by Various
His grip could have bent iron. The ogor’s neck squelched and popped as flesh and ligaments gave, but it was well beyond the need for breath. Semi-congealed fluids leaked through Ramus’ fingers as it pushed against his grip.
With its greater reach and uncaring strength it clobbered him. Massive arms bashed his helm one way and then the other. He gritted his teeth and bore it, squeezed harder. The ogor’s eyes bulged, and then something in its neck went snap.
The body fell limp, collapsing into Ramus’ grip. With a grunt of effort, he drew the ogor a little higher so his arm was outstretched and almost vertical, supporting the ogor’s weight by its broken neck. Bloodshot eyes rolled in their sockets. Its jaw worked drily.
Ramus snarled through gritted teeth.
‘Yield.’
He spoke not just with his own voice, but also with his spirit voice. The weird doubling effect gave the watching Stormcasts chills.
The ogor’s eyes flickered, seeming to focus on him, then went placid. Its tongue creaked and rolled, a gasp of stale air wheezing from the back of its throat.
‘Never, shiny man. Skraggtuff won’t never yield to no one.’
Vandalus and the watching Astral Templars murmured in surprise and revulsion.
Even Brakka glanced over and made a warding sign of some kind across his chest. Ramus ignored them, bending his will towards the ogor’s small, confused soul. It was likely that the trapped spirit did not yet even realise it was dead.
‘Mannfred has betrayed you, left your tribe here to die. Join us, Skraggtuff, and help me take vengeance upon him.’
The ogor’s throat rattled, eyes rolling inwards as it remembered.
‘Betrayed... Gaarrgh, I remember... I remember, the slimy gnoblar... I’ll have out his guts and eat ’em.’
‘Tell me what you remember.’
‘Promised us food. Promised our lands back... But he didn’t care. Only wanted someone to fight him through the Ironjawz. Us and them eaters he took from the Tree City...’
‘Ironjawz?’
If Vandalus was troubled by this news of the ghouls that Mannfred had made of the citizens of Cartha then he hid it well.
‘I’ve heard of them. An orruk tribe that once dominated here, before the Age of Chaos gave them greater battles in other places. Do they make a return?’
He stepped nearer.
‘Have they come to fight us?’
But Skraggtuff did not answer. He could see or hear no one but Ramus.
‘And where did Mannfred want you to take him? Where has he gone?’
‘Over the mountains... The Bone Sea... Talks about it always, never stops...’
Ramus glanced to Vandalus. From the first day, the Astral Templar had sought to convince him to seek out the Celestial Realm within the Sea of Bones. The convergence of their two objectives could only have been a sign that Sigmar yet smiled on his quest.
‘What does he seek there?’
‘Dunno. Talks about it always, but never says anything...’
‘Do you think it’s the realmgate itself that Mannfred is after? Does he seek to take an army to Azyrheim?’ Vandalus asked.
Ramus gave a curt shake of his head. ‘Mannfred is many things. I’ll say this for him, he is no fool.’
He turned back to the ogor, but before he could interrogate the soul further a set of iron shutters mounted just below the tower’s conical roof squealed open.
An orruk of staggering immensity squeezed his head and shoulders through the window and looked down. Jewellery dangled perilously from flappy ears, from a lower lip thicker than both of Ramus’, and from a heavy, sloping brow.
Had the brute been squatting on the henge-side of the tower then Ramus could begin to imagine why the structure would have such difficulty remaining upright. He was that big. A tatty cloak of what looked like human flesh with iron squares sewn in scraped against the window’s metal sides.
In a guttural patois, the orruk spoke.
‘Dis is Weird Zog’s hill!’
Ramus made to raise his reliquary and call down Sigmar’s storm, but Vandalus’ hand was the faster. The Knight-Azyros caught his arm at the gardbrace and eased the reliquary back down.
‘There was a truce once, brother, between the orruk tribes and the native men of the Oldwoods. They aren’t unreasonable, if you can convince them to respect you.’
Pushing Ramus aside, he stepped forward, his celestial beacon and his starblade held out wide to make himself appear large. He ignited his wings in a scream of lightning.
‘My name is Vandalus. Men once knew me as the King of Dust, the conqueror of the Yellow Sea, and now Herald of Sigmar. My lord and yours are the best of rivals, orruk, but there is no hatred between them. Tell us how you came by these ogors, and we will pass.’
The orruk’s face twisted in anger. He jabbed a thick finger, metal ringed, at the broken zombie still in Ramus’ grip.
‘Dat woz mine.’
‘But how–’
‘Mine! Traded good iron fer it. Now look.’
He looked over the armoured Stormcasts and gave a yellowing, gap-toothed snarl.
‘Wot’s meat worth, thunder man?’
The orruk uttered no prayer, performed no arcane gesture, but his eyes suddenly began to glow green. A halo whooshed up from his slab shoulders, as though he had doused himself in oil and been set alight. The green flames rose into the hulking form of a looming orruk, two heads thrashing to tear their conjoined body apart.
Ramus saw it, though he was not sure the others did. This Zog was a weirdnob. A shaman. The orruk gave a drunken, demented laugh.
‘Mine!’
Ramus spat a hurried counter-prayer, but abandoned it before the opening line was out as a massive ectoplasmic fist condensed above his head. It crackled with white veins. A ghostly umbilical ribboned back to the weirdnob in his tower.
The orruk pulled up his shoulder, and hefted his magical fist high. Ramus swore, wrestled Vandalus back with his arms around the Knight-Azyros’ shoulders, and both went tumbling as the great fist slammed down.
Rock blasted apart in a roar, arcs of green lightning mushrooming from the crater. The mace-wielding Astral Templar that had been directly under the impact was obliterated. Ramus saw the warrior come apart through the fizzing green: a man, then a statue made of dust that burst apart as the bolt of lightning tore his soul back to Sigmar.
Energy surged out from the impact site at terrific speed. Stormcasts hit by the blast screamed, armour seared, bent, buckled, all in the span of a split-second as the force bubble enveloped them and then threw them out across the hilltop.
Ramus was already down when the bubble burst, and that was probably what saved his life. He felt the ground tense up, recoil from the blow, then flex back with a vengeance, flipping him over.
A Prosecutor of the Astral Templars cartwheeled across his line of sight. A Hallowed Knight hauled himself from the rubble of a wall. He heard Vandalus yelling orders, felt the rush of wings and saw him shoot into the air. Ramus stabbed his reliquary into the bucking ground like an oar into wild waters, and, dizzied but unbowed, he stood.
He called for the Retributor and Protector Primes, his vision spinning with bodies and residual force.
‘Iunias. Cassos. Spread out and fall back to the forest. Make way for the Judicators. Sagittus!’
‘Here, Lord-Relictor.’
‘Bring that shaman down.’
The Judicator retinues were pushing into the foliage that blocked up the henge, squatting amidst the rubble walls for cover when the order was given.
‘Loose!’
Their aim was exemplary, but with the ground shaking and the tower swaying it would have taken a god to score a hit and the sigmarite-tipped bolts duly plugged the surrounding metal walls.
A moan arose from the small rocky cra
ter that the weirdnob had punched out of the hill. One of the stakes had been knocked over and the captive had rolled in – still impaled, the ogor was crawling up the near side.
Sagittus half-ran from his retinue to the lip of the hole and loosed his crossbow. The bolt fizzed through one ear and spat out the other, pitching the shambler face down into the mud.
Weird Zog screamed, smouldering green eyes bulging from his face.
‘Miiiine!’
With the back of his fist he banged on the tower’s exterior wall, another half-formed spectral hand slicing back and forth across the face of the moon.
‘I know you boyz ain’t still asleep in dere. Get out here you lazy sloggerz. Weird Zog’s Weirdmob. Great Red. Waaagh!’
There came a pounding from inside of the tower. Ramus turned towards the rusted gate at the top of the skeleton-lined steps just as a monstrous iron boot kicked the doors open.
Ramus gripped his staff tight. The figure blocked the door. His first thought was that it was an armoured construct of some kind. Surely nothing natural could be large enough to have been encased inside.
It thumped down the steps, four at a time, and turned its fang-like face grille as an Astral Templars Liberator charged it with a feral yell. The thing hit the Stormcast with a metal bludgeon so hard that the warrior was almost knocked out by his own shield.
The Liberator staggered into the tower’s wall, shook out his shield arm and barked like a wounded savage as the thing came at him with its other weapon. A huge iron gauntlet, claw-hooked and painted red, clamped shut over the warrior’s breastplate and the Astral Templar was lifted, snarling, from the ground.
Unyielding sigmarite and pitted iron scraped against one another, and then the armoured orruk slammed the Liberator hard into the ground. It turned to Ramus.
The face grille passed through the moonlight, and Ramus saw the dark green flesh and brutish yellow eyes banded in shadow inside. He saw the whole thing swell up with a deep breath.
‘Waaaaaaggh!’
More clanked down the steps, far too big to run, big enough that it did not matter. Eight. Maybe nine. They were too large, their armour too mismatched and misshapen, to count them properly. Ramus knew that orruks grew throughout their lives as they aged and fought, but he had never encountered even the mightiest warboss as big as the least of these... these... Ironjawz.
Ramus raised his reliquary like a standard and let it crackle with Azyrite energy as another swing of the claw smashed in a Liberator’s faceplate and blasted him back to Sigmar.
‘Faithful, to me!’
The remaining Astral Templars converged. A similar body of Hallowed Knights would have formed a shield wall, trusted to their comrades in arms to protect them, but the Astral Templars came at the orruks like wolves in winter.
Hammers of holy sigmarite crashed against iron plating. Axes, clubs and mace-like gauntlets beat on shields. A Liberator was suddenly hoisted like a banner above the melee in the first brute’s claw, kicking uselessly at its head.
Another warrior drove the pointed base of his shield into the joint behind its knee. It grunted and buckled slightly. The suspended warrior got his fingers into the orruk’s grille and tore at it with a vicious, animal sound burbling from behind his own mask.
The Ironjaw bellowed back, spraying both helms with spittle, and grunted in sudden pain as a shaft of light scalded across his grille.
Vandalus dropped out of the night sky like a falling star, trailing fire, and threw out a beam of golden light that hammered the big orruk full in the chest. The brute was thrown back, armour charred, as though taken out by a charging knight with a lance. Vandalus shot past.
Stabbing light beams blitzed the confusion of metal bodies, burning orruks, invigorating the Stormcasts, and in a rumble of thunder the Azyros flashed over the henge and was gone. His Prosecutors followed through the smoke in close formation, hammering the standing Ironjawz with javelins.
A broad brute in spiky plate adorned with glyphs and with a javelin sticking out of his immense pectoral armour shook a fist at the passing heralds, punched away an Astral Templar’s shield and hacked the warrior almost in half down to the groin.
‘Only the faithful!’
Ramus watched as Iunias led the Hallowed Knights Paladins forward. Of the thirty despatched with him from Sigmaron, just ten were left, the losses felt most keenly by the Decimator and Protector retinues.
The last of them remained close to Ramus as a bodyguard while the Retributors broke forward. There was no shield wall here, but no man ran a single stride ahead of another. They were a storm of thunder and faith that would break the enemy as Sigmar would one day break the hosts of Chaos.
A lightning hammer split open an Ironjaw’s crude belly plate in a violent thunderclap, doubling it over. Iunias was already following through, star-soul mace rising, cracking back its head and breaking its neck in one powerful blow. The remainder of his retinue piled in behind.
The Judicators meanwhile were keeping up their barrage on Weird Zog. The second fist coalesced out of the rain of moonlit debris, the left to the other’s right. The green was lighter, less corded with veins, knuckles knobbled with bone rings. That was where the differences ended.
The henge and five of the Judicators disappeared under the falling green slab, nothing left of either but a hole in the ground.
They could not afford these losses. They were few enough as it was. Ramus pushed up his reliquary just as it thumped out a crackling wave of power.
‘Pull them away from the tower, Sagittus! The shaman is mine...’
Overhead, black clouds boiled in the dark sky. He roared into the sudden gale.
‘Sigmar! Heldenhammer! Stormlord! Show this beast the light of Azyrheim!’
Lightning cracked down from the churning thunderhead and blasted the roof off the tower. Scraps of hissing metal rained down, what remained resembling a twig that had been brutally twisted off its branch. The weirdnob leaned out and looked up, livid.
Power leapt from the tip of Ramus’ staff and earthed in the crooked iron conductor that was the orruk’s tower. Ramus gritted his teeth, tasted salt and copper, charge pouring from his staff and into the tower until the structure began to glow blue, tendrils of Azyrite power ribboning up and down its length.
The weirdnob gripped the sides of his window and seized. Saliva foamed from his mouth. Energy ran through his chest, lit up his eyes, and sprayed from his ears.
Finally the orruk managed to let go, coughed up a smoke ring and tipped forward. Ramus lowered his staff.
The orruk hit the bottom step like a sack of nails, managed a half-somersault and slammed into the ground face down, neck bent under its own massive shoulders.
The silence that fell was so abrupt that even the ogors with their moans seemed too taken aback to fill it properly. Smaller pieces of glowing metal pattered over the two new craters.
Ramus turned to Brakka, who pulled a bloody gladius from an Ironjaw’s throat between helm and gorget and–
He stopped, and looked back to the fallen weirdnob.
‘Sigmar, surely not...’
With a stiff grunt, the weirdnob pushed himself off the ground. Ramus watched with amazement as the orruk continued to unfold. Even his own hulking warriors, even the ogors, straining to grab at his cloak, had little over him by way of height and all were shamed in a comparison of muscle.
The orruk bulged. Brushing some of the black, peeling bits from his arm with a clink of his metal-sewn cloak, the weirdnob looked at Ramus and cackled. His teeth were as wide as Ramus’ fingers and yellow as off milk.
‘Morky. Very Morky.’
The orruk’s grin devolved into something rubbery and evil. His eyes flashed green.
And then his head exploded.
Vandalus’ starblade carved through the weirdnob’s skull and deep into the dense m
uscle of the neck as the Knight-Azyros dropped from a great height, slamming bodily into the dead remains of the orruk a split-second later.
He whipped up, agile as a mountain cat, holding out his lantern and tearing back the shutter to burn the Ironjawz coming towards him. Cassos despatched the last with an explosive uppercut from his stormstrike glaive.
Leaning against his staff, Ramus pushed away the sudden wave of weariness. He turned to Vandalus, voice even, choosing to ignore the fact that they were both breathing hard and doused in gore, as if their earlier conversation had never been interrupted.
‘I assume you know how to reach the Sea of Bones?’
‘The Belial Ocean Pass is the only way to move an army over the mountains and it is a month or more in the taking, at least. But we are few now, as Mannfred’s own forces must be. It is possible that we could risk the Heldenline.’
A shiver passed through Ramus at that, and he had to look up to reassure himself that a black cloud had not just stolen the moon away. He turned his skull-faced mask to look north.
There, beyond the ghostly prickling of lifeless woods, an ugly, heavily weathered old mountain range cast long shadows over the landscape. They were lumpen and misshaped, and appeared almost to move as Ramus watched them. A trick of the dark, surely?
But he had heard of the Heldenline...
‘Lord-Relictor?’
The shiver ran down Ramus’ arm and prompted his fist to clench. He squatted down and took hold of Skraggtuff’s neck where he had dropped the ogor. The brute’s features still held their ghoulish semblance of un-life.
‘Get off! Skraggtuff doesn’t want–’
The corpse’s spine crunched, his head coming away from his shoulders in a wrenching of crushed bone and fleshy tendrils. His eyes twitched.
‘Ow.’
The head bobbled over the broken ground to Brakka’s feet. The Astral Templar looked down at it without a word.
‘We have a guide. We take the Heldenline.’
‘You have heard of the Heldenline, Lord-Relictor?’
Sagittus, tramping through the rugged scree of the mountain pass, held out his arms for balance on the loose ground. Dawn was creeping over the peaks, leaving slashes of pink here, or gold there, while in creases and folds the old night lingered.
