Tales of the Old World (53 page)

The
Heldenhammer
was no warship, however, and there was little that
could be done to prevent the dark elves boarding us. After a brief game of cat
and mouse, their grappling hooks and ropes began sailing over the deck, and I
finally saw with my own eyes the terrifying nature of our foe. In terms of
physical proportions they were not so different from men; but there the
similarity ended. Their screaming elongated faces froze my blood in a way that
the even the icy temperatures had failed to do, and the twisted, ornate curves
of their armour left me gasping with fear—what possible hope could we have
against such a foul corruption of nature? I saw in an instant that there was no
hope for us against such inhuman opponents.

From out of the dazzling whirling snow they came, falling on us like daemons.
Cruel blades glinted in the cold light as the elves hacked and lunged. Frozen
fingers fought to grip the hafts of weapons, and warm blood washed over the icy
deck. I fought blind, with the snow in my eyes, and in my fear I struck wildly
at every shape that came near me. Sigmar preserve me, but in those moments of
panic I knew not what, nor whom I struck with my clumsy blows. The battle was
not the epic struggle for glory I had so often read about; but rather it was a
brutal, ignoble farce with men slipping about on the ice and blood, while others
fell clumsily on their own blades.

It was with something akin to relief that I felt a blow against the back of
my head; and as I collapsed into the welcoming oblivion of death, I felt as
though I had cheated fate in escaping the fight so early on.

In the frozen wastelands of the north, strange sinews of light flicker in the
heavens, fitfully illuminating the blasted landscape; but all else, as far as
the eye can see, is darkness.

I did not perish on the rolling deck of the
Heldenhammer,
but as I
stumbled on through the endless night of Har Ganeth—the bleak, frozen tundra
that lies far to the north of our glorious Empire—I wondered if that was such
a blessing. Certainly with the benefit of hindsight, knowing all that I now
know, it would have been a kindness to have died then, innocent of the horrors
that were to follow.

It had been the baron himself who plucked me from beneath the mound of
corpses, and as I watched him striding through the knee-deep snow, just a few
yards ahead of me, I wondered at his fortitude. The battle against the elves had
been a grim, brutal affair, and whilst the victory had been ours, it had been
hard won. Few of the baron’s men had made it off the
Heldenhammer
alive—it was a pitiful group who remained to set foot on the packed ice of that
forbidding wasteland—yet Kelspar seemed utterly undaunted.

As for the rest of us, it was the white heat of our own avarice that drove us
onwards through the plummeting temperatures. I remembered all too well the
cheery warmth of the baron’s drawing room, and the passion with which he had
told me his story. It was a tale of the Hung: fierce, nomadic wild-men who
roamed the barren north, worshipping foul ancient gods, and feasting on the
flesh of their own fallen. It was a tale of frozen lands and unexplored realms;
but most of all, it was a tale of gold.

I had seen with my own eyes some of the strange guests entertained by Kelspar
over the years: many of them travellers from the east, with gifts of exotic
spices and lurid poetry, who regaled the wide-eyed baron with tales of
uncountable wealth in the vast steppes of the north. I had heard one man in
particular—a small, twitching seer named Mansoul—tell the baron in hushed
tones of a great city called Yin-Chi, deep in the realms of the Hung. He
whispered of great towers of ivory and gold rising out of the ice-capped
mountains, and streets littered with the accumulated wealth of generations of
the barbarians. As I turned away to pour the baron and his guest another glass
of Carcassonne brandy, I had seen in the cut crystal a sinister fractured image
of the room behind me, in which Mansoul discretely leant towards the baron and
slipped him a crumpled map. From that moment, my interest was piqued—and my
fate sealed.

All the remaining members of our party now shared this vision of riches, and
to a man we were consumed with greed.

There were seven of us in all, plus dogs, a sledge, food supplies and other
items, including a mysterious chest the baron claimed would guarantee our entry
into the fabled city. From his hints I deduced it contained gunpowder, or
mage-fire of some sort, with which he presumably intended to create a
distraction. In truth, I had not pressed him too hard as to the details of his
plan—I knew he had one and, in my fevered lust for wealth, that was enough.

I thought I had known the meaning of cold before we set foot in that cursed
realm… but I was wrong.

It is the nights that I remember the most. As the wind howled outside the
tents, we cowered inside, sleepless on bedding too frozen to crawl into, and
with terrible cramps in our stomachs from the fat-laden food we were forced to
eat.

Then, with no dawn to guide us, we would rise at some arbitrary hour and
attempt to don our packs; but by this time our robes were like plate-armour, and
our hoods had become soldered to our faces. We would lumber off like a group of
bloated revenants, limping and stumbling through the powdery whiteness. Our
breath froze and cracked painfully in our beards, and beneath all the layers of
coats and tunics, our own sweat became ice. Without the kernel of avarice
glowing deep in my thoughts, I think I would have simply lay down in the soft
embrace of the snow, and lost myself in the peaceful sleep of the dead.

But, even then I had not experienced a fraction of the horror that was in
store for me.

Despite the horrors we had already endured, it was not until the twenty-first
day of our slow, tortuous trek that we discovered the true face of terror. It
was the dogs that first alerted us to the fact that we were no longer alone in
the snow. At first they seemed merely nervous, barking more than usual and
hesitating where they had previously been sure-footed. In the pale light of the
moon, the all-encompassing whiteness felt smothering and claustrophobic, and the
agitation of the animals quickly filled us all with a nameless dread. The
younger members of the party began flinching at imagined shapes in the drifting
banks of snow, and even the baron seemed to quicken his pace a little.

Soon the dogs became utterly impossible to control. They howled and yelped,
seemingly in mortal terror for their lives, and however much the baron cursed
and kicked them, they would go no further. The barking sounded alien and muffled
in the blizzard, and my mouth grew dry with fear.

Then, suddenly, the noise dropped. The dogs crouched low to the ground with
their hackles raised and began emitting a low, pitiful whining sound that seemed
horribly ominous.

We all waited.

The sound of my heart thudded so loudly in my ears that I felt certain the
others must surely hear it.

I looked over at Kelspar, and saw that his hands were resting nervously on
his two long sabres. Something glittered in his eyes. Was it fear or merely
impatience? I could discern nothing clearly through my ice-encrusted hood.

Silence reigned, and I sensed the muscles of every man near me tensing with
expectation. I felt I might scream just to break the awful quiet.

Then, out of the snow, came the creature from my darkest childhood dreams. My
mind split like a shattered glass as I beheld a sight that in one cruel stroke
tore apart my every conception of all that was logical and natural in the world.
It loomed out of the whiteness like a mighty tree crashing down on us. Its size
was immense—ten feet tall at least; but it was not the scale of the thing that
tore screams of abject horror from me, it was its form: a shifting writhing mass
of muscle and teeth that had no right to exist in an ordered world. Bestial
faces howled and moaned in its blood-red flesh, before twisting into other
indescribably awful shapes, and cruel weapons appeared from nowhere in claws
that had previously not existed.

I’m afraid any greater detail is impossible for me to relate; my mind seemed
as incapable of grasping the being’s true nature as my hands would be to grasp
falling snow. To my shame, my legs gave way completely in the face of such a
monstrous assault on my senses and I fell to the floor.

Fortunately, the others somehow retained the strength of their limbs and drew
weapons to strike. A burly Middenheimer near to me swung an ice pick at the
heaving, thrashing creature, but its muscles seemed to slip effortlessly out of
the way of his weapon. As we all looked on in horror the man was lifted up into
the air by several pairs of arms, and, with a sound like the ripping of wet
cloth, torn clean in half. Another man leapt at the beast with a terrified howl,
swinging his hammer at what seemed to be a face, but the creature tore him open
like ripe fruit and his remains fell steaming onto the snow.

I saw then that our expedition was over, and that our end had come. I
prepared myself for the pain.

The baron had other ideas, however. With a look of determination that seemed
absurd in the face of such an unholy apparition, he strode purposefully towards
the creature with his musket drawn, and before the lumbering, howling brute had
registered his presence, he unloaded his buckshot straight into what currently
appeared to be its face.

The pitch of the thing’s voice suddenly rose to a high-pitched keening, and
for a split second, as a torrent of gore rushed from its head, the beast’s form
became fixed and solid. The baron seized his chance and, as we all looked on,
paralysed with fear, he drew both his sabres, stepped calmly forward, and thrust
them straight through the creature’s gelatinous eyes.

There was an explosion of noise and blood as the thing reared up in pain, and
at that moment, spurred on by their leader’s fearlessness, the other men rushed
forward and plunged their weapons into its still unchanging form.

This seemed more than it could bear, and with a deafening roar of impotent
rage and a spray of blood and viscera, it lurched back into the shadows from
whence it came.

“Bloodbeast,” said the baron calmly, wiping the gore from his swords and
face.

From that time on, I fear I became something of a burden to the others. My
mind seemed irreparably torn and I found even the smallest tasks arduous. The
best I could do was to shuffle along behind the others like a simpleton,
muttering to myself and flinching constantly at imagined apparitions.

Strangely, little was said of the attack over the following days. The bodies
of the dead men were placed in rudimentary graves, and we marched on in silence.
It seemed too awful a subject to broach; and what good could come of raising it?
We were alone in the wilderness. What could we do? Other than his enigmatic
statement after the beast had fled, the baron had said nought else on the
subject.

Bloodbeast.
What could such a word mean? It festered in my fractured
thoughts like a canker. How was it that the baron could put a name to such a
monstrosity? What foul tomes had he pored over to discover such a phrase? I
itched to interrogate him on the matter; but I feared that what would start as
rational speech would descend into the wailing gibberish of a madman. So I
simply acted out the mechanics of life and waited for the violent death that I
felt was waiting for me out there in the snow.

In the fourth week of our journey we perceived a change in the landscape. We
appeared to be crossing a great plateau and occasionally, through gaps in the
constant downpour, we spied what might be the distant crowns of a mountain
range. The Baron’s determination seemed not to have waned one jot and, if
anything, at the sight of those peaks, I noticed a quickening of his pace. He
began checking Mansoul’s map more frequently, and I detected a new urgency in
his voice when he spurred us on. Could we be getting near, I wondered, and, like
a long forgotten tune my greed returned to me. I felt a new resolve harden in me
and I put aside my idle thoughts of lying down to sleep on the crisp white bed
of snow.

The turn around in my spirits was, however, short lived. On the morning of
the thirty-first day of that journey into despair, I awoke to a nightmare. As
the baron and I lurched awkwardly from our tent to raise the others, we saw
their tent slashed and flapping in the wind, and their equally torn bodies
strewn across the bloodstained snow.

All three were dead.

The scene was too much for me and I retched dryly as I beheld it. Their
remains were barely recognisable: it was unmistakably the work of the creature
Kelspar had named Bloodbeast.

I searched for hours, but could not find their heads.

My descent into lunacy now seemed complete. I was nothing but a gibbering
wretch. I lay on the ground and called out for the beast to come and take me. I
begged for death.

I was, however, all that the baron had left by way of a companion and,
slapping me firmly across the face, he insisted that I take hold of myself and
remember that I was not some raving savage, but a gentleman of the Empire.
Through fear of his rage, rather than any real self-control, I managed to make a
show of calming myself.

Fortunately, the dogs were miraculously unharmed and I begged the baron to
consider returning to the coast. We had a rendezvous arranged with Hausenblas
and the
Heldenhammer,
and if we made good speed we might still evade
horrors that waited for us in the snow.

“What?” cried Kelspar, his eyes flashing in the dark. “You would return now?
When we have come so far?” Suddenly I feared him almost as much as anything else
in that frozen netherworld. There was a barely checked hatred in his voice as he
grasped my jacket and pulled my face to his. “Are you mad? Only days away from
treasures you could not even comprehend and you would turn back?” He hurled me
to the ground, and rested a hand on the butt of his pistol. “We go on, Gustav,”
he growled. “We go on.”