Hammer and Bolter: Issue 23

by Christian Dunn

Alaric extended his arms to the north and west. ‘The Black Mountains in the north and the Grey Mountains in the west. Tell me what you see when you look at them.’

  Sigmar shielded his eyes from the lowering sun with the palm of his hand and looked out over the titanic peaks of the Black Mountains. The jagged, crimson-hued mountain that men of the south knew as Blood Peak reared over a gnarled mob of craggy summits that stretched into the clouds of the far distance. Dots of bird flocks swirled over the nearest peaks, like crows over a battlefield.

  Only the misty edges of the Grey Mountains could be seen from here, the sharp slopes cowled in patches of snow. What lay beyond those mountains was a mystery to the men of the Empire. Only the Bretonii had dared venture into the ice-locked passes that led to the lands beyond, and no one had seen or heard from that lost tribe in nearly two decades. Twilight was fast approaching, and there was little Sigmar could see that had attracted Alaric’s attention.

  ‘I’m not sure what I’m supposed to see,’ he said at last.

  ‘Do you see the mountains moving?’ asked Alaric.

  ‘Moving? No, of course not,’ said Sigmar. ‘Mountains don’t move.’

  ‘Ah, lad, of course they do,’ said Alaric with the amusement of someone who knows the punchline of a jest. ‘This world is a lot less solid than you manlings think it is. All this land, these mountains and the oceans, they drift on giant beds of stone that float on vast seas of molten rock. They move and grind against each other, and sometimes they collide to raise giant mountain ranges like this. A long time ago, before we dwarfs even built our holds, two of those beds collided, and the shock of that threw up these mountains.’

  ‘You’re mocking me,’ said Sigmar.

  ‘Not at all. Aye, these beds of rock move so slowly that you fast-moving races don’t see it, but dig the rock for long enough and you’d soon know. The rock bed to the north scraped up over this one and the tail end of the northern mountains rode roughshod over the mountains of the south to make this almighty snarl-up of peaks and valleys and this pass.’

  ‘This is a pass?’ said Sigmar. ‘I thought this was just some secret path you knew. Ulric’s breath, the very teeth of winter are blowing down on us.’

  ‘It’s a pass right enough,’ said Alaric. ‘Yonder to the north-east is Karak Hirn, but our path won’t take us anywhere near there. Shame, I’d have liked to see the great wind cavern and hear it bellow.’

  ‘Alaric, why are you telling me this?’ asked Sigmar.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said the dwarf, with a soft sigh. ‘I suppose I just want you to understand the rock and stone like I do. There’s history here, and memory too. These mountains have seen their fair share of dying, and I can feel there’s more on the way. The monster we’re hunting came this way, and he wasn’t the only one.’

  ‘My scout didn’t see any signs of anything else,’ said Sigmar.

  ‘Your scout doesn’t know rock like I do.’

  ‘You think there’s trouble coming?’

  ‘In these mountains, there’s always trouble coming,’ said Alaric.

  They found a place to camp for the night only a little farther up the pass, a projecting lip of rock that Sigmar would have called a narrow plateau, but which Alaric seemed to think was a sweeping plain. In any case, the point was moot, as there was good water streaming down the cliff in a sparkling waterfall, and screes of tumbled boulders that offered plentiful cover and places for sentries to watch the approaches.

  The riders saw to their horses first, hobbling them in the centre of the flat ground and rubbing down their lathered flanks with handfuls of scrub grass warily pulled from the edge of the cliff. Each beast was then led in turn to the natural trough at the base of the waterfall and allowed to slake their thirst in the bitingly cold water.

  With the mounts settled, the men attended to their own needs, filling waterskins and breaking out hard bread and salted meat from the horses’ panniers as the darkness began to close on the mountains like a fist. Fires were lit against the cliff and the reflected heat dispelled the worst of the bitter wind blowing down from the heart of the Vaults. Warriors sat close to the fires, untying their heavy furs to allow the warmth to reach their bodies.

  Alaric’s dwarfs sat in a small circle around their own fire, though none of them removed their armour or loosened their cloaks. The race of mountain folk and the race of men were bound by powerful oaths, but neither sought out the company of the other. As alike as they were in basic form, there remained – and would always remain – a gulf of understanding between them. Common cause had brought them together, and but for a number of rare instances, few men and dwarfs would count themselves as friends.

  Sigmar moved through the campsite, taking the time to stop at each fire and exchange words with the men gathered around it. He knew every man’s name, and though he was exhausted by the time he sat at the fire with Wenyld, Cuthwin, Leodan, Teon and Gorseth, he knew the effort had been worthwhile. The talk around the other fires was animated, and good-natured banter flowed between the men instead of dark muttering and fearful speculation of what tomorrow might bring.

  ‘Another long day,’ said Cuthwin, as Sigmar sat down.

  ‘They’re only going to get longer. Alaric says these are just the foothills of the Vaults.’

  ‘Dwarf humour or dwarf understatement?’ asked Wenyld.

  ‘The first, I hope,’ said Sigmar, loosening the cords binding his boots and flexing his feet with a relieved sigh. Seeing the men around the fire grinning, Sigmar said, ‘Even Emperors get blisters sometimes.’

  ‘Even from horseback?’ said Cuthwin, passing Sigmar as bowl of hot oats and goats’ milk. The milk was starting to turn, but Sigmar didn’t mind. A warm meal at the end of a day’s travel did more to restore spirits than anything else, but Sigmar knew they would need to catch Krell soon before lack of supplies forced them to turn back.

  They ate their food slowly, letting the aches and pains of the day ease out in the heat and companionable silence. Leodan passed a leather-wrapped bottle around the fire, a powerful Taleuten liquor distilled from grain and root vegetables. Sigmar took the first drink, and Cuthwin and Wenyld gratefully accepted one also. Teon and Gorseth each took a mouthful, and both coughed and retched at the taste of the powerful spirit.

  Leodan smiled and said, ‘It’s an acquired taste, lad, but it’ll keep you snug in your bed through a long, cold night.’

  ‘Not too snug,’ warned Sigmar, as Leodan took another long mouthful. ‘Alaric’s dwarfs are taking the first watch, but we’ll be taking our turn too.’

  Leodan shrugged and put the bottle away with a sour look, as the rest of Sigmar’s warriors made themselves as comfortable as they could. With only their saddle blankets between them and the rocky ground, it was going to be a long night. Sigmar arranged his saddle for a pillow before pulling his furs over him.

  He closed his eyes, and sleep stole upon him almost instantly.

  Sigmar woke with the first touch of chill in the air, a deeper cold than simply that of the mountains. This was a cold that only emanated from beyond the portals of Morr, the breath that accompanies those unquiet souls who do not pass through the god of the dead’s halls to their final rest. His eyes snapped open, and he rolled from his furs with Ghal-maraz leaping to his hand. The rune hammer glimmered with corposant, the bound magics that were inimical to the dead sparkling like snowflakes in a fire.

  ‘To arms!’ shouted Sigmar. ‘Up! Up!’

  Not a soul moved, his men resting where he had left them. The horses stood as still as the carved horses at the end of Lancer Bridge over the Reik, their eyes glassy and lifeless.

  ‘Up, damn you!’ roared Sigmar, delivering his commands with a boot to hasten his men awake. They grunted and rolled over in their sleep, but did not awaken. Sigmar saw that even Alaric’s dwarfs were still slumbering, and knew that some fell enchantment was at work
.

  ‘Ulric’s bones, get up!’ shouted Sigmar, kneeling beside Cuthwin and shaking the huntsman violently.

  ‘He can’t hear you, son of Björn, no one can,’ said a rasping voice from the darkness.

  ‘Show yourself, damn you!’ demanded Sigmar, turning to try and pinpoint the sound.

  ‘In time, but for now it would be best for you if you kept silent. Yes, silent would be good. Your men and the stunted ones were easy, but you have will that is not easily hidden.’

  ‘What have you done to them?’ cried Sigmar. ‘Are they dead?’

  ‘Always so loud, you heroes,’ said the voice. ‘I’m not deaf, and neither are they.’

  ‘Answer me, damn you!’

  ‘Of course they’re not dead, dung-for-brains. Look, they still breathe. Their chests still rise and fall and warm air still blows from their lungs.’

  ‘Come out of the shadows, you coward! Face me!’

  ‘Face you? Don’t be ridiculous,’ laughed the voice. ‘Would I go to all this trouble just for you to bludgeon me with that hammer of yours? Now be silent, son of Björn. I mean you no harm, but they do! Look behind you, Sigmar Heldenhammer, and find yourself a place to remain silent and still!’

  Sigmar cooled his temper towards this invisible speaker, angry at being so manipulated, but as he heard the tramp of marching feet from below, he could still recognise the lesser of two evils. Sigmar ghosted silently to the narrow portion of the thin plateau on which he and his men were resting. Far below, but climbing rapidly, was a seething host of creatures, though Sigmar had difficulty in determining exactly what they were.

  Some carried torches, while others bore tall banners of bone. He could hear the clatter of armour and a scratching, squealing sound like a barnful of chittering mice. The wind changed direction, and a verminous reek of stinking, unwashed flesh was carried uphill. Sigmar gagged at the stench, like an exposed midden on a summer’s day. He fought to keep his food down as he smelled rotten meat, excrement and a hundred other fouler aromas. The noise of the approaching host grew louder, a barrage of squeals, squeaks and guttural barks.

  Though it was too dark for an accurate gauge of numbers, Sigmar reckoned that at least five hundred or more creatures were marching towards their camp. He looked back over his shoulder to his sleeping warriors, knowing they were dead unless he could get them to move.

  But how to rouse men who had been ensorcelled by some nameless enchanter?

  Before Sigmar had a chance to think of a solution, he saw the pathway leading back down the mountain ripple and undulate, as though the rock had become suddenly malleable. In the thin light of the torches, he saw a wriggling carpet of mangy rats running ahead of the host: hundreds of disgusting creatures with patchy fur, branded backs and splintered fangs.

  He stifled a gasp of horror and pushed himself hard against the cliff, stepping up onto a lip of stone as the seething tide of rats surged past like a furry river of diseased flesh and blood-matted fur. Some were brown, some were black, and yet others were white and furless. Pink tails wriggled like worms, and they snapped and bit at each other, as though driven by the whips of cruel masters. A few turned and sniffed the air as they passed him, and several turned their beady pink eyes upon him. They hissed in puzzlement, but passed on without attacking.

  Behind the rats came scuttling beasts that loped and darted in the firelight of the torches. Wretched things in rags and scraps of armour, with their elongated snouts obscured by sackcloth hoods and their eyes made huge by orbs of glass nailed to their skulls. Sigmar held his breath at the sight of these vile monsters, monstrous hybrids of man and rat. They carried rusted swords, crude halberds and heavy cleavers with notched blades and old bloodstains. They hissed and spat with feral glee as they moved past him, but none of them so much as turned a grotesque, rag-swathed head towards him.

  Sigmar took a tight grip of his hammer’s haft, but instead of falling upon his men with their brutal cleavers, the rat-things tramped over the narrow plateau as though it were unoccupied. They marched past with their strange, jerking, hopping gait, but paid no mind to the sleeping men and dwarfs in their midst. Though the sleepers were clearly visible to Sigmar, the stinking horde of ratmen ignored them, as though they had no inkling of their presence whatsoever.

  Sigmar let out his breath, and regretted it immediately as a rat-thing with black armour and a bronze headpiece, segmented like a beetle’s carapace, paused in its march and stepped close to the cliff. Its nose twitched and its blistered tongue flicked out, as though tasting the air. Stubby whiskers bristled, and it cocked its head to one side. Beneath its helm, Sigmar saw eyes that were the red of a low-burning fire, eyes that narrowed with a loathsome, feral intelligence that horrified him.

  The creature stood tall, its furred body twisted in a hideous parody of a man, upright and erect, but still with reverse-jointed legs and a whipping tail that ended in a barbed hook. A wide leather belt at its waist held a collection of skinning knives and a stubby wooden club fitted to an intricate mechanism of bronze and iron with a glowing green light at its heart.

  Sigmar leaned back, letting the cold water streaming down the cliff pour over him as the creature took a stalking step closer. The icy chill of the water was freezing, but he did not dare move. How this thing could not see him, he did not know, but he guessed that if he so much as moved a muscle, whatever enchantment was keeping his men from the sight of these beasts would be undone.

  The beast’s face was less than an inch from him, its breathing wafting the stench of its last meal in his face. The smell of spoiled dairy and rotten meat made Sigmar want to gag, and its hot, rancid breath was animal and reeked of an open sewer. The flesh of its maw pulled back as it hissed in consternation, revealing two enormous, flat-faced fangs like sharpened chisel blades.

  A whip cracked and the dreadful thing flinched, spinning around and rejoining the marching host as it continued its journey into the mountain. Sigmar watched the creature go, as larger beasts and more intricately attired creatures shuffled and scuttled past. Careful to keep his breathing even and his movements to a minimum, Sigmar blinked away the spray of water in his eyes as he tried to make sense of these nightmarish horrors.

  Wolfgart had spoken of fighting squealing creatures with the faces of rats in the tunnels beneath Middenheim, and Sigmar – like everyone else – had assumed them to be no more than bestial forest monsters yoked to the Norsii army as it burned its way south. But to see such a horde, moving with such cohesion and discipline forced him to think of these things as something else entirely.

  At last the end of the vermin horde passed his place of concealment, and when the last of the hissing, chittering beasts had vanished around the bend in the path farther up the mountain, Sigmar dropped to the hard-packed earth of the path. His body was numb with cold, chilled to the bone by the spray of water from the high peaks. His clothes were soaked through and his flesh was like ice as he stumbled back to his camp.

  A fire burned at the centre of the plateau, and he made his way towards it, stripping off his sodden garments and pulling a warm blanket from an open pack. A solitary figure sat cross-legged before the fire, a shaven-headed man whose body was concealed by a voluminous cloak of black feathers. His shorn skull was tattooed with the black, reflective eyes of crows, and his own eyes were no less black.

  Sigmar knew this stranger must be the source of the sorcery that had kept his men from the attention of the rat-things, but was too cold to do more than kneel beside the fire and let the heat from the flames thaw his naked flesh.

  ‘Greetings, son of Björn,’ the man said with a lopsided grin. ‘I am Bransùil the Aeslandeir.’

  ‘I am Sigmar Heldenhammer, but you already know that, don’t you?’

  The man nodded. ‘I know a great many things about you, son of Björn. Much of which you would rather I did not know, but that is not to be the nature of our relations
hip. I will know all your secrets, and that is why you will trust me.’

  ‘Trust you?’ laughed Sigmar. ‘I don’t know you.’

  ‘You will,’ said the man with a sage nod. ‘Or you did. It is hard to be certain sometimes.’

  Sigmar looked over to where his men still slept, peaceful and blissfully unaware of the terrible danger that had just passed them in the night.

  ‘So how is it my men and I are alive?’ asked Sigmar as the fire began to warm him. He had decided against any violence to this Bransùil, guessing that any man who could hide so large a group from so many monsters was not someone to be taken lightly.

  ‘A simple incantation,’ said the man with a grin that exposed brilliantly white teeth. Sigmar had only ever seen such clean teeth in the mouths of young children, and he was reminded of the leering skull of the dread necromancer. ‘When you spend as long in the far north as I once did, hiding yourself is the first trick you learn from the ravens.’

  ‘But how did you do it?’ pressed Sigmar.

  Bransùil leaned over the fire, and Sigmar saw the darkness of his eyes had receded. In place of the blackness of crows’ eyes, the man’s eyes were now a brilliant, cornflower blue.

  ‘Magic,’ he said.

  The HUNTER

  Graeme Lyon

  It is whispered that the forest is haunted by all manner of creatures. On the holy days, when we make the sacred rites to appease the gods, the elders tell tales of murderous tree-daemons that lurk in the deep groves, of their twisted roots and grasping branches that can snap a warrior in half. One of the dams claims to have seen huge savages with armoured bellies fighting over the corpse of a deer by the river, beating one another with the bones. I have never believed such stories. I spend my days in the forest. It is my domain and I have never seen anything so outlandish.

  Until now.

  It was the smell that first alerted me. It was familiar, a reek of unwashed flesh and matted fur, but another scent lay beneath it, something I did not recognise. I followed the odour, and soon saw more signs of the intruders.