The Empire Omnibus

by Chris Wraight

  I will ride out this very night to see him.

  As Ratboy read and re-read the words his eyes grew wide. He snatched up the book and dashed back upstairs. ‘Jakob,’ he cried, ‘look at this.’

  The priest was still crouched by the headstone, gazing into his open hands. ‘What is it?’ he muttered, taking the book. At first he flicked through the pages with a dismissive sneer on his face. ‘Braun. What a yokel he was. How little he knew of the world. Hiding out here in the comfort of his–’ As he turned to the last entry, the priest fell silent. He stood upright and held the lamp over the pages. ‘What’s this?’ he whispered, shaking his head. The colour drained from his leathery skin. ‘What’s this?’ He grabbed Ratboy by the shoulders and lifted him from his feet so that their faces were level. ‘Where did you find–’

  The movement that silenced the priest was so fast Ratboy struggled to follow it.

  Something flashed in the corner of his eye and he found himself on the far side of the temple, crushed against the altar, fresh blood in his eyes. He wiped his face and tried to draw a breath, but all the air had left his lungs. As he lay there, gasping, he saw Wolff stagger across the flagstones, wrapped in a vision of hell. It was the same creature Ratboy had seen earlier, but this time he could not take his eyes off it. From the furs and skulls, he guessed it must once have been the Reaver. He had witnessed the bloody champion many times, leading the enemy into battle, but he was now transformed beyond all recognition; every trace of humanity gone from him. What was once a man was now a heaving mass of charred skin, pulsating flesh and snarling, hissing jaws. As Ratboy struggled for breath, the already weakened priest struggled in vain to throw off the monster, cursing it bitterly as he staggered backwards towards the exit.

  He has no weapon, thought Ratboy with horror. He forced himself to his feet and began to claw desperately around in the rubble, trying to find anything the priest could use to defend himself.

  A scream came from outside. The monster had thrown the priest to the ground, thrashing him with countless limbs and attempting to attach one of its gaping maws to his face. Wolff was holding its deformed head at arm’s length, but he was already trembling with exhaustion.

  Ratboy dashed to the priest hole, thinking he might find some kind of icon or staff.

  Wolff howled in pain and Ratboy turned to see that the creature’s head was now fixed onto his neck.

  He ducked down into the priest hole, but to his dismay there was nothing: just books and a desk, not so much as a quill. He groaned with despair and leapt back up the steps, deciding to fight the creature with his bare hands. As he reached the top step, he stubbed his foot on something and stopped to curse. Only then did he realise it was the same shiny object he had noticed earlier. ‘Metal!’ he gasped, and began to clear away the stones, thinking he might have found a candleholder. ‘Sigmar,’ he muttered when he realised what a treasure he had unearthed: the priest’s warhammer.

  He struggled outside with it to see that the creature had climbed off the priest and was standing over him, taunting its victim. Its words were lisping and confused as they chorused through a dozen inhuman mouths: ‘Nownownow, littlelittlelittle, manman,’ it slurred as it writhed and danced gleefully over him. ‘Wherewherewhere isisis youryour firefirenownownow?’

  Ratboy had intended to hand the hammer over to his master, but Wolff was barely conscious. Blood was rushing from his neck and his eyes were tightly closed in pain.

  Ratboy hesitated. The monster was oblivious to him, intent on its prey as it leant closer and drew a long, sharpened bone from within its folds of flesh, all the while singing its gleeful song. ‘Wherewherewhere isisis youryour firefirenownownow?’

  Ratboy tested the weight of the warhammer in his hands, unsure whether he could even swing it. I should flee, he decided. I would barely even mark the creature. It would just kill me too. He backed quietly towards the temple.

  A memory halted him in his steps: a vision of kindness in the priest’s face as he nursed him back to health all those months earlier. Suddenly the weapon felt lighter. He lunged forward with all his strength, bringing the hammer down in a great sweeping arc towards the beast’s head.

  The hammer connected with the misshapen skull and it collapsed inwards with a muffled crunch, as easily as a piece of damp wood. The thing’s writhing ceased and it reached up in a spasm of pain, then sank silently to the floor, dropping its bone knife at Ratboy’s feet.

  Ratboy staggered backwards, shocked by his success. The warhammer suddenly regained its weight, and he let it clatter to the floor. ‘I killed it,’ he gasped, looking at his bloodied hands in disbelief. He began to giggle.

  A moist popping sound silenced him and he looked down at the beast’s body in horror. In the area where he had destroyed its head, dozens of snarling mouths were quickly bursting from the bloody flesh. Ratboy reeled with shock as the mouths swelled and multiplied, each one hissing and belching merrily at him. ‘Littlelittlelittlemanmanan,’ they sang. ‘Eateateateateateateat.’

  It launched itself from the floor and sent him staggering back into the temple, desperately trying to fend off its snapping jaws and flailing limbs.

  Ratboy screamed for help, knowing that no one would hear him. In his panic, he barely registered the various wounds appearing all over his face and chest as the monster quickly overwhelmed him. Finally, he found himself pinned against the altar, with no place left to go. The thing pressed him firmly against the stone and placed a blackened tentacle over his mouth to silence him. A terrible stench of rotting innards filled Ratboy’s nostrils and he recognised it as the same smell that had so disturbed him earlier, outside the temple. The beast’s claws and teeth grew still as the largest of its heads stretched forward, until it was only an inch from Ratboy’s face. He could see his own silent scream reflected in the unblinking blackness of its eyes.

  ‘Eateateateateateat,’ it whispered to him. ‘Eateateateatthethelittlelittlemanman.’

  Ratboy closed his eyes and waited for the end.

  He felt the thing’s limbs tighten around his body, then its whole body grew stiff and its voices rose in pitch, turning into a furious chorus of snarls and howls. After a few seconds Ratboy opened his eyes in confusion and saw the monster’s bone knife protruding from its own glistening chest.

  The creature’s limbs loosed their grip and it slid to the floor with a wheezing sound, a knife through its heart, finally dead.

  Ratboy found himself face-to-face with Wolff. The old man managed to stand for a few more seconds, smiling through his pain, then he too dropped to the floor.

  As the two men made their slow ascent back up through the forest, sounds of battle began to greet them: the thunder of horses crossing the plain, the lurid drone of enemy horns and the dull thud of steel against leather. Even from here though, they could tell the tide was turning. Without the Reaver to lead them, the marauders were being driven slowly back out of the valley. The long deadlock was finally broken.

  Wolff paused to catch his breath, leaning heavily against a tree. Ratboy had bandaged his master’s neck as well as he could, but the cloth was already black with blood. The old priest’s face was grey and drawn with pain. The despair had faded from his eyes though; replaced with a new look of defiance. He looked down at his blistered young servant and smiled. ‘I think there was a miracle in there after all.’ He lifted his warhammer so that the metal glinted in the dappled sunlight. ‘I thought I was saving you that day, when I rescued you from the soldiers, but I think, in the end, you saved me. Thanks to you, my friend, I know my despair was needless.’ He placed a hand on Ratboy’s shoulder. ‘Come,’ he said, staggering back towards the battle.

  As the priest left the trees and entered the heaving carnage of the fight, he held his hammer aloft and stood motionless for a moment, smiling up at the roiling sky as bloody figures crashed all around him, like waves breaking on a rock.

&nbs
p; As Ratboy ran to his side, he thought he saw a light, bleeding from the old man’s skin, shining out as a beacon to those who would falter and doubt.

  ‘Fare thee well, lad,’ Halbranc said, joining the others.

  Mikael handed Köller the triptych. ‘This belongs here, I think.’

  Köller accepted it gratefully. ‘Yours is a great destiny, Mikael. Do not fear it.’

  Mikael opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t find any words. Instead, he turned and walked away into the darkness.

  Outside the temple, the knights made ready.

  ‘Your orders, Captain Reiner?’ Halbranc asked, securing his zweihander.

  ‘We head back to the Road Warden’s Rest, get the horses and make for the nearest temple of Morr,’ he said. ‘There is much to report.’

  He stalked off, back the way they had come when first happening upon Hochenheim.

  Mikael thought of Köller and found his heart heavy as he walked through the ramshackle village gates and back into the Drakwald. As he did, he looked back at Hochenheim one last time. There, in the village square, he noticed the great tree and upon its branches the smallest of blossoms.

  Mathilde screamed.

  Her flabby body shook and her lips rippled. Spittle flailed into the air, glistening like pearls.

  The men and women around her screamed too. Ragged arms punched up, clad in scraps of filth-soaked wool and leather. Fists clenched knuckle-white and veins stood out on necks like rigging ropes pulled tight.

  They weren’t afraid. They had forgotten how to feel fear. They only remembered hate, glory and life. Their whole existence had become a scream: a long, never-ending scream of affirmation and violence.

  They charged. They ran up the mud-slick slope, churning through the grime and falling over one another to get to the enemy.

  Mathilde was in the front rank, screaming all the while, hearing her voice go hoarse. She lumbered up the incline, scrabbling at the earth with her free hand, slipping on the trodden-down turf.

  The rain hammered, turning the furrowed dirt into a mire of grey slurry. The sky, low and dark, scowled at them. Far in the east, the Drakwald treeline rippled, black and matted like hair.

  At the top of the slope were the beastmen.

  They bellowed and stamped their hooves. Blunt-edged blades swung and tattered hide standards swayed.

  There were hundreds of them. They stank of old blood and musk and wet hides. They roared out a deafening challenge of hoarse bellows.

  ‘Death to the unclean!’ screamed Mathilde, reaching the crest of the slope and hurling herself into the press of warped flesh beyond.

  Like the meeting of two dirty seas of bilge, the armies crunched together. Less than a thousand strong on either side, there were no glittering flashes of plate armour or bright pennants waving in the sunlight. Every exposed piece of skin was caked in mud and crusted with scabs and sores and weeping wounds. The humans smelled almost as bad as the beasts, and some were hairier.

  It was a scrum of hacking, punching, gouging, raking, stabbing and throttling. No strategy, no tactics, just a collision of two sets of frost-raw hatred.

  Mathilde ducked as a horse-faced gor swung clumsily at her. Before she could respond, its head was ripped from its neck by a bald-headed man with the image of the comet branded across his face.

  A scrawny ungor leapt up into her path, all scraggly limbs and stretched grey flesh. It swiped at her with a dirty gouge, keeping it high, expecting her to respond with her cleaver.

  Mathilde laughed as she punched out with her fist, and laughed again as the ungor’s skull bounced away. She laughed as she lashed out towards its face, and giggled as her fingers plunged into eye-sockets to gouge out the balls of jelly within. When she tore up its throat, snapping the sinews with savage pulls and wrenching the gristly sockets of the spine out, she was chortling like a young girl.

  The beasts were all a head taller than their human opponents. They were stronger, better-armed and possessed of the ingrained and wily battle lust of all their kind, but the crazed army of screaming fanatics came at them like a river in spring-flood, pouring over defences and rushing into contact.

  Dozens of human zealots died on the mad run up the slope. Many more were cut down by the beastmen as they crashed into blade-reach. They were bludgeoned into a stupor, gutted with metal or eviscerated by grinding sets of teeth.

  It didn’t matter. It didn’t slow them. They pushed on, wiping the blood from their staring eyes and screaming praise to Sigmar in unison. They were one body, one form, one vengeance.

  Mathilde swung round, seeing a big wargor rush at her with red eyes and slavering jaws. She slammed her cleaver up, jamming into the oncoming dirk and feeling the impact judder down her arm. Then she rushed in close, hauling her blade back across and tearing with her fingers, going for those red eyes again as if they were rubies.

  The gor blunted the blade attack, then smashed her down to her knees with a single blow from its head-sized fist. It loomed over her, preparing for the kill.

  Mathilde reeled and her vision went blurry. She had a vague sense that she was about to die and it gave her a sudden rush of ecstatic fury.

  ‘Sigmar!’ she screamed, lurching back to her feet and blundering around for her assailant.

  But the gor had gone.

  In its place was a single massive figure. He towered above the humans around him, resplendent in heavy, rain-dulled plate armour. A mournful face loomed up through the storm-lashed murk, slab-featured and hard as pig-iron. At his forehead was a fragment of scripture, bound tight with strips of stained leather. Huge arms, each clad in rings of tarnished steel, hefted a gigantic warhammer. Blood – the blood of the dead gor – ran down the shaft in muddy rivulets.

  Mathilde felt a fresh surge of joy. She’d never stopped screaming, but now her cries were redoubled.

  ‘Father!’ she roared, feeling the scar of her comet-brand pucker on her forehead. All around her, more zealots took up the cry. ‘Blessed Father!’

  If he heard her, Luthor Huss of the Church of Sigmar, the man who had given her everything and who had demanded everything, made no sign. He strode onwards, swinging the massive hammer one-handed, his face set like beaten metal and his mouth clamped into a rigid line of determination. Those thin lips parted only once, and then only for a single word.

  Mathilde wasn’t close enough to hear what he said. By then she was fighting again, striking out with the cleaver for the honour and glory of Sigmar, and words ceased to have meaning in the haze and crash of righteous combat.

  But Huss had spoken. He had spoken softly amid the rush and slaughter; just the one word, before the hammer swung again.

  ‘Kohlsdorf,’ he had said, and his voice was bitter.

  ‘You know, I think, that you’re asking the impossible,’ said the Margrave Bors von Aachen.

  His voice was calm. Kind, even. As he spoke, his thick lips, glossy with recently drunk wine, twitched into a beneficent smile.

  Huss looked back at him. The priest’s face was a study in disdain.

  ‘I never ask the impossible,’ Huss said. His deep voice was quiet. ‘In Sigmar, all things are possible. I ask you to enact the will of Sigmar. Thus, I ask only what is possible.’

  Von Aachen looked around the room, and his eyes twinkled with amusement.

  ‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘A priest with an education.’

  He sat back in his chair, and his fat chin wobbled.

  The margrave was dressed in robes of silk and ermine, and they stretched smoothly over his round stomach. The town’s burghers, eight of them, sat in a semi-circle on either side of him on low wooden chairs. Though it was not yet midday, rows of torches burned against the walls of the audience chamber.

  Huss stood before them all, shoulders back, feet apart, hands clasped on the heel of his upturned warhammer. His th
ick armour plate reflected the light of the torches, as did his shaved head. He was a foot taller than the largest of the other men and his shoulders were as broad as von Aachen’s gut.

  The sky outside was dark with the coming storm. The straw on the floor was stale, and the stone of the walls was grimy and crumbling.

  Kohlsdorf was not a rich place.

  Huss looked around him steadily. As his eyes ran over the faces of the burghers before him, they looked down, one by one.

  ‘The beastmen are out of the Drakwald,’ Huss said. ‘They can be defeated, but must be cowed by strength. Now, before the herd-rage draws more from the trees. Wait for them to get here, drunk on killing, and they will slay you all.’

  Von Aachen gestured lazily at the walls around him.

  ‘These walls are five feet thick, priest. I have men-at-arms here, and supplies, and protection. They would not get in here, not if there were a thousand of them.’

  Huss narrowed his eyes.

  ‘Your people are unprotected. Villages are already burning.’

  Von Aachen raised an eyebrow.

  ‘My people?’ He looked faintly disgusted. ‘If those who clamour for succour are too slow or witless to seek refuge here, then they will learn their folly soon enough.’

  Von Aachen shook his head.

  ‘Orders have been given. No man will join you. Leave these walls, and you will be on your own.’

  Huss listened patiently. His face remained static, though his eyes, set deep in a bleak visage, glowed darkly.

  ‘I will not be on my own,’ he said softly.

  Von Aachen looked at him with some sympathy then, as if remonstrating with a village simpleton.

  ‘Listen to me. There are no proper troops garrisoned between here and the forest’s edge. The beasts may ransack our villages, but that will only wear out their fury and they’ll kill only serfs. Stay here. Weather the storm until it blows over.’