Called to Battle: Volume Two Read online

  CALLED TO BATTLE

  VOLUME TWO

  A WARMACHINE COLLECTION

  STEVE DIAMOND

  MATT FORBECK

  CHRIS A. JACKSON

  HOWARD TAYLER

  Cover by

  IMAGINARY FRIENDS STUDIO,

  BRIAN SNODDY, AND ANDREA UDERZO

  CONTENTS

  MAP

  WELCOME TO THE IRON KINGDOMS

  MIND OVER MATTER

  A CASUALTY OF SCIENCE

  CONVICTION

  FLESH AND BONE

  GLOSSARY

  MAP

  WELCOME TO

  THE IRON KINGDOMS

  The world you are about to enter is the Iron Kingdoms, a place where the power and presence of gods are beyond dispute, where mankind battles itself as well as all manner of fantastic races and exotic beasts, and where a blend of magic and technology called mechanika shapes industry and warfare. Outside the Iron Kingdoms themselves—the human nations of the continent called Immoren—the vast and unexplored world of Caen extends to unknown reaches, firing the imaginations and ambitions of a new generation.

  Strife frequently shakes these nations, and amid the battles of the region the most powerful weapon is the warjack, a steam-powered automaton that boasts great mobility, thick armor, and devastating weaponry. A warjack’s effectiveness is at its greatest when commanded by a warcaster, a powerful soldier-sorcerer who can forge a mental link with the great machine to magnify its abilities tremendously. Masters of both arcane and martial combat, these warcasters are often the deciding factor in war.

  For the Iron Kingdoms, what is past is prologue. No event more clearly defines these nations than the extended dark age suffered under the oppression of the Orgoth, a brutal and merciless race from unexplored lands across the great western ocean known as the Meredius. For centuries these fearsome invaders enslaved the people of western Immoren, maintaining a vise-like grip until at last the people rose up in rebellion. This began a long and bloody process of battles and defeats. This rebellion would have been doomed to failure if a dark arrangement by the gods had not bestowed the Gift of Magic on the Immorese, unlocking previously undreamed-of powers.

  Every effective weapon employed by the Rebellion against the Orgoth was a consequence of great minds putting arcane talents to work. Not only did sorcery allow evocations of fire, ice, and storm on the battlefield, but scholars combined scientific principles to blend technology with the arcane. Rapid advancements in alchemy gave rise to blasting powder and the invention of deadly firearms. Methods were developed to fuse arcane formulae into metal runeplates, creating augmented tools and weapons: the invention of mechanika. The culmination of these efforts was the invention of the first colossals, precursors to the modern warjack. These towering machines of war gave the Immorese a weapon the invaders could not counter. With the colossals the armies of the Rebellion drove the Orgoth from their fortresses and back to the sea.

  The people of the ravaged lands drew new borders, giving birth to the Iron Kingdoms: Cygnar, Khador, Llael, and Ord. It was not long before ancient rivalries ignited between these new nations. Warfare became a simple fact of life. Over the last four centuries periodic wars have been broken up by brief periods of tense but wary peace, with technology steadily advancing all the while. Alchemy and mechanika have simultaneously eased and complicated the lives of the people of the Iron Kingdoms while evolving the weapons employed by their armies in these days of industrial revolution.

  The most long-standing and bitter enmity in the region is that between Cygnar in the south and Khador in the north. The Khadorans are a militant people occupying a harsh and unforgiving territory. The armies of Khador have periodically fought to reclaim lands their forebears had once seized through conquest. The two smaller kingdoms of Llael and Ord were forged from contested territories and so have often served as battlegrounds between the two stronger powers. The prosperous and populous southern nation of Cygnar has periodically allied with these nations in efforts to check Khador’s imperial aspirations.

  Just over a century ago, Cygnar endured a religious civil war that ultimately led to the founding of the Protectorate of Menoth. This nation, the newest of the Iron Kingdoms, stands as an unforgiving theocracy entirely devoted to Menoth, the ancient god credited with creating mankind.

  In the current era, war has ignited with particular ferocity. This began with the Khadoran invasion of Llael, which succeeded in toppling the smaller kingdom in 605 AR. The fall of Llael ignited an escalating conflict that has embroiled the region for the last three years. Only Ord has remained neutral in these wars, profiting by becoming a haven for mercenaries. The Protectorate has launched the Great Crusade to convert all of humanity to the worship of Menoth. With the other nations occupied with war, this crusade was able to make significant gains and seize territories in northeastern Llael.

  Other powers have been drawn into this strife, either swept up in events or taking advantage of them for their own purposes. The Scharde Islands west of Immoren are home to the Nightmare Empire of Cryx, which is ruled by the dragon Toruk and sends endless waves of undead and their necromantic masters to bolster its armies with the fallen of other nations. To the northeast the insular elven nation of Ios is host to a radical sect called the Retribution of Scyrah that is driven to hunt down human arcanists, whom they believe are anathema to their gods.

  The savage wilds within and beyond the Iron Kingdoms contain various factions fighting for their own agendas. From the frozen north a disembodied dragon called Everblight leads a legion of blight-empowered warlocks and draconic spawn. The proud, tribal race known as the trollkin work to unite their once-disparate people to defend their lands. Deep in the wilds of western Immoren, a secretive order of druids commands nature’s beasts to oppose Everblight and advance their own various plans. Far to the east across the Bloodstone Marches, the warrior nation of the Skorne Empire marches inexorably closer, bent on conquering their ancient enemies in Ios as a step toward greater dominion. Shadowy conspiracies have arisen from hidden strongholds to play their own part in unfolding events. These include the Convergence of Cyriss, an enigmatic machine-cult that worships a distant goddess of mathematics, as well as their bitter enemies the cephalyx, a race of extremely intelligent and sadistic slavers who surgically transform captives into mindless drudges.

  The Iron Kingdoms is a setting whose inhabitants must rely on heroes with the courage to defend them using magic and steel, whether in the form of rune-laden firearms or steam-driven weapons of war. The factions of western Immoren are vulnerable to corruption from within and subject to political intrigue and power struggles. All the while, opportunistic mercenaries profit from conflict by selling their temporary allegiance for coin or other favors. It is a world of epic legends and endless sagas.

  Enter the Iron Kingdoms, and discover a world like no other!

  MIND OVER MATTER

  BY HOWARD TAYLER

  Lieutenant Carlisle awoke to a blinding headache. He shut his eyes, but the pain remained. His ears rang so loud he couldn’t hear anything else, and the pounding in his head seemed to radiate outward from a throbbing knot behind his left ear, leaving him queasy. He was probably concussed. That might explain the nightmare images: a large silver spider climbing the back of a red-eyed crow, reaching over and around, the crow standing too straight, its beak too short, like a knobby gas mask, its eyes not just red, but glowing . . .

  Definitely concussed. He concentrated on his medical training and began taking inventory. He took a deep breath and listened for his heartbeat behind the ringing in his ears. He couldn’t find it, but th
e ringing pulsed in sync with the pounding of his head, so it was down there somewhere.

  He wiggled his fingers, then tightened his fists and felt the pulsing accelerate. He relaxed, took another breath, and wiggled his toes inside his heavy boots, happy to feel boots still on his feet. Prisoners of war didn’t always get to keep their boots.

  He opened his eyes again. The smears of hot orange light hurt to look at. His heart raced, and for just a moment he was back in the burning streets of Caspia pulling children from Menite flames, pulling hard, but this one was pinned, and her screaming had stopped, and then he was screaming and someone was pulling him away and beating him with a cloak to extinguish the flames.

  But no, there was no heat, and everything was smeared, not just the lights. Besides, the last he could remember he was on the northern front with Khador threatening, not Menites. No marching Menofixes to worry about here, right? He blinked, but everything remained blurry. He ticked his symptoms off on his fingers: localized headache, throbbing, ringing in the ears, blurry vision—enough for a positive diagnosis. Had he taken a rifle butt to the head? Lucky to merely be concussed, if he had.

  Those blurry smears of light were not the lanterns he’d hung in his surgery tent. He was indoors somewhere else, but he couldn’t imagine where. When he tried to remember what had happened, the pounding in his head intensified. The ringing in his ears intensified, and he suddenly felt tired, very tired.

  Concussed patients are kept awake. Sleeping kills the swelling brain. Concussed patients . . . He got just that far into the mnemonic before blacking out.

  “Lieutenant Carlisle, you gotta wake up, sir.”

  His head still hurt, and he still felt queasy, but the ringing in his ears was gone. He was on his back. Someone was giving his shoulder a tentative shake. He opened his eyes and the room swam into focus. Rough-hewn stone, like a mineshaft, with heavy timber braces. It was better lit than any mine he’d paid a house call to. A pair of long glass bottles with brass caps were strapped and bolted on either side of the span of timber across the ceiling. They glowed yellow-orange, like flames from a furnace, but he felt no heat from them. Were the Greylords bottling arcane light now?

  A soldier with his right arm in a sling leaned over and shook him again. “Doc, please. We need your help.”

  Carlisle sat up. His head pounded hard in response. He steadied himself and looked around. This shaft was just a side chamber, maybe twenty feet deep and ten feet wide, with stone on three sides and a low ceiling. Wooden planks covered the floor, and glistening black bars blocked the chamber’s open end.

  So he was a prisoner after all. He vaguely remembered the red coats of Khadoran Winter Guard.

  Four men shared the cell with him, and with relief he recognized each of them, though he didn’t know them well. These were his patients, each too injured to fight, none of them well enough to be locked untended in a mineshaft. Buck privates, these four, which put him in charge. If they were all prisoners, it fell to him to keep them well, to protect them, to maintain discipline and morale. Officer training drove that home repeatedly: morale and discipline were the two keys to surviving as prisoners of war.

  “It’s okay, Private Murdock. I’m awake now. Shaky and woozy, but awake. What’s our status?”

  “Locked in, sir. I don’t know who’s got us. I . . .” He shook his head and winced. Carlisle wondered if the lad might also be concussed. “Tingey’s in a lot of pain, Anders’ hand hurts, and Longstead is bleeding again.” Murdock gestured at the sling that tightly bound his arm in order to immobilize his right shoulder. “I’m okay, I guess. But Longstead . . .”

  Bleeding required immediate attention. Carlisle patted for the small field kit at his hip and was surprised to find it still there. He rolled to his side, pushed onto his knees, and stood. He waited for a wave of dizziness and nausea to pass, then minced over to where Longstead sat with his back against the stone wall.

  “Let me have a look, soldier.”

  Longstead clutched a locket in one hand. His other pressed down on his thigh. He nodded weakly and removed his hand from the wound. He had taken a grazing round, but it had torn a deep furrow through the meat. Carlisle remembered stitching it up yesterday—yesterday? Certainly it had been longer by now—and he could see that five of the eleven stitches had pulled loose, leaving one end of the wound open. The scabs had torn, and blood seeped and mingled with yellow pus. His gorge rose just a little, probably because of the concussion, not the gore.

  “It’s okay, boy,” he said with a smile. “You’re leaking, not bleeding out, and the pus is yellow, not green. Let me guess . . . you tried to run?”

  “Thought about it. Had to be close to use this.” He patted his boot.

  Carlisle lowered his voice. “You have a holdout in your boot?”

  “Yes sir,” Longstead said. “Fiscani matchbox, single shot. It’s loaded, and I’ve got ammunition for two more shots.”

  “And you charged Khadoran bayonets with it?”

  “No. I fell off the cot trying to get it out of my boot, and then I blacked out.”

  “That would explain why you’re still alive. Leave the Fiscani in your boot and don’t say anything more about it. Now hold still.”

  Carlisle took the scissors from his kit, cut away the stitches, and trimmed the ragged edges of skin they’d pulled past. Those bits of flesh were too dry to heal at this point. He threaded his heavy hooked needle, dipped it in the tiny vial of coal-tar antiseptic, and began pulling the wound closed, stitch by stitch.

  As he worked, he tried to remember the attack. He was in his tent and heard shouting, then gunshots. He stepped out and caught a glimpse of Khadoran soldiers running, but that was it. Not counting his concussion-induced dreams of a stubby-beaked, red-eyed, spider-backed crow, of course.

  “Murdock,” he said with a glance over his shoulder. “You said we’re locked in. I got that. What’s our status? How’d we get here? Who’s holding us?”

  “I think maybe Khadorans took us. The doom reavers wear metal masks and go bare-chested. Or that’s what Finn used to say.”

  Tingey spoke up. “’Tweren’t reavers. They don’t take prisoners—ever. Besides, the guys that grabbed us had ’jack hands, mechanical, like them Cryx thralls.”

  Carlisle remembered none of this.

  “Smelled like sweat, not rotting midden-meat.” Longstead winced as Carlisle pulled his stitches tight. “I saw a thrall once. It stank like Thamar’s own weeping sphi—”

  “I’m trying to sew here, Private,” Carlisle said. “You hold still and shush. Murdock, Tingey, I saw red coats and rifles. You saw bare chests and mechanical hands?”

  “It was dark. We doused the lights, see? But, yeah, that’s pretty much the last we saw. Then we all woke up in this hole, same as you, just faster.”

  Carlisle pulled the last stitch closed, poured as little antiseptic on a gauze pad as he thought he could get away with, and used that to bandage Longstead’s wound. Then he got back up to his feet, steadying himself against the wall. Less dizziness this time, but he was glad his stomach was empty. He sagged against the wall and took a few deep breaths.

  “You okay, Doc?”

  “I’ll be fine, Murdock.” Morale depended on him being fine. “Now, start again from the beginning.”

  “I . . . okay. I was getting some fresh air with Corporal Firmack, like you told us to. It was just getting dark, and suddenly half a dozen Khadorans came tearing through the camp at a run. Firmack fired on ’em, and they returned fire. Firmack went down, and then you came out of your tent right in front of the red who gut-shot him. That one swung his rifle stock at your head on his way past and just kept going. We pulled you and Firmack into the surgery tent, and then we girded up and grabbed what kit we could, in case we needed to march.

  “You wouldn’t wake up, so I stuffed some gauze in Firmack’s wound and held it down. He was breathing ragged and cursing like a Thamarite priest, but he stayed awake. It got dark out, and the red
s didn’t come back, but none of us were up to moving, so we doused the lantern and I stood watch.”

  Murdock paused, then lowered his voice and looked at the ground. “Well, I sat watch, not stood, sir. And I fell asleep. I’m sorry sir.”

  Carlisle looked around the room. “Where’s Firmack now?”

  “I don’t know. Middle of the night, the metal-handed men, they ripped the whole tent off of us before we could do anything, and next I knew they’d grabbed me and my head went all fuzzy.”

  “So this was last night?”

  “Two nights ago, at least, sir.”

  “Two? Have they been feeding us?”

  “Not as such, sir. Water comes out of that pipe-bib next to the bars if you turn the handle, and Tingey’s got three mess bags. We’ve been going easy on the rations, though. Just one tin each yesterday.”

  Carlisle’s stomach growled and then queasily complained. This was not normal prisoner treatment. Maybe there was an interrogation coming. Their flesh hadn’t been flayed from their burning bodies, so they weren’t being held by Menites, praise Morrow, but this didn’t feel like a Khadoran prison cell either. It was something new, but it wouldn’t do to let the soldiers know he was concerned. Morale and discipline.

  He pushed away from the wall and walked over to where Anders sat.

  “How are you feeling, soldier?”

  “Hurts a lot,” Anders said, holding up his bandaged hand.

  Carlisle crouched next to him, pulled back the bandages, and examined the wound. The hand had been split from web to palm between the first two fingers, but that was a price Anders had gladly paid to keep a Khadoran axe out of his skull.

  It was festering deep. The surface was clean, but the edges were swollen and red, pulling at the stitches, and Carlisle saw a greenish-purple darkness deep in the wound that spread through the hand. That told him all he needed to know. He didn’t have enough antiseptic in his field kit to open the wound up again and clean it properly, but from the looks of it, he would have had to do that yesterday to make a difference.