Teclis’s grip on his staff tightened. He could feel the presence of another Incarnate – and one far more powerful than any of those now standing in the Eternal Glade. Together, they might equal him, but separately, they stood no chance. Even here, in the living heart of Athel Loren, he could feel the malignant, suffocating pulse of Shyish – the Wind of Death – and the one who had become its host.
‘An army?’ Malekith snarled. ‘Who would dare?’
‘The Wind of Death,’ Teclis said, before Alarielle could speak. He bowed his head. ‘It is the Incarnate of Death.’ He looked up, meeting the gaze of each Incarnate in turn.
‘The Undying King has come to Athel Loren.’
SEVEN
‘Well, they appear to have prepared quite the welcome for us, I must admit,’ Mannfred von Carstein said as he lounged insouciantly in Ashigaroth’s saddle. The abyssal steed growled in reply. Mannfred patted the creature’s armour-plated neck, and glanced around at his bodyguard of Drakenhof Templars. The armoured vampires sat astride their cannibal steeds, awaiting his orders. Or so they wish me to believe, he thought. His good humour evaporated. He turned back towards the forest and ran his palm over his hairless scalp.
If he’d been human, what he saw before him might have taken his breath away. Banners of all colours and designs were raised together as, for the first time in generations, elves, dwarfs and men prepared to fight as one. The battle-lines had been arranged before the tree line, barring the army of the dead from the Wyrdrioth.
If he’d had any intention of taking his forces into the forest, such a display might have annoyed him. He turned in his saddle, taking in the bleak host which was spread out behind him. The banners of the dead were thick among the pine-crags. An army of worm-picked bone and tattered wings, lit by baleful witch-fires, the dead had spilled down from the mountains in their thousands, their every step precise, guided by a single, crushing will. The will of Nagash.
Mannfred snapped his teeth in frustration. In the years since he had aided Arkhan the Black in resurrecting the Undying King, he had seen everything for which he had worked since his resurrection from the stinking mire of Hel Fenn turn to ashes. Every scheme, every triumph, gone like dust on the wind. All of it ground beneath the remorseless heel of Nagash, as the Undying King prepared for the final war.
Even Sylvania was no longer his – Nagash had given the blighted province over to Neferata to defend, while he marched to war with his remaining lieutenants. Speaking of which… where is the bag of bones? He twisted about, hunting for any sign of his rival. Arkhan was never very far from Nagash these days. Too, he seemed somehow… diminished by the association. As if Nagash’s will had completely obliterated his own. In and of itself, the neutering of his old rival didn’t bother Mannfred all that much. But the implications of it were unpleasant, to say the least.
I’d rather not become a mindless automaton, thank you very much, he thought. Such a fate was beneath him. Then, so was the current state of affairs. Still, reduced circumstances often meant increased opportunities. And there were plenty of the latter, in the wake of the destruction of the Black Pyramid.
He smiled thinly, relishing the memory. At the time, it had not been so enjoyable. But in the aftermath, with several weeks between then and now, he had come to see it for the opportunity it was. A sizeable Chaos army, composed of the rotting dead, giggling plague-daemons and howling barbarians, had smashed through Nagash’s defences with a single-minded determination that put the Undying King’s own forces to shame. Even worse, the enemy had been commanded by old friends and absent companions – the spectral abomination known as the Nameless, and Isabella von Carstein, newly resurrected and as unhinged as ever. One of them would have been bad enough, but the presence of both had made a bad situation all the worse.
The Nameless had ever been treacherous; the dark spirit was a thing fuelled by spite and treachery, more so than any vampire, and its questions and petulant demands had been a constant annoyance. Why Nagash had brought it back, when there were any number of appropriate champions to choose from, Mannfred couldn’t say. The Great Necromancer could stir the waters of death and bring any spirit bobbing to the surface – why not bring back Konrad or one of the other von Carsteins? Anyone other than Vlad, he thought. But no, Nagash had seen fit to bend the Nameless to his will, and then forgotten about it until the creature had returned in the service of a new master.
And Isabella had come with it. Hadn’t that been a surprise, he thought. Of all the von Carsteins he had certainly never expected to see her. Indeed, he’d half expected that Nagash had hidden her soul away in some phylactery somewhere, so as to better control Vlad. It was what Mannfred would have done, had he ever conceived of such a ploy. Unlike Nagash, however, he had no illusions as to just how uncontrollable Vlad truly was. Or had been, Mannfred thought, not without some amusement.
Sylvania had resisted the End Times until that point, inviolate and unchanged. Now, it was a reeking ruin, and what little life it had once had was gone, snuffed by the contest between Nagash and Nurgle. And more than one of Nagash’s lieutenants had been claimed in that conflagration – Luthor Harkon, gone at last to join his treacherous kinsman Walach, and the mighty Vlad von Carstein himself, brought low by the woman he loved.
Mannfred couldn’t restrain a laugh. Goodbye, goodbye, parting is such sweet sorrow, he thought gleefully. So soon returned to the dust where you belong, old man. How the Chaos Gods had got their talons in Isabella’s twisted soul he didn’t know, but she had been the most effective weapon they’d employed to date. She had distracted them all, even Nagash, while the skaven had burrowed beneath Nagash’s nightmare pyramid and claimed a debt that the Undying King had owed them since the razing of Nagashizzar.
It had been a plan worthy of… well, him. He scratched his chin and chuckled, studying the ranks of the living. Of course, if he had been in charge, he would have made sure Nagash had been returned to his well-deserved oblivion, one way or another. Instead, all the Dark Gods had managed to do was stir the tiger from his lair. And now the predator had come to make common cause with his prey, against the fire that threatened to claim the forest around them. Not that the prey knew that just yet. The smell of fear on the wind was delightful.
‘Ah Vlad, if only you could be here – at last, he follows your sage counsel. Too little, too late,’ Mannfred murmured.
‘You sound cheerful for one who has just had his territories stripped from him,’ a familiar voice said. Mannfred twisted about in his saddle and looked down at Arkhan the Black as the latter pushed through the front rank of corpses. ‘I thought you might make your move at last, when he made Neferata castellan of Sylvania.’
Mannfred’s smile faded. ‘My loyalty is as solid as the bedrock beneath our feet, liche.’
Arkhan’s skull tipped back, and a weird scuttling sound rose from his fleshless jaws. Mannfred’s lips peeled back from his fangs. The liche was laughing at him. ‘Oh, be silent, you withered husk,’ he snapped.
‘You are like a spoiled child, angry at having a favoured toy snatched from his grasp,’ Arkhan rasped, staring towards the army of the living. ‘And it is only fitting that Neferata rule… She was born for it, and it would take all four gods of Chaos to shift her. Besides which, there are now more Nehekharan nobles in your precious province than the backward Sylvanian aristocracy you and Vlad dote on. Nagash took the Great Land from them, and now they will have Sylvania in recompense.’