Sigmar's Blood Read Free Page B

Inn, pouring in gunpowder before priming the flints. He calmly slotted his powder horn back into his bandolier, taking his longboot from the neck of the troglodytic ghoul that had sought him out. The inhuman beast had stopped twitching a while back, but it was always better to be cautious when it came to the living dead and their kin.
    One down, three to go .
    Cutting through the ghoul’s neck with a sharp blow from his sabre, the hunter kicked its body down the stairs and hung its disembodied head on a butcher’s hook at his waist. He laughed softly to himself, fingering the still-smoking hole in the beast’s forehead. A brace of ghouls’ heads was always useful for keeping the roadwardens quiet.
    He had the upper floor of the inn to himself, by the look of it. The sound of flintlock shots and the blood splashed up the walls would keep the inn’s patrons cowering in their beds, at least until the rest of the pack showed up.
    Sure enough, another ghoul skittered around the corner of the upper corridor. The foul thing cried out in a strange gurgling yelp that the hunter recognised as a pack-call. He glanced backwards and shot the creature silently creeping up behind him without so much as a blink of surprise. His consecrated bullet passed into the thing’s open mouth and blasted out of its back in an explosion of brown blood.
    The witch hunter turned back to confront the ghoul loping down the corridor just as it sprang for his throat. He shot it in the chest mid-leap. Deftly stepping to one side, he let its flailing body smash into the ghoul bleeding out behind him. A sweeping heel kick sent them both tumbling down to join their headless friend at the bottom of the stairs.
    Three down, one left.
    The last ghoul was always the largest of the pack, a mark of cowardice in a species too devolved to care. He could hear it scrabbling around on the layered straw of the roof above him. He ducked to avoid a taloned arm that shot through the thatch and swiped at his face. ‘Stupid cannibal bastards,’ the hunter said. ‘Never get your timing right.’
    Dropping the spent pistols, the hunter grabbed the flailing arm and pulled hard. A muscular ghoul tumbled down into the corridor, dust and straw filling the air. It leapt to its feet with surprising agility for a creature that looked like it belonged at the bottom of a swamp. No time to regain the pistols and reload. No time to use the white ring, either, come to that.
    The foul thing leapt forward, talons swiping out. It was fast, hellishly so. One of its dirt-encrusted claws went for the witch hunter’s eyes, knocking off his feathered hat and opening his lip instead. The hunter growled as he tasted his own blood.
    Pink spit-flecks formed at the corners of the hunter’s mouth as he jabbed a witch-pin into the side of the beast’s neck. A kick to the chest shoved it backwards, buying a second of precious time. The ghoul recovered quickly, pouncing forward once more, but the hunter had recovered too. The beast leapt straight into a brawler’s forearm jab. The hardwood stake strapped to the hunter’s wrist punctured its breastbone with a sharp crack. The witch hunter pushed the beast backwards all the way to the end of the corridor, impaling it against the crude wooden panels of the inn’s rearmost wall. The ghoul writhed there like an insect pinned to a cork board.
    The hunter nailed the squealing creature’s arms to the wooden planks with a carpenter’s precision, driving his witch-pins home with a small replica of Sigmar’s own warhammer. He drew his butcher’s knife and sliced the beast’s hamstrings before unhurriedly reloading his pistols in case any more of the foul things turned up. Once the flintlocks were primed and checked, the hunter put his jutting chin within biting distance of his captive’s needle-toothed maw. It was in too much pain to notice, its beady red eyes swimming with tears.
    ‘Yes, you feel that, don’t you?’ said the hunter, grinning.