The End Times:
The Bone Cage
(Phil Kelly)
The world is dying, but it has been so since the coming of the Chaos Gods.
For years beyond reckoning, the Ruinous Powers have coveted the mortal realm. They have made many attempts to seize it, their anointed champions leading vast hordes into the lands of men, elves and dwarfs. Each time, they have been defeated.
Until now.
In the frozen north, Archaon, a former templar of the warrior-god Sigmar, has been crowned the Everchosen of Chaos. He stands poised to march south and bring ruin to the lands he once fought to protect. Behind him amass all the forces of the Dark Gods, mortal and daemonic. When they come, they will bring with them a storm such as has never been seen. Already, the lands of men are falling into ruin. Archaon’s vanguard run riot across Kislev, the once-proud country of Bretonnia has fallen into anarchy and the southern lands have been consumed by a tide of verminous ratmen.
The men of the Empire, the elves of Ulthuan and the dwarfs of the Worlds Edge Mountains fortify their cities and prepare for the inevitable onslaught. They will fight bravely and to the last. But in their hearts, all know that their efforts will be futile. The victory of Chaos is inevitable.
These are the End Times.
‘Get out, quick! It’s crushing me!’
The ribs of the colossal corpse cart shuddered, straining to snap closed on the scarecrow of a man who was holding them open. The nature-priest cried out with the effort of separating the spars of the bone cage for a few more precious seconds. Almost horizontal in his straining crouch, the priest’s spine and the soles of his feet were bleeding badly.
Roaring, a barrel of a man with unkempt white hair moved in to reinforce the skinny priest, shoving his shoulder into the gap. Though he was unmistakably past his prime, the big man had the strength of a veteran woodsman. Together, the two men held the cage’s ribs open. A fellow captive, a swarthy knight in filthy golden plate mail, took his opportunity and pitched sidelong through the bars between them. As he rolled out onto the damp grass and came up with his longsword drawn, a winged horror swooped down to intercept him, shrieking like a hag.
Around the bone cage’s walls, dozens of pale arms covered in suppurating sores pushed through, grabbing and snatching at the robed inhabitants that were still alive inside. The prisoners kicked and battered at the lunging white limbs, the sound of breaking bone punctuating the excited yelps of the ghouls straining to get inside.
Many of the men and women inside the cage were still manacled to its bone walls, but several of them had slipped their bonds and were piling out onto the wasteland beneath. High above them, a large stone carriage descended from the swirling thunderheads, held aloft by a blue-green court of ghosts. The reliquary at the palanquin’s rear held something so evil it made even the night air shiver in disgust.
Mordecaul Cadavion commended his soul to Morr, braced himself and pitched through the gap in the prison’s osseus ribs.
Mordecaul awoke from his uneasy slumber, wincing as the bone prison hit another rut in the rough Sylvanian road. The cloth of the priest’s black robes tugged at the scabbing welts across his back, the legacy of his merciless whippings at Castle Sternieste. As if in sympathy, the gaping wound in his opened wrist gave another dull pulse.
Around him, slumped on a bed of dead bodies, were nine men and women shackled to the enormous rib cage structure that formed the cage at the arcane carriage’s rear. At its fore was a complex yoke of bone and sinew that was yanked along the road by six corpses clad in lacquered black plate. They were the remains of knights who had confronted the fiend von Carstein outside Castle Sternieste, resurrected to serve him in death where they opposed him in life. Mordecaul could just about make out von Carstein himself riding through the gloom at the head of the strange procession, an armoured silhouette mounted upon a skeletal stallion.
Mordecaul’s fellow prisoners were mired in a morass of disembodied limbs and opened torsos. Their heads nodded in silence as the prison trundled and bumped along the path. Each bore the same ragged wound as the priest, red-black and in many cases burning with infection. Most of their number were leaning their backs against the osseous bars of their prison. Some, like Mordecaul, were snatching infrequent moments of sleep in the hope of regaining some strength.
Yet true rest was all but impossible. The stink of the cadavers lining the bottom of the bone cage was tremendous. Plump flies buzzed and frolicked in slit guts, blood-pooled eye sockets, even in the wounds sustained by the captives themselves during their attempts to break free.
The young priest knew that he was going to die, used for whatever foul purposes Mannfred had in mind and then either abandoned far from Morr’s embrace or – worse still – resurrected to serve the vampire in death. When he had first been snatched from the renovations at Vance’s temple of Morr, the thought had been terrifying and agonising in equal measure. Now Mordecaul almost welcomed the dire truth of his predicament. It fed his anger – anger he could use as fuel to stay alive, and courage to act when the chance came close.
Mordecaul pulled at his bunched robes, scratching through the cloth at the lesions on his back, trying in vain to find a shred of comfort.
‘Don’t keep picking at them,’ hissed the round-faced matron shackled across from him.
The Shallyan priestess ripped another strip of cloth from the wimple she had tucked in the crook of her arm, winding it into a bandage that still had a semblance of cleanliness. Mordecaul had watched her pure white habit turn filthy brown over the last few days as she worked tirelessly to heal those of their number she could reach. Forgoing sleep altogether, she had prayed and prayed to the goddess of healing and mercy, but to no avail. In the end she’d had to resort to battlefield triage and whatever treatments she could administer.
An elderly Sigmarite priest lay slumped unconscious at her side. Though he wore manacles like the rest of them, he had not been bound to the cage’s walls. His bloodied bronze cuirass and heavy belt lay discarded in the muck nearby. The priestess had been right to treat the Sigmarite first, for his wounds were without doubt the most severe. Mordecaul could have sworn he’d seen the man’s brain glistening greyish-pink through the jagged wound in his skull. Dark with gore, his bandages uncoiled slowly in the Shallyan priestess’s lap.
‘If you keep picking at those whip-wounds,’ she muttered crossly as she fussed with her patient, ‘they’ll be infected in no time.’
Mordecaul let his good hand fall back down, his expression sullen.
‘What does it matter, sister?’ he asked.
She ignored him, tying fresh cloth around her patient’s split skull.
‘The boy’s got a point, Elspeth,’ said the bearded brute at the foremost point of the carriage. ‘We’ll all be food for the ravens before long.’
The big man was an Ulrican priest – Mordecaul recognised the wolf-sigil branded into his forehead. He sat with his back to his fellow captives, watching the horizon for a deliverance that no one truly expected to come.
‘Then answer me this, Olf Doggert. Why are we still alive? He’s already used our blood for that damned ritual at Sternieste, and somehow drained the faith out of this place. So why hasn’t he killed us?’