It was but a piece of a much larger struggle.
From his vantage point mounted on a warhorse, Stahler watched the pikemen crumple and give. They’d held off the orcs as long as they could. Their defensive formations had done a lot to staunch the initial rush, but now they were shedding men like autumn leaves. Tattooed orcs, their shoulders like fat slabs of meat, hacked into them as they fled. Their snarling white faces were painted to resemble skulls and they wore no armour, save their beast-hide jerkins. The Imperial spear regiments were losing a similar war of attrition. In the end, they had to break and fall back or risk being annihilated beneath the greenskin tide.
Stahler held his sword aloft. Its single rune glowed defiantly, throwing light across the blade. He winced but tried not to let it show. His wound still ached like hot pins in his gut. It was why he rode a horse rather than went on foot. Stahler had always warred on foot. He preferred to be near his men, in the dirt and the mire. Soldiers respected a captain who was willing to bleed and stand with them. But he feared if he did, he might not stand at all. Perception was everything. He had to inspire and embolden. Stahler couldn’t do that doubled up in pain or flagging in a fighting rank.
The left flank was buckling. Spears from Kemperbad and Bögenhafen, and four blocks of Averland pike, were in danger of being overrun. Three regiments of halberdiers including Karlich’s Grimblades, of whom Stahler was fond but would never show it, and a pair of sword regiments out of Streissen and Middenland was ready to fill the gap soon to be created by the fleeing polearms. Thankfully, the infantry centre and its front line right flank were holding. Despite his loathing of the fanatics, Stahler had to admit that Vanhans’s soldiers of faith were proving resilient. They’d moved to the centre and girded it with their reckless passion. It struck him as ironic that the witch hunter fought like a man possessed. To the right of the Grimblades von Rauken’s greatsworders moved up, eager for carnage.
‘Second line…’ Stahler roared, ‘…forward, in the name of Prince Wilhelm!’
Most of the pikes and spears retreated in good order, though they were still bloodied before the halberdiers and swordsmen could relieve them. There was the swift beat of drums to signal the charge then came the clash of steel and the grunting of men.
On the left flank, battle was joined with the second line.
Stahler rode up just behind them. His face was an ugly grimace. He prayed he could stay the course.
Screaming pike and spearmen barrelled through the Grimblades and the halberdiers from Auerswald.
Karlich ordered his men to let them through and come together again once they’d passed. Panic must not spread. The broken could be allowed to flee but must not get swept up in their fear.
‘Hold true,’ he cried. ‘Maintain rank and file!’
It was hard to think, let alone speak. The clatter of arms and armour was everywhere, growing louder by the second. Blood scent reeked on the air. Steel and leather, too.
They were beyond the fleeing spearmen, a frantic blur of yellow and black disappearing in the Grimblades’ peripheral vision. A slab of orcs with bloody cleavers and studded-leather hauberks confronted them, eager for more.
Karlich roared without words. His heart pounded like a blacksmith’s hammer. Then there was the rush and the carnage that followed. He took a blow on his shield, hard enough to jar his shoulder. Karlich ignored the pain and stabbed the snorting greenskin in the face. Dark blood gushed from the wound, threading from his withdrawn blade in an arc. A line of halberds slammed down in unison, splitting two orcs apart. Someone screamed. Karlich didn’t recognise who. A rear ranker moved up to fill the gap.
Stabbing and thrusting now, the halberdiers fought hard to keep the greenskins at bay where their strength and brutality would count for less.
Karlich cut again, slashing an orc’s thigh. He barely saw the beast. His enemies were a haze of snarling slab-browed faces and jutting jaws. Taking a punch to the side of the face, Karlich nearly fell. He almost lost his shield. Strong hands behind him held him up, while a halberd blade thrust overhead into the orc’s neck. It died choking blood.
‘As one we stand,’ he heard the voice of Greiss saying. No one other than Brand could have applied the deathblow.
Back on his feet and fighting, Karlich felt the weight of his warrior brothers at his back and knew that Greiss was right.
The Grimblades held. The Auerswalders and the Steel Swords held. With Father Untervash, von Rauken’s greatsworders were reaping a heavy toll of greenskins. But the orcs refused to yield. Even the goblins were undaunted.
The bloody day was far from over.
Kicking its flanks, Stahler rode his warhorse in a loop around the back of his command. The second line was holding. In the gap between it and the third, a decent amount of pike and spear had rallied and were already reforming. Their drums and horns carried orders on the air, though some had lost their banners in the panicked rush to flee.
Captain Hornschaft was supposed to be leading the front line. Stahler had lost sight of him ever since the greenskins’ initial charge. He hoped, a little forlornly, that he was still alive.
A cry echoed loudly from the far right, accompanied by the shrilling of silver trumpets. Stahler’s pride soared when he saw Prince Wilhelm and his knights ride onto the field of war. Over a hundred templars and half as many pistoliers again charged with glorious voices. Break through the greenskin horde, reach the gate and free the army of Averheim. Stahler willed them on, his voice escaping as a breath.
‘For Sigmar, noble prince…’
He averted his gaze when another, much less inspiring, sight seized his attention.
Trolls were lumbering through the greenskin rear ranks, swinging tree trunks and the bodies of dead Averheimers like clubs. Orcs and goblins were left bludgeoned in their wake. Others, battered aside in the beasts’ eagerness to feed, flew like broken dolls over the heads of rival mobs much to their cackled amusement. Plucked from amongst its kin, a goblin squealed before being devoured, a quick morsel before the feast to come. An orc flayed by acidic bile collapsed into a pile of sticky bone. The troll responsible wiped its drooling maw with a meaty hand. Vomit hissed and burned against its craggy skin before evaporating. The beasts lived only to eat and to kill. Food was neither friend nor foe. Goaded by orc slavemasters, the trolls would reach the second line soon.
Stahler was about to spur his horse – he’d need to reach his men before the trolls – when he hesitated.
A black shadow drew over him and the Grimblades, eclipsing what little light shone on the battlefield. Evil lurked within that shadow.
Blacktooth…
The name was uttered like a curse into his mind, and the minds of those who saw it, in a guttural cadence. The breath snagged in Stahler’s throat, as if too afraid to escape. Whinnying in terror, his steed caught the scent of the monster before seeing it.
A wyvern, an old beast from deep within the mountains, loomed over them. Mounted on its back in a crude saddle was the orc shaman. Blacktooth wanted a fight.
Huge, beating wings funnelled the scent of the wyvern’s rage and hate towards the puny men who could only cower. Akin to a giant winged lizard, the monster’s hide was thickly scaled and shone with a gelid lustre. It put Karlich in mind of dank places, of ancient slime-skinned caves where men should never venture. A ribbed belly, thicker than a cannon’s barrel, heaved and sucked with the effort of keeping it aloft and steady. Its barbed tail quivered, seeping poison. Fangs as long as swords, and broad as axe heads, were stained crimson. Trying to muster his courage, Karlich imagined the wyvern’s appetite for flesh was not yet sated.
Men howled before the beast wrenched straight from the depths of their darkest nightmares. Scenting fear, the wyvern roared. An ululating, unnatural din resounded over the battlefield. Those who heard it felt their blood freeze and their bodies stiffen in fear.
A
band of militia, a detachment of a much larger regiment of halberdiers from Streissen, panicked and fled. Blacktooth snarled his displeasure. As the shaman sat up in rusted-iron stirrups, Karlich got a better look at him.
Blacktooth was festooned with skull charms and totems. He clutched a strange wand in his right fist, some bizarre daemon-head charm hammered onto a stave of dark iron. A dirty, furred jerkin of many colours swathed his body. Blacktooth was barefoot. A horned hat, crested with a halfling’s skull, covered his head. He held a notched cleaver in his other hand. One of the large fangs protruding over his upper lip was blighted with decay.
The fleeing men didn’t get far. Blacktooth unleashed a blast of green lightning from his eyes. The militia never even had time to scream before they blackened and died.
‘Sigmar preserve us!’ someone shouted from down the line.
‘Morr’s shadow is upon us!’ said another.
Masbrecht was praying in the front rank. His eyes were closed and he clasped the hammer icon around his neck as if it could make him invisible.
Karlich wanted to speak, to galvanise his men, but found his mouth was dry and his tongue leaden. The urge to run, to save himself, was strong. Burning meat was redolent on the breeze. He did not want that fate.
Blacktooth and his beast aimed their malign gaze at the Grimblades. There was a form of low intelligence there, capable of much cruelty.
‘T-tur…’ Karlich could barely speak.
Run, run! his mind pleaded.
Try as he might, he was fixated on the terrible wyvern and its master. Something else was moving behind the orc hordes too. A caustic stench came with it. Karlich thought he could smell sulphur.
Were all the creatures of the dark beneath the world coming for them?
A bright light surged into being to Karlich’s right. He blinked, fighting the after flare. Dimly, he was aware of the greenskins squealing in pain. It took a supreme effort of will to tear his eyes off the wyvern and look past it but, with his vision returning, Karlich saw the greenskins in front of them were blinded. They scratched at their eyes, thumped their kin with clubs or hacked with cleavers. Enraged and afraid, the orcs were cutting themselves to pieces.
The cold dread he had felt was scoured away by a sensation of heat. Suddenly emboldened, Karlich followed the source of the light.
Father Untervash glowed with an inner glory. His every pore exuded stark and blazing fury. It filled his eyes and made them burn. The warrior priest’s voice resonated with power as he stepped forward from the front rank of the greatsworders.
‘Denizen of the deep, foul spawn, with the wrath of Sigmar I will smite thee!’
Holy fire coursed over the priest’s warhammer, flickering along the haft and up Father Untervash’s arms. He swung it three times in a wide arc then planted the head into the ground where a pulse of fire erupted. Orcs within its path were seared. Blacktooth and his wyvern were assailed by the backwash but didn’t yield to it.
A horrible, bestial grunting came from the orc shaman when it was over. The sound was deep and abyssal, drunk with unfettered power. Blacktooth shucked up and down. It took Karlich a moment to realise the orc was laughing.
‘In Sigmar’s name, I denounce thee wret–’
With a serpent’s reflexes, the wyvern snapped at Father Untervash and seized him in its jaws. Blood spewed from the warrior priest’s lips, preventing him from finishing the holy diatribe. Gasps of shock echoed through the Imperial soldiery as their keeper of the faith slowly drowned in his own blood when his chest was crushed.
Defiant to the end, Father Untervash spat through red-rimed teeth and tried to lift his hammer. His pain and anger ended when the beast snapped its jaws and him in two.
‘Morr protect my soul!’ One soldier from Auerswald fell to his knees, awaiting the end. Several more from the same regiment ran, discarding their banner as all hope faded.
The light, in many ways, died with Untervash.
Ragged halves of his torso fell out either side of the wyvern’s mouth, trailing ribbons of red meat and crumpling to the ground like scraps. Somewhere farther down the line another regiment fled. The gruesome display and the presence of the monster had unmanned them. Karlich felt the shift all the way to the front rank. Part of the second front was overrun, the pressure telling at their flank. They at least had to hold.
Without the priest to repel them, the orcs returned. Mercifully, Blacktooth took to the sky but Karlich sensed he was far from done with them. Guttural chanting infested the breeze as the shaman channelled a more powerful spell.
Remembered terror still numbing his bones, despite Untervash’s holy aura, Karlich was fighting for his life again. The orcs were badly burned by the priest’s holy fire, and they were angry. In the madness, it felt as if there was no end to them.
They’d barely begun to swing their halberds again when darkness loomed above the Grimblades. At first Karlich thought it was the wyvern returned to devour them but then he saw the giant orc foot manifesting in the clouds. One of the hulking orc deities laughed and snorted as it prepared to flatten them.
Even as he cut and hewed at the enemy to his front, wary of the devilry above, a feverish sweat overcame him. Karlich’s hackles rose. His armour became hot to the touch. Glancing skyward between thrusts, he saw tendrils of green cloud spool off the giant foot as it plummeted with inexorable finality.
Ahead, the stench of sulphur got stronger as the trolls reached them.
‘Helena, forgive me…’ He used his dead wife’s name like a blessing.
But the orcish foot did not fall. Winds billowed from the west, carrying a figure of silver and azure. Borne aloft on a wisp of cumulonimbus, Sirrius Cloudcaller stalled the wrath of gods with sorcerous will.
One hand halted the foot’s descent, a gulf of turbulent air between them. The other hand spilled lightning from its fingertips. Forks of it lanced down and burned the trolls to charred meat. Even their incredible regenerative powers were unable to mend them.
Blacktooth bared his fangs, sweeping down to confront the Celestial wizard up close. The shaman growled and clenched his fist. The orcish foot descended again but crashed against a shimmering, azure shield. Sparks cascaded like dying comets as Sirrius Cloudcaller put all of his effort into resisting Blacktooth.
The magical shield glittered like a false firmament of stars. It cracked with the immense pressure, but held. Taking a deep breath, the Celestial wizard exhaled a blast of wind that forced the shaman back. Even his wyvern could not keep them from spiralling.
Sirrius soared into the storm-wracked heavens after him. Soon he was nothing more than a shadow chasing another, climbing, ever climbing into the sky above.
A patch of fiery amber began to glow in his wake. It tinted the clouds where the Celestial wizard had pierced it to pursue Blacktooth. The edges of the ragged hole slowly blackened and there rose a sound like the world cracking along its seams. Incredible, intense heat turned the clouds to steam as a flaming meteorite tore through the gloom with a blazing tail.
The fire-wreathed rock struck somewhere far behind the orcs. Hundreds died in the crater, their bodies reduced to cinder. A wave of fiery debris claimed hundreds more. The din of its impact was felt all the way to the Imperial line and brought the Grimblades and the rest of the soldiery to their knees. Mobs of orcs and goblins were destroyed utterly. Others were left decimated.
The tribe fighting Karlich’s men lost three rear ranks in a single blow. The rest were seared by heat and left dazed and dying when the Grimblades charged. Karlich hadn’t wanted to grant them mercy, but their deaths were swift.
A few hundred greenskin dead counted for little in the overall scheme of the battle, but it meant the way lay open for the infantry to advance.
The entire left flank butchered their way through the orc and goblin remnants at the edge of the meteor blast and marched onto the
still smoking ground, slightly awestruck by what they’d just witnessed. Already, though, orcs and goblins were moving through the heat haze. Earth turned to glass crunched beneath their feet.
Wiping off his blade, Karlich cursed when he saw the Steel Swords advancing. Eager to chase down and slay a mob of shattered goblins, they had gone too far and left the Grimblades’ flank exposed. The Middenlanders were heedless to the risk, ploughing on. A disingenuous part of Karlich believed the other regiment had endangered them deliberately.
‘Sturnbled and that rabid dog Torveld would see us dead,’ griped Rechts, beating the order to march on his drum.
‘They may not have long to wait,’ said Greiss, pointing from the second rank. A band of Wolf Riders was loping through the carnage. A manic goblin in the lead was cackling and pointing back. Its warriors did so too, sharing some unheard joke.
Karlich knew what it was. In moments they would be engaged by the vast goblin mob to their front, only to be charged a second later by the Wolf Riders. They’d be fighting towards two aspects at once.
‘Wheel formation!’ he shouted, causing Lenkmann to signal with the banner and Rechts to alter the tune of his drum. They’d try to face both enemies to the front. The Grimblades slowly pivoted on their right flank, the left shuffling forward using it like a fulcrum and angling their frontage.
A low explosion suddenly erupted behind them. It sounded distant, as if it came from the embankment. Leiter, who’d replaced Keller in the front rank, turned to look but a goblin arrow from the Wolf Riders pierced his neck. Gushing blood, he fell and Ensk took his place.
They braced halberds when the goblin mob struck but, to Karlich’s dismay, the Wolf Riders arrested their charge at the last moment and skittered around them. The slight delay was hardly costly. They engaged the Grimblades’ flank.
Pressured from two sides, the rear rankers found it hard to lend their support. Karlich felt the goblins pushing incessantly, even as he cut at them with his sword. It only got worse when the sergeant glanced to his left and saw Vanhans and his soldiers of faith. The witch hunter met his gaze and glared briefly before Karlich lost him in the ebb and flow of the melee.
The Empire Omnibus Page 53
