Age of the Undead
Zombicide Black Plague
Age of the Undead
“So it begins,” the man whispered, darkly fascinated as the graveyard pitched and heaved as its occupants dug their way out from below. First one plot disgorged its contents, the rotten husk of a milkmaid, her flesh pitted with decay and her forehead crushed by the cow that had ended her life. Another grave spat out the bloated bulk of a blacksmith, his hair burned away, and his skin charred. Others quickly followed until there were a dozen undead horrors shambling about the cemetery.
The disturbance in the graveyard was noted by the sexton. Unaware of the nature of the trespassers, he rushed from his shack to confront them. The undead converged upon him, dragging him down with their necrotic hands. Then the zombies turned away from their prey. As they stalked off, the mangled remains of the sexton stirred once more. Lurching to its feet, the chewed corpse staggered away to join its killers.
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First published by Aconyte Books in 2022
ISBN 978 1 83908 112 5
Ebook ISBN 978 1 83908 113 2
Copyright © 2022 CMON Global Limited
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Cover art by Daniele Orizio
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For Kevin, who drew my attention to Zombicide: Black Plague and provoked the resultant backlog of unpainted miniatures.
Prologue
Darkness and the rancid stench of death lay thick within the underground vault. The scratch of rats’ claws upon stone was the only sound that echoed through the gloom. What little light strove against the shadows came from a few tapers set into niches in the dank stone walls.
A shape flickered across the uneven paving, disturbing the vermin as they gnawed their charnel dinner. The hem of a heavy robe swished through the dust as the figure rapidly crossed the ancient crypt. Dull thuds resounded in the dark as the butt of a staff tapped against the floor.
The intruder hurried toward a plinth set at the very center of the vault. Eyes peered from beneath the hood that swathed the figure’s head, fixating on the object that rested atop the pedestal. Leaning forward, a hand reached out and brushed away the patina of dirt that was caked about a fist-sized sphere. Where the fingers scratched it, the gleam of crystal caught the dim light and sparkled in crimson translucence.
A low chuckle rose from the intruder, and he threw back the hood revealing a lean and predatory visage. Straggly black hair spilled away from his scalp in long, greasy locks. His face, the skin drawn taut across high cheekbones, had a sickly pallor to it. The eyes alone were vibrant, deep pits that burned with a remorseless fire.
The man stared at the crystal sphere for a moment, then quickly swung the malachite-capped staff he carried. The knobby head, carved into a grinning skull, swatted one of the rats as it scurried across the floor. The macabre intruder dipped to the ground and with his free hand snatched up the stunned rodent. Stepping closer to the plinth, he raked a long, dirty fingernail across the rat’s neck. Blood spurted from the animal and pattered down onto the ruby crystal.
“The Eye of Darkness,” the man hissed, both avarice and awe in his tone. He clenched his fist and squeezed the bleeding rat as though it were a lemon. More of its blood splattered across the sphere. The crystal, in its turn, was stimulated by the gore. Its formerly transparent depths became cloudy.
The intruder tossed the dead rat aside, leaving it to the cannibal attentions of its fellows, and fixated his gaze on the scarlet fog billowing within the sphere. As he watched, the murk resolved itself into distinct images. He could see high mountains and rolling fields, walled castles and lonely hamlets. He recognized these scenes, for they represented the realm of King Heinrich IV, a monarch the great and powerful had christened “the Good” but who the majority of his subjects knew by another name.
“Heine the Indolent,” the observer scoffed as he gazed into the crystal. The king had inherited a land largely devoid of conflict. Greater predecessors had driven marauding monsters like ogres and trolls from the land. Only on the western frontier, in the rain-swept moors and forests of the Duchy of Wulfsburg, did the warlike orcs persist in such numbers as to be any manner of menace. True, the occasional dragon drifted down from the mountains to burn a farmstead or devour a herd of cattle, but for the most part, the kingdom was a peaceful one.
“But peace breeds strange ideas.” There was bitterness in the voice, a malice that provoked the crystal. The man watched as the image shifted. The landscape narrowed, focusing upon a stone tower rising above a sma
ll village. Black-clad antagonists were dragging a battered old man from that tower. His robes were ripped, his white beard stained with blood, his face bruised and battered. The villagers watched in silence as the elder was carried into the square where a post had been raised and wood was piled. “A wizard accused of practicing the black arts, summarily tried and convicted by the king’s agents.”
It was a scene that had played out many times across the kingdom. The Wizards’ Guild was often tardy protesting when the Order of Witch Hunters decided one of its members had turned to black magic. There were those in the court who used the strife to expand their own influence in the kingdom and to maintain their authority, the zeal of the witch hunters was never appeased. Always there was another magician or conjurer accused of delving into proscribed magics. Always there was someone else to be exposed and condemned to the pyre.
A sneer curled the man’s face as he stared into the crystal. “Their fanaticism to destroy the necromancers only made their worst fears become reality,” he muttered. Many an enchanter, fearful of death on a witch hunter’s pyre, sought the quick power promised by the black arts. The necromancers they’d been created to destroy grew in number. Lone practitioners banded together into cabals for mutual protection.
The scenes within the crystal now displayed a coven of humans swathed in robes edged in arcane sigils. Runes, ancient and profane, were daubed upon their foreheads and cheeks in pigments ground from bone and blood. The skulls of murdered men topped their staves or hung from their belts. In their hands they bore the accouterments of their morbid sorcery; daggers fashioned from femurs, wands carved from tombstones, grimoires bound in the flayed skin of corpses. A gathering of necromancers.
The grim cabal was gathered in a dismal, fog-wrapped swamp. Ugly menhirs projected up from the dank earth, each stone caked in black mud and green scum. The ruins of a lost and ancient place, a last testament to a terrible and forgotten race. The observer squirmed uneasily as he contemplated the inhuman design of each monolith and the grisly hieroglyphs just visible under the muck. They bespoke a prehuman age of such remoteness that evil was a feeble word to describe the profane sensation it evoked.
Before the intruder’s eyes, the crystal showed the necromancers performing a ghastly rite. Hideous sacrifices performed at a conjunction of the menhirs created a concentration of arcane energies that could be felt even across the gap of space and time. The cabal pooled their powers, drawing on the energies they’d invoked. The slime of the swamp rippled and undulated like waves on a storm-swept sea. Stagnant water and viscid mud rolled away, excavating a deep pit in the midst of the menhirs. Ancient stone blocks protruded from the sides of this depression, hints of some colossal ruin buried beneath the morass.
It wasn’t the rubble of a forgotten city that interested the necromancers. Burrowing out from the sides of the pit as though they were living things, long-buried relics crawled into view. Apprentices, attendants, henchmen and thralls, such companions as the cabal had brought with them now dropped down into the slimy hole. Eagerly they snatched up the relics as they emerged and handed them up to their masters. Just as eagerly, the necromancers seized the relics, cherishing them against their bosoms as though they were long-lost children. Some of the objects resembled swords and daggers, though of a design never intended for human hands. There were things that looked like misshapen circlets and helms, others that might have been scepters and wands. Tablets of fossilized bone, etched with the same grisly hieroglyphs of the menhirs. Fanged skulls with reptilian contours and horned brows.
“The rewards of evil are death,” the observer commented, as he watched on. The associates of the cabal, too low in the pit to climb out on their own, raised their arms in appeal to their masters as the last of the ancient objects were extracted. The necromancers stepped away, their eyes pitiless as they gazed down at their helpers. Frantic realization struck their minions then, but in their panic, none thought to aid the person next to them, instead pawing futilely at the slimy walls. Screams of horror rose as the muck that had been extruded came flooding back in. Soon the pit was filled and its occupants entombed beneath tons of mud.
The betrayed minions served as a final sacrifice in the infernal magic. Armed now with their prehuman relics, the cabal set themselves to a spell far greater than anything ever attempted before, magic of such ferocious malignity that it was beyond the power of any one of them to invoke. By pooling their energies, using the stolen relics to focus those energies, the necromancers called upon the forces of Darkness.
Even among the cabal there were those frightened by what they sought to harness. Some quivered in fear, others cried tears of terror. The most depraved, however, had only bitter satisfaction written on their cruel faces. They cried out in joy as shadowy tendrils of profane magic crackled into their bodies and flowed outward into the relics. From these foci, the dark magic was projected into the sunken menhirs.
“Magnified and defined by primordial curses.” The man nodded to himself as he watched the process. He looked on as streams of shadow slithered away from each menhir, squirming through the swamp like great worms. With unbelievable swiftness, the conjured energies scattered from the site of the cabal’s ritual. Through forest and over field, the magic spread.
•••
The observer willed the crystal to fixate upon the village where the tendril of cursed energy alighted. He watched the slithering magic ripple through the community before darting into its graveyard. Fingers of necromantic power burrowed into each plot. Foul energies seeped into coffin and shroud. The dead stirred.
“So it began,” the man whispered, darkly fascinated as the crystal showed him the graveyard pitching and heaving as its occupants dug their way out from below. First one plot disgorged its contents, the rotten husk of a milkmaid, her flesh pitted with decay and her forehead crushed by the cow that had ended her life. Another grave spat out the bloated bulk of a blacksmith, his hair burned away, and his skin charred from when he’d drunkenly fallen into his own forge. Others quickly followed until there were a dozen undead horrors shambling about the cemetery. The observer judged that every corpse that had been interred within the year had been reanimated. Those bodies that hadn’t fallen utterly into dissolution had been revived by the necromancers’ spell as zombies.
The disturbance in the graveyard was noted by the sexton. Unaware of the nature of the trespassers, he rushed from his shack to confront them. Too late did he notice the ghastly decay and hideous wounds, for by then he was in the very midst of the zombies. The undead converged upon him, dragging him down with their necrotic hands. Decayed jaws set their teeth in his flesh, relenting only when life was extirpated. Then the zombies turned away from their prey. As they stalked off, the mangled remains of the sexton stirred once more. Lurching to its feet, the chewed corpse staggered away to join its killers.
Drawn by the sexton’s screams as he was slaughtered, other villagers now saw the pack of zombies lumbering through the graveyard. Cries of alarm from the villagers brought purpose to the zombies. The creatures turned at the sound and relentlessly marched on the village. They fell upon those who had been friends and family in life, dispatching them with the same bestial ruthlessness as the sexton. Only those too severely mutilated when they were killed remained as inert corpses. The rest rose again to join the ranks of the undead. What had started as a dozen soon became twenty and then thirty. Before long, the zombies outnumbered the living in the doomed village.
The man with the crystal was impressed by how completely the population had been overwhelmed. There had been times before when a necromancer would raise a small company of undead, but never had such a horde as this been unleashed, a menace far beyond the ability of the witch hunters to combat.
“So, King Heinrich sends his army,” the observer muttered. “The king thinks he can stop the curse that now rises against him.” The crystal showed armored knights in noble livery riding before massed ranks of spearmen and archers. An army greater tha
n anything the kingdom had mustered since the orcs were finally driven across the frontier. The pennants of a hundred noble houses flew behind the heads of lances, the banners of powerful guilds were borne by the freebooters hired by their coin, even a few mages from the Wizards’ Guild were in evidence, escorted by their acolytes.
On a day so overcast that the sun was blotted utterly from the sky and noon was no brighter than midnight, the army encountered the zombie horde. Ranks of archers let loose arrows into the shambling undead. Lances were lowered as the cavalry massed. At a signal from High Marshal Konreid, the knights charged ahead into their monstrous foe. Scores of zombies were ripped apart by the lances and trampled beneath the hooves of destriers, yet even mangled and crushed, the undead continued to fight. Broken bodies clutched at stirrups and clawed at fetlocks, pulling down the kingdom’s chivalry by sheer weight of numbers.
Only a fraction of the cavalry broke through to the other side of the undead horde. As they wheeled about, the knights saw their comrades being slaughtered. Warriors were dragged from their saddles as their steeds collapsed from their wounds. Some managed to fight afoot for a time, but surrounded on all sides, it was inevitable that they’d be overwhelmed.
Afforded a far less clear view of the efficacy of his cavalry, High Marshal Konreid hurried his infantry forward to support the knights. When he did, the magnitude of the trap was revealed. The moment the infantry closed upon the horde and found themselves locked in battle, swarms of undead crested the nearby hills and began their relentless march onto the plain. Thousands of zombies, a tide of walking corpses larger than the king’s entire army.
Pinned by the initial horde, the infantry struggled to retain cohesion while also seeking to disengage. Archers shot volley after volley into the oncoming tide of undead, but the casualties they inflicted did little to lessen the menace before them. Many lost heart and fled. High Marshal Konreid, desperate to restore order, charged down several bowmen. While his horse stomped the life from a retreating mercenary, an archer turned and loosed an arrow, piercing the general’s neck. Without Konreid’s guiding hand, his panicked steed galloped away, its master slumped over the saddle.