‘Not elves,’ Vollen said, and Johann jumped in his saddle at the word. ‘The Scythians, the horse warriors of old. The Gospodars – and therefore the Kislevites – trace their ancestry back to them. They ruled here once, before Sainted Sigmar came. These lands were theirs. They built the towns whose ruins are said to haunt the Steppes. They raised the kurgans.’

  ‘The kurgans?’ Truchs said with alarm.

  ‘That’s a kurgan,’ Vollen said mildly, pointing to the distant mound.

  ‘Where? Where, damn it?’ Truchs turned his horse in an agitated circle.

  ‘Be still!’ Gerlach snapped. ‘Karl’s playing with you. Using his damned education again, eh, Karl?’

  The clarion sat back against his saddle rest and shrugged.

  Even the most poorly schooled son of the Empire knew the word kurgan. It was the name of the bogeyman, the term for the dark tribes who lurked in the north under the Shadow. Kurgans were the very monsters they had come there to fight.

  ‘A kurgan,’ said Vollen, ‘is a man-made hill, a burial mound from the early times. The vile tribes of the North are known by the term. Presumably…’ he smiled, ‘presumably because they want to hide the bones of all of us in the south under similar hills.’

  Truchs touched the iron of his sword-hilt to ward against evil charms, and spat again. There was too much loose talk and bad luck in the air for his liking.

  They rode north-west at a hard lick, Friedel just in the lead now. The cold wind was fierce in their faces and made them breathless.

  As they got nearer to the mound – and realised just how huge it truly was – Johann Friedel pulled up sharply and called out a warning.

  There were riders on the track ahead of them. A dozen horsemen emerged from the long grasses, silent and slow. Their horses were small, rangy mares, brown and bay, little more than ponies, with full, heavy tails and shaggy manes. The men were swaddled in cloaks, furs and blankets. Barbarian riders, there could be no doubt.

  Gerlach slowed to a trot and moved to the fore. The shabby riders halted their horses and watched them approach, unmoving. Gerlach Heileman suddenly felt vital and proud of his gleaming armour and his sleek charger with its braided mane and docked, bound-up tail.

  He stood in the stirrups again as Saksen pulled slow, glancing back past his shoulders at his outriders.

  ‘What do we do? What do we do?’ gabbled Johann.

  ‘Hail them, vexillary,’ advised Vollen.

  ‘Hail them? Look at them, Karl! They’re Northers! Raiders! Why should I hail them?’ Gerlach unclasped the pistol holsters on his saddle-bow, and quickly cocked the firelocks of the ready-primed pieces. Then he drew his cavalry sword. It was a basket-hilted weapon with a straight, double-edged blade a span long. It had two deep fuller grooves down the length of the blade, and its tip was pointed like a spear. It was made for thrusting, as outlined by regulations.

  ‘No,’ said Vollen quickly, in disbelief. ‘Oh no… vexillary…’

  ‘Rise in the saddle to address!’ Gerlach called out. Truchs and Friedel fell into step with him, and walked their horses forward, their sword blades resting upright against their right arms. Ahead of them, the riders remained motionless.

  Vollen lagged behind, his sword still in its scabbard. Gerlach, Truchs and Friedel increased their pace to a brisk trot, their sword-hands now steadied on their right thighs with the sword points inclined slightly forward.

  ‘Gerlach!’ Vollen shouted.

  ‘Get into line, clarion!’ Heileman yelled back. ‘Damn you! Get into formation or the captain will hear about this!’

  The brisk trot was turning into a gallop. They were less than eighty lengths from the stationary horsemen.

  ‘Present and charge!’ Heileman howled. Three sword arms lifted, the swords pointed towards the enemy and carried crosswise to each ­rider’s head.

  The shabby horsemen stirred. Their horses wheeled around and there was a dull flash in the flat light as sabres were uncased and flourished.

  Vollen tore his bugle out of its case and blew hard. A quadrille. Short-long-long-short. He did it again.

  The three demilancers broke their gallop, swords waving, confused. The enemy horsemen spread wide, to either side of Gerlach’s abortive charge. One of them raised a bone horn and returned Vollen’s hoot.

  Vollen spurred Gan forward and rode up to position himself face to face with the heathen men. Gerlach, Friedel and Truchs were riding out in a wide turn to come around.

  The warriors were caked in mud and dirt, and Vollen could smell the sweat and soil of both horses and riders without trying. They sheathed their thin, curved blades and closed around him, curious. Raw, mustachioed faces glared at him from the folds of furs and grease-heavy cloaks.

  ‘Imperial?’ asked one. He was a big man whose bulk seemed to be crushing his ragged pony. His front teeth were missing.

  ‘Yes,’ nodded Vollen. ‘The Second Company Hipparchia Demilance, ridden out of Talabheim. Hail and met.’

  ‘You? You is leader of men?’ pressed the toothless giant.

  ‘No,’ said Vollen. ‘I’m clarion.’

  ‘Klaaryen?’

  Vollen gestured with his bugle.

  Gerlach and the other demilancers galloped up and reined hard to stop. The cluster of filthy steppe riders broke to let them through.

  ‘What the devil are you doing, Vollen?’ Gerlach roared.

  ‘Vexillary Heileman, may I present…’ Vollen looked expectantly at the gap-toothed brute on the shaggy pony.

  The big Kislevite pursed his lips and then said, ‘Beledni, rotamaster, of rota of Yetchitch krug, of Blindt voisko, of Sanyza pulk, of Gospodarinyi, syet Kislevi.’

  ‘They’re on our side,’ Vollen said to the vexillary, as if it wasn’t clear enough. ‘They’re Kislevite lancers. Allies.’

  ‘El-ays, yha!’ the Kislevite leader of horse cried, and bowed low in his worn saddle to Gerlach, doffing his fur hat. His head was entirely shaved except for a long, braided top-knot and his drooping moustache. His men called out, and rattled the staves of their lances together. Each one had three spears slung in long canvas boots against the fore of their saddles: two short, slim javelins with long, sharp tips and one long pole, thicker and tipped with a narrow blade and a crossbar.

  ‘These heathens?’ asked Gerlach, incredulously.

  ‘Heeth-eyns?’ Beledni echoed, looking at Vollen for clarification.

  ‘We show only respect,’ said Vollen, slowly and carefully. Beledni thought about this and then nodded heavily.

  Gerlach spat contemptuously. ‘They don’t even talk our tongue,’ he said.

  ‘Yurr tung?’ said Beledni.

  ‘They speak our tongue better than you speak theirs,’ Vollen ventured.

  Gerlach glared at him. ‘Apologise,’ he said.

  ‘Apologise?’ Vollen repeated.

  ‘Yes, dammit! For our mistaken attack.’

  Vollen paused. Unblinking, he returned Gerlach’s gaze for a moment. ‘You ask a lot of me, sometimes.’

  ‘Are you refusing?’ the vexillary asked. His face was flushed.

  ‘Of course not,’ Vollen replied. He took a breath and looked across at Beledni. The big man and his riders had been trying to follow the exchange between Vollen and Gerlach.

  ‘Rotamaster, we are most sorry for our mistaken challenge, and uh…’

  Beledni used the tassels of his riding crop to chase away a marsh fly that was buzzing around his face and made an odd little gesture with his other hand. It was a dismissive slight turn of the wrist as if he was spilling out a handful of corn. ‘Is of no matter,’ he added with a careless, almost theatrical frown.

  ‘We meant no disrespect, sir…’

  The gesture again, the down-turned corners of the mouth. ‘Is of no matter,’ Beledni said once more, and walked his shabby little horse ahead a few steps so that he drew level with Vollen. Beledni patted him on the arm, an informal, avuncular action. ‘We will all live,’ he said sagely. Then he leaned forward, his lips to Vollen’s ear, so close Vollen was assailed by the smell of body sweat and rank breath. ‘Vebla?’ he said, and indicated Gerlach with his crop.

  ‘Vebla, yha?’

  Some of the Kislevite riders heard this, and snorted out chuckles.

  ‘What did he say?’ asked Gerlach sharply.

  ‘I don’t know, vexillary. I don’t know the word.’

  Heileman sat back against his saddle rest. He was annoyed. They were laughing at him, these heathens. Making him the butt of some crude joke.

  He’d heard many stories of Kislev lancers, stories that described them as triumphant, spectacular, armoured in finery and feathers, masters of horse, as magnificent as Imperial knights. Someone had once told him that the lancers often scared their enemies from the field by the sheer splendour of their wargear, which attested to their prowess by all the riches they had won.

  Not these dogs. It seemed that every story about the North was a lie. There was no magnificence in its landscape or its people, and their famous lancers were positively squalid.

  ‘Zhedevka,’ he said to Vollen. ‘Just ask him where Zhedevka is.’

  VII

  Without comment or ceremony, Beledni’s little troop of lancers led them another league north until the great kurgan was behind them. Zhedevka lay on the plains behind it, looking out across undulating grasslands and the distant shadow of a forest. Small patches of woodland dotted the landscape around the town.

  It had ceased to be much of a town at all, now the Imperial army had arrived. Acres of tents and pot fires, great assemblies of pikes and halberds, musters of horse. In the fields north of the town, cannons had been drawn up behind sod-built palisades and wicker gabions, and stakes had been driven into the earth, facing the forest.

  A fine drizzle came down from the east, pattering against their armour. The Kislevites drew their matted furs tighter. They rode into the town.

  Gerlach tried to estimate the numbers there. He counted at least fifteen standards, all Imperial, as well as artillery banneroles, and colours flown by two sections of Tilean foot. That meant, even at a conservative estimate, six thousand men-at-arms.

  This was what an army should look like, Gerlach thought. This was Imperial might. Combined with other forces that were now assembling along the Lynsk, they would scour the North and turn the rising darkness back.

  As they rode down the muddy, tracked-up thoroughfare, he felt unashamedly proud. Here were marching halberdiers in clean, brightly coloured tunics: blue, red, gold and white. There, pikemen with spotless surcoats and glittering steel sallets. A cantering file of demilancers from another unit, cockades and banners rippling as they came past. Fork-bearded men in gaudy velvet puff-breeches and polished hauberks, sweeping whetstones along the white-steel blades of great swords. Pipers, fifers, drummers and horn blowers, the daylight gleaming off kettledrums and the long trumpets of field clarions. Archers in leather caps and long shirts, drilling with yew longbows against straw targets.

  At a crossroads, they reined up as six Knights Panther rode by, followed by their squires and lance carriers. Huge destrier chargers, with shaggy feathering on their mighty hooves, were dressed in embroidered caparisons of purple, lilac and gold, their riders giants in full plate, leopard skins draped over their shoulders. Now that was glory and splendour.

  Gerlach was annoyed to see Beledni and his men didn’t seem at all impressed. Some of them even sneered at the gigantic knights. The only thing that seemed to take their interest was a crude wooden standard, a shield on the top of a ragged pole, hung with a red and white snake of banner cloth. The severed wing of an eagle was nailed, spread out on the shield front. This standard marked a field where the levies of the Kislev confederates were camped. More filthy men in furs, their dirty ponies wandering loose between their stretched hide tents. No discipline, no order, no sign of any pride.

  Beledni gave a half-hearted wave, more to Vollen than the other demilancers, and turned his riders away towards the Kislev muster.

  Glad to be rid of them, Gerlach rode on to the town hall, or the zal as it was called. It had a shingled roof shaped like an onion, and was the tallest structure in Zhedevka.

  Marshal Neiber had made his quarters here.

  Gerlach left Friedel and Truchs outside with the horses, and brought Vollen in with him as his escort. Neiber’s trabanten of six swordsmen, two drummers and two fifers sat listlessly in the outer atrium of the zal, passing a bottle between them. They were all richly dressed in extravagant silk pludderhosen, broad hats puffed with heron feathers, doublets artfully slashed to reveal the conspicuous damask linings. None of them gave the two marching demilancers more than a passing look as they went by.

  Neiber, field marshal of the entire host, was a heavy, sagging man with a bulging face that had been scored in early life by a duelling scar. His beard was square-cut and fierce. The field marshal’s well-fed weight seemed to bow him down, and it was helped by the wine he had been drinking. A large fire had been banked up in an open grate, and the demilancers could smell poultry fat and onions.

  Neiber was sipping wine out of a tiny thimble glass that he refilled regularly. The glass was from an expensive gentleman’s travelling case that lay open on a side table, its leather straps draped open to reveal the satin-lined caskets that held the glasses. The case had a drawer for silver cutlery that was engraved with his heraldic crest. It was etched on the glasses too.

  ‘Who the shit are you?’ Neiber asked bluntly as they came up and saluted, their helmets tucked under their left arms.

  ‘Second Company Hipparchia Demilance, ridden out of Talabheim, sir,’ said Gerlach.

  ‘Schott! Schott? Where are you, you noxious little leper?’

  A short, balding man appeared, with an attitude that reminded Vollen of a mule that had been beaten once too often. He was wearing the doublet and surcoat of a staff aide.

  ‘Here I am, my marshal.’

  ‘Where the shit were you hiding?’

  ‘I was supervising your dinner. As instructed.’

  ‘Shut the shit up.’ Neiber sat down on a low-backed chair by the grate and aimed the soles of his feet alternately at the fire. He was wrapped in a fur coat and damp hose clung to his feet and legs. The baton of his rank lay across his lap.

  ‘Are my boots dry?’ he rasped, swigging his drink and holding it out for a refill. Schott hurried to oblige.

  ‘I’m working on that, my marshal,’ the man answered as he poured.

  ‘Second Company Hippos… demilancers… what the shit was it again?’

  ‘Second Company Hipparchia Demilance, sir,’ Gerlach repeated.

  ‘That’s it. Who’s their commander, Schott?’

  Schott crossed over to the mass of log books, patents of muster and orders of battle laid out on a nearby bench.

  ‘Are you the commander?’ Neiber asked, squinting at Gerlach and pointing the baton at him.

  ‘No, sir. I’m vexillary, sir.’

  ‘Well, where the bloody shit is your commander?’

  ‘Stouer, my marshal,’ Schott called out.

  ‘Where’s Stouer? Where the bloody shit is Stouer?’

  ‘With the company, at Choika, sir.’

  Neiber belched and got up. His baton fell on the floor and rolled under his chair. ‘Not here?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘What the hell’s the point of them being at Choika? I mean, what the shitting hell is the point of that? There’s no war down there!’

  ‘We… we were ordered to report here to you by noon tomorrow, sir. The captain sent me ahead to make contact.’

  ‘Did he? Did he indeed? Stupid arse. Refill!’ Neiber waved his glass. Schott was still busy with records and patents.

  ‘Refill! You, boy!’ Neiber looked at Vollen. ‘Get the bloody bottle!’

  Vollen started forward, took the bottle from the side table, and refilled Neiber’s glass.

  Neiber emptied it. ‘And another, while you’re still hanging around like a spent fart.’

  Vollen did as he was told.

  Neiber looked at Gerlach. ‘There’s all kinds of shit in the forest out there, did you know that?’ he remarked suddenly.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘All kinds of shit. I know that from the scouts I sent out.’ Neiber tapped the side of his nose with his finger. It took a moment, as he missed the first time. ‘Not all of them, mind. I sent out fifty and got five back. Five! Shit me out Sigmar, five! The foe is right on us. A day’s ride from here, there’s a horde of the heathen scum mustering in the woodland. And they’ll be coming. Soon, mind you. Coming for us all. Boy!’

  Vollen was already there with the bottle. Neiber drank, licked his lips, and sat down again. He looked tired and his voice dropped. ‘All kinds of shit’s coming. Bigger and harder and wilder than any of the idiots back south realise. They’re meant to be over a fortnight away, but no. Oh no, no, no.’ Neiber snorted hard and spat phlegm into the fire. He glanced at Gerlach. ‘So having your company sat on their arses in Choika is no use to me. This Stouer must be a particularly stupid shit. Get back on your horse and go and tell him I said so. And tell him he better be here by dawn, or I’ll ram a cannon up his arse and light the powder-touch myself.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Where are my boots, Schott?’ Neiber roared.

  ‘Still drying out, my marshal.’

  ‘You useless shit! I ought to have you shot. Hah! Ha ha! Shot! Have Schott shot! Ha ha ha!’

  ‘Your wit is truly formidable, my marshal,’ said Schott.

  ‘Yeah, well shit on you too!’ Neiber spat and threw his glass at the aide.

  ‘You can go now,’ Schott told Gerlach and Vollen, shooing them on out.