‘He needs us for more of the same, I reckon,’ replied Mordecaul, darkly. ‘Together we’re too valuable to let out of his sight. These von Carsteins will stab each other in the back just to pass the time.’
‘Perhaps,’ offered Lupio Blaze, grinning weakly, ‘perhaps the goddess Myrmidia lets us live, so she can find out how many we can take with us into the grave, no?’
The Tilean knight made half-hearted stabbing motions, though his sword was long lost. The man was still clad in his golden armour, though the plate was caked with filth and the proud reliefs of his goddess were smeared with blood. Mordecaul avoided his gaze. The knight’s indestructible bravado was hollow as his tone, a bad joke that had long ago turned sour.
There was a grating shriek from the blackening skies and Mordecaul looked up with a start. Above the grotesque carriage wheeled the Swartzhafen devils: a pair of bat-winged vargheists, massive in frame, yet sunken and spry like ogres on the point of starvation. Mordecaul hated them, perhaps more than he hated any other breed of gravebeast, and that was a high claim indeed. Priests of Morr considered resurrection the worst of all sins, for the unliving were direct blasphemies against the death god and the eternal peace he represented. Vampires were the worst of their kind, and vargheists arguably the most hideous of them all.
Mordecaul’s tutors had taught him that the bloodsucking beasts represented the true form of the vampire, a creature of purest evil with all pretence of civility or humanity stripped away. The two fiends wheeling above them now were von Carstein’s pets, obedient to his every whim. They had opened Mordecaul’s wrist in the dread tower of Castle Sternieste. They had forced their captive’s blood to stream out as part of the apostatic ritual that had robbed the power of faith from Sylvania.
The grating, clicking outbursts of the vargheists played on Mordecaul’s nerves; their hisses sounded a little too much like laughter. Yet they were certainly not the worst of the sights he had seen in the weeks since his capture.
The clouds above the vargheists glowed red with a dull but ever-present threat. Mordecaul knew what lurked up there in the darkness: an ironbone palanquin bearing an unholy relic of immense power. He shuddered at the thought, his back aflame at the involuntary motion. He was glad he could not see it now, even if the memory of its dark grandeur waited behind his eyelids for whenever he tried to sleep. Sometimes a great black claw appeared in his mind’s eye, limned with green fire and beckoning slowly.
There was a murmur from up ahead and something half-growled by von Carstein. It sounded to Mordecaul like half of a conversation, though not in any tongue he recognised. The priest shot a baleful glare at his captor. Clad in ancient, blade-ridged armour, the vampire’s pallid scalp glowed grey-yellow in the gloom under a large crown that shimmered with ghostlight.
Mordecaul looked away, his eyes cast down. He dared not look upon the vampire for long. The last time he had, the fiend had sensed the attention on him and turned to meet his gaze. Mordecaul shuddered at the memory of the evils he had seen in von Carstein’s eyes.
‘What’s he saying up there?’ asked Olf Doggert.
‘Bad things,’ said Blaze, unhelpfully.
‘He’s talking to the crown, I think,’ said Mordecaul.
‘The crown?’ asked Elspeth, doubtfully.
‘Yes. No less than the Crown of Sorcery, if my order has it right,’ said the young priest. ‘There are etchings in my temple’s underground vault. It’s an ancient artefact, and it’s supposed to be under magical guard beneath the Temple of Sigmar.’
‘Supposed to be,’ said Blaze. ‘But the vampire, he stole it. We came from Altdorf with Grand Theogonist Volkmar to get it back.’
‘The Crown of Sorcery…’ said Olf, his brow furrowed. ‘Like the one worn by that orc, the one they called the Slaughterer?’
‘The same,’ replied Mordecaul. ‘Legends say it has part of the Great Necromancer’s power inside it. That he speaks to those who wear it, guiding them from the spirit realm.’
Silence stretched out for a few long moments, each of the captives lost in their own dark thoughts.
Von Carstein’s voice filtered back to them again as he muttered a phrase that sounded to Mordecaul more like a Morrite psalm than part of a conversation. Suddenly, the bed of dead limbs and torsos underneath him twitched and convulsed, broken fingers clutching and intestines writhing like snakes. Mordecaul could feel worm-like motions under his legs.
On the other side of the cage, a scarecrow-thin priest Mordecaul believed to be a worshipper of the nature god crawled backwards up the bone spars. His manacles clanked around the raw flesh of his wrists and ankles, but he extricated himself from the twitching limbs of the undead below with admirable dexterity.
Most of the other captives flinched, but rode it out, expressions of distaste etched on their faces. Mordecaul shook his head in frustration and flung a disembodied forearm across the carriage. The limb’s twitching fingers caught onto the bone spars and it flopped down into the lap of the maiden sitting cross-legged opposite the priest of Morr.
Mordecaul’s throat tightened in acute embarrassment, but the gruesome gift did not awaken her from her trance. The elf maiden was so beautiful that Mordecaul could hardly bear to look at her. Gold-wound tresses framed a tapering face, pale and shapely. Her perfect lips mouthed a silent chant. She had not opened her eyes since she had been shackled with the rest of them inside Castle Sternieste.
Mordecaul was grateful in a way. He must hang on to his anger and hatred, not soften it with feelings of awe and admiration. It was the only thing keeping him alive. Instead he focused on the wound at the elf’s wrist, the blood-matted tiara dangling from her hair and the disembodied limb in her lap. It was like looking at a rare and beautiful rose that had been trampled into the dirt.
‘For winter’s sake, stop staring, boy,’ sighed Olf Doggert, looking over his shoulder. ‘She’s one of them Ulthuan lot, and by the look of the jewels, she’s royalty, too. You aren’t getting under her skirts, not in a thousand years. And if you so much as touch her, Sindt,’ growled the Ulrican priest, ‘I’ll break these manacles off just to wrap ’em around your head.’
‘I’ve not touched a hair on her delicate little head,’ said the rangy acolyte opposite Mordecaul, his tone acid. Sindt had spent the first few days pretending to be asleep with his head slumped and his wrists resting on his knees, but on the third night he had finally introduced himself, grudgingly unveiling his allegiance to the trickster god Ranald. Mordecaul had hated him from the moment he had first spoken. He was the sort of man who would steal Morrpennies from a dead man’s eyes.
Sindt looked sidelong at Mordecaul through his curtain of long, black hair. ‘The old wolf’s right, my little grave-grubber. Whatever the hell that elf thinks she’s doing, she don’t need the likes of us distracting her.’
Mordecaul narrowed his eyes, but said nothing.
‘She’s seeking aid,’ said the tall Bretonnian woman standing shackled to the bone prison’s rear. Her tone was courtly, imperious even. Though she was undoubtedly very beautiful, in Mordecaul’s eyes she was nothing compared to the elf princess. ‘I recognise the cadence of the chant,’ she said. ‘She summons the beasts of the wild.’
‘I should like to see that,’ said the nature-priest, a mad light in his eyes. Everyone in the carriage lifted their head towards him, surprised that the skinny vagabond had finally spoken. Mordecaul was unnerved by the way he hung halfway up the cage’s bars with his long fingers and toes locked like talons around the curving spars. More like a beast than a man, he thought. As if the Old World didn’t have enough of that sort of thing already.
Uncomfortable under the sudden attention, the tangle-haired hermit hissed like a cat and dropped back down to land on all fours on the corpse-bed.