Martak lunged. Archaon’s sword slashed out, and the wizard’s head, eyes bulging with fury, bounced down the steps. The air reverberated with a mournful howl as something left his body, and then all fell still. Archaon sank down onto the steps, his sword planted point-first between his legs. He leaned against its length.
‘Yes, wizard, I will,’ Archaon said softly, as he stared down at Martak’s head. Nonetheless, his words echoed across the plaza. Canto, at last able to move, urged his horse forwards. The Swords of Chaos followed him. Around them, the battle was coming to its inevitable conclusion. The army that had stood with Valten was no more, its positions overrun and its few survivors fleeing through the streets, pursued by their victorious enemy.
Middenheim, the City of the White Wolf, had fallen.
PART TWO
The Last Council
Autumn 2528
SIX
Jerrod, the last Duke of Quenelles, hunched in his saddle and steeled his mind against the creeping quiet of the Forest of Loren. Since childhood, he had feared the forest which clung to the south-eastern border of Quenelles. Over the years, it had been responsible for the deaths and disappearances of more friends and subjects than he cared to count. More than once, as a young lord, he had ridden to its edge on the trail of a missing peasant child, only to be forced to turn back in failure. It was a place of pale shapes and bad dreams. Then, the world itself had become a nightmare of late.
He closed his eyes, and wished yet again that the burden he now bore had not passed to him. That his cousin Anthelme had not perished in Altdorf, victim of a plague-stained blade. That Tancred, Anthelme’s predecessor, had not fallen to the black axe of Krell. That he, Jerrod, was not the last of the line of Quenelles. But mostly, he wished that he was not here now, riding into the belly of the beast rather than fighting alongside his people in their hour of need – whatever remained of them.
Jerrod could still recall the smoke that lay thick on the horizon as he’d ridden hard through the pine crags, seeking aid for his beleaguered companions. The smoke that rose over the pyre that had been his homeland, and more besides. For there to be so much smoke, the whole of Bretonnia would need to be aflame, he knew.
What had happened, in the months since he and the Companions of Quenelles had ridden out alongside Louen Leoncoeur’s crusade into the heart of the Empire, to bend their lances in aid of their oldest rivals, greatest enemies and occasional allies? What had befallen Bretonnia in that time? He opened his eyes and reached beneath his helmet to scratch at the week-old growth of beard covering his cheeks and jaw. Since his manservant had been brained at the Battle of Bolgen, he’d had no one to make him presentable.
If what was occurring in Bretonnia was anything like what was happening in the Empire, he feared to learn of it. The Empire had always seemed an unconquerable behemoth to him, a vast dragon with many heads, belching fire and ruin against its foes. To test oneself against that dragon had been the dream of many a young knight, himself included. But now the dragon had fallen, slain by a death of a thousand cuts, each more inglorious than the last. Then, when your enemy wielded plague, storm and fire as easily as a peasant wielded a cudgel, glory was the first casualty, as he and his Companions had discovered to their cost.
Barely a third of the men who had ridden beside him, first in the civil war against Mallobaude’s wretches, and then later at La Maisontaal Abbey, and finally to Altdorf at the command of the Lion-Heart, still lived. Gioffre of Anglaron had died beneath Krell’s axe at La Maisontaal Abbey. The cousins Raynor and Hernald had fallen beside Anthelme at Altdorf. Old Calard of Garamont had died on the walls of Averheim, sword in hand and a curse on his lips. Those who remained, however, were the cream of what Bretonnia had stood for – driven by duty and their oaths to the Lady to stand against evil wherever it might be found. And there was evil aplenty in the Empire.
First Altdorf, then Averheim, had become victims of the foulness seeping down from the north. The other cities of the Empire had fallen besides, but he had been at both Altdorf and Averheim, and had led the Companions in battle against the enemy alongside the Emperor Karl Franz himself, as well as the wild-haired Slayer King of the mountain folk, Ungrim Ironfist.
The thought of the latter only made the weight on his soul all the heavier. The Slayer King had died so that they might live, and escape the trap Averheim had become. While Jerrod knew little of dwarfs, he knew from the weeks they’d spent fighting beside one another that such a death had long been Ironfist’s desire. That made it no less sorrowful, and he felt a moment of pity for the remains of the once-mighty throng which had followed Ironfist out of the Worlds Edge Mountains and into defeat. Like the Bretonnians, they too were the last gasp of a shattered people. And like the Bretonnians, they had no way of knowing the fate of those they had left behind.
He turned slightly in his saddle, to glance down at the heavy form of Gotri Hammerson as the dwarf runesmith stomped alongside Jerrod’s horse. He was old, older perhaps than many a storied Bretonnian keep, Jerrod thought, and as hard as the stones of the mountains they now travelled through. He and the dwarf had not become friends – not quite – but they had fallen into a companionable routine. Their outlooks were not entirely dissimilar, for all that the dwarf mind was a thing utterly alien to Jerrod.
It was Hammerson who had seen them safely away from Averland, after the magics of Balthasar Gelt had plucked the battered remnants of their forces from the clutches of the Everchosen. Hammerson had led the Emperor and his motley assemblage of humans and dwarfs through the Grey Mountains by hidden dwarf roads. Indeed, it was only thanks to Hammerson that they had been able to proceed at all. Unguided, the army would have foundered, burdened as it was by the number of wounded.
Even with Hammerson’s aid, the going had been difficult. Mindless dead clustered in the high crags, their only purpose to kill the living. Pools of suppurating wild magic had given birth to monsters and daemons. Too, the mountains were home to hundreds of orc and goblin tribes. Even the hidden dwarf paths had not been entirely safe. More than once, the battered group of men and dwarfs had been forced to defend themselves against greenskins which swept howling out of the crags. There, only Zhufbarak guns and Gelt’s spellcraft had carried the day, a fact which proved no small frustration to Jerrod and his remaining knights.
While he respected Hammerson, his feelings for the wizard, Gelt, were mixed. The man, clad in filthy robes and a tarnished golden mask, made Jerrod’s skin crawl. He stank of hot metal, and there was something… otherworldly about him. Jerrod had felt similarly when in the presence of the Emperor, who had wielded lightning at the Battle of Bolgen.
Unfortunately, whatever power had infused the Emperor now seemed to be gone, ripped from him by the hands of the Everchosen himself. He was nothing but a man now, in a time when men were all but helpless.
Jerrod sighed. He had seen two great nations consumed in fire and blood, and he longed to do something, anything, to achieve some small measure of retribution, no matter how futile. Nonetheless, even with guns and sorcery, it was invariably a close thing. The greenskins had ever frenzied forth in great numbers, but now, as the world came undone, they seemed particularly driven to madness. It was as if some unseen power had caught hold of them and set their brute minds aflame.
But even battle-maddened greenskins had been as nothing compared to what had come after. Even as the column of refugees had reached the pine crags that marked the northern boundary of Athel Loren, the wind had carried the sound of berserk howls. They had been pursued all the way from Averheim by an army of the Blood God’s worshippers, and it was at the infamous Chasm of Echoes that they had been forced to make their stand. While Gelt and Hammerson’s dwarfs had held the pass, Jerrod and the Emperor had ridden hard, braving the forest’s dangers in an effort to make contact with Athel Loren’s defenders.