Herrscher shook his head in disbelief, watching the river-path open up once again. The waters rushed to fill the void, sweeping away the tinder-dry wreckage, and the river cruiser’s deck trembled as the current picked up once more.
The Pale Ladies laughed uproariously, pointing out to one another where the leeches thrashed in the waves, slowly drowning.
Vlad maintained the pressure. There were miles of matted effluent to clear, and the closer they got to Altdorf the worse it would become. ‘They are scared of us,’ he told Herrscher, as his ring boiled and coughed with magic. ‘They did not expect this on their eastern flank – all their prophecies were bound up with mortal men.’
Herrscher nodded slowly. ‘They know we are coming, then.’
‘Of course they do. They will rouse every pestilence against us, just as they always have done, and they will fail, for the dead do not sicken.’ He smiled at the witch hunter. Then he gazed across the deck of his commandeered vessel and smiled at all of his servants. They were so lucky. ‘Nothing will stop us, my friend. We will sweep towards Sigmar’s city like the cold wind over graves, and when we arrive they will see just how badly they have miscalculated by ignoring the scions of Sylvania.’
‘Who, lord?’ asked Herrscher. ‘The corrupted, or the mortal?’
‘In time, both,’ said Vlad evenly, resuming his place on the throne and keeping his claw extended before him. ‘But if the Emperor has the sense to take my offer, then all things are possible.’
He settled into position, watching the forest crumple and deteriorate before the waves of grave-magic. The display pleased him, just as it did the Pale Ladies, who still cackled like urchins.
‘Send orders to the barge commanders to row faster,’ he said. ‘I smell the first whiff of rotten fish on the air – the city must be close.’
The greater part of the enemy hosts had already moved south, but that did not make the north safe.
Deathclaw had partially recovered from its wounds, but not yet enough to take wing, and so Karl Franz and the griffon remained earthbound and vulnerable. They travelled by night, trusting to the overcast darkness to hide them against the iron-dark earth. The unlocking of ancient Law had freed all manner of foul spirits from their long-established shackles. Ghosts floated across the lurid skies, shrieking in long-forgotten tongues. Cadavers pulled themselves from the ground without the aid of necromancers, and limped off in search of living flesh to gnaw. Splinter warbands from the main Chaos armies roamed the ruined lands, hunting down what little mortal prey remained for food and torture.
Every village Karl Franz passed through was abandoned, its houses empty and its fields standing fallow. Even the fauna had fled, excepting those bloated, dull-eyed mutations that flapped and limped in place of birds and beasts. Deathclaw would kill them, but not eat them. All they had for sustenance were the rotting remains in grain-stores or the trodden-down remnants of bread and pastries in looted taverns.
Karl Franz had long since stopped hoping to meet any survivors. At first, soon after he had rescued the war-griffon, he had entertained dreams of coming across resistance fighters. He would rally them, day by day, and the news would spread. Soon he would find a way to link up with Helborg and Schwarzhelm, who surely still fought on somewhere, and jointly they would take the fight to the invader again. The enemy may have been mighty, but this was his land, and they were his people.
It had become slowly apparent, though, that there were no fighters left. The invaders had driven every one of them away, or killed them all, or had dragged them all into slavery. Every hovel was empty, and every townhouse echoed with silence. Karl Franz trudged through them all, rooting through the remains under the yellow light of Morrslieb, now a mere whisker from fullness.
It was the little things that struck at his heart – the broken looms, the cold anvils, the tin plates half-buried in the straw. He soon realised that he could not have faced any of his subjects, had they still lingered by their cold hearths. He would not have known how to meet their gaze. He was their protector, and he had failed more completely than any Emperor in the annals ever had.
During the day, when he fitfully slept, he would see them come up to him in his dreams, their plague-ravaged faces accusatory.
‘We toiled for you,’ they would say. ‘We cut land from the forest, and scraped crops from it. We built chapels, and armed ourselves, and served in your armies. We looked to you when the winter storms came, or the beasts tore up our fields, or the greenskins broke from the deep wood with blood in their eyes. We would say your name as we reached for our swords. That gave us all the hope we ever had. We would say your name.’
He would wake then, his breathing shallow and his heart pounding. He would lie in the twilight of the cloud-bound day, shivering as his body lay against the cold ground, wishing he had not seen those faces.
We would say your name.
Deathclaw was able to travel for miles without tiring, though his wings still hung broken by his harrowed flanks. Every night, they would break from whatever cover they had found the morning before, and set off. If they found stragglers from the Norscan hordes, they would kill them, and for a few moments the grief would be forgotten in the sudden heart-rush of combat. Karl Franz’s runefang would flash in the dark, wielded by angry hands, and the blood of the Fallen would spill on lands that still hated them.
He knew it could not last. Sooner or later, word of a lone griffon and its rider abroad in the wastes would filter back to whatever dark mind controlled the conquest of the north, and more serious forces would be sent to hunt them down.
Karl Franz found himself hoping for that day to come quickly. Better to die fighting than wither away from starvation, lost and unmourned amid an Empire he had allowed to pass into the hands of its ancient foes. Until then, though, he never stopped searching. He never stopped praying, even though the petitions became steadily bitterer. At the end of each fruitless day, he would kneel against the sickened soil, pressing his knees and fists into the earth, and offer his soul to Sigmar.
‘Anything,’ he would whisper. ‘Any suffering, any pain, just to be worthwhile. To serve again. The runes on my blade remain dark, the sun does not shine. What power remains in your people? Is Ghal Maraz still carried? I would know, surely, if it had passed into darkness.’
Silence. Always silence. He would fall into exhausted sleep with no answers being given, just the skirl of the wind and the stink of the foul woods.
He had lost track of how long it had been since Heffengen. On one particularly cold night, the clouds underlit with yellow-green and distant thunder crackling away in the far south, the two of them crawled along a choked river bed, hugging the shadow of the rising banks. Above them, strange lights played across the heavens, dancing like flames poured from an alchemist’s vial.
Deathclaw suddenly froze, crouching low against the ground. Karl Franz tensed, recognising his steed’s threat-posture, and gripped the hilt of his sword tight.
He sniffed. Experience had taught him it was easier to smell the enemy than see them in the dark. All he could detect was the filmy muck trickling at the bottom of the riverbed.
‘What is it?’ he whispered, reaching up to rub Deathclaw’s neck. ‘What do you sense?’
The griffon’s head rose. Its golden eyes glittered, and it opened its hooked beak. One wing extended, but the broken pinions did not unfurl. With a muffled cry of agony, the creature started to shuffle up the broken riverbank.