by Rob Sanders
‘We find our enemies on the dark path. Would you join them on it?’
‘No, master.’
‘Then you know what is necessary. What is needed. This thing presents with the blessings of the Ruinous Powers,’ Kastner insisted grimly.
‘Cannot the gods decide if it should live or die?’
‘We are their instrument,’ Kastner said, lifting the blade. ‘It is decided.’
Emil looked away.
‘I cannot watch,’ the squire told him.
Kastner’s gauntlets creaked about the sword’s hilt. He paused.
‘You have much to learn, squire,’ the templar said finally, before removing his blade from above the infant’s horrific form. ‘Your education is my burden. I will not fail you as you fail yourself. Pick up the child.’
‘My lord?’ Emil said with a face contorted by mixed emotions: shame, concern and disgust. Kneeling, Emil wrapped the creature back up in its swaddling.
‘Place it back on the water,’ Kastner commanded. ‘You will come to see the mistake in your mercy.’
Emil made his way back down to the water and set the screaming child back down on the sod of woven weeds before pushing it back off into the torpid current. By the time he returned, Kastner was in the saddle, his glare full of reproachful sadness. Knowing that he had disappointed his master, the squire remained silent.
The knight prompted Oberon on with his heels, Emil and his packhorse trailing behind with the troubled Gorst mumbling incessantly to himself in their hoof steps. Kastner kept his distance from the shrieking child, the sod carried ahead of them on the sloshing waters, bouncing along the reed banks on the opposite side of the river. The templar and his squire had little to say to one another for the next hour. Emil knew better than to disturb Sieur Kastner in such a black mood.
The infant cried. The waters lapped at the muddy banks and the horses crunched through the grit of the road. Emil watched his master who in turn was looking downstream, watching the far bank. Kastner suddenly sat up in his saddle, craning his head for a better view. Drawing Oberon to a stop, the templar slid down from the steed and led the horse to the roadside. Emil followed suit and knelt down beside his crouching master. Kastner had but one word for his squire.
‘Watch.’
Peering through the long grasses lining the river road, Emil saw that the sod of reeds had become tangled in a broken branch that lay off the bank. The infant screeched – its suffering rising with the heat of the dying day. Emil watched. He waited.
The squire’s heart thudded in his chest as a figure darted from the tree line and down the riverbank. Its body was covered in piebald fur and its legs were long and cloven. Looking up and down the river, the beast – with a long face and stubby horns of a nanny goat – snatched the child from the reeds and clutched it to itself. Within moments, the creature had become one with the forest again.
‘The gods decided,’ Kastner said. ‘Just not the ones you were counting on.’ Emil felt the biting reproach of his master’s words. ‘Now the infant is our enemy.’
‘My lord…’
‘Now it suckles gall from a mother borne of hate,’ Kastner continued, ‘to take its place in a tribe of beastmen. To spread the canker of the Ruinous Powers through the ancient forests and hunt us through the darkness. To maim. To defile. To kill. To sire more of its monstrous kind for us to destroy.’
‘I’m sorry, my master,’ Emil told him, his eyes on the grit at his boots.
‘Fortunately,’ Kastner said, getting to his feet. ‘Calamity is not without virtues of its own. There is a crossing not too far downstream. We shall pick up the trail at the riverbank and you will track the beast – as I have taught you – back to its foetid herd. There Sigmar’s holy work will be done. Have no doubt. We shall end the beasts that walk like men, with all their foul get.’
‘Yes, my lord,’ Emil said. He was having difficulty finding his way to the same fervent enthusiasm for the fight ahead as his master. The feeling followed him across the Flaschgang and into the depths of the Drakwald. Light left them and the squire was forced to light a lantern. Reading tracks by lantern light was not ideal and several times the squire lost the trail, only to have the templar find a hoof print here or the broken pieces of a snapped twig there.
‘Such foundlings,’ Kastner told the squire, ‘are considered by the beastmen to be gifts from their Dark Gods. Their ears are always open to the cries of the afflicted and abandoned.’
The tracks led the pair to the suggestion of a trail, a dark path winding its way through the broad trunks of the ancient forest. The haunting sound of creaking bark and hollowed bone-chimes hanging from the branches drifted on the dank air. Moss-ravaged stone markers started to signal the beginnings of a dark and shrouded route through the forest’s ancient tangle. Once upon the winding trail, Kastner and Emil could hear the distant cries of the child. They were gaining on the beastwoman. Every step into the Drakwald depths took them into the creatures’ accursed and ancient hunting grounds. Stinking water sat in leaf-choked puddles. Fungus ran rampant across dying trees while a miasma infected the very air they breathed. The stench of rot – of disease and of slow death – coated them with its rancid musk. Through it, bloated flies buzzed. Things that droned about them crawled across their skin and bit at their flesh.
At the glint of light through the blackness of the dense forest, Kastner told Emil to douse the lantern. Again the pair crouched to watch the beastwoman, foundling cradled in her filthy claws, approach some kind of concealed camp. The smothering forest broke ahead. Cankered leaves carpeted the floor – rustling with snakes, vermin and the large beetles they preyed upon – leaving the surrounding branches bare. Black birthing pools writhed with knots of foul worms. The fat trunks of dead trees seemed to thin, making way for a circle of rough menhirs and standing stones. At the centre raged a fire, threading the forest with a muggy smoke, and casting the beastwoman in silhouette.
There were others. Many others. Black outlines of muscle, hoof and horn. Some swigged blood and ale, while others roared a bestial laughter at one another. Several creatures butted thick skulls in drunken dispute as about them beasts were snarling, bleating and jostling each other in the shadows. Beyond the fire, Kastner could see a crude altar improvised atop a fallen stone, where some kind of bestial shaman was shaking a staff crowned with a star of bloodied antlers over a sacrificial offering. The creature was dressed in rags, its fur settled with moss and its flesh harvested by blooms of fungus. A single horn curled its way out of the creature’s skull. Behind the monster, the herdstone it was honouring with innocent blood ached with unnatural energies.
‘Sigmar has blessed us,’ Kastner hissed. Emil couldn’t find it in himself to agree. ‘It’s a warherd. Take courage, boy. You could not kill the child – the God-King has seen fit to pave the way to enemies you can. These beasts are the very children of Chaos. We shall take their hides in Sigmar’s name and bring light once more to this benighted part of his Empire.’
Carefully and quietly, Kastner drew Terminus from his saddle-scabbard and climbed down from Oberon. Taking his crusader shield from its saddle-mounting on the steed’s flank, Kastner slid his arm through the thick leather restraints. Even in the gloom, the Imperial cross was clear on the shield’s battered surface – a symbol of unity across Sigmar’s lands, with the God-King bringing tribes from the north, east and west of the Empire together with the under-dwelling dwarfs under one banner. Emil climbed down also, taking his crossbow and drawing the string back to its latch. Kastner shook his head. ‘Must you? I don’t mind you hunting our evening meal with that wretched thing but must it be used to slay the God-King’s enemies?’
‘Is this not a hunt of a kind, my lord?’ Emil replied, placing a bolt in the groove. Kastner disapproved of the crossbow. It was not a knightly weapon. On the other hand, it would take little for it to slam a bolt straight through
the thick plate of his armour. Or the thick hide of a beastman, for that matter. He looked back at the raucous celebration about the standing stones. The templar stared at the wizened shaman with suspicion as it conducted its primitive ritual above the butchery on the altar. Such primitives called on otherworldly powers against which a knight’s armour offered as little protection as against a crossbow bolt.
‘Then your first quarry can be that horned thing at the centre of the stones,’ Kastner told the squire.
‘You think it leads this herd?’ Emil asked.
‘Hopefully not for much longer,’ Kastner said.
‘I’ll need to get closer.’
Kastner looked down at Terminus, the greatsword’s blade shadowed by the darkness about it. ‘You and me both.’
Emil thought on the deer and boar he hunted through the woods.
‘Won’t they smell us coming?’
Kastner nodded at the squire’s packhorse. At the stinking corpse of Yurian Spartak draped over it.
‘We are masked by the stench of corruption,’ the templar said. He took his crusader’s helm from the pommel-horn of Oberon’s saddle. ‘Fight well,’ he said to Emil. ‘Know that the God-King is with us in this desperate place. That he fights at our side in the bloodshed to come. On my signal.’
Emil nodded.
‘Good luck, my lord.’
‘When your sword is guided by Sigmar, good fortune is not a factor,’ Kastner said. ‘Remember that.’ Kastner’s face disappeared behind his helm. Taking slow steps through the mud and mire, leading Oberon by the reins, Kastner advanced on the warherd. As he got nearer he could see that the gors’ fighting, drinking and dancing was masking their approach. With Spartak’s rotten stench hiding the sweet smell of their uncorrupted flesh from the host and their warhounds, the knight and his squire made it to the outlying circle of standing stones. Roughly carved runes and daemon-honouring symbols, splashed in old blood, covered the ancient obelisks. From the leafless branches of the canopy above swung gibbet cages of petrified wood. Each contained a miserable specimen. Prisoners – men, women and children – had been gathered by bestial hunting parties to provide fresh sacrifice for their unholy gods and flesh for their grumbling bellies. The warhounds that had hunted them had been chain-staked into the ground below the prisoners. They routinely leapt and snapped at the cages, snarls and feverish drool dribbling from their jaws.
The sound of an ugly death – wet and shrill – cut through the bombast of the bestial gathering. Risking a glance about the standing stone, Kastner saw the shaman, arms outstretched, holding his staff and a gore-oozing heart in his disgusting claws. He bleated something to the stars as a disturbed cloud of flies swarmed about his filthy robes. The shaman jabbed his staff at the cages, summoning another victim to his dark altar.
Moving his helm around, Kastner peered around the other side of his stone. A hulking beastman, a wall of muscle and wiry black hair emerged from behind the swollen trunk of a diseased oak. Upon its globed, shaggy shoulders sat a squat bovine skull. The mighty horns of a bull dominated the monstrous head, while its long face bore the curse of a thing sired by daemon on livestock. Steam smoked from its nostrils as it parted the braying and bestial merry-making. Several urn-swilling beastmen failed to move swiftly enough and produced from the monster’s chest a rumble of thunder. A skull-crushing fist came down on the first goatly head, sending the beastman crashing into the mud. The second was grabbed by its furry shoulders and butted into savage unconsciousness by the oxen-headed beast. It too went down to the celebratory braying and bleating of the herd. The creatures parted for the beastman, leaving only the warhounds in its way. The bull broke one of the hunting dogs across its hoof with a furious kick. The carcass flew into the air before being torn back down to the ground on its staked chain. Within moments the gnashing mongrels were flat to the forest floor, whining their submission.
Kastner watched the bull take instruction badly from its bleating shaman. Barging through the gibbet cages and setting them to creak and swing, the monster’s search produced sobs and doom-laden shrieks from the prisoners within. The people were broken. They had watched as their number had dwindled, one by one succumbing to the butchery on the altar and a bone-splintering feast for the hideous herd. Only one seemed to have any fight left in her. A mere girl by the look of her. Kastner watched as her legs flailed out at the monster from the gibbet cage. The girl gagged.
‘Get away from me! You stink,’ the girl called. The bull reached out for her but she pulled her legs within the cage. ‘Are you deaf as well as lame of brain, you abomination? Go find a spit.’
Kastner was impressed with the girl’s spirit – and she was a girl, seeming no older than Emil. She was dressed in rags that might once have been robes, made from material that might once have been white. The girl had the reckless abandon and wicked tongue of youth. Her eyes were dark and defiant while her hair was boyishly short and looked as if it had been scissored about a bowl. Kastner had seen such haircuts before – on the novice-sisters and vestals of religious orders. Standing in her gibbet, she clutched a package to her stomach: a pile of tomes, bound in a pile with twine. As the beastman grasped the wooden bars of the cage, the girl kicked at them with her sandals. ‘Get off, you reeking freak.’
The girl certainly didn’t sound like a sister. Ire dribbled from the bull’s steaming snout. Its ears rang with the bleatings of its shaman and the girl’s effrontery. With an effortless flex of its muscle-bound arms and shoulders, the monster tore the cage apart, causing the novice-sister to drop into the den of dogs below. A fang-faced hound brought up its head to snap at the girl. Swinging the books around on their length of twine, the girl smacked its snout aside. A great hoof came down beside her, crunching the dog into the ground for its impudence. The girl screamed as the bull snatched her up by the legs and dragged her through the mire towards the altar. Clawing at the muddy ground, the girl discovered that she had lost her pile of books. She reached out for the length of twine but the bull’s monstrous stride swiftly took her out of reach. As the beastman stomped away, the warhounds rose from their subservience and closed about the package of tomes like the gates of a snarling enclosure.
Kastner moved back around the standing stone, Terminus seeming to burn in his grasp. The bull laid its colossal, blood-stained hands on the girl, producing another shriek of surprise, but the monster simply grabbed her like a sack of grain and slammed her down on the altar. Lying in the butchered remains of the previous sacrifice, the novice-sister thrashed out with her feet and small fists, knocking the heads of toadstools and settled fungus from the shaman’s flesh. The bull glowered at the victim, its stench overpowering and its hot breath billowing about them. The goat-headed shaman seemed amused by the girl’s resistance, its yellow teeth bared and its foetid form wracked by a sickly laughter.
‘I hear your shepherd calling, whey-face,’ the novice said, hitting out at the ancient. She was simple and coarse of tongue but her spirit was indomitable. The shaman reached out for her with mildewed hands. ‘Don’t you touch me,’ she said, spitting at the beast. The girl tried to get up out of the gore but the shaman’s staff suddenly came down across her throat. It both held her to the altar and restricted her breathing. She clawed at it but dark energies were flowing through the monster and it was as immovable as a tree. The goatly grin was gone from the ancient’s furry lips. It moved in with a claw still wet with blood. The girl tried to cover herself as its hand explored her shredded robes, pulling from them a small silver hammer on a chain. It dawned on the shaman, as it had done on Kastner, that the girl was some kind of novice or the sister of a religious order. With the last of her breath and the staff across her throat, the girl hissed: ‘My… God-King… will… smite… thee…’
The shaman erupted with bleating laughter. It was infectious. The creatures of the warherd joined the celebration in savage mirth. As the concubine of an e
nemy god, the girl’s sacrifice would bring many blessings from their dark patrons. Selecting a flint knife from the altar, its razored blade stained red by the many lives it had taken, the shaman held it above the torso of the thrashing girl. The shaman’s eyes closed and its lips fell to daemon-honouring bleats and incantations.
Kastner stood, the smooth metal of his plate gliding up the moss-threaded stone. The templar was tensed. His mind and body were ready for the slaughter to come. He had been watching and waiting. Enemies had been counted. Every brute silhouette had been allowed to reveal itself, the measure of its reach and its likely intention. The knight knew by horn and frame which beasts would fight and which would scatter. He knew which creatures were far from their brute weapons and which were out of their mind on ale. He knew the things that had to die first. The ones that would test him with their gifts and savagery. The gors. The bull. The wizened shaman. He looked to Emil. The squire’s crossbow was already up, resting against an opposing stone.
‘Now,’ Kastner told him, his helm coming down and tapping against his breastplate.
The shaman’s ragged ears pricked. His eyes opened and rotated in their sockets. Interlopers. Intruders on unholy ground. Fresh sacrifices for the herdstone. His thick tongue wrapped itself around curses and ancient bewitchments.
Emil’s horse reared with sudden savagery. The squire instinctively moved, sending his bolt wide. The quarrel tugged at the shaman’s rags and shattered off the herdstone behind. The squire’s steed was not itself. The creature was glazed of eye and flashing out with its hooves. Emil ducked and backed from out of the cover of the obelisk as his horse’s shoe sparked off the stone. The packhorse was similarly affected, hawing and bucking the corpse of Yurian Spartak from its back. This had nothing to do with the dead warrior of Chaos, Kastner decided. This was the shaman asserting its control over the wild natures of its beast-kin.
Kastner watched as Oberon’s eyes glazed over like a northern lake. The stallion’s lips curled back from the long pegs of its teeth. The knight had to act fast. Kastner ran at the steed, his mail and plated fist bringing his crusader shield up, smashing the horse’s skull aside. The animal stumbled backwards, both the sense and spell’s influence knocked from it. Legs faltered and the stallion crumbled and crashed to the ground unconscious. The Sigmarite templar’s gauntlet creaked about the greatsword Terminus. He was less sentimental about his squire’s steed and packhorse, which they had recently picked up in Bergsburg. The crusader blade went up between the savage hooves of the reared steed and into its chest. Pulling the broad blade from the punctured ruin of the horse’s heart, Kastner spun around. Terminus passed through the packhorse’s throat before Emil’s steed hit the ground.
