Chapter Seventeen

 

 

Viksberg had sworn never to volunteer to fight again. War, he had decided, was not for him. Unfortunately, he had learned his lesson too late. When the baron had mustered his forces, Steckler, the sharp-faced bastard, had made sure that Viksberg had been given a command and so here he was, wedged in amongst thousands of other poor saps as they prepared to lift the siege of Barwedel.

“It’s in recognition of your heroic efforts during the first battle,” the provost marshal had told him with a nasty smile.

The words still echoed through Viksberg’s terrified thoughts as he sweated within his armour. During the last few days’ march from Hergig he had dared to hope that battle could still be avoided, but that hope was now gone. Now, as the army advanced towards the enemy, all he had left was schnapps and prayer.

Mainly schnapps.

If his new command were aware of the panic which gripped their appointed leader, they gave no sign of it. They were a solid company, well armoured in riveted plate and well armed with axes. Their sergeant, a scarred and bewhiskered veteran by the name of Hobbs, also seemed to know what he was doing. Not that that prevented Viksberg’s hand from shaking when he drank from his flask. He had seen too much of the enemy to hold out much hope for their success.

They crested the last hill before Barwedel and below them, wrapped around the city like a strangler’s fingers, lay the enemy. They seethed around the walls of Barwedel, a seemingly endless swarm of foul and misshapen creatures. Almost as terrifying as the sight of them was the smell. That horrible, cloying smell. It reminded Viksberg of the first time he had met them in battle, although by now the memory felt more like that of a nightmare than of something that had actually happened.

And this time, he reflected as terror caught the breath in his throat, it is even worse.

This time he had no horse upon which to escape nor, he suspected, would he have the opportunity. He and his company were in the first row of formations that were even now being signalled forwards to march towards the enemy.

It was when they were perhaps half a mile distant that the enemy, who until that point had been carrying a forest of ladders towards the city walls, turned and saw them. They reacted with an instinctive, animal fury.

There was little discipline in their attack. Whilst the baron’s army ground forwards like some vast mechanism, the beasts came in a tide of unreasoning rage, a mass of fang and fur and steel above which standards and totems bobbed like flotsam on a storm-tossed sea.

“Come along, sir,” Sergeant Hobbs said, raising his voice above the bestial howl, and Viksberg realised that he had stopped marching forwards. The men behind him shoved none too gently and he rounded on them.

“Hold your formation,” he snarled and, with a last regretful look, put the cork back into his flask.

“Sir, we must maintain the line of advance,” Sergeant Hobbs told him, shouting as the thunder of the enemy’s hoof beats drew ever nearer. “We cannot give the enemy a ragged line to exploit.”

“Yes, all right,” Viksberg said and began to dawdle reluctantly forwards. The regiments on either side had already started to edge ahead of them. More fool them, thought Viksberg as he saw the rush of the enemy.

Ahead he saw that some of the larger beasts had already outstripped their comrades. They looked like boar, these monstrosities, but boar from some fevered dream. Their skin was as raw as if they had been roasted, and the squeals and shrieks they emitted made them sound as though they were being roasted still.

Even at this horribly shrinking distance Viksberg could see the spines which erupted from the rippling muscles that worked beneath their tortured hides. The weapons slashed through the air as they ran, as sharp as porcupine quills but as large as cutlasses. There was no courage in their charge, only the frenzied fearlessness of ravenous bloodlust.

Viksberg fancied that he could see the hunger glittering in the vicious slits of their piggy eyes.

When the creatures were no more than a bowshot away a cacophony of trumpets blared out the order to halt. On either side of Viksberg’s regiment the line rolled to the stop, individual regiments shuffling slightly to preserve the perfect edge of their front.

Only then, with a blare of their own trumpets, did a company of swordsmen advance forwards to meet the porcine fury of this wave of beasts. They marched no more than a dozen yards out from the front of the army when, with a shuddering impact, the first of the beasts hurled themselves onto their prey.

The noise of the slaughter was horrendous. Men roared as they fought and screamed as they fell. The beasts squealed with glee as they tasted blood or shrieked with pain whenever steel found its way past their spines and into their flesh. And all the while more of their kind barrelled into the swordsmen who stood like an island of steel amidst an ocean of savagery. Soon they were surrounded by a seething horde of the enemy.

“Why don’t they fall back?” Viksberg asked, glad that they didn’t. Glad of anything that distracted the enemy from him.

“Wait for it, sir,” Hobbs bellowed, mistaking the quiver of emotion in his supposed commander’s voice. “The greatswords know what they are doing. We won’t advance until the enemy is well and truly stuck to them.”

At that very moment, as if in answer to Viksberg’s question, the swordsmen’s trumpet sounded.

“Charge!” roared Hobbs, and the call was echoed all the way down the line. The rest of the front, which had been waiting with the tension of a drawn bow string, surged forwards into the flanks and the rear of the enemy, who now completely surrounded the swordsmen.

Viksberg was carried along with the charge, and with a shriek he suddenly found himself crushed up against the enemy. He held his sword out before him in trembling fingers, the gesture more one of supplication than defiance, but it didn’t matter. They had caught the foul beasts completely unawares, and most were still trying to join their comrades in feasting on the swordsmen when they died.

All around Viksberg his men’s axes rose and fell, beating out a metronome of chopped flesh that filled the air with squeals and a pink misting of blood. Viksberg cowered amongst them, his face a rictus grin of sheer terror, and allowed himself to be shoved ever further forwards.

Eventually they stood level with the swordsmen and the rest of the line straightened out into a new front. Behind them the shattered carcasses of hundreds of beasts lay in the bloodied ground.

“That’s how it’s done,” Sergeant Hobbs said, and slapped Viksberg on the back. The sergeant was splattered with blood, but it did little to dampen the savage joy which blazed on his face.

It was then that Viksberg vomited, earning himself a sarcastic cheer. But even before the jeering had died away the main bulk of the enemy was upon them.

This time there were neither manoeuvres nor tactics. There wasn’t room. Instead there was just the lethal crush and the desperate, animal need to survive.

 

Even amidst the roar of the battle that raged around the city, the explosion was deafening.

Provost Marshal Steckler, who had been hiding behind the weight of a mortar carriage, felt it suck the air from his lungs even as it punched into his ears, silencing the world around him with a high-pitched whine.

A column of smoke and debris towered up into the sky. It carried with it shattered stone and singed earth and other, less distinguishable shards of debris. Ignoring the lethal rain of this detritus, Steckler clambered to his feet and peered through the acrid clouds of dust to the city wall.

“Thank Sigmar for that,” he said, although beneath the whining in his ears even his own voice was inaudible.

The hole his engineers had blown in Barwedel’s southern wall was as neat and wide as he could have wished for. The only other entrance was the barred city gate which lay on the other side of Barwedel, in the midst of the dark heart of the beasts’ horde.

“Come on,” Steckler bellowed, waving at the overburdened column of men and horses and cannon who waited behind him. On either side their comrades were fighting a desperate battle with the beasts which lapped around the outside of the city walls, and the longer they dawdled the more desperate that battle would become.

“That’s it!” Steckler shouted encouragement as the column began to move. Only the soreness in his throat gave him any idea of the volume at which he was yelling, and he guessed that his engineers, their faces also distorted as they barked orders, were calling out just as loudly and just as inaudibly.

With the column now moving towards the city Steckler decided to leave them to it. The baron had given him the most important role in the battle. It was a simple goal, an impossible goal, a goal which he had every intention of achieving.

“Find high ground and clear lines of fire for the artillery,” the baron had told him before galloping off to lead the southern flank.

Steckler had taken one look at the congested plain of fields around the city and known that there was no such ground. Then he had looked up at the battlements of the city itself and, in that moment, Sigmar had shown him the way.

Now, as he bounded forwards over the rubble and into the city he was already looking impatiently for the quickest way to the battlements on the far wall. His brow furrowed as he looked at the confused tangle of streets his demolition had revealed.

As he tried to decide on the best way forwards a mail-clad guardsman followed by a phalanx of men rushed towards them. The man was red-faced and his mouth was working as he gesticulated towards the ruined wall. As he did so Steckler heard a pop and his hearing returned.

“…curse the lot of you,” the officer was yelling as he pointed to the wall. “You’ve killed us all. How will we defend that from the enemy? Oh.”

The man’s tirade ended as the first of the cannon, the great bronzed bulk of it rattling on its mighty carriage, was dragged into the city. Some of the gunners were busily clearing debris out of the way as, behind the cannon, a mortar was wheeled along, the permanent iron roar of its mouth pointing defiantly up towards the sky. Then another cannon, this one lighter than the first but still big enough to fire a man’s head, and behind that the precise clockwork machine of death that they nicknamed the helblaster.

“That’s how,” Steckler said smugly. “Now then, my good man. I need to get them up onto any walls strong enough to take them. Can you help?”

The officer, who realised his mouth had been open, closed it with a snap.

“Yes,” he said, and although his face was still mottled his eyes were wet with gratitude. “Oh yes, sir.”

“Lead on then,” the provost marshal said, and gave him a friendly slap on the back. “Lead on and let’s get the slaughter begun!”

 

Gulkroth rode on the chariot with a perfect balance. As it bounced and rattled beneath him he scarcely paid any attention to the movements which had already thrown off one of his retainers. Instead he kept his mind locked on the battle that was raging around him.

So far he had kept his own bloodlust in check. He knew that without his direction the herd’s discipline would evaporate in the joy of battle as quickly as dew beneath the heat of the sun.

But even though he knew it, restraining himself was hard.

When the humans’ army had first arrived he had been enraged by the interruption. His followers had been preparing to seize the city, and although a few hundred of them had fallen to the arrows and bullets of the defenders, thousands more had taken their places in carrying the siege ladders. Then, with the taste of victory in their mouths, it had been snatched away from them by the arrival of the baron’s army. In a single bloody hour the new arrivals had pushed Gulkroth’s forces back from the far side of the city and moved out to contest the flanks on either side of it.

At first this had seemed like misfortune, but now Gulkroth was thanking the Dark Gods for the baron’s arrival. The open ground around Barwedel’s walls was confined on all sides by forest, and there were so many men and so many beasts that there was hardly any room for manoeuvre. Soon the battle had degenerated into a brutal, mindless crush of bodies. And soon after that, Gulkroth’s herd had started to win.

It was a slow, bloody, drawn-out victory, but it was turning into a victory nevertheless. Yard by yard the beasts were pushing back their enemies, trampling over the dead and the dying as they did so.

The humans used what tactics they could to make the beasts pay for the ground they took.

Sometimes a lone unit would stride forwards, allowing itself to be enveloped. Only when the beasts who attacked it were blind to all else would the following regiments advance, slaughtering the beasts where they caught them in the rear.

At other times a company would seem to flee and the herd would pour into the gap it left, in the humans’ line. When that happened the beasts who pursued the fleeing men would invariably find themselves surrounded by waiting regiments. The steel-skinned warriors would then close in on them in a trap that left their corpses piled high and stinking.

Occasionally perfectly timed charges of knights would punch forwards into the horde, biting out a little island of them that the following regiments could easily chew through.

But even when Gulkroth understood these tactics he did nothing to stop his followers pushing so blindly forwards. He had faith in their purity of aggression and, despite the humans’ discipline and stratagems, that faith was being rewarded.

Already he could sense a real panic gripping his enemies. He could smell the delicious scent of their ripening fear and sense the stale-sweated desperation of their increasing exhaustion. Where bloodshed made his followers stronger it drained the humans of energy, and if they were weak now, how much more so would they be when the Chaos Moon rose to cast its blessing over the land?

He was contemplating his victory when the ancient shaman Ruhrkar appeared beside him and tapped him with his staff.

“My lord,” the ancient said, rheumy eyes wet with discharge. “We must withdraw and lure the humans back into the forest.”

“Withdraw?” Gulkroth snarled, a low, venomous hiss that had the beasts around him cowering on the floor.

“To the embrace of the forest,” Ruhrkar repeated. “If we draw the enemy in after us we will destroy them.”

For the past three days Gulkroth had been restraining the eternal rage that coursed though his body. He had been forced to by the need to orchestrate the campaign. But now, with victory in his hands, he allowed himself to snap.

It felt glorious, like diving off a high cliff into a deep pool. A feeling of utter bliss came over him as he turned and struck at his tormentor in a single, fluid movement. The blow would have killed any of his herd, and it should have killed Ruhrkar too. But the shaman, it seemed, was not quite as tired of living as he claimed.

Before Gulkroth’s outstretched claw could hit him he flitted to the other side of the gnarled old stick he carried and muttered a word. Green fire flared from the wood and ran along the ancient’s withered frame, there to circle and writhe.

Gulkroth roared as he recoiled from the sorcerous defence, and the air was suddenly full of the smell of his singed fur. He held his forearm up to examine the pink skin which had been revealed by the flame, and suddenly his loss of temper was no longer a matter of choice. It was as inevitable as the turning of the seasons or the falling of a stone.

Leaping from his chariot he swung his axe in a blurred arc that plummeted down towards the shaman. The metal shrieked as it hit the fire, and for a second the blade glowed orange. Then it hit its target and there was a hiss and the smell of boiling blood as it bit down through skull and vertebrae and ribcage, cleaving Ruhrkar’s body in two as easily as if it had been a log on the chopping block.

Gulkroth could feel the ancient’s life leave him, and as it did so a wave of unravelling energy washed over the beastlord. He stood with his arms outstretched, revelling in the wild smack of raw magic, and howled with the savage joy of life.

That was when the cannon ball hit him.

It took him on the shoulder, and as the bone-shattered echoes of the impact spread though his entire frame. Ribs snapped, ligaments tore. He realised that he was spinning through the air a split second before he landed. The ground bounced beneath him, and when the air in his lungs was driven out he saw that it was flecked with droplets of blood.

Around him a terrible howling went up as his guard looked on in despair. Gulkroth ignored them as he breathed, drawing in a lungful of air that felt so sharp that it might have been full of thorns. Ignoring the shards of ribs that moved freely within the muscle of his chest, he clambered back to his hooves and looked around him.

The cannon ball which had struck him had not been alone. Even as he looked towards the city walls he could see the flare of more artillery from gaps which had been knocked in the battlements, and the acrid stink of blackpowder drifted towards him.

Another cannon ball whistled past his ear and crunched into the beasts who stood behind him. He ignored their screams as he clambered back onto his chariot and took stock.

The flow of the battle was already turning. As well as the lethal trajectories the cannon were slicing through his ranks, explosions were also starting to mushroom up as the mortars coughed their own charges into the fray. The packed ranks of the beasts made a perfect target for the artillery, and as he saw the slaughter which was raining down around him Gulkroth felt his anger rising.

This time he kept it in check. His body was already knitting back together as the magic flowed through it. Bones re-knit and sinews writhed back together like bundles of mating snakes.

Ruhrkar, it seemed, had been right. It was time to pull back and draw the enemy into the forest. There, hidden by the canopy, they would be able to do their killing safe from the lethal attentions of the guns.

Afterwards, when the army was gone, they could worry about winkling the gunners out of their carapace of a city.

With a raised arm Gulkroth summoned his messengers to him. They swooped down from where they had been circling in the thermals above, their shadows skittering over the battle below.

One by one he took their misshapen heads in his hands, leant forwards and said: “Withdraw to the eastern forest.”

When they repeated the message their voices rumbled with the same low, terrifying tones of their lord, and one by one they flapped back up into the air to carry his orders to all corners of the battlefield.

Gulkroth watched the last of them go and, ignoring the sudden cloud of shrapnel and body parts which erupted to his left, told his chariot driver to carry him back to the forest.

He was halfway there when he realised that it wasn’t only blackpowder smoke he could smell. He paused and sniffed. Then his eyes widened as, flickering amongst the dark fastness of the forest, he saw the first of the flames.

He had ordered the herd into a forest that was on fire.

An image of Ruhrkar’s mocking visage darkened his vision, then disappeared as the racing flames licked up one of the trees. Soon it was burning like a torch, and he could smell boiling sap as well as the thickening pall of smoke.

So it was that, caught between steel and fire and raked with artillery, the herd found itself confronted by the Gentleman’s Free Company of Hergig.

 

“Keep together!” Erikson cried, his voice lost amongst the roar of the quickening flames. He had regretted the audacity of his plan almost as soon as he had executed it but now, with the fire they had started out of control, he had little choice but to race it out of the woods and into the rear of the beasts’ army.

He needn’t have wasted his breath on encouraging his men. The fire was devouring the tinder-dry forest with a ravenous hunger on either side of the company, and the heat was herding the men forwards like a flock of sheep. Even when they started to run, crashing through the undergrowth in something approaching panic, it nipped at their heels, singeing their hair and heating their armour into something you could fry an egg on.

“Run!” yelled Erikson as, just ahead of them, a tree collapsed in an explosion of sparks.

It was another redundant order. The company was already sprinting forwards, armour and weapons clinking as they vaulted over obstructions and shoved each other out of the way.

But as fast as they ran, the fire ran faster. It flew from tree to tree in the canopy overhead, and their path was veiled with showers of burning twigs. Erikson snarled defiance as he rushed through them, brushing away the sudden flashes of scalding pain on his hands. As he did so a small, wiry shape bolted past him and he watched as Porter took the lead.

Ahead there was a sudden burst of blue through the burning trees and, with a start of hope, Erikson realised that they had reached the edge of the forest. The dense stands of trees gradually thinned out, and as the heat lessened Erikson slowed his pace and stood aside, watching the company as it bolted past him.

He was trying to count them when a cry of alarm went up from the men who had already passed him. He turned, wiping the smearing of soot-blackened sweat away from his bloodshot eyes, and peered through the drifting smoke to where the company had staggered to a halt.

Beyond them the high stone walls of Barwedel.

“Charge!”

And they did. Ragged, dirty and singed, the Gentleman’s Free Company of Hergig burst from the quickening flames and hurled themselves towards the enemy.

 

Inside Barwedel’s city gates, Baron Ludenhof waited.

Behind him three hundred knights stood in a column of sixes. Their warhorses were so tall and their raised lances so high that the pennants on them fluttered above second-storey windows.

Behind the knights stood almost a thousand men, both state troopers and solid blocks of woodsmen. The sharpness of the woodsmen’s axes was matched only by their hatred of the enemy. Many of these men had lost family to the beasts over this hellish summer. Some of them had lost their entire settlements.

And above this lethal force the sound of artillery on the walls was a constant, rolling thunder. Blackpowder smoke had drifted down so that the streets were filled with the fog of it, and even packed into the city streets the waiting men had heard the change in the enemy’s inhuman calls as the cannon had scourged them. It gave them a feeling of grim satisfaction as they waited in brooding silence.

A messenger appeared from the walls and scurried down to the baron. He was alive with excitement, and the men at the front of the column craned forwards to try to hear what he was saying.

“The entire forest?” the baron asked, twirling the tip of his moustache. “Are you sure?”

“See for yourself, sire,” the messenger said, and the baron nodded and swung out of his saddle. Despite the weight of his armour he landed lightly, and clanked up the steps to the top of the wall with ease.

When he returned to his waiting horse he was beaming. After climbing back into his saddle he turned his horse to address the waiting men.

“Sigmar has blessed us with a fire in the forest beyond,” he said. “We will use it as a wall against which to chop the enemy in two. When the gates open we charge through the heart like a lance through a hog, then turn and hold the foul things as the regiments grind in from either side. Are you ready?”

“Yes, sire!” the men roared, their voices echoing amongst the narrow streets of the city.

The baron grinned wolfishly, signalled for his banner to be unfurled and then gave the order to open the gates.

When they swung open the scene they framed looked like something from the deepest of the hells. The beasts waited in a solid mass outside, an army of abominations whose very existence mocked humanity. The great mass of them swept out, broken here and there with sudden blossoms of shrapnel and carnage, and behind it all a backdrop of flames blotted out the horizon.

The baron didn’t hesitate. With a wordless bellow he spurred his horse forwards and, without waiting to see if his men could keep up, hurled himself into the boiling cauldron of the enemy.

They fell before him and his knights like wheat beneath a scythe. As strong as they were individually there was no order in their confused ranks, and the baron’s formation sliced through them with a blood-slicked ease.

Even now the cannon maintained their bombardment, shattering any attempt the enemy might have made to organise against this blow to their heart, and caught between fire and steel and the endless cannonade the fringes of the horde began to flee, squirming out between the gaps that still remained between the advancing regiments in front and the fire to their rear.

The baron roared as, with a warrior’s instinct, he sensed that the enemy were breaking. It was then that the horde before him parted and, with a rumble that shook the earth, the beastlord charged directly at him on the back of a chariot.

The creatures that pulled it were nightmares of muscle and tusk. Even the beam which ran between them ended in a vicious curved metal spike that arced up to the height of a horse’s belly.

The baron didn’t hesitate. With a kick of his spurs he let his reins out and bellowed a command to his horse. It responded instantly, bunching the great muscles of its hindquarters and leaping up and over the creatures that pulled the chariot. They squealed with surprise, and a second later the baron felt the impact as the body of his leaping horse hit Gulkroth’s axe.

Man, horse and beast collapsed onto the ground, and as the knights surged past on either side the baron struggled free of his mount’s broken body. He rolled clear and rose to face the horror that emerged from beneath the carcass of his horse.

“Stand back,” he told the knights that swirled around him. “This one is mine.”

They obeyed with an alacrity born of a lifetime of discipline. Turning their backs to their lord and the monster he faced, they pushed out to form a cordon around the combat. The beasts that swirled around them also paused, entranced by the sight of their own leader in all of his bestial glory.

As he rose to his feet Gulkroth was magnificent with pure animalistic power.

Thought. Calculation. Planning. His true nature had been restrained by these alien practices for months but now, finally, he was free of them. Now, with the glorious power of a river which has broken free of a dam, the rage which he had contained inside his bulging form erupted. He threw back his head and roared, a howl of unreasoning joy.

There was an elemental quality to the sound that had both men and beasts falling to their knees, there to cower in the dirt. Gulkroth rose above them, and even the dullest of his herd could plainly see the eddying tides of the energy that twisted around him. He writhed with their Dark God’s power, a living herdstone of bone and fang and muscle.

Only the baron found the resolve to rise to his feet. His sword, one of the Empire’s fabled runefangs, glowed in his hand. The impossibly straight lines of the weapon’s forging were a heartbreaking contrast to the raw, overwhelming power of the beast.

Ludenhof didn’t care. The human part of him seemed to have been stripped away by the horror before him, but he still moved, readying himself with the slow, graceless motions of an automaton. When all else was gone he still had the iron bonds of duty and discipline around which he had forged his life, and even beneath the blast furnace of the beast’s blasphemous presence it held firm.

He turned and lifted his sword, preparing to lunge forwards with the same cool efficiency with which he practised every morning. But before he could strike he looked up into Gulkroth’s eyes.

They burned into him, and in that moment he was undone.

For the first time in his life, the baron forgot his responsibilities. He forgot about the men behind him, and the land he was sworn to protect, and even the need to defend himself.

He forgot about everything but the abyss he was looking into. The horror of it paralysed every thought, every instinct. His breath froze in his lungs, and his sword fell.

Gulkroth kept the baron transfixed as he advanced, the great axe swinging from his grip. Despite his enemy’s steel shell and vicious weapons, he was now as defenceless as a rabbit. Gulkroth salivated as he contemplated the feast to come. This one was the lord of all the humans. Once he had devoured him then the land would be his to tear and furrow and to bring back into the smothering embrace of the forest.

Exulting in his victory, Gulkroth was unaware of the ragged band of humans that had emerged from the flaming woods behind him.

 

Erikson’s men had charged into the horde only to find it ignoring them. Most of the beasts were already running, panic and firelight reflected in their eyes. Others clustered dazed and transfixed around a circle of knights who also seemed paralysed.

Erikson, who knew that as soon as the company stopped it would disintegrate, barrelled into the unmoving knot of knights and beasts, and suddenly he found himself crashing through their terrified ranks and into the makeshift arena within.

The first Gulkroth knew of the Gentleman’s Free Company of Hergig was the sudden bite of their swords.

Erikson’s men lunged at the towering monstrosity that they found before them. They struck with all the vicious courage of those who know that their enemy’s back won’t be turned for long. They hacked at his sinews with axes, stabbed at his liver with swords, lunged at the muscles in the back of his neck with spears. In the first second they had inflicted a dozen wounds and when Gulkroth turned on them it was with a splattering of his own blood.

He snarled, and the sound echoed through their heads with the same paralysing dread which had inflicted the baron.

But the baron, released from his enemy’s terrible gaze, had already seized his moment. He stooped to retrieve his fallen sword and swung his keening blade with a terrible skill. The steel moved so fast that the tip of it blurred invisibly into the flame beyond, and even after it had struck its target it hardly slowed.

Another blade would have thudded harmlessly against Gulkroth’s matted hide, or shattered against the oaken hardness of his muscle. But the baron’s runefang was as lethal as any weapon in the Old World. Dwarf-forged and ancient, it had carved a path through a thousand armies, and it hungered to carve through a thousand more.

The weapon sliced through the bulk of its foe. Muscle and vertebrae parted beneath its razored edge and, even as the baron was swivelling around for another strike, the great weight of Gulkroth’s head swung loose from his shoulders and, tearing loose from the flap of skin which still supported it, fell to the ground.

The terrible light in its eyes glowed for a moment longer then, as the decapitated body crashed into the ground, glowed no more. A terrible keening rose up from the beasts who stood around their fallen lord, and despair spread like a contagion through their tangled ranks. The ground shook beneath their feet as retreat turned into a stampede and the great herd which Gulkroth had assembled tore itself apart.

Erikson, his costume a ragged mass of blood and filth, stepped forwards and placed his boot between the oxen sweep of the horns which adorned the fallen beast lord’s severed head.

“My baron,” he said, sweeping in a low bow. “Allow me to present the compliments of the Gentlemen’s Free Company of Hergig.”