Middenheim's Master of the Manifold and Multifarious Munitions

The roar of the Hochland Long Rifle thundered through the wooded hollow, echoing among the big oaks and the low, squat hills. A moment later, a lamb-headed Gor with a crab claw for an arm and a crown of curving horns collapsed into the mulch of leaves and moss. The smoldering hole in the beast’s skull testified that the rifle had found its intended target.

How could it not? It was not for nothing that the weapon was formally known as Todmeister’s Fantabulously Far-Reaching Harquebus of Unforeseeable and Unperceived Bereavement.

The Beastmen Warherd halted their advance through the hollow and studied their slain companion. Enraged, they began to roar and shout and pound their axes on their shields. Then, in a surge of rusted metal, bloodied horns, and reeking fur, they charged. They crashed against the line of Middenheim landsknechts, scything through the first ranks of pikemen and arquebusiers.

This was not what Ottavio Pappenheim had in mind for his retirement.

As he watched the Beastmen fling themselves at the unyielding block of Middenheimers at the base of the hill on which he stood, Ottavio Pappenheim reflected on what had gone so grievously awry in his plans for his professional life.

“Reload, if you please,” he said, coolly passing the rifle to Lorenz, his mute assistant. Lorenz complied, eagerly taking the weapon and scurrying away, leaving Pappenheim to his thoughts. He felt a kind of paternalistic affection for the boy. Lorenz had grown up downstream of Nuln’s thriving munitions industry, and all manner of alchemical effluvia had warped him in mind and body, leaving him a hopeless imbecile. Now, the lad was Pappenheim’s sole companion, and his only connection to a previous life.

A previous life of quiet scholarship, spent in the company of his fellow Master Engineers. Of boozy, beer-soaked faculty lunches on the leafy grounds of the Imperial Gunnery School in Nuln. Of droning, poorly attended lectures on the finer points of ballistics.

A previous life spent tending to the excitable boiler of the Steam Tank Deliverance, coaxing the black, smoke-belching behemoth back to life after one of its many mechanical deaths.   

A previous life blissfully empty of Beastmen, Orcs, Chimeras, carnivorous stags, two-headed boars, overgrown arachnids, and other sorts of fanged and fearsome woodland fauna.

How had it all gone so very wrong?

It was simple really. 

In retrospect, Pappenheim admitted he had erred. It had, perhaps, been a mistake to publish a paper titled “A Not So Special Skull-Splitter: Speculations on Center of Mass and Inertial Torque and Their Bearing Upon the Efficacy of Ghal-Maraz and Sundry Other Arcane Armaments.” The paper, with its impenetrable thicket of formulae and its prolix, byzantine language, ought to have gone unread and unremembered – much like all of Pappenheim’s other publications. 

Alas, it had found an audience. 

And that audience was the Sigmarite ecclesiastical hierarchy.

The Sigmarite Church were less than amused by Pappenheim’s contention that the potency of Sigmar’s holy hammer—the most sacred relic in the Empire—could be attributed to the peculiarities of its design and not to the veritable dictionary of Dwarven runes inscribed upon it. The Grand Theogonist declared Pappenheim’s work heretical.

The paper had been published on a Wellentag. He’d been dismissed from his faculty position two days later, after a contentious morning meeting. He’d been banished from Nuln by dusk. By midnight, he was on the road to the north, with only Lorenz, his former assistant, to accompany him.

Now, inexplicably, he found himself the Master of the Manifold and Multifarious Munitions, attached to the crude northern court of the Elector Count of Middenheim. The man was a mead-sotted barbarian, with the temperament of a rutting he-goat and the smell to match.

“Fortune is fickle,” Pappenheim mused aloud, watching as the Middenheimers began to push back the Beastmen, spitting the brutes with their pikes and blasting them with their harquebuses.

He sighed. No, this was not at all what he’d had in mind for his retirement.

Lorenz returned the loaded rifle to its stand and Pappenheim peered through its telescoping lens, hunting for a suitable target.

He smelled it first.

A cadaverous reek oozing out of the darkened eaves. The smell of turned meat. Of moldy, spoiled cream. Of congealed blood.

Then, he saw it.

The thing slithered through the soft verge of the trees, near the left flank of the Middenheim line. Its bloated, leech-like body heaved itself towards the men, carried forward on a thousand chitinous legs, leaving a silvery slime in its wake. It shook its bulbous head and snapped a wide, froggy mouth that brimmed with a thousand needle-sharp teeth. A long, questing tongue slid out from the thing's cavernous maw and danced like an entranced serpent, as if it were possessed of an alien, independent intelligence. The thing flapped its spindly wings, then it mewled like a newborn kitten. 

The creature’s eyes blinked dully; there were too many of them to be properly counted. 

The thing was coming for the Middenheimers. If it reached them, it would rend them all, or send them fleeing into the dark heart of the woods. If the men lost their cohesion, they would be done for. They would be easy pickings for the Beastmen.

Ottavio Pappenheim knew what he had to do.

He trained the telescoping lens of the Hochland Long Rifle on the Jabberslythe and began to calculate the myriad ways the wind speed and direction could influence his targeting.

He steadied his breathing.

He detached himself from the sounds of the battle. The cries of the wounded. The braying of the Beasts.

He felt Lorenz quivering beside him.

He uttered a prayer to Sigmar. He dearly hoped the god accepted apologies.

And then, he pulled the trigger.

***

I enjoyed painting this Master Engineer model, released early in Warhammer 6^th Edition. He proved to be rather more challenging than anticipated, owing to the little details he’s festooned with. So many pouches. So much bric-a-brac.

The blue was an experiment. I have been conflicted about how to approach the blue for the Mordheim Middenheim warband I’m planning. Initially, I intended to paint them using a highly-saturated cerulean blue—kind of a dark sky-blue shade. But, after painting this miniature, I think I’ll go for something more subdued.

This was great fun as a project. I hope you like Master Engineer Pappenheim and his dedicated, if unlucky, underling.