Blackhearts: The Omnibus

by Nathan Long

  A low, questioning murmur came from the troops, and quickly became a roar of disbelief and anger.

  ‘Yer off yer head, Nuemark,’ cried a handgunner.

  The obercaptain waved his hands for silence. ‘It is true! I have just received word from the fort. General Gutzmann attacked the fort at the head of an inhuman army. Lord Shaeder defended it as best he could, but at half strength he could not hold it. It is lost.’

  The roar became a howl, and the troops, both infantry and cavalry surged forward. Only the curses and punches of their sergeants and corporals held them back.

  ‘Believe me,’ cried Nuemark, his hands shaking. ‘I am as grieved and outraged as you are. But we cannot prevail. We must retire to Aulschweig and help Baron Caspar defend the border until word can be sent to Altdorf and reinforcements can be brought.’

  ‘If General Gutzmann has taken the fort,’ shouted a knight, ‘then we are with General Gutzmann, whoever he sides with.’

  ‘Fools! You don’t understand! General Gutzmann is dead!’ bellowed Nuemark. ‘Killed by his vile compatriots!’

  The howl dropped to a murmur as the troops took this in. They were stunned. They asked each other if such an impossible thing could be true.

  Into this lull came a new voice, calling, ‘General Gutzmann is not dead! The fort is not lost!’

  The troops turned. Nuemark and his captains looked up.

  Down the road that curved around the stand of trees came a knight on horseback, holding aloft a lance tied with pennons of blue and white. He was led by two men, and followed by a ragged company. As they walked into the light, the troops erupted in cheers, for the knight was General Gutzmann.

  Reiner, holding the general’s bridle, raised his voice again. ‘Your general is here, lads! To lead you against the vermin who storm the fort! And against the coward Shaeder, who betrayed us all.’

  The cheers echoed off the mountains. Reiner saw Captain Halmer and Matthais and their company at the front of the troops, doing as he had bidden them and crying loudly for Shaeder’s head. Good men.

  Nuemark was staring, his jaw unhinged. The infantry captains were the same. Reiner beamed. Was ever an entrance so perfectly timed? Had even the great Sierck ever written so stirring a scene? It was perfect. A masterpiece, worth every moment of sweat and furious, grisly effort. For it hadn’t been easy. Gutzmann had been frozen with rigor mortis and they had had to break his limbs to get him into Matthais’s armour. They had had to clean his face and cut off his eyelids so his eyes would stay open. Matthais had wept. Karel had vomited.

  Tying the general to Halmer’s second horse had been more difficult than expected as well. He weighed a ton, and tended to hang to one side. Fortunately, Matthais’s cloak was made for winter weather, long and heavy, and hid a multitude of ropes, straps and stays. Unfortunately, the youth’s head was smaller than Gutzmann’s and they had had to force his helmet down over the general’s brow most cruelly. It had been essential however. The ruse wouldn’t work in full light. Not even in the flickering light of a torch. They needed the shadows of a helmet to hide the stillness of Gutzmann’s face.

  ‘Command us, general!’ cried a lancer. ‘Lead us to the fort.’

  Reiner swallowed. Now came the hard part. He raised his voice. ‘The general was terribly wounded defending the fort and cannot speak nor fight, but he can yet ride. He will lead you! He will command you! Mount up, knights and lancers. Mount up, pistoliers! Shoulder your weapons, ye pike and sword and gun! We’ve a battle to win!’

  The troops cheered.

  ‘Wait!’ cried Nuemark, desperately trying to shout them down. He seemed totally undone by the situation. ‘We dare not… we… This is madness! The fort is taken, I tell you! Even with the general at our head we cannot hope to prevail. We must retire!’

  ‘Don’t listen to him,’ shouted Matthais. ‘He is Shaeder’s creature! He betrays us as well.’

  ‘A lie!’ yelped Nuemark. ‘I only urge caution!’

  ‘And look what he betrays us to,’ said Reiner. He nodded to Franka, who stood in the shadows behind Gutzmann’s horse. She stepped back, pulling surreptitiously on a rope that ran up under the general’s cloak. Gutzmann’s arm raised—somewhat mechanically—but at least it raised, thought Reiner, exhaling with relief. Hanging from the general’s hand was the bloody head of the ratman.

  ‘Look what foul monsters kill our brothers as we speak!’

  The troops stared, repulsed, at the long-nosed, long-toothed head, with its mangy brown fur. Its black eyes glittered evilly in the torchlight, looking strangely more alive than Gutzmann’s.

  ‘The ratmen!’ Reiner cried. ‘The ratmen are real! They are slaying our comrades!’

  The troops bellowed their fear and rage. Captain Halmer and Matthais mounted their horses and clattered to Gutzmann’s side as Reiner turned Gutzmann’s horse and Franka lowered his arm.

  ‘Form up!’ Halmer yelled. ‘Form up behind your general, lads! We march for the fort, and victory!’ He winked down at Reiner as the men cheered and began lining up in their ranks. ‘Nice work, pistol. You’ve a talent for mummery. I’ll handle him now.’

  Reiner bowed, hiding a smile. The captain wasn’t about to allow Reiner to be Gutzmann’s voice for a second longer than necessary. He turned away as Halmer began barking at one of Matthais’s lances. ‘Skelditz, ride to Aulschweig and remind Baron Caspar of his sworn duty to help the Empire defend this border. Ask him to bring as many men as he can, as swiftly as he can.’

  Wandering through the column in search of the Blackhearts, Reiner saw Nuemark before his tent, sitting slack on his horse. He stared at the ground while, one by one, his captains deserted him to take up command of their companies.

  The Blackhearts were forming up in the last rank of the first company of pike. Reiner joined them.

  ‘Not riding with the pistols, captain?’ asked Hals.

  ‘No fear,’ said Reiner. ‘I’ve no wish to be first in. If I thought we could get away with it, I’d wait here until it was all over. We’ve done our part.’

  ‘No thank’ee,’ said Pavel, grinning as he touched his missing ear. ‘I owe them ratties a few lopped ears. I want at ‘em.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Karel. ‘Me as well.’

  ‘And me,’ said Gert.

  Jergen nodded.

  ‘Hoy, captain!’ came a voice.

  The company looked around. Dag was stumbling towards them, waving and grinning. He had a black eye and a missing tooth.

  ‘I did good, hey?’ he said, falling in with them.

  Reiner flushed. ‘Aye, it worked. Er, sorry you were ill used.’

  Dag shrugged. ‘Had worse.’ He pointed to his purple eye. ‘And I broke three of this one’s fingers, so I got mine in.’

  ‘Well, that’s a comfort at least.’ Reiner turned away, exchanging uncomfortable glances with the others. The boy seemed to have no inkling that Reiner had hung him out to dry.

  At the head of the column, Matthais raised his bugle and blew ‘forward’, and the men got under way. Reiner groaned as the foot soldiers fell into a brisk trot behind the cavalry. He couldn’t remember the last time he had rested. It felt a decade since they had escaped the cell under the keep, and not a single break from running, fighting and sneaking since. Oh, for the quiet life of a gambler.

  The pikemen on the other hand were well rested and eager for action, inspired by the presence of General Gutzmann at their head. They made the trip back to the fort in half the time the Blackhearts had taken, and Reiner and Gert and some of the others were gasping when Halmer slowed a half a league from the fort.

  Reiner looked ahead. A trio of men, wounded and ragged, had waved down the column and were now jogging beside the captain and talking to him in urgent tones. Halmer nodded and saluted, and the men stepped to the side and watched the column pass.

  Reiner called out to them. ‘What news, lads?’

  ‘Bad, sir,’ said one, a lanky fellow with a wounded arm. ‘Very bad. The rat-
things have all the fort but the keep and the main gatehouse. Even the great south wall is theirs. And there are many dead.’

  Reiner saluted the man. ‘Thank’ee for the warning.’

  ‘Sigmar!’ moaned Karel. ‘Are we too late then?’

  ‘They won’t have an easy time breaching the keep,’ said Reiner. ‘There may still be hope.’

  As the black battlements of the great south wall rose in the distance, Halmer stood and turned in his saddle, calling back to his captains. Reiner could only just hear him. ‘Pass back General Gutzmann’s commands! Cavalry will enter the fort at the charge! Infantry will follow and hold our position! Do not allow the enemy behind you!’

  Halmer’s captains repeated the orders to the men behind them and the command echoed down the column.

  Two hundred yards out, Matthais raised his bugle again and began blowing ‘rally’, a three note tantara, as loud and as often as he could.

  Reiner and the others craned their necks, trying to see around the horses before them. Reiner found his teeth were grinding with tension. If the ratmen had since taken the gatehouse, then this attack was over before it began. They would be locked out of their own fort, a besieging army with no ladders, siege engines or cannon.

  At last Pavel breathed. ‘It opens.’

  Reiner leaned to one side and saw it through pumping horse legs—the iron portcullis rising, the massive oak doors behind it swinging in. He sighed with relief.

  Matthais’s bugle blew ‘charge’, and the horsemen before the Blackhearts’ adopted company of pikemen began to pull away. Reiner fought down a surge of regret as he watched the lancers and pistoliers move through the familiar rising rhythms of trot, canter, and gallop. What a thrill to be sprinting in, pistols at his shoulders, closing with the enemy. But then he saw a lancer fall, and another, and heard the reports of the ratmen’s jezzails firing from the walls. He shivered. Better not to be a gunner’s first target.

  Led by Gutzmann, who held aloft the borrowed lance in his dead hand, Halmer, Matthais and the lancers plunged into the black hole of the gate four abreast, howling fierce battle-cries. The knights and pistoliers charged in behind them without pause.

  Pikemen fell, screaming, to Reiner’s left and right in a rain of bullets as the company ran after the horsemen. The bullets seemed to explode on impact, ripping through breastplates as if they were muslin. At last they reached the gate and ran out of the deadly hail. The thunder of hundreds of boot heels ricocheted off the walls of the arched tunnel, almost drowning out the roar of battle that came from within. Reiner drew his pistols. Franka, Dag and Gert readied their bows and crossbows. The others drew their swords.

  And then they were in.

  Directly ahead, the lancers and knights hit the back of a solid mass of ratmen with an impact Reiner could feel through his feet. Rat soldiers flew through the air, blood spraying, as the first rank of knights raised them on their lances. More were crushed under the charge. Reiner saw an iron shod hoof pop a ratman’s skull like an egg. The ratmen recoiled from the unexpected attack, screeching and terrified.

  In the centre of the line, Gutzmann’s horse reared and kicked while the general sat bolt upright, the pennons of his lance waving bravely. And it seemed that nature—or perhaps Sigmar—conspired with Reiner to help him with his grand illusion, for just as the charge hit, the clouds above the fort broke and the light of Mannslieb shot through, haloing Gutzmann in an unearthly blue-white glow. His armour gleamed, the rat head he held shone silver and black.

  Rat gunners, drawing a bead on the beacon of the general’s breastplate, raised their jezzails and fired. Bullets punched hole after hole in his armour, but Gutzmann remained ramrod straight, not even flinching. The ratmen before him fell back, awed, at this miracle.

  Inspired by their general’s superhuman fortitude, the lancers and knights pressed forward, their ardour for battle redoubled. They left their lances in the backs of the first rank of rats, then drew their swords and hammers and laid about them in a fury. The pistoliers swung left and right, emptying their pieces into the ratmen, then wheeling in to meet them sabre to sword. The infantry captains screamed at their troops to block the sides, and the four companies of pike spread out in a long curving line as the force’s lone company of handgunners fired into the ratmen’s right wing. Reiner and the Blackhearts ran in the last rank of their adopted pikes to close with the rats on the left.

  They had to chase them, however, for already the ratmen were retreating. Panicked by the sudden shock to their rear, and as unnerved by Gutzmann’s invulnerability as his troops were inspired by it, they fell back in confusion, leaving a putrid animal musk in their wake.

  ‘By Sigmar,’ said Hals. ‘We’ve done it. They’ve broken.’

  ‘To the keep! cried Halmer.

  The knights and lancers surged forward, but were not able to overtake the ratmen’s scampering retreat. The rest of the troops followed at a run, and found themselves stumbling over the bodies of fallen men and horses, lying on the blood slicked flagstones. They had been hacked to pieces.

  Karel choked as he tripped over a gilded helm. ‘Captain, look! Cavalry Obercaptain Oppenhauer! Was he caught unawares?’

  Reiner looked back. Oppenhauer’s round, rosy-cheeked face was gazing at the sky, an expression of horror frozen upon it. It was missing an eye, and his beard was matted with clotting blood. His breastplate was pierced with the heads of three halberds. The jolly old fellow didn’t look right without a grin on his face. Reiner swallowed as he ran on. ‘They’re in full kit. They tried a sortie.’

  ‘A sortie? But that is madness! A single company?’

  Reiner looked darkly at the keep. ‘Maybe they were ordered to.’

  Karel goggled at him. ‘But… but why?’

  Reiner shrugged. ‘Shaeder continues to remove all who might challenge him.’

  Ahead of them, the sea of ratmen surrounded the keep, and lapped halfway up it like drifts of dirty brown snow. Some mounted ladders, but just as many were climbing the great piles of their dead that hugged the walls. The defenders fired down into them from the battlements, killing many, but never enough. The keep’s gate burned with a weird green fire.

  To the right, the stables and some of the other outbuildings were aflame as well, painting the scene a garish orange. From above, cannons roared, and stones and masonry exploded from the walls of the keep. Reiner could see ratkin crews silhouetted on the main battlements as they worked the fort’s great guns.

  ‘Our own cannon, turned against us,’ said Gert, bitterly.

  As they ran through their fellows, the fleeing ratkin alerted their besieging brethren to the threat at their back, and they turned, rat commanders laying about them with whips and staves and squealing orders. In seconds, what had been the ratmen’s unprotected flank bristled with spears and swords.

  The cavalry slammed into them first, but armed only with swords now, and facing a prepared enemy, the charge was not as successful. Reiner saw men and horses go down, impaled on the ratmen’s polearms.

  Next came the pikes and swords. As the Blackhearts raced toward the ratmen with their pike company, Reiner fired into the seething mass with both pistols, then holstered them and drew his sword. Gert shot his crossbow before tossing it aside to pull his axe. There would be no time to reload. Pavel and Hals began pushing up with their spears to the first rank.

  Reiner cursed. ‘Stay back, fools! Let the pikes make the charge!’

  They ignored him.

  The company hit the rat-wall as one, pikes punching their first line back into their second, but there were more behind them, and more behind those. The vermin swarmed forward, trying to overwhelm the men’s line with sheer numbers.

  ‘Don’t let ‘em through!’ cried Reiner.

  Reiner and the Blackhearts slashed and thrust from the third rank, stabbing at the vermin who attempted to get behind the front line. It mattered not where they struck, there was a furred body there to receive their blades. The ratm
en went down like wheat before the reaper, but there were always more—an endless tide of monsters: yellow teeth snapping, curved swords slashing, gashing arms, biting fingers, clawing eyes. Reiner was almost instantly bleeding from a dozen wounds, and pikemen fell all around him. Hals and Pavel were stabbing and thrusting like machines. Jergen spun his sword around him with deadly grace. Gert cleft rat skulls with his axe. Dag flailed like a drunk with a fire iron. Franka lost her dagger in a ratman’s ribs and was punching rats with her off hand as she blocked attacks with her short sword.

  All along the line, the men of the Empire slowly brought the ratmen to a standstill, and then started to press them back. The gate of the keep was coming into reach. But just as Reiner thought they might break through, men and rats began dropping all around him, screaming and writhing, as exploding bullets ripped through them. The jezzail-rats who held the great south wall had found them. Worse, they had turned the fort’s artillery away from the keep. A cannon boomed and a horse reared, its head missing. Another collapsed, legs gone. Another cannon fired and ploughed a trench through the front lines, dismembering man and ratman alike.

  ‘Do they not care about their own troops?’ asked Franka, horrified.

  Reiner shrugged. ‘Would even a ratman like another ratman?’

  The knights and lancers redoubled their efforts to reach the keep’s gate, in a frenzy now to get out of range of the gunners on the great south wall. They hacked a bloody path through the carpet of ratmen as more and more men fell under the deadly barrage. And the ratmen were flowing around the ends of the men’s lines now, trying to surround them. To protect their flanks, the pike companies folded back like two wings, at last meeting behind the cavalry to form a rough square, pressed on all sides by ratmen.

  Matthais’s bugle blew the rally again and again as Halmer bellowed up at the keep. ‘Open up! Open the gates!’