Forged in Battle

by Justin Hunter - (ebook by Undead)

  The blade caught the creature just under the chin and punctured the soft under-tissue of the creature’s neck and palate, snapping its jawbone and spraying yellow teeth into the air. The blade carried on through the beast’s upper palate and went straight into the brain, buckling only as it hit the massively reinforced skull. But Gaston held his ground and the creature’s skull snapped free of its spine and the war-axe flew forward without aim or direction.

  The men began to rally and soon Gaston’s forlorn hope had strengthened to nearly forty men; they retreated to the second barricade in four ranks.

  Freidel stood shoulder to shoulder with Gaston. He was one of the few men to still have his halberd in his hand. He kept the creatures well back, but as he stabbed his blade into the neck of a creature that was crawling towards Gaston he felt a searing pain in his leg, stumbled and fell.

  Gaston tried to reach down and drag the wounded halberdier back under the protective hedge of blades but before he could, three beastmen dragged the wounded man out of his reach and fell on him.

  Freidel’s screams only silenced when they tore his chest open and tore out his heart. A moment later they had twisted his head from his shoulders and hurled it back at the retreating men.

  When they felt the Tanner Lane barricade behind them, Gaston could feel the discipline of the men behind him begin to falter as they turned and scrambled for safety. There was no one to cover their backs and a number of men were pulled back down and cruelly slaughtered.

  Only the courage of Gaston and the men with him allowed so many to get back onto the barricade and then farm-lads with pitchforks covered their retreat, penning the beastmen back like animals as Gaston—the last—clambered onto the barricade to safety.

  On Eel Street, Butcher struck again and again, until the beastmen paused before coming near Edmunt, but the weight of numbers was almost overwhelming. Men were stumbling back from the front line and collapsing from exhaustion. Women gave out water and such little food as they could find, but there was no way so few defenders could hold back such a flood.

  The tightly thronged herds began to part and the human defenders could see terrible creatures start to push their way into the top of Altdorf Street: things that had crawled straight from the world of nightmares—Chaos spawn.

  Sigmund stood silently behind the lines, assessing the situation then he called to Strong-arm Benjamin. The burly black-haired man ran over.

  Sigmund pointed. “See that building there?”

  There was a tall thin house, the second and third floors of which over-hung the street. Benjamin nodded.

  “Find a way in and set the place on fire!”

  The street between the barricade and the house in question was full of baying beastmen. “How?” Benjamin asked.

  “Through the houses!” Sigmund said, and Benjamin understood.

  He took his twenty smithy men and clambered up to the top floor of the house next to them. It was a lodging house, with many doors and simple wooden steps leading up to the third floor, where the rooms had sloping ceilings.

  Clothes were scattered on the floor. The occupants had fled. The blacksmiths began to pound at the plaster wall. Their heavy hammers made short work of the plaster and wattle walls, and soon there was a round hole that was large enough for them to duck through.

  Benjamin’s men went from attic to attic, leaving ragged holes in each wall, until they reached the house that Sigmund had indicated. The second and third storeys hung well out over the street. If they were discovered, the beastmen would find a tunnel all the way to the defenders’ barricade. But for the fire to catch hold it would have to be on the ground floor.

  Benjamin had two of his men gather lanterns from the deserted rooms as he stole a glance from the upstairs window. The street was black with bodies, the palisade seemed like a cliff holding back a stormy sea. The Chaos spawn were moving inexorably through the beastmen and Benjamin realised with horror that they eating their way through the goatmen.

  Benjamin led two of his men down the stairs, listening for the tell-tale sound of hooves—but the house appeared to be deserted.

  As they came down onto the first floor the banners of the beastmen were hanging in front of the windows. The air was thick with beastman musk. Their hearts pounded in their chests.

  On the ground floor the lattice windows had been shattered. Beastmen were jostling each other, eager to get to the fighting on the palisade. But their attention was all focussed forward—none of them noticed the men in the houses just yards to the side.

  Benjamin held the lantern in his hand. He gestured to the other men and they began to pour oil over the beams and timbers of the house.

  Benjamin crept to the front room and unscrewed the flask he had, and shook it over the overturned furniture. But as he did so there was a pungent scent of roses.

  Scented oil! He cursed and looked with alarm at the beastman, and for a second he was sure that he had escaped. But the noses of the beastmen were far more sensitive than his. The sudden draft of scented oil made a number of them turn and they bleated with shock and delight at seeing a human inside the building. Within seconds there were three beastmen chasing Benjamin through the rooms then the front door swung open and a stream of beastmen charged in, their hooves skidding on the smooth tiles.

  Benjamin reached the bottom of the stairs and realised that there was no way he could escape. Shaking the last of the scented oil over the stairs, he smashed the lantern on the banister and held it to his chest.

  The oil caught flame and Benjamin screamed as he charged forward, a living torch. The beastmen skidded and slipped in their panic as the fiery apparition ran towards them—then the whole ground floor went up with a whumpf! of hot air—and they were incinerated in the inferno.

  As the battle raged Josh raced back and forth along the old stone wall between Altdorf Street, Eel Street and Tanner Lane. There were ten young lads relaying messages from Sigmund to Gaston and Edmunt.

  Captain Jorg was calm as he listened to each breathless report. He issued orders calmly but deliberately.

  “Gaston has fallen back to the second barricade,” Josh said and Sigmund nodded and shouted to Guthrie, who stood at the back of the lines with his Crooked Dwarf Volunteers. They were a sorry-looking band of warriors, but they were all he had left. “To Tanner Lane!”

  Sigmund looked back to see what was happening in Altdorf Street and saw the house that Benjamin had gone to suddenly erupt in flames. A wave of panic spread through the beastmen and the pressure on the front line eased.

  The flames began to lick up the front of the house, and soon the whole bottom floor was aflame. The fur of those closest to the flames began to crinkle and singe. Two of the Chaos spawn had been driven off, but one—with blue spined legs like a spider that helped drag its bloated body forward, seemed oblivious to the heat and kept onwards, its skin blackening and bubbling as its watery insides started to bubble and boil. The intense heat drove the rearmost attackers back, while those at the front were trapped. They pressed forward, desperate to escape the heat and soon the beastmen at the foot of the barricade were so tightly packed that they could not even swing their weapons or even raise their shields.

  Elias stabbed again and again, but the beastman below him refused to fall.

  “He’s dead!” the man next to him shouted. “They’re too tightly packed for the dead ones to drop!”

  As the inferno increased the heat was so intense that beastmen at the back of the press went berserk and began to attack their comrades in an effort to escape the heat. The fur on their backs blackened and began to smoke. Suddenly, the upper storey crashed down in a tumble of burning timbers. The whole front of the house toppled right across the road, burying the spawn, and killing many of the beastmen and cutting off about fifty beasts that were still fighting at the barricade.

  Sigmund drew his sword and pushed through the startled defenders.

  “Charge!” Sigmund yelled and suddenly the attackers were bes
et by a mob of furious men: halberdiers and free companies and handgunners all mixed. The terrified beastmen began to bleat in terror. Some tried to hide inside the buildings, a few tried to run through the burning ruins, one or two making it to the other side as flaming torches—their fur and skin peeling back from their bones as they roared their agony.

  * * *

  The flames quickly spread and soon houses were alight on Tanner Lane and Eel Street. In the next half an hour three more houses toppled as the flames spread from houses to house and Altdorf Street and Eel Street were impassable.

  Only Tanner Lane offered the beastmen a chance to close with the enemy. Men stumbled back from the fighting and staggered towards a makeshift field station that the apothecary, Gustav, was running in the front room of a merchant’s house.

  There was a queue of wounded men lying on the pavement outside. Beatrine helped to drag wounded men back from the barricades. Floss held the men down as Gustav inspected the wounds.

  “Get some rest,” Gustav said to two young men whose wounds were beyond help—and they were piled in the corner of the room and given a little kirsch to soothe their passing.

  The next man that was lifted onto the former dining table was a halberdier whose arm had been almost severed by an axe cut. Gustav nodded to Floss and the other helpers and they held the man down: a leather strap over his forehead pinning his head to the table.

  Gustav reached for his knifes, already dripping blood and began to sharpen them. “You’ll be losing this arm,” he said to the soldier who nodded and bit his mouth shut.

  Gustav cut quickly and cleanly about an inch above the cut, cleared the twitching muscles away from the bone that had shattered and was oozing bloody marrow.

  “Saw!” Gustav said. Floss handed him the saw then shut her eyes as the apothecary lowered it to the man’s arm and began to saw.

  The second barricade on Tanner Lane was not as high or as formidable as the others, but at least the lane was not much wider than a single cart. The fighting here was bitter and merciless. A pile of beastman bodies began to pile up outside the barricade, while Beatrine and her sisters helped drag the wounded men away.

  Gaston didn’t know how he could continue to lift his sword—when the burning houses began to shed charred timbers and the beastmen seemed to sense that they would be cut off and retreated.

  Gaston watched them leave, until the street was empty except for a carpet of twitching beastmen. The men did not dare to pursue, the flames were so intense that there was no way through. They collapsed where they were and Guthrie sent some men to bring beer from his inn. They came back ten minutes later with a barrel strapped to the back of a mule and the men passed the steins around, drinking deeply.

  As the men rested Floss took a knife from the table side and clambered over the barricade. She had been driven from her home. Her father and her elder sister had been killed. She bent over the first wounded beastman. It was small, not much larger than a boy, with soft brown fur with a dark stripe down its back. Except for its fanged mouth, its face had a strange, almost feline softness to it. It had been stabbed in the chest, and its breathing was coming slowly and raggedly.

  Floss’ skirts were knotted up. She could feel the heat of the burning house on her left cheek as she bent over the wounded animal and cut its throat.

  The next beastman saw what had happened and struggled to get away. When Floss knelt at the side of its horned head, the creature bared its teeth to frighten her away, but she had seen more blood that afternoon than most soldiers. The vertical pupils of the beastman struggled to see what she was doing—then the knife kissed its throat and its hot blood spurted over Floss’ hands.

  On Altdorf Street, Sigmund ordered a third line of barricades to be built and men and women worked frantically to empty their houses of every scrap of furniture, piling it up across the street. They barricaded the doors of their houses and knocked passages through the upper floors so the street would become a death trap for the hordes of wild animals should they break through.

  When he had given his orders, Sigmund clambered up on the old stone wall and hurried the thirty yards to Tanner Lane.

  The lane was clogged with dead bodies. The barricade was lined with exhausted men. “The lions of Tanner Lane!” Sigmund dubbed them and the men gave weak smiles.

  Sigmund recognised Guthrie and grinned. “You made a warrior after all!”

  “I will never fight again,” Guthrie said with a smile. “I only ask Sigmar to save me today!”

  When Sigmund got to Gaston he laughed out loud and embraced the man.

  “Last time I saw you, you were on the palisade!”

  Gaston smiled weakly. He had lost almost all of the men here—and he hardly knew how he had survived himself.

  “Sigmar blessed me!” he said.

  When Sigmund got to Eel Street the air was much lighter. Everyone had a handful of stories to tell about how they had escaped and they were recounting them, laughing with the shock and relief that they were still alive.

  “Captain Sigmund!” a voice shouted and Sigmund turned and saw Theodor. The merchant’s pistols were blacked with powder and he had a tear in his jacket where a knife had narrow missed disembowelling him. He saw the cut on Sigmund’s forehead and blanched. “You should not be in the front rank! You’re the only hope these people have!”

  “There’s two hundred men fighting here. Each one is hope for Helmstrumburg.”

  Theodor took hold of Sigmund’s arm. “Believe me! Your men are deserving of the highest praise, but you cannot hold the beasts of the forests forever. They will find a way to come around the defences. And when they do—their hounds will eat well!”

  Sigmund’s lip curled in disgust at his talk, but then it struck him that the man was right. They had weathered only the first storm. These beastmen were not driven by any sane desires. They had a single purpose that had smouldered for a thousand years: to drive the humans from the town.

  “These creatures are driven by a force older than Helmstrumburg. But we might destroy their unity if we destroy the herdstones!”

  “How can we do that?” Sigmund demanded. “I have no men to spare and it would take a hundred men a day to destroy those stones!”

  “Did you get my note?”

  “What note?” Sigmund frowned.

  Osric he realised what they were talking about and grinned sheepishly. Four barrels of blackpowder would have made a nice packet, but if it saved the lives of his men then it was probably worth it.

  “Is this about four barrels of blackpowder?” he said.

  Sigmund managed to find a number of carpenters from the men on the barricade and sent them down to the docks with Theodor. He had five of Frantz’s dockers go to the Crooked Dwarf and bring back ten empty barrels.

  Then Sigmund went to the north gate, where there were about fifty free company and twenty spearmen. Since the attempted treachery of Squire Becker, there had been half-hearted attempts to attack the north gate—but they had been easily beaten back. The beastmen had not been expecting to find the walls held strongly against them.

  Sigmund found a similar story when he met Gunter. The veteran had a bandage around his chest, and there was a red patch on his right side, near his armpit.

  “A lucky arrow,” he laughed, giving no sign of the pain he must be in.

  Sigmund described the battle at the palisade and the barricades and Gunter nodded in approval. Bringing the beastmen into the streets was probably the best thing to do. It limited their numbers and gave them no way to use their speed to outflank the halberdiers.

  “We are going to try and destroy the herdstones,” Sigmund said.

  “You’re doing what?” Gunter said. “That’s madness!”

  “We cannot beat them.”

  “We are beating them!”

  “This is our only chance! I have seen the numbers that these beastmen control. We can fall back from barricade to barricade. We can burn each house to gain a respite, but it
is as if the whole Drakwald Forest has emptied itself. And there are only so many houses in Helmstrumburg. When we have burnt them all then we will line up, shoulder to shoulder on the docks, and be killed?”

  Gunter didn’t say anything.

  “If we do not return by nightfall, take over command of the defences.”

  Gunter nodded. “Good luck!” he said and the two men embraced and then Sigmund strode down towards the docks.

  There was a crude raft on the dockside when Sigmund arrived, and twenty of Osric’s men standing round four firkins of blackpowder. With them were the best fighters that the barricades could spare.

  The Vorrsheimers had sent Stephan, the young spearman with the scar on his cheek.

  Next to him stood Elias, who had stopped feeling like a new recruit at the palisade. Already he had lost count of the number of times he had killed. Black-haired Schwartz grinned as Sigmund approached and Sigmund nodded to Theodor. He had seen the man fighting and knew that he was a man to be counted on.

  Osric had found a shield from somewhere and had a drawn sword in his hand. Baltzer had a cut on his cheek, but was otherwise unwounded. The short thin man leaned on his halberd for support, regarding Sigmund with ill-concealed contempt.

  Theodor had his pistols loaded and ready.

  Frantz stood next to him, with an unlit clay pipe in his mouth. Four or his dockers stood behind him, still armed with their swords and shields and steel caps.

  The dockers had put up a magnificent fight on Altdorf Street, but Sigmund didn’t want them here. He wanted trained soldiers only.

  “Who is going to carry these barrels and let your lot do the fighting?” Frantz demanded.

  Sigmund paused to consider. “Fine. Now you all know why we are here?”

  Baltzer and Stephan shook their heads.

  “Putting it simply, we are going to cut the head from the serpent,” Sigmund smiled.

  The dockers lifted the raft to the water’s edge and lowered it in. It bobbed on the water and the soldiers began to slip into the water, holding onto the sides as they slid their weapons onto the top of the raft to stay dry.