Archaon: Everchosen Read online

  Gunda had had no reason to visit the fishing village in the past few months. The marauder attack had been swift and brutal. Hovels and boats had been put to the flame while men, women and children had been put to the sword. Gunda waddled through the ash-drowned ruins, the slaughter and decimation evident everywhere: in the torched timbers, in the stains of old blood on the cobbles, in the absence of gossip and children’s laughter on the air.

  She found the Rothschilds’ hovel at the edge of the shale where she had left it four years before, after bringing the angel-faced Otto into the world. It was easy to find. It was one of the only buildings left standing. The Rothschilds had been fortunate that terrible night. Roald had got Viktoria and the children out and to his boat, the family taking refuge in the storm-mauled bay while the village burned on the shore. Few others had been so fortunate. Others who had survived had left, leaving the atrocities at Hargendorf behind – though as a survivor of life’s myriad misfortunes herself, Gunda knew that you could walk to the other side of the Empire and never quite escape the darkness of your past. It waited for you behind the closing of each eye, to be relived each night.

  She didn’t bother to knock. Viktoria’s suffering could be heard up the empty street. The hovel was dark and muggy. Roald stood by the fire. He was impassive, like one of the wooden statues lining the temple at Dempster’s Rock. He said nothing. A pot of water boiled over a spitting fire. The children were seated at the table, tearing material into the rags Gunda would need. There was no greeting from the younglings either. Dietfried joined them. Their eyes were directed through the bedroom door, on their mother and her pain. The last time they had heard their mother scream had been nine months before, on the night of the attack. The night the marauders arrived. The night the marauder crossed the doorstep and entered their lives.

  ‘Well, let’s get started then,’ Gunda said, rolling up her sleeves. She thought she should say something. In reality, Viktoria was well on her way but it was proving to be a troublesome birth. The midwife washed her hands. She told Viktoria that everything would be all right. Roald and the children just stared, as though seeing something far off. Gunda wasn’t happy. Viktoria’s cries were unnaturally harsh for a mother already of three. The tide came in. The sun went down. The midwife pressed on with the difficult birth. Viktoria reached out for Roald but the fisherman stayed by the fire, sending the children across the room when Gunda needed something. Viktoria’s suffering went on into the night. She became weaker and more frightened and Gunda felt the woman slipping from her grasp.

  The baby was born to silence. It was a strong little thing, Gunda had to admit. A boy. Few children she had brought into the world had endured such a delivery. It had fought its way through the first trial of its life and emerged bloody, bonny and full of fight. Its screams seemed to produce a reaction in the family. The children too fell to sobbing but they were not tears of joy. No thanks were offered to the gods and so it fell to Gunda to mumble a prayer to Sigmar – as she had done in his temple some hours before – acknowledging that another son of the Empire had been born.

  With the child wrapped in swaddling and placed on the bed, Gunda turned her attentions back to Viktoria. She told her how brave she had been. How well she had fought to see her son into the world. That she had attended few births so difficult. She lifted water to her lips from a ladle but Viktoria would not take it. Her eyes fluttered and her head fell to one side.

  ‘Don’t do this, lassie,’ Gunda said, but then the convulsions started. Viktoria was experiencing some kind of violent fit. Arms flew out and her legs kicked across the bed. ‘The baby!’ Gunda cried out. ‘Get the baby.’ Roald and the children just watched. Moving the child to the floor and away from the violence of his mother’s passing, Gunda attempted to hold Viktoria down. Bracing a wound rag across her mouth like a bridle, the midwife tried to stop her biting down on her own tongue. ‘Roald,’ the midwife called. ‘Get over here and help me.’

  Putting one horrified foot in front of the other, Roald made it across the hovel and into the bedroom. The children, now descended into a sobbing mess, followed him. The four of them joined Gunda by the bed. Together they held their mother down. They felt the heat of her skin and the last of the fight within her, until finally she fell still. The children wept into the blankets. Roald bawled his grief at his wife’s silence. The baby cried for attention it would not get. Gunda felt her own tears come. She backed away from the bed feeling like an intruder, knowing that the family needed this moment alone.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she murmured before making for the door. It seemed to take an eternity to reach it.

  ‘Take it with you,’ Roald managed, snatching a breath.

  ‘Roald, no,’ Gunda said.

  ‘I beg you,’ the fisherman cried, his sorrow cutting through him like a sword. His face was a contorted mask of unbearable woe.

  ‘He’s your son, man,’ Gunda implored.

  ‘He’s not my son,’ Roald barked, his anger driving his whimpers away. ‘He’s not my son.’

  Gunda stared at them all. The inconsolable younglings. The fisherman, his shoulders broad and taut, as if under some fresh burden. Viktoria Rothschild, bloody and broken on the bed. She came to understand how tragedy might have intruded on the household that dreadful night nine months ago. How the Rothschilds might not have been as fortunate as gossip had supposed. ‘Take it,’ Roald hissed through his pain and gritted teeth. ‘Or I will see to it that the tide will.’

  The midwife nodded, picked up the child and held the swaddling to her chest. She opened the door. It was the dead of night. The sky was open and a chill breeze felt its way through the layers of her clothing.

  ‘I’m truly sorry,’ the midwife said, tears rolling down her rounded cheeks.

  Gunda settled into her hood and, pulling the babe close to the warmth of her body, set off into the Nordland night.

  CHAPTER II

  ‘Thus Gerreon’s blade found its way to Pendrag’s heart and love,

  and the winds took its wielder north to the realm of bear and wolf,

  Sigmar followed with a sword-brother’s rage – eager to avenge fair Pendrag’s blood,

  He searched for dark Gereon through mount and wood,

  But vengeance turned to calling with Sigmar crushing the Norsii beneath his boot.’

  – Hollenstein, Chronicles

  The Schlaghugel Road

  Nordland

  Pendragstag, IC 2391

  The Schlaghugel Road was a ghoulish ribbon winding its way between the gurgling darkness that was the River Demst and the dread of Laurelorn Forest. Road was a charitable description for the channel-hugging pathway that couldn’t decide whether it was wagon-hardened earth, moss-threaded gravel or the occasional lonely cobblestone. It was the small hours of the night and there were no merchant wagons travelling the road. Not a messenger. Not a mail coach. Not even a footpad or highwayman. Both Swift Nikolaus and ‘Six-Fingered’ Dirk were regular sights on the route. Killers both, Gunda Schnass would even have welcomed the company of such robbers on the Schlaghugel Road that night. The breeze hissed like a serpent through towering treetops, which drooped like closing jaws over the miserable path.

  Gunda would never ordinarily have left a birth. Traditionally a midwife would remain until morning. Both mother and baby needed care, comfort and advice. The passage was safer during the day and with their wives resting, husbands were sometimes reticent about payment for the midwifery services rendered. The Rothschilds’ tragedy did not allow for such luxury, however, and Gunda found herself out on the open road, late into the night with a mewling child drawing the attention of every wretched thing that haunted the edge of the forest. Gunda saw shapes moving through the brush and the glint of eyes in moonlight.

  It was cold. The heavens were cloudless and the constellations hung above the forest like secret signs and indecipherable symbol
s. Gunda wasn’t much of a reader as it was and her talents certainly didn’t extend to interpreting the stars. The midwife peered up into the depths of the heavens with ignorance and suspicion. The sky didn’t look good, whatever it said. It wasn’t helped by the moons. Mannslieb’s great disk was settled amongst the treetops, staining them a sickly yellow. Morrslieb was in the ascendant, rising high overhead, throwing its dread radiance down upon all that might walk, crawl or creep through the Laurelorn Forest.

  Gunda hugged the child close to her. The boy was wet and hungry. His bawling left the midwife in no doubt of his displeasure. Although she had taken the child at Roald’s insistence, she had little idea what she was to do with him. She was too old to raise him herself. She was a midwife but her husband Ambros had long passed. Her daughter was a wet nurse in Beilen and there was an orphanage in distant Dieterschafen – but neither would take the boy if they knew the circumstances of his conception. The reavers and marauders of the north were known to be polluted from their compacts with dark forces and enjoyed visiting that pollution on others.

  Gunda found herself singing a low tune. Something her father had taught her as a child – The Knight’s Dalliance – about a knight’s encounter one night with a beautiful elfin stranger on the empty roads of the Laurelorn Forest. It was a deceptively cheerful tune but did not end well. Despite the comfort it gave her, Gunda allowed the song to trail off on the breeze, lest it attract the attentions of some lonely member of the elder races, whose villages were rumoured haunt the depths of the forest hereabouts.

  She heard the growls first. Low, predacious rattles from the back of blood-slick throats. As she crunched her way along the Schlaghugel Road, Gunda couldn’t help looking behind her – hoping for a farmer on a cart of hay or a fellow traveller on foot. Instead she discovered dark shapes that dribbled from the shadowy treeline, like an ink blot running on parchment. Ulric’s children. Wolves drawn from the forest by Morrslieb’s boldness. They snapped and snarled. They skulked up behind her in a loose pack, waspish in their wasted want. Their eyes glinted with craven hunger.

  Even if the child’s mewling hadn’t drawn their ragged ears, the pack could probably smell the baby’s unwashed body. Holding the babe to her bust, Gunda snatched a rock from the road and tossed it at the beasts. The crack of the stone off the road shot through the night. The wolves kept their distance, hugging her scent along the river. Their numbers grew and the midwife’s heart sank with every step. The forest fiends would soon tire of their fearful game. Their number would overcome their feral caution with baying and the baring of teeth. They would attack. Before long all Gunda could think of was the sun rising over her bone-picked corpse. Darker thoughts still were prompted by the snapping of the emboldened monstrosities at her heels. She would not die for this child. This screeching orphan. This northman’s mongrel.

  Morrslieb, full and furious, leered over the treetops at her. With each of the midwife’s prayer-mumbling steps, however, a silhouette rose from the canopy. Framed in the moon’s lurid glare was Sigmar’s glorious form. Cut out of the moon’s surface like a shadow, the unmistakable outline of the Heldenhammer rose to greet her. It was the temple. It was Dempster’s Rock. Sigmar’s statue stood proud atop the tower-dome crowning the rugged brickwork of the temple. The pitch outline of the forest broke for the tree-sparse hillocks amongst which the temple nestled. Gunda Schnass had never been so pleased to see the God-King’s bronze form. As her waddling step and the roll of her ample hips took her towards the tall temple doors she felt the wolf pack fall away. She could hear the hackle and snap of their frustration. The God-King was an imposing sight, even for the mindless, savage beasts of the world. The fearful power of Sigmar’s image held sway even over them.

  Under the temple’s great archway, Gunda found the mighty doors closed and barred. Given the hour, this did not surprise the midwife. It was not unusual to find Father Dagobert late at study but it was the dead of night, when most god-fearing folk were wisely in their beds and not in need of a priest. Unlike Gunda. Unlike the child. Huddled beneath the protective stonework of the small temple, Gunda’s tired, dread-addled mind came to a conclusion. She could not care for this child. She could not ask her daughter Ada or Mistress Buttenhauser in Dieterschafen to care for it either, not knowing where he came from. What if his father came for him one day? What if the child himself harboured an unknown darkness? He was safest there, Gunda realised, under Sigmar’s unflinching gaze. The God-King would see the child right. Gunda – a humble midwife – had seen him safely to Sigmar’s door. She had done her best. His fate was in the God-King’s hands now.

  Pulling the child away from the warmth of her breast and laying the swaddling package in the nook of the arch, Gunda laid a kiss on the boy’s forehead with her cracked lips.

  ‘Gods forgive me,’ the midwife told him as the child’s screams intensified. Gunda did not want to be seen and with heavy heart and tears on her wrinkled cheek, she hurried away – the shame of her steps carrying her off towards Schlaghugel and the hovel she called a home.

  As night wore on and the child screamed, the fell radiance of the witchmoon probed the temple archway. The great disk of Morrslieb – like a great bauble in the sky – peered from behind the temple stonework and soothed the babe with its brilliance. The child stared up in infant wonder, its eyes wide and its cries stifled. Moonlight reached through the forest also, calling to its bestial acolytes. The ill-light of the moon eclipsed Sigmar’s statue, shielding the coward-hearts of forest savages from the reproach of the God-King’s gaze. The treeline bled its gathering darkness and soon the hillocks of Dempster’s Rock were swarming with their vicious kind, baying to the moon and drooling their intention to tear and shred. What the sordid effulgence did for their night eyes the unchanged swaddling did for their empty bellies. The forest was saturated with the baby’s smell. Its tender flesh called to them.

  As the most brazen and ravenous of the wolves ventured before the great doors and into the arch, they snarled and snapped their claim, streams of slobber tossing this way and that as each advancing beast attempted to secure the prize for itself. They nipped experimentally at the swaddling, dragging the babe from the archway and down the steps. Again the child’s screams shattered the night, as it became the object of a tug-of-war between two great black beasts.

  The first barely managed a half-yelp before its skull was smashed into the ground. The second was allowed a fleeting moment of wide-eyed panic as it released the child. The spiked metal ball that had demolished its competitor came up on a chain. It accomplished a moon-scraping orbit before coming crashing down on the wolf with equal fervour. A second smash pulverised the beast and finished it.

  ‘Get out of here!’ the weapon’s wielder roared. Father Hieronymous Dagobert’s vestments hung down about his waist; the hairy belly that wobbled generously with every swing of the twin-entwined chains was pale in the moonlight. He had been woken by the cries of a baby before his temple’s doors and had hurriedly donned his robes and his boots. The morning star clutched in his pudgy fists was in fact the temple censer, streaming incense from the heavy ball of its spiked thurible.

  ‘Back, beast,’ Dagobert compelled the pack savages, his boots kicking teeth from the jaws of skulking scavengers and breaking the backs of the fleeing creatures. ‘Back, I say! In the name of Sigmar back, or you’ll get a taste of the Herald.’

  Dagobert swung the spiked ball about his great body on its twin chain, the gust-fed incense within glowing like a comet through the sky.

  Within moments of the priest erupting from the doors of his temple, the ravenous pack recovered. Lurkers slinked in under the Herald’s arc to snap at the child, who once again had become transfixed – this time by the streaming afterglow of the priest’s Herald. Beasts left the ground and snapped for Dagobert’s own ample flesh. He pounded them back with bloodied fists and tight swings of the chain. A rumble built within the priest’s belly tha
t became a growl of his own as he smashed the children of the night out of the air and into the ground. With his chest rising and falling, and the Herald burning bright at its chain-end, the pack broke off. Enough of the scavengers were dead to shake loose the moon-fuelled confederacy of their number.

  ‘Back, you beasts,’ Dagobert said finally, spitting his derision down on the mashed carcasses of wolves that had incurred the wrath of Sigmar’s Herald. Beside him, the baby stared up in blood-speckled wonder.

  ‘Now who are you?’ the priest put to the child, ‘abroad on such an evil night.’ He looked about for any sign of who had left the infant before shrugging. ‘You’d best come in with me then,’ he said, the kindness of his words labouring against the catching of his breath.

  With the babe in one hand, held against his rounded belly, and the Herald coiled in the other, Father Dagobert made his way back towards the temple. Beneath the bronze gaze of Sigmar he nodded silently, before stomping in under the archway and kicking the great temple doors closed behind him.