04 - Grimblades Read online

  Volker was moving again. Karlich could only just make out his route through the undergrowth by the faintest tremble of bracken or a carefully parted branch. Brand matched the scout’s step exactly. Karlich saw him pull a knife from his vambrace before he too was lost from sight. He ordered the rest of the front rankers forward.

  Masbrecht and Keller closed in on the flanks. Rechts and Lenkmann kept close to their sergeant. Varveiter just about kept pace, sweating profusely under the weight of his armour and his years. Eber stayed close to the old soldier. They were only fifty feet or so away, close enough to taste the corruption emanating from the beasts, when Eber set off a poacher’s trap with the haft of his halberd. The trap sprang shut with a loud clang, disturbing a flock of ragged carrion crows. Kindred of the beastmen, the wretched birds cawed loudly as they pierced the forest canopy overhead.

  The cavorting stopped abruptly, and the beastmen snarled and brayed at the men in their camp. Once Volker had established the likely spot of the beasts, Karlich had chosen to approach downwind of them. Like most animals, natural or otherwise, beastmen had a strong sense of smell and Karlich wisely didn’t want to alert the creatures to the halberdiers’ presence by their scent. That mattered little now. The beasts had seen them and bayed for the taste of man-flesh. Snatching up crude spears and bone clubs, the beasts charged straight at the Grimblades.

  Volker and Brand were the first to be discovered. The Reikland hunter rose from the foliage to stab a beast in the arm. The creature howled and made to strike back when Volker cut it again, this time across the belly, spilling its rancid guts. They were ungor, the smallest of the beastmen broods, but no less vicious or bloodthirsty. Brand took one in the throat, ramming his dagger in all the way to the hilt before yanking it free and releasing a long spurt of blood. The ungor crumpled with a burbled rasp. He killed a second with a throwing knife, the beast’s head snapping back with a jerk as the blade filled its left eye socket.

  The element of surprise lasted seconds. After their initial kills, Volker and Brand were on the defensive, ungors chasing them as they ran.

  Karlich swore. Abandoning his initial plan, he turned to Rechts and Lenkmann.

  “Sound the attack, signal the rest of the regiment!” He drew his sword. “Grimblades! Forward!”

  Rechts beat out a battle rhythm on the small drum lashed over his shoulder for his brother soldiers to follow. Lenkmann found a clear spot and unfurled the banner that had been on his back. Swinging it back and forth, he signalled their position to the other Grimblades.

  Cursing his own stupidity, Eber snapped the end of his halberd haft with his foot to free the weapon from the trap, and stormed at the beastmen.

  From either flank came the growling of hounds, the ungors’ whelp creatures, too muscled and hairy to be mere dogs. Out the corner of his eye, Eber saw Masbrecht and Keller move to intercept the hounds. A tract of heavy scrub and bracken stood between him and his fellow halberdiers.

  Volker had given up the fight now. He was simply running for his life. Brand lingered, stopping occasionally to gut an ungor. One that had got ahead of the fleeing halberdiers raised its club to stave in Volker’s skull before Brand used the last of his throwing knives to kill it. The hunter flinched as the blade whipped past his face, but nodded a hasty thanks to Brand.

  “Move, Grimblades, move!” Karlich raged. He held the line with Lenkmann but could have overtaken Varveiter who was finding the pace hard to match. Eber outstripped the old soldier by many yards, spurred on by guilt.

  Rather than negotiate the foliage, Eber just barrelled through it. He met Volker first and kept on going, smacking straight into a chasing ungor with all the force of a bull. Eber used his shoulder like a battering ram. He felt the crunch of bone as he met the beast, the impact throwing it off its feet. Another came at him from the shadows, shrieking like some mutant swine. Eber swept his halberd in a high arc and cut off the ungor’s head. He impaled a third with a thrust. He cried as a club smashed against his shoulder guard and dented the metal. Numbness spread up his arm like ice, and he nearly dropped his weapon. To be disarmed was to die, so Eber held on.

  A slew of blood arced from the ungor’s neck and it fell, Varveiter’s halberd following it.

  “Eager for the killing, eh, Eber?” Varveiter said between breaths.

  Eber nodded as a deeper cry tore from the forest depths. Ungor corpses littered the floor, but more were coming and something else, something larger.

  A muscled gor, a much bigger beastman kindred, emerged out of the gloom. A coiled goat’s horn hung from a ragged belt attached around its thick waist, and it clutched a rusty cleaver in its massive hand.

  Tilting its head back, the gor released a ululating bellow that resonated around the Reikwald, setting a tremor off in Karlich’s spine. The remaining ungor gathered to the stronger beast, acknowledging its superiority. More whelp hounds stalked at the periphery of the group.

  “Hold, lad,” gasped Varveiter. “We need to wait for the others and form rank.”

  But Eber was already plunging forward to meet the gor’s challenge.

  “Wait!”

  Eber wasn’t listening. He was determined to make up for his earlier mistake and if that meant fighting the gor, then so be it.

  With the gor easily a foot taller, even the mighty Reiklander appeared puny next to the brawny beastman. The lesser creatures seemed to sense the challenge unfolding between their herd-leader and the man-skin and didn’t interfere. Instead, they sped forward on reverse-jointed limbs to fight the others.

  “Eber!” Varveiter cried out as the gor loomed over his Reikland brother. But his attention was quickly forced elsewhere as the ungor came at him. He blocked a knife slash with his haft then punched the creature in its snout to daze it. Ignoring the pain in his fist, Varveiter swept his halberd around to cut the goat-like legs from under another creature whilst the first ungor staggered. A thrust to the belly did for that one too.

  “Eber!” he cried again, only able to take a few steps before another ungor blocked his path. Its spear thrust was deflected by Varveiter’s tasset, but it deadened his leg and he half-collapsed. Seizing its advantage, the beastman dropped its weapon and tried to rip Varveiter’s throat out instead. The old soldier turned just in time, putting his armoured forearm into the creature’s mouth. He roared when the ungor bit into the leather of his vambrace. Though small, the beast had a jaw like a blacksmith’s vice and kept on pressing.

  Its foul breath assailed Varveiter, redolent of rotten meat and dung. Just when he thought he’d pass out from the pain, the ungor’s eyes widened and it let go.

  Brand was revealed behind it, wiping the flat of his dagger on his tunic. His cold, dead eyes regarded Varveiter for a moment before he offered the old soldier a hand up.

  “Thank you, son,” he said as he was being hauled to his feet.

  Brand gave a curt nod.

  “Are you hurt, Siegen?” It was a voice like a blade being drawn from a scabbard, but it held a note of familial concern. Brand was not Varveiter’s son but the killer regarded him like a father figure nonetheless, and was the only Grimblade left who used his first name.

  “I’m fine. Go help Eber.”

  The brutish Reiklander was holding his own against the gor. Trained to use polearms in the Grünburg barracks, Eber made the most of those lessons now and kept the beastman at bay with sharp thrusts from his halberd. But the tactic also served another purpose. The gor was getting more and more frustrated, and increasingly reckless. It stomped and snorted, aiming savage swipes that sliced only air or clanged against Eber’s blade. One attack overstretched it, bringing its head forward. Seeing his chance, Eber lashed out and cut off one of its ram-like horns. Howling, the gor backed off a step and the Empire soldier came forwards. Eber jabbed his halberd into the beast’s thigh and drew blood. But it wasn’t enough to slow the creature, let alone kill it, and the gor came on with renewed fury.

  Varveiter looked on as Brand ploughed into
the forest after Eber. He could barely move, the pain in his leg was so bad. The bruised flesh pressed against his tasset as it swelled and drove hot pins of agony in the old soldier’s thigh. Despite the danger, he bent down to loosen the buckle and strap. A shadow passed across him as Varveiter came back up and was face to face with a snarling ungor. He scrabbled for his halberd, ramming the tip of its haft into the ground like a defensive stake. The charging ungor impaled itself, spit through like a boar, but left Varveiter defenceless as a pair of whelp hounds scrambled through the brush to savage him.

  The old soldier licked his lips before balling his fists.

  “Come on then, you ugly bastards.”

  One of the hounds leapt at him, as the second rounded on Varveiter’s blind side to come at his unprotected flank.

  He grimaced, but the expected impact didn’t come. There was a loud thunk of flesh on metal as Sergeant Karlich put his shield between Varveiter and the leaping hound. A yelp came from the second as Keller stuck it with his halberd’s point. Masbrecht, also returning from the flanks, staved in the creature’s skull with a hammer.

  “Sigmar’s breath, they do stink!” he spat.

  “No worse than Eber,” laughed Keller, a cruel smile splitting his hawkish features.

  “Aye, and he’ll be worse still dead,” said Karlich. “Now shut your mouths and follow me.”

  The sergeant led them the rest of the way to Eber, forcing back the ungors and what was left of the hounds. More were coming though, summoned by the death cries of their herd and the reek of blood.

  “Form rank!” shouted Karlich when Rechts and Lenkmann had joined them.

  “The rest of the regiment is just behind us,” Lenkmann reported, planting the banner and drawing his sword.

  Rechts beat out the order to form up with his drum. The others fell in dutifully.

  When it saw the gathering of men the gor backed away, recognising a threat. Eber was content to let it go. His muscles burned from the effort of fighting it, but he still took up his post in the fighting rank.

  “They’re regrouping for another charge,” said Varveiter. He’d freed his halberd and levelled it forward at the same angle as the others. Volker too had his familiar polearm, as did Brand, both collected from Rechts who’d strapped the weapons to his back before the engagement.

  “Hold this line!” hollered Sergeant Karlich. The beasts outnumbered them, but they were a rabble. The front rankers only needed to keep them back until the rest of the regiment arrived. Already, he could hear soldiers crashing through the undergrowth behind them.

  The gor herd-leader roared, snarling and lashing at the ungor trammelling the foliage to close with the man-skins.

  “Brace and meet them!” bellowed Karlich. In response, the angle of the halberds lowered again by just a fraction. Each man put his foot behind the base of the haft. Maddened by bloodlust, the ungors and whelp hounds struck the thicket of steel and were scattered. Some were shredded, others impaled. Any that got through were cut down by Karlich’s sword or brained by Masbrecht’s hammer.

  “Thrust!” came the sergeant’s next order and each man drove his halberd forward to strike a second wave of ungor. Rechts cried out when a rusty blade pierced his shoulder. Karlich battered the creature senseless with a blow from his shield before it could follow up, then Lenkmann stabbed it in the throat whilst it was prone.

  “Stay together.”

  At least a dozen more dead and injured ungor littered the ground, but with the gor at their backs the rest dare not falter.

  “Taal’s mercy, how many more of these swine are there?” asked Volker.

  “Come on, come on…” Karlich muttered under his breath. The sound of reinforcements was close, but was it close enough?

  The battle was fierce, and Karlich dare not avert his attention from it for even a second. In the end, it was the ungors that gave him his answer. The vigour drained out of them like air from a pig’s bladder and they retreated. Even the brutish gor lost its nerve. The scent of so much man-flesh and Empire-forged steel spooked rather than emboldened it. Bringing the coiled horn to its bovine mouth, it blew a long discordant note.

  Like cattle fearing the drover’s whip, the beasts took flight. Some reverted to all fours, galloping awkwardly alongside the hounds; others jerked with two-legged strides.

  Karlich felt the rest of his regiment at his back and found his confidence renewed.

  “All Grimblades,” he rallied, “advance!”

  Rechts drummed the pace as Lenkmann raised the banner. The forest was thinning and the beastmen headed to a clearing.

  Forty men drove nigh-on seventy beasts, broken by their good order and stolid defence.

  About twenty feet from the forest’s edge, Karlich called a halt. He could see through the trees and scrub to the broad clearing beyond. Caught up in a fleeing frenzy, the beasts didn’t stop until they burst through to the other side.

  Captain Leorich Stahler waited for them there with a block of fifty Bogenhafen spear and two lines of twenty handguns from Grünburg.

  An explosion erupted in the previously peaceful clearing as all forty handgunners discharged musket and shot. Smoke billowed in a vast cloud, swathing the field and drenching it with the acrid stench of blackpowder. Those beasts that survived the fusillade wandered from the grey smoke pall dazed and confused. A clipped command from Stahler sent the spearmen forward to mop them up. Some of the ungor at the rear of the herd had the sense to turn and flee but were swept up by Karlich’s Grimblades in short order.

  It was all over in a few bloody minutes and by the end all seventy-six beastman corpses were accounted for. Stahler killed the gor himself, when the two balls of shot embedded in its chest didn’t stop it. His sword flashed once with military efficiency and the herd-leader’s head was parted from its shoulders.

  “No trophies,” warned the captain calmly, as Karlich’s halberdiers emerged from the tree line. “Burn them all, every one.”

  Stahler was a tall, stocky man with a thick moustache and a dark beard. His lacquered armour was black and etched with Imperial motifs, amongst them the blazing comet and the rampant griffon. His longsword carried a laurel emblem just above the hilt and the pommel flashed as its embedded ruby caught the sun. A hat and helm sat snug in the crook of his arm, and his black hair was lathered in sweat from where he’d taken the headgear off.

  “Well met, Feder,” he said warmly, using Karlich’s first name and seizing his hand in an iron grip. “Any casualties?”

  “Mercifully none, though it was close.” Stahler raised an eyebrow, but the sergeant shook his head.

  “Nothing that troubled us unduly, sir.”

  “Good. We’re making camp in the next clearing. This one will stink to high heaven by the time we’re done with the pyres.” Stahler’s nose wrinkled as if he could already smell them. “The Reikwald is our pitch for the night. Come the morrow, we cross the Reikland border into Averland.”

  Karlich nodded.

  “Shall I have my men help with the building of the pyres, sir?”

  Stahler clapped him on the shoulder and leaned in. “You’ve done enough for one day, Feder. Head for the clearing and break camp. Your men have earned a rest.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Rousting’s over, Feder,” Stabler continued, staring into the middle distance. “Prince Wilhelm is on the march and all musterings are to meet up with him on the Steinig Road, four days’ march from Averheim.”

  Several days ago, word had reached the western provinces of an incursion from the east through Black Fire Pass. Though it was impossible to substantiate any of the reports, the news from roadwardens and outriders that had made it across the Averland and Stirland borders was that a huge greenskin army was on the move, sacking towns and burning villages. The Emperor’s response to the threat was, as of yet, unknown, at least to the likes of Stahler and Karlich. By contrast, Prince Wilhelm III of Reikland had raised what regiments he possessed, as well as a good n
umber of citizen militias from his provincial villages and hamlets, and ordered them to march forth in defence of their eastern brothers.

  “Any news from the other provinces?” Karlich asked. “Are we to ally with their forces on the border or at some other strongpoint?”

  Stahler laughed. It was a hollow sound, without mirth, and did nothing for Karlich’s confidence.

  “You know as much as I do. Though you’d think an orc and goblin invasion through Black Fire Pass would get some attention, wouldn’t you?”

  “Aye. But I’m surprised we’re not marching for the pass itself in that case. Couldn’t the dwarfs hold them?”

  Stahler’s gaze narrowed and he turned to Karlich again.

  “By all accounts, the dwarfs stepped aside.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Stahler admitted darkly. “We follow orders, Feder, you and I both. As soldiers that’s all we can really do. Prince Wilhelm marches, so do we.” He allowed a long pause as if deciding whether or not that made sense to him too, then added, “Faith in Sigmar.”

  “Faith in Sigmar, sir.”

  Eber watched from a short distance as Captain Stahler departed. He was overseeing the other regiments in the muster, making sure every single beast was hauled onto the pyres erected by the village militias and then set on fire.

  Sergeant Karlich walked past him, but didn’t meet Eber’s gaze at first.

  “You’ve earned a reprieve from pyre duty,” he said without smiling. “Volker, we’re setting up in the next clearing. Go on ahead and lead us through.”

  The Reikland hunter nodded and peeled off into the forest. Nearer to the Reikwald’s edge, the dangers within lessened. The Grimblades had driven the beasts some distance in the end, and the next clearing took them even farther from the forest’s arboreal depths. A stream could be heard, babbling through the trees. There was a village nearby too, Hobsklein it was called. Some of the militia had come from here. They, like the rest of the village’s inhabitants, were grateful to the Empire soldiers for rousting out and destroying the beastmen, and were only too happy for them to share a patch within sight of their stockade walls.