Across the whole, drab vista, the rain continued to fall, as if the flood could bear away the filth that had infected Heffengen. No natural rain could wash such plagues clean, though, and the sodden earth reeked from it, steaming in the cold as a thousand new virulences incubated in every bloody puddle.
The Bastion was broken. The Empire had been routed across its northern borders, exposing the long flank of the Great Forest to attack. Not since the days of the Great War had the wounds been so deep, so complete. Even in those dark times, there had been an Emperor to rally the free races and contest the Dark Gods.
Now there was nothing, and the winds of magic were already racing. Not for nothing did men say, in what little time of sunlight and happiness remained to them, that the end of all things had truly begun. Not in Praag, nor in Marienburg, but in Heffengen – the dank and rain-swept battlefield where Karl Franz, greatest statesman of the Old World, had fallen at last.
FIVE
Helborg woke into a world of agony.
He reached up with a shaking hand, pressing cautiously against the seared flesh of his raked cheek, and even his old warrior’s face winced as the spikes of pain shot through him. He tried to rise, and a thousand other wounds flared up. After two failed attempts, he finally pushed himself up onto his elbows, and looked around him.
He was in a canvas tent, the walls streaked with mud and heavy with rainwater. He had been placed on a low bunk of rotten wooden spars, little better than wallowing on the sodden ground itself. From outside the tent he could hear the low, gruff voices of soldiers.
He reached for his sword, but it was gone. With a jaw-clenched grunt, he sat up fully on the bunk and swung his legs over the edge. His armour was gone, too – he was wearing his gambeson, covered in a mud-stained cloak.
He could not make out what the voices outside the tent were saying – it might have been Reikspiel, it might not. He searched around him for something to use as a weapon.
As he did so, memories of the final combat with the daemon flashed back into his mind. He remembered the stench of it, spilling from the wide, grinning mouth that had hung over him at the end.
I should be dead, he mused to himself. Why am I even breathing?
Then he remembered the clarion calls of the dead, and a shudder ran through his ravaged body. If they had taken him, then the outlook was even bleaker. The servants of the Fallen Gods might torture their prey before death, but at least death would come at last. If he were in the hands of the grave-cheaters then the agony would last forever.
The entrance flaps of the tent stirred, and Helborg searched for something to grasp. The tent was empty, and so he grabbed one of the rotten ends of a bunk-spar and wrenched it free. Brandishing it as a makeshift club, he prepared himself to fight again.
The canvas was pushed aside, and Preceptor Hienrich von Kleistervoll limped inside.
‘Awake then, my lord,’ he observed, bowing.
Helborg relaxed. As he did so, he felt a trickle of blood down his ribs. His wounds had opened. ‘Preceptor,’ he said, discarding the spar. ‘Where are we?’
Von Kleistervoll looked terrible. His beard was a matted tangle, and his face was purple from bruising. He was still in his armour, but the plate was dented and scored. The Reiksguard emblem still hung from his shoulders on what remained of his tunic, soiled by the wine-dark stains of old blood.
‘Ten miles south of Heffengen,’ von Kleistervoll said grimly. ‘Can you walk? If you can, I will show you.’
Helborg was not sure if he could reliably stand, but he brushed his preceptor’s proffered arm away brusquely and limped past him into the open.
The sky was as dark as river mud. A bone-chilling wind skirled out of the north, smelling of ploughed earth and rust. Helborg shivered involuntarily, and pushed up the collar of his gambeson tunic.
Ahead of him, over a bleak field of bare earth, men were moving. They limped and shuffled, many on crutches or carrying the weight of their companions. Some still had their weapons, many did not. All of them had the grey faces of the defeated, staggering away from the carnage with what little breath remained in their cold-torn bodies.
Helborg watched the long column trudge along. So different from the bright-coloured infantry squares that had marched up to Heffengen, their halberds raised in regimented lines. There could not have been more than a thousand in the column, perhaps fewer.
Von Kleistervoll drew alongside him. The preceptor’s breathing rattled as he drew it in.
‘This is all we retrieved from the Reiklander front,’ he said. ‘Some of Talb’s men, too. Mecke was driven west. No idea where he ended up.
‘Schwarzhelm?’
‘He was still fighting at the end. Huss too, and the boy-warrior. They dragged together what they could and headed east.’
Helborg hesitated. ‘And the Emperor?’
Von Kleistervoll’s stony visage, scabbed with black, did not flicker. ‘You did not see it?’
Helborg could not remember. His last hours of awareness were like a fever-dream, jumbled in his mind. He thought he recalled fighting alongside Ludwig, dragging their heavy blades through waves of enemy daemon-kin, but perhaps that was just his damaged imagination.
He dimly remembered a skeletal dragon breaking the clouds, a nightmare of splayed bone and tattered wings. He recalled a rider in crimson armour, surrounded by spears of aethyr-lightning. He saw the grin of the daemon again, bubbling with the froth of madness. All of the images overlapped one another, fusing into a tableau of fractured confusion.
‘Could he have survived?’ Helborg pressed.
‘The day was lost,’ said von Kleistervoll. ‘If we had stayed a moment longer... I do not know. We could not remain.’ The preceptor’s voice was strained. ‘You were wounded, Huss had been driven east...’
‘I understand,’ said Helborg. Von Kleistervoll was a seasoned fighter and knew his warcraft – if he had judged that retreat was the only option, no doubt he had been correct. ‘What are your plans?’
‘You gave the order, lord: Altdorf, with all haste. The enemy tightens its grip on the north, fighting with what remains of the living dead over the ruins. Heffengen is no place for mortal men now – we must save what remains.’
Helborg remembered his final words with Karl Franz.
Altdorf is the key. It always has been.
He pulled the ragged cloak around him. He would have to don armour again, to find a steed strong enough to bear him. The men needed a leader, someone who looked like a leader.
‘My sword?’ he asked.
Von Kleistervoll smiled, and gestured towards a line of heavy wagons struggling through the mud. ‘We have it, and your battle-plate. Now that you are restored to health, the runefang will lead the army once more.’
Now that you are restored to health. Helborg felt hollowed-out, his body shriven and his mind tortured. He was sweating even in the cold, and the hot itch of blood under his clothes grew worse. ‘I saw him, preceptor,’ he murmured, watching as the grim procession of wounded and bereft wound its way past. ‘A legend from the past, standing under the world’s sun. What times are these, when the princes of the dead walk among us?’
Von Kleistervoll looked at him doubtfully. He did not know to whom Helborg was referring. There was no surprise in that – so many horrors had assailed them over the past few months that it had become hard to choose between them.