03 - God King (14 page)

Redwane left them to it and made his way towards the stairs, climbing to the
upper level where the girl was waiting for him. She stood in a doorway of the
corridor and threw him a smile. He knew it was false, but didn’t care.

She looked at him, trying to conceal the horrid fascination she had of his
scars. She reached up to touch them, but he grabbed her hand before her fingers
touched his face.

“Don’t,” he said, turning his head away. “Please.”

She nodded and led him into the room.

Wolves howled at the moon and feasted on the dead as carrion birds lined
every rooftop or billowed in sweeping clouds of feathered bodies. Death had come
to Hyrstdunn and not a single soul had lived through the battle to break down
its walls. With their dead king now fighting in the ranks of the enemy, the
defence of the city had been without heart and the mortals had fought with
desperation born of knowing they could not win.

Khaled al-Muntasir walked the darkened streets of the city, revelling in the
sounds of its doom as a conductor might enjoy a musical recital. The sounds of
death were familiar to him; as well they should be after centuries of inflicting
them upon the living. He made out the sound of splintered wolf teeth tearing at
human meat, the
peck, peck, peck
of beaks battering at skulls to get to
the soft matter within. Beyond that, he could hear screams of the last survivors
as they were dragged from hidden cellars or attics.

King Markus walked listlessly behind him, his flesh pale and dead, his eyes
flickering with green embers as the vampire’s will remade him. Dried blood caked
his ravaged neck, and though he bore the semblance of the man he had once been,
nothing now remained of that mortal vessel. Khaled al-Muntasir had delivered the
blood-kiss to the Menogoth king, knowing the effect it would have on mortals to
see their fallen leader fighting alongside the army of the dead. Markus would
soon emerge from this catatonic state, and a new blood drinker would walk the
land. It gave Khaled al-Muntasir perverse pleasure to see the panicked faces of
mortal cattle as they realised that neither prince nor pauper was safe from
death’s touch.

The sound of crying children drifted on the midnight wind, and this was the
most exquisite sound of all. Innocent blood was the sweetest elixir, and though
his hunger was long sated on the blood of warriors, there was always desire for
such epicurean delights.

The city itself was a poor specimen of architecture: a random collection of
muddy timber structures built upon older ruins. No two were alike, a mishmash of
prosaic, peasant architecture that offended his cultured eye. His lips curled in
distaste as he looked up at the count’s dwelling, a ridiculous hall of crudely
hewn stone with a thatched roof and laughably childish daubings of antiquated
gods on timber panels.

“To think that you, a king of men, lived in this hovel is absurd,” said
Khaled al-Muntasir, shaking his head in disbelief. “I was but a lesser prince
and I grew to manhood in a sun-kissed palace of marble towers, glittering
fountains and triumphal domes that enclosed vast spaces of such beauty that they
could move a man to tears. You primitive savages could never achieve something
so magnificent.”

Markus didn’t answer of course, and Khaled al-Muntasir waved his thin hands
at the hall’s swaybacked roof. “Such inelegant design is so utterly primitive
for a land that claims to be the greatest empire of man. The notion that you
people actually believe that to be true is so ludicrous that it makes me want to
laugh. Or maybe weep, I haven’t decided. Oh, how the race of man has fallen.”

He shook his head in sadness and moved on, keeping to the centre of the
cobbled thoroughfares to avoid the sewage leaking down the edges of the road. He
held his white cloak draped over his forearm to keep it clean. Filth encrusted
every surface of the city, and thousands of dead bodies lay strewn around like
burst sacks of grain.

A pack of wolves ran through its streets, fighting over scraps of flesh.
Flocks of crows followed them, eager for their leavings.

Khaled al-Muntasir climbed the steps towards the king’s longhouse, smelling
the aroma of fresh-spilled blood from within. The doors were splintered and
sagging, and skeletal warriors in rusting armour of bronze stood like silent
guardians of a tomb. He turned to look back into the city, watching as the army
of Nagash completed its destruction.

Beneath the light of the moon, armoured skeletons marched between the
buildings, gathering the dead and dragging them into the open, where they were
deposited on rotted carts pulled by shambling animated corpses. Ghoulish
scavengers loped through the streets, fighting the rotten-furred wolves for warm
flesh torn from the bone. Pale-fleshed and scabbed with open sores, these
carrion feeders hissed and bit with grave-dirt claws, their bodies thin and
wasted, yet ravenous and tenacious.

And holding court over this glorious tableau of death was its lord and
master.

Nagash himself was surrounded by ghostly flocks of revenants, howling wisps
of light and shadow that curled in supplication around his monstrous limbs.
Krell, the hulking champion of the northern gods marched at Nagash’s side, a
physical manifestation of his master’s rage and aggression. Darkness went with
them, a shroud of bleak misery that invigorated Khaled al-Muntasir, but which
sapped the living of their courage and filled their hearts with fear. More than
just the fear of death, it spoke of an eternal life of servitude to a cruel
master, of paradise denied and the promise of a life that would go unrewarded by
the gods.

The vampire stood on the highest point of the city and watched with relish as
his personal retinue of warriors climbed the steps towards him. Each skeletal
champion dragged a screaming child behind it, none older than six or seven
summers. They wept and fought, but the dead men who carried them to their doom
were as inexorable as their fate was inescapable.

His fangs tingled with anticipation, his eyes filling with killing red as the
first dead warrior pushed a struggling girl-child towards him. He lifted her
head with a finely manicured nail, tracing its razor edge around her chin.

“Hush, child,” he said. “Do not cry. There is no need for tears, they are a
waste of something precious.”

The girl looked into his eyes, and she saw his hunger.

Before she could scream, he sank his fangs into her neck and began to feed.

Khaled al-Muntasir dropped the shrivelled husk of the last child, glutted on
innocent blood and his senses afire with the rush of undiluted life energy. His
eyes beheld the world around him with greater clarity than before, every living
thing glinting with its own internal fire. To his eyes, the world was ablaze in
silver light.

He smiled, feeling the rush of another’s blood filling his atrophied veins
and unused organs with a semblance of life. Sensuous, erotic and deliciously
painful, it was a fleeting sense of wonder, absolute knowledge of the thoughts
and life of another living being as they were extinguished forever.

Yet as soon as it was drunk and revelled in, it was gone. The curse of the
blood drinker was never to know satiety, to always crave the blood of the
living. He wiped the droplets from his chin, licking his fingers clean and
enjoying the last sensations of life as a starving peasant would relish the
crumbs of a prince’s discarded meal.

His vision was already returning to its more mundane outlook as he saw the
great lord of the undead climb the steps towards him, his pall of shadow like a
soothing balm of radiant energy. Nagash towered over Khaled al-Muntasir, his
power straining at the boundaries of existence, almost too intense for his
undying frame to contain. Even with sight far beyond that of mortals, Khaled
al-Muntasir could see only a fraction of the great necromancer’s power. It was
immense and unstoppable, an energy that existed in worlds beyond understanding,
crossing the gulfs of death and empowered by a dark wind whose source had been a
mystery to even the greatest practitioners of the arts in his sand-swallowed
city.

The necromancer’s shimmering metallic hand glimmered with power, a reservoir
of untapped energies drawn into its mysterious structure by the slaughter of
this pitiful city and its inhabitants. Walking its streets, Khaled al-Muntasir
had laughed to feel the stirring spirits below his feet, knowing that this land
was already a tomb.

This region of the Empire was awash with forgotten sepulchres and barrows of
long dead warriors. The people of this place lived atop a great mound of
corpses, buried beneath the earth thousands of years ago, and didn’t even know
it.

Khaled al-Muntasir closed his eyes and let his senses flow out around the
city, searching for any sign of life, any living thing that had somehow escaped
the killing. There was nothing, and he looked up into the emerald fire of the
necromancer’s eyes.

He shook his head and the necromancer thrust his hand towards the sky.

A blazing pillar of green light filled the heavens with its necrotic glow,
piercing the clouds and unnatural darkness with its brightness. The light built
within Nagash’s body, a lambent glow that slithered down through his invisible
flesh. It filled the necromancer’s skull, infused his dried bones, formed
phantom organs and coursed through his debased body into the heavy plates of his
armour. A black wind sighed, and the silver light that suffused the earth was
snuffed out in an instant. The ground shook as the impossibly powerful will of
Nagash spread through the land, reaching deeper than the roots of the mountains
and out into the wilds far beyond.

The wolves of the city threw back their heads and howled. The darkness was
suddenly lit by thousands of pinpricks of green light as the dead of Hyrstdunn
were dragged from their rest to serve in the army that had slain them. Bloody
men, half-eaten wives and murdered offspring screamed as their dead flesh was
filled with horrid animation.

Dead Menogoths climbed to their feet, reaching for weapons that had lain
beside their brutalised corpses. Those without weapons wrenched sharpened
timbers from their former homes, gathered up meathooks, gutting knives or
cleavers from butcher’s blocks.

At some unseen command, they shuffled towards the northern gate of the city,
moving with dreadful purpose and monotonous unison. The army of the dead,
already thousands strong, swelled by thousands more. And all across this
degenerate empire, the dead would be stirring in the damp earth that contained
them, roused to wakefulness by the most powerful necromancer ever to rise from
the lost kingdom of Nehekhara.

High above Nagash, a black miasma saturated the heavens, a roof of oppressive
coal-dark cloud that roiled outwards from its boiling epicentre. The dark of
night was nothing compared to this, for it was an umbra of complete emptiness,
the
oblivion
of light not just its absence.

The dread blackness slipped over the sky like a slick of oil on a lake,
creeping towards the horizon in mockery of the coming sunrise and life itself.

Death had come to the Empire.

Some, though headless, stood erect,

From some the arms were hacked,

Some were pierced from front to back.

And some on horse in armour sat,

Some were choked while at their food.

Some were drowned in flood,

And some were withered up by fire,

Some raving mad and others dead.

Merciful Shallya of the Sorrow pours bright tears from her
eyes

Weeping and wailing the fate of Men

Alas my grief that ye did not heed her cries.

A cold, salty wind blew off the ocean and a bell chimed high on the Tower of
Tides. Gulls wheeled over the docks of the lower town, and Count Marius of the
Jutones took a moment to savour the smells of his city. Unlike many cities in
the Empire, those smells were not shit and refuse and livestock. Jutonsryk
smelled of wealth, prosperity and contentment.

The buildings of his city were a haphazard mix of stone and timber, the
oldest jutting from the cliffs and spurs of the rock forming the natural bay
that made it such a perfect location for a port. Dominating the city was the
Namathir, the leaf-shaped promontory of dark rock upon which Marius’ castle was
built. Crafted of pale stone with many slender towers and shimmering roofs, the
fortress of the Jutone count was a curious mix of power and grace. High walls of
stone surrounded the city on its landward side, patched and rebuilt by dwarf
masons hired at ruinous expense in the aftermath of Sigmar’s siege.

Always a nautical city, most buildings of Jutonsryk sported some recognition
of the sea that had made its fortune. Tall masts with billowing sails jutted
from numerous rooftops, while figureheads from wrecked ships, cargo netting and
entire forecastles made up frontages, roofs and gables. Effigies of Manann in
his aspect of a bulky man with an iron crown were common, as were images of
crashing waves and sea creatures. Warehouses and loading bays for the hundreds
of ships that berthed here every week crowded the seafront, finely-built
structures paid for by the wealthy merchants and traders who had grown fat on
Jutonsryk’s prosperity.

Hundreds of ships filled the harbour, a myriad of sails of many colours and
different kings. Udose ships sat alongside those of the Endals and ones bearing
flags of nations that most people in the Empire had no knowledge of. Ships of
all size and shape jostled for space on the quayside and a forest of lifting
hoists worked in a never-ending procession of unloading and loading.