‘It is nothing, Zintler,’ he said, pushing himself clear of the wall. He dismissed the servant with a curt wave and started walking. ‘Nothing worth a damn.’
Zintler trotted to keep up. ‘And Martak? Can we do nothing?’
Helborg whirled on the Reikscaptain, fixing him with his hawk-dark eyes. As he did so, the wounds on his cheek spiked with fresh pain.
‘We do what we have to do,’ he snarled. ‘We prepare. We train. We fight the darkness. We never give in. And we do so alone. There is no salvation from outside these walls, Zintler – you understand that? We have everything we are going to be given, and it must suffice.’
He felt the thrill of mania begin to run away from him then, and he tripped over his words. When these dark moods came on him, he felt almost like laughing.
Zintler shrank back, anxiety written on his dutiful features. ‘Just so, my lord. But – forgive me – we are all mortals. There is also need for rest. When did you last take any?’
Helborg’s eyes flared at the impudence. ‘Rest?’ he blurted. ‘Rest? Did Mandred take rest? Did Magnus? Would Schwarzhelm, or Karl Franz?’
He started walking again. He could feel his joints ache, his ribs creak, his wounds leak blood in a thin trickle down his neck.
‘To the walls,’ he croaked, keeping his shoulders back, his neck stiffly upright. ‘Our labours are not yet done, and neither are the stonemasons’. I will see the works for myself, and if they have slackened from the task I will gut them with their own trowels.’
The cauldron overflowed, sending frothy, fatty matter splatting on the stone floor.
Festus stirred more vigorously, knowing the delicate juncture he had reached. He had been working for so long now, so patiently and so carefully that even a minute error now would be more than he could bear. As his flabby body sweated from the fires, the alembics and glassware funnels bubbled violently.
From one of the cages he could hear a woman weeping. Those cages were almost empty now – he would have to find a way to step up procurement before the final stage, which would not be easy. The City Watch was getting vigilant, and he had seen evidence of those damned Shallyans poking their noses around the margins of his domain.
The Shallyans were the only thing Festus truly had anything like fear for. A normal mortal could be so easily corrupted, since their appetites were so typically gross and their fear of sickness so habitually complete. The inhabitants of Altdorf were just like the inhabitants of any other Imperial city – petty, spiteful, grasping and timorous. Being turned into vessels of a greater sickness was the best thing they could possibly have aspired to, not that they ever evinced much gratitude for it.
But the sisters – they were tricky. They did not fear illness. How could they, since they spent their whole lives immersed in it? They did not suffer from gluttony, and they had no crippling fears. They accepted the world for what it was, and felt no need to change it, other than to ease the suffering of those stricken by its more painful aspects.
That, frankly, was perverse, and was just what made the Leechlord shudder. When his work was done here and the Tribulation was complete, Festus knew exactly where he was going and exactly what he was going to do. He could already hear the screams of the sisters as they writhed on the tip of his scythe. He would take his time killing them, one by one, letting them experience the full strength of what they had always denied.
It did not matter how strong or stoical they were – when confronted with the utter inevitability of defeat, they would all crack. They would be lapping up his potions sooner or later, and they would be thankful for it.
He sniffed a slug of mucus up and swallowed. Tiny daemon-kin scurried around at his hooves, licking the drops of yellowish sweat that coursed from his bulging muscles. They were excitable now. They could sense what was in the cauldron, and they knew what it meant.
All along the walls of the subterranean chamber, vials and jars rattled and shivered. The drones of tumour-sized blowflies hummed through every vaulted cavity and undercroft. His realm had spread quickly, and now occupied hundreds of forgotten shafts and pits beneath Altdorf’s foetid ground-level streets.
This was his kingdom, a foretaste of the greater kingdom of contagion to come, but it was still fragile. If he were discovered, if the mortals chose to look beneath their blocked noses and seriously try to track down the source of what ailed them, he might yet be vulnerable.
He stirred harder. Beneath the cauldron’s surface, the dark shape grew ever more solid. A misshapen antler-prong briefly broke the brackish water, before sinking again. A gurgling sigh echoed from underwater, potent enough to make Festus shiver with anticipation.
They were all looking to him. The Glotts, the Tallyman, the Lord of Tentacles, the beasts, the damned and the god-marked – they were all looking to him to unlock the Great Tribulation.
He sweated harder. He was no longer chortling as he worked, and he no longer took any pleasure in his allotted task.
Time was running out. The deathmoon was riding low, and would be full soon. The massed hosts of the Urfather were crashing through a tangled, twisted forest of nightmares, and would be hammering at the gates uncomfortably quickly.
If he failed... if any of them failed...
Festus wiped his forehead. A diminutive toad-creature nipped his foot, and he kicked it irritably away. From the cauldron, a bubbling fountain briefly erupted, but did not sustain.
‘Come on,’ Festus muttered, putting more energy into the endless stirring. ‘Come on...’
FOURTEEN
Martak hung onto the griffon’s neck and gritted his teeth. A range of terrors coursed through him.
This is the realm of birds, he thought grimly. I have no place in it.
It had been easy enough to break into the Menagerie. With the attention of the city locked on the walls and the impending arrival of the enemy, the internal watch had grown slack and undermanned. Martak had slipped into the vast array of pens and cages during the night, using every ounce of his art to placate the creatures that slavered at him from behind iron bars.
Initially he had hoped a Bretonnian pegasus might have been held there – he knew how to ride a horse, and guessed it would be much the same to control one of their winged brethren – but the only creatures capable of flight were the colossal Imperial dragon and the select herd of Karl Franz’s war-griffons. He had not even got close to the dragon before gouts of sulphurous smoke had forced him back, and even he was not boastful enough to think he could master that living furnace of scale and talon – the world would have to be ending around his ears for him to contemplate rousing that.
The griffons were scarce less fearsome, though, rising to over twice the height of a man at the shoulder and with flesh-ripping beaks that curved like scimitars. They all growled and hissed at him as he passed their pens, pawing at the straw beneath them and watching him with beady, unblinking yellow eyes.
In the end, he had selected a russet beast, marginally leaner than the others and with bands of crimson and gold on hawk-like wings. He had held its gaze and whispered words of control and reassurance. It had taken a long time before the griffon was calm enough for him to break the locks and dare enter, and then it still reared up, cawing furiously, and Martak was forced to delve deep into the Lore of Beasts to prevent it clawing his eyes out.