Rosforth saw the strategy then. Not just the undermining and the attack from below, but that the sniper’s little stings from night to night had kept all eyes focused outwards. Marieda had set out her walls, but the rats were already inside the house.
In those first moments of the assault, all was confusion. The ragged first wave of vermin was funnelling desperately out of the chokepoints of their breached tunnels, biting, clawing, hacking at anyone close to them. Fires and braziers were kicked over. Mules were attacked, rats just latching onto any tethered beast that couldn’t flee them, dragging the shrieking, bellowing animals down in a welter of blood. Rosforth heard screams and cries, the shrilling of the rats, the occasional crack of a fusil going off.
He was shouting, but his voice wasn’t strong enough to pierce the chaos. He could see the camp falling to pieces before his eyes.
Then Marieda rode through. Already in the saddle, half-armoured, her helm askew on her head. Her warhorse trampled the rats down and her voice rang high and clear, calling on her people to form up, to hold to their neighbours. One shield to another, two to the next pair, each four to another four. Hammering order from chaos with nothing but the force of her voice, hacking down at the rats when they threatened her with spears and halberds. Rosforth tapped Slobda and the ogor made for the marshal, gathering up anyone in the way so that there was a whole swirling mess of half-dressed soldiers, civilians and children in her shadow.
A flurry of rats surged out between them and Marieda, no strategic attempt to divide them so much as the pressure of rodent bodies forcing them to expand wherever there was space. For a moment Rosforth felt the nerve of his pack of followers tremble: here beneath the corpselight of the mushrooms, in the wilds of Ghyran, facing this hideous host. He loosed his fusil into the mass of hairy bodies, no aim or finesse needed, and Slobda’s mace fell like divine judgement, crushing anything under it. Forward, forward! They waded in, the tide of rats surfing about Slobda’s knees, scratching at her armour, trying to scale her flanks with claws and teeth. The panicking people at her back had two choices: stay at her heels for the safety her bulk provided, or hold back and let her go. They chose the first, as Rosforth had dearly hoped they would. Committed, they found their fighting nerve again, hacking and stabbing at the close-pressed rats until the knot of vermin disintegrated, fleeing in every direction.
They fetched up next to Marieda, who had three sides of a Castelite square formed from anyone nearby who could lay hand to shield. There was already a huddle of the sick, the young, the old in the middle. The priorities of salvage. Rosforth’s own non-combatants ran to join them and his fighters made the fourth side.
The Fusiliers had been on the waking shift, thank Sigmar. He heard the massed roar of their guns, all at once, and then they came in sight between the mess of burning and collapsed tents. They had their own tail of hangers-on and loose Steelhelms, and in their midst Barachen Sot and his mates were wheeling Belching Ellenbrand – only part assembled and a long way from being ready to fire. Rosforth could only hope that they’d recovered all the pieces because they’d be needing that gun before long.
‘Oi!’ Slobda roared. ‘They’s stealin’!’ Because Marieda’s priority had been lives but Slobda’s was her belly, so she’d thought to look for the supplies. Sure enough the rats had the same thought. They were all over the cache, smashing open barrels and boxes and slitting sacks. Feeding or just fouling, Rosforth couldn’t know.
‘We need that,’ he decided.
‘We bloody do!’ Slobda agreed.
She didn’t need any encouragement to become the great blunt point of the charge to recover what was left of the supplies. When she hit the rats she was running full tilt, so that Rosforth could only cling to the rail to stop being jolted out of his seat entirely. He saw cartwheeling rat forms spin wildly past, silhouetted against the fungal glow. Slobda laid about her, left and right, and then just reached down and grabbed a rat with a sack of flour in its arms and stuffed both at one into her maw, biting down in an explosion of red and white.
That did for the rest of the skaven’s nerve and they fled, letting the Steelhelms surge forth to recover whatever was left intact. A pitiful stock, Rosforth saw grimly. He hoped Slobda was happy with rat-meat for the foreseeable future.
‘You ’ear bells?’ Slobda asked suddenly. ‘Like, jangly bells?’
She had sharp ears. He hadn’t registered the sound, past all of the noise of the fight. Now he cast about, trying to focus past the squealing and the screaming and the clash of steel. Distant bells, discordant metal sounds from deep within the mushroom forest. The main force, surely, hearing the far-off sounds of combat and hurrying to close the trap.
‘Marshal!’ he shouted, as they fell back with their salvaged supplies. ‘We need to move!’
There were plenty who hadn’t managed to get to the square. They were still filtering in, in ones and twos. Elsewhere in the camp there would be little holdouts, the valiant and determined, shield to shield, awaiting relief. A brutal calculation then: how long can we give them?
He saw Healer Grippe down there, already stitching in the midst of the press of civilians. A flash of blazing weapons from the far side of the square showed where Theorn was plying his art. No sign of Selias Breight, but the chance of spotting her in all of this was minimal.
Marieda had a trumpet sounded, the assembly call everyone knew and dreaded from drill squares. ‘Major,’ she told Rosforth, ‘bring our strays to us, as many as you can. We’re moving off in square, you can catch us up.’ As could the rats, with ease.
Even as she said it, there was a sudden flash of movement about the hooves of her steed. Rats from nowhere, rats from the shadows, swathed in dark cloth, the blades of their knives blacked. The trumpeter’s blast died as they fell on him and cut his throat. One scrambled up the barding of Marieda’s mount, driving a blade into her leg. She let out a bark of pain and hacked at the creature, but it dodged up behind her, gripping her backplate with both hands as its long tail lifted a dagger to stab.
Rosforth’s shot hurled the creature away into the dark, but there were more of them, carving at the flanks of the horse. The beast reared up, brought its ironshod hooves down on one diminutive killer. Another dragged a hooked blade down the length of its belly and the shrieking animal collapsed, Marieda beneath it.
Then Selias and her makeshift rangers were there, even as the shield wall pushed forwards. There was a brief, brutal frenzy of close work around Slobda’s ankles, too swift and intermingled for her to apply herself to, and then the skaven killers were dead or fled, their work at least half-done.
‘Marshal!’ Rosforth called.
‘She lives,’ came Healer Grippe’s voice. ‘Slobda, if you’d lift…’
The ogor bent down and shifted the dead weight of the horse. Marieda gave out a brief, ugly sound, forced out of her by the sudden movement.
‘Major,’ she got out between clenched teeth, face screwed up in pain. ‘You have your orders.’ It wasn’t as though Grippe needed Slobda’s big hands to hold pressure on a tourniquet.
Three times they waded out into the camp, each time seeing it more gnawed away, tents fallen, the bodies of the luckless strewn and chewed or half-dragged down into the earth. He called out to rally any who could hear, but it was Slobda’s bellowing that carved through the confusion. Men and women came running, dodging the blades of the rats. Some didn’t make it, but each time the pair of them braved the disintegrating camp, they came back with a ragged trail of survivors to add to the shield wall and its contents. Men and women, children even, but precious few supplies, no wagons, a single pack beast. The mules were all slaughtered, but the hard shell of the Andronicus beetle had held off the teeth and blades of the rats somehow. The beast was in a frenzy, its spiked head ramming and cleaving the air, its carapace scarred and chipped all over. Slobda grabbed it by the horns and wrestled with it until it calmed, and then hauled it along on its lead.
That was their last expedition. And there would be people still out there, Rosforth knew. Hiding, fighting, unable to answer Slobda’s booming call. But the bells of the main rat force were loud now, and a shrill susurrus of chittering and squealing was beginning to eclipse all other sounds, rising from the phantom light of the mushroom forest.
As they were just closing with the retreating square, the shot came. Slobda had lurched forward, stumbling over the smashed detritus of a wagon. Rosforth felt a brief line of pain across his shoulder, rather than a killing impact in his back. His fusil fell from suddenly numb hands, hanging in its pivot.
His eyes tracked across the devastation they were leaving behind, then up; of course up. There it was, the rat with the long gun. It had a new friend now, and he saw it swatting and biting at its companion as the new recruit visibly fumbled the reload, juggling and dropping its ramrod. Rosforth clutched for his fusil, swivelled it up to his shoulder, sighting, but the rat-sniper was gone, vanished away into the confusion. Leaving only one thing in its wake: a promise that this is not over.
Not the first time. There had been an orruk with a crossbow that had made one battle a constant game of hide and seek. There had been a Chaos-worshipping pleasure cultist riding some mad two-legged anteater-lizard thing, and she’d put an arrow into Rosforth and two into Slobda before he’d learned to lead her with his aim. There had been… He’d never admit this to anyone else, but there had been a curious purity to those contests. A battle of skill, for all that he and his enemy shared no other shred of commonality.
He wondered what it was like to be that rat. To come out of some festering brood of siblings into a blindly gnawing world more than happy to use its own weak and hapless as expendable fodder to throw at the blades of their enemies. To have a skill, and have that skill recognised. The gift of a well-made gun. The life of the marksman, that Rosforth had found such a curious solace in.
But these were human thoughts, and in truth he found he couldn’t think up some comforting fiction, about noble adversaries and kindred spirits. Easier to do that when the rat was dead.
Or when I am.
Enough of the rat vanguard remained behind to loot the camp that the column was able to get almost clear of them. Almost. There were always loose, ragged bands of hungry rodents dogging their steps, appearing from shadows, loosing slingshots, throwing blades and even just stones. They were in the final leg of their flight for the realmgate, Rosforth understood. There would be no stopping from here, no rest. Eat on the march, carry the children when they couldn’t keep up. The battered back of the Andronicus beetle had become Healer Grippe’s surgery, where the physician did their best to stitch and clean the many wounds the night had dealt them. The wounded who couldn’t walk were carried or dragged by travois. And every fresh casualty the rats were able to inflict would slow them all down that much more. Until someone needed to make every commander’s most bitter decision. Leave them behind?
Rosforth would have been one of those to be left behind, once. Without Slobda he still might be. And right now, if that decision had to be made, it might even be him making it. Because Marieda lived, but might yet lose her hold on life. She was borne in a makeshift stretcher between two stout Steelhelms, feverish, shaking, clinging on. Taken out not by the broken leg where her horse had come down on her, but the blade wound in the other, because of course a rat killer would have access to some fierce poisons.
Wake up, Rosforth prayed silently. There are going to be orders I can’t give. He wasn’t the hard leader Marieda was. He’d never wanted that responsibility.
Half the time he spent at the back, shooting rats wherever their blunt heads presented themselves as targets. He organised rotating shifts for rearguard. He did what he could with the supplies people had salvaged, arguing with those who just wanted to hold onto what they’d grabbed. And it was meagre fare. Empty bellies tonight, and by the night after… Well, by then it was anyone’s guess whether fatigue or hunger would be the final weight to grind the march to a halt. Slobda had taken one of the dead mules for the road, slung over her shoulder like a bloody kitbag, but by noon she was down to the hooves.
Selias Breight had asked if Slobda could carry some of the children on her shoulders. Meaning to be helpful. Slapping the ogor on the flank. And Rosforth had said that, no, he didn’t think that was a good idea, really. It would be entirely safe right now, with that mule packing out her belly. But if their straitened circumstances persisted, he really didn’t want the column’s kids thinking that it was safe.
By mid-morning, the main rat force was plainly visible behind them. Not hurrying, more than happy to run their human prey to exhaustion before braving shot and shield. They were not the keenest for open confrontation, Rosforth understood. Tunnelling and stealth were their style. They’d happily take a battered, worn-down enemy over some glorious triumph. Or that was how he read their almost leisurely pursuit. From his high perch he could see them constantly splitting and re-forming as the great mass of them processed out of the mushrooms, scavenging bands of rats heading left and right across the countryside and stripping it bare. The land they left behind them looked churned and filthy, and dead.
And he didn’t like the look of what else that army had with it, looming amidst the host of scurrying rats. Things the size of ogors, lumbering and treading on their lesser kin. And a larger thing. Vast, malformed, so that his eyes couldn’t even piece its shape together in any way that made sense.
Ahead was more forest and rock. Theorn had been intending to go via the trees, vast giants a hundred feet tall, under whose canopy the actual ground looked mostly clear of undergrowth and obstruction. For the column they had been, with wagons and time, that was the sensible path. Right now, with rats at their heels and carrying everything they had on their backs, Rosforth had a different plan. To their left the land was broken, rocky. Another ridge of high ground, red-brown rocks that looked as though they had been soaked with blood when the realms were young. Some great catastrophe had riven the whole formation, breaking a canyon into it that, Theorn’s maps claimed, would also take them to the gate.
If there’s even a gate. If it can even be conjured open. If it goes anywhere we want to be. But right now those were problems for tomorrow’s Rosforth. Today’s man had only the rats.
‘How sure are you of these damn maps?’ he demanded of the apprentice.
‘It’s not a path my master ever trod,’ Theorn told him. The mage had a bandage about his head, his hair crusted with dry blood. A flung blade had come close to robbing them of their navigator and sorcerer both. His voice was weak and shaking. Slobda sighed, bent down and lifted him up so Rosforth could hear him say, ‘But I… I think… I think yes.’
‘If it’s a dead end, then we’re dead too,’ Rosforth said. ‘But if we go into the trees they’ll catch us, and all that open ground becomes our enemy.’ The rats could outpace them, surround them. A Castelite square would hold for a little while, but not forever. Not with the sheer volume of rats in the army at their back. ‘The canyon, perhaps we can hold. For a little.’
‘Until what?’ Theorn asked. Aghast, but then he was young. He’d not seen how these things went. Or perhaps he hadn’t learned the lesson taught by the defenders of Newhalt Amarine.
‘Get them to the gate,’ Rosforth told him. ‘We’ll do the rest. We’ll do what’s needed.’
Plenty of complaints, when they changed heading. Oh, the rocks, the bad footing, uphill. Don’t we have enough troubles? But the wiser heads, the veterans, kept silent. Understood what the plan must be. Rosforth caught the eye of Barachen Sot as the man cuffed and shouted his gun crew over the rough going. Cold sober now, and plainly regretting it. He knew. Selias knew. Grippe would know. Even the rats knew, because suddenly their pursuit wasn’t as leisurely as it had been.
‘It’s been a good run,’ Rosforth said. ‘Rat for dinner, Slobda?’
‘Feh,’ she complained. ‘Promise me it’s orruk next time, chief. Or even those ghoul lads. Like well-cured jerky, they were.’
‘Next time,’ Rosforth agreed hollowly, ‘you get to choose the menu.’