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Unseen - David Guymer

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Unseen

David Guymer

‘I hate wizards.’

The two other men around the coarse-grained oak table laughed, as though he had just said something funny. It probably did sound like a joke. He said it often enough, and who didn’t despise the heartless and undeserving bastard that kept a roof over their family’s heads and ale in their cups?

Wilreich swirled the dregs in the bottom of his aforesaid cup, and tried to shake his unease. He didn’t like the woods. Never had. Didn’t like the rustling of creeping things that went unseen.

The moment he’d stepped off the wizard’s cart and into a crisp mid-afternoon beneath that weaving canopy he’d felt it. Like he was being watched. And the tower’s interior had done little to ease his mood.

‘What’s crawled under your skin?’ Ranfeld creaked back onto the rear legs of his chair. The old man gave him an unfavourable look, gums sickly black as though he’d been swigging tar rather than cheap ale from the sad little tavern half a mile back down the road to Altdorf. ‘Frisen’s paying triple tonight. That not enough to get the wife off your back?’

‘I never liked this place,’ Wilreich murmured, eyeing the ceiling. Shadows leapt from beam to beam in the flickering light of their battered lantern. ‘His manor in the city I can cope with, but this place?’ He shuddered again, still staring up at the ceiling boards. ‘And I don’t like to think what he does up there at night.’

The others followed his gaze, saying nothing. Dietmar drummed his fingers on the tabletop, the man’s burned face thoughtful. Ranfeld simply stared. Wilreich might have considered him dead but for the occasional flex of his jaw, like a dog having a bad dream.

It was Dietmar that broke the silence. ‘We should’ve sent for ale for Lenke’s lot upstairs.’

‘Piss on Lenke,’ said Wilreich. ‘He can buy his own.’

Ranfeld’s tired eyes drifted to the fourth, empty chair that sat to his right, Wilreich’s left. ‘You’re cruel on young Karsten, sending him into the Drakwald after three flagons of ale.’

Wilreich caught Dietmar’s smirk, and he chuckled. ‘When he tells me no, I’ll stop doing it.’

Ranfeld leaned forwards. His chair legs clattered into the bare wooden flooring as they struck home. ‘I’m serious,’ he said, tapping a finger to the table in that old school-masterly way he had when he wished to be attended. ‘No more of this nonsense with the new boy. You’ll get him killed. Would you want your own sons treated so?’

Wilreich frowned, but Dietmar burst out laughing before he could answer. ‘Those two boys would scare off any beastman I’ve ever seen. They’re ugly like their mother.’ He carried on cackling, even after receiving Wilreich’s boot in his shin.

‘Fine,’ he sighed. ‘I’ll treat him like my own blood.’

‘He picked a good night to start,’ said Dietmar, rubbing his leg under the table, but still grinning. ‘Frisen’s up to something big.’

‘I know,’ Wilreich said, rubbing his knuckles into his eyelids. It was going to be a long night. ‘He wouldn’t have brought in all of us, if he weren’t.’

‘I heard he can see the future.’

Wilreich grimaced, teeth jagged in the broken light. ‘I doubt it. If you could see the future, you wouldn’t fill your house with old war-horses like us.’

Dietmar looked around, head craning like a country boy at a parade. ‘I hear he’s got this place warded tight too. Magic traps, and that.’

Wilreich nodded absently. ‘That actually is true. A fox got into the cellar once. The grilles are warded and one of the crockboys saw it cross.’ He shook his head as if to shake off some fell visitation. ‘Apparently they still find pieces.’

Dietmar shrugged and resumed his fingers’ rapping. ‘Handy for when the pests rise up from the sewers, I suppose.’

Wilreich shuddered. Whether it was this place, or the joke, or simply the way the scarred man said it, it made him uneasy.

‘Makes you wonder though, doesn’t it?’ Dietmar said again, after a moment.

‘About what?’

‘Why he needs us.’

‘Shut up, Dietmar. You’ll give him ideas.’

‘Your disfigured friend is correct,’ piped a voice from behind his back. Wilreich shuffled around in his chair, wrists crossing over its woven back to form a rest for his stubbled chin. The voice belonged to a young man, arms spread to the doorframe like a small creature trying to make itself seem large. The glow from the mercenaries’ lantern cast the boy’s pale skin in an unflattering light, shimmering off blue robes that stank of days-old sweat. A good night’s sleep would probably do the boy wonders, but Frisen rode his apprentices even harder than he did his servants.

‘Herrscher Leupold,’ Wilreich observed, with a slight drop of the head.

‘We both know the master’s spell-traps are more than sufficient. I think he just likes the assurance of armed men on call.’

‘A wise man, is Heinrich Frisen.’

Leupold’s lips pursed, as though greatly wishing to argue but not daring to be seen criticising his master’s judgement.

‘Did you see Bertram or Hans on your travels?’ Wilreich asked, keeping his face a mask and his tone light, even as he wished to introduce the arrogant child to the flat of his blade.

‘The master is engaged in work of the utmost importance tonight and I have my own part to play. I was fully occupied reinforcing the wards. I haven’t time to do your job for you.’

‘Utmost importance is right, I’d say,’ added Dietmar, a hungry glint in his eye. ‘Don’t forget the silver. A big fat bag of it if all goes well, am I right?’

Leupold stepped back from the doorframe, azure robes shimmering. ‘Yes. Forget the peeling back of a new layer of mystery. Think of the shiny metal.’ He sniffed haughtily and turned to continue on upstairs.

Wilreich shuffled back round, planting his elbows onto the table and his face into his upturned palms. The apprentice’s stamping footfalls trembled back down through the stone walls of the stairwell.

‘He can’t really be a wizard one day, can he?’ Dietmar asked.

‘Do you pray?’ Wilreich returned.

Dietmar rubbed his scarred jaw. ‘Not since Stirland.’

‘I do,’ he growled. ‘Twice a day. Sigmar deliver me from haughty children.’

Ranfeld chuckled. ‘Give the boy a chance. He’s at that age. The world’s full of idiots when you’re fourteen years old.’

‘The world is still full of idiots,’ Wilreich countered.

‘Just wait ’til yours are older,’ said Ranfeld.

Dietmar rapped a short beat on the tabletop before adding, ‘But they’ll still be ugly.’

Wilreich slapped his palms to the table and rose. His chair scraped loudly over the rough boards. ‘I’d better check on Bertram and Hans. Leupold made it by them in one piece, so either the boy’s more sensible than he looks or something’s seriously amiss.’

Both men laughed at that. Bertram and Hans were not men to suffer the over-entitled.

Dietmar rubbed thoughtfully at his scars. ‘If you’re heading down…?’

Wilreich sighed. ‘What?’

‘See what happened to that crust of bread we were promised. It’s night already and I’m starved. Those servants are getting lazy.’

Wilreich kicked his chair onto its back and subjected Dietmar to a hard look. ‘Pick that up,’ he snarled. ‘Then we’ll talk about bloody lazy.’

Still grumbling under his breath, he hunched to pass under the door and out onto the landing. Stairs coiled away on either side, up and down. A high window faced north onto a darkening sky. Moonlight seeped between heavy iron bars, invisible runes emitting a warning hum and the faintest tingle of power. He looked out, beyond the trembling canopy of the Drakwald, to where the lights of Altdorf flickered, blurred to smudgy asters by the unevenly paned glass.

Not for the first time, he cursed the unnatural work that demanded Heinrich Frisen be so far from those lights. Futilely, as always, he tried to pick out the light of his family’s own crowded hovel. He turned away and, with a bitter shake of his head, trudged down.

The stairwell bore him to a narrow hall paved in rough slate. Mean-spirited windows, more iron than glass, studded the leftward wall. Something outside swayed in an audibly cruel wind, the motion dappling his face with dim smudges of silver-grey.

Uncertain why, he felt his neck prickling.

He crept on, suddenly cautious, fingers walking the contours of the plastered wall. After just a handful of steps, he froze. With the tip of one digit, he traced a shallow indent in the plaster. The material was cheap, the job roughly done, and it took little to mark. But there was something in its cleanness, the way it seemed to cut at the exact height of his own throat. His free hand massaged his neck to reassure himself it was unbroken. He crouched down, wincing at the stiffness in his knee that always came on with the season.

The black slate was speckled red.

He spotted a droplet to his finger. It was soft. Still warm. He lifted it to his lips and flicked it with the tip of his tongue.

Blood.

He rubbed the scarlet bead into his thumb, staring into the shadows of the grimly lit hall. Nothing moved. Unless one counted the shadows that danced between the flames with such agile grace...

‘Hans?’ he hissed. ‘Bertram?’

He waited. Nothing.

He shuddered in an unexpectedly chill gust of wind. Like someone had left a window open. But that was impossible. He wrapped himself in his cloak, the faded red and green of Hochland – all he had left of the old regiment, unless one counted a bum knee and a neck that turned only half-way. His finger traced the growing hole in the collar, stubbing the mail beneath. Ordinarily, Bertram and Hans were not men he would worry over. They were frightening men, and Wilreich didn’t frighten easy.

At least he hadn’t thought so.

Somewhere nearby, a door slammed, as offensive in the preceding stillness as a slap to the face. Wilreich started, reaching instinctively for his sword. It sounded like it had come from further down the hall. From the front door. Eyes on it now, close enough in the poor light to see, he watched it swing back again. The breeze carried an earthy richness, of juniper needles and winter berries, before another boreal tug pulled it shut with a resounding slam. The sudden loss of scents and sounds was like having a bag drawn over the head.

It lasted only a moment before it was eased open once again.

Wilreich shivered in spite of his threadbare cloak and broke into a run. He caught the larch wood door on its inward swing. It pulled weakly in his grip, the coarse grain unnerving his fingertips. He held it in place and swallowed hard. Where were his men? Why had they left this door open? He stole a quick look outside. The trees rustled darkly, as black as the gardens of Morr, but nothing else.

He stepped back inside, cursing, and pushed the door to.

Unexpectedly, it struck something solid, with a dull thunk of wood against wood and a muffled squeal of surprise. Heart thumping, Wilreich dragged his sword from its scabbard. He kicked the door fully open on the outside of his boot and made a grab for the scrawny, black-cloaked figure that swayed in an apparent daze beneath the doorframe. The intruder didn’t protest as he took it by the collar, shaking off its hood to reveal a pale, very human face.

A laugh burst from his throat. It was only Karsten. The boy was sopping wet. Three tankards, one of them split up the middle, fed their contents to the frost-bitten mud beneath his feet. The boy shook his fingers dry, staring at him wide-eyed, as if he’d been possessed by some madness.

Wilreich shook his head, chuckling until the back of his throat ached. He should have known there was an innocent explanation. The boy had obviously just let the door lie open in his haste to fetch the men’s ale. Even though he had fairly earned himself a sound thumping for giving Wilreich such a scare, he took him around the shoulders and gave him a companionable squeeze, uncaring of the bitter-smelling stickiness that clung to his cloak.

‘What did you do with Bertram and Hans, boy? Don’t tell me they agreed to hold your hand all the way to the tavern.’

Karsten still had that look, like he was being forced to placate a lunatic.

Wilreich’s laugh turned nervous. ‘Come on, no need to be ashamed. The Drakwald at night would soften any man’s spine. Bertram and Hans are in the tavern. Aren’t they?’ His grin had frozen into a rictus and the boy’s expression had shifted to one of silent pain as Wilreich slowly crushed his slender body against his mail. ‘Aren’t they?’

The boy choked, shaking his head in bafflement. Wilreich shoved him out from under his arm. ‘Were they at least here when you left?’

‘No,’ Karsten wheezed. ‘The place was empty.’

Wilreich spun away, a sick feeling in his gut. He slammed the door shut. It didn’t help. He didn’t even bother locking it. ‘And you thought that was normal? You didn’t think to come back and say something?’

‘I… I…’

‘Shove it,’ Wilreich growled. ‘I bet you left the door open too.’

‘I didn’t,’ the boy protested.

‘My parents were pious folk, Karsten.’ He bunched his fingers warningly into a fist. ‘Do you know what happens to boys who tell lies?

‘I’m not!’

Wilreich grabbed the boy by the arm, twisted until he squawked. Like a pilot at the tiller, he steered him back towards the stairwell. Ranfeld wanted Karsten treated more like one of his own sons, and that was what he would get.

He felt Karsten struggle against his grip. He was about to issue a rebuke when he saw what it was that had caught the boy’s eye.

A boot.

It protruded from the darkness of one of the half-dozen or so corridors that split from the hall towards the servants’ quarters. It didn’t move.

Karsten looked up at him. His face was white as dead wood. Wilreich saw his lips work, desperately trying to form words, and silenced him with a gesture. The boot was plainly Bertram’s. No other man he knew took them so large. Painfully alert to the potential nearness of whatever might have killed the man, he crept over.

Bertram rested against the wall, one half of his lax features rendered preternaturally pale by moonlight, the other lost to shadow. His throat had been slit left to right – from behind, Wilreich reckoned. Blood trickled from four punctures around his crown. Wilreich positioned his fingers over them. Like the man’s head had been held in clawed hands as a knife was drawn across his gullet.

Karsten started to shake. To a raw youngster, the mortality of a beast like Bertram must have come as a crude shock. Wilreich pushed him from the body.

‘Upstairs. Rouse the others. Go!’

Still the boy hesitated.

A disembodied voice moaned from the darkness. Wilreich whipped round, sword half-drawn from its scabbard. It had been muffled, from deeper within the manor. Like a man half-asleep screaming into his pillow. It didn’t take too great a leap to realise that Bertram’s killer was still out there. He spared a glance at the huge man – the killer wasn’t a creature he wanted to meet.

He gave the boy a firm knee in the rump. ‘I said go!’

Startled into action, Karsten sped off like a hare, and Wilreich wished his own knees could move him that fast. But still, despite the nervous itching across his shoulders, he made it to the stairwell without finding a knife between them.

Foot on the first step, he threw a nervous look over his shoulder. There was nothing there. Somehow the testimony of his eyes did little to reassure him.

He leapt for the next step and ran.

Ranfeld was already on the landing, in mail and cloak with sword drawn. Out from behind a table he was painfully thin, chainmail hanging off his shoulders – like an ageing dachshund in its master’s cloak.

‘What is it?’ he asked, quietly professional.

‘Bertram and Hans. They’re gone.’

‘Gone?’ Ranfeld asked, just as Karsten emerged from the guardroom.

Wilreich cast a worried look over the younger man’s shoulder. ‘Just two of you? Where’s Dietmar?’

Ranfeld sucked in his cheeks. ‘He thought you’d been a long time. He went down to the kitchens himself.’

‘Him and his damned stomach.’ Wilreich played with the hilt of his sword as he tried to think.

‘Should we… go look for him?’ Karsten asked.

‘That’s what it wants,’ Wilreich snapped back. Whatever it was. ‘To catch us out one by one. Besides,’ he added gravely, ‘I’d be surprised if he’s not already lying like Bertram in a corridor somewhere. Same goes for everyone else down there too.’

‘Crud,’ Ranfeld muttered quietly.

Wilreich couldn’t have agreed more.

‘So what do we do?’

As one, they looked down the stairwell. There was nothing there, but at any moment Wilreich expected a monster to form from the shadows and rend them limb from limb. It was all he could do to keep his voice from quavering.

‘We go upstairs,’ he said firmly. ‘Lenke’s lot are there. Whatever this is seems to like sneaking up on lone men from behind. I’d feel safer with three more swords.’

‘We should run,’ said Karsten. His eyes were wide, almost entirely consumed by the darting black pits of his pupils. Wilreich feared the boy had snapped. ‘We should get out while we still can.’

‘No!’ Wilreich drew his sword and moved to the window. Unfettered moonlight had transformed the swaying treetops into grasping claws, ready to claim him should he fall. He wanted out as much anyone, but if something stalked the wizard’s tower, it would have to find him in a place he had chosen for himself.

‘No,’ he said again. ‘Next one to suggest it gets a smack in the mouth. We’ll not be separated, slaughtered one by one like fowl.’

‘Hell with that,’ hissed Ranfeld.

‘Damn right,’ Wilreich seconded. ‘Come on.’

He herded them to the steps and up. Instinct screamed at him not to go last, but he suppressed it, waiting for Karsten to fully disappear behind the curve of the stone before edging in sideways himself, sword point level and shivering. Their voices and footsteps faded, leaving him alone. But he didn’t run, and dared not turn. He stumbled backwards up the narrow staircase, unable to shake the image of Bertram lying cold and dead, slain from behind.

‘Chief,’ a voice called from behind, almost making his heart stop.

Wilreich turned, almost dizzy with relief as Lenke stomped over groaning boards towards him, a reassuring block of muscle only slowly running to fat. The circular guardroom was lit by a pair of wall-mounted torches, their warmth only intermittently chasing the shadows from the thinning hairs of an old bearskin rug. Another set of stairs emerged from the far side, closed off after just a couple of steps by a door of pale, untreated larch. A square table sat out of the way beneath a chilling square of moonlight that streamed through a large, barred window, spilled dice evidently abandoned in a hurry. Two more armed men stood beside it.

Wilreich reached out a grateful hand to clap the larger man’s arm.

Lenke grunted, directed a sideways nod at Ranfeld. ‘Bertram’s dead?’

‘They’re all dead.’

Lenke looked disbelieving. ‘Who–’

‘I imagine we’ll find out soon enough.’ Wilreich looked to the second door and started moving. ‘Because no-one’s wasting time and effort on the likes of us.’

‘Where are you going?’ Ranfeld asked, chasing him across the rug.

Wilreich didn’t answer directly. He paused at the door and spun to address Lenke. ‘Block off that stairwell with the table or something. And spread the men out. I want everyone with an eye on everyone else, got it?’

‘Chief!’ Lenke barked back, wrapping his huge arms under the table and hoisting it off the ground. Around him, men spread out, eyes on the stairs, murmuring nervous reassurance. Wilreich picked out Karsten, waved him over. He straightened the boy’s grip on his sword and brushed his cloak clear of his right arm.

‘Stick with Ranfeld, he’ll see you through.’

The old man nodded, and he nodded back, then left them all to it, rounding on the door and slamming his fist against the pale wood.

There was no response. Wilreich pounded the door again, determined to keep at it until someone answered. ‘Open this door!’ he screamed.

Someone else struck from the opposite side. ‘Have you gone mad?’ came Leupold’s whining, wood-muted voice. ‘You’re disturbing the master.’

‘Good!’ Wilreich shouted, giving the door one more thump for good measure. ‘There’s someone downstairs that wants him good and disturbed.’ There was a moment’s silence. Wilreich wished he could reach through that door and shake the apprentice wizard’s neck.

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Is it?’ Wilreich yelled. ‘Come out here and tell me that!’

‘The master’s work is not to be interrupted,’ Leupold shouted, trying to out-yell him and failing.

‘I’ll keep banging ’til you open this door.’ Wilreich raised a fist to the spy-hole and made to offer it another blow.

‘Wait!’ There was silence, then the sound of a latch sliding back. The door opened a crack to reveal the apprentice wizard’s worried face. ‘You can come in if you’re quiet.’

Wilreich barged through, inadvertently lumping Leupold onto the steps. ‘Quiet, you say? Dietmar, Bertram, Hans, they can tell you what bloody quiet is.’

Leupold drew himself furiously to his feet, beating dust from the seat of his robes. ‘This is all nonsense, you imbecile. No one could breach Master Frisen’s wards without alerting him first of all.’ The wizard brushed past him and slid the latch back into place. To his shame, Wilreich didn’t try and stop him.

Suddenly, the adrenaline subsiding before that illusion of security, he felt tired. Like someone had punched tiny holes in his muscles and now just watched them drain. ‘Perhaps not,’ he said, allowing himself to sag against the wall. He twisted his belted scabbard out from behind his hips. ‘But whatever it is just walked in through the front door.’

‘It did what? That’s what you people are for!’

Wilreich took a forward step, fully intending, in that moment, to beat the fear he felt into Leupold’s skull, before a warning shout brought him up short.

His attention snapped back to the door. It had been one of Lenke’s lot. A ragged scream followed it, then more cries. He and Leupold shared a look and threw themselves at the spy-hole. Wilreich shoved a palm against the scrawny adolescent’s face and pressed his eye to the hole.

One of Lenke’s boys was face down, sprawled over the table they had bundled into the stairs. Blood matted his hair, a speck of gold buried within his dark curls. Everybody was shouting, backing off. But from what? Wilreich strained but could make out no trace of any attac–

Then he saw it, crouched between the legs of the upturned table.

Lenke roared. The man’s heavy blade smashed the table apart, but the creature itself was a ghost, seeming to twist and curve around every stroke. Chittering laughter, it vaulted Lenke’s shoulders, black cloak snapping at the man’s bald scalp as it passed. Wilreich watched, tense with horror, as the phantom vanished mid-flight, dispersing back into the shadows but for the echo of that verminous laugh.

Men wailed in panic. Lenke barked for order. Ranfeld did too, a different kind it seemed, but it hardly mattered since none were listening. Swords lashed at every patch of uncertain light. Karsten screamed. Wilreich pressed his cheek to the door and tried to see around, but the boy was just hidden from view behind the frame of the door. His hand grasped the bolt but didn’t release it, as though his arm were locked.

His eye shot back up as a shadow burst before Lenke’s second man and sprouted steel. The man spun away; Wilreich thought he was fleeing, but then the blood came. It spouted from a severed jugular, sweeping an arc as he turned, until his knees buckled and he fell, drained like a butchered swine.

Lenke bellowed like a bull and charged. Knives flashed in moonlight. Wilreich counted three, but speed blurred them. His legs had gone weak, but he couldn’t tear himself away. Lenke screamed, the way men in such extremes of pain will scream as if to hasten their deaths. His sword clattered to the ground, then fingers, hands, arms, and finally his head, lifted a clear inch above his neck on a gout of blood before what remained of him fell together like a butcher’s off-cuts.

Karsten swept into view. Wilreich beat his palms against the door, urging him run, hide, yield – anything but fight. If the boy heard, he didn’t obey, his sword hewing through the spot where the creature stood. The blade passed unhindered, as though the daemon had been a mere illusion all along, and struck unbloodied into the bearskin.

Karsten flexed his ringing fingers and looked about, frightened and confused.

Wilreich’s gaze roved the carnage. He caught the shadow as it reformed before the window. Silver light slanted oddly over the black cloak and a strange, inhumanly lengthened snout, visible for an instant before it too disappeared with a snarl of blackened teeth and a whisper of unseen fabric.

It hefted a chair, the object seemingly suspended on a cushion of shrouded blackness, and employed the wooden legs to smash out the glass from between the bars, then hurled the chair across the room. It struck Karsten full in the face, the cushion splitting, knocking the boy down in a rain of horsehair and splinters.

A maddened eye thrust itself to the other side of the gaping spy-hole. Wilreich pulled back. It was Ranfeld’s. He could see the veins as they pulsed; almost stare through the massive pupil into the pits of Morr beyond.

‘Open the door, damn you. Let me in. Let m–’

There was a scream and the man gagged on his words, pulled up as though by the hair. Wilreich caught a sliver of blackened metal at the man’s throat before blood sprayed the spy-hole.

Blinded, he stumbled back over the steps, hands rushing to his eye to rub away Ranfeld’s blood. It only made it worse. Leupold took in his blood-masked visage with a look of horror. There came another gargled cry.

It was Karsten’s. There would be no others.

There was no one left but him.

He thumped the stone staircase as he rose, holding on to his anger as all he had left. ‘It’s heading through the window. How? Aren’t they warded?’

‘Only the lower levels,’ Leupold answered hesitantly. He looked stunned. Wilreich envied him. He had only heard what came for them.

He looked up into the spiralling stone steps. Light from unseen sources shifted across the wall before the turn. He’d never been up here and didn’t know exactly how high it went as its true scale was magically distorted to outside eyes, but he suspected his best chances of seeing out the night now rested with Heinrich Frisen. He took a deep breath and started to run again. He heard Leupold following.

‘What’s Frisen up to, boy?’ he shouted back.

‘I don’t… know...’ Leupold sounded breathless, unused to the exertion.

‘You must have some clue.’

‘I know he had found… something. Some relic of a hidden race. He hoped to use it… to reveal more of their secrets…’

‘That’s better. What was it?’

‘I don’t know! If he knew, he didn’t say.’

Typical wizards, Wilreich thought. Always meddling. He supposed it didn’t matter now what the creature was – only that he reached Frisen before it did.

He just hoped he could run faster than this creature could scale sheer rock.

The stairwell slowly darkened as he climbed, the last flickering torch left some way behind. He began to fear that he was too late, that this daemonic beast lay in wait for him even now…

With an effort, he calmed himself. The well was not utterly black. Moonlight streamed down from some opening above. Frisen’s observatory could not be far. He picked up his pace and rounded the final rise.

He blinked, the light of stars and moon surprisingly painful after the near-blindness of the stairway. He opened his eyes again to find himself in a circular, many-windowed room, blanched of all colour as though overlain with some ghostly grey shroud. A single object filled it. It resembled a slender-barrelled cannon, of copper and brass, seated upon a revolving platform. The platform’s wheels, in turn, were locked into parallel tracks, which ran the circumference of the chamber. The long cylinder had been angled through a huge open window and trained onto the night sky.

A cold wind gusted through the voided space. Wilreich shivered.

Heinrich Frisen looked up from his contraption, wiry white brows clenched into a furrow of irritation. But Wilreich had barely even noticed him. There was something about Frisen’s instrument that troubled him.

No, something on it.

The harder he focused, the more blurred its outline became, but something lurked there, he was sure of it, like a jackdaw on a roof in the Hochland wives’ tale to forereckon a death. It looked his way, a silk-wrapped snout pulled back into a lethal smile. Clawed hands and clawed feet, bound in black silk, released their holds as a sinuous tail, similarly darkened, uncoiled its chokehold around the brass barrel. In utter silence, it dropped behind the wizard’s back.

The landing of a snowflake would have disturbed the ground no less.

Leupold cried out, finally seeing the monster for himself, but the creature was so blindingly fast. Frisen’s chest thrust outward, a pair of knives transecting his heart. The wizard gasped, appeared to grit his teeth as the blades twisted under his ribs. His killer held him tightly to its own breast as he began to convulse, dark foam bubbling from his lips. Poison wept from the assassin’s blades – blood turned black and vented noxious steam where the two intermingled. With a crunch of bone and a slurp of wet meat, the knives were ripped clear. The wizard toppled without another sound. Leupold’s cry, still unspent, ended as a scream.

Wilreich stumbled back, eyes fixed on those of the assassin, daemonic red. So many slain, master wizards and tougher men than he. Did this creature even bleed? Could it?

The wall at his back checked his retreat, his left arm swaying into the stairwell. He looked down after it. He could run, flee this madness. Frisen was dead. Perhaps the monster would be satisfied.

Leupold was howling a whole stream of gibberish now, enmeshed in a shimmering field of energy that flared off painful bolts of electric light. One caught Wilreich on the cheek and he recoiled, raising a hand to the searing welt. The hairs on his wrists stood tall and sparked.

Through eyes still reeling from the shock, he watched as the shadowy creature sprang into motion. Both arms flashed from beneath its cloak, each spawning a golden disc that buzzed through the magically charged air. They plunged into Leupold’s barrier like fish hooks into water, impacting simultaneously into his chest as though always predestined to such perfection.

Wilreich watched, aghast, as the wizard faltered, and saw the creature pounce.

Then he ran.

There was a flash and crack, like a bolt of lightning, and then a scream so loud it birthed afterimages in his mind as intense as the purple sprites left in his eyes by its preceding flash. Stripped of reason by terror, he turned, tripping over his own ankles and slamming face-first into the wall. His arm smashed through a burning sconce in a rain of sparks. The steps rushed up at speed.

His armour took the brunt of that first fall, but there were plenty more. He gasped as his arm twisted beneath him, nearly torn from its socket, his legs already spinning overhead as he tumbled; finally crashing to a halt against the still-bolted door, striking it side-on with force enough to make his vision swirl.

He groaned softly, and didn’t try to move. His fingers probed his dislocated shoulder, somehow brushing the grip of his sword that had fallen with him. He snapped his hand back as though bitten. Everyone else was already dead. Perhaps if he lay quiet and still he might be mistaken for dead too. Even so, he couldn’t quite bring himself to close his eyes. He stared into the stagnant pool of darkness, his heartbeat ratcheting higher and higher as, without so much as a breath of motion, a line of mortar became an elongated snout, and cracks in the steps became claws.

The shape in the dark seemed to register his notice and shifted, disentangling itself fully from the background shadow. It was hunched, rat-like, and regarded him with an unfeeling, inhuman malice.

‘W-why?’ Wilreich stammered.

‘A message,’ it hissed. ‘A warning.’ Its voice bore no trace of compassion, as much a creation of the dark as its body.

‘What are you?’

‘A messenger.’

The creature spirited closer. Wilreich didn’t see the blade, just heard his mail crunch and himself scream. There was an instant of agony. But only that. His senses seemed to hollow, retreating, until there was almost nothing beyond the sense of his own heart as it strained for one more beat, just one, in spite of the blackened shard that split it. The creature braced one paw to his shoulder and, with the other, tightened its grip in preparation to withdraw its weapon.

It grinned down on him.

‘I am the Deathmaster.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Guymer is no stranger to the worlds of Warhammer, with exciting stories in Gotrek and Felix: The Anthology and Hammer and Bolter, with much more on the way. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding. When not writing, David can be found exorcising his disappointment at the gaming table and preparing for the ascension of the children of the Horned Rat.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

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ISBN 978-1-78251-015-4

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