C. Werner - Blighted Empire

Great sheets of green flame shot out from down the street, incinerating those skaven who had not yet fled the avenue. Dozens of men were caught in the vicious blast, their bodies bursting into flame as the fiery green vapours engulfed them. Behind the fires, two wagon-like machines were dragged into the square, burly ratmen working the nozzles of hoses to spray the caustic demi-fluid across any who tried to approach the street they guarded.

The fire-throwers made no effort to advance, nor did the armoured warpguard who assumed positions on their flanks. Their orders didn’t include capturing the temple or killing the humans. Those tasks were being left to the warpcaster.

Shortly after establishing their perimeter, the vanguard of Clan Skryre heard the crackle of Sythar Doom’s voice barking orders to his warp-engineers. A moment later, the ground shuddered as the siege engine arm was sent crashing against the crossbeam.

The crystalline sphere hit high upon the face of the cathedral, flashing with ghoulish luminescence as its malignant energies vented themselves against the facade. Sculptures withered in that burst of corrosive power; gargoyles were sheared from their moorings and sent plummeting to the plaza far below. Glass melted, dripping down in grisly streams that marred the once unblemished marble. It was a terrifying display, but far less than Sythar Doom had hoped for. The Grey Lord’s whiskers twitched as he wondered if, just perhaps, some divine power did defend this man-thing temple.

Irritably, the Warpmaster snapped fresh orders to the crew of the warpcaster. He hadn’t failed to notice the shining aura emanating from the Grand Theogonist. They would put the power of this man-thing god to a real test — by unleashing the might of the warpcaster against something far less resilient than marble and stone.

Adolf Kreyssig dug his spurs into the flanks of his destrier, sending the great warhorse bolting down the narrow street. The animal’s steel-shod hooves stove in the verminous bodies of the skaven that blocked the way, crushing them beneath its bulk. His sword licked out, slashing right and left at the ratkin who snapped at him in their dying agonies or who thought to clamber up into the saddle with him to escape the destrier’s stamping hooves. Behind him, a squadron of Kaiserknecht and mounted Kaiserjaeger slaughtered the maimed monsters he left behind.

It was a desperate gamble, risking all in this frantic effort to relieve the siege around the Great Cathedral. Given his own choice, Kreyssig would have tried to hold the Imperial Palace, a structure that had been built for defence, not worship. The choice, however, wasn’t his own. Bitterly, he reflected that it had been he himself who had allowed the decision to be taken from him. By seeking to control and exploit the Sigmarites, he had caused their faith to regain much of its faltering prominence among the peasants of Altdorf. He had used Sigmar to rally the people. Now he had to back his wager. If they lost the Great Cathedral, then they would lose everything.

Kreyssig struck out with his boot, kicking fangs down the throat of a lunging skaven. The brutes they encountered now were less organised, more frantic than the packs of looters they had seen up on the hill. It occurred to him that these might be refugees from the battle unfolding around the Great Cathedral, that against all reason and odds the Sigmarites had somehow turned the tide.

Then his gaze was drawn skywards by a bright flash of light. Kreyssig saw the sphere crash against the temple wall, watched in mute fascination as the very stones began to corrode beneath the unleashed energy. His hopes of only a moment before were dashed. Some of the skaven might have quit the field, but others were still on the attack and they had brought with them some unholy weapon.

‘We must hurry,’ Baroness von den Linden called out from behind him. It was uncanny, the horsemanship she displayed, urging her slender mare to feats that even a destrier would balk at. Further evidence of the witchcraft at her command. Witchcraft, she seemed to think, was no longer a thing to keep hidden.

Kreyssig frowned and urged his own mount further into the swarming press of skaven. Half a dozen of the beasts crumpled under his lunging horse, two others fell beneath his sword and still the path ahead was engulfed in vermin. ‘We’ll never get through!’ he cursed. There were other streets they might try, but that would mean falling back, retracing their steps to the Imperial Palace. The idea of turning his back to the ratmen made the flesh between his shoulders itch, almost as though it felt the point of a skaven spear pressing against it.

Baroness von den Linden shook her head. ‘I will save this city,’ she vowed in a voice that was like a razor. Once again, Kreyssig felt the deathly chill of magic in the air. The witch’s eyes faded into pools of amber light, her crimson hair flowing about her in a spectral breeze. Thrusting her hand forwards, she pointed at the ratmen.

The witch’s voice rose in a keening wail, a sound that had in it the shattering of glass and the shriek of quenched steel. It was a banshee cry that sickened the comparatively dull ears of men. To the hyper-keen senses of the skaven, it was an aural torment, a scourge that set them squeaking in agony. Wracked by pain, clamping their paws over their ears, the ratmen turned and fled, hacking their way through their own kin in their desperate rout…

When they had ridden from the palace, Kreyssig had contrived to remove all the other prominent leaders from the effort to reach the Great Cathedral, sending Duke Vidor to coordinate his fragmented army, dispatching Grand Master Lieber to the river and warning Arch-Lector von Reisarch to keep inside the fortress lest the ratmen claim all the hierarchs of the temple in one fell swoop. He hadn’t been able to resist the baroness’s demands to accompany the group, however. It had been enough of an ordeal just to get her to keep to the rear ranks. He knew that if they succeeded the leader of the charge would be adored as a hero by Altdorf. He would be that hero.

Now, however, he found himself pushed aside by the witch. Baroness von den Linden urged her mare down the road, her eyes still aflame with the power of her sorcery. The monsters didn’t make any more attempts to scurry up the street, but instead decided the witch was more terrible than whatever they had fled in the square.

The plaza around the Great Cathedral was a chaotic scene. Ratmen swarmed seemingly everywhere, some intent on fleeing, others, cornered like the rats they so resembled, putting up a vicious fight. Corpses littered the square, the stones soaked with the red blood of men and the black filth of skaven. Upon the steps of the cathedral, his body aglow with an unearthly nimbus, stood Grand Theogonist Gazulgrund, his voice booming out in a paean of battle. At one corner of the square, a disciplined brigade of armoured skaven fended off the ragged assaults of peasants and flagellants. Assisting them in their efforts were two grisly, flame-belching contraptions.

In the street behind the fire-throwers, Kreyssig could see the palanquin of the spark-toothed rat-sorcerer. There was no mistaking that disfigured abomination. Towering behind the sorcerer was what looked like a clockwork catapult constructed on a monstrous scale. Even as he watched, the long arm of the machine sprang forwards, slamming into the crossbeam and flinging another sinister glowing sphere into the sky.

As the sphere came hurtling earthwards, Kreyssig was nearly blinded by a flare of brilliant blue fire close beside him. Overhead, the orb exploded in a burst of similar brilliance, showering a dark miasma that crackled with green lightning onto the heads of the armoured skaven and across the bulks of the fire-throwers. The skaven wailed in agony and terror in the brief instant they had to grasp what had happened.