She and Miska hurried through the rain to rejoin their group. Instinct made them form a circle. Some dropped to their knees in the mud, praying to Ursun, others to Tor, perhaps hoping for a lightning bolt to strike the beasts from the heavens. She heard the names of a dozen gods she knew, half again as many whose names were unknown to her.
But most people simply clutched one another, praying only to die in the arms of a loved one. A defiant few shouted and railed at the unseen beasts, waving woodcutters’ axes and makeshift spears at the hammering rain and the blurred shapes moving within it. Sofia caught glimpses of horns, glints of rusted armour and enormous weapons with notched blades. Heavy hoofbeats and scraping paws circled them. Snuffling snorts and bellows-breath.
‘What are they?’ asked Miska, clutching tight to Sofia’s heavy skirt.
Sofia put a hand around her shoulder, feeling the youngster’s terror. Miska was seasoned beyond her years, but she was still a child… A child doomed to die before her time.
‘Don’t look at them, little one,’ she said, pulling Miska tight to her, pressing the girl’s tearful face into the rain-stiffened fabric of her dress. What good would it do her to see the blood and horror to come?
A monster with the snarling face of a bear charged from the black rain. A slashing paw ripped the arm and head from a kneeling man. Fangs snapped shut and bit him in half. Goat-headed horrors bounded in its wake, braying howls like war-shouts. Muddy pools bloomed red. People screamed and scattered like frightened sheep.
Kaspar had spoken of how large groups would be quickly destroyed if their formation was broken. He’d been boasting of the Empire’s state troops, warriors who trained every day in the employ of an elector count, but these were terrified men and women who knew nothing of war save how to die.
‘Stay together,’ she yelled, already knowing it was hopeless. ‘We’re stronger together!’
Her words fell on deaf ears as brutish shapes, red of tooth and claw, roared from the storm. Nightmarish monsters from children’s tales given horrifying, gory life: wild killers with slavering jaws and flesh-tearing claws.
Hideously deformed, yet recognisably human, they hunted in packs. Sofia wept to see a mother and child borne to the ground and savaged with snapping bites. A man and his wife were ripped apart by frenzied beasts with distended lupine skulls and bone-bladed hands. A group of sinewy, red-skinned creatures with chittering cries and spiteful hearts finished the wounded with flint daggers or stout clubs pierced by iron-tipped tusks.
The monsters bellowed as they killed, frenzied predators given free rein on a defenceless herd of prey-meat. More slaughters went unseen, mercifully hidden by the rain. The screams still carried on the wind, agonised and piteous. Sofia sank to her knees, holding Miska pressed tight to her breast as the monsters feasted. The girl sobbed, and Sofia felt her own mother’s words rising within her, a lullaby from the northern oblast:
Her words faltered as a shadow fell across her, a towering beast with curling horns and a frothed maw of broken teeth. Bow-legged and with an umber pelt of matted fur, its blood-blistered flesh was raw with runic weals and war-scars. She heard the hoof-beats of more monsters closing for the kill. Miska tried to look up, but Sofia kept her hand firm against the girl’s hair.
‘No, little one,’ she sobbed. ‘Don’t look.’
Sofia met the beast’s maddened gaze. She had faced evil in the eyes of men before, and at least this creature wore its monstrous nature on the outside.
‘Tor strike you dead!’ she yelled as its arm swept down.
Hot blood sprayed her as the sharpened tip of a lance exploded from the monster’s chest. Its bellow of pain was deafening as the impact hoisted it into the air. The beast thrashed like a hooked fish before the shaft of the lance snapped. The wounded monster crashed to the ground as a mighty warhorse trampled it into the mud before it could rise.
A knight in burnished plate slid from the horse’s back, casting aside the broken lance and drawing a long broad-bladed sword from a saddle-sheath. His armour was dented and the black pelt of an exotic animal hung limp across one shoulder.
A knight of the Empire, one of the Knights Panther.
Something in his bearing struck Sofia as familiar, but she hadn’t time to process the thought as the wounded beast struggled to its hind legs. It plucked the broken lance shaft from its chest, but the knight was already upon it.
The sword cut the wet air, slicing down in a brutally efficient arc. The blade buried itself a handspan into the meat of the beast’s neck. Blood jetted as the warrior cranked the blade to open the wound. Nor did the knight allow the creature any hope of recovery. He dragged his sword clear and spun on his heel to take a two-handed grip on the weapon. The monstrous creature bellowed as the knight hammered the edge against its exposed throat.
Once again the blade bit deep, and the beast’s roaring ended abruptly as its head toppled from its neck in a fountain of blood. The knight kicked the headless carcass in the chest and lifted his sword skyward as it fell.
‘Fight me!’ he yelled. ‘In Sigmar’s name, fight me!’
The pack hunters heard him and Sofia heard them abandon their slaughters to turn on the lone knight. He backed away from the dead monster, placing himself in front of Sofia and Miska. Once again Sofia was struck by the familiarity of his movements, the ease of his martial bearing.
The beasts loped towards him, more than a dozen blood-slathered man-eaters. A dozen more followed, chests heaving with rabid hunger. The knight’s steed, a broad-chested destrier with a sorrel coat lathered in sweat beneath a torn caparison of blue and gold, circled around to his side.
‘Are you hurt?’ asked the knight in clipped Reikspiel, his voice muffled by the heavy rain and the buckled steel of his helm’s visor.
Sofia shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Good,’ said the knight. ‘Don’t move and it will remain so.’
Seeing they had the advantage, the monsters charged in a mass of blood-matted fur and fury. The knight stepped to meet them with a roar of fury and a wide sweep of his blade. Its edge cut like no other weapon Sofia had seen, but a lifetime tending the wounds of Kislev’s sons had taught her just how devastating such blades could be.
The knight’s sword hewed the beasts with the ease of a woodsman splitting cordwood. He fought with the fluid economy of a warrior born to bloodshed, seasoned by countless campaigns and a lifetime of war. His horse bellowed and kicked around him, churning the mud bloody as it lashed out with powerful limbs. It circled its master, stoving in ribs and cracking skulls with every blow of its iron-shod hooves.
At least ten beasts were dead already, their entrails heaped in a gory circle at the knight’s feet. But even so skilled a warrior could not fight so many alone and live. A hulking beast with a bear’s width eventually bore the knight to the ground as it died, and in the fractional pause of his blade, the rest were upon him.
He rolled and pushed himself onto one knee as a wolf-headed beast bit down on his vambrace. The metal bent and the knight stifled a cry of pain. He slammed his gauntlet against the side of its skull until the bone cracked and it fell with a gurgling whimper. Another snapped for his gorget. The knight seized it by the jaw and stabbed his sword’s pommel spike into its eye. The beast howled and threw itself away from him.