by Nathan Long
Now was the moment. Reiner and Giano exchanged a look, then jumped off the pillars as one, holding the blanket out wide between them. They landed perfectly, catching the raiders head in the blanket while he was in mid-step and pulling back hard. The giant slammed flat on his back, gasping as the air was knocked from him, and before he had time to recover and cry out, the rest of Veirts men had raced up the steps and leapt on him: Ulf sitting on his chest and pinning his arms, Gustaf and Hals holding his legs, and Veirt grabbing his head through the blanket and cramming the butt of his pistol into the man’s mouth as he fought for air.
Erich raised his sword, but hesitated, for, though pinned, the Kurgan was so strong he jerked the three men that held him down this way and that and nearly threw them off. ‘Hold him still, curse you,’ he hissed.
Reiner pulled the bag of pistol shot from his belt and cracked the giant over the head with all his strength. The fight went out of his massive limbs, and Erich brought his blade down like an executioner’s axe. The blow severed the raider’s head from his body. Veirt wrapped it up in the blanket and pressed it against the giant’s spouting neck. ‘Now get him out of here before he bleeds all over the place.’
This was easier said than done. Ulf caught the warrior under the arms, and Gustaf and Hals lifted his legs, but he seemed twice as heavy as he should be, and they could barely inch him along. Beyond that, there was no stopping the blood. Though Giano tucked a second blanket under the raider’s neck as they moved him, the flagstones of the walk were still spattered with bright red drops.
‘Clean that up,’ whispered Veirt, but it was too late. They could hear the second guard coming. Reiner and Giano ran to their columns again and started climbing while Veirt mopped at the bloody pavers with his cloak. Ulf, Gustaf and Hals, grunting with effort, tried to muscle the headless corpse down the steps, but Ulf lost his footing and went over backwards, tumbling down to the plaza with the body crashing on top of him as the rest ducked out of sight.
Reiner heard the second Kurgan call a question. He came around the hedge with his massive sword drawn and looked around suspiciously. He was as big as his companion, but bald, and with eyebrows so shaggy that he had braided the ends. He wore a mail shirt and a bearskin cloak. Reiner and Giano froze halfway up their pillars and edged around out of his line of sight like squirrels. The raider crept forward, wary. Reiner held his breath.
The raider barked another question, then stopped as he spotted the smeared blood on the flagstones. He backed up, shouting a warning to his comrades over his shoulder.
Raised voices answered him from behind the hedge.
‘Kill him!’ cried Veirt, and raced up the steps with Erich, Hals and Gustaf behind him.
The Kurgan turned to face them, which opened his back to Giano and Reiner. They leapt at him, daggers drawn, as he met Veirt and Erich’s charge sword to sword. Reiner’s dagger turned on his mail, but Giano’s struck home and the raider roared in pain. He backhanded Giano and Reiner with his free hand while slashing at the others with his blade.
Giano was knocked to the ground, but Reiner hit the balustrade and came within an inch of tumbling over it into the void. Only a painful grab at a thorny vine stopped him. Pulling himself back to safety, Reiner heard the sound of running feet, and over it, the thrum of a bow and the crack of a gun, as Franz and Oskar fired from the dormitory windows at their suddenly moving targets.
Reiner helped Giano to his feet and they ran forward to help. The bald raider was surrounded by Veirt and the others, roaring like a cornered bull. Hals had his spear in his guts, and Veirt and Erich were laying into him like woodsmen felling a tree, but still the northman fought on. As he looked for an opening, Reiner saw Ulf, still dazed from his tumble, struggling back up the stairs, and behind him Pavel, hurrying across the plaza, pistol in hand, puffing like he’d run ten miles instead of ten yards.
The raider caught Erich a glancing blow on the shoulder and knocked him flat, then chopped through the haft of Hals’s spear and pulled the head out of his innards. He used it to block Veirt’s sword and returned the blow with a slash that sent Veirt’s helmet clattering down the steps and dropped the grizzled captain to his hands and knees.
Reiner, Giano and Ulf rushed in to fill up the gaps. Reiner parried the raiders blade with his sabre. It was like trying to stop a battering ram with a fly whisk. His whole arm went numb with the force of the blow.
Giano too was knocked back, but not before he jabbed his sword into the crook of the giant’s arm and cut something vital. Blood soaked the northman’s leather wrist guard and his sword drooped to the ground. Ulf grabbed his other arm, shouting, ‘I’ve got him! Kill him!’
Reiner drove his sword deep into the raiders chest. The man roared in pain and swung Ulf like he was a child. He crashed into Reiner and they went down in a heap.
‘Hoy,’ said a quiet voice.
Reiner looked up. The raider was turning to find the speaker, and came face to face with the barrel of the pistol in Pavel’s shaking hand.
Pavel fired. The back of the raider’s head exploded in an eruption of brains and gore. He dropped like a felled ox.
‘Nice one,’ said Hals.
Their relief was short-lived. Before Reiner and Ulf could do more than stand, four more raiders rounded the hedge at a run, axes and swords in hand. One had an arrow in his shoulder, evidence that Franz could hit more than rabbits.
Veirt stood and drew his pistol. ‘Fire!’
Reiner and Erich drew as well and all fired in unison. Only two of the shots hit and only one was telling, ripping a raider’s throat out. He fell to his knees, hands to his neck, guzzling his own blood. The others kept coming, and there was no time for another volley. Reiner tossed away his spent piece and mumbled a prayer to Ranald that the dice would roll his way.
Hals snatched Pavel’s spear from him and pushed his friend down the stairs, crying, ‘Get out of the way, y’old fool.’
Erich, Veirt, Giano and Ulf squared up to meet the charge, while Gustaf, as Reiner expected, hung back.
Just before the two sides met, a shot rang out and one of the raiders stumbled. Reiner saw Oskar and Franz running from the door of the dormitory. Oskar’s gun was smoking.
Then there was no more time for looking around. With an impact like ships colliding, the two sides came together. Erich and Ulf, the biggest of the men, took the charge full on, and held, while Veirt, canny old warrior that he was, ducked low and slashed at the shins of his man. Reiner and Giano dodged left and right and swung at the raiders’ backs as they ran by.
The three raiders took these attacks without flinching. Even wounded and outnumbered two to one, they looked to Reiner to be the winning side. They slashed at the circling men with a fearless ferocity that was frightening to behold. Reiner wondered how the Empire had ever prevailed against monsters such as these.
Ulf quickly found himself in trouble, forced away from the others by a raider with tattoos winding around his bare arms. He was overmatched, and gave ground with every exchange, the haft of his wooden maul splintering under repeated hacks from the norther’s sword. But just as he was about to break through the engineer’s defences, the Kurgan slipped on Reiner’s discarded pistol and his leg skidded out from under him. Ulf took advantage, shattering the northman’s shin with a scooping swing. The raider fell to one knee and Ulf darted in, aiming for his skull. But even unable to move, the raider was a danger. He parried the blow with his sword and gashed Ulf across the chest.
‘Ulf!’ cried Franz. ‘Fall back! Back away!’
Ulf jumped back, bleeding, and Franz and Oskar, who had been hanging fire, shot the kneeling Kurgan point blank. Franz’s arrow caught him in the throat. Oskar’s ball smashed through his groin. He collapsed sideways, clutching himself, crimson to the knees in seconds.
There were two left, and one of them, the one with Franz’s arrow in his shoulder, went down almost immediately, Veirt’s long sword slipping neatly through his ribs, but the last—the
leader by his size and power—fought on, roaring like a mountain cat. Though he bled from a hundred cuts, he only seemed to get stronger—and to Reiner’s disbelieving eyes—bigger.
Reiner blinked and shook his head, ducking a wild slash from the man’s axe, but when he looked again, the illusion remained. The raider seemed to be bursting out of his armour. The leather bands around his biceps snapped as he backhanded Veirt to the ground. The links of his chain mail shirt strained and popped. A weird glyph on his powerful chest seemed to glow as if lit from within. His pupils enlarged to fill his whole eye.
‘What happens to him?’ asked Giano, uneasily, as the raiders armour dropped from him like a shed skin.
‘He is touched by his god,’ said Veirt, recovering. ‘His battle rage is upon him.’
‘Well, I’m a mite peeved myself,’ said Hals, and jabbed the monstrous warrior in the ribs. The spearhead snapped off as if he had jammed it into a stone wall. The raider kicked the pikeman back so hard he crashed into a pillar and collapsed. Giano swung his sword at the warrior’s now naked back. It glanced off as if he wore field plate. Erich and Veirt hacked at him with similar results. Erich parried an axe blow on his sword and was knocked to the flagstones, a finger-deep notch in the edge of his blade.
This was ridiculous, thought Reiner. They outnumbered the raider ten to one and still they couldn’t finish him? There had to be something sharp enough to pierce the inhuman warrior’s skin. He frowned, thinking hard. The change had made the raider bigger and stronger, but he didn’t seem any smarter—in fact he grew more bestial by the moment. ‘Back toward the plaza!’ Reiner shouted. ‘I’ve an idea!’
The men looked to Veirt.
‘Do it,’ he rasped. ‘We’re not winning this way.’
He and the others backed toward the steps, following Reiner. The raider pressed after them, slashing mindlessly.
‘Hals, Ulf,’ called Reiner. ‘Kneel at the balustrade with Hals’s spear between you.’
‘But the head’s broken off,’ said Hals.
“Tisn’t the point I want,’ said Reiner. He scooped up a handful of loose rocks, and as Hals and Ulf knelt, holding the broken spear between them, he hopped up on the balustrade, looking down into the plaza to make sure he had positioned himself correctly.
‘All right,’ he cried. ‘Scatter!’
Giano and Veirt jumped back, but Erich hesitated.
‘You heard him,’ bellowed Veirt. ‘Get away!’
Erich leapt to the side, and before the transformed northman could go after any of them, Reiner shied a rock at him. It hit him in the chest. He looked up.
‘Come on, you dirt-eating heathen!’ shouted Reiner. He hurled another rock. It caught the Kurgan on the bridge of the nose. He howled.
‘You overgrown ox!’ shouted Reiner. He bounced another rock off the warrior’s forehead. ‘You motherless son of a goatherd! I’ve stepped in things that smelled better than you.’
With an ear-splitting roar, the mutated marauder charged Reiner, axe swinging. At the last possible second, Reiner dived to the side and crashed to the flags. The raider hit the balustrade at thigh level and toppled forward. Hals and Ulf helped him along, raising his legs with the broken spear and flipping him over the rail to the plaza below.
There was a horrible wet crunch and an animal cry of agony cut short. Reiner stood, holding his mouth. He’d bitten his tongue when he landed and it was bleeding. He looked over the balustrade with the rest. They gasped. He smirked. His plan had worked. The Chaos marauder was impaled on the sheared-off statue of Shallya, the sharp wedge of marble jutting up through his shattered ribs like a white island rising from a red swamp.
‘Sigmar’s hammer,’ said Hals, rubbing his chest where the raider had kicked him. ‘He didn’t half deserve that.’
‘Bravo,’ said Giano. ‘But he might have missed. Why not just…?’ He pointed to the cliff-edge balustrade.
‘Because, unlike you,’ Reiner said, rubbing his jaw, ‘I have some regard for my own skin. A slip here and I bite my tongue. A slip there and…’ Reiner swallowed at the very thought.
‘Ah, yes.’
Veirt clapped Reiner on the back. ‘Smart work, lad. Very smart.’
Erich sniffed. ‘Hardly one for the bards, though. Heroes don’t win by trickery.’
‘That’s why there are so many dead heroes,’ Reiner retorted.
‘Well, I thought it was fine,’ said Pavel coming up the stairs. ‘Never would have thought of something like that in a hundred years.’
The others nodded in agreement. Franz grinned and gave him the circled thumb and forefinger. Erich glowered and turned away.
Lady Magda appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘If the danger has passed, it is time to enter the chamber.’
SIX
You Will Obey Me
THEY MOVED THROUGH the garden that fronted the Chapel of Shallya with wary vigilance. Franz and Giano had only seen six marauders, but there might well be more. In the centre of the garden they found a cooking fire burning inside a circle of planted spears and pikes, each with a grisly trophy affixed on top. Lady Magda’s face was set as she surveyed the whitening skulls of those who had once been her sisters. The smell of roasting meat rose from the fire. Nobody looked too closely at what was cooking.
It was evident that a much larger force had camped here in the recent past. The remains of other fires were dotted around the garden, and heaps of rotting garbage were piled in the corners. The rose bushes and decorative borders had been trampled, the statues smashed and the fountains used as latrines. At one side a crude forge had been built, and broken and half-repaired weapons and pieces of armour were strewn about it.
But none of the vandalism the party had seen prepared them for the horrors wreaked upon the chapel. The white marble walls were blackened with smoke and the tile roof had caved in, leaving the interior open to the sky. And there were worse things than mere destruction. The raiders seemed to have reserved their most imaginative blasphemies for this shining symbol of charity and mercy. The statues in the alcoves around the white marble walls had been pulled down and replaced with naked nuns tied to stakes and left to die. Eldritch runes, so evil that it was difficult even to look at them, had been smeared on all the walls in blood, and the simple wooden dove-wings carving, the symbol of the Shallyan faith which was mounted over the door, had been hung upside down and covered with the most obscene blasphemies.
Inside, among the charred ruins of the roof beams, were the bound bodies of more nuns, who had been abused most cruelly before they died. The beautiful tapestries illustrating the miracles of Shallya had been torn down and burned, and worst of all, upon the sacred altar some perverse ceremony had been performed. Strange symbols and arrows had been burnt into the stone floor in a circle around the dais, pointing toward all the compass points. Blood had been dribbled in unsettling designs, and on the altar itself, inside a thicket of melted candles and piled skulls, the body of the abbess, in life a plump, middle-aged woman, lay splayed, bound and naked, with runes carved into her flesh with a knife, and a huge sword driven down through her abdomen and into the stone table beneath her—a feat of strength Reiner could hardly credit. Shadows seemed to move around her. It took Reiner a moment to realise that these were rats, eating her extremities.
A sob exploded from Giano’s throat and he rushed forward. ‘Lady of peace, no! It no can be allow! We must clean! We must fix!’
‘Ostini!’ shouted Veirt. ‘Leave off. We’ve other business!’
But the Tilean had jumped up on the altar and was knocking away the candles and rats and cutting at the ropes that held the abbess. ‘Cursed rats! Defilers!’
Veirt marched to Giano and yanked him off the altar by his belt. ‘I said, leave off!’
Lady Magda’s face was grim and pale. She made the sign of Shallya over the abbess, then turned toward an arch in the right wall without a backward glance. ‘This way,’ she said.
The archway led to a stone stair which sp
iralled down into darkness. While torches were kindled, Veirt ordered Oskar to stand guard outside the chapel, then the rest started down the stairs. Veirt led the way, followed by Lady Magda. Erich brought up the rear.
At the bottom of the stairs they stepped out into an intersection of three short hallways. It was obvious that the raiders had found their way here as well. The bodies of a few nuns who looked as though they had died defending the catacombs lay butchered on the stone floor, and the large and intricately decorated bronze doors which glinted orange in the torchlight at the end of each hallway had been smashed open and hung from their hinges, revealing shadowed rooms beyond. The rats were feasting. Giano shuddered.
‘The convent’s mausoleums,’ said Lady Magda. ‘Where are buried all the abbesses who have led us down through the ages.’
Hals shivered and made the sign of the hammer. ‘Graves?’
Lady Magda shot him a look. ‘After the horrors through which we have just passed you are frightened of the long dead?’
Hals stuck his chin out. ‘Course not. Just don’t like it, is all.’
Magda started down the middle hallway to the desecrated mausoleum at the end. The men followed, weapons at the ready.
Veirt chewed his lip. ‘Do y’think they found the Bane?’
‘Impossible,’ said Magda. ‘The door to the chamber is cunningly hidden and impenetrable unless the correct incantation is spoken.’
They entered the mausoleum, a cramped, narrow room. The side walls had been lined with marble memorial plaques engraved with the names and dates of birth and death of generations of abbesses. The Kurgan vandals had pried most of the plaques off, then pulled the bones out of the holes they covered and scattered them, looking for loot. Hals stepped fastidiously around the remains, mumbling prayers under his breath.