desperately suppressing the urge to wail in agony. That only ever made things worse.
‘One day you’ll learn, boy,’ sighed the steward, adjusting his waistcoat. ‘There is a reason that you don’t leave these walls, that you don’t spend Heldenfast in Caedorf or Vurmling like the maids or the coachmen or the stable hands. It is because you are not like them. They are servants. You are merely an acquisition. You may be thankful that the master’s love of the Jade Kingdoms runs so deep, otherwise you would still be starving on the streets of the Living City instead of here, with a purpose in life and a roof over your head. It pleases him to have a living specimen in his collection, that is all. Do you understand?’
Arnvoe nodded vigorously and fought back tears. He understood.
‘The master took supper in his… study, this evening. See to it that the crockery is returned to the kitchen.’
The steward turned to leave but hesitated.
‘Oh, and one more thing, while you’re down there. Some time spent among the rest of the Ghyranite detritus might help you better reflect on today’s lesson. Clean it. Clean all of it.’
The houseboy limped down a set of stone steps and into a subterranean passageway, casting the dim glow of his shaking lantern on a series of dusty alcoves. In an age lost to time, the chambers beneath the west wing had been catacombs, surviving remnants of a skeletal ruin that had long since been torn down to make way for the Schreikwoods’ ancestral pile. The ancient dead had been disinterred, leaving a secluded sanctum where the master kept those acquisitions deemed more worthy of study than display. Arnvoe passed through a crumbling archway. The passages were little more than a midden of broken and discarded gewgaws; it was here, in the cavernous main chamber, that the most prized artefacts were kept.
Arnvoe set the lantern down upon a stone altar that now served as a study bench, casting his gaze across the endless panoply of Ghyranite plunder and silently cursing the steward’s name. He would do just as he was told, of course. What choice did he have? He would dust the display cases, sweep the flagstones and polish the glass. Every yellowing specimen jar would gleam like Hyshlight if it took him all night. He’d scrub every corner of the mildewed chamber until his cracked fingernails began to come away at the root.
No.
Not every corner, the houseboy thought. His damp eyes were pulled reluctantly towards an alcove in the north-east section, just on the edge of the lamplight – the alcove where the master kept acquisition number eighty-three. A wave of anxiety swept through Arnvoe’s chest. No vile punishment the steward could devise would induce him to go anywhere near eighty-three.
There was something wrong with it. Everyone knew. It radiated malice, deep and primal, repellent yet mesmerising. Arnvoe daren’t look directly at it and he daren’t turn his back. As he plucked a rag from his pocket and began to dust the clutter atop the altar, eighty-three’s mangled form lurked perpetually in the periphery of his vision, like a disturbing realisation looming on the edge of consciousness.
The first and only time Arnvoe had truly looked at acquisition eighty-three was when the lid had been prised from its battered crate in the courtyard. There had been a pall over the whole staff, all of them clustered around in the gloaming light of midwinter and staring aghast as though they’d stumbled upon the scene of a murder.
It was roughly the size of a man. It even looked rather like a man, albeit one cleaved open from the left shoulder to the right hip, leaving nothing but a dank hollow where the upper torso might have been. There was a protrusion that looked like an arm and thick roots that could have been legs. Not a man then, but a parody of man wrought in blackened bark and twisted liana, doomed to remain forever petrified in a state of contortion that looked for all the realms like pain.
Arnvoe shuddered involuntarily and dragged his mind back to the present moment, focusing intently on the contents of the altar in an effort to drive the disturbing image from his thoughts. It was then that he noticed it, there, beside a half-eaten bowl of congealing stew – the package that he’d seen from the bell tower.
The wrappings were delicately stitched from the waxy leaves of some exotic plant, but now they lay unfurled to reveal their strange fruit – a stone no larger than a thumbnail, of such viridian hue that it made its bed of lush foliage seem drab. The master’s scrawled notes beside the open package were barely legible, but one word, repeated again and again, caught Arnvoe’s attention: jadeite. The master had added a shard of Ghyranite realmstone to his collection.
It was at this moment that the wind sighed softly again in Arnvoe’s ears, though he felt no breeze upon his skin. This incongruity might ordinarily have perturbed him in such a macabre setting, but the sound, if anything, had a soothing effect. It was sweet, harmonious even, bearing the whisper of distant flutes and stirring feelings of contentment that belonged to a time and place he’d long thought lost to memory. The pain inflicted by the steward melted away, and Arnvoe watched his hand reach towards the precious stone even as his mind drifted blissfully through the perfumed forests of a half-remembered dream. The moment his fingertips made contact, he gasped, struck by a surge of sheer, vital emotion so great that his convulsions flung the jadeite shard into the shadow beside the altar.
Instinctively, he crouched behind the stone slab to reach for it, then hesitated. Realisation crept over him and made his blood run cold. He had allowed acquisition eighty-three to slip outside his field of view. Arnvoe stood bolt upright. His heart stopped.
Acquisition eighty-three had moved.
It was undeniable – the gnarled bough had broken the edge of the lamplight, reaching into the chamber towards the altar. Its talon-like branches hung dead still in the air, like a vagrant warming a frostbitten hand over a candle.
It’s supposed to be dead, Arnvoe thought. They said it was dead.
That wasn’t all. The realmstone had begun to glow. Tendrils of ethereal green vapour coalesced along the edges of the shimmering stone, then rose and crawled through the air like prehensile creepers seeking blindly and hungrily for purchase. No – not blindly. There was purpose, even intelligence in their search. The tendrils snaked towards Arnvoe and towards the shadows where the bough still hung as though waiting, calling, beckoning.
The houseboy staggered backwards. When the sound of creaking began to emanate from beyond the lamplight in the north-east alcove – when those fingers began to twitch – he could bear it no longer. He cried out and fled the chamber, leaving the lantern behind in his fright so that he was forced to stumble and feel his way through the pitch black of the ancient crypt. At last he found the steps and vaulted them two at a time, bursting through the portal and into the west wing.
He careened down the corridor, scrawny legs working like pistons as he ran to find… who? Kratchloc? Not a chance. The master? Lord Schreikwood wasn’t to be disturbed by the lower orders under even the direst of circumstances, and the cook was hardly equipped to deal with bogeys and witchery at her time of life. The Freeguild guard then. Yes, he would fetch the guards to–
At that moment Arnvoe’s legs flew out from beneath him and the world turned upside down. His back hit the floorboards with a crunch. Breathless and paralysed, the stricken boy turned his head and saw at once what had caused him to slip. The boards were alive with thick patches of the vile moss. It was growing before his eyes, spreading out from between the floorboards, crawling up the walls and onto the carved reliefs. It grew thickest around the tree-like figures, as though their barbarous rites were somehow drawing it closer and instilling it with an unnatural vigour. As Arnvoe gawped in horror at the impossible growth, he caught sight of a familiar bundle of rags shambling hurriedly towards him.
‘What in Sigmar’s name are you up to, young Arnvoe?’ the cook wailed, seeing the stricken boy lying in the midst of the unholy mess.
Arnvoe tried to push himself up. He tried to speak, but the air had been knocked out of him. All he could do was lie there, writhing and wheezing.
‘I knows for a fact that Mister Kratchloc said you was to clean up all this muck! And here I finds you rollin’ around playin’ in it like a bleedin’ piglet!’
The boy tried to protest, to explain, but no intelligible sound could be made to pass through his throat. Could the old cook not see that the grotesque morass was spreading towards her even as she berated him? Were her sunken eyes so dimmed by age?
‘Get up now, boy, before someone sees you, or you’ll be for the chop! Are you listenin’ to me, boy?’
With great effort, Arnvoe managed to roll onto his side. He could see the cook properly now, see the vile moss that formed a black sea around her, see the squirming shoots that sprang from it as though dancing to the increasingly frenzied piping of flutes that filled his mind. They grew longer, thicker, burrowing under the cook’s heavy skirts. Arnvoe pushed himself up to sitting and tried to scream a warning, but no sound came.
It was the cook, in fact, who screamed.
‘Oh! Oh, Sigmar! My feet! There’s something in my feet! It’s moving! Oh! It hurts!’
She rocked back and forth, waving her arms manically, but seemingly made no effort to escape. Every wrinkle of her face contorted in agony, and Arnvoe at last staggered to her aid, taking her by the hands and attempting to pull her to safety. This time her squeals were shriller than a pig being put to slaughter.
‘I can’t move! I can’t move! My legs! It’s in my legs! Help me!’
A pool of blood oozed from beneath the woman’s skirts. The harder Arnvoe pulled, the more she cried out. In moments her wails turned to whimpering, then insensate burbling as her body became limp.
Arnvoe fled down the hallway, leaping and vaulting to avoid the monstrous growth that now coiled over every surface, growing thicker and more twisted with each passing moment, smothering archways and windows beneath a web of entangled branches and wicked thorns.
Desperately fighting back tears, Arnvoe lurched into the great hall. The place was choked from top to bottom with briars and bracken so that it no longer resembled anything crafted by the hand of man. Only the towering corpsewood oaks appeared untouched, though even they now radiated a dark vitality that no mere carving should have been able to evoke. The houseboy tore his eyes from them and skidded to a halt before the main doors. They were not simply blocked but were barely even visible beneath the chaos of shuddering growth. The great glass windows were similarly afflicted. There could be no hope of reaching safety or summoning the Freeguild guard unless the branches could be torn away.
Only one option remained to him. Arnvoe made for the centre of the hall, stood between the baleful oaks, gripped the bell rope in his hands and pulled. The thunderous peal of the iron bell reverberated through the hall. Again and again the boy hauled on the rope with all his might, stopping only at the sight of a hoary, bearded figure appearing at the top of the grand staircase, bedecked in frayed robes of emerald silk. Instinctively, Arnvoe dipped his head in deference.
Lord Schreikwood seemed unperturbed by the madness that surrounded him. The almighty surge of growth had slowed. He descended the staircase, deftly avoiding the worst of the tangled undergrowth while examining the spectacle with gleaming eyes.
‘Fascinating…’ he murmured. ‘Absolutely fascinating. Tell me, boy – what have you done?’
It was a strange question, and one that Arnvoe would have no opportunity to answer. At that moment the steward stormed into the hall from the west wing, covered in scratches, wielding a large hatchet in one hand and an oil lamp in the other.
‘Thank Sigmar you’re all right, my lord!’ the steward rasped, placing the oil lamp on the ground then bending over and resting a hand on his knee to catch his breath.
‘Would you care to tell me what has precipitated this… wondrous event, Mister Kratchloc?’ intoned the master, barely able to contain his childlike delight.
‘The house is cursed, my lord! I say it’s the–’
‘It’s the realmstone,’ Arnvoe interrupted. ‘I saw it with my own eyes, sir! Glowing, it was! And then the thing, you know, the dead thing in the crypts, it… it came to life, sir. Everything came to life! And the cook, sir, she–’
‘I know what happened to the cook!’ snapped Kratchloc. ‘I passed by her corpse on my way here. My lord, we must leave at once. For your safety, of course.’
‘Nonsense, steward,’ said Lord Schreikwood, waving a hand dismissively. ‘This is a blessing of the Jade Kingdoms! That I should live to see my own home touched by the Everqueen’s grace! Let your heart be filled with gladness, Mister Kratchloc. There is nothing to fear.’
The steward grew visibly more agitated.
‘Please, my lord!’ he gasped. ‘This… growth, it’s unnatural! It hungers, my lord! I must insist that we summon the guards to break down these doors!’
The master considered his servant’s plea. His response came slowly, coaxed reluctantly from some far-flung corner of his mind.
‘Yes. Yes, we must summon the guards,’ he conceded. ‘I shall require all of them to help me collect specimens for study.’
Lord Schreikwood swept across the hall to the main entrance. He cupped his hands around his mouth and leant in towards the crack between the doors, squirming and flinching to avoid their fresh covering of needle-like thorns.
‘I say, you men out there! Your lord calls for aid!’
The muffled fall of heavy boots drew closer at speed, followed immediately by the frantic yell of Sergeant Gardeon.
‘Stay back, my lord! Stay away from the thorns!’
The master froze momentarily, eyes locked upon the vicious protrusions barely a hair’s breadth from his face, then retracted his head like a startled tortoise.
‘The thorns, sergeant? Why?’
‘Dhallain pricked himself on one. He’s… not well, my lord.’
The sergeant’s voice quavered a little, and Arnvoe could swear that he heard a suppressed retch before the soldier continued.
‘You tell anyone about this, boy, and it’ll be the death of you,’ she said, selecting a fresh spoon and stirring hurriedly. ‘I ain’t startin’ from scratch.’
After his meagre meal and the strange incident in the kitchen, Arnvoe returned to his duties. He would tell no one of the cook’s indiscretion, naturally. Who would listen to him if he did? With most of the staff gone, his remaining responsibilities included beating the tapestries, changing the master’s stained bed linen and pressing his robes with a hot iron. One especially vile task, normally attended to periodically by the maids, was the skimming of algae and dead skin from the tub of Aqua Ghyranis in which Lord Schreikwood bathed twice daily. The master had squandered much of his ancestral fortune in recent years to keep the thing permanently topped up, though he seemed oblivious to the possibility that most of its contents were of dubious provenance. Pure Aqua Ghyranis, Arnvoe considered, was unlikely to have things squirming in it.
All this was in addition to the houseboy’s customary routine – emptying the privies, scrubbing the hearths and polishing the replica ornamental armour styled after the Ghyran Guard. The black moss, also, required his unrelenting attention. The afternoon wore on into evening. The shadows of Schreikwood Manor grew deeper.
Perhaps it was sheer exhaustion that led Arnvoe to find himself wandering aimlessly down the maze-like passageways of the west wing in a daze. Or perhaps it was the unaccountable sighing that had drifted on the edge of hearing all day, disturbing his attention ever more with the passing of each hour. Either way, he failed to notice the sound he had been avoiding since dawn until it was too late.
Footsteps.
Every shred of warmth in Arnvoe’s body fled to his pounding heart, rendering his flesh ice-cold. His chest tightened. The footsteps grew louder, closer. A thousand pinpricks blossomed in the soles of his feet, every nerve screaming at him to run – but run where? Would there be time to sprint into an antechamber before the footsteps turned the corner? Would he be heard? Seen? Would the footsteps follow? Caught between fight and flight, Arnvoe stood rooted to the spot, unable to drag his eyes from the shadowy intersection of the passageway. Again and again the image of the dread form emerging from behind the corner of the adjacent passage forced itself into his mind’s eye, but no rehearsal could match the awful reality for sheer terror when it came. The footsteps were upon him.
‘Explain yourself, boy.’
The words were thick with venom. Kratchloc emerged from the shadows like a wraith and turned to face the houseboy, his billowing black frock coat making him appear to glide around the corner. He stopped so close that Arnvoe could smell the vile unguents the steward used to treat his sores. His throat tightened.
‘Speak!’ the steward snarled. ‘Or I’ll have your tongue. Why did you not report to me this morning? What was the meaning of that impudent delinquency in the tower? Out with it.’
Arnvoe’s mind broke.
‘I… I’m sorry, Mister Kratchloc! I didn’t mean to do anything wrong, sir, honest I didn’t! It’s just that I haven’t been outside the walls in so long and I don’t ever go down to the villages like the rest of them, sir, and from up there I… I can watch the dawn come, sir – see the light touch the mountains and the forest. It… it makes the day go a bit better for me, sir, if you take my meaning? I didn’t mean any harm, sir, please! Please…’
The steward looked down his crooked nose at the terrified boy. His stare was like ice; his expression barely flickered. There was not a crack of emotion in the granite exterior. Without shifting his gaze, the steward reached to his thick leather belt, unfastened the buckle and removed it slowly. Arnvoe trembled as the steward folded the belt in two, held it before his face and then – crack!
It was several minutes before the steward replaced the belt. Arnvoe lay huddled on the floor, whimpering, desperately suppressing the urge to wail in agony. That only ever made things worse.
‘One day you’ll learn, boy,’ sighed the steward, adjusting his waistcoat. ‘There is a reason that you don’t leave these walls, that you don’t spend Heldenfast in Caedorf or Vurmling like the maids or the coachmen or the stable hands. It is because you are not like them. They are servants. You are merely an acquisition. You may be thankful that the master’s love of the Jade Kingdoms runs so deep, otherwise you would still be starving on the streets of the Living City instead of here, with a purpose in life and a roof over your head. It pleases him to have a living specimen in his collection, that is all. Do you understand?’
Arnvoe nodded vigorously and fought back tears. He understood.
‘The master took supper in his… study, this evening. See to it that the crockery is returned to the kitchen.’
The steward turned to leave but hesitated.
‘Oh, and one more thing, while you’re down there. Some time spent among the rest of the Ghyranite detritus might help you better reflect on today’s lesson. Clean it. Clean all of it.’
The houseboy limped down a set of stone steps and into a subterranean passageway, casting the dim glow of his shaking lantern on a series of dusty alcoves. In an age lost to time, the chambers beneath the west wing had been catacombs, surviving remnants of a skeletal ruin that had long since been torn down to make way for the Schreikwoods’ ancestral pile. The ancient dead had been disinterred, leaving a secluded sanctum where the master kept those acquisitions deemed more worthy of study than display. Arnvoe passed through a crumbling archway. The passages were little more than a midden of broken and discarded gewgaws; it was here, in the cavernous main chamber, that the most prized artefacts were kept.
Arnvoe set the lantern down upon a stone altar that now served as a study bench, casting his gaze across the endless panoply of Ghyranite plunder and silently cursing the steward’s name. He would do just as he was told, of course. What choice did he have? He would dust the display cases, sweep the flagstones and polish the glass. Every yellowing specimen jar would gleam like Hyshlight if it took him all night. He’d scrub every corner of the mildewed chamber until his cracked fingernails began to come away at the root.
No.
Not every corner, the houseboy thought. His damp eyes were pulled reluctantly towards an alcove in the north-east section, just on the edge of the lamplight – the alcove where the master kept acquisition number eighty-three. A wave of anxiety swept through Arnvoe’s chest. No vile punishment the steward could devise would induce him to go anywhere near eighty-three.
There was something wrong with it. Everyone knew. It radiated malice, deep and primal, repellent yet mesmerising. Arnvoe daren’t look directly at it and he daren’t turn his back. As he plucked a rag from his pocket and began to dust the clutter atop the altar, eighty-three’s mangled form lurked perpetually in the periphery of his vision, like a disturbing realisation looming on the edge of consciousness.
The first and only time Arnvoe had truly looked at acquisition eighty-three was when the lid had been prised from its battered crate in the courtyard. There had been a pall over the whole staff, all of them clustered around in the gloaming light of midwinter and staring aghast as though they’d stumbled upon the scene of a murder.
It was roughly the size of a man. It even looked rather like a man, albeit one cleaved open from the left shoulder to the right hip, leaving nothing but a dank hollow where the upper torso might have been. There was a protrusion that looked like an arm and thick roots that could have been legs. Not a man then, but a parody of man wrought in blackened bark and twisted liana, doomed to remain forever petrified in a state of contortion that looked for all the realms like pain.
Arnvoe shuddered involuntarily and dragged his mind back to the present moment, focusing intently on the contents of the altar in an effort to drive the disturbing image from his thoughts. It was then that he noticed it, there, beside a half-eaten bowl of congealing stew – the package that he’d seen from the bell tower.
The wrappings were delicately stitched from the waxy leaves of some exotic plant, but now they lay unfurled to reveal their strange fruit – a stone no larger than a thumbnail, of such viridian hue that it made its bed of lush foliage seem drab. The master’s scrawled notes beside the open package were barely legible, but one word, repeated again and again, caught Arnvoe’s attention: jadeite. The master had added a shard of Ghyranite realmstone to his collection.
It was at this moment that the wind sighed softly again in Arnvoe’s ears, though he felt no breeze upon his skin. This incongruity might ordinarily have perturbed him in such a macabre setting, but the sound, if anything, had a soothing effect. It was sweet, harmonious even, bearing the whisper of distant flutes and stirring feelings of contentment that belonged to a time and place he’d long thought lost to memory. The pain inflicted by the steward melted away, and Arnvoe watched his hand reach towards the precious stone even as his mind drifted blissfully through the perfumed forests of a half-remembered dream. The moment his fingertips made contact, he gasped, struck by a surge of sheer, vital emotion so great that his convulsions flung the jadeite shard into the shadow beside the altar.
Instinctively, he crouched behind the stone slab to reach for it, then hesitated. Realisation crept over him and made his blood run cold. He had allowed acquisition eighty-three to slip outside his field of view. Arnvoe stood bolt upright. His heart stopped.
Acquisition eighty-three had moved.
It was undeniable – the gnarled bough had broken the edge of the lamplight, reaching into the chamber towards the altar. Its talon-like branches hung dead still in the air, like a vagrant warming a frostbitten hand over a candle.
It’s supposed to be dead, Arnvoe thought. They said it was dead.
That wasn’t all. The realmstone had begun to glow. Tendrils of ethereal green vapour coalesced along the edges of the shimmering stone, then rose and crawled through the air like prehensile creepers seeking blindly and hungrily for purchase. No – not blindly. There was purpose, even intelligence in their search. The tendrils snaked towards Arnvoe and towards the shadows where the bough still hung as though waiting, calling, beckoning.
The houseboy staggered backwards. When the sound of creaking began to emanate from beyond the lamplight in the north-east alcove – when those fingers began to twitch – he could bear it no longer. He cried out and fled the chamber, leaving the lantern behind in his fright so that he was forced to stumble and feel his way through the pitch black of the ancient crypt. At last he found the steps and vaulted them two at a time, bursting through the portal and into the west wing.
He careened down the corridor, scrawny legs working like pistons as he ran to find… who? Kratchloc? Not a chance. The master? Lord Schreikwood wasn’t to be disturbed by the lower orders under even the direst of circumstances, and the cook was hardly equipped to deal with bogeys and witchery at her time of life. The Freeguild guard then. Yes, he would fetch the guards to–
At that moment Arnvoe’s legs flew out from beneath him and the world turned upside down. His back hit the floorboards with a crunch. Breathless and paralysed, the stricken boy turned his head and saw at once what had caused him to slip. The boards were alive with thick patches of the vile moss. It was growing before his eyes, spreading out from between the floorboards, crawling up the walls and onto the carved reliefs. It grew thickest around the tree-like figures, as though their barbarous rites were somehow drawing it closer and instilling it with an unnatural vigour. As Arnvoe gawped in horror at the impossible growth, he caught sight of a familiar bundle of rags shambling hurriedly towards him.
‘What in Sigmar’s name are you up to, young Arnvoe?’ the cook wailed, seeing the stricken boy lying in the midst of the unholy mess.
Arnvoe tried to push himself up. He tried to speak, but the air had been knocked out of him. All he could do was lie there, writhing and wheezing.
‘I knows for a fact that Mister Kratchloc said you was to clean up all this muck! And here I finds you rollin’ around playin’ in it like a bleedin’ piglet!’
The boy tried to protest, to explain, but no intelligible sound could be made to pass through his throat. Could the old cook not see that the grotesque morass was spreading towards her even as she berated him? Were her sunken eyes so dimmed by age?
‘Get up now, boy, before someone sees you, or you’ll be for the chop! Are you listenin’ to me, boy?’
With great effort, Arnvoe managed to roll onto his side. He could see the cook properly now, see the vile moss that formed a black sea around her, see the squirming shoots that sprang from it as though dancing to the increasingly frenzied piping of flutes that filled his mind. They grew longer, thicker, burrowing under the cook’s heavy skirts. Arnvoe pushed himself up to sitting and tried to scream a warning, but no sound came.
It was the cook, in fact, who screamed.
‘Oh! Oh, Sigmar! My feet! There’s something in my feet! It’s moving! Oh! It hurts!’
She rocked back and forth, waving her arms manically, but seemingly made no effort to escape. Every wrinkle of her face contorted in agony, and Arnvoe at last staggered to her aid, taking her by the hands and attempting to pull her to safety. This time her squeals were shriller than a pig being put to slaughter.
‘I can’t move! I can’t move! My legs! It’s in my legs! Help me!’
A pool of blood oozed from beneath the woman’s skirts. The harder Arnvoe pulled, the more she cried out. In moments her wails turned to whimpering, then insensate burbling as her body became limp.
Arnvoe fled down the hallway, leaping and vaulting to avoid the monstrous growth that now coiled over every surface, growing thicker and more twisted with each passing moment, smothering archways and windows beneath a web of entangled branches and wicked thorns.
Desperately fighting back tears, Arnvoe lurched into the great hall. The place was choked from top to bottom with briars and bracken so that it no longer resembled anything crafted by the hand of man. Only the towering corpsewood oaks appeared untouched, though even they now radiated a dark vitality that no mere carving should have been able to evoke. The houseboy tore his eyes from them and skidded to a halt before the main doors. They were not simply blocked but were barely even visible beneath the chaos of shuddering growth. The great glass windows were similarly afflicted. There could be no hope of reaching safety or summoning the Freeguild guard unless the branches could be torn away.
Only one option remained to him. Arnvoe made for the centre of the hall, stood between the baleful oaks, gripped the bell rope in his hands and pulled. The thunderous peal of the iron bell reverberated through the hall. Again and again the boy hauled on the rope with all his might, stopping only at the sight of a hoary, bearded figure appearing at the top of the grand staircase, bedecked in frayed robes of emerald silk. Instinctively, Arnvoe dipped his head in deference.
Lord Schreikwood seemed unperturbed by the madness that surrounded him. The almighty surge of growth had slowed. He descended the staircase, deftly avoiding the worst of the tangled undergrowth while examining the spectacle with gleaming eyes.
‘Fascinating…’ he murmured. ‘Absolutely fascinating. Tell me, boy – what have you done?’
It was a strange question, and one that Arnvoe would have no opportunity to answer. At that moment the steward stormed into the hall from the west wing, covered in scratches, wielding a large hatchet in one hand and an oil lamp in the other.
‘Thank Sigmar you’re all right, my lord!’ the steward rasped, placing the oil lamp on the ground then bending over and resting a hand on his knee to catch his breath.
‘Would you care to tell me what has precipitated this… wondrous event, Mister Kratchloc?’ intoned the master, barely able to contain his childlike delight.
‘The house is cursed, my lord! I say it’s the–’
‘It’s the realmstone,’ Arnvoe interrupted. ‘I saw it with my own eyes, sir! Glowing, it was! And then the thing, you know, the dead thing in the crypts, it… it came to life, sir. Everything came to life! And the cook, sir, she–’
‘I know what happened to the cook!’ snapped Kratchloc. ‘I passed by her corpse on my way here. My lord, we must leave at once. For your safety, of course.’
‘Nonsense, steward,’ said Lord Schreikwood, waving a hand dismissively. ‘This is a blessing of the Jade Kingdoms! That I should live to see my own home touched by the Everqueen’s grace! Let your heart be filled with gladness, Mister Kratchloc. There is nothing to fear.’
The steward grew visibly more agitated.
‘Please, my lord!’ he gasped. ‘This… growth, it’s unnatural! It hungers, my lord! I must insist that we summon the guards to break down these doors!’
The master considered his servant’s plea. His response came slowly, coaxed reluctantly from some far-flung corner of his mind.
‘Yes. Yes, we must summon the guards,’ he conceded. ‘I shall require all of them to help me collect specimens for study.’
Lord Schreikwood swept across the hall to the main entrance. He cupped his hands around his mouth and leant in towards the crack between the doors, squirming and flinching to avoid their fresh covering of needle-like thorns.
‘I say, you men out there! Your lord calls for aid!’
The muffled fall of heavy boots drew closer at speed, followed immediately by the frantic yell of Sergeant Gardeon.
‘Stay back, my lord! Stay away from the thorns!’
The master froze momentarily, eyes locked upon the vicious protrusions barely a hair’s breadth from his face, then retracted his head like a startled tortoise.
‘The thorns, sergeant? Why?’
‘Dhallain pricked himself on one. He’s… not well, my lord.’
The sergeant’s voice quavered a little, and Arnvoe could swear that he heard a suppressed retch before the soldier continued.
