It took a full day for the huge host to pass from the waterfront, through the dead city and out of the ruined eastern gates. As they marched, daemons flickered and wavered in the mournful half-light, hissing and drooling as they danced. All manner of pestilential beasts, from roaches to rats, scuttled under their feet, welling up like oil from the bubbling sewer-grates.
The host was beyond counting. Every soldier in it bore some mark of the Plaguefather, whether merely a pale pallor scored by throbbing rashes, or an entirely changed body, bloated with pox and bursting with mutations. Thick armour plate buckled outward over tumours, and ragged shirts of chainmail barely concealed festering wounds. Some clearly revelled in their diseases, leering as they crunched the bones of mortal men under their boots. Others limped along in agony, their ribcages protruding as they were consumed from the inside.
For hour after hour, the banners swayed past, each one daubed with a fresh sign of pestilence. The army was larger by far than the one that had broken the Bastion. It had been sent south by Archaon, hurled far out into the trackless ocean before sweeping back towards the Empire coastline. Ship after ship had disgorged its contents into Marienburg’s stricken harbour, overwhelming the defenders in a remorseless wave of foul sorcery and dogged blade-work. For many hours the resistance had been heroic, and the fighting had been heavy in the streets.
But the result had never truly been in doubt. Archaon had unleashed his armies on the effete lands of the South in such quantities that even Asavar Kul would have blenched to see them. Two more allied hordes were already grinding their way south, tearing through the Great Forest like blades ripped under the skin. Each one alone was larger than any prior army sent to bring punishment to the unbelieving. Taken together, there could be no stopping them.
The force sent to shatter Marienburg was the mightiest of them all, a tumultuous rabble of pustular, addled, filth-spreading, contagion-fanning glory. As rank after rank trudged east, demolishing the few remaining walls as they went, they were observed by three pairs of eyes.
In the semi-remembered past, those eyes had belonged to mortal triplets, born under the midnight sun of the frozen tundra. Their family name was Glott, though that had meant little at the time and nothing to them now. The eldest, though only by moments, was Otto, who came closest of all of them to being a warrior in the traditional sense – he was a pot-bellied monster with marsh-green flesh and the tripartite marks of the Plaguefather scraped in black ink across his pocked forehead.
Otto stood atop the ruins of the Oesterdock Temple, leaning casually against the broken cupola of the Chapel of Manann. His clammy fingers pressed against the stone, causing mould-spores to spontaneously spider out across it. He laughed throatily, watching his troops lurch and swagger, then reached down for a strip of moss that had sprung up between the bricks of the temple wall. He pressed the wiry fuzz to his slobbering chin in a mockery of an Empire Greatsword’s beard, and grinned.
Ethrac, the second triplet, saw him do it, and rolled his rheumy eyes in disgust. Like his brother, he was a wiry, spare figure, emaciated under blotchy robes of coarse wool. He clutched at a gnarled staff of oak heartwood, desecrated with columns of twisting runes, and picked his way through the rubble of the temple’s roof. As he moved, bronze bells shackled to the staff-tip clanged dully, and flatulent vapours wafted out from the hem of his torn robes. He kicked aside a few clumps of rubble, and spat at them as they tumbled down to the street below.
‘We could have lost this,’ Ethrac muttered.
‘No, we couldn’t,’ said Otto casually, picking flecks of plaster from what remained of the cupola.
Their voices were strange, wet rasps, almost like that of beasts, and filtered through mouths of blackened teeth. When they spoke, they overlapped one another constantly, as if each were just a part of one confused mind.
‘I did not foresee the dead,’ Ethrac said, pausing in his scrabbling search. ‘Why did I not foresee the dead?’
Otto picked at his nostril. ‘Does it matter?’
‘It matters, o my brother. Yes, yes, it matters. We are not seeing everything. There are portents withheld. Why? I do not know. I should be seeing the world turn, the minds of men open. I did not see the dead. I did not see them.’
Just as at Heffengen, the defenders of Marienburg had been bolstered by the sudden intervention of undead warriors, though, just as at Heffengen, the reinforcements had not proved enough to halt the onward march of Chaos. That bothered Ethrac. He had sent tidings north, hoping to warn Archaon’s war council that the Law of Death was proving more mutable than in past ages, and that it posed complications, but he had little hope of any of his messengers arriving alive. The Great Forest was as unforgiving to the damned as it was to the faithful.
‘You should learn to calm yourself,’ said Otto, scratching at a new and beautiful boil that had emerged under his chin. ‘Nothing stands between us and Altdorf now. Nothing of any note, anyway.’
Ethrac shook his bald head impatiently. ‘Does not matter! Mortals do not matter. But something has changed.’ He screwed his eyes into a frown, and the scabby skin of his forehead broke out in bloody cracks. ‘They are rising from the earth like new shoots. Why? Why is the wall between living and dead broken?’
Otto sighed and walked over to his brother. He took Ethrac’s cheeks in both hands and squeezed affectionately. ‘They are desperate, o my brother,’ he whispered. ‘Every witch-rattler between the Great Gate and the Hot Lands is flailing around for something to call up. You know why? Because we are here. They know this is the end. What if a few skeletons are thrown into our path? Do you think they will last longer at the White City than they did here?’
Ethrac nodded reluctantly, some of his agitation subsiding. ‘And there is Festus,’ he murmured. ‘We must not forget him.’
Otto released Ethrac. ‘It has been sewn up, tight as a burst stomach. The Leechlord is with us. Brine is with us, the Tallyman is with us. Stop worrying.’
Ethrac started to root around with his staff again, only half placated. ‘Festus has been working hard. I can smell it from here. Much joy, to see him again.’
Otto walked back over to the edge of the temple ruins. ‘Never forget, my favoured loin-brother, that we are three, and that we have not seen the finest of the Father’s plague-pots yet.’
As he spoke, a vast, rolling mountain of scabrous flesh lumbered into view. As tall as a guilder’s townhouse, the third of the triplets stomped past the teetering shell of the temple. His skin glowed a violent green, as if lit by weird lantern-light. Vast, muscle-thick arms hung, simian-like, from swollen shoulders. One terminated in a long, greasy tentacle that trailed along in the dust behind it. Catching sight of Otto and Ethrac, the monster cracked a wide grin, and a semi-chewed leg dropped from his jaws.
‘Good feasting, o my brother?’ asked Otto, reaching out to stroke the creature’s bald head.
Ghurk, the final triplet, nodded enthusiastically, and more half-chewed body parts slopped from his slack lower jaw. Eating made Ghurk happy, and eating warm human flesh made him even happier. Several hapless victims were still clutched in his clawed hand; some of them still struggling weakly.
Otto took a short run-up, and launched himself from the temple’s edge and into mid-air. He landed heavily on Ghurk’s shoulders, and shuffled into position. Ghurk gurgled with pleasure, and started chewing again.