A dull boom rang out, making the earth shake, and plumes of emerald lightning lanced upward, shooting like geysers in the gathering dark.
Margrit swallowed, trying to remember the words of the Litany Against the Corruption of the Body. She knew, perhaps better than anyone else in the city, just what strain of magic had been unleashed in the depths of the city. It had been there for months, cradling slowly, growing like an obscene child in the dripping sewers, and now it had been birthed under the light of Morrslieb and with the hosts of Ruin camped outside the walls.
‘Blessed Mother,’ Margrit whispered, watching the column lash and unfurl, ‘preserve us all.’
Ethrac was the first to see it.
‘There it is!’ he shrieked, jumping up from his long-held crouch and nearly losing his position on Ghurk’s back. ‘He has done it!’
Otto roused from a half-sleep, in which dreams of sucking the marrow from living victims had been making him salivate, and looked blearily at his brother. ‘Who has done what?’
Ethrac cracked him over the head with his staff, making the bells chime. ‘Festus! His spell breaks!’
Otto clambered to his feet, rubbing his forehead absently, trying to see what the fuss was about.
Then he did. Altdorf lay under the night’s thick cover, lit up along its walls by a thousand grimy lanterns. The towers soared darkly into the void, black on black, each crowned by a slender tiled roof. Just as before, he was struck by the sheer vastness of it, like a mound of rotting fruit ready for gnawing on.
The roofs were overhung by lines of smoke, just as always, except that one of them was glowing green and curling like burning parchment edges. It towered over the city, rearing up like a vast and vengeful giant, swelling and bloating into flickering excess. Its green light, as gloriously lurid as anything Otto had witnessed, sent shadows leaping across the landscape. Half-defined faces rose and sank in the smoke, each one contorted into mutating expressions of agony and misery.
‘It is beautiful,’ he murmured, absently letting his hand fall to his scythe-stave.
A low rumble from below told him that Ghurk agreed. The triplets stood, lost in admiration, as the first mark of Festus’s Great Tribulation began.
‘I can feel the aethyr bending,’ said Ethrac appreciatively. ‘He has been working on this for a long time.’
Otto chuckled darkly. ‘He enjoys his labours.’
‘As do we all.’
The column continued to grow. The clouds above the city responded, sending down tendrils like stalactites, and soon a vortex began to churn over the battlements, glowing and flickering like embers. The growl of thunder rocked the valley, though this time it was not the world’s elements that stirred. Lightning snapped down from tormented clouds, flooding more emerald light over the sacrificial city.
‘It is fitting, is it not?’ mused Ethrac. ‘That the first strike should be self-inflicted? The City of Sigmar will gnaw its own innards out, and all before the first standard is lifted.’
Otto was barely paying attention. The column of smoke was twisting like a tornado, only far vaster and slower, rotating ominously as it gathered girth and momentum. The rain started up again, as if triggered by the pillar of aethyr-energy churning up out of the city’s innards. Droplets pinged and tumbled down Ghurk’s vast bulk.
A rumble drummed across the land, lower than the thunder, like the unsteady foundations of the world grating together. The rain picked up in intensity, sheeting down in thick, viscous gobbets of slime.
Otto lifted his head and grinned, feeling cool mucus run down his cracked features.
‘And do you see them?’ asked Ethrac, his bony face twisted into a look of ecstasy. ‘The others? Look out, o my brother, and observe what the beacon has summoned.’
Otto blinked the slime from his eyes and peered out into the gloom. The sun was nothing more than a red glow in the far west, but all across the northern horizon, crimson pinpricks were emerging from the forest. First a few dozen, then hundreds, then thousands. ‘I see it, o my brother,’ he said. ‘That is the Lord of Tentacles, and the scions of the beast-forest. So many! So, so many.’
‘And, though you do not see it yet, Epidemius is closing from the east. The river will be blocked from both compass points.’ Ethrac reached down to playfully tug at Ghurk’s lone eyebrow. ‘You will be feasting on live flesh again soon, great one!’
Ghurk chortled eagerly, and his shoulders rolled with mirth.
Over Altdorf, the column of green fire burst into ever more violent life, revealing a twisting helix of luminescent power coursing at its heart. The heavens responded, and the storm overhead rotated faster in sympathy, a vast movement that spread out over the entire forest.
Altdorf was now the fulcrum on which the heavens themselves turned. As the thunder ramped up and the slime-rain fell ever more heavily, a delicious air of terror lodged firmly over the Reik, seeping up from the slime of the earth and bleeding into the churn of the ruptured skies. The column of green fire punched a hole through the heart of the swirling vortex, fully exposing the damaged face of Morrslieb, hanging at the very heart of the heavens like a severed tumour set among the stars.
‘My people!’ Otto cried out, turning from his vantage to face the colossal army that had waited for so long within sight of the prize, held in place by the triplets’ peerless command. Ranks of grizzled Norscans, wild Skaelings, gurning lesser daemons, plague-afflicted mortals and corrupted beast-mutants lifted up their sore-pocked faces and waited for the order. A thousand banners were hoisted into the dribbling rain, each one marked with a different aspect of the Urfather. Cleavers were pulled from leather slip-cases, mauls unhooked from chains, blunt-bladed swords from human-hide sheaths. ‘The sign has been given!’
Otto raised one arm, holding his scythe aloft in triumph. The heavens responded with a violent crack, and green lightning exposed him in sudden vividness, his mutated face broken by a manic grin of pure battle-lust. ‘You have waited long enough! The deathmoon swells full, the Tribulation has begun. Now for the final neck to snap!’
A guttural snarling broke out from the limitless hordes, and they began to shuffle forward, impatient for the command.
Otto laughed out loud, and lowered his scythe towards the epicentre of the maelstrom.
‘To the gates!’ he commanded.
Helborg stood with Zintler on the towering summit of the North Gate, overlooking the walls below. The two of them were surrounded by a twenty-strong detachment of Reiksguard, as well as the usual panoply of senior engineers, battle-mages and warrior priests. Below then, the parapets were stuffed with men. Every soldier on the walls held a bow or long-gun, and all eyes were fixed to the north, where the plague-forest had crept ever closer. They felt the tramp of massed boots long before they saw the vast array of torches creep towards the perimeter. They heard the brazen blare of war horns, and the low chanting of dirges to the god of decay.
When the rain began, Helborg had initially ignored it. The droplets felt heavier than normal, and splatted wetly on his helm’s visor before trickling down the steel edges. His gaze remained fixed outward, ready to give the command to open fire.