“Anybody can make plans. Anybody can give orders. A leader must do more than this. A leader must give hope, and he must give it even when he has none himself. After all, how can there be endurance without hope? How can there be courage? How can there be victory?”
– A Tale of Ushoran Buried in the damp and the darkness, Brock had thought that the pain would be the worst of it. Although his wounds had been dressed after the fight, he had refused the most powerful of the petru’s unguents. He knew that, today of all days, he would need his wits kept sharp, his judgement unclouded. If that meant that the agony from his smashed gristle and cracked ribs had to be left as unchecked as a fire in a burning house, then so be it.
He was, after all, Kazarkhan.
It wasn’t the pain that kept him sweating in the cold embrace of his hastily dug burrow. It was the constant, nagging fear that he had made a mistake.
There was, after all, so much that could go wrong with the plan. If the mercenaries realised that the bulk of his forces were hiding beneath their wagons, covered only by scrapes of soil and breathing tubes, there would be a massacre, Their foxholes would become graves, and the strongest among them would die without even wielding their weapons.
Then again, what if the inner stockade didn’t hold? What if he and his men burst from the ground to fall upon the rear of an army that had already slaughtered the women and children?
Brock wriggled at the thought and listened to the muted sounds of battle. Should he have left more men on the surface? Should he have put everybody behind the stockade and hoped to hold off their attackers, rather than to trap them between the hammer of his warriors and the anvil of their families’ defence? That was what many of his people had advised, during that hurried council of war the night before. If he hadn’t still been bloodied with Ushoran’s blessing, they probably would have outvoted him, too.
However, he had been bloodied with Ushoran’s blessing.
“Relax,” Brock told himself. “One way or another it will all be over soon.”
And so it was. Even as Brock heard the first whistles of the Striganies’ retreat, somebody jerked at his breathing tube, hard. He ignored the taste of blood as the thing cut his lip and concentrated on making himself lie still. Through the earth all around him, he could feel the reverberations of running feet as his people fled from the outer perimeter and stampeded past his ring of hidden men into the sanctuary of the inner stockade.
What if they come in waves and we’re caught between them?
“Then we’ll fight them both,” Brock muttered in the darkness, and then spat out a crumb of soil.
The rushing of feet continued, although they sounded heavier, iron-shod, or perhaps that was only his imagination. Either way, he fidgeted with the communication cord that connected him with the men hidden beneath the nearby wagons. Once he pulled, they would pass on his signal, and the ground beneath their wagons would erupt with hundreds of the Striganies’ strongest fighters.
What if I give the signal too soon?
Brock waited and waited. He counted his heartbeats to try to keep some sense of time as, alone on the darkness, the seconds stretched out into infinity. For the first time, he realised how fast his heart was beating, hammering in his veins and hissing in his ears.
He swallowed dryly, and there was a crash and a cheer from above. He prayed to Ushoran that the splintering wood was that of the outer stockade, and not the inner. Images of the slaughter that would take place, if the mercenaries reached that central sanctuary, sprang unbidden to his mind, and he winced.
Brock waited until he sensed another rush of feet charging past above. Only then did he scrape away the covering of earth above him, and slowly lift his head from his bolt hole.
After so long spent in the darkness, the daylight was painfully bright. He squinted through the wheel spokes of the wagon that rested above him, trying to make sense of the noise and the rushing figures that were charging past.
Their knee-high boots and steel greaves marked them out as mercenaries. So did the sound of their exultant voices and the wild laughter of men who knew that the battle was almost over.
Brock sank back down so that only his eyes and the top of his head showed above the loose earth of his hiding place. He made no effort to count the mercenaries as they charged past his hiding place. There were too many of them. All he did was wait until the tide of them had washed past and the first sounds of the struggle on the inner barricade had begun to ring out.
Then, and only then, did he pull on the communicating cord and drag himself up out of the cold stillness of the earth. All around him, other men slithered from their hiding places, emerging from the ground like the restless dead.
From up ahead, Brock heard the clash of steel on steel, and shouted orders and curses. A woman’s scream momentarily eclipsed all other sounds. It was cut off suddenly.
The Kazarkhan exchanged a glance with the nearest of his men, a domnu he had never met until the night before. Without a word, Brock drew his cutlass and signalled the advance.
As they slipped forward to the battle ahead, he felt a tide of relief wash over him. The waiting was over, and so were the doubts. Now, there was only kill or be killed, the euphoria of victory or the merciful release of defeat. For the first time since his victory in the ring, the Kazarkhan felt at peace. Perched on the barricades, Dannie lunged forwards, to chop through the Estalian’s throat with a grunt and a single, perfectly-timed, blow. He blinded another with the back stroke, opening up a deep, bloody crevasse in the front of the man’s skull. He disembowelled his third victim as he tried to vault the barricade. Glistening intestines spooled from the wound, and the stink of his innards clogged Dannie’s nose.
He ignored the stink, just as he ignored the animal screams of the dying man. One of the children would put the dying man out of his misery soon enough, be it with a razor blade to the jugular, or an iron to the head.
He ignored the patch of damp numbness that was spreading down his left flank, too. He supposed that he had been cut, but he couldn’t remember how. He didn’t have time to remember how.
Anyway, he thought as he lunged forward to reach another victim, it doesn’t matter. Only Chera matters.
He snatched a glance across at his beloved, suddenly needing to see her as much as a drowning man needs air, and his heart swelled.
She was perfect, he thought, as he watched her swing her billhook against a pair of mercenaries. The way she moved was fluid with supple strength. Then there was the beauty of her face, the whiteness of her teeth and the dark flame of her hair. She was like a lioness defending her cubs.
In that moment, she turned, and their eyes met.
For a moment, Dannie stood still, stunned by her beauty. It would have been the death of him, if, warned by some instinct, he hadn’t torn himself from the magnificence of her gaze, and peered back to the battle. At first, he wasn’t sure what had caught his attention. Then he had it. It was a sound, a sound that was different from the screams and cries, and the clash of steel on steel.
Dodging a thrown javelin, he squinted over the melee of mercenaries in front of him. They had stopped their advance and, as their captain bellowed at them, they broke away from the barricade, and fell back.
A chorus of wild jeering broke out around Dannie, but he didn’t join in. This was no victory. Although the men were falling back, they were doing so almost reluctantly.
Then Dannie saw what they were doing among the abandoned wagons of the outer camp, and his breath caught in his throat.
“They’re running,” Chera exulted, her face beautiful with joy, despite the spattered blood that marked her porcelain skin.
“We’ve won!” somebody else called, and another cheer went up, as the last of the Estalians disappeared into the confusion of abandoned wagons.
Dannie watched, nervously, unconvinced. It wasn’t until the shouted orders of the Estalians sharpened into the steady, rhythmic pulse of a galley slaves’ drummer that he was sure of what they were doing.
“The wagons!” he cried, pointing at the nearest of them with a blood-smeared cutlass. “They’re using the wagons.”
The cheers along the Strigany line died away. Silence fell upon them, as they watched the wagons that the Estalians had seized. The men swarmed around half a dozen of them, and they were pulling them away from the inner stockade.
“So, let them steal a few wagons,” somebody said.
“No,” Dannie said, shaking his head. “I don’t think that they’re stealing them. I think that they’re going to use them.”
“What as?”
“As a battering ram,” Chera answered, and Dannie cast her another loving look.
She was so intelligent.
He was still beaming when the Estalians paused, turned, and, with a roar of combined effort, turned to push the wagons back towards the inner stockade. As they drew nearer, the wagons moved even faster, momentum taking over.
Dannie knew the vehicles were heavy, made of solid wood. Most of them were full of food, pans, tools and what not. All that weight was running on perfectly crafted, perfectly sprung wheels. He watched the hubs of the nearest blur as its speed picked up.
“Get off the barricades,” somebody said, and Dannie found himself hand in hand with Chera as they leapt from the earth bank, and sprinted away from their posts. Behind them, the wagons rattled closer, bouncing easily over the litter of corpses that lay outside the stockade, and crashing into it with a bone-splintering force.
A few of the Strigany, who had been too slow or too stubborn to leave their posts, were caught under the avalanche of careening wagons and splintered stockade. Those that survived didn’t survive for long. The Estalians finished them off as they swarmed over the wreckage of the crashed wagons and into the compound beyond.
“Don’t let them in,” Dannie yelled, running back to the fallen barricades, cutlass blurring in a bloody arc, to meet the first of the mercenaries. Chera followed behind, and behind her came the old men, women and children who had been defending the heart of their encampment.
They threw themselves against the attackers with the courage of the truly desperate, but, without the advantage of the barricade, the Strigany were pushed back, cut down and overwhelmed. And, they were not alone. Even among the chaos of their defeat, Dannie could hear the terrible, splintering crash of other wagons crushing through other parts of the barricade, the rest of the mercenaries obviously taking inspiration from the Estalians’ success.
As even more men poured over the barricades, the melee around him collapsed into a riot of crushed bodies, packed against each other. Dannie could smell the cloves on his opponents’ breaths, the stink of their sweat, and he could see the terror and exhilaration that shone in their eyes. He cut, twisted and stabbed.
He did whatever he had to in order to stay beside Chera. With their line broken, and with nowhere to run, he knew that they were both dead.
Still, he thought, with a grim fatalism, at least we can die together.
A pair of Estalians emerged from the press, coming at him from either side. He blocked the swinging cutlass blade of the first, and twisted, as the second stabbed at his midriff. This time, he wasn’t quick enough, and the steel, which felt as cold as fire and as hot as ice, sliced neatly through his muscles and ground against his ribs.
Dannie grabbed the man’s wrist, and brought his forehead down to crack into his face. With a crunch of gristle and a howl of pain, the Estalian staggered back, tearing his hand from Dannie’s grip. Before he could strike again, he fell, and, through a confusion of falling limbs, Dannie saw the hunched form of Petru Maria, her eyes twinkling like a crow’s, as she pulled her stiletto from the Estalian’s back and slashed it across his throat.
Dannie had no time to witness the man’s fate, however. His friend had already raised his cutlass for another strike.
It was a mistake. Before the Estalian could chop down, the melee around him surged, and he was knocked off balance. Dannie stabbed towards him, catching the man in the thigh as he was swept away.
He took a glance over at Chera, and breathed a sigh of relief that she was flanked by two of the men from her caravan.
Then, although he could hardly believe it, he felt the tide of the battle turning. He heard it in the voices of the mercenaries from the back of the melee. He felt it in their movements, and the sudden, panicked shift in their packed ranks. Then he heard the cry that began to echo through the wreckage of the abandoned camp.
One word, as terrible and as glorious now as it had been the night before: one word that reminded him, and every other Strigany, that Ushoran was on their side.
One word to bind them all into a single, unstoppable force: “Kazarkhan.”
The cry came from a thousand throats, and the mercenaries turned in panic to see what fresh enemy had fallen upon their rear. Dannie realised that he might survive today after all, and, in that moment, he began to fear. Blyseden had long since given up on his telescope. There was too much to see, too much to take in all at once, and too much to worry about.
Normally, Blyseden was not a man to worry about anything. After a lifetime of brutal measures and cold-blooded command, there was little in this world that he didn’t feel capable of facing. The Strigany, however, were like nothing he’d come across before. How many times, Blyseden wondered, had they seemed to be on the verge of defeat? How many times had his troops scented victory, only to have it snatched away again?
They had trapped the Strigany within their encampment, only to have fallen into traps themselves. They had cleared the barricades with an arrow storm, just as the Striganies’ foul sorcery had brought the wild birds of this cursed place raining down around them. And, just as his encirclement was tightening around the Striganies’ last redoubt, like a strangler’s fingers, a new army had appeared to encircle his men.
An entire new army, he thought with something close to awe, how was it possible?
Beside him, Vespero, his even features a mask of competing calculations, was wondering the same thing.
“Look at how many new men the Strigany have,” he said cheerfully. “Where did they all came from, do you think?”
“They must have been hiding,” Blyseden said, too concentrated on the confusion below to wonder why Vespero seemed so sanguine. From this distance, it was impossible to see if there were any real military formations left in the bloody melee. There didn’t seem to be any. Here and there, mercenary banners were still held aloft, their companies huddled around them like shipwrecked sailors around the flotsam of their misfortune. There were already far fewer banners than before, Blyseden thought, a lot fewer.
He started chewing his lip.
“I don’t see how the enemy could have hidden so many men,” Vespero said. “There must be a thousand of them, at least, probably more. Of course, if they were Tileans they would be easier to count. They would have the pride in their appearance that makes a true warrior stand out from his surroundings, a beacon of chivalry in the drabness of this northern squalor. I mean, look at them.”
Vespero seemed genuinely offended by the inelegance of his adversaries.
“Look at that one hacking through your men with an axe: no finesse, and no style. He works like a butcher, and he looks as though he might have been created out of mud.”
Vespero’s second-in-command, who had risen to his position through his skill with a quill rather than a sword, seized the opening.
“Even so, I am sure that a man of our commander’s experience would have spotted this outflanking manoeuvre, if it had been done without the use of magic,” he said, smoothly. “What do you think, commander? Is this more Strigany sorcery?”
Blyseden waved the question away distractedly.
“Maybe, I don’t know. By Sigmar, look at those fools on the left. They’ve abandoned their standard.” His fists clenched with frustration, and he jabbed an arm towards where one of the companies, surrounded and divided, had dropped its standard and disintegrated into a fleeing mob. Even as Blyseden watched, he saw their leader tripped and brought down. The Strigany fell upon him like a pack of terriers onto a wolf.
“Serves you right, you damned fool,” Blyseden snarled.
“It’s a shame,” Vespero sympathised. “Your planning was sound, commander. You just lacked the tools, and obviously, as the Strigany are using sorcery, our contracts are-”
“Ah, there they are,” Blyseden cried, his rage turning to savage triumph. “Look, down there, the ogres. By all the gods, those beasts are worth their weight in gold.”
“Ah yes,” Vespero said, pursing his lips, “the ogres. Good.” Dannie had no idea how long it took for the mercenaries to break between the hammer of the Striganies’ attack and the anvil of their defence. There was no sense of time, just the constant, mindless rhythm of strike and counter strike, of dodging and of stabbing, and of the burning pain of his overused muscles, which grew even brighter than that of his wounds.
There was also the knowledge that Chera was beside him, and that his life meant nothing compared to hers. Where losing his caravan had almost destroyed him, losing her certainly would.
That knowledge of it throbbed in his heart like a beacon, and he fought as fearlessly for her as she fought for him. It was one of the reasons they survived.
The other reason they survived was the dark, ragged shape of the Petru Maria, who flitted unnoticed among their attackers. Her stiletto punched in and out of unsuspecting backs relentlessly. Of the dozen men who could have caught Dannie and Chera unawares, not a single one managed to strike his blow before the lethal agony of the crone’s blade shot through their livers or kidneys or spines.
Then, it was over.
It took Dannie a while to realise that he had no enemies left, and that the men he was now facing across their tangled corpses were his own. As he recognised Brock, he dropped his guard, every muscle in his body singing with relief. He relaxed and saluted his Kazarkhan.
Brock looked the Kazarkhan too, every inch of him. He was covered in blood and mud and filth, as if birthed from the same ground that hid the Old Fathers, and the blades of his weapons were chipped and dark with gore.
More than that was the holy fire that burned in his eyes. It was so intense that Dannie stepped back from the figure that strode towards him. For a moment, he was sure that Ushoran was peering out of his skull, at the carnage that lay all around, and, in a flash of memory that seemed more real than the world around him, he remembered his own brush with the divine.
His strength bled away, suddenly and completely, and he staggered as his vision grew cloudy. Then he felt a hand on his arm, a soft hand with fingers that were delicate yet strong. He looked up, and his gaze met Chera’s eyes. She was pallid after the fury of battle, and grubby with blood and filth. Still, she was as beautiful as ever, radiant even. Dannie felt his strength return as suddenly as it had left him, and the two of them gazed into each other’s eyes until the boom of Brock’s laughter ended the moment.
“Never mind all that now,” he roared, slapping Dannie on the back. “There’ll be plenty of time for canoodling when the clay’s work’s done. At least, if her father doesn’t find out about it.”
Dannie smiled at the enthusiasm of Brock’s greeting, and cursed his overactive imagination. The Kazarkhan, it seemed, was still the same old bear of a man he’d always been. As to the fire in his eyes, well, it flickered in the eyes of all the men who followed him too. They were hardly recognisable, any more as the craftsmen and merchants that Dannie had come to know over the months of their exile. They were as wild as their leader, and, whether grim-faced with loss or euphoric with victory, there was no doubt of their humanity.
“Are we winning?” Dannie asked, reluctantly turning away from Chera, as he fell in behind his leader.
“Yes,” Brock said. He paused, as a distant smash of timber was followed by a chorus of screams. “Although we haven’t won yet.”
He pointed the blade of his cutlass to the other side of the stockade. Dannie followed the gesture, in time to see another wagon hurtle up above the ragged skyline of the settlement, an impossible flight that ended some way inside the inner stockade.
“That will be the ogres,” Brock explained, leaping up onto the wreckage of the barricade. He raised his arms for silence, his well-used weapons outstretched, and addressed the great mob of men that had followed him thus far.
“Listen,” he bellowed, his voice carrying across the din of the battle that still ebbed and flowed around the mercenaries’ retreat. “We have broken most of our enemies, but not all. Those of you who are too wounded or too tired, stay here. Hold this line. Defend our backs. The rest of you,” he said, “follow me.”
Somebody cheered, and the others followed him, roaring their enthusiasm at these simple words. As one man, they followed their Kazarkhan as he barrelled through the central compound towards the ogres.
“Stay here and organise the defence,” Dannie told Chera.
“No, I have to look after you,” she said.
“Will you disobey me when I am your husband?” he asked. The words were out before he’d thought of them. Chera laughed, and their fingertips brushed against each other. Then, with a grin on his face, Dannie allowed himself to be swept away in the surge of movement that followed the Kazarkhan.
As they made their way across to the other side of the stockade, he thought about how the Kazarkhan’s speech on the barricades would grow as it was told and retold. Within a week, he guessed, Brock’s few barked instructions would have been improved into as fine a piece of rhetoric as the storytellers could come up with. Within a year, it would have become an ode, and, by the time Brock died, it would be an epic.
That, Dannie decided, was exactly as it should be. They were passing through the ranks of those who were too old or too young, or too weak, to have fought. They sat huddled around the amphitheatre, sheltered within the eye of the storm of battle. As their Kazarkhan strode through them, there was gratitude and even adoration, in every face.
If they think they have a hero now, Dannie thought, wait until the storytellers have told it. Wait until 7 have told it.
Then, he saw the first of the ogres, and all thoughts of the future evaporated beneath the intensity of the. present.
It was the first time that Dannie had seen ogres, but, even though he could only snatch glances through the battle ahead, there was no mistaking their kind. The one that he briefly saw stomping down on a man had skin as grey as slate. The shifting crowd hid him, and then revealed another, arrows bouncing harmlessly off its form. To the left, a cleaver as big as a barn door briefly arced above the crowd, before chopping down.
Crushed within the ranks of his comrades, Dannie had no way of counting the ogres, but there were obviously enough of them to overwhelm all who faced them. As they ground all opposition beneath their steel-shod boots and iron-bound clubs, the noise of their assault grew ever closer.
Another inhuman roar of exertion rose above the din of battle, and another unlikely missile hurtled towards the packed Strigany. It was a handcart, oak-built and iron-bound, and, despite its weight, it spun through the air as easily as a discus.
Dannie lost sight of it as it crashed into the crowd on his right, and, suddenly, the onward rush of his comrades staggered to a halt as their front rank hit the crushing wall of the ogres’ advance.
Lost in the turmoil of pushing bodies and shoving limbs, Dannie fought to keep his balance. There was a shriek from above, and all eyes turned up, in time to see as a body that had been flung back into their ranks. Then the men in front of him turned and scrabbled back, their eyes wild with fear.
Dannie, sensing their panic, tried to think of the words to calm it. He didn’t have time. Before he could do anything, he was pushed forwards.
The ogre stood in front of him. It was perhaps twice as tall as a man, although swollen with the fury of battle it seemed even larger. Its face and chest were black with blood, and its teeth gleamed pinkly as it bellowed with joy. The iron-bound clubs, which it held in each hand, blurred as it swung them gleefully, and the men on either side of Dannie fell, their skulls crushed as easily as if they were rabbits.
Dannie screamed as he lunged forwards, his cutlass cutting up in a disembowelling blow. He realised, too late, that, beneath the mud and the gore, the ogre’s stomach was covered with an armour plate as big as a steel cauldron.
His blade hit the armour with an arm-numbing impact that tore it from his fingers. Unarmed and exposed, Dannie tried to scramble back, but to no avail. The press of bodies behind him was too great. So, instead of going back, he went forwards, dropping to his knees and rolling between the ogre’s legs.
It was then, unarmed and surrounded, that he caught his first sight of the giants that lurched forward to tower over the battlefield, and, in that moment, he knew that his people were doomed. Vespero had always counted himself a lucky man. He had been born in the greatest city of the greatest civilisation the world had ever seen; not the largest or most powerful, perhaps, but certainly the greatest. He had been blessed with a profile as fine as any imagined by even the greatest of sculptors, in his own estimation, at least. As to his skill with the rapier, that most noble of weapons, he was second to none, even to those who occasionally bested him. After all, everybody was unwell from time to time, even if they didn’t realise it.
However, perhaps his most fortunate attribute was the unerring instinct he had for fleeting opportunity. He could sense the changing winds of fortune that blew through the Old World as well as a leviathan can smell prey even in the blackest depths of the ocean.
Which was just as well. Today, he had needed to be aware of every subtlety, every nuance of the battle that was unfolding below. More than once, he had been tempted to give the order that would have ended their contract and their commander both. Yet, even though the thought of the pay chest that awaited him was alluring, he had resisted. The time had not been right.
As he felt the thump of the giants’ marching feet, he knew that he had been wise to be cautious. From what he knew of their kind, their stupidity often took the form of loyalty to their paymaster.
Vespero watched them as they ambled past, the grotesque heads as high as the hill upon which he stood. They were dirty, inelegant, clumsy and perfectly suited, he thought, to this awful country.
He sighed as he watched them lumbering towards the ruins of the Striganies’ encampment. Here and there, groups of fleeing mercenaries scurried away from their advance, flushed from amongst the detritus of the battle like partridges from a field of wheat.
Vespero’s disappointment at his side’s impending victory found expression in his contempt for his fleeing comrades. To flee from a battle was one thing, but to do so empty-handed?
“Barbarians,” he muttered.
“More than that,” Blyseden told him.
For a moment, Vespero wondered what his commander was talking about. Then he realised that it must be the giants.
He scowled. To use such abominations was exactly the sort of ungentlemanly thing he would have expected in the Empire, of course, but even so. Apart from anything else, they were surely marked with Chaos.
“By Sigmar,” Blyseden exulted as the first of the monstrosities stepped easily over a section of the outer barricade, “imagine having that beast bearing down on you. And look, the ogres are still pressing in from the other direction. I don’t know why I bothered to hire any men at all.”
Vespero bridled.
“If you had allowed us to go into battle-” he began stiffly, but Blyseden wasn’t paying attention.
“Who are those people around the giant’s handler?” he asked, his jubilation beginning to fade, as a sudden, terrible suspicion seized him. “I offered the damned man an escort, but he refused. Clerk. Clerk! Where’s my damned telescope?”
That was when Vespero smelled it, the delicious, delightful scent of Ranald’s favour. It took a sensitive nose to detect it, especially through the blood and filth of the battlefield, but Vespero had the gift.
A slow smile spread across his face, and he turned to his second-in-command. No words passed between them. None needed to. The twinkle in Vespero’s eye was enough to convey the order to get ready.
“Look at them run,” Blyseden said, trying to sound cheerful, but failing miserably. Vespero looked, and some of the Strigany were indeed running. The giants, though, paid no more attention to them than they had to the fleeing mercenaries. It was the ogres they seemed intent on.
“Who are those men around the giants’ handlers?” Vespero asked Blyseden.
“They must be volunteers,” he answered uneasily.
Vespero nodded.
The giants stepped over the inner stockade. They dwarfed the ogres, who, oblivious to the reinforcements coming up behind them, continued to chew through the Striganies’ ranks.
“In Tilea, we have a saying,” Vespero said, as one of the ogres turned and bellowed a greeting to the giant behind it.
“What?” Blyseden muttered. He watched the giant lift its club, and suddenly felt as though he was a gambler watching a roulette wheel.
“Yes,” Vespero said, nodding, “we say that to outrun a lion you don’t have to run faster than the lion.”
The giant swung its club down. The length of timber blurred as it blitzed down, and then exploded in a mass of bloodied splinters, as it cracked open the ogre’s skull. The creature collapsed without a sound, and, before its comrades knew of the twenty feet of treachery that was upon them, it struck again, smashing its second club on another ogre skull.
“To outrun the lion, you just have to run faster than the other man it’s chasing.”
Recognising the signal, Vespero’s men pounced. The dozen men from Averland’s household, whom Blyseden had kept as bodyguards, spun around to face their erstwhile comrades, but they didn’t stand a chance. Against the speed and viciousness of the Tileans’ attack, they fared little better than fumbling peasants. Razor-sharp rapiers blizzarded through the air, arcs of arterial blood spouted from severed arteries and the remains of lost limbs, and, even as Blyseden remained glued to his telescope, the last of his men had fallen to Vespero’s company.
“Sigmar curse them,” Blyseden whispered, oblivious to the carnage that had taken place around him. He was too focused on the battlefield below.
The first of the giants, its clubs destroyed, looked pleased to have done away with such sophisticated technology. The loss of its weapons certainly did little to stop its onslaught. Blyseden watched as it picked one of the ogres up, snapped its neck as easily as a chicken’s, and then took a bite out of it for good measure. Satisfied with its work, the giant looked down at another, who swung a cleaver at its legs as though it were a lumberjack felling a tree.
The giant seemed not to notice the terrible wound that must surely have reached its bone. Nor did it seem to notice the loss of blood. Instead, it concentrated on lifting the ogre from its feet, fingers finding purchase in the sockets of the thing’s eyes, and hurling it across the battlefield.
“Blyseden,” Vespero said.
For the first time since the attack had begun, the Tilean’s voice commanded Blyseden’s attention. There was an edge in it, a dangerous edge. Blyseden left his telescope, and turned to look at the captain. Then he looked beyond him to the dead bodies of the elector count’s men, and the hungry expressions of Vespero’s own.
“En garde,” Vespero said.
It didn’t take Blyseden more than a moment to take in the situation: the dead Averlanders, and the victorious Tileans, their rapiers red, and their eyes alive with greed. Another man might have panicked, might have tried to fight or run, or reason.
Not Blyseden; he reacted to his rapidly changing circumstances with the lightning reflexes of a falling cat, twisting to land on its feet.
“En garde indeed,” he said, pretending to misunderstand. “All is lost here, and we can only hope to withdraw and reorganise. Menheer Vespero, I would like to offer you and your company a bonus of half the paychest to escort me back to our lord’s demesne.”
Vespero blinked, his mind racing. Half the pay chest would be riches enough, or, to put it another way, half the pay chest would be worth losing in order to avoid becoming fugitives.
He smiled, ran a silk handkerchief down the blade of his rapier to clean it, and bowed to Blyseden.
“We would be honoured,” he said.
Blyseden smiled, hiding the rage that had already started to boil up inside him at the Tileans’ treachery, and went over to the tent. The clerk was cowering inside, a blanket over his head. Blyseden lifted it with the tip of his sword.
“Still got that shovel?” he asked.
The clerk whimpered an affirmative.
“Then get digging,” Blyseden told him, gesturing towards the earth where the chest had been hidden. “If ever there was a time for a strategic withdrawal, it’s now.”