—<SIX>—

Dead Flesh

 

 

The madmen chanted and danced with wild abandon, like Cherusen Wildmen in the grip of a bane leaf frenzy. Redwane shifted uncomfortably in his saddle, trying to gauge the right moment to ride in and end this. He glanced at the rider next to him, a wide-chested warrior in red plate and thick mail with a sodden wolf pelt cloak draped over his shoulders.

Like every White Wolf, Leovulf didn’t wear a helm, and his wild mane of black hair was plastered to his skull by the rain. Apparently to go bareheaded into battle was considered an act of bravery, openly displaying a warrior’s contempt for the foe. Redwane wasn’t so sure that going without a helm was a good idea, but since the White Wolves he’d recruited from Middenheim followed Leovulf’s lead in all things, he couldn’t very well go against it.

The man had carved himself a legend in the fighting that had raged through the streets of the northern city, and though he was lowborn, Count Myrsa had decreed that station was no barrier to entry into the ranks of the White Wolves. Courage was all that mattered.

“Madness,” said Leovulf, watching the madmen with bemused distaste. “Why would anyone do such a thing?”

“I have no idea,” said Redwane, wincing as he watched a screaming man jam a long iron nail through the palm of his own hand. “But Myrsa wants it stopped.”

“Count Myrsa,” said Leovulf.

“Of course,” replied Redwane. He’d known Myrsa for a long time, and still couldn’t get used to the idea of calling him count, though he’d more than earned that title during the siege of Middenheim. “Force of habit.”

He returned his gaze to the centre of the village, shaking his head at the sight before him.

Two hundred men dressed in rags filled the centre of Kruken, a gloomy, stockaded miners’ settlement a day’s ride to the west of Middenheim. Built upon ancient dwarf ruins, Kruken nestled in an undulant range of hills in the midst of the Drakwald Forest. It had found prosperity with the discovery of tin beneath the high ground, but that prosperity had quickly faded as it became clear the seams were nowhere near as deep and rich as had been thought.

Wailing and moaning, the madmen whipped their bare backs bloody with lengths of knotted rope bound with thorns and fishhooks. Some cut into their chests with gutting knives, while others jammed splinters of sharpened wood beneath their fingernails.

Each man chanted meaningless doggerel interspersed with monotone dirges in an unknown tongue that sounded part gibberish, part incantation. A wooden log had been hammered into the ground near the centre of the square and a pile of kindling set at its base, though Redwane wasn’t sure what they were planning to burn.

A drizzle of rain drained the life from the day, and only made the utilitarian nature of the soot-stained buildings, mine-workings and dormitories of Kruken all the more depressing. Perhaps a hundred people were gathered in the town square, watching the carnival of madness at its centre with varying degrees of dour amusement. Children threw stones at the chanting men, while yapping dogs snapped and bit at their bloody ankles.

In the days since the defeat of the Norsii horde, the people of the north had suffered great hardship; the forest beasts that had fled the destruction of Cormac Bloodaxe’s horde had returned to hunting men as their prey, banditry had increased, harvests had gone uncollected and famine was widespread. In the aftermath of the fighting, outbreaks of pestilence in the settlements around the western foothills of the Middle Mountains stretched the resources of the land still further.

Life in the north was always hard, but this last year had been especially hard, so any diversion, no matter how absurd or bloody, was welcome.

No one had noticed these wandering bands of madmen at first, for the Empire was a land of strangeness, of the bizarre and dangerous. They had been tolerated as an aberration that would soon burn itself out, but as the year grew darker and life harder, it became obvious that, far from dying out, these roving bands of lunatics were growing in strength.

The largest of these bands was said to be led by a man named Torbrecan, a man who—depending on which fanciful tale you listened to—was either a warrior driven mad by a life of bloodshed or a priest of Ulric who’d spent too long alone in the winter woods. Torbrecan’s host marched in bloody procession from the isolated towns and villages north of the mountains, curving in a southerly bow towards Middenheim. Pestilence marched alongside them, and thus Middenheim’s warriors blocked the roads to the city. Something had to be done, and so Myrsa had despatched Redwane and the White Wolves to break up this band and take Torbrecan prisoner.

Redwane shook his head as he watched a man drag his dirt-encrusted fingernails down his face then drop to his knees and plunge his scarred features into the mud. Was he Torbrecan? Who could tell? Each man looked just as ferociously insane as the next.

Leovulf shook his head. “We’ll need to move if we want to stop this getting out of hand.”

“Aye,” said Redwane. “But I want to make sure we don’t start trouble going in too early.”

“Trouble’s started already. We’re just limiting it.”

Leovulf’s gloomy assessment of the situation wasn’t far off the mark. Like most northern tribesman, Leovulf had a grim worldview, one born out of years of harsh winters and the constant struggle for survival in the inhospitable wilds of the northern marches. The people of the north were tough and hard as oak, but weren’t noted for their lightness of spirit.

A tall figure in a mud-spattered robe that might once have been white, but which was now a grimy brown danced towards the centre of the square. His shoulders were stained red, and he carried a metal-studded switch that dripped blood. Matted and unkempt hair hung lank and limp to his shoulders and his beard was tied in a number of braids like tangled tree-roots. Each burned with a small coal that sent acrid fumes into his nostrils.

“You think that’s Torbrecan?” asked Leovulf.

“Must be,” agreed Redwane. “He looks mad enough.”

The man walked a ragged circle around the square, his eyes wild and staring, his mouth open in a silent scream. He beat himself over the shoulders with his switch and laughed hysterically with each blow. His followers gouged and tore at themselves with each crack of his switch.

“People of Kruken!” howled Torbrecan. “Listen well to me, for I speak of your doom! It is the doom of us all, for the gods have turned their faces from this world! Who among you has not seen the signs of the End Times? Who among you has not seen heralds that portend our extinction from this world? Plague destroys your towns, beasts hunt your children and ungodly men seek to take what is not theirs with blade and bow! We are doomed, and it is no one’s fault but our own. We turned from our proper devotions and led the gods to abandon us. The terror that stalks the land is one of our own making, for we are a godless people, condemned to die unless we can wash away our sins in blood and pain.”

The crowd jeered him, but not as many as Redwane expected. Some looked like they were seriously entertaining this insanity, and some were even nodding their heads like he was making some kind of sense.

“The gods are far from us,” went on Torbrecan, jabbing a scabbed fist at the sky, “and they grow farther with every passing day. Only through the ecstasy of pain shall we draw their attention to us. Only by the exquisite wails of our suffering shall we turn their gaze back upon us.”

Redwane shook his head, unable to believe that folk weren’t simply laughing this man out of their village. Surely life was hard enough without people like this wanting to make it worse?

“This has gone far enough,” said Redwane, jabbing his spurs into his mount’s flanks.

“Aye,” agreed Leovulf. “Bloody lunatic needs to be shut up for good.”

Redwane shook his head. “No killing. Myrsa, Count Myrsa, was very specific about that.”

Leovulf nodded and passed the word through the ranks. The White Wolves shucked their pelt cloaks from their right shoulders to clear their hammer arms. Ustern unfurled the banner, a glorious piece of red linen with a wolf picked out in silver thread, and Holstef blew two rising notes on his clarion.

Redwane led his riders into the village, the crowds parting as their heavy horses plodded through the mud towards the centre of the square. Torbrecan saw them coming and aimed his switch at them. For a second, Redwane wondered if he was going to charge him, but instead he threw his hands up as if in praise.

“The very warriors who serve the doombringers come to silence my words! They fear the truth and the knowledge that they are blind fools serving a master who cannot see the forces ranged against him. They have not the strength to suffer as we suffer, to bleed as we bleed. Brothers, show them the strength of true belief! Show everyone!”

A dozen men ran from the mob of ragged lunatics towards the stake hammered into the earth. They fought to climb the stacked kindling, biting and punching each other in their desperation to reach the upright log. Two fought harder than the others, and clutched the tall log as close as a lover. One carried a set of hooked chains and he wrapped these around their waists, binding them fast to the wood. Those denied the chance to reach the log took up lit torches and Redwane’s jaw dropped open as he realised what they were going to do.

“Ulric’s mercy, no!” he yelled, but it was too late. The torches were thrust into the kindling, which lit with a rushing whoosh of ignition. Redwane smelled the oil and not even the misting sheets of rain could dampen the flames as they leapt high. The two men clung to one another as the fire took hold of their robes and set them alight from head to foot. So swiftly did the flames leap to life that Redwane knew their bodies must have been doused in oil too.

The crowd pulled back in horror as the two men shrieked in agony. Their robes vanished and Redwane watched in revolted fascination as their flesh blackened and blistered in seconds. As though to aid this martyrdom, the rain ceased, and the air filled with the reek of burning meat and hair. The men screamed as they were consumed, fatty smoke pouring from their melting flesh.

Their fellows danced around the flames and the burning men sagged against the log their lower limbs little more than blackened stumps of bone. The smoke would surely have killed them by now. At least Redwane hoped so.

He spurred his horse to greater speed and rode through the ragged mob of chanting madmen. They clawed at him with broken fingernails, screaming and howling without words or sense. They weren’t attacking as such, more clamouring to be punished. Redwane obliged one man with a filth-encrusted face, slamming the haft of his hammer down and sending him sprawling to the mud. The man screamed as the horse rode over him, but Redwane didn’t spare him a glance.

His horse barged through the crowd of raving lunatics, scattering them as he angled a course towards the ringleader. Keeping the reins loose in his hand, he steered his mount towards Torbrecan. The laughing madman’s switch beat against his chest and a triumphant stare of vindication bored into Redwane’s eyes.

“Deliver me unto the arms of the gods!” yelled Torbrecan, hurling himself to the ground in front of Redwane’s mount. Redwane hauled back on the reins and his horse reared up, its front legs pawing the air. The gelding’s hooves stamped down into the mud, inches from the madman’s head. Redwane kicked his feet free of the stirrups and jumped down. He dragged the mud-covered man to his knees and slammed the butt of his hammer into his face.

Torbrecan’s nose burst across his face, but he laughed as blood spilled into his mouth. Redwane hauled him to his feet as the screaming mob pressed in. Ustern’s horse came alongside him and the weak sunlight caught the red of the banner like a flash of glorious crimson.

Redwane drew himself up to his full height and yelled, “Enough! In Ulric’s name, enough!”

His voice cut through the baying mob of lunatic screeching, and the blood-smeared men dropped to the ground, moaning and yelling in equal measure. Redwane realised they were waiting for the White Wolves to ride them down, to crush their skulls with hammers or trample them beneath the hooves of their mounts.

“Hold!” he yelled. “White Wolves hold!”

His warriors pulled up, circling their horses around the madmen and corralling them away from the villagers. Realising they weren’t to be killed, many of the madmen sprang to their feet and sprinted off into the forest. Redwane watched them go, knowing most of them probably wouldn’t survive more than a day alone in the forest.

The people of Kruken cheered, amused by the spectacle as much as anything. The fire burned brightly at the centre of the village, but the black smoke from the damp kindling thankfully obscured the ravages of the fire on the dead men’s flesh. Melting fat fizzed in the fire and sharp cracks sounded as bones split in the heat.

Redwane hauled Torbrecan to his feet and thrust him towards Leovulf.

“Get him out of my sight,” he said.

 

Night had closed in on Kruken, and Redwane sat with Ustern and Holstef in what passed for the village tavern.

To ride through the forest now would be too dangerous. The night belonged to the beasts, and even thirty armed warriors would likely never be seen again were they to travel its haunted paths in the dark.

The tavern was a high-ceilinged building built of heavy timbers atop square-cut blocks of stone that were clearly of dwarfcraft. A fire burned within an inglenook that had once been a doorway, with faded angular runes carved into its lintel. Redwane guessed the tavern was normally sparsely populated, but today’s drama had brought the locals out in force. A number of hard-bitten men sat in huddled corners nursing their dark beer and casting furtive glances their way.

The beer was peaty and flavoursome, but it was too strong for Redwane’s tastes. The other White Wolves seemed to like it though. Conversation had been muted, for Kruken wasn’t a town that welcomed outsiders much, even ones in the service of Count Myrsa.

“I reckon we’ve seen the last of those idiots,” said Ustern between puffs on his pipe, a long-stemmed piece with a bowl in the shape of an upturned drinking horn. Ustern bore the White Wolves banner, and was always the first to venture a grim opinion. “Aye, the beasts’ll do for them and no mistake.”

“I’d not be too sure,” said Holstef. “They survived this long, what makes you think that just because we got Torbrecan they’ll end up beast food?”

One the youngest White Wolves, Holstef was an eternal optimist, which made him a perfect foil for the banner bearer. He and Ustern argued like an old married couple, though neither seemed to mind, as though it was all part of their friendship. Ustern leaned forward and jabbed his pipe at Holstef.

“How d’you even know it’s Torbrecan who we got?”

“He was the leader, stands to reason doesn’t it?”

“You think that lot care about ‘reason’?”

“Why was he the one doing all the talking then? Why would a leader let someone else talk?”

“So he wouldn’t be caught by the likes of us,” suggested Ustern.

“Crap,” replied Holstef. “Someone that mad wouldn’t think like that.”

“How d’you know? Touched by a bit of moon-madness are ye?”

“Must be,” said Holstef. “Why else would I fight alongside you?”

Redwane let them bicker and watched the tavern’s patrons as they drank and argued. They were a motley bunch, miners and woodsmen mostly by the look of them. None looked like they’d worked in a while, though that hadn’t stopped them coming in here to spend their coin. Redwane recognised an underlying connection between the snatches of conversation he heard, knowing a familiar thread ran through every one.

Fear.

Their expressions spoke of fear of one sort or another. Fear of poverty, fear of starvation, fear of being alone, fear of the dark and, worst of all, a fear that the madmen in the square today were right.

In the last year, Redwane had seen the same expression on many faces throughout the northern marches, a pinched desperation for things to be better. Sigmar’s Empire had promised great things, but for many of its people it had yet to deliver.

He followed one of the tavern’s serving girls, a good-looking woman with a body that time hadn’t yet caused to sag and a face in which bitterness had its claws, but hadn’t yet won the battle. She wore a black bow tied around her wrist that told him her man had been killed, most likely in the war against the Norsii, though in the north he could have met his end in any number of ways. She sensed his gaze and looked over, a thin smile creasing her full lips. She couldn’t quite keep the grimace from her face, but she nodded and her eyes flickered towards the stairs.

Redwane sighed and nodded back to her. Was this what it had come to, a fumbled liaison in a cold tavern room, loveless and bought with copper coins? He remembered having the pick of the girls, a different one every night if he’d wanted. But that was before the battle at the centre of the Fauschlag Rock when he’d swung his hammer at the daemon lord. He could still feel the searing pain as it had exploded against its infernal armour and sent red hot shards of iron into his face.

Now no woman would look at him unless he paid them.

A cold wind gusted into the tavern and the locals grumbled as candles flickered and the fragile heat in the building slipped outside. Their mutterings ceased at the sight of Leovulf in his armour and heavy wolf pelt cloak. Redwane’s second stamped the mud from his boots on a threadbare mat and pulled off his cloak. Still clad in his armour, he sat next to Redwane and shouted at the tavern keeper to bring him some beer.

“Everyone bedded down?” asked Redwane.

“Aye,” agreed Leovulf. “I’ve told them to keep the gambling and drinking to a minimum and that I’ll take my hammer to anyone who isn’t ready to ride out at daybreak.”

“Good, I want to be back at the Fauschlag before nightfall,” he said. “There’s an evil feel to the forest just now.”

“Isn’t there always?” put in Ustern.

“More than normal I mean,” said Redwane.

“It’s the pox,” said Leovulf. “Gets everyone on edge. It’s an enemy you can’t fight. Show me a beast or a greenskin and I’ll break it in two with my hammer. But the pox… that’s something a man should be afraid of.”

“You sound just like Ustern,” said Redwane.

“Ulric save me, but things must be bad,” said Leovulf with a shake of his head. He removed a thin pipe from his belt and lit it on the candle at the centre of their table. More beer arrived on a platter, and the White Wolves each took a tankard.

“To Ulric,” said Redwane, raising his beer.

“To Ulric,” echoed the White Wolves.

Their conversation turned to the logistics of their journey home, but Redwane’s attention was fixed on the serving girl. She finished her rounds and spoke a few words to the tavern keeper, who glanced over at their table. He grunted something and waved her away. She looked over at him and headed upstairs.

Redwane drained the last of his beer and said, “I think I’ll leave the rest of the drinking to you northerners.”

“See,” said Ustern, nudging Holstef. “Told you the southern tribes couldn’t hold their beer.”

Redwane knocked over his empty mug. “You call that beer. Harder stuff than this falls from the sky over Reikdorf. Our pigs drink better than this.”

“That’s no way to talk of your women,” said Holstef, emboldened by several beers.

“Easy, soldier,” cautioned Leovulf. “Watch that tongue of yours.”

Redwane left them to it and made his way towards the stairs, climbing to the upper level where the girl was waiting for him. She stood in a doorway of the corridor and threw him a smile. He knew it was false, but didn’t care.

She looked at him, trying to conceal the horrid fascination she had of his scars. She reached up to touch them, but he grabbed her hand before her fingers touched his face.

“Don’t,” he said, turning his head away. “Please.”

She nodded and led him into the room.

 

Wolves howled at the moon and feasted on the dead as carrion birds lined every rooftop or billowed in sweeping clouds of feathered bodies. Death had come to Hyrstdunn and not a single soul had lived through the battle to break down its walls. With their dead king now fighting in the ranks of the enemy, the defence of the city had been without heart and the mortals had fought with desperation born of knowing they could not win.

Khaled al-Muntasir walked the darkened streets of the city, revelling in the sounds of its doom as a conductor might enjoy a musical recital. The sounds of death were familiar to him; as well they should be after centuries of inflicting them upon the living. He made out the sound of splintered wolf teeth tearing at human meat, the peck, peck, peck of beaks battering at skulls to get to the soft matter within. Beyond that, he could hear screams of the last survivors as they were dragged from hidden cellars or attics.

King Markus walked listlessly behind him, his flesh pale and dead, his eyes flickering with green embers as the vampire’s will remade him. Dried blood caked his ravaged neck, and though he bore the semblance of the man he had once been, nothing now remained of that mortal vessel. Khaled al-Muntasir had delivered the blood-kiss to the Menogoth king, knowing the effect it would have on mortals to see their fallen leader fighting alongside the army of the dead. Markus would soon emerge from this catatonic state, and a new blood drinker would walk the land. It gave Khaled al-Muntasir perverse pleasure to see the panicked faces of mortal cattle as they realised that neither prince nor pauper was safe from death’s touch.

The sound of crying children drifted on the midnight wind, and this was the most exquisite sound of all. Innocent blood was the sweetest elixir, and though his hunger was long sated on the blood of warriors, there was always desire for such epicurean delights.

The city itself was a poor specimen of architecture: a random collection of muddy timber structures built upon older ruins. No two were alike, a mishmash of prosaic, peasant architecture that offended his cultured eye. His lips curled in distaste as he looked up at the count’s dwelling, a ridiculous hall of crudely hewn stone with a thatched roof and laughably childish daubings of antiquated gods on timber panels.

“To think that you, a king of men, lived in this hovel is absurd,” said Khaled al-Muntasir, shaking his head in disbelief. “I was but a lesser prince and I grew to manhood in a sun-kissed palace of marble towers, glittering fountains and triumphal domes that enclosed vast spaces of such beauty that they could move a man to tears. You primitive savages could never achieve something so magnificent.”

Markus didn’t answer of course, and Khaled al-Muntasir waved his thin hands at the hall’s swaybacked roof. “Such inelegant design is so utterly primitive for a land that claims to be the greatest empire of man. The notion that you people actually believe that to be true is so ludicrous that it makes me want to laugh. Or maybe weep, I haven’t decided. Oh, how the race of man has fallen.”

He shook his head in sadness and moved on, keeping to the centre of the cobbled thoroughfares to avoid the sewage leaking down the edges of the road. He held his white cloak draped over his forearm to keep it clean. Filth encrusted every surface of the city, and thousands of dead bodies lay strewn around like burst sacks of grain.

A pack of wolves ran through its streets, fighting over scraps of flesh. Flocks of crows followed them, eager for their leavings.

Khaled al-Muntasir climbed the steps towards the king’s longhouse, smelling the aroma of fresh-spilled blood from within. The doors were splintered and sagging, and skeletal warriors in rusting armour of bronze stood like silent guardians of a tomb. He turned to look back into the city, watching as the army of Nagash completed its destruction.

Beneath the light of the moon, armoured skeletons marched between the buildings, gathering the dead and dragging them into the open, where they were deposited on rotted carts pulled by shambling animated corpses. Ghoulish scavengers loped through the streets, fighting the rotten-furred wolves for warm flesh torn from the bone. Pale-fleshed and scabbed with open sores, these carrion feeders hissed and bit with grave-dirt claws, their bodies thin and wasted, yet ravenous and tenacious.

And holding court over this glorious tableau of death was its lord and master.

Nagash himself was surrounded by ghostly flocks of revenants, howling wisps of light and shadow that curled in supplication around his monstrous limbs. Krell, the hulking champion of the northern gods marched at Nagash’s side, a physical manifestation of his master’s rage and aggression. Darkness went with them, a shroud of bleak misery that invigorated Khaled al-Muntasir, but which sapped the living of their courage and filled their hearts with fear. More than just the fear of death, it spoke of an eternal life of servitude to a cruel master, of paradise denied and the promise of a life that would go unrewarded by the gods.

The vampire stood on the highest point of the city and watched with relish as his personal retinue of warriors climbed the steps towards him. Each skeletal champion dragged a screaming child behind it, none older than six or seven summers. They wept and fought, but the dead men who carried them to their doom were as inexorable as their fate was inescapable.

His fangs tingled with anticipation, his eyes filling with killing red as the first dead warrior pushed a struggling girl-child towards him. He lifted her head with a finely manicured nail, tracing its razor edge around her chin.

“Hush, child,” he said. “Do not cry. There is no need for tears, they are a waste of something precious.”

The girl looked into his eyes, and she saw his hunger.

Before she could scream, he sank his fangs into her neck and began to feed.

 

Khaled al-Muntasir dropped the shrivelled husk of the last child, glutted on innocent blood and his senses afire with the rush of undiluted life energy. His eyes beheld the world around him with greater clarity than before, every living thing glinting with its own internal fire. To his eyes, the world was ablaze in silver light.

He smiled, feeling the rush of another’s blood filling his atrophied veins and unused organs with a semblance of life. Sensuous, erotic and deliciously painful, it was a fleeting sense of wonder, absolute knowledge of the thoughts and life of another living being as they were extinguished forever.

Yet as soon as it was drunk and revelled in, it was gone. The curse of the blood drinker was never to know satiety, to always crave the blood of the living. He wiped the droplets from his chin, licking his fingers clean and enjoying the last sensations of life as a starving peasant would relish the crumbs of a prince’s discarded meal.

His vision was already returning to its more mundane outlook as he saw the great lord of the undead climb the steps towards him, his pall of shadow like a soothing balm of radiant energy. Nagash towered over Khaled al-Muntasir, his power straining at the boundaries of existence, almost too intense for his undying frame to contain. Even with sight far beyond that of mortals, Khaled al-Muntasir could see only a fraction of the great necromancer’s power. It was immense and unstoppable, an energy that existed in worlds beyond understanding, crossing the gulfs of death and empowered by a dark wind whose source had been a mystery to even the greatest practitioners of the arts in his sand-swallowed city.

The necromancer’s shimmering metallic hand glimmered with power, a reservoir of untapped energies drawn into its mysterious structure by the slaughter of this pitiful city and its inhabitants. Walking its streets, Khaled al-Muntasir had laughed to feel the stirring spirits below his feet, knowing that this land was already a tomb.

This region of the Empire was awash with forgotten sepulchres and barrows of long dead warriors. The people of this place lived atop a great mound of corpses, buried beneath the earth thousands of years ago, and didn’t even know it.

Khaled al-Muntasir closed his eyes and let his senses flow out around the city, searching for any sign of life, any living thing that had somehow escaped the killing. There was nothing, and he looked up into the emerald fire of the necromancer’s eyes.

He shook his head and the necromancer thrust his hand towards the sky.

A blazing pillar of green light filled the heavens with its necrotic glow, piercing the clouds and unnatural darkness with its brightness. The light built within Nagash’s body, a lambent glow that slithered down through his invisible flesh. It filled the necromancer’s skull, infused his dried bones, formed phantom organs and coursed through his debased body into the heavy plates of his armour. A black wind sighed, and the silver light that suffused the earth was snuffed out in an instant. The ground shook as the impossibly powerful will of Nagash spread through the land, reaching deeper than the roots of the mountains and out into the wilds far beyond.

The wolves of the city threw back their heads and howled. The darkness was suddenly lit by thousands of pinpricks of green light as the dead of Hyrstdunn were dragged from their rest to serve in the army that had slain them. Bloody men, half-eaten wives and murdered offspring screamed as their dead flesh was filled with horrid animation.

Dead Menogoths climbed to their feet, reaching for weapons that had lain beside their brutalised corpses. Those without weapons wrenched sharpened timbers from their former homes, gathered up meathooks, gutting knives or cleavers from butcher’s blocks.

At some unseen command, they shuffled towards the northern gate of the city, moving with dreadful purpose and monotonous unison. The army of the dead, already thousands strong, swelled by thousands more. And all across this degenerate empire, the dead would be stirring in the damp earth that contained them, roused to wakefulness by the most powerful necromancer ever to rise from the lost kingdom of Nehekhara.

High above Nagash, a black miasma saturated the heavens, a roof of oppressive coal-dark cloud that roiled outwards from its boiling epicentre. The dark of night was nothing compared to this, for it was an umbra of complete emptiness, the oblivion of light not just its absence.

The dread blackness slipped over the sky like a slick of oil on a lake, creeping towards the horizon in mockery of the coming sunrise and life itself.

Death had come to the Empire.