Martak shrugged, scratching his neck. ‘Wise men have not got us very far. Perhaps fools are needed.’
‘Then take armed men,’ said Margrit, seriously. ‘Take whole bands of them. Flush the tunnels with fire – if you have a Bright magister or two, all the better. I would not venture down beneath the streets with less than a hundred troops at my back.’
‘A hundred,’ said Martak, amused by the thought of this stout, severe-jowled woman leading an expedition into Altdorf’s hidden underbelly. ‘I think you’d need less.’
‘This is just the beginning,’ Margrit warned, starting to walk again. As she went, she trailed a hand along the tops of severely-harvested medicinal herbs. There were not many fresh leaves left. ‘We can feel it growing. Shallya, may She be blessed forever, does not answer us. We have a gifted sister, a young woman from Wurtbad whose power for prophecy and healing is the most powerful I have ever known, and even she hears nothing now.’
‘Why not?’
‘She hears nothing because she dashed her head against the fountain you see over there. Before we got to her, she had polluted the sacred spring with her own blood. She had been sent mad, they tell me. She had seen what was coming, and it turned her mind.’ Margrit looked close to angry tears. ‘She would have been so powerful. She would have done much good.’
Martak halted her, placing his burly hand on her arm. ‘Listen, I have to speak to the Reiksmarshal,’ he said, his gruff voice as soft as he could make it. ‘I will tell him what you told me. He has men. I will tell him we need to purge the sewers, and I will tell him to send no less than a hundred men in each party. Plus a couple of Bright mages, which I can handle.’
Margrit nodded, looking grateful. ‘If you can do that, it would help. We need our health back. If the enemy comes on us now, we will be too weak to man the walls.’
Martak knew the truth of that. As much as Helborg struggled manfully with the thousand tasks at hand, he was blind to the fundamental truth. Altdorf was not like a Reiksguard regiment, full of superbly trained men in the prime of condition – it was home to the weak, the ragged and needy. They were being given nothing, and in the final test that would cost them.
‘Lord Patriarch, tell me one thing,’ said Margrit, glancing up at him with an odd expression in her eyes. ‘We were told the Emperor will return. If he were here, I could believe that the storm will pass, but the days go by and we hear nothing. Have you any news to give me?’
Martak looked at her for a long time. They were all under strict instructions to maintain the fiction that Karl Franz was on his way south, riding at the head of his armies with Schwarzhelm at his side. Helborg had been insistent on it, fearing uncontrollable panic if the truth of his loss got out.
Martak understood the strategy. He saw the need for it. Still, the falsehood stuck in his craw.
‘You want the truth?’ he asked, hoping to evade giving an answer.
Margrit’s gaze never wavered. ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘I need to know.’
Martak thought of his dreams. They had grown more vivid with every night, and he had seen the Emperor in them all, alone and cast adrift in the benighted north.
Then he thought of the young sister, smashing her skull against the stone fountain, all through despair. He thought of the deathly faces in the streets outside, all desperate for something to believe in. If the gods had deserted them, then all they had was each other. In the end, perhaps the stories now told by the city’s generals were as good as those once told by its priests.
‘He will return, sister,’ Martak told her, doing his best to smile. ‘He is the Empire. In the hour of greatest need, how could he not be here?’
All across the north, the campfires still burned.
A frigid gale howled over the blasted lands, tearing straight from conquered Kislev across the shattered provinces of Ostland and the Ostermark. The settlements of men in those places were now no more than smouldering mazes of half-walls and gaping lintels, their inhabitants slain or enslaved. Nightmare creatures limped across the far horizon, some as tall as watchtowers and carrying heavy crowns of antlers on their bulbous, swaggering necks. Thunder cracked across an uneasy horizon, echoing with the half-heard laughter of glowering gods.
The realm of dreams was expanding. Spreading like a cancer in the wake of its victorious armies, the warping misrule of the Realm of Chaos was gradually twisting and carving through the Realm of Nature. Rivers dried up, or turned to blood, or boiled into poisonous smog. Birds fell from the sky to roll blindly in the muck, and creatures of the earth sprouted wings and flapped around in pathetic confusion.
In the wake of the great victory, Heffengen had been plundered down to the bone. The armies of Chaos, freed from the attentions of the undead and with the Empire forces destroyed, had been given free rein to sack the city, and had applied themselves with gusto. Very little now remained, save the long rows of gibbets and wheels that lined the road south, each bearing the broken, twitching corpse of a hapless defender. The Revesnecht still ran red, though the cloying mats of greymoss and throttlevine had already started to knit together from its silty banks, choking what flow remained.
It had been that thirst for plunder that had saved him. For a long time he had lain insensible at the base of a pile of rotting bodies. The course of battle, as confused and blind as it ever was, had raged about him, driving south and fixing on the walled prize of living flesh. If fate had been otherwise, he would have been trampled by cloven hooves, his neck broken and his spine crushed into the mud.
But the fates had not abandoned him entirely. A huge, bloat-bellied champion had seen him come down and had charged over to finish him off. A massed volley of musket-shot had felled the champion before he could swing his cleaver, just as the barrages mowed down a whole warband of marauders on the charge. Their bodies thunked into the mire, overlapping one another in a bloody carpet of limp flesh.
The champion had been the one to preserve him, masking his prone body with a heavy, rotten corpse. The sweep and ebb of battle had passed over them both, tearing south with all its grinding momentum, leaving behind the corpse-gardens of the dead and dying.
He awoke much later, while the broken walls of Heffengen still rang with the screams of the captured and the battlefield itself had not yet been plundered of its riches. He pushed the still-warm cadaver from him, grunting from the pain as his cracked ribs creaked. He dragged himself out from under its shadow, feeling the sharp pang of a broken arm. His helm had gone, lost on the dreadful plummet earthwards. For an awful moment he thought Drachenzahn had gone as well, then he saw the hilt protruding from beneath the doubled-back arms of a slain Norscan.
Hobbling to his feet, he took up the blade again. If the weapon’s spirit recognised him, it gave no sign – the rune-etched steel remained blank and lifeless.
After that he trudged north, knowing the danger, grateful for the night’s cold shadows as they stole across the fields of slaughter. He found a ditch to shelter in, part-masked by brambles and with a sliver of blood-foul water at its base. He shivered there for the rest of the night, plagued by the howls and shrieks of raucous joy, parched and yet unable to drink.
Karl Franz, Sigmar’s Heir, lay shuddering in the filth, listening to the sounds of Heffengen’s agony. Only as the eastern sky brightened to a death-grey dawn did he creep forth again, trusting that the aftermath of the night’s debaucheries would give him some cover. He limped north again, then west, skirting the city and hugging the sparse patches of undergrowth that still remained.