Hammer and Bolter 9

by Christian Dunn

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw a yeoman, clad in hauberk and helm, pulled from his horse by myriad clawing hands. The weight of the man’s armour only made the task easier for the rat-things. The yeoman’s mount screamed as the vermin tore its belly open, ripping out the animal’s entrails with chisel-sharp incisors.

  Dagobert heard arrows zipping overhead and saw the trails of smoke and flame arcing through the clammy air. These were followed by more shrill squeals and enraged hisses of pain as the brazier-lit barbs penetrated armour and cauterised the flesh of the rat-things encased within.

  Pulling hard on the reins, Dagobert brought Silvermane round again, the warhorse crushing another pair of fleeing ratmen under its hooves, breaking backs and splintering skulls.

  As the vermin parted before the unstoppable charge of the Lady’s champion and his powerful steed, something monstrous lifted its malformed head from where it had been busy gnawing at the carcass of another horse, the purple-grey ropes of equine intestines hanging from between its over-sized yellow jaws. The sheer size of the monster gave Dagobert, veteran of a hundred battles, reason to pause, but only for the briefest second.

  A sound that might have been a deep-throated squeak, but which sounded more like a wolfish bark, escaped the monster’s jaws as it snapped at the air with tusk-like incisors, catching the paladin’s scent on the breeze. It was to one of the rat-kin as an ogre would be to a man. Its mere presence dominated the battlefield. As broad across its abnormally muscled shoulders as it was tall, its rodent head was disproportionately small, making the wobbling throat sac stitched beneath its chin seem even more grotesquely distended. Its hide was patchy and scabbed, and between clumps of mangy, matted fur the knight could make out the criss-crossing scars of clumsy stitching. In other places the unholy, claw-scratch ideograms that passed for script among the under-dwellers had been branded into its taut flesh.

  It came at them at a loping run, clearing a path through the scrabbling throng of men and rats, claws like scythe-blades gutting and dismembering any and all that got in its way.

  As Silvermane closed with the rat ogre, Dagobert thrust the grip of his morning star under the rim of his saddle and pulled the huge warhorse round sharply, spurring his steed away from the massively-muscled abomination.

  Several villagers watched in bewildered fear, believing that the knight was quitting the field. But Dagobert had no intention of running away. He just needed the right tool to take the monster down.

  Running down more of the rat-things that suddenly found themselves frantically fleeing towards the charging knight, Dagobert reached the spot where he had thrust his lance into the ground before he had engaged with the enemy, in case he should he need it later in the battle.

  He needed it now.

  As Silvermane drew alongside the waiting lance, Dagobert grabbed hold and pulled it from the soft loam. Silvermane whinnied. The knight could sense the warhorse’s excitement as he turned it back towards the bounding rat ogre.

  ‘That which threatens, I will destroy!’ the grail knight bellowed, his pious battle-cry matching the ferocity of the guttural roar that escaped the monster’s throat at his challenge.

  Positioning the lance against his side, he lowered its tip, aiming it directly at the monster’s chest.

  ‘For my holy wrath will know no bounds!’ he declared, his strident voice ringing out across the battlefield, filling the muster of Bretonnia with the resolve they needed to keep fighting.

  Silvermane galloped past battling pilgrims, struggling peasant villagers and desperate, cornered ratmen. And then suddenly there were less than five horse lengths left between the knight and his quarry.

  Dagobert’s grip on the lance tightened, the tip barely wavering from its target as the horse thundered over broken bodies, discarded weapons and shattered, unnatural war machines in its urgency to engage with the foe. He saw too late that the brute beast was swinging its huge paw-hands together, intending to deliver a double-fisted sideways swipe as Silvermane closed.

  The rat ogre was more intelligent than Dagobert had first thought, choosing to strike the knight’s steed rather than the warrior himself.

  The savage blow smashed the lance out of the way, splintering its smoothed ash tip even as the devastating punch connected with Silvermane’s caparisoned head, ramming foot-long splinters through the animal’s throat and into its eye.

  Dagobert heard the sharp crack of bone over the screams of the rat-things, the clamour of battle, and the barking of the rat ogre.

  The horse’s forelegs gave way, Dagobert instinctively leaning back in the saddle as his steed ploughed into the ground. But it was no good. The horse’s back end came tumbling over its head, such had been the force of its charge, and Dagobert was sent sprawling in the stinking mire of blood and mud.

  Finding himself with a face full of the befouled soup, Dagobert felt the dead weight of Silvermane’s body fall across his legs, pushing him still deeper into the sucking morass.

  Dagobert knew there wasn’t a moment to lose. The adrenaline rush of battle lending him the strength he needed, he pulled himself out from under his dead steed, using the broken haft of the shattered lance still in his hand to push himself to his feet.

  He glanced back at the motionless corpse of the horse. Any one of the half a dozen dagger-sized splinters now sticking out of its head would have killed the warhorse had the rat ogre’s blow not already broken the poor beast’s neck.

  Dagobert could tell that the beast was almost on him again by smell alone. Its foul stink was a noxious combination of foetid animal musk and the putrid reek of a septic war wound.

  Barely on his feet, the old knight took a stumbling step forwards, his feet slipping in the liquid slurry, twisting his body around as he did so, the lance still in his hand. At the same moment the rat ogre pounced, as if Dagobert were the mouse and the monster the hunting feline.

  The squealing roar that issued from the rat ogre’s swollen throat sac as the broken spear of the lance pierced its sutured flesh was an appalling sound, but it could only mean one thing.

  The creature arched its knotted back, its claws ripping the armour from the knight’s body where they caught, the guttural scream showing no sign of abating as the creature writhed and jerked on the end of the ruined lance.

  Bracing the end of the lance against his foot, Dagobert put all his weight and power against the planed ash, pushing it further inside the monster’s cavernous chest. His own roar of rage escaped teeth gritted against the effort.

  Thick black blood gouted from the wound as the broken shaft ruptured the monster’s enlarged heart. Its death throes pulled the shattered lance from the knight’s grasp as a primal rage and insatiable appetite for slaughter kept it fighting to the last.

  But the Lady had decreed that the beast must die. Unsheathing his sword, he felt its divine power coursing through him. With an incoherent cry of rage on his lips he swung the keen edge at the struggling rat ogre. The sword took the monster’s ill-proportioned head from its shoulders with one clean cut.

  The creature’s hulking body slumped to the ground, thick black blood pumping from the stump of its neck, and was still at last.

  Dagobert turned from the massive corpse, but he was not done yet. The unit of black-furred ratmen were almost upon him. Hefting his holy sword in both hands, he laid about him with the mighty weapon, prayers to the Lady accompanying every grievous wound he laid against the enemy. The vermin-kin’s defence could not stand in the face of his holy wrath.

  As the last of the verminous bodyguards fell, a host of squealing rat-slaves parted, and there before the old knight crouched the warlord of the pack. It was clad in armour, like the grail knight. But where Dagobert cared for his plate mail, keeping it in immaculate condition so that it might serve him as well in battle as he served the Lady in all things, the rat-thing’s armour was scarred and pitted with some unknown, green-black deposit. Where Dagobert wore a fine helm upon his head, a sculpted chalice rising
from its crown and the polished metal glinting silver where it was caught by the sun, the ratman had a crudely hammered helm topped with a crest of cruel blades.

  ‘For the Lady!’ the knight cried, raising the blessed blade Deliverer in his hands once more, putting the aches and pains from his mind with a prayer to the divine damsel.

  Meeting his challenge, the verminous warlord gave a furious hiss, foul spittle spraying from its elongated snout. Slabs of muscle rippled and bunched under its scabrous hide as it took up what looked like a halberd looted from another battlefield. The tempered steel of the once finely-wrought weapon was blackened and corroded, despoiled by the runes scratched into it, and it pulsed with a sick green light. Totems of rats’ skulls and human hands had been bound to the haft with knotted leather cords.

  ‘That which is sacrosanct, I shall preserve. That which is sublime, I will protect. That which threatens, I will destroy, for my holy wrath will know no bounds!’

  The grail vow swelling to become a bellow of holy rage, Dagobert charged.

  V

  At least Layon was ready for the goblins this time.

  The first greenskin attack had found the men grown complacent after twelve summers of peace, with nothing to threaten the tranquillity of the valley beyond the occasional beastman incursion. But the goblins’ initial chaotic assault had left the survivors suspecting that they had not yet seen the last of the forest dwelling primitives.

  And so when young Tomas passed on his dire warning, the villagers and the grail knight’s retinue set about preparing the defence of the village. Sharpened stakes were raised and thrust into the ground in a ragged line between the village boundary and the perimeter of the forest, forming a barrier of adze-sharpened points with which to greet the enemy.

  With the non-combatants safe behind this defensive rampart and a line of bowmen protecting them, Reynard and the rest of the fighting men took up what weapons and shields they had – treasured family heirlooms and swords their ancestors had brought back from the crusades in Araby – and marched out across the field to deal with the greenskin threat once and for all.

  The bones of Sir Dagobert went before them, the last rays of the sun, the colour of embers in the hearth, catching the myriad votive tokens – silvered fleur-de-lys and gem-encrusted medallions – and setting them blazing as if aflame.

  When they were half way across the field, the men-at-arms came to a halt as one man, as the hollow echoes of falling timber and the splitting of sundered saplings reached their ears. The sounds were coming from the shadowed gloom of the forest where night had already fallen.

  The reverberating beat of a drum boomed from beneath the trees. It was echoed by the hammering of Reynard’s heart as the stressed organ beat its own tattoo of nervous anticipation inside his chest.

  Giving voice to a multitude of shrieking cries, the goblins burst from the treeline. Clad in loincloths, bedecked with feathered headdresses and waving crude spears, the scraggy greenskins bounded across the field, whooping in delight.

  ‘For the Lady!’ the pilgrim leader yelled, his fellows adjusting the position of the reliquae poles resting upon their shoulders. Sir Dagobert’s devotees picked up the pace as they commenced their charge across the field.

  With the near-naked greenskins bounding towards them, leering faces and wiry bodies daubed with war-paint, Arnaud spied something approaching through the forest: a vast shadow still hidden by the trees.

  It demanded his whole attention and he took his eyes off the goblins, staring at the unsettling shape picking its way between the crowding crooked trunks.

  ‘By the Lady…’ he heard Groffe gasp behind him, as the goblins’ monstrous ally hauled its grotesque, quivering bulk through the natural archway formed by a pair of ancient oaks.

  Sir Dagobert and his entourage stumbled to a halt. The sense-numbing effects of the ale evaporated like alcohol fumes in an instant, leaving Arnaud with a queasy feeling in his belly.

  Reynard had never seen anything so huge that hadn’t been a building or part of the landscape. The thing didn’t just look like a spider, it looked like it should be the primogenitor of arachnids everywhere. Glutted on blood-rich offerings, grown fat from decades as a prime predator, it now pulled its incredible bulk from the forest on eight chitinous limbs, each as long and as thick as a tree trunk.

  As it emerged from the shadows, its carapace assumed a toxic yellow hue, a multitude of shining black eyes, like spheres of obsidian, reflecting the last light of the day. As big as a hill, capable of taking an ox between its crushing jaws as a normal spider might a fly, across its back had been lashed a sturdy platform of broken branches and filthy webs, which teemed with more of the deranged greenskins.

  It was all Reynard could do not to soil himself. His worst fears regarding the fate of Forwin the woodcutter were confirmed when he caught sight of the bound body dangling from a gossamer rope as thick as an arm. The silk-bound parcel jerked with every movement the spider made as if it were a broken marionette.

  He had heard tales told about such things before – fireside tales of the mythical arachnarok that he had listened to intently at his grandmother’s knee, savouring every gruesome detail – but he had never actually believed such a thing could be real.

  Now that his childhood nightmare had taken on an unnatural life of its own, Reynard dearly wished that it had stayed in the realm of myth. Worse yet, there could be more of the horrors waiting beyond the treeline in the primeval darkness of the ancient forest.

  Arnaud cursed. Doubt had no place in the soul of one of the faithful. To have doubt was to have lost faith, and he who lost faith did not deserve the blessing of the Lady of the Lake. Sir Dagobert would never have faltered in the face of a fight, and neither would he now.

  As the immense spider emerged from the forest, its myriad legs moving with a jerky peristaltic motion, the pilgrim saw great rents in the softer flesh of its under parts, arrows sticking from its bony shell, cracks in its carapace where lumps of masonry fired by a field trebuchet had found their target and claw marks made by some great beast, congealing with the foul purple ichor that passed for the spider’s blood.

  The abomination was injured, a victim of Duke Theobald’s purge, the same campaign that Sir Dagobert and his faithful had been a part of, the aftermath of which had led them to Layon in pursuit of the routed greenskins. But the spider was not dead yet. It still moved with a predator’s gait and its gigantic mandibles worked ceaselessly, droplets of some deadly toxin dripping to the ground to form steaming puddles.

  It was not dead yet, but it was dying, and it would be a worthy adversary for Sir Dagobert.

  ‘Destroy that which threatens,’ Arnaud announced, his voice as clear as his purpose. He raised the worn blade in his hand, what might have been incised script blazing in the light of the setting sun.

  Hefting the reliquae upon their shoulders, the pilgrims resumed their bold march towards the monster.

  Beneath its chainmail hood, the burnished skull of Sir Dagobert – polished to a lustrous sheen like mother-of-pearl – shone gold.

  VI

  Dagobert twisted as the rat deflected his blade with a sharp swipe of its own weapon, the halberd scraping along Deliverer’s keen edge. Foul sparks were thrown from the corroded metal and the rat used its momentum to carry it forward under the old knight’s guard.

  Turning his sword to deflect his enemy’s attack, Dagobert brought the blade down swiftly, parrying the thrusting halberd. The warlord hissed again and rolled away from the paladin, throwing itself onto the ground and twisting its spine so that it was able to catch the bloodied blade against the haft of its weapon.

  Dagobert spun round, raising an iron-shod foot, ready to bring it down on the rat-thing’s skull. Moving with deceptive speed, especially considering it was clad in armour, the rat scrabbled out of his way. It was on its clawed inhuman feet again in a second, back hunched, chittering in a horrible high-pitched unvoice, holding the halberd with both hands, as if
it were a quarterstaff.

  His vow on his lips, gauntleted hands tight about the grip of his sword, the knight thrust the weapon’s lethal point towards the pack-leader as the ratman angled its own hooking blade to parry the blow.

  Dagobert rained blows upon the horror while the rat-thing tried every underhand tactic at its disposal to best the knight’s skill with a sword.

  To the pilgrims who fought with him, Sir Dagobert was a living saint, an inspiration to them all, a paradigm of what a life dedicated to the Lady could achieve. Every blow he laid against the warlord’s battered armour gave them the courage they needed to push the chittering horde back still further. For every one of the faithful that fell to a poison-coated blade, five of the mangy vermin paid with their miserable lives as the pilgrims exacted their revenge.

  But with his battle rage as hot as dragon’s breath, Dagobert’s attention was fully focused on the twisting, perfidious thing before him.

  Where the knight was honourable, the rat-thing was conniving and treacherous, prepared to try any devious trick to gain the advantage. Where the knight was bound by oaths of duty to the Lady, the rat-spawn was motivated by nothing but its own loathsome self-serving nature. Where Dagobert’s sword was straight and true, the rat’s halberd was serrated and fashioned with snagging hooks. And every time the two blades connected, Dagobert’s weapon threw virulent green sparks from the rune-etched halberd.

  A bone-numbing, wearying pain was creeping up Dagobert’s arms, but despite his failing strength, his faith in the Lady remained steadfast. And faith was the greatest weapon of all against such a foul and unholy enemy.

  The warlord made a sudden lunge for the knight, ducking in under the smooth arc described by his sweeping blade. Contrary to expectations of age, Dagobert managed to jerk his torso round so that the warlord’s blade scraped along the mail protecting his stomach, splitting the links of chain and sending more of the poisonous green sparks flying from the sundered steel rings.