Konrad [02] - Shadowbreed

  A WARHAMMER NOVEL

  Shadowbreed

  Konrad - 02

  David Ferring

  (An Undead Scan v1.0)

  This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage.

  At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it is a land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests and vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reigns the Emperor Karl-Franz, sacred descendant of the founder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder of his magical warhammer.

  But these are far from civilised times. Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war. In the towering World’s EdgeMountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands of the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods. As the time of battle draws ever near, the Empire needs heroes like never before.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sigmar’s double-headed warhammer sliced through the air, and with each mighty sweep another of the green horde died, its head smashed to a bloody pulp. But still the goblins came on and on — and each of them became a crushed corpse, victim to the sacred dwarf weapon.

  The dwarfs had named the legendary hammer “Ghal-maraz” — “Skull-splitter” — and today it truly lived up to its reputation. Time after time the heavy hammer swept down, and each time another of the repulsive enemy was no more.

  This was destined to be the day that marked a turning point in the tide of history, the day that the greatest of all names entered the annals of legend: when Sigmar, chief of the Unberogens, leader of the eight united human tribes, became known as “Hammer of the Goblins” — Sigmar Heldenhammer. It was the day that the foundations of the Empire were laid. And it was the day that the goblins and orcs and all their unholy allies were banished from the known world.

  Dwarf and goblin were ancient enemies. They had fought long and brutally for supremacy of the lands between the Sea of Claws and the World’s EdgeMountains, and it seemed that the greenskins must inevitably triumph through sheer weight of numbers. After centuries of war, the dwarfs were finally driven back to their precipitous homeland, leaving a few hundred valiant volunteers to protect their retreat through Black Fire Pass. This had seemed the last hope of the dwarf nation, although for the rearguard there was no such hope; it was their destiny to die, surrendering their lives so that their people might survive.

  But instead of destroying the heroes left to delay their advance, it was the goblin armies who were annihilated. Trapped between the dwarfs and their new confederates, the burgeoning young race known as humans, the green abominations were slaughtered by the hundred, by the thousand, until the mountain pass was littered with their twisted bodies and the very rocks indelibly stained by their foetid blood.

  It was Sigmar who led his troops into triumphant combat against the common enemy, and as he charged through the massed goblin ranks, his mighty hammer exacted its deadly toll…

  Again and again, the weapon swung, and each sweep left another hideous victim writhing in agony, its brains oozing from its pulverized green skull.

  Konrad felt invincible, a new strength surging through his limbs, his spirit infused by some powerful force that seemed as if it had always been a part of him yet was asserting itself from deep within for the first time.

  The goblins screamed out their agony and tried to scuttle away from the merciless axe. It was not only the blade that they feared, they were also attempting to escape the sudden burst of light which had illuminated their foul underground lair — from the thunder and lightning that seemed to have invaded their dark domain.

  Konrad’s lips were drawn back, bared in an atavistic snarl. He could feel the blood lust of his primitive ancestors flood through his body, sensed that he was no longer alone within himself.

  Countless generations urged him on, became a part of him, and he was almost a spectator to the massacre. It was as if his arms were not his own, that the heavy axe they held was directed by a force which was beyond his control.

  This was his moment in time, and slaying the goblin hell-spawn was his mission. He struck out mechanically, his whole body an efficient killing machine unhampered by thought. All he needed was instinct and reaction.

  The bodies of countless greenskins lay sprawled across the floor of the ancient dwarf temple, their blood flowing as freely as in an abattoir.

  And then, almost abruptly, there were no more victims. Every deformed body was dead or dying. Any survivors had crept away into the darkness, and Konrad finally ceased slaying. The wounded he allowed to suffer, letting death claim them slowly and painfully. He rested on the handle of his axe, breathing heavily, and gazed at the charnel house he had created. His expression of murderous violence curled into a contented grin. He wiped at the sticky blood which coated his face. It was not his blood, but the dead no longer had any need for it.

  Slowly he emerged from his killing trance, and gazed up at the source of light that had suddenly illuminated the cavern and which had been his salvation. Before the brilliant sunburst, his foes had begun to overwhelm him in the darkness of their own world.

  The transformation as if from night to day must have been the work of Anvila, he realized. The dust was still settling from the rocks which had fallen from above to allow light to reach the temple for the first time in millennia.

  Konrad turned towards the distant agonized figure of Wolf.

  Konrad, Wolf and Anvila had come to these mountains in search of a lost dwarf temple, where reputedly a fortune in jewels and gold was hidden. Instead they had found a goblin stronghold — or rather, the goblins had found them.

  Wolf had been captured and tortured, and was about to be slowly sacrificed when Konrad had arrived. Now Wolf hung from his wrists, naked, covered in blood. The blood was red, not green; it was his own blood, human blood.

  As Konrad made his way towards his comrade, he realized that Wolf looked different somehow. His body seemed deformed, his limbs misshapen. Possibly this was because his whole body was twisted in pain; but his tattooed face had also taken on a strange look, as if his jaw were stretched. And although his flesh was soaked with blood, it also appeared matted with thick hairs. Almost as if he were the primal creature that Konrad had sensed himself becoming…

  Wolf was staring at him strangely, as if he did not recognize his friend, or as though he were still afraid that he was about to be slowly mutilated and finally slain.

  “Didn’t you hear what I ordered?” he managed to say, his voice weak. “You were supposed to kill me, not him.” He spat towards the supine body of the goblin shaman. A ball of blood and spit landed on the corpse’s ritually lacerated face.

  Wolf had issued his command when Konrad first entered the hidden cavern, when they had seen each other from afar by the light of Konrad’s burning torch. Instead, Konrad had used his one arrow to shoot the shaman that had been torturing its helpless human victim.

  “You can’t rely on a bow — it’s a peasant weapon,” Konrad said, his reply echoing a comment Wolf had made the day that the two of them had first met.

  Konrad leaned his gory hammer against the wall and reached for his knife. Then he paused, staring at the weapon which had wrought such deadly
destruction amongst his foes. It was an axe that he had used to such devastating effect, not a hammer. Why had he believed otherwise?

  His head was still ringing with the sounds of combat and the horrendous death screams of his enemies, with the roar of the explosion and the landslide of falling rocks. He wiped at his face, rubbing away the trickle of blood that kept obscuring his vision. It was his own blood. He had been wounded and was bleeding profusely from several stabs and cuts, but he had hardly noticed.

  Such injuries had seemed as nothing in the midst of combat.

  He used his kris to slice through the ropes that held Wolf bound to the temple wall. As the last strand parted, the blade of the knife suddenly shattered into a hundred pieces.

  Konrad had owned the wavy-bladed weapon for more than half his life, and it had saved him from death on many an occasion. He gazed at the bone handle, then let it fall to the ground.

  “I thought you were going to slit your own throat before you were captured,” he said. Wolf had once vowed that he would never be taken alive.

  Wolf grimaced as he was helped down, baring his pointed teeth. “Decided I’d rather slit a few of their throats,” he gasped.

  A moment later they heard the sound of heavy footsteps in the distance, and they both stared towards the opposite side of the cavern — towards the dark tunnels into which the surviving creatures had fled.

  Konrad held up Wolf with one arm. His other arm reached for his blood-encrusted axe. Side by side, they watched and waited for their enemies to emerge from the black passages.

  The marching sounds came nearer, louder, echoing in the unholy silence. It must have been an army of goblins — and this time Konrad stood no chance.

  “Where’s all this treasure?” said Anvila.

  The dwarf stood at the end of one of the tunnels, and she stared around at the vaulted temple, ignoring the dead and dying goblins as she peered up at the bare walls.

  At last there was silence. The screams and moans of the dying had ceased. The green brutes were all dead — or else were too weak to even whimper and soon would be.

  Wolf lay unconscious on the floor, and Konrad looked at him. His wounds would eventually heal, although his body would be even more scarred than before. Apart from his superficial wounds, he looked no different from the way he had ever done throughout the time that Konrad had known him. The apparent change in his appearance must have been caused by the suffering he had endured. Either that or Konrad’s own senses had been affected by the ferocity of combat. Why else had he been under the delusion that he had wielded a hammer instead of an axe?

  He kept gazing at the darkened tunnels, thinking that the loathsome hordes would return any moment. It was the light that kept them away, but how long until they conquered their fear, until they realized how few their enemies were?

  When Konrad had ventured into the underground maze in search of Wolf and his captors, Anvila had remained on the surface. Using her engineering skills she had brought daylight to the darkness. The luminescence came from about halfway up one part of the cavern, radiating from what seemed at first to be a broad tunnel — but it was bright instead of dark, covered with a round piece of glass, which gave it the appearance of a window.

  “Dwarfs used to illuminate their subterranean temples by a series of lenses which diverted the light down from the surface, from the sun,” Anvila had explained. “I found the lens above, but it was covered in tons of rock — which I blew away with gunpowder.”

  “Told you she was clever,” Wolf had muttered, then he had passed out.

  Konrad envied his oblivion and wished that he could also rest; but there could be no rest until they escaped from the temple.

  He watched as Anvila explored the cavern. She could not have been searching for the treasure that Wolf had hoped for. If there had ever been a forgotten fortune down here, lost when the dwarf shrine was abandoned during the age of volcanoes and earthquakes, it must have been looted centuries ago.

  Anvila inspected the stones and carvings, studying the pillars that surrounded the various passages which led away from the central area. Her finger traced some of the runes, trying to make out what was written by her forefathers who had lived here countless generations ago.

  The chamber must have been hewn out of the naked rock, the ground and the walls lined with massive stone blocks. The floor was circular, some two hundred feet across; the walls were curved, arching up to meet one another in a massive dome a hundred feet above the ground.

  “This was a dwarf temple,” said Anvila, when she returned, “and now the goblins use it for their own vile rituals. This must have been some ceremony connected with the last day of spring.” She knelt by Wolf and gazed up at where he had been tied, stretched out like a sacrificial offering.

  “Tomorrow is the first day of summer?” said Konrad, softly.

  That was the day his whole life had changed. Five years ago, on the first day of summer, his native village had been totally annihilated. Konrad had been the only survivor. He shook his head, and squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to remember any of it — but most of all trying not to remember what must have happened to Elyssa on that day.

  The blood and gore which stuck to his limbs and torso stank abominably. Now that Anvila was with Wolf, he searched through the rubble of the temple for some water to clean himself.

  He had slain many goblins over the last few years, but none so warped and deformed as these. It was living underground that must have so affected their appearance, twisting them into smaller and more hunched shapes, making their skins paler, their eyes larger. Unlike beastmen, some of whose blood could burn like acid, goblin blood was relatively harmless; but it was always best to get rid of any traces of a slain enemy as soon as possible.

  Although unable to find any water within the temple, Konrad retrieved his sword from where it had fallen, then turned back to join Wolf and Anvila. As he did, he glanced up at the huge circle of glass set in the rock wall. It seemed composed of various rings of different sizes and thicknesses.

  He began to look away, but caught a glimpse of movement in the lens above and watched as a shape within it became clearer: a figure emerging as if from a fog. He saw a rider, the image of a man on horseback, a man he could not fail to recognize — the bronze warrior!

  Konrad stared in disbelief. It was five years to this very day since he and Elyssa had watched the bronze knight ride through their doomed village, a silent figure that had seemed like some supernatural being.

  And when Konrad had described the rider who had appeared the day before the village was invaded, Wolf had said that the horseman was his brother, his twin brother.

  That was the day that he and Konrad had met, and Wolf had claimed that his twin was dead.

  Konrad could still remember Wolf’s exact words: Worse than dead…

  Wolf had not mentioned his twin since, and Konrad had hardly considered the bronze warrior. He had never imagined that he would see the rider again.

  Had the horseman really returned to haunt him — or was he merely the illusion that he appeared?

  “Anvila!” Konrad yelled, pointing up at the round glass. “Can you see it?”

  “Yes!” she shouted.

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s a distant image, reflected and magnified by the lenses. The one on the surface must have fragmented, and by some phenomenon it’s displaying a stray vision.”

  “Is it real?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he real?”

  “Yes. He’s probably a few miles away, near the edge of the mountains.”

  But even as she spoke, the ghostly apparition faded into the mists of the lens and was gone.

  Konrad continued gazing up at the circle of glass, although there was nothing more to see, then he turned and hurried back to where Anvila and Wolf were.

  “I have to follow the rider,” he said.

  The dwarf looked at him, but she said nothing.

  “I mus
t go. It is… my destiny.”

  Anvila shrugged. “If it’s that important, go.”

  “What about Wolf? Can you take care of him, help him out of here?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the goblins?”

  “I’m a dwarf. These are the lands of my ancestors. I know how to deal with goblins.”

  Konrad stared down at Wolf, and Wolf’s eyes flickered open. The pain and agony he still felt were reflected in their ice blue coldness. He gazed at Konrad, his glance going from one of Konrad’s eyes to the other. He licked at his lips and opened his mouth to speak.

  “Chaos,” he whispered. He took a shallow breath, then spoke again, his voice louder. “Chaos!” he warned.

  And then his eyes slowly closed and he drifted back into unconsciousness, as though the effort of speaking had been too much for him.

  Chaos…

  It was a word that Konrad had heard before, a word that was often spoken on the frontier, a word he had even used himself, a word which seemed to mean something different to everyone. Whatever its true meaning, the word sent a cold shiver down Konrad’s spine.

  Wolf would know; but Wolf was beyond answering.

  Konrad also wanted to know about his comrade’s twin brother, what had happened to him, how he had become involved with the forces of darkness. He turned to face Anvila. As usual, she showed no reaction and said nothing.

  “I must go,” he told her.

  “You said that. If you have to, then — go!”

  Konrad nodded and backed slowly away, heading for the passage through which the dwarf had entered the temple. He was reluctant to abandon Wolf and Anvila, but the dwarf was confident that she could get the wounded human safely away from the mountains and the goblin lair.

  Wolf had been the second most important person in Konrad’s life, transforming him from a peasant boy into a warrior. But the most important had been Elyssa. It was she, his first love, his only true love, who had given him an identity, even given him his name. And it was five years since she had been murdered when the village was wiped out.