The Glöttkin hit the undead rank like a steam tank, bones flying asunder as the skeletal warriors were smashed high and wide.
Cazarro was still watching when he felt a blow like a punch to the ribs. He looked down to find a Norscan spear spitting his chest. The warrior twisted the haft. He heard rather than felt his own ribs split and he finally produced a gasp, pulled to his knees as the blade was yanked from his diseased flesh. His eyesight glimmered out as the strength left him, but there was a prickling at the edge of consciousness, something of shadow and terror just waiting for the last spark of life to fade. To the very last Alvaro Cazarro fought the darkness, his mind living just long enough to shiver from the unlife that suffused his dying muscles. The last of the Verezzians, he staggered to his feet to plunge his cinquedea into his killer’s heart and moaned.
Like Marienburg, Cazarro was dead, but his suffering had only just begun.
‘Sewer rats and festering gulls, come!’
Count Mundvard brought his hands together as his entourage retreated like whipped dogs before the onrushing mutant. Let them. He would take retribution with his own hands. Power laced through his fingers and from hand to hand, tracing a shell within that manifested a grinning black skull. The apparition screamed, shattering its magical caul, and then rocketed forwards, leaving a tail of ectoplasm in its wake. The robed hunchback on the mutant’s back pointed his staff at the missile and the skull disintegrated back into the aethyr with a wail.
Mundvard snarled. Here then was the plague-sorcerer at last. A congealed stream of gibberish ran from the mage’s lipless gums and a sickly green aura seeped from the pinnacle of his staff. Mundvard glared at Alicia, but his consort was too busy getting out of the way to work a counterspell. With an intricate sequence of gestures and phrases, Mundvard drove back the light with such vehemence that the staff was almost knocked from the plague-sorcerer’s hands.
‘I fear neither disease nor decay,’ Mundvard roared as the big mutant slowed its charge, blinking in idiot confusion at its master’s hiss of pain. The huge creature flexed its muscles and drooled. The corpulent champion moved protectively in front of the sorcerer and brought up his scythe. With a chuckle, Mundvard turned his gaze to a growing point of blackness in the sky behind the champion’s back. ‘There is nothing in your god’s power to move one such as I.’
The sorcerer placed a steadying hand on the hanging meat of the warrior’s shoulder and turned. As he did so, the terrorgheist dropped out of the sky further up the street, flung wide its wings just before hitting the road and ripping forward with bony claws spread through the Norscans in its path. With a hiss, the sorcerer clutched his staff, that gangrenous glow returning before Mundvard haughtily dispelled it with a wave. He turned to watch his mighty thrall-beast tear through the Norscan ranks. Soon. Soon. Even the mutant giant was a runt by comparison. Too late, Mundvard noticed the sorcerer’s third hand, hidden behind the tumourous mass of boils and rolling eyeballs that hunched the sorcerer’s back and frantically tracing a separate web of arcane symbols.
Count Mundvard bellowed in outrage – that he, the Master of Shadows, should be deceived by such sleight-of-hand – and spat out a counterspell, but it was too late. A nova of yellow-brown mould swallowed the terrorgheist whole and the monster shrieked as decomposition long held in abeyance ran riot: in the span of moments flesh liquefied and fell away, bones turning brown and crumbling. A second later all that fell upon the plague-sorcerer and his retainers was powder.
‘Even bone must become dust,’ spoke the sorcerer in the breathless wheeze of a lanced boil.
Mundvard’s eyes whitened with fury. The sorcerer would die last, and in ways that Mundvard had spent centuries conceiving.
‘Ghurk,’ said the enemy sorcerer, sagging to his haunches and addressing the mutant beast beneath him, who responded with a sonorous belch and a dribble. ‘Otto.’ A grunt from the fat warrior. ‘Get this over with. Then we three brothers can move on, and nuture our own garden of plagues within Altdorf’s walls.’
The creature, Ghurk, lumbered forward and lashed out with its hawser-like arm while Otto struck down with his rusted scythe. Mundvard’s lip curled as he danced easily from the swollen goliath’s blind swipe, then parried the scythe as though it had been swung by a centenarian knight and cut a riposte across Ghurk’s neck that sent pus dribbling through the folds of its chest. The stench would have poleaxed an orc, but with neither the need to breathe nor a stomach to upset Mundvard ignored it. Otto struck again and again with strength enough to cut down a barded warhorse, but Mundvard was swift as a viper and cagey as an old fox. He fought as he had always lived – with guile and forethought, and instants of subtle incision deliberated several exchanges in advance. Driven by cold-boiling rage the vampire beat through Otto’s guard in a keening blizzard of swordplay, then plunged his blade up to the hilt in Ghurk’s belly. The monster grunted in pain.
‘Suffer,’ Mundvard hissed.
A single tear ran down the mutant’s one, sad-looking eye and Mundvard twisted the blade deeper before wrenching it from the monster’s guts. His cruel laugh became a snarl as a rotten tide of bile and viscera gouted from the wound and slapped him in the face. He spluttered, blinded for just one second before he could twist his head out of the torrent and clear the muck from his eyes. A rusty scythe struck towards his neck. With superhuman speed he twisted, but for the third time in one short day he had seen the danger too late.
Pain as he had forgotten he could still feel exploded in his shoulder. The warrior’s scythe cracked the bone, speared his heart, and tore through the wizened organs that filled his gut.
The vampire sank to the ground with an unbreathing gasp, paralysis creeping through his body from his riven heart
Impossible, he thought. Impossible. His thoughts fractured under a pain he could not vocalise as the plague champion pulled his weapon free. Before he could fall, the monstrous Ghurk wrapped his tentacle limb around the vampire’s chest. Mundvard felt his breastplate buckle and his ribs creak. Desperately, he willed blood to the damaged heart to speed its healing, but he couldn’t so much as blink, and the monster dragged him towards a single eye full of hurt and opened its drooling maw.
It had been human once. Before Chaos had quashed its dreams too.
‘Suffer,’ Ghurk belched.
The huge mutant tightened his grip, then whirled the vampire once overhead and loosed. A foetid wind whipped through Mundvard’s long white hair as he flew. On the road beneath him he saw the army five hundred years in the making collapse as his driving will abandoned them. Then there were no more fighters. He was over water, the unsettled surface whispering and calling and glittering mirthfully with firelight.
The Rijk.
Horror filled him. A stake through the heart could take a vampire’s strength, the sun could claim his life, but the running water would do neither of those things. It was only torture; an evisceration of his very soul.
Count Mundvard summoned the last of his strength to drive a desperate plea into the wind of Death, but no one heard his scream as the water lapped up and took him.