It seemed harsh, however, that he was expected to bear the burden of them at
the potential cost of his life.
“Sergeant! We have seen smoke!”
They travelled for another hour before they finally saw sign of the enemy.
Duhr, one of the men from the vanguard, came riding back down the trail as
though he had a daemon after him.
“Sergeant!” Duhr brought his horse to a halt in front of Gessler and saluted.
“Sergeant, we saw smoke. It was a little further down the trail. A big cloud of
black smoke, rising above the treetops.”
“Which direction?” Walden asked, coming to join them.
“That way,” Duhr turned in the saddle and pointed east. “Edelmann said he
thought it might be coming from Kerndorf.”
“That’s a village, about three leagues east of here,” Walden said, smoothly
filling in the gaps in his new sergeant’s knowledge. “Maybe a dozen families
live there.”
“This close to the mountains?” Gessler raised an eyebrow. “It seems a
perilous place to build a home.”
“They’re here for the engelwurz,” Walden told him. Reading Gessler’s look of
confusion, he elaborated. “It’s a plant. The locals eat it like a vegetable, but
its real value is as a medicinal herb. The variety that grows near the mountains
is particularly potent. The doctors from Hergig pay a lot of money for the seeds
and leaves.”
He shrugged.
“You’re right, though. It’s dangerous. But times are hard, so people risk
it.”
“Is the village defended?” Gessler asked him.
“There’ll be a palisade wall and a defensive ditch,” Walden answered. “The
villagers around here are not shy when it comes to protecting themselves. Most
of the men will be experienced archers. Even the women and children will know
how to use spears.”
“All right, then,” Gessler said. “We’ll head for Kerndorf and see if they
need help.”
He turned to Duhr.
“Ride back to Edelmann and tell him we’re on our way. If you see any enemies,
you’re to turn back and warn us. Otherwise, I want you to hold your position
until the rest of the patrol gets there.”
“Understood, sergeant.”
Saluting once more, Duhr spurred his horse and raced back up the trail.
“What about the fort?” Walden said. The rest of the patrol had gathered
around them, awaiting orders. “Should we send a messenger back to warn them?”
“No, not yet,” Gessler shook his head. “I want to know what’s going on before
we raise an alarm. For all we know, Kerndorf might have already fought off any
raiders. We don’t even know what caused the fire. It could have a less dramatic
explanation. Maybe someone got careless. In weather like this, a thatched roof
can be dry as tinder.”
He looked at the faces of the men. It was only natural he saw some
nervousness, but there was nothing that suggested overt fear or panic. Again,
Gessler found he was pleased. They were good soldiers. They would do their duty.
“We will travel in single file,” he told them. “No matter what happens, you
will not dismount unless ordered to do so. I want you to be ready to withdraw at
all times. If we run into anything that’s more than we can handle, we will pull
back immediately. If Kerndorf is in trouble, we will help if we can. But our
first duty is to the fort. We are scouts, not a war party. Is that understood?”
The men nodded their assent, almost as one.
“Good.”
Easing his horse further along the trail as the riders arranged themselves in
single file, Gessler took up position at the head of the column. He raised his
hand.
“Move out.”
By the time they reached Kerndorf, the worst of the fire had died down. The
smell of smoke was thick in the air, along with the odour of burned flesh.
Approaching cautiously on horseback, Gessler saw the gates of the palisade wall
that surrounded the village hung open. They yawned on wooden hinges, a section
of the thick timber bolt that had once held the gates shut lying shattered on
the ground between them.
Nothing moved inside the village when he looked through the gates.
“Moeller! Schultz!” he ordered two of his men forward. “Scout inside. If you
run into trouble, I want you to raise the alarm and get out fast.”
“It looks like hell hit this place,” Walden said as the two scouts
disappeared into the village. “Maybe I was wrong about the beastmen.”
“We’ll see,” Gessler replied. He cast a wary eye at the forest surrounding
them and turned to another of his men, a broad-faced farmer’s son with pock
marked features.
“Schimmel, you’re on lookout duty. When we enter the village, you’re to stay
here and stand guard. I especially want you to keep a watch on the forest. If
anything starts moving out there, I’m to hear about it from you first.
Understood?”
After a few minutes, Moeller rode back into view. Framed either side by the
gates, he waved his shield, giving the sign that everything was clear.
Taking the lead, Gessler led the rest of the patrol into the village. Once
past the walls of the palisade, it was as though they had entered a
slaughterhouse. He felt his horse give a nervous shiver beneath him, disturbed
by the smell of death.
Bodies, both human and animal, were strewn all about them. The people of
Kerndorf had been killed alongside their livestock, murdered in the enemy’s mad
rampage. Gessler saw that chunks of flesh had been cut from some of the corpses,
though whether for use as food or as trophies he could not be sure.
He felt his gorge rise. He had been a soldier for ten years and he had seen
other massacres, but the carnage at Kerndorf ranked with the worst. Everywhere
he looked he saw sundered bodies. Images impressed themselves on his mind in no
particular order. Most of the huts were burned out, but a few were surprisingly
intact. He saw a child’s doll, made of straw. It was lying amid a pile of
corpses. He couldn’t see the owner, but somehow the presence of the doll made it
all seem more real.
“Whoever they were, it didn’t take them long to get past the gate,” Walden
said, his eyes casting expertly about as he tried to read the course of the
battle from the evidence of its aftermath. “Otherwise, you’d expect to see more
men killed at the palisade. As it is, it looks as though the enemy broke in and
slaughtered the villagers as they made a last stand here, in the centre of the
village. Poor bastards. They didn’t have a chance.” He turned to the sergeant.
“It looks like I was right after all. This wasn’t done by beastmen.”
“How can you tell?”
“If beastmen had attacked this village, I would expect to see more damage,”
Walden replied. “They would have utterly laid waste to the place: smashing the
huts, trampling crops, poisoning the well—destroying everything that had any
smell of civilisation about it. The walls would be covered in beastmen symbols
daubed in blood, while the whole place would stink of beast piss and dung.”
“I see,” Gessler nodded. He considered the matter. “Who, then? Chaos
warriors? Greenskins?”
“Greenskins would be my guess,” the other man answered. “I haven’t seen any
tracks, and they seem to have taken the bodies of their dead with them, but the
greenskins destroyed this village. I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t think they were alone, Kurt,” Gessler said, gazing past him. He had
noticed something while Walden was talking. “Look at this.”
A corpse lay slumped in a sitting position against the wall of a nearby hut.
Together, Gessler and Walden moved closer to inspect it. The body belonged to a
well-muscled man in his early forties, from his clothes and leather apron
perhaps the village blacksmith. It took no great understanding of medicine to
see how he had died. On the lower right half of his body the flesh had been
scoured from his bones as though it had been dissolved, leaving a foul-smelling
puddle of liquid staining the earth around him.
There was a corroded lump of metal lying by the man’s skeletal hand. Gessler
could not be sure, but he suspected it was all that was left of the blacksmith’s
hammer.
“Merciful gods, the stench!” Pulling a cloth from his tunic, Walden clapped
it over his mouth. “It smells like sour milk and rotting fish, but a thousand
times worse. What do you think happened to him?”
“I don’t know. Some kind of acid, maybe? Here, there’s something else.”
Gesturing to the ground, Gessler pointed to the outline of a footprint by the
body. Elsewhere, the ground had been baked too hard by the sun to show any
tracks, but the puddle by the blacksmith’s body had softened the earth enough
for the killer to have left an imprint by his victim.
The footprint was three or four times the size of a man’s. The foot that made
it had been unshod. It was shaped unusually, with a broad flat span at the ball
of the foot, narrowing to a sharp, almost talon-like heel. Whatever it was, the
creature possessed four claws in place of toes.
“Sigmar protect us,” Walden said quietly, crossing his hand from shoulder to
shoulder as he made the sign of the hammer. “It is the mark of a daemon.”
“I don’t think so.” Gessler shook his head. “I’ve never seen one before, but
I think it could be the footprint of a—”
His words were cut off by the sound of a shouted alarm coming from outside
the village. Recognising the voice of Schimmel, the lookout, Gessler turned and
spurred his horse toward the palisade gates. Walden and the rest of the patrol
were right behind him.
Shouting an incoherent warning, Schimmel came riding toward them. Suddenly,
dozens of unseen archers unleashed a volley of arrows from the trees. Most of
them missed their mark, but enough struck home that Schimmel and his mount were
transformed into pin cushions. The horse screamed, tumbling its rider to the
earth as it collapsed and died.
“Schimmel!”
Moved by a vague notion of rescuing the wounded man, Gessler galloped through
the gate. It was too late. As he drew nearer, he saw that Schimmel was dead. One
of the arrows had hit under the browline of his helmet, the shaft sprouting from
the ruin of Schimmel’s eye like the stalk of some pitiless fruit.
“It’s no good, sergeant!” Walden had kept pace with him all the way. “You
can’t save him! Quickly, we have to retreat! Sweet Sigmar! Look! They’re in the
trees! They’re coming!”
Alerted by Walden’s warning, Gessler spotted dozens of stunted figures emerge
from the forest on either side of them. He saw a succession of inhuman faces as
they poured from the forest in ever greater numbers.
Goblins!
Sizing up the situation, he realised he and his men were already surrounded.
They were outnumbered. Ready for the kill, the goblins charged forward.
“Patrol, form a line!” Gessler shouted at the top of his voice, straining to
be heard above the strange whoops and cries of the approaching enemy. “Form up
on me! Get into position!”
Manoeuvring his horse to face the charging mass of goblins, Gessler drew his
sword as his men urged their horses forward to take up position on either side
of him. The goblins were close now, close enough that he could see their red
eyes, close enough he could almost feel their eagerness. Granted courage by
numbers, they were sure of their victory, certain there was no way Gessler and
the patrol could escape.
Weighing his options, Gessler had immediately realised the patrol had only
two choices. One, they could retreat to the village, taking cover behind a
palisade wall which had already proven incapable of keeping out the enemy.
Preferring to risk danger against certain death, Gessler decided on the
second
option.
“Patrol!” He shouted, pointing his sword in the direction of the onrushing
horde. “For Hochland! For your lives! Charge!”
They were infantrymen on horseback, rather than true cavalrymen, but at that
moment the distinction seemed irrelevant. Taking steel from their sergeant’s
example, the patrol charged forward. Crossing the short distance before the
goblin archers had time to loose another volley of arrows, they ploughed into
the enemy ranks.
Caught by surprise, the greenskin attack faltered as the goblins at the front
turned and tried to get out of the way of the onrushing horsemen.
Gessler felt a shock run up his arm as he brought his sword down on the head
of a goblin. He struck out again, and again, his sword rising and falling in a
bloody arc of destruction as he cut a swathe through the enemy.
He heard goblins screaming, squealing, and shrieking as they were cut down by
flashing blades or trampled beneath iron-rimmed hooves. In the madness of melee
it was almost impossible to judge the rest of the patrol’s progress, but he
caught glimpses of Walden and Duhr either side of him, following his lead as
they carved their way relentlessly through the enemy ranks.
The sergeant and his men were still outnumbered ten to one, but the change in
their fortunes was readily apparent. The goblins had attacked expecting an easy
kill, but the patrol’s charge and the casualties they had taken had given them
second thoughts. Even as Gessler slashed his way deeper into the enemy’s massed
ranks, it was clear they were on the brink of collapse. The goblins’ confidence
was visibly draining away, leaving them on the verge of panic.
It was what Gessler had hoped for. The goblins might not fully rout; they
might only retreat a little way before their leaders could rally them, but for
Gessler’s purposes it made no difference. All he needed was for the enemy to
falter long enough for him and his men to get away.
A shiver passed through the goblin ranks. Striking his sword down with even
greater ferocity into the enemy morass, Gessler redoubled his efforts. The
moment he had tried to create was close now. The goblins were wavering. Another
second and they would break and run.
Abruptly, he heard a terrifying roar and his plans were left in tatters.
Bellowing in bestial fury, an enormous shape came lumbering from the forest.
It took a moment for Gessler to see it clearly, but as the creature emerged from
the shadows he realised his earlier guess as to the identity of the blacksmith’s
killer had been right.