‘Insolence,’ said Mundvard, raising a hand ready to strike her and baring his fangs as Alicia presented an alabaster palm and slipped back. She ran her claws along the spines of Mundvard’s books. He snarled at the disturbance to the carefully cultivated pattern of dust. ‘Do you think I dote here, senile and blind? Was it mere chance that sent a ship and captain indebted to me following the elf fleet into the Sea of Claws? There was no guarantee that the elves would soon return to bring word of their triumph or defeat. Van Gaal however would be back as soon as he had looted enough wealth to repay the debt on his ship – if he survived.’
‘I assume he did not.’
‘And how blessed with good fortune we must be that the Zegepraal was on patrol this morn rather than at anchorage as was scheduled. What luck our stars shine upon us that the strength of Marienburg was already roused for exercises on the South Dock.’
Alicia shook her head. ‘It was in your power to do more than that, dear heart.’
‘And risk exposing myself? I told you, it is too soon.’
‘Marienburg is on the brink,’ Alicia spat, twisting around in a snap of lace to face him.
‘You exaggerate. The city I have built is better prepared than that which defeated Mannfred all those years ago. It will prevail, and we will continue. And I will succeed where our master faltered.’
‘It will not,’ said Alicia, fingers nestling over one red-bound volume amongst the hundreds and tilting it towards her. Count Mundvard’s cold flesh tightened as his consort slid it from the shelf, slipped off its leather exterior, and unmasked something far older and viler than anything the ignorant folk of Marienburg would believe lay within the bounds of even their sordid city.
The Black Tome of Vlad von Carstein.
‘How did you…?’ Mundvard ground his jaw shut. Knowledge was power and ignorance weakness. ‘It is too soon.’
‘Liliet van Mariense and her pale sisters are already in the dock. The beast stirs under the Rijk.’ Alicia held out the tome. ‘It is time, and if you will not act then I will.’
With a spine-splintering crash of wood, scores of Norscan longships ploughed into the docks, disgorging rabid berserkers and huge armour-clad champions onto the shore. Men dropped even as they ran, bodies marked not by arrow or spear but by blistering black abscesses on their throats. A block of Marienburger regulars fought on amongst the rushing shapes, striking out with halberds while their captain whistled furiously and their horn-blower sounded the order to rally and reform.
Marienburg stood, but without the mercenary auxiliaries and high elf naval power on which she had come to depend she stood alone, and one by one her soldiers fell.
‘Plague!’ Cazarro cried, tearing off his helmet in a bid to clear the cotton wool fug from his head and keeping shoulder-to-shoulder with his fellow Verezzians to either side as the company withdrew. They did so with flawless disciple: pikes low, shields front. Ordinarily, Cazarro would have been proud. A mercenary could fight for many things – wealth, the honour of his regiment and the reputation of his homeland.
But no man could fight a disease.
They fell into an alley. A warehouse loomed to the right and a shipwright to their left. The cramped air smelled of guts and sawdust. Cazarro had hoped that discipline and the narrow front would confer an advantage on their retreat, but if anything it was the reverse. Man-for-man, they had nothing to contend with the might and fury of what came after them.
A Chaos warrior in bulky armour scarred by boils and verdigris hoisted a weeping axe and led a score of howling warriors in a charge. Cazarro parried a sword thrust as the Verezzian to his left was cleft in two by a downward slash of the barbarian’s axe. The man to his right met a Norscan’s blade with a clang, then coughed blood and black spores as he fell in the grip of some seizure. Another man took his place before he too was split open from hip to hip by a deathstroke of that infernal warrior’s axe. Men were being carved open left and right. Even those to the rear were not spared, coughing and spluttering as they fell to be trodden on by those that followed. The horror was as inescapable as the stink.
‘Retreat. Run. Back to the road.’
Alvaro Cazarro cast down his sword and helm and ran.
Bats congregated above the townhouse roof. Some power compelled them, and more of them came flapping over the rooftops from all quarters of the city until their seething, squealing mass blocked out the sun and Count Mundvard threw back the doors and strode out. The riot of screams rose up in full force to assail him and he checked his stride with a grunt. The air was thick with blood, so much so that he could almost open his mouth and drink of it. It had been decades – centuries – since he had last killed with his own hands, but the sight of the Rijk running red was enough to threaten even his measured self discipline. He shook off the urge to flex his claws, walking slowly to the edge as he bore witness to the anarchy that had been unleashed upon his realm.
Alicia had been right. Curse her, she had been right.
The enemy’s shipping was so numerous that they choked the wide mouth of the Rijk with sails and a warrior so inclined could run deck-to-deck from the lighthouse-temple of Manann in the west, to the gothic sea-fort of Rijker’s Island to the north, and then on the slender spires of the Elven Quarter to the east. The mass of sails pushed further towards Hightower Bridge and the city’s heart. The river’s fortifications had been reduced to rubble, and of the Zegepraal and the Marienburger navy even his keen eyes could discern no sign amidst the haze of flies and spores.
Two thirds of his city had already been lost and tens of thousands had been slaughtered. Outnumbered, on the run, and under the scourge of this unnatural contagion, it was clear that the living were no longer in a position to defend their city.
‘So the defence of order must fall at last upon the undying.’
‘Did I not say, dear heart?’ said Alicia.
Offering nothing further, Count Mundvard held out an open hand, feeling an alien sensation coil like a constricting serpent through his breast as Alicia set the Black Tome in his palm.
Count Mundvard took a hard sniff of the air, disregarding now the charnel reek and focusing instead on the currents of magic that blew against and through the wind. The putrid laughter of daemons echoed through the aethyr – tiny things, mindless, too small even for a vampire’s eyes to perceive, but delighting like children in the plague they spread. Such a deadly disease could only have been the work of a master of spellcraft.
No matter.
With a word of power Mundvard blasted the clasps that held the Black Tome’s force sealed within and with a snarl peeled back the first page. The book held the accumulated knowledge of necromancy that Vlad, first and greatest of the Sylvanian counts, had accrued over his long life. In safeguarding the precious volume from Vlad’s warring get after his death – and then masking its existence from his successors – Mundvard had gleaned enough to approach, and even surpass, his former mentor in mastery.
‘Recite with me, Alicia,’ he said, planting one white-bone digit onto the page and beginning his recitation of the ancient Nehekharan script. A second voice twinned itself with his. Alicia von Untervald was a competent sorcerer only, but the addition of her power to his drove a beacon in the aethyr and set it aflame. Count Mundvard spread his hands wide to encompass his city and laughed as power unbound flowed from the page, through him, and out into the vastness.