Dragontooth caught an errant shaft of sunlight and flashed in agreement.
The sunlight died when the wyvern eclipsed it, hurtling at Wilhelm like a thrown spear but with all the force of a battering ram. Its eyes glinted like malevolent rubies, its claws and fangs promised gruesome death. Saliva drizzled from its open mouth as the beast savoured the scent of royal flesh.
Purge your mind of all doubt. You and your blade are as one. Kogswald was with him again, only fifteen years ago.
The rising mist swept up in front of the beast, masking it from sight. Wilhelm closed his eyes until the beat of its wings nearly deafened him, then he pivoted his body aside in a wide arc and lashed out with Dragontooth.
He was buffeted hard by the wyvern’s bulk as it arrowed past him. A ribbon of heat opened up in his thigh and he realised it had cut him. Almost simultaneously he felt the enchanted blade dragging through hide and flesh, eliciting a bestial screech of agony.
Dragontooth hissed and spat as the wyvern’s blood touched the blade as if whispering a curse. The wound went deep. Wilhelm knew it by instinct. Dizzy, one hand clutching his injured leg, he turned in time to see the wyvern careening off into the distance. The membrane from its right wing hung like a ragged sail. It made the beast flail in the air like a stricken ship on invisible waves. Blood threaded the earth like a red, throbbing vein from where Wilhelm had cut the wyvern to a furrow in the ground where it eventually pitched. It wasn’t dead, a terrible mewling sound reverberated from its nose, but it was down and so was the shaman.
“Nicely done, my lord,” said Ledner running up beside him. Even he couldn’t hide his awe at what the prince had just done.
Wilhelm was breathless with effort. “It’s a little different with horses.”
Ledner didn’t know what he meant, so ignored the comment. “Can you walk?”
The prince nodded.
“Then you can ride.” Ledner turned and hailed two of the knights.
Wilhelm paled. They numbered less than twenty. Some were injured and would never fight again. Many were dead. The wyvern’s monstrous strength was awesome to behold.
Across the plain towards Averheim, whose hopes were fading like a candle at the end of its wick, several bulky shadows were plunging through the mist. The grey veil was thinnest near the city, without the powder smoke to pollute it, and Wilhelm made out a squadron of chariots heading towards them.
When the two knights reached Ledner they dismounted.
“Here, my lord,” Ledner invited.
Wilhelm frowned. “Where is my steed?”
“Dead. Now take the saddle.”
Ledner helped the prince up and then mounted the other horse.
“Come, my lord,” he said, reining his borrowed horse towards the Imperial line. “There’s little time.”
“What are you doing?” Wilhelm didn’t bother to hide his anger. “Averheim—”
“Is lost,” snapped Ledner, “and so will we be if we delay further. This way, my lord. The knights will cover our retreat.”
“Sacrifice their lives you mean.”
“If that makes you follow me now, then yes, they will. Don’t let it be in vain.”
The proud remnants of the Griffonkorps and the Order of the Fiery Comet aligned their steeds in a long fighting line. Many had lost their lances. A lone survivor of the pistoliers mixed in with their ranks, a templar in all but name for his bravery. Those on foot stood either side of the horses. Some men were praying. More than one kissed the blade of his sword and showed it to the heavens. The shaft of sunlight that had lit up Dragontooth returned to bathe them briefly in its lustre but then was gone.
Wilhelm made to ride up alongside them, but Ledner snatched his reins and stopped him.
The chariots were closing all the while. They’d been held in reserve for this very purpose. Grom was as wily as he was obese.
“You are the prince of Reikland. You must not fall!”
Ledner’s anger shook Wilhelm into understanding. His defiance crumpled into an expression of profound sadness.
“Sigmar be with you…” he murmured to the knights. He nodded slowly, almost imperceptibly, before he and Ledner rode for the Imperial line as if all the hounds of Chaos were at their heels.
It was over. Wilhelm had failed.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE BETTER PART OF VALOUR
Outside Averheim, capital city of Averland,
483 miles from Altdorf
The sight of Wilhelm quitting the field sent shock-waves through the rest of the army. They couldn’t reach Averheim and free the Elector Count’s army. A full retreat was ordered almost immediately. The orcs fighting the Grimblades seemed to sense the sudden weakness. It intensified their strength and with the burly greenskins pressing hard against them the halberdiers gave and broke.
Somewhere between running and shouting orders, Karlich fell. The damned smog was everywhere, choking the plain in a charcoal shroud. It was a curse and a blessing. For some, it meant they could retreat without fear of pursuit; for others, it meant getting lost in the darkness and stumbling into the enemy, or worse, the blades of their own panicked kinsmen.
Panic was the only way to describe it. Monsters lived in the mist and smog, some real, some imagined. Their grunting bootsteps thudded behind… or was it in front? Their snorting rage was omnipresent.
Karlich didn’t know how far they’d already run. He went to get up when he was kicked in the stomach and fell down again. It wasn’t a greenskin. The immediate view was hazy, but he thought he saw an Imperial uniform disappearing eerily away from him. He was suddenly disorientated. Perspective and direction lost all meaning in the smog.
He tried to rise again, this time managing to get to his feet and realised he was alone. Something came at him swiftly from the murk. He gutted it on his blade, belatedly glad it was a goblin. The greenskins too were running scared. Though entirely natural, the smog had taken on an eldritch quality. Snaps of harquebuses were muffled by it. Karlich thought he saw the vague blossom of their flaring flintlocks as the handgunners fired, and headed for them.
His sword wouldn’t move. Karlich wrenched at it but it wouldn’t give. It was stuck fast in the dead goblin’s body. With no time to pull it free, he left it. He didn’t know what had happened to the other Grimblades but, with only his dirk to protect him, hoped they were close. One moment they had been running together, trying to maintain some form of good order, the next he was tumbling into the hard earth and all was grey and dark around him.
He thought about shouting out for his comrades, but decided against it. There might be more greenskins, bigger ones, lurking in the smog and he didn’t want to risk attracting them.
Warily, he trudged towards the flare of guns. He remembered it was only about a hundred feet to the rear line and safety.
It might as well have been a hundred miles.
The going was slow. Littered with fallen blades and the dead and dying, the ground was treacherous. Karlich saw the shadow of an Empire soldier rushing blindly through the smog and impaling himself on a discarded spear jutting from the earth. The poor sod gurgled once and then died. It was only when Karlich saw the hulking silhouettes drifting ahead of him, too large and broad-backed to be men, that he realised he was really in trouble.
In their eagerness to chase down their defeated enemy, some of the orcs had got in front of him. Briefly fixated on the orcs, he heard the light thud of charging feet too late.
Karlich turned, just as a black-swathed figure rammed into him. He gasped as the air was smashed from his lungs. The sergeant kicked out and was greeted with a satisfying grunt of pain. Despite the fact he was gagging for breath, he tried to shove the body off him but his arm was pinned beneath what felt like his attacker’s knee. The scuffle came in flashes—a whipping cloak, black but dirty with caked mud; a silver talisman, gleaming and forbidding; the snarling face of a man he feared but barely knew. Vanhans straddled Karlich, locking his arms with his knees, and
seized the sergeant’s neck in both hands.
“Murdering heretic,” he snarled, his venting spittle wetting Karlich’s cheek.
Karlich jarred a knee into Vanhans’ back and he relented enough for the Reiklander to take a breath.
“What are you talking about, maniac?” he hissed through clenched teeth before the witch hunter reasserted his position but this time pushed the flat of his hand under Karlich’s chin.
“Lothar Henniker,” he said. “You know.”
And he did know. Vanhans had just used Karlich’s real name.
He couldn’t have known. There was no way, despite the fact they had later fought together, that Karlich could have realised the crazed butcher who had burned down Rechts’ village and condemned its inhabitants to death would visit Karlich years later. The madman’s name was Grelle the Confessor, a self-proclaimed title, and he was the worst of the Order of Sigmar’s chaff. Death warrants were issued without cause, businesses and homes were put to the torch, innocents dangled from the noose. All of it served Grelle’s paranoid fixation with purity and what he believed was a Sigmar-given duty to rid the world of the wretched and the unclean.
Grelle was the worst kind of charlatan: one who didn’t know it. Karlich, then Lothar, had turned a blind eye at first, hoping that the witch hunter and his retinue would soon leave. He resented him for the burnings and the deaths, but so long as it didn’t touch him or his family, he would keep his peace. Who knows, perhaps the victims of Grelle’s purgings were not victims at all? Perhaps they really were heretics? That was the mentality of fear talking, the desire to avoid persecution through acceptance, no matter how abhorrent. Lothar only realised this later and to his cost.
It all changed when his wife, Helena… my beautiful Helena… cured an old man’s sickness with a herbal panacea. It was nothing more than alleviating the symptoms of a cough but Grelle saw only witchery in her selfless deeds. When Lothar was out gathering wood for the fire, the witch hunter and his cronies took his wife and daughter… oh, Sigmar, not Isobel… from their home and burned them both as witches.
Lothar had seen smoke issuing from the village square and wondered why they’d lit a bonfire. A moment later he was running, the gathered firewood scattered in his wake. To that very day, Karlich couldn’t explain where the sense of urgency that filled him came from but he had never run harder in his life, nor since.
Entering through the village gates, he inhaled the stench of burning meat. The fat sizzled and crackled in his ears like cruel laughter. It was too late for Helena, too late for his daughter. Battering his way through the jeering crowds, Lothar ripped at the fire-wreathed pyre, burning himself badly in the process. Rough hands seized him by the shoulders and he was hoisted off his knees where he wept and scrabbled at the smoking wood.
Two of Grelle’s henchmen held him before their master.
“Conspirator!” Grelle denounced. “Warlock!” he accused. The witch hunter’s face was partially hidden behind a cage-like helmet, his skin a patchwork of self-inflicted scars. He wore little more than leather and rags. His calloused feet and hands were bare. The stink of urine and stale sweat emanated off Grelle in a pall. His breath was redolent of dung. This was the wretched creature that had executed his beloved family. Lothar snapped. He cried out with such anguish and apoplexy it was as if his heart were breaking.
Throwing off the minions, Lothar threw himself at the witch hunter. A charred log had rolled off the pyre and into the village square. He seized it and battered Grelle until his cage-helm was staved in and split his ugly visage. The henchmen, nothing more than bullies motivated by persecuting the weak and credulous, stood back in shock as Lothar brutalised their master. Even the rabid onlookers had lost their fervour. Stunned into abject silence, they could only watch.
Grelle mewled in pain and self pity but Lothar pounded relentlessly through the man’s pleading. Red rimed his vision. When the log finally broke, he cast it aside and shoved Grelle’s face into the wet mud. It had been raining since dawn, though not enough to quench the fires that had so cruelly robbed Lothar of his family. The witch hunter suffocated in the mud. His thrashing protests didn’t last.
Only when it was over did Lothar realise what he had done. His hands were bloody. His wife and child were nought but blackened corpses. Lothar fled, there and then, out into the forest. He’d killed a templar of Sigmar. Others would come looking for him. Stay and he condemned everyone around him. More would die needlessly. That day Lothar Henniker died too. Feder Karlich was born in his stead.
But now his old life had returned, like an exhumed corpse. The buzzing of its flies, the stink of putrefaction gave him away. He’d been careful, leaving only a shadow of his former existence, but even shadows can be caught if they spend too long near the light.
The present rushed back to the sound of heavy guns. Meinstadt was firing the cannons held in reserve. The artillery was meant to pave the Empire army’s retreat, but it was more treacherous than being surrounded by orcs. A gout of earth exploded nearby, showering the struggling men with dirt. Karlich and Vanhans were in no-man’s-land, where the dead would soon linger.
“You’ll kill us both,” Karlich snarled, finding it difficult to speak with the witch hunter’s iron-hard palm pressing against his chin.
Either Vanhans wasn’t listening or he didn’t care.
“Lothar Henniker,” he declared, “I accuse you of heretical murder and consorting with witches most foul.” He reached for something with his free hand and pushed it against Karlich’s cheek.
The sergeant screamed as red-hot iron seared his face.
“See how the non-believer burns!”
Vanhans was drunk with his ravings. He’d heated his talisman in one of the many fires around the battlefield, using it to convince himself of his own deluded mania.
The thunderous retort of great cannon was getting louder.
Vanhans tore the icon away, wrenching melted skin from Karlich’s face with it.
“I name you daemon, skulking in the guise of man. The order will have vengeance, Sigmar demand—”
Something hot and wet rained on Karlich’s face. At the same time he smelled warm iron and felt the passage of a large object soar overhead. The pressure at his chin lessened abruptly, enabling him to look down.
Vanhans was dead. He’d been beheaded by a stray cannon ball. The bounce had taken off his skull at the chin. Lolling macabrely for a few seconds, his corpse collapsed, the Sigmarite icon still clenched in his fist. Rigor mortis would make it hard to reclaim later.
Overcoming the shock, acutely aware that Meinstadt’s cannonade went on unabated, Karlich shoved off the witch hunter’s body and staggered to his feet. A cannon ball whined past him nearby and he cowered for a moment before ploughing towards the flash of harquebuses again.
Shadows loomed in the smog, the orcs he had noticed earlier. Now they noticed him too, drawn by Vanhans’ ravings. They had his scent and grunted in anticipation of the kill.
There were only two of them.
Unarmed, it was one more than needed to kill Karlich. He’d lost his dirk in the scuffle.
Fleeing was suicide. The greenskins were behind him and now they were in front of him, too. Something glinted nearby in the smog, catching what little light penetrated the gloom. Karlich reached for it, even as the pair of orcs closed, and his fingers gripped the hilt of a sword. It was Stahler’s. He recognised the rune on the blade. Without time to wonder what had happened to his captain, Karlich took up a fighting stance.
A fight it was then.
He’d need to make it quick. Despite the smog, the rest of the greenskin army couldn’t be far behind. Even deterred by the cannonade, some would still get through.
The first lunged through the grey gloom, its silhouette resolving into an ugly visage of tusks and raw aggression. Karlich let it come, ducking its clumsy swipe and slicing it along the belly. Armour and flesh parted easily and the beast was disembowelled in a single cut. The second went
to cleave off Karlich’s head but stopped mid-swing when it found a blade transfixed through its beady, red eye. Drooling blood, the orc collapsed a moment later.
Karlich marvelled briefly at whatever craft had wrought the runeblade. Truly, there was power in the world of which he had no comprehension.
Another explosion tinged the grey smog a fiery orange, spitting hot earth and shrapnel in a deadly cloud. Marvel or not, the rune-blade wouldn’t stop him from being slain by a cannon ball. Karlich needed to get out of no-man’s-land, but he was like a ship without a compass. His bearings, despite the muffled din and flare of harquebus, were off. Salvation came from an unlikely quarter.
“Sergeant Karlich! Sergeant Karlich!”
He heard Lenkmann’s voice before he saw him and the Grimblades’ banner. It fluttered like a beacon in the smog. Hazy and indistinct, yes, but imposing enough to be visible from a longer distance. Karlich made for it at once.
Lenkmann wasn’t alone. He had Volker with him.
“Though you were dead,” the Reikland huntsman hugged his sergeant warmly, who looked awkward at the gesture. “Sorry, sir,” he added afterwards.
Karlich smiled. “Forgotten,” he replied. “Where’s the battleline?”
Lenkmann looked to Volker, who frowned and looked around in the smog.
“Volker?” asked the banner bearer.
“We’re close,” he said. “Hard to get a strong trail in all this smoke.”
Cannon balls and the dense impacts of mortar shells resonated around them with growing regularity.
“Can’t we just go back?” asked Karlich. “How did you find me?”
Lenkmann shrugged. “Blind luck. I heard someone speaking through the mist and then I heard what sounded like your voice, too, sir. I followed it. Volker came with me.” He glared at the huntsman who stayed close but was becoming indistinct in the mist with every foot that he trailed a route back. “The idea was for him to guide us back.”
[Empire Army 04] - Grimblades Page 24