Despite the fact that the two fighters were only just holding their position against the verminous vanguard, the impatient ratmen had obviously decided that the humans' stand was delaying them too long inside the church, allowing the people of Nagenhof to muster a stronger defence against the invaders. So now they found themselves facing the unbridled ferocity of a rat-ogre.
Dietrich quickly assessed the situation. As long as the bell kept tolling the rats' onslaught would continue unabated. The two men would soon tire and one of the biting, clawing plague ridden vermin would find a way through their defence. Once one was through they were doomed.
'Torben!' he called out. 'We have to stop that bell ringing!'
'Pieter's dealing with it!' the mercenary captain replied, cutting down a two-headed monstrosity.
'That was a while ago now,' Dietrich pointed out, 'and I can still hear the bell!'
Torben trapped the squirming body of a giant rat under his boot and ran it through with his sword. 'You're right,' he puffed. 'Let's go.'
Kicking aside a scrabbling rodent Torben leapt over the rat swarm, heading for the stairs. Following his friend's lead Dietrich ran across the nave, crushing a number of skulls under his feet.
The skaven were squeaking furiously. At first Dietrich thought it was because they were escaping but as he reached the first landing on the staircase he saw wisps of smoke drifting under the barricaded church doors. The skaven's sensitive nostrils had picked up the smell of smoke before Dietrich was aware of it. But now he could see it billowing in thick grey clouds under the doors, obscuring his view of the skittering rats.
At a shouted command from one of the skaven the rat-ogre stomped eagerly towards the foot of the bell-tower, its massive, muscular torso visible above the rising smoke. The soldier was horrified at how quickly so large a creature could move!
'Torben! Hurry up!' Dietrich shouted. The mercenary, who was already taking the stairs two at a time, increased his stride to three.
Dietrich felt the wooden steps judder as the beast leapt onto staircase. As he raced upwards, he felt the shaking become more vigorous as the rat-ogre bounded after them. Daring a glance round Dietrich saw the club-like arm scything towards his legs and in an adrenaline-fuelled leap threw himself forwards and upwards. The rat-ogre's claws, as thick, as tough and as sharp as iron spikes, connected with the step Dietrich had just left which splintered like matchwood.
With a groaning crash part of the staircase came free of the wall. Without anything holding it up, the mid-section the rat-ogre was teetering on gave way under the monster's great weight. For a split second Dietrich thought he had escaped the fiendish creature. Then he saw the balustrade linking the last few steps he had to climb to the next landing, and safety, sag. Torben had already reached the haven of the sturdier landing but Dietrich was not so lucky. Joists came free, pinioning pegs were torn from their sockets and rotten timbers crumbled.
Dietrich felt his stomach jump into his mouth as he dropped like a stone, the stairs collapsing beneath him. He fell fifteen feet and landed heavily on the ground, amidst a cloud of dust and wood splinters. Only it wasn't the ground. Although it was hard, whatever he had landed on was pliable, warm and stank of rancid animal musk.
TORBEN FROZE HIS ascent and looked down. Dietrich lay sprawled on top of the stunned rat-ogre surrounded by the wreckage of the staircase. Through the gloom and the smoke, the mercenary could just make out the shadowy shapes of the skaven hurrying away towards the back of the church, where crimson flickering firelight illuminated their hunched rat bodies through the apse window. The rats swarmed around the base of the bell-tower in panic. The bell tolled ceaselessly.
Torben looked back down at his companion. Dietrich pushed himself up on his hooked hand, a look of bewilderment on his face. 'Dietrich! Are you all right?' the mercenary yelled down to his friend.
Dietrich looked up at him. 'Go!' he yelled. 'Finish what we came here for. There's nothing you can do here!' A rumbling growl came from the prone rat-ogre and its claws clenched. 'I'll hold off this beast here. We're old acquaintances. There will be a reckoning between us this night!'
Dietrich rolled off the mutated monster, readying his sword in his left hand as the beast suddenly sprang to its feet. Torben paused, not wanting to abandon his friend but the trained professional in him told him that he must. The tolling had to be stopped.
'Sigmar guide your sword-arm, my friend!' he called down.
'For Nagenhof!' came Dietrich's reply.
Swearing he would have his vengeance on the vile skaven, Torben resumed his rapid ascent of the stairs. He didn't look back again.
PIETER'S VISION SWAM into focus for a moment and then almost blacked out again as he felt the rough hemp strands of a rope tighten around his neck. His head ached, the noise of the bell reverberated through he skull, but the asphyxiation threatening to overwhelm him, outweighed every other concern. Realising that if he were to save himself he would have to act quickly, Pieter scrabbled at the noose.
'Try to stop me, would you?' came a slurred voice thick with saliva in his ear. 'Well you're too late! They're here!'
Pieter had no doubt who was trying to kill him - the insane hunchback, Otto the bell-ringer, who had summoned the skaven back to the town of Nagenhof. He had to be stopped and he had to be stopped now. As he struggled with the rope at his throat Pieter took in his surroundings. He had been dragged from where he had been coshed at the top of the stairs to the edge of the opening beneath the great, swinging bell.
'You're all the same,' bellowed Otto, 'and you'll all die the same way!'
The hunchback sounded as if he wasn't used to hearing his own voice clearly or his tongue was malformed. He was horribly strong and no matter what Pieter tried, he couldn't lessen the pressure on his windpipe. As his eyes rolled up into the top of his head Pieter's vision was filled with the swinging green-tinged shadow of the bell and a desperate plan formed in his mind.
Pieter pushed himself backwards, rocking onto his back. At the same time he brought his legs up, giving the skaven bell a hefty kick on the upswing. He felt the constricting rope slacken slightly as the hunchback looked up in surprise. Then all pressure was gone as the deformed mutant tried to dodge out of the way of the returning bell.
There was a loud clang followed by a groan of pain and the hunchback stumbled to the floor. Being careful to avoid the still swinging bell, Pieter stood up, rubbing his chafed raw neck with one hand and holding the bell-rope the hunchback had been trying to strangle him with in the other. He looked down at the moaning creature that was getting unsteadily to its feet. Blood ran from the hunchback's smashed mouth. The mutant was as ugly as the dream-conjured Chaos spawn of a flagellant's nightmares. He had read of such blasphemies against nature in the plague-scholar's grimoire. Such hideous deformity was all the proof Pieter needed to believe that the hunchback was a Chaos-warped mutant.
Before the stunned bell-ringer could gather his senses, Pieter covered the distance between them and looped the noose around the hunchback's thick neck. As the dizzily staggering mutant found the tables turned he began to pull at the knotted hemp. Taking a few steps back Pieter charged at his attacker's broad and twisted back. He slammed into the hunchback with his shoulder and kept pushing. Otto stumbled forwards, in his unbalanced state the momentum of the impact carrying him onwards. A clubfoot found the edge of the hole beneath the bell and slipped. As the bell swept past the hunchback tumbled through the opening with a cry - a cry that was suddenly silenced with a snap as the rope pulled taut and his neck broke.
'I knew you had the situation under control,' came a familiar voice from behind the gasping nobleman. Pieter looked around. Torben stood puffing at the top of the staircase. A loud clang resounded around the belfry, making both men wince. 'Right,' said the mercenary captain, 'let's stop that bell.'
WREATHED IN EYE-WATERING smoke, the soldier and the beast fought. Dietrich staggered backwards as he parried the rat-ogre's blow, his sword sinking into
the monster's arm up to the bone. The skaven mutant roared in pain and anger, its rancid breath washing over the soldier and making him gag. Rather than being repelled by the injury the rat-ogre was spurred on by it and pushed its advantage onward. With his sword stuck fast above him, embedded in the beast's flesh, Dietrich found himself being pushed backwards, his midriff undefended. He swept up with his hook as the monster slashed at him with its other claw-like paw. He was too late.
The rat-ogre batted his arm aside. The jarring sensation that lanced up his arm told Dietrich that the beast had almost succeeding in dislocating it at the elbow. But this split second of pain was immediately drowned by a gut-wrenching flood of agony that told Dietrich he was dying.
The rat-ogre paused, blood running from the dozen wounds, steam rising from its heaving flanks. Dietrich slumped to his knees, his intestines uncoiling through the rent in his stomach.
Through the choking smoke he was dimly aware of the rat-ogre roaring in triumph and the furious squeaking of the rats milling around him. The roof too had started to burn, blazing beams crashing to the floor of the nave. But all these sounds began to fade from his awareness as another sound became louder and louder, until it was the only sound he could hear: the dub-dub of his slowing pulse pounding in his ears. Dub-dub, dub-dub. Dub. Dub…
THE KISLEVITE'S SABRE struck the rocking beam cutting through the last coils of rope securing the heavy skaven bell in place. With a final dull bong the bell dropped down the tower, smashing into the hunchback's swinging corpse as it did so and crashing through the staircase as in tilted on its axis.
As the rat-ogre advanced on the fatally wounded Dietrich the bell plummeted inexorably downwards. With a resounding metallic clang, the skaven artefact hit the looming beast, hurling it to the ground and crushing the rat-ogre's skull.
Just like old times, Dietrich thought and died.
'WHAT DO WE do now?' Pieter asked the sweating Kislevite, as the church burned beneath them. Torben thought. What could they do now? Up until this point he had been reacting instinctively to each event as it arose with no forethought. Now they had completed what they had set out to do and they were trapped. There was no way down inside the bell-tower, now that the staircase had been destroyed by the bell and the rat-ogre, and besides, the whole building was ablaze. Parts of the roof had begun to fall in, flames licking up through the holes into the night sky. Smoke was also beginning to rise through the gaps between the planks of the belfry floor as the tower acted like a natural chimney, drawing the fire upwards. There wasn't a suitable rope they could use to climb down the outside of the tower and to jump the one hundred feet would be suicide.
Torben peered over the parapet of the belfry, as if just to confirm his initial assessment. Then over the crackling of the flames he heard something: a distant shouting. Peering through the billowing smoke he saw at first a crowd of townspeople, standing in a semi-circle around the end of the church. Within that semi-circle three figures, illuminated by the conflagration were looking up at him and calling. The biggest was standing next to a full hay-cart, which had been brought as close to the burning building as the mercenaries could manage without it catching alight. 'We jump,' Torben said, and before Pieter could question him he pointed down the side of the tower, adding, 'and try to follow my orders this time!'
Without a moment's hesitation the two men climbed onto the ledge of the opening under the eaves and, flung themselves out into space…
The two of them hit the hay, the wind knocked out of them but otherwise unhurt and Torben, for one, had never been so glad to wind up with a face full of straw. Spiralling embers swirled around them, some landing in the hay. A crackling sound, accompanied by excited cursing from Oran, told Torben that the hay had caught alight.
As Stanislav untied the horse, Torben and Pieter scrambled down from the cart, joining the others at a safer distance from where Badenov's band watched as the church of Morr burned.
BY MID-AFTERNOON THE next day the fire had gone out, enabling the mercenaries to explore the burnt-out shell of the church. Picking their way through the mounds of blackened rat-corpses and the smouldering ruins of the roof, that now filled the nave with a forest of charred beams and fused tiles, it did not take them long to find what remained of Dietrich Hassner. Opposite the dead soldier lay the flattened, charred mass of the rat-ogre. Its pulped head was almost unrecognisable but of the bell that had killed it there was no sign.
'I suppose it could have melted,' Stanislav suggested, prodding the smouldering rubbish at the foot of the tower with his boot. 'That fire was hotter than a forge.'
'It's possible,' Torben considered, 'but somehow I doubt it. I think our furry friends got what they came for in the end.'
He caught Pieter's gaze but the sullen noblemen said nothing.
'Come on,' said Torben. 'We've a burial to perform - with no priest of Morr or temple to perform it in - and the life of a friend to commemorate back at the Hand of Glory.'
As they made their way out of the ruined church, bearing the soldier's body on an improvised stretcher, Torben couldn't help feeling dejected. The usually happy-go-lucky mercenary was beginning to feel that Badenov's band was rather down on its luck as of late, what with the deaths of Alexi and now Dietrich.
Death was their business, he knew, but death seemed to dog their path. It was as if Morr himself or some darker power had mapped out their destinies for them. They hadn't even made enough money to replace the horses Krakov had lost all those months ago and Krakov himself had disappeared.
'The dead and the damned,' he suddenly found himself declaring aloud.
'What?' asked the younger Yuri, walking next to him.
'The dead and the damned,' Torben repeated. 'It seems to me that's all we are. One or the other, dead or damned.'
'What's that?' Oran interjected. 'You're starting to sound like misery-guts over here,' he said indicating Pieter, who was hanging back from the others.
'Dietrich was an old friend. Of course you're upset,' Stanislav said soothingly, as they neared the inn. 'Get some ale inside you and you'll feel like your old self again.'
Torben managed a weak smile. 'So the first round's on you?' he said.
'See? Everything will be fine,' pronounced the usually cynical Oran.
But despite his show of bravado somehow Torben didn't think so.
SWORDS OF THE EMPIRE
by Dan Abnett
'Two things that may be relied on - the swords of the Empire and the snows of the North.'
- Ostland proverb
I HAVE KNOWN twenty-seven summers and twenty-six winters, and the winter that comes upon me now will be the hardest of all. With ample favour of fortune, we might weather these white months, but I have no wit to know for certain if fortune rides amongst my company in this extremity of the world. I doubt it greatly, for it has not shown us much of favour thus far along.
The provinces of the Empire wear winter like a heavy coat; they pull it around them in the latest part of the year and thuswise huddle within it, and cast it off again with a shrug at the first buds of spring. Not so here. This is the North, the high North, the wild, elder country. Here, winter comes from some profound source, and fills up the world from within, under the skin, freezing marrow to stone and slowing blood to glass. It is a foe of itself, and knows no quarter. Subarin has told me of it. He has described the cruel temper of the season, the furious storms, the aching arctic might. Men vanish, herds likewise, sometimes villages whole, lost overnight in the whiteness, marooned for months. And come the thaw, no sign remains, as if the poor, lonely places have been scraped from the hard ground by winter's sharp claws and cast into eternity.
Against such a sorry fate, I have guarded with this account. I have made it with haste, and for this reason I ask you to pardon kindly my mistakes. I am not a scribe, and my hands are not stained from the inkhorn. I am a soldier. I have rendered this in my best practice of penmanship on two tanned goat hides that in this country are employed in th
e part of vellum. The ink was purchased dearly at the cost of a company horse, and is the only flask of such hereabouts. It is poor stuff, weak and much more of water than of black. The wizard has ink bottles, of course, but I will not touch his belongings. When I have writ this out, I will roll the hides in a bag of pigskin, and bury it beneath a marked cairn of rocks here by the hillside trackway where, in spring, travellers may discover it. Such a discovery may be why you are reading this now. It is my hope that fortune will be with us, and that in spring, I will dig this up myself and convey it with all urgency back to the Reik. Either way, the matter of my account remains the same.
SIGMAR BLESS ME. I owned I was no scribe! I have just run my eyes back over the first part of my testament above, and damn myself at how badly I have commenced. I have run my heart ahead of my story, and scattered the facts heedless like a flock scattered by a wolf. Subarin tells me I can use the flat of a tanner's knife to scrape the hide clean and start again, but that seems a waste of such expensive ink. I will write on, and take heed of two lessons. Of the first, it is to cramp my hand smaller, for already I have occupied a whole shoulder of one hide with my words, and I fear the remainder of two goat-backs will not be adequate to contain this account. It is sobering indeed to realise that all that is important to me is to be measured out in goats.
Of the second, it is to start better. To make open the facts. First then, as I should have started, with my name. It is Jozef von Kallen. Let me make it again here, as I sign it - Jozef von Kallen - so that it vouches in my hand for the veracity of this account.
I have not goat enough to say more of myself in any length, and cannot set out the names of my family and lay down my lines of descent for fear of writing off the tail end of this hide onto the next. I will suffice with this: I am a knight of the Reiksguard, may Sigmar keep its light forever lit. It has been my signal honour to conduct, at the bidding of the Elector Counts, an expedition into the wastes that are known as Kislev, that is to say the barbarous sovereignty that is north of the Empire.
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