The End Times:
Marienburg’s Stand
(David Guymer)
The world is dying, but it has been so since the coming of the Chaos Gods.
For years beyond reckoning, the Ruinous Powers have coveted the mortal realm. They have made many attempts to seize it, their anointed champions leading vast hordes into the lands of men, elves and dwarfs. Each time, they have been defeated.
Until now.
In the frozen north, Archaon, a former templar of the warrior-god Sigmar, has been crowned the Everchosen of Chaos. He stands poised to march south and bring ruin to the lands he once fought to protect. Behind him amass all the forces of the Dark Gods, mortal and daemonic. When they come, they will bring with them a storm such as has never been seen. Already, the lands of men are falling into ruin. Archaon’s vanguard run riot across Kislev, the once-proud country of Bretonnia has fallen into anarchy and the southern lands have been consumed by a tide of verminous ratmen.
The men of the Empire, the elves of Ulthuan and the dwarfs of the Worlds Edge Mountains fortify their cities and prepare for the inevitable onslaught. They will fight bravely and to the last. But in their hearts, all know that their efforts will be futile. The victory of Chaos is inevitable.
These are the End Times.
Late Winter, 2525
Midnight
The stars glittered coldly in the clear black sky. The face of Mannslieb shone like a coin, its silver glow sparkling across the cresting waves of the otherwise inky Manannspoort Sea. The three-mast galleon, Meesterhand, tacked east to west, plotting a zig-zagging course against the north wind and deeper into the Sea of Claws. The wind sighed through the rigging and the loose raiment of the duty watch, bringing an unobtrusive ripple from the ensign of Marienburg that fluttered from the sterncastle.
It carried a faint, rotten, smell.
The navigator wrinkled his nose, compared the stars to his charts with a silent prayer to Manann for clear skies and in a lowered voice called their course and bearing to the helm. The merchantman came slowly about, bow riding high as it nosed into the wind towards a port tack. Dark and quiet as a Nordlander spy in Marienburg’s South Dock, the vessel shushed ever northward. Even before the razing of Erengrad and the destruction of the Bretonnian navy at L’Anguille, these had been treacherous waters, haunted by Norscan raiders and dark elf pirates. Even with Marienburg plagued by the spectre of war, only the most reckless or desperately indebted fools would risk leaving harbour at all.
Next time, Captain Needa van Gaal would think twice before wagering the Meesterhand on such a cold run of the dice.
‘Get me lanterns prow and starboard,’ said Captain van Gaal, an urgent whisper that aped the chill night wind. He leaned over the gangrail from the high sterncastle and peered into the susurant, silver-black sea. The captain pointed north, to a raft of deeper black floating amongst the moonlit glitter, and then emitted a triumphant bark. ‘Wreckage! Helm, hard to starboard, bring us about.’
Van Gaal hurried down the pitching steps to the main deck as the twelve-gun merchantman heaved to.
The high elves’ mighty Marienburg fleet had left harbour in the early hours of the previous evening and, while the proud princes of the sea were as disdainful of their enemies as they were of their fleet’s human hosts, van Gaal was not nearly so choosy about the spoils he was willing to pick through. Just one Norse longship laden with furs and silver would pay off his debt to that serpent van der Zee.
‘Helmsman, station keeping,’ van Gaal shouted back to the shadowy mass of the sterncastle as the ship pulled through the loose island of flotsam with a series of soft, distant bangs. ‘Ready lines. And give me that light, damn it.’
There was a stab of illumination as a boatswain nervously unshuttered his storm lantern. The waves shadowed under the gunwales turned from black to a deep nightshade. Light glinted from hooks as they were lowered. Van Gaal gripped the gangrail anxiously as the debris was drawn up. His brow knotted in confusion. Norscan craft were generally of pitched black oak or pine, but the torn piece of planking hanging from his ship’s hook and twirling slowly before his eyes was as white and smooth as a pearl.
But that… couldn’t be right.
‘Shut off the light,’ he murmured, the ship sinking back into blackness just as the wind dipped. A dying ripple ran across the sails.
The horizon was dark, too dark. Van Gaal could not avert the prickling certainty that thousands of unseen sails had just passed between his rig and the wind.
When the wind returned it bore a putrid reek of rancid flesh and decay, as if the ocean itself had become diseased.
‘Hard astern, full sails,’ van Gaal choked, voice muffled by the sleeve held to his mouth and broken by dry heaves.
The elves had been defeated.
The very idea stunned him into mute inaction as the first bloated, creaking shadow appeared beneath the ocean of stars, and he felt in that moment that he understood how it was to have one’s ship teeter above a whirlpool.
All he could do was gape.
They were heading south. To Marienburg.
And there were so many.
Dawn
The shrill sea-whistles of the captains-at-arms called through the mist that hung over the city-port’s docks, mingling with the cries of the gulls and terns that circled the fog above Marienburg’s government district. Caspar Vosberger rose from his table in the members’ lounge of the exclusive Rijkside gentleman’s club and paced towards the window. The Rijkside was deserted at this hour. Portraits of merchant grandees and a proud ivory bust of Emperor Dieter IV – toasted on Secession Day – looked down from the oak-panelled walls as he slipped back the curtains and peered into the bay spread below.
A sore finger of red light was just pushing at the misted horizon. The private warships of the merchant elite swayed at anchor in the dim light, shadowed by the high stone bridge that joined the east and west halves of the city via the heavily fortified Hightower Isle. As the Rijk widened downriver, the view grew poorer. The vague, and at turns troubling, forms of ships plied the mist. The white spires of the Elf Quarter rose like the necks of cranes from the Cursed Marsh. On the poorer side of the water, the city’s main dockland, the South Dock, churned with indistinct activity. Caspar kept his gaze there for a second, the expensive glass cloistering him from the chill, reducing the foul odour to a tang in the nostrils and muffling the whistles that cried out from the docks.
It was easy to convince himself that it really was just the birds.
‘It is just an exercise,’ said the only other man in the room. He was reclined in a green leather smoking chair and swirled a twenty-five year old Estalian white in a crystal glass shaped like a scallop’s shell. The dawn light glittered redly across the rubies, garnets and spinels of his beringed fingers. Engel van der Zee held no rank or title that Caspar knew of – and being himself descended from the old Westerland nobility, he made it his pride to know – but Marienburg was a city like no other. Land and lineage counted for less than it should when the business that mattered was conducted through the intermediary of shadow. It allowed ghouls like van der Zee to grow rich. The man took a measured sniff of his wine. ‘General Segher assures me that this was all planned in advance.’ With a faint grimace of distaste, he set down the glass. ‘Leave thoughts of war to those it concerns. You should be more worried about that smell driving down the value of this place.’