Tales of the Old World (54 page)

From then on I became little more than a beast of burden to the baron. His
dislike for me was painfully apparent, and it seemed I was there simply to lug
around the box of explosives and the other luggage, while the baron plotted our
course.

Was it the madness and carnage I had endured, or the lack of food? Or was it—as certainly it seemed—the very air that began to warp my senses? My mind
seemed gradually to be growing strange to me. Alien thoughts, of no apparent
sense, gripped me as we rushed over the snow on the sledge. Scenes of violence
and power only to be replaced just as quickly by a grovelling awe of what lay
ahead. Now when I saw those mountains through a gap in the blizzard, they seemed
near and strangely ominous. Something in their make-up seemed not the stuff of
reality, but rather the ethereal matter of dreams and visions.

The shifting, capricious nature of my mind began to distort even my memory.
The details of my life leading up to that point would sometimes slip away and be
replaced by darker memories filled with blood, and a lust for war. I fear my
reason was truly gone by this time and I can only accept that my description of
what followed cannot be considered the product of a completely rational mind.

Desire seemed to grow in the baron as we neared the peaks. He seemed now
almost unrecognisable as the cultured, urbane gentleman I had met all those
years ago in Nuln. His face was now a frozen mask of greed and lust. I could not
meet his eye and, as the days went by, I grew to fear him greatly.

I know not what day nor week it was, but finally the awful contortions of my
mind reached a crisis point, whenever I saw the mountains now they seemed of no
fixed shape, but instead they had become a shifting mass—much in the manner of
the foul creature that had attacked us. The stone seemed in some places to be
formed into monstrous screaming skulls, whilst in others it became impossibly
tall towers, whose sinister shapes reared up into the darkness like claws. I
even fancied that I saw the faces of beings too hideous and incomprehensible for
me to describe, looming above the peaks and beckoning us on.

Finally I could take no more. I knew that the baron was leading me not to
wealth and glory, but death and madness. Sigmar forgive me, I began plotting his
murder.

The state of my ruptured mind, however, meant that while I had intended to
contrive some subtle plan with which I would safely kill my erstwhile protector,
I instead leapt on him clumsily with my knife at the first sight of him looking
distracted. He was in the process of lifting the heavy chest of explosives from
the sled when I attacked, and sent him, the box and myself all tumbling down a
steep drift of snow.

We spun and tumbled silently in the soft powdery whiteness, and when we came
to a stop I noticed two things: firstly, the baron’s leg was lying at a
hideously unnatural angle to the rest of his body, obviously broken, and
secondly: the baron’s wooden chest had split open during the fall, spreading its
contents over the snow.

I froze in shock.

Rather than the gunpowder I had been expecting to see, I saw instead the
severed, and by now quite frozen, heads of our three murdered companions.

“It was you?” I gasped through a parched throat. “You killed them?”

“Of course,” snapped the baron impatiently, trying to rise on his one good
leg. “How else does one buy entry into the kingdom of the Blood God, but with
skulls?”

My mind reeled. In a heartbeat I saw that Kelspar had never intended to
simply plunder some mythical city like a common thief, but rather he wished
nothing less than to offer his fealty to the Dark Gods themselves. His years of
research into the peoples of the north must have corrupted his mind. The man was
a heretic!

I lurched towards him through the snow, raising my knife to strike, but he
was quicker, and even balanced on one leg he managed to aim his pistol at my
head.

“Fool,” he said, with a bitter laugh, “you could have joined me in paradise.”
And with that he pulled the trigger. I flinched, but felt no pain.

Looking down I saw no blood, and so I raised my eyes to the baron in
confusion.

By the look of rage and frustration on his face, I guessed what had happened—the hammer of his weapon had frozen fast.

I took my chance, kicked away his one good leg, and thrust my blade deep into
his chest.

I stepped back in horror as he thrashed furiously around with the weapon
still protruding from his coat. His cries and curses were too terrible to bear
and I covered my ears as I staggered away.

As I turned the sledge around and headed back south, I could still hear his
cries echoing weirdly through the darkness—even after several hours had
passed, the hideous noise was still there, shaming me with every cry of rage and
pain.

As I sit here now, by the warmth of my fire, I question all that I once felt
so sure about. I question even my opinion of the baron. Maybe he had intended to
simply find his treasure and return to the south; maybe it was only after we
entered that forsaken realm that his thoughts turned to madness and the
unspeakable gods of the north. The one thing I
am
sure of is that it was
no city of the Hung he was leading me towards; if I had followed him over those
forbidding mountains, I believe I would have entered another realm completely.
Sigmar forgive me, but since my desperate flight to the coast, and my rendezvous
with the
Heldenhammer,
I cannot stop my thoughts straying back to those
mountains, and wondering what I may have discovered on the other side.

I find myself sleeping more than is natural, and in my dreams the baron still
calls to me; but his cries are no longer full of rage and pain, they are the
words of a man who has found a great prize and simply wishes to share it. When I
awake, my sheets damp with sweat, his voice still echoes through my thoughts:
“You could have joined me in paradise,” he calls.

As the days crawl by, all that was once so dear to me seems chaff, and I find
it harder and harder to resist his call.

There was a long silence which even Count Rothenburg seemed reluctant to
break.

Finally, after several awkward minutes had passed, he spoke, but his voice
did not carry the ring of confidence I was used to. “How did you come by this
journal?”

Gormont smiled conspiratorially, obviously revelling in the tense atmosphere
his tale had engendered. “My father’s study,” he replied smugly. “He thinks it
secure in his safe, but he has few secrets I am not aware of.”

The count stared at him.

“And where is this ‘Gustav’ now?”

“Well,” said Gormont, rising from his chair, and beginning to stroll cockily
around the room, “when he came to us, he was obviously in a very bad way, and so
my father took him in out of pity; but he soon regretted it. The man had
obviously lost his reason—we would hear him wailing like a lame dog in the
middle of the night, and his presence in the house was beginning to play havoc
with my poor mother’s nerves. Then, thankfully, two nights ago he disappeared as
suddenly as he arrived, leaving behind all his possessions—including the
journal.”

I had never seen it before, and I never saw it again, but the count was lost
for words. He gaped at Gormont as though the lad were suddenly a stranger to
him. There was a terrible ring of truth to the tale that had finally silenced us
all, and even the count seemed incapable of making light of his nephew’s story.
He began to reread the journal in silence—seeming to forget that he still had
company—and as he pored over the words, a frown of deep concentration settled
over his face.

Soon, the guests began to depart, pulling on their great coats in an
uncomfortable silence, and disappearing one by one into the cold winter’s night.

A little while later, as I stood in the hall buttoning my own coat, I noticed
the count leading Gormont away towards his private chambers. As they turned a
corner and disappeared from view, I heard a brief snatch of their conversation.

At the time the words seemed of no importance, but since Rothenburg’s
mysterious disappearance, they have begun to haunt my thoughts. In fact, they
have circled my mind now so many times, that I doubt I will ever forget them.

“Tell me again,” I heard the count say to his nephew, “what you know of the
map and the man called Mansoul.”

A chill wind drove in across the sea, churning the water into great crests,
steel grey flecked with white. A storm was coming. Change was coming. A finger
of cold, plucked from the sea, entered the boy’s heart and pierced it like a
dagger. Change was coming, and things would never be the same again.

Stefan looked up towards his father, standing like a statue at his side. His
father did not return his glance, but kept his stare fixed beyond the raging
waters, out towards the far horizon where the sun was a deep orange globe
sinking into the sea. Fedor Kumansky was waiting. Waiting for the change.

Questions formed upon the boy’s lips and faded away, unspoken. A feeling, one
that he barely yet knew as fear, was growing inside him. On either side of them,
the huge sugar-ice cliffs that marked the shores of Mother Kislev stretched away
into the distance. Before them, the boundless ocean besieged the shore.

They were standing on the edge of the world. It was the world Stefan had
known all of his life, but this unknowing fear that swelled like the sea in the
pit of his stomach was something that he had not felt before in all his eleven
years.

He tightened his grip upon his father’s hand, pinching with his fingernails
until they bit deep into the tough, leathery skin until, at last, his father
looked down at him. Fedor Kumansky smiled for his son, and Stefan saw that the
smile was a mask. “What is going to happen, father?”

By way of answer, Fedor Kumansky extended an arm out to sea. There, where
moments before there had been only the jagged line separating sky and ocean,
tiny black specks now peppered the horizon.

The ships were too far distant for Stefan to make them out, but it was a
common enough sight. Here, where the mighty Sea of Claws funnelled down into the
estuary that became the River Lynsk, the traffic of ships was ceaseless.
Fishermen, traders, merchants ferrying their wares to and from the great city of
Erengrad and beyond. Stefan found the sight of the ships almost comforting.
Except that the tiny masted vessels gathering on the horizon seemed to be
multiplying by the moment. There were too many of them.

“So many ships,” Stefan said, quietly. “Perhaps they have sailed all the way
from Marienburg, or even from L’Anguille, to trade with us?”

His father shook his head, slowly, and in that movement Stefan knew that the
small branch of comfort he clung to was gone.

“I have waited for sight of these ships,” his father said. “Waited, through
waking hours and times of sleep. Waited in the hope that they would never come.
But last night the gods spoke to me through my dreams. They told me of the dark
clouds about to gather.” He drew his son to him.

“No,” Fedor said at last. “I don’t think they come from Marienburg, nor from
L’Anguille or anywhere to the west.” He drew his cloak tighter round him to fend
off the biting cold of the wind. “I think they come from the north. And I fear
they have no wish to trade with us.”

North.
Stefan turned the word over in his mind. North was not a place; he
had never seen the north nor met any man or woman from his village who had been
there. But he had heard of “north”, and knew it as the thing that had seeded
the fear that turned his stomach. North was the savage lands of Norsca, or
worse; the savage, nameless lands whose ships set sail upon the seas of his
dreams, his nightmares.

The salt air stung Stefan’s face and tears prickled in the corners of his
eyes. He looked to his father for some sign of what he was feeling, but Fedor’s
face was blank. The time of his waiting was over. The dark shapes were more
numerous now, and larger. Stefan could make out the outline of the sails
billowing full-blown upon tall masts. Fedor Kumansky laid his arm gently across
his son’s shoulders, and turned him away from the sea.

“The time has come,” he told Stefan, softly. “And we have work to do.”

Father and son retraced their steps upon the flint path that led from the
cliffs back towards their village, into the heart of Odensk. Their pace was
brisk but not hurried; a good sort of pace for a crisp, cold day at the
beginning of spring. Stefan sensed no panic in his father’s measured strides
across the headland, but at each timbered house along the path into the village
Fedor stopped, and rapped hard upon the door with his staff.

Calm, sombre faces appeared in doorways. Strong, upright men with proud,
weather-beaten faces much like his father’s. Fedor clasped each one of them by
the hand, but this was not a time for greetings. To each of his kinsmen, the
same words, clear, spoken almost without emotion: “The time has come.”

Where there had been one man and his son soon there were a hundred, moving
through the streets of Odensk, the same message passing from mouth to mouth.
Each repetition met with the same response. Knives that had only seen service
gutting fish were cleaned ready for a grimmer purpose. Broadswords tarnished
with the rust of peaceful years were brought down and polished with oil. Staffs
became clubs in the hands of men who had spent their lives at peace. And from
out of an underground store, long-disused and fastened with padlocks, two small
cannons were removed and wheeled slowly towards the cove where the seas broke
hard upon the shore.

The sleepy afternoon quiet of the fishing port had been broken, the people
roused to a level and kind of activity that Stefan had never seen before. Half
running at his father’s side, he watched as the village transformed itself into
something new, something frightening. Tools of life turned to weapons of war;
men hardened by work stood ready to become warriors. Homesteads became
fortresses.