Scourge of Fate, page 24
‘Where is Svarbald?’ he demanded.
‘Dead,’ the fur-clad warrior said. ‘I am Ragnor. My brothers elected me to come in his place.’
Vanik nodded, but said nothing. One by one, the rest of the warband’s leadership gathered round. They all bore the marks of glorious combat – fresh wounds, notched and bloodied blades, the Gods-blessed gleam of battle-lust in their eyes. Vanik addressed them all, looking from one to the other.
‘We have pleased the Eightstar with today’s slaughter. Your warriors followed my commands, and the slaves of the Lightning God have been humbled. But our work is not yet complete. The one called Albermarl yet lives.’
‘Let us strike them now, while they look upon the corpses of their kin,’ Dravga pleaded.
‘Be silent,’ Vanik replied, glaring at the corsair. ‘Or I will butcher you myself, and save the mountain army the pleasure. They are ready for us now. The Gods do not reward idiocy.’
‘But we cannot stay,’ Faug said, his tone more cautious. ‘Their guns must begin firing again soon.’
‘That is why you will bring your war parties back over the ridgeline immediately. I have ordered the camp followers to return to the Third Eye.’
‘You would have us retreat?’ Gulgrak asked. Blood and pus were oozing from half a dozen wounds to his Nurgle-blessed gut, though he didn’t seem to have noticed any of them. ‘Leave this place after all the glory we have won here?’
‘If your warriors disobey you, you will answer to me,’ Vanik snapped. ‘Your assumptions are ill-placed. The camp is returning to the Realmgate, but we are not. The Helmgard cavalry have been slaughtered – I no longer need to spare any of your riders to guard them, Faug. I have sent another ultimatum to the coward castellan. If he does not meet it, we will begin slaughtering the prisoners.’
A crash answered Vanik’s words before any of the champions spoke. One of the Helmgard cannons had opened fire.
‘Go,’ Vanik ordered. Only Jevcha hesitated.
‘Where is Ulek?’ she asked, as the rest of the guns facing the ridgeline roared.
There was nothing but rage. It kept his dying flesh warm, kept his blood fresh and vital. It was the primordial reason for existence. Was not rage the first expression of every child, screamed into a new, uncaring world?
He screamed too. He heralded his arrival. The Warhound would know of his coming. He would know that there was no fear in Ulek, no pain in his cut-apart body, no shame in this final death. Only rage. Only such purity could be permitted within the Blood God’s sacred slaughter-realm.
He tasted blood. It was glorious. He was drowning in it, submerged in its invigorating essence. Rage and blood, the two most vital components of life.
Life that clung to him yet. He breathed. He was not drowning after all, though he barely tasted the air before more blood choked him with its coppery tang.
The agony returned, suffusing his whole body. He screamed again, to vent it. Something like fear reared up in his mind, accompanied by an addled, manic hope. He lived. The slaughter was not yet complete. His final tally of skulls had not yet been counted. He could add more, so many more.
He reared up. His body responded with an overwhelming surge of pain, but he ignored it now. It did not matter. He lived, his body still riven with blood, still drenched in it.
Ulek blinked. For the first time that day, he could see clearly. He was on his knees. Around him were his Bloodbound, scarred, bloodied. They were snarling like animals, their entreaties and words of worship incoherent but no less devout. They murmured as Ulek rose.
His body barely obeyed him any more. His flesh was ragged, carved open by swords and axes, pulverised by hammers. He felt broken bones grate, and spat the blood choking his throat – his blood, he realised. He was drenched in gore, from head to foot, his hair and beard matted, his entire body a raw, crimson spectre, like a very daemon of the Blood God.
And yet, he lived.
He stood. The Bloodbound roared. He answered them, raising both fists. He had been chosen to go on. Whether his body could or not did not matter.
The smoke had gone. He was standing amidst a litter of corpses, all of them dismembered, eviscerated or trampled. The ridge ahead was thick with more bodies. There was thunder, he realised, thunder that came not from the heavens. The earth of the ridge fifty yards to his left rose like some foul wizard’s trick, bursting apart in a shower of dirt. Warriors fell. The cowards’ guns were firing on them, he realised. The knowledge made him snarl.
The Bloodbound parted before him, their exultation fading as more shot and shells whipped past. Ulek wiped matted hair from his face. Before him stood Vanik. The Black Pilgrim had dismounted from his Chaos steed, his helm removed. His own black armour was bloodied, and the daemonblade at his hip was visibly shivering in its scabbard.
‘You live,’ Vanik said. ‘The Warhound has work for you yet.’ He spoke without relief or humour, as though he stated only facts. Ulek agreed.
‘Where?’ the exalted deathbringer growled.
‘You will know soon enough,’ Vanik replied, voice rising over the crash of cannons. ‘Await my word.’
Ulek managed to nod, though his body shook, as much with the urge to rend and tear as with the pain that threatened to overwhelm him. One of the Bloodbound stepped forward to his right, offering a weapon. It was his impaling spear. He snatched it from the warrior’s grasp, the mere contact with the brute weapon filling him with the urge to lash out.
‘Assemble the remains of your war party,’ Vanik said. ‘Bring them back over the ridgeline, and wait. You will claim more skulls today. This battle has only just begun.’
Marius watched as the artillery of Helmgard spoke once more. This time there were no fires to obscure it, but the gunners found themselves with an even more complete problem – the ridgeline. The barbarians had withdrawn back over it, leaving behind the dead and dying.
There were no targets for the great cannons, but the mortar batteries at least were unimpeded by the lack of line of sight. The engineers measured ranges and cut fuses, and the pot-bellied artillery pieces lobbed shells up and over the crest, evidence of their destructive potential relegated to the crump of their detonations and the smoke that rose up over the skyline.
‘They might be disengaging,’ Marius said.
‘We thought that before,’ Albermarl responded. ‘We have no way of knowing unless we take the ridge.’
Marius conceded with a nod. Occasionally, small groups of riders would appear along the crest, the same light horse formation whose archery had first decimated the Helmgard cavalry. They were always moving, and always vanished back beyond the crest before the batteries below could fix on them, but Marius had no doubt they were monitoring the army’s presence and standing ready to cut down any scouts Albermarl sent forward.
The only way they’d discover what was beyond was if they advanced. And Marius knew that Albermarl wasn’t going to send forward any lone detachments again.
‘The line will advance,’ the castellan barked at his couriers, then turned to Marius.
‘Will you accompany us, Stormcast?’
‘I shall,’ Marius responded. ‘If the horde is still just beyond the crest, they will come for you, lord castellan.’
‘They come, lord,’ the Red Steppe horsewoman said. She bore two feathers, dipped in blood, in her leather headband, the mark of a hetman’s child. Vanik wondered whether she was one of Faug’s many bastards. He nodded to her, and she turned her stocky mount back towards the rest of her tribe.
He had remounted Tzatzo, once more at the fore of the Eightguard. She was hungry again, chomping at her chains and raking the earth underfoot. Vanik tousled a bunch of the spines just back from the plate armour guarding her skull, murmuring nothings at her.
You will die today, Vanik, Nakali said. The daemon had been almost incoherent since the fighting started, gorging itself on the blood its wielder had shed, drunk on the essence of butchered enemies. It spoke now without its usual mocking inflection or hiss, as though it merely relayed information it had been given. That, Vanik realised, was more chilling than its former hate and spite.
‘As the Gods will it,’ he muttered. The daemon said nothing more.
Something struck his armour, rebounding from his shoulder with a ticking sound. At first he thought it was a scrap of shell casing. The mortars had been lobbing their rounds over the ridge sheltering the warband for the better part of half an hour. He’d ordered that they move well back from the foot of the reverse slope, which was now a churned-up mass of dirt and smoking craters. Still, some shells did land among the warrior bands, ripping through lightly armoured bodies and hurling limbs and viscera out over the kindred of those struck. The warband bore the barrage with a dark patience, warriors from all across the realms fidgeting with tokens and charms and murmuring blessings. Each one prayed the Gods did not send the flying metal to give them an unworthy death. Vanik himself had taken two finger-length shards of twisted iron, both embedded in his warpsteel shield.
But it was not a shell fragment that had hit him, he realised, as more struck off his black plate. Raindrops. He looked skywards, as the clouds finally opened.
‘That will dampen their powder,’ growled Kulthuk.
‘It will be of little use to them anyway,’ Vanik said. ‘Not once they cross over the ridge.’
He could imagine them now, the thick blocks of Helmgard infantry, bristling with their pikes, passing with difficulty over the dead heaped across the other side of the ridgeline, clambering slowly up towards the crest. They would be afraid and uncertain, bearing close witness to the butchery already meted out on their vanguard, wondering what awaited them in turn beyond the rise. And now the rain was drenching and demoralising them further, soaking through their uniforms and making the hafts of their weapons difficult to grasp.
Thunder rumbled, not the crash of the Helmgard artillery, but the true wrath of the heavens, stored up until now. The storm was about to break.
‘Move the prisoners forward,’ he said, turning and barking the command over another ominous rumble. More orders were bellowed and whips cracked as the mass of captives, who had been held back until now from the foot of the slope, were forced forward by Faug’s horsemen. They were a sorry, pathetic lot, mostly villagers and townsfolk captured over the past month’s raiding. There were a few members of Helmgard’s soldiery among them in their bloody, dishevelled uniforms, those foolish enough to allow themselves to be taken alive during the day’s fighting.
Vanik realised that the shells had stopped falling. Smoke drifted across the slope ahead, hugging the churned-up earth in the rain. It could only mean that the Helmgard battle line was reaching the crest, and the gunners below had ceased fire to avoid the danger of a short fuse bursting a shell above them.
‘Faster!’ Vanik snapped at the steppe riders. They whooped and shrieked at the prisoners, speeding up the stumbling, confused mass. Not for the first time, Vanik found himself thinking of a herd of brute-minded cattle. He hated them, hated their weakness, hated their fear. He offered a prayer to the Eightstar, asking that not one of their pathetic number be allowed to survive what was about to happen.
‘Forward,’ he repeated, signalling to Aramor. ‘Everyone, now!’
This was the moment of decision. This was the part when the Gods cackled and wove what they would, and mortal man – no matter how blessed – could do nothing but carry on. Vanik urged Tzatzo forward, a snarl on his lips. Just ahead, the prisoners had broken into a run, their screams lost in the swelling roar of the warband now storming up the slope behind them. Some fell and were immediately trampled.
The crest was just before them. Vanik watched it, expecting to see the flags of the Lightning Mountain rise up over it, expecting to find himself faced with locked shields and a forest of pikes. For a few seconds, as the prisoners began to spill up across the crest, he knew doubt. What if the castellan hadn’t brought his army forward at all? What if the warband crested it, only to find the great guns of the human and duardin host arrayed before them, waiting to belch forth a torrent of death? What if–
The doubts faded the same moment Tzatzo, snorting heavily, reached the crest. Immediately ahead he saw those prisoners still on their feet stumbling down the reverse slope. And beyond them, less than a hundred yards away – halfway towards the top of the ridge – he saw the regiments of Helmgard.
They’d timed it perfectly. The warband, fleeter than the cumbersome blocks of pikemen and musketeers, had won the race for the crest. Now they burst up over it. They found their enemy beneath them, drenched in the rain, struggling to form. One line of handgunners in between two of the pike blocks fired, their ragged, early volley only serving to cut down several of the terrified prisoners rushing at them. As they scrambled to reload, fighting to keep their powder dry, the Chaos horde swept up and over the crest.
Vanik knew he didn’t need to issue any orders. With a shout that seemed to shake Chamon to its iron-bound roots, the entire warband charged.
The Black Pilgrim held his retinue back as Jevcha’s Darkoath swept past. He stood in his stirrups, scanning the regiments below, searching the duardin icons and the human flags hanging limp in the rain. He was seeking a great square of silk, the device of a mountain crowned with lightning.
He was seeking Albermarl.
Hunting him.
And then he found him just as the warband crashed home. Near the centre-left of the Helmgard line, a knot of human and duardin warriors stood clustered around the flag he had seen earlier during the parley. Among them was a giant in maroon-and-silver armour, a lone Stormcast. Beside him stood Albermarl. The castellan was wielding a great warhammer as he engaged the first of Vanik’s warriors to come crashing against his line. They were one of Skoren’s former war parties, Parmin’s marauders, their hands still bearing the black tattoos of their previous master. They fell beneath Albermarl’s hammer, though they fought with a frenzy Vanik had rarely seen outside of Khorne’s devotees.
He lowered Nakali towards the castellan.
‘Albermarl!’
The champion of Sigmar caught sight of Vanik, and raised his hammer defiantly. Fangs bared, Vanik kicked Tzatzo down the slope.
The Eightguard were with him. As the Chaos knights thundered down on the castellan’s retinue, there was a crash. The detachment of handgunners directly ahead had managed to reload. Renki’s warhounds were ripping into them, but about a dozen of the second rank succeeded in getting off a ragged volley. Vanik heard a series of sickening thumps, and felt Tzatzo twist beneath him as she was hit. At least one musket ball had struck her skull, punching through the barding plate. She screeched and went down on her forelegs, forcing Vanik to grasp her spiny crest to stay mounted. Around him the Eightguard surged past, committed to the charge, his own black banner streaming from Kulthuk’s fist.
He screamed with rage, and tried to urge Tzatzo up. The wounded steed huffed, dark ichor oozing from a vicious gash just below her left eye. Another ball had buried itself in her breast. Hissing a curse, Vanik threw a leg over and dropped to the ground.
‘I will avenge you,’ he said, placing a gauntlet on the beast’s muzzle. She trilled back, claws scraping the dirt. There was a crash as the Eightguard struck home, ploughing indiscriminately through the marauders. Vanik turned and charged in their wake.
All ahead was carnage. Both retinues were locked in a death struggle. The weight of the Eightguard’s initial charge had crushed the front rank of Albermarl’s guards, but a wedge of duardin hammerers had rallied around the castellan. Already Aramor and Zoth had been unhorsed, and Klexus’ skull had been split. The castellan himself fought in the midst of the melee, smashing his great hammer against Morrick’s shield. The Stormcast was to his left, beyond the knot of duardin lifeguards.
Vanik strode over the trampled remains of several of Parmin’s marauders, bellowing Albermarl’s name. He was so engrossed in reaching the castellan that he didn’t notice the figure running at him from his right side, through the press of Chaos warriors.
A body crashed into Vanik, checking his advance. He whipped around, snarling, expecting to find himself facing a duardin or some Free Cities soldier. Instead, he realised it was one of Parmin’s marauders who had rammed into him. The warrior was scantily clad, his sinewy body clothed in a furred loincloth and light leather armour, a scraggly beard hugging the man’s gaunt face. It took a second for Vanik to recognise that face. It was the hate-filled eyes that did it.
‘Blackhand,’ he snarled. Skoren didn’t respond. The rival Black Pilgrim howled and swung Vargen. Vanik stumbled back, the daemon sword cleaving the air inches from his gorget.
‘Finally found the courage to face me then,’ he spat at Blackhand. ‘Have you been cowering like an unbloodied youth among the ranks of your former warriors all this time?’
‘I am willing to do what must be done,’ Skoren snarled manically. ‘Did you truly believe all of my warriors would simply surrender themselves to you?’
Skoren lashed a blow at Vanik and the two pilgrims locked together, blades quivering and snarling at one another.
‘You waited until now to strike,’ Vanik spat through gritted teeth. ‘You are not worthy of becoming a Scourge of Fate, Blackhand. We are not skulking assassins, we are the Three-Eyed King’s huntmasters.’
‘I knew your vanity would see you bring the castellan to open battle,’ Skoren responded, managing to grin. ‘Now he is mine for the taking.’
‘He is mine alone to kill,’ Vanik roared, and thrust himself at Skoren. The Blackhand was thrown back, stumbling but staying on his feet. Before Vanik could follow up, he realised Skoren was laughing. The unexpected reaction gave him pause.
