Karl jabbed with his sabre, his thrust rebounding off the warrior rings on the man’s left arm. The longsword, a span and a half of razored iron blade three fingers wide, sliced around and Karl ducked. He felt a wrench at the nape of his neck and suddenly the air was full of fluttering feather scraps. The longsword had sliced off his cockade.

  Desperate now, Karl hauled on his reins, wrenching Gan back a pace, and cutting out with his sabre. The horned Norther, howling through his wolf-face visor, deflected the chop with his sword and hacked in, leaving a bruising dent across Karl’s right vambrace. Pain shuddered up his arm and he nearly dropped his sabre.

  Instead, he tucked down and spurred forward, taking another whack across his backplate. The Norther’s blow actually cut through the steel and was only stopped by Karl’s mail undershirt. He felt broken rings of mail slithering down his back into his hose.

  He turned and thrust again. The sharp tip of his sabre sank into the wolf-face’s bare shoulder to the depth of a palm. Blood spurted out with the blade as he pulled it free. The huge Norther cried out and lost control of his massive horse. It galloped away, the wounded rider jerking in the saddle as he tried to cling on.

  Karl tried to straighten up. His back and his right forearm both felt like they were broken.

  Then Gan toppled sideways, hurling him off onto the ground.

  Karl rose. Gan was on his side, his legs kicking wildly. Blood was splashing in every direction. The gash the wolf-face had given his horse was far more serious than Karl had realised.

  There was nothing he could do. Gan kicked and kicked, head back and teeth bared, blood gushing out of him. In less than a minute, Karl’s beloved gelding was dead.

  Aware that tears of rage were streaming down his face, Karl ran over to Friedel and dragged him towards the porch of the zal. Friedel was moaning and sobbing. His bowels had loosened.

  ‘Get out your sword! Your sword!’ Karl shouted.

  ‘I’ve fouled myself! I am so ashamed, Karl! I have fouled myself!’

  ‘Shut up, Johann!’ Karl yelled, trying not to gag on the stink of shit. ‘Get your sword out and up!’

  Anmayer was dead. He lay face down in the mud, his forearms, shoulders and scalp sliced in a dozen places from the relentless sword blows that had killed him as he shielded himself with his arms. Stouer had dismounted, a sabre in one hand and a spent pistol in the other. He was surrounded by enemy warriors, fighting like fury, bleeding from a dozen wounds. His left pauldron was hanging off by its straps.

  The last time Karl had stood on that porch, just a day earlier – though it seemed like months before – he had been with Gerlach and they had been called back by the field marshal’s aide Schott.

  Schott, by some eerie coincidence, was there again, in precisely the same place. But this time he was dead, his body split to the backbone by a blade-blow.

  The gaudy warriors of Neiber’s trabanten were fighting a rearguard around the doorway of the hall. Two of the ten men had already fallen, but the others were battling hard with their swords.

  As befitted a field marshal’s life company, the men of the trabanten were elite fighters. The distinctive blades they were wielding were called katzbalgers: wide, round-tipped short-swords with double-curved quillons. The opulent finery of their clothing reflected their high status. They had slain upwards of a dozen raiders already.

  Karl fell in with them. He’d utterly lost contact with the whining Friedel, though he kept calling out his name. Karl found himself beside one of the trabanten, an older man in rich wargear and multicoloured hose. They chopped at the enemy press. Karl felt his sabre cut through something soft and realised he had just killed another man.

  One of the trabanten squealed as he was dragged under a mass of pushing enemy warriors and run through.

  ‘What’s your name?’ the swordsman next to Karl shouted.

  ‘Karl Reiner Vollen!’

  ‘Get in there, Karl! Get inside! Find the marshal and watch over him!’

  ‘But–’

  ‘For the love of Sigmar, we can’t let him die! I’ve sent a man to draw horses to the western door. Get him there! Get him clear! We’ll hold the door!’

  Karl faltered. The man was covered in blood, and his katzbalger was just a hacking blur.

  ‘Please…’ pleaded the struggling swordsman.

  Karl broke and ran into the zal.

  It was suddenly quiet. The din from outside was just a dull roar. He walked across the outer hall, past a lute that had been shattered when it was dropped. He heard a plink plink plink and saw it was the blood dripping off the fuller of his blade onto the paving.

  He tore off his burgonet and tossed it aside.

  ‘Marshal? Marshal Neiber? Sir?’

  In the main hall, the fire had died back. It was cool and still. Every now and then the beams shook from a crash outside. The gentleman’s travelling case lay open, with two glasses missing now from the satin rests.

  Karl put his sabre down on the table, took out one of the engraved thimble glasses that remained and filled it from an open bottle of musket. He swigged it down and felt better. The beams shook again.

  He set the thimble glass down and retrieved his sabre.

  ‘Marshal Neiber?’

  Karl pushed back a velvet door hanging with his sword tip and looked inside.

  Empty.

  He moved on, using his sword to poke open a scullery door. The kitchen was empty, and smoke floated out from the dying hearth.

  He went forward into the state bedroom, and there was Neiber.

  The field marshal was dead. Naked except for his hose, he lay on his back on the bed. He had been choked with his own field baton. His face was swollen and black.

  Karl walked towards the bed. He laughed out loud at the idiocy of it. The trabanten band was fighting to the last outside to keep this man alive, and here he was, already dead.

  Karl stiffened suddenly. This death wasn’t self inflicted. Neiber had been killed.

  He whipped around, his sabre rising, in time to smash aside the attack of the warrior who was pouncing at him from the shadows. A lithe, naked shape clad in leather swathes, its head covered in a brass bull-mask, with three twisted horns rising asymmetrically from the helm cap.

  Caught across the snout of his helmet, the Norther tumbled away, and then sprang up again, a stabbing knife in each fist. He seemed at once ridiculous and terrifying to Karl. His head was armoured in the horned, brass mask, and he was draped in leather strips, and strings of shell-beads and bone-shards. But his feet, chest, arms and groin were exposed. All the vulnerable parts a man would usually armour with metal and modesty were bared, yet the head was locked in a metal cover. The Norther lunged at Karl, his bare feet padding on the tiles, his beads jingling.

  Karl gripped his sabre and put both shoulders into the cut. His sweeping sabre hit the side of the Norther’s helm and knocked him over into the shadows, the knives clattering out of his hands. A string of shells and bones broke and scattered their little, hard particles across the floor.

  Karl ran. He ran towards the western door. The trabanten swordsman had said that horses would be there.

  Karl wrenched open the door.

  The Norther warrior with the wolf-face helm stood there, framed in firelight, blood running from his shoulder. He had an axe now. He lunged in through the doorway, smashing Karl off his feet and down on to his back. Then he swung the axe straight down to split Karl’s head.

  VII

  The dawn sky was as black as a funeral swathe. Palls of dark smoke swirled out across the oblast, driven sideways like fog banks by the wind. Zhedevka was burning.

  From the eastern fields, Gerlach Heileman could see the bright flames leaping and lashing along wall posts and roof beams. The fire consuming the aspen shingles of the zal’s onion dome was almost blue-white.

  This image of the burning town came and went as the tide of smoke draped itself to and fro across the fields at the whim of the winds. The smoke smelled of timber, rusted iron and spoiled meat. It tasted of salt.

  Gerlach realised it didn’t taste of salt at all. He was tasting his own tears. He had been weeping for some minutes without knowing it.

  Saksen was stamping and shuddering, foaming at the bit. Gerlach pulled the big horse round and cantered through the waves of black smoke. Bodies littered the trampled grass. Men, horses, broken wargear, splintered lances. Horses without mounts fled past like phantoms in the coiling darkness. Gerlach had tried to fight his way back to the standard, but all he had found was Truch’s skewered corpse.

  In the distance, he could hear the sporadic bang of firearms.

  Linser and Demieter suddenly appeared, riding hard. Linser had lost his helmet and Demieter was bloodstained and lolling awkwardly in his saddle. They pulled up when they saw him.

  ‘Vexillary!’ Linser cried.

  ‘Where stands the line?’ Gerlach demanded.

  Linser shrugged his narrow shoulders and wiped a glove across his face. His hand left a smudge of blood where it had touched.

  ‘Line?’ he asked, as if the word was new to him.

  ‘We have to rally the troops and reform–’ Gerlach began.

  ‘There is no troop,’ said Demieter softly. He was clutching his arms to his belly and his face, framed in the steel of his burgonet, was ash-white with pain. ‘Sigmar, you bloody fool! There is no troop! It’s broken!’

  Kaus Demieter was one of the quietest and most respectful men in the demilance company. To hear this new, contemptuous tone in his voice took Gerlach by surprise.

  ‘Kaus, we have to rally. Remember our oath? We–’

  ‘Damn you, Heileman. Gods damn you, you pompous little prig.’

  ‘Kaus–’

  Demieter spat blood and glared at the vexillary. ‘If we’re lucky, really lucky, we might be able to make it back to the crossing. Back to Choika. If we do, we might live until tomorrow. But if we stay here, shitting away our chances because you have some fond notion of the rules of war, we’ll be dead inside an hour.’

  ‘He’s right, Gerlach,’ said Linser. ‘This is bloody madness.’

  Shouts and screams rang from the veils of smoke. They all stiffened as horned riders pelted past, half visible in the grey haze.

  ‘Shit!’ Gerlach said. He looked at the other two.

  ‘Can you get me out of here?’ asked Kaus Demieter. ‘Me and Linser? Can you get us to the crossing? I want to live, Gerlach. I want to see my girl again.’

  Gerlach smacked Saksen’s rump and yanked the reins. ‘Ride with me!’ he cried.

  They rose into a gallop, passing over the jumbled bodies in the grass, veering to avoid loose horses. The wind picked up and the smoke thinned, driven clear for a moment. Gerlach saw a group of Norther horsemen turning on the flame-strewn field, riding down towards them.

  ‘Pick it up!’ he shouted. They had the edge of a lead, over thirty horse lengths. They could outrun the foe. Another demilancer appeared, riding hard on a parallel course to link with them. It was Hermen Volks.

  ‘This way!’ Gerlach hollered.

  South of them, dead ahead, the smoke banks drew back sharply. A line of horsemen sat there, silent and still, blades and axe-hafts resting across their saddle bows. They were clad in black armour, ring-scale, brass, full visored helmets with long horns, all of it caked with pitch.

  The enemy had the field. Now they were scouring it, systematically driving out the survivors to annihilate them. Gerlach had hunted many times in the elector’s parks. He knew how to run the quarry, how to beat it up into the rise, how to block it with outriders, how to corner it for the kill.

  Now he knew what it felt like to be the stag.

  ‘Turn wide!’ he yelled, and the four demilancers switched left, churning across the peaty grasses, kicking up mud and spray. The line of Northers remained still, patiently forming a barrier to their right. When Gerlach looked back, he saw that the rear end of the barrier line was now peeling away, one by one, to join up with the pack of riders at their heels. There were twenty, thirty, more.

  This wasn’t war at all. It had ceased to be any kind of combat Gerlach had been trained to face. It was more like some preposterous, cruel joke. The whimsy of the god Ranald perhaps, who was nothing less than a trickster and delights in the misery of man.

  Captain Stouer had once told Gerlach about a nightmare he kept having. He would come to the field of war, only to find he was alone, in the wrong place. Worse still, he was naked and without his weapons. Then the enemy swooped. Death resulted, of course, the terrifying death of a man alone against overwhelming odds, but it was the ignominy that made the nightmare so awful. The fact that Stouer was as vulnerable as a man could be and couldn’t even fight back. Humiliation was the demilancer’s deepest dread.

  This seemed to Gerlach like just such a dream. It had an unreal quality. To be trapped, outnumbered, on a field of death where the grasses smouldered and burned and to every side lay the torn and brutalised bodies of friends and comrades. And to be quarry of a hunt, stalked down and ridden to the kill by faceless creatures in horned masks.

  The hunting riders forced them north again, into the meadows, away from the escape route they had sought. The four demilancers were riding headlong in a tight group, though Demieter was lagging. Gerlach felt an uncomfortable rhythm tense through Saksen’s stride, as if the gelding was tiring or, worse, had run lame or thrown a shoe.

  There was a stand of trees ahead, overlapping another along the lowest part of the meadow. The trees ran east and thickened until they met the edge of the forest itself.

  Gerlach turned them that way, towards the trees. Behind them, closing fast, warhorns blew and blades beat upon shields.

  Three Northmen on black steeds broke out of the trees and thundered down to cut them off. There was no going wide. Gerlach wrenched out his lance and charged the first of them. There was a dull crump and the Norther he had been going for wailed out and tumbled from his saddle. His foot got hooked in the stirrup and his horse dragged him through the wet meadow weed.

  Volks had found the time to reload his petronel, Sigmar bless him. But now he was fumbling with it as the other two enemy riders cut in across them.

  Gerlach slewed Saksen hard to the right to return the favour and protect Volks. Lance down, and running at full stretch, he caught one of the intercepting riders side on and drove his shaft against the man’s ribs. The speartip missed, but their horses rammed together. The impact smashed the Norther from the saddle and wrenched the lance from Gerlach’s grip. As he came clear, he found he was barely hanging on.

  They reached the stand of trees, crashing through the bare branches and the saplings, showering dew and bark splinters around them. Gerlach saw Volks to his left and Demieter to his right.

  Linser was no longer with them.

  Gerlach looked back. The third rider had cut Linser down, killing his gelding and spilling him onto the ground. A fair number of the hunters had stopped, drawing into a circle around the unhorsed lancer. Gerlach could see Linser on his feet, arms raised, screaming as he dodged and scurried back and forth, trying to escape the tightening thicket of stabbing swords and slashing axes. The Northers were laughing and goading, playing with their prey like huntsmen toying with a wounded boar. Gerlach saw Linser struck with a sword and lose part of his hand. His welling scream rose up like sharp ice into the smoky fog.

  Oh, Sigmar! Oh, Sigmar, spare him!

  ‘Heileman!’

  Gerlach looked round. Volks was calling to him, urging him to spur on into the trees. Demieter was slumped against his horse’s neck now, and Volks had taken Demieter’s reins to trail him.

  ‘Come on, Gerlach! For Sigmar’s sake!’

  The remainder of the chasers – those that hadn’t stopped to torment Linser – had reached the tree stand and were crashing through after them. Gerlach pointed, and Volks followed him left into a maze of leafless ash and dark pine, guiding Demieter behind him.

  There was a thick stench of leaf mulch and wood husk amongst the trees, and the ground was spongy and thick with a raft of rotten leaves. They were forced to ride more slowly now. Gerlach could hear the crack and splash of their pursuers in the woodland clearings behind them.

  Riding slower, he had time to reload his pistols. He drove Saksen with his knees, fiddling with each wheel-lock in turn. Such work was meant to be done at a standstill. With the horse jolting, it was hard to manage. Gerlach lost a lot of powder and three shot-balls as he tried to finish the job. But by the time they had cleared the trees, both his pistols were primed and loaded, their wheels wound tight and their dogs laid down. Volks had accomplished the same feat with his petronel.

  The space beyond the trees was still and grey. The stand had masked the area from the worst of the smoke fuming off the murdered town. Mist foamed the wet grasses and haunted the edge of the forest to their right.

  Volks was steering his tired troop horse that way, tugging Demieter after him. He looked back at the vexillary.

  ‘Gerlach? Come on, man! The woods!’

  Gerlach wasn’t listening. He was looking west, back into the burning, smoke-wrapped field of death beyond the trees. He’d as good as forgotten about the Norther riders smashing through the stand on their tail.

  ‘Gerlach! For pity’s sake!’

  Half a league away west, a mass of enemy riders and foot troops was assembling around their chieftain. Many of them carried severed heads on the ends of their blades, brandishing them to celebrate his victory. Some had captured Imperial field banners and ensigns. Others were stabbing or whipping prisoners forward, ragged, bloodied figures in the rag-remnants of Imperial uniform. Gerlach could see William Weitz, Gunther Stoelm, Kurt Vohmberg…