[Angelika Fleischer 03] - Liar's Peak Read online

  A WARHAMMER NOVEL

  LIAR’S PEAK

  Angelika Fleischer - 03

  Robin D. Laws

  (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.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The ring—Angelika had to see it again. She could feel its presence easily enough, patting the spot above her right hip where she’d sewn its secret pocket to the inside of her tunic. There it was, safe as ever, beneath her fingers: the round band of metal, the tiny claws holding the gem in place, the stone itself. This was not sufficient. She had to look at it, perhaps to be certain it was real, that all of her work—the danger, the exhaustion, the rough living—was almost done with. Though not given to self-indulgence, Angelika was ready to grant herself this one foolish impulse. There was no one around to see her, to take it from her, to observe her in this instant of weakness.

  Angelika Fleischer sat against a mossy, rotten log. Her body was slight, but lithe and muscular. Dark eyes glittered above her high cheekbones and knifepoint chin. Before she stirred, she completed yet another unobtrusive check of the dark pines all around her, their grey trunks balefully lit by a pregnant moon. At length, when no sign of surveillance had presented itself, she decided it was safe. She leaned against the fallen tree and slid gracefully up to a standing position. Her worn leather coat moved silently with her, hardly daring to crack or squeak. Under it she wore a coal-coloured tunic that extended halfway down her thighs, partially covering tight woollen leggings. A belt with a knife in it encircled her waist; a second dagger waited snugly in the cuff of her boot. She’d recently used it to cut her silky dark hair; her work had made even more of a mess of it than usual.

  Angelika was young, but the wary grace of her movements displayed a hard-won competence that was neither youthful nor feminine. She was as beautiful as a razor.

  Faint snoring sounds, half murmur, half purr, escaped from a lanky, blanketed bundle at her feet—Franziskus, her self-appointed bodyguard. They’d been on the trail together for more than a year. He still hadn’t told her his last name. She still hadn’t asked.

  His sleeping body eased itself onto its back; a flap of bedroll fell away to expose his face. The lunar light flattered his fine, aristocratic features. Months of outdoor living had done little to weather his skin or dull his cerulean eyes. When lit by the sun, his long, rich hair shone like gold; now, by night, its sheen was more like silver. His rough elk’s-hide cloak, which he wore under his blanket, added bulk to a still-boyish frame.

  Angelika wondered where the young man would go, and what he would do with himself, after they parted ways. That time would be very soon in coming. It was a subject Franziskus, otherwise talkative to a fault, had punctiliously avoided throughout their long trek out of the frontier regions of the Blackfire Pass and back into the Empire’s outlying provinces.

  She’d expected more enthusiasm from him when she’d announced the imminence of her retirement. For years, long before meeting Franziskus, she’d made her living as a scourer of battlefields. She rolled the corpses of recently slain soldiers, gleaning their weapons, armour, jewels, and the contents of their purses. At least until recently, Franziskus had never missed an opportunity to express his disapproval of her profession.

  Despite his annoying bouts of moralising, Angelika had allowed him to tag along after her. It was her punishment for one of her periodic lapses into foolish altruism: she’d risked her own neck to save him from a mob of blood-mad orcs. In return, he’d vowed to stick by her side and return the favour, whether she liked it or not. She was pretty sure he’d discharged this duty at least once, perhaps even on multiple occasions. Nonetheless, he persisted.

  She examined his pale, sleeping face. If he was prone to a certain vexing self-righteousness, it was because his heart was good. He hadn’t seen as much of the world as she. Angelika had learned to see through the world’s many lies at a tender age. Franziskus had so far blissfully evaded any such disillusionment.

  There would be some sadness in their parting, she had to admit, and he would take the brunt of it. If it was his genuine desire to return home, he’d have done so already. She’d grudgingly come to accept his presence, to respect his usefulness and pluck, even perhaps to feel a touch of sisterly affection for him. But in the new life she was headed to, there’d be no place for him.

  Certain no one could see her, she reached up past her tunic’s frayed lower hem and into the crudely fashioned pocket. From it she withdrew her ruby ring.

  She’d bought it from Max, the vendor to whom she sold her gore-grimed merchandise. Over a period of months, she’d taken a final tour of her various crannies, caches and hidey-holes, scattered throughout the dangerous, inhospitable reaches of the Blackfire. With deft fingers she’d retrieved the coins Max had paid her over the years. With girded dagger, awaiting ambush from every cave and cliff-side, she’d hauled her swelling purse of gold and silver out of the pass and to her rendezvous with Max on the Empire’s borders, near the town of Grenzstadt. There, she’d converted her money into its present eminently portable and resaleable form.

  She held up its slim and filigreed mount of gold, so that its translucent red gem covered the moon, and was illumined by its light. Its clarity, its exquisitely cut facets, stood out to her as never before. This jewel was as valuable as Max had claimed, maybe even more. It would buy her an entire life of modest ease, away from corpses, from battlefields, from nights spent out on the cold ground, from monsters, bandits and madmen. Away from accursed, damnable mountains. Angelika never wanted to go up another mountain for as long as she lived.

  Everything else in the world might be a lie, but this ring, this tiny object—it was truth.

  CHAPTER TWO

  This is the sound of the world ending, thought Jonas Rassau: the scream of dying horses. All around him the poor beasts writhed, upended, their bellies pierced by the swords and lances of the advancing Chaos army. Dead or wounded riders had fallen beside them. Each was a lord or heir to an estate, laid low by a Chaos axe.

  The battlefield stank of mud, manure and gore. A stale wind carried resinous smoke from the north, where a pine forest burned, torched by the Kurgan horde. The smoke blew into Jonas’ face, welling his eyes with angry tears. It swathed the battle, so that men who fought only a few yards away, friend and foe alike, were obscured from view, shrouded as if they were already ghosts.

  Jonas called out to his men as they braced themselves to charge the enemy’s
flank. He heard his own hoarse, ruined voice as if it came from someone else. Blood dripped from his face down into his mouth. It was not his, but the enemy’s. The experience of battle was exactly as his father had said: time had slowed. Opposed sensations, of calm and of terror, ran through him like strong drink. He gripped the hilt of his sword more tightly. Only this cold, hard weapon, Jonas told himself, was real. Nothing mattered but the trajectory of his blade as he brought it down on the bodies of his foes. He would not die here today: it would be the enemy who would fall. Today, Jonas Rassau assured himself, his father’s reputation would pass to him, like a mantle.

  He repeated his cry to his men, his words nearly unintelligible. “Victory,” he howled. The men responded with a chorus of roars. Jonas looked back, showing them a lupine grin. He was a head taller than any man with him. His shoulders were broad; his waist, slim and his legs long. As did his comrades, Jonas wore the yellow and black of the Stirland armies. A new breastplate, polished to a sheen, bulwarked his midsection. The plumed helmet that denoted his junior officer’s rank had been knocked from his head, and was lost somewhere on the battlefield. Sweat stuck strands of sandy hair to his neck and brow.

  Heredity had blessed Jonas with a magnificent jaw and a sublimely symmetrical face. If it bore an imperfection, it was a slightly prominent brow. In refined company, these features, along with his loping, restless gait, made him seem too much the tiger. Here, with sword unsheathed, he was a man others wished to follow.

  He pointed the tip of his weapon toward the dark, smoke-wreathed figures ahead. They fought on the hilly pastures of Stirland, north of the River Aver and south of the Stir, a good threescore leagues to the west of the World’s Edge Mountains, over which the Chaos tribes had come. This range comprised the Empire’s south-eastern border. Over the centuries its tall and toothy reaches had provided a reliable barrier against the barbarians of the Kurgan steppes. Now, spurred by some harsh new leader, they’d found the unity and purpose to pour across its length, intent on destruction. In the time it had taken Stirland’s armies to muster, barbarians had already overrun dozens of border villages, their every conquest a massacre. Advancing as ragged marauders, they’d spread themselves across the plains, forcing the Stirlanders to do the same.

  This clash was but one of many. Throughout the borderlands, other similar engagements would be raging. Every time an Imperial regiment failed, a column of pillagers would be loosed into the province’s heartland. They would not stop with Stirland. Armies from neighbouring provinces, from Averland, Talabecland and even Wissenland, were on their way to staunch the flow of Kurgan fighters before their own lands were ravaged. Few expected them to arrive in time.

  Morale was poor; gloom had fallen on the regiments of the Empire like a dusting of snow. As they huddled at night, when they thought no officers would hear them, the common soldiers whispered the unthinkable, forbidden thought: that the last days might finally be at hand. Because they felt them, too, the officers found it difficult to suppress the footmen’s trepid pangs. Even if they won this nameless battle, the war had barely started.

  The Empire, forged in battle against Chaos, had survived for twenty-five hundred years. Even the simplest man knew of its eventual doom. One day the skies would run crimson and Chaos’ seething armies would rain down their final victory. The Empire, along with all the lands of men and dwarfs, would be consumed. It was a testament to the grim fortitude of the Empire’s heroes, and the power of its rival war gods, that the men of the Old World had for so many centuries staved off this inevitable cataclysm.

  When Jonas was a child, in the days when his father rode lustily into battle at the head of a shining regiment, people talked about the doom of the Empire, but as a prophecy of the distant future, not an event they would live to see. It was a campfire ghost tale, a figure of speech. A generation later, it had taken on a terrible credence. From three directions, from north, south and east, the various hordes of cultists, beast-men, mutants, marauders and daemons that made up the hosts of evil overran the Empire’s gates.

  Jonas knew these things without having to think them. All that mattered now was that his arm was strong, his eye was quick, and that his hunger for glory was no less than his enemy’s for murder and destruction.

  The engagement was seventeen minutes old. Two regiments of Empire forces, mostly Stirlanders, but with a smattering of free companies from Averheim and the Talabec, marched to meet an unruly column of marauders as they made a fast march through the province’s eastern dales. Acting on the orders of regimental commander Henlyn Vogt, a man Jonas loved with a fervour he otherwise restricted to blood relatives, the Gerolsbruch Swordsmen had stood in formation, drawn the foe out, and sent their young highborn bravos around on horseback to encircle them. Then hundreds more of the wild-eyed Kurgan footmen had boiled out from the burning forest to the north of their chosen battlefield. They surrounded and killed the lordly riders.

  Jonas had been ordered to come at the enemy from the flank with a third of the Gerolsbruch Swordsmen at his side. There had been empty ground, and smoke, and enemy fighters. These they had slain; the two who sank under Jonas’ blade were the first men he’d ever killed. They deserved it, and he was proud. He whooped with heartless joy that he was alive and they were not. After making sure that no fallen foe would again rise to his feet, Jonas and the men had run blindly through the smoke, seeking more fodder for their longswords.

  Now they were upon them: a crew of barbarians gathered together in a ragged rank, likewise on the prowl for new opponents. Each had clad himself in partial armour, haphazardly rigged together with straps of blackened leather. In matters of battle gear, the Kurgan allowed themselves no middle ground: either an arm or torso had been plated in steely armour, or it lay entirely bare. Dark lines of tattoo ink trailed across the tight layers of skin covering their hard and fatless flesh.

  Some marauders stared madly out through horned helmets; others trailed long top-knots of black, greasy hair from otherwise shaven heads. Some were bearded; others, not. Many were lightly wounded, sporting fresh gashes that would, if they survived the day, join the legions of scars traversing their drawn hides.

  Jonas resolved that not a one of them would survive to see another scar form. He screamed and ran at the nearest Kurgan fighter, who happened also to be the largest. Jonas exulted in the shouts and mucky footfalls of his men as they joined him in the charge.

  As Jonas reached his chosen foe, his perception of time slowed further. He heard his thundering heart as a distant drum beat, marking out a rhythm for his courage. The Kurgan opened his mouth wide and howled furiously. Blindly, he swung his long-hafted axe. It took him hardly an instant to loose his blow, but Jonas, instinctively calculating its arc, ducked easily under it. The barbarian’s thwarted momentum sent him off-balance and Jonas pivoted, stepping beside him to aim a powerful strike at the back of his neck. He felt the blade find and overcome resistance in enemy musculature.

  In anticipation of a counter-attack, Jonas moved back to crouch behind his shield. His opponent Jet his weapon slip from trembling fingers, then clapped a hand to the back of his neck. He did not hesitate; he pushed into the Kurgan with his shield and stabbed him between the ribs. The marauder slumped into him and Jonas slipped back under his slackened weight. He eased out of the way to let the Kurgan plummet onto the ground, face-first. He stole a fraction of a moment to note the depth of the blow on the back of his dead enemy’s neck then he readied himself for the oncoming axe of the next man in line.

  On his father’s parade grounds, from the age of six onwards, Jonas had been schooled in sword and shield. Three different sergeants had taught him their best tricks. Combat was a language of motion, it came to him instantly and without effort, as words appear on a man’s tongue when he speaks.

  The bald-headed marauder who came at him was strong but clumsy, sweeping his axe about in wide, uncontrolled arcs. His technique was difficult to predict. Jonas watched his eyes; their frenetic jerking re
liably betrayed his upcoming actions.

  Jonas skittered back, as if pressed hard by the blows, allowing the Kurgan to develop and repeat a cycle of moves: step forward, swing axe down, to the side, swing axe up, step back, swing axe overhead. The axe banged against Jonas’ shield, the blow’s force rippling up through the bones of his forearms.

  Finally, near the end of the cycle, the Kurgan did what Jonas knew he would, and left his throat exposed. Jonas shot his sword up to gash it open; blood fountained from the wound. Jonas kicked the dying man over, into another, tangling him in his comrade’s limbs. He ducked low, flanked the astounded marauder, and dug his sword tip-first into his lower back. From the corner of his eye he saw that one of his men had stopped to marvel at his three quick kills.

  A Kurgan shield clipped Jonas solidly behind the ear and hurled him to the ground. He shot out his shield-arm to break his fall. The shield did so, but he landed on it with a crunch, bruising the muscle of his upper arm. He rolled, but not in time; he got onto his back before his foe leapt upon him. The barbarian pressed his knees, each protected by a spiked section of plate, onto Jonas’ chest. They could not pierce the thick front of his cuirass, but this was not the Kurgan’s aim: he meant merely to keep Jonas down as he drew his axe back for a coup de grace.

  For the first time, Jonas saw his attacker well: he was a wiry with crazed eyes. Jonas rocked back to free himself, but the old man rode him with daemonic persistence. He madly clanged his axe down on the young officer’s breastplate. Jonas’ teeth rattled in their sockets. The man lifted the axe to aim a blow at a softer target.

  Tiny hands enfolded themselves around the bony wrist of the wrinkled Kurgan’s weapon-hand. The barbarian screeched in anger and pivoted to address this affront. Jonas took advantage of his distraction to buck him off with pushing hips. Now the barbarian was pinned, his leg stuck under the back piece of Jonas’ cuirass.