Their column made a miserable sight, slogging over rough broken ground and through patchy, open forest at the pace of Barachen’s Ironweld cannon, Belching Ellenbrand. Under better circumstances Rosforth would have looked for the rank and file of the Steelhelms to just put their shoulders to the great cannon without needing to be asked or ordered, understanding that the artillery piece was their strongest weapon should the wilds of Ghyran disgorge something truly monstrous. Loucher might not know much about command, but he’d known what he didn’t like. These squads of men and women were the ragged tail end of every army. The poor who’d taken the Coin Malleus because it was the only coin they’d see in a month. The villains who saw years behind a shield wall as better than a prison wall or exile from their city. A few who’d enlisted in good faith and come to hold their hides more holy than their duty to Sigmar. At least one, to Rosforth’s discriminating eye, who’d enlisted more than once. Selias Breight, the light-fingered, loud-mouthed life and soul of every knot of thieves and idlers she graced with her presence, had a definite air of competence about her. Back under Loucher’s glower, that just made her more trouble. Here in the relief column it might just make her an opportunity, if Rosforth was right about where she’d skipped out from.
Rosforth leant over the rail of his crow’s nest, prodding Slobda’s shoulder with the butt of his fusil. ‘How’s your back?’ he called down.
‘Gotta monkey with a gun on it,’ Slobda grunted. She’d been surly all day, and Rosforth knew she’d be chewing over – the literal translation of how she’d think of it – Loucher’s dismissal. Ogor pride. Not something people thought of in connection with what they saw as lumbering brutes, but it was there. And Loucher hadn’t known how to really insult an ogor, thankfully, but Slobda had been around smaller folk enough that human insults could sting her thick hide too.
Rosforth was about to let it go, but then she let out an enormous sigh and bent over to shove the cannon out of its latest rut. Barachen, who’d been lolling over the barrel calling out contradictory directions, fell off with a howl and nearly went under the wheels. Rosforth winced.
‘Eyes to the horizon, fusil-major!’ came Marieda’s bark as she rode past. She should be at the head, as leader, but that was an invitation for the least-committed members of the column to slope off. A decision that they might think would benefit them, but would mostly just help out some flesh-eating plant of Ghyran otherwise destined to go without supper. And ‘horizon’ was an uncomfortably claustrophobic concept anywhere in the realm, between the riotous wilds and the broken ground, but Rosforth had the best vantage. He was supposed to be on watch.
Slobda chuckled. ‘Youse in trouble wiv yer wife,’ she rumbled, loud enough that the cannon crew got the joke as well.
‘Stow that talk,’ Rosforth said, more sharply than he intended, and that, too, was cause for mirth. But then, a soldier’s life was short on laughs. He shouldn’t begrudge them the chance.
‘Are you not his wife then?’ one of Barachen’s lads dared ask, when they had the Ironweld moving again.
‘Ha!’ Slobda straightened up and rolled her shoulders. ‘There ain’t enough of ’im ter–’ And then a peculiar pause. A moment nobody would have ever looked for: an ogor choosing her words. ‘Take three of ’im,’ she corrected herself. The edge of his platform and the rim of her enormous pot helm both hid her face, but he had a sense of her waiting to see if she’d goaded him. Not that ogors were shy of that, but almost twenty years of partnership meant she knew where his raw edges were. And cared? He wasn’t sure. Just knew it was more trouble than it was worth if both of them were sulking.
Just wants to make sure she gets fed. That would be the received wisdom, on the subject of ogors. Rosforth had his own thoughts, and maybe they were true and maybe it was just how he’d prefer the world to be.
‘Head on,’ he told her, with another tap of the gun, and Slobda ambled forwards up the column. In her shadow, straying soldiers got back in line and squabbling soldiers shut their chatter. Selias Breight, who’d decided a while back that cultivating an ogor’s good opinion was a worthwhile venture, flicked something at Slobda, arcing it close enough that the ogor could just lunge forwards to snap it out of the air. A piece of cheese or a heel of bread. The way to an ogor’s heart was through the stomach, sure enough.
They reached the head of the column just as Marieda did. The old woman looked ill-tempered, both because of the nursemaid duty and because it was her default attitude to the world at large. And it wasn’t as though defending a nascent settlement out in the wilds would be easy. Aside from raids by orruks or devotees of the Ruinous Powers, there were all the animal and vegetable horrors that Ghyran produced so bountifully. Nobody would be sitting idle, especially if this was a logging town in a realm where the trees were more than happy to fight back.
It wasn’t the crusade, though. The blazing beacon of the Dawnbringers, spreading the light of Sigmar to every corner of the realms. That was what Rosforth had signed on for when he’d been a boy. That was what he’d had as his iron core, after the cannon cracked on him, and through all that had followed it. His mission, his part of the great work. And now some stuck-up Azyrite marshal had looked at him and thought: too old, too broken to be of use. Had looked at Slobda and seen not the cornerstone of an army’s mobile fortress but just a beast. And Rosforth leant on his rail and kept watch, chewed on his moustaches, the very paragon of calm. Inside he seethed with a younger man’s rage.
‘S’orright,’ said Slobda.
Rosforth started from his thoughts. It seemed unlikely that Slobda had known where they’d been going, but probably something about the way his weight was slanted up in the crow’s nest had told her he wasn’t happy. And, with that prompt, he saw movement up ahead. The trees were denser that way, but the radiance of Hysh touched green on steel, glinting like needles through the leaves.
‘Troops ahoy!’ he called down. Slobda knew the drill and beat her mace against her shield for emphasis.
Marieda had ridden up in moments. ‘Enemy?’
‘Movement, anyway. Movement ahead.’ He squinted. ‘Still coming on, and we’re in the more open ground. They’ll have seen us if they’re keeping half an eye out.’
‘Castle up!’ Marieda called. Her voice, cracked and high, was still clear and commanding when she wanted it to be.
The column milled a little, shocked out of the long, dull slog. Then Barachen and his gun crew were folding out the Ironweld’s shields like carpenters assembling a cabinet, and the Steelhelms made a halfway decent job of forming a line of locked shields on either side. Slobda stomped over, shoving and kicking, with Rosforth shouting out names and orders over the top of her growls, and that accounted for the other half. Whatever was coming from the denser woods was going to meet something that wouldn’t shame Sigmar.
‘Here, major!’ called a voice from around Slobda’s knee. ‘What’s going on?’ It was Selias Breight, suspected former deserter.
‘Back in line!’ Rosforth shouted at her.
‘You want me to take a look?’ she called, grinning round the bulge of Slobda’s paunch, practically in the shadow of the ogor’s huge shield.
Rosforth was about to tell her that there wasn’t room for new ideas inside a Steelhelm’s steel helm, but Marieda had heard by now.
‘Quick, are you?’ she asked the infantrywoman.
‘Can be,’ Breight said.
‘Clever, are you?’
‘The cleverest, marshal.’
Marieda looked up at Rosforth. Exasperated, he shrugged.
‘Go,’ the old woman said. ‘But watch for tricks. If it’s more of the swamp-orruks they’re handy with tripwires and spikes.’
Breight scampered off, leaving Rosforth wondering whether the whole thing had been an elaborate blind for a second desertion. The woman was coming back from the trees soon enough, though. Not in panicked flight, but light on her heels, and the enemy coming out in force at her back.
No, not the enemy. Rosforth saw a couple of Sigmarite standards there, the red-and-green banners of Hammerhal Ghyra. Stumbling from the woods came a whole other straggling chain of human figures. Another column! Rosforth frowned and narrowed his eyes. A few shields, a few helms. Axes and hammers. But no marching discipline, and far too many of the people he could see lacked real weapons and armour. They hauled carts or dragged at the traces of mules, or even a great Andronicus beetle laden high with packs and barrels. On the air he heard a high squalling cry, but for a moment he refused to identify it.
‘’S brats,’ Slobda said. ‘Ho yuss, like home this is. Bring yer sprogs ter war. Teach ’em ’ow it’s done.’
Selias Breight was out of breath when she got back before Marieda. She took off her helm and smeared sweat and grime across her brow. ‘Marshal,’ the scout got out. ‘We got a problem. They’re from Newhalt Amarine. Way they tell it, they are Newhalt Amarine.’
She said it loud enough that word passed back down the shield wall, and Rosforth heard the shuffle and scrape of a hundred Steelhelms discovering that the settlement they’d been sent to reinforce didn’t exist any more. ‘Hold your wall!’ he shouted down, and Slobda boomed her mace from her shield again. Something to hold their attention other than what they just heard.
‘Hold your line here and wait,’ Marieda called to them, holding a gauntleted hand high. ‘Rosforth, with me. Let’s see the damage.’
Cavalier and ogor drew close to the approaching refugee train. Rosforth saw the fraction of them who were equipped to fight push forwards, although if this had been an attack they’d be pitifully inadequate. Not that they were short of strong arms. The artisans and labourers who set out to carve new homes in the wilds of Ghyran were as stout as any servants of Sigmar, as beasts and raiders alike had discovered. But they lacked discipline and soldiers’ kit, and just jostled and tripped one another as they saw the great bulk of Slobda approaching them. Exhausted, demoralised, wretched.
And then a voice, thin and nasal, rising from the throng: ‘Ahoy hoy! Halloo the crow’s nest! Is that Slobda I see? Is that Rosforth?’
A weird moment of panic, a stab of long-ago memories. A point in Rosforth’s life when lowest ebb had met most painful decision. And a lot of good had come of it, for sure, but that didn’t blunt the trauma. And this voice had been a part of it, had been there. Had spoken to him in bright, almost cheerful tones as thin, steady hands had plied the bone saw.
‘Dockta Grippe?’ Slobda boomed. ‘Orright, Dockta! Hoi, chief, it’s–’
‘I know.’ Rosforth gripped the rail, momentarily dizzy with memory and old pain. He saw the lean figure worming its way out of the press. A broad-brimmed hat, and beneath it that sharp-nosed mask the war surgeon had never been without. Honestly, with that shrill voice, the hidden face and angular body, Rosforth had never known whether Grippe was man or woman, and their manner discouraged speculation. They were healer first, and anything else a long way second.
Grippe barely glanced at Marieda, looking Slobda up and down with a proprietary air. ‘Good posture there, excellent. How’s the back?’
‘’S good, Dockta Grippe.’ Slobda had always regarded them with an almost superstitious awe. A trade of blood and butchery that left its victims still alive had an odd place in the ogor psyche.
Marieda clicked her mount forwards a step until the horse’s chamfron spike rattled the rack of implements on the surgeon’s back. ‘Healer,’ she said. ‘You’re from Newhalt Amarine? We’re sent to reinforce your damn garrison!’ And, behind her words, the implicit question of Where the hell is it? Because the scattering of shields and axes present couldn’t account for a fraction of the defenders the settlement should have had.
‘Ah, well.’ Grippe’s long beak tilted back to peer at Marieda. ‘Perhaps we might set camp, and the magister and I shall do our best to explain.’
The ‘magister’ was nobody’s idea of a battlemage. A decently gifted apprentice, Rosforth guessed. Theorn was a thin young man, skin flecked with shiny marks where the magic had squirmed out of his control and bitten him. His robes were too big for him, double-belted about his waist with the unspoken hope that he’d grow into them – stature or power or both. He had round-lensed spectacles, one side of which was crazed with cracks, and which he constantly took off to clean between filthy fingers. He sat with Grippe and a handful of others who were presumably respected or senior in Newhalt’s hierarchy, and the story of what had befallen the settlement fell out of them in pieces and fragments.
‘The gargoylians knew first,’ Theorn said numbly. ‘All of them, the Red Duke, Wartshell, Fred-With-Legs. Suddenly they wouldn’t go near the storehouse. But none of us thought twice. You know how they are.’
Many of the creatures had come along with the refugee column, in fact. The curious little monsters that accreted around any Sigmarite gathering were lucky, everyone knew. Their presence was an attestation to the faith of the people, and they had a sense for trouble. But the more they had played up, the more the people of Newhalt had cast their eyes beyond their walls for the danger they sensed.
‘People started to complain,’ said Healer Grippe, ‘about a sound. Near the storehouse, but not from in or under or behind, just… Well, you could have gone mad trying to track it down. As though it came from a place altogether beyond, but not in any direction one could have pointed a finger in.’
‘What sort of sound?’ Marieda asked.
‘I’m afraid to report,’ the surgeon said, ‘something of a chewing sound. A gnawing. I heard it myself. A manner of rasping, crunching, grinding. Some thought that the timbers were giving. And naturally we thought of being undermined by some horror, and yet… as I said, there was no sense it was of the earth beneath us. Just… around, closer, somehow.’
‘You set a guard on the storehouse, at least,’ Marieda snapped. ‘Tell me that.’
‘Of course we did!’ Theorn retorted hotly. ‘A full quarter of our force under arms, by the end, and my master too. Prayers and wards and banishing sigils on the walls of the place. We were not fools, to ignore such signs, but still…’
And he didn’t need to say it, really. They must have poured sweat and blood into the founding of Newhalt Amarine, and Sigmar’s clarion call was ever the advance, not the retreat. How would any of them have been looked on if they’d gone running back to the city that had sent them out, on account of nothing but a sound.
‘In the last few nights,’ Grippe mused, ‘there was something else. Along with that ghastly, insistent crunching there were… bells. Great, discordant bells, like those heard from the depths of the sea. Distorted and vile, echoing from some far, vast space.’
‘Then they came,’ Theorn said.
The surgeon’s long mask nodded, birdlike. ‘Yes, then they came.’
In the end, Marieda had a whole line of witnesses lined up. No two of them had seen quite the same thing, or perhaps they’d all seen a thing that human eyes were not equipped to parse. Rosforth listened grimly, sitting slanted beside Slobda and leaning on the ogor’s huge thigh. The thing that had been eating its way towards Newhalt Amarine had broken through. Not just from the ground, not just a hole into which the storehouse had fallen, but a kind of… Grippe, the physician, had described it in medical terms. Like a festering wound, they said. A suppuration, but in the world. A place where the skin of things had gone septic and broken open, and the pus that flowed forth so freely had been…
Rats. Regular rats, yes, but also rats almost the size of a human, wearing filthy rags and scraps of armour, brandishing jagged blades. They’d flooded out so violently it was as though they’d been pressed against the walls of the world forever, bottled up in some unthinkable tunnel between sane places as they gnawed away at the membranes that held them in. The defenders of Newhalt had pressed in with shield and mace and blade, hacking at the disoriented and the diseased. Except the rats had kept coming. The wretched vanguard couldn’t have retreated even if they had wanted, because the pressure of more rats was like water flooding through a broken dam. They’d vomited out into the world, and behind that first wave of the confused and the desperate came others with pikes and mail, festering with spikes and pustules, blazing with greenish fire.
The garrison of Newhalt Amarine wasn’t here now because, against those hideous odds, they’d dug their shields in and held while the settlement’s civilians had fled. They’d done their duty to Sigmar, and now Sigmar had a hundred fewer servants to call on in his time of need.
After it was all told – after everyone had bedded down with what they had, food was being shared out, and the cold revelation had run all the way through the relief column – Grippe, Marieda and Rosforth shared an emergency command meeting between them.
‘We could retake the place,’ Marieda said. ‘Just press on. Sigmar will provide.’ Her voice was hollow, desperate. The old warrior who wanted one last great victory. Except Rosforth didn’t feel this would be anybody’s victory.
Still, she was in command. If she ordered it, that was where they’d march. He thought of the calibre of troops they were bringing to the fray: a hundred rough offcuts that Loucher hadn’t felt he could rely on, maybe another score of defenders who’d escaped Newhalt. Two hundred able adult men and women who had staves, forge-hammers, knives and clubs. Almost as many children.
He met Marieda’s steel-grey gaze, waiting to see which way the Coin Malleus would land.
‘We have a duty,’ she said, and his gut lurched, but the sentence finished, ‘to see these people safe.’ Frustrated at the hand she’d been dealt, but putting her personal ambitions aside.
That the rats would follow the broad and obvious trail the refugees had left seemed plain. The stragglers at the back of the column had reported seeing skulking rodent shapes between the trees, and the gargoylians were still hissing and fretting. Marieda had posted plenty of sentries, and would be marching out ahead of the dawn.
‘Fusil-major,’ she said. ‘How’re your legs?’
Rosforth started, but of course the legs Marieda meant were Slobda’s.
‘Wotcha need, boss?’ the ogor asked her, leaning forward over Rosforth’s head.
‘Are you up for a night march, soldier?’ Marieda asked her.
‘Could stretch me legs a bit, sure,’ Slobda agreed. Her big, brutal face split into a monstrous grin showing teeth like tombstones. ‘’Ere, we goin’ to dump this lot on Boss Loucher?’
‘I really don’t see any option but to return to the main army,’ Marieda agreed.
Slobda roared with laughter. In the echo of it, Rosforth heard a dozen newly crying children and the terrified whispers of the refugees.
‘Oh, ’e’s gonna be so pissed!’ Slobda declared. ‘Nursemaid to these foot-draggers? I get to see ’im eat that news? For that, boss, I’d run all night.’