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“Roderick! What do you think you are doing?” Edouart demanded. “Get out of there at once, the dead should not be disturbed so.”
“I know this pattern,” Roderick insisted, gesturing to the wound. The body had once been a man, and he tore his tunic down from the collar, exposing more of the gash. The scar curved towards the clavicle, intersecting with another wound to form a cross over the chest. Another horizontal scar split the ‘X’ down its center, and another cut bridged the gap on the lower ends of the first two, forming a distinct symbol that stretched from neck to belly. With the blood crying out of the cuts, the symbol was hard to discern at a glance, but now that Roderick had pointed it out, they all saw these weren’t simple wounds.
“Is that… what language is that?” Edouart asked, an expression of both awe and surprise on his face. “I don’t recognise it.”
“I do,” Roderick replied. “I’ve found our mysterious attackers, Edouart.”
“This man? But he looks the part of one of the town watch. What is that thing on his chest?”
“A brand, probably self-induced. Some of the others will likely have the same carvings hidden beneath their gear. We should have taken a closer look at the dead, but that matters little now.”
“I do not understand. Why would someone mutilated themselves so? Who’s brand is it?”
The look Roderick gave him was long and cold. “Chaos.”
He threw himself out of the cultist’s shallow grave, wiping the blood and dirt on his armoured legs. “Burn the dead,” he ordered. “And alert every man you can find, if there are Chaos warriors about, an attack is almost a certainty.”
“Burn? Roderick are you-”
“Just do as I say, Edouart. I’ve fought cultists before. It is not always certain, but occasionally their thralls have a habit of not staying dead. Light a pyre, treat them as you would a vampire. They are no longer your countrymen.”
Edouart looked like he wanted to argue, but in the end he listened, turning to his knights and relaying his orders. As Roderick turned away he called out. “And where are you going?”
“To alert Von Kessel, this place is less safe to camp than we realised. Saddle your horses, we must leave this place at once.”
Roderick took off into a run, dodging past confused Imperials and Brettonians alike, his sabatons kicking up puffs of dust. The moon was high in the sky, and most of the camp had already turned in for the night. He hoped this wasn’t’ so for the Captain, every wasted second was a moment they could not afford to lose.
The fort of Cassel opened its gate for him, but the guards had not seen Von Kessel when questioned. Roderick hurried up to the defences, knowing he would be up in the commander’s quarters.
He was almost across the inner courtyard when he heard the calls for alarm. Distantly he could hear a shout, and beyond it, the thunder of pounding hooves. He changed course, making for one of the flight of stairs that lead up to the battlements, the wooden scaffold creaking beneath him. Some of the guards were starting to become alert, peering out over the wall in the direction the sounds were coming from, north.
There was maybe a hundred meters of open clearing between Cassel’s outer wall and the tree line marking the woods, and a paved path cut it cleanly down the middle, the road trailing off into the wilds at a slight left tilt.
As Roderick peered over the palisades, he saw a figure emerge from the dark. The watchman beside him raised his handgun, but Roderick pushed the barrel down, urging him to wait. As the figure hurried into the aura of light emitting from Cassel, his clothes recognised him as one of the sailors. He was shouting something, waving his arms in alar, but his words were difficult to make out. This must be one of the forward scouts, but his horse was nowhere to be seen.
The watchman beside him cursed when the running man suddenly fell to the ground, skidding along the stone path. An arrow had sprouted from his back. There were lights moving beyond the tree line now, too bright and red to be fireflies, blinking in and out as they passed between the trees, drawing closer.
More of the watch were starting to emerge, taking positions along the wall, rifles at the ready. Roderick paced up and down the gun line, positioning them so they had an even cover over the north. These raiders looked near fifty or sixty strong judging by the torches, and they could easily flank to the sides, but he had not time to worry about that yet. “Wait for them to draw closer,” he reminded them. “Fire only when I give the order.”
The first of the attackers were starting to break cover, moving into the open with torches raised between every fourth or fifth man. Roderick vaguely wondered why they’d bring light to break their concealment, but his attention was quickly drawn to the figure approaching the hardest and quickest. He was saddled on a jet black horse, trotting straight up the center, the outline of a bow in his hand, which was clad in a giant gauntlet.
As he entered the light of Cassel, Roderick got a better look at him, and knew that this was no man. His armour was blood red, layered across a monstrously bulky body, giving even Morgoroth a run for his money. The layers of plate were trimmed with gold or yellow paint, it was hard to tell in the dim light, and he could see black belts covering the waist and pauldrons, connected to a furry cape that hung from the rider’s back. His most prominent feature was his helmet, which transitioned from a visor up to two branching horns that tapered back in on themselves, joined by a red skull jammed between them. Above said skull, the steel transferred into a likeness of the symbol Roderick had seen on the chest of the corpse.
The rider flipped up his visor, but his exposed face was hidden beneath shadow, and Roderick thought that was perhaps for the best. “I would have thought we took all the skulls of the fools who held that fort,” the rider shouted. “Come for another round, have you?”
“Order your men to halt!” Roderick called back. “You take another step and we’ll gun you down where you stand, fiend.”
“And who are you, to give Khorne’s Chosen orders so?” The rider’s giant helm seemed to split the air as he turned his head. “Do you have the command here?”
“I do,” Roderick lied. “And I have seven hundred swords ready to fight whoever would stand in our way.”
The thing in red armour glanced around the walls at the camp beyond. “Seven hundred I doubt. Four or five, by my count. Is your Lady so eager away to throw the lives of her men away in the hopes of protecting this patch of dirt?”
“Is the blood god so eager to cast away yours? We outnumber you ten to one. You would do well to leave us be, or by Sigmar, this dirt patch will be your grave.”
The rider tilted his head in surprise. “I’ve not known a Brettonian to name the dead God. Unless…”
The red knight had stopped close to where the scout had fallen, and he dropped from his saddle, giving the body a kick to flip it over. A dry, disturbing chuckle crept out from behind his twisted helmet.
“Ah, so you are Imperial pups. You must be lost, pup, this is not your precious Empire’s lands, this is Khorne’s territory. Do not worry, I’ll be sure to send your broken body to the gates of Altdorf, courtesy of Bael Bloodskull.”
”And I’ll be sure to send Khorne that helmet on a spike. Fire!”
Roderick raised an arm, and the gun line opened up in a volley of spark and thunder. The red knight, Bael, lurched as several consecutive shots found their mark, flashing off his bulky armour with loud pining noises. He turned away, slamming his faceplate back down, the armour on his back thick enough that the bullet’s did not penetrate.
Echoing the shots was the rise of a war cry, Bael’s forces taking off in a sprint, the few who were mounted running forward of the main body. Bale was quickly consumed within the mass, and even though his bright armour picked him out, he became a harder target for follow up shots.
The main host of Bale’s host came in the form of men more familiar., wearing spiked metal armour, coloured in shades of red and black. The towering marauders were larger than the average human, transformed by the evil energies of the warp. and they wielded battleaxes and wooden shields, some sporting a few bows. They were charging fearlessly towards the walls, and even though they were tall, they couldn’t hope to scale the fort without ladder or rope.
Part of the charge stopped while the majority pressed on, slinging bows and spears from shoulders. Roderick watched as the handgunner beside him was brought down by a hurtling javelin, spearing him in his center mass. Roderick ducked as an arrow arced his way, peeking between the triangular teeth of the palisade as he took cover. Those to his left and right did the same, biting and tearing off their paper charges as they reloaded their guns. The storm of arrows caught a few more of the Imperials in the chest and shoulders, dozens of thwacks ringing out as arrow shafts imbedded in the walls before them.
The men were reloaded, and a second volley swiftly followed the first, Roderick nudging he closes men and raising his voice. “The horses! Kill the horses!” The Chaos riders were numbered in the single digits, and they seemed to be calling the orders, waving banners as they directed several smaller groups of the raiders. He watched as one of the gunners cored a clean headshot on one, the rider’s horned helmet torn off at the neck, the horse carrying the limp body off into the river to the east.
Beneath the furious volley’s, a few of the enemy reached the palisades, and they took their axes in overhead swings, splintering the wood with vicious strikes. Several more made it through, intent on taking down the defences through sheer force, a common tactic employed by Chaos’ foot soldiers.
Roderick aimed over the lip of the palisade, firing off a second shot into the top of the head of a marauder, turning his head to paste. The gunners did the same, leaning and firing directly down onto the attackers, those who sprinted through the opening joining a grisly pile of bodies gently growing against the wall.
Roderick reloaded one of his pistols, his heart pounding as he watched the marauders below hammer the palisade. The wood was flimsy against battleaxes, and one of the stakes collapsed in half after a burly raider chopped it with a horizontal slash. They would be vicious in close quarters, but the gunners had the height and the range to employ the powder, and Roderick directed their fire so the weakest parts of the wall stayed clear.
The number of marauders thinned out with every timed volley, and those who had not survived the sprint over the open had turned away. He could hear a few of the sailors raise their voices in victory, but this did not seem to be a retreat to Roderick. Bael had seemed so confident, and it wasn’t like Chaos to give up easily. He watched as the fleeing raiders started to turn about, diverting to the flanks of the main charge, as though intending to circle the fort. Despite the slaughter, the men on the wall were vastly outnumbered, with the majority of the Imperials and Brettonians still stationed out in the camp.