In the days that followed, he brushed against death a dozen more times. He was almost discovered twice by armoured patrols. His wounds festered in the dank air, and he passed out from hunger and thirst more than once. He was forced to drink brackish water that made him vomit, and gorge on spoiled grain from plundered storehouses.
Only the amulet kept him alive – the silver seal at his neck that had been imbued with sustaining magic by the magister Tarnus. In the dark of the frigid night, he could feel its aethyric energies warming his chest, staving off the worst of the injuries that threatened to overwhelm him.
A few times, when the sickness raged and despair mounted, he was tempted to cast it aside. As fever raged thickly through his mind, tormenting him with visions of the laughing vampire lord, he listened to the voices that echoed within.
You do not deserve to live. You were slain, and now only prolong the agony. Let it go! Give it up!
He grasped the chain with sweaty hands, intending to rip it clear. Only weakness prevented him – he could barely lift his arms, let alone break the links.
So he lived. He kept walking, each day a fog of pain and confusion, somehow avoiding the enemy columns as they marched south around him. The enemy’s own contagions helped him, for the rampant vegetation that erupted across the conquered land soon gave ample cover.
Slowly, painfully, he recovered himself. The amulet worked its subtle power, and his body dragged itself back from the edge of death. He was still wracked with pain, and as weak as any of his sickly peasant subjects, but the worst was past.
He no longer entertained thoughts of giving in – that had been the fevers polluting his mind. He no longer considered heading away from the danger. In fragments, his memory came back, and with it his certainty.
Nothing substantial had changed. He was the Emperor. He was alive. His duty was to fight.
With that, and for the first time, Karl Franz’s thoughts turned from survival, to revenge.
ELEVEN
Otto lashed out with his scythe, ripping through the chest of the state trooper and ending his challenge. It had always been an unequal contest – Carroburg had been reduced to little more than rubble, and the only sport remained hunting the last holed-up defenders and rooting them out.
The man tottered for a moment, his legs not getting the message immediately that his heart had been ripped out, before he crashed face-first onto the stone floor. As soon as he did so, a dozen tiny daemon-kin leapt onto the corpse, tearing at it with their teeth and squeaking like excitable kittens.
Otto watched them indulgently. Twenty more corpses lay prone around the basement of the old brewery, all of them leaking guts onto the stone flags where the scythe had whirled. Their bodies would be dragged off at some point and added to the vast cauldrons simmering in Carroburg’s old town square. The army had to eat.
As he gathered his breath, Otto reflected coolly on the futility of opposing powers such as his. The fall of Carroburg had been achieved with almost embarrassing ease. Marienburg, a city over three times the size, had not been much more arduous. Perhaps the Empire had finally lost its spine. Perhaps there were no more mortals truly capable of standing against the destiny that, in truth, had always been theirs.
A frog-like daemon the size of Otto’s fist pounced onto the state trooper’s face and started to suck the eyes from their sockets.
‘Greedy, o little one!’ laughed Otto, feeling a wave of affection for it.
He watched it feed for a while, before turning from the scene of slaughter and retracing his steps up a long, winding stair. The brewery building he was in was a towering edifice of many levels, and the resistance there had been stouter than almost anywhere else in Carroburg.
The men of the Empire value their beer, Otto mused, as he clambered methodically towards the top level, his scythe-blade dripping over his shoulder as he went.
From outside the thick brewery walls, he heard the ongoing crash and thud of Ghurk’s rampage through the town’s shabbier regions. There were still morsels of living flesh to be found in some of the hidden pockets, and his corpulent brother’s hunger knew no limits.
He would have made his mother proud.
After a long haul, Otto reached the summit and entered a large vaulted chamber. Once it had been lit by rows of tall mullioned windows under a high ceiling, though now the windows were all smashed and the roof sagged. Great copper kettles stood on the tiled floor, each one capable of holding hundreds of gallons. A thick slime of grease and bloody lumps churned and bumped in them now, boiling amid a soup of altogether nastier fluids.
Otto sniffed deeply, appreciating the complex fug of aromas. He could have spent whole days in that place, revelling in the creations his brother had painstakingly piped and funnelled together, if only time allowed. Already, though, the appeal of Carroburg was beginning to wane, and the need to keep moving was making him impatient.
‘Where are you, o my brother?’ Otto called out, unable to see the far end of the chamber through the clouds of steam.
‘Here, o my sibling!’ Ethrac replied from the far side of the largest of the kettles, his voice muffled from chewing.
Otto sauntered over to him, noting the elaborate array of tubes that had been strung between the old brewery’s impressive range of glass vials. ‘What keeps you busy here?’ he asked. ‘Must be on the move soon.’
‘Come,’ said Ethrac, beckoning Otto over to where he stirred a thick slop of acrid matter. ‘This was worth the effort. We are far from home now, and need all the help we can get.’
Otto joined him at the cauldron’s edge. Ethrac mumbled a few incantations, and shook his bell-staff over the liquid. The cauldron’s contents popped and seethed, sending a lumpy lip of froth over the edge. At the very centre, shapes began to shimmer into life.
‘Observe our cousins,’ said Ethrac eagerly. ‘We are not alone.’
For a few moments, Otto struggled to see what he was being shown. The cauldron’s contents morphed into bubbling shapes, like wedges of the moss that had brought the Reik to a standstill. Then he understood – he saw the wriggling path of rivers, and the crumpled mounds of mountains. He was looking at a map, albeit one that fizzed like molten metal on the forge.
At the centre lay the object of their march – the city of Altdorf, clustered in a wobbling series of towers by the shore of a trembling Reik. Otto peered closer, leaning low over the cauldron.
‘Do not break the water!’ snapped Ethrac. ‘Ignore the city. It is the others I will show you.’
He extended his clawed fingers over the vista, and it began to zoom out. Forests and mountains swept into view, all of them picked out by the foaming bubbles of Ethrac’s sorcery.
‘We were three, when we set off,’ said Ethrac, pulling the portal expertly. ‘Autus Brine, Lord of Tentacles, hacks his way through the Drakwald, slaying the greenskin as he comes.’
As Ethrac spoke, Otto made out a long wound in the vast face of the forest. It might have been his imagination, but he thought he even saw tiny figures crashing their way through the thick foliage.
‘Is that–?’ he began, but Ethrac shushed him impatiently.
‘He has been slowed, but he picks up his pace now. He brings the Harbinger with him. You know of this?’
‘Who is it?’
‘A shaman. Beast-kind.’
Otto wrinkled his nose in distaste. ‘Reduced to such. Brine will be angry.’
Ethrac chuckled. ‘Allies are allies. They make a good pace now. The Drakwald is emptied, and they tear south with haste.’ The scope of the cauldron’s roving eye switched east, passing over more overabundant tracts of deep forest. ‘And the third of all – the Tallyman himself.’