by Warhammer
Behind them the trees fell. Felix squinted to make out the details in the bobbing lights of a moving mass of torches. The little shadows of hunched ungors scurried around the fallen trees, dragging them towards the sides of the valley, then running back for more as whip-wielding gors roared and lashed out at them.
Two more pines shivered and crashed to the ground with splintering screams, and four enormous horned shadows loomed through the gap they had made.
Kat gasped when she saw them, and Felix was afraid he had too. They were gigantic things, towering over the gors as the gors towered over the ungors, with shaggy, bull-shaped heads and heavy curling horns that stretched wider than a man might spread his arms. Each of them carried an axe taller than a beastman, with a double-bladed head that a dwarf could have hidden behind.
As the ungors hooked the branches of the fallen pines with chains and dragged them aside, the four great bulls strode to the next trees that stood in their way and hacked at their bases with slow, methodical strokes – one two, one two, one two. The trees were young and thin. It took no more than four bites of the massive axes for them to fall, then the bulls were onto the next group, with no more interest or emotion than a machine. It looked as if they had been doing this forever, and that they could go on doing it forever, never tiring, never slowing, never looking up from their work.
‘Now they,’ said Argrin, under his breath, ‘would be a good doom.’
‘For you?’ said Rodi. ‘Not if I reached ’em first.’
‘Snorri thinks there is enough doom here for everybody,’ said Snorri.
Felix wondered if the addled Slayer had ever spoken a truer word.
Gotrek just grunted and watched.
‘But I don’t understand why they’re doing it,’ muttered Ilgner, seemingly to himself. ‘Have they been cutting this path since the Howling Hills? What for?’
Two columns of ungor torchbearers filed from the gap that the terrible minotaurs had cut in the trees. Between them capered a throng of wild-looking beastmen, all masked and bedecked with feathers and bones and strange fetishes – but otherwise entirely naked – and all shaking long staves capped with human and beast skulls and bits of crystal and brass that glittered and bounced in the torchlight. The dancing beastmen roared a guttural chant and thrust up their totems to the ponderous thudding rhythm, which continued to grow louder with each passing second. Some of them tore their flesh in ecstasy. Some of them burned themselves with torches, or butted heads with their fellows, their horns clashing with deafening cracks. Some fell, and scurrying ungors dragged them to the side, while new revellers jumped in to take their place.
And every few paces, following some rhythm Felix could not perceive, all of them would turn and bow behind them, wailing and shouting, then leap up again to dance on as before.
What comes now? Felix wondered anxiously. Are they bowing to some god? Has some champion of Chaos inspired this frenzy in them? If beasts as large as the minotaurs were toiling as lumberjacks, how terrible must the leader be?
Then Felix gasped again, as did all the other men, while the Slayers swore in surprise.
For an instant, as it came out of the trees, Felix thought that his mad imagining had been true, and that it was a giant glow-worm that crawled among the herd, for the thing was long and round like a worm and had many legs, but then, as he focused through the blaze of torches that surrounded it, he saw that what he thought were the thing’s legs were actually beastmen, all walking in file and in step, with heavy wooden yokes across their shoulders that carried what Felix had thought was the body of the worm, but which was in reality the largest henge stone Felix had ever seen.
‘Sigmar’s blood!’ breathed Ilgner, as they watched it emerge from the trees. ‘What is it?’
‘It… it is a herdstone,’ said Kat. ‘The totem of the tribe. But… but it’s too big. And they never move them.’
‘They do now,’ said Gotrek.
The stone was laid on its side, and was as long as the mast of a Bretonnian galleon. Its rune-daubed dark grey granite had been crudely shaped, starting narrow at the top, but thickening as it went along until it was perhaps eight feet in diameter near the centre. Jagged veins of quartz twisted through it, pulsing from within with a weird blue light in time with its bearers’ chant.
Several of Ilgner’s knights made the sign of the hammer as they stared down at the thing, and Felix understood why. It radiated fell power like an evil sun. He didn’t just see the pulses of blue light, he felt them on his skin like a warm wind, and within his mind, like a whisper heard in a nightmare. It made him want to run away, but also to run to it, to throw down his weapon and join in the revellers’ frenzied dance. It took an effort of will to remain where he was and only watch.
‘Slayer Gurnisson,’ said Ilgner. ‘Your axe. Hide its glow.’
Felix turned to see Gotrek taking his axe off his back and burying the head in the snow at his feet. Its runes were blazing almost as brightly as a torch. Even through the snow Felix could see their glow.
Gotrek grunted, annoyed, then laid the axe flat and sat on it. The light disappeared.
Felix shared an amused smile with Kat, then turned back to the procession below.
Double columns of beastmen marched under the sturdy yokes on either side of the stone, all striding in unison to the rhythm, and shaking the ground with each ponderous step. There were at least two hundred of the monsters, a hundred per side, and more milled along beside them, chanting as well, their weapons out, the fur of their faces painted with blue stripes and symbols – an honour guard perhaps.
As the base of the stone appeared from between the trees, Felix and the others at last saw the leaders of the herd. The first was an enormous beastman, almost as large and muscular as the minotaurs, though leaner, who paced up and down on top of the stone, roaring at those who carried it. He had the blunt head and thick curling horns of a ram, but his teeth, when he snarled, were those of a predator, and his eyes glowed with the same blue light that pulsed from the stone.
The thick fur that covered his rippling muscles was coal-black, and criss-crossed with the white scars of a hundred battles. Over this natural armour he wore a suit of steel and bronze armour that fitted him perfectly, yet looked far beyond any beastman’s ability to make. The axe he carried also bore the mark of the same sophisticated hand. It was a weapon as tall as Felix, crowned with a huge, single-bladed head with a deep notch in the cutting edge shaped so that it looked like the open beak of some screaming predatory bird. Fist-sized blue gems gleamed on each side of the axe like angry avian eyes.
‘There now,’ said Rodi, chuckling. ‘I’ll have a go at him.’
‘I thought you wanted the bulls,’ said Argrin.
‘They’ll be for afters,’ said Rodi.
While the war-leader prowled up and down the stone, urging on his followers with hoarse bellows, the stone’s other passenger stood stock still upon it, a gnarled staff raised high as he lifted his goatish head to exhort the heavens in a keening, high-pitched wail. He was half the size of the other, and appeared to be some sort of bestial holy man, grey of fur and gaunt with age, and dressed in long dirty robes, stitched over with crude symbols. On his cadaverous head he wore a leather mask with a sinuous blue symbol painted on the brow, and a crest of blue feathers that arced over his head and ran all the way down his back. One of his horns was bent at an odd angle, as if it had been damaged when he was young. The strangest part of his aspect, however, was the hundreds of severed bird claws that dangled from every part of his costume at the ends of strings and leather thongs. Eagle claws served him as earrings, crow feet as braid-locks in his straggly goat beard. Hawks’ talons clutched every finger of his scrawny hands and shrivelled chicken feet fringed the arms of his robes. Even the head of his leather-wrapped, fetish-woven staff followed the motif, for it appeared to be the powerful fore-claw of a griffon, which clutched a pulsing blue orb.
‘A shaman,’ hissed Kat. She made a curious sign by
hooking her thumbs and spreading her fingers so that her hands looked like antlers, then thrust them angrily in the robed beast’s direction. ‘Taal wither you, fiend. Rhya poison your fodder.’
‘Is it a crusade of some kind, then?’ asked Ilgner, again to himself. ‘Do they do the bidding of their foul gods?’
The stone-bearers plodded slowly on, coming parallel with Ilgner’s party’s hiding place, with the main body of the herd appearing at last behind them. Felix stared as he watched them shamble out of the snow. For all the eldritch fear that the stone and its riders had inspired in Felix’s heart, this was perhaps the most terrifying sight he had yet beheld.
The beastmen came down the valley like a slow brown tide, thousands upon thousands of them, an endless winding river vanishing into the opaque distance, and filling the valley from edge to edge so that the nearest beasts lapped halfway up the hill that Ilgner’s party hid upon. Every single one of them croaked the shaman’s chant, so that the air throbbed with it. Felix edged further back into the pines for fear of being seen. Not since his journey with Gotrek and Malakai over the Chaos Wastes had he seen so many of the monsters in one place.
Ilgner too seemed impressed. ‘This beggars belief,’ he whispered. ‘Kat, have you ever seen the like?’
She shook her head. ‘There are more here than all the herds I have spied upon combined.’
‘But what is their purpose?’ asked Ilgner again. ‘Where do they go with the thing? What do they mean to do with it?’
‘Whatever it is,’ said Kat, ‘they are heading south, into the lands of men. They must be stopped.’
‘Aye,’ said Ilgner. ‘Aye.’ And Felix could tell that he had left unspoken the simple question, ‘How?’
For the Slayers the question wasn’t how, but when? They could barely contain their eagerness to be at the monsters. They shifted restlessly and toyed with their weapons.
Gotrek turned to Felix, Ilgner and the rest, a wild light in his single eye. ‘You’d best get away,’ he said. ‘Return to the fort and prepare for what is to come. This is a true doom, a final doom at last. We four will die here.’ He looked at Felix. ‘Manling–’
But whatever he had been about to say was cut off as, behind him, Ortwin stood abruptly from his fevered praying and drew his sword, then stepped to the edge of the pines and held it aloft.
‘The Order of the Fiery Heart shall have its vengeance!’ he cried, and plunged down the hill, wading through the knee-deep snow straight towards the herdstone, as ten-score beastmen turned their heads his way.
For a stunned second, everyone just stared, and then they were all scrambling at once.
‘Stop him!’ hissed Ilgner.
‘Kill him!’ barked Rodi.
‘Run!’ whispered Kat.
Felix and some of the knights stood and started forwards, but hesitated at the edge of the woods. Kat half-drew an arrow, then stopped, uncertain. Only Gotrek acted. He scooped up some snow between his hands, packed it and hurled it. It caught the squire square on the back of the head and pitched him face first into the snow.
‘Mad infant,’ grunted Argrin.
‘Forget him,’ said Ilgner, staring at the beasts, more and more of which were turning and looking in their direction. ‘We must go. Now!’
Felix was in hearty agreement, but he hesitated. Sir Teobalt had entrusted the boy to his care. He couldn’t just leave him behind. With a curse, he ran down the hill, lifting his knees like a Kislevite dancer so that the snow wouldn’t slow him.
‘Felix! No!’ called Kat.
Ortwin was just picking himself up when Felix reached him.
‘Come on, you little idiot,’ he snapped, and grabbed the squire’s arm, pulling him back towards the top of the hill. The nearest gors and ungors were starting towards them, roaring and raising their weapons, and the ripple of turning heads had reached the herdstone.
Ortwin struggled to get away. ‘No, I must avenge my masters!’
Felix cuffed his ear. ‘What kind of vengeance is suicide? Come on!’ He hauled on Ortwin’s arm and the boy reluctantly allowed himself to be dragged up the hill.
Behind them, more of the beastmen were breaking from the column, their howls getting louder. At the crest, Kat was crouching and beckoning them on as Ilgner and his men backed away and the Slayers readied their weapons.
‘Hurry!’ she cried.
Then a hair-raising shriek split the night and froze them all in their tracks. Felix turned as it echoed away down the valley, and saw that the beast-shaman was looking their way, his staff raised, and that the whole herd now stood staring at them, unmoving and utterly silent as the snow fell around them. The skin crawled on the back of Felix’s neck as he looked at them. He could see the hate boiling in their glittering animal eyes, their hands tensing on the hafts of their weapons, but they remained where they were. Even the ones who had been chasing them stopped and fell silent.
‘What are they doing?’ asked Ortwin.
‘I have no idea,’ said Felix. ‘Just keep moving.’
He turned up the hill as the shaman’s voice rang out a second time, this time in a high chant, different from the one before, faster and more urgent. Then, like the murmur of thunder, the herd began to echo him, getting louder and more insistent with each repetition.
Felix could feel the air tingle around him, and the falling snow began to dance in wild eddies that bore no relation to the direction of the wind.
‘Run!’ he shouted, and shoved the boy ahead of him.
There was a crack like a pistol shot and Felix glanced back, fearful. The shaman was slamming the head of his orb-clutching griffon-claw staff against the herdstone in time to the new chant, and with each strike, the veins of quartz that ran through it flashed blue and bright.
‘Faster!’ Felix shouted.
At the top of the hill, Ilgner and his knights had recovered from their surprise and were scrambling to mount their horses. Kat was backing away, open-mouthed, the flashes of blue reflecting in her white-rimmed eyes. The Slayers were snarling and striding forwards, ready for battle.
Felix looked back again. The flashes from the stone were getting brighter and brighter as the old shaman struck harder and the chant got louder. The blue light lanced out in knife-sharp shafts, like bars of sunlight cutting through a dark room.
One shaft cut across the snow to Felix’s right, turning it a blinding white. He pressed on, blinking and wincing as he herded Ortwin before him, then gaped when he saw that the snow where the light had touched it was melting, steam rising from it in wispy curls.
‘Sigmar, he’s aiming for us!’ he said. He waved a wild hand at the knights on their horses. ‘Down! Down! The light!’
Another crack came from behind them, and Felix threw himself to the snow, trying to knock Ortwin down with him, but the boy only stumbled and turned, reaching out a hand.
‘Herr Jaeger, take my–’
‘Ortwin! Curse you, get–’
A jagged bar of blue-white light flashed across Ortwin’s eyes and he fell back with a cry, throwing his hands over his face. Felix looked away, expecting to hear the sizzle of cooking meat, or the crackle of charring skin, but it didn’t come.
‘My eyes!’ wailed Ortwin. ‘My eyes!’ Another shaft of light shot up the hill past them and Felix heard Ilgner and his knights cry out. He grabbed Ortwin’s hand and dragged him on. Only a few more steps, a few more plodding, slogging steps.
Ortwin stumbled along blindly behind him, wailing, ‘It burns! Oh, Sigmar protect me, it burns!’ and dragging behind horribly. Did the boy want to die?
Felix turned, angry. ‘Move, damn you! Pick up your–’
He stopped, staring, utterly stricken. ‘By the gods,’ he murmured. ‘Your face.’
‘What’s wrong?’ the boy asked. Then he shrieked in agony as he was wracked with convulsions.
Felix stumbled back from him, horrified. The boy was changing before his eyes. Hair grew on his cheeks and spread like fire to his hairline. His
nose was lengthening and his chin receding. His ears were growing points. Lumps were beginning to form on either side of his brow.
Ortwin reached out trembling hands towards Felix as another spasm shook him. ‘Please, Herr Jaeger. Help me! What’s happening to me?’
Claws tore out through the fingers of the boy’s gloves. Stubby horns burst from his forehead in sprays of blood, and his irises swelled to fill his whole eye.
The boy was becoming a beast.
TEN
The squire’s yellow claws clutched at Felix’s legs. ‘Hllp me, Hrrr Jaegrr,’ he pleaded. His voice was no longer human – more like the bleating of a goat. Felix could barely understand him.
‘Ortwin,’ said Felix in a whisper. ‘I’m sorry.’
He kicked the boy in the chest, sending him tumbling down towards the herd, then turned and ran up the slope, his mind jagged with grief for the boy and fear for himself. What would he tell Sir Teobalt?
Fresh screams made him look up, and he moaned with despair. At the top of the hill, Ilgner’s knights were writhing and falling from their rearing horses as Gotrek and the other Slayers backed away from them. One of the knights was clawing at his face. Another was tearing at his breastplate, shrieking, ‘Bees! Wasps! Get them off!’ as fur grew from the joints of his armour. A third looked up from where he had fallen and Felix saw to his horror that he had a snout where his mouth had been, and the black, shining eyes of a goat. A warhorse danced in a circle, hooves flying as tusks grew from its mouth and bony spines rose from its mane.
‘Slayers!’ roared Gotrek. ‘To work!’
Kat knelt over Lord Ilgner, who was curled and shaking in the snow. ‘My lord,’ she cried. ‘My lord, are you all right?’
Lord Ilgner howled with pain and the back of his cuirass split down the middle. A sable-furred ridge like that of a boar ripped out from it. He turned, snarling from a bestial mouth, and swiped a gauntleted paw at her, knocking her onto her back.