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Broken Blood - Paul Kearney

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Broken Blood

by
Paul Kearney

They broke cover in the afternoon, just as the snow was starting again. Morgan spat over his horse’s ears as Arundel cantered up to him, as breathless as his mount.

‘Out of the trees – maybe eight score of them. They’re heading for the river.’

‘How far?’

‘Half a mile. Not more. Briscus has it in hand.’

‘Get back to him, Arundel. Hold them there. This is a feint, or I’m a lady’s maid. They’re trying to pull us out. You get back to Briscus and tell him to hold his lines.’

Arundel, a slim, ruddy-faced youth barely out of his teens, slapped his gauntlet to his chest. ‘They won’t get by us, general.’

Off he went again, kicking the ribs of his horse. Gabriel Morgan smiled. Was I ever that young, he wondered? Methodically, he opened his saddle-holsters one by one and checked the slim matchlock pistols within. They were dry and loaded, their grips as familiar to him as the hilt of his sword.

Beside him, Jubal Kane sat impassively. ‘That boy has done some growing up these past five months,’ he said in his bass rumble. The words seemed to emerge from his beard. His eyes narrowed – the closest he came to smiling.

‘They’ve aged us all, these last months,’ Morgan retorted. He clapped shut the holster-covers. Time enough yet to light the match.

‘You think they’ll make the main move here, at the ford?’ Jubal asked him.

‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘We should perhaps call in the other wings, then.’

‘Not yet, Jubal. They’re all afoot. We can dress our lines quicker than they can. Briscus and Harpius will hold where they are for now.’

A grunt in reply. Jubal Kane was not a man to waste words. He stroked the thick neck of his warhorse with one gauntleted fist. He looked old, sitting there in a cloud of his own breath. Frost had whitened his beard, giving him the aspect of an aged man, and his eyes were set in a tired mesh of lines and folds, dramatically so at the corner of the right one, where a livid scar buckled the skin in ridges. But the cold eyes were clear and bright – as hard as the icicles which hung in the lee of every rock, this high up in the Troll Country.

He and Morgan had ridden at each other’s side these past twelve years, and knew each other better than most brothers.

Most brothers.

Morgan twisted in the saddle and looked behind him. The wide white high-country extended to the horizon, a blinding snowscape dotted by black scattered woods. To the east, the Worlds Edge Mountains were a mere glimmer on the edge of sight, and to the south the open country rolled in a white waste of rocky ridges and scattered pinewoods, all the way down to the Urskoy River, perhaps some thirty leagues away. Erengrad, their base of operations, was three days, hard ride from here. If they were bested on this field, there would be no sense in retreating. They had no place to run.

And these men behind him had followed him here without question, perhaps to their deaths. Morgan turned his mount with a twitch of the reins to look up and down the lines. Perhaps two hundred men on horseback stared back at him, arrayed in two ranks. Their pennons whipped and snapped in the rising breeze, and the snow was already spotting the manes of their horses. Morgan touched the flanks of his own mount with his heels and the big animal limbered forward, kicking up the snow. He clicked his tongue and spoke to the animal softly, sensing its weariness. ‘Ho, now, Arion, my brave. Head up for the lads. Come now, boy.’

The big warhorse seemed to understand him. It lifted its gaunt head and pranced a little under him. Poor Arion was half-starved, as were they all. Not much for a horse to pick at, up here in the steppes of the Troll Country.

He rode down the lines, catching the eyes of the men as he passed, nodding, smiling, raising his gauntlet to the officers. They grinned back at him, hollow-cheeked and unshaven, many mounted on scrub mountain ponies for want of better. They wore an eclectic mix of harness: light brigandines of leather reinforced with iron scales, chainmail, and here and there a few pieces of white plate, relics of past glories. Their lances were all pointed skywards, butts in the stirrup-cups, pennons snapping. The lance-shafts were all of pine, here. In past years they had been of ash, down in the forested Empire, and cornel-wood in the foothills of the Grey Mountains.

At the pommel of every man’s saddle were two leather holsters, and from these protruded the grips of his matchlocks. They had not yet lit their match, but that time was almost upon them. It would be soon, now, very soon.

The traditional ribaldry, or a skeleton of it, flashed out as Morgan rode down the ranks.

‘General, any chance of a drink? I’m pissing hailstones.’

Morgan smiled. He saw faces which had been riding at his side for a decade – though precious few of them now. And he saw faces which had been part of his command for only a few months, like young Arundel. They all met his eyes – that was good. They would be here with him until the end.

He reined in his horse, and stood upright in the stirrups. A flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye: Jubal had raised an arm, and the banner bearer, young Kyriel, was slowly waving the battle-flag at the centre of the line.

‘Light your match, lads!’ Morgan called out at once. ‘It’s time to melt those icicles!’

He kicked Arion into a canter, wheeling him around on the spot. The big horse leapt forward off his haunches, like some huge, predatory feline – he had caught the sudden quickening of his master’s mood.

Morgan galloped back up the line as the men uncovered their firepots and began blowing their match into life. They clicked their lances into their back-straps so as to have both hands free, and soon the evocative reek of gunpowder was eddying down on the breeze. Morgan wiped snow from his face and reined in Arion. The big destrier was snorting and blowing and prancing now as though he were a colt again; he always loved the moments before battle. He had been bred for this.

As was I, Morgan thought.

‘What do we have?’ he snapped at Jubal.

The big man tilted his head to one side, looking north-east down the slope to the grey blade of the river. On the far bank the eaves of the forest loomed, dark and ominous.

‘I think our friends are making their move, Gabriel,’ he said mildly. Then he donned his helm, a battered, disreputable bowl of iron with a beak-like nose guard.

Morgan stared at the gloom-wreathed foot of the wood. There was movement there, all along the riverbank. For perhaps four hundred yards the forest was bristling with half-guessed moving shadows.

‘Take Garnedd’s squadron forward,’ he said calmly to Jubal. ‘Get them down to the water.’

‘Cold day for a bath,’ Jubal said, and his eyes narrowed in cold humour. He raised an arm. ‘First squadron, on me – at the trot – hold your ranks, you lazy bastards!’

A dry cheer went up, and horses whinnied up and down the line. The long-awaited battle was happening at last.

Morgan turned to the little knot of aides who had come forward out of the ranks as he waved his fist.

‘Krauz, go to Briscus and tell him to break off and get his wing back here at all speed. Tell him they’re going to force passage of the ford. Feldtir, you go to Harpius. He’s to make his way here at a walk. Tell him to keep an eye on his right flank as he advances. They may yet feint out to the east.’

Both men slapped gauntlets to chest, and galloped off in a cloud of flurried snow.

Morgan began to hum, an old hymn he had learned as a child. He patted Arion’s neck as the warhorse snorted under him.

It’s been a long time coming, he thought, but it ends here today.

He stared at the blank eaves of the pinewood across the river.

And you brother, are you there now, watching me from the shadows? Can you remember who you were, and what we did together, or is there nothing of your memories left now but the crazed mire of the Dark Gods?

Michael Morgan, my brother, eldest and best. My brother, whom I loved, and who must die today.

It had been ten years. Ten years of restless journeying, of fighting under a half dozen different banners. Once, the brothers Morgan had led a legion of volunteers, soldiers from Altdorf and Nuln and Talabheim and Middenheim; the great cities of the central Empire. Such had been the glory of their name that men had flocked to fight under the twin eagles of their banner, and the Grand Theogonist himself had blessed their undertaking. He had recognised in the Morgans two men of incorruptible virtue, who fought for glory and for the gods of men, who scorned every attempt to buy their services, who travelled freely about the Empire and pitched in wherever they were needed with their famed cavalry. They had fought orcs in the Black Mountains, ratmen in the Forest of Shadows, and beastmen in the Reikwald. Their numbers had been decimated many times, but always a hard core of veterans remained, and there were always more than enough young soldiers ready to make up the numbers, to share a little in the glory. They had become something of a legend.

And then there had come the news from the North, rumours of a great Chaos host rebuilding itself after the wreck of their armies at the Ulricsberg, eight years before. Michael and Gabriel had taken the army north, past the Middle Mountains, up to the Troll Country. Close to the haunted ruins of Praag. There, they had encountered a great host of Chaos warriors, still forming, and had pitched into it with their customary savagery, relying on the punch of cavalry to smash open the enemy ranks and put them to flight.

And they had prevailed.

Gabriel Morgan thought back on that day, the last time he had seen his brother alive.

‘We have them, Gabe,’ Michael cried, grinning. He beat the flat of his sword against his armoured chest. ‘One more push and they’ll run all the way to the sea!’ He turned to his trumpeter, old Gimmelman. ‘Sound me the pursuit, Lars. And keep blowing it until every mother’s-son of us is on their tail.’

The battle-horn rang out in the wild halloo that signalled the pursuit. At once, the ordered ranks of the cavalry opened out across the plain, the compact fists of the squadrons unclenching. Now the hard fighting was over, and something like sport could begin. The pace of the cavalry quickened. They set up a great shout and let their horses have their heads.

For perhaps two miles, the hosts of the enemy were running for their lives, a serried crowd of lumbering men and beasts in muck-spattered armour, snarling and slavering as they ran. Michael had killed their great champion, Graakon, in single combat, before unloosing the heavy horse. The Chaos hordes had held for almost an hour before breaking. Now they were a scattered mob, intent only on making their way to the rocky hills and forests to the east, wherein they had their filthy lairs.

Jubal Kane rode up and joined the brothers as they watched the destruction of the Chaos army, the wild pursuit that harried it to its death.

‘A fair morning’s work,’ he said. ‘I have the reserve in hand, ready for your orders.’

‘What of our own casualties?’ Gabriel asked him.

‘Too soon to say. They were heaviest out on the left, where Briscus and Harpius held the line. Good men, those.’

‘Yes,’ Michael said at once, eyes still fixed on the crowded, teeming battle-plain before them. ‘They should be promoted. They did well today… Gabe – do you see that, out to the north-east?’ He pointed with one bloodied hand.

‘They’re reforming,’ Gabriel said. ‘Maybe a company of them.’

‘I’ll be damned,’ Jubal said. ‘General, let me take a squadron out and teach them some manners.’

The Chaos warriors were cohering into a distinct line, just on the lower slopes of a small, rocky knoll maybe a third of a league to the right of their main body. Perhaps a hundred of them had halted there, and more of their fellows were joining them moment by moment, pulling out of the general rout.

‘We don’t scatter those bastards quick, we may have the morning’s work to do all over again,’ Jubal rumbled.

Michael donned his helm, a high, silver-inlaid affair with a black plume. His face disappeared; he became a shining mask, one that struck terror into his enemies.

‘Jubal, bring up the reserves. I shall lead them in. Gabriel, keep up the chase with the main body. We must cripple them before they reach the forests.’ He reached out a hand, and Gabriel took it. ‘I will see you before dark, brother.’

‘Tonight. We’ll drink on it,’ Gabriel said.

Then Michael Morgan turned his horse and cantered off, the two hundred cavalry of the reserve coming up around him with Jubal Kane at their head, the twin eagle banner snapping above them.

Afterwards, when the fighting had ended, and even the most savage of the army’s veterans had tired of the slaughter, they sat around the campfires in the long night that followed, too weary to even march far from the battlefield. Around them the jackals and wolves of the Troll Country padded in packs, feasting on carrion and other, nameless things feasted with them in the darkness, a night unlit by stars, the moon hidden by heavy cloud.

The wounded had been laid in lines upon the frozen ground, and the army physicians were at their bloody work among them. Now and again the night would be rent by an agonised scream as they pieced slashed flesh and broken bone back together. Gabriel sat on a discarded saddle, staring into the fire, and around him were clustered most of the senior officers of the army, all silent, all aghast at the news Jubal had brought among them. In the firelit gloom the rest of the army were as silent as a great host can be, as though trying to listen in on their betters. Only in the horselines was there any noise, as the tired destriers bickered amongst themselves and shifted restlessly, surrounded by the stink of blood and dead flesh.

‘How did it happen?’ Gabriel asked dully.

If men were trees, Jubal Kane was an oak, a stout, massive, unyielding oak which would break rather than bend. But now he could not meet Gabriel’s eyes, and in his own there was a shadow, a memory of horror which even he, as hardened a veteran as ever walked, could not yet bring himself to recall.

Jubal had taken a sword-cut to the face; by his eye the flesh had been stitched back together. He touched it now, as though that contact could somehow bring back the memory of the evening’s work. About him, the officers of the army waited, staring, and beyond them thousands more about a hundred other campfires sat quiet in the firelight, as though they, too, could hear his words.

Only Gabriel did not look at Jubal Kane. He stared into the fire at his feet, his eyes bright with tears that would not fall, his face as set as something hewn out of stone.

‘Speak, Jubal,’ he said.

‘We piled into them head-on, a sword-charge. We hadn’t bothered to reload the matchlocks. They were standing along a line of broken stones, so a lot of horses went down in the first contact: cartwheeling, broken legs, a pile-up here and there. We smashed their line though, broke it into pieces, and they withdrew up the knoll in front of us. Michael – the general – he reformed us, and decided to dismount to finish off the survivors, because the knoll was bad going for the horses, all crags and loose scree. We left the horseholders at the foot of the hill and continued up on foot, some seven score of us in an extended line. We outnumbered them maybe two to one. Men were laughing as they slogged up the hill, and the general was talking about how good a tall beer would taste round about then.’

Jubal paused. He seemed unwilling to go on. Then Gabriel raised his head and stared at him, a red light in his eyes.

‘The last of the enemy gathered in a huddle at the summit of the knoll. They did not even seem to be aware of our approach. There was chanting, a kind of drumming we could feel right through the soles of our boots, and then a weird light started up from the midst of the enemy, and a stink, Sigmar help me, a reek that was as foul as anything I have ever known. Like corpses in high summer, or living flesh scorched on a griddle. Our line halted maybe fifty yards from the enemy; it became hard to will oneself to go on. We froze there. Finally the general laughed. He made himself laugh, I’m sure of it. He doffed his helm and shouted at us, called us milkmaids and poltroons, to be scared of a little witchery. He strode forward alone, and he was smiling. But I saw sweat pouring down his face, and his face was as white as a tablecloth.

‘But he shamed us with his courage. Men stumbled forward after him – as did I. We followed him up that hill, though I was more mortally afraid at that moment than I have ever been in my life before.

‘And it happened. It was like standing next to a Nuln bombard as it goes off, only without the noise. There was a great flash of red light. The enemy soldiers on the hilltop were flattened, and we were staggered, some men falling. Even Michael fell to one knee.

‘And out of the light erupted a great shape, a roaring, scarlet-winged fiend. It spread its black wings and rose above us in a great spray of gore. It was as tall as a tower, horned, with a beast’s face and cloven hooves and a long tail…’

Jubal stopped. His face was slick with sweat. He wiped it with the back of his hand and dragged open a stitch in the middle of his wound, so that it seemed he was weeping tears of blood.

‘A daemon prince,’ Gabriel said into the shocked silence that followed. ‘They called up a daemon from their realm.’

Jubal nodded, the blood running unheeded down his face.

‘It swooped down on us like a storm, scattering men like skittles. I was knocked off my feet. Men threw down their swords and ran away. Others froze like statues, their fear petrifying them. But Michael stood fast. I saw him kiss his sword-blade. He was smiling, Gabriel, I swear he was still smiling. And he launched himself at this thing, one man alone. He was transfigured.’

The fire cracked, loud in the silence. No one spoke for a long time. Finally, Gabriel said. ‘So it’s true. He is dead, my brother. It killed him.’

‘No.’ Here, Jubal’s face twisted in grief and shame. ‘That is the thing. That is the terrible thing. Gabriel, it did not kill him.’

‘What?’

‘It took him, Gabriel. It grasped Michael in its claws and took off into the air like some monstrous bat. It flew off with him. It took him alive.’

There was a flurry of exclamations and denials, the quiet around the fire shattered by this news. Gabriel rose from his seat. He grasped Jubal Kane by the shoulders.

‘Jubal, by the blood of Sigmar, are you sure of this?’

The older man nodded.

Dark, slim Harpius spoke up from the shadows, his clear voice rising above the others. ‘We saw it, out on the right. We saw it fly away in the distance, and did not know what to make of it. It went north, deep into the Troll Country.’

‘We must go after it!’ Briscus snarled. ‘Hunt the bastard down – if we have to burn out every bolt hole from here to Norsca.’

A chorus of agreement was shouted about the campfire, the officers of the army gesticulating and arguing with one another, all rank forgotten. Gabriel drew a deep breath, his hands falling from Jubal’s shoulders.

‘Quiet!’ Gabriel shouted. At once, a hush fell.

‘I command this army in my brother’s absence. And I say this – yes, we will go after him. We will hunt down the thing that took him and we will free him, if he yet lives. We will do this thing – I swear it to you.’ He looked them up and down, dominating them with the glare of his bloodshot eyes. ‘But not tonight, nor yet tomorrow. We fought a hard battle today, and we have wounded. We are low on fodder for man and beast. The army must rest and be refitted ere we take up this quest – do you hear me? We must go back, back south. This will be no easy campaign, and we must prepare for it. In the morning we bury our dead and ride for the Empire. That is my will. Those who disagree can leave this army now, and make their own way.’ He hesitated, and then added, ‘It is what my brother would have done.’

That had been the better part of two years ago. Since that night, Gabriel Morgan had led the army of the twin eagles up and down the wastes of the north, hunting down every rumour, every scrap of story and tall tale he could find, trying to discover the whereabouts of his brother. They had fought innumerable battles, had frozen and starved in the crags and forests of the desolate places of the world. And they had bled and died by the hundred, the thousand, until they had become a mere remnant of what they had been. The new recruits had slowed to a trickle, without Michael Morgan’s name to draw them, and the grim quest in the deserted north did not have the glamour of their former campaigns in the Empire.

They became a hardened band of grimy warriors, kept together by the promise they had made, and by their loyalty to the one surviving eagle, the younger brother, who in Michael’s absence had grown into a hard-faced general, a leader of men whose exploits still inspired songs and stories. But Gabriel Morgan had become something else, and his men with him. In the Empire now, they were spoken of in whispers. Men said they were all doomed, destined to ride forever, until the enemies of man finally accomplished their destruction. Their luck, it was said, had deserted them.

It may be they are right, Gabriel thought, as he watched Jubal and Garnedd take their men down to the river. But we can do no other. This is what we have set ourselves to do, and we cannot turn away from it now.

Five months, this current expedition had lasted. They had long forgotten what it was like to sleep in a bed, or to walk without the weight of armour on their backs. This was the end, here today. The rumours had thickened and congealed until they had become fact. A Chaos host had reformed in the Troll Country north of Erengrad, and it was led by a great champion, a man who had once been a knight of the Empire, a man broken and twisted by hideous tortures in the lairs of the enemy until he had become one of them. A man with the face of an archangel, and the black heart of a daemon.

My brother.

I will see you again today, Michael, Gabriel thought. For the last time. This is where the journey ends.

Jubal Kane sat on his mount easily as the big animal loped forward at a steady canter. The ground was thundering, echoing back the hooves of the fifty horsemen behind him. He could smell horse sweat and leather, cold iron, and the reek of the slow-match burning. The perfume of war. He looked momentarily to the blank sky and the thickening curtain of the falling snow.

Sigmar, look upon us, we who do your work in this land. Watch over us, and welcome us to your halls when we go into the darkness.

‘Tighten up!’ he barked at the men behind him. He saw the enemy break cover to his front, a black mass of them coming out of the wood, like a tide of monstrous cockroaches.

‘Out pistols! Open ranks!’

Garnedd, the squadron captain, drew level with Jubal and grinned as he donned his helm, his black mustachios jutting out like tusks.

‘First blood to us, Jubal.’

‘Aye. Let’s see if we can’t make this river run a little red, Jonas. Take the front rank in.’

The leading line of horsemen quickened their pace, the second rank pausing, their horses half-rearing under them, fighting the bit to lunge forward. Jonas Garnedd drew his sword and stood up in his stirrups, his teeth a flash of white under his moustache. ‘Come on you bitches – this is what we’ve been waiting for!’

The line plunged forward, the men resting the barrels of the long matchlock pistols on their shoulders, their lances bobbing on their backs. The snow was falling more heavily; they looked like monstrous, grunting ghosts as they cantered down the slope to the fast-flowing river below.

Jubal watched the enemy host clear the open ground and splash into the shallows of the ford. The river was grey and white, as raw as the mane of a wolf, with patches of livid ice coursing through it. The leading ranks of the enemy infantry paused a mere second, and then splashed into it, a blunt-headed column some dozen files wide. More of their fellows were crowding out of the forest now, blackening the ground. Gabriel had been right; this was the main effort here; the move to the north had been a mere feint, no more.

You always guess it right, you big bastard, Jubal thought, and his mouth curved in something like a smile. Maybe you and he still think the same way after all… And then he frowned, and put the thought out of his mind.

The enemy infantry were halfway across the ford now, thigh deep, splashing up white flashes of foam as they waded across. Jubal could see the broad, fur-fringed breastplates, many splashed with crimson paint, and the closed helms with horns topping them. Some had human skulls spiked to their armour, while the harness of others had been wrought and forged into the leering likenesses of daemons and foul beasts.

Men of Khorne, the Blood God.

In his heart, Jubal cursed them with silent venom.

Garnedd drew up his line in the southern shallows of the ford. The snow shifted and blew, so that it seemed to Jubal a grey veil was fluttering across the field. He heard the roar of the Khornate infantry as they sighted the Imperials, and then faint on the wind, Garnedd’s commands.

‘Present your pieces – level your pieces – give fire!’

And then the staccato rattle of the matchlocks, and a bloom of smut-grey smoke with stabs of yellow light spitting out in the midst of it. The front rank of the enemy crumpled, staggered, and dark hulking forms splashed head-first into the icy water. Their fellow warriors bellowed with rage and stepped over the bodies.

Jubal stood up in his stirrups and drew his sword, an old scimitar, taken in the days when they had fought as far south as the sands of Araby. Like all of them, it was a long way from home.

‘Forward! Ready pistols!’

The second line followed him down to the river at a fast walk.

Garnedd’s men fired their second pistol over the cruppers of their saddles as they withdrew. The enemy column seemed snarled by its own dead, staggered by the power of the mountain river. Bodies were rolling half-buried in foam downstream. A tattered, horse-skull standard bobbed in the midst of the Khornate host, and the things under it were growling like animals.

‘Open ranks!’ Jubal shouted, and Garnedd’s squadron came through his line, the horses wide-eyed, nostrils blood-red and open, pluming hot steam.

Jubal’s men trotted forward. The enemy was halfway across the river now, a solid mass unfazed by the casualties they had taken. One of their champions, bare-headed, his skin white as carrion, lifted a great polearm and roared defiance at the Imperials.

Jubal turned to the trooper next to him and pointed with his scimitar. ‘Shoot me that whoreson!’

Another volley. The enemy champion went down, a heavy matchlock-ball smashing through his skull. His fellows paused for a second, slavering with fury. Jubal’s second volley sowed more chaos in their ranks. But only for a few moments.

‘Back, back!’ Jubal shouted. ‘Fall back to Garnedd’s line – move, you clodpolls!’

One man was not fast enough. As the horsemen turned tail, his mount stumbled and went down. He rolled in the shallows of the river, the horse screaming. A knot of the enemy lunged forward and engulfed horse and rider. The poor beast thrashed in the middle of a crowd of dark, gleaming forms as they congregated about it and hacked it to pieces in the water. The trooper disappeared, engulfed as though he had never existed.

Jubal joined Jonas Garnedd up the riverbank. He wiped his mouth with the back of one leather gauntlet.

‘I call that cutting it close,’ Garnedd said casually.

‘Aye, But we did turn the river red, didn’t we?’

‘Lances?’

‘I believe so, Jonas.’

The horsemen unclicked the short pennoned lances from their backs and hefted them in their right fists.

‘In and out quick, lads, like you’re with someone else’s wife!’ Jubal bellowed, and up and down the line men laughed.

‘Charge!’

The line erupted into a canter, then a full gallop. The lances came down from the vertical and the hammering thunder of the heavy horses seemed to shake the very ground. With a wordless shout, the Imperials poured down the slope to the ford, where the first of the Khornate warriors was stepping onto the southern bank. The front ranks of the enemy seemed to shrink as the cavalry swooped down upon them.

And struck.

The wicked points of the lances went in at chest-height, and driving them came the armoured men on horseback, with all the momentum of their charge. The enemy warriors were impaled, smashed off their feet, trampled, and as the front ranks recoiled, so they collided with those coming after them. The head of the enemy column was driven in, the ford erupting in a tangled, evil scrum of flesh and iron and blood and icy water. Horses reared and screamed, men shouted, shrieked, flailed at each other, brutal murder carried out again and again in the white whipped fury of the river, the foam rising red about their legs.

Jubal pulled back, sawing on the bit of his maddened horse. The cavalry were at a standstill, fighting with swords, their lances lost or broken. Their momentum had carried them halfway across the ford. But now the enemy was flooding in around them, scores of enemy warriors thrashing through the deeper water on either side of the ford, up to their necks, many carried away by the current. Heedless of their losses they came on, hoping to surround the horsemen.

‘Withdraw!’ Jubal shouted. ‘Jonas – get them out! Lads, fall back up the hill!’

By ones and twos, they hacked their way free of the carnage. The Khornate warriors mobbed the horses, chopping at their legs with great axes, hauling the Imperials off their mounts to be torn apart in the water. A mob of horsemen broke out of the melee – Jubal decapitated a fanged enemy intent on hamstringing his own horse, and then followed his men out.

They galloped back up the slope, out of the river towards their own lines. Jubal looked about him as he rode clear, counting heads. Garnedd was beside him, his moustache stiff with blood, his horse lacking an ear but otherwise hale.

‘On me, on me!’ Jubal bellowed. The stink of blood was sickening – it was congealing in his beard. His entire right arm was scarlet to the shoulder.

The horsemen drew together on the upslope, panting, their eyes still wide with the fury of the fight. The horses shifted and danced under them, in pain and fear. The Khornate infantry was across the river, on the southern bank. In the midst of the ford the bodies were rolling and turning downstream in the grip of the cold water, a ghastly flotsam. The enemy column continued its relentless march out of the forest.

Jubal counted heads as they sat their horses looking down upon the enemy advance. Fifty-one had gone down to the river. Twenty-nine had returned.

Morgan watched the struggle in the ford with a face as stiff and drawn as a marble statue. He turned to his trumpeter.

‘Galloran, sound me the recall.’

The grizzled trooper put the slim brass horn to his lips and blew, eyes closed. The long, mournful note rang out into the falling snow. After a moment, Morgan saw Jubal and his men turn and begin trotting up the slope to the main body. So few of them. Jubal had lost near half his men.

The two armies had disengaged, like fighting dogs. A flurry of violence, and then all was fluid again, and they were watching each other, ready for the next lunge. Gabriel felt the ground trembling under his horse and looked west to see Briscus bring in his wing, a hundred heavy cavalry to join the main body, a cloud of steam hanging above the labouring bodies of the horses. Looking east, he saw Harpius on the move also, another hundred men. In a few minutes his ragtag army would be reunited, the fists clenched, ready for the knockout blow.

Jubal rejoined him, breathing hard. The big man began to methodically reload his pistols, spitting the bullets down the muzzle of each one and ramming them home.

‘You really think he’s there, Jubal?’ Gabriel asked.

‘He’s there – someone is directing all this, with some skill, too. He’s won the ford and almost caught us divided with his feint moves. No Chaos champion I’ve ever fought before would be so subtle.’

Gabriel smiled weakly. ‘It’s all too familiar, Jubal. He was always a one for playing with the enemy before the main event. He’ll form up now, south of the river, and then come on in a body.’

‘What do we do?’

‘Let them dress their ranks. I want a horde of them with their back to the river. Once they have a few hundred on our side of the water, we charge, and pull out again as quick as we can.’

Jubal reholstered his pistols with a grunt. ‘The charge part is easy – it’s the getting out again that takes a little work. Gabriel, if he sits behind his men, he’ll break us down in the end. There’s a few thousand of them in the trees – they can soak up all we throw at them and ask for more.’

‘What, then?’

Jubal would not meet his eyes. ‘Call him out. Fight him sword to sword. See if he’ll accept single combat. This Chaos scum is no more than rabble once their leader goes.’

‘You’re assuming I could beat my brother if it came to a single combat, Jubal.’

‘I did not say it would have to be a fair fight,’ Jubal growled in reply. ‘Get him out from behind his phalanxes, and we’ll kill him if it takes every one of us – that’s what we’re here for isn’t it?’

‘That’s what we’re here for,’ Gabriel agreed, but the words were mechanical.

‘We’ll see what a charge or two can do first,’ he said.

Jubal opened his mouth as if to speak, then shut it again. He knew better than to argue with the look in his general’s eye.

The afternoon drew on, and the winter’s night grew closer, the light fading as the sun began to climb down into the Sea of Chaos, far to the west. The Chaos host advanced out of its forest fastness and crossed the river, company by company. From the dark ranks of the enemy obscene insults, animal bellows and crazed shouting came and went. Individual champions strode forward of the main ranks and shook their standards at the silent cavalry on the hill above them. The snow drew off a little, becoming a thin, stinging veil which whitened the horses, and made of Gabriel’s men a ghost army, a grey, looming shadow lining the high ground.

And finally the commander of the Chaos forces appeared. Flanked by columns of goat-headed warriors, he rode a monstrous steed, which might once have been a horse, but which had been warped and bloated into something else. It bore him into the middle of his stamping, cheering, roaring host, and the whole riverbank erupted into a howl of hate and fury and triumph, so that the snow slid from the boughs of trees at the very sound.

‘It’s him,’ Gabriel said. ‘He’s come at last.’ He turned to Jubal and saw that his grizzled comrade was looking down at the maddened spectacle below with a rictus of hatred slashed across his face, and tears in his eyes.

Gabriel drew his sword, and kissed the blade.

‘Galloran, signal me the advance.’

The high, fierce notes of the horn sounded out across the river-valley, and the horsemen on the hill began to move. A flash of movement went down their line as they unholstered their matchlocks, the smoke from the smouldering match-coils at their pommels leaving a skein of dark lines behind them as they advanced. Below them, the warriors of the Chaos host paused in their gibbering and dancing, to stare up at the wolf-grey line, ominous in its silence. For a moment the valley was almost still, save for the rushing of the river, and the rising tremor of the earth as the heavy horses passed across it, the rumour of a distant war.

‘A quick volley, then straight in with the lances,’ Gabriel said to Jubal. ‘Pass it down the line.’

The pace of the cavalry quickened. They broke into a trot. The Chaos horde set up its clamour again, and some of the more frenzied of its warriors broke ranks to run up the hill at the horses in a mad rage.

Eighty yards from the enemy line Gabriel reined in. He raised his sword. ‘Give fire!’

The front rank erupted in fire and smoke, two hundred matchlocks going off as one. The vanguard of the enemy staggered, the heavy bullets blasting warriors off their feet, blowing away limbs, blasting skulls to fragments. Scores of them went down, hardly a round missing its target in that tight-packed mass of muscle and iron.

‘Fire!’ Gabriel shouted again, his face red with the blood-pumping effort. Spittle flew from his lips; he felt the bones in his fist grate as he gripped his sword until the ivory hilt creaked in his fingers.

Another volley. The enemy had begun to surge forward, but this one set them back again. A ghastly windfall built up before them, a tangled mass of corpses, some half-supported by the press of their fellows. The snow blushed scarlet under them. For a few minutes the Chaos host was dazed by the double-strike of the volleys. The wounded shrieked in pain and anger and were kicked aside by their comrades, the ranks choked with maimed and dead figures.

‘Out lances!’ Gabriel shouted, and to Galloran, ‘Sound me the charge!’

The horn-call rang out, clear and clean in the darkening winter afternoon. It was repeated up and down the line, and then the horsemen began to move once more, their mounts springing up under them, straight into a canter. The riders kicked them on frenziedly, and the big horses screamed, put their heads down and thundered forward, a tide of muscle and iron, with the lances levelled before them.

They piled into the van of the Chaos horde like a hammer. The heavy horses bowled over the front ranks, smashing deep through the enemy formation, every lance finding a target, and kept going until the sheer press and mass of the enemy warriors brought them to a rearing, butting, kicking halt. The warhorses bit and lashed out and reared, whilst their riders drew their swords and began hacking at every half-glimpsed skull and unguarded piece of flesh they could see. The entire Chaos army was shunted backwards, scores trampled underfoot, hundreds more packed so tight they could not even raise their arms.

Gabriel’s men fought like fiends, until they were no longer the grey ghosts they had seemed on the hillside, but bloody apparitions of slaughter, slathered with the innards and blood of friend and foe alike, their eyes wide under their helms, and the big horses churning below them like dark engines of battle.

Now, Gabriel thought, this is the heart of it. Now you will come to me brother. This is the time.

Galloran was still beside him. Gabriel yelled at him over the torrential roar of battle. ‘Sound the withdrawal, and keep sounding it!’

The call rang out, was interrupted as Galloran decapitated an enemy warrior, then rang out again. It was picked up by the trumpeters of the other wings, and the army began to pull back. Rear ranks first, then those caught in the middle, and then in knots and groups, the men at the very front.

As they turned about, many died, dragged from their horses or stabbed through from behind. Gabriel saw one great destrier go down riderless with at least a dozen enemy warriors clinging to it, hacking at its legs, stabbing its eyes out as it collapsed. He rode over bodies, swung Arion round so the destrier could strike another Khornate berserker who was trying to disembowel him. The wide iron-shod hooves smashed the foe to the ground and crushed his ribcage as they stamped down on him.

Jubal was here, beside him, and Garnedd and Kyriel his standard-bearer. Galloran had gone down in the muck and murder of the roaring press, never to rise. The army was breaking free, galloping by the hundred back up the slope behind them, while the Chaos warriors struggled over mounds of their own dead to follow, shrieking like demented animals.

They were out, Arion at a canter. The big animal had taken a slash along the neck and, as his muscles worked the blood sprayed back in Gabriel’s face, masking him in scarlet. He reined in back up the hill and stood up in the stirrups, waving the vermilion length of his sword.

‘On me! On me! To me, brothers!’

They gathered on him, and their surviving officers set them back in rank. Dozens were afoot, and stood at the rear, gasping, vomiting with the effort it had taken to run up the slope in full armour. Gabriel looked around and with a dozen years’ experience knew at once that he had lost a third of his men.

Back down at the river, the Chaos regiments which had crossed the ford were milling in a crumpled wreckage of corpses, all order lost, and perhaps half their number now lying broken and gutted upon the ground and in the red-running shallows of the ford. Those who were still on their feet were busy mutilating the corpses of Gabriel’s men who had fallen there. One Chaos champion reared up the dismembered head of a great warhorse on a pole, and danced under it as the blood rained down from the stump onto his face. None of the enemy showed any great inclination to continue their advance however.

‘We gave better than we got, at least,’ Jubal said, teeth bared. ‘Think it’ll bring him out?’

‘It’s got to,’ Gabriel replied, wiping his face. ‘Look at them. We’ve cut the head off this chicken, and now it’s doing a dance. If he wants them to come up this hill after us, he’ll have to lead the way himself.’

Jubal spat a tooth into the snow along with a gobbet of scarlet phlegm.

‘I hope you’re right, because we’ve maybe one more charge left in us, and then we must say goodnight.’

The two men looked at one another. ‘It’s been a long road,’ Gabriel said at last.

‘Aye, but we’ll have rest soon enough. One way or another.’

They leaned over on their horses and grasped each other’s forearms in the warrior salute, their vambraces clinking together.

‘You didn’t have to do this,’ Gabriel said quietly. ‘Jubal, I would have thought no less of you had you walked away.’

Jubal spat again, wincing. ‘My arse, walk away. You are my friend, as was your brother. I do not walk away from friends. A man does that, and he’s not much of a man at all.’

Garnedd joined them, doffing his helm to show a face streaked black with his sweat-soaked hair. ‘Warm work for a winter’s day.’ His moustaches were drooping and crusted with filth, but he was smiling. The smile faded as he looked down the slope to the river. ‘Sigmar! Do you see that, Gabriel?’

The ranks of the Chaos host were opening, and their commander was now splashing through the icy waters of the ford on his great beast, as casual as though he were out for a morning’s ride. In his wake fresh regiments were mustering and waiting to cross, thousands strong. As the thing which had once been Michael Morgan set foot on the southern bank, so they set up a great clamour, a sneering, triumphant roar which seemed to shake the very landscape. The broken lines began to reform, and the enemy army seemed to take fresh heart at once.

‘This is it then,’ Gabriel said. ‘One last charge, brothers, and the thing is done.’

‘What of… Michael?’ Jubal asked.

‘You leave him to me.’

Jubal leaned over. In a low voice he said, ‘That thing is no longer your brother – remember that, Gabriel. You kill it any way you can.’

‘I know, Jubal. And I will.’

In later years, men of the northern Empire would speak of that last battle of the eagles. They would conjure a picture of the swift onslaught of Morgan’s grey horsemen, riding down to meet their doom. In the story, the great horses would thunder into the enemy with the force of a thunderbolt, and make of the Urskoy Ford a fabled battlefield.

In reality, three hundred exhausted and bloodied men, most on horseback, but many on foot, threw themselves down the hillside to the bloody ford with a kind of resigned despair. They did not waste breath on battle cries, for they had none to spare. They did not appeal to the gods, for they no longer expected an answer to any of their prayers. If there was one thing in each man’s mind as they made that final charge, it was a determination to die well. And that, the storytellers got right, as they told the tale in hushed and crowded taverns in the years to come. For what man does not wish to make a good end of his life?

This time the Chaos host surged up the hill to meet them, and the lines crashed together south of the ford. Once again, the heavy cavalry smashed deep into the enemy lines, and once again the Chaos host recoiled from that fearsome impact. But this time they had the numbers on hand to soak up the charge. Gabriel’s men were drawn deep into the enemy formation, and more warriors fanned out to left and right along the river, seeking to outflank the cavalry whilst they were embroiled in a savage melee to their front. This time, there would be no withdrawal.

In the forefront of the charge were Gabriel, Jubal Kane, Garnedd and Kyriel, the young standard bearer. These four stayed together, whilst behind them their line was chopped to pieces, and the warhorses were brought down neighing and screaming one by one, their riders pulled from their backs and torn to pieces on the ground. Dismounted men fought back to back with sword and pistol-butt and finally with their fists and teeth. The enemy mobbed them, dragging them down by sheer weight of numbers. Four and five of the Khornate warriors would attack a single trooper at a time, and though one or two might go down, the rest would smash blow after blow into the beleaguered soldier until he was on his knees. Then he would fall to the ground to be mutilated, his innards spread far and wide, his limbs amputated and held aloft as trophies.

Arion had taken a deep stab wound in his stomach, from which a rope of intestine was protruding, but still the valiant animal kicked and fought and answered his master’s rein. Atop him, Gabriel fought as he had never fought before. He had never felt so alive, so in tune with his surroundings, so aware of each and every movement of his blade. Never in all the years he had been a soldier had he ever known such savage joy in battle. All his life, he felt, had prepared him for this. It was the culmination of his existence.

‘Michael!’ he bellowed out the word with a kind of happiness. His brother was mere yards away, and turned his head. He took off his helm, and the thing which was underneath was indeed Michael Morgan, and yet it bore little resemblance to the handsome, dark-haired knight that Michael had been. The hair was gone, the skin was sallow and ridged with scars, the lips were blue and hacked, drawn back from long yellow teeth, and in the eyes there was a light like that of a wolf’s eye caught in lamplight. But the essential bones were still there; the face was still a shape that Gabriel knew.

‘Gabriel!’ the thing shouted, grinning horribly. Its tongue was long and black, and seemed to have changed the voice also. There was nothing human about it.

‘Come, make way there for my brother, you scum! I wish to embrace him!’

The ranks of the enemy opened out before Gabriel. He kicked Arion forwards, hardly aware of the cataclysmic roar of the battle all about him. Behind him, Jubal and Garnedd and Kyriel and a few others were still fighting desperately for their lives, but no enemy warrior raised so much as a knife against Gabriel Morgan as he rode forward to meet with his brother.

Michael dismounted from his misshapen steed and drew a sword, a crooked, uneven blade with a serrated edge. He wore red armour trimmed with fur and hung about with chains, and seemed taller than he had ever been before. He towered over Gabriel as his brother dismounted also, old Arion wheezing and grunting with pain.

‘You have come a long way,’ Michael said, still grinning, his black tongue slipping in and out from behind his teeth like a snake.

‘As have you,’ Gabriel said calmly. He rested one arm on Arion’s neck. In his other hand was his sword, and blood was dripping from the point of it to make a dark circle in the muddied snow. The tiredness was seeping into his bones now, but he stood up straight, taking strength from the dying horse beside him.

If Arion can stay on his feet, then so can I, thought Gabriel.

‘I have missed you, brother,’ Michael said, and stepped forward. ‘I cannot tell you how much I have wanted this moment, how I have desired to see your face again.’

‘And I yours,’ Gabriel said, and meant it.

What did they do to you, for the love of all the gods, my brother, what did they make of you – what agonies did they inflict to bring you to this?

Despite himself, Gabriel felt the heat of tears start behind his eyes. He had not expected that – he had not thought he could still speak to his brother.

‘You are here to kill me,’ Michael said. ‘I know that, and do not blame you for it. It is what you are. You are the best of men, little brother, the very best of men. It is for that reason I speak to you now. Gabriel–’ Michael drew closer, until Gabriel could smell him. He stank like a beast, and there seemed to be a heat off him, something unearthly, preternatural. The light in his eyes was hard to meet. Gabriel dropped his gaze.

‘I wish to have my brother back again, at my side,’ Michael said. ‘You and I together again, riding at the head of an army – it is what we were born to do, Gabriel, is it not? Join with me. Cast aside your delusions, the half-baked fancies we had bred into us from childhood. The hard, real world is not what we think it is. Reality is not all that it seems…’

He drew closer. ‘There are great and wonderful powers within and without this petty little world we stand upon, powers which are eternal, and who know how to reward good service. We could rise very high, you and I. Gabriel – listen to me! We could become immortal.’

Gabriel raised his head, and met his brother’s bright eyes. A tear ran down his face, cutting a streak of white through the blood. It must be done now.

‘No,’ he said.

His sword came up, as quick as an adder’s strike, the point aimed at his brother’s throat. He put all of his remaining strength into the blow, and felt the pure, perfect movement of his arm as his thrust went home–

And was beaten aside. The sword was flicked out of his hand in a movement too fast for the eye to follow.

Michael shook his head. ‘You disappoint me, Gabriel. You are a grave disappointment. I had not thought my brother to be a fool.’ He backed away. For a tiny moment, a flicker of something like grief passed over his face. Then it was gone. To the warriors who stood clustered around he snapped: ‘Kill him. Kill him now, and that damned horse beside him.’ He turned his back on his brother, and walked back to his monstrous beast.

Gabriel swayed on the balls of his feet. The Chaos warriors around him hacked at Arion. The big horse was too far gone to fight back, but he strove stubbornly to stay on his feet. Then he fell to his knees on the ground, and Gabriel leant against him as a sword-blow took him on the shoulder, numbing his left arm. He bowed his head, seeing Arion blow bright bubbles of blood out into the snow as they stabbed him in the lungs, feeling the cold steel enter his own body as they thrust at him, and saw under his nose the worn leather of the saddle-holster. He opened the flap, gripped the pistol within, raised it and cocked it all in one smooth, fluid motion. A nub of match remained, still smouldering a dull red on the wheel.

In a clear, cold voice, he called out: ‘Michael.’

His brother turned.

Gabriel pulled the trigger.

The Chaos host opened out and broke like a rotten apple. A small group of still fighting men, all on foot, held together as something like a wave of panic engulfed their enemies. These men cut their way south, away from the river, as mobs of the enemy flashed past them, somehow bewildered, lost, hardly caring to even make a fight. At the top of the hillside upon which the cavalry had formed up that morning, Jubal Kane finally called a halt. He looked around him like a man who had woken up in a strange room.

‘Who have we here? Garnedd, Harpius, Arundel? How many are we?’ he closed his eyes, swaying.

‘The general did it,’ Garnedd said. ‘Their leader fell. They fell apart straight after, like ants when you kick open their nest.’

Jubal straightened, and looked down into the valley below, a charnel house where the dead were more populous than the living. The enemy companies were wading in disorder back across the river, disappearing into the trees of the dank forest beyond. It was hard to make them out as anything else than a dark stain on the snow, for darkness was finally upon them, and in the dark the snow was thickening.

Perhaps a dozen men stood around him, all of them bloodied in some fashion or other, all with that look in their eyes, the tired resignation of men who have seen enough. Even as he noted their features, they seemed to fade into the darkness, faceless men who had expected to die today, and were somewhat taken aback to find themselves still alive.

‘The brothers Morgan are no more,’ Jubal said in a stronger voice. ‘One of them undid the sin of the other. Both were my friends, whatever became of them. They were the finest men I have known.’

‘They’ll be drinking with Sigmar tonight,’ Harpius said in that clear, singer’s voice of his. ‘I honour them. They are at peace.’

‘And what about us? What do we do now?’ young Arundel asked, shivering.

Jubal sighed, and lifted his face to the invisible kiss of the snow.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PAUL KEARNEY

Paul Kearney studied at Lincoln College, Oxford where he read Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and Middle English and was a keen member of the Mountaineering Society and the Officer Training Corps. He has published several titles including The Sea Beggars to critical acclaim, being long-listed for the British Fantasy Award.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2010 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Clint Langley

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