Gazing in horror at the obscene vista, the Emperor fled once more. There was no pattern or motive to his retreat now, simply the blind panic of a man who feels the cold claws of death reaching out to claim him.
Through chamber and corridor, down stairs and steps, the most powerful man in the Empire raced to preserve even a few scant moments of his corrupt life. He passed the collapsed forms of servants and soldiers, their bodies disfigured by the attentions of the Black Plague. Within the whole of the castle, he alone yet drew breath. All around him were the marks of death.
Approaching the dungeons in his desperate flight, Boris at last encountered something alive. It was a creature that carried itself in crude mockery of human shape, a verminous abomination cloaked in the habit of a monk, the cloth unspeakably foul and tattered. From beneath the hood, the fanged muzzle of an enormous rat projected. Its whiskers twitched as it drank in the Emperor’s scent, and its beady eyes glittered with obscene delight. Waving a disfigured paw that was bloated with pustules and lesions, the ratman summoned others of its breed from the stygian darkness.
Boris shrieked. His retreat before had been frightened. Now it was the product of madness. In his derangement, the Emperor fled back the way he had come, matching step for step as he tried to elude the ghastly ratkin.
Chance brought the Emperor into the little forsaken chapel of Sigmar. Rushing into the sanctuary, he slammed the stout door shut behind him. Sweating, the seams of his finery splitting as he dragged the crumbling remains of a pew against the portal, Boris did his utmost to block the entrance. The first pew was followed by a second, and then by a dusty tapestry he tore down from the stone wall and stuffed beneath the edge of the panel.
Panting, huffing from his exertions, the Emperor turned away from the blockaded door. It was only then that his panicked mind appreciated that he wasn’t alone in the chapel. Two other survivors had found their way here: a noble and a peasant knelt before the altar.
‘There are… things out there,’ the Emperor stammered. He rushed to the noblewoman, turning Princess Erna around to face him. ‘Vermin… Underfolk!’ he wailed, imploring her to believe him. He wilted under the accusation in her eyes. She’d begged him not to bombard Carroburg and he’d been deaf to her pleas.
Unable to maintain her gaze, Boris turned to the peasant, gripping Doktor Moschner’s arm in a desperate clutch. ‘They’re all dead!’ he wailed. ‘The Black Plague. The ratmen brought it. They mean to kill us all. We’re next!’
Doktor Moschner shrugged free of the Emperor’s hold. ‘If we are meant to die, then we will die, Your Imperial Majesty,’ he told Boris. He turned back towards the altar, raised his eyes to the hammer on the wall. ‘Only a power higher than even an emperor can help us now.’
The Emperor cringed away from the altar, horrified by the fatalistic acceptance adopted by his companions and their retreat into the facile comfort of faith. All his life he had doubted and mocked the gods. To think they had real power, to believe that they truly governed the world around men — it was a concept as abhorrent to him as his own mortality. Yet, in this hour, was it not his own mortality that confronted him? Where would all his power, all his authority go if he were to die? What would be the legacy he would leave behind?
In his despair, Emperor Boris knelt down beside Princess Erna and Doktor Moschner. All through the night he added his prayers to theirs, when he wasn’t confessing his many sins to the gods he had reviled all his life. Many were the vows he made, the oaths he swore as he beseeched Sigmar to spare him his life.
Every moment, the Emperor expected to hear his companions admonish him for his many crimes, waited to hear the ratmen scrabbling at the chapel door. Neither voice nor sound disturbed him through the long hours of darkness.
The vermin had too many victims readily available to bother about sniffing out the Emperor’s refuge.
The survivors were too shocked by Boris’s confessions to offer either comment or accusation.
There were some things too despicable even for the gods to hear.
Bright sunlight streamed into the chapel as dawn broke above the ruins of Carroburg. The first rays stabbed down, piercing through the shadows to illuminate the holy hammer mounted behind the altar. Despite the patina of dust covering it, the daylight shone from the bronze icon bolted to the hammer in an almost blinding brilliance. It was an instant only, then the sun shifted position and the blaze of light was gone.
The three survivors who had sat praying through the night rose slowly, their legs weak from cramps and impaired circulation.
‘We’ve survived the night,’ Boris observed, the words spoken in a timid whisper.
Erna shook her head. ‘Is that a blessing or a curse?’ she wondered, staring at the comet and hammer behind the altar.
‘While there is life, there is hope,’ Doktor Moschner offered. He started to move down the connecting passage leading to the great hall. He saw the fright that rushed into Erna’s eyes. They’d heard the Emperor’s description of what they might find waiting for them outside. ‘Someone has to go,’ the physician stated. ‘Besides, I’m only a peasant,’ he added, directing a glare at the Emperor.
Erna watched the doktor withdraw down the passage, creeping up on the barricade as though he were a hunter stalking prey. Timidly, he began shifting the pews Boris had used to blockade the door.
‘We are alive,’ the Emperor said, this time in a louder voice. His expression was no longer meek, but instead uplifted, the cherubic smile once more dominant. ‘Even the gods don’t dare kill Us.’
‘Do not tempt fate,’ Erna warned him. ‘You made many promises, pledged to undo the crimes…’
‘Crimes?’ Boris sneered. ‘An Emperor is the law itself. We can commit no crime!’ He brought his bejewelled hands clapping together. ‘We can use this,’ he mused. ‘If We act quickly, position the right people, We can fill the vacuum left by the ones the plague has taken. We can put Our people there, make the leaderless domains Our own! It might take a show of force to-’
A far different show of force came crashing down upon the Emperor’s skull. Boris collapsed before the altar, blood gushing from his fractured head. Erna stood above the tyrant and brought the stone hammer crashing down a second time.
A third.
A fourth.
‘Sasha and Fleischauer aren’t in the hall. The ratmen must have carried them away…’ Doktor Moschner’s report trailed off as he stared at Erna and at the mangled heap sprawled beneath her. Both were barely recognizable as the people he had left behind. Erna’s hair was bleached white, her face contorted into a fearful rictus. The Emperor had no face that could be recognised as such.
When Erna finally lifted her eyes from the man she’d murdered and saw Moschner, she let the heavy stone hammer fall from her fingers.
Doktor Moschner said nothing, simply advanced and tenderly led Erna away from the dead tyrant.
‘We must leave this place,’ the doktor declared. ‘Go somewhere there are people. People we can tell this to.’
Erna stiffened, tried to pull away from his grip.
Doktor Moschner smiled at her and shook his head. ‘You’ve done nothing,’ he told Erna. ‘His Imperial Majesty has expired from the plague. I am his personal physician. I should know such things. That is what I intend to tell people. If an idealistic young princess tells them otherwise, we will both visit the headsman.
‘You’ve done what no one else was brave enough to do,’ he told her. ‘Come, we must hurry from this place. There is an entire Empire waiting to hear that Boris Goldgather is dead.
‘In dark days such as these, the people can use a reason to celebrate.’