An ogor carrying a human up in a crow’s nest wasn’t necessarily faster than a light-footed human on their own, although Slobda could stride all day and night if she needed to, and if there were still rations in her belt pack. What the combination of ogor and Fusilier brought, to recommend them as messenger and advance guard, was that there was little the armies of Sigmar could send out alone that was better equipped to deal with what the wilds of Ghyran might throw at them. Ghyran was the Realm of Life, and Rosforth remembered, when he was very young indeed, thinking that sounded nicer than haunted Shyish or bestial Ghur. When he’d taken the Coin – no doubt in his child’s mind he’d do that – he’d thought Ghyran might be a pleasant place to see.
Pushing between the trees now, Rosforth could only wonder at what a young idiot he’d been. They were following the column’s trail back, of course, and in another country that should have meant an easy path leading all the way to where Loucher’s army had been encamped. Here, the trees were already denser than they had been, as though the land itself was trying to erase all sign of their passage. New saplings and undergrowth were boiling out of the ground practically as Rosforth watched, and the loose forest they’d marched through felt as though the trees were clenching together like slow, gnarled fingers. Ghyran was nature red in root and branch. Tooth and claw, too. Halfway through the night, an over-optimistic denizen decided that one man on an ogor was a good prospect and leapt out at them from the undergrowth. A thing like a lizard and a cat all at once, and Rosforth had a shot into it halfway through its leap. He’d swear its long head bore an expression of infinite alarm and regret in the instant between the bullet going in and Slobda’s mace coming down to finish it. That solved any question of rations shortages on the march, too. Slobda cracking bones as she ground noisily into the carcass dissuaded any other predators in the area from trying their luck.
The rain came in full dark, making a morass of the earth so Slobda had to hop from root to root, the trees becoming their unwilling ally. Rosforth kept his eyes on the faint marks of the column’s progress, using the butt of his fusil to tap her on one side of the head or the other, steering without words.
By the time the first glimmer of dawn touched the landscape, he was feeling almost cheerful. Not about tweaking Loucher’s nose, but if this mission wasn’t demonstrating their partnership’s usefulness, then what was?
Dawn rose across Ghyran as though it was being exhaled by the trees. Lambent, greenish light suffusing the air, seeming to rise up from the greenery more than descend from the vault of the sky. With a final crunch of bone and slurp of marrow, they broke from the trees and came in sight of Loucher’s camp.
He hadn’t expected to find the army still here. Loucher should be a couple of days’ march away already, but Slobda travelled far faster than a whole war-train and Rosforth would have expected to sight the rearguard before dusk.
That wasn’t how it was going to be.
Slobda grunted. No words, just a deep, thoughtful sound. On the rail of his platform, Rosforth’s knuckles were white.
The army hadn’t left. The mortal remains of Loucher’s entire assembled force was strewn across the ravaged ground of their camp and beyond. They were dead, all of them. While Marieda and her column had been marching for Newhalt Amarine, cursing the ill luck that had seen them sent away from Loucher’s glorious endeavour, the main army had been fighting for its life. And losing.
They approached slowly, warily, Rosforth hunched over his fusil, the butt to his shoulder, the barrel resting on its swivel mount. He could look over what was there and see an anatomised diagram of how they had formed up, tried to pull together, and broken. The jagged sections of line where the Steelhelms had dug in and held. The overturned wreck of an Ironweld cannon, its barrel gouged and warped. Before the matchwood wreckage of the shield wall he saw drifts of other dead, tangled and filthy, rags and stick-thin limbs and twisted, naked tails. Bared yellow incisors the size of thumbs. Matted pelts dotted with sores and boils. Rats. Rats like men.
In the heart of the camp, the ground spiralled down into a pit that the rain was already filling with a slick of greenish, oily water. Not even a tunnel, but a twisted fist of earth where the things had come through and, presumably, crept back. Burrowing out from some other place altogether to surprise the army and overwhelm it.
‘Shoddy,’ Slobda said. ‘Bad walls.’ And he was about to say something harsh, something he’d regret, about her having respect. Ogors didn’t do respect for the dead, save for how they tasted, and he shouldn’t expect her to react to a sight like this in human ways. But then she said, ‘Shoulda been ’ere, chief.’ And perhaps that was just grousing at Loucher’s decision, but she sounded as grave as she ever did. It was all the mourning that was in her.
Slobda lumbered closer, her shield up and her mace slanted over one shoulder. In the thin light, Rosforth cast his eyes over the carnage. Surely not everyone… But the story of the battle was written in corpses. He could see how they’d tried to form the wall, failed, tried again. How the tide of vermin had swept through every gap they’d left, around every unsecured edge. And they’d died, great drifts of them. He could read the book of how those expendable ratkin had bought space for bigger, meaner creatures, mailed and armed with hooked halberds, to pry those gaps larger. Here and there, parts of the field still glowed with a baleful greenish radiance, the poisonous aftereffects of some festering magic.
‘’E’s a big lad,’ Slobda murmured, pausing, looking down. At her feet was a rat-creature that would have come near to her chin if it stood upright. The charred, exploded-looking wounds of fusil fire had peppered it, the largest hole taking one eye, leaving the remaining orb bulging, cloudy. The expression on the creature’s face – on all of the rats’ faces, if they could even be said to have them – was more mad panic than hate.
‘Chief,’ Slobda said soberly. ‘We gots a bit of a problem ’ere.’ She crouched down and fished a scrawny rat body from a pile, sniffing at it.
‘Really?’ Rosforth asked faintly.
‘Wot?’ She chewed at a thin arm. ‘Feh. Nuffin’ to ’em. Skins and bones.’ It didn’t stop her continuing to worry the corpse.
Rosforth opened his mouth, trying to think of what to do. He felt that on one side was his mission: the dire need of the Newhalt survivors for somewhere safe, for the protection of a Castelite shield wall and Sigmar’s grace. On the other side was the army he still felt himself a part of, the enormity of its loss. Not even to orruks, not to the Chaos warbands that roamed these parts, not to the malignant life of Ghyran itself. To this… incursion. These new menaces that had just gnawed their way into the realm, wreaked utter devastation, and then burrowed back down.
If the world had left him alone, he wasn’t sure what he might have done. His mind had gone utterly blank with the sheer scale of the disaster. At that moment, though, he saw movement across the wasteland of corpses.
Survivors! he thought at first. And it was survivors, just from the wrong side. A pile of bodies was abruptly in motion, skinny rat bodies burrowing out between loose human limbs, clutching knives and filth-encrusted swords. More and more of them, six at least, and the mound of human dead just deflating as they exited, eaten away from the centre outwards.
The vile things shrilled and chittered. A few of the nearest began whirling slings about their heads. Rosforth’s finger clenched on the trigger without needing a conscious decision, and one of the slingers cartwheeled back in a loose-boned mess of thin limbs and whipping tail.
He’d thought they’d run then. Half a dozen of them, scrawny, ragged, no match for an ogor. Except in the next heartbeat there were twice as many, and then as many again, just boiling out of the corpse piles – their own and the human dead. Muzzles red, eyes bulging as though they were being squeezed from their long, low skulls. They surged forwards, drunk on their own numbers, squealing and shrieking in voices almost too high for Rosforth to hear.
‘Keen li’l sods, ain’t they?’ Slobda said, and then she was at work, the dance of a huge ogor with a shield as big as a set of double doors and a mace weighing more than a human body. Her reach let her drop that weighted head right into the midst of the rats before they got close, and by that time Rosforth had taken a second and was reloading, fingers moving through the steps with practised speed. A slingshot bounced from Slobda’s cheekbone with a dull sound, and then he heard at least a handful of the things ram face-first into the ironbound thickness of her shield. She lifted it and brought it down hard on anything luckless enough to fall into its shadow. Her iron-shod boots stomped and then she rammed forward, bowling the rats in all directions. Rosforth was ready by then, as she’d known he would be, and he got off another two shots, each one with force enough to spin the skinny little body of his target away.
For a moment the handful of surviving rats were defiant, baring teeth and squalling, inciting one another towards another attack. Slobda bellowed at them, eclipsing all the noise they could possibly make, opening a mouth so wide that the entire pack of them could have climbed inside together. In an instant the nerve of the wretched things snapped and they were fleeing. Not, Rosforth noted, towards the half-submerged whorl of ravaged earth, but just away, leaping and skittering across the battlefield towards the nearest trees. No way back, then, and hopefully no immediate way for more rats to pour out from nowhere and renew the assault. Not here, at least. They’d come, destroyed Loucher’s force, and then been sucked back to wherever they’d come from.
It was time to slog all the way back and break the bad news.
Not all the way, of course, because in the interim the Newhalt refugees and Marieda’s column had been following in Slobda’s footprints. When she and Rosforth were sighted through the dusk of the trees, there was even a bit of a cheer. At least before they marked his expression.
He had to tell the whole business twice over, because the scope of what had happened seemed too grand to fit into people’s heads. What, all the army? But what about the Cavaliers? Surely they’ve just retreated somewhere else and you didn’t see the tracks? But what happened to…? And he plodded through the tally of the fallen, the losses he could personally attest to. The broken cannons, the bodies of the horses with their innards gnawed out, the befouled and torn colours of Loucher’s personal standard. Until at last everyone ran out of alternative interpretations, and they were left with Rosforth’s hard, bitter words to chew on.
He saw the instant when Marieda registered that this was even more of a problem than just our entire army was just wiped out. Because it was also what are we going to do with all these people? A moment ago, Loucher was going to be playing reluctant nursemaid to the survivors of Newhalt Amarine. Now he was food for rats and all those refugees were still here.
They were at camp by now. The refugees had made better time than Rosforth had expected, marching almost at a soldier’s pace despite their wagons, because life in Ghyran left you tough or dead. They needed rest, though. Rest and time to digest how much worse their chances had just become.
‘The rat-people,’ Marieda said soberly. ‘I never fought them. Wasn’t entirely sure they were real. You hear stories, but you always hear stories.’
‘Bezzwozz,’ Slobda said. ‘’E was allus goin’ on about rats. Said the world wuz just rats alla way down, gnawin’ and chewin’ until ever’thin’ fell down.’
‘Berswon,’ Marieda corrected primly, ‘wasn’t called “Berswon the Mad” for nothing.’ A former comrade, more than ten years dead by now. An old man when Rosforth had been in his prime. A raver who’d spent half his time whipping himself for thoughts Sigmar wouldn’t have approved of. And yes, he’d had a thing about the Time of the Rats, but who’d ever listened to Berswon?
Rosforth was beginning to wish he had.
‘They’re things of Chaos,’ Healer Grippe said unexpectedly. The surgeon was tucked up practically in Slobda’s armpit, leaning into the ogor’s side because the night had brought on a chill that seemed to seep out of the trunks of the nearest trees. As though the whole living realm was in shock over the advent of the rats. ‘Skaven, scholars call them. They follow some deity even the other Ruinous Powers despise. Disease carriers, refuse eaters, things of sickness and uncleanliness.’ Grippe shuddered. They had become a physician because there was no greater horror to them than plague. There was a reason for the beaked mask and the gloves that never came off in company.
‘’At’s why they taste funny?’ Slobda asked. She had taken some of the skinny bodies for the road, but spent most of the return journey complaining about how little meat there was on them. And Rosforth was absolutely sure that any other creature dining on such fare would be vomiting it all up within the hour. But while you could sicken or poison an ogor, you could never do it through their bellies. In their long partnership he’d had to look away more than once, at what Slobda considered fit to devour.
Through all this the young mage, Theorn, had sat silent. Rosforth would have expected some scholarly dissertation perhaps. The sort of erudite and utterly impractical thing that you got from people whose experience of the world came out of the pages of a book. Instead, the youth had been thinking. When he spoke, it turned out that life in Ghyran beat even scholars into a practical shape.
‘Marshal, if I might?’ With a few gestures and a couple of false starts he conjured up a pale, wispy orb of light and spread out a panel of vellum beneath it. A map, Rosforth saw. And mapping Ghyran was a chancy business, because so much of it was forest and so much of that forest didn’t necessarily stay where you’d left it. The map was a confusion of arrows and currents showing where the cartographer had attempted to encapsulate the dynamic landscape of the living realm. That and an enormous profusion of different sigils that Rosforth was sure meant hazards of various kinds.
Newhalt Amarine was picked out clearly enough, and Theorn’s finger traced the path they’d followed to date. After a moment, Marieda picked out where she thought Loucher’s last stand had been, and the magus nodded.
‘But here,’ he said, indicating a particularly large and angry-looking sign. ‘Here, we might go.’
Rosforth looked at the spiky crimson marker, which said very plainly, Do not under any circumstance go here. ‘You sure, son?’
Theorn scowled at that son, even though Rosforth could creditably have said grandson given their respective ages. ‘My master…’ A lurch of a pause, the apprentice remembering he’d left his master behind with the doomed defenders of Newhalt. ‘My master had been working to make the countryside around our walls safe.’ Wasted effort, as it had turned out, but who could have known? ‘Which meant not just driving away threats, but building alliances. Have you known the Sylvaneth? The treefolk?’
Rosforth nodded. Known, fought alongside, not really liked. And you heard plenty of stories of ambitious settlements like Newhalt – logging towns especially – being swallowed up by the vengeful wilds once too many trees had felt the bite of the saw. The Sylvaneth, the true children of Ghyran, were neither friendly nor especially tolerant. Not of any people whose favoured tools were axe and fire. But the damage a colony of humans or duardin might do to the forests was nothing compared to the scions of Chaos or a marauding host of orruks. Strong enemies bred unlikely allies, and the Sylvaneth wouldn’t be welcoming these rat-creatures with open arms.
‘Your master teach you how to parley with them?’ he asked. Because he’d never had to speak to a treeman before. Whenever he’d found himself on the same side of the battlefield as the weird entities, there had been some specialist interpreter or ambassador handling what little coordination had been possible.
‘Enough,’ said Theorn, in a way that told Rosforth that it had been far from enough. The apprentice was willing to try, though, which won him a lot of credit in the major’s book. ‘And Healer Grippe went, once.’
‘I did, that,’ the physician agreed. ‘Not that they had much use for me. Not a tree surgeon, you know?’ A hollow little chuckle from the mask, because Grippe had always found refuge in gallows humour. Rosforth waited the obligatory slow count of one before Slobda let out a bark of laughter.
‘How far?’ Marieda was puzzling over the map.
‘Two days, at today’s pace,’ Theorn guessed. Rosforth was sure it was a guess. And, besides, it didn’t take into account what he was about to say.
‘We need to go on,’ Rosforth said. ‘To Loucher.’
Marieda’s mouth shut like a trap, understanding. Everyone else just stared. Theorn seemed about to accuse him of some vastly elaborate and time-wasting joke. Then he said, ‘The… bodies?’
‘Rosforth,’ Healer Grippe said. ‘Whilst under normal circumstances I’d applaud the measure of mass burial on grounds of hygiene, I fear that ship has sailed.’
Rosforth met Marieda’s gaze. She nodded.
‘Not to bury,’ he said. ‘But there’s more than bodies out there. Shields, mail, swords, helms. Ammunition for Belching Ellenbrand, even. We have a lot of able bodies with us who can be made soldiers. Soldiers enough, with a little instruction.’
He looked from face to face. They were all thinking over what a grim business it was to ask of people. Pick over a battlefield, fending off those rat stragglers who’d not crawled back into their tunnel before it twisted shut. Rob the corpses of the fallen, face to face with a fate that might be theirs soon enough.
‘We stoke the forge,’ Marieda said softly. ‘We plane the wood. We hammer the nail. We cure the leather. We beat the iron into the sword. Every shield, each mace and blade and breastplate, they are our devotion, as much as the march and the battle itself. These people we have with us are artisans and loggers and workers. They will be saving the work of other hands, the time and craft their kin sweated into the metal and the wood. They’ll understand. They won’t be happy, but they’ll understand.’