[Warhammer] - Broken Honour

by Robert Earl - (ebook by Undead)

  Ahead there was a sudden burst of blue through the burning trees and, with a start of hope, Erikson realised that they had reached the edge of the forest. The dense stands of trees gradually thinned out, and as the heat lessened Erikson slowed his pace and stood aside, watching the company as it bolted past him.

  He was trying to count them when a cry of alarm went up from the men who had already passed him. He turned, wiping the smearing of soot-blackened sweat away from his bloodshot eyes, and peered through the drifting smoke to where the company had staggered to a halt.

  Beyond them the high stone walls of Barwedel.

  “Charge!”

  And they did. Ragged, dirty and singed, the Gentleman’s Free Company of Hergig burst from the quickening flames and hurled themselves towards the enemy.

  Inside Barwedel’s city gates, Baron Ludenhof waited.

  Behind him three hundred knights stood in a column of sixes. Their warhorses were so tall and their raised lances so high that the pennants on them fluttered above second-storey windows.

  Behind the knights stood almost a thousand men, both state troopers and solid blocks of woodsmen. The sharpness of the woodsmen’s axes was matched only by their hatred of the enemy. Many of these men had lost family to the beasts over this hellish summer. Some of them had lost their entire settlements.

  And above this lethal force the sound of artillery on the walls was a constant, rolling thunder. Blackpowder smoke had drifted down so that the streets were filled with the fog of it, and even packed into the city streets the waiting men had heard the change in the enemy’s inhuman calls as the cannon had scourged them. It gave them a feeling of grim satisfaction as they waited in brooding silence.

  A messenger appeared from the walls and scurried down to the baron. He was alive with excitement, and the men at the front of the column craned forwards to try to hear what he was saying.

  “The entire forest?” the baron asked, twirling the tip of his moustache. “Are you sure?”

  “See for yourself, sire,” the messenger said, and the baron nodded and swung out of his saddle. Despite the weight of his armour he landed lightly, and clanked up the steps to the top of the wall with ease.

  When he returned to his waiting horse he was beaming. After climbing back into his saddle he turned his horse to address the waiting men.

  “Sigmar has blessed us with a fire in the forest beyond,” he said. “We will use it as a wall against which to chop the enemy in two. When the gates open we charge through the heart like a lance through a hog, then turn and hold the foul things as the regiments grind in from either side. Are you ready?”

  “Yes, sire!” the men roared, their voices echoing amongst the narrow streets of the city.

  The baron grinned wolfishly, signalled for his banner to be unfurled and then gave the order to open the gates.

  When they swung open the scene they framed looked like something from the deepest of the hells. The beasts waited in a solid mass outside, an army of abominations whose very existence mocked humanity. The great mass of them swept out, broken here and there with sudden blossoms of shrapnel and carnage, and behind it all a backdrop of flames blotted out the horizon.

  The baron didn’t hesitate. With a wordless bellow he spurred his horse forwards and, without waiting to see if his men could keep up, hurled himself into the boiling cauldron of the enemy.

  They fell before him and his knights like wheat beneath a scythe. As strong as they were individually there was no order in their confused ranks, and the baron’s formation sliced through them with a blood-slicked ease.

  Even now the cannon maintained their bombardment, shattering any attempt the enemy might have made to organise against this blow to their heart, and caught between fire and steel and the endless cannonade the fringes of the horde began to flee, squirming out between the gaps that still remained between the advancing regiments in front and the fire to their rear.

  The baron roared as, with a warrior’s instinct, he sensed that the enemy were breaking. It was then that the horde before him parted and, with a rumble that shook the earth, the beastlord charged directly at him on the back of a chariot.

  The creatures that pulled it were nightmares of muscle and tusk. Even the beam which ran between them ended in a vicious curved metal spike that arced up to the height of a horse’s belly.

  The baron didn’t hesitate. With a kick of his spurs he let his reins out and bellowed a command to his horse. It responded instantly, bunching the great muscles of its hindquarters and leaping up and over the creatures that pulled the chariot. They squealed with surprise, and a second later the baron felt the impact as the body of his leaping horse hit Gulkroth’s axe.

  Man, horse and beast collapsed onto the ground, and as the knights surged past on either side the baron struggled free of his mount’s broken body. He rolled clear and rose to face the horror that emerged from beneath the carcass of his horse.

  “Stand back,” he told the knights that swirled around him. “This one is mine.”

  They obeyed with an alacrity born of a lifetime of discipline. Turning their backs to their lord and the monster he faced, they pushed out to form a cordon around the combat. The beasts that swirled around them also paused, entranced by the sight of their own leader in all of his bestial glory.

  As he rose to his feet Gulkroth was magnificent with pure animalistic power.

  Thought. Calculation. Planning. His true nature had been restrained by these alien practices for months but now, finally, he was free of them. Now, with the glorious power of a river which has broken free of a dam, the rage which he had contained inside his bulging form erupted. He threw back his head and roared, a howl of unreasoning joy.

  There was an elemental quality to the sound that had both men and beasts falling to their knees, there to cower in the dirt. Gulkroth rose above them, and even the dullest of his herd could plainly see the eddying tides of the energy that twisted around him. He writhed with their Dark God’s power, a living herdstone of bone and fang and muscle.

  Only the baron found the resolve to rise to his feet. His sword, one of the Empire’s fabled runefangs, glowed in his hand. The impossibly straight lines of the weapon’s forging were a heartbreaking contrast to the raw, overwhelming power of the beast.

  Ludenhof didn’t care. The human part of him seemed to have been stripped away by the horror before him, but he still moved, readying himself with the slow, graceless motions of an automaton. When all else was gone he still had the iron bonds of duty and discipline around which he had forged his life, and even beneath the blast furnace of the beast’s blasphemous presence it held firm.

  He turned and lifted his sword, preparing to lunge forwards with the same cool efficiency with which he practised every morning. But before he could strike he looked up into Gulkroth’s eyes.

  They burned into him, and in that moment he was undone.

  For the first time in his life, the baron forgot his responsibilities. He forgot about the men behind him, and the land he was sworn to protect, and even the need to defend himself.

  He forgot about everything but the abyss he was looking into. The horror of it paralysed every thought, every instinct. His breath froze in his lungs, and his sword fell.

  Gulkroth kept the baron transfixed as he advanced, the great axe swinging from his grip. Despite his enemy’s steel shell and vicious weapons, he was now as defenceless as a rabbit. Gulkroth salivated as he contemplated the feast to come. This one was the lord of all the humans. Once he had devoured him then the land would be his to tear and furrow and to bring back into the smothering embrace of the forest.

  Exulting in his victory, Gulkroth was unaware of the ragged band of humans that had emerged from the flaming woods behind him.

  Erikson’s men had charged into the horde only to find it ignoring them. Most of the beasts were already running, panic and firelight reflected in their eyes. Others clustered dazed and transfixed around a circle of knights who also seemed para
lysed.

  Erikson, who knew that as soon as the company stopped it would disintegrate, barrelled into the unmoving knot of knights and beasts, and suddenly he found himself crashing through their terrified ranks and into the makeshift arena within.

  The first Gulkroth knew of the Gentleman’s Free Company of Hergig was the sudden bite of their swords.

  Erikson’s men lunged at the towering monstrosity that they found before them. They struck with all the vicious courage of those who know that their enemy’s back won’t be turned for long. They hacked at his sinews with axes, stabbed at his liver with swords, lunged at the muscles in the back of his neck with spears. In the first second they had inflicted a dozen wounds and when Gulkroth turned on them it was with a splattering of his own blood.

  He snarled, and the sound echoed through their heads with the same paralysing dread which had inflicted the baron.

  But the baron, released from his enemy’s terrible gaze, had already seized his moment. He stooped to retrieve his fallen sword and swung his keening blade with a terrible skill. The steel moved so fast that the tip of it blurred invisibly into the flame beyond, and even after it had struck its target it hardly slowed.

  Another blade would have thudded harmlessly against Gulkroth’s matted hide, or shattered against the oaken hardness of his muscle. But the baron’s runefang was as lethal as any weapon in the Old World. Dwarf-forged and ancient, it had carved a path through a thousand armies, and it hungered to carve through a thousand more.

  The weapon sliced through the bulk of its foe. Muscle and vertebrae parted beneath its razored edge and, even as the baron was swivelling around for another strike, the great weight of Gulkroth’s head swung loose from his shoulders and, tearing loose from the flap of skin which still supported it, fell to the ground.

  The terrible light in its eyes glowed for a moment longer then, as the decapitated body crashed into the ground, glowed no more. A terrible keening rose up from the beasts who stood around their fallen lord, and despair spread like a contagion through their tangled ranks. The ground shook beneath their feet as retreat turned into a stampede and the great herd which Gulkroth had assembled tore itself apart.

  Erikson, his costume a ragged mass of blood and filth, stepped forwards and placed his boot between the oxen sweep of the horns which adorned the fallen beast lord’s severed head.

  “My baron,” he said, sweeping in a low bow. “Allow me to present the compliments of the Gentlemen’s Free Company of Hergig.”

  Epilogue

  Erikson lay outstretched on the thin mattress that covered the camp bed. For the first time since he could remember he was neither tired nor hungry, nor desperate nor frightened nor enraged. His purse was full of enough gold to buy even the fattest of farms, a jug of wine lay at his elbow and his wounds were bandaged so expertly that he felt no pain.

  As he looked idly upwards to the canvas roof of the tent he was a man completely at peace.

  The rest of the company’s injured lay around him, their wounds bandaged as expertly as his own. In the hours after the battle the baron had insisted that they be given priority, and it was thanks to this that so many had survived.

  The dozen men who had died would be mourned in time. Erikson had given Porter, one of the few men to have emerged from the battle unscathed, the mission of finding any of the bodies he could. However, in the aftermath of the battle that had proved a hard task. As soon as the bodies were untangled the men had been laid in one of the great funeral pits and the beasts had been tossed onto great pyres that still roared with burning fat and bone.

  Not that Erikson wanted to think about that now.

  He listened as, from outside the tent, Sergeant Alter’s voice barked out a series of commands. He had pushed the baron’s blessings to include a hundred halberds and harnesses from the state armoury, and ever since he had accoutred the men with them Alter had been like a child with a new toy.

  “Halt, who goes there?”

  Dolf’s voice cut through Erikson’s reverie, and he sat up on one elbow to see who had come to visit.

  “Provost Marshal Steckler,” a familiar voice said.

  “Pass, friend,” Dolf said, and Erikson smiled. What couldn’t he do with a few dozen more like Dolf? What sort of company could he build this into?

  But no. No, he had retired.

  “Captain Erikson,” Steckler said as he prowled over to the bed.

  “Provost marshal.” Erikson nodded as the man pulled up a stool and sat down.

  “Thought you might like to keep a hold of this,” Steckler said and handed Erikson a leather tube. Erikson popped the cover off one end and slid out the company’s pardon. At the bottom, the great flourishing signature of the baron had been written. Erikson returned the parchment to the case, pressed it to his chest and smiled.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Don’t thank me, thank the baron,” Steckler said. “He’s even decided to keep your company under arms, so you’d better get well soon. I want you to find enough men to fill out your company to full strength. Say, four hundred men.”

  Erikson shook his head.

  “Talk to Alter,” he said. “Or Gunter perhaps. I haven’t decided who will take over, but I am retiring. Going to raise nice plump cattle and a nice plump wife. Have sons. Sit in the shade and drink beer and tell lies.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Steckler said. “You can’t retire. The men are under your cognisance for the next three years.”

  Erikson opened his mouth to argue, and then decided not to. What was three years anyway? He listened to Alter’s voice and already he was wondering how the company should be organised. There would be three sections of a hundred and twenty apiece, of that he was sure, but who would command them? He wanted Alter as company sergeant, so apart from Gunter who was there to…

  “Oh, and another thing,” Steckler said, interrupting his train of thought. “Your friend Viksberg. Seems he’s gone and deserted.”

  “Deserted?” Erikson asked. “But why would he desert now? The battle’s over.”

  “For the most part it is,” Steckler agreed. “But there are still bands of the beasts straggling back to their lairs. I put Viksberg in charge of a patrol which was to follow them into the forest and hunt them down. It seems his martial spirit failed him somewhere between receiving the order and reporting for duty.”

  “Did it now?” said Erikson. “Oh well. The military life is not for everybody.”

  * * *

  Over the course of the summer the emptied lake had dried into a hard pan of cracked mud. The rotting fish had long since been devoured, and nothing moved across the dried earth but dust.

  Dried dust and a single, limping figure.

  There was little left of the Hofstadter who had slunk away from his companions all those weeks ago. The nubs which had formed on his brow had sprouted into two thick horns, blunt-tipped and solid. His face had lengthened beneath them and his jaw had grown thicker so as to support the fangs that had burrowed up from beneath his old teeth. His frame, always wiry, had grown more heavily muscled and his legs had grown into those of a goat.

  Over time the ragged remains of his clothes had rotted off his frame, although even in this burning sunlight that hardly mattered. The thick pelt of fur he had grown had seen to that.

  But if he had changed physically, Hofstadter had changed even more within the tormented dimensions of his mind. The old human chatter of thought and calculation had gone, and in its place was the immediacy of animal instinct.

  It was that instinct which had led him to this place. He did not know why he had been chosen. Nor did he care. All that mattered was that the throbbing voice in his head was telling him that his dark pilgrimage was almost at an end.

  The stone was black beneath a covering of sunbaked filth. It stood before him like some terrible promise and, as Hofstadter drew nearer he realised that he would die there. The thought didn’t particularly disturb him. Even when he drew close enough to s
ee the pulsing green glow of the stone he felt something approaching bliss.

  It was the only time he had seen anything as beautiful as the amulet he still wore around his thickened neck.

  Soon he felt the light glowing within him, coursing through his blood and muscle and bones and oh, oh the pain.

  If his first transformation had been agonising, this was unbearable. It tore at every part of him, a screaming agony as his body melted and re-knit itself. The sun and the moons chased each other around the world. Flies buzzed towards the stone, settled on it, then dropped dead to the ground. Hofstadter noticed none of this. His world had become one of endless, unendurable agony.

  Then, on the third day, it stopped and he climbed to his feet, reborn. When he did so he knew two things.

  The first was that the voice which had called him here was his own, and had been all along.

  The second was that he was going to destroy the world.

  Scanning and basic

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  formatting and additional

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