There were still some odds and ends of Freeguild presence left over, around the ruins. A tattered banner showing the twin-tailed comet, a few discarded pieces of armour, a broken sword. No sign to show whether the ogors had been responsible for their eviction, or if the creatures had just lumbered in later to eat the victors. Right now, the distinction probably wasn’t important.
Rosforth took a deep breath, feeling his ribs complain. If there was an inch of him that hadn’t taken a battering, it was keeping quiet about it. Slobda was limping a little, huffing a bit more than usual. Healer Grippe had confessed that under other circumstances they’d prefer both man and ogor to have had more convalescing time. The rats weren’t going to give anyone that time, though, and if there was someone more fit to go deal with a camp of ogors then they were keeping their expertise under their helm.
The realmgate – the alleged realmgate – was set within a ruin of… Rosforth couldn’t even guess. Some ancient structure that time had not been kind to. Its stepped walls had fallen in on one side, and a net of creepers was trying determinedly to dismantle the rest. And, by those efforts, had probably now become the sole thing holding the structure together, clasping stone to stone, growth and destruction all in the one living thing. The Ghyran way.
He could see a dozen ogors outside the entrance to the place. Huge, ruddy creatures wearing bright trousers of mismatched cloth sewn together; belly-plates and iron-shod boots and bare chests covered with tattoos and scars that wrote and overwrote one another in brutal histories. Bald heads and mops of ill-shorn hair; long moustaches interwoven with bones, even with whole skulls. One of them was turning a beast’s carcass on a rough spit, slapping away the others when they tried to filch handfuls of half-cooked meat straight from the flames.
While Grippe had stitched up Slobda and Rosforth, the artisans of Newhalt had done their best with his crow’s nest. It sat at a bit of a crooked angle now, and the new railing and gun mount were decidedly rough, but he was back in it. The sense of being in his proper place was a more potent restorative than anything in Grippe’s medical kit.
‘We think there must be a score at least,’ Theorn told him, from Slobda’s elbow. ‘They know we’re here, but they’ve obviously… got enough to chew on, right now.’
Slobda sniffed the air, a massive, cavernous sound. That roasting meat calling to her.
‘That gate,’ said Rosforth, ‘had better bloody be in there.’
Theorn shrugged miserably. ‘I have my master’s word and his maps.’
Rosforth took another deep, creaking breath. ‘What do you say, Slobda? Want to go meet the family?’
‘That lot?’ She spat derisively. ‘Wouldn’t ’ave ’em.’ But he knew her well enough to hear the odd note in her voice. It had been a long time since she’d been amongst her own kind who weren’t in Sigmar’s service. ‘Maneaters’, as they called themselves, willing to take human coin and human victuals. He’d always known that one day there would be wild ogors. Free ogors. And, back amongst them, perhaps Slobda would find the weight of a human on her back to be too onerous a burden, a human voice in her ear just an annoyance. He could lose her, taking her down to meet her kin. She might remember fondly what it was like, to live a life without walls and orders and the petty concerns of small and inconsequential folk.
But right now they needed to get to the gate – to where the gate was supposed to be. And they could try a frontal assault, just charge in, but if the ogors retreated into the ruin then they could hold out for more time than the rats were going to give them. Scouts sent to the great collapsed wall of rocks reported the sound of gnawing teeth, and they didn’t even have the cannon any more.
He looked down at Theorn, seeing just a very young man, a boy, someone whose grasp of magic didn’t make them any less of a kid, honestly. I could be your bloody grandfather. What are we even doing here? He had been about to say, ‘If I don’t come back…’ but realised he had no end to that sentence. If he didn’t come back with a clear path to the gate, what did it matter? They’d fight the ogors or they’d fight the rats, or both. It would be out of Rosforth’s hands.
Instead he opted for what seemed almost insane optimism. ‘I’ll be back in a bit. Fix and mend while I’m gone. We might still have a bit of a scrap ahead.’ A broad, utterly false smile, but Theorn was young enough to be taken in by it.
‘You mean rats or them lot?’ Slobda asked him, as she ambled out towards the ruin. ‘That scrap you was talkin’ about.’
‘You know, I’m half-expecting one of the gods of Ruin to just turn up in person any moment,’ Rosforth told her. ‘Because it’s the only way this spot could get tighter.’
She chuckled at that. ‘Ho yuss, chief. Could do with a bite of daemon about now. Them’s some spicy vittles.’ And that had been an early argument, when they’d been new to one another. The younger Rosforth, knower-of-everything, telling her you couldn’t eat daemons because they just vanished away when you killed them. And Slobda, voice of reason, pointing out that meant you had to ‘git yer teeths in before they stop movin’’.
Good times. But everything comes to an end save the grace of Sigmar. And there were days even that seemed thin on the ground, and surely this was one of them.
The ogors outside the ruin had seen them – hard to miss, another ogor with a man stuck up over her back. They watched this prodigy approach with a mix of curiosity and humour.
‘Oi,’ one of them called. ‘Youse gotta bitta lunch on youse! Wants me ter fetch it down for youse?’ His accent was barbarous, but the words fought their way clear of it.
‘Sod off,’ Slobda told him jovially. ‘Savin’ ’im fer later. Whicha you streaks of meat is in charge ’ere?’
The biggest ogor was in charge, of course. He came out of the ruin at the calls of his fellows – a bruiser a good few inches over Slobda’s considerable height, and a foot broader at the waist. His eyes, tiny, narrow, half-hidden in folds of flesh, stared levelly at his visitors. By then Slobda had bullied the cook into giving her a haunch of meat and was sitting on a stone block, tearing at it.
‘Fancy coat,’ said the ogor chief, nodding at Slobda’s armour, which the Newhalt smiths had repaired as best they could. ‘Looks tight.’
‘That’s the fun of these little linkies ’ere,’ Slobda agreed, patting her chain-mail. ‘Always room ter put some more in.’
‘Skinnies do that fer youse?’
Slobda grunted the affirmative, chewing away.
‘Skinnies give youse a name?’ the ogor chief asked.
She stood, looked at the almost clean bone in her hand, and then, swifter than Rosforth could follow, smashed the nearest ogor with it, flooring the creature in a hail of splinters. He was fumbling for his gun on the instant, sure that everything was kicking off into a fight, but none of the other ogors really reacted much. He reckoned, in the aftermath, that the ogor she’d struck was the next-largest, the chief’s second maybe. Slobda was inserting herself into their hierarchy the ogor way.
‘Hurrmak,’ said the chief, jabbing a thumb at his bare chest. ‘Irontooth.’
‘Slobda,’ she said. ‘An’ you ain’t got no iron tooth.’
‘Fell out. Grew a new one.’ Hurrmak shrugged, sat. ‘You got a cave o’ skinnies up there. You sharin’? That lad up top, you givin’ ’im? Nice gift for yer new chief?’ More ogors were shambling out of the ruin, shoving one another, chewing, staring dully at the newcomers.
‘Why’d I want you as chief?’ Slobda asked.
‘Gots to be better than skinnies,’ Hurrmak said. ‘I mean, why else youse come out ’ere, if not to shed that fancy coat and join up?’
Slobda glanced up at Rosforth, who cleared his throat. His voice, in the echo of all that bass rumble, sounded pathetically thin and meagre. ‘We’re looking for passage through. To the realmgate,’ he tried. In the back of his head was the sound of rats chewing, chewing, while these ogors just sat and ate with all the time in the world.
Hurrmak cocked his head. ‘Cor, all just squeaks, innit? Can’t make out a word of it.’
‘We ’eard you got a gate,’ Slobda translated. ‘Magic gate. In there.’
The folds of fat above Hurrmak’s eyes went up in surprise. ‘Explains the smell,’ he said. ‘I said it smelled magic down there, din’ I? Mus’ be your gate.’
‘Skinnies want ter use the gate,’ Slobda said. ‘Make it go. You can go through too, you want. Got these rat lads comin’ any minute an’ there’s no good eatin’ on ’em. Been chewing on ’em for a while, believe me.’
‘Rat lads? I know rat lads,’ Hurrmak said. ‘You jus’ gots to grind up that greeny stuff they ’ave with them. Right fine con-dee-ment that is. Brings out the flavour.’ Huge fingers mimed a delicate sprinkle of spices.
Slobda grunted, surprised. ‘Worth a go,’ she decided, and Rosforth felt her shift, slightly further from being a human ally, slightly more towards being just an ogor among ogors.
‘Youse skinnies wants our gate,’ Hurrmak said. ‘Wot we reckon, lads?’
‘Tell ’em they can come,’ one of the other ogors said. ‘Only they gots to put on some ’erbs. For the magic.’
Hurrmak slapped his gut. ‘Ho yuss! Youse skinnies can come, only they gots to ’ave apples in they’s mouths. Big magic, them apples. An’ they gots to take off all that metal stuff. Gets in the way of the magics. Ho yuss!’
‘You have no idea of how many rats are on their way!’ Rosforth shouted down at the lot of them. ‘It won’t be you doing the eating, believe me! Join with us, and we can get out through the gate. Our mage can open it for all of us!’ At least it sounded as though the gate was actually there.
‘Cor, I could not be doin’ wiv all that twitterin’ and witterin’,’ Hurrmak said, shaking his head sadly. ‘What you even doin’ wiv your life, woman? I seen your frien’s when they come in. Piss-all meat on ’em. No fit company for a fine, fat slab like you.’ Which was, apparently, an ogor compliment, because Slobda chuckled almost bashfully.
‘Youse gots it so good, ’ave youse?’ she asked, and he could hear her voice shrugging off the human ways of speaking she’d got into, the accent, that exaggerated clarity to get clear words out around her outsize teeth. All that effort ogors wouldn’t demand of her.
‘Youse forgot the life? Roam free, eat well,’ Hurrmak said with a smile. ‘What else is there? Some monkey on yer back gibble-gabblin’ in yer ear? ’Ow long since you just did what youse wants, not ’im upstairs?’
‘Been a while,’ Slobda admitted slowly. And Rosforth wanted to say something. Wanted desperately to conjure up their history together, the years of fighting and marching. But he found that, set against roam free, eat well, it didn’t so much as tilt the scales. This was, surely, the life the realms had meant for her. Not some beast of burden marching under the banner of another people’s god.
I’m going to lose her, he realised. And that meant everyone back in the cave would lose too, but it was her that cut most. Right then, if she’d offered to let him come with her, be an honorary ogor, roam free, eat well, forget Sigmar and the Castelite wall… Would he be tempted? Surely he would.
‘Oh I done that,’ Slobda said, with an airy wave of the jagged half-bone. ‘Done that for years. Bit samey, dontcha find? Another beast to ’unt, or maybe there’s some grots to munch, or a big spider with a leg for everyone or somethin’. An’ you go over the next hill an’ it’s jus’ the same again. Dontcha get bored?’
The ogors stared at her, frowning at the thought.
‘Thing is, this lot don’t stay still either,’ she went on expansively. ‘Allus got some place to be, Sigmar this, Sigmar that. Hungry for roamin’ and fightin’, that Sigmar. Make a good proper big lad, ’e would. We been all over the realms, ’im up top and me. You name it, I fought it, and if I fought it, I et it. And they got cooks. Like, proppa cooks, not just burn-the-outside cooks. They got spices. Flavours wot I never ’ad before. Spice an’ sweet an’ salt an’ ever’thin’. An’ they fight just about ever’one, so you get to mix all the flavours with all the folks wot they got a beef with. I ain’t never ’ad such a range of feastin’ all my days, before I joined up with this lot. Feastin’, fightin’, trav’lin’.’ She looked up, smiled as fondly as an ogor’s brutal features could manage. ‘Best days o’ my life.’
Rosforth stared down at her. ’Im up top and me. The ogor’s eye view on their relationship. Because he was a burden, surely, but she had broad shoulders. She could carry him forever. All this time he’d assumed she had been grimly enduring Sigmar’s service, taking her food and pay with grudging acceptance. Best days o’ my life. He’d never guessed. She’d never said.
Hurrmak was less touched by the sentiments, just making a derisive noise to dismiss all of Slobda’s experience. She grinned at him. ‘Don’t knock it till you tried it.’
‘Turn Maneater?’ Hurrmak growled. ‘No chance.’ And then, because more than a few of the other ogors were looking thoughtful, he slapped and cuffed and punched the nearest. ‘Roam free! Eat well! Who needs more’n that? Do what some skinny streak of leather tells youse? Lis’en to them squeaky li’l voices alla time? Nah.’ And he squinted meanly up at Rosforth. ‘Not that I wouldn’t like ter find out wot that one tastes like though. Looks like a nice chewy strip o’ jerky, that one.’
‘’Im?’ Slobda asked. ‘Oh ’e’s delicious.’
‘Wot?’ Hurrmak asked, into the weird ogorish silence that remark occasioned.
‘Dee-lish-us,’ she spelled out for them. ‘Real lip-smackin’. ’E’s a proppa snack.’
Hurrmak looked from her to Rosforth and back. ‘Wot, you… lick him, or…?’
Slobda bared all her massive teeth, and told them.
The cannon had ruptured. His own great gun, though a cruder piece than the Ironweld Barachen would command decades later. Rosforth had seen the fiery claws of the daemon tearing at the shields, ripping them away. Panic, sheer panic, and the last thing you wanted to do with a cannon was try to load it in haste when being attacked by a creature that was literally on fire.
The blast had done for the daemon, for sure. It had done for the rest of Rosforth’s gun crew too. And when he’d come to, under the ministrations of Healer Grippe, he’d found it had done for his legs. The weight of the cannon had gone sideways onto them as he’d lain in the broken gun’s shadow. That one instant of massive, crushing weight and then darkness. And when he’d opened his eyes again the weight was still there, though the gun was gone. As though its invisible ghost was still resting across the broken wreckage of his legs, pinning him down.
They had other worries by then. There had been a dozen of them. Himself and the surgeon, plus ten human soldiers in various states of disarray and injury, hiding out in a cellar as the servants of Ruin scoured the buildings above. Twelve humans, and Slobda.
She’d not been a full war-hulk then, no crow’s nest on her back. Just a Maneater who’d signed on with a Sigmarite force and probably not expected to get the mauling they’d all just received. Now she was hiding out in this cellar with this ragbag of her former allies and precious little in the way of food. For days, as the Chaos host looted the ruins above.
The mood, in the darkness, listening to Slobda’s belly gurgle and complain. The ogor’s great bulk, taking up half the available space. All of them, within her arm’s reach. Understanding that they’d escaped one enemy just to place themselves within the hands of another. Save for Grippe, none of them was uninjured. Half of them hadn’t even made it down with a weapon to hand. The ogor’s appetite was growing moment to moment, like a whole extra monstrous creature slowly expanding into the cellar’s cramped confines. They could see the glint of her little eyes in the dark as she looked hungrily over at them.
And Rosforth had seen she hadn’t wanted to. That she respected her contract, understood that eating her employers was poor form for a Maneater. Poor form, but not unprecedented. Ogors had to eat. And, yes, every living thing did, but ogors had to eat. It was what drove them to travel the realms, because if they stayed in one place they stripped it bare. And there she was, and there they all were, waiting for the thin bonds of civilised conduct to snap.
Rosforth had seen how it would have to be. The gift he was in a position to give, to buy just enough time for the enemy above to lose interest and move on. Talking Healer Grippe into playing their part had been the tricky bit. But there was going to be a double amputation in his immediate future, so why not put it to some use?
It had been sheer pragmatism, at the time. A man with few options and assets making the best of them. An unthinkable act to one brought up on Sigmar’s writ. But to an ogor it was something else. The look on her face when she’d understood. When Grippe had finished sawing and she’d seen Rosforth’s gift to her…
There was absolute silence amongst the ogors as Slobda finished telling the story. Not telling it exactly as Rosforth would, admittedly. A somewhat different emphasis, on what part of the story was important.
Not many people ever heard a friend describe avidly, eagerly, just how their flesh tasted. What a delicacy they had apparently been.
‘Cor,’ said one of the listeners eventually, and Rosforth saw long strings of saliva running down his chin. ‘’E give you ’is own legs?’
Slobda nodded proudly.
‘Blimey,’ another ogor said. ‘I ’ad no idea they wus so gen’rus.’
‘You bin wiv ’im ever since?’ a third asked, almost plaintively.
Another nod. ‘’E’s allus made sure I got my fill,’ she told them. ‘’E’s spesh-ul.’
‘Skinny like that,’ agreed the first ogor. ‘You don’t eats ’im all at once.’
Hurrmak clapped his hands together, a sound like a fusil going off at close range. ‘Ain’t no way!’ he spat. ‘No Maneatin’ for my lads.’ At the little chorus of disappointment, he looked round at them furiously. ‘Youse my lads, youse do what yer told!’
‘Wot ’appened to “Roam free, eat well?”’ Slobda growled, low and dangerous. ‘You bin eatin’ well, lads?’
They went very still, all of them. Belatedly, Rosforth realised that all the rest had just been talk, but that was the challenge.
‘Slobda,’ he said warningly. Hurrmak was bigger than she was, after all.
‘I got this, chief,’ she said. A moment later she was unbuckling the straps that held his perch on her back.
‘Slobda–’
‘You just sit ’ere,’ she said, setting him down. ‘Me an’ ’im’re about to ’ave a dissy-greement.’
She was still beat up from the fight with the rats. She was smaller. She laid aside her great shield, keeping only the mace. Hurrmak snarled, baring yellow fangs.
‘Lads,’ he said, seeking support. But his followers were oddly ambivalent, looking from him to Slobda, licking their lips. Not a folk given to thinking much about the future, but Who’s going to serve up the best dinner? was within their range.
‘I will eat you whole,’ Hurrmak told Slobda, and took up a club that was most of a tree studded over with flints.
‘You ain’t got the stomach,’ she told him, and it turned out that was just about the worst thing one ogor could say to another because his eyes went wild and mad and he was at her in an instant fury, the others scrambling to give the pair of them space to fight.
Hurrmak was no slouch. He landed a couple of solid blows even as Slobda was bringing her mace up. Her mail took the worst of it – Rosforth saw links severed and broken by the force, the plates of one segmented pauldron flying apart as the straps snapped. Then she had her own mace solidly into the bigger ogor’s chin, staggering him. Only briefly, though. Rosforth saw his entire jaw dislocate and then snap back into place. Hurrmak spat out a tooth that bounced from Slobda’s forehead.
He rushed her, rammed her. She clouted him solidly about the head as he came in, but it didn’t slow him. Then they were grappling for a moment, and he lifted her clean off the ground and slammed her down, so that the entire ruin settled another inch, dust squeezed from between every stone and the vines sagging and stretching. Slobda took the chance to put a big metal-shod boot into Hurrmak’s groin – the other ogors whooped – and then kicked him in the belly-plate hard enough to leave a dent. He staggered back and she rolled forwards, grabbed him by the waist and threw him against the ruin, loosened stones raining down on the pair of them. She grabbed one, a jagged chunk of carved rock the size of a barrel, and smashed Hurrmak’s face bloody with it. Rosforth thought that was it. Surely that was all the fight the ogor could have in him. Except in the next moment he’d backhanded Slobda hard enough to whip her whole head round. Grabbed her by the cuirass and headbutted her with a sound like a gunshot. Then she was on her back, and Hurrmak had a huge knee in her chest, and one hand groping for his club.
‘Nice… try… Maneater,’ he ground out. She had a hand at his throat, clenching, but ogor necks were like tree trunks. ‘Skinnies’ve… made yer… soft,’ he grated. ‘Soft ’n’ tender.’ He had the great jagged weight of his club now, wrestling for the chance to lift it high.
Rosforth had no idea about ogor conventions of honour. Whether this was a sacrosanct duel or just a brawl open to all comers. He wasn’t going to let that club come down on Slobda’s face, though. If that broke ogor etiquette then he’d take the consequences. He reached for his fusil, only for a huge hand to lift it from its mount and from his reach.
The ogor beside him seemed to have absolutely no interest in the grunting, gasping struggle for supremacy between Hurrmak and Slobda. He just examined the fusil with a child’s rapt concentration.
‘Fancy,’ he said thickly. ‘Bit smaller’n mine, though. Lookit.’ He tried to give Rosforth something that was essentially a cannon, not quite Ironweld scale but not far off. More gun than Rosforth could possibly have handled.
Beyond them, Hurrmak had his club up. Slobda had a hand on his wrist. Hurrmak gripped her face, trying to drive thick fingers into her eyes as she gnawed on his wrist.
‘Could you, please…’ Rosforth reached desperately for his gun. The ogor was turning it over and over.
‘We sign up wiv youse, youse gets me one like this. Like this but big?’ he growled out. ‘Does a real nice bang, I bets.’ He gave Rosforth a sidelong look from narrow black eyes.
‘I’ll have them make one just for you,’ Rosforth promised. The ogor’s face split in a jagged, tusky smile.
‘’Ere.’ He shoved the fusil back into Rosforth’s arms. ‘Make it go bang. I wants to ’ear it.’
He had no clue, in that moment, whether that disingenuous look was just that of a simple-minded thug who didn’t understand, or a very clever ogor wanting a change of leadership, or just some idiot-savant of firearms really keen to hear something go bang. Rosforth dropped the fusil into its mount and sighted up.
Hurrmak had his club raised. Awkwardly, because Slobda had bitten off one of his thumbs. His face, in the instant before it descended, was almost placid, an imbecilic satisfaction with the violence he was about to mete out.
Rosforth put a shot right into that face, right into the centre of it. No time to worry about whether the fusil was still primed and loaded after the ogor’s handling of it. No time to think. Only time to press the trigger.
Hurrmak’s head canted at an odd angle. When it turned to glower at Rosforth, one eye was gone, the socket shattered, a fist-sized dent driven deep. But not fatally deep. Ogor flesh and bone had beaten the bullet.
It was enough of a distraction for Slobda to buck beneath him and throw him off, though. And Hurrmak was stumbling, as she regained her feet and her mace. Lurching, his grip on his club uncertain. When he rounded on her, his abused face met her incoming swing with an almost mathematical precision. Teeth exploded in all directions and he fell back, flailing and kicking.
There was a lot more after that. A lot of Slobda just standing over him and… tenderising him, was probably how the ogors thought of it. Just beating away like a washerwoman with wet clothes. Until what was left didn’t bear much resemblance to an ogor. To anything humanoid, really.
She straightened up. A blood-slathered force of destruction, licking her enemy’s fragmented skull from her face. A cannibal monster. His friend.
‘You get this mess carved an’ seasoned,’ she told the other ogors. ‘’Imself an’ me’re gonna bring the skinnies down, see ’bout this gate.’ And, at the chorus of complaints, ‘They ain’t gonna want any. They’s picky ’bout their food. Their loss, our gain, eh?’