Ghurk hauled back hard with his tentacle, digging his hooves in and tugging. The terrorgheist’s bony neck broke, and the creature gasped out a glut of corpse-gas from its gaping jaws. Its sinewy wings flapped pathetically, and it thudded to the ground. With the creature’s momentum broken, the mob of zombies collapsed around Ghurk, scattering in twisted piles of confusion at his feet.
‘There is no time for this!’ hissed Otto, using his scythe to clear the last of the clinging zombies from Ghurk’s hide. ‘Clear them out!’
Ghurk obeyed, bounding after the remaining enemy, swinging both arms like jackhammers.
The three women in lace leapt down from their vantage then, spitting curses. Ethrac was too busy breaking the remainder of the zombies to respond, so Otto hauled his scythe back, swung it around three times, then let go. The blade flew towards the leader of the trio, rotating in a blur of speed. Before she could evade the missile, it sliced clean across her neck, decapitating her in a single strike and spraying blood in broad spatters against the walls of the yard.
‘Return!’ cried Otto, reaching out with his right claw.
The scythe immediately swung around again, still spinning, and dropped back into his waiting palm.
That broke the spirit of the remaining undead horde. Bereft of the guiding will of their vampiric masters, the zombies lost all cohesion, and were soon mopped up by the oncoming tribesmen. The two remaining ladies fled back into the Palace depths, wailing like infants. Ghurk rampaged through the remaining throng, treading the last survivors into the stone underfoot. He crashed over the carcass of the terrorgheist and repeatedly stamped on it, powdering the bones and trampling the meagre scraps of sinew that still clung to them.
‘Is this really the best they can do?’ muttered Otto, still busy with his scythe.
‘We killed the master,’ said Ethrac, hurling more plague-slime about him with great heaves. ‘Why do any still stand? The dead return to death when the master is killed.’
Otto shrugged. The Palace now lay before them, its doors gaping open and its riches clustered within, and lust was already overtaking his fury. ‘Who knows? Perhaps there is another to be found.’
Ethrac kept up the barrage of raw sorcery, exploding zombies at a terrific rate. The broken dome of the Palace loomed up massively, a cyclopean structure even in its ruin. Flames still guttered around it, fuelled by the unleashed lethal energies, and the storm-pattern of clouds formed an immense cupola over the whole scene.
The devastation was now total. Every building in the city had been demolished or dragged into ruins. The death-toll was incalculable, and would never be recovered from. In a sense, it mattered not what happened now – they had done what no warlord of the north had ever done. They had broken Sigmar’s city, wreathing it in fell sorcery and drenching it in the blood of the slain.
But there was still the final blow to be struck. The human Emperor still lived, and had come back to his den in time for the denouement. Such had always been predicted, and the Plaguefather had never guided them awry.
‘He is in there,’ said Ethrac, barely noticing as his troops slaughtered and smashed the last remnants of the defence. ‘I can smell him.’
Otto grinned back at him, his face sticky with blood.
‘Then we go inside,’ he said triumphantly. ‘And bring this dance to its end.’
Margrit looked up at the vampire, not knowing whether to thank him or curse him. His fell warriors had cleared the courtyard of daemons and were now pursuing the remaining Chaos forces out of the square beyond. The surviving humans emerged from whatever places they had managed to barricade themselves behind, mistrust etched on their faces.
Vlad von Carstein was still gazing at the body of Leoncoeur. There was a sadness on the vampire’s face.
For all that, the creature’s aura still made Margrit shudder. For her whole life, she had been taught to fear and hate the grave-stealers. If any force of the world was truly anathema to hers, it was the bringers of everlasting death.
‘And what of us, lord?’ she asked, staring up at him defiantly. ‘Now you have your victory, what is your purpose?’
Vlad turned to her, as if seeing her for the first time. Margrit could not help noticing that his gaze flickered instinctively down to her throat.
‘If there were time, lady, I might show you all manner of wonders,’ he said. ‘You can see for yourself, though, that none remains.’
He looked up, past the temple dome and towards the Palace hilltop. His eyes narrowed, as if he were focusing on things far away.
‘This is your temple again, for a time,’ he said, coldly. ‘Bury your dead and look to your walls. If all goes well, I will be back.’
Then his whole body seemed to shimmer like a shadow in sunlight. The ring on his finger briefly flared with crimson light, and his gaunt frame dissolved into a flock of squealing bats. They fluttered skywards, spiralling into the rain-lashed skies.
Margrit watched the bats go, slumped against the stone of the courtyard with the dead knight leaning against her. The noises of combat were falling away as the undead drove the daemons back from the temple’s environs and into the maze of the burning poor quarter.
She looked up. The plague-rain was beginning to lessen, as was the tearing wind. Though the slimy droplets still cascaded, their force was already beginning to fade.
‘But what is left?’ she murmured to herself, looking around her destroyed temple, at the pools of blood on the stone, at the corroded and gaping rooftops beyond her little kingdom. ‘What is there to be salvaged now?’
No answers came. She smoothed the bloodied hair from the knight’s brow, and closed his eyes. It would have been nice to have known his name.
TWENTY-THREE
Deathclaw landed on the marble floor, its claws skittering on the polished surface. Karl Franz dismounted just as Martak’s beast landed on the far side of the chamber.
The place had once been a chapel to Sigmar the Uniter. In its prime, a hundred priests a day would perform rites of absolution and petition, processing up the long aisles with burning torches in hand. The high altar was draped in gold and surrounded by the spoils of war – trophies from a hundred realms of the earth, the bleached and polished skulls of greenskins, the wargear of the northmen’s many tribes.
Now all was in disarray. The chapel’s arched roof had collapsed under the weight of pulsating mosses, and loops of pus-glistening tendrils hung from the ragged edges. The chequerboard floor had been driven up, exposing masses of writhing maggots beneath. The altar itself was broken, cracked in two by a creaking thorn-stump, and blowflies swarmed and buzzed over every exposed surface.
Karl Franz pulled the reins from around Deathclaw’s neck and cast them aside. The very action of laying eyes on the devastation was enough to make him feel nauseous, but there was no time to linger over the desecration. From beyond the listing doorway at the rear of the long central aisle, he could already hear the echoes of fighting. The Palace was rife with it, from the high towers to the deepest dungeons. Even from the air he had seen how complete the defeat was – a huge army of Chaos tribesmen and mutated beasts had cut its way deep into the heart of the complex, resisted only by a motley mix of Palace guards and warriors of Sylvania’s cursed moors.