For an instant, murder gleamed in the baron’s eyes. He should have suffered no peasant to lay hand on him! Quickly, Lothar turned his face, forcing himself to be composed. Fighting down his pride, smothering his very identity, he crawled across the floor on his knees and grovelled at the foot of Vanhal’s skeletal chair. ‘Please, master,’ he pleaded. ‘Help me to see. Help me to understand as you understand!’
A cold, knowing smile crawled across Vanhal’s lips. ‘First,’ he warned his apprentice, ‘you must learn to control the spirit inside you if you would aspire to control the spirits outside. If you cannot be true to yourself, then you are doomed to ignorance.’
Lothar backed away from the seated necromancer, a feeling of horror pounding through him. Again, he wondered at the limits of the man’s power, wondered if Vanhal were able to peer into the mind and soul of his apprentice. Wondered if what was residing within the flesh of his mentor was merely the spirit of a fallen priest or if something else, something from beyond, had seeped into that body.
‘I will… I will supervise the construction,’ Lothar promised. ‘Under my direct guidance, the pace will increase. Vanhaldenschlosse will be completed as you command.’
Vanhal nodded, accepting his apprentice’s display of rekindled servitude. ‘Raise another multitude. Beyond the Grim Wood you will find Hel Fenn. The bogs are heavy with the Fennone dead buried there. Call them up, bring with them their grave goods, the weapons and armour entombed with them.’
‘You talk as though you expect an attack,’ Lothar said. ‘Have your powers given you a premonition? Is Count Malbork moving against us?’
‘I have been given warning,’ Vanhal said. ‘From the first, I have seen that it would be necessary to give battle to the enemy. Not the Sylvanians, but an enemy who is also so blind as to think dominance is the only purpose of power.’ Waving his hand, Vanhal dismissed his apprentice.
Staring again at the rising walls of his tower, Vanhal considered the name Lothar had given this place. Vanhaldenschlosse, ‘Vanhal’s Castle’. Somehow, the name managed to send a shiver through the necromancer. He was thinking of another place, another site of power that had become the namesake of its builder.
The doubts lurking in Lothar’s mind, the suspicion that there was something else within the body of his master — these were questions that brooded within the deepest recesses of Vanhal’s soul. Sometimes his own thoughts seemed alien to him, rising from some influence he didn’t understand. The pain of his family’s destruction was still there, but what of the love that had brought that pain? It was but a distant echo, devoid of intimacy. Try as he might, he couldn’t revisit those memories without an inexplicable aloofness.
When he had conjured the ghost of his brother’s wife, the woman he himself had loved what seemed a lifetime ago, Vanhal had been warned. Raising Aysha’s shade had been his first act of necromancy. In that moment, she had tried to warn him. Sympathies of spirit and mentality have flung open the gate that can never be closed again.
Sympathies, but with what was he supposed to be in sympathy?
Dressed in armour made from the bones of their own clan-kin, the skaven host scurried through the sacred grove of ash and yew overlooking the sprawl of Tempelhof’s graveyard. The ratmen reeked of death, their scent carrying a carrion stench not unlike that lingering about vultures and jackals. It was a scavenger stink imbued from a diet of rotten meat and bone marrow, a smell generations of grave-rats had cultivated until it oozed from their glands.
Seerlord Skrittar had always found that stench both nauseating and threatening. Clan Mordkin was something of an enigma within the Under-Empire. They had been the last to stand against the Curse-thing in the burrows beneath Cripple Peak. For generations they had warred against the dead-things when the rest of skavendom decided to abandon the mountain to the undead. Mordkin had become isolated and alone, scratching an existence at the very fringes of civilisation. When at last they had conceded defeat and retreated from the pits of Nagashizzar, their return had been a frenzy of carnage. Instead of crawling back with tails between their legs and throats exposed, Mordkin had prowled about the edges of the Under-Empire, attacking weak clans and seizing their burrows. Only when they grew formidable enough to stand on their own had the grave-rats allowed themselves to be properly restored to society.
As a pup, Skrittar had heard the stories of Mordkin. They were the bogey-beasts of skavendom, the dark menace every warlord invoked to intimidate his minions. ‘Don’t rat on your chief or Mordkin will invade your warren and eat you all!’ It was a threat that was well founded. Where other clans would subdue and subjugate those they defeated, absorbing them into their own ranks as slaves, Mordkin took no prisoners. Every ratman they conquered was butchered — left to rot until the meat was putrid enough to satisfy creatures accustomed to the flesh of zombies and ghouls.
Insular and mysterious as they were, Mordkin had one saving grace, at least in the eyes of the grey seers. Generations fighting against the Curse-thing had rendered them devout worshippers of the Horned Rat, hearkening to the words of the grey seers a bit more attentively than clans like Rictus and Mors. If it weren’t for their peculiar belief in achieving a greater connection to the Horned Rat by nibbling the bones of His prophets, they might have been a formidable weapon in the seerlord’s arsenal. Instead, they simply presented a convenient way of disposing of troublesome grey seers. Even the most wily didn’t last more than a few months in a Mord-kin burrow.
Even now, surrounded by Warlord Manglrr and the copious bodyguard of stormvermin which accompanied him, Skrittar felt his fur crawl every time the eyes of Bonelord Nekrot glanced his way. Such worshipful piety was horrifying when accompanied by that hungry twitch of Nekrot’s whiskers. Skrittar kept one paw tight about the mummified cat’s paw in his pocket, a talisman that never failed to bring him good luck. In case the paw decided now was a good time to betray him, the seerlord kept reciting the formula for a particularly potent spell under his breath and hoped Nekrot didn’t have a mummy paw in his pocket!
Bonelord Nekrot was a grisly sight. It was the tradition of Clan Mordkin that their leaders wore the bones of their predecessors; indeed, it was the first act expected of any warlord after usurping the position. Any too weak after such a fight to strip the bones from their fallen leader would be quickly killed by some ambitious underling of their own. That was how Nekrot had gained his own supremacy, waiting until his chief, Hussk, killed Bonelord Karkus in single combat, then falling upon his injured master.
It was the bones of Hussk that Nekrot wore, tribute to the half-minute the chief had been warlord of Clan Mordkin. The bleached fangs of Hussk’s skull framed Nekrot’s furless snout and narrow head. The ribs and spine of his betrayed master enclosed Nekrot’s torso, and sectioned halves of other bones guarded his limbs. Hussk’s tail had been stretched and dried, forming a ghoulish belt. A broad-bladed sword of bronze, a khopesh that had been plundered from one of the Curse-thing’s Dark Lords, hung from Nekrot’s belt, sheathed in a scabbard wrapped in the pelt of Karkus.