[Warhammer] - Dreadfleet Read online

  A WARHAMMER NOVEL

  DREADFLEET

  Phil Kelly

  (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.

  THE SEA CURSE

  The Dreadfleet, the fishwives called it. Scourge of the high seas and harbinger of the Curse. Its impossible warships were fireside scare-stories brought to life, legends that had breached the veil between this world and the next. The undead fleet’s approach was as stealthy as a shark, they said, its victories as inevitable as the tide.

  For countless years the Dreadfleet lurked in the memories of the old and the infirm, shrouded in hearsay. But last Geheimnisnacht, that most unhallowed of eves, its mythical warships had returned to wreak havoc upon the lands of man.

  Even the most battle-scarred pirate lord secretly feared the Dreadfleet’s vampiric commander, Count Noctilus. Rumour had it that he and his unliving captains had armies of drowned sailors and ghosts at their command, and that the count’s flagship—the Bloody Reaver—was unsinkable. Over the last six months, the doomsayers and gutter-prophets had been proven correct time and time again. The Reaver and its thrall warships had systematically demolished the city-ports of neighbouring Tilea before melting back into the darkness.

  None dared meet the Dreadfleet in open battle, for the legends told that to die at sea was to fall under Noctilus’ power forever. Since the Sea-Curse began, sunken ships had a mysterious habit of disappearing completely overnight. The pirates of Sartosa believed it was the fabled realm known as the Galleon’s Graveyard that stole away the drowned vessels and the corpses of their crewmen. None truly understood it, though all agreed that it was the work of the vampire, Count Noctilus, and his black-hearted captains.

  The Sea-Curse had lingered over the oceans of the world for decades. Burial at sea was strictly forbidden. None would venture into the waves for fear of being claimed, and many a king’s ransom was left for the fish.

  As the shipping lanes of the world were slowly abandoned and sea trade dwindled away, the pirate isle of Sartosa sank into rum-sodden decline and the war-galleons of that lawless realm remained in their docks. The grandiose and wealthy port-cities of the Empire were taking the brunt of Noctilus’ deadly attentions, after all, and Sartosa owed them nothing. The pirate lords of that hidden isle were all but convinced that the Dreadfleet would not come to them.

  And yet, one dark and humid midnight, come to them it did.

  PART ONE

  THE BATTLE

  OF SARTOSA

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sartosa

  13th Day of Nachhexen, 2522

  The night of Jaego Roth’s return to Sartosa was lit as bright as day.

  That infamous nest of rogues was slowly being consumed by a raging inferno, and the clamour of battle ebbed and flowed through the orange-tinged mist. Sartosa’s ramshackle harbours burned so fiercely that the sea glowed red and gold around the bilges of Captain Roth’s warship, the Nightwatch, as it wallowed at anchor by the docks.

  Captain Roth wiped soot-blackened seawater from his good eye and caught his breath for a moment in the shadow of a tumbledown galleon. Less than ten minutes ago, he had been at the helm of his ship, aghast at his crew’s reluctance to fight for the city-port most of them called home. His decision to dive into the cold waters, swim to Skeeter’s Jetty and clamber shivering into the mists had been madness, no doubt about it. He was freezing cold and his old bones ached even more than usual. But his family home was less than a mile from the burning docks.

  The weather-beaten captain shook his head like a wet dog, droplets flying from his mass of braided white hair, and grimaced. He hadn’t seen his family for decades and they probably hated him because of it. Still, he couldn’t just let them burn.

  Taking a deep breath, the captain plunged onwards through the dense warren of alleyways that led from the Shanties toward Rusting Harbour. Rigging clinked against the broken masts and fishervanes of the ship-houses above, and the familiar stink of rotting fish hung in the air, a note of decay under the acrid tang of smoke.

  Close by, a thick, gurgling scream echoed through the streets. As Roth rushed out to cross a badly cobbled road, he saw a flash of movement amongst the clustered architecture. The captain readied his sabre, suddenly wary.

  A pair of skeletal figures stalked out from a burning townhouse fashioned from an upturned brigantine, dragging the corpse of an old man behind them. The stooped and unnatural things were armed with rusted cutlasses and had glimmering emeralds hammered into their eye sockets. Pinpoints of green light flared as they stared straight at Roth, their bony feet clicking and scraping on the cobbles. Seaweed dangled from their mouldering limbs. One wore its lower jaw around its neck on a leather string, and the other had kelp draped across its bald scalp like an off-kilter wig. Men o’ bones, the seafolk called them, undead servants raised from their watery graves by forbidden rituals.

  Roth roared in anger and charged straight at the skeletal swordsmen, parrying the first creature’s clumsy thrust and ducking underneath the wild swing of the second before slamming the top of his head into its skull. He brought his sabre up hilt-first into the jawless face of the man o’ bones, taking its skull clean from its neck. Headless, the flailing creature continued to slash wildly for a second before collapsing to its knees.

  The captain flung himself backwards, colliding hard with the man o’ bones coming up behind him and crushing its ribcage against the stout timbers of the town house. Ducking fast, Roth spun about, the steam-powered sickle that served as his right hand swinging up to embed itself in the creature’s kelp-encrusted forehead. The captain jerked his wrist and the sickle’s mechanism clicked round in a quick half-circle, snapping his foe’s neck in two at the nape and leaving its skull stuck fast to the point of his blade.

  Roth spat on the skeletal warrior’s decapitated remains and ran onward into the burning city, using the least rotten of his teeth to pry the emeralds free from his trophy as he went. “Coin be damned,” muttered Roth, spitting out fragments of bone, but he pocketed the gems anyway.

  There came a distant crash from behind him and Roth cast a black look over his shoulder as he crossed the oil-slicked broadwalk of Lantern Street

  .

  Jutting above the floating city of captured galleons that formed Sartosa’s outer fortifications was a sight to make a daemon weep.

  Noctilus’ warship was an iceberg-sized wedge of stained rock clad in the shattered hulls of its conquests. Silhouetted against the moon was a bladed Sylvanian
keep that crested the warship’s craggy central mass like a tyrant’s crown. At the Reaver’s prow, a great scalloped wedge of age-dulled metal swept outwards, forming a battering ram so large it rose above the ramshackle taverns of the southern Shanties. The warship was a monstrous giant in comparison to the captured galleons that formed Sartosa’s outer walls. It was slowly grinding its way through the city’s tightly-packed defences like an axe forced through a stack of kindling.

  Roth cursed in disbelief as he pushed on towards his home territory of Rusting Harbour. Above him, malnourished thieves and guttersnipes climbed along ropes made of everything from plaited seaweed to the sinew of sea-beasts, emboldened to new levels of larceny by the distraction. The night air stank of salt, urine and burning wood.

  Vaulting onto an empty sea-chest and climbing the stacked barrels behind it, Roth hoisted himself up onto the gabled roof of Maud Sully’s whorehouse in order to get a better view of the incredible warship. At the harbourside below, dozens of pirate revellers had spilled out of the taverns, drawing their blades and priming flintlocks. Some shouted obscene oaths, some laughed with drunken disbelief. Others just stood agog, eyes wide as they watched the stony behemoth carve its way through their defences.

  “Don’t just stand there gawping,” hollered Roth as he crested the brothel’s roof and slid awkwardly down the other side. “Get to the jetty and stand ready to repel!”

  Some of the figures on the dock below recognised him and started to move towards the water just as a series of broadsides roared out from the chained galleons that formed Sartosa’s outer defences. Cannonball after cannonball smashed great chunks of rock and rotten timber from the Bloody Reaver’s hull. The Bretonnian gallows-ship Stilletante levelled a point-blank blast, tearing down one of the Reaver’s tilted masts and ripping loose a skull-emblazoned sail the size of a castle courtyard.

  A great wail rose from the pitted walls of the Reaver as if the warship itself was in pain. A creaking chorus of rusted metal filled the air as cannons protruded from archways and gun ports all along the Reaver’s stony length.

  With an ear-splitting boom, over a hundred ancient guns fired into the densely-packed Sartosan galleons. The Stilletante was blasted apart, jagged spars of splintered wood pinwheeling in all directions and impaling dozens of incredulous bystanders down by the dock.

  The Reaver’s lumpen aftquarters slewed around, the invading warship crushing the Beast o’ Blades with its vast bulk as it shouldered its way flush with the harbourside bedrock. The juggernaut ground to a halt, a path of devastation leading out to sea in its wake. Roth spat an oath as dozens of boarding planks and ropes were hurled onto the jetties from the castle-ship’s sloping decks.

  At some unseen signal, a clattering tide of men o’ bones spilled out from between the great spiked ribs that framed the Reaver’s foresection. Hundreds of the undead warriors clambered from cave and crypt, leaping down onto what remained of the docks. They were clad in little more than dangling scraps of dried seaweed and mouldering leather belts, and in their teeth were rusted blades and marlinspikes. Each man o’ bones had glowing gems hammered into its eye sockets, points of glimmering light that left traces in the mist as they scuttled towards the vagabond militia awaiting them.

  As the skeletal invaders scuttled towards the taverns of South Dock, marksmen shattered fleshless skulls from the portholes of the Crooked Billet and prizefighters punched calloused fists through the spines of those that got too close. Bawdy Gus, the famously obese landlord of the Roaring Wyrm, laid about himself with a cart axle that smashed bone to powder wherever it fell. The skeletal warriors fought back against the mariners with jittery speed, their daggers and cutlasses stabbing at exposed backs and stomachs. Bawdy Gus took a blade through the back of the neck, its point bursting out of his mouth in a spray of blood.

  Roth rushed onwards, passing beneath the glowing bowls of seawater that lined the street outside the Alchemist’s Fug. Each bowl held a fat electric eel goaded into a crackling frenzy by the sounds of battle. The sharp flickering light from the water-globes and the fires that danced across the Fug’s rotten rooftop made the escalating conflict resemble a scene from the End Times.

  Down in the harbour, the Bloody Reaver’s cannons roared again. Streaks of fire glowed in the mists overhead as a fusillade of incendiary shot smashed into the dockside shipbuildings, bringing aged timbers crashing down in choking clouds of debris. Raging flames spread from tavern to tavern.

  On the hilltops to the north, the cannon batteries ranged along the battlements of Castilla Diablos returned fire. The gunners of Sartosa’s hillside fortress were the best on the island, and they hammered volley after volley of shot into the Bloody Reaver. Wherever the cannonades struck home, cascades of rubble and rotting timber slid into the seas.

  Turning a corner near the docks, Roth glimpsed the rear of the castle-ship looming above a scrapyard pile of captured figureheads. His eyes widened in shock. Rising from the waters around the Reaver were the splintered remains of those galleons the castle-ship had smashed to pieces. Under the control of some strange force, they were shoring up the wounds inflicted by the Castilla’s cannons, joining with the castle-ship’s flanks as if held there by invisible hands. Already the hulls and gun-decks of the Velvet Coffyn and the Beast o’ Blades had stuck fast to the war-hulk. Thick beams of wood flew from the water to scaffold the incongruous armour in place. It looked to Roth like a cascade of debris in reverse.

  The captain ducked back into Piper’s Alley as yet more men o’ bones spilled from the depths of the Bloody Reaver. A rag-tag army of smugglers and buccaneers charged past the mouth of the alleyway to intercept the undead warriors. Some discharged pistols and blunderbusses at close range, others hacked at skeletal necks with heavy swords or bodily charged the invaders back into the sea. On the opposite jetty, the notorious stevedore Blacklegges the giant, roused from his rum-sodden slumbers by the resounding crack of cannon fire, used the remains of a loading crane to sweep men o’ bones and pirates alike into the frothing waters. The great oaf laughed madly at the carnage he was causing until a well-aimed shot from the Reaver’s chasing cannons took his head clean off with a dull crack. The body of the decapitated giant swayed uncertainly for a second before keeling backwards into the sea.

  Under the sounds of battle, a dolorous chanting wound through the mists. From every jetty and pier, hundreds of bloated corpses hauled themselves out of the harbourside waters and flopped onto the boardwalks like beached fish. Before long, the southern jetties were thronged with swollen, white-bellied sailors that writhed and crawled over each other like grubs in a fisherman’s pot. One by one, they stood and staggered forwards, pallid skin stretched and gaping with decomposition. Black liquid streamed from their mouths and eye sockets as the drowned horde limped and stumbled into the streets.

  Pistoliers and sharpshooters bullseyed the lumpen forms of the invaders, bursting heads and torsos apart, but still more of the foul things were hauling themselves from the churning black waters that surrounded the Reaver. Within minutes, those Sartosans who had brought the fight to the enemy were brought down screaming by sheer weight of numbers, their bodies wrenched apart by yellowed teeth and blackened fingernails.

  The gunners and pistoliers at the rear of the pirate line clambered into the safety of the rigging above them before opening fire upon the mass of drowned sailors below. Hanging upside down by their knees or balancing on parallel ropes, they discharged shot after shot into the horrors battering their way inside the converted dwelling-ships, but when more of the drowned hauled themselves out of the water and began to shuffle towards the defenders, the marksmen made themselves scarce.

  From his hidden vantage point in the alleyway, Roth watched the drowned mariners stagger in and out of the galleon-houses before dispersing in small groups. This was no haphazard invasion.

  The dead were searching for something.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Captain Roth ran onwards through the tangled streets of
the plunder quarter, panting heavily. Up ahead, in Gallows Square

  , a skirmish was breaking out between a scattered crew of mariners and a dripping horde of the drowned. Roth cursed in irritation. Short of climbing over the rooftops, he could see no way around it. Even then, most of the roofs hereabouts were on fire. Images of his wife and son flitted through his mind. The captain gritted his teeth and headed for the square.

  Padding down the street, Roth hacked down one of the drowned men from behind as it lumbered towards the commotion. The fishy stink of its open wounds was nauseating enough to turn even Roth’s hardened stomach. Its clammy fingers clutched feebly at his boot as he strode past.

  The square stretched out and down, every overhang decorated with gargoyles that had nooses tied around their necks, some of which were occupied by hanged traitors. As the captain emerged into the open, he saw a band of mariners atop the central gallows platform. They were fighting furiously against a small army of the drowned, their blades hacking hands and fingers from the bloated creatures clutching at their legs.

  At the forefront of the cutthroat gang was a ten-foot lump of muscle and scar tissue, his features as blunt as the sledging mallet he was using to crush the undead attackers. The captain immediately recognised him as Ogg Halfheart, the ogre first mate of the Swordfysh. Roth’s heart thumped in his chest as he cast about for the pirate galleon’s commander, the Queen of Tides herself.

  He saw her on the far end of the platform. Aranessa Saltspite, moving like a dancer upon the giant sawfish blades that served for her lower legs. Her dexterity was entrancing, even after all these years. She was singing a lewd shanty at the top of her voice as she cut down one assailant after another, pushing her own men out of the way in order to stab at the faces and necks of the drowned mariners with her triple-pronged spear.