And slowly, in the city’s dark and foetid places, things better left buried began to stir.
The screams of children, women and men rang through the marble arches and faux-Tilean palazzos of Marienburg’s centre of governance. Caspar Vosberger fought against the tide of humanity, his mind running to the stables he kept near the city’s south gate even as he was dragged under and pulled along with the flood. There were rich and poor men, as well as lords and their maids.
Their blood was equal now.
The clatter of arms echoed through the ornate stonework as the elite palace guards fought with the Norscans swarming up from the harbour. Screams came from every direction. Fires cast vast, daemonic shadows against the tall stone buildings. Black spores hung on the rot-scented air. People dropped like flies.
A scream started somewhere up ahead and found its way into Caspar’s mouth as Hightower Bridge emerged from the fog. One corner of the indomitable keep had crumbled into the Rijk under the onslaught of a thrashing mass of sickly black vegetation and a battle raged in the breach. With every minute that passed, more longships grounded themselves on the rocks that held the bridge’s struts and threw up grapnels and ladders.
Caspar’s mind whirled. His world was coming apart around him.
There was another scream, this one strikingly immediate, and Caspar watched as a young maid in a cotton shawl was cleaved in two by a Norscan’s axe. The warrior charged through the blood spray and more followed, streaming onto the main concourse and into the crowd with an outpouring of bloodthirsty laughter.
Heart hammering against his breast, Caspar fled into a side street with about a dozen others. It was lined with shops with fresh white walls – since Marienburg was forever being rebuilt – that hit Caspar with the sharp odour of wet paint and lime. Caspar sobbed for breath as he hurtled up the gradual climb. He wasn’t accustomed to the exertion, but the screams from behind were coming closer.
Sigmar, he thought, praying to the unfamiliar warrior god of the Empire, spare me.
An older man in front of Caspar stumbled on a barrow filled with pots of lime and ladders that had been abandoned in the path after the attack and he pushed the man aside. He was breathless and weak and in the brief second that their limbs were tangled, Caspar tripped and, with a panicked gasp, spun sideways into a shopfront wall. The fresh plastering where he hit cracked and expelled a rotten meat stench that closed Caspar’s throat as if a corpse had physically reached out from the wall to choke him.
A body had been interred here, Caspar realised. Judging from the smell, more than one. He looked past the panicked mob to the row of freshly whitewashed walls and swallowed.
A lot more.
A pair of arms punched through the wall either side of Caspar’s head and he dropped into a ball under a rain of plaster, squealing as a poorly coordinated hand with grey flesh hanging off its bone tore out the remaining wall from within.
Sigmar spare me, he repeated. Sigmar spare me.
The Norscan stumbled from the tinder ruins of the old Norse Quarter. He wore a bullhide shirt with metal plates sewn in and a cloak with a fur trim that was clotted with gangrenous slime. His beard was coming away in clumps and the face beneath undulated with the passage of maggots. What hair remained was brittle and crisp, and his skin was puckered as if from exposure to intense heat.
Markus Goorman, herald of the merchant privy council, watched dumbstruck as the corpse reached out with coal-black fingers and roughly took the envelope that he had forgotten he was still holding. Black flakes fell from the Norscan’s fingers as he clumsily broke the seal. One split eyeball and one socket that crawled with larvae examined the contents, then the zombie emitted a mournful sigh and drew an axe from his belt.
Mutely, Markus watched as more scorched bodies shambled from the mist.
There were hundreds of them, thousands, and with a collective moan that chilled Markus to his mortal soul, the army of the dead marched on the South Dock to wrest their city from the living.
Count Mundvard closed the Black Tome between shaking hands and stared across the rooftops of Marienburg’s old and wealthy. Flames tracked the paths of the canals, screams rising in their wake like smoke. As he watched, a canalboat caught alight, only to be crushed to kindling a moment later by the collapse of a wine shop. It had been owned by an Estalian family that Mundvard, seeing in that line a potential merchant councillor one day, had nurtured for almost fifty years.
The whole structure sank into the water in a column of sparks. Mundvard ground his teeth. Not since the defeat of Mannfred von Carstein at this city’s walls had he felt anger.
This, however. This was fury.
He turned to Alicia, marble-hard and cold, unmoved by the terror of the bats that flapped around his face.
‘Fetch my armour.’
Noon
From false doorways and forgotten cellars throughout the old city, Marienburg’s dead rose to oppose the Norscan invaders. Skirmishes raged across nearly every street. In Hightower Keep, thousands of skeleton warriors in clinking mail rose from a mass grave to those lost in the Bretonnian occupation of 1597 in order to sally forth and drive the astounded Norscans back to their boats. It was on Suidstrasse however that the main southward push of the Chaos forces met the army of undead in pitched battle.
Before the Bretonnian civil war and the closure of the sea lanes, goods from every corner of the globe had poured in through the South Dock on their way to the markets of Altdorf. The wealth of the world had paved it, if only figuratively, with gold, and tall, brightly painted mansions and offices had risen along its way. Count Mundvard had watched it grow as an expansion of the docks as the city had risen in prominence under his stewardship as a sovereign state – a powerhouse in world trade.
He no longer recognised it.
The proud buildings were riven with varicose lines of black mould, and the highway that only yesterday had been filled with wagoners and bawdy seamen now heaved with warriors. Ranks of Norscans – more disciplined than their berserker reputation gave them credit for – pushed against a resolute cordon of skeletal warriors and zombies. The battle line bulged in the centre. There the strongest and bravest bellowed their war cries in the hope of attracting the blessings of the pestilential champions of decay that fought beside them. In the crush of combat, surrounded by screams and the rattle of bone, it was impossible to distinguish those heavily armoured warriors from the worm-eaten cadavers they waded through.
How could so many lives, so many ambitions and plans, be overturned in such a short time? Chaos, it seemed, was the sunlight in which the night’s dreams were burned away.
Well this, thought Count Mundvard, observing with crossed arms amidst a coterie of acolytes and retainers, is where this anarchy stops. It was an odd feeling to be in armour after so many years and the winged scarlet plate was freckled with rust. He felt immediate, connected to the moment in a way that, for all his influence, he now realised that he had not been in a long time.