‘Maintain fire!’ he bellowed, striding along the ranks of gunnery pieces. ‘Let no man leave his station, or by Taal’s beard I shall break his head apart with my own hands!’
The walls of Carroburg had been under sustained attack for over an hour. In his worst nightmares, Blucher could not have imagined such an assault. The earth itself seemed to have been roused against them, and the forest in every direction now rang with the tramp of hooves and iron-shod boots.
The rain had started to fall soon after the enemy had arrived. At first it had been like any other deluge, though soon the drops became heavier and heavier, until it was like trying to fight under a hail of mud splatters. Every exposed surface became greasy and treacherous, fouling the cannon wheels as they were rolled out and making men slip and stagger.
Blucher was stationed on the south wall, in command of many of the bigger artillery pieces. Helblasters jostled on the narrow parapet alongside the bigger Great Guns, each one christened by their foundries in Nuln – Grosse Bertha, Todslingeren, Trollsbane. They had been firing without pause since the first emergence of the enemy, hurling their shot out at the horde and blasting great channels through the oncoming ranks.
‘Ulric damn you all!’ hollered Blucher, not paying too much attention to which god’s wrath he invoked, so long as it inspired a faster work-rate from his men. ‘Reload! They are pouring into the outer curtain!’
The blackpowder guns had reaped a terrible swathe, but it had merely sliced a tithe from the oncoming masses. They showed no fear, clambering over the twitching corpses of the felled, whooping and gurgling with glee. The driving mud-rain should have slowed them, washing them back down the steep cliff edges and into the grimy channel that had once been the Reik, but they seemed to thrive on it, slithering up through the deluge with the effluent streaming down their calloused faces.
Blucher’s guns were arranged on the inner wall, high up above the first ring of courtyards. From their vantage they had been able to rain mortars and cannonballs with impunity, but now it felt as if the fortress’s very foundations were shaking under them.
Blucher ran to the edge, skirting carefully around the red-hot maw of Grosse Bertha and taking care not to touch the metal. He reached the lip of the parapet and peered down.
What he saw took his breath away. The curtain wall was gone – overwhelmed, lost under a simmering carpet of limbs and tentacles. Shocked to his core, Blucher nearly lost his footing, and grabbed hold of the battlement’s edge to steady himself.
Mere moments ago, the outer perimeter had been held by companies of archers and handgunners, bolstered by the few Greatswords Aldred had left behind before marching out on his doomed attempt to relieve Marienburg. It had been a diminished company, to be sure, but it should have held out for longer than that. Now the walls’ summits were crawling with all manner of mutants and daemon-spawned horrors. Even as he watched, he saw the remaining defenders caught up in a rolling wave of tortured flesh, hacked apart and absorbed by the racing riptide of green and brown.
The enemy ranks were a bizarre assortment – some mortal men in plate armour and matted furs, some grotesque plague-victims carrying hooks and spike flails, some forest-beasts swollen to obscene proportions and slavering with unnatural hungers. Amid them all shimmered the faint outlines of daemons, screaming and shrieking amid the downpour.
There was no fighting against those numbers. They swarmed like rats, scrabbling up the sheer walls along living briars and thorn-tendrils. The stone underfoot gave way, crushed by their weight, but still they came on, chortling as they trod on the tumbling bodies of their own kind.
They would be across the inner courtyard in moments, and after that the great doors to the keep would not hold them for long, not if the outer walls had been demolished and surged over so ruthlessly.
‘Belay that!’ Blucher cried, unholstering his pistol and cocking the hammer. As he did so, he noticed his hands were trembling. He had been a captain for twenty years and a trooper for ten more, and was used to the sights and sounds of battle, and they had never shaken before. ‘Fall back to the towers!’
There is no resisting this, he found himself thinking even as he retreated across the parapet towards the tower beyond. This will be over within the hour.
All around him, men deserted their stations and fled for the last bastions of defence. As they did so, more stone flags cracked and splintered, sending shattered masonry flying high. The rain intensified, splattering green gobbets across the tortured citadel.
Blucher resisted the urge to run. The main gate to the tower was less than twenty yards away, and already clogged with gunnery crews trying to cram their way in.
‘In good order!’ he cried, trying to give his orders a clarity that his mind lacked. ‘Up to the top level, form up in the Great Hall!’
He was almost there – he could see the safety of the archway before him. Then, just as the last of the artillery crews slipped inside, the ground beneath him erupted.
He was thrown back, landing on his back several yards away. Dazed, he looked up, trying to make out what had felled him.
The parapet’s stone floor had burst open, and a fountain of mud and earth was jetting from the breach. Something huge was clawing its way to the surface, flinging aside stone flags as if they were children’s toys.
The entire wall-section groaned and tilted, listing out over the courtyard below. Blucher grabbed hold of a stone railing and hauled himself to his feet, bracing unsteadily as the world swayed and cracked around him.
The beast flailed its way into the open, tunnelling up from where the gunnery level had just been. It was vast, a leviathan of earth and rubble, surging up with the bulk and weight of a river-barge and slewing debris from its massive shoulders.
For a moment, Blucher did not have anything to aim at, just a shower of loose soil and broken stone pieces, but then the beast itself shook loose and turned on him.
He had never seen a monster so big. It was the size of the officer’s mess at his old parade ground, a nightmare of bulging veins and fat-slick limbs. Its pocked flesh was the green of rotten fruit. A tiny head protruded from absurdly muscled shoulders, drooling with butter-yellow saliva and grinning inanely. A low hhurr, hhurr rattled out from its vast lungs, and an overpowering stench of un-sluiced night-pans wafted out from its sweat-moist haunches.
Blucher raised the pistol, holding it two-handed to quell the shakes, then fired. The shot spun out, perfectly aimed, and hit the creature square in the forehead.
The monster stopped dead. For a moment, Blucher dared to believe that he had felled it, as a line of thin blood ran down the monster’s face. He saw it begin to topple, swaying amid the ruin of its ascent, before it blinked heavily, shook its head, and grinned again.
Blucher tried to reload. He scrambled for another shot, pulling it from the wallet at his belt and tipping it into the palm of his hand.
The monster lumbered towards him, shattering what remained of the stone floor under its tread. With a lurch of pure horror, Blucher saw that there was no stopping it. He could fire again and again, and still make no impression on that thick hide.
He pushed himself back towards the edge of the tilting parapet, and glanced down over his shoulder. Below him, a drop of over thirty feet, the courtyard filled with enemy troops. He could see Carroburgers being pulled limb from limb amid the cackling laughter of daemons. Others were being dragged before cauldrons of boiling liquid and forced to drink, gagging and screaming as the corrosive poisons boiled their innards away. Huge booms rang out as the enemy got into the blackpowder storerooms, sending cracks racing up the flanks of the tortured fortress.