Free 03 - God King by Graham McNeill - (ebook by Undead) Page A

better of him.”
    “We’ve all known suffering and loss,” said Alfgeir, raising his mug. “To the
dead.”
    “To the dead,” said Sigmar.
     
    Beneath the light of Mannslieb a hundred warriors of the Menogoths marched
from the hill fort of Hyrstdunn. They followed an oft-used road that led through
the fields and villages clustered around the sprawling settlement like children
afraid to venture too far from a parent’s protection. Many warriors carried tall
spears tied with green and yellow cords, flanked by groups of hard-eyed men in
lacquered leather breastplates with unsheathed broadswords. Torchbearers
accompanied the marching warriors; each robed in black and with their hoods
pulled up over their heads. At the head of the column rode Count Markus of the
Menogoths, draped in the black cloak of mourning and with his own swords
sheathed across his back.
    The fortress city at their back had stood for hundreds of years, a forest of
wooden logs with sharpened tips and strong towers. The land hereabouts was
rugged and undulant, rising in gentle sways towards the haunches of the Grey
Mountains that bordered Menogoth lands to the south. The earth here was fertile
and rich in resources, yet the price for that bounty was a life lived in the
shadow of the monsters that made their lairs within the mountains: greenskins,
cave beasts twisted by dark magic or strange monsters with no name and ever more
fearsome reputations.
    King Markus had carved a life for his tribe in this wild land, but not
without great cost. His people were hardy, yet their souls were forever caught
in the shadow of the mountains. Often gloomy and fatalistic, the Menogoths were
viewed as a miserable tribe by their more northerly cousins, but had they spent
a year in their lands, not one Unberogen, Cherusen or Thuringian would fail to
see why.
    Count Markus rode beneath a streaming banner of yellow and green silk carried
by his sword champion, Wenian. The banner had been a gift from Marius of the
Jutones in the wake of the great victory at the Fauschlag Rock, and its fabric
was said to have come from lands far to the east beyond the Worlds Edge
Mountains. Markus had cherished the gift ever since.
    His wife and daughter rode in an ornate coach pulled by four black horses
that had been harnessed in bronze and plumed with black feathers. The coach was
of lacquered black wood, hung with ebony roses, spread-winged ravens and, at its
front, the image of a great portal. The women had their heads bowed, and heavy
veils hung with black pearls obscured their faces.
    This was a grim night for the Menogoths, for the only son of Count Markus was
dead.
    Borne on a palanquin of spears, Vartan Gothii went to his rest among the
tombs of his ancestors. An honour guard of the Bloodspears carried the body of
Markus’ son, granted this honour for their courage in standing firm at Black
Fire while their brother warriors had run.
    Markus led the procession through his lands towards the flat-topped hill
where the Menogoth heroes of old were buried. Called the Morrdunn, its height
should have made it the natural place to build one of the forts that gave the
Menogoths their name of hill people, but the first tribesmen to settle here had
instinctively known that this was not a place for the living. A number of
torches flickered at its summit as the grim procession wound its way up the
hard-packed earth of its burial paths.
    They passed the tomb of Devyn of the Axe, the heroic warrior who had saved
the first king of the tribe from an ogre’s cook pot. Further up, Markus nodded
respectfully to the mausoleum carved into the hill where Bannan, the greatest
Swordmaster of the Menogoths, lay at his final rest. Odel the Mad lay within a
simple sepulchre of polished grey granite built into the upper slopes of the
hill, and Markus touched the talisman of Ranald at his chest to ward off the
malign influence of the berserk huscarl.
    He rode onto the