2k words. Currently travelling round so I'm updating where I can. I wasn't happy with the ending of the last update, so consider the below the start of the next chapter.
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Chapter 7
The thumps of a dozen hooves surrounded Roderick as the cavalry descended the slope, kicking his horse’s flanks to pull it into a light gallop. The colourful wilds of Brettonia stretched on to the east and west, but before them the breadth of the woods opened into a clearing, where a winding river split if right down its middle from right to left.
They had seen the smoke half a day’s travel ago, but the scouts had reported it the night prior, and Von Kessel and Edouart’s leadership had called a meeting. A handful of buildings clung to the middle of the length of water, and Edouart’s face had grown fierce.
“Cassel,” he growled. “But that is impossible. The fort is not a day’s ride south of Couronne. Watchmen from the city would have halted any raiders.”
“There is that Brettonian vigilance I’ve heard wonders about,” Von Kessel scoffed. “Perhaps you should have hired more Orges and Orcs to keep your borders clean.”
“Considering the cesspit that is the Empire, you can hardly criticise, Imperial.”
“Let us focus on the matter at hand,” Roderick had interjected. He had found himself playing more the part of mediator these days. Sure, Brettonia and the Empire were allies, but if one took away all the treaties and politics, the difference between their faiths in Sigmar and the Lady meant there was an underlying friction to every conversation.
After an initial debate, it was agreed they would send a party to scout out Cassel. Edouart seemed especially eager to join the efforts personally, and he and his horse were both clad in shiny armour for the ride. Von Kessel had appointed Roderick to go with him, along with three other sailors who were decent in the saddle. With Edouart’s men they numbered nine, and by morning they had ridden out towards the towers of smoke.
Their camp had been set up beyond the hill, a stretch of white and blue tents clustered along the slops that marked the fore of the Grey Mountains. Roderick glanced back at them over his shoulder, watching the grey terrain transform to white peaks as they reached the sky, knowing that beyond the range lay green and gold pastures that outlay the beginning of the Empire.
As they drew closer to the fort, there was movement on the right. Charging down the slope came four riders, their figures bulky and powerful. Between their legs were not horses but boars, the tusks that jutted from their snouts near as big as his calf.
Roderick supressed a bristle as the trio of greenskin riders pulled up alongside their procession, each sporting furs overlaying tough, leather garbs, with horned caps perched over their relatively small craniums. One of the riders twisted in their saddle to meet his gaze, and it lifted a green arm to wave.
“Didn’t think you’d be takin’ all the fun without us, did ya?” Mazkha called.
Neither the warboss or any of the orcs had been part of the meeting discussing Cassel, but whether that was because they weren’t invited or just didn’t bother to attend he could not say.
Mazkha was bearing a pair of spears that formed a cross over her back, and a oversized quiver full of javelins, each one as tall as Roderick at the shoulder. They jostled as she pulled up alongside, Roderick frowning down at her snivelling mount.
“I’m not sure their will be much fun to be had,” Roderick replied. “Whoever burned this place may be long gone.”
“But not far,” Mazkha added. “That smoke’s not a week old yet. The torchbearers could not be far.”
“You can tell that just from the smoke? How?”
“When you’ve been on as many pillages as I have, you start to know the signs.”
“Being a raider’s nothing to be proud of,” Rdoerick scoffed, giving her a sideways glance. “Fighting your enemy is one thing, but targeting the smallfolk is quite another.”
“Who said anythin’ about targeting? Imperials, Brettonians, orcs, dwarves, elves, there ain’t nobodies lands I wouldn’t burn if it meant fuelling the Warrrgh. I pillage everyone equally. Ain’t that the definition of fair?”
Roderick rode along without answer, the Brettonians on his left, the greenskins on their beastly mounts the right. They were of equal speed to the horses, and soon the procession had ridden up to the edge of Cassel. The world visibly greyed upon approach, the smoke hanging thick above collapsed thatch rooves, the field it was built upon resting in the shadow of the Grey Mountains. The river hugged the little town’s southern flank, perhaps eight meters across with a bottom to murky to see, but a stone bridge made the crossing a simple matter.
The bridge rumbled with tens of hooves clocking loudly against its back, the group rearing their mounts as they arrived on the other side. Dirt paths wended from the bridge around the bodies of brick and clay buildings, and just as he’d seen from a distance, those that had not been burned down were in terrible disrepair, as though the attacks had taken a cannon shot to each abode. Roderick could recognise the tavern, roughly in the center of the village, its upper floor burned to ashes. Several smaller buildings lined the branching roads, households without rooves or walls or nothing at all.
There were signs. Bodies in the street were melting to bone, crows pecking away what they could reach beneath the tattered clothing. There were carcasses of horse, arrow shafts in the hundreds needling out of the ground. There had been carnage, but from a battle, but from a struggle one-sided.
“Search for survivors!” Edouart called out, unsaddling from his horse and sending a flock of nearby scavengers flying. “By the Lady, whoever did this will pay…”
Roderick dismounted along with the others, checking his pistol holsters were loose enough to draw should the need arise. The scent of decay hung thick, and he saw Edouart gag as he moved towards the inn, his knights kneeling by the bodies he passed. Roderick had no such complications, it was a smell he was all too familiar with.
Mazkha leapt from her warg with enough weight it translated from the mud to his chest, grunting to the other orcs in a language he didn’t understand. They turned away to start their own search, but the she-orc didn’t join them, instead inviting herself into Roderick’s company.
Just next to the river was a collapsed barn with an adjacent coop, the perimeter fence the only thing left intact. Even the cattle had been butchered, clouds of flies buzzing over the carcasses.
“I’ve seen towns and villages caught in war before, but few compare to this,” Roderick said. All was quiet except for the calls of a few scavengers, and he felt compelled to fill it.
“Yeah, these place looks like it was tag-teamed by a gang of K’daai,” Mazkha mused, putting her hand on her monstrous hips.
“Is this the work of orcs, Mazkha?”
“There ain’t been no other Warrgh’s in these parts excepting our own,” she replied, hunkering down by the body of a man wearing leathers and a cap. He must have been a guard in life. “Unless they’ve moved in from the North, but I doubt it.”
“What makes you so sure?” he asked.
She plucked something from the guard’s body. He thought she might be looting him, but then she presented what she’d found. The shaft of the arrow was charcoal black, the fletching pulled from some sort of crow to match the colour.
“These ain’t no orcish arrows,” she muttered, tossing it to him. He turned it over in his glove, hoping to find some marking or detail, but it was just an arrow, about the same size as a human or elf would find comfortable notched in a bow.
They picked through the town ruins, finding more militia and farmers, but none among the living. His search brought them up to the fortress that presumably the two got its namesake from, the dirt transitioning to wood as they came upon the gate. The drawing mechanism had been lowered, and the way into the yard was unblocked except for a carriage that had been rolled in front of the gate on the inner side.
“Who leaves the door wide open?” Mazkha asked aloud, a little tall to enter the gate without ducking a little. Roderick eyed the murder holes on either side of them, more arrows sticking out from the planks. “Don’t see any damage to the chains,” she added, nodding towards the giant links that railed up into gaps in the ceiling, presumably leading to the control winch.
“Perhaps they were caught completely unawares,” Roderick suggested.
“Yet they managed to barricade this up,” she pointed out, gesturing at the cart. Yet more arrows bristled from its surface where archers had peppered the defenders, and there were rocks in place against the wheels to limit any movement. There was a little room to either side where one could squeeze through if they tried, and the furrows in the dirt suggested someone had crawled under.
“Help me with this,” Roderick said, grabbing hold of the cart. His two sailors accompanying him moved into place, and together they gave it a push. The wheels slid into the ground a little, but there was a fallen guard laying against its other side, and his corpse got in the way and wouldn’t budge.
They tried to push from the other end, but Mazkha clicked her tongue like a disapproving mother, getting their attention. “Let me get this one, little guys,” she chimed, Roderick backing out of the way. She prepared one meaty bicep, and shoved her shoulder into the cart, hitting it like an anchor slamming to the ocean floor. Her next attempt she had a little run up, and the blow sent the corpse sliding out of the way. The third try nearly lifted the cart from the ground, and Mazkha helped it on its way by pushing it from the exposed underbelly, tipping it onto its flank.
It drew a deep groove in the earth as she pushed it in and away, turning to dust her hands off and grin toothily down at the humans. “Problem solved,” she chimed.
The courtyard was in as much state as the rest of the town, but the concentration of bodies was far worse, despite the ring of palisades walling everything off. There had been a brutal close-quarters skirmish, the yard maybe twenty meters across and twice as far, its oval shape occupied by two structures. One was a small stable with an overhanging roof and adjoining barn, the other was the fort itself. Made from stone bricks, it was the sturdiest building in Cassel, made from a two-storey, blocky building and a tall watchtower with a cone-shaped top, windows running down its spine. Apart from a few lingering arrows, both were undamaged.
They searched through the dead, but once more, none had been left alive, and whoever the attackers had been, they either recovered their dead or did not sustain any casualties during the raid, for there was no evidence of who the attackers were.
“We should search inside, might find something,” Mazkha suggested. “And by we, I mean you guys. Human dwellings are hell on my back.”
The door to the fort was busted down, Roderick walking over the frame and inside. The stench of death left a sting in Roderick’s nose, dried blood splattered along the walls and floor.
The butchery led him up towards the offices on the upper floor, and the quarters that must have belonged to the commander of the fort. The door was barricaded by shelves and furniture, but something akin to a battering ram had broken through, and it seemed this had been the place of their last stand. Roderick checked the room over for any evidence of what had occurred. The guards had wounds indicative of swords and axe slashes biting through their leathers and mail, each man sporting a patch marking the Brettonian coat of arms on his wargear.
“Find anything?” Mazkha asked, when he returned to the lobby, the air outside somewhat cleaner than in.
“Signs of battle, same as out here. I did find some undelivered reports from the former commander, but the latest was near a week back,” Roderick said. “Whatever happened here, nobodies’ left.“
“You would think they would hold out here behind the walls,” Mazkha said with a gesture. “All the fortifications are intact. I checked the gate, the lever works fine. Seems to me they were just let right in.”
“Perhaps they scaled the walls with ladder and rope,” Roderick suggested. “Though we saw no sign of siege equipment, did we? I wonder…”
“Well, whoever they were, here’s hoping they come back. Could ask em’ for tips on how to leave without a trace.”
“I can’t tell if you’re joking or not,” Roderick grumbled. “Let’s go find Edouart, maybe he found something we didn’t.”