By the time the rocks of the canyon were looming either side, Rosforth had given what orders he had and the keenest of the rats were snapping at his heels. Ahead, Barachen Sot and his crew were frantically shoving the Ironweld cannon into position at what would be the centre of the Castelite line. The wounded, the non-combatants, were still being hurried past the bastion of the great gun, and Steelhelms were finding their places, one by one, squad by squad, at the cries of their sergeants-at-arms. There were so few whole squads, and no chance on the desperate retreat to merge or reorder them. Rosforth just had to hope they could hammer things into some sort of order.
For that, he’d have to give them time.
He’d picked his squads. The most complete, the most rested. Those with a vengeful look in their eye. Not just Loucher’s rejects but the toughest of the Newhalt folk, who wanted blood paid back for the home they’d lost.
‘Castle up!’ he shouted, and when his voice was lost to the air, Slobda roared out the words as she turned on her heel. The absolute most enthusiastic rat-warrior in the world ended up right under her stomping foot and her mace took one that was trying for second place and launched it far over the heads of its comrades.
Slobda faced the onrushing vanguard of the rats – all that tattered rabble – and bellowed at them. The sheer force of sound and spittle had them skittering to a halt, backing into one another. Rosforth watched, and when he saw a larger rat shrieking and yattering and striking out at its rabble of troops to get them moving, he put a fatal hole in it. Then reloaded and did exactly the same to one holding up a triangular banner of stretched skin.
The sheer defiance – and the way any order to advance was cut-off mid-squeak – held the entire vanguard for a handful of seconds, in which time Rosforth’s picked Steelhelms had formed up either side of Slobda, linking their shields and bracing. Then the rodent tide turned and the first wave of the rats was upon them.
It was busy work. The rats came not so much at a charge as a mad scrabble, pouring their numbers out against the Steelhelm shields. Desperate, frenzied, laying about them with their short hacking swords, or jabbing with crooked, filth-tipped spears. They broke against the shields, packing so tight they could barely swing a weapon as the swords and axes descended on them. At the centre, Slobda was huffing out something rhythmic as she smashed her mace left and right through the throng. Rosforth caught ‘Wun rat, too rat, tree rat, more rat!’ as she sent the broken bodies cartwheeling left and right, causing ripples of casualties further out into the host as their own dead scythed through them.
And Rosforth killed their masters. Every rat who sought to raise itself up. Every one of them whose business it was to have other rats shed blood in their place. He fired and reloaded, fired and reloaded, and the appalling sound of it all, the shrilling and the human cries and the meaty crunch of the mace, it all faded away. His calm place, almost. Up there on his roost and above it all. It was what the world had given back to him, after it took his legs.
He saw the next wave coming in. A wedge of dark armour and halberds shoving through the lesser vermin, cutting down those too slow or wounded to get out of the way. Not for the first time he considered how truly wretched it would be, to be born under the shadow of whatever rat-gods these creatures followed. Sigmar drove his people hard, it was true, but Rosforth believed that at least the God-King mourned those who fell in his service, and valued their sweat and blood. Could the rats say the same of their rodent deity? Or was its answer to every problem simply more rats?
‘Backstep, keep order, hold the line,’ he shouted, and a moment later Slobda followed with her far louder echo. She made the time, one plodding step after another, and the wall bowed, buckled, just about held firm. Rats clawed and chewed and hacked at every little gap that showed between the shields, and he saw more than a handful of those shields left on the ground with their owners, overrun by the rodent host. There was no recovering the fallen. They were just names to be added to the soldiers’ prayers, to be written on the rolls of those who had given their all in Sigmar’s cause. To be remembered by Sigmar, Rosforth hoped. Fervently hoped, as someone whose name might be on those rolls before nightfall. Or what is it all for, if nobody remembers?
He glanced back – he had the liberty to do so, given it wasn’t his feet making time for the retreat. The rest of the force had formed their own wall across the canyon with the cannon at the centre. Now would come the tricky part.
The veterans had practised this sort of manoeuvre before, the Newhalt folk not so much. A shield was an awkward thing to dance with, as Rosforth’s first drill instructor had said. He just had to hope Barachen’s line was ready for them.
From Rosforth’s vantage, the gunner was just visible past the Ironweld’s shields. Over his head, the gun’s crane-arm swung a loaded chamber into the cannon’s breech. Barachen met Rosforth’s gaze sourly. Well, look at you up on your monster. And the man had a jug in his hand, and for a moment Rosforth thought the whole plan was going to trip over a quart of ale, but then the man waved. Ready.
‘Double time now!’ Rosforth’s words were relayed by Slobda’s resounding voice. The line – in sections at first, then all of it, sped up its retreat, ploughing recklessly towards the shields behind. The woman beside Slobda tripped and fell with a terrified curse, and the ogor caught her with the toe of one boot and righted her like someone setting a chair on its legs. The rat-halberdier who’d tried to go for her caught the descent of the mace across the top of its crested helm.
Rosforth looked back. Each squad of Loucher’s veterans back there was peeling aside, making a gap in the line.
‘Newhalts. Shields to your backs and run!’ he shouted. It took a moment for the words to register with them, and even then some were too embattled, and others had their blood up too much. A fair chunk of them remembered the plan and were able to disengage, staggering through the gaps directly behind them, then forming up as a second line behind. Of the rest…
There was a moment when it was all coming apart – the retreating line and the holding line tangling and clashing – and Rosforth had neither the voice nor the orders to set it straight. The rats had been momentarily thrown by the swifter pace of retreat, but the change had won only seconds. There were blades and jagged teeth at every heel, and to stumble was to die.
Then the wall came together, with Slobda standing beside the cannon. The shields buckled, giving ground to the left, still trying to drag a last few refugees in on the right. The host of the rats…
Rosforth looked down the canyon to its mouth and rats were the world. A great bristling host of them, licking at the rock sides, scouring the ground. Their better troops, the ones with armour and that hard discipline to them, made jagged arrows through the mass of vermin like the fins of predatory fish. Beyond them, he saw bigger figures lumber forward, barrel-chested, limbs warped and bulbous with misplaced muscle. And beyond them…
‘What,’ he whispered, ‘is that?’ His eyes couldn’t even make sense of it. Just a great writhing mass of naked flesh and flailing limbs and a tangled knot of rat heads chewing the air and each other as the whole bloated mass was driven forth towards the lines.
Then Barachen had grown tired of waiting and set Belching Ellenbrand off. A grapeshot charge laid into the tight-packed mass of rats immediately before the cannon. The scythe of metal ripped into them, and Rosforth saw the shock and thunder of the shot ripple out through the whole rodent host. Only those who’d been pressed right up against the cannon’s shield had been spared, and probably half of them had died of the sheer sound of the gun discharging. Barachen’s crew were already reloading, hurrying the crane along because there were surely more than enough rats to fill the ground they’d just cleared. The Fusiliers were letting loose their own salvos now – not as many as Rosforth would have preferred, but making a solid accounting of themselves. And elsewhere…
The line was holding. Just. He saw it shift and twist like a serpent grasped in many hands. Here the rats were shoving forwards, clambering atop one another and their own dead to try and scale the wall of wood and steel before them, and being hacked down at the top by the defenders’ stalwart efforts. The living fortress, they called it. The fortifications that marched wherever the armies of Sigmar trod. And today, this hour, these few minutes, it was holding.
‘Chief!’ Slobda shouted up. ‘Big lads comin’ in!’
The rats were sending their ogorish monsters in, in twos and threes along the line. They were frothing, eyes rolling in their narrow, blunt heads. Lesser rats that couldn’t get out of their way were trampled and torn apart, some of the brutes even stopping to savage their own kin before taskmasters with whips and goads drove them on from behind. Rosforth had a terrible moment of comparison then, even as he sighted up on one of the monsters. Slobda might look like an outsize human, but an ogor was a very different beast, shaped by different gods and different realms. These monstrous creatures were just… rats, rats shaped into weapons, fed who knew what magics and poisons so that they swelled and mutated into these insensate, snarling things. Where humans used iron and wood, the basic material of the rat smith was just… rat. They were their own raw materials.
He fired, saw one beast stagger, clutching at its head and howling. A fatal shot through the brain, surely, yet it lurched and staggered on, shrieking, agonised but driven forwards by its masters. The Ironweld spoke, and a solid ball took one of the ogor-rats right in the gut. The monster folded instantly about the strike, slamming through the whip-wielders at its back, and Rosforth could only feel the swift death was more mercy than its life had ever been.
Then there was one coming at Slobda, getting a long-nailed paw at the top of her shield and shunting it back. She smacked it hard across the head but it didn’t release its grip, and a handful of lesser rats were determinedly scaling the slope it had made. Rosforth shot the lead climber, and the next. The third reached the shield’s rim with a defiant squeal before Slobda lunged sideways and got her teeth into it, turning the triumphant rodent into an opportunistic snack.
The sight of that dampened the enthusiasm of the rest enough for Rosforth to reload, and by then the Steelhelms next in line had got some blades into the huge rat’s legs and gut, carving into its knotted flesh until it groaned and let go of the shield. Slobda brought her mace down on its skull and it pitched backwards into its fellows, a dead weight.
He should have been looking for his own personal nemesis, of course, but between becoming acting commander and his personal role in the fight, he’d forgotten. It was Slobda, somehow, who spotted the danger. Abruptly she’d dragged her shield up, just the way she was never supposed to. The very edge of it actually clipped the top of his head, sending him down into the bucket of the crow’s nest, skull ringing with the impact. For a second he just saw the inside of the shield, eclipsing his whole sky. Then there was a splintered knuckle in that inner surface, the shot meant for him, that had almost done its duty despite the iron-shod planking in the way.
He elbowed his way upright, lifting his fusil. Below the lip of Slobda’s shield, a press of rats was trying to get to her ankles, fended off by the Steelhelms.
She brought the shield down again, and he saw the sniper. Up, of course. The walls of the canyon had plenty of cracks and shelves to give the creature a good vantage.
Seeing that, seeing past the hunched rat and the long line of its gun, an idea jolted into Rosforth’s head.
‘Barachen!’ he shouted, and then the shot impacted. Not into his chest, as had surely been meant, but shattering through the pivot of his fusil’s rest. His gun spun away, lost over the side of the perch, and the spray of splinters and shrapnel bounced him off the back wall of his crow’s nest, then forward into…
Empty air. The broken front rail gave as he rebounded into it, and he was tipping over it, clutching vainly for a handhold. Falling.
He hit the face of Slobda’s shield, heard her roar. She managed to kick out its lower rim, meaning he rolled rather than just falling straight to the rock. Every ridge and stud of the reinforcing iron seemed to punch him on the way down. And then he was on the ground, clawing at rat bodies, at the bloody dust. Lying on his front on the wrong side of the shields.
He looked up and saw the rats. Within arm’s reach. In that moment, they were staring at him with the same shock that was jangling through his battered body. They weren’t used to this sort of bounty being delivered to them from on high. He saw their bright, fierce eyes understand what had been set before them: a man who couldn’t even run away.
They went for him. He got his knife from its sheath, though it seemed less a threat than the least of their teeth. One of them caught a fusil-ball and spun away, and another was pinned to the ground by a Steelhelm’s sword. There were at least three more fighting each other for ownership of his corpse, though, and they descended on him in a furious mass of stinking hair and clawing nails.
He got his knife in one, for what good it did. Sharp teeth were grating at the steel of his pauldron, prying until the metal bent and the leather straps parted. Another had its jaws at his face, pushing against his upraised arm, its spittle stringing the narrowing gap between them. A third was worrying at his stumps.
The bite of an axe carved into the space directly in front of his eyes, cleaving a rat skull to do so. ‘Got you, major!’ called a voice, and then someone was trying to haul him backwards, rats and all. Selias Breight, laying about herself furiously, driving the verminous rabble away.
‘Get back,’ Rosforth tried to tell her. ‘Behind the line.’ He couldn’t even hear his own words.
Selias looked up suddenly. The lesser rats had parted, and one of their halberdiers was coming through, vaulting its kin to get to this prize. Lifting its weapon high to stab down at them from the apex of its leap.
Slobda’s shield slammed down on the creature even as it descended on them. The sheer weight and force cut the rat and its halberd in half. The sound – bone and flesh and gristle all shorn through in a single stroke – would stay with Rosforth for a long time.
‘Come on now, chief, no lyin’ about,’ Slobda rumbled. Mace stowed behind her shield, she plucked him up and placed him on what was left of his perch.
‘Oi, major! You drop something again? Got to take more care of your stuff!’
It was Selias, scaling Slobda’s flank. She had his fusil, its strap dragging at her shoulder. Her face was lit up by that sharp grin of hers, the woman who never played by the rules and always won out.
She got to Slobda’s shoulder, unslung the heavy piece and levered it into his arms. ‘You can thank–’ she started, and then most of her head was gone.
Rosforth had nothing left in his mind, then, to process what had just happened. He was made only of shock and loss, numb, distanced. It was his hands that had the fusil balanced on the rail, aiming back where that shot had come from. It was his training that had his finger on the trigger lever. It was his luck, such as it was, that had the gun still loaded and charged despite all the adventures it had been through.
The kick of the unbraced gun against his shoulder almost had him out of the crow’s nest again, but he had wedged himself against what was left of the rail, back, elbow, stumps, all fighting for purchase. The line of his gun showed him the two crouched forms on their ledge up the canyon wall. This time it was the rearmost of the two that was falling back. The gunner, the killer, finally meeting the end of their personal duel. The forward rat, the support, saw its fellow dead and was scrambling away a moment later, shield held behind it to ward off another shot.
Rosforth was fumbling to reload, the fusil clumsy in his hands. Selias’ body had dropped away. He felt numb. But the world was not going to give him time to mourn.
‘Chief!’ Slobda shouted. ‘It’s comin’!’
He looked up. No question what it referred to. The tide of rat soldiers had ebbed back, parted, leaving only a great carpet of their dead. Instead, that great mass of flesh and limbs had finally been goaded into movement and was advancing on the line like a living battering ram. Any rats that didn’t get out of its way were crushed beneath its great flowing bulk.
Rosforth stared at it bleakly. It was rats. Big rats, small rats, countless rats, all sewn together into an almost centaur-like form, bloated out, its pallid skin criss-crossed with livid stitching. Too many legs of all sizes dragged it across the ground in a living tide of mismatched flesh. A knotted mass of conjoined torsos hosted three oversized and disparate arms. Atop it all were sewn at least a dozen rat heads, mostly eyeless, some with mouths stitched shut, others that seemed all cavernous hungry jaws. Metal plates and weird machinery studded its piecemeal hide, sparking, leaking hideous fluids. It was the worst thing Rosforth had ever seen. A career spanning decades, fighting in Sigmar’s corner against everything the realms had thrown at him, and here in his last fighting years was an abomination beyond anything else. Not just because of its size or its strength or even its ugliness. Because of what it said about the enemy – that they would take their own people’s flesh and just merge and stitch and swell until this thing was the result.
His hands had been busy, improvising a new mount for the fusil, lashing it to the rail with the strap of his belt. Wouldn’t hold for long, but he didn’t reckon longevity was something he needed to worry about.
Hopefully the others – Theorn, the wounded, the civilians – were far away by now. Hopefully they were at the gate, even. Through the gate. Safe. That was a good thought.
And there had been that other thing, the thought he’d had, when he’d spotted the sniper.
‘Barachen,’ he yelled down at the top of his voice. ‘Elevate the gun. Twelve notches up, seven left!’
The gunner, midway through shouting to his own crew, stared up at Rosforth as though he was mad.
‘Do it, man!’ Rosforth snapped, then turned his focus front again. The vast, blubbery sack of ratflesh was forcing its way towards them, now surging forwards, now wallowing in its own mass. From the trail of crushed rat bodies it left behind, its own masters had only a fragile hold on its progress, but its massed battery of beady eyes was fixed on the human line; no hope it would just run amok amongst its own kind.
If that thing hits the shield wall we can’t hold it back. Rosforth could imagine all too well how that would go. The sheer mass of the thing just flattening everyone in its path, mindless and unstoppable.
‘Slobda,’ he said. ‘How’s your appetite?’
There was a moment’s pause before she answered, and he realised with an inner kick that the approaching behemoth was of a scale to dampen even an ogor’s enthusiasm. At last she said, ‘Dunno, chief. Not sure I could eat a whole one.’ That way she had, that would sound like utterly heedless joking to most ears, but he heard the strain behind it. ‘Gonna tuck in anyway, ain’t we?’ she added. He could feel the whole mass of her tense below him.
‘You, Talliscraft!’ Rosforth called down, picking the nearest sergeant-at-arms and hoping he had the man’s name right. ‘Just stepping out of line. Might be a little while. Hold until we’re back.’
A flash of Talliscraft’s ashen face: understanding, sparing him a moment’s nod before braining a rat that was scrabbling at the man’s shield.
Ahead, the ratflesh leviathan was building speed. Rosforth tapped Slobda on the shoulder with his gun butt, beating out the signal to advance.
Belching Ellenbrand spoke just as she trampled forwards, rocking them both sideways. The enormous rat-thing shuddered and skidded, its many feet losing purchase on the body-covered ground. The Ironweld’s shot had torn a vast hole in its flank, and the internal architecture revealed was as bad, worse, than its exterior. A mess of intestines and metal stapled and stitched into cancerous masses, clutched in vestigial rat limbs, or in the teeth of blind, embryonic rodent heads. Malformation as an art form, horror elevated to an obscene mastercraft. Rosforth felt his gorge rise, fought it down even as he turned himself about to gesture furiously at Barachen. After that parting shot, the gunner was working to elevate the cannon, though, the barrel tilting up and his mates shifting the wheels so that the whole engine skewed left, the shields shifting to hold firm alongside it.
Then it was time for the beast. Even as it thundered towards them, even as Slobda rammed her shield towards the great mass of mismatched hide that was its chest, he saw the hole in its flank closing up – spindly, half-formed rat limbs and serpentine loops of gut writhing to clench it closed and repair the damage from within.
Of course. If it were easy to kill, it would have died of horror at its own existence.
The wall of rippling flesh impacted Slobda’s shield. One moment the ogor had been throwing herself forwards with all her strength and mass. The next she was skidding until her heels were almost at the shield wall. She roared and ploughed her mace down into that blubbery mass, popping seams and shattering a lesser arm. Ghastly ichor sprayed from the wound, and the freed flesh beneath seethed and writhed like bugs unearthed from under a stone. The monstrosity loomed over the shield, tearing itself further against the ironwork of the rim as it quested blindly for its enemy. Rosforth picked a head almost at random and put a shot into it, and then another. Each one lolled and shuddered, jaws still working ceaselessly as though possessed by a hunger beyond death.
A vast clawed arm reached around the shield to rake all the way down Slobda’s side, tearing off armour plates and drawing lines of blood with its jagged nails. She roared, gave another foot of ground, denting the shield wall at her back. The abomination was barely even trying to fight her, Rosforth realised with despair. It was scrabbling voraciously towards the human line behind her, but it was big enough to flatten even an ogor. She pushed and strained, every sinew bent to holding the tide of its flesh back, and still it came on.
The line was giving at Slobda’s back. It was the sheer horror of the thing. They could not stand, and Rosforth couldn’t blame them. And they’d bought enough time now, maybe. They’d given the others a chance. The gate was open, surely. Theorn, the good shepherd, ushering people through to… safety? Right now, facing this, Rosforth wasn’t sure he believed in the concept. Could you be safe in a world with such monstrosity in it?
He heard Barachen shouting. Shouting his name. Telling him… ready? Telling him to pull back? But he could feel the vast momentum the monster had built up. Slobda was not holding it back, but she was like an anchor on a storm-caught ship, obstinately slowing it moment to moment even as her heels drew furrows in the bloody ground.
He risked a glance behind him, saw the state of things with the Ironweld cannon.
‘Slobda,’ he said. ‘We need to–’
‘Gotcha, chief!’ she shouted back. ‘Jus’ giv the word–’
A vast claw closed on her head. He saw her helm buckle and she gave a strangled cry. A shocking sound, too high, too sharp to come from such a stalwart soldier as Slobda. He’d never heard her make the like. He saw the knotted fingers clench on her, twisted muscles and sinews tightening like a noose.
Close enough that he could put the fusil’s barrel right to the thing’s hide, to the sinews of its wrist as they stood taut through its pallid skin. An awkward angle. An inch the wrong side and he’d be sending the shot through Slobda’s brain as well, and it wasn’t as though he had a still and steady firing platform right now.
He squinted, gritted his teeth, pulled the trigger. The gun jumped in its makeshift mount and Slobda roared in pain. For a terrible moment he thought all he’d done was put her out of her misery. Then the abomination’s arm was flailing back, and he saw that huge, gnarled fist flapping at the end of it, attached by only a strip of flesh. Slobda staggered sideways, the side of her head covered in blood. Still alive, though, alive and furious. And – perhaps because Rosforth wasn’t immediately within reach – she put all that rage into the wall of flesh ahead of her, three or four thunderous blows with the mace that split the beast at the seams, smashed limbs, broke the curved teeth that came chittering in for her.
Rosforth remembered, then, that Barachen had been shouting, and that they had somewhere else to be.
‘Back, Slobda!’ he shouted. ‘Come on now, back off!’ But she was furious, beyond hearing him. The thing got another hand on her, and then another, gripping her ankle. She just kept slamming away at it, blind with rage, roaring and roaring without words. When one of its many heads latched onto her arm, she bit it right back, crunching down on ratflesh and bone. Her face, coming up covered in her own blood and that of the rats and the oil and unnatural elixirs that they’d pumped the thing full of, was as far from human as any skaven, savagery incarnate.
The Ironweld went off. The thunder of it, tilted upwards, threw Rosforth forwards and almost out of the crow’s nest again. The fusil was gone from his hands, dangling from its straps. No shudder from the beast at any impact, but that hadn’t been Barachen’s aim.
Rosforth had seen the ledge the rat-sniper had found, up above. A ledge that existed because whatever cataclysm had opened this canyon had left it riven with cracks and fissures. He’d looked up – it felt like a thousand years ago – and seen that so much of the rock up there was just balanced precariously, waiting for the right shock. Some monstrous awakening, some convulsion of Ghyran’s nature, and the whole vast weight of it would come down.
Or, in this case, human ingenuity. That substitute Sigmar’s chosen folk had for monstrous strength or necromantic power or the twisted boons of ruinous gods.
The great gun spoke, and for a moment there seemed no answer. The monster shunted Slobda another two feet backwards even as she shoved back with all her might and smashed her mace into the midst of its many ravening heads. Then a crack ran vertically down the rock face, top to bottom and widening, as Rosforth saw it. He heard the shrill chorus of the rat army rise higher still as they registered it too, imagined them clambering over one another in a desperate rush to get clear.
‘Back, Slobda!’ he shouted, and at last she tried. Stopped pushing, so that abruptly they were being carried on a great wave of the abomination’s advancing flesh. Its limbs clutched for them, but the bulges and folds of its own bulk momentarily frustrated it. By then, all Rosforth could do was cling on with both hands and close his eyes.
He felt the impact of the great wall of rock as it fell across them all. First ploughing down into the sea of flesh that was the rat-monster, then beating at Slobda’s upraised shield. A moment later the ogor was down and he felt the stanchion of his perch snap. He was on the ground. There was a shadow over him. It was the shadow of the mountain.
Sigmar, my service. A mangled fraction of a prayer. All he had time for.
The shadow was Slobda’s, not the mountain’s. Slobda and her shield, crouched protectively over him, but the mountain was over her, and it all came down.
He dreamt. He’d rather he hadn’t. There was nothing wholesome in that dream. He felt that he could see all Ghyran, or some great expanse of it. That he – the ghost of Rosforth, because Rosforth was surely dead by now – was being gifted with this unwelcome revelation at the last. A punishment because he’d never been enough, not as a soldier, not as a comrade-in-arms, certainly not as a leader. And now his dream showed him the rats. They burrowed up through every land he knew, everywhere he’d ever brought the dawn to with Sigmar’s armies. Their twisted tunnels opened up and rats vomited out into the sunlight, and the land sickened and died wherever they touched. He saw every foe he’d ever fought beset by the unending vermin host. The swamp-orruks he’d hated, out-tricked and out-trapped by the rats; ravenous ghouls devoured down to their bones; giants brought down by masses of ratflesh greater even than they. He saw duardin trapped in their own mines, aelves and Sylvaneth fleeing despoiled forests, the cities of humanity falling into earth carved into a honeycomb of rat nests and rot. He saw the rats cover the land, and then take needle and thread, stitching one to the next until as far as the eye could see was not even rats but just rat, a single undulating landscape of turbulent, lacerated flesh.
He woke to pain, the worst he’d ever felt since Grippe had cut his legs away, and it was still a profound relief.
In shadow, just a handful of lamps about. A cave, he saw. Or were they buried beneath the collapsed canyon, waiting for the rats to gnaw in to them? He shuddered, and wished he hadn’t because everything hurt.
A nightmare face swam into focus above him. A long beak of a head, glass eyes. Healer Grippe.
‘I’m sorry,’ Rosforth managed. ‘I’ve no more legs to give.’ And then he panicked, suddenly, clenching both fists to make sure he still had them.
‘Bruises, my dear Rosforth,’ came the hollow voice of the surgeon. ‘Bruises, and perhaps a slight crack to a rib or two, but maybe not even that. She really did a good job of keeping you safe, the old girl.’
Something kicked in him, a terror he hadn’t realised was there. ‘Slobda, she–’ She’d been over him, on her knees and one hand, the other holding her shield to her back. Against the monster. Against the mountain.
‘Chief.’ A slow, rough voice. He forced himself up on his elbows and damn the pain. There she was, sitting with her back to the cave wall. They’d stripped her armour off her, and the body below was a mass of welts and gashes, all the bloody script of tooth and claw that the monster had written into her flesh. Stitched now. Stitched and left to the air, because ogor flesh healed best that way. Slobda, with all her limbs, all the great welcome weight of her.
Minus one ear. Just a ragged, bloody knot where it had been.
She saw where he was looking. ‘Youse owes me an ear, chief. Shot it right off. Thought yer aim was better than that.’ She grinned a little.
‘If he’s awake, let me speak to him,’ came a voice – young, peevish, frightened. Rosforth sank back down and pretended not to be awake enough to deal with whoever it was. There was a nasty, nagging sense to him that, once he could put a name to that voice, the world was going to start making demands of him again.
‘Tell whoever they can speak to Marieda,’ he got out. ‘She’s in charge.’
Healer Grippe went very still. ‘As to that,’ they said, ‘I… couldn’t save her. I’m so very sorry. The poison, and the beating she took… I did all I could but…’
Rosforth gripped their gloved hand. Marieda was gone, then. Another comrade he’d served with for more than ten years. And who else? ‘Selias–’ he started, but then remembered. Also dead, all that impudence and cheer just gone, in that instant, at a single shot.
‘Barachen didn’t make it either, I’m afraid,’ the surgeon said sombrely. ‘Stayed with his gun. She blew, did our Ellenbrand, when the rocks came down. Most of the barrel went through that… thing you were fighting. Knocked it back so that it didn’t come through with you. Or most of it didn’t. The regenerative properties of its flesh… Even those severed parts of it we could see were trying to return to the whole. Probably it’s still alive, under all of that.’
‘The rats?’ Rosforth asked.
‘On the far side of the collapse, but they’re working on it,’ Grippe said grimly. ‘Which brings us to–’
‘Wait.’ Rosforth had identified that other voice, the one that had wanted to speak to him. ‘Wait, wait, now. Theorn?’
‘Major, I’m here.’ The mage’s apprentice came into view, his young face sallow and drawn in the lamplight.
‘You’re supposed to be…’ Through the gate. Safe, with the civilians.
‘Major, we have a problem,’ Theorn said. Grippe was trying to shoo him away, but Rosforth propped himself up again. Because if Marieda was gone then he really was in charge, and he’d better start acting like it.
‘We’ve reached where the gate is. The ruins it’s in,’ Theorn reported. ‘It’s right out there.’ He was pointing vaguely. ‘But… the Freeguild don’t hold it.’
No reinforcements then. Things could be worse. Presumably they were.
‘Can you not open it, then?’
‘I’m sure I could, if I could get to it,’ Theorn said urgently. ‘But it’s not just sitting there. Someone else has moved in.’
Rosforth pushed himself full up, feeling his stomach twist. ‘The rats?’ he demanded.
‘No,’ Theorn said, his eyes flicking to Slobda. ‘Her people. Ogors.’