Helborg drew his sword. ‘You know what this is!’ he said, brandishing the blade before them. ‘This is the Sword of Vengeance, the Klingerach, and it has drunk the blood of the faithless across every province in the realm. I have driven you hard, and I know the burden has been heavy, but now the Sword of Vengeance marches to war, and you will march with it.’
He lifted the sacred runefang towards the empty altar. Ghal Maraz may have been missing, but his own weapon was ancient enough to honour the sacred space.
‘And so, on this day, when the fates converge on Altdorf and we become the fulcrum of the war to end all wars, I pledge this,’ he swore, feeling the lines of blood trickle down his neck. ‘I will take no backward step. I will not retreat, I will not cower, I will not relent. I will fight. I will fight for this place with every breath and with every drop of blood in my body. And if the world is to end and if all is to be cast in the fire, then I will die in the service of the Empire as I have lived, as a warrior.’
He raised the sword high.
‘For the Empire!’ he roared.
As one, the assembled warriors raised their own weapons towards the altar.
The Empire! they cried in unison, and the massed voices soared into the dome above, echoing in fractured harmony. The Empire! For Karl Franz!
Helborg looked at them all, his blood pumping. They were as ready as they would ever be, each of them filled with the zeal of combat. This was what made the Empire great – that, for all its folly and corruption, when the storm broke they had never refused the challenge.
‘Now then,’ he snarled, feeling the dark swell of battle-lust throbbing through him. ‘The time for words and prayers is over. Take your positions, and may Sigmar guide your blades.’
FIFTEEN
More orcs came over the mountains after the first gang, jogging in loose bands, their maws drooling and their eyes rimmed with madness and fatigue. Every time they were dispatched, another herd would follow, not in huge numbers, but enough to slow the Bretonnians further.
The knights rode in full battle-gear all the time, keeping lances to hand and changing horses often. Snow began to fall, dusting the bare rock with a grey slush that made the horses’ hooves skid and slip, and they lost more precious steeds and men during the vicious, short-lived brawls.
‘They just run onto our blades,’ Jhared remarked. ‘It is as if...’
They no longer wish to live. Leoncoeur could have finished the sentence for him. That, beyond all he had seen since the rise of Mallobaude, filled his heart with foreboding. An orc was a crucible of nature’s wrath, a furious avatar of martial excess. They lived to fight, to scrap, to roar out their feral abandon into the world as they tore it apart. An orc feared nothing.
And yet now they were broken. Just as Jhared said, they stumbled blindly into combat, going through the motions in a kind of dumb rehearsal of their old terrible glory. For the first time in his life, Leoncoeur took no pleasure in slaying them. It began to seem... cruel.
The series of skirmishes slowed their passage through Axebite Pass, but did not halt it. Leoncoeur gave the column no respite, and they trudged on through the swirling, snow-laced squalls. Peasants who succumbed to the grinding cold were left where they fell, and the baggage train became steadily more and more undermanned. Soon they would have scarce enough hands to keep the carts rolling and the teams of warhorses guarded, but the pace never slackened.
Eventually, they cleared the worst of the bitter high path, and the road began to snake downhill again. The vast peaks of the Grey Mountains still rose impossibly high above them, their distant heads blocked by thick cloud, but the hardest portion of the traverse was over. The knights began to pick their way down the gravelly paths of scree and boulders, going carefully lest more horses go lame.
The purity of the high airs soon collapsed once more into the thick filth they had breathed in Bretonnia, except it was far, far worse on the northern side of the range. On the second day of the descent, the vanguard rounded a tight bend in a narrow gorge, and beheld for the first time the land beyond the mountains.
Barring their path a few dozen yards away was a thick snarl of tangled briars. Beyond that lay a seething glut of vines and throttle-weeds, all gently moving as if propelled by intelligences of their own. Trees studded the congested road, looking like they had sprouted from the living rock just moments ago, their gnarled roots frozen onto the cracked stone and their crowns gasping for air and light.
From his vantage at the head of the column, Leoncoeur could see that the thick undergrowth extended for miles. It ran away from them, close-bound and endless. To their right reared the old fortress of Helmgart, once a mighty citadel, but now abandoned to the clutching vines, its walls crumbled and its keep hollow. It looked like it had been empty for weeks.
Leoncoeur sensed the dismay from the warriors around him. The way was blocked, and it would take days to hack through just a tithe of it. The pegasi would soar above it all, of course, but they were merely the spear-tip of his force.
Leoncoeur whispered an order and his horse walked on, approaching the first clumps of moss that marred the stony path. As the rank wall of growths neared, he smelled the over-sweet stench of fermenting fruit.
This is the spawn of corruption, he mused, watching the polyps flex and swell under his mount’s hooves. If it comes from magic, it can be dispelled with magic.
To the left of the path, an ice-white cataract plunged down the mountainside, swollen from the storms in the peaks above. It remained pure when all around it was foetid. Leoncoeur halted before it, remembering the words of the Lady.
Look for me in pure waters.
The white river ran on ahead of him, foaming in its narrow course and throwing up a fine spray. Far ahead, it plunged under the shadows of the trees, hissing as if angered by the contagions around it.
Leoncoeur drew his blade, stained from greenskin blood, and held it high.
‘By the Lady we march!’ he cried. ‘And by Her grace will all taint be cleansed from the world!’
His warriors remained at a distance, unsure. They had been sorely tested by the passage of the pass, and Leoncoeur was not so deaf that he had not heard the mutterings of discontent. They had been promised glorious battle, not an endless slog through poison-vines.
They would need to be reminded just who they served.
Leoncoeur pointed his sword towards the river, holding the tip just above the gurgling surface. ‘They have not removed you from the waters just yet, my queen,’ he murmured. ‘I can sense your power here, just as it was in Couronne. Their faith wavers. I beseech you, humbly, restore it.’
Nothing happened. The rain started up again, drizzling down from the grey sky and making the standards heavy. The thick filigree of branches and vines seemed to tighten, drawing across the path ahead in a heavy wall of interlocking boughs.
Leoncoeur held his weapon in place, and closed his eyes. What do you demand of me, Lady? I have already pledged everything. What is there left?
He saw her then, in his mind, just as she had been in Bretonnia. If anything, her slender face seemed even more careworn.