With his trusted swordsmen beside him, Schwarzhelm cut a channel towards Talb’s last known position. The enemy came at them in waves – Skaelings, for the most part, an unruly rabble of fur-clad barbarians carrying the first signs of the sickness and staring wild-eyed from their shaman’s ravings. Under Schwarzhelm’s direction, the Empire halberdiers managed to restore something like proper defensive lines, and pushed back the hammering cycle of attacks. Ground was regained, and the momentum of the onslaught lessened.
The respite did not last long. Up through the ranks of the enemy came sterner opponents – Kurgan warriors in dark armour and chainmail, bearing axes and long-handled mauls, followed by the scrabbling flotsam of gibbering daemon-kin. Behind them lumbered the obscene bloat of the plaguebearers as they limped and stumbled into battle. Their rancid stench came before them, a weapon in itself, making men retch uncontrollably even before reaching blade-range.
Schwarzhelm laid eyes on the closest of the daemonic plaguebearers, and marked it out with a furious sweep of his blade. ‘To me, men of the Empire!’ he thundered, breaking into a heavy jog towards the scabrous horror. ‘They can be killed! Believe! Believe in the holy Empire of Sigmar, and fight!’
The Empire troops surged after him, smashing into the incoming Kurgans in a flesh-tearing, armour-denting, blade-snapping flurry of limbs and fists. Eyes were gouged, sinews torn, throats cut and throttled, ankles broken. A whole band of halberdiers was ripped apart by a single Kurgan champion; a massive Chaos warlord was dragged down by a dozen sword-wielding state troops, hacking away at their huge opponent like wolves on a bear.
Schwarzhelm drove them onward, kicking aside the scuttling daemon-kin that raced along the earth to sink fangs into his boots. A Kurgan chieftain squared up to him, hefting a twin-bladed axe in iron-spiked gauntlets. Barely breaking stride, Schwarzhelm slashed his sword crosswise, cutting him across the midriff. Before the Kurgan could bring his axe to bear, Schwarzhelm jabbed the sword back, ripping through addled flesh, then crunching his leading shoulder guard into the reeling Kurgan’s face. The warlord staggered, and Schwarzhelm punched him hard with his gauntleted fist, breaking his neck and sending his body crunching to the earth.
The men around him bellowed with renewed bloodlust, and surged after him. All around him, emerald lightning continued to spear down from the heavens. The ground underfoot seethed with a vile mixture of blood and rainwater, pooling in boot prints and gurgling in rivulets.
‘Onward!’ roared Schwarzhelm, eviscerating another barbarian with a lone thrust of his blade, clearing the last obstacle before the plaguebearer.
The daemon’s weeping body pushed past the armoured warlords around it, stalking eerily on painfully elongated limbs. Its whole torso ran with rivers of pus, dripping onto the mud at its cloven feet in boiling clumps. Its olive-green skin had burst open, exposing loops of entrails. It had no eyes, ears or other features, just a face-encompassing jaw rammed with incisors. As it sensed Schwarzhelm, it let out a phlegmy cry of challenge, and swung a long staff topped with rust-pocked spikes. Every time the spikes were jangled, foul vapours billowed out, creeping across the ground like morning mist.
Schwarzhelm charged straight at it, holding his breath as he closed in, whirling his sword around in a blistering arc. The plaguebearer swung its staff to intercept, and the two weapons clanked together with a deadening thunk. Schwarzhelm lashed out again, feeling vile gases creep up his armour. The daemon lurched towards him, snapping its distended jaws, and Schwarzhelm ducked to one side as the saliva slapped against his helm.
He shoved out with one fist, catching the daemon in the torso. His hand passed clean into disease-softened tissue, disappearing up to the wrist. He tried to shake it free, but the daemon caught him by the throat with its free claw, and squeezed. Schwarzhelm hacked back with his blade, carving deep into the plaguebearer’s raddled body, but the wounds just resulted in more suffocating waves of corpse-gas pouring forth.
Schwarzhelm began to gag, and lashed out furiously, aiming to sever the creature’s stringy neck. He missed his aim, hampered by the plaguebearer’s cloying embrace, but something else impacted, and the daemon’s skull was ripped from its shoulders in a welter of mucus and brown blood-flecks.
The headless body loomed over Schwarzhelm for a moment, held upright by its staff. Then it toppled over, bursting open as it hit the ground. A swell of brackish fluid swilled over his boots.
Schwarzhelm staggered away, momentarily blinded by the spray of thick pus. He wiped his visor and saw the robed form of Luthor Huss standing over the daemon’s prone corpse. The warrior priest’s warhammer was slick with bodily fluids, and his bald pate was covered in a criss-cross of bloody weals.
Schwarzhelm bowed clumsily. ‘My thanks, lord priest,’ he muttered gruffly.
Huss nodded curtly. ‘And there are more waiting.’
The fighting raged around them unabated. Empire troops grappled with Kurgan, Skaelings and worse. The air no longer stank of blackpowder, for the artillery had long ceased firing. In its place came the rolling stench of long-rotten bodies.
Schwarzhelm’s entourage pressed on, sweeping around him and clearing a little space amid the close-packed battlefield. He shook the worst of the bile from his sword, feeling the dull ache of weariness stir in his bones.
‘The Emperor sent you?’ asked Huss, already searching out the next fight. From nearby, Schwarzhelm could hear the clear-voice war cries of Valten, the mysterious boy-champion who was wielding Ghal Maraz with a youthful vigour.
‘This flank cannot hold,’ rasped Schwarzhelm. ‘We must fall back.’
‘Impossible,’ scowled Huss.
‘We are outnumbered.’
‘By faith we shall pre–’
‘Vlad von Carstein is here.’
That stopped Huss dead. He turned his baleful gaze onto Schwarzhelm. ‘That cannot be.’
Schwarzhelm snorted impatiently. ‘Use your eyes. The dead march against the damned, and the living are caught between them. I have my orders – we must fight our way to the Reiksmarshal, rally what we can, then hold the centre until we can fall back in good order.’
Huss looked agonised. Retreat was anathema to him – only surging onward against the foe was sanctified by his austere creed, and he would fight on until the end of the world, unwearied, his warhammer dripping with the gore of the fallen.
But even he was not blind to what was happening. As Schwarzhelm spoke the words, realisation dawned across Huss’s face. The stench was not that of disease, but of death.
‘Where is Helborg?’ the priest asked.
Schwarzhelm was about to answer, when a fresh roar of challenge rang out. The voices were different again – not the bestial screams of the Norscans, nor the chill war horns of the Sylvanians, but a bizarre amalgam of aristocratic human and blood-crazed baresark. Both warriors lifted their eyes to the north.
Fresh troops were piling into the fray, their armour arterial red and their steeds towering behemoths of iron and bronze. They were still a long way off, but they were driving all before them. Above the vanguard soared a hideous creature of the darkest myth – a dragon, emaciated and splayed with bone and talon, cawing like a carrion crow and ridden by a lone red-armoured knight. It flapped through the heavens, its vast body held aloft by ancient magic.
In the face of that, even Huss’s mighty shoulders sagged a little. Then, with a defiant curl of his mouth, he hefted his warhammer again. ‘You will stand beside me, Emperor’s Champion?’
‘Until the ends of the earth, priest,’ snarled Schwarzhelm, brandishing the Rechtstahl.