[Warhammer] - Zavant

by Gordon Rennie - (ebook by Undead)

  It was scarcely enough to stop the attack in its tracks, Gustav knew, but it was a good start. And, as the pack of Chaos creatures kept on coming, the crossbowmen had already swiftly reloaded and were even now loosing a second volley of steel-barbed bolts at them.

  “Herr captain, what do you wish me and the other brethren to do?”

  Gustav turned towards the pale-faced, frightened-looking Himerius. Up here on the battlements above the gate, and down in the cloistered courtyard behind them, other brothers of the Order of the Holy Three stood ready alongside their Templar cousins to meet and—Sigmar willing—repel the enemy assault. In his mortal guise, the Lord Sigmar had been a mighty warrior, and the servants of his Church, even those such as monks and priests, were not afraid to take up arms against the enemies of their Lord. Sigmarite priests, wielding mighty and blessed warhammers in honour of Lord Sigmar, often led the armies of the Empire into battle. Gustav had seen whole detachments of flagellant monks in battle and knew just what they were capable of.

  Flagellants not only had no fear or pain but sometimes seemed to positively welcome it, filled with a fanatical devotion to their holy cause and with a zealous hatred of the enemies of that cause. Troops such as these, no matter how untrained or unorganised, any competent military commander could make good and effective use of.

  The brethren of the Order of the Holy Three were not one of the more bloodthirsty orders of Sigmarite flagellants and were, as far as Gustav knew, untried in battle. If he had hesitated to accept them into his battle-force it was not purely out of doubts about their worth or experience.

  Konniger had clearly understood the real reasons behind the Templar captain’s hesitance. But, as he had quietly pointed out to the young commander, if there were, as both of them were now convinced, at least one covert agent of the Unholy Powers within the ranks of the monastery’s holy brethren, it would probably make little difference in the coming battle. Battle-maddened beastmen servants of the Unholy Powers, particularly those belonging to the insane cult of the Blood God, were unlikely to differentiate between one human and another. If the beastmen did overwhelm the battlement defences and make it into the monastery, then all the inhabitants, true holy believer and covert servant of the Dark alike, would surely be indiscriminately put to the sword in the ensuing slaughter.

  Whoever the faceless evildoers were within the monastery of Alt Krantzstein, they were just as much at risk as all the others, and so had just as much reason to fight in the monastery’s defence, or so Konniger had reasoned.

  Gustav looked around him, seeing the groups of monks—fear and concern on their faces—filling out the worryingly thin ranks of his Templars. The monks held an assortment of weapons: maces, clubs, flails, hammers, wood-chopping axes and any kind of tool or agricultural implement that could be wielded as a makeshift weapon.

  “Pray to Sigmar, man,” said Gustav in reply to the abbot’s query. “And get ready to fight for your lives when I give the signal.”

  Himerius bowed in nervous understanding, and Gustav glanced away, sharing a significant look with Waasen. The tough old veteran Templar nodded briefly, acknowledging his captain’s unspoken reminder. Waasen and a few other specially-selected, experienced and trustworthy Templars had already been given their orders. They would keep a close watch on Himerius and his brothers during the coming battle; the first hint of betrayal from any of the monks would be dealt with by means of a swift and merciless sword thrust through the traitor’s back.

  The beastman line was now within optimum range, scarcely ten yards away from the monastery gates. The crossbowmen had already accounted for another dozen or so twitching, quarrel-struck bodies lying in the main horde’s wake. Now it was the turn of the rest of their comrades to spill beastman blood.

  “Now! Let them have it!” shouted Gustav, wondering how, amidst the fear and rush of real battle, all those great and venerable heroes from Empire history were supposed to have come up with all the stirring and inspirational battle cries that the historians and legend-writers speak so assuredly of.

  At his command, a fusillade of missiles spilled over the edge of the battlements, striking into the Chaos troops. Templar-hurled spears punched through shields and armour and into the vile, hair-covered flesh beneath. Stone slingshots cracked into beastman skulls, and chunks of masonry and other kinds of suitably weighty missiles rained down upon horned heads with lethal, bone-crushing force. The crossbowmen had been aiming specifically at the gor and ungor warriors in the secondary ranks of the assault formation, but this new missile wave battered indiscriminately into the beastman ranks.

  A chorus of terrible human-animal sounds—bleats of pain, dying screams and bestial shouts of outraged anger—rose up from the Chaos horde, but still they came, trampling their own injured under-hoof in their eagerness to reach their objective.

  A second later, and they crashed against the monastery gates and the battlement walls.

  The walls were not nearly high enough for any defending commander’s liking, but their lowness did allow the defenders atop them to strike directly down at the enemy below. “Lances! Use your lances!” called Gustav, thrusting downwards with his own horse-lance, feeling it sink deep into the body of one of the bestial things milling about below.

  Gustav could hear the heavy pounding of beastman blades on the wood of the monastery gates, and realised that the creatures were foregoing the use of anything as rudimentary as a battering ram and were simply trying to hack and chop their way through the gates. From above the Chaos troops’ heads, monks continued to rain chunks of masonry and even what appeared to be broken pieces of statuary down upon the attackers. There had been no time, and probably little in the way of raw materials, to prepare anything as exotic and effective as boiling oil or the terrifying, battle-winning concoction that was dwarf fire-brew, but lines of monks had brought steaming pots and pans full of bubbling water from the big, fire-heated cauldron in the monastery kitchen. Now they were emptying them over the side of the battlements onto the heads of the beastmen, giving immediate rise to high-pitched screams of pain and broiling clouds of flesh-searing steam from below.

  Despite the casualties they were suffering, the beastmen continued to push forward, and the violent pounding on the gates seemed only to increase in frenzied volume.

  Gustav knew that he had to leave the defence of the gates to others. The segment of the wall that he commanded was under heavy attack, but he had more immediate matters to concern him.

  He thrust his lance down into the beastmen again, momentarily feeling it strike something soft and screaming, before the haft in his hands shook under a violent impact. He drew back a shortened, splintered ruin—the weapon had been shivered, its spearhead broken off, probably by a blow from an angry beastman blade. He discarded it without a second thought and instead drew his sword.

  The defenders were coming under targeted attack now. A Templar man-at-arms pirouetted backwards and fell off the battlements into the courtyard below, clutching at the beastman spear that had been hurled into his chest. A monk gagged and choked, clawing at the cruel, barb-edged noose that had lassoed him round the throat. He tried to scream as his beastman captor on the ground below hauled hard on the ironvine cord of the snare. The struggling monk disappeared over the edge of the wall, landing on the upraised sword-points of the beastmen gathered there.

  The third wave of beastmen were bringing up crude climbing ladders; little more than hastily-felled tree trunks with all the branches and foliage stripped off them. Propped up against the walls and held in place by strong gor-caste creatures, they proved more than adequate for their purpose, and lines of beastmen started to swarm onto the battlement parapet with frightening ease.

  Gustav swept away first one, and then the next creature to appear in front of him atop the tree-ladder. The third one—an emaciated bray-caste creature, vile tendril-shapes squirming restlessly beneath its hairless, albino skin—was faster, and Gustav barely parried away its darting sword thru
st. His return stroke severed the wrist of the hand that clung to the top of the tree-ladder, and the sword blow went on to rip open its stomach. The creature tumbled screeching back down onto the heads of its fellows.

  “Waasen, help me!” called Gustav, taking advantage of the momentary absence of any other beastmen on the tree-ladder to throw his weight against it and attempt to push it away from the top of the wall. Waasen broke off from his own successfully-concluded beastman duel and added his formidable strength to his captain’s. The two of them pushed frantically at the top of the ladder, feeling the obstacle shake as more beastmen started scrambling up it towards them.

  With a final wrench, the tree-ladder slid away, taking its living burden with it. They would survive the tumble, but the falling weight of the tree trunk would crush any beastmen below.

  Gustav stepped away, hastily surveying the progress of the battle elsewhere. He saw a shambling gor-caste beastman vault over the edge of the parapet and gut one of Himerius’ brethren before a Templar knight—it was young von Glantz, whose father had been captain of the company into which Gustav had first been recruited—despatched it with a single expert sword thrust. The noise from the monastery gates of metal pounding violently on wood were giving way to loud, ominous splintering sounds, and Gustav saw with an anxious glance that volleys of hurled enemy spears and throwing axes had taken a heavy toll of the defenders above the gates.

  Waasen saw it too. “I’ll take care of the scum up here. You see to what’s happening down there.”

  Gustav clapped his second-in-command on the arm in farewell acknowledgement and vaulted down the stone parapet steps to the courtyard, sprinting across it towards the gates.

  “Herr captain!”

  It was Konniger; the Altdorf scholar had evidently had the same idea as the Templar commander. “Herr captain,” Konniger repeated, out of breath from his sprint from the battlements down across the cobbled courtyard. “If they’re so keen to see those gates open before them…”

  “Then let us not leave them disappointed,” grinned Gustav, immediately seeing the hidden cunning in Konniger’s plan.

  “Form up into a shield wall!” bellowed Gustav, running forward and gesturing in command to the Templars standing ready before the gates. “You men there, at my order, open the gates.”

  The monks at the gates goggled in disbelief at the knight captain’s order. Himerius appeared from nowhere, arms raised in horrified alarm. Gustav silenced him with a single angry glance.

  “Do it! Do it now, or, by Sigmar, we’ll all be dead within the next half hour.”

  The monks did as ordered, taking hold of the heavy wooden swing-beam that was all that stood between them and the beastman horde on the other side of the gates. The gates sagged inwards, shaking violently under the frenzied hacking of beastman axes and swords.

  “Remember what I said earlier about getting ready to fight for your life, brother abbot?” grinned Gustav in a un-Templar display of gallows humour. “Well, this is the moment I was talking about.”

  He brandished his sword in an unmistakable gesture of command, and the monks at the gate hauled free the latch-beam, retreating backwards as the gates burst open under the weight of beastman bodies pushing against them from the other side.

  “Stand ready!” he shouted, his words almost lost in the roars and hoots of triumph from the beastmen as they surged forward through the open gates. “Gatemen, be ready to close those gates again on my command. If you fail, we’ll all surely be dead.”

  The beastmen pack, comprised mostly of gor-caste warriors, pushed forward, assuming victory was now theirs, and were caught by surprise by the humans’ seeming sudden surrender of the defence of the gates. In their haste to take the monastery and butcher its inhabitants they rushed forward en masse into the courtyard, not thinking to secure the open gates behind them. Gustav waited for several long, agonising seconds, watching as more and more of the vile Chaos creatures flooded in through the gateway. It was a dangerous and critical equation he had to calculate. If he allowed too few of the creatures in, then the ploy might all still be for nothing. Too many, however, and he might just have doomed everyone within the monastery to certain slaughter…

  “Close the gates!” he screamed, throwing himself forward at the head of his men and towards the beastmen. “Close them now!”

  The Templar shield wall smashed into the disorganised but numerically superior mass of beastmen. It became a test of strength and will: human versus beast-thing; shield against shield; metal against wood; weapon blades rising in the air and chopping down, resurfacing bright with freshly-spilled blood.

  This was close-range killing of the most intense kind, with none of the glamour of the stirring, noble tales of great battles from Empire history. Every man in the Templar line had grown up with such stories, and many had taken holy orders as a Templar knight with minds ablaze with the exploits of heroes such as Magnus the Pious in the Great War Against Chaos. As experienced soldiers however, they now knew that all the nobility and valour was always added on later by the poets, bards and storytellers.

  The tales of heroism and the grim humour of the aftermath of battle would come later, when they sat round their campfires tending their wounds and toasting the memories of their dead. For now, there was only the terrifying, exhilarating business of close-range killing: smashing shield rims into snarling, bestial faces; thrusting sword blades into stinking, fur-covered bodies; hacking at anything, friend or foe, struggling at their feet on the blood-stained ground.

  The gates closed behind the beastman horde, more monks and Templars running in behind the Chaos things to secure the doors and cut off their enemies’ escape. Gustav had allowed the main vanguard of the Chaos force into the courtyard—savage, powerfully-muscled gor and ungor-caste creatures, the cream of the warband troops—but now, with the gates shut and guarded, they were cut off from the rest of the Chaos force still outside the monastery walls. It was a daring, some would say reckless, gambit, there was little doubt about that, but now, as Gustav and his men pressed mercilessly forward into the enemy ranks, he dared to think that they might succeed.

  The brutal slaughter continued. Men dropped, dead or injured to the ground, the gaps in the line quickly filled by other Templars or even flagellant monks. Still they pressed forward, every step further drenching the cobbled ground in blood.

  The beastman line broke in a sudden rush of wild-eyed, animal panic. Their savage resistance became a retreating stampede. The stampede became a rout, and the rout became a massacre as Templars and monks poured in at them from all sides.

  The beastmen broke and ran, pursued by their vengeful, victorious human enemies. Some turned and tried to flee back towards the closed gates, where a line of monks and Templars stood ready to meet them, determined to defend the exit with their very lives. Others fled towards the battlements, seemingly intent, in an ironic reversal of their comrades’ actions on the other side of the walls, on scaling those same walls to escape the monastery.

  Wherever they fled, they died in their droves, harried and chased by the men in the courtyard or picked off by the defenders on the battlements.

  Outside the walls, the beastman attack was also faltering. The creatures there had heard the loud chorus of dying screams and brays of fear and panic from the beastmen inside the courtyard and had realised that a massacre was taking place on the other side of the walls. Robbed suddenly of their main vanguard, the rest of the mostly lesser-caste beastmen outside the walls also broke and ran, the abattoir sounds from within the monastery courtyard ringing in their ears as they fled back towards the safety of the tree-line, pursued by the occasional well-aimed, deadly shot from the crossbowmen atop the battlements.

  The desperate, tightly-maintained struggle in the courtyard had become a wild melee, with packs of men descending on trapped, panicked beastmen. Running into the battle, Vido saw a beastman driven into a corner by a group of monks. It honked in fear, lashing out with its crude, stone-headed
axe weapon as the monks poked and prodded at it with pitchforks and hoes. One man advanced too close and fell to the ground, his skull crushed by a single blow, but the beastman’s lunge left an opening for the other monks, and they instantly fell upon the beastman, hacking and stabbing it to death.

  Vido saw a wounded Templar in lone combat with another beastman. With his shield arm crippled, the Templar was barely able to block the creature’s powerful sword swings, and his strength was ebbing away fast. Vido hurled a dagger into the creature’s back, causing the beastman to grunt in pain and stagger back. The wound wasn’t enough to kill it, but did distract it long enough for the Templar to plunge his sword into its heart. The man looked up, registering clear surprise at the identity of his saviour, but still nodded to the halfling in respectful thanks.

  Konniger was there too, in the thick of the fighting. He wielded a discarded beastman spear as if it was a quarter-staff, spinning and turning it in his hands, striking a flurry of blows which left a series of beastmen opponents lying dead or unconscious on the ground. Vido ran towards him, seeing a hulking gor-caste creature charge towards his master’s unprotected back.

  “Master!” yelled Vido, his warning shout drawing the creature’s attention away from Konniger and, in a development which Vido found most unwelcome, instead towards the sage-detective’s halfling manservant.

  The beastman snarled in fury, and struck out with its heavy, bronze-headed club. But the creature was clearly discomfited fighting an opponent of Vido’s small stature, and the blow was wildly off-target, the weapon’s spiked head digging into the ground and ploughing up several stone cobbles. Vido danced inside the beastman’s guard, punching his fists repeatedly into the vulnerable, unarmoured portion of its mid-section. He held a dagger in each fist and when he danced back a few seconds later, his hands and forearms were soaked red with the creature’s foul-smelling blood. The beastman brayed in mortal pain and slumped forward, but even before it hit the ground Vido moved in fast again and made sure of its death with an artful double-slash coup-de-grace to its throat.