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  Irritably, Malbork snapped his fingers at Scarlat, motioning for the clucer to drop the pomander. Other courtiers hurriedly followed the clucer’s example, fear of their count far outweighing even their fear of the plague. ‘I believe I smell his grace,’ Malbork stated, not without some condescension in his tone. ‘Go and admit the prayer-peddler into our presence.’

  Clucer Scarlat grimaced, but bobbed his head and scrambled down the slope. As a precaution, Count Malbork’s tent had been pitched behind a timber palisade, putting a wall between his personage and any sick enemies who might seek to deliberately infect him. He’d dispatched too many plague-ridden messengers to the grand duke’s court in Stirland to allow himself to be victimised by his own strategy.

  The clucer returned presently, leading not one but two men. Malbork was mildly surprised to see the armoured figure of Dregator Petru Mihnea. The man was supposed to be leading a Nachtsheer expedition into the Haunted Hills to round up the peasants that had escaped there from their fiefs. Fear of the plague had stirred up a great many curious ideas in the heads of peasants, not the least of which was giving survival precedence over their obligations to the boiers who owned them.

  The other man with Scarlat was no surprise at all. The stink of blood announced him as loudly as any crier. Armand Caranica, Arch-Druid of the Blood Circle, high priest of Ahalt the Drinker. The druid’s black robes stank of blood and death. The sickle tucked into the rope belt about his waist was stained with gore, for one of the strictures of his faith was that sacrificial blood was holy and must never be washed away. Armand’s face was lost behind the deer-skull mask he wore, only his thin lips and tapered jaw projecting beneath the yellowed teeth of the mask. From behind the sockets of the skull, fanatical eyes gleamed.

  ‘The plague still decimates my peasants,’ Malbork growled at the druid before he could finish bowing before him. ‘You promised me that this sort of thing was going to stop.’

  Armand leaned upon his oaken staff, hands clenched tight. ‘The might of Ahalt flows through the sacred tree,’ he said in a confident tone. ‘Very soon the tree shall grow strong enough to shield the whole of the castle from the plague.’

  ‘That doesn’t do me any good here,’ Malbork said, waving his hand to indicate the camp. ‘Maybe you could conjure up a sacred shrubbery to protect me while I’m on this side of the river? Just to bide the time while we wait for the tree to take root.’

  A bit of the fanatic gleam left the eyes behind the deer-skull. ‘Your… your excellency must allow the great god time to work his beneficence. Even Mighty Ahalt doesn’t–’

  The count raised his hand, cutting off the druid’s explanation. ‘I am no credulous supplicant coming to you on bended knee, Caranica. I am Count von Drak! Everything in this land belongs to me, right down to the robes you wear and the prayers you mutter!’ He rose from his chair, stalking out from the shadow of the tent. Without turning around, he pointed over his shoulder, indicating a long line of stakes flanking his tent. ‘Others have made the mistake of trying to exploit religious gullibility.’ Malbork smiled as he saw Armand’s eyes dart towards the bodies impaled upon those stakes, bodies that still wore the tattered rags of Sigmarite, Shallyan and Morrite clergy. One corpse, arrayed in the leather and furs of a priest of Taal, was still fresh enough that a pair of ravens were pecking at it.

  ‘I hope you aren’t repeating the mistake of your predecessors,’ Malbork declared. ‘I am acquiring quite a collection of gods. It might be amusing to add yours.’

  Armand bowed his head again. ‘The divine protection of Ahalt will preserve your excellency from the plague. It just needs more time to bear fruit, more nourishment to quicken its growth.’

  Malbork chuckled at the druid’s words. ‘You are more murderous than an orc,’ he laughed. Spinning around, the count’s glove caught the hair of the servant girl who had spilled his wine. Brutally, he pushed her into Armand’s arms. ‘Here’s one to water your tree!’ he barked as the crying girl fell to the ground. ‘But I want results. Not at the turn of the tide or the dark of the moon, but now! Sacrifice and pray, but you had better pray hard. My indulgence has reached its limits.’

  Mustering what authority he could, Armand made his retreat, one bony arm coiled about the girl’s waist as he dragged his screaming victim away with him. Malbork watched the druid for a moment, then turned his attention on Dregator Petru.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be in the hills?’ Malbork asked, his voice striking out like a lash. The dregator blanched at his master’s tone, but held himself with more dignity than Scarlat, who took the opportunity to slink back into the company of the other courtiers.

  ‘There are no peasants hiding in the Haunted Hills,’ Petru reported. Hurriedly he added an explanation. ‘They are gone, your excellency. They’ve either fled into Grim Moor or they’ve… joined Vanhal.’

  ‘I understood this madman didn’t take prisoners,’ Malbork said.

  Petru’s voice was an audible shiver. ‘He doesn’t. Where his army marches, nothing lives. He leaves neither the quick nor the dead behind him. Those he kills he raises from their graves to join his unholy army. I have seen it. Thousands upon thousands, marching across the fields, silent but for the rattle of bones and the croaking of crows. Even with the whole of the Nachtsheer at my command, I could do nothing against such power.’

  Count Malbork lowered himself into his chair, drawing the wine cup to his lips. He’d heard many such reports in the years since this sorcerer had risen to bedevil his land. Every force he’d sent to confront Vanhal had come back beaten and afraid.

  Smoothing his moustache, Malbork waved at his bodyguards. The warriors advanced through the ranks of his courtiers, seizing Petru’s arms. The count was deaf to the dregator’s assurances of loyalty and pleas for mercy. He’d heard them all before. Petru Mihnea was almost beyond his usefulness. Now he would join the priests and the other generals who had failed their count.

  Plague, gods, star-stones or sorcerers, the people of Sylvania had to understand that there was only one thing they had to fear: the displeasure of Count Malbork von Drak.

  Sylvania

  Brauzeit, 1112

  Cries of terror rose from the village as its slumbering inhabitants awoke to their doom. Panicked knots of humanity scurried out into the road, shrieking as they turned their eyes to the fields beyond their wattle-and-daub huts. Frantically, the peasants raced to the far side of the settlement, thinking to flee from the annihilation that threatened them only to discover that it waited for them there as well. Like a flock of birds, the people surged from one direction to another, each effort at escape balked by a grinning circuit of fleshless death.

  Standing atop a palanquin of fused bone and wormy flesh, Vanhal could appreciate the pathetic futility of their struggle for survival better than those within the village. There was no escape. Long before the first scream tore the night, he’d moved his army into position, locking the village within a ring of the undead. Only the slightest exertion of the necromancer’s will and that army would stir, would march down upon the village and release its inhabitants from their suffering.

  Such power over life and death and that strange world beyond death! When he had been a priest of Morr, Frederick van Hal had never dreamed such power could exist. Certainly there had been the tales of the ancient necromancers, of Nagash the Black, who had been vanquished by Sigmar a thousand years past, but even after studying the forbidden work of Arisztid Olt, he’d still thought such stories to be nothing more than exaggerated myths. He had never imagined the true magnitude of such power. If he had, he would have cringed away from such study, terrified of the forces he sought to command.

  But did he truly command them? That was a question that had troubled Vanhal’s mind since that day two years ago when he’d brought death to the people of Bylorhof. Then, he had believed what he was doing to be justified in the name of vengeance. Justice for his brother’s
family, slain by the cruel deceptions of the plague doktor Bruno Havemann. Recalling the charlatan’s torturous death, Vanhal lifted a thin hand to the bone mask he wore, touching the splintered fragments of Havemann’s skull.

  Vengeance had been his purpose then, vengeance against Havemann and Bylorhof, vengeance against the soldiers who cordoned off the town and left its inhabitants to die. But it was something darker than vengeance that drove him after that, a terrible compulsion that moved him to destroy village after village.

  He had evoked powerful forces to work his magic, but the necromancer wondered, did he command them or did they command him? Was he the musician or the instrument? Sometimes, in the dead of night, when he closed his eyes, he could sense something just beyond his awareness. Something ancient and dead and in its death dreaming. Dreaming of a world quiet and still, devoid of pain and fear. A world as tranquil as the grave.

  Vanhal exerted a small fragment of his power and the skeletal mound he stood upon shuffled forwards on the bony legs fused around its base. Like some monstrous beetle, the palanquin skittered towards the village. The necromancer’s black robes whipped about him in the night wind, a nimbus of witch-fire crackling about his lean body as he drew upon his magic.

  He could spare this place, Vanhal reflected. He could show mercy to these poor wretches. On his command, the horde of skeletons and zombies surrounding the village would withdraw as silently as they had advanced. No one needed to die. He would be able to prove to himself that he was the master of the power that flowed through him, not merely its pawn.

  Vanhal’s gaunt hand dropped to his belt, withdrawing the ugly black stone from a leather pouch. He stared at it, feeling its malign energies. The fields around the village were littered with these things, each one transmitting its aethyric poison into the earth. This place would soon become a twisted blight, a splotch of diseased horror.

  Even if he hadn’t come here, this village was doomed. The true path of mercy was to spare these people a lingering death of diseased starvation.

  Vanhal closed his eyes and the ring around the village began to close. As a single creature, skeletons and zombies marched across the fields, rusty swords and splintered spears at the ready.

  It would be over quickly, the necromancer mused. The villagers would only know a moment of pain and fear, then they would be spared those agonies for all eternity. They would know the tranquillity of that grey kingdom beyond the grave.

  A tranquillity Vanhal would bestow upon all of Sylvania.

  One village at a time.

  Chapter II

  Middenheim

  Sigmarzeit, 1118

  Looming far above the loamy earth, the ancient trees of the Drakwald blotted out the sun with their intertwined branches, casting the forest in perpetual shadow. The only sunlight that filtered past their leaves was what snuck past as the boughs groaned and swayed in a cool spring breeze.

  The men who rode beneath the trees did their best to avoid those rare patches of sunlight. The least reflection off a buckle or an exposed bit of armour would shine like a beacon in the darkened forest. The fell things that called the shadows home already had enough ways to detect strangers in their domain without making them a gift of still another.

  They’d done their best to conceal their presence, limiting their numbers to half a dozen riders rather than a stronger company of horsemen. Under the guidance of Mad Albrecht, a trapper who had made his living off the Drakwald for decades, the riders had stained their leatherworks with the musky scent of forest buffalo and banded the hooves of their steeds with fur to muffle their steps. Anything that might make noise, from scabbards to loose bridles and straps, had been carefully secured lest they rattle against a bit of armour or a kicking spur.

  Despite his attention to detail, Mad Albrecht didn’t think their chances of going unnoticed were very high. It truly was in the hands of Grim Grey Taal, Lord of the Forests, and the trapper whispered a constant prayer to his god as his eyes roved the forest, and his ears strained to catch every sound.

  Watching the trapper from the saddle of his courser, Prince Mandred felt guilt pull at his heart. Mad Albrecht was the best woodsman in Middenheim barring one or two acolytes of Taal. A refugee from the Drakwald province, the man had an almost preternatural affinity for the forest. There was no better guide a patrol could ask for.

  Which was why Prince Mandred felt the flesh behind his trim black beard flush with shame. Middenheim had lost several patrols to the forest, patrols that hadn’t been so fortunate to have a guide like Albrecht along. Patrols that hadn’t been so fortunate as to have Graf Gunthar making sure they had a man like Albrecht to guide them.

  Mandred raised his eyes skywards, watching the branches rustle far overhead. He appreciated his father’s concern, was moved by his paternal devotion. At the same time, he resented being treated any differently from the brave men who risked their lives to keep the countryside surrounding the Ulricsberg secure. It was vital that the rural raugrafs and their peasants be protected. Without them, Middenheim and the refugee settlement of Warrenburg would starve. The patrols’ importance was why Mandred had insisted on leading some of them himself, as a gesture of solidarity with the rangers. But with his father showing him extra consideration, he was finding his presence to be detrimental rather than beneficial to morale.

  The prince shifted in his saddle, glancing back at the other riders, catching them in a hushed conversation. They threw him a guilty look and quickly fell silent. A sense of regret tugged at him. He was an outsider to these valorous men, a pampered noble who could only play in their world, never actually share it. Mandred could almost curse his breeding, the vast fissure that separated noble from peasant, prince from dienstmann. The Black Plague hadn’t shown such distinction in its depredations. The turmoil and confusion left in its wake were similarly shared by all men regardless of class. Yet instead of drawing men closer, uniting them against the common adversity, it was rendering society ever more fractious and resentful.

  ‘I’ll report them to the graf,’ the stern voice of Beck growled, provoking a warning hiss from Albrecht up ahead. The burly knight just scowled at the wiry trapper. Quickly he turned his attention back to Mandred. ‘They have no cause talking about you.’

  Mandred shook his head. Beck had been his bodyguard for six years now, ever since Franz had ridden with the prince to relieve the massacre of Warrenburg by marauding beastmen. Dear old Franz had contracted the plague in that expedition. He’d died down in the refugee camp, never again to set foot upon the Ulricsberg. Mandred was ashamed that it had taken the death of his friend to appreciate the meaning of sacrifice, of what it meant to put loyalty above one’s own life. A leader could command such loyalty. A good leader was one who would never abuse it.

  Beck was a very different sort of man than Franz. He was a grim, hardened warrior, a veteran of the Knights of the White Wolf. He was a man of constant vigilance, ready to see threat in the most innocuous things. A surly look, an unguarded word, and he was ready to condemn a man as a traitorous dog. Right now, Mandred could almost see his bodyguard formulating the report he would give Graf Gunthar denouncing the three Dienstleute.

  ‘Let it be,’ Mandred told Beck. He forced a tone of levity into his voice. ‘A soldier who doesn’t complain is one who doesn’t understand his job.’

  Beck frowned back at the horsemen. ‘As you will, your grace,’ he said.

  ‘I mean it, Beck,’ Mandred warned. With all the other problems afflicting them, he found it absurd that so much attention was still devoted to custom and propriety. The Empire was tearing itself apart, decimated by disease, brought to its knees by warfare. Barbarians still held Marienburg and much of Westerland. The province of Drakwald was an abandoned ruin, her countryside ravaged by beastmen, her great cities exterminated by the plague. Nordland was ablaze with civil war after the death of her grand count, grasping barons striving with one another to
expand their own petty interests. Ostland was much the same, and the Ostermark was teetering on the brink of annihilation after a goblin horde descended upon the weakened land. As bad as things were in the north, Mandred had heard it was even worse in the south.

  The Empire was in its death throes, and the scavengers were already gathering about the carcass.

  Middenheim had withstood the worst of the plague, a fact that Mandred wasn’t too proud to attribute to the draconian policies of his father. Graf Gunthar had sealed the city against the tide of refugees, preventing the disease from gaining a foothold on the Ulricsberg. It had been a cruel, inhuman thing to do. Mandred still considered it vicious and villainous. At the same time, it had spared the people of Middenheim untold death and misery. Once, the prince had excoriated his father for such brutality. Now, he understood it, hoped that if such hideous necessity ever arose again he would have the strength to make the same decision.

  Alone among the great cities of the Empire, Middenheim had emerged from the plague stronger than before. As the disease abated, refugees were accepted into the city. Warrenburg evolved from a shabby camp into an organised settlement. Regular patrols were dispatched to bring order to the surrounding country, stabilising much of Middenland and extending to its scattered villages the protection of the Ulricsberg. Something approaching normality had settled upon the province.

  The price for that fragile peace was vigilance. Patrols such as this one constantly ranged through the forest, watching for signs of bandits, goblins and the ever-present threat of marauding beastmen. The abominable creatures had been beaten back time and again, but with small bands of refugees still braving the forest to seek the safety of Middenheim, the lure of easy prey kept the monsters creeping back. No man, even Graf Gunthar, could cleanse the Drakwald of all the evil hiding in its shadows.