by David Guymer
A vast wedge of Chaos infantry and monsters had emerged from the ruins of the Auric Bastion and was charging after the giant towards the fortified but clearly doomed village between them and the main Imperial positions. Ulrika had called it Kurzycko.
From the shape of the battle lines and the contours of the various gun emplacements and earthworks, it was clear that this was – if it could be called that – some kind of idealised scenario. The Empire’s commanders had anticipated, and correctly, that the first objective of the Chaos host would be to take the standing stones from which their wizards summoned the Auric Bastion. The enemy marched under a withering enfilade of crossbow and handgun fire, buying every foot with a hundred lives. Mortar shells whistled overhead to detonate in plumes of dirt and fire. As Felix watched, a Helblaster volley gun sited within a drystone bastion on a hillock to the side of the advance unleashed all nine barrels in a cyclone of ash and thunder. One thing was clear from the explosions and the screams.
It was not enough.
For a second, Felix wanted to send Gustav off with a message for Kat. Nothing complicated, just that he loved her and had been thinking about her at the end. For some reason though, he didn’t, instead spurring the horse Gustav had lent him on towards Kurzycko.
Because he still wasn’t sure that either was entirely true.
Gunner Heiss of the Nuln artillerymen detachment drew aside the straw gabion that blocked the embrasure of the drystone bastion and yelled range and distance, resorting to miming ‘up’ and ‘down’ and indicating yardage on his fingers. The Chaos horde made such a din it was as if the bastion had been flooded with screams. By comparison, the ringing report of the Helblaster with which their own great cannon shared a berth was as homely as songs on Sigmarstag.
Through the narrow slits in the walls, both crews tracked the monstrous pink-skinned giant striding towards Kurzycko. Its bald head rose almost level with the bastion on its hill, inducing handgun fire to snap across from the stake-lined picket below it.
‘Range, ninety feet. Wind speed, eighteen knots. Two degrees down.’ No one could hear him, but Heiss screamed directions anyway out of habit, then yanked down his fist and threw himself flat against the wall.
‘Fire!’
Ulrika watched from the back of a galloping white stallion as a terrific explosion blasted the giant’s head from its shoulders. Blood spouted from flaps of flesh that moments before had been part of a neck and the monster yawed over, crushing dozens and sending a shock wave through the ground that sent hundreds more flying.
‘Gospodarinyi!’
The Ungol warriors cheered to see the monster fall. Forget for a moment that there were a score worse horrors in its wake: nock another arrow, have another drink, for today it did not matter. Damir hollered with them, standing in the stirrups and riding with no hands like a circus performer as he pumped his fists to encourage them to shout louder.
And a hundred horse-archers from the northern oblast of Kislev – all that she and her master had been able to save before the Auric Bastion had been conjured – could make one hell of a din.
Ulrika wished she could appreciate it more.
The Ungols were warriors born, and commanding them in such a battle should have been a singular thrill. Everything was as she craved it: enemies to fight, a fine horse beneath her and the soil of Kislev beneath him. She was one of the Arisen, reborn to war. She could feel the winds of magic where they flowed, could track the path of daemons by the sour taste, and could foretell the ebb of fortune by the wavering of men’s hearts.
In her pearl-white half-plate armour she felt invincible. It was heavier than a mortal knight could wear and still function, and had been specially strengthened around the heart and the throat with the vulnerabilities of a vampiric warrior forefront in the artificer’s thinking. She would have slept in it if she could. The old leathers she had travelled in from Altdorf had been for Felix’s benefit and now, with battle looming, he had managed to wander off.
Had she not explained often enough that she needed him?
Her great white charger thundered through the sleet, droplets lashing Ulrika’s face as she cast her nose side to side in search of Felix’s scent. She knew his body inside and out. She had just spent the last four weeks alone in a carriage with him. All she needed was a trace and she could track him across mountains and oceans.
There!
Ulrika reined with a curse, wheeling the braying stallion around to face Kurzycko.
‘Felix, you idiot! Do you do these things on purpose?’
‘Where are you going, Ulrika?’ The voice rushed through her mind. ‘My forces await you to the east. All I lose here today will be for nothing if you do not make it to Praag.’
Ulrika snarled, but she had no power to deny her master access to her mind. ‘I will never make it back without Felix. You know that.’
The howls of the Chaos horde and the boom of the Empire’s guns filled the air. Ulrika felt the tingle of their collective roar upon her skin, like the remembered sense of walking in from the cold and standing too close to the fire. The enemy were so numerous that they looked more like some metallic oil that had risen from the hills than an assemblage of independent men and beasts. They were a tidal wave. They could only be mitigated, not reasoned with and certainly not stopped. They were a force of nature that she and her master had permitted to be unleashed.
As she watched, Roch’s tattered regiments redeployed to oppose them. No, not to oppose. Their ranks mustered to the flanks of Kurzycko, as if to channel the Chaos legions right down onto it and away from other parts of the field. Such as the east.
‘You cannot prevail against what is coming.’
‘Damir,’ she called. Her thrall sank into the saddle and reined in beside her, a wide grin on his wizened chestnut face. Ulrika pointed to the far east of the battle line where a battalion some two thousand strong of heavy infantry and demilancer companies waited out the fighting with an inhuman detachment. The crimson banners of Commandant Roch fluttered in the wind. ‘Carry on as planned. I will join you shortly.’
‘Don’t ask me to leave you,’ said Damir. In spite of his rough features and colourful steppe-warrior garb he looked as lost as a puppy.
Ulrika was reminded why she had always resisted the keeping of thralls. Baring her fangs, she drew a long, slightly curved sabre from its saddle sheath.
‘Don’t make me ask you again.’
The fury of the End Times bore down on the walls of Kurzycko. Its battlements flared with handgun fire. A trained arquebusier could make two shots in a minute, three if he was particularly skilled, and the two hundred soldiers with their thick burgundy hauberks, slashed sleeves, and bandoliers stuffed with munitions were the best left in Ostermark. Iron pellets punched through bone, steel, and Chaos plate, and brick by bleeding brick assembled a wall of corpses five feet high. Kurgan berserkers clambered over it. Mutated ogres smashed it down before they too were riddled with shot. Mortar rounds blasted whole sections to pieces.
Whether it was the frustrations of being held behind the Auric Bastion for so long being unleashed or some madness that came with the worship of Chaos, they pushed on, undaunted.
Cannon and handgun fire blistered the emplacements of the surrounding hills and earthworks.
‘Reload,’ roared Gunner Heiss over the ringing in the cannon crew’s ears, waving his hand in a circle above his head. Turn it around. Quickly. Quickly.
The great cannon was hauled back on its tracks until the chains on its carriage yanked taut. A crewman rammed a sponge down the muzzle to clean the inside of the barrel while a second fetched powder. The sponge was removed, powder poured inside followed by wadding and then a third man tipped in the cannonball. It hit the wadding with a dull thunk and the fourth and final crewmen rammed it tight. Then all four men put their shoulders to the wheels and heaved it back into firing position. Hei
ss withdrew the gabion from the embrasure, then screamed as a torrent of flame jetted through the slit and immolated the top half of his body.
Harpies shrieked overhead as the Chaos dragon, Kalybross, thumped into the hillock, warbled like a strangled child, and then demolished the entire bastion with a swipe of its claws. Men and their machines scattered down the hillside. Kalybross beat its wings for lift before washing a parting gout of dirty red flame over the terrified arquebusiers on the hill. Armour melted and flesh burned, powder cartridges ignited like bones popping in a fire.
Praag had been too small, and the Troll King too patient in the gathering of his monstrous host. Kalybross craved conquest and with Helbrass he would have it.
A sibilant chuckle rippled along the dragon’s long neck as it launched its bulk into the air and swooped on Kurzycko.
Crael of the Blue Wolf sprinted ahead of his warband. Sleet beat off his bare chest. Arrows and solid-shot rained from the front and from both sides, delivering death with the distant hand of gods. The Zar of the Blue Wolves drove himself through the storm with a roar and launched himself onto the ragged block of stinking, blood-soaked halberdiers like the wolf into which the Changer had remade him.
They didn’t react, or did so too slowly, halberds jerking about like bad clockwork toys as Crael’s axes went to work, tearing out jugulars, splitting bellies and severing limbs. There was little blood. Even their guts flowed sluggishly. They stank of emptied bowels and rot. A warrior whose weapon arm Crael had just severed stumbled around after him, moaned, and then lunged to take a bite out of his neck.
The walking dead. The southmen were desperate indeed.
With a scissoring motion of his axes, the Zar beheaded the dead thing.
‘Helbraaaaassss!’ he howled, crying to the Chaos moon, as the fastest of his warband caught up and ploughed into the halberdiers.
‘Archaon!’ came the return. ‘Tchar!’
No man could stand against the onslaught of the Blue Wolves, but the dead fought on even as they were torn limb from limb and with hearts impaled on blood-soaked adzes. The charge slowed, bogged down in a stew of entrails and cold bodies. Clammy, rot-softened soldiers pressed him from all sides.
With a snarl of animal rage, Crael drove forward: the Wolf of Tchar would rip himself a path in the dank blood of the dead! A heavy blade swung for him. He ducked and smashed the corpse’s head from its shoulders. The grave held no fears for one of the gods’ immortals. He pounced on another, splitting its skull and spilling its cold brains over the snow. He gave a triumphant howl that his warband picked up.
The plains to the east of the southman village lay open. Only a handful of zombies and a single woman still stood in his way. She was slender, in the way of southern women, and pale as bone carved from the earth by a winter storm. She was garbed in a dress so white it was almost translucent and seemed to sink away through the earth at her feet.
Crael bared his teeth and advanced.
The woman smiled back, spreading her arms as if to welcome him. As she did so, she floated an inch from the ground, the hem of her dress falling past her feet. Her hair billowed around her like the moon’s halo, skin seeming to wither and retreat into a cruel mask that had been blackened as if by a witch’s curse.
Eye sockets blazed diamond blue as, still smiling, the banshee took a deep breath.
The banshee’s scream turned hair white and sent shivers through men’s hearts as far away as Wilhelmshügel.
‘Sigmar’s blood,’ breathed General von Karlsdorf as the malignant pulse shocked through the flanks of the Chaos charge.
After a moment’s hesitation, pride trumped fear and he raised his eyeglass. The motive blur focused onto a pale figure, ethereal as starlight, and surrounded by wizened and lifeless corpses. Only their furs and barbarian trophy rings identified them as Kurgan. He watched in horror as some of them began to twitch, atrophied muscles struggling to grasp dead men’s weapons and rise again. With trembling fingers, he lowered the glass.
Ostermark had her share of horrors, but never would he have expected to see the living and the dead side-by-side this side of the Sylvanian border.
The alliances we must make, he thought, wondering, not for the first time, who Roch had sold his soul to. Reaching into his burgundy greatcoat he pulled out a silver hip flask filled with a liquor the natives called gorilka. He swirled its contents without the slightest intention of opening it.
Dimly, his hearing virtually obliterated by the pound of mortars, he became aware that the guns had stopped. The gunnery sergeant in charge turned to him with smoky, bloodshot eyes.
‘What should we fire at, general?’
Von Karlsdorf stared at the Reiklander as though he had been replaced by a village imbecile.
‘They’re in Empire colours, aren’t they? So fire at the blasted northmen.’
Felix screamed as the banshee wail pierced his mind and stripped years from his body. He felt the lines in his face deepen while new ones were etched into his skin. His hair whitened, the world beginning to turn grey until he scrunched his eyes shut to block it out. The hands clamped over his ears began to shake as muscles withered and joints swelled. The horse beneath him faltered and ribs started to poke through against his knees.
This was it. This was how Kat had felt under the touch of the lichemaster.
Felix clung to the saddle pommel with fingers that already felt like they belonged to a skeleton and drew a rattling breath as, after what felt like a hundred years off his life, the scream faded into the blessed background roar of battle. Stutteringly, his grip strengthened and his horse recovered its stride, though neither felt quite as sure as they had been and Felix feared the effects would prove permanent. If his stomach had felt any less feeble he was sure that he would have thrown up.
A banshee: the restless shade of an evil witch.
What had the lords of Ostermark aligned themselves with to stand strong against Chaos? And how exactly did that differ anyway from his journeying alongside Ulrika? Watching as the shambling line of halberdiers – and now marauders too – groaned and hacked at the tide of Chaos, Felix prayed they might all live long enough to regret their choice of friends. This at least explained why Commandant Roch hadn’t needed Gustav’s wares.
He smiled. One less thing to worry about.
With a shriek, a harpy swept overhead. Felix clung to his horse’s neck as it raced by, swinging blindly back to ward off the flock that followed. There was a rustle of leather, the grave-stink of rotten flesh, and claws stitched across the back of his mail. He cried out and struck back for the harpy that was savaging his cloak, missing by a yard as the winged beast veered aside and caught an updraft.
Felix cursed as it tucked its wings and dived back in, wondering how anyone managed to fight and ride at the same time. The harpy swooped down, claws outstretched, just as the galloping horse leapt a drystone wall, slamming Felix’s face into its neck and his back into the harpy. The creature squawked in surprise and began to flap away, but Felix too reacted on instinct, slashing the tip of Karaghul across the membranous underside of its wing and sending it on a wailing spiral to the ground. The remaining harpies seemed content to streak overhead onto Kurzycko and Felix let out a relieved breath.
Handgun and bow fire tracked them, but they were too nimble, swooping around the ornate onion dome of the attaman’s manor and harrying the defenders that were still trying to target the Chaos infantry. Soldiers ran through the streets with spears, accompanied by charging horsemen wreathed in smoke from their discharging pistols. Felix tried to think of something he could do to help, but it was hopeless. He was one man in the face of a hundred thousand.
The horse galloped on, and despite his continuing conviction that they were all finished, he felt warmth spread from his hand where it touched the dragonhead hilt of his sword, up his arm and into his body. It was too hot to be comfortable b
ut didn’t burn, more like a hot pack to reinvigorate a sore muscle. New strength and a strange courage washed though him. He was still doomed, but it didn’t seem to trouble him nearly so much. Karaghul became so hot that it scorched his hand, but rather than make him flinch his fingers tightened.
The sleet was no longer falling on his head and he looked up just as a heavy shadow fell across him. Felix gawped at the Chaos dragon that swept overhead, blood oozing from the red scales of its titanic frame. A droplet splotched Felix’s mail and the downwash from its flight ruffled his hair. Its shadow stretched on; neck, wings, body, finally moving on with a spatter of sleet and a muscular whip of the monster’s tail. He saw the terror that gripped the defenders of Kurzycko at the monster bearing down on them from above. But Felix didn’t share it. All he felt was a desire that made his earlier pleasure at holding the sword again seem shallow, an anger that the dragon was heading towards the village and not towards him.
The rational part of him knew that that was a foolish thing to be annoyed about whilst one was surrounded by the forces of Chaos, but it was coming from the blade not from him. The Templar blade was intended for a certain life, as Felix was becoming increasingly convinced that he was. It was forged to be the bane of dragons. Felix still didn’t know what he was meant for, but right then and there, with the semi-sentient will of Karaghul saturating him with its power, that didn’t seem important.
The dragon banked as it approached the village, long tail whipping a chunk from the battlements of the attaman’s manor and sending a pair of crossbowmen screaming to their deaths. Flame licked over its fangs and then erupted in a raging torrent of fire that seared down a Kurzycko street and reduced a score of spearmen and a unit of pistoliers to ash. Survivors screamed, stumbling into sidestreets and rolling through slush to douse burning livery as, around them, wood and thatch began to flicker. The dragon beat its wings and circled the manor for another pass. A loose volley of gunfire chased it, but it was so vast they were little more than pinpricks. It would take a direct hit from a great cannon to make it blink.