C. Werner - Blighted Empire

‘You wouldn’t dare,’ Lector Stefan cried. ‘Whatever you think I have done, she is innocent. Touch her and you will bear the curse of our lord Sigmar!’

Kreyssig scowled at the bound priest. ‘His Imperial Majesty once told me that the gods have only as much power over us as we permit them to have.’ He looked at the grim stone walls around him. ‘I have heard many prayers uttered in this room. None of them did any good.’

Lector Stefan watched in mounting agony as the Kaiserjaeger shackled Gudrun to the horns of the dragon. An inarticulate moan escaped the gagged woman as she recoiled from the heat of the coals. ‘Curse your black soul! Let my daughter go!’

‘That,’ Kreyssig hissed, ‘is entirely the wrong attitude.’ Snapping his fingers again, he set the two Kaiserjaeger turning the wheels mounted at the base of the dragonhead. In response, the horns began to tilt, pulling the captive down towards the heated surface of the bronze head.

‘Stop this, Kreyssig!’ Lector Stefan thrashed in his chains. ‘Mercy of Sigmar! Don’t do this thing!’

‘I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to bring you here,’ Kreyssig said. ‘Far too much to stop now. At its highest degree, torture is an art unto itself. Did you know that, your eminence?’

‘Whatever you want! Whatever lies you want me to confess to! Just stop this!’ the priest pleaded.

‘Later, your eminence,’ Kreyssig told him. ‘There will be time enough to explain what I want from you later. For now, just enjoy the show.’

The ghastly demonstration continued for hours. Throughout the ordeal, Kreyssig was deaf to Lector Stefan’s desperate entreaties. Even the reason for inflicting this horror wasn’t explained. Between cries for mercy, appeals to Kreyssig’s humanity, anguished offers to be tortured in his daughter’s place, the priest called upon his god. If any prayer reached Sigmar’s ears, no miracle manifested to spare the priest.

Kreyssig smiled at the sobbing Lector Stefan, listening to the agony of a shattered heart and a broken faith. Again he snapped his fingers. One of the torturers crouched beside the mutilated body, lifting the head by its blood-spattered hair.

Lector Stefan gasped in incredulous wonder. For the first time he gazed upon the countenance of Kreyssig’s victim and it wasn’t the face of his daughter! The build, the hair, even the gown had been similar enough to deceive him.

In the midst of Lector Stefan’s exhilarated relief, Kreyssig clapped his hands together. While the first pair of Kaiserjaeger dragged the dead woman away, two more soldiers marched into the torture chamber. This time, there was no mistaking the identity of their captive.

‘Now you know what will happen,’ Kreyssig told Lector Stefan. ‘You know every stroke, every cut, every stripe that your daughter will suffer.’ He smiled coldly at the priest, seeing the abject defeat in his eyes. ‘I will give you a moment to ask yourself what you would do to spare her such a fate.

‘Then, I will tell you how you are going to serve your Emperor.’

Mordheim

Hexentag, 1113

The sound you hear is dripping blood . That thought brought a cruel twist to Baron Lothar von Diehl’s face.

This is the start of Hexentag.

The necromancer’s black cape billowed about his lanky body as he swept down the marble-floored aisle, his eyes darting from one wall to the other, assuring himself that the sacred icons flanking the hall had been properly defiled. Bound to a pillar, her body inverted so that the blood might flow more freely from her slashed throat, the last of the priestesses shuddered and died. Her once pristine robes were soaked crimson, the silver dove icon torn from her throat and in its stead the dead carcass of a carrion crow. Even in death, there was a look of shock in the woman’s expression. She shouldn’t have been surprised. In this age of plague and ruin, what place was more accustomed to death than the Temple of Shallya, the goddess of mercy and healing?

Lothar could feel those morbid energies, could almost taste them on the air. When he closed his eyes, he could see them as an after-image, a ghostly crackle that throbbed all around him. This was the power he sought, the power De Arcanis Kadon had promised him. The place, the hour and the sacrifice. All three had been brought together.

There was a dread potential within a defiled temple, an aethyric reverberation that turned a holy atmosphere back upon itself and could be exploited to magnify the powers of darkness. Lothar was disappointed that he’d never taken vows himself, for if the potential of a profaned temple was magnificent, it was nothing beside that of a heretical priest. Kadon had been a holy man, in his way, before he’d discovered the true path to power and domination. Before him, there had been Black Nagash, priest-king of Khemri until he created the forbidden art of necromancy.

Yes, it was a pity he’d never taken vows, but Lothar would overcome that impediment with determination and ruthlessness. Nothing would stand in his way, not convention, not tradition, not mercy. And not familial affections.

Stalking down the aisle, Lothar could feel the eyes of his men on him, fear in their gaze. Rogues and murderers, one and all, the scum of Mordheim recruited for him by Marko that he might seize the temple. These were the sort of villains who hadn’t balked at slitting the throats of old priestesses or clubbing the brains from helpless plague victims lying on the pews. Yet even these men were offended by the outrage their employer now intended.

Even Lothar had balked at first, shying away from the ritual he had uncovered. Some timid element within himself had cringed away from this crime. It had taken weeks to silence that last foolish vestige of morality. Morality was the refuge of cowards, something to excuse their weakness. A part of him had tried to cling to such idiocy to the very last, but his determination, his need to know had prevailed at last. He had progressed as far as he could with De Arcanis Kadon ; now he must be far more daring if he would unlock the rest of its secrets.

The sacrifice was bound to the altar, tied hand and foot in hair cut from corpses, clothed only in a shroud stripped from a suicide’s grave. The alabaster statue of Shallya that stood behind the altar was draped in black, the head knocked from the stone shoulders to be replaced with a grinning skull. There was a symbol daubed upon the skull’s forehead, but it was a thing so terrible even Lothar couldn’t stare at it directly, only snatch the briefest of glimpses from the corner of his eye.

The killers were muttering nervously among themselves, shocked by what they had been told to do, frightened of what their master might do next. Standing at the foot of the altar, Marko alone understood the purpose behind it all. Perhaps that was why he looked even more anxious than the others.

Peasants! As though their thoughts and fears were of the slightest interest to a baron. Theirs were small minds and even smaller ambitions. To steal and drink and rut, perhaps at the very end try to make some atonement to the gods and redeem their pathetic souls. Such miserable desires placed them where they belonged — with the beasts!

Lothar would achieve far greater things. He had been born to a superior breed of man, endowed with a mentality that strove for something beyond crude urges and base lusts. Through his veins flowed the blood of thirty generations of von Diehls and the legacy of their great deeds. He had inherited the desire for knowledge, not as some abstract understanding or a means to some materialistic end, but as something precious in itself. If he could unlock the great secrets the gods had jealously kept from mankind, the nature of eternity, for example, then he would consider himself vindicated of all his failings. In that hour, he would be the greatest of the von Diehls.