The rest of the Tzarina’s pulk rode with their lances dipped, silent as they took in the devastation around them.
Sofia thought she had prepared herself for what lay within Erengrad. A lifetime spent healing young men and women ripped apart by war had shown her just what horrors men were capable of wreaking upon one another. She had tended the wounded and the insane in the melded warrens of Praag’s twisted streets. She had pulled survivors from the ruins of burning stanitsas in the northern oblast.
But nothing had prepared her for the sack of Erengrad.
The reavers from the sea hadn’t just captured the city, they had defiled and tortured it before putting it to the flames. The ruins of the High City were thick with corpses, the flesh of men, women and children used as playthings then left as scraps for black-winged corpse-eaters.
She heard Ryurik vomit from the back of his horse, weeping at the sight of what the northmen had done. The men of Kislev, proud warriors all, fared little better, their faces wet with tears at the sight of their kinsmen’s fate.
Everywhere Sofia looked, she saw some new horror, some fresh atrocity to turn the stomach and blacken her heart. The mutilated bodies of men and boys had been nailed to charred roof beams and used as archery targets, and heaps of torn dresses spoke to the terrible fate of Erengrad’s women. Sofia sobbed as she saw tiny bones in the ashes of cook-fires, turning Miska’s head away when she looked up.
‘No, little one,’ she said through her tears. ‘You don’t want to see this.’
‘I don’t want to,’ agreed Miska. ‘But I have to. Kislev is my country and these are my people. I want to see what they’ve done to them.’
Sofia nodded and took her hand from Miska’s head. She looked around her, at the hanging bodies, the feasting ravens and the ravaged shell of the city. Once again, Sofia saw the girl’s core of strength and marvelled at the ability of the young to endure. She felt Miska’s thin body shake, and her grip was like a steel trap.
‘They’ll pay for this,’ she said, and cold tears streamed down her delicate features. ‘Won’t they?’
‘They will, child,’ said the Tzarina, reining her horse in beside Kurt’s towering mount. ‘Count on it.’
‘Why would they do this?’ said Kurt. ‘It makes no sense.’
‘War seldom does, sir knight,’ answered the Tzarina.
‘To my eternal regret, the horrors of war are well known to me, Queen Katarin,’ said Kurt, ‘but only a fool burns so valuable a prize as a port. The enemy could raise hundreds of ships and send his fleets south to ravage the coasts of the Empire and Bretonnia.’
‘The northmen don’t make good sailors,’ said Wrodzik.
‘I know coastal towns in the Empire that would dispute that claim, Master Wrodzik.’
‘Yha, they can sail, levubiytsa,’ said Tey-Muraz, spitting on the broken remains of a tribal shield, ‘but they don’t like boats. A northman likes to walk to war.’
‘It makes perfect sense when you understand that the northmen do not make war for the same reasons as us,’ said the Tzarina. ‘They do not fight for survival or gold, for land or their children’s futures. They do not march south because some distant lord in his castle owns their lands or to right a host of ancient grievances.’
‘Then why do they fight?’ asked Miska.
‘They fight because they are men possessed of a terrible idea that their gods require it of them,’ said the Tzarina, and her eyes glittered with fearful ice. ‘What makes them so dangerous is that they truly believe in the things they say they believe; that they are the chosen warriors of an ancient power whose sole purpose is to destroy any who oppose it. Such men cannot be reasoned with, for their every belief is enslaved to the idea that the destruction of our world is their sacred duty.’
‘How can we hope to defeat such a foe?’ asked Ryurik.
‘We fight them,’ said the Tzarina, drawing her winter-hued blade. ‘With ice and sword, we fight.’
The Tzarina led her riders deeper into Erengrad, following the High City’s widest streets. So thorough was the destruction that it became impossible to tell where one building ended and its neighbour began. Stone and timber lay smashed together, and burned scraps of fabric flapped in the ruins like obscene flags.
Onwards they rode, past the pale ruins of once-graceful structures surely too wondrous to have been shaped by any craft of men. Fine-boned skeletons, ethereal even in death, were crucified upon elegant representations of strange, otherworldly gods. Even amid all the horror vying for her tears, the sight of such violated beauty touched Sofia deeply.
‘The elven quarter,’ said Ryurik, similarly afflicted at such inhumanly exquisite artifice cast down without care. He pointed to a burned hall of golden heartwood, now blackened by smoke and flame. A slow blizzard of silken pages drifted in ashen flakes from its gutted shell.
‘I was… friendly with their keeper of books, Nyathria Eshenera, and before the new outer walls were finished, she allowed me to see their collection. It was the most beautiful place I ever saw. She told me some of the books were over three thousand years old, and that one was said to have been written by Bel-Korhadris, the Scholar King himself.’ Ryurik shook his head. ‘And they burned it all.’
‘The elves fought for Norvard too,’ said Tey-Muraz, seeing hundreds of snapped shafts and bloodied arrowheads in the street beyond the shattered walls of the compound.
‘Man or elf,’ said Wrodzik. ‘Makes no difference to a northman. They care not whose blood they spill.’
Beyond the carnage of the High City, they rode to where the city opened up and the land dipped sharply towards the ocean.
The remains of Erengrad’s Low City filled the bay like driftwood, and the ocean was frothed with fatty runoff from pyres raised on the shore. Sofia’s first thought was a memory of a faded tapestry she’d seen in Kislev’s Imperial embassy. Kaspar had told her it was the work of van der Plancken and depicted the comet’s destruction of Mordheim.
To the south, the temple of Dhaz smouldered, as though its eternal flame might yet still be lit, and across the Lynsk, the Temple of Tor remained untouched atop its solitary peak. Barely visible past Tor’s hill, the shattered remains of a glassy tower of ice lay fallen in the ruins.
‘Frosthome,’ said the Tzarina, icy tears glistening on her pale cheeks.
The harbour was almost entirely gone, but the great dwarf-built bridge linking the city’s north and south remained intact. Ram-ships with beaked iron prows had smashed against its immense stone piers, but the craft of the mountain folk was beyond their power to destroy. Half-sunk trading vessels listed in the ruins of the harbour, and scores of broken hulls jutted from the surface. Torn sails held in place by fraying rigging streamed from splintered masts and forlorn flags snapped in the cold winds.
‘Sigmar’s blood,’ cried Kurt. ‘Look!’
Amid the wreckage of so many ocean-going vessels, it took Sofia a moment to identify the reason for Kurt’s oath.
An Imperial mercantile galleon, its decks bustling with activity, was moored to the bridge. It flew a flag of vivid scarlet and blue, emblazoned with a griffon rampant bearing a golden hammer.
The flag of Altdorf.
A line of smoking flint-lock handguns lowered as the pulk’s vanguard approached the high barricade built around the end of the bridge. Constructed from the abundance of wreckage strewn around the Low City, the barricade was like something thrown up in the midst of a riot.