Join the crew of a mighty Cogfort as they head into Ghur to fight the forces of destruction.
Castellan-Captain Varna Lask took a swig of devil’s draught from her hip flask and winced as the syrupy liquid scorched her throat. It tasted like engine oil, but it lit a spreading fire in her belly that went some way towards dulling the cold. She rubbed her gloved hands furiously, but to little avail.
‘Come on, you dogs!’ shouted Haybry at the leeside foretower, with just a hint of drunken slurring to his words. She couldn’t see him around the bulk of the Steel Baron’s hull, but the loudmouthed fool’s obnoxious drawl could wake a troggoth. ‘You know where we are – come and face us!’
‘Keep it shut,’ Lask growled. ‘If the orruks were on their way, we’d know about it. We’ve got Wildercorps roving up and down the marshes.’
She’d have to reprimand Haybry. A sip of the good stuff was one thing, but drunkenness was another. Not that she could entirely blame him for wanting a bit of warmth in the belly. Normally the crew of the Steel Baron would not feel the cold in the slightest, but she’d ordered the Cannonade Cogfort’s arco-combustor to be shut down until the last possible moment. They were running worryingly low on emberstone shards. Gladrick had given her nine kinds of hell about it, of course, rambling on about how bad a cold start was for an arco-combustor. She could hear the Cogsmith bustling about in the engine bay behind her, grumbling to himself.
That bloody Ironweld lot fussed over their Cogforts like they were mewling newborns. She placed a fond hand on the Baron’s stone hull.
‘It’ll take more than a dodgy combustor to bring you down, old boy,’ she muttered.
She frowned, squinting across the ridge-line ahead, a barren strip of rock wreathed in coils of early morning mist. Even as she watched, the fog seemed to thicken, curdling like spoiled milk. Did she see something move in that morass? Probably another carrion-hound searching for scraps. Peering over the parapet, she noticed the Excelsians huddling in their shieldwall. Up and to her right, an Ironweld siege piece was placed on a rime-covered mesa, with perfect coverage of the valley ahead.
They were ready, as much as they could be. The Wildercorps would bring them some warning if the green horde swept this way, but it seemed all but certain the mob was moving east to strike through Amberstone Watch. The Baron and his crew were simply here to watch the flank and swing in to support the Excelsian 112th if things got bloody. Cold as a frost ursid’s nethers she might be, but this duty was a rare breather after the last campaign season’s constant slaughter.
She was thinking this just as the first hail of black-feathered bolts came whipping in out of the mist, one clanging off the Baron’s hull an inch away from her face. A shard of stone sliced deep into her scalp and she fell back with a cry of shock. That stumble was all that saved her from being impaled by a second missile that whipped past her temple. Something vast and avian dropped from the sky to her right, and she heard an awful scream as one of the mesa gunners was snatched off into the sky, wriggling in the clutches of some half-seen monstrosity.
She scrambled to her feet, drawing her sabre. Blood streamed down her face. She could already see leering, idiot faces swarming out of the mists – faces daubed with childish but unsettling exaggeration upon red and yellow shields.
‘All hands to action!’ she cried, cursing her complacency and her luck with equal zeal. ‘Fire to the engines!’
Gladrick scrambled to the arco-combustor, cursing the Castellan-Captain and her bloody-mindedness. Now he had no choice but to jump-start the Cogfort’s engine. Doing so in the thick of battle was – to put it very bloody mildly – far from ideal. A single stray round or dropped fuel shard could start a flash-fire that would burn them all to ash, along with anyone and anything that happened to be within fifty feet of the Cogfort. Engine-grade aqthracite was not a substance to play around with.
He seized one of the casings, hefting the chunk of Aqshian realmstone as gingerly as he could. He slammed down the combustor’s hatch and slid the fuel block into the housing. Immediately it ignited with a glare of crimson, and he howled as a sheet of flame scorched the flesh from his fingertips. Stupid, stupid.
‘Cogsmith!’ the Castellan-Captain bellowed. ‘Give us power, damn you!’
Muttering expletives under his breath, Gladrick yanked the ignition lever again and again, until the telltale plume of steam and flame burst from the upper vents. The acidic chemical smell of burning emberstone filled the air. The cold of the Ghurish morning was banished in an instant by a flood of intense heat, and Gladrick fell back hard against the rear handrail as the Cogfort lurched upright with the slow menace of a waking lion, its piston-limbs rattling and groaning.
Over on the far side of the Steel Baron, the Cogsmith heard the thundering report of a rail-mounted leadshotter and that fool Haybry laughing his damned head off.
At least someone was enjoying themselves.
Gunner Mackim Haybry considered boredom to be a far greater evil than mortal peril. Three Moondays he’d spent freezing his beard off in this pulpit, staring off into the distance and praying for a bit of action beyond fending off the odd screechwing looking for a human-sized meal. He’d almost given up hope.
Now he was in it up to his armpits and he couldn’t keep the smile off his face.
‘Come on, you devils,’ he bellowed. ‘Come and get a taste!’
He swivelled the hail cannon, seeing a pack of lanky brutes with painted shields charging beneath the Cogfort, making for the flank of the embattled Castelites below. He let them have a full barrel, grinning as the weapon roared and bucked against its metal fastenings, rattling his fingers.
Half a dozen orruks tumbled, broken, bits of them falling away in a spray of red mist. The rest hesitated, their charge stalling enough for them to be bracketed by a well-aimed fusillade from the ground-pounders.
‘They’re gettin’ too close,’ shouted Bombardier Frenk, lobbing a fizzing grenade down at the enemy where it burst in a shower of flames. ‘Why in the hells ain’t we movin’ yet?’
‘Shut up and keep throwing!’ yelled Haybry, snapping back the hail cannon’s breach and slamming home a fresh magazine.
The mist – that foul-smelling, soupy morass – was so thick about them they could barely see what was happening below. A body came hurtling past Haybry’s gun-berth, screaming. More crossbow bolts skipped off the rail, and he knew that eventually the orruks would find their range and stick him full of poisoned metal. He swore and yanked the cannon back into position, searching for a new target.
Distracted, he thought the tremors that shook his nest were coming from the Cogfort’s waking combustor. He did not see the vast, leathery hand breach the mist until it seized him, squeezing so tightly that his ribs splintered and filled his innards with white-hot agony.
‘Gargant!’ he heard Frenk scream. ‘Sigmar’s blood, a gargant’s got Mackim!’
He had time to smell its rancid breath before he and his gun were torn from the Cogfort’s side and hurled through the air. The slate-grey mass of the mountainside surged forth to meet him, and he knew no more.
Deep in the bowels of the Steel Baron, the puppeteer felt the gargant’s blow, even if his half-deaf ears could not pick up the squeal of metal or the screams of the dying.
Igny Mollar knew this Cogfort more intimately than any of his comrades, even the Castellan-Captain. The Cogfort’s pilot lived here in the churning darkness and sweltering heat of the ambulation chamber, his limbs affixed to a vast array of chains, pulleys and levers: a metal spider at the war machine’s heart, sensing the slightest disturbance of his iron web.
He felt the tug on the left gauntlet of his harness that told him that Captain Lask was frantically spinning her wheel, trying to get him to bring the Baron about. Urgent vibrations reached him along the tuglines of the central gunnery tower, which told him the broad facing he should adopt.
Mollar smiled, baring rotten black teeth. Once, he had been destined for the headsman’s block. Back then, he was a torn and wizened creature, his face burned raw by the same blaze that he had started to kill that grasping merchant, his left leg broken in the fall as he tried to escape the scene of the crime. Murder, arson, theft of crusade supplies: they had him for the lot, and each a capital offence.
But that had not been his end, after all. They needed pilots for the Cogforts, and they needed them badly enough to trawl the gallow-pits. It was death or service, they said, and not a few of Mollar’s fellow criminals chose the former over decades locked in an airless, lightless, deafening cage, panting and sweating as they ‘plucked the strings’.
Not old Mollar, though. He’d gladly signed what was left of his freedom away. After all, when had it ever done him an inch of good? From the moment he stepped into the stone-and-metal shell of the Steel Baron, he’d never felt so much at home.
As it turned out, he was a natural pilot. A life of crime and desperation had given him a wiry strength and a gift for memorising the complex sequences of tugs and rotations that urged a Cogfort onwards. He ate well and drank better, because the whole damned crew from Lask down knew that without him, they were ogor meat. Yes, he could sense the disgust in their faces when they looked at him, when they smelled his rank odour after months without bathing, or when they had to haul him out of his cage for repair work. But still, they needed him and they wanted him happy. There was a kind of power in that. A sense of importance that he had rarely experienced in his long and mostly miserable existence.
And now they needed him again. He worked the axial pulleys with deft tugs, kicked his right leg out to steady the Cogfort and felt rather than heard the thrumming, grinding sound of the piston-limbs as they flexed at his command. Then he brought his fists down and heaved up on the topmost lines, his steel cage rattling and the gear-harness biting deep into his flesh as the Steel Baron swung about to face its attacker.
The gargant’s first blow nearly caved in the left flank of the Baron’s hull. The whole engine swayed with the force of that hit, and Rogin Borland nearly brained himself on a stack of leadshot rounds. Dazed, he staggered upright, his head ringing like a struck bell.
‘Fire all cannons!’ Captain Lask was roaring. ‘Bring that damned thing down!’
But Borland and his co-gunner Deerling could barely keep their feet with the whole Cogfort rolling beneath them, rocked by that massive impact.
He was about to scream blue murder down the pipe to that filthy little bleeder Mollar when the Cogfort suddenly came forward in a lurching step, its upper casement cracking into the Mega-Gargant’s nose as the massive brute tried to bring down his club in another crushing blow. There was a porcine grunt and a splatter of bright blood and the titan stumbled backwards.
Relief flooded through Borland, for with the enemy pressed in so close, there had been no chance for a killing shot. Now he felt the stomach-churning sensation as Captain Lask swung her wheel to the left and the Cogfort’s pilot responded with remarkable speed and precision to track the gargant’s staggering steps.
Igny Mollar might be a wretched creature, but not for the first time, Borland thanked all the stars of Azyr that he was part of their crew.
‘Drakesbreath loaded, sah!’ shouted young Deerling, his pinched face snow-white, terror pulling his eyes almost comically wide.
‘Hold!’ Borland yelled, holding up one gauntleted fist. They’d only get one shot at this.
The gargant was nursing his face, spitting blood and shards of chipped yellow teeth. He turned to gaze hatefully upon the Baron, and to Borland, it was like the brute was staring right through the gun housing’s loophole. His guts turned to ice, and he fought a wild urge to leap from the tower.
‘Steady!’ he heard himself say.
Raising its tree-sized warclub in two hands and shaking its head like a wet hound, the Mega-Gargant thundered towards them. Right into the path of the great cannon.
‘Fire!’
Flash and thunder rocked the chamber. A hollow ball of iron the size of Borland’s head shot out into the gloom and struck the onrushing titan right in the chest, smashing through its ribcage before erupting in a blossoming flower of red-and-orange flames. Then came the smoke, thick and choking. Through it, Borland saw the gargant’s swaying torso, split by a hole big enough for him to jump through. There was a butcher’s shop of scorched red matter in there, and some of it slopped loose when the brute toppled with a ground-shaking crash.
As Deerling howled and leapt around in triumph, Borland found himself trying to keep from spewing up his lunch.
‘Enough of that,’ he rasped. ‘Load me some grapeshot, son. There’s orruks that need a taste of the Baron’s justice.’
That, in Captain Varna Lask’s considered opinion, had been far too close. She sighed in relief and tried to ignore the insistent agony that lanced up her arm – she’d smashed her elbow badly against the Baron’s hull when that damned behemoth had struck them, and she suspected it was broken.
Now that the gargant was dead, they only had to worry about the steadily increasing volume of missiles whipping out of the mist. The God-King alone knew what was going on below. That damned stinking fog was masking everything.
So, their options then. Sit here dodging harpoons and waiting for some miracle to clear the air, or plunge into that gloom and find something to crush?
Easy choice.
‘Hold on to your guts, lads,’ she bellowed, slamming the acceleration lever forward. Beneath her, the Steel Baron churned and lurched, crunching over the prone corpse of its slain foe. ‘We’re going in!’
The stunning Cogfort miniature is available to pre-order now, along with the new Cities of Sigmar battletome. Get ready to reclaim the lands in the name of the God-King with more free fiction.
