Only then did anger flash from Huss’s eyes. Only then, at the mention of serfs, did his voice rise.
‘They are the sons and daughters of the Heldenhammer.’
Huss still spoke quietly, but the tone had changed.
‘They are his beloved, for whom he bled and wept. They are the soul of his Empire. They are the heirs to his glory.’
As his speech echoed around the audience chamber, the burghers shifted uneasily in their seats. The flames in the torches suddenly seemed to burn more strongly.
‘If you will not fight for them, I will. I will show them what they can become. I will fill their hearts with holy fire and their limbs with the strength of their fathers. They will forget their sorrow and remember their fury.’
He took up the warhammer and hefted it into a two-handed grip.
‘I will take the fight to the beast. I will go east and I will purge their filth from the realms of men.’
Von Aachen swallowed, struggling to hold Huss’s pitiless gaze.
‘And when I have done these things, I will return.’ Raw contempt rang from Huss’s voice. ‘Pray, margrave, that I do so before the beasts tear your throat from your body and feast on your fat, stupid flesh.’
The stink of the pyres rose up into the sodden air. Columns of dirty black smoke rolled across the ridged earth, heavy and acrid. The wind whipped them up, dragging them in tatters across the scene of carnage.
The zealots knelt in prayer, heedless of the blood on their rags and the bite of the rain-studded breeze. The bodies of the beastmen had been piled into a jumbled heap and set alight. Each one had been ritually mutilated before the oils had been poured over them – an eye torn out, or a clawed finger pulled off. It was a small statement, but one that meant much to the zealots. Only the bodies of the glorious dead, the human defenders of the Drakwald, went to their long rest as they had fallen.
Huss stood on the crest of the rise, arms crossed, watching the grey light of the sun fall away into the west. The rain ran down his armour, washing the blood from the steel.
For fourteen days he’d been in the wilds, gathering the scattered survivors of the beastman incursion to him and moulding them into something like a fighting force. Fourteen days since leaving that fat man in his grimy, depressing provincial town with its crumbling walls and complacent dreams of safety.
Only now was he turning back, following the gathering gangs of beastmen as they trekked west toward the prize that they really wanted.
Even as he watched, a column of figures emerged from out of the growing gloom. They came slowly, limping and dragging heavy bundles. Some bore horrific wounds. Their eyes were hollow with fatigue.
Huss waited for them to arrive. He said nothing, but his eyes, those dark and taciturn eyes, softened a fraction.
‘Rise,’ he said at last, just as the first newcomers shuffled towards the light of the pyres.
All around him, his army of zealots hauled themselves from their knees and opened their eyes. They turned to watch the newcomers. There was no hostility in their ravaged faces. Out in the wilderness, all were as desperate as the other.
The foremost traveller came up to Huss, halting a few paces before the huge warrior priest. He was a skinny man with a dirty beard and red-rimmed eyes. His stark ribcage was visible under claw-rents in his clothing.
‘Are you Huss?’ he asked, his dry voice rasping.
Huss nodded. ‘What are you seeking?’ he asked.
The man’s shoulders slumped. He looked on the verge of desperate tears. All of those behind him did too. They had been destroyed. It had long been said in the hostile marches of the northern Empire that the only thing worse than being killed in a beastman attack was surviving one.
‘I do not know,’ he said, his voice cracking from grief and exhaustion, his head hanging in bitter, angry shame. ‘Mercy of Sigmar, I do not know.’
Huss walked over to him and placed his gauntlet on the man’s shoulder. He had to stoop to do so, though the movement was tender. Those huge hands, the ones that had ripped through the beastmen with the fury of the gods, went gently now.
‘I will show you, son of Sigmar,’ said Huss. His voice was commanding, though he did not raise it.
The man looked up at him, and his tear-reddened eyes gave away his yearning. All of his fellow travellers, each clad in rags and shivering against the wind, did likewise.
‘I will give you weapons, and the spirit to use them. I will make you strong again. I will make you the instruments of the Lord of Men.’
Huss gestured towards the pyres of burning beast-flesh.
‘This is what we have done to them. This is what we will do to every one of them. Give yourselves to me, let me mould you into disciples, and you will do this too.’
Huss leaned closer, his eyes locked on the man’s ravaged face.
‘Will you do that, son of Sigmar? Will you give yourself?’
The refugee looked up at him and a desperate, keening hope flared up in his rheumy eyes.
‘I will,’ he said, his voice grasping. ‘Show me, lord, how to serve. Show me how to kill for you.’
Already, hymns of praise were breaking out from the zealots, keen to have new blood among their ranks. Though no signal had been given, several of them approached Huss. They had long metal brands in their hands, glowing angrily red from the pyres. The heads had been fashioned into the shape of the twin-tailed comet.
Huss took one up. He held the hot metal before the refugee, and the heat of it made the air shimmer. The man’s eyes widened nervously, but he held his ground.
‘This is the mark of service,’ said Huss, lowering the brand over the man’s trembling forehead. ‘This is the mark of the march of doom.’
He moved the brand into position.
‘Try not to fear. Pain is fleeting. Salvation, I tell you, is eternal.’
From the fringes of the forest, they travelled out across the broken plains, west towards the curve of the river that lay like a band of grey steel across the charred earth.
The zealots went at a punishing pace, chanting as they went. They strode through the seas of black mud, going tirelessly even as the wind hurled sleet and rain in their faces and their old wounds refused to heal.
At the head of the column, four hulking men in stiff leather jerkins carried braziers aloft. The fires never went out. Flames raged in the iron cages, red as hearts, trailing long lines of peat-dark smoke behind them.
They passed villages, all destroyed. Walls were ground down, thatch burned, wells despoiled. Filth was everywhere, the stinking spoor of the beastmen. Hoof-prints studded the clay, deep and waterlogged.
The zealots only paused to tear down the beasts’ standards, ragged poles surmounted with skulls and feathers and daubed with blood. The poles were shattered with ritual denunciations, and Huss cast out the spirits of ruin that dwelt within.
Then the march would start again, the fearsome, grinding journey, ever moving steadily west, accompanied by the holler of hymns and rolling cries of fervour.
More joined them all the time. They came from all directions, attracted by the clamour, or stumbling across them at random, or perhaps guided by some other subtle force. Huss’s forces swelled to over a thousand. He made the sign of the comet to each and every one of them as they staggered up to him, blessing them and making sure they had a weapon to wield. At the end of each day, fires would be lit and the brands heated.
On occasion, he would ask new disciples if they had seen bands of beastmen. The answer was always the same.
‘Heading west, lord.’
And Huss would nod and give the order to march once again.
The tenth day after the battle on the ridge, the zealots reached their destination. They crested the summit of a low, bleak hill. Below them, the land stretched away in a maze of dreary marshes, broken by thickets of w
iry grasses and glistening like tallow in the diffuse light.
A walled town burned on the horizon. The smoke of many fires rose up in columns, looking like the outstretched fingers of a vengeful god reaching down from the darkening heavens.
Huss looked at the vista coolly. For a long time, he said nothing. His dark eyes narrowed, peering out through the murk.
His zealots waited for the order. They struggled to restrain themselves, but waited for the word. Always, they would wait for the word.
Huss kept them waiting a little longer.
It was not clear to him that Kohlsdorf merited saving. The margrave’s refusal to meet the beastmen before their blood-frenzy reached its peak had doomed dozens of outlying settlements to ruin. Now the horde had gorged deep on manflesh, and the stench of blood on the wind had drawn more gors from the deep forest. The fact that von Aachen’s faith in his walls had proved misguided was no consolation.
It could have been different. So much could have been avoided.
So Huss weighed up the issue, knowing guidance would be shown to him, seeking the truth as he always did in reverent, disciplined silence.
Once the decision had been made, he moved swiftly, taking up his warhammer and hefting it in both hands.
‘Sons and daughters,’ he announced, his voice ringing out over the assembled ranks. ‘For the sake of He who gathers the righteous to His side in glory.’
His thin lips broke into a cold smile.
‘Kill them all.’
Mathilde was near the back, stuck with the old, sick ones who ran in a shambling, stumbling mess of limbs. Weeks of near-starvation on the march had made her skin loose and flabby, but she still had most of a lifetime’s worth of fat to burn through.
The front rank of zealots had already broken through the walls and she came in their wake, tumbling over collapsed brickwork and pushing aside teetering planks of rotten wood. Once in, they all rampaged down the narrow streets, baying like hounds. The musk of the beast was everywhere, and they went after it, their eyes blazing with frenzy.
Kohlsdorf was a ruin. Fires raged out of control and other screams, screams of pain and terror, broke out from the centre of the town. Bodies lay across the mud, their necks twisted and their bones broken. Slicks of dung and viscera hung from every exposed surface, already swarming with clouds of bulbous flies.
Mathilde couldn’t run faster. Her wobbling bulk held her back and her short legs slipped in the grime. She could only watch as the skinnier zealots sprinted into battle ahead of her, their scrawny limbs pumping and their skull-like faces distorted into masks of animal loathing.
But she did her bit. She screamed with the rest of them and lurched along as fast as she could, sniffing out the stench of the beastmen and hefting her cleaver two-handed.
The hunt consumed her. She had already forgotten her other self, the blacksmith’s chattel, raising nine bawling children and scrabbling around for a living in the hard earth of Middenland. She had forgotten the grind of water-carrying, the backbreaking labour in the fields and the rare snatches of laughter when the sun broke out and made the dank soil bloom with flowers.
They were all dead now, those children. Her husband too, gutted open with a rusty blade and torn apart by that red-eyed beast that had come out of the trees. Mathilde had run away then, screaming and weeping, out into the wilds, lost in a world of terror, just like all the others who had got free of the cull.
But then she’d found Huss and the burning pain of the comet brand had purged her fear from her. Now she feared nothing. Now she never ran from anything. Now she was a daughter of Sigmar, a blazing light in the darkness of a fallen world.
‘Kill them all!’ she screamed, echoing Huss’s final order, hunting through the ruins. ‘Find them, and kill them all!’
She lurched around the shell of an old tavern and got her wish. A courtyard opened up in front of her, fenced with shabby, leaning buildings and covered in a patchy layer of foetid straw. In the distance, the heavy stone walls of a Sigmarite chapel loomed through curtains of smoke. The townsfolk had made their last stand in there, and the beastmen milled around it, hurling rocks at the lead-lined windows and hammering on the doors with iron axes. The foremost zealots were already plunging into the horde, lashing out in fury.
‘Death!’ screeched Mathilde, running straight at the beasts. ‘Death! Death!’
She whirled the cleaver over her head, and flakes of old blood showered over her. Still screaming, her mouth stretched wide and her yellow teeth bared, Mathilde ran at the horde, her eyes lit up with joy.
Huss swung the warhammer in a vicious backhanded curve, and its blunt head connected with a wet crack. A goat-faced gor careered back from the impact, chest caved in. It bleated briefly in choking, gasping agony before being dragged down by a dozen scrabbling hands. Zealots clambered all over it, gouging at its eyes, tearing the skin from its face, ripping tufts of hair from its bloodied hide.
By then Huss was already moving, striding out into the thick of the fighting, hauling his weapon in wide, bone-breaking arcs. He was immense, a towering bulwark of stability in the midst of the confused press of bodies.
All around him, zealots threw themselves at the beastmen. The courtyard was packed with bodies, human and abhuman. Neither side gave any quarter. The beasts, disturbed from the prospect of fresh slaughter, raged at the incoming ranks of zealots, keeping their horned heads low and using them to gore and maim. The zealots rushed back at them, heedless of the death on every side, clambering over the bodies of the slain just to get close enough to stab or punch or bite.
They died in droves. They didn’t care. They had ceased to be individual souls, fretting about their own lives or ambitions, and had become part of just one mass, a driven expression of incoherent defiance. They just kept coming, blind to the slaughter around them, possessed by the only thought that remained in their minds.
Kill. Kill. Kill.
At the forefront, driving them on, was Huss. His armour flashed red from the fires. As he plunged deeper into the ranks of the beasts, blood flew around him like a halo. Lumbering wargors pushed their way towards him, bellowing their challenge. One by one, he cut them down, crunching through gnarled skulls and breaking apart warped limbs. The warhammer rose and fell like the tolling of a mighty bell and the blood-halo flared out further.
Huss issued no battle-cry. His lips only moved in silent prayer. His face remained locked in a rigid mask of concentration. Unlike his raving disciples, he was implacable. He fought methodically, intensely, moving stride by stride across the courtyard until he was standing under the eaves of the chapel’s porch.
The doors had been broken. Huss slammed aside a bellowing gor, breaking its back against the stone doorway, and kicked the remaining slivers of wood apart. Messy noises of killing echoed out from the nave.
Huss went inside, swinging his warhammer around him in wide loops. Two gors reared up out of the shadows, poised to leap at his throat. Huss, still striding, let the hammer come back round. The golden hammerhead flashed across, crunching into the skull of the first beastman and sweeping it into the path of the other one. Stunned, the gors skittered across the floor, losing their footing. By then, Huss’s zealots had poured through the doorway. They leapt on the prone beasts, fingers outstretched, jaws wide, blades poised to rip.
Huss strode down the nave, mouthing his endless cycle of prayer, face set. Men were alive inside the chapel. Up ahead, around the high altar with its stained cotton cloth and tarnished candles, a dozen or so humans fought on. They were surrounded by a gang of beastmen, all hacking away at the diminishing band of defenders.
One beast stood out from the others. It was massive, far bigger than the gors around it. As Huss approached, it turned to face him, perhaps warned by some animal sense.
It had the long face of a bull, broken by curved tusks and flared-wide nostrils. Its skin was the
black of old scabs and sigils of destruction had been painted across the exposed flesh in virulent strokes. Huge shoulders wielded a mighty double-headed axe. A long ragged cloak hung down its back, roughly stitched with what looked like human sinew. Its tiny eyes raged, and it pawed the ground with knife-sharp hooves.
It laid eyes on the warrior priest and instantly issued a throaty, hoarse bellow of challenge. The axe blade flashed as it swung round and the creature charged.
Huss braced himself, bringing his warhammer up. The beast’s axe whistled in, aimed at his chest. Huss parried and the two weapons locked together with a jarring, echoing clang.
Huss grunted, and the impact forced him on to the back foot. The beast snarled in anticipation of a quick kill and thrust down with all its strength. Huss felt his arms blaze with the pain of resistance, and released the pressure.
The beastman lurched forwards, snapping with its huge jaws. Huss spun back, letting the beast’s momentum carry it off-balance. He checked himself and swung the hammerhead back, going for the moving flank. The beast, adjusting quickly, veered away from the hammer and pulled the axe back for another swing.
The blade scythed round, heading for the priest’s neck. Huss pulled away again, evading the cutting edge by a finger’s width, before powering back in close. He lunged forward, letting the hammer fall away, and launched into a savage head-butt.
The skulls connected with a heavy snap. Caught by surprise, the creature staggered backwards. Huss punched out with his free left gauntlet, sending the beast reeling further, before swinging across with the warhammer.
The hammerhead hit just below the beastman’s jaw, smashing clean through the bone and ripping it out. The creature yowled in gurgling agony, spraying gouts of hot, black blood from the gaping wound. Grabbing the shaft of the warhammer two-handed, Huss hauled it back across, swivelling on his heel to generate extra force.
The beast’s skull shattered, cracking open like an earthenware jar. The monster tottered back, somehow still on its feet despite the blood leaking from its open neck-stump and sluicing down its chest, before crashing to the ground. Its heavy body twitched for a few moments before shuddering into stillness.
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