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Gilead's Curse - Chapter Two - Nik Vincent and Dan Abnett

The Burning - Nick Kyme

In The Shadow of the Emperor - Chris Dows

The Tilean's Talisman - David Guymer

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Gilead’s Curse

Nik Vincent and Dan Abnett

Chapter 2

Sleep comes at such awkward times when you’re as old as I am. It matters little, now. I am refreshed and ready to begin again, just as soon as you fill my glass with a little tepid water, and perhaps bring me a morsel or two to eat.

It is a conceit, I suppose, to leave one’s audience on a knife-edge, but it is not my way, I promise you. Now, where was I?

Gilead and the undead knight fought tooth and nail for long hours before dawn, and, as the sky was broken open by a new sun rising, the elf thought that, he too, would perish. He could not muster his strength. His elf abilities felt as if they were a million miles away. He sought to be shadow-fast, but the skill came in such short bursts as to be irrelevant to the passage of the battle.

Gilead had not come across so practiced a warrior in all his days. He had fought humans and daemons, monsters and beasts. He had fought creatures with brains and creatures with brawn, and, once or twice, he had done battle with beings of strength and sentience in equal measure. He had fought the spirited and the desperate, but he had never fought an equal.

With two blades, Gilead had not been able to bring down the knight. His undead foe had wielded no weapon in reply, but his skills in defence had proven his expertise in close-quarters warfare.

Gilead decided that whatever this being was, it was his equal in combat, and that was all that mattered on any field of battle.

A ray of clear, bright sunlight travelled between the branches of the trees, thrusting in at an angle to the ground, casting long shadows, and glinting dully off Gilead’s blade.

Gilead and the knight were circling each other, at too-close quarters in the confined space between the trees, looking into each other’s eyes, searching for some weakness, some chink in the other’s armour.

As the sun caught the blade of Gilead’s sword, the glowing light in the knight’s eyes dimmed and clouded.

Gilead thrust and swung, and thought, in the split second it took for the knight to parry, that his opponent might be slowing down.

Circling a little more, Gilead stepped between his opponent and the ray of sunshine, and the knight’s eyes shone once more.

The knight stepped in with the shorter blade, thrusting hard at Gilead’s side, tearing his shirt, but missing his body by the smallest of margins. If Gilead had been built like a human, the knight would have connected with flesh, muscle, and perhaps even organs, but Gilead was half the width of a man, and had evaded another grave injury.

In response, Gilead thrust high and tight, making the knight duck to his left, as another slender beam of light found its way into the clearing over the elf’s left shoulder. The strike cut another narrow, shallow slice in the knight’s neck, but it would take a great deal more than that to bring him down.

As Gilead drew his sword back to the centre, the new beam of light bounced off it slightly, and the elf noticed the clouds descend in the knight’s eyes once more. He jinked to his right, so that the knight had no choice but to circle away from him, and Gilead made another strike. This time it was a feint, designed to make the knight move a little further around the circle and into the light.

The narrow sunbeam fell first on the knight’s short dagger, and then danced from it to Gilead’s blade. The elf went through an exercise series, one that he had practised a thousand times with his twin brother Galeth in the training yard at Tor Anrok. He sliced and jabbed and made figures in the air, all designed to catch the light and throw it back into the knight’s face.

The knight’s eyes were dull and cloudy. Nevertheless, he raised Gilead’s dagger in a defensive posture and parried, while trying to find somewhere to hide from the light.

Gilead’s next strike hit its target. The tip of his sword found the gap between the knight’s ribs in the fourth intercostal space. It should have been enough to kill him.

The knight staggered back a pace or two, and fell against the sloping trunk of a tree in the grey shadow of its ragged canopy. His eyes glowed hot for a moment, and his fist clenched around his weapon with renewed vigour.

Gilead stepped back and took a long, deep breath, drawing the blade of his sword through a handful of cloth gathered up from his shirt to polish the elf-forged metal.

Gilead heard a distant whinny and then a weak bark. He swiped the blade through the cloth once more, and waited while the knight jerked his shoulder against the tree for leverage and took a step forward.

The knight and the elf circled each other cautiously for a moment or two as they both heard movement in the woods around them. There was the sound of the dog barking, eagerly, but weakly, the sounds of boots stomping through dry leaves and mulch, and then came the calls, howls almost, as the local men urged each other on, building up their confidence to face their foe.

Gilead had not been the only one to track and find the knight. The locals, tired of living in fear under the threat of they knew not what, had banded together to attack their nemesis. They would kill him, or they would die trying.

The knight, clutching the weeping wound in his chest, looked from Gilead to his mount. A dancing beam of light caught the edge of his improvised shield, and, for a moment, he was blinded again.

The local men had mistaken Gilead for their foe once before, and the elf did not relish meeting this human force again, however much of a rabble it might be. He was exhausted from the battle, mentally and physically, and he had a number of wounds to clean and dress before he could leave these dark, cold barren woods of Ostermark for good.

As the elf made up his mind, the knight flung Gilead’s dagger aside and threw a bundle over his horse’s back. Gilead swiftly and silently collected his weapon and left the tiny clearing before the wounded knight could notice his departure. The knight struggled to mount his war steed, and the horse stomped the ground flat as it circled once and then twice as the undead warrior gathered his wits. Moments later, they too left the clearing.

Gilead knew that, wounded or not, the knight would best any human attack, that the local men were too weak and ill-equipped to defeat him, even in daylight. He trusted that the knight would lie low for long enough to avoid contact with the men, that he would do no more damage to the vulnerable humans than had already been done. The warrior must be as exhausted as Gilead was, and he would surely hide from the daylight and the human force, such as it was, in order to rest and recover his strength.

It would be up to Gilead to rid the countryside of the terrible scourge of the undead warrior knight. He would hunt him down wherever he fled or hid, and he would not fail a second time.

Gilead ducked and wove his way back to his waiting mare without disturbing a single twig or leaving so much as a footprint in the dry, grey mulch beneath his feet. It was as if he had never been there.

The humans passing nearby did not catch his scent on the breeze nor hear his footfalls, despite passing within yards of him. They were tracking their quarry deeper into the woodland, and it was not Gilead.

Gilead washed out rags in the shallow culvert with its sweet water, and used them to clean and wrap his wounds. His injuries were numerous, but none of them were deep; his concern was the malignant poison that must surround such an opponent, and the likelihood of succumbing to infection. Gilead sought out the cleansing herbs he would need to make a fresh and living salve for his injuries, but there were none to be found. He dug deep among the few remaining supplies in his pack and found dried versions of the leaves he needed. He knew that they would be less effective in this form, and spent some time rehydrating the herbs with clean water and drops of the more potent oils distilled centuries before by Fithvael at their home of Tor Anrok, the lost tower. He hoped the resulting unguents would be sufficient to his needs.

Gilead had never feared death; for many decades after his twin Galeth’s death, he had cynically toyed with it, dared it to take him from the cruel world and the fates it offered. After many adventures that led him close to death, but closer to madness, he had learned from his last and best companion, gone these many years, not to throw his life away. Fithvael had taught him to look after his health, both physical and mental, and to reward his body for its skills in combat by treating his wounds with the very best medicines that were available to him. Today, in this woodland, in these straitened times, the best medicines were those he had carried, ancient and dried to powder, from his homelands.

All that remained was for him to rest, and to hope that he would not fall prey to some alien fever.

Within days, Gilead was content to continue his quest. His wounds were healing slowly, by his normal standards, but they were clean and free of infection. His horse, too, was rested and as well-fed as anyone could hope in these times of virtual famine.

It was not difficult to pick up the knight’s scent, literally and figuratively. He was not difficult to track, being less subtle than an elf, or even a well-trained human. The knight did not seek to hide his passage through the woodland, or the places where he had stopped to maim and bleed creatures to satisfy his appetites, and to allow his steed to rest or eat. Gilead was surprised that the knight had clearly covered a good deal of ground over the intervening time. The elf had wounded the knight seriously, if not fatally, and yet the creature seemed not to be slowed down by its injuries. It never stopped for more than an hour or two at a time, seemed not to need sleep, did not cook and hardly rested. When it travelled by day, it did so more deeply in the forest, staying under the canopy where it was at its most dense, where shade from the sun was at its most complete.

Gilead tracked through areas of woodland virtually decimated by the knight. He had taken almost a straight path, during the daylight hours, hacking through branches and saplings rather than going around them. The ground was churned up in places, as if the knight had forced his steed to move faster than the terrain ought to have allowed. There were no signs of cooking, and none of the edible plants that still remained just under the earth’s surface had been grubbed up or prepared. There were only the tattered, papery corpses of some of the more resilient local rodents, their flesh bled to a pale stringy consistency. Gilead did not care to muse on the knight’s tastes and urges. It was what it was, and Gilead would not stop until he had rid this northern winter land of its most feared predator.

Convinced that the knight was at the centre of all the horrors that had been visited on the Empire and beyond, determined that he must be caught and killed as soon as possible, Gilead rested little and rode his mare harder than he would have liked to make up ground.

In the northern lands, at the farthest north-east reaches of the Empire, in Ostermark, and further north on the borders of Kislev, towns and villages huddled no more than a few miles apart. In such cold climes and rugged countryside, a man might walk half a day to cover six or seven miles. If he was to visit a town or market and return home the same night, his round-trip should not be more than ten or a dozen miles at most. Homesteads and farms also congregated in the countryside in this manner, so Gilead was never very far from some form of human habitation, and yet, he saw very few people. The further he travelled in the knight’s wake, the fewer and further between were his human sightings.

On the third day of travelling, within a hundred miles of Bechafen, when Gilead felt that he was only a matter of hours away from finding his foe, he suddenly realised that he was totally alone. It was the elf’s natural state to be a solitary individual, and he was used to going for weeks, sometimes months or even longer without seeing another sentient being. Wherever he had been in the Empire, any time during the past several centuries, he had always been within the sight, sound or smell of some beast of the field, some bird, some creature, however small or humble. Now, there was nothing.

Gilead’s path took him out of the edge of the forest at last, on to a stony pathway that bordered cultivated land. An hour later, he stopped the mare along the narrow track that he had been following across sloping farmland that was roughly divided into a series of strips. He was keeping close to the high, dusty hedgerows so as not to be easily detectable, but there was no one to see him. The fields were fairly recently tended. New crops, planted in the hope of a more abundant harvest next season, from diminishing stocks of precious seeds, were trying to force their way into the world. Gilead could not help but notice that their growth was patchy at best, that the soil was dry and had not been irrigated, and that the plants were fighting for the poor earth’s nutrients with weeds that should not have been there. The small fields and narrow strips of land would each sustain only one family, and should be the lifeline to which the local community clung, but there was no one there. No one tilled the land or worked the tender young crops that were trying to grow there. If there were no humans, why weren’t the smaller beasts taking advantage of the young crops? Why were there not flocks of birds feeding on shoots and buds? Why were the shrews, voles and field mice not running amok? Why, if there was flora to feed the herbivorous creatures were there no predators to feed on them? What had happened to the food chain?

Gilead wondered whether the humans had simply deserted the farms and homesteads that he saw scattered across the land, for they appeared to be intact. The humans, if they had left, must have done so recently for the crops were newly planted and not halfway to being harvested. But where would they go?

Something unthinkable had happened. Some terrible fate had befallen all living things.

Gilead left the path with its hedgerows for the nearest metaled road, which joined the larger villages and towns. He adjusted his grip on the mare’s reins and brought her to a steady gallop in the centre of the empty road. The air was full of menace, not from a scent that he could identify, but of the lack of something. The air was too dry and stale, and Gilead felt death descending around him. The humans were dying. He was convinced of it. He was equally convinced that the undead knight had something... everything… to do with it.

Gilead rode into the outskirts of a market town called Omalk as the sun set, watery grey against a dull purple sky. He would normally have walked in, keeping to the meaner parts of town, to the alleyways and darker places. He did not hide now; there was no need for him to avoid detection for there was no one to see him. Many of the buildings, including the drinking holes and cook-shops where the poorer locals congregated to eat and drink were locked up with their shutters pulled down, or were simply deserted.

Gilead dismounted and pushed open a door that had been left ajar some time before. The tables still bore the remnants of the last meals eaten there, although the food was cold and congealed on the assortment of mismatched, chipped plates. Ale had been drunk hurriedly, leaving splashes on the tables and one last swallow in the bottoms of grubby glasses.

There was that smell again: the smell of old things, of death, and of human fear.

The men had left this drinking establishment, all at the same time, heedless of their meals and the few belongings that littered the room: a jacket slung over the back of a chair; a hessian bag, half-full of something-or-other, left under a table; a broken rake and a hoe with a split handle leaning side-by-side against the wide table that served as a bar.

Something had threatened these people. Something had threatened them with their very lives. Gilead could smell it, feel it on the air.

If he could smell it, he could track it.

Gilead could track as easily in the darkness as in the light, and much of the small town was in darkness. Chinks of light showed through in one or two places, from behind closed doors or around ill-fitting shutters. One or two windows had not been covered, nor the candles in the rooms inside extinguished, but they were few and far between. A trapdoor set in the pavement, close to a large building, showed light intermittently around its seal as someone moved around below. Then the light flickered and died.

Gilead did not need to disturb the inhabitants of the cellar to know that the place was full of women and children. He could hear the faint, shrill cries of small children and the murmurs of the women trying to soothe them. Once or twice he heard Sigmar’s name invoked in desperate prayers.

He could almost taste the foetid smell of putrefaction on the air as he rode into the market square at the centre of the town. He expected to see death and devastation on a scale that few rarely witness, but the place was still and empty.

The smell came stronger than ever, and Gilead dismounted his mare to follow his nose.

He knew that the knight had been here. He could not see or hear him, but he found evidence of his mode of battle.

Gilead looked for and found a trail of destruction. He saw leaves on the ground from the surrounding trees that could only have been sliced off by a well-sharpened blade. He saw hoof-print patterns in the blue-green verges of tough nutsedge around the town square that bore witness to a well-disciplined war steed’s wheeling and turning in response to his master’s hand on his reins. He saw barrows and stalls haphazardly backed onto curbs in avoidance of a raging battle, their meagre wares scattered across the paved streets.

Yet he saw no humans, and he saw no undead knight.

He could smell human blood, shed some hours before, and he found an abandoned shoe, and a button, sliced from a tunic. There was hair, too, a small clump of it with a scrap of skin attached, adhering to the bark of one of several trees that marked one end of the square. There were, however, no bodies, no wounded and no dead, despite the stench of mortality in the air.

The battle was over, or had moved on. This area had been cleared of dead and injured, and the women in hiding had taken their fallen men with them to tend their wounds or to prepare them for their graves.

The mare’s ears pricked as a thin wail penetrated the still silence. Then came the faintest of sounds; as if a blade was striking off stone. Gilead could very nearly smell the sparks as they flew off honed steel.

He was close, but the battle didn’t rage around him, it didn’t rage in the town proper, nor had it left the area.

The battle raged beneath his feet, below Omalk’s market square in whatever sewers, catacombs, cellars and underground sluices and passages occupied the spaces below the streets.

Gilead was struck by the thought that he should have known. He ought to have anticipated the knight’s movements. Of course, he would seek out towns that had underground places. He would not fight above ground, unless he had to. He could not fight by full daylight, not so efficiently as he could by night, at least, and Gilead had known it all the time he had been looking for the knight.

Gilead did not know this particular town, but it did not necessarily follow that the knight had not sought it out because of the dark places beneath. Many towns and cities, especially those in the north of the Empire, had masses of underground byways, tunnels and even huge, open spaces beneath them, some caused naturally, others built, often by the skilled hands of dwarfs, who took great pride in hewing and dressing rock and stone of all kinds.

Gilead thought again of the basement on the outskirts of town where he had heard the women and children gathered. This place might have almost as much city below ground as above. There must be a hundred entrances and exits, and dozens of routes and chambers.

If the town below the town belonged to them all, and was in general and continuing use, then there would be plenty of access, and it would be close to the market square, close to where he was standing.

He tethered the mare and walked around the square, touching the door handles of buildings, looking through unlit windows into darkened rooms, and skimming the ground all the time with his eyes, looking for access to the buildings below street level.

He quickly found metal grilles set into the pavement right up against the buildings. They extended perhaps eighteen inches from the buildings they abutted, were a yard across, and they covered open cavities below so that no one could fall in accidentally. One or two of them looked like they covered chutes for goods to be delivered into waiting cellars, others looked like storm drains and overflows for collecting rainwater or to aid in cleaning and draining the market square. One was clearly a run off from a slaughter house, with two well-worn, wide-brushed brooms leaning against the wall, and the faint smell of offal and old animal blood.

The smell of blood, fresh and human was stronger on the west side of the square, and, on close inspection, Gilead found that two of the grilles had removable bars. He only had to lift one of them out to be able to lower his body into the cavity. The narrow door that he found below street level showed no chink of light around it, and opened inwards.

Gilead carefully replaced the bar above his head to leave no trace of his entering the building, and then pushed gently against the door, turning the knob on the outside first one way and then the other.

The door opened an inch or two, but no further, and the strong, sweet, metallic smell of blood filled Gilead’s nostrils. The elf listened for a moment, and smelled the air again, but there was no new sound or scent. He put his shoulder against the door and eased it open, pushing aside the body that barred his way.

Gilead rolled the corpse over. The kill was only a matter of a few hours old, and it was human. It had been cruelly, and none-too-cleanly eviscerated, and the hard floor that it lay on was sticky with blood and ichor.

A low, rumbling echo met Gilead’s ears as he crossed the almost empty storage cellar, and he slowly, carefully, unsheathed his shorter blade, all the time edging towards the darkest corner of the room, eager to conceal his presence from anyone who might enter. He knew, from experience, that the knight was a fierce opponent, his equal in speed and grace with bladed weapons, and the elf wanted to meet him on his own terms, preferably by surprise attack.

Gilead backed into a dry, smooth stone wall, adjacent to an opening. He thought, at first, that it was an alcove, and glanced into it to see if it would offer him a temporary refuge, but, as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, he realised that this was the opening of a low, arched, brick tunnel. He also realised that this was where the sound was coming from.

He heard it again, but this time the low rumble was closer, and, quite clearly, a human moan, once the echoing nature of the subterranean corridor was factored in.

As Gilead stood, four-square, in the mouth of the tunnel, he glimpsed movement some thirty of forty feet away. A lurching figure staggered around a corner and fell against the right-hand wall of the corridor, clutching at its body with one hand. It groaned once more and slid to the hard, earth floor. Gilead almost felt the life force leave the bulky masculine body with that final groaning exhalation. He could do nothing for the human, now.

Gilead ducked from his full height and moved stealthily, virtually silently, along the other side of the corridor, stopping for only the briefest moment to assure himself that the knight’s latest victim was in fact dead. He looked down at the corpse still clutching at its gut even after death, trying to hold together a ragged tear that had allowed the contents of the man’s abdomen to spill out over his thighs. The wound was not a clean slice or cut. It was not the product of fierce and lunging swordplay. Either the knight had lost his weapon of choice and had resorted to some other way to see off his human enemies, or he chose to kill this way, to hack and tear when he could have killed cleanly, both more elegantly and with greater respect for his opponents.

Gilead followed where the dead man had come from, turning left and right along corridors that smelled of recently spilled blood, stepping over more bodies with ragged mortal wounds ripped through torsos, necks, abdomens and faces. Some were cold, dead for several hours, others were warmer, and one or two still spilled blood, suggesting that they had not yet succumbed to their injuries, although they no doubt would.

The light in the tunnel was subdued and intermittent. At times, Gilead passed close to one of the pavement grilles, which would have allowed light to flood in during the day, but which afforded only the most meagre glow of luminescence borrowed from candlelit interiors, few and far between on such a desolate night, in a town whose population appeared to be anywhere but here.

There were torch sconces along many of the corridors he travelled, following his senses to where the knight must be doing battle. Some of them had lit torches in them, but they were clearly old and poorly made, using inferior waxes and oils, so that they smoked or burned with dull, green light, which cast gruesome shadows on all the surrounding surfaces.

The knight, with his glowing eyes, could clearly see more effectively in the dark, and, if Gilead’s previous experience was to be born out, was stronger and more able in every way when and where the sun didn’t shine.

Gilead soon became accustomed to his surroundings. He adapted quickly and efficiently, using his heightened senses to compensate for any loss of visual clues.

Ahead of him, in the darkness, as Gilead approached a major hub where several tunnels of varying sizes and profiles, and various degrees of importance met, he saw a figure scuttling from one opening to another, and back again. Three of the tunnels were lit, and glowed oddly, casting a collection of shadows around the figure that seemed not to resemble its form at all. The figure appeared not to know where it was or where it was going. It seemed confused and not a little afraid. It was literally jumping at its own shadows.

Gilead pressed his back lightly against the cool stone wall of the corridor from which he was approaching the hub, making sure not to cast a shadow of his own. He slowed his breathing and remained totally still, watching.

The figure was joined by a second, which hurtled out of the mouth of one of the darkened tunnels, almost knocking into the creature that was already trying to find its way. Gilead could only think of them as figures or creatures. They might have been men, but he couldn’t be sure. They might have been boys, or even women. They were shorter than the average human male, and they were bent and ragged, the strange light conditions and multiple shadows hiding or distorting their forms.

As Gilead watched, the figure that had jumped at its own shadow suddenly lashed out at the other. It appeared to have a wide, short blade in its left hand, and moved quickly in frantic, staccato bursts.

It had clearly hit its target, because the other figure shrieked loudly, in obvious pain. It seemed to duck, and Gilead thought he saw it bare its teeth. Its head was entirely the wrong shape for a human, too flat on top and too narrow, and it appeared to end in an elongated jaw, too full of too-ragged teeth.

As the figures resolved, Gilead watched the creature being attacked fill its maw with the other’s arm, and thrash with extended claws, ripping at clothes and flesh, and tearing aside improvised armour.

Gilead allowed himself to breathe. The creatures, for it was clear that they were not human, were so caught up in their brutal skirmish that neither was likely to notice him.

The skaven beasts shrieked and clawed, turning and tumbling in a confusion of scrawny limbs, yellow teeth and claws, and mangy fur. Their blood, when it came, didn’t smell like human blood; it smelled of disease and decay, of rot and putrefaction.

They were dwellers in the undercrofts, sewers and tunnels that lay beneath most human habitations, and where they could not adopt lost and forgotten underground byways, they dug their own foetid labyrinth of warrens. Gilead did not wonder what they were doing here, for they belonged here, this was their natural habitat, borrowed by the undead knight for his evil ends.

As the ratmen rolled into the entrance of one of the darker, dingier tunnels, Gilead stepped deftly past them, listening at the mouths of the various corridors for sounds of battle. The skaven looked and sounded as if they were well on the way to killing each other, and the elf wanted no part of it. He had more pressing business. He was obliged to help the humans if he could, but more than that, he felt confident that he was reaching the end of a search that had taken decades, scores of years of his life.

Gilead listened for sounds that he might associate with the undead knight, for the dancing footfalls of his fast feet, for the swish of a tempered steel blade cutting the air, for the thunk and clang of ill-aimed weapons falling against his shield. All he could hear were the shrill calls of ratmen and the anguished cries and grunts of human farmers and guildsmen turned hunters and soldiers.

Before Gilead could decide which tunnel to follow, the hub was suddenly full of bodies teeming out of two of the corridors to his right. Some staggered and lurched while the more able-bodied pushed and shoved their way out. Many of the humans had jagged flesh wounds and all had rends and tears to their clothes.

A skaven horde, dozens strong, followed its prey into the hub, and, as they rushed in, the two rats who had been fighting looked up in astonishment, one on top of the other. One of the larger rats kicked them, and they struggled to get up and join the fray, at least for as long as their tattered bodies would allow.

Gilead drew his dagger. He would have preferred to avoid this mayhem, but he could not exit the hub for the mass of bodies fighting there, and, besides, the humans were being bested by the skaven, and the elf could not countenance the abject defeat of the local townsmen, knowing that their women and children were relying on them.

Gilead deftly cut the tendons in the back of one of the skaven’s legs, bringing it down, and with it, two of its brethren, as it dropped its rusting blade to reach out for anything that might keep it upright. The human under attack turned in surprise, only to find himself at close quarters with another of the rat-kind eager to finish what his comrade had begun rather than deal with a fresher opponent.

None of the filthy rodents wanted to face Gilead, and he found himself trying not to attack his foes from behind, blind-siding them. An elf warrior looked his opponent in the eye when he killed him.

A young man, slight of build, but quick and agile, a hoe held between his hands as if it were a staff, was thrusting his arms this way and that, whacking any rat that came within a couple of paces of him around the head, back and chest, or anywhere else that he might unbalance the foe. He soon realised that once any rat was on the floor it was unlikely to get up again. The skaven were weak creatures, feverish in their efforts, but shuffling and inelegant, and they were so short-lived by nature that they seldom had the chance to gain valuable experience in any sort of fight. They thrashed like fearful human infants, angry, petulant and entirely without discipline. It made them the perfect opponent in every regard, except one; they were unpredictable.

The young man swung his hoe, at waist height, once more. Gilead watched as the business-end hurtled towards a rat. The creature was a particularly ugly specimen with tufts of patchy hair protruding at odd angles from its skull and bony shoulders. The thing did not duck, but neither did the hoe blade connect with the rat’s torso, as Gilead had expected it would. The rat saw the swinging hoe, and thrust out its paws to catch hold of its shaft. The impact must have shaken the skaven’s elbow joints horribly, but it hung on, nevertheless, as the boy wrestled with it for possession of the improvised weapon.

Neither the boy nor the rat was going to let go. Hanging on to his portion of the hoe meant that the boy lost all his agility and had to plant his feet firmly, shoulder-width apart, to stop himself tipping over. He stood his ground, determined not to be bested by the ugly rat. Gilead noticed other skaven creatures reacting to the situation. They redoubled their efforts to deal with the humans, scrapping harder and faster, and squealing more loudly as they exerted every ounce of strength they had to free themselves of their individual battles, either by besting their human opponents or by escaping from them.

One rat came up behind the young man and took hold of the hoe’s handle, making it even more awkward for the boy to wield. Then two more came in low and began to bite and scratch at the boy’s ankles and legs. Seconds later, another rat hurled himself at the boy’s back, landing there, wrapping its ersatz arms around the boy’s neck in a chokehold.

Gilead switched his dagger to his left hand and drew his sword. He began to attack the rats closest to him, cutting them down with one swing of his sword or one deft thrust of his dagger, regardless of whether they were facing him or not; most of them were not. He made his way towards the boy, whose face was turning pale, but who stood his ground. The boy had two choices, he could keep a firm hold on his weapon and suffer the wounds that the other rats were inflicting on him with their snapping jaws and greasy claws, while the two on either end of the hoe disabled him, but he would surely die. Alternatively, he could let go of the weapon and have nothing left with which to defend himself against the massed skaven attack.

Gilead separated another rat from its life force, thrusting his dagger into the main artery in its groin and leaving it to bleed out, and he was right in front of the boy. The boy went from looking washed out to looking preternaturally pale. He had been heroic in his battle with the rats until they had found a way to get the better of him, and he still showed more courage than most, despite the colour draining from face. The elf was another matter entirely. Every sensible human was in awe of the elves, in awe of their stature, their prowess, and their long, long lives; in awe of their legendary standing.

Gilead saw mingled fear, respect and even hero-worship in the boy’s eyes. Then, the elf swung his sword at an angle and connected with soft tissue. The rat holding the bladed end of the hoe suddenly let go. As Gilead withdrew his sword for a second swing, the skaven clutched its paws to its belly and looked down at the blood and viscera leaking out of its abdomen.

The boy blinked, and a little of the colour flushed back into his cheeks. His eyes glistened and he nodded slightly at the elf, relieved to find an ally.

Without turning, the young man shoved the shaft of the hoe back into the rat behind him, winding it and snapping its fragile ribs, causing it to fall over the pair of skaven that were shredding his trousers and boots. He kicked them off, and then turned and backed hard into an adjacent wall to dislodge the creature from his back.

Encouraged by the boy, some of the men rallied and redoubled their efforts against the skaven, but the ratmen, if not stronger, were, at the very least, wilder, more ruthless and more accustomed to fighting. There were also a very great number of them.

Gilead continued to kill and maim the creatures in short order, but his real mission was to find the undead knight and prevent him causing any more damage. The skaven were opportunists, surely? Gilead thought it unlikely that they were in some way allied to the knight; he was a beast of an altogether different breed. He was as immortal as they were short-lived, as skillful in combat as they were clumsy, and as intelligent as they were brutish. The knight was more akin to the elf than to these sorry creatures.

The boy stayed close to Gilead, his new hero, wielding his hoe with innate finesse, felling a number of skaven while not actually managing to kill them.

‘Flee!’ Gilead said, the word alien in his mouth. He seldom spoke to humans, although he was able, preferring simply to listen to their conversations than join in with them and endure speaking in their ugly guttural language.

The boy looked at him, unsure what to think as the elf’s dulcet tones struggled with the human word.

‘Flee?’ he asked.

‘Flee,’ said Gilead, again, severing a rat’s sword-arm from its body, as it swung its spiked mace in a haphazard arc, trying to get under the elf’s guard.

Gilead and the boy were subduing the skaven horde more successfully as the elf fell into an easy rhythm and the boy’s confidence grew. Some of the men, on hearing Gilead speak, took the opportunity to follow his instruction and leave the skirmish, while some simply stared at the elf in awe and wonder.

Gilead pointed at a fallen weapon, a long, wooden handle with a blade strapped to one end with greasy twine and rags. It had belonged to a skaven rat, but Gilead indicated the boy might find it useful. The kid shook his head and rotated his hoe over his hands, showing how well-balanced the tool was.

‘No,’ said the boy.

Gilead was left in no doubt what he was being told ‘No’ to. The boy had no intention of fleeing and none of giving up the hoe he was using as a weapon.

A high-pitched war cry emanated from one of the tunnels, echoing around the hub, causing the skaven to stop fighting, and giving the few remaining live humans another opportunity to leave the scene.

The cry sounded again, closer and more urgent, the shriek a mixture of fear and loathing, distress and zeal.

Gilead cocked his head for a moment, assessing where the noise was coming from and at what distance. Then he nodded his head very slightly towards two of the tunnels to his left and one opposite. When they came, and they would come very soon, they would emerge from those three tunnels, and they would attack in their dozens or scores.

‘Flee!’ Gilead said again, but he knew that he was giving the order too late. He also knew that the brave boy would choose to stand his ground.

Gilead shrugged. He wanted to confront the knight, but he had no choice but to deal with the ratmen.

Then, at the edges of his hearing, Gilead detected the ping of tempered steel sparking off stone, and the swish of a deftly controlled blade cutting air. Perhaps the skaven were fighting alongside the undead knight after all, for Gilead knew in his heart that his enemy was bringing up the rear of the rat horde, careering down the dank tunnel towards him.

The first of the skaven emerged from the tunnel opposite Gilead’s position. They were smaller but firmer than many of the others, younger perhaps, less diseased, faster and more eager to defile the humans. They carried bladed weapons with long handles, and wore improvised armour, spiked headpieces and cuffs. Several of them also carried more of the torches, which glowed green and gave off a sickly sweet smell. The waxes and oils they used were neither fresh nor free from impurities.

As the skaven surged into the hub, they looked this way and that, and acted hastily rather than in concert. They touched their torches to anything that would burn. Soon, many of the corpses on the earth floor, both human and skaven, were burning slowly, flames licking lethargically through fur and cloth. One of the rats even managed to set fire to itself as it lowered its torch too close to the filthy rags that wrapped its backwards jointed legs. Gilead last saw it hopping and skipping about as if trying to escape the flames, but, instead, setting its twitching, frantic tail on fire.

Gilead watched for what felt like long moments as he counted the skaven pouring out of the tunnels, and assessed what damage they could do and what danger they were to him and to the humans still caught in the hub. He counted the torches, too, and worked out how long they might burn for and at what temperatures. He assessed how many of the humans would die or suffer lasting injuries, and decided that the figures were too high to be bourn.

Gilead had not been shadow-fast for many years, and had almost forgotten what it felt like. By turns it was liberating and tedious, exhausting and exhilarating. The elf had all the time he needed to prepare to fight the skaven, and all the time he needed to achieve the desired outcome of the battle. His sword and dagger moved faster than the eye could detect, even the flitting, nervous eye of the skaven. He cut them down as if they were nothing. He thrust and swung, lunged and flicked both weapons, never needing to parry, since none of the skaven were able to detect the movement of the blades in time to see them, let alone with time to mount a defence.

As Gilead worked his magic, and the few remaining humans did their best to keep out of his way, the skaven began to turn, feebly looking for an escape route back the way they had come. Ratmen began to push and shove their brethren into Gilead’s path in order to avoid the elf and his scything, invisible weapons.

Then he saw him.

High over the heads of the skaven, standing tall and lean and menacing, his eyes glowing in the low, green-tinged light shed by the skaven torches, stood the undead knight, fully armed and armoured.

Gilead spun out of the path of a pair of skaven, turning and barreling into a mass of clawing limbs and piercing squeals, and cut down two more of the ratmen who were trying to flee. His head came up for a moment, and he breathed deeply, steadying his senses as he harnessed his shadow-fast capabilities to home-in on the knight and his actions.

Gilead watched as the knight brought his sword around past his shoulder, giving his swing enough momentum for the blade to cut down two skaven at once, slicing across one belly and one back, severing a spine and gouging a gut, disabling both of the ratmen.

The knight fixed Gilead’s eyes with his own, and, shadow-fast, the elf looked deeply into the warrior’s glowing orbs for what felt like several minutes. He saw there fierce determination and the will to kill, but he also saw a kind of nobility, compassion even. Despite everything, despite the nature of the creature and his legacy, somehow, the undead knight felt like nothing so much as his ally.

The skaven were caught between two deadly foes, falling to the knight and the elf in roughly equal numbers, both warriors showing unheard-of prowess in the field of combat.

The young man stood by and watched in awe, raising his fist once or twice in celebration at some particularly powerful or subtle strike or blow, and filling the echoing chamber with calls to Sigmar.

Short minutes later, large numbers of skaven littered the hub and the entrances to all of the tunnels and corridors that led away from it. Some had managed to stagger away injured and dying, and one or two even showed some bravery, or perhaps foolishness, as they fought to the death, regardless of being seriously outclassed by their opponents.

The last of the skaven dealt with, Gilead turned his back on the small group of humans that remained underground, guarding them, his dagger and sword raised and ready before the knight.

The elf and the knight locked eyes once more as Gilead eased out of his shadow-fast state. He did not need the skill now, the very thing that would have surely overcome the knight in the glade those many days ago, and which he was now able to harness with ease, was no longer needed. It was for the best.

The knight raised his sword vertically in front of him, the hilt at his abdomen, the tip reaching beyond the top of his helm, in salute to Gilead. The elf sheathed his dagger and raised his own sword in a mirror image of his opponent. The knight closed his eyes and then opened them again slowly, and the elf nodded slightly, keeping his eyes on the warrior. The salute complete, Gilead sheathed his sword and turned to the boy.

‘You should have fled,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ said the boy.

‘Go now,’ said Gilead, and turned down the tunnel up which he had come.

‘It was the skaven,’ the boy called after him. ‘By Sigmar’s beard, it was always the skaven.’

THE BURNING

Nick Kyme

The following events take place between Salamander and Firedrake, the first two novels of the Tome of Fire trilogy. This series follows the Salamander Space Marines as they attempt to unravel the mysteries surrounding the Chapter.

First there was heat, then a sense of dislocation and a curious weightlessness as his body was propelled through humid air. It lathered his skin in a feverish steam-sweat that condensed into vapour as he moved. Pain followed swiftly, focussed in pins of agony impaled into his face, setting every nerve aflame. Reality was a series of flashes: light then dark, then hot and red.

Groggy, he lolled on his back. Ash, kicked up from the hard fall, billowed up in a grey pall. Coughing, he tried not to choke on it. Fire, fire in the eyes. Cinder flecks made them itch and sting. Scratch it out. Muffled voices spoke without meaning. The smell was potent, though. It was…

Burning.

A stark moment of revelation, and he realised it was his own flesh. His fingers…

They don’t feel like my own… smaller, not as strong.

…were just millimetres from the charred edges of his skin when a strong hand seized him.

‘Don’t…’ a voice warned. The faded quality dampened the sense of urgency it tried to convey. The accent was deep, thick. It had a silken tone that was instantly recognisable yet somehow incongruous.

‘What– what happened?’

My voice… strange, as if from someone else’s throat. No power, no resonance.

‘Dusk-wraiths,’ the other replied – he still couldn’t see him, his eyes registered only blurs of light and heat – as if that was explanation enough. ‘We must move. Come on, get up.’

‘I can’t see.’

So craven, so weak and… and… mortal. This is not my voice.

‘You will. Give it a moment.’

Strong hands gripped him again, hooking under the arms and hoisting him up. Sulphur tanged the breeze, acrid on his tongue. Sight returned slowly.

On the horizon stood a mountain of fire, its peaks wreathed in pyroclastic cloud as it spoke with a voice from the depths of the earth.

I know it. Was I born…?

A great plain of ash spread before him, grey like a tomb, flaking like cremated skin. In the distance, the mountain, imperious over its smaller brothers and sisters, reached up with craggy fingers to rake the incarnadine sky. Hot clouds billowed in the visceral firmament like blots of dissolute blood. Veins of lava bled down the mountain face, trailing to a vast lake of fire many kilometres away.

Ash, rock, flame – this was a hellish place, somewhere the damned came to suffer eternal torment. It was a red world, a world of magma rivers and razor-edged crags, of sulphuric seas and gorges of flame. It was beyond death.

One foot went in front of the other.

I used to be stronger than this…

His legs worked of their own volition, rather than through an effort of will. They were running when he spoke again, though he didn’t know from what.

‘Am I dead?’

Was I reborn?

The other turned, resolving through a milky film of slowly regained sight. He was tanned, etched with tribal scars and carrying a long spear. Even with the scaled hide draped across his body and the rough sandals on his feet, the man had a feral but noble bearing.

‘No, Dak’ir,’ he replied, nonplussed. ‘This is Nocturne.’

Home…

Behind him, Dak’ir heard the scrape and whirr of the turbines slowly closing on them. He dared not look back. Half-glances, snatched during the panicked flight, had revealed dark weapons and a long droning engine. Its nose ended in a jagged barb, its flanks were bladed and it hovered as if held aloft by the very air hazing around it. A metal stink, wet and hot, followed it in a thick miasma. Platforms either side of its black fuselage carried… daemons, black-skinned daemons.

The other had led them into a narrow gorge, scurrying down volcanic scree and through venting geysers of steam. It was hard going, even on foot, even unencumbered by armour or machineries…

I remember my armour.

…yet the turbine whirr followed.

Dusk-wraiths were dogged hunters.

I know them by another name.

Dak’ir heard their shrieking – an unnatural, eldritch clamour – grow with anticipation of the kill.

‘Follow!’ the other cried. Dak’ir lost him briefly in the smoke rolling across the crags. He fought to maintain pace, heart hammering in his chest…

Why do I only have one?

…but the other was too swift. He knew this plain. Dak’ir felt he should know it too, but it seemed distant in his memory, as if the sights were not his own to recall.

Keeping low, aware of the jagged bursts of displaced air overhead caused by weapons fire, Dak’ir barrelled around a twist in the rock.

Reaching the other side, he found the other was gone. He’d entered a belt of smoke, exuded from some venting crater, and did not appear again. Dak’ir fought his panic, held it at bay.

But I should know no fear…

Panic now and he was dead. He’d not even seen his predators clearly, yet knew in his core the sharp tortures they’d visit on his flesh.

I’ve seen their victims flayed alive, impaled on spikes…

Crashing through the ring of smoke, Dak’ir closed his eyes. Rough hands dragged him aside and into the shadow of a deep and hidden spur.

The other was there, a finger pressed tightly to his tanned lips.

Something large and fleet skidded past them, impossibly aloft on the hot air, breaching the smoke bank like a serrated knife through skin.

Three seconds lapsed before the whine of engines became the roar of explosions as the skimmer-machine was torn apart, its hellish riders thrown clear or devoured by fire.

An ululating war cry ripped from the other’s lips as he hefted his long, hunting spear.

Dak’ir found a recurve bow suddenly in his hands. He knew its contours well. This was his weapon.

And yet, it isn’t.

Nocking an arrow, he followed the other to the site of the wreckage.

More tanned warriors were emerging from the smoke and displaced ash. Some carried finely-wrought swords. A number of them even had long rifles, braced to their shoulders and spitting shot.

Dusk-wraiths lolled in the tortured remains of their skimmer-machine. Up close, it reminded Dak’ir of an Acerbian skiff but longer and infinitely more bladed. Skulls and other grotesque fetishes hung from spiked chains looped around its metal hull.

Its riders were armoured in a sort of black carapace reminiscent of an insect’s segmented outer shell. Not daemons at all, but still daemonic in their own depraved way. They were tall and lithe, cruelly barbed like their ship. Murderous coals burned in their eyes, like the embers of trapped hate.

I know these creatures, and yet they are not…

Several were dead, even before the spears, bolts and blades cut down the rest. The slain rotted and festered before Dak’ir’s eyes, their armour corroding on the arid breeze like metal rusting impossibly quickly until flaking almost to nothing. Their bodies became ash, meeting the grey patina of the plain and disappearing. By the end, there was nothing to suggest they’d ever been there.

Dak’ir lowered his bow, too stupefied to loose. The slaughter was over anyway.

The other approached him, wiping black ash and rust from his spear, and frowned.

‘Brother…’

Yes, I have many brothers, but you are not they.

‘Are you all right?’ The other came closer. Dak’ir felt the other’s hand upon his shoulder and only just realised he himself was similarly attired in sash and sandals.

‘I– I don’t…’

This is not my armour.

The other gestured for him to sit on a nearby rock. ‘Still dazed from the blast,’ he said mainly to himself. ‘It’s me, N’bel.’

I’ve heard that name before. It’s very old.

Dak’ir looked up, his eyes and senses suddenly sharp. The name resonated but he didn’t know why.

‘Brother…’ he echoed, and clasped N’bel’s arm in a warrior’s greeting. ‘I know you.’

It was called a drygnirr, a fire-lizard, one of many that stalked the volcanic plains of Nocturne. It was a kind of salamander, the lesser kin of the monstrous firedrakes that dwelled deep in the mountains near to the magma’s warmth. Dak’ir remembered this much of his surroundings as he awaited the metal-shaper.

Scurrying over the scattered rocks, the creature regarded him intently. A fire burned in its eyes, casting a glow about its onyx face. Barring a thin spine of blue, its scales were utterly black.

‘What do you want, little lizard?’

‘Don’t let the others hear you talking to yourself.’ N’bel appeared, carrying something in his hands. ‘They already doubt an Ignean’s mettle in battle.’ N’bel leaned in close and clapped a strong palm on Dak’ir’s shoulder. ‘Not I though, brother.’

Dak’ir nodded at the other Nocturnean’s camaraderie, so familiar and yet so strange to him at the same time. He had felt the prejudice at his Ignean heritage before, too.

That was another time, spoken by another’s lips.

When he glanced back towards the rocks, the drygnirr was gone. Perhaps it was just a figment of his imagination, and he wondered briefly if his doubters might be right.

‘Here.’ N’bel proffered a silver mask. ‘Pyrkinn flesh,’ he explained as Dak’ir took the mask. ‘It’ll quicken healing.’

The metal-shaper, a bald-headed, broad-shouldered warrior with folded arms like bands of iron, nodded sagely behind him. Unlike the other tribal warriors, the metal-shaper carried a stout hammer across his back. White ash marked his body in sigils representing the anvil and the tools of the forge. His skin was even darker than N’bel’s and his glossy eyes captured the fire of the overhead sun and blazed.

Eyes of fire… Skin as black as onyx…

Dak’ir put on the mask. It only covered half of his face, the wounded part, but he felt the pain ease immediately.

My face was burning when I heard them cry out his name.

‘My skin…’ he said, realising for the first time that it was much lighter than N’bel’s.

‘Ha! Ignean-ash. A cave-dweller sees less of the Nocturnean sun, Dak’ir.’ N’bel looked concerned. ‘Are you sure you’re well?’

‘Just a little disorientated. What happened to the wraiths?’

N’bel became pensive. ‘Gone.’ He gestured to the plain beyond where several warriors assembled. One of them wore scaled robes and a snarling lizard mask. He waved a crooked staff, threaded with curving fangs and desiccated reptilian tails. A chest-plate of saurian bones armoured his muscled torso. The others watched him intently as he padded the earth: taking up handfuls, tasting, scenting, releasing and finally repeating all over again.

‘The shaman will find their trail, though,’ he added sternly. ‘The earth never lies.’

On Nocturne, the earth and its people were one. She was a cruel mother, the world of fire, capable of terrible destruction and death uncountable. During the Time of Trial, she would crack and tear, spill her blood and weep tears of lava that threatened to consume the land and the very people scratching an existence on her rocky flesh. The earth gave as it took, however. It was part of the great cycle of birth, death and rebirth. She would take you back, the fire-mother, volatile Nocturne, take you back into her heart and her bosom. Life ended in fire; so too was it begun.

Resurrection was merely an aspect of tribal culture, of Promethean Creed. Nothing that ever came to live and die on Nocturne was ever truly gone. It was simply changed, reborn into something else.

Am I ‘else’, am I reborn into this unfamiliar flesh? My bones were like iron, my skin as strong as steel. I was invulnerable. And now… now… just the burning.

The shaman’s bond with the earth was great, certainly stronger than any in the modest war party. Ash flakes, smouldering craters, the very grains of the earth spoke to him in a voice only he could understand.

Dak’ir had ridden with them, a long file of tribal warriors mounted on the backs of sauroch.

Scaled, bull-like creatures, the sauroch were known neither for speed nor ferocity. But they were strong and tenacious, their hides thick and capable of bearing great burdens over long distances. Ash nomads, the transient tribes who shunned the Sanctuaries, travelled the Scorian Desert on their broad backs.

I have soared through the skies on wings of thunder…

In the blood red of Helldawn, dactylids circled. The winged lizards, combined with the whispers of the earth, had brought the shaman to a rust-red ridge veined with iron-grey. Slowly, the saurochs had followed him and there at a rocky summit the hue of old blood, they found the rest of the dusk-wraiths. Shrieking, screaming, laughing that hollow sound from throats of dust; it was a cacophony. A heavy and oppressive shroud laid upon them all, the sauroch riders.

Dak’ir could not remember the journey, though he did recall the drygnirr watching from the darkness of caves or the peaks of volcanic hills. It shadowed him, neither guide nor predator, merely an observer only he could see. It was as if the creature’s eyes could burn right into his soul and strip away the innermost secrets of his mind.

A scryer, psyker… I know you, brother. Your gaze… it burns. I burn.

‘We attack from three sides,’ N’bel was outlining his plan to the others. He’d dismounted and carved a crude map of the camp with a stick in the dirt, less than twenty warriors gathered around him. He beckoned Dak’ir closer into the circle.

‘Brother?’ The concern etched N’bel’s face as clearly as his honour scars.

I wear them too, burned into my flesh. They are a record of my deeds.

‘I’m fine.’ Dak’ir nodded for him to continue.

N’bel gave him one last look, before he went on. ‘Three prongs,’ – he made a trident from his fingers – ‘two from the east and west as a diversion. A third, much smaller, party will enter from the north where we are now.’

Dak’ir’s gaze strayed to the deep valley below the ridge as he imagined the route N’bel had inscribed with his stick. The path was strewn with crags and sulphur pits. The cinder and ash blown from the nearby caldera of slumbering volcanoes would render the ground red-hot underfoot.

I have walked across fire. I have felt it beat inside my breast. With it I shall… The rest of the litany is lost to me. The burning… it clouds my mind and thoughts.

At the nadir of the valley was a camp of wire and blades. Sharp structures, little more than metal pavilion tents like spikes, carried markings in a strange script. Even the alien letters were edged, as if merely speaking them could cleave your tongue. More skimmer-machines, like the one lying broken on the ash plains, hovered languidly nearby. Some were tethered to bloodied staves of iron; others roamed the perimeter for the entertainment of their riders. Distant figures fled before those machines, pursued by a savage pack.

One, a dark-skinned Nocturnean limping badly, was skewered by a dusk-wraith’s spear and Dak’ir averted his gaze. The riders screamed mockingly in tune with their victims, parodying their agony.

It was a slave camp this place and, judging by the sheer number of metal tents dotting the ground below, the flesh-tally was high. Dak’ir counted fifteen of the ‘tents’. No telling how many were clustered in those metal cages. A larger one at the centre of the camp drew his eye.

N’bel meant to free his people. The skimmer-machine ambushed on the ash plain had been drawn into a trap so they could follow its trail along the earth and find this graven place. He and Dak’ir had been the bait, the wound upon his face…

The burning.

…was the price of such bravery.

Dak’ir knew this, despite his fragmented memory, the sense of otherness, not just about this place, but also this time.

‘Dak’ir…’

He turned and caught a flash of lightning on the sun. It was a sword, its blade serrated and gleaming.

I know this blade… No. I know of one much like it. Its chained teeth sing a symphony of death.

‘You lost it on the ash plain. A warrior is only as good as his weapon, brother.’

You sound like someone I knew, someone I fought with a long time ago… or will a long time from now.

Dak’ir nodded and looked down into the valley. The slavers’ depraved revels were painting the earth a deep, visceral red. The heavy scent of fresh copper tainted the sulphur breeze.

‘With whom do I ride, N’bel?’

That was better. I sound something like myself, the old strength returning…

N’bel brought his sauroch up alongside Dak’ir’s. They were both so close to the edge. Another step and they’d be charging down the scree.

‘You are with the northern party.’ He smiled, but there was no mirth to it. ‘You ride with me, brother.’

They abandoned the saurochs a hundred metres from the camp, going the rest of the way on foot. The valley was littered with rocks and deep crevices thick with sulphurous smoke. There were plenty of places to hide from the dusk-wraith sentries. The earth and Nocturne’s people were one. They could blend together as fire blends with rock.

Dak’ir sent a whickering metal shaft through the creature’s neck. It crumpled, clutching its punctured throat. By the time he and N’bel had reached it, the dusk-wraith was already an emaciated husk.

‘Why do they wither to ash like this?’ he hissed.

Because they aren’t really here… ‘Focus on the burning. Use it.’ These are not my words inside my mind…

N’bel shook his head. ‘No matter how many we kill, there is always the same remaining at the camp. If I believed in it, I would say they cannot die because they are not truly alive.’

And neither are you, my brother…

A second sentry fell to a hurled spear. Another Nocturnean pairing appeared briefly before becoming lost again in the rocks and smoke.

The heart of the slaver camp was close. They’d penetrated the outer ring and were moving into the vicinity of the metal tents. The sun was still low, low enough to cast long, red shadows across the desert.

Dak’ir was about to advance when he saw the drygnirr again. It crouched atop the shell of a dusk-wraith’s corpse, blinking with eyes of flame.

‘Why do you watch me?’

He sees into your mind… my mind. I feel it… the burning… Vulkan, give me strength.

The drygnirr was occluded by a sudden stream of smoke. Once it had cleared, the creature was gone again.

Another shaft nocked to his bow, Dak’ir moved on.

Six of them crept silently into the dusk-wraiths’ camp, slaying sentries invisibly as they went. The rest of the slavers were swollen on carnage, in a drug-induced soporific slumber brought on by the brazier pans blazing lambently around the camp.

Upon reaching the first of the tents, a warning cry rang out.

The others had launched their attack. East and west, sauroch riders drove at the slavers to steal their attention.

‘Swiftly now,’ whispered N’bel, up off his haunches and running low to the first of the tents.

Dak’ir was right behind him.

N’bel ushered him on to the next tent, but gripped Dak’ir’s arm before he could go.

‘What?’

‘That’s where you’ll find what you seek.’ N’bel was pointing to the larger structure, the one at the heart of the camp. ‘He awaits.’

‘Who, brother? Who awaits?’

I can smell his decaying breath, feel it against my cheek, despite the burning…

‘Your enemy is there.’

‘My enemy? But what about the people?’ Dak’ir was struggling but N’bel would not let him go. Dusk-wraiths had noticed the commotion. Their forces were moving through the camp.

N’bel smiled. ‘We are already dead, Dak’ir. We’ve been dead for aeons, brother. Now, go!’ He pushed Dak’ir off, who stumbled and almost fell.

He was about to turn, to demand the truth, when a burst of rifle fire sliced overhead. Shard ammunition tore up the earth and shredded the flank of a tent. Dak’ir was about to loose when he saw another dusk-wraith, then a third and a fourth, heading towards them.

The large tent was near. He dropped his bow and ran.

The whine of automatic fire from the dusk-wraiths’ weapons hurt his ears. They merged with the baying of the saurochs as they were slaughtered. Somewhere a skimmer-machine exploded.

‘We are dead, Dak’ir, but you still live. Go!’ N’bel’s final words were a shout.

Dak’ir didn’t look back.

Crashing bolter fire rings my ears. I am within my gunmetal cocoon, surging to the planet below.

His path to the large tent was suddenly blocked by one of the dusk-wraiths. She was masked, the face long and elongated to tapered spikes at chin and forehead, and grinned evilly. The sun glinting off her wicked blades, held in either hand, turned the metal to the colour of blood. She was lithe and deadly, with the body of an athlete and a torturer’s confidence.

She rushed Dak’ir, a murderer’s snarl pulling at ruby lips visible through a slit in the mask.

He scraped his sword along the ground, kicking up a line of cinder-flecked dust into her face. She hissed as the hot flakes stung her, but drove on.

Dak’ir felt a cut to his ribs, then the warm splash of blood down his side. They’d crossed each other, like duelling riders, blade to blade.

I must control my breathing, remember the routines learned in the solitorium. My hearts beat with the thrill of battle.

She came again, the dusk-wraith witch, slashing down with her blades as a pair. Dak’ir parried, sparks spitting off the metal of his sword. A kick to his stomach sent him sprawling across the hot sand and into the tent.

Pain lanced his body. It was like he was on fire.

Must… fight… it… The burning… will consume me if I don’t.

Dak’ir waited several moments in the dark, watching the slivered entrance, waiting for his assailant. But she never came. He was alone.

The air smelled strange, like being underground, and the scent of soot and ash was redolent. As his eyes slowly adjusted, Dak’ir reached out a hand to touch the walls of the tent. Half expecting a barb or spike, he was cautious, but instead of a cut, all he felt was stone. The walls were rough and craggy, and hot against his tentative fingers.

The sensation was momentary. As he felt his way ahead in the dark, the walls changed again, smooth and cold as metal should be.

There were no captives, nor any dusk-wraiths. Yet, N’bel had mentioned an enemy.

The tent was larger within than it appeared on the outside. At the end of its gloomy length, Dak’ir saw a figure seated upon a throne. It was a silhouette, a veritable giant, and armoured unless he was mistaken.

‘Come forth!’ Dak’ir challenged, brandishing his sword.

The figure did not answer, did not even flinch.

‘If you are my enemy then face me.’

Still nothing.

Dak’ir crept closer.

From the corner of his eye he thought he saw movement… a flash of reptilian eyes, a streak of blue on black. But when he looked, the drygnirr wasn’t there.

He watches, even now… even as I burn.

The figure on the throne was mocking him, Dak’ir was certain. He would cut the–

A thrown spear tore into the side of the tent and a shaft of light spilled in. It lit the figure, a silhouette no longer. His armour was pitted and broken, as if it had been corroded by time or–

The melta’s beam cutting across the temple. There is nothing I can do, even when it touches my face…

Though badly damaged, much of the paint chipped away, Dak’ir saw the armour had once been green. A pair of wings with a flame in the centre emblazoned the warrior’s shattered breastplate. Fingers of bone poked out from his ruined gauntlets. A chest cavity of dust-choked ribs yawned through the ragged gaps in his plastron. A skull, locked in a rictus-grin, regarded Dak’ir where a battle-helm had long ceased to be.

A word, a name, trembled on Dak’ir’s lips as he approached the armoured cadaver.

‘Ka… Ka…’

He was my captain. My guilt gives him form in this place.

Dak’ir was less than half a metre away – ‘Ka… Ka…’ – when the corpse-warrior reached out with his deathless hands and seized Dak’ir by the neck.

‘Diiiiieeeee…’ it hissed, naming itself and damning Dak’ir in one word, though its rictus jaw never moved.

Yes, that was his name. I cannot forget.

Dak’ir was choking. He scrabbled at the bony fingers but they wouldn’t relent. Blood pulsed in his ears and he felt his eyes bulging as his brain was starved of oxygen.

The burning… Use it!

He had to drag some breath into his lungs or be strangled by the terrible undead thing before him. That was when he noticed the air bleeding out of the room, devoured hungrily by the flames wreathing his body. It burned, a flame so invasive it went to the nerves and threatened to overwhelm Dak’ir.

The skeleton’s grip loosened.

Dak’ir choked through fire-cracked lips.

‘What is happening?’

Let it burn us. Embrace the flame. It is yours to mould…

The fire became an inferno. It roared outwards in a wave, cascading from Dak’ir’s body, exploding the skeleton to ash with its fury, yet he was untouched.

Pain wracked him, bringing him to his knees as the fire rolled out, devouring the tent, sloughing the metal. It boiled outwards in a white-hot tempest. Blinking against the rising sun, Dak’ir watched the rest of the camp as it was consumed. His brothers fled before the flame but none could outrun it. N’bel fell last of all, screaming as the burning stripped flesh from bone and turned a man into a dark shadow upon the scorched earth.

It was out of his control now, a fiery maelstrom engulfing all upon the plain, consuming all of Nocturne in a relentless wave.

Dak’ir threw his head back, as the fire turned on him at last, and screamed.

Pyriel staggered as the blast wave struck him. He was standing in the pyre-chamber below Mount Deathfire. Crushing the totem creature of the drygnirr in his fist, now little more than a simulacra wrought of flame, he hastily erected a psychic shield against which the waves of conflagration broke eagerly. He could barely see the figure crouched at the eye of the flame storm, but heard Dak’ir’s screaming clearly.

White fire lit the Librarian starkly, flickering across the blue of his power armour and the many arcane artefacts chained about his person. The drakescale cloak Pyriel wore on his back snapped and curled with the tangible heat.

Sweat beaded the Librarian’s forehead. He felt it running down to the nape of his neck. Never before had he been so tested, never before seen such a potent reaction to the burning. To his horror, the edges of his psychic barrier were cracking against the fire tide. He tried to reinforce them but found he had neared his limits.

‘Vulkan’s strength…’ he gasped, beseeching his primarch and was answered.

Master Vel’cona emerged from a cascade of flame into the room, his eyes ablaze with cerulean power. His armour, only a suggestion through the heat haze, was more ancient than Pyriel’s. Akin in some ways to the earth shamans of old Nocturne, it was festooned with reptilian bones and dripped in scale.

Together, the two Librarians pushed the fire tide back until it was nought but wisps of smoke. A blackened crater outlined Dak’ir’s crouched position. He was naked, steam and fire exuding from his scarred flesh. The searing legacy of the melta beam he’d suffered on Stratos flared angrily on the side of his face, a physical reminder of how he was different to his fire-born brothers. The burning had destroyed his armour, rendering it an ashen patina shrouding his body.

Though he remained still and upright, his head tucked into his chest, arms drawn up around his legs protectively, Dak’ir was unconscious.

The entire pyre-chamber was a charred, soot-stained ruin. It was little more than bare rock, its entrance sealed by a pair of reinforced blast doors, but fire-blackened wall to wall. The only void was where Pyriel had been standing. The air was so hot it hazed, and reeked heavily of sulphur.

The ash cocoon encasing Dak’ir cracked and he slumped to the earth.

Vel’cona regarded the would-be Lexicanum impassively. ‘He has survived the burning.’

It wasn’t a question, but Pyriel answered it anyway.

‘Yes.’ He was still breathless from his exertions but recovering.

‘And?’ Vel’cona turned his penetrating gaze onto the other Librarian. The fuliginous darkness of the room seemed to coalesce around him, rendering him indistinct and shadowed.

‘Incredible power, like nothing I’ve ever seen.’

Vel’cona’s eyes flared like blazing blue sapphires in the gloom. ‘Can it be controlled?’

Pyriel removed his battle-helm, revealing a sweat-swathed face. His scalp was excessively damp. Only now was the cerulean fire in his ember-red eyes fading, such was the power he’d been forced to call upon. He delivered his answer in a low voice.

‘On this occasion, he could not.’

‘Saviour or destroyer…’ Vel’cona muttered. ‘Nocturne in the balance… A low-born, one of the earth, will pass through the gate of fire.’

Pyriel was confused. ‘Master?’

‘The Tome of Fire reveals much,’ said Vel’cona on his way out of the chamber. He had to use a bolt of psychic force to open the metal blast doors. They were fused together. ‘But it does not tell us everything. Who can say what the Ignean’s role will be in the turning tide? His flame may flicker and die, it may roar into a conflagration. Much is not yet known, but I sense a visitor approaching who may help us in our understanding.’

Pyriel had been hoping for a more straightforward explanation, but he had learned long ago not to question the vagaries of the Chief Librarian of the Salamanders.

‘What is your will, master?’

‘Keep training him.’

‘And if he loses control again?’

‘Do what you must,’ Vel’cona’s voice echoed from the darkness beyond the fire-smote room. ‘Destroy him.’

IN THE SHADOW OF THE EMPEROR

Chris Dows

‘Barrabas is dead. We need to go now.’

Commissar Abdiel shouted over the screaming hiss of air from a hundred ruptures leaking life from the Merciless Fist. Cleaved in two by the space hulk, any hope of repairing the venerable vessel was lost. If they didn’t act fast, this once-proud cathedral of destruction would be their tomb. Abdiel scowled at the impeccably dressed sub-lieutenant, the kind of irrepressible and inexperienced junior officer he loathed, waiting for him to do something.

‘He could have survived, sir. He should be back–’

The roof of the Dictator-class cruiser’s massive drop-ship bay emitted an ear-splitting crack, making the few surviving members of the salvage crew duck in unison with the two officers. All eyes darted upwards to search for the source of the dreadful sound, creating a second’s pause that they could scarcely afford. Recovering, they continued scuttling between the menacing silhouettes of a dozen Valkyrie assault carriers, desperately trying to get the battered drop-ship ready for flight. A score of bedraggled infantrymen looked on nervously in the middle of the deck, unsure what to do amongst the frenzied activity around them.

‘We have no time, Eutychus. Believe me, I’d rather have killed him myself but I’ll just have to live with the disappointment. There’s no one left outside this launch bay.’

As the amber emergency lighting continued to dim and cast ever-feebler shadows in the massive hangar, the young man realised that the commissar was right. Despite his lowly posting and rumoured fall from grace, Eutychus had to respect the fact that Abdiel was still the Word of the Emperor on the Merciless Fist, even though he was a spiteful, desiccated old bastard. And with Captain Barrabas missing, that put him, Alameth Eutychus, in charge of the evacuation. All the saviour pods had been deployed when the cruiser had been crippled in battle with eldar pirates, reducing her to the shattered state that this salvage force had inherited. This rapidly disintegrating launch deck was their only way off the ship. Clearing his throat, he shouted over to the portly form of Armsman Haddar, who was staring intently at the vaulted roof above.

‘How many Valkyries are serviceable, Haddar?’

The squat, once-muscular man snapped his gaze away, his jowly face wobbling with the sudden movement.

‘Well lad–’ The armsman caught his mistake as he saw Abdiel’s fist tightening on his chainsword hilt.

‘Apologies, sub-lieutenant. Five serviceable, but we’ve only got four pilots, including yourself.’ He paused and blinked. ‘That won’t get all of us out of here.’

‘How many is “all”?’ spat Abdiel.

‘Forty-four, commissar. Not including the infantry.’

Eutychus swallowed hard. Forty-four out of an original compliment of four thousand, and that was a skeleton crew for a vessel this size. He had to make a decision or Abdiel would take charge. Ship-wide vox was out and he could only hope the captain was on his way from the astropath’s chamber, but that would take at least twenty minutes. By his reckoning, they had five at the most. He could see the furthest Valkyrie powering up with a roar, its twin exhausts creating a furious brilliance behind it.

‘Get those troops onto that ship. The separator bulkheads have gone, so we’ll have to launch together. Tell–’

A chest-thumping bang pounded through the air and the deck dropped, sending men sprawling and Valkyries sliding with a painful squeal towards the sealed launch doors. Eutychus was up first, and made the mistake of attempting to help Abdiel to his feet. Even in the fading light he could see the telltale stretched skin from a dozen basic juvenat treatments on the sinewy neck, a vein throbbing with fury as the old man’s coal-dark eyes burned into his.

‘Save your help – and your prayers – for your absent captain,’ growled the commissar.

Nothing less than a catastrophe would compel Jahath Barrabas to set foot inside an astropathic sanctum, but the current situation fitted that description perfectly. The first space hulk had appeared out of warp with no warning, its random jagged mass instantly annihilating three of the five cruisers in this Emperor-forsaken salvage fleet. The second hulk just missed them, but Barrabas knew the capricious and cruel nature of the warp and there might well be more on the way. Eutychus could organise the evacuation; Barrabas needed to get an emergency message out. For that, he had to endure this dank, stinking cavern and its babbling occupant.

The sinewy hands of Astropath Transcendent Sharah gripped the arms of his elaborately carved wooden throne, his sunken eye sockets eerily lit by the hundred burning incense orbs surrounding his wizened form. Huge metal support beams arced upwards in the domed interior, reminding Barrabas of a starving man’s ribcage, mirroring the psyker’s emaciated carcass. Blood began to run from Sharah’s cadaverous nose, a scarlet line on parchment skin staining his filthy green cloak.

‘Clouds darken folding in blackness. Deep. Too deep. Salvage convoy two-three-ten reports three cruisers destroyed. The Genocide and the Merciless Fist survive. My soul is bound to His. No clarity to send. Repeat. Attempt.’

Barrabas had seen astropaths get twitchy before, and while he didn’t pretend to understand the workings of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, he knew enough about the massive upheaval caused by sudden translation from the warp to know it was the source of his confusion and agony. Sharah had cast his voice into the void and Barrabas was just wasting his time now. As he turned to go, the ghastly creature’s voice dropped an octave.

‘The Emperor’s tears wash our sins. The weight of House Barrabas is mighty, captain of the lost. Living in His shadow. Crawl into the Emperor’s light. Into the light.’

Barrabas was mesmerised. Sharah was talking about him, his family, his shame. The contorted skeleton of a face turned and spoke in a barely audible whisper, its body unmoving in the massive wooden chair.

‘My darkness gathers. The maelstrom awaits. Habitable planet in range. Arboreal. Barrabas… wait. Something stirs in the scarlet dawn.’

Shadows danced from the glowing braziers as the deck began to vibrate, many shaking themselves free of their rusting chains and crashing to the floor in a bloom of fire. The throne shook violently on its dais, yanking the astropath’s heavy hood loose. Grasping desperately at his skull, the psyker doubled over and vomited blood onto the floor. The Merciless Fist pitched to starboard as if swatted by a giant hand, throwing Barrabas towards the disgusting, screaming creature.

Barrabas retreated over the raised deck plates as the spasming Sharah clawed wildly at his face, blood pouring from his nostrils and eye sockets. He’d never seen the like and felt in his gut that it was the prelude to something truly horrific.

He was right.

The astropath’s head exploded, spattering slippery gore over the captain’s filthy uniform. Fragments of bone lanced into Barrabas’s stubble and he wiped them away as he stumbled into the corridor. The scene of carnage that met him took his breath away. The Merciless Fist was mortally wounded, the shriek and scream of men and metal from a dozen decks uniting ship and crew in their death throes. Another space hulk had appeared, not close to the ship, but inside it – structural integrity was collapsing on both of the parted sides, pressure bulkheads and blast doors vainly trying to slow its inevitable end. Miraculously, the space hulk’s randomly shaped protrusions provided a fast, precarious short cut straight down to the launch decks. Barrabas lost no time in clambering onto its shuddering surface, praying to the Emperor that the Merciless Fist wasn’t torn asunder before he reached his goal.

Eutychus squirmed inside the open cockpit of the battered Valkyrie, readying it for take-off. Three fully loaded, and equally decrepit, attack craft waited for his signal. Out on the deck behind, Abdiel gravely murmured the commissar’s benediction to the nine crewmembers who were staying behind. He was shadowed by the stocky form of First Mate Barat, the closest thing to an ally the commissar had. The crewmen crouched and prayed in near-darkness, gripping metal aquilas on filthy neck lanyards or loose in their bloodied hands, accepting their fate as the Emperor’s will. His duty over, Abdiel turned to leave, but was blown off his feet by a massive explosion in the hangar’s rear wall. A ragged tear of light and heat exposed the deck’s vast central corridor. Staggering to his feet, the old man squinted at what he saw and muttered a curse. Barat shook his shaven head in disbelief.

The smouldering form of Barrabas gesticulated towards the fifth Valkyrie’s open hold as he ran for it, ignoring them both.

‘Come on lads, no time to sit around. Let’s get off this wreck.’

Scrambling to their feet, the once-condemned men threw themselves at the drop-ship’s underbelly. Barrabas felt his way into the open cockpit of the Valkyrie pilot’s seat, detached his sword and dropped it to one side. Pulling on his helmet, he met Eutychus’s open-mouthed stare through the filthy glacis canopy with a thumbs up. He reached for the closing handle, but Abdiel’s gnarled hand stopped his downward tug and the commissar climbed into the co-pilot’s seat behind him.

‘Glad you could join us, commissar,’ he muttered. Abdiel merely growled in response.

Powering up the engines, Barrabas initiated an emergency depressurisation of the bay and immediately realised his mistake. The weakened inner frame buckled and the cavernous interior’s roof creased downwards, flattening the outmost Valkyrie, pressing it into the bay floor. The massive launch doors ground open with painful slowness, sucking the inferno from behind them into space along with countless spinning bodies. With just a hair’s-breadth clearance, the four remaining Valkyries roared into the void as the Merciless Fist was torn apart.

‘I have to hand it to your family, Barrabas, when you destroy a vessel of the Imperial Navy, you are very thorough.’ Abdiel wrung out every drop of sarcasm from the venomous jibe, but Barrabas was too busy navigating the massive chunks of twisted metal spinning and wheeling around them. Flicking from internal to ship-to-ship vox, Barrabas calmly spoke into the headset.

‘Single file behind me. Eutychus at the rear. Lock onto my approach vector.’

Jahath Barrabas was a brilliant flyer, one of the main reasons he’d been allowed to join the Imperial Navy despite his family history. Had he stayed a pilot, things might have worked out significantly better but, in his younger days, Barrabas had been determined to prove he wasn’t cut from the same genetic cloth as his disgraced grandfather, whose actions as a Naval captain had led to the destruction of an Emperor-class battleship and most of its complement. Unfortunately for him, one of the few survivors was the man directly behind him. Because Abdiel hadn’t immediately countermanded his grandfather’s disastrous orders and executed him, the Commissariat had found him guilty of gross negligence. Little wonder he had held a grudge for all these years.

A blossom of flame caught Barrabas’s eye and he instinctively took evasive manoeuvres. With every muscle tensed, he shrank into the pilot’s seat as the engines of the Merciless Fist’s amputated aft section roared overhead, a rainbow arc of fire pushing debris away behind them. Instantly changing course, he headed for the torn-off stern, to Abdiel’s alarm.

‘What in the Emperor’s name are you doing? We’ll be incinerated!’

Barrabas gritted his teeth and hit the thrusters, ducking and weaving through the shower of debris. Smaller pieces thumped into the nose plating and leading edges of the wings. It was only a matter of time before a chunk went straight through one of the engines, so the perfectly clear pathway created by the dying cruiser’s engines was their best – their only – way out of the maelstrom. Barrabas saw a tide of wreckage smash into the Genocide’s port side, gas erupting from several burning fractures. No ships left its bays.

He looked back to a sea of frozen bodies appearing as if from nowhere. They careened off the nose and hull, like rag dolls thrown by an angry child. Grief at the loss of his crew and command would have to wait. Grimly, he ploughed straight through them.

Curving upwards, the line of Valkyries banked as one and skirted the rapidly fading tip of the Merciless Fist’s dismembered exhausts before turning hard to starboard, using the wreck’s wake as a passage into open space.

‘Captain, I’m venting air from–’

Barrabas and Abdiel grimaced at the shouting sub-lieutenant.

‘Calm down, Eutychus. We all are. These crates are barely fit for atmospheric flight, let alone any extended time in space. Reduce the oxygen supply by twenty per cent to the hold and use your rebreathers. If there aren’t enough, then they’ll have to share. Get scanning for a habitable landing zone.

A third voice crackled into their headsets, the low tones of Tug Pilot Zebah. Barrabas was glad to hear his voice. Zebah had been with him since the beginning of his illustrious career as a salvage captain. He trusted him with his life. Like the majority of the senior crew he’d carefully assembled over the years, Zebah would joke that they lived on their bellies, crawling from one battered wreck to the next, but their gallows humour and dishevelled appearance didn’t stop them yearning for the glory of battle and a chance to prove themselves to the Emperor – despite what Abdiel thought.

‘Sir, I’ve detected a possible landing zone. It’s close.’

Barrabas could feel the commissar’s eyes burning into the back of his head. He allowed himself a sigh of relief.

‘Take us in, Zebah. I’ll lead upon planetfall. Activate the automated distress beacon with the coordinates. There may be survivors from the fleet able to rescue us.’ The lack of response in his headset was telling.

Alternating the vox-switch, he spoke to his passengers.

‘It’s going to be an uncomfortable ride, gentlemen. Prep any weapons or equipment you can find. We’re going to need them.’

Despite having no real idea where they were going, Barrabas knew that it was infinitely better than where they had been and at least offered some feeble ray of hope.

The howl of wind and turbines combined to pummel Barrabas’s hearing as the Valkyrie plummeted across the blood-red sky of the planet. His hands were numb and his knuckles burned with pain as he gripped the violently shaking control stick between his tensed legs. As they descended, Barrabas cast about for a suitable landing spot between breaks in the low, wispy cloud, but the surface was a maze of differing levels, some little more than corridors of black soil on top of crumbling stone projections, forming gaps too narrow for the unpredictably responding drop-ship to navigate. Finally, a wide, open plateau came into view and, while there were ranges of raised columns in the distance and elevated embankments on either side, it looked like their best bet.

‘All ships, try to remember as much of the geography as you can.’

Easing the nose down, the ship dropped sharply to the right as the starboard engine exploded. Alarms wailed and warning runes flashed, but he didn’t need any reminding of his situation. The drop-ship fell into a shuddering dive and he levelled off just in time for the underside of the Valkyrie to plane away beneath his feet and a small boulder make short work of the port wingtip. As the nose dug a furrow into the ground he tried to compensate with the single engine but the Valkyrie rammed headfirst into a raised bed of rust-coloured rock, pitching him upside down. His sword fell onto the roof of the canopy and, absurdly, he feared he might become the first ever captain to be decapitated in such a way. Abruptly the ship stopped and, once the soil-muffled whine of the dying engine had subsided, there was dark silence.

Barrabas heard voices, rattling and hammering, and was suddenly aware it was brighter behind his closed eyes and colder around his ringing ears. Eager hands clawed at the straps holding his body into the seat, and he dropped with a thump. Then he was on his back, looking up at broiling sepia clouds and the bloody, frowning faces of Armsman Toah and First Mate Barat. They were dressed in infantry fatigues salvaged from the hold and had a variety of small arms dangling from hastily-attached webbing.

‘Report,’ he croaked.

‘We’re all alive, captain, although Mortok’s broken his arm. Narris and Lubek are working on a short-range transmitter they found, and the others are gathering up ammo from the hold.’ Barat wiped blood from a gash in his sweating head as he spoke, while the reedy form of Toah helped Barrabas to his feet.

Straightening his tunic as best he could, Barrabas clenched his fists to coax sensation back into his shaking fingers and retrieved the dirt-covered sword at his feet. His next question was drowned by the shriek of three Valkyries, in far better shape than his, which touched down forwards and to the left of the rocky plinth on which they stood, skilfully avoiding the raised ridges that flanked their position.

‘Get the commissar out,’ said Barrabas.

Barat jumped to the order, carefully unbuckling Abdiel’s unconscious dangling form.

‘Lend a hand here, Toah!’ Barat was a powerful man, but couldn’t manage to safely detach Abdiel on his own. Toah’s eyes flicked to meet Barrabas’s frown, and the captain shook his head softly. With a shadow of a smile, Toah sloped over to help his misguided colleague.

‘Respect the uniform, not the man,’ grunted the larger man.

Toah had heard this from Barat before. It didn’t wash one bit with him or any of the crew, but his forthright response was drowned out by a loud, wet sucking sound. Barrabas wheeled towards the noise, his head spinning from the rapid movement and it took a few seconds to work out what was happening in the scarlet light. Two of the drop-ships had begun to sink, not the normal settlement of landing pads onto soft ground but a rapid, uneven descent that signalled real danger.

‘Open the gunship holds! Now!’

The heavy rear doors dropped, their leading edges immediately disappearing under the mire with a splat. Twenty men spilled out with a variety of weapons and uniforms grabbed from their respective ships, their enthusiasm on release soon tempered by the danger in which they found themselves. Still airborne, Eutychus saw the problem and pulled up steeply on emergency thrust, forcing the stricken Valkyries down faster than before in his wash. Aft-heavy, their noses rose into the air as men struggled through the quicksand, hauled out by their crewmates who had found the nearest safe footholds. Barrabas blinked away a single flickering shadow that passed to his left, blaming it on the concussion that sang between his ears.

Eutychus landed his Valkyrie on a flat expanse of rock and was out of the cockpit within seconds, hopping between boulders and natural platforms towards his captain’s inverted gunship. Barrabas ran towards the assembled crew as the stricken Valkyries slid downwards, both pilots now balancing precariously on the up-ended noses of their ships, and shouted at Zebah who was closest.

‘Jump. We’ll pull you out as soon as you get in.’

A panting Eutychus skidded to a halt besides Barrabas, while a dazed Abdiel made his unsteady way towards them.

‘They could get sucked right under if they jump from that height,’ said the young man. Barrabas nodded, clearing grit from his collar with a couple of fingers.

‘If they don’t go now, they could get pulled down with their ships. Come on!’

Again, Barrabas saw a fleeting shadow at his feet, bigger this time. He looked to the sky but saw nothing. The two overall-clad men exchanged a glance and then, with a thumbs up, leapt into the innocent-looking black soil below. Landing with a plop, they were as relieved as Barrabas that their rate of descent was surprisingly slow, and carefully waded outwards. Shouts of encouragement from the crew gave them heart, and Barrabas breathed a sigh of relief just as several flickering shadows flashed overhead. Eutychus saw them too, his head snapping upwards into the bright red sky.

‘Captain–’

At first, Barrabas couldn’t process what he’d seen; such was the speed of it. Flashes of grey and white, outstretched leathery wings with glistening edges, the glint of curved, exposed talons craning forwards in a lethal reach. Then there were screams. Again he shook his head, battling the buzzing hive between his ears, but Eutychus was already unholstering his laspistol and taking aim as Abdiel screamed at the stunned crewmen assembled nearby.

‘Don’t just stand there. In the name of the Emperor, kill them!’

Jolted into action, the thirty-nine men frantically grabbed for small arms and lasguns, a jumbled mass of confusion and poor weapons practice. Barrabas pulled his laspistol free, firing into the wheeling mass of creatures descending upon the desperately waving forms of the two pilots. Working as a lethal flock, the huge reptilian beasts flew in a tight circle around the men, a whirlwind of slashing razor-edged wings and dagger-sharp talons, until the men’s features became an unrecognisable mess of blood. An arm disappeared in a gushing instant, taken up high by one creature which, away from the group, presented a more focused target and Abdiel blasted repeatedly at its sinewy form. Surprisingly agile for its size, it ducked, turned and weaved, avoiding the fire and refusing to drop the gruesome trophy from its long, bony beak.

The screaming abruptly stopped and despite the hail of fire now hitting the flashing bodies, only two creatures fell into the swampy ground, immediately diced and devoured by their merciless kin. The pilots were now bloody stumps, cut and sliced apart piece by piece, but at least their misery was over. Some of the larger creatures swooped low over the wildly firing crew, veering off at the last second from their attack. Barrabas was horrified to see a further dark cloud of them approaching.

The ground shook.

Barrabas, Eutychus and Abdiel lost their footing and fell heavily onto the polished rock, immediately scrambling to their feet in fear of an attack from the flying nightmares. Instead, they were surprised to see the flock hurtle upward towards the distant explosion that now rolled across the skies and had surely caused the ground to quake. Their burst of speed created a foetid breeze behind them, leaving nothing more than a stream of lazily-popping air bubbles on the marshy surface and Zebah’s partially stripped leg still in its work boot. Not a fitting end for such a man, thought Barrabas, as he turned to the panting form of Armsman Haddar.

‘Get up that ridge and see what’s going on. Might be someone else made it out of the convoy. The rest of you, inventory what we have. Keep to the rock.’

Barrabas wiped the grime from his face and took a deep breath. It was cold and getting dark. Shelter would be needed, and soon. Abdiel threw him a filthy look, clearly blaming him for the situation they were currently in. Barrabas didn’t turn away from the old man’s gaze, even when the commissar slammed home a new power pack and cocked his weapon deliberately towards him.

Haddar shouted down from the raised embankment to his left. ‘Captain, there’s a big chunk of space hulk about fifteen kilometres away. Too far to make out details, but it looks like those… banshees are circling it.’

Eutychus turned to Barrabas, his face uncharacteristically serious.

‘Orks?’

‘Very likely. We need to get out of here.’

Barrabas peered into the distance through shattered magnoculars, down the wide trench in which they stood towards the towering needle-like columns darkening slowly in the distant sunset. He could just make out two of the creatures wheeling lazily between the spires and it suddenly became obvious to him they knew where their prey might get trapped – a fact they could use to their advantage.

‘We need to know what we’re up against, sir.’

Eutychus was thinking like an officer. This pleased Barrabas.

‘Agreed. Take two armsmen and scout the situation, sub-lieutenant. We’ll make our way over to the base of those towers. There are some caves at ground level.’

Eutychus saluted automatically and strode over to the assembled men, catching a lasrifle with a clatter from the stocky form of Haddar as he approached. With a nod, Toah swiftly fell in behind Eutychus, exchanging a grim smile with Haddar as they marched towards the embankment – they were they boy’s first command, but as it clearly didn’t bother the youth, it didn’t worry them unduly. Barrabas shouted after the trio as they clambered up the rocky slope. ‘Be careful where you step. Look to the skies. If those creatures fly at night, they’ll show you where to avoid.’

Within seconds the men were at the top of the incline and, after a short pause and much pointing, disappeared out of sight into the dark red gloom descending over the planet’s surface. Abdiel strolled over to Barrabas’s side, his face a shadow under his cap.

‘What kind of “captain” are you, Barrabas? What kind of role model for a young officer? He’s a good prospect. A little too well-mannered perhaps, but with the right training he might make an officer. Look at you ¬– you’re a disgrace, like your grandfather. He follows your example at his peril.’

Barrabas spoke as calmly as his hoarse throat would allow, knowing this infuriated the man beyond measure.

‘You’ve been riding my back for the last three years, Abdiel. We both know why I’m here, but what about you? What did you do wrong?’

The belt at the bottom of Abdiel’s polished breastplate creaked as he leaned menacingly towards Barrabas who, being a good ten centimetres taller than him, didn’t retreat one inch, even at the whiff of the commissar’s stinking breath.

‘The only mistake I made was to give undisciplined, wayward scum like your grandfather the benefit of the doubt. I don’t intend to repeat that error. Ever.’

Eutychus pressed his back against a rock, its dampness soaking into his tunic. To his left, Haddar pulled a battered lasgun to his barrel chest, darting glances all around in the russet darkness. To his right, the ends of Toah’s boots tapped nervously against each other as they dangled downwards at head-height. ‘What can you see?’ hissed Eutychus through cold-clenched teeth.

‘Orks, sir. Thousands of ‘em.’ Toah lay flattened to the ground on the plateau above and behind Eutychus and Haddar, surveying the scene as best he could with his salvaged lascannon scope.

Eutychus frowned. It was likely that the orks were also survivors of the collision with the fleet, and the proximity to their own crash site couldn’t be coincidence.

‘What are they up to, Toah?’

‘Bloody rocks could be hiding anything, sir. They’re trying to assemble vehicles for scouting parties, but they keep sinking under their own weight. Looks like the banshees have gone, but–’

Toah was silenced by a huge throwing axe that cleaved his skull. Wrenching it free with a sickening wet crack, the owner of the clumsy weapon turned to face Eutychus, grunting as Toah’s feet twitched wildly, his body not yet realising that his brain had been bisected. Within seconds the hulking figure was attacking; a raging shadow of muscle and sinew seamlessly connected to the enormous cannon now bearing on its target. The darkness burst into stroboscopic brilliance from Haddar’s weapon as he emptied an entire power pack into the bellowing ork’s head with absolute precision, the cover of night only returning when the greenskin collapsed onto its back.

Eutychus had heard the crew joke about Haddar’s self-proclaimed prowess in battle as the ramblings of a middle-aged, deluded man. What he had just witnessed would have stopped them laughing. Breathing heavily, the armsman looked sharply at the gaping officer.

‘There’ll be more, lad. Time to go.’

Eutychus forced himself away from the hard comfort of the wall and headed back the way they came, the ground soft and sucking on his saturated boots. The jangling of equipment and the men’s panting breath was soon joined by another sound, that of shrieking and whooping directly behind.

‘Into the shadows, Haddar. We might lose them.’

It was optimistic of Eutychus to think that they could successfully retrace their steps in the dull gloom that passed for night on this Emperor-forsaken planet, and within minutes he had absolutely no idea where they were in relation to the crashed hulk or his own crew. Rocks loomed claustrophobically around them, and things took yet another turn for the worst when the ground changed from a sucking mud to a wetter, softer consistency which grabbed at the sub-lieutenant’s legs and pitched him forwards.

‘Watch out Haddar, the ground’s–’ Eutychus’s words were drowned out in a volley of echoing fire from behind and he felt the whistle of projectiles pass his ears. Haddar’s return shots were rewarded with shrieks of pain from the darkness, but this only added to Eutychus’s frustration. He couldn’t turn enough to give any kind of supporting fire, and he knew the armsman was a sitting duck as long as he blocked the orks’ path in this slender corridor. Finally hitting solid ground, he spun and threw himself back-first onto the rock, levelling the lasgun towards Haddar. The passage was too narrow. He still couldn’t fire past or over the portly man without fear of hitting him. Then the armsman’s power pack was exhausted. Seizing the moment, the orks thundered forwards as he stood his ground.

‘Haddar! Get down!’

There was no answer. Tossing his lasgun aside, Haddar calmly reached into the pockets of his webbing and pulled out a pair of frag grenades. As the whooping greenskins smashed into him, Eutychus was thrown back a full five metres by the double explosion’s shockwave. Smoke rose into the air and the smell of singed flesh caught in the back of his throat as, seriously winded, he fought for breath. With no obvious signs of movement from the, now thankfully hidden, carnage, Eutychus wiped an angry tear from his eye and staggered off into the darkness, utterly distraught at failing his first real test as an officer.

Barrabas sat wearily at the mouth of a shallow cave and took a swig from his water bottle, watching the brown-red sunrise with concern. Their location was hardly a perfect defensive position, but the eroded cliff-face had offered some shelter and, with a deep natural passageway behind, a potential escape route. The order to rest had been issued barely four hours before, but the low murmurs from his crew confirmed their state of exhaustion.

Engineers Narris and Lubek, who had busied themselves with the salvaged transmitter to his left, hadn’t stopped since they made camp. Occasional bursts of static punctuated the air, quickly followed by the urgent muttering of invocations and supplications from the two veteran technicians in their attempt to appease and coerce the transmitter’s machine-spirit. Shifting uncomfortably on his rocky seat, Barrabas still wasn’t happy about the distance they’d put between themselves and the greenskin crash site. He could only hope the dumb rage of the orks would drop them straight into the shifting patches they’d managed to avoid. It might buy a little time, but sooner or later they would catch up. As long as it wasn’t here, they might stand a chance.

‘Your crew, such as they are, seem to think they owe you something for stranding them here.’ Abdiel appeared at Barrabas’s side without a sound. ‘Personally, I don’t see it that way.’ The commissar stared straight ahead into the gloomy valley from which they had come, eyes fixed on an unseen point.

‘While we’re alive, we still have a chance.’ Barrabas wasn’t convinced by his own words, but he wasn’t going to let Abdiel ignore the fact that he owed him his life.

‘Marooning us with no chance of rescue on a planet teeming with orks isn’t something to be applauded, Barrabas. You seem to forget I’ve been through this before with your family – giving them a chance, only to see destruction and ruin. My ruin.’

It might have been the deep, numbing fatigue or the last vestiges of concussion, but Barrabas didn’t react to the sound of Abdiel’s bolt pistol being drawn. He found himself looking into its charred muzzle and, behind, the commissar staring impassively at him.

‘I’m taking command. In the name of the Emperor, you’re relieved of–’

Both men jumped at the blaze of noise from the nearby transmitter. Luckily for Barrabas, the commissar’s finger was light on the trigger.

‘Automatic repeat. Attention all survivors of salvage convoy two-three-ten. This is Captain Rale of the Genocide. We are aware of your situation and will dispatch rescue vessels on completion of repairs to our starboard airlocks. Activate landing beacon if safe to do so. Time stamp zero-three-hundred-forty-two. Automatic repeat. Attention…’

Rushing out of the cave at the sound of the amplified voice, the crew’s excitement quickly turned to astonishment as they beheld the commissar’s pistol levelled at their captain and saviour. Lubek turned the volume down and glanced at the squatting Narris, ten years his junior but in far worse physical shape, and the two joined the increasingly tense silence of their shipmates.

From the corner of his vision, First Mate Barat saw the shadow of a weapon being raised but thrust out his muscular arm and pushed the muzzle down, praying Abdiel hadn’t seen the move. The crewman glared at Barat, but the first mate met his stare unflinchingly; this had been coming for a long time. It would have to play out between captain and commissar with no intervention from the crew.

‘It appears that I just might have saved us after all, commissar.’ Barrabas spoke evenly, his eyes staring into the darkness beneath Abdiel’s peaked cap.

‘This doesn’t change a thing, Barrabas. There’s no telling when the Genocide will be able to launch rescue ships. If it’s more than a day, we’ll be done for anyway.’

‘Make that half a day.’

Weapons clattered in clumsy response to the new voice from the dark, but recognition quickly followed as Eutychus staggered up the steep incline to their position. Without turning his attention from Abdiel, Barrabas snapped his fingers and a water canteen was handed to the exhausted man, who drank from it with grateful, heavy gulps.

‘Where are your men, sub-lieutenant?’ Abdiel regarded the filthy, bedraggled officer with no hint of pity or welcome, his arm still locked and arrow-straight despite the weight of the pistol.

‘I… lost them, commissar.’ Eutychus looked down to his mud-encrusted chest, the blue of his tunic hardly visible in the meagre light. ‘Both of them.’

‘Useless. Absolutely useless. You’re as feeble as your mentor.’

Abdiel looked back down to the unflinching Barrabas and over to the wary group behind him. He’d felt hostility from the crew before, burning into the back of his neck, heating the wrinkled skin behind his high collar, but nothing on this scale. Commissars were supposed to stand for discipline and instil the will to serve, but he felt as if he were among the scum of a penal legion and any wrong move would be his last. Easing his finger off the trigger, he casually holstered his bolt pistol and turned his attention to the transmitter and the two squatting men frozen to the spot beside it.

‘See if you can get a vox-message back to Rale. Tell him to hurry.’ He nodded towards Eutychus. ‘That idiot’s probably led the greenskins right to us.’ Turning on his heel, he marched over to the crewmen.

‘Our chances of survival will be maximised in a firefight with the greatest possible number of men. Your captain’s execution will hold – for now.’

With that, Abdiel shoved his way roughly through the line of crewmen back towards his kit inside the cave, exchanging a brief nod with Barat as he passed. Barrabas could feel the anger and confusion mounting in his men and knew he had to act fast. Rising quickly, he strode over to the dejected figure of Eutychus, whose shoulders were slumped in defeat, and turned to face them all.

‘Now listen to me. We can still get out of this.’ The men looked to each other, then back to Barrabas. ‘We’re still on our bellies, we’re still in shadow, but we have a chance to serve the God-Emperor and perhaps even survive in the process. One thing’s for sure – if we stay here, we will die. Eutychus?’

The younger man’s head snapped up, shocked by the unusually sharp tone in his captain’s voice. ‘Yes, sir?’

‘How long do you think we have?’

Eutychus rubbed his chin, Toah’s blood flaking away from his still-smooth face. ‘Eight hours, perhaps less. They couldn’t get any of their vehicles out of the swamp around them so they’ll be on foot. If anyone survived Haddar’s last stand, they could be even–’

The explosion was ear-splitting. Rock showered onto the ground from the smoking hole created by the ork mortar round above their heads and a distant muzzle flash attracted everyone’s eye. Despite the greenskins’ poor marksmanship, they would hit someone or something given enough time and shells, a belief clearly shared by the wheeling flock of banshees that had appeared as if from nowhere.

‘Move!’ screamed Barrabas, and they scattered back into the safety of the cave as the soft, black ground erupted at the base of the slope before them. The greenskins had over-corrected the trajectory and, mercifully, the shell fell short. Inside the cave, the men grabbed their gear and swiftly threw on packs, weapons and helmets, orchestrated by a furious Abdiel who pushed most of them out towards the escape route at the rear of the cavern.

Taking up the tail-end of the ragged line, alongside Barat, he ran towards the figure of Barrabas who stood to the side of a wide fissure in a sheer rock wall. The first of the men disappeared into the corridor as, far above, the banshees suddenly dropped. They fell short of descending onto the moving feast below. Instead, their wingtips loosened spikes of rock at the top of the canyon’s walls, spilling debris down upon the fleeing crew.

The ground erupted with a roar, throwing soil and stones in a filthy hail. Abdiel looked behind him and saw Barat lying on his side, one hand spasmodically clutching the air. Despite the obvious danger from another lucky shell, the commissar ran back to the mortally-wounded man, the side of his chest oozing life from a protruding dagger of shrapnel.

‘Commissar… leave me. They’re right behind us. You have to…’ Barat gritted his teeth, overwhelmed with pain. Abdiel looked down at the man with pity and fury. But Barat’s eyes were focused on the rocks raining down into the chasm and, with a sudden burst of adrenaline-fuelled strength, he grabbed Abdiel’s overcoat.

‘Get me… to the passageway, sir… I can stop… the greenskins.’ Barrabas was shouting, gesticulating wildly into a crack in the rock face, but his words were drowned out by a shrieking whistle. A smouldering mortar round thumped into the ground a few metres away, its battered shaft fizzing and sputtering menacingly. Despite his frailness, Abdiel hauled the wheezing first mate to his feet, ignoring the blood fountaining from the gaping hole in Barat’s side. With painful slowness, they approached an incredulous Barrabas as a live round exploded in the distance.

‘We can’t take him with us, Abdiel. He’ll–’

‘I’m not… going anywhere, captain.’

Barrabas blinked, then nodded. Turning on his heel, he shielded his head from the increasingly heavy rain of dust and small stones as Abdiel laid the man gently into a sitting position, his legs nearly touching the other side of the slender corridor. The creatures could be seen in the narrow crack of light high above. They had spotted their next meal and were whipping themselves into a frenzy. A boulder bounced between the sides of the chasm, pounding dust and chunks out of either side as it crashed its way down.

‘For the Emperor, commissar.’

‘For the Emperor, First Mate Barat.’

Abdiel ducked under the wedged lump of stone while Barat shielded his eyes from the dust and grit showering down on him. Behind him, another shell exploded and he could hear the thud of ork movement. The banshees needed a little more encouragement to carry out the first mate’s suicidal plan, so he wiped his hands into the warm, wet blood leaking from his body, feebly pushed out his hands and screamed skywards.

‘Come and get it!’

This was too much for the banshees, who swooped down, heedless of the danger, towards the easy pickings below. Their wings beat against the crumbling walls, opening up ancient fissures and bringing down tonnes of rock, burying Barat and catching many of their brethren in a maelstrom of stone. The passageway was blocked, and all that the furious orks could do was bellow impotently at the now-impassable corridor.

Two hours later, Barrabas’s men lay panting and exhausted on a rocky outcrop, dried mud caking their uniforms. Commissar Abdiel stared grimly into space, clearly upset at the loss of Barat, but unwilling – or unable – to discuss it with anybody. Sitting heavily next to Barrabas, Eutychus took off his cap, swigged from his canteen and wiped the back of his mouth with a filthy hand. ‘Captain, the men are in pretty bad shape. This seems like a good enough place to defend. What do you think?’ Eutychus still carried the loss of Haddar and Toah on his young shoulders, but Barrabas was pleased that the sub-lieutenant still had the condition of his men at the top of his agenda

‘We need open ground. Barat bought us some precious time, but if the orks get onto those ridges above us, they’ll flank us and we’ll be slaughtered. According to Abdiel, this valley flattens out a couple of miles ahead.’ Eutychus turned to look in the direction of the bloated red sun, shielding his eyes against the scarlet light despite the gathering clouds.

‘There are a lot of banshees over there, sir. Are you sure that’s a good idea?’

‘They’ve already done us one favour. Besides, it’s the best chance we’ve got for our landing beacon signal to be picked up. Ready the men. Our retreat’s nearly over. After this, we make a stand – and you get revenge.’ Eutychus nodded grimly. He’d aged a decade in a day.

Reaching the end of the plateau, Barrabas and Eutychus halted the men and they surveyed the change in scenery. Eutychus gulped. Abdiel snorted derisively. Barrabas looked skywards.

The ground stretched to the horizon on the left and right, sloping gently downwards in front of them to a ragged edge and a sheer drop to the floor below. Directly ahead was a narrow natural bridge leading to a wider soil-covered platform that angled upwards, terminating in a flat rocky ledge. It was a complete dead end, with no escape save for the fatal plunge surrounding it. Dozens of banshees circled high in the sky over the bridge, with new ones joining them every other second. Something was very, very wrong here but Barrabas smiled at the brilliant shaft of light breaking through the clouds like a scarlet spotlight, throwing the surface of the rocky projection into shining relief.

What had the astropath said? ‘Crawl into the Emperor’s light. Into the light.’

‘That’s where we make our stand.’

Eutychus stared at Barrabas and a soft gasp of disbelief hissed from the men assembled behind.

‘Captain… it’s a dead end. And the banshees–’

Barrabas didn’t shift his gaze from the view ahead. He spoke with a calm assuredness that cut Eutychus off without a hint of chastisement.

‘Look closely. The creatures are very high. They’re waiting for something, and I think I know what it is. Get over the bridge, spread out, and keep to the edges as best you can. The rock at the back of that platform is perfect for a rescue ship to land on. The slope will help us fortify our position. We’re going to make a redoubt.’

Abdiel barked a laugh. ‘What is this? Some exercise in ancient military tactics? This is suicide, Barrabas, and you know it.’

Barrabas turned to Abdiel. He was beyond exhaustion and past caring.

‘Commissar, there’s no other ground around here that will support the weight of a drop-ship unless you want to spend precious hours reconnoitring the area, which means splitting our forces. We can’t stay here because it’s too exposed. Over there, we have the advantage of height and focus of fire. It’s also perfect for a homing beacon. We’ll be out of range of their small arms from this side and we’ve seen how good their artillery skills are.’

Abdiel looked at him sharply.

‘You know what I mean. Barat was killed by a lucky shot, nothing more. Besides, orks will do anything to kill us up close and to do that, they have to come across that bridge.’

The crew silently regarded the island of rock in front of them and the thickening blur of banshees whirling above. With a renewed self-belief, Barrabas turned to face the remains of his crew.

‘It’s time to get off our bellies, men. Look in front of you. For once we’ll be raised up, elevated above the dirt and filth, so we can stand like men in the light of the Emperor and take strength from it. The rescue ship could be on its way right now. All we have to do is hold out for as long as we can. What say you?’

The roar of ‘Aye!’ was immediate and shouted with passion. Their long-desired chance to fight and serve had come. This was their battle, their chance for glory. They’d seen the ways this planet and its creatures could take their lives, and had survived. They would die fighting, for the Emperor, for their captain and for themselves.

As Barrabas led the men down towards the bridge, Abdiel took up the rear and watched them carefully traverse the precarious channel. Despite his objections, Barrabas’s logic was sound and there was no denying that he’d energised his exhausted men as well as any commissar.

It seemed he might be different to his predecessors after all.

Three hours later, Barrabas stood on the broad rocky ledge at the rear of the platform, looking down at the thirty-five survivors digging and patting with their field spades below. Several hundred pairs of banshee eyes also watched from their unrivalled vantage point high above, having retreated swiftly upon realising there would be no easy pickings from the men crossing the bridge, even in the softest ground at its centre.

The steps of the redoubt had shaped up quickly and would allow three rows of twelve men, each elevated behind the next, to concentrate fire on the same spot. To the left, a grime-covered Abdiel threw down his implement, wiped his brow and nodded in satisfaction at what they’d achieved, unaware Barrabas was watching with a rueful smile. Coming from the commissar, that was almost a compliment. Both men looked over at the shout from Eutychus – the orks were in sight, hammering down the canyon.

‘Throw everything you don’t need over the side. Narris, activate the landing beacon. Lubek, protect the transmitter as best you can. The rest of you, check and clean your weapons. Form ranks when ready.’

The crew moved as one, stripping down to the bare minimum – weapons, ammunition, what body armour they’d salvaged from the Valkyries. Within twenty minutes, the orks stood at the ridge opposite, assessing the situation. Their stench drifted on the air, along with guttural laughter.

‘How many do you think, captain?’ Eutychus’s voice was level, without fear.

‘More than us.’

It was obvious that the survivors had nothing like enough firepower to defeat the greenskins in open battle, but it should be adequate for his plan. He hoped.

With a roar, the orks began their untidy dash towards the bridge, a ragged mass of hate-fuelled muscle, twenty lines deep. Shafts of red light caught their dull helmets and glinted off their keen axe blades, the thumping of a thousand boots shaking the ground beneath them. The men took their places, with Eutychus to the left of the front rank, Abdiel in the middle raised position and Barrabas at the top.

High above the bridge, the banshee formation tightened, with only a couple darting down to take a closer look when, victims of their own fury, some particularly clumsy orks plunged straight off the side of the opposing cliff, such was their rush to be the first into combat. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t stop the sea of howling, mindless greenskins pouring onto the narrow bridge, its underside a rough arch thickening at the connections to the plateau and the rocky pillar on which the survivors stood. Its thinnest point was at the middle, and this would be where the men would concentrate their fire.

The orks slowed on hitting the marshy surface of the bridge, with some of them disappearing into the quagmire as they were steamrollered by their kin. Within seconds the bridge was a seething mass of bulging muscle and grinding armour, wild firing and roars of fury. It looked like a living entity, a writhing sea of chaotic movement. One of the crew caught a blast in the arm and spun with the impact, and the men began to move restlessly.

‘Steady, lads. Steady. Front rank, make ready. Look to the front, pick your targets, wait for the order.’ Barrabas’s voice was strong as Engineer Narris helped the injured crewman back to his place in the line. The orks were now queuing to get onto the bridge, pushing and shoving the dozens in front of them along, their grunts and cries a wall of sound resonating across the chasm. Sheer strength and bloody-mindedness drove them on towards their quarry, fuelled by the predictable rage Barrabas had counted on and would use against them.

‘Front rank… fire!’

A mix of lasguns and autoguns blasted in unison, hitting the lead orks with a lethal concentrated punch of beams and high velocity rounds. The beasts stumbled and looked down at the torn gashes in their bodies but the momentum of their fellows pushed them forwards still.

‘Middle ran, fire! Rear rank, fire!’

Two more volleys hit the same targets in the same spot; this time tearing into them and sending some spiralling off the sides of the bridge. Infuriated, the orks behind howled and pushed even harder, straight into the intense fire. The narrowness of the footway meant there was no room to avoid fallen compatriots, and the clumsy brutes staggered and slipped over each other, pummelling the dead or injured into the soil below.

‘Front rank, fire! Middle rank, fire! Rear rank, fire!’

The three rows fired within seconds of each other, giving their weapons enough time to cycle, stop from overheating, or for magazines and power packs to be exchanged, without a pause in the hail of focused destruction. One man in the front rank fell, then another in the middle, but the others kept their positions and maintained disciplined fire as the pile of bodies on the bridge began to mount. The few faster, luckier orks who made it onto the platform were picked off by Abdiel with carefully aimed bolt pistol fire. Up above, the banshees circled, watching the carnage unfolding below them, avoiding stray fire with great beats of their leathery wings.

The noise of human and ork weapons clattered deafeningly, but the first crack of the bridge cut through the din like a blade. Staying in line, Barrabas ducked to his left and saw rubble fall from the middle of its underside. He had hoped for this, but not the small group of infuriated orks currently rushing from the heaped dead at the bridge’s centre towards the front rank of defenders.

Abdiel’s pistol had jammed, and the orks would be on him in seconds. Eutychus saw the problem too, and both men ran forwards, weapons blazing at the approaching greenskins. Barrabas ignored the volleys of fire hurtling overhead as he joined Abdiel at the mouth of the bridge, the added peril only adding to his fury. The loss of his crew and his ship, and years of self-loathing, overwhelmed him now. Bathed in the planet’s crimson light, he let rage course through him.

An approaching ork took the brunt of his rage as he repeatedly shot it at point-blank range with his laspistol, venting his anger with a final kick to its bloody, gaping stomach, sending it spinning from the platform. That loss of control nearly cost him his life as one particularly stupid warrior seized the moment by leaping high into the air, intent on crushing the captain underfoot. His battle-cry turned from a shriek to a wet gurgle as a dozen lasguns neatly dissected his repulsive head from his thick body, spraying viscera over the other greenskins.

Recovering his balance and wits, Barrabas drew his sword and fought back-to-back with Abdiel against a couple of grunting orks while Eutychus helped from the side, blooding his officer’s blade for the first time.

‘Suffer not the alien to live! Stand fast in the light of the Emperor’s glory!’

Abdiel’s rage matched that of Barrabas and while three more men fell behind them on the redoubt, the withering fire continued. Good lads, thought Barrabas. Good lads. His reverie was cut short as a massive ork hand struck the side of his head, sending him reeling to the floor. He cursed himself for losing concentration once again and had it not been for the ground suddenly and violently shaking, he would have been stamped out of existence by the brute.

Two thunderclap cracks boomed, and the trickle of rock from the bridge’s underside became a torrent. With a teeth-rattling crash it finally gave way under the weight of the orks, dead and alive. Fracturing at its weakest point, the whole of the bridge’s length fell away and a countless greenskin throats screamed as they hurtled to the earth below in a shower of rocks and dirt. A thrashing black smear of banshees followed them down, ready to gorge on the rich pickings at the bottom.

The surviving men on the redoubt gave a spirited cheer which, as Barrabas struggled with a huge green hand around his throat, he felt to be premature. Repeated thrusts into the greenskin’s belly with his sword, and Eutychus’s frenzied slashing at its back, soon loosened the greenskin’s grip and, with a moan, it crashed lifelessly to the ground. As Barrabas pulled his blade free of the greenskin’s massive form, the transmitter suddenly crackled into life on the raised ridge behind.

‘Attention all survivors of salvage convoy two-three-ten. This is Captain Rale of the Genocide. We have your position and will be with you in minutes. Stand by.’

The air was torn by the scream of missiles overhead, pulping most of the remaining orks as they frantically assembled a variety of decrepit mortars to fire across the chasm. Near the ledge of the platform, Eutychus bent over in an attempt to catch his breath, retching at the stench of spilt alien innards while Abdiel stood panting behind him, smoking bolt pistol in one hand and gore-covered chainsword in the other.

‘Well, it seems you’ve claimed a famous victory here, Barrabas. Congratulations.’

There was no malice in Abdiel’s voice, no sarcasm or insinuation as he calmly walked towards the exhausted captain and levelled the pistol between his eyes, faint wisps of smoke tracking behind the charred muzzle. Eutychus looked up at Abdiel from his bent position and shook his head disbelievingly. On the redoubt, the surviving men watched anxiously.

Without taking his eyes from the barrel of the bolt pistol, Barrabas wiped his blade on his trousers, sheathed it and threw his laspistol to the ground.

‘You’ve saved us all,’ continued the commissar. ‘But I must dispense the Emperor’s justice. It’s time for you to die.’

Flicking his gaze to meet Abdiel’s, Barrabas shrugged. ‘Get on with it then.’

Abdiel’s finger tightened on the trigger, but the grim smile on his face disappeared along with the ground beneath him. Barrabas caught a glimpse of total astonishment on the commissar’s face before a crashing rumble filled the air and the edge of the platform dropped away. Eutychus pitched over a fraction of a second later. Reaching out instinctively, Eutychus’s arms fell heavily onto the newly-exposed edge of the platform but, with nothing to grab on to, he began to slide. Throwing himself forwards, Barrabas clutched at both retreating hands and felt the sinews pop in the younger man’s wrists. Despite having a good grip, the sub-lieutenant seemed very heavy and Barrabas struggled with the weight. Behind him, the captain could hear the remaining crew running to help, but the whole forward section of the rock pillar was giving way now that its precarious support from the bridge had disappeared.

‘Eutychus… Try to… pull yourself up if you can…’

Eutychus’s eyes bulged with naked panic. ‘I’ve got… Abdiel hanging on to me… He’s trying to climb–’

Sure enough, Barrabas could hear the breathless, cursing voice of the old man as he wildly tried to pull himself up Eutychus’s shaking body. All three slid forwards, dragging Barrabas until his arms dangled over the crumbling ledge, taking the full weight of Eutychus and Abdiel. He couldn’t hold on much longer and shouted in desperation.

‘Abdiel, you’re going to kill us all! Let go, man!’

‘I… am the Emperor’s servant… the… architect of His wrath…’

The old man’s free hand shook with the effort of pulling up the bolt pistol, levelling it at Barrabas. The captain wasn’t looking, distracted by a fast-moving shape in the sky. It swooped downwards like a dart then, metres away from the dangling shapes, unfolded its wings and thrust out its talons. The bony points punctured Abdiel’s arm and side, punching through his chest plate and violently jolting him free of Eutychus. Carried up and away in a graceful curve, Abdiel fired into the creature, which abruptly released its grip. The commissar’s fading scream ended abruptly and the banshee took its time to descend, safe in the knowledge that its feast was ready to devour on the ground.

Barrabas desperately heaved Eutychus over the ledge and the two staggered upwards towards the rocky rear and the waiting survivors as large sections of the platform randomly dropped out of sight. The entire column pitched forwards violently as it disintegrated below them, but the noise was drowned out by the sudden roar of engines directly above and the hot wash of exhaust fumes from two Valkyries, their cargo hatches open and hovering as close to the surface as the pilots dared. The men threw themselves inside the ships while Barrabas pushed Eutychus up the nearest ramp just as the ground rose, clanging on the drop-ship’s underside. With all the strength he could muster, Barrabas leaped into the grasping hands of his crew and the column crashed spectacularly downwards, burying Abdiel, the orks and Barrabas’s redoubt under tonnes of rock and dirt.

As the drop-ship climbed steeply, Barrabas looked down through the open hatchway at the teeming orks who bellowed furiously up at them. Eutychus and the other survivors breathed heavily, nursing their wounds. They had an air about them that he hadn’t seen for the longest time, one of achievement, of victory. But at what cost?

Eutychus stared at his boots with fixed, dark eyes, a new, grim set to his jaw that signalled the end of the man’s youthful verve and optimism. Many of the crew had told him that in the Emperor’s service, there was only war, and now he knew it to be true. Looking to the others, the sheer scale of it all knotted the aching muscles in Barrabas’s stomach and he quickly turned his gaze back to the exposed hatch, the loss of his ship and crew sweeping over him like a wave.

Breaking cloud cover and banking to port, the Valkyrie’s compartment was flooded with scarlet sunlight just as the heavy metal door began to close, bathing them in brilliance for a few seconds, chasing away the shadows and immediately lifting his soul. The gleaming sun gave him a different perspective. Against all the odds, Jahath Barrabas had won. Glory was his, but far more important was the restoration of his self-belief, of honour for himself and his family. He’d struggled and fought to get off his belly and out of the shadows, to bathe in the light. Now he and his men could stand tall, radiant in the glow of their beloved Emperor.

Barrabas smiled.

THE TILEAN’S TALISMAN

David Guymer

From now on, Siskritt intended to do as he was told. No more, no less. He cowered beneath the table as the slaughter raged around him. Trembling, he risked a peek through the cage of his own claws. The room resembled the aftermath of a stampede: tables and chairs had been smashed to kindling and the floor rushes were thick with the blood of countless corpses, both skaven and man-thing.

Heedless of the carpet of carrion, the melee swirled on through the same dense smoke that seared Siskritt’s snout. The roar of warpfire flooded his ears as the tavern’s frontage burned, fingers of green-black flame licking hungrily at the beamed ceiling, casting the whole orgy of bloodshed in an unearthly glare and exciting his whiskers with the tang of warpstone.

A sudden crash above his head made him jump and he bit down hard on the pommel stone of his shiny new sword to keep from yelping out loud in terror. A dirty, gold-furred arm fell across his view, the battered wooden shield it bore sliding free and rolling to a halt at his feet. The Horned One’s sigil stared into him. Silently, he screamed into the precious stone. It was a sign. He was going to die here.

Unconsciously, his paw moved to the talisman around his neck.

It had been worth it, whatever happened. The talisman belonged to him now. It would protect him. The horrors of the room seemed to fade as the talisman’s magic seeped through his fur and flesh, flowing lazily up his arms and filling his mind with calm thoughts. He closed his eyes and could almost hear its whispering voice, reassuring him, encouraging him.

He pulled the sword from his mouth and regarded the gleaming blade. This was ridiculous, now that he thought about it. It was just one dwarf.

Siskritt snarled, shaking his head as the moment passed. This was not just any dwarf: it was like a warpstone-powered engine of death.

The dwarf tore its axe from the belly of another skaven, its momentum carrying it through a low spin to take the legs from the next. An iron-shod boot across the struggling warrior’s windpipe put an end to his suffering.

Siskritt watched as the dwarf took advantage of the momentary lull to wipe skaven blood from its good eye.

In the far corner of the tavern, the few surviving man-things still hung on. Backs to the wall and side-by-side, they fought a losing battle against the endless tide.

The dwarf hefted its axe with a sneer. It opened its mouth to speak and, though Siskritt could not make out every word, its joyful belligerence was plain to see. It hurled challenges at the swarming clanrats, cursing their cowardice as the axe bit deeply into their wiry bodies. In a furious panic, skaven warriors turned swords and teeth upon one another, but there was nowhere left to run. With a final roar of laughter, the dwarf barrelled forwards, tossing the survivors aside like grass. It burst through the press of furred bodies, bellowing a war cry as it swung its axe for a warrior that knelt across a prone man-thing on the rush-covered floor.

The skaven sprayed the struggling man-thing’s grimy red cloak with fear-musk and hurriedly raised his blade in defence, but the dwarf’s axe clove the rusted weapon in two like rotten matchwood. The tip skittered off into the darkness as the rune-encrusted axe buried itself in the skaven’s skull.

The man-thing heaved the dead skaven away and clambered upright, suddenly wracked by a fit of coughing as it drew in a lungful of the acrid smoke. Siskritt could not clearly see its face through the haze, but the man-thing was tall, and its armour writhed with green shapes reflected from the spreading warpfire. He recognised it as the dwarf-thing’s companion, Feelicks. The man-thing gabbled something in Reikspiel, but the dwarf merely laughed as it sent another warrior flying with a swipe of its bare fist.

It spoke slowly, in the usual manner of the dwarfs, but Siskritt still struggled to puzzle out their conversation. He cursed bitterly as the exchange passed over his head.

A shrill note from the doorway grabbed the man-thing’s attention as a fresh wave of skaven warriors spilled through the blazing portal. Charging ahead of the rest, a wicked halberd held high in both paws, was a massive, black-furred brute in armour the colour of malachite, a challenge shrieking from his throat.

The dwarf grinned. Its man-thing friend sagged.

Siskritt leapt from his hiding place, sword in paw. He was saved. Nobody was stronger than Krizzak. He rushed to join the battle, already picturing how the grateful chieftain would reward his bravery.

The dwarf lumbered forwards to meet Krizzak’s mighty charge, swinging its axe in a killing arc. At the last instant the giant skaven checked his run and the axe instead tore out the ribcage from one of his more slow-witted brethren. Taking advantage of the mis-strike, Krizzak threw his weight against the dwarf, pinning its weapon and burying his teeth into its neck.

The dwarf bellowed like an enraged bull, and with a strength that defied reason, it ripped the skaven’s jaws clear with its free hand. The dwarf compressed its grip around the huge skaven’s throat, and Krizzak thrashed and squealed – a pathetic, mewling sound that seemed unreal coming from the jaws of the giant warrior – and sank his claws deeply into the dwarf’s bicep. Blood ran freely down the dwarf’s arm, but its hold didn’t loosen. Instead, the dwarf roared and hauled down hard, smashing the skaven’s snout with a brutal headbutt, splattering its own tattooed hide with its foe’s blood and sputum. Krizzak staggered back a pace, shaking his head to clear it before the dwarf’s axe parted it from his shoulders.

Too late, Siskritt realised he was alone, and face-to-face with a monstrosity: the vivid orange mohawk, the skaven gore smeared across the fearsome patterns on its brutish face, the axe wielded with unnatural strength that dripped with the still-warm blood of his kin. He sprayed himself with fear scent.

A faint tinkling skirted the boundaries of his perception, vaguely registering as the sound of his sword clattering to the floor from his trembling fingers.

He was thrown back into his senses by a body bowling into him. He looked up into a familiar face twisted with fear.

‘Crassik?’ he squeaked in surprise. With no time for any further thought, he spun his litter-brother around and shoved him into the dwarf’s path. ‘Fight, Crassik-brother. Kill-kill!’

Whirling away, Siskritt dashed for freedom. He had only to make it to the cellar and from there he could easily lose the dwarf in the tunnels. The cellar, he thought with black despair, why had he not just stayed down in that cellar?

Siskritt stumbled through the shattered furniture away from the rampaging dwarf. Frantically he threw his gaze left and right but could see nothing through the smoke. He forced himself to be calm. Yes! The cellar was to his right; even through the fire he could detect the rancid ale smell. He dashed in that direction, vaulting the bar, only to blunder straight into the man-thing Feelicks. This time he saw its frightful face, blackened with ash and its pale hair pasted to the skin with spatters of blood.

Only their mutual surprise spared Siskritt’s life.

His paws twitched instinctively for his weapon, but too late he recalled how he had dropped it. The man-thing’s eyes widened, and it raised its sword above its head for the killing blow.

Siskritt scrunched his eyes tight and waited for death.

The talisman vibrated on its chain, a muffled bell tolling inside his skull, and for an instant he was enveloped by an incandescent shield of light. The man-thing cried out in alarm as the sword was wrenched from its grip and fired into the ceiling like a missile from a bolt thrower.

Hesitantly, expecting his head to split like a cracked nut if he moved too hastily, Siskritt opened one eye. The man-thing’s sword was buried to the hilt in the rough wooden beams, the owner’s knuckles whitening around the grip as its feet kicked ineffectually at the empty air, trying to turn its own weight and straining muscles to tug the weapon free.

Siskritt tittered and scooped up a fallen blade. It wasn’t his nice new one, but there’d be other swords. The man-thing dropped to the floor empty-handed and spun into a fighting crouch in front of him, raising its fists as he approached. Siskritt rejoiced. Just one unarmed man-thing and he would be free!

Suddenly the man-thing relaxed, a smile splitting its ugly face. Siskritt’s nose twitched at this puzzling behaviour, but the heavy footsteps behind him sent cold dread marching up his spine, scattering all thoughts of the man-thing in its wake.

He spun on his heel as the dwarf approached.

The fighting was over. His kin were all gone and the tavern was a dead place. The only sounds that remained were the crackling of the wooden structure as it was consumed by warpfire, the heaving breaths of the man-thing, and the footfalls of the dwarf that seemed to echo the frantic hammering of his own heart.

‘You!’ he hissed in broken Reikspiel. ‘How you still live-breathe?’

The dwarf raised its axe. ‘Because nothing has killed me yet.’

Siskritt snarled. His talisman would spare him. He lived with the Horned One’s blessing. He sprang forwards, ducking under the dwarf’s swing to stab at its belly. The dwarf swatted aside the flat of his blade on its wrist and, with a deftness of foot that would not have been misplaced on an Eshin assassin, shifted its balance to bring the axe backhanded between Siskritt’s shoulder blades.

As it had before, the talisman flared into life. It caught the axe in mid-swing.

The dwarf roared as the talisman held its weapon in a supernatural grip, the axe’s runes glowing hot as it burrowed into the flickering barrier. The talisman’s song became a scream, filling Siskritt’s ears with pain. Just as he felt he could endure no more, the light fled before the dwarf’s axe, drawing back into the talisman and leaving him deafened and in darkness. He stared at it in disbelief as the dwarf’s axe punched into his spine.

His sword slithered free from nerveless paws and he sank to his knees, crumpling over onto his side. His face struck the floor but he barely felt it, his nose filling with the scent of blood, wood dust and mouldering straw.

The talisman lay before him, amidst the corpses, as far away as its chain would allow, almost as though it were trying to escape him. Siskritt tried to stretch out a paw to reclaim it but his arms no longer obeyed. Sound and colour bled from his world as his vision closed in around the talisman.

Why had it left him? Why could he no longer hear its whispering voice? Why had it betrayed its new master at the moment of his greatest need?

It was the last thing he saw as the darkness claimed him.

Siskritt watched his litter-brother work as the blood ran in tiny rivulets between the flagstones, relishing the fleeting warmth as it moved languidly between his toes. Drawing his sword, he padded over to where the dead man-thing lay, the notched and rusted weapon reflecting nothing of the cellar’s dim torchlight.

He prodded the corpse with the blunted tip of his blade. ‘Fool! Can’t you see, is not the one!’

Crassik sniffed. ‘You sure, Siskritt-brother? Man-things look all same-same to me.’

Siskritt snarled, treasured notions of skaven supremacy offended by his litter-brother’s slack-jawed idiocy. ‘This one doesn’t have it. Is just a child-thing. Look how small it is! And is too pale. The man-things of Tilea have darker hides. You spend more time watching man-things back home, then you not be so stupid-slow.’

He sighed. Perhaps it had been too much to hope that their target should fall so invitingly into their lap; Siskritt had never been overly burdened with the Horned One’s favour.

Vaguely, he realised his litter-brother was still speaking.

‘We must be going-gone. Lesskreep kill-feed for rats if missed.’

‘Fool!’ Siskritt resisted the impulse to lash out. Crassik was nearly twice his size, and not too beholden to his litter-brother’s wits to administer a beating of his own. ‘None will miss us. Who will miss two from so many? None. None will care.’

‘But–’

‘Graaah!’ With a cry of exasperation, Siskritt ignored his better judgement and cuffed the other skaven across the snout. ‘Sneak into man-thing town is what Lesskreep said, and sneak-sneak is what we do. If no other skaven knows this tunnel then is because they are not half so smart as Siskritt. Lesskreep will be pleased.’

And besides, he thought, when he found this man-thing merchant, this Ambrosio Vento, and took the talisman it wore for himself, maybe he would feed Lesskreep to the rats instead…

Siskritt chewed his weapon nervously. If any of that was going to happen, then it had to happen soon. At best, he had an hour before the attack began. When that happened, his opportunity would be lost and the Tilean’s talisman would be looted from its corpse as a pretty bauble by whoever found it first and was strong enough to keep it longest.

And that, Siskritt acknowledged, would not be him.

He returned his attention to the immediate problem, looking up at the ominous portal to the surface world. For so foreboding a thing it was a simple affair: plain and pale-coloured, raised about the height of a man from the floor, and accessible by a half-dozen roughly hewn stone steps. Giant barrels loomed in the shadows on either side like leering trolls as he padded silently towards the steps. A man-thing might have been given pause, but Siskritt was born to darkness.

He pressed his muzzle to the door and listened.

His hearing was exceptional, even by the standards of his own race. He could pick up the strains of several man-thing voices, but they were distant and his grasp of Reikspiel far too rudimentary to pick out one voice amongst so many. He stayed a moment longer, the scent of the damp wood filling his nostrils, until at last he was satisfied he could open the door in safety.

He returned his attention to Crassik. ‘You watch-see, you watch-guard. Understand? You pay attention. I go see. Anyone comes in here you kill-kill. Be quiet.’ He gestured at the dead man-thing. ‘And no eat-eat. You pay attention. You listen for me. I call, you come run-quick. Understand?’

Crassik said nothing, preferring to stare sullenly at his own paws. Siskritt smirked. His litter-brother didn’t want Siskritt to have the talisman for himself, but Siskritt was in charge, and Crassik far too big and stupid to help him steal it. Too bad for Crassik.

‘Understand?’ he repeated.

‘I watch tunnel. Come run quick-quick. I understand.’

Siskritt took a deep, steadying breath, cracked open the door, and scuttled hesitantly into the light.

It was blinding. And terrifying.

With trembling paws, Siskritt clung to the door frame, reassuring himself that escape was possible at any time. Gradually, the white glare began to fade and a vision of a smoothly cut, upward sloping stone passageway came into focus. A high-pitched squeak, well beyond the range of feeble man-thing ears, escaped his lips.

It was strange, he thought, to be so fearful of walking amongst the man-things. He had spent many nights crouched in the shadows of Sartosa, ever alert for even the most meagre of opportunities for his own advancement. But the Tilean port city was a warren of bolt holes and hiding places from years of discreet skaven exploration, and Siskritt knew every inch of it better than the scratches on his own claws. Even now, after many weeks’ absence, he could picture its close, densely shadowed alleys, filled with the detritus of a city awash with poverty and prosperity in equal measure.

Feeling emboldened by thoughts of home, he managed to slide one foot-paw forwards. He winced slightly, half expecting his leg to be burned from his body by the unfamiliar environment. When it was not, he felt his courage return like a rising tide. He flitted along the passageway’s upward incline, moth-like, towards the second doorway, cowering beneath the open frame to peer at the man-things beyond.

He supposed it was some kind of common room, typical the world over of all man-thing buildings of similar function, no doubt: wide, straw-covered floor; high ceiling supported by sagging beams and joists; a score of rectangular tables and short stools littering the floor space; and a long bar opposite the doorway.

The room was near deserted. His sharp eyes counted no more than a dozen men: the old, the sick and the crippled. Their conversations were muted, and their eyes were dead inside haunted faces. Siskritt cared not for their fears.

Upon their first arrival in the Badlands, the clan had stirred up the local orc-thing tribes who had gone on to burn a swathe through this barren corner of the Old World. It had been the grey seer’s plan and Siskritt couldn’t help but admire the old skaven’s cleverness, even though the merest thought of the grey-furred rat set loose the fear of the Horned One himself in his soul. At the cost of a few hundred clan warriors, the seer had unleashed a horde of the orcs into the man-thing territories, and even now most of those of an age to fight were somewhere out in the Badlands hoping to repel the supposed marauders. And while orc and man-thing slaughtered each other in the fields, Siskritt and his kin would rise up to claim what remained.

Siskritt peeked out from the doorway and behind the length of the bar, pulling his head back to relative safety with all the speed of a serpent’s flickering tongue. He snarled silently, nibbling at his dulled sword blade in consternation.

The bar was just a single stretch of plain wood with nothing at either end. It could give him a clear and concealed run across the common room, and to the stairway he had glimpsed at its opposite end. Were it not, that was, for the fat man-thing standing squarely in the way as though placed there by the Horned One himself as some wicked taunt. Siskritt bit down hard on the metal as he took another, more measured, look.

Tasting iron on his lips, he withdrew his sword and hefted it thoughtfully. These men were on the very brink of madness after months of war against the orc-things, their soft minds ready to snap, to be sure. Catching the fat one unawares, Siskritt could kill it easily and swiftly – both things he liked – and he suspected there was a good chance that these others would not come willingly to its aid. He could be gone and away before anyone caught a glimpse of him. A good chance…

But not good enough a chance for Siskritt. He liked to deal in certainties. Anything less left a chance for error, and when the cost of failure was so high…

Well, what in this world could be more valuable than his own life?

Not for the first time that day, he cursed the haste he’d been forced into. He didn’t like it. It made his fur crawl and his tail itch. Every sound and shadow sent his heart into his mouth. As if skaven lives were not already too short! He didn’t understand the rush, and that bothered him. What bothered him much more was the danger that that entailed for him. Damn that stupid grey seer, and damn Hellpaw too! Siskritt didn’t understand how someone as big and frightening as the warlord could be pushed around by anyone, even the insidious Thanquol.

He shivered. He had met the grey seer just once, and then only briefly, for he had felt a sudden urge to be anywhere but in that infamous skaven’s presence.

What was Thanquol after? He’d have given anything to find out. He shivered again, and changed his mind. He really didn’t want to know.

He gnawed upon his blade to keep his fear in check and chanced another look along the bar. The fat man-thing was lost in conversation, but he could neither see to whom he was speaking nor understand the words he uttered. Nor did he much care. All he could see was a few inches of bright orange hair flaring up from behind the bar. Yet another child-thing; this place seemed infested with them.

Riven with indecision, he hopped back and forth, one foot to the next, expelling some of the anxious energy that was bubbling up inside him. He had come too far, risked too much, to be thwarted at the last by… by a… a stupid, fat man-thing.

His racing thoughts were disturbed by a distant scream from somewhere outside the tavern. His ears pricked up, though none of the man-things seemed to notice. As if the first had been some kind of signal, the strains of pained and frightened man-thing voices started rising from all across the town, merging together with the sound of slamming doors and of weapons being drawn. It was a cacophony that was most pleasing to Siskritt.

At last, the noise reached the weak ears of the man-things. They raised wrinkled faces from their cups and muttered to each other fearfully. Siskritt found most of what was spoken incomprehensible, but one word stood out, a word that was common to all lands and languages of men throughout the world.

Orcs.

He couldn’t help but smirk. Yes man-things, he thought, turn to face the orc-thing that isn’t there, and die with a skaven sword in your back. It was at times such as this that the sheer magnificence of the skaven intellect simply demanded to be recognised.

Muffled noises filtered through the sturdy walls of the tavern: confused shouts, screams, the pounding of running boots on cobbles, and the dull clamour of steel on steel.

The men shuffled nervously from the doorway and towards the bar, perilously close to where Siskritt lay hidden. For a moment he feared that man-thing soldiers would come bursting in, but such fears were instantly scattered by the roar of an explosion, close enough to rattle the door in its hinges and bring clouds of dust and grime streaming from the rafters, sending the man-things into fits of coughing. He flinched momentarily, but gripped the wooden frame tightly to steel his nerve.

The fat man-thing cursed in words Siskritt did not know, before reaching behind it to a spot on the wall that was hidden from Siskritt’s view and plucking a giant war hammer from a sconce. Siskritt gulped to see the ease with which the silver-haired man-thing hefted the massive weapon, seeing for the first time the broad shoulders and powerful muscles that had lain hidden beneath thick rolls of fat. A former adventurer settled down for retirement, no doubt. He should’ve suspected as much. In many ways life in the Badlands bore similarity to life in the clans: only the strongest could survive and thrive.

Again, he cursed the enforced haste. If he could have had just one day to scout the tavern…

The innkeeper strode across the room with a calm authority, its hammer glowing with an inner power. Finally the fat one neared the door, squat and suddenly forbidding as if it were a portal to the Chaos Wastes themselves. Before it could lay hands upon the handle, a voice spoke out. Its words were in slow, deliberate Reikspiel, and Siskritt could just about make them out.

‘I wouldn’t open that door just yet, manling.’

The speaker strode from where it had been hidden behind the bar. The enormous orange mohawk came into view like the sails of a smuggler’s ship rounding the horizon, followed by the muscular, heavily tattooed shoulders of a dwarf Slayer.

The fat one turned to the dwarf to say something that seemed to Siskritt to be quite innocuous, but the dwarf spat back a venomous reply that was far too quick for him to follow. The man-thing dropped its eyes and raised an empty palm in surrender, and spoke again, this time more softly.

Siskritt cursed the man-things and their pointless plethora of languages and dialects. He would gladly have traded a paw to know what it was they were saying.

The dwarf cast the innkeeper a glance before returning his stare to the doorway. The man-thing towered above him, but the dwarf had an aura that dominated the room. Even Siskritt felt himself hanging on his next words. ‘I don’t know, manling. I’m just looking forward to killing it.’

Siskritt snickered. Foolish dwarf-man, no orc-things for you this day.

Taking one last look, he scurried behind the protection of the bar and dashed with silent haste to its far end. It was only a short hop from the bar to the shelter of the stairway. His ears twitched as the sounds of battle drifted closer.

A green-black glow was streaming through the cracks in the door, accompanied by the murderous crackle of warpfire, bathing the man-things in a ghastly light. The air was practically fizzing with warpstone ash. There was a brief struggle in the street outside: shouts, screams, shrill squeaks, and metal sliding though meat. The door rattled angrily, as though something soft and heavy had just been thrown against it. The wail of a man-thing melted into a gurgle and, by its silhouette, Siskritt saw it slump against the outside of the door.

Suddenly, it was as though a spell of quietude had been broken.

The fat one began bellowing orders and the man-things snapped into life. Tables and chairs were dragged into a crude barricade, while those that had them readied their weapons. Siskritt picked out ridiculous names called between the man-things: Roodolf, Gunter, Holegur, Feelicks. The one named Roodolf hurried for the cellar door, fumbling with a heavy iron ring of keys.

The sense of entrapment closed in upon him like claws around his throat. Between the rising barricade and the man-thing Roodolf, there was no way out. Panic rose in him as Roodolf drew closer and closer.

Grah! Now or never!

Half running, half crawling, he scrambled across the straw covered boards and behind the thin wall of stone that partitioned the stairway from the common room. He came gasping to a halt on the first step as he waited for his panicked heart to slow. Silently, he promised himself he would never ever do anything like this again.

He glanced back around the wall just in time to watch the man-thing disappear down into the cellar. For a short moment he thought of Crassik; he would not grieve for the idiot, but the sudden feeling of isolation wormed its way through his veins. He was alone, trapped in the lair of the man-things!

He took a deep breath, and though the air was thick with man-thing fear, he felt calmer. Crassik or no Crassik, he had always been alone. One Siskritt amidst a hundred thousand less deserving skaven. He ignored the shouts and noises of the busy man-things and returned his attention to the task in hand. The talisman was so close now he could almost feel its weight around his neck.

The stairway was short. He counted ten bare wooden treads leading up to the building’s second level, but they were widely spaced, more suitable for the long stride of a man-thing than for Siskritt’s short legs. He leapt delicately from one step to the next, taking great care to land silently, though he doubted the sound of a creaking board would carry far above the excited chittering of a thousand clanrat warriors closing in on an easy kill.

The upper floor was better kept than the lower. A wide, carpeted hallway stretched ahead of him, its stained and faded patterns barely visible after years of wear. To the left was an evenly spaced trio of low, recessed doorways leading to the guest rooms, each one carved with the likeness of a different fantastical beast. He could not quite discern the carvings on the further two, but the nearest door carried a rendering of a three-headed chimera, sufficiently lifelike to make him squeak out in alarm when he rounded the corner to find it six inches away and glaring into his face.

The wall to the right was broken by several wide and intricately leaded windows, and the view beyond was one to warm the heart of any skaven.

The city burned.

Half of the skyline was alight, with pockets of green-tinged flame in hotspots throughout the city. Siskritt’s heart swelled at the inherent greatness of his race. Let the foolish man-things sit behind their walls and battlements. How useless they were in the face of skaven cunning. He watched as another explosion carried the roof from a nearby building, its walls bursting like overripe fruit to be consumed by the warpstone-fuelled fires.

The flames painted the hall with an eerie green light through the windows, as though Siskritt himself swam in molten warpstone, trapped behind glass for the amusement of some half-crazed Clan Skryre warlock.

He was dragged from his reverie by a sound from further along the hallway, and he dived through the chimera door just as a pair of armed men clattered past him and down the stairs. From the furthest doorway a voice yelled after them in the Tilean tongue that Siskritt knew well.

‘I’m the one that pays you, you ungrateful dogs! Not this excuse for a city!’

For a few moments, Siskritt could hear the man-thing still hanging upon the threshold as if fully expecting its minions to return.

‘Fine then! Die together, all of you!’

The door slammed closed and Siskritt grinned to be the beneficiary of such unlikely luck. Listening to his prey’s former bodyguards lending their efforts to the man-things below, Siskritt mouthed a silent thanks to the munificence of the Horned One.

He spared a glance over the empty, unmade chimera room. The eldritch warplight from outside cast long shadows that flickered and danced across the walls and ceiling. Even in this state, the room smacked of human luxuries he could only imagine… But one day soon he would have all of this, and more. He squeezed his eyes tight with pleasure at the prospect. His paw closed over his chest where his talisman might soon rest. Yes, he would have all this and much more besides.

He crept back into the hallway, reassuring himself that the Tilean’s guards were fully occupied downstairs and would not be returning any time soon. Satisfied, he moved lightly past the second guestroom – a manticore, he thought – and around a long table towards the third.

Suddenly, a low rumble vibrated its way up through his feet. He stared out of the window in horror as the tall building across the street subsided into an evidently ill-judged skaven tunnel, burying hundreds of panicked clanrats as they swarmed clear. Broken tiles tumbled from its roof and peppered the rough stucco walls of the inn. As realisation finally dawned, Siskritt rolled under the table just as the tiles from the building’s elevated garret smashed through the windows, showering the hall with glass and heavy lengths of gritty lead that thundered against his scant cover. Rolling into a ball, he buried his face in his fur until the scraping of settling rubble and the thin cries of buried skaven told him the barrage had ceased.

Timidly, he unblocked his ears and poked his snout from his hiding place. The sounds of slaughter came clearly now through the voided windows, the wind laced with screams and heavy with the scent of smoke and burning flesh. He took a sniff, but he could smell little beyond his own blood, welling up where a sliver of glass had lacerated the soft flesh of his nose. Squeaking alarm, he squashed his bloodied snout beneath the tattered sleeve of his tunic.

The last wisps of courage fled his body with the blood from his precious nose and he scampered clear of the table, blind to everything but the instinct to escape. He collided headlong into a wall, collapsing tail-over-head into a heap before righting himself in a blur of blood and fur. Witless with panic, he trembled in the shadow of the wall, catching short rapid gasps of the charnel house air. Slowly, his nerve returned and he gingerly pulled his sleeve from his face. He gave his nose a tentative dab with the cleaner – relatively speaking – side and almost fainted with relief when it came away bloodless.

He gave the cloth an experimental sniff. Blood, dirt, faeces. All of the familiar smells.

Using the window ledge for support, he pulled himself upright, tiny slivers of glass twinkling from his fur in the fiery green glow, and peered down into what remained of the street below.

The man-thing city was overrun. The sounds of fighting continued in more distant quarters, but here clanrat hordes flowed through the thoroughfares like high-tide in the Sartosa marina, and the only sounds to punctuate their excited chittering were the cries for mercy of the nearly dead.

Everywhere, he could see skaven warriors spilling from open doorways carrying looted treasures and man-things: the living, the dead, and the half-consumed. The inn itself seemed to have checked their advance, a lone bulwark placed in the path of an unstoppable tide. One particularly creative skaven had fashioned a battering ram from an abandoned cart and was attempting to smash through to the last pocket of defenders within. Siskritt watched with detached disdain as the impromptu siege engine fell apart under the pressure without having made a dent in the heavy doors.

Fools. Someone would pay for that failure. Siskritt could have done better.

True enough, some poor unfortunate – whether the guilty party or no – had already been run through by one of his nearest compatriots, and a maddened brawl broke out before normality was restored by a high-pitched barrage of threats and bluster from a larger rat in the muddied green armour of the clan.

As Siskritt watched this minor sideshow unfold, the excitement in the street had quite palpably turned up a notch. Scanning the crowd, he could just about discern a huge black-furred skaven arriving from a side street.

It was Krizzak, Hellpaw’s feared lieutenant and second in command of the whole clan. He and his stormvermin elite were shoving a path through their lesser brethren, while a group of smaller figures trailed behind in his wake, clutching an unlikely array of machinery in their paws.

Siskritt’s nose twitched.

Lubricant… accelerant… a cocktail of chemicals he couldn’t begin to identify but had learned, through hard experience, to recognise a mile away. The delicious taint of warpstone reached his nostrils with bleak inevitability.

Warpfire thrower!

‘No, no, no. Now-now Siskritt, before whole wretched man-thing place comes down!’

He turned to face the final door, carved into the features of some kind of a feathered monster. A griffon… Or possibly a cockatrice? He didn’t care. It was nothing but the final obstacle between himself and the first step on his path to greatness. His fur tingled.

Drawing his sword, he kicked at the door with a snarl. Once. Twice.

On the third kick the lock gave and the door burst inwards. He charged through, experiencing a bravado that came only through an immediate sense of absolute mortal terror, his blade held before him as though he had a rabid plague rat by the tail.

At that exact moment, the side wall of the tavern was wreathed in a great gout of warpfire from the crew below. The surviving windows exploded inwards as fiery tendrils licked at the beams and plasterwork. Siskritt screeched in terror as he was hurled from his feet and into the room on billowing wings of unholy flame.

The Tilean merchant threw itself to the floor and wailed as Siskritt descended upon it, wreathed in a halo of green-black fire. A pewter goblet it had been clutching fell from its fingers, the blood-red contents already spilled over its silken finery.

Ignoring the stupid man-thing entirely, Siskritt hissed and snarled as he swatted out small fires in his fur and clothing, his tail spinning an intricate spider’s web of afterimages as its flickering tip lashed through the air. His wild eyes darted about the room seeking some means of escape…

But then they settled upon the talisman.

He caught his breath and his eyes narrowed, terror at once overcome by a fierce, jealous avarice. It was here. It would be his!

With wisps of smoke rising from his warpfire-scorched fur, he advanced towards the snivelling man-thing, crushing the fallen goblet beneath his paws as it scrambled backwards. He was invincible. I am Siskritt, fearsome and great, scourge of the man-things, and soon-to-be favoured of the Horned Rat!

The man-thing, who Siskritt knew was called Ambrosio, retreated until it sank into the corner, its eyes dilated with fear and its face slack with incomprehension. Siskritt had little sympathy as he closed the distance between them with short, quick steps. Despite all the evidence before their flabby noses, the man-things continued to refute the very existence of the skaven.

A Tilean of all people, dwelling in the shadow of Skavenblight itself, should know better.

‘W-wh… what…’ The man-thing cowered like a monkey cornered by a bird of prey. It might be better dressed than a monkey, it might be taller, but its flapping lips gabbled no less gibberish.

‘Quiet, man-thing. Be silent-still.’

‘Y-you speak Tilean! Are you a daemon sent to punish me?’

Siskritt responded with a burst of chittering laughter. ‘Yes-yes. I’m a daemon of… of… man-thing gods. Give me talisman and I’ll go away-gone.’

He held out an expectant paw. He hoped the man-thing didn’t notice how it trembled. He hoped the man-thing’s weak nose couldn’t smell his fear scent.

The man-thing started to weep, tears scouring twin trails over its sand-worn cheeks. Ambrosio folded down to grovel at Siskritt’s feet, either uncaring or blindly unaware of the man-thing blood that was congealed there, spongy and soft like jelly.

Siskritt cocked his head in bafflement as the man-thing began to babble a litany of supposed sins for which it was, of course, wholly repentant. The whole spectacle might have been amusing were he not so pressed for time. His back blistered in the terrible heat, and alarming groans of tortured wooden beams spread through the building. Not far below his feet, he heard the solid doors of the tavern collapse.

There would have been no need for orders. The weight of warriors filling the street would be pushing the nearest skaven through the hanging curtain of cinders and into the inn where the frightened man-things waited. The first dozen might die in agony, stepping in molten metal, fur set alight by dancing flames. Already, the frantic screams of skaven and man-thing were echoing through the smoky corridors like the unquiet spirits of the damned. Ambrosio snivelled on the carpeted floor as the sounds of chaos and carnage grew.

It was only through an effort of great will that Siskritt did not snivel right alongside the man-thing. He held his paw outstretched. ‘The talisman, man-thing! Hurry-Hurry.’

‘M-my talisman? Of course. It belonged to a man I sold as a slave. Am I being punished for that sin? If I buy back his freedom, will I be allowed to live?’

‘Yes-yes, man-thing will live! Just give talisman quick-quick or foolish man-thing die!’

Fingers sticky with sweat, Ambrosio yanked at the chain about its neck, the links tearing at its straggly beard in its haste to see the item removed. It pressed the talisman eagerly into Siskritt’s paws as though relieving itself of a curse from the gods.

Siskritt beamed with delight. In a way, it was.

His gaze settled on the talisman in his paws as though pulled by a puppeteer’s strings. The chaos of battle ebbed away as the talisman held his full attention. Long seconds passed with only the sound of his own breathing and, if he closed his eyes, the faintest whispering inside his mind, congratulating him on being such a clever skaven. So much work, so much risk, so much planning, and now it was his. Lovingly, he traced his claws across its surface.

The talisman was jet black within a latticework of platinum and a long silver chain. Even were it not magical, this pendant could doubtless have bought him his own clan. But magic it was; Siskritt could feel it. It felt unnaturally heavy in his paw given its size, and it had a presence, as though it was regarding him in return.

He pushed the eeriness aside and popped the chain around his neck, the talisman falling to rest against his thighs.

He felt strong. The man-thing had kept the talisman hidden beneath his silks, but Siskritt let it hang over his rags with pride. Let the others know I am a skaven to be reckoned with!

Ambrosio sank to one knee, having seemingly travelled through the veil of madness and well beyond the other side. ‘I have served you, servant of the gods. Will you keep your promise to me? Will you permit me to live?’

Siskritt shuffled forwards and reached down for the sword in the man-thing’s hand. The merchant released its grip willingly. Siskritt held the blade in his admiring hand. It was a long and beautiful weapon, double-edged with a cruciform hilt and tapered to a wicked point that drew blood when he laid his finger upon it. Elegant lettering traced the length of the blade from tip to hilt. He recognised the curling Arabyan script, but he could no more read it than he could this man-thing’s mind.

It was a fine weapon indeed.

Siskritt looked up at Ambrosio. ‘Of course I help, man-thing. You help-help, I help-help.’

The merchant followed him out into the hallway, but it paused at the shattered windows. The wind was angry and its breath was hot with fiery green cinders, roasted meat, and blood: always the pervasive iron whisper on the tongue, of blood.

Ambrosio was aghast. ‘What has happened here? Have I brought this terror upon them all?’

‘Quiet now, man-thing. I say Siskritt will help you.’

The street was largely empty, barring a few hold-outs that had successfully avoided the fighting. The whole frontage of the building was alight with warpfire, and even just standing here at the window was uncomfortably akin to being strung above some hungry giant’s fireplace.

Silently, Siskritt crept up behind Ambrosio. Jumping up from one leg, he planted a firm kick with the other into the merchant’s back. Had it been further from the window it might not have fallen, but its clumsy feet caught on the base of the wall and tipped it over the edge, its silks flapping madly in the rising heat as it pitched forwards with an undignified yelp. The man-thing disappeared into the flames before it had even a chance to scream.

An ominous groan from the floorboards beneath the steaming carpet sent Siskritt scurrying for the stairwell. Somehow, the fighting downstairs raged on and he could hear the booming war cry of the crazed dwarf rallying the survivors for a final stand. Siskritt drew his enchanting new weapon and waited for the right moment to join in the fray. He was injured and bloodied: no one could claim that he hadn’t been present all along.

He fondled his talisman and grinned; a smile filled with wicked, yellowing teeth. He could almost taste the greatness that would soon be his. Lesskreep, Krazzik, Hellpaw, and yes, even Thanquol. They would all recognise his power.

He flew down the stairs like a shadow to rejoin his victorious brethren.

Gotrek spared his companion a glance before walking over to where the last ratman lay. He pulled his axe free from the dead creature’s spine, the blade coming loose with a wet squeal of bone and a small gout of dark blood. Almost as an afterthought, he stamped down on the pathetic creature’s little trinket, grinding the black shards into dust beneath his boot.

He scanned the room, looking for more enemies but, disappointingly, there appeared to be none left alive.

Felix came up behind him, hacking and wheezing in the smoke. ‘Now, may we leave? Or are you going to insist on having one more drink first?’

Gotrek ignored him, instead clambering up onto one of the few remaining tables and grabbing the hilt of his companion’s runesword. He tugged it free from the ceiling without the slightest effort. Agape, Felix almost failed to catch the weapon as Gotrek tossed it over to him.

‘No,’ he said finally. ‘The ale in this place tastes like orc-spit.’

Felix raised a blood-caked eyebrow, and shrugged before starting for the cellar door. Gotrek stopped him with a raised meaty fist.

‘Where do you think you’re going, manling?’

‘That last ratman was headed this way, obviously there’s a way out.’

Gotrek shook his head and laughed his deep, gruff laugh. Lumbering into a run, he drove through the flames and out into the street. The sounds of battle resumed.

Felix sighed as he swallowed a curse. ‘A burning city filled with an army of ratmen? Of course we’re going that way.’

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2011 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Clint Langley

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