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To see the full Black Library range, visit the Kobo Store.

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Hammerhal – Josh Reynolds

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Vengeance Eternal – Matt Westbrook

The Prisoner of the Black Sun – Josh Reynolds

Beneath the Black Thumb – David Guymer

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

Assault on the Mandrake Bastion – Josh Reynolds

An Excerpt from Skaven Pestilens – Josh Reynolds

Great Red – David Guymer

Heartwood – Robbie MacNiven

The Keys to Ruin – David Annandale

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

An Excerpt from Overlords of the Iron Dragon – C L Werner

An Excerpt from Eight Lamentations: Spear of Shadows – Josh Reynolds

About the Authors

Further Reading

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Dear Reader,

Thank you for buying this book. You stand on the precipice of a great adventure – welcome to the worlds of Warhammer Age of Sigmar.

Herein you will find a host of great stories that explore the Mortal Realms – a fantastical landscape of mighty heroes, strange beasts, wizards, terrifying monsters, bloodshed and betrayal. Here, rampaging armies clash in brutal conflict, dauntless explorers test their mettle and their swords amongst the cavernous ruins of ancient civilisations, and wild magic causes the dead to rise again.

With this book you will undertake a journey through these realms and meet some of the many characters that inhabit them, pointing the way to even further adventures – recommending your next reads from the extensive and ever-expanding Black Library range.

So strap on your sword or ready your wizard’s staff and let us begin. You have but to turn the page...

HAMMERHAL

Josh Reynolds

PROLOGUE

DARK GOD’S LAUGHTER

The divine consciousness of Sigmar Heldenhammer, the God-King, raced down from the celestial peaks of Azyr and into the tangled canopies of Ghyran, the Realm of Life. His awareness, shrouded in storm winds and rain, descended through vast clouds of floating spores, passing by the shattered husks of sky-islands and storm-reefs to the green lands below.

Ghyran was a vibrant realm. Life was everywhere, taking innumerable shapes. It grew and spread with a hunger that defied all logic, responding to the eternal song of Alarielle the Everqueen. He could hear her voice echoing from every corner of her realm, as the Goddess of Life tried to put right all that was wrong and heal the wounds of war. But there were places that even her song could not reach. Places where other, darker gods held sway.

In moments, the Nevergreen Mountains rose wild about him. Sigmar was there and yet not there, a shard of his godly might riding a storm wind through the dark pine reaches of the Hexwood, which covered the mountains’ slopes.

Gradually the wind coalesced, joining with the light of the stars and the sound of distant thunder to assume the seeming of a man, clad in golden war-plate embossed with celestial heraldry. It was a form the God-King had taken often, in days gone by, when the Mortal Realms were at peace and the gods were of one mind, united in a pantheon.

But all things ended. One by one, the gods had abandoned Sigmar’s grand alliance, or betrayed him. The embers of an old, familiar anger flared at the thought, and thunder rumbled somewhere over the mountain peaks. Even Alarielle had retreated at last, withdrawing deep into the hidden glades of Ghyran, there to sleep and dream.

And as the old alliances shattered, war had rocked the Mortal Realms to their very roots. The Ruinous Powers – the four Dark Gods of Chaos – pressed close about the threshold of reality, and no realm save his own had been safe from their attentions.

Ghyran had seen more than its share of that conflict. The Plague God, Nurgle, had claimed it as his own, turning the rampant creation to stagnation. But the servants of the Everqueen had fought alongside Sigmar’s own, if grudgingly, and had beaten the foetid servants of Nurgle back on several fronts, weakening the Plague God’s hold on the realm.

Nevertheless, where one of the Dark Gods weakened, the others grew strong. That was the nature of the Ruinous Powers. They waged war on each other as readily as on Sigmar or the other gods of the Mortal Realms. And where Nurgle found himself stymied, his great rival Tzeentch, the God of Change, was sure to seek some advantage.

And here, in the Nevergreen Mountains, the Architect of Fate was making his move. Sigmar could sense the innumerable skeins of possibility and chance weaving through the Hexwood. Every tree in the forest thrummed with corruption. Each one seemed to be a black wound in reality, and past them he could see cancerous pathways stretching away somewhere, beyond even his sight.

Something vast and monstrous waited here, just beyond the trees, watching him. It had foreseen his arrival, and its laughter itched at the back of his mind like a nagging ache. A susurrus of muttering pursued him as he moved on, teasing and taunting him. He longed to face the laughing presence that he knew to be Tzeentch as he might once have. In those early days, he had matched his might against that of the Ruinous Powers, but he’d come to learn through harsh experience that there was no profit in such a confrontation. So instead, he ignored it and continued on, speeding through the forest, faster now, seeking what had drawn his attention, even in high Sigmaron in his home realm of Azyr.

He felt the touch of a mind, much like his own, start in recognition as his consciousness entered a wide clearing. Twisted trees rose up like the crumbled parapets of a broken citadel, casting strange shadows across the bestial shapes cavorting beneath their branches. The beastkin reeked of Tzeentch; his corrupting touch was obvious upon them. The tzaangors were avian-featured and horned, bedecked in savage totems and bearing weapons of bone, iron and crystal. Some of them had once been men, before the magics of Tzeentch had twisted them into new, more awful shapes. Others had been born mere beasts, raised up by foul rites to walk on two legs rather than four.

Whatever their origin, the beastkin capered to the dissonant music of crouched drummers and whirling pipers, screeching and howling in time to the cacophony. The trees about the clearing seemed to flex and bend with the raucous noise, their bark blistering beneath the caress of the damnable incense rising from the multi-coloured bonfires which littered the clearing.

At its heart, a blister of crystalline rock sprouted from the soil. It was a flux-cairn – a sour growth of stagnant magics, raised by the servants of Tzeentch to honour their dark master and facilitate his endless schemes. It spread like a gangrenous crown, its milky facets catching the light in eerie ways. The formation of fossilised sorcery towered over the tzaangors and reverberated with the thumping of their drums. Motes of iridescence, which Sigmar knew to be captured magics, crawled through it like fireflies.

The flux-cairn was the foul heart of the forest, the darkling pathways hidden within the trees all stretching unseen through its facets and into unknown realms beyond. Sigmar could feel the twisted paths growing, stretching towards their destination. The sensation of it was like the hum of a mosquito in his skull, or an itch he could not scratch. He desired nothing more than to destroy the cairn, to call down the lightning which was his to command and shatter it into a million pieces.

But something stayed his hand. He gazed deeper into the heart of the flux-cairn, and that was when he saw them: silvery spheres, wrapped in something that might have been vines or algae, hanging suspended within the cairn.

‘Soulpods,’ he murmured.

The newborn seedlings of Alarielle’s favoured servants: the sylvaneth.

The soulpods throbbed with potential – they were the raw stuff of life, waiting for their moment to bloom and grow. Within them, tree-kin spirits – though of what sort Sigmar could not say – waited for their rebirth and clamoured for release. They flickered within their cage of crystal. They sensed him, and their unformed consciousness stretched out towards him, imploring him for aid.

Aid he could not give them. This place was not his, and already he could feel the Everqueen’s anger at his presence growing. She had sensed him the moment he had entered Ghyran unannounced, and had raced with the winds to confront him. He felt her anger at his intrusion wash over him like the heat of a summer’s day. In an attempt to forestall her fury, he asked, ‘How long have they been captives, sister?’

‘Too long, Thunderer.’ Alarielle’s voice scraped across his consciousness like the sting of a hundred nettles. Her seeming appeared before him in a swirl of loose leaves and pollen. Teeth made from thorns were bared in a snarl of challenge. ‘It is no concern of yours, Lord of the Heavens. Leave this place and seek your own battles.’

Though it was his servants who had helped weaken the Dark Gods’ hold on Ghyran, Sigmar knew that Alarielle bore him little love. Perhaps she still blamed him for failures of old, or perhaps the war-song now beat so strongly within her that she could not perceive help when it was freely offered. Either way, he was reluctant to test the fragile bonds of their current alliance. And yet he could not bring himself to depart.

‘What is happening here, sister? Perhaps I can be of help…’

She swelled with wrath at his words, her form expanding to gigantic proportions, invisible to the mortal eye but unsettling nonetheless. Like Sigmar, her physical manifestation was elsewhere, engaged in some other conflict. But this shard of her was potent enough.

‘I need no aid. This is my place. My realm. Not yours.’

He could feel a familiar rage boiling within her. Long years of hardship had worn her patience to less than nothing. She longed to strike at the enemy as he himself did – to drive them before her and cast their corpses into the deepest pits. Her anger was like a hurricane beating against his perception. He drew back, lest it draw him in.

Around them, tzaangors sniffed the air and squawked nervously. They could not discern either god, but some magical sense, gifted to them by their twisted patron, had alerted them that something was amiss. The air was alive with magics.

Sigmar turned. The bowers and glens of the forest echoed with screams. He heard blades sink noisily into wood. Flesh was being torn by splintery claws, and bone snapped within constricting coils of vine. Something was coming.

‘I merely came to offer my aid,’ he began again, but Alarielle flung out a claw of pine needles and blossoms, silencing him.

‘My children have arrived. They come, and this farce ends.’

With an ear-splitting shriek, the sylvaneth erupted into the clearing. The tree-kin were bark-covered nightmares, with splintery jaws and branch-like talons. They resembled humans, but only at a distance. Some towered over their companions, swinging blades made from fossilised wood and rock. Others bore no weapons save their claws. They fell upon the tzaangors like the rage of the Everqueen made manifest. The beastkin screeched and fought back, trying to protect the flux-cairn.

The battle was fierce. Sigmar watched as a titanic sylvaneth swung a tzaangor about by its horn, smashing it to a bloody paste against the ground. The gleaming falchions and spears of the tzaangors drew sap from the twisting bodies of the tree-kin. The battle swung one way, and then the other. For every tzaangor that fell, two more raced to take its place, yet the sylvaneth fought with a fury that the beastkin could not match. The soulpods were their future, and they would risk almost anything to save them.

The air pulsed with Alarielle’s war-song as the Everqueen urged her children on. The wordless harmony rose and fell with the wind whipping between the trees, driving the sylvaneth to greater effort. Then, all at once, a shriek echoed through the glen.

Sigmar saw a hideous figure clamber atop the flux-cairn, staff in hand. This tzaangor wore ragged robes, and its thin form was bedecked with totems and sorcerous fetishes. It was a shaman, a wielder of twisted magics. It slammed the ferrule of its staff down against the top of the cairn, and the crystalline facets flashed with silent, sickly lightning.

The soulpods screamed. Their cry, part fear and part pain, echoed through the minds of every living thing in the clearing. Whatever the shaman was doing, it was hurting the nascent spirits. Alarielle echoed their cry, and her anger shook the clearing to its roots. The trees wept leaves, and the ground ruptured. The flux-cairn itself shook, and more lightning flashed as the soulpods within continued to wail.

The tzaangor shaman screeched meaningfully.

The threat was plain, obvious even to the most bloodthirsty soul. The sylvaneth were prepared to risk themselves, but not the very thing they’d come to save. The tree-kin retreated, slowly at first, and then more quickly. They slipped away, vanishing into the gloom, as the tzaangor screeched and howled in celebration of their victory.

Alarielle watched in silence, her earlier rage gone as quickly as it had come. Her seeming shrank into itself, her gaze fixed upon the flux-cairn and its prisoners. They called to her, but she could not answer them. She turned to look at Sigmar, her expression unreadable. She would not ask for aid. Could not. He understood – it was not the way of a god to beg aid from another.

‘Sister, let me help you,’ he said. He held out his hand. ‘As I have done before, let me do so now. Together, we might…’

But her seeming was gone. Like a morning mist, it wavered and dispersed, taking her attentions with it. There were other battles to be fought elsewhere that demanded her attentions. Ghyran shook with the drumbeat of war. This battle was lost; others might yet be won.

Sigmar let his hand drop. Weariness stole over him. Once, Alarielle would not have hesitated to accept his aid. Once, he and the other gods would have come to her aid unasked.

But those days were long past. The pantheon was dust, and less than dust.

He looked up, seeking relief in the stars. Azyr. The Celestial Realm. His realm. The last true bulwark against the depredations of the Ruinous Powers. He had his own wars to fight, his own realm to defend. If the other gods did not desire his help, he would leave them to it, for good or ill. But as he made ready to depart, he heard again the laughter of Tzeentch ringing out of the hidden places, taunting him.

Thunder rumbled overhead, and the laughter fell momentarily silent. The celestial lightning coiled about Sigmar as the old anger flared fully now. It was never far from the surface. He was a tempest wrought in the shape of a man. His hair and beard were as swirling black clouds, and his eyes were full of lightning. His face became a swirl of stars, blazing with cold light. His voice boomed like thunder as he bellowed a challenge into the teeth of the laughter. He was the first storm and the last, the storm which would wash the filth of Chaos from the Mortal Realms forever.

He lowered his hands, and the lightning calmed its writhing. The stars retreated, and the tempest with them, leaving only the cold edge of determination behind. The stars shone bright overhead, and he knew what he must do.

As he had done before, he would do now. And the Dark Gods be damned.

CHAPTER ONE

THE TWIN-TAILED CITY

The rat chittered, exposing yellow incisors in warning. Belloc growled and tossed his knife. The rat fled as the narrow blade thudded into the side of a mould-encrusted crate. The dock-warden cursed and ambled to retrieve his weapon. As he did so, he saw the flash of eyes in the nearby shadows. The rat wasn’t alone. They never were. Where there was one, there were a dozen – these days, at least. The sacks of grain that were stacked along the causeway of the aether-dock were irresistible to hungry vermin.

The docks rose high over Hammerhal’s warehouse district, one ring of berths and warehouses stacked atop the next, almost all the way up its length. From each ring, an ever-spreading canopy of high-altitude berths and quays extended out over the tangled streets below, like branches stretching from a tree of immense size.

Belloc had heard that it was, in fact, just that – that much of the city had been grown rather than built. He didn’t know whether he believed that or not, though there were stranger things in this realm, to be sure.

Hammerhal itself, for instance. The Twin-tailed City stretched across two of the eight Mortal Realms, separated by untold infinities thanks to the Stormrift Realmgate. Like all realmgates, it was a portal through which one could pass into another realm entirely. Countless numbers of these apertures in reality were scattered about the Mortal Realms, and all of the great cities were built about one or more realmgates.

Hammerhal spread outwards from the twinned thresholds of the Stormrift Realmgate into both Ghyran, the Realm of Life, and Aqshy, the Realm of Fire. Belloc had only been to Hammerhal Aqsha once, and the experience hadn’t been a pleasant one. The air had tasted of cinders and smoke, and he’d been covered in sweat from sunup to sundown. Ghyran was better, but not by much – it was too wet here, too humid. He missed Azyr. The Celestial Realm had its problems, but at least the weather was pleasant.

He plucked his knife free of the crate and spun it lightly between his fingers, careful not to cut himself.

‘Well,’ he said, glaring at the rats, ‘anything to say for yourselves?’

When no reply was forthcoming, he kicked the mouldering crate towards them. It came apart as his boot touched it, and he yelped in disgust. Bits and pieces clattered across the ground, and the rats took the hint, scattering into the shadows.

Belloc hopped back, scraping at the sludge on his boot with the edge of his knife. If it got into the leather, he would have to get new boots, and he’d only just managed to break these ones in. He looked around as he dislodged the last of it. There was mould everywhere, growing on every warehouse and berth that occupied the vast wooden platform of the docks. And vines. And weeds, even. It seemed inconceivable that anything should be growing this high above the city proper, but life found a way. Especially in Hammerhal Ghyra.

This side of the bifurcated city was awash in unwelcome growth. The heat from the Fire-Bastions could only do so much; no matter how much lava was channelled into the immense stone runnels from Hammerhal Aqsha, the city’s spires and golden domes were under eternal siege from Ghyran’s excessively exuberant plant life.

And the rats. Always the rats.

‘Vermin,’ Belloc muttered, thrusting his knife back into its sheath.

That was all this job was, at times. The dock-warden scratched at his unshaven chin. He was burly, but not especially brave, even with a sword on his hip. He wasn’t ashamed. Bravery cost extra, and the owners of the docks were notoriously cheap. You got what you paid for, and they had paid for Belloc. Luckily, no one was stupid enough to climb all the way up here, just to filch grain – or worse, try and steal an airship. So it was just him and the rats.

He wondered if Delph and the others were as bored as he was. Probably. Things were either boring or terrifying this high up, but they had drawn the short straws and been forced to patrol the uppermost ring.

He didn’t like it up here. The Kharadron vessels smelled of strange chemicals and the vibrations of their buoyancy endrins shook the entire dock. The sky-duardin were a stand-offish folk who kept to themselves, unless they had business to attend to. He’d heard from Delph that they lived in flying cities, but didn’t know how much credence there was in that.

Then again, Delph was a duardin herself, so perhaps she’d know, if anyone did. She said the Kharadron were duardin who had retreated to the skies when the armies of the Dark Gods had swept over the Mortal Realms. She didn’t seem to like them very much. Granted, she didn’t like anyone.

Belloc stared at one of the Kharadron vessels. It was oddly shaped. Too many curves. The bulbous aether-endrins that held the ship aloft glowed dimly, even when at anchor. If you stared at them for too long, you got dizzy. Belloc blinked and looked away.

There were sounds up here too, sometimes. Not the usual creaking and groaning you’d expect, but something else. Smells, too – acrid and unpleasant. Once, he thought he’d seen something watching him from the roof of a warehouse.

Suddenly uneasy, he glanced at the unfamiliar stars above. The sky was green here, even now at night, with the faintest tinge of azure. Sometimes it was so pale it was almost white, and sometimes it was so dark as to be black, but it was always a shade of green. The stars were the worst. They were the same as in Azyr, he was certain, but somehow different, as if he were looking at them from the wrong angle.

He blinked and tore his eyes away from the unforgiving sky. Beyond the obscuring wall of anchored airships and skycutters, Hammerhal Ghyra stretched across the horizon. It was almost beautiful from up here. Parts of the city were given over to vast groves of trees, and amongst the green he could see golden domes and white towers rising over a sea of smaller buildings.

A constant flow of molten rock poured down through immense stone and crystal runnels that emerged from the city’s heart, where the Stormrift Realmgate was located. The glowing lines stretched like veins through the tangled streets towards the distant defensive canals which marked the outer districts. He could just make out the faint reddish glow of the Fire-Bastions on the horizon.

Each time the city extended its borders, the Fire-Bastions were duly redirected by teams of human and duardin artisans. The engineers of the Ironweld Arsenal were capable of great feats of artifice. They bent the wisdom of two races towards devising weapons and mechanisms for the reconquest of the Mortal Realms.

The Fire-Bastions were one such mechanism. Fed by the runnels of molten rock, they served to burn back the ravenous flora of the realm, keeping the outer districts of the city from being overwhelmed by fast-growing plant life.

The hollow, ashen network of tunnels that were left behind when the Fire-Bastions were redirected were then gradually built over and hidden from sight. Belloc sometimes wondered how many of those tunnels were repurposed rather than filled in, and how many still ran beneath the winding streets of Hammerhal Ghyra.

‘And probably rats in all of them,’ he muttered.

The city was full of rats. And worse things. No one talked about it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t so. He’d left Azyrheim one step ahead of the thief-takers, but a stretch in the sky-cages didn’t seem so bad now compared to some of the things he’d seen.

Delph and the others swore blind that the mystic wards around the city prevented anything too horrible from getting in. They said the magic kept the monsters out, but Belloc wasn’t concerned about the ones outside. He was more worried about the ones that might already be in the city somewhere. Hiding. Waiting.

There were stories. There were always stories, even in Azyrheim. About rats that walked on two legs, and men with the heads of goats and wolf’s teeth. Belloc was no child. He knew that monsters were real, and their gods too. And he knew that nothing could keep them out for long, if they were truly of a mind to get in.

As he gazed at the horizon, he found his eyes drawn towards the Nevergreen Mountains. He’d never seen them up close, but he’d heard about the great forest that covered their broken slopes and the things that lurked within it. Lightning flashed, arcing between the distant peaks and the night sky. He shivered. The lightning reminded him that the Stormcast Eternals had marched west, towards the mountains, two days before.

He shivered again, thinking of those massive, silver-clad warriors as they passed through the steaming gates of the Fire-Bastions. Delph said they’d been human once, before Sigmar had blessed them with divine strength and holy armour, but what would a duardin know about such things? She didn’t even worship Sigmar. Like most duardin – at least those he knew – she worshipped Grungni, the god of her folk.

Something clattered. Belloc froze. Then, slowly, he turned.

It was probably a rat. It was almost certainly a rat. But sometimes it wasn’t. He’d heard stories that sometimes things crawled down out of the green sky, looking for food. It was the same in Azyrheim, but it was somehow worse here. He reached for the hilt of his sword as he took a step towards where the sound had originated from – an alleyway between two warehouses.

Belloc didn’t call for help. Delph had gotten angry the last time he’d called for help and there hadn’t been any need. He needed this job. Besides, if it was something other than a rat, calling for help would only attract its attention all the quicker.

He took a step towards the alleyway. For a moment, he heard only the creak of rigging and the whistle of the wind blowing between the buildings. Warehouses of all sizes clustered thick here, near the edge of the ring, and they collected shadows.

Another clatter, and a rat ran out of the alleyway, squealing.

Belloc sighed in relief. He nearly choked on that sigh as something pounced on the rat. The rodent died instantly as four dun paws crushed it flat. A tawny, feathered skull dipped, and a hooked beak tore at its kill. Belloc took a step back. The thing turned, golden eyes fixed on him.

‘Gryph-hound,’ he muttered as a chill raced along his spine. The creature resembled a small lion, only with the head of a bird of prey. It was no larger than a wolf, but it was far more lethal. Its tail lashed as it crouched over its kill. He held out his hands and began to back away slowly. ‘Easy there. No harm done. Enjoy your meal.’

It might have come off one of the airships, but there was no way to tell. Just as he was about to call out for help, he bumped into someone. An instant later, something very sharp was resting against his neck.

‘Hello, friend,’ said a voice. ‘No, don’t move. Especially don’t try to draw that sword you’re wearing. Things might take an unfortunate turn.’

Belloc kept his hands from his blade. Thieves, he thought. Or worse. He made to speak, but the pressure of the blade against his throat increased slightly.

‘Quietly, friend. Quietly. No need to speak.’

Belloc quickly closed his mouth.

‘Good,’ continued the voice. ‘Good. Now, I need you to point out the berth belonging to the sky-merchant Rollo Tarn. Remember, don’t reach for the sword.’

Tarn? Why did they want Tarn? He didn’t ship anything valuable. Just wood. Belloc’s mind spun in confusion. No one could expect him to die for wood, could they? He gestured slowly, hesitantly. The pressure of the knife was removed, and he sucked in a breath.

‘There now. Excellent. That wasn’t so difficult, was it?’

Belloc swallowed, but didn’t reply. He was too busy praying.

‘You can turn around, now.’

Belloc did. The man before him was tall, and dressed like someone with more sense than to be creeping around the aether-docks at night. He wore a heavy, triple-caped overcoat over something that might have once been the uniform of a Freeguild warrior. A basket-hilted rapier was sheathed on one hip, and he had a brace of pistols on the other. On the lapel of his coat was pinned a symbol that Belloc recognised all too well from his time in Azyrheim: the hammer and comet of the Order of Azyr.

Belloc drew back in fear.

‘Witch hunter!’

CHAPTER TWO

SERVANTS OF AZYR

Sol Gage, knight of the Order of Azyr, sighed, reversed the knife he held and forcefully tapped his prisoner on the head with its weighted pommel. The dock-warden crumpled without a sound, and the witch hunter lowered him gently to the ground. He sheathed his knife.

‘Bryn,’ he said, ‘get him out of sight.’

‘Couldn’t have thumped him in here, then?’ a deep voice growled querulously. A squat, heavy form stumped from out of the shadows behind Gage. Thick hands caught the unconscious dock-warden by the ankles, and began to drag him away.

‘I’m sorry, my friend – I thought you might be bored.’ As Gage spoke, a second shape, much taller than the witch hunter, stepped over the dock-warden’s body. Gage glanced up into a stern yet noble countenance, wrought in silver. ‘Don’t scowl so, Carus. I didn’t kill him.’

‘I am not scowling.’

Carus Iron-Oath stood head and shoulders above even the tallest of mortal men. Clad in silver war-plate forged from holy sigmarite, the Lord-Veritant of the Hallowed Knights was an imposing sight. A cloak of deep azure hung from his shoulders, and dark eyes peered out from behind his war-mask, the only sign of the man within.

No, not just a man, Gage reminded himself. A Stormcast Eternal – one of Sigmar’s chosen warriors, forged anew on the Anvil of Apotheosis and made into something better. Or, at least, something stronger. Where most Stormcasts were warriors first and foremost, the Lord-Veritants were, like the witch hunters of the Order of Azyr, tasked with rooting out spiritual and physical corruption – though in a far more direct manner than their mortal counterparts.

‘I am simply ill at ease with such skulduggery, my friend,’ Carus said. ‘This is not the way it should be done. We should confront them openly, and drive back their shadows with our light.’

Carus thumped the ground with his staff, and the Lantern of Abjuration which surmounted it flashed softly.

‘There will be plenty of that before the end, I have no doubt,’ replied Gage. ‘For now, we must meet shadow with shadow, lest our quarry take flight.’

‘Yes.’

‘Because they have an airship,’ Gage added, after a moment.

‘I understand.’

‘Are you smiling? I can’t tell.’

Carus grunted in noncommittal fashion, and Gage sighed. Trying to elicit a chuckle from his stolid companion had become something of a challenge for him. The Stormcast Eternal whistled sharply. The gryph-hound trotted towards him, carrying the remains of the rat in her beak, and Carus stroked the creature’s wedge-shaped head affectionately.

‘Good girl, Zephyr,’ he rumbled.

Gage turned his attentions to the warehouse the dock-warden had indicated. Like most of the warehouses on the aether-dock, it was a square structure, built for durability rather than for looks. It followed the duardin design, with a high-peaked roof of flat planks that kept off the worst of the weather, and a shell of walkways and loading platforms that entrapped it. It seemed to crouch in the shadow of taller warehouses, a web of wooden gantries and skycutter berths stretching above it. A large aether-quay had been built onto the roof, projecting outwards like a semi-circular awning of wooden planks and support pillars.

Tarn’s airship, the Hopeful Traveller, was docked there, floating above the city, snug in its nest of gangplanks, ropes and pulleys. It resembled a seagoing galley, save that its masts were burdened with thick canvas aether-bags rather than billowing sails. The double rows of oars on either side of the vessel were wide, fan-shaped assemblages of wood and cloth, perfect for catching the wind.

‘The ship is still docked,’ Gage murmured. ‘Are you in there, I wonder?’

‘Your spies say he is,’ Carus said. Gage could almost hear the Stormcast frowning.

‘Spies can be wrong. Or suborned.’

‘We will find out soon enough. Whether he is or not, Rollo Tarn must be put to the question. And if he has committed crimes, he must be made to answer for them.’

Gage nodded absently. Rollo Tarn. The name was common enough, as was the man it was attached to. A human sky-merchant of some minor standing. While the Kharadron jealously guarded their routes through the skies of the Mortal Realms, a few daring individuals had learned of other paths, sailing more dangerous winds than those taken by the sky-duardin.

Now, thousands of airships, skycutters and leaf-boats found their way to the aether-docks every day, sailing along the rift-lanes. While they could fly neither as high nor as swiftly as the Kharadron vessels, they served much the same purpose, carrying goods between the two halves of the Twin-tailed City. It was mostly food, these days, but some, like Tarn, had become wealthy trading in building materials.

Despite the nature of the realm, coming by useable wood was difficult in Ghyran. The forests, by and large, belonged to the Everqueen and the sylvaneth tree-kin. Alarielle was the Goddess of Life, and Ghyran had been her demesne for as long as the Mortal Realms had existed. Though the Plague God, Nurgle, had all but wrested the realm from her, still she claimed a proprietary interest in it – the forests were hers, from the smallest sapling to the mightiest oak. And her servants would not hesitate to punish those who violated the ancient laws of the Everqueen, whatever their reasons.

Thus, logging was all but unheard of without great ritual and expense. Yet Tarn seemed to have no trouble bringing in copious amounts of timber, which the city’s rulers, the Grand Conclave, bought eagerly, without asking too many questions. The city was hungry, in the way of all cities, and was expanding as its population swelled. Growing, as the God-King had decreed that it must. Such expansion was key to the eventual reconquest of the Mortal Realms, but it meant that the need for wood and stone was endless.

And Tarn was only too eager to supply it. The Hopeful Traveller brought in a new load of freshly cut timber every week, and it soon vanished into the city, to be made into new buildings and palisades. But where was the wood coming from? Not a whisper of Tarn’s source had reached the usual gossips among the trade guilds. That, by itself, was suspicious.

Unfortunately, as far as the Grand Conclave was concerned, suspicion was not enough to cancel such a lucrative contract. Tarn had made himself integral to the city’s growth. Not a crime, in itself, but there was something there. Gage could feel it.

‘What seems perfect, rarely is,’ he said softly.

It was a saying among his brethren in the order. Perfection was a mask worn by Chaos, and the prettiest faces often hid a singular ugliness beneath. It was his task to seek out that ugliness, and to purge it. Such was the duty handed down to the Order of Azyr and its servants by the God-King: to find the darkness, wherever it laired, and bring it to the light.

Instinctively, Gage ran a finger along the badge pinned to his lapel. The hammer and the comet. The sign of Sigmar Heldenhammer, God-King of Azyr. The founder of Azyrheim, and the creator of the Stormcast Eternals. It was Sigmar who had led the first tribes of mortal men out of barbarism and set them on the path of civilisation. And it was Sigmar who had freed the other gods from their ancient prisons, so that the Mortal Realms might flourish beneath their guidance.

It had been Sigmar who had first struck a blow against the Ruinous Powers, keeping the realms safe from their corrupting influence. And it would be Sigmar and his servants who would drive the Dark Gods back again, freeing the Mortal Realms from their monstrous clutches.

Sigmar was the light in the darkness, and that darkness was here. Not just in the city, but close by. Gage could smell it. Taste it. It was on the air, and in the water. It was like an itch he couldn’t scratch. He realised he was tapping the pommel of his sword hard enough to make it rattle in its sheath. With an effort of will, he stopped himself. He felt Carus’ eyes on him.

‘You can feel it,’ the Lord-Veritant rumbled. ‘The call of Chaos.’ He pressed a hand to his chest-plate. ‘In here. Like the echo of a song you do not recall hearing. Or the whisper of an unfamiliar voice, echoing up out of the deep.’

Gage nodded. ‘It seems impossible. To find it here, in a place sanctified by the hand of the God-King himself, and yet…’

‘Sanctity is not enough. Even the strongest stones eventually crumble.’

‘Yes.’ Gage frowned. ‘Tarn has friends in high places. They will not abandon him, not without proof. So we must find it, even if they would rather that we didn’t.’

‘Hammerhal is the greatest of the Cities of Sigmar, save Azyrheim itself. Anything that threatens it must be rooted out and brought to light. That is our task and our privilege.’ Carus’ voice was hard and sharp. ‘None may gainsay us.’

‘Not successfully, at any rate,’ Gage murmured. Carus’ gryph-hound stiffened, the feathers on her neck ruffling. The Stormcast placed a restraining hand on her.

‘Quietly, Zephyr,’ he murmured. He glanced at Gage, and gestured upwards with his staff. ‘Kuva is back.’

Gage looked up at the web of walkways and gantries above. A slim shape dropped down through them, landing lightly on the ground nearby. Despite the heavy fur cloak and armour she wore, she made no sound at all.

‘Well?’ Gage asked, as the newcomer rose to her feet.

He’d tasked Kuva with seeing to the rest of the dock-wardens on duty. He didn’t want any interruptions or surprises, whatever the night brought. If Tarn knew he was being investigated, things would become that much more difficult.

‘They will not trouble us,’ Kuva said. The aelf’s voice was a harsh rasp, and her fine-boned features were stern and marked by faint scars. The Lion Ranger was tall, taller than Gage, though still falling short of the towering Carus. She wore a long coat of golden scale mail beneath a cloak of white fur. Her flaxen hair was tied back from her face, revealing the tapered knife-points of her ears, and she rested a broad-bladed war-axe in the crook of her arm.

That axe, with its wide double blade, had tasted the blood of monsters and men alike, and she had wielded it for longer than Gage had been alive – perhaps even longer than the Mortal Realms themselves had existed. There were scribes who claimed that the origins of the Lion Rangers might stretch back to the world-that-was, but only Sigmar and his fellow gods knew for sure, and they weren’t saying.

Some among his order whispered that Kuva had been there the day the last Gate of Azyr had slammed shut, sealing the Celestial Realm away from the rest of the Mortal Realms as they reeled beneath the assaults of Chaos. They also said that she had been there, waiting, the day it opened once more, centuries later. He could believe it.

‘Dead?’ Gage asked. Kuva was the type to cut a knot, rather than untie it.

‘Unconscious. I do not kill slaves.’

Gage snorted. ‘Hardly slaves. They’re paid a fair wage.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps not enough to deal with the likes of us, but still. Comets in their pockets, and a roof over their heads. What more can any man ask?’

‘Not to get hit on the head and hidden in a rubbish heap,’ Bryn growled as he stepped out of the alleyway, dusting his hands. The duardin was almost as broad as Kuva was tall, and thick with muscle beneath the heavy gromril war-plate he wore. His bald dome of a head surmounted a thick profusion of greying beard, much of it bound in thick plaits. Beneath shaggy brows, two pale blue eyes twinkled with amusement. He wore a brace of drakefire pistols holstered across his barrel chest, and had a heavy two-handed hammer slung over his back.

‘Then again, you humans are odds ones. Complaining about every little thing.’ Bryn nodded back towards the alley. ‘I hid him well.’

‘Took you long enough,’ Gage said.

‘Don’t ask, unless you want it done properly.’

Bryn had once served as an Ironbreaker in the retinue of a duardin warden king, though which one he had never said, just as he had never explained why he had left the king’s service in the first place. The forge-proven armour he wore was decorated with golden knotwork and marked with Khazalid runes, which shone strangely in the light of Carus’ staff.

Gage had worked with Kuva and Bryn for longer than he cared to calculate. A man in his profession needed trustworthy swords at his back, whatever their race. They may have had their own reasons for aiding him in his investigations, but they had saved his life – and he, theirs – more times than he could count.

By comparison, Carus was a newcomer, though the Stormcast Eternals of the Hallowed Knights had warded Hammerhal Ghyra since its founding. As a Lord-Veritant, Carus’ authority exceeded Gage’s own. While a Lord-Veritant’s place was usually on the battlefield, they would occasionally aid the Order of Azyr if the need arose. In those instances, it was traditional that they defer to the order, though that often depended on the Lord-Veritant in question. Carus, for his part, seemed content to follow Gage’s lead – at least for the moment.

Gage looked at the aelf. ‘The warehouse?’

‘Unguarded,’ Kuva said. She hesitated. ‘Or so it seems.’

‘That’s all to the good. If we can do this quietly, so much the better. We’ll check the warehouse first, then the airship.’

‘We should burn it,’ the aelf added.

‘Which – the warehouse, or the airship?’

‘All of it.’ She looked around with an expression of distaste.

Gage smiled. The Lion Ranger had little liking for cities, even one as beautiful as this. Her order were as much creatures of the wild as the beasts whose skins they wore. They were savage and graceful, with little tolerance for what they saw as the foibles of human- and duardin-kind. Especially when it came to the reliability – or the lack thereof – of walls and cities.

‘I shall bear your suggestion in mind,’ Gage said.

He tapped the grip of one of his pistols. The baroque weapons had been crafted in Azyrheim, long before Gage had been gifted them by his mentor upon his ascension to a full knight of the order. They were filled with blessed shot, and he had used them to end the life of more than one enemy of the Celestial Realm.

Bryn chuckled, a query mark of sweet smoke rising from the bowl of his pipe. He sniffed. ‘Airships. Only a manling would think of such things.’

Gage glanced at him. ‘Your cousins, the Kharadron, might beg to differ.’

‘Aethercraft. Different sort of thing entirely. Duardin engineering, that. Not entirely respectable, but you have to make allowances sometimes.’ He pointed at the airship. ‘That, however, is a boat with a bag of hot air attached to it.’ He puffed on his pipe. ‘Might as well be magic.’

‘It is magic,’ Kuva said, looking down at the duardin. The aelf hefted her broad-bladed war-axe onto one shoulder. She frowned. ‘Human magic.’

‘Better than aelf magic, I suppose.’

‘Quiet, Bryn,’ Gage said firmly. ‘I’m not concerned with how it flies, so much as what it might be carrying. And the sooner we check the warehouse, the sooner we find out. Let’s go.’

Bryn gave a gap-toothed smile. ‘Finally,’ he said, before tapping out his pipe and stowing it somewhere in his armour.

Kuva led the way, moving quietly. Gage and Bryn followed close behind. Carus brought up the rear, moving more slowly, so as to reduce the clatter of his war-plate. Blessed sigmarite was many things, but mystically silent wasn’t one of them.

A blow from Bryn’s hammer was sufficient to shatter the lock on the warehouse doors. Kuva went in first. Gage followed, one hand on the hilt of his sword.

The warehouse spread out around him. The interior was high and vaulted, the upper reaches criss-crossed with walkways. Moss-lanterns hung from the floor-to-ceiling support beams, and the bioluminescent foxfire within them cast a pale glow across the source of Tarn’s fortune: stacks of freshly cut logs.

The stacks were twice Gage’s height, and made up of dozens of logs resting on heavy pallets. They filled the warehouse, front to back. The smell of green wood and pulp was thick on the air. And something else. Something indefinable. Gage looked around, frowning. Carus met his gaze, and nodded. He could sense it as well.

Gage had learned, through hard experience, to trust his instincts. There was something here. They just had to find it.

‘Spread out,’ he said softly, ‘but stay in sight of one another.’

‘What are we looking for?’ Bryn said. The duardin studied the stacks warily.

‘Anything suspicious.’

‘More suspicious than two manlings, an aelf and a duardin sneaking around a warehouse in the middle of the night? The aelf’s right. Let’s just save time and burn it down.’

Gage looked at the duardin. It was an old game, this. The Dispossessed, those ancient duardin clans who’d lost their ancestral holds and lands, had little patience where Chaos was concerned. Concepts like guilt and innocence were inconsequential when it came to the very real threat of corruption. Many among the Order of Azyr shared that outlook. Gage did not. Every innocent condemned to the pyre only made the enemy’s cause stronger.

When he didn’t reply, Bryn chuckled. ‘Aye, then, I guess not. I’ll keep my eyes open.’ He strode off, whistling softly.

Gage shook his head. If he and the others hadn’t been working together as long as they had, he might have been worried.

He moved through the stacks carefully, studying them. Shadows cascaded across them in the soft glow of the moss-lanterns. More than once, he caught himself staring at a point in the darkness, thinking he’d seen something. But there was nothing there. He glanced over at Carus and his gryph-hound. The beast stalked about, hackles stiff and tail lashing. She sensed something.

‘That makes two of us,’ Gage muttered. He turned, fingers tapping against the pommel of his sword. It felt as if the warehouse were holding its breath somehow. As if something was watching… waiting. But what?

Gage turned. Some instinct, honed by years of investigation into dark places, drew him to the nearest stack of logs.

‘Something about this wood,’ he said to himself.

He pulled off his glove and ran his hand along the rough-hewn logs. The wood was dark, and sticky with sap. But it was sturdy, and good for building – surprisingly so, according to some of his sources. Where was Tarn getting it?

The bark seemed to wriggle beneath his touch, and he jerked his hand back.

‘Sun and moon,’ he muttered as the bark split, rearranging itself into the approximation of a grinning face. Sap ran down from the sides of its too-wide mouth like drool as it smacked its lips at him. An inhuman chuckle rose from the wood. The bark splintered and bulged, thinning like wet dough, as the face rose. Two massive pink hands squirmed out of a knothole that was far too small to contain them. They clutched at Gage, and he stumbled back.

‘Carus!’

‘Avaunt, filth!’ the Lord-Veritant roared from behind him.

He struck the floor with the ferrule of his staff, and the Lantern of Abjuration atop it blazed brightly. Azure light washed over the stacks of wood. The thing in front of Gage squealed and retreated into its log, diminishing like smoke being drawn through a flue. As the light faded, Gage heard the scuff of bare feet on the floor. He spun, drawing his rapier.

‘Ambush!’ he cried.

He blocked a blow meant to stave in his skull, and opened his attacker’s throat with a quick slash. He looked down at the man he had killed. He was muscular and clad in dark robes, his head hidden behind a golden mask and his hand still limply clutching a serrated blade. The mask leered up at him, vaguely avian, but horribly, hideously something else. Gage felt a chill course through him at the sight of the ruinous sigils etched onto the mask. They seemed to twist in on themselves in the dim glow of the moss-lanterns.

‘The Changer of Ways,’ he hissed.

It was the mark of Tzeentch – the Chaos God of deception and fortune. Its acolytes came in secret, wearing the mask of innocence. While the servants of the other Dark Gods haunted the fringes of civilisation, the servants of Tzeentch nestled within it like a black seed. They could be anyone and anything.

His suspicions regarding Tarn were true then. Gage felt no triumph, only a sick sensation as he gazed at the stacks of wood. Shadows clumped across the logs in strange patterns, and he felt a chill as a sound like thousands of rats scuttling across the stacks whispered through the warehouse.

Daemons. There were daemons in the wood.

The thought of such hell-born nightmares loose in the world was repulsive to him on a spiritual level. Daemons were shards of the Dark Gods made hideous flesh. They could only be called forth into the material realm by certain abominable rites, practised by those who had given themselves over body and soul to the Ruinous Powers.

Laughter echoed through the warehouse. The moss-lanterns flickered and went out, plunging the building into darkness. Gage could hear the rustle of cloth and the thump of feet. More acolytes? Or something worse?

‘Guard yourselves – we are not alone in here.’ He drew a pistol.

‘No, you most certainly are not… Gage, is it?’ a voice called out. It seemed to echo from nowhere and everywhere. Instinctively, Gage looked up, but he could see no one on the shadowed walkways above. ‘A knight of the Order of Azyr,’ the speaker continued. ‘I would be flattered, if your sort were not thick as fleas in the cities of men. It was inevitable that one of you would pull on the thread of fate and come for us.’

‘Us? Us who? Who are you? Tarn?’ Gage spoke loudly. Sometimes the servants of the Dark Gods liked to talk. That volubility could be used against them. At the very least, it might buy him some time. Motes of ugly light danced across the stacks of wood, and Gage thought he could make out more daemonic faces squirming in the bark. The air took on an oily tang.

He glanced up and spotted a shape he thought was Kuva creeping along the top of a nearby stack of wood. How the aelf had gotten up there so quickly, he couldn’t say. But he knew she was searching for the source of the laughter. He needed to buy her time to do so.

‘Well?’ he continued. ‘Whom do I have the honour of addressing?’

More laughter, though it wasn’t the wild cackle of a lunatic, which only made it worse. As it faded, voices rose in a slow, sonorous chant. The moss-lanterns blazed to new life, revealing dozens of men and women, wearing golden masks and standing in ragged rows between the stacks. The acolytes of Tzeentch were clad much like the man he’d killed, and they were clutching a variety of weapons. Without the masks and robes, they could have been anyone: merchants, farmers, sewerjacks or beggars.

‘Bryn? Carus? I could use some help,’ Gage called out, hoping they would reach him before the acolytes overwhelmed him.

‘Who are we?’ the voice called out. ‘We are your neighbours, witch hunter. We are the devoted, singing false praises to the tyrant-god, Sigmar. We are the labourers who work so hard in the orchards and fields, harvesting the bounty of Ghyran to feed those who live on the other side of the realmgate. We are you.’

‘Always so theatrical,’ Gage said, and fired.

A mask pitched backwards. The chanting ceased, and the acolytes came at him in a rush. He met the first of them with his rapier, but there were too many to face alone. For every one he downed, two more took his or her place. The acolytes did not scream as they came, but instead chanted. It might have been a word, or perhaps a name. The sound of it grated against Gage’s ears and pricked at his concentration. It was all he could do to keep their blades from finding him.

‘Gage – look out!’ Kuva shouted from somewhere above him.

He glanced up, and saw Kuva dart across the top of a stack, moving swiftly. As she ran, she sliced through the ropes holding the stack together. Logs rumbled down, smashing into the surprised acolytes. The aelf rode the rolling logs to the bottom of the stack and leapt. She landed among a knot of acolytes. Her war-axe flashed, and bodies fell.

‘Quick thinking,’ Gage shouted appreciatively.

She glanced at him, and nodded. Then her eyes widened, and Gage felt a tremor run through the boards beneath his feet. He whirled, almost too late, and dodged aside. A heavy spiked flail crashed down, pulping several of the logs. He scrambled back.

The flail’s wielder was no man in a mask. Instead, it was a being out of nightmare – a hulking brute, clad in turquoise armour. One half of its chest and one arm were bare of armour, revealing pale flesh, surmounted by a monstrous growth – a twisted, parasitic sibling, eyeless and chattering, its thin arms clutching a staff. The brute drew the sword slung from its hip with its free hand, a sickly flame clinging to the blade.

Gage stared at it in horror. ‘Curseling,’ he whispered.

He’d read of such monsters, and heard stories from other members of his order. Curselings had once been men, before their lust for secret knowledge had twisted them into silent repositories of foul lore. The growth on its shoulder was a tretchlet, a daemonic homunculus – a physical manifestation of all that the curseling had learned.

The eyeless tretchlet gibbered in excitement and slashed the air with its staff, as if urging its hulking sibling on. The curseling’s breath rasped like a bellows, gusting from the vents in its featureless helm. It swung the flail again, splintering a log and showering Gage with shards of bark. He ducked back. He couldn’t match its strength.

He glanced around, seeking aid, but it looked as if his companions were preoccupied. Kuva was surrounded by a ring of acolyte blades. He could hear Carus bellowing nearby, and the shriek of his gryph-hound. And Bryn…

‘Khazukan Khazuk-ha!’ Bryn roared as he crashed into the curseling, knocking it back a step. The duardin spun his hammer about as if it weighed less than nothing, striking again and again. Bryn glanced at Gage. ‘You called, I came, manling.’ He hit the curseling again, staggering it.

With a snarl, it slashed at him, the burning blade carving greasy contrails through the air before it chopped into the floor. The duardin avoided the blow and drove the ferrule of his hammer into the side of the creature’s skull. The curseling moaned and caught Bryn a glancing blow with its flail, sending the duardin skidding across the warehouse floor, scattering acolytes.

The creature spun away from the dazed duardin, moving quicker than Gage had expected. The vile, blue-green radiance of its baroque war-plate stung his eyes, and he fell back before its onslaught. The flail it wielded in one hand slammed down, shattering the wooden planks of the floor. A moment later, its sword hissed out, trailing unnatural flames. Gage retreated, trying to put some distance between them.

Beyond the curseling, he could see Kuva fighting her way towards Bryn, who was clambering slowly to his feet. Acolytes crouched on the walkways above chanted and gestured, unleashing crackling bolts of sorcerous energy. The aelf dived aside, narrowly avoiding the explosive darts. She leapt over the cursing duardin, and lightly scrambled up the stack of logs, her eyes fixed on the walkways above.

He lost sight of his companions as the curseling’s flail snapped out again, nearly taking his head off. He ducked aside and drew a thin line of ichor from its bare arm with the tip of his rapier. The monstrous tretchlet undulated towards him, its eyeless face contorted in a snarl. It swung its staff at his head, gibbering in rage.

A long blade interposed itself, catching the blow. Carus forced the curseling back a step, as staff and sword screeched apart in a scattering of sparks.

‘No, beast, face me,’ the Stormcast rumbled. ‘I am Sigmar’s light, and his wrath, made manifest. I am the faithful.’

The curseling groaned in wordless anticipation and stomped towards this new foe. Gage took the opportunity to draw the second of his pistols. He took aim at the curseling’s broad back as it traded thunderous blows with the Lord-Veritant – the two massive warriors seemed evenly matched, but Gage had no intention of leaving things to chance.

The curseling was only a slave – a tool of the cult. Its master, the cult’s magister, would be close by, watching the fray through the eyes of the curseling itself. The magister was Tarn. It had to be. But the question was – where was he? Gage pushed the thought aside. Time enough for that later. He took a steadying breath and squeezed the trigger.

The boom of the pistol was loud, but the curseling’s scream was even louder. It convulsed in agony and spun. It lunged, and its burning blade nearly opened Gage from crown to crotch. The tretchlet spat something in a shrill voice, and a sorcerous bolt erupted from the homunculus’ twitching hands. Gage swung behind a support pillar. Heat enveloped him as the bolt struck it. He could smell fire, and realised that the warehouse had been set aflame.

The curseling’s blade chopped into the pillar, just above his head. Gage shoved away from it and slashed at the brute. It groaned and struck at him with its flail. An acolyte lunged at Gage, blade slashing a button from his coat. He spitted the cultist, all too aware of the curseling looming over him, blade raised. He turned and looked up into the creature’s empty gaze. There was no malice there, no hatred – only passionless intent. It was an automaton of meat, hollowed out and repurposed by forces beyond the ken of man. It raised its blade, and the flames limning its brutal length blazed with hideous radiance.

With a howl, Zephyr leapt atop it. The gryph-hound savaged the tretchlet with her beak as she clung to the brute’s shoulder. The curseling warbled in rage and began to thrash, trying to dislodge the tenacious beast. Gage saw his chance and lunged, driving his blade home into the creature’s unprotected armpit. His sword grated on bone and then sunk past, into something soft. Something important, he hoped.

The curseling stiffened, twin screams echoing from both heads. It staggered back, pulling itself off Gage’s blade. With a convulsive heave, it hurled the gryph-hound away before turning and lumbering off into the darkness, leaving a trail of ichor in its wake.

Gage took a step after it. It would take more than that to kill such a beast. Several acolytes moved to block his path. They raised their hands, chanting, conjuring sorcerous bolts. He tensed as the searing bursts of magical energy hurtled towards him, too close to dodge. Suddenly, Carus stepped between Gage and the sorcerous missiles. He swept out his staff, and the shimmering bolts dissipated in the light of the Lantern of Abjuration.

From above, he heard a scream, and stepped back as the body of an acolyte crashed to the floor. He looked up and saw Kuva on the walkway, war-axe dark with the blood of her foes. The aelf looked down and gestured with her head.

‘Gage – go! The duardin and I are more than capable of killing a few fools in bird masks.’

Gage hesitated, but only for a moment. She was right. He caught Carus’ eye and gestured. The Lord-Veritant nodded solemnly and whistled. His gryph-hound gave a squalling bark and loped in pursuit of the fleeing curseling. The nimble beast would stay on its trail, whatever obstacle lay between them.

Carus started after the creature, his tread shaking the floorboards. His staff snapped out to club one acolyte from his feet, even as his sword slashed down to crack another’s shield in two. Gage hurried in his wake, reloading his pistol as he ran.

‘Come, witch hunter,’ Carus growled. ‘Our quarry seeks the safety of the shadows. Let us drag him into the light!’

CHAPTER THREE

THE STEEL SOULS

Serena Sunstrike, Liberator of the Steel Souls Warrior Chamber, caught the first blow on her shield. Guided by instincts honed on the training fields of the Gladitorium, the Hallowed Knights warrior swept a second slash aside with her warblade. Undaunted, her attacker lunged, pressing its assault with a savage ferocity. She met it, matching her mystically enhanced prowess against its unnatural strength.

The beast before her might have been a man once. Now it was a twisted thing, avian-like, with curling horns and a curved, stabbing beak. Its blue flesh was marked by intricate tattoos and ruinous sigils, and its bronze armour stank of unnatural oils. It leapt forwards, yelping and gibbering, a serrated blade in either hand, trying to force her back.

All around her, the Hexwood echoed with the clamour of battle. Silver-and-azure-clad Hallowed Knights, alongside mortal Freeguild warriors wearing the white-and-blue uniforms of the Faithful Blades regiment, fought against the savage tzaangors that sought to overwhelm their lines. The creatures were devoted servants of Tzeentch, serving their dark god with bestial cunning and fierce strength.

Her opponent brought both its blades down on the rim of her shield, jerking her off balance. It darted forwards, the hook of its beak scraping against her war-mask. Instinctively, she snapped her head forwards to meet it. Silver sigmarite crunched against malformed bone, and the beast reeled with a squawk. Before it could recover, she sank the edge of her warblade into its skull.

The tzaangor collapsed, but there were others to take its place – more of its kind loped out from the trees, their trilling shrieks pounding upon the air as they crashed into the Stormcasts’ shieldwall.

‘They’re trying to overwhelm us,’ the warrior beside Serena snarled, stamping forwards. His warblade chopped down into his foe’s skull.

‘I have eyes, Ravius,’ Serena replied.

The attack was as savage as it had been sudden. One moment, the forest had been silent. Then, strange twittering calls had echoed through the trees, accompanied by the sound of pine needles crunching beneath many feet, before the first of the beastkin had burst from the dark corridors of shadow between the scaly trunks of the looming pine trees. They came accompanied by the frenetic clamour of unseen musicians – wild horns skirled, and great drums thumped, somewhere deep in the forest.

That the Hallowed Knights and their mortal allies had been seeking the very creatures who now assaulted them did not make Serena feel better about the situation. The intent had been to crush the creatures in their lair, but the column of Stormcast Eternal and Freeguild warriors had been caught all but unawares by the ambush, and now fought by lantern light.

Unlike the towering Stormcasts, the soldiery of the Freeguild were naught but mortals. But what they lacked in size and strength, they made up for in the discipline with which they faced the enemy. The Faithful Blades fought as they had been trained to fight, leveraging halberd, crossbow and handgun against their bestial enemies.

Stormcast Judicators and Freeguild crossbowmen loosed volley after volley from their positions by the supply wagons as the beastkin raced into the light. Freeguild warriors thrust halberds between the shoulders of the Stormcasts and over the rims of their locked shields, forming an uncompromising bulwark – at least for the moment.

Serena flinched as a crackle of azure lightning signalled the death of a fellow Stormcast Eternal. The lightning surged upwards with a deafening snarl and punched through the thick canopy, streaking into the dark green of the sky.

‘Another soul gone home to Azyr,’ Ravius said, shoving his opponent back.

The tzaangor staggered, screeching. Serena opened its throat with a quick slash and silenced it.

‘May they find themselves forged anew, stronger than before,’ she said. She turned, avoiding a blow, and responded in kind. She blinked away the afterimage of the lightning flash, trying to clear her vision as another of the twisted beastkin bounded towards her, shrieking out guttural war cries.

She wheeled to meet it, her pulse thundering in her ears. She drove the rim of her shield into the throat of the beast as it reached her, and it collapsed in a choking heap, dropping its weapons. She ran it through before it could rise. It clawed at her forearm as she twisted the blade, stilling its heart.

Light blazed forth suddenly, filling the glade and driving back the shadows. Serena turned, knowing the source of the radiance even as she did so. Lord-Celestant Gardus, the Steel Soul himself, fought at the centre of the battle-line, wielding a runeblade in one hand and a hammer in the other. His form blazed with a holy light – it seeped between the joins in his silver aegis war-plate, and grew brighter with every passing moment.

The beastkin confronting him fell back, their unnatural flesh steaming. They staggered as if blinded and stumbled away, seeking the safety of the dark. The heavily armoured Paladin Retributors surrounding Gardus caught them before they got far, their crackling lightning hammers slamming down on the beastkin.

The Paladin cohort, clad in thick bastion armour and wielding massive two-handed lightning hammers, were often found wherever the fighting was the thickest. At their head was Feros of the Heavy Hand, a great roaring giant of a warrior. Feros wielded his hammer with a startling elegance, and shouted imprecations at the enemy as he smashed them aside. Twisted bones snapped and splintered, and the creatures fell, their wails of pain silenced moments later.

Gardus’ light swelled as he pressed the counter-attack, he and his bodyguards driving the creatures before them with brutal efficiency. Some said the light was a blessing from Sigmar – a sign of both Gardus’ faith and the God-King’s favour. Others, less charitably, murmured that it was a sign that something had changed in the Steel Soul – that he was both less and more than the man he had been, before he had fallen in battle with the forces of Chaos.

Duty did not end with death for a Stormcast Eternal. To fall in battle was to be reforged on the Anvil of Apotheosis, to have the broken shards of one’s body and soul hammered once more into useful shape. Serena had not yet endured a second Reforging, but she had heard the stories from those who had suffered such a fate: the rush of celestial lightning, the impossible agony of rebirth… and worst of all, the loss that came with such a renewal. More and more of the tenuous memories of who they had been were stripped away with every death, reducing Stormcast warriors to taciturn automatons.

The thought of that loss, more than any other, unsettled her. What were they without memory? Without that tether to mortal existence, what was left of them? Already she could not recall much about who she had been before. It was as if those memories belonged to a different person; they crowded at the edges of her mind.

She shook the nagging thoughts aside and raised her shield, the flat of her blade balanced on the rim. Around her, the shieldwall reformed as the beasts fell back from Gardus’ light. She could hear Aetius, the Liberator-Prime of her cohort, bellowing orders.

‘Lock shields – lock them, I said! Reform the line!’

Known as the Shieldborn, Aetius was a stolid sort, stubborn and determined. He stalked behind the battle-line, his silver armour tarnished, his hammer encrusted with gore.

‘They’re running,’ Ravius said excitedly. He took a step forwards, as if to pursue, and Serena almost joined him, caught up in his eagerness. The battle-line wavered on the cusp of pursuit. ‘We can finish them!’

‘Don’t be foolish – haring off after them only earns a useless death and weakens our lines,’ Aetius snapped. ‘Are you new-forged? Remember your training.’ He caught hold of Serena. ‘Lock shields, I said.’

‘This is not my first battle,’ Serena said, stung. She shook him off.

‘Yes, but the Gladitorium is different, isn’t it?’ he chided. ‘More like play than war, though blood is spilled all the same. This is the real thing.’ Aetius studied her. His gaze was unwavering, and she met it without flinching.

‘I am faithful,’ she said.

Aetius nodded.

‘Good enough.’ He dropped a heavy fist on her shoulder. ‘Hold position, sister, until I say otherwise. That goes for all of you – hold, until I say.’ His voice rolled down the line, made unnaturally loud by Sigmar’s gifts. He slammed his hammer against his shield. ‘Who will stand, though the shadows lengthen?’

‘Only the faithful!’ Serena and the others shouted in reply.

They struck their shields with their weapons, whether warblade or hammer, casting the sound after their fleeing foes like a roll of thunder. The beasts ran, shrieking and heedless. The sound of their fading cries ratcheted through her, pricking at her consciousness.

It all seemed familiar, somehow, as if she had heard that same sound long ago. But she could not recall the circumstances. It wasn’t the first time – she often heard the murmur of familiar voices, but could not tell what they said, or to whom they belonged. Even worse, she sometimes saw faces in her mind’s eye – achingly familiar, yet she could put no name to them, no matter how she tried.

Frustrated, she struck her shield again.

She was not alone in this affliction of memory. All Stormcasts suffered from it to a greater or lesser degree. Those reforged earliest remembered the most about their mortal existence, while those crafted in the Second or Third Striking remembered less, as if the process were somehow being perfected.

Those few memories she had were invariably painful. She knew that those whose faces and voices haunted her were now long since dust, their souls gone down to the dreamless lands of the dead. All that she had been, all that she might have become, was lost.

No – not lost. Sacrificed. Forged anew on the Anvil of Apotheosis, made into something stronger and better. Something that could stand between the innocent and the darkness which threatened to consume them all.

All that mattered was who she was now: Serena Sunstrike, Liberator of the Shieldborn conclave, and a Hallowed Knight of the Steel Souls Warrior Chamber. This would have to be enough. Perhaps later, when the war was finished, she might be allowed to be something else. She shook herself, pushing the thought aside. There was enough to worry about without thinking of a future that might never be.

It had been almost a century since Sigmar had reopened the Gates of Azyr and cast the storm of his wrath into the Mortal Realms. Almost a century since the first Stormcast Eternals had hurled back the servants of the Dark Gods and established their beachheads in the realms of Fire, Metal, Beasts and Life.

Serena had witnessed some of these battles first-hand. She had fought alongside her conclave as they strove to claim the ancient realmgate known as the Gates of Dawn. She had seen the resurrection of the Everqueen at the Blackstone Summit, and watched as Alarielle’s divine fury drove back the forces of Nurgle at the Genesis Gate during the All-Gates War.

And now, in the wake of those first bloody engagements, a new age had begun. Armies of men, duardin and aelves had marched forth from Azyr to retake ancestral lands long since lost to Chaos, or to build new homes in unfamiliar realms. New cities rose on the bones of the old, and ancient alliances were renewed.

She heard the rattle of Azyrite drums, and glanced back. Within the safety of the Stormcast shieldwall, the mortal soldiers of the Freeguild moved swiftly, fortifying the glen with practiced alacrity. Such measures had become second nature to them: Ghyran was neither tame nor safe, for all that the Everqueen had made common cause with the God-King against their common foes. The forests of the Realm of Life were savage places, even when they weren’t occupied by packs of Chaos beasts.

They hadn’t planned to make camp here. They hadn’t planned to make camp at all – the forest was too dangerous for that – but with the enemy massing around them, there was no way to press on to the forest’s heart, where the creatures supposedly laired, without incurring grievous losses. They had come to wipe the beastkin out and free the forest from their depredations, but that was easier said than done.

Serena looked around. The Hexwood sprawled across the hardscrabble slopes of the Nevergreen Mountains which rose west of Hammerhal Ghyra. Scaly pine trees grew tall and strong, their roots coiling through the flaky soil and their wide branches all but blocking out the night sky. It was not a pleasant sort of forest. The dancing shadows gave the trees faces, and more than once she thought she saw something leering at her from the branches above.

The clearing the column occupied was large, but was still a thin spot in all the thick. The trees rose upwards or fell away at odd angles, following the incline of the slope. The Nevergreen Mountains were a broken jumble of crags, shrouded in scrub pines and thick underbrush – neither truly mountains nor hills, but something in between. The column led by the Hallowed Knights was strung out in a rough battle-line among the trees, but that line began to contract as the last yowls of the retreating tzaangors faded and temporary defensive emplacements were erected.

The clearing echoed with the sounds of labour as the Freeguilders completed their tasks. Stakes linked by stout chains were hammered into the hard soil around the edges of the clearing, their points jutting towards the dark trees. Supply wagons were circled, the lumbering ghyrochs which pulled them lowing in confusion as they were hauled about by their handlers. The massive beasts were covered in shaggy, moss-like hair, and their wide, flat heads bore impressive branch-like horns. Their stony hooves tore the soil in discontent as the ghyrochs scented blood.

Besides casks of fresh water, gunpowder and crates of shot, one of the supply wagons carried the Impertinent Maiden – an ancient helblaster volley gun. This lethal war-machine was an arrangement of stacked gun barrels connected to a sturdy framework. It was capable of unleashing a volley of shot at an approaching enemy, when it wasn’t otherwise busy being jammed or blowing a gasket.

The gun’s crew, in their blue-and-white livery, were fussing over the engine like concerned parents, though they hadn’t had time to use it in the battle. The wagon bearing it was pulled into the centre of the defensive ring, so that the Impertinent Maiden could unleash her affections more effectively should the need arise.

And that need was likely. The tzaangors were gone, but only for the moment. The thud of their drums still sounded deep in the forest. Occasionally, Serena caught a flash of sickly light far back in the trees. She felt eyes on her, watching. Calculating.

Unsettled, she turned her attentions to the soldiers’ efforts. The Faithful Blades regiment had fought alongside the Steel Souls since the first Azyrites had followed the Stormcasts to the battlegrounds of the Jade Kingdoms nearly thirty years before. The Freeguild regiment’s uniform incorporated the heraldry of the Hallowed Knights, and they were among the most devout of the mortal soldiery of the armies of Azyr. For them, faith was as good as armour. A handful of warrior-priests, clad in blue robes and silver war-plate, moved among them, leading the soldiers in prayer as they worked, or else reading loudly from the Canticles of War.

While the regiment itself was currently garrisoned out of Fort Gardus, some units had been seconded to act as auxiliaries for the expedition into the Hexwood. The Hallowed Knights did not begrudge the presence of these mortal allies. A Thunderhead Brotherhood was more than a match for most things that walked or crawled, but the Stormcast Eternals did not know the terrain, and the Freeguilders did. They had been fighting beastkin in these regions since the fort’s construction. Serena smiled slightly. It had been named for the Steel Soul, though he seemed much embarrassed by the honour.

Fort Gardus was a mighty bastion of stone and wood on the border of the Scabrous Sprawl, within several days’ march of Hammerhal Ghyra. While it had originally been raised to keep watch on the daemon-haunted wastes of the Sprawl, it had grown into the central node of a defensive network of smaller fortresses and watchtowers stretching from the western lowlands to the marshes of the Verdant Bay. Much like the Hallowed Knights themselves, it warded Hammerhal from the relentless dangers of Ghyran.

‘Get those bodies out from underfoot,’ a voice barked. ‘Quickly now.’

Serena made room as several apologetic Freeguilders moved through the shieldwall, dragging a dead tzaangor out past the stakes. She glanced back and saw a familiar face.

Sergeant Ole Creel had gone grey in the Faithful Blade’s service, and his shoulders were bowed with the weight of experience. But his hands were steady, and his blue-and-white uniform was clean. One leg was a wooden prosthesis. Coins had been nailed to its polished length, and they gleamed gold in the lantern light. He wore a sergeant’s badge on his cap, and had the twin-tailed comet etched into his battered chest-plate.

Creel had fought beside the Steel Souls for most of his life. Serena could recall a younger Creel, with an unlined face and two good legs, fighting in the front lines. He had marched through foetid jungles and over blistered fields, singing the praises of the God-King. Even when he’d lost his leg, his faith had never wavered. And now, he was an old man, but still faithful. Still loyal.

He doffed his feathered cap as he realised she was looking.

‘My lady,’ he said respectfully. The mortal soldiers of Azyr regarded the Stormcasts with awe, when they did not worship them outright as the manifestation of the God-King’s will.

‘Sergeant Creel,’ she said as she stepped back out of line.

Other Stormcast Eternals were doing the same, seeing to wounds or cleaning their weapons, though most remained where they were, facing outwards with a stolidity born of hard experience. Serena caught Aetius’ eye, and he nodded tersely, allowing her the break in discipline.

‘You are unhurt?’ she asked Creel.

‘All my remaining limbs accounted for. Knock on wood.’ The sergeant rapped his knuckles against his wooden leg. He gave her a gap-toothed grin and settled his cap back on his head. ‘Bit of a fight, that. Thought they might get past you there, for a second.’

She looked down at one of the dead beastkin. For a moment, she was struck by a curious sense of déjà vu. Had beasts like these been responsible for the death of the woman she had been? She did not think so, but the mind often played tricks where such things were concerned.

‘Have you seen their like before?’ she asked.

‘Twist-beaks,’ Creel said, almost spitting the word. ‘We’ve fought them too often of late. They’re getting bold, out here in the dark places. High time we purged them from these woods with fire and shot.’ He nudged the dead beast with his wooden foot. ‘Cunning beasts. Tricky.’ He squinted at the surrounding trees, a speculative look on his face. ‘Too tricky by half.’ He straightened. ‘They don’t attack like this, not without some plan in mind.’

‘Perhaps we startled them.’

Creel nodded absently. ‘Could be. Or maybe they were here to delay us.’

‘An ambush to set up an ambush?’

He glanced at her. ‘I’ve seen it before. Tricky, like I said.’ He watched his warriors work. ‘Be easier if we could fell some trees. Clear some ground.’

‘That would not be wise,’ Serena said. ‘This land is not ours.’

‘Well, someone already has.’ He gestured to a nearby stump. ‘Sawed clean, some of these trees. My father was a logger in the Nordrath Mountains. I know whereof I speak.’ Creel grimaced. ‘Besides, back at Fort Gardus, they say the sylvaneth and their queen have taken a liking to the Steel Soul. That they have an accord with him, and that it is only through his grace that we are allowed to pass through these forests.’ Creel washed his mouth out with a drink from his water skin, and spat. ‘Otherwise they’d tear us apart as swiftly as they do the servants of Chaos.’

‘You disapprove?’ Serena said, somewhat amused.

The Freeguilder frowned. ‘Can’t trust the tree-kin. They change with the seasons – calm one moment, wrathful the next. Chop down the wrong tree, and suddenly you’re up to your neck in brambles. Or worse.’

‘The Lady of Leaves guards her places well,’ one of the other Freeguilders said. She was a tall woman, and she wore a torc of wood around her neck. She touched it as she spoke. ‘This realm is hers, and it is by her will that we are allowed to breathe its air.’

‘Quiet, Shael,’ Creel barked. He glanced apologetically at Serena. ‘Ignore her, lady. She’s a local. Never known the blessed light of Sigmar, these Verdians. Think the Everqueen will stoop to save them from the Ruinous Powers, when she can’t even save herself.’

These days, the Faithful Blades included both native Verdians and expatriate Azyrites in its ranks. Most of the Freeguilds responsible for the defence of Hammerhal Ghyra did. Rates of attrition were high, as the Freeguild sought to impose some sense of order on the ancient routes which connected Verdia to the rest of the Jade Kingdoms. It was hard, bloody work, and on more days than not, the skies near Hammerhal Ghyra were thick with carrion birds and powder smoke.

While Nurgle’s hold on Ghyran had been weakened, the corrupted servants of the Plague God still prowled the wilds in substantial numbers, and their raids on the bastions of Azyr continued unabated. The Lord of Pestilence had once held Ghyran entire in his rotting clutches, and he sought obsessively to reclaim that small portion which Sigmar and the Everqueen had wrested back from him.

‘And why wouldn’t she?’ Shael countered. ‘We kept faith with her, while your folk were hiding behind high walls and sealed gates.’

‘Remember whose sigil you wear, Verdian,’ Creel snapped, his weather-beaten features flushing with anger. ‘Your folk wouldn’t even be here, free of corruption, if it wasn’t for us. We of Azyr paid a heavy price in blood and steel to buy back your lands from the Plague God.’ He thumped his false leg for emphasis.

‘And we would not have found ground worth defending, were it not for the Everqueen and all those who serve her, mortal or otherwise,’ a deep voice rumbled. Instantly, the squabbling Freeguilders fell silent and bowed their heads.

Serena turned. ‘Lord-Celestant Gardus,’ she said in greeting.

Gardus Steel Soul towered over the mortals who accompanied him. They were local tribesfolk, impressed into service as guides. They wore furs and battered leather hauberks. Their faces were tattooed with the whorl leaf-shapes common to the mountain clans of the region. They carried bows of sinew and short-hafted axes, and looked as if they knew how to use both. They stared about nervously, intimidated by the Stormcast warriors clad in silver.

Like Serena, the Lord-Celestant was clad in silver-and-azure war-plate, though his was more ornate by far, as befitted his rank. His heavy runeblade was sheathed at his side, but he carried his tempestos hammer in one hand. The weapon, like the warrior who wielded it, glowed with a subdued radiance.

‘You are one of Aetius’ warriors.’ It wasn’t a question, but Serena nodded anyway. ‘You saw the brunt of it just now, sister.’ He looked at her, head tilted enquiringly.

‘Sunstrike, my lord,’ she said. Then, a moment later, she added, ‘Serena.’ She bowed slightly and Gardus chuckled. It was a deep sound, gentle but far-reaching. She was suddenly glad for her war-mask, which hid her flush of embarrassment.

‘Serena, then.’ He looked at Creel. ‘And you are… Sergeant Creel, are you not? You took the enemy standard at the Pale Gorge.’ Gardus glanced down. ‘You lost your leg there.’

‘Fair trade, my lord, all things considered.’ Creel grinned. ‘Sigmar smiled on us.’

‘He did, and he still does.’ Gardus looked at the Freeguilders. ‘That such men and women as you stand here before me is proof enough of that.’ He gestured to Serena. ‘What do you see here, sister?’

‘I…’ She hesitated, suddenly uncertain.

Gardus took pity on her. He laid a hand on her shoulder, and looked at the Freeguilders. ‘I see folk from Azyr, Ghyran and Aqshy, standing side by side. As it should be – to defend one realm is to defend eight. For if one should fall, the others will follow in time. Even holy Azyr cannot stand alone, not for long.’ Gardus turned, scanning the trees. ‘We fight in Sigmar’s name. We are his tempest made manifest. And we cleanse the land for all people, whether they were born in Azyrheim or Verdia.’

His words carried across the clearing. Many of the Freeguilders had stopped to listen. That had no doubt been his intent, Serena realised. His words had been meant to quell the grumbling before it could get started. But that had not been their sole purpose. Gardus believed, and his faith was like a warm wind on their souls, easing the chill of the shadows that gathered about them.

As Creel and the others went back to work, Gardus leaned close. ‘I apologise,’ he said softly. ‘I saw an opportunity and took it.’

‘I understand, my lord.’

‘Discontent can afflict even the most loyal heart.’ A ghyroch bellowed, and Gardus watched as its handler tried to calm the mossy creature. The smell of blood, and perhaps of the forest itself, had disconcerted the beasts and they tossed their horns and pawed the ground in dismay. ‘There are wounds not yet healed. If they are allowed to fester, all that we work towards will be for nothing.’ He looked at her. ‘Do you understand?’

‘I… Yes.’ She did. Though the armies of Azyr had spilled into the Mortal Realms with the intent to throw back Chaos, not everyone appreciated the kind of aid they brought. For many in the Mortal Realms, the closing of the Gates of Azyr was a legendary betrayal.

The Azyrites could be full of their own righteousness, often to a burdensome degree. Some among them looked down on those they had come to save, or worse, thought them to be tainted by the very act of their survival in Chaos-held lands. She looked at the Lord-Celestant.

‘Is it true we are here at the request of the sylvaneth, my lord?’

Gardus hesitated, and she wondered if she had spoken out of turn. But Gardus encouraged a certain informality among his warriors.

‘We are,’ he said. ‘They did not ask openly, for that is not their way. Instead, they passed their warning through the foresters.’ He gestured to the tribesfolk in their furs and skins. ‘They brought word to us, in turn.’ He looked up, studying the trees which rose around them. ‘And the sylvaneth are here. Watching. Waiting to see if we are as good as our word.’

Serena tensed. She looked around, remembering the faces she’d thought she’d seen in the trees. The sylvaneth moved through forests as easily as she might walk across open ground. Could that have been them?

‘Watching us?’ she asked. ‘Why?’

‘Not us,’ Gardus said. He looked at her. ‘Some wounds are worse than others, Serena Sunstrike. And even the strongest warrior sometimes needs the help of another.’

His hand fell to the hilt of his runesword, and he stared at the trees. She wondered if he could sense something. She listened, but heard only the faint thump of the beastkin drums, deep in the woods and far away.

Gardus looked at the tribesmen. ‘Isn’t that right, Hyrn?’

‘It is, Bright One,’ the tribesman said gruffly. He was older than the rest, his greying mane held out of his face by a headband of leather. He spoke the Azyrite tongue well enough, though his accent was guttural. He caught her look and tapped his throat. ‘The priests teach us. Say we must speak the star-tongue, or Sigmar will not hear us.’

‘Faith needs no words,’ Serena said. Hyrn smiled and nodded.

‘Yes. The Lady of Leaves is always listening.’ His smile faded. ‘Though some feel that she does not do even that these days. We’ve seen witch-light flickering among the trees. It’s said that the beastkin dance here now, where the forest spirits once did.’ He frowned and spat. ‘The beastkin drove them away, and made the air and ground sour. Soon, they will drive the last of us away as well. Or worse – we will join them in their dancing, as so many of our folk have.’

He shuddered, and Serena frowned, recalling what she had heard of the corrupting magics of Tzeentch. How many of his people had Hyrn seen twisted into monsters, warped body and soul by witchcraft he had no defence against?

Gardus laid a hand on the tribesman’s shoulder. ‘No more will join them – this I swear to you, by the light of Sigendil. That is why we are here. We will not abandon you.’

Serena made to reply, when she felt the wind shift. The smell of death was replaced by something even fouler. Creel and the other mortals nearby coughed as the sickly sweet scent wafted over them. Serena turned and raised her shield. She knew that scent – sorcery. Something was happening. The air had taken on a greasy pall. There was a sound like… loose flesh, slapping against bark.

From the darkness beyond the lantern light, something screeched. A shrill ululation that sent knives of pain through her skull, such was the wrongness of it. Creel and the other mortals staggered, clutching at their heads. Some dropped their weapons and collapsed; others maintained their discipline, but only barely.

‘Shieldwall! Form the shieldwall!’ Aetius bellowed from the line. ‘Pull the mortals back!’

Sigmarite crashed as the rest of her cohort advanced to the line of stakes, thrusting those mortals too slow to move behind them. Serena caught a Freeguilder by his cuirass and yanked him out of the way. She caught sight of Creel doing the same, dragging his dazed warriors out of the path of the Stormcasts.

‘Go, sister,’ said Gardus. ‘Take your place in the shieldwall.’

He was already turning away as he spoke, and a moment later he was shouting orders. Serena turned and hurried back to the line. She slid into place smoothly, swinging her shield out and locking it rim to rim with those of the warriors to either side of her.

Ravius chuckled. ‘You are moving up in the world, sister. Speaking with the Steel Soul himself.’

‘Aye, and why not?’ Serena said. ‘He is our lord, and we are his warriors. The least we can do is speak to one another.’ And perhaps, she thought, even listen on occasion.

Ravius laughed, but a ringing thwack from Aetius’ hammer against his shoulder-plate silenced him.

‘Did I say you could laugh, Ravius?’ Aetius growled as he stalked past. ‘Something about this amuses you, does it? Eyes front, mind clear, hand steady. Laughter comes with victory, brother, not before.’

He stopped behind Serena, but said nothing. She kept her eyes resolutely forward, not giving him any excuse to chastise her. Out in the dark, something was watching them. She could feel its gaze on her, sliding across her armour like an oil slick.

‘There’s a light out there,’ Ravius murmured.

‘Flux-fires,’ Aetius said softly. ‘The attack was intended to make us stand still long enough for them to muster enough bodies to bury us. They’ll come quick, now that they have an idea of our numbers, and in strength.’

Serena could hear them now, creeping through the dark. A low, pale mist slithered between the trees and surged about the Hallowed Knights’ legs like the ghost of a river. It brought the stink with it, and she swallowed, trying to clear her mouth of the taste. The mist wasn’t natural. There were shapes in it – ghostly, leering faces with flapping mouths.

The phantoms washed over the Stormcast battle-line, gibbering silently, but otherwise harmless. She heard shouts from behind her, and the crack of a handgun going off, followed by the bull-bellow of an angry sergeant berating whoever had let their nerves get the better of them.

‘Hold,’ Aetius said. ‘We are the bastion upon which the storm of Chaos breaks.’

In the darkness between the trees, something shrieked. A wild, ululating call: a cry of challenge, and of summons. The sound cut through her like a knife.

Behind her, Aetius – steady Aetius – raised his hammer. ‘Who will face the ruin of all things, and not break?’

‘Only the faithful,’ Serena said. She was echoed by Ravius and the others, the words running up and down the line.

Only the faithful. The words were more than a battle cry. They were a mantra. A prayer, a plea and a promise. The warriors of the silver-clad ranks of the Hallowed Knights were chosen for their faith in the face of damnation and death. They were the martyrs of Sigmar, warriors who had fallen in battle with his name on their lips or with great faith in their hearts. That faith bound them after their Reforging more tightly than any earthly chain. They were the faithful, and they would hold back the enemy. They could do no less, if the Mortal Realms were to survive.

More flux-fire flashed in the dark. She could hear screeching, inhuman voices, raised in song – no, a chant. The air became thick and rancid. A sour pong gave vibrant edge to the omnipresent stink, and there came a sound like black thunder, pounding at her ears.

Then the night was split by a daemonic cacophony. All other sound was drowned out by the bellicose roar, and the ground shook beneath her feet. It felt as if something – many somethings – were stampeding towards her.

The first of them appeared a moment later. The creatures had tubular bodies, balanced on a flabby skirt of fungoid flesh. Their flesh sprouted gnashing maws and wailing faces, seemingly at random. Flames spurted from the tooth-lined stumps at the ends of their flailing limbs. They hopped forwards through the trees with ungainly speed, accompanied by loud whooshes of discoloured air. The world seemed to shrink away from them as they lolloped towards the shieldwall, and Serena felt an instinctive chill.

Daemons. She had fought daemons before – the putrid servants of Nurgle, who came stumbling on stick-thin legs, their swollen bellies dripping pus, accompanied by clouds of flies. But these were something different. Something worse, for familiarity bred contempt, and she had never faced anything like these creatures before.

A daemon bounded towards her on its rubbery trunk, hissing and spitting eldritch fire. The flames washed over her shield, and the sanctified metal grew unpleasantly warm. She swung the shield aside and lunged, her warblade punching into the twisting, unnatural form. The daemon squealed and flames cascaded across her armour, scorching the silver black. She tore her blade free in a welter of ichor, and kicked the thing backwards.

‘Hold the line, brothers and sisters!’ Aetius roared. ‘Not one step back, whatever comes. Who will hold the firmament suspended, though the world crumbles?’

‘Only the faithful!’ Serena shouted, joining her voice to those of her brothers and sisters. ‘Only the faithful!’

More daemons tumbled between the trees, spewing their multi-coloured fire across the wall of shields. She raised hers again as a wash of heat enveloped her. The sorcerous fire clawed at her sigmarite, seeking its weaknesses. It slashed out, enveloping the nearby trees and scoring the ground. She heard her brothers and sisters roaring their defiance as the shieldwall began to buckle against the relentless pressure. She set her feet and shoved back against the strength of the flames.

‘Only the faithful!’

For a moment, the flames slackened. Daemons fell, as warblades and hammers rang down with terminal finality. The Stormcasts hacked and battered at their foes, driving them back. From behind her, she heard cries of alarm.

‘The trees – they’ve set fire to the trees,’ Ravius roared, slashing at a persistent daemon. It clung to his shield, rings of teeth gnawing at the metal.

Serena risked a look around and saw that he was right. In every direction, the forest seemed to be ablaze. Multi-hued flames shimmered along the branches and trunks of the pine trees, causing them to groan as if in distress.

She felt a pressure on her foot, and looked down. A black root had surfaced from the ichor-soaked ground. It resembled nothing less than the head of a questing leech. Shouts and curses filled the glen, as more roots tore themselves loose from the soil with a wet rasp.

The sound rose up, accompanied by a deluge of creaking and popping. At first, she thought it was the foliage being consumed, but then a tree twisted towards her.

As she watched in growing dismay, its bark split open to reveal a distorted maw of splintery fangs, oozing sap. With a soul-curdling groan, the thing that had been a tree lurched towards her, newly grown jaws snapping hungrily.

CHAPTER FOUR

SPLIT-SOUL

The light of change was beautiful.

Tzanghyr Split-Soul, Great Changer of the Thornhoof Warflock, floated in its embrace. The infinite threads of fate threatened to pull his shade in innumerable directions, but he knew his place and purpose, and he held fast to them – to lose one’s self in the Infinite was to risk the ultimate dissolution.

Even so, the light was beautiful.

It was the only truly beautiful thing in the realms. The thrum of colour – every colour – and the subtle thunder of the realm’s pulse rose up through him to expand and fill his senses. It was blinding and painful and wonderful, all at once.

He could feel the thunder of ancient drums in his spirit, and see the threads flash like lightning. The tops of the trees glowed as if they were aflame, and bands of impossible colour ran through the soil, growing brighter with every passing moment. The Hexwood was growing. Changing. Its crooked pathways were stretching through black seas of infinity, and soon he and his warflock would follow them into the light.

For now, his shade stalked the shadowy threads of fate which ran through the forest, hunting the scent of prophecy. It was the quickest way of seeing what must be seen, in order to prepare for what was to come. The eyes might lie or misjudge, but the perceptions of the soul were harder to fool. The paths of moment and fortune had been seeded and grown here over the course of centuries, and he walked them without fear. The Hexwood had grown strong as its roots fed on the blood of sacrifices, both willing and otherwise. Soon, it would flower in full. When the rite which was even now underway was complete, its shadow would spread over the cities of men – starting with the one called Hammerhal.

It was Tzanghyr’s destiny to spread that shadow. To claw out the beating heart of Hammerhal, and make of it something more fitting: a monument not to failed godlings or their servants, but a citadel fit for the children of change – a bastion of the Great Schemer, from where his designs might unspool and stretch to the far corners of every realm, unthreatened and inviolate.

Nurgle, the Chaos God of plague and despair, had once ruled supreme here. The Realm of Life had been his from roots to canopy, even as he wasted his reign hunting the fugitive Everqueen. His brothers had gazed on the prize with envy, for none among them could claim one of the Mortal Realms as their sole fiefdom. But while Khorne had turned his attentions to the realms of Fire and Death, seeking new challenges, Tzeentch had worked patiently and subtly to undermine his great rival.

Now, with Nurgle’s season at last waning and his foetid servants in retreat, it was the time of the Great Schemer. His influence swelled as that of his brother dwindled. Where once stagnation had held sway, now change would rule.

The possibilities swarmed about Tzanghyr like a murder of crows, whispering into his ears. He saw victory, and tasted defeat. Every action, every decision, was a ripple in the Infinite. New portents were birthed from these disturbances, and he sought them greedily, casting aside those which were of no use. They came faster and faster as the power of change built deep in the black heart of the pine forest.

His shade sped on, weaving between the memories of trees. They belonged to Tzeentch now, but the echo of their former masters was held within them, both as a warning and as a prize. The sylvaneth had been driven out at last, thanks to Tzanghyr’s cunning. He had taken their soulpods, and with those, their future. He held it in the palm of his hand, and he could crush it at a moment’s notice. That threat had been enough to force the tree-kin to leave the forest, but they still lurked close at hand. Watching, always watching. He could feel the subtle pressure of their attentions on the skeins of fate.

They were patient. And cruel. In a way, he almost admired them. But their time was done: the Hexwood belonged to the tzaangors now, and soon Ghyran itself would belong to Tzeentch. Tzanghyr felt the sharp pulse of magics thrum through him, and he followed the multi-coloured threads to their source near the forest’s heart.

Too near. Too soon. It had been foreseen, but even so, he experienced a moment of uncertainty.

He saw the shade of his coven-brother directing the warflocks in tzaanwar – the ritual slaughter of those who did not know the light of change. He saw the silver-skins and the soft-skins, held at the place he’d dreamed, trapped in a ring of flame and wood. Some would escape the trap – that too, he’d dreamed. He would be waiting for them.

His coven-brother, Mzek, wove cunning sorceries, calling on old alliances made long ago with the Ninefold Courts of Scintillation. Daemons streamed through the gateways of wood, bleeding from one realm into the next, seeking the prey promised to them by his fellow shaman.

Mzek, Tzanghyr whispered, sending his thought-greeting to his coven-brother.

The other shaman twitched where he crouched atop his daemon-disc, his staff clutched tightly in his claws. His brightly hued plumage stiffened as he grunted in irritation at the intrusion in his thoughts.

Tzanghyr laughed. How goes it, coven-brother?

It goes as was preordained, Tzanghyr. It can go no better, and no worse. You would know this, if you were here. Mzek was a sour creature, scarred and bitter. Tzanghyr had outstripped him in influence and power, forcing him into a subordinate position that he chafed in. Soon, if things proceeded as they must, he might seek to redress the balance between them. For now, though, he made an able subordinate.

Beware the bite of the Bright Soul, brother, Tzanghyr warned. I have seen your end, and I would not be proven right in this instance.

What will be, will be. I have not dreamed of my death. Mzek clacked his beak in irritation. Begone, coven-brother – back to your bower. You have your rites to oversee, and I have mine.

He gestured, and their minds snapped apart, like the ends of a broken thread. Tzanghyr hesitated, and then moved on. Mzek would rise or fall by his own doing. They all would. Such was the will of the Great Schemer.

In his dreams, he had seen the silver-skins come and topple the flux-cairn and the lesser herdstones. That could not be allowed, not when they were so close to victory. The uncertainty grew. The forces of the Bright One were closer than he’d thought – Mzek had let them get too far into the forest before he’d sprung his trap.

Tzanghyr glanced up, past the shimmering canopy, into the sky, and saw not stars but the top of a vast hall, stretching into infinity. Pillars rose like distant mountains, holding up a curved roof, upon which had been carved a dizzying array of shapes and scenes. These seemed to move and change before Tzanghyr’s eyes, and he hurriedly looked away from them. Such sights were not for him. Only those who had the favour of the Feathered Lords could gaze upon the convolutions of the Impossible Fortress without being driven mad.

Great avian shapes, indistinct and immense, were perched among the pillars. They looked down upon him with cold calculation. When they spoke, it was not with words, but in a rush of colour and sensation that soothed his uncertainty. The Feathered Lords were pleased with his gambit thus far. They approved of such audacity, when it served their ends.

Satisfied, he looked away. He was following the right threads. He held the skein of his fate firmly. He was sure of it. He had only to pull it taut, and the true work could begin. Emboldened, he flew on, racing now, following the pulsing glow of the change-light back to the roiling heart of the Hexwood. There, in the great vale, his shade circled the nine crystalline monoliths that erupted from the raw soil like blisters, forming a single crown-like shape. The monoliths towered over him, thrusting outwards in all directions and at all angles, catching the light of the moon and stars above and changing it in unsettling ways.

The ancient flux-cairn was like a blister of festering magic; it was the wellspring from which all his hopes and schemes flowed, the heart through which pumped the black blood of the Hexwood. It was almost blinding in its luminosity, and where its light touched, all things changed. The soil became as water or smoke, and the trees bent themselves into ruinous sigils, or else sprouted curious fleshy protuberances which sang soft hymns to the Great Schemer. Strange shapes moved through the ever-shifting soil – things like roots or worms or both, stretching and streaming outwards and away, deeper into the forest.

At the heart of it all, dozens of tzaangors crouched, pounding on wide drums made from the hollowed-out bodies and stretched skins of daemons, their voices raised in a shrieking hymn of abasement. Others blew wild skirls on pipes made from bones, capering as the mad rhythm of the flux-cairn’s song flowed through them. The lunatic tempo rose and fell, like waves crashing against the shore, and with every rising, the light of the flux-cairn blazed more brightly.

Tzanghyr found himself drawing closer to the flux-cairn, though it was dangerous to do so as a bodiless shade – he risked being drawn into it, and his essence devoured by the emptiness between realms. Nonetheless, he slid through the stones, following a softer song than the one that held the attentions of his kin. A subtler melody, and older.

At the centre of the stones, floating within their radiant opacity, was a clutch of shimmering orbs – the soulpods of the sylvaneth. The silvery spheres were the hope of the tree-kin made manifest. Within them lay the potential for new groves of sylvaneth, and where they nestled, life flourished. To Alarielle’s servants, they were the most valuable of treasures, to be guarded and preserved whatever the cost.

The soulpods were caught within the flux-cairn, both trapped by it and a part of it. To Tzanghyr’s eyes, they were all shapes and none, changing faster than even he – attuned to such transmutations – could follow. They were life itself, and there was no telling what they might have become in time.

Even now, they blazed with the raw stuff of creation. That power was all that protected them from the warping influence of the flux-cairn. Soon, however, it would not be enough. The flux-cairn had been raised around them and drew upon their power, turning it to different ends. The rite currently underway would drain that power entirely, and the soulpods would be consumed at last and their essence drawn into the cairn. Whatever was within them would be consumed as well, the whole of its potential devoured and used to fuel the twisted machinations of Tzeentch.

Tzanghyr could hear the soulpods crying out for their protectors as the rite grew wilder. And he could hear the sylvaneth as well, somewhere beyond the forest’s edge, watching helplessly, gnashing their splintery fangs in impotent fury. They could not risk a rescue attempt – not if they wanted the soulpods intact – but neither could they allow the ritual to proceed. He shivered in pleasure as their helpless despair resonated through him.

He leapt away from the flux-cairn, satisfied that things were as they must be. He swept beyond the circle of drummers and pipers, seeking the place where his body lay under guard. He looked down at himself, lying curled in a foetal ball upon a bed of moss and branches, steaming braziers arrayed around him. Their contents began to bubble and froth as he dropped down towards his form.

The tattoos which covered his blue flesh began to squirm in welcome, and his crimson mane of plumage flared and flexed as he slid inside himself. Breath flooded his lungs, and he lurched upright, gasping. For a moment, he saw his surroundings through two sets of eyes, and heard the music through two sets of ears. Then his soul settled within his flesh and he was whole again. His limbs trembled with weakness.

‘Kezehk – water,’ he rasped.

A shape crouched beside him and handed him a clay bowl filled with brackish water. He slurped it eagerly, wetting his beak, and nodded his thanks to the tzaangor. Kezehk was the most loyal of his supporters, though loyalty, like all things, was prone to change at the whim of the gods.

‘What did you see, Split-Soul?’ Kezehk croaked. The thread-like filaments that encircled his dull eyes twitched slightly. The aged aviarch was all but blind, but his other senses – both physical and magical – had expanded to compensate. ‘Victory for the warflock?’ Even crouched, he loomed over Tzanghyr, his form swollen with magical strength. His flock of Enlightened waited nearby, and Tzanghyr could smell their eagerness.

The hulking tzaangors were paragons among the beastkin. They wielded spears wrought of change-metal and saw the echoes of the past-yet-to-be with a clarity that Tzanghyr was envious of. They were warriors without equal, each capable of slaying many lesser foes. They each bore a shard from the herdstone somewhere on them, on their war-plate or embedded in their scarred flesh. To them fell the honour of guarding the flux-cairns, and they had performed this task well under Kezehk’s command.

‘Always victory, even in defeat,’ Tzanghyr said, stretching his aching body. ‘All have purpose in the Great Plan, though we see it not.’ Such was the way of things, and he took comfort from it. Even failure had its place, though victory was always preferable.

‘Yes, yes, but what did you see?’ Kezehk asked, testily. ‘The Great Plan will be as it will be. What does today bring for us?’ He thumped his chest with a big fist.

‘Fire. Flame and spark. The flux-beacon has been lit, and the Grand Vizier calls out to us, from across the twisting path.’

Kezehk gave a caw of laughter. ‘Grand Vizier, eh? He grows vainglorious, that one.’

Tzanghyr snorted and rose to his feet. Kezehk stood with him.

‘It is the way of them. They know not the beauty of the light, and so cloak themselves in shadow. Names within names. But useful, for all their foolishness. They serve the machinations of the Feathered Lords no less than we.’

‘Aye, they serve. And I grow eager to do the same.’ Kezehk thumped the soft loam with the butt of his spear. ‘Battle calls to me, Split-Soul. I would walk the war-road.’

‘And you will, sooner than you might think.’ Tzanghyr turned away. ‘The silver-skins will come. They will seek to topple the flux-cairn. We must be ready to meet their fortune with ours, and break their destiny beneath the weight of our own.’

Kezehk cawed in satisfaction and thumped the ground again. ‘That we can do. Our destiny is heavier than stone, and sharp besides.’ His warriors screeched in agreement.

‘As sharp as fate,’ Tzanghyr said. He caught hold of Kezehk’s beak and brought their skulls together with a gentle crack. Their horns scraped and the shaman stepped back. ‘But fate cuts both ways, flock-brother. Be wary.’

Kezehk nodded. ‘Always, Split-Soul.’ He laughed. ‘But you worry overmuch. My path is set, whatever comes. What will be, will be, and I follow it gladly.’

He turned to snarl orders to his warriors. They would guard the approaches to the glade, and hold back any who sought to approach unbidden. Tzanghyr knew they would do this even if it meant their death, such was their devotion to the light of change and the Great Schemer’s design.

Leaning on his staff, the shaman approached the flux-cairn where it cast its strange light across the clearing. He ignored the drummers and the dancers. Being so close to it inflamed his senses. His strength swelled, but his ability to concentrate dwindled. No matter. Tzeentch gave, and Tzeentch took away. All things served the Great Plan. He reached out to brush his claws across the shroud of iridescent lichen covering the closest of the stones that formed the flux-cairn.

When he looked into the crystal, he did not see his own face reflected back at him. Instead, he saw that of a soft-skin: his coven-brother, the mortal known to some as Rollo Tarn, and to others as the Grand Vizier. The reflection was part of the bargain he had made, so long ago, before the sylvaneth had been driven out and he and his kin had claimed the Hexwood. It was a shard of his coven-brother’s soul, resting within his own.

Soul-bonded and bound, their fates were a single thread, stretching into the future. Where one went, the other would follow. Such had been the terms of their bargain, and it had served them well in the years since.

Tzanghyr placed his palm flat against the flux-cairn’s surface.

‘Coven-brother,’ he said. ‘Can you hear me?’

Rollo Tarn turned as the apparition appeared in the stateroom of his airship, the Hopeful Traveller. He had a goblet of wine in one thick hand, and took a sip before speaking.

‘Hello, coven-brother,’ he said warmly, nodding to Tzanghyr’s shimmering form. ‘You look well.’ He held out the goblet. ‘Care for some wine?’

Tzanghyr cocked his avian skull. ‘I am not here.’

‘I know – I am being polite.’ Tarn took a sip. He frowned. ‘It is terrible, at any rate.’

‘Then why drink it?’

‘Someone has to.’ Tarn took another sip. ‘Is something amiss?’

‘Things proceed as they must, here. The crooked path aligns with the skein of fate, and we will soon follow it. Will we find welcome, when we reach its end?’

‘You will.’ Tarn hesitated. ‘We are making ready to weigh anchor. Once we are airborne, the ritual will commence. The way will be opened, and the city will be yours.’

‘Why have you not begun already?’

It wasn’t quite an accusation, and Tarn took no offence. Tzanghyr was impatient – understandably so. Nonetheless, he paused before answering. Sometimes, his coven-brother needed his beak tweaked.

‘We had visitors. I was hoping to deal with them before we began.’

He restrained a grimace. In truth, he had intended to stage the ritual in the warehouse, surrounded by the blessed wood he had retained for that very purpose. But the invaders had made that impossible. Instead, his acolytes would have to settle for the ship’s hold. No matter. He could feel the strength of the rite growing, despite the interruption. Soon, every door would be flung wide, and the servants of the Changer of Ways would sweep through the city.

Tzanghyr cocked his head, one dark eye fixed on Tarn. ‘Visitors?’

‘A witch hunter. And a Stormcast Eternal.’

‘A silver-skin?’ Tzanghyr demanded.

‘Yes. Gaudy brute.’ Tarn swirled his goblet. ‘My followers are dealing with them now. Vetch has them trapped in the warehouse. I have faith that he will see that they pose no further interruption to our schedule.’

What the curseling lacked in wit, he more than made up for in tenacity. There were few threats Vetch couldn’t deal with, in his own inimitable fashion. He had claimed the souls of more than a few of Tarn’s enemies over the years.

‘Why did you not alert me of this sooner?’ Tzanghyr hissed, plumage rattling. ‘They could endanger everything we have worked towards.’

‘It is being handled.’ Tarn frowned. He had miscalculated somewhat, true, but he saw no reason to admit that, not even to his coven-brother. ‘Vetch is perfectly capable–’

‘The curseling is a brute and fool. It is why he is as he is.’ Tzanghyr tapped the side of his head. ‘His weaknesses condemned him to a lesser fate…’

Tarn stiffened. ‘Careful, coven-brother,’ he said.

The old hurt flared anew, buried so deep he sometimes forgot it was there. Vetch hadn’t always been Vetch. Tarn remembered a baby’s smile and a child’s laugh, and a father’s pride at his son’s accomplishments. No, Vetch had once been someone else, someone better. But the thread of his fate had been cut, and woven into a new pattern – one more pleasing to the Changer of Ways. But that was slim comfort, even to a man like Rollo Tarn.

Tzanghyr hesitated. He clacked his beak. ‘Forgive me, coven-brother. I spoke out of turn. Allowed my impatience to colour my words.’ He placed a hand over his heart. ‘But you must hurry, or all our efforts will be undone. The trees are the doorway. We open the path from our end, but unless you open it from yours as well, our forces will be lost to the tangled pathways between worlds.’

‘The ritual will proceed, coven-brother,’ Tarn replied. ‘Vetch will not fail. I will not fail you. As you have never failed me. Our thread is one.’

Tzanghyr nodded. ‘Our thread is one. My kin and yours.’ He looked away, as if at something occurring over his shoulder. ‘I must go, coven-brother. I have my own battles to fight. May the Feathered Lords give you strength.’

‘Go with the blessings of the Great Schemer, Tzanghyr.’

A moment later, the image of the tzaangor shaman wavered and popped like a soap bubble. As it faded, Tarn touched his chest. He could feel a strange yet comforting warmth there, where his heart ought to be. It came from the shard of Tzanghyr’s soul which rested within him, lending him some of his coven-brother’s strength, and vice-versa. But would it be enough? Time would tell.

‘I can smell the bitterness of your memories from here, coven-brother.’

Tarn looked up, smiling slightly. ‘Not bitterness, Aek. Regret.’

Taller than Tarn, Aek had to stoop to fit beneath the stateroom’s ceiling, and even seated, he loomed. He was so still and silent that Tarn had half-forgotten that he was there. Aek could be quite unobtrusive, when he put his mind to it, which was a handy skill to have for a servant of the Great Schemer.

Aek had served Tzeentch longer than either Tarn or Tzanghyr. He had served many covens, and participated in many schemes. When he had first arrived in the city, in secret, Tarn had been wary. But in the years since, Aek had proven himself as loyal a coven-brother – and as loyal a friend – as Tzanghyr.

The fatemaster was clad in heavy baroque armour, and wore silken robes worth more than the airship they currently lounged aboard. His conical crested helm rested by his feet, leaving his pale features and long, colourless hair exposed. He smiled easily at Tarn, his black eyes shining with good humour.

‘Regret is the spice of a life well lived,’ he said.

‘I prefer plain foods. Predictable.’

‘There is no sin in that. What man does not want a predictable life? Though you may have chosen the wrong god to serve, if that is the case.’

Tarn snorted. ‘Who said I chose him?’

Indeed, it was more the other way around. It was Tzanghyr who had saved him from the wrath of the monstrous sylvaneth. The tree-kin had almost taken everything from him, for the crime of simply trying to make his fortune. If not for Tzanghyr and the Changer of Ways, his path would have been short indeed.

Tarn frowned, remembering those early days. He looked around his stateroom, with its sumptuous carpets and expensive carvings, and then at the rings on his fingers and the stitching on his robes. Once, the thought of such luxury had been inconceivable.

A hard life, then. He’d come from Azyrheim with little more than the clothes on his back and the strength to swing an axe. He had been a forester in the Nordrath Mountains, as his father and his father’s father had been, but the promise of new realms, of new forests to tame, had been too much to resist. So he’d left. There were opportunities in Ghyran, if you were brave and canny enough to take advantage of them. He’d seen a need and filled it. Soon he was paying others to swing axes, rather than doing it himself.

He flexed his hand. The old scars and calluses earned through a life of hard labour were still there – reminders of the path that had brought him here, to his ultimate opportunity. Even though he’d had men to do it for him, he’d still swung his axe day in and day out, right alongside them. A point of pride, at the time, and one that had almost led to his death.

Tarn took a deep gulp of wine, and felt it burn its way down his gullet. The day he’d set his sights on the Hexwood had been both the worst and best day of his life. A day of great change and opportunity – the very things he’d come to Ghyran to find. But the cost…

His hand tightened on his goblet, and the soft metal buckled. The tree-kin had slaughtered his loggers and stalked him for days, playing on his hope of escape in order to draw out his torment. Their rasping laughter had driven him near to madness. Sigmar had not answered his prayers for aid, his pleas to see his wife, his children, just once more.

But something had. And he served that something now, out of gratitude as much as greed. The Great Schemer was a patron to the ambitious, and the rewards were great indeed, if one could walk the path without slipping. He set aside the crumpled goblet and cast his mind outwards, feeling for the strands of Vetch’s dim consciousness.

There was pain, there, and the jagged ever-present pressure of the tretchlet, T’vetch’tek. Not all curselings were subservient to their daemonic symbiote, but most were. Vetch was not one of the rare few with the strength of will to maintain a separate consciousness. He was a hollow thing – a receptacle for magic and the will of the Changer of Ways. He could smell lies and seek out hidden magics – it had been Vetch who had learned how to link the two ends of the crooked path, and to make the lumber taken from the Hexwood into a gateway. In the end, that secret had cost him everything.

‘It cost us both,’ Tarn murmured. He peered through Vetch’s eyes, watching as he fought in the coven’s name. ‘But is it worth it?’ He returned his gaze to Aek. ‘Sometimes I wonder.’

‘Life is an endless dance of change, coven-brother. We must follow the rhythm, or be lost. You followed. And for that, you and Tzanghyr will be rewarded.’ Aek tapped the hilt of the immense two-handed blade standing upright before him. ‘As I was.’

Tarn glanced at the blade, and felt a twinge of unease. Known as the Windblade, the great weapon was a cruel-looking thing, all barbed convolutions and squirming lines. The hilt resembled the stretched wings of a bird, and the pommel, an avian skull. Strange colours, such as he had only seen in dreams, ran through the metal of the blade. As Aek’s fingers stroked it, the hilt seemed to flap its wings. Tarn suspected that the Windblade had a mind of its own, and that mind was a cunning one.

Aek chuckled. ‘It does and it is,’ he murmured.

Tarn wasn’t surprised that the fatemaster knew what he was thinking. Aek’s talents were many. He often finished other’s sentences, as if he knew what they were going to say before they said it.

‘It has had nine hundred masters,’ the fatemaster continued. ‘It has been broken and reforged nine thousand times, across ninety-nine thousand years. Sometimes, I feel those other wielders, as if they and I are but facets of a whole. We all grip this blade as one – nine hundred hands, and nine hundred wills.’

‘No wonder you can lift the blasted thing so easily,’ Tarn said lightly.

Aek chuckled, and for a moment, Tarn thought he heard a chorus of laughter and saw other faces, some not human at all, superimposed over Aek’s own. But the moment passed, and it was only Aek there once more. His coven-brother. His friend.

An alarm bell began to ring above deck. Tarn set his goblet aside. He felt a sudden wrenching sensation, accompanied by a sharp pain in his skull. Images of silver and fire swept across his mind’s eye, and he staggered. Aek rose and steadied him.

‘Coven-brother?’

Tarn pressed his fingers to his head, trying to massage some order into the chaotic flood of sensations surging through him. He could feel Vetch’s dim-witted panic as the battle turned against him. He sent the impulse to turn and fight arrowing into the curseling’s stunted mind. If Vetch could hold them, just long enough for the airship to cast off, then he would have served his purpose.

‘Forgive me, my son,’ Tarn murmured.

Great opportunity only came with great cost. Thus said the Feathered Lords.

‘What is it, Rollo?’ Aek asked again. ‘What has happened?’

‘It seems we are discovered. We must cast off now. We cannot risk being caught here. The crooked path must be thrown open. The city must fall.’ Tarn pushed away from the fatemaster. ‘Ready yourself, Aek. For war has well and truly begun.’

CHAPTER FIVE

FIRE AND AIR

The gryph-hound snuffled at the floor. The blood trail had stopped suddenly, deep within the maze of log stacks and support beams, as if the curseling had vanished entirely.

Carus glowered about him. ‘Gone,’ he said, his voice echoing.

‘So it seems,’ Gage replied. ‘It led us a merry chase. We should have caught up to it.’

Somewhere behind them, he could hear Kuva and Bryn giving good account of themselves against their foes. He longed to go back and help them, but he knew that tracking the curseling was more imperative than killing a few acolytes. Capturing the creature might enable them to find its master, if Carus could compel it to talk. At the very least, they might learn why every stack of wood in the warehouse seemed to be suddenly sweating daemonic ichor.

He glanced at a nearby stack, lip curling in disgust. The smell, like tar and sugar, clung to every scrap of wood in the place.

‘Witch-stink,’ he murmured.

The air had gone muggy and thick. It felt like breathing soup. He had experienced such unnatural heat before, though thankfully only rarely. It built in places of foul magic, like a pot being brought to boil.

‘We are being watched,’ Carus said.

Gage gripped his sword tightly. ‘More acolytes?’

‘No. These are not human eyes.’

The Stormcast turned, head tilted as if scenting the wind. Perhaps he was. Carus’ senses were greater than those of a normal man, as were his strength and fortitude.

Gage looked around. ‘Daemon, then.’

Every instinct he possessed was telling him to get out of the warehouse – to find the others and run. Burn it, as Kuva had suggested, and purge the entire docklands if necessary. Some among his order would not have hesitated to do just that, but Gage preferred subtler methods of investigation. Though he supposed subtlety was no longer an option, in this instance.

‘Perhaps,’ replied Carus. ‘Perhaps something worse.’

‘There’s nothing worse than daemons, in my experience.’

Carus chuckled. There was little humour in the sound. ‘Let us hope that is the case.’

Gage shot him a glare. ‘You didn’t have to come, you know.’

Carus looked at him.

‘Of course I did. The protection of this city, the sanctity of its soul… They are my responsibility. The Hallowed Knights swore an oath – Hammerhal Ghyra will not fall while the faithful stand.’

In the dark, something laughed. The sound rose and fell in arrhythmical fashion, as if it were made by two voices, laughing out of synch.

‘HammerhalHammerhal hashas alreadyalready fallenfallen.’ Like the laugh, the words were out of synch and echoed strangely. Two voices – one impossibly deep, the other almost a screech.

Zephyr snarled and turned, scenting the air. Gage heard a walkway creak somewhere above. The logs in a nearby stack shifted. Something dripped across the floorboards with a steady sound that invaded his head and made it hard to concentrate.

‘Kuva was right,’ he said softly as he drew his pistol. ‘We should have burned this place.’

The deep voice rose again, this time in a guttural chant. Motes of greasy light danced across the stacked logs. The rough bark split and twisted into grinning faces. Zephyr screeched, and Gage turned to find the animal staring at a nearby support pillar. The flat surface of the wood had a glimmering crack running vertically down its length. As they watched, several wriggling pink shapes emerged and bent like hooks to grip either side. Then, with a rough, wet sound, the aperture widened perceptibly. The light within flared, and Gage gagged as an eldritch stink wafted from it. A bulbous, unformed head thrust out, and eyes like lanterns fixed on him with hateful intent.

Gage recognised the creature easily enough – every knight of the Order of Azyr was made to learn the many thousands of distinct, lesser daemonic manifestations. Some were more common than others, like the daemons known as horrors, and easier to draw up from whatever coruscating hell they inhabited. The pink horror flexed its too-wide hands and crouched on stubby legs as it emerged fully from the rift, which shrank back to a vaguely shimmering crack behind it. The daemon chuckled as it eyed Gage, its worm-like tongue lolling over its ramparts of teeth.

It made as if to speak, but Carus swung his staff up and lunged. The Lord-Veritant drove the staff into the daemon’s gaping mouth, shattering many of its teeth. He forced it back, pinning its fleshy form to the pillar it had emerged from.

‘Who will carry his light into the dark?’ he said, twisting the staff. The daemon gagged, clawing at it, groping uselessly for the Stormcast’s hands. ‘Who will gaze into damnation’s heart unblinking? Only the faithful.’

There was a sound like an overripe fruit bursting, and the daemon seemed to deflate, its pink form dissolving into flame. Its body split and slid from the staff, only to form into two new, smaller creatures – blue horrors.

The blue-skinned little daemons grumbled belligerently as they scampered away, trailing flames in their wake. Gage shot one before it could escape into the dark, and it splattered like hot oil. The bits of flaming flesh writhed for a moment, before a group of even smaller shapes took form, coalescing out of the fire. They scattered like burning insects, and the sound of their high-pitched giggles echoed eerily about him.

‘Daemon filth,’ Carus said.

Zephyr snarled. The gryph-hound crouched, her feathers ruffled, tail lashing. Her eyes were wide with rage. Ugly chortles rang out around them. Gage holstered his pistol and drew his second one.

‘I think they heard you.’

He heard a thump from above, and looked up at the closest stack of timber. Pink limbs were squeezing out from between the uppermost logs, followed by the rotund torso-heads of the horrors themselves. More pink horrors were oozing from the other stacks on all sides of them. Eldritch flames dripped down the logs and crept across the floor.

Many of the horrors seemed to lack the strength to manifest fully, but others had no such difficulties. Chortling daemons reached for Gage and Carus, trying to trip them up or casting flashing spirals of energy at them from their fingertips. Gage swept his sword out, trying to force them back. Steaming ichor spilled from the wounds his blade made, the blessings woven into its steel biting deep into daemon flesh. Zephyr snarled and snapped at the protesting blue horrors when the smaller daemons got too close.

‘Carus,’ Gage said, ‘I think it’s time to use that lantern of yours again!’

The Lord-Veritant drove the ferrule of his staff down, and it cracked against the floor. Holding it there, he began to intone a prayer. His words beat upon the air like hammer blows. The Lantern of Abjuration began to glow with a holy light as Carus summoned its full power. The daemons worked more frantically to pull themselves free of their wooden hiding places. They jeered and chuckled, but their eyes rolled with what Gage hoped was inhuman panic. They knew that the light of the lantern would banish them, if Carus could complete his prayer.

One of the horrors, quicker than the others, leapt for the Lord-Veritant, hoping to interrupt him. Gage slid between them, second pistol levelled. He fired, blowing a chunk from the horror’s rubbery skull. The daemon staggered, burbling in rage. Then, more swiftly than he could follow, it leapt again, blurring into a frantic streak of glowing colour.

Gage lunged to meet it. Ichor washed over him as his blessed blade pierced its form and disrupted its cohesion. It split into azure shreds, and two blue horrors tumbled away, complaining vociferously. Zephyr leapt upon one, savaging the squealing daemon into burning tatters. The other began to weave its hands in a ritual fashion, but before it could complete its spell, a heavy form trod on it, splattering it like an overripe blueberry.

The curseling thundered out of the dark between stacks, flail swinging. Carus staggered as the creature struck him a glancing blow, interrupting his prayer. The Lord-Veritant spun his staff, trying to drive the creature back, but it pressed its assault. The flail cracked down, smashing the helm from Carus’ head, exposing his dark features and a mane of wiry hair bound back in a thick plait. He dropped to the ground and rolled aside as the flail slammed down again, snapping floorboards.

‘Carus!’ Gage tried to go to his companion’s aid, but he was surrounded. The daemons seeped up out of the stacks, clutching at him and giggling like demented children. He slashed at them, hoping the blessed steel of his rapier could harm them. Outsize fists cracked against his back and shins, causing him to stumble.

Zephyr leapt onto the curseling, her beak tearing at its exposed flesh. The tretchlet chattered and struck at the gryph-hound with its staff, swatting the animal away.

‘NowNow youyou diedie, servantservant ofof thethe singlesingle pathpath,’ the curseling roared, the tretchlet echoing every word.

Its flaming sword chopped down. Carus caught the blow on his staff. The force of it drove him to one knee. The crackling flames coiled about the staff and the Lord-Veritant’s forearms, scorching his silver war-plate black.

The tretchlet waved a hand, and a bolt of sorcerous light burst from its palm. It struck Carus and dissipated into streamers of colour. Thin strands of lightning raced along the length of his staff and crawled along his armour. The daemonic homunculus screamed in agitation and began to thrash on its roots, its fury shaking the curseling. The brute groaned and lifted its flail, ready to bring it down on the pinned Stormcast.

Gage fought desperately to free himself from the daemons. Lashing out with his fists and feet, as well as his sword, he momentarily broke loose. Stumbling slightly, he snatched his knife from his belt and sent it spinning towards the curseling. The blade sank into the curseling’s unarmoured wrist with a meaty thunk. Like his sword, Gage’s knife had been blessed by the hands of the Grand Theogonist herself, and a thick steam erupted from the wound. The curseling’s hand gave a spasm, and its flail fell to the floor. The brute turned, roaring in pain, and tore its blade loose from Carus’ staff forcefully enough to send him tumbling to the ground with a crash of sigmarite.

It lurched towards Gage, trailing blood from its wounded hand. The tretchlet screamed imprecations and pounded a thin fist against the brute’s helmet, as if trying to stop it from pursuing Gage. The witch hunter retreated, and the curseling pounded after him, smashing aside daemons in its haste. Gage backed into a pillar. The flaming sword arced out and Gage ducked aside. The blade bit into the wood and stuck, its fires crawling upwards as the pillar began to burn.

Flames leapt to the logs and grew merrily. Oily smoke billowed. Past the curseling, Gage saw daemons leap on Carus, their laughter tinged with something that might have been hysteria. The Lord-Veritant lashed out with staff and sword, pulping unnatural flesh or separating groping hands from gangly arms. Sorcerous fire washed across his armour, leaving greasy stains on the silver but doing no real damage. More daemons joined the fray, hurling themselves at the towering Stormcast Eternal, trying to drag him down through sheer weight of numbers.

The curseling left the sword where it was stuck in the pillar and groped for Gage. Its bloody hand, the tip of his knife still jutting from its palm, stretched towards his face. Gage fell back, thrusting his rapier at the brute in a vain attempt to hold it back. Its hand missed him, but only just. He scrambled upright.

The broken body of a daemon tumbled past, crashing into a stack of wood and momentarily diverting the curseling’s attentions. Gage saw Carus bulling towards them, despite the daemons attempting to restrain him. Their limbs smoked where they clung to him, and he brushed the creatures aside, or crushed them beneath his feet. Daemons scattered before him, yelping in dismay.

‘Gage!’ Carus cried. ‘Leave this creature to me!’

The curseling roared and turned, catching hold of the blade of Carus’ sword as the weapon arced towards its head. It forced the Lord-Veritant back a step, even as ichor poured down its wounded palms. Carus cursed and managed to kick the brute in the chest, knocking it against the pillar.

‘I have killed stronger foes than you, beast,’ Carus growled. The curseling grunted and reached around to wrench its sword free in a gout of burning splinters. Their swords connected, and the curseling’s burning blade exploded into a thousand shards. The two warriors reeled away from each other as chunks of fiery metal scattered in every direction.

Gage took the opportunity to slash at the distracted curseling, but his blade merely scraped its armour. The tretchlet screamed and thrust the bladed tip of its staff towards Gage’s face, trying to drive him back. The metal glowed white hot. Gage parried the blow and rammed his sword into the tretchlet’s torso. It stiffened, a screech dying on its lips. Black ichor burst from its mouth, and the staff fell from its slack grip. It folded backwards, pulling itself off his blade.

The curseling moaned in agony and clutched at its parasitic passenger, as if trying to wake it. At that moment, Carus rose up behind it, his armour all but black with daemonic blood. His sword crunched through its back-plate. He ripped the weapon free in a welter of ichor.

‘Avaunt,’ Carus said flatly. Daemons edged away as the Stormcast Eternal flicked ichor from his sword blade.

The curseling staggered away from the Lord-Veritant, groaning.

‘F-father,’ it grunted. ‘F-f-father, h-help me! H-help!’

It turned, stumbling, reaching for something Gage could not see. The tretchlet slumped down its back, body flopping limply as the curseling sank to its knees. It fell onto its hands, wheezing. Gage felt sick. He stepped up to the beast, blade gripped in a trembling hand.

It looked up at him. Its gaze was empty of its previous malignity. Instead, there was only brute incomprehension there now, like an animal that could not conceive of its own destruction. ‘H-help,’ it wheezed.

‘Yes,’ Gage said. He raised his sword, and thrust it cleanly through the slitted visor of the curseling’s helmet, silencing its groans for good. It crashed to the floor and lay still. He jerked his blade free.

‘Well struck,’ Carus said.

Gage had no time to reply. Even with the curseling dead, the daemons were still coming. They seeped from the logs and rose up from the floor, their forms twisting and expanding as they burst through the multi-coloured smoke that was beginning to fill the warehouse. They laughed and clambered over the curseling’s body, as if its death meant nothing more to them than a momentary amusement.

Carus lifted his staff, and his voice echoed like thunder as he completed the prayer of banishment that had been interrupted earlier. He slammed the ferrule down with an echoing crack. The azure glow within the Lantern of Abjuration brightened, then speared out to blinding brilliance. Shadows were burned away, and the half-formed daemons with them. In the sudden silence, Gage could hear the clash of weapons and Bryn’s deep bull-bellow. He hesitated.

Carus caught his shoulder. ‘We cannot tarry, Gage. These are delaying tactics. They are trying to hinder us.’

Gage shook off the Stormcast’s grip. He was right. It had been a trap, and they had walked into it. They’d stumbled on more than just a cult. This was something bigger. A sick feeling grew in his gut.

‘The airship.’ He looked at Carus. ‘The airship, Carus – we have to get to the airship.’

He turned, and started in the direction of the quay-side doors of the warehouse. The fire started by the curseling’s blade was beginning to spread, leaping from log stack to stack. Smoke choked the air, blotting out even the daemon stink.

‘Why? What is it?’ Carus asked as he loped smoothly in Gage’s wake.

‘You’re right – this trap wasn’t meant to kill us. It was meant to delay us, to buy time for the airship to slip its mooring and cast off. I only pray there’s still time to stop them!’ He hoped Bryn and Kuva would have enough sense to get out before the warehouse burned down around them. ‘There – the doors!’

He pointed. The huge double doors were meant for moving heavy logs through. At the moment, they were closed and barred with an immense square beam. Carus put on a burst of speed.

The Lord-Veritant’s blade slashed down through the beam, splitting it moments before his shoulder struck the doors. They slammed open with a deep boom of abused wood. Smoke flooded out into the open air. Gage ran after Carus, and saw the Hopeful Traveller in all its glory.

The airship resembled one of the low-slung galleys that plied the waters of the Verdant Bay, save that its masts bore no sails. Instead, they connected to several great green gasbags. These were marked with magical sigils, bought at no small cost from the mages of the Collegiate Arcane. The Hopeful Traveller was slowly moving from its berth. Crewmen bustled on the quay, throwing off the anchor chains. They scattered as Zephyr darted towards them, screeching.

‘We have to catch it!’ Gage shouted. Carus nodded.

They raced along the quay as the airship slid from its berth. The ship was picking up speed as the anchor weights were cast off, and it edged ahead of them. Gage had a moment of vertigo as he reached the edge of the quay and saw the vast green sweep of the city spin out below him, but he forced it aside long enough to jump. Heart in his stomach, he crashed against the hull. Flailing blindly, he caught hold of the bottom of the deck rail and hauled himself up, muscles straining, heart thudding.

The rail shuddered, cracked and burst as Carus struck it. The Lord-Veritant crashed down onto the deck, staff in hand. Gage fell after him. He scrambled to his feet, kicking his way free of the broken rail. Behind him, he heard Zephyr shriek in frustration as the ship left its berth, leaving the gryph-hound standing on the quay. Gage glanced back as the animal turned away and darted back towards the warehouse. He turned around to see Carus drawing his blade.

‘What now, witch hunter?’ the Stormcast rumbled.

Carus stood tall, blade in one hand, staff in the other. Gage drew his rapier. The crew ringed them, weapons ready. They clutched a mix of belaying pins, knives and back-alley blades. They were hard-looking, and all bore the ever-shifting sigil of Tzeentch somewhere on their person – as a tattoo, a scar or a badge pinned to their scarf.

‘Drop your weapons,’ Carus growled. ‘Your souls are forfeit, but your lives might yet be ended in a merciful fashion.’ The Stormcast thumped the deck with his staff. Lantern light washed outwards, casting strange shadows across the dark wood.

‘And when have you ever shown mercy?’ The words echoed over the deck. Gage glanced aft. Two figures now stood at the rail, looking down at the lower deck.

One was a heavyset man, richly clad and wearing a golden mask similar to those worn by the acolytes, though more ornate in design, with proportions that seemed to twist and change as he looked down at them. One gloved hand rested on the pommel of the sword sheathed at his side, and he held a gold-topped staff. The staff seemed innocuous at first glance, no different to what any wealthy citizen might carry, but the strange runes that gleamed and crawled along its length were anything but innocent. The sight of them stung Gage’s eyes, and elicited a feeling of deep revulsion in him.

The other figure was tall, abnormally so, and clad in strange, faceted armour that caught the light in odd ways. He wore brightly coloured robes of rich silk beneath the shimmering war-plate, and balanced a long two-handed blade across his narrow shoulders with a studied insouciance. His helm was archaic in fashion, tall and featureless save for a thin slit for vision and a multihued crest of horsehair which rose over it. The light of the lanterns hanging from the masts seemed to bend and shift strangely about the macabre warrior, and Gage found himself unable to look at the being directly. Even so, he could feel the warrior’s fell power beating upon the air.

‘Well. I don’t recall inviting you two, but welcome aboard regardless,’ the heavyset man in the golden mask said. Though Gage couldn’t see his face, he sounded amused. ‘I suppose it’s only fitting – what is the point of a grand working without an audience to appreciate it?’ He leaned lazily against his staff. ‘My name is Rollo Tarn. I’m told you were looking for me.’

‘Rollo Tarn,’ Gage said, ‘surrender yourself, in the name of the God-King and the Celestial Realm–’

Tarn threw back his head and laughed. ‘I do not recognise the authority of your tyrant-god, witch hunter.’ His armoured companion joined in the merriment with his own hollow chuckles, and Gage felt his stomach lurch at the sound. He was certain now that there was nothing human under that armour.

‘Whether you recognise it or not, it has come for you,’ Carus growled. He glared about him, and the crew drew back a step. Tarn looked at him.

‘Come to burn more innocents on your holy pyres, Stormcast?’

Carus glared at him. ‘You are not innocent.’

Tarn spread his hands. ‘No. I am not, at that. Not for a very long time, at least. But the blood I have spilled was done so for a great purpose.’

‘I’ve heard that before,’ Gage said. ‘It’s always the way with your sort. But your great purpose inevitably amounts to the same thing – death and ruin. Not today.’ He extended his sword. ‘Today, your purpose is unravelled.’

Tarn looked at him. ‘I think not. Fate is an ocean, and its tides can wear down even the mightiest of mountains. And these tides have been at work for a very long time.’

‘The wood,’ Gage said, coldly. ‘It’s cursed.’

‘Blessed,’ Tarn corrected. ‘Every scrap and sliver of it is both gate and key in one. I spent a fortune bringing it into the city, hiding its true origins, ensuring that it was used in every building I could. Now, I will turn the key and throw wide the gate. But first… Aek, bring me the Stormcast’s lightning.’

‘It would be a pleasure, coven-brother,’ the tall warrior said. He stepped up easily onto the rail and then off it, walking across the air as if it were solid ground. He hauled his blade off his shoulder, and it moaned eerily as he swept it about himself.

‘That’s no normal sword,’ Gage said.

‘That’s no normal warrior,’ Carus growled. ‘It is a fatemaster – another cursed slave of Tzeentch, and a far greater one than any curseling.’

Gage tensed. Fatemasters were among the deadliest of the diverse servants of the Ruinous Powers. They were fell warriors, infused with unnatural strength and longevity.

The wind picked up, and the ship’s rigging thrashed like a wounded animal. Gage could feel it pulling at him, threatening to knock him sprawling. His coat flapped about him, and his boot soles scuffed the deck as he was pushed backwards, step by step.

Carus had no such difficulty. He stalked towards the approaching fatemaster, head bowed against the wind. The Lord-Veritant slammed his staff down, and the wood of the deck buckled and blackened about the point of impact. The air took on an electric charge, and Gage felt his hackles prickle. The Stormcast released the staff, leaving it upright in the deck.

The fatemaster dropped down, quicker than the eye could follow. His blade wailed like a lost soul as it swept towards Carus. The Stormcast interposed his own, and there was a sound like the pealing of a great bell as the swords met.

Crewmembers were knocked sprawling by the reverberations of the blow, and Gage stumbled back against the rail. Lightning snapped and snarled about Carus as he met the fatemaster blade to blade. The daemon-sword keened piercingly, while Carus’ judgement blade blazed brighter with every impact. For long moments, the only sound was the crash of metal as the two warriors circled one another, their duel carrying them from one side of the deck to the other.

While all eyes were on the battle, Gage hurriedly reloaded his pistols. His hands moving on instinct, he let his eyes roam. The wood of the deck pulsed strangely in time with every blow. He wondered if the airship was made from the same wood that had been stacked in the warehouse. As if in answer to this thought, two deck boards at his feet bent away from one another like the lids of a monstrous eye, and something yellow and shimmering peered up at him. Its slit pupil contracted as it caught sight of him.

He leapt back as more boards tore away, revealing a fanged maw. A slobbering laugh emerged from the mouth as he backed away. More eyes and mouths and waggling fingers began to emerge from the wood, piercing it as if it were a thin membrane. Indistinct shapes hunched and heaved, straining to free themselves. Coarse laughter filled his ears as daemons swam through the wood in pursuit of him. Only the light of Carus’ lantern was keeping them from fully manifesting.

‘They’re beautiful, aren’t they?’

Gage turned, pistol raised. Tarn stood close by, watching him. Too close.

‘They’re always there, you know,’ he said, taking a step forwards. Crewmen surrounded him like an honour guard. ‘Watching. Waiting. Tzeentch’s hand is at your throat, though you see it not. His servants walk among you, serene and unknown.’ He gestured to himself and the crew. ‘And now, the time has come for them to reveal themselves. They shall break through again, where they broke through of old, and the cities of men shall burn in prismatic fire.’

‘Not if I can help it.’

‘You can’t,’ Tarn said. He laughed, and spread his hands. Scintillating flames blossomed on his palms and quickly engulfed his hands. ‘The rite has begun, and the crooked path stretches through Hammerhal Ghyra. The city will belong to the Architect of Fate.’

CHAPTER SIX

HEXWOOD

The daemon-tree lurched forwards on torn roots, flailing its burning branches. Somehow, in some way unknown to sanity, the daemon-flame had twisted the trees into monstrosities. The mouth in its trunk gnawed mindlessly at the air. Goat-like eyes glared from knotholes and a stink of old blood and rotting wood rolled over Serena as she raised her shield. A branch crashed down on the sigmarite, leaving a trail of smouldering sap. She hewed at the branch, trying to ignore the roots that clawed at her legs.

Her warblade drew thick gouts of sap from the tree’s branches, and it reeled back, as if in pain. The tree writhed, its trunk splitting and bleeding as it turned away from her to swat Ravius off his feet. He fell onto his back, and only just managed to interpose his shield between himself and a branch. More branches hammered down, driving him deeper into the loam. Roots slithered over him, as if to drag him beneath the ground. Serena moved to aid him. She chopped apart those roots she could while still defending herself, but the more of them she cut away, the more that lashed about her struggling comrade.

Burning trees lumbered into battle all along the shieldwall, shrieking eerily. Heavy branches swept down, leaving behind burning trails of pine needles. Stormcasts staggered or fell, knocked off their feet by heavy blows or tripped up by slithering roots. More of the flame-spewing daemons raced through the gaps made by the trees, seeking easier prey.

Before they got far, a withering volley of crackling arrows struck them down. The arrows streaked across the clearing, punching the creatures back. Serena glanced behind her and saw a cohort of Judicators approaching, skybolt bows humming as the archers nocked and loosed their deadly missiles. Wherever the shimmering arrows struck, lightning sparked and snapped, casting a white glare across the battlefield.

‘Eyes forward, Sunstrike,’ Aetius said as he shoved past her. He drove the rim of his shield down, severing one of the roots that entangled Ravius. ‘And you, Ravius – on your feet. This is no time for lazing about.’

Together, Serena and the Liberator-Prime managed to free Ravius as the Judicators advanced. The Stormcast archers loosed a pinpoint volley into the trees over the heads of the Liberators, snapping branches and opening steaming black wounds in the squirming bark.

Trees toppled, groaning. A second volley swiftly followed the first. The tree looming over Serena and the others split open and burst, scattering burning pulp over them. Even as it fell, a knot of daemons lolloped towards them, spitting flame. Serena only just managed to interpose her shield. She gritted her teeth against the heat as the Judicator-Prime of the cohort moved to aid her.

‘Easy, sister – hold it back a moment longer,’ he said, his voice mild. He nocked an arrow and took aim just over her head. ‘Easy, easy – there!’ He loosed the arrow and she heard a yowl, cut short. The flames diminished and the heat faded; she lowered her shield and quickly thrust her blade into the wounded daemon before it could rise.

She glanced back at the archer. ‘My thanks, Solus.’

He nodded genially and drew another arrow from his quiver. ‘I’m here to help, as ever.’ Solus spoke calmly, as if he were anywhere other than on a battlefield. The Judicator-Prime was a serene presence, and one that many among the Steel Souls looked to for reassurance when things were at their bleakest.

‘Took you long enough,’ Aetius said, shoving another daemon back. He smashed his hammer into one of its maws and tore its body open. It reeled, hissing. Solus loosed an arrow into it, knocking it backwards in a clap of lightning.

‘I wanted to be sure you actually needed help, brother. You can be very indignant about such things, at times.’

Solus nocked another arrow. Around him, his Judicators spread out behind the shieldwall. At his command, they loosed a withering volley. Daemons shrieked and spun, setting more trees alight as they came apart in shreds of viscous slime and shimmering motes.

As the last of the daemons dissipated, the warped trees tottered towards the shieldwall. Somewhere beyond them, Serena could hear the sound of running feet and the crash of metal on metal. Screeches and howls echoed up; the tzaangors had regrouped, and were using the lurching trees as cover as they raced towards their foes.

She was forced to step back as a heavy branch slammed down, nearly crushing her flat. Nearby, a Judicator screamed as a jagged branch punched through a gap in her armour. She fell, her form reduced to crackling sparks of azure lightning. A Liberator was dragged bodily out of line and into the mass of trees, where he vanished from sight. His curses dissolved into howls of agony before another blue bolt soared skywards. Roots lashed through the gap he’d left, slamming against the warriors to either side, causing them to stumble. The shieldwall was beginning to fray beneath the unyielding assault.

Serena jerked her shield up over her head. A branch splintered itself against it. ‘We have to fall back!’ she shouted.

Aetius nodded, but before he could reply, the ground began to shake. Serena turned and saw Gardus’ bodyguard of Retributors advancing quickly to the fore, Feros in the lead.

‘Step aside, brothers and sisters!’ he roared. His voice echoed through her like the rumble of thunder. ‘It is time to gather some firewood.’

The Paladin Retributors advanced as a solid wedge as the Liberator shieldwall dispersed. When they struck home, the wedge flared and opened, revealing Lord-Celestant Gardus in their midst. His light blazed forth, and the corrupted trees cowered back. Their newly sprouted eyes rolled and their twisted mouths gibbered as the radiance washed over them.

The Retributors, led by Gardus, went to work. Wherever their hammers struck, a tree toppled, or burst into cleansing flame. Gardus’ own tempestos hammer snapped out. Lightning flashed through the glade, and a twisted tree splintered. It toppled with an almost human groan, branches flailing.

‘On the final day, who will remain?’ the Lord-Celestant roared. ‘Only the faithful!’ Feros and the other Retributors echoed him, their voices rising up over the sound of destruction.

As the last of the ambulatory trees fell, a tzaangor leapt over it and swung a two-handed blade at the Lord-Celestant. Gardus parried the tzaangor’s blade and smashed the creature from its feet with bone-breaking force.

‘Who will guide the lost from the dark of despair?’ he cried. A second tzaangor was sent sprawling, neck snapped, as it slunk out of the mist and smoke. ‘Only the faithful!’ Gardus lashed out with a boot and kicked a tzaangor backwards. As it stumbled, he caved in its skull. ‘When the strength of men fades, who will yet stand?’

‘Only the faithful!’ Serena responded, her voice joining that of every Stormcast within earshot.

She clashed shields with a charging tzaangor and knocked the beastkin sprawling. She stamped on its chest, crushing its sternum, then turned to meet the charge of another. The avian monsters flooded out of the trees, attacking with a singular ferocity. Solus’ Judicators chose their targets with precision, trying to stem the assault, but slowly the line of Liberators and Retributors was being driven back by the sheer press of bodies. Only Gardus held his ground, and neither daemon nor beast could touch him.

For a moment, his light blazed forth, brighter than the moon above, only to be snuffed out by a vivid firestorm that engulfed him and his bodyguards with a colossal roar of sour light and strangling heat. Feros, on the fringes of the blast, was knocked to one knee, parts of his war-plate fused to slag. Several of his cohort were sent hurtling back to Azyr before they even had a chance to scream. Gardus himself was hurled back into the battle-line, his armour smoking. He crashed through the shieldwall, knocking several Stormcasts sprawling.

Half a dozen flying shapes screamed out of the smoke and flame.

The tzaangors were mounted on daemonic disc-like creatures. Some of the discs resembled spinning sawblades, while others looked like tailless lampreys studded with barnacles of bone. Several of the tzaangors carried bows, while others grasped barbed spears. The one in the lead bore no obvious weaponry, but seemed all the more dangerous for it. Unlike the rest of its foul kin, the creature was clad in shimmering robes and bedecked with thick plumage. The air bubbled and twisted around it, as if the world itself were trying to reject the creature.

‘Shaman,’ Aetius spat.

The tzaangor shaman hurtled across the clearing over the heads of the stunned Stormcasts. Crouched atop its whirring disk of brass and silver, it gestured with its crooked staff. Blue flame cascaded from its tip, enveloping a nearby knot of Freeguilders as they rushed to bolster the battle-line.

The soldiers screamed as their flesh darkened, and they collapsed to the ground, tearing at their uniforms. Feathers burst from their flesh, and their skulls cracked and split, lengthening into new shapes. Serena watched in horror as the mortal warriors were twisted into braying tzaangors. The creatures lurched to their feet, still clad in the rags of their uniforms, and lunged at their former fellows. Several of them peeled off and rushed for the wagon on which the Impertinent Maiden sat.

The helblaster volley gun gave a roar, and the rushing tzaangors were reduced to bloody pulp and mist. The crew hastily began to reload as a tzaangor disc-rider shrieked out of the thickening mist. The beastkin whipped past them and separated their heads from their necks with its spear in a spray of red. Smelling blood, the ghyroch pulling the wagon snorted and began to gallop away, spilling shot and supplies from the back as it went.

Lightning crackled as Solus’ Judicators loosed a well-timed volley. The disc fell, writhing sickeningly, arrows jutting from its underside. The tzaangor rider hit the ground and rolled, squalling. Freeguilders closed in on it as it clambered to its feet, but were driven back by its barbed spear. It fought with a savage skill, moving more swiftly than the mortals could match.

Serena glanced at Aetius, who nodded tersely. ‘Go,’ he said, taking her place in line.

She raced towards the creature, moving as fast as her war-plate allowed. It turned at the last moment, thrusting its spear towards her. She caught the blow on her shield, and guided the barbed blades over her shoulder in a spray of sparks. She drew a line of blood from its side, and then they were moving in a tight circle. Spitting unintelligible gibberish, it spun its spear, the weapon seeming to leave phantom afterimages in its wake. The tzaangor thrust the spear at her again and again, driving her back.

As she blocked its blows on her shield, she saw more of the disc-riders hurtle through the walls of flame. These carried cruel-looking bows rather than spears, and they loosed as skilfully as any Judicator did. A Liberator was punched from his feet, an arrow jutting from the eye-slit of his helm. As he fell, his form dissolved into lightning and surged upwards. More daemonic arrows thudded into a bellowing ghyroch, slaying the dumb beast in its tracks. Arrows punched into the ground around Serena, sending her stumbling back.

Her opponent leapt forwards, cackling as its disc-riding brethren swooped by, seeking new prey. The spear twisted, gouging deep lines across the face of her shield and nearly tearing it from her arm. She turned with the blow, and slashed at the beastkin. They moved back and forth, trading blows. It was faster than she was, and that speed only seemed to grow as the fight went on. Their blades connected, and she felt the reverberation not just in her arm, but in her soul as well. It shook things loose within her, brief fragments of the past dappling her consciousness like raindrops. She saw a woman’s face – her own, perhaps – and felt a faint echo of melancholy. It slipped away as another blow tore her shield from her.

She staggered back, flourishing her warblade to keep her opponent at bay. It lunged again, but lurched at the last moment as a crossbow bolt sprouted from its neck. Beyond it, she saw Sergeant Creel make the sign of the hammer in triumph, or perhaps thanks. Teeth bared, she took a two-handed grip on her warblade and drove it through the beastkin’s chest until the hilt clanked against its armour.

Serena tore the blade free as bow-wielding tzaangors shot past her in pursuit of Creel and his men as they fell back. Retrieving her shield, she moved after them.

The beastkin’s deadly arrows tore through several of the fleeing Freeguilders, ripping them from their feet and sending their bodies tumbling like dolls. Creel, despite the awkwardness of his wooden leg, made it into the shelter of a supply wagon. He hauled himself over the side and into the back with ungainly speed.

A line of crossbowmen had formed near the wagon, using it as an improvised rampart. As Creel clambered to his feet in the back of the wagon, someone handed him up a loaded crossbow. The Freeguilders fired at his barked command.

The onrushing discs didn’t slow, despite the bolts bristling from both discs and riders. Creel shouted again, and the crossbowmen dropped flat, allowing the halberdiers crouching behind them to rise up and thrust their weapons out. The beastkin were caught by surprise. One of the tzaangors fell from its perch, squalling, and several crossbowmen fell on it with knives and swords. Two died, but the blades of the rest of them found purchase, and the beastkin slumped, its broken bow sliding from its grip.

The remaining disc-rider tried to flee, but Creel raised his borrowed crossbow and let a bolt fly. It caught the tzaangor between the shoulder blades and knocked it from the sky. His men cheered as the thing rolled to a stop near Serena. She lopped its head off as it tried to rise, and raised her bloody blade in a terse salute. Creel responded in kind.

A wash of heat across her armour caused her to turn. She saw the tzaangor shaman swooping over a group of Stormcasts. Its fiery magics splashed across their armour, staggering them, but otherwise doing no harm. Judicator arrows slammed into its disc, and the circular daemon-thing convulsed and shrieked. The shaman leapt lightly from its daemonic mount as it fell, wracked by lightning.

The shaman landed and swept its staff out, unleashing a lash of flame that drove nearby Stormcasts and Freeguilders back. It cawed harshly, and began to weave a spell. Serena hurried to intercept it, but Gardus reached their foe first. The Lord-Celestant stepped through the shaman’s flames without hesitation.

His armour still smoked from earlier, and his sigmarite warcloak was in tatters. Streaks of soot and ash marred the golden ornamentation. But his light still burned, and as he scraped the blade of his sword against his hammer, the flames thinned.

‘This forest is not yours, beast,’ he said, his voice carrying easily through the glade.

‘Not yours either,’ the creature crowed. It pointed its staff at him and traced abominable sigils on the smoky air. ‘You will not claim Mzek’s plumage, Bright Soul, whatever others might have dreamed. I will rip out your lightning and weave it into a chain to wear about my waist, eh?’

‘No,’ Gardus said softly.

Even so, the word boomed out, as final as an executioner’s strike. The shaman cocked its head, as if confused. Then it reared back, screeching in pain. Serena’s eyes widened as she caught sight of one of the tattooed tribesmen behind the beast, a bloody knife in hand. While they’d all been distracted, the forester had struck. The shaman spun, shrieking a deplorable word. The forester died in silence, erased from existence by a fiery undulation that left an after-image seared on Serena’s retinas.

As his ashes fell to the forest floor, his comrades attacked. The tribesmen leapt on the tzaangor shaman. Knives and hatchets flashed as the savage warriors hacked at the stunned creature. It squalled in pain, and slashed wildly with a hooked knife. As it flung its attackers aside, crude arrows loosed from bows of horn and sinew sprouted from its back and chest. The beastkin staggered, slumping against a wagon. The knife fell from its hand.

The tribesmen stalked towards it, faces hard. Serena made to join them, but Gardus thrust his hammer out, stopping her. ‘This kill is theirs,’ he said firmly. ‘A debt long in the owing, now paid in full. As I swore to them.’

The shaman’s screeches spiralled up before breaking off into strangled gurgles. Out in the dark, the thump of drums fell momentarily silent before starting up again, their fury redoubled. Daemonic laughter echoed through the trees, but not so loudly as it once had. With the death of the shaman and his entourage, the rest of the tzaangors had retreated.

‘They will regroup soon,’ Gardus said. ‘We must be quick. Hyrn!’

The tribesman stood. ‘Here, lord.’ He looked at Gardus. ‘There are more beast-witches than that one in this forest. One more, at least.’

‘We need to find the seat of their power.’

‘It is not far, I think,’ Hyrn said, cleaning his knife on his furs. ‘There is a place where the forest turns sour, and the wind sings strange songs. It is where they lair. But they will intercept us before we can reach it…’

‘Not if we force them to split their attentions,’ Gardus said. ‘Gather your warriors. You will lead us now, while they are in disarray.’ He turned. ‘Feros, with me – you will clear us a path. Aetius, Solus – I will need some of your conclaves too. We must find the head of the serpent that encircles us, and crush it.’ Gardus looked at Creel, who stood nearby. ‘Sergeant Creel. Can you get the Impertinent Maiden singing again?’

Creel saluted with a bandaged hand. ‘We’ll get her caterwauling, my lord.’

Gardus nodded in satisfaction. He looked at the others. ‘Hold the line. Hold their gazes here. I don’t want them to see the blow that kills them until it’s too late.’ He met Serena’s gaze. ‘You – Sunstrike. You will come with me.’

‘As you will, my lord,’ she said. ‘As far as my faith will carry me.’

‘To the heart of the forest will be far enough.’ He turned to Aetius. ‘I need four more. And five from you, Solus.’

‘Will that be enough, my lord?’ Aetius said doubtfully.

‘It will have to be.’ Gardus looked at Serena. ‘Who will walk through the fires of Chaos unbowed, sister?’

Serena slammed the flat of her sword against her battered shield. ‘Only the faithful.’

‘Only the faithful,’ Gardus said, nodding. He looked towards the forest. ‘Let us hope that is true. I fear that this blaze is but the barest edge of an inferno unseen.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

RITE OF THE CROOKED PATH

Rollo Tarn gestured, unleashing his spell, and multi-coloured flames washed over the deck of the airship. Gage threw himself aside and fired one of his pistols. Tarn staggered with a startled cry as a blossom of blood appeared on his robes. He clapped a burning hand to his shoulder and screeched, ‘Kill him!’

Tattooed crew members leapt to obey. Gage cast aside the empty pistol and fired the other. Tarn ducked away, and a crewman folded over with a groan. Then the others were on Gage, and he had no time for anything but the fight at hand. Parrying a blow from a cutlass, he drew his knife and retreated, intent on putting the mast at his back.

The crew were tough. Experienced. The veterans of tavern brawls and boarding actions. But he was a knight of the Order of Azyr. With cool, precise skill, he used their numbers against them, as he’d been taught. Witch hunters often found themselves alone and outnumbered, and Gage had learned how to turn that weakness into strength.

As the crewmen closed in on him, he twisted aside, avoiding blows that fell on the men behind him. His rapier lashed out, not for killing blows, but in crippling slashes directed at tendons and hamstrings. Overeager crewmen tripped over their wounded fellows, opening themselves up for his blade. His knife zipped out across wrists and elbows.

However, skill alone wouldn’t see him through. He knew that, as surely as he knew that he had to stop whatever rite Tarn had set in motion. Carus’ light wouldn’t hold the daemons back forever either. The Stormcast might be able to purge the vessel of its daemonic infection, but only if he were given time.

As he fought against the crew, Gage kept an eye on the duel between the Lord-Veritant and the fatemaster. The two warriors seemed evenly matched, but Aek was fresher. The wailing blade he held disrupted the wind with every slash, causing the deck to pitch and yaw. Carus stumbled back, barely interposing his own sword as the fatemaster struck at his head. The echoes of the blow swept across the deck, knocking several of Gage’s opponents sprawling. He took advantage of the momentary opening and lunged towards Tarn.

The magister, hand still pressed to his wounded shoulder, thrust his staff towards Gage. The sigils hammered into its length flared with a sickly light. Gage, on instinct, dived aside as the sorcerous blast pierced the space where he’d been standing. It enveloped a crewman who’d been coming up behind him, club raised.

The man screamed as his body tore itself apart. His flesh split like an overcooked sausage, revealing scales and feathers. His bones splintered and reshaped themselves, lengthening and curving. His flesh sloughed away and resurged, colours changing. Eyes and mouths sprouted in the nooks and crannies of his new shape, as thorn-like talons slid from raw, fleshy paws. Bulbous tendrils composed of repurposed muscle and fat lashed out in an orgy of agonised violence. The thing screamed through a thicket of sharp fangs.

Unlucky crewmen were smashed from their feet, or torn apart where they stood. Loyalty to the Dark Gods was no proof against the maddened instincts of the newborn Chaos spawn. It was a thing of pure hunger and instinct, all that it had been consumed in the unholy fires of its creation.

The Chaos spawn lunged for Gage, yowling. He ran, leaping over casks and bundles of rope, and darted behind a mast. The Chaos spawn blundered after him, splintering the deck boards with its heavy body. It caught hold of the mast and swung itself around, its stretched maw opening in a roar.

Gage dropped flat as its claw lashed out. The mast shuddered as the beast struck it. Gage turned, caught hold of a mast line and chopped through the knot holding it secure. He was jerked off his feet and yanked upwards as the rope slithered through the pulleys above. The Chaos spawn shrieked and pursued him, scrambling swiftly up the mast.

Gage slammed into the mast, on a perch just beneath the bottom of the gasbag. He let go of the rope and caught hold of a guide line, preventing himself from plummeting back down to the deck below. He tried to think of some way of defeating the creature rapidly ascending in pursuit. There were any number of blessed sigils and sacred talismans in the pockets of his coat, but he doubted they would do any good.

Mind racing, he glanced up across the night sky, back towards the aether-dock. A thin shape was visible – a skycutter. The smaller vessel was a graceful blade, its aether-sails pushing at the air like the wings of a falcon. The skycutter arrowed towards the Hopeful Traveller, and Gage’s heart leapt as he caught the faint sound of a duardin sky-shanty, ringing out from the approaching vessel.

‘Bryn?’ he muttered.

The skycutter caught the wind and surged forwards, closing the gap. No one had noticed it yet, being too distracted by the Chaos spawn’s rampage. Gage glanced down as the creature hauled itself closer. Its bulk was still realigning itself to its new shape, slowing its ascent. It lashed out at him with a spiny tendril, and he slammed back against the mast to avoid it. Its claws tore into the perch, and he stabbed at them with his rapier. A tendril tipped by a snapping maw shot towards him, and, using the guide line for balance, he ducked aside, swinging out over the deck. He pinned the tendril to the mast, eliciting a shriek from the Chaos spawn. The monster began shaking the mast, trying to free itself.

Gage ripped his sword free, and the beast screamed as it made to haul itself up onto his perch. Before it could do so, the skycutter crashed into the side of the Hopeful Traveller with a tooth-rattling roar. Timbers bent and burst, and the airship thrashed like a wounded animal. Crewmen were flung screaming from the ship, and Gage was nearly hurled from the mast. The Chaos spawn wasn’t as lucky. It tumbled to the shattered deck below with a bellow.

Through the smoke of the impact, Gage could see that the skycutter had lived up to its name – its reinforced prow had chopped into the side of the Hopeful Traveller like a knife blade. The smaller vessel hung in place, embedded in the larger airship. It had torn a gouge in the deck, deep towards its centre. Stunned crewmen started towards the vessel, even as others ran to try and steady the Hopeful Traveller. The airship was listing badly, its hull creaking. Shouts of alarm filled the air. Gage wondered how much longer it would hold together.

‘Ha-ha!’ Bryn bellowed as he dropped down from the prow of the skycutter, a pistol in either hand. The duardin’s armour was scorched and stained, but he seemed to be in one piece. ‘Khazukan Khazuk-ha! The duardin are on the warpath, and your debts have come due!’

The drakefire pistols roared, and crewmen fell. Bryn holstered the weapons and unslung his hammer, swinging it out in a bone-crushing arc. He trod over the bodies of the fallen, accompanied by the gryph-hound Zephyr.

‘Ho, Gage! You can come down now – I am here, and you are safe.’

‘I’m not worried about me, Bryn – watch out!’ Gage shouted down as the Chaos spawn rose unsteadily to its feet. Its many eyes fixed on the duardin, who turned to face it.

‘Come on then, you ugly–’ he began.

A double-bladed axe spun through the air, embedding itself in the spawn’s skull. The creature stiffened, whined and slumped. It seemed to deflate as Gage watched. Kuva leapt lightly from the skycutter and reclaimed her axe.

Bryn glared at her. ‘He was mine.’

‘There are plenty of other things to kill.’ Kuva nodded to Gage as he climbed down from the mast. ‘You caught the curseling?’

‘We caught more than that. The skycutter?’

‘We borrowed it from the dock when Zephyr came to find us.’ She bestowed a rare smile on him. ‘I had forgotten how much fun they are to fly.’

The smile vanished as quickly as it had surfaced. She spun, axe chopping through a crossbow bolt as it streaked towards her. The crewman who’d been holding it backed away, hastily attempting to reload. Kuva pursued him, frowning.

Gage looked at Bryn. ‘Help Carus.’

Zephyr was already loping across the deck, following the ringing clash of blades. Carus and his opponent ignored everything else, intent only on each other. They moved through the smoke, easily holding their balance on the swaying deck as their swords connected again and again.

Bryn frowned and peered at the duel. The fatemaster raced through the air, and Carus met him, blade to blade. Gage and Bryn had to turn away as lightning flashed.

‘Doesn’t look like he needs any help to me,’ the duardin growled.

‘It’s a distraction. I need him to help me undo whatever rite they’ve begun. Help him.’

‘And what’ll you be doing, while I’m doing that?’

‘What I can.’ Gage started towards the rail and the wound that the skycutter’s arrival had opened in the Hopeful Traveller’s starboard side. He had not seen Tarn since the crash, but it was too much to hope that the magister had been one of those killed in the impact.

Sheathing his sword, he climbed out over the rail. The wind tore at him, and he caught a glimpse of the city, spinning out below. From this height, it looked like the rings of a tree. Moving carefully, he kicked aside broken hull planks and clambered through the hole, down into the ruptured hold. He was acting on instinct now; Tarn had mentioned a rite, but there had been no evidence of one in the warehouse, or above decks.

A curious sight greeted him as he dropped beneath the broken deck. A circle of nine acolytes, dressed much the same as those they had fought in the warehouse, sat in a wide circle around an alchemical flame, burning up from a large, flat crystalline plate. Braziers had been arranged about the hold, but several had been knocked over, scattering burning coals. The wood smouldered.

Despite the condition of the hold, the edge of the skycutter’s prow thrust into their sanctum, and the rush of the wind, the nine acolytes paid no heed to anything save the flames. Their hands moved in ritual gestures, and their voices, hoarse with effort and exhaustion, were raised in a chant. They looked wasted, somehow, as if they had not eaten in weeks. Their golden masks sat strangely on their faces, and their robes hung loosely.

Gage had seen similar sights before. They were feeding something of themselves into whatever rite they were conducting; it was draining them of life, so it could grow stronger. But as to what the rite was, he could not say.

In the false light of the flame, he could see different parts of Hammerhal, the images floating like soap bubbles above the crystal plate. In one, the door of a tavern split like a new scab as something tubular and frenzied wriggled out into a packed common room. Daemonic flames washed across the startled patrons, consuming them. In another bubble, the back wall of a stable began to shudder as pink shapes burst from it like maggots from a wound. The chuckling daemons fell on the screaming horses with a monstrous enthusiasm.

Sickened, Gage looked away. It was the same in the other bubbles – and not just daemons, but twisted beastkin as well. Tzaangors erupted into filthy alleyways and temple naves, and they immediately set about slaughtering anyone who crossed their path.

More bubbles rose from the flames: tens, dozens, hundreds. In each, similar scenes played out. In the barracks of a Freeguild regiment, in a duardin delving tunnel, inside the warehouses of the aether-dock – anywhere and everywhere Tarn’s wood had been put to use, daemons and beastkin emerged from the flat planes.

‘Gate and key, as I said.’

Gage looked up. Tarn walked down the steps on the other side of the hold, followed by several crewmen.

‘The God-King’s witches harnessed the volatile emanations that nestle in the bedrock of this place to create protective wards about the city. Wards which are proof against even the most cunning magics, as others have discovered to their detriment, time and again. However, I long ago learned that there is no problem money cannot solve.’ Tarn rubbed his fingers together for emphasis.

‘You brought the wood in, sold it to unsuspecting buyers and somehow opened a path through the city’s defences,’ Gage said, circling the chanting acolytes, keeping them between himself and Tarn. There had to be some way to break the spell.

‘It took years. But I learned patience in service to the Changer of Ways.’ Tarn lifted a sheathed sword into view. ‘I learned many things. Like the best way to harvest cursed wood from a god-touched forest and use it as a pathway back to that same forest. Though granted, I had some help with that.’

Gage lifted his own sword. The crewmen descended and spread out around him. Daemonic faces leered at him from the walls and beams of the hold, laughing silently at his predicament.

‘You think you’ve won, don’t you?’ he said.

Tarn laughed. ‘No. This is but the beginning.’ He drew his sword and gazed down its length. Ugly, gash-like sigils marked the blade. ‘This city is well defended. But there is an army on the other side of the gate – the blessed children of change wait for us to open the way from this side. Hammerhal Ghyra will fall to the warflocks of the Hexwood. Then, Hammerhal Aqsha. And after that – who is to say?’

Gage shook his head in disbelief at such hubris. Men like Tarn always spoke with conviction, even when they said the same words a hundred men before them had already said, and a hundred men after would say too. It was always the same. Domination. Conquest. Hubris.

His sword still extended, Gage cast a quick look around. He needed a distraction.

The deck above bowed and burst, raining jagged chunks of planking down on the congregants. They did not cease their chanting, though slivers of wood pierced the chests and arms of several. Tarn stepped back, cursing, as Carus and the fatemaster slammed into the floor in a cloud of splinters.

‘That’ll do,’ Gage said.

The two warriors were on their feet almost instantly, neither giving ground. Their swords crashed together with hurricane force, and daemon-winds lashed through the hold. Crewmen were lifted and hurled back against the hull. The flames snapped and surged.

‘Aek, take the fight away from here – we’re too close now!’ Tarn howled. He drew his own blade and lunged for Carus.

Gage intercepted him. As their swords scraped together, Gage caught hold of Tarn’s robes and swung him into the flames. It wasn’t pretty, but it was effective. Tarn screamed in agony as the mystic fire blazed up, seemingly consuming him. Hearing his screams, the fatemaster glanced around, as if in concern. Carus seized the opportunity, and his judgment blade crashed down on his opponent’s helm, splitting the metal.

The fatemaster groaned and swept his sword out. A typhoon of wind sprang up and caught at Carus. Slowly, the Lord-Veritant was forced back by the building tempest. His armoured boots dug shallow trenches in the deck as he was pressed back towards the place where the skycutter had impacted the Hopeful Traveller. The smaller vessel shook as the mystic winds lashed it. With a trembling roar, it was ejected from the hull of the larger airship, hurtling away and down towards the city below.

The winds built to a screaming crescendo. Carus spun his blade and stabbed it into the deck in an attempt to anchor himself. Even so, Gage could see that it wouldn’t hold for long. Unless he acted quickly, the Lord-Veritant was going to be swept out of the hold.

He lunged, thrusting his rapier through a gap in the fatemaster’s armour. The creature stiffened and whirled, dragging the winds along with his blade. Gage was flung backwards, perilously close to the flames; he rolled aside, only just managing to avoid them. As he rose to his feet, he saw that the eldritch flames had spread, consuming the circle of chanting acolytes. Their seated shapes burned like hunched pyres. They hadn’t even tried to escape. The spell had consumed them utterly – there would be no easy way to break it now.

He turned back to the fray as a hurled axe struck the fatemaster in the chest, knocking him flat. Kuva leapt down into the hold, reaching for the haft of her axe. The fatemaster lurched up, driving her back. He tore the axe from his chest and cast it away. The aelf ducked aside as the warrior hacked at her, and his blade split a support beam. The hold groaned as the flames crept higher. More of the heat blister images formed. They drifted through the hold, momentarily distracting the combatants. Among the new images, Gage saw a forest and the silver-armoured forms of Hallowed Knights, locked in battle with tzaangors and daemons. Whatever was going on, it wasn’t isolated to Hammerhal Ghyra.

Blades slammed together with a crack of steel. Carus had regained his feet, and the fatemaster met him. Even wounded, the servant of Chaos seemed determined to prevent them from interfering with the flames in any way.

Kuva caught Gage’s eye from across the hold. She glanced up, and he saw Bryn standing above, at the edge of the hole in the upper deck. The duardin lifted a pistol meaningfully. Gage nodded, and he and Kuva moved to flank the fatemaster. Carus wouldn’t thank them, but that was a problem for later. Needs must, when daemons drove.

A drakefire pistol roared from above as Bryn made his contribution to the fray. The fatemaster staggered. He turned, eyes glazed with pain.

‘Nowhere to go,’ Gage said, lifting his rapier. Kuva raised her axe and stepped forwards. Carus stepped back, a disgruntled look on his face.

The fatemaster tore off his battered helmet, exposing pale, saturnine features, covered in blood. ‘There is always another path,’ he said, smiling slightly. Then, with a single awkward step, he dived into the flames, dragging his screeching blade in his wake.

Startled, Gage made no move to stop him. The flames blazed up, licking at the walls, and the fatemaster vanished. Whether dead or simply gone, Gage couldn’t say, and he didn’t particularly care at that moment.

‘Carus – we may need your lantern,’ he shouted, gesturing to the flames. ‘Whatever they’ve started, I know of no way to stop it.’

‘We have to destroy this ship,’ Kuva said, glaring at the flames.

‘That alone will not be enough,’ said the Lord-Veritant. ‘The daemons have already breached the wards of the city. We must collapse the paths they’ve created and draw them back into the Realm of Chaos.’ Carus stared into the flickering flame, his face set, his expression grim. He whistled sharply and Zephyr appeared in the hole above, head cocked. The Lord-Veritant looked up. ‘Bring me my staff,’ he called out. He steadied himself with his sword as the hold shook.

Gage frowned as he caught hold of a support beam. The ship felt as if it were about to shake itself to pieces. ‘Can you do it?’

‘If I could not, I would have suggested something else.’

Gage looked up as the bubble containing the image of a warrior chamber of Hallowed Knights fighting in a forest drifted by. Was that the Hexwood that Tarn had mentioned? The only Hexwood that Gage knew of was a forest on the slopes of the Nevergreen Mountains.

A harsh sound filled the air – a scream of pure, infernal malice. It ripsawed through them, and Gage staggered, hands clamped to his ears. Even Carus shuddered, squinting against the monstrous pressure. Only Kuva didn’t flinch. She looked around.

‘Daemons,’ she said flatly.

‘Where?’ Bryn demanded from above.

Even as he spoke, something long and pink erupted from the splintered end of a broken plank and swiped at him. The duardin jerked back with a curse as the pink horror hauled itself towards him, a twisted grin on its malformed features. His hammer snapped out and crushed its head. It flopped to the deck, still partially merged with the wood.

Daemonic chortles echoed through the planks, and ugly faces swam across the interior of the hold. Hands and talons oozed out of the grain of the wood on all sides, reaching for them. Gage stabbed a leering face as it bulged towards him, bursting one yellow eye.

‘Carus – whatever you are planning, make it swift,’ he said.

A muffled shriek sounded as Zephyr reappeared, clutching Carus’ staff in her beak. The gryph-hound leapt into the hold, bounding from broken plank to beam, agilely avoiding the burning talons of the daemons that swiped at her. Carus caught up his staff and slammed the ferrule down. Light blazed from the lantern, bathing the hold. For a moment, the daemons retreated. But only for a moment.

‘Go,’ he rumbled. ‘Get above decks.’

Gage hesitated. ‘What about you?’

‘I am where I must be.’ Carus met his gaze. ‘Much is demanded of those to whom much is given. The time has come to pay down that debt.’

The fires roared up suddenly, licking across the ceiling and spreading across the floor. Gage and Kuva were driven back towards the steps leading to the upper deck. Carus gestured with his sword. ‘Zephyr – go!’

The gryph-hound shrilled, as if in protest, but leapt over the growing flames to join the others. As they backed up the stairs, Gage’s sword split a daemon’s leer, and Kuva’s axe finished it. Blue horrors rose from the bubbling remains, and Gage punted one of them into the spreading fire. The other was split into two burning, cackling daemon-flames by Kuva. Gage stamped on them, snuffing them out.

Over the spreading flames, he saw Carus raise his staff. The Lantern of Abjuration glowed with a light that rivalled that of the flames. The Lord-Veritant was chanting as daemons rose up around him, bleeding from the floors and walls. The creatures tore at him, their cackles taking on a frenetic quality. Lightning bled from his wounds and crackled within his eyes. His voice thundered above the wind and the howling of daemons. His sword slashed out, spilling daemon-ichor, as his prayers reached their crescendo.

‘Come, Gage, hurry,’ Kuva said, catching Gage’s arm and hauling him up the steps. ‘Whatever he’s planning, we won’t survive it this close.’

He allowed the aelf to pull him out of the hold, but he couldn’t look away from the Lord-Veritant’s final stand. The flames encircled Carus like the talons of some great beast. His cloak burned away to ash as Gage watched, and his armour blackened and warped, its gilding dripping away as the sigils etched into the plates glowed white hot. But still he stood, holding his ground against innumerable foes and the heat of foul magics. Azure light bled from him, rising in crackling motes from his armour and exposed face.

Despite all of it, he was smiling. That was the last sight Gage had of him, as he scrambled above decks with the others. Bryn hurried towards them.

‘The crew – what’s left of them – scrambled the driftboats a few moments ago,’ he said. ‘Think they know something we don’t?’

Cobalt lightning lashed upwards through the holes in the deck. It ravaged the masts and upper decks, tearing at the wood. Somewhere, daemons were screaming – not in joy, now, but in pain. And, Gage hoped, fear. Whatever Carus was doing, they didn’t like it.

A moment later, a column of lightning blazed upwards through the deck, scattering boards in all directions and nearly deafening Gage. One of the masts cracked and slammed down, knocking them all sprawling. Overhead, the gasbag rippled as lightning tore across it, leaving burning punctures in its wake.

Daemons tried to free themselves from the wood, only to be caught by the strands of lightning and hauled back towards the hold, dragged screaming into the radiance that burned there. This was not the sickly glow of the ritual fire, but a purer light: the light of Azyr, of Sigmar’s cleansing storm, unleashed at the heart of whatever ritual the foe had enacted. The ship bucked beneath the touch of the lightning. Whole sections of the hull cracked and fell away, raining like burning comets over the city.

Gage looked at Bryn. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a driftboat left?’

Bryn grinned and patted his hammer. ‘I thought you might ask that, so I made sure of it.’

He turned and clambered off, moving as fast as his thick legs could carry him. Zephyr bounded ahead of him, screeching in encouragement, and Gage and Kuva followed as quickly as they could. The Hopeful Traveller was cracking apart even as it drifted over the city. Lightning crawled across the shaking deck, as if urging them on.

The driftboat was a curved leaf of massive proportions, folded and shaped by the Greenpriests of Hammerhal Ghyra into a vessel which could catch the wind and carry its occupants safely to the ground. It hung from the side of the rail, and they hastily clambered aboard, settling themselves on the rounded benches. Kuva’s axe easily sliced through the ropes holding it attached to the airship, and Gage’s stomach leapt into his throat as they dropped away from the lightning-wracked hull of the Hopeful Traveller.

The city rose swiftly to meet them, before the driftboat caught the wind and levelled out. Below them, Hammerhal Ghyra was burning – or at least parts of it were. Even from such a height, Gage could hear the crack of gunfire and the bellicose grumble of Ironweld artillery.

‘He’s dead, then,’ Bryn said, watching as the Hopeful Traveller succumbed to the forces within its hold. The night sky blazed bright for a moment as the airship exploded and the last of the lightning savaged its way towards the stars and Azyr. ‘That sort of lightning only crackles when one of Sigmar’s chosen falls.’

‘Yes, but in death, he’s beaten them,’ Gage said, and knew it was true. The raw power of Carus’ sacrifice would surge through the mystic pathways that Tarn’s cult had created, hopefully collapsing them. Without constant reinforcements, the remaining daemons and tzaangors would swiftly be overwhelmed by the city’s defenders.

‘Not all of them, I hope,’ Bryn said. ‘Be a dull affair if we go through all that and miss the battle because we’re too busy riding a flying leaf.’

Kuva laughed. ‘There are always more daemons to kill.’

‘She’s right.’ Gage leaned back. ‘Somehow, I think we’ll find a way to keep busy.’

He reached out and stroked Zephyr’s flat skull. The gryph-hound settled beside him, chirping. If she was dismayed by the fate of her master, she gave little sign. Then, perhaps she knew she’d see him again, sooner or later. Gage looked up, watching as the burning wreckage descended across the horizon.

‘Hurry back, my friend,’ he murmured. ‘I fear we’ll need your light again, and sooner than we think.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

FIRES OF LIFE AND HEAVEN

With Hyrn and his Verdian tribesmen leading the way, the Steel Souls’ march through the Hexwood was swift. Around them, the pine trees shook, as if caught in a great wind. Wisps of light danced across their tops and flames licked at the horizon, as the battle in the glade began anew. Serena wondered whether Creel, Shael and the others in the Faithful Blades regiment would survive the coming hours. For a Stormcast, death was inevitable – they had been forged to die, and die well. But mortals were more fragile. The Stormcast Eternals fought and died so that mortals could live; to see them die so brutally, and so permanently, sickened her to her core.

She tried to push the thought aside. ‘Much is demanded of those to whom much is given,’ she murmured. The first canticle of the Hallowed Knights, the words by which they lived and fought. Sigmar had given them great strength, and in return, he asked only that they use it in a righteous cause. In his cause.

Even as she repeated the words, she caught glimpses of what might have been faces staring at the marching Stormcasts from knotholes and strange shapes that loped from one trunk to the next, moving within the bark like shadows, keeping pace. Serena tried to ignore them, but they pressed close, and more than once she thought she heard the whisper of voices, just at the edge of her hearing.

The Steel Souls were being followed.

Whether by foes or something else, she did not know, but she suspected the latter. At least twice, their small group had nearly run right into a warflock of tzaangors – loping towards the battle in the glen, or away from it – but the beastkin had not so much as paused, despite the wind being at the Stormcasts’ backs. In both cases, Serena thought that the trees had somehow bent, as if to obscure them. As if the forest were seeking to hide their approach from the beasts who now ruled it.

‘Halt.’

Gardus’ voice carried easily through the dark. Serena and the other Liberators spread out automatically, falling into a skirmishing line among the trees. The Judicators stayed close, arrows nocked. Feros and his surviving Retributors stood at the centre of the line, arrayed to either side of Gardus. They had come to a cleft in the slope where the trees thinned. Great eruptions of rock, marked with strange carvings and sigils, cut through the forest floor, rising like irregular parapets. Thick scrub covered the ground and clung to the rock.

From beyond the stones came the sound of drums, the same ones they had heard at the beginning of the earlier attacks. There was light as well – a watery glow, shimmering up into the murky sky above.

Hyrn spat and unslung his bow. ‘This is it. The forbidden vale is beyond these rocks.’

Though he spoke softly, Serena heard him as easily as if she had been standing beside him. The cleft was narrow and unwelcoming: the perfect place for an ambush, or a stalling tactic, depending on how far back it travelled.

‘Those carvings on the stones,’ Ravius murmured from beside her. He’d been chosen to go as well by Aetius. ‘They’re sylvaneth. I saw them at the Blackstone Summit.’ He looked around warily, scanning the trees.

‘And in Gramin,’ Serena said. ‘But they’ve been defaced.’ The crudity of the desecration offended her, though she did not recognise the original purpose of the sigils.

‘Other gods rule here now.’ Gardus drew his runeblade. His voice silenced all conversation in the ranks. ‘But not for long.’ He looked down at Hyrn. ‘You and your people will stay here. This battle is not for you. If we fail, you must carry word back to the others.’

Hyrn made as if to protest, but fell silent under Gardus’ calm gaze. There was a weight to that gaze, Serena knew – not a harsh or hateful one, but heavy all the same, and few could bear it for long. The tribesfolk melted away into the trees, silent as shadows. Gardus watched them go, and then turned back to the cleft.

‘Heavy Hand,’ he said.

‘Aye, my lord,’ said Feros. ‘Speak, and we shall do.’

‘Make a joyful noise, my brother,’ Gardus said, scraping the edge of his blade against the face of his hammer. ‘Let them know who has come to call.’

Feros laughed loudly. He slammed the ferrule of his hammer down on a stone and raised the weapon up. ‘You heard him, brothers and sisters. Let us sing them the song of our people.’

He started forwards, and the other Retributors advanced with him. As they strode towards the cleft, they slammed their hammers together, weaving a ponderous rhythm. Cobalt sparks flickered with every crash, until the head of each hammer was wrapped in crackling brambles of azure light. The sound echoed up, pushing back against the dolorous beat of the unseen drums like the crash of the sea against the shore.

‘Where I walk, no gate shall bar the way,’ Feros rumbled. ‘No wall, no bastion shall halt my advance. I am faithful, and my faith opens all doors.’

As they reached the cleft, the Retributors lifted their hammers as one. They moved without hurry, but steadily, a millstone of silver and azure. Their lightning hammers snapped out and the rock face… ceased to be. Dust filled the air as the cleft crumbled, and the slope shook. With every impact, more lightning ravaged among the stones, reducing them to rubble or uprooting them entirely.

‘Loose formation,’ said Gardus as he advanced into the billowing dust, his light acting as a beacon to those following behind.

As they walked, Serena and the other Liberators began to strike the flats of their shields with their hammers and warblades. Behind them, the Judicators’ voices rose in song – a hymn from the Age of Myth, remembered now only by a few scattered tribes of desert dwellers and those who had been raised up from among them. The song flew ahead of them, riding the crashing wave of destruction.

The Retributors forged ahead, widening the cleft with every swing of their hammers. The rock face crumbled beneath their assault, and the slope quivered as avalanches were set off nearby due to the rhythmic destruction. Over the noise, Serena could hear the panicked cries of beastkin. Undoubtedly, they had been guarding the path, but there was no defence against such unbridled destruction. As the Stormcasts advanced through the dust, she trod on broken bodies – tzaangors, caught by falling rocks or the ricocheting bands of lightning that erupted with every hammer blow.

‘We seem to have ruined their ambush,’ Ravius said. ‘Pity.’

‘There’s more where they came from,’ Serena said. Somewhere above them, on the shuddering slopes, dark figures raced. Screeching brays sounded as avian bodies leapt down into the dust and thunder, seeking silver prey.

Serena pivoted, and her blade caught a tzaangor in the neck. Its head spun away in a cloud of gore. Behind her, a Judicator fell beneath a swarm of bodies. His essence thundered upwards, and tzaangors rolled away, beating at the flames that clung to them. Ravius crashed into them, scattering them.

Gardus moved through the fray like a pillar of fire. His voice rang out, a clarion call cutting through the noise. ‘Whose deeds shall be written upon stone?’

‘Only the faithful,’ Serena panted, choking on dust. The others echoed her.

She drove a tzaangor back against the crumbling rock face with her shield and slid her blade into its midsection. She let the body fall and stepped back, instinctively seeking the safety of the formation. Maintenance of the battle-line above all else was drilled into the Stormcasts from the moment of their apotheosis. Only by working together as a single mechanism of war could they hope to be victorious.

‘Who will find redemption, at the end of all things?’ Gardus roared out, somewhere ahead of them. His light flared, and she caught a glimpse of him, surrounded by darting beast-shapes. The tzaangors were drawn to the Steel Soul like moths to a flame.

‘Only the faithful!’ she cried, advancing to his aid. Arrows shrieked overhead, punching tzaangors off their feet or pinning them to fallen trees.

‘Who shall weather the storm of storms?’ Gardus called, backhanding a beast with his hammer. He lunged smoothly, spitting another on his blade.

‘Only the faithful!’ Serena bulled into a tzaangor shield-first as it made ready to strike the Lord-Celestant. She bore it under and stamped on its head, bursting its narrow skull. ‘Only the faithful!’ she cried again. The words filled her with strength, easing the weariness that threatened to slow her limbs.

‘Indeed, sister. Only the faithful.’ Gardus wrenched his runeblade free of a dying tzaangor. ‘Keep moving, brothers and sisters. Do not slow your pace. Do not hesitate. We are the blade of Azyr, and we seek the enemy’s heart.’

The Hallowed Knights advanced as one, following the trail of destruction carved by Feros and his fellow Retributors. The cleft widened into an immense vale, like a wound within the heart of the slope. Trees clustered as thick as a ghyrlion’s pelt, rising from the uneven ground in clumps and bunches. Rocks rose among them, thick with phosphorescent moss.

At its heart, a cyclopean circle of crystalline shapes rose from the blighted soil. They loomed like the prongs of some vast, hateful crown, and the light which emanated from them warped everything it touched. A glowing mist rose from the torn earth, faces and shapes forming and dissolving within it. Those trees closest to it had become nightmarish growths of flesh and scale, rather than bark. Their roots twisted and thrashed like snakes, and their branches tore at the air like claws. Serena had seen such a thing before – a flux-cairn, raised by the beastkin over sites of great magic.

Phantasmal daemons capered within the twisted grove that surrounded the stones, singing an abominable hymn. They gave no sign of noticing anything save the monstrous colours pulsing and flickering deep within the milky facets of the flux-cairn. Nor did the ring of tzaangor drummers and pipers show any awareness of the enemy who had come upon them so suddenly. But the vale had more defenders than just bestial musicians and daemons. Tzaangors swarmed through the trees, screeching out war cries as they raced to intercept the invaders to this, their most sacred of places.

As the Hallowed Knights entered the vale, Serena saw that Feros and his Retributors were already locked in battle. They fought with a group of heavily armoured tzaangors, larger than the others and led by an eyeless brute. Feros and the creature strained against one another, their weapons locked.

Gardus stormed towards them, smashing aside any beast that sought to bar his path. ‘Who shall carry Azyr’s light into the darkness?’ he cried.

‘Only the faithful!’ Serena shouted as she fought at his side.

They were outnumbered. The vale was full of beastkin, but the creatures did not press their advantage as one might expect. Instead, only the bare minimum needed to slow the Stormcasts’ advance threw themselves into the fray. The rest of the tzaangors loped into the blazing facets of the monoliths as if they were doorways. The surfaces of the great crystals churned like whirlpools, greedily enveloping the beastkin as they plunged into them.

‘Where are they all going?’ Serena shouted, bashing a beast from her path. ‘Where are they sending them?’

Gardus didn’t reply. The Lord-Celestant steadily pushed his way towards the centre of the clearing and the cairn, chopping down or smashing aside anything that got in his way. Feros and the surviving Retributors fought to clear his path against the heavily armoured tzaangors, but there were simply too many of the beastkin. Even with Serena and the others aiding them, their progress was slowed to a crawl.

Then, the eyeless tzaangor broke away from Feros and lunged for Gardus. The Retributor-Prime roared in fury, but found his pursuit blocked by another of the creatures. The tzaangor’s spear carved a black trench across the Lord-Celestant’s side, staggering him.

‘Kezehk has seen you, Bright Soul,’ the creature bellowed. ‘Seen you in dream and portent. Now Kezehk will slay you, in the name of the Feathered Lords.’

The creature spun its spear with impossible speed, launching blows, driving Gardus back step by step. Off balance, the Lord-Celestant absorbed these blows, turning with them.

Serena and Ravius fought their way to his side. Ravius got there first, and managed to interpose his shield, catching a blow. The force of it knocked him to one knee, and before he could rise, the tzaangor was on him. It kicked him in the chest, knocking him prone, and drove its spear down through his body, pinning him to the ground. Ravius screamed. Lightning billowed upwards, separating the tzaangor from Gardus. It staggered back, losing its grip on its spear.

Furious, Serena drove the rim of her shield into the back of its skull, knocking it onto its hands and knees. There was no finesse to the blow, only anger. As the beastkin shook its head and tried to rise, Serena drove her blade down through its neck.

The creature lurched away from her, gagging. It swept its fist back, catching her on the temple. She fell, her helmet rolling away. The tzaangor stumbled after her, one hand clamped to its ruined throat. It was dying on its feet, but was determined to avenge itself. She pushed herself upright and sprang to meet it. She smashed the tzaangor back and hewed at it. It caught at her shield, gurgling imprecations as she forced it backwards, plunging her sword into it again and again. She lost sight of Gardus – of everything save the creature before her. In that moment, it seemed to be the sum of all that was foul in the Hexwood.

Abruptly, it fell away from her, dragging her shield from her arm. Dead, it toppled backwards into one of the facets of the flux-cairn, and vanished with a sound like a stone falling into mud. Bewildered, she looked around, and realised that she’d somehow managed to force herself a path through the melee. The light of the flux-cairn caught at her gaze, drawing her eyes towards the pearlescent shimmer in its depths.

She could see great pathways of twisted wood stretching backwards into a kaleidoscopic void. The pathways rose and fell with no rhyme or reason, like a tangle of dark thread. Daemons and beastkin raced along most of them, hurrying towards a mote of green light in the distance. Flying monstrosities hurtled through the void above, riders bearing twisted standards hunched upon their backs. She could hear the scream of infernal horns and the crash of war drums. An army on the move, but heading where?

It all made sense now. The tzaangors had never intended to drive them from the wood. This was no army here, but a rearguard, meant to protect this hideous gateway until the last of their forces were on the march. But… there was something else there too. Something at once impossibly far away, and yet within arm’s reach.

Entranced, she looked into the heart of the flux-cairn, and saw… light. A purer light by far than she’d expected. Silvery shapes pulsed in that light, shapes that were all things and none. There were faces there, childlike and androgynous, calling out for aid. She felt the desperate trill of their song in her bones, and took an unconscious step forwards. The surface of the facet rippled, as if in eagerness.

The sounds of battle faded to a dull clamour. Lightning flashed, casting its glare across the clearing. She took another step towards the light. She felt the song grow in her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw lean shapes, inhuman but beautiful for all that, watching from among the trees. No – from within the trees. They were singing as well, singing to the silvery shapes, calling to them, reassuring them.

Trapped. They were trapped. Prisoners. No… They were hostages. She shook her head, trying to clear it, and she raised her warblade. If she could free them…

Pain flared through her, and she staggered. More pain – flames licking over her armour, reducing the holy sigmarite to white-hot slag. She spun, instinct guiding her blade, and sheared through the end of a staff clutched in the talons of a tzaangor. Another shaman, to judge by the primitive decorations it wore. The creature screeched at her as it cast aside the ruined staff and drew its knife. The shaman leapt onto her, knocking her backwards. Her warblade whirled from her grip. The beastkin was stronger than it looked, and its eyes burned with fury.

‘You will not!’ it shrilled in a croaking parody of a human voice. ‘The crooked path will remain open. Open!’

Its knife pierced a join in her armour, seeking the flesh beneath. She grunted in pain and struck the creature. It reeled, beak splintered by her blow. She shoved the creature back and lurched upright. Bleeding, weaponless, she lunged towards it, hands reaching for its throat. The shaman gave a screeching laugh as she bore it back. Why was it laughing?

The song in her head rose to a mournful ululation. There was fear there, and despair. Pain. She glanced at the flux-cairn, and at the shapes within it. They were starting to dissolve.

‘Too late,’ the shaman hissed, grabbing her. ‘They will feed the path with their death. It will remain open.’ She didn’t understand what its words meant. Whose death?

The blade of its knife threaded a gap, and found her abdomen. She gasped. The edge of her world turned azure, and she wondered if this was what Ravius and the others had felt. Was this what it was like to become one with the lightning, to die again and be reforged? There was blood on her hands, and in her armour. She reeled back, vision dimming.

The song changed. It pierced the fog of pain. She shook her head, listening – truly listening now, for the first time – and took another step back, closer to the shimmering cairn. The tzaangor shaman pursued her, screeching imprecations. She ignored it. Turned. And saw cerulean lightning erupt suddenly from within the flux-cairn. It boiled up from somewhere deep within the green light at the other end of the pathways and cascaded across the crystal edifice, cracking the stones and disrupting the light.

Serena shaded her eyes, and felt the familiar pulse of Azyr within the lightning. Somehow she knew that, on the other end of that daemonic pathway, something disastrous for the foe had occurred. Acting on instinct, she lunged forwards and plunged into the lightning-wracked facet before her.

It felt like diving into a storm-tossed sea. She was buffeted on all sides by unseen forces as she entered the pallid void. In the distance, distracting colours swirled through a great emptiness, broken only by innumerable fibrous pathways, twisting like mangrove roots away from her and into the green distance. The silvery motes hung suspended at the heart of this root-like web, and she stumbled towards them. The pathway undulated beneath her feet, as if in pain from the lightning crawling across it.

More than once, she nearly fell, due to either her injury or the writhing of the pathway, but something kept her on her feet. She felt as if someone were beside her, helping her walk. The wound in her side wept lightning, and it crackled and crawled over the silver surface of her armour, burning it clean of filth. She heard a faint roaring in her ears, and thought it might be a voice, urging her on.

She stretched her hands towards the silvery motes, fighting against the silent winds that swept through the void. She knew what they were now. Soulpods – the future of the sylvaneth race. They cried out for aid, and through her, something answered. Their warmth enveloped her; their song welcomed her. Driven by some instinct she could not name, she gathered them to herself, protecting them against the scouring wave of lightning as it filled the hollow space between moments.

Ignoring the pain, she cradled the silvery pods, hunching forwards to absorb the impact of the lightning. It cascaded across her, and she sank to one knee on the spongy surface of the wooden pathway. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw many of the other twisting pathways crumble, one by one, as the cerulean energies lashed through the ranks of the army attempting to traverse them. Screams tolled in the void like bells, and the sound of splintering wood threatened to deafen her.

Eyes half closed, she huddled, wondering when it would end. The pain in her side grew, spreading through her, and the lightning clawed at the edges of her sight. She heard the plaintive song of the infant spirits in her care, and the voice of the lightning, whispering in her head. She could see a watery reflection of reality back the way she’d come. She rose to her feet and stumbled towards it, intent on carrying her charges to freedom. Around her, the empty place between moments convulsed like a thing alive. Lightning strobed across its impossible dimensions, burning more pathways and streaking off into the iridescent emptiness.

The essence of the void caught at her like quicksand, slowing her. Even as it was consumed by the lightning, it was trying to prevent her from leaving with its prize. She stumbled, and felt the panic of her burden. So close to freedom, and yet… so far.

Then, a beam of light punched through the colourless murk. The voice of the lightning thundered wordlessly in her head and soul, urging her on towards the radiance. A silver gauntlet emerged from within its blinding heart, reaching for her. She caught hold and was hauled out of the void, even as the lightning collapsed the pathway behind her.

Gardus dragged her back into the vale with a shout of triumph. As she tumbled to the bloody ground, her burden slid from her grip. The soulpods rose into the air over the vale, their radiance growing stronger with every passing moment. Where it struck the tortured earth, foulness was cleansed. Twisted trees burst into purifying flame as the steaming soil expelled the sourness within it. Daemons screamed as they were consumed by light and lightning both. They wavered and vanished like burst soap bubbles.

‘Up, daughter of Azyr. Now is not the time for rest.’ Gardus caught Serena’s hand and hauled her to her feet. ‘There is work yet to be done, and a war yet to be won.’

‘My warblade,’ she began. Her body ached, but she felt no weakness. It was as if the lightning had reinvigorated her, drawing her back from the cusp of death.

‘Take mine,’ Gardus said, drawing his runeblade and passing it to her. He looked at her. ‘You did well, sister. Whatever comes of it, know that.’

She nodded her thanks, though she was not sure of just what she might have accomplished. She took a two-handed grip on the runeblade, wondering what had possessed her to do as she had done. It was as if some force, far greater than herself, had guided her actions. She could still feel the heady pulse of it pounding in her veins.

Around them, the battle continued. There were so few of her brothers and sisters now – of the twenty who had accompanied Gardus, fewer than half remained standing. Feros was among them, roaring out oaths as he smashed tzaangors from their feet. The lightning danced across them, lending new strength to flagging limbs. Serena blocked a blow and bisected her attacker from its crown of horns to its gem-studded belt.

Above them all, the silvery shapes grew more distinct as they grew brighter. They contained a multiplicity of possibilities. Some held tall, winding stalks with feathery leaves, while others were heavy with golden, glowing cocoons. Inside still more were shimmering fungal orbs surrounded by haloes of diaphanous seeds. Hundreds of shapes, each stranger and more glorious than the last. And all of them sang with the same voice: a roaring tidal wave of joy that washed over the vale and set the pine needles to clicking.

Serena heard a screech of denial, and saw the tzaangor shaman fighting its way through the melee towards them, surrounded by a bodyguard of its bestial kin. As the creature wove its claws in a mystic gesture, its followers surged towards Gardus. He turned to meet them, hammer in hand, but before he could strike a single blow, a flurry of movement interrupted them.

In the glare of the light, she saw impossibly quick, thin shapes burst from the trees all around. The sylvaneth were at once humanoid and utterly unlike any living thing. The tree-kin emerged from all sides of the vale, and fell upon the remaining tzaangors en masse.

Bark-sheathed, bladed limbs scythed through tzaangor flesh. Root-like talons propelled lean, trunk-like bodies into battle. Jagged mouths opened in a communal hiss, as branch-laced skulls thrust forwards fiercely. The sounds of the sylvaneth pulsated on the air, like the crash of old trees toppling. Tzaangors died, and those that did not, fled.

‘What is this?’ Serena asked.

‘Something I’d wager that they have been waiting for for some time,’ Gardus said.

The shaman was taken by surprise. Sylvaneth fell upon it from all sides, their splintery talons tearing into the startled creature. Their screams were vengeful, rasping things that sent a chill through Serena. The tzaangor gave a despairing shriek and fell, all thoughts of vengeance forgotten. Roots and vines ensnared the creature, dragging it to the ground.

All across the vale, a similar entrapment was taking place. All of the surviving beastkin were afflicted by grasping roots. Some were dragged out of sight, deeper into the woods, while others were jerked, struggling, up into the trees. But most were pulled flat to the ground and then, slowly, beneath it. Their screams echoed through the vale.

Serena watched as the shaman tried to hack itself free of the entwining vegetation with its knife, but to no avail. Slowly, inexorably, the shaman was drawn beneath the churning soil, babbling prayers and curses. Then, it – and all of its kin – was gone, leaving no more than a faint smear of ichor upon the ground.

Wrath sated, the sylvaneth looked up as, with a final roar, the silvery soulpods surged upwards and away into the green skies. There they scattered on the wind like shimmering pollen until they were at last lost to sight. As the light of their passing faded, the first of the stones began to crack and shift. The lightning too had faded, but it had completed its task: the flux-cairn was dying. Its glowing facets had grown dim and cracked. One by one, they began to crumble into glittering fragments.

As the last of them collapsed into dust, the sylvaneth turned to study Gardus and Serena. She hesitated beneath those flat, inhuman gazes. She could still hear their song in her mind, though only faintly now. The tree-kin undulated closer, one reaching out with a barbed talon to push aside her sword. It tapped a claw against her chest-plate, and she looked down to see that strange, knotted patterns – reminiscent of the twisting shapes of the soulpods – had seared themselves into the sigmarite. From the pain in her chest, she suspected that similar markings now scarred her flesh as well.

‘What…?’ she began. She glanced at Gardus.

‘A token of esteem,’ he said. He bowed his head to the sylvaneth. ‘From one ally to another.’ The tree-kin hesitated, and then emulated the gesture. They were not human, but some things were universal.

A moment later, they departed, with only the rustle of loose leaves to mark their passing. They vanished into the shadows between the trees, and were gone.

Serena turned to gaze at the shattered cairn. ‘What happened here?’

‘I told you,’ Gardus said, ‘sometimes even the strongest warrior requires aid, even if they cannot ask for it directly.’ He pulled off his helmet and tucked it beneath his arm. His hair was white, and though the face it framed was that of a young man, his eyes were old, and tired. But still vibrant. Still faithful.

‘But, these cairns… I saw pathways…’ She stared at the rubble.

Gardus nodded. ‘Perhaps the sylvaneth were not the only ones who needed help. Sigmar moves in mysterious ways.’ He looked up at the stars above. ‘To defend one realm is to defend all eight. We stand together, or fall separately.’ He made a fist with his free hand. ‘We are more than Sigmar’s wrath, sister.’ He opened it again. ‘We can also be his hand, extended in friendship. Today, we were both.’

‘And what of tomorrow?’

‘We are the faithful, and we will stand, whatever the cost.’ He looked at her. ‘Never doubt that, sister. Whatever the future holds, whatever waits for us there – remember this moment. Remember what you did. That is our purpose, above all others. Much is demanded…’

‘Of those to whom much is given,’ Serena said. She straightened her shoulders, her fingers tracing the new patterns burned into her armour. Only time would tell what they meant.

Gardus clasped her shoulder. ‘What awaits us when the last war is won, and the last march home begins, is a mystery. I doubt even the God-King himself knows. But today, you have brought us one step closer.’ He smiled. ‘And tomorrow, I have faith we will be one step closer still.’

CHAPTER NINE

THE GREAT GAME

Aek opened his eyes. The howl of eldritch winds had died away, leaving his ears ringing and his skull full of echoes. It had been a risk to leap into the ritual fires. There was no guarantee that they would do anything more than consume him. But Tzeentch loved a gambler, and Aek had seen no other option.

The fatemaster staggered to his feet, the Windblade gripped tightly in his blistered hand. The daemon-blade growled softly, as if in warning. Groaning, he used the blade to lever himself upright. Everything hurt, but the Feathered Lords had blessed him with a durability far beyond that of any mortal. A durability that had been sorely tested this day…

The Stormcast warrior had been stronger than any that he had yet had the misfortune to face. And a passable swordsman, besides. Aek ran a hand through his sweat-matted hair, grimacing at the throb of pain in his skull. If not for his helmet, his head would have been split, and the Windblade in the hands of a new master.

‘But not today,’ he muttered, tightening his grip on the sword. It quivered in his grip, though whether in pleasure or annoyance, he could not say.

He looked around. He stood in a circle of flame atop a stone dais. Masked acolytes watched him from beyond its glare. They stank of fear. Some bore wounds, but others were conspicuously unharmed. He grunted in satisfaction – some of them had been wise enough to restrain themselves from joining the battle. Perhaps Tzeentch had whispered in their ears, warning them of the failures to come. The Great Schemer wove plans within plans; every eventuality was prepared for.

Especially defeat.

‘Where is the Grand Vizier?’ he croaked as he staggered out of the circle, ignoring the flames that licked at his battered form.

He recognised his surroundings. It was another warehouse, somewhere in the River District – one of Tarn’s many properties scattered throughout the city. The smell of sawdust and rotten fish was thick on the air. Empty pallets were scattered across the wooden floors. He could hear the slap of water against docking posts somewhere close by. There would be boats, waiting to take the survivors to safety, where they could plot and scheme anew.

‘H-here, coven-brother.’ The voice slipped out of the darkness. Weak. Full of pain. The acolytes made a path, and Aek stepped through them. Some bowed, murmuring obsequious pleasantries. Others glared at the fatemaster, as if blaming him for the setback.

That was to be expected. Every scheme set its ripples in the ocean of fate. The coven would splinter, and the disaffected would form their own covens and weave their own schemes. Thus was the glory of Tzeentch promulgated. Thus would the infection spread through the cities of men. Even in defeat, there was victory of a sort. For every grand scheme that failed, a hundred smaller ones might succeed, and in each of them was the seed of greater plans yet.

Tarn lay on a pallet, his body a burnt shell of its former strength. His robes had cooked to his flesh, and his mask was now a melted cage for his head. His hands were weeping, blackened claws. Several acolytes sat close to him, tending to him as best they could; some among their ranks were apothecaries and herbalists.

One of them looked up as Aek joined them. ‘He doesn’t have long. We’ve done what we can.’ He wiped bloody fingers on his robes. ‘The wounds are magical, and our art can do nothing to heal him.’

Aek nodded. That was to be expected. Few in the coven had the knowledge to undo what the mystic flames had done, save Tarn himself. And he was in no condition to do so.

‘Your diligence is appreciated. Go now.’ Aek gestured. ‘The servants of the Storm will be combing the city for any sign of us.’ He looked around. ‘Remove your masks. Slip back into old rhythms until the call to meet comes again.’

‘Will it?’ someone asked, half in challenge.

‘As sure as the sun rises, and fate claims the unwary,’ Aek said firmly. He set the Windblade point-first into the floor. ‘Go. Now. I would speak with my coven-brother, before the end of his thread.’

He summoned a soft wind to emphasise his point. It moaned through the warehouse, rustling papers and tugging at the acolytes’ robes. They left, swiftly, all heading in different directions, careful not to let anyone see where they went.

Aek waited until the last of them was gone. Then, he sank to his haunches beside Tarn. ‘You’ve looked better,’ he said.

‘So have you,’ Tarn croaked. He reached up and caught Aek’s wrist. ‘Tzanghyr is dead. I can feel his soul rotting in me. It saps what is left of my strength. And when I perish, we will both be truly dead.’

Aek nodded. ‘I suspected as much. The Stormcast did something. The crooked path is closed to us, and all those on it, lost.’

Tarn closed his eyes. ‘Lost,’ he muttered. ‘All lost.’

‘Regret is the spice of a life well lived,’ Aek said gently. Part of him – that part that was still human after all these centuries of service to the Great Schemer – mourned the wreck of a man before him. Tarn had sacrificed much, raising the stakes with every gamble, and now it had come to this. Somewhere, the gods were laughing.

‘You’ve said that before,’ Tarn coughed. ‘Vetch is dead.’

Aek nodded. ‘He came to the end of his thread. As Tzanghyr has. As we all must, in our own time.’ The names of those who had slipped from ambition’s path were legion. Tzeentch’s game was complex and ever-changing, and every gambit had its sacrificial pawns. This scheme had failed, but new ones would be born from the ashes.

‘And when will you come to the end of yours, Aek?’

Aek was silent. He had often wondered the same thing. But it was useless to worry: Tzeentch would preserve him until he chose not to, and not a day longer. His grip on the Windblade tightened, and the sword groaned.

Tarn laughed weakly. ‘Never mind.’ He patted Aek’s hand. ‘You must walk the path alone, now, as you did before you joined us.’

Aek stood. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, coven-brother.’

‘Goodbye, Aek. And good fortune.’ Tarn closed his eyes.

Aek raised the Windblade in both hands. It moaned eagerly as it slipped into Tarn’s heart. The magister shuddered and died. The glimmering motes of his bifurcated soul, entwined with that of Tzanghyr’s, rose with the Windblade as Aek extricated the sword. He reached out and gathered the motes to him, as he had so many times before.

Nine hundred times or more. He had lost count now. With every setback, his strength grew, just as Tzeentch planned. Wheels within wheels. Every eventuality was planned for. Especially defeat. Soon, his strength would be enough to tip the balance of the board and secure victory when it was most needed.

‘You were wrong,’ he said to the flickering motes. ‘I have not walked alone for many centuries. And I will not, so long as you and all those who came before are with me.’ He pressed the motes to his chest, and felt their warmth as they became one with him. ‘Together.’ A rush of possibilities, of fates unwritten, filled him, and his aches faded. ‘We are all but facets of a whole, pieces in a game greater than any of us.’

He lifted the Windblade, and he felt the hands of his coven-brothers on the hilt. It was lighter than ever, and he wondered to what purpose it would next be put. Only Tzeentch could say. For now, Aek would simply go where the winds blew him.

‘The greatest game.’ He smiled. ‘And one we will surely win, in time.’

VENGEANCE ETERNAL

Matt Westbrook

They gathered in their hundreds to hear the words of their God-King. Azyrheim was a changed place since the blessed hammer Ghal Maraz, symbol of Sigmar’s might, had been returned. It had always been a city of wonders, of soaring archways and winding crystalline stairs, of boundless treasures that echoed an age when the light of humanity had shone in every corner of the realms, but now its glory appeared greater. When the first realmgate had been opened by the heroism of Vandus Hammerhand, there had been relief and joy, and then a frisson of nervous excitement as the Stormhosts poured forth into the Mortal Realms, taking the war to the great enemy with the indefatigable fervour of the righteous.

But it was symbolic victories that incited a people at war like little else, and nothing could be more emblematic of the changing times than witnessing the God-King take up his fabled weapon once more.

The hammer had been reclaimed, and with that triumph the halls of Sigmaron rang with renewed purpose. Mortal servants and workers rushed here and there, filling serene halls and quiet chambers with a flurry of excited whispers. Stormhosts were despatched in ever greater numbers, marching to war with thunderous fanfare, roaring their hymns of faith in a tumult so loud it could be heard all across the great city. And then there was the rhythmic ringing of the forges, which truly never ceased; Azyr’s armouries were the miracle that kept the gears of re-conquest moving at their relentless pace.

The Bladestorm, a Warrior Chamber of the Celestial Vindicators, had barely rested since their return from the Eldritch Fortress. They had forged countless new legends in their pursuit of Ghal Maraz there, and now they were summoned to Sigmar’s throne room. From there, the God-King himself would send them forth once more. Mortal warriors might have balked at being thrown back into the war so quickly, but these demigods were no mortals; they were giants, forged for war and destined for battle.

The Stormcasts’ boots beat a perfect rhythm on the gleaming floor of Sigmar’s throne room, a vaulted wonder filled with flawlessly carved sculptures and artisanal iconography celebrating the countless legends of the God-King. All this splendour was nothing compared to the vision of Sigmar himself. He sat upon his throne, watching proudly as his loyal warriors assembled, an avatar of righteousness and strength, radiant armour glittering, eyes burning with resolve.

Lord-Castellant Eldroc’s heart rose to see his master’s glory. It felt like an age since they had last returned to Azyr, and he drank in every wondrous sight anew, from the breathtaking statuary to the masterful paintings and tapestries that draped the walls. This was what they were fighting for, he reminded himself: to return the light of civilisation to every corner of the Mortal Realms, to bring about a world where smiths and artisans could create such works, and where simple, honest folk could bask in their glory. They would earn that future, he swore, as he took his place in the front rank of warriors. Armour creaking under the weight of relic-bones and holy parchments, the Lord-Relictor Tharros Soulwarden came to a halt by his side.

‘I cannot help but wonder at this place, no matter how many times I see it,’ Eldroc whispered.

‘It has a certain grandeur to it,’ the Lord-Relictor said, briefly regarding the vaulted ceiling above, which was immaculately painted with images of great heroes, captured in the moment of their triumph.

‘You have no art in your soul, my friend,’ said Eldroc, grinning. ‘You would be just as happy if we gathered in some dusty old crypt to hear Sigmar’s words.’

‘In my experience there is often a great deal to be learned from dusty old crypts.’

They ceased their conversation as Lord-Celestant Thostos Bladestorm strode past and his cold blue gaze briefly washed over them. Their liege made his way to the foot of the stairway leading to the throne, and took his place at the head of his Warrior Chamber. There he stood, still as one of the statues lining the great hall, and waited for the word of the God-King.

‘How is he?’ Tharros asked.

Eldroc felt a pang of sadness and frustration seize him. It would be a better, easier world if he knew the answer to that question.

‘He is… still not himself,’ he said. That was understating things to a laughable degree, but Eldroc had not the words to describe what he felt when he looked upon his lost friend.

‘No,’ Tharros said. ‘And he never will be. To be reforged…’

Tharros paused a moment, then turned his skull-faced visage to Eldroc.

‘There is always a price for cheating death, brother. We will all pay it, before the end. Too many of us forget that. They think this is a game we play.’ He shook his head. ‘No. We fight a war beyond mortal comprehension. There is always a price.’

There was a creaking yawn as the grand double doors to the throne room opened. Again, the floor rumbled with the steps of hundreds of warriors. Marching into position alongside their brothers came a second Warrior Chamber of the Celestial Vindicators. These warriors wore the same turquoise armour as the Bladestorms, trimmed with golden sigmarite and deep red leather, but where Thostos’ officers wore purple helmet crests and plumes signifying their rank, the newcomers wore a rich, royal blue. Their leader was tall even for a Stormcast, and carried a grandblade across his back, the huge weapon almost reaching to the floor.

‘Lord-Celestant Argellon and his Argellonites,’ Eldroc murmured. ‘His star rises, it is said.’

‘His head swells, you mean,’ Tharros said.

Mykos Argellon took his place at the head of his chamber, before the throne. His mien could not have been more different to that of Thostos. Where the Bladestorm stood stock still, his fellow Lord-Celestant burned with pride and righteousness, his hands clenching and unclenching, his body fairly trembling with fervour.

‘By all accounts he has performed admirably thus far,’ said the Lord-Castellant. ‘Perhaps we should give him a chance.’

‘Perhaps,’ Tharros replied.

The God-King rose from his throne, ending the conversation. He was as magnificent a figure as ever, but now emanated an even greater power with Ghal Maraz held in one mighty fist. His radiance was so bright that it almost hurt to look upon him, but not one of the Stormcast Eternals averted their eyes.

And Sigmar spoke.

‘The realms shake beneath our righteous justice!’ he roared, and the throne room erupted in an echoing chorus of shouts and cheers. Sigmar smiled fiercely as he looked upon his warriors, and he let the cheers fill the room for many moments before resuming. ‘On all fronts your valiant brothers purge the taint of Chaos with the hammer and the storm, and thanks to the legends you yourselves forged in pursuit of Ghal Maraz, we can now prepare for the next stage of the great war.’

There was a breathless silence as the Celestial Vindicators waited to hear where they would bring the light of Sigmar.

‘You will travel to Ghur, the Realm of Beasts, to a wild region known as the Roaring Plains,’ the God-King proclaimed. ‘There lies a foul bastion of Chaos known as the Manticore Dreadhold. This fortress guards a realmgate that is critical to our next offensive. Destroy the dreadhold and secure this gate. Put its cursed defenders to the sword, and send their wretched souls screaming to their dark masters. This I task to you.’

Another cacophony of cheers resonated throughout the hall. Sigmar held up a hand for silence.

‘There will be many dangers,’ the God-King said. ‘The Roaring Plains is an untamed wilderness, and its dangers have already sent many of my loyal warriors back to the forge.’

His eyes bored into Thostos, whose own blazing blue orbs stared back implacably. Eldroc felt that Sigmar’s iron gaze softened for just a moment as he studied his champion.

‘Look to your brothers,’ Sigmar said, eyes full of pride as he surveyed his conquering heroes. ‘Trust in the gifts I have given you, and remember your oaths. Remember what it is that we fight for.’

He raised Ghal Maraz, and the light caught the intricate craftsmanship of the legendary hammer, reflecting back off the gleaming turquoise ranks of the Celestial Vindicators. There was no darkness, no cruelty or malice that could stand in the face of that holy brilliance.

‘Vengeance for the lost,’ bellowed the Celestial Vindicators. ‘Glory to Sigmar’s chosen!’

Lord-Celestant Mykos Argellon parried a rat-thing’s wild swing and slammed his fist into the creature’s eye socket. It yelped and toppled backwards, and he thrust his grandblade, named Mercutia, into its panting chest. Its scream cut off abruptly, and Mykos slipped his blade out and swept it to the side to draw a red line across another creature’s throat. Alongside him, his warriors hacked their way through the last of the skaven stragglers.

Liberators battered the creatures to the ground with their heavy shields, then ran them through with swords, or crushed them with hammers. Retributors cared not for such precision; they barrelled in with heavy hammers, breaking through the ratmen’s weak guard, and shattering bones with every swing. There was no gap in the Stormcast line, no weakness for the skaven to exploit. In every direction the creatures turned they were met with sharpened steel and an impassable wall of storm-forged metal. The Lord-Celestant felt a surge of pride as he watched his men make perfect war.

Mykos looked around the cavern. No sign of Thostos and his chamber, though judging by the shattered and broken bodies that were already lying in heaps before the Argellonites had entered, they had certainly passed through this way. Mykos frowned, not for the first time concerned about his fellow Lord-Celestant’s incautious approach.

‘Sigmar casts us in blessed sigmarite, hurls us out into the realms, and there we find our true calling,’ roared Knight-Heraldor Axilon, shaking his broadsword free of gore. ‘We are gilded tavern cats, tasked with hunting mice!’

The warriors laughed, and Mykos couldn’t help but smile. ‘Pray, do not speak again, brother Axilon,’ he pleaded with mock sincerity. ‘Else you’ll bring these walls down upon us.’

The Knight-Heraldor covered his mouth with one gauntlet and nodded fervently. That earned another chuckle from the others. Axilon was the implacable herald of the Argellonites, his voice a roar of thunder that could be heard across a battlefield, extolling his brothers to ever-greater acts of valour. It was joked amongst the warriors that Axilon need not bother with his battle-horn – the radiant instrument that all Knights-Heraldor carried – for his voice alone would suffice.

‘Not good terrain, this,’ said Axilon, approaching Mykos and gesturing at the rough stone walls and winding, gnawed-out tunnels. ‘It favours the stinking rats. We cannot see ahead, and we cannot guard our flanks. I cannot even give them a taste of the God-King’s thunder, lest it brings this cursed labyrinth down on our heads.’

‘Brother,’ said Mykos, shaking his head and pointing one finger down at the floor. ‘The ground is below us, and the ceiling above. Consider our last venture, and thank Sigmar we are not battling through the warped geometry of the Tower of Lost Souls, pursued once more by the mutant scions of the Broken Prince.’

‘A fair point, my Lord,’ Axilon smiled, but his mirth did not last long. He lowered his voice as he came closer. ‘Lord-Celestant Thostos has pushed too far ahead without us. He’s going to get himself surrounded.’

‘I am certain that the Lord-Celestant’s tactical situation shifted,’ said Mykos, a note of warning in his voice, ‘and he was forced to adjust our battle plan.’ It would not do for the rest of the chamber to start voicing their own concerns about Thostos’ behaviour.

‘As you say, lord,’ said Axilon.

The Knight-Heraldor kicked one of the dead ratmen disdainfully, turning it over with the tip of his boot. The creature was ridden with boils and rashes, and wrapped in black leather marked with obscene symbols that Mykos did not care to look upon.

‘So soon we see battle,’ Axilon said. ‘We barely made it out of the realmgate before we came upon these foul creatures.’

‘Who had taken up position throughout the only pass that leads down to the Roaring Plains,’ Mykos nodded gravely. ‘It has not escaped my notice, my friend. It feels uncomfortably like these creatures were sent here to bleed us.’

That was not a pleasant thought. They had been counting on the element of surprise, but if the enemy was already aware they were coming… He shook his head. It was no use second-guessing their mission now. They could do nothing but push on and try to find a way out of these warrens, which meant his force had to link back up with Thostos as soon as possible.

‘We will push forwards, into the central passage,’ Mykos said, pointing a gauntleted finger at the largest of the three tunnels that split off from the cramped nexus that they currently occupied.

Prosecutor-Prime Evios Goldfeather stepped to the tunnel entrance.

‘Battle has been joined, my Lord-Celestant,’ he said, in his clipped, distinguished voice. Goldfeather was so named for the fabulous golden quill he kept tucked into his war-helm. When asked about it, or even when none had asked, the airborne warrior would loudly proclaim that it was a gift from the ‘Father of Griffons’, in return for his slaying of a rampaging manticore, and proceed to tell that tale in punishing length and detail. Mykos considered this a small price to pay in exchange for the man’s keen senses.

‘They have encountered heavy resistance,’ he continued gravely. ‘It’s not just swarm rats – I can hear the vermin’s heavier weapons in the field. Foul, sorcerous siege pieces.’

Mykos approached, and even without the Prosecutor’s superior senses, he could hear it too. The spatter-whine of the skaven’s filthy magic, and the barking crack of their bizarre weapon-pieces. Undercutting those alien sounds, faint but unmistakable, were the battle-hymns of his Vindicator brothers, the tramp of booted feet, and the cleansing celestial thunder of Sigmar’s storm.

‘We must move quickly,’ Mykos muttered, and raised his runeblade high. ‘To me, Argellonites. Forwards to glory!’

Thostos Bladestorm swept his runeblade back and forth in great arcs, hewing his way through dozens of the shrieking vermin. Heads flew. Limbs shattered. The warren stank of fear, the sour terror of the ratfolk and the foul reek of their diseased blood. One of the degenerates, bolder than its fellows, jabbed at Thostos with a crude shortspear. The blow skipped off his blessed sigmarite, barely denting the god-forged metal. The Bladestorm replied with a backhand sweep of his sword that bisected the unfortunate creature, sending its torso spinning away over the heads of its fellows. Hot blood splashed across Thostos’ battle-mask, and he roared in exultation.

Exultation? No, that implied that pleasure was found in the act. Fury? That came closer, but what he felt lacked the cleansing, satisfying heat of true rage. He settled for whatever it was he did feel, because he felt something, and that was enough.

In truth, the filthy skaven were poor subjects for his anger. They fell before him in their dozens, hacked and hewed apart. Those nearest to him barely even attempted to block his attacks. Instead they scampered as far away as they could in the cramped confines of the warren, scratching and pulling at their fellows, dragging others into the path of blows aimed at them. He was dimly aware of his brothers following in his wake, launching themselves at the skaven in a sea-green blur.

In the face of Thostos’ onslaught, the pack broke. Dropping weapons, abandoning all pretence of organised retreat, they swarmed from the cavern in a ragged tide of brown-and-grey fur. Something buried deep within Thostos called for caution; the skaven were unpredictable and treacherous foes, and these tunnels were suited to their deviant, backstabbing form of warfare. That caution met the desperate battle-lust that filled him, and evaporated in an instant.

‘Vengeance,’ he roared, his voice thick with hatred, ‘Vengeance in the name of Sigmar!’

The Lord-Celestant charged after the fleeing vermin. Bellowing battle-hymns of praise to the God-King, the Bladestorm Warrior Chamber followed him to war.

The Celestial Vindicators followed the skaven through a rough-hewn corridor no taller than a mortal man, losing pace with their quarry as they bent to force their way through the cramped confines. The Stormcasts had many reasons to be thankful for their blessed armour, but here, in the skaven’s favoured terrain, it slowed them and made movement cumbersome.

Thostos simply smashed his way through the dry earth, his momentum hardly slowed by the ramshackle, makeshift nature of the skaven excavations. He broke free of the tunnel in a rain of debris, sword and hammer raised.

He had entered a central chamber of the warren, some thirty feet high and maybe four times that across. In the centre was a raised mound of dirt, flecked with rat spoor and other filth, around which the fleeing ratmen swarmed in their hundreds. Upon the raised earth stood several larger beasts. Near three times the height of their multifarious kin, these skaven rippled with muscles. Bizarre, arcane devices were bolted to their flesh, strange, cylindrical tubes of metal capped with several small nozzles. As Thostos burst into the chamber, the creatures screeched as one, and as one their strange weapons blared with a vile eldritch light, and let loose a repeating blast that echoed like thunder.

Retributor Arodus was the first Stormcast to follow his Lord-Celestant into the central chamber, and was rewarded with a hail of bullets that blasted him backwards into his fellows, blood pouring from countless holes punched through his armour. Retributor Wulkus leapt forwards in fury at his brother’s death, crushing a one-eyed skaven foot soldier into the dirt with a wild overhead swing of his hammer. As he brought the weapon back up there was a loud crack, and a hole appeared in the centre of his faceplate, releasing a faint pink mist. He collapsed, and both Stormcast bodies disappeared in a blast of pale light. As the main force of Celestial Vindicators poured out to meet the skaven infantry, a whickering storm of fire met them.

The cavern was strobed with violent green light as the strange contraptions continued to fire. Those skaven unfortunate enough to be nearest to the Stormcasts exploded in torrents of gore, and others went down howling as ricochets found thighs, ankles and fingers.

Even the devastating hail of bullets could not hold back the fury of the Celestial Vindicators, who broke into the main chamber and launched themselves at the enemy. Thostos ignored the chattel that snapped at his heels, barrelling further into the press of bodies, straining to reach the escarpment. Daggers were thrust at him as he ground his way into the skaven ranks, tapping out a staccato rhythm as they scraped against his war-plate. He butted a taller, wire-furred rat-thing, splattering its nose, then slammed his hammer into its gut and trampled over its mewling, bleeding form. On to the next, a pot-bellied fiend encased in pockmarked iron. That one died quickly as his sword bit into its skull, blessed sigmarite tearing through bone and tissue as if it were parchment. To the next, a runt of a thing wearing robes, which tasted the blunt face of his hammer and burst apart in a spray of viscera.

And on to the next…

Lord-Castellant Eldroc realised, with a horrible clarity, that they had been baited neatly into the skaven’s trap. Caught up in their fury, they had pushed forwards too far from their brothers, and now the enemy hurled fresh troops at them from every angle. Eldroc’s loyal gryph-hound Redbeak snarled and spat at his side, his trusty senses overwhelmed by the stench of the enveloping skaven mass. Ratmen dropped from hidden holes in the roof of the cavern, clawed their way free from cunningly disguised apertures in the walls, and leapt upon the Bladestorm’s exposed flanks. Suddenly the Stormcasts were an island of turquoise in a sea of wretched grey fur.

Cursing their foolhardiness, and cursing himself for allowing the joy of righteous battle to overrule his caution, Eldroc scanned the packed ranks of the Celestial Vindicators for a glimpse of his Lord-Celestant. He found him, of course, at the very forefront of the battle.

Vermin assailed him from every side, but they could not slow his furious advance. Eldroc knew well how mighty Thostos was in battle, but even he was shocked at the raw-edged brutality his commander displayed. The Bladestorm had always tempered fury with caution; that was why he was chosen to lead, because he could channel the rage and lust for vengeance of the Celestial Vindicators – ever the most aggressive of Sigmar’s sons, ever the first to leap into battle – to its true potential.

Now, he barely seemed to acknowledge his brothers. He never looked back, merely ploughing forwards into the packed ranks of the enemy like a tormented hound let loose.

In such numbers, even the primitive weapons of the skaven clanrats began to take their toll. Stormcasts were dragged down by dozens of the creatures, which stabbed and cut at them in a frenzied orgy of carnage. Daggers found eye sockets, the gaps between gorgets, and vulnerable spots where the barrage of bullets had weakened even the mighty sigmarite battle-plate. It was honourless murder, of the sort at which the ratmen excelled. Eldroc rushed to one fallen Stormcast, stuck with half a dozen blades and weakly pawing at a band of wretches who cackled as they clambered over him, dissecting him with wicked glee. Redbeak hurled himself onto one of the creatures, ripping with his sharp beak and raking with four powerful talons, but another skaven quickly scrabbled up to replace it.

Eldroc raised his warding lantern and intoned the name of blessed Sigmar as he unleashed its celestial energies. Warm, cleansing light washed over the stricken Stormcast, wrapping his form in a halo of flickering luminescence. The skaven skittered back from the power of the holy light, screeching as it burned at their cruel, beady eyes. The fallen warrior’s back arched, and as the glow washed over his body, the sigmarite melted and flowed like wax, refashioning the rents in his armour so that his hallowed war-plate glistened as if it had been freshly forged. Up came the Stormcast, blade in hand, howling his hatred at the enemy with renewed vigour.

Yet Eldroc could not reach all his brothers. Bursts of lightning rippled across the cavern walls as loyal warriors were called back to Azyr, strobing the unfolding carnage with blue light. Even these few losses were too many; they had barely begun their holy purpose, and already they were weakened.

Thostos had reached the central mound now, and was hewing his way through the Stormfiends that had opened fire on them. He thrust his sword into the neck of one creature, then swept his hammer across, low, to snap the vermin’s legs. It screeched in agony and toppled to the floor. As Eldroc watched, Thostos let gravity drag the broken thing from his blade, then caved in its chest with another mighty blow from his hammer. Ahead, cowering behind its taller bodyguards, was a wiry, grey-mottled creature whose yelps and screeches echoed over even the general clatter and chaos of battle. Its bronzed armour carried a shoulder-rack upon which were mounted several strange icons, ragged banners and shrivelled heads. The skaven commander, Eldroc surmised.

Thostos was killing his way towards the warlord, bleeding now from a dozen wounds. More Stormcasts hauled themselves up onto the mound, but still the skaven guns blazed, now joined by an enfilade from the right flank. The skaven had brought forth a heavy wooden shield, from behind which several long-barrelled rifles laid down a vicious crossfire. Another Liberator went down, crimson spurting from his ruined gorget, spasming as he fell. Eldroc felt a dull thud on his thigh, and growled as it was followed by searing, white-hot agony. Not the sharp, honest pain of a flesh wound, but something more sinister, a rapidly spreading toxic ache that burned across his leg. He lowered his warding lantern and let the blessed light bathe his smoking limb.

They had pushed too hard and too fast, and they had fallen for the enemy’s trap.

Then, the blaring of a war-horn shook the cavern.

The battle was over as soon as the Argellonites crashed into the flank of the skaven horde. At the tip of the spear, Knight-Heraldor Axilon and his retinue, hardy Retributors wielding mighty two-handed hammers, smashed apart the skaven’s vile weapon platforms, slaughtering the operators and ending their savage crossfire. More Celestial Vindicators followed in their wake, shields together in a line of blessed sigmarite that crashed into the enemy’s softened ranks, battering broken ratmen to the floor where they were either ground underneath the boots of onrushing Stormcasts, or despatched with swift blows.

As the first wave pushed left to clear the flank of the besieged Bladestorm, Mykos Argellon led the rest of his warriors straight through to the mound and Thostos. The Argellonites’ Lord-Celestant was the very image of the God-King’s glory in his ornate plate, luminescent even in the darkness of the cavern as he cut a bloody swathe through the enemy horde.

‘Forward, Argellonites!’ he shouted, voice rising even above the chaotic din of battle. ‘Show them the fury of the Celestial Vindicators.’

He wielded Mercutia in a blur, thrusting, slashing and battering with the heavy pommel in a whirlwind rush so fast it seemed impossible that he could retain any measure of control. Yet not a single strike was misplaced, and the Lord-Celestant left great piles of broken and torn skaven behind him as he went.

‘Take the Stormfiends,’ shouted Prosecutor-Prime Goldfeather to his men, finally given space to stretch his wings in the vaults of the cavern.

His retinue swept above the fray, calling lightning-wreathed javelins into their hands to hurl at the towering beasts. One went down under a hail of missiles, still firing its bizarre weapon as it toppled from the central mound. Another turned and fired at the Prosecutors, projectiles stitching across the roof of the cavern and cutting down two heralds in clouds of bloody smoke.

Emboldened by the arrival of their allies, the Bladestorms renewed their own vicious assault. Now the skaven’s superior numbers became their downfall; pressed against two unyielding walls of steel, there was no room to scrabble free, and barely space to gasp a desperate lungful of air. Dead skaven were packed so tight in the melee that they were held upright by their fellows, who scratched and tore in panic but could find no escape. Those vermin fortunate enough to be on the outskirts of the battle wavered, their fear-musk foul and pungent.

Blessed with that uniquely skaven insight of when to cut your losses and scamper away, Warlord Zirix cursed, spat and turned to flee, content in the knowledge that his filthy kin would keep these metal warriors busy long enough for him to disappear into the darkness.

As he turned, he met a pair of blazing blue eyes.

Terror escaped him in a sharp, sour odour as the giant before him snapped out a gauntlet to wrap around his neck. He tried to scrabble for his blade, a rusted, green-tinged shard of metal whose toxic coating had eaten away the flesh of many man-creatures in his short and wretched life. The blade was slapped free from his paw and skittered away.

Zirix screeched and gasped as he was lifted slowly into the air. The giant was so strong. He scratched and clawed at its arm, but to no avail. His eyes bulged and his vision swam with crimson as blood vessels burst under the pressure of the vice-like grip. The giant brought him closer.

‘Vengeance,’ it growled, its voice the pitiless inevitability of an avalanche. ‘Ever vengeance.’

The creature stopped struggling, and Thostos placed one gauntlet behind its neck, wrenched its head around with a sickening crunch and hurled the dead thing into the sea of ratmen that surged around the foot of the raised knoll, where it was swept up like a leaf in a rushing river.

The warlord’s death marked the end of any semblance of skaven resistance. Away the ratmen scurried, hurtling down hidden passages and burrows, scrambling over each other in terrified desperation. The Celestial Vindicators culled those too slow to run, and Mykos’ warriors flowed around the Bladestorm formation, forming a wall of steel at every entrance to the cavern in case of counter-attack.

The Lord-Celestant of the Argellonites surveyed the carnage. The Bladestorm had wreaked a horrific toll on the skaven. The cavern was a charnel-pit of dead vermin, their stinking blood marking every surface, spattering the armour of the Celestial Vindicators from helm to boot. The nature of the Stormcasts’ god-given immortality meant that it was hard to judge losses, but there were more than a few stricken warriors lying amongst the wreckage of corpses. They were being tended to by Lord-Relictor Tharros Soulwarden, who went from man to man, salving their wounds with the power of his healing storm.

Alone at the heart of the wreckage stood Thostos himself, surrounded by the broken and hewn corpses of the skaven Stormfiends, weapons hanging limply by his side. He stared at the dead creatures, barely moving. Mykos approached him and as the Lord-Celestant turned, he felt a shiver run down his spine as those pitiless eyes bored into him.

‘Their leader is dead,’ Thostos said. ‘The vermin will not trouble us further as we progress through these warrens.’

Mykos cleared his throat. ‘You slew many of these foul beasts today, brother,’ he said, cautiously. ‘You and your men fought a valiant battle.’

He paused, on the verge of saying more. There was a silence that dragged on too long, broken only by the groans of the wounded and the low, droning chant of the Lord-Relictor at work. The Bladestorm had a way of leaving him tongue-tied.

‘You wish to chastise me for my rashness,’ said Thostos. ‘For not regrouping with your Argellonites before making a push into the core chamber.’

‘I…’ Mykos blinked in surprise.

‘The movement of the enemy force suggested coordination, which meant there had to be a leader directing the vermin. The largest concentration was coming from a single direction, where I judged that the leader was likely to be. There was no time to inform you of my decision, so I trusted that the sound of battle would lead you to us.’

Mykos smiled behind his mask and shook his head.

‘You disagree with my actions?’

‘No, not entirely. I would prefer that our communication was more open, but I understand the value of risk in war. That is the Celestial Vindicators’ way.’ The Lord-Celestant shrugged. ‘It’s simply that this is the most words we’ve exchanged since we first joined our forces for this mission.’

If he was hoping that some comradely small talk would thaw the Bladestorm’s icy mood, Mykos found himself disappointed. His fellow warrior simply stared at him, saying nothing. Mykos heard the approaching steps of Lord-Castellant Eldroc with something approaching relief.

‘The men are ready to move out,’ he said, limping slightly on one leg as he approached. Redbeak was at his side, blood staining his noble features, proud eyes narrowed. ‘We lost twenty-six warriors, Liberator-Prime Lucos among them.’

Thostos nodded without any sign of regret. ‘The air is fresher this way,’ he said, pointing at the northern end of the cavern, the opposite side to which they had entered. ‘It may lead to a way out of these warrens. You can feel the wind. Move the men out.’

‘You are wounded, sire,’ Eldroc said, his voice rising in concern. Mykos saw that the Lord-Castellant was right. Thostos’ arm was bleeding heavily, and he could see several small holes dotted across the Lord-Celestant’s plate where bullets had penetrated.

‘I… had not noticed,’ said Thostos quietly, staring at the blood.

Eldroc went to his Lord-Celestant’s side and bathed Thostos in the renewing glow of his warding lantern. The Bladestorm bowed his head, and the blue flame behind his eyes flickered and dimmed. Mykos thought, with no small amount of surprise, that he could hear an exhausted sigh – but the Bladestorm seemed beyond such mortal displays of fatigue. As he watched, the Lord-Celestant’s wounds closed, and sigmarite flowed across the ruptured areas of his plate armour.

Thostos nodded to his Lord-Castellant and rotated his shoulder, testing the joint and stretching his arm.

‘Move the men out,’ he said again, and the emptiness was back. He gave Mykos one last look, the briefest nod of his head, and then strode away.

The Stormcasts emerged from the stinking warrens onto a wide shelf of rock overlooking the Roaring Plains. Pale yellow grass stretched to the horizon, shifting so violently in the restless wind that it almost seemed to ripple like fire. Clouds rushed across the sky, swirling and reforming in an endless, roiling tempest. It was a foul-tempered wind. At this height, a mortal man would be at risk of being blown clean off the mountaintop – only the Stormcasts’ weight and strength kept them rooted. A single, steep stair was cut into the edge of the platform, winding away towards the foothills below, which reached out to the grasslands in raised veins of blackened rock, ridged and twisted, almost skeletal.

‘The Roaring Plains,’ Eldroc said, stepping up to the brink of the ledge and peering down at the vista that spread below. He raised his voice as a lash of thunder broke, rolling across the sky so loudly that the mountain itself seemed to shake beneath them. ‘Seems a pleasant enough place,’ he said, with no little sarcasm.

‘Across this plain lies the Manticore Dreadhold,’ said Thostos, his voice a granite rumble. ‘We must make haste. The next stage of Sigmar’s plan cannot proceed until we secure it and hold it.’

Mykos watched the Lord-Celestant. Thostos showed no interest in the grand spectacle of the plains, nor did he make any attempt to bolster his warriors’ spirits after their struggle through the warrens. His hands were clenched at his sides, and he stared listlessly at the distant horizon as the Celestial Vindicators formed up behind him. The fervour and the anger were long gone, and in their place was stillness, but not calm. His armour and battle-mask obscured any expression, but Mykos could feel the tension in him even at this distance. He was coiled like a spring, ready to snap at the slightest opportunity.

‘Goldfeather,’ Mykos shouted, dragging his mind back to more immediate matters. The Prosecutor-Prime dropped neatly off the rock where he had been perching, and glided down to where the Argellonites were still ranking up.

‘My lord?’ he asked.

‘Take your swiftest men and survey the foothills and the immediate area. I want no more surprises. Anything suspicious, anything at all, and you report back to me. This land has already sent many broken brothers back to Azyr, and I do not intend to take its dangers lightly. Go.’

The Prosecutor-Prime nodded and went to gather his fellow heralds. The rest of the Argellonites and the Bladestorm had begun to filter down the winding stair, though it was so narrow that only two could walk side by side. It would take several hours to reach the foothills and redress once more into proper fighting ranks. That worried Mykos. Of the Stormcasts’ manifold virtues, stealth was not one; they were exposed here, and the skaven had amply proven the potential of a swift surprise attack.

As the Argellonites began to file down the twisting steps, Eldroc came to Mykos’ side. His armour was freshly repaired, and the hint of a limp that had marked him in the warrens had disappeared. Once again he was an image of strength and implacable fortitude. Of all the Bladestorm’s warriors, Eldroc had been the most forthcoming, and Mykos was grateful for it. He liked the man’s simple honesty and level-headedness.

‘You seem troubled, my friend,’ Eldroc said.

‘It is nothing, Lord-Castellant. Merely concern that we found battle so soon. I had hoped to arrive at our destination without issue.’

‘How fine that would be,’ Eldroc chuckled. ‘In these times that would be a rare blessing, in any corner of the realms.’

He rested his halberd on his shoulder and leaned upon the haft. They were silent a moment, listening to the tramp of boots and the howling of the wind as it whipped its way through the mountain pass.

‘He can be difficult, I know,’ the Lord-Castellant said, quietly.

Mykos said nothing. It was clear that Eldroc was choosing his words carefully, and he gave the man time to gather his thoughts. It was no easy thing for a Stormcast to question a fellow warrior, let alone his leader. Absolute loyalty and brotherhood was as much a part of them as their armour, as their weapons and their fearlessness.

‘I have spoken to many of our reforged brothers,’ Eldroc sighed, ‘and the change is more marked in Thostos than in any of them. He used to be such a thoughtful man. I think that was why he was chosen to lead. We are a wrathful host, and we need such men to temper us.’

Eldroc turned to Mykos. There was a pleading edge to his voice, and Mykos realised that the Lord-Castellant had likely never spoken to another soul regarding his concerns.

‘Give him time, my lord,’ Eldroc said.

Prosecutor-Prime Evios Goldfeather enjoyed the spiteful power of the winds of the Roaring Plains as they buffeted him mercilessly. It was pleasant enough to glide in the tranquil air of the Singing Gardens, or even over the celestial valleys of Erianos, but if there was one thing Goldfeather valued, it was a challenge. The wind here had no sense to it; a zephyr would drift west, allowing him to glide on its gentle arc, then a wall of force would slam him back in the other direction, blasting him so hard that he dropped several yards, and spinning him so fast that he could barely control his descent.

At first it was unsettling, but he quickly found himself relishing the unforgiving nature of the place. There was a pattern to be found in the midst of the madness. He caught a rising gust and let it lift him, felt it sway and weaken, and sought a westerly gale that filled his radiant wings with air, letting it take him on a wide arc over the churning grass of the Roaring Plains. His fellow Prosecutors followed in his wake, though he noted with no surprise, and no small amount of satisfaction, that they were finding the turbulent winds far trickier to deal with. Galeth and Harion had already been blown off course, despite the power of their Azyrite wings. He would have to speak to them later; he demanded a certain level of excellence from his men, after all.

He returned his gaze to the plains. It was an astonishing sight, the Prosecutor-Prime had to concede. The great grass seas stretched for miles in every direction, punctuated by jagged, twisting spears of rock and wind-scoured mesa clusters that broke through the earth’s surface, clutching at the sky. In all that space one might expect a measure of stillness, but that was not the case; everywhere Goldfeather looked, there was motion. Around the base of the rocky protrusions the grass grew longer, grasping at the escaping formations, wrapping around them in choking vine clusters. The wind shifted and pulled at these vines, tightening them like a hangman’s noose. As the shifting clouds passed overhead and darkened the plain for a moment, Goldfeather thought he saw one great claw of rock lurch, dragged down towards the earth by a thick belt of thorns that encircled it. Then sunlight speared though the clouds once more and it was still. Just a trick of the light, he supposed.

He was distracted by a low, rumbling noise that built into a roar. In the distance, the earth itself split. Dirt was kicked up as a great gouge tore across the plain, as if something monstrous was attempting to wrench itself free. No sooner had the earth ceased its writhing movement than a second rent appeared, following the path of the first. There was a tremor, signified by a series of great cracks that rippled across the ground, and then an uneasy quiet.

Soaring higher, Goldfeather saw more terrible wonders. A carpet of flesh roiled across the plain far to the Stormcasts’ left, a shifting mass of stampeding beasts so thickly packed together that he could not see the ground beneath them. They were flat-headed, quadruped grazing beasts, with mighty horns that wrapped backwards around their skulls. There were thousands… hundreds of thousands of them.

The Prosecutor-Prime dropped closer and saw another flock of creatures, scaled and lizard-like, but with brightly coloured feathers across their wings and hindquarters. Each was bigger than a man, almost the same size as a Stormcast, and as Evios watched they rolled and dived into the stampede, nipping at the flanks of the beasts and trying to drive them into one another. As he watched, one of the larger avians succeeded in tripping an unfortunate creature; there was a horrific avalanche of hooves and screaming flesh, and a great chunk of the onrushing tide collapsed in on itself. Nothing could survive such carnage and Evios watched, impressed despite himself at the winged creatures’ ingenuity, as a mountain of crushed beasts piled up, ground to pieces under the sheer weight of the onrushing mass. They would eat well once the stampede had passed on.

One of the avian creatures noticed his presence and began to shriek, and Goldfeather decided it was time to move on. He signalled his retinue, and as one they peeled away from the massacre.

He dropped again and found another gust of wind, and let it sweep him back to the south, towards the Stormcast position. The Prosecutor-Prime had almost satisfied himself that he had a clear reading on the region when he caught something out of the corner of his eye. Heading in a lateral direction towards the foothills that the Stormcasts were heading to, he saw a number of specks. He signalled his men to follow and soared towards the movement.

As he swept closer, he saw that a large mob of creatures was pursuing a smaller, scattered band across the plain. The pursuers numbered a couple of hundred, perhaps, and their size, lumbering gait and bulky, crudely grafted armour marked them out as orruks.

Prosecutor Omeris finally caught up with him. ‘They head towards our brothers,’ he said, straining to be heard above the howl of the wind. ‘We should head back to inform the Lord-Celestants.’

‘Orruks,’ spat Goldfeather. ‘Low-minded filth, the lot of them.’

‘They almost have their prey,’ said Omeris.

‘Hardly surprising,’ Goldfeather replied. ‘The cursed brutes can run for hours when their blood is up.’

His gaze fell upon the fleeing band. They were scrawny and battered, and they wore ragged scraps of leather not much more refined than that of the primitive savages chasing them, but there was no mistaking it.

They were human.

The Stormcasts wound their way through the bluffs, alert at every howl, every creak of earth. Eldroc marched at the head of the column, a few paces behind Thostos. He watched his lord stride onwards, heedless of the noises around them. Eldroc, and all of his brothers in the Celestial Vindicators, had seen their families and friends slaughtered by the vile hordes of Chaos. As the blades finally came for them too, they had bellowed their defiance to the skies, and prayed to mighty Sigmar for the chance to wreak their vengeance upon the hated minions of the Dark Gods. This oath had been offered willingly, and any price had been a price worth paying.

And yet, looking at what had become of his Lord-Celestant, Eldroc was filled with doubt. The man was hollow, an unfeeling shell filled with nothing but an insatiable need to exact his vengeance. Gone was the thoughtful, righteous man that Eldroc had battled and trained with for so many years leading up to the great venture into the realms. They had talked together once, sharing dreams of a new era of hope and glory for the scions of Sigmar, both knowing that they would never get to experience that peace for themselves. They had accepted that truth gladly, but it was one thing to welcome an inevitable, honourable death, and another to die eternally, each fresh Reforging bringing a symphony of agonies, further draining and weakening the soul.

And what else did the Stormcasts risk, every time they went to war for the God-King? The truth only Sigmar knew. Each warrior came back altered in his own way. There was a Liberator in the Bladestorm who returned unable to remember any of his former friends, but able, with perfect clarity, to recall hundreds of ancient sonnets in some archaic language that could barely be deciphered. Others remembered only fragments of their former lives, as though they were seeing them through the eyes of another person.

Eldroc himself had felt the agony of Reforging. Yet somehow he had emerged without the traumas that his friends and brothers had suffered. His memories had faded, yes, like a rich tapestry left in the blazing sun, but deep down he knew himself; he remembered the man he had been and what he fought for.

There was guilt, too, when he looked upon the haunted visage of his Lord-Celestant, the broken shell that Thostos had become. Why had he not suffered as brutally as his friend? This terrified him more than any malady or sickness of the mind. A gnawing thought echoed inside Eldroc’s head: he had not yet discovered just what he had sacrificed – when he did, would it make what Thostos had gone through seem minor?

Absolute loyalty and devotion to his God-King ran through Eldroc like a rich vein through unyielding stone, but still he could not set aside his misgivings. Nor could he sleep at night.

The beating of wings stirred him from his dark thoughts. The Argellonites’ Prosecutor-Prime had returned, arriving some way ahead of his fellow scouts. He dropped nimbly from the sky, landing before Lord-Celestant Argellon with ease.

‘My lord,’ he said, his voice tight and urgent. ‘A mob of orruks is heading towards us, pursuing a band of mortals.’

Mykos visibly tensed. ‘Have they fallen? Do they bear the mark of the Dark Gods?’

The Prosecutor-Prime considered this a moment, and shrugged. ‘They are savage-looking, wrapped in animal skins like primitive brutes,’ he replied, and Eldroc could hear the disdain in his words, ‘but I saw none of the wretched symbols or marks of Chaos. I cannot say for certain, though I do know they will not make it much further before they tire and the orruks run them down.’

‘How many orruks?’ said Thostos, and Goldfeather gave a start at the Lord-Celestant’s sudden presence.

‘Roughly two hundred,’ he replied.

Mykos exchanged a look with Thostos. ‘We do not need a fight with the orruks,’ he said. ‘Our mission will be difficult enough already without their interference. Yet these mortals may be able to provide us with valuable information regarding this region. We should show our strength.’

The Bladestorm stared at Mykos for a long time, then gave an almost imperceptible nod and turned to survey their current position. They were coming to the mouth of the foothills, and the terrain was sloping down to meet the plains. It was still rough ground, jagged, heat-baked and dry, but it formed a natural defensive position against an infantry assault. The embankments that channelled them were roughly the height of two Stormcasts, and the ground between was narrow enough for two-score warriors to hold the line without threat of being outflanked. Some thousand yards or so ahead, the rocky earth sloped down one final time, and beyond that Thostos could see a glimpse of open ground.

‘Retributor-Prime Hyphon,’ he shouted, ‘summon your warriors. Lord-Celestant Argellon, we will take a hundred men and make haste for the ridge ahead of our main force.’

Liberators dashed to the summit of the ridge, forming into lines and smashing their colossal shields down into the dirt to form an impenetrable ring of steel. Behind them the Judicators judged their range and held their bows taut and ready as the orruks rumbled closer. It was easy to hear them now, hooting and hollering their bestial war cries as they drove themselves ever harder, desperate to catch the fleeing mortals.

Staggering with the half-drunk sway of exhausted prey, the beleaguered humans spotted the formation of Stormcasts and stopped still. Several dropped to their knees, exhausted.

‘Move your idle backsides,’ roared Goldfeather, hovering above the ragged band. He scanned the group to indentify the leader and settled on a wiry female who was down on one knee, a curved blade in her hand. She seemed to be the one the others looked to.

He swooped down to meet her. ‘Get your people behind those shields, or we’ll leave you to the greenskins,’ he said.

The mortals’ nervous eyes flicked towards the woman, who stared up at the Prosecutor-Prime with a familiarity and lack of fear that made him feel surprisingly uncomfortable. He was used to little more than servile deference from mortals. Finally, she nodded, put two calloused fingers between her lips and gave a sharp whistle, clearly deciding that a slim chance of survival was better than the certainty of death. Summoning up one last reserve of energy, the mortals dragged themselves forwards, scrambling up the shallow incline towards the Stormcasts’ shield wall, which opened to let them through. As they passed, the Celestial Vindicators slid back into position expertly.

‘They’re a ragged lot,’ said Knight-Heraldor Axilon as the humans passed. Mykos could hardly disagree.

They were wiry and weathered, with a leanness to their frame that suggested many nights had gone by without a decent meal. Ritual scars and red-ink tattoos covered their sun-browned skin; they wore little armour besides thin hide shirts and breeches, and leather wrappings on their feet and hands. The tall, raven-haired warrior who led them in had her hair bound up on one side with leather scraps and shaved clean on the other. As her party staggered past, her eyes locked with those of the Lord-Celestant. They were cold, grey and hard – a hunter’s eyes, a wolf’s eyes. She showed no fear, and no surprise or awe that he could discern. These are killers, Mykos thought. He signalled Liberator-Prime Julon, who nodded and began to secure the mortals, stripping any weapons they carried and examining them for any overt signs of corruption.

The orruks howled, denied of their prey, and thundered forwards into a wide, loose semicircle some twenty yards ahead of the Stormcasts. They grunted and snarled, spat and snorted, but for now they seemed curious enough not to hurl themselves into the Stormcast line. Shoving his fellows out of his way, a hulking specimen stomped forward, lazily scratching his thick neck, a wicked-looking greataxe held loosely at his side. Several burly warriors followed him, each bearing a smeared, red claw mark upon their black-iron breastplates.

‘What now?’ asked Goldfeather, gently dropping to the ground beside his Lord-Celestant, a stormcall javelin held at the ready in one gauntleted fist.

‘Now we parlay,’ said Mykos grimly, looking to his fellow Lord-Celestant, who was gazing at the orruks dispassionately. Thostos said nothing, though his weapons were drawn and held in steady hands. ‘Humanity has known a common purpose with the orruks before. Perhaps we can avoid a skirmish that will gain us nothing.’

He signalled to Axilon, and the Knight-Heraldor nodded and selected five broad-shouldered and eager Retributors. If this did come to blows, he wanted the orruks down and dying as soon as possible. Together, the retinue stepped out from the shield wall.

Mykos held Mercutia, and the wondrous grandblade caught the sun, sending a ripple of light over his armour. He motioned his men to halt and strode forwards, sword raised high. The orruks watched, their ape-like brows furrowed. With elaborate slowness, the Lord-Celestant made a show of lowering the weapon, sliding it securely into the scabbard at his thigh.

The orruks looked to their leader, inching forwards slowly. He held out a meaty palm to stop them, and raised his own weapon. Tongue protruding in mock concentration, he lifted the greataxe and slotted its haft through an imaginary scabbard. His warriors guffawed idiotically. He smirked, and barked something indecipherable at his warriors. Eight came forward, while the others loomed menacingly in the background.

‘That, I think, is as close as we’re likely to get to a formal truce,’ said Eldroc from the shield wall.

‘Follow me,’ said Mykos. ‘And keep your hand near your blade.’

Mykos and Eldroc led the way, armour gleaming bright turquoise in the midday sun, in stark contrast to the dull, crude metal scraps and chains that the orruks had wrapped around themselves. Thostos walked behind them, his eyes locked on the warband’s leader. The orruks snickered and hollered amongst themselves in their crude tongue, and one began a mock drumbeat upon its chest plate. Its fellows roared with laughter at this lack-witted attempt at humour.

Behind his battle-mask, Mykos couldn’t help but sneer. Orruks. It never failed to amaze him how such a savage, dull, self-destructive race could be so resilient. They possessed no honour, no discipline or ambition beyond finding their next brawl, and yet the foul creatures propagated in every corner of the realms. One of the first tasks of the Stormcast Eternals, after their forging in the halls of Azyr, had been to clear the wilds of the Celestial Realm free of orruks. They had torn down the creatures’ crude icons and the totems erected to their bestial gods, and put the beasts to the sword. The greenskins had fought savagely – orruks always did – but against the plated fist of Sigmar’s avenging warriors, their only fate was death. Mykos remembered those battles with little fondness. It had been a grim task, valourless butchery that was necessary before the Stormcasts took their war to the true enemy.

Despite his disdain, Mykos could not help but note the difference between these hulking creatures and the wretched, feral scraps that they had ground underboot in Azyr. Their armour, for one. These orruks had bound themselves in thick plates of black iron, with wicked armour spikes upon the joints. Whereas the sigmarite armour of the Stormhosts was sculpted to artisanal perfection, the orruks’ plate was worn, scratched and dented, and daubed haphazardly with slashes of red paint, forming fangs and jaws on greaves and vambraces. The quality was crude, and the effect should have been ludicrous, but on the heavily muscled, scarred forms of the orruks, it instead spoke of blunt efficiency, of the race’s atavistic, uncultured love of war.

They were bigger, too, broader and more heavily muscled, and marked from head to toe with scars, burns and all the other trophies that battle bestowed upon a warrior’s skin. Most wore pot helms decorated with horns or more wicked spikes, though others went bareheaded. The leader, an anvil-jawed monster with a wicked scar that cut an angry red line across his porcine right eye as it travelled down to his jaw, was as tall as the Stormcasts. He leered at the Celestial Vindicators and swaggered forwards to meet them. His warriors spread out in a semicircle around him, hands resting on jagged axes and spiked mauls. Mykos felt his hand drift down to Mercutia, who yearned to break free of her scabbard. There was a pregnant silence, broken only by the howling wind, and then the orruk leader spoke.

‘Ain’t seen yore kind before,’ he rumbled in a crude tongue that the Stormcasts could understand, licking his lips like a starving man presented with a bountiful feast. ‘Very shiny, ain’t ya?’

His warband rumbled with amusement, their leader gave a broken-toothed grin, and Mykos resisted a strong urge to slice his head off. Eldroc stepped forward.

‘We are the Celestial Vindicators, the blessed swords of Sigmar,’ he said in his deep, resonant voice. ‘We have no quarrel with you or your kind, but these humans are now under our guard.’

‘’Sat right?’ the orruk growled, scratching one filthy ear with a yellow-taloned finger. ‘Here,’ he turned to his warriors, cocking his great head, ‘who ’sis land belong to, boyz?’

‘Ironjawz!’ they roared as one.

‘An’ who says what goes around ’ere?’

‘Drekka! Drekka! Drekka!’

The orruk leaned in conspiratorially. ‘There’s that then,’ he chuckled. ‘Reckon I won’t take no orders from some tinpot git dropped outta the sky. We’ll be taking those humies, and they’ll go right t–’

A sword whipped through the air and buried itself between the orruk leader’s eyes.

The momentum of the throw hurled the creature back into the orruk standing behind him, knocking both to the ground with a clatter. Mykos turned and saw Thostos drawing his warhammer, an empty scabbard at his side.

Silence. A sharp peal of astonished laughter came from Goldfeather. Then the orruks charged.

Roaring more with eager battle-lust than any feelings of betrayal at their leader’s death, the orruks poured forwards. The Retributors met them, hammers drawn and swinging. The close quarters robbed the majority of the momentum from the charge, but Mykos saw Stormcasts go down under the greenskins’ boots and blades, trampled and broken. As a bellowing orruk wielding two axes charged him down, he drew his sword, spun to the side and let his momentum add power to a lateral swing. Mercutia sliced straight through the creature’s torso, opening its belly horizontally, spilling its innards to gush over Mykos’ boots. The dying orruk attempted a wild swing at the Lord-Celestant, but he avoided it easily and put his boot in its chest, sending it crashing backwards to land in a crumpled heap.

By now the front ranks of the larger orruk mob had reached the fray, though Mykos could also hear the stomping of heavy boots and the battle-hymns of the faithful as the Liberator shield wall abandoned its defensive position and rushed forwards to protect its leaders.

Eldroc had set his halberd, and Mykos saw him skewer an orruk though the shoulder blades, twist his weapon and send the creature spinning to the floor. Another charged him from the side, and the Lord-Castellant retracted the halberd and thrust again, driving its heavy spike deep into the beast’s gut. It squealed in fury and hurled its axe in a last desperate act of spite. It sailed past Eldroc, staving in the chest armour of an unfortunate Stormcast, who collapsed immobile on the ground. Redbeak snarled and hurled himself at the dying orruk, tearing out its throat and ending its defiance.

The ridge ran red with blood, orruk and Stormcast, but the impact of the orruk leader’s death had swayed the momentum in favour of the Celestial Vindicators. Without his bellows and beatings, whatever strange, mob mentality bound the orruk band together in battle was shattered by the rage of the Stormcast Eternals. They were simply too strong and too skilled for the artless form of warfare that the orruks favoured. Liberator shields intercepted axe blows, then were shifted to one side for a killing thrust of a sword, or the crushing blow of a warhammer. Retributors swept their heavy hammers from side to side, breaking bones and smashing skulls to pieces.

Thostos was a blur of turquoise fury at the heart of the melee. He had replaced his thrown sword with a gladius, holding the short blade in a reverse grip and using it to stab and drag the nearest greenskins towards him, where he bludgeoned them to the ground with his warhammer.

It quickly became a slaughtering field. Not a single orruk left the ridge alive.

The runeblade was still lodged in the foul creature’s idiotic smirk. Thostos put his foot on the dead orruk’s forehead and wrenched his weapon loose. It came free with a spurt of gore, yellowed teeth splinters and torn flesh.

He heard boots thumping towards him on the hard earth. Two pairs, one fast and angry, one slower, more tentative.

‘What in the name of Sigmar was that, Bladestorm?’ barked Mykos Argellon, loud enough to draw the stares of several Stormcasts who had been dispensing Sigmar’s mercy to any injured orruks. ‘We were at parlay. They did not threaten us.’

‘They have killed children of Sigmar,’ Thostos said. ‘That is reason enough for them to die.’

‘They are cruel, unthinking savages, but they are not our enemy here. Sigmar gave us this righteous purpose, and you would risk it all to sate your bloodlust,’ Mykos spat. ‘We could have avoided all of this. Men have died for nothing.’

Thostos rolled the orruk over with his boot. ‘Look at this one,’ he said, his voice betraying not a hint of tension. ‘He decorates his flesh with trophies. Human bones, hands, ears. He keeps a tally upon his armour, see?’

It was true. The dead orruk’s chain hauberk was heavy with knucklebones, stolen jewels and other trinkets, all recognisably of human origin. Thostos reached down to snatch a trophy from the brute’s belt. It was a gauntlet of spiked black iron, and upon the palm there was the eight-pointed star of the eternal enemy. Eldroc cursed, and Thostos threw the gauntlet for Mykos to catch.

‘Have you ever known orruks so bold?’ he asked. ‘Look at their armour, their weapons. Hardly the sticks and stones that the greenskin rabble brought to bear on us in the Amaris Foothills. These are stronger, more vital. They are blooded and battle-hardened. They have met the forces of the Dark Gods in battle and triumphed.’

‘They did not attack us,’ insisted Mykos, ‘not until you gave them reason to. This is not the first time your reckless fury has cost us lives.’

‘Their curiosity was all that stayed their blades, and that would have lasted scant moments longer. Your indecision would have endangered us, and so I acted in your stead.’

Mykos started forward, but Eldroc placed himself between the two Lord-Celestants and slammed his halberd down into the earth.

‘Enough,’ Eldroc hissed. ‘The men are watching. Remember yourselves.’

Mykos glanced back. Thostos’ men stood there, staring impassively. His own warriors were looking at each other in uneasy confusion. He could not see his warriors’ faces beneath their battle-masks, but he could sense their tension, and he cursed himself for losing control.

Thostos sheathed his weapons.

‘You are right, brother,’ he said, staring at the hewn corpse of the orruk leader. ‘They are not our enemy here.’

He turned back to look at Mykos, who returned his blue-flame gaze without flinching, no matter that he felt that familiar ache of discomfort.

‘But they are never allies,’ Thostos growled. ‘Sigmar’s light has been gone from this place for too long, and these savages have grown bold in its absence. We will meet them in battle again, do not doubt.’ He stalked away.

Mykos Argellon had never felt true anger at a fellow Stormcast before. He tried to calm his breathing and centre his humours, but all he could feel was a white-hot fury and an aching sense of betrayal. How could he command this expedition alongside a man who trusted only in his lust for battle? Thostos could not be reasoned with, and his recklessness had already cost them lives that they could ill afford with such a lengthy, dangerous quest ahead of them. His anger was so keenly focused that he barely noticed Lord-Castellant Eldroc was still standing beside him, until he sensed that the man was about to speak.

‘Say nothing, brother,’ Mykos warned. ‘I do not wish to hear it. Do not tell me that he needs time, or tell me of how he has suffered. Tell it to the Stormcasts who fell here, when they make their own return from the forge.’

He turned to Eldroc, daring him to say a word in his lord’s defence. To his credit the warrior did not avoid the Lord-Celestant’s wrathful gaze. Neither did he speak. Instead, he simply gave a sad nod and strode off after the Bladestorm, leaving the lord of the Argellonites standing on his own on the blood-soaked ridge, amongst the dead.

THE PRISONER OF THE BLACK SUN

Josh Reynolds

I still endure.

I still stand.

This realm is mine.

Spiders have spun their webs across my eyes, and worms burrow in my chest. But I still live. I yet stand against my enemies. I shall always do so, for I can do naught else. My will gutters and flares, like a fire newly stoked. The Great Necromancer awakens.

I still endure.

The Three-Eyed King crushed the ranks of my servants. His daemon-blade shattered my bones, and cleaved my heart in two. My rites and magics were torn asunder, my power broken on the altar of fate. My body was left to the dust, and to the dust I returned. My soul fell shrieking into the darkness as a black comet, streaking across the underworld, and the impact of it cracked the roots of this world.

I still endure.

Nagashizzar is toppled. Its great towers and basalt pillars are dust. Where it once stood, there is now only broken earth; in the streets where a thousand warriors marched, the only sound to be heard is the wailing of jackals.

Yet I still endure.

I have pulled down the sun, cracking the seals of the underworld, and dried the seas and burned the grasses. I have humbled my enemies and cast the earth into the sky, walking to and fro in the deep places, and still I am returned.

Nagash has risen.

Something stirs in the wild places of all that which is mine. Some power, stinking of the storm, comes slinking into my demesnes. I sit upon my throne in starless Stygxx and feel it rising all about me, drawing to it that which is mine. Souls slip my grasp, spirits flee my voice. Thieves and invaders stalk my realm. They think me gone.

I still endure.

Heed me. Listen to my words, those of you who have the wit to hear. The Realm of Death is my body. Its caverns are my bones, its peaks my crown. The realm is as large as my word, as small as my wish. I bestride the seas of the east, and shatter the mountains of the west. My throne is in the north, and my shadow in the south. Wherever you so seek, I am there. Wherever you make worship, so Nagash strides.

Whosoever believes in me, whosoever follows my will, the will of Nagash, shall prosper. I have awakened, and my enemies shall know my name again. Seek out my foes, and make them yours. Seek out these thieves, and take from them as they have taken from me.

Hear me. Heed me.

Listen, and be joyful.

Nagash is all, and all are one in Nagash.

Nagash has risen.

Tarsus, Lord-Celestant of the Hallowed Knights, gave voice to a full-throated bellow. He brought his hammer down on the crimson helm of a howling bloodreaver and the warrior fell, its skull split in two. Tarsus whirled to open the belly of a second opponent, the sword he held in his other hand slashing in a deadly arc. His weapons crackled with holy lightning as he struck out left and right, dropping foemen with every blow.

‘Who will be victorious?’ he roared.

‘Only the faithful,’ came the reply, from the small host of Stormcasts that streamed in his wake. Liberators, Prosecutors, Judicators and Retributors – all were clad in star-forged sigmarite, and bearing weapons of the same material. Their panoply of war gleamed silver where it was not rich gold. Their shoulder guards bore their sigil – the curling white slashes of a bull’s horns – and, like their heavy shields, were of deepest regal blue. The weapons they carried shimmered with holy fire. Now, they swept them out to smash down any enemy who managed to avoid the attention of their Lord-Celestant.

He stepped over the body of a bloodreaver and looked ahead. Through the ranks of the enemy, the path they had been following since they had arrived some days previous was visible. Sigmar had cast his lightning down upon the shattered husk of a once-proud citadel, now overgrown with grey lichen and nodding, vast-rooted trees. A carpet of yellowing grass had clung to the cracked stones of the courtyard, obscuring the heaps of bones that clustered thickly throughout. The thunderous arrival of the Stormcasts in the Vale of Sorrows had set thousands of crows to flight, and a black cloud of the croaking birds had followed them ever since.

The path ahead had previously been a road, but was now mostly overgrown with the stiff, yellow grasses that seemed to cover this region. Ancient ruins and shattered hovels stretched out across the landscape to either side of the path. At one time there had been a city here. Now it was only a howling wilderness full of enemies and carrion birds.

‘Who shall win Sigmar’s favour?’ Tarsus cried, swinging his hammer over his head. He brought it down on a bloodreaver with bone-shattering force. With his sword, he chopped through the deplorable icon the blood-cultist had borne and trampled it beneath his feet.

‘Only the faithful,’ the Stormcasts around him shouted, as one.

‘Only the faithful,’ Tarsus echoed as he whipped his sword around in a deadly pattern, splitting the gullets of the enemy who pressed close. He smashed the dying bloodreavers aside, using his greater weight to grind them under.

Tarsus’ warriors called him the Bull-Heart, a name earned at the Battle of the Cerulean Shore, when Tarsus had crashed in amongst the enemy ranks with a ferocity few could equal. It was a fitting war-name for both he and his Warrior Chamber, and they bore it with pride. Their swords were as horns, their hammers were as hooves, and they employed both against the enemies of Sigmar in equal measure.

‘Smash them,’ he bellowed. ‘Grind them under, in the name of Sigmar and the Realm Celestial!’

Bodies littered his path as he drove forwards, into the very teeth of the foe. The bloodreavers were maniacs, but mortal, and none who were such could stand before Tarsus. He was a Stormcast Eternal, and in him flowed the might of Sigmar Heldenhammer. He roared and stamped, battering opponents from his path as he led the way towards the knot of heavily armoured blood warriors that formed the raging heart of the enemy battle line. The latter charged to meet him, chanting the name of the Blood God as they smashed aside their own followers in their eagerness to come to grips with the Hallowed Knights.

‘Who will be remembered?’ Tarsus cried.

‘Only the faithful,’ thundered his Stormcasts as the leading retinues of Liberators came to grips with the blood warriors. Spread out in a line, they closely followed the vanguard of Retributors and Decimators led by their Lord-Celestant.

Tarsus caught one of the blood warriors in the belly with his shoulder, and flipped the frothing berserker over his back even as he plunged on without slowing. The hammer of a Retributor from one of the retinues marching behind him slammed down, ensuring that the blood warrior remained where he’d fallen. Tarsus caught a second across the head with his hammer, and rammed his sword into the belly of a third, plunging it all the way to the hilt. His blade became lodged in the baroque plates of the blood warrior’s armour, forcing him to spend precious moments wrenching it free. Even as he did so, a saw-toothed axe crashed down on his shoulder plate.

The force of the blow drove him to one knee. A second blow clipped his head, and he teetered off balance. Brass and crimson shapes surrounded him, and axes covered in daemonic sigils chopped down. For every one he turned aside two caught him, drawing sparks from the sigmarite plates. No blow had yet pierced his armour, but it was only a matter of time.

‘Hold fast, Bull-Heart,’ a voice thundered.

Lightning speared down, washing over Tarsus and his attackers. He grinned fiercely as the blood warriors shuddered and jerked in the clutches of the storm. Smoke boiled from their mouths and eye sockets, and what flesh was visible beneath their armour was charred black.

Tarsus surged to his feet and caught one of the smoke-wreathed blood warriors beneath the chin with his hammer. The warrior pitched backwards and then lay still. Tarsus hacked another down and turned to greet his rescuer. ‘Nicely done, Ramus,’ he said. ‘A few more moments and I might have been sorely pressed indeed.’

‘Think on that, the next time you find yourself so eager to meet the foe that you outpace the rest of us,’ the Lord-Relictor of the Bull-Hearts said. ‘There are not so many of us that we can spare you, Tarsus.’

Like all those of his rank, Ramus of the Shadowed Soul bore weapons and armour replete with icons of faith, death and the storm. It fell to him to keep the souls of the Hallowed Knights of his Warrior Chamber from the gloom of the underworld with words and fire.

Tarsus nodded. ‘I shall. But for now – show them your power, my friend.’

Ramus raised his reliquary and murmured a soft prayer, his words lost amidst the clangour of battle. The sky overhead was already dark, and roiled and jagged as spears of lightning struck the enemy, burning them to ash or reducing them to stumbling, screaming torches. Tarsus raised his hammer, bringing his Stormcasts to a halt as the lightning continued to strike again and again, until all was silent, save for the soft crackle of flames.

‘Who will be victorious?’ Tarsus murmured, as he gently tapped his Lord-Relictor on the shoulder with his hammer.

‘Only the faithful,’ Ramus intoned, glancing at Tarsus. ‘The road ahead is clear, Lord-Celestant. We are free to continue our march.’

‘Indeed, and we shouldn’t tarry,’ Tarsus said, as he signalled for his retinues to fall into a proper marching order.

The Stormcasts swung fluidly into position with an ease born of centuries of training. Liberators moved to the fore and flanks, encircling the Judicators, while the Prosecutors swooped overhead. The retinues of the winged warriors would range ahead of the host as it marched, keeping a keen eye out for any more would-be ambushers.

Not that such a tactic had succeeded yet, and nor would it if Tarsus had anything to say about it. Had he been anything other than a Stormcast Eternal, he might have taken the continued attacks for an omen, but fear had been burned out of him long ago and left only faith in its wake. He and his warriors were heroes, their valour proven in battles all but forgotten in the haze of their Reforging. The Hallowed Knights had been the fourth Stormhost to be founded, the ranks of their Warrior Chambers filled with the faithful of the Mortal Realms. Their only commonality was that each had called upon Sigmar’s name in battle – and been heard – and that each had shed his mortal flesh in the name of a righteous cause.

Tarsus could but dimly recall the days of his own mortality. He remembered the weight of his sword and armour, and the rustle of a war cloak of deepest purple. He remembered screaming himself hoarse on the stone battlements of a burning citadel as red, lean-limbed daemons scrambled up the walls and across the causeways towards him and those he led. He remembered a name – Tarsem – and a word – Helstone – and the moment a monstrous shadow had fallen across him and the air had writhed beneath the beat of great wings. Then a roar, and… nothing. Nothing until he’d awoken in Sigmaron, forged anew.

That was the way of it, and Tarsus was glad. His enemies had not changed, but now he had the power to meet them, and break them. He was Stormcast, and they would learn to fear that name, before the end. His reverie was soon broken by Ramus.

‘This is a fell place,’ Ramus said, as he and Tarsus led the host.

‘Parts of it, yes,’ Tarsus said. He thought of the things they’d seen since arriving: strange hourglass-shaped mountains that rose along the far horizon, and clumps of pale flowers that softly sighed when one walked past them.

‘A land of endings and silent decay,’ the Lord-Relictor said. ‘This is a place of whispers, where forgotten ghosts wander roads and paths that lead nowhere. A place where mountains crumble only to be raised anew with the sun, and birds and beasts are born and die in the same day. All is in decline here, though I know not whether it is the doing of our foes or the dread master of this realm.’ He looked at Tarsus. ‘Do you think he will listen?’

‘I do not know,’ Tarsus said. ‘Nagash betrayed Sigmar once. Mayhap he will do so again. But that is not for us to worry over… Our concern is to gain audience with him and make common cause, so that we might begin to wrest this realm from the enemy.’

‘But first we have to find him in this wilderness,’ Ramus said.

They had been searching for a way into the underworld since their arrival – one of the legendary Nine Gates into the underworld of Stygxx. The Great Necromancer had vanished, disappeared into the depths where none could find him. But Sigmar had set his scribes the centuries-long task of scouring the ancient records, compiled long before the Allpoints War, for any hint of where the Nine Gates might be. That knowledge had been passed on to the Stormcasts charged with seeking out Nagash. The Nine Gates had been housed in nine citadels, some massive and well-defended, and others so small as to be forever hidden from the eyes of the enemy. Nine Warrior Chambers had been despatched to find these structures and the gates secreted within their walls.

So far the gates had proven elusive, but Tarsus had hope; Sigmar would not have sent them to this place were victory not achievable. A gate was within reach, somewhere. And they would find it.

The trail grew rougher and steeper as the Stormcasts marched on, leaving the detritus of battle far behind them, winding through verdant fields that withered in the moonlight only to flourish once more as the sun rose, and trees that shuddered and sighed in the slightest of breezes. The sky overhead was pale and dim, even in the middle of the day, as if the sun feared to show its face in the Realm of Death. The crows were still overhead, circling and wheeling amongst the Prosecutors as they swooped above on wings of lightning.

‘Aye,’ Tarsus said. ‘And we will do so, even if we must fight our way across this land to do it.’ They had come into conflict with the deranged servants of the Ruinous Powers more than once since their arrival. The worshippers of the Blood God were as thick as fleas in the crags around them. The Realm of Death was under siege, and every peak and valley was infested with the followers of the Dark Gods. He shook his head. ‘Though I’d not turn down aid in that regard, if it were offered.’

A cry from above caught his attention, and Tarsus looked up. One of the Prosecutors swooped low and pointed towards a rocky outcrop that rose abruptly from the surrounding landscape, towering over the bare trees.

‘Something ahead – a structure of some sort at the top,’ he cried. Tarsus waved them forwards, the winged warriors hurtling into the distance, towards the dome-roofed ruin that occupied the summit of the tor.

‘Another ruin,’ Ramus said.

‘And perhaps a way into the underworld,’ Tarsus said. He raised his hammer, signalling to his retinues. ‘Liberators to the flanks, shields out,’ he said, his voice carrying over the gleaming ranks of his Warrior Chamber.

Liberator retinues moved to the flanks of the formation, shields at the ready, in case there was an ambush in the offing. If it were the place they sought, it could be defended and such a place might well provide refuge for warbands like the ones that had relentlessly attacked them since their arrival. With a single gesture from Tarsus, shields raised over the heads of the Stormcasts and to the sides, transforming the Stormhost into a veritable serpent of sigmarite. Their protection allowed them to weather arrows, rocks and even sorcery as they moved. Satisfied, Tarsus swung his hammer towards the ruin.

‘Forwards,’ he bellowed.

A wide path wound around the outcrop and led to the top. Tarsus led the way, and saw that the path ahead was lined with skulls as he rounded the slope. Mounted on spikes of brass and iron, the skulls twitched and champed yellow, cracked teeth, as if in protestation of their fate. Bones were scattered below them, mixed with bits of rusty armour and broken weapons, and piled up in drifts alongside the path. Tarsus stared at the skulls, pity warring with disgust. ‘They still live,’ Tarsus murmured. ‘Even now.’

‘No, Tarsus,’ Ramus said. ‘They do not. And that is the horror of it. Nothing in this realm ever truly dies, even now,’ he said, looking at the skulls. ‘Their souls are bound here, in chains of magic of the darkest sort.’

Tarsus shook his head. ‘Keep moving,’ he called over his shoulder.

More bones awaited them at the summit of the tor. They were scattered and in piles – some whole, though most cracked and broken. Crows hopped among the heaps, cawing to one another. Everywhere dolorous icons and foul standards, marked with sigils of murder and slaughter, had been stabbed into the rocky slope. Jawbones and finger bones hung from many of these, softly clattering in the breeze.

‘We are not the first to come here,’ Ramus said.

‘No,’ Tarsus replied.

The structure crouched ahead of them, partially built into the massive fang-like crag of rock that topped the outcrop, and resembled nothing so much as a dome. Its walls curved outwards in an immense semicircle from the crag, dominating the slope below despite the ragged gaps in their length. A curved roof surmounted the walls, resting in the crook of the crag, crows circling it in great numbers. Vast symbols had been carved into the outer walls – symbols representing the sun, moon, stars and other, more esoteric shapes.

‘It’s as large as any citadel I’ve seen,’ Tarsus said. ‘Though in worse condition than most.’ Despite the state of it, he could see that it had taken great skill to shape the stone. Sundials and dry fountains decorated the courtyard, and Tarsus thought that it might once have been a beautiful place before the occurrence of whatever evil had befallen it. As Tarsus studied it, he felt a pang of something – sadness, perhaps, or the twitch of some long forgotten memory, newly stirred – and his hands tightened on his weapons.

‘I have seen this place before,’ he murmured.

‘Lord-Celestant?’ Ramus asked.

Tarsus shook his head, irritated. ‘I’m fine. This place – there is something about it.’ Overhead, the Prosecutors had dropped onto the dome, scattering the crows, who croaked in agitation. The Stormcasts moved into the ruins and through the remains of what had once been an outer wall, collapsed for many years into irregular piles of stones and shattered columns.

Tarsus left several retinues of Judicators and Liberators on guard in the courtyard and led the rest of his warriors into the ruin. More bones greeted them inside the gargantuan entrance hall: crushed, splintered and scattered about at random. The entrance itself was composed of heavy stone slabs, marked by more symbols – suns and moons, comets and falling stars, all carefully carved into the rock face.

Tarsus traced one of the latter with his fingers as he passed, wondering why it all seemed so familiar.

‘What was this place?’ he asked, as he gazed up at the faded mural that had been painted on the curve of the roof above, depicting a vast field of stars and a black-cloaked scythe-wielding figure hard at work, reaping a cosmic crop.

‘An observatory, perhaps,’ Ramus said, looking around. ‘There are places in the Nihiliad Mountains that this reminds me of. They were places of contemplation, for stargazers and sky-worshippers, maybe this is one. This outcrop is the highest point in the vale – a perfect place to watch the night sky.’

‘Perhaps, but watch it for what?’ Tarsus said. ‘The stars in this realm are all askew, and the night sky is in upheaval.’

‘It was not always so,’ Ramus said. He gestured to the strange carvings that marked the walls. Tarsus thought they resembled the star-fields depicted in the mural above. ‘I suspect that these are the patterns of the stars as they were, before the coming of Chaos.’

‘As they could be again,’ Tarsus replied. He pointed down the corridor with his hammer. ‘There. The central chamber.’ He moved through the archway at the end of the hall and into the heart of the observatory. Despite its outward facade, the observatory was, in reality, merely a single, immense room.

The central chamber was massive – easily large enough to accommodate a hundred men – with high vaulted ceilings that curved upwards to meet at a central open skylight of stone. Crows clustered about the circumference of the skylight, staring down at the Stormcasts below. A massive dais occupied the centre of the chamber, directly beneath the stone. Sloped, circular steps led upwards to an enormous wheel-like orrery, crafted from black iron and made in the shape of a sun. The orrery was larger than three men, and its colossal rings were spread outwards, so that the dull light from above streamed down through the holes in them, casting weird shadows upon the walls and floor of the chamber.

Ramus gazed at the orrery. ‘More stars,’ he said, his voice echoing through the chamber. ‘The holes in the iron correspond to the patterns on the walls. This used to be a place of study and contemplation.’ He sounded almost wistful.

‘Now it is nothing save a curiosity,’ Tarsus said, looking around.

As with the rocky slopes outside, the floor of the chamber was obscured by broken bones and scattered pieces of armour. All the walls were covered in faded murals and tenacious lichen, except one that was occupied solely by a basket-hilted sword, wedged deep into the stone. Dead clumps of the lichen marked the floor beneath the blade, and the steel had turned cracked and powdery where it had touched the stone. Something about the blade bothered him. He felt a chill, though he could not say why.

‘We should go. I was wrong, there is nothing for us here,’ he said.

‘Tarsus, wait. Look at the orrery,’ Ramus called out. Tarsus turned towards the great dais and peered at the orrery. He blinked, startled. There was something caught in the rings. No, not caught, he realised; trapped. He hadn’t seen it before, because it had been hidden by the rings. But now, he could see it clearly.

Quickly he climbed the dais, Ramus one step behind him. ‘It’s a man,’ Tarsus said.

‘Alive?’ Ramus asked. Around the dais, the Stormcasts spread throughout the chamber. Though they were wary, they were curious about this realm and all it held. Many of them, after all, might have stood in this very chamber in centuries past. They might even have died in its defence, or in defence of any one of the great and shattered citadels thrust up from the dry sod of these lands like scattered tombstones.

‘I do not think so,’ Tarsus said, softly. The orrery moved, albeit very slowly, clicking and creaking along its runnel, and allowed the sunlight to flow through the holes in the iron. The man’s body was held aloft by brass spikes hammered through his wrists and into the curve of one of the orrery’s rings, leaving him to dangle within a makeshift cage. Dried blood coated the marble flesh of his bare arms and head, staining the ornate armour he wore on his torso and legs. Wounds marked his arms and face. His armour too was marked, and by many weapons. A tattered crimson cloak was pooled on the ground at his feet, as if it had been ripped from him and then summarily discarded. The body stank of blood and death, and the aquiline features were slack.

Something about the dead man’s face held Tarsus’ attention. It was not familiar, and yet… was. Were you there, in that final battle when I proved my worth to Sigmar? But how could that be, for that was centuries ago, the Lord-Celestant thought.

‘Help me move these rings.’ Tarsus caught hold of the outer ring and began to push it back, so that the others folded into it. The metal squealed as rusted joints and hinges were propelled into motion. ‘We must release him,’ he said, looking at Ramus. ‘Whoever he was, no man deserves such a fate.’

Ramus did not question him, and together the two Stormcast Eternals managed to move the ancient mechanism so that the body was no longer trapped out of reach.

Ramus caught hold of the dead man’s jaw and looked to Tarsus. ‘These wounds on his flesh – the followers of the Blood God are known for their brutality to those taken in battle. Perhaps he had the ill luck to be taken alive…’

‘Come… closer… and mayhap… I shall tell you.’

Tarsus drew his sword as the stink of old blood washed over them. ‘Ramus, beware,’ he said.

The body twitched in its bonds. Metal scraped metal, and the battered head rose, eyes red and alight with a terrible need. Quicker than either Stormcast could react, the thing’s feet suddenly slid up to brace against the curve of the ring, and the body lunged forwards, held in check only by its pinned wrists.

Bones popped and shifted hideously as it snapped long fangs together, just shy of Ramus’ face. The Lord-Relictor stepped back, hammer ready, as the thing thrashed wildly, biting at the air in a frenzy. Around the dais Stormcasts snapped to attention, weapons raised. A retinue of Decimators began to move towards the dais, axes ready to chop the creature apart. Tarsus waved them back.

‘Hold,’ he rumbled. ‘Stand fast.’ Whatever this thing was, he was confident that he and the Lord-Relictor would be enough to handle it.

‘Enough,’ Ramus said. His hammer snapped out, catching the thing in the stomach, and knocking it from its perch. It squalled as it fell and the spikes tore its flesh. It dangled, shuddering, then coughed and looked up.

‘Haaaa…’ The vulpine jaws sagged, and a bloody stink swept over Tarsus again. The red eyes faded to orange, then yellow, and the tension drained from the dangling shape. ‘Do… do forgive me, I am… I am not at my best,’ the thing croaked.

Tarsus extended his hammer and used it to lift the creature’s head. ‘What are you?’

Even as he asked the question, he realised that he knew the answer. Vampire. The word was jostled loose from the depths of his memory. Had he encountered such creatures before, in his previous life?

Withered lips peeled back from long fangs, and the vampire gave a rattling laugh. ‘A better question might be… what are you?’ One sunken eye narrowed. ‘I smell… storms and clean water. You are not mortal men.’

‘Not for a long time,’ Tarsus said.

‘The same might be said of me, I suppose,’ the vampire rasped.

‘What is your name?’

‘What use is a name, when one is bound thus?’ The creature twitched its thin fingers, causing the brass spikes to screech against the iron rim of the orrery. It winced, in obvious pain. ‘If you release me, perhaps I shall tell you, eh? How curious are you?’

‘Not enough to release a monster,’ Tarsus said, lowering his hammer. ‘Vampires are not to be trusted. They lie as easily as other men breathe, and treachery festers in their veins.’ Even as he spoke, he wondered where the words came from. They felt familiar on his tongue, as if he’d spoken them before. Helstone – the word floated to the surface of his mind.

‘Then kill me,’ the vampire croaked. ‘I would be free of this place one way or another.’ The creature peered at Tarsus, and then gave a harsh chuckle. ‘Unless you lack the fortitude to do so, Stormcast?’

Tarsus’ eyes narrowed. The old, faded memories receded, as suspicion flared. He traded a glance with Ramus, and then replied, ‘I thought you didn’t know what we were.’

‘Did I say that?’ the vampire said. ‘I merely asked a question. The implications thereof were of your creation.’ He showed his fangs. ‘I know what you are, well enough.’

‘Why were you here?’ Tarsus demanded. ‘Speak plainly, or I will leave you here for the carrion birds,’ he said, gesturing to the crows gathered above.

‘Implying… what? That if I answer truthfully you’ll free me?’

‘Enough of this,’ Ramus said. He looked at Tarsus. ‘We have wasted enough time here, bandying words with a talkative corpse. Let us leave this place, Bull-Heart.’ He started down the steps. Tarsus turned to follow.

‘Wait.’

Tarsus turned.

‘I was looking for something.’ The vampire grimaced. ‘A gateway into Stygxx.’ He smiled, though there was little humour in the expression. ‘I was looking for a way… home.’ His hands twitched, and the smile twisted into a snarl of pain.

‘Where is it?’ Ramus demanded.

‘Why do you care?’

‘We seek an audience with the Great Necromancer,’ Tarsus said.

The vampire blinked.

‘With Nagash?’ he hissed, in evident disbelief. ‘Are you mad?’

Tarsus frowned. ‘No. But we have a duty, and we will fulfil it or die in the attempt.’

‘Yes, one or the other is quite likely. Both, even more so,’ the vampire said. He shook his head. ‘I was right. You are mad. Leave me, madmen. Let me rot in peace.’

‘Did you find the gate?’ Tarsus demanded.

The vampire snorted and closed his eyes. ‘No,’ the vampire said. ‘Before I could do so, I was set upon by a servant of the Blood God calling himself the Woebringer. He and that pack of beasts he calls a warband cast down my servants, and bound me here. They thought it amusing, given my nature, to imprison me inside a sun, black iron or otherwise.’

‘Why not simply kill you?’

The vampire’s smile widened. ‘How can you kill what is already dead?’ The smile faded. ‘In truth, I think they took my durability as a challenge…’

Tarsus’ eyes strayed to the many wounds that covered the vampire’s exposed flesh and the blood that stained the dais. ‘They tortured you,’ he said.

‘They are torturing me,’ the vampire hissed. ‘Every few days. The sunlight, weak as it is, and a lack of blood have kept me dangling here – a prisoner of mindless brutes. I have no doubt you’ve encountered the Woebringer’s foraging parties – he sends them out, looking for worthy prey, while the rest of the warband wanders about these hills, fighting anyone and anything they come across, including others of their ilk. When that gets boring, he comes here and carves his name on my flesh.’ The vampire grinned suddenly, and his eyes flashed with amusement. ‘In fact, he’s due any moment now, I’d say.’

The sound of horns suddenly echoed through the chamber.

‘Lord-Celestant, the enemy approaches,’ one of the Prosecutors called from the dome above.

‘How many?’ Tarsus asked. Inwardly, he cursed his inattention to priorities. He’d failed to send the Prosecutors to scout the area around them, and now the enemy was almost upon them.

‘Twice our number, easily,’ came the reply. ‘They’re climbing the eastern slope, and with war-beasts.’

‘Khorgoraths,’ the vampire hissed. ‘Ugly brutes, and hard to kill. The Woebringer quite likes his pets. Dotes on the beasts.’

‘Then we shall make ready for them. Ramus, fortify this chamber for war. It is no keep, but it must do,’ Tarsus said.

‘And what of you, Lord-Celestant?’ Ramus asked.

‘I wish to see the enemy’s strength and disposition for myself,’ Tarsus said, striding towards the largest of the gaps in the wall. As he did so, the Stormcasts he had left outside streamed into the observatory, as their training dictated. The enemy outnumbered them, and only proper discipline would ensure the Bull-Hearts’ victory.

‘Hold,’ Tarsus said, casting his voice to carry over the clatter of sigmarite plates. ‘Shields to the vanguard. Sigmar has provided the room, let us make use of it. Who will hold, when the daemon-winds rage?’

‘Only the faithful,’ his Stormcasts cried. Liberators turned and sank to one knee in the gaps until a low hedge of shields lined each one. Soon more retinues joined them, dropping the bottom rims of their shields atop those of their brethren, creating an improvised wall. Tarsus stepped forwards into an opening the Stormcasts provided for him and surveyed the approaching enemy.

‘By the Realm Celestial,’ Tarsus muttered, as he looked out over the brawling horde. Foul standards rose over seething ranks of howling barbarians and armoured blood warriors. Their numbers dwarfed the small warbands they’d encountered earlier in their travels. This was a horde, in the truest sense of the word. Worst of all were the chained monsters – the khorgoraths – that bellowed and thrashed amidst the mortal warriors, including those who prodded and whipped their charges, driving them into a frenzy.

Despite the clamour of these monstrosities, Tarsus found his eye drawn to a lean, loping shape. The creature was made not of flesh, but of dark metal and other, less identifiable things. Its bat-like features were twisted in an expression of inhuman agony, and he could see that it was held in check by brass chains and festooned with ruinous icons. A febrile steam rose from its twitching, catlike form as it stalked forwards, goaded by a number of bloodstokers who continuously slashed its flanks with barbed whips and prods.

‘What in the name of the great drake is that?’ he murmured.

‘Its name is Ashigaroth,’ the vampire called out, weakly. He had overheard him, somehow.

Tarsus glanced over his shoulder. The vampire wasn’t looking at him, but he noted something in the voice. ‘What is it?’ he asked Ramus.

‘Mine,’ the vampire hissed.

‘A dread abyssal,’ Ramus said, as he joined Tarsus at the wall. ‘They are things of darkness, bound by necromancy.’ He looked at the vampire. ‘He is no mere pilgrim.’

‘No, but I can be of service to you… Free me and I shall aid you,’ the vampire said.

‘We do not need your aid,’ Ramus began. Tarsus waved him to silence, and looked back out over the slope of the tor. The ranks of the enemy stirred, and a broad, muscular shape pushed its way through, dragging a screeching khorgorath in its wake. The warrior was no mere bloodreaver, Tarsus knew. No, he was of the elite – a champion of the Ruinous Powers. His skull was surmounted by great, curling horns and his thick chest, where the armour did not cover his flesh, was branded with the sigils of the Blood God. He carried a wide-bladed axe in his free hand, and the arm that held the monster’s chains was protected by a heavy gauntlet topped by claw-like blades.

‘I am Tarka Woebringer,’ the Chaos champion roared. ‘Exalted amongst all deathbringers, and master of a hundred beasts.’ The khorgorath whose chains he held slavered and gnashed at the air. The champion hauled back on the chains, fighting to keep the beast from breaking loose. ‘This is my place, earned with the red coin of crushed shield and splintered spear. Who are you to walk these stones without my permission?’

‘He’s a talkative one,’ Ramus said, one foot braced on the broken wall, the haft of his hammer resting across his knee.

‘The more he talks, the more time we have to make ready,’ Tarsus said.

‘I know you, for you reek of lightning, and word travels quickly on the roads of ruin,’ the Woebringer continued. ‘The Blood God will smile on me for delivering up your skulls. Aye, and the skull of my slave as well, for I’ve grown tired of cutting his ever-healing flesh.’ The khorgorath roared and shuffled forwards, dragging Tarka a few steps. The champion laughed. ‘Bloodswiller is eager to sup on your entrails, silver-skins. He and his brothers did for the vampire’s bony servants, and they’ll do for you as well – go, Bloodswiller!’ Tarka released the chains and stepped back, as the monster surged forwards.

It was not alone in its mad charge across the broken courtyard that separated the Stormcasts from their foes. From behind the Woebringer, several more of the beasts plunged past, freed from their chains by Tarka’s oncoming warriors. The khorgoraths bounded through the rubble, covering the distance more swiftly than any man or Stormcast. Tarsus’ Prosecutors hurtled down, hammers whirling from their hands to strike with meteoric force. One of the khorgoraths stumbled and fell, its crimson flesh puckered by smoking impact craters.

‘Shields up,’ Tarsus roared, as the first of the monsters thundered towards the gaps in the observatory wall, smashing aside a sundial in its haste.

Liberators were thrown back as the khorgorath barrelled into them. Hammers thudded into its flesh, and warblades bit at its flanks, but it refused to fall. The shield wall disintegrated into flying bodies as the rest of the monsters tore at their foes.

‘Ramus,’ Tarsus said.

‘At your command, Lord-Celestant,’ Ramus cried, as he thrust his reliquary forwards. Lightning crackled about the standard, and then sprang forth in a blinding flash to strike the beast in the chest. The khorgorath stiffened and shrieked.

‘Judicators,’ Tarsus roared. Boltstorm crossbows hummed, and explosive bolts peppered the monster, dropping it to its knees. Liberators swarmed over it, hammers rising and falling in deadly rhythm. Tarsus looked around. Two more of the beasts were locked in combat with the Decimator and Retributor retinues just inside the chamber, and a third was still outside of the observatory, swiping blindly at the swooping forms of the Prosecutors who were holding its attention. But the last, the beast the Woebringer had named Bloodswiller, was charging across the observatory floor towards Ramus, whose attention was on the creatures fighting his Decimator bodyguards.

Tarsus moved to intercept the beast. Hearing the monster’s approach, Ramus turned, but not quickly enough. Bloodswiller’s talons smashed down, knocking the Stormcast Eternal from his feet, his reliquary clattering from his grip. Ramus rolled aside as the khorgorath stomped down, but even as he came to his feet, hammer raised, the monster caught him and lifted him up.

‘Unhand him, beast,’ Tarsus snarled, as he reached them.

His hammer crashed against Bloodswiller’s back, but before he could strike a second blow, the creature backhanded him hard enough to rattle his armour. He was sent flying backwards and crashed down on the dais, cracking the stone. As a Decimator tried to hack through the wrist of the claw holding Ramus, Bloodswiller screeched and tore an unlucky Stormcast apart. It slung the Lord-Relictor down, battering him against the floor and wall.

Ramus’ struggles grew weaker, and none of the nearby warriors could land a telling blow against the frenzied beast to free him. Blue bursts of lightning, spearing upwards towards the heavens, attested to the fate of those who tried. The monster was faster than it looked, and stronger than its kindred.

Tarsus pulled himself to his feet, and readied himself to lunge back into the fray.

‘I can save him,’ he heard someone say. He looked up to see the unsmiling vampire gazing down at him from where he hung.

‘I am faster than you, even now, and stronger,’ the vampire said. ‘You will not get close to it before it kills either you or your friend. More, I owe that particular beast for the blow that landed me here, in such a humiliating state. I can save him, Stormcast – free me. Or die. It matters not to me.’

Tarsus did not hesitate. He spun and brought his sword down, slicing through the rings of the orrery. It toppled forwards, and as it did so Tarsus dropped his weapons and caught it with a grunt of effort. Swiftly, he wrenched the brass spikes free of the vampire’s flesh, and the creature fell to the dais in a crouch as Tarsus chucked the orrery aside. The vampire glanced up at him. Then, with an eyeblink, he was suddenly at the far wall where the sword Tarsus had seen earlier was embedded.

As swift as lightning, the vampire tore the blade free of the wall and sprang towards Bloodswiller. The great crimson brute roared and swung a thickly muscled arm, but the vampire dodged the blow, and, with two hands, drove his blade down into the flesh between the beast’s shoulder and neck. The sword’s blade flared with unholy power, and a crimson steam spurted from the wound. The khorgorath shrieked and flailed, trying to fling the vampire loose. It dropped Ramus and Tarsus charged forwards, weapons at the ready.

‘Well, what are you waiting for, fools?’ the vampire snarled. ‘Help me kill this thing.’

Tarsus lunged forwards. His hammer crashed against one of the Bloodswiller’s bone-studded knees, splintering it. The beast shrilled and sank down, still clawing futilely at the vampire, who held tight to his perch on its shoulder. The vampire hissed and gave the hilt of his sword a vicious twist. Then he tore it free in a welter of gore and leapt away. The khorgorath fell forwards, its talons gouging the ancient marble floor of the observatory. ‘Now, Stormcast – strike now!’ the vampire said.

Tarsus drove his hammer down on the exposed crown of the Bloodswiller’s skull, cracking it. Ramus, having regained his feet and his hammer, joined him. Together, they struck it again and again, until black ichor spilled across the floor, and the beast fell still. Tarsus looked around – the other khorgoraths had met similar fates, brought down by the weapons and divine fury of the Stormcasts. Already, his warriors were reorganising their lines, and readying themselves for whatever might come next. He looked at the vampire, who said, ‘What now?’

‘Now? Now we finish this.’ Tarsus turned towards the gap and extended his sword towards the distant shape of the Woebringer. ‘Is that the best you can muster?’ he shouted, clashing his weapons. ‘We are still here. Who will stand?’ he bellowed.

‘Only the faithful,’ the Hallowed Knights roared in response. Hammers crashed against shields. ‘Only the faithful!’

Tarka threw back his head and screamed in rage. The Woebringer sliced the air with his axe and his warriors surged forwards – a snarling horde, clad in the colours of blood and brass – bloodreavers, blood warriors and worse things bounding in the wake of the mortals.

Tarsus stepped back from the gap. ‘Stand fast, Bull-Hearts,’ he said. ‘We have won a short reprieve, but they come again, in strength. Judicators, thin their ranks. Fall back when they reach the gaps. It’ll be close work then. Hammer and shield work, eh, my friends?’ he said, swatting a nearby Liberator’s shield with the flat of his sword. ‘Who will be triumphant?’

‘Only the faithful,’ came the reply. Tarsus nodded.

‘Only the faithful,’ he said firmly. ‘Stand fast, and fight as if Sigmar himself were watching. Or as if Ramus were watching, for he’s closer.’

The air throbbed with the hum of boltstorm crossbows firing and men screaming. Tarsus glanced quickly towards the gaps in the wall where the Judicators had formed two firing ranks: one kneeling, one standing. Together they fired into the disorganised mass of foes climbing towards them. The Prosecutors harried the enemy as they charged, adding to the tally claimed by the Judicators. They had earned a few moments of peace before the battle would be well and truly joined. Nevertheless the enemy pressed on, and soon they would be spilling into the observatory.

Tarsus caught Ramus staring at the vampire. ‘You do not trust him.’

‘You said it yourself – he cannot be trusted.’

‘He saved you,’ Tarsus said.

‘He saved himself. My fate was incidental,’ Ramus countered.

‘Indeed it was,’ the vampire said, striding towards them. ‘But, for the moment, our paths align. They have my beast. I would have him back. He is… precious to me.’

Tarsus nodded. ‘So be it. But if you turn on us, know that it will be my hand that strikes you down.’ He raised his hammer for emphasis. The vampire smirked.

‘Duly noted,’ he said, as he laid his sword across his shoulder.

There was a clatter of sigmarite as the Judicators fell back, and the Liberator retinues moved to take their place in the vanguard. ‘Shields up,’ Tarsus said, his voice carrying throughout the chamber. Shields rose, and then slammed together, rim to rim, forming a wall of steel.

‘Hold the line,’ Tarsus continued. He tightened his grip on the hafts of his weapons. ‘Move on my order.’

‘Where do you wish me to go?’ the vampire said, bowing shallowly. ‘Shall I take my place in line and fight alongside your warriors?’

‘Fight as it pleases you,’ Tarsus said, watching the approach of the enemy. ‘You are no longer a prisoner.’ He glanced at the vampire. ‘You are free.’

The vampire blinked. Then, he inclined his head. ‘As you say.’ He turned towards the broken wall as the howls of the blood-worshippers filled the air. The first bloodreaver burst through the gap at a run – an axe in either hand – and more followed. Soon a wave of murderous fury swept towards the waiting Liberators, who continued their war-rhythm, waiting for their Lord-Celestant’s order.

Tarsus stepped off the dais, arms spread and weapons ready. ‘Hold, Bull-Hearts. Hold,’ he rumbled. ‘Ramus, call the storm.’

Ramus lifted his reliquary and slammed the haft down so that the sound quavered through the air like the peal of a bell. Outside the observatory, a heavy rain began to fall. Thunder rumbled, and the blood-worshippers still outside screamed as crackling streamers of lightning slashed through their ranks, speeding along armour and edges of weapons to lance into branded flesh. Men died in droves, cooked in their armour, or else set aflame as they ran. Confusion swept throughout the enemy.

‘Lower your horns,’ Tarsus roared, pushing through the ranks to the front. Liberators bent, their shields thrust to the fore and hammers held low. ‘And… forwards.’ As one, the Liberator retinues began to march on. Tarsus led the way, picking up speed with every step. His warriors kept pace and, with a thunderous crash, the shield wall met the front rank of the bloodreavers. Shields locked as the Liberators pushed against the enemy, driving them back. Tarsus fought at the fore, making room for his warriors to move forwards with every blow.

More enemy warriors continued to press through the gaps, even as the front ranks were forced back. Frenzied blood warriors tore through their own fellows as the crush of battle intensified. The Liberators fought efficiently, using their foe’s numbers against them. Hammers cracked against knees and shot forwards to crush chests. In other such encounters, it had been enough. The Stormcasts were as relentless in their own way as the servants of the Blood God were in theirs, and when they marched no enemy could stand against them.

But soon, numbers began to tell against discipline. Howling blood warriors hooked shields and arms with their axes, dragging the Stormcasts into the depths of the mob and ripping them asunder in explosions of blue light. The hulking shapes of khorgoraths lurked outside the observatory and tore at the remaining walls in a frenzy, trying to widen the gaps. Debris sifted down from above as cracks raced across the roof and walls of the structure. A section collapsed with a roar, crushing Stormcasts and bloodreavers alike.

‘Fall back,’ Tarsus shouted as he blocked an axe blow. ‘Tighten the line and fall back from the walls.’

Those Liberators who could began to back away, shields still locked. Others could not break away from their opponents and were swiftly surrounded and brought low. More explosions of searing blue light streaked skywards, and Tarsus cursed. He looked around, watching Ramus organise the Retributors and Decimators for a counter-charge.

It wasn’t going to be enough. They were outnumbered ten to one and the enemy wasn’t afraid of death. They didn’t care if they were crushed, mangled or pierced. They kept coming regardless. He needed a new strategy.

‘Lock shields,’ he cried, setting his feet. Around him, Liberator retinues stopped their retreat and did as he ordered, forming up around the wide steps of the dais. ‘We hold here. Not one step farther.’

As he spoke, the Prosecutors hurtled into the chamber, striking like lightning and retreating swiftly, trying to take some of the pressure off their comrades. Celestial hammers crashed into the closely packed mobs of bloodreavers, hurling broken bodies into the air. But the remainder pressed on. Tarsus waved the Judicators forwards. Several of the retinues had made the dais defensible, moving the heavy bookshelves and stone biers into place like barricades. Those who were not firing from behind their improvised ramparts moved quickly to take up position behind the Liberators.

Lightning flickered across the ranks of the enemy, blinding and burning them. A section of the shield wall opened, and Ramus led his Paladin brotherhoods forwards. The great two-handed axes of the Decimators chopped through crimson armour with ease, as the lightning hammers of the Retributors smashed the strongest Chaos champions from their feet. But the enemy pressed close about them, and even the heavily armoured Paladins could not stand alone against such a tide. Still too many of them, he thought. He’d hoped the observatory would provide some defence against numbers, but it wasn’t enough.

Over the heads of his warriors and the heaving ranks of the enemy, Tarsus saw the Woebringer fighting his way through his own followers, dragging the creature the vampire had named Ashigaroth in his wake and striking down anyone too slow to get out of his way. The dread abyssal came unwillingly, continuously fighting its chains.

As Tarsus took a step towards them, he caught sight of the vampire crouched atop the shattered dome of the observatory with arms spread and body angled so that he leaned over the chamber below. A guttural chant rose from his lips as he threw back his head. The dread abyssal began to buck and scream in its bindings. The bloodstoker struck the creature with his lash again and again, but the beast only grew more agitated. A weird purple light played across the piles of bones scattered on the floor and in the corners of the great chamber. They began to shiver and rustle, and Tarsus felt his hair stand on end.

‘Stop him,’ Tarka howled, motioning towards the vampire with his axe as he stepped into the observatory, hauling Ashigaroth after him by its chains. The bloodstoker followed him and struck the dread abyssal again before smashing off the chains that bound it, gesturing at the vampire with his blade. But rather than lunging immediately towards its former master, the creature twisted about and snapped its ebony jaws shut on the bloodstoker’s head. Tarka lashed out at Ashigaroth with his axe, and the monster struck at him with its talons, scraping his armour and knocking him back a step as it bounded over him and towards a nearby Stormcast. The latter was crushed to the ground, his body evaporating into blue light. The dread abyssal screeched and flung itself into the melee, ravaging all those it could reach, without distinction. Blood warrior and Stormcasts alike fell to its frenzy.

Tarsus charged towards the Woebringer, bulling aside any bloodreaver foolish enough to get in his way. Behind him, he heard the vampire’s chant growing louder, but the Woebringer was his only concern. Even as Tarsus closed with his foe, the Chaos champion staggered to his feet and sent his axe slicing out. Hammer, sword and axe clashed in a whirring dance of death as the Bull-Heart and the Woebringer traded blows.

‘I will take your armour and mount it upon my lodge-pole, warrior. Your skull will be my drinking cup, and your weapons I will give to my slaves,’ the Woebringer growled, as the clawed gauntlet he wore tore Tarsus’ warcloak. ‘After I am finished with you, I shall peel the flesh from the bones of a dead man, and wear it as my cloak!’ He sliced at Tarsus’ gut.

‘Are you here to talk, or to fight?’ Tarsus said, as he avoided the blow. His hammer thudded down, cracking the red armour that covered Tarka’s shoulder. The Chaos champion howled and reversed his axe, digging it upwards in a mighty blow. Tarsus stepped back, but not quickly enough, as the edge of the axe drew a spray of sparks from his chest plate and sent him staggering back. The Woebringer crashed into him, driving an elbow into the side of the Lord-Celestant’s head. His opponent was strong, stronger than any Tarsus had yet faced.

Tarsus fell, and only narrowly managed to avoid his opponent’s axe as it crashed down where his head had been. Before the Woebringer could launch another blow, however, a broken sword crashed against him. Tarsus looked up and saw the fleshless limbs of several skeletons gathered about him protectively. The undead warriors attacked the Woebringer, jabbing at him with splintered spears and hacking with blunt, chipped swords. More clung to him, grabbing his arms or the great horns that topped his bestial head. He roared wordlessly, lashing out to shatter a skeleton. The dead thing fell, but crawled back towards him.

Khorgoraths screamed in agony as they were swarmed by skeletons and dragged down through sheer weight of numbers. The dead rose up amidst the press of the melee and fell upon the Woebringer’s warriors with silent savagery, cutting them down even as they fought the Stormcasts. Everywhere, the silent legions hurled themselves into the fray, compelled by the vampire’s will and sorcery.

Tarsus got to his feet as the Woebringer whirled towards him, bleeding from a dozen wounds, but showing no signs of weakness.

‘I defeated the dead before, and I will do so again. But first, I will take your skull, silver-skin,’ the Chaos leader shrieked as he charged towards Tarsus, smashing aside the skeletons in his path. Tarsus raised his hammer, ready to meet his foe’s charge, when a black shadow spread over them both.

The Woebringer looked up. Tarsus took advantage of his opponent’s distraction and caught the Woebringer with a blow that rocked him off his feet. As he fell, the dread abyssal dropped out of the air and onto the Chaos champion with a cry. The vampire sat astride the creature, and laughed as Ashigaroth’s claws tore the life from the fallen warrior. As the creature tore at the body, the vampire looked down at Tarsus.

‘I do apologise, my friend, but… debts of blood were owed to both Ashigaroth and myself,’ he said. He smiled thinly.

Tarsus shook his head and looked around. The battle was over. And now, the living and the dead stared at each other warily across the bodies of their common foe. He looked up at the vampire.

‘You have my thanks,’ Tarsus said, careful to keep his weapons lowered, reminding himself that the dead could not be trusted. The vampire chuckled, as if reading his thoughts.

‘Mannfred,’ the vampire said. ‘I am Mannfred.’

‘Mannfred, then,’ Tarsus said. He hesitated, then extended his hand. Mannfred stared at it for a moment, as if puzzled, then he clasped Tarsus’ forearm. ‘I am Tarsus, Lord-Celestant of these warriors.’

‘And I am Mannfred von Carstein, Count of the Hanging Wood,’ Mannfred said, bowing deeply. As he straightened, he said, ‘Do you still wish to find a way into the underworld, friend Tarsus?’

‘Then you did find a gate here,’ Tarsus said.

‘No,’ Mannfred said. His smile widened. ‘Not here.’ He slid from the back of his monstrous steed. ‘But I know of one, and can lead you there.’

‘Why?’

‘Call it a debt of honour,’ Mannfred said. ‘I owe you, for freeing me, Tarsus of the Stormcasts.’ He paused, as if thinking, before adding, ‘Perhaps for more than just that.’ He extended his hand. ‘And as you’ve seen, I pay my debts.’

Tarsus hesitated. He looked up, into Mannfred’s unblinking yellow eyes, judging. Somehow, he felt as if he had lived through this before, and wondered if it had turned out for the best then. Somehow, he didn’t think so.

But he had a mission to complete. And live or die, he would see it done.

Tarsus clasped Mannfred’s hand.

‘Lead on then, Mannfred von Carstein. Where you go, the Stormcasts will follow.’

BENEATH THE BLACK THUMB

David Guymer

I

‘You come to me offering death,’ said Copsys Bule, stabbing his long-handled trident into the soft red soil. Blood or something distantly akin to it oozed lazily up around the sinking tines. ‘A kingly gift, envoy, but death flourishes where I choose to sow it. I am a harvester of death.’

Kletch Scabclaw studied him with eyes that could have gleaned weakness from diamond. They were milk yellow, and glared over the mangy scrap of man-skin that he held pressed to his muzzle in the claws from which he had taken his name. The look on his furry, verminous face might have been one of disgust, though at what, or who, was something the plague priest kept for himself.

‘A new age begins, they squeak-say.’ Spreading his paws, the skaven irritably swatted aside a buzzing bloat fly. Through Bule’s blurred vision it appeared to have three eyes, until the ratman snapped his claws and his vision once again became clear. ‘War comes. Even to you.’

Bule snapped his head up.

The skaven immediately backed up a pace, hunched for fight or flight. Light on his foot-paws, he stood atop the rotten mush that went up to Bule’s greaves. His right paw had gone for the weapon he concealed beneath his robes, and he hissed a warning through his scented rag.

Bule smiled, rotten flesh yielding to produce something too wide for a human mouth.

Slowly, Kletch held up his empty paws, then the gnawed-on nub of his tail. It switched over the ratman’s head with irritation. ‘I did not come-scurry all way from clan-burrow to fight-quarrel. The Black Thumb and Clan Rikkit were friend-allies in the Age of Chaos. Is written. Is remembered. Now we must-need fight tooth to claw again.’

Bule turned his back with a mild shake of the head. Withdrawing his bloodied trident, he stabbed three new aeration holes into the soil, the tines spearing an inch deep before hitting something unyielding. Baring the black stubs of his teeth he gave a grunt of pleasure, planted his foot to the back of the fork-head, and rocked back and forth on the handle.

Levering the trident against his bloated girth, he turned over the unyielding patch in a waft of decomposing flesh.

The human corpse tore off its blanket of topsoil and flopped over. A face that was grey-black and runny and lovely as a crop of sweet tubers fresh out of the ground stared up at the slow circling stars with the clarity of the dead. Disturbed maggots and worms squirmed under the starlight, as if divulging some great secret under torture. Bule watched them re-bury themselves, lulled by the drone of a billion bloat flies and the rank cackle of crows.

Wriggle. Wriggle.

‘Rotbringer,’ the skaven prompted him.

Bule pinched his eyes wetly, mind asquirm with worms and portent. The ratman continued.

‘The lightning men hit clan-burrows in Cripple Fang, Untamed Lands and Putris Bog. Even clan-cousins from far Ghyran come-flee, tunnelling the realm-places to bring word of war.’

Shouldering his trident, Bule turned around suddenly enough to elicit a low squeal of alarm from the plague priest of Clan Rikkit. The ratman leapt to one side, reaching again for his concealed weapon, but Bule merely squelched through the spot he had been occupying as though he were a zombie suddenly impelled to be elsewhere.

‘Bule. Bule!’

Copsys Bule ignored him, his armour emitting a mould-muffled clank with every step. Several of the spiked plates were split apart at the joins, but the damage to his armour had been inflicted not from without but from within. Corpse gasses distended his belly, opening up the plates from the inside like a fat grub eating its way out of an egg sac. Everywhere there remained living skin, swellings, boils and tumours caused further buckling, mottling the once-green metal to black.

Not since before the Age of Chaos had Bule known an equal, and his gardens brought weeping harvest to lands from the Bloodbloom Fields in the south to the Avalundic Ice Kingdoms in the north, from the peat bogs of Murgid Fein to the unconquerable Rabid Heights and their gargant kings.

His demesne was too vast for one name.

It encompassed the Pox Sands, the great Bloat Lake and the Plantation of Flies – fleshwork patches stitched with irrigation ditches that steamed with blight and hummed with spawning daemonflies. As far into the bubonic haze as the eye could see, scrofulous, once-human things tilled the soil with rakes and hoes, or waded into pools with long prods to turn the bloated corpses that floated in them, gestating towards ripeness. Hundreds expired in the time it took Bule to walk past them, and were dragged away to the nurseries to replenish the soil in their turn.

But it was the nature of lesser beings to attach small names to great things.

They called it the Corpse Marshes.

Seemingly at random, feeling where the dead desired his knife, he squatted down into the mire. A sigh of simple pleasure escaped him. The crucified remains of men, women and children staked the ground in serried rows for a stretch greater than a man could ride in a day. Here could be found the bodies of almost every race, including several that no longer existed anywhere but as they did here now. For reasons fathomable to few but Bule himself, he called it his Living Orchard. A foetid breeze moaned through the dead, making them hum and sway, like lush-leaved trees in bloom. Drawing a curved knife from his arming belt, he sawed away a hand that liquefaction was beginning to pull away from the wrist. It was human. A nectarine blackness trickled from the cut. He licked it from his hand, eyes closed in ecstasy.

There was no plan in his mind of how his garden should be, but he knew what needed to be done towards its completion. And it would be soon. Very soon.

The thought thrilled him even as the part of him that had cherished these labours was saddened by their imminent passing.

‘There are a great many of your kind here,’ Bule said, aware that the ratman had followed him and was now crouching on an old wall behind him. Keeping his distance. ‘Your fur. Your guts. You teem with life like no other.’ He cut away another sagging limb with a clinical slash. ‘Nothing rots as quickly as a skaven rots. Nothing embraces Grandfather Nurgle so completely.’

‘Is that what you want-wish me to take back to my masters?’

‘Ask me again come the high moon.’

‘Why-why? What changes then?’

Bule licked his knife with a wide smile. Birds cried in fevered tongues, a diseased animal sagacity that he might one day have the fortune to fathom but half of. ‘You come on an auspicious night. For the first time in thousands of years the stars will align my realmgate with another.’

‘And then?’ Kletch hissed, suddenly wary.

‘Ask me again come the high moon.’

II

Fistula, First Blightlord of the Black Thumb, delighter in sickness and death, opened the orruk from hip to hip with a sawing reverse of his blade. A surprised snort issued from the greenskin’s tusked helmet, but the fighter remained upright, tough as necrotic flesh and just as dead to pain. Holding its squirming guts in a fist the size of a buckler, it swung its axe at the blightlord with a roar.

Hardwearing, vicious – orruks were infamous. But the fever spreading fire through its veins from the infected belly wound made it sluggish. Fistula sidestepped the clumsy slash with ease then broke its shin with a heel jab. It was sweating. Most men would never know that an orruk could suffer the way this one now did. But still it would not yield.

Fistula appreciated that.

Dashing aside its weakening backslash on the flat of his sword, he stepped in behind its flailing trunk of an arm, close enough to smell the daemon plaguelings rampaging through its veins, then plunged his parrying dagger through its throat.

The orruk’s mammoth jaws snapped spasmodically as Fistula tore his dagger loose and kicked the brute away. Blood from the torn artery sprayed in a rising arc and painted the open face of Fistula’s helm green. He gasped. Partly to drink the wetness from the air. Partly for the raw pleasure of doing so.

Fistula looked down on the beaten orruk. It was still snapping its jaws even as it drowned in its fluids and its eyes turned white. Fistula could have ended it quickly, should have, perhaps, but endemic as the orruks were in the shadow of the Rabid Heights there were never enough to last. He looked up.

The orruks were still fighting in scattered mobs spread out along the length of the narrow gulch into which the Black Thumb had pursued them, but they were broken. Not in the manner of a human or Rotbringer host. They did not run. Rather, they held on with the witless tenacity of sick beasts. Hardy as they were as a race, all bore the stigmata of infection: weeping sores and crusted cuts that would not heal. For every hundred that lay dead with an obvious wound, a hundred more twitched on the ground with blood foam in their mouths and flies on their rotting flesh.

Gors and bestigors plunged headlong into the fray, hacking and goring with frenzied abandon. Rotbringer knights on maggot-riddled steeds galloped up the steeply climbing wall of the gulch to strike at the orruk warleader. The huge beast was surrounded by his biggest and most brutal, but was already heavily beset by the Tzeentchian warhost driving in from the opposite side of the ravine.

The Changeling host was a cacophonous legion of colours and shapes. Gold glittered. Strange voices whispered. Flames of every cast, smell and texture danced along the crossbars of banner poles, and suits of almost-sentient armour whispered secrets to the deepest subconscious of all nearby with a mind to hear. Daemonflies buzzed over everything and everyone. Blight hounds ran along the flanks, pulling down the isolated and the maimed. Giant slugs burrowed up from under the hardpan to swallow Tzeentchian warriors whole while plague drones and sleek daemonic screamers swept at each other in pitched battle for the skies.

The orruks had become almost incidental.

Fistula read the kindred mood in his opposite number, the hunger, coming from somewhere out there in the gulch. They had both come to torment prey, but now, starved of a true challenge, they threw their warriors at the other with greater ferocity than they had ever before.

It was something that Copsys Bule had become too fat and old to realise. Even the most rapacious of plagues could be tamed, lingering only on the scraps left by those they had once devastated in their millions.

A stamp of hellsteel and an ebullient cry called Fistula back from the abstract of the battle. Through a congested melee of putrid blightkings and sickening orruk fighters half again their size, a Chaos warrior encased in full plate armour of azure and gold barged towards him. His helm was solid metal, with only the etching of half-lidded eyes through which some enchantment perhaps permitted him to see. From the sides, golden horns spiralled inwards towards infinity. The Tzeentchian knuckled aside an orruk and roared the final strides with his broadsword swept high overhead.

With a shout, Fistula pivoted on the spot and smacked his saw-toothed blade hard into the larger blade’s descent. It was not a parry. He struck the Tzeentchian’s broadsword as though meaning to do it harm. The impact arced up his arm. He felt it vibrate in his teeth. Reflex action shocked his fingers open and would have lost him his blade if not for the blood and pus that pooled endlessly into his grip from infected calluses and glued palm to hilt.

The Tzeentchian reeled as though it had been struck on the head by a blow that had left its helmet ringing. Its heavy sword trailed, elbows locked in spasm with the aftershock of keeping a hold of his blade.

Fistula struck off the warrior’s head with a single blow to the neck and laughed.

He was the opposite of Copsys Bule in most ways. Where the Lord of Plagues had become a bloated wreck of a man, Fistula’s body was wasted, the favour in which he was held written in lesions on pared bone and in the ropey musculature that seeped and seeped without end. He was a warrior. A fever raged in his mind that no level of war could ever purge and his armour, lighter by preference, was etched with tallies of the blights he had tasted and the civilizations he had brought low.

‘Secure the dead,’ bellowed a cadaverous, jaundiced blightking wearing a cruel harness of scythe-edged plates and hanging mail. He lay into the orruks with a pair of matching knives, bloodily proficient in his preferred mode of killing. Fistula was one of the few to know him as Vitane. To most, he was Leech. The blightking turned and waved a come now gesture. ‘Bring up the wagons. If we are not back by high moon it will go poorly for you.’

Rattling in under a fug of disease came a dozen wagons. Each was drawn by a team of six wheezing horses, their loose wheels the size of a man, their high sides scratched with the knife marks of individual warriors and with a splintered parapet of aged wood. Leprous harvesters in hoods and swaddling leaned over the parapet with hooks to draw up the dead. The drovers called a halt. The horses snuffled in their traces, hacking, puking, biting at each other’s flea-ravaged coats.

Fighting his way to Fistula’s side, Vitane looked down on the orruk still dying at his lord’s feet. The leathery tissue was continuing to shrivel away, the liquidised remainder sinking around the bones.

‘He will be unhappy. This one is worthless.’

Fistula sneered. Vitane was old enough to have fought with Copsys Bule from the beginning, lacking enough in ambition or favour to prevent his star being eclipsed by the man he now followed into battle.

‘I am not here to scavenge and I am not here for Bule,’ Fistula said.

They could not all dine off glories past.

Fistula scanned the confusion for the Tzeentchian champion. Warriors of every stripe filled the gulch from wall to wall with a riot of colour and noise. Even the sky reflected the vivid clash, the bubonic haze that blanketed Bule’s demesnes turned a sickly turquoise by the rolling cumulus of Tzeentchian fire that followed the war horde from the north. Twisted trees covered in naked sores and weeping black foliage clung to the ridgeline. They swayed under the opposing winds.

Fistula shivered though he could not say why. His eyes narrowed.

There was something there, hidden under the drooping canopy. Fistula glimpsed a figure, or the suggestion of one. More a feeling than something he could later describe and claim with certainty had been real. He perceived a sense of robes, of a gaunt, skeletal height, but his overriding impression was one of watchfulness, of many, many sets of eyes trained upon every aspect of this moment in time. In a blink of the mind it was gone. The inkling of its prior being was a subliminal glamour that nevertheless refused to fully fade, as though he had gazed overlong upon a daemon and imprinted its corona of power onto his mind.

He shook his head, and with the blessed release of a peeled scab pulled off his helmet and wiped the orruk’s gore from his hairless scalp.

The sense of watchfulness remained on him, a nagging question at the back of his mind. He felt judgement, though for what, Fistula doubted he had the faculties to comprehend. Nor did he care. He bared his teeth in anticipation and raised his sword to signal the charge. His own glorification was all that mattered.

Let it watch. Let it judge.

III

Kletch Scabclaw spread his arms out to either side while a skavenslave hung the heavy ambassadorial cloak of Clan Rikkit over his shoulders. It was a bit much for the cloying humidity of the Corpse Marshes, and itched in hard-to-reach places that no garment so august should. Its fleas had been passed from priest to priest for two hundred years, and were now the hardy descendents of those that had survived the clan’s full arsenal of pesticidal sorcery.

His dresser ducked under his arm and shuffled around to the front.

The slave was naked but for its own scrappy fur and the brands of clan and owner, but Kletch was only partially reassured by that. To his mind there were any number of innovative places in which a determined assassin might secrete a weapon. His yellow eyes drilled into the side of the slave’s head. The wretch bared its throat with a whimper, stabbing its thumb several times in its panic to fasten the cloak’s rat bone collar. Kletch fidgeted as the slave fussed.

It was too hot. The garish green light of the warpstone braziers around the low-roofed tent was too bright. The spiced scent they gave off to hold back the reek was too sickly sweet.

‘How much-long to high moon?’ he asked of the plague monk seated against the wall of the pavilion behind his back.

‘Soon-soon.’

Scurf’s piebald fur was pox-scarred, so denuded of hair from his own incessant scratching that he resembled a game bird that had been abandoned before it could be fully plucked. The crusted word-bringer set his claw quill onto the stack of man-skin parchment on which he had been cataloguing the many new diseases they had encountered since their arrival in the Corpse Marshes and shrugged. ‘An hour, I think-guess.’

Kletch wriggled his shoulders in discomfort. ‘Something is about to happen-come. I feel-feel in my claws.’

‘I feel-smell also,’ said Scurf, always eager to concur.

The slave scurried over to the brass-ribbed chest sitting open by the hide wall of the tent, and returned with Kletch’s warpstone-tipped staff. Kletch snatched it off the slave with a snarled rebuke. Feeling a little better, he gave the air a fresh sniff, opening his mouth to taste. Between the reek of putrefaction and his own efforts to keep it at bay, there was little left to be smelled, but somehow he knew, knew, that there was more than just the three of them present in that tent.

‘You want-wish to go home?’ asked Scurf.

‘No,’ said Kletch, meaning yes. ‘Clanlords will not reward us for returning with paws empty. The lightning men hit them much-hard in lots-many places. Clanlords grow desperate. They… make bad decisions when they are desperate.’

The slave scurried back bearing a bottle filled with a greenish red liquor that it poured into a goblet. Steam hissed off the cup as the liquid hit the lacquer. The slave bobbed its head low and presented the potation. Kletch eyed the rodent severely. With a gulp, the slave brought the cup to its lips and took the daintiest sip.

Kletch took the goblet from his retching slave, stole his nerve, and then downed its contents. He grimaced, throat tightening, musk glands clenching, and stuck out his tongue. ‘Blegh!’

‘Best-best potions taste worst,’ said Scurf sagely.

Clan Rikkit had once been part of Pestilens, before a tunnel collapse in the ways between worlds had separated them from their brethren. They still retained many of the old immunities, but the cautious rat was the healthy rat.

‘This all a waste of time anyway,’ said Scurf, picking up his quill once more and dunking it in the shelled ink bug still twitching on his table. Scratching away at the parchment, he went on. ‘He has many warriors, but this not the Copsys Bule used to frighten my litter when I was small-young.’

Kletch was unconvinced. Bule could afford to let the world pass him by for a millennium or two if he chose to do so, of that he was certain. And if Bule was any less than the tyrant of clan legend then Kletch was glad that he had not been the envoy sent to treat with that Lord of Plagues.

‘One hour more we can wait. Let us see this over-done, but have all my warriors ready to go.’

‘Yes-yes,’ said Scurf, carefully folding his quill and packing it away.

Kletch twitched aside the tent flap and slipped out into the muggy night with wrinkled nose and downcast eyes. Two from the two-dozen plague monks quietly chittering their praises on the broken ground outside of the tent fell into step behind him.

A colossal fortress-temple had once stood here, built by a people who had worshipped the stars and raised towers of incredible scale that they might feel the distant objects of their faith more keenly. For all that their eyes had attended the heavens, they had clearly also been masters of stone. Many of the great structures still stood though they were ruinous now, vertebral columns of stone that had been yellowed by blight, weather and war. Copsys Bule called this place the Hanging Gardens, named so for the thousands upon thousands of dead and dying strung up from its moss-clad defensive walls. Those still alive writhed in fever so that the walls themselves appeared in motion. Their mouths moved but no evidence of their torment could be heard from them, not above the flies.

To count the flies was to court insanity. They were infinite, swarms within swarms, billowing over the corrupted fortress in such numbers that at times they were as the chitinous outer wings of a beetle closing over the world and shutting out the sky. At such times the drone was a gnawing on the boundary between earth and heavens, between real and unreal. At other times it was simply maddening. It set the teeth on edge.

The Clan Rikkit camp pavilion was set up on the rubble where the innermost gate had crumbled to create a rockery populated with razor weeds that were watered each day with the blood of year-dead men. It would foul a charge as surely as any gate ever would, assuming any enemy had the fortitude to survive as far as Bule’s innermost defensive line.

From that vantage Kletch had an unimpeded and deeply unpleasant view.

The Corpse Marshes were monstrous. It reminded him only somewhat of the honeycombed pox caves of Murgid Fein, where diseases were bred, mutated and harvested from slaves of every race. But here the scale was far more epic. The very fabric of the world for as far as his dim eyes could show him felt rotten, perished. The reports of all of his senses scurried about his mind to decry its wrongness and even he, master of the industrialisation of degradation, felt sickened by it.

A geyser of corpse gas rippled upwards and outwards from a sinkhole further down near the gatehouse. Grime spattered back over the rotten gates and the band of warriors marching home over its splinters. A column of plague beasts and meat wagons followed them. Kletch recognised Fistula’s pack: the most useful of Bule’s warriors, but a drop in the septic ocean of his horde.

Leaning against his staff, he settled in to wait.

‘Another day spent in genuflection to our lord’s placidity, envoy?’ said Fistula as he tramped up the slope, evidently bound for the same destination as Kletch. The champion was spattered with loose gore and beaming, contempt for all and sundry and for Kletch in particular vibrant in his bloodshot eyes.

The blightlord walked over, laden carts drawn by withered, pestilential beasts creaking on behind him. Kletch stiffened with immediate suspicion and sniffed at the flies buzzing lazily after the vehicles’ cargo. The experiments of Clan Burrzik in breeding eavesdropping mosquitoes had faltered as a consequence of the clan’s incompetence, but one never knew. One never knew.

‘Maybe,’ he said, then chirred something conciliatory and gestured with his tail to the top of the hill.

There, encircled by a ring of luminous white pillars that in their cleanliness exuded a sense of power and prominence, was a marble archway carved with astrological constellations and runic notations. It stood bare to the stars as if waiting only on their call, and even inert as it was, the sight of it sent a frisson of imagined dread running to the tip of his tail. He could understand why the ancients here had built such a monument to the heavens.

He licked his gums nervously. ‘What does Bule want-think will happen tonight?’

‘I can tell you what I think will happen.’

Kletch caught the blightlord’s look and read the need there. Battle. Survival. Aims not identical to his, but with cunning words and enough will perhaps complementary ones. He glanced upwards again to mark the approach of high moon, his neck, accustomed to tunnels and caves, already sore from continually doing so. That was when he noticed what had been worrying at him since he left his tent.

The stars were moving.

IV

For a count of years numbering seven times seven times seven times seven, Copsys Bule had tended his garden. He did not know how many millions he had pulled out of the ground since that first day. Unlike some, he kept no lists, no ledgers, except that which existed in his mind. He knew only that his god saw it as good.

Turning his knife so that it was point down, he pushed the blade into the mushy chest of the body spread like soft grey cheese over dry bread across the trencher table in front of him. There was no resistance. It was like cutting into marrow jelly.

Flesh separated in a great swelling of maggots as Bule carved from collar to coccyx. A comingling of organs and body juices dribbled from the gash. The smell was pure ambrosia. His belly gurgled. Decay was a master gourmet. It loosened the fat, softened fibres and pulled meat from the bone. It brought out a depth and range of flavours that the impatient flesh-eaters of Khorne or the squeamish that burned their meat with fire could never experience.

He licked the juices from his knife blade, mouth distending to accommodate his entire fist. The panoply of tastes and odours gave him shivers and he closed his eyes.

The added spice of plague magic, the power of new life, tingled on the tip of his tongue and then diffused through him like a warmth. He withdrew his hand, sucked clean, and then hung the knife from one of the curing hooks that protruded from his armour.

‘All. Ready,’ snuffled Gurhg, the bray shaman thumping the ground with a skull-topped stave as he walked around the stirring realmgate. Standing behind the sagging trenchers in an octed around the realmgate, blightlords and champions watched solemnly. The shaman raised his bull snout and snorted, bone fetishes and feathers tinkling from blistered horns. He closed his eyes and emitted a low sigh that made the hanging flesh of his throat quiver. ‘Feel. Him. Stirring.’

Bule spread his arms with a smile. Torchlight flickered from sconces set in the columns. Brass tocsins played by hooded slaves with wire brushes hummed a sonorous chorus.

‘Feast, my children.’

To a great squishing of meat and crumbling of rot-softened bone, the gathered worthies of the Rotbringers tucked in with a hunger. Bule watched them all, hands across his swollen girth. There was Fistula, ever prideful, ambitious, filling his mouth with the same abandon as the others. Beside him the old bloat hound, Vitane, sucked jelly from his fingers and laughed at a joke. Their greatly honoured guest from Clan Rikkit was hunched behind a corner trencher, nibbling diplomatically at a bit of bone and throwing uneasy glances up at the sky. Copsys Bule basked in the paternal glow.

It was nearly time. The magic was rising, and Bule could feel the realmgate responding. For a moment he could feel the connections that ran through the Eightpoints to some other place, some other realm, where one far mightier than he tended a garden of his own. He looked up. The moon was approaching its zenith. The stars were in alignment, brighter and clearer than Bule had ever seen them before. One of them momentarily grew brighter.

Bule examined the moving constellation with wide open eyes.

Yes. Yes.

The star grew brighter, brighter, shining out the others around it and projecting a beam of starlight directly onto the realmgate. Bule grunted at the sharp glare and shielded his eyes with his arm. As the light dissipated, he looked immediately back to the gate.

A slender-bodied lizard wielding what looked like a dartpipe and a spear was now standing on the pedestal before the gate. It stood on its hind legs like a man, shorter even than Kletch Scabclaw and more wiry still. The black colouration of its scales mottled to white as Bule watched, matching itself almost seamlessly to the marble hues of the gate behind it. His eyes continuing to recover from the flash, Bule noticed a hundred or so more of the little creatures, spread out in the shadows around the gathered Rotbringers.

A strained silence fell over them all. Even Gurhg noticed and stopped chanting.

The lizard-man lowered its head, spines engorging to raise a vivid frill. It emitted a warbling chirrup then lifted its dartpipe to its beak.

For one so vast, Bule could move like poison through a panicking man’s veins when quickened to do so. That he had not been so roused in over a hundred years was nothing. He was Copsys Bule, the Black Thumb, and his knife was in his hand and wrist deep in the lizard’s still-shattering ribcage before the creature had drawn its breath.

The lizard’s nictitating eyelids fluttered in shock. Already its scaly skin was beginning to blister with the lesions of Nurgle’s blessed rot, daemonflies pupating inside the wound in its chest, but to Bule’s surprise what emerged from that wound was not blood but pure, cleansing starlight.

Scalded where it touched his arm, Bule tore his hand back, ripping a chunk of the lizard’s chest out with it. It shuddered and fell, vanishing in a cascade of glimmering motes before it hit the ground.

Clenching and unclenching his fist around his knife handle, feeling the burned, cleansed, tissue pulling, Bule grunted at the barely comparable sensation of a metal-tipped blow dart puncturing his neck. He felt the venom enter his blood and would have laughed at its impish ineffectuality had he not been building towards such a fury.

This was his moment, his time. The signs had been guiding him for centuries towards this night.

With a snarl that came from deep in his monstrous belly, he turned and flung his knife. It spun end over end, so fast it appeared as a solid discus, and punched a chameleon lizard from its feet in an explosion of light and bone.

Blow darts and javelins droned around him like hornets, snuffing out the torches with the wind of their flight, and falling on the Rotbringers. They bristled from unfeeling flesh, rattled off heavy armour and even downed a handful of the mighty warriors before they had a chance to react. The beastman, Gurhg, dropped to his haunches and backed into a trencher table with his head down. He found Kletch already under it.

Air rippled inside the arch of the realmgate.

It was subtle but there, the power awakening in direct response to the plague magic that Bule had nurtured in his garden for two thousand four hundred and one years. That power was still rising. Nothing would stop it now.

Copsys Bule looked again at his hand, free of blight for the first time since he knew not when.

‘Kill them all!’ he shrieked. ‘Let none of them touch my garden!’

V

Fistula was more disoriented than angry. He was drunk on meat and cankerberry wine, and on a power that he could not put name to but which filled him with a fever swirl of thoughts. The discordant moan of tocsins droned through his mind, though they were playing a cadence of battle now rather than of ceremony. The taste of meat was in his mouth, but it was fresh, torn not from the embrace of Copsys Bule’s soil but from the struggling bodies of the living.

He spat out a mouthful of blistering starlight. Or tried to. His throat burned, however hard he wretched and gagged.

Goaded into lucidity on a knife-edge of pain he struck down a lizard-man that was hissing in cold-blooded consternation at the chunk bitten out of its wrist. It disappeared in a drizzle of glimmer dust. Two more took advantage of the light-shock to blindside him. They came with spears held short.

Fistula caught the haft of the first spear thrust, then with his sword hand punched it in half. The lizard stumbled. Turning his body across and through it, he pushed it on its way to the ground, spitting his sword out to arm’s length to impale the second. Light exploded from its back around the tip of his sword. This time he was ready for the glare. Eyes already narrowed, he spun quickly away, stamping on the first lizard and grinding the light that bled from its fractured skull under his boot.

Something small and metallic spanked his pauldron guard. Darts tipped with starmetal zipped by. He saw a burly Rotbringer with a cloak of festering hide go down under a volley of them. Another took a freak hit, a dart straight down the ear, dropping the warrior like his weight in dead meat.

From somewhere, screaming. Melting flesh and starlight.

Every one of these warriors was a master of war, the mightiest of mortal champions uplifted to near daemonhood by the Lord of Decay. But they had forgotten what it felt like to be challenged. After millennia of pointless warfare they had forgotten what it truly was to fight.

Fistula clutched at his gut with his off-hand.

He felt ill, stricken, a great swelling pressing up from inside his chest. Pressure climbed up his throat, as though he were a snake trying to regurgitate a man that had been too large for him to swallow. A bilious taste flooded his mouth and, on unconscious reflex, he doubled over and vomited forth a torrent of foulness and corruption.

The lizard-men caught in the flow died instantly and in agony. The Rotbringers similarly touched were healed as if by the beaming intercession of Grandfather Nurgle himself. Maggots squirmed over open wounds. New and glorious infections puckered flesh that had been rankly cleansed by the lizards’ light.

Swallowing several times to assure himself that he too was whole again, he looked about for more enemies. There were none. All around him were in advanced stages of rot or already returned to whatever heavenly body had spewed them forth.

He panted, heart racing. Was that all?

‘Kill them all!’ he heard Copsys Bule shout, a shrill note of fury screwing his voice tight. ‘Let none of them touch my garden!’

Fistula shot around to look down the slope. His heart thumped hard for joy.

Light knifed frenziedly from the heavens. Flashes blossomed within the fug of flies, then glowed and spawned warriors. Many of them were bigger than the lizard-men he had just slaughtered. Some of them were a lot bigger. That first wave must have been some kind of advance party. Scouts. Assassins, perhaps. This was an army, coming down in conventional formations.

Accompanied by tocsins and bells and calls to glory, warriors of the Rotbringers mustered over the old corpse-hung curtain walls to oppose them. Bule commanded the souls of a hundred thousand, and although more than half were scattered wide over the Corpse Marshes and beyond, what remained was a mighty host indeed.

He bared sharpened teeth, a feral grin. Now for notice. Now for glory. This was going to be a fight.

‘You want war?’ Bule roared at the stars, and the very ground beneath seemed to tremble at his words.

Someone had passed the Lord of Plagues his helmet, and his voice boomed from inside the steel. In both hands he gripped the haft of the trident with which he tended his garden, veins standing out from bulging biceps as he continued to howl without words. God-gifted power oozed from him, turning the air around him syrupy brown. Sickly, cyclopean figures began to take shape there. They were horned, drenched in mucous and stooped over serrated swords that reeked of soulrot. Nurgle’s tallymen. Plaguebearers. From the strain in Bule’s bearing it was though he passed them from his own body. In a sense he did.

Fistula howled, maddened by battle-lust and plague.

Bule crashed the brass ferrule of his trident into the ground and screamed.

‘I will give you war!’

VI

Kletch Scabclaw ran in the middle of the Rotbringers’ counter-attack, where he felt naturally safest, ducking, weaving, leaping between pockets of solid ground. Not that he felt all that safe. Beastmen thundered downhill like rabid animals while Chaos warriors, each with their own maddened cry on their black lips, battled each other to be the first to meet the enemy and in their blundering almost dragged Kletch under more than once. Of course, the plague monks of Clan Rikkit could be just as zealous in battle, but only with the inspiring words of their priest in their ears and the fumes of his blessed censer in their snouts. As well as being unruly, the horde was not as sufficiently numerous as he would have liked. That wasn’t exactly helped by those who were continually peeling off to strike out at the lizard-man skirmishers firing down on them from their flanks.

The lizards scampered with near-impunity over walls and pox moats that, judging by the clear lack of defenders, the Rotbringers had considered impassable.

The Rotbringers had been fools.

Even by Kletch’s own standards, the lizards were light on their feet. Their bones seemed to be hollow, and with little else to them but light they skipped across floating corpses as cleanly as if they were solid ground. Only the moats themselves gave them pause – fecund nurseries of disease that hummed with deadly daemonflies – but they served only to funnel the rabid Rotbringers through their own defensive works where they were easy pickings for the lizard’s dartpipes.

Skinks.

Kletch shivered, some deep residual instinct to freeze and play dead almost killing him there amongst the running column of Chaos warriors, beastmen and mind-plagued fanatics.

He kept running, not watching, his pre-conscious replaying him impressions of jungles he had never seen, of stepped pyramids he had never visited, the terror of being prey in a land he had never called his. He had not seen or heard of these lizard-men, these seraphon, before now, but deep down he knew them, and it was a knowledge that a thousand generations of new lands and new enemies could not wipe from his racial memory.

He leapt from one patch of solid ground to another, then another, easily outpacing the beasts and once-men that ran around him. His heavy cloak slowed him only a little, flapping out as he made one long leap, landing on a leaning root of a column. Sinking around his staff onto all fours, he sniffed the air for the musk of his own.

Useless. The whole castle was thick with decay. With a snarl, he resorted to using his eyes.

Despite the lizards’ – the skinks’ – success in drawing the Rotbringers into more difficult terrain, the bulk of Bule’s horde were still charging for the good ground where the main outer curtain walls converged on the gatehouse citadel. He could hear the drums and horns, the shouts and the roar of beasts. Skaven eyesight grew dim over any kind of distance and for that, today, he was grateful.

‘Go around!’ he squeaked, gesticulating furiously from his pedestal to the band of Rotbringers that were wading into a stinking brown pond to get at the brightly scaled skinks on the other side. ‘Go get. Kill-kill. Go!’

To no surprise of his, the Rotbringer’s champion plunged on into deeper water. The warrior was an idiot. He’d earned the dart in the throat that dropped him face down into the mire a moment later.

The skinks were making a mockery of the heavily armoured blightkings, making them look sluggish. The daemons were another matter.

Every sore on Kletch’s body wept, every ache seizing and filling his wiry body with pain as ten of Nurgle’s tallymen strode onto the pox moat, walking weightlessly upon the scum that floated on the surface and through the stinging daemonflies. The cold-blooded star-creatures barely reacted. Kletch watched as a skink shaman rustled his feathered cloak, flying over the plaguebearers’ heads to land in a swirl of red and gold on a stump of wall behind them. There, he shook his staff, exhorting a hail of darts from his kin that fell amongst the closing daemons.

Kletch snickered. Everyone knew that daemons could not be killed that way. But the tallymen fell by the handful, if anything even more vulnerable to the seraphon’s envenomed darts than the mortals they marched beside.

With a snarl, Kletch reached inside his cloak for his weapon, eyes locked on the shaman.

‘See-smell how tough you are. Kletch not afraid of scrawny scaly-meat.’

The faintest trace of reptile musk warned him of the danger just before an ear-splitting shriek from above re-triggered every instinct he had to freeze, run, hide. Terradon. The giant reptile swooped overhead, banked gracefully under the effortless direction of its skink rider, then dropped a boulder from its hind-claws. It came down like a meteor. It was a meteor.

With a terrified squeal, Kletch leapt from his column, arms and legs churning as the spot he had been standing on was annihilated, the air at his back electrified by a starlight explosion. His tail peeled. His cloak caught fire. He landed in a roll, steaming from fur and clothes and from the accidental release of fear musk down his leg.

‘Scratch and sniff,’ he swore.

Patting himself down, he brushed a string of darts from the back of his cloak. He swallowed the bad taste in his mouth. Dropping to all fours to make himself less of a target to any skinks looking to pick off survivors, he scurried from the path, zig-zagged through a verge of bloodgrass that stuck up from a hummock of dead men and horses like pins, and then dived into a wild patch of bruise-coloured bushes that clung to a ledge growing out from the second curtain wall. A few tail-lengths in he poked his head up through the scratching branches.

Below, clanking streams of Chaos warriors fed into a blurrily defined blob of screams and steel, a blood-and-lizard stink spilling out over half a league of the Hanging Garden’s heartlands. He didn’t need the eyes of a surface-dweller to see the blocks of bulky lizard warriors – saurus – grinding in under their golden icons. He could see well enough the giant reptiles that towered over all with swaying howdahs on their backs, even if he couldn’t quite count the horns on their bony head shields.

The seraphon were being held back for now. Nothing stood up to attrition like a warrior of Nurgle, and Copsys Bule commanded monsters of his own. Kletch sniffed the air and shivered at the sharp, unmistakeably vile scent.

The Lord of Plagues was down there. Good riddance.

‘Scabclaw-master!’

Kletch hissed angrily to mask his surprise, but this time held onto his musk. Scurf was scurrying through the flesh-drinking grasses, surrounded by a clawpack of stormvermin mercenaries in muddy black plate mail and wielding vicious-looking halberds. Several hundred raggedy plague monks followed, individuals breaking every so often to sniff the air, lash their tails in fear, and then hurry on.

‘Lightning men!’ Scurf squealed.

The word-bringer was in the same stained linen cassock he’d been wearing an hour ago, but had, apparently in great haste, donned a mail coif and was clutching a cracked tome that he held onto like a shield. He waved a rusty scimitar at the stars. Flies eddied and swarmed, a billion billion, but the stars behind no longer moved. An unnaturally intense constellation in the shape of a squatting toad glared down with eyes tinged red.

‘Fool-fool,’ Kletch snapped. ‘This is something other.’

‘Something new?’

Kletch shook his muzzle. ‘Something old.’

‘The claw-packs are ready to leave-go,’ added Scurf. He glanced down to the battle and gulped. ‘Very-very much-ready.’

Kletch bared his teeth, yellow eyes shining. This might all just work out after all. If Copsys Bule was defeated, as looked likely, then the clanlords could hardly blame him for failing to secure an alliance that the Lord of Plagues had never appeared to want at all. And if the weakened Lord of Plagues somehow managed to secure a pyrrhic victory? Perhaps then the generous backing of Clan Rikkit would appeal to him more.

‘This way,’ Kletch hissed.

Darting back into the bloodgrass, he wove through it, driving purposefully away from the main seraphon assault. Corpses at varying stages of rankness wobbled underpaw, tipping, sinking, at times disintegrating before he was able to leap clear and plunging him into foetid water. He spluttered a wordless prayer to the Pestilent Horned Rat that the tonic he had drunk would continue to prove effective. Keeping his head down and his nose clear, he scurried on. He was moving inside the circle of the inner walls to the far side of the fortress-temple. From there, with luck, he would be able to clamber down and escape without great difficulty. He upped his pace, becoming a blur of fur and movement.

There was nothing in all the realms quicker than a skaven with a battle to escape, but Kletch was not yet so anxious to flee as to allow himself to pull ahead of his brother monks.

Not for the first time – and he fervently hoped not for the last – sound skaven thinking saved his hide.

Crashing through a canopy of hanging dead, a lumbering reptile as massive as a barded warhorse snapped the lead clanrat up in its jaws, trampling three more before the saurus riding it could rein it back.

Its predatory head was huge and low-slung, supported by a monstrous neck and counter-weighted by a thick tail that tacked menacingly in advance of its movements as it turned. The skaven in its jaws was shrieking. A savage yank of neck and jaw and the beast bit the pitiful creature through, sending legs and torso flying over opposite shoulders. A rake of its vestigial forepaws claimed another.

Scurf issued a rallying squeal, backing into the stormvermin clawpack as the beast completed its turn and snorted in his nose. He whipped up his book of woes with a frightened squeak as the saurus’ mace came down.

The book was mouldering parchment bound in cracked leather.

The mace was meteoric stone.

Hurriedly withdrawing from the smashed word-bringer, the stormvermin lowered their halberds, throwing up a wall of hooked blades between them and the beast. The reptile – a cold one – snapped contemptuously, taking off one of the blades and eating it.

The saurus hefted its bloodied mace and with cold calm scanned the skaven scattered across the grass before it. Every scale armouring its grossly powerful hide was chipped and scarred. Its eyes were old. Beautiful works of golden plate clad vulnerable spots such as its throat and wrists. It shone like the light at the end of all the skaven’s tunnels.

Pumping its mace up into the air, it gave a roar that shook the air. With answering roars, a full cohort of glittering saurus warriors marched into the open.

Kletch squealed for order, for ranks, shoving his way to the back of them as he did so. These saurus were on foot, armed with spears and shields, but it scarcely mattered. Each one was twice the size of an armoured stormvermin and looked the match for any six.

With frenzied squeals, the plague monks charged. The saurus trampled them without appearing to notice and slammed into the line of stormvermin.

‘Hold. Fight! Kill-kill!’ shouted Kletch, growing ever shriller as the lizards’ massive line troops ground their way through his.

A rustle from the tall weeds to the right made his heart sink. There were more.

Hacking wildly at the bodies that came at him on nooses from all sides, Blightlord Fistula ran through, savaging a saurus from behind before the cold-blooded brute had even realised he was there. Coming under a swarm of flies, his putrid blightkings piled in behind him.

This was a more even fight. The blightkings were Bule’s elite and, Kletch knew, Fistula’s were the best. He was not at all surprised that the first blightlord had been amongst the reckless few to be dragged out into the swamp chasing skinks.

‘In! In!’ Kletch squeaked, urging his warriors on.

Scenting blood, the clawpacks and surviving plague monks pushed forward, wedging the saurus between two sets of enemies.

Observing the reverse in fortunes with an impersonal, calculating detachment, the saurus pointed its cold one towards Fistula and roared its challenge. The first blightlord ran at it with a yell, both weapons out at his side, armour dripping with bile.

The saurus struck first. The cadaver-thin blightlord parried the lizard’s mace with a blow that would have broken both of their arms had either been a lesser being, then rolled out of the lunge of the cold one’s jaws. His knife chewed down the side of the beast’s neck and spat out scales. He dodged back, turning a crunching side kick from the old saurus on his vambrace, then charged back in.

The saurus was wheeling his furious mount when Fistula stepped onto a plague monk’s mushed body and, using it as a springboard, vaulted over the reach of the cold one’s flailing snap. Sliding down the beast’s spiny neck, he slammed bodily into the saurus and punched a knife towards its neck. It moved just fast enough to take it in the shoulder. If it felt either surprise or pain it didn’t show it. A shattering head butt snapped back Fistula’s head and sent him crashing over the cold one’s flank and down to the sucking ground. The cold one stomped on his breastplate, pushing him deeper under.

Then Kletch withered away the saurus’ head with a bolt of plague magic.

The cold one issued a defiant roar that shook the eardrums long after it vanished into the same cloud of light that reclaimed its master.

Shivering off the giddy tingle of the warpstone fumes from his pestilent censer, Kletch secreted the relic back into its pouch underneath his robes. He had taken the weapon from the clan vaults to deal with Copsys Bule, but it smelled like that was one precaution he didn’t need anymore.

‘He had me.’ Fistula’s laughter bubbled crazily, riding down from some wild adrenaline high.

‘We should be going-gone. Before more like it come.’

‘Going?’ Fistula sat up straight, face flushed red and cut in half by a razored smile. ‘I would fight more of your lightning men.’

‘They are not lightning men,’ Kletch snapped, suddenly lacking all patience for the stupidity of others. ‘The lightning men are… are much worse.’

‘Worse?’

‘Come with me,’ Kletch hissed, sidling closer, tail switching side to side. ‘Bule is old. Leave him to rot in his garden. Come kill-slay with Clan Rikkit.’

Fistula looked to his warriors. Kletch bared his fangs in a grin. He wouldn’t be returning to the clanlords with empty paws after all.

VII

Copsys Bule was untouchable.

Of the lizard-men that came close, only the very mightiest amongst them could make it within reach of his weapon before Nurgle’s Rot left them crippled and blind. And yet on these star-lizards came, fearing neither death nor disease.

His trident struck like an adder, piercing the throat of a heavily scarred lizard and exploding through the back of its neck. With one huge scaly hand it grappled with the haft, swinging a glowing starmetal axe with the other. Bule yanked back on his trident, pulling the impaled scar-veteran into a forward stumble and sending its axe stroke flailing harmlessly past his shoulder. An open fist to the gut punched the scar-veteran off his weapon’s tines, two feet through the air and onto its back. Bule closed the distance, trident spinning once, twice, overhead, and then smashing through the lizard-man’s chest. With a heave, he drew the trident up, the weapon arcing back overhead to its full extension to polearm the spear warrior that had been charging his supposed blindside.

With the rest of his horde struggling to hold their line, Copsys Bule took another forward step.

A powerful lizard in golden armour blocked him. The blinding might of Azyr screamed between the joins of its scales, and the roar of its challenge was like that of a furnace. Saliva stellar white hissed from its jaws as it brought up a primitive-looking two-handed blade.

Bule turned the hacking stroke with a loop of his trident, then took the haft between both hands and drove the ferrule into the sun-lizard’s groin. The warrior emitted a grunt and staggered back, unhurt, throwing a punch that caught the haft of Bule’s weapon. The struck trident popped out of Bule’s fingers and landed in the mud behind him. It was the deft, impish move of a master of unarmed combat.

With a celestial roar, the sun-lizard swept its weapon overhead.

Spinning and dropping, Bule planted his knee on the ferrule and slid his hand under the trident’s haft. Halfway along, a flex of the fingers bounced it up, reversed against the slope of his shoulder, just as the sun-warrior charged in to deliver the deathblow.

There was a heavy crunch, a sigh, the burn of starlight raining across his back.

Bule turned as he rose, swinging his weapon out like a scythe, letting fly, and sending the dying sun-warrior cannoning into the head of the hulking lizard giant that had just strode into view. Both went down in a mighty crash. The sun-lizard vanished in a flash of sunbeams. The giant, merely unconscious, did not rise again.

‘Is this it?’ he cried, laying out a murderous sigil of overlapping figure-of-eights. ‘Is this all that you have?’ To kill again, and to kill swiftly, felt glorious. Colours were vivid, scents sharp, cries like bells. He was a man awakening from a coma and remembering that he was furious. ‘Do you even realise whom you face?’

He shovelled down another lizard-warrior on the flat of his tines, then spun, alerted by the prickling sense of something approaching from behind.

A robed figure stood there on the writhing carpet of sickening lizards. It regarded him through the haze of flies, neither noticeably human nor obviously reptilian. Daemonic perhaps, yet not. Its head was angled like a hoe with a row of eyes along its ridge. Some of them examined Bule archly, others with compassion, mirth and contempt. In spite of himself, of what and where he was, Bule felt a chill.

Blind to their visitor, a cohort of warrior lizards charged through the hazing flies. They died one by one. The inhuman apparition did not react, but, despite having no obvious mouth, Bule had the impression that it smiled at him, as though he were a bloat hound that had earned a treat.

A tremendous death bellow drew his attention away.

There, the mighty plague maggoth that had been rolling over the lizards’ advance with a wedge of Rotbringers in train collapsed in an avalanche of folds. A sunbeam split the monster from shoulder to navel and the armour-plated head of some apex reptile butted it aside. Fixed to the lizard creature’s back was the silver and star-metal housing of some inscrutable god-engine, which clicked and reset amidst a glow of energies. The Rotbringers retreated, their forward push stymied. Bule was aware of the enemy pouring forward on all fronts now as his own defences began to crumble. With a snarl, he took his trident overhand like a javelin and made to challenge that armoured reptile’s invulnerability.

‘He seeks a champion.’

The apparition’s robes whispered as it followed him. Its clothing was made not of hides or cloth but of eyes, and the susurrus it made was the sound of hundreds of blinking eyelids, rippling white, green, black, and every other colour that skin came. It moved without truly moving. It spoke without speaking.

‘Seek him, champion.’

Turning, gesturing without anything so prosaic as a pointed finger, the figure directed Bule’s gaze to the realmgate. The skin within it flexed. The stars above it wheeled. Even from afar Bule could see that the view within was no longer of the garden with which it had previously been twinned. Fury returned to him redoubled. Disbelief. It was not mere bad fortune that had brought the seraphon upon him with the aligning stars. They had come for his realmgate.

Somehow they had manipulated the Eightpoints to change its destination. How? The magic involved in enacting such a feat was godlike!

The apparition hissed in sudden distress. Its cloak shimmered with many colours, every eye tightening shut as though simultaneously blinded. And then in a searing moment of universal light, it was gone.

‘Grandfather!’ Bule cried, light like a fire in his eyes. ‘Aid me!’

Shading his eyes with one heavy arm, he peered into the oncoming host.

Floating on a cushion of force above the golden spears of its warriors came the source of the light. It was as if a star had been called down from the heavens and condensed into a brittle caul of bone-brown wrappings and dry flesh. Its presence alone was massive. From its palanquin, the mummified creature regarded the battle with the distant disinclination of an inhuman god. Instinctively, Bule understood that here came a being that had known power long before some daemons had even come to be. He felt himself drawn spiritually towards it, the golden funerary mask that picked out its amphibian features in jewels swelling to fill his mind as the universe subtly reordered around it.

It made no word or gesture, but somewhere in the cosmos something gave.

The heavens opened.

Bule howled impotent fury as the stars glimmered and fell, plucked from the sky, and smashed into his horde.

The first meteorite hit at an angle, obliterating a dozen Chaos warriors utterly and blowing a crater hundreds of feet wide. Then came the rest. The ground shook under the fury. The sky turned white, light and sound reaching an intensity where they sublimated into one, a single shrieking colour in Bule’s inner eye, and even the daemons burned in fire.

Bule struggled gasping onto hands and knees, tripping a warrior lizard running in behind him with a backward kick and riding it face-down into the filth until it stopped thrashing. He stood up, dazed senseless by thunder. Waves of power smashed out from the advancing palanquin. It was almost impossible to stand against it, but in a tremendous feat of will, he stood. He shook his head.

‘Aid me!’

Nothing. Nothing but the awesome presence of this starmaster.

Moving with difficulty, he turned and staggered back the way he had come. Never in his life had Copsys Bule run away, but Grandfather Nurgle did not know defeat.

With every waning, he would wax again.

VIII

First Blightlord Fistula stepped out of the realmgate and onto another world.

The air was syrupy, hot, sweetened by the sweat of fat citrus-scented leaves and by the bell-shaped blue flowers that he and his warriors crushed underfoot. He looked around in amazement, turning ponderously. He felt… weightier, as if the sky itself pushed him down under its palm. And the sun – forgetting for the moment that it should be night – was over large and buttercup yellow. Winged creatures rustled through the leaves above. And from somewhere, screams.

He pulled off his helmet, wiped his running nose, and drew deep.

‘New lands.’

Soon all that was green would be a verdant collage of yellows and browns and leaf-rust reds. It would be the cradle of a new land’s blight, the metastasis from which a new canker would swell. And all of it was his.

‘Over here,’ growled Vitane, crunching through the undergrowth in the vague direction of those screams.

Fistula acceded to the old blightking’s instincts for pain and followed. After a few minutes of unexpectedly heavy going through the dense foliage of this foreign land, the warriors were, to a man, blowing hard, their armour hanging loose on straps. The screams got nearer. More abject. Chesting aside a branch, too weary to bother his arm with the task, Fistula pushed ahead into a sun-drenched clearing.

Varicoloured lichens and mushrooms covered the split bark of the fallen log that dominated the clearing. The cries were coming from the other side of the log.

Shading his eyes from the visceral brightness of the sun, Fistula saw the bray shaman, Gurhg, who was easy enough to pick out with his totemic staff and cloak woven with bones, even within a knot of his followers. There were perhaps two-dozen, stomping about and smashing horns – re-establishing dominance hierarchies and staking claim to new territories. Gurhg stood hunched and swaying in the middle of it, nodding his goat head approvingly as six men and a woman bound to a line of hastily woven racks screamed. The wails of the seventh man were of a different order. A beastman with the face of a horse and a line of horrendously infected iron piercings through its top lip diligently flensed the human with a blunt knife.

Fistula smiled. There were people here. Good. It had been too long.

‘Blightlord.’ Arms spread, snout turned to bare the throat in that odd gesture of his, Kletch Scabclaw padded towards him through the forest. The skaven envoy fussed at the clasp of his cloak, but despite his obvious discomfort he did not seem inclined to take it off. At the treeline, he bobbed low and withdrew with a hiss, averting his eyes from the sun.

‘Where are your warriors?’ asked Fistula.

‘In woods. Less brave rats than I must cower where sky is less bright-strong.’

‘Good.’

Fistula looked across the clearing at the brawling beastmen, and the blightkings now spreading out through the lichens to crash down and rest. It was not much, but it would be a start, and more would flock to him soon enough.

‘I will have them seek-burrow for the way home at once,’ said Kletch, stamping his foot-paw anxiously.

‘Good…’

Fistula put his hands on his hips and turned his face full on to the sun. It was his. It was all his.

Something heavy and wet tramped up through the woods behind him. The wheezing breath on the back of his neck was thick with the stench of stagnant meat.

‘I began my quest with less. I can begin again.’

Fistula spun around.

Bule.

‘I see now,’ said Copsys Bule, unhelmed, smiling blackly. ‘I see what I have been missing.’

‘This is mine,’ Fistula snarled, baring his blades. Some withered instinct for self-preservation kept him from using them, some dim recognition that the gods too had their favourites. He backed into the clearing. Bule moved towards him, Fistula continuing to retreat until the fallen tree prevented him from going any further. He dropped into a fighting crouch. ‘I will not let you turn my conquest into another garden. You have forgotten how to do anything else!’

The Lord of Plagues spread his arms in forgiveness as he passed from the tree line and into the sunlight. His eyes squeezed shut against the sudden glare, but still Fistula did not think to attack. Mosses mottled and died where Bule trod. Insects dropped dead out of the air as he breathed it. Throughout the clearing beastmen, skaven and blightkings alike stopped what they were doing and abased themselves.

He came within sword’s reach, knife’s reach, arm’s reach. Fistula lowered his weapons. He felt lethargic. His skin was hot.

Dropping to one knee in front of him, Copsys Bule leaned in and embraced him.

Fistula made an attempt at fighting it, but he felt so weak. His breath drained up and down like fluid. He shivered with chills even as fever sweat poured down his skin. Jerking in his determination to fight, he struggled as the Lord of Plagues cradled him, lowering him to the ground. Fistula tried to stare hatred at him, but failed even in that. Delirium fogged his eyes and opened his mind to wisdom’s flood.

Sorcerers robed with eyes. An army of champions. Chaos united. A three-eyed king. Round and around.

‘I’ll. Fight you. Forever,’ he swore.

‘Grandfather Nurgle does not want us to submit,’ Bule smiled. ‘He wishes us to rage.’

The last thing Fistula saw before Nurgle’s Rot fully entered his mind was Bule turning towards Kletch Scabclaw, arms open in blessing and friendship.

IX

Copsys Bule broke up the earth with his trident. A tangle of roots knotted up the soil, making it tough, and before long he was breathing hard, a burn spreading through his shoulders. It felt good. The simple labour eased his mind and his muscles. The repetitive activity gave him the chance to think, and to order his thoughts.

He had much to think upon.

‘There,’ he said, giving the ground a vigorous final crumbing, then stabbing his trident to one side. He ran his arm across his lank-haired brow, then turned and nodded.

Vitane slid his toe under Kletch Scabclaw’s body and rolled the corpse into the rill that Bule had prepared for him. Flies crawled over the ratman’s lips. His eyes were the black of rot-pickled eggs and the smell had that same astringent piquancy.

‘So much life.’ However many skaven he buried, the truth of that still filled him with wonder. ‘My garden will thrive here. It is as I said to you, envoy, no other race gives so thoroughly of themselves to Grandfather Nurgle.’

The skaven did not answer and nor did Bule expect him to. He would live again, of course. That was Nurgle’s promise to all. The ratman’s flesh would nurture many millions of short and wondrous lives, his decomposition would bring bounty to the ground in which he lay, but never again would he talk, think, or interfere in the ambitions of a Lord of Plagues.

Pulling up his trident, Bule proceeded to bed the skaven in.

The humans would go here, and here, either side, where their decay would be accelerated by the skaven’s proximity. One of the other ratmen he’d dig a plot for over by the south-facing tree line where its remains could feed the poplars there. They were fast growers, and the rot would spread quickly. Already their leaves were beginning to wilt and brown at the edges. Birds hawked up a thin and sickly chorus of phlegm on the bowers.

He could see it now. He did not know how this was to end, he never had, but he knew how to begin.

‘Archaon.’

Fistula was fetched up against the log, shivering like a man just fished in full armour from an ice pail. He muttered non-sequiturs under his breath, tired, for the moment at least, of raging them at the forest. His eyes rolled, like bones cast by a feverish shaman, and his brush with Nurgle’s Rot had bequeathed him a circlet of rugose blisters that rimmed his bald head like a crown. Bule examined the stigmata. There was a sign there, he knew it, but of what?

‘He grows more lucid,’ observed Vitane.

‘Nurgle favours him greatly.’

‘A lord of flies,’ Fistula murmured, shaking. ‘A king with three eyes.’

A sign. Definitely.

Taking up his trident, Copsys Bule pushed it into the ground and began again.

He had much to think upon.

ASSAULT ON THE MANDRAKE BASTION

Josh Reynolds

‘Forward! For Sigmar, for Azyrheim, and for the Realm Celestial!’ Orius Adamantine roared, as he and the Stormcasts of his Warrior Chamber fought their way up the ashen slopes of the Tephra Crater. They battled through the crumbled barrows of a fallen people, and amongst swirling clouds of ash stirred into being by the burning, acidic rain which pelted down from the ominous sky. Its sizzling droplets left black streaks on the golden war-plate of the Stormcasts. Jagged streaks of azure lightning thrashed in the belly of the clouds, and the storm grew in intensity as the Hammers of Sigmar plunged into the fray.

The Lord-Celestant’s sigmarite runeblade slashed out to cleave a bloodreaver’s head from his shoulders, even as his hammer crushed the skull of another. More enemies surged towards him, hurling themselves down the slope through the burning rain with savage abandon. Crude axes and jagged blades hacked at him, drawing sparks from his golden war-plate.

‘Forward, my Adamantine,’ he shouted, smashing a bloodreaver from his path. ‘Let no foe bar thy path, no mercy stay thy hand – grind them under!’

Liberators advanced up the northern slope of the Tephra Crater, moving through the rocky barrows in tight formation, shields locked against the blood-addled tide that sought to sweep them from their path. They marched in lockstep, never wavering or slowing, but steadily ascending. Behind them came the Judicator retinues, their skybolt bows singing. They launched crackling shafts of energy into the air over the heads of the advancing Liberators to explode amongst the enemy. Rank upon rank of the Bloodbound fell but more pressed forward, clambering over the dead in their eagerness to come to grips with the Stormcasts.

The retinues of the Adamantine fought their way towards the rudimentary palisades that stretched across the curve of the slope. Crafted from volcanic stone, with trees torn from the rim of the crater many miles above, these palisades were larger and sturdier than those Orius’ chamber had brought down on the lower slopes. Tribes of bloodreavers occupied those unsophisticated ramparts, defending them on behalf of the monster who had descended into the crater to drown it in blood.

‘Anhur,’ Orius growled, unable to restrain the sudden surge of anger at the thought of the Khornate warlord as he smashed a bloodreaver to the ground. The Scarlet Lord had made a name for himself as he carved a path of carnage across the Felstone Plains. There were monsters aplenty plaguing Aqshy, but the Scarlet Lord was no simple blood-soaked raider or warmonger. He had purpose, and that made him deadly indeed.

But then, you always were one for plans, Orius thought. A face surfaced from among his scattered memories, the face of a man he’d once served. Angrily, he banished the memory. That man was as dead as the man Orius had been. Only the Scarlet Lord remained.

Twice before they’d fought, in those first red days of war, as the storm broke over Aqshy. He’d been in the vanguard at the assault on the Bale-Furnace, where the Bloodbound forged terrible weapons. Anhur had been amongst those warlords gathered there, to pay homage to the twisted furnace kings in return for weapons and armour. The Scarlet Lord had retreated across the Furnace Lands, taking whatever fell artefacts he’d bargained for with him.

Warrior Chambers from no fewer than three Stormhosts had pursued the warlord to the Hissing Gates and brought him to battle amidst the searing geysers. There, for the first time, Orius had met his enemy face-to-face… A crimson figure, awaiting him beyond the boiling breath of countless geysers. The sound of their blades clashing… a moment of recognition… He shook his head, thrusting the memories aside. Anhur had beaten the Stormcasts back then, mauling them badly enough that they could not pursue him as he led his warriors across the Felstone Plains.

Why Anhur had come to the Tephra Crater, to Klaxus, Orius did not know, but he would deliver the creature up to the judgement of Sigmar regardless. He drove his shoulder into a barbarian’s sternum, splintering bone and killing the warrior instantly. He swatted the body aside and forged onwards, a trail of crushed and broken bloodreavers marking his progress. Retributor retinues waded through the battle in his wake, their heavy lightning hammers striking with all the force of the storm itself. With every blow a resounding clap of thunder shook the air, and crackling sky-magics ripped apart the bodies of the foe.

Working in unison, hammers rising and falling with a brutal rhythm, the Retributors cleared a path for their fellow paladins – the Decimator and Protector retinues who would punch through the Bloodbound lines and lead the assault on the palisades. At Orius’ signal, the Decimators surged forward, plunging past him, deep into the enemy lines. Their thunderaxes reaped a red harvest as severed limbs and decapitated heads were flung skywards.

As the bloodreavers reeled beneath the counter-assault, Orius and the remaining paladins fell in behind the advancing Decimators. The stormstrike glaives of the Protectors wove searing patterns in the air as they shielded the Liberators from attack, and the lightning hammers of the Retributors tore great holes in the enemy battle-line. Soon, the fur- and brass-clad tribesmen were in retreat, staggering back through the swirling clouds of soot and stinging rain.

The Stormcasts did not pause in their advance. Orius signalled to his auxiliary command, indicating that they should press onwards. They had to reach the palisade before the enemy regrouped. He knew similar scenes were being played out across the circumference of the crater, on every slope. Warrior Chambers from a dozen different Stormhosts – the Hallowed Knights, the Astral Templars, Celestial Vindicators and more – were fighting their way up these ash-choked slopes, smashing aside the bastions and stone bulwarks of the enemy in an effort to reach the rim of the Tephra Crater.

They all shared the same purpose, but each chamber had its own objective. To the south, the Hallowed Knights of the Stormforged Chamber fought to breach the enormous basalt gates which straddled the path to the rim-citadel of Ytalan. On the western slope, Lord-Celestant Zephacleas led the Astral Templars of the Beast-Bane Chamber against the howling hordes which guarded an ancient duardin road through the Raxulian lava-tubes. But to Orius and his chamber had fallen the task of clearing the Mandrake Bastion of Klaxus, and scouring that kingdom clean of the Blood God’s taint.

My kingdom, Orius thought, as he stalked forwards, at the head of his warriors. While he, like many Stormcasts, could but dimly recall the days of his own mortality before his death and Reforging at Sigmar’s hand, Orius remembered enough. He could still recall the heady musk of the Ashen Jungle after rain, and the way the colossal roots of the immense trees had wound through the walls and streets of Uryx. The jungle and the city were one, and its people comfortable in either. He had been comfortable in either. Klaxus had been his home.

And now, he who had been Oros of Ytalan had returned to save it.

Yet though he remembered some things, others were lost to him. The day of his death, for instance. He remembered war – no, an uprising – as the people thought to throw off the shackles of oppression, but little else. Anhur had been there then, clad in the black armour of Ytalan, as Orius himself had been. He could not even say whose side he had fought on, save that he had fought for the right reasons. Otherwise, Sigmar would not have chosen him.

His reverie was broken by the voice of his Lord-Relictor.

‘This is the third of these filthy bastions in as many days, Orius,’ Moros Calverius said, as he joined his Lord-Celestant at the fore. ‘How many more dung-heaps must we scatter across these slopes?’

Holy lightning crawled across Calverius’ golden mortis armour. It wreathed his limbs and formed a crackling halo about his skull-shaped war-helm. In one hand he gripped the haft of his reliquary staff, and in his other he held a sigmarite hammer, its head marked with the runes of life and death. ‘Not that I mind the exercise, you understand, but I would like to believe we are making some form of progress, even if your strategy does not call for it.’

Orius grunted. There were still many miles between the Adamantine and the Mandrake Bastion, and with every palisade they toppled, the enemy seemed to redouble in strength. But he had expected that – he’d fought the Bloodbound before. He knew that they favoured attack over defense to a monomaniacal degree, and that the only way to break them fully was to blindside them. To that end, he’d dispatched the Angelos retinues of the Adamantine, led by Kratus, the chamber’s Knight-Azyros, to catch the enemy unawares. Kratus would assault what few forces had been left to guard the Mandrake Bastion, even as Orius and the rest of the chamber distracted the bulk of the foe. ‘You disagree with my plan, Lord-Relictor?’

Moros chuckled. ‘No, my Lord-Celestant. Merely making an observation.’ He raised his staff. ‘The palisade draws close. And it appears Tarkus has beaten us there, as ever.’

Orius peered towards the palisade and saw a number of Liberator retinues racing ahead of the rest of the chamber. They followed the gleaming figure of Tarkus, Knight-Heraldor of the Adamantine, as he chopped himself a red path through the enemy. As they watched, Tarkus raised his battle-horn and blew a bellicose note, exhorting his brethren onwards towards the gates and the palisade.

‘He was ever eager to take the fight to the foe,’ Orius said, annoyed. Tarkus was as brave and fierce as a gryph-hound, but seemed to lack a single iota of that animal’s common sense. More than once, the Knight-Heraldor had found himself ahead of his brothers, alone amongst the enemy. Yet even so, he persevered. Where his horn sounded, victory soon followed.

‘We should join him, unless we wish to be left behind,’ Moros said.

‘And so we shall. Galerius, to the fore,’ Orius said. The heavily armoured shape of the Knight-Vexillor of the Adamantine pushed his way through the marching Protectors, the battle-standard of the chamber clutched in one gauntlet. ‘Moros, you and your warriors are with me – we shall join Tarkus. Galerius, lead our brethren forward.’

Galerius nodded. He raised the battle-standard of the Adamantine high, so that the celestial energies which crackled about it were visible to the eye of every Stormcast. Liberators moved forward at his signal, shields held at a steep angle as they ascended towards the palisade. Judicators followed them, firing over their heads in an attempt to drive the Bloodbound back. As the bulk of the chamber’s forces continued their steady ascent, Orius and Moros led their Paladins forward, clearing the way as they had before.

The Bloodbound were in full retreat now. All but the canniest of the bloodreaver chieftains had fallen, and those who remained were bodily dragging their warriors away from battle. Even as he fought his way towards them, Orius saw the crude gates rise on ropes of woven scalp-hair and brass chains, pulled up by savage tribesmen at the bellowed command of a bulky, lash-wielding warrior. Bloodreavers flooded out of the gates, howling war songs as they trampled their own retreating comrades. Brutal duels broke out amid the carnage as chieftains and tribesmen clashed, fighting for survival.

The Decimator retinues waded into the madness, cleaving the combatants apart with broad strokes. Soon, the remaining bloodreavers were streaming back through the gates, their berserk courage broken. Orius picked up speed, running now as the gates began to close. Jagged spears and crude javelins, crafted from bone and wood, pelted from the top of the palisade, splintering against sigmarite armour. The Bloodbound had little liking for such weapons, but they employed them when necessary.

Even as he reached the palisade, the gates thumped down with finality. There were still some bloodreavers left on the slope, but they were isolated and easily picked apart by his warriors as they advanced. Tarkus met him at the palisade, his armour streaked with gore and ash, but his enthusiasm undimmed.

‘Unwelcoming lot aren’t they, my lord?’ he called, ignoring the chunks of stone and bone-tipped spears that rained down around him. ‘I’ve half a mind to blow this filthy nest of theirs right over.’

‘If memory serves, you got the last one,’ Moros said. He lashed out with his reliquary, smashing a javelin from the air.

‘And so? Am I not the herald? Is that not my duty, Lord-Relictor?’ Tarkus said. A chunk of volcanic rock bounced off his helm.

Orius waved Moros to silence. ‘It is your duty to announce us, Knight-Heraldor. Blow your horn and let them know we are soon among them.’ He motioned the paladin retinues to the fore. As the Liberators raised their shields over their heads to absorb the rain of rocks, javelins and spears, the heavily armoured Retributors and Decimators ploughed forward. He looked at the Lord-Relictor. ‘Moros, yours is the honour this time. Open the gate, O Master of the Celestial Lightning. Let them know the fury of the power aetheric.’

Moros whirled his staff about and slammed the sigmarite ferrule down against the hard black stones. As he did so, he spoke, fiercely and fast, firing the words as if from a skybolt bow. They shivered on the air as they left his lips, and Orius felt the power of them reverberate through him. The Lord-Relictor was calling upon Sigmar, and such a thing never failed to invigorate those Stormcasts who heard it. The glow about him grew brighter and brighter. With a roar that shook the ground, an immense bolt of lightning punched through the palisade, ripping away the gate and much of the wall besides. Dust filled the air, and the Stormcasts moved immediately to take control of the gap.

Decimators and Retributors widened the smoking hole, smashing aside burning bones and sections of charred stone so that the Liberators could step forward, shields locked. They formed a shield wall before the gap, marching forward slowly so as to make room for the other Stormcasts. The bodies of those Bloodbound unlucky enough to be too close to the gates when Moros shattered them lay scattered all around, and any survivors were quickly dispatched as the Stormcasts moved into the palisade.

As the smoke cleared, Orius saw that the Bloodbound had built their fortress on the plundered remains of hundreds of barrows. Savage altars of brass and iron, spewing red smoke, had been set up beneath primitive stone monoliths. These enormous pillars were covered in the hateful runes of the Ruinous Powers. Standards and daemonic icons had been stabbed into the rocky soil in haphazard fashion, and their number stretched back up the slope as far as the eye could see. Bodies hung from some of these – flayed, burned and broken by the savage tribesmen who even now gathered beneath them. Croaking carrion birds perched on iron crossbeams, pecking at human wreckage or watching silently from atop the monoliths.

‘Thus does the Blood God claim his killing fields,’ Moros murmured. Bloodreavers crept through the forest of icons and hanging bodies, chanting the name of their foul god. Larger shapes moved behind them – not blood warriors, but something else, something worse. Huge mutation-scarred warriors, clad in heavy half-plate the colour of freshly spilled blood, loped forward, smashing aside icons and any bloodreaver too slow to get out of their path.

‘Skullreapers,’ Tarkus muttered. ‘The head hunters of Khorne.’ Then, with a laugh, he added, ‘They must have heard we were here.’

Past the skullreapers, Orius saw a heavy-set figure standing on top of a crumbled barrow, exhorting the bloodreavers forward with gestures and the kiss of an expertly applied lash. He was clad in battered armour marked prominently with the rune of Khorne, and wearing a helm made from the split jaw-bone of some savage beast. His flesh was the colour of a fresh bruise and one hand had been replaced by a cruel trident, anchored in the raw, red stump of his wrist.

‘The fat one – I know his kind. A bloodstoker. He’s lashing the others into a frenzy,’ Moros said. ‘They’ll drive us back through sheer momentum unless we break them now.’ Even as he spoke, the bloodreavers began their charge. They came in a howling wave, closing in on the Adamantine shield wall from all directions.

‘Then break them we shall. Set your standard, Galerius,’ Orius said. ‘We shall take not a single step backwards. We smash them or they smash us. There will be no retreat. You will hold here until there is nothing left to hold.’

‘Aye, my lord,’ Galerius said, stabbing his standard pole into the rocky ground. ‘Let them come, and break themselves on our shields. None may withstand us.’

The Bloodbound crashed against the shield wall a moment later. Clouds of dust thrown up by their charge washed across Orius and his auxiliary commanders. The rattle of sigmarite meeting brass and iron filled the air.

‘No one seems to have informed our enemies of that,’ Moros said, as he directed his Protectors forward to bolster the shield wall. ‘Then, they seem a fairly primitive lot… Perhaps they simply don’t understand what and who they face.’

‘They understand,’ Orius said, watching as the Liberators locked shields and pressed the enemy back. ‘They know us by now, Moros. See how eagerly they run to us, and how joyfully they accept the gifts we bring.’ He raised his runeblade to point at a howling tribesman. The warrior had managed to clamber over the shields of the Liberators and had fallen behind the shield wall, his body covered in grievous wounds but his fury undimmed. As he struggled to rise, Orius removed his head.

‘Moros, Galerius, hold the line,’ Orius bellowed. ‘Tarkus, with me. Form up. Form up, my brothers – the enemies of all the realms stand before us.’ He gestured with his hammer and the Retributors swung into motion around him as he started forward, Tarkus at his side, leading them forwards. ‘Make a path, brothers,’ he cried, and the shield wall split with a crash of sigmarite. Orius led Tarkus and the others through the gap.

The Retributors struck the bloodreavers like a mailed fist, driving deep into the frenzied bands of tattooed warriors. Bellowing chieftains and clan-champions were broken and cast down by the heavily armoured paladin retinues. Grisly battle standards were shattered and discarded, even as those who sought to defend them were cut down.

‘The fat one is yours, Knight-Heraldor,’ Orius said, swatting a barbarian aside. ‘We shall break them here – you see that they do not get up again.’

Tarkus laughed harshly and blew a fierce note on his battle-horn, rallying his Liberators to him. He plunged towards the bloodstoker, chopping a path through the enemy. It was the Knight-Heraldor’s pleasure, and his duty, to meet the champions of the foe and break them in Sigmar’s name. Orius turned his attention back to the fray. He caught sight of the brass and bone icons of the skullreapers as they made for the Retributors.

Lightning hammer met daemonblade as the two groups slammed together, scattering lesser warriors in their haste. The crack of lightning and the bellowed prayers of the skullreapers filled Orius’ ears as he ducked a wild blow and rose up to ram his runeblade through the chest of one of the murderous berserkers. He forced the skullreaper back, even as his dying foe hammered at his head and shoulders.

Orius tore his blade free in a spray of gore, and spun, narrowly parrying a blow. He brought his foot up between his attacker’s legs and was rewarded with a shriek of pain. He crushed the skullreaper’s head with a blow from his hammer and turned. He saw one of his Retributors stumble as another skullreaper, larger than the rest, battered at the warrior.

The skullreaper’s jagged blade tore through the blessed sigmarite. The Retributor staggered and sank down as a second blow caught him on the back. His lightning hammer tumbled from his hands as he fell to his knees. The hulking skullreaper howled in triumph as his third blow severed the Stormcast’s head from his shoulders.

But the warrior’s glee was short-lived. The Retributor’s body evaporated in a searing bolt of azure lightning, which speared upwards. Stormcasts did not die as others – instead, the fallen returned to Azyr, there to be reforged anew by Sigmar. Our duty began with death, thought Orius as he started forward, and it shall not stay our hand.

The skullreaper staggered, roaring in fury, momentarily blinded by the display. Orius charged forward through the fading motes of blue light that marked his warrior’s fall and drove his shoulder into the skullreaper’s gut. The Bloodbound stumbled back and Orius gave him no chance to recover. His hammer snapped out, catching the maddened warrior in his unprotected throat. Cartilage crunched and the skullreaper bent forward, clawing at his throat. Orius’ runeblade descended, and his foe’s head rolled free of his neck.

The Lord-Celestant turned as he heard the crunch of hell-forged iron on stone. Another skullreaper bounded towards him, a huge headsman’s axe clutched in either hand. Orius interposed his runeblade at the last second, halting the axes’ descent in an explosion of sparks. He staggered back, off-balance. The ashy ground crumbled beneath him, slipping away from his feet as he was forced back against one of the barrows. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Tarkus had reached the bloodstoker. The bloated warrior flailed at the Knight-Heraldor with his lash, but Tarkus pressed forward regardless. Orius grunted and shoved the skullreaper back.

The hulking warrior recovered quickly and hewed at Orius. The Lord-Celestant twisted aside, and the jagged axe tore a gouge in the side of the barrow, ripping it open. Stone crumbled, and ash-stained bones spilled across the ground as Orius surged forward. A flurry of blows drove the skullreaper back, and he gnashed broken fangs in frustration. Orius parried a wild slash with his runeblade and smashed his hammer into the Chaos warrior’s knee, buckling the crimson armour and pulping the bone beneath.

The skullreaper bellowed and staggered. Orius put him out of his misery a moment later, cleaving his skull in two. As he pried his blade free, Orius caught sight of the scattered bones. They were grey and crumbling, rendered thin and hollow by the heat rising from within the crater. He wondered, as he turned away, who they had been. Only the poor and unclaimed of Klaxus were buried on these far slopes, their bones tumbled into hollows and covered in dust and loose rocks.

Sleep in peace, whoever you were, he thought. The storm shall pass you by.

The last of the skullreapers had fallen, his head crushed by a lightning hammer. The remaining Retributors strode over their foes with nary a backwards glance as they pursued the retreating bloodreavers, driving them up the slope. Orius glanced around, taking stock. Moros and Galerius were advancing with the rest of the chamber, toppling the monoliths and shattering the standards left behind by the enemy as they ascended the slope. The Retributors and Decimators would see that the foe did not rally. They would drive them up the slope, all the way to the Mandrake Bastion, if need be. The Bloodbound would turn there and make their stand; Orius was counting on it.

If Kratus was successful, the Adamantine could catch the enemy between the hammer and the anvil and smash them utterly, freeing the Stormcasts to enter the crater-city of Uryx. Then would come battle of a different sort. Not a gruelling ascent into the teeth of the enemy, but house-to-house and street-to-street, a war of increments. The sort of war I’ve fought before, he thought. His grip on his weapons tightened, as, for a moment, he was back in Uryx, leading his warriors in a last desperate bid to unseat the priest-kings. He had failed then. Failed his people, failed Klaxus. But he would not fail now.

Tarkus joined him, carrying the bloodstoker’s head by its scalp.

‘Another for the ash-heap,’ he said, indicating the head. ‘If this is the quality of our foe, I wonder why the Hammerhand had such trouble in the Igneous Delta.’

‘Your arrogance will be your undoing. This is only the beginning,’ Orius said, tapping his hammer against Tarkus’ shoulder-plate in a chastising fashion. ‘We have surprise on our side – the eyes of the enemy are elsewhere. It will not last. When we reach the Mandrake Bastion, you will see the true measure of the foe, unless Kratus is successful.’

‘One can but hope.’ The Knight-Heraldor tossed his grisly trophy aside. ‘Kratus will be there to greet us, Lord-Celestant, of that you may have no fear. And Gorgus, as well. The light of Sigmar shall guide us to victory.’ The Knight-Heraldor lifted his battle-horn and blew a single, sterling note.

‘Let his will be done,’ Orius murmured, as far above the crater rim the black clouds split wide and azure lightning hammered down, again and again. Sigmar be with you, he thought. Then, he raised his hammer and roared, ‘Forward!’

As one, the Adamantine swung once more into motion, as inexorable and inexhaustible as the storm itself.

The stones of the Sulphur Citadel had begun to sweat blood. The stink of it mingled with the bitter stench of the vast sulphuric lake for which the citadel was named, and above which it rose like a gnarled fist of stone. It blighted the air and burnt the flesh of the warriors who climbed the immense porphyry steps of the temple-bastion towards the great gilded dome at the citadel’s summit.

The Sulphur Citadel was composed of hundreds of flat slabs of yellow stone, each larger than the last, rising in a slumped pile from the pale, steaming waters of the lake. These gigantic slabs were encrusted with thick battlements, looming turrets, and immense statues hollowed and shaped from the very stone. The uppermost levels had been carved into a many-pillared palace, from which the priest-kings of Klaxus had ruled.

Now, that palace was home only to monsters and madmen. The blood, and the wind which carried its charnel stink, was a sign. A call to arms. They came in silence, save for the rattle of the panoply of war. Flayed standards, torn raw and dripping from the bodies of captives and enemies, rustled softly in the stinking breeze, and red armour, creased by axe and sword, clattered as they climbed the steps.

Eighty-eight warriors, chosen from among eighty-eight thousand who had followed the Scarlet Lord into Uryx through the Ashen Jungle, ascended the wide steps to the upper bastion as the red sun sank past the horizon, and the pale, orange moon rose to replace it. Some still bled from the wounds which they had taken to earn their place here, while others clutched gory weapons, still wet with the blood of their fellows. Khorne cared not from whence the blood flowed, and neither did they. The bitter wind rose up from the sulphur lake and whipped amongst them as they splashed through the blood cascading down the steps of the citadel.

A war-wind, thought the Scarlet Lord as he ascended the steps at the head of his Gorechosen. It was a familiar thing, though in no way comforting. It was the stink of slaughter, of spilled blood and burning bone; a smell that he who had once been Anhur, Prince of Ytalan, had grown far too fond of. He had been assured by the god he now served that carnage was the coin by which victory was bought. But gods are not to be trusted, only obeyed, he thought. An important lesson, and one best learned quickly and soon by those who bartered their souls to the Ruinous Powers.

He had seen the truth of it on the killing fields of the Furnace Lands as he shed his old life and was born anew from the cauldron of war. Once, he had hoped to fight for his people, but they had turned on him. Now he fought for another – one more demanding than any mortal, but also more appreciative. The gods were not selfish with their gifts.

Then, some gifts are more useful than others, he thought. He had seen other men become beasts, reduced to slavering horrors as the hand of Khorne passed over them. Whatever their form, they battled in Khorne’s name, and that was all the Blood God truly required.

But not all battles were equal. Not all wars were worthy of the name.

He had learned that much, as he carved out his path to glory. Khorne favoured the bold, even in defeat. But victory… ah. Anhur had fought too long and too hard to countenance defeat. He had left a trail of fire and death behind him, but he would accomplish more than simple slaughter before he was finished.

Anhur stopped when he reached the top of the steps, and turned to gaze out over the city he had brought to ruin. Uryx was a labyrinthine maze of walls, palaces and plazas, built within the bosom of the Ashen Jungle, and up along the vast sweep of the crater’s inner slope, to the far northern rim, where the Mandrake Bastion rose wild. The city was a sickle moon of stone and wood, spreading like a stain along the rock face. Untold millions had lived, worked and died here. Generation upon generation had shaped jungle and crater-cliff into something more, something greater… Uryx of the Nine Hundred Pillars, greatest of all the crater-cities, mighty in war, wise in rule – the jewel of Klaxus.

Yes, Uryx had once been the greatest city of Klaxus, supreme among the kingdoms of the crater. Now, thanks to him, it was nothing. He looked down, at the eighty-eight Bloodbound who had followed him across the Bridge of Smoke and up the weeping steps of the Sulphur Citadel, and something in him whispered, Is it as you imagined, Prince of Ytalan? Is this the day you dreamt of, in your long exile?

No, he thought. Once, he had hoped to rule here, wisely and well. But the city was ashes, as were his hopes. Only a single dread purpose remained.

It was something of a relief, frankly.

Behind him, the great stone doors to the palace rose up, taller even than the brimstone gargants of the Flamefields. They were flanked by two immense statues, wrought in the shape of the loathsome toad-dragons which had once claimed the Sulphur Lake for their own, in the centuries before men had come to rule the Ashen Jungles of the Tephra Crater. It had been his ancestors who had slain the beasts and raised up a citadel over their bones.

‘Uryx of the Nine Hundred Pillars,’ he rumbled, as he spread his arms. ‘And not a single one left standing.’ Shrouded in daemonic iron, Anhur made for an imposing figure, even among the barbarous ranks of his followers. His war-plate was the colour of dried blood, as were the frayed silks he wore beneath it. His helm and tattered chainmail were as black as the single-bladed axe he carried easily in one hand. Great flat horns rose from the sides of his helm, and met above his head to form the crooked rune of the Blood God. His free hand rested on the pommel of the sword sheathed at his side.

‘Eight days,’ he said, more softly. ‘Was that all it took?’

Are you disappointed that it took so long… or that it did not take longer? the voice in his head murmured in reply. Is it all that you dreamt it would be, Anhur of Klaxus?

Anhur ignored the voice, stifling it with an ease born of experience. Now was not the time for doubt, only courage. He looked up and saw something vast cross the sky, blotting out the very stars as it passed – a monstrous form, made from smoke and screams and the light of the mad moon, reflected in the blades of the Bloodbound. Clad in baroque armour, his visage that of a snarling war hound, Khorne strode the red road through the burning skies of Aqshy, seeking war, the Allslaughter in his hand and his legions following.

For a moment, Anhur thought that the Blood God had seen him, and he tightened his grip on his axe. He could not say whether it was fear or eagerness which seized him. The moment passed, and he looked down at his Gorechosen – those champions who had proven themselves worthy to fight at his side – and wondered whether any of them had seen the god, as he had. He caught the eye of the hulking skullgrinder, Volundr, and the fearsome warrior-smith nodded. The smouldering anvil he bore turned slowly on its barbed chain as he pulled the links tight, and the weapons of those warriors arrayed behind him glowed briefly.

‘Smell that?’ said Apademak the Hungry, another of the Gorechosen. ‘It’s a butcher’s breeze.’ The looming slaughterpriest stretched his long, scarred arms out, as if to grasp and pull the stench to him. ‘An auspicious omen. Khorne smiles upon us, brothers.’

‘Were you ever in doubt, Hungry One?’ Hroth Shieldbreaker asked. The exalted deathbringer was wide where Apademak was tall, and hairy where the other was smooth. A long beard, plaited with bone and gristle, hung down onto his barrel chest. Weapons of all sizes and shapes dangled from his war-harness, and he fondled them as he spoke. ‘He has blessed us with victories aplenty – even the Bloodwrath himself would have been hard-pressed to breach the crater-bastions of Vaxtl, but we did that in a fortnight.’

‘Aye, brother. Doubt is for the weak. Khorne calls us to the feast, Hroth, and to the feast we must go,’ Apademak said. His smile was a slash of red, his teeth stained the colour of spilled blood. ‘Klaxus is ours, my brothers,’ he said, more loudly. He turned and raised his axe, and a murmur of assent swept through the ranks of the Bloodbound.

‘No, Apademak,’ Anhur said. ‘Klaxus is mine. Even as all of the kingdoms of the Tephra Crater are mine. They are my offering to the Blood God.’ He lifted his axe so that the light of the moon limned the black edge of its wide blade. ‘By this axe, I rule. Do not forget or I shall add your skull to my tally, slaughterpriest.’

‘I meant no offence, my lord,’ Apademak said, with a mocking bow. ‘Take my skull, if it pleases you. I ask only that you mount it upon your shield, so that even in death I might face your foes and ward you from harm.’

Anhur extended his axe and slid the flat of the blade beneath Apademak’s chin. He raised the warrior’s face, and said, ‘Obsequiousness does not suit you, Hungry One.’

Apademak grinned. ‘I am glad to hear it.’

Anhur snorted and stepped back. He looked up. The sky had grown darker. Black clouds pulsed with silent lightning, and the air had grown harsh and clean.

‘A storm, my lord,’ Berstuk, the wildest of his Gorechosen, said. ‘It brings with it the clamour of war. Why do we tarry here, when there is blood to be spilled elsewhere?’ He struck the blood-slick steps with the brass ferrule of his portal of skulls. ‘The enemy is at hand – let us meet him!’ The bloodsecrator was a murderous engine, driven by thought of battles yet to come. His chest-plate was covered in skulls culled from the ranks of the defenders of Vaxtl, Ytalan and Klaxus – heroes and champions all, who had fallen to his ensorcelled axe.

‘We do not tarry, skull-bearer. And our battle is not over. Indeed, it has barely even begun,’ Anhur said. A sudden urgency gripped him, as distant thunder rumbled. The enemy – the true enemy – were near at hand.

Quickly, he led his warriors into the pillared corridors of the Sulphur Citadel. His Gorechosen followed in his wake, leading the rest of his warriors in silent procession, shattered bones crunching beneath their feet. They could feel it as well as he – it was in the air, and the slabbed, bleeding stones they walked upon; it clung to the gore-stained statues which lined the path to the palace’s heart, and bristled in every shadow.

The weirdling pressure grew stronger as Anhur led his warriors into the massive central chamber, where the Klaxian priest-kings had once sat in judgement of heretics and criminals. Now it was an abattoir. Hundreds of bodies were stacked like cordwood in great heaps, and flayed skins hung like tattered banners from the pillars. Skulls had been nailed to every imaginable surface, or else piled high in macabre pyramids. Flies hummed through the air, winding among the pillars in great, serpentine clouds.

As Anhur led his warriors towards the centre of the chamber, bulky shapes revealed themselves, moving purposefully to intercept them. The warriors were bloated mockeries of men, with sagging folds of rotting flesh squeezed into corroded armour. They carried pockmarked blades dripping with pus and stank worse than any battlefield. The blightkings stopped as Anhur raised his axe, and with many a wheeze and groan, sank to their knees.

He strode through the kneeling ranks of the pox-warriors. The chamber floor dipped, descending into a wide, shallow crater. A carpet of stitched flesh covered the bottom of the depression, hiding the intricately carved map of the Tephra Crater and its diverse kingdoms which stretched from rim to rim. Every inch of flayed skin was marked by bloody runes and sigils which caused his pulse to quicken. The flesh-shroud had been crafted from the skins of the last defenders of the citadel, and now it squirmed with potent magic.

But it was what hung above the flesh-shroud that occupied his full attention. Eight immense plates of polished obsidian hovered above the centre of the chamber, suspended in the air by sorcery, rotating with ponderous, machine-like precision. The plates were each as large as the palace doors, but as thin as silk and framed with etched brass, marked with the runes of Khorne. Their slow dance was almost hypnotic, and as each spun in its turn, Anhur thought he could see dim forms and faces pressed to the oil-black surface.

The plates had been shaped by the twisted artisans of the Bale-Furnace, and they had dubbed them the Black Rift. Given their purpose, Anhur thought it as good a name as any. The Furnace-Kings, with all the terrible artifice of their kind, had shaved and chipped the obsidian into polished smoothness, and crafted the brass frames which banded each.

It had taken months to transport the plates across the Felstone Plains from the obsidian fields of the Igneous Delta and then up the crater wall before descending into the jungles within; more than once, they had almost lost them to misadventure or enemy action. The loss of even one would have been disastrous.

Anhur looked around. It was here that the Klaxian noble families had made their final stand, and it was here that he had butchered them, beneath the great gilded ceiling. He gazed up at it, past the obsidian plates. The inner curve of the dome was shaped like a vast, inhuman countenance, bearded and stern. It was duardin work, he recalled, gifted to the first king of Klaxus in those dim, distant days before the coming of Chaos, and shaped like the face of…

‘Sigmar,’ he said, thinking of the lightning he’d seen thrashing about in the clouds.

‘Aye, and a great one for glowering he is,’ a voice said. Anhur laughed harshly. A lean shape, hooded and robed, wearing rusty scraps of armour, joined him in his examination of the dome. ‘He’s been doing it since I started the ritual,’ the hooded shape continued.

Before Anhur could reply, the obsidian began to pick up speed, the plates turning more sharply. The runes etched into their frames began to glow white hot, and the air grew thick and cloying. Anhur could smell rotting meat and brimstone, sour blood and burning bone. The obsidian began to wobble and tilt and there were pinpricks of red within the starless dark. The flesh-shroud began to undulate as if in pain, the stretched and flayed faces of the dead twisting in silent screams.

The blood which stained the stones of the chamber began to bubble, as if something stirred beneath it. Half-formed shapes heaved and splashed, pushing up from below the dried gore, striving towards the light. Brass talons and black horns breached the surface, but only for a moment. A litany of frustrated howls nearly deafened Anhur before fading to nothing, as the blood grew still and calm once more.

‘Pay them no heed, my lord. At the moment, they are not worth the effort,’ the lean figure said as it turned from the slowly spinning facets of obsidian. He threw back his hood, exposing mouldering, cadaverous features. One eye bulged from its socket, a glittering, faceted orb, like that of one of the flies which swarmed about the chamber.

‘Soon, then?’ Anhur said. ‘Will it be soon, Pazak?’

‘It will happen as the gods will, and not a moment sooner,’ Pazak of the Faceted Eye said. The sorcerer looked at Anhur and sniffed. ‘Glaring at me won’t make it happen any faster.’

Anhur’s hand fell to the sword, sheathed on his hip. ‘Careful, Pazak. I spared you once. I shall not do so again if you continue to test my patience.’

Pazak looked at the sword and then at Anhur. ‘And if I thought you would actually draw that sword, I might fear such a threat,’ the sorcerer said. ‘But you have never done so. Even when pressed, you refuse to draw it.’

‘And so? What business is it of yours which weapons I employ?’ Anhur hefted his axe. ‘Shall I test my axe, then? It served to still your tongue well enough in the Alkali Basin, as I recall. Should I finish what I started that day and remove your head in its entirety, rather than simply scratching your throat?’

Pazak threw up his hands in surrender. ‘Forgive me, my lord. It was a silly question, I know. Curiosity has ever been the greatest of my vices,’ he said. Anhur laughed.

‘I doubt that,’ he said. He looked around. ‘Did you know, in all my years here, I never once saw this place for myself. This citadel was barred to all save the priest-kings of Klaxus and their retainers.’

‘And for good reason,’ Pazak said. ‘One can only imagine the havoc you might have caused, had you and your allies gained access to this place and its secrets.’ The sorcerer cocked his head. ‘Then, given that you fled one step ahead of the headsman, I suppose that you caused quite a stir regardless.’

‘I led a rebellion, Pazak,’ Anhur said, watching the facets.

‘A ruckus, then.’ Pazak gave a wheezing laugh. ‘All for the best, I suppose. Victory was achieved, in the end.’

‘We have not won yet.’ Anhur looked at the sorcerer. ‘The storm is on our doorstep, even as we speak.’ Anhur lifted his axe and pointed it at Pazak. ‘We must welcome it,’ he said, and smiled, thinking of the glories to come. Come storm-walkers, come lightning-men, come dogs of Azyr… Come and meet thy doom.

Kratus the Silent dropped through the clouds towards the Mandrake Bastion on wings of crackling lightning. He dived through the storm, piercing it like an arrow from on high. The root-encrusted walls of the crater-city of Uryx grew larger, spreading beneath the Knight-Azyros as he shot downwards, faster than the speed of thought, his starblade in one hand and his celestial beacon in the other. Clad in azure and gold, his brother Stormcasts fell with him through the curtain of rain, their gleaming wings folded so as to lend them greater speed in their descent.

As he dived, Kratus could see the vast sweep of the inner slope of the northern edge of the Tephra Crater, upon which much of Uryx nestled. The great rocky slope was shrouded by immense, ash-born trees for miles in either direction, as the city nestled within the jungle’s embrace, riding the curve of the crater wall down into the sprawl of jungle below. Uryx was still in its death-throes. Smoke boiled up out of the city as great fires raged unchecked, and even at this height, he could hear the clash of weapons and the screams of the dying.

The Mandrake Bastion waited below, growing larger and larger the closer he drew. The enormous battlement of stone and living roots, each wider than three men, jutted up from and rose over the smaller walls of the city. The bastion was the gateway to Klaxus and Uryx from the north, and it had repelled mighty orruk hordes and even the black-armoured warriors of the Vulcanus Empire in the centuries before the coming of Chaos. It might even have been able to hold back the forces of the Adamantine as they fought their way up the slope. A slim chance, but a chance all the same. Thus, the Mandrake Bastion must fall.

To Kratus the bastion looked as if giant hands had woven the roots together, and then stabbed immense blocks of stone between them or laid them across the top. The roots rose upwards, conglomerating into a dozen monstrous effigies, each as tall as a watchtower and twice as wide. The effigies stood balanced on the rim of the crater, towering over the outer slopes, misshapen faces slack as if in slumber. But appearances, Kratus knew, could be deceiving. He swept his starblade out, signalling to the Prosecutors on his right. They peeled off, hurtling towards the closest one.

Kratus angled himself towards another, and his remaining Prosecutors followed suit. They could not take the whole bastion, but they could take its heart, just above the main gatehouse. There were thousands of Bloodbound stationed throughout the vast winding length of the bastion, but there was only one gate. What forces occupied the remainder of the fortress would be trapped when it was taken, easy pickings for the rest of the chamber when they arrived, regardless of their numbers.

Scuttling masses expanded and divided, becoming hundreds of individual warriors, clad in barbaric raiment and clutching crude weapons. As lightning ripped the sky wide and thunder shook the air, some of them looked up into the stinging rain. Eyes widened, mouths opened in warning, but too late. The warrior-heralds of Sigmar had arrived, bearing messages of violence and retribution. Kratus led his warriors in a steep dive, blazing wings unfolding at the last moment, carrying them low and fast over the bastion in a blur of shining sigmarite.

The Prosecutors unleashed their celestial hammers, hurling them with meteoric force as they sped along the rampart. The hammers were wrought from the energy of the storm itself, and they struck with its fury, rending stone, wood and flesh alike. They tore chunks out of the bastion and the gatehouses, and obliterated the head of one of the massive effigies.

Kratus swept past a burly chieftain, clad in a reptilian pelt and wearing a brass muzzle over his face. His starblade licked out, and the chieftain tumbled in his wake, headless. The Stormcasts swooped upwards. Javelins and spears clattered uselessly behind them.

Celestial hammers thundered down the length of the bastion, as the second group of Prosecutors began their own assault. Kratus signalled for his warriors to make another pass. As he did so, he saw a bulky, armoured figure stagger out of one of the gatehouses. No chieftain this, but a deathbringer, clad in the crimson armour of one of the Blood God’s chosen. The deathbringer bellowed inarticulately and grabbed one of the milling bloodreavers. He swung an axe out, gesticulating towards one of the effigies.

Kratus and his warriors began their second pass, lower this time. The bastion rampart was wide enough for twenty men to march shoulder to shoulder along its length, and the bloodreavers charged howling to meet them. Others moved towards the effigy, bearing heavy iron spears. Each spear was so long that it required three of the Bloodbound to lift it. Kratus sped towards them, but knew he would not reach them in time.

The immense wooden figure twitched and heaved as the bloodreavers stabbed it with the heavy spears. Dark rivulets of sap ran down its tangled frame, pooling like tar on the bastion. A foul smell filled the air, and the great eyelids snapped open, revealing milky orbs. The mandrake twisted on its roots, vast head turning one way and then another as if seeking something. It moaned as the iron spears dug into its form, drawing forth streams of sap.

A moment later, the living tower opened its enormous mouth and began to scream. A Prosecutor fell from the air, clutching at his head, as the noise washed over the bastion. Kratus lunged past him, and crashed in among the bloodreavers as they pelted forward. Another Prosecutor fell, blood streaming from the slits in his war-mask. The mandrake stretched up, head tilted back, and wailed. Kratus felt as if his teeth would shiver from his jaw and his bones would crack in his flesh, and he flung himself skywards.

The surviving Prosecutors followed him. The bloodreavers fell swiftly upon those who had been downed by the mandrake’s scream, hacking and slashing at them in a frenzy. Blue bolts of lightning speared upwards, hurtling past Kratus and vanishing into the roiling clouds above. More bolts sped upwards from further down the bastion, and he knew that a second mandrake had been woken.

The living towers were foul things – terrifying, but pitiable. Grown by the priest-kings of Klaxus in ages past, they knew only pain, and their screams would boil the brain of any unlucky enough to be the focus of their ire. Such was the terrible power which had shattered the Black-Iron Reavers of Vulcanus and the Ashdwell orruks. Even Stormcasts were not immune, it seemed. Kratus shook his head, trying to clear it.

Below, the mandrake twisted in its confinement, searching for them, mouth opening and closing. Its eyes rolled in their cavernous sockets and it gave a thunderous grunt. As one, the Prosecutors hurled their hammers and the enormous face vanished in an explosion of sap. Even as its smoking bulk lurched and hung dripping, the Prosecutors were dropping downwards again, ready to finish what they had begun.

Kratus gave no orders this time; none were necessary. The Prosecutors knew their business and went about it with ruthless efficiency. Weapons wreathed in lightning struck out left and right, smashing bloodreavers to the ground. The bastion cracked and trembled as hammers hurled from on high smashed home, sending bodies, rock and roots into the air. Enough of the bastion would be left standing for their purposes, but not by much.

The Knight-Azyros dropped to the rampart, cracking the ancient stones. He rose from his crouch, his starblade singing out to behead a bloodreaver. As they drew close, he realised that the Bloodbound were horribly mutilated – each one had only raw, stitched wounds where his ears should have been, and their eyelids had been removed, leaving their eyeballs exposed and staring. It was no wonder that the mandrake’s scream hadn’t harmed them. They howled as the dust of his arrival cleared and flung themselves at him.

Kratus wove through their ranks with his starblade flashing. Bloodreavers shrieked in agony as the sword pierced armour and flesh. Kratus turned, smashing the screaming mortal wreckage aside and locked blades with a howling blood warrior. The armoured berserker strained against him, raging incoherently. Kratus slammed the gilded bulk of his celestial beacon into the warrior’s belly, driving him back a step. Before the Bloodbound could recover, Kratus thrust the tip of his starblade through the berserker’s eye and into his frenzied brain. He jerked his weapon loose and turned as the foe came in a rush.

Beyond the armoured tribesmen he could see the smoking shell of the mandrake begin to twitch and rise. The ruptured roots began to sprout anew and shrill moans rose from them. It was regenerating. Soon it would unleash its scream again. He would have to deal with it himself, before the rest of the chamber arrived.

Kratus leapt forward, impossibly quick despite the weight of his armour. The hilt of his sword slid smoothly across his palm as he thrust it forwards, and the blade punched through a bloodreaver’s chest. He tore it free and turned, smashing the sigmarite pommel into a second bloodreaver’s face. The Chaos warrior catapulted backwards, struck the edge of the rampart and spun away, into the dark below. Kratus continued to move, stabbing, sweeping, thrusting, leaving bodies behind even as the distant towers continued to scream.

His Prosecutors continued to pummel the battlements from the air. Occasionally they would swoop through the ranks of the foe to leave a trail of broken bodies in their wake. Kratus fought his way towards the mandrake. The deathbringer rushed towards him, bulling through his own followers with a roar. He wore a round helm studded with brass nails, and his arms were bare and scarred. His axe keened strangely as it swept through the rain.

Kratus parried the blow and replied in kind, driving his opponent back. The deathbringer roared imprecations and curses as the two warriors stamped and whirled in a deadly gavotte. Kratus fought in silence, save for the hiss of his blade as it cut through the rain. The deathbringer raced forward. Axe and sword became locked as the two champions strained against one another.

‘I will pluck out your skull and mount it upon my trophy rack,’ the deathbringer snarled. When Kratus did not reply, the champion cursed. ‘Say something, damn you! I would know the name of my prey – I demand it!’

Kratus twisted his opponent’s axe aside and jerked forward. His head cracked against his foe’s, and the Chaos warrior staggered in surprise. Before he could recover, Kratus slid his starblade free and whipped it across the champion’s exposed forearms, severing the tendons there. The deathbringer howled as his axe fell from nerveless fingers. He lurched towards Kratus, trying to grapple with him, but the Knight-Azyros slid aside and chopped through the back of his opponent’s legs. The champion sank to his knees, and Kratus reversed his starblade and drove it down through a gap in his armour, between head and shoulder. He gave the blade a twist and jerked it free, as the dying deathbringer toppled over the parapet and tumbled to the slope far below.

Kratus held his starblade out so that the rain sluiced it clean. As he did so, he turned his head to meet the stunned gazes of the other Bloodbound. He said nothing, made no challenge. That was not his way. Silence spoke eloquently enough for his purposes these days.

Once, he had been a singer of great renown, in the days before the closing of the Gates of Azyr, before the fires of Chaos raged wild across the veldts of the Striding Kingdoms. He had wandered, singing for the highest chieftain and the lowliest tribesman alike. He had sung songs of peace and of war. But he would sing no more, not until the last embers of Chaos had been extinguished or his final hour, whichever came first.

Above the Bloodbound, he could see the mandrakes taking form. Their shrill piping grew in volume as new-grown roots rose and twined about one another with sinister speed. Soon, they would scream again. From below, on the outer slopes of the crater, he could hear the familiar clarion call of Tarkus’ battle-horn as the Knight-Heraldor urged his fellow Stormcasts on. Bloodbound warriors were streaming up the slope, retreating. Kratus could hear the groan of the colossal gates as they slowly creaked open. If it was to be done, it would have to be done now.

Kratus used the tip of his blade to open the shutter of his celestial beacon. Light poured out, the pure, blinding power of the Heavens themselves. It swelled, driving back the dark, reflecting from every drop of rain. To the faithful of Sigmar, that light was a wonder to behold – in its scintillating radiance was all the splendour of the heavens, clouds of nebulae and the shining of uncountable stars, a glimpse into the wide cosmos, and the glory of the Celestial Realm.

But to creatures like the Bloodbound, twisted and fallen from grace, the light of the celestial beacon was purest agony. It burned them as no fire ever could, searing the darkest corners of their corrupted souls. Armour, flesh and bone gave way before the light; warriors were reduced to smouldering wisps, their contorted shadows burnt into the stones of the bastion. Slowly, Kratus turned, lifting the beacon high so that its light swept across the closest mandrake. It shuddered as the light touched its tormented flesh, and, with a soft, sad sigh, the tree-thing collapsed in on itself, crumbling to ash.

Kratus lifted his beacon higher, even as the second of the great wooden effigies collapsed, joining its fellow in dissolution. The light blazed brighter and brighter, and the thunder rumbled. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his Prosecutors swoop low, towards the gates. They would take control of them before the enemy could open them.

More Bloodbound burst out of the stairwells of the shattered gatehouses, charging towards him. The first to reach him exploded into motes of char, as did the second, but the third swatted the beacon from Kratus’ grip even as he smouldered and crumbled. Kratus parried an axe and beheaded a bearded bloodreaver.

Lightning streaked down, and struck the bastion again and again. Each strike shook the stone wall down to the foundations. Bloodreavers were flung from the rampart, or were burnt to cinders by the touch of the lightning. But more still pressed forward, driven to a killing frenzy by fear and madness. As the last echoes of the lightning faded, Kratus readied himself to meet their charge. But he knew that he would not do so alone.

‘Ho, Silent One, you called and we have come – make way, make way,’ Lord-Castellant Gorgus roared, as he plunged out of the swirling smoke of the lightning strike. He whirled his sigmarite halberd about in a tight circle over his head as he pounded towards the stunned bloodreavers. His loyal gryph-hound, Shrike, loped alongside him.

Before the Chaos worshippers could recover their wits, Gorgus and Shrike were among them. As the smoke cleared, newly arrived Stormcasts followed their Lord-Castellant into battle. Liberators pressed forward, smashing into the bloodreavers and driving them back. Judicators took up position on the walls, and began to fire down into the enemy milling about on the slope below.

‘Take the gatehouses – quickly now,’ Gorgus said, directing a retinue of Liberators forward. He scooped up Kratus’ celestial beacon with the tip of his halberd and extended it to the Knight-Azyros. ‘Lost something, did you?’

Farther down the bastion, a howling mandrake fell silent as Prosecutors destroyed it. The winged warriors swooped past a moment later, rejoining their fellows as they attacked the Bloodbound on the slope below. Caught between their own bastion and the advancing Stormcast, the Khorne-worshippers were slowly coming unravelled. Those that did not flee would be ground under, and eliminated. Gorgus hurled a barbarian over the rampart and turned. ‘Best go let Orius know we’ve arrived, eh? I’ll settle up here,’ he said, and extended his hand. Kratus nodded and shot into the air.

The Mandrake Bastion had fallen.

The storm had come to Klaxus.

An excerpt from

SKAVEN PESTILENS

Josh Reynolds

CHAPTER ONE

The Crawling City

Skuralanx the Scurrying Dark, the Cunning Shadow, servant of the Great Corruptor, verminlord and blessed child of the Horned Rat, crept on stealthy hooves through the dead temple towards its central chamber. The daemon’s massive frame was heavily muscled beneath his mangy hide, and his bifurcated tail lashed in equal parts annoyance and excitement as he ducked his many-horned, fleshless skull beneath a cracked archway.

He crawled, skulked, scurried and slunk through the shadows cast by the eternal lightning-storm which swirled about the cracked domes and shattered towers. Writhing streaks of lightning cascaded down broken statues or struck the pockmarked plazas of the temple-complex. The sky above was a knot of painful, shimmering cobalt clouds, and the daemon avoided the sight of it as much as possible.

The mortals who had built this place called it the Sahg’gohl – the Storm-Crown of the City-Worm. A fitting name, Skuralanx thought, for a place where the air stank of iron and the elemental heat of Azyr. Within the domed central chamber was a door to that realm, and it wept forever in fury. Perhaps that explained the lightning. Skuralanx didn’t know and didn’t particularly care. Such doorways could be twisted out of shape and off-path with ridiculous ease, if one knew the trick of it.

But that was not his purpose here. Not yet at any rate. He was no brutish Warbringer or treacherous Warpseer, looking to conquer for conquest’s sake. No, he was a child of the Great Witherer, born of blessed foulness and blighted shadows, and his was a higher calling. The Eater of All Things was in turmoil, roiling with conflicting desires which could only be assuaged by that which Skuralanx sought – or rather, by that which his servants sought on his behalf.

One of the Thirteen Great Plagues was here. He was certain of it. Hidden away from the eyes of mortals and daemons alike. Skuralanx had followed its trail from the Jade Kingdoms of Ghyran to the rime-encrusted tarnholds of the fallen duchies of Shyish, and now, at last, here, to the Ghurlands and a city built on the broad, ever-undulating back of a colossal worm.

And he had not come alone, no-no. Skuralanx was a craftsman, and like all craftsmen, he possessed many tools. Two had come to the city-worm at his command, though neither knew that the other served him. The skaven of the Red Bubo Procession and the Congregation of Fumes, drawn from the Clans Pestilens, had risen at his order and drowned the inhabitants of the city in a foetid tide of pox and pestilence. Led by their quarrelsome plague priests, the two congregations had burst from the body of the worm, ringing their doom-gongs and spreading noxious death wherever they scurried.

It had been a thing of beauty and horror in equal measure. A civilisation, millennia old, ruined in a fortnight by the teeming, pestilent hordes that scurried forth at his behest. Even better, his chittering servants were now hard at work making this place fit for the children of the Horned Rat. Soon, this city, which had once belonged to the man-things, would instead be home to the Clans Pestilens. And Skuralanx would rule over them – whichever ones managed to survive, that is. He played no favourites and was content to allow them the freedom to murder one another with vicious abandon.

As long as one or the other found that which he desired, he cared nothing for their fate. They were in competition, and every setback and victory spurred them on to greater heights of cunning, just as he’d planned. Live or die, his triumph was assured. One of them would find the Liber and bring it to him.

Had he wished, he could easily have sought out the object of his desire himself. Indeed, there were some among his kin-rivals who would have done just that. But Skuralanx was patient. And besides, what was the point of having minions if one didn’t let them serve? Had not the Horned Rat spawned his children to serve him, after all?

Snickering, the verminlord leapt onto the shoulder of Sigmar. Or his statue, at least. Stern, bearded, unforgiving, the massive sculpture of the man-thing god glared out over the chamber where once his followers had gathered in worship. The chamber glowed with an unpleasant radiance. The glow emanated from the vast iron hatch composed of intersecting plates and set into the base of the statue’s plinth. Lightning dripped from it, crawling across the walls and floor in crackling sheets. It filled the air and made his hide prickle.

The interlocking plates had been designed to be opened only in the proper order. Skuralanx had no doubt that his cunning would prove equal to the task, when the need arose. At but a touch, he would wrench the realmgate open and twist it back upon itself, turning the way to the Jade Kingdoms and the maggot-infested warrens his minions called home. Plague congregations and clawbands without number awaited but the merest whisper of his voice, for his schemes and the tools with which he enacted them were infinite.

Beyond the chamber, through the shattered walls, Skuralanx could see the wide, pillar-lined causeway which connected the ruined temple to the rest of the city.

‘Blind, so blind, yes-yes,’ the daemon hissed, carving filthy runes into the statue’s cheek. He had come here every day for weeks to do so, because it amused him, and the statue’s face was all but swallowed up by the daemonic graffiti. ‘Can’t see what’s right in front of him, oh no. Blind god, broken god, dead god.’

He looked up past the lightning to the amber skies of the Ghurlands, where strange birds flew and worse things besides. ‘Soon, all of the gods will be dead, yes. Only one left, only the strongest, the stealthiest, the most brilliant of gods, yes-yes… all dead, and we will ascend in their place.’

They would rise and flourish, spreading decay across the Eight Realms. Yes, and more besides. All realms, all worlds, all peoples would fall. All would rot, never to be renewed. From out of this glorious corruption, new life would swell, but not mortal life, not man-thing life or hated duardin, no-no – only skaven life. Only the faithful skaven-life – no place for the unbelievers. All things would die.

And Shu’gohl, the Crawling City, would be the first.

The air smelled of worm. Not an unpleasant smell, by the standards of Vretch of the Red Bubo, but not altogether pleasing either. It was a coarse, acrid odour which clung tenaciously to everything here, living or otherwise. It filled the sprawling city of looming towers and swaying bridges which the skaven of the Clans Pestilens had, for the most part, occupied. It was even, regrettably, in his fur. It overlaid his natural pungency, subsuming the unique tang of his many and varied blessings, drowning them in worm-stink.

Chittering in annoyance, he scratched at a ripe blister until it burst, briefly releasing a revivifying aroma of pus and blood into the air. The plague priest’s thin nose twitched as the sickly-sweet smell faded, and was once more replaced by the dry stench of the monstrous enormity known as Shu’gohl, the Crawling City.

The great worm crawled ceaselessly across the Amber Steppes of the Ghurlands. Its segmented form stretched across the grasslands from sunrise to sunset, carrying the city and its people along with it. Shu’gohl crept slowly from horizon to horizon, day after day, devouring all in its path with remorseless hunger. It was not alone in this – to Vretch’s knowledge, there were at least ten of the immense worms remaining in the grasslands, driven to the surface in aeons past by great rains. Someday they might once more descend into the cavernous depths beneath the Amber Steppes, but for now they seemed content to squirm mindlessly across its surface, cracking the earth with their weight.

That suited Vretch just fine. The thought of all that amber-hued sky stretching far above was nothing less than terrifying to most skaven, but Vretch was not most skaven. And in any event, the Setaen Palisades were cramped enough to make any child of the Horned Rat feel at home. The great, bristle-like hairs which rose from the worm’s hide were as hard as stone, and thousands had been hollowed out in ages past to make the tiered towers which rose throughout the city.

Those hairs closest to the eternal lightning storm which wreathed Shu’gohl’s head had been made over into veritable citadels. They rose higher than any other structure in the city, and were connected by a vast network of bridges, nets and heavy palisades made from quarried worm-scale and frayed hairs culled from the worm’s dorsal forests. From the uppermost tiers, which Vretch had claimed for his own, one could see the entirety of the Crawling City. Not that there was much to look at. The man-things knew little of artisanry, preferring to stack stone rather than burrow through it.

His chambers were in the highest tiers of the Setaen Palisades, where the city’s noblest families had once resided. The former inhabitants now swung from makeshift gibbets and iron cages outside his windows, where they could be retrieved at any time he deemed necessary. Sometimes he rattled the chains, just to hear them moan. It had a soothing quality which he had come to appreciate in the weeks since his arrival.

The chamber at the heart of his domain was circular, and mostly open to the elements. The domed roof was supported by intricately carved pillars, and the floor was covered now by the tools of Vretch’s trade – ever-seething pox-cauldrons and bubbling alembics, piles of grimoires and heaps of parchment, and tottering stacks of cages, in which plague-rats and moaning man-things waited for his ministrations. Flayed hides, still dripping and streaked with rot, hung like curtains from the roof, and the signs most sacred to the Horned Rat had been carved onto every available surface. Plague monks clad in ragged robes moved back and forth through the chamber, their scrawny limbs bound in filthy bandages. They worked at various tasks, stirring his cauldrons and refining the battle-plagues they would inflict on the dwindling kernels of resistance within those areas of the Crawling City they controlled.

And then, and only then, it would be Kruk’s turn. Vretch’s claws tightened unconsciously as he thought of his brutal and foolish rival. Kruk, plague priest of Clan Festerlingus, had pursued Vretch to Shu’gohl like a bad smell. Then, that had always been Kruk’s way. Indeed, Vretch could almost admire such single-minded determination, were it not for Kruk’s blasphemous inclinations. Every skaven knows proper buboes are red, Vretch thought, grinding his teeth as the old anger surged through him. Red!

Both plague priests had followed a trail of stories whispered about the campfires of the savages who populated the Amber Steppes, racing to be the first to find their quarry. Vretch’s agents had spied upon the tribes of wild riders and nomads who fled before the approach of Shu’gohl. The worm-city crawled endlessly across the steppes and brought with it a strange plague, which afflicted all those caught in its shadow.

Vretch and his congregation had ascended on the worm, burrowing through its hard flesh and soft tissue to attack the city and its unprepared defenders from within.

Or so they had planned. Vretch ground his teeth in frustration. They had erupted from Shu’gohl’s flesh to find the defenders already occupied with Kruk and his heretical Congregation of Fumes. Now, Kruk held the tailwards section of the city, past the Dorsal Barbicans, though how long he would remain there only the Horned Rat knew.

He and Kruk were both looking for the same thing – the source of the mysterious plague which stalked in Shu’gohl’s wake. It rose from the worm’s ichors and stained the land black. The afflicted man-things grew hollow and rotted away, eaten inside out by burrowing black worms. He’d tested it numerous times since, and found it to be a thing of great beauty. Perhaps it was even one of the Thirteen Great Plagues…

The floor beneath his claws shuddered unexpectedly, and he tensed, clutching at a support pillar. He scuttled to the window and peered out over the expanse of the Crawling City, which sprawled like an unsightly encrustation across Shu’gohl’s broad segments. Its towers and tiers rose and fell with the segments and furrows of the great worm upon whose back it had been erected in millennia past.

Smoke still rose from beyond the distant walls of the Dorsal Barbicans. Kruk’s congregation hard at work, no doubt. Or perhaps something else… Only a few days ago, the skies overhead had grown dark and thunderous, and a harsh rain had fallen. Lightning had struck the great worm, causing it to shudder in agony. The storm clouds had dispersed somewhat as the worm continued its eternal crawl, but they were still there. His whiskers twitched.

The Setaen Palisades themselves rose in staggered levels, starting from a segment of the worm. The upper levels were built around the tops of setae, so that they moved when the worm moved. They had been crafted with care and skill, raised by the hands of eager artisans to house the mighty and wealthy of Shu’gohl. Now, they were steadily being transformed into fields of rot and plague by the hands of their former inhabitants.

How they wept, these weak man-things. How they shrieked and cried, as if they did not understand that all things rotted, all things died. Even the great worms of the Amber Steppes.

He looked down, eyes drawn by the clangour of industry. Far below, his followers oversaw the excavation of the Gut-shafts. Hordes of man-thing slaves, chained with iron and disease, cleared the great pores of flesh and solidified mucus, opening a path into Shu’gohl’s interior. As he watched, a geyser of the worm’s viscous blood spurted up, drowning a dozen slaves, as the Crawling City shuddered again. From somewhere far beyond the storm which wreathed the worm’s head, a throbbing, dolorous groan sounded. Birds rose from the tops of the towers and fled shrieking into the sky.

Soon, Vretch thought, the worm would die and its great hide would slough into bubbling ruin. A great stink would rise from it, choking the sky. It would be beautiful, Vretch thought. Especially if Kruk perished in the meantime.

A garbled moan caused him to turn. His assistants cowered back from the source of the sound, and he could smell the whiff of fear musk rising from them. Vretch chuckled and waved them back. The monks huddled away as Vretch stepped towards the crude plinth which had been built around the largest of his pox-cauldrons.

The Conglomeration was his finest work. A dozen slaves had gone into its creation, their tormented bodies merged through a combination of a hundred different plagues and poxes. Bile, pus and blood from weeping sores and raw wounds had flowed together to harden into stony scabs. The twitching mass of flesh, bone and infection sat astride its plinth and gazed down at Vretch with dull eyes.

‘Vrrretch,’ the thing said, with many mouths.

‘I am here, my most verminous of masters,’ Vretch said. The Conglomeration was an oracle, of sorts. On the rare occasions when it spoke, it did so with the voice of the Great Witherer. Other plague priests looked for their omens in the froth of cauldrons or the guts of boil-afflicted rats, but Vretch had provided the god and his servants a suitable receptacle for their mighty will.

‘You are too slow, Vretch,’ the Conglomeration hissed. The various heads spoke all at once, their individual voices merging into a familiar baritone snarl that shook Vretch to his bones. It was ever thus; his patron spoke with the voice of the Destroyer, the Crawling Entropy, the Eater of All Things… Skuralanx, the Scurrying Dark. One of the mightiest of those verminlords blessed to serve the Horned Rat in his truest aspect – that of the Corruptor. ‘Too slow, too slow. That heretical fool Kruk is ahead of you. Where is my pox, Vretch? Where are my blisters, my buboes, my worm-plagues?’

Vretch thrust a claw beneath his robes and scratched furiously at his greasy fur. Mention of his rival always made him itch. Red buboes, red! he thought. ‘Coming, coming, O mighty Skuralanx,’ he said. ‘I read-study quick-quick, yes? I must learn-know all there is, yes-yes?’ He scanned his chambers – the piles of scrolls, the bubbling cauldrons, the dismembered prisoners. Then, more firmly, he said, ‘Yes.’

The conjoined mass of skaven-flesh gave an impatient growl. Loose limbs flailed and claws smacked the stone floor. Blind eyes rolled in their sockets as froth-stained muzzles snapped in apparent frustration. The whole mass gave the impression that it was about to tear itself apart. Vretch stepped back warily.

‘Are you lying to me, Vretch?’ Skuralanx hissed. ‘What is there to study here? Kruk controls the great library in the Dorsal Barbicans, not you.’

And many thanks for reminding me of that, O most scurvy one, Vretch thought sourly. The Libraria Vurmis, the repository of centuries of knowledge gleaned from the far reaches and diverse kingdoms of Ghur by the scholar-knights who’d founded it, lay in the hands of the one skaven singularly unsuited to possess such a treasure.

‘Much-much, yes,’ he said, gesturing around in what he hoped was a placatory fashion. ‘More than one library in this squirming bastion, O mighty one.’

He hunched forward and swept out a crusty claw, indicating his surroundings. ‘I have found many-much secrets, O Conniving Shadow,’ he said obsequiously. ‘There is a world apart, in the guts of the great worm. One of the missing Libers is there – your most loyal and faithful and devoted servant is certain!’

The blind eyes of the conjoined skaven rolled towards him, as if peering at him in judgement. The bulk swelled and quivered for a moment. Then Skuralanx said, ‘Yessss. Find this world for me, Vretch of Clan Morbidus, and Skuralanx the Cunning shall see that you are rewarded beyond your wildest imaginings.’ Several gnarled claws rose and gestured contemptuously. ‘First, however, you must hurry-quick and send your devotees tailwards. The old enemy has come, riding sky-fire and bringing pain for the Children of the Horned Rat.’

‘The lightning,’ Vretch said. He had seen the storm-things before, at a distance, some months ago. It had been in the Jade Kingdoms, and he twitched as he recalled the gigantic silver-armoured warrior who had slaughtered so many of his fellows in the Glade of Horned Growths. That was where he’d first made Skuralanx’s acquaintance. The Scurrying Dark had filched his broken form from the battlefield, and they had made their bargain in the shadow of the great Blight Oak.

‘Yes,’ Skuralanx murmured, through many mouths. ‘The destroyers of Clan Rikkit, the harrowers of Murgid Fein and Cripple Fang, have come to Shu’gohl.’

‘And you want me to… go towards them, greatest of authorities?’ Vretch asked.

‘Yesss.’

Vretch scrubbed at his muzzle. After a moment, he said, ‘Why, O most scurviest of scurvies?’

‘They will defeat Kruk. Or he will defeat them. But either way, the Libraria Vurmis will be lost to you. You must claim it and all of its wisdom,’ Skuralanx hissed. The Conglomeration grew agitated, and the plinth creaked beneath its weight.

‘But… I already have it, most blemished one,’ Vretch said, peering at the Conglomeration. ‘Access to it, at least.’ He scratched at his chin, dislodging a shower of lice. ‘Yes-yes, all mine – ours! Ours! – most lordliest of lords.’

The blistered muzzles of the Conglomeration turned towards him. The question hung unspoken on the air. Vretch shrunk back, somewhat unnerved by the expressions on its faces. ‘I– I have a claw in Kruk’s camp, my most cunning and wise and beautiful master,’ he said, slyly.

The daemonically possessed mass grew still. Then, as one, the many mouths sighed, ‘Of course you do.’

The smell of blood hung as heavy as dust on the air of the Libraria Vurmis, and it only grew stronger as Kruk dug one blistered talon into the cheek of the man-thing. Squeelch clutched at his ears as the man-thing began to scream again. The cries echoed through the wide, circular chamber and even out along the ramparts of the Dorsal Barbicans, in which the library nestled. Kruk chittered in pleasure and continued with his ministrations, pulling and peeling the human’s abused flesh until bone gleamed through the raw red.

‘Talk-talk, man-thing,’ Kruk gurgled, holding up a gobbet of dripping meat. ‘Talk, or lose more bits, yes-yes.’

Squeelch looked away. He wasn’t particularly squeamish, but between the noise and the smell, he was getting hungry. He gazed about him, taking in the Libraria Vurmis and the bodies which now decorated its floors. In life, they had been something the man-things called Vurmites – an order of holy warriors, devoted to the library and its secrets. In death, most of them had begun the delightful slide into putrescence. Those who were not quite dead yet were chained or nailed to the great curved shelves which occupied the chamber, to await Kruk’s attentions.

Throughout the chamber, the most trusted members of Kruk’s congregation searched the great shelves for anything of interest, or fuel to feed the fires which heated their pox-cauldrons. The plague monks worked under the watchful gazes of Kruk’s personal censer bearers. The deranged fanatics held their spiked, smoke-spewing flails tightly and dribbled quietly, twitching in time to a sound only they could hear.

Squeelch grimaced and turned as the man-thing librarian sagged in his bonds. He moaned softly as his blood spattered across the piles of loose pages and torn parchments which covered the floor. He was the seventh in as many days, and was sadly proving about as useful as the other six. Squeelch could only assume that the weeks of deprivation and torture had rendered them senseless. Either that, or the fact that neither he nor Kruk could speak their language was proving a greater stumbling block than expected. Regardless, Kruk’s frustration was palpable. His scarred tail lashed like a whip as he dug his claws into the dying man’s flesh.

Squeelch cleaned his whiskers nervously, watching as Kruk tore the hapless man-thing apart. The plague priest was a brute, even among the black-furred monstrosities of Clan Festerlingus. He was broad for a skaven, and his heavy robes made him seem all the larger. His cowl was thrown back to reveal a flat, wide skull wrapped in seeping bandages. Kruk was missing his right ear and his left eye, courtesy of a rival plague priest – Vretch, of Clan Morbidus, current occupier of the other half of the Crawling City.

Vretch had tried to obliterate Kruk with a meticulously planned trap. As Squeelch recalled, it had mostly involved certain explosives, procured from the Clans Skryre at what was no doubt great expense, stuffed down the gullet of the man-thing Kruk had selected for his second interrogation. Squeelch recalled this because he had been the one to plant them, at Vretch’s behest. It was always a behest, with Vretch. An imploration, a request, a favour… commands by any other name. Commands that Squeelch was happy enough to follow, as long as it led to his assumption of the Archsquealership of the Congregation of Fumes. Even if Vretch was a heretical Red Bubite. Purple, that’s a proper bubo, Squeelch thought. But still, by clinging to Vretch’s tail, he might rise very far indeed.

Unfortunately for them both, Kruk was sturdier than he looked. Thus, Vretch and poor, put-upon Squeelch would have to find a more effective means of his disposal. Squeelch had considered and subsequently discarded any number of options, from the mundane – a knife in the back – to the noteworthy – many knives, not just in the back – to the extraordinary – more explosives, and in greater quantities, possibly also filled with knives – but no real solution, as yet, had presented itself.

Kruk’s resilience was frustrating. Under his leadership, the Congregation of Fumes had staggered from one massacre to the next, swelling and shrinking with an unfathomable virulence. But such destructive potential was wasted on a creature like Kruk. Even Vretch agreed with that. There were better ways to spread the Great Witherer’s gospel through the Mortal Realms. And Squeelch would do it, with Vretch’s backing. The Congregation of Fumes would stalk at the forefront of Vretch’s procession and reap the benefits of that alliance. Why, together, they might even challenge the great clans themselves…

But all of that was predicated on his removal of Kruk, a task that seemed more difficult with every passing day. Kruk was a monster, and Squeelch doubted that even a direct hit from a plagueclaw catapult would finish the other plague priest off. Two or three, at least, he thought nervously, watching as his superior dismembered his prey. ‘Maybe more,’ he muttered.

‘Wwwhat did you say?’ Kruk hissed, turning to glare at him. ‘What-what? Speak up quick-fast, Squeelch.’ Brown fangs flashed as he stepped towards his lieutenant.

Squeelch shied back, clutching his boil-dotted tail to his chest as he tried to avoid Kruk’s single, madly gleaming eye. ‘Nothing, O most pestiferous one,’ he squeaked. He was beginning to suspect that his bargain with Vretch hadn’t been well thought-out.

‘Lyyyying,’ Kruk crooned, stretching the word out. He reached out a bloody claw and grabbed a handful of Squeelch’s whiskers. Squeelch whined and fought the urge to squirt the musk of fear as Kruk pulled him close. ‘Speak, Squeelch. Or I will tear out your tongue and eat it, yes-yes?’ Kruk’s own tongue slid out to caress his scarred muzzle, as if in anticipation. The plague priest had eaten his last second-in-command, Squeelch recalled.

No, not well thought-out at all, he thought, in growing panic. His paw edged towards the poison-encrusted dagger hidden within his robes. He would only get one chance, if Kruk decided he’d outlived his usefulness.

‘Kruk.’

Kruk released Squeelch and turned, good eye narrowing in consternation.

‘Kruk, Master of the Fumes. Heed me.’

‘Skuralanx,’ Kruk muttered. Squeelch swallowed. The air had taken on an oily tang. He could hear and feel something gnawing its way towards them, through the spaces between moments. His head ached and blisters burst and popped on his flesh as he staggered back, scratching at himself. The flesh of his tail grew hot and he felt as if his stomach might burst. He heard a skittering as of a thousand rats, and then the body on the floor began to wriggle and twitch in a most unseemly fashion.

A great talon rose upwards through the bloody midsection of the dead man, clawing at the air. Then it fell, striking the floor. Clawed fingers spread, and wormy muscles bunched. With a sound like a branch being pulled free of mud, something monstrous hauled itself out of the corpse’s midsection. A narrow head, bare of flesh and topped by massive horns, breached the blood first. Then a second talon. The sound of buzzing flies filled the air, and eyes which glimmered sickeningly fixed unwaveringly on the two plague priests.

Squeelch cowered back, trying to make himself as small as possible. Kruk tensed, his scabrous tail lashing. ‘Greetings, most-high Skuralanx, Cunning Shadow and Mighty Pestilence,’ the burly plague priest said, his good eye narrowed in wariness. ‘To what do I owe this pleasure, O most esteemed patron?’

‘No pleasure, Kruk. Only impatience. Where is my Liber, Kruk? Where is the Great Plague?’ Skuralanx said, blood running down his mangy fur. ‘Have you found it yet?’ Squeelch flinched as the daemon’s voice echoed through his head. Kruk’s daemonic patron was a power unlike any other. He loomed over the two plague priests, and the tips of his great curving horns scraped the domed ceiling of the library. Clouds of flies swarmed about his massive shoulders and lice squirmed in his mangy fur. His cloven hooves drew sparks from the stone floor as he shifted impatiently.

Kruk looked down at the body the verminlord had emerged from, and then up at the daemon. ‘No, O most Scabrous One,’ he said. His shoulders were hunched, and his head held low. Not even Kruk was mad enough to openly challenge a firstborn child of the Horned Rat. ‘The man-things are… stubborn,’ Kruk said.

The daemon’s fleshless jaws clacked in seeming frustration. ‘You hold one of the greatest libraries in this realm, Kruk – have you even thought to search for my book amongst all of these others?’ the daemon hissed, extending a hand to indicate the shelves which surrounded them.

Kruk blinked and looked around. Squeelch tried his best to make himself inconspicuous. As he shied back, the daemon’s gaze fell on him. What might have been amusement flickered in that hellish gaze, and Squeelch froze. He knows, he thought, in growing panic. He knows!

‘Stupid-stupid man-thing books hold no answers worth the name, O horned and hoofed one,’ Kruk said, gesturing dismissively. As he spoke, the ground shuddered and several of the great shelves toppled, spilling their burdens across the floor. Panicked squeals came from outside on the ramparts as Shu’gohl convulsed in what Squeelch suspected was agony. The quakes had been growing stronger, and happening more often. Hundreds of skaven and man-things alike had died, crushed by the twitching segments of the worm as it trembled.

‘Vretch believes that they do,’ Skuralanx said slyly, as he shoved a fallen shelf aside.

‘Vrrretch,’ Kruk growled. Iridescent foam bubbled in the folds of his muzzle. ‘Kill-kill! Tear-bite him, yes-yes!’ the plague priest continued, hunching forward, his bloody claws opening and closing uselessly on the air. ‘Strike him down for me, mighty Skuralanx.’

Skuralanx rose to his full height. ‘Who are you to command me thus, priest? I am the will of the Great Ruiner made manifest. You do my will, little flea,’ the verminlord hissed, his tail lashing in anger. ‘And I say that there are more important matters to attend to than your petty murder-lust. Or even your failure to find my pox…’ The daemon sank to its haunches as Kruk backed away, head bowed.

‘More… important?’ Kruk said, slowly.

‘Lightning-things come, Kruk. More dangerous even than Vretch. You must kill them, quick-quick,’ the verminlord said, stirring the gory remains of the librarian with one of his curved talons.

Squeelch blinked. They’d heard and seen the lightning which struck the outskirts of the city, causing the great worm to heave and thrash. Kruk had dismissed it, and the subsequent reports of fighting in the lower segments of the city. The Congregation of Fumes had spread like a miasma, each individual choir rampaging through a chosen section of the city, killing those who resisted their attacks and capturing those who didn’t.

But that already unsteady flow of chattel had been interrupted. Kruk, with his usual simplicity, had assumed the others had fallen to fighting amongst themselves over some scrap of street or a theological debate, as was their wont. Squeelch’s own congregation had reported sighting strange flying shapes, neither bird nor beast, and the sound of lightning, though the sky was clear. But… lightning-things? He clutched his tail, kneading his sores in agitation.

‘Lightning-things,’ Kruk hissed, his good eye widening in pleasure. ‘Yessss…’

Squeelch tensed. He knew that tone. Kruk was insane – his brain was rotted in his mossy skull. He had a love for bloodshed that outstripped even that of a daemon like Skuralanx.

‘Yes, I shall rip them and break them. I shall fill their pretty armour with maggots,’ said Kruk. He whirled and caught Squeelch by his robes. ‘Get to your plagueclaws, Squeelch. Fill the air with great clouds of pestilence and your lovely poisons – I would fight in the shade.’

GREAT RED

David Guymer

Forwards, thought Ramus, as though it were sheer will rather than Azyr-forged muscle that thumped his boot into the dust and dragged the other past it.

He could see nothing through the swirl of dust beyond the spitting candle flare of his reliquary staff, hear nothing but howling and the nail-like rap of fine grains of weathered bone hitting his black plate. He did not pity himself the loss of his senses. If there was anything that could be felt anywhere on the Sea of Bones then it was dust and sand and endless wind.

On, his mind intoned, and his body responded to the word as though it were a rod across his back. I will cover every grain of this accursed desert if that is what it takes to have Mannfred von Carstein’s neck between my hands, he swore silently.

The shield, Sigmar’s Gift, clanked against his back. The skull of the ogor, Skraggtuff, swung out and in and banged against his thigh. And he pushed on, forwards.

‘We should ride this storm out, brother,’ yelled Vandalus. The Knight-Azyros was to Ramus’ left and half a dozen paces behind, walking bent into the wind, the skeletal frame of his wings tugged back. Wind-whipped totems of feathers, leaves and bits of bone swirled around his maroon armour, partially obscuring the depictions of stars, storms and wild beasts in gold. ‘My Prosecutors saw a huge number of Ironjawz orruks moving ahead of us. We could be on top of them already. The dust will give us no warning.’

Ramus snorted. ‘I thought men once called you the King of Dust.’

‘An easy title to claim and an easier one to give to another, but the dust respects me no more for it.’

‘We go on. Our guide is insistent that this is the Betrayer’s path.’

‘An ogor, and a dead one at that. The dead cannot be trusted.’

There was a dull pain in Ramus’ chest. Lord-Celestant Tarsus had used to say that. He shook his head and ploughed on.

He touched his fingers to the shield banging against his shoulders. There was a sudden hiss of burning metal and he snatched his fingers back. He smiled a grim smile as he shook off the sting. Sigmar’s Gift had delivered unto the Betrayer the God-King’s fire, and it remembered. The closer they drew the hotter it burned, and Ramus ardently prayed that the same would be true for Mannfred von Carstein’s undying flesh.

The ogor skull butted his thigh plate and bounced, out, in, and banged again. Skraggtuff had initially been part of a trap left for them by the Betrayer, but Mannfred was not the only one with talents.

Was he not Ramus of the Shadowed Soul, Lord-Relictor of the Fourth-Forged Host, the Hallowed Knights? His will was a conduit for the divine storm. Life and death were his to go between.

Splaying his fingers over the skull’s broad features so that they scratched in the sand over its eyes and mouth, he closed his eyes, and bent his mind towards the soul-eternal. He could see it still, a dull ember bound by the Betrayer’s dark necromancy to the ogor’s bones.

‘Awake, Skraggtuff.’ His spirit voice darted in and around his flesh like a sibilant, quicksilver tongue.

The sepulchral echoes that rang back from the storm brought an animal growl from Vandalus’ mask. He raised his lantern and readied his starblade, warily. ‘I still don’t like this, brother.’

Ramus ignored him. He did not like it either, but Sigmar demanded much of those to whom much was given, and the ogor was what Ramus had been given. If he was to recapture Mannfred, and in so doing atone for the failure of his embassy to the Great Necromancer and the loss of the Hallowed Knights’ Lord-Celestant, then he could ill afford to dismiss such gifts from his enemies.

‘Awake, Skraggtuff. It is I, Ramus, your brother in vengeance.’

Frost rimed the weathered metal of Ramus’ gauntlet where it covered the skull’s mouth. A spark of blueish light took up deep within the dead thing’s eyes.

‘Ungh. You.’ A pause. They were creeping in more often, growing longer. ‘Are we there yet?’

‘You tell me.’

‘He’s near. I can smell him. Can’t you?’

Ramus pulled his hand away. He felt the tenuous bridge between them snap and the light guttered and died. The frost on his palm needled to nothing, scoured to bare metal by the wind.

‘What did it say?’ Vandalus shouted after a moment.

‘He is near.’

‘That still leaves the problem of the Ironjawz.’

To the left and right, haggard-looking Hallowed Knights marched, draped in dust cloaks so heavy that only the meanest sliver of gold or silver glinted through the storm. Nodding in thought, Ramus forced himself on into the wind.

Were the Ironjawz a problem? Or were they just another gift from his enemies?

‘Sigmar has seen us this far, my friend. Have faith that he will not let us stray now.’

The broad axe hit Ramus’ shield with the weight of a felled tree. It scratched, snarled, squealed for purchase, but the shield held firm. Sigmarite was more miracle than metal, able to take many colours and forms, and this part of his mortis armour was far tougher than the mirrored silver it appeared to be. All that force had to go somewhere though, and if the shield did not yield, then it would go through Ramus.

He grunted with effort and the throbbing pain. His arm yielded, and the back of his shield struck his skull helm, twisted his face in, and drove his shoulder remorselessly down towards his bent knees. Metal scraped over metal. The crushing weight lifted, dragged back for a final, cleaving blow. Ramus imagined it scuffing along the dusty ground and looping up, up, glinting at arm’s length above his assailant’s monstrous head. The moment.

With a roar, he uncoiled and slammed his shield through the brute’s unguarded jaw.

The big orruk grunted. It was an ugly mound of muscle, sinew and scar tissue encased in armour plates, impractically thick. Sand-worn spikes thrust out from shoulders, forearms and thighs. Another set curved up from the collar, so long they almost doubled as a visor and forced the orruk to squint between the notched edges. There were no conventional ‘joints’ or obvious points of weakness. There were no buckles or straps. Rather, the plates had been bent into one another as if by hand.

It swayed back maybe half a foot, braced its back leg, then drove a knee that sliced the lower rim of Ramus’ shield into his groin and knocked the Lord-Relictor’s legs from under him.

Not the reaction he had been hoping for.

‘Tough, these Ironjawz,’ he muttered as he rolled sideways.

He caught a glimpse of silver and blue where a Retributor and something hunched and dusty tussled in the wind, and then the orruk stomped down a boot.

Ramus came up onto his haunches, grey sand spraying from his hammer as he smashed aside the orruk’s axe. This was not a duel. Neither axe nor hammer was a weapon of refinement. Each was designed for smashing and killing, as the orruks and Sigmar’s Stormcast Eternals had themselves been so designed.

A lot of blood had been shed since Ramus had last crossed an opponent he could not overpower with the simple virtues of smashing and killing.

They crossed hafts and strained, beast versus divine. The orruk’s nose flapped wetly where Ramus’ shield had broken it, green-black blood and snot bubbling out with every breath, but it concerned the brute not at all. Ramus felt the desert dust sink around his boots. His arm began to burn with the effort.

‘We are not… your… enemy!’

Putting all his remaining strength into it, Ramus levered his haft up, turned the locked weapons like two halves of a wheel and forced the orruk to be turned with it or let go. It chose wrong. Ramus guessed right.

‘Hah!’

The orruk folded after its weapon, its nose cracking against the headbutt coming the other way. Ramus heard the crunch and splatter of a half job being messily finished. The orruk bent across him, off balance, axe blade in the dust. Ramus rammed his shoulder into its ribs, this time sending it stumbling away, then lashed his shield back across its jaw with a sound like an iron pot being smashed through a wall.

The blow actually straightened the orruk up. Its head snapped almost fully around, but it did not seem to feel a bit of it below the neck. It stuck out an arm and grabbed his throat.

Ramus felt his feet kick away from the ground as the Ironjaw hauled him to the level of its spiked grille. It glared at him with scrunched up red eyes. The visible bit of its dark face, wedged in tight, was scabbed with tough stubble. Its breath stank of leaf mulch and mushrooms.

Metal squealed as the Ironjaw tightened its grip, seeking to shape Ramus’ armour with its bare hands as it had presumably shaped its own. Like his shield, the armour held. It would take more even than the grip of an Ironjaw to make sigmarite bend. It still felt as though his eyeballs were going to burst out of his face.

He smashed his hammer into the orruk’s grille, but could not deliver force enough to break it. At the same time he drove his boot into its gut, but could not hit anything more vulnerable than muscle and iron. He managed to hook a finger up the orruk’s nose and dragged it up towards him. The creature twisted irritably and snapped at his hand, spraying his faceplate with spittle.

His vision began to blur. Bent, disjointed figures stumbled through the beating dust into his peripheral view and then faded to black. His ears, however, seemed to grow keener to compensate. The rasp of sand on dead throats, the pop of old joints.

‘Not… your… enemy.’

There was a hiss, a string of metallic thunks and a row of foot-long Sigmarite-tipped bolts stitched up the Ironjaw’s side. It grunted, in surprise rather than pain, and glanced down at the striking line of starmetal piercings running from hip to armpit. Ramus swung his boot up onto the lowest bolt. The sigmarite shaft held true, blessed be, his kick twisting the bolt sharply and driving it deeper into the orruk’s guts.

And that, by almighty Sigmar, it felt.

Ramus had his feet on the ground and dry, dusty air in his lungs before the orruk had thought to let rip a howl. Letting his shield hang from the wrist strap, he took his hammer two-handed like a mallet and cracked it across the side of the Ironjaw’s head. Moving around behind it, Ramus hammered his weapon into its back and shoved it down onto its face. It struggled to push itself up only for its arms to sink into the sand and Ramus’ boot to step on the back of its neck.

He ground in his heel until its spine finally snapped. The Ironjaw went limp, and Ramus made sure with a last hammer blow that cratered the back of its head and stippled his black greaves with gore.

‘Tough, these Ironjawz.’ He glanced sideways and nodded. The Judicator lowered his boltstorm crossbow, his dusty armour silver and blue. ‘My thanks, Sagittus.’

The Judicator-Prime gave a quick nod, redressed his aim to a point just above Ramus’ shoulder and fired again. Bolts fizzed past, and punched into the shambling corpses until there was no longer enough meat left on them to stand.

‘Only the faithful, Lord-Relictor.’

‘Only the faithful.’

With another tilt of the helm, the Judicator turned back to the fight.

Ramus did the same. He spotted his reliquary where he had left it, plunged into the shifting bone sands, both a battle standard and a waypoint should any of his knights become lost in the swirl. A fuzz of Azyric power spread into the grey around it, illuminating the morbid imagery of faith, death and the storm depicted thereon, in fits and snatches. Big, hulking shadows brawled around it, tusks, blades and iron plates glinting blue, on the ground and in the sky above.

As Vandalus had predicted, the dust had allowed the Stormcasts to walk right into the Ironjawz and given neither side warning. Finding the orruks themselves beset was something neither had anticipated. Mannfred had been wily enough to avoid an encounter with the warclans of the Great Red thus far.

If Ramus had expected the orruks to be grateful for his aid – and in that initial flush of self-righteous glory in which he had almost felt his breath upon the vampire’s back, he had expected it – then he should have expected too his disappointment.

It was impossible at a glance to tell who had the edge. Sigmar’s Stormhosts excelled in close combat, as they had been forged to excel in all things, but the Ironjawz took a savage delight in it, as if they had been purposefully bred to go toe to toe with the mightiest warriors in the realms, and some of the largest carried twice the weight in muscle and half again the breadth.

Ramus stowed his shield and ran for his reliquary. He snatched it up, feet sliding in the shifting dust before he regained his footing, boot wedged under a sand pile of long, partially buried bones.

‘You!’ came the grunted, straightforwards challenge, from a veritable behemoth of armour plate mounted on a seething, boar-like beast veering from the churn of bodies. ‘You’re mine! The Great Red’s gonna be the first over the Bone Sea, and I’ll be there with ’im.’

Its iron frame was so massive that it was almost as thick across the shoulders as it was tall. Each pauldron looked to have been remade from a complete anvil, and its elbows struck out like the two points of an upended diamond. Its mount was itself dressed in knotted sheets of mail that abraded its grizzled fur with every step and no doubt accounted for a measure of its wild-eyed ill temper.

The beast swept itself a path through the dust with long, saw-edged tusks, snorted, and thundered into a charge.

Ramus drew back his reliquary, lowered it as though it were a spear and the orruk a charging juggernaut. He growled the opening bars of a prayer. Lightning played around the metal haft. He felt a static tickle under his gauntleted fingers.

Before he could unleash it, the orruk was gone.

There was a creak, then a groan, as the Ironjaw’s hands flapped up despairingly, and it sank rapidly into the ground. Ramus backed up quickly, his own feet sinking into the sudden flow of dust.

‘Grindworm!’ he roared, biceps bulging as he pushed back with his staff against the swelling current. He sought out Sagittus and his other Primes, couldn’t see them in the confusion, but waved his arm back anyway. ‘Stay clear!’

The ground flexed like a muscle and an Astral Templar Liberator disappeared in a plume of dust. There was a trembling deep underfoot. Stratified layers shuffled and restacked, the subterranean flows of sand shifting to accommodate the approach of some kraken of the desert sands, and then a terrific explosion carried the lot of it sky high, bones and debris blasted like grapeshot around the bolt of lightning that jagged up in search of the sky.

Ramus swore as his body plunged a foot deeper into the sand. Knuckles and teeth and weathered nubs of bone he could not identify swirled around him like the surface manifestation of a developing whirlpool. Everywhere, fissures opened to drink in the desert dust and the shambling undead, while Stormcasts and Ironjawz wrestled for the skeletal islands the retreating sands laid bare, carcasses so vast that entire armies could have fought over them unnoticed.

And then the Ironjaw leader and his boar mount reappeared.

Thrashing about under six feet of dust, both orruk and beast were trapped in a hellish, faceless orifice large enough to swallow both whole with room to spare. Dust spouted around the struggling orruk and a segmented body that seemed to be made wholly of sand reared up out of the desert floor.

Ramus scowled, trying to draw further away from the rising worm, but the suction on his legs was tremendous.

He did not know whether the creatures were truly living predators or a natural phenomenon of the Sea of Bones. The Astral Templars, however, had dubbed them grindworms, for the screeching, sand-scratching roar they made as they appeared and killed. Their attacks seemed random, drawn by fighting or the movement of large numbers on the surface, but Ramus could not with certainty say that there was not some malign will driving this monster onto him before all others.

He forced his staff into the sand, not deep enough to arrest his downward slide, but enough to slow it. He clamped his hammer to his belt and took the reliquary in both hands. Overhead, storm clouds boiled through the gravel-white sky. ‘If you hear this, Mannfred, if you see it, then pray tell me how this feels.’

A bolt of lightning tore through the sandstorm and detonated the grindworm’s emerging head. Clods of sand and tiny pieces of glass rained over the desert. The Ironjaw, torso blackened, legs gone, hit the ground with a muffled clank.

Ramus gave a roar of defiance as the headless sand-beast thumped to the ground not far from where he was caught. Every muscle heaved in the direction of one last gargantuan pull towards freedom. There was some give. He felt his legs beginning to slide out of the dust, could see the weathered black plate of his thigh. He bared his teeth for the coming effort.

‘Can I help you, Ramus?’ Vandalus called down. ‘Or do you mean to climb out yourself for a greater tale?’ The armoured angel beat his wings, dust fizzling and popping as it was blown through his lightning feathers. His attention was down, pointing at Ramus with his sword, clearly blind to the gaunt shape flapping furiously towards him.

‘Attend yourself, Azyros.’

Vandalus turned his head, lifted and unshuttered his lantern in the same moment it must have taken him to recognise the threat, and burned the ghoul from the sky with a searing shaft of celestial light. The ghoul simply evaporated. By the time he had closed his lantern again and looked down, Ramus had dragged his body out and onto more stable ground.

He looked around. The grindworm was sinking into the desert, the dust it had disturbed beginning to resettle into new formations, burying titanic skeletons greater than dragons and lifting still more from the depths. Already a whole new landscape, utterly alien to what had been before, lay about them. The surviving Ironjawz were withdrawing – and it was a withdrawal – into the storm. The remaining undead were being methodically hacked apart by the Astral Templars and Hallowed Knights. Ramus counted exactly two dozen of the former and about double that of the latter.

More losses.

Vandalus touched down on the sand and walked towards him, blade pointed accusingly at Ramus’ hip. ‘I told you that the dead cannot be trusted, brother. That thing you carry led us right into that battle.’

‘It took us on Mannfred’s trail, which is all it can be expected to do. The battle is on us.’

The Knight-Azyros snorted and stowed his weapons. ‘As it should be. And with the Ironjawz occupied with the dead it was a battle we had every chance to avoid. Astral Templars will never grieve over a pointless exercise in killing, but I know you saw it too.’

‘I had believed that if the Ironjawz could see us fight alongside them then they might be persuaded to aid us in our quest. The Sea of Bones is vast. Even I am not so proud as to deny that we could use their aid if we are to search it fully.’

‘What you could use, brother, is ten full Stormhosts scouring this wasteland west to east, and driving your vampire into the desert sun. We should focus our energies on seeking out the Celestial Realmgate.’

‘No!’ Ramus snapped, startling himself with his vehemence. ‘No,’ he growled, more softly, but with teeth still. ‘This path has been set before me by Sigmar himself and I will not veer from it one inch.’

‘Peace.’ Vandalus clasped Ramus’ forearm and with the other hand gripped his pauldron plate. Some barbarian embrace from the Azyros’ mortal heritage. ‘My Chamber has enough bad blood with Mannfred to follow you, you know that, but did the black-skinned orruk we captured on the Marrow Delta not tell us it was the Great Red himself who took the realmgate from my brother Lord-Castellant in the first place?’

‘A realmgate you cannot now find.’

Vandalus flung out an arm. ‘Light of Sigmar I may be, but I defy anyone to find their way in a landscape that changes from moment to moment.’

‘And was it not also you who once spoke to me of the reasonableness of orruks? That all one needs to earn their trust is to win their respect?’

‘The orruks I knew,’ Vandalus muttered darkly. ‘These Ironjawz are another breed entirely. I don’t know what you would have to do to earn the respect of such foes.’

Ramus shook his head, his hand drifting to the skull at his hip, a faint but reassuring whisper occupying the darker corners at the back of his mind that might otherwise provide a purchase for doubt. ‘I am resolved. If the Great Red can be convinced that Mannfred is the threat he surely is, if he can be won around by our strength…’

He clenched his gauntlet and Vandalus took a step back. The look Ramus felt from behind that gilded, implacable mask was searching. The Knight-Azyros shook his head and raised his hands. ‘As you want it, brother. I had my Prosecutors follow the Ironjawz retreat. I heard one of them speak of a fort not far from here.’

‘Then gather the host, Azyros. We march the moment they return.’

The Ironjawz had erected their fortress on what must have been the only example of static geography for a thousand leagues. It was certainly the first that Ramus had seen since crossing the Junkar Mountains.

It was a skeleton, the mountain-sized remains of a Titan of the Age of Myth, and cold proof, were it needed, that Mannfred von Carstein could never be allowed to possess the Sea of Bones. The skull was buried under a massive dune, vertebrae arching high up into the dusty sky where a scrap heap of rust-brown walls, towers and metal gangways vied for height and space. Ribs that had been weathered smooth by aeons of wind curled beneath it like a dead spider’s legs. Sand devils whipped and swirled around the half-buried bones. Partially sheltered under the gargantuan cavity, a fleet of ironclad war-junks – ships of all things – creaked and listed and banged together.

Vandalus had told him that orruks liked to build high, that the size and towering nature of a boss’ stronghold spoke directly to his status. The Ironjawz seemed even more itinerant and warlike than the orruks of Ramus’ experience, but they were every bit as territorial. Whatever warboss ruled from this structure was surely very high indeed.

Perhaps even the legendary Great Red himself.

Green shapes cavorted over the distant walls, jeering. The scrap fort’s windswept turrets clattered and clanged with gongs, cymbals and pans.

‘Rank up, shields ready, weapons high, Prosecutors in formation,’ Ramus barked.

He looked left, seeing the two lines of Hallowed Knights, mixed Paladins front, Judicators back, glittering silver and blue, as straight as statues in the wind. To his right were the Liberators of the Astral Templars, their battered maroon and gold decked out in eclectic war paint and charms that wagged about them like animals’ tails. Above, Astral Templars Prosecutors hung in the sky like baubles of light. The harsh wind tugged at their fur cloaks and the strips of scripture stuck to their war-plate. It had even managed to tease some of the hair from under their sealed helms and whipped it giddily about them as though triumphant at what it had done. They had been beaten hard, but they were all the more magnificent for it. By Sigmar, they stood yet.

‘Let them see what the strength of the finest two chambers in Sigmar’s host looks like. Who shines with his light?’

‘Only the faithful!’ shouted the Hallowed Knights, and even a handful of the Astral Templars, gamely attempting to out-shout their brothers-in-arms.

Bursting with pride in them all, Ramus returned his attention to the fort.

‘Three of its sides overhang the monster’s ribs,’ observed Vandalus, pointing them out. ‘An aerial assault on that quarter would almost certainly find the orruks’ defences unprepared.’

‘You have not the numbers to carry out such an attack,’ Ramus returned.

Vandalus clapped his shoulder. ‘Which is why I’ll need my brother to relieve me.’

Ramus shifted his gaze to the gate. According to millennia of military theory, it should have been the weakest point. The Ironjawz were clearly unfamiliar with this theory. Their gate was a lump of iron that, at first glance, actually looked fractionally too large for the frame it had been wedged into. It would take a monstrous application of force simply to get it open, much less to knock it down.

The approach to the gate however was the first, and arguably greater, obstacle. An uncertain-looking stairway of iron planks, not all of them flat, zig-zagged up the titan’s spine towards the fortress. It was presumably stable enough to bear the tremendous weight of an Ironjaw but it was a challenging path, and every second that the Stormcasts’ attention was on not falling to the desert floor was a second in which the wall’s defenders would be showering them with missiles.

‘Restrain yourself, Azyros. We do not need to take their position outright, just impress upon their leader our strength as allies.’

Vandalus waved a clenched gauntlet in the direction of the fort. ‘What did you think I was proposing?’

‘But first,’ muttered Ramus. ‘To get their attention.’

Ramus raised his reliquary and muttered a grim prayer. The sky began to bruise, deeper, blacker, and a sudden wind blew against Ramus’ back and swept the dust off it to leave the smell of thunder and fresh rain. Sheet lightning flashed. The thunderhead folded and churned, the wind whipped into a howling cyclone with Ramus the eye of the storm.

‘I am Ramus of the Shadowed Soul,’ he roared. The wind stole his voice from his mouth, but it rumbled from the black clouds like the anger of the storm itself. Rain lashed the scrap fort, deadening the chaotic clangour. ‘I am Lord-Relictor of the Hallowed Knights, the Fourth-Forged of Sigmar’s Eternal Host. I seek embassy with your leader. The one that calls himself the Great Red.’

‘That should do it,’ Vandalus yelled.

Thunder rolled, unappeased, and the rain picked up. Ramus saw several of the Astral Templars turning their faces towards it, letting the water rinse the dust from their faceplates. The Hallowed Knights stood still, statues come rain or storm. From the fortress however, something moved.

A horn was blasted, a set of deep drums enthusiastically pounded, and in a tooth-aching squeal of metal along bone, the scrap fort’s great gate began to grind open.

As Ramus watched, a huge orruk in garb garish enough to be seen even through the downpour danced through the opening gate. It was clad in a spiked and heavily decorated half-plate of mismatched iron scraps and painted bone that clapped as it dropped, leapt and spun down the stairway. It was unarmed in the conventional sense, but carried a club-like length of bone in each hand, using them to slap its thighs, its wrists, its iron garb and each other, in a frantic, strangely thrilling rhythm.

A mob of black-skinned orruks in conventionally wrought heavy armour, full helms and shields stomped out behind the weird warchanter.

Following them with a swagger came the true Ironjawz themselves. Ironclad behemoths, each one clanked inside a personal battle-frame that made the black-skinned orruks look like whelps, wrapped for their own safety in foil. They nodded metal-encased heads to the warchanter’s rhythm, bashed axes, maces and articulated fist-claws to the beat.

‘I’d say they weren’t impressed,’ shouted Vandalus, wings shrieking into energetic life as he lifted himself off the ground.

‘Lines of battle,’ Ramus snapped.

The Astral Templars clumped forwards and locked shields. His own Exemplar Chamber bore no shields – wielding instead a deadly blend of two-handed thunderaxes, stormstrike glaives and lightning hammers – and simply took a forwards step to maintain a perfect line with their more eager Astral Templar counterparts.

As they positioned themselves, the first of the greenskins reached the rain-packed desert floor. There they spread themselves into battle lines that mirrored those of the Stormcasts, except for being half again as long and several ranks deep. Ramus estimated that they were outnumbered at least three to one. The big Ironjawz brutes held the centre, flanked by disciplined detachments of the sober black orruks. On the left flank, opposing the Astral Templars, was a vast and unruly mob of grots, armed with anything that was going and cursing shrilly across the rain-driven gulf. On the opposite flank, two full ranks of boar cavalry drew themselves into a roughly unified mob and snorted impatiently for the signal to go.

‘No flyers,’ Ramus muttered, choosing to focus on that advantage, however small.

The Protector, Cassos, scoffed at his Lord-Relictor’s attempted optimism. He was the last of that particular calling left. Ramus had never seen a man more adamant in avoiding his return to Sigmar’s keep.

Ramus thrust his reliquary above his head and looked down the line. ‘Who fights with Sigmar by his side?’

‘Only the faithful!’ sang the Hallowed Knights.

‘Who will be victorious?’

‘Only the faithful!’

The warchanter took the last few steps in a leap and began to flap about in the sand, hunched over as he danced up and down the greenskin line, sticks a blur, huffing and grunting in a singsong growl. Faster, louder. The orruk sank to his knees in front of the Ironjawz brutes in an ecstatic crescendo, bone sticks drumming on his thighs. The rain lashed his upturned face as he roared, and the entire greenskin line erupted with him.

First to break forwards were the brutes, then the black orruks. The boar cavalry, for all their impatience, got themselves together last but quickly pulled ahead as the vicious beasts thundered into a gallop. Only the grots held back, loosing a volley of arrows that sucked wet sand well shy of the Astral Templars.

‘Hold,’ Ramus muttered, conscious of the Astral Templars edging forwards, then turned to glance over his left pauldron. ‘Judicators, loose.’

A rattling volley of sigmarite-tipped war-bolts fizzed towards their distant targets, arcing up, up into the rain, and droning down, their accuracy and potency far superior to the missiles fired by their greenskin counterparts. The bolts fell amongst the boar cavalry, thunking into heavy armour. One boar-beast slammed to the ground with a foot-long bolt in its shoulder and crushed its rider. The beast behind barged it out of the way on its tusks without slowing down. The rest rode on, armour bristling with shafts and crackling with Azyrite power.

‘Again. Loose.’

Another volley shot across the distance. This time there was no need to correct their aim for range. The boar cavalry were a wall of scrap iron and bludgeoning power. The ground shook. Another Ironjaw rider took an impaling hit in the belly, grunted, but did not fall. To the right, an Astral Templar in shining bright maroon and gold, called only recently from Sigmaron to Vandalus’ beacon, aimed high, and drew back on his enormous shockbolt bow. There was a rush of charged air as the giant arrow twanged from the bowstring. It looped over the running black-skinned orruks, fizzing like a firework, and exploded amongst the grots in a storm of lightning.

The boars picked up speed. Wet sand flew from thundering, iron-shod trotters. They were now just moments away – close enough for Ramus to see the red of their slathering mouths. Grasping his reliquary, Ramus closed his eyes. He could hear their grunting breaths, feel the shaking of the ground, but he set it aside to focus his senses on the rampant energies of the divine storm that raged around him. It was untouched, as wild as Azyr’s Eternal Winterlands.

‘There is no shaman here,’ he muttered as he opened his eyes.

‘That will level the field,’ said Cassos.

‘Yes, it will.’

Feeling his power rise to fill him, Ramus lifted his reliquary. He felt its unsubtle pull, as though it would lift him from the ground and make him as one with the broiling storm clouds if he did not fight to control it.

‘Sigmar, lord of lightning!’ he roared. ‘Bare their flesh to Azyr’s fire.’

He blasted a lightning bolt into the onrushing cavalry, reducing orruks to ash and turning their brutish mounts into running meat. Teeth bared, he unleashed his power again and again until his body glowed. Lightning blitzed the terrified beasts, bolt after searing bolt, until armour bubbled over scorched flesh, and hulking warriors squealed like pigs as they rolled in sand to quench the flames.

‘Sigmar!’ he cried, breaking into a charge with his steaming reliquary held aloft. ‘He fights beside us!’

The two armoured blocks slammed together in a splintering squeal of shields and blades and split pig-flesh. A thunderaxe hacked off an Ironjaw’s arm at the elbow in a clap of noise. A riderless boar impaled a Retributor on a tusk. Bolts whistled from behind. An orruk bellowed a curse, and a moment later was spit through. Weapons hummed with Azyric charge. Two Ironjawz shoved towards Ramus, barding grinding until it shrieked. There was a snap of energy, a crimson blur that cut left to right, and both orruks slumped headless from their mounts. Cassos swept in front as the boars pulled apart and galloped past, stormglaive whirling with such venom it looked as though he must be holding two of them. It threw a barrier of spattered red between Ramus and the press of Ironjawz, and flicked the desultory shower of grot arrows waspishly from the air.

The Retributors and Decimators surged into the break, the Astral Templars a yard ahead as always. Ramus heard the Stormcasts’ savage howls and the ring of starmetal as the Liberators crashed into the black orruks and through to the brutish Ironjawz behind. Smashing and killing. War as the God-King had always meant it to be.

Vandalus lanced overhead, beams of light from his lantern punching golden holes through the orruk ranks, then rolled left while the Prosecutors that followed peeled right.

Flight alone was a mighty task for these angels in armour, and to do it with grace demanded not only a fluidity of body, but a finesse of mind and will that transcended even the superhuman. Wielding javelins like lances and celestial hammers two-handed, they thumped into the terrified grots like comets. Bodies flew, and to a cacophony of ululating war cries, the Stormcast barbarians set about tearing the light skirmishers apart.

The grots were broken almost as the first Prosecutor fell to earth amongst them, and they were already fleeing for their weird ironclad paddle ships.

‘Ardboyz!’ bawled the heaviest brute in the block of Ironjawz ranks, clacking a big, clunky grabber claw, all rivets and red paint, at the second mob of black orruks. ‘I has this. Go sort out those ones with wings.’

The second mob wheeled one hundred and eighty degrees and tramped back towards the grounded Prosecutors.

‘The centre holds,’ called Sagittus from somewhere nearby.

‘Judicators to the flanks!’ shouted another Stormcast.

Ramus drove his boot heel into the face of an Ironjaw that was trapped under his dead boar. Cassos’ stormglaive hummed around him like an angry guardian spirit. Somewhere amidst the smoking remains and the iron clamour, Ramus could hear the orruk warchanter pounding away with his bone sticks. A vicious tempo that the orruks strove to match with their weapons.

‘The brutes rally to him,’ growled Cassos. ‘See how they shield him.’

An Ironjaw rose up in front of Ramus like a wall. It was the claw-toting boss, and the brute alone occupied the width of two others. Ramus dropped his shoulder and slammed into the Ironjaw’s pectoral before he had the chance to turn his weapons on him. Air woofed out of him, but he did not yield an inch. The grabber claw champed shut inches in front of Ramus’ neck. The Lord-Relictor swayed back, whipped up his hammer and deflected the moon-shaped axe that had been scything for the crown of his helm.

A crackling stormglaive spat across its turned shoulders. The Ironjaw bent out of reach, swatting the blade gruffly aside on the back of its claw. It was a split-second distraction and Ramus took it. His hammer dented the iron cladding on the Ironjaw’s right side and drove all the brute’s weight onto its left. It gave a threatening growl and paddled its arms for balance, but had nothing free to stop Cassos punting his stormglaive into its throat and tipping it onto its back.

Ramus knelt over the big boss and smashed the brute’s helm open with a blow from his hammer.

‘Sagittus!’ he roared, as Cassos moved protectively in front of him. The warchanter’s tempo had picked up, and it seemed to thump out of the bloody air. Ramus caught glimpses as the rest of the Ironjawz mob pressed forwards to defend the performer. Its eyes shut, mouth open, it played through the grip of some wild, degenerate rapture. ‘Take him down, Sagittus.’

Heavy bolts hammered into the Ironjawz but they held firm, too thickly packed for the missile fire to get through. Even the Prosecutors that had managed to retake to the skies before the black orruks’ charge had hit home found their javelins and thrown hammers blocked or knocked out of the air. And driving it all to ever greater heights of aggression and fury, was that drumming beat.

‘I have him, brother.’

Vandalus swooped in behind the block of brutish heavy infantry, and there executed a barrel roll that dragged him across the rear of their formation. He unshuttered his golden lantern. Ironjawz howled as the wondrous light of Azyrheim burned across their backs, bled through cracks too slight for any boltstorm bolt or stormcall javelin to reach, and even tightly shut as they were, brought green smoke from the warchanter’s eyes.

The orruk’s demented chant bubbled off in a rabid scream.

Ramus saw the Ironjawz waver, enough for him to barge through the heavier orruk warriors and put the warchanter out of his torment with a hammer blow to the temple.

That was enough for the remaining black orruks, who immediately began to break off and run after the scattered grots. The Ironjawz however, outnumbered and surrounded, fought on.

Vandalus flung out his wings and speared upwards into the rain. The pall around him thickened. Lightning flashed. Ramus felt the hairs on his body respond to the rising charge, and sparks danced along the points of his reliquary’s sigmarite halo. The Knight-Azyros slid his lantern’s aperture to its widest setting and the full force of its illumination seared the dark of the storm away. For a moment, for one divine moment, Ramus felt the eyes of the God-King upon them all.

The throaty screams that greeted his gaze were affirming – the sudden, burning blindness of the apostate. The sky cracked open and lightning jabbed again and again into the desert floor like a chisel against a tooth, until the rain-soaked ground was cloaked in bone dust and all Ramus could see were the flashes.

Cassos laughed as cries of ‘Sigmar!’ greeted the Azyros’ display of might.

The cloud began to settle, thinning as it did to reveal the glitter of maroon and gold, perfect as gemstones. Two dozen Stormcast Eternals, fresh from the barracks of Sigmaron and perfect to the finest facet of their war-plate, gave voice to a thunderous cheer and charged the Ironjawz’ rear.

Breathing heavily, Vandalus landed beside Ramus.

‘Difficult to win an audience when everyone’s dead.’

Ramus smiled grimly. ‘The Astral Templars were not part of the embassy to Shyish, were they, my friend?’ With an amused snort, he pointed over the determinedly fighting Ironjawz to the scrap fortress, seemingly abandoned on its lonely, bone-top promontory. ‘A day or two of rest will serve us well. We will regroup, resupply and recover the Betrayer’s trail. And maybe someone will show up to reclaim it.’

The Ironjawz’ clan hall was cold. Air came in through a pair of iron-grilled fireplaces in the long side walls and ruffled the dyed skin hangings. A long feasting table filled most of the floor space, a mishmash of metals so beaten, rumpled and chewed on there was not flat space enough to set a jug.

Ramus took it all in with a cursory sweep of his gaze. He stood with the open door behind him where it was coldest, dust circling, the big fireplaces either side, the table extending before him to a large, bloody iron throne. A hide banner covered the whole wall behind it, depicting two crudely drawn glyphs on a red background. He knew little of the orrukish languages, less of their written forms, but these he had seen everywhere.

Great. Red.

‘We have searched the compound thoroughly, Lord-Relictor.’ Sagittus stepped in from outside, letting in the dull clangour of pots and pans, strung up wherever they might catch the wind. Mist clung to his grim-faced silver mask. His boltstorm crossbow hung by his side in one heavy gauntlet. ‘It is empty.’

‘Very good,’ Ramus murmured. In his mind he pulled those two symbols apart, turned them over, searching for the hidden complexity that was so jarringly absent.

‘Lord-Relictor?’

‘Look again.’

‘My lord, I assure you.’

Ramus turned his head towards his second, the deep sockets of his skull helm boring in. ‘When I feel assured, I can guarantee that none will know of it before you.’

The Judicator gave a stiff bow from the neck. ‘Very well, my lord. Once more.’ His boots clicked on the metal floor as he walked back outside.

Ramus returned to his contemplation of the fluttering banner. Sagittus had not been part of the Warrior Chamber at the Bridge of Seven Sorrows and had not experienced the Reforging. He had not been given the time to reflect on the consequences of that quest’s failure. Tarsus was Sigmar’s and he had been stolen. To Ramus’ exhaustive knowledge of the histories, such a violation had never befallen another Stormhost and the shame of his participation in it seared. And if he should fail to recover the Lord-Celestant now…

The Hallowed Knights were a company of immortals. There was no precedent for the elevation of one of their number to leader.

He touched his fingers to Skraggtuff’s skull and closed his eyes, giving himself to the cold. His lips parted in a wisp of vapour. They were numb and pinched.

‘Awake, Skraggtuff.’

‘Mmmmm,’ came the answering echo, the dull murmur of a dreamer.

‘How much ground has Mannfred gained on us? You are connected through the aether, Skraggtuff.’

‘Mmmm.’ Ramus felt the impression of a wretched spirit, tossing and turning, eyes flickering between sleep and wakefulness. ‘Not far. Time to sleep maybe. Just for a bit.’

Ramus withdrew his fingers with a start and opened his eyes, his perceptions suddenly, jarringly normal. He blinked a few times, licked his lips, worked his fingers to restore them to some kind of warmth, and as he did so a door clicked open at the far end of the hall where there had been none. It put a ruck into the banner that had been draped over it and blew dust in underneath. A golden gauntlet felt under the fabric, swept it up and back over the top of the thick metal door. Vandalus peered around, looking slightly lost, then turned to Ramus and pointed to the ceiling.

‘I came in from the roof. Don’t be too harsh on Sagittus, it was bolted from this side.’

‘Did you–’

‘No,’ Vandalus sighed. ‘I did find a grot hiding back here, but I suspect it was his duty to open the door for whoever sat in that throne.’ He pointed to it and gave a dead-eyed smile. ‘Orruk bosses prefer high spots. It shows everyone else how important they are, and lets them see everything that’s theirs.’

‘See how far?’

‘The dust covers everything. Not far.’

‘Show me.’

White, as deep as the eye could show. The one thing from his experience that Ramus could compare it to was being trapped in mist. It looked like mist, superficially perhaps, but to stand within it was to know what deceptive devils appearances could be. It was bone dry and bitingly cold. The wind hissed. Bone shards tinked against his armour and further out where he could not see, all around, the chitter of bone whispering across bone was constant. If the dead were to converse away from the ears of the living, then Ramus knew by the chill in his soul that this was how it would sound.

He moved to the spiked, metal rampart, set his gauntlets on the sharpened edge, and peered down. White. All the way. He could not even see the spiral stair any more.

The wind moaned against his helm’s frozen sides. Sound moved strangely in the Sea of Bones. It hung in the air, making it seem sometimes more like being under water than on a desert. The dull mutterings he heard could have been an army passing under his nose, a lone beast trumpeting a thousand leagues away, or even the tectonic wars of the Junkar, far, far behind them.

Something on the rampart beside him blew its nose and he turned his scowl upon it. He had reasonably assumed that ‘found a grot’ meant ‘killed a grot’ but now the wretch was looking up at him with wide wet eyes, ears flat back against its head, Ramus had to concede that the mood was not exactly on him either.

Gorkamorka had once been part of Sigmar’s great pantheon, he reasoned. It was belligerence, rather than fundamental theistic differences, that set the two powers at odds.

‘We are looking for the Great Red,’ he said, speaking firmly. ‘Where is he?’

‘’s not here,’ the grot squeaked.

‘I see that. I asked where he was.’

‘Gone.’ The grot swallowed, the big lump in its throat bobbing up and down. ‘Gone to fight at the thunder door.’

The scrawny greenskin nodded vigorously.

‘Why?’ asked Ramus.

‘To fight.’

‘But why?’

‘To be first over the Bone Sea. Think of the fame. Even the old Junkar never did that.’

Ramus turned to Vandalus, over by the door onto the stairwell.

‘The desert nomads that greeted us on our first arrival believed the Sea of Bones went on to the edge of the world. In Cartha’s libraries, we found texts describing distant lands, so far across the lifeless plain that even the Age of Chaos had yet to reach them.’

Ramus snorted. ‘Stories told to give hope to children.’

‘’s true,’ piped the grot. ‘And the Great Red was all about to head off too. Had his boats loaded and everything, before the dead one snuck in and took his thunder gate.’

Ramus’ jaw clenched. His chest had gone suddenly cold.

Mannfred.

‘He means the Celestial Realmgate,’ said Vandalus, moving across.

‘There’s another fort there,’ said the grot quickly, warming to its theme. ‘’s very important. The Great was gonna use it to bring in stuff and store it. ’s a long way over the Bone Sea.’

‘Tell me about the dead one,’ Ramus demanded, dropping down beside the grot and eliciting a terrified squawk. ‘Tell me everything you know about Mannfred.’

‘Wait,’ said Vandalus, turning to the deep white view and cocking a gold-helmeted ear. ‘Do you hear that?’

Ramus gave an irritated wave, but as soon as he did it he realised that the distant susurrus had changed. It was no longer so distant, for one. Drums. It was scores and scores of big, deep drums. The cracked chant of guttural voices. The tramp of armoured feet.

‘Clear the skies,’ said Vandalus urgently. ‘As you did before.’

Though he ached body and soul from his efforts in the battle, Ramus raised his reliquary and gave voice to a doleful prayer. The wind picked up and the dust pall began to thin, the sky so cleared blackening and producing a rumble of distant thunder.

‘There!’ Vandalus shouted.

Wearily, Ramus looked in the direction the Knight-Azyros pointed. The stamp and clank of massed ranks rolled in from the desert plain towards the scrap fort. Several score of the damnable warchanters cavorted ahead of armoured columns, each a thousand strong, beating out a marching rhythm that held little in common with their neighbours’ to create a raucous banging. Steaming between the formations, vast ironclad paddleboats, top heavy with crowded siege decks and bristling with artillery, chugged through the sand. Energy coursed through them and occasionally arced off. Ramus could see one of the strange Ironjaw shamans enthroned on the main deck of each monstrous vessel. He could sense their power, swollen to near god-like proportions by the weight and vibrancy of their greenskin kith around them, and somehow understood that these vessels served equally as troop transports, shock weapons, and amplifiers to ward off the grindworms.

The Great Red had planned his warclan’s migration well.

Searching the marching files, Ramus saw him at last.

‘There he is. The Great Red.’

A dark shape, a knot of ill-defined aggression, hung over the front ranks, mounted on a lumpen monstrosity of a creature that beat furiously at the surrounding air as though to physically subdue it with its small but muscular wings.

Ramus was aware of Sagittus shouting from under the iron floor beneath him, Judicators charging for the walls and priming crossbows.

‘So many,’ Ramus muttered.

‘Too late to worry about that now,’ Vandalus snapped. ‘You wanted to impress the Great Red and I’d wager that’s him right there. Impress him. Be strong, show no fear, and if he doesn’t kill us both then maybe he’ll be intrigued enough to hear your piece.’

Nodding his understanding, Ramus turned back and channelled his voice into the storm. ‘I am Ramus of the Hallowed Knights, orruk, and I have been waiting for you. Come to me, and let us settle this as equals.’

He strained to catch the Great Red’s reaction as the wind failed and cloaked the space between them in dust. The last thing Ramus saw was the Ironjaw’s beast pulling ahead of his army and striving for height.

‘A maw-krusha,’ said Vandalus. ‘I saw one in the Carthic Oldwoods once. The native ogors used to leave living prey in the forest to keep the monster from their tribes.’

Ramus caught the grot staring at him in open-mouthed, wide-eyed and flat-eared horror. He grunted and turned to Vandalus. ‘Will he come?’

‘He will. No orruk would let a challenge like that go unan–’

The Azyros looked sharply up. Ramus heard it at the same time. It sounded like–

‘Waaaaaagh!’

Ramus pushed himself back against the spiked battlement as an armour-plated boulder smashed into the centre of the rampart.

The structure tilted sharply and squealed. Ramus clung grimly onto the rampart spike with one hand, arm hooked behind it and grinding on the metal. He saw the grot tumble past him, smack once against the wall, again on the skeletal structure, coming apart like a ball of yarn and disappearing into the pall.

Unconcerned by the swaying tower and the alarmed clangour of chimes and bells, the maw-krusha unfolded arms and legs and rose up onto knuckles the size of Ramus’ fists. Forelimbs covered in hard scales, some of them carrying faded red paint, opened out like a pair of shield walls to reveal a head that was almost all mouth. A massive underbite, made even more pronounced by a muzzle of huge prosthetic fangs, chomped up over its small red eyes.

Stooped under a mass of wargear with ironclad thighs around the monster’s neck and toes scraping the ground, was the largest greenskin Ramus had ever seen.

He had had cause to say that many times over the past months, but he doubted he would ever have another. The brute was gigantic, clad in thick armour daubed half and half in red paint and black, with massive, clawed gauntlets and spiky boots, dull red with old blood. Only its head was exposed, the black and red pattern reversed with a slash of red paint over its brutalised, dark hide. One eye was nailed shut with an iron plate, a wandering green eye crudely drawn over it. The megaboss grinned down at the Stormcast, a slow, ape-like drawing in of muscles to reveal a mouth full of sharp, oversized metal teeth, bloody where they must have bitten into the roof of its own mouth.

If Ramus and Vandalus had stood together and been clad in a single piece of armour, they could not have been as large.

‘I’m da Great Red,’ the megaboss bellowed, voice so deep it seemed to come up out of the ground. The beast snorted and dragged its knuckles over the floor in an agonising screech. The Ironjaw glared at Ramus with his one eye, then twisted to mark Vandalus with a squeal of metal plates. He turned back to Ramus. ‘Kill my boyz, take my stuff, you fink you’re big enough to take Korruk da Great Red?’ He dropped his heavy jaw and roared with laughter.

Ramus planted his reliquary into the metal between them. ‘This land has been claimed. From the Celestial Realmgate to the Junkar Mountains and beyond the forests of Cartha, this land is Sigmar’s.’

At the name ‘Sigmar’ power lashed from his staff and stung the hulking Ironjaw a blow to the shoulder. Korruk jerked back, bellowed in pain and shock, electric spasms forcing out a grunt of annoyance as he involuntarily yanked on the chain attached to his mount’s spiked collar and locked his thighs down on its neck. It choked out a growl and instinctively threw out a battering-ram punch that smashed Ramus in the gut and off his feet.

His legs flipped over his head. Light to dark. Sky to metal. His face plate smashed the top of the crenel spike, a crack spidering from the left eye socket of his helm. Dark to light, the sky above him. He flung out a hand and caught the spike. His arm snapped taut and jerked him back, slammed his body hard against the fort’s metal wall. Ramus’ feet slid across the wall without getting any kind of purchase.

‘Haha!’ roared the Great Red. ‘Maybe you should both have a go. Hah! Take turns, maybe.’

A flash of light burned like forked lightning through Ramus’ shattered orbit as Vandalus explosively took wing. There was another bark of pain from the Ironjaw, and the clash of blades.

With a grimace, Ramus tested his bicep against his weight and heaved. He began to lift, bellowed as his shoulder passed his elbow, and then tossed his reliquary back inside and hauled himself after it. He collected his staff and rose, lightning pouring into him until the metal beneath him turned blue.

Vandalus and the Great Red were fighting high up above the fort’s roof. The Azyros flitted agilely around the Ironjaw’s monstrous axes, leaving a glowing trail where he passed as though it were a net, cleverly lain to trap the brute in his own savagery.

The megaboss’ metal teeth glinted hungrily, one booming growl rising from his vast jaw without any apparent need for breath. He was a green storm, destruction made manifest, his brute physicality merely the solid housing for a force of nature. His axes flashed down together, forcing Vandalus into a parry that sent the Azyros spinning. The maw-krusha’s claws clenched as though taking the air in its grip and then lunged out. A paw like a gargant’s spiked mace smacked the careening Azyros, and hammered him back down.

Vandalus hit the roof in a blaze of spinning pinions and rolled until he hit the inside of the parapet. Ramus could hear armoured boots pounding up the staircase below. It would be Cassos.

‘Sigmar is the true lord here, beast!’

Lightning stabbed from Ramus’ staff and coursed through the megaboss and his monster. The Ironjaw sprayed Vandalus in phlegm before he could grind his metal jaws shut. Blood ran down his chin as his enormous body seized. Howling, flapping with erratic fury, the maw-krusha crashed back down. Exhausted, Ramus recalled the flow of current and turned to check on Vandalus.

The Knight-Azyros stood up, almost fell right back over, but steadied himself with a widened stance and shook out his light wings, creating a dazzling show of might and colour, as if to ward off a rival or a predator. To Ramus’ surprise, Korruk gave a rumbling chuckle. The Ironjaw dismounted with a gravely structural clang and kicked his war-beast out of the way.

‘You fight good for thunder men. Better than the big boss I killed at the thunder door.’

Vandalus started forwards, only for Ramus to hold him back.

‘Take him,’ hissed Skraggtuff, down by his hip. ‘While his guard’s down.’

Of their own volition, Ramus’ muscles tensed to lift his reliquary, but then he frowned. ‘I did not summon you.’

‘He’s too strong. He doesn’t need you. He won’t listen. End him while you have the chance.’

Ramus lowered his staff. ‘That is Skraggtuff’s voice. But those are not his words.’

A sepulchral chuckle issued from the skull. Not one, in fact, but two, an eerie echoing effect as though he were being laughed at from both sides. The first was gruff and breathy, recognisably Skraggtuff, while the other was the sound of courteous good humour. Korruk ground his thickly armoured slab of neck around, one eye narrowed in annoyance. It was that, rather than the voices from the other side, that turned Ramus’ insides colder than the desert wind.

Ramus was the conduit for the divine storm, the beacon for the soul-eternal.

Only he could speak with the dead.

‘Awake, Skraggtuff,’ whined the skull in a wheedling falsetto. The ogor’s voice was gone, replaced entirely by the urbane imposter that Ramus recognised all too well. ‘So tediously stentorian. Where is Mannfred, Skraggtuff? You are connected through the aether, Skraggtuff.’

Now that it was presented to him, it was clear that the voice had always been there behind the ogor’s words. How had he not heard it before?

‘That voice,’ breathed Vandalus.

‘The Betrayer.’

‘Here, O conduit of the tepid squall, beacon of arrogance eternal. Tell me, are the Stormcast Eternals prone to delusions or is it just you? Imagine, believing that your quaint, half-mastered talents could begin to rival mine.’

The voice tutted, and Ramus realised that it was no longer coming from the skull. A hazy human figure had appeared, wavering about a foot above the rampart. His black, ridged armour was dented and scratched from countless battles, and the red cloak he wore, though magisterial still, was tattered. The wind blew through him, his long dark hair fluttering in some other breeze. His hair was wilder than Ramus remembered, his teeth longer, his eyes redder. His patrician features were horribly burned. Sigmar’s gaze was not so swiftly healed.

‘Poor, pathetic hero.’

‘You brought me here,’ Ramus yelled, fury making his voice crack. ‘You led me by the damned nose. Why?’

‘Temper, temper, Lord-Relictor. What kind of example does that set the peasants?’

‘Why!’

Mannfred laughed. ‘I think we demonstrated back in Cartha that I have little to fear from you.’ He half turned towards Korruk, one melted, hairless eyebrow suggestively raised, like a school master trying to goad the proper answer from a well-intentioned but slow-witted pupil.

‘Me?’ rumbled the Great Red, scrunching up his face in thought.

‘Where have you just been?’ Mannfred prodded.

‘The thunder door.’

Vandalus’ face dropped in understanding. ‘Just think, my friend. Had you gone straight to your realmgate as you suggested then I might never have been able to get by the Ironjawz to take it.’ The megaboss drew up at that. ‘Of course, Great Red here would have killed you out of hand, but we can’t have everything can we, and as he’s likely going to do that anyway, that would have come at no real cost to you.’

The apparition turned to Ramus and bowed. ‘Of all the Stormcasts I have encountered, dear friend, you are the most rigid.’ He grinned, teeth sharp and somehow brighter for their transparency. ‘I appreciate rigidity in my friends. It makes them so much easier to bend.’

‘I am no friend to you, Betrayer,’ Ramus spat, but Mannfred continued as though he had not heard, and turned to the glowering Ironjaw with a long, low bow, cloak falling to a floor that was not there.

‘It will be I, not you, who will be the first to cross the Sea of Bones. The march of my horde will be felt in the Realm of Death.’ With an elaborate flourish, he rose and turned back to Ramus. ‘I will hold our mutual friend Tarsus with affection, when he is my prisoner instead of Nagash’s.’

With a spluttering cry, Ramus thrust his reliquary into Mannfred’s wavering face and cried out to Sigmar for lightning. His staff pulsed blue-white and sprayed power in indiscriminate, arcing forks that carved through the apparition without effect. The vampire replied with a tolerant smile, swept his cloak across him and became a cloud of red that disintegrated on the wind.

‘Dwell upon your failures, Stormcast,’ came the disembodied voice, ‘as I make the Sea of Bones mine.’

Korruk’s sudden howl of fury struck Ramus from any fixation on his own boiling blood. Stomping around without another intelligible word, the Ironjaw jumped onto his maw-krusha’s back and kicked the beast into the air. It gave a bellow, flung out its vestigial, leathery wing-flaps and leapt from the parapet. It dropped into the pall like a stone.

Ramus listened as the megaboss’ livid cries receded. He bowed his head as though in prayer. His eyes stung. It was impossible to hear the Ironjaw and not be reminded of the same unthinking rage that had driven him to this place. Despite it, his heart hammered for further vengeance.

If only his own intemperance could be soothed away as readily as the bone cloud took the Ironjaw’s.

‘Vandalus. Brother, I–’

‘What’s done is done, brother. Sigmar will judge you, but not I.’

Ramus hung his head. Such a covenant should have been reassuring, but for some reason the prospect of receiving Sigmar’s judgement gave him a flutter of apprehension.

The Knight-Azyros spread his wings, stowed his starblade and offered Ramus his hand. ‘What are we waiting for, brother? Would you leave all the fighting to the Ironjawz?’

Ramus lifted his face to the golden light of the Azyros and felt an icy peace quell his heart – the peace that only a certainty of purpose could bring. The Hallowed Knights had departed Azyrheim to renew old alliances, and perhaps a truce with the warriors of Gorkamork had always been Sigmar’s will.

‘They will have all the fight that they please,’ he said as he clasped the Azyros’ gauntleted hand. ‘But Mannfred is mine.’

HEARTWOOD

Robbie MacNiven

The Realm of Life had become a place of death.

Blood and bark, iron and earth, the glade shook with the fury of battle. At its centre a warband of Rotbringers had turned at bay, their tight cohorts of rusting plate armour and sagging, rotten flesh split apart by nature’s wrath.

Nellas the Harvester, branchwych of House Il’leath, swung her greenwood scythe in a hissing upward arc, parrying the blightking’s stroke. The hulking Rotbringer leant into the blow, trying to use his bulk to force Nellas’ guard down. The sylvaneth was dwarfed by the warrior, but she stood her ground, willowy limbs invested with the strength of the Wyldwood’s deepest roots. Bark creaked and the scythe shuddered in her grip as she held the blightking in place, while from the trees all around the sylvaneth poured. The whole forest keened with the battle-song of the Wargrove; the encroachment of the Great Corruptor’s minions into Brocélann would not be tolerated.

The bittergrub that coiled among Nellas’ branches saw its opening. It darted forward and locked its mandibles around the upper thigh of the Rotbringer, slicing through corroded plate and neatly snipping a hamstring. The blightking grunted and went down on one knee. The bittergrub held on.

Nellas leant back to give herself room, and plied her scythe in a great arc. There was a crunch, and the warrior’s cyclopean helmet thumped to the ground, a jet of pus-like ichor pattering across the glade’s trampled grass.

Nellas was pushing past the decapitated corpse before it had even slumped, her bittergrub wrapping around her once more. The Rotbringer champion was ahead, bellowing vile curses as he swung a great, rusting mace at Thaark. The treelord ancient’s own household revenants were struggling to reach him, locked in a grinding melee with the Chaos lord’s bodyguard. Nellas shrieked with fury as she saw the Rotbringer’s blow thump home into Thaark’s thigh, splintering wood and splattering thick amber bloodsap. The head of House Il’leath tore into the champion’s flesh in response, his great talons splitting armour and spilling rancid guts, but to no avail. The Rotbringer’s wounds regenerated as soon as they were made, the obese armoured body bound together by more than mere mortal willpower.

The Rotbringer heard Nellas’ cry and turned in time to swat aside her first blow, moving with a speed that belied his diseased bulk. Nellas darted back to avoid the warrior’s backswing, the forest air thrumming with the force of the mace’s passing. Thaark lunged at the champion’s exposed back, dragging fresh gashes down his spine, but he simply shrugged off the wound and stepped in closer to Nellas. She attempted a shortened slash with her scythe, but this time it merely clanged off corroded battleplate. For all her strength, the branchwych didn’t possess Thaark’s oaken might.

And now she had overextended. The Rotbringer was too close to strike at her properly, but the thrust of his mace was still deadly. The blow smashed into Nellas’ side, and pain fired through the branchwych. She went down, roots questing for purchase in the glade’s bloody earth. Her bittergrub lashed out at the plague champion, maw snapping at the wounds already dealt by Thaark, but the Rotbringer simply snatched its writhing, segmented body in one iron gauntlet. With a bile-choked laugh he crushed the spite, popping it with a hideous crunch.

Nellas tried to rise, shuddering at the departing soul-shriek of the grub. Her bark was splintered, bloodsap running down her side. The Rotbringer turned to Thaark, another stroke of his mace splitting a great gash down the treelord ancient’s trunk. Nellas could feel her lord’s life force draining as he swayed back from the blow.

‘Your Wyldwood is mine, tree spirit,’ the Rotbringer said, the voice rasping as though from two separate, phlegm-choked throats. ‘Skathis Rot claims this kingdom for the Grandfather.’

Thaark was able to ward away another huge blow with his upper branches, but he teetered as the Rotbringer kept swinging, snapping limbs and scattering leaves. Around him the tree-revenants of Thaark’s guard were battling furiously to reach him, but the phalanx of blightkings protecting their own champion were still unmovable. Only Nellas had broken through.

The branchwych rose silently. The whole glade shuddered as Thaark went down on his knees, a creaking groan seeming to run through the surrounding forest spirits as they felt his agony. Nellas hissed at their song of pain and loss.

‘Surrender your pathetic kingdom to Grandfather’s mercy,’ Skathis Rot spat, standing over Thaark’s splintered form. ‘Share in his magnificent blessings, and embrace the majesty of abundant decay.’ The Chaos champion smashed another blow against Thaark’s torso, breaking the iron-hard bark and exposing the soft heartwood. Chuckling grotesquely, the Rotbringer leant forward, one gauntlet probing at the sap-soaked wound.

Whatever it was doing, the distraction was enough. Nellas swung at the plague champion’s exposed back. There was a crunch as the greenwood scythe parted Skathis Rot’s skull. Grey brain matter, thick with maggots, splattered the branchwych. She shrieked with furious triumph.

The champion’s corpse fell heavily, the ground sizzling where vile ichor pulsed from its split skull. Nellas went on her knees before Thaark, running slender fingers over the great rent splitting her master’s trunk.

‘It is no use,’ the head of the clan said slowly, voice creaking like a great oak bending in a tempest. ‘He cut to my heartwood.’

‘You must rest, lord,’ Nellas responded, willing the broken bark to reknit beneath her fingers. It could not be too grievous a wound. House Il’leath could not lose Thaark.

‘Take my lifeseed, branchwych,’ the treelord said, gently brushing aside Nellas’ touch. ‘Plant it in the Evergreen with the others who have fallen here. Give Brocélann new life, and we will resist these invaders for an eternity. Ghyran endures.’

Around them the tree-revenants had finally broken through the remaining blightkings, butchering them with blade and talon. Nellas was oblivious to it all, looking up into the eye knots of her lord. The green battle-fury which had burned there was dimming.

The song of the Wyldwood shifted fractionally, a new melody struck by the dying treelord. The sound pricked at Nellas’ memory.

‘The song of Everdusk’s Waxing,’ she said.

‘It always was my favourite,’ Thaark murmured, swaying slightly. Nellas could only nod. Around them the last sounds of slaughter faded, and the survivors of House Il’leath gathered with bowed branches to hear the final spirit-song of their lord and master.

After death, the harvest.

The glade had once been a tranquil place, an enclave of lush green grass dappled by the shade of overhanging ash and yew boughs. Now it was a circle of hell, the grass trampled into churned mud, the spiked, armoured forms of butchered Rotbringers intermingling with the smashed kindlewood corpses of felled sylvaneth, dark blood and amber sap mixing in the furrowed muck.

Nellas passed over it in silence, using her scythe as a crutch. The wound in her side still throbbed. It would heal in time, when she had an opportunity to rest in the Evergreen and channel the forest’s healing song. Until then she pressed on. She had a duty to perform.

One by one, she harvested the lifeseeds of her fallen kin. As a branchwych it was her most vital task, a part of the ever-turning cycles of the Wyldwood. From the day she had sprouted from her soulpod many seasons ago, Nellas had served House Il’leath as one of its harvesters, plying her scythe and carrying each and every lifeseed fallen, in peace or in war, back to Brocélann’s heartglade – the Evergreen. Amidst a reaping of death she was a sower of life, of tender branches and new shoots.

As she went, Nellas hummed a new song. She sensed other little voices joining in, one by one, answering her lilting call. She spoke to them as allies and as friends, not with orders, as she would have her fellow sylvaneth clansfolk. And one by one they answered her. They came buzzing, fluttering or leaping from the surrounding Wyldwood, dozens of tiny forest spirits that gathered around her, their bodies glittering with fey light. They had come to show their respect to the ones who guarded their homes. They had come to bear away the fallen.

Every time Nellas plucked a lifeseed from the dead wood before her, one of the spites flitting around her would retrieve it, ready to carry it with the branchwych to its resting place in the Evergreen. The creatures did so in silence, their playful jostling and bickering suppressed for the moment by the gravity of their task.

Near the far edge of the clearing Nellas paused, her flock of spites going still around her. She had been one of three. Her sisters, Llanae and Sylanna, had completed Il’leath’s triumvirate of branchwyches. Between them the trio had reaped the echoharvest of the lamentiri, the sylvaneth spirit-songs, and ensured the continuing existence of the Wyldwood of Brocélann since Thaark had been a sapling. But no more. Nellas found Llanae and Sylanna side by side, bark broken and lifeless, their bittergrubs crushed alongside them. She had sensed them fall during the fighting, had heard their battle-song cut short, but in the fury and desperation of the glade’s killing she hadn’t had time to mourn. Now, as a pair of little spites reverently received their lifeseeds, Nellas felt the ache of their felling keener than the wound still burning in her side.

It had been a grim day for Brocélann. By the time Nellas had passed over the whole glade, the sun was sinking below the treetops and the air was thick with attendant spites. The urge to dig her roots in and rest was almost overwhelming, but she resisted. She was now the only one capable of seeing so many lifeseeds replanted. As the Forest Folk set about piling the Rotbringer corpses for burning, she made her way to the Evergreen.

It was a long walk, through hidden vales and along the high paths of Brocélann’s wooded uplands. Few outside the noble houses travelled such routes, fewer still at so late an hour. As she went, her way lit by the light of her buzzing companions, Nellas felt the ancient forest sigh and creak in sympathy around her. The whole of Brocélann had suffered, the loss of so many venerable sylvaneth sending an undertone of pain through the Wyldwood’s spirit-song. Nellas could still feel the shared agony in every rustle and moan of the forest around her.

By the time she arrived at the outskirts of the Evergreen, darkness had fallen. The woodland was restless, still distressed by the violation it had suffered. Things darted past Nellas, their shapes insubstantial in the dark. She felt the beat of wings as a woodland owl soared overhead, hunting. The killing, Nellas reflected, was never done. Around her she felt the ever-present song of the Wyldwood waver, as though the chorus had become suddenly doubtful. A colder, more cutting note entered the recital.

‘Stop.’ The command seemed to breathe from the trees themselves. Nellas halted, grip tightening around her scythe’s haft. There were few creatures capable of taking a sylvaneth by surprise in her own woods. None of them meant her well.

Shapes melted from the shadows beneath the surrounding boughs, taking physical form seemingly only with great reluctance. They were sylvaneth, but they possessed none of the graceful bearing of the Noble Spirits Nellas was used to communing with. Their outlines were jagged and sharp, their trunks stooped, features twisted with fang-filled disdain. They blocked the path ahead, pressing in on the branchwych from all sides. The song of the woodland grew colder still around them.

Spite-revenants, she thought. Outcasts. Nature’s most merciless aspect given form and thought.

‘You go no further,’ one of the malevolent spirits said. He was big, bristling with jagged fir needles, his eyes glowing a bitter, icy blue in the creaking darkness. ‘You are not welcome here.’

Nellas faced the Outcast, straightening despite the pain that flared from her wound.

‘The shadows are deep, so I will forgive you your mistake. I am Nellas the Harvester, of House Il’leath of the Heartwood Glade. I am bearing the lifeseeds of many of my house. Too many. In the name of the Everqueen, stand aside.’

‘We know who you are, branchwych,’ the spite-revenant said, showing no sign of moving. ‘And I am Du’gath, of the Loneroot. Your presence defiles the sanctity of this enclave. These woodlands do not want you here. Their roots squirm at your passing.’

‘Are you delirious with barkrot?’ Nellas snapped. ‘These little spites with me carry the very future of this Wyldwood. You have no right to impede us.’

‘You carry corruption. We can feel the taint that infects you. We cannot allow you to spread it to the Evergreen. Whether you are aware of it or not, you could bring about the destruction of the heartglade and the death of the whole forest.’

Nellas shook her head angrily, leaves rustling. ‘You refer to my wound? It was earned today in battle with those who would defile these sacred glades. I did not see you or your kindred there when Lord Thaark was felled.’

‘That does not mean we weren’t present,’ Du’gath countered, taking a step closer to Nellas. He stretched out one jagged talon, moving to touch her splintered side. The branchwych darted back instinctively, hissing as the sudden movement sent a pulse of pain through her body. She felt her anger flare.

‘It won’t heal,’ Du’gath said. ‘It is infected with the rot of the Great Corruptor. If you enter the Evergreen you may pass the taint on to the saplings there.’

‘If I don’t enter, the lamentiri will wither and be lost,’ Nellas countered. ‘Make way for me, Outcast. Unless you wish to see this Wyldwood brought to ruin.’

‘You know not what you carry,’ the spite-revenant said. ‘But I cannot bar a branchwych from her own glade. Tread with care, Nellas the Harvester. We will be watching you.’

The spite-revenants receded back into the darkness, their bitterness lingering on the night air. Nellas continued up the path, until the final branches parted before her.

The Evergreen, Brocélann’s heart, lay ahead. A clearing at the peak of the Wyldwood’s uplands, at its centre stood the great Kingstree, the oldest oak in the forest. It was here that the lords of Brocélann’s noble families gathered in council and mustered the Wargrove in times of conflict. It was also the focal point of the forest’s combined memory-echoes, the well that collected the reverberations of House Il’leath’s many life songs. Some, like the melodies of the Kingstree itself, were as old as the Jade Kingdoms’ deepest roots, while those soulpod groves newly planted in the shade of the great oak had only just begun to add their own cadence to the forest’s choir. Through them, Ghyran endured.

At night the clearing space was lit by the flickering of a thousand fireflies, and the colourful flashes that marked the passage of lesser spites weaving darts of light among the shadows of soulpod saplings and thick wildflowers. Nellas began to murmur her greetings to the many forest spirits as she stepped into the clearing, brushing gently past fresh shoots and leaves. As she did so more spites fluttered to her, perching in her branches, their tiny songs full of concern.

‘Do not worry yourselves, little lights,’ the branchwych murmured gently to them. ‘I will heal. Many others this day will not.’

As the spites that came to greet Nellas wove among those already carrying the lifeseeds, their songs melded into a mournful chorus. It was a tale of passing and of withering, of falling leaves and dry, dead wood. Nellas let it play out around her as she began the replanting.

Each of the lifeseeds had its place, a soulpod in the Evergreen. Those who had been Forest Folk, the dryads and the branchwraiths, were planted among those that formed a great grove arcing around the clearing’s edge, nearest to the trees which grew thick all around. The tree-revenants and the other members of the noble houses were planted among the pods closer to the clearing’s heart, ranked by their dedication to each of the Wyldwood’s ever-changing seasons. Then, nearest of all to Brocélann’s heartwood, in the shade of the mighty Kingstree itself, the treelords were laid to their final rest, the lamentiri of all planted in the fertile soil around them, their echo-memories allowed to rejoin the great chorus of the Wyldwood.

Not even the Everqueen knew what form, great or small, any of the lifeseeds would take when they sprouted once more from their soulpods. But regardless, all would serve the natural cycles. Nellas planted Thaark last of all, among the very roots of the Kingstree. The flourishing soulpods round about the old oak would take both strength and wisdom from its presence, and from the same soil new life would one day join the ranks of the sylvaneth.

As she nestled Thaark’s seed in the knotted core of the shining soulpod, Nellas swayed. Her exhaustion was coming close to overwhelming her. The harsh words of the spite-revenant returned unbidden, disrupting the mourning of the spites and the gentle songs she sang to the fresh seedlings. Corruption. Taint. She was infected. Her wound still throbbed, and every step brought with it a deep, aching pain. The growth song of the Evergreen called to her, promising the chance to rest and heal, but she pushed it gently from her mind. She had one more duty still to perform. Sensing her distress, the spites around her fluttered and darted to and fro.

Thaark’s seed safely buried, she took one of the lesser tracks out of the clearing, leaving the Evergreen’s hum of renewal behind her. The darting lights of the spites lit her way, guiding her faithfully down a steep, twisting path tangled with briars and thorns. As she went, the number of spites multiplied, until the whole Wyldwood seemed to be illuminated with buzzing, kaleidoscopic colour, the flying forest spirits dancing and spinning around, over and under one another with glittering, preternatural grace.

She paused at the edge of the path, beneath the boughs of a soaring beech tree. Its branches were laden with small sacks, around which the creatures dashed and darted. They were cocoons, each one bearing within it the germinations of a new forest spirit. Nellas reached out and delicately brushed one of the larger sacks, its skin black and mottled with orange blotches. It was ripe, close to hatching. As she came into contact with it, she prayed to the spirits of Ghyran that she would have a new bittergrub to accompany her. Her song throbbed through the cocoon, binding the small creature’s first memories to her own, imprinting on it the work of the Harvester. The loss of Nellas’ former grub, and the lack of the soothing, simple counterpoint of its little spirit-song, tugged at the branchwych’s subconscious. Just one more pain for the day’s tally, both mental and physical.

She no longer had the strength to return to the Evergreen. Instead, she walked a little way into the forest and planted her roots, letting her mind join the wider thoughts of the Wyldwood. As her consciousness fragmented, her last memory was of Thaark, and his final moments.

In the surrounding darkness, the Outcasts watched her, silent, waiting.

Realisation struck her. It was time. She pulled her scattered thoughts together, easing the forest’s drowsy night-time murmur to the edge of her thoughts. It was right that she witness this. The first song it should hear ought to be her own.

She returned to the beech, scythe in hand. The spites had gathered, adorning the boughs of the tree with shining, bickering brilliance. They crooned and fluttered as she appeared, excited at what was about to take place.

The black-and-orange cocoon stirred beneath its branch. She reached out a hand and touched it, twigs splayed. Through the fragile membrane, she could feel warmth and the squirming pulse of fresh life. Yes, she thought. It was time.

She withdrew her hand as a split appeared in the sack, oozing a thick, clear substance. The watching spites chittered all the louder, pushing and shoving one another as they tried to get a better view. The hatching of a new bittergrub was an uncommon occurrence. She prayed to the Everqueen that her new companion recognised her.

There was a pop, and the cocoon burst. A flood of green-grey slime poured from the ruptured sack, splattering the beech’s roots. With it came a thin, segmented form, gripping onto the branch it had hatched from with vicious pincers. A vile stink filled the cool forest air.

She knew immediately this was no bittergrub. It only bore a single segmented black eye, and hissing, acidic toxins dripped from its wicked mandibles. Its body was worm-like and its flesh translucent, exposing inner organs that were riddled with pulsing, yellow veins and swollen by globules of raw filth.

As the plague wyrm uncoiled, the attending spites shrieked with terror, scattering in a great, roiling cloud. She found herself rooted to the spot, frozen in a moment of horror as she understood that the rot had reached the very heart of the forest. The Outcasts had been right. The monstrosity that had hatched from the Wyldwood cocoon hissed at her and lunged, its slime-coated pincers snapping–

Nellas!

Her thoughts returned like a springsfed flood. She gasped and twitched, the first sensation that of the pain in her side, her second the realisation that at some time during the night she’d fallen, and now lay among the tangled thorns and bracken near the beech tree.

The bittergrub. A nightmare or a vision – she couldn’t tell, but the memory of the vile creature that had hatched so close to the forest’s heartglade made her branches shudder. She tried to rise. The pain of her wound was worse than it had been the night before. Not only had the splintered bark refused to heal, but now dark veins criss-crossed the injury, spreading like an ugly latticework along the bottom half of her trunk.

The accusations of the spite-revenant came back to her. She was infected. She was spreading the Rotbringer’s plague to Brocélann. The nightmare made her shudder again. Then she remembered what had woken her.

The voice of Thoaken of the Blackroot, snapping and splintering with a rare urgency.

She dragged herself up by her scythe, body trembling. Light was filtering through the forest canopy. It was well after dawn, she realised. The Wyldwood was quiet and still, as though the forest spirits around her were straining to overhear something momentous.

My lord, Nellas thought, letting the shoots of her mind quest out through the woodland and join the wider spirit-song. There, at its heart, she found him, along with the other treelords. They were gathered at the Kingstree. That could only mean an impromptu council had been called.

Where are you, Nellas? The treelord ancient’s creaking tone filled her thoughts. We have summoned the noble house to a moot. Grave news has reached us from beyond the treeline.

I’m on my way, lord, Nellas responded. She took a step, and found she was able to stay upright. Leaning heavily on her scythe, she began to make her way back towards the Evergreen. On the way she glanced at the beech tree, still surrounded by darting spites. The bittergrub cocoon hung among the others, whole and unblemished. Had it merely been a nightmare, a discordant tremor in the forest’s evening song, or a vision of something yet to transpire? She pressed on.

In the Evergreen, the noble household of Il’leath had assembled. A host of tree-revenants ringed the edge of the clearing, their attention fixed on the Kingstree at its centre. Beside its great trunk, the lords and ladies of the woodland clan stood in a close circle, swaying gently with the rhythms of their discussion. There were the treelords Bitterbough and Thenuil, the two loremasters, Ancients Gillehad and Whitebark, and Thoaken himself. The absence of Boughmaster Thaark leading the debate sent a stab of sorrow through Nellas’ heartwood.

The murmured contemplation of the watching tree-revenants stilled as she arrived. They parted wordlessly for her. She could feel their eyes on her injury. The sudden hush caused the treelord conclave to cease their own discussion and turn to watch her slow approach. She felt her anger spike under the scrutiny.

‘You need not bow, Nellas,’ Thoaken said as she drew closer. ‘I did not know you were wounded.’

‘It will heal with time, my lord,’ Nellas said, letting her roots sink in a little as she stopped before the gathered moot.

‘The whole Wyldwood aches for the loss of your sisters, branchwych,’ Thenuil said. He was a redwood by nature, his rust-coloured bark giving him a warlike appearance as he loomed over his fellow treelords.

‘And for the head of the clan, the venerable Thaark,’ Gillehad added, the ageing willow bent almost double. ‘The goodness of his spirit and the wisdom of his leadership will not soon be forgotten. May his lamentiri enrich many a sylvaneth as-yet unplanted.’

‘Such a loss makes your well-being all the more important, Nellas,’ Thoaken added. He was old, even by the standards of the ancients. A slender pine, his highest needles matched the canopy of Thenuil, while his grey bark was knotted and craggy with age. He swayed gently as he talked, each word as inexorable and measured as the passage of years.

‘Until the soulpods sprout fresh branchwyches, you alone can safely harvest the lifeseeds and tend to the Evergreen. And until we have elected a new head of the clan, Brocélann needs you now more than ever. We already miss Thaark’s guidance.’

Doubt made Nellas hesitate. Should she admit her fears? Should she tell the conclave that she believed Skathis Rot’s blow to her side had brought on some form of infection? That the Outcasts had accused her of corruption?

‘Spite-messengers have brought us grievous news,’ Thoaken said before Nellas could order her thoughts. ‘From both Ithilia and Mer’thorn. Our sister woods have been overrun by the worshippers of blight.’

His words chased all thoughts of self-doubt from Nellas’ mind, and she felt a keening at the thought of such desecration flare in her breast.

‘Surely not,’ she heard herself say.

‘It has been confirmed by those Forest Folk that escaped the felling,’ Gillehad creaked. ‘And we ourselves feel the spirit-song ache of many great lords cut down and wise ancients forever uprooted. Tragedy has finally caught up with our corner of Ghyran.’

‘How is this possible?’ Nellas demanded, turning from one treelord to the next. ‘The glamours have kept Ithilia and Mer’thorn safe ever since the Great Corruptor set foot in the Jade Kingdoms. How have the Rotbringers been able to overcome them?’

‘How did that warband pierce our own treeline?’ Gillehad replied.

‘Bands of Rotbringers stumble across us from time to time,’ Nellas said, voice snapping angrily like broken branches. ‘There were no survivors to tell of what this squirm-scum uncovered. There never are.’

‘I agree,’ said Whitebark. The ancient loremaster was the least vocal of the conclave, so old that he seemed in a perpetual doze, his spirit-song drifting and languid. A knotted silver birch, he leant heavily on one drooping branch like a crutch. ‘The chances of not one but two great Wyldwoods falling to the random roving of a warband large enough to overcome their enchantments are almost non-existent. We must assume their glamours failed them.’

Or that some rot beset them from within, thought Nellas. The realisation hardened her resolve.

‘We must discover the state of our sister woods,’ she said. ‘And find how the Rotbringer filth were able to locate them. I propose to the moot that I be allowed to spirit-walk to Mer’thorn for this purpose.’

‘Out of the question,’ Thoaken replied. ‘I have already told you of the vital place you now hold in Brocélann, Nellas. If we lose you, the very future of this Wyldwood would be threatened.’

‘If we do not discover how the sister woods fell, we will be next,’ Nellas said. Her anger drove out any thought of admitting her private fears, of agonising over what even now gnawed at her bark.

‘Spites are being dispatched,’ Thoaken said. ‘And the Wargrove assembled once again. We shall begin a muster as soon as our household has rested its roots.’

‘That will take time. A spirit-walk will be faster and safer.’

‘Not if the Wyldwoods have indeed become as corrupt as we fear.’

Nellas didn’t respond immediately. As far as preserving Brocélann was concerned, Thoaken was right, and the whole woodland knew that once he dug his roots in, the fury of all the gods, great and small, would not move him. But if Nellas’ fears were correct, they didn’t have time to assess the threat from afar. She bowed, ignoring the discomfort the motion brought her.

‘As you wish, venerable lord.’

She could feel the scrutiny of the conclave as she spoke, prickling with suspicions. Most of them, she suspected, perceived her intentions. She kept her eyes on the Evergreen’s nearest soulpod saplings, praying by bough and branch that they didn’t demand assurances of her. She could not disrupt the natural cycle by refusing a direct order from the conclave, but nor would she wait passively for events to play out around her. The fury smouldering inside her demanded her sister woods be avenged. Eventually, Thoaken spoke.

‘The moot will continue to ponder these dark events. You are clearly in need of rest, Nellas. You are dismissed, for now. May the Everqueen’s blessings be upon you.’

‘My thanks, lord,’ the branchwych replied, turning her back on the conclave.

She would have to be swift.

Nellas slid gently into the clear depths of the woodland spring, slender bark limbs immersed in its cool flow. The waters embraced her, whispering a song of renewal as they slid over the thick tangle of thorns and vines that sprouted from her scalp. Her green eyes opened beneath the surface, following the redfins and minnowspawn as they darted back and forth through the clear depths. The water was brimming with life, just like the soil it fed.

She could not allow a place such as this to fall to corruption. Ghyran endured.

Closing her eyes once more, she let the stream’s song fulfil her. The healing waters had reduced the agony of her wound to a numb throb. She could spend an eternity in here, watched over by the spirits of the spring, sustained by their soothing embrace. But in her mind’s eye she saw the waters congeal, the clear flow discoloured by filth. To stay would be to surrender Brocélann to damnation, a truth she had known even as she had paid lip service to Thoaken’s commands. Her bark would not leave the Wyldwood’s treeline, but her spirit would.

She hummed to herself, communing with the spring’s song, letting its melodies entwine with hers. As she did, she felt the flow around her tug, teasing at her branches. Though her roots remained sunken into the slick stones at the spring’s bottom, her mind started to drift.

There were many ways for the spirit-song of a sylvaneth to travel between the Wyldwoods of Ghyran, and the sacred waterways were one of them. The stream was one of several that flowed from Brocélann to her neighbouring woodlands, one of the realmroots blessed by the Everqueen to bring her life-giving energies to this part of the Jade Kingdoms. As Nellas’ spirit-song left her physical form, the water’s flow snatched at her and carried her along. She bound herself to the form of a passing bluescale, the big fish darting over rocks and between lazy fronds and watermoss, following the current as it carried her beyond Brocélann’s borders.

The sense of detachment was exhilarating. The pain of Nellas’ wound had become a distant ache, left far behind. The natural rhythms of the stream flooded her thoughts, the instinctive concerns and needs of its wildlife merging with her own desires. It was only with difficulty that she slid free from the bluescale, forging through the current towards the bank.

She emerged without disturbing the water’s surface, her spirit-form invisible to mortal eyes. It was immediately apparent that she was in Brocélann no more. Around her, trees stretched, but these were not the healthy boughs and branches Nellas had passed through when she had last visited Mer’thorn, many seasons ago. The forest was skeletal, leafless, the trunks bare and gnarled, each tree seemingly struggling to stand beneath the weight of its own dead wood.

Their song cut to the branchwych’s heartwood. It had none of Brocélann’s spirited cadence, none of the vibrant pitch and swell that coursed through the Jade Kingdoms still resisting the Great Corruptor. Instead it was a low, weary moan, the creak and sigh of a tree that had long given up the hope of ever sprouting fresh shoots again.

Nor were there any spites. The lack of the little darting lights and the elegant counterpoint of their songs was like a void in the branchwych’s core. A forest without spites was a forest that had lost the essence of its being.

Nellas eased her own song into that of Mer’thorn’s, her light, quicker tempo seeking to stoke the Wyldwood’s sentience.

Who has done this to you?

The tired answer drew her on along the bank of the stream, deeper into the Wyldwood. As she went, she noticed the waters beside her were also changing. The stream no longer possessed the crystalline clarity it had in Brocélann, but instead grew steadily murkier. Soon it was brown and discoloured. It began to congeal around the edges, the banks thick with green scum. Eventually it took on the appearance of tar, oozing and black, a pestilential stink coming off its bubbling surface.

The woodland, too, grew worse with every ethereal step Nellas took. The trees were no longer bent over and gaunt, like bare old beggars. Now they were clothed, but in all manner of vileness. In her time tending to the Evergreen, the branchwych had uprooted and carved out many diseases and blights before they could take hold among root and bark. Ever since the distant days of the Great Corruptor’s arrival in Ghyran, constant vigilance had been needed to ensure his plagues didn’t achieve what his Rotbringers could not.

Here, those plagues had run rampant. As she passed through the fallen Wyldwood, she saw every blight she had ever encountered in evidence around her. Spinemould covered entire trees, turning them into bristling, puffy growths. Sap with the consistency of pus poured from the hideous gouges bored by Weeping Rot, while all manner of monstrous worms and maggots had burrowed out nests among bark and branches. Leaves were black and slippery with Slimestench and Daemon’s Spit, while the forest floor beneath was rapidly becoming a rotting, shifting mulch. Instead of mischievous spites and darting forest spirits, great swarms of black flies now droned, filling the air with their buzzing, ugly insistence.

Nellas stopped trying to commune with the Wyldwood. Its song was no longer weak and breathless. It was no longer the voice of something dying a slow, inevitable death. It had become a drone, unhealthy but strong, a sonorous chant that she wanted no part in. The forest here, she realised, was no longer dying. It was alive, but it was not the life granted by the changing of the seasons or the Everqueen’s grace. It was unwholesome and twisted, a vile parody. It was the fresh life of maggots bursting from a boil, of a virus coiling in a bloodstream, of flies hatching from rancid meat. It was a mockery of everything green and vibrant, of everything Nellas had spent her entire existence nurturing and protecting. The realisation sent righteous anger coursing through her.

She began to seek out the Everqueen’s distant song, holding onto it like a beacon amidst the encroaching darkness. Even though she was invisible, the sensation of being observed made her thorns prickle. The forest was aware of her. She knotted a glamour about herself with whispered words, clutching her scythe close. Even her spirit-self felt as though it was swarming with lice and maggots, and each step became more difficult, more repulsive, than the last.

Before her, a clearing emerged. She realised as soon as she gazed beyond the final dripping, cancerous boughs that her worst fears were true. The heart of Mer’thorn and the heart of the corruption were one and the same.

Like all Wyldwoods, Mer’thorn had also once had an enclave at its heart, a grove where the energies of life swirled and eddied the strongest, where the soulpods thrived and the spirit-song reached its crescendo. Such places could take many forms, and Brocélann’s mighty Kingstree was only one expression of a heartglade. Mer’thorn’s had once been a menhir, a great, jagged pillar of primordial stone standing tall upon a grassy knoll, thick with moss and carved with the swirling heraldry of the enclave’s sylvaneth clan.

That menhir still stood, but it was split and deformed almost beyond recognition. Something had burrowed out its core, and now the space within was no longer a part of the Realm of Life. A sickly yellow light pulsed from its heart, and whenever Nellas tried to look directly at the rent in reality, her gaze instinctively flinched away, her spirit shuddering with revulsion.

From the open rift daemons came, clawing their way into the Wyldwood. They already infested the heartglade around the menhir, a sea of sagging, diseased flesh and corroded iron. Clusters of plaguebearers circled the space with an endless, limping gait, the tolling of their rusting bells a counterpoint to their throaty chanting. Great flies, bigger than Nellas and dripping with thick strings of venom, droned overhead. Underfoot, a living carpet of nurglings writhed, bickering and giggling like a nightmarish parody of the spites that had once inhabited Mer’thorn. The entire clearing was alive and bursting with the vital virulence of entropy and decay.

The Wyldwood’s heart was still beating, Nellas realised. It was choked and rancid with rot, a rot that had first taken root not at its borders, but at its very core.

The horror of realisation momentarily eclipsed all of Nellas’ other concerns. Her glamour shimmered, and she heard the chanting of the daemons skip a beat. The dirge of the trees around her rose in pitch. Her spirit-self tensed. She sensed a thousand rheumy, cyclopean eyes turn towards her.

Branchwych. The words, squelching like maggots writhing in rotten bark, slipped directly into Nellas’ thoughts. Skathis said you would come. He wants us to tell you it is too late. He wants us to thank you, branchwych. He wants to bless the rot that already works through your bark, for welcoming him into your home. Grandfather’s glory be upon you, and upon his Tallybands.

She had been right. Mer’thorn was lost. Shaking, she fled.

Nellas returned to her body with a scream of pain and rage. For a second, she didn’t remember where she was, her branches thrashing through the water as she surfaced.

But the agony in her side, worse than ever before, stung her thoughts into order. She had been right. She had brought corruption into Brocélann, but it hadn’t been in her. It had been in what she had carried.

Scythe in hand, she made for the Evergreen, keening a song of fear and warning for the forest spirits to spread around her. She had to rouse the Wyldwood, before it was too late.

‘She took the realmroot to Mer’thorn,’ said Brak. Du’gath dipped his branches in acknowledgement, fangs bared as he watched the branchwych race towards the Evergreen. To the spite-revenant’s attuned senses, the wound in her side reeked of corruption. Her visit to the fallen Wyldwood and her sudden madness were the final confirmation.

‘She must die,’ he said to his surrounding kin. ‘Before she can spread her foulness any further. Follow me.’

As she neared the Evergreen, Nellas’ spirit-song quested ahead. Even now, a sliver of defiance within her held out the hope that she was wrong. Maybe it had simply been her wound the daemons had referred to. Maybe, with time, the rot could be excised, and she could be made whole again. Maybe Brocélann was untouched.

Thaark.

She pushed her song ahead into the clearing, seeking out the individual voices that flowed from the Evergreen. She should be able to commune with them. She should be able to know for certain that her fears were misplaced.

Nellas.

The voice that answered her did not belong to any sylvaneth. It didn’t run in harmony with the melodies of the forest, but cut across it, a discordant baritone rich with rot.

Thank you, Nellas. Thank you for bringing me here.

She had heard the voice before. It belonged to Skathis Rot – not the mortal Rotbringer champion she had cut down, but the daemon that had inhabited his flesh. The daemon which had been transferred by hand to Thaark’s heartwood even as Nellas had split the champion’s skull. The daemon her spites had carried in the treelord’s infected lifeseed, right into the centre of Brocélann.

I will destroy you, monster, Nellas keened, her fury eclipsing even the pain of her wound as she threw herself through the last of the undergrowth and into the Evergreen.

Around her the trees were no longer singing. They were screaming. Nellas had planted Thaark’s lamentiri in a soulpod right beside the Kingstree, nestled among its very roots. In doing so, she now realised, she had carried the lifeseed tainted by Skathis Rot right into her home’s heartglade.

The Evergreen was under attack. What had once been Thaark’s budding soulpod was now a sinkhole, a black pit from which the filth of Chaos welled and poured. Plaguebearers were already limping and staggering through the Evergreen, chanting and muttering darkly to themselves as they hacked at the groves surrounding the Kingstree with rusty blades. The nurglings that accompanied them gnawed on roots or gleefully ripped down saplings, destroying future sylvaneth generations before they had even had a chance to bud. Around the clearing, great swarms of fat flies buzzed, breeding and hatching in a frenzy of infestation.

Worst of all was the thing at the Evergreen’s centre. Skathis had taken on physical form, a tall, emaciated, one-eyed daemon who now sat languidly above the sinkhole, reclining amongst the roots of the Kingstree as though they were his throne. Maggots longer than Nellas’ forebranches squirmed and writhed across the great oak’s bark, seeking to burrow in and defile its core. As the branchwych laid eyes on him, Skathis spread both skeletal arms, his long face split by a warm grin.

‘Welcome home, Nellas,’ the daemon boomed, his voice unnaturally deep and vibrant for such a wasted frame. ‘Good Boughmaster Thaark told me all about you before I consumed the last of him. How joyous it is to finally meet you!’

Shrieking, Nellas flung herself at the nearest plaguebearer. It was attempting to uproot a briarthorn soulpod with both hands, seemingly numb to the gashes the plant was leaving in its diseased skin. It was too slow to avoid Nellas as she sliced its head from its shoulders. Its daemonic form exploded into a great cloud of flies.

Nellas surged on, even the pain of her wound momentarily burned away by the rage that blazed through her bark. She disembowelled a second plaguebearer, then a third, Skathis’ merry laughter ringing around her all the while.

‘Curse you, maggotkin!’ she screamed, a single swing of her scythe eviscerating a clutch of squirming nurglings. ‘Die!’

‘Not before you, Nellas,’ Skathis chuckled, pointing one long, bony finger at her. ‘Not before you.’

Around the branchwych, the Tallyband closed.

‘Drycha’s curse,’ Du’gath spat as he looked down into the Evergreen. ‘We’re too late.’

‘It was the lifeseed,’ Brak said. ‘Not the branchwych. The disease was in what she planted, not her wound.’

‘We must help her,’ another of the spite-revenants added. ‘If we wait for the Wargrove to muster, the heartglade will already have fallen.’

Du’gath was moving. He burst from the treeline into the Evergreen like an icy gale, fangs bared and talons out. Keening their own cold war-song, the Outcasts followed.

Nellas plied her scythe, the harvester come home. One monstrosity after another fell, their corroded blades no match for her greenwood, their daemonic bodies disintegrating with every strike. But still they came, on and on, as inevitable as time’s decaying grip, and Skathis laughed all the harder. Nellas had barely managed to take a dozen paces towards him, and with every passing moment the sinkhole between them grew larger, and more filth hauled itself up from the depths. The Kingstree had started to bow slightly as the hole reached its roots. The ancient oak’s throaty song of pain and fear drove Nellas into an even more violent fury.

So busy was she with hacking and slashing, swinging and slicing, that she didn’t notice the press of rotting bodies easing around her. It was only when a clawed hand caught the downward stroke of a rusting sword meant for her upper branches that she realised she was no longer alone. With a contemptuous twist, Du’gath snapped the plaguebearer’s blade and tore the leprous daemon limb from limb.

There was no time for a greeting, much less for explanations. Nellas pressed forward, screeching at the woodland around her to rise up and strike down the violators of the heartglade. To her left and right, the spite-revenants ripped into the Tallyband, their features twisted with hideous fury, the same rage that now gave Nellas strength. For a moment, Skathis’ laughter faltered.

‘Slow yourself, dear Nellas,’ the daemonic herald said, weaving a complex pattern in the air before him. ‘That wound in your side looks like it may be infected.’

Pain, worse than any she had ever felt, speared through the branchwych. Her limbs seized up and her scythe slipped from her fingers. In a daze she fell to her knees, discoloured bloodsap oozing from her wound. Du’gath stood over her, driving back a trio of plaguebearers with a savage swipe of his talons.

‘We won’t reach the Kingstree in time,’ the Outcast called back to her. ‘We’re too few!’

Nellas couldn’t reply. The taint Skathis had planted in her side drove out all else, its agony threatening to eclipse her own spirit-song and cut her off from the strength of the Wyldwood. A single melody remained connected with hers, entwining itself with her thoughts. It refused to let her go. Through the haze, she recognised its voice. It was a bittergrub. It had been born, hatching pure and unblemished from the nearby beech tree. It lived, and with it came hope, sure as the first buds among the snows.

Nellas closed her eyes, seeking to focus through the pain. She could not save Brocélann alone. She could not even save it with the strongbranch fury of the likes of Du’gath and his Outcasts. But Brocélann could save itself. She only had to show it how.

She began to sing. It was not the terrible battle-cant of sharpened bark-claws and crushing roots, nor did it possess the violent beat of the fury that motivated the sylvaneth when they saw their sacred enclaves defiled. It was something deeper, something even more primal, a rhythm only the branchwyches, with their instinctive connection to all the creatures of the Wyldwood, could access. It spoke of shared lives and shared fates, of the bonds forged in the changing of Ghyran’s natural cycles. It was directed not at the noble houses, nor the Forest Folk, or any of her forest spirits. It was sung to the smaller creatures, dedicated to the multitude of tiny, vibrant souls that called Brocélann home. They were all the Everqueen’s children, as worthy as the most gnarled treelord ancient, and the death of the Wyldwood spelt their doom as assuredly as it did that of the sylvaneth.

Nellas heard it first as a hum, a counterpoint to the infernal buzzing of the flies that choked the air around her. She continued to sing, her voice rising and becoming stronger as the hum grew. Pain flared once more as Skathis sought to silence her. She ignored it now. Her spirit was no longer wholly bound to her body, but rose above the fighting to direct the Wyldwood’s salvation. Skathis had stopped laughing altogether.

From the trees the spites came. They were a cloud, a nebulous, darting, roiling swarm that shrieked with a rage as potent as their branchwych’s. They struck the flies first. The Great Corruptor’s emissaries, countless as they seemed, were squashed or snapped up, or had their buzzing wings ripped off. The spites engulfed the whole of the Evergreen in a multihued blizzard, poking out plaguebearers’ eyes and bursting nurglings like little pus sacks.

Nellas unleashed them on Skathis Rot. The herald of Nurgle wailed first with rage and then fear as the cloud descended upon him. The spites picked the bark of the Kingstree clean, plucking off and crushing each and every loathsome maggot that sought to defile the venerable oak. Then they set upon Skathis, ten thousand little limbs raking and pulling at his flesh, gnawing at his eye, slicing and slashing with little claws.

‘You cannot stop me now!’ the daemon wailed, flailing ineffectually with his gaunt limbs. ‘You are too late! A thricepox curse on each and every one of you! Grandfather take your miserable little souls!’

The daemon screamed all the louder as a spite lanced his eye with a long sliver of living wood. He staggered forwards and lost his footing on the edge of the sinkhole, teetering for balance. With a concerted heave, the swarm of spites tipped him. The daemon bellowed as he plummeted over the edge, knocking a clutch of plaguebearers back down into the pit even as they sought to climb up out of it.

As the daemon fell, the Evergreen resounded with the call of hunting horns. Nellas, still engulfed in the breaks and eddies of the spites’ great spirit-song, was only dimly aware of a furious roar. It was one the forest hadn’t heard in a very long time, and it was enough to make the roots beneath her quiver. From the trees around the glade the Forest Folk poured, twisted with their war aspect, and at the fore of their vengeful tide came Gillehad. The stooped treelord ancient roared once more.

The sound was echoed by the battle cries of tree-revenants as they too emerged into the heartglade. Striding in their midst were Bitterbough and Thenuil, talons bared and branches firm. The Tallyband broke before their thunderous blows, diseased forms flickering and turning insubstantial as they were banished back to their master’s blighted realm.

Nellas felt the grasp on her spirit-song waver and break. Her voice faltered. Her mind returned to her body, dragged down by exhaustion and pain. Her wound, she realised, was killing her. Du’gath still stood over her, roots planted and immovable, his bark scored and slashed in dozens of places by daemonic blades. She remained on her knees, bent and broken. She felt her consciousness slipping, the song of the Wyldwood suddenly distant and muffled. She could feel something crawling among her branches and gnawing at her bark. Memories of diseased worms and maggots made her shudder. Her thoughts finally slipped away, and her song faded into nothingness.

It was the singing of her new companion that woke her.

Her bittergrub was coiled on her breast, watching her with beady eyes. She stretched out a limb to let the creature run along her branches, and was surprised to notice the absence of a shock of pain for the first time in what felt like many seasons.

Tentatively, she shifted her body so she could look down at her side.

Her wound was healing. The flow of bloodsap had finally been stemmed, and tender greenwood had now replaced the rotten bark. She realised abruptly that the final sensation she’d felt before her spirit-song had faded was the bittergrub eating away at the diseased bark, freeing her body from the Great Corruptor’s foul grasp. It had saved her life, and with it possibly the future of Brocélann.

‘Your new grub would not leave you,’ Du’gath said, looming over her. ‘It gnawed away the rotting wood and gave your wound a chance to reknit.’

Wordlessly, Nellas thanked the creature, letting it scuttle appreciatively up one limb and nestle among her boughs.

‘I thought about cutting it in half,’ Du’gath said coldly. ‘But I trust the spites more than I trust you, Harvester. May you serve them well.’

‘Branchwych,’ boomed the venerable tones of Gillehad. The treelord ancient was striding across the Evergreen towards Nellas, who rose to meet him with the assistance of her scythe. She looked around as she did so. The heartglade was scattered with the dead wood of fallen sylvaneth, and the swiftly decomposing filth of the Tallyband, but of the sinkhole that had nearly consumed the Kingstree there was no sign. Soulpods had been ripped up or brutally slashed, and lifeseeds lost forever. But the Evergreen stood, and with it the future of the Wyldwood remained secure. For now.

‘You are healing, I see,’ Gillehad noted. ‘Thoaken has been beset with worry. We all have. We sensed your spirit travelling the realmroot to Mer’thorn.’

‘I beg forgiveness from the conclave,’ Nellas said, voice firm. ‘But I would have done it again if need be. It was necessary, for the good of all Brocélann.’

‘And in doing so you undoubtedly saved the entire Wyldwood,’ Gillehad replied. ‘By the time we were aware of what was afoot, it was almost too late.’

‘I would have made little difference if it weren’t for the Outcasts,’ Nellas continued. She turned to gesture towards Du’gath, before realising the spite-revenant and his sinister kin had vanished.

‘They do what they can, as do we all,’ Gillehad said slowly, casting his wizened gaze across the treeline. ‘There can be no bystanders in the war against the blight. Noble houses and Forest Folk, spites and Outcasts, we are all a part of the great Wargrove.’

‘I will tend to the soulpods until I have sisters again,’ Nellas said. ‘Once they have been fully instructed in their duties as branchwyches, I will travel the realmroots to all the remaining Wyldwoods of the Jade Kingdoms. They must be warned not to make the same mistakes we made. They must be told to examine all things, especially where it concerns their heartglades. The rot that festers from within may yet prove more deadly than that which gnaws from without. Thaark’s passing must not have been in vain.’

‘True words, Nellas,’ Gillehad agreed. ‘I wish all the seasons’ blessings upon such a task.’ 

‘Many thanks. Now, with the greatest respect, venerable lord, I must be about my duties.’

‘Yes, of course.’

Nellas bowed again, hefted her scythe, and began the harvest afresh. She sang as she made her way slowly through the Evergreen, a recital of both triumph and sorrow, the intertwining roots that ran through everything. It had always been so, the branchwych mused as she worked. And it would always be so, long after she and all she had ever planted had returned to the ground.

The seasons changed, but Ghyran endured.

THE KEYS TO RUIN

David Annandale

I

Daemons were dancing over the Voidfire Plain. The flamers of Tzeentch spun and whirled, their columnar shapes rocking back and forth. Their serpentine limbs outstretched, they bathed the grasses of the Voidfire in their unholy flames, twisting the land, catching it up in their lunatic dance. Wherever he looked, Vrindum saw the daemons. They kept their distance from the Fyreslayers, too scattered and too few to mount a challenge to the great host. They remained writhing silhouettes close to the horizons. The grimwrath berzerker’s grip on Darkbane, his fyrestorm greataxe, was tight with frustrated anger. He longed to cut down the taunting abominations.

Just ahead of Vrindom, Bramnor, youngest of the runesons, rose in the throne on his magmadroth. ‘Face us!’ he shouted at the daemons. ‘You are craven beasts!’ His roar was powerful. The long, roped braid of his beard shook with the force of his shout.

The flamers danced on. They had no need to close with duardin. Mindless, they were caught in the ecstasy of the song, the song that was greater than the daemons, the song that blew with the wind over all the regions and vastness of the Evercry. The song that had called to Beregthor-Grimnir, auric runefather of the Drunbhor lodge. The song Beregthor had answered, leading his warriors down from the mountains, away from the magmahold in Sibilatus, exhorting them to cross the wailing plain.

A choir of a billion voices joined the wind in singing the melody of the dance. The song was simple, repetitive, insistent. It had three notes. Low, high, low. Short, long, short. The beats soft, strong, soft. The voices came from the grasses of the plains. They were tall, waist-high on Vrindum, and flexible, hollow, fleshy, corrupted. Along each shaft, a multitude of toothed mouths chanted. The reeds swayed with the song, bending with and against the wind. When by chance a cluster of reeds leaned together, they burst into eldritch flame. Across the endless stretch of the plain, blossoms of fire shot up into the hard light of the sun. They spread like oil upon water, then went out with the suddenness of candleflame. Fire without cause, out of nowhere, appearing and vanishing.

A tangle of reeds blew against Vrindum’s arm. They grasped at him, mouths gnawing with hunger. He yanked back, uprooting and tearing them. Green ichor spattered. A step later, a cluster formed and spat their fire over him. He growled at the burn. A thousand searing claws crawled over his flesh, seeking to swallow him in metamorphosis. He shrugged away their touch and swung Darkbane like a scythe, cutting a swathe through the reeds. The fire went out.

All along the Drunbhor lines, Fyreslayers fought the ravenous, singing, burning grass. So it had been for days beyond counting.

A flare of violet flame swept over Bramnor. His magmadroth spat its own fire over the grass, killing it with the purging acid. Bramnor snarled as he passed through the daemonic burn. ‘This is not war. I’ve had enough of this cursed land.’

Frethnir, the eldest runeson, said, ‘There is change ahead.’ He pointed.

Vrindum squinted. There was darkness in the distance. A mass of tall forms, much higher than the grasses.

‘Is that a forest?’ The middle brother, Drethor, shaded his eyes.

‘It is not,’ Vrindum said. The shapes, vague as they were this far away, did not belong to trees. He cut through more grasses as they reached for him. Their mouths issued discordant cries, but they fell without burning.

‘Runefather,’ Frethnir called, ‘is that the promise of honest battle we see?’ His tone was jocular, but Vrindum heard an undercurrent of concern. It had been present when Frethnir spoke to his father ever since the departure from Sibilatus, and had become clearer and more urgent during the endless crossing of the Voidfire.

There was no answer from Beregthor.

Instead, there was a cry from further back in the lines. An upheaval of flamer-corrupted grasses wrapped around both legs of a hearthguard berzerker. Blood streamed down his limbs and he fell into a conflagration. He cursed to the last as his flesh burned and his body changed, bones thrusting clacking tongues through muscle, eyes sprouting in his beard, wings unfolding on his back. ‘Brothers!’ he called at the end, and his voice was the only thing that was still duardin about him. His comrades answered his need, and ended his suffering, preserving his honour. Then, in rage, they set about slashing the cursed plain with even greater vigour. In the distance, the flamers danced and paid them no heed.

Another death. They were becoming more frequent. The movements of the land were hypnotic. Mistakes were easier and easier to make with every passing day.

Frethnir had turned around in his throne when he heard the shout. Now he met Vrindum’s gaze. Frethnir’s face was expressive in its pain. His features were thinner and longer than those of his brothers. Even his beard seemed more angular. A great scar ran from Frethnir’s forehead to his chin, earned when he had single-handedly slain two maggoths. Sigils of ur-gold ran along the mark, a sign of Frethnir’s honour and strength. At this moment, though, it seemed to be the division in his spirit. Loyalty and love fought with doubt.

Doubt. Frethnir had spoken it aloud. Bramnor, recoiling from the vast sky over the Voidfire, had been complaining since they reached the plain. Drethor, quieter than the other two runesons, had fallen into a silence he now rarely broke as the days had turned into weeks and supplies had run low. He fought on through the cursed grasses with a stoicism more grim than patient. Frethnir, though, had expressed concern about the quest at the start. He had argued with Beregthor, then accepted the runefather’s decision as final. After so long in the Voidfire, though, the doubts had returned, and grown more serious. They were clearly eating at Frethnir. The lack of answer from Beregthor did not help.

Vrindum moved to the side, hacking through screaming reeds, so he could look past the runesons. Twenty paces ahead, Beregthor rode the magmadroth Krasnak, as high and proud in his throne as he had been the day the fyrds of the Drunbhor had left Sibilatus. Vrindum saw no doubt in the runefather’s posture, and no fatigue. The days in the Voidfire Plain had not worn him down. There was a leader who was sure of the path he had set for his lodge.

Vrindum glanced back at Frethnir. The runeson’s brow was still furrowed, his features still tortured by a decision he did not want to make. He faced forward once more, his posture rigid.

There could only be one choice so agonising. It was between two great loyalties: to the runefather, and to the lodge.

He thinks he might have to challenge the runefather, Vrindum thought.

Vrindum and Beregthor had grown up together. They had fought side by side their entire lives. The idea that the runefather might no longer be fit to bear the name Beregthor-Grimnir was a tragedy Vrindum refused to countenance.

Yet he could not ignore the accumulation of events that had pushed Frethnir to this point. Not just the endless march through the Voidfire Plain. The quest itself was driven by reasons even Vrindum found vague. We seek a gate where the wind is born, the runefather had declared. The lodge of our forefathers calls to us, he had said. A lodge never spoken of before. Beregthor led the Drunbhor towards a myth, to aid another myth. And there was the near-catastrophe at Sibilatus…

He looked again at the bearing of the runefather and felt better. There was a great warrior. He had not fallen, and Vrindum would follow him wherever he led.

But it was hard to look back and no longer see the towering bulk of Sibilatus.

II

Sibilatus: the howling mountain, magmahold of the Drunbhor lodge. Vrindum had dedicated his life to its defence, and it was a wonder worth defending. It shouldered high above its neighbouring peaks, a hulking, titanic skeleton turned to granite, crouched and brooding over the leagues before it. The skull took the full brunt of the wind that blew over the Evercry.

The night of the coming of the storm, Vrindum stood deep in the orbit of the skull’s left eye. He was a mote in the vast opening. The rounded roof was hundreds of feet above him. The wind hit him as it surged through the tunnel, roaring with all the strength built over the uncounted leagues from its legend-shrouded origin. It rushed in through the gaps in the ribs, and through the openings of porous bones. The entrances to the caves of Sibilatus numbered in the thousands. Where Vrindum stood, the voice of the wind was a deep, animal bass. Entwined with it were the higher notes of the ringing through tunnels long and short, wide and thin, straight and twisting. Sibilatus was a single great instrument, and the wind played it, creating a song of many harmonies. Vrindum revelled in the strength of the howling mountain. As he did every night, he rededicated his life to its defence. He spread his arms and welcomed the power of its booming, ever-changing hymn.

The songs of Sibilatus accompanied the retelling of sagas, the revels of feasts and the thunder of war. He knew them all.

Then came the storm.

In a single moment, all variation ceased. The song became a simple one. It was an immense cry. A war horn bigger than worlds sounded three notes over and over. Vrindum staggered under its blow. Silver lightning exploded beyond the horizon. It streaked to earth as if the stars themselves were coming to wage war. This was lightning such as Vrindum had never seen before. The light was both more pure and more savage than that of any storm.

Such portents. Such omens. He stared. He could not fathom what he heard and saw.

A new thunder sounded beyond the portal to the cavern. It was the runefather’s voice, extraordinary in its power, as if it were drawing strength from the storm.

‘Bear witness, fellow Drunbhor!’ Beregthor called. ‘Look to the west, and see the hand of fate itself! See the workings of prophecy! Bear witness! Bear witness!’

The runefather’s command was taken up and passed through all the tunnels and chambers of Sibilatus. The Drunbhor climbed to the heights of the magmahold. In the socket of that vast eye, Vrindum was soon no longer alone. There were hundreds of Fyreslayers with him, and thousands more wherever there was an aperture giving on to the eruption of the heavens.

The horizon flashed with new war. The entire Drunbhor lodge bore witness.

All eyes looked west, and so they did not see the enemy.

III

The flamers danced, the grasses burned and clutched, and the forest drew near. Vrindum thought of it as a forest because there was no other word he could find for it. The silhouettes of the tall, swaying trunks were swollen with large, tumorous shapes. There was no foliage, though there appeared to be branches. They coiled and gestured, summoning the Drunbhor to their darkness. Over the three-note song of the wind came a rasping sound. Vrindum thought of the rubbing of rough, horned flesh. A scent like foul, piercing incense wafted over the fyrds.

Vrindum drew level with Krasnak. The magmadroth slashed at the hungry grasses before each step. The great beast bore the scars of burns. So did the runefather. He looked down from his throne and smiled at his old comrade. ‘Are my sons full of doubt?’

Vrindum nodded.

‘Will Frethnir challenge me?’

‘He wrestles with the decision. Why did you not answer him when he called to you?’

Beregthor laughed. ‘What need?’ He pointed the Keeper of Roads, his latchkey grandaxe, towards the tortured shapes ahead of them. ‘Is that a fit destination for our quest? My sons need more faith.’

‘Frethnir does not speak against you.’

‘Loyal but troubled, is he?’ Beregthor chuckled.

Vrindum saw little cause for amusement, but the runefather had been in high spirits since the first night of the storm. Even as the Voidfire gnawed at the ranks of the Drunbhor, Beregthor remained transported by the purpose of his quest.

A flamer twisted close, almost within reach, then moved away as throwing axes flew in its direction.

‘And what do you think, Vrindum?’ Beregthor asked.

‘That I march where you march.’

Beregthor laughed again. It was a great laugh, deep and strong. It shook Beregthor’s entire frame. ‘That much I can see, and I am grateful, as always, for your comradeship.’ He turned serious. ‘We are not alone in our purpose. Other lodges are on this journey.’

Vrindum frowned. ‘Have there been messages?’ He did not know how this was possible.

‘No.’ Beregthor rose in the throne once more as Krasnak took them through a burst of flame. ‘That is the prophecy. A new age dawns! It is full of change and war! Grimnir calls to all Fyreslayers, and we must answer!’

Vrindum wondered at this. Beregthor claimed his knowledge came from seeing a prophecy fulfilled, but it was a prophecy known only to him. Not even Runemaster Trumnir had heard of it before.

‘Tell me,’ said Beregthor, ‘do you believe in our journey? Do you believe in the reason we march?’

‘I believe that what happened at the magmahold had meaning, runefather.’

Of that, at least, he was certain.

IV

What happened at the magmahold…

They were all looking west, at the storm and the portents. They let their guard down. They were not looking inward. They did not see the enemy until almost too late.

With a cry of rage, Vrindum leapt from the gallery surrounding the Chamber of the Gate. He came down in the centre of the cave, on the very dais of the Drunbhor’s realmgate itself. He landed on the back of a raving priest, shattering his spine. He swung Darkbane in great arcs, left then right, its dual blades chopping down the corrupted warriors of the Changer of the Ways. The two long braids of his beard whipped about his head. Limbs and skulls flew. Blood fountained, drenching Vrindum in the death of the invaders.

Hearthguard berzerkers stormed in through the four entrances of the chamber. They hacked their way deep into the horde. They brought brutal punishment to the foe that had dared trespass so deep into Sibilatus. None would escape alive.

But they should never have come this far.

Anger and shame battled in Vrindum’s breast. The chamber, deep in the heart of the magmahold, in the roots of the Whistling Mountain, was closely guarded, though it had not been used in centuries. He did not know how the invaders had learned of its existence, or of its location, or how they had reached it undetected. What mattered was that they had done so, and that they tainted the sacred ground of Sibilatus with their presence. The incursion dishonoured all the karls of the Drunbhor. If Vrindum killed all the wretches with his own hands, the fact that they had been here at all could never be forgotten, the taint never washed away.

Vrindum’s fury redoubled. He laid waste to the corrupted. He stood in the midst of a rising pile of corpses. If any of the attackers survived long enough to strike him, he did not feel the blows. He saw only their blood, and there was not enough of it. He would have more and more, until the foe was drowning in it.

The attacking force was a strong one. There were raving, self-mutilating worshippers of Tzeentch, eager to sacrifice themselves for their god. But with them were true champions, Chaos warriors in full armour, the plate distorted with twisting spikes and runes of madness. They fought hard against the Fyreslayers, and they fought well.

They died all the same. A towering warrior reared up before Vrindum, wielding a black, saw-toothed blade. Vrindum smashed the knight’s blow aside hard enough to shatter the sword. He brought his axe around and slammed it into the warrior’s helm, cleaving it and the skull beneath in two.

And there were daemons. Flamers of Tzeentch; hopping, twisting whirlwinds of flesh. Spellfire gouted from their snaking limbs. Vrindum’s anger had him on the edge of a killing frenzy, but he retained enough awareness to see there was strategy in the enemy’s assault. The debased mortals and the Chaos warriors formed a wedge around the daemons. They took the brunt of the Fyreslayers’ counter-attack. The broadaxes of the hearthguard berzerkers cut through the bodies of the cultists, then clashed against the armour and blades of the warriors. The glorious fire of duardin rage battered the darkness. Ancient armour shattered under the blows of the berzerkers. Their columns punched into the ranks of the Chaos warriors, but the hulking champions of ruin held the line, slowing the berzerkers with their own wrath and sacrifice. The flamers ignored the Drunbhor. All of their attention was focused on the gate. They trained their spectral flames on the stone pillars of its archway. The wards of the gate flashed, lashing out with purging lightning, reducing one of the daemons to ash. The others paid no notice. They continued their attack.

Sacred stone began to squirm. Portions softened, turning to flesh. A Chaos warrior hurled an axe at the flesh even as Vrindum brought him down, choosing to harm the gate rather than save himself. The thrown axe cut deep into the newly created muscle. The gate began to bleed.

The base of one of the pillars turned to glass.

Vrindum barrelled into yet another knight, sending the warrior flying out of his way. He roared at the flamer beyond – the one changing the pillar into crystalline brittleness – and plunged his greataxe into the daemon creature. The flamer would have shrugged off the blow of an ordinary weapon, but this was Darkbane, wielded by the grimwrath berzerker of the Drunbhor lodge. There was nothing ordinary about the blow. Stricken, the flamer unleashed a maddened, otherworldly howl. Vrindum’s ears bled at the sound. Darkbane was buried deep in the daemon’s core. He leaned on the shaft and the blade descended further, then the being exploded. Dissipating sorcery washed over him, and his flesh writhed in its wake, but he was stronger than the wave of change.

Two more knights rushed him as he turned to attack the next flamer, but it was too late. Glass shattered. Flesh tore. The pillars of the gate fell.

From the dying gate came a scream of sorcerous light that filled the chamber.

Many of the invaders were destroyed along with the gate. The few who survived were slaughtered by the wrathful Fyreslayers. The incursion was over, but it had served its purpose.

‘They did not seek to seize the gate,’ Vrindum told Beregthor as the runefather walked through the wreckage of the chamber. ‘They came to destroy it.’

Beregthor nodded absently, deep in thought. After several long moments, he said, ‘They had reason to destroy it. The storm has given them urgency. They would prevent us from fulfilling our duty. All they have done is ensure that we will.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Vrindum said.

Beregthor smiled.

Then, for the first time, he spoke of the other lodge.

In the days that followed, as preparations were made for the great march the runefather commanded, he said much about the lodge. How its magmahold had lain a long, but not impossible, journey beyond the other side of the lost gate. How in ages past, the Drunbhor had left that lodge to travel the realms and had come to Sibilatus. How the great storm portended a union of the two lodges in battle against Chaos. How the song of the wind, now unchanging, was the call to the Drunbhor, the call to march to that union. How the incursion had only made clear the necessity of this quest.

‘This prophecy…’ Runemaster Trumnir began when the council met.

‘Passes from runefather to runefather,’ Beregthor told him. ‘It is the memory of our lineage.’

‘But the gate is destroyed,’ Frethnir said. ‘Our way is closed.’

‘There is another gate,’ said Beregthor.

Again, Trumnir looked surprised. The runemaster’s beard and hair were streaked with lightning strokes of iron grey. He was older than Beregthor. That he had not known such secrets stunned him perhaps even more than the other Drunbhor.

Beregthor raised the grandaxe. ‘The gate is locked. It will open only to the Keeper of Roads. We must seek it where the wind is born. We march to the Typhornas Mountains.’

Mountains of lore. Mountains from the oldest stories of the Drunbhor.

A quest for a myth within myths. That was when Vrindum saw the first shadows of doubt and unease on Frethnir’s face.

‘How will we find them?’ the runeson asked.

‘By answering the call of the wind,’ said Beregthor. ‘It summons us to the west.’

Towards the storm.

V

The ground began to slope upwards where the Voidfire Plain ended at the forest of monsters. The smell of incense was overwhelming. It clawed at Vrindum’s lungs when he breathed. The Drunbhor left the grasses behind and passed between trunks swollen with bulbous growths. Their texture was patterns of shifting, spiralling whorls. Their colours varied from deep flesh-pink to the blue of bruises, and the shades changed from one moment to the next. To gaze on a single plant was to be confused by an ever-shifting pattern of colour and movement.

The limbs of the plants were long, thin and serpentine, reaching across the space between them to tangle with each other. It was impossible to tell where the branch of one plant ended and that of another began, as the limbs rubbed against one another, creating a susurrus of muttered truths and shapeless words. They seemed to gesture towards the Drunbhor, calling them deeper into the woods of madness.

‘Be vigilant, fyrds of the Drunbhor,’ Beregthor called.

Clusters of spines curled out from the trunks and branches. Their tips were sharp as blades.

The plants were as tall as fifty feet when they stood straight. Many were coiled like giant ferns or the tentacles of a sea leviathan. Like the flamers on the Voidfire Plain, they danced to the song of the wind. Though each monstrous plant had its own movement independent of all the others, the rhythms of each sway and bow and sinuosity were in time to the sounding of the three notes.

Short, long, short. The beats soft, strong, soft. The song never altering, the same notes since the first moment of the storm. The lightning had long since ceased, but the song remained, calling and calling.

‘The wind summons us!’ Beregthor said, as he had so many times since the coming of the storm. ‘It calls us to battle!’

The dance of the corrupted plants disturbed Vrindum. If the call was to the Drunbhor, why did these unclean growths respond to it?

Behind Vrindum, Frethnir said, ‘These creatures sense us.’ Shudders ran up the trunks and along the branches, as though a web had been disturbed. Vrindum eyed their movements carefully, even as he also watched the shadows between their trunks. There was no underbrush in the forest-that-was-not-a-forest, but the plants stood close to one another, and the light was dim.

There were no paths. The Fyreslayers were forced to wend their way between the trunks. The line of their march became twisted. When Vrindum looked back, he could see only the first couple of fyrds behind the runesons. On a column of more than a thousand Drunbhor, if something happened to the leaders or the rearguard, the other end of the host would not know it.

If the Voidfire Plain had been no proper place for a Fyreslayer, this was worse yet.

‘We are here!’ Vrindum shouted. Let the enemy come at last and meet the edge of his axe. ‘Know us and fear us!’

Laughter ahead. For a terrible moment, Vrindum thought it came from the runefather. Then he realised it emanated from a cluster of trunks a score of paces further on. As one, when the wind’s long note sounded, the growths on the trunks bulged, deep pink and shining. There was a wet tearing noise. The tumours grew arms and horns. They pulled away from the trunks, glistening with mucus. Newly born and ready for war, the pink horrors dropped to the ground. They were heavy, squat, horned things, some with three limbs, some four, some five. All had huge, gaping jaws. Their flesh was the colour of exposed muscle.

Bramnor answered the daemons with laughter of his own, angry yet eager.

‘Finally!’ he roared. ‘A proper fight.’

The rumble of voices along the Drunbhor column echoed Bramnor’s words. Drethor and Frethnir added their voices to the clamour. Bramnor was the brashest of the runesons, but all were hungry to inflict true punishment on the enemy after the grinding losses of the Voidfire.

‘Guard the flanks!’ Beregthor commanded, even as Krasnak charged with him towards the immediate threat.

The hearthguard and vulkite berzerkers aimed their weapons to the sides. The column moved forward, its edges sharp.

The daemons rushed at Beregthor, Vrindum and the runesons. A moment later, more of the pink horrors burst from the trunks on either side, falling to the ground with fat thuds, a rain of monstrous fruit. And as the daemons surrounded the Drunbhor, the plants attacked too. Their true nature was now clear; they were daemons of the same ilk fused and melded into each other, their limbs distorted and stretched into branches, their horns turned into the spines. Flexing, grasping, the conglomerations of daemons were even more like tentacles now, as if the entire forest were the claws of a great fist that now began to close. The huge trunks whipped down, shaking the earth with their impact. The spines lunged for the Fyreslayers.

‘Avenge Sibilatus!’ Trumnir cried. ‘Avenge its desecration!’

On his magmadroth, Runesmiter Harthum beat the war altar, and down the length of the Fyreslayer line the sigils of ur-gold worked into the warriors’ flesh stirred them to the joyous frenzy of war. The essence of Grimnir awoke in all of them, and would be satisfied with nothing except the utter annihilation of the daemons. Vulkite berzerkers tore into the pink horrors, while the magmadroths slashed at them with great claws and spat streams of flaming bile. In the gap created by the dissolving, burning daemons, the hearthguard berzerkers stormed outwards, pushing hard against the daemons, cutting down abominations who dared attack the runefather. The vulkite berserkers advanced on either side, and the more the gibbering creatures attacked, the wider the column became as the Drunbhor met their challenge with a rising tide of fury.

Vrindum hurled himself at the daemons seeking to climb the flanks of Krasnak and take down Beregthor. He slammed into them with the force of a battering ram, knocking them back. His blows sank into solid, dense muscle that flowed with the possibility of change. There was no structure of bone. Revulsion fuelled his rage and his violence, and he struck harder yet, severing the flesh completely. It came apart in sticky tendrils.

A cackling daemon opened its maw wide enough to swallow his head, and Vrindum cut it in half with a single blow of Darkbane. The daemon’s laughter turned into a shriek, and then into wails of petulant grief as the two portions of its body shifted to blue and sprouted limbs. The new daemons reached for Vrindum, their gestures both predatory and entreating. They barely had time to come into being and mourn the loss of their greater self. Vrindum already had Darkbane raised again. He brought it down in a diagonal slash. One blow had ended the pink daemon; now one blow destroyed the two blue ones. The onyx blade smashed through Chaos flesh so hard it left a huge cleft in the ground. The daemons vanished mid-howl, their essence erupting then dispersing with a fading echo of a snarl. Vrindum yanked the greataxe from the ground and rounded on more of the foe.

Standing high on his throne, a roaring Beregthor battered pink horrors down from Krasnak’s flanks with the Keeper of Roads. He hit the head of one daemon with such force that he squeezed its essence within the cleft of the blade. Then he twisted violently, snapping the head in half. The blue horrors that came into being were flawed, malformed even for daemons, half their heads missing. Beregthor dispatched them quickly, crushing their bodies beneath the weight of the grandaxe.

Trunks bent and limbs grasped, but the Fyreslayers concentrated on the daemons not rooted to the ground. The other pink horrors numbered in the hundreds, a horde that would have overwhelmed an army of mere mortals with the sheer monstrosity of its existence. But the Fyreslayers waded into the struggle with eagerness. They were strong, and they were legion. They hacked at the pink horrors and then the squealing blue daemons. The enemy multiplied, then began to dwindle in a matter of seconds.

The Drunbhor batted away the probing spines as a mere annoyance. Drethor was bleeding from minor wounds on his face and chest. They were insignificant, barely noticed in the heat of anger and slaughter.

The fused horrors reached and stabbed, accumulating wounds, drawing blood. The tips of their horns broke off and left jagged burrs in the flesh of the duardin.

As Vrindum sent two more daemons into oblivion, he saw many of his brother Drunbhor now fighting while their arms and necks bristled with spines. Blood poured down their skin, obscuring the fire of the ur-gold. The spines writhed. They whistled. And then, as ever to the rhythm of the wind’s three-note song, a metamorphosis took place. Drethor jerked. He dropped his weapons. He cried out in agony. He arched backwards. He kept bending until his spine cracked to splinters. Still he folded backwards, his hair and beard losing their red, turning pink, turning to flesh. The back of his head fused with his legs. Skin flowed over his face, destroying his identity. His shoulders moved back up through his torso until his arms emerged from the sides of his stomach. His misshapen legs grew longer. The flesh of his midsection tore open, becoming gnashing jaws. Muscle bunched, twisted, flowed and grew horns.

Where Drethor had been, a pink horror stood on his magmadroth’s back. It sank claws and fangs into the back of the beast’s neck. The magmadroth writhed, seeking to dislodge its attacker, but more daemons sprang into being, swarming over it. The enemy’s army grew. The lines of the Fyreslayers became ragged from a new and insidious incursion. The cry that went up was beyond rage. It overflowed with grief and horror.

‘Guard yourselves!’ Runemaster Trumnir shouted. ‘Purge yourselves of the foul thorns! Do not despair! Let the fire of Grimnir burn strong and destroy the taint of Chaos.’ He raised his staff high, and holy fire crackled around it. Daemons rushed him, but were held back by the hearthguard berzerkers at his sides long enough for him to complete his summoning and bring the point of the staff down with a blow that shook the earth. A moment later, lava burst from the ground, enveloping an entire cluster of the daemonic trunks. They shrivelled to ash in the molten rock.

Vrindum descended further into rage at the sight of his possessed brothers. He moved too fast for any daemon. He was a storm. Darkbane was a blur. He waded through a rain of daemonic ichor. The only clear thought in the whirlwind of his rage was the need to protect the runefather. Beregthor roared his battle fury, seeming in no need of protection. Vrindum broke through a wall of pink horrors to see Beregthor hurl four of them away at once with a mighty stroke of the Keeper of Roads. Their forms shattered and they fell from Krasnak’s back to be trampled to nothing beneath the magmadroth’s claws.

‘See our runefather lay waste to the daemon!’ Trumnir commanded. ‘Forward! Cut through the enemy in all his guises! Leave a trail of flame and blood to mark our passage!’

Inspired by the voice of the runemaster and sustained in wrath by the drumming of the runesmiter, the Fyreslayers attacked the pink horrors with renewed fervour. The duardin were wary now of the corrupting thorns. They had been made to fight and destroy creatures that had been their brothers, and vengeance was in every blow. The daemons had begun to break through the lines, but now they were hurled back, then hammered and slashed to oblivion.

Beregthor urged Krasnak into a charge, leading the Drunbhor host in a merciless advance. No longer did the Fyreslayers go around the trunks; instead they drove a straight line through the monstrous growths. Though the pink horrors giggled as if they had already won the battle, their laughter ended in squealing and the rending of daemonic flesh. Vrindum ran alongside Krasnak, Darkbane an engine of slaughter. The spirit of Grimnir was strong upon him. The intricate tracery of ur-gold that covered his flesh shone with anger. He lost himself in the charge, and his world became the destruction of the foe. He tore through daemonic flesh and pulsating trunks, unleashing a torrent of ichor and blood.

Then Darkbane swung through air, striking nothing. Vrindum ran forward a few more steps, but there was nothing to kill. He slowed, blinking. The rage faded, and he took in his new surroundings.

He had broken through the corrupted forest. The daemons were gone. Ahead, the ground became more rugged. Vrindum saw foothills, and the promise of mountains.

He looked up at Beregthor. The runefather seemed exhausted for the first time since the departure from Sibilatus, and more drained than triumphant. His face was set, committed to the path, apparently uninterested in anything except the march towards the goal.

And still the wind of the Evercry was constant. Short and long and short, the three notes guiding the Drunbhor to their destiny.

VI

The abominable forest was the first day. The first trial. Eight more days followed. For nine days, the Drunbhor fought through a land full of terrible life, corrupted and enslaved to Chaos. After the forest came the swamp. There the ground was a sucking mire, and ropes of flesh tangled the Fyreslayers while screamers of Tzeentch slashed through the air and through the warriors, their shrieks a choir following the song of the wind.

On the third day, they came to a land riven with narrow gulleys. When they tried to cross, the gulleys became grinding jaws.

On the fourth day, as the land sloped more and more sharply upwards, the ground turned into living glass. It blazed and snarled in the heat of the sun. It broke beneath marching feet without warning, plunging warriors into jagged crevasses, while flamers skittered over the surface. There were many more than on the Voidfire Plain, and they attacked.

And so it went, each day a new trial, a gauntlet that chipped away at the army of the Drunbhor, and the goal was not in sight. Vrindum watched Frethnir’s doubts grow and grow. But the battles were ceaseless, and to challenge the runefather would be a shattering blow to the morale of the fyrds. Frethnir could do nothing to arrest what he clearly thought was a path to disaster without being the cause of a worse one. His agony was terrible to see.

As he fought, Vrindum muttered prayers to Grimnir. ‘Prove the runefather right,’ he said. ‘Prove him right.’

Then there was the wind. The song was still the same, but the air grew more foul. The incense of the forest was gone, but what the Drunbhor now breathed was worse. It was thick and humid, the air of open graves and of a fresh battlefield. It was rotten, and it made Vrindum wonder about the song.

He spoke about the stench with Beregthor.

‘The forces of Chaos seek to turn us aside,’ the runefather answered. ‘They will not succeed.’

Beregthor did not speak with the same fire as he had upon setting out from Sibilatus. His voice was hard, grey, almost a monotone. He did not look at Vrindum. He stared into the distance, as if the invisible goal had thrown a noose around his neck and was slowly pulling him in.

On the eighth day, the Drunbhor encountered fungi so huge they formed caves. Bone-white, streaked with red, they sought to dissolve the Fyreslayers with spores. And when at last fyrds hacked and burned their way through the growths, they beheld mountains ahead of them.

And so, on the ninth day, the Drunbhor reached the Typhornas Mountains.

The wind was immeasurably worse. It was difficult to breathe. Vrindum regarded the landscape with wonder and suspicion. The lodge had arrived at a place of legend, and it was as the myths described. The mountains breathed; they were the lungs of the Evercry. They expanded and contracted, immense heaving movements visible to the eye, and the ground rose and fell beneath Vrindum’s feet. Yet the sensation was not that of an earthquake. The rocky surface did not crack as it stretched. Individual boulders tumbled down the mountain faces, but there were no avalanches. At the same time, Vrindum did not feel as if he were walking on the body of an immeasurably vast beast. His boot heels rang on stone, and the crags on all sides were jagged, solid, monolithic. They were mountains, not flesh.

In and out they breathed, in and out, bellows of such size they sent their endless wind across the breadth of a continent. And the wind was foul. It grew stronger by the hour, until the Drunbhor had to lean forwards, walking into a gale. The three-note song became the shrieking whistle of a mad thing. In the distance, over a bowl in the mountains, lightning flashed. Thunder rumbled from dark, spiralling clouds. This was not the storm the Drunbhor had witnessed from the peaks of Sibilatus. No stars were falling here. There was no explosion as of a war to change the times.

The Fyreslayers entered a narrow pass at the coming of night. They struggled through it against the furious wind. The pass ended at the lip of a huge bowl, a circular valley formed by the meeting of eight mountainsides.

Silence fell.

The wind stopped.

The song ceased.

For a moment, Vrindum thought he had gone deaf. Not once in all his centuries had he not heard the keening over the Evercry. Then he heard the muttered exclamations of the runemaster. He was not deaf, then; yet still the mountains rose and fell, rose and fell.

They rose and fell in silence. There was no breath. Even the stench was gone. It was as if the Fyreslayers stood on a corpse that was unaware of death and continued in its ignorance to move.

In the centre of the valley, on a circular dais, was the gate. Vrindum felt a cautious surge of confidence as the Drunbhor host approached their goal. The gate was clearly the kin of the one the daemons had destroyed in Sibilatus; the pillars bore similar engravings, and though many of the runes were mysterious to him, some of them were also in the language of the Fyreslayers.

A shout of triumph rose from the exhausted fyrds.

The host of the Drunbhor lodge surrounded the wide dais on which the gate stood. Beregthor dismounted from his magmadroth and climbed up. He walked slowly towards the gate, the Keeper of Roads held before him with both hands. Runemaster Trumnir and Runesmiter Harthum walked with him. Vrindum and the runesons followed a few steps behind.

‘Runefather,’ Frethnir said, ‘you were right.’ Relief flooded his face. The shadow that had followed him from Sibilatus lifted.

Beregthor did not answer. Vrindum watched him carefully. The runefather did not appear to notice he was accompanied. His eyes were fixed on the gate, unblinking. He had said nothing since their arrival, falling silent along with the wind.

Trumnir and Runesmiter Harthum examined the pillars. Trumnir frowned. ‘We will have to proceed with caution,’ he said. ‘This gate is warded. I do not recognise all the runes of protection.’

‘Nor do I,’ said Harthum. ‘They were not all part of the original construction. If any are triggered, they might destroy the gate. Or worse.’

‘A fine end to this quest that would be,’ Bramnor said. ‘To have come this far for nothing.’ He spoke in jest, his impatience jovial now.

Frethnir was not pleased. ‘This is our father’s moment of truth,’ he said.

Bramnor nodded. ‘You’re right.’ To Beregthor he said, ‘Runefather, I honour you, and mean no disrespect.’

Beregthor still did not respond. He stood before the centre of the gate, motionless except for his head as he looked back and forth along the span of the arch.

Vrindum moved up beside him. Beregthor’s profile seemed eroded. His skin was grey, worn. It was as if his skull were retreating beneath his hair and beard.

Something was wrong.

‘Runefather?’ Vrindum asked.

No response. The eyes dark like coal.

Trumnir said, ‘I shall begin.’

‘No.’ Beregthor did not raise his voice. He did not need to. His command was so cold.

Trumnir stopped in his tracks as if Beregthor had slapped him. His face darkened with anger. Then he looked concerned.

‘Runefather,’ Vrindum tried again.

Beregthor took a step forward. ‘Leave the gate to me,’ he said. ‘All of you.’ He turned his head to take in the assembly on the dais. ‘I know what needs to be done.’

Trumnir and the runesmiter backed away. They, Vrindum and the runesons retreated to the foot of the dais.

‘He is not himself,’ Frethnir said.

‘Is he unwell?’ Vrindum wondered. ‘He is old, but I would not have thought this journey would exhaust him so.’

No, Vrindum thought. This is something more.

Beregthor raised the latchkey grandaxe. He began to chant. The words were strange to Vrindum.

He turned to Trumnir. ‘Do you know this ritual?’ he asked.

‘I do not.’ Trumnir did not look away from the gate. ‘But the runefather knows what he is doing. Look.’ He pointed to the pillars. Runes glowed, flared white, and then subsided to a dull, magmatic red. ‘He is disarming the wards.’

‘Perhaps his father passed down the knowledge of rituals older and more secret than have been granted to us,’ said Harthum. He sounded unconvinced.

Ancient power crackled between the pillars. Light and space bent, twisted upon one another, and began to spiral. Reality fractured into a thousand shards, then reassembled itself. The view through the gate took on a definite character, becoming more stable. What was revealed was the interior of a stone chamber.

Vrindum saw how this gate and the one in Sibilatus had been mirrors of each other. The Drunbhor’s gate, Beregthor had said, led from the magmahold to a location within reach of the other lodge. This one, a long journey from Sibilatus, led directly to the magmahold of the other lodge.

There was movement in the ranks as the Fyreslayers prepared to march through the gate. Trumnir raised his staff in warning.

‘Hold!’ he called. ‘Many of the wards are still active. We cannot cross yet.’

Beregthor finished chanting. He made a complex pass with the Keeper of Roads before the gate. The gestures hurt Vrindum’s head to watch. He stared at the runefather, and he did not recognise the Fyreslayer before him.

Beregthor completed the gestures. In the centre of the gate, floating in the air, a large stone keyhole appeared. Beregthor lowered the Keeper and approached it. He made to insert the head of the weapon into the keyhole.

The latchkey grandaxe was a symbol. The design of its blade represented the keys to glory. But it was also a true key. It opened the most secret vaults in the magmahold. And now it would open the final lock on the gate.

The wards that were still active glowed red. It was a cold colour. Reptilian. Anticipatory. Trumnir was looking at them with alarm. ‘I don’t think…’ he began.

Vrindum jumped onto the dais. He ran forward and grasped Beregthor’s shoulder, holding him back before he could place the key in the lock.

‘Runefather,’ he said, ‘the gate is still dangerous. Should we not wait?’

Beregthor ignored him. He strained forward.

Vrindum used both arms to restrain him. ‘Beregthor-Grimnir,’ he said, ‘will you not speak to us? Do you know where you are?’

Beregthor turned his head to face Vrindum. His eyes had sunken further yet. His skin was turning greyer with every passing moment.

On the back of his neck, something wriggled.

Vrindum looked closely. There was a small wound just beneath the edge of his helmet. The tip of a daemonic spine protruded from it. At the same moment, Beregthor opened his mouth.

The pink horrors had wounded the runefather deeper than anyone realised during the first battle. A thorn had pierced Beregthor’s flesh. It had been embedded in him, controlling him.

‘The Runefather bears a daemonic wound!’ Vrindum shouted.

Frethnir leapt forward to help. He had been freed of the pain of doubt, but now an agony a thousandfold worse had fallen on him. He had not acted when there was a chance, and now it was perhaps too late. He tried to reach for the thorn.

Beregthor twisted violently. He broke Vrindum’s grip and smashed the side of the grandaxe against the grimwrath berzerker’s skull, knocking him aside. He caught his son with the return sweep. His mouth was still open. His lips and tongue worked, trying to shape the sounds he was commanded to utter. His eyes widened. They were consumed with mortal horror. His soul struggled to silence the coming word. It failed. His voice ragged as if ripped apart by claws, he shouted a name. He sang a name.

‘Kaz’arrath!’

Three notes. Short, long, short. Three beats. Soft, strong, soft.

Now the wind returned. It exploded from Beregthor’s words with such force it smashed Vrindum flat. The runefather was suddenly the origin of the wind. He was the source of the song that had called the Drunbhor lodge to this place. The three-note refrain resounded across the bowl, echoing against the mountainsides.

Kaz’arrath, Kaz’arrath, Kaz’arrath.

A song of triumph. And of summoning.

The wind howled the name. It shrieked over the Fyreslayers as if the combined force of the Typhornas Mountains had come to rage through this site. At the edges of the bowl, the growing night thickened. It swirled with dark tendrils, ready to burst. Beregthor kept his feet in the hurricane. He turned back towards the gate, his face slack.

Vrindum propelled himself up and forward. He did not know what would happen if Beregthor used the latchkey, but he did know it must not happen. What he had said to the runefather so many days ago was true: the events at Sibilatus had meaning. Every step of the journey had meaning, and the steps had led to a moment that could only mean ruin. So he threw himself at the hero of the Drunbhor, at the Fyreslayer he had followed his entire life. He would die for Beregthor. Now he attacked.

He swung Darkbane, and he howled with grief that he must do so. Filled with sorrow and dread, he was far from losing himself in the vortex of rage. He aimed Darkbane so the sides of the blades struck the shaft of the Keeper of Roads. He knocked it away from the keyhole, then rammed his shoulder into Beregthor. The runefather stumbled from the impact, then turned on Vrindum, his face contorted. Vrindum did not see the righteous anger of the Fyreslayers in his expression. He did not see the sacred fire of Grimnir. He saw only savagery, and a mindless malevolence.

Around the dais, the Fyreslayers were in uproar. Their most ferocious warrior was fighting the runefather. The world had lost all sense. Vrindum trusted that Trumnir, Harthum, the runesons and those who were closest could see the distorted, possessed face of Beregthor. But those further away would only be able to see an impossible conflict, the seed of a terrible schism.

Kaz’arrath, Kaz’arrath, Kaz’arrath, cried the wind.

Beregthor raised the Keeper of Roads over his head and brought it down, aiming for Vrindum’s skull. The grimwrath berzerker dodged to one side. Beregthor was attacking with enormous power but little skill. The Keeper slammed against the dais, lodging itself in stone. Vrindum launched himself at Beregthor again, battering him hard enough to break his hold on the latchkey grandaxe. Beregthor stared at his empty hands, and he howled.

Kaz’arrath, Kaz’arrath, Kaz’arrath. Short, long, short. A call. A summons.

The summons was answered.

The eight passes that formed the passages to the bowl erupted. The night gave birth to a horde of daemons. A legion of pink horrors and flamers cascaded down the slopes. Gales of demented laughter drowned out the cry of the wind. And to the north, striding behind the thousands of its army, a towering daemon appeared. It was winged. It stalked forward on long legs with multiple articulations. Its arms were almost as long, and it carried a staff in the shape of a giant iron key, whose head changed configuration second by second. Its own head was long and beaked, and its eyes blazed with the terrible cold red of the wards on the gate.

The arrival of the daemons restored some confidence to the fyrds of the Drunbhor. Here was a clear enemy. Here was a war that must be fought, however daunting the odds. And so the great mass of the vulkite berzerkers advanced in an expanding circle around the dais. They shook the earth too with the stamp of their feet and the thunder of their battlecries. The runesons leapt away from the dais, racing through the ranks in three separate directions to lead from the front. Trumnir took a fourth, while Harthum climbed atop his magmadroth and once again began to hammer out the beat of war.

Beregthor and Vrindum were alone on the dais, though Vrindum could feel the eyes of Kaz’arrath fixed upon them.

With the great daemon present, and the mirroring of its eyes and the warding runes, he understood what would happen if Beregthor turned the key and opened the way. The Drunbhor would not pass through. The warding would destroy any who tried. But the Keeper of Roads would permit the daemons to pour directly into the other lodge’s magmahold. This was the quest the daemons had goaded the Drunbhor into completing. The daemons had destroyed the gate in Sibilatus so the Drunbhor would seek and open this one, unleashing horror on the kin they had thought to help.

Vrindum stood between the runefather and the Keeper of Roads. Beregthor ran at him, hands extended like claws. Vrindum met his charge. He grappled with him. He pulled a dagger from his belt and stabbed sideways at the back of Beregthor’s neck. He felt the blade slice into flesh. It struck something hard, and he prayed to Grimnir it was the daemonic thorn.

‘Runefather,’ he pleaded. ‘Remember who you are. You are the greatest of the Drunbhor, and we have need of you now!’ He shoved deeper with the knife. Something severed. There was a sudden weakness in Beregthor’s limbs, and Vrindum wrestled him to the ground.

‘Hear the altar of war,’ Vrindum said. ‘Hear the true call. Hear the wrath of Grimnir. Free yourself of the grip of lies.’

Harthum must have seen the struggle, for his booming hymn of battle grew louder yet. Vrindum’s frame blazed with the strength of his god. He saw the shine of holy fury in the runes on Beregthor’s forehead.

The runefather’s eyes cleared. Blackened coals burst into heroic fire once more. Vrindum released him, and Beregthor leapt to his feet. He stared at the gate, and at the Keeper of Roads embedded in the dais. His mouth twisted in anger and grief. He seized the grandaxe.

And paused.

A wave of grey settled over his features once more. He shook it off with effort. He turned to Vrindum. ‘I hear, old friend. I keep my honour to the last.’ He shuddered, leaning as if his body would unlock the gate if he did not force it away. Then he gave Vrindum a grim smile.

‘Frethnir will lead well,’ he said, and stormed off the dais. His roar parted the ranks of the Fyreslayers. On instinct they made way for their auric runefather. Krasnak bellowed and joined his master. Beregthor climbed his back into the throne for one final time. They drove deep into the gibbering daemonic legions.

Beregthor headed directly for Kaz’arrath. The Lord of Change was halfway across the bowl towards the lines of the Fyreslayers. Beregthor and the magmadroth plunged deeper and deeper into the roiling mass. The runefather’s attack was reckless. It was too fast. He was not leading the Drunbhor. He was leaving them behind.

Vrindum raced after him. Beregthor had no intention of surviving. He was intent merely on destroying as many abominations as he could before they overwhelmed him. Vrindum howled a denial to the fates and raced after the runefather. Beregthor would not be forced to make this sacrifice. Vrindum would fight by his side until the last of the daemons had been dispatched to oblivion.

The battle rhythm of the runesmiter rang through Vrindum’s being. The voice of Battlesmith Krunmir thundered over the battle, his recitation of the victories of the Drunbhor in harmony with the drumming of the war altar. Ahead, Vrindum saw the overwhelming odds turning against Beregthor. Krasnak mauled the daemons and burned them with bile. The Keeper of Roads rose high before coming down with destructive force. But the pink horrors kept coming, piling up on each other, reaching to drag at the runefather. Flamers closed in on Krasnak, and the magmadroth screeched as their unholy fire washed over his scales. His hide rippled, portions of his body in the first convulsions of change. Vulkite berzerkers were fighting furiously to come to Beregthor’s aid, but the mass of daemons slowed them down. They would not reach him before the sea of nightmares pulled him under.

Or before the dreadful author of the tragedy arrived to destroy the runefather utterly.

Vrindum’s focus narrowed to the single point of Beregthor’s peril. Everything else vanished in the rage of battle. He tore into the daemons, and he was a force beyond reckoning. His throat unleashed a continuous cry of rage. His ur-gold sigils were molten with Grimnir’s wrath. The god demanded vengeance. Vrindum was that vengeance incarnate.

He did not see individual foes. The daemons were an undifferentiated mass that presented itself for the slaughter. Darkbane cut through a sea of daemonic flesh. Pink turned blue, blue vanished in sprays of ichor. Horns and blades slashed at him, but whether they hit or not made no difference. He was the fury of war, and no foul thing would stop him from reaching the runefather.

He drew alongside Beregthor, and the proximity of the runefather pulled him back again from complete battle madness. Krasnak had fallen, fighting to the last as his flesh mutated out of control, transforming him into a hill of pulsating scales and crawling parchment. Beregthor had lost his helm. His face and arms were sheathed in his blood, but he fought as if fresh to the battle.

‘Go back!’ Beregthor shouted.

Vrindum cut a pink horror in two, then destroyed the blue daemons before they uttered their first wail.

‘Come with me, runefather!’ he said. ‘You are restored to us! Your honour does not require your sacrifice!’

Beregthor shook his head. He thrust the Keeper of Roads forward through the jaws of a blue horror, exploding the daemon’s head.

‘I cannot return to the gate. If I do, I will bring ruin to us all. But you must. And destroy it.’

Ahead, Kaz’arrath was less than a dozen great strides away.

‘The gate is lost to us,’ said Beregthor. ‘We must take it from the daemons as they took ours in Sibilatus.’

Vrindum hesitated.

‘Go!’ Beregthor roared. ‘Your runefather commands it!’

With an agonised cry, Vrindum abandoned Beregthor. He turned back. Once more he cut his way through the daemonic horde. Wrath fused with grief. He would have tried to destroy every daemon in the field if not for Beregthor’s desperate order. Several fyrds of vulkite berzerkers were pushing hard to reach the runefather too, and it was not long before Vrindum was in their midst.

‘The gate!’ he said. ‘We are commanded to destroy the gate!’

He leapt onto the platform. He raced to the right-hand pillar, thinking only of his duty and not the consequences as he swung Darkbane. With the first blow, a chunk of ancient stone went flying. The vision in the portal shook. And a roar of denial and rage went up across the battlefield.

The daemons surged forward, and there was no laughter from the pink horrors now. They howled with desperation. They fell on the Fyreslayers with determination, forcing them back. The Drunbhor were suddenly on the defensive, fighting to keep the daemons from reaching the dais.

‘Think you to escape destiny?’

The voice was magisterial and filled with venom. Vrindum’s mouth flooded with blood.

‘The book is written. All change is ours. For you there is but the completion of your task,’ Kaz’arrath said. The daemon reached down and grasped Beregthor in a huge claw. It spread its wings, beat the air with them and rose above the fray, moving towards the dais. As it did, it struck downwards with its staff, and Fyreslayers by the score died, their bodies twisted into the shape of unholy runes.

‘Destroy the gate!’ Beregthor’s cry was monstrous in its pain, a soul making its last stand in terrible combat.

Vrindum renewed his attack on the pillar. Stone flew. The wards blazed in anger, but he was not attempting to cross the threshold. Frethnir and Bramnor joined him. Their blows eroded the strength of the pillars.

‘Faster!’ Vrindum shouted. ‘We must end our failures here!’ Kaz’arrath descended on the dais. With a contemptuous gesture, the daemon swept aside the berzerkers who blocked its way. It held Beregthor towards the portal. It could ward the gate and twist its nature, but it could not open it. The runefather of the Drunbhor alone could do that. His body trembling, controlled by a will much greater than his, Beregthor raised the Keeper of the Roads and inserted its blade into the floating keyhole.

Vrindum attacked the pillar with the frenzy of wrath.

Beregthor turned the key.

The circumference of the portal blazed with lightning. The vision of the magmahold took on depth. The keyhole vanished. With a raucous caw of triumph, still clutching the victim of its manipulations, the Lord of Change stepped forward into the gate.

And the pillar collapsed.

It toppled like a felled tree, pulling the entire arch of the gate down with it. Runic, warded stonework fell into the portal with the daemon and Beregthor only partway through. The gate exploded. The heart of the Typhornas Mountains flashed with searing violet and silver. The dais erupted.

Vrindum hurtled through a maelstrom of fire and stone and raging power. The storm raged, and he raged with it. The fury of reality’s ending battered him.

He bellowed a cry of victory and grief.

VII

The destruction of the gate turned the centre of the bowl into a crater. The blast killed many Drunbhor. The uncontrolled storm of sorcerous energies wreaked even greater devastation on the daemons. With Kaz’arrath gone, they were leaderless and despairing. With Beregthor dead, the Fyreslayers were terrible in their vengeance.

The end came quickly.

At dawn, Vrindum stood at the edge of the crater. The wind blowing from the Typhornas Mountains had shaken free of the three-note refrain. The song was changeable once again, varying with every rise and fall of the mountains. It sounded in Vrindum’s ears like a chant of mourning. But perhaps there was a thread of triumph too. Beregthor’s final command had defeated the daemon’s machinations. And he left behind a legacy.

As the sun’s rays crossed the lip of the bowl, the veins of gold in the crater gleamed.

Frethnir joined Vrindum. ‘The runemaster says there is a rich concentration of ur-gold below,’ he said.

‘Beregthor would be pleased,’ said Vrindum. ‘He led us well until the end.’

‘He did. I should never have doubted.’

Vrindum bent down and picked up the Keeper of Roads. It had survived the explosion, though its blade was gravely scarred. Vrindum presented it to Frethnir.

The runeson shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘That is for Bramnor. It is not for me to be auric runefather of the Drunbhor. My brother will lead the march back. I will stay here with those who choose to join me. We will found a new lodge where our father has brought us.’

‘Then I will be of your number,’ Vrindum said. Where the daemon had sought to bring ruin to the Drunbhor, now there would be a greater strength.

The wind’s cry grew louder, a martial song for the birth of a new era.

An excerpt from

OVERLORDS OF THE IRON DRAGON

C L Werner

CHAPTER I

The sorcerer’s face curled back in a leering rictus, exposing the blackened stumps of bone hidden behind his lips. There was something almost batrachian in his visage, bulbous eyes jutting from puffy folds of skin. Unlike the flesh around them, there was no softness in Khoram’s toadlike eyes, only a rapacious hunger as they stared both outwards and inwards.

Possibilities and potentialities, the twistings of doom and fate, the shadows of futures yet unmade. Scenes of glorious victory and visions of annihilating disaster, each waxing and waning like the falling sands of time. The ebb and flow of prophecy was unrelenting and unforgiving. The weak of mind were consumed by the ordeal of divining insight from the tide of omen and portent, driven mad by their inability to confine such knowledge into purely mundane perceptions. The weak of spirit lost themselves in the cosmic expanse of the infinite, flesh and soul obliterated as they surrendered to the cyclopean enormity where past and future united into a single moment that defied the mortal conceit of time. Humanity had been the first and least of the sacrifices Khoram had rendered to his black arts.

The sorcerer was a tall man, his body disfigured by the manifold blessings thrust upon him by his dread god. Grossly mutated, his robes and armour folded awkwardly about his frame. The side of his neck bulged with a hideous feathered growth, pushing his head down towards the opposite shoulder. One hand, the less malformed of his extremities, gripped a long staff. The other hand, ending in elongated, boneless digits, beckoned to the fist-sized sphere of glass that hovered around his head. At his summons, the sphere came to rest, floating just before his eyes.

Wind rippled the sorcerer’s robes, disturbing the feathers of the growth on his neck. The beast upon which he stood shuddered, shifting slightly as it adjusted its flight through the darkling skies, high above the bleak hills of Shadowfar. The sorcerer’s boots were gripped by hairy tendrils that emerged from the creature’s back, melded into its very substance. The flattened, ray-like daemon could no more divorce itself of its rider than it could shed its own organs. Its corporeal form had become subsumed by Khoram, existing as an extension of his own. Through the skies of Chamon it would carry him until such time as it was dismissed and its physical mass dissolved into vapour. There would always be another daemon ready to enter the Mortal Realms to replace it when the sorcerer was in need.

Khoram’s wormy fingers reached out and curled around the scintillating sphere, little ribbons of steam rising where his cobalt-hued skin rested against the glassy surface. Even flesh that had been transformed by the blessings of Mighty Tzeentch wasn’t immune to the corrosive touch of temporal abeyance.

‘Mighty is your power, oh Orb of Zobras,’ Khoram hissed to the gleaming sphere. ‘You are prophecy manifest. Prediction given physical form.’ He felt the heat in his fingers gradually lessen. The sorcerer thought of the great seer who had created the orb. ‘Zobras sacrificed much to achieve you,’ he told the relic. ‘At the height of his power he commanded daemons to forge you from the essence of time and dream. You are the pinnacle of his magic.’

The flattery spilled off Khoram’s tongue, tasting bitter in his mouth. By arduous rite and obscene ritual, the sphere had been soulbound to him, orbiting him like a captive star. To command the orb was never enough, however. It had to be appeased. Zobras had ignored the will of the relic he had created and in the end it had betrayed him when the armies of Chaos laid waste to his theocracy. The prophet’s ruin was a warning, a reminder to remain humble before the Dark Gods.

‘Reveal to me the path of things yet to become,’ Khoram enjoined the orb.

He stared into the sphere, peering into its thousands of facets. Each one bore its own story, its own interpretation of how the future would unfold. Trying to concentrate upon all of them would be futile, an effort that had driven lesser sorcerers mad. Khoram, however, had received one blessing from his god that made all the difference.

‘There! There!’ The words sounded from the feathered growth on Khoram’s neck. A tiny face peered out from the midst of the feathers, clusters of black eyes fixated upon the orb’s planes. ‘There!’ the homunculus repeated.

Khoram diverted his attention from the images his parasitic daemon had rejected. He depended upon the creature’s guidance to lead him to the most propitious of the visions. A connoisseur of lies, the tretchlet unerringly sniffed out the truth for its master.

The sorcerer’s eyes gleamed as his familiar drew his attention to the image playing out within one of the facets. The moment he focused upon the image and his mind digested the scene, the other surfaces around it changed. Now they exhibited a new array of futures, possibilities derived from the initial prediction. Again, Khoram felt the tretchlet guiding him to the most truthful of the prophecies. Mustering his resolve, he tore his gaze away from the orb. It was unwise to peer too far ahead at one time. Therein lay the route of obsession and the madness of infinity.

Looking away from the orb, Khoram gazed out across the cloud-swept skies. Ugly fogs of scintillating amber cascaded through the atmosphere, thrown aloft by the forests of spytepine that infested the hills far below. Buzzing swarms of tiny blot-midges flocked to the amber, greedily glutting themselves on the shimmering motes of hardened sap. Those that fed too lustily became weighted down by their feast, crashing onto the slopes below, their carcasses fertilising the very trees that provoked their downfall. The flux of Change in action, from benefactor to exploiter, from predator to prey. The role played one moment was but a mask that could swiftly be torn away, either by expedience or by the whims of fate.

Khoram’s left hand closed tighter about the whorled runestaff he held. Glancing down at the daemon upon which he stood, the sorcerer drove the spiked butt of the implement into one of the scarred grooves that circled the creature’s forward edge. The disc-shaped thing snarled in irritation as the goad jabbed at it. Wormy tendrils tried to writhe up from underneath the daemon’s body, but their reach was incapable of threatening the mortal on its back. The creature let out another snarl, the shudder of its annoyance shivering through its substance up into Khoram’s feet. The circular daemon floated upwards, racing towards the height to which its master directed it.

The roar of battle crashed upon the sorcerer’s ears. The skies below him were filled with conflict. Savage warriors draped in kilts of sapphire and malachite soared through the air on daemonic chargers similar to the one Khoram rode. Fiery chariots harnessed to still larger daemons careened across the atmosphere, trailing plumes of smoke and flame in their wake. Bird-faced half-men glided about the fray, borne aloft upon shrieking daemon-steeds and loosing arrows of bone from bows cut from the tendons of gargants.

The warhost of men and monsters spiralled around a clutch of fantastical craft. Great ships soared over Shadowfar, supported by metal cupolas suspended above their decks. From prow and stern, each ship directed an array of weaponry against their tormentors. Beams of golden light streaked out at masked warriors, punching through their flesh as they solidified into bullets just before reaching their targets. Harpoons rocketed away from cylindrical launchers fixed to the decks, the spears impaling howling beastmen, leaving them dangling against the keel until the chains fitted to the projectile were reeled back in.

From the decks, from armoured baskets fastened to the cupolas and the sides of the hulls themselves, the crew of the sky-vessels directed a determined defence. Pistols belched shot into the very faces of the attackers, larger snub-nosed weapons spewed blasts that shredded the wings of beastmen and scoured the hides of daemons. Axes and pikes were employed to deadly effect, hacking through the beaked faces of the monstrous raiders or plucking warriors from the backs of their steeds to send them plummeting to the earth far below.

‘How unfit for the storm are our foes,’ Khoram mused, the tretchlet gibbering in agreement. The crews of the sky-vessels were utterly unlike their vicious foes. They were shorter and stockier, broadly and stolidly built. Most wore bulky armour of heavy metal plates, their faces locked inside helms with glowering masks and golden beards. ‘They lack the grace and agility of those born to the skies. Brutes of rock and stone that seek to conquer the tempest with their puerile inventions.’

The sorcerer shook his head. ‘The duardin are a meddlesome breed. Whatever the peculiarities of their creed they invariably demand great effort to dispose of. More effort than some are willing to expend.’

As the thought came to him, Khoram gazed back into the orb. Responding to his mind, the facets shimmered and displayed a new array of images. Each facet displayed the same Chaos warrior standing upon the back of a daemonic disc. He presented a gruesome aspect, his baroque armour still dripping with the sacrificial blood used to anoint it before the fighting. Dismembered fingers dipped in wax were plastered about his gorget like hideous candles. Veiled by the smoke rising from the smouldering fingers his horned helm was an indistinct suggestion of shape and motion. Only the nine eyes that stared from the jumble of visors scattered across the helm’s face exhibited any clarity, shining through the smoke like angry embers.

‘Tamuzz is in a particularly wrathful humour,’ Khoram told his homunculus.

As he watched, an armoured duardin defending the bow of one of the ships jabbed at the warlord’s daemon-steed with a pike, ripping into its mottled hide. Tamuzz brought the fiery blade of the glaive he bore crunching down into the duardin’s head. Even as the enchanted blade bit through iron helm and bony skull Tamuzz pressed the attack, not relenting until he had cleft the enemy from pate to palate.

‘Losing so many of his followers in the fighting has upset him,’ Khoram stated. ‘For all the blessings Mighty Tzeentch has seen fit to bestow on him, Tamuzz still reckons power in tired old conceits of mortal rule and domination.’

Seen in the facets of the orb, Tamuzz ripped his glaive free and sent the body of the slaughtered duardin hurtling over the side of the ship. The warlord sought another foe, but even as he did Khoram sent a tendril of magic rippling through the orb to reach into Tamuzz’s mind. ‘Come to me,’ Khoram hissed, his homunculus echoing the words in a greasy titter. ‘Come to me.’ He was careful to invest the summons with more suggestion than command. Too overt a touch would rouse Tamuzz’s resistance and Khoram knew from past experience that the warlord’s will was strong enough to defy his magic if he was aware of its influence. ‘Set the thought in his head, let Tamuzz think it is of his own volition and there is little he will not do,’ Khoram boasted to his tretchlet. The daemonic parasite whined, reminding his master that his boast wasn’t entirely true.

The dark spectre of the warlord came speeding away from the battle, a thin slick of ichor seeping from the injured daemon that supported him, leaving a greasy smear in his wake.

‘My slaves perish, curseling,’ Tamuzz hissed at Khoram as he soared towards the sorcerer.

‘Mighty Tzeentch demands payment,’ Khoram replied. ‘The Changer does not favour slaves…’

Tamuzz shook the massive glaive he bore, the arcane energies bound within it causing a flicker of power to coruscate along the blade. ‘Spare me your philosophy. You promised me the sky-vessels. Bring them down.’

Khoram cocked his head to one side, staring past Tamuzz to watch the battle over the warlord’s shoulder. He saw one of the warlord’s adepts pitch from the back of his daemon-steed when a duardin shot him in the face. ‘They will fall,’ Khoram said. ‘But they will fall when it is propitious to a greater purpose. The purpose to which we both strive.’

The flash of arcane energy faded from the warlord’s glaive. The smouldering eyes lost their lustre, almost seeming to pull the veiling smoke tighter around them. ‘I have not forgotten,’ Tamuzz replied.

‘Then let us do what is needed of us,’ Khoram said. He waved his snaky fingers away towards the horizon. ‘We must harry them still further away from Shadowfar. The next valley. That is where their doom will come.’ The sorcerer nodded at the orb circling him. ‘Such is the prophecy that guides us.’

‘I will lose more warriors,’ Tamuzz objected, some of the edge creeping back into his tone.

‘You will gain more, glorious Tamuzz,’ Khoram insisted. ‘Through me, you will be at the right hand of Power.’

Grokmund Wodinssin watched from midship as carnage waxed and waned all around him. The gold fillings in his teeth felt as though lightning were racing through them, an impression that had always presaged some disaster. The last time he’d felt that unpleasant tingling in his teeth was when Lodrik Kodraksimm had challenged him to a drinking contest and he lost his stake in a most profitable voyage.

What he felt now was far worse. Grokmund thought if he champed his teeth sparks might fly out, so fierce was the sensation. Was it because of greater danger or because he had more to lose this time? He glanced at the deck beneath his feet, picturing the box locked away in his cabin below. The aether-khemist’s tests had given every indication that this find would make all their fortunes, would expand the wealth of Barak-Urbaz a hundredfold. If Grokmund was right, this venture would mean more than riches – it would mean fame and glory. The mightiest duardin in the sky-hold would regard them with honour.

Grokmund ducked down as a daemon-riding cultist flew above the Stormbreaker’s deck. As the brawny human passed, he brought a heavy mace swinging at the aether-khemist. The bludgeon struck sparks from the duardin’s helm but failed to deal any greater damage. As the enemy soared away he was struck from behind by the rifle-fire of a Grundstok thunderer. The cultist sagged across the disc-like daemon, borne away as the creature flew onwards.

Grokmund rose slowly, shaken by the nearness of his escape. Mutant beastkin darted around the ships of Admiral Thorki’s fleet like megalofin pups in a school of sungills. The Kharadron defenders sent volley upon volley into the raiders, felling some but leaving far too many to press the attack. Swooping from below the hulls of the frigates and gunhaulers, diving down from on high to slash at the great endrins that kept the vessels aloft, the ambushers were taking a slow but steady toll upon the Kharadron. Lifeless skyriggers drifted away from the fleet, the small aether-endrins fitted to their backs keeping them airborne until at last their fuel would run out and bring them sinking earthwards. Some of the skywardens who’d attached cables to the frigates now dangled from the sides of the ships, their aether-endrins damaged, their bodies clanging incessantly against the iron-plated hulls.

‘You’ll lose your head that way,’ Admiral Thorki reproved Grokmund as he helped him back to his feet. Encased in a heavy suit of aether-powered armour, Thorki was easily able to lift Grokmund with one hand while his other aimed a volley pistol at the raiders. He sent a bullet smashing into the beaked face of a beastman as it came whipping towards the ironclad’s endrin. The maimed creature dropped its bow and pawed at the gory wreck of its face before vanishing into the distance.

‘I have to do my part,’ Grokmund told Thorki. ‘Protecting the find is all that matters now.’

Thorki shook his head. ‘We need you to make certain of our claim and secure full rights to the find.’ Despite their magnetised boots, both duardin felt the deck beneath them tremble as aethershot carbines mounted in the hull plastered the attackers with a withering volley. Around them, Grundstok thunderers blasted away at the raiders with their rifles and mortars, trying to keep the attackers from swarming the ironclad’s decks. ‘Get below,’ Thorki told the aether-khemist.

Grokmund remained where he was. ‘If the ship falls it won’t matter anyway,’ he said. ‘I’d prefer to die fighting than hiding down in the hold.’

Thorki conceded the point grudgingly. ‘If you get yourself killed, our backers will shave my beard,’ he snapped. The admiral swung around, shouting commands to the gunners up on the forecastle. He gestured with his pistol towards a pack of bird-faced beastkin that were flying at the ship from starboard. ‘Udri! Bring them down!’

At Thorki’s command, the gunners swung around the great volley cannon bolted to the roof of the forecastle. The whole ship shook as they fired the weapon. Caught in the explosive discharge the centre of the oncoming pack was shredded, daemons and beastmen alike plummeting from the sky. Arkanauts rushed to the gunwales, picking off mangled survivors with their pistols.

‘We’re winning!’ Grokmund shouted. The very next instant he felt a withering heat smash against his face. Visions of glory evaporated as a spout of sorcerous fire splashed against the side of the ship, immolating the arkanauts that had been picking off wounded beastmen. Behind the flames came a sinister chariot drawn by slavering daemons. Standing in the chariot, seemingly growing up from its bed, was a foul fungoid thing with stumpy arms that sprayed jets of shimmering orange fire. An arkanaut sprinting past Grokmund was caught in the flames, flailing about wildly as the daemonic fire clung to him and gnawed greedily at his armour. Another arkanaut tried to help his comrade smother the flames only to have the fire leap eagerly to his gauntlet, bubbling and sizzling as the metal began to melt.

Grokmund hastened to the stricken arkanauts, gesturing to Thorki to hold back. ‘Keep everyone away,’ he warned the admiral.

Closing upon the fire-wrapt duardin, Grokmund employed his anatomiser, drawing out the air from his immediate surroundings. The daemon-fire had little kinship with natural flame, but even it couldn’t withstand the resulting vacuum. In a heartbeat, the ghastly fires were snuffed out. The arkanaut whose gauntlet had been afflicted staggered around, befuddled by the anatomiser’s effects. His comrade was little more than a charred smear on the deck.

The injured duardin ripped away his mangled gauntlet and flexed his fingers, ensuring they could still hold a weapon before trusting his pistol to them again. ‘Profit to you, Master Grokmund,’ he thanked the aether-khemist, his voice distorted by the breathing mask fitted to his helm. His eyes narrowed as he stared at the sky. ‘I’d pay tenweight in gold if that murdering scum would come in range of my gun.’

‘Let me see where it has gone,’ Grokmund said. The enhanced array of lenses on his helm made it possible to succeed in his purpose. The discordant pattern of splotches and blemishes that marked the stalk of the fungoid fire-sprayer was distinct enough to recognise again. Grokmund saw it diving for one of the frigates, again letting its daemonic flames splash across the decks and harry the crew. The long-suffering frigate could do little to repel the monster, so depleted had the ship’s crew become. Yet the chariot made only one attack. It didn’t linger to press its advantage, or remain to vanquish its enemy. Instead it went speeding away to assault a gunhauler and then to turn upon another frigate.

A suspicion grew in Grokmund’s gut. He swung around to Thorki. ‘The Chaos scum are up to something,’ he declared. Carefully he picked out another of the attackers, a bird-faced beastkin loosing shimmering arrows at the sky-vessels. He watched it fly past one of the frigates then duck away to come at the Stormbreaker. An arrow sizzled against the plated hull, then the creature was wheeling away again, seeking out a new target.

‘They aren’t pressing their attacks,’ Grokmund told Thorki. He quickly pointed to the almost crewless frigate. ‘They aren’t seizing advantage when they gain it.’

‘Sky-devils eat their bones,’ Thorki grumbled. He raised a spyglass to his eye, watching as the raiders displayed more coordination than he had considered them capable of. ‘They’ve some design in mind. Deliberately wearing us down.’

A fierce war-cry brought the two duardin spinning around. Grokmund pulled back just as a half-naked cultist came diving down at him upon a daemonic disc. The man slashed at him with a crooked blade, the serrated edge biting into the blue-green steel covering his shoulder. The impact sent Grokmund staggering back a pace. Before the masked human could strike at him again, he raised his atmospheric anatomiser and pressed its actuation rune. This time, instead of drawing in the air, the mechanism expelled a plume of virulent gas. The cultist raised his heavy shield to block the blast of the noxious aether, but the vapour simply billowed over its edges. The man shrieked as the gas seared his face. Wracked with pain, he fell from his daemonic steed onto the ironclad’s deck. The daemonic disc flew away, unconcerned by the fate of its late rider.

Thorki fired his volley pistol at another of the cultists, preventing the man from aiding his stricken companion. Bullets ripped into the daemonic steed as its rider sent it rearing back to absorb the shots. Then the man was leaping down, slashing at the admiral with a crooked blade.

Grokmund moved towards the foe he had knocked to the deck. He unlatched the heavy hammer from his tool belt and stalked after the fallen cultist. The man was clawing at his face, struggling to remove the beaked mask he wore. He had it free just in time to see Grokmund’s hammer swinging at his face. A crunching impact spilled the man back to the deck, a mash of brains and bone dripping from the duardin’s hammer. Before Grokmund’s shocked gaze, the corpse twitched and writhed, its contours shrinking and shrivelling. The warrior he’d struck down had been powerfully built, in the prime of condition for a human. The corpse at his feet was that of an old man, wrinkled and wasted. Only the swirling tattoo across his chest proclaimed that this was indeed the same foe. Grokmund touched his thumb to the face of the steel girdle he wore, pressing against the forehead of the revered ancestor moulded across it. Such repulsive sorcery was disturbing even to an aether-khemist.

As Grokmund turned from his fallen foe, Thorki was just settling his own adversary. The admiral’s gauntlet was around the cultist’s neck. With a brutal clenching of his fist, Thorki crushed the man’s throat. He tossed the twitching body to the deck and swung around.

‘It would seem they’ve tired of their strategy just as we suspect it,’ Thorki said. The admiral sprinted towards the forecastle, shouting orders to Udri and the gunners. ‘Fire wherever they bunch up! Break their resolve!’

The men who had attacked Grokmund and Thorki were not alone. They were part of a renewed surge of enemies, a universal increase of ferocity. The enemy now pressed home their assaults, no longer content to harass, to strike and run as they had before. Gunhaulers went down with all hands as flying leech-like daemons latched onto their endrins and compromised their integrity, rupturing fuel lines and reservoirs to send jets of aether spilling into the atmosphere. Skyriggers were shot down by the arrows of beastmen, struck again and again by the piercing shafts. One frigate had its prow turned into a conflagration as three chariots concentrated their attacks against it, the fungoid daemon-riders loosing blast after blast of eerie flame at the ship.

Grokmund fended off the attack of a charging beastman, managing to break one of the rope-like feelers of its disc-steed as the creature retreated. He could see the endrinriggers hovering overhead trying to keep the attackers away from the tanks of the endrin above the ironclad’s deck. They spun away, attacking with their rivet-guns and saw-blades, lashing out with the tools they used to repair the ship in order to defend it.

The ironclad’s captain was likewise doing his best to protect the ship. Since the attack had begun the Stormbreaker had been pushed to top speed, striving to pull away from the foes. An uncanny headwind had defied them, retarding their efforts at escape. Having spotted a method to the attack, Grokmund now wondered about that stubborn gale. The fleet had turned in the direction of least resistance in trying to escape the attack.

Until these last moments the slaves of Chaos had been content simply to harass the fleet. Now they pressed the attack with unrestrained malice. Why, Grokmund asked himself, unless the reason for such restraint had passed? Like the wind, the enemy had been trying to steer them, lead them to some point they wanted the Kharadron to be. The nauseating image of ripperbats herding prey into the waiting fangs of their colonies filled his mind.

Grokmund turned from the fray unfolding about the ironclad’s port side, hurrying towards the forecastle to alert Thorki of their danger. ‘They are herding us into a killing-ground!’ he shouted to the admiral.

Thorki was just climbing the ladder up to the forecastle when he heard Grokmund calling to him. He looked back, puzzlement in his eyes.

‘They are trying to drive us into a trap,’ Grokmund declared. ‘That is why they press their attack now!’

‘We can outrun them,’ Thorki stated. ‘That is the best way to reduce our losses.’

Grokmund shook his head, waving his fist in the air. ‘Don’t you see? This hellish wind is conjured by their sorcery! It pushes us where they want us to go. Their attack is simply to force us to stay the course.’

Thorki paused in his climb. ‘The only other choice would be to smash our way through them. That would cost us too much to accomplish.’

‘Risk some to save the rest,’ Grokmund advised. ‘Trying to save everything might bring the whole fleet to ruin.’

Thorki turned his head, looking across the embattled ships of his fleet. ‘We have lost too much already,’ he said, his tone almost accusing.

‘If my box does not make it back to Barak-Urbaz, then their deaths count for nothing anyway,’ Grokmund snapped. He had to get Thorki to appreciate their peril. Only the admiral had the authority to command the fleet and turn them around before it was too late.

Before Grokmund could press his point a ghastly figure swooped down upon the forecastle – a huge man clad in armour and wearing a tall helm topped with spiralling horns, his face hidden in a murk of smoke. The flying daemon he was riding sank its jaws around the head of Udri, who was loading the volley cannon. Even as the gun commander fell, the daemon’s rider lashed out with the fiery glaive he bore, the red-hot edge shearing through armour and bone to leave another gunner mangled at his feet.

Admiral Thorki lunged up the ladder and charged at the Chaos butcher. His volley pistol barked, sending blasts of aetheric shot streaking at his enemy. Arcane runes flared outwards from the shield the barbarous foeman carried, each sigil surrounding one of the shots and snuffing it out entirely. The warlord’s glaive caught the upward sweep of the admiral’s immense hammer as Thorki tried to press his attack.

‘Thorki!’ Grokmund cried as he sprang for the ladder. But before he could help the admiral he found himself beset by an adversary of his own. A hideously mutated man suddenly appeared between himself and the ladder. Arrayed in armour seemingly moulded from molten sapphire and crushed malachite, the human stood a head taller than the duardin. An obscene growth protruded from his neck, bloated and feathered. The growth’s head rested against the smooth helm that covered that of its host.

‘It is the fool who would hurry his doom,’ the man declared.

To Grokmund it seemed he heard the words not with his ears but more as though they were thrust directly into his brain.

‘All things come into season. Even death.’ The sorcerer raised the gnarled staff he carried. The riot of talismans and charms chained to its jewelled head clattered wildly as he harnessed their powers.

Grokmund raised his anatomiser, thinking to spray the sorcerer with corrosive aether before he could work his magic. He was depending upon the stifling qualities of his own aether-powered equipment to at least partly impede whatever spell the warlock hurled against him. In this, however, he again underestimated the craft and cunning of the enemy. It wasn’t against the aether-khemist that the sorcerer directed his magic, but the deck beneath his feet. A coruscating spiral of crackling light spilled across the floor, undulating with a monstrous animation as it seeped into the wood and iron.

The violent swirl of energy crackled through the planks. Before Grokmund could react, the deck under him shuddered open, gaping wide like a waiting maw. Like a plummeting stone, he was sent crashing down into the darkened hold below.

His last view of the battle was the sorcerer and his parasite staring down at him from above.

An excerpt from

EIGHT LAMENTATIONS: SPEAR OF SHADOWS

Josh Reynolds

Somewhere in the mortal realms, the smith raised his hammer. He brought it down, striking the white-hot length of metal he held pinned against the anvil with one fire-blackened hand. He rotated it and delivered a second strike. A third, a fourth, until the smoky air of the cavernous forge resonated with the sound of raw creation.

It was the first smithy, long forgotten save in the dreams of those who worked with iron and flame. It was a place of stone and wood and steel, at once a grand temple and a brute cave, its dimensions and shape changing with every twitch of the smoke that inundated it. It was nowhere and everywhere, existing only in the hollows of ancestral memory, or in the stories of the oldest mortal smiths. Racks of weapons such as had never been wielded by mortals gleamed in the light of the forge, their killing edges honed and impatient to perform their function. Beneath them were less murderous tools, though no less necessary.

The smith made little distinction between them – weapons were tools, and tools were weapons. War was no less a labour than ploughing the soil, and hewing down a forest was no less a slaughter, though the victims could not, save in rare instances, scream.

The smith was impossibly broad and powerful, for all that his shape was crooked, and bent strangely, as if succumbing to unseen pressures. His thick limbs moved with a surety of purpose that no mechanism could replicate. He wore a pair of oft-patched trousers and a battered apron, his bare arms and back glistening with sweat where it wasn’t stained with tattoo-like whorls of soot or marked with runic scars. Boots of crimson dragon-hide protected his feet, the iridescent scales glinting in the firelight, and tools of all shapes and sizes hung from the wide leather belt strapped about his waist.

A spade-shaped beard, composed of swirling ash, and moustaches of flowing smoke covered the lower half of his lumpen features. A thick mane of fiery hair cascaded down his scalp, spilling over his shoulders and crackling against his flesh. Eyes like molten metal were fixed on his task with a calm that came only with age.

The smith was older than the realms. A breaker of stars, and a maker of suns. He had forged weapons without number, and no two were the same – a fact he took no small amount of pride in. He was a craftsman, and he put a bit of himself into the metal, even as he hammered it into shape. This one needed a little more hammering than most. He raised it from the anvil and studied it. ‘Bit more heat,’ he murmured. His voice at its quietest was like the rumble of an avalanche.

He shoved the length of smouldering iron into the maw of the forge. Flames crawled up his sinewy arm, and the metal twisted in his grip as it grew hot once more, but he did not flinch. The fire held no terrors for one such as him. Tongs and gloves were for lesser smiths. Besides, there was much to be seen in the fire, if you weren’t afraid of getting close. He peered into the dancing hues of red and orange, wondering what they would show him this time. Shapes began to take form, indistinct and uncertain. He stirred the embers.

As the flames roared up anew, clawing greedily at the metal, he felt his students shy back. He chuckled. ‘What sort of smiths are afraid of a bit of fire?’

He glanced at them, head tilted. Vague dream-shapes huddled in the smoke. Small and large, broad and gossamer-thin. Hundreds of them – duardin, human, aelf, even a few ogors – crowded the ever-shifting confines of the smithy, watching as he plied his trade. All who sought to shape metal were welcome in this forge, barring an obvious few.

There were always some who made themselves unwelcome. Those who’d failed to learn the most important lessons, and used what he’d taught them for bitter ends. Not many, thankfully, but some. They hid from his gaze, even as they sought to emulate his skill. But he would find them eventually, and cast their works into the fire.

The voices of his students rose in sudden warning. The smith turned, eyes narrowing in consternation. Talons of fire emerged from the forge, gripping either side of the hearth. Bestial features, composed of crackling flame and swirling ash, congealed. Teeth made from cinders gnashed in a paroxysm of fury. A molten claw caught at his arm, and his thick hide blackened at its touch. The smith grunted and jerked his arm back. The daemon lunged after him with a hot roar, its shape expanding as if to fill the smithy. Great wings of ash stretched, and a horned head emerged from within the hearth.

‘No,’ the smith said, simply, as his students scattered. He dropped the metal he’d been heating and caught the twisting flame shape before it could grow any larger. He had to be quick. It shrieked as he dragged it around and slammed it down onto the anvil. Burning claws gouged his bare arms and tore his apron to ribbons, as flapping wings battered against his shoulders, but the smith’s grip was unbreakable. He raised his hammer. The intruder’s eyes widened in realisation. It warbled a protest.

The hammer rang down. Then again and again, flattening and shaping the flame into a more agreeable form. The daemon screamed in protest as its essence was reduced with every blow. All of its arrogance and malice fled, leaving behind only fear, and soon, not even that.

The smith lifted what was left of the weakly struggling daemon. He recognised the signature on its soul-bindings as easily as if he’d carved them himself. Daemons were like any other raw material, in that they required careful shaping by their summoner to make them fit for purpose. This one had been made for strength and speed and not much else.

‘Crude, always so crude,’ he said. ‘No pride in his work, that one. No artistry. I tried to teach him, but – ah well. We’ll make something of you, though, never fear. I’ve made better from worse materials, in my time.’

So saying, he plunged the daemon into the slack tub beside the anvil. Water hissed into vapour as parts of the creature sloughed away into motes of cinder, swirling upwards to float above the anvil. What was left in the tub was only a bit of blackened iron, pitted and veined an angry crimson, the barest hint of a snarling face scraped into its surface. The smith bounced it on his palm until it cooled, and then dropped it into the pocket of his apron.

‘Now, I wonder what that was all about.’

It had been some time since he had been attacked in this place, in such a way. That it had happened at all spoke of desperation on someone’s part. As if they’d hoped to prevent him from seeing something. He looked up at the cloud of floating cinders and reached to grasp a handful. He set aside his hammer and ran a thick finger through them, reading them as a mortal might read a book.

With a grunt, he cast them back into the forge and gave the coals a stir with his hand. An indistinct image took shape in the flames. Moments later, it split into eight, these clearer – a sword, a mace, a spear… eight weapons.

The smith frowned and stirred the coals fiercely, calling up more images. He needed to be certain of what he saw. In the flames, a woman clad in crystalline armour drew one of the eight – a howling daemon-sword – from its cage of meat, and traded thunderous blows with a Stormcast Eternal clad in bruise-coloured armour. She shattered her opponent’s runeblade, and the smith winced to see one of his most potent works so easily destroyed. He waved a hand, conjuring more pictures out of the wavering flames.

A bloated pox-warrior, one side of his body eaten away and replaced by the thrashing shape of a monstrous kraken, wrapped slimy tendrils about the haft of a great mace, banded in runic iron, and tore it from the hands of a dying ogor. An aelf swordsman, eyes hidden beneath a cerulean blindfold, ducked beneath the sweeping bite of an obsidian axe that pulsed with volcanic hunger, and backed away from the hulking orruk who clutched it.

Angrily, the smith swept out a hand, summoning more images. They came faster and faster, dancing about his hand like the fragments of a half-remembered dream – he saw wars yet unwaged and the deaths yet to come, and felt his temper fray. The images moved so fast that even he couldn’t keep track of them all. Frustrated, he caught those he could, holding them tight, only for them to slip between his fingers and rejoin the flames. The time had come around at last. He would need to make ready.

He ran his wide hands through his fiery hair and growled softly. ‘Best get to work.’ He turned and fixed several of his students with a glare. ‘You there – stop skulking and find something to write with. Be quick, now!’

His students hurried to obey. When they returned, bearing chisels and heavy tomes of stone and iron, he began to speak. ‘In the beginning, there was fire. And from fire came heat. From heat, shape. And that shape split into eight. The eight were the raw stuff of Chaos, hammered and sculpted to a killing edge by the sworn forgemasters of the dread Soulmaw, the chosen weaponsmiths of Khorne.’

He paused a moment, before continuing. ‘But as the realms shuddered and the Age of Chaos gave way to the Age of Blood, the weapons known as the Eight Lamentations were thought lost.’ In the fire, scenes of death and madness played themselves out, over and over again, a cycle without end.

Grungni, Lord of all Forges and Master-Smith, sighed.

‘Until now.’

Elsewhere. Another forge, cruder than Grungni’s. A cavern, ripped open and hewn from volcanic stone by the bleeding hands of many slaves. Fire pits and cooling basins occupied the wide, flat floor. Racks decorated the uneven walls, and hackblades, wrath-hammers, weapons of all shapes and sizes, hung from them in disorganised fashion.

At the heart of the forge, within a circle of fire pits, sat a huge anvil. And upon the anvil, a hulking figure leaned, head bowed. Sweat rolled down his muscular arms to splatter with a hiss upon the anvil. His crimson and brass armour was blackened in places, as if it had been exposed to an impossible heat. He inhaled deeply, trying to ignore the weakness that crept through him. He had infused the daemon with some of his own strength, in the hopes that it would prove a match for the Lord of all Forges. Or at least last longer than a handful of moments. He consoled himself with the thought that it was not every man who could match wills with a god and survive.

‘Then, I am no mere man,’ Volundr of Hesphut murmured to himself. ‘I am Forgemaster of Aqshy.’ A warrior-smith of Khorne. Skullgrinder of the Soulmaw. He had forged weapons without number, as well as the wars in which they were wielded. He had raised up thousands of heroes, and cracked the skulls of thousands more.

But for the moment, he was simply tired.

‘Well?’

The voice, cold and soft, echoed from the shadows of the forge. Volundr straightened, skull-faced helm turning towards the speaker who sat in the darkness, wrapped in concealing robes the colour of cooling ashes. Qyat of the Folded Soul, Forgemaster of Ulgu, was more smoke than fire, and his shape was seemingly without substance beneath his voluminous attire. ‘He saw,’ Volundr rumbled. ‘As I predicted, Qyat.’

A second voice, harsh and sharp like shattering iron, intruded. ‘You seek to excuse your own failure, Skull-Cracker.’

Volundr snorted. ‘Excuse? No. I merely explain, Wolant.’ He turned, pointing a blunt finger at the second speaker, who stood beyond the glare of the fire pits, his profusion of muscular arms crossed over his massive barrel chest.

Wolant Sevenhand, Forgemaster of Chamon, was a brass-skinned, eight-armed abomination, clad in armour of gold. Seven of his arms ended in sinewy, fire-toughened hands. The eighth ended in the blunt shape of a hammer, strapped to a mangled wrist in an effort to correct a long-ago injury. ‘If you think you can succeed where I failed, then try your luck by all means,’ Volundr continued.

‘You dare–?’ Wolant growled, reaching for one of the many hammers that hung from his belt. Before he could grab it, Volundr snatched up his own from the floor and slammed it down on the anvil, filling the smithy with a hollow, booming echo. Wolant staggered, clasping his hands to the side of his head.

Volundr pointed his hammer at the other skullgrinder. ‘Remember whose smithy you stand in, Sevenhand. I’ll not suffer your bluster here.’

‘I’m sure our bellicose brother meant no harm, Volundr. He is a choleric, self-important creature, as you well know, and prone to rash action.’ Qyat unfolded himself and stood. He loomed over the other two skullgrinders, a tower of lean, pale muscle, clad in black iron. ‘Even so, if he is so rude as to threaten you again, I shall lop off another of his hands.’

‘My thanks, brother,’ Volundr said.

‘Even as I will pluck out your eye, if you continue to stare at me so balefully,’ Qyat added, mildly. He spread his thin hands. ‘Respect costs men like us so little, my brothers. Why be miserly?’

Volundr bowed his head. ‘Forgive me, brother,’ he said. Weak as he was, he was in no shape for a confrontation with a creature as deadly as the Folded Soul. Wolant was bad enough, for all that he was a brute. He set the head of his hammer down on the anvil and leaned forwards, bracing himself on the haft. ‘Wolant is right. I failed. The master-smith knows. And now he is aware that we know, as well.’

Wolant growled. ‘If you had not failed–’

‘But he did, and so new stratagems must be forged in the fires of adversity.’ Qyat pressed his hands together, as if in prayer. ‘The Crippled God cannot be allowed to take from us that which is ours.’

Wolant laughed. ‘Ours, Folded Soul?’ He spread his arms. ‘Mine, you mean. Perhaps yours, if I am unlucky. Or someone else entirely, for we three are not alone in our quest. Our brother forgemasters begin their own hunts. The Eight Lamentations call to we who forged them, ready to spill blood once more.’ Seven fists shook in a gesture of challenge and defiance. ‘Only one of us may earn Khorne’s favour by recovering them. Or had you forgotten?’

‘None of us have forgotten,’ Volundr said. ‘We have each chosen our champions, and cast them into the realms to seek the Eight. But that does not mean we cannot work together against those outside our fraternity.’ He shook his head. ‘Grungni is not our only foe in this endeavour. Others seek the Eight as well. If we do not work together, we will–’

Wolant clapped four of his hands together, interrupting. ‘Nonsense. The greater the obstacle, the greater the glory. I came only out of respect for the Folded Soul’s cunning. Not to join my fate to yours. My champion will acquire the Eight Lamentations for me, and the skulls of your servants as well, if they get in his way.’ He laughed again, and turned away. Volundr watched him stride towards one of the great archways that lined the cavern wall, and wondered whether he could split the other smith’s skull while his back was turned.

Qyat chuckled softly, as if reading his thoughts. ‘Would that you could crack his thick skull on your anvil. Though I would be forced to slay you in turn, brother, should you choose to break the iron-oath in such a way.’

Volundr grunted. The iron-oath was the only thing keeping the remaining forgemasters from each other’s throats. The truce was a tenuous thing, but it had held for three centuries. And he would not be the one to break it. He gestured dismissively. ‘It will be more satisfying to snatch victory from him. My champion is most determined.’

‘As is mine.’

Volundr nodded. ‘Then may the best champion win.’ He turned his attentions to the fire pits and gestured, drawing up the cinders and sparks into the air. He stirred the smoke, casting his gaze across the mortal realms, seeking a singular ember of Aqshy’s fire. When he found it, he cast his words into the fire, knowing that they would be heard.

‘Ahazian Kel. Last of the Ekran. Deathbringer. Heed your master’s voice.’

In a land where the moon burned cold, and the dead walked freely, Ahazian Kel heard Volundr’s voice. Though it was like heated nails digging into his mind, he decided to ignore it. Given the situation, he thought Volundr would forgive him. Then again, perhaps not. In any event, it was done and Ahazian gave it no more thought.

Instead, he concentrated on the dead men trying to kill him. Deathrattle warriors, animated skeletons still wearing the tattered remnants of the armour that had failed them in life, emerged from the shadows of the great stone pillars extending to either side of him. They pressed close in the moonlight, crowding the wide stone avenue. Rusted blades dug for his flesh, as corroded shields slammed into the ranks of his followers, bowling several of them over.

Ahazian gave little thought to the bloodreavers’ plight. The living were a means to an end, and the dead merely one more obstacle between him and that which he sought. Ahead of them, past the ranks of the dead, at the end of the pillar-lined avenue, were the open gates of the mausoleum-citadel. Two skeletal giants, carved from stone, knelt to either side of that immense aperture, their skulls bowed over the pommels of their swords. Somewhere, a funerary bell tolled, rousing the dead from their slumber of ages.

Deathrattle warriors flooded the avenue. They marched out between the shadowed pillars, or from within the mausoleum-citadel, singly and in groups. Not just the dead native to this place, but even those who’d been slain here more recently heeded the tolling of the unseen bell. Though their bones had been picked clean by the jackals and birds that haunted the ruins, he still recognised the sigils that adorned their ruptured armour – the runes of Khorne and Slaanesh, the baleful glyphs of a thousand lesser gods, all were in evidence among the silent ranks of the enemy.

In Shyish, there was only one certainty. One the gods themselves could not defy. It was a land of endings, where even the strongest would eventually falter. There could be no true victory over that which conquered all. That didn’t stop some from trying.

But conquest was not Ahazian’s goal. Not today.

He stood head and shoulders taller than even the tallest of the tribesmen who fought alongside him. His broad frame was hidden beneath razor-edged plates of crimson and brass armour, and the skull-visage of his helmet curved upwards, coalescing into the rune of Khorne, clearly marking his allegiances. Heavy chains draped his form, their links decorated with barbs, hooks and the occasional scalp.

He was surrounded by a phalanx of savage tribesmen, culled from the lowlands of this region. The heads of their former chieftains slapped against his thigh, their scalps knotted to his belt. If there were a simpler way of making others do what you wished, he hadn’t yet found it. The bloodreavers wore rattletrap armour scavenged from a thousand killing fields. It was decorated with totems meant to ward off the dead, even as their flesh was painted with ashes and bone dust, to make them invisible to ghosts. None of these protections seemed to be working particularly well at the moment. They didn’t appear to mind.

The bulk of the bloodreavers fought fiercely to either side of him, hacking and stabbing at the silent dead. Ahazian held the vanguard, as was his right, and pleasure. The Deathbringer surged forwards like the tip of the spear, his goreaxe in one hand, skullaxe in the other. Both weapons thirsted for something this enemy could not provide, and their frustration pulsed through him. The thorns of metal set into their hafts dug painfully into his palms, opening old wounds, so that his fingers were soon slick with blood. He didn’t care – let them drink, if they would. So long as they served him faithfully and well, it was the least he could do. Blood must be spilled, even if that blood was his own.

He chopped down through a shield marked with the face of a leering corpse, and splintered the bones huddling beneath. Brute strength was enough to win him some breathing room, but it wouldn’t last for long. What the dead claimed, they held with a cold ferocity that awed even some servants of the Blood God. One of the many lessons his time in Shyish had taught him. ‘Onward,’ he snarled, trusting in his voice to carry. ‘Khorne claim him who first dares to cry hold.’

The bloodreavers closest to him gave a shout and redoubled their efforts. He growled in satisfaction and drove his head into the rictus grin of a skeleton, shattering its skull. He swept the twitching remains aside and bulled on, dragging his followers along in his wake. A spear struck his shoulder-plate and shivered to fragments, even as he crushed the spine of its wielder. Fallen skeletons groped for his legs, and he trampled them into the dust. Nothing would be allowed to stand between him and his goal.

What lay beyond the gateway was his destiny. Khorne had set his feet upon the path, and Ahazian Kel had walked it willingly. For what else could he do? For a kel, there was only battle. War was – had been – the truest art of the Ekran. Its reasons did not matter. Causes were but distractions to the purity of war waged well.

Ahazian Kel, last hero of the Ekran, had sought to become as one with war itself. And so he had given himself up to Khorne. He had offered the blood of his fellow kels in sacrifice, including that of Prince Cadacus. He cherished that memory above all others, for Cadacus, of all his cousins, had come the closest to killing him.

Now, here, was simply the next step in his journey along the Eightfold Path. He had followed that path from the Felstone Plains of Aqshy to the Ashen Lowlands of Shyish, and he would not stop now. Not until he had claimed his prize.

Ahazian let the rhythm of war carry him forwards, into the midst of the dead. Slowly but steadily, he carved himself a path towards the gateway. Broken, twitching skeletons littered the ground behind him. His followers shielded him from the worst blows, buying his life with their own. He hoped they found some satisfaction in that – it was an honour to die for one of Khorne’s chosen. To grease the wheels of battle with their blood, so that a true warrior could meet his fate in a more suitable fashion.

He swept his skullhammer out, smashing a skeleton to flinders, and suddenly found himself clear of the enemy. A few dozen bloodreavers, stronger than the rest, or simply faster, stumbled free of the press alongside him. He did not pause, but forged on, running now. The bloodreavers followed him, with barely a backwards glance between them. Those who were still locked in combat with the dead would have to fend for themselves.

The forecourt of the mausoleum-citadel was lit by amethyst will o’ the wisps, which swum languidly through the dusty air. By their glow, he could make out strange mosaics on the walls and floor, depicting scenes of war and progress. Statues, weathered by time and neglect, lurked in the corners, their unseeing eyes aimed eternally upwards.

Ahazian led his remaining warriors through the silent halls. The bloodreavers huddled together, muttering among themselves. In battle, they were courageous beyond all measure. But here, in the dark and quiet, old fears were quick to reassert themselves. Night-terrors, whispered of around tribal fires, loomed close in this place. Every shadow seemed to hold a legion of wolf-fanged ghosts, ready to spring and rip the tribesmen apart.

Ahazian said nothing to calm them. Fear would keep them alert. Besides, it was not his duty to keep their feet to the Eightfold Path – he was no slaughterpriest. If they wished to cower or flee, Khorne would punish them as he saw fit.

The sounds of the battle outside had faded into a dim murmur. Shafts of cold light fell from great holes torn in the roof above, and the amethyst wisps swirled thickly about them, lighting the path ahead. Ahazian swept aside curtains of cobwebs with his axe, and smashed apart toppled columns and piles of obstructing debris with his hammer, clearing the way.

The spirits of the dead clustered thick the deeper they went. Silent phantoms, ragged and barely visible, wandered to and fro. Lost souls, following the paths of fading memory. The ghosts displayed no hostility, lost as they were in their own miseries. But their barely intelligible whispers intruded on his thoughts with irritating frequency, and he swiped at them in frustration whenever one got too close. They paid him no mind, which only added to his annoyance.

When they at last reached the inner chambers, his temper had frayed considerably, and his followers kept their distance. He found himself hoping for an enemy to appear. An ambush, perhaps. Anything to soothe his frustrations.

The throne room of the mausoleum-citadel was a circular chamber, its rounded walls rising to a high dome, shattered in some long-forgotten cataclysm. Shafts of moonlight draped the ruined chamber, illuminating the fallen remains of broken statues, and glinting among the thick shrouds of cobwebs and dust that clung to every surface.

‘Spread out,’ Ahazian said. His voice boomed, shattering the stillness. His warriors shuffled to obey. He stalked towards the wide dais that occupied the centre of the chamber. It was topped by a massive throne of basalt. And upon the throne, a hulking shape sat slumped. Broken skeletons littered the floor around the dais and upon the steps, the scattered bones glowing faintly of witch fire.

Ahazian climbed the dais warily. It was almost a given in this realm that a silent corpse was a dangerous one. But the broken form slumped on its throne didn’t so much as twitch. The heavy armour was covered so thickly in cobwebs that its crimson hue, as well as the bat-winged skulls that decorated it, were all but invisible. As he drew closer, he felt a touch of awe at the sheer size of the deceased potentate. The being had been massive, as was the great, black-bladed axe that hung loosely from one fleshless hand, its edge resting on the ground. The corpse wore a heavy, horned helm, topped by a frayed crest.

He scraped away some of the cobwebs with the edge of his axe, revealing a long, gaping rent in the filthy chest-plate, as if some wide, impossibly sharp blade had passed through the metal and into whatever passed for the dead man’s heart. ‘Ha,’ Ahazian murmured, pleased. At last, he’d found it. He buried his goreaxe in the armrest of the throne and thrust his hand into the wound. Spiders spilled out, crawling up his arm, or tumbling to the floor. He ignored the panicked arachnids and continued to root through the mouldering chest cavity, until his fingers at last closed on that which he’d fought so long to find.

He ripped the sliver of black steel free of the husk, and there was a sound halfway between a moan and a sigh. He held his prize up to the dim light. A splinter, torn free in the death-strike. It was a fragment from a weapon – and not just any weapon, but one forged in the shadow-fires of Ulgu. One of eight.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Ruinstorm and The Damnation of Pythos, and the Primarchs novel Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar. He has also written Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, several stories involving the Grey Knights, including Warden of the Blade, and The Last Wall, The Hunt for Vulkan and Watchers in Death for The Beast Arises. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction set in The Horus Heresy, Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar universes. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

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

Robbie MacNiven is a highland-born History graduate from the University of Edinburgh. He has written the Warhammer 40,000 novels Carcharodons: Red Tithe and Legacy of Russ as well as the short stories ‘Redblade’, ‘A Song for the Lost’ and ‘Blood and Iron’ for Black Library. His hobbies include re-enacting, football and obsessing over Warhammer 40,000.

Josh Reynolds is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novels Fabius Bile: Primogenitor and Deathstorm, and the novellas Hunter’s Snare and Dante’s Canyon, along with the audio drama Master of the Hunt. In the Warhammer world, he has written the End Times novels The Return of Nagash and The Lord of the End Times, the Gotrek & Felix tales Charnel Congress, Road of Skulls and The Serpent Queen. He has also written many stories set in the Age of Sigmar, including the novels Hallowed Knights: Plague Garden, Eight Lamentations: Spear of Shadows, Nagash: The Undying King, Fury of Gork, Black Rift and Skaven Pestilens. He lives and works in Sheffield.

C L Werner’s Black Library credits include the Space Marine Battles novel The Siege of Castellax, the Age of Sigmar novel Overlords of the Iron Dragon and the novella ‘Scion of the Storm’ in Hammers of Sigmar. For Warhammer he has written the End Times novel Deathblade, Mathias Thulmann: Witch Hunter, Runefang, the Brunner the Bounty Hunter trilogy, the Thanquol and Boneripper series and Time of Legends: The Black Plague series. Currently living in the American south-west, he continues to write stories of mayhem and madness set in the worlds of Warhammer 40,000 and the Age of Sigmar.

Matt Westbrook is one of Games Workshop’s newest authors. He has written The Realmgate Wars: Bladestorm for Age of Sigmar, and the Warhammer 40,000 novella Medusan Wings. He lives and works in Nottingham.

Further Reading

Warhammer Age of Sigmar

Eight Lamentations: Spear of Shadows
Josh Reynolds

Hallowed Knights: Plague Garden
Josh Reynolds

Legends of the Age of Sigmar Omnibus
Various

Overlords of the Iron Dragon
C L Werner

The Realmgate Wars

War Storm
Guy Haley / Nick Kyme / Josh Reynolds

Ghal Maraz
Guy Haley / Josh Reynolds

Hammers of Sigmar
Darius Hinks / C L Werner

Call of Archaon
Various

Wardens of the Everqueen
C L Werner

Warbeast
Gav Thorpe

Fury of Gork
Josh Reynolds

Bladestorm
Matt Westbrook

Mortarch of Night
Josh Reynolds / David Guymer

Lord of Undeath
C L Werner

Warhammer Chronicles

The Legend of Sigmar Omnibus
Graham McNeill

The Rise of Nagash Omnibus
Mike Lee

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

‘Vengeance Eternal’ first published in Bladestorm in 2016.
‘The Keys to Ruin’ first published in Fyreslayers in 2016.
‘Heartwood’ first published in Sylvaneth in 2016.
‘Great Red’ and ‘The Prisoner of the Black Sun’ first published in Mortarch of Night in 2016.
‘Beneath the Black Thumb’ first published in Call of Archaon in 2015.
‘Assault on the Mandrake Bastion’ first published in Black Rift in 2016.
Overlords of the Iron Dragon first published in 2017.
Skaven Pestilens first published in 2016.
Eight Lamentations: Spear of Shadows first published in 2017.
This edition published in Great Britain in 2017 by
Black Library,
Games Workshop Ltd.,
Willow Road,
Nottingham,
NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Akim Kaliberda.

Hammerhal & Other Stories © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2017. Hammerhal & Other Stories, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78572-784-9

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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