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On the Shoulders of Giants and Other Stories – Extract

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1

The orruks had come before dawn, unable to resist the lure of a human force camped at the edge of their swamp, but too smart to form up within cannon range and wave their spears. Of the various orruk breeds he and Slobda had fought in their long career, Rosforth reckoned this clever type were his least favourite. Nasty and gangly, and with all sorts of swamp monsters under the whip. Not that it had done them much good in the end.

Now, mid-morning, Slobda stomped through the detritus of the battle. The orruks had been scythed down by Fusiliers. Their hulking, howling beasts had met the thunder of the Ironweld cannons. They had broken against the wall of Steelhelm shields. Their sorcerer, a hunched thing wearing a giant’s skull as armour, had been Rosforth’s own kill, a single clean shot over the heads of both armies. He’d tried looking for the body amongst all the others, but the massed tangle of dead limbs and broken spears made for grim viewing and he lost the stomach for it quickly enough.

Lost enough of me already. Can’t be leaving my stomach behind or soon enough there’ll be nothing left.

Slobda’s stomach was fine, needless to say. Every so often she stopped when something caught her eye. Bent down to snatch up a prize from the field, a very specific sort of looting. Bent with the knees, not the back. And in the first few months of their association, Rosforth and Slobda had exchanged some heated language on that subject, but these days it was second nature to her. Which meant that, these days, Rosforth didn’t end up dangling from his crow’s nest rail in front of her nose, like a tassel on an over-elaborate hat.

Riding an ogor war-hulk into battle hadn’t been his first choice of career. The younger Rosforth, the kid who’d taken the Coin Malleus with a zealous fire in his eyes – he’d lived for the big guns. More for the roar and the stink of burned powder than holy duty to Sigmar, honestly. He’d just been a poor smith’s son – one of the Reclaimed whose kin had clung on in the realms through generations of upheaval – but ever since he’d heard those heavy pieces fired in his home city’s defence, he’d known how he’d wanted to spend his days.

A bright lad, a quick study, a good hand with the instruments, to calculate elevation and trajectory, or even just by eye in the heat of the fray. From powder squire to apprentice cannoneer to commanding his own Ironweld gun. Bringing the inarguable truth of Sigmar with lead and fire.

It had all gone wrong, of course. The fire, the blast, the weird shrieking cackle of the flaming thing that had grappled itself to the forward shield of his gun, too many too-long arms reaching over and around, limned with green blaze. A single moment, one he still dreamt about. The bitter dreams where he still had his legs.

‘Yer thinkin’,’ Slobda observed. There was a loose-jointed thing in her huge hands, flopping and jiggling as she picked at its plate-and-rope armour, trying to unshell it.

‘I am that,’ Rosforth agreed, leaning on his rail. At least these days he had a better view of the field. Between having your feet on the ground and the Ironweld’s massive pavise, you never could quite see what was going on. Had to rely on the orders from your marshal, which was all very well when you could trust their judgement. In his new role, the niche he’d cut for himself since he and Slobda had become a team, the only servants of Sigmar who saw further than he had wings to carry them.

‘Bad ’abit.’ Slobda lifted the body, got her spade-like teeth into the armour and ripped it away. Ate it, too, crunching on the metal, grinding it with the implacable knowledge that orruk metal would give before ogor teeth did. She picked a few strands of rope from her gums, then plucked something from the corpse’s belt. ‘Oho.’

‘Now you be careful with that,’ Rosforth warned her, leaning over the rail a little. At first, he’d felt the clutch of vertigo, up in his little one-man castle. A crow’s nest on an iron-reinforced pole secured to the back of a theoretically consenting ogor. Enough to make anyone queasy. Now, the view down was second nature. A reminder of the silver linings that his losses had brought him.

‘Seasonin’.’ Slobda had one of the little explosives the orruks’ hobgrot allies liked to throw around. With a twist of thumb and forefinger she cracked it open and sprinkled the contents on the mangled body.

There were others from the winning army going over the battlefield nearby. In the midst of where the shield wall had stood, a team of engineers was working with professional patience to replace the wheel of an Ironweld cannon, one sparing a moment to wave as Slobda ambled past. Around them all was a wide net of soldiers bending to examine the strand-lines of the fallen. Not looting, but recovering the human dead for the proper rites, to commend their souls to Sigmar and their place on the wheel, to honour their memories. And to recover everything salvageable, because every piece of the army’s equipment was some crafter’s own devotion to the cause. Everything wasted was an insult to its maker. No hammer nor blade nor helmet that could be mended was left behind.

They looked sidelong at Slobda. Oh, the veterans back in the ranks were used to ogors – their habits, and how they took their ‘bonus pay’, as they said. Anyone getting sent out on body detail was de facto younger and greener. Plenty of horrified expressions when Slobda thrust the duly salted body whole into her gaping maw and began chewing.

It had been worse in the early days, Rosforth recalled. Back when Slobda had been new to the idea of working with humans, and hadn’t been all that picky about which side’s dead were furnishing her table. But she’d learned. Let nobody tell you ogors couldn’t. He wasn’t going to swear to the comet that she’d never tasted human flesh these ten years, but she’d at least learned to do it out of the sight of her comrades.

‘Picky lot, ain’tcha,’ she’d said on the subject back then. Said it philosophically, even – let nobody tell you ogors couldn’t be philosophers! The younger Rosforth of that time had told her, outraged, that she’d hardly have taken a bite out of her own kin, if some other ogor had fallen beside her. And Slobda had stared up at him, head tilted all the way back so she could see his inverted expression bent over the rail. She’d stared, eyes bulging from that great meat-slab of a face, the bulbous, broken nose, the warts, the creases. Let nobody tell you that you can’t shock an ogor! And suggesting that they wouldn’t eat their own was, apparently, how you did it.

‘Spicy,’ she said now. He heard bones crunch and splinter. In the echo of it, a thin voice was hailing him.

‘Rosforth! I say, fusil-major! I have an order for you!’

Slobda made a big show of looking left and right, a vast burlesque of puzzlement. And she was playing it up, for sure. The thin voice belonged to a thin youth, the Relic Envoy to Freeguild Marshal Loucher. Slobda didn’t like him because he was thin, and Rosforth didn’t like him because, at sixteen – less than one-third Rosforth’s own years – the kid considered himself the sum total of Sigmar’s wisdom on how battles should be fought.

The envoy took a couple of hurried backsteps as Slobda turned around. She’d hooked her enormous shield to the stanchion of Rosforth’s crow’s nest, but now she unshipped it and planted it in the bloodied dirt, looking over its crenellated edge as though the kid was about to lay a one-man siege to her position.

‘Wossit?’ she asked.

‘I-I have orders. For Fusil-Major Rosforth,’ the boy stammered out. He had to look up at Slobda. He had to look even further up at Rosforth, and that greater up was past the intimidating buttress of Slobda’s leer. He managed it, but only just. ‘The marshal demands your attendance, fusil-major.’

That didn’t bode well. It had been coming for a while, ever since Rosforth’s company had been slotted into Loucher’s hierarchy. The man had certain preferences and prejudices.

Rosforth had been a tall man, once. Seen from up on his perch, he still had the look of it: a long face made longer by drooping moustaches and a forehead that his hair had been resolutely marching back from in good order for years. Lines of pain and experience – and a little laughter, too; let nobody tell you it’s all bad. A beak of a nose. Long arms that could still hold the fusil steady as iron as he squinted down it, years be damned. He’d killed generals and Chaos magicians and put a blessed bullet through the skull of a vampire lord at extreme range, and all while pitching about above Slobda’s shoulders as she laid about herself with her mace. Put him where he belonged, he was the tallest man in the army.

Marshal Loucher had a condition of the neck, however, that didn’t let him look up at people. In fact, his neck was most eased when he could sit atop his majestic horse, Vilfreyd, and look down on his subordinates. By the time Slobda lumbered up, he already had quite a selection of them arrayed before him. Rosforth looked over the usual suspects – some old guard from his own company, some from elsewhere in the army. Names that came to him, because the names of troublemakers always did.

Three companies of troops were arrayed in parade-ground order at Loucher’s back, because the man did love an audience when he was about to pontificate. Given the sourness of the marshal’s customary expression, being at his back was infinitely preferable to standing in the gap they’d left for Slobda, alongside the other problem cases.

‘Got a bad feeling about this,’ Rosforth said to Slobda.

She shrugged. She had a way of doing it that just rocked him slightly, rather than pitching him all over. Whatever was going on here didn’t have much to do with eating, unless one of these reprobates was about to get sentenced to a truly unorthodox punishment. Hence, she wasn’t interested.

‘Good of you to join us. I trust we didn’t cut short your mount’s breakfast,’ Loucher said sourly.

‘I’m sure there’ll still be seconds when we’re done, sir,’ Rosforth said. He could feel the approach of bad news like an army. Nothing to do about it save brace for the charge.

‘Get down here,’ Loucher told him. ‘And get your beast to sit.’ Because, even mounted, his eyeline was around Slobda’s chin.

Rosforth gritted his teeth, but then Slobda said, ‘Feets got tired anyways,’ and lumped herself down beside the others. One huge hand went up, feeling about the rail of the crow’s nest until Rosforth had hold of it with both arms. She lifted him down; no great feat for ogor strength. Set him on her knee like a child, and there had been a time he’d found that infuriating, humiliating. Now he leant back into the curved plates over her gut, finding that particular angle that was most comfortable. Met Loucher’s stare, seeing the marshal’s instinctive discomfort at a soldier who was less than whole, yet still deployed to the front lines. The neatly pinned cloth just past Rosforth’s hips, the stumps decorated with a handful of lucky medals and pins.

‘You had word for us, sir,’ Rosforth prompted when the stare became uncomfortable. Loucher had a scar. A thin line where some enemy spear or arrow had come close to taking his eye out. The man covered it over with powder and tried to pretend it didn’t exist. His idea of what a stalwart soldier of Sigmar looked like had all its body parts accounted for.

‘This sort of indiscipline,’ Loucher announced to the air, ‘is precisely the problem.’ He didn’t specify what sort of indiscipline or, indeed, which problem. Presumably both qualities existed in some ideal abstract known only to Sigmar and perhaps the High Pontifex. And Loucher, of course.

‘We are driving a course through this Ghyran wilderness,’ the marshal went on, ‘so that our supply trains and messengers may move unmolested.’ He was speaking pointedly over everyone’s head. Which meant he had to actively avoid looking at Slobda because, even seated, the top of her head and the vacated crow’s nest spoiled his view. ‘We cannot afford these inconclusive clashes with the foe.’

Rosforth, fifteen years the man’s senior and most of his life in the army, reckoned what they’d just won was as conclusive as you ever got against the clever sort of orruk. And, dug into their swamps, they were never going away, but probably it would be a while before they’d be raiding in strength in this direction. Apparently, the victory hadn’t been perfect enough for Marshal Loucher.

The marshal let Vilfreyd step portentously up and down the line. A motley assortment, Rosforth had seen on their approach. Steelhelm infantry from the rougher sort of companies, those who came by the Coin Malleus at the bottom of a tankard or to get out of a debt. Barachen Sot, the cannon master who never took to the field without leaving two empty wineskins behind him. Grey old Arch-Knight Marieda, longer in the tooth even than Rosforth. Definitely a pattern here. Someone was in for a chewing out.

The man stopped his horse before Slobda and finally deigned to glower down at Rosforth. ‘My nephew’s arm is broken,’ he announced.

That wasn’t quite what Rosforth had expected. ‘Sir?’

‘Your beast blundered into him during the heat of the battle. He’s lucky it didn’t trample him to death.’

Oh, that. ‘Sir–’ he started, but then Slobda’s deep voice was rumbling through the armour at his back.

‘Jus’ nudgin’ ’im back into line, like,’ she said. ‘Only I knows ’ow you lot like yer li’l squares.’

For a moment, Loucher was about to speak directly to Slobda, which would have been a first. Then his head snapped down to Rosforth, propped in the ogor’s lap.

‘Your creature believes it knows the business of a Castelite formation better than my nephew?’

‘Advantage of an elevated view,’ said Rosforth. ‘Marshal.’ He held Loucher’s narrow gaze, deciding that things were already bad enough so why not throw oil on that fire and watch everything burn down? He could feel the heat building behind him through the iron of Slobda’s gut-plate. Ogors knew the stomach was the seat of all emotion and Slobda was getting riled.

‘We could have lost the coherency of our line with your beast blundering about,’ Loucher spat. ‘We’re lucky we were able to hold at all. Ogors are a liability to a disciplined formation. I never saw the need for–’

‘’E was outta line, li’l squit,’ Slobda rumbled. And to an ogor it was just a murmur. A soldier’s sidelong comment to their neighbour in line. Given the great barrel chest that voice originated in, they must have heard it seven ranks back in the formation.

Loucher’s colour began to climb towards the purple.

‘I does squares good,’ Slobda said. ‘Dun I, boss? I does the corner real neat. An’ when I sees some li’l squit what’s all over the place, I gives ’im a nudge. On account a how ever’un’s allus tellin’ me them squares is important. Not my fault ’e’s so breakable.’

‘My nephew–’ Loucher started, through clenched teeth.

‘’E spends more time watchin’ where ’is feet goes, maybe ’e spends less time with a hurtin’ arm,’ Slobda said defiantly. ‘I knows squares.’

The entire assembled company was silent now. No ambush party lying in wait for a sharp-eared enemy could have been more so. Rosforth reckoned that if anyone had a helm off, he’d have seen ears swivel.

‘Your beast,’ Loucher pronounced, ‘presumes to lecture me on geometry.’

And the wise soldier deferred to the army’s marshal. Sigmar’s servants lived and died by their chain of command, because when there were orruks and ghoul-kings and Chaos daemons loose in the world, only that cohesion and discipline could hold the line against them. But Rosforth had been with Slobda for a long time.

‘What can I say, sir? She knows her squares.’ And it was true. Slobda wasn’t going to sit anyone down and explain the philosophy behind the Castelite formation to anyone, but once she’d learned it was important, she understood it. Ideas were like everything else to Slobda. When she finally grasped them, her grip was unbreakable.

‘Right!’ declared Loucher, his face galloping through the spectrum of outrage towards the red end. ‘All here present saw how we routed the orruk filth, for all they had the numbers. It is the lean discipline of an army that triumphs in the field. As we continue to pacify the realm here, I will not have my efforts impeded by the drunken, the rowdy, the subhuman’ – a barbed look at Slobda – ‘or the incomplete,’ he finished, shooting its counterpart at Rosforth.

No magician, Rosforth. No magister of the Collegiate Arcane, or devotee of Ruinous Gods, or anything like that. Or else Loucher might just have burst into flames. And, behind that antipathy, sheer exasperation at the phrase ‘pacify the realm’. Rosforth had fought in Ghyran long enough to know that there was no pacifying the place. That its wildness was your ally, sometimes, because its roots would drink orruk blood as willingly as any other.

There was that other element, too, inherent to Loucher’s gaze. Almost all the troops he had up in front of him, the beneficiaries of his ire, were of a certain sort. ‘The Reclaimed’, whose ancestors hadn’t spent the worst of times holed up in the pristine sanctuary of Azyr. Loucher’s people had not scraped and starved and got dirt under their nails through all the hardscrabble generations before the realmgates opened again. They had come in the shadow of Sigmar’s chosen to regain the world for Order and purity. And while they had made common cause with the human survivors they found there, the old Azyrite dynasties reckoned they knew who were Sigmar’s true champions.

‘There is a settlement nearby, established not long ago,’ Loucher announced to the world. Rosforth knew it. Newhalt Amarine, one more desperate venture carving a niche for itself in the wilds. ‘Logging and mining,’ the marshal went on. ‘Mundane and tedious activities.’

So said a man who saw war as glory without ever considering where the materiel came from.

‘Since their founding they have petitioned for a greater garrison to stave off the terrors of the wilderness. In my munificence I have decided to answer their prayers. Sigmar shall provide.’

Placing his own little feet in Sigmar’s big shoes, but what of it?

‘You reprobates assembled here before me, I gift you to them. You shall depart the army and take up a defensive role at Newhalt Amarine, and I consider myself well rid of you.’

A stir in the soldiers at his back. A good hundred robbed from the battle-line. A whole cannon team under the admittedly unsteady Barachen Sot, too many good shields stolen from the wall. Not clear who hated the order more, those who were leaving or those who were staying.

‘Lean,’ Loucher informed his audience. ‘Lean and efficient. No army ever suffered from cutting the fat away.’ He shot a venomous look at Slobda as he said it, which was entirely lost on her because to an ogor ‘fat’ was the greatest compliment. It spoke of success because winners got to eat. ‘Arch-Knight Marieda,’ Loucher snapped. ‘I give you responsibility for this wretched excuse for a detachment. Consider yourself as acting marshal.’

Marieda, who had been standing with her head lowered, looked up. Her withered jaw was clenched. She had led countless charges at the head of her cavalry lance. Given all the teeth the realms’ jaws were equipped with, she was the single oldest veteran Rosforth had ever known, a woman whose continued survival against the world and the odds was little short of miraculous.

And he himself was the second-oldest, he considered bleakly. Maybe Loucher’s right. Trim the fat. Drunkards and ancients, mutineers and villains the lot of us. He’s better off without. He found, in that moment, that if it had just been his honour then he would have gone to this duty with a light heart. He’d tried to explain ‘honour’ to Slobda once, and she’d just frowned and asked what it tasted like. Not a stupid question to an ogor because, to them, the world existed to the extent you could put it in your mouth: that was how you understood things. And yet in Rosforth’s mind she did have honour, of a sort, and it had been slighted.

‘This is a mistake,’ he called out into the quiet that followed Loucher’s words. ‘Sir.’

‘Sigmar damn me,’ said Loucher, ‘if I take the advice of a glorified Reclaimed mule-wrangler.’

Slobda stood. She did it considerately, meaning Rosforth ended up balanced in the crook of her arm and not face-first in the dust. She stood, and looked down on Marshal Loucher, and the man’s haughty voice dried up to a rattle and a squeak. Behind him, the entire assembled company braced, and for a moment Rosforth thought this would be it. The moment Slobda decided she wasn’t part of Sigmar’s marching faithful any more. And they’d kill her, then, but she’d take a fair few with her.

He was already reaching up, tugging at her jowls. ‘Hey, hey now…’ But he underestimated her, as so many humans did. She’d just wanted that squeak out of Loucher. That acknowledgement that, inside the armour and the arrogance, he was frightened of her.

‘S’pose I better pack me stuffs,’ she announced, ‘’sumin’ I’s dismissed, chief?’

Loucher swallowed and didn’t trust himself to speak as Slobda lumbered away.

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A Black Library Publication

‘The Book of Transformations’ first published in Inferno! Volume 3 in 2019.
‘The Manse of Mirrors’ first published in Inferno! Volume 4 in 2019.
‘The Siege of Greenspire’ first published in Oaths & Conquests in 2020.
‘River of Death’ first published in Inferno! Volume 5 in 2020.
‘Roadwarden’ first published in Inferno! Volume 6 in 2021.
‘False Dawn’, ‘Murder by Moonlight’ and ‘Past Returns’ first published digitally in 2023.
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