by David Guymer
‘Has Roch found where those beastmen are coming from? Just yesterday I lost an entire volley gun crew in Kurzycko.’
The general scowled at the memory. The Kislevite village was square in the middle of the Imperial formations. It was the centrepiece of the defence between the Auric Bastion and the Three Sisters and had been heavily refortified around the solid stone hub of the old attaman’s manor. The building had been converted into the most northerly temple of Sigmar in the Empire and a redoubt bristling with small-calibre demi-cannon. Its extensive wine cellars now stored blackpowder and grain. Some of the more febrile flagellants camped in Kurzycko even claimed they were connected to a branch of the dwarf Underway, but twelve months of idling had not uncovered a hidden entrance, so von Karlsdorf was content to scotch that rumour as hearsay. So how a band of beastmen had managed to get in and kill five men there without any of the garrison spotting their approach remained a mystery.
‘Not that I know, general. I bring word that General Straghov has returned from Altdorf.’
‘Anything else? Did she bring reinforcements with her or any word of when we can expect them? I don’t care about the Bretonnian border, or the Sylvanian front for that matter. The summer’s plague took nearly a quarter of my men.’
With a shake of the head, he nodded towards the great mass of infantry camped nearest to the Auric Bastion, beyond the range of all but the largest of the earthworks’ great cannon. Campfires winked between the layered curtains of sleet, but otherwise they were as still as freshly turned earth. They were Roch’s men, an amalgam of soldiers in the colours of Ostermark, Ostland, and the southern oblast, and brought by far the greatest contingent of troops to the field. Although none of von Karlsdorf’s superior ordnance.
‘One day I hope to hear Roch’s secret.’
‘Forgive me, general, but no. She travels with a Herr Felix Jaeger whom we were told to expect.’
‘One man? I lose a thousand without once getting the enemy in range and Helborg sends me one man.’
‘Some kind of hero, apparently. Slew a giant in Nuln, or something like that, all very inspiring. He wrote a book about it.’
‘Just what we need,’ muttered von Karlsdorf, taking up his eyeglass and dismissing the messenger from his sight before he uttered something uncouth. ‘A damned writer.’
The yard behind Jaegers of Altdorf was dark. The building was sufficiently large that it blocked out the few mean sources of illumination from the square, and the few structures on the opposite bank of the Upper Talabec looked long abandoned. The air tasted damp and raw and the only sound was the urgent rush of running water, the river tormenting the pilings of a jetty with white foam and freezing spray. An unladen riverboat bobbed on a bed of seething bubbles and pulled on its moorings.
On the bank by the jetty the unsecured corner of a canvas sheet flapped wetly, revealing sack upon sack of grain. From the bitter odour the weather had soaked through and caused it to spoil. Set back from the water, what looked almost like a rampart of sturdy wooden crates had been thrown up between the river and the back of the house. On the side of the yard nearest the side gate was a stable occupied by ten slightly malnourished horses.
Something still lived here.
Muzzles poked inquisitively from the stalls and snorted hot mist as Felix passed. Without thinking about it, he caught one of the friendly snouts and stroked the horse’s chin. It nosed his palm for food and, finding none, pushed it away with a disgruntled snort.
This part of the house would have been where tradesmen and servants had come and gone, where Gustav would have taken and stored shipments from Altdorf and elsewhere before sending them on. He turned back to the stables.
The horse could have been for transporting goods or for running messages, or perhaps even for mercenaries on the company’s books. Felix didn’t really know how to tell the difference. There was one thing however that he was growing increasingly sure of.
Gustav was here somewhere.
It was then that he registered a light: a tiny chink of it streamed through the cracks in a back door. It was what he was currently seeing by. A wooden hammer had been nailed into the door frame and a sprig of hawthorn looped around the handle. Felix frowned. It seemed a little peculiar for his modernist nephew Gustav. This door was not barred.
He knocked, bringing a drizzle of fine slush from the narrow portico above his head. He hugged himself deeper into his cloak, hunched his shoulders and shivered against the chill. He waited, counting heartbeats under his breath as the echoes of the knock faded from his mind. No response.
‘I know you’re in there, Gustav,’ Felix murmured to himself.
The constant rush of water was starting to get on his nerves. An old adventurer’s instinct. Anyone could sneak up behind him here and he’d never hear it over the river. Uneasy, he glanced over his shoulder. Sleet pattered against canvas sheets, the edges rippling in the wind. He forced himself to take a deep breath. He was getting himself worked up over nothing.
Turning back to the door, he saw something. The slice of light that shone through the door wavered, just once, as though someone had just passed between the door and their light. Holding his breath, Felix drew an inch of steel from his scabbard and stepped back. His breath clung to his beard as he carefully watched nothing happen. He was beginning to think he’d imagined it, a trick played by his moving head: a stray strand of fringe or a blink at the wrong time.
Then it happened again, followed by the iron moan of a withdrawing latch and the slow gape of the door as the wind nudged it open. Light spilled out on a breath of warm, sweaty air. Felix grunted as the light hit his dark-adjusted eyes, watching through narrowed lids as the half-open door swayed back and forth.
‘Gustav?’ he said, easing Karaghul quietly from its sheath as, blade leading, he shouldered open the door and edged into the house.
The floorboards creaked underfoot. The room smelled lived in, of breath and sweat and salted meats. The warmth of a fire brought a shiver. His eyes were still adapting to the brightness, but he had a sense of space, of plastered walls stacked with more goods and, to his right, a suite of armchairs surrounding a low table. The floorboards gave another groan.
Felix froze. He hadn’t moved. It had come from his left, just beside the door.
Instinct flung him back into the door frame as a golden blur struck for his chest. His sword rose to meet it, catching it with a clang and driving it up into the lintel. A cultured voice swore lightly and Felix slid from under the door frame and backed into the room, trying to put the light behind him. He raised his sword to guard. His eyes throbbed, but he forced them to stay open, his attacker a painful outline around a red glow that pulled his sword from the lintel beam and came again.
Felix twisted and parried. He couldn’t see, but he could do this one-handed in his sleep. A hengetort guard caught his opponent’s blade like a man catching a thrown egg, then the slightest shift of balance and a push sent the swordsman across his body, and into the unchivalrous elbow waiting on the other side.
The man – from his strength and the tenor of his voice, it was a man – screamed as Felix’s elbow cracked his cheekbone, and then lashed out with a frenzy of thrusts, slashes and lunging stabs that had Felix falling back. His eyes had recovered enough to glimpse a tall, blond man in light mail and a blue cloak. The other man might have lacked some of Felix’s skill, but he was stronger and quicker. His blade too was considerably lighter than Karaghul and made sharp, incisive lunges over or under Felix’s guard, and it was taking everything he had to keep up.
Felix gave ground, too busy to notice the table behind him until his calves were up against it and his counter to a belly slash sent him crashing into it.
Shot glasses shattered underneath him and went tumbling, Felix’s sword whipping athwart his chest to intercept a downward stroke. Felix grunted as the swordsman turned his height advantage into
weight against the two blades. Inch-by-inch Karaghul sank until it was at Felix’s throat.
He had always thought his end would have more… meaning.
With a snarl, he kicked out, making a satisfyingly meaty contact with his attacker’s groin, and then rolled off the table as the downward pressure on his sword relented. He hit the floorboards in a crunch of shattered glass fragments, clothes sticking to their alcohol glaze as he rolled under it, sword still in hand, to rise on the far side already en garde.
His assailant, however, had not got up. The young man lay groaning, slumped up against one of the armchairs with his head on the seat cushion and a rapier loose on the ground a few feet away.
The resemblance to a certain roguish ne’er-do-well in his early twenties was striking: the long blond hair, the sharp blue eyes and hard jaw. All he was missing was the scars. Felix lowered his sword.
‘Sigmar’s blood, Gustav!’
‘Felix?’ said his nephew, one hand cupping his groin while the other nursed a bruised jaw. ‘I was expecting… someone else. What are you doing here?’
‘You called for me, you dolt,’ said Felix, sheathing his sword and trying very hard not to shout.
‘Months ago. I thought you weren’t coming.’ With a piteous moan, Gustav manoeuvred himself up off the floor and into the armchair. Wincing, he fingered his cut cheek.
‘Don’t be such a child,’ said Felix, collapsing into a chair of his own. ‘Women love a scar.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Wasn’t it Hölderlin who gave the classics their first imperfect hero?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Gustav snidely, but his fingers treated the scratch Felix had given him with new respect. ‘I never read that jingoistic rubbish.’
Shaking his head in exasperation – and though he tried to mask it, exhaustion – Felix looked over the room. It looked like an overspill warehouse and smelled like an ale den. Crates had been stacked high and pushed up against the walls. Some made secondary tables, cluttered with weapons and yet more drinking glasses. A few had been wrenched open to spill packing straw and reveal the greenish glimmer of unopened bottles. A fireplace glowed dully in the wall nearest the chairs and a lantern turned to its fullest illumination blazed from the mantel. The two windows were both boarded. By the door, cloaks and weapon belts hung from a row of pegs, enough for eleven or twelve men. Pinned to the neighbouring wall between four knives was a poster that Felix was starting to think would follow him all the way to Kislev.
Victory in the North.
Someone had scribbled something terribly witty regarding Felix’s manhood over the illustration of the Auric Bastion and some of the text had been charred around a puncture that looked suspiciously like a bullet-hole.
‘That was the staff, not me,’ said Gustav. ‘Some of them are remarkably literate for Ostermarkers.’
‘They don’t approve?’
Gustav shrugged, then winced, his expression souring further. ‘I suppose some people just don’t like being foisted paper heroes.’
Felix raised an eyebrow, then shook his head. Sometimes he almost got the impression that Gustav didn’t care much for his uncle. Things must have been serious indeed for him to call on Felix for help.
‘Just tell me what’s going on. I might have killed you.’
‘Or I might have killed you,’ Gustav retorted. ‘I’ve been practising since father sent me north. It’s not as if there’s much else to do.’
‘Anything’s possible, I suppose,’ said Felix, dropping a pause and inviting Gustav to fill it.
His nephew duly obliged.
‘Roch wants me dead,’ he said simply, glancing at the open door before rising gingerly to go and close it. He peeked out one last time before resetting the latch and hobbling back to his chair. ‘I noticed things were off as soon as I arrived. The whole eastern front is supplied through this office, but almost nothing we ship out goes where it’s supposed to. I had one of our own supply wains followed and found that it’s all just piling up inside Castle Rackspire.’ Gustav gesticulated to the crate-blocked north wall. ‘There’s forty thousand men across the river, uncle. Or at least there’s meant to be, but what are they eating? How are they keeping warm?’
Felix regarded his nephew sceptically. He supposed he should be flattered to find his own example of clueless agitation being so well followed by the next generation of Jaegers. ‘Other suppliers, perhaps?’
Gustav gave a mocking laugh that he wasn’t nearly old enough to have earned. ‘Jaeger and Sons owns this part of the Empire. Grandfather saw to that after the last war.’
‘Stockpiles? Loot from the enemy? Or maybe Commandant Roch simply likes to control his own supply chain.’
‘No, no, and no,’ Gustav snarled. ‘I’m being watched, Felix, and I can’t leave this house without being followed.’
‘So you stay in the house?’
Gustav indicated the pile of gear by the door. ‘After the first few visits from Roch’s goons, and particularly after they promised to string me up outside the bathhouse with the beastmen, I decided to hire some mercenaries. They’re upstairs.’
Felix glanced up at the ceiling. ‘They’re not exactly rushing to your defence.’
As though annoyed by the observation, Gustav ignored it. ‘Father did ask me to show willing, be patriotic. I thought raising my own free company would kill two birds with one stone.’ As an unwelcome afterthought he added. ‘I’m sure I’ll not actually have to do any fighting with them. You’ve not seen the Auric Bastion. Trust me. Nothing’s coming through that.’
‘Forget the Auric Bastion,’ Felix cut in. ‘I can’t believe that this Roch could be, what exactly, running down his own army? Ulrika speaks highly of him.’
‘You know General Straghov?’ asked Gustav, then smiled like a moonstruck young swain. The look on his face irritated Felix more than it should.
‘Old friends.’
‘She’s all right, I suppose.’ Gustav gave a ribald chuckle. ‘More woman than I’d expect from a horse-loving Kislevite.’
‘She’s at least twenty years too old for you,’ Felix replied sharply.
‘That kind of “friend”, is she? How very bohemian of you.’
Felix gave his nephew a withering glare, but his wedding ring felt suddenly very tight around his finger.
She was lying to you, you know.
‘She came for help, that’s all,’ Felix explained, pushing the memory aside. ‘A friend of ours was captured when the Chaos forces broke through at Alderfen.’
‘Another friend?’ said Gustav, sarcastically. ‘How many you seem to have collected.’
Felix took a deep breath. ‘What can you tell me about Alderfen?’
‘Not much, so few of the men sent downriver to oppose them came back. I’ll tell you this though: I hope that friend of yours likes snow, because he’s not coming back.’ He laughed like a condemned man who’d just seen the man ahead trip on his way to the gallows. ‘You don’t just walk across the Auric Bastion. It’s not some glittering portcullis in the sky that a kindly wizard will raise for you if you ask nicely. It’s so high that even the enemy’s winged monsters can’t cross it.’ He signed the hammer across his chest, then knocked superstitiously on the tabletop. ‘Praise Sigmar.’
‘Perhaps I should go and see it,’ Felix mused.
‘Don’t be so brazenly heroic, uncle. I’ve just eaten.’
Levering himself from the clutches of Gustav’s armchair, Felix stood and flexed the stiffness from his muscles. They weren’t used to the exertion. Perhaps he should thank Gustav for the warm-up. Smiling at the thought of how well that conversation would go down, he walked to one of the broken crates and took a couple of bottles.
The glass was a seaweed green and unlabelled but judging from the smell that still clung to his cloak after falling in a tableful of
the stuff, it was some local variety of pear schnapps. He snuck the two bottles under his arm as he opened the door. He doubted Commandant Roch would miss them, and he’d not been able to enjoy a proper drink since his last night in Altdorf. He sighed.
Perhaps it was the young man’s resemblance to how Felix still pictured himself. Or maybe it was the thought of Kat, her lie, that he would not have a child to raise in his own likeness. Whatever the reason, he held the door open and turned back.
‘Are you coming?’
Ulrika’s black coach followed the rising trail as it wound into the Worlds Edge Mountains. The iron-shod wheels broke ruts into brown slush and sent scree scrambling down the scarp to the canopy of spruce that clung to the foothills far, far below. Ulrika listened to the echoes of their fall, and to the assurances that Damir muttered like a mantra to the horses. The sky was grey enough that she could travel unveiled and with her curtains drawn, albeit in some discomfort. She could feel the sun behind the clouds, as one would feel a pyre through a blindfold.
But it was worth it for the view, which was nothing short of spectacular.
The grand might of Ostermark lay before her, a flood of burgundy and gold. She could pick out the stitching of every epaulette and cockade amongst those tens of thousands, but the glorious colour of it all was something she could now only infer from memory and from the dim hues that her inhuman eyes perceived. The army was camped in a rough battle formation around a series of fortified earthworks and the pre-existing creases of the drystone walls that criss-crossed the veldt of Kislev’s southern hinterlands. There were hundreds of regiments down there. Dozens of generals flew their colours over the sleet and mud. Like any honest Kislevite, she had used to joke at the virility of Sigmar’s Empire, but had someone suggested to her then that the Emperor’s poorest province could deploy such a force she would have laughed twice as hard.
At the heart of the aggregated formations was a knoll topped by an ancient-looking henge that her people had called Trzy Siostry. The standing stones were cloaked in black soot from the mortars dug into the surrounding hills. The engulfment of the old by the new. Wizards in the robes of the Gold and the Light Colleges held alternate positions within the henge, a circle of men within that circle of stones, hazed by incense and aethyric power. Around them, warrior priests and their acolytes chanted in unison with the mages.