The End Times: The Return of Nagash
- Автор: Рейнольдс Джош
- Год: 2014
- Язык: английский
- Год: Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd.
- Жанр: Боевая фантастика
Электронная книга - «The End Times: The Return of Nagash». Краткое содержание книги:
Kemmler cackled and weird shadows wreathed him, obscuring him from sight as Tancred attacked. Tancred struck out at him, but his blade bit nothing but air again and again. ‘What’s the matter, Tancred? Too long off the tourney field?’ Kemmler hissed, as though he were right beside him. A blow caught Tancred in the back and he lurched forward. He turned, but the flickering shadow-shape was gone before he could so much as thrust. More blows came at him. One of his pauldrons was torn from his shoulder, and rags of chainmail were ripped from his torso. His surcoat was in tatters and his pulse hammered in his head painfully. He couldn’t breathe, could barely see for the sweat, and his muscles trembled with fatigue.
‘I’ve been waiting for this for centuries,’ the necromancer said, circling him, his form rippling like a rag caught in a wind. ‘Your father and grandfather – your whole stinking line – has harried me from the day I first had the misfortune to set foot in this pig’s wallow of a country. Again and again I have been forced to flee from you, but no more. Today your line ends screaming…’
Out of the corner of his eye, Tancred saw the old man’s shape waver into solidity. The necromancer raised his sword for a killing blow, his face twisted in a leer of satisfaction. Tancred spun and his blade pierced the old man’s side, tearing through his flickering cloak. Kemmler screeched like a dying cat and he flailed at his enemy with his blade. Tancred avoided the wild blows and moved in for the kill. He could hear Krell roaring behind him, but he concentrated on the hateful, wrinkled, fear-taut features of the necromancer before him. He drove his shoulder into the old man’s chest and knocked him sprawling. ‘No, old devil, this is the end of you,’ Tancred said. He stood over Kemmler, and raised his blade in both hands. ‘For my father, and in the name of all those whom you have slain and defiled, you will die.’
Before he could strike, however, he felt a sudden ripping pain, and then everything was numb. The world spun crazily. He struck the muddy ground, but felt nothing. He couldn’t feel his legs or his arms. He saw a headless body – whose body was that? – totter, drop its sword, and fall nearby. Everything felt cold now, and he couldn’t breathe. He saw Krell, axe dripping with gore, kick the headless body aside, and drag Kemmler to his feet. Whose body? he thought again, as darkness closed in at the edges of his vision. Whose body is that?
Then, he thought nothing at all.
Heinrich Kemmler watched as Tancred’s head rolled through the mud. He tried to smile, but all he could muster was a grimace of pain. He levered himself awkwardly to his feet with his staff, its skulls, hung from it with copper chains long ago gone green with verdigris, dangling grotesquely. It was a potent artefact, his staff, and he drew strength from it as he gazed down at the wound Tancred had left him as a parting farewell. Blood seeped through his coat and dripped down into the dirt. The wound hurt, but he’d suffered worse in his lifetime. He scrubbed a boot through the dirt. ‘That’s the last taste you’ll have of me,’ he hissed. He looked up as a shadow fell over him.
Krell, coming to check on him, like a faithful hound. Or perhaps a hound-master, checking on his pet. As he gazed up at the scarred and pitted skull of the wight, Kemmler wondered, and not for the first time, if he was fully in control of his own fate. He thought of the shape he sometimes saw, that seemed to lurk in Krell’s shadow – a phantom presence of malevolent weight and titanic malice. He thought that it was the same shape that padded through his fitful dreams on those rare occasions when sleep came. It whispered to him, indeed had been whispering to him all of his life, even as a young man, after he’d first stumbled upon those badly translated copies of the Books of Nagash in his father’s haphazard ancestral library.
Those books had started him on his journey, the first steps that had seen him defy death in all of its forms, benign or sinister. He had fought rivals and enemies alike, striving to stand alone. The Council of Nine and the Charnel Congress – rival consortiums of necromancers – had faded before his might, their petty grave-magics swept aside by his fierce and singular will. He had pillaged the library of Lady Khemalla of Lahmia in Miragliano and driven the vampiress from her den and the city, and in the crypts beneath Castle Vermisace he had bound the liches of the Black Circle to his service, earning him the sobriquet ‘Lichemaster’.
He had counselled counts, princes and petty kings. He had gathered a library of necromantic lore second only to the fabled libraries of forsaken Nagashizzar. He had waged a cruel, secret war on men, dwarfs and elves, prying their secret knowledge from them, and with every death rattle and dying sigh the voice in his head, the pressing thing that had encouraged him and driven him, had purred with delight. Until one day, it had gone silent.
It had abandoned him to a life of scurrying through the hills, a broken, half-mad beggar, his only companion a silent, brooding engine of destruction, whose loyalties were unfathomable. He had thought, once, that Krell was his. Now he knew better. Now he knew that they had been at best, partners, and at worst, slaves of some other mind.
Kemmler’s eyes found the tall, thin shape of Arkhan the Black, as the liche oversaw the rout of the remaining Bretonnian forces. With Tancred’s death, they’d lost heart. In some ways, the living and the dead were remarkably similar. He glared at the liche and then stooped to retrieve his sword. He grunted with pain, but hefted the blade thoughtfully.
Arkhan heard the same voice he had, Kemmler knew. Krell as well; both liche and wight were slaves to it. And that was the fate it intended for Kemmler. Just another puppet. He could hear it again, though only faintly. But it was growing louder, becoming a demanding drumbeat in his fevered brain. It was inevitable that he would surrender.
Kemmler looked at Krell. He spat at the wight’s feet and sheathed his sword. ‘Inevitability is for lesser men.’
ELEVEN
Mannfred brought his blade down on the rat ogre’s broad skull, cleaving it from ears to molars. The beast slid away, releasing its grip on Mannfred’s mount, as he jerked his blade free in a welter of blood and brains. Two more of the oversized vermin lumbered towards him, growling and giving high-pitched bellows. He spurred his mount towards them, his teeth bared in a snarl. As his skeleton steed slipped between the two creatures, he swept his sword out in a single scythe-like motion, sending the heads of both monsters flying.
‘A heady blow, cousin,’ Markos crowed, from nearby. The other vampire’s armour was drenched in skaven blood, and his blade was black with it from tip to the elbow of his sword arm. Markos, like the other Drakenhof Templars, had been at the centre of every recent battle.
‘Shut up and see to our flanks, Markos,’ Mannfred snapped, shaking the blood from his sword. ‘I tire of this.’ He stood up in his saddle and looked around. When his scouts had brought him stories of the lands ahead literally swarming with the rat-things, he had thought they were exaggerating. But in the past weeks, he had seen that, if anything, his spies had been conservative in their estimates of the number of skaven running roughshod over the Border Princes. This was the fifth – and largest of them all by far – horde in as many weeks to bar his path, and he was growing frustrated.
It was as if some unseen power were seeking to block him from getting to Mad Dog Pass. He’d thought it was the skaven, at first, but the hordes he faced were more intent on pillage and loot than on stopping him. They inevitably attempted to retreat when they saw the true nature of the forces at his disposal, as had the first such band they’d encountered.