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Empire at War – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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CHAPTER ONE

DEMILANCE

I

Vatzl to Durberg, Durberg to Harnstadt, Harnstadt to Brodny, in one furious week, in one laborious gallop, a double line of helmet cockades and lance banners bobbing and fluttering.

A rest stop at Brodny, then out, into the edges of the oblast itself. After Brodny, all the place names began to change, for there the Empire slipped away behind them like a flying cloak cut loose.

The sparse haunches of Kislev lay before them.

To the west, the dogtooth line of the Middle Mountains, receding into violet haze. The sky, light and clear like glass. Endless acres of green crops, hissing in the wind. Grasslands riven with gorse and thistle. Larks singing, so high up they were invisible.

Brodny to Emsk, Emsk to Gorovny, Gorovny to Choika, through numerous oblast villages that no one had time to name, tiny hamlets where rough wooden izbas clustered around lonely shrines.

On the track, the massed columns of infantry under standards, each trailing behind itself a long baggage train like the tail of a comet. Ox-teams, kitchen wagons, tinkers with barrows, victuallers with heavy drays of kegs and barrels, muleteers, war carts piled with pike-shafts, stakes, firewood and unfletched arrows, all plodding north. The convoys of engineers, hauling the great gun carriages and the pannier trucks of shot and powder with oxen and draft horse, struggling with block and tackle where iron wheels fouled in the mud. Halberdiers and pikemen, in file, looking from a distance like winter forests on the move. Marching songs. A thousand voices, making the oblast ring. A hundred thousand.

The Empire was lowering its head and squaring up for war.

For that was the spring of the Year That No One Forgets. The dreadful year of waste and plight and hardship, when the North rose as never before and plunged its several hordes like lances into the flanks of the world. It was the two thousand five hundred and twenty-first year marked on the Imperial calendar since the Heldenhammer and the Twelve Tribes founded the Empire with sinew and steel. It was the age of Karl Franz, the Conclave of Light – and Archaon.

II

At Choika, where the river was wide and slow, they rested their horses a day. The people there regarded them in a sullen manner, unimpressed by the sight of fifty Imperial demilancers jogging two abreast into the town square. Every horse was a heavy gelding, chestnut, black or grey; every man dressed in gleaming half-plate and lobster-tail burgonet. A light lance stood vertical in every right hand. A brace of pistols or a petronel bounced at every saddle.

The clarion gave double notes with his horn, long and short, and the troop flourished lances and dismounted with a clatter of metal plate. Girths were loosened, withers patted and rubbed.

The company officer was a thirty-two year old captain-of-horse called Meinhart Stouer. He removed his burgonet and held it by the chinstraps as he knocked grass burrs out of its comb of feathers.

Thus occupied, he barked sidelong at the clarion. ‘Karl! Find out what this town is called!’

‘It’s Choika, captain,’ the young man replied, buckling his gleaming silver bugle back into its saddle holster.

‘You know these things of course,’ smiled Stouer. ‘And the river?’

‘The Lynsk, captain.’

The captain raised his gloved hands wide like a supplicant and the lancers around him laughed. ‘May Sigmar save me from educated men!’

The clarion’s name was Karl Reiner Vollen. He was twenty years old, and took the teasing with a shrug. Stouer wouldn’t have asked if he hadn’t expected Vollen to know.

The company’s supply wagons, with their escort of six lances, rattled belatedly into the square and drew up behind the lines of horse. Stouer acknowledged their arrival and limped over to the well fountain. He was stiff-legged and sore from the saddle. He tucked off a leather riding glove, cupped it in his hand, and splashed water from the low stone basin over his face. Then he rinsed his mouth and spat brown liquid onto the ground. Beads of water twinkled in his thick, pointed beard.

‘Sebold! Odamar! Negotiate some feed for the mounts. Don’t let them rob you. Gerlach! Negotiate some feed for us. The same applies. Take Karl with you. He probably speaks the damn language too! If he does, buy him beer. Blowing that horn and thinking hard is thirsty work.’

Gerlach Heileman carried the company’s standard, a role that earned him pay-and-a-half and the title of vexillary. The standard was a stout ash pole three spans long. The haft was worked in gilt and wrapped in leather bands. On its tip was a screaming dragon head made of brass, from the back of which depended two swallowtails of cloth. These symbolised the Star With the Pair of Tails. Under this astrological omen, the great epochs of the Empire had been baptised. Some said it had been seen again, in these last few seasons.

Beneath the brass draco was a cross-spar supporting the painted banner of the company, a heavy linen square edged in a passementerie of gold brocade. A leopard’s pelt hung down behind the banner and parchment extracts from the Sigmarite gospel were pinned by rosette seals around its hem. The banner’s fields were the red and white of Talabheim, and it showed, in gold and green, the motifs of that great city-state: the wood-axe and the trifoil leaf, either side of the Imperial hammer. A great winged wyrm coiled around the hammer’s grip.

Gerlach kissed the haft of the standard and passed it to the demilancer holding his horse. Removing his helmet and gloves, he nodded over at the clarion.

The pair walked together across the square, their half-armour clinking. Long boots of buff leather encased the legs of every demilancer to the thigh. From there to the neck, they wore polished silver suits of articulated plate over a coat of felt-lined ringmail. The horse company was a prestigious troop, recruited from the landed nobility, unlike the levies or the standing armies of the state, and so each demilancer was required to provide for his own arming. Their armour reflected this, and the subtle nuances of each rider’s status. Gerlach Heileman was the second son of Sigbrecht Heileman, a sworn and spurred knight of the Order of the Red Shield, the bodyguard of Talabheim’s elector count. Once he had served his probation in the demilance company, Gerlach could expect to join his father and elder brother in that noble order. His half-armour matched those rich expectations. The panels were etched and worked to mimic the puffed and slashed cut of courtly velvet and damask, and his cuirass was in an elegant waistcoat style that fastened down the front.

Though outwardly similar, Karl Reiner Vollen’s half-armour was much plainer and more traditional. He could trace his lineage back to the nobility of Solland, but that heritage had been reduced to ashes in the war of 1707. Since then, dispossessed and penniless, his family had served as retainers to the household of their cousins – the Heilemans. Gerlach was two years Karl’s senior, but they had grown up within the same walls, schooled by the same tutors, trained by the same men-at-arms.

Yet a world of difference existed between them, and it was about to get much wider.

III

The pine dwellings of Choika-on-the-Lynsk bore roofs of grey aspen shingles that overlapped to give the appearance of scales. There had been a town here for a thousand years. This incarnation had stood for two centuries, since the razing of the previous version in the time of Magnus the Pious. Dry and old and dark, it would burn quickly when the hour came.

Vollen and Heileman walked under low gables into the gloomy hall that served as the town’s inn. Ingots of malachite were inlaid around the door posts, and the lintel was hung with charms, sprigs of herbs, and aged, wooden-soled ice skates.

Under its roof of smoke-blacked tie-beams, the hall was dark. The compressed earth floor was strewn with dirty rushes, and there was an ill-matched variety of benches, stools and trestles placed about. Wood smoke fouled the close air, and twisted in the light cast by the window slits. Vollen could smell spices and spit-meat, vinegar and hops. Heileman couldn’t smell anything that didn’t offend his nose.

Three long-bearded old men, grouped around a painted table, looked up from the thimble cups of samogon they were warming in arthritic hands. Their hooded eyes were deep-set in their crinkled faces, and utterly noncommittal.

‘Hail and met, fathers,’ said Heileman, perfunctorily. ‘Where is the inn host?’

The eyes continued to twinkle without blinking.

‘I said, fathers, the inn host? Where is the inn host?’

There was no reply, nor any sense that they had even heard his words.

Heileman mimed supping a drink and rubbing his belly.

Karl Reiner Vollen turned away. He had little time for Gerlach Heileman’s arrogance, or his condescending pantomimes. He saw a huge broadsword hanging on the wall and looked at that instead. Its blade was mottled with rust. It was a Kislev weapon, a double-edged longsword of the Gospodar, deep-fullered and heavy-quilloned. A shashka, he believed they were called.

‘What is you here?’ asked a deep voice. Vollen turned back, expecting a man, but saw instead a heavy, sallow woman who had emerged from the back room, hugging a round-tipped serving knife to her streaked apron. Her eyes were permanently narrowed to slits by the ample flesh of her face. She stared at Gerlach.

‘Food? Drink?’ Gerlach said.

‘Is no of food, is no of drink,’ she told him.

‘I can smell it,’ he insisted.

She shrugged, humping up the slopes of her thick shoulders under her shawl.

‘Is wood burns.’

‘You miserable old mare!’ snapped Gerlach. He tore a kid-skin pouch from his belt and emptied it onto the floor. Silver Empire coins bounced and skittered in the dirty rushes. ‘I’ve sixty-two hungry, thirsty men out there! Sixty-two! And there’s not a wretch in this ditch-town fit to clean the boots of any of them!’

‘Gerlach…’ Vollen said.

‘Get off, Karl!’ A blush was rising in Heileman’s neck, the sign of his ugly temper. He closed on the flabby woman, then suddenly stooped and snatched up a coin. Holding it between finger and thumb, he pushed it at her face.

‘See there? His Holy Majesty Karl Franz! On his orders we’ve come here, to take up arms and save this bloody backwater! You’d think you’d be grateful! You’d think you’d be happy to feed us and keep us warm so we might be fit and ready to guard your souls! I don’t know why we didn’t just leave you to burn!’

The woman surprised Gerlach. She didn’t recoil. She lunged at him, slapping the coin out of his hand so hard it pinged away across the inn. She shouted a stream of curses into his face; a torrential proclamation in the harsh language of Kislev.

As she did so, she waved the serving knife expressively.

Gerlach Heileman backed away a step. He reached for his dagger.

Vollen interposed himself between them. ‘Enough!’ he snapped at Gerlach, pushing him backwards with one hand. ‘Enough, mother!’ he added, waving at her to calm down.

Gerlach walked away with a dismissive oath, and Vollen turned squarely to face the woman. He kept his hands raised and open to reassure her.

‘We need food and drink, and we will pay for both,’ he told her slowly.

‘Is no of food, is no of drink!’ she repeated.

‘No?’

‘Is gone all! Taked!’

She beckoned him with a rapid, snapping gesture and led him into a little side room where sacks of rye were piled up. There was a wooden coffer perched on the sacks. She lifted the lid and showed Vollen what was inside.

It was full to the brim with Empire coins. Enough to make the chests of most company paymasters look meagre.

She raked her fat fingers through the silver. ‘Taked!’ she repeated firmly.

‘Tell me how,’ he said.

IV

In the course of the previous week, seven Imperial units had passed through Choika. The first had been another company of demilancers, and from her description, they were the Jagers of Altdorf. The folk of Choika had welcomed them and seen to all their needs: meat, sup, bedding, fodder. They had welcomed all seventy of them like brothers.

Two days later, an infantry column of nine hundred men from Wissenland arrived – pikemen mostly, but a fair number of arquebusiers. On their heels, two hundred more pikes from Nordland, and a train of cannon from Nuln. That night, the population of Choika had almost doubled.

Barely had these gone when another infantry mass marched in. Archers, arquebusiers and halberdiers, wearing yellow and black, she said, so that probably meant Averland.

Then sixty great fellows from Carroburg, shouldering their massive hand-and-a-half swords like polearms. After them, nigh on fifteen hundred Imperial levies, who drank so much they almost rioted.

A day behind the levies, thirty Knights Panther. These were the most impressive, she admitted, tall and armoured like princes. They were courteous and deserved much respect but, by then, the novelty had worn off.

Choika had been wrung dry.

‘There’s barely enough food left to see the town until harvest,’ Vollen said. ‘Wave as much damn money as you like, there’s nothing to buy.’

They were standing out under the gables of the inn. Heileman turned slowly to face Vollen.

‘I smelt cooking. It was rank, but it was food.’

Vollen shook his head. ‘They’re cooking for the town. Pooling what they have left. Our advance has even taken most of their firewood. What you could smell was supper for the entire place, roasting over the one fire they can afford.’

‘We’ll take that, then,’ said Gerlach simply.

‘You want them to starve?’

‘If we starve, they’ll be dead. Burned and split and raped when the Northers come in, with us too empty-bellied to stop it.’

Vollen shrugged.

‘I’m not going to say anything to the captain, not this time,’ said Heileman.

‘What?’

‘In respect of our association. I won’t say anything.’

‘About what?’ Vollen asked.

Heileman’s eyes narrowed. ‘Damn you, Vollen! You showed me disrespect in there! I am vexillary! Second officer! No junior horse shows me up like that! You forget yourself, sometimes, and I’m man enough to appreciate why.’

Vollen reined himself in. He knew better than to push it. ‘I am honoured by your kinship, vexillary. I will mind my place.’

Heileman bit his lip and nodded, shifting away. ‘Good, Karl, that’s good. I’d hate for you to forget you’re only here because of me.’

Karl Reiner Vollen felt himself tense. It took considerable will to fight back the desire to swing for Gerlach Heileman. The conceited bastard…

Captain Stouer hallooed them from across the square. They walked together, over the cobbles, to rejoin him.

V

Handing over the reins of his gelding to one of the troop, Stouer watched as Heileman and Vollen approached him from the inn.

Stouer knew his vexillary looked forward to great things in his future. Heileman had the blood for it, after all, and the connections. Another summer or two and he would be a Knight of the Red Shield, or spurred to some other great order at least, part of an elector’s life company. He looked the part. Heavy set and over two spans tall, with fair hair shaved short and a trimmed beard that grew white-blond. Noble of bearing and hazel-eyed, he had exactly the frame you expected to see filling a full suit of silver-steel plate, exactly the face you hoped to find behind the close-helm’s visor.

The clarion, though. Ahh, Vollen. Like Heileman, a gifted horseman, and just as tenacious. But his future was not so bright. It was all down to blood. Vollen didn’t have the lineage, or the connections. He might make captain of a state troop eventually, but that was about it. But for the recommendation of Herr Sigbrecht Heileman, Vollen wouldn’t even have got a position in the demilancer company.

Vollen was a head shorter than Gerlach Heileman, and as dark as Heileman was fair. He was clean-shaven, like a boy, and his jaw jutted forward pugnaciously. His eyes were as blue as a summer sky. He was the most learned soldier Stouer had ever had the pleasure of commanding. Even the most noble-born sons riding in the horse troop were only partially literate, and Stouer had never had much of letters himself. Vollen had studied hard under his tutors and it showed. It was probably an effort to compensate for his lack of status.

‘Say it as it is,’ he instructed as they came up.

‘There’s no victuals here, captain,’ Heileman replied. ‘The town’s been picked bare by the companies that have preceded us. They have some food cooking, but it’s the last dredgings of their larders. We should look to our own supplies rather than deprive these people.’

Stouer nodded.

‘Karl was all for taking the food by force, but I think we owe it to these kind folk to be respectful.’

Stouer glanced at Vollen.

‘That true?’

The clarion stiffened, and looked like he wanted to spit. He said simply, ‘My appetite got the better of me, captain. The vexillary is right.’

Stouer scratched an ear. He knew full well there was more to it than that, but he wasn’t really interested. There was never any sense pampering soldiers. If what he’d been told at the Vatzl garrison was true, there were hard times ahead for all of them. Stouer had seen service in the oblast before, five summers previously. It was a hard country, more brutal in climate than any part of the Empire, and it seemed to go on forever. The people were by turns dour and hearty, though he’d never had much time for any of them. Their great, harsh territory, only partly conquered by civilisation, formed a natural buffer between the Empire and the Northern Wastes. He’d heard Kislev men state emphatically that they were the true protectors of the North, keeping the Empire’s border secure. That was nonsense, of course. The Empire had the greatest army in the world, and when it moved north in times of invasion-threat, as now, it usually ended up saving the skins of the Kislevites too. But for the grace of Sigmar they held this land, and but for the army of the Emperor they would lose it.

And now the Northern tribes were rising again. Rising as never before. Thick and dark, like ants upon the tundra, spilling south. There had been omens, prophecies, signs. Even if the threat was exaggerated, it was going to be a hard year. Stouer had certainly never known the Imperial army to dispose a force of this size into the north, nor bind itself to so many allies. Bretonnian heavy horse, trained bands from Tilea, and from the damnable Old Races too. Everyone was taking this seriously.

The captain walked over to his saddlebags and took out a scroll-case. ‘Karl! Your eye, please!’ he said. Gerlach and the clarion were still regarding each other poisonously, and Stouer knew they needed a distraction or two. Like siblings, the pair of them. Constantly locking horns.

Stouer opened the case and unrolled a small chart. ‘This is Choika, yes?’

Vollen examined the map and nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Here, the river. The crossing, here.’ Stouer traced lines with his fingertip in a general way. It was all inky scratches to him, but he didn’t want to betray his lack of learning.

‘This is the Lynsk,’ Vollen said, pointing. He was well aware of the captain’s lack of letters, and knew that Stouer often used him as a clerk. ‘Here’s the crossing. About a league upstream.’

The captain studied the map and nodded sagely as if it made perfect sense. ‘Our orders are to join up with Marshal Neiber and the Wissenland pike north of the crossing by noon tomorrow. At a place called Zhedevka. Now then, Zhedevka… Zhedevka…’

‘There, sir,’ Vollen pointed.

Stouer straightened up and took a deep, thoughtful breath. ‘Still a few hours of light left. Gerlach, take three horse and scout the crossing. See what you can see. And be back by nightfall.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Heileman said. He pulled on his rein-worn gloves. ‘Sebold? Johann? You too, Karl.’

Stouer bristled slightly. His intention had been to keep Gerlach and the boy apart and occupied. What the hell! If they were busy, they couldn’t fight each other.

VI

Fields of unripe barley and rye stretched out from the trackway east of the town, and to the north, jumbled marshes and thickets of bulrushes clustered in the sodden flood plain of the river. The sky had clouded over and turned a peculiar, flat shade of white, though it was still bright. Where the track ran beside the river, damsel flies darted through the air, bright and exquisite as living jewellery.

Their lances slung secure in saddle-boots, the four demilancers hacked up the river trail and broke into a gallop where the track widened. All had their stirrups cinched short, as per regulations, so that when they rose, heads lowered for the chase, there was a good hand’s breadth between them and their saddles. Gerlach led the way on his big grey, a seventeen hand three-year old called Saksen. The companies favoured young horses for their spirit and energy, though they could be skittish and difficult, and Saksen was unruly at the best of times.

Vollen came behind, alongside Sebold Truchs, a long-faced man who, at twenty-nine, was about the oldest trooper in the company besides the captain himself. Truchs was considered something of a veteran, and the younger men looked to him because of his experience. He rode a big chestnut gelding with a star on its brow. Vollen’s mount, Gan, was a black of sixteen hands with a ferocious spirit, but more even tempered than Gerlach’s grey.

Johann Friedel rode at the back of the group. He was nineteen years old, the third son of a merchant baronet, and as boisterous as his young black troop horse. For all of them except Truchs, this was their first experience of war. Real war. Their careers thus far had been spent in training and cavalry schooling, manoeuvres and ceremonial duties. They were all eager and scared in equal measure, but they showed only their eagerness.

Truchs had seen action four times: two border disputes and two scourge campaigns against the bestial filth in the Drakwald Forest. His colourful stories were numerous and, to be fair, contradictory. For though he had seen action, as the phrase went, he hadn’t actually seen much action. A shield wall, at a distance, through the rain. A border town shelled by Imperial cannon, from the vantage of a windy hill three leagues away. An aborted charge and rally into what turned out to be an empty wood. And four dead bodies in a dry field outside Wurschen, terribly split and twisted by sword cuts. That was an image that still woke him some nights.

But still, his stories were good, all the better for the constant embroidery. And whatever he had done or had not done, it was more than any trooper in the company – except the captain, who had been in a real war once. Sebold Truchs would have been quite content not to have ridden north that summer, preferring to linger in the spartan enclosure of the Cavalry School at Talabheim, training and drilling and practising.

For there was one thing he knew for certain about this deployment to the bitter north: there was a real war waiting there for all of them, and their days of monotonous practice were gone forever.

The river was fast and high from the spring melt. Its headlong rush sounded like jingling coins. The track following it bent north in a long, slow curve. They came to the crossing: a broad timber bridge raised out of the water on five stone piers. Gerlach didn’t break stride. He just nosed his grey on, and pounded across the boards, spitting sideways from the saddle to avert the ill fortune of iron hooves on wood.

The other three did the same, though Vollen merely did it out of custom. Gerlach’s spittle, flying back in the slipstream, spattered across Vollen’s cuirass. The vexillary could have aimed his mouth aside, but he hadn’t bothered. Vollen said nothing and wiped it off.

They came off the bridge into the reeded banks of the north side, standing upright in the stirrups to urge their steeds up the sodden slope. Open grassland lay before them, wide and flat, vaster than any landscape Vollen had ever seen. Under the flat, white sky, it looked like a grey sea, the stalks rippling in the wind like waves. To the north-west, several leagues away, the horizon swelled up in a great mound, a curve rising proud of the grass like a pregnant bulge.

Gerlach reined in, and paced his excited, snorting mount. The others drew up behind him.

‘Zhedevka? Over there?’ he asked.

‘It lies on the grasslands near a mound of the Old People,’ Vollen said. ‘So… yes, I’d say.’

‘Old People?’ Johann Friedel called out. ‘You mean… the Slight Ones?’

He meant elves. Just say it, Karl Reiner Vollen thought. In this modern age, it was preposterous for a man to be coy about saying a simple word. Mentioning them by name was said to bring bad luck. And men still believed that, damn them for fools.

‘Not elves,’ Vollen said, and Johann jumped in his saddle at the word. ‘The Scythians, the horse warriors of old. The Gospodars – and therefore the Kislevites – trace their ancestry back to them. They ruled here once, before Sainted Sigmar came. These lands were theirs. They built the towns whose ruins are said to haunt the Steppes. They raised the kurgans.’

‘The kurgans?’ Truchs said with alarm.

‘That’s a kurgan,’ Vollen said mildly, pointing to the distant mound.

‘Where? Where, damn it?’ Truchs turned his horse in an agitated circle.

‘Be still!’ Gerlach snapped. ‘Karl’s playing with you. Using his damned education again, eh, Karl?’

The clarion sat back against his saddle rest and shrugged.

Even the most poorly schooled son of the Empire knew the word kurgan. It was the name of the bogeyman, the term for the dark tribes who lurked in the north under the Shadow. Kurgans were the very monsters they had come there to fight.

‘A kurgan,’ said Vollen, ‘is a man-made hill, a burial mound from the early times. The vile tribes of the North are known by the term. Presumably…’ he smiled, ‘presumably because they want to hide the bones of all of us in the south under similar hills.’

Truchs touched the iron of his sword-hilt to ward against evil charms, and spat again. There was too much loose talk and bad luck in the air for his liking.

They rode north-west at a hard lick, Friedel just in the lead now. The cold wind was fierce in their faces and made them breathless.

As they got nearer to the mound – and realised just how huge it truly was – Johann Friedel pulled up sharply and called out a warning.

There were riders on the track ahead of them. A dozen horsemen emerged from the long grasses, silent and slow. Their horses were small, rangy mares, brown and bay, little more than ponies, with full, heavy tails and shaggy manes. The men were swaddled in cloaks, furs and blankets. Barbarian riders, there could be no doubt.

Gerlach slowed to a trot and moved to the fore. The shabby riders halted their horses and watched them approach, unmoving. Gerlach Heileman suddenly felt vital and proud of his gleaming armour and his sleek charger with its braided mane and docked, bound-up tail.

He stood in the stirrups again as Saksen pulled slow, glancing back past his shoulders at his outriders.

‘What do we do? What do we do?’ gabbled Johann.

‘Hail them, vexillary,’ advised Vollen.

‘Hail them? Look at them, Karl! They’re Northers! Raiders! Why should I hail them?’ Gerlach unclasped the pistol holsters on his saddle-bow, and quickly cocked the firelocks of the ready-primed pieces. Then he drew his cavalry sword. It was a basket-hilted weapon with a straight, double-edged blade a span long. It had two deep fuller grooves down the length of the blade, and its tip was pointed like a spear. It was made for thrusting, as outlined by regulations.

‘No,’ said Vollen quickly, in disbelief. ‘Oh no… vexillary…’

‘Rise in the saddle to address!’ Gerlach called out. Truchs and Friedel fell into step with him, and walked their horses forward, their sword blades resting upright against their right arms. Ahead of them, the riders remained motionless.

Vollen lagged behind, his sword still in its scabbard. Gerlach, Truchs and Friedel increased their pace to a brisk trot, their sword-hands now steadied on their right thighs with the sword points inclined slightly forward.

‘Gerlach!’ Vollen shouted.

‘Get into line, clarion!’ Heileman yelled back. ‘Damn you! Get into formation or the captain will hear about this!’

The brisk trot was turning into a gallop. They were less than eighty lengths from the stationary horsemen.

‘Present and charge!’ Heileman howled. Three sword arms lifted, the swords pointed towards the enemy and carried crosswise to each rider’s head.

The shabby horsemen stirred. Their horses wheeled around and there was a dull flash in the flat light as sabres were uncased and flourished.

Vollen tore his bugle out of its case and blew hard. A quadrille. Short-long-long-short. He did it again.

The three demilancers broke their gallop, swords waving, confused. The enemy horsemen spread wide, to either side of Gerlach’s abortive charge. One of them raised a bone horn and returned Vollen’s hoot.

Vollen spurred Gan forward and rode up to position himself face to face with the heathen men. Gerlach, Friedel and Truchs were riding out in a wide turn to come around.

The warriors were caked in mud and dirt, and Vollen could smell the sweat and soil of both horses and riders without trying. They sheathed their thin, curved blades and closed around him, curious. Raw, mustachioed faces glared at him from the folds of furs and grease-heavy cloaks.

‘Imperial?’ asked one. He was a big man whose bulk seemed to be crushing his ragged pony. His front teeth were missing.

‘Yes,’ nodded Vollen. ‘The Second Company Hipparchia Demilance, ridden out of Talabheim. Hail and met.’

‘You? You is leader of men?’ pressed the toothless giant.

‘No,’ said Vollen. ‘I’m clarion.’

‘Klaaryen?’

Vollen gestured with his bugle.

Gerlach and the other demilancers galloped up and reined hard to stop. The cluster of filthy steppe riders broke to let them through.

‘What the devil are you doing, Vollen?’ Gerlach roared.

‘Vexillary Heileman, may I present…’ Vollen looked expectantly at the gap-toothed brute on the shaggy pony.

The big Kislevite pursed his lips and then said, ‘Beledni, rotamaster, of rota of Yetchitch krug, of Blindt voisko, of Sanyza pulk, of Gospodarinyi, syet Kislevi.’

‘They’re on our side,’ Vollen said to the vexillary, as if it wasn’t clear enough. ‘They’re Kislevite lancers. Allies.’

‘El-ays, yha!’ the Kislevite leader of horse cried, and bowed low in his worn saddle to Gerlach, doffing his fur hat. His head was entirely shaved except for a long, braided top-knot and his drooping moustache. His men called out, and rattled the staves of their lances together. Each one had three spears slung in long canvas boots against the fore of their saddles: two short, slim javelins with long, sharp tips and one long pole, thicker and tipped with a narrow blade and a crossbar.

‘These heathens?’ asked Gerlach, incredulously.

‘Heeth-eyns?’ Beledni echoed, looking at Vollen for clarification.

‘We show only respect,’ said Vollen, slowly and carefully. Beledni thought about this and then nodded heavily.

Gerlach spat contemptuously. ‘They don’t even talk our tongue,’ he said.

‘Yurr tung?’ said Beledni.

‘They speak our tongue better than you speak theirs,’ Vollen ventured.

Gerlach glared at him. ‘Apologise,’ he said.

‘Apologise?’ Vollen repeated.

‘Yes, dammit! For our mistaken attack.’

Vollen paused. Unblinking, he returned Gerlach’s gaze for a moment. ‘You ask a lot of me, sometimes.’

‘Are you refusing?’ the vexillary asked. His face was flushed.

‘Of course not,’ Vollen replied. He took a breath and looked across at Beledni. The big man and his riders had been trying to follow the exchange between Vollen and Gerlach.

‘Rotamaster, we are most sorry for our mistaken challenge, and uh…’

Beledni used the tassels of his riding crop to chase away a marsh fly that was buzzing around his face and made an odd little gesture with his other hand. It was a dismissive slight turn of the wrist as if he was spilling out a handful of corn. ‘Is of no matter,’ he added with a careless, almost theatrical frown.

‘We meant no disrespect, sir…’

The gesture again, the down-turned corners of the mouth. ‘Is of no matter,’ Beledni said once more, and walked his shabby little horse ahead a few steps so that he drew level with Vollen. Beledni patted him on the arm, an informal, avuncular action. ‘We will all live,’ he said sagely. Then he leaned forward, his lips to Vollen’s ear, so close Vollen was assailed by the smell of body sweat and rank breath. ‘Vebla?’ he said, and indicated Gerlach with his crop.

‘Vebla, yha?’

Some of the Kislevite riders heard this, and snorted out chuckles.

‘What did he say?’ asked Gerlach sharply.

‘I don’t know, vexillary. I don’t know the word.’

Heileman sat back against his saddle rest. He was annoyed. They were laughing at him, these heathens. Making him the butt of some crude joke.

He’d heard many stories of Kislev lancers, stories that described them as triumphant, spectacular, armoured in finery and feathers, masters of horse, as magnificent as Imperial knights. Someone had once told him that the lancers often scared their enemies from the field by the sheer splendour of their wargear, which attested to their prowess by all the riches they had won.

Not these dogs. It seemed that every story about the North was a lie. There was no magnificence in its landscape or its people, and their famous lancers were positively squalid.

‘Zhedevka,’ he said to Vollen. ‘Just ask him where Zhedevka is.’

VII

Without comment or ceremony, Beledni’s little troop of lancers led them another league north until the great kurgan was behind them. Zhedevka lay on the plains behind it, looking out across undulating grasslands and the distant shadow of a forest. Small patches of woodland dotted the landscape around the town.

It had ceased to be much of a town at all, now the Imperial army had arrived. Acres of tents and pot fires, great assemblies of pikes and halberds, musters of horse. In the fields north of the town, cannons had been drawn up behind sod-built palisades and wicker gabions, and stakes had been driven into the earth, facing the forest.

A fine drizzle came down from the east, pattering against their armour. The Kislevites drew their matted furs tighter. They rode into the town.

Gerlach tried to estimate the numbers there. He counted at least fifteen standards, all Imperial, as well as artillery banneroles, and colours flown by two sections of Tilean foot. That meant, even at a conservative estimate, six thousand men-at-arms.

This was what an army should look like, Gerlach thought. This was Imperial might. Combined with other forces that were now assembling along the Lynsk, they would scour the North and turn the rising darkness back.

As they rode down the muddy, tracked-up thoroughfare, he felt unashamedly proud. Here were marching halberdiers in clean, brightly coloured tunics: blue, red, gold and white. There, pikemen with spotless surcoats and glittering steel sallets. A cantering file of demilancers from another unit, cockades and banners rippling as they came past. Fork-bearded men in gaudy velvet puff-breeches and polished hauberks, sweeping whetstones along the white-steel blades of great swords. Pipers, fifers, drummers and horn blowers, the daylight gleaming off kettledrums and the long trumpets of field clarions. Archers in leather caps and long shirts, drilling with yew longbows against straw targets.

At a crossroads, they reined up as six Knights Panther rode by, followed by their squires and lance carriers. Huge destrier chargers, with shaggy feathering on their mighty hooves, were dressed in embroidered caparisons of purple, lilac and gold, their riders giants in full plate, leopard skins draped over their shoulders. Now that was glory and splendour.

Gerlach was annoyed to see Beledni and his men didn’t seem at all impressed. Some of them even sneered at the gigantic knights. The only thing that seemed to take their interest was a crude wooden standard, a shield on the top of a ragged pole, hung with a red and white snake of banner cloth. The severed wing of an eagle was nailed, spread out on the shield front. This standard marked a field where the levies of the Kislev confederates were camped. More filthy men in furs, their dirty ponies wandering loose between their stretched hide tents. No discipline, no order, no sign of any pride.

Beledni gave a half-hearted wave, more to Vollen than the other demilancers, and turned his riders away towards the Kislev muster.

Glad to be rid of them, Gerlach rode on to the town hall, or the zal as it was called. It had a shingled roof shaped like an onion, and was the tallest structure in Zhedevka.

Marshal Neiber had made his quarters here.

Gerlach left Friedel and Truchs outside with the horses, and brought Vollen in with him as his escort. Neiber’s trabanten of six swordsmen, two drummers and two fifers sat listlessly in the outer atrium of the zal, passing a bottle between them. They were all richly dressed in extravagant silk pludderhosen, broad hats puffed with heron feathers, doublets artfully slashed to reveal the conspicuous damask linings. None of them gave the two marching demilancers more than a passing look as they went by.

Neiber, field marshal of the entire host, was a heavy, sagging man with a bulging face that had been scored in early life by a duelling scar. His beard was square-cut and fierce. The field marshal’s well-fed weight seemed to bow him down, and it was helped by the wine he had been drinking. A large fire had been banked up in an open grate, and the demilancers could smell poultry fat and onions.

Neiber was sipping wine out of a tiny thimble glass that he refilled regularly. The glass was from an expensive gentleman’s travelling case that lay open on a side table, its leather straps draped open to reveal the satin-lined caskets that held the glasses. The case had a drawer for silver cutlery that was engraved with his heraldic crest. It was etched on the glasses too.

‘Who the shit are you?’ Neiber asked bluntly as they came up and saluted, their helmets tucked under their left arms.

‘Second Company Hipparchia Demilance, ridden out of Talabheim, sir,’ said Gerlach.

‘Schott! Schott? Where are you, you noxious little leper?’

A short, balding man appeared, with an attitude that reminded Vollen of a mule that had been beaten once too often. He was wearing the doublet and surcoat of a staff aide.

‘Here I am, my marshal.’

‘Where the shit were you hiding?’

‘I was supervising your dinner. As instructed.’

‘Shut the shit up.’ Neiber sat down on a low-backed chair by the grate and aimed the soles of his feet alternately at the fire. He was wrapped in a fur coat and damp hose clung to his feet and legs. The baton of his rank lay across his lap.

‘Are my boots dry?’ he rasped, swigging his drink and holding it out for a refill. Schott hurried to oblige.

‘I’m working on that, my marshal,’ the man answered as he poured.

‘Second Company Hippos… demilancers… what the shit was it again?’

‘Second Company Hipparchia Demilance, sir,’ Gerlach repeated.

‘That’s it. Who’s their commander, Schott?’

Schott crossed over to the mass of log books, patents of muster and orders of battle laid out on a nearby bench.

‘Are you the commander?’ Neiber asked, squinting at Gerlach and pointing the baton at him.

‘No, sir. I’m vexillary, sir.’

‘Well, where the bloody shit is your commander?’

‘Stouer, my marshal,’ Schott called out.

‘Where’s Stouer? Where the bloody shit is Stouer?’

‘With the company, at Choika, sir.’

Neiber belched and got up. His baton fell on the floor and rolled under his chair. ‘Not here?’

‘No, sir.’

‘What the hell’s the point of them being at Choika? I mean, what the shitting hell is the point of that? There’s no war down there!’

‘We… we were ordered to report here to you by noon tomorrow, sir. The captain sent me ahead to make contact.’

‘Did he? Did he indeed? Stupid arse. Refill!’ Neiber waved his glass. Schott was still busy with records and patents.

‘Refill! You, boy!’ Neiber looked at Vollen. ‘Get the bloody bottle!’

Vollen started forward, took the bottle from the side table, and refilled Neiber’s glass.

Neiber emptied it. ‘And another, while you’re still hanging around like a spent fart.’

Vollen did as he was told.

Neiber looked at Gerlach. ‘There’s all kinds of shit in the forest out there, did you know that?’ he remarked suddenly.

‘No, sir.’

‘All kinds of shit. I know that from the scouts I sent out.’ Neiber tapped the side of his nose with his finger. It took a moment, as he missed the first time. ‘Not all of them, mind. I sent out fifty and got five back. Five! Shit me out Sigmar, five! The foe is right on us. A day’s ride from here, there’s a horde of the heathen scum mustering in the woodland. And they’ll be coming. Soon, mind you. Coming for us all. Boy!’

Vollen was already there with the bottle. Neiber drank, licked his lips, and sat down again. He looked tired and his voice dropped. ‘All kinds of shit’s coming. Bigger and harder and wilder than any of the idiots back south realise. They’re meant to be over a fortnight away, but no. Oh no, no, no.’ Neiber snorted hard and spat phlegm into the fire. He glanced at Gerlach. ‘So having your company sat on their arses in Choika is no use to me. This Stouer must be a particularly stupid shit. Get back on your horse and go and tell him I said so. And tell him he better be here by dawn, or I’ll ram a cannon up his arse and light the powder-touch myself.’

‘Sir.’

‘Where are my boots, Schott?’ Neiber roared.

‘Still drying out, my marshal.’

‘You useless shit! I ought to have you shot. Hah! Ha ha! Shot! Have Schott shot! Ha ha ha!’

‘Your wit is truly formidable, my marshal,’ said Schott.

‘Yeah, well shit on you too!’ Neiber spat and threw his glass at the aide.

‘You can go now,’ Schott told Gerlach and Vollen, shooing them on out.

‘Refill! Schott! Get me a refill! And… and another bloody glass!’

‘Yes, my marshal.’

VIII

Outside it was getting dark, earlier and faster than they had anticipated. Braziers had been lit all across the camp, flickering like earthbound stars in the twilight. As they rejoined Friedel and Truchs, Gerlach and Karl could hear camp songs being sung.

‘Vexillary!’

Schott called them back to the porch of the zal. He held out a wax-sealed parchment to Gerlach.

‘Tell your captain to advance and join us with all speed. Your company is to take order in the right wing. I’ve marked the place on this plan. The water meadows east of the town, to ride in support of the Sanyza pulk.’

‘The who?’

‘The marshal wants strong demilance companies interlaced with the local regiments.’

‘The Kislevites? Very well,’ said Gerlach, not liking it at all.

‘Move up and take position. With all haste as you can. Then have your captain report to the marshal here. We’re not expecting a fight for at least three days, but get yourselves up and ready.’

‘We’ll ride directly,’ said Gerlach. He paused. ‘The marshal… is he all right?’

‘He’s drunk,’ said Schott, matter-of-factly.

‘Is that… usual?’

‘No,’ said the aide. ‘He’s drunk because he’s scared. He has a good idea what’s coming.’

‘It can’t be that bad–’

‘Can’t it? Have you fought a border war before, vexillary?’

‘No.’

‘Then, to be frank, you don’t know what the shit you’re talking about.’

IX

They rode south in the gathering darkness, the Imperial drums beating behind them in the camp at Zhedevka. Night was falling, sheathed in heavy rain. Over the receding tattoo of the Imperial drums, Karl Reiner Vollen thought he heard another drumming.

Darker, deeper, slower, throbbing from the forest.

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