Warhammer - Curse of the Necrarch Read online

  A WARHAMMER NOVEL

  CURSE OF

  THE NECRARCH

  Steven Savile

  (An Undead Scan v1.0)

  To Marie, For loving me and saying so

  For loving me for my faults, not despite them

  You make me want to be the hero of my own life.

  This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage.

  At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it is a land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests and vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reigns the Emperor Karl-Franz, sacred descendant of the founder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder of his magical warhammer.

  But these are far from civilised times. Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war. In the towering Worlds Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands of the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Cods. As the time of battle draws ever nearer, the Empire needs heroes like never before.

  The Last Redoubt

  Deep in the Hollowing Hills, Middenland

  The Twilight of Humanity, 2032

  The smell of old death was heavy in the air. It had its own peculiar reek. It was not sweet and cloying like new blood. It was thicker, rancid, pustulant and more human.

  Snow swirled in the air, the wind raising white devils to spin and gyrate across the killing ground between the last redoubt and the death that waited beyond the immense black iron-bound doors of the castle. It was a remote hellhole. The thin air at altitude burned at his lungs, making it a chore to breathe. The caps of the rolling hills were crusted white, the trees burdened and bowed by the weight of the snow. Kastell Metz appeared to stand on an island in the heart of a frozen lake, its bulwarks and bastions dusted with a thick layer of unbroken white. In truth the lake was curved like a horseshoe. A narrow path ran beside the castle wall, skirting the edge of the lake and then ran the length of the skeletal trees before emerging on the plain. From any sort of frontal approach the illusion of the island fortification was perfect.

  There were no guards shivering against the bite of the cold as they walked the walls.

  There were precious few left to defend it from the dead and every one of them knew that nothing as fragile as flesh could save the living.

  The buildings beyond the frozen lake lay in tatters, walls torn down, the clay tiles of the roofs shattered and trodden into the dirt along with the bones of their lives: brothers, sisters, mothers, wives, sons and daughters left to rot in the muck of defeat. It had been a vibrant town no more than a month ago. Like so many remote settlements the town was a haven that had sprung up around the castle to serve the needs of its defenders. For years it had been nothing more than a few wooden buildings. Then little more than a year ago those had been replaced with stone houses, giving the doomed settlement an air of permanence.

  Felix Metzger stood on the battlements, a solitary point of calm amid the chaos of the thick falling snow. It settled in his grey hair and across the shoulders of his cloak and his bronze plate armour. Bitterness frosted within him. Down in the small courtyard the remnants of his knights stood over campfires, burning anything the enemy might find useful come dusk and their victory. Five hundred of them had defended the castle; thirty remained. He was immune to the cold, this mortal cold at least.

  Another cold had settled inside him ever since he had begun thinking of himself as a dead man walking. It was not in his nature to admit defeat, but this creature with its vile, twisted bramble of a soul had undone him and everything he loved. He was broken inside. All he could think of was one final act of defiance, one last tilt. His home would fall, that was a foregone conclusion. The question now was the price he claimed for it. He had lived with the notion that an army was like a snake, sever its head and another would grow to take its place, but the denizens of death were different, mindless in their devotion to their liege, this accursed Korbhen who clung to the shadows, afraid of honest daylight.

  Cut off his head and perhaps they would all fall?

  Metzger was a simple man who lived for the people under his protection. He did not crave the glory of combat, the thrill of steel ringing on steel, the frenzy of bloodlust nor the calm that came in its wake. That did not mean he feared death, either, only that he did not seek out the endless winter night like some men he knew. This new death of the Winter War was different. When the dead did not stay dead, how could the world as you knew it be trusted? When friends rose up at your back, suddenly enemies desperate to feed on the marrow of your bones, how could you look the living in the eye let alone raise a hand to strike down the dead?

  His charge was simple: hold the castle and keep the pass open.

  Even after all this time fighting them, Metzger understood little of his enemy, and that bothered him. A good soldier knew his foe intimately, and used that knowledge to his advantage, but after years of chasing vampiric shadows he knew as little now as he had on the first day he had taken up his sword. His head swarmed with a flurry of questions every bit as chaotic as the snowstorm that buffeted and bullied him. How did their vile resurrection work? How could they be bound once more to life and yet remain dead? Did Morr relinquish his hold on their souls or cherish them, leaving the flesh to rot? Were they robbed of an afterlife, cursed forever to live a half-death? Could they think and act of their own volition?

  There was one question that haunted him more than any other: was there anything left of them, the real them, when they came back? Could they remember? Could they be saved?

  Like so many other good men he wrestled with guilt and grief, unable to come to terms with the conflicting emotions that warred within him when he was forced to take up arms against the faces of men he had once called friends. Yet that was the nature of the conflict. Death wore familiar faces.

  He watched a black bird of ill-omen battle through the sky thick with snow and alight on the ruined section of what had been the Temple of Sigmar in a flurry of black wings. A pale, cadaverous figure greeted the bird, taking it in its withered hands and holding it up to its face as though listening to the raven’s caws. With the snows intensifying, the crook-backed figure shuffled away from view. It was easy to imagine those malignant shapes clawing out across the frozen lake to pierce the hearts of every last man huddled in the dubious safety of the redoubt. His fears were like that now, as insubstantial as shades, worming their way into his mind, undermining his resolve. It was easy to fear the unknown, natural even.

  He was not a coward though, no matter how strong fear’s grip on him. He was Felix Metzger, Knight of the Twisted Thorns. His strength was the flame-scalloped blade in his hand.

  Metzger reached down instinctively for the reassuring comfort of his sword, letting his fingers linger on its hilt.

  “Give me strength,” he whispered, his words carried away from his chapped lips by the wind. Its only answer was a mocking lament, low and mournful, the voices of all the dead returning to plague him.

  He drew little comfort from the knowledge that it would all be over soon, for better or for worse.

  Dusk closed in, its darkness more stifling for the swirlin
g snows.

  Metzger’s men huddled around their lanterns, watching them burn down with dread. Lanterns, bonfires and torches, anything that offered light had become more important than swords now that the hard-faced moons had emerged. Men tended the fires religiously, making sure they did not burn down during the night, for if they did there would be no light. The one thing they knew, without doubt, was that the dark was their enemy’s territory.

  Metzger shivered; it had nothing to do with the cold. He had never truly understood dread, even though he had lived through all of it, birth and death.

  He had crouched beside his own son as he drew that final shuddering breath. His life, the lives of all he cared for, had been reduced to blood and ash. Now, on this gods forsaken castle, within this lake of ice, staring at the ruined walls of the temples, oast houses, granaries and mills, imagining the damned they sheltered, now he understood it. Dread was so much more than fear.

  Metzger turned his back on the fallen town and walked back down the narrow stone stairwell carved into the wall to join his brother knights. He was desperately hungry but they had precious little in the way of food left. Like everything else the harsh winter and the drawn-out siege had worn their stockpiles down to nothing. The conversations hushed, the men looking expectantly towards him.

  There were ten faces around the fire, and ten more around the one across from it. Ten more were gathering faggots to feed the flames. They were running painfully low on firewood and had taken to burning anything that would light. The beast was toying with them. Metzger had no rousing words to lift their spirits. His brother knights knew as well as he did what they would face during the darkest part of the night; they had lived most of their lives either hunted by or hunting the beasts. That was the curse of the time they had been born into and that was how he thought of the dead, as beasts, monsters. Metzger hunkered down and rubbed his hands briskly before the low burning camp-fire.

  “I want these roaring, lads, I want the fires licking the sky and turning night to day before the hour is out. Anything we’ve got, burn it. It ends here so let’s go out in a blaze of glory. The bronze armour is going to shine like the sun when I walk out across that drawbridge.”

  Sarbin, the youngest of the knights, looked up at him. There was no hope in his pale blue eyes. “You’re going to sacrifice yourself, then?”

  “No, lad. I’m going into the belly of the beast and I am going to cut its heart out,” Felix Metzger said with all the confidence he could muster. With the elegiac wind cutting across his words they sounded like hollow bluster.

  “Then let us stand beside you.”

  “No, lad. This is about honour. Men of my line have been charged with protecting this fortress for two hundred years. This is a line that can never be broken. Whether I live or die, these walls are Metzger every bit as much as my flesh is, and my father’s was. I will face the beast alone.”

  Leiber rose, a look of utter disgust on his hawkish face. “No. With all due respect, that’s not the way it is going to be, sir. We’ve stood with you this far. We will stand with you at the end. We are not children to be sheltered from pain. We are men of the sword. We pledged our lives to protect this place and its people. If we die trying we die with honour.”

  The others grunted and nodded their agreement.

  “This isn’t the end, my friend,” Metzger said. He meant it. “Live or die, this wasn’t the end. The vampire’s kind infested the Empire, like rats carrying their stinking pox of unlife into every town and village. This isn’t the last battle. There will always be another beast that rises to wear the mask of evil. Human or inhuman monsters, this world of ours is made for them. When we stop fighting the monsters, that is when we succumb to true evil, my friend. Remember, the sun also shines on the wicked.”

  “Yes, but it burns these ones to a cinder,” Koloman said, grinning at his gallows humour. The man’s weasel-like nose twitched, throwing long shadows across his acne-pitted skin.

  “That it does. Now I will have no more arguments, you’ll have those fires blazing and that is an order.”

  “They’ll burn, but we will not let you take the long walk alone, sir.”

  And he knew they wouldn’t. They were good men.

  Metzger left the circle, confident they would disobey him. They were brothers to the bone, not merely warriors. More, they were the Twisted Thorns. They would stand together and die together.

  He sat alone, gathering his thoughts for a while. The world around him seemed so much more vital now that he had entered his last few hours, the colours more vibrant, the cold of the snow more chilling, the wind in his face brisker.

  Metzger occupied himself so as not to brood, for what would be would be. He checked the fastenings of his greaves, methodically oiled the individual joints of his gauntlets and adjusted the lie of his mail shirt beneath the heavy bronze breastplate. It needed no thought; he had done each a thousand times over a thousand nights of conflict during his life. There was comfort in the preparations; they offered the illusion that he was in control of his destiny, that this last night was his and not the beast’s. Last of all, he drew his blade, a mighty flame-scalloped sword, and lay it across his knees. The blade had tasted the blood of hundreds of men over the course of their time together and not once had the edge failed him. Metzger raised the crosspiece of the bronze hilt to his chapped lips and kissed the cold metal. “One last time, old friend,” he whispered.

  Behind him the first of the bonfires spat and cackled as the men threw more kindling on it. He saw them hacking up the refectory table and the oak benches, feeding them to the flames along with tapestries and other flammable treasures. The shadows of the flames danced all around him.

  Metzger pushed to his feet.

  He was an old man feeling every one of his years as he walked slowly through the falling snow towards the huge winch that would open the castle’s wooden drawbridge. The ice that had filmed across the ground cracked, the sound rolling around the hills. It was an omen, Metzger decided. The thaw was coming. The snows could not last forever. Two more ravens flew in over his shoulders, resting on either side of the portico. As one, they craned their necks to gaze down at him with their jaundiced eyes. He did not care. The sound of the ice cracking could mean only one thing: the great winter was drawing to a close. The long night of the vampire counts faced the inevitable dawn that humanity had been longing for, and with the sun would come true death for the children of the night. With each successive step Metzger drew himself a little straighter, a little taller, sloughing the weight of the years and the burdens of so many failures from his shoulders.

  The light from the fires blazed all around him, orange and red tongues licking at the sky. They lit up the spires of the citadel and the chapel and the length of the high curtain wall, throwing eerie shadows across the parapet walks along the barbican and the drum towers.

  Metzger grasped the winch and turned it one cog at a time until the gates stood open, and strode out onto the wooden drawbridge.

  He did not need to turn to know that the last remnants of the Twisted Thorns were gathering behind them.

  The gatehouse dwarfed him, the keystone of its arch more than half his size again. The bronze plate caught every movement of the flames, transforming him into the sun as he drew the great blade and demanded, “Face me!” at the top of his lungs.

  The Knights of the Twisted Thorns emerged from the castle behind him and formed a line, blades drawn.

  The wind shifted, skirting the wall walk, bringing back with it the stench of the desecrated town beyond the frozen lake. The stink battered him back a step, but he recovered his balance quickly. He heard the scurry and scuttle of movement across the lake and the rasp and slither of insidious voices. He waited, the snow gathering in the chinks of his armour, squirming down his neck to dribble slowly and uncomfortably down the curve of his back. Visibility was poor but he knew they were coming.

  “Face me, coward, one leader to another,” he bellowed, send
ing the challenge at the barred gate. “Do away with the darkness and the shadow. Or are you afraid?”

  Behind him one of the knights began to beat slowly on his shield with the flat of his sword. Another took up the beat a moment later. Then another until all of them were beating out a slow taunting rhythm. Metzger raised his sword, taking it in both hands. The flames danced along the length of the blade, bringing the cold metal to life.

  Shadows thickened along the expanse of the ice lake. He could feel their eyes on him. The scrutiny made his flesh crawl.

  With the snow swirling around him, Felix Metzger walked slowly out onto the ice, the cacophony of swords on shields ringing in his ears.

  “Face me,” he yelled again.

  He saw long, delicate and utterly bloodless fingers reaching out of the snow towards him, black nails thick with crusted dirt. The long fingers became a hand, each fine bone picked out in sharp relief against the slack white skin.

  Metzger’s breath caught in his throat as the snows parted around the pallid, bald pate of the beast. The vampire revealed itself. It was not the beast he had imagined in his nightmares.

  “You would face me, little man?” the creature wheezed, its voice a grating death rattle. It was less, and yet more than he had expected: less monstrous, more human. Bloodless lips parted on crooked and chipped tombstone teeth. The incisors appeared to have been filed to sharp points. “Here I am. Bring your sword and cut me down if you would.”

  It shuffled forward two paces, crook-backed and wizened.

  “Cut me down, hero of the Empire, if that is what is in your heart.”

  The vampire threw its bony arms wide. The creature’s clothes hung on it like rags. Snow devils swarmed around its legs. Clumps of white hair matted at the base of its skull. Only its black eyes set deep in the hollows of its head betrayed any sort of strength or cunning. They were soaked in moon madness.