The prison’s wheel hit a large root, and the whole carriage shuddered. A disembodied leg fell out of the back of the corpse-bed, rolling to a halt in Mordecaul’s line of sight. The young priest sat bolt upright as one of the loping shadows that had started to follow them a few miles back darted forward and snatched it up. A pallid scavenger of little flesh and too much skin, it leered at him over its prize before receding into the gloom. Its expression had been drawn and crazed, but there had been something undeniably human behind its gormless, blood-flecked grin.
‘Ghouls…’ he muttered.
Mordecaul’s order had a special hatred for ghouls. Cannibals who fed on the flesh of the dead, the creatures regularly raided those crypts and graveyards that were not consecrated in the name of the death god. The young priest had seen a fair few of the creatures in his time, even killed a handful in them himself in defence of his sacred sites. Yet these ones were even more starved and disgusting than usual. The unnatural darkness that had robbed the life from Sylvania, driving its people to flee the province or die, had also robbed the vampire counts’ minions of their sustenance.
Here and there the prison had trundled past scattered patches of rags and rusted armour that had been gnawed to scraps, the last remnants of mercenaries and adventurers who had trodden these paths. The stories told that sometimes, lost and starving, they had found new lives as cannibals instead.
As Mordecaul watched them approach a large bundle near the middle of the track, Sindt’s hand shot out from the bone prison. Quick as a snake he grabbed a sword hilt and yanked it from its scabbard, the bone spars of the giant cage shuddering as if in shock at the sudden motion. Sindt tossed the sword towards Lupio Blaze and folded his arms back into his loose crouch in one smooth movement. The Tilean knight caught the sword with commendable dexterity, plunging it into the nearest torso so that only its hilt protruded in the shadow of his knee.
Drawn by the flash of movement, the vargheist that had been injured by the elf princess’s eagle swooped along the forest path and alighted on the top of the cage’s bars. The enormous creature scrabbled around until its beady eyes stared right down at them through a mask of red bone. Strings of bloody drool pattered into their midst, but not one of the prisoners was foolish enough to meet the thing’s gaze. Eventually it flapped away, shriek-clicking to the wing-devil that hung upside down from the canopy up ahead.
‘Not a bad snatch,’ said Mordecaul, his voice a little shaky.
‘Lucky fingers,’ said Sindt.
The path grew wider as it wound onwards, turning into a broad oak-lined clearing. Morrsleib’s wan green light threw twitching shadows from the ancient trees, their cracked branches grasping slowly at the air. Mordecaul craned his neck to look past Olf’s bulk at the front of the carriage, and saw a shattered ruin atop a small hill in the distance.
‘Morr’s blade,’ he said under his breath. ‘We’re here.’
At the head of the procession, Mannfred von Carstein cried out in jubilation, taking the Crown of Sorcery from his head and stowing it on the horn of his saddle. His skeletal horse broke into a gallop, its hoofbeats unnaturally loud in the cloying quiet of the wood.
The tower up ahead was a many-tiered mass of tumbledown walls and shattered minarets. Its mossy stone walls were veined by creeping, pulsing black tendrils that looked nothing to do with natural vegetation. Stone skeletons stood vigil around its walls, robed in the manner of priests and clutching roses and stylised scythes in each hand. As the carriage’s armoured zombies pulled it closer, Mordecaul could see the sinewy remnants of a corpse dangling from the ruined tower’s upper storeys. A thick noose of torn velvet was tight around its neck.
The vampire thundered in close, dismounting from his steed and disappearing from sight into the depths of the ruined tower. As von Carstein descended the stone steps to the basement a cloud of bats were startled from their nest in the corpse hanging high above, revealing that the body still wore the scruffy black robes of a priest. The cadaver’s face was a barren mask of bone, though pennies had been pressed deep into its eye sockets, an offering made in the hope of a proper afterlife.
‘Ghalacryst,’ moaned Mordecaul. ‘So it’s true. The tome was buried here.’
‘One of them, at least,’ said the Bretonnian woman archly. ‘He still needs three more, I believe.’
‘And how come you know so much about all this, my lady?’ asked Olf, staring up from under knotted brows.
‘You mistake the lady for her messenger,’ said the Bretonnian, her hooded eyes glistening with amused contempt. ‘And even then, think again.’
‘Sindt, look,’ said Blaze. ‘A helm.’
Lying amongst the scattered debris at the edge of the clearing was a fleshless skeleton, and sure enough, a dented bronze helmet was next to it. As the prison ground forward, it became obvious to Mordecaul that it would pass close by.
Sindt slumped over, his shoulder close to the bone spars nearest the skeleton. As the helmet came within arm’s reach, Sindt shot out a pale arm and grabbed for it.
The jagged bone spars closed with a snap, clipping off the trickster’s arm in a spurt of blood.
The prison erupted into bedlam. Sindt gave a deafening scream, clutching the ruined shoulder-stump that geysered blood all over Olf’s lap. The giant Ulrican stood up with a roar, shrugging off his opened manacles and barging forward to put his shoulder against the gap in the bars. Russett leapt up to wedge himself bodily in the opening, bracing his shoulders and bare feet on either side of the gap and pushing it as wide as he could. Blaze drew the captured sword from its corpse-sheath, muttering prayers to Myrmidia as he tried to lever open his manacles.
Their vargheist jailors shrieked, their oddly angular heads whipping round. Wings snapped wide as the beasts took flight, a pack of ghouls loping from the forest eaves behind them. Ruddy illumination lit the entire clearing as low thunderheads formed a whirling vortex, the reliquary bearing the Hand of Nagash at its centre. The Mortis Engine’s spectral guardians emitted soul-splitting shrieks as they lowered its palanquin towards the prisoners. Mordecaul could feel his skin tauten and his scalp tingle as the vile relic came closer.
‘Get through the gap!’ shouted Olf, his broad face turning an ugly red with the effort of holding the ribs of the cage apart. Above him, Russet’s feet were trickling blood down the jagged edges of the bone spars, the nature-priest giving a thin moan as he fought against the unholy strength of the prison’s magic. Mordecaul yanked forward, but he was weak with hunger, his shackles still bound tight. The vargheists were nearly upon them, and the ghouls loped in close, arms outstretched and mouth agape.
‘Sigmar Unberogen!’ shouted the old Sigmarite priest lying amongst the corpses, rearing up from Elspeth’s side to bring his discarded metal cuirass down hard upon Blaze’s damaged manacles. The blow sent chain links scattering in all directions. Mordecaul’s heart filled with hope as he realised the warrior priest was Volkmar the Grim, Grand Theogonist and head of the Sigmarite cult. But rather than banishing the undead clustering around him, the old priest bared his teeth in an atavistic snarl and slammed his jagged cuirass into the pate of one grasping ghoul after another.
Screeching down from above, the faceless vargheist lunged a taloned arm towards Blaze. Its claw grabbed air as the Tilean dived headlong through the gap in the bone cage. The knight landed well enough, tucking into an awkward sideways roll before coming up fast to impale a leaping ghoul on the point of his stolen sword. Sweeping his arm wide, he flung the cadaverous creature from his blade right into the path of the swooping vargheist. The impact knocked the winged monster from the skies in a flurry of leathery flesh.