‘I fink spicy,’ said one ogor, running a tongue over a jagged arrangement of teeth. ‘Spicy like them li’l red fruit things.’
‘Nah,’ said his fellow. ‘Salt. Like proppa sea fish salt. All kinda salt.’
In the gloom within the ruin, Theorn was doing his best to ignore the conversation, but given an ogor’s conversational tone was like human shouting, he wasn’t succeeding. And it was probably hard to concentrate, with a pair of ogors discussing just how being a mage changed the way humans tasted.
Rosforth was trying to think past a different sort of ogorishness. The one with the cannon had attached himself to Slobda’s elbow, and had been talking with more enthusiasm than comprehensibility about aim, angles and ammunition – meaning mostly whatever he could cram into his weapon’s barrel with both hands. He was Hvorch or, as the other ogors called him, Boring Hvorch, but there was something oddly endearing about his utter enthusiasm for things that went bang. As though there was some unacknowledged, cross-species siblinghood that he and Rosforth had been inducted into. Him and me and poor Barachen Sot. And even that cursed rat-sniper, perhaps. Some way we all have of seeing the world that those who never smelled the stink of powder could know.
The fugitive humans were all camped up at the entrance to the ruins, and so were the ogors. Thus far the latter hadn’t eaten any of the former, although there were shields up and swords handy because nobody trusted that state of affairs to necessarily continue.
‘Can you open it?’ Rosforth said. Because if Theorn turned to him and answered in the negative then things were about to get very messy.
‘I think…’ the apprentice said. ‘I think… Yes. Yes, I can feel where it is. With my master’s notes–’
‘I don’t need the lecture,’ Rosforth snapped. ‘Just make it happen.’ And he was about to elaborate on the consequences of it not happening when the call from outside came.
‘Major! The rats!’
Rosforth closed his eyes for a moment. I do not want to be responsible for what comes next. But there was nobody else.
‘Castle up!’ he shouted. ‘I’m coming!’ He heard the scrabble and clatter as they formed what little section of a Castelite wall they still could. Ducking as Slobda emerged into the daylight, hearing Hvorch and the other ogors trooping out after him, he left Theorn to his magery.
Slobda took one end of the shield wall, planting her massive pavise solidly down. Her presence lending a little strength to the little human creatures beside her, just from being there. An ogor, but their ogor. And then the other ogors, shambling out, kicking, laughing, slapping one another – Hvorch and a few others with those huge, crude cannons just braced in their arms, and the rest with clubs, or swords that were little more than great slabs of iron sharpened on one edge.
The rats were surging through the canyon, driving their own weak and wretched ahead of them. Seeing the humans and their new allies, the rodent advance actually slowed a little, the front ranks pushing back against those who were shoving them from behind. Hundreds of mad, bulging eyes expecting a beaten enemy and finding that impenetrable wall facing them yet again.
‘I don’t do speeches,’ Rosforth shouted, hearing his voice crack. ‘I don’t presume to know Sigmar’s will. We hold, we live. We hold, those people behind you live. Even the bloody ogors live.’ The roiling tide of rats squabbled and fought and then began to advance again. ‘Not for ever. Not even for long. Just till the gate opens. So hold. For me, for Sigmar, for getting to see tomorrow. Just bloody hold!’ And then, gauging ranges, he continued, ‘Ready fusils! Pick your targets. Leaders if you see them.’ He had his own in his sights – a big rat five ranks back, lashing out at its meaner fellows with a whip. ‘Hvorch?’
‘Gonna go wiv spears,’ said the ogor cannoneer thoughtfully. ‘Real nice spread wiv a gun fulla spears.’ He hefted his weapon, which rattled with a whole squad’s worth of sharp points.
A hideous shrill shrieking went up from the rats, and they charged.
‘Let the bastards have it!’ Rosforth shouted, and fired, knowing only relief that his actual leadership role in the battle was done. That there was no cunning stratagem left in him, no clever orders he could give. They would hold for long enough, or they would fall. It was down to each and every one of them. All he had to do was load and shoot, load and shoot, as Slobda laid about herself, braced her shield against the rodent tide. Roared out jokes to the other ogors as they smashed down into the host of hairy, chittering bodies, and threw titbits to one another.
’Ave you tried the rat? So fresh it’s wrigglin’!
The line was giving from the start. He saw it, from his privileged vantage point. There weren’t enough of them any more, and they didn’t have the solid anchor of the Ironweld to clasp to. The sheer press of rat bodies was pushing them back, and behind them was only the ruin, and those who couldn’t fight. The injured, the children, those who lacked the strength to brace a shield or swing an axe, crouched behind the Castelite wall with wide eyes, hearing the appalling shrilling of the skaven host as it tried to force its way through.
The rat elites struck here and there down the line, prying at every weak spot, trying to get their halberds past the shields. Or else the sheer mass of rodent bodies mounded up until individual rats were vaulting over the top of the wall, practically throwing themselves onto the defenders’ swords to escape the press of their own kin behind them. The wall gave, bent, buckled, held together in a crooked zig-zag forever on the very point of shattering into individual shields. ‘Sigmar!’ went the cry, and ‘Newhalt!’ and just shouts, just human voices yelling out over the skull-drilling sound of so many shrieking rats.
And one voice, just one voice over all of that. Healer Grippe, shouting his name.
‘Rosforth, the gate!’ the surgeon called. ‘It’s open, but we don’t know how long for!’
He risked a look back. The non-combatants were already flooding down into the ruin.
‘Backstep!’ he shouted, and had to try twice more, voice rasping and hoarse, before Slobda put in her bass echo and the sergeants passed the word along.
‘Chief,’ Slobda bellowed up at him. ‘Big lad’s back.’
Rosforth’s heart clenched. That bloated mass of ratflesh hadn’t perished beneath the rockfall. Of course it hadn’t. Here it was again, vomiting into sight. Robed rats clambered over it, and he saw they were still stitching and wiring the thing back together, emergency repairs on the vast agglomeration of their kin. Unsteady, perhaps. Weakened, perhaps. But it was still the biggest thing on the battlefield, and picking up speed as it lurched through the rodent ranks towards the wall.
‘Squad by squad,’ he shouted, hearing Slobda echo his orders. ‘From the far end, peel off. Get yourselves through the gate!’ Because that way at least some of them would make it.
He felt the line shudder as it began to contract. The lucky, those furthest from him, did their best to fall back in good order, but the rats took every inch of ground and pushed for more, gnawing at the very shields, pushing into every gap, underneath, over the top. Rosforth could feel the whole line start to break as every Steelhelm still being asked to hold counted the seconds until their own turn came. They were just human, he knew. Humans who wanted to live. Who wanted any future that wasn’t bones picked clean by the rats.
He felt the instant the line failed. Abruptly everyone was pressing backwards, treading on the toes of the people behind, jostling to get into the bottleneck of the ruins. The ogors were pulling back too, and where they shoved, mere humans were squeezed out of the way. The rats seemed to rise up like a tidal wave, clambering over one another high enough to blot out the sun.
Then their great monster burst through, and for a moment it became the defenders’ unlikely ally, fighting the mass of its own fellows in its desperation to reach the line. He saw great handfuls of rats hurled left and right by all those knotted hands, rat bodies fought over by the blind, endlessly biting heads.
Behind him, the remaining Steelhelms hurled themselves down into the ruin, the ogors too. At Slobda’s side, Hvorch let fly with a barrel full of scrap, right up into the monster’s knot of heads.
Slobda set her shield. Took one big step back. She was the last, the rearguard, setting her bulwark in the ruins’ very doorway while everyone ran and tripped, stumbled and fell down into the space below. Into the gate.
‘Duck, chief!’ Slobda hollered. Rosforth snapped off one last shot and then let himself topple down into the bucket of the crow’s nest with his fusil, as the ceiling of the ruins scraped the rail.
The entrance to the ruins was far too small for the abomination to follow them in. Then it wasn’t. Rosforth saw the stones of the place shake and shift, and the vast torrent of writhing rodent flesh forced itself into the gap, clawing and biting, funnelling itself down in a great wall of hungry mouths and crushing bulk that would scour the chamber below of absolutely every scrap of life. Only Slobda’s shield was keeping it back, and only because the shield and the passageway were just about the same size. In a moment they’d be forced out into the chamber below like a cork from a bottle, and the thing would surge out on all sides and crush them.
He felt the instant that the walls were no longer on either side of them. That sudden, fatal freedom, shunted backwards far faster than Slobda could have moved under her own power. The shift and jump of every stone as the intruding bulk of the monster forced the ruin apart. The weight of the ceiling sagging above. A moment where the pale flesh of the abomination was everywhere Rosforth looked, an engulfing landscape crossed with scars and stitching.
Then brightness, heat, a change so sudden and shocking that in his mind it was the cannon exploding again, the one that had taken his legs. A mercy, surely. A clean death, a gunner’s death. Better than he deserved.
Slobda was lying on her back. Which meant so was Rosforth, wedged in the bucket of the crow’s nest. Gingerly he hauled himself out, into sunlight so dazzling that for a moment all he could see was glare. The skies of Aqshy, fierce and searing.
When he had blinked some vision back into his eyes, his first concern was his partner. Slobda’s huge chest rose and fell. One eye rolled to look round at him and he saw her grin. On her upraised arm was a jagged, whittled piece of wood. All that was left of her shield after the rats had been at it.
‘Cor,’ she said faintly. ‘Bit of a close one, chief.’
Rosforth hauled himself over to her, propped himself up on her arm. ‘The gate–’ he started.
‘Shut.’ Theorn loomed into his view, looking like his own corpse, utterly drained.
‘The rats–’
‘On the other side still.’ The apprentice swallowed. ‘Or most of them.’
‘Most of them?’ He fumbled for his fusil, but it was lying well out of reach. And yet he could see the survivors standing around, soldiers and civilians both, and nobody was panicking. They were just staring with morbid fascination at…
The ogors, gathered about something, presumably where the gate had been. A mass of flesh. He saw heads, arms, folds of hide. Quivering, writhing with horrible animation. The front end of the abomination, still hideously alive after being severed from its body by the closure of the gate.
‘’Ere,’ one of the ogors was saying. ‘You pull an arm off, there’s anuvver one growin’ back.’
‘Mus’ be one of ’em “all youse can eats”,’ said another sagely.
Hvorch ambled over, cannon slanted over his shoulder. Slobda slapped him across the head with force enough to kill a human, a fond greeting by ogor standards.
‘Someone sez somethin’ about a place near here, city or somethin’,’ she said. ‘Someone there who can get these lads fed?’
‘Theorn,’ Rosforth called. ‘Are we near Brightspear? How far?’
The mage consulted his maps one last time. ‘Just over the rise and we’re in sight of it, I think.’
Rosforth took stock. Healer Grippe was dispensing aid to the worst of the wounded – those who had still been mobile enough to get away. Time enough later to commit the names of the rest to Sigmar’s memory. The rats had their own mages, he was sure. Hopefully the realmgate site was buried under collapsed ruins and ratflesh on the far side, but he didn’t want to risk the thing just opening up again and disgorging an army of rodents.
‘Let’s march,’ he decided. There was a chorus of groans and he shouted out, ‘Walls and safety, beds and hot meals. Get your boots moving, and we’re home and clear before nightfall.’
Much grumbling, but they’d come this far. Left their home, left Ghyran, left the rats. A few more miles wouldn’t hurt them.
The Aqshy landscape was jagged rock under a baking sun. If Brightspear hadn’t been close, they’d have run short of water before nightfall. Theorn’s maps were good, though. That wasn’t the problem.
Rosforth stared. He felt every ache, every bruise, every old bone in his body. There was Brightspear, bastion of Sigmar. There were the towers, the high temple, the hanging gardens he’d always wanted to see. The roofs shining bronze in the sun, banners streaming in the wind…
And there, in the distance but advancing, were the rats. A great host of them, funnelling up from the sinkholes they’d bored in the earth, from the pestilential realm that had bred them. A vast horde seething towards Brightspear’s gates, dragging their war machines, driving forward their monsters.
It never ends. If he’d been able to walk away, he would have. But he relied on Slobda to walk for him. It would come down to her, in the end.
‘What do you say, girl?’ he asked. ‘One more fight?’
‘Like it’s ever jus’ one more,’ she said, but there was her rough chuckle behind the words. ‘Ho yuss, chief. Besides, gots to give these lads a chance ter show ’ow tough they is, right?’
‘Right.’ And he was so grateful for her. For the indomitable strength of her, and her willingness to put up with him, when surely there were other things she could have done with her life. He lifted his voice for the benefit of the others. ‘All right now, double time, carry the wounded, we can reach the walls well before they do,’ he called to them. ‘It looks like this time we’re the reinforcements. Just think of how happy they’ll be to see us!’
Slobda took the lead, setting off towards Brightspear’s shining walls, and the humans and ogors fell into step behind.