[Empire Army 01] - Reiksguard

by Richard Williams - (ebook by Undead)

  “What I do with what is mine, is mine to say alone,” Thorntoad warned, and the ogre stiffly turned away from the prisoner.

  “My bulls hunger, they need more than this,” Burakk replied, kicking the bundles in the centre of the room.

  “They need? They need? But what do they deserve, Burakk Craw? These were taken by my fiends, not your bulls. Your bulls were not even there. I cannot give the choicest cuts to those who did not fight.”

  “We cannot fight in your warrens, goblin. But they hide down there because of my bulls. We stopped them walking the surface. We stopped their caravans travelling down the river. That was our doing.”

  “And for which you took your reward and ate most of what was taken, while my fiends scraped their dinners off rocks. Now they have won and taken spoils; they too must be rewarded.”

  Thorntoad’s logic meant nothing to Burakk. An ogre tyrant commanded the loyalty of his bulls only so long as he ensured their hunger was sated. Thorntoad’s goblins could survive on nothing but the fungi that grew in their tunnels; Burakk’s ogres needed meat.

  “We ate better when the fight was hard than we do when the fight is almost won,” he grumbled.

  “Ah, Burakk Craw,” Thorntoad hissed as he climbed the ropes back to the top once more, “the fight is not done yet.”

  An object fell from the darkness around Thorntoad’s voice and bounced with a clang. Burakk picked it up. It was a helmet, but this one did not have a finely wrought face-mask as was typical of dwarfen warriors; this one was plain, crudely made by comparison.

  “It is from the warriors of the tribes of men. Have you heard of them, Burakk Craw?”

  The ogre murmured assent. He remembered these men: the way their flimsy bodies broke, the way their swords and spears bounced off his skin; but he also remembered their guns, their cannon which roared like giants, their iron shot that smashed through gutplates and took an ogre’s life from a hundred paces away.

  “An army of their warriors has crossed into our mountains, marching to the dwarfs’ aid. They are well fed, and they have plump animals with them too. So have patience, ogre, your next feast marches towards you. And in the meanwhile, the Snaggle Tooths did not attend this night; you may take your bulls and eat your fill of them.”

  Burakk grunted again, then took up the bundles and dragged them away. Thorntoad watched until he had left, and then slithered down his ropes and rings to his prisoner. He pulled on a chain nearby and a goblin was dragged from a hole, the chain connected to a collar around his neck. Thorntoad could not bear to have squig-beasts in his presence; they reminded him too much of his own years of degradation, and in return they detested him, smelling his freakishness upon him. Instead, Thorntoad kept other goblins as his pets, as he had once been kept. This one had been a shaman, and had thought to call down Gork and Mork’s judgement upon Thorntoad. Instead the gods had proved who they truly favoured. Thorntoad yanked the shaman’s chain again and drew him over to the bound dwarf.

  “Wake it up,” Thorntoad ordered.

  The miserable shaman took a small pouch of spores and blew them in the dwarf’s face. The warrior stirred, mouthing words in the dwarfs’ secret tongue. The dwarfs protected their language closer than they protected their gold; they thought if they did so, they could conceal their secrets from their foes. That they could, if the only place their foes looked for knowledge was in their books. Thorntoad preferred to look for knowledge in people; it was far quicker, provided you could hurt them enough. And here the dwarfen language was no protection, for in their greed for wealth and trade, the dwarfs had learned another language, one which had no secrets, one which even a goblin could learn: the language of men.

  “What… you… name?” Thorntoad asked the dwarf in broken Reikspiel.

  The dwarf gave no reaction, and muttered another few words of his native gibberish. Thorntoad slipped a razor from the rock and held it close beside the dwarf’s ear.

  “I… cut off… you… beard,” Thorntoad sneered. The dwarf’s eye suddenly widened, and Thorntoad grinned in delight. The convenient tribes of men had solved another problem of his. He and the dwarf could understand each other; and that was all that Thorntoad needed. That, and time.

  Delmar sat at the base of a tree, the rain drumming on his helmet. The drops poured down the grooves in the metal in tiny rivers, and each time he turned his head a fresh gush of water cascaded off like a waterfall. He clutched his cloak tightly to him, though that had long since grown sodden. Ahead of him, a group of knights and bergjaegers were stepping carefully into a dry cavern, looking for any sign of goblin presence. Every cave, every crevasse, had to be checked in case of ambush.

  It had been four days since they crossed the Nedrigfluss, and it had been two days since the rain began. It fell in heavy, packed downpours such as Delmar had never before encountered. The army’s progress had stalled. The higher paths had been washed away in muddy slime and the lower submerged beneath the swelling Reik. On the first day they had tried to carry on and made a little progress, but by the second it was fruitless; it took no more than a few dozen horses upon a fresh track to turn it into a morass.

  Around Delmar, the other knights of Jungingen’s banner did what they could to keep both themselves and their equipment dry. Some sat under trees like Delmar, some even under their horses; they had stored their bright plumes, and their scarlet cloaks were so waterlogged that they were nearly black. It was a picture of misery, and Delmar felt the most miserable of all.

  This campaign was not as he had hoped his first would be. He had not even seen the enemy. The goblins knew they stood little chance against the knights at close quarters and so they gave ground, harassing them from a distance. The only proof Delmar even had of their existence had been the occasional shower of black arrows from the depths of the woods and the tops of cliffs. They caused little harm to the knights in their thick armour, but each time the column was attacked, it came to a halt while the site of the attack was investigated and secured.

  Delmar’s investigations concerning Griesmeyer and his father were equally unsuccessful. He had spoken to every knight in his banner, but none had been with the order twenty years before. Preceptor Jungingen himself had only served for ten. He was ambitious as well, and was determined to reach one of the senior offices within the order, and so only had praise for the influential Griesmeyer.

  Though Delmar was surrounded now by nearly a thousand men whom he called brother, there was not one of them whom he trusted enough to confide in. For all the talk of brotherhood during their training, of the connection that ran through each knight of the Reiksguard, here he was on campaign and he felt nothing. The older knights of the banner had drawn close during the war in the north, but he had not been a part of that. Amongst the knights of his vigil, Siebrecht, Gausser, Falkenhayn and the rest, those brothers to whom he should be closest, there was still that division.

  Delmar had thought, had hoped, that the rivalry between the Reiklanders and the Provincials would have fallen away on campaign, that they would be united in the face of the common foe, but it had not happened. The distance between the two factions was still there, and Delmar no longer fit with either. He could not stand Falkenhayn’s superiority and posturing, and yet there was no place for him amongst the Provincials.

  For all of Gausser’s words the day of the aborted duel, he and Siebrecht had never been out of each other’s company, and yet Delmar could not make his peace with the knight from Nuln. Gausser had shamed Delmar into withdrawing his challenge, but Siebrecht had never withdrawn his own injurious comments. His mind may have been sick with grief at the time, but it was no longer. He therefore either meant what he had said, in which case he denigrated everything that Delmar believed in, or he did not and it was sheer pride and arrogance that prevented him apologising. If that was the case then he was just as bad as Falkenhayn, and Delmar wanted nothing to do with either of them.

  A bergjaeger emerged from the cavern and declared it clear. Delm
ar and the knights around him wearily clambered back to their feet, brushing off the mud as best they could, and led their horses inside.

  Some way ahead, Kurt Helborg led his own horse into the shelter beneath a ledge. Ahead of him a crew of a light cannon had blocked the path, struggling to lever their burden upwards. It was too wet to bring out the map, but Helborg did not need it in any case. This territory was burnt into his brain and he saw the pattern of mountains and rivers every time he closed his eyes. For all the care and attention to detail that had gone into its creation, though, the map did not tell him what he most desperately needed to know. Where, in Sigmar’s name, was his enemy?

  Councillors of state like Count von Walfen and the Baron von Stirgau thought they knew what war was because they read dispatches and watched it happen from a distance. Helborg had heard of a game that was becoming increasingly popular amongst the noblemen of Altdorf and the palace courtiers. They used models as fighting men, and they played on a board to represent a battlefield, standing over it as gods. They thought it taught them strategy, generalship, the qualities of a Reiksmarshal. Helborg had had Preceptor Trier sit down with him for an hour and teach him the basics of the game; Helborg had then vowed never to play it again. It was a toy, an exercise in fantasy. Nothing more. Had the players been blindfolded, kept in separate rooms, only been told once an hour of the positions of their forces and been required to feed their models each day or have them disappear, then, perhaps, they might acquire the merest inkling of command.

  The army had progressed nearly five miles up the western bank of the Reik, passing the lower peak of the Litzbach and crossing another smaller tributary, known as the Sonnfluss. The vanguard of the army had reached the next tributary along, the Unkenfluss, and there it had paused; for on the other side of the Unkenfluss was Und Urbaz.

  Und Urbaz was little more than an outpost, a walled watchtower and storerooms for trade. But nothing constructed by the dwarfs was ever less than sturdy and as a race they could not help but build with a touch of grandeur. Und Urbaz was as strong as any Empire fort, and its walls and towers were sculpted with the faces of dwarfen warriors and the anvil and fire totems of Karak Angazhar.

  The dwarfs, though, were nowhere to be seen. The grey walls were blackened with smoke, and the lower sculptures had been attacked and chiselled away. Whether the place had been captured or whether the dwarfs had left of their own accord, Helborg could not discern. Goblins had certainly been there since, and if they hid there still then they could wreak havoc upon the army as it tried to cross the Unkenfluss.

  Jaeger Voll assured Helborg that the Unkenfluss could be forded an hour or so to the west and, for once, Helborg had relented in his pursuit of speed. He sent Sub-Marshal Zollner and Wallenrode’s banner up the tributary. They were to cross where they could, then take Und Urbaz from the flank. And if they failed, Helborg had deployed the cannon ready to pound Und Urbaz to dust.

  Zollner’s knights were harassed by goblin archers from the heights every step of the way, but their casualties were light, their armour protecting them from the goblins’ barbs. It took them half a day, though, to reach the ford in the Unkenfluss and then circle back.

  As the rain began again, Helborg watched Zollner’s assault from across the river. As he expected, Zollner orchestrated an expert assault with his knights both mounted and on foot. They quickly surmounted the undefended walls and disappeared inside. All a general’s skill, though, could not protect his men from the unknown, and Helborg waited impatiently for them to re-emerge. Half an hour passed, and Helborg watched Zollner himself head into the outpost. Whether it meant that they had encountered the enemy or not, Helborg did not know. He did not, though, try to call over or send one of his guard to check. He had trained Zollner, he had trained all his preceptors personally. They trusted his orders, and he trusted them to carry them out.

  After an hour, Zollner’s knights re-emerged. There had been no goblins. The chambers under Und Urbaz had been cut deep and had taken time to explore. But Helborg’s hope that Und Urbaz might hold some means of communicating with the dwarfs was in vain. The tunnels which stretched further into the mountains had been collapsed, deliberately.

  With Zollner’s knights standing watch, the rest of the army crossed behind them. The soldiers hoping to spend a few dry days inside the outpost were to be disappointed, however. The storerooms were full to their low ceilings with the charred remains of barrels and crates, and the stench the goblins had left behind was unbearable.

  Even the watchtower was no use, for its insides had been gutted and it floors broken apart. And so it was left there, unclaimed by either side, looming over the army as the rain poured down.

  Und Urbaz was the gate to Karak Angazhar, keeping all the unwelcome, men included, from trespassing too deep into the dwarfen kingdom. For beyond Und Urbaz lay the great mountain bastion known as the Stadelhorn, which dipped at only one place for the route of the Reik. Voll said the dwarfs called it Bar Kadrin, but the bergjaegers called it the Dragon’s Jaw.

  It was there, Helborg predicted, that the goblins would attack. And it was there, he knew, that they might be destroyed.

  The Dragon’s Jaw, just as Und Urbaz, bore the marks of its previous owners. The dwarfs, in more prosperous times, had carved giant faces of their ancestors into the rocky outcrops on each side, in the hope that they would watch over the river below them and the dwarfs’ enterprise. When the greenskins had taken control, they too had put their own touch upon the landscape and smashed the faces into grotesque parodies more akin to their own features.

  The Jaw cut through the Stadelhorn bastion, leaving the heights to the west and the peak known as the Predigtstuhl to the east. It sides were steep and what little level ground there was at the base of the pass was filled with the raging Reik. Helborg’s army would be horribly exposed as it marched through, for only three or four men could walk abreast on either bank. For all that the goblins may have abandoned Und Urbaz, they would not, they could not, leave them to travel through the pass unopposed.

  Helborg sheltered against the thundering rain in the lee of the watchtower and looked out into the Jaw. He could not simply entrust his fate to Sigmar and advance blindly into that. In the first two days since they entered the mountains, he had sent out scouting parties spread on either side of the army’s line of advance to look for the enemy. They had found them. None of his scouts had managed to travel more than a mile from the main body before being attacked and driven back. If they could not venture even that far without the protection of armoured knights, there was no chance that a single rider might slip past and make it all the way to Karak Angazhar. The dwarfs, Helborg assumed, must be in similar straits for if they had sent a messenger, by boat or foot, then it had not reached him.

  It had been Jaeger Voll who found the solution, and on the third day he had left the army to make the arrangements. He had only just returned.

  “Did you get them?” Helborg asked the smaller man.

  “Aye, my lord. They’re outside.”

  “Good,” Helborg said. “Where would be best for them?”

  “Normally,” the bergjaeger said, “we would use them from the Litzbach, from there they could reach Und Urbaz. But now the dwarfs are no longer here, the Litzbach will be no good.”

  “Then where?”

  The bergjaeger brought out his own small map, painted with black oil on calfskin and quite waterproof. “The only place then is here.” A dirty finger pointed at a spot. Helborg peered down. The bergjaeger’s finger was pointed at the Predigtstuhl.

  “That mountain, jaeger, is huge, and the western face is infested with goblins. I have had more and more reports of sightings every hour.”

  “Aye,” the bergjaeger muttered patiently, “but we will not need to be at the peak. On the eastern face, there is a ridge. If we go around the Predigtstuhl and up onto that ridge, then we will reach Karak Angazhar itself.”

  “Brother Sternberg?” Helborg called for the knight f
urther down the wall.

  “Yes, Marshal?”

  “Who is there left to cross the Unkenfluss?”

  “The sergeants’ rearguard, Marshal, and Preceptor Jungingen and his banner.”

  “Very well. We will divert Jungingen and his knights to the eastern bank of the Reik. You can meet them there, Jaeger Voll.”

  “Aye,” the bergjaeger replied, but did not move. Above them, the rain continued to fall.

  Helborg considered the man for a moment. He was often dubious about these kinds of local irregular troops: their loyalties were divided between the Empire and their home; they were unused to direct command and often proved stubbornly independent. They had no understanding of the brutal choices that war put upon commanders and their men. This wiry bergjaeger with his pointed face had proved himself motivated and ingenious, but his obedience had yet to be tested.

  “I will have a message sent to Preceptor Jungingen to expect you and your men. You leave at once.”

  “Aye, my lord. We will set out as soon as the storm breaks.”

  Here was the moment, Helborg knew, where the true extent of the bergjaeger’s loyalty would emerge.

  “No, Jaeger Voll. At once. You must be in position to act as soon as the rain clears; we cannot wait and hope that it holds off long enough for you to circumvent the Predigtstuhl as well.”

  The bergjaeger paused and sucked air through his teeth in thought. He knew, far better even than the great Reiksmarshal, the danger in that order, in climbing even part way up the Predigtstuhl in such weather, not knowing what forces might oppose them. But then, the Reiksmarshal knew that he knew better, and yet still it had to be done.

  “Aye, Marshal,” Voll said slowly. “At once.”

  Helborg dismissed the bergjaeger with a nod. This mountain hunter was indeed proving to be quite exceptional.

  As his boat approached, Siebrecht sat and eyed the eastern bank of the Reik warily. The water had risen to the forest’s edge and the trees cloaked the ground in shadow. He could not help but be reminded of their crossing of the Nedrigfluss and of the arrows that had shot from the darkness to kill them. The leading elements of Jungingen’s banner had already landed and cleared the bank, but still Siebrecht could not quiet his trepidation. Gausser and Bohdan behind him were speaking of their new companions, Jaeger Voll and his men. Five of them had caught the knights’ attention, for instead of carrying a bow they each had a long pipe, twice the height of a man and curved and splayed at the bottom end, strapped in a harness on their backs. The tubes were wrapped up tight against the rain.