WITH ICE AND SWORD

  Graham McNeill

  Late Autumn, 1000 (Gospodarin calendar)

  Hope was their undoing; hope and the certainty that their gods had inflicted suffering enough to visit yet more misery upon them. They had lost so much already: their homeland, their loved ones, all their worldly possessions. Surely, they prayed, the gods must now keep them from further loss, must surely balance their grief and hardships with deliverance.

  What else but hope could explain the march of weary, frostbitten survivors of Kislev’s destruction, trudging silently through this unnatural storm hammering the corpse-sown oblast? Almost two hundred starving, sickly and godforsaken souls, numbed by horror and hollowed by the carnage they had witnessed.

  Doomsayers and holy men had always claimed that portents of the world’s ending were there for all to see, but whoever really believed them? Devotees of the apocalypse tore their hair and whipped themselves bloody as they screamed of oncoming doom, but life in Kislev went on as it always had: dry, wind-soured summers and hard, frozen winters.

  As regular as the turning of the seasons, the northern tribes raided Kislev in what Anspracht of Nuln had dubbed the Spring Driving, a term only someone who had never lived through such times would dare coin. The leather-tough rotamasters of the high stanitsas would gather their riders to meet the northmen in battle, and Kislev’s mothers would weave mourning shrouds for their dead sons.

  Such was life in Kislev.

  As the sages of the steppe had it: is of no matter.

  Even the terror of the Year That No One Forgets had been endured, the victories at Urszebya and Mazhorod decisive enough to beat the broken tribes back to their desolate homelands. Now it seemed those slaughters had simply been feints in preparation for the death blow.

  With the first thaw, the northmen had come again.

  Kurgans, Hung, Skaelings, Vargs, Baersonlings, Aeslings, Graelings, Sarls, Bjornlings and a hundred other tribes came south under a single wrathful banner.

  And the End Times rode with them.

  Men, beasts of the dark forest and hideous monsters surged through Kislev in numbers never before seen. They swept south, not to conquer or plunder, but to destroy.

  Cursed Praag was engulfed by howling daemons and horrors undreamed as Erengrad fell to midnight reavers in wolfships who burned the western seaport to the ground. And Kislev, impregnable fastness of the Ice Queen herself, was taken by storm in a single night of terrifying bloodshed. Its towering walls were now rubble, thick with screaming forests of impaled men and women whose ruined bodies were attended by red-legged carrion-feasters as black as the smoke of the city’s doom.

  Those who abandoned Kislev before the war-host reached its walls fled into a land gutted by war and bleeding in its aftermath, where mercy was forsaken and savagery the common currency. Ruined settlements burned on every horizon, their timber palisades cast down, the slitted eyes of beasts-that-walked-as-men gleaming as they feasted in the ashes.

  All across Kislev, the fleshless bones of its people were stacked like cordwood as altars to Dark Gods.

  And this was but the opening move in the last war.

  The girl had seen perhaps six winters, seven at the most. She knelt in the stunted grass beside the body of a woman with white hair, shaking her and sobbing her name, as if that might be enough to return her to life.

  Sofia had seen the woman fall, and paused beside the weeping girl. Her hand hovered over the clasp of the satchel containing her few remaining medical provisions, but it was clear no craft she possessed could return the woman to life.

  Swirling mud was already blurring her outline, but no one else in their wretched column of brutalised survivors was bothering to stop. Too many had died to mourn one more. They shuffled onwards through the storm, hunched over and wrapped in thick cloaks against the rain sheeting over the open steppe.

  ‘You have to get up, little one,’ said Sofia, too exhausted to say much else. ‘You’ll be left behind if you don’t.’

  The girl looked up. Her features were angular with Gospodar blood and her eyes were frost-white, steely with defiance. She looked at the refugees shambling through the steppe grass and shook her head, taking the dead woman’s hand.

  ‘She wasn’t my mother,’ said the girl. ‘She was my sister.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but she’s gone and you have to let her go.’

  The girl shook her head again. ‘I don’t want the northmen to eat her. That’s what they do, isn’t it, eat the dead?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ lied Sofia.

  ‘She wasn’t a good sister,’ said the girl, her voice hard, but brittle. ‘She beat me and called me bad names when… But I’m still sorry she’s dead.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Miska,’ said the girl.

  ‘A proud name from ancient times,’ said Sofia.

  ‘That’s what mamochka told me,’ said the girl. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Sofia.’

  Miska nodded and said, ‘You’re the healer, aren’t you?’

  ‘I was a physician in Kislev, yes,’ said Sofia. ‘A good one too, but I can’t help your sister. Morr has her now. She is at peace and beyond the woes of this world. Even though she called you names, I’m sure she loved you and wouldn’t want you to die out here. She got you this far, yes?’

  ‘No,’ said Miska, standing and brushing wet strands of flame-red hair from her face. ‘I got her this far.’

  ‘Then you’re stronger than you look,’ said Sofia.

  Miska’s head snapped up and Sofia saw the bleak sky of the oblast reflected in her eyes. She bared her teeth and her nostrils flared like an animal sensing danger.

  ‘We need to go,’ said Miska. ‘Right now.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Sofia, realising that even after all she’d seen and experienced, she could still feel terror.

  A bestial howl echoed through the storm.

  Something predatory. Hungry.

  Close.

  They huddled together, crying and clutching one another in fear as the howling came again. Bovine grunts and bellowing roars echoed back and forth, like a wolf pack on the hunt.

  Sofia knew these were no wolves.

  She and Miska hurried through the rain to rejoin their group. Instinct made them form a circle. Some dropped to their knees in the mud, praying to Ursun, others to Tor, perhaps hoping for a lightning bolt to strike the beasts from the heavens. She heard the names of a dozen gods she knew, half again as many whose names were unknown to her.

  But most people simply clutched one another, praying only to die in the arms of a loved one. A defiant few shouted and railed at the unseen beasts, waving woodcutters’ axes and makeshift spears at the hammering rain and the blurred shapes moving within it. Sofia caught glimpses of horns, glints of rusted armour and enormous weapons with notched blades. Heavy hoofbeats and scraping paws circled them. Snuffling snorts and bellows-breath.

  ‘What are they?’ asked Miska, clutching tight to Sofia’s heavy skirt.

  Sofia put a hand around her shoulder, feeling the youngster’s terror. Miska was seasoned beyond her years, but she was still a child… A child doomed to die before her time.

  ‘Don’t look at them, little one,’ she said, pulling Miska tight to her, pressing the girl’s tearful face into the rain-stiffened fabric of her dress. What good would it do her to see the blood and horror to come?

  A monster with the snarling face of a bear charged from the black rain. A slashing paw ripped the arm and head from a kneeling man. Fangs snapped shut and bit him in half. Goat-headed horrors bounded in its wake, braying howls like war-shouts. Muddy pools bloomed red. People screamed and scattered like frightened sheep.

  Kaspar had spoken of how large groups would be quickly destroyed if their formation was broken. He’d been boasting of the Empire’s state troops, warriors who trained every day in the employ of an elector count, but these were terrified men and women who knew nothing of war save how to die.

  ‘Stay together,’ she yelled, already knowing it was hopeless. ‘We’re stronger together!’

  Her words fell on deaf ears as brutish shapes, red of tooth and claw, roared from the storm. Nightmarish monsters from children’s tales given horrifying, gory life: wild killers with slavering jaws and flesh-tearing claws.

  Hideously deformed, yet recognisably human, they hunted in packs. Sofia wept to see a mother and child borne to the ground and savaged with snapping bites. A man and his wife were ripped apart by frenzied beasts with distended lupine skulls and bone-bladed hands. A group of sinewy, red-skinned creatures with chittering cries and spiteful hearts finished the wounded with flint daggers or stout clubs pierced by iron-tipped tusks.

  The monsters bellowed as they killed, frenzied predators given free rein on a defenceless herd of prey-meat. More slaughters went unseen, mercifully hidden by the rain. The screams still carried on the wind, agonised and piteous. Sofia sank to her knees, holding Miska pressed tight to her breast as the monsters feasted. The girl sobbed, and Sofia felt her own mother’s words rising within her, a lullaby from the northern oblast:

  ‘Sleep, bayushki bayu.

  Softly the moon looks to your cradle.

  I will sing you a hero’s tale

  and all the songs of joy,

  but you must slumber,

  with your little eyes closed,

  my sweet bayushki bayu.’

  Her words faltered as a shadow fell across her, a towering beast with curling horns and a frothed maw of broken teeth. Bow-legged and with an umber pelt of matted fur, its blood-blistered flesh was raw with runic weals and war-scars. She heard the hoof-beats of more monsters closing for the kill. Miska tried to look up, but Sofia kept her hand firm against the girl’s hair.

  ‘No, little one,’ she sobbed. ‘Don’t look.’

  Sofia met the beast’s maddened gaze. She had faced evil in the eyes of men before, and at least this creature wore its monstrous nature on the outside.

  ‘Tor strike you dead!’ she yelled as its arm swept down.

  Hot blood sprayed her as the sharpened tip of a lance exploded from the monster’s chest. Its bellow of pain was deafening as the impact hoisted it into the air. The beast thrashed like a hooked fish before the shaft of the lance snapped. The wounded monster crashed to the ground as a mighty warhorse trampled it into the mud before it could rise.

  A knight in burnished plate slid from the horse’s back, casting aside the broken lance and drawing a long broad-bladed sword from a saddle-sheath. His armour was dented and the black pelt of an exotic animal hung limp across one shoulder.

  A knight of the Empire, one of the Knights Panther.

  Something in his bearing struck Sofia as familiar, but she hadn’t time to process the thought as the wounded beast struggled to its hind legs. It plucked the broken lance shaft from its chest, but the knight was already upon it.

  The sword cut the wet air, slicing down in a brutally efficient arc. The blade buried itself a handspan into the meat of the beast’s neck. Blood jetted as the warrior cranked the blade to open the wound. Nor did the knight allow the creature any hope of recovery. He dragged his sword clear and spun on his heel to take a two-handed grip on the weapon. The monstrous creature bellowed as the knight hammered the edge against its exposed throat.

  Once again the blade bit deep, and the beast’s roaring ended abruptly as its head toppled from its neck in a fountain of blood. The knight kicked the headless carcass in the chest and lifted his sword skyward as it fell.

  ‘Fight me!’ he yelled. ‘In Sigmar’s name, fight me!’

  The pack hunters heard him and Sofia heard them abandon their slaughters to turn on the lone knight. He backed away from the dead monster, placing himself in front of Sofia and Miska. Once again Sofia was struck by the familiarity of his movements, the ease of his martial bearing.

  The beasts loped towards him, more than a dozen blood-slathered man-eaters. A dozen more followed, chests heaving with rabid hunger. The knight’s steed, a broad-chested destrier with a sorrel coat lathered in sweat beneath a torn caparison of blue and gold, circled around to his side.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ asked the knight in clipped Reikspiel, his voice muffled by the heavy rain and the buckled steel of his helm’s visor.

  Sofia shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘Good,’ said the knight. ‘Don’t move and it will remain so.’

  Seeing they had the advantage, the monsters charged in a mass of blood-matted fur and fury. The knight stepped to meet them with a roar of fury and a wide sweep of his blade. Its edge cut like no other weapon Sofia had seen, but a lifetime tending the wounds of Kislev’s sons had taught her just how devastating such blades could be.

  The knight’s sword hewed the beasts with the ease of a woodsman splitting cordwood. He fought with the fluid economy of a warrior born to bloodshed, seasoned by countless campaigns and a lifetime of war. His horse bellowed and kicked around him, churning the mud bloody as it lashed out with powerful limbs. It circled its master, stoving in ribs and cracking skulls with every blow of its iron-shod hooves.

  At least ten beasts were dead already, their entrails heaped in a gory circle at the knight’s feet. But even so skilled a warrior could not fight so many alone and live. A hulking beast with a bear’s width eventually bore the knight to the ground as it died, and in the fractional pause of his blade, the rest were upon him.

  He rolled and pushed himself onto one knee as a wolf-headed beast bit down on his vambrace. The metal bent and the knight stifled a cry of pain. He slammed his gauntlet against the side of its skull until the bone cracked and it fell with a gurgling whimper. Another snapped for his gorget. The knight seized it by the jaw and stabbed his sword’s pommel spike into its eye. The beast howled and threw itself away from him.

  ‘Behind you!’ screamed Sofia, and the knight spun his sword with a glittering flourish, reversing the blade and ramming it upwards beneath his right armpit. The charging creature was scaled and horned, with more limbs than any natural creature ought to possess. It defied any easy description, but died just the same as it spitted itself on the knight’s sword.

  He surged to his feet and Sofia saw they were surrounded.

  A ring of slavering beasts, thirty at least, and the brief ember of hope in her breast was snuffed out. The smaller beasts lurked behind the biggest creatures, and their grunting, hooting barks were filled with monstrous appetite.

  Sofia felt the thunder of hooves pounding the sodden earth.

  And a skirling shriek echoed over the steppe in time with a host of whooping yells, the sound as wild and unfettered as any heart in Kislev. Her heart soared, recognising the sound at the same time as the riders charged from the storm.

  In they swept on steeds painted with mud and coloured dye, winged lancers riding high with rain-slick cloaks streaming like crimson gonfalon. Braided topknots and drooping moustaches were glorious as they rode the beasts down with kopia lances lowered. Feathered wing-racks bent at their backs, shrieking in the wind of their charge.

  The circle of monsters broke apart, two dozen skewered in the first crashing impact of pennoned lances through mutant flesh. The rest fled into the storm and the painted riders gave bitter yells as they pursued, slashing their curved szabla back to split braying skulls. Winged lancers had once laughed as they killed, but few in Kislev laughed now.

  The knight lowered his sword as the lancers rode the last of the beasts down, stabbing the blade into the red mud at his feet. Sofia let out a shuddering breath, and Miska looked up at the lone knight with wonderment.

  A giant Gospodar warrior on a towering horse in the black and silver of Tor broke away from the main body of riders to rein in his mount before the knight. He sheathed a heavy straight-bladed sword, an enormous six-foot pallasz, across his fur-cloaked shoulders.

  Sofia had seen none his equal. Even Pavel Leforto – Olric rest his uncouth soul – had not been proportioned as copiously.

  ‘Levubiytsa!’ yelled the man, climbing from his horse with surprising grace and planting hands like forge-hammers on the Knight Panther’s shoulders. ‘I think you try get yourself killed, yha? You should wait for rest of us, eh?’

  ‘You are correct, Tey-Muraz rotamaster,’ said the knight, and his accent was that of the Empire’s greatest city. ‘Yes, I should have waited, but look. There she is…’

  The knight nodded in Sofia and Miska’s direction, and the giant turned to face them. His long moustache was braided with silver cords, and his glowering, wind-burned features opened with understanding.

  ‘So it seem at least one god still listen to prayers, my friend,’ he said, smoothing out his long hauberk of riveted iron scales and pulling his fur-lined greatcoat across his enormous girth.

  ‘You are Sofia Valencik?’ he asked in her mother tongue.

  She nodded. ‘Yes, but how could you possibly know that?’

  ‘Because I told him,’ said the knight, removing his helm.

  Sofia’s heart lurched at the sight of his face, thinner than she remembered and framed by hair that was now silver. It was a face she had last seen twisted in grief as he told her how Ambassador Kaspar von Velten had died at Urszebya.

  ‘By the gods,’ she said. ‘Kurt Bremen. How can you be here?’

  ‘Because I came back for you,’ he said.

  They left the dead to the steppe, even the fallen riders.

  By rights each horse ought to have been loosed into the steppe with its rider enshrouded on its back, free to chase Dazh’s fire until there was no more earth to ride.

 

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