With a stab of anger he bolstered the battle line with freshly fallen warriors, delighting in the barbarians’ horrified cries as their own dead rose against them. A pulse of will quickened stiff muscles and hardened bone and Mundvard watched with bared fangs as the Norscan push came to a standstill. He was tireless and the dead unlimited – a stalemate would end only one way.
The certain outcome left his blood still hot, his fury strangely unfulfilled. He knew he should have limited his intervention to the reinforcement of his lines, let the inevitable play out, but for once in his long and circumspect unlife the voice of reason found itself appealing to a dead heart.
There was no victory to be had here. Too much had already been destroyed, catspaws he had cultivated over generations slaughtered, and with the clarity of prescience he saw the future: a city shattered and leaderless, an Empire on its border that had waited seventy years to bring its wayward province to heel. He saw witch hunts, reckoners of the Imperial treasury in every counting house, the all-powerful merchant companies brought firmly under the yoke of the house of Wilhelm. He could win a crushing victory here and still be set back another five hundred years.
Mundvard extended a hand towards the battle line and turned his palm up. Anger burgeoned into power, black eddies swirling around his arm. Then he clenched his fist with a snarl and the road split in two with a calamitous crack that broke the Norscan ranks and sent them reeling backwards. Mundvard voiced a command and the buildings shuddered, the fissure emitting an existential scream before ejecting a legion of rabid, inhuman spirits that tore into the terrified Norscans from below.
‘Too much,’ moaned Alicia von Untervald. While Mundvard worked his magicks to bolster their forces, the rest of his coterie were engaged in countering the enemy’s sorcerers. His consort’s face was drawn with the effort, fingers twitching like divining rods attuned to the flows of the aethyr, and she had until now been bewitchingly silent. ‘You will draw attention.’
Good, thought Mundvard as the stones underfoot began to rattle and the water to churn.
He pushed his hands towards the river, then tucked them into his chest and strained as if to raise a great weight. The crimson waters frothed white and the Norscans’ longships began to groan. He hoped the Chaos warlord would come for him. Mundvard wanted to see the look on the plague-dog’s face as he tore its head from its neck with his bare hands and drank.
The vampire bared his fangs as dark energy flashed before his pallid eyes.
He had only just started.
They would learn why even Mannfred von Carstein had once seen fit to dub him Mundvard the Cruel.
Every sailor had his own tale of the South Dock beast, a winged horror – by some accounts, at least – that was rumoured to roost amidst the sunken wrecks at the bottom of the Rijk and to feast upon those who defied the Master of Shadows.
They were good and grisly tales. And every word was true.
The terrorgheist burst from the river in a foaming pillar of water and splintered longships, flinging out skeletal bat-wings and issuing a scream that hit the docks like the wave of an explosion. Norscans and Chaos warriors alike spasmed and bled from their eyes as their minds were blown apart. Ships bowed away from the monster as the power of its voice filled their sails.
Then the monster beat its wings, air hissing through the bare bones of its jaw as it glided to where the great hulk, Greenwolf, had been run aground. The decking groaned as the monster flapped onto the prow and proceeded to demolish the ship with a furious combination of teeth and claws. Hurling a length of mainmast from its jaws, the terrorgheist issued a frustrated shriek at finding only dead prey and bunched rotten muscles to launch itself into the air once more.
The violent imperative to hunt down the Chaos warlord and rend him limb from limb filled its small, dead mind. It sniffed the air, recovered the trail, and soared towards the scent of battle.
The large warehouse window shattered under the sudden onslaught of sound and burst inwards, showering Alvaro Cazarro and the surviving Verezzians with broken glass. The men screamed, covering their ears as the flying terror beat its wings and made the roof over their head tremble.
‘Out!’ the captain yelled, glass tinkling from his shoulders. He pulled himself from the ground and threw himself through the gaping window just as the ceiling gave way, dropping a tonne of diseased spores onto the storage chamber beneath.
He came up in the alley outside in a coughing fit. Cazarro almost choked on the stink of death and disease. It was as if the air itself had been infected and was slowly dying. The sky seemed to writhe in torment, and the mercenary captain noticed that the noonday sun had been swallowed by a cloud of bats. Their frenetic flapping left the darkness foetid and warm.
The warehouse collapsed slowly from the inside, coughing out a cloud of dust. Cazarro retreated to the other side of the alley as a column of shambling troops in the garb of Erengrad kossars marched silently through the hanging dust. He glanced up as two men in tarnished breastplates brushed glass and mould from their doublets and coughed. Only two – all that remained of the Twenty-Four Ninety-Five. Even the banner of Verezzo had been lost in the rout from the docks. Their eyes were bloodshot, with pupils that seemed far too wide. Their cheeks were pox-marked, their skin laced with black veins. He laid a hand upon his own face, and brushed numb and blistered flesh.
The doomed reality of their situation finally settled. They were not going home. ‘What do we do?’ shouted one of the two between heaving coughs.
‘Fight,’ Cazarro coughed. ‘For the Lion of Verezzo and the honour of Tilea.’ Cazarro drew his cinquedea from its scabbard and thrust the short stabbing sword into the air. He tried to deliver a war cry, but ended up spluttering into the back of his elbow as he staggered from the alley and into the madness of Suidstrasse.
It was like falling into the ocean. The bluffs of tall buildings rose high through the haze of dust and flapping shadows, flanking a turbulent cauldron of death and life. The three men fought with the strength of drowning men, as if, knowing in their hearts that they were the last men of Tilea, they sought vengeance for their own deaths in advance. One went down to an axe across the throat, another was doubled over by a spiked mace that ruined his belly. Cazarro rammed his cinquedea through the Y-shaped split of a Norscan’s barbute helm and emitted a scream that crackled from his lungs. Through a break in the maelstrom, he saw Sergeant Goesling and the Drakwald Greyskins. They were dead. Everyone was dead. Except for those who wanted to kill him. With a cry of despair, Cazarro buried his fist-wide blade into a Norscan’s armpit.
A terrible roar shook the street to its guts and a great cry went up from the Norscans. The dead fought on, unperturbed, but Cazarro looked up to see a hideous mutant beast bull through the Norscan ranks towards the battle line.
‘Glöt!’ the warriors roared, shaking weapons and standards in the air as the beast stormed nearer. ‘Glöt! Glöt!’
Cazarro felt its footfalls through the paving slabs and as the beast finally reached the front rank he realised that this Glöt was not one creature but three. Between the monster’s shoulders rode a hideously obese warrior with a rusted scythe and, sheltered behind his corpulent bulk and cracked armour, a three-armed hunchback whose quivering flesh was surrounded by a halo of flies. This final figure held his crooked frame on its perch with the aid of a staff and wore fluttering green robes, woven with runes seeping with disease and gum that seemed to shut the eye that dared to try and read them.