“Now you look here…” Erikson began.
“No, you look here,” a woman’s voice interrupted.
Both men turned to watch Schmitt’s wife make her way up the gangplank. She was short, but what she lacked in height she made up for in girth. Her body seemed to consist of nothing but curves, not all of them in the right places. Her dress bulged tightly as she clambered onto the boat, and her double chin wobbled with indignation.
“Madam,” Erikson said with a withering scowl, “this is between me and your husband. I will thank you not to interfere.”
“Madam, is it? Madam!” Having made it onto the deck she put her hands on her hips and looked up at Erikson menacingly.
Erikson looked at Schmitt, who smiled weakly.
“Maria does tend to look after the accounts,” he said.
“And the cleaning,” she reminded him. “And the raising of the babies and the feeding of the tow horses, and the cooking and the looking after the barge while you’re drunk in town.”
Schmitt had looked happier when he was being dangled by his hair. Erikson decided to save him.
“Look here, my good woman,” he said, his eyes twinkling with an expression that so many women before had found so charming, “I’m sure this has all been a mistake.”
“First a madam and now your good woman,” Maria sneered. “The man can’t decide whether I’m a whore or a nun.”
There was muted laughter from the bank, and for the first time Erikson realised they had an audience. A score of people, well dressed but dirty, huddled together behind Maria. Erikson tried to ignore them.
“It’s just that I paid full passage to Hergig. Full passage. And now I hear that the barge isn’t going to Hergig at all. That it’s going to turn around and go back down the river.”
“And so it is,” Maria told him, her chins jutting defiance.
“But,” Erikson said, “I’ve paid my fare.”
“And we’ve given your money back. You’ll just have to make other arrangements. We’ve got refugees to transport, poor souls. Some of them with youngsters. A big lug like you is perfectly capable of making his own way without denying transport to those in need of it.”
Erikson looked at the people who were gathered on the bank, and yes, he saw of course they were refugees. He had seen thousands like them throughout his career. Tired, frightened and moving like beggars even though they were dressed in their finest clothes.
In spite of their plight, he couldn’t help feeling a flicker of satisfaction. Here at last was the proof that the rumours of war in Hochland had been true. And war, after all, was his business.
Then something Maria had said sunk through.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “You said I’d been given my money back?”
Both he and Maria turned on Schmitt, who already had the coins in his outstretched hands.
“Here you go,” he smiled. “If only you’d given me the chance I’d have returned it sooner.”
Erikson took the coins, and looked from Schmitt to his wife to the refugees who huddled beyond.
“Very well,” he said, shrugging, “but can you at least let me have one of your tow horses?”
“Yes,” Maria decided. “Twenty-five crowns.”
Erikson thought about haggling, then looked into the flinty eyes that gleamed within her plump features and knew that it was pointless.
“Let’s see this beast then,” he said and followed the triumphant woman back down the gangplank. He turned to Schmitt one last time and, instead of the glare he had intended, he found himself giving the old villain a sympathetic nod.
In front of him, Maria was already scolding somebody else.
The horse, although cheap, was at least sturdy. It carried Erikson’s few pieces of luggage easily. There wasn’t much of it. A leather cape, his best clothes, spare feathers for his hat. There was also his camping gear in the form of a bedroll, a pot and a light bow for hunting. Hidden beneath this miscellany were his spare sword and, most prized of all, a waterproofed wooden box of pipe weed.
The horse also carried water skins and a couple of sacks of hard tack and dried meat. As he passed the refugees who trudged past him in the other direction, he was glad to have it. Unlike those which had been rich enough to book passage on Schmitt’s barge, these families had a lean and hungry look.
On the first evening ashore Erikson shot enough pigeons and squirrels to fill his pot, cooked up a stew and invited those passing by to join him. They were pathetically grateful, and begged him to turn back and accompany them. But Erikson wanted neither their gratitude not their advice. He wanted their knowledge, and between mouthfuls of stew they shared it with him eagerly.
They told him of how the beasts had emerged from the forests to annihilate an entire army. Only the hero Otto Viksberg had survived. Apparently this great warrior had slaughtered a score of the beasts to retrieve his regiment’s standard only to lose it whilst crossing a river.
Erikson refilled his guests’ bowls while they told of the terror which had spread like wildfire as the victorious beasts had ravaged the land. It was this panic that had driven many into exile, or at least into hiding behind the walls of the cities. Erikson, who had once seen the creatures which now descended upon Hochland, could well believe it.
By the time he had passed around the bottle of schnapps they had told him of the mustering of the regiments by Baron Ludenhof, and by this point Erikson was finding it hard not to show his satisfaction. It seemed that after the destruction of an entire army, Hochland was desperately short of armed men, and it was that desperation Erikson was counting on.
Later, when the fire had burned down to embers and his guests slept huddled around him, Erikson filled a pipe and smoked, blowing smoke rings into the warmth of the calm night air and up towards the stars. This was to be his last campaign, he had decided. Then he would retire.
He smiled in the darkness, and let his mind wander away to dreams of the land he would buy and the horses he would breed there. Soon he was asleep.
* * *
Erikson was awoken by the rain. It hissed down through the leaves of the tree beneath which he had slept, and by the time he had pulled on his leather overcoat the remains of last night’s fire were too sodden to make them worth relighting. Instead he loaded his horse and, walking beside it to spare its strength, made off northwards towards Hergig.
He passed a few more refugees, indiscriminate shapes huddled miserably around overburdened carts or beneath bundles of their possessions. Erikson ignored them. In his profession he had become hardened to suffering a lot worse than theirs.
The first thing he really noticed about them was their absence.
It was midday. The rain had stopped and the sun had burned through the last of the cloud to set the ground steaming. The path which Erikson had been following through fields of newly planted wheat had reached the outskirts of the forest. The trees here were coppiced and interspersed with well-grazed pastures but ahead, as dark as a storm cloud on the horizon, the deep forest lay.
Erikson looked at the shadow of it and pursed his lips.
“What do you think, old girl?” he asked his horse, who merely flicked her ears in response.
Erikson sighed, cursed Schmitt and then filled his pipe. Only a fool braved the Empire’s forests alone, and that was at the best of times. Now, when the elector’s forces were holed up in their cities and beasts were ravaging the land… well, it scarcely bore thinking about.
“You’re right, of course,” he told his horse, and breathed out a plume of smoke. “We don’t have a choice.”
He finished his pipe, knocked out the ash and started unpacking. He changed into his finery, leaving his travel clothes by the pile of gear on the side of the road. Then he started discarding other bits and pieces. By the time he was finished he was carrying nothing but his bow, his sword, his leather cloak and a couple of water skins. After some thought he took his pipe weed and three days’ worth of dried meat too.
“Right then,” he told his horse. “Let’s get going.”
He took a firm hold of its bridle and, ever ready to swing onto its back and gallop away, he pressed on.
They were waiting scarcely half a mile within the forest.
By then the endless blue of the sky had been squeezed into a thin strip that barely lit the path. It wriggled between ancient trees with trunks like clenched fists and thickets of sharp-thorned brambles which thrived in the darkness.
Erikson didn’t like the way the forest leaned over the path, nor the fact that it was impossible to see more than a few feet into the gloom, nor the cloying smell of rot and decay. What he liked least of all, though, was the quiet. There was not so much as the call of a bird. Instead there was a deep, liquid silence, as endless as the forest and as cloying as a grave.
It was almost a relief when his horse stopped, digging its hooves in and flattening its ears against its head. Its eyes swam in the darkness, white and terrified, and it whinnied miserably.
Erikson tightened his grip on the bridle when he noticed how its nostrils flared. He sniffed the stifling forest air and yes, there it was. That’s what had spooked it.
It was sharp, as acrid as wood smoke but a lot less pleasant. Erikson had never smelled anything like it before. It combined the biting ammonia of a latrine with the sickly, rotten taste of spoiled meat. There was something else in it, too. Something vile.
“Steady on, girl,” he whispered, and slipped onto his horse’s back. It jittered nervously backwards, but Erikson held it with his knees and reins and the soothing tone of his voice. He touched it with his heels and, against its better judgement, it walked on.
Then it screamed and reared onto its back legs, and Erikson realised that they had been ambushed.
The things that burst from the cover of the undergrowth were so close that even Erikson couldn’t bite back a bellow of surprise. They moved with a speed that left no time to react, and even as he dragged his sword from its scabbard his mount was fleeing, its hooves accelerating into a gallop.
One of the shapes leapt up in front of it, and Erikson had time to see the curve of its horns and the yellow glitter of its eyes. He swung his blade towards its neck and after a brief shock of steel against bone the thing fell headless onto the ground.
He reversed his grip as another attacked from the right, but this time he was too slow. Before he could thrust the point into the V formed by the thing’s collarbone it had slashed at the horse with a crudely shaped axe. Erikson felt it jump beneath him, and its hooves blurred as it put on even more speed, but he could already feel its warm blood soaking his leg.
He glanced down as they rocketed through the gloom of the twisting path, but in the darkness it was impossible to tell how badly his horse had been injured. He concentrated on holding on, keeping his head down so as to avoid low-hanging branches, and turned to see if they were being pursued.
They were, and with a terrifying speed. The path seemed choked with a sprinting mass of goat-legged horrors, their teeth bright with saliva which glistened like jewels in the occasional flash of sunlight. Some of them were howling, their deep-throated voices wordless and inhuman, but most were just running.
“Come on, girl,” Erikson whispered as he leaned over his horse’s neck, and in that moment they burst into a clearing that opened up where a stream crossed the path. The brightness of the sunlight here made the forest ahead look as black as night. Even in the midst of this danger Erikson felt a flash of joy as the sunlight warmed his face. Then joy turned to horror as, with a lurch, his horse stumbled and fell forwards into the stream.
Erikson rolled clear, dropping his sword and ignoring the snap in his ribs as he hit the stones beneath the water. He leapt to his feet, grimacing at the shot of pain that burst in his ankle, and snatched up his sword. A single glance at his horse was all he needed to see that it was finished. A soup of entrails was spilling through the gash in its side, and blood spattered out with every breath it took.
He looked into its eyes, maddened with terror and pain, and then beyond to where the things were spilling out of the forest.
He didn’t have time to put it out of its misery. He couldn’t waste the strength.
He did it anyway.
“To Sigmar’s fields,” he whispered, reversing the blade in his hand and stabbing down to end its life. Then he turned and ran to the narrowing gap of the path as it left this brief clearing. He glanced over his shoulder, hoping that his pursuers would be content with the feast of fresh meat he had left in their path.
They were not.
Barely pausing, the front runners vaulted over the dead horse and closed in on him. Now they were so close that he could count their fangs and see the hatred burning in their eyes. There would be no escape, Erikson knew.
“Come on then,” he snarled, turning to face them. They paused as the leader, a thing which might once have been human, rolled back its misshapen head to bellow out its own challenge.
Erikson didn’t wait for it to finish. He leapt forwards, the point of his sword stabbing through the knotted muscle of the thing’s neck and out on the other side. With a grunt Erikson used the vertebrae to lever the sword back out in a wide slash that opened up the throat and turned the challenge into a hiss. He leapt back and watched as the beast collapsed, gurgling into a pool of its own blood.
Its followers hesitated, and Erikson described an arc in front of him with the bloodied steel of his sword.
“This is mine,” he snarled at them. “Understand? Mine.”
He met their eyes as he spoke, glaring through the burning hatred to find the sanity beyond. But with these things there was no sanity beyond. There was only rage, bestial and unreasoning.
They charged him in a wall of muscle, hide and horn. Erikson stepped forwards to meet them, and as he did so thunder rolled from behind him.
The first of the creatures, its almost-human face twisted up into a crown of antlers, flew backwards. Erikson caught a split-second glance of the wound that had blossomed in its chest, a sudden cavern fanged with splintered ribs.
The beast to the right of it, goat-headed and boar-fanged, continued to charge even after its head had exploded like an overripe pumpkin.
The beast to the left, its slit eyes as red as poppies, collapsed forwards in sudden agony, revealing its following companion even as its jaw was torn off and sent spinning away in a spray of blood.
And still they came, and still the thunder rumbled. Limbs splintered as suddenly as branches snapping beneath hoarfrost, skulls exploded like snapdragons in spring, bodies burst open. As well as thunder, Erikson noticed the smoke that had begun to drift from behind him. Blackpowder smoke.
As the slaughter continued he decided that it was the most wonderful thing he had ever smelled.
The beasts smelled it too. Erikson watched as the mass of creatures hesitated, then stopped, then turned and slipped back into the forest. They vanished with an eerie silence, slipping like shadows away from the sun and into the undergrowth. Some of them carried the still-warm corpses of dead comrades between them. Erikson’s stomach rolled with nausea as he realised what they wanted the bodies for.
“Good afternoon.”
The voice was as cool and as languid as the stream which gurgled carelessly between the bodies littering the clearing. Erikson turned and saw the men who had saved his life. Half a dozen of them had stepped out of the forest, although he was sure that many more waited behind.
They were dressed more like bandits than soldiers. They didn’t seem to be wearing any armour, and their clothes were dyed with dull greens and browns. Instead of cloaks they wore stained and shapeless sackcloth sheets. Even the man who was so obviously their leader lacked even a single plume in his shapeless slouch hat.
On the other hand, Erikson noticed with a professional eye, the handguns they carried were perfectly maintained, the metal well-oiled and the stocks well varnished. And as he had seen, they were expertly handled.
“Mein herr, I am at your service,” he said, sweeping his own hat off in an elegant bow that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Emperor’s own court. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Free Captain Erikson, late of Praag, late of Reikland, now seeking fresh glories in the war against the beasts.”
“And I am Freimann,” the gunner said, without returning the bow. “Tell me, captain, do you think it wise to wander the forest alone?”
“Sigmar is my shield,” Erikson told him, his hackles rising at the man’s patronising tone.
“Yes,” Freimann said, mockery bubbling beneath the surface of every word, “I suppose that he is. Well, fare-thee-well, then.”
“Just a moment,” Erikson said as the men turned back into the forest. “I wonder if you might tell me how far Hergig is. I am new in these lands.”
Freimann shrugged. It was a gesture his lank form might have been made for.
“Perhaps a week on foot,” he said. “Perhaps more. But there is a town a few miles ahead. If you make haste, and if it still stands, you might reach it before nightfall.”
“Thank you,” Erikson said.
“You are very welcome. If you will take my advice, you will hurry. The smell of blackpowder carries a long way, and brings as many creatures as it scares off.”
Then, sweeping off his shapeless hat in a gesture that could only have been sarcastic, Freimann turned and led his men back into the dark vastness of the forest. They disappeared into the undergrowth as easily as the beasts they had been hunting. As silently, too. Within a couple of minutes Erikson found himself alone with the carcasses of his horse and the abominations that had died in the volley. He examined them, nose wrinkling.
The vermin which had infected their fur were already streaming away from their cooling bodies, lice and ticks hopping into the undergrowth in search of fresh carriers. The first of the flies had arrived to cluster around the wounds, but despite them Erikson could make out the way in which beast and man had been so horribly fused together.
[Warhammer] - Broken Honour Page 3
