It was already over. In the space of just a few hours, one of the oldest and proudest garrisons in the Empire had been overrun. Blucher’s fear was replaced by a deadening sense of shame. They should have done better. They should have fought harder.
By then, the behemoth was nearly upon him. Blucher cast his pistol aside and reached for a short sword, staring up at the monster as it loomed over him. As he did so, he saw two twisted figures crouching on the beast’s shoulders, one in dirty robes and carrying a bell-bearing staff, the other wielding a scythe. Neither of them seemed to have noticed him – they were both absorbed in the carnage bursting out all across the reeling citadel.
‘This is not the end!’ cried Blucher, holding his blade as firmly as he could. ‘The Emperor will have his vengeance! Sigmar protects the faithful! The fate of the fallen is–’
His tirade was cut off by a single down-stomp of the monster’s hoof. His body was smashed into the stone, crushed into a bloody pulp as the earth beneath was shivered into scree.
Atop Ghurk’s shoulder, Ethrac paused and turned to his brother. ‘Did you hear something?’ he asked.
Otto was in a frenzy of war-lust, barely sensible to anything outside his own world of slaughter. His red-rimmed eyes sparkled with delight as he surveyed the volume of destruction around him. ‘Hear what, o my brother?’ he asked, absently.
‘Never mind it,’ muttered Ethrac, preparing the next phase of the noxious deluge that would rip the roofs from the towers and expose the last of the cowering defenders within. ‘Press on, Ghurk. Break and shatter, snap and wither.’
Ghurk barked with enthusiasm, too enraptured with the joy of destruction even to scrape the remains of his last kill up to his mouth. Turning cumbersomely, he swayed drunkenly towards the pinnacles of Carroburg.
The sky above them lanced with flashes of green, exposing the shimmer-pattern of daemons in the air. All around them, a symphony of screams, flesh-schlicks, ribcage snaps and eyeball-pops swelled in the storm.
The battle was won. Now the true carnage could begin.
Another day dawned over Altdorf, as dank and rotten as all the others. The Reik’s flow had slowed to a grimy halt, and the stagnant waters now lapped at the edges of the streets above the quaysides. Insects multiplied on the filmy surface, and their massed buzzing drowned out even the cries of the merchants on the loading wharfs.
Martak strode down the winding streets through the poor quarter, trying not to slip on the grime-soaked streets. Altdorf’s thoroughfares were filthy places at the best of times, but the endless rain and damp and plague and misery had turned them into little more than rivers of mud. The drenched and half-starved populace shuffled around in the margins, hugging the dripping eaves of the wattle-and-daub townhouses and shivering in the cold.
For Martak, used to the wilds of the Great Forest, the confinement and the stink were especially trying. He had long since given up trying to get used to it, and had actively turned his finely honed sense of smell towards the task of detection. The plagues were being borne by foul winds from the north, that was certain, but there had to be a source within the city as well. Every chaplain of Sigmar was chanting nightly to banish the contagions, and the fact that they had failed suggested either that the power of faith was waning, or a greater power was at work, or both.
There was no shortage of places to look for the plague’s root – the City of Sigmar was built upon a warren of alleys, cesspits, warehouses and thieves’ dens, all of which were suitable nesting places for the Rot. There might be just one source or hundreds – it was impossible to know, not without tearing the entire poor quarter apart, brick by rotting brick.
Ahead of him stood the Temple of Shallya. It had been deliberately placed in the darkest and most impoverished district of the old city, and stood like a shaft of sunlight amid piled-high tenements. Very few inhabitants of Altdorf were free of the fear of being assaulted or pick-pocketed while abroad in that district, but the Sisters of the Goddess lived their lives unmolested in the very heart of the lawless slum-city. Every day they would receive long lines of supplicants, desperate for relief from the panoply of maladies that afflicted them. Since the full onset of the Rot those lines had grown fourfold, and the temple was now permanently besieged by a throng of blistered and scarlet-faced sufferers.
As he neared the temple precincts, Martak pushed them aside, using his staff to drive them from his path.
Sister Margrit, the head of the order in Altdorf, watched him struggle. Her stern, matronly face showed some disapproval as she waited for him at the top of a wide flight of stone stairs. By the time Martak had reached her, he was sweating like a hog in midsummer.
‘Tell me, sister,’ he panted, wiping his greasy forehead, ‘how do you stand it?’
‘Stand what?’ Margrit asked.
‘The smell.’
‘You are not that clean yourself.’
Martak ran his fingers through his clotted beard. ‘True enough. But you know why I’m here.’
Margrit nodded. ‘Come.’
The two of them passed from the crowded courtyard and walked under an open colonnade. Beyond the pillars lay a shaded cloister, free from the worst of the clamour outside. A fountain played amid a knot garden of carefully tended herbal plants. Martak felt like he had stepped into another world, and took a deep breath. The faint tang of corruption still laced the air, but it was less overpowering than outside.
‘It is rare, for one of your kind to come here,’ said Margrit, walking slowly along the cloister paths. ‘Wizards and priests – we have not always seen the world the same way.’
‘Times are changing,’ said Martak. ‘And I’m not a very grand sort of wizard.’
‘You are the Supreme Patriarch.’
Martak winced. ‘Come, you know that means nothing. The Reiksmarshal has more than a dozen better battle wizards on his roster.’
Margrit stopped walking, and regarded him carefully. ‘But they are not here.’
‘No, they are not.’
Margrit considered that. Then she swept a pudgy hand around her, demonstrating what she presided over. ‘We dwell in an island now – a drop of clear water amid a sea of pain. We guard it, and we tend it, but it cannot last forever. Mark it well, my lord. All gardens wither.’
‘Where is the sickness coming from?’ asked Martak. ‘Helborg has his eyes on the walls, on the Great Guns and the Knightly Orders. He looks out from the ramparts, searching for the coming storm, but he is blind to what is happening here. What is the source?’
Margrit smiled sadly. ‘Our masters are military men. What do you expect?’ The smile faded. ‘I cannot tell you where the Rot wells up from. We have made enquiries. The people tell us things, as long as we bandage their sores and listen to their sorrows.’
‘You have nothing?’
‘It comes from the sewers, but that will not help you. There are miles of them down there, and the City Watch does not send its men under the streets.’
‘They might need to.’
‘None would come back.’ Margrit looked at him sympathetically. ‘You don’t spend much time in the city, do you, wild-man? There are things under Altdorf that have lain undisturbed since the time of the old Emperors. Only a fool would venture far down there.’