03 - Sword of Vengeance (13 page)

For Volkmar, who had nothing but contempt for the pitiable worship of Verena,
that was about the only thing he had in common with such borderline heretics. He
hated the Cathedral. He hated the gold, he hated the gilt, and he hated the
pilgrims. They were simpering fools, the lot of them. None knew how to wield a
warhammer, and hardly any would have been able to read the scriptures or the
ordinances. They would come to the Cathedral fresh from whatever petty
debauchery they’d been engaged in, thinking that a donation of brass and a few
genuflections would save their souls from an eternity of damnation.

Volkmar knew different. He knew what kind of god Sigmar was.
Sigmar didn’t value excuses, and He certainly didn’t value offerings. He needed
spirits forged in white-hot steel, hands willing to take up swords, feet willing
to march into the cold wastes of the north to pin back the hordes of
destruction.

Volkmar also knew about damnation. He’d stared into the face
of it, seen the fate awaiting mankind should it falter. On the pitiless plains
of the far north, he’d been struck low by the Everchosen of Chaos, Archaon the
Mighty. He’d felt his life slip away, had cried out as his soul was ripped from
his mortal frame. It was Chaos that had brought him back, had pulled his essence
back into his ravaged body and tortured it before the gibbering hosts of ruin.
The ranks of the corrupted had stretched from horizon to horizon, filling the
northlands with a simmering tide of hate.

Volkmar alone of mortal men knew what it was to die and be
forcibly reborn. He alone knew of the utter horror of existence on the planes of
madness, and he alone had seen, however briefly, the world through the aspect of
a daemon’s eyes.

Most would have been driven mad. He sometimes wondered why he
hadn’t. No doubt there was a reason he’d endured. There was some pattern, some
divine intention behind it. He wasn’t sure what it was yet. In the meantime,
taking the war back to the filth that had caused him such pain seemed like a
reasonable way of repaying the debt. They said that familiarity bred contempt.
Volkmar, uniquely amongst his peers, was familiar with the great enemy, and
Volkmar, uniquely amongst his peers, held it in utter, withering, grinding
contempt.

And so it was that he despised the Cathedral. It was showy, a
front for the futile rivalry between the Cult of Sigmar and the officials of the
Imperial Palace. He preferred the Chapel of the Fallen, or the Cathedral of
Sigmar the Avenger in Talabheim, or the Abbey of Sigmar the Destroyer of Beasts
in Middenheim, hard under the shadow of the imposing Ulrican temple and carved
from solid granite.

He strode down the long south transept, snarling at the shiny
flummery around him. Every so often, a priest would see him coming and look for
an escape. If none was available, the man would bow low, desperate to avoid the
wrath of the Theogonist. Even the brute mass of the populace, as ignorant as
they were malodorous, knew well enough to keep out of his way. A six-foot
mountain of a man, clad in heavy furs and carrying the ancient Staff of Command,
was not someone to be crossed lightly.

Eventually, Volkmar reached his destination: a small door in
the outer wall of the transept, barely marked and overshadowed by a tasteless
frieze depicting Magnus smiting some worm or other. With a final snarl at the
milling crowds around him, Volkmar pushed the door open, ducked under the lintel
and went inside.

It led into a small, unadorned chamber. Centuries ago this
had been a tomb. Now Volkmar had commandeered it for his private meetings. The
walls were made of solid stone and had no windows. Though he was in the very
heart of Altdorf, nothing of the plague-ridden, gossip-laced town ever
penetrated down there.

There were men already waiting for him. They clustered around
the old sarcophagus in the centre of the chamber. All around the walls, torches
guttered, throwing sooty smoke curling into the vaulted roof. It was dark, cold
and austere. Just how a chapel to Sigmar ought to be.

“Greetings, Theogonist,” said one of them.

Volkmar grunted, slammed the door shut behind him and shot
the bolts home. Then he rose to his full height and surveyed the scene.

There were three figures waiting for him. All wore armour,
notched and scored by recent fighting. They were nearly as massive as Volkmar
himself and had the confident stare of men who’d faced death, or worse, in
battle. Two of them Volkmar knew almost as well as he knew himself. The third
was new.

On his left was his confessor, Efraim Roll. The man looked as
old as the tomb he stood behind. His beard was long and matted, and his skin
lined with a latticework of wrinkles. His head was bald, and old wounds
decorated the bare scalp. His dark eyebrows jutted out, as did his chin, and he
bore himself with the demeanour of a man fighting against a constant stream of
rage. His armour was as ancient as any in the Empire, having been forged by
dwarfs for the first conclave of Sigmar’s personal priesthood. It was hammered
from purest gromril and engraved with runes of destruction and damnation. Roll
was perfectly suited to it, being Volkmar’s confessor and the only man in the
Empire apart from Karl Franz who ever dared to give him an order. In the
flickering light of the torches, the innate savagery of his face was amplified.

To his right stood a very different figure. Odain Maljdir was
a vast bear of a man, ruddy-cheeked with a blond beard bursting over his
enormous breastplate. He wore his hair long, and it streamed in a series of
elaborate plaits over his studded pauldrons. His skin was tanned by the
ice-glare of the far north and looked as tough as old horsehide. Once the man
had been a priest in the service of Ulric and had made his name smiting the
Norscans on their endless raids across the Sea of Claws. They said he’d once
held back an entire company of them single-handed on the steps of a pagan temple
while waiting for an army of State troopers to relieve his position. Soon after
that, something had changed. He never said what it was, but he’d ended up
travelling south. The first Volkmar had known of it was when the huge man had
hammered on his door with his two fists, blurting in heavily accented Reikspiel
that he’d come to learn of the ways of Sigmar. Since then he’d been inducted
into the secrets of the Cult, and given the warhammer Bloodbringer as his
weapon. If he still hankered for the bleak worship of Ulric, he never gave a
sign. He’d become as devoted a Sigmarite as Volkmar himself, which was a rare
thing in an Empire made up of doubters, heretics and fools.

The final figure stood apart. He looked scarcely less deadly
than his counterparts, though he was clearly no Templar of Sigmar. His dark hair
was long, and his visage lean. Like the others, his armour was of ancient
pedigree, though dented by recent sword blows. He had a haughty, noble look
about him, as confident as it was pitiless. This was a man who had been forged
in the keenest fires of combat, who had ridden once against the terror-inducing
foes of mankind and had the stomach to do it again. He carried a longsword at
his belt, sheathed in a scabbard marked with the campaign records of Araby and
Tilea. It was the first day he’d been in Altdorf since being ordered to take the
fight to the enemy in the wind-scoured wastes of the north. He bore the scars of
that assignment in his dour expression. No man fought against the legions of the
dark gods and was unchanged by it.

In other ways, though, he was still the man he’d been when
standing besides Schwarzhelm at the battle of the Turgitz Cauldron. Preceptor
Leonidas Gruppen of the Knights Panther had been summoned home, though at that
point he had absolutely no idea why.

“Greetings to you all,” grunted Volkmar. “Now, to
business.”

Drassler lay still amongst the boulders, his grey cloak
smothering him, barely an inch of room exposed to see out from under. His
breathing was shallow and he could feel his heartbeats against the stone. Around
him, he knew the rest of the mountain guard, all two hundred of those who
remained, were similarly concealed. As the sunlight began to wane, throwing
shadows across the broken landscape, their disguise became even more effective.
For generations the bergsjaeger had known how to blend into the barren
landscape. The skills had originated in the hunting of game but had been
perfected over the long years for warfare. Now he waited, face down and sprawled
against the ice-hard rock, waiting.

Nearly two hundred yards away, the Keep stood as solid as a
peak. The barrage from Bloch’s artillery was being maintained and a steady
stream of arrows flew up at the battlements. Drassler and his men had crept
round to the east side of the castle. The gates were in view now, and he could
see the Averlanders continue to goad the orcs with feigned executions and
mutilations.

He didn’t like the tactic. Drassler had seen too many
greenskin armies use the same strategy, driving defenders mad by torturing their
comrades in sight of the walls. But he knew what Bloch was doing, and saw how it
gave them their chance. The commander had deliberately left his force in
disarray, making it look like the overconfident approach of a novice general.
The orcs would see that. They would see how far back Bloch had deployed, how
little he threatened the gatehouse. The sortie beckoned. If Drassler had been in
charge of the Keep, he’d have been tempted.

He wouldn’t have taken the bait. Unlike the orcs, Drassler
knew of the opportunities for ambush, of the techniques the mountain guard could
use for creeping up unawares. All his men were clad in the same stone-grey
cloaks, mottled and streaked to mimic the pattern of the terrain beneath them.
It had taken hours to work their way around to the east of Bloch’s position and
then shuffle forwards over the rock, grazing flesh and tearing the stiff leather
of their jerkins.

If a watchful orc on the battlements happened to gaze
straight at them, then the game would be up. Even their camouflage, as good as
it was, couldn’t foil direct scrutiny. So it was that Bloch kept up the nagging
barrage, doing everything he could to keep the eyes of the Keep on him.

It was a dangerous tactic. A sudden rush from the gates in
numbers risked overwhelming Bloch’s first lines of defence. The cost of being so
ostentatiously out of position was that a determined assault would cause havoc.

It was a risk worth taking. As long as the gates remained
closed, the chances of driving the orcs from the Keep were slim. As soon as they
opened, those odds shortened.

Drassler moved his head fractionally, looking out at the
distant lines of archers. They were being given a hard time by the defending
greenskins. Perhaps a third of them had been killed or wounded, and the
shield-bearing infantry around them had fared little better. Orcs didn’t like
using ranged weapons if there was a choice, but they were more skilled shots
than many Imperial generals gave them credit for.

He felt his stomach turn in disgust. The gates remained
closed. The ammunition for the guns would begin to run down soon. Bloch would
have to pull back. If he did so, then all his plan would have yielded would be
four-score men dead and a brace of empty gun barrels.

Drassler reached slowly for the sword at his back. At any
moment he expected to hear the signal for withdrawal, closely followed by
bellows of derision from the orcs locked up within. Then their own position
would become precarious, and they’d have to get clear of the walls. A shambles.
A bloody shambles. They were running out of time.

Then came the first sound.

A heavy clang of iron, as something was unhooked from within
the gates. A fresh barrage cracked out from Bloch’s artillery, harmlessly
smashing against the walls. Drassler felt his heart start to pound. At last.
They were going for it.

He turned to the nearest of his men. The sounds of more beams
being flung to the ground came from the Keep. A thin line of daylight stretched
down between the mighty iron-barred doors. From behind them, a rising tide of
baying and bellowing came out. Against all hope, they were going for it.

Drassler rose to a low crouch, ready for the breakneck sprint
across the rock. This would all still unravel if the mountain guard couldn’t
close in quickly enough. He saw the massive gates begin to swing open. The noise
of the horde rose in volume, a terrifying roar of pent-up aggression and
frustration. The orcs had been maddened, and the storm of their emergence would
be terrible.

Drassler’s hand was damp with sweat as he drew his sword,
keeping it under his cloak as best he could. They’d be outnumbered badly until
Bloch could get to them. Surprise was all they had.

“On my mark, lads,” he hissed, knowing his men would be as
taut as he, ready for the charge, knowing the danger. “On my mark…”

There was a boom, a scrape of tortured metal, and the gates
slammed back against the stone. With a torrent of bellows and roars, the orcs
surged out, eyes blazing red, blades swinging, trampling over one another in
their lust for combat.

The pretence was over. Now the real fighting had begun.

Volkmar walked up to the sarcophagus, the heel of the Staff
of Command clanking on the stone floor. The other three men clustered around the
tomb.

“We don’t have long,” said Volkmar. “The army is gathering,
but these things take time.”

“What’s the state of it?” asked Maljdir.

“Twenty thousand men promised. We need twice that.”

Gruppen let slip a low whistle.

“That’s big.”

Volkmar nodded. “That it is, Herr Gruppen. I’d like it
bigger. I’d like more warrior priests, and I’d like more wizards.”

Roll shook his head, looking disgusted. “Spellcasters?
Sigmar’s bones, surely we can do without them this time?”

“We can’t, and we won’t. Most of the magisters are on duty in
the north, but there are some stationed here and in Nuln. We’ll take as many as
we can find.”