[Heroes 05] - The Red Duke Read online

  A WARHAMMER NOVEL

  THE RED DUKE

  Heroes - 05

  C.L. Werner

  (A Flandrel & Undead Scan v1.0)

  This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage.

  At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it is a land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests and vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reigns the Emperor Karl-Franz, sacred descendant of the founder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder of his magical warhammer.

  But these are far from civilised times. Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war. In the towering World’s Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands of the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods. As the time of battle draws ever near, the Empire needs heroes like never before.

  PROLOGUE

  The clamour of the battlefield roared like thunder across the plain, the pounding of hooves, the crash of blades, the screams of the dying and the ghastly croaking of the eager vultures circling overhead melded into a single diabolic din. The sky was black, choked with dark clouds, the sun hiding its face from the carnage below. Fields that had been green the day before were now a crimson morass of blood and mud, a bone yard of mutilated bodies, the carcasses of the dead and the twice-dead littering the landscape as far as the eye could see.

  The strength of the two armies was not yet spent, though battle had raged since the early hours of morning. The pride of Bretonnia made their stand against the debased horrors of a blighted realm, the unliving legions of the vampire, the beast they had ridden to war against.

  The Red Duke.

  Isabeau the prophetess had warned King Louis that he must face the vampire in the clean light of day, that he must force the fiend to fight him in the sun when the Red Duke’s profane powers would be at their weakest. The king had heeded her advice, avoiding contact with the undead legions until he could be sure of the time and place when battle would be joined. Ceren Field offered open ground over which his knights could charge the rotting warriors that marched under the Red Duke’s tattered banner. A bright dawn had heralded the day, as though the Lady herself were smiling down from the heavens and encouraging the king’s attack.

  What horror did the king feel when the dawn faded into blackness, smothered behind dark clouds that grew from nothingness in the empty sky. In a matter of minutes, the bright new day had become as black as midnight. Across the field came the marching skeletons and shambling zombies of the Red Duke’s horde. King Louis knew that if he allowed his army to retreat now he would never regain their confidence, not after holding them back for so long, forcing them to watch as the Red Duke ravaged the land.

  Into glory or disaster, the king knew he must lead his army now or never. Praying to the Lady that his decision was bold, not foolish, he brandished his lance, letting the royal pennant snap taut in the wind. As he lowered the lance again, he spurred his steed forwards. The earth shook as two thousand knights followed their liege into battle.

  Any mortal army would have reeled from the impact of that charge. Hundreds of the enemy were shattered as the knights drove their attack home, skewered upon the lances or crushed beneath the iron-shod hooves of warhorses. But the silent legions that served the Red Duke had no souls to stir with fear, no hearts to quiver with sympathy for their fallen comrades. The undead simply closed ranks about the embattled knights, heedlessly marching over the smashed bodies of their fallen. It was then that the real fighting began.

  The king fought alongside his knights, smashing rotted faces with his lance, breaking fleshless bones with his armoured boots and the flailing hooves of his steed. For hours he fought beside his men until a fresh surge of undead warriors swept him away. Like a mariner cast adrift, he struggled to win his way free from the hostile waves that engulfed him. For each wight he cut down, three seemed to take its place; for every skeletal spearman he broke, a dozen stabbed at him. Against such numbers, the king’s courage began to break.

  It was in his moment of doubt, the instant when his deathless foes looked certain to overwhelm him, that King Louis was granted a respite. As though all their vicious energies had been spent, the wights and zombies fell still. Lifeless eyes stared at the king as fleshless arms lowered rusty swords and splintered spears.

  A flicker of hope swelled in the king’s heart, but was quickly stifled as a cold horror crawled across his skin. The king could feel the vampire’s presence before he could see the Red Duke galloping through the putrid ranks of his ghoulish army. The vampire wore heavy armour of steel stained to the colour of blood. The steed that bore him was a spectral thing of bone and witch fire, its corruption swathed in a black caparison. As the vampire advanced, the undead warriors parted before him, opening a path between the Red Duke and the king.

  Vampire and king stared at one another across the battlefield. Infernal hatred, pitiless and cruel, blazed in the eyes of the Red Duke. Those of the king became solemn and sad.

  “You could not content yourself to be king,” the vampire spoke, his voice low and venomous. “You had to be Duke of Aquitaine as well.” The Red Duke’s face pulled back in a feral snarl, exposing his sharp fangs. “Now you will be neither.”

  The king drew no terror from the Red Duke’s words. Tears were in his eyes as he gazed upon the monster. “The man I knew is dead. It is time he found peace.”

  The Red Duke’s face contorted in a sneer. “I will make you immortal, Louis, so that I may torture you and kill you every hour of every day. Then you may speak to me of death and peace!”

  Even in that moment, the king felt neither fear nor hate for this thing that had once been his friend. Sombrely, he lowered his lance and spurred his horse towards the Red Duke. The vampire bared his fangs in a vicious grin, gripping his own lance, a barbed thorn of steel already caked in the blood of a dozen knights. With a wolfish howl, he charged his spectral steed at the king.

  In that moment, as man and monster bore down upon one another, the evil darkness the Red Duke had conjured to cloak his army faltered. A single shaft of daylight shot down from the black sky, enveloping the king. The king’s silvered armour shimmered with sunlight, casting a wondrous glamour into the vampire’s hideous countenance. The Red Duke reeled back in the saddle, throwing his arms before his stinging eyes.

  An instant, the Red Duke was blinded, but it was enough. The king’s lance crunched through the vampire’s blood-red breastplate, tearing through steel plate as though it were parchment. The Red Duke was lifted clear from his saddle, writhing upon the end of the king’s lance like a bug upon a pin.

  King Louis held the struggling vampire aloft, the tip of his lance transfixing the Red Duke’s heart. Furiously, the undead fiend tried to cling to life, tried to force his unclean body off the spike that held him. The king felt his arms weaken, the weight of the vampire and his struggles taxing his strength. But he drew deep from his own resolve, forced his fatigued arms to maintain their burden. Sternly, he forced himself to watch the vampire perish. The fiend’s pallid flesh began to darken and shrivel, pressing close against the bones beneath his desiccated skin. The
Red Duke’s eyes became pools of blood, sanguine tears streaming down his ghoulish face. From the vampire’s mouth, a grisly moan arose, a sound at once pitiable and menacing.

  “Not to destroy the monster,” the king murmured to himself whenever he felt his strength waning. “Not to destroy the monster, but to redeem the man.”

  “…For such is the sad and lamentable story of the Red Duke. A song of tragedy and terror that must stir even the tears of the fey by its mournful dirge. Beware, you sons of Bretonnia! Beware the forces of darkness that lie in wait to tempt and trap even the strongest soul! Beware the sad end of that heroic knight, that defender of chivalry and crown! Beware, you children of Aquitaine, lest your wickedness draw down upon you the foul curse of the Red Duke!”

  The troubadour doffed his feathered cap, sweeping it across the floor as he bowed to his audience. Hearty applause filled the inn, the floorboards groaning as dozens of feet stamped in approval of the singer’s ballad, Jacques le Thorand had recited the epic at the courts of barons and dukes; once he had even performed before King Louen Leoncoeur himself. He certainly found nothing about his current surroundings either opulent or regal. The little timber-walled inn was no different than a thousand others littering the road between Aquitaine and Couronne, a humble place where merchants and messengers could brush the dust of their travels from their boots, where peasants and woodsmen could go to ease the pains of their toils with a swallow of wine.

  Jacques had performed the Last Lamentation of the Red Duke hundreds of times over the years, expanding upon the ballads of earlier minstrels, combining different versions of the tale until he composed what many Bretonnians lauded as the definitive telling of the tale. The troubadour was proud of his composition, the sort of pride shown by any craftsman who has produced a work he knows is of quality. Jacques, like any true artist, did not measure his success in wealth or privilege, but in the accolades of his audience. It did not matter to him if the applause came from the royal court or from a rabble of grubby peasants. To him, it was all the same.

  Even so, Jacques felt an especial sense of satisfaction as he looked out across the crowded common room of the Tipsy Squire. This audience wasn’t simply any gathering of Bretonnians. These people weren’t Carcassonnian shepherds or Bordelen vintners. These were Aquitainians. They had been raised upon the tales of the Red Duke and the heroes who had stood against him and laid his evil to rest. All the troubadour had to do was step outside the inn’s door and turn his gaze northward and he should see the dark shadows of the Forest of Châlons, the place where superstitious peasants insisted the vampire lurked to this day, plotting his revenge upon Bretonnia and dreaming his black dreams of building an empire of blood.

  To Jacques, the praise of these people was a coin richer than gold. It was easy to forget his critics, to forget the scornful disdain of crusty historians like Allan Anneau of Couronne. The applause of these humble people, reared upon the legends of their land, was the true vindication of Jacques’ talent. Let the historians spew their bitter poison; it was in the hearts of the people that Jacques’ ballads would endure.

  The hour was late when the crowd finally began to steal away from the inn’s warm hearth. They withdrew into the night by threes and fours, some brandishing heavy walking sticks, others nervously fingering little wooden images of Shallya as they went out into the darkness. Jacques smiled at the simple fears of these simple people. Among the lands of Bretonnia, Aquitaine was the most peaceful. The beasts of the forest seldom strayed north, the orcs of the mountains were rarely numerous enough to fight their way across Quenelles and into the meadows of Aquitaine. liven bandits were uncommon, brigands quickly finding themselves beset by Aquitainian knights with no more worthy foes to taste their steel.

  It was the grim song of the troubadour that made the peasants nervous as they went out into the night. Jacques had evoked the heroism and tragedy of Aquitaine’s rich past, but so too had he conjured up the dark horror of those times. The Red Duke was a name every Aquitainian learned before he left the cradle, a bogeyman called up by mothers and nursemaids to frighten naughty children. Through his ballad, Jacques had made that frightful phantom live again in the minds of the peasant folk. As they left the inn, each one of them imagined the vampire lurking in the shadows, his steely fangs waiting to savage their throats and damn them to join him in his empire of blood.

  Jacques shook his head at such credulous beliefs. The Red Duke was gone, destroyed by King Louis the Righteous upon Ceren Field over a thousand years past. True, there had been a second vampire calling itself the Red Duke who had threatened Aquitaine four hundred years later, but Jacques did not accept that this creature had in fact been the same monster. Evil, once vanquished by a King of Bretonnia, did not stir from its grave.

  “It is a silvered tongue you have,” chuckled Entoine, the rotund proprietor of the Tipsy Squire. His smiling face shifted between shadow and light as he manoeuvred among the rude tables and timber benches scattered about the room. At each table he paused, inspecting the wooden cups and clay pots his patrons had left behind. Those that had not quite been drained of their contents were carefully emptied into a wooden cask tucked under the innkeeper’s arm. Jacques silently reminded himself not to buy the cheapest grade of wine on Entoine’s menu.

  “Seldom it is that I’ve seen them linger so late,” Entoine explained, scowling as he noted a long crack in one of the drinking vessels. “Baron de Lanis isn’t the sort to forget when his peasants should be out in the fields. There’ll be many a sore head cursing the dawn, I should say.”

  Jacques waved the tin tankard he held, an extravagance Entoine normally reserved only for those rare instances when a wandering knight patronized his inn. “They looked as though they might welcome some sun when they left here. However early the baron wants them working, they weren’t too happy to go out into the dark.”

  Entoine laughed at the troubadour’s words, but the merriment didn’t reach his eyes. Jacques had not imbibed enough of the inn’s wine to be oblivious to his host’s discomfort. “Come now!” he admonished. “There can’t be any rational reason for them to be afraid. If the farthest one of them has to walk to get home is more than a mile, then I’ll accept that you put no water in your wine!” The troubadour took a swallow from his tankard, wiping the sleeve of his frilled shirt across his mouth. “You’d think my song had called up the Red Duke from his tomb!”

  The innkeeper shuddered at the last remark and turned away from Jacques. “As you say, there’s no good reason for them to be afraid of anything.”

  “By the Lady!” Jacques exclaimed, slapping his knee. “That’s what you really are afraid of!” He shook his head in disbelief. “I admit my ballad is exceptional, but you can’t lose your grip on reality.”

  “It was a tale finely sung and none of those people will regret having heard it,” Entoine told the troubadour. “But you are a stranger to these parts. You do not understand the old fears your tale has reawakened.”

  Jacques walked towards Entoine, sipping from his tankard. “Nursery stories and fairy tales spun to keep unruly children in line,” he said, punctuating his declaration by pouring the last mouthful of wine from his cup into the innkeeper’s keg.

  The innkeeper set down the keg and glared defiantly at Jacques. “Is it a nursery story when a shepherdess goes missing, only to be found weeks later drained of blood?” He pressed a calloused finger against the troubadour’s chest. “Is it a child’s imagining when a knight rides through the village, intent on challenging the evil lurking in the forest, only for his bloodless corpse to be found floating in the River Morceaux?”

  “Beastmen,” Jacques said.

  Entoine snickered at the suggestion. “There haven’t been beastmen in these parts since anyone can remember. And who ever heard of beastmen leaving meat on the bones of their victims? There’s only one thing that drinks the blood from a man’s veins and leaves his pallid corpse behind.”

  Jacques grimaced, shaking his head
at the innkeeper’s logic. He had spent years reading every story about the Red Duke’s reign of terror, listening to every ballad composed about the vampire and his doom. They were things that belonged to the past. Even if the creature that had threatened Aquitaine six hundred years ago had been the real Red Duke, that monster too had been laid to rest at Ceren Field by Duke Gilon.

  Entoine only smiled when Jacques tried to explain all of this to him. It was the sad smile of a man who knows he is right, but wishes with all his heart he was wrong. “You have your beliefs,” he told the troubadour. “But what I know, I know. You say the Red Duke died at Ceren Field. I say the vampire still lives, biding his time somewhere in the Forest of Châlons.”

  For a moment, Jacques was silent, his eyes roving the deep shadows of a room that suddenly seemed foreboding. It took him some time to free himself from the irrational sense of uneasiness that gripped him. He forced some broken laughter and clapped a hand on Entoine’s shoulder. “You should have been a storyteller,” Jacques said.

  With all the dignified bravado he could command, Jacques made his way from the Tipsy Squire’s common room and mounted the timber stairway leading up to the building’s private rooms. Entoine had given his talented guest the best room in the house. Situated at the very top of the inn, the room, like the tin tankard, was usually reserved for wandering knights and other rare guests of noble breeding. The room was uncommonly spacious, its splintered floor concealed beneath an assortment of animal skins and threadbare rugs. The furnishings were heavily varnished to preserve them against the slow decay claiming the rest of the inn, including a bed that seemed large enough for both a knight and his horse, Jacques smiled as he ran his hand across the rough wool blankets and felt the lumpy pillows stuffed with chicken feathers. There was something almost amusingly pathetic about the feeble attempt to recreate the luxury a nobleman might expect.