03 - God King (39 page)

“Emperor,” said the vampire, and Sigmar saw the gleam of razor-sharp fangs in
the corner of the monster’s mouth. “It is a great pleasure to see you again.”

“I cannot say the same,” he replied.

“No, I expect not,” agreed the vampire, turning his attention to the Asoborn
queen with a mocking glint in his eyes. “And Queen Freya, I am gratified to see
you survived our previous encounter. I cannot promise you the same mercy I
showed you at the river, but as you can see, many of your tribesmen now fight
with me. Were you to join them, it would have a pleasing symmetry.”

Freya seethed with fury and hurt, and Sigmar saw it was taking every scrap of
her restraint not to hurl herself at the vampire. She took a deep, shuddering
breath.

“You defeat my army, but you run from a host of old men and children,” she
said, each word a venomous barb. “You are nothing to be feared. You and your
kind are leeches, not warriors. A true leader would have died with his army, not
run like a gelded catamite.”

Khaled al-Muntasir glared at her, but his angry expression turned to one of
polite indifference, as if she had not spoken.

“Death is meaningless to me,” said Khaled al-Muntasir with a dismissive wave
of a thin-boned hand. “None of your inferior race can strike down one of my
kind. The blood of ancient queens runs in my veins, and I will simply rise from
any wound a mortal can deal me.”

Sigmar was studying Khaled al-Muntasir’s eyes as he spoke, and almost missed
the lie, so glibly did it trip from the vampire’s mouth.

“I don’t believe you,” said Sigmar, suddenly seeing a crack in the vampire’s
self-perpetuated aura of invincibility. “You fear extinction like any mortal.
More so. You’ve become so attached to the idea of immortality that just the
thought of oblivion terrifies you.”

The vampire turned his gaze on Sigmar, and he felt the full might of his
will, a potent force that had sustained his existence for centuries and which
had seduced hundreds with its promises of a life undying. Its promises were
empty to Sigmar, for he had faced the temptations of a being far older and far
more dangerous than a mere vampire.

“I told you that you were not welcome in Reikdorf,” said Sigmar, without
breaking the vampire’s gaze and letting him know that the attempt to dominate
him had failed. “I said that if you returned that you would be killed.”

The vampire looked hurt at Sigmar’s harsh words and said, “You would not
respect the sanctity of the parley? I had thought you a civilised man.”

“What do you want, fiend?” demanded Wolfgart.

The vampire’s tongue flicked out, as though tasting the air like a serpent.
He smiled and nodded toward Wolfgart. “You should keep yapping dogs on a leash,
Sigmar. They might have their throats torn out to teach them a lesson.”

“Now who’s not respecting the parley?” said Alfgeir. “What is it you want?
Speak your offer so we can spit on it and get back to our drinks.”

“Very well,” said Khaled al-Muntasir, more offended at Alfgeir’s disrespect
than any notion of the parley being broken. “I came here to offer you one last
chance to hand over my master’s crown. Ride out with it within a day and you
will be…”

“Spared?” laughed Sigmar.

“No,” replied Khaled al-Muntasir. “Not spared, but you would become exalted
champions of the dead, great kings among the host of the unliving. It is a great
honour my master does you by even offering you this chance.”

“So why doesn’t he come here himself to offer me this boon, ruler to ruler?”
said Sigmar.

The vampire cocked his head to one side, as though trying to discern whether
Sigmar was joking. Deciding he wasn’t, Khaled al-Muntasir shrugged.

“My master does not lower himself to treat with lesser races,” said the
vampire. “Bring him his crown and your deaths will be swift, your rebirths
glorious. Deny him and he will kill everyone in your ridiculous city, and bring
your people back from the dead only after their corpses have been violated by
the flesheaters. There will be no glorious resurrection for any of you, just
mindless hunger and a craving for living meat that can never be sated.”

“Tough choice,” said Wolfgart. “Can we think about it?”

Missing the sarcasm, the vampire said, “You have one day. When the twin moons
rise, the end begins.”

“Then we will fight you beneath their light,” said Sigmar, turning his horse
back towards Reikdorf. Before he could rake his spurs back, Khaled al-Muntasir
had one last parting shot.

“Where are my manners?” said the vampire with mock embarrassment. “How rude
of me not to introduce you to my new companions. My brothers, come greet our
honourable foes.”

The two warriors accompanying Khaled al-Muntasir rode level with the vampire
and raised their visors. Sigmar’s heart lurched with a spasm of grief as he
beheld the once-noble features of Counts Siggurd and Markus. Their faces were
pale and bloodless, lined with spider-web patterns of empty veins, and their
eyes gleamed red with hunger. Sigmar counted these men as his dearest brothers,
warrior kings who had marched into the jaws of death with him and emerged
victorious.

He had called them to his side time after time, and they had honoured their
oaths to him without question. Now, when they had needed him, he had failed
them. Their people were enslaved and their heroic lineage had been ended, each
man cursed to an eternity of suffering and torment as a soulless blood drinker.
They stared at Sigmar with undisguised thirst, fangs exposed and their bodies
leaning forward, as though about to leap from their horses and bear him to the
ground.

“You must forgive them their ill-manners,” said Khaled al-Muntasir with
relish. “They are little more than children, still driven by their own selfish
desires and hunger. They have yet to master their appetites when in civilised
company.”

“What have you done?” said Sigmar, overcome with anguish at the sight of
counts.

“He has given us a great gift,” said Markus. “One that can be yours if you so
choose.”

“Gift?” spat Sigmar. “You are both damned and you do not see it.”

He turned away from the vampires, disgusted and ashamed at what had become of
them.

These abominations looked and sounded like his counts, but they were not
Siggurd and Markus, and he wouldn’t waste any words on the monsters that wore
their faces. The brave men who had fought beside him at Black Fire and who had
come to his aid at Middenheim were no more, and all that remained of them were
memories.

Sigmar and his companions rode away from the vampire counts, each struggling
with their emotions at the sight of the newest blood drinkers. Khaled
al-Muntasir’s laughter rang in their ears and Markus spurred his black horse
forward to shout after them.

“We have been lifted from the mud of mortality,” the former count of the
Menogoth tribe cried. “Born anew to higher forms, and if you could feel what I
feel, you would beg for my fangs to fasten on your neck!”

No one answered him. No one could.

The sound of hammers woke Govannon from a deep sleep, a percussive beat that
set his whole room vibrating. It was dark, but that didn’t mean anything. Since
the dead had arrived it was always dark. He had thought that the loss of
sunlight would not make much of a difference to him; his world was grey and
lightless anyway. But even locked in his blind world he felt the crushing
bleakness of a world without sunlight.

Though everyone in the city was afraid, including Govannon, he had no trouble
in sleeping for his work on the dwarf war machine had driven him past the point
of exhaustion. He had yet to discover a workable fire powder compound, and his
body was unforgiving in its protests at his treatment of it.

Rolling onto his side, Govannon yawned and stretched his tired muscles. He
groped for his bearskin pelt, hanging on a hook beside the bed, and pulled it
around his shoulders. The hammering was coming from below, but who would dare
break into his forge to use his tools and materials without asking? They’d be in
for a hiding, that was for sure. Bysen might have the mind of a child, but he
had the right hook of a bare-knuckle fist fighter.

Govannon crossed the room, seeing nothing, but not needing to. The layout of
his room was well known to him. He reached down to wake Bysen, but found his
son’s bed empty and cold. It hadn’t been slept in for some time, and Govannon’s
anxiety grew. Bysen was missing, and in that moment, Govannon was back at Black
Fire Pass, desperately searching the infirmary tents for any sign of his boy.

He heard muffled voices from below, and reached for the knife wedged in the
gap between Bysen’s bed and the wall. The blade was sharp on both edges and
triangular in section, meaning any wound it caused would never properly heal. It
was a weapon of spite, but whoever had broken into his forge had more than
earned that spite.

Govannon eased onto the stairs that led down to the forge, feeling the heat
wash up from below on his skin. A blurred orange glow illuminated the lower
level of the building, a glow that told Govannon his forge was burning hotter
than it had ever burned before. The voices were punctuated with clangs of
hammers on metal and sparks of white fire that penetrated even Govannon’s
limited sight. The air tasted of hot metal, burning coal and some nameless,
actinic residue he couldn’t identify. What in Ulric’s name was going on down
there?

Though he carried a knife, Govannon wasn’t naive enough to believe that he
could defend himself from an intruder. Still, his forge was his domain, and
anyone who thought otherwise was going to get badly hurt before they cut him
down.

He counted twelve steps, made a turn to the right and then counted another
ten. The heatwash from below was like nothing he had felt before, a rushing
all-enveloping fire that burned hotter than any forge he had ever known.

“Whoever you are, get out of my forge!” he bellowed, mustering as much of his
warrior shout as he could. “I swear to Ulric, I’ve a knife I’ll stick in the
neck of any bastard who tries to take me!”

Govannon saw two shapes beside the forge, one tall and hunched over, the
other short and squat and swinging what looked like a short-handled
sledgehammer.

White sparks flew, each like a firefly of light that cut through his
blindness in staccato flashes of clarity. The knife dropped from his hands as he
saw Bysen by the roaring maw of the forge, lifting a gleaming sword blade from
the anvil, where one of the mountain folk stood back with a monstrously
heavy-looking hammer casually slung over one shoulder.

The sight faded with the white sparks and Govannon groaned as his vision
became blurred and hazy once again. He heard Bysen’s voice over the roaring of
the forge.

“Da, you’re here!” said his son, closing the door to the firebox with an
iron-reinforced boot heel. “I didn’t want to wake you, da. But the dwarf man
said it didn’t matter none.”

The heat in the forge dropped as the firebox door shut, though it was still
hot enough to take the chill off the unnatural cold that filled Reikdorf.
Refugees clamoured to take shelter in the lee of the forge, as it was one of the
warmest places in the city.

“Are you all right, da?” said Bysen. “You need to go back to sleep?”

“I’m fine,” insisted Govannon, walking toward where he had seen the dwarf
with the enormous hammer.

“You are Govannon, the blind manling smith?” said a gruff voice, pitched
somewhere between irritation and condescension.

“I am,” he said. “Who are you and why are you in my forge?”

“I am Master Alaric, Runesmith to King Kurgan Ironbeard of Karaz-a-Karak, and
I am here to reclaim my property. You’re in a lot of trouble, manling.”

“What are you talking about? You’re not making any damn sense,” said
Govannon, before the identity of the dwarf hit him between the eyes. “Wait,
Master Alaric?

“You’re the smith who made the runefang. And Sigmar’s crown.”

“Amongst other things,” grumbled Alaric in annoyance. “I do make things other
than trinkets for manlings, you know.”

“Of course, of course,” said Govannon, moving through the forge with the ease
of one who had a perfect memory of its layout. “It’s a great honour to meet you.
I’ve admired your work for years. I just wish I could have seen the Runefang
Blodambana before I lost my eyes…”

“Bloodbane,” said Alaric. “A good name well earned.”

“Bysen, fetch our guest some beer, the good stuff,” said Govannon.

“Aye, da. Right away, da,” said Bysen, moving past him. The sword blade he
carried shone in the light, as clear to Govannon’s sight as if he looked upon it
with Cuthwin’s keen eyes.

“Wait,” said Govannon, putting his hand on Bysen’s arm. “What is that?”

“It’s Master Alfgeir’s sword, da,” said Bysen. “The mountain man helped me
finish it.”

“He helped you…”

“Finish it,” said Bysen happily. “Now all I need to do is take it to Master
Holtwine and he can fit the handle he made for it.”

Govannon had all but forgotten about Alfgeir’s sword, it had been so long
since he had begun its forging. Though he had sworn to the Marshal of the Reik
he would finish it before the snows, that had been an empty promise, for the
work on the war machine had taken all his time and effort.

“Show me,” he ordered.

Bysen obligingly lowered the sword, and Govannon was amazed at the finished
blade. Smooth beyond belief, the metal was pristine and etched with angular
symbols along its centreline that sparkled with strange light. Though everything
around him was as blurred as ever, the sword blade was sharp and clear, a vision
of perfection that made Govannon’s eyes wet with tears.

Gingerly, he tested its edges, not surprised to find that both were sharp
beyond the ability of any human whetstone to grind.

He turned to Alaric. “You did this?” he said, his voice choked.