C. Werner - Blighted Empire

‘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.

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.