‘And… three,’ said Healer Grippe, dropping the flattened disc of lead into the tin bowl. ‘Excellent stoicism there, Slobda. Always my best patient. Let me stitch now.’ They brought out the sort of needle that a leatherworker would only use for the most recalcitrant pieces, wide and curved like the talon of a great hawk.
Ogor hide was thick, their flesh and bones dense, and cushioned with a layer of glutinous fat all over. The grapeshot pellets had raked into the most prominent part of her anatomy, as she lay on her front, meaning Grippe had been delicately removing them from her right buttock.
Rosforth, sitting discreetly by her head, looked at her. Her face was clenched, though not particularly in pain. Even in proportion to their size, ogors could endure privations that would cripple a human. Everything except hunger, and he’d been passing her pieces of bread, cheese and dried jerky throughout the procedure. Now he tugged at her ear, the sort of yank that would be aggressive bullying to a human, but to her was a friendly greeting. ‘All right?’
She rumbled angrily as Grippe’s busy needle passed back and forth. ‘Gotta dissy-plin problem, chief.’
‘We’ll talk it out.’
One yellow eye swivelled to regard him. ‘Not you, chief. You got respect.’ Her voice was a low purr. Ogors often sounded almost pleasant when they were really, really angry. Most of the time the bellowing and roaring was good humour in them.
Rosforth opened his mouth to say something wise and restraining, but the surgeon’s bright voice intervened with, ‘And done! Though I wouldn’t mo–’
Slobda jumped to her feet and hauled her trousers up grimly. Her belly-plate, that prized piece of protection, cinched round them even as Rosforth was asking her to sit back down.
She’d lain there, perfectly still, as the surgeon worked. For a human that would be time to calm down from anything. Ogor fire didn’t work like that. Their hunters could patiently track a quarry all day before exploding into berserk fury when it was within their reach. Rosforth had been so relieved that her wounds amounted to only a handful of grapeshot that he’d missed the signs. Now he saw she’d been husbanding her grudges as carefully as any duardin.
‘Be right back, chief. Gonna see a man about a gun,’ she said, and ducked straight out of the war surgeon’s tent into the main camp.
‘Slobda, wait!’ Rosforth called. His crow’s nest and its stanchion lay along one side of the tent. She hadn’t taken him with her. Which might look like absent-mindedness but meant Slobda was about to do something she knew he would tell her not to.
‘Damn it,’ he hissed. ‘Grippe, get me out there, double time.’
The surgeon looked from him to their delicate hands, indicating that they dealt with bodies in situ, they didn’t actually carry them about. Outside he heard Slobda holler out a name, amidst a chorus of human alarm.
‘Oi, Sot!’
‘Ah,’ said Grippe. ‘Well.’ They did their best. Bent right down and gave Rosforth some little support, but it was still more dragging than carrying. There were gawpers aplenty when they were outside, though, and Rosforth yelled at a couple until they had him propped between them, an arm over each of their shoulders and his stumps suspended in air.
‘Slobda,’ he called at the ogor’s retreating back. ‘Wait for me!’ Because there was a clash of cultures incoming and he needed to mediate.
She was heading for the little forge camp where Belching Ellenbrand was in pieces, being serviced by the gunner’s mates. Curious gargoylians scattered from under her boots as Slobda bore down on them, kicking through fires and trampling bedrolls.
‘Sot!’ she bawled. ‘You shot me arse!’
The gunner himself put in an appearance. Barachen Sot was not a small man. Heavyset, red-faced, balding, more than ready to slap his assistants about when the mood was on him. He’d shared an army with Slobda for over a year and, like most humans did, had made certain assumptions. Because Slobda, like many ogors with regular mealtimes, was jolly. Because she had put on a handful of human mannerisms, like someone might put on an amusing hat, that they could take off just as easily. Rosforth liked Slobda. She was, no lie, his closest friend in all the world. I can always count on her support had been his joke, at his own expense, at the role that fate and disability had fit him for, but it was true, too. And the heart of that friendship was knowing that she was not just a big human with a big appetite. She was a child of a different god entirely.
‘Shame it weren’t your face, there’d be no ruining that!’ Barachen shouted at her. ‘Your own fault for bein’ such a big target. Be grateful I knocked some chunks out of you. World’s a better place with less of you in it!’
Slobda stopped at the words. Something changed in her. Rosforth, very alive to all that writ-large body language, saw it clearly. She’d been about to curse Barachen out and shove him around, just remind him who was bigger and which of them needed to watch their aim. Slobda didn’t entirely understand battlefield discipline, lines and order, but she’d seized on enough of it to be a terrifying drill sergeant. And that would have been all except, rather than just knuckling under, Barachen was drunk enough to try and shout her down. Worse, he’d said that.
Slobda was abruptly running, then leaping, clearing a fire full of startled Fusiliers with a single bound to come down like thunder right in front of Barachen. She grabbed the gunner with both hands and lifted him high in the air, as easily as a parent with a baby.
‘You say that again, Sot!’ she growled into his face.
‘Yer face–’
‘Not that.’ She was low and quiet now, her dangerous voice. The whole camp was silent, save for Marieda distantly calling for order. The nearby Fusiliers were scrabbling for their pieces, frantically fumbling to load them, seeing the ogor gone mad.
‘Stand down!’ Rosforth shouted, swinging between his bearers like a sack of meat. ‘Everyone! Slobda!’ He felt the indignity of it: the man they all looked up to, when he was in his proper place, being bundled through the camp like a commodity.
It was the comment about her size. The exact wrong thing to say. Not in suggesting she was big. In suggesting she should be smaller. Among ogors, size was virtue in and of itself. There was a whole mess of cultural associations Sot had carved through with one ill-chosen comment. World’s a better place with less of you in it. A mean comment to a human, a killing insult to an ogor.
‘You been picklin’ yerself ever’day since I knew yer,’ Slobda said. ‘Yer ready to eat.’ Her maw gaped open, and further open, all but dislocating like a snake’s, and suddenly even Barachen Sot was going to fit between those massive grinding teeth.
The gunner’s belligerence ran down his leg and away. He began shrieking, prying at a grip he couldn’t possibly shift.
Rosforth’s bearers had him at the scene by then, but he urged them closer still. Even as Barachen kicked, a boot bouncing unheeded from Slobda’s chin, Rosforth reached up and hooked himself around one huge arm. Not that his meagre weight would stop her, but just for his presence. Just him, just Rosforth, the human she knew best, his scent in her nose, his hands clutching at her sleeve.
One of her eyes rolled down to look at him. Murder, in that eye. Murder and hunger, the beast that was Slobda beneath that veneer of human manners. The ogor in its natural environment.
He was very aware that the Fusiliers had their guns charged and levelled now. That everyone in the camp was staring. He felt it, the very human horror of it. As though Slobda had torn her face away and revealed some dreadful mark of Chaos beneath the features they’d all thought they knew.
He just held her gaze. No words, because when she was this angry, mere human words wouldn’t help. Just touch, just him being there.
She looked back at Barachen. He’d gone very still, face turned from beery red to chalky pale. Her jaw, her jowls, quivered, as though they were hungry monsters on their own account, barely under her direction.
With infinite care she set the gunner down on his feet. She chuckled. In the quiet of the camp it seemed the loudest sound in the world.
‘Had ya goin’,’ she said.
Barachen gaped up at her. The firelight showed the spreading stain across his breeches. A couple of the Fusiliers snickered and the gunner’s mates smirked. A ripple of amusement ran through the camp. All a joke. Oh she really had old Barachen there, the drunken fool!
Slobda tucked Rosforth into the crook of one arm. He could feel her trembling. Only he knew, or perhaps Healer Grippe would guess, having known the ogor from way back. She’d have devoured the gunner and turned on the rest of the camp. Because she was hurt, and because she was insulted. Because respect was something ogors demanded, and enforced without limit, amongst themselves and in any other company. But show humans a big, slow, jovial creature, happy to devote her strength to just standing in line and carrying someone around, and they forgot.
‘Sot,’ Rosforth said. ‘Next time your gun’s in the line, it had better be anchored and steady. And you’d better be sober.’ Honestly the man looked like he might never touch the bottle again. ‘And as for you lads,’ he told the Fusiliers, who were trying to pretend they hadn’t been about to let Slobda have a salvo in the back, ‘if those pieces are ready then I assume you’ve got some target practice to be about.’
Through his back, he could feel the quivers of anger through Slobda’s bulk, slowing gradually. Looking up, he was surprised to see an expression that might, on a human, have been embarrassment. Another thing she’d learned that wasn’t native to an ogor.
Healer Grippe walked up alongside, fastidiously cleaning their hands. ‘For what it’s worth,’ they said, ‘there has been no appreciable diminishment of the, ah, scale of the affected region.’
Slobda took a moment to translate that, then let out a deep laugh. ‘Take more’n ’is li’l pop gun,’ she said. There was still an edge to her, a tension in her arms. A memory of how close she’d come.
The next day saw them climbing, hauling their wagons and the cannon up slopes thrusting clear of the trees. Despite having had three balls of grapeshot removed from her, Slobda trudged on as indefatigably as ever. Pain was a dull and distant thing to ogors. Rosforth envied her that.
Denied any succour from the Sylvaneth, they’d mostly been moving away, putting distance between their column and the rats. Plenty of sentries and stragglers claimed the creatures were keeping an eye on them, skulking through the shadows at their back, but their progress had been enough that no large force of the creatures had caught them. Rosforth thought about that: the creatures erupting into the world from below, beyond, elsewhere. Hopefully they were spending their time securing their beachheads in Ghyran, coping with the realm’s challenges, rather than chasing random groups of fugitive humans.
He thought of those mad-eyed chittering rodents and couldn’t quite convince himself of it.
From his high elevation, he was the first to see the true scale of the problem. Turning to look back down the length of the straggling column, back down the gradient of the land as it fell away into the trees, his breath caught in his chest.
‘Marshal,’ he got out. ‘You’ll want to see this. Call a halt when we’re at the crest.’
Marieda frowned up at him, a woman who could really do with no more bad news right now. The world wasn’t done with them, though, and never would be. There was no point in Sigmar’s teachings where you just got to sit back and enjoy the fruits of your hard work. Another threat, another crusade, another march, another struggle. We build our walls, but they’re sand and the world is the tide. We must forever bolster them or be washed away.
They could see where the Sylvaneth wood had been, from this vantage. A spreading stain of ashen leaves and dead, bare branches as the stricken trees died off. Beyond it, just in view, they could see the distant field where Loucher’s force had met its end, the sun glinting greenly off the stagnant pond that had drowned the rats’ ingress. And perhaps that sunken pockmark in the landscape was even Newhalt Amarine, off in the distance. Hard to tell, though, because there were more. A dozen more at least. Groves of fallen forest giants whose roots must have been chewed to matchwood by busy rodent teeth. Suppurating, fallen depressions in the land, like sores on a plague victim. Rosforth’s keen eyes could pick out seething movement in some, the rat-folk mustering in such numbers that distance couldn’t hide them. Elsewhere, he could just make out the start of some manner of construction, accompanied by great plumes of foul greenish smoke. Rat industry, as though they were mocking the forges and workshops of human hands.
Except that was to miscast the rats, just as most people miscast Slobda. She was no vacant-minded brute, and the rats were not just a mindless devouring horde. He remembered that gun, the rat-sniper’s patient aim over the shield of its fellow. The shrieking, ill-clad host of the rat vanguard were just vermin’s vermin, chaff to soak up shot and effort. The skaven had more and worse, cunning and artifice to spare.
The Mortal Realms were not short of threats: tireless undead legions, frothing fanatics of the Ruinous Powers, hosts of orruks bent on destroying everything anyone had ever built. Somehow none of it clenched his stomach quite as much as this eruption of rat-creatures. Some combination of savagery and stealth and smarts that between them constituted a truly existential threat: to Sigmar’s faithful, to all creatures, to the realms themselves.
‘We need,’ he said, ‘somewhere to go. Walls to get behind. Something.’
‘We do,’ Marieda agreed. ‘Our map-mage has some thoughts, though I don’t like them. But then there’s precious little to like.’
They set to marching again, putting the ridge they’d ascended between them and any sight of the rats. The countryside beyond was not yet scarred by their intrusions, but Rosforth had a strong sense that was only a temporary state of affairs.
‘Basically,’ said Theorn, ‘there is somewhere. In fact…’ He tried to point out the heading he meant. The countryside ahead began as high, scrubby altiplano – drier, patchy, with stands of trees where there was water and grassland between them. Herds of hulking horned beasts drifted across the clear land like the shadows of clouds, and above them raptor-like birds that might have been the size of a hawk or a griffin. Huge reddish spires jutted like stone fingers out of the landscape, the nests of martial insects that would furiously defend their territory. Beyond the altiplano the land fell again, shadowy and miasmal, a forest or swamp or some combination of the two. That, needless to say, was the direction the apprentice’s maps were leading them in.
‘On that heading,’ Theorn said, ‘according to my master’s notes, there is a gate.’
‘A realmgate?’ Rosforth queried. Familiar to any servant of Sigmar who’d served as long as he had. Familiar, and not to be trusted if you could help it. Yes, the swiftest way to pass between realms, or across grand distances within them, but you heard far too many stories of expeditions, whole armies, going astray, lost to the fickle fluctuations of magic.
‘An old one, linked reliably to another within easy march of Brightspear, he said,’ Theorn confirmed. Reliably meaning, presumably, within the wild variance of such things.
‘That’s… Aqshy,’ Marieda recalled. ‘We’ll need to husband our water. I’ll have Healer Grippe tear up all our spare cloth for headscarves too.’
‘This gate is open?’ Rosforth asked. ‘It can’t be.’ If there had been a regular path to somewhere like Brightspear then both Loucher and Newhalt Amarine would have had aid to call on.
‘Not in living memory, but I have my master’s notes,’ Theorn said. ‘I can open it, I think. And even if not, there’s a Freeguild company holding it, to stop any enemy from using it to get close to the city. Or there was. You know how hard it is to get word in Ghyran.’
If the rats haven’t already boiled up from the earth and taken it. Rosforth kept the thought to himself.
‘There’s nowhere else?’
‘Not anywhere close,’ Theorn confirmed.
‘We’re not equipped for a long march,’ Marieda said. ‘We’re already having to repair the wagons, and our provisions…’ In Ghyran, foraging was always an option, but it would slow them. ‘We can resupply and reinforce with the Freeguild, consider our options then.’
Rosforth stared out across the dry landscape, the uneven fringe beyond. Thought about magic and realmgates and all the stories. A bad feeling, a bad place. Darkness and old magic, and the rats with their industrious expansion. Below him, Slobda rumbled, sensing his disquiet, unable to dispel it.