They made a grim and unhappy imitation of soldiers, the folk of Newhalt Amarine. Hardly surprising, given the armour and the kit they’d been forced into still bore the marks of where it had failed to protect its previous owners. All cleansed, by fire and invocation to Sigmar and a dunk in Grippe’s decontaminating elixirs, but hurriedly, by people keen to be away from the reeking field of carnage. There were flies already, because Ghyran was a place that bred insects out of the least dead matter, life reclaiming its substance to breed new life. Worse, there were rats, and who knew which were the regular rodents and which were spies for the enemy?
There were the actual vermin-folk as well, those abandoned stragglers. They were constantly bolting from within the corpses, where they’d been feasting and festering. Marieda set her troops to driving them across the field, clearing them away. Rosforth, meanwhile, had Theorn and Barachen Sot gathering up anything flammable that could be spared, They couldn’t give over the time a respectful disposal of the dead would require, but the more corpses they could burn, the fewer there would be to feed rats and worse than rats. A grim business, a reminder of mortality as keen as a knife before the eyes. And then, to have all those loggers and haulers and crafters don that riven mail, take up those battered shields. It was as good as telling them you’re next. But if they were to make it even the few days to the Sylvaneth hold, then they’d need to be able to fend off the terrors of Ghyran, which now included incursions of ratmen that could burrow out of the very substance of the world to erupt anywhere.
When it had just been their own settlement, the thought had plainly been we were unlucky. Some unheralded and solitary misfortune had devoured their home, but it was over, the rats left behind. The news, the sight, of what had befallen Loucher’s army, transformed the event into just the first action of a campaign. Rosforth thought of Berswon’s ravings. Rats underneath all of the realms, gnawing upwards, closer every day.
A thin foil of a silver lining: however little the Sylvaneth liked humans, this should at least count as common cause. Hell, Rosforth would have Slobda stand side by side with an orruk if the rats showed their diseased muzzles again.
Going to visit the Sylvaneth meant going where the forest was deepest. Slow travelling, and twilight at noon under the increasingly thick canopy. The ground become a corrugated interlacing of knuckly roots that turned the foot that landed on them, so that Healer Grippe was constantly being summoned for twisted ankles and wrenched knees. Barachen Sot, the cannoneer, had been cursing at the top of his voice for an hour now, as the Ironweld got stuck in every dip, beached on every rise. Marieda had come close to ordering the cannon left behind, save that if they met something truly monstrous in these woods it was the best answer they had.
Rosforth ducked, branches sweeping just inches over his platform’s rail. Slobda shouldered her way between two trees, then got yanked back as her shield stuck between them, turning to jostle and pry until she could get it free. The trees didn’t want them there, that was the uncomfortable sense Rosforth had. The gaps between them always turned out smaller than you thought, the footing always less certain. And the bugs! The air was full of flies and beetles and dragonflies, or else weird hybrid things that looked like three different insects crammed into one shape, each less appealing than the last. They were Sylvaneth things, Theorn said. As the column was accompanied by the various gargoylians that always sought out Sigmar’s folk, so the Sylvaneth’s very presence bred this profusion of half-insect half-spirit things. Which Rosforth wouldn’t have minded if the wretched swarms had just stayed where the Sylvaneth were, but it seemed that the trees for miles around were hosting a veritable insect festival. Creeping, flying and slithering things in profusion, all very determinedly going about their inscrutable insect business. And any one of which might be a prized pet or ally of the creatures they were going to beg sanctuary from, meaning everyone had to watch what they stood on and where they swatted.
‘How will we even know when we’re on their land?’ he called down to Theorn, trying to shoo away a four-winged, long-bodied thing investigating his moustache.
‘I mean, we’re always on their land,’ Theorn said unhelpfully. ‘The way they say it. If it’s living earth, it’s a part of them. Or something.’
‘Taking a more practical perspective, however,’ Healer Grippe put in from behind, ‘I rather think we might want to proceed with an embassy from hereon in, rather than en masse. Otherwise our vegetable friends might, ah, take offence at our offensive, so to speak.’
Rosforth signalled Marieda, and she dropped back down the column to hear him.
‘Who d’you want?’ he asked.
‘I should lead.’ She scowled. The forest was no place for a cavalry action, and she was no woman to be nannying civilians, but… ‘I know, I know. They’re on the point of going to pieces. I’ll stay with them.’ The logging folk of Newhalt Amarine were plainly feeling the trees’ hostility towards them. Dressing them in uniform hadn’t made them soldiers overnight. ‘You’ll go?’
‘I’ll take the mage and Healer Grippe,’ Rosforth decided. ‘And Selias Breight, and a dozen others.’ It felt like a good balance – not too many to anger the Sylvaneth, not so few that they couldn’t manage a fighting withdrawal.
Selias Breight didn’t look delighted at being picked out by name. ‘You got it in for me, major?’ she asked.
Slobda had sat down so Rosforth didn’t have to shout. He leant over the side of the crow’s nest, studying the woman before him. Insubordinate, untrustworthy… competent. ‘Turn your ankle yet, Selias? Trip on a root or get scratched by thorns?’
Selias frowned at him, narrow-eyed. ‘Say what, major?’
‘I see you go through these woods like you’ve got aelven blood, Selias Breight,’ he told her, then lowered his voice as he leant lower. ‘Wildercorps, was it, that you ran from the first time?’
She’d gone very still, the tension of an animal about to bolt. And desertion wasn’t something Sigmar let go. You took the Coin, then you were his.
‘You can’t prove nothing,’ she told him.
‘Don’t need to.’ And his word would be enough, to Marieda.
‘I never,’ she said.
‘Well that’s fine,’ Rosforth agreed. ‘And all I’m asking is you use those skills they never taught you, and lead the way ahead. Because these folks we have here are no strangers to the forest, but they’re not Wildercorps.’
The last thing he did, before they set off, was to have Slobda haul Barachen Sot up by his collar. No kneeling down for the cannon master. Just hoisting in the air until he was reddish nose to nose with an unsympathetic Rosforth.
‘Now you listen to me,’ the fusil-major said. ‘I want the Ironweld set and ready in case we come back out of those woods with a bloody great treeman stomping after us. I want to see you at the centre of a line of Steelhelms with locked shields, you hear me?’
‘Go bawl out the marshal about it.’ Barachen scrabbled ineffectually at Slobda’s pinching fingers. ‘How’m I responsible for that rabble?’ His voice was slurred, his breath rich with spirits and tooth decay.
‘They’ll be a lot quicker to form up around your piece,’ Rosforth said, ‘if they trust you to point it the right way and not drop a match into your powder barrel. And right now, I wouldn’t put money on either. You dry yourself out before we get back, Barachen Sot, or else Slobda’ll have words.’
Barachen abruptly disappeared below the railing, which meant Slobda had yanked him down so she could look him in the face.
‘Words,’ she said, somehow also conveying lunch. Amazing how much fine linguistic shading ogors could impart on certain subjects.
The cannoneer demanded to be put down, swore oaths on Sigmar and called her an unclean brute of Chaos. Slobda put him down by means of just letting go, and the man ended up howling in a heap at her feet.
‘Show an example!’ Rosforth called back as the ogor stomped off, reflecting that Barachen somehow always did, just not the sort of example anyone needed right about now.
He picked six of the column veterans he knew could stand firm, and added half a dozen of the Newhalt folk who were most at home under the trees. Hopefully Marieda would be using the pause to remind the rest of what a Castelite formation looked like. Few left the walls of any of Sigmar’s cities without some basic shield training, at least, but probably most of the refugees were more than rusty. He only hoped that some small sojourn with the Sylvaneth would give them a chance to find the steel beneath it. And that Theorn’s maps had another destination they could head for, because treefolk hospitality was unlikely to be endless. He’d heard there were some cities where humans dwelled in living houses and had woodland spirits as their neighbours, but it wasn’t anything he’d seen for himself, and he wouldn’t put money on it happening here.
Venturing deeper into the Sylvaneth wood quickly became an unsettling experience. The trees grew closer, so that the cannon wouldn’t have made it another twenty yards in, and nor would most of the pack animals or wagons. Vines and ivy webbed between the trunks, leaves so dark they were almost black. Rosforth set out lanterns at the corners of his platform, hanging off the rail, and the others clustered so close at Slobda’s heels they were in danger of being trodden on. The ogor herself had to shoulder forwards half the time, forcing her bulk and her shield through narrow gaps, only to stumble out into great vaulted spaces like green-lit cathedrals, vast enough for two ogors on each other’s shoulders and yet wholly enclosed by an unbroken canopy. Weird, irregular hollows, susurrating with the frenetic flurry of flying things, shadowy as the halls of sunken ruins at the bottom of the sea. Nowhere humans were supposed to be.
‘I find myself less enamoured of this plan,’ Healer Grippe said quietly. ‘I fear some of these trees are dying. Some are dead.’
Rosforth frowned. No botanist he, but now the surgeon called it out, he could see a certain skeletal aspect to some of the branches above. Foliage withered in a premature autumn. A drift of the dry and the fallen that Slobda was kicking through, both leaves and bugs both.
‘A blight, you think?’ he asked.
‘I see no immediate signs of it.’ The surgeon’s mask jabbed at the nearest trunk like an outsize woodpecker. One gloved hand tugged at the bark and pulled a shield-sized plate of it away without any real effort. ‘But dead, yes dead. The wood beneath. Not even rotten, just…’
‘Sigmar’s fists!’ Selias Breight exclaimed from up front. She’d been going a few yards ahead, her eyes keen in the gloom, but now she retreated hurriedly. ‘Stab me, I thought it was a person.’ She laughed weakly. ‘Just a tree. Just another tree.’
Rosforth peered down, narrowing the shutters of one lantern to cast a tight band of light ahead. For a moment, capering figures leapt out in the unsteady radiance, shadows dancing madly. Then it was just trees, small and twisted. Upsetting in a way that his mind couldn’t immediately work out but that his gut understood instantly. Twisted shapes of bark and wood, leafless, dead, standing. Twin trunks growing together, then parting. Legs, body, an outthrust branch like a gnarled arm, the splayed twigs at its end almost a clawed hand. A hollow cavity where the rest of a humanoid form might be. Rosforth cast his light forwards, swept it side to side, seeing more of them, a dozen at least. A nasty, twisted little wood-within-the-wood.
‘I, ah, feel very strongly that we should not be here,’ said Healer Grippe.
‘Those are…’ The apprentice, Theorn, sounded very much the boy and not the man right then, voice high and shaking. ‘Those are Sylvaneth.’
Rosforth swallowed. ‘They’re… trees. Weird trees. Of course they have weird trees here.’
‘They’re Sylvaneth,’ Theorn repeated. ‘The… husks…’
And Rosforth wanted to tell him no, for no other reason than he didn’t want it to be true, but Slobda rumbled, ‘Don’t smell like jus’ trees. Bitta tree, bitta peoples, bitta aelves.’ And then, because things could always get worse. ‘Bitta rats.’
Something vast groaned and shifted within the forest.
The soldiers they’d brought were pressing close, veterans and Newhalters both. Rosforth could feel the fear – that ever-present old battlefield companion – worming up from within him, and he fought it down desperately. If he broke, they’d all break. If they all broke, they’d die. That was the lesson of the Castelite wall. You stood or you died, because the world was full of terrible things that could run faster than you could.
‘Castle up,’ he managed, although his throat felt as dry as dead wood.
At the furthest reach of his light, a huge shape moved. Huge as the trunks around them, towering over Slobda, over him in his roost. He heard the crack and grind of tortured wood. With a sudden lurch it shoved between two great trunks and they toppled as though they had just been balanced precariously on their ends. Where Rosforth would have looked for a clutching networks of roots, there were just stumps, ragged with the work of sharp teeth. Eaten away from below.
The thing that staggered into sight between the trees was a tree itself, a towering forest giant, but one that walked on two trunk legs. High above was a face like a wooden mask, jaw hinged open as though it were screaming. Flailing arms brought down more of the forest around it, what seemed living plants revealed as hollowed out and brittle as it smashed them to the floor. A great tormented groan issued from within it.
The soldiers bunched around Slobda, hunched behind their shields. Rosforth heard Selias let out a yelp and saw her struggling with Healer Grippe.
‘It’s hurt,’ the surgeon got out, for all the creature was beyond any medicine they were trained in. ‘Maybe I can–’
What Grippe might or might not have been able to do became moot even as they spoke. With a thunderous report, a crack ran up the entire front of the walking tree. For a moment the deep groaning rose to a high, agonised shriek and then the thing split open and the rats poured out. Dozens of them, hissing and snickering and brandishing knives. They’d eaten the treeman from the inside, gnawed out its innards with their ceaseless, busy teeth. Abruptly the trees around them were seething with motion, more of the ragged, emaciated rodents scrabbling between the trunks or digging up from the earth.
‘Pull back!’ Rosforth decided. There was nothing to be gained here. ‘Theorn, some light.’ His little lanterns weren’t keeping the dark away.
The boldest of the rats fell under the hammer of Slobda’s mace, and once she’d flattened a few, the rest were far less keen to get close. A few sling-stones and thrown blades whickered out of the dark, striking off shields. One rang a clean note from a recruit’s helm, but that, as they said, was why we wear them.
Theorn stammered out something. The light he conjured flared, guttered, died, and then he practically shouted it into being again, casting a ghostly radiance that sent the rats scurrying back. All this time Slobda had been keeping up a measured backstep, pace regular as a clock so that the others could keep time with it. For a moment it seemed that, between mage-light and mace, the rodents wouldn’t have the heart to impede them.
Then other forms were pushing through the trees, even hacking and striking at the craven creatures if they got in the way. More rats, but these armed and armoured and advancing like soldiers. They were bigger – better fed, said Rosforth’s traitor imagination – and they had backspiked halberds and coats of overlapping plates. All of it rusty and filthy, but that just lent more peril to any wounds they might inflict. Their bared incisors were like curved brown daggers and their eyes were red and mad.
‘Keep going, shields steady.’ Rosforth sighted up and put a shot straight into one of them, punching through that mail and slamming the thing into its neighbours. The rest just flowed round the corpse and skittered into a charge, the lesser rats at their heels filled with borrowed courage.
‘Slobda, brace!’ Rosforth said, taking down another and reloading, his hands so calm and measured they could have belonged to someone else.
‘Sure, sure.’ And just as the vanguard of the rat-halberdiers reached her, anticipating her next backstep, she rammed forwards. Planted her shield so that the force of their charge piled into it, at least one halberd bending and snapping as its point drove into the inches-thick wood. Her mace swept down and crushed the keenest of them, and Selias and a couple of the sharper Steelhelms were striking to either side, keeping the rats pressed in on one another without room to bring their longer weapons into play. They recovered quickly, though. Rosforth, trying to aim straight down past the rail, saw a jagged blade ram past one soldier’s shield rim to open the man’s throat, a savage and precise piece of butchery. The lesser class of vermin were spreading out to either flank now, squealing and yattering and darting in with their short blades. Another soldier went down, stabbed under the armpit. Grippe hauled them back and got to work on the wound.
Slobda bellowed. A halberd thrust at her face and she got her teeth into the blade, crumpling it, twisting it from the shaft. She stamped on a rat unwise enough to try and get under her shield, and her mace rose and fell until the rats were clambering over one another to get out of its shadow. The retreat had slowed, but they were still shuffling backwards.
Rosforth heard Selias shouting. She’d lost her shield somehow, had an axe in one hand and a rat sword in the other. She was turned inwards, though, threatening Theorn. ‘Bring the bloody fire!’ she shouted at him. ‘You got an actual war spell in you, boy? Or is it just pretty bloody lights?’
Rosforth knocked a hole in the skull of the biggest halberdier, hoping it was their chief and that the loss might undercut their discipline. ‘Selias!’ he shouted. ‘Enemy! Fight the enemy!’ But he couldn’t spare any more time than that. He was no inspirational leader like Marieda, or even Loucher. He just did and had to hope that everyone else followed his lead.
Then Selias had Theorn in a headlock, practically dragging him out from Slobda’s shadow to point him at the rats. ‘Fire! Lightning! Magic something at them!’ she shouted.
He’d been shaky enough just making the light, but somehow being half-strangled was a wonderful tonic for spellcasting because he threw his hands forwards and a great wave of… nothing happened. He’d certainly howled out some arcane-sounding words, but there was no lightning, no blue fire. Even the rats had cowered back from his gestures, plainly no strangers to fighting mages. Except…
Except Slobda’s mace was abruptly aflame, searing with a magma-bright fire. All of their blades were. Crackling lines of it even crawled down the barrel of Rosforth’s fusil.
‘Ho yuss!’ Slobda whooped happily and lamped down with a strike that melted the rat-halberdier’s mail before crisping the flesh beneath. ‘Lookit, chief, we’s doin’ cookin’ now!’
The rats eddied back from the magic, and those who didn’t eddy fast enough caught the searing edges of swords and axes that blistered through their armour and their skin. The air was abruptly rank with the smell of burnt hair and charred, rancid meat.
‘Back, double time!’ Rosforth snapped. They were four down, he saw. Bodies left behind because there was no chance to recover them. He felt sick for it, but his duty was to get the living out, not spend more blood over the dead.
The halberdiers were forming up again, and he kept them busy with shot, forcing them into the cover of the trees. For a good twenty yards they had a clear run of it, even as the blazing fire Theorn had lent to their weapons dulled and died.
Then Slobda said thoughtfully, ‘Them’s big lads, chief.’
Bursting between the trunks, now on four legs, now on two, came a pair of hulking monsters close to an ogor’s size. Rats, but bloated out with irregular, knotted muscle, massively broad across the chest, their backs ridges of bony spines. They came at the gallop. Rosforth put a shot into one that staggered but didn’t stall it. He felt Slobda bunch herself and ram to meet their charge.
One – the injured one – slanted off her shield, stumbling aside to meet the blades of the soldiers. The other struck head-on, and for a moment Slobda was teetering. Rosforth’s whole world swung vertiginously. He clung to the rail, and his fusil jumped from its mount and was lost over the side. The monstrous thing had its claws over the top edge of Slobda’s barrier – had its teeth hooked in, bending the ironwork. She took a massive backward step for balance, bounced jarringly off a tree and then shoved back. The giant rat-creature got itself humped half over her shield, pinning it to the ground. Its teeth closed on her shoulder, tearing at the double-thickness mail, sending broken rings flying as it chewed down.
‘Oi!’ Slobda had strong thoughts on just who got to eat whom in the Mortal Realms. In going for the bite, the ogrish rat had bared its neck, and she gave it back its own treatment, gnawing at matted fur, at leathery flesh and iron-hard sinew. For a moment, Rosforth could only stare as the two behemoths just ate at one another in a mindless contest of working teeth. Then Selias Breight was there, her foot on Slobda’s belt as she shoved his fusil back at him.
‘Dropped something, major?’ she got out. He took the gun and she twisted in her high vantage to lodge her axe in the ear of the other huge rat.
Rosforth checked the breech, found the fusil still loaded, and practically touched the barrel to the skull of the monster gnawing on Slobda. The shattering of bone and the discharge of the weapon merged into one ungodly crash of sound, and the thing dropped away.
The other, the one he’d shot on the way in, was down as well, though it had taken another two of the soldiers with it. By now the trees around them were less dense and shadowed; the edge of what had once been the Sylvaneth’s domain, but now belonged only to the dead and the rats.
A host of glinting eyes regarded him from the gloom. The new masters of the land mustering their rodent courage. Slobda bellowed at them, beating her mace against her shield. Under her breath, though, he heard her mutter, ‘Bloody ’ell, chief. There’s enough of ’em, ain’t there?’
‘There surely is,’ Rosforth agreed. But they’d had their fill, it seemed. The corpses they had to chew on, the threat of human magic and ogor might, were enough to keep them in the trees for now.
For now, he reckoned, but not for long. ‘Keep backing up,’ he told his diminished troop. ‘I reckon we’ve got until–’
A moment later he was against the back rail of his platform, thrown there by reflexive shock. The front rail had a splintered hole in it, a hand’s breadth from where he’d been leaning. No sling bullet that. He was crouched low at that rail a moment later, sighting down the fusil, searching, searching…
He saw them just too late. Not one rat but two, in fact. A partnership, in a weird echo of his own. The back one was sighting towards him along the length of a truly remarkable-looking gun, whilst the front one hunkered down behind a shield, propping up that long barrel. Rosforth scrambled to get his fusil directed at them, but then the trees were erupting with rats, some tipping point of numbers lending them courage. His shot ploughed into them, punched clean through one to take a second, but the screen of bodies kept him from killing the rat marksman. Similarly, he had a fraction of a second to see the rodent gunner throw up its own clawed hands in an all-too-familiar annoyance as its own allies spoiled its aim.
Didn’t know they had those. And no time to consider the implications, but if there were rats with guns in the realms then the realms had just become a markedly less pleasant place.
‘Run, chief?’ Selias called up.
‘Keep the mage safe!’ he told her. He knew Grippe had some of the fleetest legs Sigmar had ever seen, but Theorn looked the type to run out of puff. ‘And run!’
They pelted through the steadily sparser forest, Grippe in the lead and the half a dozen soldiers right on their heels. Selias had Theorn by the collar, hauling him along so precipitately that the man looked like a kite she was flying. Slobda pounded along at the back, shield slung behind her. Stones and thrown blades rattled and bounced off it, and once something more solid ploughed deep into the wood. A parting gift from Rosforth’s opposite number.
Then the column was ahead of them, and they’d kept their battle order just as when the ambassadors had left them. He heard Marieda’s high voice calling to lock shields. Right in the centre of the line was Barachen’s Ironweld, its shields folded out, and Fusiliers on either side with their own lesser guns levelled. Right at the centre. Right where they were all heading.
At the front, Healer Grippe made an astonishing leap, their stick-thin frame vaulting like a grasshopper to disappear over the Ironweld’s pavise. The soldiers on their heels, weighed down with their own gear, couldn’t make the same feat of athletics, but by then the Fusiliers had seen what was about to happen, and the men beside the cannon managed to pull back, making a brief doorway they could pile through.
Selias Breight, impromptu wizard-wrangler, had fallen behind, and the shield wall was already closing up. With an oath offensive to the dignity of Sigmar she threw herself and Theorn down at the very base of the shields, hands pressed to her ears and face screwed up in anticipation.
Which left only Slobda and Rosforth, the largest targets on the field.
‘Slobda!’ yelled Rosforth, knowing he wasn’t going to enjoy it. ‘Fall flat!’
‘Bloody ’ell,’ the ogor complained, and did so, just going straight over on her face. Rosforth was catapulted out of his crow’s nest, rolling over and over. He came to rest on his back, clutching at the ground with both hands to try and stop himself.
She’d hurled herself – and him – left, and it should have been clear of the Ironweld’s blast. But Barachen hadn’t anchored the wheels properly again. When the gun spoke – in unison with the squad of Fusiliers – the cannon jumped and skewed, scattering a hail of shot across the face of the rat advance, and across Rosforth and Slobda as well. He was flat on the ground, beneath the gun’s notice, but Slobda was a great hill of flesh right behind him. Trying to press her bulk as flat as possible, but that was never going to be very flat.
Rosforth saw Slobda’s body quiver with the impact. Beyond her, the rushing tide of rats exploded into ribbons of flesh as Barachen’s grapeshot charge tore through them. The combined force of all that lead brought the rats to a standstill, and before they could regain their wits the Fusiliers had spoken again, another punishing hail of shot tearing through the milling rodents.
That was enough for them, for now. They fled back into the shadow of the trees.
Panting, half-deafened, Rosforth clawed his way over to Slobda.