Mannfred was howling with laughter, and Arkhan could feel the weight of the mighty magics that thrummed around the vampire, waiting to be unleashed. As Mannfred gathered them to him, the words to a powerful incantation dropping from his writhing lips, Arkhan readied himself.
Nevertheless, the first shaft of sunlight was as much a surprise to him as it was to Mannfred. It burst from the clouds high above and struck the bridge between them. The latter’s skeleton mount reared and hurled him from his saddle. Arkhan staggered as the pressure of his enemy’s magic faded. The expression on Mannfred’s face as he clambered to his feet was almost comical. The vampire looked up, eyes wide and hastily released the murderous energies he had been preparing to hurl at Arkhan back into the aether. The clouds roiled and the sunlight was once more choked off by the darkness.
‘Well, that was an amusing diversion,’ Arkhan rasped. He started across the bridge. ‘Are you prepared to listen to reason now?’
Mannfred shrieked like a beast of prey, and drew his blade. Without pause, the vampire leapt at him. Arkhan drew his tomb-blade and blocked Mannfred’s diving blow in a single movement. The two blades, each infused with the darkest of magics, gave out a communal cry of steel on steel as they connected, and cold fire blazed at the juncture of their meeting. Mannfred dropped to the bridge in a crouch before springing instantly to his feet. He sprinted towards Arkhan, his sword looping out. This too Arkhan parried, and they weaved back and forth over the bridge, the screams of their swords echoing for miles in either direction. Overhead, the sky growled in agitation, and the noisome wind swept down with a howl.
Below them, in the mud and stagnant water, the dead fought on, straining against one another in a parody of the duel their masters fought above them. Arkhan could feel Mannfred’s will pressing against his own. He’d foregone magic, save that little bit required to control the dead. Their battle was as much for mastery of the warring corpses below as it was against each other. The vampire came at him again, teeth bared in a silent, feral snarl. His form flickered and wavered as he moved, like a scrap of gossamer caught in a wind storm. A living man would have found it impossible to follow the vampire’s movements, but Arkhan had long since traded in his mortal eyes for something greater.
He matched Mannfred blow for blow. It felt… good, to engage in swordplay once more. It had been centuries since his blade had been drawn for anything other than emphasis or as an implement of ritual. The ancient tomb-blade shivered in his hand as it connected again with Mannfred’s. The embers of old skills flared to life in the depths of Arkhan’s mind, and he recalled those first few desperate battles, where a gambler’s skill in back-alley brawls was put to the test by warriors whose names still lingered in legend. It was good to be reminded of that time, of when he had still been a man, rather than a tool forged by the will of another.
Arkhan wondered if Mannfred knew what that was like. He thought so. The vampire’s magics had that taste, and his voice was like the echo of another’s, though he knew it not. Arkhan could almost see a familiar shape superimposed over his opponent, a vast, black, brooding shadow that seemed to roil with amusement as they fought.
I see you, Arkhan thought. This was a test and a pleasure for the thing that held the chains of their souls. Arkhan’s master had ever been a sadist and prone to cruel whimsy. This battle had been a farce, a shadow-play from the beginning. There was a power in that knowledge. A power in knowing exactly how little of it you yourself possessed. It allowed you to focus, to look past the ephemeral, and to marshal within yourself what little will your master allowed.
Arkhan the Black was a slave, but a slave who knew every link of the chain that bound him by heart. Mannfred had yet to realise that he had even been beaten. Their blades clashed again and again until, at last, Arkhan beat the vampire’s sword aside and swiftly stepped back, his now-sodden and torn robes slapping wetly against his bare bones.
‘We are finished here, vampire.’
Mannfred’s eyes burned with rage, and for a moment, Arkhan thought he might continue the fight. Then, with a hiss, Mannfred inclined his head and sheathed his sword with a grandiose flourish. ‘We are, liche. A truce?’
Arkhan would have smiled, had he still had lips. ‘Of course. A truce.’
FOUR
‘The problem isn’t getting in. It’s just a wall, and walls can be breached, scaled and blown down,’ Hans Leitdorf, Grand Master of the Knights of Sigmar’s Blood said, glaring at the distant edifice, which towered along the border of Sylvania. That it was visible from such a distance was as much due to its sheer enormity as to the height of the parapet he and his guests stood atop. ‘It’s what’s waiting on the other side. They’ve had months to erect defences, set traps and build an army out of every scrap of bone and sinew in Sylvania. And that’s not even taking into account the things slipping over the border every night to bolster the cursed von Carstein’s ranks. Strigany nomads, strange horsemen, beasts and renegades of every dark stripe.’ He knocked back a slug from the goblet he held in one hand. Leitdorf was old but, like some old men, had only grown harder and tougher with age. He was broad and sturdily built, with a barrel chest and a face that had seen the wrong end of a club more than once. He wore a heavy fur coat of the sort Ungol horsemen were fond of, and had his sword belt cinched around his narrow waist. ‘We’ve tried to stop them, but we’re too few. I don’t have enough men to do more than put up a token effort. And when I ask for more men from the elector and Karl Franz, I get, well, you.’ He looked at his guest.
Captain Wendel Volker gave no sign that Leitdorf’s insult had struck home. The fourth son of a largely undistinguished Talabecland family tree, he hadn’t expected a man like Leitdorf to be happy with his arrival. His uniform was still coated in trail-grime, and he shivered beneath his thin officer’s cloak. It was cold up on the parapet, and it had been a wet trip. Volker was young, with a duellist’s build and a boy’s enthusiasm. The latter was swiftly being sapped by the circumstances of his current posting, but, as his father had said on multiple occasions, one mustn’t complain.
‘Oh he’s not so bad, is our young Wendel. He guarded me ably enough on the road from Talabheim,’ the third man on the parapet rumbled, as he stroked his spade-shaped red beard with thick, beringed fingers. He was a big man, like Leitdorf, though his size had more to do with ample food supply than anything else, Volker thought. There was muscle there, too, but it was well padded. Despite that, he was the most dangerous of the three men on the parapet. Or, possibly, in the entire keep. ‘Able, aristocratic, attentive, slightly alcoholic… All virtues as far as I’m concerned,’ the third man went on, winking cheerfully at Volker.
‘You hardly needed an escort,’ Leitdorf said. ‘The Patriarch of the Bright College is an army unto himself. There are few who would challenge Thyrus Gormann.’
‘I know of one,’ Gormann grunted, tugging on his beard. He waved a hand and, for a moment, a trail of flickering flame marked the motion of his fingers. ‘Still, neither here nor there, all in the past, all friends now, hey?’ He scratched his nose and peered at the distant wall of bone that separated Sylvania from Imperial justice. ‘That is one fine, big wall the little flea has erected for himself, I must admit.’