[Warhammer] - Zavant Read online

  They came at him from either side. The one on his shield side was the slower and clumsier of the two. Gustav lashed out with his foot and raked the points of his spurs across its face. Blinded, it stumbled and fell to the ground, bleating as it died beneath the iron-shod hooves of Gustav’s mount. The other feinted, and darted forward to try and hamstring or disembowel the charging warhorse with its rusting scimitar. Gustav saw the move coming and struck out with his mace, an unconventional but effective uppercut blow that caught the creature on the underside of its goat-like face, turning its lower jaw into powdered bone and lifting its whole body off the ground with an impart that must have surely shattered its horned skull.

  Gustav charged onwards, but the third beastman had already reached its objective. The armed squire who had been driving the wagon was dead—killed by a fearfully accurate and powerful beastman spear pitch—and so there was no one to stop the monster as it eagerly leapt up onto the pillion seat and pulled aside the canvas covering only to tumble backwards again, hands clasped to its neck as its lifeblood gushed out onto the ground from a knife-slash to its throat.

  Gustav had witnessed more than enough bloodshed during his time of holy service to Sigmar to recognise expert knife-work when he saw it. He doubted that it was the handiwork of his distinguished bookworm charge, so Gustav guessed that his initial impressions of the man’s halfling manservant were indeed correct. His father had been a magistrate in Wolfenburg, and as a boy he had learned much of human nature from watching his father give judgements at the city’s daily assizes. The Templar was not fooled by the benign appearance of the bookworm’s manservant; he could see through the facade of false innocence to the criminal nature that lurked beneath, a look he was familiar with from the many wretches who had appeared before his father’s bench. However, whatever sins or crimes the halfling might have been guilty of, Gustav was prepared to forgive them all as long as he continued to put his dubious skills to use killing off the followers of Chaos.

  Gustav looked round, taking further stock of the situation. There were more dead or dying beastmen in sight than there had been the last time he surveyed the scene, but then he saw a second wave of the creatures burst screaming and roaring from the tree-line to the right. Frantically, he looked round, calculating how many of his remaining men he could pull away from the ongoing battle on the left flank to bolster the line on the right.

  Suddenly, the decision was taken out of his hands.

  A terrible, high-pitched roar erupted from somewhere amongst the dense foliage far to the left. It sounded for all the world like some maddened creature in rage or agony. The effect on the beastmen was staggering and instantaneous: they broke and ran, fleeing bleating and barking back into the trees, abandoning their dead and injured behind them. A few of the younger and less experienced Templars chased after them on horseback, yelling in excited and vengeful bloodlust as they mercilessly cut down several of the fleeing creatures. Urgent shouts from their more veteran brethren called them to a halt just short of the tree-line. On horseback, in open ground, they had the advantage, but inside the dark tangle of the densely-wooded forest they would be easy prey for any beastmen waiting in ambush. Waasen called them to heel, selecting several to form a small scout force under the command of an older veteran knight.

  “Sigmar’s teeth! What was that damned hellish sound?” blasphemed Waasen as he rejoined his commander, forgetting his Templar oath of knightly piety for a moment in the aftermath of the recent madness of battle.

  “The command call of a bull ungor, or at least a passable imitation of one, amplified through a hollowed-out bone horn,” said a calm, authoritative voice from behind them. “My knowledge of beastman battle communications isn’t quite all it could be, but, judging from the manner in which they took flight, I imagine it to have been some kind of urgent retreat signal.”

  The two Templars turned, staring in disbelief at the figure of Konniger as he climbed down from the rear of the wagon, carefully stepping round the body of the throat-slashed creature lying on the ground.

  Waasen spat in disgust, and gestured in loathing at the still-twitching corpse. “You’re trying to say that these things can talk to each other?”

  “Why, yes,” replied Zavant Konniger, adopting an expression of polite, puzzled surprise at the Templar’s scornful contempt. “Anselm the Damned wrote a most informative treatise on the subject of beastman tribal groupings during his time of exile in the Northern Wastes. Of course, the tribe he had befriended ate him before he could finish his observations, but his studies showed that—”

  “Herr Konniger,” interrupted Gustav, with ill-disguised impatience. “I have injured and dead men to attend to. We’ve still got a long way to go until we reach our destination, and I want to get there before nightfall. Unless, of course, you want to spend the night in the woods with these creatures still on the prowl?”

  “Sir!” came a shout from one of the scouts, interrupting any reply that the scholar-bookworm might have made. The man came galloping up, brandishing a gruesome, red-dripping object in his mailed fist. “We found this just inside the woods. It was hanging in plain sight from a tree branch.”

  The knight held up the grisly trophy. It was a decapitated beastman head, its long, split-tailed tongue lolling out from between its blood-stained jaws, its two red-pupilled eyes matched by two more Chaos-mutated eyes alongside them. Dual horns twisted and curled around each other to form an unnatural sigil shape. Flies buzzed hungrily around the thing. The smell emanating from the putrescent object spoke of something many days dead, but the fresh blood still dripping from it suggested a far more recent demise.

  Gustav looked questioningly at Konniger, who nodded in agreement at the young Templar commander’s unspoken question. “An ungor beastman, one cursed—or favoured, as such creatures would see it—with the body-corrupting mark of its foul gods. It would surely be the leader of this tribal warband, which raises a particularly curious question—”

  “Yes. If this creature was already dead when the attack commenced, then who or what sounded the signal for the creatures to retreat?” asked Gustav. Konniger looked at him with new-found respect, impressed at how quickly the Templar commander had grasped the point he was leading to. Konniger accorded the Empire’s knights all due respect in issues of bravery and martial skills, but in matters relating to imaginative free-thinking his respect was less forthcoming, a fact that was even more true amongst the notoriously dogma-bound members of the Templar orders of the Church of Sigmar.

  Konniger looked around warily, scanning the shadowy recesses of the thickets and foliage of the surrounding forest. A glance upwards confirmed that the sun was past its zenith and moving steadily downwards towards the horizon. It was still some hours to sunset, but, as the Templar commander had pointed out, they still had some distance to go to their destination, and a forest full of marauding beastmen was no place to be come nightfall.

  “You are correct, commander. We should be on our way.” He glanced again at the dark forest, wondering to himself what hidden eyes might be out there observing him at that moment. It was a question to which he secretly half suspected he already knew the answer.

  “We should keep faith in the protection of Lord Sigmar, commander,” he added, mysteriously, “for somehow I sense that he or some other higher power may have sent an invisible guardian to watch over us.”

  From his perch amongst the treetops, the hunter watched as the wagon and its escort of holy knights moved off along the track. It was still a few hours until sundown and he judged that, if they maintained their present pace, they should be able to reach their destination before nightfall.

  That was just as well, he decided. The beastman warband that had attacked them had been successfully driven off—thanks in no small measure to his own secret efforts aiding the knights—but the hunter knew that there were other warbands moving through the woods. From his high perch, he could faintly discern the distant brays and calls of their scouts, and
he realised that they would be here soon enough, and in greater numbers than before.

  Despite the danger, he allowed himself to relax for a moment. With their cloven hooves and poorly formed hands, beastmen were poor climbers, and he was safe enough hidden in the treetops. He could hear the scattered remnants of the last warband as they crashed through the forest, panicked by the abrupt end of the attack and subsequent discovery of the death of their chieftain.

  The hunter smiled, recalling how he had effortlessly stalked and killed the chieftain creature and its small retinue as they oversaw the warband’s ambush of the Templars. The hunter was a woodsman by nature, but it had been a long time since he had hunted and killed beastmen amongst the forests of the Empire. In his own grim and silent way, he was enjoying this reminder of the simpler days of the past: the days before he entered the Emperor’s service, when he had offered his unsurpassed skills to stalk and kill enemies that were often far more dangerous and elusive than these crude, bestial monstrosities. And now he had been despatched on this new service, a mission that would require all the subtle and deadly gifts he possessed. The hunter had accepted the duty without qualm; he served the Emperor and so everything he did, no matter how ruthless or underhand, was ultimately in the Empire’s best interests, was it not?

  Expertly judging the coast to be clear, he collected up his few weapons and equipment and began his silent climb back down to the ground. Moving on foot through the forest, he would have to travel quickly to keep pace with the Templars, but this was no real challenge or hardship. As he ran, he touched the bone horn now hanging from his neck, the horn he had taken from the beastman chieftain, which he had used to sound the false retreat call to the creature’s troops.

  Who knows, he mused, perhaps I’ll encounter more of the creatures in the course of the journey? He smiled thinly at the thought of a chance to kill again soon.

  * * *

  The daemon-thing’s servants flocked in clouds around it, feeding off its rotting flesh and whispering to it in their scratchy little voices. Their insect whispers told of the failure of this last warband ambush, and of the humans’ approach to the gates of their master’s prison-sanctuary. The nascent daemon snapped its jaws in annoyance, its long, reptile tongue whipping out to snatch mouthfuls of the flies that buzzed lovingly round its head.

  The daemon chewed noisily on the remains of its servants, knowing that, soon enough, their consumed substance would grow and hatch anew from his diseased flesh. It was the way of the plague-gifts that Grandfather Nurgle gave to the world—the endless cycle of blessed, pestilent rebirth from out of glorious, vile corruption. This pleasing thought quickly calmed the creature’s angry mood.

  The failure of its servants in the forest did not matter. There were more servants on their way through the dark forests that surrounded its home, and when they arrived the human and his companions would be trapped.

  Trapped in a place they did not know, at the mercy of its inhabitants, some of whom had already been corrupted into the daemon’s service, they would stand little chance of survival.

  At first, the daemon had feared the arrival of this human whose mind burned with a cold, clear light, and that fear had increased when it learned that the man was guarded by a company of holy warriors of the false god Sigmar.

  Now, however, it realised that its fear was unfounded: there was no danger here, only a cunning gift from Grandfather Nurgle. After all, its own full rebirth was imminent, and what had first seemed like an unfortunate and dangerous coincidence was now surely all part of the Grandfather’s slow but sure design.

  Rebirth out of festering corruption was the way of the Grandfather, and now the Plague God in his wisdom had sent his servant more raw material—clean and unsullied flesh, purified to the service of the weakling human god Sigmar—to be corrupted and used in his service. This body—and these others lying rotting around it in the darkness—had served its purpose well enough during the long years of secret growth and rebirth, but it would need new, uncorrupted flesh if it was to walk abroad once more in the world beyond the confines of its prison.

  Perhaps this human that was approaching would make a suitable new vessel for its daemonic spirit.

  Soon, it promised itself, as it waited alone in the foul darkness of its prison.

  Soon.

  The monastery reared up suddenly into view over the tree-tops, becoming dramatically visible just as the track took a steep turn before it ascended the slope of the rocky promontory from where the monastery fortress looked out across the landscape of the densely-wooded forest plain.

  Vido peered cautiously out through a gap in the wagon’s canvas covering, not liking what he saw at all. At first glance, the monastery looked dark and foreboding. At second glance, it looked even more so. It was protected on three sides by the sheer cliff faces of the escarpment it was built upon, and the only means of approach was by the road they were now on, the road which crossed the open space that led up to the gates.

  The monastery’s high walls would at one time have been as sturdy and solid as those of any other similar fortress outpost built in the dangerous wildernesses that existed within the Empire’s borders. However, time and neglect had clearly made them crumbling and ramshackle, and in dire need of repair. Lichen and creeping vines scaled up their moss-eaten sides, almost as if the forest itself was trying to pull down the stones and wipe out any trace of the place.

  As one would expect, an area of arable land had been cleared around the monastery for growing crops and foodstuffs, and to provide grazing ground for the monastery’s livestock. Vido saw a few desultory and sporadic patches of sickly-looking wheat or corn, but the general air was one of long-term neglect, and the forest seemed to be steadily advancing across the untended fields to reclaim the land for itself. At the edge of the neglected fields there was a small cluster of huts and other buildings, evidence that a small village may once have flourished in the protective shadow of the monastery rock. It would have been home to the settlers who would have come here to work in the monastery’s fields and vineyards, who would in time have turned the dangerous wilderness into a prosperous and fertile area.

  The dwellings, like the fields, had obviously been abandoned long ago, and there was a distinct and unsavoury air of neglect and creeping decay about the whole monastery and its surroundings.

  “Alt Krantzstein. A strange name for a holy monastery,” ventured Vido, glancing at the figure sitting opposite him in the wagon.

  “Indeed,” agreed Konniger. “‘Old Sickstone’. This area of the Empire has long been blighted by outbreaks of pestilence and disease. The monastery was originally built some four hundred years ago after a holy crusade had cleansed the area of the evil that had taken root during the worst of the civil wars of the preceding century. The rock had previously been the centre of a coven dedicated to the adoration of the Malign Powers, and it was thought that founding a holy fortress of Sigmar upon it would serve to purify it of the abominable taint of Chaos, and restore prosperity to the land around it.”

  Vido looked out of the wagon again, seeing little sign of purity and prosperity, and wondering to himself just how successful the Church’s grandiose plan had been these last four centuries.

  No, he thought again, he definitely did not like this place.

  Glancing out of the open rear of the wagon, he saw a sight he liked even less: the sun fast sinking below the horizon and the dark shadows of nightfall stretching out towards them across the roof of the forest. So it was almost—but not quite—with a sense of relief that he greeted the sound of the solid wooden gates closing behind them as the wagons and their Templar escorts rode into the courtyard of the monastery.

  Konniger stepped down from the wagon and Vido quickly followed him, glad to be standing on solid, cobbled ground surrounded by stone walls instead of being imprisoned in a rickety, swaying wagon in the middle of woods where beastmen or worse seemed to lurk behind every tree. Giving lie to the popular human image of halfl
ings as pint-sized country bumpkins, Vido hated the countryside with a passion, a feeling only reinforced by his unhappy upbringing amidst the rolling hills and fertile valleys of the Moot. He had ran away from home at the earliest opportunity, heading straight for the bright lights and dark alleys of Altdorf, where he would be quite content to remain for the rest of his days, given the choice. Altdorf was the centre of the universe, and the rest of the Old World—particularly those parts of it that were home to marauding tribes of Chaos beast-creatures—was in comparison a dark, forbidding place little worth bothering about.

  Sadly, there were the terms of a certain Imperial pardon to consider, as well as his duty to his master, and so it was that Vido all too often found himself unhappily following Konniger off to some far-flung and uncivilised corner of the Empire.

  “Herr Konniger?” asked one of the monks waiting to greet them at the doors to the monastery. It was dark in the courtyard. The looming shape of the building blocked out what little remaining sunlight there was, and two of the monks carried burning torches. The flickering light gave the monks’ faces a strange, unhealthy-looking pallor, a look which Vido would later notice was not altogether dispelled by the daylight.

  “I am he,” answered Konniger. “You received my message?”

  The lead monk gave a polite curt bow of his head. “I am Brother Himerius, abbot of this place. Your messenger preceded you by only a day. We were surprised to learn of your imminent arrival. We are a small, remote outpost of the one true faith, and we rarely—”

  Konniger abruptly cut him off, pointing towards the figures of the mounted knights. Many of them slumped exhausted in their saddles, and several of them bore bloodstained bandages, evidence of their trials on the journey to the monastery. “Brother Himerius, we have travelled far, and the commander and his men have fought bravely and suffered grievous losses to get me here. If you have received my message, then I assume you have made the proper preparations for our arrival. Show us to our quarters, and bring me whatever apothecary materials you have, so that I may properly attend to these men’s wounds. There is much for me to do here, I fear, but I will commence my investigations in the morning.”