by C. L. Werner
Wulfrik glared up at the walls, fairly daring any bowman to shoot him. None of the southlings rose to the challenge of his threatening stare, nervously watching him from behind their stone ramparts, each man promising himself he would wait until the hero took another step before loosing an arrow at him.
‘Men of the Empire!’ Wulfrik called out, his voice like the roar of a lion. ‘I would have words with your leader!’ He waved his sword through the air, Torgald’s head bouncing upon its tether. ‘Fetch him, that I may speak with him!’
‘I am Baron Udo Kruger!’ a sharp voice rose from behind the fortified face of the gatehouse. ‘Wisborg is under my protection and I have no words to waste with heretic scum!’
Wulfrik laughed at the baron’s rebuke. ‘Protect your town then! I only came here to see your wife and my children!’
There was an inarticulate screech of outrage from within the gatehouse. Wulfrik retreated back to the safety of the shield wall as dozens of arrows came shooting down at him. A few of the northmen cried out as handguns were discharged and shot punched through their shields.
‘Let me in, Kruger!’ Wulfrik yelled. ‘It’s not right to keep the baroness waiting!’
Wulfrik smiled as he heard the baron shrieking in fury, calling for armour, demanding his knights saddle their warhorses. From his tone, it seemed he wouldn’t be swayed by his advisors or his officers. He was determined to answer the challenge Wulfrik had hurled upon him, the insult the Gift of Tongues had torn from Kruger’s mind and placed on the hero’s lips.
The northmen beat their shields and called upon the name of Khorne, working their blood up into a fury of battlelust while they waited for Baron Kruger to sally forth from the walls. A punishing fusillade of arrows, bolts and bullets had come shooting down from the walls, but the heavy shields of the marauders prevented many casualties. More devastating had been the cannon the southlings had wheeled up onto the battlements and fired into the swine-array, blasting a score of northmen into heaps of mangled flesh in an instant. Before the cannon crew could fire again, one of the seers Wulfrik had brought from Ormskaro unleashed a nimbus of black cloud about their heads, causing their flesh to melt off their bones like hot wax and detonating the supply of gunpowder beside the cannon. The resulting explosion removed thirty feet of battlement and set fire to some of the buildings close to the wall. Since then, the southlings had shown no interest in bringing more cannon onto the walls.
The clarion call of trumpets gave the northmen warning before the gates of the city were flung open. But there was no warning when a shower of burning stone plummeted down upon their heads. Sections of the phalanx shattered as warriors were set afire by the flaming stones, as the tiny meteors ripped through shields and armour. As the formation shattered around him, Wulfrik glared up at the gatehouse. He remembered seeing similar magic worked by Zarnath against the dwarfs. Now he found himself staring at a bearded southling dressed in elaborate robes of midnight-blue. There was only one thing that harkened back to the Kurgan shaman: the wizard’s glowing eyes.
Wulfrik bared his fangs and would have charged the walls despite the shower of fiery magic and the hail of arrows. Only the thunder of hooves clattering across the lowered gate snapped him from his thoughts of revenge. He watched as Baron Kruger and forty horsemen came galloping out from behind the walls, lances lowered.
‘Loose the hounds!’ Wulfrik roared. The command brought some semblance of order to his reeling warriors. The northmen formed up ranks again, locking their shields together in a fortified barrier against the tide of snapping, snarling fury which came loping from the direction of the longships. Dozens of warhounds, bred by the northmen for size and ferocity, twisted by the powers of the gods into ghastly monstrosities, charged full into Baron Kruger and his knights. The smell of the great hounds excited the horses, causing them to falter at the worst moment. The momentum of their charge lost, the baron and his men were forced to defend themselves from the mutant hounds, stabbing at them with lances, kicking at them with the hooves of their steeds.
The northmen quickly followed the charge of the warhounds, pouncing upon the embattled knights, dragging them down from their saddles, braining them with axes and flails.
A sharp cry of fury drew Wulfrik’s attention. The hero watched as Baron Kruger fought free from the hounds, skewering one on his lance, crushing the head of a second with the iron-shod hooves of his warhorse. Mouthing a stream of obscenities, the baron came charging at his enemy, tossing aside his lance and drawing his sword.
The hero stood his ground before the massive destrier and the enraged knight upon its back. At the last instant he ducked aside, rolling away from the deadly sweep of the baron’s sword and ending the manoeuvre at the opposite side of his foe. Wulfrik slashed his blade into the breast of Baron Kruger’s horse just behind its steel barding, dropping the beast like a stone and trapping the armoured nobleman beneath its weight. He kicked the sword from the baron’s hand as the noble tried to stab him in the gut. Scowling at the pinned baron, Wulfrik shook his shaggy head.
‘Don’t make my dogs sick,’ the marauder growled, ripping the helmet from the baron’s head. He turned his back to the screaming man, rushing to join the tide of northmen streaming through the open gates of Wisborg.
Stossel watched with mounting horror as the warhounds were set loose, their crazed rush spoiling the charge of Baron Kruger and his knights. Loudest among the voices advising the baron against such a reckless sally, warning him that it was the witchery of Wulfrik’s voice that goaded him to such madness, the astromancer could now only watch in frustration as his fears were realised. What use was foresight if no one would listen?
The wizard prepared to send another shower of meteors streaming down into the marauders. Kruger and his knights were finished, but it was still possible to keep the northmen from entering Wisborg. Behind him, he could hear the commander of the gatehouse ordering the gate drawn up. Like Stossel, he realised the baron and his men were lost.
Suddenly the commander’s words disintegrated into a wail of pain and a wet, slurping noise like a toothless ogre licking its lips. The interior of the gatehouse became as cold as ice and Stossel could smell the reek of dark magic in the air. He turned to find the commander wreathed in fire, but the purple flames were not burning him. The havoc the witchfire was working upon the man’s body was far more ghastly. Before Stossel’s eyes, the soldier’s flesh was curdling, running off his bones and reshaping itself into flopping tentacles and snapping pincers. New eyes sprouted from the stricken man’s knees and a slobbering mouth tore open across his spine, a cluster of snake-like tongues flapping obscenely along his dislocated shoulders.
The commander’s body swelled with the raw magical power being siphoned into it, his very substance being corrupted by the essence of Chaos. One of the archers in the gatehouse shrieked in horror, the sound drawing the mutated commander’s attention. An arm with too many joints in it reached for the soldier, impaling him upon a finger that was like a bony spear.
Stossel’s eyes glowed with power as he unleashed a stream of starfire into the abomination’s face. Skin blistered and peeled beneath the fury of the spell, eyes bursting from the cosmic heat the wizard had evoked, but the thing refused to die. Spawned from Chaos, the mindless, wretched horror howled through the wreckage of its head and undulated towards the nearest soldier.
The wizard sent another blast of cosmic fire into the beast, but with as little effect as before. Soldiers charged it as the thing that had been their commander lashed out with clawed tentacles and spiked flippers. One man cried out as his head was crushed in a pincer-like appendage, and another laughed madly as he stabbed the abomination’s flank over and over again with a halberd.
A creeping trickle of fear rolled down the astromancer’s spine as he realised the commander hadn’t closed the gates before the foul magic of the northmen struck him down.
‘Forget the monster!’ Stossel shouted. ‘Close the gate
!’
The wizard threw open one of the steel shutters, staring down at the gateway. Already it was choked with ravening marauders. Stossel closed his eyes, focussing upon the scene with his wizard’s sight. He pointed his hand at the gateway and made a sweeping gesture. A tremendous wind crashed down upon the northmen, driving them to their knees, hurling them back across the shoreline.
Stossel coughed, wiping perspiration from his brow. Blood trickled from his nose, his body shivering with the tremendous toll the spell had taken from him. He would not be able to loose another such storm upon the barbarians. Even as the thought occurred to him, he could see enraged northmen rising to their feet, charging once more for the entrance to Wisborg.
‘Close the gates!’ Stossel cried out again.
The soldiers had the slobbering hulk that had been their commander pinned in one corner of the gatehouse. At the wizard’s shout, two men left the cordon around the monster and scrambled to the windlass that controlled the gates.
The soldiers never reached their goal. Once more, the stink of sorcery filled the air and a man’s body was enveloped in twisting, mutating fire. The soldier beside him ran his sword through the changing abomination, intending to end its hideous new life before it began. Instead, the spell that had enveloped his comrade spread to engulf him as well. The bodies of the two soldiers seemed to flow together, merging into an almost shapeless mass of bubbling skin and blinking eyes.
Stossel peered from the window again, this time gazing away from the gate. He found what he expected to see, one of the Norscan seers leaning over a pile of animal bones, working his obscene magic against the men in the gatehouse. The astromancer felt his blood boil at the sight of the heretic sorcerer gleefully inflicting such atrocities.
The wizard’s anger took the shape of a spear of lightning, crackling down from the night sky. The Norscan seer looked up, his clawed hands waving wildly in a desperate effort to ward himself against Stossel’s magic. The effort failed and the seer’s body leapt ten feet in the air as the lightning sizzled through him, vaporising his innards and leaving his blackened husk smoking on the ground.
Inside the gatehouse, the second abomination was lurching across the room towards the first. Some of the soldiers broke off from their efforts to contain the first spawn, fleeing down the stairs to the street below. A few stubbornly tried to hold back both beasts.
Even if he had the strength, there was nothing Stossel could have done to save the embattled soldiers. Any spell powerful enough to affect the Chaos spawn would incinerate the men he was trying to help. The wizard turned his back on the ghastly scene, trying to block the screams of the doomed men from his mind. He needed every bit of concentration now. There was no room for guilt and pity in his thoughts.
With the spawn between himself and the stairs, Stossel’s only avenue of escape was the window. A bigger man could never have squeezed himself through the narrow opening, but the astromancer had the lean, scrawny build common to scholars and ascetics, men who took pains to feed their minds but often forgot their bodies. Holding his breath, he squirmed out onto the narrow ledge.
Shouts from the northman horde told that his exodus had not gone unnoticed. Arrows and throwing axes flashed through the air as the marauders trained their fury upon the fleeing wizard. The brooch of star-stone Stossel wore upon his cloak blazed with energy as the missiles provoked its lambent magic into life. A spectral wind whipped around the wizard, scattering the arrows and axes like chaff.
The wizard ignored the thwarted attack. The talisman would only defend him for a limited time and he had to focus his thoughts if he would be away before one of the Norse sorcerers took an interest in him. His magical powers already taxed, he doubted if he would be a match for even one of the savage warlocks.
Stossel spread his arms, his cloak and robes fanning out around him like the wings of a great bat. The wizard stepped away from the window, out into empty air. Instead of falling, the astromancer’s body lifted into the sky, twinkling lights flickering all around him as the Wind of Azyr bore him aloft. More arrows and axes rose from the horde as the wizard soared above them. The ring on Stossel’s left hand glowed as its energies were evoked, warding the wizard against the hostile magic being directed against him. He smiled coldly as a cluster of northmen exploded into a cloud of crackling ashes, victims of the spell his ring had caused to ricochet back upon the barbarians.
It was tempting fate to linger any longer over the battlefield. Stossel pictured his tower in his mind and his body flew out over the besieged town. If he would do his people any good, he had to replenish his power. There were things in his laboratory, ghastly secret things any sane wizard shunned. He had discovered the method of their creation in one of the old books Grylikh had found for him. There was a price to be paid for evoking such forces, a price of blood.
If it would stop Wulfrik, then Stossel knew he had to pay that price. Wisborg was doomed unless the northmen could be vanquished.
Stossel had brought this doom upon the town. Whatever it cost him, he knew he had to save whatever was left to be saved.
The northmen rushed into the narrow passageway between the outer and inner gates. Both portals were still open, Wulfrik’s challenge to Baron Kruger and the magic of his seers had seen to that. The passageway was only a dozen yards long, and roughly as wide, but the southlings had made it a killing field. Murder holes bored into the roof above them, arrow slits cut into the walls to either side, and before them a barricade of broken wagons and piled furniture from which riflemen fired into the very faces of the attackers.
Against the assault of weaker foes, the brutal defence would have thrown the enemy back. The northmen, however, would not be denied. Like beasts scenting blood, they would not relent until they fed the hunger burning within them. They knew the eyes of their gods were upon them, judging their strength, testing their courage. The northmen did not court death, but they accepted it when it came. To fall with sword in hand was their destiny, either here in Wisborg or on some other battlefield. They feared the shame of defeat more than the kiss of the valkyries.
Molten lead poured down upon the northmen from the holes in the ceiling, so they used their shields to deflect the boiling metal. Arrows whistled from the slits in the walls, so they piled the bodies of their dead against the holes so that the hidden archers couldn’t strike at them. The bullets of the gunners tore through shields and ripped through armour, so they propped their shrieking wounded before them and used their flesh as a living barrier against the defenders of the barricade.
Foot by foot, the northmen closed upon the barricade. When they heard the gunners retreat from their positions, the marauders flung aside the bodies of their mangled comrades. In a great wave of armour and muscle, the northmen crashed against the mass of piled furniture and broken wagons. The barricade shuddered under their assault, grinding against the flagstones of the street as it lurched outwards from beneath the gate.
Soldiers rushed at the barricade, hurling flasks of oil at the piled debris. Other soldiers raced to fling torches into the oil. Flames soon licked about the barricade as the wood began to burn.
Still the northmen would not be denied. The warriors pushing against the barricade tried to retreat from the flames, but the press of bodies behind them left them nowhere to flee. If they did not want to burn, they had to bull their way through the fiery barrier.
In failing to drive back the marauders, the fires set by the soldiers actually helped their enemies. Weakened by the flames, the charred wagons and smouldering wreckage splintered apart under the furious assault of the Norscans. After three mighty efforts, the barricade crumbled. Hulking northmen, their beards singed, their hide leggings and fur cloaks smoking, came leaping through the flames, axes gleaming red in the flickering light. To the defenders of Wisborg, the scene was like watching the mouth of hell spit out a legion of blood-mad daemons.
‘You are men of the Empire!’ a fierce voice shouted. ‘You
are the children of Sigmar! Do not fear the heathen beast! Drive it back into the abyss with its black masters!’
Wulfrik charged through the flames, his eyes glaring at the town around him. The gateway opened into a market square, a wide plaza fronted by several tall buildings and with a half-dozen streets snaking away from it in every direction. Stalls and carts had been tipped over to form improvised defences for archers and gunners. More marksmen were perched upon rooftops, raining death down upon the northmen. Across the centre of the square was a wall of spears and shields barring the marauders from gaining the side-streets and running amok through the town.
‘Formation!’ Wulfrik bellowed, watching with disgust as blood-crazed warriors rushed pell-mell at the southling spearmen only to be cut down by bullets and arrows. ‘Shields!’ he roared, ripping a massive panel of wood and steel from the burning body of a marauder at his feet. ‘The gods spit on any man who dies without the blood of ten southlings on his blade!’
A horn sounded. The northmen emerging from the gateway no longer raced across the square in berserk fury but instead closed ranks, forming once more the fang-like wedges of their broken phalanx. The arrows of the archers clattered harmlessly against the thick shields, only the bullets of the gunners capable of striking the men sheltering behind them. And the gunners were too few, their weapons to slow to re-arm, to turn back the horde.
The northmen surged forwards in a great body, their boots causing the flagstones to shiver beneath them. Again axes clattered against shields, again the marauders shouted the name of the Blood God. ‘Khorne!’ they yelled, flecks of blood flying from their lips, froth and foam trickling down their beards.
The wedges of the Norscans smashed into the defensive line of the southlings like a typhoon pounding against a crumbling shore. From the first impact the soldiers of the Empire were staggered, struggling to retain their cohesion. Militiamen, unaccustomed to a pitched battle against anything more serious than scraggly herds of beastmen raiding farms or bandits preying upon travellers, they were forced to rely upon their training rather than experience.