by Warhammer
This time Felix and Kat hadn’t bothered to strip out of their armour before lying down, and were therefore quick to the walls to see the zombies’ new trick. Under cover of darkness the undead had brought tall, crudely made ladders to the castle and leaned them against all the land-side walls, and were now pulling themselves up towards the battlements in droves.
This wasn’t much of a threat – at least not on its own. The zombies were terrible climbers and fell often, and the handgunners found it easy enough to use a pike to lever the ladders away from the wall and topple them to the ground. The problem was, they never stopped. It didn’t matter how many times the defenders pushed the ladders back and sent all the zombies smashing into the moat, they just got up again, righted the ladders and resumed climbing, single-minded and untiring.
The handgunners were quickly joined by spearmen and river wardens sent by their captains to relieve them, but even with reinforcements, the men on the walls were run ragged, hurrying from ladder to ladder in a never-ending foot race. Unfortunately, it was even more pointless to try to kill the dead who mounted the ladders, for Kemmler would never run out. No matter how many the defenders might decapitate, or shoot through the head, there would always be more zombies to take their place.
Felix and Kat joined in the dizzy dance of run and push, run and push, run and push until the sky began to turn grey in the east, when they were finally both so tired they could no longer handle the pikes they had been given, and collapsed panting against the crenellations, legs as weak as twigs.
Captain Hultz, who looked no less weary than they, took the pikes and shooed them away. ‘Go and sleep,’ he said. ‘You’ve done the work of ten tonight, the both of you, and the morning watch comes on any minute. Away. Away.’
Felix saluted and helped Kat up, and they staggered down the stairs, arm in arm, towards the knights’ residence. But as they stumbled along the quayside, Kat stopped suddenly and blinked at two boatmen who were using boat hooks to manoeuvre a stone from the dismantled captains’ residence under their winch so they could lower it into an oarboat.
‘What is it?’ Felix asked, frowning.
‘Boat hook,’ said Kat.
‘What?’
The girl was gibbering from fatigue.
‘Just a minute,’ she said, then shrugged out from under his arm and crossed to the men.
‘I need that,’ she said, pointing.
The boatmen looked at her askance.
‘The stone?’ said one. ‘What d’ye want a stone for?’
‘The hook,’ said Kat. ‘I want the hook. And some rope. A lot.’
The boatmen looked at her again, and Felix did too. He had no idea what she was on about. Still, it was clear she’d had some sort of idea.
‘If you can spare it,’ he said politely, trying to make up for Kat’s almost dwarfish brusqueness.
The boatman who had spoken shrugged, then went back onto the sloop and returned a moment later with a third boat hook and a coil of rope.
‘I’ll need all this back, mind,’ he said, but Kat was already hurrying back to the stairs, tying the end of the rope around the T-shaped handle of the hook.
Felix stumbled up the stairs after her, still baffled, as she found Hultz and held out the hook and rope to him.
‘Here,’ she said, weaving slightly where she stood. ‘This will stop them.’
Hultz blinked. ‘And what is it supposed to be? A weapon? Am I to hook the corpses’ guts out with it?’
‘Not the corpses,’ said Kat. ‘The ladders. They can’t climb without the ladders.’
Felix goggled at her. So did Hultz.
‘Sigmar,’ he said at last. ‘Sigmar, it might work.’
He took the roped hook from her and called to his men. ‘Lanzmann, Weitz, Sergeant Dore, take the end of this.’
Felix and Kat followed him and looked out as he let the hook drop down the wall. Just to their left, a mob of zombies was laboriously righting a fallen ladder and angling it towards the battlements.
‘Perfect,’ said Hultz, and sidestepped until he was above them.
The ladder bounced as it slapped against the wall, just a few feet below the crenellations, then steadied as the first of the zombies started to mount it.
‘Quickly now, quickly now,’ Hultz muttered to himself as he flicked the hook towards the rungs of the ladder. ‘Before they all pile on.’
He got it on the second try and pulled it tight. ‘Now, lads, now!’ he shouted. ‘Haul away!’
The three handgunners pulled on the end of the rope, gathering up the slack, then began to drag the ladder up the wall. There were two zombies at the bottom of it, but as it started to rise, one lost its grip and fell away. The other came up with the ladder, and clung to it as the gunners grabbed it and pulled it up hand over hand.
Hultz was waiting for it, and stove its head in with a flanged mace as the bottom of the ladder reached the top of the wall. The corpse fell away and the handgunners tossed the ladder down into the courtyard with a cheer.
Hultz turned to Kat with a grin. ‘Girl, I do believe you have saved us a whole lot of bother.’
‘And given us a nice supply of firewood,’ said one of the gunners. ‘Nice of that necromancer to provide for our cook fires.’
‘Now all we need is food,’ said Hultz, then turned to his men again. ‘Lanzmann, Weitz, go tell them river pirates we need all the hooks and rope they have, and be quick about it!’
As they started back towards the stairs, Felix looked out over the wall at the fields beyond. The sun hadn’t crested the horizon yet, but there was enough light to see all the way to the black line of forest, and a flurry of seething movement there caught his eye.
‘What is that?’ he asked, slowing.
Kat followed his gaze and they stepped to the wall for a better look. A tall, crooked shape was rising from the mist in front of the trees. It looked like a mummified giant, or an enormous cocoon, white and lumpy and asymmetrical, with a huge gaping mouth yawning and black at the top – and it was crawling from top to bottom with a constantly moving skein of zombies.
With growing horror and fascination, Felix realised that they were building the thing as he watched, like wasps constructing a hive, though instead of wood pulp and mud, they were using dead trees and bones and stretched skin. Angular black branches stuck out at random from the structure’s mottled sides, and its base was affixed to giant curved tusks that looked like they had come from the skeleton of some long-dead leviathan.
‘Taal and Rhya protect us, it’s a siege tower,’ said Kat.
Felix shuddered. That was precisely what it was. The curved tusks were skids so the thing could be dragged over the fields, and the hideous yawning mouth at the top would disgorge swarms of undead troops onto the walls. And another was just beginning to rise beside it.
‘And look there!’
Kat pointed to the left of the towers, where two lower, wheeled constructions crouched in the shadow of the forest like monstrous insects – a heavy-timbered trebuchet and a catapult, as strangely constructed as the towers.
‘Siege engines too,’ said Felix, his stomach sinking. ‘They’ve been busy.’
No one else seemed to have noticed the things. They were all too consumed with the task of hooking or pushing away ladders, but at Kat and Felix’s words, the men on either side of them looked up to see what they were talking about.
‘Sigmar’s blood!’ said one. ‘Look at that!’
‘Captain Hultz!’ cried another. ‘The wood! Look to the wood!’
Hultz looked up from trying to hook another ladder and cursed, but then raised his voice to shout down the babble of fear that was spreading like fire along the wall as the rest of the men began to notice the towers and the engines.
‘Easy, lads! Easy!’ he cried. ‘They ain’t moving yet. And plenty of time to prepare when they do. Keep on them ladders for now and we’ll see to the rest when they get here.’ He turned to his sergeant. ‘Dore! My respects to
Steward von Geldrecht, and if he could come have a look-see when he has a moment.’
Sergeant Dore saluted and trotted off to the stairs, and Felix steered Kat after him.
‘And we’d better tell the Slayers,’ he said.
The distance Gotrek, Rodi and Snorri had dug overnight was astonishing. They had bored down through the floor of the captains’ residence cellar to a depth of about eight feet, then tunnelled east through the earth under the castle walls, and were already a few paces beyond them. A steady stream of squires and kitchen boys went in and out of the hole, carrying out buckets full of dirt and mounding it up all over the room. Off to one side, Volk, the artillery captain, was directing his gunners as they packed blackpowder into sections of clay drain pipe and affixed fuses to them. He gave a grin and a salute as Kat and Felix lowered themselves into the hole.
Felix had to bend almost double to enter the tunnel, for the Slayers had shaped it to dwarf proportions, and it was very low. A lamp was pegged into the wall at the far end, and he could see Gotrek and Rodi’s broad muscled backs gleaming in its glow as they swung their picks at the workface. Snorri was a little bit behind them, shovelling the dirt into buckets for the squires to take away.
Felix was pleased to see that Gotrek and Rodi were still working side by side without growling at each other. The truce that had existed since they had discovered the broken runes of warding seemed to be holding. Felix only hoped it would stay that way.
‘Slayers,’ he called, picking his way down the tunnel. ‘Kemmler’s undead are building siege towers and siege engines. It looks like they will try the walls tonight.’
Gotrek nodded without breaking his rhythm. ‘We will reach the corpses’ tunnel soon after sunset,’ he said. ‘We will return to the walls once… once it is collapsed.’
Felix frowned. It sounded as if Gotrek was out of breath. That was almost unheard of. Felix had seen him fight a whole day and spend hours digging through solid rock and hardly do more than breathe hard, but now he was gasping.
‘Gotrek?’
The Slayer cleared his throat and spat. ‘I’m fine. Just dust.’
Rodi shot a look at Gotrek at that, but said nothing. Felix swallowed, unnerved by Gotrek’s ragged voice and Rodi’s glance.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Dust.’ He hesitated, wanting to say more, but then just nodded. ‘Send word when you’re nearly through. We’ll return.’
‘Aye,’ said Gotrek.
Felix and Kat exchanged a look as they made their way back out of the tunnel, but neither spoke what they were thinking. Was it truly dust, or was it the slivers from Krell’s axe doing their evil work? Could the vile specks really kill Gotrek? And if so, how long did the Slayer have?
As Felix and Kat stepped back into the courtyard they saw a very bleary Steward von Geldrecht limping down from the walls and stroking his beard with nervous fingers.
‘Hultz must have shown him Kemmler’s towers,’ said Kat.
Felix nodded. The man looked overwhelmed. His face was grey and slack, and he limped unseeing through the sawhorses and timber stacks of the hoarding crews as he headed for the stairs to the keep. Before he reached them, however, Sister Willentrude saw him, and stepped from where she had been praying before the ever-burning pyre of the dead. Her habit and apron were covered in blood, and she looked like she hadn’t slept since Felix had seen her last – which was likely true.
‘My lord steward!’ she cried after him. ‘I demand you release Tauber and his assistants!’
Von Geldrecht turned towards her, blinking like a sleepwalker, as all around him the construction crews raised their heads. ‘Sister?’
‘Twenty-two men died last night, my lord,’ she said, her eyes flashing. ‘Twenty-two men that would have lived with a surgeon’s care. I and my initiates can keep disease and infection at bay with our prayers and purified water, but we are not adepts of the knife and the needle. We cannot stop men from haemorrhaging to death, or drowning in their own bile.’ She raised an accusing finger to the steward. ‘You have killed these men, my lord. By locking Surgeon Tauber away, you doomed them to unnecessary–’
Von Geldrecht caught the sister by the arm and started to drag her towards the keep, a ghastly smile plastered to his face. ‘Let us discuss this in private, sister,’ he hissed. ‘In private!’
Felix smiled grimly to himself. He hoped she gave him even more of an earful in private, for she was right. When von Geldrecht had caved in to Bosendorfer’s threats against Tauber, he had endangered the lives of every man in the castle. If there was anyone other than Kemmler to blame for the fix they were in, it was the steward and the greatsword captain.
Quite a few of the men in the courtyard, however, didn’t seem to see it that way. They stared after von Geldrecht and Sister Willentrude as Felix and Kat stumbled through them, murmuring amongst themselves.
‘Does the old cow think Tauber would save us?’ scoffed one. ‘After he poisoned all the rest.’
‘I don’t know,’ said another. ‘I would have died after Grimminhagen if not for him. He saved my arm and no lie.’
‘Men can change,’ said a third. ‘He wouldn’t be the first who came back south a different man than marched north.’
‘Bosendorfer says he was a bad’un before he went north,’ said the first man. ‘A poisoner from the start.’
Kat shook her head angrily as she and Felix entered the knights’ residence. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I think words are more poisonous than poison.’
When Felix and Kat woke again that afternoon, they found that Kemmler’s second siege tower and another trebuchet had been completed at the edge of the woods, assembled by the ceaseless, swarming industry of the undead. More unnerving, the zombies who surrounded the castle had learned their lesson, and were no longer throwing their ladders up against the walls to have them stolen by the defenders’ hooks. Instead, they held fresh ladders at their sides and stared up at the battlements with dead blank eyes – waiting.
And while the dead waited, the defenders scrambled to finish all their tasks before the storm broke. Men were levering apart the last stones of the officers’ residence tower and winching them onto the oarboats for their last trips to the water gate. The powder monkeys were laying out the powder and shot beside the cannons that faced the land side of the castle, and the carpenters were cobbling together rickety hoardings out of the last few scraps of usable wood and sending them up to the walls to be fitted into place.
Felix and Kat joined the men on the walls, muscling the sides and roofs of the hoardings into place, while more skilled men made final adjustments and nailed them together. It was heavy, nervous work, done with one eye always glancing over the battlements to make sure the horde hadn’t started its advance, and Felix therefore jumped a while later when a polite young voice piped up behind him.
‘Herr Jaeger?’
Kat looked up as Felix turned.
A dirt-smeared squire was hovering near the work gang. ‘Slayer Gurnisson’s compliments,’ he said, bowing. ‘He and the others are almost through to the zombies’ tunnel.’
‘Thank you,’ said Felix. ‘Tell him we’re coming.’
He and Kat turned to the lead carpenter as the boy scurried off.
‘All right?’ asked Felix.
‘On your way,’ said the man. ‘And give ’em hell.’
Artillery Captain Volk and four of his men stood around the hole in the floor of the cellar. Each of the men held a pipe charge in his arms, and had picks, trowels, even metal spoons tucked through their belts, as well as lines of matchcord that snaked away behind them like tails, while more pipe charges were piled at their feet. In the centre of them, hunched over a spindle upon which all the match cords were wound, was Volk himself. He grinned when he saw Felix and Kat, his fire-scarred face forbidding in the light of the tinder pot that glowed at his side.
‘Your mates are nearly through,’ he said, stepping aside so they could get to the hole. ‘Can hear the zombies through the d
irt now – leastwise, they can. I can’t hear nothing. Too many years around the guns.’
Felix nodded as Kat started down the ladder into the hole. ‘Is there a plan?’
‘Oh aye,’ said Volk. ‘You and the dwarfs push them dead bastards back to the mouth of their tunnel. We work in behind you and set the charges. When we’re primed all the way to the far end, I call “fire in the hole” and y’run like blazes back to here, then…’ He spread his fingers wide, eyes dancing with glee. ‘Boom! The tunnel caves, the zombies are squashed, the castle is saved.’
Felix swung onto the ladder and started down. ‘And we’ll be able to get clear in time?’ he asked.
‘Aye,’ said Volk. ‘The Slayers’ve rigged a door in their tunnel that’ll close behind them and cut off the blast. Should go as smooth as silk.’
Kat glared as they turned to go into the low passage. ‘That was a jinx if ever I heard one,’ she muttered.
‘Aye,’ said Felix, and crossed his fingers. He wasn’t normally a superstitious man, but there was no sense tempting fate.
As they ducked into the tunnel, footsteps clattered down the stairs from above and six spearmen entered the cellar.
‘Sergeant Abelung reporting,’ he said. ‘Steward sent us to help. Where do we go?’
Volk pointed at Felix and Kat. ‘With them.’
Felix looked the spearmen over as they climbed down the ladder. They looked as tired as he felt, and no wonder. They had been working all day on the defences as well.
