The Bone Cage - Phil Kelly Read online

  ‘In Hunger Wood,’ whispered the young priest, ‘there’s a site where Ghalacryst, an old member of our order, was said to have made a pact with Morr. A pact to keep something he discovered secret, something ancient and evil.’

  ‘Like the thing inside that horrible flying carriage up there?’ asked Olf.

  ‘Sort of,’ said Mordecaul. ‘A grimoire he found in the bowels of Mordheim.’

  ‘Mort-heim!’ said the nature-priest, his growl like that of a cornered fox. ‘It is cursed.’ Sindt shot a look up at him, making a slashing gesture across his neck before motioning for Mordecaul to continue.

  ‘Well, this tome he found,’ continued Mordecaul, ‘he knew it was of great value to the agents of undeath that were hunting the ruins. They didn’t care for money, nor for wyrdstone. Just for the grimoire. So Ghalacryst hid it away from the sight of the living and the dead alike, deep in Hunger Wood. He’s still there now, guarding his find, or so they high priests say.’

  ‘Seven hells, boy,’ said Olf. ‘Enough mystery. What does the vampire want with this thing? And why wait ’til now to retrieve it?’

  ‘Well, we know that our gods aren’t… I mean our devotions aren’t being rewarded. None of us wants to admit it, but there it is. Look at us. An acolyte of Ranald, shackled to his own bad luck. A priest of Morr, trapped amongst the undead. A priest of Taal, caught like an animal behind bars. A Shallyan, unable to heal the wounded. Do I need to spell it out for you?’

  ‘Er… Maybe a little bit,’ said Olf.

  ‘The powers of the faithful have no meaning in Sylvania, not any more!’ hissed Mordecaul, his manacles clinking as he threw his hands up in frustration. ‘Not since the ritual in Sternieste. That means that the spell of seclusion worked by Ghalacryst isn’t working!’

  ‘And that our host has hence learned of this priceless… grimoire,’ said Elspeth carefully.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s where we’re going now,’ said Olf. ‘To pick it up.’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘And if he’s listening to us now,’ said Sindt, ‘and didn’t know about your order’s dirty little secret before, you’ve pretty much just told him all about it.’

  The tall Bretonnian woman gave a short trill of laughter, a note of desperate madness in the dark.

  A sudden cry came from the south, so pure and high that it instantly drew their attention. Mordecaul spun around to see a great eagle swoop low towards them, its wingspan the width of the winding road.

  Plummeting out of the clouds behind it came one of the Templehof vargheists, screeching in outrage as it folded its wings for a killing dive. The great eagle banked hard, lashing out at its pursuer with talons the size of a farmer’s sickle. It tore the wing-devil’s face clean off, leaving only a flayed, screaming skull.

  As the eagle dived low the second of the two vargheists shot out of the clouds, slamming its own claws into the creature’s shoulders and pulling up hard. Above it, something writhed in the clouds, looking to Mordecaul like a mass of ectoplasmic figures. The skies pulsed red as the Mortis Engine slowly descended. The ragged nature-priest shrieked, crying out for Taal to save him. Mordecaul had to fight hard not to scream himself, screwing his eyes shut to blot out the thing’s unholy glory. A black claw beckoned behind his eyelids, mocking him, drawing out his dreadful suspicions and making them real. He shook his head in defiance and looked up once more.

  The aerial battle between the eagle and the vargheists was becoming more and more frantic. The eagle was biting and slashing, banking and swooping, but it could not shake both the vargheists at once. Wherever it struck, the greyish flesh would heal over once more, caressed by the bilious energies of the unholy palanquin. Blood pattered down onto the upturned faces of the captives, each of them silently willing the eagle to prevail as the aerial struggle unfolded.

  As if directed by one mind, both of the winged devils dived in at once, catching the eagle and holding it fast in mid-air. The floating reliquary came in close, the ruddy pulse of its raw power washing over the tableau.

  The eagle seemed to age, shrinking in on itself, flesh and feather mouldering away as it became thinner and thinner. The great bird shrieked, cawed a coarse bark, then fell silent. The vargheists released it from their grip. It fluttered downwards for a moment, fleshless and strange, before dissolving into a scattering of desiccated bone.

  A single long feather of white and gold wound its way down through the air towards the captives, passing straight through the topmost spars of the bone prison and settling just out of reach on the mound of disembodied limbs inside.

  Mordecaul felt tears pricking his eyes as the elven princess gave a long, mournful keen of pure sorrow.

  Hunger Wood, Vale of Darkness

  ‘Ranald take these infernal… Just… Elspeth, push against that… Yes…’

  Across from Mordecaul, Sindt gave a toothy hiss of triumph. With the healer Elspeth Farrier’s help, the trickster-priest had finally managed to get his manacled foot free from his tightly-strapped longboot. Mordecaul’s stomach growled; he was so hungry he considered hooking the boot over with his own foot and chewing its leather for whatever meagre sustenance it could provide. It was a cruel irony that they were passing through Hunger Wood, with its reputation for forbidden feasts. Even the trees looked like old flesh clad in wrinkled skin, the branches like dried and elongated fingers. So much meat to hand, rotten and rancid but surely better than nothing, was right there in the corpse-bed beneath them. All going spare for one with the courage to claim it…

  The young priest shivered and pulled his attention back to what his fellow captives were doing. With his leg fully extended, Sindt was wiggling his toes through the holes in his stocking. Once the largest two were sticking out, he lowered his foot delicately towards the feather. He strained and grimaced, but was still a few inches short. Mordecaul watched from under hooded eyes, silently hoping the Ranaldite priest would dislocate something in his febrile attempts to snatch his trophy. Sindt stretched again, his face a rictus of effort.

  Lupio Blaze puffed out his cheeks and blew a burst of air at the feather, his moustache quivering on either side of his mouth. At first, nothing happened. Then Elspeth caught on and joined in, both of them huffing and blowing like short-changed halflings.

  Finally their combined efforts managed to ruffle the feather a few more inches towards Sindt. The trickster-priest grabbed it between his toes and retracted his leg as if he had been stung, quickly curling crosslegged and hiding the feather from sight completely. The vargheist with the red skull for a face swept by overhead, but did not come close enough to notice.

  ‘You can’t summon more eagles with just that,’ whispered the nature-priest.

  ‘Shut up and watch, Rube,’ replied Sindt.

  ‘I’m not Rube,’ said the nature-priest. ‘I’m Russet.’

  Sindt ignored him, hiding the feather in his armpit so that the hollow tip stuck towards his mouth. He bit down into the quill-end with an expression of utmost concentration, nibbling a little here, spitting out a piece there, all the while giving the impression his head was merely nodding with the motion of the bone prison.

  ‘And…’ mouthed Sindt, stretching out the word as he finished his work, ‘Ranald’s your mother’s lover.’

  The trickster-thief showed the feather’s dented tip against his palm for a second, reminding Mordecaul of an Altdorf street sharp showing a Stirland farmer his chosen card.

  ‘Great,’ he muttered. ‘Now we can write Karl Franz a few strongly-worded letters.’

  ‘No, death priest,’ said Lupio Blaze quietly, shaking his head and holding out an admonishing finger. ‘You wait.’

  As soon as they passed under a canopy thick enough to hide the moonlight completely, Mordecaul heard a faint ‘click’ of metal, then another. When the moonlight fell on Sindt once more, he sat exactly as he was before, but for the hint of a smug smile on his face.

  ‘So we have a chance, then,’ muttered Elspeth. ‘I
f we can get these manacles off… With Shallya’s grace, we still have a chance.’

  ‘Not without weapons, we don’t,’ snorted Olf gruffly. ‘They’re vampires, woman. There’s no way we can take them. And that… that thing in the clouds… What’s inside it is worse than even the von Carsteins.’

  ‘Just call it what it is, you fat coward,’ sneered Sindt. ‘You heard the vampire say it, just like the rest of us. It’s the Hand of Nagash.’

  The woods fell silent. Even the buzzing of insects and rustling of leaves stopped.

  The Sigmarite priest in Elspeth’s lap stirred in his unconsciousness, crying out. His voice sounded like it came from a great distance away.

  ‘The Hand…’ he mumbled. ‘It begins… It will bind…the sands… the triplets… the moon… blood and fire… dead gods…’

  ‘Hush, now,’ murmured Sister Elspeth, shooting a fierce glance at Sindt as she laid a hand on the old man’s brow. ‘Try not to move. Be at peace.’

  A cackling scream echoed through the forest. Mordecaul felt sweat break out on his forehead. It had not sounded like it had come from a human throat.

  His stomach rumbled again. This time he punched it in frustration, but the gnawing sensation was still there.

  As the bone prison bumped its way through the twisting paths of the wood, Mordecaul watched in grudging admiration as Sindt went to work. The trickster-priest slumped in feigned sleep over first Olf, then Russet, the odd clink of metal lost under the trundling clank of the carriage’s wheels. Russet’s face lit up when he realised his manacles had been undone by Sindt’s clever hands, and it took four sets of glaring eyes to convince him not to spring up and attempt escape straight away. Sindt whispered something into the nature-priest’s ear, and a slow, guileless smile spread across Russet’s battered features.

  Sindt wasn’t done there. Placing the feather in between his toes once more, he extended his leg to its fullest extent and inserted its nib into the lock on the manacles around Blaze’s ankles. The trickster-priest’s tongue stuck out of the corner of his mouth as he waggled his toes back and forth. Mordecaul found himself hoping that, this time, the Ranaldine thief would succeed.

  He was not disappointed. Though Sindt was sweating and gritting his teeth by the end of it, his efforts were rewarded with a soft click.

  ‘It won’t make any difference, you know,’ said the Bretonnian lady at the rear of the carriage. ‘We’re all dead already.’

  ‘Nonsense. We’ll see you out of here, alive and well,’ said Olf.

  ‘Oh no you won’t,’ she laughed softly, her voice like knives on silk.

  Mordecaul hoped against hope for the dawn, even for a single shaft of sunlight to give them hope.

  In his heart, he knew it would never come.

  The woods around the path were getting denser by the hour. The only illumination within the prison was the occasional shaft of light from Morrslieb, and a soft lambent glow that surrounded the elf princess. Other than the occasional despairing moan and the old man’s occasional mutterings from Elspeth’s lap, the company had fallen silent. Some of their number were pale with loss of blood, and Mordecaul could smell that some of their wounds were turning rotten.

  The prison’s wheel hit a large root, and the whole carriage shuddered. A disembodied leg fell out of the back of the corpse-bed, rolling to a halt in Mordecaul’s line of sight. The young priest sat bolt upright as one of the loping shadows that had started to follow them a few miles back darted forward and snatched it up. A pallid scavenger of little flesh and too much skin, it leered at him over its prize before receding into the gloom. Its expression had been drawn and crazed, but there had been something undeniably human behind its gormless, blood-flecked grin.

  ‘Ghouls…’ he muttered.

  Mordecaul’s order had a special hatred for ghouls. Cannibals who fed on the flesh of the dead, the creatures regularly raided those crypts and graveyards that were not consecrated in the name of the death god. The young priest had seen a fair few of the creatures in his time, even killed a handful in them himself in defence of his sacred sites. Yet these ones were even more starved and disgusting than usual. The unnatural darkness that had robbed the life from Sylvania, driving its people to flee the province or die, had also robbed the vampire counts’ minions of their sustenance.

  Here and there the prison had trundled past scattered patches of rags and rusted armour that had been gnawed to scraps, the last remnants of mercenaries and adventurers who had trodden these paths. The stories told that sometimes, lost and starving, they had found new lives as cannibals instead.

  As Mordecaul watched them approach a large bundle near the middle of the track, Sindt’s hand shot out from the bone prison. Quick as a snake he grabbed a sword hilt and yanked it from its scabbard, the bone spars of the giant cage shuddering as if in shock at the sudden motion. Sindt tossed the sword towards Lupio Blaze and folded his arms back into his loose crouch in one smooth movement. The Tilean knight caught the sword with commendable dexterity, plunging it into the nearest torso so that only its hilt protruded in the shadow of his knee.

  Drawn by the flash of movement, the vargheist that had been injured by the elf princess’s eagle swooped along the forest path and alighted on the top of the cage’s bars. The enormous creature scrabbled around until its beady eyes stared right down at them through a mask of red bone. Strings of bloody drool pattered into their midst, but not one of the prisoners was foolish enough to meet the thing’s gaze. Eventually it flapped away, shriek-clicking to the wing-devil that hung upside down from the canopy up ahead.

  ‘Not a bad snatch,’ said Mordecaul, his voice a little shaky.

  ‘Lucky fingers,’ said Sindt.

  Sage’s Ruin, Hunger Wood

  The path grew wider as it wound onwards, turning into a broad oak-lined clearing. Morrsleib’s wan green light threw twitching shadows from the ancient trees, their cracked branches grasping slowly at the air. Mordecaul craned his neck to look past Olf’s bulk at the front of the carriage, and saw a shattered ruin atop a small hill in the distance.

  ‘Morr’s blade,’ he said under his breath. ‘We’re here.’

  At the head of the procession, Mannfred von Carstein cried out in jubilation, taking the Crown of Sorcery from his head and stowing it on the horn of his saddle. His skeletal horse broke into a gallop, its hoofbeats unnaturally loud in the cloying quiet of the wood.

  The tower up ahead was a many-tiered mass of tumbledown walls and shattered minarets. Its mossy stone walls were veined by creeping, pulsing black tendrils that looked nothing to do with natural vegetation. Stone skeletons stood vigil around its walls, robed in the manner of priests and clutching roses and stylised scythes in each hand. As the carriage’s armoured zombies pulled it closer, Mordecaul could see the sinewy remnants of a corpse dangling from the ruined tower’s upper storeys. A thick noose of torn velvet was tight around its neck.

  The vampire thundered in close, dismounting from his steed and disappearing from sight into the depths of the ruined tower. As von Carstein descended the stone steps to the basement a cloud of bats were startled from their nest in the corpse hanging high above, revealing that the body still wore the scruffy black robes of a priest. The cadaver’s face was a barren mask of bone, though pennies had been pressed deep into its eye sockets, an offering made in the hope of a proper afterlife.

  ‘Ghalacryst,’ moaned Mordecaul. ‘So it’s true. The tome was buried here.’

  ‘One of them, at least,’ said the Bretonnian woman archly. ‘He still needs three more, I believe.’

  ‘And how come you know so much about all this, my lady?’ asked Olf, staring up from under knotted brows.

  ‘You mistake the lady for her messenger,’ said the Bretonnian, her hooded eyes glistening with amused contempt. ‘And even then, think again.’

  ‘Sindt, look,’ said Blaze. ‘A helm.’

  Lying amongst the scattered debris at the edge of the clearing was a fleshless skeleton, and
sure enough, a dented bronze helmet was next to it. As the prison ground forward, it became obvious to Mordecaul that it would pass close by.

  Sindt slumped over, his shoulder close to the bone spars nearest the skeleton. As the helmet came within arm’s reach, Sindt shot out a pale arm and grabbed for it.

  The jagged bone spars closed with a snap, clipping off the trickster’s arm in a spurt of blood.

  The prison erupted into bedlam. Sindt gave a deafening scream, clutching the ruined shoulder-stump that geysered blood all over Olf’s lap. The giant Ulrican stood up with a roar, shrugging off his opened manacles and barging forward to put his shoulder against the gap in the bars. Russett leapt up to wedge himself bodily in the opening, bracing his shoulders and bare feet on either side of the gap and pushing it as wide as he could. Blaze drew the captured sword from its corpse-sheath, muttering prayers to Myrmidia as he tried to lever open his manacles.

  Their vargheist jailors shrieked, their oddly angular heads whipping round. Wings snapped wide as the beasts took flight, a pack of ghouls loping from the forest eaves behind them. Ruddy illumination lit the entire clearing as low thunderheads formed a whirling vortex, the reliquary bearing the Hand of Nagash at its centre. The Mortis Engine’s spectral guardians emitted soul-splitting shrieks as they lowered its palanquin towards the prisoners. Mordecaul could feel his skin tauten and his scalp tingle as the vile relic came closer.

  ‘Get through the gap!’ shouted Olf, his broad face turning an ugly red with the effort of holding the ribs of the cage apart. Above him, Russet’s feet were trickling blood down the jagged edges of the bone spars, the nature-priest giving a thin moan as he fought against the unholy strength of the prison’s magic. Mordecaul yanked forward, but he was weak with hunger, his shackles still bound tight. The vargheists were nearly upon them, and the ghouls loped in close, arms outstretched and mouth agape.

  ‘Sigmar Unberogen!’ shouted the old Sigmarite priest lying amongst the corpses, rearing up from Elspeth’s side to bring his discarded metal cuirass down hard upon Blaze’s damaged manacles. The blow sent chain links scattering in all directions. Mordecaul’s heart filled with hope as he realised the warrior priest was Volkmar the Grim, Grand Theogonist and head of the Sigmarite cult. But rather than banishing the undead clustering around him, the old priest bared his teeth in an atavistic snarl and slammed his jagged cuirass into the pate of one grasping ghoul after another.