Warhammer Anthology 12

by Death

  It may be they are right, Gabriel thought, as he watched Jubal and Garnedd take their men down to the river. But we can do no other. This is what we have set ourselves to do, and we cannot turn away from it now.

  Five months, this current expedition had lasted. They had long forgotten what it was like to sleep in a bed, or to walk without the weight of armour on their backs. This was the end, here today. The rumours had thickened and congealed until they had become fact. A Chaos host had reformed in the Troll Country north of Erengrad, and it was led by a great champion, a man who had once been a knight of the Empire, a man broken and twisted by hideous tortures in the lairs of the enemy until he had become one of them. A man with the face of an archangel, and the black heart of a daemon.

  My brother.

  I will see you again today, Michael, Gabriel thought. For the last time. This is where the journey ends.

  Jubal Kane sat on his mount easily as the big animal loped forward at a steady canter. The ground was thundering, echoing back the hooves of the fifty horsemen behind him. He could smell horse sweat and leather, cold iron, and the reek of the slow-match burning. The perfume of war. He looked momentarily to the blank sky and the thickening curtain of the falling snow.

  Sigmar, look upon us, we who do your work in this land. Watch over us, and welcome us to your halls when we go into the darkness.

  ‘Tighten up!’ he barked at the men behind him. He saw the enemy break cover to his front, a black mass of them coming out of the wood, like a tide of monstrous cockroaches.

  ‘Out pistols! Open ranks!’

  Garnedd, the squadron captain, drew level with Jubal and grinned as he donned his helm, his black mustachios jutting out like tusks.

  ‘First blood to us, Jubal.’

  ‘Aye. Let’s see if we can’t make this river run a little red, Jonas. Take the front rank in.’

  The leading line of horsemen quickened their pace, the second rank pausing, their horses half-rearing under them, fighting the bit to lunge forward. Jonas Garnedd drew his sword and stood up in his stirrups, his teeth a flash of white under his moustache. ‘Come on you bitches – this is what we’ve been waiting for!’

  The line plunged forward, the men resting the barrels of the long matchlock pistols on their shoulders, their lances bobbing on their backs. The snow was falling more heavily; they looked like monstrous, grunting ghosts as they cantered down the slope to the fast-flowing river below.

  Jubal watched the enemy host clear the open ground and splash into the shallows of the ford. The river was grey and white, as raw as the mane of a wolf, with patches of livid ice coursing through it. The leading ranks of the enemy infantry paused a mere second, and then splashed into it, a blunt-headed column some dozen files wide. More of their fellows were crowding out of the forest now, blackening the ground. Gabriel had been right; this was the main effort here; the move to the north had been a mere feint, no more.

  You always guess it right, you big bastard, Jubal thought, and his mouth curved in something like a smile. Maybe you and he still think the same way after all

  And then he frowned, and put the thought out of his mind.

  The enemy infantry were halfway across the ford now, thigh deep, splashing up white flashes of foam as they waded across. Jubal could see the broad, fur-fringed breastplates, many splashed with crimson paint, and the closed helms with horns topping them. Some had human skulls spiked to their armour, while the harness of others had been wrought and forged into the leering likenesses of daemons and foul beasts.

  Men of Khorne, the Blood God.

  In his heart, Jubal cursed them with silent venom.

  Garnedd drew up his line in the southern shallows of the ford. The snow shifted and blew, so that it seemed to Jubal a grey veil was fluttering across the field. He heard the roar of the Khornate infantry as they sighted the Imperials, and then faint on the wind, Garnedd’s commands.

  ‘Present your pieces – level your pieces – give fire!’

  And then the staccato rattle of the matchlocks, and a bloom of smut-grey smoke with stabs of yellow light spitting out in the midst of it. The front rank of the enemy crumpled, staggered, and dark hulking forms splashed head-first into the icy water. Their fellow warriors bellowed with rage and stepped over the bodies.

  Jubal stood up in his stirrups and drew his sword, an old scimitar, taken in the days when they had fought as far south as the sands of Araby. Like all of them, it was a long way from home.

  ‘Forward! Ready pistols!’

  The second line followed him down to the river at a fast walk.

  Garnedd’s men fired their second pistol over the cruppers of their saddles as they withdrew. The enemy column seemed snarled by its own dead, staggered by the power of the mountain river. Bodies were rolling half-buried in foam downstream. A tattered, horse-skull standard bobbed in the midst of the Khornate host, and the things under it were growling like animals.

  ‘Open ranks!’ Jubal shouted, and Garnedd’s squadron came through his line, the horses wide-eyed, nostrils blood-red and open, pluming hot steam.

  Jubal’s men trotted forward. The enemy was halfway across the river now, a solid mass unfazed by the casualties they had taken. One of their champions, bare-headed, his skin white as carrion, lifted a great polearm and roared defiance at the Imperials.

  Jubal turned to the trooper next to him and pointed with his scimitar. ‘Shoot me that whoreson!’

  Another volley. The enemy champion went down, a heavy matchlock-ball smashing through his skull. His fellows paused for a second, slavering with fury. Jubal’s second volley sowed more chaos in their ranks. But only for a few moments.

  ‘Back, back!’ Jubal shouted. ‘Fall back to Garnedd’s line – move, you clodpolls!’

  One man was not fast enough. As the horsemen turned tail, his mount stumbled and went down. He rolled in the shallows of the river, the horse screaming. A knot of the enemy lunged forward and engulfed horse and rider. The poor beast thrashed in the middle of a crowd of dark, gleaming forms as they congregated about it and hacked it to pieces in the water. The trooper disappeared, engulfed as though he had never existed.

  Jubal joined Jonas Garnedd up the riverbank. He wiped his mouth with the back of one leather gauntlet.

  ‘I call that cutting it close,’ Garnedd said casually.

  ‘Aye, But we did turn the river red, didn’t we?’

  ‘Lances?’

  ‘I believe so, Jonas.’

  The horsemen unclicked the short pennoned lances from their backs and hefted them in their right fists.

  ‘In and out quick, lads, like you’re with someone else’s wife!’ Jubal bellowed, and up and down the line men laughed.

  ‘Charge!’

  The line erupted into a canter, then a full gallop. The lances came down from the vertical and the hammering thunder of the heavy horses seemed to shake the very ground. With a wordless shout, the Imperials poured down the slope to the ford, where the first of the Khornate warriors was stepping onto the southern bank. The front ranks of the enemy seemed to shrink as the cavalry swooped down upon them.

  And struck.

  The wicked points of the lances went in at chest-height, and driving them came the armoured men on horseback, with all the momentum of their charge. The enemy warriors were impaled, smashed off their feet, trampled, and as the front ranks recoiled, so they collided with those coming after them. The head of the enemy column was driven in, the ford erupting in a tangled, evil scrum of flesh and iron and blood and icy water. Horses reared and screamed, men shouted, shrieked, flailed at each other, brutal murder carried out again and again in the white whipped fury of the river, the foam rising red about their legs.

  Jubal pulled back, sawing on the bit of his maddened horse. The cavalry were at a standstill, fighting with swords, their lances lost or broken. Their momentum had carried them halfway across the ford. But now the enemy was flooding in around them, scores of enemy warriors thrashing through the deeper w
ater on either side of the ford, up to their necks, many carried away by the current. Heedless of their losses they came on, hoping to surround the horsemen.

  ‘Withdraw!’ Jubal shouted. ‘Jonas – get them out! Lads, fall back up the hill!’

  By ones and twos, they hacked their way free of the carnage. The Khornate warriors mobbed the horses, chopping at their legs with great axes, hauling the Imperials off their mounts to be torn apart in the water. A mob of horsemen broke out of the melee – Jubal decapitated a fanged enemy intent on hamstringing his own horse, and then followed his men out.

  They galloped back up the slope, out of the river towards their own lines. Jubal looked about him as he rode clear, counting heads. Garnedd was beside him, his moustache stiff with blood, his horse lacking an ear but otherwise hale.

  ‘On me, on me!’ Jubal bellowed. The stink of blood was sickening – it was congealing in his beard. His entire right arm was scarlet to the shoulder.

  The horsemen drew together on the upslope, panting, their eyes still wide with the fury of the fight. The horses shifted and danced under them, in pain and fear. The Khornate infantry was across the river, on the southern bank. In the midst of the ford the bodies were rolling and turning downstream in the grip of the cold water, a ghastly flotsam. The enemy column continued its relentless march out of the forest.

  Jubal counted heads as they sat their horses looking down upon the enemy advance. Fifty-one had gone down to the river. Twenty-nine had returned.

  Morgan watched the struggle in the ford with a face as stiff and drawn as a marble statue. He turned to his trumpeter.

  ‘Galloran, sound me the recall.’

  The grizzled trooper put the slim brass horn to his lips and blew, eyes closed. The long, mournful note rang out into the falling snow. After a moment, Morgan saw Jubal and his men turn and begin trotting up the slope to the main body. So few of them. Jubal had lost near half his men.

  The two armies had disengaged, like fighting dogs. A flurry of violence, and then all was fluid again, and they were watching each other, ready for the next lunge. Gabriel felt the ground trembling under his horse and looked west to see Briscus bring in his wing, a hundred heavy cavalry to join the main body, a cloud of steam hanging above the labouring bodies of the horses. Looking east, he saw Harpius on the move also, another hundred men. In a few minutes his ragtag army would be reunited, the fists clenched, ready for the knockout blow.

  Jubal rejoined him, breathing hard. The big man began to methodically reload his pistols, spitting the bullets down the muzzle of each one and ramming them home.

  ‘You really think he’s there, Jubal?’ Gabriel asked.

  ‘He’s there – someone is directing all this, with some skill, too. He’s won the ford and almost caught us divided with his feint moves. No Chaos champion I’ve ever fought before would be so subtle.’

  Gabriel smiled weakly. ‘It’s all too familiar, Jubal. He was always a one for playing with the enemy before the main event. He’ll form up now, south of the river, and then come on in a body.’

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘Let them dress their ranks. I want a horde of them with their back to the river. Once they have a few hundred on our side of the water, we charge, and pull out again as quick as we can.’

  Jubal reholstered his pistols with a grunt. ‘The charge part is easy – it’s the getting out again that takes a little work. Gabriel, if he sits behind his men, he’ll break us down in the end. There’s a few thousand of them in the trees – they can soak up all we throw at them and ask for more.’

  ‘What, then?’

  Jubal would not meet his eyes. ‘Call him out. Fight him sword to sword. See if he’ll accept single combat. This Chaos scum is no more than rabble once their leader goes.’

  ‘You’re assuming I could beat my brother if it came to a single combat, Jubal.’

  ‘I did not say it would have to be a fair fight,’ Jubal growled in reply. ‘Get him out from behind his phalanxes, and we’ll kill him if it takes every one of us – that’s what we’re here for isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s what we’re here for,’ Gabriel agreed, but the words were mechanical.

  ‘We’ll see what a charge or two can do first,’ he said.

  Jubal opened his mouth as if to speak, then shut it again. He knew better than to argue with the look in his general’s eye.

  The afternoon drew on, and the winter’s night grew closer, the light fading as the sun began to climb down into the Sea of Chaos, far to the west. The Chaos host advanced out of its forest fastness and crossed the river, company by company. From the dark ranks of the enemy obscene insults, animal bellows and crazed shouting came and went. Individual champions strode forward of the main ranks and shook their standards at the silent cavalry on the hill above them. The snow drew off a little, becoming a thin, stinging veil which whitened the horses, and made of Gabriel’s men a ghost army, a grey, looming shadow lining the high ground.

  And finally the commander of the Chaos forces appeared. Flanked by columns of goat-headed warriors, he rode a monstrous steed, which might once have been a horse, but which had been warped and bloated into something else. It bore him into the middle of his stamping, cheering, roaring host, and the whole riverbank erupted into a howl of hate and fury and triumph, so that the snow slid from the boughs of trees at the very sound.

  ‘It’s him,’ Gabriel said. ‘He’s come at last.’ He turned to Jubal and saw that his grizzled comrade was looking down at the maddened spectacle below with a rictus of hatred slashed across his face, and tears in his eyes.

  Gabriel drew his sword, and kissed the blade.

  ‘Galloran, signal me the advance.’

  The high, fierce notes of the horn sounded out across the river-valley, and the horsemen on the hill began to move. A flash of movement went down their line as they unholstered their matchlocks, the smoke from the smouldering match-coils at their pommels leaving a skein of dark lines behind them as they advanced. Below them, the warriors of the Chaos host paused in their gibbering and dancing, to stare up at the wolf-grey line, ominous in its silence. For a moment the valley was almost still, save for the rushing of the river, and the rising tremor of the earth as the heavy horses passed across it, the rumour of a distant war.

  ‘A quick volley, then straight in with the lances,’ Gabriel said to Jubal. ‘Pass it down the line.’

  The pace of the cavalry quickened. They broke into a trot. The Chaos horde set up its clamour again, and some of the more frenzied of its warriors broke ranks to run up the hill at the horses in a mad rage.

  Eighty yards from the enemy line Gabriel reined in. He raised his sword. ‘Give fire!’

  The front rank erupted in fire and smoke, two hundred matchlocks going off as one. The vanguard of the enemy staggered, the heavy bullets blasting warriors off their feet, blowing away limbs, blasting skulls to fragments. Scores of them went down, hardly a round missing its target in that tight-packed mass of muscle and iron.

  ‘Fire!’ Gabriel shouted again, his face red with the blood-pumping effort. Spittle flew from his lips; he felt the bones in his fist grate as he gripped his sword until the ivory hilt creaked in his fingers.

  Another volley. The enemy had begun to surge forward, but this one set them back again. A ghastly windfall built up before them, a tangled mass of corpses, some half-supported by the press of their fellows. The snow blushed scarlet under them. For a few minutes the Chaos host was dazed by the double-strike of the volleys. The wounded shrieked in pain and anger and were kicked aside by their comrades, the ranks choked with maimed and dead figures.

  ‘Out lances!’ Gabriel shouted, and to Galloran, ‘Sound me the charge!’

  The horn-call rang out, clear and clean in the darkening winter afternoon. It was repeated up and down the line, and then the horsemen began to move once more, their mounts springing up under them, straight into a canter. The riders kicked them on frenziedly, and the big horses screamed, put their he
ads down and thundered forward, a tide of muscle and iron, with the lances levelled before them.

  They piled into the van of the Chaos horde like a hammer. The heavy horses bowled over the front ranks, smashing deep through the enemy formation, every lance finding a target, and kept going until the sheer press and mass of the enemy warriors brought them to a rearing, butting, kicking halt. The warhorses bit and lashed out and reared, whilst their riders drew their swords and began hacking at every half-glimpsed skull and unguarded piece of flesh they could see. The entire Chaos army was shunted backwards, scores trampled underfoot, hundreds more packed so tight they could not even raise their arms.

  Gabriel’s men fought like fiends, until they were no longer the grey ghosts they had seemed on the hillside, but bloody apparitions of slaughter, slathered with the innards and blood of friend and foe alike, their eyes wide under their helms, and the big horses churning below them like dark engines of battle.

  Now, Gabriel thought, this is the heart of it. Now you will come to me brother. This is the time.

  Galloran was still beside him. Gabriel yelled at him over the torrential roar of battle. ‘Sound the withdrawal, and keep sounding it!’

  The call rang out, was interrupted as Galloran decapitated an enemy warrior, then rang out again. It was picked up by the trumpeters of the other wings, and the army began to pull back. Rear ranks first, then those caught in the middle, and then in knots and groups, the men at the very front.

  As they turned about, many died, dragged from their horses or stabbed through from behind. Gabriel saw one great destrier go down riderless with at least a dozen enemy warriors clinging to it, hacking at its legs, stabbing its eyes out as it collapsed. He rode over bodies, swung Arion round so the destrier could strike another Khornate berserker who was trying to disembowel him. The wide iron-shod hooves smashed the foe to the ground and crushed his ribcage as they stamped down on him.