Another hit, and the door bulged and splintered. The runes were agonised squiggles, running like drops of water down the wood.
The door burst inwards and the brass-shod head of a four-man ram ripped into the room. Before it had time to withdraw Tarn’s blade lashed through the opening and cut deep into the throat of one of the legionaries—he heard the cry of anger and pain. Two men tried to scramble into the room and Tarn caught one in the side of the head with a vicious side kick, cracking the sword’s pommel onto the back of the other’s neck. He glanced through the wreckage and bodies and saw there were maybe two dozen legionaries lined up on the battlements, queuing up to kill the infiltrator.
Arrows lashed in and Tarn ducked back. With a roar, the legionaries charged inside, hoping to fill the small room with their bodies and pin Tarn down with the sheer weight of numbers. Tarn stabbed twice, felt more blood spurt onto his gore-covered arms and chest, as three or four legionaries pitched through the door spear-first. Tarn weaved between the stabbing spearheads, swivelled and sliced, taking the head clean off one man. Then he leapt on his attackers, pinning two down onto the floor, kneeling on their backs and slamming the small of his palm into the jaw of the next man through.
Tarn thrust again with the short sword in his right hand, pulling a spear from the mess with his left. More legionaries were charging, yelling words Tarn couldn’t understand, cascading through the doorway with no fear.
Tarn grabbed them and hauled them onto his blade, parried with the spear, stepping back into the room as the tumbling pile of bodies grew. Men clambered up from the drift of corpses, wounded and spewing blood, to be killed a second time. Blood spurted from cut throats and severed limbs to spray across the walls. The hungry runes seemed to drink the blood, growing larger and beginning to glow.
Arrows were raking in from archers just outside, but by now the bodies were piled halfway up the doorway and most of the shafts thunked into dead men’s flesh. Tarn was by now dragging spearbearers and swordsmen over the rampart of bodies to kill them. Reinforcements had rushed down the battlements and Tarn had taken them on too.
How many would they send? How many would they let him kill before they shattered the tower with a massive shell from a gun, or sent gouts of lightning crackling through the door from some magician’s hand? How long before they hurled in flasks of oil and flaming brands?
Tarn didn’t care. It would happen sooner or later. But for now, he was determined to spend what was left of his life killing, just as he had spent the years that had gone before.
A mutant barrelled through the pile of bodies, with four massively muscled arms and a huge, homed, equine head. It carried no weapons, but one great paw slammed Tarn against the room’s back wall. It stamped through the corpses and stood over him, ready to drive its huge balled fists down towards Tarn’s prone body. Tarn rolled to the side as a fist splintered the stone beneath him, reached up and dragged the sword’s blade through the meat of the mutant’s thigh. An artery was severed and blue-green blood gouted out. The mutant stumbled as Tarn ripped the sword through its hamstring, and it fell against the back wall—Tarn squirmed up behind it and cut through its spine at waist height. The mutant slumped further and Tarn stabbed it in the back of the head.
Tarn let the pain register, to gauge his injuries. He was cut in a hundred places. He had broken a couple of fingers on the hand that now only held the splintered shaft of a spear. The monster had broken several of his ribs—his sternum had separated and moved agonisingly as he breathed. Shards of bone could have speared his lungs, or cut through some artery or vein. He could be filling up with blood.
He dropped the shaft and braced himself for the next assault. But none came. Through the human wreckage piled up at the doorway he could see the battlements were clear of troops, right up to the next bastion. Beyond that, spearpoints glistened between the bastion and the gun emplacement, but none seemed to be rushing to avenge the dozens of fallen. The gun roared—not at the tower, but almost straight down. The explosion echoed from far beneath and Tarn realised the horde must be right at the base of the walls, trading arrows and trying to find some way up.
Had they run out of men? Had Tarn killed every last legionary on this stretch of wall, and had their deaths not been missed yet in the confusion?
No… someone was approaching. Tarn looked in the mangled bodies for a bow and arrows, so he could pick them off before he got here, but there was none. He realised the room was knee-deep in blood.
The figure approaching was not a legionary. It was dressed in a cloak which hung from its shoulders down to the ground, dark blue with swirling purple embroidery, trimmed in gold. In one hand the figure held a tall staff of brass with the head wrought into a rune like those covering the room’s walls—like them it was shifting and painful to see, the eye refusing to focus on it.
The figure had a tall collar that went right round its head save for a slit at the front. For this Tarn was grateful, because as the figure approached he could just see grey, bloodless skin and a ragged hole where a nose should be.
They said sorcery took its toll on the body, ageing a man well beyond his years. But those who mastered it could ignore the body entirely, living in a cadaver and yet staying as lithe and strong as they had been in youth. This had to be such a creature.
The figure waved its free hand and the bodies started to rise. Tarn slashed at them as the oozing torsos and severed limbs began to float. But they drifted out of the room and hung above the rampart floor as the sorcerer walked through them. The blood stayed, though, a pool knee-deep and rising.
The sorcerer was at the door. Tarn held the sword in both hands, rising onto the balls of his feet ready to strike, but knowing instinctively that something as mundane as a blade through the heart wouldn’t even discourage a creature like this.
The blood was running up the walls, feeding the runes that were huge and fat, writhing and shuddering. Tarn tried to look at them, but his eyes forced themselves away from the blurred shapes.
Cataracted eyes gleamed through the shadows of the sorcerer’s face. Desiccated lips mouthed words in a language that Tarn had never learned, but somehow understood.
“Thank you, my friend,” it said. “You have saved me a lot of trouble.”
This was the worst it had ever been. Hath had been at the last stand at Vengeance Pass and the massacre at the head of the Blackwater River. He had seen it when battle plans went utterly wrong, and seen it from both sides. But this was worse. There was no way on Torvendis that they would take those walls. The ladders and grapples that were carried in the barbarian throng wouldn’t be enough, not when the walls were so tall and sheer—there would be more than enough time for the defenders to cut down or shoot anyone who made it that far.
But Hath couldn’t stop it now. No one could. He had to do as warriors always did. He had to fight on, do everything with courage and strength, and hope he would be alive when the madness ended.
Hath knew something was wrong even before he hit the wall. Far up the line he could just see the section of the line led by the Serpent tribe—if anything he had expected them to travel faster than his own men. The Serpent were accustomed to lightning raids on the coast, beaching longboats, pillaging and butchering, then melting away again into the darkness of the ocean.
But they had broken like a wave halfway across the defences, well shy of the wall itself. They were being hammered by two guns and countless volleys of arrows, but so were the Emerald Sword and Bear tribesmen swarming around Hath and they were carrying forward on a tide of death and anger.
There had to be something else. The Serpent were oathbreaking, degenerate murderers to a man and never ran from anything. Something was wrong.
But there was plenty wrong around Hath, too. He had never seen madness like this. Ahead of him was an enormous fortification, a solid block of heaped earth bristling with spikes. Most of the barbarians—the clean-shaven, axe-wielding Emerald Sword and the bearded Bear tribesmen who ca
rried maces and brought many of their women to the fight—were going around the mound but some were clambering over it, becoming ensnared in the near-invisible threads of some strong, sharp metal or slipping off the crumbling side to fall beneath the feet of those below.
Arrows were sheeting down and there was some kind of rapid-firing war engine mounted on the rampart directly above, stitching explosions back and forth across the crowds surging across the defences. The din was appalling. The smell, of burning bodies, loosed bowels and blood, was worse.
Hath held his axe high, trying to thrash aside the press around him. “Make way! Go round! Go round!” He bellowed at the top of his voice, but his command was still lost amongst the din. A swarm of what looked like bright glowing insects poured down off the walls and plunged into the crowds some distance away from Hath, but even then he could hear the yells of confusion as the golden-orange sparks buzzed in and out faster than the eye could follow. Men clambered over one another to get away, their bodies on fire.
Another spell lanced down, and thorned vines writhed from the ground, dragging men down and into the blood-sodden earth, strangling and ensnaring. Many were trampled as Hath watched, the pull of the throng taking him ever closer to the walls.
Another line of explosions raked through the press, blasting broken bodies high, with an ear-splitting sound that left Hath’s ears full of white noise.
Then, the thunder of magic and crack of the guns stopped. Hath wondered if he had been deafened, but no, he could still hear the battle-cries and the moaning of the dead like a rumble all around him.
The whistle of falling arrows had gone, too.
If Hath could have turned back, he would, but there were still crowds of warriors surging in and carrying him around the fortification, over staked pits and body-choked ditches.
The soil began to lift off the heaped fortification. Bodies were carried up, too, dead and alive—Hath looked up and saw a trio of Lady Charybdia’s sorcerers on the battlements, hands held high, white sparks flashing in their eyes and between their fingers. The body of the fortification was dissolving into a rising column of earth, exposing foundations of stone between which yawned a great black pit.
It was the damnedest thing Hath had ever seen. He had a suspicion it would be the last thing, too.
The column disintegrated and rained black, wet earth down over Hath and the warriors crowded around what was now a huge dark tunnel entrance.
From that entrance came hundreds of legionary spearmen, silks billowing as they leapt from the concealed tunnel and charged into the barbarian mob.
Far to the south, white horses were galloping up the wall. The remnants of the desert horsemen were riding vertically up the battlements, swapping arrows with the archers like punches. They had lost perhaps nine out of every ten of their number, but this was still enough to lead the assault on the ramparts. No one really knew anything about the desert raiders, least of all that their steeds were as magical as their arrows and throwing blades. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising that the decision to take their horses against the wall, seemingly the maddest of a whole cacophony of insane risks, turned out to be the single best tactical choice in the entire assault.
Ladders rose from Golgoth’s horde in the centre, propped precariously against the immense walls. Only the bravest had made it that far, so there was no shortage of madmen to clamber up the tall, narrow ladders one at a time into the storm of arrows. Spearmen pushed ladders away from the wall to fall like felled trees back into the throng. It rained warriors as well as arrows.
Two spell-wrought sally ports opened and legionary shock troops poured out into the Bear and Sword surrounding Hath and the Serpent swarming to Hath’s right. They had large round shields as well as spears, and barbed daggers for when their spears broke and they were crammed nose-to-nose with the barbarians. The combat was hellish with the barbarians pushed forwards by the masses to the rear and the legionaries with nowhere to retreat to. These shock troops were pumped up with freakish concoctions that turned their eyes into pupil-less white orbs and shut all pain out of their minds. There was nothing but killing there, no retreat and no skill, sheer butchery in the shadow of the walls.
The Serpent had been halted entirely, facing the legionaries with a solid wall of shields and longswords, taking charge after charge, bending as their front ranks were felled but never breaking. The Serpent were winning, but they wouldn’t get within easy bowshot of the walls before darkness fell.
The muscular, pale-skinned valley tribes people died almost to a man, pummelled with the fire of half-a-dozen guns and drenched in hot oil and acid as they scrabbled up the ropes of their grapples. Perhaps a tenth of their number survived to retreat, the rest dead or dying in heaps at the foot of the wall.
The desert horsemen reached the battlements and kept going, charging two abreast in both directions. The defenders had been drilled well, but a cavalry charge along the top of the wall had not been anticipated, and the spearmen couldn’t form hedges of spears dense enough to deter the desert men’s charge. The battlements were swept from bastion to bastion along nearly two kilometres of wall, three guns were rid of their crews. When the bastions were collapsed with explosive charges to block their passage, the horsemen regrouped, made a silent decision, and charged down the narrow stairways into the columns of legionaries ascending to attack them. They had decided to die there, and many of them did, man and horse tumbling down the back of the wall or charging onto the spears of the legionaries. But a fearsome spearhead made it into the barracks, butchering scores of men as they were still chanting their battle-prayers.
The survivors, their honour satisfied, turned around, swept back up to the wall and back down the front. As purple-grey twilight took over from the blood orange day, a gaggle of proud white horsemen galloped in quiet triumph through the routing masses of the valley tribes people.
Few others made it onto the wall. Through sheer bloody-mindedness many of the Emerald Sword under Golgoth crammed themselves onto the walls, hacking with their axes before they were surrounded and slain, at huge loss, by legionary swordsmen. Golgoth was not among them, though not for want of trying.
A substantial knot of Emerald Sword, along with Bear tribe warriors who had been forced wide from Hath’s group, found themselves scaling ladders unopposed and emerged almost intact on a wall completely empty of defenders. Thinking they had the luck of heroes, they prepared to charge down into the vulnerable rear defences of the wall when a torrent of lithe, sinisterly beautiful daemonettes poured from a blood-filled tower. The warriors were transfixed by their sensual movements right up until the moment when sharp claws and needle teeth bit through their armour and into their flesh. As night began that stretch of wall was manned, not by fanatical legionaries, but by the summoned servants of the Pleasure God himself.
The assault had failed everywhere. Nowhere were there warriors still on the walls in any numbers, but nowhere could the barbarians approach and ascend the walls with impunity. The night, which on Torvendis could turn from glimmering moonlight to complete darkness for no reason and without warning was entirely on the side of the defenders. Some madmen carried on fighting giving their lives with no hope of success. The barbarian horde fell back, mostly in disarray, some like the Serpent with a good day’s battle under their belts, a very few like the horsemen riding with the aspect of victory.
Torvendis was cruel. It sent out a night that would shine down in mockery on the battlefield. The Slaughtersong, ever-present since Golgoth had first met with his mentor high in the Canis Mountains, was low and central in the sky, larger than in living memory with a blue-white corona around a pinprick of light. The blood soaking into the trenches and corpse-heaps glowed white, and the walls looked as if they had been gilded with silver.
No one had even tried to recover any of the bodies. The only movement had been the scuttling corpse-eaters who had melted out of their forest hovels, and the flashes of the arrows sent by the sentries to chase th
em off.
The cold light filtered down through the thick canopy of the forest, pooling between the trees, illuminating the stragglers still making their way back from the battlefield.
Golgoth watched them as he crouched in the foliage. The forest around him was thick and dark, the gnarled trunks covered with mosses. Though the forest edge was razed regularly by the soldiers on the walls, it grew back almost immediately and each time looked older and denser as if in mockery of their efforts. Thick moss and mulched leaves were heavy underfoot and the dark greenery was like a close green sky. The smell of moss and the forest’s quiet exhalation was almost enough to cut out the reek of blood rolling off the battlefield.
The forest was full of survivors, many of them wounded, filtering through the dense trees back towards the grassy foothills where the army had first gathered. The moans of the dying could be heard through the sighing of the leaves, as could the heated arguments where men tried to apportion blame for the failure to take the walls.
Twining roots snared many of the stragglers on the edge of the forest as they tried to reach the cover of the canopy. Golgoth could swear he saw some forms moving that were not survivors but scavengers, drawn from the depths of the forest by the promise of wounded prey struggling through the undergrowth. Surviving the battle was not necessarily enough to survive until nightfall.
It had been carnage. Golgoth had seen it raining corpses as the ladders went up, and walked over a thick swamp of gore as he fell back with the twilight. He had seen war before, more than enough to make him utterly certain of his worth as a warrior. But he had never seen anything like this. He had never seen, with his own eyes, the sort of bloodshed that would one day become one of the legends that made Torvendis the world it was.
The Emerald Sword had lost a quarter of their entire population, easily. The valley folk had lost more like two thirds, and they were still dying—Golgoth could hear their gurgling screams as the acid poured from the battlements finally ate its way into their lungs. Even then, hearing the broken remnants of his army struggling to make it through the night, Golgoth knew they would never be able to count the dead. One hundred and fifty thousand dead would probably be understating the butcher’s bill.
[Warhammer 40K] - Daemon World Page 14