The rat gave a squeal of enraged frustration as its lunge carried it forwards, exposing it to Dagobert’s counter-attack.
‘That which is sacrosanct, I shall preserve!’ the old knight declared, with a bellow of vindication. Reaching the end of his sweeping swing and twisting his arm at the elbow, he turned Deliverer deftly in his grasp. The tempered steel sang as he brought it down towards the rat-thing’s exposed neck.
‘That which is sublime, I will protect!’
But the rat proved just as fast as the knight, and even more agile. It twisted its back, bringing its defiled weapon to bear once more, braced before it in both paws.
Dagobert would not be denied.
‘That which threatens, I will destroy,’ he chanted as he brought the blade down, muscles in his arm on fire as his faith in the Lady granted him all the strength he needed. ‘That which threatens, I will destroy!’
The worn shaft of the halberd splintered beneath the blessed blade’s keen edge, the gleaming steel catching the light for a moment as the sun burnt through the cloying mists at last. Just for a moment it seemed as if Deliverer burst into flame. The tip of the blade connected with the creature’s breast, parting the exposed flesh between neck and sternum.
‘For my holy wrath will know no bounds!’
Dagobert’s declaration of faith rang out across the battlefield for all to hear. The vermin-kin squealed in fear. The knight’s faithful followers rallied, driving home their advantage as the rat-things fled the battlefield, making their own evangelical calls to the Lady, routing the enemy with vigour.
Dagobert forced the tip of the blade home, ramming it through the throat of the struggling thing, skewering the rat to the ground with his holy sword. The warlord’s shrieking screams dissolved into choked gurgles.
A sudden spear of pain burned in the knight’s side.
Dagobert gasped, staggering back from the stricken ratman, releasing his hold on his sword that still pinned the treacherous creature to the ground. And then he saw the tip of the halberd clasped in its left hand, the dizzying symbols pulsing with sick green light. The knight’s blood smoked as it ran down over the rune-etched blade.
Even with the tainted blade removed, the acid agony remained. The burning pain was joined by a pernicious cold that radiated from the point where the halberd had pierced his side with a creeping malignity.
He could feel his legs giving way under him. His stumbling steps carried him down the rugged hillside towards the babbling waters of a stream that ran pink with the blood of the men and vermin that had met their end upon its banks.
His vision greying, Dagobert made for the brook, his mouth suddenly dry, wanting nothing more than to sup of the waters that tumbled from the same holy spring that filled the font in the Lady’s chapel. The Lady had chosen him to be Her champion and she gave succour to those who needed it and peace to those that had earned it.
Reaching the stream, he gave in at last to the numbness spreading throughout his body. He fell to the ground, feeling the damp earth beneath him as the soil of Bretonnia welcomed him with its soft embrace.
As he attempted to draw the waters of the stream to his mouth with one quivering cupped hand, the words of the vow he had first taken as a youth – so many years ago now – tumbled unbidden from his parched lips.
‘When the clarion call is sounded, I will ride out and fight for liege and Lady. While I draw breath, the lands bequeathed unto me will remain untainted by evil. Honour is all.’
And so the last thing on his lips when oblivion took him was the first vow he had taken on setting out upon the path to honour and glory in the Lady’s name.
VII
The monster’s bile-yellow shell was thicker that a knight’s plate armour. The creature must have survived for centuries within the lightless depths of some primeval forest, having nothing to fear from man or greenskin, growing fat on the flesh of forest goblins and the offerings they made.
Thorn-like protuberances studded the spider’s carapace, forming symmetrical patterns across its back. Some of these spines had grown to enormous proportions, becoming great spears of bone-like chitin that thrust forward over its head, protecting it from attack as sharpened stakes did the ranks of Bretonnian bowmen.
Buoyed absolute faith in the divine blessing the bones of Sir Dagobert conferred upon them, Arnaud led his brother pilgrims across the field, despite the fact that the men of Layon’s charge had already faltered with the monstrous spider’s emergence from the forest.
Bellowing in triumph before they had even engaged the enemy – so sure was he of their forthcoming victory over the greenskins and their monstrous mount – Arnaud led Savaric, Aluard, Fulk and Elias as they bore the reliquae at the head of the pilgrims’ zealous charge.
The spider moved with stilted steps, the gargantuan arachnid favouring its right side and yet still covering as great a distance with one rocking stride as the bier bearers did running at full pelt.
But the pilgrims’ charge did not falter, even as the gibbering greenskins hanging from the web-strung platform rained crude arrows down upon their heads. Brother Hugo fell with a bolt through his thigh but the holy warrior continued on.
Brother Aluard stumbled and went down, a lucky goblin arrow piercing his eye. For a moment, the reliquae bearers – robbed of one of their number – stumbled too. Jules stepped up to take Aluard’s place and the pilgrims surged on across the field.
Through the encroaching gloom and the haze of battle-lust, Arnaud saw again the spears and lances protruding from blackened rifts in the spider’s side, the hafts of the buried weapons clattering together with every stalking step the monster took. He saw that one monstrous eye was gone, ichor oozing from the savage wound the monster had been dealt.
And yet, despite having suffered injuries that would have levelled an entire regiment of men-at-arms, the spider was still standing. More than that, it was still striding towards Layon. But the knowledge that it was hurt made one thing perfectly clear to Arnaud. If the monster could be injured, then it could be killed.
‘In the name of Sir Dagobert! For the Lady! And for fair Bretonnia!’ Arnaud bellowed as the pilgrims closed with the horror. ‘Attack!’
Sir Dagobert met the monstrous beast in battle.
A spearing tarsus came down among the pilgrim mob, running Brother Luc through from shoulder to groin and lifting him clear of the ground, screaming in agony. Another spider claw came down almost on top of the reliquae itself, missing Sir Dagobert’s bones but snagging a piece of Silvermane’s caparison and tearing it free.
Despite the best efforts of the spider and its frenzied passengers, the pilgrims found themselves directly beneath the monster’s furiously working jaws. Strings of corrosive venom drooled from fangs the size of ploughshares, burning smoking holes in the crumbling raiment of the knight’s tabard where they touched.
In no more time than it took Arnaud to blink in startled surprise, the spider struck.
Moving far more quickly than should have been possible for something so vast, the monster’s discoloured fangs snapped closed about the body of the knight. The crushing bite punctured steel plate and splintered bone as if Sir Dagobert was nothing more than a scarecrow of sticks and straw. The idiot beast delivered a great jolt of poison through its fangs deadly enough to drop a giant, pumping the relic-knight’s remains full of venom that corroded the smooth surface of his polished armour and dissolved the links of his chainmail.
Rising up on its hindquarters, the spider tore the reliquae apart, sending tatters of cloth, broken bones and pieces of armour raining down about the pilgrims.
With Sir Dagobert preoccupying the beast, his faithful followers made the most of the distraction and, out of range of the shrieking goblins, ran for cover beneath the bloated arachnid.
Caught within the cage of the spider’s legs, Arnaud froze. The beast’s underbelly seemed to pulse with disgusting peristaltic ripples as if something was moving beneath the white puckered flesh.
Myria
d tiny spiderlings swarmed over its leathery hide to drop down onto the pilgrims crouched beneath their monstrous brood-mother. They scampered across the ground around the spider as well, scuttling up the legs of the unwary, squirming inside jerkins and into hose, delivering crippling bites and making the men cry out in pain and horrified surprise.
‘Come, brothers, do not fail Sir Dagobert now when his work here is almost done!’ Arnaud shouted, tightening his grip around his blade. ‘Stand firm and let not your sword-arms fail the Lady and Her champion!’ With that, he thrust his own blessed blade high above his head.
It pierced the pulsating sac of the spider’s abdomen and he pushed it home with both hands, feeling internal organs rupture as he forced its tip deeper into the monster’s belly. Following their leader’s example, the faithful hacked, pierced and bludgeoned the spider’s soft flesh.
The spider made a sound like a high-pitched hissing scream and the pilgrims redoubled their efforts, chanting prayers that called down the Lady’s divine retribution about the unholy monster.
Viscous fluid poured from the beast’s wounds, drenching the pilgrims in a stinking torrent, but still they did not relent. The men hacked and slashed, opening up even more grievous wounds in the monster’s abdomen. Brother Baldric lost his dagger inside the beast as the slime-slicked weapon slipped from his grasp. Reaching for the broken end of a splintered lance still hanging from the spider’s side, he rammed the weapon further inside the beast, screaming with the fury of a zealot.
The gargantuan spider spasmed with every sword thrust, every axe that cleaved its flesh drawing from it more hissing screams. The creature twisted, trying to catch its tormentors in its terrible jaws, throwing screaming goblins from the howdah as it did so. But the pilgrims were sheltered beneath its belly and with every blow they dealt the beast, its strength ebbed, making it harder for the gigantic spider to keep out of reach of their vengeful blades.
Soon, the spider was possessed by the paroxysm of its death-throes, the forest goblins howling in terror, unable to believe that their god had been bested.
Sir Dagobert’s followers had at last finished what the muster of Duke Theobald had begun.
VIII
Dagobert slowly opened his eyes. Flickering shadows resolved into jostling figures and, as his sluggish senses finally caught up, he realised that someone was tugging at his body.
He could feel his slack limbs being pulled this way and that, but felt like he barely had the strength to breathe, let alone resist the attentions of the looters.
He could hear the babbling of a brook close by and smell the mingled scents of blood and fire on the air. Realisation came to him at last as he remembered where he was and what had happened.
He could still feel the burning pain of the death wound the warlord had delivered with its cursed halberd. And yet he was not dead and the hole in his side burned less than it had. Even the numbness was beginning to pass. He would yet live to fight another day.
He had lain dying of his wounds in the sacred stream, as if age itself had finally caught up with him, but the waters of the Lady’s blessed well had saved him, washing the poison from that last grievous wound, and setting him on the road to recovery. With rest and time, and the ministrations of a grail damsel, he would recover, and even return to protect the Lady’s shrine. But there was another obstacle he would have to overcome first.
Dagobert understood what was happening to him now. With the ratmen routed, his idiot followers – clearly believing him to be dead already – had returned to claim what relics and other trinkets they could from his body, whether it be a piece of his armour or some token of the Lady that he carried about him.
‘I’m not dead,’ he tried to say, defiant to the last, but all that escaped his parched lips was a hoarse whisper. Swallowing hard, trying to draw saliva to his mouth, he tried again. ‘I’m not dead.’
A dark shadow passed across the canvas of the featureless white sky and resolved into the lumpen features of the pestering pilgrim. What was his name? Dagobert seemed to recall that the man had been a blacksmith before joining the knight’s entourage. He was staring at the knight, an imbecilic grin splitting his ugly face. Arnaud, that was his name.
‘Arnaud, help me,’ Dagobert commanded, but his voice that was still little more than a cracked whisper. It was certainly unlikely that any of the other pilgrims had heard him. ‘I’m not dead.’
Arnaud knelt down beside him and whispered in his ear. ‘I know, my lord.’
For the briefest moment, hope filled the grail knight’s world. But only for a moment.
‘And I know, too, that you will live forever,’ the pilgrim went on, his voice acquiring a disconcerting quality. A distant look glazed his eyes, as if the pilgrim could see a secret future the old knight could not. ‘You will be an inspiration to all who follow you – to the downtrodden, to those in peril or in fear for their lives – a champion to the threatened and the oppressed. And you shall serve the Lady until the coming of the end times.’
Dagobert suddenly felt a great weight pushing down upon his ribcage, making it even harder for him to breathe. He fought against the pressure, struggling to even lift his head to see, blinking to clear his greying vision.
The pilgrim was sitting on his chest, examining the blessed blade that was now in his hands, turning Deliverer over and over as if scrutinizing its craftsmanship in minute detail.
‘But I’m not dead!’ Dagobert spluttered, gasping for breath.
Arnaud leant over and whispered in the knight’s ear again. ‘You are the thrice blessed; blessed by the Lady when you took up the mantle of a knight, blessed by Her when you drank from Her holy cup, and she blesses you again now with the honour of serving her forevermore.
‘You are a living saint, an inspiration to us all,’ the pilgrim went on. ‘But saints are only ever really appreciated when they’re dead.’
Dagobert wanted to thrash and kick and fight against the dying of the light, as he felt the pressure building behind his eyes and his vision began to fade. But he didn’t even have the strength to lift his arms.
Arnaud didn’t meet his gaze again. Holding the knight’s sword in his right hand, the thug reached over and, without looking, put a firm hand on Dagobert’s brow, forcing his head under the churning current of the holy stream.
Every fibre of his being fought against the pilgrim’s unyielding grasp, but the warlord’s toxic blade, having failed to kill him, had nonetheless robbed him of strength.
The pressure increased and deep inside himself, for the first time in a long time, Dagobert began to panic. The very waters that had saved his life twice now threatened to take it from him.
He could hold his breath no longer. He opened his mouth to cry out in rage at the pilgrim, to give a shout that the whole world might hear and realise he was not done yet. But rather than a wrathful roar, his final breath burst from his lungs in a torrent of furious bubbles.
As his greying vision gave way to the blackness of oblivion, Dagobert saw white flowers falling through the dark. The scent of apple blossom was in his nose and he heard the Lady calling to him across the gulf of eternity, guiding him to his long-deserved rest.
IX
The spider was dead and the goblins gone, having fled back into the forest in shrieking fear after witnessing the agonising death-throes of their forest god. And yet that night only the snores of the grail knight’s entourage disturbed the darkness. No one else in Layon slept a wink.
With the rising of the sun came the thankless task of disposing of the dead. The howdah mounted atop the monster’s carapace loaded with the greenskin dead and set alight, the flammable webs soon catching and the fire spreading until it became a great conflagration that reduced spider, goblins and all to nothing but ash.
As far as Arnaud was concerned, only one task remained: recruiting others to the pilgrims’ cause. There were those in the village who heeded the call of his rabble-rousing, men who had lost everything in the goblins’ a
ttack other than their pitiful lives. With nothing left to live for, and nothing to keep them in Layon, they readily rallied to the pilgrims’ totem. With freshly tonsured scalps, they joined Arnaud and the others in reconstructing Sir Dagobert’s remains from what was left of the grail knight’s bones after the spider’s desecration of the holy reliquae, making up any missing parts with what they could scavenge from the village shrine, their own family heirlooms and even the charcoal-black bones left after the funeral pyres had burned down.
‘We cannot tempt you to stay?’ Reynard asked as the battle pilgrims did what they could to reassemble the bones of the grail knight and his steed, shoring up the reliquae with copious sticks and borrowed twine.
‘Do not seek to tempt me, peasant!’ Arnaud said, glaring furiously at Reynard. The reek of alcohol was still strong on his breath. ‘But you could lend us a few more of those apples and a couple of flagons of ale to see us on our way.’
‘So where will you go now?’ Reynard asked, once the requested victuals had been scraped together from what was left of the village reserve stores.
Eleven of the original fourteen battle pilgrims remained, but another eight had joined their number since the battle with the spider. As four of them raised the rickety reliquae upon their shoulders once more – Brother Gervase taking up the dead horse’s hooves once more and giving an equine whinny – Arnaud looked back towards the ridge, from where Sir Dagobert’s hunting party has first set eyes on the village of Layon only the day before.
‘Sir Dagobert’s quest is done,’ he said, Reynard uncertain as to whether the man was gazing into the distance or into the future. ‘He desires only to be laid to rest within the shrine that he raised himself from the razed ruins of the Castle Perillus.’
‘Then I bid Sir Dagobert–’
‘The thrice blessed,’ the other interrupted.
‘–and you and your fellow brethren, farewell.’
Ignoring the hand Reynard offered him, Arnaud pointed towards the horizon with his cleaned blade once more and Reynard noticed for the first time how letters etched into the surface of the blade reflected the sun, spelling out a name.
Hammer and Bolter 9 Page 7
