03 - God King (47 page)

The black riders charged through the gap he had broken, rampaging through the
Asoborns and slaughtering them with slashing blows of their black swords.
Siggurd hurled Garr to the ground, the heroic warrior’s throat torn out and his
head lolling on a last shred of sinew. Transformed into something evil,
Siggurd’s eyes blazed crimson with thirst and his fangs gleamed in the twilight
as he bore Queen Freya to the ground.

Maedbh rushed to the queen’s side, but a backhanded blow from the vampire
count hurled her back. Ulrike sent an arrow thudding into the blooddrinker’s
back, and he roared in pain. His fangs bit down on Freya’s neck, but before he
could tear out her throat, Cuthwin leapt onto the vampire and buried his knife
in his side.

Siggurd arched his back, his form blurring as though in mid transformation
and he slashed a clawed hand across Cuthwin’s chest. The young Unberogen fell
back, his chest in tatters. Siggurd screeched in anger, his fangs bared and
bloody. Fridleifr stabbed the vampire in the back with his spear, the tip
punching through his belly. Siggurd spun around, wrenching the spear from
Fridleifr’s hands and tearing the weapon from his body. Faster than Maedbh could
follow, the spear left Siggurd’s hands and plunged into the boy’s chest,
punching through his armour and driving him to the ground.

Sigulf gave a cry of loss and anger and slashed his sword through Siggurd’s
arm. The vampire screeched in agony as a wash of black blood sprayed from the
wound. Siggurd looked at the wound, unable to believe he had been hurt.

“That stung little one,” hissed Siggurd, leaping forward to take hold of
Freya’s son.

He looked into the boy’s eyes and laughed, as though at some private jest,
before drawing a short-bladed dagger and ramming it into Sigulf’s belly. The boy
screamed, but before Siggurd could twist the knife and spill his guts, another
arrow hammered the vampire’s body.

Maedbh saw Ulrike standing behind the vampire, scrabbling to nock another
arrow to her bowstring as Siggurd fastened his hungry gaze upon her.

“Blessed arrows,” he said, dropping the wailing Sigulf to the ground. “Little
girls shouldn’t play with such dangerous things. Now I’ll have to make you
scream.”

The vampire stalked towards Ulrike, who fell to her knees before the
terrifying figure, his form blurring as his cloak billowed around him like the
wings of an enormous bat. Siggurd’s eyes widened as his lower jaw distended and
his fangs sprouted like daggers.

Maedbh clambered to her feet and staggered towards Ulrike, though she knew
she could never reach her before Siggurd. Her pain was incredible, but she
had
to reach her daughter.

“Ulrike!” she begged, hearing a swelling roar around her. “No, please! Don’t
hurt her!”

Siggurd lifted Ulrike from the ground. The young girl’s face was a mask of
tears. Siggurd turned back towards Maedbh. He sniffed the blood on Ulrike’s face
and his monstrous face broke into a horrid leer of understanding.

“Ah… this is your spawn,” said Siggurd. “Now you will watch her die.”

Before the vampire could say another word, the roaring in Maedbh’s head
swelled as a mob of people charged into the black riders. There were hundreds of
them, maybe even thousands. Most were without armour, dressed in the garb of
farmers and ordinary men and women. They fought with the fury of Thuringian
berserkers, tearing the dead riders from their saddles and breaking them apart
with blows from clubs, felling axes and scythes.

Leading them was a young boy spattered in blood and with the light of battle
fury in his eyes. He fought with a spear tied with blue and red rags, and Maedbh
saw he knew how to use it. The boy hooked the haft around the legs of an
unhorsed black rider and stabbed it down into the dead warrior’s chest, twisting
the blade before he withdrew it from the body. Dimly she knew she should know
him, but how she could know an Unberogen boy escaped her.

The people of Reikdorf swarmed over the undead and drove them back. Siggurd
threw Ulrike down as a score of howling men and women ran at him with spears and
swords. Some of these, he could kill without difficulty, but all of them… Maedbh
didn’t think so. She ran over to Ulrike and scooped her up into her arms.

“I’ve got you, dear heart,” said Maedbh. “I’ve got you.”

“Mother!” cried Ulrike, burying her head against Maedbh’s shoulder. “The bad
man…?”

“Gone,” said Maedbh, oblivious to anything except her daughter’s weight. “He
can’t hurt you now. Not ever.”

Ulrike wept into her neck, and Maedbh held her tightly, closing her eyes and
willing the fear away as her body pulsed with waves of fiery pain. They stayed
like that until Maedbh heard footsteps. She looked up and saw the young boy with
the spear tied with the blue and red rags looking down at her.

“Is she all right?” he asked, and Maedbh caught the strong eastern accent in
his words.

“Daegal?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She smiled. “You remembered your spear training.”

He nodded, and suddenly he wasn’t a blood-covered Asoborn warrior, but a boy
of twelve years. She gathered Daegal to her and hugged him and Ulrike close to
her chest. At last, she released them both and said, “You were both so very
brave. I can’t tell you how proud I am of you. You fought like real heroes.”

Ulrike smiled through her tears, and Daegal held himself tall, as though some
dreadful weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He looked back over her
shoulder and Maedbh saw Freya carrying Sigulf while Fridleifr and Cuthwin had
their arms around each other’s shoulders to hold themselves upright. Both were
bloody, but they were unbowed.

“Siggurd?” she said.

“Fled,” answered Cuthwin. “When the people came, he took to the air and flew
away.”

Maedbh nodded, looking to her queen with relief beyond words. Freya was pale
and unsteady on her feet, and blood streamed from the wound at her neck.
Sigulf’s eyes were closed and his belly wet with crimson. His chest rose and
fell, but weakly.

“He’s alive?” asked Maedbh.

“Barely,” said Freya, her voice cracked and faint. “We have to get him back
to Reikdorf.”

“We
all
need to get back,” said Cuthwin. “We’ve seen this lot off, but
there’s more of them coming this way.”

Maedbh looked to the east, and the flame of hope was smothered in her breast
as she saw thousands more skeletal warriors marching in lockstep towards them.
They had weathered this attack, but the dead had many more warriors to send into
battle.

“Everyone back!” she shouted. “To Reikdorf!”

Krell’s axe slashed down, but instead of cleaving through armour and flesh as
it had done in his slaughter of the Red Scythes, this time his blade was halted
by gromril armour and the strength of mountains. The towering monster paused in
its butchery and looked down at the stout forms opposing it. The furious light
in the champion’s eyes burned even brighter, as though recognising the stunted
forms before him from battles fought thousands of years ago.

Master Alaric felt the power of Krell’s blow throughout his body, his
great-grandfather’s shield almost bent in two by the force. The shock
reverberated through his armour and he thanked Grungni that he’d thought to
strengthen himself with several firkins of beer.

“Is that the best you’ve got?” he sneered at the long dead champion. “No
wonder Grimbul Ironhelm was able to beat you.”

Krell roared with renewed fury, and his axe came up as a hundred dwarfs
charged him. Alaric hurled himself at the ferocious champion whose name was
entered countless times in the Dammaz Kron, his every transgression written in
the blood of the High Kings of the age. He hammered his axe against Krell’s
blood-red form, feeling the star-iron of his axe bite a hair’s breadth into the
skull-etched plates of armour. Krell roared and slammed his axe down on a dwarf
warrior’s head, cleaving him from skull to groin. Blood sprayed the armour of
his comrades, and they attacked with renewed fury.

Like the great pistons of Zhufbar, the dwarf axes beat the black armour of
Krell, cutting shards of cursed iron away from his body, but leaving the giant,
skeletal body beneath unharmed. Alaric circled behind the undead champion,
rolling beneath the return swing of the black axe that left six dwarfs bisected
at the waist. The ring of iron and gromril tightened around Krell, but the sheer
weight of numbers only seemed to drive him to greater heights of frenzied
delight.

Krell’s axe swept left and right, and those it didn’t kill were hurled away
to land with the butchered human horsemen. An injured warrior, the one Alaric
had spoken to, watched the fight in pained amazement. Alaric would sooner eat
grobi dung than fail in front of a manling. The shameful life of a slayer
awaited such unfortunates. That was not going to be Alaric’s fate.

Yet more of the undead were moving up behind Krell, pushing forward in giant
blocks of marching skeletons and lurching corpses. Hundreds of bats wheeled
overhead and ghostly wisps of howling shades swirled around them. One way or
another, this fight would need to end soon, for there was no way his dwarfs
could hold against such numbers.

Alaric waited until Krell swung his axe in a low arc, killing another four
dwarfs, before throwing aside his shield and leaping onto the dead champion’s
back. He wrapped his hand around a broken hunk of armour and beat his axe
against Krell’s shoulders.

Plates shattered under the assault, and Krell arched his back as he felt
Alaric’s presence. He roared and spun around, seeking to dislodge Alaric as the
remaining dwarfs pressed their attack, battering his thighs with axe blows and
hammer strikes. Sparks flew from the red armour, like metal fresh from the forge
on an anvil. Alaric fought to hold on as he thundered his axe against the metal
of Krell’s armour. He felt his grip slipping and slammed his axe though a
weakened plate, wedging himself in place by gripping an exposed rib within the
unclean iron.

It felt like plunging his hand into an icy lake, and Alaric felt the cold of
the other side seeping into his hand, a frozen touch of utter lifelessness and
doom. He tried to snatch his hand back from Krell’s essence, but it was stuck
fast. The cold slithered through his hand, oozing through the veins and meat of
his wrist. Alaric knew that when it reached his heart, he would become no better
than Krell.

“Master Alaric, sir!” shouted a loud manling voice. “Da says you got to get
clear!”

Alaric knew he had only one chance to live and grimly freed his axe from the
weakened plate of broken armour.

“Alaric the Mad, eh?” he said. “Maybe they’re right.”

He brought the axe down upon his wrist, the razored edge easily slicing
through his flesh and bone. Alaric grunted in pain and kicked out on Krell’s
armour, throwing himself as far away from the champion as he could get. He
landed on a dead horse and rolled behind it as he heard a series of snapping
hammers being pulled back.

“Left one’s out of alignment,” he grumbled, as the world filled with fire and
noise.

Govannon pulled the leather firing cords, elated and terrified at the same
time. He couldn’t see much of the battle, which was a relief to him, yet out of
the shadows one shape was terrifyingly clear. The blood red form of Krell loomed
in the darkness, a monster of nightmare come to hunt the living.

The first hammer struck the side of its brass cauldron, slowing enough to
prevent the flint from sparking, and Govannon’s heart sank. The hulking champion
of Nagash loomed over the war machine and Govannon cursed himself for a fool in
wishing to be part of this fight. Krell would kill them all; nothing could stand
against this horror from an ancient age.

He cursed his naive belief that he could repair a machine of the dwarfs,
bitter that he could have spent these last weeks far more productively. Armour,
swords, shields, axes, arrowheads—

The second hammer struck true, and puffs of smoke and fire frothed from the
brass cauldrons at the back of the machine. The barrel erupted in a booming
storm of shot and fire, another a few seconds later. Govannon’s ears rang with
the concussive force of the detonation and his eyes watered with the brightness
of the fire erupting in thundering booms from the barrels. Then the fourth
barrel fired. As the hammer slammed down in the powder cauldron of the barrel he
had repaired, Bysen lifted him away as the Thunder Bringer rocked back with
ferocious recoil.

The barrel held firm and erupted with a blizzard of iron shot and, clear as
day, Govannon saw the towering champion fall, his blood red armour ripped to
shreds by the hurricane of fire and iron. Bones were shattered and torn away,
the horned helmet little more than a ragged lump of pulverised iron hanging from
a torn leather chin strap.

Part of Krell’s head was gone, the left side of his skull a shattered ruin.
Blackness gaped within, yet the fire in Krell’s right eye blazed as the dwarfs
fell upon his ruined body with sharp axes and vengeful hearts.

“It worked!” shouted Govannon. “In Ulric’s name, it worked!”

“Aye, da, it worked good!” said Bysen happily. “Big, big bang! Bysen’s ears
hurt!”

Khaled al-Muntasir rode at a leisurely pace towards the north, watching as
the army of the dead began to fully envelop these mortals who dared to stand
against Nagash. He had ridden with all speed towards where the red-armoured
cavalry had fought the black knights to a standstill, but halted upon feeling
Markus’ death.

For a mortal, Markus was a tremendous swordsman, but enhanced with the power
of undeath, he had been superlative—better even than Khaled perhaps. Yet he
was dead, his soul consigned to oblivion by a mortal. The unease that had
stirred in the vampire’s belly all night returned, stronger this time, and he
cursed himself for succumbing to such a mortal sensation.