A WARHAMMER NOVEL
Broken Honour
Robert Earl
(An Undead Scan v1.0)
This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage.
At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it is a land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests and vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reigns the Emperor Karl Franz, sacred descendant of the founder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder of his magical warhammer.
But these are far from civilised times. Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war. In the towering Worlds Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands of the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods. As the time of battle draws ever nearer, the Empire needs heroes like never before.
Prologue
It had only ever been a matter of time.
It had almost happened in the winter, when their bones had shown through their hides and their joints had ached and all there had been to eat were the lice they had harvested from their pelts. In such times his folk had no scruples about cannibalism. Meat, after all, was meat.
But although he was the smallest of the herd, Gulkroth had remained alert enough to dissuade his fellows from devouring him. His teeth had remained sharp in his maw even when scurvy had peeled back his gums, and although his muscles were withered by the long, lean hungry months so were all of the herd’s.
Then came the thaw. The ice which had marbled the forest into a chill mausoleum melted. Vegetation grew and animals emerged to feed upon it. The herd, in turn, fed upon them.
It was thus drunk with the sweet intoxication of living flesh that the herd found a small woodcutters’ village in the forest. It was a new settlement, containing half a dozen human families. Perhaps they had thought that they were safe behind their stockade. Perhaps they had thought that the axes of their men or the jaws of their hounds would protect them.
That was the trouble with humans. They thought too much.
The attack had been sudden and ferocious. The herd waited until a party of woodcutters returned to the stockade, and charged through the opened gates. Once inside they slaughtered with joyful abandon, their bellows echoing within the stockade as they painted the walls red.
It was here, surrounded by the maddening brightness and smell and taste of human blood, that it finally happened.
Gulkroth had been feasting on the succulent remains of a child when, with a roar of murderous joy, Hosse had turned on him. Hosse, dull-witted and stupid. Hosse, strong and vicious. Hosse, who stood a head taller than any of the herd and who carried an axe as heavy as a man.
Gulkroth had turned in time to see the promise of death in his fellow’s eyes. Urine spurted down his legs as he leapt away from the blur of the first murderous lunge. Hosse reversed his grip and followed him, rolling his shoulders and chopping down like a woodsman splitting a log. Gulkroth tried to block the blow with his own weapon, but the smile of sharpened rust was no match for the power of the blow. Hosse’s axe shattered through the steel and bit deep into the packed earth where Gulkroth had been standing.
Unarmed, Gulkroth looked around for a means of escape. There was none. The herd, their bellies bulging and their blood-sodden fur swarming with flies, had encircled the two fighters. They howled and shrieked with delight, stamping their hooves and clashing their weapons in their eagerness to see him slaughtered.
The sight of their glee filled Gulkroth with a sharp spike of pure, red hatred. He was suddenly no longer thinking of fleeing. Instead he turned to his opponent. Hosse had just freed his axe and was swinging it back for another guillotine blow.
It was then that the voice spoke to him. It was small and still and quiet, and it was irresistible.
Gulkroth listened to the voice and understood. He turned to Hosse and, kneeling in front of him, lowered his head so that his horns were down and the nape of his neck was exposed.
The herd jeered at this attempt at submission. Hosse didn’t jeer. He just snarled with a deep satisfaction, and swung his axe up to make the killing blow.
Gulkroth waited until the blade was plunging down towards the brittle snap of his spine before he lunged forwards, lifting his head so that his horns jabbed upwards into the matted fur of Hosse’s groin. He felt the jarring impact as his horns bit deep into hard flesh, and heard the grating as the tips scraped through gristle and then against bone.
Hosse screamed, his voice piercing the roars of the herd and echoing off the blood-soaked stockade. Gulkroth snarled with a savage joy and rolled his shoulders as he corkscrewed his horns even deeper into his foe’s flesh, tearing them up through the groin and into the stomach. He was rewarded with a sudden spill of entrails, hot and steaming against the back of his neck, then his horns tore loose and he fell back.
He began feasting upon Hosse even as the beast’s still-beating heart sent arterial blood spurting into the air. The flesh tasted sweet although the respect all around him was even sweeter. When Gulkroth had finished gorging himself the voice which had spoken to him sounded once more within the confines of his skull. This time it was summoning him.
Without a moment’s hesitation he picked up Hosse’s axe and padded out of the abattoir of the ruined stockade. The rest of the herd turned and followed him as he made his way towards the voice.
The stone stood in the midst of a drained lake, a desert of slime and mud and the last dying movements of fish drowning in air.
There was no telling why the waters had vanished, although the land around here often shivered and groaned. Gulkroth wondered if that might have been because of the stone itself. It clawed up from the still-sodden mud of the lake bed, twenty feet of towering stone thrust up towards the sky.
As Gulkroth approached, the voice whispered even more urgently in his head. It spoke of things both terrible and wonderful, but even when Gulkroth felt that he must die with revulsion he didn’t slacken his pace. He couldn’t. Beneath it all, beneath the fear and the horror and the certainty of death, there was the single burning promise of something he could not refuse.
A promise of power.
His hide began to crawl. At first he thought that it was no more than the cancerous aura of the stone at work upon him. It wasn’t until he glanced down that he saw that his fur had come alive. Ticks and fleas and other parasites were burrowing their way out of his body and falling dead into the mud beneath him.
The fish that flapped here were larger than any he had seen before, and he wondered at their mutations. Some had tusks. Others had feathers and fur and the same yellow, slit-pupilled eyes as he had himself.
When he looked up from the abominations his breath caught in his throat.
Somehow he had come to within touching distance of the stone. It loomed over him, and as its voice echoed within his skull he felt his mind tear. Beneath the drying silt and mouldering weed it glowed with a sickening green light.
Gulkroth, not knowing what he was doing, smeared the filth away. The luminosity lit his muzzle and fangs as he bent forwards and started licking the tears of light away from the stone as easily as lichen from a tomb.
Soon he felt the light glowing within
him, coursing through his blood and muscle and bones and oh, oh the pain. It tore at every part of him, a screaming agony as his body melted and re-knitted itself.
The sun and the moon chased each other around the world. The fish around him died and rotted and stank. Gulkroth noticed none of it. His world had become one of endless, unendurable agony.
Then, on the third day, it stopped and he climbed to his feet, reborn. When he did so he knew two things.
The first was that the voice was his, and had been all along.
The second was that he was going to destroy the world.
As the green orb of Chaos waxed overhead Gulkroth returned to the herd that had been waiting on the shores of the dead lake and led them back to the world below.
Chapter One
General Count von Brechthold regarded the land below with the same steady gaze as the raptors which circled overhead. These pastures comprised the last few undisputed miles of Hochland before the border was lost to the wilderness. Several barons had laid claim to those wilds, but none had tried to collect taxes there. None had been foolish enough.
“Damn fine day for it, isn’t it, Viksberg?” the general asked. His blue eyes twinkled within the weathered crumple of his face and the tips of his moustache twitched like the whiskers of a terrier who can smell a rat.
“Yes, count,” Viksberg replied, and tried to look equally enthusiastic. He had been given a command in the count’s force as a favour to his deceased father and he didn’t want to appear ungrateful. Even so, he found enthusiasm hard to muster as he examined the bright blue sky through bloodshot eyes. The hoch had been flowing last night, and he was still feeling delicate.
“A damn fine day for it,” he said.
What he didn’t say was that it would be an even finer day for being somewhere else. Somewhere a long, long way away. The annual cull was all very well, but there were always casualties. Always horrific casualties.
Viksberg swallowed then lifted his telescope to examine the ground below them. It had been used before, and with good reason. The gods who had made the Empire had crafted it into a perfect killing field. From the crest of this hill a mile of gradually sloping pasture rolled down to the sudden dark line of the forest. It was one of the Empire’s primal forests, ancient and inviolate. The spaces between its gnarled trunks were choked with thorns, and even in the clear morning light a permanent gloom reigned beneath its canopy.
Viksberg peered nervously through the lens into that darkness. It was incredible that anything could move amongst such tangled snares of vegetation, let alone things as big as the creatures they were hunting. They would be in there now, merged invisibly into the decay of their domain.
In fact, Viksberg thought, they were probably watching him. Watching and hungering.
He suppressed a shudder and switched his gaze to the rows of feeding posts that stood half a mile down the slope between him and the forest. They had been hewn from massive tree trunks and each had been buried up to half its length in the ground.
Flies swarmed around them, feasting on the rotting blood that stained the gnawed wood. For the past two days these posts had been used to hold a pitiable variety of animals. Lame horses, old mules and spavined sheep, anything that could be bought cheaply but which still had a pulse.
Viksberg grimaced as he thought about what had befallen the poor creatures. Even half a mile away their screams had lifted the hairs on the back of his neck. Some of them had sounded almost human in the extremity of their terror.
And the way that they had been killed. It had been like nothing he had ever seen before.
Viksberg closed his telescope and took the stopper out of his flask. He tried to conceal the trembling in his hands as he raised it to his lips and took a long, gurgling swig. The fire of the liquid helped to dispel the memory, and he forced a good-natured grin as he replaced the stopper.
“Bit early for that, isn’t it?” one of his brother officers asked.
“Isn’t that what the midwife said to your sister?” Viksberg snapped back. Somebody snorted with laughter and the man he had insulted turned red.
“Apologise for that comment,” he said, his hand already on the hilt of his sabre.
“I apologise,” Viksberg muttered, and cursed himself for a fool. The last thing he wanted was a duel with some meat-headed soldier. He had enough to—Why oh why had he volunteered to lead one of the state regiments? Why couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut and stayed safely back in Hergig?
It was the drink that had got him into this mess, he decided. It always was. As usual on such occasions he swore that he would never touch the stuff again.
“Ah, here comes breakfast!” Count von Brechthold guffawed. The assembled officers laughed dutifully as the livestock detail dragged their victims towards the feeding posts. It had been an easy enough task at first but now, with the smell of the previous day’s massacre in their nostrils, the animals fought with dumb terror. The men whispered and soothed, kicked and dragged. Some had tears in their eyes as they led their charges to the feeding posts. The fattened flies rose in expectant clouds before them.
“Glad that this is the last time I’ll have to watch this,” one of the officers muttered.
“Don’t be so bloody sentimental,” von Brechthold scolded him. “They’re dying for a good cause.”
“They certainly are, general,” Viksberg loudly agreed, and turned a haughty eye on the man who had spoken.
When he turned back it was to see that one of the horses had slipped its bonds. It was a bony old thing with a sway back, but as soon as it was free it ran like a thoroughbred.
Viksberg wished that he could follow it.
Barely half the animals had been properly tethered when, with a sudden, ravenous roar, the forest vomited out the ragged horde of its vile spawn.
They spilled from its depths like maggots from the belly of a corpse, and although all were horned and hoofed and shaggy with verminous fur no two were exactly alike. Some stood barely as tall as a man, their twisted forms lean and skinny. Others loomed far above them, their muscles bulging with terrible power. Beneath the filth that matted their fur the creatures were striped and piebald, grey and brown. One was albino, its pink eyes making it seem even more inhuman than its fellows. Another, hunchbacked, scuttled forwards on all fours.
And they stank. Even a mile away the sour, ammonia stench of the horde drifted along the warm spring breeze, and Viksberg had to fight down a roll of nausea.
It was all too much for the men who had been struggling to bind the animals. They gave up and, suddenly united with their charges, they flew in blind panic.
“Bad show,” von Brechthold muttered.
“I’ll see that they’re flogged, general,” Viksberg offered, and was horrified by the way his voice squeaked.
“Never mind that now,” the count said. “Just get back to your men. All of you now. Quick!”
The assembled officers scattered like a flock of chickens. Leaving the general with his personal guard they galloped back to where their regiments waited behind the hill. They had been formed up there since before dawn, and Viksberg took comfort from their massed ranks as he rode to his own unit.
These were the state regiments, the best trained and the best armed in the whole of the Empire. They stood in neat, perfectly dressed ranks. The armour they wore over their red and green uniforms gleamed with captured sunlight and their eyes were hard with arrogant courage.
Like all state regiments, iron discipline was the source of their strength. Years of training had seasoned each man, binding him into a unified whole that was so much mightier than the sum of its parts.
Three regiments of knights stood in the front rank. Behind them six more regiments of foot soldiers waited. These were the spearmen and the halberdiers, the solid core of the army. Their formations were laid out with the geometrical precision of some vast, mechanical device. Of the two thousand men, not a single one stood out of place.
Viksberg fe
lt his fear beginning to abate as he rode to where his own regiment stood. They were halberdiers, the paragons of their profession. Each barrel-chested man carried the murderous weight of his pole arm as lightly as a broom, and they stood to attention as perfectly as toy soldiers. Usually Viksberg had little but contempt for his inferiors, but here and now he felt a sudden affection for them.
“Are the men ready?” he asked the captain, a scarred veteran who had spent a lifetime clawing his way up from the ranks.
“Yes, sir,” the captain bellowed. “Siggi will take your horse if you are ready to join us.”
Viksberg hesitated. He could see other infantry officers dismounting, ready to join their men for the fight to come. He knew that this was normal during drills, but surely nobody could expect him to give up his mount during a real battle? He was an aristocrat, Sigmar damn it! His blood was valuable. Priceless. It would be madness to give up the means of escape if things became… difficult.
“Don’t worry, sir,” the captain said. “Siggi will take good care of it.”
Viksberg could have cursed the thug. Instead, aware that every other officer had done so, and aware that the entire regiment was watching him, he dismounted.
“We’ll keep it with us,” he decided defiantly. “Captain, see that it is kept safe in the back rank.”
“That’s not usual, sir,” the captain responded. “It may hinder our formation.”
“Sigmar rot you, man, do as you’re told!”
“As you say,” the captain agreed stiffly. “Sir.”
No sooner had the horse been led to the back ranks than the trumpeters signalled the advance, and the signal flags started fluttering from the hilltop. With an explosion of noise the regimental drums started to beat, throbbing with a hypnotic pulse as the army began to move.
Viksberg thought back to the council of war he had attended last night. As always when facing this old foe, von Brechthold’s plan was a simple hammer and anvil. The knights would lead the charge. Packed together as tightly as the fingers in a mailed fist, they would smash through the seething horde of the enemy, and then expand out behind them to cut off their escape.
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