Forged in Battle (23 page)

The town square looked more like an army camp than a market
place. There were camp fires lit all across the square, and around them huddles
of men gathered for warmth. They heard the horn and knew what it meant—Helmstrumburg’s doom had come upon it.

Sigmund strode down the steps of the Crooked Dwarf.

“Guthrie?”

There was a holler from the camp fire to the left. “Stay here
till I call for you! Squire Becker! Where is Squire Becker?”

“He’s gone to the north gate!” one man from the Crooked Dwarf
Volunteers shouted.

Sigmund cursed. Damned pompous oaf! He had told him to wait
for orders.

“Frantz!”

A voice answered and the familiar shape of his friend came
through the darkness.

“Bring your men! We are going to the palisade!”

* * *

Osric had no idea what he told his men—but as the horde of
beastmen closed in, he exhorted them to bravery and courage and swore he would
track down and castrate any man who failed to do his duty. Every second word was
an expletive, but his men barely heard him—they were staring with horror at
the tide of horned shapes running through the gloom.

At the top of the ditch on the right of the gateway Baltzer
crowded in behind Osric and adjusted his money pouch to stop it swinging against
his hip. Schwartz shut his eyes and squeezed out a prayer to Ulric to lend him
strength and fury, while Freidel flashed back to the assault on Blade’s Reach
Tower, when the greenskins had charged like this—and he told Sigmar that he
would gladly sacrifice another finger as long as he could come out of this
alive.

On the parapet above the gateway, Vasir’s trappers laid their
quivers at their feet and tested the string on their bows.

The beastmen came on, without order, in bands behind their
tribal leaders. Some of them carried ragged standards, thankfully hidden in the
gloom.

On the other side of the gate Blik Short drew his sword and
called out to his Old Unbreakables, “Hold fast!”

The old men drew their swords and waited.

At fifty yards Vasir and his trappers started to fire arrows
low and straight at the enemy. Many of their arrows struck home—but with each
beastman that dropped two more surged to take its place.

Within seconds the attackers were at twenty yards. The
leading beastmen reached the far lip of the ditch they had so laboriously
deepened. The slime they had dug out was slippery and a few beastmen fell—either
shot by Vasir and his men’s bows, or tripped up with treacherous footing—but
they were trampled underhoof as a solid mass of bodies followed after.

The leading beastmen charged down into the ditch and barely
slowed as they charged up the steep bank, a few of them flinging spears at the
men on the palisade. There was no plan or strategy to their assault. They did
not come with ladders or grappling hooks or battering rams, it was little more
than a ferocious stampede. They were wild animals that knew no better strategy
than to simply overwhelm the palisade by force of numbers.

As soon as they reached the foot of the palisade the beastmen
leaped up, like wild dogs, caught the top of the parapet, and hauled themselves
up.

Osric stabbed down and caught one on the up leap. The power
of his thrust and the power of the creature’s own momentum drove his halberd
blade straight through the crude armour through the creature’s stomach. It hung
on the blade, trying to thrust its spear into his face. Osric threw his halberd
down and with it tumbled the beast. Then Osric drew his sword and stabbed the
next beastman through the windpipe.

Freidel felt the palisade shiver at the impact of the
attackers. A thrown spear barely missed him, and he stepped back from the lip of
the parapet. Two hands caught the top of the palisade in front of him. Freidel
had no idea whether it was one beastman or two, and stabbed each with his blade—noticed with a mixture of horror and curiosity that he had cut off a
beastman’s finger and it was lying, claw and all, by his feet. Then a beastman
jumped and caught the top of the parapet and Freidel beheaded it with one
ferocious cut.

At the north gate Squire Becker and his men—Chaos cultists
all—fell upon the astonished Vorrsheimers. They screamed horrific curses and
clawed and slashed and gored like rabid beasts. The spearmen barely had a chance
to reach for their weapons before three of them were lying dead or dying.

Squire Becker and his men trampled the bodies in their haste
to reach the cross-bar. They struggled to lift it from the heavy brass braces as
more soldiers streamed from the walls and the guardhouse—but it was too late.
The heavy doors opened outwards to the night on the enormous black iron hinges.

“Get those doors shut!” Hanz shouted, and a ferocious
struggle ensued. Both sides tried to maintain their hold on (he gates as they
tried to kill each other. On the walls above the gate Holmgar lifted his
handgun, blew on his fuse and then aimed his handgun at Squire Becker. There was
a cloud of smoke as he fired, and when it cleared he saw that he had not hit
Squire Becker but the man next to him: the shot had scattered his brains over
the inside of the gateway.

The spearmen outnumbered the cultists and cut them down—but
even in their death struggles they hung onto the gates and would not let them
close.

“Get these doors shut!” Hanz shouted again, but at that
moment there was a thunder of hooves outside the walls and a herd of monstrously
large beastmen came from the darkness, running towards the open gate.

Holmgar struggled to clear the smouldering embers from his
gun. There was a ragged patter of handgun shots, but the war party must have
numbered nearly a hundred: even if all the shots hit home they would make little
impact. If this war party took the gate the whole forest would stream into
Helmstrumburg.

Holmgar fired his shot and was already looking for a way of
escape when a huge boom of thunder shook the walls. The whole gateway was
wreathed in smoke. Holmgar had a terrible intuition that some traitors had mined
the wall, until he heard Vostig laughing and remembered the swivel-gun.

In front of the gate there was a twitching pile of bodies and
body parts. One beastman was struggling to crawl away, but the lower half of its
body had been shot clean away, and only a few tangled remains of bone and sinew
trailed after it before it expired with a low moan.

After the initial shock Hanz’s men tumbled out of the
guardroom and charged. Squire Becker and his cultists were driven back from the
gateway by sheer weight of numbers. But they fought ferociously, and even when
they had fallen to the ground, they still bit and scratched at the legs of the
Vorrsheimers.

Another two spearmen fell before all of Squire Becker’s men
were killed. Vostig was busy reloading his swivel-gun with a couple of handfuls
of shot. Holmgar peered down at the warband of beastmen that had been standing
there. There were rumours of war machines from the master craftsmen of Nuln that
could deal death to a hundred men, but Holmgar never thought he would see such a
thing. It was truly wondrous!

The beastmen had attacked all three gates at once, but it was
on the west side of town, where the palisade enclosed the new town, that they
attacked with their main strength.

By the time Sigmund reached the palisade the fight was well
underway. Osric’s men had weathered the storm of beasts, but it was obvious to
Sigmund that they could not hope to hold the palisade against such numbers.

Already there was a stair of dead beastmen along the palisade
that the creatures behind were using to clamber up to the walls. Osric’s men cut
and thrust until their arms felt like lead weights.

Blik Short had lost two of his Old Unbreakables, but the old
warriors held their stretch of wall with stoic courage: not ceding an inch to
the beastmen that threw themselves onto the palisade. As they watched, a massive
beastman clambered over the palisade to the far right and used a huge battle axe
to cut down two of Osric’s men. Into the gap followed four of the smaller
beastmen and soon the wedge began to widen as more and more beastmen scrambled
for the opening, intent on seizing the palisade by sheer weight of numbers.

Frantz and his dockers were impatient to join the battle but
Sigmund held them back until the beastmen assault along the rest of the wall
faltered. All hurried to the opening and then he drew his sword and charged.
Osric’s men, who were about to break felt the impact of Sigmund’s charge on the
pressed mass of beastmen and struck back with renewed vigour.

Sigmund slashed left and right. A spear stabbed at him from
out of his field of vision and he felt the blow on his cuirboili breastplate and
was knocked sideways. The spear-thruster sensed an advantage and readied another
stab, but this time Sigmund caught the shaft. At the same time as he pulled he
slashed down with his sword and lopped off both of the beastman’s forearms, then
ran him through with his own spear.

Next to him, Frantz desperately parried an axe blow with his
buckler, but the power of the blow jarred his hand and arm. He struck back in
fury and gutted him with a slow thrust.

Above the gateway, Vasir strung another arrow and looked for
a suitable target. Through the mass of bodies he could see a number of
bull-headed creatures—minotaurs—pushing their way through the press. They
were over eight feet tall and they carried twin-headed axes in their massive
fists.

Vasir’s first arrow hit one in the chest, but even though the
arrow embedded itself into its flesh the creature didn’t seem to notice. He
looked in his quiver, he only had three arrows left. The beasts were just below
him now, bellowing like enraged bulls and swinging their axes into the timbers
of the gate as if they meant to chop a hole through.

There was no way Vasir could miss. The next arrow hit the
same creature in the shoulder and it dropped the axe for a moment. The next hit
it in the lower back as it bent over, and the last caught the creature in the
knee—but instead of keeling over the beast lowered its thick neck and charged
the gate like a maddened bull. Vasir felt the whole gateway quiver under the
impact. The bull charged again and this time his platform swayed violently. He
clutched the palisade for support but the creature charged again and part of the
walkway broke free.

“Back!” Vasir shouted but the other trappers had already
started to jump to safety. Two men tipped over the front of the parapet into the
path of the minotaurs. The foul creatures grabbed them by the limbs and
literally tore them apart.

* * *

At the base of the water tower on the east wall Theodor
waited in the shadows as he saw the figure that he knew would come creep across
to the disused shed. Theodor silently adjusted the grip on his pistols and moved
to lessen the distance between him and his prey.

He could see a smouldering fuse in his prey’s hand, and heard
the rattle of a key as he undid the lock. There was no reason to wait, but
Theodor did so for his own satisfaction. The shed door swung open and his prey
uncovered the lantern and—gasped in fury.

The barrels which were to have blown a hole in the wall for
the beastmen to charge through had gone!

Eugen spun around as Theodor stepped from the shadows, twin
pistols raised and primed, fuses smoking dangerously.

“You have failed, Eugen,” Theodor said in his Talabheim
accent. There was special emphasis on the word “failed”. Confronting his former
master was more than satisfying, it helped expunge the memory of what he had
pretended to be for so long.

Eugen hissed and drew his sword, but there was no chance to
fight. He fired the right-hand pistol then paused to let the smoke clear and
shot the left. The first was a death shot low in the groin, the other high on
the left arm: shattering the bone as the heavy shot pulverised the arm and left
it hanging useless.

Eugen staggered and fell—blood pumping from his pulverised
arm and groin, his breath already beginning to rattle with the onset of death.

Theodor stared down at him for a moment, then spat in the
face he hated above all, slowly reholstered his pistols and then turned back the
way he had come, where the din of fighting was growing in volume.

There was no attack on the east gate, so Gunter sent Elias to
find out how the men on the west of town were faring.

The streets of Helmstrumburg were empty as Elias ran. He
found Sigmund standing behind the palisade gate with a bloody bandage around his
head and a sword still in his hand.

Sigmund’s face was flushed, but there was no evidence of
panic as he watched the fighting and issued orders. He saw Elias and recognised
that he had come from the east gate and he turned and hailed him. “What news?”

“Sir—there was no fighting on the east when I left it.”

Sigmund nodded. The situation was confused, but it seemed
that the beastmen had thrown their whole weight against the west gate and
palisade, and although they had driven the beastmen back over the wall, Osric’s
men were outnumbered and exhausted. The palisade would not hold.

As they stood the gate began to quiver with impacts, and the
trappers scrambled for safety. Sigmund calmly watched the hinges that kept the
gate attached begin to start from the gate posts.

“Elias!” he said. “Get everyone behind the barricades! I want
all the men that Hanz and Gunter can spare to join us there!”

Elias sprinted off again, almost relieved to be running
messages rather than fighting. But he was sure that there would be much more
fighting for him before the day was done.

The press of beastmen on the palisade was such that it began
to creak dangerously and the men of the free companies started to run from the
walls. A blood-splattered figure loomed up from the melee of bodies and Sigmund
recognised Osric.