Chapter Thirteen

 

 

Gulkroth brooded amongst the blasted remains. By now he was getting used to the stink of shattered stone and burned blackpowder that hung around the desecrations of the herdstones. He had visited several himself and every day messengers came to him with fresh reports of new blasphemies.

No matter how many of these sites he visited he would never get used to the hungry, gnawing emptiness a destroyed herdstone left behind it. He could still feel the energy which pulsed and writhed through the ground, but the centuries of power which the stones had bound left a terrible void in the world as they dissipated.

It was the same here as it had been everywhere else. The herd which had worshipped the stone stood amongst the steaming soil and splintered timber of their defiled grotto. Although they had fed well this summer they had a shrunken, defeated look.

Their shaman, a wall-eyed ancient who had served Gulkroth well over the summer, was crawling around on all fours amongst the ruin. He mewled like an infant as he gathered up the shards of stone that lay about the earth. Some of them still glowed with power, but they were no more than embers from a once-mighty pyre of energy.

“Do we have the scent of those that did this thing?” Gulkroth asked the shaman.

“They are dead,” the ancient hissed. “We caught them as they tried to flee.”

Gulkroth felt the rage building up inside him, ripening like some terrible fruit beneath a burning sun.

“We will reap such a revenge for this,” he said, stalking up to the herd so that he towered above them. “We will tear the humans asunder and gorge on their blood until we are as fat as ticks.”

There was no response. Tails remained curled up between legs. Eyes remained downcast. Some crouched on the floor, arms wrapped around their legs as they rocked back and forth.

“Shaman,” Gulkroth said, turning back to the ancient as he scrabbled about the ruins. “What can we do to restore your herd’s pride?”

“A new stone can be planted,” he muttered without looking up. “In time it will grow in power. In time.”

“Then a new stone will be planted,” Gulkroth decreed. “Where will we find such a one?”

For the first time the shaman looked at Gulkroth, and the lord was pleased to see ferocity in his eyes.

“We must take it from the humans,” he hissed through bared teeth. “Tear it from one of their cities and baptise it with rivers of their blood.”

Gulkroth rumbled his assent.

“The time is coming,” he promised, raising his voice so that the thunder of it lifted the fur on the back of the beasts’ necks. “Even now the Chaos Moon grows fatter, growing pregnant with power. When it is full we will be gathered, I promise you that, and we will fall upon the humans in a storm of blood and victory.”

“And of vengeance,” the shaman added.

“And vengeance,” Gulkroth roared, and despair turning to rage, the assembled herd roared back at him.

 

“It’s quite out of the question,” Viksberg said, his voice echoing around the cavernous expanse of his office. It lay in the depths of the baron’s palace, an ancient expanse of vaulted stone, and he never grew tired of listening to the acoustics of the dank place. They made him sound so authoritative.

Freimann, who was slouching in a seat he hadn’t been offered, didn’t seem to notice. He hated being stuck in Hergig, let alone inside the cold, airless depths of the palace. Even more, he hated the officious functionaries that inhabited it.

This Viksberg was a prime example of his breed. Below his watery eyes and weak chin he wore a uniform that could have graced the Emperor himself. Silvered armour gave way to silk brocade and slashed velvet breeches. Despite the fact that it was high summer outside, he also wore a cape lined with ermine, and a hat bristling with feathers lay on the desk in front of him, and sewn and embroidered and encrusted throughout the costume there was an entire menagerie of heraldic animals.

Freimann, who had spent his childhood as a trapper, wondered how much this fop’s vestments would be worth if he were caught in a snare and stripped. Then he realised that the fool was talking.

“…so as you can see from the map, we have no reserves to spare for any but the direst of emergencies.” Viksberg waved at the map which graced the wall behind him. The coloured pins which represented the enemy swarmed across it like hornets.

“The beasts have been grinding us down throughout the barony,” Viksberg continued, enjoying how knowledgeable the parroted analysis made him sound. “We have lost towns, hamlets. An entire regiment was swallowed up on the way to Lerenstein, and we haven’t received a single message from the new settlements within the deeper forest for weeks.”

“Precisely,” Freimann said.

“What? What do you mean?”

“We can’t afford to lose any more men. Erikson’s band are a bit scruffy, but they fight well enough. Got guts, too. You should have seen how they got back into the town.”

“In that case I’m sure they will be able to rescue themselves,” Viksberg said. “Now, if that will be all…”

“Besides,” Freimann ploughed on, “I was talking to the captain of a cavalry squadron while I was waiting. He said he’d be happy to do it.”

“I’m sure he would, but that’s beside the point. These were just militiamen,” Viksberg said and, horrified at the wheedling tone in his voice, he cleared his throat before continuing. “As the provost marshal’s assistant, I can’t justify sending a valuable unit to save a few dozen criminals and an arsonist.”

Freimann smiled.

“So you know them,” he said.

Viksberg swallowed and looked down at the parchments which covered his desk. Every single one of them was a requisition for firewood. For some reason, the provost marshal wouldn’t let him handle anything else. Just firewood. It was only through the most excruciating bribery that he had persuaded the heralds to send any enquiries regarding Erikson’s accursed company his way.

“Because if you do know them,” Freimann continued, the smile never leaving his face, “it would be most unfair of me to ask you to make the decision.”

“No it wouldn’t,” Viksberg said.

“Ah, but it would. Torn between affection and duty, how would you be able to sleep tonight?”

“I will be able to sleep just fine,” Viksberg said.

“No, I won’t burden you with this. I’ll take it up with the provost marshal himself instead.”

“You can’t,” Viksberg squeaked. “He’s busy.”

“Then the baron,” Freimann lied. “I have a briefing to deliver to him anyway.”

“All right,” Viksberg said. “All right, if it will save you from bothering the baron, I will send a small detachment to bring them out.”

“You will send that cavalry captain in at once,” Freimann said. “The sooner he and his men can leave, the better.”

“Fine,” Viksberg slumped back in defeat. “And these men are at Nalderstein you say? Very well. Now, if there is nothing else I can help you with, I must get on.”

Freimann bowed, turned and left the room.

Behind him Viksberg slumped behind his desk. He had absolutely no intention of sending anybody to rescue Erikson’s militia. On the other hand, what if Freimann checked? There was something disturbingly insistent about him.

His eyes fell on the cylinder of red wax that lay next to his quills and ink. He had no seal. The provost marshal, curse him, had just laughed when he’d requested one. But he did have a ring. In fact, he had several.

He slipped it off his finger and just had time to take a steadying swig of schnapps before the door burst open and a cavalry officer bounded in, all puppy-dog eagerness and idiot courage. How Viksberg despised him.

“You have a mission for me, sir?” the cavalryman asked.

“Take a seat,” Viksberg told him as he started to write. “I am to give you sealed orders which you are not, under any circumstances, to open until you reach the great crossroads to the west.”

“Understood,” the soldier said and watched as Viksberg, turning to the map for a final check, wrote the order which would send him and his company in exactly the opposite direction to Nalderstein.

 

“I don’t like it,” Sergeant Alter said.

He was standing beside Erikson on the platform which leaned behind the stockade. The smoking ruins stretched away like a desert on all sides, only stopping at the dark green wall of the forest beyond.

“What’s not to like?” Porter asked. “I know they can’t carry a rhythm, but they can certainly belt out a tune.”

The men turned back to the forest from which the enemy’s beating drums had been pounding out their discordant rhythms ever since daybreak.

“Is it ‘Little Brown Jug’?” Brandt asked, his brow furrowed in concentration. Laughter broke out around them, and was instantly silenced by his glare.

Alter looked at Porter, his expression unreadable. He had known men like this back in the regiment. Know-it-alls. Loud mouths. Troublemakers. What really annoyed him about the Porters of this world was that, more often than not, they had the makings of the Empire’s best soldiers.

“Have you drawn up a rationing system yet?” Alter asked him. Porter nodded smugly.

“Of course. We have also pooled our resources with the townsfolk’s,” he said, smiling as he thought about the store of grain he had so effortlessly requisitioned. With any luck they would break out in time to carry a good portion of it back to Hergig, where prices must be going through the ceiling by now.

What a life it is to be a quartermaster, Porter thought, and burst into song.

Gertrude’s a girl who knows more than she ought to

And of more she’ll get the hang

Coz although she’s only the gunner’s daughter

She knows how to make a bang

Those who knew the tune started to clap in time, and soon the town was echoing with the rhythm. For the first time in hours the drums from the forest were silenced beneath the company’s own rough music, and soon another of the men offered a verse.

Molly’s a wench who does as she pleases

And please a lot she will

Just ask the sergeant where he lost his breeches

After he’d had his fill

The men roared their approval. This was an old song, and its words were never the same twice, but it was no less beloved for that. Dolf caught the beat and started drumming out the percussion, and soon the clapping had spread from the company to the civilians who stood with them behind the stockade. As it did so Porter caught sight of Gunter, the only man unmoved by the rhythm.

Young Gisela was raised down in Stirland

And she’s been raising ever since

And makes a change from his tired right hand

Says our own dear warrior priest

Further down the barricade Gunter looked bemusedly at his hand and the men around him cheered raucously. By the time they had quietened down one of Gunter’s own men had composed a verse of his own.

After skinny Lynn tumbled the quartermaster

She counted on growing fat

But it was only gruel that he gave her afterwards

And she had to pay for that

Porter grinned at the compliment, and let another man take the next verse as he thought about the sergeant who stood beside him and how far his sense of humour might stretch.

As the song grew louder and more bawdy, the drums in the forest beyond fell silent. None of the men noticed. The enemy had been forgotten as they sought to rhyme insults with names, or just contented themselves with clapping and cheering.

It wasn’t until the enemy emerged from the woods that the song died.

They swept towards Nalderstein with the unstoppable speed of the cloud shadows which raced them across the expanse of the smouldering fields. Voices which had moments before been raised in laughter now fell silent or barked out orders and warnings. As the men who lined the walls saw the enemy that was upon them, one even began to sob. Alter could be heard snarling at him, but as he did so the pitiful sound was drowned out beneath a roar that emerged from hundreds of bestial throats.

It was a single, wordless cry of rage, and suddenly the approaching beasts looked less like the components of an army and more like the limbs of a single, vast predator. A monstrous beast which had been bred for no other purpose than the destruction of humanity.

As the nightmarish horde drew nearer Erikson told himself for the thousandth time that, after this war, he was retiring. He didn’t feel the grin that spread across his battle-scarred features.

 

After Kathgor had fallen to the humans’ blades, Hruul had welded the herd together under his own command. The burns he had suffered hadn’t weakened him any more than the slices in his hide. After the summer’s glut of blood he was strong, and his flesh was re-knitting even as he dispatched the single beast foolish enough to challenge his new position.

It was only then, with his position secure, that he had made up for his predecessor’s idiocy. Last year it wouldn’t have occurred to him, but after a summer spent in Gulkroth’s company the way he thought about things had started to change. It wasn’t that he had any less contempt for calculation than before. Far from it. It was just that the urge to destroy had been sharpened like a fang upon a stone.

That was why he had spent the following day urging the herd to chop and clean dozens of trees.

They didn’t like the work. The shaman who lurked amongst them didn’t help, either, the old mutterer. Sorcery or not, Hruul had almost been tempted to tear the senile old creature to pieces, but he had restrained himself. There would be time for that soon enough.

The herd had worked into the night, using their crude axes to chop the tree trunks into the right length and to chip notches in the timber. As day had dawned the drummers speeded their brothers’ work by drumming out a promise of slaughter to come. Only when the last of the makeshift ladders was ready did Hruul lead the herd out of the forest.

And now, finally, after an agony of waiting, the time for slaughter had come.

Hruul felt the ground trembling beneath his hooves as his herd charged forwards, the lengths of timber carried between them. He could see the humans’ heads poking over the sharpened stakes of their stockade. Pale, sneering heads, devoid of horn or hide. How he hated them.

Lips peeling back in a snarl, Hruul quickened his pace, thundering ahead of the rest of the herd. Through the pounding of his own pulse he heard a quickening chorus of zips and whines. Then he felt the bite of a mosquito. He swatted at it absentmindedly before realising that this was no insect but an arrow which had buried itself in his hide. He snarled as he pulled the gory shaft free, and the scent of his own blood washed away the last of his reserve.

With a howl of pure, animal rage he hurled himself at the stockade. The ladders behind him were forgotten as, axe haft held in his jaws, he clawed and clambered his way up the crude carpentry.

More arrows punched through his hide as he dragged himself up towards his prey. He ignored them, barely feeling them in the terrible euphoria of the moment. He climbed higher and looked up in time to see the rock that plummeted down from above. With a twist of his neck he caught it on one horn. There was a snap and a dull, bone-deep flare of pain as the rock and the tip of his right horn cracked away and fell below him.

More arrows, and then the first bite of the steel blades which lined the parapet like teeth. This time Hruul snarled with agony as well as rage. As he clawed his way up the final few feet, the steel bit deeply, slicing through muscle and grating against bone.

Then he was over and free, and the blood misted the air as he swung his axe through the cramped ranks of the defenders. He could smell the stink of their terror, and then the rotten, intestinal perfume of their severed bodies as he cut low, dragging his blade through bellies and ribs. Some of the men fought back but, maddened with blood, he was beyond feelings of pain now.

In the midst of this carnage Hruul felt an odd peace. His world had shrunk to a glorious, pink-tinged womb of slaughter, and as the tops of his herd’s makeshift ladders crashed onto the stockade around him he showed no more mercy to them than he did to the enemy. Those who could avoid him did. The rest ducked and dodged, lunging away from their leader through the scattering of men.

It was only when he found himself bereft of victims that Hruul realised that they had taken the stockade. He blinked around him. There was suddenly nobody left but torn bodies and the last scurrying shapes of his followers as they chased their brethren into the slaughter below.

Pausing only to snap off a couple of the arrows which remained buried in his muscle, he leapt down, goat legs bunched beneath him as he plummeted down to land in the midst of panicked townsfolk.

As the slaughter continued he lost himself in the perfect joy of a creature doing what it was built to do. Any attempt to direct the battle was long gone, but that no longer mattered. Over the wall and amongst the panicking humans his warriors no longer needed direction. All they needed was the instinctive savagery and the sweet, sweet taste of man-flesh to drive them on.

 

“We have to pull back,” Erikson shouted above the din of battle.

“What’s that, captain?” Alter bellowed, turning briefly from his efforts to kick the survivors into some sort of formation. After the onslaught which had pushed them from the stockades, barely two-thirds had managed to form up in the town square. The rest were scattered amongst the chaos of the enemy’s assault, or lying amongst the dead.

“I said,” Erikson repeated, “we have to pull back.”

From the melee in front of him Gunter emerged, leading the bedraggled remnants of his section. In one hand he carried his sword, which was red and dripping, and in the other he was dragging one of his injured men along by the scruff of the neck.

Beneath the spattered gore that freckled Gunter’s face he was grinning. It was a terrible sight.

“Get in formation,” Erikson called to him, waving him forwards. Gunter nodded his assent and loped towards the company. Behind him beasts rampaged amongst the townsfolk, ignoring the warriors as they sought easier meat.

Erikson had formed the men up just within the gate. The enemy had ignored it and concentrated their assault against the southern wall, where he hadn’t been expecting them. They’d also used ladders. He hadn’t expected that, either, but he should have.

I’m getting too old for this, he told himself, then growled as he suppressed the defeatist thought. There would be time for recriminations later. Now all he had to do was save his company.

“How many of the men do we have?” he asked Alter as Gunter’s section bundled past them and into the formation.

“Maybe three-quarters,” Alter said. “Are we going to charge them when they come into the open?”

“There is no open,” Erikson said, watching as a fleeing woman was brought down by two goat-legged horrors less than twenty feet away. She screamed and screamed and then fell mercifully silent.

“Three-quarters will have to do,” he continued, watching as the woman was dismembered. “We are going to make a tactical withdrawal. Dolf, sound the—”

“Wait,” Alter said, horror etching new lines onto the wrinkled leather of his face. “We can’t flee. Who will defend these people?”

“They are past defending,” Erikson said with the cold, emotionless tones of a merchant discussing some minor commercial loss. Alter and Gunter stared at him, shocked.

“It is our duty to defend this town,” Gunter reminded him.

Erikson shook his head. “We have failed to do so. We must go and report our failure and await new orders.”

“No, we must try,” Alter said. “And besides, where is there to flee to? Better to fight here than be torn down in the open.”

“They won’t chase us,” Erikson told him with a grim certainty. “They will stay here for a while yet. Look.”

The men looked. The beasts had fallen upon the stout wooden doors of the stone granary which stood opposite them on the other side of the square. Inside were those too old or too young to fight. The crude rectangles of the enemies’ blades hacked into the ancient wood, and soon the splintered carpentry was disintegrating beneath their enthusiastic attack. From within, the screams of babes could be heard.

“They will…” Erikson began, then coughed as he felt the words choking him. “They will be distracted while we make our…” Again, the words caught in his throat. “They will be distracted while we make our escape.”

“No,” Gunter said.

“We will stay and fight,” Alter agreed.

“You will do as you’re told,” Erikson told them.

As the men watched, one of the women from inside the granary launched herself at the beasts who were burrowing in. She wielded the scythe with a wild desperation that sent them leaping back in momentary surprise. Then they fell upon her, squealing with glee as they tore her to pieces.

“If we’re going to run, then at least we will take their children with us,” Alter said.

“He’s right, captain,” another man said from behind Erikson.

“We can’t leave the babes.”

Erikson turned. He had long since learned to ignore the sufferings of those around him, especially if they were civilians. It was how he had survived for so long and on so many battlefields. A man who didn’t learn how to do that would soon be driven mad by war and its attendant horrors.

But the men behind him, the cut-throats and poachers and lunatics and thieves, they hadn’t learned that lesson. They had never had to. As he looked into their pinched and villainous faces he envied them.

“Very well,” he said, knowing it was madness, but unable to resist. “Gunter, your section holds the right. Alter, yours the left. Porter, your lads make sure the back stays solid.”

Erikson realised that Gunter was grinning as he organised the assault. He realised that he was grinning himself.

By Sigmar, he thought, these men have driven me mad after all.

“We go to the barn, we take whoever we find there and we escort them from the town. Now. Follow me.”

The company’s drum sounded the advance, and the Gentleman’s Free Company of Hergig advanced towards the mass of twisted horrors that swarmed around the barn. As they did so it occurred to Erikson that, for the first time in his life, he was fighting as a soldier and not a mercenary.

Before he could wonder at that a scream of alarm snapped him back into the present as, from the left, a second wave of the enemy crashed against their formation.

 

Freimann had been given pride of place in the baron’s council chamber, sandwiched in between the provost marshal and the baron himself. Next to their armour and finely cut cloth the rifleman looked as drab as a hen amongst the peacocks. Even the sunlight that streamed in through the narrow windows failed to find a single brass button or metal buckle on his garb.

The rest of the men who were gathered around the table with them were scarcely any more presentable. Riflemen and rangers stood amongst hunters and trappers, and the assembled woodsmen wore perhaps the drabbest collection of clothes the great hall had ever seen. They wore no decorations, either, instead counting their scars and bandaged wounds as sufficient badges of honour.

Not that it mattered. Now, as they stood leaning over a great vellum map of Hochland, their lack of finery was as irrelevant as their lack of formal rank.

“What about the three stones above the Great Falls?” the baron asked, pointing at three squares that had been pencilled onto the map.

“All gone,” one of the trappers told him. “We lost two of the parties, but they did the job before they were caught.”

“How do you know?” the baron asked, fixing the man with a piercing blue gaze.

“Saw them myself,” he replied. “Went alone to make sure.”

The baron held him in his gaze for a moment longer. Then, satisfied, he gestured to the provost marshal, and watched while he drew a small, neat cross through each of the stones.

“Thank you, Steckler. Now, what about this one, south of Hammerstein?”

Silence greeted the question.

“That was the one we assigned to Hendrick’s group,” the provost marshal said.

“I see,” the baron nodded and stroked his chin. “That’s a shame. What about this one, east of Nalderstein?”

“That was mine,” Freimann said. “It went up along with the engineer who destroyed it.”

“Good,” the baron said, and watched while the provost marshal crossed the stone off the map. “Now, how have we been doing in the south? I know we destroyed that stone near the junction of the Stirland road. That was one of yours too, wasn’t it, Freimann? Freimann?”

But Freimann had already gone, slipping away from the meeting with the same effortless stealth with which he had slipped though the forest.

“Shall I have him called back?” the provost marshal asked.

“Never mind that now, Steckler,” the baron said, turning back to the map. “Now, what about these two? Who did we assign there?”

 

The meeting went on until the servants came in to light the braziers which lined the walls. As the remaining woodsmen filed out to find their dinners and to tend to their animals and men, the baron and the provost marshal remained behind, alone in the echoing vastness of the great hall. The braziers cast their shadows across the flagstones, and the occasional draft sent them fluttering about like ghosts.

They weren’t the only ghosts in the room.

“We’ve got rid of more than half of the stones,” the provost marshal said. “Or at least, half of the stones we knew about.”

“Yes,” the baron said as he peered out of the slit windows into the darkness of the night.

“Do you think it will be enough to bring the enemy to battle?”

“We shall see,” the baron sighed. “It’s at times like this that I miss Ganamedes. He always had an idea, even if it was the wrong one. I knew him ever since we were boys.”

Steckler said nothing. Ganamedes had died soon after he had told them what he knew, his heart giving up whilst he was still strapped down in the dungeon.

“Poor old Ganamedes,” the baron said, talking to himself. “What could he have been thinking of?”

“And yet,” Steckler offered, “if we do drag the enemy to battle, and if we can defeat them there, then we will have Ganamedes to thank for it. Without his knowledge… his blasphemous knowledge… the enemy could have gnawed away at our strength until there was nothing of us left.”

“All over Hochland men are fighting, dying, scraping together what courage they can,” the baron said. “I wonder what the witch hunters would say if I told them that, by following his heretical studies, Ganamedes was one of the most valiant of them?”

Steckler didn’t reply. He didn’t need to. Baron or not, he knew exactly how the witch hunters would react to such blasphemy.

The baron treated himself to another moment’s peace before sighing, turning on his heel and going to read through the day’s scouting reports.

 

It was midday when Erikson realised that they were being followed.

They had been double-timing it ever since they had fought their way clear of Nalderstein, jogging through the night despite their hunger and exhaustion and the weight of those that needed to be carried.

He had counted on getting clear before exhaustion took them but now, as the ragged column stumbled to a halt at his signal, Erikson knew that the gamble hadn’t paid off.

“Halt,” he called back down the line. “We will take five minutes’ rest. Finish your water.”

His followers collapsed with mindless relief. In amongst the soldiers there were the refugees they had rescued. There were pitifully few of them.

Perhaps a dozen women, each with at least one infant strapped to their backs. A score of children. A couple of old crones.

They were all that had remained alive by the time the company had reclaimed the barn.

“Dolf.” Erikson led the drummer to one side. “Look back there. Can you see anything?”

Dolf looked back, eyes unclouded by years. For a moment he gazed into the blue distance, then he caught his breath and his eyes widened.

“Are they the enemy?” he whispered.

“I was hoping you could tell me,” he said, “but I suppose they must be. We didn’t leave much else alive behind us.”

The two of them squinted, so intent on the line of figures that they jumped when Gunter spoke up behind them.

“Work left undone always finds its doer,” he intoned.

“Do you have a point, corporal?” Erikson asked him. “I’m too bloodied, too hungry and too exhausted to worry about riddles.”

“That is no riddle, but one of the great truths from the ballad of Sigmar Heldenhammer,” Gunter replied with a limitless patience. Although he had fought as hard as any man, he seemed remarkably untouched by their predicament, and through his irritation, Erikson was grateful for that.

He also knew exactly what the man was trying to say.

“You are right, of course,” he said. “The question is, how do we finish this job?”

Porter, who had appeared to be out of earshot, spoke up.

“When we were on the leg we always used to split up as soon as possible,” he said. “Don’t let the watchmen know who to follow and you’re halfway free.”

“These aren’t watchmen,” Erikson told him. “And anyway, all that means is that they will catch the slowest.”

“So?”

“So what was the point of taking them with us in the first place?”

Porter opened his mouth to argue, but before he could he saw a toddler chase a butterfly through the wheat, laughing uproariously all the while. The child fell and Porter, instead of pressing his point, just lay back and sighed.

“Then what do we do?”

“It’s obvious,” Gunter told him.

“Tell us,” Erikson said, and so Gunter did.

 

Hruul ran through a world which was ablaze with a thousand maddening tastes and smells. He could sense the life in the rodents which scuttled through the hip-deep sea of wheat that stretched away to every horizon. On the back of his neck he could feel the bright, lethal gaze of the raptors which circled overhead and, stronger all the time, he could smell the terror of the fleeing humans.

Although he and his followers had been working and fighting for days, they ran with the exuberant energy of foals. While the red harvest they had reaped within Nalderstein had pushed some of the herd into a stupor, it had the opposite effect on him and his twenty followers. It had filled them with a daemonic energy which pulsed through their ripening muscles as they ran, full-bellied yet ever ravenous.

The sun cast their shadows out before them, and the dark shapes clawed towards the fleeing humans. Every hour they had grown nearer and now, when they were less than half a mile away, Hruul bellowed a challenge.

He was disappointed to see that most of the men had outstripped the panicking mob ahead. Only a dozen or so warriors remained with their young. They broke into a pathetic attempt at a sprint as Hruul and his followers thundered into a charge.

Somewhere deep beneath the pounding of his hooves and the eternal thunder of his heart, Hruul sensed something in the wheat. Something new. But before he could register what it was he saw the soldiers ahead turn and fall back into a single rank, their weapons glittering in the sunlight. As their young continued to scurry away a drumbeat started and the men advanced towards Hruul’s charge.

Almost at the same time a series of grunts and screams broke out from behind him. Hruul turned, snatching a glance back over his shoulder, and realised immediately what he had sensed moments before. The rest of the soldiers hadn’t fled. They had been hiding, lying flat in the furrows between the endless rows of wheat. And now they were amongst his followers.

Hruul saw the first of his herd go down, its tendons sliced neatly through. He staggered to a halt, confusion boiling up as he regarded the charging line of the soldiers in front and those who had appeared in their rear. With a roar he abandoned the effort to reason and followed his rage towards the nearest of the enemy.

It was a wiry little runt of a man, and he looked small enough to be crushed in a single paw. Hruul grunted and slashed at him. His axe severed a shower of wheat but there was no satisfying thunk of steel on bone. Instead the rodent of a man rolled away.

“Brandt,” Porter squeaked, twisting as he slipped through the wheat. “Where are you?”

Hruul ignored the creature’s chattering as a more worthy foe appeared in front of him. Behind the man he caught a glimpse of the confusion of bodies which struggled through the wheat, men and beasts lunging and slashing at each other.

Then he felt the deep, hard bite of a blade into the banded muscle of his thigh.

He screamed with rage and surprise and staggered away from the blow.

“Sigmar’s balls!” Porter snarled as he ducked back away. “The sod took my blade with him.”

Brandt didn’t waste time in debate. He was already swinging his heavy, double-handed blade at the beast. The steel bounced off its ribcage and he bellowed in frustration as the momentum carried him off balance.

Hruul, instinctively recognising the danger of fighting two enemies at the same time, turned and bounded clear before pirouetting back to find a new target. As he did so the second group of soldiers burst into the combat. The solid impact of their line pushed the swirling melee back, and although a couple of them fell beneath the axes of the herd even more beasts were slaughtered.

Hruul realised that he wasn’t the only one whose enthusiasm for the battle was waning. It was one thing to face your enemy with steel and muscle. It was quite another to find him on every side of you, cutting you off from your herd and snapping at your heels.

A flash of pure, blinding aggression washed through him. Partly it came from the surfeit of human blood upon which he had gorged. Mainly it came from the twisted, ever-burning depths of his bestial soul.

“Fight!” he roared, lifting his axe as though it were a battle standard. “Stand and…”

Death found him like that.

It came silently and unseen. For a moment he stood in a moment of perfect, mindless calm. Then he was falling, plunging into the swirling darkness that led from this world to the next.

He fell even before the distant report of the rifle reached him. More shots rang out, the distant volley sounding like little more than the popping of kernels in a fire. But although the weapons spoke with a soft voice the bullets punched through the beasts like needles through cloth.

One of the beasts was caught in the shoulder, and the bullet exploded outwards along with a pink shrapnel of bone and a spray of arterial blood. Another was hit in the stomach, the lead ball punching through its intestines to shatter its spine and leave it flopping on the ground as helplessly as a gutted fish. A third was shot in the eye, a perfect piece of marksmanship that killed it before it could blink.

Hruul had barely started cooling before his herd, the meat sickening in their stomachs and their fury giving way to terror, turned and ran. Erikson’s men made no move to pursue them. Instead they stood amongst the trampled wheat and corpses and wondered at the fortune which had spared them.

“Get down!” Erikson told them as the distant reports of gunfire volleyed on. “Give ’em a clear shot.”

The men hunched down and watched, cheering each time one of the enemy was felled. It wasn’t until the fleeing beasts were far out of range that the gunfire stopped and, appearing out of the wheat on a distant slope, a figure stood up and saluted with a wave of his bedraggled cap.

“Freimann!” Erikson grinned, and realised that he did like the man after all.