by Rob Sanders
‘Again,’ the knight bawled through his helm at the squire who was reloading his crossbow.
The fire raged. The warherd remembered themselves. Ale-jars were flung into the standing stones of the circle. Muscle-bound silhouettes came at the templar. The longhorns first. Savages already tested in battle with greenskins and ratmen. Monsters who had killed enough and had lived long enough to enjoy the appreciations of their herd. They had never met a Knight of the Twin-Tailed Orb, however. They had never met Diederick Kastner. Their beastflesh was tough and wiry, shot through with sinew and strong bone. Terminus cleaved through it like clotted cream. Kastner became a silhouette amongst many – the fire framing both the clean, confident movements of his training and the invention he introduced in between.
The beastmen, in contrast, were bludgeoners, favouring scavenged axes and stone hammers. Their weapons were rude and rusted but the strength with which they swung them was hate-fuelled and barbaric. There was no organisation or consideration of tactics, only an animal cunning and a pecking order, with monsters of greater size and length of horn engaging first. It was easy for a warrior – even a templar knight moving within the exhausting constraints of metal plate – to lose himself in battle. To become such an animal.
The lost were in the thrall of the Blood God – their rage a mindless offering. Such men were no better than the beasts Kastner was taking apart with the disciplined strokes and thrusts of his templar blade. Kastner had reasoned that the best warriors thought their way through battle. They knew where their blade would be the moment before it landed. They knew where the service of their shield would be required before the fatal landing of the axe. A man that fought by instinct alone – like even the most capable savage – could not know such things. He could not predict the lethal preferences of his enemy and he could not learn from them mid-engagement. Battle was a serious game of strategy and skill, like those played with boards and fancy pieces. Able players could rely on rehearsed moves, while simultaneously exploiting the weaknesses of opponents as they were revealed before them.
Terminus hacked limbs from muscular torsos. Shoulder-cleaving swings took heads almost from shoulders. Streams of hot beast-blood sailed about the knight as the herd’s best gors carpeted the ground within the circle. Kastner’s shield soaked up the frustration and desperation of axe-wielding monsters that roared at him as if it meant something. The onslaught continued as Kastner plunged his blade through the carcasses of their fellow savages. In between such surgical thrusts, the templar found a moment to slam back at the creatures at his rear, smashing jaws from goat-skulls with the cross guard of his sword and kicking monstrosities back into the flames of the furious fire.
As the carnage unfolded and the warherd began to get over the drunken shock of the intrusion, the shaman slashed his flint knife through the air, motioning the hordes of lesser gors and brays on into the slaughter. As the herd’s best butcherers were cleaved apart by the fearless knight, there were few beastmen that relished such a proposition. With the ale souring in their bellies and their spears and cudgels loose in their claws, they hesitated.
During a raid or the murderous slaughter of a village, the cogs of barbaric carnage were usually oiled by the blood spilled by beastlords and longhorns – the very creatures the plate-clad knight was hewing his way through. With lesser creatures and beastlings fleeing into the darkness of the forest, many of the herd’s savages thought of doing the same. Several hoofsteps back, however, they were stopped in their tracks by the thunderous roar of the bull. The beast snatched a broad woodcutter’s blade from a nearby creature and took its head clean off with a bellow-driven sweep. Both the sound and the violence drove the warherd on, like a storm at their backs, across the stone circle at the templar knight.
The shaman bleated its alarm at the bull, fearful of offending its gods and intent on completing the sacrifice. Spinning the axe in its colossal fist, the beast caught it and launched the weapon haft over blade at the tree supporting the gibbet cages of the prisoners. Embedding itself in the diseased trunk, the axe cut through the lines supporting them. The cages crashed to the ground amongst and on top of the herd’s warhounds. Like the horses, the dogs had been driven to mindless savagery by the shaman’s incantations. The prisoners shrieked their terror as their cages shattered and the diseased maws of the dogs set upon them, tearing the flesh from their bones.
The last of the beastlords was a four-horned monstrosity that Kastner thought he had put down in the first few kills. The monstrous thing, driven on by some bestial refusal to die, swung a mace made up of the embedded fangs of some sabre-toothed conquest. Twice the weapon had punctured Kastner’s shield and had even plunged through his plate pauldron and into his shoulder.
As Kastner cut pieces off the beastman with his greatsword and the creature mauled him in return with its thagomizer, Emil found it difficult to take the shot. He had held the crossbow to his eye for some time. Each time he prepared to take the shot, Kastner’s armoured form or the flailing body of one of his brute victims moved before the target. As Emil had moved to get a better shot, beastmen had joined the fray – some bound for the squire and intercepted by Kastner.
The shaman, eyes closed and lips mouthing ritual incantations in some dark tongue, held his flint blade over the girl’s chest. The novice’s bosom rose and fell rapidly in alarm, the creature’s staff holding her down on the altar. She pushed up against the staff but it would not move. The mumbling ended. The knife came up. Emil’s target would not wait. The squire let the bolt fly. It whistled between Diederick Kastner and the four-horned beast he was exchanging blows with – the pair barely noticing.
The shaman did notice. The quarrel – which had flown straight and true – had found its way between the creature’s unsettling eyes. It stumbled against the mighty herdstone at its back as the flint knife clattered to the altar. The macabre staff followed. Sliding back down the herdstone, the shaman was dead by the time it reached the cankered earth. The novice-sister sat upright, clutching at her throat. She was coughing, cursing and trying to get her breath.
There was snarling. There was barking. And it was getting closer. Emil turned to see that the hulking bull had stomped through the flesh-stripped prisoners and released the warhounds. The beast towered over the chain-trailing creatures, snorting its hate at the squire before thundering its way back towards the Sigmarite knight and the horde of bestial kin it had unleashed at him. Emil hooked the stirrup over his boot and feverishly reloaded the crossbow.
‘My lord,’ he said, the words leaving his lips like a last regret. Bringing the crossbow up, he slammed the bolt into the lead creature, pinning it to the ground. He reloaded. The pack scrambled on.
Kastner looked to the squire and then back at the four-horned beast before him which refused to die. Behind the creature was a horde of bull-spooked beastmen, charging with spears and gnarled clubs. Another hound went down. ‘Master,’ Emil called, hammering a third mongrel into a tree trunk.
Kastner threw Terminus down at the ground, the blade quivering in the soft earth, and allowed the beastman’s fanged mace to bury itself in his shield. Shrugging the weapon aside and with his gauntlets free, the knight seized the creature by the horns and butted it in the snout with his crusader helm. And again. And again. With the beastman’s ruined face splattered across the helm, Kastner released it, allowing the creature to fall backwards.
‘Present your blade,’ Kastner roared across the stone circle, retrieving his own weapon.
The pack was almost upon the squire. Emil lined up his next shot but realised the futility of the action. Allowing the crossbow to drop, he tore his short blade from his scabbard, slashing the first of the hounds to one side. Another came at him and received the same treatment. Somehow, in the unfolding havoc, Emil found his way to his training. The disciplined cuts and slashes that Kastner had taught him. Moves that suited a short blade and an inexperienced swordsman
. But there were too many. Too many sets of jaws. Too many blood-crazed hounds, savaging his legs, clamping onto his arms, leaping at the squire and dragging him down. Emil became a mound of emaciated bodies, whippet tails and diseased maws, tearing his body in different directions.
Kastner saw the occasional flash of the blade and the isolated yelps of animals unfortunate enough to find themselves skewered by it. The squire was down, however, and needed help. The templar took several determined steps towards the screaming squire, but the dogs were dragging his fang-slashed body into the trees. The templar’s steps became an awkward run, exhaustion and the weight of his plate dragging him down. He felt the warherd slam into his shield like a team of charging stallions at the head of a runaway coach. Kastner fell to one side, almost tripping over his own armoured boots. He almost went over, which Kastner knew would have been the end of him. Down on the ground in full plate armour, he would have been an easy sitting target for crooked spears.
Self-reproach sizzled in his chest. He could not save the squire without saving himself. He was no use to the God-King dead. Kastner dug his boots into the sloppy earth. The horde pushed. With a roar the knight heaved back.
‘Sigmar,’ he hissed within his crusader helm. ‘My god… my king…’
Kastner heaved. He heaved again. Blows began to rain down on his armour from the flanks. He gasped as a spear slipped in between his plates and cut, hot and wicked, into his side. Cutting through the shaft with Terminus, he pushed on into the centre of the mob. Every mongrel and half-breed wanted to own his death. The yellowness of their hearts was gone. Their bare chests beating with the confidence of their number, the success of their savage blows and the knight’s impending death. Diederick Kastner had no intention of meeting such an expectation.
‘Sigmar, grant me the strength to cleanse this land of your foes…’ the knight snarled through his efforts. He heaved at the mob before him. His teeth gritted beneath his helmet and his boots stamped footholds in the ground. He hurled himself at the shield and the shield at the warherd. ‘…as the light cleanses the darkness.’
One final gargantuan push had driven the monstrosities before him into the embrace of their own fire. Kastner screwed his eyes shut against the brightness that flooded his helm. He felt heat pass rapidly through the metal of his plate. In driving the throng before him, the templar had half-stepped into the fire himself. The silhouettes of his enemies, thrashing at the knight with their weapons moments before, were now thrashing at themselves – bleating and screeching – as the beastmen attempted to extinguish the flames licking their way through their shaggy fur.
Kastner turned, the heat scorching its way through his plate searing the skin. With part of the horde aflame and the rest unwilling to follow them, the knight found himself alone. The hammer of blows raining down on his buckled plate had ceased. Spears failed to lance his flesh. Muscular bodies no longer clashed with his own. The beastmen huddled together. They were a wall of spear-points and the crude presenting of weaponry. Kastner had reminded them why they should fear him.
The templar’s steaming plate rattled as his shook himself back to composure. He stretched his tension-knotted neck from side to side. Terminus ached in his gauntlet and he clashed it three times against his mangled shield.
‘Come on!’ the knight roared at them. ‘Come on! I have the God-King’s absolution in my hand. Come and get it…’
One exhausted step followed another, taking the templar into the bestial ranks. A ram-headed beast came at him with a stone hammer. It died. An antlered monstrosity tried to impale him on a pitch-forked spear. It died. A stubby-horned fiend threw itself and its serrated hatchets at him. It died. Cut. Thrust. Shield-smash. Repeat. As his plate cooled, righteous hatred for the darkbreeds burned. He would kill them all. Holding back a pair of dead-eyed goat monsters, Kastner swung Terminus about him, severing head after bleating head. Pushing the beastmen back he pulled the shield aside and slammed the length of the greatsword blade through the pair of carcasses. He would kill them all. The stone circle stank of death like never before. Kastner found himself striding through mounds of corpses. The beastmen stumbled through their dead. Terminus sang through them – its blade an instrument upon which a ballad was played. A story of drama and death. Mostly death. Even as the herd thinned and the cowardly creatures went to flee, the knight cut them down, opening their shaggy beastflesh from their broad shoulders to their buttocks. He. Would. Kill. Them. All.
But he wouldn’t. The bull – a ferocious tower of bovine fury – denied him. The colossus stomped forward, shaking its mighty horns and smashing remaining beastmen aside with its huge fists. As the broken bodies of its kindred hit trees and the standing stones of the circle, the bull grabbed the herd’s final gor. The goat-faced wretch bleated in terror before the bull tore it in two. With gore and intestines dribbling through its huge fingers, the monster snorted pure hate at the knight standing before him.
‘Come on,’ Kastner said, beckoning it on with a gesture of his shield. ‘In the God-King’s name, let’s finish it…’
The bull stormed at him, its hooves shaking the ground like thunder. Its head came down. Its horn-points came at the templar, dark with dried blood. Kastner assumed a fighting stance. He was ready to side-step the beast and use its own momentum to take it past him. There he would deliver a strike to fell the creature – or at least slow it down. The bull was fast for something so huge and at the last moment Kastner decided that he would not be able to evade the avalanche of muscle and rage coming at him. Bracing himself behind the shield, Kastner found himself driven backwards before the impact.
Corralled between the monster’s two great horns, Kastner was slammed back into the rough stone of a primitive obelisk behind. The hulking beast grabbed the standing stone with its huge hands, and trapping Kastner between the unforgiving obelisk and its thick skull proceeded to pound the knight to oblivion. Kastner felt his shield buckle and his plate crumple about him. His head bounced back and forth within his helm as the bull smashed him into the standing stone.
The assault stopped and Kastner attempted to recover his breath. The beast’s huge skull moved away, once again allowing the knight to see the light of the fire, the stone circle and the shadows that lay beyond. The only other living thing within the circle was the girl, who, benefitting from the bull’s distraction, had picked her way back through what was left of the hound-mauled prisoners to find her precious pile of books.
Kastner pushed himself away from the obelisk, his plate having moulded itself to the stone’s imperfections. Like a prize-fighter trapped in a corner by his opponent, Kastner was pushed back. His shield battered him into the rough stone, its metal surface pounded to uselessness by the beastman’s colossal fists. Suddenly the shield was gone, torn away by the bull – the creature eager to pulverise the knight’s armoured form and the soft flesh that lay within. A fist came at Kastner. He ducked. Barely in time. The woolly knuckles of the beast smashed stone from the monolith. Another almost took the knight’s head off – settling instead for shattering away a section of the obelisk.
Kastner launched himself at the colossal creature’s chest. It was like the side of a building, muscles bulging like bricks – it had its own brutal architecture. Kastner slammed it again with his battered pauldron – enough to make room for Terminus, and the chest-opening sweep of the blade that gashed the beast from naval to nipple. The monster bellowed its pain, smacking the broad blade from the knight’s exhausted grip. As the sword clanged off the standing stone and onto the wet earth, the beast back-fisted Kastner across the circle.
For moments following, the knight had little idea where he was. The brightness of the fire eclipsed all else. Its crackle was a mind-aching torment. The ground seemed to move with a sickening motion. Suddenly Kastner was up. The bull was upon him once more. It lifted the armoured templar and flung him like a sack of grain back across the circle. He hit an
other of the standing stones. There was a sharp pain in the back of his skull. When he opened his eyes he found that his helm had gone. He was sitting at the base of an obelisk. All he could hear was the fury spilling out of the beastman. It charged.
Kastner toppled himself to one side, his plate rattling like a wagon on a rough road. He felt himself drifting in and out of consciousness. The brute’s hoof smashed down into the base of the stone where the knight had been. Kastner crawled miserably away, plated arm over buckled arm. The creature raged above him like a storm. The knight dashed his face in the muddy pool he was crawling through, bringing him briefly back to clarity. The standing stone gave an excruciating moan as the bull tore at it, toppling it across the knight’s scrabbling form. Trapping Kastner briefly, the irregularity of the obelisk and the marshiness of the ground beneath its fallen length allowed the knight to scrape his armoured legs free. Before Kastner knew it, the beast was bringing another stone down on him. The knight rolled to one side through the mud, the mire squelching in through the rents in his plate. The bull grasped a broken chunk of stone, bigger than the monster’s own head, and held it above its horns. Mounting the fallen stones, the creature stood above the knight’s prone form, snorting its clouded exertions into the night air. Its arms trembled. Kastner stopped crawling. He rolled back over to present himself to the bovine colossus… the squire’s recovered crossbow in his muddy gauntlets. It was not a knightly weapon – but it would serve. Kastner fired.
