25 For 25

by Various

  ‘You all right?’ Fellick asked. He had seen the slightly nauseous expression on Brael’s face before. Brael nodded.

  ‘Time to go,’ he repeated. The nagging something that had been scratching at the edges of his mind had grown louder, more insistent. As he returned Fellick’s concerned gaze, a bilious yellow blob exploded behind his eyes, growing to fill half his vision before it faded.

  ‘Get them moving,’ he added, waving Fellick away. Fellick nodded then moved off, shouting for the men to prepare to move.

  ‘I can hear something!’ It was the boy – young man really, perhaps seventeen summers old. Brael thought of Bron and immediately regretted it.

  The boy was standing beside one of the piles of heavy rubble. He pointed. ‘I can hear something,’ he repeated. ‘Something’s moving.’

  ‘What are we supposed to do when they won’t even die when you drop a building on them?’ Kobar asked. Several of the men laughed.

  ‘More blackpowder next time, Kobar!’ called Tylor, prompting more laughter.

  ‘Leave it, boy,’ Fellick called. ’We’ll be gone by the time they crawl out from under that lot.’

  ‘You’re leaving?’ the young man seemed incredulous. ‘But... but you’re here to protect us!’

  His words got the loudest laugh of all.

  ‘Sorry kid,’ said Costes. ‘We were left here to die as slowly as possible so that the rest of the army can get as far away as possible.’

  ‘And now we’re leaving, right?’ Fellick directed his last word at Brael who, head swimming, managed an unsteady nod.

  ‘Quickly,’ he said. ‘Very quickly.’

  They left the square at a run, most of them jangling with looted ammunition belts, Costes and Perror already swearing about the weight of the machine-rifle they carried between them.

  A high-pitched whine peeled through the air, growing in volume, but descending in tone.

  In the market square, a slab of masonry shifted. It slid down the side of the pile of other such debris, revealing a green-skinned hand, fingers thick as a baby’s arm, and a massively corded forearm, covered in crudely drawn tattoos. A choking sound issued from within the pile; the sound of a creature dying from crushing internal injuries. Those appalling wounds did nothing to dampen the creature’s burning, instinctual rage, its overwhelming desire to kill.

  From within its ready-made tomb, the creature heard the sound of the incoming ordnance and knew its waaagh was over.

  The ground bucked under the men’s running feet. Slates fell from the surrounding buildings, shattering on the cobbles over which they ran. The young man, whose name was Vikor Lodz, glanced back as he ran. All he saw was a vast rolling cloud of dust racing along the street towards him.

  When the dust cloud overtook them, the men ran on, coughing and spitting as they went. Leaving it behind, they kept up the pace, running over ground that continued to shake from the sound of other impacts. A bombardment had started.

  ‘I thought they’d at least spend some time looting before they pulped the place,’ said Tylor. They had finally come to a halt in another square, smaller than the last. The streets in this part of town were narrow, as were the buildings, which seemed to lean across the street towards each other.

  At the square’s centre stood a votive shrine to a minor harvest deity. Vikor Lodz realised with a start that he was only a few streets from his family home, though his family – just his mother and sister, really – had joined the caravan of wagons that left with the soldiers.

  ‘They probably worked out that they can come back here and loot any time they like,’ muttered Tombek, a massively built Vinaran with a melancholic streak. ‘It’s not as if anyone’s going to try to stop them.’

  ‘I thought that was what you – I mean we – were supposed to do,’ Vikor blurted out. ‘I thought we were going to stop them.’

  The absurdity of his words struck him the moment they were out of his mouth. This time, however, the others did not laugh. That only made him feel even worse.

  ‘I’m afraid we’re done here, kid,’ Brael said. ‘All we can do now is stay alive long enough to kill some more of them.’

  ‘We going out the south gate, following the army?’ asked Costes. The combined column of the armies and the caravan of refugees had gathered there before moving off. Brael shook his head, as much to clear it of the nagging ache as in answer to Costes’s question.

  ‘Even a blind man could follow that trail. You’ve seen how fast those two-wheeled wagons move. They’d run us down before dusk. I got a look at a map during the briefing for the rearguard. A river cuts through the land on the other side of the hills to the south. The army is heading for a shallow ford that’ll allow them to get the wagons across. They’ve been gone a day and a half, which means they’re not far from it by now. There was another crossing point marked on the map, off to the south-east. It looks deeper and wider, but we haven’t got to get wagons and horses across it.

  ‘But we still have to get out of here through the south gate, so let’s get moving.’

  The rest of the men nodded.

  Vikor raised his hand. ‘You – we – don’t have to go out through the south gate,’ he said. ‘We can go through the stockyards. It would be much quicker and we’d already be heading south-east.’

  Brael regarded him for a heartbeat, head cocked as if he was waiting to hear someone whisper to him from his shoulder. Then he nodded.

  ‘All right, young man, lead on.’

  As he led the strangers through the stockyards, whose wide gates the retreating army had neglected to secure, past open-sided butchers stalls and over the open blood-sewers that criss-crossed the flagstoned floor, Vikor thought about his mother and sister, huddled aboard one of the wagons that would be jouncing along in the army’s rutted wake. His heart sank at the thought of the invaders’ smoke-belching machines catching the civilian wagons at the rear of the column.

  ‘C’mon, kid.’ Kobar, who was walking alongside him, looted ammunition jangling across his chest, a pike propped over his shoulder, slapped Vikor on the back. ‘Whatever it is you’re worrying about, don’t bother. What really happens is always going to be worse.’

  Navigating by the angle and direction of the sun’s path across the sky, Brael’s men marched south-east at a brisk pace. Their course took them through a gulley in the rolling hill-country, what might have once been a tributary to the river towards which they were heading, but which had dried up generations ago. The land rose on either side of them and the sound of the bombardment, which had hammered at their backs as they left doomed Grellax behind them, gradually faded away.

  The gulley curved around the foot of a low hill, taking Brael’s men out of direct sight of Grellax. Before he lost sight of the town, Vikor looked back. Plumes of smoke rose over the houses, lit from within by licks of flame, and over the shattered town walls. The wind shifted and he thought he caught the scent of burning wood and something else: the tang of oil.

  He remembered his outburst in front of the strangers with whom he now marched and felt a rush of embarrassment. Grellax was dead long before he had realised it. All the greenskins were doing was cremating its corpse.

  Then Fellick called to him to keep up and he hurried after his new comrades.

  Dusk fell and they marched along the gulley into the night. The moon was on the wane when the sound of fast-running water reached them. They made camp amongst a stand of trees a short way from the steeply-sloping, reed-strewn riverbank and Brael dispatched men to scout the bank in either direction. Only when the scouts had returned with reports that the bank was deserted in both directions and, as far as they could tell, on the far side of the river as well, did Brael allow a small fire. Someone produced a small, battered can and a handful of tea leaves. Someone else had liberated a few scraps of meat from a butcher’s stall in the stockyards.

  The combined smells of tea and cooking meat drifted on the air as Vikor told his story: after seeing off his mother and siste
r – his only family after his father had succumbed to a wasting illness a year and a half ago – in the caravan that followed the army away from Grellax, he had been given a pike and was assigned to a reserve platoon. They were to reinforce areas of the wall defences as it became necessary. He and a few of the others were on their way to do just that when something exploded nearby, throwing everything – even his memory, it seemed – into confusion. He remembered blood and screaming and the blank, vacant expression on the face of an old friend as he lay slumped against a wall, one side of his chest a mess of seeping meat and exposed bone. He remembered little after that until he found himself in the market square, where Kobar had been directing the positioning of the booby traps.

  ‘And we were out playing bait,’ said Fellick. ‘Brael’s idea, of course.’

  ‘Sounded like suicide to me,’ said Massau. Vikor had noticed that the slender man with what had once been a carefully-clipped moustache drooping over his upper lip did not share the others’ sense of closeness.

  ‘Brael’s no fool,’ Costes replied. ‘He was probably safest of all of us.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Vikor asked.

  ‘Bumpkins’ superstitions!’ Massau scoffed before anyone else could answer. The others shot him looks that ranged from pity to contempt.

  ‘You weren’t with us at Erewell,’ Perror said. ‘There were twenty of us just before things got really bad. Ten of us didn’t listen to Brael.’

  ‘Coincidence!’ Massau blustered.

  ‘And why aren’t we still in the square back there, picking over the greenskins as the bombardment came in on top of us?’ Costes asked. ‘You may not have had much use for things you can’t record in your guild’s ledgers, but you’re not in Primax now, you–’

  ‘I agree with Massau.’ Heads turned sharply. Brael was standing over them. He had been listening, unseen, from a short way off. ‘We make our own luck by keeping our eyes and ears open for things that might kill us...’ He surveyed his men, their faces painted by the firelight.

  ‘And then make sure we kill them first.’ The men laughed and nodded. Brael noticed that Massau had missed the point; the Primaxian wore a self-satisfied expression, sure that Brael had proven his argument for him. All Brael cared about was making sure that his men aimed their hatred at the greenskins, not at each other.

  He moved away from the fire. Looking up through the trees, he saw that the sky was almost cloudless, the stars as bright as gems. It reminded him of a similar night, a year ago. But he forced himself to think ahead to the route they should take to catch the rest of the army.

  It would be so easy to think of Vika and Bron, to imagine how their lives had been since he set them upon an iron caravan’s open wagon and waved to them as they pulled away. It would be so easy to imagine how it would feel when he saw them again, among the crowds of people who will have gathered behind Mallax’s high walls by the time Brael and his men arrive.

  If only he had not woken, less than a month after their departure, gripped by the sure and certain knowledge that they were dead.

  Dawn had begun to tint the sky when the remains of the fire were kicked over and the men moved down to the riverbank. The water rose to mid-chest and ran quickly and forcefully over slick, rounded rocks. Vikor found the noise of its passage oddly soothing – a reminder of the natural world, after the overwhelming noise of the greenskins’ infernal machines. Invisible among the treetops, birds began to sing their greeting to the new day.

  They moved carefully across the river, holding their powder pouches overhead as they felt their way around the largest of the riverbed rocks with their toes. Brael was first across, half-sliding down the steep bank into the icy water, pushing through the stiff reeds and then fighting to hold his balance against the strong current, all the while feeling his way with the toe of his boot as the water rose to chest height before the riverbed at last began to rise towards the gentler, less reed-clogged opposite bank.

  On the far side, Brael secured a line around the nearest tree and threw it back to Kobar, who was waiting waist-deep in the water. He and the rest of the men used the line to help maintain their balance against the force of the river. With his mutilated hand, Brael would have been unable to take much advantage of it.

  The land rose gently ahead of them as they marched away from the river, covered with tough, low-growing shrubs and the occasional moss-encrusted boulder – whether they had rolled down from the hilltops in ages past, or else were left there by ancient floodwaters, Brael couldn’t guess.

  Again steering by the sun, Brael tried to keep them moving along a south-westerly route that would bring them back in line with the army’s southerly course. That was assuming he had remembered the map correctly – he had only seen it for a moment; the minor baron who had given the briefing didn’t expect any of the men he was addressing to survive.

  Gradually, the roar of the river faded behind them and for a while they marched in silence. The grassy land undulated softly beneath them and maintained a gentle upward gradient. Only the muted noises of the equipment they carried marked the time.

  The sun was approaching its noon-point when a new sound reached them: a low rumble. At first, Vikor took it to be distant thunder, though the storm season was still two or three months away. The looks on the faces of his companions made him think again.

  ‘Distek! Kleeve!’ Brael beckoned and broke into a run. Distek, a farmer like Brael, and Kleeve, a trader in tanned hides, slipped the ammunition belts they were carrying from their shoulders and ran after Brael, quickly disappearing through a stand of trees that marked the crest of the long rise they had spent the morning climbing.

  Those left behind didn’t slacken their pace. As they marched, they began to check their own and each other’s equipment; those who had rifles loaded and primed their weapons. Costes and Perror began to debate how best to set up the machine-rifle.

  The sun had passed the noon-point by the time Distek reappeared, a look of urgency on his face. He beckoned them on then turned and ran back the way he had come. The rest of Brael’s men ran up the still-rising land after him. The sound that Vikor had taken to be thunder had long since resolved itself into the sound of explosions punctuated by the ratcheting cough of engine-driven rifles and the deeper growl of two-wheeled war machines.

  They passed through the line of trees and were surprised by the suddenness with which the land dropped away, scooping down into a shallow vale dotted by stands of trees. A taller hill rose from the far side of the valley, its top disappearing into the blue distance. Brael and Kleeve were standing at the edge of the drop, staring down at the carnage.

  The dead lay along the length and breadth of the valley: a few greenskins, many more Agrans. Trees and shrubs were burning, the ground appeared to have been scorched by the passage of the engines that had rolled over it, slaughtering as they went. A phalanx of two-wheeled machines had run the length of the column from the rear, firing indiscriminately, first at the packed wagons, then the foot soldiers. Wagon drivers had whipped their horses into a gallop, making for the valley sides. The war machines had driven them down, pumping round after round through the wagon’s bodywork and the screaming refugees within. The corpses lay with the ruined wagons across the length and breadth of the valley floor.

  The small number of mounted fighters had wheeled their horses to face the oncoming greenskins, with predictable results: the torn and shattered bodies of men and their mounts lay among the other corpses of militiamen who had tried to fend off the sudden attack.

  Brael remembered the first lesson he had learned: do not engage the invaders in a pitched battle on open ground.

  He counted four men still on horseback. A rider whose purple helmet plume identified him as belonging to the Primaxian hussars weaved between two overturned and shattered wagons, jinking his horse right and left to avoid the greenskins’ fire, until he was finally able to outflank one of the two-wheeled monstrosities and skewer its rider with his cavalry lance. The
greenskin was hurled from its saddle and the machine careered away, the gunner seated in the sidecar frantically lunging for the handlebars.

  A burst of gunfire from another of the wheeled attack vehicles cut short the hussar’s moment of victory. Both he and his mount were punched to the ground, gaping holes torn in their bodies by the high-calibre shells.

  Seeing this, the three remaining horsemen wheeled their horses about and made for the far end of the valley at a gallop, disappearing into the drifts of smoke that wandered across the vale from the pyres of shattered wagons and scorched corpses.

  Gunning their engines, the greenskins roared after the horsemen, their wheeled war wagons eating up the distance at an impossible rate, their riders howling with barbaric glee, until they too disappeared into the smoky distance.

  ‘They must have expected us to run,’ muttered Brael. Fellick had come to stand beside him. All of his men watched in silence, momentarily rooted to the spot. ‘They must have sent scouts around Grellax while the main force came through the town.’

  ‘But how did they find the column so quickly?’ Fellick asked. ‘I know they left a hell of a trail but any scouting party would still have to cover a lot of ground to–’

  A broad shadow passed overhead. Everyone ducked involuntarily. Tylor was the first to look skywards.

  ‘Gods of harvest and home!’ he breathed. ‘It’s not possible. It’s... it’s unholy!’

  The flying machine swooped gracefully away from them, its path taking it out over the battlefield. It appeared to be little more than a child’s kite, constructed on a much larger scale: a framework of struts and vanes, roughly lashed together, covered by a sheet of fabric that somehow caught the wind and held the whole thing aloft. And, hanging face-down in a harness beneath the wings: a greenskin.

  ‘Now I know we’re doomed!’ said Tombek.

  ‘I can’t believe it’s taken you this long to work that out,’ replied Kleeve.

  It was as if the sight of the impossible machine – somehow more impossible than the engine-driven chariots, the machine-rifle and the mere existence of the greenskinned invaders from the heavens – unlocked something in Vikor. His last memory of his mother, being held aboard a wagon by his sister, Freytha, and a woman he didn’t recognise, flashed before him. Lowering his pike he charged down the incline, into the valley.