Dead Winter tbp-1 Read online

  Dead Winter

  ( The Black Plague - 1 )

  C. L. Werner

  C. L. Werner

  Dead Winter

  Prologue

  Skavenblight

  Geheimnisnacht, 1111

  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.

  The noise of creeping rats inside the walls died out as the fumes incinerated their tiny lungs and liquefied their little brains. Beetles and roaches fell from the rafters, their bodies shrivelled into desiccated husks. Bats took wing, shrieking their fright as they desperately tried to flee the deathly miasma, smashing against walls and ceiling, raining down to the floor in battered, bloodied strips of quivering flesh.

  Seerlord Skrittar’s whiskers twitched as the smell of blood flickered amidst the searing scent of warpstone. It was an unconscious, instinctive association. Skrittar’s mind was far too disciplined to be distracted in this, his hour of terror and triumph.

  The Seerlord stood at the head of a ring of creatures dressed in grey robes. Like him, they were ghastly, inhuman things, abominable monstrosities that seemed to blend the most hideous qualities of man and rat. Great horns protruded from their elongated heads, terrible symbols were painted or branded into their furry foreheads; the eyes in their verminous faces blazed with malefic energies, glowing green in the omnipresent darkness. Their paws were folded before them, clawed fingers entwined, their fangs clashing together in a low chant of hisses and squeaks.

  Seerlord Skrittar felt panic drumming inside his chest, as though any moment his heart might burst from sheer terror. The audacity of what he had thought to achieve! The arrogance! The impudence!

  No! The Seerlord forced his nerves to quieten. There was danger, there was always danger when invoking the forces of darkness, when engaging in a conjuration beyond the blackest of the black arts. No other skaven would have dared what he had dared! Yes, the risk was great, but the reward was still greater!

  His eyes narrowed as he gazed across the vast chamber. Eleven horned ratmen in grey robes, all of them the most potent of the Order of Grey Seers, with himself, the mighty Seerlord, and the Horned Rat himself symbolically assuming the sacred role of thirteenth intimate of the cabal. Each of the skaven sorcerers had imbibed in a potent mixture of wormroot and warpstone before the ritual, magnifying their own abilities yet further by devouring the still-living brains of their most gifted acolytes. The malign influence of Geheimnisnacht itself increased their powers still further, and whatever extra magic they needed they could draw from the warpstone fumes rising from six caskets arrayed about the edge of their circle.

  Protection? Of course: a series of concentric circles composed of sigils and runes drawn in the blood of elf-things mixed with crushed warpstone and the powdered bones of dragons. The greatest protection, though, lay in numbers, playing the chance that if anything went wrong then the aethyric retaliation would claim a different ratman.

  Skrittar gazed past his chanting minions, staring above them at the great window of stained glass. It was a relic left behind by the original builders of Skavenblight, the foolish man-things who had reared the Shattered Tower and engineered their vast city, only to have it taken from them by the Horned Rat and bestowed upon his favoured children — the skaven.

  There was something of magic about that portal of stained glass set into a spider-web of iron. Only magic could have allowed it alone to survive the tolling of the thirteenth hour, when the Horned Rat’s divine malignance had struck down the humans like a mighty earthquake and left their great tower broken and crumbling. Only the most potent of sorcery could have allowed it to endure a million generations of ratkin, staring like a great unclean eye upon the teeming hordes of Skavenblight as they birthed, grew and perished.

  Through the window, Skrittar could see the gibbous moon of sorcery, the ghoulish Morrslieb with its erratic orbit and eerie allure. This night, the Chaos Moon was ascendant, perched exactly at the centre of the thirteen constellations. Glancing away from the moon’s unsettling glow, Skrittar could see the fangs of the Big Rat and the long tail of the Little Rat, he could see the snarling muzzle of the Cornered Rat and the bloated carcass of the Drowned Rat, there were the feeble nubs of the Pink Rat and the murderous eyes of the Black Rat, and, whining off in the stellar shadows, was that cosmic buffoon, King Mouse, the meat that thought it was skaven.

  Rare was such a conjunction. Maybe once in a thousand generations of skaven did moon and stars align in such a way. When such an alignment came to pass, there were certain spells and rituals, handed down from Seerlord to Seerlord, that could be performed. Magic of such awful potency that no other skaven was allowed to even suspect their existence. Yet there was only so much magic a single sorcerer could conjure, and Skrittar wanted far greater things.

  The heathen vermin of Clan Pestilens were brewing some new contagion, a great plague they thought might finally bring the surface-dwelling man-things to their knees. Spies from every clan in Skavenblight had reported this to their warlords and now the whole Under-Empire was a seething hotbed of rumour and ambition. Outwardly, Skrittar dismissed the plans of the plague monks as diseased fantasies, delusions brought on by the maggots of madness burrowing through their brains. Inwardly, however, he feared that Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch really did have such a weapon. If he did, the balance of power in Skavenblight would shift, the other Lords of Decay would scurry to curry favour with the plague priests and forget their true allegiance towards the grey seers and the Horned Rat.

  It was something to make the Seerlord’s glands clench, the thought that the plague monks would gain ascendancy over skavendom. It was a possibility that had led him at last to build this cabal and initiate the greatest feat of magic ever executed by skaven sorcery.

  Skrittar raised his paws, invoking the thirteen secret names of the Horned Rat, scratching his god’s mark upon the great ritual. At once, there came a shift in the chamber’s atmosphere. It was not necessary to feel the power rising from the circle, he could smell it, almost see it, draining out from the grey seers like a tremendous shadow. Through the stained glass window, he could see the face of Morrslieb begin to darken, its ghoulish glow muffled behind the magnitude of dark magic assaulting it.

  A squeak of anguish echoed through the chamber. Skrittar could smell black skaven blood on the air. He heard a body crash to the floor. A few instants later, there was a second shriek, a second crash. Then there came a third.

  Fear coursed through the Seerlord’s heart. Had he misjudged the potential? Was this too much power for even an entire cabal of grey seers to command? Around him he could feel the air becoming charged with an ever-increasing pulse of eldritch energy. He could see the moon growing dim as its very essence was overwhelmed by skaven sorcery.

  A fourth shriek! Now there came anxious squeaks and whines from the other grey seers. One more death and the survivors would panic and break the circle, fleeing like fool-meat despite the havoc such an abrupt break in the ritual would cause. Skrittar ground his fangs together at the cowardice of his treasonous underlings. They deserved a bloody and unnatural death for their lack of fortitude. By their sacrifice, the Order of Grey Seers would ensure its place as masters of skavendom! It was their duty to stand and die for the glory of the Horned Rat and his true prophets!

  Skrittar nervously nuzzled his chin against the elven talisman he wore, hoping its magic would be enough to protect him if his craven hench-rats broke the circle.

  Before that could happen, the air lost the charge that had been building
up inside it. The moon’s glow was restored. The smell of aethyric malignity drained away.

  The Seerlord ground his fangs, glaring at his nervous underlings. If he found out one of them had ended the spell prematurely, if he learned one of them was responsible for causing the ritual to fail…

  Then there was a tremendous flash of light. The sky beyond the window was aglow with a spectral radiance, a great aura that surrounded Morrslieb. Skrittar hissed in triumph. The ritual had worked! By means of his sorcery, he had reached out and ripped chunks from the moon itself! Great shards of celestial rock that would now circle above the earth, waiting for that moment when Skrittar would call them down and claim them for his own! Because there was a secret about Morrslieb, one that even elven wizards treated as impossibility and which other skaven thought of as a wonderful myth with no basis in reality.

  The Chaos Moon, dark Morrslieb, was composed of pure warpstone! The chunks Skrittar had torn from its face would be enough to drive the Under-Empire into a new era of might and power. It would be enough to make the skaven the uncontested rulers of the world. It would be enough to make Skrittar the wealthiest ratman in skavendom, able to buy and sell the other Lords of Decay as though they were sacks of goblin-meat!

  Seerlord Skrittar smoothed his whiskers, savouring the excited squeaks of the surviving grey seers. They knew what they had done. The ritual had exhausted them, left them drained and weary, but still their hearts burned with avarice as they imagined all the warpstone waiting to be called down from the sky.

  Skrittar bared his fangs in a savage grin. The parasitic whelps would never share in that wealth. It belonged to the Order of Grey Seers and the Seerlord, not to a rabble of overly ambitious schemers and traitors! It was really too bad they knew too much. A little knowledge was a dangerous thing. A lot of knowledge was a death warrant.

  Fingering his lucky cat’s foot, Skrittar’s gleaming eyes drifted to the darkness beyond the circle of power. He could just see the shape there, and only because he knew where to look for it and had saved enough magic to allow him to see it. A wiry figure, stealing unseen and unknown upon the exhausted grey seers, its body draped in a cloak of black, a mantle woven from the scalps of changelings and daemons. He could see the dripping daggers clenched in the killer’s black-furred paws, the enchanted metal of the blades themselves saturated with poison so that the knives exuded a constant sweat of venom.

  Deathmaster Silke, the supreme assassin of Clan Eshin, the finest murderer in the Under-Empire. His hapless minions should feel honoured. Skrittar had spared no expense to ensure that they wouldn’t tell anyone else what they had done this night. He wondered if they would appreciate just how costly the services of the Deathmaster were. It was the finest compliment one skaven could pay another — spending a small fortune to murder them.

  Skrittar watched as the first of his underlings went down, both of the grey seer’s lungs pierced from behind by Silke’s blades. Before the first victim had even hit the floor, the Deathmaster’s invisible form was springing across the circle to open the throat of a second witless sorcerer. It was exciting to watch the slaughter, thrilling to watch an accomplished killer at work.

  Just the same, Skrittar kept a good grip on his cat’s foot and made sure he had an escape spell ready.

  There was no knowing if the Nightlord of Clan Eshin hadn’t made a mistake and ‘accidentally’ added an extra name to Deathmaster Silke’s contract.

  Chapter I

  Altdorf

  Nachgeheim, 1111

  Stewards dressed in rich doublets of crimson, their black boots polished to a reflective shine, hurried about the grand hall. Some circled the richly carved table of dark Drakwald oak which dominated the room, filling goblets and replacing victuals as the need arose. Others laboured to tend the three blazing hearths which opened upon the room, stuffing logs into the extravagantly sculpted maws of the fireplaces. Still other stewards, heavy black cloaks thrown about their shoulders, stood beside the mammoth picture window which stretched the length of the hall’s western approach. The cloaked servants each held a long pole tipped with ostrich plumes, employing the curious tools to fan smoke from the fires through small vents set just above the frosted panes of glass.

  The men situated about the great table paid no notice to the stewards, taking it for granted that an empty plate would soon have a sliver of cold venison upon it and an empty goblet would be refilled with dusky Solland wine.

  Upon the dais situated at the far end of the hall, however, sat one who gave more than passing notice to the stewards, particularly those standing about the Kaiseraugen, that vast window which offered such a magnificent view of the River Reik and the ancient city nestled against its banks. The window was a masterpiece, crafted by the finest glaziers gold could buy. Dwarfcraft, for only the doughty folk from under the mountains could create such astounding artistry. Glass itself was an expensive luxury only the temples and the wealthiest nobility could afford. Something of the scale of the picture window would have bankrupted any single province. Only the Emperor could afford such indulgence. Gazing upon the window, Boris could almost feel the magic of the dwarfs rushing through his bones. It was sometimes an effort to remove his attention from the window and look past it upon the stunning vista beyond.

  The mighty span of the Reik, greatest river in the world, and the opulence of Altdorf, the greatest city in the world. It sent another thrill coursing through his bones when he considered the river and the city. More than the opulence of the hall, the finery worn by servants and courtiers, the husky aromas of Tilean perfumes and Arabyan spices, the sweet melodies of silver-stringed lyres, the cool feel of velvet cushions — more than any of these, the sight of the Reik and Altdorf spoke to him of wealth and power.

  His wealth.

  His power.

  If those churls allowed so much as a single smudge of soot to defile the Kaiseraugen he would have each of them discharged and then lashed to a ducking stool and hounded through the streets of Altdorf. The swine could try their hand at farming or starving!

  The Emperor’s brow knotted in puzzlement at that last thought. He raised a bejewelled hand to his chin and scratched at his thick black beard. Why should he care if discharged servants should starve? They were no concern of his. Still puzzled, he turned his eyes away from the distracting vista and returned his attention to the irritating babble rising from around the oak table.

  The men seated about the table wore accoutrements to match the richness of their surroundings. There was a king’s ransom on display, a riot of blackwork and brocade, exotic calico and fustian, silver-threaded gipons and folly-bells crafted from the most lustrous gold. Count van Sauckelhof, envoy of the Westerland Court, sported a lavish cloak trimmed in sealfur and embroidered with fish and ships in cloth of gold. Baron von Klauswitz of Stirland wore a stylish tunic of russet, its sleeves broken by scalloped slashes to expose the fine material of the shirt beneath.

  There were, of course, exceptions. No amount of finery, for instance, could make Chief Elder Aldo Broadfellow look anything but ridiculous. The halfling’s efforts to ape the styles of the Imperial court only made him look even more the buffoon, though at least the portly rodent had the good sense to keep his mouth shut and not draw further attention to his foolishness.

  The same could not be said for Baron Thornig of Middenheim. Even in the Imperial court, the fellow affected the barbarous appearance of a half-civilised Teutogen, his shoulders draped with the snarling pelt of a white wolf, his hair and beard long and worn in the wildest state. The affectation of the backwoods savage was one designed to deliberately provoke the rest of the court, an effort to remind the rest of the Empire that the City of the White Wolf was full to brimming with wild warriors chomping at the bit to rush into battle once more.

  It might do to remind Middenheim of her less than sterling record upon the battlefield in the most recent violence to disrupt the Empire. For all their vaunted prowess, for all their supposed woodcraft, the sold
iers of Middenheim and Middenland had proven incapable of crushing the latest uprising of beastmen in the Drakwald. Perhaps old Ulric, god of wolves and war, had been caught napping.

  A scowl flickered across the Emperor’s lean features. His eyes turned towards the foot of the long table where sat a bald-headed man dressed in a black robe trimmed in crimson, a golden hammer embroidered upon the breast. Arch-Lector Wolfgang Hartwich, representing Grand Theogonist Thorgrad and the Temple of Sigmar. Since the Sigmarites had relocated the headquarters of their faith to Altdorf after the fire that had destroyed the Great Cathedral at Nuln and claimed the life of the old Grand Theogonist, their presence in the capital had become increasingly prominent… and intrusive. The arch-lector was an insufferable annoyance, fairly exuding disapproval with his every glance and gesture. If Ulric could be caught asleep, it seemed Sigmar was infuriatingly vigilant, his clergy only too ready to insinuate themselves into matters which were none of their concern.

  Emperor Boris tapped the gilded arms of his throne, pondering the question of Sigmar and his temple. He knew the Sigmarite faith was stronger in the south than in his native Drakwald, fairly eclipsing the worship of other gods when it came to Altdorf and the Reikland. The Grand Theogonist was the most powerful priest in the Empire, the pretensions of Ar-Ulric notwithstanding. Worse, the Temple of Sigmar had a structure and organisation beyond any other faith. They could use that organisation to disrupt production and trade as effectively as any goblin invasion or beastman uprising. Even an emperor had to treat them with deference and care, lest he offend the Temple and the thousands of zealots who placed devotion to Sigmar above their duty to their sovereign.

  ‘…but it remains to be determined how serious the menace is.’

  Emperor Boris shifted in his throne, focusing on the gaunt, cadaverous figure of Palatine Mihail Kretzulescu. The envoy from the court of Count Malbork von Drak, Voivode of Sylvania, had risen from his seat in order to address the assembled dignitaries. Count Malbork was, ostensibly, the vassal of Grand Count von Boeselager of Stirland. Von Drak had purchased his title for a hefty contribution to the Imperial treasury and made little secret of his ambitions to make Sylvania an independent province in its own right. With tacit encouragement from Altdorf, von Drak had become too powerful for the grand count to simply remove. Stirland had to endure the voivode’s talk of an independent Sylvania while trying to counter von Drak’s bribes in order to ensure the Emperor didn’t grant the territory its freedom.