by ich du
When they had reached the second flight and the mutants were thinning around them, Reiner shoved Rumpolt's face into the wall.
The handgunner looked around, eyes wide, a smear of dust on one cheek. 'What was that for?'
'I give the orders.' said Reiner, pushing him up the stairs as he spoke. 'No, "Into the hole", or "Retreat" from you, you understand?'
'But-'
'I'm a reluctant leader.' Reiner carried on, ignoring him, 'as the lads will tell you. But in battle, there's one voice. And it certainly ain't yours!'
'But I was only...'
Reiner shoved him again. 'You aren't listening! One voice, you hear me, gunner? One!'
'Aye, captain.' said Rumpolt, thrusting out his lower lip.
Reiner turned away from him, disgusted, and the company continued up the stairs.
Three storeys up, the stairway rose up into the earth ceiling. The chill wind the Blackhearts were following whistled down from the darkness. There were no more mutants above them, but the mob that swarmed up the stairs had swelled to a hundred or more. The stairs ended at an open door, black as night. Reiner stopped and thrust his torch in, revealing a peak-roofed attic, low and cramped. The Blackhearts halted behind him.
'Are y'certain there's a way out?' asked Gert, uneasy.
'There must be.' said Reiner. 'Or they wouldn't be trying to stop us.'
The first rank of mutants were being pressed into the pikemen's spears as the rest pushed up behind them. The stairs creaked ominously.
'They'll be climbin' over us soon, captain!' called Hals, over his shoulder. An axe blade missed him by a hair's breadth.
Franka stabbed between them and opened up a gash in a mutant's belly. Rumpolt picked up a loose brick and hurled it, and hit Pavel in the back of the head.
'Rumpolt!' Reiner roared.
Pavel stumbled forward, grunting, and a sword blade skidded across his breastplate and plunged into his arm. He thrust back reflexively and spat at the mutant who had struck him, but he was unsteady on his feet. 'Who threw that paver?' he shouted, furious.
Rumpolt ducked his head guiltily, but Pavel saw him. 'I'll be having words with you, laddie!'
'Less of it, pikeman,' shouted Reiner. 'Hold the door 'til we find the way out.'
'No trouble, captain,' Pavel said. 'If the infant doesn't kill us first.' He kicked a mutant in one of its faces and gutted another. Three more thrust at him.
Reiner entered the attic. 'Hafner, with me. Take this torch. And don't throw anything.' Reiner hurried forward with Rumpolt, Gert and Jergen, crouching low beneath the slanting roof. Franka, Dieter and Darius filed in behind them. Pavel, Hals and Augustus stayed in the door and set their spears.
Filthy blankets and piles of straw were tucked under the eaves where the roof touched the floor. Scraps of food and bits of candle littered the planks, and roaches scuttled everywhere. Something marginally human backed away from their torchlight, its eyes glowing like a cat's. The low room bent at a right angle. The cold breeze blew in Reiner's face as he turned into it.
'There,' said Jergen, pointing ahead.
Reiner followed his gaze. Ten paces on, the planks and slates of the roof had been torn out, leaving a ragged hole a yard high and just as wide. A rough tunnel slanted up from it. Reiner stepped forward and looked in. Only a few yards above, bars of golden light shone down through a grate.
'Franka,' said Reiner. 'Up there and have a look.'
'Aye, captain.' She clambered up on fingers and toes and peered up through the grate.
'All I can see is sky, captain.' she called back.
'Sky,' said Gert. 'Thought I'd never see it again.'
'We'll have to risk it,' said Reiner. 'Up you go Gert, and be ready to raise the grate on my command.' He turned to the others. 'The rest of you in behind him.'
Dieter, Jergen, Rumpolt and Darius began ducking into the hole as Reiner ran back to the corner. In the doorway, Hals, Pavel and Augustus were bathed in sweat and blood. Dead mutants were piled at the top of the stairs as high as Pavel's belt, and more clawed over them, stabbing madly at the three pikemen with swords and staffs.
'Now, Gert!' called Reiner to his left, then, 'Fall back, pikes! Run!' to his right.
There was a second's pause, then Reiner heard a muffled clang from the tunnel, and Darius, who stood outside the hole staring at Rumpolt's backside, followed the handgunner in and disappeared.
The three pikemen jumped back from the door and turned, running in a crouch. The mutants tumbled through the door behind them, crawling over the pile of their dead.
Reiner pointed the pikemen at the hole. 'In boys, in!'
Hals dived in head-first and Pavel and Augustus followed. Reiner took one look back at the swarming mutants, then shot in after them, his skin crawling, but though he heard the things scrabbling and slobbering behind him, he reached the grate unscathed and was lifted out bodily by Hals and Augustus, who set him on his feet. They were in a burned out cellar, open to the sky. The blackened beams of the upper floors lay like dragon bones across the ash covered flags of the floor.
'The grate, quick!'
Jergen and Gert muscled it to the hole, and dropped it with a clang, smashing heads and crushing forearms as the mutants surged up. But there were too many behind the first wave and the grate began to rise. Gert and Jergen jumped on it, trying to hold it down with their weight, but they rocked and teetered like men standing in a shallow boat.
Reiner looked around. One end of a massive roof beam rested precariously at the very end of a crumbling brick wall next to the grate.
'Lads! The beam!'
All the Blackhearts but Jergen and Gert ran to it and began pushing at its side. It wouldn't budge. They grunted and strained to no effect as Jergen and Gert stabbed down through the bucking grate.
'Not the beam!' said Pavel. 'The wall!' And to illustrate, he began jabbing at the powdery bricks below the beam.
'Good thinking!' said Reiner. 'Everybody at it!'
The Blackhearts began hacking and chopping at the end of the wall with their spears and swords. Reiner stepped to Gert and took his hatchet from his belt, then hammered on the wall with the back of it. Bricks smashed and fell out of the dry mortar like hail until it looked like a giant had taken a bite from the wall.
Suddenly, with a groan and a popping of exploding bricks, the beam's weight finished the job, crushing the unsupported bricks below it and sliding toward the edge.
'Gert! Jergen!'
The swordsman and the crossbowman leapt clear of the grate as the beam crashed to the flags with a deafening boom. The grate lifted, the mutants welling up under it, but the beam bounced once and mashed it back down, pinning their arms and fingers and necks beneath it. Horrible muffled screams came from below it.
Reiner slapped Pavel on the back while the others caught their breath. 'Well done, lad. Now let's away.'
Reiner led them up a stone stairway and they spilled through a door onto the street, and froze in shock. The neighbourhood had become a jungle.
The Blackhearts stood at the base of the crater wall, the street rising rapidly to their right into the cluttered vertical slum of shacks that clung to its inner curve. But though there were buildings all around them, it hardly seemed they were in a city at all.
Talabheim had been long known throughout the Empire as the city of gardens. Its parks were famed for their beauty. Trees lined most streets, and even the poorest hovels had flowers at every window, but now the trees and flowers had consumed everything. Mutant ivy poured down the crater wall like a green waterfall. Once stately oaks and beeches had grown into twisted monstrosities, sprouting gnarled, questing branches that had smashed through walls and pushed down buildings. To the left was a hulking, black-leafed giant that might once have been a larch. Fat purple fruit hung from its branches. The fruit screamed through gaping sphincters.
The structures that still stood were wreathed in matted vegetation. Some were choked by pale, pulsing lianas that sprouted we
t pink flowers. Others were hung with torso-thick black vines that bristled with thorns as long as daggers. Burned tenements rose out of this underbrush like tottering matchstick giants. The vines that covered the lower storeys of one were hung all over with bodies. Reiner cringed as he saw that the vines had grown through the corpses like curved spears. Blood-red grass grew between the cobbles, coarse and sharp.
Hideous mutants crept through this jungle like wild beasts, travelling in packs for safety and eyeing each other warily. Reiner watched a man with a parrot beak for a mouth lead what might have been his family across the street and into a shattered bakery. Before they were all in, the branch of an oak tree twitched down and snatched up one of his children.
The parrot man turned and beat the branch savagely with his staff, until with a rustle of leaves, it dropped the boy to the ground. The man grabbed him and ran inside with his four-armed wife.
'Shade of Sigmar,' said Reiner softly. 'Where are we?'
'Hell,' said Gert hollowly. 'This is hell.'
'It is the Tallows,' said Augustus. 'At least... Oh, Father Taal! What have we done to you?' he cried suddenly, turning away and covering his eyes. 'This is not my home,' he mumbled. 'This is not my home.'
Franka too was moved. Tears streamed down her cheeks. 'Captain,' she said, choking. 'Reiner, this cannot be the fate of the Empire! We cannot allow this to happen! Look at them, the poor horrible things! They could be my mother and father. They could be...' She firmed her jaw. 'We cannot give the stone to that... elf. I care not what he does to us! We must bring it back to Teclis. We must put everything right!'
'Quiet, you little fool,' said Reiner, tapping his chest meaningfully though it was agony to do it. 'Of course we will bring the stone to the Druchii. We made a bargain with him and we will honour it.'
The others looked at him sullenly. He ignored them and turned to Augustus. 'Right, Kolbein. You know this place. Lead us back to civilization.'
'Aye, captain,' Augustus said dully. He looked around at the horizon. 'The Street of the Emperor's Grace is... this way.' He pointed left down the street, then started marching stolidly through the long red grass. The others fell in behind him, weapons out.
The journey was quite literally a nightmare. Here they saw a man hacking off his fur-covered left hand with an axe. There was a thing with a head like a bobbing bouquet of eyeballs. Here was a dog dragging itself by its front paws, its back half a scaly fish tail. There walked a naked woman with fangs down to her chin trying to nurse her dead baby at her breast.
Fortunately, most of the denizens seemed too concerned with their own affairs to bother with the well-armed Blackhearts. Reiner hoped they reached their destination soon, however, for the sun was setting quickly and the thought of travelling though this place at night made his blood run cold.
As they walked, Hals examined the blood matted hair at the back of Pavel's head while Pavel wrapped the gash in his arm with linen from Darius's kit.
'Not to worry, lad,' said Hals. 'He ain't knocked yer brains out. Ain't even a hole.'
'I'd knock his brains out,' said Pavel, giving Rumpolt a dirty look. 'If he had any.'
'It was an accident!' cried Rumpolt. 'I meant to throw it at the mutants.'
'And if y'hadn't thrown it at all,' said Hals, 'there'd ha' been no accident.'
'Y'owe Voss a pint of blood, infant,' said Augustus.
'I was only trying to help.'
'Aye,' said Pavel. 'Help. It's no wonder the lads of yer company sent ye to the gallows. They were trying to save their lives.'
'Have ye no common sense?' asked Hals. 'Were ye not trained?'
'Trained?' laughed Augustus. 'He's hardly weaned!'
The pikemen laughed, as did Dieter and Gert.
Rumpolt looked close to tears. 'Captain, will you let them mock me so?'
'I'm waiting for them to say something that isn't the truth,' said Reiner dryly.
'You side with them?' said Rumpolt, disbelieving. 'When they abuse me for a mistake?'
'I side with them because they are proven men,' he said. 'You'll have to prove yourself their equal before I think of siding with you. And you've a long way to go, laddie. A long way.' Of course one of the others is a spy, Reiner added gloomily to himself, but at least they could handle themselves in a fight.
Rumpolt lowered his head. His hands gripped his gun barrel as if he were trying to choke it.
Reiner grunted. Curse the boy. He seemed to invite insult by his mere presence. He was trying to think of something encouraging to say when a yelp from behind made them all turn.
Thirty paces back, Darius was being dragged into an alley by an obese, toad-like woman with a mouth that opened to her navel. The scholar had a knife in one hand and a clump of writhing vines in the other.
'Hie!' cried Reiner. 'Leave off!'
The Blackhearts ran back, shouting and waving their weapons. The toad-woman dropped Darius, terrified, and bounded with surprising speed into the shadows.
Reiner pulled Darius up roughly by the arm. 'Are you mad? What are you doing falling back?'
'I... I'm sorry,' said Darius. 'I was taking cuttings.'
'Cuttings?'
'Aye. Look.' Darius held up the wriggling plants. 'The mutations are fascinating. I want to plant the seeds and see if they breed true away from the influence of the warpstone. Imagine what might be learned from-'
Reiner dashed the stalks from his hands. 'Fool! They're diseased. Do you want to spread this madness?'
Darius glared at him. 'I am a man of method. I would not let that occur.'
'You certainly won't,' said Reiner. 'Because you're leaving them behind.' He shoved Darius forward and the Blackhearts marched on.
AS THEY PASSED through the barricades at the border of Old Market and the company began to march wearily through the only marginally less lunatic merchant quarter, a crushing depression settled upon Reiner. With every step, the futility of continuing their quest was more apparent. The ratmen had the waystone. And by tomorrow morning, if the fables of the beasts' globe-spanning tunnels were true, it might be anywhere in the world. The Blackhearts' chances of recovering it were worse than a mark's chance of winning at dice in a rigged game.
Giving up would be such a relief. All he had to do was lie down and do nothing for three days and then Manfred would kill them before the dark elf killed him. It would all be over - all the struggle, all the confusion with Franka. Nothing but blissful oblivion.
But the faint, flickering hope of freedom floated ahead of him like a will-o-the-wisp drifting across a swamp, and try as he might, he couldn't let it go. It was so tantalisingly close. Only an army of vermin stood in the way.
'Right, lads,' he said as they reached the townhouse's back gate. 'We'll carry on as before, and make another try for the stone tomorrow, after I have thought of a way to get it away from the ratmen.'
That none of them laughed at that foolish statement was proof of their weariness. They only nodded and wandered off to their various quarters. Reiner, Jergen, Darius and Franka climbed the stairs to the second floor, then stopped as they saw the nobles of the Reikland legation in full armour milling around Count Manfred's quarters, all talking at once. Manfred's door was open.
'Hetzau,' called Lord Boellengen, his chinless face livid with outrage. 'What is the meaning of this? Where is Count Manfred?'
ELEVEN
Beasts and Vermin
REINER GROANED. HE was not ready to be clever. All he wanted to do was close his eyes. He took a deep breath and stepped forwards, looking as earnest and concerned as he could manage.
'M'lords, I apologise if we have caused you any concern. I would have informed you of events earlier but, as you can see, we have had a trying day ourselves and are only just returning from the most desperate adventure.'
'Do not try to oil your way out of this, rogue,' said Lord Schott, sneering. 'Where is Count Manfred?'
'I am endeavouring to tell you, m'lords,' said Reiner. 'There was an attempt on
the count's life early this morning, in this very house. Strange assassins breached the locks of his room by unknown means, and only the skill of Jergen here held them off. Afterwards, for his safety, the count felt he should be moved, like Teclis, to an undisclosed location, and this we have done.'
'What nonsense is this?' rumbled Grand Master Raichskell. 'We heard no attack. We did not see the count leave.'
'The assassins were very silent m'lord,' said Reiner. 'And we removed Manfred as quietly as possible, so as not to alert any spies among the household staff.'
'I see,' said Boellengen, sceptically. 'And where is the count now?'
'Er, forgive me, m'lords,' said Reiner. 'But the count has asked that I keep his new quarters a secret, even from his allies. He has reason not to trust the walls of Talabheim with the knowledge.'
Boellengen and Schott and the others exchanged looks. Boellengen said something to an attendant, who hurried away, then he turned back to Reiner. 'We begin to suspect, Hetzau,' he sniffed, 'that you have abducted Count Manfred. You and these others will turn over your weapons and surrender to our custody.'
'M'lord,' said Reiner. 'I assure you, we have done nothing to Lord Manfred. We are, in fact, entirely concerned with his safety.'
'Be that as it may,' said Boellengen, 'we will hold you until you agree to bring us to Count Manfred and he tells us that all these peculiarities were by his command.'
'But, m'lord...' said Reiner, desperately. Sigmar! If they were locked up, it was over. The dark elf's deadline would pass and they would be found in their cells twisted and dead by Manfred's poison. His foolish wish to end it all would come true.
Boellengen interrupted him. 'I am disappointed that we cannot question you immediately, but a crisis has arisen that requires our immediate action, and we must go.'
Men in Boellengen's colours appeared at his shoulder. More men came up behind them on the back stairs. Jergen put his hand on his hilt.
Reiner shook his head. 'Save it, lad. We'll end up fighting the whole Empire.'
