The City Is Theirs

Philip Athans

It was the sound of it that he hated the most. The grunts and roars, rough green skin against leather and stone, heavy footfalls and creaking wagon wheels, all came together to create a horrific tumult.

‘Beasts,’ his daughter’s voice quavered from behind him.

Count Brutus Leitdorf turned to look at the girl, and his heart sank at the terror writ plain on her delicate, once-innocent features. ‘Gisele,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’ Leitdorf tipped his chin at the young knight behind her, and the man suffered under his gaze, not sure how to respond.

‘He’s taking me away,’ Gisele said, before the knight could fully gather himself.

‘She will be well guarded, my lord,’ the young man finally said, but Leitdorf ignored him and crossed the few steps to gently turn his daughter away from the orc horde massing at the eastern gates.

‘She should have been away from Nuln days ago,’ Baron Leberecht grumbled from the back of the room.

‘They’re beasts,’ the girl said, ignoring the gruff baron, unable to pry her eyes from the doom massing outside the city. ‘From a distance, they look like one giant monster.’

‘They are one giant monster,’ Leitdorf said. He took her chin gently in his hand and tipped her face up to his. The scattering of freckles on her cheeks made him sigh. So like her mother’s… He was sure he could have traced the same little constellations on both their faces. Then fear in her eyes made him say, ‘I have some experience fighting giant monsters.’

His heart sank again when he could see that she didn’t believe him. But still she said, ‘Yes, father.’

Leitdorf kissed her on the forehead, trying not to wonder if it would be for the last time. He looked at the young knight with cold, intractable eyes, and said, ‘Take my daughter to safety, Sir Lehrer. You’ll have a platoon under your command to assist.’

Leitdorf didn’t respond to the hushed, choked-off gasp from Baron Leberecht that followed the order. ‘A whole platoon – sixteen men – to protect a single girl,’ the baron stated with a flat, dull voice, ‘when the orc Gorbad comes at us with millions.’

Could it be millions, Leitdorf asked himself even as he scowled at the baron? It looked – it sounded – like millions.

‘Sixteen men will hardly make a difference against millions, will it?’ the count asked the baron. ‘And though I owe you no explanations while you’re a guest in my city, baron, I’ll have you know that since the death of my wife, Gisele is the only family–’

‘Father…’ Gisele started.

‘She is the sole heir of the Leitdorfs.’ He kissed her forehead once more and whispered, ‘See, it wasn’t the last time.’

‘Father…’ Gisele started again. ‘I…’

‘You will go,’ he said, his voice louder, stern, fatherly and commanding – everything he knew she had to hear in it. ‘Sir Nedry and his men will protect you, and we will see each other again.’

‘When?’ she asked, even as she let him move her back to the waiting knight.

‘When my duty to the Empire is discharged,’ he told her. All he had left for her, after all, were a platoon of bodyguards and the truth.

‘Father…’ Gisele whimpered, but Sir Nedry turned her away, and she let him.

Leitdorf shifted his attention back to the enemy so he wouldn’t see his daughter ushered down the tall, winding spiral stairs from the Lord Astronomer’s tower, down through the bridge houses of the University, and into the tide of refugees reluctantly abandoning the eastern districts of the city in the face of a rampaging horde of greenskins.

‘My apologies, Count Leitdorf,’ Baron Leberecht said, with just enough sincerity in his voice that Leitdorf let his shoulders relax. ‘If I could have saved my own children…’

Leitdorf nodded and the two men stood for a while without speaking, looking down at the chaos.

Another young knight, this one smelling of sweat and mud, saluted and announced himself. Leitdorf couldn’t place his name, but he nodded and listened to the man’s report. There was precious little good news in it, save that, for the time being at least, the eastern wall was holding.

‘The gates are burning,’ the knight reported, and from high atop the needle-like tower Leitdorf could see the smoke. ‘They’re being reinforced by our own engineers and a few hearty volunteers from among the city’s skilled labourers, but–’

‘They won’t hold forever,’ the baron finished for him.

‘They won’t have to,’ the count replied. ‘If we can get the people out before they breach the walls…’

‘The people?’ Baron Leberecht asked. ‘Which people? Civilian refugees from fallen Averheim? Or perhaps a hundred ragged halfling survivors of the Moot? The few handfuls of starved, still-bleeding wretches from the villages closer to the mountains?’

‘And the people of Nuln, yes,’ Leitdorf replied. ‘If we can get them west across the bridges, it’s conceivable we might contain then dilute the orcs in the city’s narrow, winding streets.’

‘And you’ll send these people out there?’ asked the baron, eyebrows raised over red eyes ringed in bruises.

‘No,’ Leitdorf said as he glanced back over the baron’s shoulder to the window opposite and the citadel that rose high on a commanding tor at the far western edge of the city. Leberecht followed his gaze and nodded. The wide river, with its single choke-point bridge, then the western districts of the city, would provide two more buffers from the rampaging savages.

‘The people of Nuln will be guests in my bailey,’ the count said.

‘For how long?’ asked the baron.

‘For as long as it takes.’

‘Or you could arm them,’ the baron said, stepping forwards then stumbling when his wounded leg nearly gave way.

‘Baron Leberecht,’ Leitdorf said, concerned at the knight’s deteriorating condition.

‘A scattering more refugees have made it known they’re willing to take up arms,’ the young knight said, his own red, tired eyes darting from count to baron and back again.

‘Any able-bodied peasant will be welcome,’ Leitdorf said, ‘but I will not conscript–’

‘You have no choice but to…’ Baron Leberecht started, then trailed to a stop at the count’s disapproving glare.

So far Nuln had absorbed the sum total of four survivors – the Baron Leberecht included – of the Count of Averland’s army, which fell to Gorbad on the Aver Down. Nuln herself provided some tough, city-bound men willing to defend their homes, but not entirely certain how to go about it.

‘The peasant militia will fight,’ Leitdorf replied, ‘but might not be much better organised than their enemy – and certainly not their match.’

‘Again, count, I apologise,’ said the baron. ‘I have a … Gorbad owes me a debt.’

‘And what is that?’

‘Everything.’

Leitdorf held back a snort, and only nodded instead. After a moment he added, ‘All told, I command fewer men-at-arms than Averland threw onto the battlefield, and by all accounts the greenskin army has only grown bigger between the Moot and Nuln. We’re beyond pitchforks and rusty old blades.’

Baron Leberecht looked away and stumbled back half a step to slump on a high stool that creaked under his armoured weight.

Leitdorf glanced back at the young knight and said, ‘Thank you, Sir…’

‘Sir,’ the knight answered. ‘Pieter Hahn. At your service, count.’

‘Is that all?’ Leitdorf grumbled.

‘We’re still having some difficulty with the citizenry, sir.’

Leitdorf turned to regard the man. Blood stained his tabard, his face and his hands, all mixed with mud.

‘I gave strict instructions that the civilian population of the city was not to be harmed,’ the count said.

‘It’s not like that, sir,’ the knight replied. ‘Someone threw a pig carcass at me. The people are arguing – fighting, even – amongst themselves. Some are trying to get out faster, some are dragging their heels. There’s been looting, too, sir, and more than a few of the older folk are refusing to leave at all. In the wealthier districts, families are making… difficult requests. Communication is slow and uncertain. We have so few men–’

‘Shall I produce more men for you, then, Sir…?’

‘Hahn.’

‘Shall I produce more men for you, then, Sir Hahn?’

Hahn’s face drained of colour, and Leitdorf actually felt a brief pang of guilt.

‘You’ll do with what you have, then,’ the count said.

The young knight blushed, and his eyes shifted to take in the Lord Astronomer, who it seemed he’d only just then noticed in the room with them. The tall and scrawny old man smiled at the knight through a thick white beard, revealing a full mouth of unusually healthy white teeth. The young knight swallowed hard.

‘May I present the Lord Astronomer,’ Count Leitdorf said with a wry grin. ‘Lord Astronomer, Sir Hahn.’

The two men nodded to each other, then at a slight wave of Leitdorf’s hand, the exhausted young knight clicked his heels and strode off down the narrow stairs. The count spun the long brass tube of the Lord Astronomer’s telescope once more to bear on the orcs.

‘I’ve used a spyglass or two in my time, but this is remarkable,’ he said, turning a rough-edged spindle in minute motions to bring the image in the telescope into focus.

‘It is my honour to serve, my count,’ said the Lord Astronomer. The old man stood against the rough stone wall of his own observatory like a squire awaiting his master’s pleasure. ‘But I apologise that the instrument was not intended to be… pointed downwards.’

Leitdorf sighed when a mass of green coalesced into the raging face of a single orc among the roiling horde. It appeared upside down, and the Lord Astronomer explained that the image was reversed, too, as though reflected in a mirror. The orc’s brutish features were partially obscured by rough runes painted across its flat cheeks – some kind of totemistic nonsense already fading under the onslaught of rudely guzzled beer and wet mud flung up by the stomping tread of its comrades-in-arms.

Unconcerned with one orc among hundreds of thousands, the count refocused the telescope with a slow, even motion. The exercise helped steady his hand, and in so doing, his nerves.

The count trained the telescope on the rooftops. Few of the chimneys showed any smoke – uncommon for a chill autumn day. He panned down to the streets and was greeted with the upside down and backward image of a throng of peasants. From this distance he couldn’t hear their rough shouts, the occasional woman’s scream, or the crying of babies. Though the crowds were of similar size, the din of the orcs overwhelmed the sounds of the human throng.

A cart had become wedged in a narrow alley and people shouted at the driver to free up the way. The crowd surged around it like water flowing through a hole in a dam. People shoved each other, manners forgotten. A boy of perhaps twelve, no older than Gisele, hopped up onto the cart, making his way over the uneven, lumpy canvas tarpaulin. Two other boys joined him, the driver reaching out to grab them. The boys laughed. Grown men in the crowd cheered them on.

Then the tarpaulin came loose, spilling a pile of apples, then the boys, onto the heads of the crowd. Some stopped to gather up the fruit, some tossed them back at the driver in anger. The boys disappeared into the tide of the crowd as though they’d been swept into a slow-moving river and dragged under water.

Leitdorf took his eye away from the telescope and looked out over his city.

He’d set trebuchets and ballistae on the walls, which fired over and over again to no avail. Archers drawn from his own fighting force, the city’s watch, and whatever local hunters were willing to lend a hand, continuously rained arrows down on the seemingly oblivious horde.

The orcs occasionally fired missiles of their own over the walls: arrows sent out to kill at random, or boulders lofted high by their crude catapults. They’d begun launching goblins, too – living missiles that rarely survived the trip, but served their purpose of terrifying the people of the city.

‘They have bodies to spare,’ Leitdorf whispered to himself.

‘Count…?’ the Lord Astronomer queried, but Leitdorf only shook his head and called down the stairs for his seneschal.

‘Yes, count?’ Otho asked even as he rounded the corner of the stairs and stepped out onto the observatory floor, his ever-present leather-bound notebook and a charcoal stylus in his hand.

‘If there are men waiting to see me, just send them all up,’ he said. ‘I tire of these one-at-a-time bits of bad news.’

‘Yes, count,’ Earvin replied, ‘but then there are so many men, sir, and the observatory is–’

‘Go back down there,’ Leitdorf interrupted, ‘and explain to the gathered throng, then, that I understand perfectly well that we have too few men, too little time, and too many enemies. Then ask if anyone has come to bring me the slightest sliver of hope upon which to cling.’

The seneschal nodded, bowed deeply, and went back down the stairs.

The count, the baron, and the Lord Astronomer stood in silence for a very long time before a slow, shuffling step echoed up the stairwell.

‘Who are you, then?’ Leitdorf asked the tiny little man who emerged from around the corner.

Bald, dressed in a butcher’s smock stained with blotches from every colour of the rainbow, the man put a hand against the wall and wheezed so loudly that for a moment, the rumble of the greenskins was finally overwhelmed. He held a small steel box under his other arm, which trembled under its weight.

‘Count Leitdorf,’ the Lord Astronomer said, ‘may I present to you one of my colleagues, Doctor Isaak Meitler. He is an esteemed member of the University faculty, sir, an alchemist of some renown.’

Leitdorf raised an eyebrow at the man and said, ‘An alchemist, eh? Greetings, then, doctor, but I’m not in the habit of employing–’

‘Just shut up for a second,’ the old man wheezed, ‘and let me catch my breath, will you?’

‘I do beg your pardon, sir,’ Count Leitdorf said, doing his best to impart the deadly consequences underlying his mood.

Baron Leberecht stood from his teetering stool and stared daggers at the man.

‘Isaak, please,’ said the Lord Astronomer. ‘Surely you recognise our noble Count Leitdorf, and this is the Baron Leberecht, recently of Averland.’

The old alchemist took a deep, shuddering breath and waved them off. Leitdorf raised an eyebrow to the blushing Lord Astronomer, who replied with, ‘Doctor Meitler rarely leaves his laboratory, my count. But please accept that he is a serious and learned man, a highly regarded practitioner of his–’

‘Oh, leave it out, stargazer,’ the alchemist interrupted. ‘I’ve brought something our noble Count Leitdorf needs to see.’

‘And what is that?’ Leitdorf asked, gesturing to the steel box under the old man’s arm.

‘This?’ the alchemist responded, following the count’s eyes to the box. ‘This is the means to kill every last one of those green-skinned savages, and with barely lifting a finger.’

The baron laughed, and it was not a pleasant sound. Leitdorf didn’t bother trying to suppress a chuckle of his own, but then he faltered a little under the stern gaze of the Lord Astronomer.

‘May I see this treasure, then, doctor?’ the count asked.

The alchemist’s knees popped loudly when he attempted to kneel on the hardwood floor. With a wince he gave up, holding the box out in both hands, his whole body shaking.

‘A table?’ he spat at the Lord Astronomer.

Leberecht and the Lord Astronomer quickly cleared a small writing desk of a sheaf of papers upon which were drawn various concentric circles – Leitdorf had no idea what either of these learned men were up to, locked up in the ancient halls of the University.

The alchemist set the box down on the desk as though he were putting a newborn infant down to sleep, then took a deep breath and began fiddling with a series of brass tumblers.

‘A combination lock,’ the Lord Astronomer said in response to the baron’s quizzical look. ‘Very new…’

‘Dwarfish work,’ the alchemist chimed in.

‘Indeed?’ asked the Lord Astronomer. ‘I have a dwarf working on a–’

‘Gentlemen, if you please,’ Leitdorf interrupted. ‘We are in a state of emergency, after all.’

The Lord Astronomer bowed and made his apologies, but the alchemist didn’t seem to hear him. Something in the case clicked, and the old man lifted the hinged cover to reveal a soft red velvet insert that nestled two glass spheres. They were of identical design, roughly two inches in diameter, with no apparent cork or opening of any kind. Each contained a blue-grey liquid. The stuff exhibited a cloudy consistency, roiling, Leitdorf assumed, from the jostling at the hands of the alchemist.

‘This is it?’ Leberecht asked, fairly dripping in impatient disbelief. ‘These little glass balls filled with whatever that is… This will kill Gorbad?’

‘Gorbad?’ the alchemist replied. ‘Is that the leader of the orc horde that’s trying to get in through the eastern gate?’

The baron turned away and clenched his gauntleted hands into fists, while Leitdorf responded with a nod and a sigh.

‘Then yes.’

Count Leitdorf raised both eyebrows and he and Baron Leberecht stared the little man down.

‘I’ve had these for years,’ the alchemist said finally. ‘Keep them hidden away where no one’ll fool with them. Tried for a long time – longer than you’ve been alive, I’d guess, to sort out their composition.’

‘Glass,’ the count said, ‘and–?’

‘Glass…’ the old man scoffed. ‘Not the vessels, but the compound they contain.’

‘A poison?’ the Lord Astronomer guessed.

The alchemist heaved a great sigh and said, ‘An explosive.’

All three of the men raised an eyebrow, waiting to hear what that word meant.

‘Really?’ the alchemist asked. ‘I thought you two at least were supposed to be soldiers.’

‘I beg your–’ Leitdorf started.

‘You never saw anything explode before?’ the alchemist pressed. ‘Burst into flame and cause all sorts of death and destruction?’

‘Ah,’ the Lord Astronomer sighed. ‘Explosion… explosive… a substance that causes an explosion.’

The alchemist rolled his eyes but went on, ‘And a bigger explosion than anyone alive today except me and maybe twelve… no… thirteen… maybe fourteen or fifteen other people have ever seen. These are the last two – the only two – left in the wide world, and if they explode, well, that’ll be the last the world will ever see of them.’

‘Do we have this time to waste, count?’ Leberecht asked.

‘A rhetorical question, sir?’ the alchemist said, drawing a deadly glare from the baron.

‘Isaak,’ the Lord Astronomer said, ‘are you quite sure–?’

A sadness descended over the gruff little man when he said, ‘I’ve tried everything I know to make more of them. Not that I think we’re meant to wield power like this. Could be it wasn’t a human first mixed it, and mixing more is simply beyond us, and beyond us for good reason. Might as well let these last two do what they were meant to do, and save this city in the process.

‘So yes, I’m quite sure,’ he went on. ‘I’m quite sure they’ll do what I say they’ll do, and quite sure it’s time the world was through with them. Now, the trick is getting them from here to there’ – the alchemist gestured to the east and the orcs – ‘without having to be anywhere near – and I mean a couple hundred yards or more – from where it explodes.’

‘Earvin,’ Leitdorf called. Before the seneschal could reply, the count said, ‘Summon the Lord Artillerist.’

Kätzchen pulled her hand out of the woman’s grip so hard she elbowed someone in the crowd behind her.

‘Careful, brat,’ the man behind her complained. ‘Another inch and it would’ve been my balls!’

‘How dare you talk to a little girl like that, you old drunk,’ the woman who’d taken Kätzchen’s arm roared back. ‘I’m tryin’ to–’

‘I’m not a little girl, you fat old pig,’ Kätzchen shot back. The fact that the woman looked at her with anger instead of hurt made Kätzchen feel a little less guilty for snapping at her like that. ‘I’m a halfling, and a grown woman,’ Kätzchen explained. ‘And you’re the third spinster who’s tried to adopt me this morning.’

‘A halfling?’ the man behind her exclaimed.

‘Well,’ the pudgy woman huffed, turning her back on Kätzchen, ‘I never.’

‘Forget my balls,’ the man behind her said, lifting his voice over the general noise of the jammed street. ‘Let me check my purse is still here.’

Despite a sudden, burning desire to elbow the old drunk in the crotch after all, Kätzchen left him to his prejudices and slipped between the people crowding the street.

She was lost, and had been since she’d entered the city with a mass of exhausted refugees less than a week ago. She’d run – as fast as she could, as far as she could, for as long as she could – from her village in the Moot. What Kätzchen left behind would never be described as a village again. Her language didn’t have a word for what it had become.

Kätzchen shivered. It was cold and she had no coat. The street was wet and she had no shoes. But then she was used to going barefoot, and it was better to be cold than–

‘No,’ she said aloud.

People in the crowd ignored her. They were too busy trying to get to the bridges, as they’d been ordered. But she wasn’t talking to them anyway. She was talking to herself, to her own memories – to the sight of boiling water in great cauldrons, and her family being–

‘No,’ she whispered, and wiped away a tear.

A woman screamed and Kätzchen’s blood went cold. Then the argument started. Someone had tried to make off with another refugee’s bundle. The humans were stealing scraps of cloth from each other even as some of them tried to protect what they saw as a young girl on her own.

Kätzchen wondered if the woman who’d tried to help her would survive, or go into the pot. Would she escape, and if she did would she have any idea of the fate that would have befallen her at the hands of the horde? Would her house burn? Or would it be home to a clan of orcs? Would it be made into a slaughterhouse, a torture chamber, or a brothel?

Music came from a building Kätzchen passed. Men stood in the doorway with great pewter flagons, swilling beer and laughing at the press of the escaping citizenry. Would that building burn, too, once the orcs had finished all the beer? Would those men fall fighting, or be trampled, passed out drunk on the streets and pulverised under the weight of a million savage brutes?

‘Who’s in charge here?’ Kätzchen asked the crowd around her.

No one answered, and though it was possible they didn’t hear her, she was beginning to think they didn’t know.

‘How far do you say we have to be from where it hits?’ the Lord Artillerist asked, rubbing his chin and staring down at the open case and the two tiny glass globes.

‘As far as humanly possible,’ the alchemist replied.

‘Be precise, Isaak,’ the Lord Astronomer said.

The bent old alchemist sighed and shrugged. ‘A couple of hundred yards at least – twice that to be sure.’

‘On the outside of a longbow’s shot,’ Count Leitdorf said to his Lord Artillerist, who nodded in response.

‘You can’t be seriously considering–’ Baron Leberecht began.

But the alchemist grumbled, ‘What’re you thinking? Tie one of these onto an arrow, hope it’s properly balanced and isn’t jostled about or – may every god forbid – dropped by the archer?’

‘A catapult then?’ Leitdorf asked. ‘That was my first thought.’

‘Too small,’ the Lord Artillerist stated with a frown. ‘And they’re too light. Best to make arrowheads out of them. Besides, even our bigger trebuchets are only good for maybe three hundred yards.’

‘Ah,’ the Lord Astronomer piped in. ‘But if the missile is lighter?’

The Lord Artillerist shrugged, and Leitdorf urged the Lord Astronomer to continue.

‘In my studies of the celestial spheres I’ve observed that the mass of an object has some bearing on its motion through space.’

‘Well, I’ll be…’ said the alchemist with a frown. ‘All that looking up at the sky might have some use after all.’

‘Still,’ the Lord Artillerist said, ‘these are too small to launch in a trebuchet. The action of the engine itself will break the sphere.’

‘And kill everyone within three hundred yards,’ the alchemist said, rubbing his chin along with the count’s catapult man.

Leitdorf considered the possibility for a moment then asked, ‘What if we encase it in something? Wrap it in some kind of material – cloth or whatnot – to make a bigger sphere on the outside, one that will cushion it enough to clear the trebuchet but not enough on the other end that it won’t break the glass when it hits. That is all it needs to… what was that word, doctor?’

‘Detonate.’

‘All it needs to detonate,’ Leitdorf continued, ‘is for the glass to break. Yes?’

The Lord Artillerist was already smiling. ‘I could rig that. A cage of sorts, made of wire to hold it together.’

‘I can mix a glue,’ the alchemist offered. ‘Nothing fancy, but with a little paper we could surround your wire cage… make a bigger sphere around it.’

‘But if the cage is strong enough to hold it in place, will it be strong enough to keep the glass from breaking?’ asked Baron Leberecht.

‘I’m sure we can rig something,’ Leitdorf said, and he too started to rub his chin. ‘Pins, maybe… some kind of pin inside with the outside end tied to a string, with the other end tied to the basket of the trebuchet so that it’s released when the glue-and-paper globe is fired, and will pierce the glass globe on impact.’

‘Damn it all,’ the Lord Artillerist whispered. ‘It could work. But you’re sure this stuff will have an effect at the other end?’

Hands shaking from lack of food and water, eyes blurred from days of weeping, Kätzchen still managed to climb the brick wall of the three-storey building. When a half-naked woman shrieked from one of the windows, Kätzchen almost lost her grip. But she held firm, her thin fingers pressed tightly into the almost-too-small gap between poorly mortared bricks. Before the orcs had destroyed her life, Kätzchen would have offered the woman a wink, and some kind of witty quip, but instead she just grunted and pulled herself another arms-length from the woman’s window and continued up. Even as she threw a leg over the bargeboard, Kätzchen surveyed the besieged city.

The high curtain walls of the city of Nuln encompassed an area roughly four miles long and two miles at its widest. Only two gates, one protected by an imposing citadel and the other – the one the orcs were besieging – by an elaborate barbican, emptied out onto land. The only other way in was through the river gates – great steel portcullises that dropped all the way to the riverbed. The wide river bisected the city, spanned by only a single wide bridge covered in buildings and topped with a delicate, tall tower that scraped the bottom of the sinister grey clouds. The enemy had approached the city from the east, massed at the eastern gate, and just sat there. Nuln was hard under siege, but the western gate, at the citadel, was still clear of orcs.

The dense overcast sky made it difficult for Kätzchen to tell how late in the day it was – not quite noon yet, anyway – but there was no mistaking east. Gorbad’s horde was an ever-shifting mass, devouring the fields and dismantling the farms. Human soldiers scurried along the wall walks, occasionally stopping to fire a volley of arrows down into the orcs. Kätzchen watched the mass of greenskins part in spots, as though the arrows were the wind, and the orcs the prairie grass. Kätzchen didn’t doubt that with each volley a few orcs were wounded, maybe one or two were killed.

Then bigger holes formed.

Kätzchen’s people didn’t have any of the strange things the humans had built atop their towers. Spindly constructs of wood and rope rose from the flat-topped guard posts. Two of them burned, sending columns of smoke into the already grey sky. The others whipped forwards while other parts rotated backwards – and they threw boulders, or sometimes a kind of flaming wicker ball – into the mass of orcs laying siege to the city.

They might have killed half a dozen with each volley, and a louder roar echoed up from the horde when they hit. Kätzchen’s blood ran cold at the sound of it. The orcs laughed.

Kätzchen put her face in her hands, smelled the dirt ground into her palms, and the dry stink of her own breath.

‘No,’ she told herself when her shoulders started to shake.

The fine hair on the back of Kätzchen’s neck stood on end, and something told her to look up.

One of the rock-throwers whistled and whirred, and whipped its missile towards the horde. Kätzchen cringed, though she wasn’t sure what was wrong. The rock flew at the wrong angle – it was too light. There was something wrong with it, but the halfling couldn’t explain what it was that made her think that.

‘No,’ she whispered again when the horde answered with a siege engine of their own. They sent a rock arcing up and towards the walls, followed by a great cheer, from the massed greenskins.

But it wasn’t a rock.

As it arced closer, Kätzchen could see it move – arms and legs pinwheeling through the dense grey sky.

‘A goblin,’ she whispered to herself.

The strange rock thrown by the humans passed over the wall, and Kätzchen marvelled at the precision – or the luck – brought to bear by the savage greenskins. The goblin and the humans’ rock made right for each other.

The little goblin screamed. The horde cheered, and they hit.

There was a burst of red and green mist in the sky, then it was as though the air rippled. Beneath the point of impact, the horde shimmered along with the ripples of air. Orcs, goblins, their siege engines and towers, their tents, and the few trees they hadn’t had a chance to cut down yet splayed outwards from that centre point in an ever-increasing circle. They fell, then they left the ground and flew.

From a distance Kätzchen couldn’t make out individuals, just waves of alternating green and brown and red and black.

A sudden wind hit her hard enough to knock her back three steps then down to the slate roof. The sound was impossible for her to describe. It was every bell from every bell tower everywhere in the world ringing just once, at precisely the same time. Kätzchen screamed, and could feel it in her throat, but couldn’t hear it.

She rolled to her knees then scrambled to her feet, reeling when she saw how close she’d come to being blown off the roof.

A cloud of grey-white she couldn’t identify – not smoke, dust perhaps – expanded up and out from the place where the strange missile had hit the goblin. The cloud seemed to have a life all its own. As it spilled into the city it turned corners, filling the streets, moving at a slow, terrifyingly deliberate pace, swallowing everything in its path.

Then Kätzchen’s ears began to recover, and register the screams that tore from the throats of orc and human alike.

‘I told you it would work,’ the alchemist said.

Leitdorf spun and the old man took a step away from him, fetching up against the wall of the Lord Astronomer’s observatory. The count staggered, almost falling, and had to put a hand to a wall himself. He shook his head to clear it.

‘What is that?’ the Lord Astronomer asked. He had fallen to his knees when the shockwave set the tower swaying like a sapling in a hurricane. The tower still moved, but Leitdorf stayed on his feet. His knees shook in time with the tower.

Baron Leberecht grunted and winced in pain as he struggled to sit up where he lay prone on the floor. The stool had shattered under him. ‘I’ve never seen anything like that,’ he said.

‘I told you it would work,’ the alchemist repeated, his voice rough and quiet.

‘There was no fire,’ Leitdorf said. He turned and watched a grey cloud fall slowly across the eastern districts of Nuln, covering buildings like freshly fallen snow. ‘What is that?’

‘Dust,’ the Lord Astronomer replied, slowly climbing to his feet.

‘Dust?’ the alchemist asked from the back of the room. ‘What kind of dust – what colour?’

‘White,’ Leitdorf said. ‘By the gods, the screaming…’

‘What colour?’ the alchemist insisted. Leitdorf heard him struggle to his feet, the Lord Astronomer lending a hand.

‘White,’ Leitdorf repeated. ‘Grey. A pale grey.’

The alchemist staggered over to stand at Leitdorf’s right shoulder.

‘Oh, no,’ the old man said.

Leberecht shook his head and asked, ‘What was that?’

‘The wall,’ the alchemist said. ‘I told you that trebuchet wouldn’t throw it far enough.’

‘The wall?’ Leberecht asked. ‘What about the wall?’

‘We should go, I think,’ the Lord Astronomer said, his voice suddenly thin, almost shrill.

‘That cloud,’ said the alchemist, ‘is all that’s left of a good portion of the eastern curtain wall.’

The tone of the screams had already begun to change. Mixed in, there were roars.

‘The wall…?’ Count Leitdorf whispered.

Something heavy and wet hit the roof next to Kätzchen, and some thick, hot liquid splashed all over her.

Blood.

Kätzchen took a breath in to scream when another piece of dead orc hit the roof, and another splash of red coloured the slate tiles.

Something soft and wet bounced off her shoulder, and Kätzchen flinched away from part of a goblin’s bare foot. People on the street below her screamed. Kätzchen let out her breath, but didn’t bother adding to the cacophony.

The strange cloud had settled, and she had barely enough time to thank her lucky stars that it had fallen short of devouring her. ‘And now it’s raining orcs,’ she whispered.

Her shoulders quivered, then a shudder passed all the way down her body to her toes.

Covering her head with her hands she crouched on the flat slate roof for what seemed like a very long time until the pieces of dead orcs stopped falling.

When she felt it was safe to stand she looked first to the east. The dust began to clear in the thick, humid air, and there was no wall behind it any more. That’s when Kätzchen decided to scream – a wild, piercing, incoherent shriek.

After two more of those, she cast about for anything resembling hope, and her eyes fell on the tower that rose above the Great Bridge and its cluster of bridge houses. The impressive structure was the highest point in the city.

‘That’s where I’d go,’ Kätzchen whispered to herself. ‘If I were in charge, that’s where I’d go.’

The humans had a weapon that could do that – that could make the air tear the world apart – and they might have killed a few thousand of Gorbad’s horde, but opened their city to the rest of them in the process. They had a weapon that could do that, but they didn’t know how to use it.

‘Who’s in charge here?’ Kätzchen asked the mute sky.

The crowd below streamed west towards the bridge much faster – panic settling in. Kätzchen wiped as much of the orc blood off herself as she could, then swung a leg over the bargeboard at the edge of the roof and started to climb back down to join the ragged tide of humanity.

Count Leitdorf stepped out onto the street at the west end of the Great Bridge with only the smallest entourage, but still the throng of citizens parted for him.

‘Count Leitdorf, please, sir,’ Earvin practically begged. ‘It will only take a few minutes to call for the–’

‘Carriage?’ Leitdorf interjected. ‘In this crowd?’

‘It will get to the citadel fa–’

‘Much more slowly than we can on foot,’ Baron Leberecht interrupted.

‘But count, are you sure you need to carry that–?’

‘Telescope?’ Leitdorf replied. ‘Yes, I’m quite certain. We will bring everything out of the University that we can carry.’

If the seneschal was the slightest bit annoyed at not being able to finish a sentence, he didn’t show it. That was left to the baron.

‘Those savages wouldn’t know which end of that thing to piss into, let alone look through,’ he said. ‘If you want to save telescopes and books, stop running west.’

Count Leitdorf stopped in mid-stride, and a pikeman they’d picked up on the bridge span proper bumped into him hard enough that both his and the count’s helmet visors crashed down. The pikeman scrambled back, bowing, and fouling his long weapon in a laundry line above.

Leitdorf raised his visor and waved at the pikeman to calm the man down. He reserved his irritation for the refugee baron.

‘Accuse me of cowardice in the face the enemy, Baron Leber–’

‘No!’ the baron practically barked.

A peasant woman passing by gasped, then shrank back into the press of bodies when she realised the noblemen had noticed her. Most of the people who passed were more concerned with keeping up, not being trampled, and pushing through with their overlarge bundles or string of dirty, exhausted, and protesting children. They didn’t register their leader at all.

The baron held up a placating hand and said, ‘I know full well you are no coward, sir, and I trust you know full well that I make no such accusation. But I have some experience with these brutes, count, and I ask to be heard.’

Leitdorf sighed, and shifted the long brass telescope in his grip. The instrument clanged on his polished breastplate. ‘Speak,’ he said, ‘while we walk.’

With a nod and a shaky first step forwards, Baron Leberecht said, ‘These are orcs, Count Leitdorf. They’re fierce and ruthless, and when they mob up like this they act as one – one mind, one weapon, one seething mass of incoherent rage.’

‘And?’ Leitdorf prompted. He hadn’t heard anything from the limping baron he didn’t know full well already.

‘And that’s both strength and weakness,’ the baron went on. ‘Count Leitdorf… Brutus,’ – Leitdorf raised an eyebrow at that – ‘you don’t fight orcs army to army, that was Averland’s mistake.’

‘Count Averland,’ the seneschal corrected, then blushed at a stern glare from Leitdorf.

‘Why are we stopping?’ the old alchemist asked, the locked box with the last of the pair of alchemical bombs tucked securely under his arm.

‘Count Averland fought the mass of orcs with the mass of his army,’ Leberecht continued. ‘And that was on open ground. Here, in the tight streets of the city, they can be carved into smaller gangs. They can be fought not horde-to-horde, but man-to-man.’

The Lord Astronomer took the alchemist by the shoulders and gently turned him away.

‘A million of their men to a few thousand of ours?’ asked the count.

‘I’ll wager on one decent fighting man against half a dozen greenskins at least.’

Leitdorf paused in the midst of the slow-moving crowd and considered the baron’s advice for a moment.

Knowing he had the count’s ear, Leberecht went on in earnest, ‘If an orc slaps you, count, you punch back. If it cuts you, you stab it. If it hurts you, you kill it. They understand two things and two things only, sir: blood and death. And if you don’t show them both, they’ll show you.’

From the corner of his eye, Leitdorf saw the pikeman nod his agreement, and tighten his grip on his weapon.

‘But all these people…’ Leitdorf offered with a sweep of a hand.

‘The women and children, sir, of course,’ Leberecht acquiesced. ‘The old and infirm, certainly. Hide them in your citadel. But any man with two hands. Anyone who can swing a club – or swing a gods-be-damned fist – must go east, sir. Because the enemy is to the e–’

‘They’re through, count,’ the blood- and mud-spattered Sir Hahn shouted as he clawed his way through the crowd to the count. ‘The orcs are through the wall.’

A woman screamed when she heard that, then another and another, and people started running. Though the knight had shouted, only a few people into the crowd could hear him, but when a few people started to run, everyone else followed.

‘Oh,’ Leitdorf breathed even as the hands of his retainers closed around him to keep him safe from the stampeding refugees, ‘bloody hell…’

Especially being as short as she was, it wasn’t easy for Kätzchen to make her way from the middle of the flood of refugees to the side, but with some luck, some persistence, and a little bit of rudeness, she managed.

She fetched up against the back of a short flight of stone stairs, and immediately climbed up to the landing, maybe eight feet above the bridge deck. With about twenty square feet of her own in which to breathe, Kätzchen paused and shivered. Rubbing her own arms with dry, scratchy hands, she looked up at the vaulted ceiling of the enclosed bridge. She’d never seen a ceiling so tall before – had never been in a room so big, even if it was opened at both ends.

The Great Bridge, as wide as four city blocks, supported a small city all its own. Kätzchen could tell just at a glance that there were more rooms, more enclosed space, in the bridge buildings than in all of the houses in the village of her birth.

‘No,’ she whispered to herself to fend off images of that glorious bridge falling under the weight of the seething green mass of orcs.

Kätzchen told herself she was almost there, that she’d made it to the bridge, to what the townsfolk called the ‘Universe-city’ – Kätzchen didn’t know that word – and the tower rose somewhere above her.

The stairs led to a stout oaken door, reinforced with black wrought iron bands. Knowing the humans’ love of locked doors, Kätzchen didn’t hold out much hope, but tried it anyway, and was as delighted as she was surprised when it opened with a loud grinding of rusted hinges.

She slipped into the dark space beyond and closed the door behind her.

The corridor in which Kätzchen found herself had the second tallest ceiling she’d ever seen in her life, and was dimly lit by a few candles burning down to nubs in ornate wall sconces. She knew she needed to find stairs – anything leading up – so she picked a direction and pressed on.

Only minutes later the corridor spilled out into a huge vaulted chamber. She heard an animal snort and blinked against the oil lamps set on the four corners of a crude cart. A donkey turned to look at her, bored, and it seemed to sigh.

‘Oi, you there!’ a man called out. A soldier approached her, his arms filled with a heavy stack of leather-bound books. ‘You can’t be in here, girlie. Count’s ordered everyone west to the citadel. And that means everyone.’

The soldier was one of about a dozen, pulling books from tall stacks of shelves, an armload at a time. They loaded the tomes into the cart as though they had all the time in the world.

‘You’re taking all these books?’ she asked the soldier.

The man grunted as he hefted the stack of books up onto the cart then he shrugged and said, ‘We have our orders – everything in the University, including all eight of the libraries, goes into the citadel before them orcs can loot them.’

‘Loot them?’ Kätzchen asked, shaking her head.

She looked to her right and saw a dozen spears leaning against a wall. On the floor beneath them, the men had arranged their helmets and other gear.

‘Your mum know you’re here?’ the human asked her, leaning in and blinking at her in the dim light.

‘My mum…’ she started, but just shook her head and began walking again, to a door on the other end of the big room. She stopped all at once, turned back to the soldier, and asked, ‘Do you know how I get up to the top of that tall tower in the middle of the bridge?’

The soldier looked up at the ceiling as though he could see it through the roof – but it was so dark Kätzchen doubted he could even see the ceiling.

He looked back at her and shook his head.

‘You’re wasting your time,’ Kätzchen felt obligated to say. ‘They won’t steal your books.’

‘Won’t they?’ the man asked, plastering a silly grin on his face. He still thought he was talking to a child.

Kätzchen opened her mouth to speak, but closed it without a word, turned, and ran at speed to the door.

She could hear voices beyond it even before her hand touched the ring and she flung it open.

‘–other choice but to bring down this bridge,’ a tall and handsome man in shining silver armour said. He wore a tabard elaborately embroidered with a red shield topped with a delicate helmet, which itself was topped with a gold crown. Black vines poured down each side of the shield from the helmet. The vines were tipped with red things that might have been either thorns or flowers. Kätzchen hoped they were flowers.

‘Wait,’ she said, not realising to whom she was speaking. ‘Bring this bridge where?’

‘The eastern districts of the city will be all but cut off, save for boats, I suppose, but…’ another tall, armoured man responded. His tabard was stained with dirt and blood, and was black already. Kätzchen didn’t like this man’s rough, unshaven and grim face at all.

‘But the orcs have no boats,’ another, shorter man carrying a book said.

‘Who is that there?’ asked a fourth man – taller than the rest and older, by the grey-white cast of his long beard. He was dressed in a robe coated with mud along the bottom four inches or so, and he had a kindly gleam in his eyes.

The last of them was a grumpy-looking old human clutching a metal box under one arm. Kätzchen winced at the look on his face – though she couldn’t describe why he gave her such an unsettled feeling.

‘Little girl!’ the man in the gleaming silver armour called out to her. He stepped a little closer and squinted at her, then his face fell, and he almost dropped the long brass tube he cradled in his arms like a babe. ‘Gisele?’

‘Mistress Gisele?’ the man with the book said, too, also squinting to see her face.

‘By the gods, Gisele, what are you–?’ the silver-armoured man said, but finally realised she wasn’t this Gisele person.

‘My name isn’t Gisele,’ Kätzchen called out, sure to keep both of her empty hands out at her sides. ‘And I’m not a child. I came from the Moot.’

‘A halfling,’ one of the men whispered.

‘You’re going to destroy this bridge to keep the orcs on the other side of the river?’ she asked.

The men all looked at each other as though they’d never seen a halfling before.

‘Is one of you in charge here?’ she asked, not challenging them, but hopeful.

‘I am,’ the silver-armoured man replied. ‘Count Brutus Leitdorf, at your service, ma’am.’

Kätzchen felt her whole body sag. She almost poured out onto the floor. The count set down his long brass tube and rushed to her side. When his warm, strong hands wrapped around her arms, she did sink to the floor. Kätzchen let him hold her for a moment before she asked. ‘Do you have another of whatever that was that made the sky bite the earth?’

The count looked surprised and horrified all at once, and he glanced back at the little man with the box under his arm.

‘As a matter of fact, I do,’ the little man said. ‘What of it?’

Though he certainly had more than enough to occupy his mind, Leitdorf couldn’t help but be distracted by the halfling. The freckles that dotted her cheeks made his heart feel heavy in his chest. Her eyes were Gisele’s, too.

‘You could have been sisters,’ he said to her, then blushed and looked away.

She put a hand on his shoulder and when he looked at it he had to sigh. That was where the resemblance ended. Her hands were rough, dirt packed into every crease and wrinkle. Her nails were dirty and broken.

‘Your people…’ he said, ‘your family were farmers?’

She nodded but looked away.

‘They’re all dead, aren’t they?’ he had to ask.

That’s when she looked at him, looked him deep in the eyes, and she didn’t look anything like Gisele then. She looked like Gisele’s mother.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the count.

‘Me too,’ Kätzchen replied.

‘The men have the roof off,’ Sir Hahn reported, before adding, ‘Excuse me, count.’

Leitdorf, happy for the distraction, stepped away from Kätzchen and turned his attention back to the task at hand.

‘The Lord Artillerist and his men are already on their way up,’ the knight went on.

Nodding his approval, Leitdorf sent the knight on his way, and stepped closer to the three men bent over another of the special missiles – perhaps their last hope. He’d ordered another trebuchet hastily assembled at the city’s highest point, the Lord Astronomer’s tower, now divested of its domed roof. They all hoped it would give them the range necessary to kill enough of the Waaagh! that they’d give up and withdraw. Or at least it might be a fairer fight.

‘You have enough glue there, astronomer?’ Baron Leberecht asked.

‘Yes, baron, thank you.’ The Lord Astronomer tore a long strip of paper from a book.

‘What are you doing?’ Leitdorf exclaimed.

The three men sat back, revealing half a dozen faded old tomes, already relieved of half their pages. A stack of half a dozen more sat next to them on the floor of the dimly-lit and abandoned University mess hall.

‘We’re… um,’ the Lord Astronomer began.

‘Those books…’ the count said. ‘What are you destroying? Can those be replaced?’

‘Yes,’ the old alchemist said, without the slightest sincerity.

Baron Leberecht gave the alchemist a disapproving glare.

‘I ordered those books to be evacuated to the citadel,’ Leitdorf went on. ‘Are we looting our own city then?’

‘Count Leitdorf, I…’ Leberecht began, but ended with a shrug.

‘The orcs don’t want your books,’ Kätzchen spoke up, and all heads turned to her. ‘They might burn them when they run out of wood, but do you really think that horde knows how to read? They’ll take gold, anything that might be food, and weapons to be sure, but books? Whatever that brass tube is, if it isn’t a weapon of some kind? Do you think they’ve come for your glassware and your satin doublets?’

‘I think I know–’ Leberecht growled at her.

Unfazed, Kätzchen interrupted, ‘If you’re suffering over a few books – any books when there are still people on the wrong side of the river, Mister, I don’t think you know scat from scrolls.’

With some difficulty from his wounded leg, Baron Leberecht stood to glare down at Kätzchen and sneered, ‘Maybe we’ll take a cue from your friends out there, give you the bottle, and put you in that trebuchet with–’

Kätzchen yelped when Count Leitdorf’s fist smashed the baron in the jaw and dropped the armoured man to one knee. The count’s seneschal stepped forwards to grab his master’s arm, but Leitdorf shook him off. Leberecht put a hand to his face and wiped blood from the corner of his mouth. He made to stand, but when Leitdorf advanced a step, he stayed on one knee.

‘She’s no goblin, Baron Leberecht,’ the count said. ‘And I will hear your apology.’

‘Count Leitdorf,’ the baron said, his voice tight with rage, his face flushed with embarrassment, ‘please accept–’

‘Not to me,’ Leitdorf cut in, and he held a hand out to indicate the halfling.

The two men glared at each other in silence for a while before Kätzchen spoke up. ‘No apologies necessary, baron.’

Leitdorf looked back at her, and she shook her head. When he turned back to Leberecht, he held out a hand and helped the armoured man to his feet.

‘Tense moments, baron,’ the count said.

The two men looked each other in the eye again, but before either could say anything more there was a terrible roaring sound of shattered stone, falling bricks and splintering wood from above.

The floor shook and they all dived to the planks with their arms over their heads as screams and shouts echoed in from the mass of people still crossing the bridge outside.

‘Can anyone here tell me what that was?’ Count Leitdorf asked, his head still pressed to the floor.

‘I think…’ the Lord Astronomer said, pausing to cough. ‘I think that was my tower.’

Leitdorf rolled to a seated position and took stock of the room: dust in the air, plaster trickling down from the roof. A loud creak made his blood run cold, but it stopped quickly enough. The sounds of panic from the bridge outside began to subside.

‘Baron?’ Kätzchen said. ‘What was that about giving me a bottle and sending me out?’

‘As a rule,’ Count Leitdorf said to Kätzchen when the last of the plans had been made, ‘I don’t send men out on suicide missions.’

‘Well,’ the halfling responded with a twinkle in her eye, ‘I’m neither a man nor particularly suicidal, count, so your rule remains unbroken.’

‘Kätzchen…’ he began.

But he was interrupted by Earvin with a hand on his shoulder. ‘Count,’ the seneschal reported, ‘it’s as we expected, sir. The orcs are well into the eastern districts, but advancing slowly. They’re burning, sir, and looting along the way. Some of the fires seem to have got away from them, and block their advance at points, but they’re clear to here, sir, to the Great Bridge.’

‘The only way across…’ Baron Leberecht said, though they all knew that.

‘The bridge itself is clear, sir,’ Earvin went on. ‘All the citizens and refugees… all who’ve survived thus far, count, are across and making for the citadel.’

‘Keep them going,’ Leitdorf commanded.

‘Sir?’

‘Baron Leberecht,’ Leitdorf went on, ‘would you be so kind as to take command of the full evacuation of the city of Nuln?’

‘I beg your–?’ Leberecht exclaimed.

‘We won’t stop them,’ Leitdorf said. ‘We can’t stop them. They’re moving up catapults now, aren’t they, into the city?’

‘It was how they destroyed the Lord Astronomer’s tower, yes, count,’ Earvin replied.

‘Then we’re lucky they’re stopping to loot and eat,’ Leitdorf said. ‘And it’ll be dark soon.’

‘Such a long day…’ Kätzchen whispered.

Leitdorf smiled and nodded. ‘We might have tonight – one night – to cut off their advance by bringing down this bridge. Still, that will only slow them. The western districts of the city, where the streets are wider, will slow them only a little, too.’

‘The citadel?’ Baron Leberecht asked.

Count Leitdorf shook his head.

Baron Leberecht took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and steadied himself. ‘It will be my honour to escort your people to Altdorf.’

‘I’ll see you have the best my stable has to offer, Baron,’ said Leitdorf. ‘That leg of yours…’

The two knights clasped hands, but were once more interrupted by Earvin.

‘And sad news, count,’ said the seneschal. ‘The body of the Lord Artillerist has been recovered from the rubble of the tower.’

‘Gorbad will pay for that loss with his own black blood,’ Leitdorf vowed.

‘Who?’ asked Kätzchen. When Leitdorf looked at her as though she’d taken leave of her senses, she continued, ‘You know, I don’t think there even is such an orc as Gorbad? I mean, does this look like something that someone’s leading?’

Leitdorf took in a breath to argue, but stopped when he saw the earnest expression on the halfling’s freckled face.

‘All those orcs care about is… stuff,’ she said. ‘They don’t need a leader to help them steal food and kill and rob. They laugh when you kill their so-called comrades, and then put their own people in… what do you call those things?’

‘Catapults,’ Baron Leberecht answered.

Count Leitdorf shook his head and said to Earvin, ‘No more of that. No more recovering bodies. I want every last man back across this bridge. Leave the bodies where they lie, leave the books and–’ he gave Kätzchen a smile – ‘the glassware behind, and rally at the citadel. And that means us as well, my friends.’

‘All but me,’ said the halfling.

‘Kätzchen,’ Count Leitdorf started again, ‘Are you absolutely certain?’

‘Yes, count.’

Leitdorf nodded and asked, ‘You have the map?’

The halfling held up the hastily drawn map of the University provided to her by the Lord Astronomer.

‘Then all you need is this,’ said the alchemist, and he stepped forwards holding in the upturned palms of both hands the last of the little glass spheres.

Kätzchen wanted to close her eyes, but she kept them open. She wanted to scream, but remained silent. She wanted to run, but didn’t move a muscle as the orc scout passed within an arm’s-length of her.

Most of its flat face was mouth. Fat, flabby lips failed to contain yellowed things more like broken tusks than teeth. Its beady eyes glared red under a dense, deep brow. Little ears that came to points, like a dog’s, were set high on its head, even with its eyes. Its tree-trunk neck was attached to its chest rather than its broad shoulders, which hunched into veiny, heavy-muscled arms. Fingers like sausages gripped an axe handle so wide that Kätzchen didn’t think she’d be able to hold it in both hands. Little black hairs like a wire brush bristled in patches from skin the colour of fresh peas. Its black leather tunic had been sewn together from mismatched pieces from half a dozen different animals, as were its rough trousers and boots. The brute smelled of scorched meat and faeces, and the sound of its breathing was one part snore, one part wheeze, and one part gasp.

Kätzchen had found a place where the falling tower had broken open a hole in the wall. Making her way inside the walls of the University was physically easy. Kätzchen was small enough. But being closed up, not being able always to see if there were orcs and goblins an inch from her face, worked at what little nerve she had left.

Every time she caught a whiff of an orc scout, or heard a rough footfall or grunt, the sight of her family going into the cauldrons, screaming, flashed through her mind’s eye. She’d already stopped once to fight back body-wracking sobs.

There was no way for her to tell how much time had passed, or even how high she’d climbed up through the University walls, or how far across the bridge she’d passed.

Kätzchen wanted to climb back down – she should have climbed back down – but the higher up she went the fewer orcs she encountered. The scattered greenskins scared her more than the mass of them. The army itself was too big, too overwhelming even to understand except as a force of nature.

But that’s how the orcs had first come to the fields around her village, in ones and twos, in scouting parties that probed at their stockades, ran off with sheep, stole supplies. They came first as an annoyance, as thieves in the night.

Then they came as an avalanche.

A deafening crash broke her from her reverie, then the sight of a scratched green forearm protruding into the space between the walls beneath her almost made her scream. But in order to save her own life, Kätzchen held her tongue.

The orc barked out something in its crude tongue and at least one more voice responded.

They were probing the walls. Had it heard her? Smelled her? She couldn’t go back down.

Painfully aware of the fragile glass globe in the pouch at her belt, Kätzchen hung there until the orc began to make the hole bigger. She had to be up and away before it stuck its head in.

Kätzchen climbed, because she had nowhere else to go but up.

Count Leitdorf didn’t want to, but he had to pause a moment and lean against the strong battlements of the tower to catch his breath. It was starting to rain, and the sun was maybe two hours from the western horizon. The air up there felt good, and he drew in big, almost gasping breaths. He’d spent considerable time on the roof of that tower, the tallest in the citadel, but when he finally stood and looked down on the city, that once-lofty perspective paled in comparison to the Lord Astronomer’s towering observatory.

As his breathing settled, Leitdorf made a silent promise that he would rebuild that tower – taller even – if it was the last thing he did.

With one more deep breath, Leitdorf set up the long telescope in the space between battlements. The lenses, miraculously, were intact, and after a quick inspection, he found the little wheels that brought distant points into focus.

First, he turned the telescope back to the south-west, to the citadel gate. It took some time, some trial and error, but he finally picked Baron Leberecht out of the crowd. The man who wanted to stand toe-to-toe, man-to-orc, with Gorbad sat astride Leitdorf’s finest horse. Upside down and backwards, Leberecht still looked regal and confident on his mount. Leitdorf couldn’t read his lips, but the baron’s body language was plain – the refugees would have to move a whole lot faster before he would be entirely satisfied.

‘Now, young lady…’ Leitdorf whispered to himself and swung the telescope back east, to the Great Bridge. The wreckage of the Lord Astronomer’s tower had broken gaping holes in the slate-tiled roofs of the University, and bricks and broken lumber littered the rooftops. More wreckage, and bodies – even without the telescope Leitdorf could make those out – floated in the dirty brown water of the slow-moving river, fetched up against the bridge’s three dozen arches.

Something moved at the corner of one of the buildings and at first Leitdorf hoped it was Kätzchen, though climbing onto the roof wasn’t part of their plan.

He brought the telescope to bear and when he finally focused in on the source of the movement his blood went cold, and drained from his head so fast and so thoroughly he was afraid he’d faint.

‘Count,’ Earvin gasped from behind him. ‘What… is it?’

Leitdorf had managed to outrun his seneschal, but not by much. The count found his assistant’s voice soothing enough that he didn’t faint after all.

‘It’s…’ Leitdorf replied. ‘It’s a spider.’

The creature climbed around the eaves of one of the bridge buildings, legs twitching forwards, tips like spearheads digging into the masonry and woodwork. Leitdorf wanted to scream at the sight of the unclean horror.

‘They’re on the bridge?’ Sir Hahn asked – Leitdorf hadn’t heard him come up the stairs.

Leitdorf scanned the Great Bridge from west to east. Orcs in threes then twelves, then a hundred in a cluster, were revealed in the holes in the roof of the Great Bridge. The bulk of them had made it halfway across.

‘Kätzchen,’ the count whispered. ‘Tell me you’ve set the trap. Set that trap, damn it. Set that–’

‘Count?’ Hahn and Earvin asked at the same time.

‘Oh,’ Leitdorf whispered, ‘no.’

‘It’s raining,’ Kätzchen whispered to herself as she clawed her way up out of the hole in the roof, elbows digging into broken wood. The sharp-edged slate cut her, and she’d lost track of the number of splinters in her hands, face, and neck.

She swore when she felt something tickle her side and saw the map slip from her belt and flutter through a hole in the floor behind her. A little gust of wind took it away.

With an uncharacteristically deep grunt, the halfling hefted herself up the rest of the way and rolled out onto the shallow-sloped roof. She paused to take a deep breath, and let the light rain patter her hot, dirty face.

Kätzchen had never felt so exhausted in her entire life, and she’d recently spent days on end running.

She had very little time or energy left, and she knew the orcs were well across the bridge. Still, she might make it if she stayed to the roofs and ran west as fast as she could. She was reasonably sure she could climb back down to the street on the west end before the bulk of them made it across, and certainly she could move faster and more stealthily through the western districts to Leitdorf’s citadel and safety – however temporary.

That word stopped her.

Temporary.

They could hold the western half of the city, but not for long. Hold the citadel, maybe a little longer. Count Leitdorf had told her that himself.

And what then?

Maybe escape to… what did he call it? Alt-something. Another human city. Another target for Gorbad.

Another few hundred miles from home.

Another few hundred miles from anything Kätzchen recognised – from her own kind, from everything worth staying and fighting for.

The roof trembled and she stopped breathing but kept her eyes closed.

When it trembled again she shot to her feet.

A sickly blue-black, the monster had the spiky, segmented legs of a crab, the head of a spider, and on its back, its shell torn open and bent upwards, rode a mass of squalling goblins. A shrill whistle sounded from the giant spider, a beast as big as four horses. Black eyes rimmed in blood-red shell gleamed even in the dull light. Something Kätzchen hoped was spittle, but feared was venom, dripped from a cluster of ebony-black fangs, each as long as her arm.

The goblins riding it squealed when they saw her laying on the roof. If Kätzchen looked like a human child, the goblins might have been the malformed offspring of their orc masters – shorter even than Kätzchen, naked save for the odd loincloth or feathered token, they would have appeared comical if they weren’t so murderously ill-tempered.

Kätzchen turned to run, facing west.

And saw three curved, blue-black legs twitch up and over the eaves of the west end of the roof. She heard orc voices in the attic below, and spared them a glance through the hole from which she’d climbed – and made eye contact with the orc scout.

It smiled at her.

It had her map in its hand, and it looked… hungry.

Kätzchen put a hand down to her belt pouch and looked up at the citadel rising into the distance.

‘Oh, no,’ Count Leitdorf whispered, ignoring the men behind him clamouring for news. ‘No, Kätzchen.’

She was surrounded. The hideous spider-mounts clawed their way up the sides of the building. He watched her – upside down and backwards – step back away from a hole in the roof as a pair of orc hands scratched for purchase from below.

‘Kätzchen,’ he pleaded. ‘Gisele… no.’

She looked up, right at him – Leitdorf would swear for the rest of his life that she looked right at him. But how could she see him from atop the tower in the citadel, what… nearly two miles away in the rain, in the failing light?

But she looked him in the eye when she took the little glass globe from her pouch.

‘No,’ Leitdorf pleaded again, but he knew she had to do it. It was their only hope – their only hope, but not hers. ‘Kätzchen, no.’

She winked at him through the telescope and Leitdorf couldn’t help but cough out a sob at the sight of the smile that split her face.

As though it was nothing, a cast-off bit of food, a worm-eaten apple, she tossed the little glass globe off the side of the roof. One of the orcs clambered up and grabbed at her ankle.

Leitdorf didn’t see where the glass globe fell, where it hit.

He turned from the telescope, pulling it back off the battlements with him, and he sat down, his hands held over his head.

Leitdorf cried as the Great Bridge exploded in a burst of pulverised stone and splintered wood. The river’s surface parted to form a bowl and the bottom part of the Great Bridge fell down into that bowl and drove itself into the riverbed. The bridge buildings, the irreplaceable University and its centuries of learning and tradition went up into the sky in the form of a roiling cloud of grey and black and green and red.

It rained pieces of orcs for half a mile in every direction and when the shockwave hit the citadel it was like a storm. The cold rain drove into them so hard, some of the men on the tower roof screamed at the pain of its impact.

Then the water filled back into the bowl all at once and swallowed anything that might have been left of the Great Bridge.

And anything that might have been left of maybe a quarter of the orcs of Gorbad Ironclaw’s army.

And anything that might have been of the bravest woman Count Brutus Leitdorf had ever had the honour of knowing.

‘Count,’ Earvin said, all but yelling into Leitdorf’s ear. ‘The bridge is gone!’

Leitdorf could only nod.

‘Count Leitdorf, sir…’ the young knight Pieter Hahn said, leaning down and holding out a hand to help him up.

Leitdorf wanted to slap the young knight’s hand away, and he almost did, but he stopped and looked up at the men around him.

‘What now, sir?’ Hahn asked.

Leitdorf sighed and took the young knight’s hand. When he’d climbed to his feet and straightened his armour and tabard, Count Leitdorf said, ‘We hold them, Sir Hahn.’

‘For how long, sir?’

Leitdorf looked down at the flood of refugees. They’d cleared the western gates and already streamed across the rolling fields to the west of the city.

‘As long as it takes to protect their retreat,’ Leitdorf answered.

‘But what of Gorbad?’ another young knight asked. Leitdorf couldn’t place his name, but was sure that by the time the night was done, he would never forget it.

‘A young lady of overwhelming courage once told me she thought there was no Gorbad,’ Leitdorf said, ‘not really, anyway.’

‘Then what of Nuln, sir?’ the same knight asked.

‘We have innocents in our charge,’ Count Leitdorf said, ‘and we’ll see them safely away or die trying.

‘As for Nuln?’

Leitdorf turned and looked out over the burning ruin his city had already become. The orcs were beginning to regroup.

Wiping a tear from his eye with the back of a hand, Count Brutus Leitdorf said, ‘The city is theirs.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PHILLIP ATHANS

Philip Athans is the New York Times best-selling author of Annihilation and ten other fantasy and horror books including The Guide to Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction and the recently-released Completely Broken. His blog, Fantasy Author's Handbook, (http://fantasyhandbook.wordpress.com) is updated every Tuesday, and you can follow him on Twitter @PhilAthans. Born in Rochester, New York he grew up in suburban Chicago, where he published the literary magazine Alternative Fiction & Poetry. He now makes his home in the foothills of the Washington Cascades, east of Seattle.

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Published in 2011 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Clint Langley

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