As the drums of war continue to beat a pounding rhythm against the walls of Hammerhal Aqsha, Callis and Toll answer a desperate summons from the Guild of Arcanogeologists in the latest instalment of the Dawnbringer Chronicles. The horrors of the Kingsblood Curse have kept the ever-vigilant witch hunters occupied until now, but their attention can finally turn to other matters… though it may already be too late.
The glow of fires raging on the borders of Hammerhal Aqsha had cast the city in crimson. Hanniver Toll and Armand Callis picked their way through the urban tangle, weaving through a stream of haggard-looking citizens who were going about their business as best they could under the shadow of war. Callis felt as if he was trapped in some waking nightmare, so lurid and distorted did the red skies make the city appear. Bloodied faces stared out at him from doorways and windows, fear in their eyes. Screams and distant gunfire formed a constant, staccato symphony.
‘Feels like the damned apocalypse is upon us,’ he muttered.
‘Three times in my career I’ve been trapped in a city besieged,’ said Toll. ‘I number them as the three worst experiences of my life.’
‘Any news from the front?’ said Callis.
Toll’s expression told the story. ‘You can’t move for corpses, as I hear it. Ours and theirs. The big guns and the Hammers of Sigmar are keeping the bulk of the reavers at bay. For now, Hammerhal Aqsha holds, but it’s a damned close thing. By the God-King’s grace, our own little contribution might ease some pressure on the Freeguilds.’
‘I wouldn’t call rooting out a nest of flesh-eating ghouls a minor contribution,’ said Callis, recalling just how close they had come to death during that last devilry.
Toll shrugged. ‘All things are relative when the world is on fire.’
They crossed what would normally have been a busy thoroughfare but was now a road choked by abandoned carts and steam-carriages, the cobbles strewn with ankle-deep drifts of soot. On the far side there was a tall gate of burnished silver, and behind it a bizarre-looking building that appeared for all the world like a gigantic alembic. It was connected to a great bellows-tower that spewed discoloured gases into the sky, turning the clouds above an oily blue.
‘The Guild of Arcanogeologists,’ said Toll. ‘Hammerhal’s foremost centre of geomantic research. At the last estimate, the geomancer Val Petras has sent fifty-seven missives to the Grand Conclave, describing some threat to the ley-patterns of the Parch in increasingly dramatic terms. Fifty-six too many, given that the Conclave's been ignoring them.’
‘I remember Petras,’ said Callis. ‘Nervous little character with all the maps.’
Toll nodded. ‘I studied some of their findings. Most of it was beyond my grasp, and we had our own disasters to deal with at the time. But I told Petras we would hear what they had to say in person, when the Kingsblood Crisis was dealt with.’
Callis paused at the foot of the great gate. It was open. There was a thick, red smear across the bars. Looking down, he saw a single tattered glove – with a hand still inside.
‘Ah,’ said Toll. He had already drawn his pistol.
‘Nothing’s ever easy, is it?’ muttered Callis, easing the gate open and wincing as it gave out a rusty creak.
Beyond was a soot-dusted garden lined with rocks and crystals of various fiery hues and shapes, arranged in loose spirals. Here and there, dowsing rods were thrust into the soil, connected by piping to strange cogwork mechanisms that clicked and whirred. A large double door led into the main building.
They passed through, Callis leading with a pistol held at the ready. Glass cases mounted upon the walls emitted a kaleidoscope of refracted colours, for each contained a glittering array of minerals, from pulsing fire-rocks to glittering Hyshian diamonds and globular Chamonic ore. The effect was surreal and headache-inducing.
A crash of breaking glass sounded from the floors above. Callis and Toll raised their guns, but the disturbance was followed by nothing but silence.
‘After you,’ said Toll, gesturing towards the stairs.
Callis sighed and took the lead. They ascended to a narrow landing filled with cabinets on both sides. The looming cabinets were slightly too large, forcing him to turn sideways in order to squeeze his way through. At the far end of the hall was a door left ajar, splattered with more blood. Callis eased it open with the barrel of a pistol.
Beyond lay a room that looked like it had hosted a riot. Callis assumed it had once been an office, because the floor was littered with charred scraps of papyrus and technical diagrams whose meaning escaped him. The rest of the space was taken up by display cases, heavy ironwood cabinets and spherical bowls containing various liquid metals. Some of these had been knocked from their perch and now oozed their contents freely.
‘By the comet, what is that?’ said Callis, screwing up his nose. There was an acrid stench in this chamber, a chemical reek of sour, sulphurous corruption that caused his eyes to water. The floor was splattered with a red mulch.
‘Where is everyone?’ he said.
‘We’re standing on them,’ said Toll grimly, looking down at the slimy paste sticking to his boots.
He was right, Callis saw. There were fragments of bone amidst the goo. Here, a pair of shattered spectacles. There, a pocket chronometer, still ticking.
‘What in Sigmar’s name happened here?’ muttered Callis.
A slight ruffling sound issued from a wooden cabinet to his left. Toll met his eyes and nodded, levelling his wheellock. Callis reached down for the handle and gave it a sharp pull.
A thunderous crack and a flash of flame sent him tumbling on his back, his ears ringing. The bitter tang of blastpowder invaded his nostrils, momentarily banishing the room’s foul aroma. He looked up. There, crouching in a corner of the empty cabinet, clutching a double-barrelled scattergun almost as large as they were, was Val Petras. Callis recognised the slight arcanogeologist immediately, though they looked somewhat worse for wear than the last time they had met. Petras’s eyes were wide and bleary, and their clothes were caked with dried gore.
Toll stepped forward and grabbed the absurdly oversized handcannon, twisting it easily from Petras’s grasp.
‘Finally!’ Petras squeaked. ‘Do you know how long I’ve been hiding in here? Two bloody days now. Is this how long it takes the Order to respond to a summons for aid? No wonder the city’s gone to the pits.’
‘Do you want to apologise at all,’ asked Callis, as he staggered to his feet, ‘for very nearly blasting my damned head off?’
‘Warning shot,’ Petras said, with a dismissive wave of a hand. ‘Well, you got here at last in any case. I assume that means our little vermin problem is dealt with.’
Toll helped the scientist out of the cabinet. ‘And what problem would that be?’
Petras blinked at him, furrowing their thin eyebrows.
‘The cursed rats!’ the arcanogeologist hissed. ‘Fat, bloated things that swept through here like a flood, devouring all of my colleagues and – worse than that – nibbling their way through several years of painstakingly assembled notes on the theoretical applications of pressurised emberstone gas.’
‘Rats?’ said Callis, who had a soldier’s hatred for those particular creatures, those invaders of trenches and spreaders of plague. ‘Fantastic.’
‘Speak quickly,’ snapped Toll. ‘Tell me exactly what happened here.’
‘Well, it started with a horrible, horrible sound,’ said Petras. ‘A sort of scuttling, scampering, squeaking sound that quite disturbed us.’
As if their mere words had summoned something foul from the aether, the eerie silence of the Guild of Arcanogeologists was broken by a sort of scuttling, scampering, squeaking sound.
‘Like that?’ said Callis.
‘Yes, that’s the one. Oh dear.’
It was in the walls and in the ceiling all around them, growing in intensity by the moment. Toll grabbed Petras and they ran, stumbling through the corridor of teetering lockers and coming to a skidding halt upon the landing. Directly opposite them the wall bulged weirdly, plaster cracking as something forced its way loose.
‘Move!’ yelled Toll, and they sprinted down towards the front door. Halfway down the stairs the plasterwork wall gave way, and vermin gushed forth like blood from a wound.
Surging towards them came a wave of grey-brown fur and thrashing tails. Callis cried out in horror, and leapt over the bannister, landing awkwardly. Rats spilled over the side of the stairs, and he fired both pistols wildly as he backed away. Some of the hateful things exploded in puffs of pink mist, but he might as well have tried to shoot down a tidal wave.
‘Climb, fool!’ came Toll’s voice, and Callis saw the witch hunter had hauled himself up onto one of the display cases on the ground floor. Petras had found their own perch, balancing precariously on a marble statue of a furious-looking arcanist and still clutching that teetering pile of parchments.Callis scrambled onto the nearest glass cabinet as dozens of tiny fangs snapped at his heels. He leapt to the next, then the next. Glass crackled and creaked, threatening to send him tumbling down to the floor, which writhed with obscene motion as the rats circled and clambered over each other. All that kept them from surging up the sides of the cabinet were its smooth, metal legs, which offered no obvious claw holds. But the vermin continued to try, getting closer and closer every time, their little eyes blazing with insane determination.
‘Solutions, anyone?’ shouted Callis.
‘None spring to mind,’ said Toll, still wearing a maddeningly calm expression as his eyes scanned the chamber. ‘All I have on me is a flask of flash-oil and about twenty bullets.’
‘Flash-oil!’ said Petras, clicking their fingers. The arcanogeologist jabbed a skinny finger back towards the stairway, at a spherical glass orb that protruded from the wall. It contained what looked like a fist-sized chunk of white stone, veined with crimson streaks.
‘Ignic sulphurite,’ Petras grinned, as if either of their companions had the faintest clue what that meant.
‘Come again?’ said Callis, teetering wildly.
‘Shoot the glass!’ screamed Petras.
Callis did not hesitate. His pistol bucked in his hand and the display case shattered, the force of the gunshot sending its rocky contents clattering down amidst the surging vortex of rats. Toll reached into his pocket for the thin vial filled with flash-oil, and hurled it at the white rock. Callis saw the ruby-red liquid already bubbling within its container as it whirled through the air.
It struck the ground and shattered, unleashing a sudden flash of heat and light that briefly illuminated the chamber like a Hyshian dawn. For a moment Callis thought that was it, but then the ignic sulphurite caught fire.
Callis had once seen a stray drakebreath round set a munitions cart alight, in a million-to-one stroke of ill fortune. The resulting eruption had wreathed everything within a dozen metres in fire, including two-score Freeguilders and an artillery battery. Toll’s makeshift effort was only slightly less destructive. Sheets of flame rushed across the hall, turning hundreds of rabid vermin into living torches. By some Sigmar-granted miracle neither Callis, Toll or Petras were knocked from their perches by the rush of scalding air that followed, though the left side of Callis’s face was scorched raw, and Toll was forced to swipe desperately at his greatcoat as its hem caught fire.
The smell of roasting rat-flesh forced its way into Callis’s nostrils, and he fought the urge to vomit. The floor of the chamber was a smouldering carpet of rodent corpses, piled ankle-deep. A few stragglers who had somehow escaped the incineration squeaked and skittered into cover, their appetite for human flesh temporarily absent.
‘That was even more effective than I had hoped,’ said Petras, rubbing their soot-blackened chin thoughtfully. ‘One can only contemplate the military applications.’
‘Can we contemplate them later?’ said Callis. ‘If I know anything about rats it’s that there are always more.’
‘Of course!’ cried Petras, leaping down from their perch into the pile of curled-up rat corpses. ‘I quite forgot the very reason that I summoned you. Follow me to the cartographium, would you please?’
And so they waded across the blackened chamber, towards a corridor on the western side. There were more half-eaten bodies beyond. Toll stooped to examine one that was propped up against an Azyrite timepiece, his legs nibbled away to ragged stumps. The arcanogeologist had died with an expression of mild surprise upon his face.
‘This one was slain before they started to eat him,’ Toll said.
He indicated a deep, stab-wound in the man’s chest, right through the heart. The actual cut was astonishingly precise and thin, as if made by an oversized needle. Yet around the scar the man’s flesh blackened horribly, spiderwebs of foul corruption spreading across the torso.
‘Poison,’ said Toll. ‘Not needed in this case, of course. The poor devil was dead before he hit the ground.’
‘Further proof that this was done by someone who knew their business,’ nodded Callis. ‘Whoever it was hit this place hard and fast, and left the rats to clean up the mess.’
‘Come along,’ said Petras, hauling open a door ahead of them.
The corridor opened out into a large, vaulted hall, its walls covered in maps and diagrams depicting the known realms. There were Chamonic metal-etchings, tapestries of Lethisian cloth and crystalline models that displayed the fractal continents of the Realm of Light in exquisite detail. Petras passed these by, heading for a strange device mounted on the blank wall at the far end of the cartographium. It looked to Callis like a giant beehive of hexagonal bricks, connected by a tangle of cogwork machinery to a lens directed at the wall. Some kind of image projector, he supposed.
Petras began to pull out the hexagonal blocks one by one, frowning and cursing under their breath.
‘Where are they?’ Petras hissed. ‘Where are they?’
‘Where are what?’ said Callis.
‘This archive contained every arcano-tectonic survey ever carried out by the Guild. Readings of the deepest levels of Hammerhal Aqsha, and an exhaustive recording of every ley line, nexus and font of arcana in the Great Parch. Not to mention similarly thorough readings from our colleagues in Ghyran, Ghur and the Chamonic heartlands. And all of it… it’s all just… gone.’
‘I think we know what our mysterious assassins were after,’ said Toll.
‘All this death for a bunch of maps?’ said Callis.
‘Maps?’ squeaked Petras. ‘We are talking about the most exhaustive surveys of magical phenomena and realm-wide energy fluctuations in any Sigmarite archive. We are talking about reams upon reams of priceless knowledge that it will take decades, perhaps a century or more to replace.’
‘Calm down,’ said Toll. ‘You summoned us here because you had something important to tell us. Get to it.’
‘I had something important to show you,’ corrected Petras. ‘Arcanothermic readings taken within the last season, indicating extraordinary levels of geomagical disturbance across the Great Parch, indicating a continent-wide, perhaps even realm-wide trauma. The ley lines are on fire, Master Toll. Everywhere and all at once. I’ve never seen or read about the likes of it before.’
Callis felt a familiar sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.
‘And someone has just slaughtered your entire guild to keep that fact a secret,’ he said.
Toll dragged a palm across his weary face and exhaled slowly.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘The Order will send a clean-up team to go over every speck of dust in this place, and see if there is anything of note that our intruders missed. Meanwhile, you, Petras, are coming with us.’
‘Where?’
‘To speak with the Conclave. I hope you have at least some of that knowledge stored in your head, because they need to know the scale of what we’re talking about here.’
After the announcement of the new edition of Warhammer Age of Sigmar over the weekend, and the verminous tide that now sweeps across the Mortal Realms, it’s clear that the disturbances heralded a terrible future indeed. We’ll have more from the Vermindoom and the new edition’s explosive developments very soon here at Warhammer Community, and in the meantime, you can read the rest of the Dawnbringer Chronicles below.