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Sticks and Stones - Jonathan Green

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Sticks and Stones

Jonathan Green

‘Fire!’

Rutger Erlang heard the gruff voice of the outrider sergeant quite clearly, even over the clamour of battle that engulfed him.

A staccato fusillade of shots rang out as his fellows fired their pistols. But rather than do as his sergeant commanded, Rutger held his position and waited.

Left hand tight on the reins, he kept his horse, Abelard, in check as it pawed the ground, whinnying and shaking its head in agitation. The flintlock pistol in Rutger’s right hand remained pointed at the greenskin charging towards him.

The orc was hunched atop a brute of a boar that stood as tall as Rutger’s steed at the shoulder, although it probably weighed three times as much. Mount and rider charged towards the pistoliers’ position, fury blazing in their eyes.

‘What are you waiting for? Shoot it!’ Sergeant Ubel Hirsch bellowed, turning his own steed about.

‘Wait until you can see the blood-lights of their eyes,’ Rutger muttered to himself. That was what his late father had taught him.

‘What?’ Hirsch barked as he moved to join the pistolier.

‘What are you waiting for, Erlang?’ came the cry of another pistolier wearing the distinctive black and silver plate of the Pistolkorps. ‘Fire!’

‘Wait until–’ Rutger began to repeat his mantra. And then, in that moment, he saw the red of the orc’s bloodshot eyes. They were the coals of a blacksmith’s forge blazing in sunken sockets beneath the beetling brows of its blunt, brutish skull.

The orc gave a guttural bellow, a sound like ‘Waaagh!’

The barrel of the flintlock aimed squarely at the orc’s face, Rutger eased back his finger on the trigger in one smooth motion. The pistol discharged with a sharp crack and a puff of white smoke.

The orc’s head snapped backwards, as surely as if it had been hit in the face by a warhammer. Instantly the rest of its body followed, as the greenskin flew from the back of its snorting steed.

The boar charged on.

His hand still tight on the reins, Rutger calmly but quickly holstered the discharged weapon and prepared to draw another from the bandolier strapped about his breastplate.

The boar’s eyes burned yellow. Rutger’s pulse began to race as he realised there wasn’t enough time left to do what needed to be done.

A gunshot rang out. The animal gave a porcine squeal and its forelegs buckled. It tumbled to the ground, clouds of dust rising from its matted fur as it slid to a halt not three yards from the hooves of Rutger’s mount.

The pistolier looked about him. The natural ebb and flow of battle had taken them from the thick of it, leaving them at the periphery of the carnage. He was suddenly afforded a clear view of the men of the Empire – and the orcs that had arrogantly, and foolishly, claimed these lands as theirs – clashed upon the wide, windswept slope.

The Reikland army led by Kaspar Lambrecht, Graf of Greifgestein, was mainly made up of horses and infantry, with little in the way of either cannon or great beasts to support them. The greenskin rabble could barely be described as an army – so chaotic were the actions of its warriors, but that made it nonetheless lethal. For this vast rabble was led by the infamous orc chieftain Ghazbag da Cleava, so named because of his penchant for cutting things in half, which, to date, included the dwarf king Grodber.

‘What do you think you’re playing at?’ Hirsch snapped.

‘Fulfilling my duty as a member of the Emperor’s Pistolkorps,’ Rutger said, eyeing the bodies of the motionless orc and its steed.

The sergeant lowered his own smoking handgun and pointed at the dead boar. ‘If it hadn’t been for me, you’d have been the plaything of that brute by now.’

‘I had everything under control,’ Rutger lied.

‘You might have done, just, if you’d fired when I ordered you to.’

‘Yes, what were you playing at, precisely?’ Another pistolier had trotted over to join them. The extravagantly-plumed helmet, the ostrich feather dyed blue and the yellow sash he wore marked him out as a son of Nordland.

Removing his helmet, Otik Reiner ran a hand through the mane of blond hair beneath.

‘You always were the best marksman among us,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never known a soldier take as many risks as you. It’s that sort of attitude that’s going to get you killed one of these days, or even worse, get me ki– ’

Reiner’s head exploded in a burst of scintillating green flame. A gory mixture of blood, bone and brain matter splashed across Rutger and Hirsch making both men exclaim in surprise and revulsion.

‘Greenskin magic,’ Hirsch hissed, wiping the gruel of blood and brain from his face with a callused hand.

Rutger’s mouth yawned open.

‘Sergeant!’ came a shout from behind them.

The outrider and pistolier turned together, backs straightening and saluting automatically as they saw General Lambrecht’s subordinate approaching them. Count Gerulf might be one of the general’s sub-commanders, but he was still a nobleman with substantial estates of his own, and both Hirsch’s and Rutger’s superior by quite some degree.

Gerulf’s armour gleamed silver, his luxurious beard as white as the horse he proudly sat upon. His left eye was hidden behind a patch that some camp follower – or someone beloved of the count, perhaps – had taken the trouble to embroider with the coat of arms of the Reikland. The count pointed at a hunched and hooded figure moving towards them as the tide of battle turned once again in the greenskins’ favour.

‘That orc with the staff there. Kill it!’

‘Yes, sir! At once, sir!’ Hirsch replied.

Levelling the repeater handgun clutched in one gunpowder-black hand at the skulking shaman, the irascible outrider opened fire.

A fusillade of sharp cracks rang out over the rocky escarpment that fate had determined would form the battleground of this day, as the rest of the unit of pistoliers – three in number now, discounting Rutger, and led by Jakob Enderlin – followed their outrider sergeant’s example. White gunpowder smoke filled the air, obscuring Rutger’s view, only to dissipate again moments later on the chill breeze.

The orc still stood, glaring at them, thick strings of spittle flapping from its slack mouth, a corona of green-tinged light crackling about its misshapen skull.

‘What witchery is this?’ the outrider barked.

Rutger’s eyes were on the sorcery-guarded orc.

The shaman’s eyes weren’t red, or yellow. They glowed a luminescent green. The raw energy radiated by the orcs, who were even now freely throwing themselves into battle against the Reiklanders, ran like blood in its veins, energising every fibre of its hideous being.

Rutger started, feeling the shaman’s furious emerald gaze upon him. But in the next instant the brute turned and bounded away over the rocks, climbing higher up the escarpment towards the canyons and crags of this broken land that lay beyond the immediate battlefield.

‘Sergeant!’ came the distinctive voice of command across the wind-tugged tussocks as Count Gerulf addressed Hirsch once more.

‘Yes, sir?’ the grizzled outrider responded, noticeably less enthusiastically than he had been before attempting to shoot the shaman.

‘That orc with the staff appears to be breathing and yet your man is still dead.’

‘Yes, my lord, I–’

‘Go after it, man,’ Gerulf cut him off, ‘and do not return until you’ve put an end to the fiend. You do not want to earn General Lambrecht’s displeasure, do you?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Hirsch said in barely audible acknowledgement. ‘I mean, no, sir.’ And then, considerably louder, ‘You men there’ – he was clearly addressing Rutger and the surviving members of the Pistolkorps – ‘with me!’

And with that, the five men turned their steeds from the battle to the rock-strewn slope and set off after the fleeing orc shaman at a canter.

The cold fingers of the wind raked the exposed escarpment. Rutger pulled his cloak tighter about him in a vain attempt to keep out the biting chill, and cursed the greenskin breed for the hundredth time since the hunting party had set out after the barbaric shaman.

Five men on horseback should have been able to run a single orc to ground without any trouble, he thought with a grunt of annoyance. But not so this day, as was now painfully clear.

The orc was leading them higher into the broken foothills of the Grey Mountains, above the valley where the battle still raged between the orc forces and the Reikland host. Rutger could see the ebb and flow of battle much more easily from this vantage point, the clash of weapons and shouts of men and orcs carried to him in the voice of the wind.

‘Take it easy,’ the sergeant commanded the pistoliers as they advanced over the scree-laden slopes between the tumbled boulders that littered the rugged landscape. ‘If your horse catches a hoof in a crevice it could end up lame.’

‘And a lame horse is no use to a horseman,’ one of the pistoliers, Franz Baldemar, finished for him.

The pistoliers might all be faithful soldiers of the Empire, and skilled marksmen to boot, but first and foremost they were horsemen. They knew the value of their steeds: each one was worth several times as much as a man-at-arms in both monetary cost and strategic value on the battlefield. But more than that, they cared for their horses, treating them with the respect they would any member of the Pistolkorps.

For those young noblemen recruited into the Emperor’s own Pistolkorps, it was all about the glory and esteem that inevitably came with the honour. Following the tried and tested profession that they hoped would one day see them admitted to one of the knightly orders of the Empire – regiments of renown such as the Knights Panther or the Order of the Blazing Sun, maybe even the personal army of Karl Franz himself, the famed Reiksguard Knights – they understood that without their mounts they would also lose the elevated position within the hierarchy of the battlefield that their steeds afforded them.

‘Sigmar’s teeth!’

The curse that escaped Gunther Krieg’s lips, the skitter of stones and the hollow clop of hooves losing purchase, only served to prove the veracity of Hirsch’s words as another of Rutger’s fellows almost lost control of his steed during their awkward climb.

They weren’t leaving the battlefield far behind. The orcs had apparently deemed these lands valuable, and fought now to protect their territory, even though every right-thinking man knew that these lands were under the purview of the Emperor. Despite that fact, it didn’t make the climb up the winding canyon they were now following any easier.

‘What did I tell you?’ the sergeant said in his all too familiar insufferable tone.

It was the duty of such outrider sergeants as Ubel Hirsch to instruct those noble-born men inducted into the Pistolkorps in the ways of warcraft. It was also their duty to mitigate their intemperate natures and extol discipline as opposed to hot-headed impetuosity. However, for Rutger Erlang and his compatriots, that castigating guidance came in the form of the slovenly Ubel Hirsch.

‘Now watch where you’re going and try to keep up!’

The cantankerous Hirsch led the way further along the canyon, dogged and disgruntled in equal measure at having disappointed the general. He was a good twenty years older than the eldest of the pistoliers, and the only one not destined for knighthood and its associated glory, no matter whether he impressed his masters in the standing army of the Reikland or not. For Hirsch was the only one amongst them of low birth, and he made no secret of the fact that this situation irked him.

He had commanded dozens of men in his time as an outrider, all of them going on to greater things and being lauded with glory and fame the likes of which he could never hope to achieve. A lifetime of being undervalued and unappreciated – as he saw it, at least – had made him bitter.

A persistent rumour around the army campfires also said that he drank, but then what man didn’t when faced by the atrocities carried out by the orcs and their kind.

After him went the taciturn Jakob Enderlin. The pious noble was pale, almost to the point where his complexion could have been described as having a deathly pallor. His steed’s coat, on the other hand, was a lustrous black, and the horse had a temperament to match. The animal snorted in frustration as it picked its way over the cracked limestone pavements and granite outcroppings. Enderlin, however, remained quiet – as quiet as a priest of Morr and as gods-fearing too, judging by the number of votive symbols he wore about his person, and the way he read his prayer book before retiring every night.

Behind Enderlin went the far less taciturn Franz Baldemar. Where Enderlin was pale, Baldemar was dark. Where Enderlin was trim and toned, almost to the point of being considered gaunt, Baldemar was broad and a head taller too. In Rutger’s mind, Baldemar seemed surely destined to join the Middenheim Wolves rather than any other order, even though he originally hailed from Talabheim, home of the Knights of the Blazing Sun. His manner certainly suited the hard drinking and hard fighting Ulric-worshipping band of brothers, as much as his colouring and build. He was bluff and hearty, always ready with a good-humoured riposte and quick to raucous laughter, even with the permanently irritable Hirsch as his commanding officer.

The military hierarchy within the pistoliers’ unit was an uneasy truce between aristocratic superiority and a life lived on the battlefields of the Empire. What Hirsch lacked in status, by dint of his lowly origins, he more than made up for in terms of experience. After all, he had spent as long in the service of the Empire as some of those now under his command had been alive. By contrast, the noblemen pistoliers were heirs to massive estates, and were used to having large retinues running to answer their every beck and call.

Gunther Krieg, who followed Baldemar and his steed, was heir to not one but two manors, not to mention a forlorn castle, all of them bordering the Reikwald Forest. With his finely-groomed moustache and a jawline that might have been carved from solid marble, Krieg looked every part the Imperial hero. And it was a role that suited him well, much better than that of lord of the manor. Rutger knew from countless fireside conversations that Krieg fully intended to become a career soldier. No doubt he’d make general one day, as long as his hot-headed temperament didn’t get him killed first.

In that way he was so like Rutger Erlang, second son of old Osterhaag Erlang of Wissenberg, bringing up the rear of the hunting party with one hand on the reins of his horse, the other absent-mindedly stroking the butt of one of the twinned flintlocks. They had been a gift from his father upon his admission to the Pistolkorps. The paired firearms were an ancient family heirloom and many legends were told of them as well as those who had carried the guns in generations past. But none of them would compare to the new legends Rutger intended to carve out for himself.

And so they continued – the hot-blooded pistoliers and their rather more phlegmatic outrider sergeant – heading ever onwards into the twisted, broken-walled canyon.

‘Watch your step,’ the outrider grunted as the pistoliers emerged from the gullet of the winding pass at the head of a crag-sided valley. ‘We’re right at the heart of orc territory.’

Joining the others, Rutger cast his eyes over the fractured landscape before him. He was looking across an undulating spur of boulder-strewn moorland that lay in the shadow of a vast cliff of black rock. From the top of the cliff, many, many feet above, tumbled a silvery-white cascade, the echoing crash and roar of the waterfall echoing back at them from the rockface.

Ostensibly these lands were under the purview of the Emperor Karl Franz himself, held under his title of Elector Count of the Reikland. The unacknowledged truth of the matter, however, was that the Empire was little more than a collection of isolated city-states, whose eternal battle against the coming dark – whether it be borne upon the wings of vampires, following in the wake of barbarian incursions from the north, or with the constant war-waging of the greenskins – was the only thing that united them. From the ever-dark depths of the Drakwald Forest to the cursed county of Sylvania, it could all too easily be argued that the Empire was the domain of monsters as much as it was that of men.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in the hinterlands of the Reikland, where broken stony crags, like the splintered teeth of ancient earth giants, were beset by the relentless, worrying wind.

And it was here, in just such a place, that the orc shaman was waiting for them.

This was a wild place beyond the rule of whatever laws the Emperor and his elector counts might hold dear within the fastnesses of their city-states. Here the rocky slopes were littered with the debris left behind by what had clearly once been a greenskin encampment. And littered was the only word for it.

Rutger could see painted skulls mounted on stakes, poking out from between the remains of decrepit straw-roofed hovels. Many were bounded by a crude wooden stockade, and everywhere were piled heaps of rotting rubbish and steaming mounds of dung.

Clumps of toadstools had sprouted in the shade of the stockade wall, green-gilled fungi threaded with mildew.

But there weren’t only signs of orcs having been here. It was clear that the men of the Empire had been here recently too, and as Rutger surveyed the escarpment he slowly began to interpret the message left scrawled upon the landscape of churned mud and broken boulders.

Beyond the tumbledown stockade, its ditches filled with dung and goblin bones, the undulating turf became a broad sward of wind-blown grass and knotty gorse. Rutger could see the wreckage of carts, the bared spokes of broken wheels and even the occasional carrion-picked corpse of a horse lying between the uneven ridges.

A black look passed across Rutger’s face. He was quite sure he could read the outcome of the battle in the debris left behind: the abandoned gun-carriages and the bodies of soldiers clad in the off-white of the Reikland host, left to rot where they had fallen. To leave such valued possessions behind and the dead unprepared for entry into Morr’s realm, their spirits left to wander these blasted moors, was unconscionable. Even the lack of battlefield scavengers – it could all only mean one thing.

‘So this is what befell Gausser’s expeditionary force,’ Rutger breathed.

‘So it would seem,’ Baldemar agreed behind him.

It was the disappearance of Gausser’s artillery unit, on training manoeuvres in the region, that had first alerted the Reiklanders to the growing threat posed by the orc tribes massing under the banner of Ghazbag da Cleava. Now it appeared that they had marched right into the enemy territory and paid the ultimate price for their hubris.

Gausser’s Reiklanders had lost this battle. Not only that but they had been routed utterly with not a single one of them left alive by their aggressors.

The wind picked its way between the bones and bodies of the dead, giving a keening cry, as if it too mourned the loss of the men who had died here, defending their Emperor’s sovereign lands from the depredations of the destructive greenskins.

But something troubled Rutger more than the massacre of an entire expeditionary force, and that was the orc that had brought them to this place.

The shaman’s flight had bothered him; he had not known an orc to turn tail and flee so readily before. Their scrawnier goblin kin, certainly, but not the bigger, brutish orcs. But then those orcs possessing the ability to manipulate the unholy power generated by the very presence of the horde – shaping it, by some innate means, into a physical demonstration of the fury of their brutal gods – were not like other orcs. They were as cunning as wolves and as unpredictable as rabid dogs.

The shaman was watching them from the shadows of the hood drawn up about its misshapen head.

Why had it led them to here? And why had it chosen to stop now, and out of range of their guns too? It was as if it had intentionally led them to this blasted place.

Rutger shot anxious glances about him, as if half-expecting an ambush, straining his ears for the clatter of cleaver on shield, the heavy footfalls of the enemy, or the grunted commands of the greenskins.

But no ambush came. The only orc present was the wily shaman.

The savage scowled at them, one blunt tooth – more like a stubby tusk than an incisor – protruding from its bottom jaw and over its top lip.

The meaty paws of its hands held a huge leg bone that had surely once belonged to some ill-begotten giant, or a monster mutated by the warping effects of Chaos magic. Even at this distance, Rutger could see that the femur had been carved with jagged lightning bolt sigils and leering orcish faces, their eyes set with glittering gems, maybe bloodstones. The staff rattled with twine-hung teeth and rat skulls.

And there it stood, under an overcast sky, atop a cairn of tumbled boulders, the detritus of the orc camp – everything from a huge orc head, crudely carved from a block of basalt to discarded, rusted weaponry and splintered shields – heaped around its base. The orc’s eyes were hot coals that pulsed a volcanic red.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Rutger muttered, his eyes on the restless creature that rocked from one foot to the other, never once taking its eyes from the pistoliers gathered on the ridge below it.

‘It’s mocking us,’ Krieg said. ‘As if it knows it’s out of range of our weapons.’

‘Oh it knows, all right,’ Ubel Hirsch growled. ‘Cunning as a sack of snakes and twice as nasty.’

‘Then what are we waiting for?’ Baldemar exclaimed in a jovial bellow, a broad grin across his face and a mad gleam in his eyes.

This time the pistoliers were spoiling for a fight. The death of Otik Reiner, one of their own, still had to be avenged and they were eager to avenge it.

‘Hold!’ the outrider sergeant’s voice rang out across the bleak escarpment, sensing the brewing ill-discipline of the others.

Baldemar’s horse pawed the ground, as eager to be about the business of battle as he was. ‘We can take it!’ the Talabeclander fumed. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

‘He’s right,’ Krieg added. ‘The ground’s clear here. We can get within range and shoot that bastard orc down!’

‘That greenskin killed Reiner,’ Enderlin joined in. ‘It is an abhorrence in Sigmar’s sight that it still breathes!’

‘No, it’s up to something.’ Hirsch’s narrowed eyes, like Rutger’s, were fixed upon the greenskin standing atop the pile of boulders and other battlefield debris.

‘All the more reason to strike quickly and without hesitation,’ Rutger said.

‘In Sigmar’s name, Reiner’s death must be avenged.’ Enderlin sounded like a priest preaching a Festag sermon. He lifted a bronze hammer icon that hung from a chain of gold about his neck and kissed it. ‘If we strike now, His hand will guide us. We shall not fail.’

Hirsch threw the devout nobleman an angry look and sucked in air through his teeth in a hiss of irritation.

‘It’s a trap! Can’t any of you inbred idiots see that?’

Rutger felt his blood grow hot at the insult, but fought to keep his rage in check. It was the outrider’s way, his bitterness and resentment at their positions of privilege bubbling to the surface, like marsh gas rising from the depths of a foetid swamp.

‘Why flee into these hills, giving us enough glimpses to keep us following as we made our way along that canyon to this particular place, only to stop running now?’

Loath though he was to admit it, Rutger had been asking himself the self-same question. However, the grizzled veteran’s vacillation made him uneasy.

If they waited, surely it only gave the shaman time to prepare another spell, such as the one that had done for Reiner – Sigmar rest his wretched soul.

Rutger looked at the shaman again. Beneath the hood of its filthy cloak emerald lightning crackled.

‘We should strike now!’ he shouted, surprising himself with the force of his exclamation. ‘Before we have time to regret it.’

Rutger sniffed. The very air was redolent with the stink of primitive magic.

It made Rutger uneasy. It was like another presence, watching them from the ruins of the orc stockade, a wild thing of blunt-minded intentions and coarse appetites, a thing born of war and seeking only to return to the fray where it might bash heads with the enemy, be they man or orc. It mattered not which to the excited battle-frenzy of the Waaagh.

The susurrus of scattering scree, and an emerald flash at the periphery of his vision, turned his attention back to the shaman on the other side of the exposed plateau.

The clatter of pebbles became louder as larger stones were sent bowling down the hillside and over the broken boulders that strewed the battlefield. It was as if the very rocks were shaking off the slumber of centuries, sending clods of earth and clumps of grass flying as they did so.

‘Sigmar preserve us!’ Enderlin breathed.

‘We’re too late,’ Rutger uttered in dismay.

Piles of rocks, including boulders as big as ox-carts rose impossibly from the ground. Bound together by chains of sparking green energy, they rose higher, obscuring the shaman – arms outstretched before it – from view.

To Rutger’s mind it was like observing a rockfall in reverse. Boulders heavier than any man could possibly lift ponderously rolled on top of one another. Smaller stones collected beneath these and suddenly, where before there had been nothing but battlefield debris and lichened lumps of limestone, there was now the crude representation of a foot.

Another pillar of rocks formed as the shaman channelled the residual power of the Waaagh through its body.

With a shuddering groan the cairn tore itself apart, but rather than giving way in a great rockslide, it reformed atop the two great trunks of stone, teetering there for a moment, great slabs of granite shifting and sliding together as tiny pebbles filled the gaps between the massive menhirs.

Many of the rocks were adorned with crude, daubed symbols, obscene glyphs that could only mean something to an orcish mind. Others were carved with similarly crude symbolism although some of the marks might just as easily have been made by a greenskin sharpening its cleaver against a convenient stone. And yet all moved with the same unstoppable purpose, to join the growing pile, like plummeting meteorites drawn to a larger celestial body.

Rutger gasped as the huge, basalt head – complete with its covering of moss and quartz-seamed tusks – shifted and then slowly rolled backwards, exposing the mud clinging to its base. Earth, worms, slugs and centipedes were shaken loose with every rotation, leaving a trail of mud across the flattened grass behind it.

The cairn of stones was steadily taking on the hideous appearance and imposing form of one of the monstrous orcs. Reaching the foot of the effigy the tumbling head sped up, rolling up the solidifying legs, over the trunk formed of slabs of granite. And there it came to rest, between those stones that had become the broad shoulders of the crude icon. It hung there, held in place by nothing more than the savage will of the shaman and the persistent power of the Waaagh, which the orc still absorbed from his feral fellows rampaging about the battlefield below, soaking up the esoteric energies like sphagnum moss absorbed water.

Stone grated as the orcish idol turned carved eye sockets upon the shocked men. In the rocky hollows Rutger saw the glitter of quartz.

Four times the height of a man, dragging its still-rooted left leg from the hillside, the animated statue moved towards the men with all the fury of a living landslide.

Rutger heard as well as felt the thud of its heavy tread, as did Abelard. The horse whinnied in fear and shied, taking several trotting steps backwards. It was only Rutger’s hands, tight on its reins, that kept the horse from running altogether.

And then the impossible idol was pounding towards the mounted pistoliers at such a pace that it caught them all momentarily off-guard.

‘Sigmar’s bones!’ the usually reticent Enderlin swore, grasping one of his holy icons tight in a white-knuckled hand.

The pistoliers had all cleaned and reloaded their weapons whilst on horseback in pursuit of the fleeing orc. Instinctively, Rutger aimed one of his flintlocks at the lumbering rock pile and – even as he heard a small voice inside his head tell him that it would do no good – fired.

The lead shot struck the giant’s rocky hide and was squashed flat. As if triggered by Rutger’s attack, a fusillade of pistol shots rang out across the open hilltop.

Aiming for one of the hollow eye sockets of the crudely carved head, he discharged his second pistol. The result was just the same.

The idol continued barrelling towards the pistoliers’ position over the blasted moorland that had abruptly become a field of battle once more.

But what else was he supposed to have done he thought as he turned Abelard about? He was a warrior. His instinctive response was always to fight.

It was sobering to think that the dread strength and power exhibited by the idol was only possible thanks to the even greater power that had brought it into being. And it had been magic wielded by a brutish orc at that, and not some college-schooled Imperial wizard trained in the art of war as well as sorcery.

The boulder statue was like a hillside on the move and probably weighed the same to boot. The shadowed eye sockets of the head that had once been devoid of life glowed with luminescence. It was the same light that had filled the shaman’s eyes as it worked its primitive enchantments upon the forgotten heap of stones.

The pistoliers and their horses scattered before the monster’s lumbering advance. They had all known they would have a fight on their hands when they finally cornered the shaman, but none of them – not even the veteran outrider Ubel Hirsch – had expected anything quite like this.

Rutger had heard the battlefield rumours, of course, the stories of orc-made statues coming to life and joining the greenskins in the prosecution of their wars. He was also aware of the standing order that such statuary should be toppled, wherever it might be found. But he had never expected to witness such warped greenskin sorcery himself, first hand.

At the very edge of his vision, Rutger saw the monster set to work with its huge rock-pillar arms, their lethal power as inevitable and inescapable as an avalanche.

A huge fist smashed into the last of the pistoliers to flee before the idol’s battering-ram charge.

Rutger heard the wet crunch of bone and, moments later, the carcass of Baldemar’s horse crashed back down to earth in front of him. The shattered spars of its ribs stuck out from the bloody mess of its flanks, while Rutger’s steed was forced to swerve to avoid it.

Baldemar flopped loosely in the saddle. From just one glance – catching the glassy-eyed expression on the Talabeclander’s slack face and the bloom of blood upon the side of his caved-in skull – Rutger was able to determine his friend’s fate.

One blow was all it had taken. Just one blow, from one of the effigy’s bludgeoning fists, and Franz Baldemar was dead, along with his horse.

Rutger felt a knot of ice twist his gut. What hope was there for the rest of them?

‘Retreat! Retreat!’ Rutger heard Hirsch shouting in panic over the crash of the monster’s thumping footsteps and its rockfall roar. ‘Retreat and regroup at the head of the pass! Regroup and reload!’

The surviving pistoliers were only too ready to obey the sergeant’s commands now. And yet, there was still a part of Rutger that rebelled at the idea of quitting the field so readily, and with their mission left uncompleted. Two of their number were dead, and so there were twice the number of reasons to inflict revenge upon the orc shaman.

But none could argue against the logic of Hirsch’s orders. Their blackpowder weapons – usually so effective against all but the most heavily-armoured opponents – were useless. If you denied the pistolier his pistol, then where did that leave you?

Turning their steeds about, Rutger, Krieg and Enderlin followed the outrider’s lead and quit the field of battle, their panicked, galloping steeds soon leaving the Waaagh-formed monstrosity behind as they headed for the relative safety of the canyon pass beyond.

The jangling of the agitated horses’ harnesses, their stamping footfalls and the adrenaline-fuelled conversation of their masters echoed strangely from the looming walls of the canyon.

‘Our best bet is to turn tail and keep on riding until we have caught up with the main host.’ Hirsch was gabbling. ‘We can return to this place and its guardian later, when we’ll see how it fares against a cannon, rather than a pistol.’

‘So let me get this straight,’ Rutger interjected. ‘You’re saying we should flee?’

‘Have you not heard the expression, “He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day”?’ Hirsch retaliated. ‘And what about that other old adage, concerning discretion and valour? To try to take that thing on as we are would be suicide!’

‘Not suicide. It would be the right thing to do. We were tasked with this mission by General Lambrecht himself,’ Rutger persisted. He looked to Krieg and Enderlin, searching for some sign that it was not just him who felt this way. He received the approval he sought in their nods and grunts of agreement they offered him.

‘After a fashion!’ Hirsch snorted in derision, firing furious glances at each of them in turn. ‘You want to end your glorious careers before they’ve even begun, then I won’t stop you. But if you go back up there to face that beast armed with nothing more than a brace of pistols each and the arrogance of the aristocracy you were born with, then you won’t live to see another sunrise, let alone join the ranks of some up-their-own-arses knightly order.’

Ubel sniffed loudly, and wiped the back of a hairy hand across his top lip.

‘Take it from one who knows: the idealism of youth must soon make way for the realism of experience, or else perish.’

‘And experience tells you to choose the path of the coward, does it?’ Rutger spat, unable to help himself, his temper getting the better of him at last.

‘Have you not listened to a word I’ve said, boy?’ the outrider countered. ‘Go on then! Prove a point, if you must. But you lot are nothing without someone to wipe your arses and blow your noses and point you in the direction of the nearest greenskin!’

Rutger opened his mouth to speak again, and then hesitated. He took a deep breath, calming himself, and tried again.

‘All I’m saying, sergeant, is there must be another way.’

The rest of the group remained silent.

‘Well, if you’ve got any better ideas – ones that don’t include at least one of us getting crushed to death by that walking rock pile – I’d love to hear them!’

Now it was Rutger’s turn to keep silent.

‘Go on!’ Hirsch challenged. ‘No? I thought as much.’ The sergeant grunted. ‘Well then, as I was saying–’

‘Actually, I do have a suggestion,’ Rutger said interrupting the outrider, much to Ubel Hirsch’s obvious annoyance. Nonetheless, his confident tone silenced the surprised sergeant in an instant.

From somewhere beyond the winding pass, at the head of the valley, a sound like toppling mountain peaks was carried to them on the wind.

A shot from the outrider’s repeater hand cannon signalled the start of the pistoliers’ retaliatory attack on the orc shaman and the animated rock pile, as the four surviving members of the hunting party galloped from the mouth of the pass, pistols primed and at the ready.

‘For the Emperor!’ Ubel Hirsch’s harsh shout rang out over the battlefield.

‘In Sigmar’s name!’ Jakob Enderlin announced in reply.

‘This is it. Are you ready?’ Gunther Krieg asked his friend.

‘As I’ll ever be,’ Rutger Erlang replied, breathing in sharply through gritted teeth as he spurred his horse forward. ‘As I’ll ever be.’

‘The Heldenhammer rides with us,’ Enderlin declared.

‘We can only pray,’ Rutger replied. ‘Just try not to get yourselves killed,’ he added.

The three of them were the only pistoliers left. As their sergeant, Hirsch didn’t count. Rutger wasn’t entirely certain he could rely on the outrider to play his part in the gambit he had devised anyway. Not if by stepping back from the fight he might see the heir to the Erlang estates fail, and thereby have his initial assessment of the situation confirmed; this was one battle they could not win.

Urging their mounts forward, Krieg and Enderlin galloped across the desolate battlefield towards the cairn of rocks where the shaman still lurked. Its clumsily-enchanted bodyguard stood solid as a fortress gatehouse before it. Rutger couldn’t be sure, but the unpleasant barking rising from within the hunched greenskin’s chest sounded a lot like laughter.

With a rousing shout of, ‘Sigmar, cast you down!’ from Enderlin and an unintelligible scream of battle fury from Krieg, the two pistoliers bravely spurred their mounts towards the orc’s position.

The zigzag of the idol’s haphazardly-carved mouth opened again and, giving voice to another landslide roar, the monstrosity thudded towards its challengers in an ungainly run.

The pistoliers’ horses had been trained since foals to be accustomed to the clamour of battle, the crack of pistol shots and the boom of cannons. But the truest measure of the animals’ loyalty was the way in which, with only the subtlest direction from their masters, they would willingly charge towards what was effectively the very earth and rock of the hillside made to walk – a landslide waiting to happen.

The crude stone colossus came on enthusiastically, at a lumbering run, to meet the pistoliers’ retaliatory challenge. But Krieg and Enderlin were ready for it this time. As impossible as it might seem that the very sigil-daubed rocks of the earth had risen up to fight them this day, there was no reason why their encounter with the construct should be any different from any other battle, if one took time to consider the situation calmly.

The idol might be strong enough to tear one of the Emperor’s majestic griffon wings from limb, but, more often than not, it was the battle strategist’s sharp mind that ultimately won the day, and not necessarily the warrior’s doughty sword arm.

Today, upon this battlefield, Rutger Erlang was the shrewd tactician, and not Ubel Hirsch. This day his incisive mind would help him prove his worth and give the others an inkling of the greatness that was surely to come, once he was admitted to one of the noble knightly orders of the Empire.

‘Give me covering fire!’ he shouted over his shoulder at the hesitant Hirsch.

The outrider sergeant said nothing, but hefted the heavy repeater handgun in both hands. Closing one eye and sighting along the multiple barrels of the weapon, he fixed the stone giant in the handgun’s sights.

He didn’t need the curmudgeonly old bastard anyway, Rutger thought. He was more than soldier enough to see this mission through to completion without having to rely on the outrider’s help. Besides, surely the shaman would be focused on channelling the power of the Waaagh into the lumbering idol, leaving the orc in no position to defend itself against a gung ho pistolier.

Abelard tore up the ground as Rutger drove his mount towards the scattered boulders.

Enderlin and Krieg closed with the hulking effigy, firing their pistols at the brute statue come to life. They knew that lead shot wouldn’t stop the colossus, but hoped that the loud bangs and flashes of gunpowder ignition would distract it long enough for Rutger to do what needed to be done.

As the idol came at them, Enderlin and Krieg peeled away in formation to left and right, keeping clear of the monster’s sweeping fists, before coming round again, deftly swapping their discharged pistols for freshly primed ones as their steeds wheeled and turned.

And then Rutger was past the animated effigy and coming up on the startled orc.

For a moment the shaman and the pistolier made eye contact and suddenly Rutger was aware of the idol approaching from his left. Ignoring the distraction that had been set up by the other riders, the mindless monster had turned its pounding, rock-crushing steps to meet the new challenger.

With a shout, Rutger spurred Abelard forward to one final, exhaustive attempt to reach the shaman. Foam flapping from the corners of its mouth, the horse raced towards the pile of sigil-scratched stones while the clumping colossus closed on them.

The thing was fast, much faster than Rutger would have believed anything so big could be. It covered the length of a man’s body with every stride and there was now no doubt in Rutger’s mind that the charging rockpile would reach him before he reached the shaman. But then he didn’t have to reach the shaman and if his plan didn’t work, he was good as dead anyway.

A flintlock pistol in hand once more, he sighted along the barrel, fighting to keep the weapon level as the horse closed the gap between him and the orc shaman.

Reaching the foot of the mound atop which the shaman stood, Rutger fired as the shadow of the gigantic orc idol fell across him.

Rutger saw the puff of smoke as the lead ball flew from the muzzle of the pistol, and then the spurt of blood that followed as it punctured the orc’s skull. A look of dull shock seized the shaman’s face as it toppled sideways, blood, bone and brain matter bursting from the back of its head as the pellet emerged again on the other side.

As the orc fell – ever so slowly, as it seemed to Rutger – the coruscating green light in its beady eyes died and became like black lumps of dulled jet. In the same instant, whatever power it was that held the animated effigy together and enabled it to walk, died too.

The colossus took its final step and the boulders that had bound together to form its body came tumbling down in a cascade of mud, rock and battlefield debris. Rutger pulled hard on Abelard’s reins, steering his horse clear of the collapsing idol as the shaman’s body was buried beneath several tons of rubble and broken siege weapons.

The thunder of hooves faded as the pistoliers reined in their mounts, and the echoing clatter of the tumbling rocks died in the teeth of the bitter wind that forever blew here.

‘Sigmar be praised!’ Jakob Enderlin proclaimed. His delighted proclamation was quickly followed by a relieved cheer from Gunther Krieg. The pistolier picked his way across the rippling grass to join Rutger, who sat slouched in the saddle, panting for breath, the discharged pistol still in his hand.

‘You always were the best shot of all of us,’ Krieg said, clasping his friend’s hand and wrist in a warm handshake.

‘Truly, Sigmar was guiding your aim this day,’ Jakob said, beaming uncharacteristically.

Rutger, still shaking from the thrill of the moment, couldn’t do anything other than laugh.

In the strange stillness that followed the shaman’s demise, and that of its monstrous puppet, a last boulder tumbled from the top of the cairn now covering the dead orc, and rolled away down the hillside.

Rutger looked up, uneasy and suddenly aware of the chill wind again. The wind was rising, sweeping in eddies across the escarpment. It flung the debris from the orc camp and the abandoned battlefield into the air, creating a vortex of spinning clumps of grass, broken bits of shield and the torn pennants of beaten Imperial units.

He watched, momentarily hypnotised as the whirling eddies performed their balletic dance, spinning across the ridge, the spiralling zephyrs uniting to form stronger currents that continued on their inexorable way across the slope of the hill. The longer Rutger watched, the clearer it became that the ever-strengthening whirlwind was heading towards the tumbled idol and the dead shaman buried beneath it at the foot of the black cliff.

Another boulder lurched clear of the top of the mound. And another.

All eyes were on the rockpile now. The pistoliers stared in disbelief as the whirlwind continued to pick up speed, lifting the scree from the slope, larger stones soon following. Green lightning flashed at the heart of the unexpected tornado, even though there was not a storm cloud to be seen within the broad sweep of the sky above.

The coruscating light suffusing the maelstrom was the same sick green colour as the light Rutger had seen crackling in the shaman’s eyes. As the lightning continued to spark and flash, boulders the size of loaded weapons wagons slowly levitated into the tormented air. They too were caught by the wind and began to rotate as they joined the impossible, magical dance taking place above the hilltop.

‘Sigmar’s bones!’ Enderlin hissed, effectively summing up how all the witnesses to this sorcerous spectacle were feeling in those two simple words.

It seemed that for all the pious pistolier’s professions of faith, the gods of the greenskins were not yet done with those who would desecrate their sacred tribal grounds in such a cavalier fashion. It was as if the very soil of this place was saturated with the psychic residue of ancient orc Waaaghs.

Within the magical maelstrom the effigy took shape again, fingers of wind and crackling lightning locking the stones into place. Only this was not the same animate embodiment of the orcs’ dire deities they had faced already. This was something much worse.

Whereas the idol the shaman had conjured had been as tall as a house, the effigy taking shape now – composed of heaps of rock, stinking orc dung and the wreckage of weapons’ carriages – was taller again by the height of a man.

‘This place is cursed,’ Enderlin cried in despair, ‘sacred to the orcs and their kind. The fell power that took root here when the orcs chose this place for their encampment lingers still.’

‘And is every bit as deadly when left untamed, such as it is now,’ Krieg added, anxious eyes fixed on the hulking idol.

In turn, the idol looked down at the men, regarding them and their horses as if only just noticing them for the first time. Its crudely carved face was hidden behind a totemic mask, nailed together from rough-hewn planks of wood, the like of which Rutger had seen before surmounting the gated entrances of other orc stockades.

Ubel Hirsch’s vituperative curses could be heard over the howling wind, reverberating from the escarpment, just as clearly as the clattering and crashing of stones as the effigy’s form finalised.

‘I told you we should have quit this place while we still could!’ The sergeant turned his furious gaze on Rutger. ‘Your cocksure arrogance will be the death of us all! So, my lord,’ – the outrider spat the title – ‘what do you suggest we do now?’

Before Rutger could answer, the monstrous idol was on them again, swinging its massive stone arms before it in potentially lethal sweeping arcs.

Hirsch didn’t bother following up his riposte, but turned his own horse around and, rising in the saddle, urged it forward and away. With the danger they were in all too clear to them, Krieg and Enderlin turned their horses about too, their mounts ready to run from the advancing behemoth.

Only Rutger hesitated longer than he should, shocked into stupefied inaction by a growing sense of guilt and the simple knowledge that he had been wrong and Hirsch had been right all along.

He felt the bow-wave of air pressure a split second before the sweeping boulder-fist struck, even as he was kicking his spurs into Abelard’s sides to drive it on to escape the advancing construct.

The horse shrieked in shock and pain as the pulverising fist caught it across the hindquarters. The blow flung the animal through the air to land on its side amidst the tussocks of the battlefield.

And as the horse landed, so did Rutger, flung from the saddle by the idol’s attack. He rolled to a halt in the grass, his pistol – the pistol that had killed the shaman – still tight in his hand.

Blinking sharply and shaking his head to clear the disorienting dizziness that followed the fall, Rutger sat up. With a whinny of fear, his horse tried to stagger to its feet again, and failed. With a sinking feeling forming in the pit of his stomach, Rutger realised his horse was mortally wounded. Its spine was broken, as were its back legs, he was sure of it. All he could do for his old companion now was put it out of its misery with a single shot to the head.

Rutger scrambled to his feet, keeping a tight grip on the gun in his hand, but immediately stumbled, the sudden pain in his hip making him gasp.

The ground under him shook at the idol’s relentless advance. It came ever onward, not needing another sentience to direct its actions now.

Rutger’s landing had not been as injury free as he had first thought. In fact it felt like his own armour was the cause of his injury, its sharp edges sticking into him when he fell onto the hard ground.

Recovering himself and aware of the dire predicament he was now in, Rutger compensated and, abandoning his steed to its fate, set off after the others at a limping run.

In the peak of physical fitness, he would have thought himself more than capable of outrunning the striding idol, but like this, with a badly bruised hip…

He could feel every lumbering step the colossus took, reverberating through the ground and up through his feet.

‘Ho!’ he called after Hirsch’s retreating form. ‘Hirsch!’ he shouted again, not needing to look round to know that the idol was bearing down on him with its every thudding footstep.

Hirsch had to have heard him, even over the pounding of his own horse’s hooves and the hammering of his panicked heart.

‘Hirsch! In the Emperor’s name, have pity, man!’

And then he knew for certain that Hirsch had heard him, as the gruff outrider made the mistake of looking round. The look of contempt Rutger saw in the sergeant’s eyes told him his own doom had already been determined.

Turning away once more, the outrider rode on. He didn’t look back again.

Though Rutger’s stumbling attempt at flight was made all the harder by the tremors of the idol’s thundering approach, he turned to look behind him.

The orcish idol rose above him like a mountain on the move, its bulk blocking out the sky and its malignant mask-face tilted towards him. He ran on, still glancing back over his shoulder, even though a part of him knew that there was no escaping the swift and imminent demise the idol doubtless intended for him. But he couldn’t simply give in and face his fate without a fight. That simply wasn’t the warrior’s way, and, if nothing else, before he considered himself a noble-born son of the Erlang line, he considered himself first and foremost to be a warrior.

It was then, as the monstrous magical construct bore down on him, that Rutger saw something that made his heart lift, and gave him the strength to keep running, knowing that there might be a way out of this after all.

For there, amidst all the rocks and dung and splinters of palisade that made up the colossus, the crushed frame of a wooden carriage carved with grand griffons could be seen, its splintered, iron-shod wheels protruding from between the great slabs of granite.

The drumming of hooves suddenly loud again nearby, Rutger turned as another pistolier’s horse pounded past. Its rider leaned down from the saddle, an arm outstretched. Rutger judged the moment and, as he ran, threw out his left hand – the pistol still clenched in his right – and grabbed hold.

The two men clasped arms and then Rutger was being lifted off his feet, the rider using the momentum of his charge to pull his fellow pistolier up onto the back of the horse behind him.

‘Thank you, my friend,’ Rutger panted, slapping the pauldron of Gunther Krieg’s armour with a gloved hand.

‘Don’t mention it.’

Feeling the bow-wave of air pressure again, Rutger snapped his head round to follow the idol’s progress. If Krieg hadn’t intervened when he did, Rutger would have been no more than a messy paste beneath the monster’s splayed rock feet.

A furious emerald light burned in the eye slits of the idol’s mask-face, wisps of smoke rising from them into the air, and another rumbling roar like an earthquake boomed from somewhere within it.

‘Let’s get out of here.’

Rutger could see Hirsch galloping away ahead of them. Enderlin was keeping pace with them twenty yards away to their right.

‘What?’ Rutger suddenly gasped. ‘We can’t leave now! The general specifically tasked us with–’

‘How do you suggest we stop it?’ Krieg snapped, cutting him off. ‘Our weapons are useless. We can’t even try the same trick you tried before. We’d need a damned steam tank – old Indomitable herself – to take that thing down.’

‘How about a Helstorm battery?’ Rutger said. His eyes were on the idol again, his last remaining undischarged pistol aimed at the lumbering rockpile.

‘Yes, that might do it.’

The sound of the pistol firing silenced Krieg in an instant.

Rutger held his breath. It had been his last shot. It had to count. He wouldn’t get another chance, not like this. Not now.

As soon as he heard the pang of the lead shot hitting flinty rock Rutger’s heart fell. His body sagged and he let out his breath in a loud sigh of disappointment.

The monster didn’t even react.

But then, as the echoes of the missed shot faded, they were replaced by a furious hissing sound.

In an instant, Rutger’s eyes were back on the boulder beast. There amidst the grinding slabs of granite, a torrent of fat white sparks fell in a furious cascade from amidst the broken rocket battery wedged in the idol’s shoulder socket.

‘Flint!’ Rutger suddenly laughed. ‘Of course!’

The lead shot striking the stone had raised a spark as surely as a flint upon firesteel. That spark had found the Helstorm battery and the fuse of one of the rockets now buried at the core of the idol’s amalgamated body.

‘Ride, Gunther! Ride!’ Rutger screamed in his friend’s ear.

With a muffled bang the rocket exploded. The secondary explosion that followed a moment later, as the rest of the battery’s payload went up, was so loud it was preceded by a wall of silence, as if the world held its breath in anticipation of the deafening roar to come.

Amidst a cloud of billowing white smoke, the effigy exploded. The blackpowder detonation blew the component parts of the ugly effigy apart in a cataclysmic eruption of flame that hurled fractured boulders, the spear-like shafts of the stockade wall, and the iron-shod wheels of a gun carriage outwards with volcanic force.

A last rocket, loosed from the Helstorm battery by the statue’s destruction, whined overhead – its tubular body ablaze – as the concussive force of the explosion caught up with the escaping pistoliers. Krieg’s steed was thrown forward by the blast, falling to its knees, throwing the two men over its head to land in a tangle of limbs amidst a knot of cruel brambles. Thankfully their armour bore the brunt of the damage and defeated the knot of thorns’ attempting to snag their flesh.

Rutger rolled clear off his companion and onto his back on the grass, as something like a comet roared overhead, trailing smoke and flames. He looked up into the broken grimace of the idol once more. The orc’s fractured face looked back at him for a moment, and then was gone again.

The feral spell binding the idol together had not so much been broken as blasted apart by the exploding Helstorm battery. The rampaging idol was dead at last – if it could ever have been considered to be truly alive in the first place – and wasn’t the only one.

They found the idol’s huge basalt head another twenty yards away. It was the one piece of the destroyed idol that had been carried the furthest by the devastating explosion. If the orcs had hurled a rock as big as that at General Lambrecht’s Reikland army, his forces would have been decimated.

As it was, the carved boulder had claimed only two victims.

The rock was half sunk in the blackened earth and scorched grass where it had come to ground like some furious falling star. A tangle of limbs – some human, some equine – stuck out from beneath it.

‘In Sigmar’s name,’ Enderlin said, making the sign of the hammer across his chest, and bowing his shaven head in a moment of quiet reverence.

‘I wouldn’t waste your prayers,’ Krieg chided him, not giving the bodies flattened beneath the rock a second glance.

‘So much for, “He who fights and runs away”,’ Rutger cut in, his eyes still examining the scene.

‘Treacherous bastard only got what he deserved. He never had a kind word for any of us.’

‘Sticks and stones,’ Rutger mused thoughtfully.

‘Quite,’ Krieg said, stabbing a finger at Enderlin. ‘Now that you can thank Sigmar for.’

Something was lying in the grass not two feet from the outrider’s outstretched open hand. Rutger bent down and picked it up.

He weighed the handgun in his palms for a moment, taking in the sleek lines and the carefully greased mechanisms of the weapon, savouring the moment before finding a space for the firearm among the pistols, the pre-measured charges of powder, the leather pockets of wadding and shot that filled the compartments of the bandolier strapped across his breastplate.

Enderlin eyed him guardedly, but said nothing.

‘So, what now? Any more bright ideas?’ Krieg asked with a grin, and in what was quite a close approximation of the outrider’s gruff manner.

‘Our mission is complete,’ Rutger said. ‘It’s time we re-joined the battle. After all, we three are warriors, are we not?’

Krieg and Enderlin nodded sagely.

‘And what’s the point in sharing our battle prowess with the empty hills when our overlords could be watching instead, gaining the measure of us and marking us out for future greatness within the knightly orders of the Empire.’

As Rutger climbed back up behind Krieg, his friend turned his horse towards the mouth of the pass and the echoing clamour of the battle still raging beyond.

‘We ride to war,’ he said, with a rallying wave. ‘Destiny and the death of greenskins await!’

Without so much as a backward glance at the burial marker formed by the fallen idol’s carved head, the three pistoliers set off into the mouth of the twisting canyon once more, ready to carry news, both good and ill, to the general’s lieutenants and to re-join the battle for the Reikland.

And after all, Rutger thought, if they could kill a rogue idol, what was one orc warlord? Ghazbag da Cleava would not prevail, nor even live to see another sunrise. This he swore, in Sigmar’s name, as an honoured member of the Emperor’s elite Pistolkorps.

‘Just don’t fire until you can see the blood-lights of their eyes.’

About The Author

Jonathan Green's contributions to the Warhammer 40,000 universe include the Black Templars books Crusade for Armageddon and Conquest of Armageddon and the novel Iron Hands. In the Warhammer World, he wrote Magestorm and The Dead and the Damned. He is also the author of numerous short stories and the Path to Victory gamebooks Herald of Oblivion, featuring Imperial Fists Space Marines, and Shadows over Sylvania. He lives and works in London.

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Published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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