ELEVEN

The Eye of the Storm

 

 

“The powers of the pyromancer are truly formidable, and where they bend their powers ruin and destruction is sure to follow, no matter what is intended.”

 

—From A Treatise of
the Lores of Magic by
Theodoric Wurstein

 

Wolfenburg.

It stood before the gathered Chaos horde as a symbol of Imperial might they had to overcome. If it could be conquered, then the whole of Ostland would be Surtha Lenk’s for the taking and the Empire would be Archaon’s.

As summer began to wane, so the shadow cast by the fluctuating Realm of Chaos broadened, engulfing more of the lands of men. The Chaos host felt its power surging through their bodies, pulsing in their veins with every beat of their hearts. Now in the fourth month of the siege, a host as large as the one that had attacked on the night when the prisoners had been taken was readying itself for the final assault on Wolfenburg.

Drums beat a tattoo of death that was interrupted by the unearthly blaring of carynx horns and the clashing of weapons against armour and shields. In front of the Northmen stood the prisoners they had taken from amongst the valiant defenders of the resilient city. They had been lashed to barbaric symbols constructed from an amalgam of rotten wood, huge bones and rusted metal. They were in the shadow of the horde’s leviathan siege engines.

Some of the Northmen’s prisoners remained proud and resolute, showing no fear, despite the despicable treatment they had suffered at the hands of the barbarians. Others, however, were whimpering shells of the men they had once been, who screamed their pleas for mercy to the uncaring heavens; they were broken by the atrocities they had suffered and been forced to witness in the daemon-worshippers’ camp. Some were no longer aware of what was happening to them; they were either unconscious or their wits had left them, so terrible had been the experience.

The Northmen knew that those watching from the walls of Wolfenburg would be able to see the prisoners and would understand what fate was about to deal them.

Dark clouds were building on the horizon over the Middle Mountains, rolling down from the north to smother the marches of Ostland as they had done during the spring of that year. The wind was picking up too.

Behind the lines formed by the Chaos warbands, Vendhal Skullwarper sat cross-legged within the outline of another blasphemous symbol that had been burnt into the turf of the ground. To any that could bear to look at it, they would see the sigil was that of an eight-pointed star, four spans across which merged with a curving, fish-like form set within a corrupted circle. Where the sigil had been formed, the grass hissed and smouldered, and an acrid smoke rose from the ground where the corrupting influence of Chaos had taken hold.

Other esoteric markings had been made at the various points of these images as well. Around the outside of the ring nine stakes had been thrust into the ground at regular intervals, each topped with a skull, which had been doused in tar and set alight. Despite the wind, these death’s-head torches burned brightly.

Vendhal Skullwarper studied the roiling currents of flickering colour that wound and bucked around, above and within his circle of power. He breathed in deeply. The wind brought the smell of death and decay to him as well as the scent of future possibilities. The time was almost ripe. He could feel the strength of the Shadow in his bones; he could see it creeping over the Northlands towards this place, towards the moment when all future possibilities would end. It would grow like a malignant cancer that would ultimately envelop the whole world.

“It is time,” the sorcerer said, his voice heavy with the doom of what was coming to Wolfenburg.

At his word one of the high zar’s battle-shamans, wearing nothing but the skin and horns of a stag and wildly applied body paint, capered from where he waited into the ranks of the amassed warbands. He fidgeted nervously.

“It is time.”

“It’s time.”

“The time has come.”

“It is time.”

The sorcerer’s decree spread through the ranks of the Northmen like wildfire. Then, unnervingly, all the noises ceased. For several seconds, the only sounds were from the mewling and groaning prisoners. Prayers could be heard alongside babbled nonsense, as men commended their souls to Sigmar and others whimpered their agonies to the unheeding air.

Warriors stepped forward from each of the gathered warbands, blades drawn. The marauders held their swords ready. A large, hunchbacked creature raised a brass horn, its trumpet mouth a boar’s head, and blew one sonorous note that echoed mournfully over the ground between the two opposing forces. Almost as one man, the chosen warriors raised their swords and axes and executed the prisoners. So much blood washed over the hateful symbols to which the men had been tied that the tinny stink of the life-giving fluid was carried on the breeze to the city itself.

The blood-letting drove the impatient horde into a frenzy. Only the total destruction of their enemy would satisfy them now.

The ritual slaughter of the captured knights and men-at-arms would have as much of an effect on the morale of the city’s appalled defenders as it would against Wolfenburg’s defences. Now that ritual could begin in earnest.

The sorcerer could feel the forces he needed gathering in the ether around him, drawn by the spilling of blood and the markings of power. He was bound by ancient covenants and summoned by primal emotions. It felt as if he was at the very centre of the roiling storm of magical energy.

The sorcerer could feel the insidious creep of Chaos in every part of his body until it was the realm that existed beyond reality that seemed most real to him. Reality became nothing but a ghostly echo.

The pounding of hooves, the jangle of harnesses and the snorting of horses brought him back to the real world briefly. Twenty riders stood beyond the limit of the magical sigils. Their intrusion irritated the sorcerer but their arrival was necessary for the completion of the ritual Vendhal had begun. They needed to bring the wrath of the Dark Gods down upon the bricks and mortar of Wolfenburg.

The riders were all from the high zar’s personal bodyguard. A giant of a man led them who had bullhorns sprouting obscenely from his malformed skull. The big man dismounted and stopped at the edge of the circle.

“You have it?” Vendhal asked.

“I have it,” the bodyguard replied.

“And it has been blessed by the chosen one from amongst Zar Uldin’s band?”

“It has.”

“Then give it to me,” the sorcerer commanded.

The horned giant tossed something cold, hard and round into the circle. Vendhal caught it deftly and looked at it. It was a human skull that had been polished to a pearlescent finish. The sorcerer caught the shimmer of rainbow colours skitter over the shiny smooth bone as he turned it in his hand. It had indeed been blessed by the touch of Tchar. Tzeen was looking down upon their enterprise with favour.

Vendhal now had the last piece of the puzzle in his hands. It might only be a human skull, but to one who knew the origin of that skull and the power that it had been imbued with, one also understood that there was no greater instrument of war.

And so Vendhal Skullwarper commenced his dark ritual. The Chaos sigil began to glow and the grass burned black.

The city would fall to the barbarian legions of the high zar and it would fall tonight.

 

Gerhart Brennend looked across the bend in the river at the hill rising up to the city beyond. A biting wind blew around him, whipping his robes against his lean, wiry form. He stood firm, however, staff in hand. This rising wind, he knew, was not wholly of natural origin. The tormented weather reflected the turmoil that had seized the flow of the winds of magic sweeping from the north in the wake of the Chaos incursion.

Gerhart could see disturbance all around him. Tendrils of translucent colour whipped overhead or soared from the roiling sky to coil around him in knots and spirals of coruscating, multi-hued energy. Shades of sparkling azure, fiery crimson, burnished gold, glittering emerald, dazzling acid-white, deep purple, dusky grey and earthy umber swept and gusted around him. It was as if a tempest had beset the winds of magic and the more disruption there was within the flow of magical energy, the stronger the effect on the surrounding atmosphere growing over Wolfenburg.

As the hurricane whipped the strands of power around him, Gerhart could also see the tendrils being drawn towards the seething black clouds above the sentinel city. Its great, grey walls now seemed almost black as the day darkened to night. It was as if the glowering thunderheads were drawing the magical energies towards themselves for some fell reason.

This was no midsummer thunderstorm, this was an unseasonable gale that was growing to almost cyclonic proportions. It was as if summer itself were dying. So mighty was the Chaos invasion, and so great the destruction it had caused—whole armies massacred and entire towns laid waste—that the natural world itself seemed to have suffered a mortal wound.

Gerhart and Captain Reimann’s regiment stood watching all this from amongst the stand of trees at the top of the hill. Below them was the cave that led to the secret tunnel and the dungeons of Wolfenburg Castle.

They had reached the city in time to see the Kurgan quitting their camps and preparing to bring down Wolfenburg at last. Gerhart knew that they were going to have to get back inside the city. One of Reimann’s men had scouted ahead, crawling through the mud and filth of the tunnel again, only to find it blocked after less than half a mile. Just as Gerhart had predicted, once they had escaped the city, those left behind had brought the roof down—with Auswald Strauch’s blessing, no doubt.

“We are too late, there is no way back into the city and the attack has already begun,” one of the Reiklanders said dejectedly.

“We are not too late,” the captain chided. “We can still make a difference.”

“But there are only ten of us left,” another weary soldier pointed out. The halberdiers had paid highly for the destruction of the daemon engine and the antlered sorcerer’s warband.

“It does not matter!” Gerhart said, unable to believe what he was hearing. “While we still breathe we can fight. And while we can still fight we can exact a high toll from those who would bring doom to our ancient city.”

“We are tired, exhausted!” another complained bitterly.

“Enough!” the veteran captain exclaimed. “Rest while you can, all of you,” he said and many of the halberdiers gratefully sat down on the stones and turf of the hill. “But be ready to move at my command. Wizard, might I have a word?”

Gerhart understood what Reimann wanted. The two of them moved away from the rest of the party but kept the city, and the advancing horde within sight.

When they were out of earshot of the battle-weary soldiers Gerhart said, “What is it?”

“I believe that you have some understanding of the ways of battle,” the captain said, almost begrudgingly.

“Indeed I do,” Gerhart declared. “I thought you would have seen that for yourself by now.”

“Then I would like to hear what you suggest we do now,” Reimann said, running a hand through his close-cropped grey hair. “I know what I would do, but I would like to see if we concur.”

“Is it not obvious? We pursue this to the end,” Gerhart declared boldly. “We take the fight to the enemy, harry them from behind and do all we can to stop them succeeding in their task, or die trying.”

“My men are weary. They have been pushed to the limits of their endurance.”

Gerhart could see that Karl Reimann was a good man and a worthy captain. He had the well-being of his men at heart but never showed any signs of weakness in front of them.

“With but a push in the right direction, even the slowest soldiers can find the way to greatness,” the wizard said gruffly.

“To a soldier, the only thing more treacherous than the battle itself is the expanse of open ground yet to be won,” Reimann countered.

The captain was obviously tired himself after their recent exertions. Gerhart felt it too, and more keenly with the worsening of the weather, but they could not let it beat them. Not now.

The bright wizard looked back to the city. The flickering beams and bars of the Northland lights had intensified, exuding a malign phosphorescence not unlike the light cast by the sickly Chaos moon Morrslieb. The eerie luminescence lit the night for miles around.

A distant rumble rolled across the hills and the blanket of the forest, but it was unlike the growl of thunder. It was as if the storm had a voice, a booming voice that spoke of the coming of the End Times, the doom of nations and annihilation of all mortal races. And it was getting colder, much colder.

The storm of Chaos was upon them.

 

Vendhal screamed the words of the incantation in dark tongue. They cut through the gale and the roar of the wind with their cruel timbre.

The Chaos sorcerer was only half-aware of his pronouncements. It was as if he was so saturated with power now that he had transcended his mortal body and was looking down on the scene as he neared the climax of the ritual.

The runes on the ground flickered and writhed. He stood at the heart of it all, the glittering skull raised high above his head, the winds of magic swirling around him in a tumbling tumult. He had thrust his staff into the ground next to him. The stones set into the sockets of the iron skull surmounting it were glowing a malevolent red, like his own eyes. The orb-wand tucked into his belt pulsed with a throbbing, cold blue light. Power soared into him.

Overhead the storm clouds sparked with barely-contained lightning. They roiled and writhed like things given unnatural life by the warping magical energies saturating the environment. The very air seemed to thicken around him.

For a moment he felt as if the power of the building storm was more than he could bear, as if he was about to unleash a force upon the world that was so devastating it could not be controlled by a mere mortal.

But Vendhal Skullwarper was no mere Northern shaman. He felt that he was no longer even just a sorcerer of Chaos. He was something much greater. He was the chosen channel of the power of the Dark Gods of Chaos, who dwelt beyond space, time and the comprehension of primitive mortal minds.

Vendhal threw back his head and looked up into the vortex of power surging above him. He luxuriated in the energising essence of the magical forces gathering there.

“The power of Chaos is mine!” the sorcerer screamed to the tortured heavens.

With a howl like a hundred packs of hungry wolves, the winter storm rushed in and the warping power of Chaos tore through the summer night. The wail of the tempest drowned the excited cheers of the Kurgan as the power of the north laid siege to Wolfenburg.

Snow did not so much fall as sweep across the countryside in a whirling wall of white. In no time at all thick frost covered the landscape for a league in every direction and ice, growing upon thrashing branches in minutes, weighed down the trees of the surrounding spurs of woodland.

Then the night exploded.

Forked lightning clawed the sky, striking the city walls like repeated hammer blows rained down by a storm giant. Masonry exploded from the stonework where the lightning lashed at the curtain wall with flashing talons of actinic white energy.

This was the power of the Dark Gods in all its terrifying glory. Nothing could stand before the might and the supremacy of raw Chaos.

With a roar like the crashing scream of a landslide the ancient gatehouse of the city, which had withstood attacks for two thousand years, collapsed in an avalanche of rock and stone. Men fell screaming to their deaths, crushed by the very battlements that they were sworn to defend.

The city had been breached.

Jeering and yelling, the Northmen needed no command to drive them on. Bellowing their battle cries the marauders galloped and ran towards the fractured city walls. In a great black tide, Surtha Lenk’s barbarian horde broke open Wolfenburg and began to put everyone inside to the sword. They exacted their bloodthirsty revenge on those who had denied them their prize and the glory of battle for so long.

With coruscating tendrils of magic whipping about him still, Vendhal Skullwarper stepped from his circle of runes and joined the advance. Wherever he trod, the ground wept tears of blood, in response to the Chaos power that infused every fibre of his being.

Following the rampaging Chaos horde, the sorcerer strode into the blighted city. Icicles hung from the eaves of buildings, their roofs laden with heavy falls of snow. Ice crunched underfoot, melting with a sizzling hiss wherever he walked.

The wintry winds were now beginning to give way to something far more Chaotic altogether. Such was the warping way of the great mutator; nothing remained free from the effects of change for long. Almost as abruptly as it had begun, the blizzard ceased but the storm did not abate. Tendrils of Chaotic power began to snake down from the seething clouds, striking like lightning. Only unlike the caress of lightning, these strange tendrils had an altogether different effect.

Vendhal watched with unalloyed pleasure as a coil of cloud, rippling with all the colours of the visible spectrum, whipped down from the boiling sky. The warping tendril struck the side of a house. Where it hit, the wall was stone no longer. Instead, something more akin to dark purple flesh bubbled and blistered there.

Another tendril struck, earthing itself against the cobbles of the street. As the power discharged, bulbous, glistening eyes blinked in terror from the stones and gaping, leech mouths opened and closed in the road spasmodically.

A woman ran screaming from the crumbling ruins of a lightning blasted house. Vendhal watched as her foot snagged in an opening leech-mouth and she fell onto her hands and knees. Another twisting tendril of energy lashed down from the storm and struck the woman. Her cries became a harsh, braying wail as her whole body underwent a terrifying transformation.

The woman’s legs became boneless, rubbery tentacles. One arm sloughed its skin and became a serpentine protuberance, her hand now a fanged maw. Her other arm sprouted iridescent feathers and became a flapping wing. Great clumps of hair fell from her scalp as her head swelled and contracted again. It was as if something was writhing inside her skull trying to claw its way out.

Vendhal walked past the woman with a sick smile on his lips. He was revelling in the glorious changes wrought by Tzeentch upon Wolfenburg. The thing that was left after this terrible transformation fortunately did not survive much longer.

The sorcerer knew well the stories of what had happened to the city of Praag in Kislev after the attack of Asavar Kul. Once he was finished with Wolfenburg, Praag would seem like a mere experiment. The sentinel city would become the new renowned masterpiece of Chaos.

Across the street, houses burned amidst the last flurries of snow. Vendhal raised his skull-staff and pointed at a man fleeing from the Chaos looters. He still clutched the pearlescent skull in his other hand. Another bolt of warping energy seared down from the fiery clouds, blasting the sorcerer’s victim from his feet. The man tumbled to a halt against the side of a building, from which blinked tearful eyes. The man now resembled something more like a toad, with a forked whip-tongue, cockerel’s wattles and scuttling crab legs.

Truly he, Vendhal Skullwarper, was the chosen of Tzeentch. He was luxuriating in the raw stuff of Chaos that wreathed his body, heightened his senses, and raised his mind to unparalleled levels of consciousness. Surtha Lenk was nothing compared to him. The high zar was not even fit to lick the filth from the soles of his boots.

When the doom of the Dark Gods had been wrought upon the city of Wolfenburg, Vendhal Skullwarper would show the Kurgan horde who commanded the warping storms of Chaos. They would see who the true messiah of the great sorcerer was.

 

The blizzard had abated as swiftly as it had arisen. In its wake, the rag-tag survivors of Karl’s regiment, along with the glowering wizard, had made it as far as the city and were now following the Chaos horde, trying to find a way into Wolfenburg.

Ahead of Karl’s party, the last of the barbarians were making their way into the city through a shattered gap in the lightning-blasted curtain wall. It was plain to the life-long soldier that these were the runts of the marauder horde; those who had followed the tribes as they moved south in the hope of sharing in the glory of conquest but having little to offer themselves. They were the weakest, feeblest and oldest among the camp followers.

The Northland lights still flickered over the burning rooftops of Wolfenburg, bathing the snow-covered landscape for miles around with their spectral luminescence. It seemed to Karl that the weather itself had been possessed by some Chaos power, as tornado-like spirals of cloud swooped down from the broiling multi-hued mass of the thunderheads.

A sound like thunder rumbled across the city, but to the veteran Reiklander it sounded more like the snarling of some feral beast. Unnerved by what was happening, Karl looked to the ruddy-robed wizard.

There was fire in the mage’s eyes. The bright wizard paused at the fissure in the curtain wall as the acrid stench of burning washed over the party. The mage inhaled deeply, closing his eyes, almost as if in ecstasy. Gerhart held his oak staff tightly in his left hand. In his right he held a sword that one of the Imperial soldiers had given him. It had belonged to one of their fellows who had fallen battling the daemon engine’s protectors. The wizard’s straggly grey-black hair flicked and writhed in the unnatural winds that blew through the gap in the city wall. He looked every part the avenging hero of old. Perhaps there was hope for them all yet.

Then the screaming began.

 

At first the city’s terrified townsfolk thought that the daemonic howls were an effect of the unnatural storm battering Wolfenburg. But the sinister, unearthly cries continued and panicking eyes were turned towards the heavens.

Lashes of fluctuating indigo, blue and yellow energy were coiling down from the storm clouds, making the tempest look like some sky-borne ancient kraken of legend. Other things were also escaping from the roiling clouds: creatures born of nightmares, all teeth and talons, carried on bat-wings like ragged shrouds.

The creatures descended in a squabbling flock, falling on the fleeing townspeople. These were the furies. Their flickering shadows swept over the snow-covered, burning streets.

The distraught defenders did their best to fend off the furies’ attacks but they were terribly outnumbered. Men were lifted off the ground, yelling, in the taloned grips of the flying beasts. They were carried, struggling, high above the rooftops only to be dropped again.

Before they even hit the ground, many of the poor wretches were caught by other diving furies and torn apart in mid-air by the savage, hellish creatures.

Those who did manage to escape the clutching talons of the leathery-winged daemons found other, equally horrific things emerging from the smoke and fires. Where the warping-lightning struck, great fire-spouting wyrms had grown, their bodies lengthening as they absorbed the magical energies saturating the air of the city. Gangly-limbed things capered and danced in a seething sea of eldritch energy, their pink and blue-skinned forms never constant as mystical energy seethed through them. They were Chaos unbound given physical form.

What many saw within this scion of hell drove them into madness.

A tall figure moved awkwardly through the running rabble. He was swathed in a thick black cloak, his face hidden by the heavy cowl. As he watched the chaos unfurling all around him he gibbered and giggled to himself, seemingly unconcerned by this vision of hell. Instead, every so often he patted something secured under his tightly drawn cloak.

The stranger had been mad long before the Realm of Chaos descended on Wolfenburg and made the city a domain of daemons.

 

The halberdiers, their commander and the fire mage, forced their way further into the madness that was Wolfenburg, cutting down blood-crazed marauders and wild-eyed maniacs every step of the way.

The stricken city was like a living, vibrant vision of one of the paintings of the heretical artist Beronymous Hosch. Buildings burned, men and women, old and young, were put to the slaughter, and screams rent the greasy air.

All around them the Northmen put people to the sword, whilst daemonic entities that had no right to exist in the mortal realm feasted on the bodies and souls of innocent and sinner alike. It was all the soldiers could do to keep from losing their minds as well. But their captain was a veteran of countless battles, many against the unnatural thrall-servants of the Chaos powers. As long as he stood firm in the face of the enemy, then so would his men.

The seething crowds of marauding barbarians, embattled defenders and fleeing townspeople parted and Gerhart and the others suddenly found themselves in an area of relative calm. They were in a square. It was as if they had reached the eye of the storm, of this storm of Chaos.

They were not alone. On the other side of the square stood a figure, silhouetted against the backdrop of burning buildings. The figure was draped in a long, hooded cloak, almost the same colour as the robes worn by the fire mage. Gerhart could see at once that this was no pyromancer of the Bright order. The man also wore brass armour adorned with leering, gargoyle faces, and runes that glowed with an eerie inner light. They left no doubt as to where the man’s loyalties lay.

Gerhart could see immediately that the stranger was alive with the raw power of Chaos-magic. It came off him in pulsing waves; enough to make the world around him shimmer in a heat haze. Gerhart could see it in the glowing red gem-eyes of the sorcerer’s iron-skull staff, in the man’s own burning stare, and in the glowing sockets of the polished human skull gripped in his other clawed hand. The closer Gerhart looked, the more it seemed that the eyes of the pearlescent skull flickered in time with the storm writhing in the sky.

And there was something else. To Gerhart’s mage-sight it seemed that the Chaos sorcerer was draining the magical essences of the winds of magic.

Gerhart was convinced that it was this sorcerer who was responsible for the Chaotic storm. Ribbons of swirling magical energy linked the man to the turmoil above, and the enchanted skull was the key to the spell.

Gerhart knew what had to be done.

In his mind’s eye, and in the presence of the hungry flames and the growing power of Aqshy that was drawn to the burning city, the candle-flame was no more. Instead it was a fiercely blazing brand. Gerhart could feel warmth being transmitted through his body as well as the heat of the fires all around him, suffusing him with their power, their majesty and their might.

Seeing what had become of the ancient sentinel city, frustrated that the council of war had not followed his advice, and angered that he had been sent away from Wolfenburg when the city needed him most, Gerhart had fuelled the fire of his fury and hatred. This in turn fed the fires burning within him, and the flame of Aqshy.

The fury the pyromancer would unleash upon the Chaos sorcerer would be like nothing the self-satisfied villain had ever known, nor would ever know again.

Meanwhile, the fell sorcerer held the glimmering skull above his head and began to utter some vile incantation in the cursed language of those blasphemous entities that existed beyond the boundaries of the mortal realm.

The two spell-casters faced one another across the square. The Chaos sorcerer seemed unconcerned by the ten halberdiers. He was wholly focused on the bright wizard who stood braced, staff outstretched, sword in hand, ready to duel.

But then Reimann’s men had their own battles to fight. As if drawn to the heart of Chaos, warp-changed Chaos spawn crawled and slithered through the corridors of flame that were the burning streets of Wolfenburg.

The Chaos sorcerer laughed mirthlessly as he witnessed their predicament.

 

Hearing a scraping behind him, like plate mail dragged over cobbles, Karl turned. Dragging itself towards him across the square was something that had obviously once been a man. From the chest up it was still human, whimpering and moaning in agony and horror. From the waist down, the poor wretch had been changed utterly. His lower body had developed a hardened carapace that looked like armoured plates. His legs had become swollen, veiny-fleshed arms, his feet now clawed, three-fingered hands. No matter what his broken mind might will, the lower half of his body was reacting to some other sentience as it heaved its bulk forwards.

And there were other things too creeping, scuttling and sliding towards them. Things with feathers, claws and fungoid bodies. Things with too many bony limbs and too many gaping mouths. There was something that looked like two people merged, but they were joined in such a way that it was no longer possible to tell which limbs had belonged to which half. The skin covering the Chaos twins looked like melted wax and was striped with great red weals as if it had been under the lash.

The Reiklanders moved away from the wizard’s side to more defensible positions. The fire mage was on his own now and Karl prayed that the wizard was a match for the corrupted sorcerer.

An arachnoid abomination, bloated and covered in matted fur, but displaying a fanged human face with ophidian eyes in the centre of its body, skittered down the side of an untouched building. It leapt several yards in one bound to get close to the infantrymen.

Karl realised that this might very well be the last battle he ever fought. He was determined to make it count and sell his life dear, as would all of his men. This was what they had been born to, the life of a soldier was the only life any of them had ever known. Karl couldn’t imagine meeting his end any other way.

“Come on, boys!” the old Reiklander captain shouted grimly over the tumult of the warp storm. “This is it. This could be our last stand. Make it count!”

Shouting the war cry of the armies of the Reik, the halberdiers prepared to sell their souls at a very high price indeed.

 

Spells roared from the hands and staffs of the two wizards like screaming skull-face comets. They streaked through the tortured air as the Chaos sorcerer and the Imperial wizard each tried to bring ruin upon each other. Arcane gestures and sweeps of their magical totems lessened their impact.

A raging inferno swirled around them, sparking eddies of power bursting from the mage-storm and exploding like firecrackers in the air. The flames leapt higher, as if in response to the fury of the magical duel being waged in the square. Every building around them was burning now, like a fiery barricade that kept other players in the battle at bay.

As they battled in their unreal otherworld of sorcery, the unnatural light of the spectral storm overhead combined with the blasts of their spells to illuminate the two combatants.

The Chaos sorcerer was so suffused with magical power that nothing Gerhart did seemed to touch him. They would fight on until exhaustion eventually claimed one of them. Gerhart feared he would be the first to tire. For while the sorcerer had the fearsome skull in his possession the winds of magic were drawn straight to him, to fuel his spells as well as his magical defences. Thanks to the barrage of sorcery directed at him by the warp-enchanter, Gerhart could not get near enough to his opponent to disrupt his spell-casting.

Gerhart was on the verge of losing his temper but he somehow managed to focus his mind and keep a tight rein on his powers. He feared—he knew—that if he lost control now, with the Chaos storm raging above him, he too could go too far into his own magic and never be able to return. He would become a feral thing like the creature he had encountered in the hills above Keulerdorf. And if that happened Chaos would have his soul and what semblance remained of his humanity. His individuality and personality would be swallowed up in a haze of soul-destroying madness. Gerhart Brennend would not allow that to become his fate.

The heroic effort he was making to remain in control was costing him dear. In spite of the wind of Aqshy surging through him, he still felt himself weakening with every spell he cast. Gerhart did not know how much longer he could keep his efforts up for.

He was only vaguely aware of the Reiklanders battling the Chaos spawn around them. He was becoming more and more aware of the bone-aching weariness that threatened to overwhelm him. Then, weakened, with his guard down, the Chaos sorcerer would step in for the kill, no doubt savouring the moment of victory.

The burning brand inside his mind began to sputter and spark fitfully. Gerhart sensed that he could only really channel one more spell before he was spent.

Then it came to him, as lucidity comes to an old man on his deathbed, when there is nothing more that can be said or done.

Gerhart staggered backwards, leaning on his staff for support. The flame trailing from the end of the oaken bough coughed and went out. Perverse satisfaction flashed in the Chaos sorcerer’s unblinking, coal-eyed stare. The bright wizard sagged to his knees on the hot cobbles of the square. His nemesis took a step towards him.

“Before I kill you it is only right that you should know the name of the one who has robbed you of your strength, your art and your life, so that when your soul has become the plaything of daemons you will be tormented for all eternity by the knowledge,” the Chaos sorcerer declared cruelly. “I am Vendhal Skullwarper and the warping storms of Chaos are mine to command!” the sorcerer pronounced, his voice rising above the howling of the storm and its Chaos-spawned offspring.

“And I,” growled a sweat-streaming Gerhart, “am Gerhart Brennend, pyromancer of the Bright order and keeper of the keys of Azimuth. Now burn in hell, you bastard!” and with that the fire mage released the spell he had been holding back—one last magical missile that burned with the intense heat of a volcano.

The monstrous fireball, a flame-wreathed screaming skull of a comet, blasted at the sorcerer, hitting him with all the force of a meteorite crashing to earth. Possessed of a supreme arrogance in his own abilities, the gloating sorcerer had fallen for Gerhart’s piece of ham acting, and had left himself open to a close range attack.

Vendhal Skullwarper was sent flying through the whirling air by the impact of the fireball and smashed through the burning bricks and mortar of a building. With a ravenous roar, the blazing timbers of the structure’s roof gave way, crashing down on the sorcerer in a great cloud of blossoming sparks.

For a moment Gerhart believed he had stopped the master of the Chaos storm, but the wreckage of the burning building was thrown clear and the Chaos sorcerer strode out of the ruins, his body seemingly unharmed. He was surrounded by an aura of writhing multi-coloured energy, the ever-changing colours looking like the swirling spectrum of oil on water.

So charged with magic was Vendhal Skullwarper that Gerhart’s final, most powerful spell had not caused him any damage at all.

But it had made him drop the glittering skull.

 

Karl witnessed the blow the Imperial wizard dealt the sorcerer, and saw the servant of Chaos hurtle through the wall of the burning building, the malignant skull flying from his grasp. Then, in horror, he watched the sorcerer rise from the ashes, apparently unharmed.

The gleaming skull landed with a clatter amongst the scalding cobbles and scattered pieces of burning material. He did not fully understand why, but Karl knew that he had to get hold of the skull before the Chaos sorcerer did.

With a sharp thrust of his gore-encrusted halberd, the veteran soldier dispatched the half-fish thing that was hopping towards him, hissing like a serpent, opening its belly with a deft twist of his weapon. Something akin to stinking broth gushed from the wound. There did not appear to be any solid organs amongst the mess. Karl forced his tired leg muscles into a sprint, desperation and adrenaline lending him strength.

Karl reached the spot where the skull lay just in time to kick it from the grasp of a slime-exuding, tentacled thing. With a sharp thrust he brought the heavy haft of his weapon down on top of the shimmering-hued bony object.

There was a crack like a thunderclap as the skull exploded and Karl was lifted off his feet to crash to the ground again several yards away as the warp storm went berserk.

 

With the destruction of the Chaos sorcerer’s potent talisman, it was not only the warping storm that changed as the link holding it all together was broken.

The sorcerer was screaming, his shrill, high-pitched shrieks cutting through the voice of the storm like a bell. His cloak streamed out behind him, and he became the focus of the storm’s rage.

Something else was happening to the sorcerer as well.

Gerhart saw it most clearly in the man’s puffy grey features. The flesh there rippled like the wind-blown surface of a lake. The fire faded from the sorcerer’s eyes, which now bulged and retracted as the warping power flooded through every part of his body searching for a means of escape.

Unable to contain the raw warping energy surging through it, Vendhal Skullwarper’s body reached breaking point and warped out. Arms and legs twisted at unnatural angles. Other bones and joints bent out of shape, thrusting at the man’s deforming flesh from inside. His staff was torn from his grasp and spun away.

Still screaming, the mutating Chaos sorcerer was carried up into the spiralling vortex by hurricane force winds. He was sucked up into the heart of the storm, his body twisting horribly out of shape in excruciating throes, until he was no more than a dark speck against the flickering, roiling, unnatural clouds.

Gerhart gradually became conscious of a shout coming from the soldiers still battling around them. It was the Reikland captain. “We have to get out of here, now!” the veteran soldier was screaming.

The bright wizard glanced up at the boiling clouds above him. The thunderheads had darkened to purple like a spreading bruise, and the clouds roiled like milk poured into water. The Chaos sorcerer was gone, Wolfenburg had been razed and there was nothing more that they could do now.

With the command, the survivors of the halberdier regiment, several sporting gaping wounds delivered by scything claws, brutal fangs and contusions caused by constricting tentacles or pseudopods, rallied. Reimann prepared to lead his men out of the city again. The howling hurricane had blown out many of the flames so that now a way could be navigated between the burning buildings. Gerhart, exhaustion threatening to overwhelm him, leaning heavily on his staff for support, turned to follow.

A new sound came to his ears over the whining of the wind and the crackling of the flames. Hearing an insane giggling, the wizard turned. Behind him, on the other side of the square, standing between two burning buildings, was a figure wearing an all-enveloping cloak.

“Gerhart Brennend!” the stranger called. There was something familiar about the voice. “We meet again.”

An arm emerged from the folds of the heavy cloak and the figure aimed the flintlock pistol at the fire wizard. With a ratcheting click the firearm was primed. The pyromancer had seen that weapon before. He had been in a similar position once before.

The cloaked stranger threw back the hood of his cloak to reveal the horribly disfigured, burn-scarred face beneath. Regardless of the terrible changes that had been wrought upon the man’s body, there was enough about him for Gerhart to recognise the man as being his one-time judge, jury and would-be executioner, the witch hunter Gottfried Verdammen.

Verdammen’s manner retained nothing of its previous composure. It was apparent to Gerhart that the terrible burns the witch hunter had suffered at the fire wizard’s hands, and all that he had witnessed since from within Wolfenburg had driven him insane. How had he even survived his fireball spell, Gerhart found himself wondering?

Verdammen giggled again, a disconcerting, childish sound. “I won’t miss this time,” he said, and fired the pistol.

There was no way of avoiding the shot and the bullet found its mark. Gerhart was spun round by the force of the impact and went down, falling into the ruins of a burning house.

The witch hunter’s hysterical laughter ceased abruptly as the fire mage rose from the flames like the legendary phoenix of Arabian myth, born again from the fires of its own destruction.

Gerhart’s robes had caught fire. His eyes blazed and balls of scintillating flame surrounded his bunched fists. The flames of the burning building flickered and writhed, forming a roaring vortex of fire with the pyromancer at its heart. Dark blood dribbled from the bullet-hole in the wizard’s shoulder.

At first the terribly scarred witch hunter’s face fell, then the hysterical laughter returned. Verdammen was still cackling like an inmate of an asylum when the smouldering fire mage cast his spell.

Racing, writhing flames burst from the wizard’s stabbing fingertips, eating up the space between the mage and the witch hunter. By the time the conjuration reached Verdammen it had become a roiling ball of fire that burst around him in a molten flood. Clothes, hair and skin charred, sizzled and blistered as Gerhart obliterated his nemesis in a fiery, bone-burning conflagration.

Within seconds the searing blast turned the witch hunter into a blackened skeleton and a cloud of whirling ash that was carried up to the heavens by the ascending thermals. As the furious blast furnace roar of the flames died so at last it seemed did the madman’s hysterical laughter.

And with that, the temper that Gerhart had struggled so hard to control burst like a ruptured dam. The searing pain of the bullet wound he had sustained had been the final straw. The one thing that he had tried so hard to prevent had come to pass. He lost control of the raging magic coursing through his veins like molten magma.

Fires raged.

Wolfenburg burned.

And all hell was let loose once again as the pain-maddened pyromancer went on the rampage like a man possessed.