[Warhammer] - Runefang Read online

  Beyond the ranks of his knights, Armin could see the rest of Count Eberfeld’s heavy cavalry forming up: the Geschberg Guard, their massive warhammers slung from the horns of their saddles, their features hidden behind the extravagantly horned great helms they wore; the Sablebacks, their ranks filled with the nobility of Wissenland, the polished steel of their armour gleaming with a blue hue beneath the rising moon, their fur cloaks billowing about the hindquarters of their massive coursers. To the other side of Armin’s knights were the Kreutzhofen Spears, commoner cavalry maintained by the merchant guilds, mounted on swift-footed rounseys, and armoured in stiff brigandines of canvas and steel, their slender weapons a pale echo of the enormous lances carried by the knights.

  Armin turned in his saddle, glancing over the heads of the knights behind him, watching as the count’s infantry trudged into position, fixing every company in his mind. A battle was decided not only upon knowing where the enemy was, but where your allies were as well. He could see the halberdiers from Grunwald and the spearmen from Beroun. There were the grimy archers that had mustered in the Sol Valley and marched to answer the count’s call to war. He could see the swarthy crossbowmen who had marched down from Kreutzhofen alongside the cavalry, their felt hats and elaborate uniforms betraying a touch of the Tilean about them, and the Brotherhood of Schwerstetten, a regiment of mercenaries drawn down from the Reikland border by the smell of war, their ranks sporting men from a dozen lands and weapons from a dozen more, their hawk-eyed Captain Valdner studying the battlefield with a tactician’s eye.

  Beside the mercenaries were Baron Ernst von Rabwald’s men-at-arms, a mixed force of halberdiers and crossbowmen, the mounted baron looming above his soldiers as he conferred with his officers.

  The last group to move into position was one that did much to bolster Armin’s confidence: a gang of stocky, broad-shouldered dwarfs pushing a trio of wide-mouthed cannons into place upon a small hillock. Armin did not know what strange paths led the dwarfs to be employed in Count Eberfeld’s army what curious circumstances had drawn them down from the Black Mountains, but their fire-belching artillery was a welcome sight. At the Siege of Averheim, Armin had been on the receiving end of dwarf cannons and so he had a first-hand grasp of the terrific impact they could have on any battle. It would be nice to have the formidable guns as allies rather than foes this time.

  Upon another hill, the sapphire banner of Wissenland fluttered above a golden pavilion. Even from a distance, Armin could make out the hulking figure of General Hock leaning over his map-strewn table. Count Eberfeld would not be far away, surrounded by his advisors and guards, monitoring every turn in the battle, wishing every moment that he was riding with his Sablebacks rather than conferring with strategists and trying to decipher Hock’s maps.

  The battlefield showed General Hock’s eye for an advantage. The count’s army occupied the high ground, giving the Wissenland commanders an unobstructed view of the pastureland that straddled the Heufurth road. Beyond the pastures were thick stretches of forest. Hock’s scouts had been watching the hideous army for days, reporting on their movements. The lifeless warriors displayed a rigid, slavish adherence to maintaining their ordered ranks. They favoured open ground where their files could maintain formation, going to great lengths to avoid broken ground and obstructions. Indeed, when such elements proved unavoidable, the entire army seemed to undergo a sort of fit as it slowly adjusted to the change in its regimen. Like puppets dancing on strings, the dead army wasn’t terribly good at accepting sudden adjustments in its performance.

  With the forests forming a distinct limit to the battlefield, Hock intended to exploit it to the fullest. They would funnel the dead army into a killing ground from which there would be no escape. There was always a mind guiding such hideous monsters, an inhuman intellect that stirred them from their graves and set them upon the living. Necromancer, vampire or warlock, Count Eberfeld was determined that whatever force had gathered the abominable army would not slip back into the black shadows of night. The cavalry would bear the brunt of the attack, smashing through the centre of the enemy formations. The breach the knights created would be exploited by the infantry following behind. Like a butcher’s cleaver, the cavalry would cut its way through the enemy, breaking its lines and reforming ranks on the far side of the disintegrated formations of the lifeless warriors. The horsemen would form a wall, blocking any chance for the enemy to retreat back down the road. The infantry would press against the disordered ruin the knights left behind, pushing it towards the wall of cavalry and the knights’ waiting swords.

  Armin smiled as he recalled the plan. It was the same strategy Hock had used against the beastmen of Thugok Festerhorn when the brutish warherds had menaced Steingart. The slaughter of the mutants had been so decisive that Count Eberfeld had promoted Hock to the rank of general. If it served him half as well today, there would be titles and lands in the general’s future.

  Night strengthened its hold on the land, the last rays of the dying sun a distant memory. The warm autumn breeze grew cold, biting at the face it had earlier caressed. The horses of the cavalry companies whinnied and stamped their hooves, protesting at the prolonged exposure to the cooling darkness. Among the infantry there aroused a surly murmur that their officers never could quite silence completely. Even some of Armin’s knights grumbled under their breath when they thought the marshals were not listening. Armin knew it was only nerves, the jitters that shivered through any army as it waited to do battle. In many ways, combat was never so hard on a soldier as waiting for the fight to begin.

  An excited tremor ran through the army as a pair of riders appeared on the Heufurth road, but the excitement abated when it became obvious that the men were alone. As they rode past the line of knights, Armin saw that the men wore scruffy leather hauberks, brambles and dust clinging to their beards. More of General Hock’s scouts, riding back to report to their commander. The wild-eyed look on each scout’s face, the way he lashed his steed with savage disregard, told Armin that whatever news they brought, it was of great import. Had the army of the dead turned from the Heufurth road? Was it no longer marching relentlessly towards the battlefield that Hock had so carefully chosen?

  Armin’s fears for the disposition of the enemy were silenced by the flag that rose to replace the sapphire banner above Count Eberfeld’s golden pavilion. It was a silver pennant and upon it were two symbols: the fang of Ulric and the spear of Myrmidia, the god and goddess of war and conflict. With the battle flag raised, every man in the army knew that the wait would soon be over.

  As Armin looked back from the count’s pavilion and the raising of the battle flag, he witnessed a sinister change crawling across the far side of the road. Where the path passed around the bend of the forest, a thick mist had appeared, almost glowing as the moonlight shone upon it. Another murmur passed through the ranks of the Wissenlanders as they watched the eerie fog billow out from beyond the trees. Horses stamped and snorted, but this time it was not idleness that disturbed them. Armin could feel a new chill to the air, a clammy coldness that was not the natural cool of night.

  Silence descended once more, and this time it took no officers to enforce it. Every man in the Wissenland host watched tensely as the glowing fog continued to roll down the road, billowing out to stretch from the forested slopes to the east to the thick woods on the west. It spread across the pastures, like some ethereal tide, washing remorselessly forwards, drawing nearer to the waiting soldiers and knights.

  Dimly, at first, a sound rolled out from the fog. It took Armin a moment to identify it, but at length he decided it was the rattle of armoured bodies marching on the hard-packed earth of the road. No other sound accompanied it: not the snorting of draft animals, not the shouts of officers, not even the cough of a marcher choking on the dust of the trail, but only the rattle of jostling armour. Like all Wissenlanders, Armin was a pious man, but his prayers were normally voiced to Taal and Rhya, Myrmidia and Shallya. Now, only one god pulled a
t his devotion, the one who was all but forgotten in this age of strife. With his hand, he made the sign of Sigmar Heldenhammer, the first emperor, the man-god who had driven the black lord of the undead from the lands of the Empire and who had preserved civilisation against all the horrors of Old Night.

  Shapes appeared within the fog, spindle-thin and moving with a ghastly precision that sent a fresh thrill of anxiety quivering through Armin’s belly. The knight realised that no mortal host moved like that. The shapes might be mirror images of one another, for all the difference there was in their motions. They were not many, staggered out in a long line. Armin could see some that appeared to be mounted, though upon such lean, scrawny steeds that the knight could not grasp how the animals could support their riders. Then, through the opacity of the mist, Armin found his answer, instantly repenting his curiosity. He had expected horror, he had heard the tales of the nature of the foe the count had called upon them to fight, but there was no way a man, however disciplined, could prepare himself for the flesh and blood reality behind the horror.

  No, not flesh and blood: only bones. The rider he saw through the fog was nothing more than a skeleton, its body absolutely picked clean of skin, meat and muscle. Upon its skull, it wore a strange, high-peaked helmet, stained almost black with decay. Around its waist, it wore a chain belt from which was suspended a quiver that slapped against its thigh bone. The horse beneath it was likewise stripped bare, an equine apparition, as removed from the trappings of the mortal coil as its repulsive rider, the last sorry remnants of tack and harness hanging in rotten strips from its skull.

  There were dozens of the silent, skeletal riders, their fleshless steeds moving in a grotesquely slow manner, as through straining to cross a greater distance than the mortal terrain Armin’s eyes could see. Beyond them marched small clutches of infantry. Devoid of the strange helmets of the riders, the infantry sported grimy bands of iron and bronze around the crowns of their skulls. Strips of festering leather hung from their midsections, pathetic reminders of the armour they had worn in life. Each of the infantry carried a quiver like the horsemen’s, but much larger. Armin could see large shafts protruding from the decaying quivers, another shaft gripped firmly in each skeleton’s right hand. The knight was perplexed by the strange weapons. They were too big to be arrows, too short to be spears and certainly lacking any kind of edge, Armin could not decide precisely what the things were meant to be.

  For what felt like an eternity, the Wissenlanders watched the ghastly army march, spellbound by the unreal horror of that silent legion. Then the silence was shattered with a resounding boom from the hill. Fire and smoke belched from the mouth of a cannon. In rapid succession, the dwarfs fired the other guns. Havoc smashed into the spindly shapes marching through the mist, as the deadly salvo bore home. Against a fortification, the dwarfs would use huge balls of iron to batter down walls of stone, but against less formidable targets they had turned to fiendish innovation. It had been called “chain-shot” during the Siege of Averheim, a pair of fist-sized balls of pig-iron fired from a cannon, a length of chain fixing the two spheres together. When blasted out of a cannon, the iron spheres spun end-over-end, the chain hurtling along with them. The effect of the chain-shot smashing into a company of knights was hideous, the chain slashing through the legs of horses and men like a farmer’s scythe through a field of wheat.

  Now, the chain-shot worked its awful potency against the undead warriors. Armin could see scores of them drop as the cannon-fire slashed through them, spilling them in jumbles of shattered bone and crumbling armour. Infantry or horseman, the chain-shot took its gruesome toll, leaving inhuman corpses and equine carcasses littered across pasture and path. Yet still no cry went up from the enemy ranks. The dead that had been struck down fell in silence, giving no voice to the violence of their destruction. Only the rolling echoes from the cannons gave testament that the Wissenlanders had indeed struck the first blow.

  The colour faded from Armin’s face as he saw some of the toppled skeletons rise once more, to crawl towards the count’s army, leaving their dismembered legs behind. The sight was one that threatened to unman every soldier present, driving home the horror they faced. Men who had looked death in the eye many times, who had struggled against the inhuman barbarity of orcs and the abominable cruelty of beastmen, felt the icy touch of fear clawing at their hearts. This was something more than death, something obscene and vile beyond description. Where other men found terror in this realisation, Armin found determination.

  “Men of Wissenland!” Armin roared, his voice carrying like the boom of the dwarf guns. “Do these wraiths unman you? Do they fill your hearts with fear? Think how much greater the fear will be when it is your wives and daughters who cower before them!” The hochmeister drew his sword, the blade singing with a metallic rasp as it cleared the scabbard. “Strike, you dogs! Strike and send these wretches back to their tombs! For Count Eberfeld! For Wissenland! For the ghosts of Solland, strike these wretches down!”

  The hochmeister set his spurs into the flank of his destrier and with a surge of motion, the massive animal was rushing towards the mist. Armin’s ears filled with the thunder of hooves as his knights galloped with him. Around them, the remaining cavalry was charging forwards, weapons at the ready, war cries filling the air. Behind them, the infantry surged forwards, to cover the flanks and rush into the holes the knights would create in the enemy line. The voices of Armin’s knights lifted in song as they charged, the bittersweet ballad called “The Lament of Solland”.

  Ahead of them, the ragged clusters of walking dead reacted to the charging knights with slow, precise deliberation. The infantry, those that had been left whole in the aftermath of the cannon-fire, crooked their arms back with an eerie unison of motion, the strange short, fat-bodied spears clutched in their bony claws. Still maintaining their hideous silence, the skeletons sent their javelins hurtling across the field towards the onrushing cavalry.

  The iron missiles crashed against the thick steel armour of Armin’s knights and the heavy barding of the destriers, their pointed tips blunting against the armour and glancing harmlessly into the dirt. Against the lightly armoured Kreutzhofen horsemen, however, some of the iron pila struck home, stabbing into unprotected flesh, ruining shields as the cumbersome iron shafts became embedded in the wood. More troubling to the knights were the mounted archers, firing their compact bows with a cold, emotionless precision. More than a few steeds were brought down, bronze-tipped arrows sticking from throat and eye. In the rush of the charge, the thrown riders were smashed beneath the hooves of their comrades.

  The charging knights lowered their lances as the hochmeister’s voice rang out. Like the fangs of some great beast, they were thrust at the silent, deadly foe. A promise of death cast in steel and carved from oak, the men who bore them intended to visit, in full, their capacity to ruin.

  Even as the knights smashed through them, the skeletal peltasts and undead horsemen continued their missile fire. Armin saw that they were nothing more than skirmishers, ranging out ahead of the main army, which he observed as a stretch of shadow slowly crawling out through the mist. Where mortal skirmishers would have broken and scattered before the cavalry could reach them, the peltasts held their ground, hurling pila until the very moment when their brittle bones were shattered beneath the charge. They made a sickening contrast to the men and greenskins that Armin had ridden down in his time, barely jostling his steed as the huge destrier smashed through them, breaking apart like bundles of sticks as his lance found its targets.

  Soon they were beyond the skirmishers, rushing towards the main enemy formation. Armin saw that there was little visual unity to the skeletal warriors they quickly closed upon. They carried a riotous mixture of weapons, from rusty old swords to worm-eaten scythes and blunted wood axes. He saw the squat shapes of dwarfs, the horned skulls of beastmen and the hulking bones of orcs mixed among the ranks of those skeletons that had once belonged to men. Whatever their shapes, however,
and whatever the weapons gripped in their withered talons, they moved as one.

  As the charge bore down on the undead host, Armin saw that they did not present a single battleline. There were holes in the formation, curious gaps in their defence. The hochmeister felt a tinge of alarm as he saw the strange deployment, but it was much too late to turn back the attack. The Knights of the Southern Sword smashed into the skeleton warriors with a thunderous impact, hurling shattered bones into the air, grinding skulls beneath hooves and impaling rotten ribcages on lances.

  Then they were through, their charge carrying them past the massed ranks of the undead. The sudden absence of foes was almost more shocking than the initial impact of the attack. Armin saw a second line of undead warriors, as curiously arranged as the first, with pockets and gaps between the units. These differed from the motley rabble of the front line, however. Each of these skeletons was encased in a rusty iron breastplate and wore a heavy iron helm with flaring cheekguards.

  Enormous rectangular shields, which Armin could liken only to Tilean pavises, were held against their bodies as they marched. Armin noted at once the arrangement of these better-armed skeletons. They were positioned in such a way that they approximated the gaps left in the first line. Before Armin could make sense of the observation, the knights were past the second line and crashing against a third. Armoured like the second line, these were arranged in the gaps left between the units of the second rank, approximating the positions of the front line. It was like the arrangement of squares on a chessboard, though how deep the pattern might continue, Armin did not want to consider.

  The charge had lost much of its impetus after its brutal passage through the front ranks. Smashing into the shield wall presented by the third line, many of the horsemen floundered, unable to punch through the undead warriors. Only the Knights of the Southern Sword had the power to smash their way through the third line, battering their way through ironclad husks of men fifteen deep. When they had won clear, Armin risked a look back, watching as the survivors of the charge silently and steadily re-formed their ranks, ignoring the broken carcasses of their fallen. A chill went up Armin’s spine as he realised that the first line would be doing the same. Indeed, by straining, he could see the second line merging with the first, forming a single uninterrupted front, like a gate being slammed shut behind the knights.