Tales of the Old World (126 page)

Something flew out of the shadows and hit him square in the side. Ribs
cracked and his body skidded across the floor and came to a crushing halt
beneath a pile of bones and coffins. Dead teeth and sharp clavicles tore his
coat and flesh, while powerful claws reached through and pulled him free.

“You die now, man-thing,” the white one roared above him, its claws slashing
through his coat and exposing his chest. Heinrich tried to fight back, tried to
hold his arms up to block the assault, but he was too weak. Where is my sword,
he wondered. Where is the Heart?

None of it mattered anymore, as his eyes winked in pain with each slash. A
giddy warmth consumed his body as the space around him swirled. I’m sorry,
Broderick. I have failed you.

Through his nausea and sleepy haze, Heinrich watched as White One stood up
and stepped back. Its tails pulled two blades from the sash at its waist. Blades
long and sharp. Blades dripping green with poison. It held the blades above its
head as it squatted down on powerful hind legs. It wavered there for a moment,
screamed, bared its teeth, then leaped.

A white and brown blur flew across Heinrich’s view. When it was gone, White
One was no longer before him, but lying to his side. Heinrich pulled himself up
and spotted a warhammer, lying still against the wall, pulsing hot in Sigmarite
prayers. Beneath a pile of brown wool lay an old priest with two weeping blades
sticking out of his back.

Heinrich’s mind snapped to attention immediately as energy poured into his
throat. “Father, no!” he screamed.

It seemed as if he were outside his own body, looking down from the painted
dome of the cave. Everything had a black and white sheen. There was clarity now
in his thoughts, a single mindedness, and somehow he stood up and lurched across
the floor and found his hands upon the warhammer. Somehow he raised the weapon
above his head and found White One righting itself from its dishevelment.
Somehow he found the strength to swing the pulsing hammerhead. The skaven’s head
exploded under the strike and its body was tossed like a rag doll against the
wall. Heinrich followed and struck again, and again and again, until White One
no longer moved. But he kept swinging, until the shape on the floor before him
was no longer a skaven or a mutant, but something different, something basic, a
singular representation of the City of the Damned, and he felt that if he kept
swinging, he could, with mighty strokes, drive the evil away and bring the city
back to life. Bring Broderick back to life.

But a hand reached into his space and pulled the hammer away. Arms held him
firmly and pulled him back. Whispers from the darkness. “It’s over, Heinrich.
It’s over.”

Colour returned and he was standing again in the cave. He looked to his right
and found the Estalian beside him, holding him tightly. He tried to pull away,
but his arms were too weak. “I’m sorry, Heinrich,” Bernardo said, “but you will
have to kill me this time to keep me from stopping you.”

The last of his strength failed him and he collapsed. Heinrich lay on the
floor for a long time, how long he did not know. Perhaps he slept. When he
opened his eyes, his men were around him, their warm smiles confirming that he
was not dead and this was not the afterlife. Hands propped him up.

“How are you, sir?”

The Estalian’s voice was calm and surprisingly comforting. Heinrich turned
and felt a sharp pain in his ribs. He gripped the broken bones and groaned,
“Even to a bower like you, it should be obvious.”

Bernardo laughed and helped Heinrich to his feet. “Well, say a prayer, brave
servant of Sigmar. It’s over. We’ve won.”

Indeed it was. The skaven were gone. Obviously the destruction of their idol,
the death of their leaders and the loss of the Heart was too much for them to
bear, lust as well, Heinrich thought as he took a shaky step. “How is everyone?”

Bernardo gave a small smile and a wink. “As if the comet itself sits upon our
heads, but we’ll make it… all except Father.”

Heinrich saw the crumpled brown robe on the floor and Father’s bald head
resting upon Rupert’s knee. Blood and spittle streaked the corners of his mouth.
Bernardo helped Heinrich down and he held the old man’s hand. The handles of the
weeping blades stuck out of Father’s chest, their poison eating his flesh.

“It seems as if I’m finished, captain,” Father said, choking through blood.
“Just as well.”

“You foolish old man,” said Heinrich, gripping the priest’s hand tightly.
“Why did you do it?”

“I’ve lived a long life,” Father answered. “I saw no better way to leave it
than in the protection of my captain.” He coughed very hard. “We have both won a
victory here today, you and me. You will live to carry on against the Eternal
Struggle, and I will finally, at long last, die. Tell me true, captain. Did we
get the Heart?”

Heinrich didn’t know what to say. Did we? He wasn’t sure. But he nodded.
“Yes, Father. The Heart is ours.”

“Praise Sigmar,” Father said calmly and raised his hand. He motioned his
captain forward. Heinrich leaned in and let the priest’s fingers stroke his
hair. “Now close your eyes, captain, and pray for me.” Heinrich cupped his hands
together. “And captain? Be sure to give those tears to someone who will use
them.”

The Tears of Shallya. Heinrich had quite forgotten them. He reached into a
pocket and found the vial. To his surprise, it had survived. He held it tight,
closed his eyes and prayed.

Father’s hand slacked.

Heinrich made the sign of Sigmar and crossed Father’s arms over his chest.
I will miss you, old man.

Bloodtooth limped out of the shadows. Heinrich smiled as the hound drew near,
but his joy quickly soured as he saw the medallion, the Heart, dangling on its
leather cord from the dog’s teeth.

“Roland!” he yelped. “Get that away from him and wrap it in a cloth… now!”

Roland yanked the Heart from the hound’s bloody jaw, tore a piece of cloth
from his shirt, wrapped the artefact and handed it over. Heinrich tucked it
away.

“I don’t understand, captain,” Bernardo said. “Is something wrong with it?”

Heinrich shivered at images of burning bodies and raining fire. “It’s too
powerful for us,” he said. “We are not worthy of it. It needs a stronger soul
than mine to understand it, to harness its power.”

“Then what do we do with it?” asked Roland.

“As I’ve stated, we will take it to his Grand Theogonist in Altdorf. He will
know what to do. And now,” Heinrich said, giving Bloodtooth a little scratch
behind the ears, “let’s collect our things and get out of here before they
decide to come back. I suspect they will take some time to reconcile to the
truth that their god is but a pile of shattered bones, but they’ll be back. They
always come back. I’ve had enough of them for a while. Did we get any wyrdstone
for our troubles?”

“A full bag of it, captain,” Albert said, raising a sack of glowing green,
“and jewels too. Enough to buy the City of the Damned itself.”

Heinrich chuckled through aching ribs. Maybe, he thought to himself, but I’m
not buying.

“How are we going to get out of here?” asked Bernardo.

Heinrich shook his head. “I’ve no idea,” he said, looking around. Pieces of
the heavily damaged ceiling were still falling, and new cracks were forming
everywhere. “We’d better find a way out soon or we’ll be buried alive.”

And then he felt a cool breeze brush across his face. Heinrich stepped back
and saw a small shape of grey smoke dart across his view and into one of the
skaven tunnels. The shape stopped momentarily and a face formed in its centre.
It seemed to smile. Then it disappeared down the tunnel, leaving a trail of
faint white light in its path.

“Well, Bernardo,” Heinrich said, “it seems as if we’ve made some friends
today.”

The Estalian’s face flushed with surprise. “Bernardo, eh? I’m no longer ‘the
Estalian’?”

“Well, we should speak informally if we are to be partners.”

“Partners? Who said anything about being partners?”

“I could use some support on the road to Altdorf. If you and your
Marienburgers would care to join us?”

“Altdorf is not my home.”

“But it could be,” Heinrich said. “You said it yourself… you are as much a
man of the Empire as I.”

“What about Mordheim?”

“We’ll return. There’s much work to be done here. Unless, of course, you wish
to fight this city alone. In that case, you’re welcome to it. Just let me know
who to send your remains to the next time you decide to burn baby rats.”

Bernardo’s face blushed deep red. “You’re never going to let me live that
down, are you?”

Heinrich shook his head. “Not likely.”

The Estalian paused for a moment, then said, “Alright, you win. To Altdorf it
is. Then let’s fight this city. Friends?”

As Heinrich made his way slowly toward the lighted tunnel, he felt guilty. Am
I betraying your memory, Broderick, he wondered, by accepting another as my
friend? But as he greeted Bernardo’s smile with his own, he knew the answer.
This was a test, like Broderick had explained many times before. This was a test
to see if his faith in Sigmar’s cause could sustain such a loss and survive. And
the fight was not over. Today, they had made great strides against the Eternal
Struggle, but there would be many more battles to come. Can I fight this city
with an Estalian at my side? he wondered. Only time would tell.

“Friends?” said Heinrich. “Well, let’s take it one day at a time.”

Bernardo nodded and together they helped secure Father for transport. As more
of the ceiling began to fall, they entered the tunnel with the priest’s body
supported between them, while Bloodtooth limped ahead, his jowls wet with skaven
blood. Together, they followed the ghost light as men of the Empire, Reiklanders
and Marienburgers, servants to Sigmar, loyalists to the Lady Magritta, and
followers of the Goddess of War, determined to stand firm against the city that
never slept, the city of damned souls, the city of lost dreams, the city of
night fire…

The city of Mordheim.

The Lords of Death have but one apparent purpose, which is to raise armies of
skeletons, zombies, wraiths and ghouls to fight against the living. There are
many philosophers among the living who consider the Lords of Death to be
essentially stupid, and their purpose essentially futile. They argue this case
on the grounds that the living are bound to die soon enough, whether they do so
in battle or in bed, while the dead are far too numerous already to be in urgent
need of further company. There are also philosophers among the dead, however,
who take a natural delight in the solution of such paradoxes. They declare that
the duration of life is an irrelevance by comparison with the manner of its
progress and that if life is merely one phase in the long career of a soul, as
the existence of armies of the dead surely proves, then it might matter a great
deal how the living enter the state of death. Equally important, according to
the philosophers of the dead, are the ways in which the living are prepared for
death, and the kinds of future that might be mapped out for them thereafter.

Living philosophers are sometimes wont to claim that the central question of
philosophy is “how should men live?”. Dead philosophers, not unnaturally,
think differently. Were their world a mere mirror of its counterpart, the
central question would become “how should men die?” but that is not the case.
Since even the unquiet dead are, by definition, already dead—although victims
of an understandable confusion sometimes prefer to call them “undead”—they
take up a more pragmatic viewpoint, which is also more sophisticated. They
prefer to ask “how should the dead assist the living to reap the rewards of
death?”—and this, of course, is where the Lords of Death and the Emperors of
Necromancy enter into the equation.

Although the living tend to think of battles between their own armies and the
armies of the dead as matters of unholy enmity between opposites, only the most
imbecilic among the dead think in similar terms. The philosophically-inclined
dead think of these conflicts as the entirely natural intercourse of the
dead-but-active and the active-but-not-yet-dead, by which the former attempt to
embrace the latter and initiate them into the mysteries of their own condition.
From the point of view of the philosophical dead, therefore, the crusades waged
by their lords are not matters of bitter warfare but affairs of enthusiastic
reproduction—which might be as joyous as the kinds of reproduction in which
the living indulge, were it not for the fact that the living insist on crying
“foul!”. Given that there never was an army of the living whose
extra-curricular amusements did not result in profuse cries of alarm from
variously threatened womenfolk, one might expect them to be more understanding,
but stupidity is certainly no monopoly of the dead.

The Lords of Death are mostly practical individuals who are more interested
in mass murder than in self-justification, but there are a few of them who deem
this narrow-mindedness a tragedy, and firmly believe that if only the dead would
take the trouble, they could do much more to help the living understand the
rewards of death, and thus make them more appreciative of their necessary
fate.

The greatest of all the Emperors of Necromancy is, of course, Nagash, the
Supreme Lord of Death and the architect of the Great Awakening. He resides now
in Nagashizzar, the Cursed Pit, but he was born in Khemri, the most splendid of
the ancient cities of Nehekhara, where he raised the Tomb Kings from their long
sleep to serve as his disciples in the Great Crusade Against the Living.

The Tomb Kings are more numerous and more various than the living probably
imagine, and the fiefdoms they have established within the barren circle whose
circumference the Marshes of Madness, the Black Tower and the city of Quatar are
just as numerous and just as various. There is no denying that the greater
number of them are not at all philosophically inclined, and by no means
intellectually blessed, but there are a few Tomb Kings who take a greater
interest than their fellows in matters philosophical, and there is one among
them who takes such matters seriously enough to ask questions which are deemed
slightly heretical by the majority of his peers. He is the Lord of the
Necropolis of Zelebzel, and his name is Cimejez.