In that they bettered them at least four to one.
Nassam, meanwhile, rushed to my side with about fifteen spearmen in tow. Freeguild-trained greatswords served as honour guards to their generals and heroes, and, adorable as that was, that remained his first instinct in battle.
‘Defend the old woman,’ I told them. ‘Leave this to Sigmar’s own heroes.’
Something altogether mightier than a vampire forced an entrance through the doorway rubble. A pair of morghasts. The arcai type, I was sure, armed with black-bladed halberds half again as long as mine. The harbinger type that I had faced earlier were assassins, constructed to the sole end of ensuring the Mortal Realms knew that Nagash was unhappy about something. The arcai were the bodyguards of the God of Death and his generals, and rarely ventured far beyond their sight.
As if to congratulate me on my knowledge of Shyish, Mannfred von Carstein strode in between them like a nobleman on a summer stroll.
The Mortarch was unnaturally tall. His head was bald with a ridged brow, his face bestial and far from human. His eyes were dominated by the whites, no iris or pupils, and the canines were huge in his mouth. He was armoured as his knights were, in ridges of black plate. Gothic shoulder guards flared back from his breastplate, batwings ribbed with gold, and stamped in turn with rondel pieces in the shape of chiropteran skulls. In his right hand he carried a long sword. In the other, a long-handled glaive with a curved sickle edge. Both weapons were surrounded by nimbi of unsubtle killing force. Skeletal runes on the two weapons, and on the Mortarch’s armour, sucked the life energy out of the room.
‘Mannfred!’ I bellowed, driving every spark of belligerence and charisma in my being into those syllables, and struck my halberd’s ferule on the ground. ‘We meet again!’
The vampire turned to me, and I felt the awesome tonnage of centuries that lay behind those death-white eyes. He had grown in power since the years we had spent stalking one another across the forests of Cartha and the Sea of Bones. The renewed patronage of his master and the Arcanum Optimar had been good to him.
But then, I hadn’t exactly been sitting on my hands since the Realmgate Wars either.
‘Bear-Eater,’ he snarled.
Bellowing at the top of my lungs, I launched myself at the smirking Mortarch.
It was not all bluster. The armies of Death depend on their figurehead the way those of the Kharadron rely on their endrin – take it away and things start falling. If I could slay Mannfred von Carstein then I could decapitate his army and live to boast about it afterwards.
This is what I call win-win.
I swung my halberd like a headsman’s axe. Had it connected it would have cloven the vampire in two and, as messy as that would have been, I would have been more than happy with that. As it was, Mannfred yielded. He bent like a snake, upper body twisting away from me even as his legs stayed rooted, his sword whipping back across his body to meet the descending blade. Our weapons clanged, locked, and we held that pose for the span of a heartbeat, snarling in each other’s faces, testing each other’s strength.
He struck me an uppercut that lifted me from the ground like a toy soldier.
The back of my shoulder plate crunched into the cosmic orrery. I bit my bottom lip with the impact. I had a moment to appreciate the power of the machine I had just hit as it spasmed through me, just as one of the outer spheres sliced across my arm and flung me sideways.
I must have gone a dozen feet, over the heads of the melee certainly, but somehow Mannfred was there waiting when I landed.
His glaive arced down for me. I rolled. The cruel blade gouged into the rock, an inch from my face. I sprang quickly to my feet. Mannfred saluted me with a dip of the head and a flourish of his sword, his glaive humming as he spun it lightly about the wrist.
He was playing with me.
Gripping my halberd two-handed, across my body like an oar, I went at the bloodsucker with both ends.
With an effortless twirl of his glaive and the occasional back-step he parried blade and butt, his smirk widening all the while.
‘I have missed you, Hamilcar. Unlife has hardly been the same since Sigmar called off your hunt for me. The Hallowed Knights did not take the same pleasure in our chase.’ A dizzying combination of sword and glaive reversed us, turned me onto the back foot. An up-swing from the glaive broke open my guard. The halberd’s shaft went up, over my head, my chest open. ‘I appreciated that.’ His sword darted out for my heart.
It struck the flat of Settrus’ hammer.
The Lord-Celestant’s cloak sparkled, killing forces earthing themselves through his armoured frame and rippling out through his sigmarite warcloak.
‘My name is Settrus,’ he announced, in a voice that brooked no contradiction, ‘Lord-Celestant of the Imperishables, and I command you die.’
Mannfred flinched.
The Mortarch of Night actually flinched.
His dismay lasted about a second. And then he started to laugh. If I had hoped it to be the peculiar mode of his demise then disappointment was as swift and unerring as a star-fated arrow from a realmhunter’s bow.
He punched Settrus in the chest, crushing the sigmarite breastplate around his fist, and tossed the Lord-Celestant aside.
‘Oh, Sigmar,’ he cried. His laughter became screeches of merriment. ‘What advantage do you seek to gain from this sleight of hand?’ His smile was predatory and wide as Settrus struggled back up, breath rasping through at least one ruptured lung. ‘You lie, thief. You are not the king whose name you bear! If you were he, then I would be slain already.’
‘Hamilcar!’
My bellow drew the vampire’s attention from the injured Lord-Celestant, and I lunged at him like a wild man from the Everwinter, dropping my halberd shaft over his shoulders and pinning him between it and my body. His feet kicked up off the ground as I bent backwards and pulled. He gnashed his fangs. I grinned.
Settrus, one hand cosseting his chest, hefted his warhammer grimly.
In light of the events that followed, my memories of the fight are understandably somewhat hazy.
I think we were winning…
I slid down the wall of the vault, my body aching as though I’d been run over both ways by a gryph-charger. The rough outline of a fist had been hammered into my armour in several places. I groaned, my head ringing with the faraway sounds of thunder. Settrus, meanwhile, struggled in a chokehold. Mannfred lifted the Lord-Celestant the way a knight might raise a goblet to his king, ignoring the Imperishable’s kicks to his chest and crushing the warrior’s gorget in his grip.
‘To Sigmar,’ Mannfred laughed, his mild manner betrayed by the animal hiss in his words. ‘Do not consider me ungrateful, cur, for holding this Stormvault safe for my return.’
He looked away from the helpless Lord-Celestant.
Only two of Settrus’ Liberators were still fighting, backed into a corner by the furious Carstinian blood knights. The Freeguild had been massacred attempting to fend off the two arcai. Nassam and a couple of spearmen were all that were left, resolutely defending Ansira’s dais, as well as the bowmen pestering the bone behemoths with arrows.