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The Sea Taketh – David Guymer

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A Black Library Publication

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The Sea Taketh

David Guymer

‘Oh, ware the day the fishing folk come,
To no barrier will they concede,
Their lures will entice both the strong and the frail,
And lo will the good fishes bleed…’

‘What is that ditty she sings?’

Ingdrin Jonsson had no idea at what age humans considered their offspring to be competent adults, as per Artycle Nine of the Kharadron Code, but the girl was as winsome and waifish a thing as he could imagine, and so addressed his question to the father.

‘’Tis an old song, Master Jonsson,’ Tharril bellowed, his words timed to the rhythm of his oars and the crash of spray across his back. ‘Her ma sang it to her, as my ma sang it to me.’

‘It gives me the creeps.’

‘Any honest song should.’

Jonsson clung grimly to the port gunwale as freezing saltwater sprayed his face. It was not like plying skyborne currents. His dusky beard stuck to his skin and to his light sky-captain’s leathers. He could taste the ocean on his breath. Holding fiercely to the slimy wood, he peered back into their star-speckled wake. The surface of the ocean bulged and receded, as though something vast and primordial breathed. Where waves crested, they caught starlight. Where waves sank, they folded under, taking that captive light back with them to the depths. The oceans were realms within the realms, forgotten by time, history and gods. Ancient magic dwelled there, unformed, untouched by hands mortal or divine since the formation of the aethyric cloud itself. With every precipitating crash against the hull, he was reminded of its elementalism. With every tug of current on the keel, Jonsson conceded a little more that he had placed his fate in the hands of a dark and unruly god.

‘They crave what’s within, ’neath flesh and ’neath bone,
Sparing only the young…’

Tharril was effectively enthroned in the wooden prow of the boat, an oar in each hand, controlling the boom of the lateen sail with a pedal-like noose of rope about his left foot. Beneath the bench there was a massive warhammer, and in his lap, a spear. Tharril and his folk were fishermen, but there were plenty of fish around Blackfire Bight that would consider a single-sail like this one small prey. Jonsson too was armed, a skyhook on a strap across his shoulder and a privateer pistol loaded in his holster.

Thalia, the girl (Jonsson had also heard her father call her ‘spratling’ or oft times just ‘sprat’), sat against the starboard gunwale, across the centreline from Jonsson. A plaid net lay in sodden folds over her knees as she sang her ballad, extricating wriggling fish as long as her arm or longer. Silver, nightshade-blue and bone-white shimmered under starlight as they flapped and squirmed, only to disappear into buckets of cold brine. Jonsson watched as she pulled another fighter from the net. Smaller, this one, its tail barely reaching her elbow with her hand clamped expertly about gills. She tossed it over the side.

The ocean accepted its return with a faint splash.

‘And when they grow old and grandchildren forget,
That will be the day when the fishing folk come.’

Jonsson wondered if he were paying Tharril and his girl too much to sail him out there, if they were just going to pursue a normal day’s take along the way.

‘Why do you throw back the small ones?

‘They are young,’ she replied.

‘But why?’

She shrugged. ‘You just do.’

With a grunt, as disturbed as much by the company of the odd girl as by her brute of a father, Jonsson pried his fingers from the gunwale and leant forwards. His chest of equipment had been stowed inboard.

With exaggerated care because his hands were numbed with cold and shrivelled by salt spray, he worked the combination lock and lifted the lid. Unrolling the now-wet fleece packing, he assembled his zephyrscope and arktant.

Bringing the rubber eyepiece to his eye, he trained it on the twinkling dot of Sigendil. The night sky might vary from realm to realm, and even within a realm, and with the movements of Ulgu-Hyish within the aethyric cloud, but the beacon star of Azyr was a fixed point in every sky. With one eye on the High Star, he manipulated the sliders on his arktant to account for the position of the local constellations.

‘Can you hold this thing steady?’

‘Ha!’ Tharril barked, rowing.

‘Bokak,’ Jonsson swore, as a sideswipe wave spoiled his measurements.

‘What are you doing?’ Thalia asked.

‘Taking a position, girl.’

‘Why?’

‘Because!’

‘I thought Kharadron lived in the sky.’

Jonsson sighed. ‘Aye, girl, we do, seeking our fortunes on the aether winds.’ He leant across the open chest and winked. ‘But every now and again, some careless soul drops something.’

‘You are looking for treasure?’

‘It won’t look for itself.’

The girl sniffed, with the iron rectitude of the very small. ‘No one takes from the sea.’

‘Good. It’ll still be there then.’

‘No one takes from the sea.’

‘What about these.’ Jonsson nodded towards the nets and buckets full of splashing fish.

‘That’s what the sea gives.’

Her deathly earnestness brought a snippet of a smile to Jonsson’s face. ‘A sour face like that aboard an aethership is almost always a sign of something trapped in the ear. Very serious if left untended.’ He reached out as though to tug on her ear, but then pulled his hand back with a flourish at the last moment, presenting her with a copper comet and a toothy grin.

She frowned.

‘Hah!’ said Jonsson, slapping his thigh. ‘Would you see that? Somebody raised this girl right.’ He passed one hand over the other, the copper coin disappearing. Then he unfurled the palm of the crossed hand to reveal a larger, golden coin. The girl’s eyes lit up, as if in reflection. ‘A quarter-share, from the aether mints of Barak-Thryng, girl. Legal tender under any of the six great admiralties.’

‘Take the coin, spratling,’ grunted Tharril. ‘Afore he makes it disappear again.’

Jonsson winked as the girl scraped it off his palm.

‘What’s that?’ she said.

Jonsson followed her gaze down.

‘Now that,’ he said, patting the hard object that lay safe beneath the second layer of fleecing, ‘is something that will really amaze you.’

Jonsson’s heavy boots thudded to the ocean floor. His legs bowed, his shoulders bunching, the monstrous pressure of the sea bottom crushing down on the weak points of his armour. The rigid plates of the deep-sea-adapted arkanaut suit creaked like a metal pipe being squeezed by a gargant.

‘Oh, ware the day the fishing folk come.’

He turned on the spot, ponderous as an armoured beetle. His headlamp sent a speckled beam into the pulverising blackness. Bubbles issuing from the seams in his armour and the rings of his air hose – a mile of collapsible metal flexing from the back of his helmet towards the surface – cut up his light. Every one was a tiny mirror held up in the completeness of the dark.

‘Ingdrin Jonsson isn’t afraid of the deep!’

He lowered his skyhook warily.

Almost nothing lived at these depths.

He knew of the merwynn and the kelpdarr, fiercely isolationist and protective of their territories, but even they rarely plumbed beyond the sunlit layer. The great beasts that preyed on such folk, lurkinarth and kalypsar and the like, prowled the richer waters of the coastal regions and shipping lanes accordingly. The ocean floor was a desert.

Spiny encrustations of rose-coloured coral glittered everywhere his lamps passed.

There was nothing here.

Bracing himself against the awesome weight of water on his shoulders, he thumped down to one knee. Bubbles and silt puffed up around the armoured joint, but the cloud stayed compact and low. With his beams angled tight to the opalescent reef around him, he ran his gauntlet over its surface. He had never seen a mineral like it. His light seemed to be trapped by the structure of it, spreading outwards through veins of denser crystal. Piece by piece, the reef lit up, and street by colonnaded street, the turrets and spires of a drowned city was lifted out of darkness.

‘Tromm…’ he breathed, bubbles squirming through the gaps in his mask.

The structures were of coral and lime, as if grown out of the reef itself, the lustre of nacre gleaming from monuments and domes. There were high towers. Great bridges. Palaces. Walls. Statues of what looked like aelves stood sentry over squares and gardens, armoured in opulence in pearl and shells and mounted upon monstrous piscine steeds. For all its obvious former glory, however, the place was a ruin. Pallid, light-shy vegetation strangled the life from the great works, the camouflaged wings of bottom-feeding rays rifling through the debris that littered the grand avenues.

‘Aighmar.’ Jonsson stared over the coral-lit city with something like reverence. ‘Lost city of the Deepkin aelves. I found it.’

‘Their lures will entice both the strong and the frail.’

Jonsson gripped his skyhook and looked back. His helmet could not freely rotate about his shoulders. It took a moment.

‘And lo will the good fishes bleed.’

Behind him again.

‘Who’s there?’

He plodded around another half-circle, bubbles exploding from his helmet’s seals as he cried out in alarm. While his attention had been fixed on the lambent city of the aelves, the blunt nose of something gigantic had emerged from one of the larger hollows in the reef. Jonsson did not see much. A dull flash of cartilaginous teeth. A silvery ripple of gills. Then there was an explosion in the water, spined fins seething, monstrous grey muscle writhing, and the beast was surging from its lair towards him.

He reacted on a hair-trigger. It saved his life.

In a storm of bubbles, the heavily adapted aether-endrin bolted onto his shoulders pushed him up and back. Shudders ran through the water as the beast’s jaws crashed shut on the effervescence where he had just been.

Jonsson got a horribly good look.

The beast was as long as a short-range gunhauler, grey as battle-damaged iron. Its eyes were glassy yellow knotholes of alien hunger.

With a powerful stroke of the tail, it twisted into Jonsson’s bubble trail, dorsal blade-fin carving the water as it closed the distance, fast. Jonsson swung his skyhook between them and fired. The harpoon launched in silence, a red cloud billowing from the side of the monster’s snout.

The beast thrashed in pain and fury, almost ripping the skyhook, still tethered to the harpoon by a taut length of steel chain. Jonsson pulled the release bolt before the gun was ripped out of his hands and the chain twanged off towards the wounded creature. Jonsson drew his pistol from its thigh holster. He had no expectation that it would fire under water, but it was all he had left.

The monster jerked about the middle, gnashing at the chain that its own movements flicked tauntingly over its head, missed, and drove its head through a coral wall. The reef crumbled around it, blood fountaining as the coral worked the harpoon embedded in the beast’s snout like a well pump, and something in its animal mind said ‘enough’.

It swam away, churning a thin river of red with its tail.

Jonsson let out a relieved breath.

That had been an allopex.

‘You have the best bad luck of any duardin born, Ingdrin Jonsson,’ he told himself.

He had never heard of an allopex hunting alone, and a school of them could bring down a krakigon.

‘They crave what’s within, ’neath flesh and ’neath bone.’

With a snarl, he swung his pistol towards the source of the voice, twisting his head prematurely so that he was looking into the back of his helmet. He almost laughed when he realised. It was the air hose. That girl, Thalia, must have been sat near the inlet, singing. He gave the base of the hose a rap as his boots sank inexorably back towards the ocean floor. ‘Nothing to fret over,’ he said loudly, hoping that his voice would carry back up. ‘Just like I promised.’

But when he started towards the ruins of Aighmar, he did so quickly.

There was blood in the water.

One night and another day later, Thalia had a knife in her hand, blood as far up as the elbow.

She sighed, opening the ghoulish bream from mouth to tail and emptying its guts into a pail. She enjoyed filleting. Normally. She liked the sliminess of the fish in her hands. She liked the smell, the sound of the brothing pot bubbling inside, waiting for the tailfins and the heads, listening to the hens in the back patch clucking their goodnights.

She squinted across the shingle to where the sunset was slowly turning the ocean an amethyst-tinged red. The water was placid, as still as the brass mirror that da had never removed from ma’s dresser. It looked bigger to her somehow, swollen. Waves lapped at the pebbly promontory, like the village cat at the fish juices on her fingers.

She blinked herself awake, realising that she had been about to nod off. Right there on the porch step, her chores unfinished. She shook her head. The air was thick. Her eyelids felt like honey.

Stifling a yawn, she found herself facing in a direction that she had scarcely given a moment’s consideration to before today. The inland road. It was the way to Toba Lorchai, the greatest city in all the realms next to fabled Azyrheim itself, or so her da had told it. Da had never been there though. Neither had she.

Jonsson had gone there.

Thalia had slept all night and most of the morning, but the Kharadron had been packing his chest into his strange metal caravan, pushing a clinking pouch into da’s hand and been disappearing up the inland road almost as soon as they had drawn the boat up onto the beach.

‘A black wind in his sails,’ da had said that night.

A sudden shriek from the direction of the water snapped her head up.

The sound lingered on the air for a moment before being abruptly silenced. She strained her ears, but could hear nothing but the crash and tumble of waves on the shingle. The tide was in too high, washing about the boat sheds and net stores. The sea was too red. Brown-and-white kelp bobbed with the action of the waves like bodies.

‘Da?’

She bent down to deposit the un-gutted fish back into its bucket as an arrow thudded into the porch post in line with where her eyes had just been. She looked back at it, quivering in the split wood, and gasped, too shocked to scream.

A woman with a dripping shortbow stood waist deep in the shallows, buffeted from behind by pliant waves. At first glance she might have passed as human, but she was not human. Wet robes the colour of an ocean under moonless skies clung to a slender physique, fish-scale armour cladding her forearms and torso. Her face, shoulders and midriff remained bare, her skin as pale as a dead fish’s eyes. Thalia thought her beautiful, but it was a haunting, pitiless kind of beauty, the sort that would drive mere mortals to distraction and despair.

The woman nocked another arrow to her bowstring. She raised her bow to draw, sighting down the shaft. Thalia noticed with horror that she had no eyes. Just smoothed, perfect skin over shallow sockets.

From the first shot to now it had probably been about a second.

Thalia did scream then. She screamed and she ran.

Da would have wanted her to go inside and bar the door. That was what he had always told her to do when the dead and the drowned came. But that was not what she did.

The second arrow whipped past her face, splitting the wood nearer the bottom of the porch post, as Thalia leapt onto the loose stones and tore towards the pier.

Set at the lip of the promontory at the outskirts of the village, the pier served both as a wave breaker and as a mooring for a dozen one- and two-berth boats on its leeward side. It was also where da and the others would sit out and drink beer when the nights were warm.

She started to hear noises as she got closer.

Shouts. Metal.

Fighting.

‘Da!’

She sped around the last cabin, a third arrow thudding into the corner boards at her heels, and saw it.

The jetty speared outwards into the still, swollen water, a zigzagging half-bridge of wood, forested with masts and lines. Eight women and three men – most of the adults in the village – were there on the boardwalk, hemmed in by an ever-circling tide of lissom warriors wielding two-handed swords. Like the bow-woman they were sightless. Like the bow-woman it did not seem to matter. The village had always prided itself on being well-armed, and had been taught by harsh necessity how to use its weapons well. But they were accustomed to fighting off the seasonal deadwalker floods, enemies that could not flow around a cudgel or a spear-thrust like seaweed in the currents of a passing fish. These warriors seemed almost to be dancing rather than fighting, the huge blades in their hands willing partners instead of tools to be directed.

Old legends, myths and songs skipped through her mind. Frightful tales of the dark ocean and hungering aelves.

‘Deepkin…’

Thalia picked her da out from the fighting.

Her heart almost stopped beating in relief.

Her da was as broad across the chest as the keel of a boat, browned by sun and sea, and caulked with scars. He could lift Thalia in one hand and cousin Rollin in the other, and throw them both, squealing, off the end of the pier. He was a champion, the god-king of her world.

With a roar, he smashed his warhammer into an aelf’s chest.

The blow shattered the swordsman’s armour. The aelf crashed back to the decking a dozen feet back and did not rise.

‘Da!’ Thalia screamed in exultation, but he did not hear her.

His full attention was on his enemy.

Seawater was seething up through the planking of the jetty, causing the downed aelf’s arms and head to lift up. Thalia gasped, for she was well used to the horrors of necromancy, but this was different. Wasn’t it? Something compelled her to keep watching as a ghostly light shrouded the body. It seeped into the aelf’s skin through the half-heart brand on his forehead, and mere seconds after hitting the deck a ruin, the aelf was vaulting athletically back to his feet. Armour hung off him, but the bruises over his ribs were already fading. He butterflied his moonlit blade.

Her da scowled and hefted his hammer.

Thalia’s mind was racing, faster even than she was as she tore onto the boardwalk.

A very different-looking aelf warrior emerged from the sea on the crest of a solitary wave to be deposited onto the boardwalk beside her da. His armour was scalloped and studded with jewels, heavier and finer than that worn by his warriors. His helmet was tall and fluted, inhumanly ornate, and entirely without any openings for eyes or ears. Only the mouth was visible and it was thin-lipped and cruel. In his hands, he bore a long-handled weapon with a serrated edge that fell somewhere between scythe and spear. A small lantern globe hung from its head. There was something about its light that pulled on Thalia, behind her eyes, inside her chest, that was desperate to take leave of her and be one with the source of that light.

The newcomer turned his spear, his light towards her da.

His eyes softened as the light bathed his face. He lowered his hammer as though arms could no longer lift it. He stared into the light. Something horrible and golden seemed to lift from his shoulders, streaming towards the aelf’s lantern.

Then her da collapsed to the deck.

‘Da!’

Small and desperately quick, Thalia darted through the melee, avoiding friends and hard-faced aelves both as she splashed onto the flooding jetty and threw her arms over her da. She shook him, crying. ‘Da. Da! Da.’ His eyelids quivered as if he were asleep and dreaming. His chest rose and fell beneath her body. Relief choked off her sobs. He was not dead. He was not dead. She wiped the tears from her eyes, feeling the sting of seawater. ‘Wake up, da.’ Taking a shoulder in each of her hands, she shook him. ‘Wake up!’

‘I think that I am… feeling,’ said the aelf with the light, looking down on Thalia and her da through the faceless metal of his helm. His lips remained straight lines, but he steepled a hand over the ridged plate of his breast and turned his blade aside. ‘Pity. Sorrow.’

‘It is understandable, soulrender.’

Another magnificently lithe aelven warrior strode down the boardwalk. She was perfect, a queen of austerity, dark haired and pale skinned, armoured in black, as cruel as the ocean waves.

‘Away from the crush of blackness and cold, what can we do but feel as we were made to? Trust instead that soon it will be done, and that oblivion awaits us all beneath the waves.’

The one she had named ‘soulrender’ lowered his head. ‘It is rare to find such wisdom in the souls of the akhelian. The martial council chose well in electing you our queen.’

Thalia’s lip was trembling, but she knelt defiantly upright between the aelf queen and her da, brandishing the inch-long filleting knife that was still in her hand.

‘I like you, child,’ the woman said, though neither her voice nor her face expressed any emotion. ‘I would see my namarti children take souls like yours.’ With a scimitar that glowed the colour of rose coral, she tilted Thalia’s jaw so that their eyes met. ‘My name is Pétra. Queen of the Mor’phann, protector of Aighmar, and reaver of souls.’

Thalia was suddenly painfully aware that the sounds of fighting had stopped while the aelf queen had been speaking. A tear glistened in her eye, in defiance of her pride.

She wanted her da.

‘Speak to me of the one that took from my ocean.’

Jonsson woke to the crash of waves.

He started, huge fists clamping around the leather steering grips of his endrin-cart and squeezing until both knuckles and leather were whitening. He breathed, letting the tension go slowly. Just a dream. Clearing the misted glass with a sleeve, he peered out at the bleakly forested hillside. The trees were stick thin, sparse black leaves rustling with a sound like that of the distant sea amplified through a conch shell. It was dawn. He had allowed himself to sleep for too long. The expedition to Aighmar had wearied him more than he had admitted to the girl. But he had not been prepared to linger in that village a moment longer than he had to.

Cursing under his breath, he wiped the nightmare sweat from his palms on his trouser leg, and pulled open the door.

A rush of chill morning air displaced the stale, fish-breath odour that had been allowed to stew in the cabin overnight.

Too long.

Too, too long.

He clambered out, stretched his back, stretched his legs, then hurried around to the front of the cart to crank the endrin. Once the vehicle was awake and purring he hauled himself back inside and pulled the brake lever.

He made it another six hours before the endrin packed in with a wheezing sputter. He got out again, tense and muttering, to crank it one more time.

One last time. Another six hours ought to do it.

He stopped for nothing. Not for food. Not for drink. Definitely not for sleep. When the sun again began to sink below the barrow hills, he got out to light the lamps and climbed right back in.

Blackfire Bight was a vast and lawless expanse of grim hills, moribund coastline and bone-coloured sands, but it was neither banditry nor undeath that worried him.

He had already slept too long.

Jonsson did not know much about the sea-aelves. No one did. They were a myth, and in some cases even less than that, and from every scrap of information he had been able to uncover, they were quite brutal about ensuring that remained the case. ‘Deepkin’, some called them. ‘Idoneth’, those scant records suggested they called themselves. Some fragments of text claimed them to be descendants of the Cythai, the first, mythical race of aelves to have been drawn into the realms by their creator, the god of learning and light, Teclis. Legends. If there was even a nut of truth to them, then the Cythai had fallen a long way indeed. Such stories as existed in the inherited consciousness of coastal communities across the Bight were of settlements scoured overnight, ships vanishing, armies disappearing without a trace of an enemy, wars of migration as entire nations were driven inland by a sudden, inexplicable terror of the sea.

Jonsson did not know much.

He knew enough to move inland, fast.

He tried to avoid thinking of Tharril and the girl.

If Jonsson’s mind was a keenly running endrin, then his conscience was that oil-stained bit of machinery that presumably did something of tremendous import, and which Jonsson had managed very well by never interfering with. He patted idly at his jacket pocket, cursing himself for giving the girl a whole quarter-share. What had he been thinking? What was she going to spend it on? He scowled. This was exactly what his old endrinmasters had always tried to teach him. Know every bit of your endrin. If you did not, then it was liable to hiccup at the most inconvenient of times.

The endrin-cart grumbled as it continued to climb.

Walls. That was what he needed. High ones. And guns. And an airship. Grungni, did he want his feet back on his airship. The Deepkin were coming for him, he could feel it in his water, and the one place nearby that was as far beyond the reach of an angry sea as it was possible to get was Toba Lorchai.

Skyport of the Kharadron.

Toba Lorchai was a thriving free port, a small city or a large town, depending on how one interpreted the finer Points and Artycles of the Code, and the stubbornly still-beating heart of Barak-Thryng’s various interests in Blackfire Bight. While trade was administered (and, more importantly, taxed) by the admiralty, it was a stridently independent frontier port in most respects. The bulk of its labour force were human, which was true of many such ports across the realms, with a sizeable contingent of duardin craftsmen, traders and oath-soldiers, as well as a peripatetic community of orruks of a more mercantile bent. They traded in meat and in bone, and in the spoils of their constant warring on the restless lands of Skulldrake and Wither and Deathrattle Point. Most Kharadron authorities would have run the greenskins off long ago, but as long as there were other foes to fight – and Toba Lorchai had plenty – then their belligerence was an even greater boon to the town than their trade goods.

Its streets were gutters for the filth of the realm, its timber buildings climbing roughshod over the black rock of the hills and each other, as inconsiderate as the people that lived within them. Factionalism was rife. Kharadron and dispossessed. Dispossessed and human. Orruk and absolutely everyone else. The detritus of brawls and base trades littered every doorway and corner. Draft animals that had to be blinkered and distracted with belled harnesses lest they go mad, lowed their distress in alleys. Giant vermin and hillfowl, war-bred beasts and skeleton birds, shrieked in cages. Smoke stuffed the winding lanes like a gag in the mouth.

It stank of cheap spices, night soil, and endrin greases. It stank of ten thousand living, stubbornly still-breathing souls.

Jonsson thought that Toba Lorchai was probably the basest and worst den of iniquity in the eight Mortal Realms. If a fellow traveller or sage had told him authoritatively that it was, in all truth, the basest in all of creation then he would have been amused, but unsurprised.

But right then, that unpleasantly acidic burn in the back of his mouth was the taste of sanctuary. The timber stockade might have been ugly, but it was thick and it was high, and the populace, by virtue of being crooks and felons to a man, duardin, or grot, were satisfyingly well armed. Better even than that, however, was the sheer freneticism of the markets, of the bawdy houses, of the excise forts and the smithies. It killed the sound of the sea that had been rasping in Jonsson’s ears right up to the point that he guided his dying endrin-cart through the town gates.

Brushing off the yellow tobacco-stained fingers of an ancient and drunk-looking duardin offering to trade a tale for a coin, Jonsson pushed into the bustle.

Every grain of good sense was telling him to get back to his airship, but there was one duty he couldn’t leave without observing.

The building that he was looking for was on the corner of a three-storey tenement in one of the most lightless and lawless wards of the lower city called the Greys. The skyports and grand houses of the Kharadron admiralties projected over the township beneath, like a gargantuan two-pronged fork suspended over their heads by the hand of Grungni himself. It cast large shadows and, situated right at the base of the old port’s supporting columns, there were few places where they fell deeper than in the Greys. The building seemed to sag. Its roof drooped, its walls bulging imperceptibly. As if it were a plant withering for want of a ray of light. Its gritted windows displayed a piecemeal collection of faux-Nulahmian crockery and antique tableware. A spiderghast grot stood on the porch step. His body had been painted entirely in lime-white, except where carapace and mandibles had been scraped from the underlying green. He slapped a cudgel in his small palm, glaring menacingly at the handful of passers-by.

Most of the Greys’ residents knew Murrag’s place well enough to avoid it, but there was always the possibility that a stranger important enough to be missed might come innocently browsing for faux-Nulahmian crockery or antique tableware. The grot made sure that never happened.

Jonsson had known Murrag for decades.

When he had first deserted the venerable ironclad Angrin-Ha! (an incident involving a looted Nagashi idol and a few misplaced coins that the admiral had entirely overblown), it had been Murrag who had seen a place for him in her enterprise. Over the following decades, he had proven his eye for antiquities and his knack for acquiring them, generally from the cold hands of their former owners. The coin that had purchased him a small dirigible, the Fiskur, and a crew of his own, had been hers. Whenever he unearthed a treasure that he felt was too well-protected for him to handle, he made sure that word was passed along, and she would find someone with more guns or fewer scruples. Any acquisitions that he did make went first through her. Always. It was an agreement he knew better than to renege on, even had he not been Kharadron and contractual obligation writ into his blood.

Aye, he knew Murrag well.

The miniscule enforcer glared at Jonsson as he approached. The insanely potent blend of narcotics that was currently hollowing out the grot’s nervous system caused his eyes to cross and his head to jerk violently on his neck.

‘It’s me. Jonsson.’

‘S-s-s-s.’

Jonsson was unsure what the grot was trying to say, but he shuffled aside obligingly. Jonsson pushed in the door.

To one who had never ventured inside (and most would have considered themselves lucky to be amongst that group), the shop would have seemed surprisingly spacious. The interior walls had been knocked down to leave just one large front-of-house area and a small living area at the back. The ceiling had been elevated, abolishing the second floor entirely. Jonsson was not sure what had become of the third floor. He had never been up there, nor seen any sign of stairs.

A handful of heavily intoxicated grots lounged about on chitin-stilt chairs that were small even to Jonsson, but in the context of this space seemed positively minute. It was as though they, the grots, and Jonsson had all been shrunk and had ventured into a normal-sized room.

The effect was as disconcerting today as it had been the first time he had been admitted.

The grots largely ignored him, gazing in wonderment at the ceiling or eyeballing each other, a competitive spiderghast custom that Jonsson knew from experience could go on for days. One of them, however, was sufficiently lucid to lurch upright and stagger towards the knuckle-bead curtain that partitioned off the back of the shop.

Jonsson waited, fiddling nervously with his pistol grip. He did his best to ignore the ingrained fungal aroma. A muffled squawk and a crunch sounded from the other side of the curtain. He did his best to ignore that too.

‘Ingdrin Jonsson.’

Murrag swept aside the curtain and, leading with the vastness of her belly, stomped into the shop.

The gaggle of opiated grots sprang suddenly to attention.

They saluted.

Murrag was the undisputed sovereign of all semi-legitimate and downright illegitimate business in antiques, artefacts and relics in Blackfire Bight. Her word was law, her utterances waited upon with baited breath, her needs, wants and every interest catered by any man who cared for the distinction between life and death, rich or poor.

She was also an ogor. And huge.

Each of her arms was thicker than Jonsson’s waist. Her hands were like shovels, studded with bracelets and torqs that she wore as rings. He had once seen her rip a man in half. Literally. In half. And then eat him. Her gut was gargantuan. It was almost a second entity, as if she had smuggled a handcart full of ripening produce under the mountain of her skirts. Her eyes were jet black spigots, furrowed down into a slab of brow. Her hair was coarser than goat’s wool, braided and decorated in the Kharadron style. Her appearance was brutal, but she was clever, very clever. When first they had met, Jonsson had thought he would be clear of her debt and free with her dirigible in a month. He had underestimated her, as almost everyone did. Her insatiable greed was just another manifestation of her ungodly hunger.

She was chewing as she entered.

Amongst unlicensed traders and petty crooks in every port of the realms, an ogor bodyguard was the ultimate symbol of status. The grots, then, had always been Murrag’s idea of a poke in the eye to convention.

‘Gnollengrom, Lady Murrag,’ said Jonsson, unclasping his hands to give a respectful tug on his beard. He bowed.

‘I always liked you duardin,’ Murrag rumbled. ‘So respectful.’

Jonsson bowed so low that his beard swept the floorboards.

‘You are back so soon, Ingdrin. You found it then.’

Jonsson nibbled on his lip, trying to ignore the grumbling noises coming from Murrag’s belly, so powerful they were shaking her skirts. ‘Aye, lady, I did. Aighmar. Home of the Deepkin aelves in Blackfire.’

She gestured Jonsson towards a side table. ‘Show me.’

The table was scaled for the anatomy of an ogor, and Jonsson was forced to stand on a chair in order to tip the contents of his satchel over the table. Rings and chalices and blades and glittering chunks of coral spilled over the polished wood. Murrag picked through it.

‘Aelves under the sea,’ she mused. ‘I had tasted the rumours. The Undying King hunts for them, you know? And the one with Three Eyes. Stealers of souls to one. Exiles of the Dark Prince to the other. They hide from them, but not from Murrag. She crunches the bone and gristle of legend and myth, devours through to truth inside.’

Jonsson bowed again.

‘How did you find them?’ she asked.

‘We waylaid a skycutter flying the colours of Barak-Zon. Its own fault for straying so far from the patrolled lanes. Anyway, they had recently boarded and scuttled a Skye clan ruinship that had been running repairs after a battle of its own. They didn’t know what they had taken from its holds – not everyone reads Queekish – but it was a written record of a skaven invasion of Aighmar.’

‘Records?’ Murrag’s brutalist features slipped into a broad grin. ‘Not very… skaven.’

‘Very detailed records too. The site was easy to find once I’d translated the skins. My guess is that they meant to pass them on to someone.’

‘So, Nagash?’ She licked her lips. ‘Or Archaon?’

‘I’d prefer not to think about it.’

The ogor picked up a blade from the loose pile of treasures to examine it more closely. It was a shortsword, its nacreous blade and cross-hilt plain, but fabulously ornate around the grip – as if it were intended to impress by touch rather than sight. In Murrag’s grip it looked like a supper knife.

‘Pretty.’ She looked up, hungrily. ‘Is there more?’

‘Aye, plenty more. There’s a whole city down there. The skaven have picked it over, but for a race of scavengers, they’re careless. You can send another crew though. I’m moving on.’

‘Moving where?’

‘Anywhere. Away. That was always our arrangement, Lady. If ever I feel there’s a prize I can’t handle then I pass it on. No fee. No trouble. That’s what I signed, and that’s what I’ll stick to.’

Murrag frowned down at him, the enormous muscles of her face shifting. ‘The Deepkin scare you. Enough for you to tell me what our deal is.’

‘They’re coming for me. I can feel that they are. You as well now, I’m guessing.’

The ogor delivered a booming, stinking gale of laughter and gestured to her guards. They stiffened furiously.

‘I feel very safe here.’

‘I’m not joking.’

‘Nor am I.’

Jonsson straightened. ‘Well, then. I’ll take my due, then I’ll take my leave.’

Rubbing her belly with one hand, Murrag carefully separated out the trinkets from the coral shards and drew the former towards her side of the table, using the blade of the Idoneth shortsword like an admiral moving ship tokens around a campaign map. Jonsson’s heart sank to see the coral being pushed back towards him. The mineral was clearly a repository for some kind of aelf magic and must have been worth a fortune to someone from the Collegiate Arcane, or even an arcanite cabal for all he cared. He wanted rid of the stuff.

‘Old things,’ Murrag growled, stirring through the pile of jewelled conches and ornate weaponry with the pommel of her sword. ‘That’s what I buy. That’s what I sell.’ She grumbled something in a hissing greenskin language to summon one of her attendants. ‘Cradz. Fetch the ledger. Five shares, made out for Jonsson.’

Jonsson gawped at her.

He could not sell his dirigible for five shares, even if Vorgaard, his pirate of a bosun, could have been persuaded to scrape off the rust.

‘Get the rest of it where I can’t see it,’ said Murrag. ‘I don’t like the way it smells.’

There was something magical about gold. It was a long-standing physical principle amongst the aether-khemists and chirurgeons of the Kharadron that the placement of a sufficiently high denomination coin could cause a suppurating wound to close or a malignant growth to shrink. Meditating upon its glow could cure ills both physical and mental. Even just the weight of a coin in a duardin’s pocket could make his cares evaporate, making his soul feel lighter by a ratio corresponding unerringly to the value of said coin. Jonsson might have expected the miraculous effect to become even more pronounced once he had passed through the various stairgates and customs forts into the skydock proper and could safely remove his hand from his pistol holster.

He felt no easing of his spirit.

And did not move his hand.

Something he could not tally, nor weigh out on a set of calibrated scales, had put his teeth on edge. The endrin of every patrolling gunhauler and monitor, of every skywarden and rigger, sounded to him like the roar of the ocean. From every street vendor and high-end duardin restaurant, the smell of decaying seaweed and saltwater made him want to gag.

The skyport was not the Toba Lorchai that most of its inhabitants knew, but it was the face that the admiralty lords would recognise. Here were the stone-built docks erected by the first pioneers of Barak-Thryng, long before the locals had come to build a settlement at its base. Here, shipping magnates and lords of industry of all races comported themselves in gowns, flocked by equerries and viziers, while ship captains strode about the port’s wholesalers in armour.

After removing himself from Murrag’s company – for the last time, with any luck – Jonsson had been of half a mind to pay a visit to a jeweller of his acquaintance in a last attempt at unloading the Idoneth coral before taking his final leave of Toba Lorchai itself. A master gemsmith of the dispossessed, his acquaintance was as famed for his honourable approach to the business as he was for his eye for a gem.

Something persuaded him to err towards the direct route.

The thought of just dumping the coral on a bench or in a doorway somewhere and foregoing his profit never occurred – to do so would have been a flagrant violation of the Code, and Vorgaard, his bosun, would have stripped him of his captaincy had he even suspected.

Exchanging curt nods with familiar faces amongst the harbour watch, Jonsson hurried towards the docks.

The sooner he was a thousand feet above sea level with his gold and the Idoneth coral securely stowed away in the captain’s cabin, the happier he would feel. He could sell it in another city. Preferably in another realm.

Then, maybe, he would feel ready to move his hand from his pistol’s grip.

Across from the imposing granite portico of the endrinmaster’s guildhall and bank, a fountain prattled. A scale replica of the Barak-Thryng ironclad Thallazorn, spouted water from her gun turrets into a pool. The sound grated on Jonsson’s nerves. A ring of metal benches surrounded the fountain. They were popular with lunching endrinmasters, but it was barely an hour after dawn, and there was only a handful of bleary-eyed longbeards nibbling on a belated breakfast.

Jonsson sat down.

It was only four thousand and nine steps from the Grundstod Gate to the docking tines, and he was practically a beardless scamp at a mere fifty-seven years old, but he was finding it increasingly hard going catching a breath. He let it out slowly, looking up in astonishment at the stream of transparent bubbles that issued from between his lips and floated up towards the sky. Schools of skeletal fish shoaled about the equally astonished skywardens.

Trailing bubbles from his open mouth, he brought his gaze back down to port level, to where an allopex swam between the granite colonnades of the guildhall. The huge, grey-skinned sea monster was collared and bridled, barded in a rigid plate of darkly tinted shells. An aelf in elegantly streamlined armour and wielding some kind of net launcher rode in a standing saddle on the monster’s back.

Jonsson’s first thought was that he had gone mad.

The anxiety of his flight was bleeding into the reality of his five senses, his fear that the denizens of the deep ocean would come for him, and now he saw the ocean in all its horror right where it simply could not be. He would have laughed at his own broken mind had the beer-soaked endrinmaster on the bench beside him not muttered a drawled curse, tugged a volley-pistol from the expanse of grey beard bundled up in his lap, and opened fire.

The hammer burst of shots snapped Jonsson out of his shock.

He jumped up smartly, drawing his own single-shot firearm.

The endrinmaster’s salvo tore into the allopex’s head. It crashed into the ground like a side of meat dumped from the back of a wagon, and crushed its rider’s leg to the ground beneath its mass. The aelf screamed, seemingly in anguish from being wounded, than from the pain itself. The endrinmaster casually walked over to the downed beast and shot the rider in the head, then belched an enormous bubble.

Throughout the great concourses and plazas of the skyport, the impossible was spreading. Everywhere Jonsson turned he saw his nightmare writ in powder smoke and charging bodies. Aelven warriors flowed down the main thoroughfare as though borne along on a flood tide, sweeping aside all before them, while in the air allopex knights and grim-faced warriors mounted on fangmora, eel-like horrors that coursed with sparking energies, converged on the endrinriggers working in their high nests.

The Kharadron of Barak-Thryng, however, were far from defenceless in their home port, even when assaulted unawares. Shots rang out. The leaden booms of skycannons. The rattling chatter of aethermatic weapons. Every food hall and warehouse in view that had been host to a captain and his entourage had become a casemate from which decksweeper volleys and fumigator fire raked the aelves and their bonded nightmares. In the sky, amidst the endrin rigs and aethermatic hoists, the Kharadron spat back at the aelven cavalry with drillcannon and rivet-fire. Shields of crackling elemental power surrounded the fangmora knights, deflecting most of the incoming fire. A second contingent armed with energised spears swept past the first before the lightning shields had fully dissipated, sweeping towards the endrinriggers’ impromptu redoubts with the fury of a wave.

Jonsson did not stop to watch.

‘Grungni the Maker,’ he breathed.

The old master belched another large bubble, which Jonsson took for typical longbeard disdain before noticing the arrow embedded in his chest. He pitched backwards and into the fountain with a splash.

Jonsson brought his pistol up as he quickly backed away, circling around the marble bulk of the fountain’s scale model ironclad.

The aelves were advancing through the columns of the guildhall. They came with an eerie, floating gait, bounding rather than walking. It was as if they moved through water even as Jonsson, a hundred feet away from them, was not.

With a snarl, Jonsson aimed and fired.

The pistol kicked hard, annihilating an archer’s shoulder and spinning him hard into the face of a column. The rest kept coming, loosing as they ran. Another old endrinmaster caught an arrow in the chin and in the eye and dropped with a gurgle, his weapon unfired.

Jonsson did not even waste time reloading his pistol.

Toba Lorchai had been good to him. He would miss the place, it was true, but for him home had always been just a port of call. And the Code was very specific on the subject of lost causes.

Artycle Four, Point Five.

He turned and sprinted for the aether-docks.

The docks were Toba Lorchai’s beating heart, its higher purpose and its soul. Three great prongs of granite, like a colossal fork, protruded from the crown of the hill, busy with aethermatic winches and cranes, skyships docking or embarking, loading or unloading. They were a hive at any time. If not for the incessant drum of gunfire and the eerie wailing of the aelves, then Jonsson might have been able to force his way into the cussing mob of grundstok crew and longshoremen without noticing anything amiss.

A very large (and very well-paid) garrison of grundstok thunderers had responsibility for the docking tines, with a contingent of orruk mercenaries that fluctuated in strength depending on the perceived threats of the times. Fire-duels crackled into life as the aelves advanced on the docks. Howling mobs of green-skinned and war-painted orruk berserkers surged from the grundstok stockades to engage the aelves hand-to-hand. The melees that broke out were ferocious. Seven-foot-tall orruks with bulging muscles hacked at the delicate aelven warriors in a frenzy. Scores of them fell in the first seconds of the charge, but the survivors neither cried out nor broke. They sang a flat, empty lament as they whirled into the attack with graceful, perfectly controlled strokes of their hefty blades.

The anarchy consuming the tines themselves was, if it were possible, of a different order.

Stevedores and endrinriggers fought one another for right of way. Harbourmasters bellowed red-faced at unyielding captains. Arkanaut companies beat terrified humans and duardin from their vessels’ boarding planks with the butts of their pistols. Frigates and gunhaulers launched with their moorings still attached, ripping giant hooks out of the granite, crashing into the back of other vessels that had not yet cleared the dock, all of it conducted under the gale-roar of cold aether-endrins being pushed hard to full power.

Jonsson’s own dirigible, the Fiskur, was smaller than most, a humble three-gunner with an aethershot carbine mounted in the prow, port and starboard, and a bow-chaser in the aftcastle. The collection of armour-plated spheres suspended over the deck within a girder of metal housed an old but well-proven aether-endrin. The winged blades of its propellers were already humming. A crew of seven were already releasing the mooring lines and riveting the endrin-rigging for departure.

‘Don’t tell me you were about to cast off without me,’ Jonsson shouted over the rising howl of the endrin, striding over the boarding plank mere seconds before an arkanaut companion with a torn ear and an eyepatch dragged it in from under him.

‘As per Artycle Seven, Point Three,’ said Vorgaard Hangarik cheerfully. The leathery-skinned bosun wore a crown that he had lifted from a dashian tomb in Lyrhia at an angle he considered dashing, and which, on a duardin half his two hundred years, might well have been. He observed the frantic activity of his company with an unhurried ease, thumbs wedged under the belt that was buckled around his armour, sucking on the dry stem of an unlit pipe.

‘Point Three pertains to the incapacity, insanity, or death of the existing captain,’ Jonsson panted.

‘Well.’ Vorgaard withdrew the pipe from his mouth and used it to gesture towards the violence that was slowly breaking through the Kharadron defences and spilling into the docks. ‘What was any right-minded duardin to think?’

‘I…’

Jonsson put his hands on his knees and coughed.

‘You need a moment to catch a breath, cap’n?’ said Vorgaard. ‘I’ve got time.’

‘Do we have clearance from the harbourmaster?’

‘I wouldn’t say clearance exactly.’

‘Good enough.’

Blowing quickly and hard, Jonsson wove through the arkanauts and hurried up the sheet metal steps to the aftcastle. He nodded to the turret gunner, and took the wheel.

Vorgaard followed him.

‘Get my ship out of here,’ Jonsson bellowed into the pole-mounted speaker-horn that was welded to the deck plating beside the wheel. ‘Full power to the endrin. I want a thousand feet between us and the Deepkin before I can count down from the five aether-gold shares in my pocket.’

A raucous chorus of ‘ayes’ rang out at the promise of gold as the Fiskur lurched into a sudden climb. Jonsson gripped tight to the wheel, pulling the dirigible’s course inland and upwards. The hull plating squealed and shuddered. The endrin-rigging emitted a long, tortured whine punctuated by bangs of stressed metal as the propellers dragged the ship away from the ground. The vast bow of an ironclad hove into their course. Grumbling under his breath, Jonsson hauled on the wheel, shaking his fist at his counterpart as the Fiskur sailed under the ironclad’s keel and continued to climb.

Throughout it all, Vorgaard remained in a solid, wide-legged posture that he could hold unflustered through aether-storm or sky-battle. He cast Jonsson a sideways look.

‘Deepkin, you say?’

Jonsson set his jaw. ‘Aye.’

‘The old legend?’

‘Aye.’

‘Skat,’ Vorgaard swore.

‘Aye.’

‘I think we’re out of it,’ said Vorgaard, after a moment’s silence.

Jonsson nodded and loosened his hold on the tiller, reducing the buoyancy in the aether-bags and levelling the pitch of the propellers. The dirigible eased off with her complaints as she levelled out of her climb, bar the occasional cough from the endrin that the endrinmaster quickly moved to tend.

He looked back.

The monolithic tines of Toba Lorchai were shrinking behind him. Even the gunhaulers and monitors that had been patrolling the sky lanes before the attack had been sprung looked small, coming about to add aerial support to the port’s defenders even as the Fiskur pulled ever further away. Just in time, Jonsson thought. He was not so high yet that he could no longer distinguish the dark, graceful tide of aelves from the splintering battle lines of the Kharadron and their allies. From up high it looked like a black sea coming in, sweeping away the sand fortresses and metallic pebbles that had been set up around the beach in its absence. They had already swept as far in as the tines. The fighting was even spilling over onto those ships still in dock, deck watches defending their gun ridges like the ramparts of a floating castle. Those that were not already fending off boarders redoubled their efforts to be aweigh, adding to the carnage in the slipways.

‘Good thing somebody had the endrin running,’ Vorgaard murmured.

‘It looks as though they’re sparing the township,’ said Jonsson. ‘Trust Murrag to get out of this in one piece.’

He looked away, sick, and stared at the matt gunmetal of the ship’s wheel in his hands. He could not shake the dread that this was somehow not over, that the sack of Toba Lorchai was simply incidental. It was him the Deepkin wanted, he was sure of it. He did not know how they were following him, but he did not think they were going to stop here.

Perhaps he could return to the skyhold of Barak-Thryng itself. Or Azyrheim. Gods, yes. Let the Deepkin pursue him all the way there.

‘New heading, bosun,’ he yelled, spinning the wheel, the prow following it slowly to starboard. ‘We’re heading for the Azyr Gate at Glymmsforge.’

‘Good idea,’ said Vorgaard.

One hand on the wheel, Jonsson shrugged off his satchel, the coral a lumpen weight in the bottom, as if he had a spiked mace against his back, and tossed it to Vorgaard.

‘Throw it overboard.’

The bosun tested its weight in his hand. ‘Is it valuable?’

‘Cite me later. Throw it overboard!’

‘Aye, cap’n.’

Vorgaard walked towards the aftcastle battlements, arm drawn back for an overarm hurl into the wide, blue aether, but then just stopped mid-stride. His arm dropped to his side and he just stared. Jonsson glanced over and swore.

‘As aether is bloody light.’

In the sky dead ahead of their new course, in defiance of every scientific law that Jonsson cared for, there swam a gigantic armour-plated turtle. The behemoth was easily the mass of a fully gunned ironclad, but throbbing waves of distortion rippled from the howdah mounted on its back made it difficult to make out in detail, or to accurately count the swarm of allopex and fangmora knights that ran abeam of it like gunhaulers escorting a dreadnought.

‘A leviadon,’ Jonsson breathed.

‘Turn! Turn!’ Vorgaard grabbed the wheel from him and bellowed into the speaker-horn. ‘Port broadside. Aethershot carbine, fire. Skilli, why am I not currently deafened by drill cannon-fire?’

The dirigible shook to a pair of tremendous booms, falling close enough together to be heard as one. The aethershot sailed into the diffraction cloud and to all obvious purposes disappeared. The detonation drill from the bow-chaser was not so easily waylaid. It burst in the vicinity, faceted loops of explosion rippling around the leviadon as if seen from the other side of an armoured window. A couple of fangmora knights dropped out of the sky, or sank, Jonsson was not sure, becoming increasingly visible as they fell away from the leviadon’s protective field.

‘Brace!’ Jonsson yelled as something twinkled back in return.

A razorshell harpoon as long as Jonsson was tall crunched into the rigging, perilously close to the endrin housing. The impact lurched the dirigible to starboard, smashed Jonsson’s face into the wheel, and sent him sprawling back to the aftcastle deck. He groaned. Voices fought for attention in his skull.

‘Endrinmaster. Wakaz! To your post.’

‘Fire! Fire!’

‘Boarders aft.’

‘Stand and repel.’

‘All hands to the hold.’

The clash and clamour of steel brought him back around, the scuff of armoured boots on metal planking. He jerked upright, reaching for his pistol. The repellent stench of something dank and rancid hit him halfway.

He blinked, looking up into the flat, noseless features of a nightmare with no right to exist beyond the blackest deep sea trench. Its skin was rubbery and white, bristling with spined frills and venomous-looking barbs. It floated sinuously up and down, as if riding ocean currents that Jonsson, in his landlocked insensibility, was numb to. Its clawed fins raked Jonsson’s beard with every down-movement, its triplet of tails coiling and unbunching on the deck.

An aelf woman sat bestride its back. Every part of her body, apart from her head, was encapsulated like a pearl within a shell of perfectly shaped black metal. Her skin was so gaunt and so pale that Jonsson could see the veins that webbed her face, and even make out the dark green of her eyes when she blinked. Her skin, her armour, and her weapons all glistened with wetness, her voluminous dark hair billowing with unnatural buoyancy around the clamshell plates of her shoulders.

He could hear his crew fighting. Vorgaard, probably. Skilli in the turret. He grabbed up his pistol and swung it around. The aelf cut the barrel in half with a curt downstroke of her sword. It clicked as he pulled on the trigger.

‘Boka–’

The aelf impaled him through the shoulder with the lance in her left hand, driving it through hard enough to pierce the metal of the deck, skewering him in place. The deepmare she rode opened its hideously alien mouth, but made no sound.

‘Who… are you?’ he said.

‘Pétra. Queen of those from whom you stole.’

Jonsson shook his head vigorously, wincing as he pulled against the lance in his shoulder. ‘I stole nothing. I found it. The city was abandoned. I claimed galkhron in accordance with Artycle Two, Point One of the– aaaarrgh!’

Pétra released the butt of the lance and let it stand slack again.

‘A thief’s notion. To assert that a thing is unclaimed simply because it is untended.’

‘My queen, here.’

Jonsson turned his head to look sideways along the deck. Vorgaard was sat up against the aftcastle wall, eyes closed, breathing shallowly as though asleep. His armour was unscratched. A tall aelf with a shining coat of armour scales and a helm that enclosed his entire face but for an expressionless mouth stood over him. He was the one who had spoken. He shook out the contents of Jonsson’s satchel and held up the coral to his blank, eyeless mask. He appeared to sigh, a strange gesture when unaccompanied by any obvious outward sign of emotion.

‘What have you done to my bosun?’ Jonsson gasped.

The aelf ignored him.

‘The lost shards of the chorrileum of Aighmar. I can feel the souls bound within.’ His lips stiffened. ‘I hear them wail.’

Pétra nodded, as though satisfied.

‘The rest is in the township,’ said Jonsson, pain making him gabble. ‘I can show you who has them and where, in exchange for my life and my ship.’

The aelf queen regarded him with inexpressive eyes, a picture of untouchable beauty painted on a rock.

‘I care not for the trinkets. Things can be replaced. Souls devoured by the Thirsting Prince are forever lost.’

Jonsson did not know what to say. How did you treat with a creature so alien in their values as the Deepkin aelves?

‘Then… what do you want?’

‘How did you learn about Aighmar?’ she said.

‘The city?’ Quickly, Jonsson explained everything that he had previously related to Murrag, about the Barak-Zon skycutter, the skaven ruinship, everything.

‘Then it is done,’ said the helmeted aelf. ‘We can return to the sweet annihilation of the senses and feel no more.’ He lowered his scythe-like weapon, the light-globe swinging from its head emitting a curious pull on Jonsson’s attention.

‘No,’ said Jonsson, trying to pull away, but for reasons other than the obvious one sticking through his shoulder, he could not. ‘No.’

‘You duardin are long-lived,’ said Pétra coldly, hidden within the totality of the lure-light. ‘Your soul will be highly prized. It will bring joy, of a kind, to the parent of a namarti who will otherwise wither in childhood and perish.’

‘There’s a whole city down there,’ he protested. ‘Thousands. You can’t take them all. There will be those that remember you.’

Jonsson closed his eyes, but somehow he could see the scythe-wielding aelf’s blank expression through the light. Pity. Sorrow.

And then there was nothing but the light.

Thalia hugged her knees to her chin and watched the waves break against the rocks. They were bodies, woollen and black, tumbling, ripping open, spilling their frothing white guts over the beach. She shivered, cold. She did not know what she was doing here, could not remember, only that she was alone. Her da had been taken by the sea, as her ma had been, long ago. The memory of the more recent event slurped and gurgled from her grasp, like wet sand from between her toes as the waves dragged it away to where her recollections of the older had long been submerged.

‘And when they grow old and grandchildren forget, That will be the day when the fishing folk come.’

She looked back, along the deserted shoreline. To the inland road.

Because they were not the fishing folk.

They were the fish.

About the Author

David Guymer wrote the Primarchs novel Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa, and for Warhammer 40,000 The Eye of Medusa, Voice of Mars and the two The Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he wrote the audio dramas The Beasts of Cartha, Fist of Mork, Fist of Gork, Great Red and Only the Faithful. He is also the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Awards for his novel Headtaker.

For an age, the Realm of Life has languished in the grip of Nurgle, the god of pestilence and decay. Now, the Queen of the Radiant Wood has awoken in her war aspect, and the sylvaneth heed her call to reclaim their forest kingdoms in all the Mortal Realms. Now is the season of vengeance.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library,
Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Catherine O’Connor.

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ISBN: 978-1-78030-958-3

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* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.