He was so caught up in his study of the crown that he didn’t turn as another rock surged towards his head. He caught the missile without looking and crushed it. He held up his hand and let the crumbled remains dribble through his fingers. ‘Stop it,’ he said. He looked at the walls behind the barrier of lecterns, where his nine prisoners hung shackled. Except that there were only seven of them. Two were missing.
Mannfred heard a scrape of metal on stone and whirled. A man clad in once-golden but now grime-caked and dented armour, decorated with proud reliefs of the war goddess Myrmidia, lunged for him, whirling a chain. Snarling Tilean oaths, the Templar of the Order of the Blazing Sun swung his makeshift weapon at Mannfred’s face. The vampire jerked back instinctively, and was almost smashed from his feet by the descending weight of a heavy stone lectern in the shape of a daemon’s claw, wielded by a brute clad in furs and a battered breastplate bearing a rampant wolf – the sigil of Ulric.
Mannfred backhanded the Ulrican off his feet with one hand and snagged the loop of the Myrmidian’s chain with the other. He jerked the knight towards him and wrapped the links of the chain about his neck. He kicked the knight’s legs out from under him and then planted his foot between the man’s shoulder blades. Wrapping the chains about his wrist, he hauled upwards, strangling the man.
The Ulrican gave a bellicose roar and staggered towards him. Burly arms snapped tight around Mannfred’s chest. He threw his head back and was rewarded by a crunch of bone, and a howl of pain. Mannfred drove his foot into the back of the knight’s head, driving him face-first into the stone floor and rendering him unconscious. Then he turned to deal with the Ulrican.
The big man staggered forwards, blood streaming from his shattered nose. His eyes blazed with a berserk rage and he roared as he hurled himself at Mannfred. Mannfred caught him by the throat and hoisted him into the air. The man pounded uselessly on the vampire’s arm, as Mannfred slowly choked him comatose. He let the limp body fall to the floor and turned to face the other seven inhabitants of the chamber. ‘Well, that was fun. Anyone else?’
Seven pairs of eyes glared at him. If looks could kill, Mannfred knew that he would have been only so much ash on the wind. He met their gazes, until all but one had looked away. Satisfied, he smirked and looked up at the shattered dome of the tower above, where fire-blackened support timbers crossed over one another like the threads of a spider’s web. He could see the dark sky and stars above, through the gaps in the roof. He whistled piercingly, and massive, hunched forms began to clamber into view from among the nest of wood and stone.
There were two of the beasts, and both were hideous amalgamations of ape, wolf and bat. Mannfred had heard it said that the vargheist was the true face of the vampire, shorn of all pretence of humanity. These two were collectively known as the Swartzhafen Devils, which was as good a name as such beasts deserved. One of the creatures clutched something red and wet in its talons and gnawed on it idly as it watched him. He had given the beasts orders not to interfere with any escape attempts on the part of the captives.
Mannfred claimed the body of the ghoul and dragged it into the room by an ankle. The vargheists were suddenly alert, their eyes glittering with hunger. He rolled the body into the centre of the outline of Sylvania and stepped back. The vargheists fell upon the dead cannibal with ravenous cries. The captives looked away in disgust or fear. Mannfred smiled and set about rebinding the two men. That they’d escaped at all was impressive, but it wasn’t the first time they’d tried it, and it wouldn’t be the last. He wanted them to try and fail, and try again, until their courage and will had been worn down to a despairing nub.
Then, and only then, would they be fit for his purpose.
His eyes flickered to the lone nonhuman among his captives. The elven princess did not meet his gaze, though he did not think it was out of fear, but rather disdain. A flicker of annoyance swept through him, but he restrained the urge to discipline her. Instead, he moved towards the prize of the lot, at least in his eyes.
‘Bad dreams, old man?’ Mannfred said, looking down at Volkmar, Grand Theogonist of the Empire. He sank down to his haunches beside the old man. ‘You should thank me, you know. All of you,’ he said, looking about the cell. ‘The world as you knew it is giving way to something new. And something wholly unpleasant. Outside of Sylvania’s borders, madness and entropy reign. Only here does order prevail. But don’t worry, soon enough, with your help, I shall sweep the world clean, and all will be as it was. I shall make it a paradise.’
‘A paradise,’ Volkmar rasped. The old man met Mannfred’s red gaze without hesitation. Battered and beaten as he was, he was not yet broken, Mannfred knew. ‘Is that what you call it?’ Volkmar shifted his weight, causing his manacles to rattle. The old man looked as if he wanted nothing more than to lunge barehanded at his captor. A wound on his head, a gift from one of the vargheists, was leaking blood and pus, and the old man’s face was stained with both. Mannfred could smell the sickness creeping into the Grand Theogonist, weakening him even further, despite the holy power that was keeping him on his feet.
‘I didn’t say for whom it would be such, now, did I?’ Mannfred said. He rose smoothly and pulled his cloak about him. He looked down at Volkmar with a cruel smile. ‘Don’t worry, old man… When I consummate my new world, neither you nor your friends will be here to see it.’
PART ONE
Alliance
Autumn 2522-Spring 2523
ONE
The world was dying.
It had been dying for a very long time, according to some. But Erikan Crowfiend, in his long trek from the battlefield of Couronne, had come to the conclusion that it was finally on its last legs. There was smoke from a million funeral pyres on the wind, not just in Bretonnia but in the Empire as well, and the stink of poison and rot was laid over everything. In the villages and wayplaces, men and women whispered stories of two-headed calves that mewled like infants, of birds that sang strange dirges as they circled in the air, and of things creeping through the dark streets that had once kept to the forests and hills.
Beasts and greenskins ran riot, carving red trails through the outskirts of civilisation as nightmare shapes swam down from the idiot stars to raven and roar through the heart of man’s world. Great cities reeled from these sudden, unpredictable assaults, and the great gates of Altdorf, Middenheim and Nuln were barred and bolstered, almost as if it were intended that they never be opened again.
Erikan had seen it all, albeit at a remove. He had been forced to fight more than once since crossing the Grey Mountains, and not just with beasts or orcs. Men as well, and worse than men. Then, Erikan wasn’t exactly a man himself. He hadn’t been for some time.
Erikan Crowfiend’s heart had stopped beating almost a century ago to the day, and he had not once missed its rhythm. He moved only by night, for the sun blistered him worse than any fire. His breath reeked of the butcher’s block and he could hear a woman’s pulse from leagues away. He could shatter stone and bone as easily as a child might tear apart a dried leaf. He never grew tired, suffered from illness or felt fear. And under different circumstances, he would have been happy to indulge his baser instincts as the land drowned in madness. He was a monster after all, and it was a season for monsters, from what little he’d seen.
But he was no longer the captain of his own destiny, and hadn’t been since the night a pale woman had taken him in her arms and made him something both greater and lesser than the necromancer’s apprentice he had been. So he moved ever eastwards, following a darkling pull that urged him on, across beast-held mountains and over burning fields, and through forests where the trees whimpered like beaten dogs and clawed at him with twisted branches.