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  Blighted Empire

  ( The Black Plague - 2 )

  C. L. Werner

  C. L. Werner

  Blighted Empire

  Preface

  That period of Imperial history preceding the stability brought by the ascension of Magnus von Bildhofen as Emperor in the year 2304 is a confused and frustrating time for the serious scholar. Many of the records from that era that have survived consist of accounts recorded by monks and friars and, by consequence, are couched in such a manner as to reflect and magnify the religious dogma of the author’s temple. Most secular works relating to this period were destroyed over the course of the centuries of warfare that gripped the Empire in what has been termed the ‘Age of Three Emperors’ and the Vampire Wars which briefly interrupted that vicious civil war.

  What is left for the historian, then, is a large body of myth and legend. How much veracity there may be in accounts of Underfolk is debatable at best; however, in compiling this treatment of those years when plague decimated the Empire, it has been constructive to adopt an attitude of credulity.

  In the first volume of A Folkloric History of the Black Plague and the Wolf of Sigmar, the conspiracy of Prince Sigdan of Altdorf and his allies against the despotic corruption of Emperor Boris I was detailed. Due in no small measure to the despicable Adolf Kreyssig, commander of the Emperor’s secret police, the conspiracy failed. In the course of their invasion of the Imperial Palace, Captain Erich von Kranzbeuhler of the outlawed Reiksknecht absconded with Ghal Maraz, depriving the Emperor of the ultimate symbol of his authority.

  The Black Plague’s depredations across the Empire were nowhere as marked as in the region of Sylvania. In that ill-omened land, a distraught priest of Morr turned against his faith when his family succumbed to the disease. Frederick van Hal, drawing upon forbidden texts, resorted to necromancy in a desperate effort to reconnect with those he’d lost. By employing the dark art, van Hal opened himself to eldritch forces beyond his comprehension. Christening himself ‘Vanhal’, the terrible necromancer turned against his neighbours, unleashing the undead against the town of Bylorhof and slaughtering its populace.

  Middenheim, the famed City of the White Wolf, was spared the brunt of the plague in those early years. Graf Gunthar, ruler of Middenheim, imposed harsh measures to protect his city, refusing refugees from other provinces sanctuary on the Ulricsberg. These draconian policies offended the ideals of his son, Prince Mandred, who struggled to help those he felt his father had abandoned. Ultimately, after a heroic charge to relieve the refugee camp at the foot of the mountain when it was attacked by beastmen, the young prince came to understand the cruel wisdom behind his father’s edict.

  No account of the plague years would be complete without delving into the Underfolk, the rat-like skaven of many a nursery fable. The ratmen are often credited as the instigators of the Black Plague, and anecdotes about their treacherous manipulations can be found in dwarf records of the time. A plague priest named Puskab Foulfur is often associated with the genesis of the plague. After concocting this dread disease, the skaven were emboldened enough to make direct attacks on the cities of men. Displaying the cunning depravity of his breed, Puskab contrived to place himself on the Council of Thirteen, the villainous Grey Lords, by first allying with and then betraying one of the sitting Grey Lords. Together with his own leader, Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch, the pestiferous Clan Pestilens possessed two seats upon this Council, allowing them even greater influence over the verminous Under-Empire. At their instigation, the despotic Warmonger Vecteek commanded an ever-increasing deployment of the Black Plague.

  In the grim year of 1111, the Black Plague was unleashed. Before it was finished, three of every four men in the Empire would be dead. In the midst of such widespread decimation, old evils stirred to take their place in the sun.

  This second volume details the aftermath of that original dead winter.

  — Reikhard Mattiasson, A Folkloric History of the Black Plague and the Wolf of Sigmar Vol. II

  Altdorf Press, Vorhexen, 2513

  Suppressed by order of Lord Thaddeus

  Gamow, Jahrdrung, 2514

  Prologue

  Skavenblight

  Geheimnisnacht, 1112

  The pungent smell of smouldering warpstone wafted through the blackened chamber, the corrupt fume slithering into every nook and cranny, oozing between the crumbling bricks, burning into beams of oak and ash, discolouring glass and tarnishing bronze. It was the stench of darkest sorcery, and this was its night.

  Resplendent in silver robes woven from the scalps of man-thing she-breeders, Seerlord Skrittar perched atop the dais, his claw stroking the silky texture of his finery. The wealth displayed by such a garment! He could smell the envy in the scent of his subordinates whenever he donned it. It was a considerable expenditure to abduct the she-breeders, bear them back alive to Skavenblight and confine them in the blackest burrows beneath the city. They had to be kept in darkness, nurtured on a rich diet of glow-grubs and swamp maize for many seasons before their hair assumed the correct hue, scent and texture. It was a sad reality that only the smallest amounts of weirdroot could be used to keep the she-breeders tranquil or the drug would affect the desired properties in their hair. The breeders of the man-things were eccentric, excitable animals, entertaining pretensions of intelligence the Horned Rat had thankfully spared the brood-mothers of the skaven. They were given to crazed moods and had to be constantly watched lest they kill themselves in an unguarded moment.

  Skrittar’s whiskers twitched in amusement as he pondered the perfection of the skaven mind. The Horned Rat had blessed his children with the divine spark, had created the ratmen in his own image and invested in them all the craft and guile of his own black spirit. The skaven were destined to dominate and rule over all others. It was a holy imperative. To do less was to betray their sacred duty. From the very first time the Shattered Tower’s bell had tolled the thirteenth note, the skaven had known it was their destiny to inherit the world.

  The seerlord’s whiskers became still. His furred lips pulled back to expose his yellowed fangs, his naked tail lashed in annoyance against the cold stone floor. If not for the petty squabbling and bickering amongst the clans, the skaven should have dominated the world long ago. Short-sighted despots and craven-livered tyrants who could think only of their own pretensions of power and greatness. The Grey Lords had squandered the resources of the mighty Under-Empire on their internecine feuds and rivalries. If they could only put the welfare of skavendom ahead of their own ambitions, nothing could keep the ratmen from rising up and overwhelming the surface world. There was no force among gods or men that could stand against a united skavendom!

  Skrittar shook his horned head, his nose crinkling in a sour expression as though a foul scent had filled his nostrils. There was a real prospect of skavendom uniting now. The past winter had seen Clan Pestilens unleash their hideous Black Plague against the man-things. The disease had run rampant, decimating the humans in numbers that were truly astounding. Virtually the entire Council of Thirteen had rallied behind Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch, even permitting a second plague priest to assume a position among the Lords of Decay, the diseased Poxmaster Puskab Foulfur, creator of the Black Plague! First Among Equals, Warmonger Vecteek the Murderous had showered the plague monks with gifts and honours, indulging them as the vicious warlord of Clan Rictus had never indulged any clan before.

  If things persisted, all would march together under a single banner. But it wouldn’t be the divine light of the Horned One and his living prophets, the grey seers, who would guide the united hordes of the Under-Empire. It would be the pestilent minds and heretical creeds of the plague priests!

  Skrittar stamped his paw against
the floor, spinning around and scurrying to the gigantic mess of copper tubes and pipes that dominated one end of the vast, cavernous hall high within the holy confines of the Shattered Tower. The ancient stained-glass window that had been left behind by the original human builders of the city had been broken up and sold as scrap. It had been a necessary defilement to allow the great crystal lens of the hulking warpscope to focus upon the black tapestry of night.

  A fabulous creation, that mountain of copper and bronze, glass and crystal. There were plates of polished warpstone deep inside the housing, sheets of the stone that had been ground so thin and fine as to be translucent. Exploiting a network of silver mirrors, the warpstone lenses would draw down the image of the night sky into the eye of the observer, permitting him such a view of the moons that it seemed he might reach out and grab them.

  The seerlord chittered as the humour of such a thought occurred to him. Reach out and grab the moons? That was precisely what he had done. Not through the arcane technology of Clan Skryre; all their foolish contraption — itself shamelessly patterned after similar instruments developed by the dwarf-things — could do was offer a view of the moons. With his magic, Skrittar had done much more. Much, much more! He had stretched forth his tyrannical will and gouged his sorcerous claws across the face of Morrslieb, tearing great chunks from the dark moon’s surface. Chunks of raw, pure warpstone!

  For a full cycle of seasons those boulders of warpstone had circled across the sky, becoming like little black stars, waiting for the moment when he, Skrittar, Voice of the Horned One, would draw them down to earth.

  Skrittar’s paw brushed across the focusing mechanism, manipulating the little flywheel as he pressed his eye to the observation port. Supposedly the Skryre tinker-rats had insulated the viewing plate against the harmful energies of the warpscope’s lenses, but just to be safe the seerlord hissed a quick prayer to invoke the Horned Rat’s protection. Ordinarily he would leave the hazards of using any of Skryre’s contraptions to an easily replaceable underling or an overly ambitious subordinate, but at the moment there was no one to indulge such caution.

  Looking away from the observation port, Skrittar cast his gaze across the long chamber with its arched ceiling high overhead, and its stone walls black and hoary with age. The floor was marked with a bewildering array of protective talismans and circles, each figure drawn with exacting precision in the blood of elves and griffons and even more dangerous beasts. Bronze braziers cast a fume of smouldering warpstone into the air, saturating the chamber’s atmosphere with the stuff of raw magic.

  Skrittar had bided his time for a full year, waiting for the cosmic conjunction of moons and stars that was Gnawdawn. It was only during such a conjunction that the black energies of dark magic were magnified to their full. Even then, even with his abilities bolstered and heightened by warpstone elixirs and vapours, his spiritual aura strengthened by obscene rites to the Horned Rat, Skrittar had known the sorcery he needed to perform was beyond his ability alone. As he had one year ago, Skrittar had summoned a cabal of his underlings, a coven of twelve of his ablest and most wicked grey seers.

  They had been wary and suspicious when they had submitted to Skrittar’s summons, calling them to the grand observatory. The entire Order of Grey Seers had been shaken by the deaths of twelve of their number exactly one year previously. Outwardly, none of them had been so foolish as to doubt Skrittar’s claim that their comrades had expired in a failed magical experiment. He didn’t think anyone had managed to ferret out the true nature of their deaths — Clan Eshin had a most un-skavenlike propensity for discretion. Still, there had been an inordinate number of assassination attempts on Skrittar’s life since that Great Ritual one year ago.

  Skrittar ground his fangs together in irritation. Even among the grey seers, prophets of the Horned One, there was a woeful lack of vision. Any of them should be happy to become a martyr, to give his worthless life in the name of his god. Their sacrifice would be the stuff that would blot out the heathen taint of Clan Pestilens forever! Their blood would be the first waters of a tide that would sweep through the Under-Empire and establish a theocracy that would dominate skavendom for all time! Their deaths would bring supreme power to their master, Seerlord Skrittar!

  There were twelve more martyrs to the cause now. Twelve grey-cloaked bodies strewn about the floor. All the protective wards and talismans they had carried, the spells and arcane safeguards they had evoked, hadn’t been enough to save them. The grey seers had lent their magic to Skrittar’s ritual, each of the greedy fool-meat imagining the wealth that would soon belong to them, presuming themselves a share of what belonged to the Horned Rat and his supreme servant Skrittar alone! Greed formed a chink in their defences, made their caution falter for just a brief moment.

  It was the only moment Skrittar needed. The twelve had died in an especially agonising fashion as they inhaled the poison. The seerlord had been too crafty to use Deathmaster Silke as he had the previous year, just in case someone had learned of their connection. Instead, he had engaged the Deathmaster’s disciple Killmaker Nartik to dispose of his unwanted, untrustworthy minions. Nartik had been crafty too, tossing the pungent packet of poison into one of the braziers the instant the ritual was over and the cabal had outlived their usefulness. Skrittar had been told the effects would resemble the Black Plague to such a degree that only the most adept assassins in Clan Eshin would be able to tell the difference. The rest of Skrittar’s Order would be convinced the massacre had been the work of the heathen plague monks this time!

  Skrittar turned back to the warpscope. Through the viewing lens he could see the chunks of orbiting warpstone, each of them radiating a faint nimbus of green light now. Before his gaze, he could see them being drawn downwards. Soon, the magic Skrittar had conjured would have the warpstone plummeting into the earth, smashing down as a rain of meteorites. He had been very careful in his calculations. He knew where the warpstone would come smashing down, a section of land barren enough to be shunned by most skaven yet not so distant as to make a journey there noteworthy. He’d already picked one of the less powerful warlord clans to provide the labour he would require, a clan with sufficient dread of the grey seers and enough pious terror of the Horned Rat that the slightest twitch of Skrittar’s whisker would have them scurrying to carry out his commands.

  The seerlord leaned away from the warpscope, rubbing his lucky cat’s foot over the eye he had pressed to the observation port just in case. He bruxed his teeth as he consulted the ratskin map laid out on a bench atop the dais. The trajectory of the warpstone would draw it down to the bleakest backwater in the region of the man-thing Empire. When the warpstone shower struck, Skrittar would not be far behind. His lackeys would harvest the biggest bonanza of warpstone the Under-Empire had ever seen, wealth that would make even Vecteek and Nurglitch bow to Skrittar and kiss the tip of his tail!

  With the man-things sick and weak, with the dwarf-things hiding in their mountains and the green-things fighting among themselves, there was no one who would oppose Skrittar’s invasion of Sylvania.

  Chapter I

  Altdorf

  Pflugzeit, 1114

  Slivers of agony raced through his arm, searing through his very bones. There was a sensation of scalding cold, the gnawing bite of hoarfrost sinking into his skin. Before his eyes, the hairs on the back of his hand turned brittle and crumbled into little motes of ice. He clenched his teeth against the torment, refusing to scream. This time I will not scream, he vowed to himself. It was a promise he had made many times. A promise he had always failed to keep.

  As the pain became too great, Adolf Kreyssig spat the wooden block from his mouth and gave voice to a torturous cry. He screamed until he thought his lungs must burst and his throat would be stripped raw. He screamed and screamed, but there was no respite. He knew there would be none. There would be no relief until the ordeal had accomplished what it needed to accomplish.

  Just as he felt consciousness slipping away, as blac
k oblivion began to wrap its welcoming folds about his brain, Kreyssig felt the pain begin to abate. Gradually, the chill evaporated from his bones, the frost melted on his skin as blood coursed back into his arm. He watched as a cold mist rose from his warming flesh. Layers of frozen skin sloughed away as he flexed his muscles.

  Through the lingering agony, Kreyssig smiled. He could feel his muscles respond, see the fingers of his hand clench and open. True, there was a certain lethargy about the motion, but it was less pronounced than before. Improvement! Reward for the torture he had been submitting himself to for over two years.

  Two years! It had been two years since he’d pursued the traitors Baron Thornig and Captain Erich von Kranzbeuhler into the sewers trying to recover the relic, the Holy Hammer of Sigmar, which they had stolen from the Imperial Palace. In the very moment of his seeming triumph, tragedy had struck him down. Cornered, the two rebels were at the mercy of Kreyssig’s Kaiserjaeger when events had spiralled out of control. The disgusting, verminous mutants Kreyssig had been exploiting in secret as spies had also been hunting the rebels and rushed into the subterranean gallery. Before Kreyssig could stop them, his startled men attacked the monstrous creatures. The resultant fight had destabilised the ancient masonry, bringing the building above crashing down on all their heads.

  Kreyssig had been fortunate to survive. None of the others did. Crushed beneath tons of brick and stone, he’d been more than half dead when some of his men discovered him lying in a cellar of the Courts of Justice. Some of the mutants must have pulled him from the rubble and taken him to where he would be found and given help. Even with the best attention, however, he had hovered at the Gates of Morr for several months. The attentions of priests, herbalists and even the Emperor’s personal physician had preserved his life, but his body had been left a broken shell. It had required stronger measures to make him whole.