A tangle of mouldering vegetation crushed the life out of those fortifications that still stood and through the breach came the Norscans, hundreds of warships cleaving the seething waters under a cloud of black spores. The virulent munitions that had brought low the sea wall had left their sails rotten and black, but by some daemoncraft they still managed to catch the wind. Snarling figureheads depicting sea dragons and kraken rose and fell in sprays of brine as the longships rode the bow-waves of the colossal capital hulks that led the armada down the mouth of the Rijk.
They were huge teetering hulks with no earthly duty to remain afloat. Barnacles crusted their bloated hulls up to the load lines like iron cladding while vast mould-blackened sails tugged the foetid plague hulks towards the South Dock.
The largest of them, the flag of the invading fleet, was a lurching behemoth cloaked in green algal webbing and hanging spores, surrounded by an escort of longships. Its high deck bristled with catapults and ballistae, and a coterie of champions gathered around a warlord whose own sorcerous mana bathed the hulk’s bridge in a sickly green light. An ensign bearing the image of a pustulent and semi-decayed wolf wafted from the sterncastle while the same design flew from the topgallant and snarled in rotten wood from the figurehead.
A string of rocky islands peppered the delta, forcing what had previously been an unstoppable mass of warships to break up, while the brine-lashed bastions that had been erected upon them poured scathing volleys of Helblaster-fire and gouts of dwarf flame into the incoming fleet. Boats were blown asunder, shredded bodies staining the Rijk red between rafts of burning debris. Shoreside batteries poured ballista- and cannon-fire into the maelstrom. Loose cannonballs sent great geysers of seawater spuming over the hard-rowing Norscans.
The Greenwolf’s hull was riddled with iron bolts, its barnacle cladding splintered where cannonballs had scored direct hits, but it came on, unstoppable as a tidal surge.
More than half of the Marienburger navy were still in anchorage – those few sloops and schooners under weigh hurriedly ordering themselves into a bow-to-stern formation across the South Dock, presenting a wall of broadsides to the incoming armada. The defenders’ ships were outnumbered dozens to one, but their position was strong – the landside batteries were reaping a terrible harvest and the Norscans would be fighting against the wind as well as the Marienburgers’ broadsides in order to bring their own weapons to bear. The fleet took further heart from the indomitable presence at the centre of their formation of the Zegepraal, a seventy-four-gun dreadnought that in its sixty years as the flagship of Marienburg had yet to know defeat.
The Greenwolf sailed into a fusillade of such ferocity that the Zegepraal was pushed several yards out of formation. Angry black smoke drove back the mist and stung the smell of rot with honest saltpetre. Heavy iron rounds punched through the hulk’s prow in explosions of calcified crust and mildewed wood. Chain shot scythed through its rigging, the warriors crowding its deck screaming as masts splintered and fell. Quickly, Zegepraal’s well-drilled gunners reloaded while the smaller ships in the line of battle opened up with their own belching salvos.
But somehow, still, the Greenwolf endured.
The crew of the Zegepraal watched aghast as a mutant creature larger than a fisherman’s cottage loaded a heavy black urn into a catapult fixed into a forward firing position on the Greenwolf’s bridge. The creature’s muscle-bound frame was the green of rancid flesh and split by boils and buboes. Entrails hung from its hanging belly. One huge arm tapered to a bone-spike tip; the other ended at the wrist in a mouth rimmed by rows of teeth and suckered tentacles. Flies buzzed around its horns as it transferred its virulent payload to the catapult.
The life rafts from the Vloedmuur had borne a handful of survivors, and their tale had spread like a pox.
Plague!
The men of the Zegepraal cried out in unison as, with naught but its own strength, the brute hauled back the catapult arm and loosed.
Midmorning
‘This,’ said Count Mundvard firmly, arms crossed over his broad chest as he looked down over the canals and half-timber townhouses of the Old Money Quarter to the string of melees raging along both banks of the Rijk. ‘This is not happening.’
‘Believe it,’ came a woman’s voice from the darkness of the audience chamber behind him. Her voice was clipped and haughty, toeing the line between empathy and outright spite. ‘Can you not hear the temple’s bells cry it out?’
The count’s sunken face wrinkled still further with distaste. The clangour of steel and raised voices carried across the city on rot-scented winds. He had invested too much in this city – time and wealth, blood and soul. As he watched, an explosion bloomed amongst the warehouses on the Suiddock. He knew it well. He knew it all too well. He continued to look on as the blast settled. The north wind blew debris and the strange black moss of the Norscans deeper into his city. Buildings older than he was fell to rot and decay wherever it landed, blades blunting with rust and men choking on spores in the street. This was no mere Norscan raid. It was a full-fledged incursion. The aethyr reeked of plague magic, of a champion of decay.
Disorder. How he despised it.
He turned from the window, dismissing the chaotic scenes from his mind.
The audience chamber of his townhouse was dark due to the blackened glass that filled its windows, crafting the orderly illusion of perpetual twilight. The luxurious carpet was redolent with the spice of roasted Arabayan coffee. An ornate granite fireplace stood against one wall, but it was for appearances only and was unlit. Books in matching blood-red bindings were neatly ranked along the walls. Silk throws from Ind lay over armchairs made by Estalian masters. Daylit landscapes of lost Sylvania wallowed grimly in the dark. With a ruffle of moon-white feathers, a long-tailed bird dived from one of the bookshelves and swooped towards the mantelpiece above the hearth. It was a parakeet from the subterranean jungles of southern Naggaroth, rare and prized for a harmonious song that it would perform only by night. In the penumbral murk of the chamber, it trilled contentedly.
Alicia von Untervald watched it settle out of the corner of her eye like a cat. She was garbed in a gown of black lace ornamented with mother-of-pearl that was almost identical in hue and lustre to her flesh. Her eyes were as white as a blind woman’s and her fingers ended in long, delicate claws. The tilt of her jaw was regal, the curl of her lip proud. To a gentleman of a certain era she was passably attractive, but after four hundred years Mundvard found her increasingly loathsome on the eye.
And yet he loved her as he loved this despicable city – both were his beyond all doubt, and yet while a single burgher or errant thought remained beyond his control there could be no satisfaction. What fool could take pleasure from so partial a conquest?
‘You have been building a trap of this city for the past four centuries,’ she said, voice becoming suddenly as bitter as that coffee odour. ‘Is there no small pleasure in seeing all that patience come to fruition, watching the jaws of that trap close at last around mortal necks? Will it not be all the sweeter for watching the arrogance crushed from these invaders at the very cusp of their triumph?’
‘No,’ said Mundvard quietly. ‘It is not ready.’
‘You would push pawns around your board for eternity!’ Alicia hissed. ‘It is time we stepped out of the shadows, master. Our Sylvanian kindred rise again. Lady van Mariense whispers to me that Vlad himself fights this same scourge in the north.’ Her claws closed over her hips and she pushed out her chest with a repugnant pout. ‘Now there is a man.’