Camilla staggered up the steps and out onto the battlements a few moments before one of the demonic gouts of fire struck. She was able to press herself back into the shelter of the doorway before the blast of heat and shower of masonry chips swept passed her. The castle was old, doubtless a fine fortification in its time but not meant to stand up to modern weapons. Camilla had some dim recollection of listening to a discussion on the merits of sloping walls against modern weaponry but it got technical fast and she couldn't follow it. It was very unlikely that even modern Tilean fortifications would have offered too much protection against the demonic hellfire however.

Judging the risk of incineration to be accceptably low, she peeked out onto the battlements. A few men were down, mostly cut by flying chunks of rock but for the most part they seemed to be holding up. As she watched she saw a swarm of beastmen rush forward at the wall into the hail of projectiles from the defenders. They were carrying pine trees, recently hewn from the ground and Camilla wondered what lunacy had possesed them until they thrust the makeshift siege ladders into the ground and pushed them against the walls. Beastmen began scrambling up the boughs like monkeys, crashing into the steel of the defenders.

Camilla spotted Cydric and keeping low darted across the battlements towards him, pausing only once to thrust her rapier into the back of a disoriented beastman. Reaching Cydric she took stock of the situation. The Imperials were driving back the improvised assault, swordsmen and halbiders hacking at the frantic enemy as they crested the wall. Swordsmen and halbiders but no knights. There was one knight now that she looked, the young man who had received Gilderoy's stony glare for cheering Cydric at dinner. He seemed to be shouting what she took to be more or less nonsense to the soldiers near him, they didn't appear to be listening but that obviously didn't stop the young man from trying.

[b]"Cydric!" [/b]she shouted over a lull in the fighting and the Imperial turned to look at her. She pointed her rapier at the knight.

[b]"Do you know where the other knights are? I just saw Gilderoy running into a cellar."[/b] Several horrific beastmen leapt atop the wall at once but a volley of handgun fire from one of the towers scythed them down like children's toys, topling their bleeding screaming bodies back over the parapet. She glanced down into the court yard perhaps expecting to see Gilderoy and the others forming up for a sally but the stable remained a mass of restive horses

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[b]"You see, they are not so very many,"[/b] grumbled Kron the Champion of Kron. Velabrass turned his many hued gaze on the great warrior. Like most Khornate warriors Kron was massive and his armor bedecked with skulls stylized and other wise. Most, but not all, Velabrass thought, remembering a Kurgan woman he had known once barely five feet tall and so full of battle fury that whole warbands had turned and fled from her. Kron's grip tightened and loosened on his axe, the whole thing was covered with razor sharp spikes, including the handled and it punched holes in Kron's hands as he fondled it. A dark liquid, not blood exactly ran from the rents in his gauntlets, appearing not to bother the beserker overmuch.

Velabrass sneered beneath his helmet. How like the skull lords maniacs to charge into battle to taste blood when time and worthless minions would do the job for them. Haste was foolish when the enemy had no where to go, and especially so when you were hasty for no better purpose than to indulge your own bloodlust.

[b]"Not that I would lament your death Kron, but it would be wasteful. I did not win the Field of Azarth by my haste, nor best the Sorcerer Lords of the Seven Towers by charging in when time would bring me the victory. Let the beasts and the cannon batter a breech and then I will release you to your work, to our work.[/b]" Velabrass savored the coming battle, unlike Kron he could wait, and victory would taste all the sweeter for its inevitability. 

[@POOHEAD189]