The End Times: The Return of Nagash
- Автор: Рейнольдс Джош
- Год: 2014
- Язык: английский
- Год: Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd.
- Жанр: Боевая фантастика
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The catapults fell silent a few moments later, and he allowed himself to feel a flush of victory. The battle had been costly, but he had done it. He made to call out to Gormann when the wind suddenly shifted. The breeze, which had played across the city all morning, increased in speed and strength, becoming a roaring gale. The sun faded as dark clouds gathered, filling the sky. Instinct made him turn in his saddle.
The clouds were thickest and darkest around Heldenhame Keep. ‘No,’ he said, in disbelief. The enemy had got past them, somehow, some way, and they were in his city. He thought of Weskar, and the few men he’d left on the walls and knew that they would not be enough, brave as they were. ‘Sound the retreat,’ he snarled to his trumpeter, jerking his horse about and driving his spurs into its flanks. ‘We have to get back to the city – now!’
But as he said it, he knew it was too late.
The vargheists went first, as was their right and their duty. They hurtled down from the teeth of the storm onto the battlements of Heldenhame Keep, unleashing a frenzy of blood-soaked death upon the men who manned them. Handguns flamed, and here and there, a bat-like shape plummeted with an animal wail. But such occurrences were few and far between. The remaining vargheists took the fight across the battlements and into the passageways and barrack-rooms of the towers, drawing defenders after them into a nightmarish game of cat and mouse, just as Mannfred had intended.
Astride his steed of twisted bone and leathery wings, Mannfred watched the battle unfold with a cruel smile. His strategy had worked to perfection. Leitdorf and his cursed knights had been unable to resist the bait Arkhan had dangled before them, like meat before a lion. They had denuded the castle of defenders, and he intended to make them pay for that error in blood. ‘You thought me caged, Leitdorf? There is no cage built or conjured that can hold me!’ he roared, spitting the words down at the battlements as his mount swooped over them.
Well that’s simply not true, now is it?
Mannfred grimaced. Even here, amidst the fury of the storm, Vlad haunted him. Or perhaps not Vlad. Perhaps something else, something worse. He shook his head. ‘I say what is true. I make my own truth, ghost. Go haunt Arkhan if you wish to play these games. I grow tired of them and you.’
Clouds billowed around him, and he could almost see the outline of a face, the same face he’d glimpsed so many months ago in the garden, and from out of the corner of his eye many times since. It smiled mockingly at him and he snarled in annoyance. Vlad’s voice was loud in his head, as if the long-dead Count of Sylvania was right behind him. This isn’t a game, boy. It’s a warning from a teacher to a student – do you remember that night? The night it all began, the night I opened the Book of Nagash and set us on this path? Do you remember what I said then?
Mannfred twitched and tried to ignore the voice. At his unspoken command, spectral shapes descended through the storm or flowed up through the rocks of the castle. These were the ghosts of madmen, warlocks, witches and worse things, conjured by his skill and impressed into his service by his will. He felt their cruel desire to abate their own sufferings by inflicting pain and death, and encouraged it. At a thought, they swept into battle with those who still manned the walls and artillery towers, killing them in droves. Such things could not be harmed by mortal weapons and as such made effective shock troops.
I asked you a question, little prince… Maybe you didn’t hear me. Or maybe you are afraid to answer…
‘I am fear itself, old man. I cause fear, I do not feel it,’ Mannfred hissed, watching as the defenders of Heldenhame died in their dozens. He longed to join the battle, to drown out Vlad’s needling voice in blood and thunder, but he had to be patient. He could not risk himself, not now. He was too close to victory.
He could feel the Black Armour calling to him as the other artefacts had. It longed to rejoin them, and he could hear its whispers in his mind, imploring him to come and find it. Luckily, he didn’t have to. That was what the ghosts and vargheists were for. They would locate the armour, and when they had, he would strike.
You see it, don’t you? Or are you so blinded by ambition that you cannot temper it with common sense? Vlad hissed. What did I tell you? Answer me!
Mannfred closed his eyes and ground his fangs together. ‘You said that Nagash was not a man, but a disease that afflicted any who dared use his works. A pestilence of the mind and soul, infecting those who sought to use his power.’ His eyes opened. ‘And maybe he is. But just as he used a plague to wipe the Great Land from the ledger of history, I will use him to clean off the world and remake it in my image. His Great Work shall be superseded by mine, and I shall do what you never could – what Ushoran and Neferata never could. I will seat myself on the throne of the world and rule unto eternity. My people will worship me as a god and I shall serve them as a king ought,’ he said. ‘I have waited so long for this moment. I shall wait no more.’
Then you will be broken on his altar, as Kemmler was. As Arkhan is, so shall you be, my son, Vlad said, softly.
‘I am not your son,’ Mannfred shrieked, bending forward in his saddle, his eyes glaring at the clouds about him.
But you might have been. Now you are… what you are, and I am dead. Yet still, you conjure me to beseech me for my advice, as a son would. I am you, boy. I am your wisdom, your wariness given voice. In this moment, you know that you can still escape the trap that yawns before you. You can still be free of the shadow of Nagashizzar and its legacy, Vlad said intently. Only now, it wasn’t Vlad’s voice he heard, but his own. His own thoughts, his own worries and suspicions given shape and voice.
‘I am free,’ he said.
The words sounded hollow.
In his head, something laughed. Not him, not Vlad, but something else. Something that had shadowed him since he’d returned from the muck and mire of Hel Fenn. He closed his eyes, glad that he had left the Drakenhof Templars to safeguard Arkhan.
Freedom is an illusion, his voice murmured. Power carries its own chains. But you can slip this one now… Run. Retreat… Go anywhere else. Fly to the farthest corner of the world until its reckoning. Live out what remains of these final days as your own master. Leave Nagash to rot in whatever hell holds him. Just… leave.
‘I will not die,’ Mannfred said. ‘I shall not die. I shall not perish a beggar. I was born for greatness…’
Your mother was a concubine. You would never have ruled your city of jewelled towers and tidy streets, and you know it, his voice said. You were born and you died and you returned. You have ever meddled and sought to control the uncontrollable, and what has that brought you, save strife and madness?
‘I am not mad. Konrad was the mad one, not me!’ he shouted.
Then why are you talking to yourself? Why pretend it was Vlad’s ghost haunting you when it was your own fear? Run, fool. Fly from here. Leave everything behind. Do not die again for a fool’s dream!
Down below, there was a flash of light. Aged blades, blessed long ago, blazed like torches as the castellans of the castle rallied. The blessed weapons drove back the confused spirits, cutting their ethereal flesh. It was time for Mannfred to take a hand, if he still wished for victory.
Did he still wish it? That was the question. Some part of him, wiser perhaps than that to which he’d given voice, screamed that it was already too late, that he was being pulled in the wake of a black comet that could not be stopped from reaching its destination. An undercurrent of laughter greeted this and he looked up, trying to read the future in the skeins of the sorcerous storm clouds he had summoned.