Chapter I: Introduction
W hat’s going on?” Imke asked. Franz looked round. The other rag-pickers were still where he had told them to stand, huddled in loose groups, talking nervously. But the girl had come right over to him. Rain streaked her face. “I told you to-” She fixed him with her oh-so-intense eyes. “Something,” he said, looking back through the rain at the ruins. “Something’s going on in there. I heard some cries. A...” “A what?” “A snorting sound. I don’t know.” Franz tightened his grip on the pig-spear. “You hear that?” Imke said suddenly. “No.” He strained to listen, to look. All he could hear was the torrential drumming and hissing of the rain, the occasional half- sound from behind the ruins ahead of them. “Have a care!” she cried. A hooded thing, bleeding from one of alarm. Franz hefted his spear and thrust it at the hooded creature, but the sword chopped around and shattered the spear’s shank behind the tip, ripping it out of Franz’s hands. Franz leapt backwards, dodging the next murderous blow. He wrenched out his own sword, and the blades kissed with a clatter. Franz blocked and guarded, but the thing was furious in its attack, and drove him backwards. He crashed against a mossy wall, then ducked to the left as the curved sword swung in again, scoring a long scratch across the lichen-coated stone. Franz shouldered the thing away and hacked again, missing wildly. Then it was on him, crashing into him with its whole bodyweight, and they grappled. He could smell the thing’s fetid wet reek, its animal stink, its rancid breath. He tried to break off, but it clung to him, snorting and squealing. They staggered backwards through a ruined doorway and went sprawling amongst roof tiles and scattered masonry swamped by at least six inches of water. Franz thrashed free, spraying water, but the thing rose up again, blade raised to split his skull in two. Then it squealed, louder and more furiously than ever before. The squeal turned into a gurgle, and then a great vomit of bloody matter sprayed out of its mouth. It crashed over onto its face. Franz struggled up, clutching the iron charm of Sigmar around his neck in gratitude. Imke crouched down beside the thing’s corpse, and drew a long, straight estoc, a most elegant dagger, from the small of its back. She wiped the blood of its blade, and neatly sheathed it away in a leather scabbard bound to her right calf. Then the rag-picker rags fell back, concealing her leg and the weapon. Franz blinked. No vagabond owned a blade like that, or knew how to use it so surely. “You’re no rag-picker,” he murmured. Imke put a lean index finger to her lips and pinned him with those eyes again. T he sweeping falchion missed Grunor’s skull by a little finger’s length, but he didn’t seem to care. A Dwarf knows his limitations, especially those decreed by his stature. He had no reach, no height to prevail with. But he had brute strength, and an axe as sharp as all glory. To win out, he had to get close, right in under the massive beast’s attack. So, heedless of the danger—and his madness helped him much in this wise—he stamped forward and kept his head down. The goat-thing shied and circled, trying to get the distance back. It made a low cutting attack with its heavy blade. Grunor bawled out the war cry of his people, and lopped round with the axe. The head-blade struck clean through the beast-man’s malformed shoulder, came ploughing out of the ruins right towards them. It was snuffling and whining. It had a crude, curved short sword in its left fist. Imke stumbled backwards with a shrill cry
“Ulric spare us,” Broch gasped, and raised his arquebus, drawing back the wrapper and pausing only to touch the silver charm of true aiming he had tied around the handgrip. “Vermin! Vermin in the city!” Grunor yelled, already charging down the slope into the water, his axe whooshing as he circled it. The beast-thing heard the cry and glanced round. In that second, the priest saw a chance, and took a swing of his own. But he was too slow, perhaps too out of breath to land it properly. The beast- man saw it coming, and lashed out, catching the priest in the face with the hilt of his weapon and sending him sprawling backwards into the turgid water. Then it turned, nostrils flaring, and brayed as it faced the charging rat-catcher; its brown, spatulate teeth bared, its tongue blue as the spittle spattered out. “That’s right, you filth. Smile,” whispered Broch. He had a good aim. the water, slopping around, and the beast had all the range of a far longer reach. It sliced the notched blade at Grunor, deflected once by the whirring axe, and then again. This time the blow seemed to connect directly with the Dwarf’s face. Broch cried out in dismay, and threw his arquebus aside. It looked like the ratter had been decapitated. But no. Grunor sprawled in the water then got up again just as fast. There was blood on his face, and two of his beard plaits were missing, but his head was still on his shoulders. With an angry whoop, the Dwarf dragged his axe out of the silt, ducked another slash, and renewed his attack, howling out some curious battle cry. Broch had drawn his great sword now, sliding it deftly from the scabbard over his broad back. The blade was nearly four feet long, its grip double-handed. It had served Werner Broch well for seventeen seasons. He was beginning to scramble down the slope towards the fight when he heard a sound to his right. Two more figures appeared from the ruins above him. “Damn me, Ulric, but you don’t like me much today!” Broch spat. Two more beast-kin emerged, both shorter than the first, but no less monstrous. One was a skinny, shambling thing with a potbelly, its legs the backward jointed, cloven limbs of a goat or hog. Its arms were particularly hairy and short, and held up a bone lance. Its head was also goat-like, but its horn was a single thing, rising from its brow like the monocorn in the books of myth. Its eyes, hideously, were human. The other was the size and form of an average man, clad in a tabard of sewn-together hides that seemed, distressingly, to have been flayed from the flesh of several humans. Malevolent symbols, marked in dye, covered the hides, and the sight of them made Broch sick to his stomach. The thing’s head, malformed and grunting, was mercifully draped in a hood made from another stitched hide, with slits cut for the glaring eyes. The beast’s pig-nose protruded from the front of that stained hood, tusked and foul. They hurled themselves at Broch. He met them with his first swing, putting his back into the cut, and caught the hooded thing across the right shoulder. It was a glancing blow, but the thing staggered aside, squealing, and lurched away into the rain, out of sight. A result, but it was far from over. Now the lance was stabbing at him, striking at Broch’s belly to rip him open and let his lights spill out. He guarded once, then his foot slipped on a wet stone, and he barely recovered in time to strike away the spear-point a second time. Cursing, Broch tried to make a full swing, cross-body, but his feet slipped again. And this time he went over, crashing backwards down the slope into the pool. There was a dull thump. The firearm had dead-fired. The cursed rain had soaked the black powder, despite his best efforts. “Damn it!” Broch yelled. Grunor had already engaged the beast, but the advantage was not his. He was nearly up to his waist in
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