01 - Empire in Chaos (13 page)

There were carved statues of reclining women, and each had a plaque before
it. She looked at one, but she could not read, and it meant nothing to her. The
stubs of candles protruded from candelabras that may have been lit in honour of
the temple’s deceased priestesses, but thankfully it seemed that the marauders
had not discovered this area, and the stench was not as strong down here.

The hair on the back of Annaliese’s neck rose as she heard a scrape against
the cold stone flooring, and she froze. A shadowy shape dashed away from them,
and Eldanair motioned for her to approach.

Peering into the gloom, she saw that there was a person crouched behind one
of the tombs. She saw a glimpse of long hair and pale robes, and understanding
dawned on her. She placed Tomas onto the ground and knelt before him, looking
into his tearful eyes.

“I want you to be a brave boy, and to stay with Eldanair for a moment. I
won’t be long.” The boy whimpered and clung to her. “I promise I will be back in
a moment, I am just going to talk to the lady over there.”

She began to move towards the woman, but Tomas continued to cling to her
desperately. She sighed, and picked him up again. Eldanair shrugged. “All right
Tomas, you can come with me. Come on.”

She moved slowly towards the woman. “Hello?” she said. “My name is Annaliese,
and we are not going to harm you. You are safe now.”

She stepped around an ancient stone tomb. The woman cowered in the corner,
her face mostly hidden beneath an unruly mass of dark hair. She was wearing the
robes of a priestess.

“You are one of the Sisters of Shallya, aren’t you? It’s alright; there is
nothing here now. They have gone.”

She moved closer, and dropped to her knees, steadying Tomas onto his feet. He
stared at the woman curiously.

“Where are the others of your order, sister?”

The woman looked her in the eyes then, and they were filled with pain and
fear. Her face was dirty and streaked with tears, and she began rocking back and
forth.

“Gone,” she said, shaking her head. “They’ve all gone. Just Sister Margrethe
and I left…” She looked up at Annaliese frantically. “I don’t know where Sister
Margrethe is. I… I heard her screaming.”

“She is not in pain anymore,” said Annaliese, and the woman slumped down
against the wall.

“I prayed for her. They are gone?” she said fearfully. “They are truly gone?
They were animals, they attacked us, braying and shouting…”

“Shh,” said Annaliese softly, hugging Tomas. Seeing the boy the woman’s eyes
seemed to clear a little and she smiled through her tears. “And what is your
name, young man?”

“Tomas,” he replied shyly.

“Tomas—a strong name for a strong boy,” the woman replied.

“You don’t need to cry,” said the boy, and the priestess laughed, wiping away
her tears.

“Bless you, boy,” she said. Annaliese stood and offered her arm to the woman,
who took it and allowed herself to be helped to her feet. “The strength of the
innocent is a wondrous thing—here am I, old enough to be his grandmother and I
have gone to pieces, yet a boy not more than five years old can still smile.”

“How far is it?” asked Annaliese to the priestess, whose name was Katrin.
With her face and robes cleaned, Annaliese could see that she was a handsome
woman of middling years, and though her eyes were haunted, she had a way with
the child.

“Two days’ walk, no more,” Katrin answered. She turned and smiled at
Annaliese. “You have travelled far—I am grateful that you are escorting me to
the temple. I do not think I could have faced it alone—to be honest I do not
think I would ever have summoned the strength to leave the crypt.”

“I am glad that we found you,” she said, staring up at the towering Black
Mountains before them. “Though I am sorry we did not arrive sooner.”

“There would only have been more pain and death had you arrived any sooner,”
said Katrin.

“We might have been able to stop them.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Either way there would have been more death and violence,
and that is anathema to our order. It would have made the goddess weep.”

“Is not your order dedicated to life? To living?”

“Of course it is, but not at the expense of the life of another, Annaliese,”
she gently chided. She sighed deeply. “I already miss Sister Margrethe greatly—she was a gentle, simple girl.”

“I’m sorry to remind you, sister,” said Annaliese.

“Pff,” said Katrin, waving away the apology. “Grief and sadness is a part of
life, and not something to hide from,” she said, looking into Annaliese’s eyes.
The girl looked away quickly, her hand resting on the hilt of her sword.

“The boy is strong and healthy,” said Katrin, judging Annaliese’s mood and
changing the subject. The boy was running ahead, looking back anxiously to see
if they were still following. “Though there is pain hidden away inside him that
will take a lifetime to heal. If it ever does.”

“You are good with children,” said Annaliese.

“As are you. You are what—seventeen years? You have no children of your
own?”

“No. I… never married.”

They walked on in silence. Eldanair was out in front, an indistinct grey
shadow a hundred yards ahead.

“You certainly keep strange company,” commented Katrin, shaking her head. “An
orphan and an elf.”

Annaliese smiled, and nodded.

“Why did your order leave your temple, Katrin? Why was it only you and
Margrethe that were left behind?”

The older woman sighed again.

“The Empire is beset by foes, surrounded on all sides by enemies deadly and
jealous. The head of my order was visited by a vision of the Lady Shallya
herself in a dream. The goddess was weeping, for she knew of the horrors yet to
come. When the head sister awoke, she ordered the others to ready themselves to
travel to Black Fire Pass, to the temple of Sigmar there. That was where we
would be needed in the dark days to come,” Katrin said.

“But why were you chosen to stay behind?” asked Annaliese.

“In truth? I requested it. I am tired, Annaliese, and I have seen much horror
in my life. Though I know the head sister wished for me to be at her side, I
asked to be the one to remain behind, to tend the weeping shrine until the order
returned.” She shook her head with a sigh. “Strange how things turn out, but it
is not my place to question the will of the gods.”

“It must be peaceful, living within the temple,” said Annaliese. She
immediately went red. “Under normal circumstances, I mean,” she hastily added.

“Peaceful? Yes, I was never more at peace than I have been in the years since
joining the order. Sad? Yes. Difficult? Yes. But you are correct; I am at peace
in myself.”

“You could join the temple, Annaliese,” Katrin said after a pause. “You would
find a home amongst us. And I can see that you have the healing touch within
you.”

Annaliese blushed again. Lightning flashed above the Black Mountains.

Katrin sighed to herself. She had spoken the truth, and the girl could find a
home amongst the Sisters of Shallya, but she would never become one of their
order.

Another god had already claimed her as his own.

The lightning flashing across the skies above the mountains in the distance
made the mood of the camp grim. In Grunwald’s experience, soldiers were a
superstitious bunch, and seeing the flashes in the direction they were
travelling could be seen as a bad omen.

He had no time for omens and he was far from a superstitious man, even when
he had been a regular soldier in the army of Nuln. He had always been devout,
and was careful to pay due respect to the gods—invoking Manann whenever he
stepped aboard a ship, and giving thanks to Verena whenever justice was rightly
served—but he frowned upon the ignorant, uninformed rural practices, oaths and
lucky charms that many claimed warded against bad omens and spirits. Such things
had the reek of infernal practices, and they were a way that one could
inadvertently slip towards damnation.

The state soldiers had picketed in orderly lines, with eight men to each
simple canvas tent, and the air was filled with the smells of cooking and the
chatter of men. Merchants and whores moved around the encampment, selling their
wares—camp hangers-on were common when an army marched, for it provided safety
as well as willing customers with little else to spend their money on. Not that
there was much money to go around—he had learnt that these soldiers had not
seen a coin for months.

In the centre of the camp were the lavish tents of the officers and nobility,
flying pennants and banners high. Each was larger than the house of an average
Empire citizen, and their fabric was decorated with gold and heavily
embroidered, as if each was trying to outdo the other, which was probably the
case. It made Grunwald sick.

He had glimpsed the military commander of the state troops, a foppish inbred
noble said to be the second cousin to one of the contenders for the disputed
position of Elector Count of Averland. The noble wore weapons glittering with
jewels and ornamentation, and wore a gold-plated breastplate moulded to
represent a heroic, muscled torso. A limp-wristed fop who played at war, was
Grunwald’s assessment. Averlanders generally had a reputation within the Empire
for extroverted displays of wealth and ornamentation, yet this nobleman took
that to a whole new level.

The Knights of the Blazing Sun had no overt political association with the
state, nor with any other, and they were picketed separate from the Averlanders.
Grunwald had learnt that the temple that these knights had come from was within
Stirland, and there was little love lost between Stirlanders and Averlanders.
Nonetheless, they had come at the behest of the Emperor himself, and they were
utterly devoted and honourable servants of the Empire.

“I am still intrigued as to how travelling to Black Fire gets you closer to
the battlefields in the north,” said Grunwald. The preceptor laughed.

“The dwarfs have some machine here that will shorten the journey,” he said.
“I will need to see it with my own eyes to believe it, but it is said to be a
monstrous creation of steam and metal,” he shrugged.

A pair of Averlanders, clearly more than a little drunk and with their arms
draped around a trio of women reeking of cheap perfume, staggered past
Grunwald’s campfire, laughing raucously. As they caught sight of the glaring
witch hunter they fell silent and hurried on their way.

“You know, I think your presence is making the state soldiers nervous,”
remarked Karl.

“Only the guilty need fear my presence,” replied Grunwald. Karl smiled from
across the campfire at the grim witch hunter.

“My, you are an uplifting, positive character to have around, aren’t you?” he
said, his eyes full of humour.

“Being uplifting and positive doesn’t really go hand in hand with my
occupation,” said Grunwald, scowling. In truth he liked the young knight—he
was easy company after spending weeks on the road with the dour ironbreaker,
Thorrik. The dwarf lowered his bulk and sat down noisily alongside the pair, and
within moments was puffing on his dragon-headed pipe.

The witch hunter liked the fact that the knight seemed utterly unfazed by him—he was not cowed in the slightest by his appearance, manner or occupation, and
he found it a refreshing change.

“You should try it sometime though,” continued the knight. “It might put
people more at ease—and when people are at ease,
that’s
usually when
they’ll say something wrong and implicate themselves.”

“People are pretty good at implicating themselves when they are very much
ill
at ease,” said Grunwald in reply, twisting his knife in front of him
before eating the hunk of meat off its tip.

“I’d imagine that is correct,” said Karl. He was a handsome, blue-eyed man,
probably in his early twenties, Grunwald gauged. His wavy hair was fair, and
hung to his shoulders now that he wore neither his chainmail coif nor his
black-lacquered helmet. Vain, thought Grunwald—long hair had a tendency to
catch painfully in chainmail. Long hair, in his opinion, was impractical for
warriors at the best of times. It gave the enemy something else they could use
against you. Still, he was certain that many of the younger women camp followers
were besotted with the dashing young knight, so longer hair clearly had some
benefit. He snorted at his own line of thinking. “What?” asked Karl.

“Nothing. I was just thinking that you make me feel old,” Grunwald said.

“Yes, you are getting a bit long in the tooth, grandfather, and there is more
than a bit of grey in your moustache. You must be pushing, what, thirty?”

Grunwald snorted again. “Thirty-three, and you should learn to respect your
elders—I’m not so old that I couldn’t break that pretty nose of yours.”

“Thirty-three,” guffawed Thorrik. “Ha! I remember thirty-three! Barely past
suckling at a teat!” Karl burst into laughter, and Grunwald smiled.

Weary beyond words, Annaliese climbed the high mountain road, the sleeping
form of Tomas clinging around her neck. Night had long fallen, and they
travelled in silence. Eldanair stalked out in front of them, bow in hand, his
every movement sharp and wary. Katrin walked at her side, the hem of the
sister’s robes dirtied from days of travel.

The rough road had been hewn into the side of the mountain, and to her right
it rose steeply, covered in dense fir trees. To her left the ground fell away
sharply, the mountainside rocky and steep.

Far below in the dark valley glinted the lights of the small settlement,
Priesterstadt, and on the far side the mountains rose against the dark sky. The
valley fed into Black Fire Pass itself, and though nothing of it could be seen
in the darkness, merely being in such close proximity to the hallowed place
filled her with awe. It was said that the earth had spewed forth molten rock and
fire which had cooled and hardened and filled the valley with the craggy, black
surface that gave the pass its name. Annaliese was unsure of the truth to the
story—rock that ran like water and burned like wood sounded even more
far-fetched than the idea of giant rats that walked upright like men and lurked
beneath the surface of the world.