02 - Empire by Graham McNeill
Sigmar hammered Ghal Maraz against the centre of the door, smashing it to splinters with a single blow. The door flew from its frame, and Sigmar vaulted into the tower over its shattered remains. Horrified Jutones filled the room, and Sigmar gave them no chance to recover from the shock. His hammer struck out, and two Jutones died in as many strokes. Unberogen warriors followed Sigmar, slaying their enemies with sword and axe.
Sigmar led the way down the curving tower stairs. Arrows flashed upwards, ricocheting from the walls and off his shield. The level below the ramparts was also filled with Jutone warriors and a volley of gull-feathered shafts and iron crossbow bolts flashed. Sigmar’s shield finally broke apart, and he hurled it aside as crossbow bolts hammered into the warriors next to him.
Sigmar charged the Jutones with a terrifying war cry.
Then he was amongst them and Ghal Maraz sang out. The fury of battle was on him, and Sigmar’s world shrank to the space around him and the movement of blades and limbs through it. He fought with hammer, elbow and foot, using every weapon available to him to throw the Jutones back. Sigmar swept up a fallen short sword and hamstrung a Jutone archer, before charging for the stairs that led to the ground.
An arrow flashed past his head, and Sigmar pressed himself to the wall as another archer loosed up the spiral stairs. The arrow clattered from the walls and struck his breastplate, but its strength was spent and it fell clear. The spiral stairs were curved so as to impede a right-handed attacker from swinging his weapon. They were designed for swordsmen to defend, not archers. Sigmar charged down the stairs, keeping as close to the centre as possible so that any arrows would skitter around him.
He could hear shouting voices calling for more archers, and the clash of swords and shields. Sigmar glanced over his shoulder, to see grim-faced Unberogen warriors gathered behind him, their swords and faces red with blood.
“Let’s take them,” he said, and spun around the last steps of the staircase. A line of archers knelt by the far wall of the tower’s lower chamber, and no sooner had Sigmar appeared than they loosed. Sigmar threw himself flat, rolling beneath the slashing volley of shafts. Screams sounded behind him, and a second volley flashed overhead.
An arrow thudded into Sigmar’s breastplate, and another bounced from his helmet. His dive had carried him to the archers, and he rolled to his knees, sweeping his hammer in a wide, slashing arc that shattered thighs, crushed kneecaps and scattered his foes like straw men. Another shaft ricocheted from his pauldron and sliced across his neck, drawing blood, but the wound was not deep.
Unberogen warriors poured from the stairs, following Sigmar into the Jutones. The men in the tower were doomed, yet they fought on, and Sigmar was forced to admire their courage even as he killed them. A screaming Jutone lancer tried to skewer him, but Sigmar batted away the barbed tip of his weapon with his forearm before slamming his hammer down on the man’s skull.
In seconds it was over, the interior of the tower a charnel house of the dead.
Sigmar took a moment to catch his breath and let the visceral rush of combat drain from his body enough for him to think. Around him, Unberogen warriors roared in triumph, and Sigmar saw the potential for a massacre in every gap-toothed bloody grin. Worse, he saw his own lust for violence reflected in their eyes.
Sigmar felt a savage joy when he fought his enemies, but this was different, this was a war that could have been averted. Looking at the Jutone corpses, he knew that but for one man’s ambition, these men would still be alive. He knelt beside the last Jutone warrior he had killed, a man with a family and dreams of his own no doubt, and wondered whose ambition was worse, his own or that of Marius.
Daylight and the clamour of battle sounded from beyond the doorway, and Sigmar took a deep breath. This battle was not yet won, and more would die before this day’s bloody work was done.
—
A Darkness of the Heart
Outside, all was chaos. Smoke from burning siege towers painted the sky, and the walls were bloody battlegrounds where the difference between life and death could depend on a step in the wrong direction or an accidental sword thrust. The inside of the city reminded Sigmar greatly of Reikdorf, though he had no citadel to match that of Marius.
Rearing up from the Namathir like a collection of stalagmites, the citadel was a fortress within a fortress, with gates of iron, protected by a deep ditch and a barbican of solid, hoarding-covered parapets. Flags bearing Marius’ crown and trident symbol flapped from the blue-tiled roofs of the towers, while flights of arrows arced from the highest ramparts.
Behind the citadel, the city of Jutonsryk spread down the flanks of the promontory to the sea, and Sigmar could feel the fear of its inhabitants. He read the pulse of the fighting in a second, and his masterful eye saw that the battle for Jutonsryk rested on a knife-edge. Wolfgart appeared at his side, his enormous blade wet and dripping.
“The walls are still holding,” cursed Sigmar.
“We’re too exposed here,” said his sword-brother. “If the Jutones counterattack from that citadel, we’ll be slaughtered.”
“I know,” said Sigmar. “We need more warriors inside the city.”
“Looks like you’ll have some soon!” cried Wolfgart, looking along the length of the wall.
Two hundred yards to Sigmar’s left, Count Otwin stood atop the breach, his naked, spike-pierced body red with blood, and his chained axe raised to the heavens in triumph. Thuringian and Cherusen warriors poured over the rubble, hacking down their fleeing opponents. Having fought their way through the bloodiest possible aspect of a siege, the berserkers and wildmen were drunk on slaughter and hungry for death.
Sigmar took Wolfgart’s arm.
“Go!” he said. “Put something between Otwin and the Jutones. He’ll drown this city in blood if you don’t.”
“Where are you going?”
“I am going to get more warriors inside the city.”
“The gate?” asked Wolfgart.
“Aye, the gate, now go!”
Wolfgart nodded and dragged half of Sigmar’s warriors towards the screaming Thuringians and Cherusens. Wolfgart wouldn’t be able to stop the berserk warriors completely, but Sigmar hoped he could prevent the inevitable fury that followed the carrying of a breach from becoming a wholesale slaughter. He put that thought from his mind, and turned his attention to the task at hand.
He had around thirty warriors with him, hopefully enough for what he had in mind. More would follow when they realised that this gate tower had been taken, but these few were all he could count on for now.
“With me!” he yelled.
Sigmar followed the curve of the tower until he reached the cobbled roadway that ran between it and another gate tower just like it. The mighty gateway of Jutonsryk loomed in the torch-lit darkness between the towers, shuddering under repeated blows from an iron-sheathed battering ram on the other side.
The gate’s heavy wooden structure was braced with thick timbers that had once been the keels of oceangoing ships. Giant chains of iron ran from the top of the gate to an enormous winch and wheel mechanism, which was protected by around a hundred Jutones clad in colourful tunics worn over mail shirts.
The gate’s defenders carried heavy pikes, and were formed up in three lines facing the gate, ready to repulse any assault. Should the gate be broken down, any attackers would run into a solid wall of sharpened iron, or at least any attackers coming from the front…
A strident trumpet blast sounded from the tallest tower of the citadel, and Sigmar looked over his shoulder to see its iron portal opening. A glittering host of armoured horsemen wearing the blue cloaks of Jutone Lancers emerged, riding out to assemble beneath a vivid turquoise and green banner depicting a crown and trident.
“Marius,” whispered Sigmar.
Part of him wanted to charge out to face the king who had caused them to shed so much blood, but that part was Sigmar the warrior. To win this battle, he had to be Sigmar the Emperor. Marius wo
Sigmar turned to his warriors and shouted, “For the glory of Ulric! The gate must open!”
He charged towards the gate, Ghal Maraz held over his shoulder. His warriors pounded after him, ferocious war shouts driving them onwards. They were feral hunters, warriors with the taste of blood on their lips and the fires of battle in their veins.
The Jutones cried out in alarm at the sight of them, a thunderous wedge of bloodstained warriors that howled like madmen. They tried to turn and face the threat to their rear, but in the confines of the gateway and with long, cumbersome pikes, such a manouevre was doomed from the outset.
Sigmar smashed his hammer through the spine of a Jutone pikeman, plunging his borrowed sword into the chest of another. The man fell, tearing the sword from Sigmar’s hand. He shifted his grip on his hammer and swung it two-handed, killing again as he plunged deeper and deeper into their ranks. Unberogen warriors cut through the heart of the Jutone defenders, fighting with the strength of Ulric as they sought to emulate their Emperor.
Polearms were cast down and swords unsheathed as the Jutones realised their pikes were useless, and the battle for the gate devolved into a close scrum of stabbing blades and brutal axe blows. Sigmar’s hammer was a blur of dark iron, slashing left and right as he slew the defenders of the gate without mercy. Swords and knives scored his armour, and a stabbing dirk sliced the skin of his arm.
Even with the bloody slaughter of the opening moments of the fight, the Jutones outnumbered the Unberogen three to one, and those numbers were telling. More of Sigmar’s warriors were being cut down, and he knew it was only a matter of time before a lucky blow found a gap in his armour.
A screaming warrior in an orange-dyed tunic stabbed his sword at Sigmar, the blade lancing into his thigh. Sigmar grunted in pain and stepped back as he thundered his fist into the man’s face. He spun away from a thrusting spear and backhanded his hammer into the Jutone warrior’s chest. An axe clanged against his breastplate, and he dropped to one knee as his wounded leg gave out beneath him.
He threw up his hammer to ward off another sword blow, and an iron-shod boot hammered against his helmet. Sigmar rolled and ripped the helm from his head as dizziness swamped him. A pair of Jutone warriors closed on him with their spears aimed at his neck. They stabbed, but before their speartips struck a slashing blur of silver hacked the points from the ends of the polearms. Sigmar looked up to see Wolfgart roaring in anger as his sword swept back and clove through the first Jutone. His reverse stroke all but beheaded the second.
Bestial howls echoed from the gate towers and a host of near-naked warriors with painted and tattooed skin smashed into the Jutones. Wolfgart hooked his arm beneath Sigmar’s shoulder and helped him to his feet. All around him, Thuringians and Cherusens were butchering the Jutones, hacking them to pieces with their swords and axes in a frenzy of bloodletting. King Otwin bashed a man’s brains out on the cobbles, and a naked warrior with hooks embedded in his arms wrestled a Jutone to bloody ribbons.
Within moments, the Jutone defenders were dead, and the berserkers and wildmen roared their triumph in the torch-lit gateway.
Still groggy from the blow to the head, Sigmar said, “What…? How did you get here?”
“You said to put something between Otwin and the Jutones,” said Wolfgart. “I figured this gate would do.”
Sigmar watched as Otwin continued to slam the virtually headless body against the ground, the light of madness in his eyes.
“How?” gasped Sigmar, nauseous from the blow to his head. “The red mist is upon him.”
“I told him you were in danger,” said Wolfgart, showing Sigmar an enormous dent in his breastplate. “Though I had to let him hit me a few times before he knew who I was.”
Sigmar nodded, hearing the shrill blast of a Jutone cavalry horn.
“Get those supports down!” he shouted. “The gate must open or we are lost!”
The Thuringians hurled themselves at the timbers bracing the gate and attacked them with ferocious axe blows. Wood splintered under the assault of blades, and one by one the supports came crashing down.
“Wolfgart,” said Sigmar, “the winch mechanisms! I will get the one on the left, you take the one on the right.”
“It’ll take more than you and I to open this!” cried Wolfgart, but he ran to the winch on the opposite side of the tunnel. Sigmar ran to one of the winches that lifted the gate and shifted the locking bar from the wheel. He dropped Ghal Maraz and began hauling on the spoked wheel, but the gate was designed to be opened by teams of horses yoked to the mechanism.
“It won’t move!” shouted Wolfgart from across the gateway.
“Otwin!” shouted Sigmar. “Gather your warriors and help us!”
The Berserker King looked up from his slaughter and bellowed in answer. Two score men ran to help Sigmar and Wolfgart, bending their backs to haul on the chains and winch. Sigmar’s muscles burned with exertion, and he felt the sinews straining as he fought to push the mechanism.
A thin line of daylight appeared as the gate lifted a hand’s span, and the Thuringian count bellowed at his warriors to push harder. Not to be outdone, the Cherusens chewed more of their wildroots and dug deep into their madness for strength. The line of daylight grew larger, and as the gate began to move upwards, Unberogen, Taleuten and Endal warriors crawled under and wedged iron bars beneath it. More warriors ran in to help with the winch mechanism, and Sigmar released his hold to allow stronger warriors than him to push.
He swept up Ghal Maraz as a squadron of black-armoured horsemen rode under the gate. Count Aldred and Laredus rode at their head, and the captain of the Raven Helms raised his lance in respect when he saw Sigmar. Two score Taleuten Red Scythes and a half-century of White Wolves were mixed with the Endal horsemen, and Sigmar saw Redwane carrying his crimson banner like a lance.
With the gates raised enough to allow cavalry within, the locking bars were dropped, and warriors streamed through the open gate. More horsemen rode with them, and Sigmar ran to a riderless gelding with bloodstains coating its flanks. He gripped the saddle horn and vaulted into the empty saddle. He looped the reins loosely around his wrist, and the horse reared, its front hooves pawing the air.
“Warriors of the empire!” he shouted. “This is our moment! This is where we make our land whole. We will defeat our enemies and make them our brothers. Now ride with me!”
Sigmar thundered from the gatehouse at the head of a hundred and fifty horsemen, black-armoured Raven Helms, wild and bearded White Wolves, shaven-headed Taleutens, and Unberogen bowmen. They formed a wedge like a wide-bladed Asoborn spear aimed towards the heart of the Jutone defenders. Warriors on foot followed them in their hundreds, and the misery of two long years of siege was forgotten as they charged into the city of their enemies.
Trumpeting war horns sounded from the walls, and roars of triumph erupted from the attacking warriors as they saw their Emperor ride out with his banner unfurled like a slick of blood on the air. A Jutone flagpole was hacked down from the gatehouse towers, and Sigmar’s army surged towards the opened gate.
From the back of his horse, Sigmar saw the Jutone lancers fighting at the breach in the city walls, riding down any warrior who survived the hails of arrows from the citadel’s towers. A warrior in golden armour with a silver helm led the Jutone cavalry, riding beneath Marius’ banner. Though he could not see the warrior’s face, Sigmar instantly recognised the man’s majestic bearing.
With the Jutone king beyond his fastness, Sigmar angled his horse towards the lancers, knowing that he could end the battle in one fell swoop. A rising series of notes from a Jutone clarion sounded a warning note, and the blue-cloaked lancers expertly wheeled their horses.
Sigmar expected the lancers to ride for the citadel, but he was surprised and not a little impressed that they turned to face him instead. The lancers formed up in a wedge with the golden warrior at their point, and galloped across the killing ground behind the walls towards them. S
Sigmar leaned forwards in his saddle, pressing his heels back hard against the stirrups. He held Ghal Maraz high for all to see and let loose a fearsome war cry. Less than a hundred yards separated the two wedges of horsemen, and Sigmar felt the familiar exultation at riding into battle on the back of a charging steed. The sensation of speed and power was like a wild elixir, and he laughed as he gripped the reins tightly. Truly, the cavalrymen were the kings of the battlefield!
He steered his horse with his thighs, aiming his charge straight towards Marius. The Jutone king unsheathed a curved blade that shimmered with a blue green light. The noise was incredible, the rumbling thunder of so many horses like being in the midst of a storm.
The cavalry met in a deafening clash of iron, bellowing warriors and screaming horses.
Men were punched from their saddles as lances spitted them and splintered under their weight. Swords swung, axes chopped, and the two groups of horsemen were soon tangled together in a heaving mass of struggling warriors. The Jutone Lancers carved a bloody path into Sigmar’s warriors, but they did not escape unscathed. The Raven Helms and White Wolves gave as good as they got, unhorsing scores of enemy warriors with their dark lances and heavy cavalry hammers. The Red Scythes lived up to their name, reaping a fearsome tally with their broad-bladed swords.
Sigmar swung Ghal Maraz at Marius, but the Jutone king swayed aside and slashed his sword at Sigmar’s back as he passed. The blade clanged from Sigmar’s armour, the dwarf-scribed runes flaring as they repelled the enchantments bound within Marius’ sword.
Sigmar heeled his horse, the hooves throwing up sparks from the cobbles as it skidded to a halt. Beside him, Redwane slammed his hammer into a lancer’s chest, toppling him from the saddle with his ribs shattered. Laredus threw aside his splintered lance and drew his black-bladed sword. Count Aldred circled his kicking horse, Ulfshard rising and falling in ghostly arcs of blue light.