Hammer and Bolter: Issue 20

by Christian Dunn

  ‘Scyla,’ he whispered.

  Freya smirked, taunting them just beyond their reach as the beast Scyla climbed down next to her, blocking the pass, and the only way in or out of the clearing.

  ‘Not one word that passed my lips was a lie,’ she said, clearly unafraid of the monster even as it opened its slobbering jaws beside her, revealing a maw lined with dagger-like fangs, scraps of rotten flesh still wedged between them. ‘Can you not see my beloved Scyla is even more fearsome now than ever he was before?’

  ‘But what…’ Vhorgath began. ‘How did he…?’

  Freya ran her hand over Scyla’s gorilla-like shoulders, but the beast never broke its predatory stare.

  ‘Scyla’s passion for the favour of Khorne brought him many gifts from the Blood God. So many indeed that in the wake of his victory at Undermountain…’

  ‘He descended into this,’ Ruaddon said.

  ‘That is the reason for his seclusion, the reason none but his own kinsmen have seen him over the years since. He has been warped by the Ruinous Powers into a far more dangerous beast than those he once hunted,’ she said.

  She stroked Scyla along his haunches. Somehow, whether by sight or by scent, he seemed to recognise her, and nuzzled his immense bulk against her slender form.

  ‘The village you ravaged, my home – it was the last of the Ironpelt tribal lands. Only we have cared for him in the years since.’

  ‘You cared for this?’ Ruaddon shrieked.

  ‘Of course. His raids once brought my people honour and riches beyond measure. So now we bring him what he most desires.’

  ‘And what is that?’ Vhorgath hissed.

  Freya smiled, even as she drew further behind the hulking, salivating creature.

  ‘Stop her! I will hav–’

  Scyla roared. His serpent-tail whipped around, striking the first warrior like a viper, tearing the man’s throat out in a mess of bloody cartilage. Just as quickly, he snatched up another with his massive pincers, the man’s armour squealing under the strength of his grip.

  Before the third could level a blow, the beast snapped his companion cleanly in half, hurling the bisected body over the precipice and leaping forwards with blinding speed. His jaws snapped open and he sank his great fangs into the warrior’s skull.

  Ruaddon stared, wide-eyed, as Scyla effortlessly tore the man’s head away from his shoulders in a fountain of gore.

  Dropping the mangled corpse, he turned to face Vhorgath and Ruaddon, a sluice of blood and bone fragments drooling from his hairy chin.

  ‘Scyla hungers,’ Freya finally said. ‘He always hungers.’

  Ruaddon gripped his sword tightly. ‘Damn you,’ he whispered to his master. ‘You’ve doomed us both!’

  Vhorgath was speechless beside him.

  Freya turned her back, not sparing the two men so much as a glance as she walked away. The clamour of desperate battle and the dying screams of Vhorgath and Ruaddon echoed through the mountain pass after her, blending with the feral roars of the beast that was Scyla Anfingrimm.

  LORDS OF THE MARSH

  Josh Reynolds

  ‘I was drunk,’ Erkhart Dubnitz said, stepping back to avoid the rapier’s tip. The deck of the rolled beneath his feet and the rail of the river-barge connected with his hips. He held up his big hands, palm out, trying to look simultaneously innocent and contrite. As a true son of the Most Holy Templar Order of Manann, Dubnitz was equally bad at both, and his expression slid more easily into one of slightly panicked guilt. He wasn’t frightened, but he was worried. It had been miscalculation on his part. It had been enjoyable, but, in retrospect, unwise.

  ‘That’s no excuse for despoiling my sister, you-you lout!’ Sternhope Sark barked. The Averlander wore what passed for finery in Averheim, but his rapier was real enough and sharp. The tip of the blade scratched across the enamelled sea-green surface of Dubnitz’s cuirass, marring Manann’s face with a thin scar. Dubnitz’s gauntleted hand snapped shut on the blade and jerked it and Sark’s arm forward. The rapier’s tip bit into the rail and Dubnitz’s other fist came down on the flat of the blade where it met the crosspiece, snapping the thin metal.

  ‘Whoops,’ Dubnitz said, flinging the broken blade into the Reik. There was a heavy mist on the river, and it seemed to reach up and clutch for the rail as Dubnitz turned back to Sark. ‘How clumsy of me, I do apologise.’ There was a murmur of laughter from the nearby crew, and they gathered to watch. There was little to do on a barge, and any entertainment was good entertainment.

  Sark gawped at him for a moment. Then, with a hiss, he struck at Dubnitz’s face with the broken end of the blade. Dubnitz grabbed Sark’s wrists and wrestled him around, trapping the smaller man between him and the rail. Dubnitz’s forehead connected briefly with Sark’s and the latter’s limbs went noodle-limp. Dubnitz grunted as a thin trickle of blood ran down from his brow, across his cheek and into his beard. Averlanders were a prickly lot when they were sober, in his experience. They were worse than Reiklanders, in their way, but he couldn’t fault the young man’s determination.

  ‘And I’d hardly call what I did despoliation,’ Dubnitz said, grabbing the young man’s coat to keep him on his feet. ‘It was more a peaceful transfer of military aid, if anything.’

  ‘Are all Marienburgers so bad at euphemisms, Erkhart?’

  Dubnitz turned and glanced at the woman who had pushed through the throng of sailors who had gathered to watch the confrontation. There was a resemblance about the cheeks to the young man he held, which, given that they were siblings, was no surprise. Sascha Sark was dressed in the latest Nuln had to offer for the upper-class out-of-doors woman, with an exquisitely carved iron and wood hunting crossbow held braced against the ample swell of her hip. She was flanked by two bodyguards, the best money could buy.

  ‘We’re a simple folk, Sascha. Unsophisticated, even,’ Dubnitz said. ‘Granted, we also manage to keep our private affairs private.’ The light cast over the deck by the lanterns mounted on the mast and swoop of the rail was becoming muted by the evening mist rising from the river. The mist crept across the deck sliding between the feet of those gathered. Something about it pricked at his instincts, but he dismissed it, being more concerned with the matter at hand.

  ‘We’re on a boat, Erkhart,’ Sascha said glibly.

  ‘We weren’t on a boat in Nuln, Sascha. In fact, I seem to recall a very soft bed and–’ Dubnitz began, momentarily lost in a bouquet of pleasurable memories. It hadn’t been his idea, but then, he’d never been one to say ‘no’ to a lady.

  ‘Fiend,’ Sark mumbled, grabbing at Dubnitz. The mist was creeping up his slumped form and Dubnitz waved it away. It had the smell of the Reik on it, which was unpleasant enough, but there was something else just beneath it… the stink of standing water or old stone perhaps.

  ‘Knight,’ Dubnitz corrected, still looking at Sascha. ‘Why did you tell him?’

  ‘Why did you bed me?’ she countered.

  Dubnitz snorted. ‘Fine, but you could have waited, perhaps, until after the order’s business with your family was concluded.’ The business in question was trained warhorses, specifically the Order of Manann’s lack of them and the Sark family’s possession of some of the finest horseflesh in the Old World. Dubnitz had been sent by Grandmaster Ogg to sweet-talk the horse merchants into opening up a business relationship with the order, which he’d done. ‘More or less,’ he muttered. The mist reared up before him and he had a momentary impression of a striking serpent. He blew the tendril into swirling threads. It was thicker than normal for this time of year.

  ‘What was that?’ Sascha said.

  ‘Nothing, my lady,’ Dubnitz said, beaming. ‘I trust that this won’t sour our burgeoning relationship.’ The Sarks had insisted on sending representatives to Marienburg to meet with Ogg and the Masters of the Order. Of those representatives, he found Sascha to be the most convivial for obvious reasons. Her brother, he thought, was mostly along to glower at the proper points during the n
egotiations.

  Sascha laughed. It wasn’t a polite laugh, or a girlish laugh. It was crude and bursting with innuendo. Dubnitz suddenly recalled that it had been that laugh that had led him to his current predicament. ‘I meant in regards to the horses my humble and pious order requires if we are to serve the good folk as Manann, in all of his foamy wisdom, intended.’

  ‘You’re thugs in armour, Erkhart, nothing more.’ Which was true, as far as it went; the order was a work-in-progress, as Ogg liked to state. It was a halfway professional fighting force, composed of the best of the worst, and dedicated, roughly, to spreading the word of the god of the seas. ‘Nonetheless, we are happy enough to sell you horses, should my brother agree.’ Sascha gestured to her brother, smiling prettily.

  Dubnitz looked down at the semi-conscious young man and sighed. ‘Wonderful.’

  Sascha was a cunning one. After several weeks in her close company, Dubnitz had become grudgingly aware that there was a very good reason that it was she who had been sent. He wasn’t afraid to admit that she had had him wrapped around her finger within an hour of their first meeting. In Nuln, he had done his level best to abuse his hosts’ hospitality in several tried and true methods, and one or two that he hadn’t even considered, before Sascha had suggested them. It was a game that Dubnitz knew how to play. However, it was disconcerting to discover that his opponent was even better at playing it than he was.

  Ogg should really have sent someone else, someone more… pious.

  ‘I don’t suppose I could convince you to tell him that he slipped?’ he said hopefully.

  Before Sascha could reply, there was a crunch. It was a loud sound, and the faces of the sailors turned ashen as the boat shuddered. Dubnitz knew that sound. The bottom of the river boat had struck something. An alarm bell began to ring, the sound of it muffled by the thick blanket of mist that had settled on the boat.

  ‘What was that?’ Sascha said.

  ‘It sounds like we’ve run afoul of something,’ Dubnitz said. He peered over the rail. Something splashed, out past the rail. Then something else, there were more splashes and a number of thumps. The mist boiled up over the rail like a billowing curtain. He squinted, thinking he’d seen lights flickering in the mist. Suddenly wary, Dubnitz reached for the sword sheathed on his hip. Sark struggled in his grip and he released the merchant, shoving him towards his sister. ‘Sascha, get your brother back to your cabin and stay there.’

  ‘What is it?’ Sascha said. Her bodyguards tensed, looking around. Like him, they had sensed something wrong. Both men were veterans of Nuln’s infamous Blacklegs regiment, and as swordsmen, only Dubnitz was their equal. They had enough battlefield experience to know when something went wrong.

  ‘Maybe nothing,’ Dubnitz said, trying to see through the mist. He could barely make out a shape near the waterline. They had struck something. He saw skeletal trees looming through the mist and the shore was covered in the thick grasses that marked the Cursed Marshes. The Reik was separated from the darker waters of the marsh only by the thickly clustered hummocks and boils of earth and soggy stretches of semi-dry land that the marshes consisted of.

  As always, whenever he passed through these narrow waterways, his mind conjured any number of ways in which the trip could go wrong. Now the worst had apparently happened. But not as the result of random happenstance, he suspected. He loosened his sword in its sheath. There were so many stories about the Cursed Marshes that it was hard to know what to be afraid of. It was the haunt of mutants, Chaos-worshippers, goblins and less physical threats. Ghosts clung to forgotten structures and swamp-goblins ambushed Marsh-Watch patrols every full moon.

  But this was something different.

  ‘Erkhart, what is it?’ Sascha said again. The mist seemed to swallow the sound of her voice.

  ‘Stay back,’ Dubnitz began. His eyes narrowed and then widened.

  ‘Lady Sark, you should go back to your cabin,’ one of the bodyguards said, grabbing for her arm. She cast a hot glare at him and he sighed and stepped back.

  ‘Sarks do no cower in cabins, Helmut,’ she snapped.

  ‘What is it? What do you see?’ Sark demanded, throwing his own glare at Dubnitz. His previous ire had been washed aside by concern. Hot-headed the boy might be, but Averlanders were a practical lot at the bone.

  ‘Nothing, but that doesn’t mean…’ Dubnitz trailed off. His eyes were tearing up from the strain of trying to see through the mist, and he blinked. Something was moving out there. All he saw were hints and vague bubbles of movement, swelling in the mist. He heard thumps and scrapes and his gaze travelled down, where the soup of the mist clutched at the hull.

  Something rose to the surface. Sharp and stiff, it cut into the wood with a dull noise. Dubnitz blinked. Was that–?

  More sharp things stabbed the hull. Something metal swooped past him and chopped into the rail – a grappling hook. Dubnitz stepped back with an oath.

  ‘What is it?’ Sascha said, her voice rising.

  ‘Get back!’ Dubnitz snapped.

  Faces pierced the mist, grinning like wolves. Sabres, cutlasses, spears and axes followed as their attackers gave vent to blood-curdling cries. Dubnitz jerked back as a spear skidded off his pauldron and danced across his earlobe, sending a rush of warmth down the inside of his gorget. He cursed and chopped down, splitting the spear. Its wielder stumbled, off balance, and Dubnitz opened his throat to the bone.

  But even as the one fell, more replaced him. Dubnitz was forced back from the rail. ‘Pirates,’ someone yelled. ‘’Ware, pirates,’ the cry bounced from crewman to crewman. In these parts, piracy wasn’t confined to the open ocean. Much trade was moved along the Reik, and where there were valuables there were men who would look to take such for themselves. Still, for pirates to have gotten this close to a fully-crewed barge was astonishing. The river-jackals were normally more cautious, laying breakwater chains and playing wrecker on rougher waters. Perhaps the mist had made them ambitious.

  ‘Take the big one first!’ a pirate barked, swinging a club towards Dubnitz’s head. Dubnitz caught the blow on his vambrace and the club cracked. As the pirate gawped, Dubnitz split his skull, crown to chin. He kicked the dead man in the midsection and jerked his sword free. More blades and clubs and spears sought him and he grabbed the dying man and flung him into a knot of his attackers. ‘Manann,’ he bellowed, lashing out with his sword.

  ‘Stromfels,’ someone shouted in reply, invoking the god of pirates and storms. The mist cleared and a broad shape stepped forward, sword extended, gold teeth glinting in the torchlight. He was around Dubnitz’s size, though rangier, with years of hard-living stamped on his face. At his gesture, the pirates retreated.

  Dubnitz stiffened, his eyes narrowing in recognition of both the face and the voice. ‘Fulmeyer,’ he growled. ‘I heard that the Reiklanders had stretched your neck.’

  ‘If it isn’t my old friend Dubnitz,’ the pirate said. ‘Still stringing up honest river-men?’

  ‘Who is this devil?’ Sark demanded, his hands clutching emptily for the rapier Dubnitz had broken. The two groups faced each other tensely, the pirates on one side, the crew on the other and only the mist separating them, like a thin curtain caught in a breeze.

  ‘A dead man,’ Dubnitz said tersely.

  ‘Quintus Fulmeyer, at your service,’ Fulmeyer said, spreading his arms. ‘Some call me the Marsh-Hound, but none do it twice.’ His dark eyes narrowed. ‘Dubnitz here tried to have me hung.’

  ‘Several times,’ Dubnitz said, tightening his grip on his sword. ‘I should have just done it myself.’

  Fulmeyer laughed. ‘Maybe you should have at that. Fancy running into you here,’ he said. ‘The gods truly are kind.’ Fulmeyer was one of those thorns that you never realised was in your side until it began to hurt. He was a pirate’s pirate, and Dubnitz dearly hated pirates, especially ones with the temerity to avoid Manann’s justice on three separate occasions.

  ‘They are indeed,’ Dubnitz said, starti
ng forward. Fulmeyer stepped back and raised his blade.

  ‘I have more than twenty men, Dubnitz. And you’ve no troop of mounted knights to aid you this time. Just some poxy sailors and a handful of toffs,’ Fulmeyer said. ‘Surrender, as we’d rather not kill any we don’t have to. We have you fair and square,’ the pirate barked. ‘No need for this to turn bloody.’

  Dubnitz was about to comment, but before he could so much as open his mouth, a crossbow suddenly went tung and a bolt spiralled through the mist towards Fulmeyer, who squawked and fell back. The bolt narrowly missed his hunched form. Dubnitz glanced back at Sascha, who was already reloading her crossbow. ‘What was that?’ he said incredulously.

  ‘You Marienburgers talk too much,’ Sascha said, lifting her reloaded crossbow. Before Dubnitz could reply, the pirates surged forward with a full-throated roar. The fight was brutal, and swift. The had a small crew, and the pirates outnumbered them two to one. Nonetheless, the former fought like born brawlers. Sascha’s bodyguards took a terrible toll also.

  But the pirates had other, unnatural advantages on their side. Dubnitz’s skin crawled as the mist seemed to thicken and grip at him, as if to aid the pirates. Coils of wet air snagged his sword-arm, slowing his blows and causing him to stumble. Too, the dank smell of it invaded his head, causing his vision to blur and his lungs to seize. Was it sorcery, he wondered. It wouldn’t be the first time he had faced a daemon-spawned mist, after all.

  Thoughts of that brought a longing for absent companions. He wished Goodweather were here with him. The priestess of Manann’s prayers could easily have dispersed the mist, which seemed possessed of an almost malign will. And that will was bent towards hampering the increasingly desperate efforts of the defenders of the river boat. Fulmeyer had never displayed any mystical acumen in their previous encounters, however. This was something new… something dangerous. Perhaps the pirate had hired a hedge-mage or some grave-robbing necromancer to help him. Such criminal activities were well within the Marsh-Hound’s purview.