by Ben Counter
The wizards joined the Imperial army as it gathered in the three towns of Pfiefendorff, Holn and Drufenhaag. Battle magisters from the Colleges of Magic had joined the call from the Imperial Court that had brought knights from the Order of the Blazing Sun to march side by side with the Emperor’s own Reiksguard, and drawn militia and state units from across the Imperial heartland. The beastmen had moved swiftly, as they were wont to do, using every hidden and underground path to seep their way from whatever pits they inhabited to the large and prosperous town of Dunkelsteiff. It was unlikely that anyone had escaped Dunkelsteiff alive, for not even tales of swift death and glinting red eyes had escaped the place. From a distance, scouts had reported the town and the fields around it smouldering and barren.
The beastmen had needed time to gather their force together. Quite probably they were coming from across the Empire and maybe beyond, welded into a single force by the will of some prophet among them. The men of the Empire had needed time, too, for gathering an army was no small undertaking. It had needed the presence of the Emperor himself to get it done, and thousands of troops had choked the country lanes as they slogged their way towards the mustering points.
Sorteliger Maarten Scarfinkrae of the Celestial Order had led the magisters who joined the Emperor’s army at Holn. Scarfinkrae was a battle magister, a wartime diviner who sought out portents of victory or defeat in the stars, or in the daytime by any one of a dozen means of divination with which he was proficient. He had selected the magisters who were to join him, bringing the battle magisters the colleges of Altdorf could spare in the short time permitted. Kardiggian of the Order of Light. Grunhelder of the Order of Amber, a master of the Lore of Beasts who, it was said, spent more time in the form of a monstrous black bear than as a man. Rootwarder Wseric of the Jade Order. Scarfinkrae had also suggested that a magister be given the task of gathering what understanding could be gleaned about the beastmen, to ascertain what about them had made them so difficult to bring to battle on the Empire’s terms.
For this task Kardiggian had suggested his order’s pre-eminent mind in the area of research – Comprehender Egrimm van Horstmann, whose work on the hidden writings of Vries had gained him no small acclaim across the colleges of Altdorf.
And so it was that van Horstmann was in Holn the night the beastmen made their move.
The stink of the decaying was familiar. Already men were dying. The men stationed at Pfiefendorff had been struck almost as one by a virulent and debilitating disease that left them lying in moaning heaps in the houses they had taken as billets, unable to be roused to battle even when the scouts galloped back in panic and the regimental trumpets began to sound. The smell of disease wafted through the night to Holn, and van Horstmann knew that the battle was near. It smelled like Kriegsmutter Field. Soon it would look like Kriegsmutter Field too.
Van Horstmann left the simple farmhouse on the town’s outskirts. Outside already, the men of a Reiklander militia, who had slept in the rooms above him, were gathering in the yard. Chickens ran around clucking as the militia leader, apparently self-appointed, read a prayer to Shallaya for preservation and to Taal for the swiftness and aim of the huntsman. These were simple men who carried bows their fathers had probably shot before them, with the well-built shoulders and tough hands of those who had practised with their weapons since they were old enough to hold a bow. For a uniform they wore a red scarf around one arm. Otherwise they were dressed much as they might be if they were working the fields of whatever town they had come from.
It was a patchwork army, thought van Horstmann as he made his way towards the town square. Everywhere they were emerging from their billets and forming up. The wealthier or better trained, those who served as standing state troops or were drawn from the sons of the nobility, were helping one another strap on their armour. Others were swapping dark tales of what these beastmen did when they captured you. Many glanced nervously at van Horstmann as he passed. Few men, even natives of Altdorf, were used to seeing a wizard among them who openly wore the robes of a college of Altdorf and carried a staff with which to do unpredictable things to the fabric of reality. Perhaps they were afraid of him, perhaps they were glad to have him on their side, regarding him with the respect one might reserve for a particularly sharp blade. Perhaps the two balanced themselves out.
Ahead, the sky flashed. The stars seemed to be pulsing down at the centre of Holn like signal lanterns. Van Horstmann could see Sorteliger Scarfinkrae standing on the plinth that held the statue of Holn’s mayor, examining the stars with a hand-held lensed device of great complexity. He muttered his findings to a trio of scribes who wrote down what he saw there. Scarfinkrae wore the deep-blue robes of the Celestial Order, embroidered with stars and planets, and a pair of spectacles with multiple lenses that could be folded into place. He had a long and mournful face with a turned-down mouth and long, straggly grey beard.
‘What news from tomorrow?’ called van Horstmann.
‘Clouds and smoke,’ replied Scarfinkrae. ‘The future is clouded. I cannot see. There is bloodshed, yes, but beyond that I see nothing. The portents turn their faces away. But that in itself is an omen. They are afraid, Comprehender van Horstmann. They shy away from this time and this place.’
Scarfinkrae stepped down from the statue’s podium. ‘I saw you,’ he said. ‘Fates converge on you. I can say no more than that.’
The sound of hooves approached. A trio of scouts were trotting along the town’s main road, as fast as the wagon ruts would allow them.
‘They’re moving on the town!’ cried the lead scout. He was probably a huntsman, pressed into service because of his horsemanship and knowledge of the area. ‘The hillside’s bloody thick with them!’
The buzz of alarm that already ran through the town rose to a panicked babble. Soldiers were running from their billets and taking up position at the barricades they had hastily set up between the buildings on Holn’s eastern edge. Into the square rode a dozen or so knights in the yellow and black livery of the Blazing Suns, their horses armoured and caparisoned with the heraldry of some of the Empire’s finest families. Handgunners in the yellow and blue of Reikland’s state troops were sharing out ammunition and powder for their firearms, the latest matchlocks from the armouries of Nuln. Hundreds of men, thousands, had garrisoned Holn through the night, arriving in columns marching the country lanes, and now before they had forced a decent night’s sleep out of the town’s paltry bunks and farmhouse floors they had to make ready for war.
Van Horstmann entered one of the buildings, a three-storey inn with guest rooms on the upper floors. He found a window on the top floor and leaned against the sill, looking out onto the darkness.
By Sigmar, he could see them. The hillside was dark against a moonlit sky, but against that blackness he could just make out a deeper darkness. It seethed, as if alive. Because it was alive.
Thousands of creatures, indistinct but moving as if scurrying rapidly down the hillside towards the town, a black tide of them.
‘To the barricades!’ a sergeant was yelling, accompanied by perhaps fifty men as they massed at the crossroads at the end of the street. One of them set up a standard with the crest of some Reikland noble family and the others formed up with bows ready to shoot, sticking handfuls of arrows in the dirt beside them so they could nock and fire them more quickly.
Van Horstmann could hear the chittering of the horde now. The smell of them was mingling with the miasma from the plague billets. Raised voices echoed across Holn as the men stationed there took up their positions.
It would have been better, perhaps, if the Imperial army could have waited until dawn and gone on the offensive, marching on the beastmen positions before they could launch their own assault. But the enemy had played their hand first, and the Imperial force had no choice but to dig in and let the tide of the enemy hit them.
Some of these soldiers were nothing more than boys. Among them were fathers and sons, brothers, bands of old friends from tiny
villages along the Reik. Van Horstmann could tell the ones who had fought in the Empire’s plentiful wars before – they wore dented and blood-tarnished armour, the greying remnants of their campaign uniforms, the scars of the battles they had survived.
Skarfinkrae was in the street below, on the front line. He was casting handfuls of bones on the ground, and from the glowing patterns they scribbled in the dirt he was reading the tides of battle. He sketched symbols in the air with a finger and they hung there in front of him. Van Horstmann recognised runes of fate, fire and destruction. The Celestial Order specialised in reading the future, but when it came to war, they called down anger from the heavens above. Skarfinkrae was asking the stars for their aid, and some of them seemed to grow in brightness as if they were leaning down towards the earth to watch.
‘Here they come!’ someone yelled. The chittering became a scream, closer and closer, and now van Horstmann could make out what they were.
Rats. A swarm of them, thousands upon thousands. Each one was the size of a dog, a filthy thing of matted fur, yellow teeth and pink wormlike tails.
So, thought van Horstmann, not beastmen after all. Something else. Perhaps something worse.
‘Volley fire!’ cried the sergeant in the street below. Fifty arrows thrummed into the air, falling in an arc towards the approaching rats. It would have been difficult for any arrow to miss if the archers had tried, but there was no dent visible in the approaching swarm where they fell. There were too many rats to see if any had been skewered – surely they had, but they would have been few among the swarm. All along the Imperial line volleys of arrows were arcing across the darkness into the mass of the enemy, wave after wave of them.
A preacher was praying loudly, recalling the strength of Sigmar when he cast the greenskins out of Reikland and imploring the Empire’s god to lend that strength to the soldiers who fought in his name. A banner with the initials of Emperor Eckhardt III unfurled on the top of Holn’s mayoral residence, the grandest building in town, and archers were setting up on the roof around it.
The rats swarmed into the opening to the street ahead, surging down it towards the knot of archers. Another volley streaked almost horizontally into the swarm, and this time van Horstmann could see their bodies thrown down, the rats behind surging around them. Fifty arrows must have found fifty black-furred bodies, but there were hundreds more.
‘Down your bows!’ cried the sergant. ‘Take up your blades! Here they come!’
Van Horstmann ran down the stairs and into the street. The soldiers were terrified. The sergeant was doing well to keep his own voice steady. He was a veteran, van Horstmann guessed, a deeply lined and scarred face with a grizzled beard and a grimy uniform of black and grey with slashed sleeves. He turned to look at van Horstmann as he approached, and van Horstmann knew what he must be thinking.
Here was a wizard. A worker of wonders. Perhaps he and his men would be saved by some grand miracle called down from the aethyr.
‘Give me room,’ said van Horstmann. The men before him scrambled away, leaving a gap behind the barricade into which van Horstmann stepped.
The eyes of the vermin were red, and they winked brightly in the starlight. Van Horstmann leaned on his staff.
‘It will not end here,’ he whispered to the golden mask at the top of his staff. ‘Not here and not now, Lizbeta. I promise.’
The rats were halfway down the street, pouring through the windows and doors of the houses that lined it. In a moment they would be on van Horstmann, dragging him down with a thousand tiny, sharp teeth, stripping his body of its flesh and leaving him a gory pile of gnawed bones in their wake.
Time slowed, and as well as the vermin-choked street in front of him, van Horstmann stood before the fortress. It was glowering and ornate now, the sky overhead red and shot through with lightning. The ground was torn and barren, broken by clusters of bleached bones. The doors ground open, revealing a host of gargoyles and grotesques carved into the walls and ceiling of the chamber inside. In their mouths and eyesockets were the gemstones of crystallised power.
Snakes slithered along the floor. Van Horstmann forced his lurching stomach down and they receded. He turned his thoughts to three motes of power: protection, fire and the purity of the Light.
The fortress did not like it. The fortress wanted the black jewels of Dark magic to rain down, the magic of ruin and corruption. But van Horstmann denied its wish. The aethyr was conducive to Dark magic here, perhaps because the enemy shamans used it with such abandon. But there were witnesses here. He could only use the Dark away from the eyes of those who might recognise it for what it was.
The fortress was gone. Foul yellow teeth filled a hundred squealing mouths. Van Horstmann drove his staff into the ground and let the power he had dredged up from his soul flow through him, earthing into the dirt of the street, radiating out of him.
The tide of rats broke against the barricades. They surged up like a wave, leaping towards him.
They were met by the wall of white flame that rushed out from van Horstmann. As they passed through it they were incinerated, their bodies stripped of fur and muscle. Charred bones rained against him – tiny curved ribs, malformed skulls, pattering onto the ground.
The force of the rats’ charge meant they could not turn away. They surged into the zone of flame around van Horstmann, burning in their scores. Van Horstmann gritted his teeth as he felt the force of raw magic pulsing through his veins and organs, burning as if his blood had been replaced with boiling water. He yelled, forcing the pain down, and the wall of flame flared outwards and died.
He dropped to one knee. He willed himself not to relent and magic rippled down the skin of his free hand, gathering at his fingertips. More vermin leapt at him and he sprayed a gout of white flame at them. They were incinerated so thoroughly that not even bones remained.
Silence fell. The soldiers crouched by the barricade, shuddering with shock at the conflagration that had just filled the street, blinking its glare out of their eyes. The white flame had not harmed them though it had raged around them, and the street was now full of smouldering bones.
Van Horstmann stood in a clearing in the remains, where there had fallen only ash.
‘Take… Take up your posts!’ ordered the sergeant. ‘There will be more!’
A yellow ball of flame rushed overhead, impacting against the hillside – a chained comet, conjured and thrown by Scarfinkrae. In its fire was illuminated the approaching army. The giant rats had been their vanguard and now the beastmen themselves were marching, ill-disciplined mobs of ragged slave-creatures alongside regiments of armoured beastmen carrying halberds and standards. Their exact details were impossible to make out in their hoods and helms, their bodies hidden by patchwork armour and swathes of rags.
Were there goat’s legs under there? Or vermin covered in matted fur?
They were only beastmen. That was what every regular soldier had to think as he stood there waiting for the order to attack. A wizard had more freedom of thought, and a wizard had read more of the Empire’s history, of the battles that were not fairy tales but attested events, where the ratmen had been not imaginary but a direct threat to every man and woman in the Empire. When their generations-long plans came to fruition they emerged to claim the surface world for themselves, and when they were put down a pall of unbelief came down to obscure the truth from the collective memory of men. It took a man like van Horstmann to put the pieces together and see the truth for what it was. And it took a man like him to realise that the truth had to stay hidden, or the knowledge of the ratmen – the skaven, as scholars had once called them, when they were free to write about them – would destabilise every city in every province.
And there, among the throng, was a single skaven with pale grey fur. It was carried on a platform of lashed bones by a horde of skaven slaves. It carried a staff topped with a metal sphere, off which electricity was arcing, earthing into the bodies of the slaves. It had one eye, the other replaced w
ith a chunk of glowing green rock, and a twisted pair of horns grew from its brow.
Overhead, Skarfinkrae flew over the inn and alighted on its roof. ‘Comprehender!’ he called down. ‘The enemy approaches! Can we hold?’
‘I think not,’ replied van Horstmann. ‘But then, you are the one who can read the future.’
‘And I agree,’ said Scarfinkrae. ‘We are many, but our lines were unprepared. Already they bend and break. The Emperor’s standard has risen and the Reiksguard are massing in Drufenhaag. They will sally forth and bring the fight to the enemy.’
‘Then we must join them!’ replied van Horstmann. ‘Sergeant! Can you send out the word? The Emperor advances and so shall we. We will not wait in these streets to die. We will bring death to the beastmen.’
‘I can,’ said the sergeant. ‘Bugler! Sound the advance! Send the word down the line!’
And so the deciding move of the battle was made, the Imperial army advancing in the wake of its Emperor.
Eckhardt III was not the most martial of emperors. Some before him had belonged on the battlefield, eschewing statesmanship and the responsibilities of rule to charge across the Old World leading campaign after conquest. In this they echoed Sigmar, the first of them, who had won the Empire by war. Eckhardt was an administrator and a diplomat, a stabilising influence chosen because he was unlikely to make too many enemies among the nobility. His role was to help the stability the Empire still craved after the Great War of Magnus the Pious, not to put enemies to the sword in person.
And yet, at what would later be called the Battle of Drufenhaag, the Emperor rode at the head of his Reiksguard Knights. They were the strongest sons of Reikland, and their mightiest and best-bred war steed was reserved for the Emperor. The jet-black charger, the size of a shire horse and armoured in black and gold, led the thunderous charge. The Emperor’s lance was tipped with a starmetal blade gifted by an ambassador from the elves of Ulthuan and his red plume was cut from the tail of a cockatrice.