Chapter I: Introduction
north and burned its unholy path down into the lands of the Empire, making Wolfenburg its prey, and a dozen other towns besides. Word was, Lenk’s host was but one of many that had made savage inroads from the northlands. The world had turned upside down. Franz was twenty-five years old, the son of a Wolfenburg cobbler. As a member of the city militia, he had fought to defend the walls and, by the strange blessing of Sigmar, had been amongst the few hundred souls to escape the final destruction with his life. He was of average height, and owned good strength in his upper body, but he was thin and sallow from the lack of decent food, and his black hair, long and tied back, was shot through with streaks of grey that had appeared almost overnight after the city fell. The sights he had seen, Franz believed, the horrors, had scared the colour from his hair. Franz carried a short pig-spear with a crossbar under the blade, and a poor quality sword. His clothes seemed torn and dirty brown, but were in fact, under the rusted breastplate and the grime, the tunic and breeches of the Wolfenburg militia, quartered in the black and white of Ostland. In the months following the sack, survivors—Franz amongst them—had trickled back to the city ruins, some in search of family, others in search of food, and most because they didn’t know where else to go. A shantytown of dirty tents and shelters had grown up outside the southern skirt-wall, slowly spreading as more and more folk appeared. Living conditions were dismal, and food scarce. The only viable occupation was “rag-picking”, which entailed venturing into the ruins each day to sift the debris for anything valuable. Coin and other precious trinkets certainly lay hidden in the flattened city, and a few of the pickers fooled themselves they would escape their misery by finding wealth. But for the most part, all the rag-pickers hoped to find was cutlery, combs, unbroken pots, furniture, perhaps preserved food from some collapsed larder. Franz hoped to find something too. That’s why he had joined. That’s why he was Werner Broch’s man. At the head of the line now, Werner Broch trudged through the rain with the Dwarf Grunor at his side. Behind him, the procession tailed back. Some of the pickers carried baskets, others pushed empty barrows. “Damn rain,” Broch murmured, to himself. “This is no way to make a damn living.” Grunor grunted in agreement. Broch was a mercenary, a veteran. He was unusually tall, but stoop-shouldered, as if his years pressed down on him, and he wore decent leather armour with metal thigh-plates and a plain black hauberk. A great sword was sheathed across his back in a massive leather scabbard, but he carried an arquebus, currently shrouded in a waxed canvas wrapper against the rain. His hair, almost white, was shaved close against his scalp, and his face sported a strangely lopsided silver beard. At some point in his career, Broch had taken a blade in the left side of his face, leaving a deep scar of shiny tissue across his cheek and right down through the jaw line. The jaw had healed, cleft and deformed, twisting his face oddly. Where the scars lay, no hair grew, so the left side of his face was beardless. As a mercenary, he owed allegiance only to coin. Only his accent and a small medal of Ulric betrayed his origins. Franz reckoned, rightly enough, that Broch had come to Wolfenburg on the sniff of plunder. But there was work here. Rag- picking was a dangerous employment, for the ruins had become home to scavengers from the forests: bears, wolves, feral dogs and worse. So bonds had been formed. Each team of rag-pickers, when they went out, took with them a soldier or two, to watch over them. In return for this service, anything of value found by the pickers was to be split with their guards. Broch and Franz were the soldiers assigned to this party, and Broch was in charge. The Dwarf, Grunor, was a tag-along, who with them because he wanted to be. Ancient, decrepit and quite the worst smelling thing in a place where everything smelled bad, the Dwarf was utterly mad. But they tolerated him. His axe had proved useful more than once.
The rain showed no sign of slacking. It was sheeting down, straight down, like the torrent of a waterfall, drumming off the broken rubble, running down the stained plaster of those walls still standing. Small flash floods had turned old gutters into racing streams, and the party kept to the stones and broken tiles because the earth was now sucking mud. “Aye now!” Grunor said suddenly, his head turning to the left. He held up one filthy handful of stubby fingers and cocked his head. “More of your damn rats?” Broch asked wearily. “Nah,” rumbled the Dwarf. “Summat else.” Grunor had been one of Wolfenburg’s premier rat-catchers before the fall. His clothes and armour were made of unidentifiable materials, thickly patched and no doubt stuck to his body by dirt alone, but the jerkin over the top of them was sewn together from rat skins. Several dozen vermin skulls rattled around his neck on a cord, under his plaited beard. His face above the straggled moustache was wizened and sunken in around his lump of a nose. One eye was bright, the other milky and dead. From his belt hung a great many mismatched daggers and estocs, the tools of his trade, the salvage of a lifetime in the sewers. “There’s rats for sure, but this ain’t one of ’em,” he said. “Not even your great rat?” Broch sniggered. “Don’t joke of it!” Grunor hissed. “I knows what I saw. Great thing from under the ground. When I sees it again, I will know it and make kill of it.” That, as far as Franz could fathom, was the source of Grunor’s madness. During the city’s destruction, Grunor claimed, he had seen great rats the size of men come up out of the sewers and fall upon the fleeing citizens. The sight had snapped his mind. Grunor had sworn to his calling as a catcher to find them and skin them. Rats the size of men... Franz smiled at the notion as he clambered forward to join Broch and the Dwarf. “Why have we stopped?” Franz asked. “Keep ’em stopped,” Broch replied. He was looking to the left too now, following Grunor’s gaze. “The ratter’s right. There’s something there.” Franz glanced back at the rag-pickers and held up his hand. He saw Imke, near the front of the line, staring at him intently. “Just the rain,” Franz said. “Just the rain hitting a broken bottle...” Broch shook his head. “That’s a blade. Metal on metal.” Franz shrugged. “If you say so.” “Stay here!” Broch yelled to the waiting pickers. “Stay and watch them,” he told Franz. Then he and the Dwarf began to approach the tumbled walls ahead. Waddling on his stocky legs, the Dwarf had raised his long-hafted axe across his chest. They struggled up a scree of rubbish and mud, and through a shattered archway until Franz and the pickers were no longer in view. “Through here,” Grunor mumbled. The noises were getting louder: a fight, most definitely. They crossed under a leaning, charred timber frame, and found themselves looking down in a deep cavity, a crater of rubble where some large building, perhaps a tavern, had been razed right down to the cellar floor. This depression was now shin-deep in dirty rainwater, and wading through it, a young man in the robes of a priest was fighting to stay alive. He was armed with a warhammer, plain but well made, and was using its metal haft to fend off the blows of a jagged falchion that was swinging at him savagely and repeatedly. With every struggling impact, the young priest barked out a grunt of effort. The falchion’s owner was over six feet all. His bare, hairy torso was fat and bulbous, like an infant’s, but his legs and arms were long and ghoulishly thin. He wore furs, and some small sign of metal trinkets and bone ornaments. His head... well, that was what made him an “it”. The head was that of goat. Shaggy, bearded down the throat, with snorting nostrils and rounded, maniacal eyes. Above the tufted ears, the brow widened in a crest from which sprouted two long, curled horns. With each savage blow, the beast rasped and whinnied.
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