03 - Sword of Vengeance (49 page)

Grosslich’s face remained contorted with rage.

“Remember this, as I kill you,” he hissed. “You were our
instrument.
Whatever choices I made, you made them happen. It’s over now.
The game is finished. You have no blade left that could hurt me.”

“But I do.”

It wasn’t Verstohlen’s voice. Both men snapped round.

Schwarzhelm was there, a giant amongst men, his armour
encrusted with the patina of war, his eyes dark with betrayal. He raised the
Rechtstahl, and the blade was as red as blood.

As Helborg rode through the barrier into Averheim he felt the
heat of it crush his lungs. He took shallow breaths, almost choking as the
searing air filled his throat. Averheim was a furnace.

No dog-soldiers followed them in. Helborg looked over his
shoulder. The clamour of battle came from behind the hindmost Imperial soldier
like a muffled echo. The enemy troops beyond the gates had turned away from
them, back towards the greater mass of Empire soldiers to the north. It was as
if, by passing across the portal, they’d ceased to exist.

His men paused, waiting for the next order. A profound sense
of dread had come over all of them. Less than three hundred, mostly halberdiers,
warrior priests or knights. They now clustered together, eyes wide, bravado
forgotten, faces pale.

The battle-fury had gone. The only sound was the low roar of
the bloodfire, lifting their hair and pressing against their armour. It was hot
but it did not burn. Its purpose was not to injure, but to preserve. Other
things, inhuman things, thrived in such rarefied airs.

Helborg looked about him warily, keeping a tight grip on the
Klingerach. Everything was blackened by the fire. The street ahead was charred
and ruinous. Nothing living stirred on the stone, and the windows of the houses
gaped like mouths. Far ahead, some massive brazier sent billows of lilac smoke
into the fervid air. The ground thrummed incessantly, as if machines ground away
far beneath their feet.

Above it all, the Tower loomed, dark and terrible, shimmering
behind a haze of unrelenting heat. The dread leaking from it was palpable, a
tight, horrifying cloud of fear. The structure was an aberration. It didn’t
belong. No mortal could dwell in such a place. Then, and only then, did Helborg
understand its purpose. It was no fortress or citadel. It was an instrument. A
device. A means of focussing something within the city.

None of the men spoke. None of them moved. Leitdorf looked
like he was trying to remember something by mumbling words under his breath.
Volkmar had let his golden fire ebb. The madness had passed from his severe
features, replaced by the grim determination that had given him his nickname.

Helborg’s steed was skittish under him. All the other horses
were the same. One of them kicked out in a panic, infecting the others. They
were going mad.

“Dismount,” ordered Helborg, and his voice echoed strangely.
“Horses will be of no use to us in here.”

The knights did as they were bid, and the released horses
galloped back through the gates, preferring a death on the plain to one in the
city. All men stood shoulder to shoulder on the road, swords and halberds held
ready.

“Stay close,” warned Helborg, turning to look each of them in
the eye. “Fear is your enemy. It will kill you if you let it. Trust to faith and
to your blades. The Tower is our destination. Stay true, and we will destroy the
architect of all this.”

He walked forwards. Even as he did so, there was a howling
noise from the far end of the street. As if a mighty wind surged towards them
from far away, the fire in the air rushed and swayed.

Helborg tensed. The Klingerach felt suddenly heavy in his
hands. All around him, men took up defensive positions.

Something was coming. Something fast.

“Trust to faith,” he growled, standing his ground. Beside
him, Volkmar’s fire flared up again.

Then they came. From the far end of the street, shapes
appeared in the air. They grew quickly, hurtling towards the Empire troops like
storm-crows, flapping and shrieking. In their wake was pure terror, dripping
from the air and pooling on the blasted stone.

They tore past the rows of houses. Their shapes grew clearer.
They were women, or parodies of women, impossibly lovely, impossibly terrible.
Their flesh was lilac, and their exposed skin shimmered in the bloodfire. In
place of hands they had rending claws and in place of feet they had talons like
a bird’s. Their bald heads were crowned with forbidden sigils, and their mouths
were stretched open wide, lined with incisors and poised to bite.

Some of his troops broke then, dropping their weapons and
racing back to face their end on the battlefield beyond the gates. Helborg
hardly noticed them go. The remainder braced for the impact, fear marked on
their ravaged faces. Even the Marshal, inured to fear by a lifetime of war, felt
his heart hammering and sweat bursting out on his palms, slick against the grip
of his sword.

“Trust to faith!” cried Helborg again, hefting the runefang
and preparing to swing.

Faith seemed like little protection. As swift as death, as
terrible as pain, Natassja’s daemons screamed down the street towards them, eyes
black with delicious fury, faces alive with the joyous malice of those about to
feed.

Verstohlen watched as Schwarzhelm broke into a furious, heavy
charge. Kraus was at his right hand, as were a whole company of swordsmen in the
colours of Talabheim. Behind the sorcerer, a unit of dog-soldiers had formed up.
The opening cleared by Grosslich’s sorcery began to close back in on itself.

Verstohlen, his vision still cloudy, the sickness eating at
his heart, could only watch as the Emperor’s Champion swept across the broken
earth, his battle-ravaged features blazing with fury. As Schwarzhelm tore
towards Grosslich, Verstohlen saw the same dark expression on his face as when
Grunwald had died. Though his grim demeanour didn’t always make it obvious,
Schwarzhelm cared about his men like few Imperial commanders. When one of them
died,
he felt
it.

Grosslich took a step back. His hands kindled lilac energy,
snapping and snaking around his gauntlets. Tendrils of oily matter strung out
along his swordblade, catching on the viscous fluid still dripping from the
metal. As Schwarzhelm closed him down, Grosslich fired a spitting column of it
outwards. The pure stuff of the aethyr surged across the narrow gap between the
two men.

Schwarzhelm didn’t so much as pause. Still charging, he swept
the Sword of Justice into the path of the corrupted essence.

The matter exploded. Shards of it spun into the bodies
around, burning through armour and cracking metal. Both men and dog-soldiers
shrank back from the swarm of glowing embers. In the centre of it, vast and
inexorable, Schwarzhelm ploughed onwards, shrugging slivers of sorcerous
discharge from his rune-warded pauldrons.

Grosslich tried to blast at him again, but by then
Schwarzhelm was in range. The Rechtstahl came across in a sweep of such
staggering force that Verstohlen thought it would cleave the man in two.
Somehow, Grosslich got his own twisted blade in the path of it. Me was slammed
back heavily, his legs bending under the impact. A filigree of cracks ran across
the crimson armour.

“Faithless,” hissed Schwarzhelm, swinging his blade back for
the next strike.

“You can talk,” gasped Grosslich, giving ground and
frantically blocking the rain of blows that followed. His face had twisted into
a mask of loathing—for Schwarzhelm, but also for himself. The handsome
features that had once awed Averheim had gone forever, scarred by the mutating
whim of his new master. “You
made
me.”

“I’d have killed you for Grunwald’s death alone,” Schwarzhelm
growled, his blade working faster and heavier with every plunge, knocking
Grosslich back steadily, stride by stride. “You need not give me more reasons.”

Verstohlen found himself held rapt by the exchange, unable to
intervene, clamped down by the poisons coursing through his body. Schwarzhelm
fought like a warrior-god of old, shrugging off Grosslich’s attempts to land a
blow and raining strikes of crushing weight on the sorcerer’s retreating frame.
The traitor’s armour, invulnerable to the bite of lesser weapons, began to
fracture under the assault. Even Bloch, for all his skill, hadn’t as much as
dented it.

Bloch.

Verstohlen spun round. Where was he? The rush of bodies began
to obscure the open space Grosslich had opened up. Dog-soldiers and swordsmen
surged across it, a mass of sweat-draped limbs and blood-streaked faces.

Verstohlen staggered along, pushing his way through a press
of straining swordsmen. He was unarmed, vulnerable. He didn’t care. The battle
roared on around him. The sounds of it were muffled, the stench of it muted. As
if drunk, Verstohlen clumsily shoved and ducked his way to where Bloch had
fallen.

“Merciful Verena,” he whispered, the words slurring from his
sluggish mouth. “As you have ever guided me…”

He didn’t need to finish his prayer. A line of Empire
swordsmen swept in front of him, driving a detachment of dog-soldiers back
several paces. In their wake, a gap opened up. There, lying on the churned
earth, lay the halberdier commander, forgotten by the fury that boiled around
him. His blood had stopped flowing and his face was as pale as ivory. Somehow
he’d regained hold of his halberd, and it lay across him like a monument of
honour.

Verstohlen limped over to him, falling to his knees by
Bloch’s corpse. The commander had fallen awkwardly, his legs twisted and broken
under him. His face was fixed in a snarl of aggression. Belligerent to the end.

The virulence was now deep within Verstohlen’s bones. Without
treatment he knew he’d be dead soon. Then the two of them, scholar and soldier,
would find their end together, as unlikely a pairing as a minstrel and a slayer.

He looked up. The swordsmen had maintained the assault but
the right flank had been left exposed. More dog-soldiers crept forwards. There
was nothing between Verstohlen and them. They advanced steadily, eyeing the
vulnerable figure crouching down next to the body of their master’s last victim.

For a moment, he thought his end had come. He was weak. Far
too weak.

“No,” he breathed, gritting his teeth and getting to his feet
with effort. “You shall not despoil this.”

He picked up Bloch’s halberd. It was heavy, far heavier than
he’d imagined it would be. For the first time, he began to understand the scorn
of fighting men for those they protected.

The dog-soldiers kept coming. Verstohlen could see the
unnatural light within the helmets of the lead warriors. The stench was just as
it had been in Hessler’s townhouse so long ago, the first time he’d seen one of
the creatures up close.

“Damn you,” he snarled, standing over Bloch’s body and
lowering the halberd blade awkwardly. “This is
not
for you.”

If they understood the words, the dog-soldiers made no sign.
They came on remorselessly. Empire troops, seeing the gap in the lines, came up
to Verstohlen’s side. He was not alone. Without speaking, needing no orders,
they closed in around the body of the fallen commander.

All knew the score. This was ground that would not be
yielded.

As the first of the dog-soldiers came into range, Verstohlen
narrowed his eyes, swallowed the bile rising in his gorge, adjusted his grip on
the wooden stave and braced to meet the charge.

Helborg swept up the Klingerach, aiming at the screeching
face of the nearest daemon. It swooped past him, swerving away from the steel
and spinning back into the air. They would not take on a holy blade. He swept
round, looking to catch another of them with its edge.

They were too fast. Like hawks above prey, they darted into
the crowd of men, picking off the weak and hauling them into the fire-laced sky.
Their victims screamed with horror as they were born aloft. Warrior priest or
knight, it made no difference. These were foes beyond all of them.

Volkmar kindled his staff again and lightning spat along its
full height. He whirled round, releasing a volley of twisting bolts. They
streaked up at the circling daemons. One hit, dousing the creature in a ball of
swirling immolation. It screamed in its turn, an echoing mockery of the cries of
mortal men. Its companions merely laughed, and the sound was alive with joyous
spite.

“The men cannot fight these,” muttered the Theogonist. “The
fire sustains them.”

“We won’t go back,” said Helborg, watching as the daemons
clustered for a second pass. “Can you do nothing?”

“Hurt them, yes. Kill them, no.”

The daemons swooped back between the houses, their claws now
dripping with blood. As they came, the wind howled around them.