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:
Nyktolos shook his head, banishing the memory. He wanted no part of the dwarfs and their explosives and cannons, thank you all the same. Better to let them vent their petty grudges on more deserving targets.
Down below, horns wailed and the beastmen slowed in their tramping. That wouldn’t do. The dwarfs were still several leagues away, and marching towards Templehof. Nyktolos clucked his tongue and set his spurs to his mount. ‘Come, my dear. It is feeding time, I expect,’ he said as the terrorgheist shrieked and dived down towards the trees. The rest of the swarm followed him, screeching and chittering. Nyktolos drew his sword as the terrorgheist crashed through the canopy and landed atop a squalling centigor. Several more of the snorting quadrupedal beastmen charged towards Nyktolos, who flung himself from his seat with a yowl. He chopped through a hairy midsection as he landed, separating the centigor’s top half from its lower body.
Quicker than thought, Nyktolos spun and blocked a club that would have dashed his brains across the forest floor. The centigor reared, and Nyktolos slashed open its belly as he ducked aside. The beast fell with a squeal. Beastmen rushed headlong out of the trees, covered in bats, and the terrorgheist lunged forwards, making a meal of two of the closer ones.
Nyktolos killed another, opening its throat to the bone with a casual flick of his blade. More creatures poured out of the trees. He surged amongst them for a moment, like a tiger amongst goats, killing them with wide sweeps of his sword and his own talons. Then, satisfied that he had regained their attentions, he leapt back onto the terrorgheist and swatted it between the ears with the flat of his blade. ‘Up, you great, greedy beast! Up!’
The giant bat-thing heaved itself up into the air with an explosive shriek, tearing apart the forest canopy as it clambered into the sky. Nyktolos guided the creature in a low swoop across the tops of the trees. ‘Follow me, little beasts. Your playmates await you!’
Malagor roared in fury as his herd rampaged out of control through the forest. They were going the wrong way and there was little even he could do about it. The horde was driven by its primal appetites. The cloven-hoofed warriors had left a trail of devastation in their wake, burning and pillaging a path right into the heart of Sylvania, and Malagor felt little impetus to control their baser urges, so long as they kept moving in the right direction.
What lay at the end of their trail was a mystery even to him. He knew only that though he was the truest of servants, he had failed to fulfil the desires of the Dark Gods three times. Three times Arkhan the Black had slipped away from him, and three times Malagor had given chase. He had pursued the bone-man across the world, from mountain to forest to plain and back again, and always, always the dead-thing escaped. With each failure, the whispers of his gods had grown in volume, until he thought his brain would be pounded to mush inside his vibrating skull. But they had not punished him, as he’d feared they might.
The Dark Gods knew that even though he was their truest child, his kin were less so. They were too wild to ignore their primitive urges and too feral to be organised for long. His failures had been no fault of his, but a weakness in the tools he’d been gifted. The gods knew this, and they whispered their endearments to him, urging him towards Sylvania. As he’d driven what was left of his horde after the debacle at Heldenhame into the lands of his enemy, more and more beastmen emerged from the forests and submitted to his will. By the time he’d reached Sylvania’s northern border, and the crumbling wall of bone that protected it, the tumult of his horde could be heard for many leagues in all directions.
It had been a simple enough matter to gain entry after that, between his magics and the brute strength of his followers. They’d poured into Sylvania like a flood, following the pull of the Dark Gods. Now, however, that pull was being disrupted yet again by his followers’ bestial instincts. No matter how many he killed, order could not be restored and they still pursued the flapping abomination that had harried them for some days.
It attacked and retreated, drawing his followers ever further away from their true goal, playing on their bloodlust and stupidity. He’d come close to killing the vampire more than once, but the creature was almost as slippery as Arkhan. It avoided open battle, and seemed content to bloody his flanks and slip away, just out of view.
Malagor flew over his loping warriors, easily dodging through the twisted woodland, his frustration bubbling away inside him. If he could get ahead of them, he might be able to head them off. That hope died a quick death, however, as he exploded out of the trees and saw what awaited him in the open ground beyond.
Arrayed about an irregular circle of standing stones the colour of freshly spilled blood, was a force Malagor recognised easily, though he’d never seen them before. Gold-topped standards rose above a wall of shields, and the air was cut by the stink of gunpowder. Malagor rose into the air, his black wings flapping, and tried to understand what he was seeing.
There were dwarfs ahead, thousands of them. Their numbers were nothing compared to those of his followers, but they should not have been there, and certainly not arrayed for battle. It made no sense – why were the stunted ones here? Was this part of the Dark Gods’ plan? Or was it something else?
As he tried to come to grips with it, he heard the first of his followers burst through the tree line. The big gor, a chieftain called Split-Nose, snorted in incredulity as his watery, yellow eyes fixed on the distant shieldwall. Then he brayed and raised the axe he held over his head. Malagor growled in realisation. He had to stop them. If he failed again, there would no next chance.
‘No,’ he roared, and fell out of the sky like a rock. He crashed down onto Split-Nose and crushed the gor’s broad skull with the end of his staff. He swung the staff like a club, battering another beastman off his hooves as they began to straggle through the trees in small groups. ‘No! Go back – Dark Gods say go back!’
A bellow greeted his cry and the ground trembled beneath his feet. A moment later an enormous doombull smashed a tree into splinters with its gargantuan axe as it charged out of the forest. Its piggy eyes were bulging redly with blood-greed, and slobber dripped from its bull-like jaws as it charged forward. Malagor bleated in anger as he thrust himself skywards, narrowly avoiding the doombull. Minotaurs, centigors and beastmen followed it. It was as if some great dam had been cracked, and a tide of hair and muscle flowed out, seeking to roll over everything in its path.
Malagor could only watch as his lesser kin charged towards the dwarf shieldwall, heedless of anything save their own desire to kill, defile and devour that which was in front of them. He could feel the displeasure of the Dark Gods beating down on him, and with a strangled snarl, he flung himself after his followers, eager to drown out the voices of the gods in the noise of slaughter.
‘Come on then, scum! Come kiss my axe,’ Ungrim Ironfist roared hoarsely. His voice was almost gone, and his limbs felt like lead. Nevertheless, he and his bodyguard of Slayers bounded out from amidst the dwarf shieldwall as the pack of bellowing minotaurs and bestigors charged towards the dwarf lines stationed around the blood-red standing stones. From behind him, volley after volley of cannon fire tore great, bloody furrows in the ever-shifting ranks of the children of Chaos, but the hundreds who died only served to make room for those who thundered in their wake. The air shuddered with the roar of the guns and the maddened braying of the horde, as it had for days.