Lileath shook her head and held out her hand. Reluctantly, he placed the locket into it. With no sign of effort, the goddess crushed it and flung the shimmering dust into the air, to create a portal of purest starlight before him.
Araloth turned. Keyberos took a step towards him. ‘What does it mean? What is she here for?’
Araloth glanced back at Lileath, squared his shoulders and said, ‘The Everchild’s fate is written, my kinsmen. And we have no power to change it.’ As the elves raised their voices in protest, he held up his hand. ‘But there is a task for us elsewhere. On a distant shore, a great battle will be waged and the warriors of Athel Loren must go and wage it. Lileath intends to take me there. Any who wish to follow may. There is no shame to those who do not.’
Keyberos looked around at the gathered warriors, and then smiled sadly. ‘I think you know our answer, Araloth. We followed you this far. And one battle is as good as the next.’
Araloth smiled, turned and took Lileath’s outstretched hand. There was a flash of light, and the host of Athel Loren passed from Sylvania and mortal sight.
‘Five leagues,’ Mannfred murmured, as he watched the dead fall upon the Knights of Sigmar’s Blood. He stood on the edge of the vast garden of Morr, which occupied the southern edge of the village of Klodebein, and leaned on the hilt of his sword. ‘Five leagues between him and his allies.’ He glanced at Elize, his eyes wide in mock surprise. ‘Not even my doing. His own impatience brought him here. I merely seized the moment,’ he said with some bemusement. ‘Would that all our enemies were so foolish, eh, cousin?’
‘One could argue that any who choose to invade Sylvania on the edge of winter are prone to foolishness,’ Elize said. She sat atop her horse, and looked past the tombs that crowded the garden, to where the ramshackle houses of Klodebein sat. Mannfred followed her gaze. He could hear the terrified communal thudding of the hearts of the inhabitants as they waited out the massacre occurring just past their walls. Barely a quarter of the living population of Sylvania yet remained, most in villages like this, close to the Stir. He’d wondered for a moment if the folk of Klodebein might try and warn the knights of the danger they were riding into, but instead they hid in their homes, waiting for it all to end and the never-ending night to become silent once more. He smiled and turned his attention back to the battle.
He’d have thought a seasoned campaigner like Leitdorf would know better than to lead his column through what amounted to a very large graveyard in Sylvania, but then maybe wearing all of that armour gave some men an inflated sense of invincibility. Or maybe it was Leitdorf’s infamous impatience in action. It was that same impatience that had seen him leave Heldenhame Keep undefended, and it had finally got him killed. Or so Mannfred intended to ensure.
When his scouts had reported that the joint force of knights and elves had left Templehof, he’d thought perhaps that they were planning on attacking Sternieste. Or worse, they’d somehow discovered his plan for keeping their allies at bay, and were rushing to the aid of the dwarfs at Red Cairn. Instead, they’d begun to march slowly through Sylvania’s heartlands, making for the Glen of Sorrows. That alone would have been enough to prompt Mannfred into taking action; Arkhan had not yet completed his preparations for the Geheimnisnacht ceremony, and if their enemies reached the glen before then, everything they had accomplished until now would be for naught.
Luckily, Leitdorf and his ironmongers had ever so obligingly ridden right into the jaws of a trap. As the knights rode through the closely packed tombs of the garden of Morr, the vargheists Mannfred had roused from a nearby well had struck. The Klodebein Brothers had betrayed Vlad at the Battle of Fool’s Rest, and they and their equally treacherous sister had been sealed in their coffins at the bottom of the village’s well since Konrad and Mannfred had run them to ground in the days following their disastrous ambush. The centuries had not been kind, but it had built in them a ferocious hunger, which they duly vented on the hapless knights.
As the newly freed vargheists revelled in a maelstrom of blood and death, Mannfred gestured and incited the death-magics that had long since seeped into the tombs and graves of the garden. As the first blindly clutching hands thrust upwards through the damp soil, Mannfred turned to Elize. ‘How long do you think it’ll take them to realise there’s no escape?’
‘A few minutes, if ever,’ Elize said. ‘Men like these do not admit defeat easily. The original Drakenhof Templars went to the grave assured of eventual victory, if you’ll recall.’
‘Would you care to place a wager, dear cousin?’
‘What would we wager?’ Elize asked carefully.
‘I’m sure we can think of something,’ Mannfred said, and laughed. His mind stretched out, awakening the dead in the sparse forest that surrounded Klodebein. Soon there were hundreds of shambling cadavers filling the garden, attacking the already embattled knights with worm-eaten fingers, brown, broken teeth and rusted blades. Soon there were ten corpses for every knight, and Leitdorf’s warriors began to die.
A vargheist shrieked, drawing Mannfred’s attention. He recognised Hans Leitdorf as the latter smashed his shield into the monster’s face, rocking it back. The vargheist reared, wings flapping, and Leitdorf rammed his sword through its throat.
‘Von Carstein!’ Leitdorf roared, twisting in his saddle to face Mannfred. He spurred his horse into a gallop, and several knights followed him, smashing aside any of the dead that got in their way.
‘Oh dear, he’s seen me. Whatever shall I do, cousin?’ Mannfred asked.
‘You demean yourself with such flippancy,’ Elize said softly.
Mannfred looked up at her. ‘Do I? How kind of you to let me know, cousin. Wherever would I be without your words of wisdom?’
Elize continued as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘Leitdorf has killed many of our kind, cousin. Do you recall Morliac? Or the Baron Dechstein? What of the Black Sisters of Bluthof? They were von Carsteins, cousin, and Leitdorf slew them all. You would do well not to underestimate him.’
Mannfred laughed. ‘You sound like someone I used to know.’
‘Did you listen to her?’
Mannfred didn’t answer. His amusement faded as he watched Leitdorf gallop towards him. Elize was correct, whether he wished to admit it or not. After Volkmar, Leitdorf was his greatest foe in the region, and he had expected to feel a certain sense of satisfaction at his destruction. Instead, he felt… nothing. Annoyance, at best. He should have been at the Nine Daemons, overseeing Arkhan’s preparations. Instead, he was wasting valuable time dispatching a fool. He was so close to ultimate victory that he could taste it, and he was as impatient for Geheimnisnacht as Leitdorf was to get to grips with him.
The ground shook as Leitdorf drew closer. Mannfred watched him come, impressed despite himself by the mixture of bravado and stupidity that seemed to drive men like Leitdorf. Had he ever been so foolish? He glanced at Elize, and knew that she would say ‘yes’. She had seen him at his worst, skulking in Vlad’s shadow and scheming away against his kith and kin. Neferata too would have agreed with that assessment, he suspected. Then, the Queen of the Silver Pinnacle had never been shy about sharing her opinion on things that did not concern her.
Mannfred shook the thoughts aside. What Elize or even Neferata thought of him mattered little enough, and would matter not at all come Geheimnisnacht. He stretched out a hand and drew up the skeletons that slumbered beneath the ground at his feet. They rose in shuddering formation, and at a twist of his hand, they formed a tight phalanx immediately before him, directly in Leitdorf’s path. Timeworn spears of bronze were levelled at the approaching knights.