THE PLAGUE PIT
By Jonathan Green


A CHILL GUST of wind whipped across the twilight landscape. It tore over the desolate moorland and rode the contours of two long-overgrown burial mounds, full of the promise of a harsh winter to come. It swirled around the age-weathered standing stone and buffeted the huddle of men crouched around the dancing flames of a small campfire. Leaving the mercenary band pulling their thick, Kislev cloaks even tighter about them, it continued on its way up the slow-rising slope until, at last, it reached the dilapidated windmill standing at the summit, tugging at the sails that groaned in protest at the wind's attentions.
Torben Badenov, raven-haired leader of the band, looked up at the building's black silhouette half a mile to the south on the crest of the hill. The windmill stood out stark against the darkening sky. To Torben it looked like some mysterious sentinel studying his party, as if they were invading its territory, and watching over the scholar's work at the monolith with dark interest. The builders of the windmill had chosen the spot well. The wind scoured these desolate moors relentlessly. And yet despite the ideal location, the wild unforgiving land had proved almost impossible to tame, man and nature instead living in an uneasy truce that could be overturned at any moment. Time and the weather had taken its toll on the mill too. Here and there a sail baton was splintered or missing, the brickwork was crumbling and there were holes in the roof.
Here as much as anywhere, Torben was reminded of the fact that civilisation was only to be found in small pockets across the Old World. Karl Franz might claim this wild country as his Empire but in reality, it belonged to indomitable nature and the rough elements. It was in places such as this that it became apparent that the greatest battle the peoples of the Empire had ever fought was with their environment. The early winter chill cut him to the marrow, even through his bearskin cloak, and with the rising wind the air pressure was rising also.
A lean figure, crouching close to the fire, his cloak clenched tightly about him, broke the silence with a bitter request: 'Just remind me why we're here again.'
Torben straightened, rubbing the small of his back with one hand while running the other through his black hair. He swallowed hard, trying to relieve the pressure in his ears that was making them ache. 'The same as always,' the tall mercenary said bluntly, 'because of the money.'
'You really think he's going to pay up?' a slim, mop-haired young man asked, looking towards the rough-hewn monolith, fifty yards or so from the campfire. Hunched at the foot of the granite obelisk was Johannes Verfallen, scholar of Ostermark and currently the employer of Badenov's band.
'I do, Yuri,' Torben replied. 'He came up with the first half of our fee, didn't he?'
'That he did,' said the fourth member of the party. Stanislav was a huge bear of a man, deft at the use of a battleaxe. Strong as an ox and yet as gentle as a kitten when occasion allowed - that was Stanislav.
'But only half,' the weaselly, rat-faced Oran Scarfen pointed out. 'Half on hiring, the rest on finding the mound, just to ensure our loyalty. I mean, how desperate for money do we look?'
'Pretty desperate, by the looks of you,' Alexi, the old solider, said with a grin, adjusting the jerkin of his leather armour.
Rubbing his neatly trimmed beard Torben cast his mind back to the smoke-filled bar of the Slaughtered Troll in Ostermark and remembered with a shiver the warmth of the alehouse compared to the bitter cold of the moorlands. Krakov, the last member of his mercenary band, had failed to show up after driving the Lady Isolde of Ostenwald to petition the Lord Gunther, commander of the city's militia, for his aid in ridding her demesne of a deathless threat. No doubt Krakov, the debonair, style-conscious Kislevite, had found the attentions of one of Gunther's chambermaids more appealing than the prospect of meeting up with his companions. Either that or he was still too embarrassed at having lost the party's horses to show his face again for a while. He would be propping up the bar again by the time Torben and the others returned, with drink-fuelled tales of the escapades he had been involved in during their absence, the hearts he'd broken and the money he'd lost at the gaming-house. He wouldn't see any of the gold from this latest venture, however: if he couldn't be bothered to turn up for a job he certainly wasn't going to get paid for it!
But it was while waiting for the errant Krakov that Torben had been approached by the gaunt Verfallen. In Torben's considered opinion, Johannes Verfallen was a typical man of learning: nervous, pale-skinned, and with a sparrow's physique hidden under a black cowled robe two sizes too big for him. Before explaining the reasons he had for wanting to hire Badenov's band, the young scholar was at great pains to expound his credentials to Torben. The mercenary had to hear every last detail of how Verfallen had studied first at the University of Altdorf. How he had gained a degree in Ancient History with particular focus on the beliefs and practices of the tribes of the Old World, before making the move to Ostermark. There he continued his research under the supposedly renowned sage Heinrich the Grey. But then you'd want to mention every last qualification you had earned, Torben thought, if you had no scars or battle stories to testify to the achievements of your life.
And yet despite Verfallen's apparent youth there was something prematurely old about him. His face was gaunt, fleshless skin stretched taught over the sharp contours of his skull, and a sharply receding hairline revealed blemishes not unlike liver spots on his balding pate. Beady eyes, sunken into shadow-ringed sockets, twinkled from behind severe pince-nez glasses and Torben noticed that when he lifted his cup of watered-down wine to his thin, colourless lips, Verfallen's hand shook tremulously - and his breath stank.
Torben would be the first to admit that at times, particularly the morning after a heavy drinking session, his mouth smelt like something akin to a latrine, but Verfallen was something else. His breath reeked of dental decay, gum disease and the promise of an agonising visit to the nearest barber-surgeon for some serious tooth pulling. In fact, extreme as it might sound, Torben could only liken it to an odour he had smelt when his chosen career in life had caused him to break into charnel houses or exhume corpses from their graves - the stench of death.
Torben wasn't surprised that the scholar came to him with his somewhat peculiar request, for his band of mercenaries to accompany Verfallen as bodyguards onto the moors east of Ostermark, while he searched for the burial mound of some ancient king. He wasn't ashamed of what he did and saw no point in keeping it a secret in the presence of others. In fact, Badenov was rather proud of his career as a mercenary. Like so many others who sold their sword-arms to others for a living, he had cut his teeth in the art of killing as a soldier. In Torben's case, it had been in the army of old Tzar Bokha himself. That was where he had met Alexi and Yuri, having joined up with the weasely Oran Scarfen as the result of a foolish, beer-fuelled bet. Then circumstances had changed and they had decided to try their hand as mercenaries and the risk had been worth it.
In those days - how many years past was it? seven? eight? - Arnwolf, Lars, Manfred and Berrin the Dwarf had been part of the company. But they were gone now: the life of a sell-sword was not without its pitfalls. Manfred had been the first to leave the band, an orc's arrow protruding from his stomach as he fell from the battlements at the Siege of Galein's Gate. Arnwolf had fallen victim to a troll's vile appetite - if only he hadn't gone to answer the call of nature alone! A skaven assassin's weeping blade had done for Lars the Norseman while Berrin had left alive, of his own choice, muttering something about now being the last of his line and the ancestral hall calling him home. The heavy-drinking Stanislav and eye-patched Krakov had joined them later - Alexi still felt a twinge on cold nights as a result of wrestling the gentle giant Stanislav on their first meeting.
Then there was the newest member of the party, Pieter Valburg. Torben looked at the well-dressed nobleman's son sitting with his back turned to the fire, staring out into the encroaching night. 'Everything all right with you, Pieter?' he asked.
'The wind's picking up. There's a storm brewing,' the glum young man replied, directing Torben's gaze towards the massing black billows to the south.
He could be right, Torben thought. Since dusk had fallen there had been a distinct rise pressure in the air. It could be the reason for Torben's earache. Slightly unnerved by Pieter's manner, Torben felt some sort of reply was needed to break the tension in the atmosphere. 'Hmm... looks like rain.'
Torben still hadn't worked Pieter out. The only son of the mayor of Schwertdorf, he had given up his former life to pursue a personal vendetta against the creature responsible for the death of his childhood sweetheart. But once vengeance had been claimed, his morbid air had remained. He was almost permanently quiet and sombre. At times his dark, sullen moods worried the others: that one man could carry such a sense of doom about him! It made their lives, and all the lives they had taken, seem so insignificant and futile in the scheme of things. In Torben's often-voiced opinion, the nobleman's son thought about things too much.
Yet Torben couldn't fault Pieter's courage, loyalty, ardour and skill as a swordsman - but then he had been trained by the best fencing coach his father could afford. Pieter Valburg had a purpose to his actions like none of the rest of them. He wasn't in this business for the money. He was a man with a mission and at times, it seemed that his mission was to wipe out every evil thing and servant of the Dark Powers in the Empire and beyond.
A low chanting drew Torben's attention back to their client. Verfallen was muttering almost continually under his breath in a monotonous drone. Torben would never understand scholars and sages. They were weak specimens, more like women than men, and that was demeaning to a good number of the fairer sex he had encountered in his life. So what if Badenov's band were effectively no more than playing nursemaids to a scholar at present? They had seen the colour of Verfallen's money and he paid very well for such simple work. It was worth putting up with the cold, the wind and the rain for a night or two in return for another five hundred crowns. That would see them clear to replacing the steeds that preening fool Krakov had managed to lose for them.
Verfallen was hunched in front of the dark monolith, as he had been since long before dusk fell. The stone itself was ancient. The scholar had said it had been set in its place on the hillside by a tribe of primitives in times long past. The carvings that covered the surface of the ancient stone were weatherworn and pitted with age before the founding of the Empire. It was almost impossible to make out the strange runic script that wound over the granite in a serpent-like trail. Torben should know, he had tried for a full two minutes before giving up. Verfallen had been at it for hours. Rather than stop as the light began to fade, he insisted on continuing with his transcription. A lantern provided flickering illumination, while he peered through his spectacles at the impressions left by the chiselling tool of some prehistoric hand, the tip of his nose almost touching the lichen-covered stone.
Learned men! Torben had to admit that at times, knowledge could prove a valuable weapon against the dark but when it came to the conclusion of things, it was the sword, the axe, the dagger and the bow that won the day. He would trust his survival to strength of muscle and cold steel.
'What's he doing again?' Alexi enquired, pausing mid-way through sharpening his sword.
'He said he'd got to translate the carvings on that ages-old stone to find the site of some old burial mound,' Torben explained once again. 'Apparently, this whole area was once the territory of some ancient human tribe. The barrows around here are the resting-places of the tribe's chieftains.' Torben was quite getting into his role as historian and his opinion of scholars, for now, was forgotten. 'As I'm sure you know already, it was the practice in those days to bury the chieftain with all his worldly possessions. Most were looted long ago but Verfallen reckons the barrow of one ancient king - Verfallen calls him Morroot, or something like that - is still intact and you know what that means?'
'Ah, they're all the same, these so-called learned men,' Oran interrupted. 'They make out they're concerned with things on a higher plane, only interested in increasing the depth of their knowledge, but they're just like the rest of us. They're only in it for the money or the power! In this case, the money.'
Now it was Pieter's turn to speak up: 'You don't know that he isn't searching for forgotten wisdom!' Of all of the mercenary band, it was Pieter who held the greatest sway by the research of academics.
'Trust me,' Oran spat, scowling at the young nobleman, looking even more like a rat than usual in the flickering light of the fire. 'Money or power, simple as that! Bloody hypocrites!'
'What was that?' A hush fell over the party at Torben's interjection. Then they all heard it: the sound of someone being violently sick.
'Sounds like our scholar's not feeling so well,' Oran said with obvious delight.
The retching came again accompanied by the splatter of a half-digested meal regurgitated over the ancient monolith. It sounded as if Verfallen were throwing up his intestines.
'That doesn't sound good,' Torben said, surprised at the concern apparent in his voice. 'That doesn't sound good at all!'

INSTINCTIVELY WITH ONE hand on the hilt of his sword, Torben moved at a jog towards the monolith and the hunched figure of Verfallen. As he neared the stone Torben could see the scholar picked out in the circle of light cast by the lantern. He was doubled up, leaning against the obelisk with one hand supporting his weight while his other hand clutched at his midriff. A convulsion passed through Verfallen's body and he vomited again. By the lantern's light, Torben could see that the scholar was throwing up great gouts of blood and black bile.
The mercenary captain was joined by the rest of the party, muttering and troubled. But Torben had noticed that something else had started to happen. At first he thought it was merely an effect caused by the bunched folds of the scholar's robe but now it was unmistakable - Verfallen's stomach was starting to swell. As the retching man struggled to stay on his feet, with the convulsions wracking his body, his belly was rapidly blowing up like an inflated pig's bladder.
'Shouldn't someone help him?' Yuri suggested feebly.
'Why, are you offering?' Oran threw back as a retort. The stomach continued in its seemingly inexorable swelling.
'I'm not touching him,' Alexi said. There was a ripping sound as the strained fibres of cloth covering Verfallen's expanding gut began to tear apart.
'Nor me,' Stanislav added. 'I'm not going anywhere near him.'
As one, the party turned their eyes away from the vomiting scholar and onto their raven-haired leader.
'Well don't look at me!' Torben exclaimed. There was a wet ripping sound. Turning back to the sickening scene before them Torben added in a horrified gasp, 'By all the gods!'
The others were too shocked to comment.
Verfallen collapsed in front of the monolith, blood pooling beside him and mingling with the puddle of vomit. It was too revolting a sight to behold but Torben found himself unable to tear his eyes from it. The man's distended stomach was split right across its middle. A mass of bloated, yellow maggots spilled from the rent as worms writhed in the great open wound. Torben found himself mentally comparing the injury to a twisted red smile.
'Maybe it was something he ate,' Oran said darkly. Nobody laughed.
'It's like he was rotten to the core,' a stunned Yuri managed to utter.
'Is he dead?' asked Stanislav.
As the mercenaries watched, the body spasmed again. Torben noticed that the fingertips of Verfallen's hand were still just touching the snaking line of runes. A glittering shimmer passed through crystalline formations in the rock. It was as if they followed the line of runic script, culminating at the point where Verfallen's hand made contact with the granite obelisk. The impression only lasted for a second. Then, as they watched, the fingers twitched.
'What's going on?' Yuri asked, trying to suppress the quaver in his voice.
'I don't like this at all,' Stanislav stated firmly.
'We must destroy the body.' It was the first thing Pieter had said since leaving his place at the fire.
The party turned to look at the serious young man who had given them the order. He stared back at them from darkly hooded eyes.
'Why do you say that?' Alexi asked, disconcerted.
There was a terrible sucking, stretching sound as skin tore, muscles elongated and bones twisted themselves into new, unrecognisable shapes. Verfallen was transforming before their very eyes, growing as some embryonic life form might over several months, only at a grossly accelerated rate.
Impossibly rising from the hips, the thing that had been Verfallen rose to its hoofed feet, adjusting the stance of its triple-jointed legs to get its balance. The scholar's distorted body was now over three yards tall. Verfallen's face was unrecognisable, the pallid skin and flesh having split and stretched to accommodate the equine qualities the scholar's skull had taken on. The thing looked down at them from black-pitted eyes.
'That's why!' Torben declared, his sword already out of its scabbard.
Illuminated by the tumbled lantern and distant campfire, with a glance Torben took in every detail of the foul creature's physique. Its elongated skull; the extended arms ending in three-clawed talons, Verfallen's finger bones having fused together; the beginnings of a bony tail; the multi-jointed hindquarters. The creature's body was covered in the stretched skin of the scholar and where it had torn under the pressure of the mutating body knots of wet, red muscle had been exposed.
Torben suddenly realised that they had all unwittingly taken several steps back.
Opening its malformed mouth, blunt teeth splitting the gums, the creature that only moments before had been Johannes Verfallen let out a neighing cry like that of a horse being slaughtered. It was like nothing that would come from a human throat. A guttural roar that issued from the creature's stomach echoed the howl. Where Verfallen's gut had torn open sharp teeth now lined the ragged, bleeding edges of a monstrous second mouth.
With a roar that was as much to boost his own resolve as to terrify the enemy, Torben charged at the aberrant beast. A great three-fingered talon lashed out, striking him fully across his chest and sending him flying. The mercenary captain had fallen into the trap of expecting the horror to move more slowly because of its increased size but it had struck like lightning, lashing out with the speed of a striking serpent.
Torben's fellows helped him to his feet but were in no rush to imitate their leader. He grunted, a look of angry disdain on his face.
'Come on! Attack! What are you afraid of?'
'What do you think?' Oran yelled back.
'What is it?' Yuri demanded, holding back.
'Chaos spawn,' Pieter hissed, half to himself under his breath. 'A creature formed from mortal flesh by the twisted powers of darkness and disorder that threaten to overwhelm us!'
Yuri hesitated still further, as if Pieter's explanation was almost more shocking than the gangling horror before them.
'It doesn't matter what it is!' Torben shouted incredulously. 'We're going to kill it anyway! We've fought worse than this. What about that beastman horde outside Tierdorf? By Queen Katarin's sword, we've even routed a whole nest of vampires! What are you waiting for? Are we dew-eyed milkmaids or Badenov's band?'
Their leader's rousing speech had the desired effect. 'Badenov's band!' the mercenaries cried as one, apart from the reticent Pieter. As one they rushed the horror.
The foul monstrosity kicked and struck, jerking its disproportionately long neck forward in an attempt to bite the mercenaries. Sword, axe and dagger made contact with pliable, newly rendered flesh. The second terrible mouth snarled and hissed uselessly as the men did their best to give the monster a wide berth between lunges. And yet for every wound laid against it, with the incline of the hill aiding it, the monstrosity still managed to advance on the mercenaries, driving them back towards the campfire.
As they fought the Chaos-spawned beast the wind whipped more fiercely about them. Howling in fury, the enraged fiend lurched forward. Stanislav's double-headed battle-axe bit deep into a shin-bone, splintering it and bringing the monster down on one knee with a baleful braying. As Alexi lunged at the beast, intending to plunge his sword deep into its chest where he supposed its dark heart to be, the mutant snaked its neck down sharply. Its hot, moist breath caught him full in the face, the noxious stench making him gag and lose the initiative. Only a swift up thrust from Pieter's sword into what had once been Verfallen's sternum saved Alexi from losing his head to the champing jaws.
Pushing down on the ground with its great knuckled hands the spawn hefted itself back into an almost upright position. In its determination to stand, it seemed to shrug off the continued attacks of the mercenaries. It soon became apparent, however, that each well-placed hit had taken its toll. The monster hobbled forward, Oran sidestepping out of the way to avoid having his foot crushed by a large, bony hoof. As it tried to support itself on both legs again, its broken limb gave way and the horrific mutation crumpled into a heap on top of the campfire.
Not pausing for a second, Torben snatched up a burning brand and thrust it into a dark-pitted eye-socket. The creature screamed but this only made the mercenary captain push all the harder, driving the blazing branch into the monster's skull. His work finished, Torben stepped back from the blaze as the corrupted form of Johannes Verfallen began to burn.
For a few, long, panting seconds the only sound they were aware of was the hissing and sizzling of the creature's Chaos-mutated flesh cooking on the fire, orange-white coals melting its already warped bones. Then the roar of the gale broke into Torben's consciousness.
Throughout the battle with the monstrosity, the wind had continued to rise. What had started as an evening breeze had become a howling gale that showed no sign of abating. Black clouds scudded across the midnight blue of the sky, drawn into the swirling turmoil centred over the hilltop. The roiling storm clouds had blotted out the moon long ago. Beneath the centre of the tempest stood the dilapidated windmill, its ragged sails spinning freely in the racing air currents.
Torben looked around at the circle of faces lit by the flickering flames of Verfallen's funeral pyre. Beyond them the hillside was black, the stone was black, everything apart from the campfire, the deep blue of the distant horizon and their anxious faces was an amorphous mass of darkness. Over the keening of the wind around the monolith and the crackling of the fire there was a wet popping sound and the darkness moved.
Shadows, blacker even than the blasted, nighttime landscape, stirred and scampered at the foot of the standing stone. Above the roar of the gale the popping sound continued and was joined by a high-pitched, unintelligible gibbering which was getting louder. More shadows moved to either side of the mercenaries. Whatever was emerging from the night was increasing in number and very rapidly.
A distant rumble rolled across the moors towards the hill and then something came within range of the flickering firelight. Torben caught the gleam of a claw, the wicked grin of discoloured teeth and the glistening of mucus on green skin.
'What was that?' Yuri exclaimed, pushing the black tangle of his fringe from his eyes.
Then with one concerted movement the darkness advanced towards them. The forms at the vanguard of the scurrying mass broke from the shadows and Badenov's band took another step back.
The creatures were the colour of bruises. Haemorrhage purples, greens and yellows, dribbling strings of silver spittle and oozing night-soil brown fluid from pores and unnatural orifices on their small swollen bodies. They were all studying the soldiers with darting jaundice-yellow eyes.
'Ugly little bastards, aren't they?' Alexi stated unnecessarily.
Pointed ears pricked up at the words and several of the creatures snarled through curling lips.
'Oh, well done,' Oran muttered, 'now you've upset them.'
'I don't think they're that bothered about making friends,' Torben assured his companion as the mass of tiny green monsters waddled forward, clawed hands raised menacingly. There wasn't a single one of the creatures that was more than two feet tall and yet each one looked as if it was quite capable of taking a man down, having gone for the throat.
'So what do we do now?'
Torben hesitated, scouring the area around them. The discoloured, bloated bodies surged towards them like a rippling tide of corruption.
'We run,' Pieter stated simply. 'We can't fight them, there are too many of them. We would appear to be surrounded on all sides but to the south. The windmill will provide us with a better position. So we run.'
They didn't need telling twice: Oran was already a good fifty yards ahead of the rest of them. Torben didn't like it. He was a fighter but he knew when we was up against the odds and liked the idea of being eaten alive by these disgusting things even less. With a firm grip on his drawn sword, he sprinted after the fleeing mercenaries.

TORBEN WAS THE first to burst through the unlocked door into the windmill. 'Anybody here?' he called out, half-expecting the startled face of the miller to greet him. There was no reply. There wasn't a sound. The mill was dark and empty. It stank of mildew. 'No? Good.'
Puffing and panting, the mercenary band staggered into the mill. The run through the night, fuelled by fear and adrenaline, had taken its toll. A lantern was found, lit, and hung from a beam in the centre of the room.
Alexi sat down heavily on a bulging sack of corn. 'I'm exhausted,' he managed to say between gasps.
'You can't sit down yet,' Torben said, closing the door and barring it. 'Now that we're in, we've got to make sure that nothing else can follow us in. Something tells me those things out there aren't going to give up too easily.'
'Did any of you see where they came from?' Yuri asked, a shocked expression on his face after witnessing one horror after another that night.
'It was dark,' Oran pointed out, 'and I was busy at the time, fighting a monster from children's nightmares!'
'It was like they came out of the night itself, I mean out of thin air, right in front of us,' Yuri continued, as if he hadn't heard a word Oran had uttered.
The chamber they found themselves in was effectively one storey of the mill. A thick wooden shaft emerged from a hole in the floor above and was connected to large cogs and other pieces of mill machinery, culminating in the grindstone at the centre of the room. On the other side of the building, a heavy-looking trapdoor covered the entrance to a cellar. Various pieces of furniture stood around the chamber, including a rough wooden pallet draped with a blanket. More curiously, what seemed like half a library was strewn about amongst the mill workings. Someone had been living here recently and it didn't look like it had been the miller.
Torben grabbed the end of a table covered in books and papers. As he dragged it in front of the doorway, with Stanislav's assistance, several scrolls and open tomes fell onto the floor. The rest of the party began making the windmill as siege-proof as they could but Pieter was more interested in the clutter covering the table.
'Look at all this,' he said gesturing to the piles of papers.
'What about it?' Oran said, gruffly.
'Well it's hardly the sort of thing you'd expect to find in a mill is it?' He picked up a slim black volume and studied the gilt-embossed words on the spine. 'How many millers do you know who read Braustein's Ancient Tribes of the Ostermark Region? Or, Lempter's Necrotic Diseases of the Body. Most of them can't even write their own name, let alone read La Lune d'Enfer in the original Bretonnian.'
He exchanged the book in his hands for a battered bundle of pages held together with knotted string. The others listened to his almost unhealthily excited ranting, as they barricaded themselves into the tower.
'The Albergoeren Almanac has been declared a heretical text. I remember old Walter telling me about it. It contains a list of all the feast days observed within the Empire, including those of the Fell Powers. He had a copy until the Edict of Verbrenner decreed that copies of the book should be destroyed, after the razing of Krachzen.'
As well as the books, rolls of parchment had been spread out on the table, the corners held down with anything that had come to hand: a curious looking device of brass and mahogany, a pestle, a stoppered flask. There were maps here, of the heavens as well as the lands of the Ostermark Marches, and charts for calculating the movements of the moons.
'I shouldn't read that, if I were you,' Pieter said anxiously, eyeing Stanislav, who was holding a large grimoire that seemed to be bound in some kind of dark, scaly hide.
'Why, what is it?' the great bear asked suspiciously.
'I believe in the scholar's script it's called the Liber Pestilentia. It's said, if you're not an acolyte of the Dark Gods and you're not protected by various talismans and charms, that reading that will drive you insane and make you go blind.'
The heavy book fell with a thump onto the table.
'Ah, now what's this?' Pieter said, the excitement in his voice unmistakable and unnerving.
Despite themselves the more poorly read members of the band gathered around the erudite youth.
'Yes, I do believe it's Johannes Verfallen's journal!' he exclaimed. Pieter began intently scouring the slanting spider scrawl that covered page after page of the book open in his hands with closely packed notes. Not a square inch of paper had been wasted. There were diagrams and lines of runes, as well as a thickly inked, unreadable script that Torben didn't recognise and yet spoke to him of dark yearnings, bodily corruption and spiritual depravity. What was it about scholarly types that made them want to write down every little thing they did? Why couldn't they just be satisfied with living their lives rather than writing about them?
Beyond the walls of the windmill the wind whistled while the sails creaked and groaned. Inside all was silence as Pieter scanned page after page of the insane scholar's journal, gradually piecing together all the parts of the puzzle. At last he looked up at the huddle of expectant faces around him.
'So what's it say?' Torben voiced the question they were all thinking.
'In a nutshell?' Pieter looked grim. 'If you thought things were bad so far, they're about to get a whole lot worse. What happened at the standing stone was only the beginning. Apparently, from what I can make out from this,' he said, tapping the journal with a finger, 'the monolith was some sort of ''keystone''. It was set up centuries, probably even thousands of years ago, by a primitive marauder tribe, like those who dwell beyond the known world at the edge of the Chaos Wastes.
'This particular tribe worshipped the Plague God in the aspect of a monstrous, skeletal carrion crow. Their greatest leader was a shaman who went by the name of Moruut. It was his desire to attain daemonhood and it seems he would have succeeded, had he not been traitorously murdered by his own son.'
'What is this,' an incredulous Oran challenged, 'a bedtime story?'
Taking a deep breath, Pieter ignored the ignorant heckle and continued. 'The monolith was erected to collect and store magical energy. The runes covering it were a spell to release Nurgle's power in this area. Casting the spell would have given Moruut the power he needed to become a Daemon Prince!'
Gasps passed around the group.
'Surely such things are just legends?' Torben pointed out.
'Well, let's hope so,' Pieter replied, 'because Verfallen wasn't translating those runes, he was casting the spell.'
'And Grandfather Nurgle got a foothold in this world,' an anxious Yuri added. 'I didn't think that storm was natural.'
'Exactly, hence the appearance of the nurglings - those monsters outside. It seems Verfallen expected to be turned into some kind of Chaos champion himself but the Dark Gods are fickle, as we witnessed.'
Torben pushed a callused hand through his mane of thick black hair. 'So what's next? Plagues of flies? Crops failing for miles around? The pox?'
'Worse than that. As was the custom of the tribe, Moruut was buried in a barrow, like those we saw on our way to this forsaken place.'
'Oh, let me guess. I think I know this one,' Oran mocked. 'The barrow's under this hill.'
'Yes,' Pieter said coldly. 'Right under this windmill, according to Verfallen's notes.'
'So if Nurgle's power has been released in this area, could Moruut's dream still be fulfilled?' Yuri asked, desperately hoping to be wrong.
'Verfallen thought so. But the effects of the spell would have only awakened the daemon from what's left of Moruut's physical remains. To restore it fully so it can exist beyond its tomb, the daemon needs potent human sacrifices.'
'Don't they always?' Stanislav said uncomfortably.
'By Sigmar, we're exactly where that bastard wanted us!' Torben suddenly exclaimed angrily. 'He didn't hire us for protection. He hired us to be the sacrifices!' The mercenary captain slammed his fist down on the table. A stunned silence reigned inside the windmill.
With an ear-splitting crash and perfect dramatic timing, the storm broke directly overhead. The thunderclap resounded around the mill and shook the building to its foundations. Gale-force winds howled around the windmill with cyclonic force, driving horizontal rain against the solitary building.
'I haven't witnessed a storm like this since the night the old Tzar died,' Alexi said.
'I told you, it's not natural,' Yuri repeated. 'It's not the weather that's causing this, it's the power of Chaos!'
Then they heard them. Over the crackling booms of the storm raging beyond their erstwhile sanctuary they heard gibbering cries and howls; the scraping of tiny, yet insistent, taloned hands on the stonework, shutters and door of the windmill. Despite their best efforts, with cold realisation the mercenaries were suddenly very aware of how poorly protected they were inside the crumbling structure. Although there was only the one door in or out, there were also the shuttered windows on this level and the next. Against a larger attacker their barricade would have been adequate, although they would have still been prisoners inside the windmill. Against a small, determined foe, however, one that could scale the pitted exterior of the building with ease and one in such large numbers, their defences seemed pitifully inadequate.
There were narrow spaces between the boards that made up the shutters and a draughty gap under the door. The neglected state of the building didn't help. All around them there were countless tiny access ways into the mill: knotholes in the wooden planks; gaps between the stones where the mortar holding them together had disintegrated. Such holes didn't need to be big, not when it was tiny claws and bodies that were trying to break into the mill. Yet with the press of hundreds of bodies, the nurglings' size proved to be no disadvantage in terms of the force they could exert on rotten boards that should have been replaced years ago.
'Every man to an opening!' Torben commanded. 'We can't let them get in!'
Instantly each of the mercenaries took up a position at a window or in front of the mill door. The shutters shook on their hinges as clawing green hands reached through the gaps between the planks, trying to pull them apart, while the door-bolts rattled in their fastenings.
Torben had fought ratmen, black-armoured warriors of Chaos and even the undead, in his time, but never had he encountered such an indomitable foe. It wasn't their strength or even their dogged determination: it was their numbers.
'Give me a mad axe-wielding minotaur any day!' he found himself blurting out aloud. 'Any thing but these little buggers!'
Torben and his companions did their best to fend off the nurglings' onslaught but where one grasping limb was removed, or one hole jammed with a sword blade, three more taloned hands tore through elsewhere. Besides, the mercenaries' weapons were proving unwieldy in such confined conditions. Their swords and Stanislav's axe were for use in open combat where a soldier could swing his weapon freely, thrust and parry. At the windows inside the mill, their weapons had to be used more like spears or polearms, in a stabbing motion, which was proving to be hard work. Not only that, it brought them in reach of the clutching claws of the besieging nurglings.
The only one who seemed to be having any luck was Oran, whose slim dagger slipped neatly between the boards of the window he was defending. Every well-aimed jab resulted in a high-pitched squeal from the other side of the shutter.
Alexi gave a pained shout, distracting the others for a moment. Glancing round Torben saw the old soldier hopping around on one leg. Hanging on to his other ankle by its teeth was one of the fat little daemons, while three more squeezed under the now undefended door, under the table and into the mill.
Then Stanislav was striding across the floor. In one fluid motion, which appeared incredible from a hulking bear of a man like him, he dropped his axe and picked up a long-handled scythe from its place against the wall. With his newly-appropriated weapon gripped firmly in his huge hands, Stanislav was able to keep his distance as he swept the long, curved blade under the door. The rusted and notched blade cut through daemonic flesh and bone. Four swift strokes left a brace of dismembered bodies oozing dark green ichor in its wake.
Crushing the nurgling attached to his ankle against the mill's grindstone, Alexi finally managed to kick the struggling creature free of his leg, although its sharp teeth tore a chunk of flesh away with it. The nurgling tumbled through the air, landing in a gibbering heap in front of the barricaded door. Extending his stride, Stanislav brought his foot down on top of the foul creature. There was a squelching pop as the daemon was squashed under the great man's booted heel.
Following Stanislav's example, Torben, Pieter and Yuri exchanged their more familiar weapons for the pitchforks, sickles and rakes the original occupant of the windmill had left behind, defending their positions all the more effectively as a result. Suddenly light-headed, Alexi sat down heavily on the broad grindstone, tying a hastily prepared bandage around his bleeding ankle.
For half an hour, the six mercenaries battled against the onslaught of innumerable nurglings as wave after wave of the Plague God's children assailed the mill. The strain was beginning to show. They had been fighting for their lives since sunset. First Verfallen's Chaos spawn, then the flight up the hill and now the incessant attacks of the nurglings.
Where the nurglings were inevitably beginning to break through the rotten wood of one window, Yuri had begun piling sacks of mouldy grain into the window frame in an attempt to block the daemons' advance.
Putrid green ichor running from the sills and the rapidly decomposing remains of the nurglings that had infiltrated the tower had mixed with the flour and chaff-dust that covered the floor of the mill, creating a thick, foul-smelling sludge that was treacherously slippery underfoot. Pieter and the limping Alexi both lost their footing on the ooze-slicked planks.
There was a sudden, loud thud from the floor above them. In a second Stanislav had abandoned his position by the door and was up the ladder. Almost as quickly, he was leaping down it again.
'They're in!' he yelled, looking desperately to his captain. 'They've got in upstairs!'
Torben opened his mouth as if to issue an order, but no order came. When it mattered most, he was at a loss about what to do.
'Then we go into the cellar,' Pieter said, grimly.
Turning from the window he guarded, the steely-eyed young man crossed the room to the heavy trapdoor set into the floor. Taking the great iron ring in both hands he heaved on the trap, lifting it up and sending a shower of wheat-dust and chaff into the air around him. Taking the lantern from its hook Pieter took his first step into the cellar. The lantern cast a weak halo of light into the depths as if unwilling to enter the subterranean chamber itself. Pieter peered ahead into the gloom beyond the lantern's circle of illumination.
'Are you mad?' Yuri yelled.
Scores of scrabbling green creatures were pouring down the ladder into the main chamber. Clawing, biting, howling nurglings surged towards the mill's defenders, a mass of bloated, suppurating bodies with snapping needle-like fangs and ripping talons. One of the creatures flung itself from the surge of daemons, latching onto Stanislav's unprotected face with its jaws. Ripping the nurgling from his cheek he cast it back into the mass of scrabbling bodies.
The giant turned to Yuri, blood streaming down his face. 'They're going to overwhelm us!' he said with brutal finality.
'We have no choice!' Pieter shouted back over the gibbering cacophony of the daemonlings and then added to himself: 'So into the jaws of hell we go.'

HOLDING THE LANTERN at arm's length ahead of him, Pieter looked into the darkened cellar. After the clutter of the mill, the cellar was spartan by comparison.
As he crept down the stone steps into the space beneath the windmill, Pieter's lantern cast flickering shadows on the curved walls. The cellar was cold and damp. Slime and patches of pallid, strangely shaped fungi covered the walls. The underside of the mill floor was thick with mould. Pieter shivered, although whether it was from the cold or some deep-seated fear, he wasn't sure - or at least didn't like to admit.
Reaching the bottom of the steps, he steadied himself against the wall with one hand. It was clammy with condensation and cold to the touch. They were on bedrock here. The rough stone of the floor of the cellar was dangerously uneven. Pieter hung the lantern from a splintered beam above his head, trying not to disturb any of the fungi growing there and so release any toxic spores.
The rest of the party followed Pieter into the under-room, Yuri and Stanislav being the last, fighting back the nurglings as they came. With a final swipe of his reclaimed axe, Stanislav slammed the heavy trapdoor shut, crushing the skull of one of the tiny daemons and the grasping forelimbs of several others in the process. With a satisfying ''Shunk!'' he slammed the bolts home. It wasn't until much later that Stanislav wondered why the trapdoor should have bolts on its underside - unless someone had wanted to be able to keep others out should matters so dictate.
The lantern-light reflected off gleaming yellow-white bone and Pieter found himself looking into the empty eye-sockets of what he took to be the former owner of the mill. The almost fleshless corpse lay slumped against the wall, a cluster of thin-stemmed toadstools growing through the exposed bones of his ribcage. Doubtless the miller had been the first sacrifice made by Verfallen to re-consecrate this place to Nurgle and to begin the process of awakening the dormant Moruut.
And yet, other than the algae and necrotic-loving fungi, there were none of the accompanying carrion-feeders that Pieter would have expected. Where were the beetles, the centipedes, even a lone rat? Where was the buzz of bluebottles, laying their eggs within the host corpse that would provide a feast for their larval young? Perhaps they had departed long ago. Or perhaps they were down there.
Pieter took a step forward to get a better look at the round metal grille set into the centre of the cellar's stone floor. Three or four feet in diameter, and with widely spaced bars practically rusted through, the grille was sunk into a dressed stone rim. Beneath it, all Pieter could see was utter blackness. It was as if the hole swallowed up any light cast into it. The stink of the grave and the sewer assailed his nostrils, making him gag.
Then a sound rose up from the bottom of the pit: the splashing of water, the splatter of filth and a faint mewling moan, horribly as if of something newborn. Something was sloshing around in the slime at the bottom of the pit. Something large, by the sounds of it.
Stepping back again he noticed for the first time the filth-encrusted grooves in the floor, partially hidden by rotting straw and other muck. He followed the narrow channels filled with congealed blood and other unspeakable fluids, tracing the pattern they formed. Yes, there were the three connected circles and the three arrowheads emerging from between them: the symbol of the Plague God as recorded in Verfallen's journal. Nurgle's rune had been chiselled into the bedrock before being filled with putrescent material pleasing to the Lord of Decay. The blasphemous symbol covered most of the cellar floor with the grilled pit at its very centre.
'This isn't a cellar,' Stanislav said with a sense of unease.
'No, this is a shrine,' Pieter said, 'dedicated to Nurgle.'
'How does that saying go again?' Oran started with a tone of contempt in his voice. 'Out of the frying pan-'
'Into the plague pit,' Torben finished.
'At least up there,' Oran complained, indicating the floor above, 'we could have got out of this ruddy place!'
'Oh yes, and into what?' Torben snarled turning on him. 'An agonising death at the hands of the hordes of Nurgle? At least down here we're still alive, for the time being, and right now that's all that matters!'
'And this could be our way out,' Pieter said with something approaching excitement, an intense look in his glazed eyes. He hadn't taken his gaze from the rusted iron grille.
'You are insane!' Yuri exclaimed, his voice raised in fear and anger.
Torben hushed him with a gesture. 'What do you mean?' he asked, his commanding tone demanding an explanation from the nobleman and silence from the others.
'Inside this hill, Moruut is growing, awakened by the spell inscribed on the monolith. His body is reforming from the sludge and slime of his mortal remains that has lain in his burial chamber for countless centuries.'
'If you say so,' Oran muttered.
'As Verfallen recorded in his journal!' Pieter fumed.
'Go on,' Torben said.
'Anyway,' Pieter said, composing himself again, 'before he can return to full strength on this earthly plane Moruut has to consume the lot of us, body and soul.'
'Doesn't seem too unlikely from where I'm standing,' Yuri moaned, continuing in his despairing vein.
'Ignore him,' Alexi said, the old soldier encouraging the young noble.
'Well, if we could destroy Moruut before he's fully re-formed, while he's still comparatively weak, Nurgle's power in this area will be broken and the nurglings will be banished back to the Realm of Chaos. They won't be able to maintain their physical form with the source of the corruption gone.' It seemed there was no stopping Pieter now he had settled on this train of thought. 'Moruut's still a daemon, so he'll still be pretty strong, but we should be able to do it.'
'It sounds like it could work, in principle,' Alexi said, pondering the plan.
'Sounds like a good plan to me,' Stanislav agreed.
Oran grunted: 'It's the only plan we've got!'
'I hate to spoil things,' the mercenaries' leader said, interrupting their musings, 'but as you said yourself, this thing's a daemon - a Daemon Prince, no less! Something tells me that our weapons aren't going to be enough. What are we going to fight it with?'
'This.' Pieter reached inside his jerkin and pulled out a small, leather-bound book. The cover was dark with age and the grease-stained pages well thumbed. A number of scraps of paper and strips of ribbon marked places in the book.
'What's that?' Yuri asked.
'You godless heathen!' the older Alexi suddenly bellowed. 'Don't you recognise a prayer book of Sigmar when you see one?'
'It was given to me by my old manservant, Walter,' Pieter explained, opening the book and turning the pages as if searching for a particular passage.
'Right, so how's that going to help?' Torben asked, his brow furrowed in concentration as he tried to fill in the gaps.
'It is known that the holy might of Sigmar can smite the creatures of Chaos, such as daemons. Walter told me tales of such horrors when I was a boy. They cannot stand against the purity and righteousness of the Heldenhammer. They are repelled by his cleansing zeal.'
Pieter stopped on a page, scanning the verses printed there before continuing. 'In this book, there is a ritual of purification. With the charms I have in my possession and a little time I think I can carry out the rite and purge this place of evil. All we need is to hold to our faith in blessed Sigmar.'
'Faith?' Oran scoffed. 'It's all very well talking about faith in the safety of your churches and surrounded by a city wall but I think you'll find there's precious little faith out here?'
'Really?' Pieter challenged. 'Verfallen had faith. His belief in his Dark God is what got us into this mess! I am strong in my faith. Will you be found wanting when your time comes?' The resolute noble fixed the rat-faced mercenary with his steely-blue eyes.
'If the scholar's journal was correct, this evil that you speak of has probably been here longer than the Empire. To have lasted that long it's got to be strong too,' Torben warned, 'and we're just a bunch of desperate swordsmen who know little of the ways of the priest.'
'Nurgle's power waxes and wanes like the moon, as outbreaks of plague and other epidemics rise and fall,' Pieter explained patiently. 'I am sure we can prevail here.'
'What, all of us?' The party turned to look at Alexi at the old soldier's words. Normally he was the last to speak of failure. The hard-bitten veteran of a hundred campaigns, defeat wasn't a concept Alexi seemed familiar with. But then they saw the reason for his change of heart.
Alexi was sitting on the steps, one leg of his britches rolled up to the knee to expose his bitten ankle. The teeth marks were clearly visible as angry red puncture wounds, apart from where the nurgling had torn off a mouthful. The flesh around the bite was discoloured purple and green. As Alexi pressed the flesh with his fingertips yellow pus dribbled from the wound. It was already infected. Alexi's face was a pallid grey and he was starting to sweat despite the cold.
'We end this now!' Torben determined. 'Pieter, do what you have to and tell us how we can best help.'
Hastily the devout young man instructed the rest of the party to take up positions around the pit. He knew the daemon would not go back into the void without a fight. As the mercenaries spaced out equidistantly around the chamber, Pieter placed a superstitious trinket or holy charm at each of the points where the carved lines of Nurgle's rune intersected.
Stanislav and Yuri stood at the bottom of the steps, half expecting the attack to come from the nurglings that had overrun the windmill. Torben and Oran flanked Pieter, who knelt down in the filth at the edge of the pit, while the weakened, hobbling Alexi marked the fifth point of the pentagram. He leant heavily on his sword for support while the others took up a fighting stance, weapons at the ready.
Kneeling on the cold, wet floor, Pieter began the ritual of purification. All eyes, other than his own, focused on the grille. The rabid gibbering from the nurglings above had died down, as if the tiny monsters knew that their lord was on his way.

LIKE A BLOATED purple-green slug at first, and then more like a sinuous snake, a tentacle emerged from between the bars of the grille. Slick with slime the lantern light caused oily rainbow spirals to swirl across its mucus-wet skin. Slowly it began to uncoil towards the kneeling Pieter.
'Careful,' the mercenaries' leader said in a forced whisper.
Raising his sword, ready to fight, the lame Alexi took a staggering step forward to balance himself. The tentacle suddenly froze and then just as quickly whipped backwards wrapping itself around the rotund old soldier's waist. A look of horror flashed across Alexi's face and then he was being pulled through the air. With a sickening crunch he hit the grille, arms and legs outstretched. The tentacle pulled tighter, forcing out what little air he had left in his lungs.
Gasping, Alexi somehow found his voice: 'By the gods! Help me! Help me!'
To Torben it seemed that his own movements suddenly slowed to a snail's pace. Tensed muscles released, he was running towards Alexi as Pieter slowly intoned the words of a prayer to Sigmar. But before he was even halfway across the cellar, the disgusting, boneless limb tightened still further, tugging at the rotund man. Alexi's screams were joined by a mournful moaning from the bottom of the pit, and another sound - the sound of twisting metal. Within two seconds the protesting bars, half-eaten through by rust, snapped.
Torben reached out his hand to the flailing, screaming Alexi only to see the old soldier fold impossibly in the middle as his spine snapped.
And suddenly Alexi was gone.
His screams of agony descended into the blackness of the pit only to be cut off abruptly a second later. As the mercenaries stood in stunned silence around the cellar a new sound came to their ears. At first it was almost inaudible, a bass growl that vibrated through the bedrock and then rose in pitch and volume until it became a daemonic roar of triumph that shook the ground and rung in their ears long after it had ceased.
Torben stood where he was, in stunned shock. There was nothing he had been able to do! He remembered Manfred, clutching at the arrow protruding from his stomach as he toppled from the battlements into the greenskin throng below. There had been nothing he could do then either, but this was different. Manfred's death had been in the midst of battle. Alexi had been lost in a cellar, under an isolated windmill on a bleak hilltop in the middle of the Ostermark Moors. This was no battle to be sung of later in mead halls!
Following the daemonic roar, Pieter's words became more urgent, the litanies and prayers of supplication tumbling from his lips as he desperately tried to complete the ritual. More tentacles emerged from the pit, lashing out at the mercenaries. The men dodged to avoid the muscular, rubbery flesh as they tried to lay their own blows with their keen-edged blades.
And then, rising from the pit amidst the mass of tentacles, Verfallen's face appeared. Torben caught sight of the grinning scholar and, momentarily distracted, only just managed to deflect a swipe from a squidlike limb with the flat of his sword blade. Only it wasn't Verfallen: it was a sickly-green facsimile of the Chaos acolyte's head, bony growths standing in for spectacles, bobbing on top of a scaly, serpentine neck.
The head spoke: 'I am Moruut the Festering, Daemon Prince of Nurgle, the Infecter, the Corruptor, the Plague Lord's Chosen One.' Verfallen's image surveyed the warriors beneath it struggling against the constricting tentacles a malevolent smile on its thin purple lips. 'And you are all going to die!'

ONLY HALF-AWARE of what was going on around him, Pieter began reading the prayer of exorcism: 'Lord Sigmar, Defender of the Empire.' He spoke the words as boldly and confidently as he could but it suddenly seemed to him that his voice was like that of a feeble, pleading child. And then Moruut spoke to him, directly.
'Pieter Valburg,' it said, 'what do you hope to achieve?'
Pieter stumbled over the next line. He tried to focus on the book held open in his shaking, sweating palms and then repeated the invocation.
'You couldn't save your dead sweetheart from the Dark Kiss and you won't be able to save your pathetic friends now.'
Pieter struggled on but no matter how hard he tried to ignore the taunts spoken by Moruut's slimy, slug-like tongue, the incessant, blasphemous chatter of the daemon drowned out his own feeble pleas to Sigmar, distracting him from his vital task.
'It's no good, boy,' Verfallen's grotesquely grinning head seemed to be saying to him.
'...and let the glorious light of righteousness shine into the dark places...'
'Your god is dead. He cannot hear you.'
'...and let the corrupters turn from your beauteous face...'
'Stop this futile charade. Give in to the darkness.'
'...for as your arm is strong smite the daemons and creatures of Chaos with your hammer of truth...'
'You're exhausted, boy. We all go to the darkness in time. Go now and let your body rest.'
Verfallen's head glided down on its great neck until they were practically nose-to-nose. Pieter could feel the daemon's warm foetid breath on his sweat-cold skin and it pimpled at the contact.
'Let your body rest. You have fought enough.'
Pieter paused. The daemon's words sounded so reasonable. It even sounded human. There was no gurgling voice as though spoken by decayed vocal chords choked with sewer-slime. Just a clear, persuasive human voice, dripping with honey, sickly-sweet like the sickly-sweet smell of decay that lingered in the cellar.
Slowly Pieter looked up from the open page before him and was just in time to see Torben's sword connect with the sinuous neck. The force of the mercenary captain's cutting stroke was powerful enough to slice through the unnatural flesh, severing the neck from Verfallen's grotesquely grinning head. Foul fluid spurted from the stump and the neck lolled. The simulacrum of the scholar's head landed at Torben's feet with a wet thud and an unearthly howl echoed around the cellar. With one strong kick he sent the monstrosity flying into the pit.
'Come on, lad,' he said turning to Pieter. 'We need you now, more than ever, you're the only one who can get us out of this!' Taking a deep breath, Pieter resumed the ceremony.
Writhing tentacles emerged from the hole in the floor, snaking across the chamber towards the kneeling nobleman. Before any of the others could react, the squid-like limbs were coiling around his arms and legs, and even trying to tear the prayer book from his grasp. But this only had the effect of making Pieter even more determined to complete the ritual. He had almost given in once. The daemon was becoming desperate, scared. If it feared him, he must be winning. He wouldn't give in again.
Over Pieter's frenzied invocations yet another sound rose to the party's ears from within the pit. The buzzing rapidly increased in volume until the swarm burst into the cellar. Flies filled the air. There were so many of them that Pieter could hardly see the words of the page in front of him as the tightening tentacles tried to pull him and the holy book apart. And still they came, bloated, hairy black bodies bombarding the warriors incessantly. Their weapons were useless against such a foe. Cutting through the swarm had about as much effect as cutting through the air itself. All the while the buzzing bluebottles found their irritating way into the mercenaries' clothes, hair, ears, noses and mouths, distracting them as they desperately fought against the daemon!
'Bloody hell!' Oran spat through a mash of black bodies.
Pieter kept reading. Only a few more verses, a final prayer of benediction and the ritual would be complete. With each line, each word, Pieter fancied he could sense the daemon flinch and recoil as if his words themselves were like the touch of acid on its festering flesh.
'Don't give up now!' Torben was yelling over the infernal buzzing. Pieter wasn't going to. They were winning, he knew it, and he was going to see this thing through to the finish.
'Hold fast!' Torben barked as the battering tentacles assailed his beleaguered band once again. It was all the harder now. With Alexi gone there were only three of them left to hold off the daemon long enough for Pieter to complete the ritual of purification. Yuri had fallen back to the steps and the trapdoor where the nurglings had renewed their attack and were beginning to break in to the cellar.
Despite their best efforts Pieter was now ensnared in the tentacles but still he read on as his companions fought to break the daemon's hold on him. Oran darted in between the slimy pseudopods, stabbing his dagger into their thickest parts and twisting before withdrawing his blade, ready for another strike. Ducking a swipe from a tentacle, Stanislav swung his axe in a figure-of-eight, chopping more of the limbs into pieces. Seizing the initiative Torben flung himself into the gap created by Stanislav's attack. Skewering another tentacle with his sword, he managed to get a hand on Pieter's shoulder.
'That was always your problem, Torben Badenov,' a familiar voice said behind the captain, 'you never did know when you'd lost.'
Torben looked round into Alexi's anxious face. He froze, shocked by what he was seeing. He knew it wasn't Alexi: they had seen their friend pulled into the pit; they had all heard his death-cry. Yet here he was again, ever the wise old soldier, Torben's mentor from years before, offering him words of gentle advice like a father. How could this be?
Alexi's face winced and a tremor shook the hill.
'You always were too stubborn and stupid to realise you hadn't a hope!' Alexi reiterated, the snake-like neck it was attached to recoiling suddenly. The ritual was nearing its end. Pieter had faltered once but now he would not be stopped: he had been duped himself in such a way before by his vampire lover, Rosamund. But Torben's moment of doubt was enough.
A tentacle twisted around the mercenary's arm, yanking his hand from Pieter's shoulder as the coils around the nobleman constricted and pulled. The last lines of the ritual became a scream as the daemon dragged the vainly struggling Pieter, along with his prayer book, into the hole. Then he too was gone.
In an instant Stanislav was next to Torben, his face red with anger. The first blow from the big man's axe opened the side of Alexi's head. The second removed it from the daemon's body and sent it flying across the cellar. The foul parody of their dead companion landed next to the skeletal remains of the miller with a splat. It started to scream.
The near-deafening blood-curdling howling tore through all of them, pounding at their eardrums, ripping through their minds and churning their stomachs. A bellowing roar from deep inside the hill joined the scream. In response to the daemon's death-howl the cellar began to shake. Dust rained down from between the boards above their heads. The shaking worsened as a deep rumbling rose through the rock beneath their feet. Torben and the others found themselves stumbling to keep their balance as the stone floor buckled and split. But the screaming didn't stop.
'He did it!' Yuri shouted. 'The daemon's dying!'
The lad was right, Torben thought as the tentacles thrashed uncontrollably and began to retract into the pit. Pieter had succeeded! His death had not been in vain. The buzzing cloud of flies dissipated, escaping from the collapsing cellar through holes in the floor above. With a sickening sound, the joists holding up the floor of the windmill splintered and began to give way.
'Go! Get out of here!' Torben yelled above the noise.
The four remaining members of the band staggered across the chamber, trying to stay on their feet and avoid the rifts appearing in the floor. Part of the cellar wall subsided as the party reached the steps, climbing up them on their hands and knees as earth and stones showered down around them. Stanislav hurled the trapdoor open and burst into the tower of the windmill. All around him, mewling nurglings writhed in torment, their bodies dissolving into slime before his eyes. With the Plague Lord's power broken in this place, the daemonlings were unable to maintain their physical form.
As Torben reached the top of the steps, the last to escape the cellar, he glanced back at the pit, set at the heart of the rune of Nurgle. The tentacles had gone: Moruut had returned to his burial chamber to die. Moruut, Daemon Prince of Nurgle, the Corrupter, killed by Badenov's band, but not before it had claimed two of their number.
The fingers of a filth-covered hand grabbed the dressed stone lip of the pit. Then a second hand reached over the rim. Knuckles whitening the fingers pulled and a filth-splattered face emerged from the hole. Torben leapt down the steps and, half-falling, half-running, reached the pit in a matter of strides. Grasping Pieter's wrist, Torben pulled the struggling nobleman from the pit. A fractured beam crashed down next to them as Pieter's feet found purchase on the edge.
Then the two of them were fleeing from the cellar, following the others out of the building. Either the earthquake or the nurglings had destroyed their makeshift barricade in front of the door that now hung open, the rest of the mercenaries having fled into the night beyond. Torben skidded across the room and, hearing a dreadful groaning, looked up in time to see the mill machinery shake free of its settings. The great cogwheels and drive shafts smashed through the floor into the cellar and into the walls. Masonry crashing down around them, the air thick with dust, Torben and Pieter made it through the doorway and out of the crumbling mill.
Adrenaline driving their exhausted bodies on, the two men found the strength to make their weary legs run. Torben was suddenly aware of pale moonlight bathing the view before him, the moon visible once again through the clouds. The storm had abated. Ahead of them he could see Oran, Stanislav and Yuri pelting down the shaking hillside but Torben couldn't help glancing back over his shoulder. Behind them great rents emanating from the base of the windmill at the summit split the ground open. He hurtled on, a fissure zigzagging its way down the slope to his right. He could hear the windmill collapsing behind them. With a whirling crash the mill's sails cartwheeled past him, bouncing off down the hillside.
Past the fallen standing stone, past the smoking remains of their campfire, right at the foot of the hill, Badenov's band gathered, hands on knees, protesting lungs heaving, and watched the windmill's demise. Its sails gone, its drive shaft broken, the whole structure toppled in on itself and was swallowed up by the earth, as the summit of the hill caved in.

MORNING CAME AND with it clear skies, the unnatural storm Verfallen had raised with his blasphemous spell having dissipated. The hill had a distinctly different outline against the horizon, the summit and the windmill both gone. Amongst Badenov's band there followed the usual ritual of dressing wounds. However, whereas after a victory there would normally be the cheerful banter of the mercenaries celebrating a job well done, on this morning they were silent as all mourned the loss of Alexi of Nuln and honoured his memory in their own private way - all except Pieter Valburg.
Pieter's thoughts were elsewhere. He stood away from the group. With his back turned to the others he removed something from inside his jerkin. The cover of the grimoire was as black as the heart of the scholar who had owned it. Daemon faces leered at Pieter from the sculpted leather, if leather it was, and a spiked ring rune, picked out in crimson, left no doubt as to the nature of the book.
As Pieter traced the pattern with his fingertips an old adage of his late manservant came to mind: know thine enemy.