Kasimir was also stuck with someone who he could do without, though rather than being mired in self pity, he was wading through the bog of self righteousness that was Reynald of Montfort, a veritable Grail Knight in the making if he was to be believed. As he prattled on about his miraculous slaying of various beastmen and greenskins, and one particularly smelly ogre, Kasimir kept his ears closed and his eyes open. Soon, he found himself in a wood he recognized all too well. The trees were gnarled and bloated at their bases, but not from some evil. It was the near constant rain and the strange soil from the waters that flowed down from Nordland, no doubt festooned with rotted wood and poisoned norscan flesh.

"We need to dismount soon, hide our horses in the brush. There are no beastmen this close to the manor, and we cannot ride up to the archway lest we get molested." Kasimir remarked, already readying himself to step off his horse.

"Deesmunt!? Do yeu tink vwe zshall zsneak in like some...some...zsneakthief!?" Reynald warbled, aghast at the very notion of not charging at anything with his lance coached. As much as Kasimir would have liked to have seen that, it would get them nowhere. He also did not want to see the knight charge as a distraction. He might not think the man too bright, but he did not want his death on his conscience, even if it would be a grand display.

"Monsiuer, our goal is to rescue the damsel, no? When we have her, we shall embark upon a grand sortee and sally forth through the masses of enemies, I assure you."

The Brettonian chewed his mustache as he considered the proposition, and for a moment Kasimir believed he was going to deny him. But eventually he acquiesced with a nod and a grunt, muttering in his native language under his breath. He almost wished he had Emmaline to deal with. At least she was fine to look at, with a better voice than this one. But he supposed he could be going it alone, so he should thank Ulric for the assistance of another warrior.

As the two swordsmen tethered their horses to the trees, there was a commotion up the road. Hooves and flapping cloaks reached Kasimirs ears, and he kept his mouth shut, clinging to his horse a dozen meters away from the road to keep the beast from nickering. To his amazement and relief, Reynald kept quiet as well. Unfortunately, the swordsman only got a glimpse of the small troupe of three that galloped past, but Ulric watched over them, as no one looked their way, too intent on the road.

He realized they were heading toward Kasimir's and Reynald's destination. But why?

“Eleanor. Eleanor open the door!” Emmaline struggled out of the bath she had been luxuriating in, splashing water all over the floor. She stepped out and immediately slipped on the dark wooden floor, comically pin wheeling her arms before landing on her rump in a crash.

“Lady Eleanor?! Are you ok?! Julian’s shrill voice came through the door, “are you ok.”

“Vhat are you goeng to do break down le doair?” she called back acidly as she scrambled to her feet and towleed herself off.

“What?” Jullian called back, unable to penetrate the accent through the thick timber door.

“Ould on a momon,” she called, pulling on a gown and stumbling into the main room. She turned they key and pulled the door open. Julian nearly fell into the room, all but scratching at the door. His earnest face was pale and his lips were visibly trembling. His eyes bulged at her state of relative undress and his pale face suffused with a blush so deep Emmaline worried he was about to pass out.

“Well? Why aré you breakeng down mon doair and intairrupteng mon bath?” she demanded. Julian opened and closed his mouth like a fish. Emmaline snapped her fingers repeatedly under the boy’s nose.

“Oh ahhh… men just arrived, men from my father,” he whined, all but wringing his hand. Emmaline manuvered him onto a couch and thrust a glass of schnapps into his hand. He swallowed it in a convulsive gulp then gasped as the liquor’s burn hit. Emmaline plucked the glass from his hand before he could drop it.

“Zo mén arrived from yur fathair…” Eleanor prompted, struggling to reign in her mounting frustration. Julian blinked and then seemed to return to himself.

“They are closeted with Colditz now,” he explained, “I think there is a priest with them.”

“A priest?” Eleanor asked then her eyes widened.

“Eez 'e haire to marry uz do you think?” she asked. Julian looked momentarily confused.

“I… I think he might have found out about… no, I wont let it happen!” he cried then leaped to his feet and rushed out of the room.

“Julian!” Emmaline yelled after him confused and starting to grow a little afraid. She looked down at the schnapps bottle in her hand and took a long drink, then quickly started dressing.

The screams came a half hour later once Emmaline was dressed and heading out in search of Julian. They seemed to come from the valley and what they portend Emmaline had no idea. She slipped from the room and to her surprise Colditz and his guards were no where to be found. Emmaline wasted only a few minutes to grab a few valuable items then headed for the stables, willing to take advantage of whatever breaks came her way. More screams came from the house as whe was pulling a saddle onto an expensive looking horse. There was something fell on the air and she could feel a knot of ice in her stomach. The need to get away from this place was a desperate throbbing thing. The buckles were just about in place when a hand fell on her shoulder. Emmaline screamed and tried to twist away but the fingers gripped like iron. She was whirled around and found herself face to face with Colditz. Or what was left of his face. Great bloody rents had been torn in it with what looked like claws and his palor was cold and dead. Witchfires burned in his eyes and though he had not yet the grey color of the grave the stink of dark sorcery poured off the cadaver. Other horrors, older fleshless skeletons stained with graveyard earth and moss joineed Colditz, hemming her in. Screaming she was dragged infront of the manor.

“It is ok Eleanor, it will be ok!” Julian was shouting, his eyes wide and wide with shock. Emmaline could pick out burst blood vessels in his face and dark magic coiled around him.

“I learned this at university, I know it looks bad but I promise I’ll keep you safe… I’ll let you….” he trailed off shooting her an agonized look as he realised that if he let her, or anyone else go the truth of what he was would get out. He was a necromancer. A wizard who tampered with the forces of life and death and was forever damned by the poison of dark magic.

“Look I’ll think of something,” he promised. One of the chambermaids stumbled from the manor and was struck down by a skeleton with a scythe. Julian whimpered then muttered something, the maid rose jerkily to join a growing perimeter around the house.

"Julian! Julian! You have to let me go!" Emmaline shrieked, momentarily forgetting her accent.

“I’ll think of something,” Julian promised as the zombie of Colditz dragged Emmaline screaming into the house.

They crouched in the brush at the base of the treeline, watching the stately manor from down a small decline. Their swords drawn, the middenlander and the brettonian had noticed a patrolling watchman minutes ago, but he had yet to return. Otherwise, they could see no one providing sentry around the perimeter. The manor stood eerily silent, erected before the overcast sky like a grand mausoleum of an ancient king from Sigmar's day. Somehow, Kasimir was more unnerved now than if he saw the walls being overrun with armed men.

"Zshall ve adwance?" Reynard asked in a conspiratorial whisper. He was eager before, but now he seemed more confused than anything. Kasimir did not blame the cavalryman.

"Now seems as good a time as any," Kasimir temporized, and the two began to move, making their way round the shrubs before stepping onto the open ground, keeping low as they moved up the hill, making their way to one of the many archways along the walls. A quick peek, and Kasimir saw no guardsmen within. Shockingly, to the left was a fallen spear, and what looked like a small pool of blood on the cobblestones of the walkway through the small, well-tended garden.

"Sacre bleu!" The Knight exclaimed.

"Sssshhh," Kasimir urged him.

"Wot happoned?" Reynard asked, this time more softly. The two knelt by the fallen spear, but could find no trace of anything pertaining to what could have occurred.

"Damned if I know," the imperial cursed, shaking his head at this further complication. The woman had brought him nothing but trouble since he had met her, and now he was walking into some sort of chaos or violence he could not guess. "Our mission is still the same. Let's move."

"Oui," agreed Reynard, and the two hurried on to the closest doorway, an open portal into a darkened manor. It's door stretched out, apparently whoever had opened it had been in too much of a hurry to bother with closing. Kasimir felt a pang of trepidation, but his armor and sword were some of the best money could buy, and Reynard's armaments were castle-forged. Glancing at one another with grim determination, they stepped into the door, their forms engulfed by darkness.

"ULRIC'S POXMARKED NUTTSACK!"

Kasimir leaped out of the gloom as Reynard scrambled back, making for the light as the mottled corpse of some scullery maid reached out for a cold embrace, gnarled fingers grasping for their throats. Reynard gave a ungentlemanly scream, long and highpitched like the keening of a banshee as Kasimir beheaded the zombie with an instinctual backhanded swing of his backsword. The body stumbled forward even as the head hit the ground, but a kick from Kasimir sent the corpse to the floor as well. He placed a hand on Reynard to halt the squeal. The knight blinked, embarrassed and petrified at the entire situation.

"Les morts-vivants immondes!" He exclaimed, before stammering: "Z-Ze foul undead, monsieur!"

"I know, I killed it!" Kasimir retorted.

"Yieou did noot tell me whe weyer fightin ze undead!" The errant knight snapped at Kasimir.

"You think I hid this from you!? I'm surprised too!" He riposted, both eyeing one another and then the corpse. Kasimir sighed, running a hand through his mane of hair. "Okay, now that we know, we will not be taken by surprise again, no?"

"No," Reynard acknowledged.

"Julian! Julian you lét me oot of haire right now!" Emmaline shouted, pounding on the door with balled fists. Her skin crawled from where the corpse of Colditz had gripped her as he dragged her back to her rooms and locked her in. Judging from the dull return of her blows, the corpse was leaning against the door on the outside. She spread her arms behind her and screamed wordlessly, stamping her foot with frustration. The door remained unmoved. Emmaline stomped over to the window an threw up the sash. Iron bars had been set in the wall to cover the window and prevent escape. Beyond the bars evening was falling and tendrils of mist were coiling up out of the valley, giving the impression of a vast leviathan pulling itself free of the earth. The impression was deepend by the greenish glow of the rising moon which seemed to turn the mist luminous and sinister. Shapes seemed to move in the fog, to Emmaline's eye they were shambolic and threatening though she never made one out clearly. She made a mental note to retire the phrase: at least it can't get any worse.

"Well I suppose being eaten by beastmen isn't the worst thing," Emmaline muttered, considering the dozens of miles of wilderness between the valley and civilization. She gripped the bars for a moment, feeling the cold iron beneath her palms. No time like the present. Emmaline hurried over to her dresser and took a nail file and a bottle of brandy. She pulled the cork with her teeth and spat it away, taking a long swallow. That was doubtless a sin against good liquor but her nerves needed steadying. Etching the runes she needed into the iron bars was a frustrting task. Not for the first time Emmaline promised Ranald that if she survived she was going to pay more attention to her studies. When she was finally satisfied with the runes she splashed some brandy over the bars and took a step back.

"Eleanor?" Emmaline nearly jumped out of her skin as the door creaked open. She spun about, cursed at not shutting the window and endeavored to cover it as best she could with her stance. Julian stepped through the door with an appologetic look on his face. He looked awful. His usual lean face was haggard with unhealthy dark circles under his eyes, a slight tick tugged at his left eye every few seconds and his hands trembled.

"I'm sorry about all this," he said earnestly, as though he had ruined a ball rather than used black sorcery to kill an entire estate worth of people and animate thier corpses to do his bidding.

"Pléase you 'ave to let me go," Eleanor begged, she would have dropped to her knees and begged, if that wouldn't reveal what she had been doing at the window. Julian's eyes flicked to the bottle of brandy in her hand and, absurdly, Emmaline felt a little embarassed.

"You aren't planning to hit me with that are you?" Julian asked, his eyes cutting back towards the statue still corpse of Colditz. Emmaline hadn't considered it but suddenly wished she had. Instead she took another long slug and held the bottle out towards Julian. The necromancer shook his head.

"I need to stay clear headed," he said, maddeningly calm about the whole situation. He seemed to be determined to act as though this were no different from any of their other conversations, as though he hadn't revealed himself to be a monster.

"It all started at university," Julian explained, unasked. He flopped down onto a couch and patted the space beside him. Emmaline considered her options and stepped towards Julian, taking another theatrical swig to draw his attention away from the window. Brandy burned in her belly and she felt her cheeks flushing. She wanted to scream at him that she didn't care but she was too practised a con artist to give in to that emotion.

"Eet dosen't mattair ai know you are a good man et zat you would nevair 'urt me please let me go," she beeseched, taking his hand in her own. It might have been imagination but there seemed to be a slimy texture to the boy's flesh that hadn't been there before. He gripped her tightly, obviously pleased at the contact.

"At first it was just history," he confided, "I became fascinated with the Sylvanian wars." Emmaline knew only the vaugest legends of those invasions, mostly from sermons she had been forced to listen to when she was a girl. Priests liked telling stories about those dark times, each one seeming to think that the time of the Three Emperors was a fertile and original field for parables.

"But the university had all kinds of materials, some of them had... passages in them. I knew they were proscribed but I just wanted to learn," Julian explained. Emmaline had heard of such texts, books where spells lurked in code, in foot notes, even masqureading as childrens nursery rhymes. An educated man with talent and money might easily piece them together but to try such spells, incomplete and corrupt was as close to insanity as Emmaline could imagine.

"Sigmar save me how am I going to explain all this," Julian wailed, putting his head in hands.

"Well you could tell evairyoné zat a plagué came through and wé waire ze on-lee survivairs," Emmaline suggested, unable to turn off her devious mind even now. Julian looked up at her considering it, his eyes widened with sudden hope as he turned over the idea.

"That... that is a really good idea," Julian admitted. "But...I could never trust you not to reveal what I have done. Emmaline shrugged her shoulders.

"But I will be away in Brettonia, and who would believe a simple woman?" Emmaline suggested. Julian nodded eagerly and seemed ready to spring to his feet, just as suddenly his eyes narrowed.

"What happened to your accent madmo..." The brandy bottle crashed into Julian's head with a shattering impact that flung shards of glass and drops of brandy in all directions. The necromancer slumped on the couch in a daze. Emmaline leaped to her feet but the zombie Colditz was already comming through the door, obeying some command to defend Julian. Emmaline screamed in frustration, then darted for the window, her lips forming hurried arcane sylabbles. She leaped at the window and crashed through the iron bars, transmuted to glass by her hasty spell. She plunged six feet to the tile roof a floor below, then slid down the incline disloding a tide off wooden shingles. She made a desperate grab for the edge but the shingle came away in her hand and she fell, crashing down into a decorative shrub.

"Stop her!" Julian roared from the window, moping at the blood running from his scalp. Emmaline leaped to her feet, hiked up her robe and sprinted off into the darkness.

The manor was like every other statehouse Kasimir had been in. It was far too large and confusing in its layout, serving no one but the pride of the architect and the patron who paid for it. Reynard and he had made it down three turns of the halls and a small banquet dining room, and had cut their way through five lurching zombies. Despite his initial fear, the Brettonian knight proved his valor, smashing through a larger one with a sturdy chair before cutting its head off at the shoulder, and barreling through a turned, freshly dead scullery maid that moaned until he split her down the middle with his sword.

Whilst they were not privvy to this information, or much of anything for that matter, a zombie's greatest strength was the terror it evoked. Even a well-traveled mercenary felt a sense of unease and dread when faced with the grasping, lifeless corpse of a man that could only be moving by necromantic magics. It was unnatural and the antithesis of reality itself, most would agree. However, when two moderately armored and trained warriors could get past that barrier, there was not much difference between a zombie and their living counterpart, save maybe a lack of self preservation. As long as they kept their heads and did not get surrounded, they would be fine.

The two burst into a room that, at first glanced, seemed to serve as a meeting hall for honored guests. A rich rug of red and gold thread was draped across the floor, slim desks hugging the walls held busts and an exquisite book, accompanied by a quill and ink, for prospective dinner guests to sign their names. Outside the windows was the central courtyard and garden. It would have been quite lovely were it not for the half-crazed spearman stabbing an unmoving corpse near the dining room doorway.

His face shot up, a crazed and wild look in his eyes. He bore a classical peaked morion helmet, along with a breastplate that was spattered with blood. It took Kasimir a moment to even realize he was a still-living man, but before he could speak the fellow screamed, wrenching his spear out of the corpse and leveling it at them.

"Monsier! Herr soldyer! We ah hyeyr tu aid yu!" Reynard hearkened to him, holding a hand out pleadingly, but the fellow was too far gone. He cried out something unintelligable, though Kasimir fancied he was yelling something to Taal. The guardsman charged, hoping to skewer Reynard, who was the closest. The knight hefted his shield, and even as the spear point crashed into the kite shield, Kasimir's bastard sword ran the man through beneath the breastplate, ending his life. He croaked and died, falling on his face. Kasimir and Reynard gave one another a grim look, and then Reynard cut the man's head off, just to be certain.

The black deed was abruptly interrupted as the door behind them opened, and a buxom blonde scrambled into the room, rushing headlong and slamming into Kasimir from behind like a pissed-off goat. Kasimir gave a started cry and hit the ground, off-balance and bowled over by the momentum of the fleeing Emmaline Von Morganstern. It was a curious sensation, the entire room spinning and the ground rushing up to meet him, but it took him no time to take stock as he raised his head. He glanced up, and saw Emmaline raise her own head, flinging her mass of golden hair back and blinking her blue eyes. Immediately, Kasimir felt a curious sense of relief she was not dead, or worse. But then his eyes burned with frustration. True to form she had survived, but inconvenienced him in a dozen different ways at once.

"Get off of me!" He complained, pushing himself up so Emmaline rolled off to the floor. She gave a generous 'eep!' but then recovered quickly.

"Kasimir?" Emmaline breathed in disbelief. Relief and confusion warred on her face, and by the look of her eyes, she had a hell of a day. Her next words were given with uncharacteristic hopefulness, even joy to see him. "Are you here for me?"

"Yes, I am." He answered, sitting up and pulling his sword out from under his leg. Luckily he had crashed onto the flat of the blade, else he would have gotten a nasty cut. He glanced at Reynard, who watched expectantly. "I mean, yes, we are." He gesticulated with his right hand. "This is Sir Reynard of Montfort, who valiantly volunteered to aid in your rescue, mademoiselle."

For his part, Reynard gave a courtly bow. "A pleasheyer. Bot, are yu trouly vrom Brettonia?"

"She has spent much time amongst us lowly Imperials. She picked up our mannerisms quite well." Kasimir answered for her, getting back to his feet. On second nature, he held his hand out for her to take. She took it, and perhaps because of the heat of the moment or the fact he had not known if she had been dead or forceibly married, there was a spark there he hadn't expected when their hands entwined. He could see she noticed something similar, but he did them both a favor and elected to ignore it as she steadied herself. He brushed himself off. "And now, we're going back."

"Ai em noot reterening to Middenheim, Kassymere! Ze mereley wish to tayik mai het!" She declared, clutching her neck for Reynard to see and pouting her lip.

"I would not let that happen." Kasimir promised.

"Un zince wen dew yew keyer abot me?" She inquired, her arms crossing, evidently closing her eyes for drama but peeking out one lidded eye in curiosity.

"I don't," He said, too quickly to not be suspicious. "But I did not ride through beastland and hack apart men alive and dead just to get you killed. Besides, you can always stay here if you like."